Culture: December 2002 Archive Page

Anthropologists have long looted the gravesites of native peoples in the name of science -- and profit. But the recent trend to return those remains for reburial is not always welcomed by the cultures involved. "Far from being led by Native communities, the trend towards repatriation is driven by intellectuals on the cultural left, and endorsed by the key cultural and political institutions in mainstream Western society. It is a consequence of the decline of Enlightenment values within intellectual thought and the rise of relativism and mysticism within postmodern academia, and has had a practical impact upon governments and museums. If indigenous groups have come to identify with repatriation claims, it is mainly because they are working within a political terrain set up by intellectual trends generated elsewhere." Josie Appleton --Battle of the BonesSpikedOnline)

"The future is now. My pocket video camera stores hundreds of images on a single plastic stick of gum. My mobile phone means I'm reachable virtually anywhere I go. I have hundreds of digital TV channels beamed to me from space. I can communicate with millions of people in one go through this weblog - (I wish). Many diseases and illnesses can be cured today. I can look at the face of my unborn child. My car talks to me and prevents me from getting lost. My money is mostly electronic 1's and 0's. Mostly 0's. My pocket computer can playback entire movies. I can walk around my house and garden surfing the net without wires to hold me back. My kettle filters its water before boiling it. I've spoken to you many times but we've never met. I'm living in the future I used to dream about when I was a kid." Gary Turner --I'm Living in the FutureGary Turner's Weblog)

"Now, before you call me Ebeneezer Scrooge or jump all over my my seeming lack of Christmas spirit, let me just say that Christmas is far and away my favorite holiday and the source of some of my best memories. But these are just plain bad...."

• Place your children's stuffed animals under the tree as a welcoming committee for Santa. I'm sure all the kids will feel great when they go to hug Mr. Snuggles and he's full of pine needles and tree sap.
• Buy a pair of red flannel pajamas that you only wear on Christmas Eve. Red flannel...dang sexy.
• Let go of a problem you can't solve. Enjoy the season. If we could do that so easily, it would be Christmas year-round.
• Bake Christmas cookies while a Johnny Mathis Christmas album plays in the background. Good idea, Suzy Homemaker.
• Wear a smile and a Santa hat when you walk through the mall. Sure, if you want to get kicked.
• When you're with a child and see a blinking red light in the sky, ask her, 'Do you think that could be Rudolph?' Look, it is! And he just crashed into the side of that DC-10.

--I attended my first Christmas party of the season last night... (A Dash of Salt)

Jenny Anderson vents some exam-week stress all over her newly-unwrapped copy of The Little Book of Christmas Joys: 432 things to do for yourself and others that just might make this the best Christmas Ever by H. Jackson Brown, Jr. By the way... Amazon has a used copy on sale for eighteen cents! The UWEC English club could get a 2.5% commission on that $0.18 sale! What are you waiting for??

"Like Shakespeare, or many of the greatest writers, [P. G.] Wodehouse is violently cavalier with English grammar. The dictionary will tell you that 'window' is a noun, 'small' is an adjective, 'Fred' is a proper noun. Shakespeare's Cleopatra sees herself 'window'd in great Rome'; Hardy has a figure which 'smalls into the distance'; a character in Wodehouse can 'out-Fred the nimblest Astaire'. Try to do that in German. " Philip Hensher --The Music of the LanguageSpectator)

"[E]very word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " Mary McCarthy's famous quip about Lillian Hellman is the inspiration for Nora Ephron's play "Imaginary Friends." Dick Cavett suggests that the wrath of Hellman eventually destroyed the health of both women. --Lillian, Mary and MeNew Yorker)

"[M]any big-city journalists -- especially those who set the agenda for what gets covered in the rest of the media -- have moved away from much of the largely middle- and working-class audience they purport to serve. At best, they're out of touch. At worst, they've become elitists." David Shaw --Jouralists Losing Touch with the Man on the StreetLA Times)

• It's not 'cat sat on the mat or 'Peter and Jane' writing. Almost anything - from leaflets and letters to legal documents - can be written in plain English without being patronising or over-simple.
• It doesn't mean reducing the length or changing the meaning of your message....
• It's not about banning new words, killing off long words or promoting completely perfect grammar. Nor is it about letting grammar slip.
• It is not an amateur's method of communication. Most forward-looking senior managers always write in plain English.
• And finally, it is not as easy as we would like to think.

--How to Write in Plain EnglishPlain English Campaign)

According to the Plain English Campaign, Dec. 5 is "Plain English Day." The Plain English Campaign led me to www.anadrom.net, which includes the following mission statement: "Please browse the site to see our full range of services, we can remain customer focused and goal-directed, innovate and be an inside-out organization which facilitates sticky web-readiness transforming turnkey eyeballs to brand 24/365 paradigms with benchmark turnkey channels implementing viral e-services and dot-com action-items while we take that action item off-line and raise a red flag and remember touch base as you think about the red tape outside of the box and seize B2B e-tailers and re-envisioneer innovative partnerships that evolve dot-com initiatives delivering synergistic earballs to incentivize. " Someone's been playing with Catbert's Mission Statement Generator. What's even worse -- I got nothing when I went to the site. Google's cache of anadrom brings up a very slow page with an animated intro that reveals a small inset window; the mission statement is buried so that you have to click a scroll button to read it.

"Is it possible that we have actually come to the end of fairy tales as an available, rather than an archival, entertainment? Fairy tales, however many times they are transformed, depend in some part for their effect on an air of sincerity, of urgent seriousness. For the not merely wise but wised-up children of this new century, other tales and other, more skittish ways of telling seem to have usurped the old stories and styles. Which means that the fairy tale could be headed for the place where all our good used-up things go, America's Island of Misfit Toys, the college English department." Adam Gopnik --Magic Kingdoms... What Is a Fairytale, Anyway?New Yorker)

While the websites that traditional journalists tend to read and cite are written mostly by men, most people who are even vaguely familiar with weblogs would have little trouble finding good 'blogs written by women. "Was there really a gender gap in Blogville? The answer, I soon learned, was complicated. And it was wrapped up in knotty issues like the power of celebrity, the male tilt of the computer industry, the grip of sexual stereotypes (women keeping diaries, men droning on about politics) and the preciousness of time - specifically, the fact that women with children and jobs have almost none to spare." Lisa Guernsey

--Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)NY Times [registration])

Guernsey praises weblogs for giving men a chance to talk about their families and women a space to discuss politics, but I find the whole premise of her article troubling and ill-informed. James Lileks often writes humorous and detailed rebuttals of elitist or anti-American editorials, but he also writes fondly about his baby girl "Gnat." "I, Cringely" is a geeky technology column on PBS (not a 'blog, but regularly cited by bloggers) wrote an essay on the death of his infant son Chase (in his arms, while his father was reading e-mail) that moved me to tears: "as a grieving nerd, I feel the need to do something." Both sites are widely cited by the kind of political and/or geeky bloggers that Guernsey dismisses as not interested in such "feminine" topics as raising children.

"I was at the mall today and I was waiting forever in line to tell you what I want for Christmas," wrote Nichole, 8, from Tucson, Arizona. "So I really like that I can e-mail you right away without lining up. Well except for after my little brother." Steve Kettman --Dear Santa: You've Got E-MailWired)