Fundamentalist Science-Haters

I don't like to talk about global climate change, because the subject depresses me. It seems fairly obvious to me that climate change is happening. Consensus among the vast majority of scientists throughout the world is that it's happening. The US Military is so sure that it's happening, that they've already started to put contingency plans into place. Satellites show that the polar ice cover is steadily shrinking. Extreme weather events are becoming more common all over the world. And yet here in the US we continue to do nothing. We keep on buying our big gas-guzzlers and filling them up with $4.00 gas. We keep on making our hourlong commutes, from a job at one end of the county, to an expensively heated and cooled home in a suburb at the other end. And we angrily (and stupidly) deny even the possibility of a man-made climate crisis in our future.

What? The climate is changing? Don't be ridiculous! We had snow this winter! Fox news says that means there isn't any! It frustrates the hell out of me when my fellow countrymen act dumb like this. Experts are called expert for a reason. They study one thing, for a long long time, and when they make pronouncements about it, it's only after careful thought and lots of research. Unlike blowhards like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, who get paid handsomely for stoking emotion and keeping their audience ignorant. I want to see people pay attention to the real scientists, the ones who know the subject and can be counted on describing it accurately, not just because we're running out of time to make the changes we'll need to make to protect the climate we're used to, but because I don't like seeing people voluntarily choose ignorance over fact.

But I think I know why so many Americans do it. And I think you can find the explanation by looking at how we do religion:

The Royal Wedding

For people of my generation, the real royal wedding will always be the one that took place on July 29, 1981, when Diana Spencer shared vows with her Prince, who was some 14 years older (and at the time we all thought he was so old, and what would a girl her age want with a geezer like that). Diana brought romance back, she brought puffy-skirted wedding gowns back -- She brought hats back for crying out loud, after a good decade-and-a-half, where no one wore them at all except for little old grandmothers. -- and for a while there, all of us, were transfixed by her, even the ones who lost interest later on.

And nowadays we look rather pityingly, on the hype surrounding the wedding of William (who we remember in diapers) and Kate Middleton, who's kind of ordinary-looking really, kind of like Lindsay Lohan, only without the coke-fueled burnout.

Diet Watchers (Notes from a time when dieting sucked even harder than it does now)

All my life, I've tended a little toward the fat side. I've had my times of being larger, and my times of being smaller, but when you divide th world up between the people who can eat a 6-pack of Hershey bars and wash it down with a McDouble Value Meal and still zip their jeans the next morning, and the ones who can't, I've always fallen firmly the second category. Here's me in 6th grade; I don't think I look all that fat in this picture (although my parents said I was huge), but I'll admit, the leotards I wore for ballet practice on Tuesdays were getting harder and harder to squeeze into.



DIET WATCHER'S GUIDE: A PROVEN METHOD OF WEIGHT REDUCTION BASED ON THE GROUP PROGRAMS OF DIET WATCHER INC.And this was when my mom and I both joined Diet Watchers. For those of you who have never heard of it (which is probably all of you), Diet Watchers was a diet program based, like Weight Watchers, on nutritional guidelines developed by Dr. Norman Jolliffe, of the New York City Board of Health, and incorporated by a couple of ladies with weight problems, named Ann Gold and Sara Welles Briller.

The two programs are so similar, that I frankly am amazed that Ann and Sara ever managed to get theirs incorporated. These days they'd see their now-shrunken butts sued for copyright infringement as soon as they convened the first meeting. But these were the free-and-easy 1970's, and anyone was free to do their own thing, which apparently included being able to start meetings under practically the same name as another diet plan, teaching people to follow a practically identical program, and making money by selling them books with yummy recipes in them, such as Mock Sweet Potato Pudding (the mockery, in this case, coming from the fact that sweet potatoes were forbidden by the Diet Watchers' program; LOL, those orangey vegetables you just gobbled, were actually summer squashes in disguise).

Weight Watchers was already a very successful program, by the time my mom and I started out to lose weight back in 1973. They had meetings, and recipe cards with pretty-colored pictures on them, and everything. Diet Watchers, was like a low-rent cousin, with only two cookbooks for sale, and no pictures in either of them, and recipe cards that were mimeographed by the local group-leaders, rather than pre-printed by the company and full-color gorgeous.

In her book The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan, Wendy Mc'Clure has already done an awesome job of showing just how ugly and disturbing-looking even the best food photos from the era could be (especially food with names like Inspiration Soup and Fish Balls), although she's helped out of course, by the fact that the food in most old photos looks like barf. If you want to see more of the horrors of 70's-era diet food, you should definitely find a copy of her book and read it, because it's laugh-aloud funny. If you want to read more about what the food tasted like, stay here.

The Workhouse and School Testing

Whenever you find someone doing useless, uninteresting work, you can be sure you're seeing an unequal power distribution in action. For example, take the bad child who acts up in school, and is set to writing sentences for his teacher: His writing them doesn't do the teacher any good, it doesn't do him any good (because if writing "I will not kick the Principal/ steal lunch money/ or whatever," the first time doesn't change him any, writing it 99 times more certainly won't either). Why is he writing? It's to make sure he understands that the teacher is the boss, and he isn't.

You can find examples of this kind of unequal power distribution throughout history, but probably the best example of all time was the workhouse of 19th century England. Born out of the arrogant and judgmental attitudes of Victorian aristocrats, the workhouse was seen as a solution, to the "problem" of poor people getting government aid without doing anything in return.

Racial Prejudicing in the Warriors Book Series

Fireheart

At first glance, the Warriors series of books are about feral cats who have established tribal governments and embark upon wild adventures. However there are also some strong undertones of racism. "Kitty-Pets", cats who were born and raised in captivity, are not allowed on clan turf and are banned from ever becoming a part of the clans.

Writing Fanfiction

Fanfiction has a kind of a disreputable reputation. This is based, I think, on the fact that it first came to the public's attention through the Star Trek fandom. Star Trek fans, as everyone thinks they know have no life (Everyone also thinks they know that once, at a fan convention, William Shatner told all the Trekkies to "get a life", but actually that's from a Saturday Night Live skit). Anything to do with them, is automatically vaguely comical. Also, fanfiction is not just associated with the Star Trek fandom, but with what a lot of people might think was the most embarrassing part of it, which is the pairing of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock as lovers. I don't know why it is, but the fact is, there are an awful lot of people in the general public, who are so conventionally-minded that they don't like to see any characters paired, except for the ones who are couples in the original material. And of course back when the Star Trek fandom was first getting big, and the first Kirk/Spock stories were being published, same sex love was still considered fairly disturbing by a majority of the general public.

Cigarettes

Today cigarettes are mostly famous for being highly addictive, and hugely dangerous (although many of us still can't help admitting that a person does look awfully cool when they're smoking one). And it's common knowledge that the tobacco industry had to pay out a huge settlement in 1998 to make up for having covered up their knowledge about the dangers of cigarette smoking for most of the Twentieth Century.

But if you've been alive for more than a few decades as I have been, or if you've studied a little history even, maybe you've noticed that talking about the dangers of smoking is not exactly a new thing. Maybe you've seen ads like this one from 1930, which mention the irritating effects of cigarette smoke:



Or this one from 1935 which touts how great Camel cigarettes are, compared with those others that "get your wind":



Perhaps you've read that cigarettes used to be called coffin nails, or that an old Australian nickname for them was gaspers. Perhaps you've wondered: How long have people actually known that cigarettes are bad for you?

It was after the automation of the cigarette-rolling industry in the 1880's led to a reduction in prices, that cigarette smoking first began to grow popular. There is evidence to suggest however, that the tobacco used in those first early cigarettes was coarse and rough-tasting, so that smokers probably did not inhale. Smoking without inhaling, while not a good thing, is a less dangerous way of smoking.

It was Dr. Isaac Adler, in his book Primary Malignant Growths of the Lung a Bronchi, who first made an anecdotal connection between cigarettes and lung cancer. The first actual research proving the link, wasn't published until 1929, however. And by then cigarette makers had consolidated their place at the center of American society. Cigarettes were given away free to soldiers serving overseas during World War I. And in 1929, the publicist Edward Bernays won what is probably the biggest public relations triumph in history, when he made the connection between smoking and women's liberation, by persuading a group of debutantes to march in the New York City Easter Parade, smoking their torches of freedom.



Further research on the dangers of smoking came only slowly. In 1950, British researcher Richard Doll published his study showing links between smoking and lung cancer and heart disease. Following in 1956, convincing proof of that link was shown by the British Doctor's Study. Public opinion in America began to move gradually away from smoking after that, but even so, the move was a slow one.

As near as I can tell, the reason for that is twofold: First of all, it has been shown by documented proof that the tobacco industry actively hid evidence that smoking cigarettes is dangerous for many years. In addition though, I think it was the anti-smoking forces themselves, who helped keep smoking popular.

The anti-smoking movement, you understand, began in the 1830's, before there was any evidence at all that smoking was dangerous. Activists from the American prohibition movement spoke out against smoking for its role in "creating a morbid or diseased thirst" which only liquor could quench. The Prussian government made a law saying smokers had to shield their cigars behind a wire mesh contraption, to keep sparks from falling on the skirts of ladies nearby. Into the Twentieth Century, cigarette the powers that be said that smoking was "unladylike". They condemned the flappers of the 1920's for smoking in the street, as well as for other such supposedly unladylike behaviors as shortening their skirts and allowing boys to kiss them on dates.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that this kind of condemnation probably encouraged people to smoke instead of stopping them. It's like the anti-drug films our teachers used to make us watch in class in the 1970's, that kept telling us smoking a single joint was going to turn us into strung-out heroin abusers or LSD trippers flying out of ten-story windows, long after most of us had actually tried marijuana and found out differently.



Scare tactics don't really work so well unless they're connected up with some real facts. Sometimes they don't work very well even if there are some facts behind them, because the facts end up taking a back seat to the overblown hype. A lot of the kids I went to school with went on to try cocaine, and a lot of the other BIG, TERRIBLE DRUGS we were all warned about, because so many of the warnings we were given were so obviously dumb, that they stopped taking any of them seriously.

I suspect the same thing happened with cigarettes. After years of stuffy old ladies saying dumb things, like "no lady smokes", smoking came to be seen as cool, and emancipated. Men smoked to look "manly", and women smoked to keep up with them, and finally you end up with so much smoking going on that I imagine the average room must have smelled like those horrid designated Smokers' Rooms that you're sometimes unlucky enough to have to rent when you show up too late at the Holiday Inn Express and all the good rooms have taken.



HyperSmash

Gingerbread Part 1

Nowadays they're made by little kids in daycare classes or Girl Scout meetings, out of graham crackers glued together using tubes of store-bought frosting, and decorated with peppermints and M&Ms, but when I was a kid, gingerbread houses were in their glory. Their proliferation, during the 1960's and 60's was, I think, another result of the Feminine Mystique. Intelligent women, kept at home by the expectations of the time, needed an outlet for their creativity. For the rest of the year maybe, knitting or Paint-By-Number would do, but during December, they made gingerbread houses.

Here is Betty Crocker's picture of what one was supposed to look like, from the classic 1963 edition of the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, the edition my generation grew up with, that we all studied when we wanted to try baking, or to beg our mothers to make cookies for us:



My own mom made gingerbread houses every Christmas for several years in a row, enough years that I was quite shocked, and outraged, the year she said she wasn't going to do it any more.

"Make one yourself, if you want one so badly," she told me. And so I did.

I am here to tell you, that making gingerbread houses back then, was a labor-intensive process. Nowadays you can find ready-made pans; all you have to do is glop your dough into them and bake, and wa-la, perfect walls, roof, etc. Back when I was young, first you made your gingerbread dough. You chilled it, you rolled it out, then you laid it carefully onto un-greased cookie sheets, trying very hard to get it smooth, so your walls would come out flat. After you'd baked it, you used paper patterns that you'd made by scaling up the template-pattern in the Cooky Book to cut out your various house-pieces.

Then you waited. Your walls and roof had to be perfectly dry before you were going to be able to put together a house -- Believe me, I know; my house looked like it had been through the San Francisco earthquake, there were so many cracks and cemented-together broken bits. -- You stuck the pieces together, using a special, hard-drying type of frosting that you made yourself, again following the instructions from Betty Crocker. Finally, after you'd taken pains to decorate it as nicely as possible, and set it on display for an admiring family until well after Christmas, then was when you were able to eat it.

And then was when you found out that a properly-made gingerbread house is inedible, at least for anyone over the age of 5. By the time the gingerbread has hardened enough to stay together in the form of a house, it's not only totally and totally hard, but close to flavorless as well. The special hard-dry frosting has no taste at all besides a vague sweetness. And as for the candies you put on so carefully to make it look "special", well those have all fallen off by then, and your little sisters or your dad have taken them away and eaten them. I was never so disappointed by anything in my life, than I was by that damn house I made, and I understood finally, why my mom had stopped making them.

HyperSmash

To be or not to be...a furry

Fur Suit

Lucario Fursuit

The term furry is a fairly obscure one, kept hidden away in chat rooms and on forums, but the concept is very common. A furry is an anthropomorphic animal like Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse. Everyone likes Mickey Mouse right? Then why is it that the furry fandom is received in such a bad light? The answer lies in the fact that it's a little on the strange side and can have some sexual connotations. The majority of the furry fandom are people who simply like animals and feel a connection with them. Sometimes this connection is expressed through visual media or prose, and sometimes it's expressed through a simple sense of community with others who feel like they do.