This link is blatantly stolen from Mr. the Bruce. I agree with him that it may give the "average American" a lot of credit, especially for map skills. It words for me though, except I think it underestimates the threat posed by Mauritania and our, um, sand and rock gap.

For the hell of it, I just copied my entire blog from day one into a Word file and did a word count, and I'm at 17,774 words prior to this entry. I'm not sure what to do with that info, I just found it interesting.

Funny animation is funny. Here's some, and here's some more.

I don't know that this is fraught per se, so with a nod to Mr. Infield-Harm, I declare this news story "rife".

Oscar nominations are out. Last year I saw literally every movie with a major nomination by Oscar night. This year I've seen practically nothing. But my totally uninformed early handicapping is thus:

• Best Actor: Brody's got no shot, Caine's got almost no shot, and the other three are legitimate contenders. I thought Cage was wonderful, but Day-Lewis' performance was amazing, and I think it'll be rewarded. Jack's won enough.
  
• Best Actress: Lane and Hayek win by being nominated--Frida was a tiny film on the radar, and I thought Unfaithful came out in 1998. Probably ditto for Moore, so this is a two-horse race between Kidman and Zellwegger. My gut instinct is Kidman, but if this is that one year in ten when a totally unknown film surprises, there's a chance this goes to Hayek.
  
• Best Supporting Actress: I've got no clue here, but maybe Moore gets rewarded as a double nominee.
  
• Best Supporting Actor: Wow, this category is filled with heavyweights. Unless Newman or Walken gets a lifetime achievement award, though, I have to think Cooper will be rewarded. Cooper and Day-Lewis are the two actors in recent memory I can remember creating very original characters, and I hope they win for it.
  
• Best Director: This has to be the lifetime achievement award for Scorsese, doesn't it? If not, it'll come down to whichever of The Hours and Chicago gains more Best Picture momentum.
  
• Best Picture: I think this will come down to Chicago and The Hours. Lord of the Rings has no other major nominations, people had mixed opinions of Gangs of New York, and The Pianist is another very small film. Is Chicago this year's Titanic or this Year's Color Purple? I'm thinking somewhere in between, but my prediction is that it will win Best Picture.
  

February 11, 1975 was an interesting day. Jorge Mir was born. Indiana topped the AP basketball poll. Linda Ronstadt's "You're No Good" was #1 on the WABC Musicradio Survey. Warren Beatty's Shampoo opened. The Chinese year of the rabbit began. The Happy Days episode "Cruisin'" (in which Richie, Potsie, and Ralph go cruising for girls) first aired. Former Steeler preseason kicker Joe O'Donnell was born, as was Orlando Magic backup point guard Jacque Vaughn. Oh yeah, so was I.

I'm just testing settings--don't mind me.

As regular readers know, in addition to my day job as a temp secretary, for the last few weeks I have been teaching a GRE class for what, if I were on, say, Sale of the Century, I would call a Major Test Preparation Company. It is a mild pain to drive an hour into Pittsburgh and an hour back (conservative estimates) to teach a two-hour class, but I have taken advantage of the trips to do other fun things, like hang out with Bill and Terri or eat Mineo's Pizza for lunch. Very good times.

I bring up my class for a couple of reasons. One is that it's clearly one of the major things in my life right now--between the commute, the teaching, and the preparation, it's only behind work, sleep, and maybe TV in terms of my hours per week. I'm enjoying it enough that I will probably continue, and possibly even train to do more tests. The second reason I bring it up is more specific.

DEK and I have this running gag developed watching football this year whereby we refer to problematic things as fraught. "Fraught" always goes with something, and it's never good--DEK's example being that nothing is ever "fraught with puppies". So just saying "fraught!" presumes a "with problems", "with issues", "with danger", etc. "Fraught" has also shown major signs of spreading as a concept, so here's your fraught primer.

Something is fraught when your immediate reaction is "oh, this is NOT going to end well," and something is DEFINITELY fraught when you think, "oh, this is NOT going to end well, and I want to be there to watch." For example's sake, here are some things that are fraught:

• Throwing late over the middle
  
• Getting a tattoo on your face
  
• Your star point guard shooting 43% from the free-throw line
  
• That movie you've been looking forward to being given a January 15th release date
  
• Anything the guys did in the "Bad Idea Jeans" commercial
  
• A People magazine cover story about Robert Downey Jr./Christian Slater/Matthew Perry finally having their life in order
  
• Referencing "Bad Idea Jeans" to anyone under 23
  

So I was preparing to teach a lesson on a Major Standardized Test Verbal Question Type Saturday morning, and one of the points of the lesson was to discern whether words have a positive charge (pleasant, outstanding, Dushku) or a negative charge (abhorrent, tragic, WB). The teacher's edition actually contains definitions of all the words and answer choices, and on one question "fraught" appeared as an answer choice. As I mentally chalked that up to very negative word charge, I glanced at the definition provided, and it boiled down to "abundant, having many". I ask you, are there any other words that mean something so positive but are so negative in connotation, or vice versa? I'd be hard-pressed to come up with another one.

Something that was fraught for me on Saturday was that for half of the class, the only students there were of the English as a second (or subsequent) language (ESL) variety. This is generally not a problem as they are smart people and fairly fluent, but as we know English is a funny language and at times frustrating to understand even for native speakers. I hereby declare "fraught!" any effort to explain the prefix "in-" to ESL students: "So, when you can't define a word and you want to take it apart, 'in-' will tell you that you're looking for the opposite of the root, like 'insensitive' or 'inaccessible'. Except that sometimes instead of 'not' it means 'particularly' such as 'inflammable'." "OK, Joe, so what should we do in this situation?" "Um, let's talk about some strategies for making educated guesses on these types of questions."

(Sigh)

I recently finished reading Tom Wolfe's collection The Pump-House Gang. Through a diverse set of articles, Wolfe pursues a common hypothesis. Basically, after World War II, the middle and lower classes in America and Britain (and to some extent the upper-middle as well) decided that they had no interest in pursuing the traditional mainstream quest for status, because (a) the rich are stodgy and who wants to emulate them anyway, and (b) the rich never really let anyone in anyway. If you're not born into high cultural status, you can't truly achieve it because you'll always be a Johnny-come-lately.

In place of this common quest, various groups pursued status within distinct subcultures. Wolfe writes here about California surfers and bikers, London mods, and other mostly young groups doing their own thing, but doing so within a strong set of conventions that arise within each group. Hugh Hefner in one essay becomes the ultimate exemplar--pursuing a rich lifestyle based on acquisition but never becoming acceptable in mainstream rich circles because he'll ultimately always be someone who made a fortune on skin mags. So Hef literally locks himself in his own world--in fact staying in his house without leaving for months at a time.

Wolfe bogs down for me at times when he gets into the details of different styles; style in and of itself is not very interesting to me, as anyone who has ever seen my wardrobe can attest. But he does say something about a fragmented society, and why perhaps we should cautiously welcome such fragmentation. In fact, he expresses shock at one point when he is on a panel that his fellows talk about all the problems of the mid-'60s, while he is seemingly the only one to notice a major outbreak of happiness among people rebelling against the mainstream.

Oh yeah, and at one point he goes to a titty bar with Marshall McLuhan.

I found this book to be worth reading, but if you want to pick up Wolfe essays on the '60s, I preferred The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

This post reminded me that I hadn't seen my favorite poster of all time in a while. Also, if you enjoy Dave Barry columns, now you can make your own.

I have been reconnecting with a few people over the last several days, and I have applied for some jobs. Most notably, I am now trying to get hired at my alma mater, an idea that I have resisted for some time. However, they have posted a few jobs that interest me now if the price is right--specifically, there are some positions in academic advising that sound as if they could be interesting, and since they are looking for people with a master's I am hopeful that they will pay a little bit. Also, some of my old contacts from OAFA and the UHC have close ties there, so I may have an in. We shall see.

Also, I've finished the math section of my GRE class, and I'm not sure what to think. I thought everyone was doing OK, and then during the last session I gave them time to work individually and when we came back together it seemed as if they had forgotten most everything. I don't know whether to chalk that up to performance anxiety or lack of practice, but maybe it will at least convince them that they need to do their homework like I've been saying.

In part to assuage the "too soon" crowd that pops up when people talk about bad things, I waited 24 hours, but here goes:

When I heard about the Space Shuttle explosion yesterday afternoon, I had pretty much the same reaction I had when the Challenger blew up 17 years ago. This reaction was well expressed by a commenter at Eschaton going by candyboy; I don't agree with every word, but here's the key sentence:

"My feeling is that these astronauts should be mourned appropriately, which means neither more nor less than today's first seven auto accident victims."

Once I was in a class where a debate was going on about how the media deadens us to violence and tragedy, and my position on the topic suddenly crystallized in my head, and then out loud: That's true, and thank our lucky stars for it. What I meant was that, if you want to wait out the next 7 people in the world who you don't personally know dying, chances are you will have to wait about 7 seconds. Literally every second, someone somewhere in the world dies. Fortunately, our minds are such that we do not dwell on this fact, because if we did it would totally incapacitate us all the time. My totally untested hypothesis is that every once in a while a particular death or a particular group death catches our collective attention somehow--the Challenger, Princess Di, JFK (Sr. and, less explicably, Jr.), perhaps now the Columbia--and by engaging in a massive public outpouring of emotion, we colelctively wash away all that mourning that fails to go on for the countless hundreds, thousands, millions who go basically unmourned except by a handful oif people very close to them. Is this a good or a bad thing? I don't think so--I think it's just a thing. Ultimately, though, I personally cannot place any more (or less) value on the seven lives lost 200,000 feet above Nacogdoches than I can on the lives of seven poor people who died yesterday in Botswana, seven rich people who died yesterday somewhere in private hospitals, seven people listed in the obituary section of my local newpaper this morning who died within 30 miles of my house yesterday, seven people who died on the ground in Nacogdoches yesterday, etc. etc. etc. Maybe some people feel a little closer to them because six were Americans (2 dead Americans always seem to trump 1,000 dead foreigners on the news anyway), but I'm not wired that way.

The part of my brain ruined by grad school has some interesting questions, though, about comparative tragedy and how we deal with death as a culture. For instance, are seven deaths in one incident more tragic than seven scattered deaths? Is tragedy additive, geometric, or is there some other mechanism there? My favorite book on this subject (yes, I have a favorite book on comparative tragedy; I know, I should seek help) is Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life, which is a cultural history about the curious process by which events on European soil basically committed upon other Europeans has been incorporated into our national psyche as an American tragedy. He compares the DC Holocaust Museum to the notion of having a museum of the American slave trade in Berlin.

The most interesting bits to me are to watch how Novick traces a cultural change in which being a Holocaust victim in the late '40s through the mid '60s was seen as tragic but just one more obstacle to overcome like good Americans do (we don't dwell on tragedies, we move on), to a change whereby being a survivor literally becomes an identity that it is presumed cannot be put behind but will be carried through life and is ritually reenacted (the identity, not the Holocaust) by having the person speak and appear repeatedly as a "Holocaust survivor". But the most relevant bits to what I'm describing are efforts by America's Jewish community leaders to preserve the Holocaust as a unique tragedy; I'm not going to argue the merits of their point (OK, I am--if we're talking about all-time comparative tragedy, I give the title to Pol Pot's Cambodia, but the Holocaust is right up there of course), but what I found interesting was the attitude that Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, etc. could be horrifically awful, but not only could they not be AS awful as the Holocaust, but the comparison itself was insulting and possibly anti-Semitic.

What will be interesting to follow in the days to come is to see the effect the Columbia explosion has on our policy toward space. I am all in favor of continued space exploration if the case is made based on tangible benefits of scientific research and so forth, and if those benefits are placed in cost-benefit analysis with other federal funding decisions. But I don't like the idea of space exploration as adventure, competition, aspiration, etc.--at least not public funding of space exploration on that basis.

Tomorrow's entry should be more cheery, because frankly how could it not be?!?!