Category: Ranty

This Is Some Kind of -ist Bias, But I’m Not Sure What

Two months ago I submitted a picture to the Tumblr page Hot Chicks In Batman Shirts. Though I am not a ‘hot chick’, I felt my submission was relevant because the concept I created was in step with the essence of the page. There have not been many posts since I submitted, so clearly the editor of the page is not inundated with material. If anything, I thought I would get a pass because it was a unique spin of the concept.

On my previous post, I had updated the status for all interested parties (two people maybe…). I checked back a few times over the next few weeks, but felt that a running update when no change had occurred was beating a dead horse.

Then I forgot about the whole thing.

Then I remembered and didn’t get around to writing an editorial about the sad state of exclusivity given to beautiful people and our broken society. Something came up. I don’t remember what it was. I’m going to say apathy. I could probably come up with a better excuse and one that didn’t make me out to be a moody teenager, but that’s closest to the truth.

THEN I happened to see a new post from the hoity-toity Tumblr in question today. Not my image. So now I’m going to call them out publicly on the Internet and shame them.

FOR SHAME, person I don’t know. FOR SHAME.

Feel free to join me in shaming them for their behavior. It’s fun.

FOR SHAME.

Here’s the image, in case you aren’t familiar with the original post:

Continue reading →

Current (male) workers are not-good and exceptions can be made for (good) female workers.

From the transcript:

ROMNEY: We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I’m going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women.

Let’s start with that First clause: “We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy…”

Logical inference: In the current economy, we don’t have employers, or we have employers but they are going away.

Second clause: in the economy I’m going to bring to play…

Logical inference: The economy is a ball, and Rich Mitt has the best ball, and he’ll let you play with it… if you make him head of the kickball team.

Third clause: [employers] that are going to be so anxious to get good workers…

(His use of “anxious” is troubling. Anxious can be viewed as ambivalent, hesitant, or wary. So I’m going to presume he means excited or enthusiastic.)

Logical inference: The new employers in our new economy will be sick of the current economy’s workers… who are not good. American workers right now ARE TO BLAME FOR THE ECONOMY.

Fourth clause: [employers] are going to be anxious to hire women.

(again, let’s ignore the ready connotation that employers are going to be ambivalent to hire women.)

Logical inference: Balancing anxious employers, good workers, and women, he’s either saying that the employers are so desperate that they’ll even consider hiring women, or that current workers who are to blame for the economy are all men, and no good. Either way, he’s got good workers on one side of the statement and women workers on the other. Women can be good workers, but they sound like the exception.

This is not good. What’s worse is what he said about women in the workplace right before this:

CROWLEY: Governor Romney, pay equity for women?

ROMNEY: Thank you. An important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

A great start!

Well said, Governor. Your record on this is sound.

Unless you read this article from The Boston Phoenix written by David S. Bernstein:

What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

Mitt’s version:

ROMNEY: I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.

Sure, he can take credit. Fine. The facts don’t matter. But then he makes it so much worse:

Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you’re going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school.

She said, I can’t be here until 7 or 8 o’clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o’clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let’s have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.

His anecdote is fine and in fact it makes him look like a considerate employer. EXCEPT THAT this is exactly what we don’t want in leadership. Women are not an exception. He implies that you don’t NEED women in the workforce. He implies that hiring women comes with an additional risk. This is 1950s sexist glad-handing at its worst. And he said this last night, in 2012.

Working crazy hours should be a decision made by each employee, male or female. He’s peppering this answer about pay equity for women with an anecdote of someone who should not have been the effing chief of staff for a governor. She wants to be home at 5pm? She should be a baker. I DON’T GET HOME AT 5pm, and I don’t do shht at my job.

Here’s old Grandad Romney making room for women even though they have funny schedules and kids and needs that men don’t have. Even though he implied above that the current (mostly male) workforce is people by not-good (male) workers.

Hot Coffee on a Hot Day – NPR explains

“Trust me,” she said. “I’m Indian, I’m British. A billion Indians can’t be wrong. They drink hot tea in hot weather.”

I love that quote.

NPR gives a brief explanation of a brief investigation. They could have tried a little harder with this article. Consider the quote above and then take a look at how he ends this piece:

I have to say I’m still a little skeptical about hot tea on a hot day. I’d still rather have a tall glass of ice water. What about you?

Even by NPR’s standards, that’s crappy journalism. “It’s just a blog,” you say? Once he calls up a neuroscientist and says “I’m with NPR” it’s more than just a blog. And he didn’t even answer his own question: Does drinking hot tea on a hot day actually cool you off (reduce body temperature), or is it just a physiological trick, like a ceiling fan, that makes you more comfortable without lowering body temperature?

My apologies. I didn’t intend to rant against this guy. I just wanted to call out Scott for not drinking hot coffee on the day he helped me move.

Anti-Beardism Is Alive and Well In Our Society

I’ve been out of work for a year. Last week I had my first interview after 12 months of submitting resumes. I nailed it and started this morning. I met with my supervisor, got a key card (no color coding like Doom), had my photo taken for my ID, and proceeded to the “Fish Tank”. I was going to be working in a call center and the Fish Tank was the loving name the employees gave it. I’ll leave out the name of the company and those involved to save faces.

After an hour of training with my supervisor, he received a call from HR. His brow furrowed, eyes narrowed, and he slowly exhaled. He tilted his head back, looked into the sky for something that wasn’t there, dipped the phone receiver beneath his chin, and through gritted teeth said, “Okay.” He turned to me and said, “I have to send you home.”

I cocked my head to the side with a quizzical look. “What?”

“HR just informed me that it’s against company policy for employees to have beards.” He was visibly shocked and pissed off with HR and himself for not remembering this policy. I had interviewed with said beard. With two supervisors. No one said a thing about facial hair restraints. Hell, one of them had a goatee.

I nodded, I’ve heard of such policies, but still shocked that in this day and age we are still faced with rampant anti-beardism. “Alright, so now what?”

You see, I was not the only one being trained today. There was another young lady. She may have had a mustache, but took the time to wax it. I can’t be certain, I didn’t look closely enough. The supervisor told me, “I can’t hold off on training you with [redacted] here. I was going to see how you both handled the work, but you’ll be at least a half a day behind and I can’t go back over those things with you later. I’m going to call [my temp agency rep] and talk to her.” I started laughing and this broke the tension, but he did have a look on his face that one uses for possibly crazy people. I left and called my rep.

Needless to say, she was shocked. After an hour, I was without a job again because of a beard that no one had cautioned me about before. This has been my day so far.

How’s yours?

Lets dont get carried away!

I am posting this here now as it is a subject with which I feel intimate and the entire world strongly.

Michael Rosen argues that the apostrophe is on the way out.

I personally cannot stand the look of apostrophes or quotation marks, yet I adore an aptly dropped comma. I concede that quotation marks in dialouge-heavy prose allow the reader a brisk passage through the text. I do not concede, however, that a brisk passage through the text is always the desired, nor best, approach.

Hey, look! Here is something related! (Albeit two years old.) Utter chaos. I repeat: utter chaos.

My theory, which is not a theory because I’m right, is that people who are insecure about their education jump on the grammar campaign because it proves that they remember at least one thing they learned from grammar school.

Just look at this asshole’s post in which he declares that it is not only possible but somehow deplorable to commit a “crime” against the least consistent language ever hobbled together.

The crimes against the English language committed in the first eight pages of this book are so deplorable that I could not reach the double digit page numbers at all.
–some asshole

I believe he means to write “the crimes against syntactical conventions of the English language;” something not nearly as criminal as putting the spoon to the left of your dinner plate. And by “reach” of course he is using the rhetorical figure. He couldn’t possibly mean that he was unable to leaf through 5 or more pages of a novel that an author spent three years of his life composing. That would be silly. And the two would in no way be connected. He should probably call a doctor.

And check out this string of assholes, many of which slight McCarthy’s idiosyncratic style as aping Hemingway, the “great American novel,” a “Proper novel,” or anything else that can be aped.

I think if Cormac McCarthy wanted you to think he was writing a proper novel (what the fuck is that?), all he would have to do is… have it published.

How is it that we are nearly a century in debt to Woolf and unorthodox styles are still being openly mocked, nay, openly discarded as illegitimate?

And to those conservative viewpoints, I highlight the argument of one of the Cormac apologisers: Cormac’s style is purposefully polysendetic, a style “used extensively in the King James Bible” according to everyone’s favorite internet source. If you’ve read Cormac, you understand why biblical allusions are apt. I presume secondary school literature classes focus more on imagery and symbolism, and less on tone and cadence.

This was not intended to be a defense of Cormac McCarthy. I intended to borrow the nonsense of one or more blowhards on the internet (my mistake) to highlight the controversy and political nature of the apostrophe debate detailed marvelously in Michael Rosen’s article. Because it is a ridiculous controversy.

Try Not to Weep

Seriously. This is some of the worst news I’ve heard in a long while. Combined with the The Emmanuel’s crackdown on free speech, I am suppressing the urge to scream.

Copyright law in the United States is incredibly complex. This ruling was made to comply with international copyright law, and as such, it makes a drop of sense. But understanding why the ruling passed (6-2) does not make the ruling correct.

This is terrible in so many ways that I cannot even begin to articulate them.

If you’ll allow me to indulge an overly apocalyptic view: What happens if you create a project using public domain works that subsequently pass back into copyright?

Example. James Joyce recently passed into public domain, and Scott and I have shot a multi-million dollar film that combines all of his work into one epic, 120 minute film. It’s called, “James Joyce, All of James Joyce, in One Epic Film.” It’s terrible. It wins an Oscar.

Then, James Joyce is ruled back into copyright. It doesn’t matter why. Maybe Germany changes their copyright law to extend protections to artists for 300 years, and the US reciprocates. Maybe Disney buys Congress again (it’s happened before) and decides this time that they want exclusive control of the collective works of Joyce so that they can create a Disney Princess version of Finnegan’s Wake. What then?

A more realistic worry; it was already – before this ruling – an almost impossible task to determine copyright in many cases. It’s often very hard to determine whether something is, in fact, public domain.

This ruling makes it even harder. Good luck figuring out whether something is in the public domain now.
I could go on. I probably should. I just may, after I finish screaming.

Supreme Court rules Congress can re-copyright public domain works.

Batman of Interest

I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the show Person of Interest, but I watched five minutes of it a few months ago and instantly thought, “Oh, this is Batman without the suit.” I tweeted that thought and got numerous replies of, “Oh man, you’re right! I love Batman and this show!” Really? Then how did you not put that together before.

Jim Caviezel is an ex-black ops… guy whose family was murdered and, as far as the public is concerned, he doesn’t exist. Michael Emerson’s character is handicapped and he made some software for the CIA that can identify people who are most likely to commit terrorist acts, or something like that. His software also identifies those who are likely to commit murder or other heinous acts, but the CIA doesn’t care about that. (Really?) These two pair up, didn’t see the pilot so I have no idea how that happened, and Caviezel is Batman to Emerson’s Oracle. (This is pre-”New 52!”.)

But hold on! There’s a feisty, young detective, played by Taraji P. Henson, crosses paths with Caviezel and she starts to question who this mystery man is and why he’s interfering with her cases. Episode after episode she catches clues to his presence, but can’t figure out who this guy is and this becomes a personal mission since no one else in her department believes her.

I’ve only seen, maybe, two episodes, but I’ve seen plenty of clips from commercials and just walking by others watching it from time to time, the above synopsis is what I’ve gleaned from my experience of the show. I just happened to see an article stating that the three are going to form a partnership in a future episode. So we’re out of Year One territory now.

I tweeted this a few months ago “Person of Interest is basically a real-world version of Batman…” and received a few replies from people saying, “Oh man, you’re right! I love Batman and this show!” Really? You love both but couldn’t put that together yourself?

Oh, and to top it all off, the show was created by Johnathan Nolan. He’s most famous for co-writing Batman films with his brother Christopher.

Update:
I forgot to add that Caviezel does an impression of Christian Bale’s Batman voice the entire time. Or he’s trying to whisper loudly. I’m not sure which it is.

Why Can’t I Quit You?

I came across this quick breakdown of sales figures for December 2011 for the comics industry on Tumblr, began to write some thoughts and decided to share them.

First, pie!

This also accompanied the graph:

Marvel Comics has come out on top in terms of sales last month, knocking DC Comics from its three-month streak as the leading publisher. This new report comes from the monthly sales estimates published by Diamond Comic Distributors that gives us the scoop on how Marvel accomplished the maneuver. According to Diamond, Marvel held a 34.43% dollar share and 39.05% market share while DC Comics held a 33.74% dollar share and a 37.72% market share.

Despite the new title earned by Marvel for the month of December, DC still managed to hold eight spots out of ten for the month’s best-selling issues, including Justice League #4 and several other #4 issues from DC’s ‘New 52′ relaunch while Marvel only held two spots in the top ten (Avengers: X-Sanction #1 and Defenders #1). It’s still tricky to see how these numbers are playing out given that DC is publishing around 70 titles a month while Marvel continues to publish well over 100 each month. Taking these numbers into account along with the fact that Marvel double-ships several different titles each month on average, it can be said that Marvel tends to flood the market in order to get a stronger foothold. Regardless of the numbers on quantities, there’s no denying that fans are clearly more impressed by DC’s offering given the top 10 books in the sales chart.

My thoughts:

I’m a bit fed up with Marvel’s practices as a company. The numerous “incentives” they push to retailers by giving a rare sketch cover for defacing DC titles, having a handful of “universe changing big events” every year, rebooting a series a few times in the past 5 years with a new #1 each time – or simply renumbering for a new storyline – to lure collectors, and rehashing stories decade after decade. I’m sure they’ve got some decent writers on their payroll, but they sure as hell aren’t putting them to good use. How many times have the Avengers and X-Men fought, Wolverine has enough trouble being in 100 books a month.

Their films have done well, but I don’t know how well they’ll hold up after Avengers. They have sequels for the stand-alone characters in the works, but Iron Man 2 was more of a lead-in for the Avengers and suffered as an Iron Man film. It will be interesting to see what happens with the X-Men franchise and Amazing Spider-Man has promise, but they’ve already rebooted both of them. Are they still kicking around ideas for the Fantastic Four?

And now they plan to publish novels of their biggest stories?* I’ve seen novelizations of story lines before in bookstores, but I’ve never had the desire to actually read one. I tend to just roll my eyes.

DC is also starting to piss me off with their new price for Batman and Detective Comics. I think it was less than a year ago DC started pushing their “holding the line at $2.99″ gimmick, and it looks like every popular title will be at least $3.99 this year. They had announced a few books, Action Comics and Justice League, would be $3.99 at the launch of the new 52, but then decrease to $2.99 after a few issues. That didn’t happen. DC’s excuse is that the books are longer, 40 pages as opposed to 32, but they’re padding the books with extras and not story. Look at the back of a JL book, character designs were in the first three. Action Comics #4 had a story to fill in the gap that occurred during the story they were telling. Why was that even necessary? If you need a supplementary story to fill in a gap of your story, rewrite the damn thing.

If the extra pages are dedicated to story as they claim, great! I just expect it will be little more than a chance for them to cram in a few more ads. I definitely don’t want to pay more for character designs and more space for letters to the editor. I’m sure that’s popular for some readers, but increasing the price 25% (didn’t check my math) for that seems ridiculous.

Rant over.

*If you haven’t read Gutters, you should look through them, especially if you’re a comics fan. It’s often topical, so if you don’t get a reference there is usually a blurb written by the author below to help you narrow down your Google search.