A big step toward normalizing pot as a positive good:
Fans attending a major NASCAR race this weekend will see a most unlikely video posted on a giant video screen shortly before entering the track: a pro-marijuana legalization ad. Outside the NASCAR Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis, the same track that hosts the famed Indianapolis 500, Marijuana Policy Project, the nation’s largest pro-marijuana legalization advocacy group, has purchased space to air – dozens of times over the weekend – a video that pushes the theme that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol.
It marks the first time a pro-marijuana legalization ad will appear so close to an entrance gate of a major sporting event. The Brickyard 400, in its 20th year, is regarded as one of NASCAR’s biggest races.
Update from a reader:
After the ad ran for several hours on Friday, it was pulled. A spokesman for the company that pulled that ad issued this statement:
“We in no way support marijuana at family events,” the spokesman said. “We didn’t expect this ad to be interpreted the way it did. We don’t want anything to do with it anymore.”
So, a major event with huge alcohol sponsors (Crown Royal & Miller Lite, anyone?), and a sport with a huge culture of alcohol consumption “doesn’t want anything to do” with marijuana. Not even a simple ad that isn’t promoting “marijuana at family events” but simply promoting the idea of an alcohol alternative in general. Wow.
I live in Colorado, so I can see first-hand that the tide is starting to turn, but decades of culture war are going to be tough to crack in some places.
Martin Amis makes an analogy to describe two kinds of authors:
A great part of writing is hoping to make things as nice as possible for the reader — be a good host, have them put their feet up by the fire, pull up a chair, get out a good wine. The writer who loves the reader always feels that; Nabokov would always give you his best chair.
But there have been one or two writers who didn’t give a shit about the reader, like Joyce — partly because he had patronage, he didn’t need the reader to earn a living. And Henry James, who went off the reader in a huge way, which is why those last few novels became impenetrable. If you look at early James, he’s almost middlebrow, then you get The Ambassadors, this incredibly convoluted thing. Joyce and James became bad hosts: If you wandered into their house you wouldn’t be welcomed. You’d stagger around while they were in the kitchen making some vile concoction which might amuse you, but it would taste disgusting and eccentric.
Astronaut Sunita Williams describes how space travel changes your perspective:
When you’re flying in space some of the things down on Earth seem trivial. Things like politics leave your mind. I didn’t feel like I was a person from the United States, I felt like I was lucky enough to be a person from Earth. For me, [most] news wasn’t important but people are important, so when you hear about natural disasters like hurricanes and fires, that makes you miss home and wonder how everybody’s coping. But I would also look back at the planet and think, “Gosh, it’s a pretty little place, everybody’s going for a walk on the beach or something like that, they must be enjoying life down there.”
Like so many children of the ’90s, James Patrik learned about bisexuality from Friends:
“Sometimes men love women/Sometimes men love men/And then there are bisexuals, though some just say they’re kidding themselves.”
As an impressionable kid, those lyrics [from Phoebe], comedic as they might be, represented the first time television had told me what to think about bisexuals. Whoever these bisexuals were, I was taught, they were foolish and cowardly. Too scared to just come out and admit their obvious gayness.
Growing up, the television and the community sold me a binary world view: gay or straight. There were only two viable options, and I secretly dreaded the eventuality of having to pick one. So I didn’t. I proceeded, undefined, not wanting to belong to either one of these groups. Not out of spite or youthful rebellion, but out of truth. I never really believed I was straight, and I never really believed I was gay.
After years of identifying himself as either one or the other – “I was always ashamed of my dishonesty when I did this, but also relieved at having avoided a potentially complicated conversation” – Patrik came out as bisexual. But he says the stigma remains:
Some likened my sexuality to a light switch, flicked in either direction on a whim. Some have regarded me as foolish and simply afraid of admitting my attraction to men. Some have just called me greedy. … What is it about bisexuality that so confounds? Labels and categories inform so much of how we interact with others. They flavor our expectations of how people will (and should) behave and force us to see otherness where none exists. In a society so bent on ‘outing’ celebrities and public figures, the bisexual man or woman circumvents this game and evades inquiring minds by sitting on the fence and defying categorization.
Don’t play Assassin’s Creed. Or go to a hospital. Or do much of anything else. That’s the takeaway of this neat visualization of the world’s worst data breaches.
Maureen O’Connor believes that in the era of social media, breakups are an increasingly relative concept:
[M]ore often than not, you will see him again. Like “dialing” a cell phone or “filming” a digital video, “one-night stand” is an anachronism. Even if you only have sex once, you will spend time with your hookup when he finds you on Facebook, appears in a mutual friend’s Instagram, or texts about a weird bump he found on his penis. Older generations didn’t have a word for this kind of thing—they couldn’t have. But these are, in fact, relationships. Even casual dates have expansive biographies to plow through and life narratives you can follow for years.
You hear about their hangovers when you check Twitter for the morning news. You see their new apartments when you browse Facebook at work. They can jump into your pants whenever they want by sending text messages that land in your pocket. Online, you watch your exes’ lives unfold parallel to yours—living, shifting digital portraits of roads not taken with partners you did not keep.
There was also a time, I am told, when staying in touch was difficult. Exes were characters from a foreclosed past, symbols from former and forgone lives. Now they are part of the permanent present. I was a college freshman when Facebook launched. All my exes live online, and so do their exes, and so do their exes, too. I carry the population of a metaphorical Texas in a cell phone on my person at all times. Etiquette can’t keep up with us—not that we would honor it anyway—so ex relationships run on lust and impulse and nosiness and envy alternating with fantasy. It’s a dozen soap operas playing at the same time on a dozen different screens, and you are the star of them all. It’s both as thrilling and as sickening as it sounds.
Jessica Love parses a study that finds we’re significantly less conscious of the flavor and quality of our food while we do other things. She calls it “zombie eating”:
Just about anything can turn us into zombie eaters: reading the newspaper, listening to Pride and Prejudice, even socializing. As distractions mount, so do the dangers. When our focus isn’t on our food, we may be slower to notice the physiological cues that tell us we’re full. And without tangible evidence of our binge—a pile of incriminating candy wrappers, say—we tend to lose track of how much we’ve eaten. This spurs us to eat more, for this meal and—hey, why not?—even for our next.
The antidote to zombie eating is mindful eating, where one focuses on eating—just eating—in a deliberate, even meditative, manner. Yesterday over lunch I gave mindful eating a whirl. To my mind the experience was not unlike silent hiking: my movements slowed, my senses piqued, the familiar became wonderfully strange.
I know this is juvenile, but I can’t help it. Here in New Hampshire, Dick Swett was a congressman for a few terms in the early 1990s. His campaign posters never failed to elicit a smile. Best of all, he was subjected to the Daily Show treatment when he stood up and asked President Obama a question at a town hall in Nashua in 2010.
Another:
I used to be a political consultant, and in the office we would keep track of great political “Dick” names. In the early 1990s, the president of the Cook County Board (the county that contains Chicago) was Dick Phelan. The last name was pronounced exactly the way it would to have your doctor write you an ED prescription.
Another:
When I did political fundraising in Michigan there was a big time lobbyist named Dick Weiner. Yes, just like Anthony. That was a difficult call to make without laughing!
Another:
I was doing some personal research on Blower Bentleys yesterday and came across this video on the 1937 Grand Prix circuit:
I’ve always found the most unfortunate politician’s name to be Dick Mountjoy, a politician in the California State Assembly and Senate. It didn’t help that I first encountered him while on a middle-school field trip to Sacramento. I’d say his name was tailor-made for an adolescent’s sense of humor, but I can’t honestly say that I find his name any less hilarious now 15+ years on.
Another shifts genders:
Your reader who served with SFC Boner reminded me of a sailor off the USS Blue Ridge I met several times while I was deployed to Japan: a woman named Seaman Boob.
Imagine hearing that name get passed over the 1MC several times a day. Getting promoted didn’t help her much either; I believe she was an an interior communications electrician, so she became IC3 Boob, then IC2 Boob, and if she stayed in long enough, IC1 Boob …
Another:
Clearly the American military enjoys a significant advantage in terms of amusing names: the relative ethic diversity and the omnipresence of the nametape on the uniform make it impossible to ignore. In my brief military career alone, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Sergeant First Class Crazybear, Sergeant Sargent, and Major Horney.
Nothing, however, will outstrip a fond memory at the end of a deployment to Iraq at Ali Al Salem Airbase, Kuwait. I was redeploying separately from my unit, and there were about 50 random sleep-deprived souls scattered about the waiting area, ready to head back home. In such situations, a relatively senior individual is designated to ride herd on the other passengers and ensure everyone is present through the time-tested Army roll call. We all stood in yet another formation as a major read our names off in a loud, commanding voice:
“Garrity!”
“Here!”
“Gilchrist!”
“Here!”
The major paused. A note of uncertainty crept into his voice.
“Glass … coke?”
And from the back, loud and triumphant:
“It’s pronounced Glasscock, sir!”
Another looks to the sports world:
Allow me to introduce you to Dick Pole, former Major League Baseball player and coach. And here are a few more from baseball, including Rusty Kuntz.
Another:
Let us not forget Randy Bush, who played outfield for the Twins in the 1980s.
Another:
This person isn’t a public official or a news reporter, but I still think the classic funny name of all time is a retired ob-gyn in Virginia named Harry Beaver. Yes, he goes by Harry, not Harold.
And another:
Whenever I hear about people with funny/unfortunate names, I always think back to one of my college professors at UC Santa Cruz. Harry Beevers was one of the preeminent plant biologists of the 20th century. He was instrumental in discovering the glyoxylate cycle and the glyoxysome in plant cells. He was from the Northeast of England and spoke with a pronounced Durham / Geordie accent. He was a little intimidating in his classroom lectures but brilliant.
Another might just be pulling our leg:
In Junior High School (Greenfield Jr High, in El Cajon, CA) close to 30 years ago, my gym coaches were Harold Balls and John Hiscock. No joke. Of course the common refrain (amongst both students and staff) was, ” Where’s Hiscock and Balls?”, followed by much snickering.
I heard that after I left, Hiscock retired and was replaced by a coach named Longerbone. The whole thing was so preposterous that a local radio station once called the school on air to confirm that this wasn’t some kind of joke.
Another:
When I was in college I worked at a call center doing tech support for AT&T Wireless. One time I fielded a call from someone named Harry Johnson. My supervisor heard me laughing (while my microphone was muted, of course) and wandered over to check it out. When he saw the name Harry Johnson on my computer screen he started laughing too. Then, in one of the coolest but least responsible things a boss has ever done, he told the rest of our 15-person team to put their customers on hold and check out my screen.
One more:
My first GYN was named Dr. Stiff. Nice man, went to our church, had a good (and I should add, properly scientific) talk – along with his female partner in his practice – with all us high school girls about the sorts of things you need to see a GYN about, and made us feel very comfortable, and then I started going to him. I say this because I would not have chosen a GYN named Dr. Stiff out of the phone book – which might have been why he was trying to drum up business at church!
More readers are snickering over at our Facebook page. Update from a reader:
Now that you’ve expanded the review into the sport world, you have to acknowledge the legendary NASCAR racer, who died earlier this year: Dick Trickle. I once asked someone who worked in the sport, why he didn’t go by Richard or Rick? He said that Trickle started racing in Wisconsin on dirt tracks, where one of the other competitors was Richard Head, who did not go by Richard. I assume Trickle figured, by comparison …
And then there was the former head football coach at Glassboro State College in New Jersey in the ’80s: Richard Wackar. He did not go by Richard.
I assume you now realize this thread may never end?
Subscribers need to get their [tinypass_offer text=”$2/month”]’s worth.
Linguist Geoffery Pullum calls the latest news item about dolphins’ communication skills “patently obvious twaddle”:
What the scientists did according to this new report was to capture the signature sound (the specific typical whistle noise) of each individual in a group of wild bottlenose dolphins and play the sounds back to the group. And what happened?
“The researchers found that individuals only responded to their own calls, by sounding their whistle back.”
Now, think about that. If you call out “Geoff Pullum!” in a crowded street, and I’m there within earshot, I’m likely to turn round and look at you. But what I am not likely to do is yell “Geoff Pullum!” back at you. The very description in the article of what happens when a dolphin hears their own signature whistle reveals that signature whistles do not function anything like names. It sounds analogous to a study of dog behavior finding that if you play Fido a recording of his own bark, he will bark.
Update from a reader:
Why does he assume dolphins and humans communicate the same way? What if repeating back his own name is simply an efficient way of saying “Yes, I’m here?”
When I first read the story, it seemed like dolphins use their names as message headers the same way pilots do. Whenever a pilot radios someone, she begins the conversation by saying who she’s calling and who she is, and then typically ends the conversation by repeating her own callsign:
Airplane N12345: Tower, November 12345.
Tower: Aircraft calling tower go ahead.
N12345: 345 holding short 22-left, ready to go.
Tower: November 12345, line up and wait runway 22-left, landing traffic one mile final on 18.
N12345: 345 [has received and understood your transmission]
So what’s so “obvious[ly] twaddle” about:
Dolphin 1: Dolphin 1 [calling anyone], just saw some tasty-looking tuna.
Dolphin 2, 30 miles away: Dolphin 2 [here, I have received and understood your song, and I’m coming too].
Dolphin 1: Dolphin 1 [understands you Dolphin 2 and will save some tuna for you].
Seems to me they’re pretty efficient communicators.
Young Kenyans are “less concerned with tribal loyalty than their parents” and “looking to forge a new, contemporary identities,” Rowan Emslie reports. One result: Nairobi now boasts a sizable goth community:
I meet [David Lith] at The Goth Shop, a clothing store and tattoo parlor housed in a mall in the affluent Westlands neighborhood of Nairobi. The very existence of this shop is noteworthy – it is fairly unusual to hear rock music in bars or shops in East Africa, much less experience anything related to goth culture. For some, old Dolly Parton and Jim Reeves cassettes in supermarkets remain the closest thing to even “rock culture” available in the mainstream. David is acting as my guide, taking me on a tour of the awkward little tattoo parlors, shops and bars that occasionally host the itinerant goth population of East Africa’s regional hub. …
[I]nterest in goth culture came about shortly after tattoos were popularized in the early 2000s through MTV and other Western music channels. Across the several parlors [I] visited, most had at least one goth-influenced artist on staff. Thanks to the launch of a rock-heavy radio station, XFM, and an increasingly popular metal DJ called Van Doom, the number of young Kenyans partaking in goth culture seems likely to expand in the near future.
A 2011 estimate put the Nairobi’s goth community at 300, but The Goth Shop has nearly 1,000 fans on Facebook and Oh My Goth Designs has more than 2,000. Check out more fantastic photos on the latter’s fan page.
