I just saw this article at Wired News, and had to share it with my legion of loyal readers. That is, after last month's Spore-induced Blogging Lameness, if you're still here, this means you.
It's an article on Weird Al, and how he's been adjusting to (among other things) the changes in the music industry over the last three decades. That's right, he's been kicking his betters around since the very tail end of the 1970s. And with very few exceptions, he's outlasted all of them.
(Will he outlast Madonna? Still an open question, but I think the smart money says yes. They're both in pretty good shape, but I suspect Weird Al has a larger fan base, and they're more rabidly loyal.)
The thing about it, is that Weird Al--by all accounts--is a genuinely good person. He's not just in it for the glory and celebrity; he's in it because he genuinely enjoys making his fans laugh, using the same kinds of jokes that he finds funny. He revels in being so uncool, that he redefines what cool is and is not. For generations of high-school nerds (among whose number I was counted), he was the one who let us know that, "Y'know--you don't have to play the popularity game. You can mock the cool people instead--and not only is it okay, not only is it really fun, you'll have plenty of company when you do--And they're all a bunch of weirdos, just like you."
I got to see him once in the early '90's, at a concert in Fresno. This was shortly after the movie UHF came out. The concert was an absolute, rocking blast. I seem to remember that the band that opened for him was called The Neanderthals, and their big hit song (it was a hit in Fresno, at least) was "I Like Legos! Lincoln Logs Suck!" done in a very loud punkish style. After they got through, Weird Al's troupe came on and did their thing, and it seems from the linked article that he hasn't changed his methods very much in the fifteen years or so since I saw him. Not even the fat suit. Some things just get better with age, I suppose.
Anyway, take a look at the article. Be careful which youtube links you click on, however; the article documents the fact that he has lots of imitators and competitors now, and not all of these use clean lyrics. In particular, the Star Wars Gangsta Rap is pretty disgusting. And the earlier of Yankovic's efforts are mighty strange. But reading the article, I had a good trip down memory lane to my own nerdy upbringing.
And I'd forgotten just how funny his lyrics to "Another One Rides The Bus" were.
Monday, October 6, 2008
More Proud Daddy News
Ok, I tend not to get comments from these kinds of posts--most likely because y'all are probably gagging yourselves as you read them. Tough. My blog, my rules. :-)
Two more things happened today that made me really, really proud to be the Daddy of my kids.
First: the Happy Boy. Now, this kid is about twenty months old. Most kids, by this age, are starting to mouth words--especially animals (cat, dog, cow), vehicles (car, truck), favorite toys (ball), favorite people (Mamma, Daada), and various food-related terms (more, no). But for some reason the Happy Boy seems to be something of the strong silent type. Minus the "silent" part, generally; but he doesn't say a whole lot.
He has a few vocalizations: "maaamaaaa", which sounds like he's trying to say "mommy", actually means he wants food. I suspect that it's linguistically related to the phrase, More! more! When we try to give him food, it's often in the context of "Would you like some more?" so we suspect he's equated the word "more" with whatever you put on his plate.
And he has the word "ball" down. And he refers to the picture of Uncle Paul as "ball", as well, which is something. But for the most part, he doesn't use words to communicate.
That is, he understands absolutely everything that we're saying to him; but he seems to think that we're supposed to read his mind and body language. And truth be told, this usually works. He's pretty direct about what he wants.
But! We've noticed a talent developing.
You see, he loves his videos, and the videos he wants the most these days are the Leap Frog videos that I've mentioned in previous posts--especially the Letter Factory, which covers basic phonics (consonant and short vowel sounds).
And this little, non-speaking 20-month-old is learning the sounds of his letters.
Well, today the Happy Boy came running into the kitchen where Mommy was, yelling, "AAAAAAaaaa!" while clutching something in his hand. Mommy, startled, asked him what the trouble was. Then he grinned a big grin and handed her the letter "A" puzzle piece he was holding.
This kid is going to be reading before he talks, at the rate he's going.
It's gotten to the point that we're almost afraid to hand him hymnals at church. We're afraid he might open one at random to the song "A Mighty Fortress", see the first letter, and proudly proclaim "AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa!" right in the middle of communion or something.
...
Ok, here's the other one. This one involves the Adrenaline Junkie, our three-year-old daughter.
She was negotiating with us tonight at the dinner table. She had gotten it in her head that we need a swingset in our backyard. In fact, it would be really, really cool if it were a tire swing.
And silly us, we were trying to give mere reasons that a swingset wouldn't be a good idea. That is, we were trying to reason with a three-year-old. That never works.
But! We got the distinct impression that our three-year-old was trying to reason with us. And one of the ways that you can tell our three-year-old is trying to reason with us, is that she starts using big words (usually of Latin derivation). That's right, she inherently knows that certain words sound Big and Important, and if you use these words, it makes your argument more authoritative.
So: imagine the cutest little three-year-old girl you can think of, speaking very seriously in her sweet, high-pitched three-year-old voice, trying to remind you of all the benefits one gains by having one's own tire swing. And she finishes her spiel with the line:
And where in the world did she pick up the idea that Latin-derived words are more authoritative and help you win arguments?
Um, hm... maybe I need to go wash my mouth out with soap.
Two more things happened today that made me really, really proud to be the Daddy of my kids.
First: the Happy Boy. Now, this kid is about twenty months old. Most kids, by this age, are starting to mouth words--especially animals (cat, dog, cow), vehicles (car, truck), favorite toys (ball), favorite people (Mamma, Daada), and various food-related terms (more, no). But for some reason the Happy Boy seems to be something of the strong silent type. Minus the "silent" part, generally; but he doesn't say a whole lot.
He has a few vocalizations: "maaamaaaa", which sounds like he's trying to say "mommy", actually means he wants food. I suspect that it's linguistically related to the phrase, More! more! When we try to give him food, it's often in the context of "Would you like some more?" so we suspect he's equated the word "more" with whatever you put on his plate.
And he has the word "ball" down. And he refers to the picture of Uncle Paul as "ball", as well, which is something. But for the most part, he doesn't use words to communicate.
That is, he understands absolutely everything that we're saying to him; but he seems to think that we're supposed to read his mind and body language. And truth be told, this usually works. He's pretty direct about what he wants.
But! We've noticed a talent developing.
You see, he loves his videos, and the videos he wants the most these days are the Leap Frog videos that I've mentioned in previous posts--especially the Letter Factory, which covers basic phonics (consonant and short vowel sounds).
And this little, non-speaking 20-month-old is learning the sounds of his letters.
Daddy: So, can you tell me the sound of the letter F?This last one is pretty funny. In the Letter Factory, the way Professor Quigley teaches the young letter A's their proper sound, is that he jumps out at them in a monster suit, and they all scream, "Aaaaaaaaaaaaa!"
Happy Boy: Fffffffffff... (with plenty of spit)
D: And can you tell me the sound of the letter P?
HB: P'uh! (more spit)
D: And what about the letter A?
HB: Aaaaaaa! (as he runs away. The effect is best if you imagine a severe Doppler shift....)
Well, today the Happy Boy came running into the kitchen where Mommy was, yelling, "AAAAAAaaaa!" while clutching something in his hand. Mommy, startled, asked him what the trouble was. Then he grinned a big grin and handed her the letter "A" puzzle piece he was holding.
This kid is going to be reading before he talks, at the rate he's going.
It's gotten to the point that we're almost afraid to hand him hymnals at church. We're afraid he might open one at random to the song "A Mighty Fortress", see the first letter, and proudly proclaim "AAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa!" right in the middle of communion or something.
...
Ok, here's the other one. This one involves the Adrenaline Junkie, our three-year-old daughter.
She was negotiating with us tonight at the dinner table. She had gotten it in her head that we need a swingset in our backyard. In fact, it would be really, really cool if it were a tire swing.
And silly us, we were trying to give mere reasons that a swingset wouldn't be a good idea. That is, we were trying to reason with a three-year-old. That never works.
But! We got the distinct impression that our three-year-old was trying to reason with us. And one of the ways that you can tell our three-year-old is trying to reason with us, is that she starts using big words (usually of Latin derivation). That's right, she inherently knows that certain words sound Big and Important, and if you use these words, it makes your argument more authoritative.
So: imagine the cutest little three-year-old girl you can think of, speaking very seriously in her sweet, high-pitched three-year-old voice, trying to remind you of all the benefits one gains by having one's own tire swing. And she finishes her spiel with the line:
Isn't that a possibility?Yep, Just think of the possibility. Just think what happens when this three-year-old, who's using five-syllable-words at age three, finally turns 12. Assuming a linear relationship between age and word length, she'll be using twenty-syllable-words on us by then, and we'll never win an argument through unadulterated logic ever again.
And where in the world did she pick up the idea that Latin-derived words are more authoritative and help you win arguments?
Um, hm... maybe I need to go wash my mouth out with soap.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Magazines in Hospital Waiting Rooms
So Tonya and I were in the hospital today for the first ultrasound of her pregnancy....
...and incidentally, we don't have a whole lot to report, other than the fact that things are going well. Our sweet little blob had a healthy heartbeat, and this veteran daddy was able to pick it out of the ultrasound the moment that the doctor scanned in the right direction. And the kid is the right size for this stage of development. At this point--according to the doctor--there is only about a 2% chance of miscarriage. My wife's only real risk factors have to do with the fact that she's an "older mother"--meaning thirty-five or older--and the fact that our babies have averaged just about nine pounds thus far. But then, she's been an "older mother" for every one of her pregnancies, so far; and the babies are all long and skinny, with smallish heads, so there's no big deal there....
...so, while this is all very welcome news, there's not actually that much news there. So! I thought I'd post a little comparative review of the magazines we found in the waiting room.
Hey, this is my blog, and I can write what I want. You actually want to read a blog post about important stuff? Great. Go write it yourself.
...
Of course, it's pretty typical when we go to see the doctor that we'll have to wait a minimum of half-an-hour before we get called in--and it's longer when it's an afternoon appointment. So we sit down, we get comfortable (or, as comfortable as is actually possible on those chairs--When you're pregnant....), we talk about whatever weird stuff has been going on in our lives; then we discover pretty quickly either that: A. Our lives aren't very weird at all, or B. There's so much weirdness in our lives that it's become normal, and is thus not very noteworthy. At any rate, pretty soon we decide that our own company isn't mentally stimulating enough, and we start checking out the local reading material.
Usually the pickings are pretty slim. Once in a while you score a National Geographic, and that's cool. But when you're sitting in the waiting area for Women's Health, the magazines tend to be parenting magazines, and fashion magazines, and pregnancy magazines, and news magazines (which are usually several months old, so the punditry therein is good more for laughs than anything else, since you get to see in retrospect just how wrong most of it was) and magazines on food, and entertainment, and (if you're less unlucky) interior design.... And today the pickings were pretty slim.
Except! There were a couple of issues lying about of a magazine I'd never seen before, entitled Western Horseman Magazine. Now, there could be several reasons why there were issues of Western Horseman lying around in the Women's Health waiting area:
Well, after flipping through this magazine, it's pretty apparent that I'm a wimp. And for that matter, dear reader, so are you.
The thing is, the magazine doesn't intend to make you feel like a wimp. No: it's mainly just filled with good, practical advice. And it's the fact that you'll never find yourself in a situation to use this advice is what makes you feel like a wimp.
For example, one of the articles I read had to do with the selection and use of a proper Dutch oven that can be taken out on the trail. The writer offered several really good pieces of advice: you don't cook in these by putting them on the fire; you cook with them by putting them on coals. And for some recipes, you need to pile coals on top of the lid, as well. The writer recommended that you get two of these Dutch ovens when you head out on the trail, so that you load one on each side of your pack horse, to keep the load balanced. Of course, they need to be cast iron to stand up to the rigors of the trail; and the two 11" Dutch ovens will be about 50 lbs; but since pack animals can usually take up to 150 lbs, that gives plenty of extra capacity for loading up food and other necessities. Just make sure that when you pack the Dutch ovens, you do it with the lid-side toward the animal, so the legs on the ovens don't rub sores in its side....
Then there was the article about the proper way to get a cow into a trailer. I found myself unable to keep from laughing as I read the article--not because there was anything wrong with the article itself, but because it so clearly illustrated just how pampered and sheltered my life really is. The article kept talking about how the rider should position himself just off the cow's point, and be prepared to block the cow's avenue of retreat. And I kept thinking to myself: "What? Cows have points? What else do I not know about them that could serve to get me killed?"
Well, at least I now know much more about getting cows into trailers than I ever imagined there was to know. It appears that if you just try to push them into the trailer, the cow thinks of this as a Bad Experience, and it gets harder and harder the next time. And if you have several cows and you're trying to get them all into the trailer (at the same time!) pushing one cow in tends to scare off all her herdmates--by the time you get the first one in, the others will generally have long since taken flight, and you'll have to go hunt them down again....
You see what I mean? This magazine is geared toward people who actually go out on cattle drives. This is for people who actually go out in the bush on horseback for days or weeks at a time. This is for people who actually need to know what a spade bit is and when it's appropriate to use one--and where to get good ones. This is not a magazine for people who like to dress up like cowboys so they can go line dancing on weekends. This is for people who need to know how to deliver foals, and repair their own saddles.
This came through even the parts of the magazine dealing with fashion, and the puff-pieces on "Women of the West". There was a review of some women's boots in there, which explained that this particular brand was really well designed--that the soles weren't glued to the boot (as is usually the case), but rather that the sole was sewn to the welt, which in turn was sewn to the rest of the boot. The reviewer said that her pair held up really well to the rigors of the trail, and that she's managed to keep them in good shape for several years' worth of pretty constant work, which made them a particularly good buy--and, oh by the way, they're really purty too.
And the puff-piece interview I read of a ranching woman (Australian!) had questions along the lines of, are there any special challenges for you, being a woman, in dealing with the physical demands of such a highly physical way of life? The answer in essence was: it's hard, and there are times when I have to ask someone for help lifting something that's particularly heavy; but I've always known that the physical demands were just part of the lifestyle, and so I just be as strong as I can...
Meanwhile, I'm thinking to myself that this woman is more of a man than I am.
So, anyway, after reading several of these articles, I put the magazine down and looked around me.
There was a copy of Vogue lying there, with a very pretty makeup model on the cover.
And after Western Horseman, there was just something about the model that made me ask, "Yeah... but what is she good for?" I mean, can she rope a wayward calf? Can she whip up a meal for a bunch of hungry ranch hands just from the stuff she's packed on the back of a mule? Is she good at anything other than putting powders and greases on her face to make her look better than God really intended her to? What's she actually good for? I realize this is just a surface-level snap judgment; and I realize that Western Horseman is also trying to sell an image of its own. But after reading that interview with that Australian gal, reading about how she takes pride in her lack of sleep during calving season--because she knows her presence results in healthy calves and healthy mother cows--well, I'm not one to have curiosity in Vogue under the best of circumstances, but in juxtaposition with what I'd just read, I felt positively repelled by that model.
It's not that she wasn't pretty; she was very pretty. It's that her prettiness required her to be seated for hours in a makeup chair. They want their target audience to value looking good to others, and feeling good about being seen in society. It's a narcissistic beauty. Now, that Australian cowgirl was plenty pretty, but that wasn't the basis of her desirability: it was the fact that she had proven herself worthy of respect in a very tough man's world. She wasn't trying to make herself look pretty; she was just trying to keep her family's ranch running, and she did it passionately and with a smile on her face. And, unlike Vogue's target audience, this girl didn't give off any vibe that she might be suffering from self-esteem issues. In fact, I rather doubt that she even thinks about self-esteem on a regular basis--because she's just too busy doing things that matter. That's what was beautiful about her; and next to that, the Vogue cover model looked nothing so much like a cheap counterfeit.
Ok, I'm getting a little heavy here. And as I said, I fully accept that there's a whole bunch of image in Western Horseman, too. And Lord knows there are plenty of "cowboys" out there who couldn't tell one end of a cow from the other, who just want to look the part.
...
Ok, so Western Horseman Magazine has indirectly informed me that I am, in fact, a wimp. But! The first step in any recovery is recognizing that one has a problem, and I am now duly cognizant of the fact that I am a wimp, and I can now take action.
(In fact, this is true of nearly all people who use terms like "duly cognizant". Have you ever heard a real cowboy talk like that?)
And, at least now I know something else about cows, if I ever have to manage them: they have this thing called a "flight zone", which I'm supposed to block with my horse if I want to keep them going in the right direction. I wouldn't have guessed that. I would have thought that you would want to keep out of the flight zone, to avoid being hit by low-flying cows...
...and incidentally, we don't have a whole lot to report, other than the fact that things are going well. Our sweet little blob had a healthy heartbeat, and this veteran daddy was able to pick it out of the ultrasound the moment that the doctor scanned in the right direction. And the kid is the right size for this stage of development. At this point--according to the doctor--there is only about a 2% chance of miscarriage. My wife's only real risk factors have to do with the fact that she's an "older mother"--meaning thirty-five or older--and the fact that our babies have averaged just about nine pounds thus far. But then, she's been an "older mother" for every one of her pregnancies, so far; and the babies are all long and skinny, with smallish heads, so there's no big deal there....
...so, while this is all very welcome news, there's not actually that much news there. So! I thought I'd post a little comparative review of the magazines we found in the waiting room.
Hey, this is my blog, and I can write what I want. You actually want to read a blog post about important stuff? Great. Go write it yourself.
...
Of course, it's pretty typical when we go to see the doctor that we'll have to wait a minimum of half-an-hour before we get called in--and it's longer when it's an afternoon appointment. So we sit down, we get comfortable (or, as comfortable as is actually possible on those chairs--When you're pregnant....), we talk about whatever weird stuff has been going on in our lives; then we discover pretty quickly either that: A. Our lives aren't very weird at all, or B. There's so much weirdness in our lives that it's become normal, and is thus not very noteworthy. At any rate, pretty soon we decide that our own company isn't mentally stimulating enough, and we start checking out the local reading material.
Usually the pickings are pretty slim. Once in a while you score a National Geographic, and that's cool. But when you're sitting in the waiting area for Women's Health, the magazines tend to be parenting magazines, and fashion magazines, and pregnancy magazines, and news magazines (which are usually several months old, so the punditry therein is good more for laughs than anything else, since you get to see in retrospect just how wrong most of it was) and magazines on food, and entertainment, and (if you're less unlucky) interior design.... And today the pickings were pretty slim.
Except! There were a couple of issues lying about of a magazine I'd never seen before, entitled Western Horseman Magazine. Now, there could be several reasons why there were issues of Western Horseman lying around in the Women's Health waiting area:
- Women like to look at pictures of pretty horses.
- Women like to look at pictures of pretty men riding those horses. Although in this case, "pretty" means rugged, muscular, rustic, and strong. Even the older cowboys who showed up in this magazine, with the leathery skin and lined faces, were obviously Men with a capital M.
- Some guy there to give his woman moral support got thoroughly desperate for something non-girly to read, and so sneaked across the hall to Urology or Orthopaedics and filched a few copies of something decidedly non-girly. To them, I say, good for you.
Well, after flipping through this magazine, it's pretty apparent that I'm a wimp. And for that matter, dear reader, so are you.
The thing is, the magazine doesn't intend to make you feel like a wimp. No: it's mainly just filled with good, practical advice. And it's the fact that you'll never find yourself in a situation to use this advice is what makes you feel like a wimp.
For example, one of the articles I read had to do with the selection and use of a proper Dutch oven that can be taken out on the trail. The writer offered several really good pieces of advice: you don't cook in these by putting them on the fire; you cook with them by putting them on coals. And for some recipes, you need to pile coals on top of the lid, as well. The writer recommended that you get two of these Dutch ovens when you head out on the trail, so that you load one on each side of your pack horse, to keep the load balanced. Of course, they need to be cast iron to stand up to the rigors of the trail; and the two 11" Dutch ovens will be about 50 lbs; but since pack animals can usually take up to 150 lbs, that gives plenty of extra capacity for loading up food and other necessities. Just make sure that when you pack the Dutch ovens, you do it with the lid-side toward the animal, so the legs on the ovens don't rub sores in its side....
Then there was the article about the proper way to get a cow into a trailer. I found myself unable to keep from laughing as I read the article--not because there was anything wrong with the article itself, but because it so clearly illustrated just how pampered and sheltered my life really is. The article kept talking about how the rider should position himself just off the cow's point, and be prepared to block the cow's avenue of retreat. And I kept thinking to myself: "What? Cows have points? What else do I not know about them that could serve to get me killed?"
Well, at least I now know much more about getting cows into trailers than I ever imagined there was to know. It appears that if you just try to push them into the trailer, the cow thinks of this as a Bad Experience, and it gets harder and harder the next time. And if you have several cows and you're trying to get them all into the trailer (at the same time!) pushing one cow in tends to scare off all her herdmates--by the time you get the first one in, the others will generally have long since taken flight, and you'll have to go hunt them down again....
You see what I mean? This magazine is geared toward people who actually go out on cattle drives. This is for people who actually go out in the bush on horseback for days or weeks at a time. This is for people who actually need to know what a spade bit is and when it's appropriate to use one--and where to get good ones. This is not a magazine for people who like to dress up like cowboys so they can go line dancing on weekends. This is for people who need to know how to deliver foals, and repair their own saddles.
This came through even the parts of the magazine dealing with fashion, and the puff-pieces on "Women of the West". There was a review of some women's boots in there, which explained that this particular brand was really well designed--that the soles weren't glued to the boot (as is usually the case), but rather that the sole was sewn to the welt, which in turn was sewn to the rest of the boot. The reviewer said that her pair held up really well to the rigors of the trail, and that she's managed to keep them in good shape for several years' worth of pretty constant work, which made them a particularly good buy--and, oh by the way, they're really purty too.
And the puff-piece interview I read of a ranching woman (Australian!) had questions along the lines of, are there any special challenges for you, being a woman, in dealing with the physical demands of such a highly physical way of life? The answer in essence was: it's hard, and there are times when I have to ask someone for help lifting something that's particularly heavy; but I've always known that the physical demands were just part of the lifestyle, and so I just be as strong as I can...
Meanwhile, I'm thinking to myself that this woman is more of a man than I am.
So, anyway, after reading several of these articles, I put the magazine down and looked around me.
There was a copy of Vogue lying there, with a very pretty makeup model on the cover.
And after Western Horseman, there was just something about the model that made me ask, "Yeah... but what is she good for?" I mean, can she rope a wayward calf? Can she whip up a meal for a bunch of hungry ranch hands just from the stuff she's packed on the back of a mule? Is she good at anything other than putting powders and greases on her face to make her look better than God really intended her to? What's she actually good for? I realize this is just a surface-level snap judgment; and I realize that Western Horseman is also trying to sell an image of its own. But after reading that interview with that Australian gal, reading about how she takes pride in her lack of sleep during calving season--because she knows her presence results in healthy calves and healthy mother cows--well, I'm not one to have curiosity in Vogue under the best of circumstances, but in juxtaposition with what I'd just read, I felt positively repelled by that model.
It's not that she wasn't pretty; she was very pretty. It's that her prettiness required her to be seated for hours in a makeup chair. They want their target audience to value looking good to others, and feeling good about being seen in society. It's a narcissistic beauty. Now, that Australian cowgirl was plenty pretty, but that wasn't the basis of her desirability: it was the fact that she had proven herself worthy of respect in a very tough man's world. She wasn't trying to make herself look pretty; she was just trying to keep her family's ranch running, and she did it passionately and with a smile on her face. And, unlike Vogue's target audience, this girl didn't give off any vibe that she might be suffering from self-esteem issues. In fact, I rather doubt that she even thinks about self-esteem on a regular basis--because she's just too busy doing things that matter. That's what was beautiful about her; and next to that, the Vogue cover model looked nothing so much like a cheap counterfeit.
Ok, I'm getting a little heavy here. And as I said, I fully accept that there's a whole bunch of image in Western Horseman, too. And Lord knows there are plenty of "cowboys" out there who couldn't tell one end of a cow from the other, who just want to look the part.
...
Ok, so Western Horseman Magazine has indirectly informed me that I am, in fact, a wimp. But! The first step in any recovery is recognizing that one has a problem, and I am now duly cognizant of the fact that I am a wimp, and I can now take action.
(In fact, this is true of nearly all people who use terms like "duly cognizant". Have you ever heard a real cowboy talk like that?)
And, at least now I know something else about cows, if I ever have to manage them: they have this thing called a "flight zone", which I'm supposed to block with my horse if I want to keep them going in the right direction. I wouldn't have guessed that. I would have thought that you would want to keep out of the flight zone, to avoid being hit by low-flying cows...
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
A Clearly Written Account of the Financial Mess
With a hat tip to the Instapundit, I'd like to point out this very well-written analysis of what it was that made our country's financial system to go kablooie.
Now, the guy who wrote this is a professor of Tax Law and Policy at Loyola U, and he clearly knows a whole lot more than I do, but I do have a few little quibbles I'd like to mention. The Professor states:
Ahem.
In this context, the teaser-rate loans only became possible because the lenders were confident they'd be able to sell these loans to other parties. Had Fannie and Freddie--and the other purveyors of Mortgage-Backed Securites--been more discriminating in the debt they were buying up, or had the lenders been required to hold their loans until maturity, they may well never have issued the stuff.
...
Nevertheless, that's a minor quibble. The article is very good at explaining a very complicated situation in laymen's language.
In fact all of the articles I've read on the Understanding Tax blog are very interesting. Who'd'a thunk that a blog entitled "Understanding Tax" would have articles that wouldn't put everyone straight to sleep?
Now, the guy who wrote this is a professor of Tax Law and Policy at Loyola U, and he clearly knows a whole lot more than I do, but I do have a few little quibbles I'd like to mention. The Professor states:
The main quibble has to do with the sentence about "Some" people blaming these teaser-rate mortgages on the CRA of 1977. Maybe, but that's not the version of the argument I've been hearing. In fact, this post is the first place I've heard Teaser Rates and the CRA mentioned in the same breath. The argument that "Some" people are making is that:The media talks about “sub prime mortgages” – by which it means mortgage loans to borrowers with less than stellar credit. The real problem, however, was the advent and widespread use of teaser-rate mortgages in both the prime and sub prime markets. A teaser-rate mortgage allows a borrower to make relatively small payments for several years. At some point, the rate jumps dramatically, and the borrower faces much higher monthly payment obligations....
(Some have tried to blame teaser-rates on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which encouraged lending to minorities and lower income Americans. But that act only applied to commercial banks. A majority of this crisis’s teaser-rate loans were made by unregulated originators not subject to the act. More fundamentally, there is no evidence the present crisis started in 1977. Teaser-rate mortgages first became widespread after Mr. Bush took office in 2001.)
- The CRA gave power to federal regulators to punish lenders that were perceived as having racist lending practices. This power was used increasingly aggressively during the course of the 1990s. This was the "Stick" (as in "Carrot-and-Stick").
- But it wound up undermining the banks' lending standards. The trouble is, minorities tend to be less wealthy than whites; and on that basis alone a colorblind lending standard results in minorities tending to qualify for less credit, and getting more rejections.
- But simultaneously, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were there to "Fund the American Dream". And the way they did it, was to buy up all these shaky mortgages from the banks, repackage them as Mortgage-Backed Securities, and sell them to third party investors. This was the "Carrot".
- So the mortgage lenders--being pressured from the regulators on the one hand, and incentivized by Fannie and Freddie on the other--chucked their lending standards out the window and started making a whole lot of really shaky mortgages to borrowers that they wouldn't otherwise have touched. Of course, they sold these loans to Fannie and Freddie, thus unloading the risk.
- All this meant that the mortgage lenders could start making lots and lots of really lousy loans, secure in the knowledge that someone else would be on the hook if the loans defaulted.
Ahem.
In this context, the teaser-rate loans only became possible because the lenders were confident they'd be able to sell these loans to other parties. Had Fannie and Freddie--and the other purveyors of Mortgage-Backed Securites--been more discriminating in the debt they were buying up, or had the lenders been required to hold their loans until maturity, they may well never have issued the stuff.
...
Nevertheless, that's a minor quibble. The article is very good at explaining a very complicated situation in laymen's language.
In fact all of the articles I've read on the Understanding Tax blog are very interesting. Who'd'a thunk that a blog entitled "Understanding Tax" would have articles that wouldn't put everyone straight to sleep?
California Homeschoolers: Legal Deadline Approaching
To any of my California readers who homeschool (if I have any left after my September blogging hiatus):
Just a friendly reminder that private schools are required to file their affidavits between October 1 and October 15. That means, do it now. If you don't, there's a good chance you'll wind up in violation of the state's education laws.
The online form for submitting the private school affidavit is here. Additionally, the HSLDA has a page of advice on how to fill out this form, here.
A few especially important bits of advice:
(Note that the HSLDA takes the approach of minimum compliance. They believe homeschoolers should comply with the laws, but should not overcomply: that is, they suggest that homeschoolers not volunteer any information beyond what is legally required, for the sake of privacy--and because of the belief that if too many homeschoolers willingly go beyond what the law requires, it becomes that much easier for this behavior to become the new status quo, and become required behavior for everyone. Take their position for what you will....)
...
Incidentally, in case any homeschooling parent out there is content to let this slide, consider this gentle little reminder of the stakes, taken from a local news story: Truancy Sweep Lands Parents In Handcuffs....
Yeah, this story doesn't mention homeschoolers; it's meant for true truants. But get those affidavits in anyway, m'kay? Good.
Just a friendly reminder that private schools are required to file their affidavits between October 1 and October 15. That means, do it now. If you don't, there's a good chance you'll wind up in violation of the state's education laws.
The online form for submitting the private school affidavit is here. Additionally, the HSLDA has a page of advice on how to fill out this form, here.
A few especially important bits of advice:
The CDE has stated that they will not accept a Private School Affidavit form that has been printed from the web site and completed manually. The web site form must be completed online.Also, after the online form is complete:
Click on the “Submit Form” button at the bottom of the on-line affidavit to submit your completed affidavit to the CDE. It will generate a confirmation page. Print two copies of that page for your records.Emphasis added. Always good advice.
(Note that the HSLDA takes the approach of minimum compliance. They believe homeschoolers should comply with the laws, but should not overcomply: that is, they suggest that homeschoolers not volunteer any information beyond what is legally required, for the sake of privacy--and because of the belief that if too many homeschoolers willingly go beyond what the law requires, it becomes that much easier for this behavior to become the new status quo, and become required behavior for everyone. Take their position for what you will....)
...
Incidentally, in case any homeschooling parent out there is content to let this slide, consider this gentle little reminder of the stakes, taken from a local news story: Truancy Sweep Lands Parents In Handcuffs....
Yeah, this story doesn't mention homeschoolers; it's meant for true truants. But get those affidavits in anyway, m'kay? Good.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Interesting Article on Pitch Development Training
I come from a musical family. On those occasions we get together, we generally break out into spontaneous song. Usually these songs have four parts to them. In those cases where they don't, it's often more like five or eight.
Looking back on my childhood years, I find that I can't pinpoint the exact time that we became a musical family--it was just always so. We've nearly always had a piano in the home, even when we were stationed in Germany for four years. I remember my Dad occasionally arranging pieces of vocal music for weddings. I remember having groups of people from church over in our house for singing sessions.
And I remember, back in my pre-teen years (just as my voice was starting to change), how we'd all be crammed into the Toyota driving somewhere, and my Dad would suddenly pull out the pitchpipe, blow a C, and demand that we all start singing The Lord Bless You And Keep You (with the polyphonic ending!).
Daaaad! Not again!
This is a tradition that I fully intend to pass on to my children. :-)
The ability to read music, to glance at a page full of notes and know what's going on musically, has come in mighty handy over the years. And the ability to hold my own vocal part, when I'm the only one on that part--and my part is in difficult, dissonant harmonies with the other parts--has come in mighty handy too. But it didn't come easily, and it took a lot of practice. I'm not sure this is the sort of thing that one picks up by osmosis, even when one attends a church like ours, where we have a tradition of four-part A Capella singing. I managed to pick up these skills somehow; my wife, who grew up in very similar congregations to the ones I attended, didn't--at least not to the same degree.
So in the pedagogical division of labor in our little homeschool here, I'm the music teacher.
And I'm very interested in reading whatever material I can find on music education of children--especially the teaching of music theory, since a strong understanding of music theory is crucial to good sight-reading skills.
Well, in the Carnival of Homeschooling from last week there was an interesting article dealing with the development of the "inner ear". And by "inner ear", he's not referring to the Cochlea or those funny little bones or structures that keep you from listing to port--he's referring to the ability to "hear" the right pitches in the head, regardless of whether they are being played or sung at all.
In a really well-trained musician, this results in the ability that was portrayed in the movie Amadeus, where Solieri is reading the manuscripts of Mozart's music that were just handed to him, and is hearing the music in his head, without needing to have them played first. (And in an extremely well-trained musician, this results in the ability to write good music when you're completely deaf, as with Beethoven and Smetana.)
I'm not that ambitious. :-) But I have been thinking about the kind of musical training I need to give my kids. I've been giving regular piano lessons to the Fairy, and she's been doing well. We're going slowly, and she doesn't particularly like to practice, but she's making progress. But the little Angel on my Right Shoulder (or is it the Devil on my Left? I can't always tell) keeps insinuating that there's so much more that she needs to be learning--how to read the notes on the staff better, how to do scales, how to sing so that she matches pitches. She's definitely getting better at this last one, but I admit that my own pride sometimes gets in the way of allowing her just to be a little kid. She's a Power kid, for goodness sakes! This stuff should be coming naturally to her! Well, no. After all, she's five; I didn't start sight-singing until I was in the fifth grade, and I was, um.... abnormal.
But my wife tells me she loves me anyway. :-)
Anyway, check out that article. It's on the long side, and (to my mind) it rambles a bit, but that's only because he has a whole bunch of good points to make.
Looking back on my childhood years, I find that I can't pinpoint the exact time that we became a musical family--it was just always so. We've nearly always had a piano in the home, even when we were stationed in Germany for four years. I remember my Dad occasionally arranging pieces of vocal music for weddings. I remember having groups of people from church over in our house for singing sessions.
And I remember, back in my pre-teen years (just as my voice was starting to change), how we'd all be crammed into the Toyota driving somewhere, and my Dad would suddenly pull out the pitchpipe, blow a C, and demand that we all start singing The Lord Bless You And Keep You (with the polyphonic ending!).
Daaaad! Not again!
This is a tradition that I fully intend to pass on to my children. :-)
The ability to read music, to glance at a page full of notes and know what's going on musically, has come in mighty handy over the years. And the ability to hold my own vocal part, when I'm the only one on that part--and my part is in difficult, dissonant harmonies with the other parts--has come in mighty handy too. But it didn't come easily, and it took a lot of practice. I'm not sure this is the sort of thing that one picks up by osmosis, even when one attends a church like ours, where we have a tradition of four-part A Capella singing. I managed to pick up these skills somehow; my wife, who grew up in very similar congregations to the ones I attended, didn't--at least not to the same degree.
So in the pedagogical division of labor in our little homeschool here, I'm the music teacher.
And I'm very interested in reading whatever material I can find on music education of children--especially the teaching of music theory, since a strong understanding of music theory is crucial to good sight-reading skills.
Well, in the Carnival of Homeschooling from last week there was an interesting article dealing with the development of the "inner ear". And by "inner ear", he's not referring to the Cochlea or those funny little bones or structures that keep you from listing to port--he's referring to the ability to "hear" the right pitches in the head, regardless of whether they are being played or sung at all.
In a really well-trained musician, this results in the ability that was portrayed in the movie Amadeus, where Solieri is reading the manuscripts of Mozart's music that were just handed to him, and is hearing the music in his head, without needing to have them played first. (And in an extremely well-trained musician, this results in the ability to write good music when you're completely deaf, as with Beethoven and Smetana.)
I'm not that ambitious. :-) But I have been thinking about the kind of musical training I need to give my kids. I've been giving regular piano lessons to the Fairy, and she's been doing well. We're going slowly, and she doesn't particularly like to practice, but she's making progress. But the little Angel on my Right Shoulder (or is it the Devil on my Left? I can't always tell) keeps insinuating that there's so much more that she needs to be learning--how to read the notes on the staff better, how to do scales, how to sing so that she matches pitches. She's definitely getting better at this last one, but I admit that my own pride sometimes gets in the way of allowing her just to be a little kid. She's a Power kid, for goodness sakes! This stuff should be coming naturally to her! Well, no. After all, she's five; I didn't start sight-singing until I was in the fifth grade, and I was, um.... abnormal.
But my wife tells me she loves me anyway. :-)
Anyway, check out that article. It's on the long side, and (to my mind) it rambles a bit, but that's only because he has a whole bunch of good points to make.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
I'm So Proud Of Them....
You know, one of the reasons that I haven't been blogging as much lately is that I've said it all already.
Well, it's not entirely that way. But a little something happened today that caused this Daddy's heart to swell with pride in his little girls. So of course, I wanted to blog about it; but I vaguely remembered that I'd done a post on a similar topic at one point, and I Googled my own site...
And came upon this post. And it said pretty much everything I was hoping to say this time around.
Darn, I scooped myself again! You see my problem; when you write numerous blog posts about family life, after a while the same themes come up over and over, and it takes some serious work to think of new things to say. After a while, you are reduced to saying the same things over and over again, just in different ways. As time progresses, you're tempted to use less and less originality (since that takes work), and you just link to yourself and say, "Read this one again."
It's a little like what I suppose comic strip writers go through. Every year, Lucy would hold out that football; every year, Charlie Brown would try to kick it; and every year, Charles M. Schultz would have to try to think of a new way to make that scene funny. It's to his great credit that he usually succeeded; I remember the version of that strip where Charlie Brown and Lucy were discussing the three things that are inevitable in life as they were setting up for the kickoff. Charlie Brown could only remember two: death and taxes. He couldn't think of the third, and Lucy kept teasing him that it was so obvious, clear through to the panel where Charlie Brown was lying in pain flat on his back....
I understand that Bill Watterson had the same problem with the character of the Sadistic Babysitter in Calvin and Hobbes. The Babysitter was one of the fan base's favorite recurring characters, of course, but apparently he dreaded having to come up with new storylines for her every year or so. How many different ways can you write a funny story about Calvin trying to outsmart his Babysitter, and the Babysitter using threats of physical violence toward her charge (and extortion of his parents!) to keep everyone in line? Ultimately, Watterson (wisely) decided that Calvin and the Babysitter actually had more in common than either cared to admit, and that they'd get along famously in the right circumstances; his last storyline involving her had her learning the "rules" to Calvinball (the only rule: no rule is ever valid more than once) and having a blast trying to beat Calvin at his own game.
...
But I digress. Wildly.
I've mentioned before that we've been using the method of Blend Phonics developed by Hazel Loring for teaching our kids basic phonics. I've mentioned this method here and here. (Unfortunately I can't seem to open the web site of Don Potter, where we first found the link to Hazel Loring's stuff. Is this site just not loading, or has it expired and been taken down? Unknown at this time....)
But the method itself is very simple: the teacher sits down with the pupil, with some kind of writing pad. We use a Magna-Doodle for this--and find it to be the perfect tool for the job. The teacher will explain whichever phonetic rule will be used in the lesson, such as "The letter A usually makes the aaaaaaaaaa sound..." or "when you see P and H together, it makes a sound like ffffffffff." Then the teacher will start taking words from a list. For each word, the teacher spells it on the Magna-Doodle one letter at a time; as each letter is drawn, the student sounds out the word so far. It looks a little like this:
Teacher writes F.
Student says ffffffffff.
Teacher writes an A next to the F, making FA.
Student says fffffff-aaaaaaaa.
Teacher writes a T next to the FA, making FAT.
Student says fffff-aaaaaaa-T, then recognizes the word fat, and becomes really happy.
Then the teacher has the student use the word in a sentence. Then, on to the next word on the list, continuing for as long as the kid's attention span allows. (In our three-year-old's case, this is no longer than 15 minutes, or slightly upward of a dozen words.)
This program has 44 lessons to it. When teaching the Pillowfight Fairy, Tonya broke these lessons up into multiple sessions, because there were far more words in many of the lessons than could comfortably fit within her attention span. It took the Fairy about three months to work through the whole thing, at which point she had most of the phonetic rules down (although she still preferred to read by sight instead of sounding out; but that's another issue--and one in which she's greatly improved over the last year, I might add).
Well, now it's the Adrenaline Junkie's turn. She's approaching her fourth birthday, so she's about the age that the Fairy was when she was learning to read. And the Junkie has become fascinated with the stories in all the books; she loves to be read to; she occasionally tries to read short words; and she occasionally draws lots of letters on the pictures she draws. So Mommy decided that it was time to start. She pulled out the notebook with Ms. Loring's program, and started going through the process.
...
Now, here's where it gets interesting. The Fairy rather squirmed her way through this process when it was being taught to her. She was interested at first, but then it got boring and she wanted to do other things, so we occasionally had to sit on her, practically, to keep her still long enough to do the lesson with her. But now that it's her sister's turn, she's so enthralled with the process that Mommy has to keep warning her not to blurt out the answers before the Junkie can answer them. The Fairy is fascinated at watching the same process being done with her sister as was done with her, and she wants to help in any way she can.
I guess it's less fun being the one lectured to, than it is being the one doing the lecturing. What can I say? Some of us love to explain things to others. I suppose it gives us a sense of power and status. ;-)
At any rate, the Fairy definitely inherited this love of explaining things from her Daddy. And so now that the Junkie is in the position of learning things that the Fairy has already mastered, the Fairy wants a little piece of the pedagogical action, it would appear.
So today, when the Junkie wanted to "do her words", and the Fairy wanted to administer the lesson, Mommy pulled out Ms. Loring's notes, turned to the correct lesson, pointed the right list of words out to the Fairy, and set them both loose.
And the Fairy--little, not-quite-six-year-old girl, administered the phonics lesson to her three-year-old sister. And she did great.
The only quibble that Mommy had is that it took longer than normal, because the Fairy wanted to draw illustrations of all the nouns and verbs in the list. But this is of course a very minor quibble.
(Yes, she illustrated the verbs too. She illustrated the verb "tell" by drawing the profile of a face, with a big empty speech balloon coming out of the open mouth...)
...
Now that is something to make a parent proud, and it does so on multiple levels.
For one thing, it's something of an article of faith in a big chunk of the Homeschooling world--especially that corner of it that's influenced by the thinking of Charlotte Mason--that you've never truly learned a thing until you are able to teach it to another. The ultimate test of subject mastery is that you're able to help someone else master the material. And pretty much any teacher will verify that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it. This is one reason that Charlotte Mason so advocated the discipline of narration: it gives the pupil the chance to explain things, briefly to become the teacher.
And my 5.9-year-old daughter is teaching her 3.8-year-old sister how to read. This is absolutely splendid--not just for the Junkie, not just for Mommy (who managed to get out of teaching a lesson today!), but especially for the Fairy.
The Fairy loves words. She loves reading stories, she loves reading comic books, she loves poetry; she loves writing down her own stories (as regular readers of this blog know). She doesn't always love writing her assignments; but that is in part because there is other stuff she'd rather be writing. And now, she's seeing that her sister is starting to enter her world, so to speak; the Junkie loves being read to, as well, and the Junkie also likes poems and stories. Tonya thinks the Fairy is becoming excited by the fact that her sister is beginning to figure the reading thing out, because now she'll have someone to share her enthusiasm with. And that enthusiasm, in turn, is infecting her younger sister.
So she's very excitedly jumping in and pushing this process along in whatever way she can. When the Junkie wants a story, but Mommy and Daddy are tired, we can often ask the Fairy, "Would you read a story to your sister?" And she'll do it! And the Junkie loves it!
...
Sometimes we homeschoolers wonder whether we're doing this stuff right; whether we're doing enough; whether our kids are going to fall behind. But one of the joys of the homeschooling lifestyle is that we occasionally have days like today, in which we can see real, tangible proof that we're at least doing something right.
Well, it's not entirely that way. But a little something happened today that caused this Daddy's heart to swell with pride in his little girls. So of course, I wanted to blog about it; but I vaguely remembered that I'd done a post on a similar topic at one point, and I Googled my own site...
And came upon this post. And it said pretty much everything I was hoping to say this time around.
Darn, I scooped myself again! You see my problem; when you write numerous blog posts about family life, after a while the same themes come up over and over, and it takes some serious work to think of new things to say. After a while, you are reduced to saying the same things over and over again, just in different ways. As time progresses, you're tempted to use less and less originality (since that takes work), and you just link to yourself and say, "Read this one again."
It's a little like what I suppose comic strip writers go through. Every year, Lucy would hold out that football; every year, Charlie Brown would try to kick it; and every year, Charles M. Schultz would have to try to think of a new way to make that scene funny. It's to his great credit that he usually succeeded; I remember the version of that strip where Charlie Brown and Lucy were discussing the three things that are inevitable in life as they were setting up for the kickoff. Charlie Brown could only remember two: death and taxes. He couldn't think of the third, and Lucy kept teasing him that it was so obvious, clear through to the panel where Charlie Brown was lying in pain flat on his back....
I understand that Bill Watterson had the same problem with the character of the Sadistic Babysitter in Calvin and Hobbes. The Babysitter was one of the fan base's favorite recurring characters, of course, but apparently he dreaded having to come up with new storylines for her every year or so. How many different ways can you write a funny story about Calvin trying to outsmart his Babysitter, and the Babysitter using threats of physical violence toward her charge (and extortion of his parents!) to keep everyone in line? Ultimately, Watterson (wisely) decided that Calvin and the Babysitter actually had more in common than either cared to admit, and that they'd get along famously in the right circumstances; his last storyline involving her had her learning the "rules" to Calvinball (the only rule: no rule is ever valid more than once) and having a blast trying to beat Calvin at his own game.
...
But I digress. Wildly.
I've mentioned before that we've been using the method of Blend Phonics developed by Hazel Loring for teaching our kids basic phonics. I've mentioned this method here and here. (Unfortunately I can't seem to open the web site of Don Potter, where we first found the link to Hazel Loring's stuff. Is this site just not loading, or has it expired and been taken down? Unknown at this time....)
But the method itself is very simple: the teacher sits down with the pupil, with some kind of writing pad. We use a Magna-Doodle for this--and find it to be the perfect tool for the job. The teacher will explain whichever phonetic rule will be used in the lesson, such as "The letter A usually makes the aaaaaaaaaa sound..." or "when you see P and H together, it makes a sound like ffffffffff." Then the teacher will start taking words from a list. For each word, the teacher spells it on the Magna-Doodle one letter at a time; as each letter is drawn, the student sounds out the word so far. It looks a little like this:
Teacher writes F.
Student says ffffffffff.
Teacher writes an A next to the F, making FA.
Student says fffffff-aaaaaaaa.
Teacher writes a T next to the FA, making FAT.
Student says fffff-aaaaaaa-T, then recognizes the word fat, and becomes really happy.
Then the teacher has the student use the word in a sentence. Then, on to the next word on the list, continuing for as long as the kid's attention span allows. (In our three-year-old's case, this is no longer than 15 minutes, or slightly upward of a dozen words.)
This program has 44 lessons to it. When teaching the Pillowfight Fairy, Tonya broke these lessons up into multiple sessions, because there were far more words in many of the lessons than could comfortably fit within her attention span. It took the Fairy about three months to work through the whole thing, at which point she had most of the phonetic rules down (although she still preferred to read by sight instead of sounding out; but that's another issue--and one in which she's greatly improved over the last year, I might add).
Well, now it's the Adrenaline Junkie's turn. She's approaching her fourth birthday, so she's about the age that the Fairy was when she was learning to read. And the Junkie has become fascinated with the stories in all the books; she loves to be read to; she occasionally tries to read short words; and she occasionally draws lots of letters on the pictures she draws. So Mommy decided that it was time to start. She pulled out the notebook with Ms. Loring's program, and started going through the process.
...
Now, here's where it gets interesting. The Fairy rather squirmed her way through this process when it was being taught to her. She was interested at first, but then it got boring and she wanted to do other things, so we occasionally had to sit on her, practically, to keep her still long enough to do the lesson with her. But now that it's her sister's turn, she's so enthralled with the process that Mommy has to keep warning her not to blurt out the answers before the Junkie can answer them. The Fairy is fascinated at watching the same process being done with her sister as was done with her, and she wants to help in any way she can.
I guess it's less fun being the one lectured to, than it is being the one doing the lecturing. What can I say? Some of us love to explain things to others. I suppose it gives us a sense of power and status. ;-)
At any rate, the Fairy definitely inherited this love of explaining things from her Daddy. And so now that the Junkie is in the position of learning things that the Fairy has already mastered, the Fairy wants a little piece of the pedagogical action, it would appear.
So today, when the Junkie wanted to "do her words", and the Fairy wanted to administer the lesson, Mommy pulled out Ms. Loring's notes, turned to the correct lesson, pointed the right list of words out to the Fairy, and set them both loose.
And the Fairy--little, not-quite-six-year-old girl, administered the phonics lesson to her three-year-old sister. And she did great.
The only quibble that Mommy had is that it took longer than normal, because the Fairy wanted to draw illustrations of all the nouns and verbs in the list. But this is of course a very minor quibble.
(Yes, she illustrated the verbs too. She illustrated the verb "tell" by drawing the profile of a face, with a big empty speech balloon coming out of the open mouth...)
...
Now that is something to make a parent proud, and it does so on multiple levels.
For one thing, it's something of an article of faith in a big chunk of the Homeschooling world--especially that corner of it that's influenced by the thinking of Charlotte Mason--that you've never truly learned a thing until you are able to teach it to another. The ultimate test of subject mastery is that you're able to help someone else master the material. And pretty much any teacher will verify that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it. This is one reason that Charlotte Mason so advocated the discipline of narration: it gives the pupil the chance to explain things, briefly to become the teacher.
And my 5.9-year-old daughter is teaching her 3.8-year-old sister how to read. This is absolutely splendid--not just for the Junkie, not just for Mommy (who managed to get out of teaching a lesson today!), but especially for the Fairy.
The Fairy loves words. She loves reading stories, she loves reading comic books, she loves poetry; she loves writing down her own stories (as regular readers of this blog know). She doesn't always love writing her assignments; but that is in part because there is other stuff she'd rather be writing. And now, she's seeing that her sister is starting to enter her world, so to speak; the Junkie loves being read to, as well, and the Junkie also likes poems and stories. Tonya thinks the Fairy is becoming excited by the fact that her sister is beginning to figure the reading thing out, because now she'll have someone to share her enthusiasm with. And that enthusiasm, in turn, is infecting her younger sister.
So she's very excitedly jumping in and pushing this process along in whatever way she can. When the Junkie wants a story, but Mommy and Daddy are tired, we can often ask the Fairy, "Would you read a story to your sister?" And she'll do it! And the Junkie loves it!
...
Sometimes we homeschoolers wonder whether we're doing this stuff right; whether we're doing enough; whether our kids are going to fall behind. But one of the joys of the homeschooling lifestyle is that we occasionally have days like today, in which we can see real, tangible proof that we're at least doing something right.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
I'm Not Dead Yet!
Ok, Ok. I did, after all, mention three posts back that "blogging would be light", didn't I? I suppose I didn't realize at the time just how light blogging would be.
Spore is a really, really evil game. It's not a game for the hard-core gamers; they would say that the gameplay is "light"--that is, you're not having to remember which key on the keyboard operates the pressure valve on the intake manifold on your third engine when you're operating in Silent Mode. It's more a game for the more casual gamers; those who don't want to face death every time they're in front of the screen. Casual gamers like those games with simple controls and uncomplicated, intuitive rules; where you're not under constant survival or time pressure; where you get to explore at leisure. The trouble is, games like that can take all month to finish.
So, here we are two weeks later, and none of us has finished a game yet. We've enjoyed playing (obviously), though we enjoy different parts of the game: My daughters are into the creation of new monsters and spaceships; my wife is into the early stages of the game; and I rather enjoy zooming around space looking for new sources of Purple Spice.
Hmmm... somehow, the thought occurs to me that we could work out an arrangement to make a game of Spore be a family affair, where everyone plays their own favorite bits. That'd work!
And it means that I'd get to play it the most, because the Space Stage in this game takes longer than all other parts put together. Sneaky, aren't I?
...
While we're on the subject of video games, I thought I'd take a quick stroll down memory lane. Anyone else among my readers get the game Myst when it came out? Remember that one?
Believe it or not, it was released fifteen years ago tomorrow. And I'm feeling really, really old.
Man, I loved that game. And it wasn't that it was particularly hard; when my parents got me a computer for my post-college-graduation present in 1995, I had the shop throw in a copy of the game, and I had it solved pretty much within two days. It wasn't that the puzzles in the game were so hard; it was that the game was beautiful, and that it had a sense of hugeness to it. You were exploring a complete world. No, strike that--you were exploring a complete multiverse, shifting between worlds as you discovered the links between them. As the histories of all these worlds were revealed bit by bit, it evoked strange moods and emotions--a sense of longing, a sense of nostalgia, a sense of loss.
It reminded me of the feeling of wandering through an old World War 1 battleground (which my family has done, by the way)--you feel ghosts around you. You know that terrible things happened here once; everything is peaceful now, but it still doesn't feel right.
The thing about Myst was that it wasn't just a game, it was at least in part a work of art. So even after I solved it, I found myself playing it again and again, just so I could look at all those scenes again, and see all those details--the brass nails holding together the table in the corner, the grain in the polished wood writing desk, the gears and cogs in the orrery, the model ship sunk in the birdbath....
Of course, a lot has changed in fifteen years. Most games have very detailed images these days, and some of them can animate them, with shadows and reflections, in real-time (while Myst used nearly all still images). And yet, there's still a beauty to this fifteen-year-old game that I think few others before or since have matched.
If you'll allow me to wax philosophical, I think this is true of Art in general; I'm not sure that Art has "progress". That is, in any artistic medium, there is great art from every period, and there is dreck from every period too. The fact that Medieval artists had not mastered perspective does not diminish their artistic accomplishments; the fact that Renaissance artists did master perspective does not make their art superior. Moviemaking was in its infancy in the Twenties and Thirties, with many of today's tools and techniques not yet discovered (including color, and even sound!); and yet Buster Keaton still managed to make better comedies than most of today's crews.
The quality of a work of art isn't determined by the medium; rather, it depends on the artistic vision of the artist, and an ability to understand and work within the constraints imposed by that medium. Some of the greatest works of art were only grudgingly created by the artists, at the demands of overbearing patrons--the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel comes to mind. And some of the worst, most self-indulgent dreck comes about when you give artists blank checks and government grants.
I suspect that the term "starving artist" contains truth: the best art comes from artists who are, in fact, starving. Well-fed artists do whatever the heck they want. Hunger has a way of focusing the mind....
...
Anyway, the game Myst is noteworthy not because it was the end-all and be-all of games, but because it made the absolute best use of the limited (by today's standards) hardware resources it had access to. They came up with a truly interesting storyline for the game. And they somehow managed to create hundreds of beautiful images, a fair amount of (admittedly postage-stamp sized) video, and over an hour's worth of well-composed mood music and squeeze it onto one CD. It was, to use a cliche and a pun all at once, a game-changer.
And it sold six million copies.
So if I have any readers left after my little hiatus, what do you remember about this game? Did you like it? Hate it? I'm curious to know....
Spore is a really, really evil game. It's not a game for the hard-core gamers; they would say that the gameplay is "light"--that is, you're not having to remember which key on the keyboard operates the pressure valve on the intake manifold on your third engine when you're operating in Silent Mode. It's more a game for the more casual gamers; those who don't want to face death every time they're in front of the screen. Casual gamers like those games with simple controls and uncomplicated, intuitive rules; where you're not under constant survival or time pressure; where you get to explore at leisure. The trouble is, games like that can take all month to finish.
So, here we are two weeks later, and none of us has finished a game yet. We've enjoyed playing (obviously), though we enjoy different parts of the game: My daughters are into the creation of new monsters and spaceships; my wife is into the early stages of the game; and I rather enjoy zooming around space looking for new sources of Purple Spice.
Hmmm... somehow, the thought occurs to me that we could work out an arrangement to make a game of Spore be a family affair, where everyone plays their own favorite bits. That'd work!
And it means that I'd get to play it the most, because the Space Stage in this game takes longer than all other parts put together. Sneaky, aren't I?
...
While we're on the subject of video games, I thought I'd take a quick stroll down memory lane. Anyone else among my readers get the game Myst when it came out? Remember that one?
Believe it or not, it was released fifteen years ago tomorrow. And I'm feeling really, really old.
Man, I loved that game. And it wasn't that it was particularly hard; when my parents got me a computer for my post-college-graduation present in 1995, I had the shop throw in a copy of the game, and I had it solved pretty much within two days. It wasn't that the puzzles in the game were so hard; it was that the game was beautiful, and that it had a sense of hugeness to it. You were exploring a complete world. No, strike that--you were exploring a complete multiverse, shifting between worlds as you discovered the links between them. As the histories of all these worlds were revealed bit by bit, it evoked strange moods and emotions--a sense of longing, a sense of nostalgia, a sense of loss.
It reminded me of the feeling of wandering through an old World War 1 battleground (which my family has done, by the way)--you feel ghosts around you. You know that terrible things happened here once; everything is peaceful now, but it still doesn't feel right.
The thing about Myst was that it wasn't just a game, it was at least in part a work of art. So even after I solved it, I found myself playing it again and again, just so I could look at all those scenes again, and see all those details--the brass nails holding together the table in the corner, the grain in the polished wood writing desk, the gears and cogs in the orrery, the model ship sunk in the birdbath....
Of course, a lot has changed in fifteen years. Most games have very detailed images these days, and some of them can animate them, with shadows and reflections, in real-time (while Myst used nearly all still images). And yet, there's still a beauty to this fifteen-year-old game that I think few others before or since have matched.
If you'll allow me to wax philosophical, I think this is true of Art in general; I'm not sure that Art has "progress". That is, in any artistic medium, there is great art from every period, and there is dreck from every period too. The fact that Medieval artists had not mastered perspective does not diminish their artistic accomplishments; the fact that Renaissance artists did master perspective does not make their art superior. Moviemaking was in its infancy in the Twenties and Thirties, with many of today's tools and techniques not yet discovered (including color, and even sound!); and yet Buster Keaton still managed to make better comedies than most of today's crews.
The quality of a work of art isn't determined by the medium; rather, it depends on the artistic vision of the artist, and an ability to understand and work within the constraints imposed by that medium. Some of the greatest works of art were only grudgingly created by the artists, at the demands of overbearing patrons--the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel comes to mind. And some of the worst, most self-indulgent dreck comes about when you give artists blank checks and government grants.
I suspect that the term "starving artist" contains truth: the best art comes from artists who are, in fact, starving. Well-fed artists do whatever the heck they want. Hunger has a way of focusing the mind....
...
Anyway, the game Myst is noteworthy not because it was the end-all and be-all of games, but because it made the absolute best use of the limited (by today's standards) hardware resources it had access to. They came up with a truly interesting storyline for the game. And they somehow managed to create hundreds of beautiful images, a fair amount of (admittedly postage-stamp sized) video, and over an hour's worth of well-composed mood music and squeeze it onto one CD. It was, to use a cliche and a pun all at once, a game-changer.
And it sold six million copies.
So if I have any readers left after my little hiatus, what do you remember about this game? Did you like it? Hate it? I'm curious to know....
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Public Service Announcement
We interrupt this blogging hiatus and nearly-two-week late-night Spore orgy to bring you a very important Public Service Announcement.
Tomorrow--Friday, September 19th--is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
You see, too often I would forget all about Talk Like A Pirate Day until it was nearly over. I'd get home from work, have dinner, be Daddy for a few hours, put the kids in bed, check the news... and then realize that it was Talk Like A Pirate Day, and I'd nearly missed it! I hadn't even uttered one lousy Aaarggh to my precious little squabbies.
Thus, the PSA: I'm informing everyone tonight, so that you can remember it tomorrow and be prepared to plunder your mateys' booty.
(Actually, the apostrophe is wrong. It should be matey's booty. If you plunder the booty of more than one matey, they tend to get mad at you. Not that a true pirate would have minded....)
Tomorrow--Friday, September 19th--is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
You see, too often I would forget all about Talk Like A Pirate Day until it was nearly over. I'd get home from work, have dinner, be Daddy for a few hours, put the kids in bed, check the news... and then realize that it was Talk Like A Pirate Day, and I'd nearly missed it! I hadn't even uttered one lousy Aaarggh to my precious little squabbies.
Thus, the PSA: I'm informing everyone tonight, so that you can remember it tomorrow and be prepared to plunder your mateys' booty.
(Actually, the apostrophe is wrong. It should be matey's booty. If you plunder the booty of more than one matey, they tend to get mad at you. Not that a true pirate would have minded....)
Friday, September 12, 2008
On Press Coverage, and "Tough Questions"
Ok, ok... So I've been playing a whole lot of the computer game Spore lately, and haven't been spending much time thinking about what my next blog post should be--AKA "Feeding the Beast".
(Of course, the phrase "Feeding the Beast" is reminding me of Spore, too. Everything seems to, these days....)
And I've completely blown my one-post-per day benchmark. Ah, well. So I guess I might as well blow another self-imposed rule of mine, the one about avoiding political topics.
...
Since Sarah Palin came on the scene two weeks ago, she's rather dominated the political news coverage, in a way that few candidates do. In fact, the last candidate to get this much coverage, to become this kind of a media phenomenon, was Barack Obama himself. The trouble for him is that he was the phenomenon about eight months ago; now Palin has become the new shiny thing that has attracted everyone's attention. Eight months from now, even if the McCain/Palin ticket wins, the press will find something or someone else to cover, and it will be on with the next fad...
Now, to be fair, there are some good reasons that Palin has grabbed everyone's attention. She has the very real potential to upend this race, and it looks like this may in fact be happening. And I'll probably blog about her more in the future.
But this post isn't actually about her. I have an observation to make regarding the press.
...
Since Tonya and I don't have a TV in our house, we tend to miss a lot of the news as it happens, and then we read about it after the fact. Just from a time management standpoint, it's a whole lot faster to read a speech, than it is to listen to it. If there's some news video we want to see, we can go look it up online; but if we're not particularly interested in something, we never see it.
Now, the big political news over the past day or so has been the interviews that Mrs. Palin did with Charlie Gibson of ABC News. Tonya and I haven't been particularly interested in the interviews themselves, so we haven't seen them.
But what has caught my attention is some of the reaction to these interviews. Being something of a socially conservative libertarian type myself, I tend to read a lot on sites like Townhall, Redstate, the Instapundit, National Review, Hot Air, and so forth. And the consensus on these sites is that Charlie Gibson is asking some very tough questions and pressing for answers--not always fairly, as when he misquoted some statements of hers about the Will of God and demanded that she defend them. And the consensus is that she's handling these questions reasonably well. Not perfectly; she's had better performances before; but she's doing adequately.
Here's what's caught my attention: So many of the commenters at these various sites are decrying the media bias, and saying things like: How come they never ask Obama hard questions like these? and If she was a man, they'd never ask her stuff like this, and Oh, that question was so off base that it's absolutely clear they're in the tank for her opponents, and So when are they going to ask Obama about X, Y and Z? and so forth.
There's an underlying assumption here that I'd like to pull out into the daylight and kick around for a while, to see what y'all think. The thought process of these commenters goes something like this:
Suppose for the moment that these commenters are right--that there is a strong leftwing bias in the press, and that this manifests itself as hostile questioning of non-leftist candidates, and friendly questioning of leftist ones. Is it not possible that this disparity actually works to the benefit of the non-leftist candidates? That is, the hostile questioning actually makes the intended target electorally stronger?
After all, consider:
So what happened? Well, that skit got seen by millions of people. Hillary herself started referring to it in later debate performances and stump speeches. And, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, that was about the time that her election performance started to improve; after a disastrous February, she won most contests after that, and nearly caught up to Obama by the end of the primary season.
I suspect that some combination of my four points above happened: the fact that she was widely percieved as having harder questions earned points for her in people's minds. It earned her sympathy, and gave her opportunity to show off her command of the issues and her ability to perform under fire.
...
And it's important to note who's actually been winning the presidential elections lately.
Now, my readers are free to disagree with me on this point if they want--after all, gauging Press Bias is a highly subjective exercise, and I tend to be on the right-hand side of the political center, so I will tend to see the press as left-leaning. Your mileage may vary.
Nevertheless, let's look at all the elections over the last forty years or so and see who's been winning them, and who the press favored.
1968--the press hated Nixon. I don't think there was a time that they ever didn't hate Nixon, even when he was Ike's Vice President. (And back then, the press supported Adlai Stevenson.) Nixon won anyway.
1972--ditto, especially because Nixon's "secret plan" to get us out of Vietnam ultimately involved escalating our efforts until we won. Nixon won anyway. (Incidentally, Wikipedia says that Nixon never actually used the term "secret plan" himself; that phrasing was actually coined by a reporter...)
1976--Carter v. Ford. These were the post-Watergate years, and the press hated anything Republican. Carter won the election--barely. The undecideds mostly broke for Ford, nearly bringing him to popular-vote parity with Carter on election day, after having trailed badly during the summer.
1980--Carter v. Reagan. At this point in time, Reagan was seen in the press as a warmonger and social neanderthal. He was also dismissed as a shallow B-Movie actor and intellectual lightweight. He won anyway.
1984--Reagan was still viewed by the press as a warmonger, social neanderthal, and shallow B-Movie actor. And Mondale had picked a woman for his running mate, which made it the first time a woman had run on a major party's presidential ticket. The press were all over them. Mondale then went on to lose 49 states. (Incidentally, this was the first election that I really remember personally; I was vaguely aware of the 1980 election, but I was only nine at the time.)
1988--Bush v. Dukakis. I was not quite old enough to vote, but some guys in my senior class were, and there was a lot of interest in this election. I remember the press's absolute loathing of Bush after the Willie Horton ad, which didn't run in our neck of the woods and I never got to see. Bush was seen as the third term of Reagan, and won a strong victory (after having trailed in the summer).
1992--The press was tired of the Bush/Reagan years, and was constantly pushing the "we need change" line, as well as pushing the idea that the congressional-presidential "gridlock" of those years was entirely the fault of the President. They also played up the "Man from Hope" theme quite a bit. Ultimately, Clinton won--but with only 42 percent of the popular vote, since Perot took a big chunk. It's not really known how the vote would have panned out had Perot not been on the ballots; but it's within the realm of plausibility that Bush would have captured enough to win.
1996--Times were good in the US. We were at peace, the economy was strong, and the press was happy. Dole never really had a chance.
2000--Dubya was alternately portrayed as a hick and as a pampered scion of an aristocratic family. Every little slip of the tongue--and to be fair, there were many--was jumped on to portray him as an idiot. Al Gore was viewed as the Candidate of the Environment, the one who would fight for the little guy, the intelligent one; Bush was seen as having Daddy issues. Ultimately Bush won the election in the Electoral College after a very messy count/re-count/re-re-count process in Florida.
2004--The press hated Bush. For one thing, many of them thought he'd stolen the 2000 election. For another, he had gotten us involved in Iraq. Kerry was held up as Bush's intellectual superior; Kerry's military service in Vietnam was repeatedly invoked and compared to Bush's time in the National Guard. And then there were the forged papers that CBS tried to use to smear Bush. Yes, the press were definitely in the tank for Kerry the last time around. Bush won anyway.
2008--I don't seriously think there are too many people in the mainstream press who want McCain to win. I suspect most of them think that Obama's presidency would be "historic", that it would be for them a welcome repudiation of the Bush years and The Time That America Is Made Right Again; McCain for them would be just another Dead White Guy in the presidency. (Ok, technically he's not dead yet, but they keep bringing up that age thing....)
So not counting the 2008 election, that's 10 elections since 1968. If my assessment of the media favorites above is correct, it means that the media favorite only won three of those ten contests, and lost seven of them. If they are trying to sway elections with hostile questioning, it doesn't appear to be working....
...
So my advice for any political observer who happens to read this post (and any candidate! I can dream, can't I?) : don't complain if your candidate receives tough questions from a hostile press. In fact, pray that your candidate does receive tough questions--and pray that your candidate hits them out of the ballpark. You should see tough questioning as opportunities to shine; the more of these you get, the better you can show yourself to the electorate. The candidate who gets only softballs never has a chance to show his calm under fire, his command of the issues and of their details, and his depth of character. No candidate ever lost an election solely to tough questions, so long as he or she was able to give reasonably competent responses. Tough questions, and hostile press, only sink the candidacies of those who shouldn't have been candidates in the first place.
And regading Palin? From what I'm seeing, she's doing just fine.
(Of course, the phrase "Feeding the Beast" is reminding me of Spore, too. Everything seems to, these days....)
And I've completely blown my one-post-per day benchmark. Ah, well. So I guess I might as well blow another self-imposed rule of mine, the one about avoiding political topics.
...
Since Sarah Palin came on the scene two weeks ago, she's rather dominated the political news coverage, in a way that few candidates do. In fact, the last candidate to get this much coverage, to become this kind of a media phenomenon, was Barack Obama himself. The trouble for him is that he was the phenomenon about eight months ago; now Palin has become the new shiny thing that has attracted everyone's attention. Eight months from now, even if the McCain/Palin ticket wins, the press will find something or someone else to cover, and it will be on with the next fad...
Now, to be fair, there are some good reasons that Palin has grabbed everyone's attention. She has the very real potential to upend this race, and it looks like this may in fact be happening. And I'll probably blog about her more in the future.
But this post isn't actually about her. I have an observation to make regarding the press.
...
Since Tonya and I don't have a TV in our house, we tend to miss a lot of the news as it happens, and then we read about it after the fact. Just from a time management standpoint, it's a whole lot faster to read a speech, than it is to listen to it. If there's some news video we want to see, we can go look it up online; but if we're not particularly interested in something, we never see it.
Now, the big political news over the past day or so has been the interviews that Mrs. Palin did with Charlie Gibson of ABC News. Tonya and I haven't been particularly interested in the interviews themselves, so we haven't seen them.
But what has caught my attention is some of the reaction to these interviews. Being something of a socially conservative libertarian type myself, I tend to read a lot on sites like Townhall, Redstate, the Instapundit, National Review, Hot Air, and so forth. And the consensus on these sites is that Charlie Gibson is asking some very tough questions and pressing for answers--not always fairly, as when he misquoted some statements of hers about the Will of God and demanded that she defend them. And the consensus is that she's handling these questions reasonably well. Not perfectly; she's had better performances before; but she's doing adequately.
Here's what's caught my attention: So many of the commenters at these various sites are decrying the media bias, and saying things like: How come they never ask Obama hard questions like these? and If she was a man, they'd never ask her stuff like this, and Oh, that question was so off base that it's absolutely clear they're in the tank for her opponents, and So when are they going to ask Obama about X, Y and Z? and so forth.
There's an underlying assumption here that I'd like to pull out into the daylight and kick around for a while, to see what y'all think. The thought process of these commenters goes something like this:
- The press prefers candidate X over candidate Y.
- Therefore, the press will give much harder questions to candidate Y than X...
- ...In the hopes that candidate Y will stumble...
- ...Making X look more attractive to the electorate than Y...
- ...Thus influencing the vote in the direction that the press wants.
Suppose for the moment that these commenters are right--that there is a strong leftwing bias in the press, and that this manifests itself as hostile questioning of non-leftist candidates, and friendly questioning of leftist ones. Is it not possible that this disparity actually works to the benefit of the non-leftist candidates? That is, the hostile questioning actually makes the intended target electorally stronger?
After all, consider:
- If a candidate handles a hostile question well--keeps his or her cool, gives a detailed and weighty answer--that's impressive to most fair-minded observers. Softballs don't impress anybody. A hostile press gives more opportunity for a good candidate to shine, than a docile press does.
- A candidate that routinely gets hostile questions will, over time, become good at answering them. A hostile press can actually make a candidate stronger on the stump, or in debate, than he or she would otherwise have been.
- Furthermore, a hostile press can wind up causing the electorate to sympathize with the candidate being targeted. Americans have always loved the underdog and hated bullies; when a candidate holds up to tough questions delivered by sneering reporters, we're likely to cheer them on.
- Suppose a voter agrees with a candidate on Issue X. Suppose a reporter gives the candidate a really tough, even unfair, grilling on Issue X, implying that anyone that agrees with Issue X is stupid. What does that do to the voter? It helps him realize that he agrees with the candidate, and suggests to him that he might be better served by tuning in to a different channel for his election coverage.
So what happened? Well, that skit got seen by millions of people. Hillary herself started referring to it in later debate performances and stump speeches. And, perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, that was about the time that her election performance started to improve; after a disastrous February, she won most contests after that, and nearly caught up to Obama by the end of the primary season.
I suspect that some combination of my four points above happened: the fact that she was widely percieved as having harder questions earned points for her in people's minds. It earned her sympathy, and gave her opportunity to show off her command of the issues and her ability to perform under fire.
...
And it's important to note who's actually been winning the presidential elections lately.
Now, my readers are free to disagree with me on this point if they want--after all, gauging Press Bias is a highly subjective exercise, and I tend to be on the right-hand side of the political center, so I will tend to see the press as left-leaning. Your mileage may vary.
Nevertheless, let's look at all the elections over the last forty years or so and see who's been winning them, and who the press favored.
1968--the press hated Nixon. I don't think there was a time that they ever didn't hate Nixon, even when he was Ike's Vice President. (And back then, the press supported Adlai Stevenson.) Nixon won anyway.
1972--ditto, especially because Nixon's "secret plan" to get us out of Vietnam ultimately involved escalating our efforts until we won. Nixon won anyway. (Incidentally, Wikipedia says that Nixon never actually used the term "secret plan" himself; that phrasing was actually coined by a reporter...)
1976--Carter v. Ford. These were the post-Watergate years, and the press hated anything Republican. Carter won the election--barely. The undecideds mostly broke for Ford, nearly bringing him to popular-vote parity with Carter on election day, after having trailed badly during the summer.
1980--Carter v. Reagan. At this point in time, Reagan was seen in the press as a warmonger and social neanderthal. He was also dismissed as a shallow B-Movie actor and intellectual lightweight. He won anyway.
1984--Reagan was still viewed by the press as a warmonger, social neanderthal, and shallow B-Movie actor. And Mondale had picked a woman for his running mate, which made it the first time a woman had run on a major party's presidential ticket. The press were all over them. Mondale then went on to lose 49 states. (Incidentally, this was the first election that I really remember personally; I was vaguely aware of the 1980 election, but I was only nine at the time.)
1988--Bush v. Dukakis. I was not quite old enough to vote, but some guys in my senior class were, and there was a lot of interest in this election. I remember the press's absolute loathing of Bush after the Willie Horton ad, which didn't run in our neck of the woods and I never got to see. Bush was seen as the third term of Reagan, and won a strong victory (after having trailed in the summer).
1992--The press was tired of the Bush/Reagan years, and was constantly pushing the "we need change" line, as well as pushing the idea that the congressional-presidential "gridlock" of those years was entirely the fault of the President. They also played up the "Man from Hope" theme quite a bit. Ultimately, Clinton won--but with only 42 percent of the popular vote, since Perot took a big chunk. It's not really known how the vote would have panned out had Perot not been on the ballots; but it's within the realm of plausibility that Bush would have captured enough to win.
1996--Times were good in the US. We were at peace, the economy was strong, and the press was happy. Dole never really had a chance.
2000--Dubya was alternately portrayed as a hick and as a pampered scion of an aristocratic family. Every little slip of the tongue--and to be fair, there were many--was jumped on to portray him as an idiot. Al Gore was viewed as the Candidate of the Environment, the one who would fight for the little guy, the intelligent one; Bush was seen as having Daddy issues. Ultimately Bush won the election in the Electoral College after a very messy count/re-count/re-re-count process in Florida.
2004--The press hated Bush. For one thing, many of them thought he'd stolen the 2000 election. For another, he had gotten us involved in Iraq. Kerry was held up as Bush's intellectual superior; Kerry's military service in Vietnam was repeatedly invoked and compared to Bush's time in the National Guard. And then there were the forged papers that CBS tried to use to smear Bush. Yes, the press were definitely in the tank for Kerry the last time around. Bush won anyway.
2008--I don't seriously think there are too many people in the mainstream press who want McCain to win. I suspect most of them think that Obama's presidency would be "historic", that it would be for them a welcome repudiation of the Bush years and The Time That America Is Made Right Again; McCain for them would be just another Dead White Guy in the presidency. (Ok, technically he's not dead yet, but they keep bringing up that age thing....)
So not counting the 2008 election, that's 10 elections since 1968. If my assessment of the media favorites above is correct, it means that the media favorite only won three of those ten contests, and lost seven of them. If they are trying to sway elections with hostile questioning, it doesn't appear to be working....
...
So my advice for any political observer who happens to read this post (and any candidate! I can dream, can't I?) : don't complain if your candidate receives tough questions from a hostile press. In fact, pray that your candidate does receive tough questions--and pray that your candidate hits them out of the ballpark. You should see tough questioning as opportunities to shine; the more of these you get, the better you can show yourself to the electorate. The candidate who gets only softballs never has a chance to show his calm under fire, his command of the issues and of their details, and his depth of character. No candidate ever lost an election solely to tough questions, so long as he or she was able to give reasonably competent responses. Tough questions, and hostile press, only sink the candidacies of those who shouldn't have been candidates in the first place.
And regading Palin? From what I'm seeing, she's doing just fine.
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