Tuesday, November 22, 2011

A funny story... but not really

About five years ago, I was going through a Mexican cooking phase, and I was feeling kind of cocky about my ability to handle spicy foods. Long story short, I ended up adding way too many habañero chili peppers to my fajita recipe (for the record, ANY number of habañeros is too many). The eating part was actually okay... maybe a little uncomfortable, but I had rice and chips and other stuff to absorb the oils.

Then I washed the dishes and sat out on the porch for nice post-meal glass of wine. At which point my hands exploded.

Now, I've had eczema all my life, so random itchy rashes aren't something unusual in my life. But this was by far the most skin-related pain I've ever been in. The super-strength, prescription-only hydrocortisone cream that knocks out my eczema flare-ups did nothing to touch this. Finally, out of desperation, I reasoned that since drinking milk helps with easing spicy-food mouth-burn, rubbing cream cheese all over my hands would cure this. Believe it or not, it worked.

I bring this up because, according to Scoville Unit scale, which officially ranks peppers by the amount of capsaicin they contain (capsaicin is the angry oil that you can apparently only neutralize with dairy products), habañero chilis have 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). A jalapeño pepper has 3,500 to 8,000 SHUs.

Law enforcement-grade pepper spray? 500,000 to 2 million SHUs. Or, at minimum, five times the strength of the most physically painful thing I've ever been through, or maybe up to 20 times as painful, depending on the variety of spray.

In other words... anyone out there, say, going on national television to say that Occupy protestors at UC Davis are just big babies because pepper spray is "a food product, essentially," is either a) hopelessly partisan to the point that he/she can't acknowledge the basic humanity of people they disagree with politically, b) a blooming idiot, or c) both.

(Substitute "middle aged retirees as a Tea Party rally" for "college students at an Occupy protest" and see if you still think pepper-spraying a peaceful assembly is A-OK.)

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

NBC's going to Britta this one

This morning, I had to sit in on a meeting about an upcoming community event. Now, there's a reason I don't do event planning, and that's because I suck at event planning. I have zero interest and negligible ability. I could not possibly have less patience with spending an hour debating the appropriate tablecloth. My philosophy is, you plan it and I'll promote it. So, I was not having a good time.

Long story short, someone mentioned decorations in the bathroom, and I literally had to put my hand over my mouth to keep from saying "Olives! Put a bowl of olives by the toilet... It's a fancy party, Britta." And the reason I had to restrain my self from saying this out loud is because I was 99 percent sure no one else in the room would get it. And that makes me sad, because it means that not enough people are watching "Community."

It was just about a month ago, about the time that "Remedial Chaos Theory" aired, that I realized I looked forward to watching "Community" roughly 400 times more than I do "The Office" (which makes me sad for different reasons...). Anyway, "Remedial Chaos Theory" isn't just one of the best episodes of "Community;" it's one of the best episodes of any TV show I've ever seen, period. "Community" is the rare network TV show that trusts its audience's intelligence, and that's why I love it.

I do not trust NBC in the slightest, unfortunately. "Community" is not on the mid-season schedule - at all. NBC could've moved it to another time slot on Thursdays, or another night, but instead they chose to shelve it entirely for months. "Community" isn't cancelled yet, but raise your hand if you have any faith in the programming instincts of the network that destroyed "The Tonight Show."

Just about every network TV show I watch, I have on in the background in the next room while I'm working at night. There is exactly one network show that I make an appointment to watch every week, and NBC just put it on the bench.

Great thinking, guys. Britta'd it.

But you still have about another week to watch "Remedial Chaos Theory" on Hulu!

Saturday, November 12, 2011

A Word Nerd Rants

Coupon: COO-pon

Anything else is just wrong. Sorry.

This has been a longtime pet peeve of mine. Not just this one word, but common mispronunciation of words in general that I think might be a unique product of regional psychology. I'll explain.

Coupon. From the French word "couper," meaning "to cut." It seems so straightforward, and it is in pretty much the entire English-speaking word except for the South, where much of the time you're liable to hear "cyoo-pon" instead. You'll hear educated, professional people saying "cyoo-pon" as if it's remotely logical or linguistic to see C-O-U and think, "that's pronounced CYOO."

This drives me up the wall, even moreso than double negatives or "ain't." In my experience, saying something like "I ain't got no (whatever one has none of)" is a product of ignorance, and that's understandable. What is NOT understandable is educated people who should know better persisting in flat-out mispronouncing words, just because. I'm no expert on language (just a card-carrying Word Nerd), but in my anecdotal experience, the desire to appear to be educated is behind a lot of common mispronunciations.

Like "often." It's supposed to be "OFF-en," the T being silent, as in "listen."

A friend I had in college always pronounced the word "tavern" as "TAV-ren," order of letters be damned. She said that the "ern" sound made her feel like she "sounded ignorant," which I interpreted to mean, "sounded country." (Because mispronouncing a simple word doesn't make you sound ignorant AT ALL.) This was also one of the people (more than one, sadly) I've met in my life who refused to use the proper words for genitalia, because they "sounded dirty"... as opposed to something like "vajayjay," because that's obviously so dignified... anyway.

Anyway, I think my friend was on to something. Nobody wants to sound stupid, or unsophisticated, or unschooled. I think that Southerners, and surely rural people everywhere, are particularly sensitive to this. We've been lectured about our lazy enunciation, so we react by super-enunciating everything in order to seem more sophisticated than we are.

And, like the self-conscious hostess of a party I attended once who spent the whole night telling her guests, "You can't drink white wine out of that glass; that's a red wine glass!" we just end up looking silly. What about simple syllables is so threatening?

It's coo-pon. It's off-en. It's "regardless," and it's tavern.

I am the world's biggest proponent of regional dialect. You can pry my "y'all" and my "reckon" and my "yonder" from my cold, dead hands. But saying words the wrong way doesn't get you anything from dirty looks and frustration from people who know better. You, really, really, really don't have to work that hard to convince people that you're awesome.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

May no act of ours bring shame

Today I found myself thinking about an elective I took at a community college about the Holocaust. It was less a history class than a course focusing on the philosophy of evil, for lack of a better term - why seemingly good people do terrible things. We read about the Kitty Genovese case, and the theory that people will be less likely to respond to cries for help if they think others are around to do so instead. We looked at the Milgram Experiment, which found that people will continue to administer progressively more intense electric shocks to another person as long as someone who appears to be in authority tells them it's okay. In modern times, there's plenty of anecdotal and scholarly evidence to show that, under the right circumstances, most people are capable of anything.

I hope there's a class like this at Penn State. It looks like they could use it.

Just before I went to bed last night, Penn State's Board of Trustees finally fired both the university's president and head football coach Joe Paterno. As I wrote last night, I think it was the right decision. A few thousand Penn State undergrads felt otherwise, and spent the evening pulling down light poles, overturning news vans and getting appropriately pepper-sprayed. They weren't demonstrating on behalf of the (at least) eight alleged victims, or out of anger at the coaches and administrators who swept this under the rug from (at least) 15 years. No, they rioted over a football coach getting fired. I'd like to give some leeway to the kids here, given what a bubble college life can be. I seriously hope the students quoted in this story, in particular, grow up at some point. "WE ARE... over-privileged children* with no perspective whatsoever!"

*Though... aren't current Penn State students the same age now as some of the victims would be? You'd think THAT would be a bit of a reality check.

Anyway, I continue to read comments from Paterno supporters (including in the above linked story) that he's being made a scapegoat, he did everything he should've, etc. Pardon me, but that's BS. Let's walk through this one, shall we? (A lot of this is drawn from the grand jury summary released this week. Read it only if you have a strong stomach.)

Backstory: there were allegations against Jerry Sandusky in 1998 serious enough for the local DA to look at them. At least one public school principal banned Sandusky from his campus. A Penn State janitor reported walking in on Sandusky and a young boy, and was so upset at what he saw that his coworkers feared he'd have a heart attack.

So, when a graduate assistant coach (widely reported to be current Penn State assistant Mike McQueary) comes to Paterno back in 2002 and tells him that, the night before, he walked into the shower room and saw Sandusky committing anal rape on a boy he estimated to be 10 years old, it wasn't like this was something out of the blue. Some have speculated today that the 1998 incident is what led Sandusky to retire abruptly in 1999. Also, McQueary played for both JoePa Linkand Sandusky, and grew up in State College. This is not some campus rumor drifting up the ladder; it's an insider reporting what he saw with his own eyes.

It's not clear how much detail the assistant/McQueary went into with Paterno. An uncomfortable chat with the man who holds your professional future in his hands about his colleague of 30 years is not, after all, sworn testimony. But, here's the thing. Even if all McQueary said that day was "I saw Sandusky naked with a kid in the shower," who on earth would not say, "Elaborate, please?" Either Paterno blew off what he was hearing, or he deliberately stuck his fingers in his ears. Then he did the bare minimum of ass-covering by passing the report to his athletic director, the vp, the president, etc. "May no act of ours bring shame," indeed.

No, Paterno didn't molest anyone, but still he may have broken the law. Pennsylvania is a state that requires reports of sexual abuse of children to be reported to law enforcement. It's a misdemeanor no to do so, but still. More seriously, the federal Clery Act requires every college to publish an annual report of crimes taking place on campus, even those that are never prosecuted. If Penn State's top administrators knew about a credible allegation and did not investigate it even through campus channels, this university could be in very serious trouble. Like, six-figure fines and potentially losing federal financial aid trouble. THAT is why these men lost their jobs.

But, I think a huge part of why this has become such a major story is that this happened at Penn State, and not, say Miami or Ohio State or USC. Penn State fans can take pride at their athlete graduation rate and the fact that they've had no NCAA violations during Paterno's tenure. But narratives matter. As grotesque as the charges against Sandusky are, what's really feeding the widespread fascination and/or shock with this case is the troubling reality that it was JoePa, the "win with honor" paragon of integrity, who failed utterly when it counted. The great coach who inspired generations, who recruited "clean" kids and would've cut one of his players in a heartbeat for doing a tenth of what Sandusky is accused of - when it mattered, when honor and courage and fortitude weren't just vocabulary words for a pre-game pep talk but tools that might've saved an innocent child from the worst harm there is - Paterno choked.

I have no doubt that Paterno is a good man. So were the people who went to bed that night in 1964 while Kitty Genovese bled to death outside. If you won't help them - and I do mean you personally - then who will?

Yes, it's sad that Paterno's legendary coaching career will end like this. And by "like this," I mean, "by the revelation that he covered for his friend the serial child rapist," not "OMG the media sucks so hard, bro."

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Breaking: JoePa is out

I still have things I want to say about this - long-winded, hopefully thoughtful things - but for now I just wanted to note that, after Penn State's Joe Paterno announced today that he'd retire at the end of the football season following the indictment of his former assistant Jerry Sandusky for numerous counts of sexual abuse, Penn State's Board of Trustees fired him effective immediately. They also fired the university's president.

It should go without saying that this is the right decision. For now, I'll set aside the ethical arguments and just focus on the cold, hard calculus of image management. Some are protesting that Paterno, with his 50+ year history coaching at Penn State, should be allowed to leave on his own terms*. But that would mean that this would continue to drag on for the next three weeks, minimum. The Big Ten can't be wild about the possibility of this stink clinging to their championship game. If Penn State makes a high-profile bowl game, ye gods. Ok, the football players shouldn't be punished for their coach's monumental failure of morality... but at least cutting JoePa loose now gives the team at least the possibility of moving on.

I've also read the argument about how much Paterno has done for the university over the years, and how much money he helps raise. Um... exactly. Like the Penn State advancement office is going to ask JoePa to sign a fundraising letter or make an appearance at an event right now. The Penn State community is hurting, and they're angry. They just learned that their god of "winning with honor" turned a blind eye toward straight-up rape of a 10-year-old on campus. Sadly, there probably are Penn State alums and boosters out there who will threaten to withdraw their support out of JoePa love... but they are far, far outnumbered by the alumni and parents who want their school's honor back. After all, that "B.A., Penn State" is going to be on one's resume forever, and no one wants that tarnished.

The board made the right call. Only they should've done so days ago... or years ago.

*As I once wrote relating to Ben Roethlisberger, it's pretty rich for anyone to complain about being forced into something when... HELLO.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Socratic NASCAR, part II: NASCAR is mad, y'all

Just because I enjoyed the first part so much...

(...and, again, apologies for being so slow. Adjustment to new job is kicking my a**.)

But it turns out that NASCAR has given this story a few days' more legs by fining Kyle Busch $50,000 for wrecking Ron Hornaday Jr. last Friday, after parking Busch for the Saturday Nationwide and Sunday Cup races. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled...but on an intellectual level I understand that there's stuff I should work out.

You were super-happy to hear that Kyle Busch couldn't compete Saturday or Sunday. You gloated, and you know it.
Yep. Guilty. It's about time NASCAR stopped treating this punk like the Lovable Scamp Who Gosh Darn It Just Wants to Drive Racecars (trademark pending)! and started treating him like they would anyone else who blatantly wrecked another driver. Wasn't Busch on probation once already this year? It's not like Jeff Burton or Elliott Sadler went out there and crashed someone.

But the fact that it was Kyle Busch HAS to be affecting your reaction at least a little, right?
I think that's fair. I can't tell a lie - after days of parsing by how many spaces Dale Jr. would have to finish ahead of Busch in order to move up in the standings, learning that Busch would essentially be scoreless in one race was a "pinch me, I'm dreaming" moment. It helped that Kurt Busch also finished the perfect number of places behind Dale Jr., so my driver ended up gaining not just one spot in the points, but two. I freely admit that I'm not objective when it comes to either my favorite or least favorite drivers. Who is? If this had been Harvick or Stewart being parked, I'd have been pissed.

Parking him for the whole weekend, and then a fine on top of it? C'mon, that's extreme.
I disagree. Again, this is not a driver with a clean record. Busch has been stacking straws on the back of this camel for a long time, on and off the track. And we can't forget that the motorsports world doesn't operate in a vacuum. Two-time Indy 500 champ Dan Wheldon died in an in-race crash two weeks ago. Sunday, while Busch was not getting ready for a race at Texas, Motocross racer Jim McNeil died in an exhibition outside. People die in this sport. Wrecks will happen, but intentionally crashing someone head-on into a wall at full speed can't be tolerated. Ever.

Yeah, but would NASCAR have penalized Busch to this extent if he'd been higher than 7th in points?
That I can't answer... but I'll bet the powers-that-be are glad that they don't have to answer it either. It's one thing to say, yes, we absolutely treat every driver the same... and another to know that your subjectively applied penalty surely cost someone a championship (and potentially sponsors and/or a ride). But race fans argue all the time about how debris cautions or penalties cost their drivers. Football fans gripe about holding and PI calls; baseball fans gripe about strikes; basketball fans call foul on fouls. A little subjectivity is what makes sports interesting.

...Are you still gloating?
Yes.


Men behaving badly, and all the other people who have to clean up after them

When I read yesterday for the first time an opinion commentator writing that Penn State doesn't have many other options other than to ask Joe Paterno to resign, and when I read today that this might actually be in the works, my first reaction was, "Well, this sucks." It's sad that Paterno's decades-long career might end because he may have helped cover up a former colleague's sexual abuse of children (which I refuse to refer to as a "sex scandal" - "sex scandals" are between consenting adults, not predators and children).

But then the other half of my Gemini brain immediately swooped in pointing out that sympathy should be reserved for the children here, not grown men who should've known better. Ok, other half, that's true. Sure, Paterno made choices and now he has to deal with the consequences. But I can still make room in my mind and my heart for the thousands of Penn State alums, former players, and of course the families of the people involved, because it's a terrible feeling to realize that the person you've admired for almost 50 years maybe isn't that admirable.

That's nothing compared to the loss of innocence that the children assistant coach Jerry Sandusky is accused of assaulting must have gone through. Sexual assault is always heinous, but especially so in cases like this, or the many Catholic priest abuse cases, where the child victim belongs to a culture that tells him or her that this particular grown-up has special authority. Because what goes through that child's mind is a litany of thoughts like "This person is always right, therefore I must have been the one who did something wrong." Even if the child realizes that abuse has happened, who's going to believe a kid over a minor deity like a Penn State football coach?

The more authority you have, the more responsibility you have not to abuse it.

This week, two of the women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment several years ago have "gone public" - one by choice, with an attorney and a press conference, and one against her will. This morning on the radio, there was a discussion of how this expanding harassment issue will affect Cain, and someone brought up Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers. Again, a consensual relationship is NOT the same thing as non-consensual comments or behavior... so Clinton/Flowers isn't at all applicable here.

There are plenty of places on the 'net to discuss what the revelations of these allegations might do to Cain's presidential candidacy, but I relate more to the women involved. I'm not in a position to weigh in on what happened all those years ago. But I can relate to going through something of that nature, doing the hard work of moving on with your life, and then dreading what will happen to your put-back-together life when, at any point decades from now, someone in the press gets ahold of it.

I can also relate to the children in the Penn State case. What's getting lost (or under-reported) here is that this abuse happened over a 15-year period. Y'all know what happened to me, a little over four years ago. The guy in my case also had very close ties to a college athletic program, with a lot of people who idolize and idealize the program. When I'd see those news stories about the great athletic tradition of blah blah blah, all I could think was - you have a rapist in the family. Do you know that? If you do, do you care? Do you believe what I said was true and are you ashamed, or are you sitting up there on your booster-funded pedestal thinking I'm a crazy liar? For 15 years, there have been at least eight children thinking something very close to that every time a Penn State highlight rolls across the ESPN ticker.

This is what's the most awful about abuse, or any crime... even when the perpetrator is caught and (rarely) brought to justice, it seems that the victims, their families, and any number of people who are just caught up in the ripple effects are the ones who truly end up dealing with the consequences in real, life-altering ways. Sexual abuse isn't just a one-time incident where someone in power takes advantage of someone else. It's a decision to permanently alter another person's life for the worse. That's why it's so obscene. The perpetrator might (rarely) end up in jail, but someone else is always going to have to clean up the mess.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Bless your heart, New York Times!

(First of all, apologies for being so lax in posting lately. I started my new job not quite three weeks ago, and I love that it's so fast-paced... but naturally that leaves me less time for pontificating.)

True story: this summer, my family, traveling in a tourist-y area in the Blue Ridge Mountains found ourselves entering a restaurant at the same time as a small party of men. The men visibly raced to the door to squeeze in after the first half of the family, and allowed the restaurant's screen door to slam directly in the face of the second half of the family, which included me. My instantaneous, instinctive first thought at getting a face-full of spring-loaded screen door was, "Yankee." (I wish I could say that this was followed by "Bless his heart, he doesn't know any better," but it wasn't. Those guys pissed me off.)

Yep. Guilty. In my hind-brain, any full-grown man in the South who fails at anything so basic as holding open a door just MUST be ... well, not from here. Call me
prejudiced. I am.

This morning, I read this New York Times story about how the South - the world's last bastion of courtesy, apparently - is gradually losing our trademark hospitality. (Ah, the South. Even our war was civil!) For what it's worth, they also blame the Yankees. Now, I love the Times' reporting of actual news events, with their ability to place a multitude of reporters in all 47,000 places that news might be breaking. But their "lifestyle" stories tend to go something like this: Question? Competing anecdotes. No objective data. Page clicks. etc. Or, as Gawker put it,
"Manners Down South: Killed by Anecdotes."

As a Southerner, I love that "has manners" is a major part of our identity, even as I can understand that our region doesn't in fact have a monopoly on saying "Ma'am" and holding open doors. In my experience, people in rural areas anywhere tend to be more cordial than those in large cities, simply because the city peoples' personal encounters tend to be more anonymous. If you live in a town of 627 people, there's not a lot you can get done if people aren't nice to one another.

But, aside from the lazy reasoning, the Times story bugged me for a number of reasons. Mainly, the argument that Southerners came up with manners just so we could get away with racism, and now that we can't have Jim Crow laws, we just don't know what to do with ourselves. There's a big difference between etiquette designed to enforce unwritten oppressive social codes and just plain courtesy. When I think of the former, I picture an elderly black man being called "boy" by any white person who addresses him, or a woman whose doctor won't talk to her about her own health. That happened, and not just in the South. (Newsflash! Racism and sexism do in fact happen in other parts of the world.) But I don't put that in the same category as saying please and thank you.

I'm not insensitive to the gut reaction of people who are suspicious of the racist/sexist origins of some points of etiquette. The man who cuts my grass calls me "Miss Sara," even though I've told him he can call me plain old "Sara." It bothers the hell out of me; I feel like a plantation owner. But he still says it. And, if it's true that manners are ultimately about making other people feel at ease, then am I the one being rude by repeatedly correcting him?

But, again, rigid social codes are a far cry from basic manners. I don't feel discriminated against when a man holds open a door for me. I hold open doors for people every day, men included. That's because slamming a slab of wood or glass in the face of a woman with a stroller or a man toting a stack of boxes or a person of any gender who's right fracking behind you is just rude.

I was raised right (and not by parents with scads of money or privilege, either). I still put my napkin on my lap; I stand when people enter the room; I say please, thank you, ma'am, sir, etc., and I don't call my elders by their first names unless they tell me I may. I write thank-you notes. I by God hold open doors, and say thank you when others do so for me. As proud as I am to be from the South, I certainly hope that a child raised in Westchester or Palm Beach or Minot, North Dakota is able to say the same thing.

(And side rant - "bless your heart" or "Isn't that nice" aren't passive-aggressive. They're just courteous. Again, manners are about putting others at ease, not crowing from the rooftops that you've got Emily Post memorized, for pete's sake.)