Here’s why I love living in age of Wikipedia. I was listening to Michael Jackson’s song “Wanna be Startin’ Somethin’” and realized that for years I’ve been wondering what the chorus is chanting in the background. A trip to wikipedia tells me that it’s a reference to the 1973 Manu Dibango hit “Soul Makossa” which was influential in spawning disco and that the Makossa is a kind of dance.

That phrase, which is just soundplay on the name of the dance, has been passed around many other songs since like a pop music version of telephone.

Continue reading “Mamasay mamasah mamakosah” »

I completely unplugged from television news years ago, but I understand that television is leaning pretty heavily on Twitter these days for news coming out of Iran. That’s interesting, but it’s good to keep in mind that the unfiltered news is not necessarily reliable. Mark Ambinder wants us to treat Twitter the way a CIA analyst would, and I think it’s a skill we’re all going to need regardless of the situation or the medium. Even before the Civil War a lie could travel halfway around the world before the truth got its boots on. Now it happens before the truth can even find its socks.

That’s not to say what’s coming out of Iran is a lie. Or even true. But it’s people’s emotions, street rumor, hearsay, propaganda—maybe even potential misinformation. So we should all take a few moments to upgrade our bullshit detectors.

I’m with Fred on this: journalism is serious work, requiring real effort and training. It plays a critical role not only in our democracy but in our daily health and well-being. So it’s disappointing to read things like this:

Why is Al Sharpton on my teevee talking to Geraldo Rivera about Iran? LGM: Befuddled

Why indeed? In fact, why is the news reading Twitter on the air? I understand it may be difficult to do real journalism in Iran at the moment, but real journalism is often difficult. If you can’t get the sources, maybe you could talk about the background for a bit. Give people some context. There are maybe half a dozen people in the United States who understand Iranian politics, and none of them are Al Sharpton or Geraldo.

I have not been keeping up with the news in Iran. I don’t trust the Twitter news feed and I don’t have the proper background to have a functioning bullshit detector. I would like to rely on traditional news sources, but they’ve all been gutted for profit and replaced with News-Like Entertainment Substitute.

Also, I have a toddler who makes it difficult to concentrate on anything for more than thirty minutes. My thirty minutes is up. Sorry if this isn’t coherent. Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.

Either on the news or the toddler.

New things Sprout has done today:

• Tasted faux-chicken Morningstar Farms buffalo wings.
• Learned to dip his finger in honey-mustard dressing to see what it tastes like.
• Tried drinking honey-mustard dressing.
• Seen a dog parade.
• Gone to his first community festival.
• Waved at a couple hundred people
• Eaten kettle corn.

You know, it’s worth mentioning that large swaths of the country are still without power after Ike.

I realize I haven’t blogged much recently about Cory — we should probably come up with a nickname for him along the same lines as “Elf” — but change is starting to come pretty rapidly now. He hasn’t quite figured out crawling or sitting yet, but he gets angry if you have something interesting in your hands and he can’t have it. He gets around by rolling and scooching, can pick up and pass items from hand to hand — including a toy he has that’s a large, hard sphere — and has started demonstrating planning and forethought. Just now Elf reported from the front lines that Cory rolled himself across the floor so he could unfold some laundry.

I think he is now smarter than our cats. Although Elf isn’t quite so sure.

I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile, but almost every time I have my camera in my hands it’s taking pictures of Cory. But our friend Missie the Blogless did a fantastic cross-stitch to celebrate Cory’s birth, and it’s hanging right now in his bedroom. Fortunately, Missie the Blogless started her own blog and posted a picture of the project.

Thanks, Missie!

I’ve been thinking more and more about my personal media collection — books, movies, music, and video games — and at what point it’s appropriate to introduce our son to these. I imagine we’ll have to wing it. But here, like many other decisions we’ve made so far, we are probably going to end up being Bad Parents. We’ve been warned away from television violence, cartoon violence, any discussion of sex or sexuality. Even the first few seasons of Sesame Street are inappropriate for young viewers because Cookie Monster occasionally has a pipe in his mouth and Oscar the Grouch is anti-social.

I think we’re going to be Bad Parents because we really don’t care. Miss Piggy karate-chops Kermit? That’s fine by me. The Brain occasionally bops Pinky on the Noggin? What’s wrong with that? A pipe that blows soap bubbles? Looks like a fun toy to me. And I am not going to hide Super Mario Brothers from Cory because Mario stomps on mushroom-people’s heads, and I’m not going to confiscate play guns from his toy box unless I discover they constitute a choking hazard or have been painted with lead.

I think it’s important for parents to teach their children how to distinguish between fantasy and reality. A toy gun is OK because it is pretend; a real gun is not OK because it is real. Pretend violence is OK because it is pretend. Really hitting someone is not OK because it is real. When we ban the pretend stuff because we’re afraid it will somehow magically become the real stuff, then we demonstrate that we have difficulty telling the difference between fantasy and reality.

So it’s with some degree of relief that I run across Gerard Jones, who suggests that fantasy violence is an important part of childhood development and that we may be doing our children a disservice by trying to prevent them from participating in it:

At its most fundamental level, what we call “creative violence” — head-bonking cartoons, bloody videogames, playground karate, toy guns — gives children a tool to master their rage. Children will feel rage. Even the sweetest and most civilized of them, even those whose parents read the better class of literary magazines, will feel rage. The world is uncontrollable and incomprehensible; mastering it is a terrifying, enraging task. Rage can be an energizing emotion, a shot of courage to push us to resist greater threats, take more control, than we ever thought we could. But rage is also the emotion our culture distrusts the most. Most of us are taught early on to fear our own. Through immersion in imaginary combat and identification with a violent protagonist, children engage the rage they’ve stifled, come to fear it less, and become more capable of utilizing it against life’s challenges. [ Violent Media is Good for Kids ]

That sounds very Klingon, but I think the man has a point. And if we treat violence as so taboo the slightest violent fantasy is not allowed — just as we have with drug education and sex education and alcohol consumption — our kids won’t have the tools to deal with them as they grow up.

But I think it’s giving them the tools that’s the key. You can’t just hand sex and violence over to a child or young teenager and call it done. It’s not carte blanche. You talk about what the story means, and why it’s appealing — and then you talk about why the reality doesn’t work in real life. My own parents did this. As a young teenager I was allowed to watch violent movies, but I always understood they were fantasy. My dad used a Dirty Harry film to explain vigilantes and police brutality to me, and while we certainly didn’t think of Dirty Harry as the “bad guy” I understood that the real world operated by different rules than the movie world. Dirty Harry always shot the right person; in real life, things are more complex.

You can’t teach that lesson if you’re afraid of exposing your child to depictions violence.

And so I don’t think we’re going to. Indiana Jones is a hero, even though he occasionally shoots or kills someone. Cory can learn that Pinky’s head pops back, but real people’s heads don’t. And, given time and guidance, I think he can learn to understand anger and the impulse to violence without succumbing to it. At least, I hope we can teach him that. But I’m absolutely certain that trying to keep a media bubble around him is going to help him not at all.

Gerard Jones also did an excellent interview with video game publication The Escapist, which was where I first heard about him.

Cory has started making all kinds of faces. After a great deal of effort, I finally managed to get a picture of my favorite one:

It was actually several days before I saw this face clearly. I was always catching it out of the corner of my eye or he was always pulling it when looking some other direction.

When he gets married, this one is going out with the wedding invitations.

You know, I was going to post something about this:

I couldn’t help noticing, however, how different the Thanksgiving experience was for my husband and children, both boys. Thanksgiving was a day off from school and work, 48 hours spent getting their relax on.

What is it about Thanksgiving that highlights to the unwritten, yet apparently universal, law that has ladies in the kitchen that day and men folk in front of the TV — or being anywhere else besides the kitchen? Yes, there are more than a few guys who take an active role in preparing Thanksgiving dinner (thank God for deep fried turkey!). [ This Holiday, Equality Is for the Birds ]

but then I realized it was just another airheaded Sinbad-esque “Men do this, Women do this” column. For the record, I cooked Thanksgiving dinner, thank you, and I deeply resent the attitude which leads people to assume I’m not capable of cooking on anything other than a grill. Once I made cookies for a holiday party, and a co-worker said “these are good! Your mom must have made these!” I said no, I made them. “You mean you helped,” she said.

Also for the record, this is not an attitude that I get from feminists. Feminists are much more likely to take my turkey-roasting and cookie-baking in stride, and much less likely to be impressed that I’m in the kitchen at all. Which is why I tend to like feminists — they’re far less patronizing.

This kind of insulting gender game stuff doesn’t usually end with the kitchen, though. It certainly extends to child care. HH5 at Gaming With Baby talks about the ‘tude he and his wife get because he’s a stay-at-home dad:

Things are remarkably different for SAHDs and the women who support them. HH6 is starting to see the flip side of having her husband stay home with the little poo maker. She’s increasingly having to face the ridicule and having to deal with the perceived notion that her husband is living the sweet life staying home playing video games all day while she busts her ass making a living for her family … For her part she has handled it remarkably well, stood her ground, and not only defended her husband, but she has defended her decision for me to stay home an take care of 2. But some days it’s just too much for her to handle. [ The Straw ]

I don’t see this as much now as I used to, but when Elf was pregnant it was usually assumed by health care workers and others that I wanted to pretend like she wasn’t pregnant, that I wasn’t going to be around to help. They’d forget to include me, or give me patronizing advice (“Dad, you’ll have to learn how to change a diaper, too.”).

That’s the true flip-side of gender bias. It’s not that the company hires a woman because they want “diversity” while us white males have stand in the soup line. It’s that when we try to ignore the traditional gender roles, the rest of the culture is stacked up against us. We get laughed at for trying. And no one really believes us anyway.

at least for Cory: