The End

Well, thank goodness all that’s over.

Left Side Story

When I was a senior in high school I went driving in a caravan with a bunch of friends to Panama City Beach, Florida. This was an extremely popular vacation destination for teenagers in those days and probably still is. It was an eventful trip even before we arrived. On the way one of our number was tricked into revealing his drug cargo to the police and spent some hours in jail, only arriving much later than we did with some other kids who were in the same boat as he had been. The sting worked like this: the police set up a roadblock along the highway to Florida. It was spring break, so thousands of high school kids were making there way there from all over the country, presumably. Well, the sight of a police roadblock is enough to scare the drugs out of any car, so the unwitting took their bags of leafy stuff or pills or whatever and threw it into the surrounding forest, which is what our friend did. The police, having planted lookouts in the trees, could easily spot the contraband and haul in the offenders. I was lucky enough to be in a car only carrying cases of beer. While approaching the roadblock we worriedly wondered whether drug-sniffing dogs could smell beer, and ultimately decided to sit pat and drive through. The roadblock, of course, was only a decoy, and we drove on to the golden beaches.

While there we went to a party in a stranger’s hotel room and there I met a resident of PCB (as it was sometimes known) who suffered from the weird misconception that west–that is the cardinal direction–is on the left–that is the left-hand side. I, having had a few Buschs, tried to help by qualifying that west is only on the left if you happen to be facing north. He didn’t disagree that west does always correspond to the cardinal direction west, but continued to insist that it’s also the left, wherever you happen to be facing. “You know, like when you say something’s west of here,” he offered, waving his arm to the left. I imagine this would also mean that you’re always facing north, even when you turn left, which introduces all sorts of problems. Anyway, seeing that I wasn’t going to get anywhere and being uncomfortable with his animated insistence, I tried to agree. He didn’t seem convinced of my sincerity, though, and I had to melt into the unruly crowd of the party to escape.

I haven’t gone back to Panama City Beach since then, but I assume they have GPS devices and can find their way around.

Tough All Over

If you’re like me, you’re part of the ten percent of the workforce actively failing to get a job. If you’re even more like me, you’ve spent many years training for a highly specialized job, of which there aren’t any, making you overeducated and undesirable for many other jobs, leaving you with the same level of marketable skills as a high school graduate.

If it turns out you’re starting to suspect that your chosen field, the one in which you did all that training and specializing, is really a charade and you wish someone had told you years ago about the emperor and his clothes and all that, then our similarities are getting uncanny.

Just don’t tell me that you can’t get a callback about a volunteer job, because that would be too weird.

Ten Second Movie Review: Up in the Air

A first-run theater where all shows are just $4.75 !?! Even Juno and Thank You For Smoking won’t keep me away from that!

Ten Second Movie Review: Sherlock Holmes

I know I saw it. And Robert Downey Jr. was in it, so he must have been great.

Some Things Never Change

I haven’t written anything about students in a long time. A lot has happened in this intervening period, like the election of  Barack Obama that solved racism in the US. Inauguration Day 2009 was a day of unmatched historicality. Here’s what happened to me on that January 20th.

My wife and I went to eat lunch at a downtown eatery where we watched the Bush era board a helicopter and fly away. Afterward as I was walking to the data analysis center to do some data analysis, a former student stopped me on the sidewalk. At first I didn’t recognize him but he had been in my class the last fall. He blew it off most of the time and didn’t put one iota of effort into the work, which earned him a C-. Seems like a pretty good deal, but you have to get at least a C to get credit for the class, so giving it to him I felt like he at least had to deal with the repercussions of his negligence by taking the class over again. Since it’s unlikely he ever had to deal with repercussions before and didn’t want to start now, he sorrowfully told me he didn’t get his Political Science degree because of this and asked me to give him a chance to bring up his grade–that’s the grade that had been assigned more than a month earlier and about which he never said anything. It seems to me that not getting your degree is pretty serious business and that you ought to be a little concerned about it while class is actually in session and not just when you randomly bump into your former instructor, but to each his own, right?

Ten Second Movie Review: The Proposal

The two votes of my mother and wife outweigh my one vote for Harry Potter.

Doors

I was thinking about Silver Spoons on Tuesday. You know, Silver Spoons starring Ricky Schroeder and Alfonso from Fresh Prince, not to mention the fabulously dreamy Kate who was even dreamier on Buck Rogers. Anyway what came to mind was that stately Spoon Manor was a sprawling castle from the looks of it on the intro, but everyone always hung out in the same room, right at the front door.

That’s not surprising in itself given that sets cost money, but what else occurred to me was that it seemed like most of the other sitcom houses I could think of shared the stage left front door. One after another, I thought of sitcom houses with the door on the left: Good Times, Good Times, Sanford and Son, Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss, Small Wonder, Full House, Mr. Belvedere, Growing Pains, the list went on and on. Of course exceptions immediately popped into mind, like Seinfeld, the Cosby Show, Diff’rent Strokes, and Family Ties. But it seemed like for every right-hand door I could name there were three or four left-hand doors. I began to wonder if there was some reasoning behind left-hand doors: is it somehow cheaper, or do they put the cast snack table on the right according to hallowed tradition stemming from medieval theater days?

After a while I had to discard this whole notion as a case of selective memory. I started to realize that I could name just about as many right-hand doors as left. Even the turbolift door to the Enterprise bridge was on the right (classic and TNG). Nonetheless, every time I remembered a right-hand door I felt a little dispirited, like a novel discovery was slipping from my fingers, and I wished it would go away. “Curse you ALF set” I would think.

Now as a social scientist, I know there’s something to be learned in this. I now know how my fellow social scientists feel when they see their theories melt away when subjected to empirical testing. So the lesson might be the importance of a value free scientific method, rigorous hypothesis testing, and consideration of alternative hypotheses, all of which guard against the introduction of personal bias in scientific investigation of the social world. But since I think that’s all so much hokum, I think the lesson is probably that it might be unnatural that I remember so many fictitious houses as well as any I actually grew up in and that I spent half my waking hours as a kid watching TV.

Ten Second Movie Review: Star Trek

Start to finish thrill ride. And it’s good to see the Orions have been emancipated.

Ten Second Movie Review: Juno

Funny, heart-warming, delightful. Except all of the parts with Juno, which were insufferable.