Recently in culture Category

I guess it’s a kind of time travel. From Florida:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- The teaching standards for Florida schools include the word "evolution" for the first time, under a decision Tuesday by the state school board.

The board approved the use of the term "scientific theory of evolution" in public schools science standards.

And from Texas:

FORT WORTH, Texas — A federal appeals court has overturned a Texas statute outlawing sex toy sales, leaving Alabama as the state with the strictest ban on such devices.

Poor Alabamans. Come on into the modern world, the water’s fine!

(Technorati tags: evolution, sex toys)

Via Slashdot and Feministing, an article at Computer World that serves as a reminder that it’s still hard out there for a girl with geek tendencies. Bits and pieces:

You can balance an IT career with your home life, but it means making choices that are true to your priorities and understanding the trade-offs. “Having it all” is a fantasy.

Except for men, of course, whom no one expect to choose between work and family...

When geeks go on political rants:

British Suspects Detained in "Cheese Bomb" Training Run

Miami, FL (APE) - Transportation Security Administration authorities today confirmed the arrest of two British suspects in connection with a recent spate of what are described as "dry run" airline bombings. Authorities stated that the two may likely have been complicit in what are described as fake devices using modeling clay or block cheese that were seized in four separate incidents in the last two years at various US airports.

More, from My Left Wing...

(Technorati tags: cheese terrorism, homebody security)

Geek critique:

(Technorati tags: iRack, Iraq)

From Jezebel via Pandagon, Feministing, and a ton of other sites, comes this monstrous example of the evils that Photoshop can be put to:

Real, beautiful woman? Or plastic fembot? Have the photo editors and Photoshop geeks at Redbook not heard that with great power comes great responsibility?

(Technorati tags: Redbook, evils of Photoshop)

Is there anything cooler or nerdier than checkin’ out the new words that are being added to the dictionary? I don’t think so. Merriam-Webster recently clued us in to some of the new additions that will be showing up in the 2007 update of its Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, and I cannot tell you how excited I was to see that such glorious units of language as DVR and soduku were being given a hearty literary slap-on-the-back of approval.

And wait! What’s this? Also on the new-word list: RPG. Wow: are role-playing games finally being recognized by the tome that, I can note that in my capacity as a professional editor, is, in its various editions, the official dictionary of choice for 99.9 percent of major magazines and book publishers? But no: geekiness has not won out. Merriam Webster thinks “RPG” means rocket-propelled grenade. Real-life desert warriors trump the half-elven kind.

(Technorati tags: Merriam Webster)

It’s been more than a year since I did one of these “Onion or AP” bits, and I have to admit that I’ve given up on reading The Onion because it’s virtually indistinguishable from CNN these days. But then I came across a story on BBC News the other day that boggled my mind. Is it this one?:

Thousands More Dead In Continuing Iraq Victory

Statistics released by the Department Of Defense estimated that 2,937 U.S. troops and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the ongoing American military victory in Iraq.

"Victory deaths are at a higher level than we had anticipated, yes," Gen. George Casey, Jr. said at a press conference shortly after the figures were released. "But one of the crucial lessons of our Vietnam experience is that a victory, in order to remain victorious, can't be abandoned halfway through, or in the case of Iraq, one-eighth of the way through."

Or this one?:

British blamed for Basra badgers

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.

Onion or AP-- er, BBC?

Now I need a drink.

(Technorati tags: Onion, AP)

Yesterday was the the 60th anniversary of whatever the hell happened at Roswell, New Mexico, on July 8, 1947. UFO crash? Weather balloon down? Who knows? It’s weird that we commemorate the date not of the actual incident but of the day the Army in Roswell issued a press release about the debris from a “flying disc” it had recovered a couple of weeks earlier... which is the same day it almost immediately issued another press release denying it. Or maybe it’s not so weird. Maybe that day marks the beginning of our collective culture being defined not by fact but by spin.

Fifty thousand people got into the spin this past weekend at the Amazing Roswell UFO Festival, and the story is still spinning, with the recent “news” that a “deathbed confession” by one of the participants of the 1947 events supposedly confirms the “tiny dead ET corpses” aspect of the tale. *yawn* I will believe when a spaceship (the TARDIS, pretty please) lands at the UN, or in Trafalgar Square, or outside the Kremlin. Summer is UFO season, supposedly, so keep your eyes peeled. Could be the aliens are already here, spying on us -- Whitley Strieber thinks so, or not. It must be a beautiful thing to be so noncommital that you can claim to be right no matter what happens.

From Sunday’s Times of London, about Live Earth:

Critics question whether a pop concert, however large, really has the power to make people take climate change more seriously. Others point to deeper contradictions. How, they ask, can an event epitomising global consumerism be a valid way of tackling a problem largely created by the West’s conspicuous overconsumption?

I’ve been watching the Live Earth stuff all day -- I dunno how I got sucked in, but here I am, glued to Bravo all day. I missed Spinal Tap in London -- I dunno how that happened, except that Bravo hasn’t seen fit to show that clip yet, and, oh yeah, I can’t watch the live streams on MSN because MSN wants us to use Internet Explorer to watch the live streams and there is no IE for Mac. I’m sure Spinal Tap’s appearance will be up on YouTube before you can say “choked on someone else’s vomit” -- I’m looking forward to their new song, “Warmer Than Hell,” written especially for Live Earth, but still: freakin’ Microsoft.