Culture: June 2003 Archive Page

"My new friends seem to expect the life of a young woman living in Manhattan to mirror that of Carrie Bradshaw, the alluring protagonist of the popular TV programme Sex and the City. I'm expected to follow in the stiletto heels of that (in)famous TV drama's befurred, cosmo-swilling crew. Alas, I am inevitably a disappointment to these admirers; for I came to New York not to linger over the pistachio- encrusted sea bass of the latest celebrity chef, but rather to ponder North American language and usage as one of three lexicographers working for the OED's North American Editorial Unit. And, while I hate to disappoint, there is no way around it: champagne-fizzed evenings will not be followed by breakfasts of white truffles and afternoons at Barneys - not on my lexicographer's salary. My mornings, afternoons, and evenings will be spent in an office suited for the serious study of lemmas - secluded, snug (not to say cramped), my desk laden with computers and tiny, scrawled-upon citation slips." Madeline McDonnell --Lex in the City: reflections on a year in the North American Editorial Unit (OED Newsletter)

Thanks, Jim for pointing me to the newsletter archives.

"We need to take a minute to consider how anomalous a genre weepies really are. Most movies—especially American movies—are essentially dramatic, as opposed to lyrical (concerned with mood or the inner self) or conceptual (concerned with ideas). The weepie's the exception. It creates an interesting aesthetic problem for the people making it: How do you explore characters, in an essentially visual medium, who are not constantly externalizing their conflicts in action? Babette's Feast takes that problem and turns it right around, making it work for the movie." Jim Shepard --Babette's Feast and the Reclamation of Melodrama (Believer Magazine)

"From Bouffant Hairdos to Platform Shoes, these are the fashion trends which were the style of the day, and the nightmare of the next decade." --Bad Fads Museum -- Fashion (Bad Fads)

The site also includes pages categorized under "Collectibles," "Activities" and "Events". I've seen similar nostalgia sites that are sorted according to decades... this one just sort of lumps everything together. And while the site claims to cover the last 100 years, it seems to focus mostly on the 70s.

The site also doesn't have a good entry page... badfads.com is a pointless splash page, and the page you get when you click the "enter" button rather lamely offers links to the 4 categories.

Via Distracted.

"For months I've fought to get the number of marketing messages I receive down to a manageable number. I tried just to get to a countable number... I ran naked through my house with a tape deck, ranting. I ranted:

'In My Kitchen...

There's a Kenmore 20 fridge, a Sharp Carosel microwave, a Rival Electronic can opener, envelopes from Working Assets and SBC, Whole Foods Soy Protein powder, Hershey's Cocoa, some Safeway Select Original Decaffinated Coffee, Peet's Coffee and a Miletta Mill coffee machine.'"

Michael Taht --Beating the Band (Postcards from the Bleeding Edge)

Rosemary Frezza writes:

I can run this program and have a "virtual commute" on those days when I work from home.

--Microsimulation of Road TrafficWWW)

It's not really a "game," but it comes close. See also my own "York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator".

"Lying in the service of power, money and advancement — or simply to avoid embarrassment — is nothing new. Bill Clinton lied about having sex 'with that woman'; Richard Nixon lied about his abuse of power during the Watergate scandal. Lyndon Johnson lied about American destroyers being attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin. What is different today — thanks in part to around-the-clock media coverage and the peculiar American habit of making celebrities of the fallen — is that kids see lies, half-truths and hype not as aberrations but as the norm.... They weren’t born that way. They learned it from us." Susan E. Tiff --Will Today’s Pinocchio Culture Become the Norm? (Cantonrep)

Thanks, Jim.

"Who would have guessed, when this New Hampshire YMCA camp was founded in 1905, that anyone would even have to think about an electronics policy?| But in today's world, where some teens are more tech-savvy than their parents, and they often won't leave home without their electronic toys, that's reality. And camp directors are having to respond to this new reality and decide how much they will let the wired world into their simpler, far more rustic communities." Jennifer Wolcott --Welcome to Summer Camp! Now Hand Over Your Cell Phone (CS Monitor)

The Corpus Christi Play was an annual outdoor event, involving hundreds of actors; it was already a long-established tradition by the end of the 14th century, and continued until suppressed by the Protestant Reformation in the late 16th century." --Medieval 'Body of Christ' PlayLiteracy Weblog)

Today is the day the medieval church would have celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi ("Body of Christ). This website is one of my oldest online resources. I created the first version in C++, and it ran only on Windows. When I demonstrated it as a poster paper at my very first academic conference (almost 10 years ago), I learned just how many medievalists are also mac users. That led me to learn Java.

"Like automakers that moved production from Michigan to Mexico or textile firms that abandoned the Southeast for the Far East, service firms are now shifting jobs to cheaper locales like India and the Philippines. It's not just call centers anymore. Indian radiologists now analyze CT scans and chest X-rays for American patients in an office park in Bangalore, not far from where Ernst & Young has 200 accountants processing U.S. tax returns. E&Y's tax prep center in India is only 18 months old, but the company already has plans to double its size. Corporate America is quickly learning that a cubicle can be replicated overseas as easily as a shop floor can." Nelson D. Schwartz --Down and Out in White-Collar America (Fortune)

Would you use "anymore" as a synonym for "from here on" or "these days"? It's a common regionalism here in Pennsylvania, where I've heard it from people with a wide range of educational backgrounds. (Thanks to Jim, the Electric Eclectic.) --Dialect Survey Results: Harvard)

"In June 1999, Bhutan became the last nation in the world to turn on television...Bhutan's isolation has made the impact of television all the clearer, even if the government chooses to ignore it. Consider the results of the unofficial impact study. One third of girls now want to look more American (whiter skin, blond hair). A similar proportion have new approaches to relationships (boyfriends not husbands, sex not marriage). More than 35% of parents prefer to watch TV than talk to their children. Almost 50% of the children watch for up to 12 hours a day. Is this how we came to live in our Big Brother society, mesmerised by the fate of minor celebrities fighting in the jungle?" Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy --Fast Forward into Trouble (Register)

"[T]he younger people are, the more likely they are to text. | More than eight out of ten people under the age of 25 are more likely to send someone a text message than call. | But, at the other end of the scale, just 14% of those aged over 55 said they preferred to text." --Young BBC)

This article summarizes a report issued by a mobile phone company -- take both the article and the report with the appropriate caution, since people are notoriously inaccurate whenit comes to answering pollster's questions about their own behavior.