Category Archives: Pop culture

No TV

The Neilsen people, the ones who do the ratings for television programs, called me up yesterday. The pleasant man who called wanted to know if I’d received the postcard they had sent out. Yes, I had. He asked if I would be willing to keep a log of my television viewing habits for one week.

“Yes, I’m willing,” I said. “It’ll be easy since I don’t really watch any TV.”

“Oh,” said the man. He seemed momentarily flustered. “OK. Well, I have a few questions I have to ask you, even though some of them won’t apply to you.”

He asked his questions, and I replied that I did not work for the Neilsen company or any related company, that our house does not have cable access, that there is one television in our house (it’s twenty years old and Carol’s parents gave it to us, though I didn’t bother telling him that).

He told me that I should expect a booklet in the mail, that it would have five dollars in it to thank me for my trouble, and all I have to do is write “No television viewed” on it and mail it back. He confirmed my mailing address. Then he said, “Be sure to open the booklet before you mail it back to us, and get your five dollars out.”

“OK,” I said.

“You know, this is an unusual call,” he said. “Usually when I reach someone who doesn’t watch TV, they tell me that they refuse to participate. But we need to hear from the people who don’t watch TV, too.”

So that’s why he had sounded flustered when I told him I didn’t watch TV. He wasn’t flustered because I don’t watch TV, he was flustered because I didn’t give him a hard time about the fact that I don’t watching TV. “Well it’s no big deal to me,” I said, laughing. “I don’t have to do anything except mail the booklet back to you.”

“That’s right,” he said. He thanked me again, and hung up.

What an easy way to make five bucks.

Bon mot

Carol and her co-author are close to finishing their latest book. I will be glad when the book is done. I will be glad when the late nights and the cries of frustration from Carol’s office finally end. Having said that, when Carol is working intensely, she sometimes throws off good ideas like a grinding wheel throws of sparks. A couple of months ago, she was typing away in her office and I was sipping a cup of tea in the dining-living room while reading the newspaper.

“The age of the paradigm is over!” she called to me.

“Huh?” I said.

“The age of the paradigm is over,” she repeated. “The time has passed for creating new paradigms. This is the age of actually doing things.”

I’ve been thinking about that idea for the past few months, and I think she’s right. I think we’re no longer living in a time when being overly conceptual will pay off. The age of the paradigm has passed, at least for the foreseeable future.

Email [curse | blessing], part two

The second installment in an occasional series where I think out loud about using email effectively.

First off, reader and comics fan Craig pointed out this wonderful comic strip on the perils of email: Link. Thanks, Craig!

Next, here are some of my own current ruminations about email….

Spinning out of control (and how to stop)

Sometimes you have to use email to conduct business. The problem is that email discussions have this habit of spinning out of control. Sometimes people write things they later regret. Sometimes people stop reading carefully, and talk at one another instead of with one another.

Recently, I was participating in an ongoing email discussion. Another woman and I separately sent out perfectly innocent email messages that unwittingly stirred up strong emotions in someone else. That person sent out a very restrained reply, but suddenly it occurred to me that something was wrong.

Suddenly, it felt like things might spin out of control very quickly.

Fortunately two other people sent out nearly simultaneous email messages:– one person wrote, Let’s wait for our face-to-face meeting next week and discuss this there;– the other person wrote, This can wait until we have our next meeting. And our email conversation stopped immediately, while we wait for our next face-to-face meeting.

I’ve decided that when you’re communicating via email, you always have to be ready to stop and say, I’ll call you and we’ll talk on the phone — or, Let’s meet face-to-face and discuss this. In addition, I’ve decided that when you’re communicating via email, you always have to be ready to listen when someone says, Hey I’ll call you on the phone — or, Hey let’s meet face-to-face and discuss this. You always have to be willing to stop the email discussion at someone else’s request, and move to a more interactive mode of communication like the telephone or a face-to-face meeting.

The thing about email is that you often don’t know the emotional state of the person with whom you’re exchanging email. When someone else asks for a phone call or a face-to-face meeting, you have to trust that they really mean it. I’m thinking that when someone else asks for a phone call, the only appropriate email response is:– What are some times I can call you, and what’s the best phone number to reach you at? (or: What phone number are you at right now?) If someone asks for a face-to-face meeting, you can say:– When and where? That should keep things from spinning out of control.

Two other possibilities:– I believe that the better you know someone, the less likely it will be that an email discussion will spin out of control (which means that team-building for committees using email heavily is probably a good idea). I believe that having regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings helps a little to keep things from spinning out of control (because you know that you’re going to have to come face-to-face with those people).

But everything I’ve said here is up for debate. What are your experiences with email spinning out of control? What goes on when email discussions spin out of control? Once they start spinning, how to stop?

Next installment: Email [curse | blessing], part three

Bad dessert

Waiter Rant had a great post on bad restaurant desserts. And I posted a comment there that I can’t resist reposting here, because those of you who live in New Bedford may well know the restaurant I’m talking about in the second paragraph….

Ah, the joys of restaurant desserts…. Once when my partner and I were driving across country, I tried apple pie at every restaurant we ate at. The diners with their allegedly “home-made pie” were the absolute worst:– crappy pie without much in the way of apples, soggy crust, badly microwaved, tasting worse than a McD’s apple-pie-in-a-box. So much for the much-ballyhooed diner food. The absolute best apple pie I ate on that trip was at a Bob Evans — probably my least favorite chain, but they probably turn over so much food that at least the pie was relatively fresh.

On the other hand, bad desserts can be really good under the right circumstances. Here at home, the fancy restaurant in the next block over from our apartment serves really bad apple crisp. I mean really really bad. They buy it from someone who uses those canned spiced apple slices covered with sweetened goo that isn’t even crispy, and then at the restaurant they barely heat it with a microwave so that some bits are cold and some bits are hot. We love it anyway — we order it at the bar because (sick but true) it tastes really good with a martini. Yeah, OK, you have to drink half a martini before it tastes good, but whatever.

I was over at the fancy restaurant down the street earlier this week, and I think they now have cut down on the microwave time for the apple crisp (maybe they’re trying to save power?), and this time only the corners were vaguely warm. I ate it anyway. Yum.

So what I really want to know is this — have you ever gotten good apple pie at a restaurant? In fact, have you ever had a good dessert at a restaurant?

“My Sweet Lord”

I’ve been trying to sort out the naked-chocolate-Jesus kerfluffle. As you probably know, the Lab Gallery in Manhattan had been planning to show a life-size figure of Jesus, sculpted out of chocolate by Canadian-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro. Cavallaro’s Jesus was to be suspended from the ceiling in a pose of crucifixion. But the U.S.-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights deemed the sculpture offensive, and called for a boycott of the Roger Smith Hotel, which houses and sponsors the Lab Gallery. In a press release dated Thursday, Catholic League president Bill Donohue fumed:

“All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don’t react the way extremist Muslims do when they’re offended — otherwise they may have more than their heads cut off [presumably Mr. Donohue is implying here that extremist Muslims cut off genitalia]. James Knowles, President and CEO of the Roger Smith Hotel (interestingly, he also calls himself Artist-in-Residence), should be especially grateful. And if he tries to spin this as reverential, then he should substitute Muhammad for Jesus and display him during Ramadan…. The boycott is on.” Link

Today, the hotel yielded to pressure and told the gallery to cancel the exhibit. The gallery’s director, Matt Semler, told the press that the Catholic League’s demands amounted to hate speech. Outraged by this, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue announced yesterday that even though the exhibit was off, the boycott of Roger Smith Hotel is still on. And today, the BBC reports that Semler announced his resignation as gallery director [link].

Yesterday, the U.K.-based religious think tank Ekklesia offered this slightly wry commentary on the kerfluffle:

Christians in the US have been angered by the decision of a New York gallery to exhibit a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ. The six-foot (1.8m) sculpture, entitled “My Sweet Lord”, depicts Jesus Christ naked on the cross. It was a Roman custom to strip naked those being crucified, and the Bible records the Roman soldiers dividing up Jesus’ clothes between them. Many will also note the statue highlights how Easter has lost much of its Christian meaning amidst the giving and receiving of chocolate eggs.

But Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever”…. The Catholic League, which describes itself as the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organisation, also criticised the timing of the exhibition. “The fact that they chose Holy Week shows this is calculated, and the timing is deliberate,” Mr Donohue said….

Mr Semler said the timing of the exhibition was coincidental….

It is not known whether the chocolate is fair trade. Link

So Matt Semler probably should have realized that Holy Week wasn’t the best time of year to mount such an exhibit, but who knows if he even knew what Holy Week is. As for calling this “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever,” that sounds like an overstatement of the facts. Aside from that, I too wonder if the chocolate was fair trade.

Now an unashamed intellectual

It finally hit me today. I was taking a long walk, from North Cambridge down to Lechmere Square, thinking about nothing in particular, when I realized why I have a visceral dislike of the current president of the United States. It’s not because he’s an evangelical Christian, because I get along quite well with other evangelicals. It’s not because I’m a fiscal conservative, because you can make the case that wartime calls for deficits and besides I can understand that the temptation for deficit spending is more than most politicians can resist. It’s not because I’m a pacifist, because I know full well that most politicians do not follow the non-violence teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, my spiritual leader. These are areas where I simply happen to disagree with policies that can be justified.

No, the reason I have a visceral dislike of Mr. Bush is that he is an anti-intellectual. I know, it’s ironic that he’s an anti-intellectual given that he is the product of an elite university that practically oozes intellectualism. Even so, he affects that down-home I’m-really-not-that-smart attitude, and he makes his affectation implicitly condemn anyone who claims to be smart. Not that I blame him for affecting an anti-intellectual attitude. Anti-intellectualism has always been a minor part of the United States mythos, and in the past couple of decades it has become a dominant element in the political life of this country. Mr. Bush is just one of many United States politicians who have decided to affect anti-intellectualism in order to win votes.

This prevalent anti-intellectual attitude has even managed to influence me — I’ve become more and more cautious about claiming to be an intellectual. So I’ve changed the tag-line for this blog to “Adventures of a post-Christian heretic and unashamed intellectual.”

Let’s all go out and remember to be openly smart, OK? No matter what the president says, smart is good.

Can I just say…

Went to YouTube. Went through laborious sign-up process, with lots of glitches. Tried to upload video to YouTube. Didn’t work, twice. Banner ad showed woman in leopard print bikini. Gave up. Blah.

Went to blip.tv. Easy and fun to sign in. Uploaded video on first try. Got to look at banner ad that read: “Convenient Truths: A green video contest. Wanted: Inspired, pragmatic videos to help get us out of this mess.” Gave me good code to embed video in my blog. Very cool.

Shut down

Pursuant to the previous post, I note with interest that a group has declared 24 March 2007 to be “Shutdown Day“:

Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate! Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

Not a bad idea. It reminds me of the concept of a “media fast” advocated by Thomas Cooper, professor of media at Emerson College. Cooper described the purpose and results of a media fast in an article titled “You Are What You Watch,” available on the Emerson College Web site in a PDF file (the article appears on the second-to-last page): link.

Since March 24 is a Saturday, a day when I’m not in the office, I’ll be able to participate. No blog entry that day.