Recently in Annoyed in America Category
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?
