Superteam iPad Program (XtraNormal)

Episode III of "The Paragon" begins after Bowie has rescued team captain Muffy from an attack by the Russian Robot Brigade. In the aftermath, Muffy asks him to think about implementing an iPad program for their team.

Superteam iPad Program
by: hermietheelf

Horn Dog: Technidiot (XtraNormal)

Episode II of my XtraNormal series, "The Paragon."

Muffy, team captain to The Paragon, confronts Horn Dog after he misses the rescheduled team meeting. Horn Dog apparently has trouble with modern technology. Anyone who met Horn Dog in Episode I ("Horn Puppy & Crew Cuts") will have no trouble believing this.

Horn Dog: Technidiot
by: hermietheelf


Dear creators and writers of "Archer,"
Please feel free to find these episodes so uncontrollably hilarious that you contact me at bottomoftheglass@gmail.com and ask me if I would be interested in writing with you. Or, better, creating a show that came on after "Archer." Peace out, hippie.

Rent, Buy or Steal?

What Would Bob Do? - Colin Hay (mp3)

Blockbuster closed again. This is the third store in our area to shut down in the last year or so, and this one was close to our house.

When the previous one closed down, I asked the manager at this one how long she thought they’d survive, and she said, “Oh, there’s no plans to downsize us. We’re doing fairly well all things considered. We’ll be here a while.”

Apparently “a while” equals about half a year.

The two streams of commerce and popular culture continue to collide in strange and unprecedented ways as we try and figure out this concept called CONTENT.

When I buy the latest Matt Nathanson album on mp3, what do I own? What did I pay for?
When I buy a Kindle book, what do I own?
When I buy Season 1 of Archer on Amazon, what did I pay for?

Why do we, collectively, seem more comfortable owning books, renting movies, and stealing music?

When they have increasingly all just become slightly different versions of pop culture content? Rent, Buy or Steal?

These aren't new questions, but it fascinates me that I still don't quite know how to answer them, and I consider myself well past the midway point on the TechnoBell Curve.

Almost everyone I know who likes but doesn't love music spends 80% of their music time on Pandora. They don't have to buy anything, and they get to listen to something akin to the radio, and they don't have to make but a few decisions to do it.

People of all religions and income levels, with all levels of music love, steal music. They even call it "stealing music" and seem minimally bothered by it, apparently because it's not as blatantly wrong as walking into John Cusack's music store and physically having to enact the Five-Finger Discount. "Data Transfer" just doesn't sound as criminal.

This happens with movies, too, of course, but the film industry seems to have done a better job of getting ahead of the curve by giving consumers who prefer being honorable (and I think most consumers are like this) options to watch movies via the Internet without excessive cost.

At least three of every four friends of mine is on Netflix... for now. The ability to watch digital streams of unlimited movies and TV shows through the computer totally tipped the scales. Music has these options: Rhapsody, Napster, and the new kid to the US party, Spotify. But people don't seem quite as willing to pay rent for music rights.

Maybe it's about digestion. The longer it takes you to get through the content experience, the more obligated we feel, culturally, to own it. Books take the longest, so we still feel like it's only right to buy them. Songs mostly run five minutes or less, the equivalent of a few pages in a novel, so we don't feel so badly about just stealing them or trading them with friends like baseball cards. Movies, falling somewhere in the middle and not frequently re-experienced by the average fan, get rented.

I only know I feel like I'm somehow falling behind. One of my favorite pasttimes was to walk into Blockbuster, rifle through their Previously Viewed aisles looking for their best "2 for $20" or "4 for $20" offerings, and biting off a few fingernails while wondering if the DVDs I had picked out were really worth my 20 bucks. Two-thirds of the time, I'd walk back out with nothing and feel like I'd earned some small, meaningless moral victory of fiscal responsibility.

But those times when I do buy, the movies go home with me, and they get added to my ebbing and flowing bookshelf row of Movies To Watch, and I lovingly stack them and plan for my next late night viewing experience.

I was so distraught over Blockbuster's closure that I drove straight to Best Buy and bought the first two seasons of The West Wing, a show I've never seen, for $14.99 each. That's, like, $0.75 an episode, and I'd totally pay $1 to cut the 20 minutes of advertising out of any TV show I watched and to be able to watch it whenever I felt like it. This is a universally true statement.

I took home 45 episodes. They're mine. I own them. I'm an owner. I like owning things despite the flaws in the approach. My collection of some 200 DVD movies and some 20 boxes of TV shows loses value every day even as I cherish my ability to obsess over something as meager and laughable as DVDs, something that will one day be mentioned in the same breath as VHS.

But I've never been comfortable with renting. No matter how practical, it just doesn't feel right to me. Something about knowing it's mine, and that I acquired it legally and properly, and that it will always be there until I choose to get rid of it, that all just feels better to me.

Twitter & the Luddite

Change of Time - Josh Ritter (mp3)

When removed from its Christian context, an evangelist is anyone who trumpets the glories and power of an idea -- or object or belief -- with the confidence and stubborn insistence that anything short of full commitment is weakness.

The evolution and progression of civilization requires evangelists. Ideas cannot reach enough ears and eyes without the unwavering passionate commitment from these kinds of people.

I am not an evangelist.

A close relative of the evangelist is the early adopter. They’re the eager guinea pigs of the technology world. These are the goobers who camp out overnight so they can be the first to own an iPhone. They’re the ones who pay attention to when a new version of Photoshop is released. When the Zune debuted, early adopters actually purchased those goofy things. They’re the soldiers at the front of the group in the U-boats from Saving Private Ryan -- you know, the first ones to their brains blown out.

I am not an early adopter.

21st Century progress depends heavily on evangelists and early adopters.

In the world of education, you would be hard-pressed to find a larger collection of passionate evangelists and early adopters than collected in Philadelphia in January at a sold-out convention known affectionately as EduCon 2.3. These people drank so much of the Kool-Aid that the damn thing was sold out roughly eight years ago.

I wasn’t there, so everything I say now about EduCon is pure speculation based solely on reading the Tweets and follow-up blogs of many who did attend.

EduCon is the Jesus Camp of teachers who are early adopters and evangelists. They all pack into a finite space, work one another into a fervent lather, speak in techno-tongues, and then disperse with a fiery passion powerful enough to stay lit for days if not a whole week in the face of the pitiful skeptics and realists who were stuck in their classrooms back on the home front.

I mock them because I love them, these wild-eyed iPad-toting preachers who use words like “wiki” and “ning” and “hashtag” and “techno-pedagogy.” Watching them get all wide-eyed and teenage-girl-giddy when talking about something like Pixton is to see the embodiment of hope and conviction and optimism and urgency. Sure, it comes with a dose of negative scary cult vibe, but that’s the price of human nature.

My role in the process is equally essential. My type weighs costs and benefits. We consider risks and rewards. We observe the plights and trevails, the glories and successes of the early adopters. We talk to them. We challenge them. And, over time, we allow them the possibility of convincing us to get on the boat with them.

Our pushback hones an evangelist’s message. It shaves down the brainwashing and forces them to prove their claims. We don’t make the products and beliefs you buy; we make the products and beliefs you buy better.

You know who I don’t love? You know who I don’t understand? Luddites.

Luddites are the Amish. They are anyone who, at any point in time, drew a line and determined that all technology and modernization up to said point was acceptable while all of it beyond said point was evil, deplorable, of the devil, whatever. They are people who bury their head in the sand and wish new things would just go away.

Case in point. Our IT director sent out what was intended as an innocent email. Our school needs to figure out how to use text messaging to reach students, and she was curious as to how many teachers and coaches and dormitory advisors were already doing this. How, what software or program, et cetera.

Three of the emails she received back were sent solely to decry the horror of a school that would discuss using text messages. The level of cleverness and degree of indignation varied, but the theme was constant: “F**k Text Messages and the iPhone they rode in on!”

The goal of the Luddite is merely to freeze time, freeze assumptions, freeze change. And they seethe and growl at those who attempt to move things forward.

The Republicans I struggle most to like are those who seem not to argue for a cause so much as for a bygone era. They romanticize an earlier America and long for us to return to it. They refuse to discuss social change because if it wasn’t like grandma used to make, they want nothing of it. Period.

Ironically, in the world of education, the Luddites tend to be very liberal politically. They don’t mind social change, but they fear anything that threatens the 1955 nature of their authoritarian classroom. Like grandma used to teach it. Of course I’m being overly simplistic, but it feels far more accurate than not.

Text messages, Facebook and XBox are not the enemy. They’re not the devil anymore than automobiles or rotary-dial telephones or the Gutenberg press. They are merely vehicles, means by which and through which both good and evil can be accomplished... albeit usually at a much more efficient pace. Anyone paying sufficient attention to the revolution in Egypt should not so quickly dismiss Twitter as child’s play. It seems 140 characters can play an astonishing Best Supporting Actor role in history.

Educational evolution (or revolution) need not be lightning fast. It need not be dictated and forced through by evangelists. But the longer the Luddites are allowed to stay at the table and scream out their own edu-Palinisms, the sooner it feels an edu-Armageddon is inevitable.

Two Spaces

A Small Victory - Faith No More (mp3)

“That’s just how I was taught.”

Interesting how that phrase gets used by most of us. It’s a defensive statement. It tends to mean, “Hey, don’t blame me. Someone else did this to me. I was just a kid, and this is what I learned.”

When it comes to matters of prejudice, bigotry, or hatred, and when it involves someone inheriting/learning from the small-mindedness of previous generations, many of us are impatient or outright angry at the excuse. Being raised by racists, or being raised by a misogynistic father, or being taught that the original lunar landing was a conspiratorial hoax by a wacky teacher... None of these are excuses for carrying forth with or propagating such nonsense.

But if you throw down the gauntlet about something like the proper number of spaces between sentences, folks come out of the woodwork in defense of two spaces with this very desperate cry, “I was just taught that way!”

Or, better yet, “It’s just a matter of habit!”

Slate.com offered a polemic against double-spacing recently, and were it not for the hype of a Tiger Mother, it might well have been one of the most unpredictably viral screeds of the week. Slate’s page received a barrage of commentary, well over 100 at last count. Of particular fascination is how much time many people took to observe that the entire issue was a waste of time. That is, people wasted their own precious time to point out the time they clearly wasted to read the piece and scroll down and sign in and offer opinion.

Compared to matters of warfare and world hunger, the issue of space width between sentences is certainly trivial. Yet more than 100 people, myself included, find ourselves wasting time and some level of emotional energy on the matter.

Two spaces versus one. Edward versus Jacob. Yankees versus Red Sox. We Americans crave meaningless and superficial debates about things which ultimately mean little or nothing, because we seem so poor at handling matters of greater import. We are so irresponsible in how we debate and discuss truly important issues, and we embrace such a low level of intellectual discourse, that we instead drift into debating things with little true significance. Because, ultimately, even the lowest-educated soul can find some way to argue for a favorite football team or a preferred lover for Bella. You need only read two books or sit in front of a TV for a few hours, and suddenly you have all the firepower necessary to engage in a heated and passionate debate.

With the matter of sentences and spacing, the bar is set even lower: Have you ever written a paragraph? If you answer in the affirmative, then you are immediately capable of injecting your opinion into the debate.

While Mr. Manjoo comes across too much like a snooty bully for my tastes, his “side” of this debate is backed with more than ample research and information which, if you remove his taint, is quite convincing.

The real deal-breaker: everything anyone reads online or in newspapers or in magazines or in books. Almost every printed piece you’ve ever laid eyes on that wasn’t written for or by an educator uses a single space after sentences. Even the most conservative, anti-evolutionary, most change-o-phobic sites on the Interwebs use a single space between sentences.

What’s more, most of us have accepted this online reality without batting an eye. We read the papers and the Internet articles, and few of us notice or care about the single space.

Personally, here’s the reason I prefer single space: I’ve rarely if ever seen a single-spacer inconsistently use that option in writing. Double-spacers are maniacally inconsistent. Rarely if ever do I run across anything of modest length by a double-spacer where at least one or two sentences are followed accidentally by a single space. (My job requires that I read and edit lots of copy from lots of sources, so this isn’t some willy-nilly claim.)

A single space is economical. Eventually, piled up sentence after sentence, single spaces save trees. Compared to two-space people, I’ve probably saved a whole tree. And each tree means something to some little dog out there in the world, needing to take a piss. Or a bird needing to build a nest. Hell, it's possible I've helped save an entire small ecosystem compared to those wasteful, space-eating, greedy two-space sumbitch bastards.

Help save the planet. Stop pressing that space bar so many dadgum times. Quit using that lame “That’s how I was taught” nonsense and join us here in the 21st Century.

Kindle II: Revenge of the Kindle

I Could Write a Book - Harry Connick, Jr. (mp3)
Calling America - Electric Light Orchestra (mp3)

NOTE: Bob wrote a piece on his new Kindle back in July. Read it here, ‘cuz most of what he observes, I ain’t gonna re-observe.

I got the super-simple stripped-down Kindle for Christmas. After a month of somewhat intensive research and contemplation -- iPad? Droid Pad? Kindle? -- I decided the wisest move was to go with the cheapest and simplest option, the option that is almost universally loved in spite of its vast limitations. I’ve yet to hear someone complain that their Kindle “is too complicated” or “doesn’t do everything I expected it to” and that they regret the purchase. (I’m sure they’re out there, but not in my circle.) And, ultimately, isn’t that the best we can hope for in our modern capitalistic world?

Two weeks into my ownership, I’m giddy at the call. Worth every penny.

Yes, the weight and size are great. The user-friendly nature of the device is great. The ability to control how the text is presented in about 10 different ways is incredibly useful. But here are the 2 ½ most compelling reasons I’m loving this Kindle:

1. FREE SAMPLES!

You can download an introductory chunk -- usually the first chapter -- of almost any book sold for the Kindle free of charge. While far too many books cost a little more than I’d prefer when all you’re getting is the digital residue -- not like I can trade it into a used bookseller when I’m done, and paying merely for the information feels steep at times -- free samples are guaranteed to save me between $50-100 every year.

You see, pre-Kindle, if a book intrigued me, I had two options: (a) buy it and put it on my “In the Queue” shelf at home, where a long stack of books I bought in the hopes of one day reading linger, sad and forlorn like ugly pound puppies, or (b) make a mental or physical note of said book and hope to God I don’t forget or lose the note until some magical future time when I have time to give a flip. Neither of these options were ideal, and Option A can be painfully cost-ineffective at times. Buying a book used is even more doomed, because my screwed-up logical self then decides that, since I didn’t have to pay as much for said book, I need not feel the same urgency to read said book.

Now, if I want to keep a book in mind for consideration, I just download the free sample. It sits there -- Free. Brief. Harmless -- until I read that chapter. When finished with that chapter, I can then decide whether I want to pay for the whole book. This feature, dear friends, was made for idiots like me.

2. NOTES & HIGHLIGHTS!

Anyone who writes a blog for three years without ever earning much or building an arena-sized following must be in love with their own clever thoughts. But I’ve always been handicapped about marking up books I buy, and I have no logical explanation for it. I don’t like having to keep a writing utensil handy, and something about soiling the pages bothers me, but I don’t see how these reasons are quite enough.

Regardless, I bet I haven’t scribbled notes or underlined passages in more than half a dozen books since I graduated college. Yet here I am on my second Kindle book, and I’ve written more than 50 comments to myself and highlighted more than 100 passages. This is almost certainly New Purchase Overkill; however, something in me has long been wanting to have this power -- to add my own side commentary or observations to works with which I’m enthralled -- and it’s already clear that jotting notes and highlighting passages allows the book to make a deeper mark in my memory.

OH YEAH, NOT TO MENTION...

One of my biggest and baddest reading habits is to predetermine where I will stop reading. I find my bookmark and then immediately flip ahead to see where the chapter ends or where an ideal stopping place seems to be. Not having this ability on Kindle actually results in me reading more. I also now have the Kindle app on my Droid and, if stuck in a dark place with nothing to do (or the toilet stall next to Bob in the mall), can get through a few more pages on my phone.

So, in conclusion, It fits nicely and lightly into my backpack. It helps me better remember what I read. It minimizes my unnecessary purchase of books I might never read, and the books I do buy are a little (sometimes a lot) cheaper. And I read more ‘cuz I can’t as easily predetermine a good stopping place or too easily read the last page in advance.

Amazon, feel free to send all my advertising royalties ℅ “Bottom of the Glass.”

Big Brother Goes to College

The Shot Heard 'Round the World - Ween (mp3)
The Schooling - My Friend Steve (mp3)

Still working on my best of lists. So you’ll just have to read or ignore another random commentary today.

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of rooting for Big Brother.

A story in the November 15 New York Times explores the increasing use of technological “clickers” to monitor student attendance and attention in college classrooms, and parents all over the country who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to advance their children’s knowledge and abilities, should be thrilled that technology is at last doing something to prevent rather than provide distraction for their kids.

Remember when someone on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” wants to Ask the Audience? And then everyone in the audience keys in their answers? Best I can tell, technology is allowing professors to make the college lecture hall or classroom into a giant, individually-trackable Ask the Audience.

So when Ben Stein is up there asking the snoozing classroom about the Laffer Curve and Voo-Doo Economics, he can actually track the attentiveness of each student in that class by requiring them to input answers while he banters about.

Will this allow shitty boring teachers to, while failing to make any point of significance or failing to teach anything of import, ignore their own shitty boringness? Of course it will. But in my experience, 90% of shitty boring teachers are incapable of even recognizing a fraction of how terrible or boring they are. Further, no amount of wishing or politicizing will magically erase shitty boring teachers from the planet's surface. To bastardize Garrison Keilor, not all teachers can be above average.

Therefore, if I’m paying for my child’s college education, I don’t really care how boring or shitty a given teacher or professor may be. I care that my child shows up to class, pays attention, and works diligently. The person most essentially responsible for my child’s education is... my child.

When my advisees tell me they are doing poorly in a class because a teacher is bad or boring, I consider that to be a convenient and lazy excuse most of the time. (Occasionally, the level of teacher crappiness is indeed reasonable cause for student struggle.)

Plenty of studies correlate positive relational dynamics with student performance. The more a kid likes his or her teacher, the more they trust and respect that person, the better they’re likely to do in a class. Fine. But if part of college is to prepare us for the harsh world beyond, then part of that education is that we cannot solely rely on those in charge of us to be our motivators and inspirators. Almost all of us will, at some point or another, work for people who don’t inspire us, who don’t encourage us. This will not excuse us from remaining passionate or committed to our responsibilities. And if it does excuse us, then the job is a job rather than a calling.

Having discovered the Twitterverse last spring, I’m utterly wrapped up in reading reports and research about the evolution of teaching & learning. It’s great to read one day about the vital nature of computers in keeping math education relevant and read the next day about the danger of computers in classrooms or in the home. The simpleton might dismiss these findings as contradictory, as eggheads fighting, when the truth is far more fascinating and energizing.

Technology, like all great tools, can be used for good or ill, for advancement or dysfunction. Laptops and cell phones and Twitter and everything else in our modern techno-worlds can be both good and bad at once, just like humans.

And the harsh truth is, in college classrooms all around the country, a little more Big Brother is a good idea. Next up: lightscribe pens with fingerprint identification for in-class essays, software with plagiarism software that works much like spell-check now, underlining suspect passages almost as we type. (NOTE: If someone reading this is smart enough to come up with a good business model, I only ask for a tiny pittance for the idea. Have your people get in touch with my people.)

Weak Parent Sauce and the System That Slurps It Down

Like Whoa - Aly & AJ (mp3)
Who Will Comfort Me - Melody Gardot (mp3)

Please read the following very carefully:

     The girl’s parents, wild with outrage and fear, showed the principal the text messages: a dozen shocking, sexually explicit threats, sent to their daughter the previous Saturday night from the cellphone of a 12-year-old boy. Both children were sixth graders at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, N.J.
     Punish him, insisted the parents.
     “I said, ‘This occurred out of school, on a weekend,’ ” recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. “We can’t discipline him.”
     Had they contacted the boy’s family, he asked.
     Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together.

The New York Times article goes on to explain and explore the very delicate legal challenge facing (public) schools when it comes to cyberbullying, and it's a very good read. But I can't get past these first eight sentences, because they ultimately explain exactly why we're in this pickle to begin with.

Many parents, myself included, will literally go to the mat for our children during an intense sporting event. When we see them wronged, we get angry. When we see an act of intentional viciousness -- even if it's not directed at our child -- we will get vociferous, and sometimes arguments or worse will ensue.

But when we see that some young punk has been sending our daughter sexually-explicit and unwelcome text messages? We go crying to... well, I'd say "Mommy & Daddy," but we're s'posed to be Mommy and Daddy!

Even more pathetic is the excuse listed above. The father in question doesn't want to upset his coaching relationship with this other dad. The guy probably coaches a mean offensive line, or maybe he hits grounders like a mofo. Anyway, clearly the relationship on the athletic surface is far too important to risk by informing this other guy that his son is sending X-rated Buffalo Bill "it rubs the lotion on its skin" shit via cell phone to sixth-grade girls.

That these parents are pathetic, weak and utterly focused on the wrong things doesn't make the problem for schools easier. We can acknowledge the idiotic parenting strategies that explain away almost every problem we see in children, but none of that seems to let schools, teachers, or administrators off the hook for trying to solve these problems. Educators, whether we like it or not, spend more time with kids than most parents. Far too often, educators know kids better than parents. Many times, kids feel closer to and are more likely to heed the words of a teacher. None of this is right; none of it should be OK with us; but, as they say, it is what it is.

Every year, some dozen or so parents call our middle school administrators to complain about their own children's hair. "Please make my son get a haircut," these parents will say.

"But... you're his parent..." our Middle School head will say.

"Yes, but he might listen to you. If he knows he'll get in trouble at school, he might be willing to do it."

I'm not making this shit up. We have parents who have, apparently, castrated themselves without even knowing it. Parenta castrata.

How sad must it be, as a child, to grow up in a house where parents are so weak and pointless as to be incapable of serving as authority figures? How can kids learn about adult responsibilities, about the dangers and rewards of power, if they can't even witness the adults in their own homes wrestle with that responsibility. But today's parents aren't wrestling with the challenge. They're fish, flopping around on the mat, just waiting to be pinned so they can go sit back on the bench and keep drinking and playing golf.

As parents wimpily scurry farther away from being... well, parents, teachers and school administrators find themselves having to play detective, mediator and lawyer, all for bargain-basement pay.

Oh, and add one more role: armchair psychologist.

Not only are they under the gun to investigate thorny legal and disciplinary issues they can't even be sure they're allowed to investigate, they now find themselves deciding whether kids should have best friends.

Yes, there is now a debate amongst psychologists and educators whether it's healthy for kids to have best friends.

Far better, it seems, to have numerous shallow and marginally-meaningful relationships. You know, because the history of literature is rampant with kids who had best friends and were absolutely miserable.

Meanwhile, as schools get bogged down with having to play all these different roles, they are, far too often, failing to serve in their primary and original role: F#*KING TEACHING KIDS, LIKE, SCHOOL S*#T. It's not remotely fair for us to ask that of them, is it? When they're so busy doing so many other things that weren't ever supposed to be in the job description in the first place?

Teachers. Parents. Neither seem capable of focusing on the most important part of the jobs their titles imply.

The biggest difference: Teachers don't have much choice.

The ChatRoulette Rabbit Hole

The Strangest Party (These Are the Times) - INXS (mp3)
Clothes Off! - Gym Class Heroes (mp3)

I heard the word(s) "ChatRoulette" several times on my weekend in New York City, and when a connection up there sent me a link to this "explanation to the uninitiated" post, I read it and decided to link it for our parents... on the off chance they look at our page and read those links.

ChatRoulette allows people to connect, randomly and anonymously, to other people via webcam. Ms. Yardi describes the site very well, and she also lays out the pitfalls and concerns of the way the system works. Yet, very much like my experiences with Internet-broadcast terrorist beheadings and "the video that shall not be named," something about the ease with which one's curiosity can be ferreted and soothed drew me to pay the site a visit last Thursday evening.

Clad in my blue jeans and T-shirt, I hopped on. Two of the first five cams I encountered were singularly focused on exposed manhoods being fondled in an onanistic manner.

At that point, I hopped off and contemplated my own ground rules:

1. Upon exposure to genitalia of either gender, I would immediately click "New Game." (Yes, the mere phrase "new game" as a way to switch "partners" is a little discomforting.
2. I would attempt to type to anyone, male or female, not exposing themselves and not clearly prepared to do so. Any communication leaning in that direction would be cut off.
3. I would chat with no one longer than 5 minutes.

With that in mind, I reentered.

When I was in eighth grade, I went on a school trip to Louisiana. Six classmates and our English teacher, a Louisiana native, spent a day and night in the French Quarter. Although I had by that point been exposed to dirty magazines and the like, it wasn't until walking down Bourbon Street, seeing pictures of strippers, their breasts exposed right there outside the strip club, that I realized that what I'd seen in print actually found ways to translate itself into real life.

Until then, Penthouse was a sexualized fiction. Instead of orcs and hobbits, there were breasts and penises, engaged in epic battles and exposed in ways that just didn't really happen. The letters section of that magazine were, to our minds, clearly made up. Stories of fast food workers having sex in the drive-thru window or at wild parties. That stuff was no more believable to me than tales of dragon-slaying or the Balrog.

Bourbon Street wasn't merely sexualized. It was an exposure to several new dimensions. The street performer as pseudo-art, high-end panhandling. The restaurant as cathedral. The gutter as acceptable receptacle for vomit. All of this was powerful and revelatory to me.

ChatRoulette is Bourbon Street on techno-steroids. The kind of Bourbon Street that might interest Congressman Massa more than, say, the average guy.

Over the course of about an hour, I encountered at least 200 web cams.

Only twice did another male even say "hi" to me. And both times the chats lasted only long enough for me to say no, I'm not interested in jerking off with you, but thanks for the invitation.

Only eight times did I encounter a cam with females. Four times, they instantly clicked "New Game" and ejected me. Twice I had 5-minute chats. One was a 25-year-old Brazilian woman who shared with me some of her favorite Brazilian musicians. We also talked about the World Cup. I asked her for the names of their best players.

The other longer conversation I had was with a pair of young college, or possibly high school, girls. The conversation was amusing and lasted about three minutes before it seemed to cross the line and inched into the inappropriate. (It's tough to know where that line is when their first words to me was, "OMG, it's a fully-clothed man!")

The other two times, the chats lasted maybe a minute. Long enough for them to be certain I wasn't whatever they were interested in seeing or talking to, I guess.

No fewer than 40 times did I encounter a penis.

Another 20-25 times, the cam was focused in such a way that masturbation was clearly the end goal. Cam trained on bulging underwear, or in downward-facing angle where crotch could be seen in a moment's notice.

Another 10 or so times, I encountered drawings of penises, as if that kid from Superbad had taken over a percentage of the ChatRoulette computers. (One funny one had, written beside the penis: "This is a drawing of a tree! I swear!")

Nothing about me should suggest I'm a prude. Even the best parts of our great civilization requires cesspools and garbage dumps. All part of the Yin/Yang thing. So I get it. ChatRoulette is 95% Yang. (ha.)

Thanks, but I'd just as soon go find my Yang somewhere else.

Oh yeah, and three times I encountered a group of kids. Like, middle school age. Two groups of three, and one single boy. And that's where the whole Yin/Yang, ChatRoulette, let's-make-fun-of-the-penises thing gets a little bit weightier than I can handle.

It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?

TMI

Stay Over - The Rescues (mp3)
The World is Our ____ - This Will Destroy You (mp3)

Alison was almost three years older. She was the middle daughter of one of my mother's best friends, and we spent a ton of time together growing up. I always gravitated to older kids, and Alison was no exception.

One night when I was in fifth grade and Alison spent the night, she and I were in my room playing before bedtime, and I dropped my pants and showed her my property. I don't remember what instigated this decision, but it wasn't a dare, and it wasn't a request. It might have been when I was changing into pajamas. Anyway, as best I can recall, her reaction was a mix of fear and utter shock. She was in seventh grade. I was 10 and she was 13, and she was far more than 3 years' my superior in maturity, having been raised in a turbulent family household I suspect had many of the soap opera problems stereotypical of the 1970s.

This confession isn't something I'm proud of. In fact, flashing Alison qualifies as one of the three or four most shameful memories of my life.

Part of this shame stems from having no understanding of why I did what I did. Maybe I was testing her friendship or trust. It couldn't have been particularly sexual -- I don't even think I had yet stumbled on my first Playboy hidden in the bottom of my dad's closet. But she had definitely blossomed physically, and I knew she was seen as attractive, so maybe there was something cluelessly sexual about it.

Not knowing why, but also knowing I did it with the awareness that the action was wrong, makes the memory harder to live with, thus the greater shame. It's when we do bad things that we just can't quite explain, that make no sense to anyone including ourselves, that moving past the shame feels the most difficult.

Working in a school with teenagers, those of us who earn trust are inevitably and regularly exposed to the underbelly that damns them. Yet we must also cling to our love of that age group and our desire to do what we can to see them through it.

I don't want to steal Bob's thunder, but he recently ran an anonymous experiment with his class in honor of A Clockwork Orange in which he asked each of them to submit a note describing the worst thing they've done but never got caught doing. Bob said the responses included "most everything you'd worry about, this side of murder. You name it, and it was probably in there."

Maybe some of them were exaggerating or making stuff up. But most were probably being honest.

Boys who graduated have returned and told me stories of "bad decisions" involving alcohol, drugs, drag racing, disturbing pranks. They don't talk as openly about sex -- maybe I seem too prudish, or maybe they know that's dangerous ground -- but I've overheard many tales of group sex, drunk sex, computer sex, cell phone sex. One boy a few years back was sharing a video he recorded on his cell phone of his girlfriend giving him oral pleasure. One boy in our middle school got caught in his math class looking at a cell phone picture of a naked girl. She was out of school that day and had sent it from her bathroom. Home alone and bored in eighth grade in 2008 ain't what it was 20 years ago.

And these are, as people like me enjoy saying, the good kids.

Limiting myself solely to the teens and parents in my own circle of acquaintances, I know of at least two dozen teenagers who have engaged in something sexually scandalous: having sex with an adult, or sexting personal pictures or videos, or impregnating/getting pregnant, or multiple partners in a single night.

With modern teens spending more than half their awake time hooked into something electronic, it shouldn't surprise that an increasing number of these scandalously bad decisions center around computers and cell phones. It's also no surprise that this is leading to more suicide attempts related to sexting and the like. The morality play of the Paris Hilton sex tape plays out in shrunk-down versions in high school hallways and small towns all over this great country.

Bob says -- and I'm kinda paraphrasing -- that the lesson of A Clockwork Orange is that successful adults survive their teenage years without getting caught.

If I were in fifth grade today, and I had exposed myself to a 13-year-old female friend while alone with her in my bedroom, and if she had told her mother, and if her mother had told authorities... well, I feel absolutely certain that my life would be drastically different than it is today. I highly doubt I would be allowed to work a job around kids.

There's a super-awesome article in Slate called "No Brakes!" about how a parent can help minimize the risks for their children. Any parent should read it, probably four or five times.

I'm left with two thoughts about all of this:

1. I used to get pissed off when people talked about how much tougher kids had it today with drugs and temptations. I can no longer deny that they suffer from TMI. Literally, they have too much information coming at them too fast; they are exposed to often out-of-control and out-of-context (and usually unsupervised) information, while also given more power and methods to communicate. That's an incendiary combination.
2. My writing suggests that this challenge is restricted to teenagers, but adults are caught in it, and teens are just taking their cues from us. Watching a sobering and electric show like Breaking Bad only serves to remind that we adults are world leaders in "bad decisions." Walter White is quite possibly the most horrific reflection of the American everyman I've ever seen. Maybe we don't all deal with terminal cancer by manufacturing crystal meth, but the metaphorical connection between him and most of us is clear and undeniable.

Teenagers are just us, except with the valid excuse of inexperience and ignorance. Adults know far better and do far worse.

Sex: The Mississippi River of Gender Divides?

Sex as a Weapon - Pat Benatar (mp3)
Skin Trade - Bob Mould (mp3)
Mr. Roboto (live) - Dennis DeYoung (mp3)

Two stories recently caught my eye. That they caught my eye says plenty about me, but they also, when set next to one another, say quite a bit about men and women and that timeless beautiful word, SEX.

The first story I found at The Frisky. (It's like sneaking a peek at Cosmo except without the guilt or shame of other adults watching you do so while you're sitting in a Barnes & Noble or something. Thank God for the Internet!) Apparently a German company by the name of First Androids have created a life-sized and somewhat realistic sex doll android. At a cost of almost $4,000, the company claims to have received four MILLION backorders of this creation. Yes, four million men -- or maybe three million men and a million more bigamist wannabes who just can't stand the idea of screwing just one android sex doll for the rest of their lives -- believe it's totally worth a $4 grand to have the replica of a female at their eternal sexual beck and call, so long as they have enough D batteries (or should I say "Double D batteries"?).

The second story surrounds the new book, "Why Women Have Sex," written by a pair of researchers who identified 237 reasons why women have sex, with most of them having absolutely nothing to do with romance or physical gratification. TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN REASONS!!! The researcher even rattles off, just right off the top of her noggin, a huge list of great female motivators for having sex:

"...promotion, money, drugs, bartering, for revenge, to get back at a partner who has cheated on them. To make themselves feel good. To make their partners feel bad." Women, she says, "can use sex at every stage of the relationship, from luring a man into the relationship, to try and keep a man so he is fulfilled and doesn't stray. Duty. Using sex to get rid of him or to make him jealous."

Meanwhile, according to Dr. Moi, men pretty much have sex for one of about five reasons:

1. Because we like a woman, and this connection turns us on.
2. Because we think a woman is irresistibly hot, and this connection turns us on.
3. Because a woman makes us think we're hot or irresistible or adorable or (insert ego-boosting adjective here).
4. Because we're horny and needed a nut, and we hardly even care who assists us.
5. _________________ (This space left open just in case I've left some really compelling reason out... which is unlikely. I just figured I should give men five reasons because that's how many fingers they have on one hand... oh never mind.)

Don't worry, men and women aren't really THAT far apart. The Almighty Orgasm is the number one reason women have sex, and LOVE is a safe #2. The difference is that, for men, it pretty much starts and ends right there, but with women, there's this whole string of additional possible motives, littering the floor  like bullets from a scene in Black Hawk Down, that could motivate their sexual decisions from one minute to the next.

Another great quote:

"The degree to which economics plays out in sexual motivations," Buss says, "surprised me. Not just prostitution. Sex economics plays out even in regular relationships. Women have sex so that the guy would mow the lawn or take out the garbage. You exchange sex for dinner." He quotes some students from the University of Michigan. It is an affluent university, but 9% of students said they had "initiated an attempt to trade sex for some tangible benefit".

Women use sex for economic benefit; men buy $4,000 androids so they can get their rocks off without the burden of an (unspoken) economic transaction. They use fiscal economics to avoid the dangers of sexual economics, knowing how easily abused they can be in that world.

OK, it's not all men. OK, I don't think men actually want sex androids to avoid anything. OK, I think men are just really really really horny and don't even think about anything all that deep that involve both words "sex" and "transaction."

Is four million orders surprising because it's too many from that tunnel-visioned half of the gender divide... or not enough?

Are 237 reasons to have sex too many, or is five too few?


* -- For those of you under the age of 30, back in the '80s and farther in the past, you had to buy these printed things called "dirty magazines" to see boobies, and that's all most of the magazines showed, was pictures of boobies and sometimes other parts covered in patches of hair. Nowadays you can, with two clicks and Google, witness just about any sexual act the mind could invent in even its most demented states. But trust me, it used to require careful planning and cunning tact (huh huh).

Evrthng Bd s Gd LOL

Last Word - Archers of Loaf (mp3)

There's this book, Everything Bad is Good for You by Stephen Johnson.
And there's these articles about the potential damages heavy texting might be doing to young minds (NYTimes, CBS, Examiner.com).
And then there's the fun link: texts from last night

[There's also this song, "Everything Good is Bad" by JJ Grey and Mofro, which I previously used, but only briefly due to techno-glitch, but I'm throwing it in here because that band kicked raw butt at Nightfall in Chattanooga last week.]

Tennessee just passed a law that bans drivers from texting.

But it doesn't ban lots of other fun stuff. I can still fuck with my iPod as it sits attached to my cigarette lighter. I can still reach into my glove compartment and search for some napkins and commence cleaning up the Whopper that just collapsed all over my lap. I can still drive with my knees. I can still rub my wife's shoulders or hold my head out the window like Ace Ventura. And I can sure as hell still talk on my cell phone, not to mention use a GPS device or any number of iPhone "apps" while driving, all without being fined for breaking a law.

But if I'm texting? Im fukd.

Not to say I don't appreciate the motivation behind the law, because I do. Teenagers do more texting than talking. And teenagers -- no offense young readers -- are statistically the shittiest drivers this side of Clara "Where's the Beef?" Peller or the old lady in Ferris Bueller. (Yes, I'm proud of those two references. -- billy)

Teen males drive too fast and recklessly to deal responsibly with something vibrating in their pocket. Teen girls struggle to avoid mailboxes and garage doors and parked cars, and they text in much longer strings (because they actually think in sentences as opposed to quippy one-liners like guys). Neither of them need yet one more thing distracting them from what is an underappreciated skill, which is to say "keeping it between the ditches."

But to so nakedly punish one distraction while completely ignoring so many that fall into the same general category is just... well, that's Tennessee for you, Land of the Third Worst State for High School Education, whose graduates become our politicians.

Much of Adult America is worried sick that texting is going to erode the last remaining brain cells of our already half-vegetated children. Or, at least, that's what a number of reporters and studies would have you conclude.

But if we're that worried, like really really worried, then why are so many parents purchasing so many plans that allow for so much damn texting for their kids? Further, if texting is so unhealthy for teenagers, why are more and more adults fighting so damned hard to catch up to said teens' texting productivity? Five years ago (was it even five years ago??), texting was almost exclusively a teenage phenomenon. Same with Facebook. And we adults have swooped down, seen these addictive distractive wonderful useful things and claimed them for ourselves at the same time we're decrying them for those precious, vulnerable and easily manipulated teenagers.

So text messaging finds me stuck in the miserable grey area of the Infamous Slippery Slope. If I'm going to acknowledge that texting only seems bad when we're talking about teens, and that when it comes to adults, we mostly think it's a peachy keen and useful tool, then how far down do I slide before I start having to reconsider other supposed "vices"? Like alcohol. Like sex.

Adults seem to try and protect teenagers from these very "adult" things, because kids aren't mature enough to handle them properly.

Well shit. I don't know what newspapers or web sites you've been reading lately, but last I could see, adults aren't doing a bang-up job of handling their liquor, or their sex drives, or their firearms, or much of anything else to be honest with you. It would be nice to tell you that pornography is the top subject for Google because of them damn teenagers, but you know it ain't true. We men lead that charge, by gum.

All of which has me in quite the pickle as I rethink the protective instincts of adults constantly battling the exploratory and experimental nature of youth. Maybe the youth are supposed to win those battles. Maybe adults are supposed to fail in trying to catch them. Kind of like the park ranger always failing to catch Yogi and BooBoo. Maybe the only way Those Meddling Kids turn into really strong adults, the kind we can be proud of, is if we let them solve the mysteries while we bumble around and ask them to program our TiVos for us.

At least, that's where I am on July 6 at 10 p.m. Who knows where I'll be on it by July 8? Just check my Twitter account. Not that I have one, but I'm 37, so it's gonna take me a little longer to catch up to them whipper-snappers.