Not sure I understand the logic behind accepting the "I didn't have an abortion" ad but rejecting the "gay dating" ad. If "free speech" and "they handed us a check" are the bases for accepting the former, why isn't that the same reason for accepting the latter? It's not as if they're not both subjects that would be difficult for parents to explain to very young children, if very young children in the audience is the concern, but other than that, what's the problem? Many of us don't like all the medical ads - the endless, endless medical ads - but certainly don't expect them to be pulled even if I assembled all kinds of documentation to show that drug companies cause ill health (and plump up their bottom lines) by focusing on illness instead of wellness (not to mention the assault on our personal attempts to stay healthy). The point is that advertising is first and foremost a business transaction: you pay, you run your ad. I guess you can't espouse the overthrow of a government or anarchy or whatever, and shouldn't show truly horrible things, but otherwise, what the heck.

Labels: absurdities, modern times, tv

Appallingly and unkindly and altogether unChristianly, Pat Robertson said some things about the Haiti earthquake that are inexcusable and simply beyond any pale. Amazingly and wonderfully, so-called extremists supposedly on his side of the political fence, among them Michael Savage, have excoriated what he said, and I give them credit for being willing to verbally take a stand outside their obvious boxes.

Labels: amazements, modern times

To each of you who chances by,
and to all my family
and to my blogging friends,
and theirs and theirs,
I wish the best of years ahead

Labels: anniversaries, modern times

Inviting Jason Blair to speak at this ethics seminar is either cool or ridiculous and apparently even the organizers are of both minds.

Labels: ethics, modern times, writing

Why do some people come, all excited and worked up, bursting at the seams to share some issue or concern or problem, then pause for a reaction, and then continue on their merry rant without even the least lip service to whatever may have been said from the audience? Why not talk to a tape recorder if all they want is to hear themselves talk? Even adding "yes, that happened to me with them, too" doesn't get a nod from this genre. I remember joking with my mother when she would clearly not be listening to what one of us was saying, and I would say "hmm, did someone say something? wait! I heard something...." and then she'd chuckle (or not) and pay more attention. Conversation is meant to be two-way, I thought. Sometimes more one person or the other but both people usually expect to speak, yes?

On the other hand, I have had some unexpected and energetic conversations recently, too, in unexpected places and with people who turned out to be very interesting. You just never know, I guess.

Labels: friends, modern times, personalities

The recent silence from me was neither because I had nothing to say that I thought merited posting nor that I was running scared from commenters - reasons that have previously muffled my singular and oh-so-marvelous voice (ha ha ha). It was "technical difficulties" with my DSL. The issues started Wednesday evening. I called Verizon's supposedly 24/7 technical hotline and spent nearly three hours on the phone, 45 minutes just getting to a live human being and the rest of the time - unsuccessfully - just talking. The tech people a zillion miles away over oceans and seas, and very hard to hear clearly. Plus they seem programmed to say platitudes in response to almost everything (e.g., "that must be very frustating for you" and "I will definitely help you with that" etc.). The talking was time-delayed a bit and the sound quality was dreadful which doesn't give you much confidence since Verizon was first and foremost a PHONE company. I mean, inter-country phone quality was awful when I was in college but that was in the Dark Ages; I would have assumed the cables and/or copper or whatever it is now are far better materials.

I realized at some point that I had unconnected a phone while rearranging furniture on Wednesday, a phone I no longer use, so I thought maybe unplugging the phone had signalled to the modem that something had changed, so I replugged the phone. The modem still wasn't working on Thursday night when I got home, however, so I called the supposedly direct number that one of the tech people had given me. What a surprise (not) to find that it wasn't a direct line at all but just another entré to regular lines with lots and lots of prompts to choose one's way through. As a result, I got to spend another 2-3 hours with all the techies saying they'd tested the connections and everything tested fine so, oh my, it is very hard to know what's wrong and my goodness how frustrating it must be for me. No one could figure out what was wrong except one person I caught who said she'd been out the previous times I called but she could see that the phone line was unresponsive. Eventually the phone got fixed, on Friday, and they told me the DSL line tested fine. However, when I got home Friday night around midnight, the phone was indeed fine but the DSL was still blinking (a/k/a no signal). Saturday morning I called again and spent 4 more hours at it. With no success. (I definitely need to learn to quit sooner.)

So here's the thing. I completely understand that things break and that maybe whatever happened to the phone caused a problem in the modem or even the router. Or maybe vice versa. But it should never have taken four hours for people who know these things to figure out that the first issue was the phone line. Furthermore, a customer should not have to repeat anything dozens of times and STILL be ignored. I wish I was exaggerating about that, but I'm not.

They said they have to come to the house to diagnose and fix the problem, but can't come on Saturdays. Well, that's what they said until I said for something around the two hundredth time (NOT an exaggeration) that I could not be home during the week. Could. Not. Be. Home. During. The. Week. Because it would require taking an entire day off because they won't provide a two-hour window. After all that, I said I guessed the only answer was that I would stop Verizon service and write the PSC about the whole experience just trying to get a DSL up and running. At that point, somehow, magically, the guy said "let me check something" and it seems they CAN send someone on Saturday. Next week.

However, it was THE most unpleasant seven or eight hours. I am not kidding that I said "I can't be home on a weekday but only on weekends" and the man answered with "Well, we will send someone Tuesday, all right?" And that exchange happened dozens of times and even after I was referred to a supervisor and then to his supervisor. No wonder we make jokes about how they are trained to ignore what a person says. They are, in the end, simply beyond infuriating and frustrating and rude. On a scale I have never previously encountered.

I had work I had to do on Saturday evening so the solution I came up with was to try one thing first (buying a (returnable) modem and seeing if it worked because it was the modem that was faulty). Apparently that was not the answer. (I am pretty convinced by now that it's the signal being sent incorrectly but I may never know.) The second thing I did was pick up a NetZero HiSpeed internet connection disc. It isn't particularly high speed, not when you're accustomed to DSL, but it *IS* an internet connection so I was able to do my work. I am grateful.

I've talked to several people about all this and they ALL told me about their or their friends' similar Verizon horror stories, two of which were identical about being on hold forEVER and utterly unable to hear or understand the tech people and having to wait a week to get it fixed. They have ALL switched to cable or Optimum. So if my sample is representative of anything, Verizon had better be worried. I mean, no one had no problems. That's quite startling. Even with a small sample of about a dozen people, 100% is amazing. Do the words AIG and Lehman resonate with their priorities? Don't they realize what we all now know, that huge no longer means invulnerable?

Labels: commerce, modern times, web tools

Granting that polite and gracious behavior is always more pleasant - not to mention polite and gracious, heh - nevertheless I wonder about our reactions to Serena Williams' outburst at the U.S. Open. It is certainly true that the ideal reaction of people in the public eye, whether glad or miserable, whether winning or losing, would be graciousness. A column in the NY Times puts it well and clearly (here). It is true, however, that many people kind of chuckle when men athletes (hockey players, baseball hitters, tennis players, etc.) freak out and throw things. People voice distaste for John McEnroe's antics but there's a vague sense of amusement in their reactions, too. But Serena's yelling was "so unseemly," as someone put it to me yesterday. Why? She had received a crucial call that stopped her momentum and was likely to wreck her game, and she was angry. Who on earth would not be furious? Furthermore, as video has since shown, she was correct!!!! It was a bad call!! She lost the match and the championship on a bad/wrong call and on her reaction to the bad/wrong call. Man oh man. Fortunately she has a successful career and many other victories to savor but this must be extremely frustrating.

It's almost 2010. Women have voted for 90 years, have had personal health protection for nearly that long, have been freed from being official property of fathers and husbands for almost 40 years . . . and yet women are still expected to smile and be polite, no matter what happens, and no matter that unrestrained reactions would be acceptable for men.

Labels: modern times, people of note

According to this article, at some time in the not-too-distant-future, we will have to pay a fee to get news on the internet. You'd think - considering plummeting hard-copy newspaper sales and all - that the people planning this (if indeed they are planning it and this isn't just them throwing the idea out to see if it floats) would realize its folly. For one thing, there will (continue to) be ways around subscription articles (a solution for some subscriber-only articles at present, for example, is copying a headline then plopping it into a search engine and opening the free result). Also, although television news is far less detailed than print or internet, and the anchors usually shout a lot or flirt with the camera/viewer, and the content emphasizes way celebrity/ gossip/ entertainment, tv news is available eighty gazillion hours a day. Also, too, there are bound to be services providing news for free so that will mean that any that charge fees will have fewer subscribers than they expect and/or count on. As with hiking commuter and other fees, there is always a balance to consider between increased revenue from increasing or adding fees and decreased revenue from refusal to buy a product at that or perhaps any fee. And is it a good idea to add one more claim on people's money at a time when there's not quite enough to go around for most of us? My prediction - hope - is that they will realize this is a bad idea and not do it.

Labels: modern times, news

I am getting awully tired of hearing about it and even more tired of hearing the over-wrought analyses that blame The Cambridge Incident of 2009 on racial and/or intellectual attitudes. Why does it have to be so complicated? Why does it have to have been anything more than two individuals reacting instinctively and hot-headedly, although entirely understandably? Don't we do ourselves and them a disservice by calling it all kinds of other things? And don't we thereby also trivialize racism?

My own example may prove my point. Back in the day, as they say, I was a hippie-ish young mother, complete with long hair, mascara, tie-dyed skirt and flowy blouse. One morning I drove to work and saw police barricades at both ends of the four-block stretch that led to my office. I drove around a couple of times and, being nearly late, convinced myself that the barricades were meant to prohibit thru traffic but not prevent residents or workers from access. Although I may have been correct, the way I went about acting on my conclusion was not and the error of my ways was quickly made clear because no sooner had I turned into the street than a policeman ran over, loudly telling me to "stop right there." He called me "honey" and "hippie-girl" among other sobriquets including ones I won't write here. I felt quite scared (you know that odd feeling as if your blood is rippling right under your skin?) but wasn't about to let him know it so I stopped my car and started to explain as if to a dim-witted lamppost that I needed to get to work in that building in the middle of the block. I was loud and sarcastic and demanded to know why he wouldn't let me go through. He said it was none of my concern. We were both very angry and both thought we were completely correct. Eventually, when I sneered something along the lines of "come on, let me go to work, this is getting ridiculous," he snapped something along the lines of "oh you think it's ridiculous, do you" and pulled out his book and wrote me a ticket for "insubordination" - putting the lie, by the way, to the news people I've heard asserting that one cannot get a ticket for rudeness unless a crowd is gathering.

Labels: modern times, personalities

Everyone wrote and talked and showed pictures about the Apollo 11 anniversary, yesterday. But several different websites put the moment when Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface (land previously only seen as a big man with a lot of cheese, and later visited by Wallace and Grommit for that very reason (ha ha)), was somewhere bewteen 2:56 a.m. and 3:39 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time today, July 21, 1969. Yes, on the east coast of America that was nine-ish p.m. on July 20th which is the common wisdom moment that gets all the hoopla - but it's amazing and a bit disappointing, I have to admit, to realize that even something seemingly factual like the time of the occurrence of a historical event is American-northeast-centric.

Labels: anniversaries, madness, modern times

A friend mentioned to me this morning that there is a tv show called Little Miss Perfect on WEtv. Its description says it "takes you on a journey into the world of children's pageants." As I wrote Sunday, reflecting on the Jon Benet Ramsey movie/story (here), I know there are many ways to grow up healthy and I'm truly sure that it's impossible to identify with any certainty which interests will or will not help develop healthy, wealthy and wise adulthood. On the other hand, it does seem creepy and feel wrong for little girls to hold all kids of sexy poses and get all dolled up . I very much hope and want to believe that girls who do pagents and become engrossed in these activities as post-toddlers really can and do grow into emotionally and intellectually strong women.

Labels: children, modern times

Little girls are innocent, open, interested, eager. They are often adorable and gorgeous. They are tons of fun to be with and play with. They're even fun to play with as if they're real live dolls that you can dress up and do their hair. Unfortunately there is a flip and ghastly side to all that in that they are also sometimes the targets of very sick, cruel, evil people.

While rearranging some furniture and doing some cleaning, I put the tv on for background noise and got lured into watching a movie on Jon Benet Ramsey. The actors are an impressive line-up and quite good (Kris Kristoffersen, Marg Helgenberger (far more appealing onscreen than Patsy herself was), Ronny Cox, Ken Howard, John Heard, Dennis Boutsikaris, Jane Powell (yes, that Jane Powell - she plays JB's dance instructor), Ann-Margaret (she plays Mrs Ramsey's mother), among others). And although the movie is uneven from a critical point of view, it effectively depicts the all-too-human errors of the investigation, some unavoidable and some due to odd quirks of the people involved. It has been bizarrely impossible to solve the case partly because many of the police and detectives were so convinced that the Ramsey's had murdered their daughter, despite how unlikely it was from all kinds of points of view, so that they refused to pursue any alternative evidentiary leads. Even after nearly thirteen years, the story remains both oddly fascinating and very disturbing.

I found the story even creepier than I remembered, perhaps because t2cgitw arrived during the intervening years. Probably because of them, what struck me now is how much Jon Benet and her mother were/are like other little girls and their mothers. All the dressing up and make-up and playing at being ten or more years older than they are and caring so much about being fairy tale/cliché cutesy/pretty/sexy is so familiar and so ordinary.

On the one hand, one has to wonder if there is something at all damaging or wrong with so much emphasis and focus on external and superficial frill. On the other hand, maybe not because maybe fantasy play of all kinds is good for the imagination - and goodness knows that a healthy imagination is vital for self-aware and contented growth and development. It's hard - perhaps impossible - to know where the line between healthy and sick is - or even if there is such a line. There are so many ways to get from birth to death and who are any of us to be sure we know which are valid and which are not?

But whatever else is not entirely evident (pun intended), it is certain that this is a sad and awful story. I only wish there were clear lessons to take to heart, learn and pass on.

Labels: children, modern times, movies, today's movie