Urbzen

A few months ago, I posted here about the dangers I saw in the Amazon Kindle and the rise of digital publishing—namely that as we move our books and other media from a printed to a digital format, we increase the odds that they can be altered or even deleted without our consent and possibly without our knowledge.

It’s a bit of a paranoid thesis, but I think it moved closer to reality today when it was revealed that Amazon had “reclassified” a whole slew of books dealing with LGBT issues—from gay romances to academic works on the impact of homophobia to Heather has Two Mommies—as “adult” and thus removing them from some searches, sales rankings and bestseller lists on Amazon.com.

That Amazon chose to reclassify books with any sort of gay theme—be it academic, literary, or journalistic—but not those with much more explicit heterosexual content is blatantly homophobic and certainly worthy of discussion. But what I’m more concerned about is the creeping corporate control over the flow of information and ideas.

In a world of printed media, the consumer holds at least some of the power. Once a book is disseminated into bookstores, libraries and homes, it’s a herculean if not impossible task for a single entity—the executive suite at Amazon, say—to move, reclassify, alter or censor it in one fell swoop. As we’ve seen from Amazon, though, in a digital world, titles can be removed wholesale from searches, rankings, etc. quietly and overnight.

Given that, it’s not too big of a stretch to imagine a day when a handful of big-name sites like Amazon dominate the distribution of literature—on devices like the Kindle, they already do. Say these companies, for whatever reason, decide that a particular title—a political manifesto, maybe, or a book on radical Islam—isn’t “suitable” for their audience. What’s to stop them from quietly removing the offending title from search results, from rankings, or just taking it down altogether?

Of course, it’s always been up to retailers to decide which books to sell and which not to sell. But the digitization of books gives way to an unprecedented centralization; Instead of hundreds of thousands of bricks and mortar booksellers in America, there might be maybe three or four online outlets. Do we really want to trust to the discretion of a handful of corporations that kind of power over the flow of information?

It’s important to note that Amazon never announced this change. Much like the Facebook TOS changes that caused such a stir back in February, they just… did it. Quietly. So that a book that would have shown up in your search results on Friday would have been absent on Monday. No announcement, no opt-in, no empty space on the bookshelf, almost like it was never there.

So I was browsing through Oprah.com yesterday, for, uh, RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY, and I came across O’s interview with one of the original Kings of Comedy, Steve Harvey. Being someone who occasionally likes to “laugh” at “jokes,” I thought the Harvey piece would be right up my alley.

Oh, my.

Turns out our friend Steve fancies himself as something of a social commentator. And you know his favorite thing to offer commentary on? Women. Specifically, Steve was on Oprah to share with us his pearls of wisdom regarding how ladies ought to behave.

Harvey’s first book, “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man” currently tops the New York Times best seller list in the advice category, and Oprah, apparently, is lapping it up. According to Harvey, whenever a man approaches a woman, he knows what he wants from her and is trying to determine what it’s going to cost him—a premise that’s hardly revolutionary. In fact, I’m fairly certain I’ve heard it somewhere before.

The problem, Harvey says, is that modern women “have stopped setting the bar high.” You sluts are basically giving it away for free. And because, according to Harvey, a gal’s vagina is pretty much all she brings to the table, by giving it up, you’re giving away all your power. Steve is just looking out for you, see.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, though, Harvey isn’t comfortable calling sex sex. Instead, he calls it a “cookie”: “We’ve got to have a cookie. Everybody likes cookies. That’s the thing about a cookie. I like oatmeal raisin…but if you’ve got vanilla cream, I’ll eat that too.”

Honestly, I don’t even know what that means.

And how long does Harvey think a lady should wait before giving up her “cookie”? Three months. Months. Look, I’m all for taking things slow if that’s what you feel like you want to do. Fine. Good. But 90 days? I’m a lady, Steve, not a saint.

Of course, Harvey says, you can put out the cookie platter before then, but only at the risk of looking “desperate.” “You all keep changing the rules,” Harvey writes. “And men are aware of the fact that you are changing the rules. We’re aware of the fact that you act desperate. We’re aware of the fact that you think there’s a good shortage of good men out there.”

The flaws, insults and outright misogynies in Harvey’s argument are both too numerous and too obvious to outline here. But it all goes back to the idea that sex—I mean, the “cookie”—is the only thing a woman has to offer that a man could possibly be interested in. Which, when you think about it, is degrading to men maybe most of all.

I’m not big on movies. Really, really not big on movies. Saying that I’m not a movie buff is sort of like saying Stalin wasn’t really a people person. An understatement. On anybody’s list of Great Cinema, I’ve probably seen one out of maybe 10 or 15, and even then I was simultaneously playing very competitive game of Scrabble, Twittering, and trying to assemble a bookshelf from Ikea, in the dark.

But, Internet, this economy is not just going to reach around and stimulate itself, so this weekend I ponied up and bought a ticket to Taken, the Jack Baueresque action flick featuring everybody’s secret boyfriend Liam Neeson.

The plot is pretty straightforward: Retired superspy (Neeson) is trying to build a relationship with his 17-year-old daughter, much to the chagrin of her ice queen mother and mom’s wealthy new husband. Daughter goes to Paris, daughter is abducted by sex traffickers, Dad flies to Paris and uses his mad spy skills to save the day. Daughter is saved, mom is grateful, scores of bad guys die in grisly and intensely satisfying ways (and if you think any of that constitutes a spoiler, well, you see even fewer movies than I do).

Fine. Good. It’s an action movie. BUT, oddly, Taken left me with a lingering sense of discomfort, and I think I know why. The producers of the film went to near-exhaustive lengths to first inform and then remind us again and again that Kimmy, the daughter, was a virgin. From her wardrobe of jumpers, jean jackets and sneakers more suited to a 7-year-old than a high school senior to Kimmy’s squealing glee at receiving, yes, a pony for her birthday to the repeated references to her ‘first time’ in future tense, the message is agonizingly clear: Virgin. Virgin, virgin, virgin.

What Taken implies is that this young woman’s assault, kidnapping, trafficking and ultimately systematic sexual abuse would have somehow been less awful, and her plight less sympathetic, had she been sexually active in the first place. Case in point, about halfway through the movie, Neeson is in a grimy makeshift brothel, searching for his daughter. Instead, he finds Amanda, Kimmy’s much more overtly sexual friend who brought her to Paris in the first place. Amanda is handcuffed to a bedpost, beaten and dead. Without pausing even a beat, Neeson and the film move on. Amanda was a slut; she got hers. Point taken.

The writers go so far as to make clear that even in the time between her abduction and when Dad swoops in to save the day, Kimmy isn’t raped; i.e., her purity isn’t compromised. It’s honestly not clear whether Dad is on a mission to save his beloved daughter or on a Sharia-esque crusade to salvage her honor. Ultimately Kimmy is snatched (heh) in the nick of time, just before she’s deflowered by the lecherous (and, naturally, Arab) Sheik and swept back to the safety of Beverly Hills, honor intact.

Now, of course I’m not saying Kimmy isn’t a sympathetic character or that any father worth his salt wouldn’t go to the absolute ends of the earth to prevent his daughter from being raped. But I do disagree with, and was more than a little upset by, Taken’s assertion that only “good girls” deserve to be saved.

Look, I know I’m not a journalist. I know that. Heck, I’m barely even a blogger, and while I do get paid not terribly poorly for my ability to string together a coherent English sentence, I have no illusions about being a media expert of any kind. So, please, take what I’m about to say with a huge hunk of salt.

Also, you should know that I love journalists. I do. They perform an essential service for practically no money and even less respect and can drink any other profession under the table with cirrhotic liver to spare. Hell, I even wanted to BE a journalist once, before I realized that I could probably make more money smashing my face against a wall and posting the video to YouTube.

But there’s one kind of journalism that makes me want to throw my borrowed MacBook across the room: The “trend story.”

I hate trend stories. I hate them.

Whether it’s the perennial report on female sexual desire that’s invariably written by a dude, or the assertion that legions of Ivy League women are forfeiting careers to care for their families based on one personal account and no research, the trend story is one-third speculation, one-third arrogance and one-third ham-handed obfuscation.

Today MSNBC.com features an especially egregious incarnation of this phenomenon. According to contributor Diane Mapes, recession-related stress is causing grammar snobs to become more aggressive. Leaving aside for a moment the sheer banality of Mapes’s assertion, it’s not clear whether this phenomenon exists outside the confines of her mind.

But wait! She has sources!

“Hanging on to some kind of rule might be comforting to people,” says a grad student from Athens, Ga., whose credentials consist of a blogspot.com blog and Mapes’s phone number. “People are looking for something they can control and ‘What should we do about our foreign policy?’ is a lot more complicated a question than ‘Should the period go inside or outside the quotation mark?’ ”

That’s not stretching. That’s just made up.

Trend stories are lazy journalism. The formula is simple: Come up with a moderately plausible far-reaching social assertion based on your experience or that of your friends or maybe just something from an old episode of Dr. Phil. Bonus points if your thesis defies conventional wisdom or ties into an actual trend, like the recession. Next, find one or two people whose story supports your assertion. Don’t be afraid to use your friends. Finally, pepper your story with vagaries like many, often, seems and experts say. Voila, you have yourself a trend story.

Surely this kind of drivel has its place, but passing it off as journalism is nothing but a disservice to an already troubled institution. Maybe someone can help the Diane Mapeses of the world start their own blogs where they can brazenly assert that their personal experiences as harbingers of larger cultural phenomena, but let’s at least agree to stop calling it news.

Seriously, class. Pencils down.

I work in a pretty informal office. We don’t have cubicles, Thursday is bagel day, and if you wear anything other than jeans and a sweatshirt people assume you’re probably up to something. Even in this environment, though, I absolutely cannot understand how the sink continually fills up with dirty dishes that sit and fester for weeks at a time. Who do you think is going to come around and wash them for you? The magical dish fairy? God? Your mother?

I’m hoping my friendly new sign will help alleviate the situation:

Welcome to the nation’s capital! We’re glad you’re here. To ensure this weekend is a great time for everyone, we’ve put together some friendly pointers to help you navigate the city.

• Stand right, walk left. I cannot overstate this point. The entire city is going to be on edge this week, and blocking everyone’s progress is enough to get you shoved down the escalator.
• Once you’re in the station, have your Metro card ready to avoid rummaging through your Spy Museum gift bag while everyone waiting behind you thinks about throwing you on the tracks. You knew you were going into a Metro station, right? This isn’t a surprise.
• Should you make it all the way down the escalator and onto the train, your work still isn’t done. Please do not plant yourself directly in front of the door and then wonder, aloud, why everybody is pushing you. Grab your fannypack and get the hell out of the way.
• Similarly, don’t walk three wide down the sidewalk at a pace slower than Robert Byrd on a bad day. Move it or lose it. Seriously.
• When you’re eating out, if you don’t know what it is, you probably shouldn’t order it. You can try a kay-suh-dill-uh some other time.
• Be advised that while your waiter probably will ask you where you are from, this is not your cue to recite the entire 300-year history of Texarkana. He’s only asking to be polite, and because he probably can’t think of one single other thing to chat you up about.
• Despite the fact that you’re on vacation, this isn’t Disney Land. DC is an actual city where actual people work at their actual jobs. You might get lucky and find somebody who wants to stop and explain the difference between the 14 Smithsonian museums, but don’t count on it.
• Nobody wants to know that this isn’t the way they do things in Toledo. God willing you’ll be back there soon enough, so shut the hell up already.

*You can read Part 2 of this post here

As many of you know, this weekend my little sister is embarking on what can only be described as the Matrimonial Olympics, and yours truly has the (mis)fortune of playing a supporting role. With that in mind, and with a serious debt of ingratitude to what has to be the single most horrifying list of wedding etiquette in history, I drafted a form letter that I plan to include with every wedding RSVP I send from this point forward.

Dear Bride,

Congratulations! I really am happy for you two. Whether you are getting hitched for love, for security or just because the baby Jesus wants you to, your wedding is sure to be a day you’ll remember forever.

That said, I’d just like to offer a few guidelines so that you don’t come out of your wedding having fewer friends than you have ecru-and-celedon ceramic gravy boats.

 

• Contrary to popular belief, bridesmaids are not dolls, they are real human beings with lives, concerns and finances of their own. Please consider that 50 lbs of pink taffeta is probably not how these women would have chosen to spend their annual bonus and tread lightly. The point of having a wedding party is to share an important day with the people who matter to you most-not to incite resentment by insisting they refrain from hazardous activities like skiing, driving and walking for a month prior to the wedding, lest somebody has the nerve to get injured and ruin your big day.

• And speaking of, it’s your day, not your week.
  
• In regard to gifts: That’s precisely what they are, gifts. Marriage is an important milestone, but your particular life choices don’t mean that anybody owes you anything beyond a warm “Congratulations.” And please spare everyone the lecture on how much a head your reception is costing. You’re the one who had to have the arugula and glazed duck; we’d have been perfectly happy with mac & cheese.
  
• And don’t get all huffy if somebody decides to go off registry. Again, it’s a gift. And they’re wedding guests, not Santa.

• Finally, spare us the martyr act. The more you whine about the crippling stress involved in throwing yourself a big goddamn party (often with somebody else’s money), the more we want to smother you with an embroidered satin pillow. Seriously, some people have real problems.

 

All that said, I hope your wedding is the beginning of a wonderful marriage. Because if this doesn’t work out, next time you’re not getting shit.

Love,

Me

Found this little gem on GodTube this morning, apparently it and it’s attending paraphernalia are popular among the Christian set, much like Footprints.

girls are like apples on trees.
the best ones are at the top of the tree.
the boys don’t want to reach for the good ones
because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt.

instead, they just get rotten apples from the ground that arent so good but easy
so the apples at the think that somethings wrong with them
when in reality they are amazing.
they just have to wait for the right boy to come along
the one who’s brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.
DID GOD PUT U AT THE TOP?

Perhaps I’m just a bitter rotten whore apple, but things sound pretty self-righteous at the top of the tree.

To hear her tell it, Margie Christoffersen is a hapless victim with a shattered life. ”I’ve almost had a nervous breakdown,” she tells the LA Times in a column published this Sunday. “It’s been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Through sobs, she tells the reporter how hard her life has been since she was outed online for contributing $100 in support of Proposition 8, the ballot measure to restrict marriage in California to heterosexual couples only. Christoffersen is the manager and public face of El Coyote, an LA landmark famous for its throngs of customers. Following the Prop 8, revelation, though, many of those customers apparently decided to go elsewhere. Business is off 30 percent and large sections of the restaurant sit empty.

Now Christofferson is singing a slightly different tune. “I love [gay people] like anyone else,” she tells the Times. But as the proverb goes, she’s already put her money where her mouth was, and that’s on the side of intolerance.

Nobody, gay or straight, was trying to deny Christoffersen anything–not her business, not her (heterosexual!)  marriage– but that didn’t stop her from not just voting for, but actually coughing up $100 to support an intitiative to rescind the rights of thousands of gay Californians. She may never come around on the gay marriage issue, but, with the restaurant once owned by her mother at the  brink of collapse, at least now she knows what it feels like to have the most important thing in your life taken away.

Special thanks to our friend Tony who discovered this gem in a book he checked out on interlibrary loan at the College of Charleston:

It seems that in order to be recognized by anyone other than Ann Coulter, the Reverend Fallwell and the Taliban, our friends at Bob Jones “University” have to suffer the indignity and moral outrage of stocking books on such incendiary topics as… urban planning?

In retrospect, we probably should have let these wingnuts secede when we had the chance.