Another Example of Why I Hate Today's Political Climate

A few days ago I wrote a rather long post complaining about the political climate of 2010. Here's another example: Today I was browsing Google News and found the article linked to at the end of this post. It's an article from FoxNews.com, and its headline reads "Mel Gibson: Obama Doesn't Have What it Takes to 'Fix' America." I'm not a particular fan of Mel Gibson, and as the post above mentions, I'm not a fan of Fox News either, so I'm not sure why I decided to look at the article, but I did. I guess because Gibson is a non-American, I was interested in what his take on the whole thing was. I also knew that--at least religiously--he was a conservative, and again I was interested in his point of view.

I read the article and was baffled. Gibson wasn't attacking Obama at all. If anything, he was defending Obama. His quote was, "Obama is a man with an impossible task on his hands. He got left a mess and I wish him all the best but I don't think he's going to fix it in five minutes and probably not in his entire tenure." Apparently that was ALL he said. How FoxNews went from that to its headline eludes me. The only solution is that they're looking for ANY reason to put down Obama.

Conversely, if MSNBC ran the story, I'm sure they'd pick up on the FRONT of Gibson's quotation rather than the back, and their headline would read something like "Mel Gibson: America's Problems are Fault of Previous Republican Adminstration, Not Obama's"

Read the article.

Embarrassing Admissions

If I had to list my Top 10 all time favorite movies, Steel Magnolias would be somewhere in the list. I make that statement sheepishly. I know that the movie is considered a "chick flick" and that a macho man would never be caught dead watching a movie with lines like "Pink is my signature color!" and "In a good shoe, I wear a size six, but a seven feels so good, I buy a size eight." But I love the movie. It has an air of authenticity to it, and I watch it, but I don't go around bragging about it (until now, I guess).

Why am I telling you this? Because in the same way that there are movies that at least a part of me is kind of embarrassed that I like, there are musicians I like that some of my friends would tease me about mercilessly if they knew I liked them. Neil Diamond is one such artist. Another is John Denver. And Dan Fogelberg is another (I think The Innocent Age is an underrated classic).

In the same vein as those three, I'm also a fan of Don McLean. His voice grates on me sometimes, but I think many of his songs are magical. His most famous song--"Miss American Pie"--is NOT my favorite of his.

One of my favorites is this song about artist Vincent Van Gogh:

(I can't see the video.)

And here's another of my favorites (Oh, and as I just listened to this YouTube video more closely, I realized that the audio is taken from a recording off of an LP. I can hear the imperfections caused by a slightly warped record and by dust on the needle. THAT takes me back a few years):

(I can't see that video, either!)

Okay, if I had to admit it, Steel Magnolias wouldn't just be in my Top 10. It would be somewhere in my Top 4!

More About Yesterday's Post

Yesterday I wrote about my 13 year old daughter getting a Facebook account, and I wrote about how amazed I was to find how frequently she and her friends are online using Facebook. Then today I stumbled across this article while at work, and I found it very enlightening.

People have been saying for years that schools have to be completely rethought or redesigned because of some new change, whether it be a fractured family life or a generation of kids grown up on TV, or whatever else people feel like using as an excuse for tearing down the traditional school system. And as an educator, usually, I feel like the stories are absolute rubbish. It's true that our culture IS changing, but the fact that students watch 7 hours of TV a day has never meant that schools needed to do much differently from what they were doing before.

But the information in this article is different. Thanks to cell phones, the Internet, and dozens of other tools, the younger generation truly is communicating in an entirely different way. I almost feel like we are rapidly evolving as a species as a result of these changes, and schools--and more importantly, teachers--HAVE to adapt to this change. This article interests me very much.

Read the article.

They Grow Up So Fast

My older daughter, who is 13 years old, is on Facebook now. That scares me a little. I won't lie. The idea of her participating in any social networking site more advanced than Webkinz is kind of scary to me. There are a lot of bad things out there that I don't want her to be exposed to. Also, I just find it kind of weird to log onto Facebook and see some post that she's made, and to know that she's reading MY posts, too.

And I was amazed at how many of her friends were on Facebook, too. And by "on Facebook" I don't mean they had accounts. I mean they were really "on" Facebook, logged in and utilizing it. My daughter asked me several times a day for a couple of days if I'd help her get on Facebook (My wife and I had told her she could get on it, but only if someone was there to help her set up her privacy settings correctly so that those aforementioned "bad things" couldn't get to her). When I finally got around to setting up her account, we created a username and password, and spent maybe five or six minutes going through the privacy settings for Facebook, with me explaining to her what the various options did, and then me telling her what those options would be on her account.

After that I clicked the "Home" link at the top of Facebook and then scrolled her down to the Notifications area at the bottom of the page. "Okay," I said to her as I scrolled, "later, when you let your friends know you're online, you'll come down here to find any friend requests you have and stuff like that. You'll see right here--Holy cow!" I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My daughter ALREADY had five friend requests! I started to explain to her what she needed to do, but she sort of maneuvered her way in between me and the computer and started accepting her friend's requests. In just a few minutes she was chatting with several of them.

She's been on Facebook less than a week and already she has 67 friends. And while I know about half of them (She's been going to the same school for eight years, after all), I didn't know the other half of them. When I asked her, I found that they were mostly older kids in the band with her.

She's just growing up. That's all. In a few years she'll be driving. After that she'll graduate and go off to college. This is another step along the way.

The Obama Agenda Survey Anti-Massacre Movement

I'm a political moderate, which I think by definition means that I somehow manage to irritate and get irritated by both liberals and conservatives. Last week at my house we received a letter from the Republican National Committee that really got under my moderate skin...

The letter sounded very official at first. In fact, after the greeting, the first sentence was "Your immediate action is required" (underlining was theirs--not mine). The letter then went on to say that I should complete the enclosed objective survey, called the "2010 Obama Agenda Survey" and return it to the RNC immediately. I was vaguely even threatened that I HAD to complete it. The letter stated that the survey was "REGISTERED in your name and affixed with a tracking code to ensure that it is accounted for in the tabulated results" (Again, the capitalization and bold face is the RNC's, not mine). 


According to the letter, the survey results would be used "to gauge where you and other grassroots Republicans stand on the critical issues facing our nation."


Aside from--as I just mentioned--being vaguely threatened at the beginning of the letter, I actually have no problem with the idea of the RNC giving a survey to gauge people's opinions. Sounds like a great idea, in fact. I think the RNC and the Democratic Party both need to listen to their members. I take umbrage, though, with the particular survey that was enclosed. To call the survey "objective" is ridiculous. The questions were slanted in a way to anger people, not to get real data from people.


Here is a sample of some of the questions, to which the receiver was supposed to answer either "Yes," "No," or "No opinion.":

• Do you support amensty for illegal immigrants?

• Do you believe that Barack Obama's nominees for federal courts should be immediately and unquestionably approved for their lifetime appointments by the U.S. Senate?

• Do you believe that the best way to increase the quality and effectiveness of public education in the U.S. is to rapidly expand federal funding while eliminating performance standards and accountability?

• Do you support the creation of a national health insurance plan that would be administered by bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.? 

• Are you in favor of reinstituting the military draft, as Democrats in Congress have proposed?

I could go on, but you get the idea. Every question in the survey was written in such a way as to guarantee a response of "No" from ALL Republicans and from 90% of anyone else. If the framers of the survey REALLY wanted to know how Republicans felt about the issues, the questions could have been framed in a more objective manner. For instance the above questions could read

• Should government institute a program which would allow otherwise law abiding illegal aliens in this country a process through which they could become legalized?

• Should the approval process for federal judges be streamlined to allow for quicker approvals?

The education question bothers me especially because it actually is covering two issues at one (1. whether or not the No Child Left Behind Act should remain in its current form and 2. whether government should increase federal funding to education). Thus, that question, if the RNC REALLY wanted useful data, would have to be broken into two questions:

1. Should the Federal No Child Left Behind Act remain in its current form?
2. Should the federal government increase funding to education, a cost traditionally handled by the individual states?

Continuing on with the questions, the next would read

• Should health insurance reform include the option of a federally run plan to compete with currently existing private plans?

And the last question is just ridiculous. Any politician who talks of reinstating the draft is a minority in ANY party, including the Democratic party, and is just posturing for some reason and has no REAL plan to do so. 


Now, my feeling is that many Republicans would answer "No" to all or most of these more objective questions as well, and that's okay. That's who they are. But these more objective questions would give the RNC some data about how strongly Republicans really feel about these political issues. But finding out how people feel about the issues wasn't the point of this survey. Not really. 


So if the point of this "survey" was not to get useable information, what WAS the point? The answer is pretty simple. At the end of the survey was a place where the survey taker could check a box to make a donation of $500, $250, $100, $50, or $30 to the RNC. The REAL purpose was to craft a survey where all of the answers would be no, where the survey taker who completed the survey would be so angry at the end about all of the terrible things happening in Washington that he'd be willing to fork some money over to the RNC to fix the problem.


This, in my mind, is what's wrong with America today. The word "objective" has no meaning. Politicians long ago quit caring about what's right and started caring about who wins. And that's just wrong. We live in an age when the most slanted news station on cable proclaims itself "Fair and Balanced," spitting in the face of George Orwell in the process. And "objective" surveys like this remind me of this glaring fault in our national personality.


So what did I do? The letter came with a "Postage paid by addressee" envelope to return the survey (and presumably, a check to the RNC). I stuffed the postage paid envelope with as much blank paper as it could hold (to increase the postage cost) and put it in the mail and sent it back to the RNC. It was a petty move, I know, and I don't necessarily feel all that good about it. But I did it. And maybe I shouldn't feel so bad. After all, the letter that accompanied the survey urged me over and over again to rise up and start a grass roots movement. 


It didn't tell me what it was I supposed to rise up against...

A Coward

I didn't really have an opinion about Kentucky's governor one way or the other...until yesterday when the governor released his new budget plan.

Governor Beshear's new budget, as pretty much any newspaper in Kentucky will tell you, hinges on the passage of a bill which will allow expanded gambling in Kentucky race tracks. I'm personally against expanding gambling, but that's not why I'm upset with the governor. I understand why people want to expand gambling, and while I don't agree with them, I can respect their reasoning.

What bothers me is this: Almost every influential Kentucky politician--on both the left and the right--is saying that the bill has almost NO chance of passing. If that's the case, then the governor is presenting a FICTIONAL budget, and he knows it. A budget that has no chance of ever being enacted is as good as no budget at all. It is the height of irresponsibility for the governor to present such a budget. The only explanation is that he doesn't want to be the one to propose a budget that either has significant increases in taxation or significant cuts in services.

It's the coward's way out.

Birthday Cupcakes

Saturday my younger daughter had a party celebrating her 11th birthday. She's the craftier of my two daughters by far, and that shows in her birthday parties. Last year she had a "beading party" where everyone made beaded necklaces at the party. This year, instead of making a birthday cake, we made a bunch of cupcakes and mini-cupcakes, bought a whole bunch of decorative candies and cookies, and the girls made snowmen cupcakes as a party activity. We put them all together on a tray and THAT was her birthday cake.

It actually went better than expected. I fully assumed that the whole activity would be an absolute disaster, but it actually turned out a) that the snowmen looked good and b) the activity wasn't all that messy. It was fun.

Oh, and we can't take credit for the idea. Natalie got the idea from a cupcake cookbook that she got for Christmas. If you think the snowmen above are cute, you'll be amazed at some of the other decorating ideas in this book!

Here's a video of the girls working.



(I can't see the video.)

BRAG ALERT: Proud of My Girls

My girls have given me several reasons to be proud in the last few weeks. But one act in particular has stood out for me.

First, my older daughter, who is a 7th grader, took the ACT--that same test that junior and senior college hopefuls take--as part of a program funded by Duke University. She scored a composite of 25, which is really not a bad score for a high school senior, and is absolutely OUTSTANDING for a 7th grader. As the website above explains in one of its links, my daughter's individual scores are better in every category (Mathematics, Science, Reading, and Language) than at least 89% of gifted 7th graders, and her Reading and Language scores were better than 99% of gifted 7th graders. I don't think Lisa and I were able to communicate to her how outstanding her scores were. We were so proud.

And then yesterday I find out that my younger daughter, who is a fifth grader, has scored in the 240's on her reading MAP test at school. The MAP test is not nearly as well known as the ACT, so that number probably doesn't mean as much to most readers as the ACT score above might. But let me put it this way: If you look at the chart that NWEA (the company that creates the MAP tests) has created to explain the test results, you'll see that the highest grade level described is 11th grade. An 11th grade reading level is listed as 227. That means that my 5th grade daughter can read at a higher level than an average 11th grader! Further, if you look on the chart at the highest of the "higher achievement" numbers, which represent the 95% percentile (often the dividing mark for "gifted students,") you'll see that my 5th grade daughter scored better than the highest scoring 8th graders. That means that she did better than the average gifted 8th grader on the test. Again, we were so proud of her.

But neither of those things is what I want to talk about now...

About three months ago we started giving both of our daughters a daily list of chores that they had to complete. In exchange for those chores we gave them a weekly allowance. Not a ton of money, but enough that they can purchase their own concessions if they go to school events, and they can save for higher expensive items that they want.

Last night Lisa and I watched the 6:30 national newscast on NBC. Almost the entire half hour was about the earthquake in Haiti. Throughout the newscast the TV showed images of the suffering in Haiti, played eye witness accounts of the devastation, and implored viewers to go to the MSNBC website to find out how to contribute to the relief effort. Our younger daughter watched the entire broadcast with us, and when it was over she disappeared for a few moments before coming back down the stairs carrying in her hand her entire allowance from the previous week. She walked over to Lisa and said, "Here, Mommy. I want to give this to the people in Haiti."

Lisa looked her in the eye and said, "Honey, are you sure?"

"Yes," my daughter said. "We have everything, and they have nothing!"

Of all of the reasons to be proud of my children, THAT was the moment when I felt proudest of either of them. I went up to the computer, we got online, and we donated that money to the Red Cross. Lisa and I donated some money of our own as well. What we donated was quite a bit more than what my younger daughter donated, but I tell you this: It wasn't a week's salary.

Netflix and Homophobia

Lisa a couple of weeks ago decided to resubscribe to Netflix after two or three years away from the service, which perhaps explains why this and the previous post both have to do with Netflix. But that's not the point of this blog entry. I just couldn't think of a good lead in.

The point of the blog entry is this: The first two movies that we decided to watch via Netflix have shaken me a little bit and gotten me questioning my male friendships over the years. Those two movies are Brokeback Mountain and I Love You, Man. Both films center around male friendships, the former of the homosexual variety and the latter of the heterosexual variety.

And what's gotten me worried as a result of watching these films centers around that fact that I have NEVER been good at picking up sexual signals from either sex. I can't begin to tell you how many conversations I've had after someone has walked away from a group I've been in that have gone something like this:

ME: She was nice.

SOMEONE ELSE: NICE??? She's was totally flirting with you, dude!

ME: (maybe blushing a little) No, she wasn't!

SOMEONE ELSE: Uh, yeah she was!

ME: How do you know?

SOMEONE ELSE: It was completely obvious! She practically threw herself at you!

ME: Really? I thought she was just being nice.

SOMEONE ELSE: You're an idiot!

And I guess I am when it comes to the area of flirting. I really can't tell when someone is doing it unless they're just absolutely obvious about it. For instance, if she has a t-shirt on that says "I'm flirting with you," or if she walks up to me and whispers in my ear, "Hey, you're my kind of guy!". Anything any more subtle than that and I'm probably not going to pick up on it.  I'm still not sure how I ever ended up dating ANY ONE EVER.

Anyway, back to these two movies...

Brokeback Mountain is, as I mentioned above, famously about a homosexual relationship. But it wasn't that relationship that rattled me (nor the fact that I was willingly watching this film). What bothered me was late in the movie when Jake Gyllenhaal's character Jack, who is married, strikes up a conversation with another married man, whose wife is a friend of his wife. During the conversation the other man mentions a cabin that he has out in the woods and suggests that he and Jack maybe go out there and spend a weekend fishing. In the film the two stare at each other meaningfully, and it's apparent that there is a sexual invitation being extended.

And that got me thinking. I've had friends who have made similar suggestions before, friends who've said that the two of us should get together for a beer after a game sometime, friends who've suggested that we should go deer hunting together some weekend. Were these friends coming on to me? Or did they REALLY want to go hunting? I'm not sure anymore. I'm not always good at making eye contact during conversations. Maybe I missed the meaningful sexual invitation by staring over the head of the person I was talking to.

Luckily for me, I guess, I'm not much of a joiner anyway, so I've never ended up in some compromising position, maybe out in the woods in my camoflauge gear while some guy with his pants down comes after me. But still, I'm wondering what these guys' intentions were.

The second movie I mentioned, I Love You Man, eased my mind a little bit. This film was about two very heterosexual men who had a non-sexual "bromance" with one another. This film--at least at first--comforted me with the idea that two men can have a relationship without being gay.

But in the middle of the movie the main character, who is searching for a best man for his wedding, goes out to dinner with a potential new friend. He's been warned never to go to dinner with a man because it sends the wrong image, and sure enough the man he has dinner with is gay and assumes that the main character is interested in him.

So now I'm worried because I HAVE had dinner alone with a single man on many occasions before, and three questions bother me: 1) Was the person I was having dinner with gay and assuming I was gay, and did he think my lack of a sexual advance was being shy or playing hard to get or something like that? 2) Was the person I was having dinner with worried that I was gay and that I was going to come on to him? 3) Did all of the OTHER people in the restaurant assume that we were gay, too?

I think the end result of these movies is that I might be afraid to be alone with a man now...

Warner Brothers and Netflix

I just read a story online that Netflix and Warner Brothers have reached a new deal whereby Netflix will be allowed to rent out new Warner Brothers releases 28 days after they become available for sale. DVD sales are down, and the thinking is that more people will buy the DVD's rather than waiting the 28 days to rent them. Since Netflix did this, I'm assuming that other video rental places like Blockbuster will follow suit.

This is an absolutely dumb strategy. I can't think of single movie that I have EVER rented that I would have purchased instead if it had been available for purchase a month before. I'm not saying I would never purchase a DVD. If I saw a movie in the theaters, absolutely LOVED it, and knew I'd watch it over and over again, I'd buy it when it came out on DVD. I just purchased two movies for my children for Christmas, both of which met those criteria. Whether they were available for rent had nothing to do with me buying them.

And if it's a movie I haven't seen but really want to see, I don't mind waiting 28 days to rent it. I mean, if time was of the essence, I could have watched it in the theaters months ago. Waiting 28 more days isn't a big deal to me.

The opposite strategy, by the way, has been tried before, too. When my family first got a VCR back in 1985, movies used to be available for rent for months before they were available for sale. Well, I guess you COULD purchase the movie, but you'd have to pay the approximately $150 a movie that the rental stores were being charged. After a few months, once the distributors had sufficiently fleeced the rental stores, the prices dropped to the $20-$30 range.

But then it became apparent that some people really wanted to OWN the movie, not just rent it, so the sale prices for VHS movies, especially big ticket movies, began to premiere in that $20 to $30 range. And eventually all movies dropped into that range.

Blah blah blah. Here's my point: For now and for ever, some movies will be movies we'll want to own, and some will be "renters." And I don't see how this new policy is going to do anything but tick people off. I just don't understand the logic here.

Another Sweasy on the Internet

As I watched this video, I was struck by three things:

1) Why in the world would someone marry into the name "Sweasy," get divorced, but KEEP the married name? How bad must her maiden name have been?

2) What's up with the people on the sides of the video? This is one in a series of videos, and they're in ALL of them!

3) I've written before that maybe this blog gives away too much private information about my family. I'm pretty sure this video gives up WAAAY too much.




(I can't see the video.)

2010

Happy New Year to everyone! No matter what your 2009 was like, I hope your 2010 is even better!

This is the time of year when people make resolutions, and I'm making them, too. One of my resolutions centers around the fact that I've been feeling overworked and overstressed lately. As a result, I've decided to look for ways that I can cut back on extraneous activities that take up precious time. I've decided that writing this blog on a daily basis in one of those activities.

I haven't missed a day since October 9, 2008 (I didn't miss ANY days in 2009, and in fact on a couple of days published TWO posts, meaning that I wrote 367 posts in 2009) and I've really enjoyed writing this blog, but I've also found at time that it's become tedious, almost an extra daily job rather than something I was enjoying doing. Thus, I'm going to cut back. I'm going to continue to write it, but maybe only post twice a week or something like that.

In any event, Happy New Year!