All I want for Christmas

(and my birthday, which falls shortly after Christmas)

• The tea stains off my two front teeth.
• Elvis Costello cd's, including "My Aim is True," "Get Happy!" "Imperial Bedroom," "Trust," and "The Delivery Man."
• [REDACTED]
• The final Harry Potter book to come out so I can gloat when most of my predictions about it are true.
• Good mental health.
• A scarf.
• [REDACTED]
• Whatever the best Jay-Z cd is.
• All the white evangelicals to realize how inherently racist it is to wish for a return to America's glory days of the pre-1950s.
• For said evangelicals to realize how inherently silly it is to believe that God guides American history and that He/She/It speaks directly to them.
• A good Hold Steady cd.
• The ability to eat the apples I buy and not forget about them, letting them rot into softness next to the stove.
• Nothing pony-related. (Take heed, bro and sister-in-law.)
• An academy award for Borat.
• More email, less junk email.
• [REDACTED]

Updated

• A new pair of jeans.
• Less back pain.
• Really stylish hair, but just for about a month.
• Underwear. Well, only from my wife.
• Functional government.
• [REDACTED]
• Funnier running jokes.
• A new laptop.
• A working knowledge of a foreign language.
• Cable television without the addiction to bad television.
• Funkytown's football team to make it to the NFL playoffs. (This would be funnier if they weren't an NFL team.)
• Bill Maher to realize that a comedian wearing a suit is still merely a comedian.
• For said comedian to realize that his one-liners aren't that great, that few comedians use one-liners anymore, that smirking when you reach the one-liner doesn't make it funny.
• To ease up a bit on people like Bill Maher and direct my energy elsewhere. Like Deadspin.
• Coffee, without the shakes.

Updated again

• A one-credit course for all incoming undergraduates on how to use the fucking bathroom, including the normalcy of using a urinal, the good reasons not to pee on the seat, and how to flush.
  

Hey Douchebag! "Hitchens Hearts Borat" Edition

(Warning: Borat spoilers ahead)

If Christopher Hitchens were to dine with a Southern, Christian family that lived on Secession Drive, how long do you think he’d last before being asked to leave? I ask because Hitchens has written an odd, scattershot essay about Borat for Slate. That means it’s time for another installment of “Hey Douchebag!”

Ever the contrarian (or reactionary, I can’t decide which), Hitchens doesn’t like Borat. But it’s where Hitchens begins that signals just how off his piece is: he makes a lot of hay about a bad summary of the movie in a review in The New Statesman (subscriber only). He begins with the bad table-of-contents listing (not likely to have been written by the reviewer), “Sacha Baron Cohen’s exposure of crass Americana.” Like any headline, that one does an injustice to both the movie and the review. Neither the film nor Ryan Gilbey, the reviewer in question, is interested solely in “crass Americana.” Hitchens, of course, cannot deny the volume or variety of American crassness in the movie (the homophobe who tells Borat to shave his mustache because he looks like a Muslim and terrorist; the frat boys who extol bad behavior with women, then go on to support slavery; the Pentacostals who speak in tongues and “save” Borat; the incredibly long line of people waiting with books, magazines, and life-sized reproductions of Pamela Anderson’s character in Barb Wire, who all want their memorabilia signed by her). Given how troubling the acknowledgement of so much crassness would be to his thesis, he ignores it.

Gilbey’s offending paragraph is, as Hitchens points out, inaccurate, especially in Gilbey’s odd (though not entirely inaccurate) use of the word “compliance” to describe how storeowners respond to Borat. But instead of acknowledging that Borat receives at times compliance and at times resistance (though it’s actually no surprise that a gun owner wouldn’t sell a “Kazakh” a gun with a camera trained on him), Hitchens focuses on “the discovery that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse.” He then catalogs the good manners of those who come into contact with Borat and acknowledges the normalcy of those who threaten Borat on the subway. But here’s what Hitchens (and many other reviewers) have missed: Borat isn’t just satirizing the “attitude of painfully maintained open-mindedness and multiculturalism that is really being unmasked and satirized by our man from the 'stan” (Hitchens) or “crass Americana”: he’s also (and maybe most importantly) exposing how Americans use decorum and politesse to obscure their narrowmindedness (and worse).

Let’s take the example of the formal dinner Borat attends in Birmingham, which Hitchens returns to as a prime example of the pedantic hospitality and politesse of Americans. We’re introduced to the diners by way of a street sign, the above-mentioned Secession Drive. On this street that stands as a stark reminder of the South’s enduring legacy of the Civil War, they tolerate his behavior admirably. (It’s worth noting they knew they were on camera and signed waivers.) But they speak to him and of him in the most condescending way. When Borat compliments a woman on her “erotic physique,” the pastor in the group says with the slow nod of patronizing, “That’s correct. That’s a very good observation.” And when Borat is out of the room, a woman speaks of how easy it would be to “Americanize” Borat. Hitchens summarizes that moment as when they “agree what a nice young American he might make,” a summary that elides just how patronizing that moment is.

Borat’s vulgarity and crassness escalates in each scene not to elicit the vulgarity and crassness of some Americans (though he succeeds in that), it escalates to show how we mask our crassness. That’s why scenes such as “The Running of the Jew” matter so much as counterpoint—many Americans imagine that we’ve moved well beyond crass racism, jingoism, and prejudice. The counterpoint of Borat’s crassness with the disturbing (and sometimes easily pierced) masks of Americans is what the movie is really all about.

That, and the opportunity to hear a fat man yell, “Eat my asshole!”

NFL Officiating Officially Sucks

In an era when any play in a football game has at least four camera angles, bad officiating simply should not have a role in deciding games. A few weeks ago against Tampa Bay, Cincinnati got screwed on a phantom roughing the passer call on Robert Geathers, and today, on Cincinnati's last-chance drive against Baltimore, officials failed to call an obvious 4th down pass interference that would have kept the drive alive. Would Cincinnati have won today's game? Not necessarily, but they should be 5-3 (the Tampa game) and could be 6-2 if they'd had a shot on their last drive. The cameras were in the right place to see, but not the officials.

*****

A plea to sportswriters everywhere:

Stop using the phrase "perfect storm." Any time a couple of circumstances lead to an outcome, a sportswriter (or, in the case of Randy Cross, an announcer) will call it a "perfect storm." And each time they do, I get the sense that they're using it because they think it makes them sound smart. But now it's become a sports cliche. Go ahead, use Google to see how often ESPN's writers use it, or Sports Illustrated's, or the writers aggregated through Yahoo Sports.

*****

I love the Sports Gal

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Bill Simmons has long since lost his edge, but at least his football picks are worth reading for his wife's brief columns. She's funny, and unlike her hubby, she doesn't labor the jokes she makes, she just makes them and moves on. Also, she's out-picking him so far this NFL season. I'm rooting for her.

It is futile to resist

Olive wants you to call for change.













If you don't, she'll take away your frisbee.

Play a role, any role

Help win the election

Why the mother-loving internet exists

Positively literal

Usage pet peeve: people who use "literally" to modify something figurative. For example, from a marketing book I recently read: "People are literally bombarded with advertisements in their mailbox every day." Unless the writer is describing Iraq, I don't think that's a literal bombardment.

But in reading a book about Abraham Lincoln's depression, Lincoln's Melancholy, I came across the following description of the raucous reception Lincoln received one week before the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago:

"The crowd went wild. Delegates and onlookers threw hats, books, and canes into the air. The wigwam shook so much that its canvas exterior became detached from the wood beams. 'The roof was literally cheered off the building,' declared an early account of the maelstrom."

Now the pleasure of a sentence like the one from the early account is diminished because people don't care enough to know the distinction between literal and figurative. Nuts.

Teachers, my gift to you

Those of you who've ever taught understand the frustration of a student who's done little work, trying to scrape by on some misguided notion of "charm" and the slack standards of public school (NB: the slack standards of public school made my hellish teenage years slightly smoother than they would have been otherwise), coming to you and complaining about his or her grade. "But I deserve [to pass] [an A] [a B] etc."

Well, teachers, here's the balm for your scabbed hearts, a phrase you can use in the office to complain. Or if you're the brutal sort, you can use it with your students. My gift to you: revisionist bitchery. Use it wisely, use it often, use it well.

This pretty much says it all

Johnny Cash

An unexpected pleasure

I'm not a Fiona Apple fan, but she and Elvis Costello do an incredible job here of one of my favorite E.C. songs. Enjoy.

Somewhere, off in the distance, a blog barked

The first time I heard the term "flame war," it gurgled from the mouth of an anxious English teacher and fantasy geek. He wasn't sure whether he should post a response to another fantasy geek looking for the only kind of fight he could win, a curse-laden, unproofread discussion board screed about D&D or World of Warcraft. "I don't want to start a flame war," he said. I probably left to use the bathroom.

In case you were curious...

why atheists care about religion.

The regimen

Sorry about the slow posting the last few days. Between the sinus infection and my newfound work ethic, I haven't had much time for blogging.

But I'd like to list what I'm taking in the morning while I'm sick, just to give you a sense of how unhuman I feel right now:

1. Anti-depressant
2. Methylcobalamin, sublingual B-12 (dissolved under the tongue)
3. Generic Sudafed (not with pseudephedrin, but with the other ingredient)
4. Two teaspoons elderberry syrup
5. Homeopathic sinus/cold remedy, dissolved under the tongue (two pills)
6. Three asprin
7. Ricola

Ugh.

In a completely unrelated note, Sports Illustrated football "expert" Peter King was 7-7 in predicting the weekend's games. My congrats to him.

The Laughing Cure

Two anecdotes:

1. A few years ago, I went into the men's room at a Barnes & Noble. At the urinal was a bald man wearing a shirt my mom would describe as "loud," kicking her faint Southern accent into full Arkie (that's Arkansan) mode. As he's urinating, he farts loudly, then sighs. Why do I note this? He was my therapist at the time.
2. In my second or third therapy session of all time, I was describing my making out with a girl outside a bar the weekend prior. The therapist interrupts and asks, "Was there heavy petting?"
   

I'm telling these stories a) because they're funny (I think) and b) because they signal to me the major problem of therapy: it's with another human being, one who farts, wears ugly shirts, likes bad movies, laughs inappropriately, and uses phrases no one's used since Beaver Cleaver.

That's all. Go about your business.

Please be tender with the ouchy groin

"Peter King knows football," reads the ad at the top of the page. The subhead for the article declares, "Bucs, Panthers will do anything to avoid 0-2 start." Well, anything short of winning, it seems. That's right, Peter King's Weekend Pickoff NFL predictions provide me again with the joy that only bad predictions made by an expert can. To wit:

Atlanta 14, Tampa Bay 3
PK's Pick: Tampa Bay 16, Atlanta 13. King writes, "You know how Jon Gruden is. The sky is falling, the world is ending, the entire planet will grind to a halt if we don't win this week. That's what he's telling his team this week. And I'm naive enough -- particularly with John Abraham's ouchy groin either limiting him or sidelining him -- to buy it."

I'd like to note here that Michael Koenen, Atlanta's kicker, went 0-4 on field goals, so the game wasn't really as close as 14-3. Perhaps he has what King calls an "ouchy groin." After the game, King was found in the NBC men's room hitting his head against the hand dryer and repeating over and over again, "Why am I so naive?"

Buffalo 16, Miami 6
PK's Pick: Miami 16, Buffalo 14. According to King, "I like the Bills a lot more than I thought I would. But if you think they're going to win at Nick Saban's house, after Saban limp-wristed the replay flag in the fourth quarter during the Pittsburgh loss and after the Dolphins have had three extra days to prepare, you're crazy."

See, if you predict the future accurately, you're crazy. And Sunday night, King went to Saban's house, where he screamed about Saban's "limp-wristed play calling." Saban responded by punching King in the face and instructing Daunte Culpepper to throw a football at King. Fortunately for King, the ball slipped out of Culpepper's hand.

New Orleans 34, Green Bay 27
PK's Pick: Green Bay 17, New Orleans 12. Still angry about the Saints winning in Week One, King writes of this pick, "I don't know why, really. I guess because this game, quite literally, is the Packers' season. They're at Detroit, at Philly and at Miami for three of their next four, and starting 0-2 at home would end any hopes they have of salvaging Mike McCarthy's rookie year."

Yes, Peter King knows football. I don't know why, really.

New York Giants 30, Philadelphia 24
PK's Pick: Philadelphia 19, New York 17. King writes, "I loved hearing Tom Coughlin the other day. Everyone's anointing the Giants as a very good team (me among them). He came out and said: Hey, you gotta win to be a very good team. Winning. Pretty important factor."

To King's credit, had he picked Philly to win at halftime, I would have agreed. This game will probably lead to Bill Simmons recalibrating his "Levels of Losing"--not that Simmons would rehash an old column because he's out of ideas. Hey, why's it quiet in here all of a sudden? Anyway, notice that King says absolutely nothing about the game. You know, everyone's anointing King as a football expert. Correctly picking games. Pretty important factor.

Minnesota 16, Carolina 13
PK's Pick: Carolina 23, Minnesota 20. King: "I have a bad feeling about the Panthers right now. Really bad. Dan Morgan's fifth concussion, Maake Kemoeatu looking like a turnstile against the Falcons' run game, Travelle Wharton out for the year, necessitating Jordan Gross' move from right to left tackle. But John Fox will be Grudenesque this week. It's must-win time."

Why isn't King reading the first things he writes before making his pick? Again: "I have a bad feeling about the Panthers right now. Really bad." At least he was right about John Fox being Grudenesque.

San Fransisco 20, St. Louis 13
PK's Pick: St. Louis 20, San Fransisco 13. Man, he almost had that one perfect. King writes, "Talked to Scott Linehan the other day. What a cool cucumber. Raved about two of the best leaders he's seen in the league: La'Roi Glover and Corey Chavous. They might be pretty good."

What do cool cucumbers do? They rave. Chavous' stats? One tackle, assisted. Glover's? Zero tackles. Yes, they might be pretty good.

So all in all, King didn't pick so badly; just six losses (I'm writing this before the Pittsburgh/Jacksonville game is over, so there could be a seventh loss; it's an exciting 0-0 halftime tie as I write). But when he's off, man, he's way off. Seriously, though, seriously: he's got an ouchy groin.

Why I blog anonymously

or, Lee Siegel is so, so fetching.

Every Sunday I open The New York Times Magazine, I tell myself, "No, Crazy Little Thing, don't read "Questions for ________." You'll just get mad that they've chosen the idiot they've chosen this week for a shallow, boot-licking "interview." And it happened again this morning, when I turned to "Questions for Lee Siegel," which was right after a nice short piece by Michael Bérubé about "liberalism" in the university and why it's not a problem (though if you've ever been to MB's blog, you've read similar things before). By the way, all you need to know about Lee Siegel is that he's a self-indulgent cultural critic who got suspended from blogging for The New Republic because he anonymously attacked his critics in comments to his own posts.

So how bad was "Questions for Lee Siegel?" Bad. Bad bad. Me stripped of words and stuff to articumulate it. (More on this in a moment.) It all begins with the first clause of Deborah Solomon's first question: "As one of the country's most eloquent and acid-tongued cultural critics..." Ahem. I know it's spoken in an interview, but how about this eloquence from Siegel: "Seriously, the blogosphere strips argument of logic and rhetoric down to the naked emotion behind it."

Point #1: Nice generalization, sprezzatura. That generalization had the appearance of no effort. Point #2: While the rhetoric on blogs may be weak or poorly thought-out, it's still there. See, if it were just the "naked emotion behind it," it might look like this: kljma,.mkljw y;hqgjakl/nmfsad;ljasjdgahfsadaaaaaaaargh!

I will praise Deborah Solomon for the greatest question ever asked of Siegel: "What are you talking about?" But even asking that crucial question, she's still indulged him too much. Consider the following:

Did you feel that you were doing something ethically questionable when you posted, for instance, a comment by Sprezzatura that carried the headline “Siegel Is My Hero”?

Every man is a hero to his alias. No, it never occurred to me at the time that I was doing something wrong. There are other people who appear anonymously on Web sites; they do battle with their detractors. Anonymity is a universal convention of the blogosphere, and the wicked expedience is that you can speak without consequences. What was wrong about it is that I did it under the aegis of The New Republic, as a senior editor of the magazine.

But beyond the breach of your journalistic compact, don’t you think it’s intellectually lame to express one’s opinions anonymously?

I do indeed. Everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities that come from being who you are. I think that is why the blogosphere is thriving. It allows people to develop a fantasy self.

*****
This brings me to my point: I blog anonymously (seriously, Crazy Little Thing is not my real name). A few points on this. I'm not a hero to my alias in any sense; anonymity is far from being a "universal collection"--see Daily Kos, Crooks & Liars, Think Progress, any number of the bloggers at Science Blogs, the above-linked Michael Bérubé, even Instapundit and Michelle Malkin; the error was not blogging anonymously "under the aegis of The New Republic," it was "the dishonesty and sockpuppetry"; and finally, thanks again for the overgeneralization of "everyone seems to be fleeing from the responsibilities." Eloquent, indeed.

So why do I blog anonymously?

1. I'm a grad student working toward a Ph.D., and I also teach undergraduates. What I write on the blog has little to do with my academic work, but given the discomfort many in academia seem to have with blogs, anonymity allows me a certain comfort to know irrelevant ramblings won't adversely affect me on the job market someday.
   
2. I'm also a fiction writer, but that work is also distinct from what I do on the blog. I don't want to use the blog as a stepping stone for publication, but as a conversation with a few friends and, sometimes, for a wider audience.
   
3. The blog can function as a kind of journal, which allows me to post more personal things with confidence and comfort.

But you know what? Sprezzagella has a point: if you choose to blog anonymously, you should acknowledge some responsibilities. Ultimately, if my blog cowl were removed and I could no longer growl, "I'm Blogman" without my real identity being known, I'd be okay with that. I've still maintained boundaries of decorum and respect. I don't libel or make personal attacks; and if I do veer into name-calling and immaturity, it's not under Siegel's incomprehensible saying, "I am too childlike to be immature," it's because I back it up with an argument invested with a pretty high level of logic and rhetoric, or at least as much as I can. (Unless I'm writing about sports. But that's different.) So I'll go on being "intellectually lame" for a while.

Hey douchebag!

Today, I'm beginning an occasional series I've wanted to begin for a while: Hey douchebag! My goal is to confront the problems with Slate magazine's contrarianism. They post any number of ridiculous things in the course of a week, and they need more watchdogs. Among their most telling efforts, see Christopher Hitchens' bizarre attack on Juan Cole. Of course, he chides Cole not for his published writing, but for a comment on a closed discussion board. Or see Jacob Weisberg's god-awful column claiming that Hillary Clinton's iPod demonstrates that she's a calculated politician and that Bush's iPod demonstrates that he's an uncalculating regular guy.

So why "Hey douchebag!" and not, say, "A reasonable dissent from the tone and style of Slate?" Because I'm aping their silly contrarianism, the penchant for startling headlines.

(Note: I regularly visit Slate, and I often enjoy what they produce. This is, in part, an effort to enjoy more of what they produce by curbing the badness in any small way I can.)

For the first installment, let's look at how Slate approaches science: with dilettante Gregg Easterbrook, who has no qualifications to write on science. Yet he tries to tell us that String Theory is junk, based on the fact that he's read one (count 'em, one) book. Now, Easterbrook, summarizing Smolin, might be right about string theory. In fact, other scienticians who've read the book take Smolin's argument seriously. And Smolin is a reputable scientist. (NB: I'm also not a scientician, and I'm happy to let actual scienticians do the research.)

However, let's bear in mind that Slate gives us the review of Smolin's book through the filter of a writer manifestly unqualified to write about science, a writer who clearly has other axes to grind. For example, here's Easterbrook's opening paragraph:

"The leading universities are dominated by hooded monks who speak in impenetrable mumbo-jumbo; insist on the existence of fantastic mystical forces, yet can produce no evidence of these forces; and enforce a rigid guild structure of beliefs in order to maintain their positions and status. The Middle Ages? No, the current situation in university physics departments. I just invented the part about the hoods."

So we know what Easterbrook begins with. All university physicists are trying to protect their narrow, myopic world. (By the way, Easterbrook only recently came around to "believing" in global warming, and he advocates teaching Intelligent Design in public schools. Just fyi.) Easterbrook again:

"If you worry that even in the 21^st century, intellectual fads have as much to do with university politics and careerism as with the search for abstract truth, The Trouble With Physics is a book you absolutely must read."

Yes, folks, that's right, let's base our approach to this book on overgeneralized biases about the state of the university. Because nothing helps out "the search for abstract truth" like overgeneralized biases.

"The physics establishment reacted adversely to Smolin's cosmic natural selection because the idea implies direction: Over time, existence progresses toward a condition more to the liking of beings such as us. In recent decades it has become essential at the top of academia to posit utter meaninglessness to all aspects of physics."

I'd like to note that Easterbrook cites absolutely no one who claims that science must look toward meaninglessness. I'm sure he can find plenty of scientists who note the difference between study of the physical world and study of the metaphysical world (i.e. science and religion). However, noting that separation and arguing for meaninglessness are not the same thing. Of course, then we get to Easterbrook's particular axe to grind:

"Today if a professor at Princeton claims there are 11 unobservable dimensions about which he can speak with great confidence despite an utter lack of supporting evidence, that professor is praised for incredible sophistication. If another person in the same place asserted there exists one unobservable dimension, the plane of the spirit, he would be hooted down as a superstitious crank."

Poor Gregg, unable to tout his religious ideas in a scientific forum. But let me be the first to say: whether or not Easterbrook is a superstitious crank, I don't know. But he's certainly a crank.

There'll be days like this, my marmoset

We're drunk on power and website hits today, going so far as to use the first-person plural (or as I once called it in an undergrad class, "the fourth person"). I'm also drunk on love. And some beer. Thanks to Deadspin, Awful Announcing, The Big Lead, and Javadog Sports, for linking to me over the past two days and sending my ego soaring. So send them all some love back and go visit them, if you don't already.