Recently in Society & Culture Category

Lindsay's Slippery Slope
March 10, 2010 8:29 AM

I'm sure that you've heard that Lindsay Lohan is suing E-Trade and its advertising firm for using the name "Lindsay" in one of their wildly popular TV commercials. The "actress" wants $100 million for "pain and suffering" because - her lawyer claims - she's a "one-name celeb like Oprah or Madonna" and the TV ad sends a subliminal message that reflects badly on her image.

Excuse me? First, I feel compelled to remind Lindsay that she's made a series of choices in her life that have relegated her to the B-list (at best) of impaired and out-of-control wannabes. Having a talking baby make fun of her (even subliminally) would actually be a step up for her.

Setting aside the fact that in 1986 (the year of her birth, in case she can't remember) the name "Lindsay" was the 46th most popular girl's name in the USA (and the variant "Lindsey" ranked even higher, at 39), I think she should give careful consideration to the implications of claiming an exclusive association with certain descriptors. If her lawsuit is successful and thus requires that every time we hear "Lindsay" (or, if we have a discriminating ear, "Lindsey") we think of her, then it will have to logically follow that we'll also bring her to mind whenever we hear "pathetic," "narcissistic," and "delusional."

Then again, perhaps that horse has already bolted the stable.

Update: This just in - Oprah and Madonna are suing Lindsay and her lawyers for associating their names with hers.

And just to show how seriously we here at the Gazette take Lohan's lawsuit, here's the ad in question:

Laugh for the Day (or not)
March 4, 2010 11:23 AM

If you work in the oil industry - or know anything at all about it - and are looking for a laugh, you might want to check out this article at a website called The People's Voice.

The author decries our economy's continued reliance on fossil fuels, but implies that as long as we're going to drill for oil, we ought to stop doing it where it costs so dang much money.

Inexplicably, the industry picks the most expensive places on the earth to drill for oil.

He then quotes another apparent genius in the field:

"You really don't need to know a lot about geology or oil to figure out something is wrong here, why don't they go back to the old days and drill oil wells onshore?"

I'm sure the chairmen of Exxon, Chevron, and BP are at this very moment slapping their collective foreheads and exclaiming with great vigor, "why didn't we think of that!? We should just drill where it costs less!"

After reading that, I quickly checked the address bar of my browser to make sure I hadn't been redirected to The Onion without noticing.

Interestingly, those assertions are the most reasonable things put forth by the author, as he then attributes various natural disasters around the world to the pain caused to Mother Earth by poking holes in her skin. Seriously.

During the various stages of the energy extraction process, the globe of the earth suffers limitless pain as the area where the drilling occurs. It is gradually being depressurized and cooled internally, causing cycles of contsriction [sic], joint-rending cramps, intermittent partial asphyxiation and searing pain as they use large drills to puncture pericardium and into the heart, sometimes as deep as 10,000 feet.

He even provides Bible verses to back up his thesis.

OK, on further review, this isn't a bit funny.

Link via The Oil Drum

I shouldn't be surprised but he can't even get the basic facts right to support his hypothesis. Drilling often occurs below 10,000 feet, but the deepest wells on record are only six miles deep. Compared to the almost 8,000 mile diameter of the earth, this is barely a pinprick to the skin, much less a penetration to the "pericardium and into the heart."

"When The Money's All Gone"
March 3, 2010 1:17 PM

Good time Charlie's on the evening news
The party's gone public, grab your dancin' shoes
Pass it around 'til we all get stoned
We'll all come down when the money's all gone.

Everybody's livin', everybody's high
Everybody's sellin' so buy, baby, buy
Everything's had and nothing is owned
Around it goes 'til the money's all gone.

[Chorus]
When the money's all gone we'll get back to work
Get back in the garden, get back in the dirt
It's an ill wind doesn't blow some good
We can put it back together the way that we should.
It might not be the worst thing after all...
When the money's all gone.

There's only so much that can go around
The top goes up but the bottom goes down
Call it what you want to
Tell me I'm wrong
We'll all find out when the money's all gone.

When the money's all gone we'll get back to work
Get back in the garden, get back in the dirt
It's an ill wind doesn't blow some good
We can put it back together the way that we should.
It might not be the worst thing after all...
When the money's all gone.

Lose a little, you can scream and shout
But you gotta lose big 'fore they bail you out
They'll buy the bank so they can take your home
They don't need you anymore when the money's all gone.

When the money's all gone...
When the money's all gone.

When the Money's All Gone
Jason Eady & Kevin Wilkins

I've been listening to Jason Eady's music a lot lately, especially the preceding song from the album of the same name. The iTunes Store puts his music into the Country genre, but I think that's too limiting for the mixture of delta blues, zydeco, rock, and gospel that wraps around lyrics that manage to be simultaneously intelligent and catchy. When The Money's All Gone is a perfect example. It's as good an economic commentary as you'll find in the Wall Street Journal, and a heck of a lot more danceable.

Unique Local Haiti Relief Effort
February 25, 2010 2:17 PM

Vicki Jay is the director of Midland's Rays of Hope, a grief counseling resource for children (and an outreach of HospiceMidland). She leaves next week for Haiti for ten days as a part of a grief/trauma team working with children in a Haitian village that was devastated by the earthquake. That relief project could use your help. Here's the appeal; you know what to do:

On March 4 - 14, Vicki Jay will be traveling to Mizak, Haiti representing Rays of Hope on a "Volunteers in Mission - Global Ministries" relief effort.The grief/trauma team will be working directly with the children in the village as well as their families. Vicki will be serving as Camp Director for the children's camp. The camp will be staffed with other members of the team as well as Haitian leaders. The team will partner with a trauma team from China and Japan called Operation Safe and with HAPI (Haitian Artisans for Peace International), a mission group established in Haiti. In addition to the grief/trauma team, there will also be a medical team headed by Dr. Peter Reed, son of Rev. Jan Reed.

Needs: The cost of food has dramatically risen since the earthquake. In the past, $1.50 would cover the cost of supplying a hot meal for the children in the village. Due to limited supplies, that cost has risen to $4.50 per meal. The goal of the HAPI (Haitian Artisans for Peace International) is to meet the basic needs of the children, knowing that having those needs met will contribute to a more peaceful lifestyle and sense of community. Checks can be made to HospiceMidland to help supplement the expense of providing hot meals.

Rays of Hope has found t-shirts that have feelings faces with French expressive words that would complement the work we hope to do in Haiti. Fifteen dollars would cover the cost of getting a t-shirt to the kids and families in Haiti.

Rays of Hope knows that children in our community might want to give to the Children in Haiti. We would like to collect the following inexpensive items to be distributed to the children in Mizak. Items can be brought to Rays of Hope by Tuesday, March 2nd.

Small containers of playdough
Bright colored pipe cleaners
Permanent markers
Bright colored index cards
Beach balls
Individual packets of Kleenex
Inflatable Balloons (not water balloons)
Kazoos
Small thick combs
Frisbees

Please remember the families in the Mizak village and the mission team in prayer. Please pray for the team to be effective in their relief work and for a safe return.

Rays of Hope is honored and humbled by the opportunity to participate in this relief effort. We appreciate your support of the expansion of our mission. Thank you.

Checks should be payable to HospiceMidland (designate Haiti Relief) and mailed to:

HospiceMidland
c/o Vicki Jay
911 West Texas
Midland, Texas 79701

100% of the donations will go to the Haiti Relief.

Beck Fisks Huffington
February 3, 2010 9:42 PM

Back in the Golden Years of Blogging, around 2001, a practice known as "fisking" came about, and it provided many hours of enjoyable snarkiness. If you're relatively knew to blogging, or if you have an actual life, you may not be familiar with the term, which is defined on Wikipedia as:

A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or hand-waving is considered poor form.

I don't see much fisking nowadays (which could be attributed to the fact that I don't spend much time reading political blogs) and I miss it just a bit. So it's good to know that the practice hasn't vanished completely, and in fact has been adopted by the edgier members of the Legacy Media.

Following is a clip of Glenn Beck applying a proper fisking to the infinitely annoying Arianna Huffington. Now, I'm not a big GB fan; his style occasionally approaches the Infinite Annoyance that Huffington has somehow managed to exceed. Nevertheless, our ideologies have much in common, and he's an equal opportunity skewerer when it comes to calling out chumps on both sides of the political aisle (and, believe me, there are plenty of them...enough to fill out, say, a whole branch or two of federal government). And, as he shows in the following video, Beck knows how to administer a proper fisking. Enjoy. (Link via Little Miss Attila)

Forgetting J.D. Salinger
January 29, 2010 9:23 AM

The media is filled today with stories about the impact that J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye made on impressionable [mostly] young readers. For example, the co-hosts of NBC's Today Show shared their recollections of how the book affected them, with Matt Laurer stating that he remembered being proud that Catcher was his first "real book."

I must be one of the few people in America who don't have a similar story to share. I'm pretty sure I've read the book and I think we still have a copy somewhere in our home library, but frankly, it made absolutely no lasting impact on me. I can't recall a single detail from Catcher other than the name of the lead character, Holden Caufield. And all this talk about the author and the book has stimulated no desire whatsoever to find the book and [re]read it.

A friend recently tagged me via Facebook for the "15 Books That Affected Me" meme. While I didn't respond (Sorry, Joe; nothing personal, but I don't do Facebook memes. I don't do much of anything Facebook, but that's another story.), I did spend about thirty seconds thinking about it, and in light of today's Catcher lovefest, it seems appropriate to list at least a few books from my youth that did stay with me.

I was a big fan of science fiction as a kid, and while that ardor has cooled somewhat over the years, the books I remember most tend to come from that genre. Robert Heinlein's New Agey (the term hadn't been invented at that time, AFAIK) Stranger in a Strange Land made an impact on me, as did Harlan Ellison's short story collection, The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World. And, of course, the list wouldn't be complete without Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and its prequel, The Hobbit. (And in the interests of complete transparency, there was that one summer when a copy of J. D. Southern's scandalous novel Candy circulated between beach towels at the Fort Stockton public swimming pool, the "best" passages easily found by their dogeared pages.)

I wish I could point to more intellectually sophisticated reading material - and my reading habits really were more varied than they may seem - but there it is. Salinger and Catcher may have shaped a generation, but I never got on that particular bus.

"The intricate economics of terrorism"
January 15, 2010 5:33 PM

Loretta Napoleoni is an economist, journalist, political activist, and author. Her professional specialty is in the financing of terrorist activity, and how mainstream economic activity is affected by that financing. I found [via Bruce Schneier's blog] the following video of a speech given at the 2009 TEDGlobal Conference, and it's quite fascinating.

In a relatively short amount of time, Napoleoni posits that (1) most terrorists couldn't care less about the ideology of the group with which they're aligned - they're in it for much more self-serving reasons; (2) the pre-9/11 US economy benefited greatly from money-laundering activities used to finance terrorist and criminal organizations around the world, because - let's face it - everyone wants US dollars; and (3) the Patriot Act essentially shut down those money-laundering activities, causing a massive flight from the dollar to the Euro; Europe is now the center of those illicit activities, and is enjoying something of an economic boost as a result.

If you can spare fifteen minutes to watch the following vid, I think you'll be challenged by what you hear. I gained a new perspective on terrorism and the implications for how it might be more effectively fought...and perhaps why it's not being fought equally on all fronts.

Traffic Control Cameras: Ineffective...or Worse
December 19, 2009 10:37 AM

One of the more Big Brotherish ideas to come down the pike in a long time is the installation of cameras at intersections to catch speeders or red light runners. At first glance, this would seem to be an ideal and objective way of dealing with lawbreakers, since there's not a lot of gray area involved in determining whether or not your car was in the intersection before the light turned red, or whether you were going faster than the posted speed limit. And while one might argue that there are theoretically mitigating circumstances for doing such things ("...my hamster was in labor!"), the simple fact is that those circumstances rarely (if ever) justify the risk of potentially fatal encounters at intersections.

So, the theory was that by installing cameras - and alerting the driving public of their presence - motorists' behaviors would be positively modified and the result would be fewer accidents. Well, not so fast (pun intended). In the Chicago area, a study of intersections fitted with these cameras showed either no change in accident rates, or increases in those rates, presumably from an increase in rear-end collisions as drivers suddenly realize that the intersection they're approaching has a camera and decide not to chance making the yellow light. For some states that actually bothered to check such statistics, the decision was made to ban the cameras.

It's hard not to be cynical and figure that the real reason cities want cameras at their intersections is to increase traffic citation revenue. If they were really serious about reducing accidents at such intersections, they'd either increase the amount of time the yellow light stays on, or increase the time before the green light for cross traffic switches on, or both. Both of these things have proven effective in reducing accidents at intersections.

I hope the city of Midland will be cautious in any consideration it's giving to installing such cameras.

And, in yet another fine example of the the law of unintended consequences, creative punks have learned how to use those cameras to harass their enemies.

"Portraits of Power"
December 10, 2009 1:05 PM

What do Muammar Qaddafi, Gordon Brown, Barack Obama, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Dmitry Medvedev, Hugo Chávez, and Benjamin Netanyahu have in common...well, besides that whole "head of state" thing? They each were photographed individually, along with forty other national leaders by Platon, staff photographer for The New Yorker, during a U.N. General Assembly last September. The results are displayed in this fascinating multimedia presentation.

I don't remember how I came across this article, but I've kept it open in a browser tab for several days even though I hadn't taken the time to look at it in detail until this morning. I hadn't realized that the photographer had added an audio commentary to each photo - a brief glimpse into the process, the situation, or most interestingly, the character of the subject of each picture.

Those comments are what elevate this presentation over the normal portfolio (setting aside the fact that there perhaps has never before been such a compilation of political power by one person at one time). The photographer is careful and diplomatic with his observations, but not to the point of banality (OK, there are some banal comments, but they're excusable). And, occasionally, his remarks tell more than the photos themselves. Be sure to listen to the commentary accompanying the image of Robert Mugabe, president/dictator of Zimbabwe.

Brain Dead Man Not - Or Not
November 24, 2009 9:41 AM

Update: Some instances of so-called "Facilitated Communication" have been scientifically debunked. Here are some media reports on those debunkings. Particularly damning is this one detailing the results of a double-blind test in which not one of 180 FC tests yielded the proper response.

By now, you'd have to be in a coma not to have heard the account of the Belgian man who was diagnosed as being "brain dead" for 23 years, but was recently found by doctors to have normal brain function and who further claims that he had been conscious through the entire period. He's now communicating via a special keyboard and thus is able to finally share his heartbreaking story with the world.

Or is he?

I saw a televised report of this story this morning on a national news show, and what I saw was a "facilitator" using the man's finger to type on a keyboard. I was puzzled about a minor detail: how does she know what he wants to type? The "facilitator" is said to be specially trained to detect - and interpret - faint movements by the subject, and translate them into coherent communications. This is a wonderful skill to possess...if indeed it actually exists.

James Randi thinks it's a "cruel farce," and lays out his impassioned case against "Facilitated Communication," of which, he says, this is simply the most recent example.

I sincerely hope Randi is wrong about this, for the sake of the man's family at the very least. And I'm torn between wanting to believe that this man's new-found communication ability is real and his relationship with his loved ones restored, and wanting to believe that he didn't really endure 23 years of conscious silence. I have a hard time imagining anything worse than the latter.

[Link via Neatorama, but original skepticism all mine.]

« Social Media | Main Index | Archives | Sports »

Recently in Society & Culture Category

Lindsay's Slippery Slope March 10, 2010 8:29 AM

Laugh for the Day (or not) March 4, 2010 11:23 AM

"When The Money's All Gone" March 3, 2010 1:17 PM

Unique Local Haiti Relief Effort February 25, 2010 2:17 PM

Beck Fisks Huffington February 3, 2010 9:42 PM

Forgetting J.D. Salinger January 29, 2010 9:23 AM

"The intricate economics of terrorism" January 15, 2010 5:33 PM

Traffic Control Cameras: Ineffective...or Worse December 19, 2009 10:37 AM

"Portraits of Power" December 10, 2009 1:05 PM

Brain Dead Man Not - Or Not November 24, 2009 9:41 AM

About this Archive