This is what happens when you disturb a local monolith for local people.

Yesterday I saw, perhaps in the New York Times or the Chronicle of Higher Education, yet another article based on the notion that today’s college students[1] are inherently different because they are multitaskers, where “multitasking” is exemplified as working on homework while listening to music while chatting with friends via IM.[2]

The sentiment underlying–motivating, even–such articles is common, and I believe microsurgical technology has advanced to a point at which society can take the necessary corrective, protective action.

I submit that anyone writing or having written such an article should be apprehended, anaesthetized, and treated to surgery in which precision lasers are used to etch the following lyric onto their corneas, such that the evidence refuting their hype is visible whenever they should open their eyes[3]:

There she was, friends, lyin’ there in all her radiant
beauty, eating on a raisin, grape, apricot, pomegranate,
bowl of chittlin’s, two bananas, three Hershey bars,
sipping on a RC co-cola listenin’ to her transistor,
watchin’ the Grand Ole Opry on the tube, readin’ a Mad
magazine while she sung, “Does your chewing gum lose
it’s flavor?”–satirical description of a typical teenager circa 1962

Removing this scourge would b a small matter, but a very pleasing one.

[1] Are we still calling them Millenials? Or, rather, should we still be calling them Millenials? I’d thought the “Millenial” label was initially coined to describe those kids who graduated high school in 2000. Those kids, or at least those who want to be liberal-arts professors, should have or be getting their PhDs by now.

[2] I’m open to evidence that “digital natives” really do have a different approach to gathering and using information that do members of earlier generations. What I’ve seen barely rises to the level of anecdote, being more generally supposition of what kids must think based on stereotypes of what those kids do. This discourse is also polluted by a near-universal tendency to compare all members of Team Millenials to the academic elite of earlier generations.[2a]

[2a] Popular defenders of and commenters on humanistic pursuits may (or may not) excel at self-awareness, but they demonstrably suck at other-awareness. This leads to no end of grief and get-off-my-lawnism.[2a.i]

[2a.i] Of course, the greatest defense of humanistic pursuits offered by these defenders is the idea that the humanities help us gain a greater appreciation and understanding of, y’know, humanity. They probably also think that these pursuits help one gain an appreciation of irony, and it all gets self-reflectively wibbly at that point.

[3] It must be admitted that the effectiveness of this remedy depends on the violators opening their eyes on a regular basis. This may assume facts not in evidence.

I thought that a while back I wrote something about how many, many people are resistant to even the idea that subtext exists. I was pretty sure I even remembered a comment from Pete on that post. I can’t find it using the cruddy search whatsit, though, so hm.

Anyway, I thought of that possibly imaginary post when I saw something in the Videogum archives just now.

OK, first, I’m possibly the only one here who watched True Blood on HBO, so you’re going to have to bear with me here. The Videogum post was about how the blatant vampires=symbolic_gays subtext that had been used to infuse something like gravitas into the first few episodes was, when mixed with the actual text unfolding on screen, making a political argument probably the exact opposite of what the show’s creator intended.

Take my word for it: The gay-vamp symbolism in True Blood, especially early on, was subtext in the same way that Bugs Bunny was subterranean: It was technically beneath the surface, but every time it moved there was a big hump in the ground. It was the kind of subtext written in flashing neon letters; vampires were “coming out of the coffin”, protesters carried “God Hates Fangs” signs, that sort of thing. If ever there was a case in which something was clearly being said without being spoken aloud, this was it.

And yet.

And yet, in the comments to the Videogum post, the crowd was about 3:1 in claiming that the vamps=symbolic_gays subtext was absurd, that the Videogum author was reading way too much into the series, that vamps were vamps and that was that.

So the question must be asked: Do many people actually turn off the analytical parts of their brains when consuming entertainment, or are those brain bits never actually on in the first place?

From: Wealth-Less Effect: Earning Well, Feeling Otherwise:

To a family earning $50,000, $250,000 is well off, but for the family earning $250,000, rising college and medical costs and dropping home values make the perception debatable.

Are families earning $50,000 are immune from rising college and medical costs? No? Then shut the fuck up. A receding tide lowers all boats.

“I’m not complaining, but the reality is Obama may call me wealthy, but I thought we were just good old middle class.”

The woman who said that? She’s the wife of a doctor in Sevierville, TN, the matriarch of a family earning over $250,000 a year. The median household income in Sevierville? $30,623[pdf]. Only 1.4 percent of Sevierville families earn over $200K. If the top percent isn’t wealthy, then who could possibly be?

“[The] perception is debatable”? Bullshit. Among working households, average income is $44,563. If the average person has 1 milkshake and you have 6 milkshakes, then there’s no way to honestly debate the notion that you and the average person have more or less the same number of milkshakes.

I think I know where this ridiculous idea that “the perception is debatable” comes from, though. More on that later.

On a coworker’s recommendation, I acquired Supernatural and have been letting it play out in the background, paying half attention and occasionally looking up to drool over Jensen Ackles or to see what kind of monster they’ve cooked up for that episode.

In the ep that’s currently on, a police officer spots a Telling Detail that puts her and Ackles on the trail of the baddies–there’s a traffic camera photo of a rickety old van, but the detective notices that it has shiny new plates. Suspicious!

Except, no. Out here in the non-TV world, every few years everybody has to buy a new plate, yeah? It doesn’t matter how old your vehicle is, every now and then you get a brand new piece of stamped metal instead of just a new sticker.

The weird thing is, I’m pretty sure this only jumped out at me because I had to buy my new plates last month. Regardless, it’s a piss poor clue. It’s like fingering a woman as a shoplifting suspect because she’s 50 years old but wearing new shoes; it’s absurd enough that disbelief instantly crashes to the floor, no analysis or even actual thought necessary.

I bet there’s something along these lines on TV Tropes, but I’m too lazy to go digging. Besides, it’s dangerous over there; every time I visit one of their pages, I end up with seventy or eighty tabs open before I finally stumble, red-eyed, to bed.

I spent some time putting together a (pen and paper) form this afternoon, and when I finished the last revision before quitting time I saw that there were two major formatting errors. One of them was something that might not be immediately noticed but which was askew enough that it would give the reader a sense of wrongness even if they couldn’t figure out why; the other one was a colossal cockup–the left margin ended up 1/3 the size of the right margin after I changed the font sizes.

My dep’t head saw that I’d printed out the form, and I gave it to him to look over. He said he was going to circulate it for feedback, and I told him that it wasn’t ready yet. Somehow this set off a confrontation, him claiming that…

Well, as near as I could tell, he claimed that the form didn’t represent my work because it would ultimately serve as representative of the library, so I had no say in whether or not it was ready for review. My claim was that it wasn’t ready for review, as there were two major known errors.

So it looks like we’re going to be meeting with the director tomorrow, because of my insubordinate work habits.

From here:

Corey Menscher, a graduate student at New York University, developed the Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!�

Young Mr. or Ms. Menscher is going to make a lot of therapists a lot of money in a couple of decades.

A coworker is trying to find the source of her nephew’s tattoo.

She says it’s a sheep running in the opposite direction of a herd of cattle; he told her it came from an 80s album.

He’s probably in his early 20s, as she says he just got back from Iraq. This tells me a couple of things: An album he says is from “the 80s” could actually date from anywhere between, oh, 1978 and 1994ish. It also suggests it’s the kind of album which would have stood the test of time, as it was quite possibly issued before he was born.

I’ve scanned through a number of “best albums of the 80s” lists, and none of the covers there jumped out at me. They were all heavily tilted toward college-radio hits, though, so that could be why it’s not showing up.

Anybody have any ideas?

Instant update: Fiddlesticks. As soon as I posted I tried one more search and found what I was looking for, #100 on Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 1980s. Turns out it’s Minor Threat’s Out of Step.