I’d love to help Oliver Willis out, but not at the expense of rooting for the Redskins. Sorry.
When life throws you a curve….
Mike, of the Baseball Rants, has fathered a child, and is to be congratulated. I think it would be funny if it turned out that his new kid looked like Joe Morgan….
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Priorities? What’s That?
Kevin Drum points out a depressing article about parents and their cellphones, and then he writes about the pressures of “proper” schooling (as in, getting kids into the right schools and first-graders spending four hours each night doing homework and the like). Both of these articles put me in mind of George Carlin.
In the cellphone article, in which parents clearly think their phone conversations are of greater importance than their kids, I recall Carlin saying, “It’s a baby. Touch the little prick once in a while; he’ll thank you for it someday.” That’s exactly right. I’m as guilty as any parent, really, of not always being attentive to what my kid’s up to. It’s really hard not to be. It’s really hard not to simply say “That’s nice”, without turning my head, when she wants to show me that her kitty is sitting on her lap for the thousandth day in a row. But that doesn’t make it right. There is a fundamental difference between occasionally having to say, “Sweetie, I’m doing something important right now, so can you play by yourself for a while?” and treating your child as a feature in the wallpaper of one’s life.
And in the second case, a recent Carlin album has a lengthy segment on how out-of-whack our society’s fixation on children has become. He says, “You have a child fetish, you’ve turned them into little cult objects, and it’s not healthy.” This goes hand-in-hand with the cellphone article, because we’re in increasing danger of not seeing children as people but as things to be paraded about so that our peers can see how wonderful we are. Children have become one more way of “Keeping up with the Joneses”, and it’s really depressing. I resent being made to feel that if my daughter isn’t quite reading yet (much less at a fourth grade level or whatever), or if she’s only starting preschool yet (actually, she is), or if she’s not already taking violin or dance lessons, that I’m somehow crippling her future. I resent it because (a) it’s completely false (late-bloomers and early-flameouts are a dime-a-dozen), and (b) it’s none of anyone’s damn business but ours, anyway.
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An Ellis Moment
Move any beverages away from your computer before reading Warren Ellis’s take on Enterprise, particularly a bit about halfway through when Ellis draws a contrast between Captain Kirk and Captain Archer. Of course, Ellis disses Star Wars in his last sentence, and for that he must be eliminated. All in good time, my pretties….
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Outfits Not Seen Enough in Buffalo, #477
Back in my day….
HE went to Harvard?!
Via TBOGG, I find Conan O’Brien’s commencement speech to Harvard from a few year’s back. This is one of the funniest things I’ve read in quite some time.
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For $45, this had better be the best beer ever!
Matthew Yglesias is sure lucky that he’s writing good articles for The American Prospect, like this one on media bias in 9-11-03 coverage, seeing as how his new subserviance to new Lords and Masters requires him to not write as many blog entries these days.
It is pretty weird, though, that Matthew gets to write posts for Tapped, the Prospect‘s weblog, but anonymously since Tapped doesn’t attribute its authors on the group blog. I wonder what their rationale for that is?
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…Went down, down, down, but the flames rolled higher…
I suspect we all have musicians and recording artists of whom we periodically think, “Why do I only own one CD of theirs?” Johnny Cash was one of mine. My favorite songs of his were “Ring of Fire”, “Tennessee Flat Top Box”, and “The Long Gray Veil”. But I’ve heard so very few of his songs.
A few years ago, I toured the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland (with this guy and his uncommonly-tolerant wife) and saw some of Cash’s artifacts on display there. Until that time I had pretty much thought of Cash as only a country music artist, when in fact he was much more than that.
(Aaron also laments Cash’s passing today, and provides some links.)
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Wake up, Stanley…I think Jack just got home….
I often check AICN in the morning, just to see if there’s any breaking news about movies or whatever that I can’t live without. This morning, the first thing I see is this: “AICN remembers John Ritter”. And I’m thinking, “What the hell? Wasn’t John Ritter on TV, like, two nights ago?”
Yes, yes he was. And no, he won’t be any more. Damn.
(BTW, am I the only one who remembers his movie Hero At Large, in which Ritter plays an actor who gets overly attached to his role as a caped superhero?)