Category Archives: Culture

April Fool’s Day (UPDATED)

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As a general rule, I’m not a fan of pranks, for the simple reason that they are, almost invariably, much more fun for the prankster than the pranked. The pranked person’s enjoyment is, at best, secondary, and at worst, irrelevant. That’s not how I do humor*. 

That said, I do appreciate history and all that, so here’s a wee bit about April Fool’s Day:

The custom of setting aside a day for the playing of harmless pranks upon one’s neighbor is recognized everywhere. Some precursors of April Fools’ Day include the Roman festival of Hilaria, the Holi festival of India, and the Medieval Feast of Fools.

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392), the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is set Syn March bigan thritty dayes and two. Modern scholars believe that there is a copying error in the extant manuscripts and that Chaucer actually wrote, Syn March was gon. Thus the passage originally meant 32 days after March, i.e. 2 May, the anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia, which took place in 1381. Readers apparently misunderstood this line to mean “32 March”, i.e. 1 April. In Chaucer’s tale, the vain cock Chauntecleer is tricked by a fox.

Pranks are hard to pull off, though, especially in the Internet Age. As Megan Garber says at The Atlantic, “April 2 regrets are, at this point, almost as common as April 1 fools.”

For more fun, “fun,” and “what the hell were they thinking?”, check out “The Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time.”

UPDATE (04/01/2015): Thanks to Edwin for directing me to this John Oliver video:

A few choice quotes:

“April Fool’s Day is to comedy as St. Patrick’s Day is to Irish culture.”

“Pranks are terrible. Anyone claiming to be excited for April Fool’s Day is probably a sociopath, because what they’re really saying is ‘I cannot wait to hurt the people close to me.'”

“If you want to break your family’s heart, don’t play a mean trick on them. Just ask them for money for another improv class. You can do that any time of year, and you will shatter them.”

* Yes, i got pranked a few times as a kid. What’s your point???

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Depression vs. “Depression”

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“Depression” seems to signify social ills for which we have no solution, from violent, homicidal behavior, to health illiteracy, to our culture’s neglect of the elderly. Constructing societal deficits as a medical problem does everyone a disservice—because treatment specific for depression won’t work for people who don’t really have depression. People who need social support can be expected to benefit most from programs that provide social support—not from psychiatrists.

– Anne Skomorowsky, “Don’t Blame It on Depression: That’s not what made the Germanwings co-pilot murder 149 people.”

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“Garbage”

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Dehumanization is one of the most important tactics used to justify the denial of rights, of freedoms, and of life itself. We dehumanize people to rationalize killing them in warfare, exploiting them in sweatshops, stealing their land and their natural resources. We dehumanize people to rationalize, withholding services or assistance, discriminating and segregating and limiting freedoms. We dehumanize to rationalize the denial of justice.

Garbage doesn’t deserve protection. People, though, people do. And people, no matter how troubled or unpleasant they are, are not garbage. They are human beings.

– Elizabeth Wood, “Dehumanization In A Nutshell: ‘We Work With The Garbage Of New York'”

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What I’m Reading, March 4, 2015

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Beyoncé as Gateway to Satan? The Long, Strange History of Conservative Christian Panic Over Satanism, Evan McMurry, AlterNet, February 27, 2015

Last week, a priest in Ireland blared a severe warning about a dark practice that was surreptitiously leading people to the “Kingdom of darkness” where “Satan and the fallen angels” waited to prey upon them.

What nefarious activity had so insidiously masked its agency of darkness? Yoga.

***

Spotting links between Satanism and yoga and Harry Potter is both the ridiculous result and the natural continuation of a decades-old practice of spying Satanism’s flag in the most innocuous segments of western culture, an evolving trend that functions as a map to the shifting class and gender anxieties beneath the culture wars.

What Christians Mean When They Use the Word “Atheist”, Neil Carter, Ex-Communications, February 19, 2015 Continue reading →

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Follow Your Passion!!!!!! Or Don’t. (UPDATED)

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Remember kids, you too can follow your dreams! All you need is drive, determination, and $250,000 in seed capital!!! (h/t Thax)

It all started with a high school assembly on the first day back from winter break. The guest speaker was the founder of an Austin-based company with a positive message about following your dreams. But what was supposed to be a motivational speech turned into a war of words between high school students and staff and Kash Shaikh, the founder of #BeSomebody, that played out on blogs and social media.

On January 5, Shaikh spoke to students at Austin High School, at the school’s invitation. According to his Twitter, his talk at the high school was similar to his talk at a recent TEDxUWMilwaukee event, which was produced independently of the famous TED Conferences.

In his speech, Shaikh said he’s tired of people being all talk.

“I called myself out 19 months ago and walked away from everything I once thought was important: money, title, lifestyle, things, a career that started at Proctor and Gamble, the largest consumer products company in the world, and started to blossom at GoPro, the fastest growing camera company in the world,” Shaikh said. “I called myself out to go all in on my passion.”

Okay….. It seems a bit…..interesting to talk about walking away from “money,” “a career,” and other such things to a group of people who haven’t even started their adult lives yet, but let’s see where he goes with this. Continue reading →

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Inspiration, by NdGT

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Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.

–Neil deGrasse Tyson

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The Cake Will Be Bone-Shaped, I Assume

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Pat Robertson is worried. In other news, the sky is blue.

But seriously, Pat Robertson is concerned about same-sex marriage. Again.

After a Washington state judge found on Wednesday that a Christian florist had violated the state’s anti-discrimination law by refusing to sell flower arrangements for a same-sex couple’s wedding, Robertson asserted that an “intelligent judge” would have ruled against the gay men.

“To say that some procedural anomaly in the statute overrides the fundamental religious freedoms of the people, it’s just crazy,” he insisted. “And I hope that the lawyers for this florist will appeal this thing to get into the federal courts.”

“But this is outrageous!” the conservative preacher continued. “To tell a florist that she’s got to provide flowers for a particular kind of wedding. What if somebody wanted to marry his dog? She’s got to have flowers for that? What if there’s a polygamous situation where a guy has five wives and he wants to have five ceremonies, and she’s going to be forced by the law to provide them flowers. I mean, this is crazy.”

[Emphasis added.] (h/t Alice)

My favorite part of this whole “marrying-your-dog” trope is that it gets the question backwards. If you really value liberty and freedom, the question should always be “why should this be illegal?”, not “Why should we as a society allow this?” (Yes, I’m paraphrasing Donna from “The West Wing.”) Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, February 19, 2015

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Blame the Muslims: how government and media stoke the fires of Islamophobia, Lindsey German, The Age of Blasphemy, February 12, 2015

Why are the approaches to different groups of terrorists so different? Part of the reason is racism: Muslims are portrayed as fanatics and extremists, caught in a clash of civilisations where the good guys are representatives of western civilisation while the bad guys are identified with backwardness, superstition and barbarity.

This dichotomy conveniently ignores western lack of civilisation, whether through two world wars and a holocaust or through the creation of empires which ruled over whole peoples – many of them the same who are being demonised here. It also ignores the record of Muslim culture historically.

There is one overwhelming reason why this happens however: the wars themselves. There is a refusal to link terrorism with the wars which have taken place over a decade and a half, and a refusal to see that one of their outcomes is a rise in Islamophobia.

There is a hideous symmetry in this: as the wars involving Britain and the US have become more mired in failure, so civil liberties have come under greater attack and the rise in Islamophobia has become more pronounced.

“The bills! The bills!”: A Japanese woman’s experience giving birth in the United States, Fran Wrigley, Rocket News 24, February 13, 2015 Continue reading →

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