Month: October 2010

The Guardian's resident television columnist, Charlie Brooker, decides ten years of abuse is enough. I can see why:

Why quit now? Well partly because I'm afraid of the future of TV, but mostly because 11 years of essentially rewriting the phrase "X is an arsehole haw haw haw" over and over until you hit the 650-word limit is enough for anyone. See, I was never a proper critic…

Oh, I tried to make the odd point here and there, but the bulk of it – the stuff people actually remember – consists of playground, yah-boo stuff.

I was horrible. I fantasised about leaping into the screen and attacking a Big Brother contestant with a hammer; then, without a hint of irony, announced that Nicky Campbell exuded the menace of a serial killer. I also claimed Jeremy Kyle (who struck me as "a cross between Matthew Wright and a bored carpet salesman") was the Prince of Darkness himself – almost ("Look at his eyes: there's a spine-chilling glint to them … Not that I'm saying Kyle himself is an agent of Satan, you understand. I'm just saying you could easily cast him as one. Especially if you wanted to save money on special effects.").

The moment anyone appeared on screen, I struggled to find a nice way to describe their physical appearance. David Dickinson was "an ageing Thundercat"; Alan Titchmarsh resembled "something looming unexpectedly at a porthole in a Captain Nemo movie"; Nigel Lythgoe was "Eric Idle watching a dog drown". I called Alan Sugar "Mrs Tiggywinkle" and said he reminded me of "a water buffalo straining to shit in a lake". What a bastard. And I'm no oil painting myself, unless the painting in question depicts a heartbroken carnival mask hurriedly moulded from surgically extracted stomach fat and stretched across a damaged, despondent hubcap. I think that constitutes some form of justification.

By some accounts the trend began a bit earlier – circa 1888, for example.

After reading that Time piece about the mood in the Obama administration, Douthat advises the White House staff to buck up:

If you believe in Barack Obama’s agenda (as, presumably, most of the people working for him do), then you have no business giving up on Rushmore now: His presidency could still have over six more years to run, and he’s already achieved the public policy dream of a generation’s worth of liberals! There have been dark, depressing times to serve in a White House (the last year or so of the Bush administration, to pick a recent example). But the midterms and Tea Partiers notwithstanding, the 22nd month of the Obama era really shouldn’t be one of them — unless, of course, you came into the job with such unreasonable expectations that anything short of a perpetual inauguration-style lovefest would have disappointed you.

My feelings entirely. But strange to hear Ross having to give the Obamaites a pep-talk.

Mike Barthel declares bullies "the new cultural villain of the moment," traces the shift in attitudes toward suicides among gay teens, and tells an anecdote about a time he gave his class bully a bloody nose:

[W]e're telling kids that it gets better. Which means we're pretending that adults are far less terrifying creatures.

I've known enough friends who've gotten gay-bashed as adults that I know bullying doesn't stop at graduation, and that seems like a far bigger issue. … It's hard to escape the feeling that things like Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project, National Coming Out Day, and this nightmare have only been successful because they make straight people such as myself feel better about ourselves, like we are doing something to help the cause of equality, even though we're not really doing anything substantial. 

They may make us tear up, but it also makes gay people into Sanrio dolls for the enjoyment of the straights—cuddly creatures who, like John Hughes characters, are pure of heart. That's better than being seen as child molesters, but it still seems unproductive. And on one level, anti-bullying campaigns are just one more way to delude ourselves that human cruelty is something we can overcome.

Alan Jacobs offers a brief thought on the eager-to-please student:

I am suddenly thankful that I grew up in a family with absolutely no academic expectations, a family who treated my interest in going to college as a nearly incomprehensible eccentricity. Almost everything I’ve done in my intellectual life that I now value I did because I was unconcerned about the approval of any officially designated authorities.

I grew up in the same kind of environment. Neither of my parents attended college, and my own scholarship to Oxford was regarded as a weird kind of freak. My dad thought I was too nerdy for my own good some of the time; my mum was proud but not in any way pushy. I pushed myself. As for authority, well … I have some self-evident issues, I guess. At high school, I revered some teachers but waged war on the headmaster. My dissertation on Oakeshott, to take an extreme example, is actually brutally critical of him at times – and yet he is the modern thinker I most revere, and I even sent it to him to read, before having the extraordinary chance of discussing it with him.

I revered his authority because I knew from reading him that he was only interested in the truth. Which is to say, he had no authority but his conscience and his mind. And it was that approval – and only that – that I craved.

I still feel the same way, as any boss I have ever had will testify.

A reader writes:

A wife's perspective here.  My husband was very overweight, and snored a lot, but I always figured he didn't have sleep apnea because he had so many dreams and I thought dreams only came with deep sleep.  But what dreams they were.  He was often in a fight, or tackling someone in a football game, and once even slugged me hard in his sleep as he was dreaming of fending off an attacker.

When he was finally diagnosed, the doctor explained that his dreams were actually his mind's response to the panic his body was feeling as it gasped for air.  No wonder so many of them were violent.   It's been six years now.   Like you, my husband never goes anywhere without his CPAP.  Made all the difference in the world.

Another writes:

I see that you used my comment about use of a neti pot.  I hope it helps someone else. I've been thinking again about using a CPAP machine.  My wife has been out of town this week, so she has not been there to flip me over on my stomach when I stop breathing.  That has resulted in several very bad nights.

Another:

Last year, my sister found her boyfriend dead.  He had fallen asleep at his computer without his machine on. They called his death "positional asphixiation."  He was 37 years old. I implore everyone to take sleep apnea very seriously, and if a doctor tells you to wear a CPAP, please do.

John Horton has started an automated crowd-written blog called Mechanical Proust.  Contributors answer basic questions taken from the Proust Questionnaire. They are paid by Amazon Mechanical Turk, an "online market where people perform simple tasks for pennies, like labeling photos, though more recently, social scientists are using it to do online experiments." Horton learned:

Most of the responses are unsurprising but they are occasionally poignant or insightful. People are proud of their children. They regret dropping out of school. They want to live in Paris. They fear dying and being alone. They like chicken dishes, etc.

(Hat tip: Samuel Arbesman)

Trent Gilliss admires the latest installation at the Tate Modern by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei:

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s latest installation at the Tate Modern is an incredible feat: one hundred million hand-painted pieces of porcelain that resemble the shells of sunflower seeds. 

Sadly, they have stopped letting visitors walk across the sculpture due to dust.

(Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)