I Feel Like A Natural Woman

I am not one normally to adhere to gender stereotypes. And who among us does not appreciate a good shampoo. I somehow got signed up for a Suavenomics and they sent me a coupon for free product. I like free, I wash my hair, so this seems just fine to me. But I'm a bit confused at the letter they sent addressed to Matt in which they say

We believe beauty should be recession proof, so we're giving women like you across the country a free bottle of Suave.

Emphasis mine. Sure, I'm not the most alpha of men, but how would they know that? Because I realize this is all automated and I know a thing or three about programming I have to wonder in what error checking routine does the name "Matt" map to the adjective "woman"?

But I'm not mad about it, I'll still take the free bottle.

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Breathing new life into the industry

Idiot Triggers, an occasional series.

I am a self-confessed music snob. I voraciously seek out new music that is interesting to me and routinely dismiss* popular music. In the past I've been much more defensive when people dismiss whole swaths of the musical landscape. In my old age and infirmity I have mellowed a bit. It still annoys me of course, but rather than argue with someone who will not change their mind about something ultimately unimportant, I simply put a little checkmark next to them in my head saying "opinions on cultural issues are to be ignored".

I recently read a blogger who wrote "Well rap isn't really music." I won't delve into the underlying racism that often accompanies such a sentiment other than to note it. His point was that most rap is sexist/violent/promotes drug and/or alcohol consumption. That's confusing the message with the medium. There is a tremendous amount of rap that isn't about those things but those are the things that MTV, radio, and particularly advertisers work hard to promote.

Another common claim is that rap isn't music because "it's just talking" indicts as well such undisputed musical forms as the recitative in opera and tone poems. Let's look for a moment at an unbiased arbiter, our friend the dictionary.

an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.

Well, that pretty much wraps up the topic right there. If only they were all this easy.

It's OK to not like a genre of music, I can't bear Country music at all. Nor am I a fan of Norwegian Death Metal. But it's simply ignorant to claim they aren't music. It's existence as music is objective, appreciation of it is subjective. Frank Zappa once wrote something to the effect that composing is taking something and putting a frame around it and calling it art. Once you've declared it art, it is art. The worth of it depends on the viewer, but the objective existence of it as art remains a constant.

Furthermore, you can debate the relative merits of particular artists until the cows come home, if that's your idea of a good time. There are sort of general ideas of what the norms are in any genre, a band that is playing out of sync with each other or in different keys could reasonably be called 'bad' or at least inept, but it's a creative undertaking and sometimes the most interesting results come from going outside the norms. Sure, there's not a whole lot of digeridoo in rap. You rarely hear overdriven crunch guitars in folk music. But is an artist who makes those sorts of moods 'good' or 'bad'? Totally subjective. I'll be the first to acknowledge that NIN is a lousy mariachi band, but that doesn't make them a lousy band. ...

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If I have one more pie a la mode

Don't forget, tomorrow is PI DAY! Mmmm, pie.

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Chop suey's chinese food that is eaten by the masses

On Bill Maher's excellent HBO show Real Time he repeated the popular (particularly in the business world) idea that in Chinese the word for crisis and opportunity are the same. Given his views on medicine and vaccines I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that he doesn't recognize total horse crap when he sees it. The best debunking of this nonsense comes from the esteemed Victor H. Mair. Please, go read it. And never repeat the woefully uninformed trope. Note that saying such a thing in front of a native Chinese speaker will probably cause them to roll their eyes and laugh at you.

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Caught you lookin' for the same thing

There was a story on NPR which I think exemplifies the editorial drift of the last 8 years. In a 4 minute piece on natural gas they hammered home the idea that Democrats in Congress and the Obama Administration policies were decimating the natural gas business, profiling in particular a small businessman who was going bankrupt having only gotten into the business 6 months ago. Barely mentioned in the final two sentences of the whole thing was the fact that plummeting prices as a result of the financial crash were clearly the largest and really only important reason for the troubles facing the industry. So three minutes and 50 seconds of 'business good, government and especially Democrats bad and evil' and less than 10 seconds of 'oh and here's the facts that completely disprove our prior contention, hope you don't notice.'

To their credit, at least they still run the tiny tiny bit at the end proving their entire argument dishonest and false, whereas the rest of the media don't even bother with that part at all anymore.

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What they do in Washington they just look out for number 1

As much as the Republican Party gets bashed for being anti-science, an oft-ignored point is that there are just as many anti-science nuts in the Democratic Party. And like the Republicans there are a variety of reasons they are so. Some are ideologically anti-science (new age woo is very popular amongst Dems), others are so wrapped up in pomo thinking that they think that science is 'just another way of looking at things, no more valid than any other'. Other times it's pure political leverage, as with the current blocking of President Obama's science nominees by Democrats.

Just as no one party has a monopoly on patriotism, no one party has a monopoly on putting their own personal agenda before what's best for the country.

UPDATE: It's been brought to my attention, by Dr Novella, that the Harkin case is actually even more potentially dangerous in the long term. Harkin is actually advocating that *the rules of science be changed to support his person views on health and medicine*. This man is actively hostile to fact based medical treatments. Note that his largest campaign contributors all work for a pyramid scheme company that has benefited directly from his efforts for over a decade.

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My tiger friend has got a sled

Chris Roberson (whom I found via John Scalzi) references this really great bit of artwork:



And just last week I pulled out all my Calvin and Hobbes collections for my 5 year old. She doesn't get the jokes but is fascinated with the books nonetheless. So at bedtime we sit and read a few pages of strips and I laugh and then try to explain why it's funny. Explaining humor is hard to do and I don't think I do it very well.

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