Bored of the Rings

I laid money at the hairy feet of Peter Jackson last week, paying to see The Hobbit's final installment on the big screen.  I don't regret the cost of my admission.  $8.50 is a perfectly reasonable price to spend for a night with friends.  But I'm no fan of Middle Earth, as you'll see in this reposting from 2010.

Extra Credit For Sale

I've sent e-mails, Tweets, texts, IMs, and Facebook updates. I've made personal appeals with handshakes in the hall. Finally, I ended the exam period with a reminder to students to fill out their on-line course evaluations. One student said "I hear other teachers are giving points for a certain class response percentage. What do we get if we evaluate you? " A friendly class opinion leader with whom I have a good relationship, he had the mischievous gleam in his eye of a boy who's just discovered the closet in which his parents hide unwrapped presents.

Good Enough

Picasso's Femme en Pleurs (detail)

A high school junior I know wants desperately to attend an art school.  Recently he asked me, “How do I know if I’m good enough?”

“Show your work to a teacher.” I said.  “To someone who’s good at what they do.  Someone who’s not related to you. Someone who knows you, but maybe doesn’t love you.  Ask that person if your art is good.

Ferguson By The Numbers

Is Michael Brown a statistical anomaly?  Frankly, there's no way to know...

Many of my media theorist friends are wondering how to include coverage of Ferguson and Staten Island tragedies in courses next semester.  Perhaps they'll be aided by some of my recent digging.

THE LIKELY VICTIMS
Searching the CDC's Fatal Injury Database for deaths attributed to "legal intervention with a firearm," Bill O'Reilly claims that police in this country are killing far more whites than blacks.  "In 2012," O'Reilly says, "123 African-Americans were shot dead by police.... Same year, 326 whites were killed by police bullets."

But a ProPublica report sees it differently.  Three of its reporters suggest that young black males (age 15-19) are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than their white counterparts.  From 2010 to 2012, teenage white men were killed at the rate of 1.5 in 1 million.  Compare that to 31 in 1 million for teenage black men.

Excellence by Default

"Asking students to evaluate their professors anonymously is like Trader Joe's soliciting Yelp reviews from a shoplifter." -- Rebecca Shuman, education columnist for Slate.

An exhausted alternator took out the truck's electrical system.  I coasted to the side of the road and called AAA.  Six hours and $1100 later, I was back on the road. 

Please, don't give me grief for going to the dealership.  I do know better.  It was the closest service garage.  Yes, $1100 is an outrageous price to pay for an alternator and a new battery.  But the waiting area had a fireplace, a coffee bar, and a concierge.  Well, the coffee bar was really a trio of thermoses.  And the concierge was a secretary who relayed customer questions to mechanics.  But the fireplace was real.  Well, it was a real gas fireplace.  So the flames were real.

You're Doing It All Wrong

Stanford's Andrea Lunsford (L), one of five writers proving Everyone's An Author.

You know the place.  The vacant lot.  The backyard.  The driveway with a basketball hoop.  That neighborhood venue where kids congregate to play. Then along comes an adult who figures out the game isn't being played by FIFA or NCAA rules.  With the best of intentions, this mom or dad steps in to "improve" things.  They want leagues and brackets and sponsored jerseys.  Over time, 4th graders are playing for "sportsmanship" and "most improved" trophies.  And the fun of the neighborhood pick-up game is gone, stolen by people who invited themselves.

The Train Wreck of Hate Watching

The moment of impact at the famous Crush, Texas train wreck in 1896.  Many of the 40,000 onlookers were injured by debris.

Some of the best-attended spectator events of the 19th century were staged train wrecks.  Decommissioned locomotives intentionally smashed into each other at high speed before grandstands of onlookers.  Perhaps this love of calamity constitutes an antecedent for the phenomenon of “hate watching.”  Yes, our species is so reliably bitchy that NBC strategically presumed a certain percentage of this week’s Peter Pan Live! audience would be snarky tweeters hoping for something to go wrong.

That reminds me of a few too many college committee meetings.  You know how they are.  Somebody presents a new idea.  Maybe a curriculum upgrade, maybe the renaming of a course.  And those around the table offer criticism.  They almost always offer criticism.  They offer criticism because it demonstrates they’ve read the agenda or studied the proposal.  Much less often (in my own experience) do they say, simply, “I like it,” “Count me in,” or “Let’s move forward.”

Digital Poop

ISS Commander Barry Wilmore displays the first object 3-D printed in space

This week, NASA tested a 3-D printer in space.  An on-demand machine shop is a pretty incredible tool if you want to get to Mars.  A couple of years ago it was widely reported that we'd all have such devices in our homes by now.  Turns out it was a little ambitious to think we'd be fabricating toaster replacement parts in the basement.  Still, you can probably have a decent one out of the box and working for about $1000.

The obstacle to ubiquity isn't affordability.  It's creativity.  Jessica Banks, CEO of RockPaperRobot says "it might be that many people get their 3-D printers and they're like 'This is going to be awesome.  I can make everything in my life.' And what do they do?  The make a spoon."  Spoons are the sorts of objects Banks refers to as "digital poop."

Why Colleges Can't Stop Rape

The law of unintended consequences:  Is Jeanne Clery the reason university presidents
can't stop rape?

MILESTONES IN CAMPUS RAPE  (The sad story so far…)

• 1957. American Sociological Review publishes Clifford Kirkpatrick and Eugene Kanin’s “Male Sex Aggression on a University Campus.”  Their article claims/predicts that college men use secrecy and stigma to pressure women in sexual situations. 
• 1986.  Jeanne Clery is raped and murdered in her dorm room.  She is a freshman at Lehigh University, an idyllic campus she and her parents had fallen in love with.  Though  Jeanne is initially interested in Tulane, she settles on the Pennsylvania school because it “feels safer.”

The Half-Life of Facts

Stephen Fry of the BBC's Quite Interesting reminds us of the eroding certainty of knowledge.

Easily my favorite game show is the BBC’s Q.I. (a.k.a. “Quite Interesting”), hosted by the planet’s honorary ombudsman, Stephen Fry.  I guess you’d call it a trivia quiz.  But really the object is for the four panelists, usually comedians, to be interesting, to be witty – even more often than they’re correct. 

A recent episode was themed around the Half-Life of Facts.  Essentially, the program’s creator, John Lloyd, went back through the show’s earlier seasons and collected knowledge which has since been proven inaccurate.  Once, for example, the host reported that there was no way to accurately tell the age of a lobster.  But by the time of this Q.I. retrospective, marine biologists had learned that the lobster’s eye stalk was the key to dating it.

The Servile Arts

Serfing the internet.

Once upon a time, the world of education was divided into three spheres:  Fine Arts, Liberal Arts, and Servile Arts.  Fine (or “Beaux”) Arts means today pretty much what it meant when the phrase was coined.  Think of bohemians in berets on the southern bank of the Seine.  Painters, sculptors, poets, all making beautiful things.

Liberal and Servile Arts perhaps require a bit more historical context.  Imagine a bunch of rich lads in Genoa, drinking wine as they plot to spend their fathers’ fortunes.  Theirs is a gentrified world not unlike Downton Abbey (though predating it by at least six centuries).  Lots of leisure time for the upper classes, but with less indoor plumbing and more church attendance.  The fellows decide – more or less as a hobby – they’d like to know something about mathematics.  They pool a few ducats and pay some monk to teach them a little algebra.  Voila!  The University is born.

Hatchets in the Dark (B+)

Holy crap. Turns out Chris Evans can act.  He can hold his own against Tilda Swinton and John Freaking Hurt.  "Captain America" proves himself an actor who balances brutal action with believable character discovery in Snowpiercer.

A train endlessly circles the ice-encased earth.  Aboard the thousand carriages of this ark-on-rails, humanity's remnant survives.  The population is harshly striated, class determined by one's distance from the locomotive.  Evans leads the latest revolt, taking Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, and Kang-ho Song along in a quest for the holy engine.

Nurture Shock & Trophy Kids

Alex Gregory for The New Yorker

Recently, I listened to an interview with Ashley Merryman, co-author of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children.  She argues that we’ve raised a generation of trophy kids.  They are rewarded not for excellence so much as mere existence.  One example:  more money is spent on trophies by youth soccer organizations nationwide than on coach training or equipment.  Indeed, parents faced with little league budget cuts more often choose to save money by playing fewer games than by giving fewer trophies.

Some other highlights from Merryman’s interview:

Self-Reported Mischief

Tom Hiddleston as Loki, the Norse god of mischief.

Last year, Margo created a survey to gauge attitudes toward bullies by their middle school peers.  The questions took months to draft and vet for bias. The Institutional Review Board checked her protocol against NSF rules for the ethical treatment and informed consent of human subjects.  The survey was tested on a dozen middle schoolers.  Three of them misunderstood the wording of question 17.  Six more rewrites.

Next Margo sought guinea pigs.  She needed a representative mix of ethnicities and genders.  Some urban schools, some rural.  Private and public.  Bible Belt South and affluent Northeast.  Six weeks of research, e-mails, and snail mail.  The begging phone calls to sixty principals:  “Yes sir.  Completely anonymous.  I know, sir.  You’re absolutely right; the school day is precious.  I promise.  Fifteen minutes, max.”

The Scariest Comedy Ever (A)

Harold Lloyd, the most popular comic of the silent age, in Safety Last.

If you don’t know silent comedy, then maybe you’ve only heard of Charlie Chaplin.  If you took a Film Appreciation course in college, you might also know Buster Keaton.  But when Safety Last was released in 1923, Harold Lloyd was by far a bigger star than either of his better-remembered competitors. 

Lloyd’s masterwork follows a Midwestern rube to bustling Los Angeles.  He promises to send for his naïve fiancée when he makes good.  But he can’t afford married life on the hourly wage of a dry goods clerk.  When his manager offers $1000 to anyone who can dramatically increase the store’s visibility, Lloyd concocts a public event with his roommate, a “human fly” known for scaling skyscrapers.  Only the roommate never quite does his share of the climbing, leaving Lloyd to navigate twelve stories of obstacles without a net.

The Cosby Conundrum

Teachers of media history routinely screen episodes of The Cosby Show for their students.  We cite it as a turning point in the cultural depiction of African Americans.  A colleague of mine now wonders if he should be troubled by rape accusations surfacing against the series’ eponymous star.

Of course he should be troubled.  We should all be troubled by accusations of sexual misconduct.  Will Cosby’s personal life color his contribution to media history (and vice versa)?  Yes.  Does that complicate our appraisal of the Huxtables?  Does it add to the meta-conversations about black celebrity presented in Black Dynamite?  Yes, yes, and again… yes.

Avid, Apple & Adobe (Again)

Today's essay comes with a caveat:  We are always, always, always having this conversation.  Production folk don't ever stop talking about it.  I do not expect it to be helpful a year from now as the marketplace changes.  But because a colleague asked (she's on the cusp of a major institutional purchase), I'll submit some observations that feel true to me in the moment.

Our school (70 production majors at a liberal arts college of 3500) was firmly committed to Avid. The company had market share. They had ProTools. They had the edge in server-based file sharing. They had great student pricing. Then, in February, Avid stock was delisted by NASDAQ following some financial shenanigans. Even though they’ve been reinstated, I think institutions are (rightly) a bit wary of financial dealings with them.

If It Bleeds, It Leads (A)

Jake Gyllenhaal as video mercenary Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler.

One of my dearest grad school professors came to academia from the news desk of an Alabama TV station.  She wrote her dissertation on the relationship between morbidity and ratings, observing a significant increase in the coverage of violent crime and trauma during the ratings sweeps of February and November.  TV ad rates for the rest of the year are determined by the audience measurement snapshots taken during these periods. 

The pressure on local news programs is enormous.  Their ads typically account for more local revenue than any other programs a station carries.  Thus, low ratings frequently motivate personnel changes.  Anchors, reporters, news directors — they all live and die by the ratings book.  So the connection of ratings and revenue to the “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” headline is intensely personal.  You want to keep your job?  Deliver eyeballs.  Make people watch.

The Edge of Not As Bad As It Could Have Been (B+)

At least your bad days only happen once.


"Not as bad as I expected," seems to be a recurring theme of response to Edge of Tomorrow. Because I don't have money to throw away on intentionally disappointing films, I generally don't buy tickets to movies I expect will be bad (live Rifftrax events being an important exception to the rule).

Based on word of mouth or trusted critics, I decide whether to see a movie (1) in a first-run, 3-D, IMAX theater after a steak, (2) in a $5 second-run house with a box of smuggled Junior Mints, (3) on a scratched DVD borrowed from the library, or (4) interrupted by commercials on broadcast TV. Okay, I employ other nuanced tiers of discernment, but you appreciate the gist of the economic scale.