Last fall, the wireless card in the laptop stopped working. I poked around in the HP forums and discovered that it was a known issue, a problem with the mobo, and that all warranties had been extended to cover that particular problem. I had a wireless adapter lying around, though, so I decided against sending my laptop away for 7-10 days (which I’d read often turned into 4-6 weeks).

This evening, once I finally got my laptop to boot, I decided to see if there were any possible fixes accessible through the HP Customer Care application that came preinstalled. I loaded it, and in the process of updating itself it told me that my warranty would be expiring soon.

!!!

I don’t know why, maybe HP decided to do a blanket extension on all of this model instead of waiting for people to step forward with the particular wireless card problem. I clicked through and discovered that there are many, many more known problems now, starting with the wireless problem and extending through a loss of video and a plain old failure to boot.

Yay, I guess?

Anyway, after 45 minutes on the phone with a nice Indian fellow, HP is sending me a mailer. Within a few weeks (I hope) I should have a nicely refurbished, relatively reliable laptop. Hurrah!

Looks like I’ll have to drag out the clunky old CRT monitor and hook up my desktop for the interim.

So early this month I started having a serious laptop problem.

When trying to turn on the laptop, the little lights on the front come on but there’s no BIOS (or, as I should apparently call it, POST) screen, just a blank monitor. The panel lights also stay frozen in their “we’re on, but we’re waiting for orders before we do anything” configuration.

I’ve found that waiting it out does no good. I have to press down the power button and force a shutdown (even though it was never actually up), then try again. And again. And again and again and again. Usually on the third or fifth try something inside will catch, the POST screen will come up, and everything will load and operate normally.

Any ideas what might be the problem here?

Seriously, does anybody actually appreciate designers incorporating Snap-type content previews into their webpages? You know, that annoying code that forces a pop-up window with a tiny-to-the-point-of-illegibility preview of the webpage that will load if you click through the link?

I hate it. Loathe it. Revile it. In attempting to provide context, it literally obliterates context by hiding the text surrounding the link. The “information” it does provide is worthless, as it gives nothing but a blurred and tiny snapshot communicating nothing more interesting than the layout and general design of the target page. Why the fuck would I care what the page I’m clicking through to might look like? Especially when this “preview” mangles the design of the page I’m currently on?

It doesn’t help that I’m an active reader, moving my cursor through the text while scanning and highlighting bits that might be worth reading more deeply. Snap and its ilk ruin my reading experience, puking up a worthless distraction every time I hover over an infected link.

Are there people who appreciate this? If so, what do they appreciate about it? And how can they be stopped?

(I find it telling that, at least among the sites I read, it’s found almost exclusively among the “Web 2.0″ cheerleaders.)

From the Human Rights Campaign:

Following conversations between the Human Rights Campaign and senior Mars representatives, the company has agreed to pull its most recent ad using stereotypes of gay men to sell its Snickers product line.

Well, good. I guess. If nothing else, this will make a lot of TiVo-less people’s lives a little less sucky.

Continuing the conversation, John wrote:

I don’t mind someone saying “I’m insulted�, it’s the insinuation that I’m supposed to do something about it that bothers me.

This is not a bad point.

If you’re the person responsible for the insulting action, I maintain that it is incumbent on you to do something about it. Actually, it’s logically impossible for you to not do something about it. You can either continue the insulting behavior or stop it. It all depends on whether you care that you’re being insulting, and on whether the insulting behavior is in the service of a greater good.

Look at it like this: When you’re the originator of the insult, the person saying “I’m insulted” is, among other things, asking you to clarify your position. They’re asking, “Are you an asshole? And if so, what kind of asshole are you?”

If you are an asshole and you’re OK with that, fine. I’m perfectly cool with the fact that I’m an asshole toward neocons and Creationists, for example. However:

If you don’t mean to be an asshole, or you don’t want the target group to think you’re an asshole (even if you really are), or if you think the benefits of not looking like an asshole exceed the benefits of freely expressing yourself, then damn skippy you have to do something about it. (This is where I end up in day-to-day interactions with neocons and Creationists.)

This is one of those lessons that’s surprisingly hard to learn: You have no control over what other people find insulting. To use an extreme example, it doesn’t matter that it’s fucking stupid to get upset by the word “niggardly”; if you know that people are going to get upset when you use the word, even though it’s admittedly fucking stupid to do so, then you can’t use the word and expect them not to get upset. If you know there’s going to be a cost to the action, whether that cost is based in reason or not, then it is your responsibility to decide whether the action is worth it.

Sometimes it is. The protagonist in Enemy of the People pissed all of his neighbors off by insisting that there were bacteria in the hot springs, but it was worth the personal cost to champion the truth of a public health hazard.

Sometimes it’s not. If I were to object to the political opinions loudly voiced in the cubicles next door, then interdepartmental peace would be shattered and even less would get done.

(I realize I’ve overlooked a whole big set of possibilities, the ones that arise when the insulted person is in the right and you are, unknowingly, in the wrong. There’s probably a big tree that opens up from that possibility.)

If the insulted person is referring to a third party, I’d say that there’s less (or possibly nothing) incumbent on you. That all depends on how supportive you are of that person or of that person’s cause. Bill Donohue’s Catholic League is insulted by lots of things, but as far as I care he can go hang.

Let’s put it like this: If some coffee shop started targeting your sister in their advertisements, you’d probably stop buying coffee from them. You’d also be justified in expecting your close friends to stop shopping there.

If the same shop targeted Albanian goatherders, you (and I) wouldn’t give it a second thought. Albanian goatherders would stop shopping there, and they’d expect their close friends to stop shopping there as well. Goatherders and Albanians in general would have to decide for themselves how narrowly construed the insult was.

The question is, in any given instance, is the person being insulted closer to your sister or to an Albanian goatherder?

This is all ignoring the issue of the psychological effects of being in an outgroup. Let’s just say that the Really Big Things (Matthew Shepard, Billy Jack Gaither) and the little personal things (graffiti carved in bathroom walls, taunts from passing cars, tenth-grade classmates talking about how they’d feel justified in killing any gay sons they might one day have) add up and weigh down the psyche to the point at which some small stupidity like a Snickers commercial will trigger what looks like an overblown reaction. Factoring this in, someone saying “I’m insulted” is also saying “You have the opportunity to make a lot of people’s lives a little less miserable, and I’d like it if you’d take that opportunity.”

Why have I never tried gin and cranberry before?

I wonder what else I’ve been missing out on.

I don’t hate every movie I see, honest.

Some things recently watched and enjoyed:

• Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic
• Justice League: The New Frontier
• Madeinusa
• Team America: World Police
• Dawn of the Dead (2004)
• Hairspray (2007)
• Futurama: Bender’s Big Score
• Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs

Not a lot to say about any of these. Silverman’s comedy cracks my shit up, the semi-Silver Age superheroes in New Frontier made me giddy, Team America’s politics annoyed me a little but overall it was hilarious and visually arresting.

Madeinusa was recommended to me, and I recommend it to you. It’s impossible to describe, reminding me of The League of Gentlemen and Fat Girl at once, even though those two things don’t seem to be at all like one another. A stranger from Lima is stranded in a tiny Peruvian town while the mayor’s daughter is elected to serve as Blessed Virgin during the Holy Week(end) festivities, which turn out to be a very traditional carnival. If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can stream it immediately.

I was surprised by how engaging I found Dawn of the Dead. I expected some fun zombie munching, but Sarah Polley and Vingh Rhames rocked the house.

I expected to be a little bored by Hairspray, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. I didn’t like how they toned down “Run and Tell That!” and truncated “Big, Blonde, and Beautiful”, and the standard Hollywood approach to racial politics and the civil rights movement injected unneeded false gravitas (I understand the Broadway staging is more irreverent, and possibly more honest), but the damned thing as a whole was so much giddy fun that I don’t care.

Also, season two of Dexter was awesome, just not as awesome as season one. I still want to have Michael C. Hall’s babies.

So, see? I do like some things after all.

Did I ever mention my theory about American Beauty?

My theory is that American Beauty is actually two diametrically opposed films projected simultaneously.

Less fancifully, I theorize that the screenplay written by Alan Ball is the polar opposite of the screenplay read and realized by Sam Mendes, even though all the words on the page are the same.

I reckon that Ball set out to write a real expose of the soul-numbing banality of the American class, penning a wicked satire that undermines the melodrama that America likes to tell itself about itself. He wrote a script that apes the form of that melodrama but reveals that the various black hats are really just people trying to make a nice life for themselves without–honestly–hurting anybody, while the white hats in this oft-told, oft-praised story are assholes who claim to be ground down by The System, Man, but who are really just whining about the fact that the entire world doesn’t reorganize itself around there inherent (and never displayed) specialness.

Mendes read the script and thought it was a straight-up telling of the familiar story. Basically, he empathized with the central character that Ball had intended to skew.

Lester Burnham was written as a pathetic man-child who eventually realizes his own mediocrity; he was directed as a heroic man-child who eventually learns An Important Life Lesson. Worse, his wife was written as a woman who works (too) hard to create for her family a life that is more pleasant than the one she grew up with; she was directed as a calculating shrew.

Two things give it away: First, the director plays the “plastic bag floating in the wind” scene straight. Second, there’s the scene in which the wife justifies her (unfortunately excessive) materialism and drive to succeed to her daughter by saying (paraphrasing) “I didn’t want you to have to grow up in a duplex.”

Mendes films this scene as an indictment. Ball has clearly actually lived in a duplex for a significant period of time. I think this explains the divergence between the authorial and directorial intent.

It’s interesting to think about the material on the page, as it forces us to see how far Mendes missed the mark. Any movie whose ultimate baddie is a Nazi-memorabilia-collecting closetedly gay Marine driven to homicidal rage because he’s jealous over not being invited into the (mistakenly assumed) tryst between his son and neighbor…well, that’s clearly not the sort of material that any reasonable reader would play straight.

(Note: While my tongue is not in cheek, I am being more harsh than the film warrants. While the Lester Burnham character really does piss me off as presented, and the presentation of the wife character sometimes makes makes me apoplectic, I find the film itself mostly tedious and slightly annoying.)

(Another note: For the sake of full disclosure, I should admit that my distaste for this film, like that of Fight Club, boils up from a rage I’ve been carrying for…11 years now? Ever since I realized that American mass-cultural products are produced with the assumption that all Americans are middle class, where “middle class” actually means “at the lower end of the top quartile of wage earners”, I’ve had a fire in my belly.

For a refreshing and instructive alternative, one can look to the works of Stephen Sondheim. Even in his major work that is devoted entirely to the lives of wealthy uptown Manhattanites, Company, he is careful to concentrate on the woes and joys common to all humanity. As the man is a genius, he does all of this without ignoring or rejecting the trappings of wealth; these are part of his characters lives, but there’s never a pretense that they are universals. He does possibly engage in a little class-based sniping with “Ladies Who Lunch”, but the rage at the end of the song, as well as the context in which its performed, add a disquieting ambiguity even there.

Then he goes on to write my favorite show, Assassins, in which he makes it perfectly damn clear that he sees the same problem I do. And he also gives us a lovey-dovey duet between Squeaky Fromme and John Hinckley, which just can’t be beat.)

I saw the Mr. T commercial yesterday. Check it here.

John wrote:

Though I’ve never seen it, the description of the Mr. T snickers ad made me laugh.

You know what? Me too. And actually seeing it, it was even funnier. Funny and Wrong are (to use Pete’s word) orthogonal. Think dead baby jokes; for a closer parallel, think dumb blonde jokes.

So, funny? Yes. Offensive?

Offensive. We need a detour here.

The Anti-PC types have made “offensive” into a word of ridicule, suggesting the overreaction of a humorless stick-in-the-ass type who is actively looking to be offended. (Notice the circularity of the definition? I think that’s a feature, not a bug, but that’s for another time.) The act of being offended is, in the popular mind, somewhere between a hobby and a character flaw. “Offense” is something sought out, something inherently external to the individual.

When people actually say they’re offended, though, what they’re really doing is using a euphemism. What “I’m offended by that” actually means, when said honestly, is “That fucking pisses me off, motherfucker. Sheeit.” That’s not really printable in respectable media, so “I’m offended’ will have to do.

So is the commercial offensive? Hell yeah it is. Open a commercial with a close shot of a man sashaying (they claim it’s speed walking, but come the fuck on) in short-shorts and the the blood starts heating. Finish the commercial by victimizing the subject, victimizing him triumphally, and it boils over.

Any work of art containing Mr. T bursting through a suburban ranch home to assault an unsuspecting passerby with a candy-bar machine gun is inherently funny. There’s not getting around that. Have him assault that passerby for the crime of being a faggot, though, is about as offensive as you can get.

Both/and, not either/or.

The subject of the commercial, by the way, is clearly coded as gay. The wiggle of his hips is way too suggestive to suggest mere effeminacy; that there’s a faggot, folks.

Pete wrote:

It claimed the word “homophobia� as commonly used is a misnomer; American culture hates sissies rather than fags, and the fact that some fags are also sissies is an unfortunate coincidence (correlation without causation), because Americans are not good at the subtle art of reduction.

An interesting notion, but there’s more than a faint scent of bullshit. Saying “I don’t hate fags, I hate sissies” sounds parallel to “I don’t hate blacks, I hate niggers.” And anyway, it’s given the lie when we look at people like Peter laBarbera, who reserves his vitriol for leather men. (If you can find anything less sissified than IML, I’d like to see it. Although I’m not sure my heart could take it.)

I think John hits closer to the mark when he says “As a man, society teaches me to not be feminine,” but I think it’s a mistake to conflate femininity and sissiness. First, to put it out in the open, how is being a sissy in any way like being a woman? I know that we put the two together in our heads, but I maintain that this is more cart than horse, a facto that’s all ex post.

I can think of three obvious signifiers of sissiness:

• Walks with a wiggle.
• Lisps (although it’s not actually a lisp)
• Has a limp wrist (which always surprises and amuses me when I encounter it in real life)

Of these, only the first can be seen as in any way feminine. I’d also argue that the sissy wiggle is distinct from even an exaggerated womanly wiggle, but I wouldn’t argue it too strongly.

Oh, wait, there’s one more thing attributed to sissies:

• Likes to have sex with men.

This they do have in common with (straight and bi) women, but they also have it in common with all other fags.

And yet, “sissy” and “feminine” are inarguably conflated in our cultural overmind. Why is this? Again, you can guess who I blame.

In the case of sissiness, it become pretty clear that “acting like a girl” doesn’t mean “acting like (even a stereotype of) one of those vagina people”, it means “failing to act within the narrow construction of masculinity”. “Girliness” becomes everything outside of a set of expectations totally unrelated to biology. This is one of the ways in which the patriarchy is as corrosive for XY people as it is for XX people, and why even straight men should support radical feminism. But I digress.

(This is starting to seem a lot like another Fight Club reaction. Hm.)

This is the biggest reason, really, that I’m skeptical of the “homophobia is a reaction against teh sissie, not teh buttsecks” idea. That notion assumes that “acting unmanly” can be separated from “likes mansex”, which I’m pretty sure just ain’t so. The Sissy is just the image on the propaganda poster, suggesting but not representing the actual object of hatred.

Moving on.

John wrote:

I don’t think I’m pro or anti PC. But I certainly am not afraid to hurt someones feelings and I don’t think there is a right to not be insulted.

I think this is the biggest honest misunderstanding between the roughly drawn pro- and anti-PC camps. The pro- camp doesn’t think there’s a right not to be insulted, either. They do think there’s a right to say “I’m insulted” after they’ve been insulted.

Looking at the actions, not the rhetoric, of anti-PC types and you are forced to realize that they are, at best, the shock troops of the status quo. They claim they support absolute freedom of expression, but they’re fierce denunciations of people expressing their distaste puts the lie to that.

Further, the pro-PC camp thinks that it makes sense to not insult people unless you intend for them to be insulted. If you know someone will be insulted by Phrase A but won’t be by Phrase B, there’s no good reason not to use Phrase B. There’s no right to not be insulted, but there’s also no reason to insult people needlessly.

Really, it comes down to a willingness to take responsibility for one’s actions. The anti-PC crowd wants to be freed from responsibility, the pro-PC crowd thinks the speaker should be held responsible for hir words. Ironically, the anti-PC crowd tends to overlap with the crowd loudly claiming that the ills of society result from people not taking responsibility for their own actions.

Finally, I like the contrast between these two quotes:

Pete: [The anti-PC brigade have] always seemed to me to be at war with the precise use of language rather than any person or persons.

John: I think the PC folks are dumb and I DO disagree with their use of language because I think it’s silly.

Pete says the PC usages are more precise, and I think he’s right. John says they’re silly, and my gut says he’s right, too.

Welllllll…I think John’s right because when I think “PC language” I, like most people, think of those lists of “silly PC phrases”. And then I remember seeing some research demonstrating how those lists are salted with real usages but are mostly made up of phrases created as parody but then presented as real. I think it was in an old issue of Skeptic, but I’m too lazy to go looking.

Yes, “personhole cover” sounds ridiculous. “Fireperson” and “mailperson” are awkward, but I can’t see anybody honestly having a problem with “firefighter” or “mail carrier”. And I’m sure we can all agree that it was a good idea to stop calling girls “co-eds” and just refer to all the brats as “students”.

I have now been writing blog posts for almost four hours straight. I’m not sure, but I think that disqulifies me as seeming like an authority on anything.

First, apologies for failing to close a tag in the original article. Fixed now.

Second, I’d never noticed that comment text is automatically bolded. That’s annoying, and I’ll see if I can fix it. Some day.

Next: Zero wrote, “Other’s ‘torture’ response is an obvious lie - they’re doing it because it’s fun” makes more sense than the story I presented. In the story as experienced, though, it was clear that the “torture” response was wholly sincere, in the sense that they probably really believed that was why they were doing it. In fact, these two had a ridiculously homoerotic history of testing the limits of each other’s manliness (”manliness” here being almost a parody of societal expectations of how men behave).

(An aside: It’s interesting to contrast these two kids’ responses to my coming out. The one who was a total horndog was cool with it, very encouraging and with lots of questions. The one who tended to get very drunk and exhibit camp tendencies, expose himself inappropriately to other men (and only other men), and occasionally try to cuddle was aghast.)

Now, I think Zero is justified in suspecting that the “torture” response was a bullshit cover story. I don’t think it was intended as bullshit, though, and was instead the way they justified propping up their anxious masculinity to each other. I will defer to Zero’s presumed experience re: the fun of the activity; I never tried it myself, and it doesn’t have immediate appeal.

Moving on: I’m glad Zero and Amy took me to task for my misreading of the film. I should have made it clear that I knew it was a misreading, that my reaction is based neither on things intentionally within the tex or inferrable from the text by a reasonable viewer; it is, in fact, pretty much contradicted by the text. I’ve long known that my dislike of Fight Club isn’t entirely fair; what I presented the other night, which I should have made explicit, was the way I react to the movie despite what is in the movie itself. It wasn’t intended as criticism of the film because it is based more on the shadows in my head than on the shadows on the screen.

Narrator’s mindset still strikes me as being closer to that of the Greek girlfriend in “Common People” than to a legitimate social critic’s, though. That is, he’s the kind of person who never drank the shitty cheap coffee that prevailed before Starbucks started popping up, and he doesn’t realize that the shitty cheap coffee is still widely available; he only sees their expensive good coffee as being in opposition to the expensive good coffee available through locally owned shops. This leads him to underestimate how relatively sucky a life outside the system would be.

(The movie actually props up his privilege once he appears to exit the system, providing him with a thick sheaf of travel vouchers and a big chunk of severance change. While he does move into squatter’s squalor, he retains the means to transition back into bourgeois comfort whenever he gets bored or too bruised.)

Now, I’ll admit that even this contention isn’t too strongly held. It’s still probably based more in bitter experiences than in the text itself, but it’s so deeply scratched into my lens that I can’t see the film any other way.

Since library school, I can’t look at Narrator without thinking of one of my best friends from that time. He was just like pre-psychotic break Narrator in outlook, cheesed at the alleged feminizaton of American culture, rankled by the softness around him, desirous of proving to himself that he could live a hardscrabble, self-supporting, self-creating lifestyle. Yet he continued to fall back on all the (very real, and readily admitted) privileges available to him to make sure he never fell into actual poverty, that he always enjoyed a reasonable measure of comfort and security. But still he would occasionally rant, and he never took kindly to the suggestion that what he claimed was impossible was, in fact, very possible indeed; tell him he could stuff a backpack and wander a couple of miles off the Cumberland Trail, for example, and he’d shut right up.

This sort of brings me to the bit where Amy wrote:

It isn’t stuff that he has a problem with, it’s the chains of debt and barely disguised indentured servitude that people unwittingly fasten upon themselves to get stuff.

That’s the culmination of Project Mayhem, yes, but before that they spend plenty of time smashing Starbucks storefronts and erasing videotapes at Blockbuster. This suggests to me that the impetus underlying the Project really isn’t as much about liberating humanity but is instead about forcing all of humanity into the condition that Narrator doesn’t have the balls to subject himself to individually.

(This might be the subtle point, though, as it is made clear that each stage in Narrator’s attempt at liberating his fellows ends up with him leading a cult of personality. The surface reading, which I’ve never questioned, is that people are inherently followers, too tribal to enjoy true liberty; it’s possible, though, that the author, or screenwriter, or director is quietly hinting that Narrator/Durden has been engineering this situation all along thanks to his unacknowledged egotism. This is based entirely on hazy recollection, but I’ll be looking for any suggestions of this on my next viewing.)

Also, it’s never been clear to me how seriously we’re supposed to take the armageddon ending. Thinking that you can destroy a bank by blowing up its corporate headquarters is a lot like thinking you can destroy a hard drive by shooting the computer’s monitor. The latter is a long-established movie convention, though, so maybe we really are supposed to accept that Narrator’s plan would work as intended. It’s something that’s always bugged me.

Now, Zero is correct in surmising that I was in a foul mood the first time I saw the movie. I’ve watched it at least five times since then, though, and I’ve never found anything to love. I’ve kept watching because it looks like the sort of thing in which I should find something to love, and this and the piece from the other night are my realization of why I just can’t love it.

I want to make it clear that I am not being fair to the movie. This is not criticism or analysis, this is a purely personal, biased, and probably willfully blind reaction. I look forward, honestly, to being told how wrong I am.

(Oh! And John: I haven’t read any of Palahniuk’s other books, although I did read Fight Club a week before the movie opened. I keep meaning to pick some of his stuff up, since he sounds sort of like a less meta Bret Easton Ellis, but I never quite seem to get around to it.)

Many responses to many comments tomorrow.