Burping Slugs

This makes me happy...

Me: talking about ideologies and Harry Potter and showing students the graphs showing reasons for challenges.
Student: All of those reasons sound like personal preference. I thought banned books did something illegal.
Me: Most of the challenges are personal objections, but banning doesn't take into account everyone else's personal preference. Why do you think people might object to Harry Potter?

[list of reason goes here]

Different student: People actually think that spells in Harry Potter are real? If they were real, I'd make those people burp slugs.

Stupid Question

I forward my campus email to my Gmail account because the campus email system hates me, but I also do it so that I can decide which emails I want to see (i.e. personal emails go to the inbox and student emails/listserv junk skips the inbox). Tonight I'm pretending like I haven't checked student emails today because I can't think of anything nice to say about these? (punctuation, spelling, and general intelligence has been preserved)

• My project is on [insert classic children's text here], and I found an article about the movie, is that okay?
• I know you said that we couldn't use book reviews but I found a really long one can I use it? (This really long review is 2 1/2 pages)
• is there an assignment sheet for this project?
• My copy of Oliver Twist is only 32 pages is it a bridge? (I had to read this one more than once before I figured it out)

I know that this is only 4 out of 30 who ask really dumb questions, but still. I'm annoyed.

YA For Obama

I haven't had a lot of time to explore YA for Obama, but from what I've seen it looks pretty interesting. When I first saw it, I was a little confused because it seems like a rather haphazard group (young adult writer, readers and friends, according the website), but in reality this is not different than nurses, teachers, or steel workers for Obama, plus it offers an interesting glimpse into the political lives of people who are usually only defined by their books. Regardless of whether or not you support him, if you teach ya lit, it's a sight you might want to check out.

I did quickly google YA for McCain to see if such a group existed, but nothing turned up. I guess in terms of ideology it would be more likely to see Children's Authors for McCain. If I thought it wouldn't offend students, it would be interesting to examine the ideologies of children's literature in terms of the election.

Procrastination (or Why I'm going to quit planning ahead)

I was supposed to be observed tomorrow, so I wrote out my lesson plans two weeks ago.

Then, this weekend...

• Blackboard decided to "eat" my discussion boards and none of my students bothered to tell me until this weekend.
• I didn't know my students were telling me this until today because my university password expired, so I couldn't log in Blackboard.
• Now I have to start class tomorrow with "here's the new plan" instead of the fabulous lesson plan.
• I feel like crap, so I'm not excited about any of the above or the lesson plan that has been done for two weeks.

But in the weirdness of the universe, it doesn't matter if tomorrow's lesson plan goes out the window because my advisor broke her nose this weekend and rescheduled the observation for next week.

I consider all of the above cosmic justification for my procrastination.

Offensive Politics

Recently I've heard conversations about the inappropriate nature of a recent (and unapproved, I might add) slogan that says: "Jesus Christ was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a Governor." What I find most unnerving about the conversations labeling such a slogan as blasphemous and offensive, is that they imply that religion is off limits for humor and satire.

I find this unnerving because this afternoon I returned from lunch where we had a lovely, intelligent, and productive conversation about religion, ideology, politics, feminism, and other issues worthy of discussion to read a story about "Obama Waffles." The waffles invoke two major stereotypes: the racist imagery of Aunt Jemima combined with the head coverings worn by Muslim men.* The mixes were sold at a forum co-sponsored by American Values and Focus on the Family Action. To be fair, the forum later discontinued sales of the waffle mix (after 3 days): saying they had not realized the boxes displayed "offensive material." The creators had this to say about the problematic images:

"We had some people mention that to us, but you think of Newman's Own or Emeril's — there are tons and tons of personality-branded food products on the market. So we've taken that model and, using political satire, have highlighted his policies, his position changes.

So here's my question, are we going to label this as blamphemous or is it okay to make race and religion the subject of satires as long the religion isn't Chritianity. For all of those who cried fowl at the unauthorized Jesus Christ was a community organizer slogan, I challenge you to demand aplogies for this as well. If religion is off limits, then shouldn't everyone's religion be off limits, especially when that satire is used to falsely perpertrate the image of Obama as Muslim, when he is not, and never has been. And if he were Muslim, would you protect his religion from satire in the same way you object to Christianity being used in satire?

Politics are dirty, but the rules should be the same for both parties.

*I struggled with the question of whether or not to place the images on my blog, and I have decided that the racism in the images is too great for me to reproduce here. If you wish to see the images, please click on the Obama Waffles link.

Frat Party in Suburbia

This is what I saw when I got home from work this afternoon...

From Blogger Pictures

And in case you couldn't tell exactly what you are looking at, yes, that is 5 full bottles of Miller Genuine Draft in the middle of the road. If I had gotten home a few minutes earlier it would have been 5 bottles of beer, a school bus, and about 12 kids all in one picture. I'm not really sure who is partying in the street on Wednesday afternoons, but clearly one of our neighbors isn't nearly as Leave it to Beaver-esque as we thought.

From Blogger Pictures

Fringe

I'm not a huge tv watcher, but with Greg out of town and my irrational fear that silent houses equal someone trying to break in, I landed on Fringe tonight. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it, but here are my initial thoughts.

Initially it won my attention for basically two reasons: it's produced by J. J. Abrams (of LOST fame among other things) and it had to be better than Big Brother Season 942 or a really bad impersonation of a Japanese game show. It terms of it's competition, it's a winner, but then again, I'm not really sure what wouldn't be a winner in that time slot.

I hadn't heard much hype for the show, but then again I've spent most of the last several weeks watching Bones on DVD, so I am not really surprised by this fact. As soon as the show started, I could tell that it was going to be some weird combination of LOST, X-Files, A Beautiful Mind and Bourne Supremacy. It starts with an electrical storm mid-air that creates a mystery flight full of skeletons by the time it comes back "on the radar." Okay, I get it, if you have a mystery illness a plane makes a great contained area to start the plot, but two series in a row with freak electrical storms mid-air, at this point I wasn't holding out much hope. The trailer even looks like the grabbed the first 20 seconds of LOST.



The similarities with LOST mostly end there, except for the obnoxiously obvious evil company that is secretly manipulating the world and even has a fake commercial embedded in with the real commercials. Abrams does do some cool effects with added text. Instead of the typical Law and Order style subtitle that labels a location switch, Fringe features text that is as much a "part" of the scene as the new location. The camera flies through the text, thus melding the "edited" narrative and the "camera lens" narrative to a certain extent. I found this intriguing the first couple of times I saw it, but I'm guessing that by the end of the season it may become a little cumbersome.

In terms of actual storyline, Abrams had to know that the secret government agency and conspiracy theory thread was getting rather worn out, but I like his invocation of the older trope of the "mad scientist" as a fresh take on the plot. For me, it was Dr. Walter Bishop that kept the narrative going. Quite frankly it was a little slow until they got Dr. Bishop out of his prison/mental hospital and back to the basement of Harvard. Exploring the mind that is capable of incredible discoveries with the potential for incredible harm is a much more interesting story than exploring secret government agencies that are constantly trying to deny and cover up their real "work."

At this point, I'm still on the fence about whether or not I will continue watching. I think it has the potential to be a really great show. If Abrams can capture the CSI/crime drama and the sci-fi X-files crowd at the same time, the show will be brilliant. I worry that at least in the pilot, the show was trying to do too many genres and as a result was a little choppy and disconnected in addition to being slow. I'm willing to give it another go, however, because pilots generally do get better.

In less scholarly analysis, I really like the cow. I was worried that we were going to see some experiments on the poor cow, but at least in this episode the cow requested in the following clip does nothing more than take a trip through a crowded Harvard hallway and watch cartoons with the mad scientist and his estranged son.

Dirty Duck Stamps

The Fish and Wildlife Administration has apparently learned the value of proofreading. Instead of advertising their new duck hunting with the correct phone number (1-800-STAMP24), they included a phone number to a sex line (1-800-TRAMP24). If you are planning on hunting migratory waterfowl in the next year you can expect to be

welcomed by “Intimate Connections” and enticed by a husky female voice to “talk only to the girls that turn you on,” for $1.99 a minute.

According the news story, they are not reprinting the stamps because of the cost.

Pantagraph.com | WTF | Duck Stamp error sends callers to sex line

Conventions

While I still think that JibJab should be the only people allowed to produce campaign ads, I'm also a fan of limiting other political news to Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. I really want to know the name of the guy in the RNC video who says that the convention was canceled because liberals were upset about "some people getting rained on."



And to be fair, a clip of the DNC as well...

Willy Wonka and/in the Lincoln Bedroom

Oompa loompas are a little creepy and do seem like the spies of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but apparently their spying ways in the film are not all that different than Roald Dahl's own past. The news that Dahl was a war-time spy was not nearly as entertaining as last month's revelation that Julia Child was a spy, but his methods were a little more scandalous. According to recent reports, the celebrated children's author was employed by the government to charm and then sleep with well-connected Americans in order to win confidences from them. Does 007 really come from 00-mpa loompa? According to one source in The Telegraph:

"I think he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that [was worth] more than $50,000 a year."

While this this may sound like a great gig, accordng to Newsweek:

Dahl was assigned to gather pillow talk from Mrs. Luce, who was regarded as anti-British. It was hard duty. "I am all f–––ed out," Dahl complained to the ambassador, Lord Halifax, after a three-night stand. "You know it's a great assignment but I just can't go on."

Supposedly FDR knew he was a spy and allowed Dahl to report his pillow confessions to the UK, as the US would enter WWII shortly. More interesting to me, however, is what the children's lit backlash will be.

In my 170 class this morning we talked briefly about this and related issues and my students seemed unsure how to process sex spy turned children's author. Luckily they seem to have fallen in love with his books first and are unwilling to degrade their value simply because of scandal. Let's just hope Sarah Palin doesn't get wind of this story. According to Time, while mayor of Wasilla, AK she, among other things,

continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them.

Clearly Harry Potter is to blame for teen pregnancies!*

*I've found conflicting reports about the titles of the books she sought to ban. John Green first alerted me to this connection. I'll be interested to see what's on that list though.