OmegaMom

You invited the dotter to your daughter’s birthday party.

The party was in Big City at the science museum.

WAY kewl!

Um.

But.

Um.

That’s a fifty mile drive.  One way.  It takes an hour to drive.  One way.

Sorry, we’re not going.

(Does it strike anyone else as a wee tad overboard to be having your six-year-old’s birthday party at a big science museum that is an hour’s drive away?)

The newsies are agog at the notion that Miley Cyrus has (gasp!) revealed herself (gasp!) in a truly artsy pic by Annie Leibowitz, and by (gasp!) a picture of her lounging against her boyfriend that (gasp!) shows her midriff (o the shock, o the horror!).  Stories are written saying that she is setting foot on the primrose path to ruin that has been taken by other teen stars lately–specifically Britney and her ilk.

Our culture is totally schizophrenic.  On the one hand, we’re practically drowning in pictures and videos of scantily clad females doing all sorts of things that one might expect scantily clad–or unclad–females to be doing.  Licentiousness abounds.  On the other, a 15-year-old has a few pics taken and suddenly Moms Of Pop Culture Unite to prostrate themselves upon their chaises longues, hands to their foreheads, having the vapors that the Queen of Pre-Teen Clean is allowing herself to be defiled.  The hordes of teeny tweeny Hannah Montana fans are suddenly going to transform into an army of mini-Lolitas, and it’s All Miley’s Fault.  Prudery rears its ugly head.

OmegaMom is rolling her eyes here, big time.

OmegaMom is also rolling her eyes at an article about "When Young Teachers Go Wild On The Web".

Kozmik All help us:  22-year-old teachers have MySpace pages.  And they…and they…omigawd, how can my trembling fingers write this??  They have pictures on those pages!  Pictures of (gasp!) themselves holding (gasp!) bottles of tequila!  Or, even worse, paintings they have done showing women’s lingerie peeping out from under upflung skirts.  Or (shudder!) paintings of frontal nudes!

(One does wonder if those paintings were anything like these…)

And they say things!  Like "rocking out with some deaf kids.  It.  Is.  Awesome." 

Or talking about bl0w j0bs.

Or showing posters about cartoon sperm.

What is wrong with these teachers?!  Have they no decorum?!  No reserve?!  Aren’t they aware they are molding young children’s minds?!  How dare they have lives of their own!  How dare they have thoughts of their own!

Now, granted, each and every one of the things mentioned above could be taken too far.  Let’s not show pictures of orgies featuring oneself in the buff.  But in and of themselves, my opinion about the examples in the article is…well…um…hell, these are 20-something teachers.

I was party-hearty girl until I reached my early 30s.  Well, not as "hearty" as some, but I went out, I drank, I partied, I danced, I stayed up all weekend long, I had hangovers, I talked sex with all my buds, I toked joints, I had sex, I listened to rock-n-roll.  And if the web and blogs had been around then, I’d probably have blogged about all of the above.

It might have been drearily boring.  I have to admit that my overwhelming response to most blogs or MySpace pages put out by folks in their late teens and early 20s is that they are an appallingly vacuous, inane collection of stream of consciousness gossip, in conjunction with angsty poetry.  This is why, when I use the "next blog" button on Blogger, I go through about fifty blogs before I find something I would consider even vaguely interesting.

I can’t imagine Mrs. Shoetree, the dotter’s kindergarten teacher, having a webpage with a poster about cartoon sperm, or paintings of frontal nudes, or talking about "rocking out" with anyone; she is, after all, older than me, and more staid.  But if she did I wouldn’t care, because she’s a damn fine kindy teacher who my dotter adores.  Which is, after all this bloviating, my main point:  Folks, teachers have Real Lives.  Yes!  I know it’s a surprise, but, hey, there it is, and it’s my pleasure to pass this piece of arcane knowledge on to you.  Teachers are Real, Live Human Beings who, amazingly enough, have been known to go to parties, or fall in love, or be indiscreet.

In a refreshing departure from administrative powerhunger, some administrator actually said that webpages should be handled case by case.  (What, no standardized testing?!)  On the other hand, another administrator type had this to say:  "We all understand the importance of living a public life above reproach…"

Dear lord.  We are doomed; the only people who will go into teaching or politics twenty years from now are people who are upright, humorless prigs…

When I was growing up, there was a saying:  "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

Of course, kids still called names, and it still hurt, but having that said often enough sort of conditioned one to think that being called names was an ephemeral thing.

Then there was the "turn the other cheek" philosophy, in which, if you were hurt, rather than hitting back, you offered a further target.  Sort of pre-Gandhi-ism.

So what’s changed?  What makes a nice middle-class mom decide to fake an online personality to gain friendship with a depressive teen, then yank the "friendship" away, all as a way of "teaching a lesson" or some such thing to a girl who had "hurt" her daughter–resulting in the teen’s suicide?  What makes fresh-faced cheerleader gals decide that a previous buddy’s namecalling on MySpace warrants a half-hour long smackdown to be posted on YouTube?  What makes the mother of one of the beaters go onto national television and say–in all seriousness–"This is all blown out of proportion"?

Of course, these incidents have caused folks to come out of the woodwork to blame the Internet.  It’s MySpace’s fault!  It’s YouTube’s fault!  My girl wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeeevul Internet wasn’t there!  Or, I wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeevul Internet hadn’t made me do it.

Seriously.  In these cases, the parents seem to have something missing.  Us old-fashioned folk would call it "conscience", I guess.  Or morals.  Or a sense of proportion.  Or something.  What happened to saying something like, "If that girl is trash-talking you, surely you don’t want to associate with her?"? 

Currently, the dotter is deep in the midst of the standard "If you don’t do x for me, I won’t be your friend anymore!" pronouncement phase.  I give her the hairy eyeball at such statements to me, until she breaks down into a grin and giggles.  She knows that saying those things doesn’t cut it with me.  And I’ve had to intervene once or twice at after-school care when one or another of the girls says something like that as well.

The idea being that it’s not what someone else thinks of you that’s important:  It’s what you think of yourself.  It’s knowing you’ve done the right thing.  It’s knowing when you’ve done the wrong thing.  It’s realizing that some of these great dramas won’t mean a damned thing when you’re forty years old.

These internalizations don’t spontaneously emerge, of course.  You have to work on them.  And it’s not faux self-esteem B.S. that we’re talking about here–the "I am Special" entitled attitude.  It’s the feeling that you’ve worked hard on something, tried your best, done the right thing, have stuff inside you that is worthwhile…

These girls–and their parents–seem to have missed the boat on all of this.  The jockeying for prestige and station becomes the be-all and end-all of their existence.  They’re judging their own worth by what other people say, in the heat of the moment, either to their friends or on MySpace.  Now, I realize that names hurt.  They sting.  You can, indeed, end up crying in the middle of the night over what one of your acquaintances said behind your back.  And it continues even when you’re forty-something.

But the thing to do is move on, concentrate on what’s good and going well in your life.  Not beat the shit out of your former best friend so you can toss it up on YouTube and get lots of comments.

Every once in a while, I haul the dotter off to Veronica’s, the local manicure-in-a-mall, for an hour of frou-frou girly-girl stuff.  The last time we were there, Veronica carefully painted an itty-bitty snowman on one fingernail, and an itty-bitty Christmas tree on one of the fingernails on the other hand.  The dotter gets pink or purple, usually with glitter, while I get clear nail polish.

It’s a pleasant little interlude.  Veronica does a much better job with fingernails than I do, the dotter gets her glittery pink or purple, I get my jagged edges filed smooth, and then the dotter begs a quarter off me so she can ride the horsie in the mall lobby.

All pretty laid-back.

I am obviously far behind the times, though.

I should be getting her a bikini wax.  Or her eyebrows plucked.  Or, if I were really thinking ahead, a botox job.

What’s that you say?  She’s only six?

No, no, no!  You don’t understand!  These days, it’s the "in" thing to do!  Mommy-daughter bonding time at the spa and salon!  Mommy goes in one door to get a bikini wax and daughter goes into the other to get her eyebrows shaped.

Now normally I’d pooh-pooh such a story, putting it down to a reporter who sees something twice and then turns it into a "trend".  But in this case, the author asked a whole slew of salon owners, and got a quote from a pediatrician; besides that, there was a remarkably similar story in the New York Times just a few days ago.

I recall a slightly bewildering Christmas visit to the in-laws, when our niece L., who the previous year had been quite happy hiking and scrambling over rocks with us, a lovely, natural beauty at 15, spent an hour and a half in the bathroom before emerging as a sleek, made-up model-type to go to the mall with her boyfriend.

I also recall a time when I had to chase three girls out of my great-aunt’s bathroom as they had monopolized it for far too long in preparation for a family gathering at the local buffet restaurant.  They emerged with Big Hair (this was, after all, the mid- to late-’80s), a cloud of perfume puffing out of the bathroom door, with big blue racoon eyes.

Somewhere between my own total lack of primping and grooming, and these ladies hauling their children off for buffing and plucking and botoxing, there’s a happy medium.

What happened to that happy medium?

On the one hand, I seriously consider taking the dotter, at age 13 or 14, to the local Clinique counter a few times to have instruction on how to do make-up without looking "made up".  I think of doing a nail-painting party for a bunch of ten-year-olds (thank heavens that’s a few years off!).  I personally indulge in massages now and then.  But all of these are "treats" in my mind, not something that gets done on a regular basis.

I dunno.  Mainly, I’m an old fart with a semi-hippy outlook and a worry that the dotter will be sucked into a pop-culture outlook that places emphasis on the outer wrappings, rather than the inner character.

From birth to death, one is ever-learning, ever-growing. The collection of serendipity we call "the Internet" and "blogs" helps with this process–sometimes in a way that is, frankly, shallow, silly, a bit of mental fluff and floss, and sometimes in a way that makes you stop and go, "Whoa. I didn’t know that."

While OmegaDad was out of town, I indulged myself with a few-hour binge on YouTube watching ’80s music videos. I did Tom Petty. Queensryche. Bon Jovi. Joe Satriani. Dire Straits. Van Halen. Pat Benetar. The Clash. John (Cougar) Mellencamp. Midnight Oil. U2. I did a whole slew of U2, including a live performance of Sunday, Bloody Sunday from "Rattle and Hum", which I’m sure most of my older readers have seen, but I haven’t:

Then, today, I wandered over to Whatever, and encountered this version of U2’s Pride (In the Name of Love):

And I thought to myself, "Wow! What a great way to use U2’s song!"

And then I did a little googling, and discovered I must be the oldest person on earth to finally realize that U2 wrote that song as a tribute to Martin Luther King. Um. Yes, somehow I managed to get through the ’80s rockin’ out to U2 and never really listened to the words or learned that little fact.

So: Ever-learning, ever-changing, ever-growing. That is OmegaMom.

Today is the anniversary of the assassination of MLK. I was old enough that I should remember it, but don’t. We didn’t watch much news, and I spent my time with the TV watching Star Trek and Twilight Zone and Dark Shadows, with a hand grasping the antenna (because that was the only way we really got a good signal).

Children who are growing up these days simply won’t have any concept of what it was like back then. (Actually, I don’t really have any concept, either, because I was so young and still focused on the family, not the outer world.)

Oh, yes, there’s still prejudice. There’s still racism. But it wasn’t that long ago that "separate but equal" was codified in U.S. laws, that whites marrying blacks was illegal in many states, that desegregating busing led to the need to call out the National Guard to escort little children to school doors in the face of adult hatred. It was only 40 years ago that James Earl Ray shot the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. out of fear and hatred, fear of a man who said, "I dream that my children will be judged by the content of their characters and not the color of their skin."

But today…today we have a black man running for President of the United States, with polls showing him ahead of a white male Republican opponent.

In the name of love, let us all move forward.

(Gah.  My apologies to those who see this in their RSS feeds multiple times–I’m trying to center the videos, and it keeps messing up.  So I give up.)

We’ve all encountered those questions.  They’re in the pseudo-IQ-tests you can find online; they’re definitely in my dotter’s homework now and then.  You’re supposed to look at a group of items and find the one that "doesn’t fit".

So, with that in mind, here are real headlines from MSNBC’s Business section today.  That’s one day.  I’m not going to link them all, just send you to the Business main page:

"Automakers see sales fall during March" - GM sales down 19% year-over-year, Ford down 14%, Toyota down 10%, Nissan and Honda sales down, too.

"Truckers protest high fuel prices" - Remember the song "Convoy"?  (Yes, I’m dating myself here, that’s a big 10-4!)  NJ truckers formed a convoy to protest high diesel prices.  Diesel is going for $3.99 per gallon at our local gas stations.

"European banks see $23 billion subprime hit" - UBS Bank (Switzerland) expects $19 billion in write-downs, Deutsche Bank to write-down an additional $4 billion.  Since January 2007, banks have seen write-downs or credit losses off $232 billion; that’s a lot!

"Construction spending falls again in Feb." - Residential construction spending has dropped for 24 months straight.  Recent news indicates that commercial construction spending is starting to turn down, too.

"Manufacturing activity contracted in March" - An index of manufacturer economic activity was at 46.5 for March (above 50 means growth, below 50 means no growth).

"Just how bad can the economy get?" - Worried readers ask questions of the business desk folk at MSNBC.  The response?  "First off, we have yet to see confirmation that the economy has entered even a mild recession, let alone a severe downturn."

"Auto industry workers face hard choices" - Chrysler, GM, and Ford have recently announced cutbacks and closures.  How is this affecting auto industry workers?

"Food price hikes changing eating habits" - The average price of a loaf of bread has increased 32% over the past three years.  Eggs have gone up 50% over the past year.  People are making fewer trips to the stores, eating out less, cutting coupons more.

"New home sales fall to a 13-year low in Feb." - Sales dropped to an annual rate of 590,000 units, with inventory of new houses at the highest level in 26 years.

"Some homes worth less than their pipes" - People are breaking into empty foreclosed houses to rip out the copper plumbing and electric wiring.  The headline, of course, is a bit off; they’re talking houses in some really really rundown areas of rundown cities.

"Analysts see 200,000 banking industry layoffs" - More layoffs are inevitable, say banking industry pundits.

"Wall Street soars amid economic optimism" - "Wall Street began the second quarter with a big rally Tuesday as investors rushed back into stocks, optimistic that the worst of the credit crisis has passed and that the economy is faring better than expected. The Dow Jones industrials surged nearly 400 points, and all the major indexes were up more than 3 percent."  Another news source calls it the best first-quarter end for the DJIA since 1938.

I called the borough.  I talked to Jane, a nice lady who informed me "it happens all the time, don’t worry."

Look, okay, when I get something that has in big red letters "TAX DELINQUINCY NOTICE" and the word "foreclosure" on it, I get kind of hot and bothered.

But Jane said not to worry and to talk to my mortgage company.

Which was, of course, my next step.

I will not go off on a rant about outsourcing to India.  I will not.

Ahem.

Jarmesh was very polite.  Once we had communicated all the particulars, he said that everything would be taken care of.

So…Now that I know where the info is, I will be watching the escrow balance like a hawk.

In the end, I am left feeling very anticlimactic.  I hyperventilate and panic–the borough and the mortgage company act like it’s no big deal.  It damned well better be no big deal, is all I can say!

In the meantime, I leave you with the physics behind why peeling old wallpaper is a bitch (someone went to the trouble of a study to point out that peeling things slooooowly really helps a lot?!), and with Big Dog Beta, humanity’s answer to the Big Dog robot.

(No, not about taxes!)

Most of the time, I go through life thinking most people are pretty nice, that everyone (generally) just wants to get along, that the folks who get a kick out of hurting other people are few and far between.  That hackers are only interested in scoring, via macho skillz, or making money by scamming or thievery, but not interested in hurting other people.

Then I read something like this.

Hackers and spammers and what-not are branching out, it seems.  Not content with stealing people’s credit card numbers or identification, or posting 279 spam comments on an obscure blog per day for a week, they’ve now decided to target epilepsy patients, with something that hurts them.

An epilepsy support board was hacked by folks who put javascript in place to either display a seizure-inducing picture or redirect the post-reader to another website entirely that displayed a full-screen video of seizure-inducing patterns.

What kind of sick fucks would do something like that?!

I mean, really.  I can get "revenge".  I can get "personal animosity" aimed at one person.  I can get graffiti.  I can get theft.  But I can’t get the kind of personality that impersonally poisons an online medical support group with something that can actually physically incapacitate or hurt someone.  My considered opinion:  These are scum-sucking slimeball pigs with the morals of a hyena, like roaches of the internet, who should be squashed like the bugs they are.

Bastards.

A recent Disney film is now available on DVD.  So, since we’ve instituted "family movie night", wherein we watch a movie together and eat dinner in the family room, and since it’s a Disney movie, a fairy tale, we figured we’d get it and watch it and have a pleasant evening.

It’s a fun movie!  Really!  See, there’s this princess locked away by a prince’s evil stepmother, who’s very Snow-White-esque, singing to all the birds and animals and daydreaming of her handsome prince.  The prince hears her singing…he searches out the beauteous voice…he finds the princess…she’s swept off her feet…

And then the evil stepmother, trying to keep her away from the prince, dumps her into a wishing well that has, as it’s other end, New York City.

At which point, the movie turns from a cartoon into real life.

All well and good.  Lots of hilarity ensues when this dewy-eyed innocent Disney princess tries to cope with real-life NYC.

She meets a man.  She starts falling for the man.  The prince and a henchman of the stepmother also go through the wishing well to rescue her/keep the prince from rescuing her…

And then the evil stepmother, deciding her henchman is worthless, jumps into NYC herself.

At which point, the dotter crawled up into my lap.

And then the witch, foiled in various connivings, busts loose with lots of flames and witchery and turns into a very well-done CGI dragon lizard thing, big and scaly and scary.

"Scary" being the operative word.

Really scary for a six-year-old who has only encountered scary stuff in The Wizard of Oz (which is banned from the house for a few years) and in cartoons.  She’s quite the adept at the scary stuff in cartoons, because she’s well aware that it’s Not Real.  But CGI that’s presented in a realistic way?

Really, really scary.

I spent quite a bit of time last night in the dotter’s bedroom before she fell asleep, having to explain how it was all Make Believe.  How it was all done with computers.  How it wasn’t a real dragon lizard thing, and the witch wasn’t a real witch, and it wasn’t real fire, and it was all pretend, and everything was okay.

I felt blindsided, frankly.  I didn’t even think to research the movie beforehand–after all, it’s Disney, fer cryin’ out loud!  A Disney children’s movie.

So:  Make sure your kiddos aren’t quite as innocent about scary special effects as mine was before you show it to them.

One of the Great Truths about me is that I never mastered Big Hair.  The only time I came close was when I had my poodle perm (see this post).  My hair has always been, and always will be, fine, straight, thin, silky hair that loses any hint of a curl when the relative humidity goes past 20%.  Since I grew up in Chicago, and lived there during the majority of the ’80s, perms were the only path to curldom.

Then there was the fact that, if one really wanted it, one could get Big Hair by spending inordinate amounts of time in the bathroom, fiddling with curlers, curling irons, hair spray, and teasing.  I had more important things to do, such as read.  Or write.

Anyway, I muddled through the ’80s as best I could.

Another Great Truth:  the dotter, though totally genetically unrelated to me, has that same hair:  fine, straight, thin, silky.

So last night, as you know, I subjected the dotter to soft curlers all over her head.

Of course, some came out during the night.

But!  The rest stayed in, and when they were unrolled, her hair was quite bouncy and curly.

I combed.  I sprayed.  I curling-ironed her bangs.  I didn’t do any hair-teasing because I am morally against such things.  So here’s our ’80s cowgirl, looking sassy (i.e., making a face):

It actually was big!  Here’s a close-up (the color is off and I couldn’t figure out how to correct it):

In which you can immediately tell that the bang curls didn’t do what they’re supposed to, and you can see some straight hairs that escaped the entire curler fiasco.

But the sad thing is that the dotter’s hair, like mine, immediately began to go flat.  Obviously, even though I applied what I thought was a dreadful amount of hair spray, lifting locks and spraying under them, holding them up so they’d dry a bit fluffy, it was all for naught.  By the time I haul her off to gymnastics this afternoon, the curls will be a sad, sorry shadow of themselves.  All that will be left is sticky residue.

Sigh.

The good news is that she will not be subjected to an entire decade of trying to do this every morning.

There were no shoulder pads (how could I forget shoulder pads?!  But I did!).  There were, however, jean legs tucked into the boots, and a hair pick in the back pocket.

Gazing back into those misty, halcyon days of college, I dimly seem to remember something called "study groups".  At the beginning of the semester (or quarter), you’d collect names and phone numbers of other folks in your class who were interested in studying together, then you’d set a time, and someone would be tagged as the person to glom onto the first good study room or carrel at the university library.  You’d meet, everyone would have their textbooks and class notes, someone would bring noshes, and you’d spend a few hours going over the notes and exchanging answers and ideas about the homework.

"Y’know, I tried number 48, but I kept getting hung up!  Did anyone figure that problem out?!"

In my Numeric Analysis class (one of my favorites, really!), our prof gave us take-home tests for the mid-term and final.  He fully expected us to work in groups.  They were some of the hardest–and most fun–exams I had in my college experience.  Our study group met for hours in the library, in the break room in the basement of the math building, out on the lawns.  We worked hard.  We worked our butts off.  We thought deeply.  My mid-term response was 20 pages long; my final response was 30 pages.

We also had classes where it was probably assumed by the professor that we were working alone on homework and studying.  But even in those cases, hammering out the answers to more difficult problems with other students helped all of us understand the basic concepts better.  And those who got answers easily explained to those who didn’t, and gained from that aspect as well.

These days, it seems, such study groups often convene on the intertubes.  Specifically, at places such as Facebook.

One professor at Ryerson University, who apparently had a requirement that students were to work on assignments alone, discovered that a student had set up a Facebook study group for his class.  That student is facing expulsion and 147 counts of academic misconduct, one for each member of the study group.  His B grade was changed to an F by his professor after the Facebook group was discovered.

So many different ways of looking at this.

The professor didn’t want students working out answers to problems together. 

If that is the sole issue here, why weren’t all the other members of the study group equally penalized?  Why didn’t every student who was a member of the online group have his or her grades reduced/revoked?

As I understand it, each student was assigned different questions; since they were all different, was requesting help cheating?  Is the requirement to work on homework assignments alone a good requirement or a bad one?  Do students learn better by sweating through the problems on their own, or by helping each other find ways to reach the solution?

Different students respond in different ways to different approaches.  Some students do not like to work in groups at all.  Some students like to work in groups for some classes, but not others.  Some students work in groups all the time.  Some students work in groups to get off easily–but how does that help them when it’s time to take a test?  Some students who work in groups learn that they do all the work and others take the credit.  Some students learn better through reading, some through working through problems on their own, some through discussing, some through teaching others.

Questions of pedagogical approach aside, there are those who think that in this case it’s an open-and-shut case of cheating.  Others say that no-one posted specific answers to any problems and that mostly it was an ongoing session of tips and tricks on how to approach the problems. 

One blogger said that someone knowing they were getting the wrong answer indicates that they were cheating, because otherwise how would they know the answer was wrong?  Well, hell, I could always tell when I was getting the answer wrong–because nothing would check out when I worked the problem backwards.  Or else it just "felt" wrong.

I don’t know.  I think requiring college/university students to work alone on homework assignments is not the best approach; I think that by that age the student knows whether s/he wants to collaborate or work alone.  I also feel that the students who are actually getting specific answers from others without doing any of the work are cheating mostly themselves.  They’re the ones who will end up doing poorly on quizzes and tests.  They’re the ones who won’t be able to do the basic work when they get into a more advanced course.  They’re the ones who will constantly be scrambling to keep up or cover up as they move into the workforce.

What say you?

For a very spirited discussion on this subject, from both sides, check out The So-Called Facebook Scandal at A Blog Around The Clock.

Here in Alaska, as many people know, we have an overload of daylight hours in the summer.  We’re talking 19.14 hours of daylight at the peak where the Omega Family lives, and more up north.

That’s a lot of daylight.

Our kids don’t need to work on the crops quickly after school to get them in before the sun goes down.

So why do we have Daylight Savings Time here?

I mean, really…why bother?  In the summer, our "noon" ends up being at 2 p.m. or thereabouts, an artifact of when Alaska managed to get itself all in one time zone (except for the further reaches of the Aleutian Islands) so that the state managers in Juneau could talk to various state folk in Anchorage and other places without having to worry about time zones.  Previously, we were in four time zones. 

So why didn’t they just get rid of DST at the same time?  I don’t know, but apparently there’s a move afoot to get it on a ballot this year, though some folks grumble that Alaska will then be up to five hours off the eastern part of the U.S. during the summer.

This morning, upon waking, I stumbled through the house re-setting clocks.  OmegaDad and I are going to hang drapes today; it’s necessary because now the dotter will be going to bed while it’s still somewhat light outside.  Soon the same will be happening for OmegaDad and me–we’re gaining almost six minutes of light per day.  I can sleep in any environment, but OmegaDad can’t get to sleep if it’s light in the bedroom…

Mainly, DST is a big bother for us and the other 670,000 people who live here.

I like my blog.  It’s a nice, cozy place, where I get to rant and rave and philosophize about whatever I want, and inflict pictures of my darling dotter or other members of the family on The Public.  It skeeves me out that blog scrapers come by on a regular basis, grab a paragraph and a link, and then slap it up on a blog-ad-site (blad?) filled with AdSense ads, but it’s certainly better than folks who grab your entire blog, change some details, and publish it as their own (I’ve encountered this a few times, second- or third-hand).  It bothers me that there are people out there who will steal your pictures of your life, your child, and pretend the pictures are their own, illustrating their own life.

I can actually sort of understand it, though.  There are people out there who yearn after validation, who want to be seen as creative, as kind, as loving, as beautiful–whatever image it is that they are seeking, and stealing, they’ve got a serious self-image problem.  While I think plagiarizing like that sucks dead toads and should be the object of scorn and contumely, I also feel sorry for these folks.

But what the hell possesses people to start up an email with a lie?  You don’t know ahead of time that your email is going to go viral…

OmegaGranny recently sent me a forwarded email.  There were two lines of text, and 26 photos.  The text read: 

Entries for an art contest at the Hirshorn Modern Art Gallery in DC

The rule was that the artist could use only one sheet of paper.

The photos–the photos were awe-inspiring.  Fascinating.  Lovely.  Amazing.  Beautiful.  Quirky.  Sad.  Thought-provoking.

The photos were also very familiar to me.  I was dubious that these were the work of multiple people, because I could swear I had seen these very same pieces of artwork on one person’s website.  But I wasn’t sure.

So first I went off to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  I couldn’t find anything that related to an "art contest".  I did an advanced Google search of the entire website, and didn’t find anything.

I went to Snopes, just to see if they had anything listed.  Nope. 

So then I googled "paper art".  Because I was sure I had seen these pictures before.

And lo and behold, the very first link that shows up when you google "paper art" is the site of Peter Callesen, a Scandinavian artist who has been creating paper art for years.  Every single one of those 26 photos is directly from his website.  He’s been published in books, he has had oodles of shows in Europe (none at the Hirshhorn, by the way), he has permanent art up on display in various corporate places.

He’s a "name".  It’s his work.

Why?  Why would someone send out an email claiming his artwork is the result of an anonymous collection of art contest entrants?  Why on earth didn’t they just say, "OMG.  You have to see this guy’s artwork!  He’s a genius!"?  There’s no need to actually copy the photos (a violation of copyright) and send them on in an email–just provide a link to his website.

What is the motivation in doing something like this?  The person who originally sent the very first email (first in a long chain, trust me, because googling the text pulled up a large number of hits) knew that what s/he was doing was telling an outright lie about the artwork.  Why deny the artist of his recognition?  This man has worked long and hard establishing a reputation in the art world.  Why steal it and apply it to no-one in particular?

Gah.  It’s frustrating to me.  Anyway, as a result of that email, I have a post for the day, and I have a website to point y’all to.  Go look at Peter’s website.  Enjoy his artwork.  It’s amazing.

Any ideas?

Wow!  My homeschooling post has generated a lot of chatter, new viewers, and an absolutely lovely take-off a la Mark Antony’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, written by Dana, which is an absolute must-read and much classier (and classical) than my rantlet.

Some very valid objections to homeschooling were voiced, as were some equally valid supportive points.  I’m trying to pull the various commentary together into a coherent whole that I can respond to, but it may take a while to work my way through this.

First, we have the objections to homeschooling and a few good points about public schooling:

• Kate suggested that out-of-the-home-school gives one survival instincts that are priceless in the corporate world…which can be true, but to me can be seen as a sad commentary on both schooling and corporations.  I know far too many nerds who only "survived" middle and high school, blossoming only once they were out of the strictly age-regimented, slightly Lord-Of-The-Flies world that the school system provided them.
• Lisa had a neighbor with 10 children who "homeschooled".  I put the word in quotes because apparently this family’s idea of homeschooling was to just let the children fend for themselves.  Unfortunately, yes, this can happen and does happen.
• Johnny points out that his eldest niece lost out on science and math teaching because of the prejudices of the science/math teacher in his sister’s homeschooling co-op.  This makes me sad and mad and frustrated–because any niece of Johnny’s is likely to have been more than capable of understanding and liking the scientific viewpoint.
• Dosia was homeschooled until she took control of her own life and enrolled herself in the local public school system in her sophomore year.  I salute:  that took immense guts.  I don’t think I could have gone against my own parents in so forceful a way at that age; I was a beige adolescent who liked to fade into the background as much as possible, and didn’t discover a real backbone or real courage until I had been living on my own for quite a while.  Dosia’s take is that her parents had insecurities and biases of their own that they impressed upon their children, and not having any other outlet, the children absorbed that set and have been struggling ever since to restructure their lives.

Then we look at some viewpoints from homeschooling proponents:

• Adso of Melk rightly points out that the dynamics of teaching 30 kids versus teaching three are vastly different, something totally glossed over by the author of the article.
• Dawn, a teacher who homeschooled three of her children, mentions in passing NCLB.  I despise NCLB with a passion, because I believe the way it is implemented almost forces school districts to "teach to the test".  In the Best of All Possible Worlds, school systems would sneer at the very idea of "teaching to the test" and proclaim, loudly and proudly, that providing children with good educations will allow them to pass the tests with flying colors any time.  Unfortunately, when federal funds are tied to test scores, pride and self-confidence take a flying leap out the nearest school administrator’s window.
• Erika says that her neighbor, a teacher considering homeschooling her kids, is also concerned about the way that NCLB "ties the hands" of teachers.
• Crimson Wife notes that the original article’s author has degrees in Early Childhood Education and Elementary Education.  I admit my jaw dropped when I read that.  For some reason (perhaps the poor writing, lousy structure, and the fifty kazillion spelling and grammar errors) I had just assumed that the author was a high school student, writing in response to an assignment.  I confess:  I didn’t even look to see.  That’ll teach me.

The problem, of course, is that the process and end result of homeschooling is highly influenced by the abilities, motivations, and determination of the parents doing the schooling.  On the one hand, public schooling does try to adhere to certain standards across the board, though how well the application of those standards works is spotty…on the other hand, over-standardization of homeschooling in an attempt to avoid egregious problems would end up making it a Mini-Me of the public school system.  On the one hand, you have cases like those mentioned by Johnny, Lisa, and Dosia, where homeschooling has clearly failed, either outright or in part, to produce well-balanced and well-educated end results (adults)…on the other hand, you have cases like those cited by Dawn and me, where the parents were determined to provide the best education they could for their children, while ensuring that the socializing aspects of childhood and adolescence were equally attended to.

I haven’t investigated longitudinal results.  If anyone can point me to studies done by universities or educational associations or well-respected thinktanks, I’d be interested to see them.  The problem I have is that many opponents of homeschooling tend to see it as a religion-driven method of indoctrinating children into specific religious worldviews, and throw the baby out with the bathwater, as it were, by waving their hands at the extremes.  The same happens on the other side, of course.  Me–I’m a numbers person.  I like studies.  I like hard numbers.  So sue me.  If someone is going to argue that homeschooling is either Bad or Good, I want to see solid evidence to back up that argument.   I’ve got anecdotes galore on both sides, but the plural of anecdote is not data.  Give me data.

OmegaGranny has, at times, hinted to me that I might consider it, motivated, I think, by worries about the mediocrity of the public school system.  I’ve thought of it.  But I personally don’t think I’d homeschool; my dotter is strong-willed and I am short-tempered, and that combination can be deadly. 

On a side note:  Folks noted that I used the F-word.  Ahem.  Yes, I did.  What can I say?  Yo!  Dudes!  I grew up on the near-nort’ side of Chicago, near Cabrini Green!  I worked in journalism!  My peeps, they use those words!  I could use "messed up their children", but that’s a dreadfully mild way to describe what some parents do to their kids.  There are times when a good F-bomb is about the only way I can express my indignation succinctly and clearly.

I thought, also, of titling this one, "The Wheels On The Bus Go Round and Round…", hoping to pass that hideous earworm on to my faithful readers.  But then I realized that would be cruel, and besides I had already given this post a title.  And then I realized that I could do both.  Bwahahaha!

Life has changed greatly in the past two and a half years.  Two and a half years ago, after a years’ worth of cruising my local real estate market and doing up a spreadsheet that showed the average asking price and average per-square-foot for houses in Hippy Dippy Enclave In The Woods, I googled "housing bubble" and found housing bubble blogs galore.  What a relief!  It wasn’t just me who was thinking that things were totally cockeyed in the world of real estate!

At the time, I thought many of the prognostications on the bubble blogs were a bit out of whack.  Commenters were gleefully anticipating the housing crash, and crowing that it would spread throughout the economy, ushering in a recession at the least and a depression at the worst.  I would raise a skeptical eyebrow as I read those particular prophecies.

In the meantime, it’s been like watching a movie when you’ve already read the book.  Everything–every damned thing–that those bubble bloggers and their commenters had laid out as the expected playing out of the bubble bursting has come to pass.  It’s pretty eerie.  What’s also eerie is that…well…the comments were full of common sense, and one kept wondering just why the mainstream media kept playing up the drumbeat of "it’s a whole new world out there!  Housing prices will never go down!"  The majority of economists cited by the MSM seemed equally purblind.

So I watched with amazement as the housing boom came to a screeching halt, and then as sales and prices started plummeting around the country.

One of the things that the bubble bloggers were talking about, way back when, was the coming tide of foreclosures.  They talked about "jingle mail"–where buyers who were negative on their mortgages and suddenly slammed with higher rates on their ARMs, would decide to just mail the keys to the house back to the lender, rather than fight against foreclosure.  And they said the immense number of foreclosures would bring the housing market down ever further, even quicker.

Well.  Let’s look at some things:

• 77% of the houses sold in Stockton, CA, in January were foreclosure sales (okay, in re-reading the story, it’s not clear whether that 77% is of all houses sold in Stockton, or of the houses sold by one particular broker).  In the Sacramento, CA, area there were 1,815 homes sold in January, but almost as many–1,782–foreclosures were recorded in that area in the same month.  Sit back and think about that–it’s just astonishing.
• Realtors are offering "foreclosure tour" buses, where the real estate salesperson grabs a list of foreclosing houses off the database, rents a bus, fills it with people who want to buy, and just spends a day shepherding these people from house to house, vacant, empty, owned by the bank.  The bank which is desperately trying to forestall further bleeding from the money accounts, and offering what seem to be bargain-basement prices.  Of course, some of these houses are going to be in dreadful neighborhoods, and some of the amazing deals will turn out to be money pits.  But there they are:  Pismo Beach, CA…Stockton, CA…San Jose…Las Vegas…Palm Beach, FL…Phoenix…Orlando…Michigan.
• Of course, someone has decided to cash in on the foreclosure business by offering a "how to put on a foreclosure bus tour!" seminar.  A few years ago, it was "how to make money fast, fast, fast by flipping real estate!"
• RealtyTrac claimed that there were 2,203,295 foreclosure filings across the country last year, on 1,285,873 properties, with more than 1% of all households across the country in foreclosure.  This was up 75% from the year before.  (Why are there more filings than properties?  I’d guess either some folks managed to close the door on the foreclosure wolf, or else some folks had more than one filing put on their property–people with multiple mortgages, perhaps.) 
• And homeless people have started moving into foreclosed houses as squatters.

The bubble blogs claimed that mortgage brokerage companies would start going out of business…and, sure enough, at the start of 2007 they started being able to track the bankruptcies.

But now it’s spreading.  The way that mortgages got purchased, chopped up, and resold as "investment vehicles", it turns out that a wide variety of financial investment companies find themselves holding the bag on loans going belly up.  The media has been playing up the "subprime mortgage" as the main culprit–mortgages handed out to poor credit risks.  But reports lately have shown that the same problems are showing up in the "more prime" mortgages as well…because what was risky was not just handing out money to people who could show they were breathing, but the fact that adjustable rate mortgages were the name of the game, people were mortgaging up to 100% of their new property, and people were taking out home equity lines of credit on their properties’ perceived value.  Now that housing prices are dropping, you’ve got ordinary everyday "good credit risks" who have discovered that their various mortgages and HELOCs have interest rates going up and they suddenly can’t pay what they were able to pay previously.

You’ve got real estate sales people who were making six figures two years ago who have had to quit the real estate business and get jobs.  You’ve got homebuilding companies that are either suddenly holding huge "sales" or else simply vanishing, even in Small Mountain University Town.  Even the companies that insure the financial investment companies against housing market losses are suddenly tottering.  Mortgage companies, trying to contact the mortgagees who flinch away from the phone ringing these days, are disguising their pleas to please pay up as wedding invitations (yes!).

And two years ago…two years ago, people were standing in line when new home communities opened their sales office doors, with prices ratcheting up $25,000 within a day as the hordes swept in.

What a difference two years makes.

So I got three votes for the economy and foreclosures, and three votes for homeschooling.  And one that said "I’ll read anything you write!" (BadMutha, you sure know how to make me blush!  And, honest, 75-100 is not too shabby as regular readers.  Nothing like The Big Guys, but still not too shabby.  I say so as someone with an average visit of just around 100.)

Since Mrs. Fibgy voted for the economy but said she’d be interested in the homeschooling critique critiquing, I used that as a tie-breaker.

Whilst wandering around ScienceBlogs last week, I came across a snippet of a "critique of homeschooling" on Greg Laden’s blog.  I followed the link to this article.  I read it.  Really!  I actually forced myself to read it, even though my former editor’s brain kept shrieking, "ACK!  ACK ACK!  ACK ACK ACK!" and my analytic brain kept grumbling "cherry-picking, dammit!" and my marketing brain kept snickering, "Ooooh, yeah, let’s get some more stereotypes in there, why don’t we?!"

Of you go.  Read.  Go on, go go go.  I’ll just wait right here.

Done?

First, let me reveal a snobby bias:  A poorly written article automatically prejudices me against the author’s viewpoint.  I hang my head in shame.  Lots of people who Think Good Thoughts can’t write their way out of a paper bag.  But clunky construction, poor verb-subject agreement, awkward (or nonexistent) segues, and downright errors in articles make my eyes cross and my brain stutter.

But, hey.  We all know that this particular post of mine will be inevitably riddled with errors, this being the Way of the Kozmik All.  "Whom the gods destroy they first make proud" and all that.  So let’s take that as a given, and I don’t want to hear any grumbling from the roaring mob about how not only am I a snob but an utter hypocrite to boot.

Let’s get to the substance.

The author ranks the reasons for homeschooling as:  Violence in the school system/safety and desire to provide better education.  She mentions in passing that many homeschoolers are religious, but doesn’t list that as a reason.  She waves her hand at "my research" but doesn’t say where she researched or what information she got.

So I had a go at looking for reasons for homeschooling.  The U.S. Department of Education performed surveys of homeschooling parents in 1999 and 2003.  The "most important" reasons for homeschooling given in the 2003 responses were:

That "concern" about the environment included drugs and peer pressure, not just "safety".  And having an "analysis" so poorly written that reason #2–religious or moral instruction–was conflated with other reasons and not discussed separately bugs me.

Then the author goes on to sniff at any concerns about the school environment, asks homeschooling parents what the crime rate is in their neighborhoods (?), and immediately takes off after…

…all those psychotic moms and dads who homeschool their kids and abuse or kill them.  Like Andrea Yates.  Or a lady named Deanna Landrey, who beat her kids with rocks to Save Them From Satan.

Because the Big Problem with homeschooling, dontchaknow, is that the kids are socially and physically isolated, and that’s a good way to hide child abuse.  Aside from the everyday horrors of not being socialized.

I stop here to say, yes, I know that there are, indeed, plenty of homeschooled kids who are socially isolated.  And social isolation is an excellent method of hiding abuse.

But then I look at all the homeschooling families I know of.  I worked in ITS with two.  I’ve made friends with a bunch via the web.  The parents of one of the dotter’s friends (another child adopted from Guangxi, whose birthday is one day later than hers) are homeschooling their child.  And the parents of one of her fellow ballet dancers are more homeschoolers.  Every single one of these parents has been using what’s known as a "home schooling co-op".  Some have been religiously oriented.  Some have been definitely non-religious.  All the kids that I’ve met are happy, healthy, dreadfully social children.  They go on homeschooling co-op field trips.  They play sports with other homeschooling kids and in the soccer leagues and the softball leagues and dancing and gymnastics.

The author goes on to say that those who are concerned about their kids’ educations should be more concerned about homeschooling than public schooling, because there are no requirements for teaching in a homeschool and the parents won’t be able to teach all the various subjects.  Amazingly enough, most of the homeschooling parents I know recognize quite well when they’ve reached the limit of their knowledge, and turn to the homeschooling co-ops for help.  Their children get taught science or math by parents in the co-op who are (gasp!) scientists or mathematicians.  They get taught English by parents in the co-op who are literature or English majors.  They learn online.  Or their parents study the subjects before their kids reach that point, so they can guide them.

Ah, but public (or private) school teachers are certified!  They’ve studied pedagogy!  They’ve done student teaching!  They have all the latest teaching theories under their belts!  They know how to handle 16 to 30 kids at once!  In some states, they need masters’ degrees!  A person without all that preparation simply can’t teach children!  Because they don’t Know How To Teach!

To which I say–pish tosh.  Again, the homeschoolers that I have encountered are wildly motivated to get their kids to learn.  Some have specifically taken their children out of school systems because…because…their kids weren’t learning.  All that teacher training, the masters’ degrees, the certification, the theories…and their kids weren’t learning.

To top it all off, she says that homeschoolers will share their biases (not "there bias’s") with their children.

Um.  Yeah…?  Do you know of any parents who do not share their biases with their children?  The only way I can think of for parents to not share their biases with their offspring is to…well…just keep their mouths shut.  All.  The.  Time.  In addition, the implication that teachers in school systems don’t share their biases with the children they teach is mind-boggling.  In every way, in every word, in every path of teaching, those teachers do share their biases.  The kids learn a whole slew of biases from the school system.  And from their parents.  And from their aunts, uncles, friends’ parents, and everyone they encounter.

Of course, being exposed to one, and only one, set of biases isn’t the best of all worlds in my mind.  Many parents do homeschool precisely because they don’t want their precious loinfruit to have their ears sullied by the word (or concept) of evolution, or sex education, or Harry Potter books.

I am not an apologist for homeschooling, trust me.  I do think that some people are quite capable of fucking up their children via homeschooling.  But to use an "analysis" such as this one to trash homeschooling is insanity.  This article is so full of stereotypes, misconceptions, scare mongering, lack of citation, and just bad writing, logic, and grammar, that it is, in my opinion, totally worthless.  If you’re going to disapprove of homeschooling and attempt to persuade someone that it’s a bad idea, this is not the article to use.

I first heard about it on Figlet’s blog.

Then I read about it on Bastardette.

And reading some comments here and there, I found this at Heart, Mind, and Seoul.

The gist, for those who don’t want to follow the links, is that someone put up a website purporting to be an adoption agency where lucky adopters who need organ donations can get two, two, two! for the price of one:  An adorable child (or baby or teen) specifically type-matched to be an organ donor.  Or you could even use the kids for sexual purposes (never said right out loud, but implied).

As Bastardette says, it’s satire.  I recognized this almost as soon as I started reading the intro.

And it’s thorough, complete:  it includes a child listing, it includes adoption prices, it includes "testimonials" from satisfied parents.

And it’s appeared on Snopes and been debunked pretty quickly as a hoax (what a surprise).

But, of course, some people take it seriously, so it was the brunt of horrified "OMG!  Have you seen this horrible, horrible website!" comments on a variety of adoption lists and sites.  I will admit that the horror came from those who thought it was real and those who didn’t but thought it was Not Funny At All.

Two viewpoints.  Both having their points.  Two viewpoints, what is more, that are held by bloggers and posters who I actually find interesting, intelligent, respectful.  So, what to do, what to do?  Do I stand by my original POV, that of chortling in dismay at the black humor and poking at various shibboleths, the send-up of both the entire adoption industry and those who treat children as commodities, those who would put different prices on children based on their color?  I thought it was hilarious.  Dark, oh yes.  Blasting, oh yes.  Searing?  Oh yes.  Creepy?  Oh yes.  But hilarious.  This is the view of people like Figlet and Bastardette.  But horrible?  Bad?  Evil?  Not humorous at all?  People like HMS and Chicagomama (I think) stood on that side.  So I find myself torn, a bit.

The one objection that I truly agree with–once I thought it over–is that it uses real children’s pictures.  It didn’t occur to me at first; I figured they were stock pictures, but even so, perhaps that’s a step over the line.  The website could be done with children’s pictures from the back, or in the distance, or blurred by soft focus, and the "profiles" handled by not having pictures at all, with the complete justification that various countries don’t allow pictures.

But some objections?  They make me roll my eyes.  "Giving people ideas" about adopting children for sexual purposes?  "Giving people ideas"?!?!  Please.  Let me just say "Masha Allen".  (For those who don’t know, Masha Allen was adopted as a child from Russia by a single man who managed to spend years abusing her, videotaping the abuse, selling the videotapes, and more.)  There are plenty of sick, twisted people who already use adoption as a covert method of obtaining children for sexual purposes.

Then there was "oh, noes, people will come up to us in (insert country of choice) and ask us if we’re adopting for organs!".  Dudes.  Read about the rumors of the destination of internationally adopted children that run rampant in some countries–Russia, Guatemala, even China.  While I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done that (it would be most difficult to arrange, I would think!), the rumors swirl around, fly up, get denied, die down, and then pop up again all over again.  There’s not much to do about it except educating, over and over and over again–which people who have adopted have to do anyway.

It’s been sneered at as the work of someone with an ax to grind–either against organ donation or against adoption.  No…ya think so?

It "portrays children as commodities"–well, guess what?  They are, in many cases, around the world and here in the good ol’ U.S.A.

And the thing is:  There are adoption agencies that push the hard sell almost as much as this fake website does.  I have seen ads for children to be adopted from Russia where the child is described as "sweet, obedient, willing to help around the house"–profiles that make it pretty obvious the child is being pushed as a family helper, or a maid, rather than a beloved child.  There are agencies that are pushing for adoption from Vietnam whose Vietnamese facilitators went right back to the old, corrupt methods of obtaining children as soon as Vietnam re-opened for adoption after the prior corruption hiatus imposed by the U.S. immigration service.  There are agencies that still tell potential adoptive parents who are looking at China that it will take 12 months to get a referral–not telling the truth about the three to four-year wait until after the PAPs are signed up and well into the process (some obfuscating the wait until after the PAPs have their dossier completed and logged in with China’s central adoption authority).

There are agencies and facilitators that regularly pressure potential birthmothers into adoption.  There are crisis pregnancy centers that funnel girls into maternity homes and "counsel" them into adoption.  There are agencies that whisk pregnant women over state lines into states where the adoption laws favor the adoptive parents much more, and birth fathers have hardly any rights at all.  There are still, in this day and age, pregnant girls who are hidden away from "the neighbors" by their families, sent off to other cities to have their babies in secret, alone and unsupported, just to hand them over to adopters who have lied up and down and left and right about keeping the adoption open–until they get their hands on that baby.

All this website does is to distill and concentrate a whole slew of ethical issues with adoption and paste them into one fictitious bundle, guaranteed to raise hackles, make people swoon with horror, and maybe…just maybe…make some people think about some of the issues that surround adoption.

So, I guess, in the end, while I understand the objections some people have, I side squarely with those who find it a brilliant satire.  I won’t link to it, but if you’re interested, do a search on "medical adoptions".

A few years ago, OmegaDad purchased a book called (I think) "Dinosaur Hunters", an in-depth retelling of the story of the feud between Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh, two paleontologists who set the standard for dinosaur fossil hunters in the 1800s.

For those who think that scientists are cold, aloof, logical, precise, and passionless, the story of these two would be an eye-opener.  We’re talking claim-jumping.  Races to publish data.  Vituperation and personal attacks galore.  Weapons drawn.  Dashes to be the first to dig in a promising new place.  Fights over who got to name what, whose reputation would be solidified down the centuries as The Premier Dinosaur Discoverer.  Nasty letters to the editor back and forth.  A feud played out in the public eye.

(Of course, as a person who grew up with scientists and scientifically-minded folk, I’m quite aware that the stereotype in the paragraph above just doesn’t cut it.)

One of my current regular blog-stops is ScienceBlogs.  You get it all there–climatology, biology, physics, computer science, zoology, oceanography, medicine, pharmacology–you name it, it’s there.  Along with lots of lively writers who are passionate about their fields.

This week, in the rotating blog headline spots, there was something about "armadillodiles".  I wasn’t interested, so skipped over it.

Then there was a rotating headline about Aetosaurs and Whistle-Blowing–The Saga Continues.  Well!  "Whistle blowing"?!  I had to dip in.

Dipping in led to this further article from a year ago. 

It turns out that there has been a controversy brewing in the U.S. paleontological world, starting small a few years ago, and growing.  The story, in a nutshell, is that the paleontologist who is in charge of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and is one of the editors of its journal, seems to have "jumped the gun" a number of times, citing other people’s work, work that was "in progress", taking the credit himself for the conclusions, and grabbing at chances to name specific fossil branches himself.  This includes claims that he cribbed info from unpublished masters’ theses, used information garnered from visits to other museums that were working on soon-to-be-published research, skipping over the peer-review process, and pretty much ran rampant over lots of younger paleontologists’ research.

This had been bubbling up in the professional email list for paleontologists.  It led to a variety of posts similar to the second one I linked (you need to read the comments, too!).  And then, the reason for the first post cited:  Nature Magazine, the stuffy crown prince of the natural sciences, has just published an article about the controversy.

A certain amount of stuff got posted afterwards, with titles such as Paleontologists Behaving Badly, Something’s Fishy About These Armadillodiles, Who’s Scooping Whom and Why This Matters, and Way to Represent Your Professional Community, Dude!

The entire affair seems redolent of the Cope/Marsh wars, an interesting perspective on scientific clashes, and also an interesting perspective in how Things Have Changed.  Once upon a time, the natural history world was filled with adventurers pushing each other out of the way, racing to be The First…enough so that "Around The World In 80 Days" is couched in those terms, a daring duel between scientific adventurers and scoundrels.

There you have it:  Dinosaur Wars, which I thought were a thing of the past, still exist.  The ethical scientists get creamed by a modern-day throwback.  Passions flare.  And it’s all about science!!!

This morning I read a post on a blog-center (dunno what else to call it?  A place that has bunches of bloggers who are paid to blog there?).  The post was written by a woman who got involved in a horrible divorce case that featured her husband and MIL and others printing out a year’s worth of posts from her old blog and using them to portray her as a horrible woman who was tearing down her husband and didn’t deserve custody of her kids.  The case played out long ago, but today she discussed the fact that post-divorce, her child’s therapist told her that she had read her blog and had known that her husband/MIL/others had found her blog and were reading the posts and printing them out, but had felt it was unethical to tell her so until she was no longer therapising her child.

Anyway.

I mean, aside from that piece of weirdness (okay, your kids’ therapist reads your blog and it’s obvious that issues in the blog are related to the kids’ therapy, but…um…surely it’s okay to say, "Hey!  I read your blog!"?)…

The author of this post talked about how she wouldn’t have written those things if she had known her husband and MIL and unknown others were actually reading it.

Hm.

In a similar case, on a private email list I was on a few years ago, one of the posters regularly vented about things her husband did.  Most of us knew–in general–that it was venting and meant naught.  Unfortunately, one of the other posters had a hate-on for the first poster, and spent a year forwarding bits and pieces from the vents to her husband, anonymously.  Naturally, choosing the ugliest, pettiest of vents.  Over the year, poster number one became more and more bewildered by how morose her husband was becoming, how distant, how things weren’t what they had been before.  Then hubby finally exploded and admitted that someone was forwarding these emails.  There was a Big Blow Up in the marriage, accompanied by therapies and lots of discussion, and a Big Blow Up on the list, accompanied by the closure of the list, the hunting down of the person who had done the forwarding, and a big drop in the overall trust level between all these folks.  The marriage survived, the list changed, people moved on.

So.

The first…well.  Hm.  She didn’t know people were reading her blog.  She was posting all her vents out on the open Internet.  Yes, there are millions of pages of…stuff…on the Internet.  But lordy lordy.  I avoided the whole question of "what would people think about my posting" in two ways.  One way was to just crow to my darling OmegaDad about my blogging.  And to my mom.  And to others.  The other way was to say to myself, when posting, just about the same thing I say to myself most of the time when I’m about to write an angry email or a furious response on a message board:  Do I really want to post this?  So I sit on it.  And a few hours later, usually, the spleen is vented, life is better, I can look at the prompting event, and see it from a different perspective.

(Though when it comes to leaving throat lozenge wrappers all over the house, ahem…No perspective will ever make that acceptable! )

Don’t post something on the Internet that you wouldn’t mind seeing in your local newspaper.  Or else password protect it from day one and make sure it can’t be indexed by Teh Google or the WayBack Machine.  It’s a fairly good rule of thumb.

The second is a different matter.  It was, to me, a betrayal of trust among a group of supposed friends.  One is putting up a broadside on an often-passed telephone pole near downtown.  The other is chit-chatting with your buds in the safety of your living room while playing pinochle or Bunco.  One has an implied privacy (the email list); the other doesn’t (a post on the Internet).  Both involve a communications gap–one of which was solved by party B asking party A what the heck was going on, the other of which was "solved" by going to court and what sounds to be a nasty custody case.

In general, I have no idea where I’m going with this post, aside from the fact that it is vaguely related to yesterday’s post in topic, and the question of the difference between the two situations–the difference that I see but that others may be quite able to argue isn’t there at all–intrigued me. 

Do you see the difference?  Or is there one?

Tomorrow:  Dinosaur Wars!

The explosion of the Internet has its glories–I found our first house on the Internet long before it was the normal way to look at houses, I pay my bills by Internet by preference, I book flights and hotels and learn about adoption via the Internet.  I started out long ago on Usenet, following alt.callahans, then moving to misc.gettingmarried or whatever it was, then misc.pregnancy, then alt.infertility.  And some email lists.  Then I moved on to message boards.  Then blogs.

(But not Twitter.  Or miniblogs.  Or other Web 2.0 social networks.  I joined a few blogging networks, but haven’t really done much with them.)

All of which revealed to me that the written word has an amazing ability to be misconstrued.

Some people can write well.  Some people can’t.  Some people can read well.  Some people can’t.

Writing blog posts, or bulletin board posts, or Usenet posts can be fraught with uncertainty:  Sometimes what you write, meaning one thing, becomes read in a totally different manner.  I’ve had this happen before, and wrote about it before, and when it happens, you become totally flabbergasted, appalled:  But…but…that’s not what I said!  Or:  But…but…that’s how it reads, but that’s not what I meant!

So some people litter their posts with emoticons to ensure that their meaning is not misread.  Or, occasionally, someone who has been misconstrued to the point where they feel they’re disliked, may start sprinkling lots of emoticons to the max, hoping–like a puppy dog wagging its tail–the readers will "read" see?  see?  I’m not being snarky or condescending!  I’m making a joke!  Laugh!  Please!  Please don’t take this the wrong way!  Please don’t be angry at me!  And then, people being people, maybe others will take the overdose of emoticons as a sneering reminder that They Don’t Read Things The Right Way, and take it as being condescending.  Enough of this interaction, and the puppy-like emoticons morph into exactly what is being seen:  an angry tirade, a way of saying:  Damn you idiotic fuckers anyway, this is a joke but I know you’re not going to get it, so maybe if I put goddamned neon lights around it you’ll recognize it (though I doubt it).

Oy.

Long ago and far away, on a private board, someone wrote about her bad body image.  How it affected her life.  How miserable it made her.  Lots of people wrote back, doing the womanly "Uh-hunh, I hear you, girl, I know what you mean!"  Someone else wrote back about her bad body, how she was "ugly", and she used a phrase that I read as being written with a sort of rueful snort, a form of rolling her eyes at herself.  Others in the discussion read it a totally different way–it was seen as a slam, a piece of spiteful cruelty.  The disjunction between the two led to an all-out fight.

Oy.

I’ve seen it play out elsewhere:  something that’s meant jokingly or ruefully or in a silly way gets taken seriously.  Someone saying idly "Lordy, I wish (insert President’s name here) were dead" gets turned into an investigation from the FBI into a death threat.

Oh, it happens in real life, too.  Miscommunications abound.  A guy says to his wife "Yeah, I look at those girls’ tushies and boobs and want to mess around with them", thinking he’s just being honest and open, and she decides it means he’s having a mid-life crisis and is about to leave her.  Or a college girl’s parents tell her, after she announces she’s getting an apartment of her own, "How are you going to pay for all that?!" (meaning pay for an apartment while she’s attending college) and she hears "How are you going to pay for an apartment AND COLLEGE?!" (meaning pay for everything, since she’s obviously about to go out on her own and that means she’s not going to have college paid for anymore) and immediately drops out of college.

But it’s a lot harder to have things totally misconstrued when you’re talking in person.  There are physical cues:  lifted eyebrows, shrugs, blushes, rolling eyes, a V-8 whap against the head.  There are a million different non-verbal cues in person to let someone know you sympathize, you’re joking, you’re being serious, you’re angry, you’re bored.  We’re hard-wired to learn all these cues from childhood.  When they go missing–on paper or on a computer screen–we’re left with only our own extrapolations to fill in the blanks. 

Maybe my extrapolations are the ones out of whack.  Maybe where I saw the puppy-dog trying to wiggle its way back into the graces of friends, I was wrong.  Maybe when I "heard" the rueful snort, I was wrong.  Maybe all those other people were right.  I’ll never know.

(For the record, this has nothing to do with any bloggy blow-ups that have happened recently or in the past.)

Onto other things:  Anocat wanted to know what "that pink thing" was.  It’s called "Pinkie Pie’s Balloon House™, a three-level My Pretty Pony extravaganza of small unnecessary plastic items that garnered awestruck indrawn breaths from almost every girl at the party.  Noreen wanted to know how many attended:  There were four girls and one boy who showed up, plus a small sibling who was supposed to be outside in the general play area but who hung around the glass door with such a sorrowful face, sobbing, "Sissy!  Sissy!" that we let her in, too.

When you’re sick, and your brain is fuzzy and bleary, you generally sleep and seek out mindless entertainment.  I am trying to keep various space navy stratagems firmly in mind while reading my latest Honor Harrington book, but The Illness keeps me falling asleep instead.

So, off to the intertubes for mindless entertainment.

And I find…

…in all its glory…

…I present…

The Disintegrator!

Our world is a very, very interesting place when there are people who will spend four months lovingly hand-building something like this.

At least this keeps me from having to come up with something intelligent to say to Our Fearless Leader’s plan to "stimulate" the economy (sliding into the crapper as we speak!) by handing out tax rebates.  Ya think that people who are worried that their house is about to be foreclosed on will find a $300 check…stimulating?

Many years ago, when OmegaMom was a young lass in school, she loved both her creative writing and history classes.  In both, she discovered, she could happily produce chapters of romance novels, fresh from her imagination, and actually get good grades for it!  Hot damn!

In fact, OmegaMom decided, upon leaving high school and entering college, that she would major in history, learn German, take lots of writing and English classes, and forge herself a career writing historical romances.  Bodice rippers, in other words.

Well, she went from being a big fish in a small pond (smart in high school) to being a little fish in a big pond (sat next to a National Merit Scholarship winner at the new student introductory symposium at Big Name Midwestern College) and promptly went into a depressive tailspin, flunking German, spending her spring semester taking horseback riding and ice skating, and dropping out of college at the end of her first year.  *Poof* went my prospective career, lost in the mists with my need to, say, pay the rent and buy food.

Many, many years later, here is OmegaMom, working with computers, eyeing the downhill slope of her life, and long long past the daydream of bestselling romance writer-hood.

But pity the poor romance writer!

You have to do research, y’know.  (This was why I was going to learn German:  it seems that many history research books were written in German, and so, to get the background of various small European principalities, I thought I would need to learn the language.)

And you have to find a way to get it into your book, as background, y’know.  (Most of us have ways of reading stuff, digesting it, and then regurgitating it in our own words.  It’s a skill.  It helped immensely during all my humanities courses.)

So there I was, reading John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, when I came across this post about plagiarism.  It seems that a best-selling romance writer was found by the ladies at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books to have plagiarized backstory research in her romance novels–one of their friends had gotten intrigued by the clunky dialogue in one spot in a book, and googled it–and the story has been making the rounds of romance fan boards, writers’ blogs, and more…A trainwreck, to be sure.

Then today, I run into a headline on MSNBC:  "Newsweek:  Plagiarizing Hot Ferret Love"…and I just had to find out what it was about.

Lo and behold, it was one of the writers who was plagiarized, writing about the entire affair.  And let me just say, it’s hilarious.

All of which reminds me of some amazing instances of blog plagiarization I have encountered (blog newbies just copying famous bloggers’ posts in toto and changing a few details to make it seem that the posts were their own), and the recent issue photographers on Flickr have had with big media companies actually using their photos without attribution.

The internet, it seems, is both a useful tool for plagiarizing, and for catching plagiarists.  O Brave New World…

Anyway, I highly recommend following the trail above.

The dotter is quite mumchance about her days at school or at after-care.  Trying to get her to talk about it is…well, you either do a version of Twenty Questions, or wait until the Feeling Game at bedtime, at which point some info may (may) come out.  The Twenty Questions approach needs variation, so I can:

1. Ask whether she had gym, library, or music that day.
2. Ask who was teacher’s helper.
3. Ask what book was read today, and what it was about…

You get the drift.  It’s like getting blood from a stone, and I’m sure we’ll be getting the "Where did you go?"  "Out."  "What did you do?"  "Nothing." conversation when she’s older.

So the other day, when she said that she had had gym that day, I asked her, "So what did you do?"

She shrugged and said, "I don’t remember."

AAARRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!

Desperate to get some detail out of her, I asked, "Did you do cartwheels in gym today?"

Dotter shook her head.  "No, we’re not allowed to.  We might get hurt."

OmegaDad and I blinked at each other across the table.  After a moment, I asked, "Did you play games in gym?  Like…like Red Rover?"

Dotter shook her head again.  "No, we can’t play that.  Someone might fall down."

We blinked again.  OmegaDad said to me, in an aside, "Oh, goodness no, we can’t have