Before I check out for the weekend, an observation: This morning, I was at the gas station filling up. And I realized something – you never, ever see Priuses at gas stations. Never. And, contrary to some people’s beliefs, they don’t run on granola, sunshine and dreams. They actually do have to use gas.

So I’m thinking – do Prius owners find out of the way gas stations at which to fill up, to avoid the shameful admission that they use gas? Do they sneak out at 2 AM and gas up when none of their fellow conservationists can give them the stink-eye?

This is kind of like how women go to the bathroom while men are either sleeping or not at home – to make us think that they never actually go. So there’s that.

Sorry I haven’t been on here much in the last week.  I’ve got a big study I wrote for WPRI droppin’ on Sunday, so I’ve been busy wrapping that up.  I’ve got some good stuff planned for next week, so check back.

In the meantime, I would like to announce that I love the new Andrew Bird disc, “Noble Beast.”  Here’s a performance of “Fitz and the Dizzyspells” from Letterman the other night.

If you happened to be in the West Side Madison Best Buy last night, I was the crazy person over in the TV section laughing to himself.  You see, I still have a TV in my kitchen that just runs on an antenna – and I broke the rabbit ears on the old one, so I needed to get a new one.  As I scanned RCA’s selection of antennas (they come in all shapes and sizes now, apparently) I noticed they had a quality rating system on each box, to tell you how good that particular antenna was.  And the system they use to rate the quality of their antennas is thus:

Standard

Good

Great

Excellent

Superior

and finally, Ultimate.

Aside from “Standard,” how are any of these any different?  Is “Superior” really better than “Great?”  Shouldn’t they be more honest and move the scale down, so the lowest one is “Really Crappy,” the next lowest one is “Not as Junky,” and the middle one is “Standard?”  I mean, they’re trying to say each one of their products is good, while saying some are better than others.

This reminded me of the report cards my daughter gets from her pre-school.  If they’re really good, they get an “O” for “outstanding,” but if they’re horrible, they get a “D” for “developing.”  As in, “Your child has not developed out of being a knucklehead.”  I, for one, would welcome a more honest grading system – I think five year olds can handle it.  Except when my daughter came home with all “K’s” – for “knuckleheaded.”

One of my fondest memories from childhood is when my dad sat down with me and read Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to me.  That’s right, every night we dutifully sat down, and my pops read the whole thing to me, word for word.  I believe this occurred around 1981.

Naturally, with Huck Finn being one of the seminal American novels, I have considered doing the same thing for my kids.  In preparation, I sat down and re-read it this weekend.  And it is as good as I (and most American literary historians) remember it.  It’s fascinating that when written, that book was meant for children – yet when compared to today’s literature, it is more complex and verbally advanced than 90% of the books meant for adults in modern times.

But, of course, there is “the problem.”  The book contains dozens of instances of the “n” word.  Of course, the book is told from the perspective of a 14 year-old uneducated boy, who in 1884 probably would have used the word liberally.  (Shakespeare has received similar criticism for his unflattering portrayal of Shylock the Jew in Merchant of Venice – although, again, that’s how Jews would have been portrayed at the time it was written.)  Further, one of the main themes of the book is exposing how de-humanizing slavery is.  But that really doesn’t matter now, when I am faced with reading that word to my kids a couple hundred times.  There are passages of the book that are really difficult to read, given how ugly the language is in the contemporary context.

Clearly,  I’m not the only one who has figured this out.  The American Library Association actually keeps statistics on the most objected to books in American libraries, and between 1990 and 2000, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ranks fifth – 124 years after its original publication.  Presumably, the main objection is the continued inclusion of a racial slur.  (Although the same people who make this objection are probably the same ones willing to fillet Sarah Palin for her supposed desire to ban books in the Wasilla library.)  Most of the other books in the list deal in touchy cultural issues, like “Daddy’s Roommate,” “Heather Has Two Mommies,” and “Little Hitler Learns to Love Gays.”  (Okay, I made that last one up.)

Maybe I’m being too touchy – after all, kids have heard the word in this book for a century and a quarter, and it doesn’t seem to have sparked a revival.  Maybe I’m not giving my kids enough credit for being able to understand context.  But reading the book aloud is probably enough to get me elected into the Klan hall of fame. (They can put my bust right next to Marge Schott’s.)

So what do I do?  Just forge ahead and hope they understand enough not to use that word?  Wait until they’re older and understand the context better?  Read it and do some self-editing, thereby desecrating an American work of art?

Did I ever show you that story written for the Atlantic by an anonymous professor who demonstrates the failure in pushing people into college who don’t belong there?  I didn’t?  Well here it is.  And it an outstanding read:

America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns.

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it-try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

William Saletan at Slate.com argues that we need to rethink laws against marrying within the family:

Does science support our laws against incest and cousin marriage? If so, does it also support other laws that would restrict sexual or procreative freedom in the name of genetic health?

To longtime readers of Human Nature, this question should be, if you’ll pardon the term, familiar. A few years ago, we looked at the science and ethics of “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Surname.” Then we examined the prevalence of inbreeding in nature. Then we considered the awkward question of why, if incest is too genetically risky to permit, maternity in your 40s isn’t.

He goes on to cite statistics that show very low birth abnormality rates in cultures where marrying relatives is common, in an attempt to convince us that laws prohibiting such activity are overly restrictive.

I actually appreciate arguments like these that challenge conventional wisdom with facts.  Yet, in this case, I can’t go along with the thesis.  Facts or no facts, inter-family sex should remain illegal for one important, time-tested reason:

IT’S GROSS.

Throughout the entirety of Inauguration Week, I haven’t heard a better, more thoughtful, and heartfelt analysis of Barack Obama’s election than that of Los Angeles Times sports columnist J.A. Adande.  You can hear what I’m talking about on “The Sports Guy” Bill Simmons’ podcast here.  They talk about NBA stuff for a while, but when they move on to talk about Obama at the 26 minute mark, Adande gives a wonderfully erudite explanation of what Obama means to African Americans.  It gave me chills.

A small nugget that seems to have slipped by my notice:  It looks like former Washington Post reporter Peter Baker has moved over to the New York Times to cover the Obama White House.

A personal note, for a moment – Baker was my high school’s newspaper editor-in-chief a few years before I took over the reins.  He came back to our school several times after taking his first job as a young reporter with the Washington Post (once to cover a horrific suicide at our school, where a student crashed his motorcycle into a brick wall), and I had the occasion to talk to him a little.  I still have a letter he wrote me when I was editor of “The Orange Peal,” (when he was editor, it was called the “Farm News,” but I hated it, so I got the staff to change it), offering me encouragement when entering the field of journalism.  (Apparently, it wasn’t enough encouragement, given what I do for a living now – but it was always appreciated.)

Aside from being a nice guy and a class act, he is also clearly an outstanding reporter. Obviously, as he has ascended to White House Correspondent for the New York Times, a few important people think so, too.  I’ve read two of his books and a great number of his reports throughout the years, and I honestly can’t tell where his political persuasions lie.  And I look pretty closely for that type of thing.

Oh, and not that it matters, but he is also a frequent guest on “Washington Week,” on PBS, some episodes of which can be seen here.

O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.

~Mark Twain, “The War Prayer”

Mark Twain dictated this poem in 1904, and it professes to capture the horrors of battle.  Unfortunately, Twain would have had many more horrors to write about had he ever visited Disney World.

It was with this attitude that I took my family down to Florida this past week for a trip to the Magic Kingdom.  As a professional misanthrope, I was not looking forward to this trip at all.  It seemed to involve a lot of walking and purchasing, where my ideal vacation rarely involves me leaving the supine position.  And as it turned out, it was more work than actually being at home.  By day three, I needed a vacation from my vacation.  But I thought my kids were ready for the experience, and parents and sisters were all going, so I felt obligated.

The thing I dreaded the most was the compulsory obeisance the Disney company forces on families.  Being in the complex is really like being in a Disney sensory deprivation chamber – as if nothing that didn’t involve Donald Duck could be happening in the world.  No television, no internet.  I ran into a restaurant to pick up a pizza one night, and caught a little bit of ESPN (another Disney property) out of the corner of my eye.  It was telling me the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had hired a new head coach.  I had to text my friend Mark to find out what happened to John Gruden.  Maybe this is just a statement on how wired we all are now to get instantaneous information, but it was unsettling.  For all I knew, a fiery meteor could have just taken out Wisconsin (or, fingers crossed, Illinois), and I’d be sitting there happily, chowing down on some Buzz Lightyear ribs.

The other thing that struck me about the parks was how anachronistic they are.  Everything still has the feel of when I first visited 20 years ago.  This is strange, since the properties that are carrying Disney aren’t the same ones I grew up with.  Mickey and Minnie have been replaced by Wall-E, the Incredibles, High School Musical, and Lightning McQueen.  Yet when you walk around the parks, these characters are nearly invisible.  In fact, it appears they are now just getting around to crafting some Toy Story rides, and that movie came out a decade ago.

On the one hand, it makes sense that they would want to stay rooted in the original Disney characters that have served them so well for so long.  And it certainly costs a lot of money to create a new ride with the newer characters in mind.  You don’t want to build an expensive ride for a property that may be fleeting – for instance, there are a couple of attractions centered around “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” a movie that hasn’t been played on any DVD player in America in 5 years.

But it does make the parks seem hopefully out of date.  When rides at Epcot are still hailing the advent of FIBER OPTICS, it may be time for a facelift.  It appears the only 21st century upgrades in the whole complex are the new inventions that allow them to vacuum money directly out of your wallet.  When we walked by the Hall of Presidents and noticed that it was closed, I figured they had to re-do the whole show to indicate that black people, in fact, now can be President.  I wonder how long it takes them to build a whole new robot Obama (or ROBAMA, a name I hereby coin as my own.)  In fact, my favorite rollercoaster happened to be “Women Can’t Vote Mountain.”

(For an excellent piece by P.J. O’Rourke  about how Disney fights to remain cutting edge, read here.)

Despite my general crankiness about being held hostage to the Mouse, it is impossible to be negative when your kids are having so much fun.  And my kids were having the time of their lives – although, as parents know, it’s always a bittersweet experience when your kids are so happy.  Because in the back of your mind, you know that there will quickly come a point when your kids realize that they will have to stop doing what is thrilling them to death.  Then, it is payback.  You will, without a doubt, get more blame for making them leave Disney World than you will get credit for taking them in the first place.  You just have to hope that at some point in their 20′s, they have a flashback that Mom and Dad may not have been so bad.

Our third day there, my mother shelled out big money for my daughter to get a princess makeover at the “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique,” which dresses little girls up as their favorite Disney princess.  This was a risky proposition for my 5 year-old daughter, as she almost seems to be equal parts diva and tomboy.  It all depended on what mood she was in.  Plus, the whole thing kind of seemed to be a little “stage parent” for me – carting your daughter around a park dressed as a princess just felt a little too “Jon Benet.”  As I stood outside the boutique waiting for the makeover to finish, at least 70% of the poor little girls walking out of their makeovers were crying.  It’s as if they were showing “Schindler’s List” in there.

Ater the makeover, it became clear that my daughter has some issues with being the center of attention – although she warmed to the outfit and actually demanded that she get to wear the dress to the park the next day.  On the other hand, my 3 year-old son is the exact opposite – he is “Mr. Entertainment.”  At a Canadian Epcot steakhouse, he could be found holding court for the entire restaurant on a variety of issues: How much he loves elevators, how much he dislikes snakes, and how he thinks turkeys like potato chips.  To top things off, he treated the restaurant to renditions of “Amazing Grace,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” and Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

For my son, however, the highlight had to be the monorail.  Had we not paid a cent to get into a park, he would have been happy just riding the rail for five days.  (Advocates of the Kenosha-Racine rail should hire him as their spokesman.)  In fact, I took him to ride the train in a loop one last time before we left for the airport – and he sadly said goodbye to the monorail.  I have to admit – it really is a great system of moving people around the various parks.  Now, if I can only get one to take me from my couch to my fridge, we’ll be okay.  (I had to laugh when the announcer on the monorail bragged about how “ecologically friendly” the trains were.  As if Disney didn’t have a larger carbon footprint than most underdeveloped nations.)

While my son was preoccupied with the monorail, my daughter kept dragging me around to more and more rides.  I loved pretending to be scared of the rollercoasters, which allowed her to pat me on the back and gently tell me to “stop being so chicken.”  It made her feel great to think she was braver than her old man (and in the case of Space Mountain, which she rode 4 times, she was absolutely right.)

While the crowds did get pretty thick at times, we were always there early and able to hit the rides without much waiting in line.  The park obviously does seem a lot smaller than when I was a little kid, but that may be because people now are so much fatter.  Honest to God – you can’t walk around anywhere in America now without thinking half the people walking around are about to have a coronary.  And we’re going to be paying for these peoples’ health care.  You know on the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons when the little Hawk gets hungry and sees Foghorn as a giant roasted turkey?  I see these people walking around as giant paycheck deductions.

There also seemed to be a group from the Middle East that overtook the Magic Kingdom on Sunday.  They all come wearing the same t-shirt, following someone with a giant flag.  Granted, I have no idea where they were from – but it would be strange if their conceptions of America were derived from Disney World.  They probably still wish death to America – but not until they ride Splash Mountain one more time.

At Epcot, there was also a large group of teens wearing “Faith in 3-D” t-shirts, which I assume is some religious organization.  Seems to be that there’s no better way to get laid as a male teen than going on a trip to Disney with a bunch of Jesus people.  There were a lot of Wisconsin people there – and this is what I love most about people from here: They think they are doing you a disservice by not announcing to you that they are from Wisconsin.  As if your life is poorer if they don’t wear Badger, Packer, or Brewer paraphernalia.  And they are always friendly.  I love this place.

As for the parks themselves, my kids liked the Magic Kingdom the most, followed by Epcot, which doesn’t have many rides for their age group.  Hollywood Studios pretty much blows.  Didn’t make it to the Animal Kingdom.  And Downtown Disney is just a bunch of stores that consolidates all the Mickey Mouse junk you can buy in the parks.

Even though it was 70 degrees and sunny while we were there, I am certainly happy to be home.  Now, after my vacation, I can finally rest.

People who know me know that I’m certainly no lettuce and granola-chomping hippie.  But I am completely open to being convinced that food companies are trying to kill me.

Today over at WPRI, I posted an article about how government subsidies for certain agricultural crops (such as corn) actually distort the market, making it more appealing to eat crappy food.  Subsidies make sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup more affordable, thus making unhealthy food the most marketable to low-income American citizens.  While most people think the answer to health care is spending more money for care on the back end, it might actually do us some good to spend less money on government subsidies for corn.

If you’re interested in this topic, I’d also recommend you watch the movie “King Corn,” which follows two recent college graduates as they attempt to become corn farmers.  You can watch it free online if you have Netflix:

This morning, I stopped into a gas station to get a snack.  After I paid, I turned to walk out and noticed a 70 year-old-ish, rugged man coming out of the bathroom holding a newspaper.  He then proceeded to walk over, drop the newspaper on the stack of papers for sale, and leave the gas station.  It appears he was just taking the Wisconsin State Journal for a trial run while in the can.

God bless that guy.  Livin’ the dream.

Finally, once again, there’s hope for the hirsute.

I’m never really sure how to handle posts I do for WPRI.  I don’t know if people that read this blog are also interested in the political stuff – so instead of posting them in full here, I’ll just link to them.

Here’s a post I wrote today discussing the issue of legislative pay raises.  There’s no real point of view, it’s basically me just bitching about everything.

Here’s a long post I wrote detailing the lyrical stylings of State Senator Pat Kreitlow, who offers up some pretty lame talking points regarding the upcoming Wisconsin legislative session.

Over the weekend, my lovely wife and I went to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” I thought it was actually pretty good, and I have to admit that I got a little misty at the end. As everyone knows by now, it stars Brad Pitt as a man who is born as an 80-year old and ages backwards – so when he’s 5 years old, he has the body of a 75 year-old, and when he’s 75, he has the body of a 5 year-old. You get the picture.

The movie only spends a brief time on Pitt’s real age (65). And Cate Blanchett doesn’t show a single wrinkle until she turns 50. But the technical accomplishments are amazing – it actually distracts from the movie quite a bit. When you should be making some emotional connection, you’re instead wondering “how the hell did they do that?” My wife and I debated which was probably harder – making Brad Pitt look 75, or making him look 16. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves at home.

Of course, the whole storyline of a man aging backwards is implausible. But when we got home from the flick, I looked at my 3-year old son in a completely different way. I began to realize that it’s entirely possible that he is actually 77 years old. In fact, it’s likely, given the time-tested torture techniques he uses against me and my wife. I’m guessing he was once a young officer in the KGB, learning all the painful ways to extract information from political prisoners.

For instance, he has gotten into a habit of running up to you, shaking his tail in your face, and yelling “BOOTY BUTT!” And he stays on that line for a good half hour.

“BOOTY BUTT!”
“BOOTY BUTT!”
“BOOTY BUTT!”

Sure it may sound cute – but I’m pretty sure that is the same method used by Mao Zedong to punish political dissidents. And how would my son know that?

Think about it. You should probably call in sick to work today to contemplate it, actually.

He has also taken to repeating the words of this song over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, AND OVER. As I wrote in my Christmas letter, cultural anthropologists will one day look at my son as the child who changed the saying from “terrible twos” to “daddy needs a drink threes.”

THAT’S NOT MY NAME!
THAT’S NOT MY NAME!