It’s highly possible I just deleted some of your comments stuck in the moderation queue. I logged in to check and found 4250 (!) spam posts and so very possibly caught some legitimate ones when I did a mass delete.

Q! I have been challenged by the incomparably delightful Little Lai to come up with a list of ten Q words and their significance to me. Click the preceding link to see her Ms (naughty!), read on for my alphabetically-ordered Qs.

1. Qat

While it’s not a hands-down winner, “qat” is very much in the running for my Favorite Scrabble Word of All Time. God knows why, but the Scrabble dictionary insists that Q-A-T is a valid alternate spelling for the word meaning fuzzy wee felines. It’s just so delightfully wrong, you know? And worth lots of points while also allowing for easy dumping of a high-penalty tile late in the game.

2. Qdoba

I had almost broken fast food’s iron grip on my gustatory soul when, on moving to Tuscaloosa, I found that this small chain had a location just down the street from my apartment. This is a joint that does up speedy Mexican while you watch, like Subway but with burritoes and nachos. Their ingredients are of decent quality, their chips crack-a-licious, and their sauces much better than they have any right to be. I hate to be a willing corporate stooge, but damn Qdoba’s good.

3. Quality

The first lightbulb moment of my undergraduate career came about three months before I started classes. I had been selected to attend a four-week residency fellowship thing for incoming engineering students, with instruction held on-site at the offices of the Alabama Advanced Computer Research & Development Network. There was usually hands-on stuff in the mornings followed by seminars after lunch.

In one of the first seminars, the presenter went kind of off-script and into a vehement denunciation of the notion of “quality” as a mission goal. “What the hell is ‘quality’ anyway? What does it mean? How can it be measured?”

He went on and on, diatribing against the essential meaninglessness of what is typically promoted as a basic goal of any manufacturing endeavor. And the curtains lifted, and I began to realize how so many of the things we accept as basically true and good and pure are, in fact, just weak placeholders we use to address notions we really don’t understand.

4. Queer

I don’t think I’m radical enough (yet) to call myself Queer in good faith, but the more man-loving men I know the more I’m disinclined to simply self-describe as Gay. “Gay”, as it is used, seems to imply some sort of ingrained acceptance of one’s inferiority, of the necessity of not merely submitting but actively embracing one’s Otherness as a flaw, or at best something embarrassing enough to keep mostly under wraps.

“Queer”, on the other hand, still strikes me as being a bit too much reactive, as reifying the Otherness into a thing-in-itself. This is problematic in that it seems to be a position of allowing the amorphous and invisible makers-of-convention to define the terms one is reacting against, so the Queer person continues to be not self-creating but still creating hirself in opposition to (as opposed to the Gay person’s compliance with) perceived conventions of normality. Also, people who self-identify as Queer are often fucking annoying.

I think I would like to go with “GLBT”, although that suffers from a sort of overly precious academicism.

(There are those who would, and will, ask why any labels are needed at all. I think I shall address this separately, and soon.)

5. Quest items

I am not a big fan of fantasy fiction, and I think that quest items are a big reason why. Quest items, sometimes called “plot coupons”, are the maguffins that drive yer typical fantasy narrative; they’re the things that must be sought, then transported, then somehow employed. Problem is, they’re rarely interesting in themselves and typically function as Things That Make The Plot Work.

Hm. Can of worms is now open. Yet another something I’ll have to return to at length, and soon.

6. Questions

I like ‘em. Do you have any?

7. Queue

The greatest invention of and most reliable marker of true civilization. The queue exists as the alternative to the miserable Hobbesian war of all against all, a social device that allows for the closest approximation of equality of access to all comers. Let’s hear it for the humble, civility-enabling queue.

8. Quimper

One of the greatest villains ever, the creepy masked midget introduced into Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. Like so much else with the series, the character faded into a mere shadow of himself and was resolved flatly after Morrison was killed in a tragic bus accident just after finishing volume 2, leaving the series to be completed by a chap assuming the same name and undergoing extensive plastic surgery to achieve the late author’s appearance.

9. Quip

A wonderful example of a word that undermines what it intends to communicate. One labels as a quip that which is meant to be witty and spontaneous, but on actually looking at things called quips one finds them to be typically neither. Also, the word “quip” is wonderful in how it conjures up images of polyester, corduroy, and Charles Nelson Reilly.

10. Qwerty

Mmm, such a wonderfully nonsensical arrangement of keys, a deliberate impediment to functionality which has become the universal standard for Roman-character keyboards. Qwerty highlights the inherent perversity of human nature, and I love it.

And that’s 10. Anybody want a letter of their own?

What say you, gentle readers? More importantly, what would you like to see a week of?

I’m tapped here, luxuriating in the blissful indolence of NoWorkNoSchool, but I really want to be writing again. Any help would be much obliged.

Right now I’m still coming down from the whole no-school afterglow thing. I think it’s about over, though.

So I was sitting here thinking about the Confederate flag and how it inherently represents, no matter what else it might be taken to stand for, armed rebellion against the United States government.

And I also got to thinking about how one of the (more curious, in my opinion) rallying points of the anti-immigration movement is the claim that illegal immigrants are especially bad because they’re disrespecting the sovereignty of the United States government.

And then I got to wondering how many people make the “respect our authoriteh sovereignty” noises while simultaneously showing honor for the flag of treason. I’m betting it’s a non-trivial number.

Because the former seems to me to make more sense on the face of it, but I seem to see the latter more frequently.

In short, dunno. Felt like they weren’t completely satisfied with me, but also that they weren’t 100% turned off either. There’s one more round of interviews before offers are made, so I’ll know something by next Friday.

Looks like about a five hour drive to my hotel. Ugh.

Interview is from 12:20-3:30 EST (GMT-5) tomorrow. Prayers, suras, sigils, happy thoughts, and what-have-you would be much appreciated.

In speculation about who might bite it by the end of the season on Lost, a user on this page of a lengthy thread notices that it is being taken as given that all the major white-male characters are presumed absolutely safe while every non-white major character is being argued as potentially killable; the poster concludes by saying

Seems really odd since white men are the predominant players on Lost that there are not more of them are getting killed.

As I imagine most of the readers here can guess, the next couple of pages erupted in indignation, accusing the poster quoted above of insisting the show’s writers distribute mortality in a politically correct manner, regardless of the dictates of story. There’s much frothing and gnashing of teeth and more than a little oh-wounded-me sarcasm from white males lamenting that their views will be discounted because they are white males (which, tellingly, would not have been known by anyone in the anonymous forum had not the white males seen the (not quite) inexplicable need to bring it up).

So here’s the situation: Original poster makes the perfectly valid observation that the characters most consistently in the thick of dangerous situations are white males. The poster also makes the perfectly reasonable assumption that, in a narrative that plays fair with causality, the persons most in the thick of danger are the characters most likely to be negatively impacted by that danger. The poster further observes that, within the discussion thread, all the non-whites are being potentially marked for death while all the whites are being treated as inviolable.

Putting the two inarguably true observations together with the reasonable assumption, the poster concludes with what seems to me a mild suggestion that perhaps the conversants might be making assumptions from cultural bias instead of narrative logic, or that the show’s writers are allowing cultural assumptions to override narrative logic.

Shitstorm ensues. Original poster throws his hands up in a let’s-be-cool gesture and says sie was only kidding around with the original post, but of course this does nothing to soothe the beast.

What fascinates me about this sub-thread is the fact that it doesn’t even need to be unpacked: the display of unexamined, unrecognized arrogance is as bald as the unquestioned adherence and allegiance to oppressive cultural norms.

Somebody points out how a conversation is being informed by some fairly well-recognized cultural assumptions. One can fairly infer that the person thinks that such is a bad thing, but the person does not call for the writers of the show to kill of some white guys to balance the scales. (In fact, what the poster suggests is kind of the opposite and none subtle: If the writers were not beholden to notions of inherent white-male superiority, the narrative they have already been presenting would already be littered with more main-character white-male deaths than female and person-of-color deaths. The poster does not mention it, but it is intriguing that the one death of a significant white male was of a character who had consistently been portrayed as unable to live up to expectations of manliness.)

So. Guy points out something that really shouldn’t be controversial: the people who have most often placed themselves in the jaws of peril have thus far been the characters least likely to suffer harm. Further, these same logically-most-imperilled characters are being assumed to remain untouchable by fans of the show. This is not a call for warfare, folks, just an honest observation of what is being displayed.

The angered responses boil down to this: If the white-male character were to be made equally susceptible to risk as non-white-male character, this would be unrealistic, politically motivated pandering on the writers’ part. There is a clear assumption on the protestors’ part that white-male characters possess an inherent resistance to danger, and that they deserve it. To remove that shield of privilege is unthinkable; the only conceivable way to reform the unequal, unrealistic distribution of risk would be to implement some sort of affirmative action program and hand out undeserved shields to the non-white-male characters.

It’s a fascinating subthread, displaying in practice just about everything that is theoretically mainstream about assumptions of and about privilege and the twisting, warping effects of such assumptions. Socially-constructed privilege is conflated with inherency, and even a simple observation of that privilege in action is seen as a threat not just to the system of privilege but to the nature of justice and civility themselves.

The first rule of Privilege Club is: We don’t talk about Privilege Club.

Bah, I say. Bah.

My final MLIS grade is in, and I have been graduated with a four point oh. Nifty!