Okay, folks - in the interest of 2009 being a fresh start in a lot of ways (details to follow), the blog is moving to a new--FREE--Wordpress home. I'll keep the paid account for another month while I retrieve and import entries from 2003 - the present to the new blog, but then this domain will vanish forever.
The new blog address is as follows:
New posts are over there, starting today. Please change your links accordingly. I assume Wordpress has an RSS feed, but I haven't figured it out yet. Bear with me for a day or so!
Me: So we signed the contract and we've got about 2 weeks to make the house look halfway decent, then we'll see what happens.
Mom: I already got some fabric books from Dero's and you'll never guess what I saw at the consignment store...
Me: Mom.
Mom: There was this gorgeous dining room set...
Me: Mom...
Mom: And it had all the leaves and 12 chairs with it! Clean lines, that darker wood that you like -
Me: MOM!
Mom: Only $900! I'm thinking about seeing if I can put a hold on it - should I go back and do that?
Me: Mom, not only is our house not even on the market yet, I have not stuck a foot in any other potential home. Plus the fact that our house could take a long time to sell - and I don't even know if I'll have a large, formal dining room!
Mom: Oh, trust me. Those houses your dad and I went to when we visited last time? They all had large formal dining rooms, very open.
Me: Yes, and many of those houses you visited--without me, might I add--were about $100,000 out of our price range!
Mom: You can get a lot of house for the money right now!
Me: Provided I can actually SELL MY HOUSE, perhaps. And not to be morbid, but you do realize that your dining room set will be mine one day, right? It's not like I entertain regularly or anything.
Mom: I plan to live a really long time, and you need a dining room set for Christmas at least.
Me: Could we maybe wait until I have a potential house in mind before you start purchasing random furniture?
Mom: (Sighs) Well, okay.
Me: Okay.
Mom: But I still might ask about the hold option.
Seriously, am I just getting too out-of-touch in my declining years, or isn't this guy over already?
Or maybe I'm just not all that amused by someone who takes advantage of folks' better, i.e. trusting, natures, to turn them into the butt of a joke. On camera. Whoo, doggie! Them's some good yuks there!
Guess I'm insufficiently ironic for 2009, huh?
This weekend was full of fun for the family - we attended the children's symphony concert, where we were regaled with giant puppets of the sort normally found at anti-war rallies in Berkeley, though with less blood and no effigies of George Bush; The Boy had a friend over to argue about video games for approximately 4 hours; and I managed to complete my Disney photo album via Snapfish. I heart Snapfish.
All of this fun served to take my mind off of current events; well, except for a couple of stupid comments in our Sunday School class that had Hublet rolling his eyes and barely refraining from scathing replies. He persevered! Hurray for Hublet! And note to wide-eyed rubes whose names I do not even know--yes, our Sunday school class is that big now--perhaps one reason why the happy folk of Europe spend all their time in coffee bars instead of at work is because a) They have 4 people crammed into 200 square feet at home, and b) there aren't as many opportunities for work. I could point you to an excessively glum group of scots I know who would bear this out, if you were inclined to listen rather than vomit your pathetic vapid self-flagellation all over the rest of us, but I like to try to practice forebearance for at least two hours a week, so I remained silent. Yeah, yeah, no gold star from God for me, but I am trying not to suck. Maybe I'll get there before I kick the bucket.
And also, if your main question concerning "getting back to the simple life" has to do primarily with how to simplify WITHOUT ACTUALLY SACRIFICING ANY MATERIAL COMFORTS, I'm thinking you missed the point. A lot. Repeatedly.
Hmm. Rereading the above, it becomes apparent that perhaps my weekend vacation from reality wasn't too successful after all. So maybe I shouldn't have been surprised to receive a visit from my long-absent friend Irony this morning, who came bearing this delicious article, which contains the following quote:
"Rep. Barney Frank charged Monday that a decision by financially strapped insurance giant AIG to pay millions in executive bonuses amounts to 'rewarding incompetence.' "
The jokes, as Irony pointed out, write themselves.
One of the points I have to make--repeatedly--to folks here in academia who are going to interact with media, is that it pays to know who you're dealing with. In a general sense, it means that if you're being interviewed for a print publication versus TV, the print reporter is probably going to have more time to get it right, and will most likely be someone whose entire job consists of covering the topic that you're being interviewed about.
Of course, since no NC publication employs a science beat reporter anymore this is a tad misleading, but let's just move on.
Whereas with TV journalists, their prep time for a story tends to go something like this:
Desk: Hey! There's a thing with a dog at the university! Get the story!
TV Journo: Umm, what?
Desk: Here's the press release. It's in 15 minutes! Go!
So generally speaking, when I do media training for academics, I tell them that TV reporters are usually less prepared than their print counterparts. I do this primarily so that the academic will not get shirty with the reporter on camera when said reporter has not familiarized him-or-herself with the academic's entire ouvre. Sometimes this backfires, and instead of a prickly professor, you get someone treating the reporter like a sweet but slow child, but most of the time, you can avoid unnecessary unpleasantness by just bearing in mind that nine times out of ten, TV folks aren't real clear about what's happening--particularly if it's science related.
But then, sometimes you get the TV journalist who embodies the stereotype of the Evil Agenda-Having Reporter, who already HAS the story, thank you very much, and would prefer that you egghead types limit your quotes to those that fit the narrative.
And it's harder to tell them apart than you may think, which leads me to the point of this post.
Last night I was watching the local news, which was doing the obligatory embryonic stem cell story, wherein apparently all science has been freed from the dark ages by a strike of Saint O's pen and some blithe handwaving over all that "ethical" stuff. Perhaps it's above his pay grade.
Anyway. The reporter introduced the topic, then brought on the Dying Baby Who Can Be Saved By Stem Cell Research--except that the stem cells involved in saving the baby came from umbilical cord blood, not embryonic research. Well, okay. Hurray for saving the baby and stuff!
The you had the obligatory researcher talking about how embryonic research will cure every other disease ever, because those cells can become every other cell. Yes, and the Japanese figured out in 2007 that so can adult harvested stem cells. But whatever. The piece ends on the obligatory "stem cell research, yay!" but never got into the fact that lives are also being saved by using ethically "clean" stem cell research, and tends to conflate all stem cell research with embryonic research.
I was puzzled. The reporter merely mentioned that the stem cells being used were umbilical in passing, but neglected to make the obvious connections - which were that stem cell research can and did continue sans embryos, it was apparently successful, and that scientists haven't been sitting around twiddling their thumbs for eight years, all, "Oh noes! The federal government won't give me money for embryos! No more research for me, I guess!"
So I was left to wonder - disingenuous, or stupid?
I am a gigantic cheeseball and am about to explode with excitement, because the fam is heading to Disneyworld!
Weeeeeeeeeeeee!
Ahem. I would like to interrupt my crazed squeeing to point out that during this time of financial upheaval, the Big Arm family is doing its level best to support the national economy by blowing a wad of cash on a vacation destination populated by animated rodents. You're welcome, America.
Yeah, I got nothin' more substantial than that right now; deal with it. In the next few weeks, once I have a handle on all the extraneous crud going on chez casa Big Arm I will share why I've been mostly AWOL, but right now I'm too focused on the big mouse to be bothered with or by the usual suspects here at work or elsewhere.
Oh, and it snowed here last night. So Florida is looking better and better.
I literally don't get it. Okay, so you get a penalty for tripping, but you and another guy can beat the crap out of each other on the ice for about 3 minutes and the refs will just stand there, and then you get a penalty? Or tossed out? I don't know. So how come they didn't fight after every roughing up incident? What made the one incident such a big, fat, hairy deal? Everybody was getting slammed around the entire game. Whatever, heavily padded guys with unpronounceable names.
And how the hell do you delay the game? I'm just trying to figure out where the puck is and it all seems to be moving pretty quickly to me, so again, whatever, people.
But The Boy got a foam finger, and yelled "woooo!" at the appropriate moments when Ric Flair was on the jumbotron, and our team won, so I'm calling our yearly foray to the arena a success.
In other news, clawing my way back from the phlegm-producing cold from hell, and feeling much better. Of course, this feeling is somewhat tempered by the fact that I have to spend tomorrow corralling chemists (who are notorious for being whiny and feeling put-upon on this campus - no clue why) for the media. God only knows what they'll say on camera.
I need more vitamin C.
