Timely Questions for Reverend Harold Camping

Dear Reverend Harold Camping:

You must be very busy, what with the Rapture coming tomorrow and all, but I’m hoping for just a minute of your time. Actually “a minute of your time” is exactly what I want to ask you about. Because what’s really extraordinarily clever about your Bible calculations is that you’ve not only figured out God’s super-secret plan to Rapture the Earth on May 21, 2011, but also that he’s going to do it one time zone at a time. According to press accounts of your discovery:

the massive doomsday earthquake will start at the International Date Line before moving west. New Zealand . . . will get hit first – at 6 p.m. local time. And then that wave of destruction will roll around the world, wreaking havoc at 6 p.m. in each time zone.

Not only was it smart of God to come up with that cool plan for phased destruction--I mean, Rapturing the whole Earth at once would be kind of unwieldy, especially the Christian parts where there are so many souls to collect--but it’s especially neat how he wrote down the whole plan in code all those thousands of years ago in the Bible. Pretty funny that he tried to throw us off the trail with that whole “but of that day and hour knoweth no man.” He sure fooled me, but he didn’t fool Harold Camping!

I do have a couple of questions, though.

No, I’m not going to ask “what about Daylight Saving Time.” Please. Obviously because God knows everything, he knew that we humans were going to invent Daylight Saving Time, so he factored that into his Bible code.

And same goes for the whole time zones / standard time concept. Sure, in Biblical times and for practically all of human history time was reckoned locally based on the position of the Sun. But again, I’m sure God foresaw that one day there would be railroads, telegraphs, and a corresponding need for uniformity. And because His plan was to Rapture Boston and Cincinnati at exactly the same moment, instead of the 52 minutes apart that 6 p.m. would occur in those cities if we still used “Local Apparent Solar Time” like Abraham and Jesus, God just coded that into the Bible, too.

But here’s the thing. Not to second-guess God or anything, but actually doing it the old fashioned way would kind of make more sense. Because you can totally see how a continuously moving wave of destruction, travelling at an equatorial velocity of just over 1500 feet per second so as to hit each spot at “true” 6 p.m., would work.

Whereas the whole-time-zones-at-a-time model presents some difficulties. Take for example a town that straddles the Texas / New Mexico border. When the Doomsday earthquake flattens everything on the Texas side, will it be made up of some kind of special shockwaves that know to stop at the state line? And what if it turns out that I’m one of the saved, and I get Raptured while straddling the border? Do I risk the right half of my soul being “left behind” for an hour?

And actually, speaking of Daylight Saving Time, did God make clear how your calculations should deal with places that don’t observe it? Like if I’m in Arizona do I get an extra hour, even though Armageddon is already in full swing due North in Utah? But if I step onto the Navajo reservation, which does observe Daylight Saving Time, then I’m toast? What if I’m a member of the Hopi nation, so my land is within the Navajo reservation, but my tribe keeps with the rest of Arizona in not observing Daylight Saving Time? Supposing I’m off the reservation at 5:15, and I want to get home before the Rapture to make sure I didn’t leave the oven on? Will God understand that I’m only passing through Navajo land to get to the Hopi section, and give me the extra 45 minutes?

Even apart from Daylight Saving issues, it seems like the Rapture is going to have to do some jumping around. If you look at a world time zone map, it’s pretty complicated. For all kinds of political reasons you’ve got places where it can be 6 p.m. already even though somewhere to the East still calls it 5 p.m. (Or 5:30 or even 5:15.)

And then you’ve got places like Kashmir, where no one can agree whether it’s part of India (GMT + 5:30) or Pakistan (GMT + 5:00). Do the Hindus get Raptured half an hour before the Muslims? I mean, I understand they’re all going to Hell anyway because they haven’t accepted Jesus, but it would be useful to know.

Also what about at the South Pole? By convention, Amundsen Scott Station uses New Zealand time, but technically speaking the Pole is in every time zone. From what I’ve heard, that place can become a den of iniquity for the “winter-over” crew, owing to the gender imbalance and prolonged isolation in darkness.  So the schedule on which their souls will be called to account is not just an academic question.

And of course there’s the International Space Station to consider. Here we see why it was definitely smart for God to choose standard instead of solar time. Can you imagine if he had to Rapture the astronauts 16 times in one day?! My only question is whether He’ll use Greenwich Mean Time, which the station normally follows, or adjust for the crew’s current temporary shift to Space Shuttle Endeavour’s Mission Elapsed Time. Your Bible calculations take that into account, right?

I would appreciate the courtesy of a prompt response to these questions, preferably by 6 p.m. tomorrow. 6 p.m. my time, I mean.

Gilbert Gottfried and the Discourse on Disaster

A Portrait of Gilbert Gottfried with a Dead Aflac Duck
on His Head by Dan Lacey (www.faithmouse.com). 
Used with permission of the artist.

As the world confronts escalating conflict and looming nuclear disaster, the Holy Prepuce has been ruminating on a more consequential matter: the Gilbert Gottfried sacking.

Why, exactly, did “tweeting” a series of earthquake / tsunami jokes get Gottfried summarily canned as the voice of AFLAC? Gottfried, after all, famously broke the ice at a post-9-11 Friar’s Club roast by recounting “The Aristocrats,” the classic improvised litany of incest, scatophilia, and a rotating menu of other horribles. So it’s not as if AFLAC was allergic to controversial material.

I suspect that Gottfried ran up against an unwritten rule of comedy: disaster jokes are not allowed to have identifiable authors.

The re-telling of disaster jokes is permissible because they are both ubiquitous and anonymous. Anyone of my generation could tell you, for example, how we knew Christa McAuliffe had dandruff, what “NASA” stands for, and why there were no showers on the Challenger. Elliot Orring’s “Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster” (1987) collects fourteen such examples, and I found no more than a handful unfamiliar twenty-five years after the Challenger explosion. Some were undoubtedly adapted from prior maritime or aviation accidents; several I have since heard re-purposed for Princess Diana or 9-11. Folklorists collect this material: Bill Ellis’s “A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes” (October 5, 2001) identifies twelve discreet “cycles” addressing a range of events including the Kennedy assassination, the Jonestown suicides, and the Lockerbie PanAm 103 bombing.

The universality of these jokes allows us to rationalize their creation as an instinctive defense mechanism with a plausible genesis in evolutionary psychology. The impulse to detach from tragedy through humor serves as a counterbalance to our empathy and attachment, traits essential to social animals but paralyzing if unchecked in times of crisis. Laugh today about yesterday’s sabre-tooth tiger attack and you pull yourself together to hunt mastodon, eat, and live to pass along your genes.

When these jokes seem to rise from the zeitgeist, the telling itself can become the primary gag, the observational meta-joke that human beings are sick bastards who find this funny. It works because we’re all in this together: I’ve heard this one, you’ve heard that one, someone like us must have come up with this; everyone’s responsible so no one is.

But when Gottfried tweets Japan jokes as a professional comedian, there’s him and there’s us. We have no ownership, no liability as the kind of people who think this stuff up. He’s the sick bastard who finds this funny, we’re decent folk who need to take a stand against this trash.

I also think Gottfried is a victim of the Comedian On Twitter syndrome. Social media’s low-cost marketing comes at a price for comedians: fans expect free, instant funny. And so the temptation is to brain-dump ideas that might otherwise never see the light of day.

Looking through Gottfried’s tweets, and putting aside any question of taste, most of them are poorly constructed and don’t really work as jokes. A few would be salvageable with editing. One or two seem to stand on their own:

I asked a girl in Japan to have sex with me. She said “okay, but you'll have to sleep in the wet spot.”

This would be a decent mid-set gag, a supplemental laugh on an established subject. It trades on a mixing of taboos: sex and disaster, but in an understated, minimally-graphic fashion. It turns on clever incongruities of type, number, and scale. And it’s a rather sweet homage to its “sleep in the wet spot” precursor jokes, those Sexual Revolution-era meditations on negotiating casual sex and its aftermath in that brave new gender-equal world.

Here is the best of the lot:

I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said “is there a school in this area.” She said “not now, but just wait."

The central equivocation is actually a stroke of genius: the ambiguity in meaning is possible only in the apocalyptic conditions of this specific moment. Delivering the punchline in the agent’s voice furthers the uncertainty: Does she intend the meaning we perceive? If so, does she take Gottfried’s question so literally as to assume a flotsam schoolhouse would meet his needs? What is her attitude toward the catastrophe if she is breezily offering its consequences as a selling point?

The fundamentals are also solid: a classic setup-line-punchline, with a strong core incongruity between mundane and extraordinary elements. I award bonus points for the dependence on visual imagination, generating dual meaning through reliance on imagery highly specific to the present moment when footage of the deluge is seared into our collective consciousness.

Indeed, the imagery invoked softens the joke by substituting masonry for human flesh. Elliot Orring points out that a defining feature of the Challenger disaster was the “shield[ing]” of “the view of that human disaster miles above the earth . . . by flame and the opaque wall of the shuttle cabin,” whereas “beyond these speakable images of flame and falling debris lay the imaginable but unspeakable images of horrific trauma and mutilation.” Many Challenger jokes operated, Orring argues, by “forc[ing] us to confront what lies behind the speakable media images that are created or manipulated for our consumption.”

The disaster in Japan was not so antiseptic: cameras covered every angle of the destruction, making blanket censorship of death impossible. Gottfried’s text in some fashion works the reverse of a Challenger joke. Instead of laying bare an obscured mayhem, it renders the devastation more palatable by focusing on a cartoonish inanimate object, without speculation as to what could lie inside.

Pre-Twitter, Gottfried might have crossed out five of his ideas, tried the rest at a small club on a Tuesday night, and wound up with the “school” bit as the one piece of usable material. It’s an excellent joke, standing alone, whose merits may render the subject matter forgivable. But by surrounding this pearl with an unvarnished barrage of lesser attempts, Gottfried came across as desperate for laughs, and his use of the subject exploitative.

I’m a tough crowd.

An Open Letter to danah boyd (an Ethnographer Who Does Not Capitalize Her Name)

Dear Dr. boyd:

Congratulations on achieving position #1 in the "Social Media Ethnographers" tab of every reporter's Rolodex. As April's Facebook F8 conference approached, I predicted an electronic avalanche of danah boyd, and the media did not disappoint. Your ubiquity is confirmed to me not only by Google News search but also, no doubt dearer to your heart, by re-posted snippets of your wisdom bubbling through my Facebook "stream."

Now, if I may, a small anecdote:

I once attended the recital of an Arnold, Missouri dance school, and discovered that one of the older girls had listed herself in the program as simply "Essence." Essence was in several numbers, and for each one the billing read something like, "Mary Jane Jaworski, Erin O'Sullivan, Joanne Simmons, Essence." And I have to say, Essence was a pretty good dancer. But instead of thinking "how nice for this girl that she dances so well," all I could think was "you do not get to call yourself 'Essence' in the recital program of an Arnold, Missouri dance school."

Essence came vividly back to mind some twenty years later, as I encountered the following sentence in an October, 2009 CNN.com article:

Ethnographer danah boyd, who does not capitalize her name, said she watched the class divide emerge while conducting research of American teens' use of social networks in 2006.

Any insights I might have been developing on the subject of the article (socioeconomic stratification in social media use) flew through the windshield as my attention screeched to an abrupt "wait, what?" A quick reversing, then, again: "Ethnographer danah boyd, who does not capitalize her name." It was now time for me to Google you, because anyone who "does not capitalize her name" to the point of instructing a CNN reporter that she "does not capitalize her name" must surely maintain a personal website on which she she explains why.

And you do. Visitors can learn that you legally changed your name to "danah michele boyd" as the result of a "mental tangent" in which you pondered:

What's in a name? What's its worth? Why is it so valuable that it is to be capitalized? Down this path, i started thinking about names as descriptors versus separate entities. Isn't a name simply another unique adjective for me? A label? I am not my name; my name is simply another descriptor of me. Should i weight that descriptor as anything more valuable than the other adjectives used to describe me?

Well, danah, to begin with: no, your name is not "simply another unique adjective" for you. As it happens, names are not adjectives at all. They are proper nouns, which we capitalize in English probably to reflect the special attention that humans like to pay to other humans, the places they live, the groups they form, and the unique objects they create. Surely an ethnographer of social media knows that.

What interests me more is that your "mental tangent" was an outgrowth of an earlier decision to stop capitalizing the pronoun "I":

I was always bothered by the fact that the first person singular pronoun is capitalized in english -- i always thought it was quite self-righteous. . . . Ever since i was a kid, i was told that the world does not revolve around me, yet our written culture is telling me something entirely different. . . . i gave up on giving it such a special level of importance -- it is referring to me, right? I thought an attempt at minimalizing the individualization could start at home.

In order to test the sincerity of your belief that "the world does not revolve around" you, I suggest an experiment. First spend ½ hour or so poking around CNN.com. Then report back as to how many other names appearing on that site require explanatory parentheticals in order for editor, reader, and reporter to clarify that pretension, rather than slovenly proofreading, is at work.

Here is the list of people who get to spell their names without capitalization:

1. Celebrity poets of the 20th Century

2. Lesbian Vegetarian Canadian country music stars

3. Postmodern chroniclers of the Black female experience in America

Oh, I'm sorry... it looks like "ethnographers of social media" is not on the list.

Yours Sincerely,
Holy Prepuce

Brown

When did "Brown" become the new thing that we self-important intellectuals are supposed to call everyone who is not of predominantly European, African, and/or East Asian origin? I don't actually object to the term as such. Assuming that we are not going to abandon anytime soon the project of categorizing people by racial or ethnic origin, "Brown" does a fairly good job of conveying American social attitudes toward the people it describes: not subject to the disabilities of Blackness, but not afforded the privileges of Whiteness, either. What bugs me is that everyone around me started using the word without explanation or acknowledgement, as if they had received a universal memorandum so unassailable in its logic as to preclude further discussion.

I did not receive this memorandum. Rather, I distinctly recall coming across the term by accident, in the unprepossessing forum of an "Ask Amy" column. Amy's correspondent complained that her mother disapproved of the writer's boyfriend: "the problem? He is Brown and I am not." There was "Brown" in the Washington Post, a daily newspaper of national reach, as if the term had been in common usage since Dr. Johnson retired to Gough Square. While I could puzzle out the writer's intention from the context, I felt entitled to a footnote, a word of explanation from the Post's copy desk to the effect of "attention readers: by virtue of Style Manual revision 234B, persons of other than predominantly European, African, or East Asian origin will henceforth be referred to as Brown."

I am only a little annoyed because this reminds me of what happened with the word "Asian." When I was a kid, everybody called people of East and South East Asian origin "Oriental." Self-important intellectuals called them "Oriental"; "Orientals" called themselves "Oriental." And then it was decided that the term should change to "Asian." The switch started on the East Coast--at the time I was applying to colleges, everyone I knew in the Midwest still said "Oriental," but I was scolded for using the term while on a college visit in the East. And I've used the word "Asian" ever since, not because I believe that even one person in ten knows why "Oriental" is offensive, but because saying it makes you sound like a redneck. My change in usage, and everyone else's, has made the transition self-reinforcing: anyone under the age of 70 who uses the term "Oriental" today is either unusually sheltered or being deliberately provocative.

(If you're curious, "Oriental" is supposed to be offensive because it divides the world into Occident (West, from the Latin occidere, "to set") and Orient (East, from the Latin oriri, "to rise") with it being Eurocentric to label someone as being "from the East," thereby implying that the speaker's society is located at the central reference point. Ask your Asian friend in the next cubicle over if she knew that.)

But the abandonment of "Oriental" has resulted in a net loss of linguistic specificity, because, again, assuming that categorizing others by ethnicity is an inescapable part of human experience, "Oriental" had a less ambiguous reach than "Asian." Today, when I say "Asian," the listener must decode whether I'm just using the substitute terminology for people we both grew up knowing as "Oriental," or whether I really could be talking about someone of Sri Lankan or Kazakhstani origin. And if I'm talking to a British person, they must guess whether I am translating for their benefit to the British meaning of "Asian," which refers to people of Indian subcontinental ancestry. In America, of course, such people are now "Brown."

And so, much as it vexes me, I too have caught myself saying "Brown." All I want to know is, who gets to decide these things? To whom have we ceded the power to crawl inside our brains and reprogram our labels for the world outside? No, don't answer that question. I fear the response will include a citation to an academic journal of which the title ends in "Studies," and an article making repeated use of "unpack."

***

On a related note, can I just take this opportunity to question the assumption held by many American office workers that Latino janitors don't know the English word "trash"? Whenever people in my office want to dispose of something too large to fit in a standard trash can, they tape a sign to it that says "basura."

Now, if you moved to another country and took a job where a significant part of your job responsibilities included collecting trash, don't you think that within the first day or two you'd probably pick up the word in that country's language for "trash"?

Really what those signs should say is "look, I know a word in Spanish!"

The Monty Hall Problem Meets The Bachelorette

Last Monday evening inexplicably found the Holy Prepuce attending a Bachelorette viewing party. In a turn of events that almost merited its billing as "the most dramatic Final Rose Ceremony ever," previously-eliminated bachelor Reid Rosenthal returned unexpectedly to the program.

Reid's arrival greatly surprised bachelorette Jillian Harris, who had just dispatched finalist Kiptyn Locke and was about to declare her love for alpha male Ed Swiderski. (In the post-feminist world of reality television, the distaff may choose its betrothed, even sampling candidates' sexual talents along the way, but the marriage proposal must come from the spear.)

My fellow viewers expressed differing views as to whether Jillian should dump Ed for Reid. I had no opinion as to the gentlemen's relative merits, having seen too few episodes to form one, and was disappointed at my inability to participate in the exercise.

But then, I had a brainwave: Jillian must switch. Why? The Monty Hall Problem, of course.

Imagine that Jillian is a contestant on Let's Make a Deal. The host, Monty Hall, shows her three doors, and tells her there is car behind one of them. Behind the other two are goats. (As a child, I often wondered whether losing Let's Make a Deal contestants were required to take home the livestock, and if so, whether they took proper care of it.)

Jillian chooses door #1. Monty, who knows where the car is, opens door #3, revealing a goat. Monty now gives Jillian the options of standing by her selection of door #1 or switching to door #2. Assume that under the rules of the show, Monty must always open an unpicked door, must only reveal a goat (not the car) in doing so, and, regardless of where the car is, must always offer the opportunity to switch doors. Assume also that when Monty has a choice of doors to open--i.e. when both unpicked doors contain goats--he is required to choose at random.

The question: should Jillian stay with door #1, should she switch to door #2, or does it make no difference? The answer, which nearly everyone gets wrong, is that she should switch to door #2. Doing so doubles her chance of winning the car.

People usually get this wrong because they remain fixated on the one-in-three a priori odds of the car being behind any particular door. Opening a door doesn't change where the car is, they reason, so the relative odds of it being behind #1 or #2 remain what they were: even.

The conclusion that switching makes no difference fails to recognize the conditional probabilities that kick in with the new information conveyed by Monty's choice. Formal explanations are discussed here, but put simply, where a contestant has chosen door #1, Monty has only a 50/50 likelihood of opening door #3 if the car is behind door #1, but must open door #3 if the car is behind door #2. Hence, Monty's choice to open door #3 is twice as likely to signify a car behind door #2 as it is to signify a car behind door #1.

On The Bachelorette Jillian isn't trying to pick a car, she's trying to pick the perfect husband. But unlike in normal life, where she would have the opportunity to choose from many men encountered over a number of years, her choice on The Bachelorette is subject to Let's Make a Deal-like constraints. A contestant on Let's Make a Deal can't go hunting for free cars wherever and whenever she wants, she must take her chances right now, with the three doors before her.

For the sake of analysis, let's take the final two Bachelorette episodes as a single "game." Thus, we'll treat Jillian's decisions to eliminate Reid and Kiptyn as a single event, i.e., the selection of Ed out of three possible suitors.

We're allowed to do this because of my next assumption, which is that Jillian's conscious mind has become confused. It did an OK job of whittling the field of bachelors down to three, but the exhausting whirlwind of travel, green-room liquor, and sudden stardom has negated its ability to choose intelligently among the finalists. Jillian's selection of Ed is based on irrelevant heuristics, as was the order in which she eliminated Reid and Kiptyn.

Assume also that Jillian's subconscious mind is unaffected; that it wants what's best for Jillian and knows which one of the three men is right for her. But being subconscious, it can't fully direct Jillian's decisions. It can only cause her to consider, or not consider, certain courses of action.

Until Reid shows up, Jillian's conscious mind has been driving her decisions. The rules of The Bachelorette require that she eliminate a prescribed number of bachelors in each formalized Rose Ceremony, and she has dutifully complied. But with Reid's return at the emotional climax of the series, the producers have changed the rules unexpectedly. Jillian's guard is down, and her subconscious mind seizes the opportunity: it makes Jillian consider taking Reid back.

Jillian's subconscious mind is Monty Hall. Jillian thought she had made a one-time choice (Ed) among three "doors." Her subconscious has presented her with a second chance at one of the "doors" (Reid) after exposing the third "door" (Kiptyn) as a "goat."

How do we know that Kiptyn is a goat? Let's make another assumption here: out of fairness, the same Bachelorette producers who changed the rules to permit Jillian a second chance at Reid would also allow her a second chance at Kiptyn. In other words, when Reid walked onto the set, Jillian could have said, "I know I don't want Reid, so if I get a do-over, I'll think about using it on Kiptyn." (Given the Molly / Melissa switch on the last Bachelor, the assumption is not unreasonable.) Jillian's subconscious thus has the power to "open" either Reid or Kiptyn by causing Jillian not to reconsider him. And just as Monty Hall is not permitted to eliminate the car, presumably Jillian's subconscious isn't going to "open" the perfect husband and subject Jillian to the pointless cruelty of choosing between goats. Jillian doesn't think about a Kiptyn do-over; Kiptyn is "opened"; ergo Kiptyn is a goat.

A final assumption: Reid's reappearance is sufficiently destabilizing that it compels Jillian at least to consider dumping Ed. Jillian's subconscious can't force her to think of no one but Ed, even if it believes that he is the perfect husband. Jillian's conscious mind must make the choice between Ed and Reid.

So, should Jillian switch to Reid? The Monty Hall Problem tells us yes. Given Jillian's initial choice of Ed and Reid's return, it is two to one that the "opening" of Kiptyn signifies that Reid is the "car"--the perfect husband.

Unfortunately (SPOILER ALERT, in case the finale is still queued on your TiVo), Jillian does not switch, and is now engaged to Ed. She has settled for an ill-suited marriage, life's ultimate game of Let's Make a Deal.

This has been the nerdiest Rose Ceremony ever.

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Gaza

You know what I think we should do to solve the crisis in Gaza? I say we get a whole bunch of 747s and take out all of the seats so they can hold 1000 people each. Then we land them at Gaza Yasser Arafat International Airport (GZA), and when the stairways drive up we have a State Department official come out of each plane with a big stack of Green Cards. And then anybody who wants to can get on the planes, and we fly them all to Montana or Wyoming where we give them a big chunk of federal land that is twice the size of the current state of Israel, and everybody gets a brand-new doublewide with water/sewer hookup and premium cable.

Because you have to figure that despite all the rhetoric, a good percentage of Gazans have got to be saying to themselves, "Dude, death to Israel and all that, but this sucks. I'm living 6 to a room, my ass is full of shrapnel, and my mom wants me to blow myself up over some orange grove my grandfather supposedly owned in '48. In America, they have this shopping mall with a roller coaster right inside the goddamn food court. And also they have these chairs where you put in a dollar and the chair gives you a massage, but nobody even uses them because you can sit in the one at the Brookstone for free. And there are these machines that mix Coke with crushed ice and you drink it with a straw, but it's a special staw that opens into a little spoon at the bottom so you can scoop the ice out instead if that's what you want to do. Whereas here, the electricity works three hours a day and Hamas confiscated my spoon. Also, in America, there's this MTV show called 'A Double Shot at Love,' where twelve straight guys and twelve lesbians all live in the same house with these bisexual twin sisters. And every week the twins have to eliminate some of the guys and some of the lesbians, and at the end the winners and the twins have a big double wedding in a hot tub. Dude, screw orange groves."

I'm just saying.

Smartass Gets a Toaster

Mrs. P and I recently became proud owners of a T-Fal Avante Deluxe two-slice apparatus, and as a public service I thought I would reproduce, with annotations, portions of the instruction manual:

After a week of staring expectantly at that cardboard box, hoping for breakfast, I'm glad I finally consulted the instructions.

What?! And I bet you're going to tell me this "bread" is "sold separately."

But... but... you just told me I had to...?!

Not strictly an "instruction" (unless you are the toaster), but reassuring nonetheless.

This is generally how it works with toasters on Planet Earth, yes.

But how am I going to clean this fellow if I can't put him under the faucet? Wait, I know: the dishwasher!

Damn. Are you sure?


Curses!

This requirement excludes two of the three persons in my household.

toast \'tōst\ v.t.: to render (as bread) crisp, hot, and brown via a process of heating and drying.

Eliot Spitzer Swallows

Okay, two things I want to say about Eliot Spitzer and the Emperors Club investigation:

First, it's not the prostitution that pisses me off. As long as the world contains human females, evolved to mate selectively, and human males, evolved to mate indiscriminately, money will change hands for nookie. Criminalizing the exchange just ensures that the industry will be run by criminals.

I wouldn't go to a prostitute myself; partly because I am married, which I interpret to preclude all extracurricular schtupping, whether fee-based or charitable, and partly because I don't find barely concealed contempt all that sexy. But I don't think it should be illegal, and if the same testosterone that fueled Spitzer's ambitious rise to power fuels multi-thousand-dollar sessions as "Client-9" at the Mayflower Hotel, that should concern no one but Mrs. Spitzer. It certainly should not concern the U.S. Attorney's Office.

But if it's going to be illegal, Spitzer ought to have had at least the decency to refrain from the very conduct for which he sent people to jail as New York's Attorney General. So as I say, it's not the prostitution, it's the hypocrisy that gets me exercised.

With that out of the way I want, second, to direct your attention to the criminal Complaint in the Emperors Club investigation. According to the Complaint, the website www.emperorsclubvip.com

ranked the prostitutes using a ranking system from one to seven diamonds, and charged hourly rates according to the assigned ranking. For example, according to the Website, the Emperors Club charged $1,000 per hour for a three-diamond prostitute, and $3,100 per hour for a seven-diamond prostitute.

The question that comes to mind is whether one could really articulate seven meaningfully distinct strata of prostitutes to justify such a granular rating system. Given a double-blind presentation, could a connoisseur accurately distinguish a four-diamond hooker from a five?

The Complaint goes on to inform us that emperorsclubvip.com

offered the Emperors Club's most valued clients "membership" in the "Icon Club," a status which allowed the clients to access restricted areas of the Website and permitted them to schedule appointments for illegal prostitution services with the most highly-ranked prostitutes whose fees started at $5,500 per hour.

So in fact there were at least eight Emperors Club prostitute ranks, and quite possibly more, given that the fees of the most highly-ranked prostitutes "started" at $5,500. This raises the same question as before, but, more fundamentally... fifty-five hundred dollars an hour?

Now, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of sex. On the list of things I like, it's right up there with chocolate ice cream and amusement parks, and I dare say it even beats out the fantasy of owning my own Slurpee machine. But (ignoring for the moment my above disclaimer) there is no one-hour act, no matter how skillful, original, or debased, for which you could convince me to pay $5,500. Not to two women. Not even to identical twins.

What on earth could possibly justify such a fee, Eliot? Do these women have a second vagina or something? Jesus Christ, Alan Dershowitz doesn't charge that much.

Holy Quid Pro Quo

Friday night found the Holy Prepuce channel surfing over to the Christian Broadcasting Network membership telethon. My interest in Pat Robertson's flagship media organ had been piqued by Robertson's Charles Foster Kane-worthy plan to buy the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, presumably in order to shut down its critical coverage of him. (Among other topics, the Virginian-Pilot has exposed Robertson's non-profit Operation Blessing as a front for his commercial diamond mining enterprise.)

The segment in progress as I tuned into the telethon concerned the proprietor of a Florida-based Karaoke entertainment company, who attributed his growing success to the favor of Jesus Christ. A few years ago, this fellow had been nearly bankrupt. God had spoken to this man and told him to spend his last dollars not on, say, rent, but instead as a "seed offering" to CBN. Sure enough, within a few months the karaoke business took off, and three short years later he employed eighteen DJs and a fleet of as many mobile karaoke units. And all because he had "sown" his cash with CBN--a practice he now continued through tithing, which he emphasized was "not about the money, but about obedience."

Following a brief intermission of typical telethon fare (donation thermometer rising, bells ringing, operators cheering) a new segment began. This vignette concerned a young couple who had been scrounging to make ends meet. But after sending one dollar, just one dollar to CBN, the wife found a ten dollar bill in the laundry. She sent this money to CBN, and three weeks later, her grandmother's estate settled (it had been tied up in the courts for over a year) and she received $10,000. God then spoke to the husband "in that way that God speaks to you," and directed that 10% of this windfall be "sown" with CBN. Flash forward one year, and the couple now lives in a beautiful home, with new cars, a thriving business, etc., etc.

Occasionally the program would cut away to a segment about the relief work performed by Operation Blessing in some developing nation, but clearly such details about what CBN planned to do with the money were secondary to the monetary payback the almighty had planned for viewers who would only pick up the phone and "seed."

This was not the first time I had encountered the sow/reap metaphor from a Christian "ministry"--I have received several appeals in the mail from an Arizona outfit known as the Don Stewart Association, promising me "an Unveiling of Money Blessings" if I would "stretch [my] faith and Prove God with a Seed Faith Gift of $30." One of the mailings even included a packet of oil, with which I was instructed to anoint my "purse or wallet, some financial papers, or bills."

But something else struck me as familiar about CBN's appeal--a feeling that I had seen all of this before on cable television. And then it dawned on me where: those "No Money Down" real estate infomercials! The plot lines were nearly identical: an impoverished protagonist makes a small investment, and through some mysterious process (the details of which are never very clear), winds up rolling in dough. The visual elements are interchangeable--well-coiffed white people in big houses with oversized furniture, interspersed with cutaways of expensive cars driving along the ocean. Of course, the paths to riches being sold are different--I'll leave it to the reader to predict whether slipping Jehovah a sawbuck for some Karaoke bookings has greater prospects for success than hitting up complete strangers for seller-financing--but the central concepts are the same.

Part of me feels that anyone credulous enough to believe the creator of the entire universe will go to bat for them in probate court if they send $20 to some cable channel deserves to go broke. But another part of me, the part with empathy for those less fortunate, wishes there were a way to shut down these con men who wrap themselves in the mantle of spirituality while shaking down the desperate for their last dollars.

I am all for religiously-based charitable appeals when there is some trace of theological content to the request. If you want to get on the air and ask for money to feed the children of Madagascar because that's what Jesus would have done, more power to you (assuming the money goes where you say it will.) But the telethon I saw was strictly a dollars-and-cents proposition: lay a C-note on God (who doesn't handle cash directly, so CBN will gladly accept it on his behalf), and the big guy will hit you back with a grand. If CBN's message were directed at rich people, I would shrug and say a fool and his money are soon parted. But when it is so obviously targeted at people struggling to ends meet, I say it's nauseating.

Support the Troops!

The recent House of Representatives debate on the nonbinding Iraq War resolution was long on rhetoric and duration, and short on pretty much everything else. The one conclusion I was able to pluck from the bluster is this: our national discourse on the war has been hijacked, at the highest level, by a slogan. "Support the troops!" Whether yea or nay on the resolution, practically every speaker had to recite his or her "support" for the troops. Indeed, the phrase infects the resolution text itself "(1) Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq."

We see it on bumper stickers, yard signs, and lapel pins. "Support the troops!" But what on Earth does it mean? Do I support the troops? Well, financially I sure do--their room, board, and housing gets withheld from my paycheck every two weeks, and the bill for what I'm not paying now will go to my children and grandchildren, with interest. But I'm guessing that's not what the banner on the overpass means.

Does it mean I'm not supposed to spit on them, Vietnam-style, in airports? Fair enough, I don't do that--I think most of us are over the idea that every nineteen-year-old kid in a uniform is a baby killer with personal responsibility for Pentagon policy. (Interestingly, the military justice system doesn't seem quite so progressive--it hung the enlisted staff of Abu Ghraib out to dry with nary a stain on the epaulettes of commanders who authorized the same sexual and religious humiliation techniques across multiple facilities.)

Perhaps "support" is meant in the sense one "supports" English football teams, as in "I support Manchester City, he supports Arsenal"? Are we meant to rush out and buy a new Army "kit" every time they change the camouflage design, then get into pub fights with insurgency supporters and slash their tires every time we lose a street battle?

Seriously, though... I "support" the troops in the sense that I don't want them to get killed. I want them to get letters from home and Xboxes and dental care. I don't want them to come home missing arms and legs--living two miles from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I've seen enough limbless soldiers in the supermarket these past few years for any one lifetime.

But wanting to see your fellow human comfortable and alive is something quite different from blind support of whatever fool errand the government happens to have sent him on. At least, that's the way I see it. Others argue that one can't "support" the troops without "supporting" their mission, and since the failure of a military mission typically involves a lot of soldiers getting killed, I suppose they have a point.

In truth, so long as "support the troops" remains on church signs and baseball caps, it doesn't much matter what meaning we ascribe to it. I can think it means "don't spit on soldiers," you can think it means "don't question the government," military families can be happy to read it, and we all can go home and watch our all-Anna-Nicole-all-the-time cable news.

But when the slogan infects a Congressional debate--and worse yet, hogties a coequal branch of government from exercising its constitutional function as a check on the executive--we've exited the realm of feel-good virtue. The notion of "supporting our troops" has made any serious proposal to cut off funding for the war a political non-starter. Americans believe--or so Congress seems to think--that our soldiers would view being sent home as a personal betrayal. Worse yet, the war's backers insinuate that a halt in funding would not bring the troops home, but rather leave them in the field without supplies or reinforcements. And so the resolution focuses on the sideshow of the President's "surge" of 20,000 troops, while pandering shamelessly to those who so "support" the 140,000 already in Iraq that they will not question the reasons for their presence.

Flight Status: Flight Risk

Rule # 1 of successful blogging: add value to information. To justify his bandwidth, the blogger must create, discover, or improve knowledge. And so I am faced with a problem. Clearly, today's post must be about yesterday's NASA love triangle fiasco. The problem is that the story already exists, everyone already knows it, and, definitionally, one cannot improve on the most awesome thing that has ever happened.

No, there is no point in going over the details of how Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak, Navy Captain and mother of three, became the rival of space program engineer Colleen Shipman for the affections of fellow Astronaut Bill Oefelein. Nor how, after learning that Shipman would take a commercial flight from Houston to Orlando, Nowak drove the 850 miles to intercept her, wearing a diaper to avoid bathroom breaks. Nor... no wait, must go over that one: wearing a diaper.

And there's no need to describe how Nowak, sporting a wig and trench coat, pepper-sprayed Shipman in the Blue Satellite Parking lot of Orlando International Airport. Nor how police found Nowak stuffing the wig, trench coat and a BB gun into a trash can, while carrying a duffle bag that contained $600, a brand-new steel mallet and buck knife, and "3-4 feet of rubber tubing." Nor that Nowak had apparently ridden a shuttle from the airport's LaQuinta Inn, where police would later search her car and discover latex gloves, Shipman's itinerary as printed from Oefelein's computer, detailed maps of the airport grounds, and a list of items including the wig, the knife, and something called "ammo 9."

What can I possibly add to this? Oh sure, there's the obvious "flight risk" joke, which I thought myself pretty clever to have come up with until Jay Leno used it last night.

At least I can be helpful and provide you with links to the important documents: the initial charging affidavit, the second charging affidavit (not thinking the attempted murder is going to stick, guys), and Shipman's affidavit in support of her application for a protective order.

And, for what it's worth, a few observations: First, this story is made all the better by the fact that its players are not just among the scores of "Astronauts" that NASA trains but never puts in space. Nowak flew on Discovery last July and is considered an expert in operating the shuttle's robot arm, and Oefelein piloted the same orbiter just two months ago. Fewer than 500 human beings have ever flown in space, and two of them are involved in a love triangle that necessitated the use of rubber tubing, a steel mallet, and the LaQuinta Inn airport shuttle.

Second, the common denominator in all sensational crime seems to be poor problem-solving skills. Take Scott Peterson's problems, for example: failing marriage, affairs, mounting debt. Good problem-solving skills solution: get a divorce, declare bankruptcy. Scott's solution: tell new girlfriend he was a globe-trotting widower, kill Lacy two weeks later and dump her body in the Berkely Marina during a Christmas Eve "fishing trip," then phone new girlfriend from New Year's Eve candle-light vigil for missing wife, claiming to be in Paris. I can't say what would have been the best solution to the Nowak/Shipman rivalry, but I'm guessing it didn't involve diapers.

Third, speaking of diapers, I might point out that Nowak benefited from years of NASA research into adult waste collection garments. The story of space flight is in many ways the story of human excrement containment engineering. When Grissom and Young blew the hatch after a week in space on the first Gemini capsule, a rescue diver actually passed out from the stench. But today, an Astronaut can drive non-stop from Houston to Orlando swaddled in odor-free absorbency.

Finally, how cool must it have been for Officer William Becton, no doubt used to filling out "unemployed" or the like on his charging affidavit forms, to type in the following:

JonBenet in the Balance

If I had laid odds on the manner of apprehension for JonBenét Ramsey's killer, I would have favored a DNA database hit by some run-of-the-mill Colorado jailbird. He would have been transferred from whichever county jail he had washed up at for his latest cheerleader-flashing, we would have learned some sketchy details about an abusive childhood and a string of dishwashing jobs, and that would have been about it.

Statistically speaking, that is what the perp was going to look like in a case like this. As over-the-top as the JonBenét extravaganza had been, there was little to suggest that the perpetrator--if not a Ramsey--was anyone of particular interest.

This probable ordinariness presented a certain difficulty for both prosecutors and the media. After the longest, most overblown national obsession with a child murder since the Lindbergh baby, after years of tabloid spreads and "48 Hours Investigates," how were they going to sell America on the idea that it all came down to some two-bit psycho and an unlocked window?

JonBenét deserved better than that. She was larger than life, an iconic victim of all that ailed fin de siècle American culture. In the narrative of our mid-90s zeitgeist, she died for the sins of John and Patsy--conspicuously-consuming nouveaux riches who tarted up their 6-year-old like a teenage hooker so Patsy could relive vicariously her long-gone beauty pageant days. But these were our transgressions, too, and we ate up the media cornucopia because we saw in JonBenét a sacrificial lamb who could purge us of our shame.

Fortunately for all involved, the dullness never manifested. Instead, we received a bonanza in one John Mark Karr, apprehended halfway around the world in exotic Thailand. This man was worthy of his role in the law enforcement and media spectacular that swept him to a billion television screens worldwide. The stuff of jet-set parent nightmares, he had roamed the world bathing children of the wealthy and powerful. Obsessed with child murderers, he had corresponded with the killer of Polly Klass and even taken up residence in Polly's hometown of Petaluma, CA. His cat-and-mouse emails with a Colorado journalism professor were the stuff of a Dell Shannon novel, and his address, December251996@yahoo.com, incorporated the date of JonBenét's murder. To boot, he dabbled in that old trash-TV standby, the sex change operation.

Arresting Karr in Thailand was guaranteed to produce some East-meets-West law enforcement scenes worthy of Jackie Chan's made-for-the-USA oeuvre, not to mention the international intrigue of our diplomatic attachés' involvement. And Karr delivered on the money shots, with his cryptic press conference admissions, shrimp-and-champagne toasting on the luxury flight home, and overall telegenic creepiness.

I have no idea whether Karr is the genuine article or just an attention-seeking, delusional obsessive who planted a trail of email clues leading to himself and then basked in the glory once it found him. But with so much to live up to, is it possible that the Boulder County authorities extended their credulity just that little bit more than they would for a less media-friendly local? Was the allure of extraditing a globe-trotting expatriate transsexual halfway around the planet just too much to resist?

I am reminded of historian William Manchester's oft-quoted letter to the New York Times:

Those who desperately want to believe that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy have my sympathy. I share their yearning. To employ what may seem an odd metaphor, there is an esthetic principle here. If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime--the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern state--you have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals.

But if you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn't balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president's death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.

Likewise, it just would not have done for JonBenét's killer to be a simple lowlife. Not for the Boulder authorities, not for the news media, and not for us. In John Mark Karr, we have found a counterweight solid enough to hold its own across the scales from JonBenét, and all for which we have come to rely on her. Let's hope he's the right guy.

Having a Baby Changes Everything

Johnson & Johnson, venerable purveyors of everything from dental floss to prosthetic shoulder blades, recently let loose a barrage of print and TV ads featuring the tag line "having a baby changes everything." Each TV spot's voice-over is of the format

"{A(x)}, so who'd have ever thought that {B(x)}. Having a baby changes everything."

where A={statement of frivolous, vain, or egocentric pre-baby attitude toward subject x}, and B={statement of laudable, nurturing, and mature post-baby attitude toward subject x}. The print ads' texts run somewhat longer, but present extended riffs on essentially the same themes.

What I find fascinating about this campaign is that the ads make no specific claims about particular Johnson & Johnson products. Nor do they suggest that the use of Johnson & Johnson products will enhance the everything-changingness of your baby-having. Bottles of Johnson's Baby Wash show up in a few of the print ads and one of the TV spots, but generally appear in the background or out of focus. The company logo is understated in both print and broadcast versions, and the company name is not spoken aloud on TV.

These choices puzzled me at first, because they didn't suggest any clear reason why one should prefer Johnson's nourishing milk wash over, say, Gerber's, or why babies absolutely cannot live without lavender chamomile soap. After all, such messages of brand superiority and want-equals-need feature prominently in most succesful advertising.

But then it struck me: the ads are not promoting Johnson baby care products; they are promoting babies. Johnson & Johnson enjoys such a lion's share of the industry that advertising to lure marginal customers away from competitors is less profitable than telling consumers to get busy and make more babies. Probably 90% or more of births inspired by the "changes everything" campaign will result in babies who are washed, shampooed, balmed, swabbed, and de-diaper-rashed with Johnson products.

For all the warm fuzziness of this campaign, I have to question its social and ethical implications. At an abstract level, the profit-motivated encouragement of human reproduction instills in me a Kantian unease. Is not the (even indirect) creation of human beings as a means to economic ends an affront to human dignity?

Moreover, having a baby certainly "changes everything," but I dare say the change isn’t always for the better. If you don’t believe me, try spending an afternoon at the family law clinic where I volunteer. In its unqualified promotion of childbearing, I fear the campaign does not discriminate between targets for whom the change would be a life-affirming miracle, and those for whom it would prove an unmitigated disaster.

Indeed, the ads may encourage the latter group disproportionately. People who are emotionally, socially, and financially ready for parenthood probably don’t want to change that much about their lives, other than the absence of children. But tell people whose lives could use a lot of alteration that “having a baby changes everything,” and they are liable to conclude that they can change everything by having a baby. Want to find love, find a purpose, save a marriage, get married, get respect, get your own Section Eight voucher? Having a baby changes everything!

And then, of course, there's the overpopulation thing. But since the "change everything" babies will be funding my Social Security checks, I’ll shut up now.

Did I mention that Mrs. P. & I are expecting a baby?

Victoria Station, 1747

Today's episode of "Dumbass Anglophile" features this handsome wall clock:

Ah, the charme of olde Londone. Imagine this "timeless timepiece" bringing history alive in your home! Experience the thrill of dashing for a train in the real Victoria Station, back in... 1747?

I don't know much about clockmaking, but you have to figure that this product was conceived, designed, approved, etc., by more than one person and over some period of time. Yet throughout this process, did no one bother to check whether "Victoria Station" and "1747" were reasonable concepts to associate on the face of a single product? Now, I don't expect everyone to know off the top of his/her head that Victoria Station was not constructed until 1860. But it seems to me that people with the savvy to mass-produce and market a consumer product should be capable of some basic research.

That aside, the continued availability of this item suggests that someone, somewhere, is buying the thing. Assuming that people don't generally intend their homes as showcases for laughably obvious horological anachronisms, we may conclude that these purchasers are unaware of the mistake. I don't, of course, hold purchasers to the same standard as the designers--we all have better things to do than dig out an encyclopedia every time we go to the mall. But one typically associates Anglophilia with a desire--however ill-conceived--to project sophistication. So it might not be too much to ask that the committed Anglophile recognize two rather glaring clues that something is amiss.

OK, first: for whom might Victoria Station be named? Hmm... famous Englishwomen named Victoria... aha! Queen Victoria? Indeed. And when did Queen Victoria reign? No exact dates needed, just a general sense. Let's see: Victorian era... Charles Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper... sometime in the 1800s right? So is it likely that Queen Victoria was having a station named after her in 1747? Why, no.

And, second: let us think about 1747. Hell, let's just think about the entire 1700s. Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the American Revolution--were the key players chugging around on locomotives? Did Tom Jones extricate himself from a hay-loft sex romp in time to catch the 07:28 for Taunton? No, because there were no trains! (Yes, yes, there were horse-drawn rail trams, but they didn't carry passengers until 1807.) So, in the absence of trains, is it likely that a train station was constructed prior to 1747? Again, no.

Of course, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Anglophile. So maybe the designers of this piece figured they'd be wasting their time coming up with a plausible date. Perhaps I'll buy one, and present it to the Townes at Cameron Parke.