Today M’ris comments on an article
in Salon about Charles Bowden’s, “Blues for Cannibals”. The Salon article’s author
is
unimpressed with the book’s rhetorical tactics:

Bowden tells us that he’s telling us things people don’t want to know, suggesting there’s something
transgressive about what he’s doing. In the book’s long section about this three years as a reporter
covering sex crimes, he repeats a sentence that for him distills the widespread attitude toward his grisly
subject — “Don’t talk about it, no one wants to hear these things.”

I don’t think this is true. If people didn’t want to hear these things then JonBenet wouldn’t sell
newspapers and we wouldn’t have “Law and Order Special Victims Unit,” an entire prime time television
show showcasing a new sex crime every week.

I feel a bit sorry for Bowden… he’s trying so hard to shock us out of our bourgeois
stupor, but in this day and age, we bourgeois are pretty hard to shock. Oh, every once
in a while we get a case like the Texas woman who
ran
into a homeless man with her car, drove home with him stuck in her windshield, and let him bleed to death while
she went inside and had sex with her boyfriend. But for the most part, I agree,
shock tactics are not the way to go.

Listen, I’m going to let you all in on a little secret. I have an idea for a novel that I got
a few months ago, after listening to Jonathan Franzen on the radio. This idea
is so radical, so transgressive, that it will be beyond the pedestrian tastes of
the Booker prize and the National Book Award. Yes, I’ll be talked-about, vilified,
and made rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Are you ready? Think you can handle it?
Here it is: I’m going to write a novel that says, “Suburbia is just swell!”

Yeah, I bet you wish you had thought of it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… for the last three years at work, I’ve been stuck with
Netscape 4. But in just a month or two, the company is switching us all over to Netscape 6.2.1
(cue angelic music). Yes, our intranet (i.e. my entire client base) will be using a browser
with pretty darn good CSS2 support and a standards-compliant XML processor. Do you know what
that means? It means I can do client-side XSLT, and you can’t. Nyah, nyah!

Edit, April 2003: My bragging was premature. As of November 2002, the company had still not switched over from Netscape 4.7, and there was no publicly-announced date for the changeover either.

It looks like there’s going to be an Alexander the Great movie coming to
theaters around Christmas 2003.

The good news is that the part of Alexander will be played by Heath Ledger.
The bad news is that the part of the director will be played by Oliver Stone.

Ledger is a brilliant choice. Right age, right talent, right looks.
As for Stone… considering his total disregard for historical fact,
I shudder to think what he’ll do with this one. Particularly since
if anything, we Americans know less about Alexander than we do about
JFK or Nixon.

I learned a new metric unit of measurement today:

milliHelen

the amount of physical beauty required to launch one ship; 1/1000 of a Helen

Lord knows that one’s going to come in handy.

Happy Valentine’s Day! I just finished reading an interesting
Atlantic article,
“Have You Ever
Tried To Sell A Diamond?”

Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds
in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem
diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines
were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon
being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The
British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that
their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value — and their
price depended almost entirely on their scarcity.

And thus, the DeBeers cartel was formed. DeBeers completely
controls the world’s diamond supply, maintaining artificial scarcity and
artificially high prices. Those who defy the cartel (like
Zaire in 1981)
suffer the consequences.

But who cares? Diamonds are a luxury item. No one forces you to buy them… right?

Nope. Every American man is expected to spend, at a minimum, two months
salary on a diamond engagement ring. Two months salary (before taxes?) on a
pretty rock that should be about as valuable as jade or amber. And why,
pray tell?

Because DeBeers says you should. The culture of buying staggeringly expensive
diamond jewelry to cement your engagement did not exist until sixty years
ago. But in 1938, DeBeers created
the “Diamonds are Forever” marketing campaign, and the rest is history.
In twenty years, the American psyche was transformed. At the end of the 1950s
DeBeers was able to crow,
“Since 1939 an entirely new generation of young people has grown to marriageable age.
To this new generation a diamond ring is considered a necessity to
engagements by virtually everyone.”

Not that any of this is news. The Atlantic article I cited dates back to 1982.
Economics and marketing professors have used the DeBeers cartel as a
case
study for years. It’s a fascinating issue, from an academic perspective.

Unfortunately, there’s no avoiding the result — you can’t get married in this
country without giving your sweetie the biggest, bestest rock you can afford.
End of story. Even questioning the idea makes me sound cheap, doesn’t it?
That’s how ingrained the whole thing is.

Listen, I’ve got no problem dishing out the cash… if that’s what it takes to prove
my undying devotion, so be it. I just resent that a ruthless cartel is forcing me
to spend money on a near-worthless object. (And let’s not
forget that these days, there is no way to know if you are buying a
“conflict diamond“, which
is the sanitized way of saying “thugocracy diamond” or “rape-and-murder diamond”.)
All I’m saying is, why not spend the money on something positive? For example:

“Darling, I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life without you. And to cement
our relationship, please do me the honor of allowing me to pay back the next two
years of your med school loans.”

Or how about:

“Darling, I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life without you. And to cement
our relationship, I want to give you a really special gift.
Let’s go get your teeth straightened, like you’ve always wanted!”

Who knew I was such an
incurable romantic?

Remember Charlotte Raven?
Well, she’s baaack.
This time she’s gushing about Muhammad Ali for telling an anti-Semitic joke at a recent
charity banquet. (What’s the difference between a Jew and a canoe? A canoe
always tips. Yuk, yuk.)

Raven is, of course, thrilled with Ali. In fact, she goes so far as bestow Ali with the
highest praise possible in the postmodern universe. Yes, she calls him “subversive”.
Nope, sorry, Ms. Raven. Telling anti-Semitic jokes is mainstream… and
boring, to boot. Hiding Jews from the SS: now that’s subversive.

In Other News: Gregg Easterbrook is not a happy camper.
“Where’s my Enron bribe?” he
demands. After all, he’s been writing long boring energy policy pieces for
years. But nobody cared. Here’s his account of trying to sell
an energy deregulation piece to
The Atlantic in 1992:

Bill Whitworth was silent for a long pause and then said in his
modified Arkansas drawl, “Gregg, don’t you think that topic is — a little dry?”
When Bill Whitworth, the most bookish and circumspect in a storied line of bookish
and circumspect Atlantic editors, tells you your topic is a little dry, that’s
like the pope telling you that you need to get out and meet some girls.

As for my life:

Sarah got pretty sick last night. With Mom and Dad both out of town,
I was the only one left to take care of her. She has some variant of the flu
with a nasty fever. Poor kid.

On Tuesday, we had a major Invasion on Poker Night. Our old friend Phil
was in town, and that brought out a number of friends from all over the bay,
including a couple of significant others. Well, just one significant other.
There was another cute girl (a cute Mudd alum!!) who I thought was
Brian Cheney‘s spouse, but
turned out not to be. Believe me, I was emphatically not-crushed to
learn I was mistaken. Unfortunately she’s moving to Albuquerque, NM in a matter
of days. At least that’s what she said… hmmmm….

Anyway, we had ten people for poker. We played with two decks,
high-low split on nearly every game, with very few wilds. It worked out
pretty well. I even came out a buck ahead, although Lord knows I didn’t
deserve to. On one game of
“Pass the Trash”
I had the winning high hand, but I folded on the first round. The hand that
actually won was a straight. A freaking straight. It was agonizing to
realize on the third round that half the pot should have been mine. Mine!

At least I played it
cool at the time. I was simply too embarrassed to let everyone know how high my
hand was. I’m still too embarrassed. I must be the Worst Poker Player
Ever. Grandma Ruth, if she were still alive, would definitely not approve. And
I don’t care for basketball, either. Oh, the shame.

First, I’d like to call your attention to this month’s sidebar commentary.
I’m sponsoring a very special charity project. I’m sure you’ll
all agree that it’s a worthy cause. Check it out… and give, give, give!

Last night Nancy, Randy, Shauna, and I went to a
Bill Fredlund lecture on “Fra”
Filippo Lippi, an influential
painter in early 15c Florence. (I use “Fra” in quotes because
as it turns out, Brother Lippi did not exactly turn out to be the best “Fra”,
as his wife the ex-nun might attest.) It was a good Bill-lecture, although
at just over an hour, it was a bit short. Also, while some of Lippi’s paintings were
breathtaking, he had the same “misshapen baby” problem that all his contemporaries
struggled with. Perhaps there was some tradition or taboo in Renaissance Italy
where adult males were not permitted to see infants? I can’t explain it otherwise.

Incidentally, while I was looking for Lippi biographies to put on the site, one of the
biographies
I ran across had this amusing statement near the bottom:
“His pupils were far inferior to him.” Ummm, really? Inferior like, say, Botticelli?
Oh, well. I only mention this to remind you all that I scruplously check
all links on this site for quality. Rest assured, a goer.org link is a
mark of taste, erudition, and 100% quality, guaranteed. You’re welcome.

In Other News: This morning I was listening to
Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!
on the radio today, and guess who they had as a guest? That’s right,
Petra Verkaik (warning: link unsuitable
for children), perhaps better known as the
Playboy Playmate who took 17-year-old Toby Hocking to his Winter Formal dance
(as I mentioned earlier).
Coincidentally, NPR is doing another Pledge Week right now. Can you think of
a better reason to support National Public Radio? Neither can I.

Today I went to Amazon.com to look for a book. On the front page, it
had some book and music recommendations, including the album “Lateralus”, by Tool.
“Hmmmm,” I said, as I clicked on the link “Why was I recommended this?”

The next page said, “We recommended Lateralus (Tool) because you recently
purchased or rated Undertow (Tool), Toxicity (System of a Down), and
The Aeneid (Virgil).”

Whaaat? What the heck does Virgil have to do with Tool?

The Aeneid, tr. Robert Fitzgerald, Book IV, lines 465-469
(Aeneas’s weaselly parting words to Dido, Queen of Carthage, who later kills herself.)

As to the event, a few words. Do not think
I meant to be deceitful and slip away.
I never held the torches of a bridegroom,
Never entered upon the pact of marriage.

“Sober”, by Tool

I am just a worthless liar.
I am just an imbecile.
I will only complicate you.
Trust in me and fall as well.
I will find a center in you.
I will chew it up and leave,
I will work to elevate you
just enough to bring you down.

Maybe that Amazon database is onto something.

A funny thing happened yesterday. I was walking out to my car when I
heard a kid say “Hey, Mister!” I looked around — I didn’t see the kid,
although I did see a middle-aged man across the parking lot. I kept
walking. “Hey, Mister!” And then another, “Hey, Mister!”

Finally, I saw a little head bobbing up over the wooden fence.
The kid was just strong enough to jump up for a second and call,
“Hey Mister!” — not quite strong enough to hold himself up or climb
over. Anyway, he was talking to… me.

“Ummmm… can I help you?” I said.

Turns out he had dropped a homemade birthday card over the fence.
I picked it up, reached over the fence, and handed it to him.
“Thanks, Mister!”

So I’m a Mister now. Crap.

I’m fighting off a cold. It’s not helping that I have to be at work at the crack
of dawn to train my European colleagues on the software we’re releasing next week.

Not that I don’t appreciate German humor or anything. For example, I was explaining
a new module our software has, one which lets you create new benchmark centers
cost centers, and organizations. The German manager was duly impressed.
“So Evan! Ven I klick on ze button, do I alzo aquire ze budget
for ze new center? Ho ho ho!” The best I could manage at 7am was a feeble,
“Sure Ruediger, that’ll be in the next release, I promise.”

Even the French were better-behaved.

Since I don’t have cable TV, I’ve had to amuse myself in other ways. Recently
I’ve been plowing through the archives of
The Brunching Shuttlecocks. I swear, their
stuff is as good or better than The Onion. Take, for
example, the Everquest FAQK:

Q: But I can at least put myself into the shoes of an adventurer, righting wrongs and
fighting evil?

A: Sort of. The evil in question reappears in the world after you vanquish it, often
within mere minutes. and the world as a whole never changes because of anything you do.
So in that way it’s less like being a fantasy adventurer and more like being a social worker.

But I’m running out of Brunching. Fortunately there’s Andrew Sullivan, who,
after seeing Lord of the Rings for the first time, concluded that
George
W. Bush is Frodo Baggins. Which makes the United States the Shire. And
George Sr. is Bilbo, who “had his own little adventure with the dark forces, but poor
Frodo is stuck with the legacy.” Ah, I dunno. It made me chuckle.

M’ris is back from vacation, but she
seems pretty swamped with going through the
WIHA slush.
I sent her a non-WIHA related email, and her response began like this:

Thanks for sending this e-mail along, but I’m afraid it’s not for
me. Aside from a passing mention, it had nothing to do with aliens, much
less with hating them. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.

Oh. Sorry. You get into the zone, you know…

Speaking of M’ris, her January 4 journal entry is on
college and niche marketing.
Specifically, she’s talking about her alma mater,
Gustavus Adolphus College, and the
fact that they are eliminating “J-term”, which is a one-month term in January
where you take one course. I’m not sure if J-term is unique to Gustavus,
but it’s got to be reasonably rare, anyway.

M’ris is not in favor of the ditching-of-the-J-term. She says, rightly, that
it’s good that the thousands of different colleges and universities
in this country are so different from each other, and they should stay that
way. The more niches that colleges manage to satisfy, the better for students.

That’s all true. Although I’ve got one nit to pick: perhaps
because I am not a Gustavus alum, I’m a bit confused
about why J-term is so important for Gustavus’s niche marketing.
Clearly Gustavus has many many attributes that differentiate it from
Harvey Mudd, BYU, Simon’s Rock, Yale, Bob Jones, Duke, or Florida State…
is J-term really all that high on the list? Maybe for some. I dunno.

Anyway, the real reason I brought this up
was that M’ris does a spot-on job of describing the different types of
college students. For the heck of it, here’s my take on the subject:

The Three Types of College Students

• Type A (The University as Glorified Summer Camp):
  The most common type. This student is there because he
  is a member of the middle or upper class, and in this country the rite
  of passage for staying in the middle class is going to college. Other than that,
  he isn’t quite sure why he’s there, other than Mom and Dad are paying. You can spot
  these folks easily enough: they are those who wax poetic about “The College Experience”,
  who drone on about how “the most important things I learned weren’t in the classroom”.
  A self-fulfilling prophecy — after all, you weren’t in class after the first week,
  were you?

  It’s unfortunate that we in the United States have chosen college
  as our rite of passage to middle class adulthood. Couldn’t we choose a less
  expensive ritual? Or at least a less time-consuming one. For example, maybe
  the kids could link arms in a circle around a bonfire while their parents
  stand behind them, symbolically tossing briefcases of twenty dollar bills
  into the blaze.

• Type B (The University as My Ticket Up (or Out)):
  The next most common type. This student knows why she’s going to
  college. She knows that for some reason, you need
  a bachelor’s degree in this country. And she’s going to get one —
  and if she has to jump through hoops and put up with frippery that has
  nothing to do with her major, so be it.

  Many type B students are older people going back to college, first- or
  second- generation immigrants, or from low-income backgrounds. They are
  most heavily concentrated in pre-med, law, business, and engineering.
  Unlike their more slothful Type A colleagues, Type B students are
  hyper-aware of grades and finances.

• Type C (The University as Palace of Learning):
  By far the rarest type. The Type C student is the kind of student that
  colleges like to claim that they serve in their glossy brochures. Type C students
  go to college because they actually like learning.
  Some of these pathetic throwbacks love only one field, such as physics; others
  are true polymaths who drink up literature, history, theater, chemistry… you name it.

  Although the number of Type C students is small, the group is still
  big enough (and academically monomanaical enough) to produce a
  distressingly large supply of professors. This has lead to exponential
  growth in the number of academic papers and books produced, which
  many
  pundits
  falsely
  equate
  with
  exponential
  growth
  in
  human
  knowledge.
  The oversupply of Ph.Ds sometimes even forces the metastasis of yet more
  colleges and universities, thus exacerbating the problem.

Different institutions have different ratios of Types A-to-B-to-C. For example,
Harvey Mudd was about 30-40-30, while UCSB (which I view as more typical) is
more like 70-25-5. At a place like
The University of Phoenix, the ratio might
be 5-85-10. There’s a lot of variation, but I’m pretty sure that overall,
C < B << A.

Here’s my modest proposal: Each school would shoot for having most of its
students in one column. The Type Cs would go to fancy-schmantzy academic
liberal arts schools, like Swarthmore. The Type Bs would go to trade schools or
engineering schools, like MIT. And the Type As would go to pure party schools,
like Stanford. We could even explicitly label schools as A, B, or C, to help
high school students choose.

The benefits are clear. Happier students. No more stupid debates over
football interfering with academics. No more pre-meds whining about having
to take Physics and English Lit. No more worrying about whether your kid
is getting the education he or she needs.

And just think how much more honest those glossy brochures and alumni magazines
would be. Anyway, just a thought.

Last night Nancy and I had dinner at Bill Fredlund’s
house. You can always count on Bill for good food, great wine, and excellent conversation.

You can also always count on Bill to invite interesting young people.
There was Andy (the heartbreakingly handsome South African), Erin (Andy’s drop-dead
gorgeous girlfriend), Jenny (cute… and possibly Jewish, if you go far back enough),
and Melanie from class (who claims to be 42… if so, she has a rapidly aging
portrait hanging somewhere in her attic).

At the last dinner (which Nancy and I missed), Andy had apparently made a few
predictions about the war in Afghanistan — all of which turned out to be
spectactularly wrong. Andy was good-natured about it though, and when Bill
put him on the spot he cheerfully made a few more predictions. Here’s hoping
he’s wrong again.

Bill also described his experience living in Italy in the 80s, when the Red Brigades
still had the country paralyzed with terror.
I’m trying to imagine how it must have been to live in Italy back then. Assign
a tough new anti-terrorism czar? Boom! he’s blown up in the middle of a piazza. Elect
a competent prime minister? Kidnapped, murdered, and left in the trunk of a car.

Eventually Italy managed to break the movement (with a little help from us).
In the end, it turned out that some of the ringleaders were extreme left-wing
university professors. Everyone knew that these professors were vocal
communists… but no one had any idea that they were directly responsible for
violence.

I find it interesting that while the Italian professors did awful, criminal things,
they at least acted on their convictions. In contrast, our very own American and
British academic extremists merely prattle on about their ridiculous world-views,
knowing full well that they live in a masturbatory fantasy world; that nobody outside
of their tiny circle cares what they think. We should all give thanks, looks like
we got the better deal.