Oregon Zoo Lights – Pictures
My family and I went to see the Oregon Zoo Lights last week. I was tasked with taking photos. (Tough task, I know.)
Category: …and everything else
Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.
“after all, the sky is filled with stars and planets”
stars fall which is much worse but that doesn’t make us fear…*
I flew home on a red eye over New Year’s Eve. I had been hoping to see fireworks from the air – and in fact, did, in all their tiny, bright, sea anemone glory.
But they were overshadowed, in fact, completely minimized, by our flight path, which took us over northern Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Anyone familiar with that arc knows what it means: almost no lights below us, meaning the stars shone in all their crisp, twinkling glory.
And then the shooting stars started, and I spent most of the flight with my face and hand pressed against the window, watching star after star streak down and burn up and away into the new year.
It was a magical start to 2012; hopefully that magic extends the entire year.
Happiest wishes of the new year to you all.
iTunes has this song listed as “The Sky at Night” by Dave McKean, but I haven’t been able to confirm that via rapid Googling,… ideas?
Today in a Picture
If I had to sum up today in a picture, this would be it.
…as a matter of fact, that might sum up the PNW in general.
Is Apple/Siri anti-choice, or are we seeing behind the curtain of politics & search engines?
There’s been a big fuss this last week over whether or not Apple is showing anti-choice sentiments via Siri’s answers for abortion providers, crisis pregnancy centers, and so forth. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you already are familiar with the debate.
Apple has released a statement saying that no, not so much, not anti-choice, just limited programming.
Do I buy this?
Yes.
Why?
Well, a few reasons. First, and probably foremost, the fun and funny answers that Siri gives are things that are largely connected to geek culture, or flippant responses to basic questions. And as the push to celebrate female geeks in the last year should already tell you, women are still making inroads in being a visible part of geek culture, which is still very male-oriented. Plus, if Siri had a tongue-in-cheek response to an abortion question, well, can you imagine? (Say, offering a coat hanger signed by RK Milholland?)
Okay, well, then why is Siri bringing up crisis pregnancy centers in response to searches for places for abortion? Chances are, it has to do with Siri’s search algorithms, which haven’t been revealed to us. As some bright blogger (who I found via Twitter following the other day, and thus have completely forgotten the name of) pointed out, many Planned Parenthood’s don’t list themselves as abortion providers, but as women’s health services or clinics. CPCs, on the other hand, tend to try to position themselves to come up as high as possible on searches for abortion services (and many do the same for birth control). Siri relies on third-party search services when not defaulting to smartass responses, and in this case I think we’re seeing a glitch, or at least a reveal of the curtain, of what happens when politics meets the world of search engines that aren’t Google.
Apple’s become a bit of a popular target lately, probably because there’s only so much a success story people want to hear before they can get a bit vindictive. A lot of people also want to see the company falter without Jobs, and are looking for signs of it.
But this issue with Siri doesn’t suggest a problem with Apple – or even with the third-party company, SRI, that developed Siri before Apple bought the technology last year. Instead, it suggests to me that we need to take a closer look at how legitimate and valued pro-choice, pro-women companies like Planned Parenthood have been forced to position themselves on the internet and in advertising, and how CPCs take advantage of that to promote their anti-choice agenda.
Why I Don’t Like Twilight & You Shouldn’t Either
This started out as a blog comment response over on The Nerdy Bird’s blog regarding Twilight and if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I was directed to this from Nerds in Babeland’s post defending sparkly vampires, which I flailed about and responded to on Twitter, after GeekGirlCon tweeted the link this morning.
Caught all that? It’s as convoluted as it sounds.
What it boils down to is this: as far as I’m concerned, Twilight tells girls that their only value is in what an older man thinks of them, and it primes these young girls to accept that abusive relationships are normal, romantic and desirable, when the reality is ever so very different.
I don’t have a problem with emotionally healthy and mature grown women enjoying Twilight as a guilty pleasure – a lot of people scoff at some of my guilty pleasure reading, which includes a paranormal romance series that many people have similar abuse concerns with (Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark – a concern I don’t share for consent reasons that are absent in Twilight, and I can go into in another post if people are really all that curious).
Regardless, what adults read? Is what adults read.
My concern is largely about the message that tweens and teens take away from the Twilight series. Obviously the biggest issue I have is the domestic violence one; everything – EVERYTHING – Edward does shows up as a red flag in DV handouts (something Dr. NerdLove addresses well in his recent Twilight post). And as I mentioned on Twitter, I know of too many young girls who wonder why their boyfriend isn’t as jealously protective as Edward is, or who justify the stalking and abuse because that’s what love is like, just look at Edward and Bella.
I genuinely believe that any teen girl seen reading these books needs to have an adult intervene and make sure she doesn’t have screwy ideas about what a relationship is, because too many girls are grasping on to it – and to be fair, this is precisely what The Nerdy Bird wonders: why are young girls taking that wrong message?
And naturally, being an opinionated soul, I have ideas. 😉
I do think SMeyers got something very right with the book – she tapped into that feeling that I think the majority of teen girls have. That feeling of awkwardness as your body shifts and your gravity changes and you’re suddenly a klutz. The whole roil of hormones, the feeling like an outsider because of the hormones and sudden competition between female friends for the guys and seeing guys through that light of hormones and all the travails and trials that every single teen girl EVER goes through. Except, of course, the one teen girl you wanted to be like – the one with the perfect hair and clothes and everything else that you never were.
Well, in Twilight, that’s subverted – Bella ends up learning that she really is the perfect one that the pretty (vampire) girl wants to be because of her functional uterus and the worship of this perfect male god and on and on.
Which are all the reasons that adults like the books – the understanding and fond remembrance of being THAT girl (and thank god for growing out of it).
And Twilight isn’t the only series that has done this. I think we can probably look back at any time period and find That Series of Books that teen girls latched on to and loved, which probably had similar themes of the to-die-for (just not literally) older guy seeing the beauty and value and inherent goodness in the not-really-mousy girl who just needed to get contacts and change her hair. (It could be those of us from the late 80s and 90s had it in Brat Pack movies instead of books – in this I am not a good example, as I discovered Pride & Prejudice early, and then was busy reading fantasy and scifi novels in my teens, which whoa, want to talk about unhealthy relationships,…)
The difference with Twilight is that it’s the first time (as far as I know) the message has been combined with the ones that come along with the domestic violence flags.
Unfortunately, we know, from research, that the things we see on TV or read subconsciously influences us and tells us this is “right.” The most common example is the so-called CSI effect, but it’s also been tracked in medicine. (People who watch medical shows like ER or Chicago Hope or even Scrubs believe that CPR is much more effective than it is. When asked how they know, they just know that they “learned it somewhere”.) So we in effect have an awful lot of girls getting the idea that these abuse-y, red flag, drama and control and danger relationships are normal, if not ideal (“he’s so protective because he loves me”). There isn’t popular media out there countering the *bad* ideas in Twilight, or giving alternate models of romance for girls to form their ideas – and ideals – on. In fact, I would argue that popular media aimed at this demographic reinforces that ideal – a pretty big change from the ideas teen girls were exposed to in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Or at least, that’s my brief (and yet still too long) blog response on the idea.
(There are other issues I’ll beat on with Twilight, too, like that the only role a woman has is the one the male wants for her, and motherhood. [Some, for example, might want to frame Darcy and Elizabeth’s romance as bordering on an abusive situation, but Lizzy’s life doesnt’ revolve around Darcy – she has her family, her own life, her own dreams and desires that extend beyond marrying. In fact, to the point of accepting she won’t marry, because it’s so important to her to stay her own person.] And that’s not even touching on the really creepy “imprinting why is no one concerned about the pedophilia implications here?” But that’s deviating WAY further than I should – although give me an ounce of encouragement and I’ll go there, too.)