Rove Done Pissed me Off

Take cheap shots at Obama and the rest of the Dems. That's what he does (OK, sometimes), and I'm not asking him to stop--though I think he's a royal prick and leads a vacuous, empty existence. But when you start taking shots at Politifact and FactCheck, he's pissed me off in the worst way.

Suck it, Rove.

The Difference Between a Good Coach and a Mediocre One

Jim Tressel (aka "The Vest"), the head coach of The Ohio State Buckeyes, held out his star player yesterday in their epic battle against Pete Carroll and the USC Trojans. This game was--we should understand--likely worth a lot of money for OSU since it could have propelled them into a national championship game which pays out approximately $17,000,000. It was a brave thing that Tressel did, I think. It doesn't reflect anything about Tressel's coaching abilities, but it does say something about him as a human being, as a caretaker for his players, and a person who understands the place of sport in life. He's taken some heat for the decision, and I can't say whether it was the right one or not because I don't know the nature of Wells' injury, but I can say Tressel showed he cares about his players more than the record.

And that is what separates him from some perpetually-also-ran like Mike Bellotti at the University of Oregon. Last year, his star player hurt his knee, but Belotti let him play with an ACL tear against the Arizona Wildcats. No offense, but OSU vs. USC and UO vs. UA is apples and oranges. Oregon was highly ranked playing an inferior opponent, whereas OSU was highly ranked playing a team that was picked to beat them (and beat them USC did...badly). Whose decision was tougher?

And there is a moral equivalency because team doctors had cleared both players. Wells was cleared before Tressel said "no," and Dixon was cleared, I guess. The doctors assured Bellotti that Dixon couldn't do any more damage to the knee, but still.

Also, Belotti doesn't have the cojones to stand up to Nike and tell them to stop testing out ugly-ass uniforms on his players. I'm pretty sure the new Nike gear has some dangerous chemicals in it and will, perhaps, create at least one super-hero or -villian from the roster of this team.

Portland, ME Reporter Asks McCain Some Haaaaaaard Questions.

A couple of notes about this interview:

• McCain probably wishes that he'd taken that Larry King interview instead of some bulldog from Portland, ME looking to make a name for himself. It's pretty sad when some local reporter asks harder-hitting questions than anyone from CNN, ABC, NBC, or CBS (not counting FOX or MSNBC as "real").
  
• McCain misspeaks a lot, but it's not as funny as Bushisms like "we won't get fooled again."
• I do not understand how knowing more about energy than anyone else in America (his words, not mine, and I know that's a silly assertion for him to make, but still) means that she has significant national security/defense experience. To be sure, energy independence is now recognized as a part of national defense, but it's not a qualification--or else the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Shell, and ConocoPhillips would be considered national defense experts.
• McCain asserts that Obama has never gone against his party, but I submit that being against the Iraq War when most other Dems were for it is going against your party. I'm sure he got pressure to vote for it so the Dems would look patriotic.
  

Interesting Arturian Exhibit in Rennes

"King Arthur, A Legend in the Making" is a new exhibition at the Champs Libres in Rennes, France. It's nice to see some love for the French in the Arthurian tradition since they're the ones who kept it alive for a long, long time.

I'd love to live there or at least visit.

Songs Forever Tied to Scenes from Movies

In this ever-growing list, I am excluding songs specifically written for movies (sorry, Kenny Loggins and Irving Berlin)

• Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again," the final scene of Kubrick's Dr Strangelove in which numerous and sundry nuclear bombs explode and destroy the Earth
• Steeler's Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle with You," the (in)famous ear scene from Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs
• Genesis' "Sussudio," the 3-way scene in American Psycho
• Strauss' "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," from the evolution scene of Kubrick's 2001
• Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," from Wayne's World
• Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," from the chaos/napalm scenes in Good Morning Vietnam
• The Squeeze's "Tempted," from the Winona Ryder driving scene in Reality Bites
• Katrina and the Waves' "Walkin' on Sunshine," from the mix-tape scene in High Fidelity
  
• Elliot Smith's "Miss Misery," from the end credits scene of Good Will Hunting
  
• 
  

Palin Says Small Towns Grow Good People. Serial Killers Beg to Differ

In her acceptance speech for the Republican VP nomination, Sarah Palin agreed that "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," continuing that she knew "just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman." So let's put that supposed truism to the test. I've divided up American cities into 3 categories Big City (500,000+) Mid-Sized (20,000-500,000), and Small Town (<20,000). American Serial Killers page on Wikipedia. I'm not done, but the preliminary results show that no matter where you were raised, you have a relatively equal chance of being a serial killer. Moral of the story: if you're manky in the head, small towns ain't gonna save you.
*Special prize if you can guess which city below is my father's hometown!

Big City:

• Benjamin Atkins (Detroit, MI): killed 11
• David Carpenter (San Francisco, CA): raped and killed 5 women
  
• John Wayne Gacy (Chicago, IL): raped and murdered 33 young men
• Gary Ridgway (Salt Lake City, UT): killed 48
• Richard Angelo (Long Island, NY): 25 killed
• Robert Diaz (Phoenix, AZ): 12 killed
  
• Richard Cottingham (Bronx, NY): killed 5
• Harvey Glatman (Bronx, NY): killed 3
  
• Andrew Cunanan (San Diego, CA): killed 5
• Scott Erskine (San Diego, CA): killed 3
  
• Lawrence Bittaker (Philadelphia, PA): raped, tortured, and killed 5 women
  
• Albert Fish (Washington DC): killed 3-5+
  
• David Berkowitz (Brooklyn, NY): killed 6
  
• Howard Allen (Indianapolis, IN): killed 3
• Ronald Gray (Miami, FL): raped and killed 4 women
  

Mid-Sized City:

• Robert Berdella (Cuyahoga Falls, OH): raped, tortured, and killed 6 men
• Henry Lee Lucas (Blacksburg, VA): killed 11-300
• Alton Coleman (Waukegan, IL): killed 8
• Joseph Duncan III (Tacoma, WA): killed 7
  
• Albert DeSalvo (Chelsea, MA): the Boston Strangler, killed 13
• Dean Corll (Fort Wayne, IN): killed at least 27 boys
  
• Angelo Buono, Jr. (Rochester, NY): one of the Hillside Stranglers, killed 10
  
• Kenneth Bianchi (Rochester, NY): one of the Hillside Stranglers, killed 10
  
• Ed Gein (La Crosse, WI): 2+ killings, used body part to create whimsical home decor items
• Ted Bundy (Burlington, VT): killed 26-57 people
• Westley Allan Dodd (Richmond, WA): killed 3
  
• Richard Biegenwald (Trenton, NJ): killed 9
• Kristen Gilbert (Fall River, MA): killed 4
• William Heirens (Evanston, IL): killed 3
  
• Richard Evonitz (Columbia, SC): killed 3
• Jon Joubert (Lawrence, MA): killed 3
  
• Charles Cullen (West Orange, NJ): killed 35-45
• Wayne Adam Ford (Petaluma, CA): killed 4
  
• Carroll Cole (Sioux City, IA): 16
• Kendall Francois (Poughkeepsie, NY): killed 8-10
• Joseph Paul Franklin (Mobile, AL): killed 7-20
  
• Gary Evans (Troy, NY): killed 13
• Hadden Clark (Troy, NY): killed 2-3
  

Small Town:

• Kenneth McDuff (Rosebud, TX): 14+ killed
• Ronald Dominique (Thibidoux, LA): 23 men killed
  
• Charles Ray Hatcher (Mound City, MO):
  
• Carlton Gary (Columbus, GA): killed 7
• Gary Heidnik (Eastlake, OH): killed 2
• H.H. Holmes (Gilmanton, NH): killed 9-27
  
• Jerry Brudos (Webster, SD): killed 4, necrophilia
  
• Arthur Bishop (Hinckley, UT): killed 5
• Christine Falling (Perry, FL): killed 3
• Janie Lou Gibbs (Cordele, GA): killed 5
• Robert Hansen (Esterville, IA): killed 15
  
• Nannie Doss (Blue Mountain, AL): killed 11
  
• Robert Charles Browne (Coushatta, LA): killed 48
  
• Jeffrey Dahmer (West Allis, WI): raped and killed 17 men, possible necrophilia
• Thor Christiansen (Slovang, CA): killed 4
  
• Dallen Bounds (Ashland, OR): killed 4
  
• Joe Ball (Elmendorf, TX): killed 5-20
• Faye Copeland (Harrison, AK): killed 5
• Robert Garrow (Dannemora, NY): killed 8
• Donald Gaskins (Manning, SC): killed 9-100?
  

Palin and Clinton, or A Celebration of Binaries

I was just reading Adreinne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" and came across this gem of a sentence: "But even in reading these women I was looking in them for the same things I had found in the poetry of men, because I wanted women poets to be the equals of men, and to be equal was still confused with sounding the same."

Of course it got me to thinking about Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and the view of women in/and politics. My wife and I were talking about this and she said the thought there were 2 routes to a top executive position in the US: you can either be tougher (read: "manly") than anyone else, or you can be so feminine that no opponents put the smack down on you--or they wait until too late to do so. This second approach is in some ways the more suave, nuanced, elegant (read: "feminine") route; it recognizes (implicitly or explicitly) the idea of femininity and motherhood in the US and exploits that. Clinton and Palin are distinct examples of this (...maybe. I bet women who were heavily involved or invested in Clinton's campaign would disagree with some of the generalizations I'm going to make, but they're not average Americans, at least in this sense).

Clinton was treated like a man for most of the campaign; there was some talk of her gender, but when it did come up, it had usually been raised by a conservative pundit to take a swipe and one of their favorite targets.

There are two things this picture tells me: 1) Photoshop was invented by the Devil, and 2) Clinton scares the hell out of some men and has been slapping the shit out of their notions of manhood. Throughout the campaign, "toughness" was either explicitly conflated with "manly" or it was implied when the word was used. My wife is tough, and I don't mean that in a gendered way. Ma Joad was tough in any gendered way. It's pretty obvious that Clinton is tough, but there wasn't enough "femininity" presented to appease some Americans. Her daughter began to introduce her, and she started talking about her mom more, but only at the end. At the end of the day, I think a lot of Americans (even some whom I love very dearly) don't like her because she's too "manly." She does the things that are still sometimes considered the arena of men.

So, then, you may wonder why the conservative folk love their Palin. By the rationale I just presented, one would expect conservatives to reject Palin for overreaching. Of course not, and to see that as a pat conservative response would be to miscast many, many conservatives. It's not that they want to keep women in the home and keep them tied down by the apron strings. Instead, it's all about how women venture into male-dominated arenas. Clinton fought her way in. She got perhaps a better education than did her husband (and definitely a better one than Palin, no offense U of Idaho...and Hawaii Pacific U...and North Idaho College...and Matanuska-Sustina College), she jumped right into a man's world and really made her own way. Then she got elected on her own merits (and, probably, last name) to the Senate. Then she declared her presidential campaign. Palin, on the other hand, was invited to the party. To my mind, that's a big difference in the minds of many conservative voters.

Palin started, of all places, in the PTA. (Psssst, that means she's a great mom, and every mom should feel empowered to be a VP nominee or at least mayor. If gender's not such a big deal, why doesn't every kid raised by single-parents get to be President? Why don't all war-heroes get automatic seats in the legislative branch?) She followed the "acceptable" avenues to power for women whereas Clinton seems to have travelled the other one...the one most men use. Mostly, it comes down to the pant-suits. Clinton didn't look or act like many conservatives thought a woman should--no matter what her politics or ideas. Palin is disarming, helping the Republicans accept her with that spoonful of sugar of skirts and hockey-mom-hood. She acts like a mom and a woman first and a politician second. Clinton acted like a politician first and a woman second.

So there's your gendered binaries for women in positions of power in the US. It works along the same lines as the binaries appended to male candidates. President Bush, Sr. was unfairly called a "wimp," Dukakis looked like an effite fool in that tank, and it's probably only a matter of time before the charges of elitism and intellectualism on Obama morph into the same sort of thing. That's one side: the not-tough-enough side (which is usually code for "not-manly"). The other side is McCain war-hero, T.R. rugged individualism toughness. Reagan touched on it with the big talk during the Cold War, and Bush, Jr. often projects it with brush-clearing and sabre-rattling. The sides are rarely gendered because there was no need for them to be. It was (and mostly still is) a boy's club, so there was no reason to explicitly equate the "wimps" with feminine traits and tough guys with masculine ones. Now that women have entered the upper echelons of government in a big way, things will start being more and more gender-oriented.

The real question, I guess, remains: which of the two women--Palin or Clinton--are confusing being equal with men to sounding and acting like men (or as men want them to)? That one I do not have an answer to.

UPDATE: I am a genius, I tells ya. The LA Times started talking about this very thing on 09.11.08.

UPDATE2: I really am a genius. The SNL opening from 09.13.08: