Unless something unusually accelerated happens in the handful of specials scheduled for this year, the next season of Doctor Who will begin with a regeneration but without an established companion.

This worked well enough with the Eccleston relaunch, as the first episode began, both with the narrative and with that regeneration’s still-unrevealed history, in media res. The next Doctor, though, will be expected to show some continuity with Eccleston-Tennant. For Doctors past, the companions have served as the transitional bridge; this not being an option, the new production team will have to pull off something really clever.

Of course that team will be overseen by Steven Moffat, so cleverness is guaranteed. This should be good.

Warning: Un-sober blogging ahead.

I am all the time wanting to write things here, you know?

The problem is, many of the things I want to write would create an untenable degree of exposure. Not just identity exposure–I reckon this blog is semi-anonymous at best–but attitude exposure.

One thing I think I’ve long known subconsciously, but which has only recently crystallized for me, is that the majority of people–regardless of levels of education, social status, political leanings, or what-have-you–make no distinction between “criticism” and “damnation”. Talking about a systemic flaw, to most people, is no different than saying the system is worthless. Worse, it is no different than saying the system and the larger systems in which it is placed are worthless.

Compounding the problem is the notion that objecting to a system means that one is unable to play as an effective actor within that system. Hell, take your pick of L. Ron Hubbard, George Soros, or Ted Haggard to put the lie to that one.

This leaves me in a pickle.

Years back, I encountered a cod-Latin phrase in Skeptic or Skeptical Inquirer that electrified me, that spoke to the very essence of my self. It was the sort of thing that, once seen, must be embraced as one’s motto. Ars sine sciencia nihil est. “(Art/performance/behavior) without (science/knowledge) is nothing.” One’s ethos, that which determines one’s behavior, must be informed to the fullest extent possible by the actual frikkin’ evidence, where “evidence” means that phenomena must be considered before (one’s understanding of) noumena or teoria whenever possible.

So.

In actual interactions with actual people, I find that teoria is given pride of place. The notion of “what should be good” directly informs “what is good”. No space is allowed for actual evaluation of the performance of the theory’s performance; in fact, evaluation of the products of theory is often anathema. I’m sure Augustine would be pleased.

That’s simply not the way I’m wired. I’m convinced it’s bad practice. The Enlightenment gave us a big gift, and I think we should use it. Theory should be evaluated against its fruits. If the theory cannot predict the results of implementation, then it is bad theory and should be considered unuseful; if the results of an implementation of a theory produce fruits other than those predicted, then it is a bad theory and should be rejected. Unfortunately, this seems to be a minority opinion.

Finding a theory unuseful or bad shouldn’t mean we have to throw up our hands in despair, though. It just means that we have to look around for a better theory. It may mean that we must abandon some of the things from which we have derived meaning for our lives, though; them’s the breaks. Meaning’s way overrated, anyway, as it’s the sort of thing that can be demolished by a handful of puny facts.

But, for reasons that honestly elude me, people don’t want to risk giving up that which gives their lives meaning. As you may’ve guessed, I don’t personally put a lot of stock in the whole “meaning of life” thing, but many people apparently do. As such, I can’t write about many of the things I find fascinating, perplexing, and sometimes downright wrong without running the risk of making myself unwelcome.

Them’s the breaks, I guess.

I returned the call this morning, got voicemail, got a callback soon enough.

She was calling to make sure I was cool with there being no reimbursement for moving expenses and to see how soon I could start if I were offered the job. She said there was no guarantee I would even get an interview, but that I’d survived the first cut of the 300 applications received.

Still a longshot, but wow.

I applied for a dream job last week, and I just now got home and found a voicemail from them. From her. From the Senate librarian. From the Senate librarian.

I know it’s a long shot, but still I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep tonight.

I once had a really lousy teacher who consistently made use of a really lousy pedagogical method. Or, rather, he consistently used a so-so method lousily. He’s not the only person I’ve known to do this, but he is fortunately the only one I’ve known whose teaching could honestly be characterized by it.

Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing that’s hard to explain, and it’s probably impossible to communicate without a good example. Since it never occurred to me to transcribe them as he presented them, and since the full extent of the awfulness lies in both the context and in the exact words used, I’ve never been able to effectively talk about it.

Today, fortune smiled.

In a comments thread at Pandagon, reader caliban wrote the following:

Of the couple of thousand of students I have taught over the years, I will estimate that maybe 10 have answered me correctly when I ask what are the two things absolutely necessary to make a sentence: subject and verb.

Now, I do not doubt that a nontrivial percentage of college freshmen fail to have “basic sentence=subject+verb” in their knowledge bases. However, I also do not doubt that an even larger percentage of college freshman know perfectly damned well that “basic sentence=subject+verb”, will demonstrate that knowledge infallibly whenever producing a sentence, but have simply passively absorbed it and are unable to identify it as a rule.

Most damningly, though, is the nature of what I suspect is the supermajority of college freshman. Picture it: You’re in freaking college, you’re in a class devoted to the study of language in what you expect to be more depth and detail than you’ve ever encountered before. You think you’re supposed to be in the process of putting the things of child behind you, you think you’re supposed to be taking a more intellectual approach to what had been familiar objects of study.

The teacher asks, “What two things are absolutely necessary to make a sentence?” Your brow furrows. You start thinking about the nature of language, trying to discern two essential attributes distinguishing sentence from…from what, exactly? What is the teacher trying to get at here? A sentence must convey a thought? Is that what she wants? That’s only one thing, though; what could be the other? Maybe you start sweating a little; you should know this, goddammit.

Teacher finally breaks the tense silence, chipper but failing to completely hide hir disappointment. “A sentence,” sie says, “must always contain a subject and a verb.”

Your jaw drops. You glare. That’s it? That’s what sie was looking for? Your respect for the teacher, for the course, possibly for the entire enterprise of liberal-arts education evaporates.

And then, unbeknownst to you, the teacher adds another bitter tick in hir book, counting off yet another class of utter dolts who, to a person, proved unable to answer one of the most basic questions imaginable. It truly is the worst of all possible worlds, and it’s all the fault of the teacher’s poor grasp of reference frames and question forming.

So I watched Juno the other night. I hadn’t really been anxious to see it, but I wasn’t trying to avoid it either. I noticed it coming on, I recorded it, and I gave it a casual viewing. I thought it was pretty meh.

Even though I found it just meh, there was something about it that bugged me, made me itch. I found bits of this and that to latch onto, but never enough to accumulate into a thesis. Sort of like having a dusting of snow, but not enough to scrape into a snowball–you can see it, you know it’s there, but you can’t put together enough tangible evidence to whap somebody upside the head.

Its position on abortion seemed kind of fuzzy, as did its notions on the ramifications of teen pregnancy. It seemed to say that bitchy yuppiness was, well, bitchy and yuppity, but that it also made for great mothering. It (I cribbed this bit, didn’t occur to me naturally) exalted punk rock of the 70s as being the only real music, but the soundtrack was all contemporary twee acoustic. Juno herself was supposed to be a loner rebel punky type–she only had two friends, and only that if you counted the oft-neglected boyfriend–but she never had to endure taunts or visible exclusion.

It’s like the filmmakers took a look at the pre-production product and sanded away every rough edge in every character’s life, and then glopped industrial-grade lube over any intractable tight spots. Every characteristic that might suggest an actual aesthetic or social or ethical point of view was de-emphasized or counterbalanced.

This stripping-away and spit-shining is nothing unusual in popular film. It results in films that are unremarkable and maybe a bit boring, but those are the kind that often bring in tons of money. The tricky bit with Juno is that, somewhere along the line, somebody decided they wanted the movie to be both slickly innoffensive and quirkily engaging and memorable.

The dialog helped out a lot there. Love it or hate it, the film’s lexicon got (and deserved) the audience’s attention. With the exception of the yuppie mom-to-be, who was never able to rise above the character’s cardboard nature, all of the performances were top-notch. The direction was assured, the set design and cinematography lively and appealing. All of the elements worked well together, and we were given a studiedly square film cloaked in a perfect illusion of hipness.

I think that’s what got under my skin, that tension between the film’s essence and its presence.

But still, I think I’m in no position to evaluate the film, as I appear to have completely misunderstood one of the plot (such as it was) points. I’ve spent much of this evening looking at reviews and discussions of Juno, and one point has been raised frequently and never challenged: The audience, it seems, was supposed to think that Jason Bateman’s character was a total dick.

I honestly didn’t get that from the film at all. I really, truly thought that the movie was validating Bateman’s character and tough decision in parallel with Juno’s. That was the point of all the intergenerational mirroring of the two, wasn’t it?

(Apparently not, according to everybody who’s talked about it. Apparently those scenes weren’t intended to see the two characters as parallels, Bateman’s minor theme resonating in harmony with Juno’s major, but instead to make Bateman look like a never-grew-up skeeze, or at least like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come should Juno not reform and become a good, responsible adult like the frigid yuppie mom-to-be.)

It seems that we were meant to boo and hiss Bateman’s decision to take control of his life, to be his own person, to untether himself from his materialistic, domineering, scarily obsessive wife. If I’d realized that while I was watching the movie, I think I would’ve just outright hated it.

Hm. Maybe that was another thing that bugged me about the movie. There was a sense that no decent person would ever get a divorce, and there was a definite subtext of baby worship. The yuppy mom-to-be was, I thought, consistently portrayed to be a frigid, manic shrew up until the scene where she’s playing with strangers’ kids in the mall. That scene confused me, because Juno’s reaction suggested that such behavior was supposed to humanize and elevate the character; personally, I thought it made her seem creepy as hell. She kept up the tight-lipped, control-freak persona afterward, but still we were supposed to think that her finally getting a baby made for a super-happy ending.

(I understand that there was a scene at the end, which I missed, suggesting she grew to accept the mess and disorder that comes with taking care of a newborn. Maybe so, but you just know that in five years she’ll be making the kid go through three bottles of hand sanitizer a day while shuttling it between playdates and soccer practice and piano lessons.)

And then there was the fact that every responsible adult character bought into the idea that it was scandalous for a married man to ever be alone in the presence of another woman. Hm. The more I think about this movie, the more I dislike it. I think I’ll stop now.

There’s an infuriating story at Media Matters, which I found via Pandagon. Looks like the lying liars couldn’t even wait for the confetti to hit the ground.

THE STORY: Uppity wastrel Obama’s inauguration cost the taxpayers an unprecedented sum of money, soaking up four times as much scratch as Bush’s ‘05 shindig.
THE EVIDENCE: Bush’s ‘05 party cost us $40 million, while Obama spent a whopping, breathtaking, irresponsible $160 million.
THE LEGERDEMAIN: The accounting for Bush’s inauguration, like that of every other inauguration ever, excluded security costs. The only charges to his account, so to speak, were for Bibles and balloons. For no particular reason, security costs are being included in Obama’s expenditures for the first time in history. Obama is being held accountable for Bibles, balloons, and bullets; Bush (and everybody else) also had bullets, but they were counted as a necessary cost and not a special inaugural expenditure.
THE TRUTH: When both are added up by the same criteria, Bush’s ‘05 inauguration cost $40 million while Obama’s ‘09 inauguration cost $45 million.

You know the people who would see this and, with a studiedly world-weary shrug, say “Lies, damned lies, and statistics, what do you expect?” They’re the exact same people who think they win when they say “You’re just arguing semantics.” Statistics don’t lie, they’re just used by liars to fool people too lazy or too innumerate to pay attention to what’s actually being said.

And like all semantic questions, this is a matter of representing reality through words so that reality becomes comprehensible, which in turn effects the way in which we interact with and manipulate reality. I really fucking hate it when people say “You’re just arguing semantics!” as if that’s a bad thing.

Ahem. So.

Can something be said to be essential if it routinely goes unused by those for whom it is alleged to be essential?

Let me note the first roadblock that, in my experience, always pops up in this discussion: essential does not mean beneficial. “Essential” means “you cannot possibly do X without Y“, not, “you get a better X if you use Y“. I don’t know why, but many people seem to have a hard time grasping that.

So: if two out of three X-masters never use Y, and if one out of three X-masters demonstrate incompetence at Y even when pressed, and if the rankings of X-masters can be shown to be independent of Y use or competence, can Y be said to be essential for X?

To make things interesting: assuming the situation above, how can we explain the fact that all X-masters, if asked, will claim that Y is essential?

I’m way, way, way out of the loop. Any of y’all happen to have been following the goings-on in the DCU over the last couple of years?

I’ve just now this morning learned about two recent Grant Morrison arcs, Final Crisis and Batman RIP. I’m curious as to what was going on there, but the Wikipedia articles are written in that damnable faux-detached, faux-scholarly, faux-encyclopedic style that makes them pretty useless for getting a sense of the things.

So, anybody have some beans to spill?

Epiphany.

In the comment thread related to the post cited below, I found this from tjallen:

As to the respect due geniuses of the past - just try lecturing on Plato in an undergrad Intro to Philosophy class. I always had to deal with the instant reaction, Who does this grad student hick think he is, nitpicking the father of philosophy?

That made me remember that in my very first college semester I took a special section of Philosophy 101 taught by the department head and tailored for new students on the Honors track. That course got its hooks deep in me, and I concentrated as heavily as I could in philosophy classes during my UAH years.

From my very earlier time in college onward, I was taught that the proper approach to a new text was, “Hey, buddy! Just what do you think you’re trying to slide past me here?” Authors were to be remotely interrogated via their texts; nothing was to be taken at face value, and for sure nothing was to be taken as true just because it sounded good.

(Of course, this attitude of never trusting brand names, no matter how respectable, was fomented earlier by the usual gang of idiots at Mad Magazine.)

For at least the last 17 years[1], then, my approach to any text has been “Show me, motherfucker.”[2]

I do wonder–jhayes? k?–whether I’ve always been like this or if it really did become more pronounced after I started uni.

[1] Damn, I’m old.

[2] Dr. Martine and his compatriots encouraged us to be aggressively skeptical. Or maybe that’s just the lesson I took from them. And James Randi.