Most People Are DJs. Also Thieves.

Since this blog came up in conversation today, I thought I'd mention that I endorse 100% of the things Kevin Carey says here. To sum up:

• The Hold Steady is awesome.
  
• Stealing music is lame.

hi dennis. how r u doing? LOL

MySpace is cool again! Check out their Impact page, and peruse the 2008 presidential candidates' MySpace pages. Guess who new my newest friend is?

Most candidates are going with polished pages, but Bill Richardson opts for the muted default template. It looks like we have something in common! Until he tells me about his taste in music, movies, and books, though, I don't know if I can trust him to lead the nation. His friend Charlotte is pretty cute.

Hillary Clinton claims to have over 51,000 friends. I bet she totally doesn't know that many people.

Everyone's favorite Mitt likes the Beatles, Huckleberry Finn, and serving the state of Massachusettes. According to hip Top 24, there also appears to be a gaggle of Romneys invating the internets.

Rudy Guliani has his profile set to private. What a douche!

Oh Give Me a Break

Poor Scot Pollard.

Cleveland Cavaliers center Scot Pollard looked into the camera during a recent game and said, "Hey kids, do drugs." ...

"We have spoken with Scot and certainly do not condone his actions," general manager Danny Ferry said in a statement Wednesday. "He regrets his mistake, using inappropriate humor, particularly when he has always been very involved in the community, projecting positive messages to our youth. We will handle the issue internally."

I dunno, I thought it was pretty funny.

Wait, Can They Do This?

I'm just one shade away from being one of those jerks who doesn't own a television and goes out of her way to drop this fact into casual conversation with friends who are supposed to be impressed because she abstains from mind-rotting boob tube; rather, I have a TV, but I don't have cable.

I knew I was in the minority, but I didn't realize that cable-less Americans were so rare that the government could declare that security concerns are more important than free entertainment. (I wouldn't watch "How I Met Your Mother" if I had to pay for it, dammit!)

Analog TVs will no longer receive a signal come Feb. 19, 2009, unless users update their hardware to receive a digital signal. ...

The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) said it is setting aside $990 million to pay for the boxes. Each home can request up to two $40 coupons for a digital-to-analog converter box, which consumer electronics makers such as RCA and LG plan to produce. Prices for the box have not been determined, but industry and consumer groups have estimated they will run $50 to $75 each. ...

"The whole digital TV transition will enable public safety responders to have more spectrum for more operability and public safety uses," said Todd Sedmak, a spokesman for the telecommunications administration. ...

But consumer groups worry that poor and middle-class families, who can't afford to spring for a new television, will get left behind in the move and that the $40 vouchers won't be enough.

"How do you get it to the people who need it?" said Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America. "Has Congress set aside enough money to make sure everyone is held harmless? The answer is: probably not. Now you have a problem of certain consumers being hurt. They have a TV set that works today and won't work tomorrow and they have to spend money to make it work again."

I'm impressed (and thankful) that the government is recognizing that it's only fair to subsidize the cost of converting from analog to digital broadcasting if in fact the government is mandating that transition. I'm surprised about it, too, because I didn't think free television was considered an essential need worth being paid for by the state. Perhaps televisions can be construed as necessary because they broadcast essential safety information during emergencies. Do regulatory laws demand that the state provide coupons?

Can you think of any other reasons the federal government would be obligated to subsidize analog-to-digital TV converters?

Not Just Not Bad For You

Via Julian Sanchez, it looks like there's not actually much evidence that playing violent video games leads to violent behavior:

According to a new study by a researcher at Texas A&M International University, studies that see a connection between video games and violent behavior usually suffer from shoddy research techniques. Dr. Christopher Ferguson studied the results of a number of recent studies linking violent video games to aggressive behavior with an eye not just to individual results, but also to overall trends in the studies as a whole.

Wait, but I thought we knew that virtual violence made players nastier and more aggressive!

Ferguson found that the connection between violence and gaming had more to do with publication bias than it did with any actual correlation. In other words, journals were more likely to publish studies that supported the hypothesis that playing violent games made a subject more prone to violent behavior.

I, for one, am not surprised, but this did remind me of an article I read a few days ago about the benefits of playing video games:

Playing video games appears to help surgeons with skills that truly count: how well they operate using a precise technique, a study said Monday.

There was a strong correlation between video game skills and a surgeon's capabilities performing laparoscopic surgery in the study published in the February issue of Archives of Surgery.

...
It supports previous research that video games can improve "fine motor skills, eye-hand coordination, visual attention, depth perception and computer competency," the study said.

The sample size involved was actually pretty small, but I've got first-hand experience using video games to help students with visual processing or sensory-motor skill disorders. It turns out that experts actually recommend video games for those purposes, and I see no obvious reason why similar sorts of benefits wouldn't be seen more generally.

What's more, one of my girlfriend's pet theories is that computer science offers a medium in which one can be a comfortable, confident learner because mistakes are neither embarrassing nor dangerous; you can always just start over if you screw up, and nobody has to be the wiser. Students are therefore more likely to take risks and push the limits of what they know. They can also look forward to immediate feedback, which is definitely gratifying. My girlfriend typically emphasizes those potential benefits of programming, but I see very similar phenomena with even the fairly primitive computer games I give my students to, say, study for geography quizzes.

None of which is to say that kids ought to be playing Grand Theft Auto at school, but I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that 1) it would be nice to see computers better integrated into the school day and 2) that kids deserve leisure time and there are certainly worse, less-productive ways to spend it than on video games. They could be blogging, for instance.

Facebook: Stupid for So Many Reasons

I'm uptight, possibly Nazi-like, about calling out subtle and culturally normative sexist attitudes or phrases that occur in everyday life. It's exhausting maintaining my level of vigilance, in fact. Do you realize how tiresome it is to correct everyone who refers to adult women as "girls"? My throat is nearly parched from jeering every television commercial that portrays only women doing housework. Can anyone else appreciate that I've perfected my "Excuse me? What did you just say?" face to employ when someone says "female doctor" or "male nurse"? Just the other night on Deal or No Deal, when a female contestant was explaining that she's a shopaholic because she buys whatever she wants, Howie retorted, "I think that just makes you a woman!" I literally booed the television, and not just because that's a horrible show and Howie Mandel is a pox on the small screen medium.

Anyhow, it didn't escape my notice that Facebook, which is aimed primarily at Internet-savvy high school and college students, is using "Mother's maiden name" as a login security prompt:


All of the other security questions are pretty innocuous (though you could argue "What is your favorite pizza topping?" discriminates against those with wheat allergies), but this default question is painfully behind the times. Yes, many mothers, even mothers of kids in the youthful 12-25 age group, took their husbands' last names when they got married, but how many of those moms have subsequently gotten divorced and reclaimed their birth names? How many of those moms didn't get married or didn't change their names to begin with?

More importantly, why is a seemingly hip outfit like Facebook perpetuating the normativity of patriarchal customs?

I Don't Feel Like Listenin'

I can't figure out why the Scissor Sisters, who are wildly popular in the UK and all over Europe, have flopped so miserably in the United States. The New York natives are among the best-selling artists in the United Kingdom but haven't cracked the charts in their home country.

My best guess is that their beat-you-over-the-head-with-a-dildo homosexuality is simply too abrasive for American audience. For some reason Europeans have a higher tolerance for former gay bar strippers wearing nothing but overalls than Yankees do. Though not all members of the Scissor Sisters are gay, and though gay themes don't entirely dictate their lyrical and aesthetic content, the band is fairly, uh, flamboyant. I saw them at the Warfield during their break-out tour, and it appeared that a large proportion of their fan base (at least in San Francisco, which is hardly an average city) are cross-dressers, bears, or unafraid to hold hands with their same-sex partner in public. Incidentally, it was one of the best concerts I've ever attended. (That they can put on such a fun show, replete with multiple costume changes, yet still maintain such a high degree of musicianship in their live performances is amazing.)

But it's not like Americans haven't embraced gay groups before. Queen and Elton John never had trouble making it huge in the US. "Relax" made it to number 10 on the American charts. Wham! was a hit over here. Though, as my boyfriend pointed out, all of those groups developed an American fan base before they had come out as gay or they were big in the 1980s, when thinly-veiled homosexual aesthetics blended in quite nicely with the overall styles of the day. Have their been any majorly successful, openly gay artists in the US in the last decade and a half?

I'd suggest that the band's actual music is what's keeping them down in the states--they preform an uncategorizable fusion of disco, glam, and dance-friendly pop--but half the junk that tops the charts on this side of the pond is synth-infused disco crap. Gwen Stefani's two solo albums have thrived in America in spite of (or because of) her synth-pop sound. Justin Timberlake could turd in a paper bag and it'd immediately go platinum in the US, and everything he does sounds pretty disco.

So what gives? Are Americans actually put off by gay music? Or would any band that's so unconventional--gay or straight--flounder in the states? Or are we just allergic to music that's not easily categorized?

Slapped, Not Stirred.

I've watched each of the twenty-one films in the James Bond series, in chronological order, over the last nine months. Thus I can say with authority that Casino Royale is hands-down the best movie in over a score of otherwise boorish action flicks, and Daniel Craig is easily the most dynamic, nuanced, intriguing, vulnerable, and skilled actor to portray the titular double-O. And guess what? He's sexier than all the five previous bonds. Guess what number two? He makes Sean Connery look like a flabby, balding, slimy, antiquated, meat-headed Neanderthal in comparison.

After viewing about fifty hours of Bond flicks, I've grown to appreciate exactly how misogynistic the first twenty (and, to a lesser extent, the twenty-first) movies are in their portrayal of women, men, and sex. Women are passive objects, men are violent saviors, and sex exists for male pleasure (or as a way to wrangle top-secret information from naive women). You know, the usual afflictions of any popular cultural output largely informed by male priviledge.

/Commence plot spoilers/ But Casino Royale paints a slightly different picture, much to some viewers' shagrin. Bond seems more interested in playing good poker than bedding a good partner. He only definitively sleeps with one woman, Vesper, whom he eventually falls in love with, and who is clearly the secret agent's intellectual equal. Rather than spending 150 minutes rescuing Vesper from improbable situations, Bond proves to actually be quite bad at rescuing anyone, including himself. If Vesper is a damsel in distress, she can't count on James being her knight in shining armor. Eva Green's character even enjoys the distinction of nearly double-crossing Bond, and only failed deliberately. One disturbing element of the movie, though, was in complying with the theme that the only good woman is a dead woman; the underlying violence toward women is a little hard to swallow, but necessary for the future of the Bond franchise. Far be it from me to choose between a married James Bond and the production of more 007 movies. /Conclude plot spoilers/

Casino Royale critics having been falling back on the "Sean Connery is the quintessential Bond" argument when defaming Daniel Craig. Maybe this is because Connery helped sculpt Bond's anti-woman demanor over the course of his six films as the character, and the other fourteen pre-Craig* movies took that misogyny and ran with it, thus establishing Bond as necesssarily an anti-woman character. Connery is the definitive Bond specifically because Bond is the asshole Connery made him into. Daniel Craig does not portray a misogynist douchebag version of Bond, so he inherently cannot be what we expect of 007. To which I say, thank goodness.

But why listen to my analysis? Let's let Craig and Sean speak for themselves. Yes, the two men's Bonds aren't clones of the actors behind the tuxedo, but the actors' personal beliefs certainly shine through. Here, Sean Connery explains that it's okay to slap a woman if she's talking too much.** (Not only is that sexist, tasteless, and morally wrong, it's also illegal. Jesus.) Daniel Craig on the other hand, as if to prove how un-Sean Connery he can be, welcomes the idea of having James engage in a gay-themed scene in an upcoming Bond movie. How far in advance can I buy my tickets?

* Or B.C., as I like to say.

** For some reason the anti-feminist propogandists have fooled dullards into thinking that feminists should think that slapping women is acceptable because hitting men is also acceptable and, hey, you wouldn't want women and men to receive unequal treatment! There are so many things wrong with that argument that I'll have to address them in a later post.

I've had it with these motherfucking snakes!

This just in: Snakes on a Plane is this summer's Citizen Kane. The critics are going gaga over a movie about snakes ... on a plane.

This is not politically relevent, except as an illustration of Hollywood's mysterious magic powers.