In the U.K. Arctic Monkeys.
Category Archives: Pop Culture
Pitbulls & Profiling
In a New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell examines how municipalities deal with the problem of aggressive dogs. Interestingly, he draws on what we’ve learned about policing of humans (what New York City has done, for example, reduce its crime rate) to make the case that banning a specific breed is the wrong way to reduce the incidence of dog bite.
The article surveys the data about what breeds of dog have been involved in fatal dog bites, and concludes that the reason pitbulls have made the news so often in the past few years is that more people own them:
The kinds of dogs that kill people change over time, because the popularity of certain breeds changes over time. The one thing that doesn’t change is the total number of the people killed by dogs. When we have more problems with pit bulls, it’s not necessarily a sign that pit bulls are more dangerous than other dogs. It could just be a sign that pit bulls have become more numerous.
But who owns these dogs? Here we get to the real crux of the issue. The strongest predictor of viciousness in a dog has far less to do with the dog, and an awful lot to do with the owner:
In about a quarter of fatal dog-bite cases, the dog owners were previously involved in illegal fighting. The dogs that bite people are, in many cases, socially isolated because their owners are socially isolated, and they are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog. The junk-yard German shepherd’s which looks as if it would rip your throat out and the German-shepherd guide dog are the same breed. But they are not the same dog, because they have owners with different intentions.
When I was doing research for my novel Loose Dogs — the protagonist is an animal control officer who breaks up a dog fighting ring — I was given a tour of the kennels that Rochester Animal Services use to hold stray dogs they’ve picked up. It’s not unusual for over half of these dogs to be pit bulls, or pit bull mixes.
You know what else? If these dogs — the pit bulls — aren’t claimed, they are put down — the city won’t offer a pit bull for adoption. I can’t say as I blame them. They don’t want to be in the business of offering the type of dog that attracts the wrong type of owner.
But it still breaks my heart.
It’s fiction . . . it’s a memoir . . .
No: it’s a Freymoir!
Even better: we’re now using cathartic television to help us recover from the trauma caused by . . . cathartic television. Oprah feels “duped.” Frey ‘splains it all was a “coping mechanism.”
Meanwhile, back in the real world, A Million Little Pieces languishes at #4 on Amazon.
No word on whether Amazon plans to re-tag the book as Literature and Fiction instead of Biographies and Memoirs. Or get rid of the now-embarrassingly-dated editorial reviews.
(Gawker live-blogged the show, if you’re interested in a minute-by-minute.)
Update: Also meanwhile, my dog training book is enjoying an Amazon ranking dip so deep it’s scraping barnacles off its belly. Maybe I should post about how naughty my dog is???? Secret’s out! I caught her gnawing a wooden block today! That is NOT a chew toy!
Music’s pearly gates
A month or so ago, an acquaintance who has forgotten more songs than I will ever listen to in my life told me about this UK site.
Now, via Meg at Blogcabin: Pandora.
The idea of both sites is that you tell them what sort of songs you like, and they assemble a “radio station” that streams similar music. You can refine the “station” they build for you by giving feedback (e.g. by banning a song that grates on you). You can also share the station/s you’ve created with friends.
What a great way to explore music. What a perfect example of how technology can offset the homogenization that tends to result from mass market commerce models. And we didn’t even need to wait for the Singularity :-D
Pan Scan
If you’ve ever read a supposedly “great” book, and hated it — or tried to talk with someone about a really-is-great-book and turns out he/she hated it — you’ll find this amusing.
Time magazine’s list (the 100 best books written in the English language since 1923) here.
Don’t don’t
I was aware that The Manolo was planning to feature “Fashion Don’ts That Make You Crazy” for his 1/16 Carnivale of the Couture, and considered contributing, but frankly I was certain that my pet “don’t” would be suggested by someone else.
Now I’ve just checked, and one of his contributors has actually broken my “don’t” (!)
So here it is. My fashion “don’t” is to stop banning “don’t” from the lexicon of fashion acceptability.
Please let’s put some rules back in! We obviously need them! How long has it been now–10 years? 20?–that we’ve been shuffling about, figuratively speaking, in our ratty robe and slippers. Enough is enough. We’re not depressed! We’re happy! Let’s spruce up a bit & show it!
Update: Edited to tone down the 1st draft, um, preachiness ;-)
The peril of abstract spaces
In the Toronto Star, Nicholas Hune-Brown surveys the way the ‘burbs have been depicted in literature and film, then veers off into his own, equally peculiar gloss.
He begins, reasonably enough, with this observation:
The North American suburbs of 2006 are a world away from the imagined suburbs of Cheever or Lewis. Traditional suburbs have grown and aged. Many of the once identical houses of Levittown and other subdivisions have now been customized and renovated. As developments on the urban fringe have become increasingly independent from their urban centres, the very existence of “suburbia” in the traditional sense has been questioned.
Fair enough. But Hune-Brown’s most earnest complaint is not that writers fall back on cliche when setting their narratives in the ‘burbs. It’s that they “ignore the real problems of suburban development,” that is, the “hideous” esthetic of the modern subdivision, segregation, and “sprawl.”
So. Hune-Brown would have writers jettison one set of the over-exposed abstractions, only to pick up another.
But that’s the wrong fix. I mean, think about it, a movie on the evils of sprawl? Characters adrift in emotional malaise because they they burn too much gas to get to work? And not only that, they have to drive past ugly 7-Elevens all the time, and don’t have ethnically-mixed neighbors?
“No ideas but in things.” William Carlos Williams. Anyone looking for artistic inspiration needs to start there. Not with abstractions, because beginning with an abstraction makes for lousy art, even if your abstraction is the political cause du jour.
It’s De-Lurking Week???
Now, isn’t that cool, and my blog less than over a week old yet! Hooray for serendipity!
But this does mean y’all have to comment!
Read here for more :-)
Update: FYI I haven’t figured out how to make a post sticky yet so although I originally wrote this January 10 I just edited keep editing the time stamp to put it at the top of the page — hey, it works! ;-)
[tags] delurking week [/tags]
Those naughty trees
Environmental science reporting and medical science reporting have one thing in common: if you bother to follow either very closely, you’ll wind up with a nasty case of mental whiplash.
One day, you’ll read something like: “eating chocolate will KILL you.” A few months later, your trusty ol’ health news journalist will be urging you to eat nothing but:
Researchers Find Chocolate Eaters Taller! Able to Levitate!
So I was hardly surprised to read that scientists are now accusing trees — those cute, lovable green fellas we’ve been told to nurture and love — of being, yes, bad for the environment.
This was reported in Nature, folks, not by some schlocky, publish-in-the-back-of-a-van anti-greenery fringe group:
They have long been thought of as the antidote to harmful greenhouse gases, sufferers of, rather than contributors to, the effects of global warming. But in a startling discovery, scientists have realised that plants are part of the problem.
According to a study published today, living plants may emit almost a third of the methane entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
Above quoted from the Guardian, Global warming: blame the forests, which later adds:
A recent study in Nature found cutting air pollution could trigger a surge in global warming. Aerosols cool the Earth by reflecting radiation back into space. Scrapping them would have adverse consequences
There’s no period at the end of that last sentence. I imagine because Alok Jha, science correspondent, at that point slumped down in his chair, senseless.
He should try eating more chocolate.
[tags] Environment [/tags]
“A fine volly of words, gentlemen,
“& quickly shot off.”
Dialogue from Two Gentlemen of Verona which I found last night, quoted in Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography .
That’s now the official slogan of my blog, and as soon as I get a chance to tweak the site design some more I’ll (hopefully, lol) figure out a way to display it somewhere.
It captures the way I see blog writing perfectly, which is no doubt why, with only a week of this blogging business under my belt, I find myself blissfully addicted. I should mention that I’ve been a blog reader for years now, and have joined the conversation of various blogs by leaving comments, so I have a sense of the pacing of this medium. It’s a huge conversation and while on the one hand it’s too sprawling to be considered “topical” in the classic sense (there are plenty of people, today, blogging about last week’s news), on the other hand, unless you want to sit in your own little corner talking to yourself, you need to find spots where the interest is sparking and jump in to contribute.
I like the water cooler analogy of the blogosphere — it’s much more apt, not to mention respectful, than the “mob” analogy that some find so comforting — but it’s also wilder than the typical impromptu office chitchat. So it’s more like a crowded party, and the trick is to float, keep your ear cocked for the liveliest clutch of conversationalists, and be ready to fire off that oh-so-fine volly.
