Oh…blech. Blech and ick upon Saudi Arabia, whose system still considers it right and proper that a father can marry his 12-year-old daughter off to his 80-year-old cousin in exchange for an ample dowry. At least this time, this suck-tastic story comes wrapped in a possible not-so-miserable ending. The country’s Human Rights Commission has interceded in the case, assigning the girl a government lawyer to argue her side before a local court. Whether this will do the poor child any good remains to be seen.

Traditionalists are arguing to keep the practice, because, hey, the Prophet Muhammed had a 9-year-old bride! Top Saudi Cleric Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh argued just one year ago that people who say a girl under 15 can’t take a husband are being “unfair” to the child. At the time, Al-Sheikh, a.k.a. His Venerable Horniness, was reacting to a judge who had refused to annul the “marriage” of an 8-year-old girl to a 47-year-old degenerate.

Sigh. And you wonder why some people hate religion. Two words, Saudi Arabia: human trafficking. These aren’t marriages. These girls were sold into sexual slavery.

I’m no American exceptionalist, but I’m glad to live in a country where men who even contemplate this are considered candidates for state-sponsored castration.

feminism, islam, marriage, saudi arabia, women

I need schooling. Specifically, I need someone to explain the appeal of Foursquare, a.k.a. the TMI of GPS.

For those of you who are unaware (lucky bastards), Foursquare is a mobile application where you “check in” upon arriving at a destination. As you accumulate check-ins, you win prizes, or “badges.” Check-in to a single location enough, and you’re declared its “Mayor.”

For the record? The first friend who attempts to become the Mayor of my apartment earns himself an ass-kicking.

If you’re on Facebook or Twitter and have any friends with a half-modern mobile phone, chances are you’ve seen your share of Foursquare check-ins. Personally, whenever one floats through my media-stream, I think of “The Game,” that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where the crew of the Enterprise gets addicted to a headset that doles out warm tinglies for every point scored. All that’s missing is the brain-jack. Seratonin for iPhone, anyone?

Oh, sure. Call me jealous. Dismiss my complaints as the bleating of a technophile wannabe whose current cell phone looks like a prize from a box of Cracker Jacks. (No, those aren’t tears. Got sumpthin’ in my eye. Shut up.) But really, guys – I don’t care where you are. I mean, I care in a general way. You at home? Work? On a trip to the Bahamas? At a convention listening to a life-altering speaker? That’s great – let us know. That’s newsworthy among friends. But I don’t need latitude and longitude. I don’t give a shit that your hankering for day-old corn dogs has made you Mayor of the 7-11 at 91st and Roosevelt. I’m your friend, man – not your professional stalker. For that, I charge extra.

David Kornik, a Foursquare user, ponders the impact this game will have on privacy. Do we want Big Brother – whose role, formerly occupied by the government, is now being played by Corporate America – to know our every moment? Oddly, that doesn’t bother me. I’m a TMI kind of guy who’d happily trade privacy for a big red shiny. Give all the information to Corporate America you want, my lovely online friends. Just don’t give it to me. Friends don’t tell friends their coordinates.

foursquare, gps, mobile, privacy, star trek, technology

I breathed a sigh of relief  this morning. The blurb in my inbox declared that publishers yearned to change the $10 price point for eBooks. Finally, I thought in my pre-caffeine naivete: a remedy to overcharging! $10 is a deal if you’re buying John Adams or The Family, which sell for a pretty penny even in paperback. But a Terry Pratchett novel that retails for $7.99 at Barnes & Noble? Yep, $10. Wasn’t the elimination of the printing press supposed to make books cheaper?

Oh, foolish, foolish Jay. Wired reports that publishers think $10 is too low. They want to jack up the price point for select titles – the same ones, I presume, that are already great deals. Not to make more money for themselves, of course. It’s all about paying the poor authors what they deserve. Hachette Book Group’s sound bite about why they want to pressure Amazon and other e-tailers to charge more for their wares is ingenious in its disingenuousness:

“In the long run this will enable Hachette to continue to invest in and nurture authors’ careers — from major blockbusters to new voices. Without this investment in our authors, the diversity of books available to consumers will contract, as will the diversity of retailers, and our literary culture will suffer.”

Spare us. Mainstream publishing doesn’t care about new voices unless they’re blockbusters. The midlist has been perishing for years, prior to the arrival of Internet The Business-Model Slayer. The blockbusters aren’t the next great authors of our generation. They’re trash factories – the Dan Browns and Stephenie Meyers. Publishers are drowning, and gouging consumers is their latest life raft.

Higher price points for eBooks will have one and only one effect: to slow their adoption just as the market is poised to take off. It’s galling when you realize that publishers want these prices, not to sell you a book, but as Cory Doctorow pointed out, to license it to you. You don’t own an eBook; you’re borrowing it for a fee. An Kindle or a Nook is a library fueled by your credit card.

Argh, I sound like a Luddite, I know. Which I’m not. I love the digital age, and I have high hopes that electronic publishing will kill the middleman and bring authors in closer contact with their readers. And we’re so close that we’re thousands of miles away. The adoption of eBooks is retarded by the restrictive licensing models, inability to share, and the cost of the readers. Hell, even I don’t want a Kindle yet. The Seattle Public Library still serves most of my book needs. They even offer some titles electronically. (I’m reading Jeff Sharlet’s The Family in a separate window on my laptop.)

But I’m more pessimistic than I used to be about Internet publishing. Some authors – the Doctorows of the world – will thrive at online promotion and distribution. Many authors will prefer to focus on their writing, and let others handle the messy legwork. As for publishers? They’ll stay fixated on blockbusters, because “the Long Tail” is bullshit.  As Anita Elberse demonstrated, media companies continue to make the bulk of their profits off of their hits.

Two years ago, New York Magazine ran a long piece by Boris Kachka on whether the publishing industry is ready for a pine casket. To put it mildly, it’s in deep shit. Sales are down; trash is triumphing over talent; retail outlets are shrinking; employees are miserable. Publishing will live, Kachka concludes, but as a pygmy version of its former Amazonian glory. I think he’s right. Writing and reading will evolve, shaped by the Internet and digital publishing. Publishers will stick around to skin profits off trash and, perhaps, promote the odd genius or two.

Yeah, that’s my best-case scenario. And as the impending eBook price war demonstrates, the power-structure will fight like hell on its way down.

amazon.com, books, ebooks, kindle, publishing, seattle public library, writing

“I will die for the people of America!” Sarah Palin declared in exchange for a hefty fee at last night’s Tea Party Convention. To which my immediate response on Twitter was, “Well hell, lady, get busy!”

Uncharitable, sure. It’s as charitable as Palin’s statement was realistic. This woman lives in a country that has seen peaceful transitions of power for 150 years, yet she talks like she’s about to face down Deng Xiaoping’s tanks in Tiananmen Square. Indeed, her lecture in front of an adoring crowd was chock full of frightening, over-the-top statements, only a few of which she had to write on her palm. Take this gem:

We need a commander-in-chief not a professor of law standing at the lectern.

Right! Who needs that pesky Constitution anyway? Not Palin, who declared to the crowd that it is time for “another revolution,” and that America’s future lies in “seeking divine intervention again.” Did she mean “divine intervention” in the same way that Pastor Wiley Drake called for “divine intervention”? Or “divine intervention” in the sense of “It’ll take an act of God to get Sarah Plain in the White House?” Either way, it was an odious declaration in the midst of a terrifying evening. Sarah Palin declared jihad on Barack Obama last night, with all the fervor (and logic) of a holy warrior.

What a contrast to the man who currently occupies the White House. In a Washington Post article on Thursday that I didn’t stumble across until last night, Anne Kornblut documents how President Obama likes to keep his strong faith in God private, even though there are days when it’s the only thing that sees him through:

When Obama appears at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Thursday morning — a regular presidential ritual — it will mark the rare occasion when he puts religion in the foreground. In that appearance, he will discuss “the need for civility in the public square, and how Americans can work together in a spirit of goodwill,” a senior administration official said.

Now that’s leadership. Obama, in private, has a very strong, personal Christian faith. In public, however, his message is ecumenical and inclusive.

Paid pundits like Roland S. Martin are in a tizzy about Tim Tebow, and how courageous it is for a superstar pulling down millions of dollars to express his faith in Christ and his belief that women are chattel. Sorry, not impressed. What’s impressive is someone like Obama, who weds a strong personal belief to a public secularism that stands on its own foundation of logic and empathy. The atheist creed that religion is a cancer that must be excised from the human politic is a load of bunk. We need to recognize that religion’s place is our souls and our homes, not our civics. (And yes, “religion” includes the religions of “no religion” and “none of the above.”) Good ideas can come from religion, but their appeal has to be broad; they have to translate into the language of reason and humanism, and not be grounded solely in personal religious fervor or – worse – blind faith.

Obama gets that in a way that Sarah The Divine Interventionist never will. As Andrew Sullivan notes, she’s making a play for the Presidency because she believes God is in her corner.

And just for the record, God? If you make a play in 2012 on her behalf, your ass is sleeping on the couch.

barack obama, politics, president, religion, sara palin, spirituality

I meant to watch Sideways years ago. Somewhere between “I only drink after 5pm” and “Jack & Coke makes a great mouthwash,” it fell off my to-do list. The movie appealed to me for three reasons:

1. I love Paul Giamatti;
2. I love Alexander Payne (director of Election); and
3. I loved wine.

While I preferred hard liquor for getting drunk, I loved wine for camouflage. Wine carries with it a snobbery that provides perfect cover for an alcoholic. I don’t have a problem, goddammit – I’m a connoisseur. A connoisseur constantly seeking samples. Even before I admitted I had a problem, I had a niggling feeling deep in my bowels that all my talk of tannins and the aftertaste of apple and pear was fancy-speak for “refill.” After all, I measured my wine consumption by the box.

Fast forward to 2010, five months into Round 2 of sobriety. I put Sideways on my Netflix queue. I may avoid wine, but hell, I still love Paul Giamatti. I adored his turn as Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, a role which earned him much critical acclaim, but did little for his commercial appeal. Sideways is the flick that put this talented actor on the map. I can see why. Giamatti’s Miles is the kind of guy you can’t decide if you want to hug or run over with a Hummer. He’s smart, amiable, a touch arrogant, beset by rejection, and prone to self-loathing. With his marriage long dead, his closest friendship is his old college roommate Jack, a Lothario who measures wine by its chugability.(Yes, that’s a word. Look it up in a few years, once the dictionaries catch up to me.)

Sideways is a tour de force of drunkenness, adultery, hope, despondency, and love. It’s a great film – but one that is, at times, a bitch to watch sober. The movie revolves around Miles and Jack’s trip through California’s wine country before Jack, an expiring actor, marries into money. The scenery is lush, rolling acres of green, of plump grapes nearly bursting on the vine. Along the way, Miles the struggling writer puts the full force of his talent behind explaining to Jack the deep mysteries of wine: how to judge color, pick up the bouquet, and separate the complexities as you swish the initial sip around in your mouth. Miles doesn’t simply like wine, or even love wine. Miles has a romance with wine. Lacking any significant connections to other human beings, it’s become his significant other – his exhilarating partner when things go well, and his lonely refuge when life turns sour.

Since Miles’ life is a package of Sour Patch Kids, he spends a good portion of the film either stumbling around drunk, or dragging a hangover around like a lead weight. Which I enjoyed watching. Okay, “enjoyed” is too sadistic. What I mean is that watching drunk people can be a boon to my sobriety. A few years ago, I hung out with friends of friends for the 4th of July. At the time I hadn’t had a drop to drink in over a year. Seeing everyone at the party get progressively wasted made it easier to steer clear of temptation. When your friend is telling you how much he loves you in sentences where every second word is so slurred that it’s unintelligible, you wonder, “Whatever made me think this was fun?”

But that’s not sustainable. It becomes sobriety through schadenfreude. For that reason, I don’t think I’ll ever give Sideways a second viewing. It feels too much like watching home movies of your ex-girlfriend with a box of Kleenex and a half-gallon of ice cream nestled in your lap. I’ll get my next Giamatti fixes from Cold Souls and Shoot ‘Em Up instead.

And no, you can’t talk me out of Shoot ‘Em Up. It’s Giamatti with access to high-caliber weapons. How can that be anything less than brilliant??

alcoholism, cinema, film, movies, sideways, sobriety

You cover enough stories about a topic, and you see patterns. Take censorship, where a recurring theme is “The Delayed Freak-Out”: a play or work is used for months or even years without anyone bitching, until – BAM! one or more complaints from a handful of self-appointed moralists send a school district into a lather.

The play “Snow White in The Black Forest” had been performed previously at Robert Frost Elementary in Kirkland, WA before the principal and teachers demanded re-writes. Similarly, no one objected for years when high school students at Fort Madison High School in Fort Madison, Iowa performed Cotton Girls, a play by Scott Tobin in which three 18-year-old girls in 1950s America dish on premarital sex. Two days before a state competition, the school handed the teen actresses a redacted (read: censored) version of the script to perform.

After an outcry, Fort Madison High School relented, and the girls performed the play as written. No victory for free speech here, though. Superintendent Kenneth Marang says that he’d censor all over again, and only reversed course because the girls didn’t have time to memorize the changes. Some legal experts say that the precedent set by Tinker vs. Des Moines could’ve put the school in legal hot water, and that the performance of Cotton Girls outside of the school amounts to an unconstitutional restriction of speech.

Cotton Girls is still under copyright, but Google Books provides the first few pages of the play free of charge. Perhaps it gets racier, but this is the most “offensive” passage to be found:

COLLEEN. Yeah? So, what would you have us doing on graduation night?
BERRY. Things that we should be doing, like normal graduates.
COLLEEN. Like?
BERRY. Like driving around…I don’t know…driving around, drinking, laughing, going all the way with guys.
COLLEEN. Yeah? How’s that idea hit you, Miss? Going all the way with guys? What do you think of that?

MISS. Well, if you want to go driving around, we can go driving around. If you want to mess around with guys, I’ll drop you off.
BERRY. No. Understand that the most important thing is  that the three of us are together.
COLLEEN. That’s right.
MISS. Good then.

If Fort Madison High School officials believe 18-year-olds are talking so euphemistically about sex in the 21st century, perhaps this play isn’t the only thing stuck in the 1950s. Only one of the three girls in the play has “gone all of the way” with a guy. The actresses’ speech coach, Joe Harmon, describes it as a dialogue about sex that doesn’t “romanticize” free conjugation. This play is performed every year by high school girls around the nation; and – shocker! – some have won state competitions with it.

WTF, Iowa? What’s up with you guys and free speech? West Des Moines pulled the same shit several years ago with The Laramie Project. Perhaps the fault lies not in the plays, dear Iowa, but in yourselves, that you are such free speech ninnies.

censorship, education, free speech, iowa, school

Lord of Lords, but stories like this make it hard to be nice. Via Joe My God, we see that the Florida Family Policy Council has sunk to an all-time low. The FFPC included the leftmost photo in a press release blasting a court decision granting a lesbian couple the right to adopt a child. Except that that’s not the couple involved in the case. The cuter-than-fuck couple on the right are Vanessa Alenier and Melanie Leon, the plaintiffs and proud new parents.

There’s a double shame here. The first round of shame goes to the FFPC, of course, for taking the first photo that popped up when they Google Image searched for “ugly lesbians,” and using it in their smear campaign. But that’s also heartening. As I pointed out a few days ago, the anti-equality crowd has nothing left except anger. Scott Maxwell, who originally wrote about this case for the Orlando Sentinel, put it righteously:

The rationale for preventing balanced, loving parents from adopting children — when the state has a backlog of needy children, no less — is hard to justify in concept. And when you actually look at the specifics of human lives involved in real cases — the way Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Maria Sampedro-Iglesia did last month — it’s darn near impossible. In considering the case, Judge Sampedro-Iglesia heard from family members, a child psychologist, the boy’s preschool administrator, a social worker and the state-appointed Guardian ad Litem. All of them, the judge wrote in her order, “testified in support of the adoption as being in the best interest of the child.”

The state did not offer a single witness to rebut that claim.

How does the FFPC explain itself? On its blog, it refers to the “mistaken photograph” as an “admittedly boneheaded mistake,” and it offers to apologize “if you or someone else felt it was warranted.” “If”?! This rant makes FFPC out to be the victimized party, a poor political action committee bludgeoned by a reporter on a “slow news days.” Apparently aware that this wouldn’t fly with the majority of non-hateful Americans, FPCC President John Sternberger eventually issued an apology for his organization’s “mistake.”

Mistake my ass. The facts say otherwise. How does a photo from a “different adoption story” get substituted for two women who look like they stepped out of a corporate board meeting? Sternberger and crew are too chickenshit to admit that they got caught spraypainting dirty words on the side of the school.

The second round of shame goes to some of the Internet commenters on Joe My God and elsewhere, who are heaping insults upon the first couple. Really, folks, save the schoolyard shit for the haters.

florida, florida family policy counsel, gay, gay rights, glbt, parenting

“Snow White”? What the hell could be wrong with “Snow White”? Apparently enough that the principal of Robert Frost Elementary in Kirkland, WA demanded that theater organization Studio East make some changes before their production “Snow White in The Black Forest” went live:

Some parents are upset that Principal Sue Anne Sullivan asked the play’s directors to remove parts of the script that violate the schools’ human-dignity and anti-bullying policies. Cuts included the name of the character “DimWitty,” making the “crazy gesture” — rotating the index finger near the ear, and lines of a song about being proud of being curvy.

“Our concern was that in certain instances, the specific nature and/or degree of put-downs for humorous purposes was excessive or inappropriate,” said Sullivan, stressing that the objections had come from several teachers.

And this isn’t the first time. Studio East’s production of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was eighty-sixed when the school demanded too many changes. For “Snow White,” Studio East had to remove the character name “DimWitty,” the use of the word “stupid,” references to a character being “senile,” a song about a woman who’s proud to be curvy, and as bit where a character makes “the ‘crazy gesture’ – rotating the finger next to the ear.” (After decades of use, we don’t have a name for that??)

Next at Robert Frost Elementary, we’ll be showing A Christmas Story – but edited to remove characters eating soap, Ralphie beating up Scut Farkas, and any and all references to the Leg Lamp. Oh,. and that bit where Santa kicks Ralphie down the slide? That’s right out.

The school maintains it wants to eliminate bullying and name-calling. Hey, as a formerly bullied kid, I’m all over that. But you don’t deny to kids that bullies exist. You protect them when bullies strike out. A kid’s not going to hear the word “stupid” in this play and think to himself, “Hey…I could use that to steal Billy Arnold’s lunch money!” The problem with schools hasn’t been that they don’t teach kids to be sensitive and kind, but that they turn a blind eye when the little pissants tease and beat the shit out of the pack’s weakest members.

Think of the ripple effect. If kids can’t be exposed to the word “stupid” or shown bullying behavior, what classic works will Robert Frost pitch in the shredder? By the school’s standards, Horton Hears a Hoo! earns a spot on the Banned Books list – it’s all about bullying! The kangaroo threatens to boil an ENTIRE CIVILIZATION! What kind of example does THAT set, huh??

Stories sometimes depict bad behavior to teach good lessons. Too bad that simple fact is lost on the scions of Robert Frost Elementary.

censorship, free speech, kirkland, school, school play, snow white, washington state

Oh, awesome – another reason to despise Dubai besides its financial excess, virtual enslavement of foreign workers, and jailing of expats who miss a car payment. An unnamed British woman and her fiance reported to authorities that the woman had been raped. In a fit of compassion, police jailed the couple for the crime of extramarital sex, which carries a six-year penalty.

The couple produced a marriage certificate. Authorities dropped the sex charges, and the pair ran like hell.

This isn’t the first time Dubai has wielded sex as a weapon. In 2008, Michelle Palmer and Vince Acors were convicted of sexing it up on a beach. The pair were deported before they could serve their three-month sentences. In the Palmer and Acors case, Emiratis and expats alike argued that the couple deserved what they got: when you visit a foreign country, you’d damn well better follow the rules. If the law says “don’t fuck without a license,” then keep your britches zipped.

But what’s the excuse this time? Yes, the couple were oblivious of local customs related to unlicensed drinking and sexy-timing. That justifies letting a potential rapist bastard roam free? The 23-year-old woman, who alleged she was raped by a waiter, wasn’t only jailed, but cajoled into signing a statement declaring that the rape never occurred. The charges were calculated to scare her silent. They worked like a charm.

In a civil society, a rape allegation would usurp other, minor crimes. In Dubai, the minor crime is the major offense. My condolences to this poor woman and her now-ex-fiance. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Dubai’s debt load signal the end of the Good Times, and that greed will no longer send people flocking to this high-tech monument to the Dark Ages.

crime, dubai, feminism, rape, sex

I love zero tolerance policies. They make great blog posts! Seriously, these policies are little more than showcases for teachers, principals and other school administrators to model robotic thinking to their students. The latest example comes from Staten Island, where 9-year-old Patrick Timoney was hauled into the principal’s office and threatened with suspension because he played with a Lego figure holding a tiny automatic weapon.

I understand the school’s policy: there have been incidents where fake guns have been brandished as real guns, with deadly results. But does anyone believe that this Lego Gunner could pop a cap of any size in anybody’s ass? Even a computer program would be smarter than this. A sensible teacher might have confiscated the toy, explained to the child he could have it back after school, and sent an advisory letter home to his parents. A sensible principal might have boxed a teacher who dragged this kid to his or her office about the ears. Neither happened, and as a result a kid was humiliated and likely reduced to tears over an action figure smaller than my pinky.

Laura Timoney, Patrick’s mom, says she wants to sue the school for “a lack of common sense.” I sympathize, mama bear – but if that were a crime, we’d have to convert most of New England into a penal colony.

(Thanks to Glad Dads for the link!)