This slacktivist post about a possible new head of the Texas Board of Education should be a jaw-dropper, but it kind of isn't, at least for me. Rick "If you don't behave, federal government, Texas will take its toys and go home!" Perry is clearly a guy who cares more for grand rhetorical gestures than productive functional governance. Promoting an opt-out homeschooling honest-to-god-whatever theocrat to make decisions on behalf of all students who aren't lucky enough to have parents willing or able to sit around with them all day doing long division is just the sort of Fuck You gesture I'd expect from him.

And don't think that just because you don't live in Texas or have kids in public schools that this sort of dumbassery won't affect you or your little muffins.

The story reminded me that I'd been meaning to post a republished article about the textbook industry by Tamim Ansary.* It's a few years out of date, but still the best summary I've ever found for the way school publishing works, and the big takeaway from it is that Texas (and, to a lesser extent, California and Florida) is the tail that wags the dog for every school in the nation. The decisions made by the Texas Board of Education quite literally determine what textbooks are going to look like in most classrooms across the country, and Texas, just for example, considers "the importance of patriotism" to be the single most important takeaway from a Social Studies curriculum. [How to] "function in a free enterprise society" is second, and last but probably least is the ability to "appreciate the basic democratic values of our state and nations." Digging into the TEKS state standards, the line-by-line ("summarize the major political and cultural developments of the civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa;") is less eyebrow-raising, but the high-level goals are no accident. Just for fun, check out what the Health Education standards say about what students need to learn about contraceptives. Hint: It's not "How to use them."

I work in the textbook industry, so none of this is news to me. And I suppose I'm not surprised that the inner workings of relative bureacracies and market segments isn't something a lot of parents spare time for. But man, I wish they did, because Mel and Norma Gabler, who got this whole party started way-back-when, decided what kids would learn in school for pretty much the entire country and I don't think that's right.

* You may recall reading something he wrote in September 2001 about his home, Afghanistan, that is probably more upsetting now than it was almost eight years ago. Ansary totally has a seat reserved for him at my Perfect Imaginary Dinner Party.

I've been thinking so much this week about the Iranians I met in Turkey - it wasn't any big thing, really, but it stuck out to me at the time and has stayed with me since. We had stopped at a scenic turnout for some water and to admire the view, and a busload of tourists were there at the same time. Sarah, Nate and I were on bikes, and struggled to explain that no, we weren't riding across all of Turkey, just taking a day trip around Cappadocia. I remember feeling bad for disappointing their expectations and self-conscious about wearing a sleeveless shirt. I remember being surprised by how friendly they were, so interested in talking to three Americans. I remember the young woman who took point on translation, her short hair, her glasses. I remember the man with beautiful eyes that shaded from green to brown. I remember that he approached us, not the other way around.

I assumed, because they were riding a well-appointed bus around Turkey dressed in very Western clothes and they spoke passable English, that they were fairly wealthy, probably urbane people. Building out from that assumption, I'm inclined to wonder if they've been on the streets this past week. Perhaps they've shouted in the dark from rooftops or translated blog posts for the benefit of English speakers or left the doors to their homes unlocked for fleeing protestors. I don't look for them, exactly, in the wide shots of massive crowds, or in the shape of word clouds, but I see them there, even if every single one of them is a hardliner who voted proudly for Ahmadinejad. I hope they are okay.

Sarah took some photos at that turnout. I've been looking at them again today, wondering, worrying.

There are so many things to love about this 1986 episode of Crossfire featuring Frank Zappa arguing with a guy who sort of looks like a turtle. Like: Crossfire was on the air for that long? And: Bob "A lot of people love me" Novak used to be one of the hosts? Most importantly: Remember that article in the Weekly Reader about Zappa's congressional testimony regarding the PMRC? That was a very good article. I read it instead of paying attention one day in (irony alert!) music class.
It's really cute when the turtle guy has to refer over and over again to his notes for talking points on suicidal teens and the "Hot for Teacher" video while Zappa looks straight into the camera and destroys him. Dude knew his stuff.

I'm really long past the age where it's acceptable for me to spend a lot of time thinking about how cool I am, or am not, particularly as it orients me relative to other people and especially when relative coolness is determined by scrutinizing the things I or other people enjoy spending time or money or thought on. But I totally do it anyway, and I think I've figured something out that makes sense of at least some of that navel gazing.* I'm not fond of the verb 'unpack' as in 'talk at length about using all my big words,' but that's totally what I'm about to do. Stand back, y'all!

It's been years now since the first pass at a Geek Hierarchy started making the rounds, and even longer since the rehabilitation and semantic relaxation of the word 'Geek' itself began in earnest but there's still no true consensus on the relative geekiness of any particular interest relative to another, and geek pride proclamations still come off a bit sweaty and overeager. Because people are people and people like to categorize. Preferably into hierarchies. I do it too, but never very successfully. Part of this surely has to do with the scattershot nature of my own interests. In addition to the usual self-consciously highbrow stuff you could guess I like just looking at me, I get a lot of genuine unaffected enjoyment out of what could be considered junk culture. I'm game for nearly any film movie or TV show if it's set in a high school, and, I'll keep saying it, I really liked that Paris Hilton album.** I like genre stuff, sometimes enough to do follow-up reading that involves comic books, and one afternoon a few months ago I actually killed a couple of hours on a weekend watching Battlestar Galactica fan edit clips on YouTube. So while I do consider myself "better" (meaning "in posession of more refined aesthetic sensibilities") than people who love the crap out of "Heroes" I regard that as a knee-jerk and rhetorically indefensible position. At best I'll argue that "Heroes" is not a very good TV show, but even that isn't as fun as it was when I was younger and meaner.

But even as I got more and more comfortable with the idea that it's not that cool (Shit! There I go again!) to give people a hard time about the things that they enjoy, especially when the whole pseudo-objective aesthetic criticism doesn't hold together, I still knew that my I-can't-help-it hierarchy still existed. I just no longer had any clue how I was doing the sorting. I only realized what it was like a week ago, and now, no joke, it's like seeing the world in a whole new dimension. Or, more to the point, along a whole new axis. See, the problem with most of these hierarchies is that they only operate along a single scale of variability. What you like matters, yes, but how much you like it matters just as much, if not more. I don't think I'm "better" than people who love "Heroes," I think I'm better than people who love "Heroes" so much that it matters to them in a very personal way what I think about "Heroes." I feel the same way about people who love "Lost" so much that it matters to them in a very personal way what I think about "Lost." And I watch "Lost!" I love it! I read epic close-reading academic analysis of each episode (sometimes)! I don't dislike tween Jonas Brothers fans because they like the Jonas Brothers, I dislike them because the degree to which they are into the Jonas Brothers sort of horrifies me. I'm not contemptuous of people whose opinions on abortion differ from mine, I'm contemptuous of people whose opinions on abortion are so strongly held they feel entitled to commit acts of intimidation, vandalism and murder on the basis of those opinions. And here all this time I thought I'd been making progress toward being open-minded!

Someday I'm gonna get to the point where I can be totally cool with anybody in the world and genuinely respect their humanity and not look for reasons to write them off for lapses in judgment, taste, hygeine standards, whatever. I'll probably die of old age the very next day. But in the meantime, if the best I can do is be slightly less of a reflexive judgmental asshole each day, I suppose I'll take it.

* You know what? No, it doesn't.
** Liking it does not mean I don't hate Paris Hilton the person, or, more precisely, Paris Hilton the cultural construct. Except for that cameo she did in that one O.C. episode. I thought that was kinda funny, albeit totally unconvincing.

It was fun (by which I mean infuriating) to watch credit card companies try to protect their (plenty comfy) profit margins in the face of the legislation that still managed to sail through congress this week, though not before I got a "HEY BY THE WAY, WE ARE JACKING YOUR RATE JUST BECAUSE WE CAN!" letter from one of my credit card companies.

I really enjoyed my time working at a cash-only establishment because in addition to giving me a totally legitimate reason to say "no" to customers, it gave me the chance to school more than a few people on the business model of credit card providers. A lot of people had absolutely no idea that merchants pay credit card companies for the privilege of accepting plastic,* and merchant fees are more than enough to make credit cards a profitable venture, even if every single customer turned into what is charmingly known in the industry as a 'freeloader' or 'deadbeat' - ie someone who doesn't carry a balance and essentially uses credit cards as rewards-gathering devices and 30-day interest-free loans. For all the hand-wringing about average credit card debt amounts, one in three cardholders fits into this category.

All this grandstanding about being forced to do things like cut back on rewards plans or eliminate grace periods isn't just posturing, it's outright bullshit, and the credit card companies know it. They're just hoping to capitalize on people's ignorance. The thing about freeloaders is that they don't need credit cards. If I began to accrue interest the moment a charge went through on one of my credit cards, I'd stop using it altogether. Ditto if I stopped getting that measly 1% back on all my purchases or started having to pay an annual fee for the privilege. If I (and all the other freeloaders) did that, a shit-ton of merchant fees would go uncollected, credit card companies wouldn't make any money off of us, and they'd still be stuck with the default risk of the cardholders who do carry balances and pay interest rates and late fees and over-limit fees. Only difference is that the average cardholder would be a bigger risk and a smaller revenue target than he was before, and we all know what happened to the subprime mortgage lenders. The legislation actually makes freeloaders more attractive as customers, since they're such a known quantity and a stable, predictable source of revenue. If you're going to make less money on the risky customers, you want your customer base to be less risky. That means not alienating the customers who can afford to walk away.

But hey, if I'm wrong, and suddenly I do have to pay for the privilege of using a credit card, I'll stop doing it. It's nice for me that I don't have any debt and can do that really easily. It's nice for me that my dad, also a freeloader, made sure I knew just how stupid it would be to carry a balance on a credit card when I got my first one at 18. It's nice for me that I have a healthy economic safety net that means I don't have to charge emergency purchases. If the cost of making things a little less crappy for people who don't have those nice things is that I don't get airline miles or Amazon gift certificates, I can live with it.

I'm not wrong, though, those execs are just liars. Fuck 'em.

* This, by the way, is why, if you're an earnest shop-local-shop-indie sort of person, it's a good idea to pay cash at mom-and-pop-type place. Because merchant fees are a volume business, the fee on your latte paid by the locally-owned coffee place, which does $1,000 a day, is likely to be higher than the fee paid by Starbucks, which does lord-knows-how-much a day. Merchant fee structures also sometimes involve an automatic charge per transaction - 75¢ say - on top of the percentage-of-transaction cost. This means that it may actually cost a business money to sell you a muffin for $1.50 if you pay for it with a credit card. Obviously as a customer you've got no obligation to a business beyond paying for what you buy, but I know some people think about their buying habits in terms of expressing support for a particular business or business model, and if you're one of those people, it's probably worth knowing this stuff.

Some tiny part of why I read the New York Times has go to be my dislike of the people who hate it. Enemy of my enemy and all that. It's like my mom finding common cause with Catholics on death penalty issues: Sensible and uncomfortable. Like, I dunno, wool pants. My problems with the paper are usually to do with the ideas and values behind the articles, but sometimes the writing sucks too.

Does anyone have any idea what this sentence* means?

(That Rodriguez helped destroy his marriage by cavorting with strippers and Madonna long provided regularly cycled doses of front-page bulk and energy to a different kind of “oid.”)

Is it a too-clever boast by Nicholas Dawidoff that he knows how to pronounce the word "schadenfreude?" Because otherwise, I'm lost. Either way I'm really annoyed.

* From a review of a book about a baseball player, yes, haters.

I managed to retain from my reading of Sacred Games a fair amount of Hindi profanity. It comes in handy, now that I'm working with a largely Indian development team, to be able to call any one of them a motherfucker in his or her native tongue. I'm trying to get one of the Tamil speakers to teach me some insults in her language, but she moved to the US when she was 13, and never got fully conversant in slang. She swears the insults aren't that interesting anyway, as they translate literally to pretty mundane things. Unfortunately the one example she named was "chickenhead."

Also we finally watched Slumdog Millionaire a couple days ago and I kept yelling to Andy "THAT MEANS WHORE!" when characters drifted in and out of English and weren't subtitled.

My mom once tried explaining to me very rationally, appealing to my already excessive intellectual vanity, that profanity was a cheap tactic and a refuge of the uncreative mind. I was probably 11 or 12, and already remarkably foulmouthed. She absolutely had a point, but we probably should have had that conversation when I was like five. Sorry, mom.

Last week I hung out on a street corner after work with a slacking courier watching a Fred Phelps posse picket the Israeli consulate in front of the Park Plaza building. Both of us were struck by one sign in particular* reading "You Will Eat Your Babies." Our conversation was maybe ten minutes long and I can't speak for the other guy, but I haven't been able to shake the image. Driven to distraction this afternoon by a massive dull task, I took on the rather quixotic work of making sense of Fred and company. I'm no the only one - it's even in their FAQ - but the shrieking insanity is the usual out-of-context close-reading of the Old Testament with a bonus shout-out to Jonathan Swift who, they note, is writing "Presumably tongue-in-cheek." Presumably! Also the Food Network has a role to play in all this and the Obama daughters are whores. You know - typical stuff.

But it led me to the Westboro Baptist Church Retardation Road Show schedule, and that's where the cockeyed genius is.

Omaha South Magnet HS - God Hates Omaha! 4519 S 24th St WBC will picket this High School, and these brats had BETTER be thankful for it. Your parents, and all the other adults are trying to marinade you in lies so they can cook you and eat you over at the Dixie Quick's on Leavenworth (that was a little shout out to the Food Network fans)! This may be your one and only opportunity to hear/see some truth in your entire lives.

What did Omaha ever do?!

I find it interesting that I can't be bothered to muster genuine outrage toward the Phelps gang. (It certainly makes arguments like this easier to believe.) They strike me as an annoyance at best, and Fred Clark even makes a pretty convincing case for their usefulness. I think a big piece of it is the way the most insidious and ultimately damaging intolerance in contemporary life is the coded kind, the kind that disingenuously pretends it isn't about hate, it's about THE CHIIIILLLLLDREEEENNN or FREEEEDOM or whatever. It's hard for people to fight their own natural tendency towards prejudice when they don't think they're prejudiced, and a lot of people don't think they're prejudiced simply because they would never call someone a nigger, spic, chink or fag to his face. And it probably sucks a little bit less to be denied a job based on the color of your skin or the kind of name you have without getting slurred in the process, but it still sucks. I guarantee you Carrie Prejean doesn't think she's a bigot. In some really important ways that makes her a bigger problem than Fred Phelps.

* "God Hates Jews" seems rather passé, no? Certainly it's not a novel argument.

In a 5-4 decision, the justices said federal law has long prohibited the broadcast of "indecent" language, and they said the Federal Communications Commission had ample authority to crack down on what Justice Antonin Scalia called the "foul-mouthed glitteratae from Hollywood."
David G. Savage, LA Times

Dear Antonin Scalia,

Don't think you can charm me with hamfisted pluralization of a Latinate word!

Pedantically,
Ann.

PS:
If you think two and a half million people under the age of 18 give enough of a shit about the Billboard awards to watch Cher accept one of them, it's time to think about retirement.

Previously.

I was oddly grateful to the April 15 Tea Party phenomenon because it reminded me that I hadn't submitted my tax returns ahead of time this year (whoops). Also because I have an inner twelve-year-old boy who likes it when ostensibly-serious cable news broadcasters make broad winking body part and sex jokes.

Anyway, I've had this photo, via metafilter, open up in my browser for most of the day and everyone who comes by my desk can theoretically note a tab titled, in truncated fashion, IShavedMyBalls, and that's vaguely embarrassing.

Speaking of embarrassing, I've also had videos of old TED talks in the background while I try to chart up the umpty different registration paths on a bunch of different websites. I've got hundreds stacked up on my iPod, I'm just running through all of them in reverse-chronological order, and Rick Warren's talk sucks. It's almost insulting how bad it is - a self-congratulatory ramble with tacked-on exhortations to "Go Be Awesome!" delivered to an audience that, I'm fairly sure, doesn't need to be patted on the head and called special.

THE VAGINA IS FULL OF AIDS.

You know how people just fling around acronyms without regard to their literal truth? I don't do that crap. When I say LOL, I fucking mean it. I can't decide whether I want this to be a real joke or not. Either way, it's too bad for me that the next time I add dairy to a cup of coffee I'm going to die laughing.

Thanks to one of the UI guys at work (who was the first person I saw today posting about the NIN April Fool's Day prank), I've been YouTube-ing old Ministry songs. With Sympathy old. Fake British accent old. I stand by my assertion that "Work for Love" is the best thing Al Jourgensen's ever written.

Leaving tomorrow, via the Blue Lagoon. If I ever come back, it'll be at the height of midnight sun, and something like warm. Whatever I was thinking when I booked this trip, I didn't realize it would amount to "You know what I'm going to need at the end of March? MORE WINTER."

Today I saw a geyser (called geysir). Also the Icelandic Adrien Brody and the Icelandic Charlie Pace. Sirkus is no more, but the owner has a new bar nearby. It's called Boston, which: ha.

I'm a big fan of the chocolate milk juiceboxes called Koko Mjolk. We buy them from 10-11, which is a 24-hour grocery store around the corner from our hotel. The guy working there was on this morning when we bought snacks before our day trip, and the night before when we bought candy bars and the malt beverage that isn't beer and tastes a little of licorice. His job sort of sucks, but once his shift ends, he told us, he has 7 days off. Then he told me to quit taking pictures of the food. I didn't mind - already had a photo of the squeezable tubes of caviar.

Cool Ranch Doritos are labeled "Cool American" here, and you can get paprika flavored Lays.

Spending a few days in Indianapolis this week for work, and getting frequent reminders of all the endearing Midwestern quirks I've forgotten over the last 12 years of living in Boston. Local roller derby team? Tornado Sirens (wonderfully clever!) I got called a FIB yesterday by a native of Wisconsin (heh). This morning we started meetings too early to go to the local breakfast place that everybody loves, deciding instead that the locals would get some caffeine and breakfast food for the whole team. It was a long conversation that I mostly ignored, except to remember that weird thing where lots of people around here pronounce "bagel" more like "begel." I reflexively attribute weird vowel patterns in the Midwest to the Northern Cities Vowel shift*, but after looking a little more closely at it, I'm not so sure that's what's going on here. Or maybe it is? The long a in "bagel" isn't one of the phonemes typically included in the chain of shifting sounds, though short a ("cat") typically is, and it shifts forward and down a little, towards short e/schwa. Am I making any sense at all, or is this just crazy talk?

My garlic begel was also quite good.

* I think of this as the "Chicago vowel shift," partly out of Second City chauvinism, partly because the historical linguistics textbook I happened to use seems to be the only place where the term is used. Or is Chicago a totally different vowel shift? I've forgotten so much of IPA that the vowel charts are really hard to read.

I've been at my new job for just shy of two weeks now. It's long enough that I'm starting to find the local jargon and acronyms to be parsable, but not so familiar that they're second nature, which means I still pause to think about the ha-ha implications of talking all the time about how scary "Five-0h" is going to be,* even as I start using the term myself. For months at my last job I spelled out ISBN, even though everyone around me preferred to say "is-bin." I don't know when that stopped, but I noticed immediately that here, saying "is-bin" will get you the look I used to give to people three years ago. It was months back when I realized that part of why I kind of halfheartedly want to get certified as a project manager is the slight possibility that someone will see the PMP** in my signature block and misread it as PIMP. Today wins, though, because today I've got some spare time and I've chosen to use it learning about Unified Modeling Language, which I halfassedly learned about four-ish years ago, and then never got a chance to use. It's all over the place in this job, so I'm trying to be more serious this time. But I got totally tripped up by the very first page I looked at, because the group that maintains the standard for UML is called the Object Modeling Group. The logo is a stylized acronym, and their URL is http://www.omg.org/ and I couldn't continue reading until I publicly expressed my amusement.

Thanks for being there, internet.

* We're planning to meet the needs of a platform's version 5.0.
** Project Management Professional. My profession? Sometimes utterly ridiculous.

On Thursday I'm gonna go to the ICA after work to see the Shepard Fairey exhibit with G and maybe M and his crew.

This means I have three days to watch the video of this NYPL event: Steven Johnson moderating a discussion between Fairey and Lawrence Lessig about remix culture, the evolution of fair use, and how much it sucks to get sued by the AP, and read this New Yorker profile.

If I have the time after all that, I'll reminisce about the time I saw a little poster exhibit of Fairey prints at a record store on Newbury street that doesn't exist anymore and take a moment to pat myself on the back for being old school. If I have time after that I might consider the possibility that I am simply old.

On May 17th, I might, if I'm feeling cheeky, bandit the ICA-sponsored bike tour of Fairey artifacts in Boston and Cambridge. They're charging $23 a head - Fairey would approve, right? Actually, he'd probably want me to DIY it. Sigh.

Oh, Meghan, not you too!

"Today, taking shots at a woman’s weight has become one of the last frontiers in socially accepted prejudice."

Psst! Meghan! Ask your little sister about socially acceptable prejudices.