Them Wall Street Protests

Been super busy lately, so blogging has gone back down to the bottom of my priorities list. And I really feel like I should have posted something by now about the occupy movement, but such is life sometimes.

Though trust me, that will happen eventually, for now I don't have the time to say anything too insightful about it that hasn't already been said (though I will soon! I promise!), so instead I'm going to take the cheap cop-out and link to someone else writing about it instead.

Several versions of this kind of argument have been making the rounds of the facetubes and twitbooks and whatever else the kids are using these days, but I think this one stands out for being well-written and from a reputable source. That being said, I direct your attention to Four Charts That Explain What The Protestors Are Angry About.

Obviously you can go read the article yourself, but the gist of it is that while minimum wage and real incomes (inflation adjusted) for the bottom 40% have declined and barely risen, respectively, corporate profits have skyrocketed, and executive compensation and incomes for the top earners have experienced similar sharp growths.

While the income disparity angle is interesting enough, I think the corporate profits chart explains the problem even more succinctly. The wave of outsourcing and off-shoring in the 80s was justified by businesses as an attempt to stay afloat and keep pace in a hectic global market. And if that actually were the case, then asking for some concessions from workers would be a reasonable option. But since they were all actually seeing record profits...well, I don't mean to sound too cynical, but this may indicate that not only were these businesses maybe not being super truthful, they also were literally lining their pockets with money stolen from the pockets of workers.

And this is why people are angry.

Ryan Gosling Would Like To Discuss Feminist Theory With You

In today's hilarious tumblr round up, here's Feminist Ryan Gosling:

This Proves Pretty Much Everything I've Been Saying...

Headline from today's newspaper: With immunity ruled out, U.S. troops unlikely to stay in Iraq past 2011.

This is so blatantly ludicrous, I don't even know where to start. It's one of those crazy moments where the powers that be accidentally tell the truth, and for people like me, those moments are always simultaneously exhilarating (they're telling the truth! and I was right!) but yet completely depressing (shit! I was right about all the horrible things they're doing!).

For those who don't wan to read the article, the gist is that the Iraqi government, because of the many, many straight-up homicides, rapes, and other incredibly illegal and immoral actions of US soldiers and contractors, will no longer grant a blanket immunity to all US military personnel and instead will now prosecute them for illegal acts (crazy, I know). And now because the US military does not get to do whatever it wants whenever it wants wherever it wants, it's taking its ball and going home like the spoiled child it is.

This is also pretty concrete proof that the many problems and legal violations of the invasion were systemic, and not the fault of those classic "few bad apples." Because if only a "few bad apples" were breaking the law, you wouldn't really need blanket immunity from all prosecutions. Hell, if it truly were just a "few bad apples," wouldn't you want legal prosecution of them, to show how upstanding and law-abiding the rest of you are?

But maybe I'm being too cynical. Maybe no laws were ever broken by any military personnel or contractors. But if I'm wrong about this, I'd sure like to hear an explanation of why the refusal to extend immunity is the reason why they're finally packing up and going home, because I'm just not smart enough to figure out any other way those two things are connected...

To Whip It or Not To Whip It

As any long time reader of this blog will know, I am sucker for every possible type of graph, flow chart, venn diagram, or other such smart-ass way of graphically depicting things from pop culture.

So, for instance, if you're worried about whether Mothersbaugh and company would advise you to whip it or not, well, worry no more:

Announcing Healthy October

Part 5  in the Bottoming Out and Moving Onwards Series. Find Part 1 here, Part 2 here,  Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.

Pictured: Me?

It turns out that being depressed isn't particularly good for your health. I'm sure there's all sorts of scientific studies or some such thing that say this, but I'm sure it's more than obvious to anyone who's gone through a shitty point in their life, which would be pretty much everyone, I assume.

Anyway, as part of bottoming out in life this summer, I more-or-less abandoned every even semi-healthy activity there is. So little things like exercise and eating food that contains nutrients were replaced by drinking heavily, eating shitty fast food, sitting on my ass all day, and then some more heavy drinking. As such, I've gotten a little soft around the edges. And by "soft around the edges" I mean fat and lazy.

And while getting into shape and living healthily really aren't that hard, it is often hard to start doing them, mostly because living unhealthily and being fat are super duper easy.

After a few false starts, I've decided to arbitrarily pick the beginning of October as the time I would get serious about this, and take it super seriously for a month -- the month of healthy October. The idea being that if I take getting back into somewhat healthy habits really seriously for a month it will pretty much maintain itself after that.

So for the rest of this month, it's going to be making all my food at home, and mostly fruits and vegetables and all those sorts of things at that; knocking out the unhealthy snack foods completely; maintaining a regular exercise routine; and cutting back on the drinking. I figure, do all that for a month with strict discipline, and that's got to be good enough to get back into fighting shape.

The end of healthy October will be marked by Halloween, during which I will drink heavily and eat a lot of shitty food.

I Gots To Get Paid, Son

Man, has it really been nearly a month since I last blogged?

According to the records on this website, yes. Sorry about that.

But I have a damn good excuse, and this time it's not nearly as mopey -- I've been busy putting together job applications. And not just any job applications, but applications to get a real big boy professor job.

And not too surprisingly, before a university hires you to be a professor, they expect a lot of information from you. A lot.

Like upwards of 20 or so pages of essays, commentaries, past work, etc. And then, of course, writing samples and all sorts of other fun stuff on top of that.

So I've been doing little else but working on those things for the past few weeks. But I'm starting to see a scant amount of light at the end of the tunnel, telling me I must be getting close to finished with them. OF course, these are the kinds of things that are never actually finished, so I guess I mean I'm getting close to a place where I fine with other people reading them and judging me based on their contents.

With out getting into the inside baseball of academia, the kicker of this is that I'm fully expecting not to get any job offers from this group of applications. Hell, I'd be pretty surprised if I even got an interview out of it.

So really this is all just getting me some valuable life experience. Or something like that. And if there's one thing I've learned in my short time on this earth, it's that life experience usually involves something being a frustrating pain in the ass...

It Seems To Be a More-Or-Less Weekly Event

It sure does seem to be a regular event these days that some sort of righteously anti-gay politician or preacher is found buying meth and having gay sex in a public restroom, or hiring a gay prostitute to go on vacation with them, or employing some form of wide stance that only coincidentally appears exactly the same as gay code for anonymous sex in an airport bathroom.

But at this point, who can even keep track of these guys anymore? Hell, it's stopped even being that much of a surprise when one of these guys is accidentally out. It seems more like the burden of proof is now on homophobic politicians to prove they're not actually secretly gay.

Well, if you're having as much trouble keeping track of all of the hypocrites as I am, there's a handy new resource: gayhomophobe.com. It's a simple compendium of all known hypocritically anti-gay politicians who were either outed or admitted to their sexuality. It also features a nice running tally of the number of days since a prominent homophobe was embroiled in a gay sex scandal. You know, so you can accurately decide who won the Ted Haggard office pool.

No, They Certainly Don't

Here's the most entertaining tumblr I've found in a long time (occasionally NSFW): Boobs Don't Work That Way.

It's a nice little compendium of pretty much the biggest problem with comic books/anime. The representation of women in comic books is a lot like the problems I have with corporate sports as they exist today.

Because I enjoy both greatly. And like modern corporate sports, there's actually a lot more to comics than skeptics and the disinterested give them credit for. It's been years since Alan Moore and his ilk took comic books to the realm of respectable art, but many people still dismiss them as pulp or useless. So, much like I find myself when discussing sports with the educated elite that populate our nation's higher-learning institutions, I'm often stuck defending comic books to people who think they're at best a waste of time, at worst, some sort of blight on humanity.

But again like it is with major sports, there's some things about comics I just can't defend, the absurdly and aggressively sexist portrayal of pretty much all women in them (when they're even there) being foremost among them. And like most of the shitty things about modern sports, this incredible sexism is completely unnecessary and obnoxiously pointless, not to mention, giving them a bad name and an easy excuse for dismissal by those already inclined to ignore them.

I suppose that's a lesson of life though; there's really nothing you can support that doesn't have some obnoxious shit you have to apologize for...

Family Man or Incompetent Man-Child?

Part 4 in the Bottoming Out and Moving Onwards Series. Find Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.

Traveling abroad is great for providing examples of socialization, because being in another culture lays bare how truly so many of our rather fundamental beliefs are essentially arbitrary. This is not to say that many of them aren't quite good ideas or ways of doing things, just that there are plenty of other great ideas and ways to accomplish things, and why you chose one over another is mostly dependent on the society you grew up in.

Take living with you parents, for example.

In the recent years, there's been a bunch of panicky articles about this in the American media; 20/30 somethings who had moved out of the house were moving back in because of the tough economy. The articles especially focused on college graduates who had to move back in with their parents after college because they couldn't find any work. I'm sure there was even some cutesy nickname attached to it, like re-nesters, or something like that. I don't care nearly enough to search for it.

Anyway, the point is that these people moving back in with their parents were not only seen as quite an abnormal development, they were seen as some sort of commentary on our society. Some posited them as a sign of how bad our recession is. Others claimed that kids today just refuse to grow up, what with their cartoons and their music and their invasions they just can't stop fighting and whatnot. But all of them saw this as an inherently negative or backward step for both these young adults and, more-or-less, the country.

Because we have a powerful cultural narrative in American about what it means to be an adult. And for the vast majority of people here, this means leaving the home at 18, probably getting a degree of some kind, buying a house, getting married, having kids, etc. But all of these latter steps are predicated on the idea that you've left your parents house.

Where I was overseas, the situation was the exact opposite. Many people only left their house when they got married, if they even left the house at all. And because of various cultural, religious, and economic restraints, younger sons and daughters may have to wait a long time to get married. Most people I met were prety surprised to learn I was no longer living with my parents at the tender young age of 28, what with the fact I was neither married nor had any children. Who cooked for me? How did I manage a household? Etc.

So really, this is just two versions of ways to do things, specifically where to live. Neither of them is inherently good or bad (they both have their upsides and downsides), but we tend to think the one we do is normal and that doing it another way is odd at the very least, horribly wrong at the worst.

It's also a good example of how understanding how a social process works in no way prevents you from being a part of it, whether you want to or not. So I know, for instance, that living with your parents or not is essentially an arbitrary cultural script, so it's not really anything to worry about it. But I live in this particular cultural context that says it's odd. So anytime it comes up that I lived with my parents for most of the summer, I'm quick to explain how it was a really unique circumstance, it wasn't for a long term, etc.

And that, of course, is if the subject is even brought up in the first place. Because even though I've never felt judged by anyone about this and they always understand (especially when I offer my now well-rehearsed explanation), I can still feel how out of step with the normal cultural script this is and feel pressured to explain why I've deviated.

Though of course now I'm living on my own again like a grown up, so I can just pretend it never happened...

Marvel At My Semi-Competent Adulthood

Part 3 in the Bottoming Out and Moving Onwards Series. Find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.


Blogging has been quite spare lately because the day has finally arrived -- by the end of this very day, I should be fully moved out of my mommy and daddy's house. So this past week has been a blur of packing and all the other mishegas that goes with moving.

While were I live likely has little to do with how successfully I put my life back together, there's definitely some psychological benefit to no longer doing something pretty widely regarding a marking you as a failure in life.

So by the next time you read this humble li'l blog, I'll be out living on my own, like a big boy...

What Football Team Do You Support?

I've apparently been on quite the flowchart kick lately, so here's yet another one. If you're lost on which NFL team you'd like to support in the upcoming season, here you go:

Back To School Time

Just in time for heading back to campus, might I present the 10 douchiest colleges in America.

I'm...proud?...to say there's 3 Big 10 schools on the list, making us by far the most well represented college conference.

Though this list has surprisingly little overlap with the top 10 party schools lists, which you assume would also draw in a significant amount of douche bags. Not to say I'm questioning the methodology or results of such a precise scientific endeavor, but it does seem a little suspect...

In 1992, I Could Have Reproduced This Poster From Memory

I grew up when professional wrestling was in its death throes, but wasn't the horrid wasteland it is today. Sure, the great regional leagues had all been picked clean by Vince McMahon and the like, but at least there were still fun and colorful characters, like fighting garbage men and angry barbers. Of course, there were some horrible racial stereotypes, but I assume that's still going on in wrestling and has really always been a mainstay of the sport.

But the reason I complain about wrestling today is not just the insidiously sexist/homophobic corporate clusterfuck nature of it, but the fact that all of the fun and mostly wholesome names and characters have been lost in favor of characters who are just aggressively dumb and sexist.

But via the always entertaining deadspin, here's a definitive taxonomy of professional wrestling names (click to enlarge):

They May Be Crazy, But Their Method May Still Be Sound

So of all things, I recently read an interesting interview with the Public Information Officer for the Madison Police Department. Apparently when it's a slow day or a really interesting case comes down the pipe, Joel DeSpain writes a ripping good police incident report for it, such as this one of a possible rapture situation.

This made me instantly think of two quite divergent thoughts. The first is of a Patton Oswalt bit from his slightly over-rated Werewolves and Lollipops. He says there are certain towns like Madison or Austin that are so incredibly weird and encapsulated in their own little world that you either need to get out quite young, or never leave. Because if you try to leave as an adult, the rest of the normal world will be completely bewildering to you ("You mean I can't pay for this sandwich with a song?" "No. You literally cannot do that.").

And so it makes sense this DeSpain guy works for the Madison PD. Only in Madison do you have a couple of cops get called out to some annoying little cutesy stunt and instead of getting pissed off and angrily cleaning it up while grumbling about the God damned kids these days, they pass it along to this guy, who spins a fantastical tale of whimsy about it. I feel like this man would be beaten up in many other departments.

But the other thought was that things like this are not such a bad idea. Because really, a lot of what causes the perceived/ real (there's some significant arguments about which of those it really is) hostility, or at least distance, between the general public and the police comes down to the perception of police as dicks. And while some certinaly are, I'd argue the vast majority are not.

But I would argue the vast majority of police are pretty humorless, at least when attending to official police business. And the complete lack of humor and self-awareness, while probably aimed at being professional, certainly doesn't do anything to combat the appearance of just being jerks. Which again, I argue most police are not.

So maybe finding ways to inject some levity into the police world, as well as allow the public some glimpse into the often absurd/surreal world of policing, might break down that real (or possibly only perceived) divide.

But the fanciful NPR-oriented-humorist-style police reports? Yeah, that will probably only work in Madison...

I Am Officially Living A Country Music Song

Part 2 in the Bottoming Out and Moving Onwards Series. Find Part 1 here.


By any metric, this has not been a particularly good summer for me. Which makes it even more of a bummer, because Minnesota summer is something to look forward to. Nay, something to dream about. A shitty winter? No sweat, it's already pretty shitty. A shitty spring? No problem, for you have summer to look forward as you dig out of it. A shitty fall? Not that great, since I love fall and all, but at least the slowly decaying life around you thematically highlights your self-pity. But a shitty summer? That's just straight up shitty.

But being the eternal optimist I am, I've been joking that at least there's a couple of country music songs to get out of my misery. And this past weekend, that became so much more true. On my way up to the Pine Country Demolition Derby, my poor li'l purple car finally died. Well, it didn't die, but the clutch blew out, and would cost far more to replace than that piece of shit is worth, so the unfortunate decision was made to junk it.

In addition to all the memories of my 16 year-old baby, I now am without a car, which fully completes the country song. To recap my summer: my fiance left me, I'm flat broke, and my car died. So help me God, if something happens to my dog, I'm officially done with life.

R.I.P. Li'l Purple Car

Your Pic For Friday

I don't know if the following image is photo-shopped or not, but supposedly this is a pic from the Simpsons store at Universal Studios:

I choose to believe it's real, because this is the kind of world I want to live in...

Bottoming Out and Moving Onwards (And Possibly Upwards)

So it's been well over  a month since I last blogged, and it's about time to get back into the game. Why the extremely long layoff, you ask? Or, more accurately, you will eventually ask someday when you stop by to check if I've ever updated this.

The short version of the story: as regular readers know, I was overseas all spring. About a week and a half after getting back, my fiancee left me. In addition to taking the shattered remains of my heart, she took most of the household goods. And also my place to live, as it's hard to find apartments for one that will also accept a dog. While I've found a place to live with a friend, the house is currently being remodeled, so for the next month-ish, I'll be living with my parents.

Now, I fully understand that life can get much worse than this, blah, blah, blah. But as a personal low, being left by my fiancee and being forced to move back in with my parents pretty much qualifies as my biggest personal failure to date.

So after taking a month or so off of life to "process my emotions" (read: drink a lot and ignore the problem), I've decided it's time to come back to the land of the living and start to put my life back together.

So while this humble li'l blog will continue to feature all of the potty-mouthed ramblings and mildly humorous links you've come to expect, updates on my bottoming out and attempt to reconstruct my life are going to become a new regular feature.

And so far, I have to say that other than little things like dignity or self-sufficiency that other folks may worry about, living with your parents as an adult is really not that bad. Lots of free food, physical copies of the newspaper (ha! old people!), and someone else paying the utilities. Could be worse.

Anyway, stay tuned for more...

They're Even Afraid of Athletic Competition

Without going too much into it, pretty much everyone who is even remotely close to unbiased about the situation agrees the American drug war is completely screwed up. Heck, even a lot of people who are strongly biased to support the drug war admit it's screwed up. Whether you believe in the legalization of drugs or not, it's pretty hard to deny our current system of mass incarceration and ever-increasing penalties is having absolutely no effect on the levels of drug use in our nation and is having all sorts of deleterious effects (with little things like us having the most people in prison in the world, measured by raw numbers of percentages, and having more people in prison on drug charges than the entire EU has in prison for any reason).

Yet what's frustrating for people who would like to reform this broken system (let alone people who would advocate for legalization) is that when presented with the fairly indisputable evidence of how the war on drugs is not working, the official government responses is to pretty much put their fingers in their ears and yell "la la la! I can't hear you!" until you go away.

And in what has to be the most humorous analogy for this I've ever stumbled across, in the Congressional Softball League in D.C., the ONDCP's Czardinals refuse to play the drug-policy reform Capitol Hemp One Hitters (I swear to God I'm not making up either of those names).

While the Czardinals claim a scheduling problem is preventing the match up, the One Hitters took to a press release to note this has happened 6 years running now and wondered why the ONDCP was so afraid to face them, either in debate or on the softball diamond.

McBain: The Movie

Sorry blogging has been so light lately. I'm on the very tail end of my great overseas adventure, so I've been really busy cramming work in, seeing friends for the last time, and all the other things one does at the end of a long trip overseas.

But to tide you over until I return with my patented brand of angrily ranting into the empty void of the internet, someone has stitched together all of the McBain clips from the Simpsons over the years and it pretty seamlessly becomes a pretty good action flick.

The writes claim this is entirely a coincidence, but knowing those folks, I wouldn't be too surprised if this was a little intentional...

How Good Is It If It Has Nothing To Say?

I hated Eminem long before doing so was cool, though I had a friend who long tried to persuade me I was wrong to dismiss him so flippantly. He tried to convince me that Em had really great rhyming skills, and his flow was impressive, and all the other things that various music critics and fans have cited for liking him. But being a self-righteous college activist, I would tell him I simply couldn't sign off on any music that brazenly misogynistic and homophobic, and was frankly surprised he could. His defense was that you don't have to agree with everything someone says to like their music (which I agree with), but I would retort that if you really disagree with much of what someone says, then why are you listening to their music?

And while I'd like to think I've gotten a little less self-righteous over the years and have come to accept more music I might have once found questionable, I think the basic point still holds. At a certain point, someone's objectionable lyrics just override whatever else their music might have to offer. It reminds me of a review I read a couple years back of a Snoop album in which the reviewer wrote something to the effect of "Sure, Snoop has one of the best and most recognizable flows in all of rap, but he doesn't really have anything worthwhile to say with it."

And this sort of debate happens all the time in music, but it coming to the fore now as the indie world has fallen in love with flavor-of-the-moment rapper Tyler, The Creator, whose debut features music so violently misogynistic and homophobic it's become notable in a genre that's pretty much known for such things.

Sara of Tegan and Sara recently took to the interwebs to object to the uncritical praise Tyler's gotten from otherwise intelligent folks, writing in part:

As journalists and colleagues defend, excuse and congratulate 'Tyler, the Creator,' I find it impossible not to comment. In any other industry would I be expected to tolerate, overlook, and find deeper meaning in this kid's sickening rhetoric? Why should I care about this music or its 'brilliance' when the message is so repulsive and irresponsible?... The more I think about it, the more I think people don't actually want to go up against this particular bully because he's popular. Who sticks up for women and gay people now? It seems entirely uncool to do so in the indie rock world, and I'll argue that point with ANYONE.

It's a somewhat tired point, but still relevant. Even more telling about the state of gender relations in our time, though, is probably Tyler's response:

"If Tegan And Sara Need Some Hard Dick, Hit Me Up!"

For a guy who's supposed to be a lyrical genius, you'd think he might be able to come up with a bit more intelligent come back...

Update: Emma Carmichael has a much more intelligent take on this.