March 21, 2008
Like the Good Old Days
There was a time when my blog comments took the form of mocking limericks and off-color poetry. I thought those days were gone forever.
UPDATE: Because I don't want to see it lost in the commenting either, because I was particularly happy with it, I'm posting my best limerick here:
Peev, the quintessential contrarian,
Can drone on like a scolding librarian.
If you take time to read
His meandering screeds,
You’ll emerge as an octogenarian
March 20, 2008
Cartoons Again? Really?
Well, in honor of this:
Osama bin Laden warned in a new audiotape of a "severe" reaction for the publication of cartoons of Islam's Prophet Muhammad in what experts saw as a direct threat of a new attack in Europe.
I thought I'd resurrect one of my old sidebar images (with appropriate nods to the now defunct "Strip Mining for Whimsy").
Because, really, fuck off Osama bin Laden.
March 19, 2008
Olympic toilet Time
As we continue our slow, trudging slog through 2008—a year that has so far proven that, yes, you CAN become nauseatingly weary of today’s 24/7 election cycle as early as Jan. 4—it’s important to remember there’s another huge event being planned and prepared for at this very moment: the Summer Olympic Games!
What? Didn’t you hear me? I said the SUMMER OLYMPIC GAMES!
*crickets chirping*
*uncomfortable cough at the back of the room*
Okay, granted, the Summer Olympics aren’t quite the shining beacon of pure athletic prowess they once were, since it’s been disclosed practically every athlete outside of badminton has taken steroids at some point in their training. I could be wrong, but I think even some of the Olympic television announcers have probably been guilty of juicing up; there was something about John Tesh’s commentary during the 1996 games that just seemed steroid-ish.
If you’re not already aware, the Olympics this year are going to be held in China, which is a large Asian country that’s doing its level best to ensure every American child has the proper amount of lead in their bodies, and that American pets receive enough tainted pet food to ensure the proper level of dead in their bodies. Yes, China has a storied history of looking after us Americans, so be sure to show your gratitude come this year’s Olympic games.
Now, China has always had a flair for the dramatic. Back in 1993, for example, when they lost their bid for the 2000 Olympic Games, they set off—er, I mean, TESTED—a nuclear weapon as a form of protest, so you just KNOW the opening ceremony for the 2008 games is going to be a must watch event. Come for the athletic competition. . . stay for the healthy radioactive glow.
Unfortunately, despite all their preparations and government controlled media hype, China’s reportedly hit a bit of a snag. According to a March 19, Associated Press report our of Beijing, “at the more than 30 test events held by organizers, the presence of squat toilets at many of the new and renovated venues has drawn frequent complaints.”
According to my own sources, which don’t exist, a majority of those complaints were made by a certain toe-tapping senator from Idaho. It’s generally understood that it’s notoriously difficult to proposition undercover law enforcement officers for sex while hovering over squat toilets. I spent some time living in Japan, where squat toilets are quite common, so I know what I’m talking about here. . . and you know who you were, Mr. Officer, sir, and I apologize again for that terrible misunderstanding.
Where was I? Oh, right, China’s Olympic squat toilet problem! Back to the article we go: “’We have asked the venues to improve on this, to increase the number of sit-down toilets,’ Yao Hui, deputy director of venue management for the Beijing organizers, said Wednesday. ‘Many people have raised the question of toilets.’”
The main reason I excerpted that paragraph was because I wanted you all to enjoy the sheer deliciousness of saying “Yao Hui” to yourselves. Your pronunciation of “Hui” may vary, but no matter how you deign to pronounce it, it translates into AWESOME. Personally, I pronounce it “way,” so I’m left thinking: “Yao Hui? No way! Yao Hui? No. . . way! Yehweh?” And then my brain kind of goes on and on like that for several minutes.
Once more into the breach, dear friends! Er, I mean, let’s go back to the article, shall we:
“Yao suggested it would be difficult to change every permanent toilet in the 37 venues, 31 of which are in Beijing. So he said the focus would be on satisfying three groups of visitors: athletes, journalists and the Olympic family, meaning primarily VIPs.”
That’s right, you lowly, sullied, plebian, non-VIP Olympic-goers will have to squat with the lowest of the low. You shall hover uncomfortably whilst expunging your bodily waste. You shall make collective bathroom time as equals, which is exactly as Chairman Mao envisioned while leading his Communist revolution.
Or, something like that.
UPDATE: By popular demand, but which I mean Donna, I present you with an image of the good-old Asian squat toilet:
toilet.jpg">toilet.jpg" src="http://ramblingrhodes.mu.nu/archives/squat_toilet-thumb.jpg" width="450" height="495" border="0" />
I Can't Help That I Find It Funny
Yes, you'll have to click the extended entry, because this one is marginally NSFW.
Via LearnedFoot, who has been responsible for a lot of my Web surfing destinations lately.
March 17, 2008
Welcome to the InterWebs
This article made me smile. It's hilarious because it's just so completely years behind the times.
As traditional news outfits migrate online to become dot-coms, one of their biggest headaches is how to adapt to the sprawling new frontier of public comment.
The sprawling NEW frontier of public comment? Sure, if by new you mean more than a decade in the making.
In the pre-Internet world of TV and newspapers, public comment wasn't a problem.
Sooooo, public comment is a problem?
Broadcast news didn't have any -- aside from the weekly guest spot, usually some hapless civic association president reading from a prompter and staring terrified into the camera. Papers had their letters pages, but allowed only enough space for a few dozen a week, and they were generally written with care and were easy to prune for taste and diction.
Only enough space for the chosen. Those with the proper taste and diction. Gah, he makes it sound like it should be a poetry reading. I'll grant the Web is chock full of bad grammar and spelling, but you can ignore it if you're so inclined. It's not that hard.
Things were nicely under control.
Free speech! Under control!
But on the Internet, public comment isn't kitchen table talk, it's saloon brawl. Postings are sharp and rough-and-tumble. Harsh and derisive exchanges are common. So are personal attacks. Chat rooms and message boards routinely allow people to post comments anonymously. Only when postings are so egregious, so outrageous, racist or vile that other participants cough up hairballs do managers strike the comments and banish the authors.
Where has this guy been living for the past five+ years? Jeez, that paragraph pretty much sums up what my ThunderJournal comment box was like back in 2003. And I was just fine with it. Made for some pretty entertaining coversations, back in the day.
That's the cyber pond that traditional news organizations are diving into. They understand that their own futures hinge on re-establishing online the central role in civic life that they've played offline. So they are eager to host forums where people in the communities they serve go first to offer comment.
The role in civic life they've played offline? Seriously? Just how much of a self-important opinion does this guy have of himself and his profession?
What about taste, civility?
What about it? Taste and civility are almost entirely irrelevant online. I think there's a general understanding, with a few exceptions, people don't act like they do online. I, for one, don't tend to devolve into unchecked profanity when someone says something I disagree with at the local convenience store. Instead, I make a mental note that that particular person is a dumbass and procced onward with my day.
So they embrace the rambunctious discourse of the Internet with the zeal of the convert -- and the sweaty fervor of the desperate: Got something to say? Tell us!
Sounds about right. So, what's the problem?
Editors who would never dream of running an unsigned letter-to-the-editor now argue for promiscuous anonymity.
It's the Internet! Who cares?
And taste and civility, respectfulness? Old-line values of a discredited media elite.
And don't let the door hit you on your way out, you old bunch of pretentious cock gobblers.
I exaggerate, but not that much. The new guiding principle is hands-off. At an American Society of Newspaper Editors workshop I attended recently in California, some very good and high-powered online journalists -- not the consensus, admittedly -- suggested that even screening postings would drive commentators to other websites, where they could speak their minds without restraint. And that would be ruinous to newspapers' online strategies.
And they would, too. Not all, but many.
The Organization of News Ombudsmen, a group I admire and to which I belong, has an e-mail thread right now soliciting input on how news organizations should handle public comment: Is it to OK to block anti-immigrant rants, to weed out defamation, to protect privacy and attempt to enforce some standards of reasonable expression? What about unsigned comment?
An e-mail thread? Dude, get an online forum.
Some organizations argue that they are providing a public space, which they don't have the right, let alone the duty, to regulate. It will look after itself.
That's my policy on my ThunderJourrnal. Okay, I don't have a policy. Let's just say I'm too lazy to regulate. Granted, I try to whack down spam comments when they appear, and I tend to close comment threads that get too spammy, but that's the extent of my regulation. I regularly visit some blogs that feature commenters that sorely need to be banned just because they quite obviously suffer from Internet Commenting Disorder, but other than that, I say let 'em all comment and let stupidity sort 'em out.
But is the marketplace of ideas self-regulating?
Yes.
Is defamation canceled out by testimonials, falsehoods by truth?
Is he talking about newspapers, or Web discussions? Because there's plenty of defamation, testimonials, falsehoods and truth printed DAILY by established media outlets.
Or does Internet talk promise another sad case of what the late ecologist Garrett Hardin called the ''tragedy of the commons'': Each individual herdsman benefits from putting one more head of cattle onto public pasture, and suffers little from cumulative overgrazing. In time, though, community disaster ensues.
Good God, man, could you be more melodramatic? Community disaster won't ensue because of a lack of civility in online discourse. If you've been paying attention to sites like, say, Fark.com over the past several years, the community tends to thrive (and a huge chunk of those Farkers pay $5 a month to dabble in unfettered, uncivil, online discouse) and some of the most original, hilarious and downright ingenious contributions emerge there as a result.
In this case, the extreme license given individuals to vent, dissemble, excoriate and indulge their hates verbally, winds up destroying the expressive freedom that other people, less bold and less opinionated, need.
Look, if you're afraid to mix it up in online discussion boards and comment threads--where the most that usually happens is someone insults you *gasp*--then you have a severe case of uncurable wussy-itis.
Venturing an opinion, even a sound one, just isn't worth the risk. The overall result is a less expansive, less robust sphere of expression -- and sound, worthwhile thoughts aren't shared.
Honest to God, is this guy for real? Is he even remotely familiar with the storied history of online discussion of the last decade? The online sphere of expression is more robust and inclusive than anything dead tree newspapers ever came close to achieving in their golden age.
Public conversation -- exchanging ideas about what a community is and ought to be -- is something that has to be learned.
What a bunch of flaccid twaddle.
Unfortunately, mainstream media have made a fortune teaching people the wrong ways to talk to each other, offering up Jerry Springer, Crossfire, Bill O'Reilly. People understandably conclude rage is the political vernacular, that this is how public ideas are talked about.
Yeah, welcome to human civilization. It's been around now for about 10,000 years or so. Thought you'd met. Burr and Hamilton duel it out with pistols a couple hundred years ago, and this guy has the vapors because an anonymous commenter can call another commenter a "douchenozzle." Jesus wept.
What's going on, what matters
It isn't. With the move online, journalism has the opportunity to morph into a practice based not just on information gathering and narrative skill, but of stewardship, of presiding over a community-wide conversation about what's going on and what matters.
Gah. What a self-important toad-screwer. He doesn't get it. The days of a newspaper "presiding" over a conversation are gone. They've been gone for years. They don't get to "preside" any more, they just get to participate. As soon as a newspaper decides it wants a presiding role online is the same moment their audience, or at least a huge chunk of it, goes elsewhere, to the seemingly infinite number of forums, blogs and other venues that encourage unfettered discourse.
Those message boards and chat rooms aren't just market extension opportunities for media owners. They're warm and busy spaces where a new world of expression and communication is incubating.
Okay, so, we agree. Great. Awesome.
To say there should be rules, that communicants should be admonished to strive for honesty and civility and respect, is not to justify elitism. It's not even to prescribe the rules. But it's to acknowledge that rules are needed, and to kick off the process of writing them.
Uhhh, it's not about prescibing rules. . . it's about writing them? How's that different?
Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University.
Knight professor! Neat-o!
Quick Question
Pardon my lower-middle class naivete, but at what point was it decided that the "a" was going to be dropped from "apologize?" There's this God-awful song that gets repeated play on one of the area's only two radio stations, and I swear, I SWEAR, the overly-repeated refrain is "It's too late to pologize." Come to think of it, the name of the song is probably "Too late to pologize." They repeat the phrase so often, I almost suspect they're trying to indocrinate the listeners into accepting "pologize" as the actual word and spelling.
Combine that with all the Web-speak that's out there right now, and it's a bit disconcerting to think about what we can expect of our educated youth once they join the workforce. I'm dreading the day a co-worker comes up to me and says something along the lines of: "WTF? Why did you write that? I want you to pologize right now!"
On the other hand, since my chosen career path is one that requires above average spelling, grammar, editing and general English skills, I sometimes look at today's youth and their "hip" ways of communicating in broken, nonsensical gibberish and I think "Hey, job security!" since I'm one of the few remaining people who actually care about communicating in written English.
I realize I may be insulting many of today's youth with my broad and sweeping overgeneralizations. If I have so insulted you, I sincerely pologize.
The Broken Branches of My Family Tree
Well, today is St. Patrick's Day! So, drink hearty! And begorrah! And something. . . IRISH!
True fact that's factually true, unless it isn't: I'm 50% Irish, with a 25% dilution of French and 25% Polish blood if the conventional wisdom is to be believed. It's the 50% Irish that's always been up for speculation, however.
You see, my father was adopted at around the age of five (maybe seven, I'm not sure on some of the particulars), along with one of his brothers--another brother, and a sister, were never adopted and thus lived considerably different lives. The important point is, my father spent quite a bit of his early life in an orphanage after being taken from his biological mother and father, who were deemed abusive at worst, neglectful at best. Whatever the case, they weren't up to parental snuff, according to the state.
At any rate, my father and one of his brothers were adopted by a good old, hard working, salt-of-the-earth couple who owned a farm out in the agricultural Minnesota flatlands around New Ulm. Specifically, my father went to school in the state's toughest-named town called Gaylord, and was a football running back for the intimidating-sounding Gaylord Gaybees, which has, since that time, I believe changed it's mascot. He eventually went on to college in Bemidji, where he was quite the successful track and field pole vaulter. It was there where he also met his future wife, with whom he'd eventually spawn his most important achievement. . . me.
But, getting back to the ancestry of all this, my father never much cared about, and never sought out, his biological parents, and they, certainly, had no interest in seeking him out. My father was busy being a happily-adopted young man, while his biological parents were busy living lives of unconcerned debauchery, if the accepted narrative is to be believed, and there's no real reason to doubt it. As far as my father was concerned, he and his brother were adopted and loved and nurtured. What more could he they ask for?
Forgotten, in his adopted bliss, was he had a sister and a brother who had journeyed down far different paths. His sister, having never been adopted, found her way to San Francisco, where she eventually married and had two children. The other brother, similarly, gravitated to the West coast, although he didn't quite make it all the way--details about his life and whereabout are sketchy on my end, although I'm told I met him at least twice when I was quite young. The sister, fortunately, never forgot about her lost siblings and eventually sought them out, locating them in the late 1970s, which resulted in a reunion of sorts that garnered a little bit of local press coverage. While the sister did, indeed, also have the opportunity to speak with her biological mother, my father never had any interest to do so.
Which brings me back to today: St. Patrick's Day. I'm told my father's biological mother--my grandmother--was 100% Irish, with a storied history that included being purchased at a religious revival event, as well as being one of the few Minnesota women of the time to attend college, although I don't think she ever graduated. My father's biological father--my good old grandpa--was also supposedly 100% Irish, and named "Jonathan Ellington Jr." Again, if the accepted narratice is to be believed, my biological grandfather is buried in Minnesota's very own Ft. Snelling National Cemetary, although I've never sought to verify this.
So, there you have it; my tenuous claim to 50% Irish blood on this St. Patrick's Day. I don't know if it will help me celebrate the day any more or any less, but here's to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
