I was screwing around and messed up my layout! I’ll fix it soon. Don’t worry.
General
29
Jul 04
Untitled
New species of worms discovered in ocean:
“Vrijenhoek, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., said the worms, ranging from 1-inch to 2 1/2-inches long, have colorful, feathery plumes that serve as gills and green “roots” that work their way into the bones of dead whales. Bacteria living in the worms digest the fats and oils in the whalebone.”
“Initially we were puzzled why every worm was a female,” Vrijenhoek said in a telephone interview. He said Rouse took some worms to his laboratory for study and discovered tiny male worms living inside the females.
There were as many as 50 to 100 males within each female, Vrijenhoek said.
The males still contained bits of yolk, as if they had never developed past their larval stage, but they also contained large amounts of sperm.
The female worms, regardless of size, were full of eggs, the researchers noted….
“These worms appear to be the ecological equivalent of dandelions – a weedy species that grows rapidly, makes lots of eggs, and disperses far and wide,” Vrijenhoek said.”
29
Jul 04
Untitled
- How to Remove Internet Explorer via BB
- RFID Hack Could Allow Retail Fraud: “As a proof of concept, Grunwald also added a “cookie” function to RFDump that allows a store to track the number of times a shopper enters or picks up an item. An audience member pointed out that that had serious implications for personal privacy. “You are exactly correct,” Grunwald said. “It is a very scary thing.”
- Guerrilla Drive-in Theatres. Awesome.
27
Jul 04
MovableType license changes
I was looking over the new features in MT 3.1 today and saw they had made some changes to the license structure for MT. Too late for my little website, but I am glad they finally came to their senses. I still think the price point is a little high, however we’ll reserve judgment as long as they keep releasing new features in a timely manner. I’m not entirely sure they changed anything since you can still only have one author in the free personal version. I think they just made the restricted personal version less prominent. Bogus! You should still use WordPress unless you’re dying to give away your money.
27
Jul 04
An interesting deconstruction of “American Beauty”
Courtesy of the ever-informative MaryAnn, who originally posted this in a comment thread here. She makes some fascinating points on the crisis of masculinity:
“Eek, now I feel on the spot. The crisis of masculinity, as I and others perceive it, is the disconnect straight American men feel from the traditional masculine model of their fathers and grandfathers because of the threat posed to it by women’s and gay liberation, and the difficulty of trying to redefine their own masculinity.
Okay. Here’s the short version. Lester feels unable to express his masculinity because his wife Carolyn dominates him financially and emotionally. Because she denies him sex, he seeks out unsuitable love objects (Angela) whom he can, in turn, dominate and who will not question his masculinity. In doing so, he also sublimates his incestuous desires for Jane.
Ricky serves as Lester’s doppelganger, the mysterious double every person supposedly has and who, in folklore, heralds one’s own imminent death when one sees him. To Lester, Ricky represents his own free younger self. Ricky provides Lester with both a conduit to his freedom (by selling him marijuana and introducing the idea of simply quitting one’s job) and a suitable (non-incestuous) sexual partner for Jane of whom Lester can approve. Of course, Ricky also fulfills his folkloric role by introducing Lester to his father the Colonel, who eventually kills him.
The Colonel is the latent homosexual who channels what he perceives as illicit desire and his fear at being discovered into an intense homophobia. His choice of the military as a career both lampoons and reinforces the military as a male charade (a performance of masculinity for a global audience) and haven for closeted gays. His own wife does not work, portraying the traditional homemaker role as a prison which reduces her to a ghost.
There is no happy medium between the roles of the Colonel’s wife, who keeps an immaculate house but has become less than human, and the “bloodless, money-grubbing freak†Carolyn has become.
Lester eventually arrives at a new definition of masculinity, sensitive without being gay, sensual without being sexually threatening, and resolves his incestuous feelings by reminding himself of the vulnerability of Jane and Angela. Of course, in so doing he renders himself abject in the diegesis of the film–he can no longer fit inside the confines of his world, and so must die.
Therefore, the film offers the not-very-comforting idea that to resolve the crisis of masculinity is to become a new sort of person that cannot fit into traditional American life, meaning you must be expelled from the community.
Whew! Hope you don’t think that’s too weird.
My husband maintains that the film is a sort of Zen text, which the filmmakers kind of validate in the DVD commentary. So I guess I did all that thinking for nothing. Ha. “
21
Jul 04
Only children
Jody sent me this link about a “study” on only children done by Dr. Toni Falbo, an ed-psych professor at UT, Your One and Only:
Educational psychologist dispels myths surrounding only children.
I’m not impressed with any of her conclusions here, although I have not had the opportunity to read the actual study itself. There’s just nothing compelling about them, at least as described by this article. There are also a number of weaknesses in Falbo’s approach. For one thing, Dr. Falbo makes it sound as if the entire field of psychology was against only children and families who have only children. As an only child herself and as the mother of an only child I get the sense that she has too much at stake personally to achieve anything of real value here. It’s almost as if she went into her project looking to overturn certain assumptions she found personally negative. She mentions the work of G. Stanley Hall and Freud and puts the blame on their heads for spreading negative assumptions of only children into the easily influenced mass of society:
21
Jul 04
Cultural pendulum swings
I have been guilty of many of the grievances outlined here. I think more than anything it’s a consequence of a culture that celebrates immaturity and individuality. That can certainly lead you down the road to self-absorption: NYO: Stuff It, Emo Boy!
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“I would say that historically, and right up through the present, one of the things that defined femininity—especially in the white, middle-class culture—is women listening to men and being their audience, their support system, and really asking for relatively little of that in return,” she said. “There’s been a really disproportionate share of attention of all kinds that men demand and assume as their due.”
As for the rise of the emo boy, “Men have always assumed that they get the lion’s share of air time,” Dr. Fels said. “It may be that this is the new fashion in how they monopolize the air time: If this is how women want it, I will talk in these terms. But it’s the same assumption that they will speak more, be listened to more, be supported more.”