I’m a sinner, I’m a saint; I do not feel ashamed

Christine pointed out last week that all of UrbanDictionary’s definitions of feminism are pretty wretched. I navigated over to check and, sure enough, it’s some kind of travesty. It’s a rather well-cloaked travesty, don’t get me wrong - all sorts of intellectual shit like “if feminism were really about equality, it would be called humanism.”¹ It’s the same sort of shit you see every Martin Luther King, Jr. day in conservative magazines and weblogs, when neocons argue that the Reverend Doctor would have opposed Affirmative Action - because King was about color-blindness, not color-preference.²

Anyhow, while noting with approval that each definition had more DOWN votes than UP votes by a factor of 300% or more, I saw a link to Urban Dictionary: Fularious Street Slang Defined. It’s a book that you can buy on Amazon which compiles definitions of some of the terms you find on UrbanDictionary. Hopefully the author picked some less controversial ones, like “crunk” or “upper decking.”

My thoughts:

1. What a delightful regression in medium! If UrbanDictionary has any value at all - still in debate - it’s that anyone in the world can update entries. This may not produce the most useful results (see “feminism”), but crowd-sourcing has certain advantages. Especially for a slang dictionary. So the smartest course, obvi, is to freeze a current view of the palimpsest and embed it in unchanging text. What if someone comes up with a hep new definition? Why, then we totes issue a new book! Who needs hypertext when you have crippletext?

2. Aaron Peckham, the “compiler” of these books, has found a sweet scam that I want in on. UrbanDictionary is 99% user-generated content with a smattering of HTML, CSS and maybe some PHP. In other words, a few million people just put money in Peckham’s pocket. Maybe they’ll get contributor cred (this entry for “John Blaze” comes to us courtesy of Dat Nicca D, although DRM took objection). I want a million people to do work - for free, of course - that I can get paid for. See also: the PostSecret book.
   

Way to go, Internet!
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¹ Which, of course, Gloria Steinem actually called it. Oops!

² And maybe the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr would have been opposed to affirmative action. Who knows? That’s still a pretty disingenuous argument for a white guy to make.

lower the curtain down on Memphis

First off a question: did Charles Dickens name Amy Winehouse? No? Are we sure? So it’s just serendipity, then?

Now, an anecdote with a moral: a few months ago, a friend told me about a trip she took to Italy with her mother. In a dense part of Rome one morning, a pack of gypsies surrounded the two of them. One of them thrust a baby into her mother’s arms, proceeded to strip her mother of purse and watch, and then reclaimed the baby. “What do you do in that sort of situation?” she asked me, rhetorically.

“Drop the baby,” I answered.

She stared at me in horror. “You can’t just drop a baby!”

“No, you can’t force a baby on a stranger and rob them. What obligates me to show more concern for this child’s life than his own mother did?”

Of course, I have no problem saying this in my armchair - or, as when I heard the anecdote, the evening streets of Harvard Square - but I don’t know if I’d react as coldly in the actual situation. For one thing, the sheer bizarreness of it all (”who are these people? what’s this baby doing here? hey, my wallet!”) would probably stun me for the few seconds a pro needed. For another, I’m a notorious softy when you get past my cynical exterior; I don’t know that I’d actually drop a baby on the filthy cobblestones of Rome just to prove a point. And finally, the gypsies have been doing this for centuries - I’m sure they have a contingency plan for finding a hardass like me (scream in suddenly fluent Italian for the cops, press charges, etc).

Another bit about language: no one can agree on the proper nomenclature for the satisfied humming noise people make when they see tasty food. Either “mmmm” or “ummmm”. I always use the former, as I associate the latter with the awkward mouth sound people make when they struggle for the right word. Are you hungry or confused, sir? Please indicate in a follow-up letter.

Normally this doesn’t matter, except when someone goes overboard and writes in all-caps. Consider the following e-mails:

And then we can stop in at J.P. Lick’s for some … cake batter ice cream! MMMMMM!

Vs.

And then we can stop in at J.P. Lick’s for some … cake batter ice cream! UMMMMM!

The latter, to me, looks like oddly loud indecision. “I DON’T KNOW WHAT I WANT. UMMMM … SHOULD I GET ICE CREAM OR COOKIES? UMMMM …” An autistic child, instead of a dessert connoisseur.

Finally, has anyone seen this ad on YouTube over the past two weeks? The Republicans want people to submit videos for their convention. I just want you to look at the elephant silhouette in the lower left:

For those of you not as steeped in nerd culture as I am, take a look at this image of iconic Lovecraftian horror, the mad alien god Cthulhu:

Do you see it? Am I the only one who sees it? At the very least, making the trunk and the tusks the same color fails as a design choice.

the grandma test

Whenever I wonder whether I should get really angry about a feud on the Internet - or even in real life, where many Internet tendencies are born - I use a private standard, which I believe I invented, called the Grandma Test.

The Grandma Test works as follows: could my 85-year-old Southern grandmother understand the nature of this dispute if I brought it up to her in casual conversation?

I’ll give an actual example that has nothing to do with Internet arguments. Many years ago, my parents gave me a Sony minidisc player for Christmas. I started playing with it while visiting them for the holiday. My grandparents were visiting as well, and my grandmother saw me in the living room with the player one morning.

Grandma: Is that one of your gifts?
Me: Yes it is, Grandma.
Grandma: What is it?
Me: A minidisc player.
Grandma: What does it do?^*
Me: It records mp3s that I download off the Internet onto minidiscs.
Grandma: It does what?

I explained it to her in detail, because I’m not a dick, but the sheer volume of concepts that I had to unpack in order to speak on it meaningfully - mp3, download, Internet, minidiscs - made it into more of an adventure than I anticipated.

Since then, I realized that many of the intractable differences I felt with strangers on the Internet would seem ludicrously trivial if viewed through the eyes of my grandmother. And 99.9996% of the time, this was because they were ludicrous. They were trivial. If my grandma couldn’t understand why I got so upset, what reason did I have?

Some examples (note that I never actually had any of these conversations; playing them out in my head served to soothe my nerves):

Grandma: What are you so mad about?
Me: Well, one of the mods on the RPG.net forums banned someone for posting a quiz on which movie Batman was best: Michael Keaton, George Clooney, Val …
Grandma: One of the who?
Me: A mod. A moderator.
Grandma: Moderating what?
Me: A forum. A message board. It’s where people go to post messages on the Internet.
Grandma: Messages about what?
Me: About sci-fi and comic books and pretending to be elves and … you know what, it’s not that big a deal. I don’t know why I’m so worked up over it.

Or:

Grandma: You look awfully perturbed.
Me: All the new members in this LJ community keep spamming the page with cat macros.
Grandma: In the what community?
Me: LiveJournal. It’s a blog aggregator.
Grandma: It’s a what?
Me: It puts all these blogs in one place. A blog is what people used to call a web page.
Grandma: That’s certainly an unusual name. Why do they call it ‘blog’?
Me: I don’t know.
Grandma: So this is a place you can go on the Internet that activates blogs?
Me: No, aggregates them. Collects them all onto one page.
Grandma: And what is this LiveJournal doing that got you so worked up?
Me: It’s not LiveJournal; it’s … actually, I can’t even remember at this point. Thanks, Grandma!
Grandma: Oh, I’m glad to help. Have a Fresca.

Or:

Grandma: What’s got you so mad, dear?
Me: Well, Atrios misinterpreted Glenn Greenwald’s response to Meghan McArdle’s post about … you know what, forget it. I’m better now.

My grandmother isn’t dumb, and she’s certainly not senile. But she doesn’t have the immense contextual investment that many of our generations (Gen X and Millennials) have in the Internet. In certain cases, that’s a good thing. It means she doesn’t take Facebook de-friending, threadcrapping, trolling or fisking as seriously as we do. And being able to reach that sense of perspective from time to time can only be healthy.

Face it: we’re arguing with strangers on the Internet over things we can’t control. It’s like leaving a slip of paper under a rock in the road for the next traveler to find, debating about how hot the sun should be tomorrow. We’re ridiculous people. If the source of your frustration doesn’t pass the Grandma Test, for the devil’s sake let it go.

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^* My grandmother, a Kentucky native and a lifelong Texan, transposed the h and the w in what, as all deep Southerners do. Try it yourself.

god loves ugly

A quick one to start us off: my favorite workout at the gym - to observe, not to perform - is the desultory chin-up. That’s when a guy walks up to the bar and does one chin-up, maybe two, before remembering how hard they were. Then he drops to the mat and walks off like he has something else in mind.

Now to talk about how much reading sucks: I’m glad that the fantasy story trope of “your wish comes true, but it’s twisted” gets less play these days. You know the one I mean: I wish for a million dollars, but it comes in the form of a life insurance payment when my wife dies. Or I wish for time to read in peace and quiet, but I only get it after a nuclear bomb wipes out civilization. Also known as the “monkey’s paw” conceit, after the 1902 short story which spawned it, this slapdash shortcut has been worn into a faceless grit through overuse. Holy hell, it’s annoying.

For one thing: if horror is really just a form of Gothic moralizing (the prince who taunts the Red Death plague gets infected; the girls who sleep around get their throats slashed; etc), then what lesson should the reader learn from this story? “If you get the chance to make a wish, phrase it very carefully”? Great lesson; I’m sure it’ll stick with me in the wish-filled future I anticipate. “Getting what you want without hard work will curse you with sorrow”? I can see that - kind of the Protestant work ethic with slick urban styling - but maybe there’s a better way to phrase it. Really, I see nothing but downsides to telling generations of impressionable children that “getting what you want will ruin your life.”

For another: note that the magical malefactor always picks a particularly ironic way to fulfill the wish. Irony requires intelligence - recognizing a pattern that matches in some ways but differs in others - so we have to presume that the monkey’s paw has, I dunno, some evil genie watching it and waiting to screw over the life of whoever holds it. Because if I had to grant evil wishes, and I felt particularly lazy, I wouldn’t be very creative about it:

Rube: I wish my boss hadn’t fired me.
Genie: Fine! Now your boss hasn’t fired you, or anyone else - because he’s dead!
Rube: I wish I looked just like this for the rest of my life.
Genie: Mwah-ha-ha! You’ll look exactly the same for the rest of your life if I kill you in five seconds!
Rube: So you’re not exactly granting my wishes as much as looking for an excuse to murder people, are you?
Genie: Just for that, I’m going to murder Jeff Probst! Ha ha ha ha ha!

And so forth.

Fortunately, sci-fi / fantasy is a great and terrible beast that eats its young and pits them against each other. Every trope worth naming in the genre has been established, re-hashed, deconstructed and reassembled in the 20th Century alone. Take time travel for instance. Ray Bradbury gave us the notion of the fragile past in “A Sound of Thunder,” in which stepping on a butterfly in the prehistoric past causes the entirety of Western Civilization to be rewritten. Fritz Leiber riffed on this concept, presenting a past that stubbornly resisted time travellers’ attempts to change it in “Try and Change the Past.” Alfred Bester did the same, but with a bit more style, in “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.” Rather than telling the same tedious story over and over again, sci-fi turned time travel into an open-ended source of inspiration.

Let’s do the same thing with “wishes.” Instead of a wish that twists the speaker’s words, how about a world where every wish comes true - a constantly fungible reality, alien and nightmarish, subject to the most recent whims of the greatest number? Or how about a world where warring nations use Monkey Paws like weapons? Drop a Monkey’s Paw in an enemy garrison, let opposing soldiers start screwing up their own lives until they run out of wishes, then send a black ops team in to mop up the chaos? I picture a hazmat team in full chem-gear, stalking through an outpost filled with titanium statues in tortured poses, carrying out a glowing orb in a lead container. “Let me guess - I’ll bet they wished to be bulletproof. Or maybe to live forever. Gets ‘em every time. Who’s paying for the beer, anyhow?”

In an unrelated closing observation: have you ever noticed how the questions “can you do me a tiny favor?” and “can you do me a huge favor?” mean almost exactly the same thing in requested effort?

just like witches at black masses

Does anyone else find it odd that we refer to activating a hyperlink in HTML, or an icon on a graphical desktop, as “clicking”? That we call the action by the noise the input device makes? I find it weird - not offensive, mind you, just deeply odd - that that evolved the way it did. I would never say, “Hey, could you go vreet-vreet this on the copier for me?” Or “Yeah, just hummmmmmmmmmmmm-BEEP-BEEP it in the microwave for thirty seconds on High.”

Everything else in the graphical metaphor we call an Operating System has a real world analog. Your “desktop” at home might have a stack of “folders” on it, which you could open to discover “documents” or close and arrange in “files.” But clicking doesn’t connect to any other real world behavior. I don’t push in on the spine of a book before taking it off the shelf. File clerks of a century past weren’t tapping twice on the cover of an account ledger before opening it, unless they had the palsy.

While the mood strikes me: I hate the word “blog.” I remember first seeing it a few years ago and praying it wouldn’t catch on. The word just sits there on the screen, stiff and ugly - the clumsy bl blend, the dissonant og on the end of it. If a two-year-old child kept mispronouncing “weblog,” that’s the noise I’d expect. To hear it coming from a supposedly literate adult irks me.

“Click” I just find weird, but “blog” turns my stomach.

And as long as I have you here: should I pronounce .gif like the peanut butter or like the space hippo? Does anyone else pronounce the word “MMORPG” so it rhymes with a certain Black Sabbath song? Why does it take longer to abbreviate “World Wide Web” than to say it? And why do all those kids on my block keep listening to that loud garbage music? You know the kind I mean.

My point: stop letting engineers name things.