Why people should stop whining and pay their goddamn taxes already, from one of those small business owners who the Fortune 500 like to use as a human shield.
h/t John Scalzi
Jul 302011
Twitter is afire with the #YAsaves hashtag and various young-adult fiction authors (and readers) angry about the latest old-fogey rant to fill a few lonely column inches before a deadline; this time, a Wall Street Journal book reviewer is determined to prove that the boys on the editorial page don’t hold that newspaper’s monopoly on stupid.
Meghan Cox Gurdon, a former conservative columnist for the National Review and the Washington Examiner, somehow managed to slither her way into a berth reviewing children’s books for the WSJ. Predictably, her complaint is that YA fiction these days is just awful and ugly and brutal, not like the gentle, sun-touched fiction for teenagers of our own youth.
Which, setting aside the pearl-clutching, is really where I stopped. Our youth? Yes, you heard that right; as with everything else worthy in life, children’s literature was destroyed by those awful 1960s, and children’s literature turned to the Dark Side forty years ago. Apparently Gurdon’s outrage has affected her math skills; the “46-year-old mother of three” she fusses over in her opening paragraph would have barely been in kindergarten in 1967, and would have been exposed to that “dark” YA literature in her own teenage years. As would all, if not most, of Generation X. You know, the people who are now getting middle-aged and raising kids and thus supposedly having to worry about the terrible YA literature that awaits our young’uns, and the same people who grew up with that “dark” fiction of the terrible post-1960s lurking in the bookstores.
If Gurdon’s column were factual, it would be trivial to point out that there is plenty of YA fiction that isn’t “dark”, and is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff we had available as kids; I’d have loved to have Leviathan or Zoe’s Tale or White Cat to read when I was a teenager, and none of those are exactly on the level of Go Ask Alice as far as “dark” fiction went.
But it’s not. She’s simply regurgitating a pearl-clutching rant about Kids These Days and how much better things were in the innocent days of our own youth, and throwing on a steaming sprinkle of conservative ranting about how the culture imploded once those goddamn hippies showed up. Which is a pity, because it seems like even the Twilight books would be a refreshing breath of air for kids otherwise stuck listening to their mom rant about the culture wars.
So in the wake of RaceFail 2009, John Scalzi rethinks his reflexive “no way am I putting my hand in THAT blender” position, and invites Mary Anne Mohanraj to write a guest blog post. Which she does in a thoughtful, kind, non-blaming, We Can Work It Out sort of way full of linky goodness.
And damn if the thread doesn’t immediately get clunked on by people who amaze you only by their ability to type with fingers jammed firmly in their ears, going OMFG U CALLED ME AN OPPRESSOR!! and “Racism? That’s so twentieth century, darling” and “But shouldn’t we wait for people of color to come to us before we acknowledge they have a role in SF?”
Oh Internets, just once, I would love you to surprise me.
YANAL
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Mar 072009
If you feel compelled to preface a discussion with “I’m not a lawyer, but…”, even in abbreviated form, chances are the next thing to come out of your mouth is going to be a horribly-manged misunderstanding and/or generalization of the law that will make anyone with a JD clutch their ears and howl in agony.
Then they will recover, and beat you viciously and without mercy. Rhetorically speaking.
It is true that many people who aren’t lawyers to have a clear understanding of certain areas of the law, and are even able to talk about it intelligently. Unfortunately those people are vastly outnumbered by other people, who think that Wikipedia is a real legal resource, or who take one line in a judicial opinion out of context and think that’s what the law is.
It is also true that the law is full of different specialities and lawyers have different levels of competency. I’m not familiar enough with patent law to explain its complexities to you, either at a cocktail party or on the Internet. Likewise, don’t tell me that you fully understand product-liability law in California because you heard about it from your dad, a retired lawyer who used to do criminal cases in Massachusetts.
And for god’s sake don’t present your half-baked legal expertise as legal advice to others.
The main difference being that cockroaches don’t have the ability to whine loudly about how you’re shining light on them.
Tip for public servants: if you’re going to pimp your rig, at least make it look beige. “Backup server” won’t fly.
Jan 192008
The cat seemed a little scruffier than usual last night, but as I was pretty tired from a three-hour drive and dealing with a very sick Kid Peligro, I didn’t pay that much attention. Today I took a closer look and noticed that the left side of his face was about twice the size of the right side, plus aforementioned sluggishness. Luckily the vet lives just down the road. Unluckily, as we suspected, the problem was an abscess requiring immediate surgery.
Total cost of surgery, anesthesia, surgical tubing, collar, medicines that we have to administer over the next three days, etc. etc.: over $800.
“As long as we have him under anesthesia, do you want to go ahead and have his teeth cleaning done?”
Oh sure, why not. What’s another $65 when you’re paying enough money to buy a whole new cat, perhaps one not stupid enough to get into fights with other cats half his age.
I spent another $25 on the way home to buy three big bags of potting soil, and dragged it along with months’ worth of dead leaves in mounds along the bottom edge of the fence. If he wants to sneak out and pick fights with the locals again, he’s damn well going to have to work for it.
Amanda blogs about a Dr. Helen post, the essence of which you’ve all heard before, i.e. men aren’t getting married because evil, gold-digging women only give it up for rich guys, then divorce them and take all their money.
Nov 122007
John Scalzi writes a cheerful and entertaining report about his long-promised visit to the Creation Museum.
The take-away message: Even evolution-denying, Talmud-ignorant, metaphor-tone-deaf, pretzel-headed Christian literalists are forced to acknowledge and honor the utter coolness of dinosaurs.
The short version: As soon as you start whining about how coddled Kids These Days are and how overprotecting [other] parents are, you have officially become a blathering old fart, and you might as well have a disclaimer slung around your neck: “Please disregard the above as fatally tainted with half-assed nostalgia. Also, my memory isn’t what it used to be.”
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