A Different Street

The #1 song the day I was born was “Runaway” by Del Shannon. What’s yours?

Wil Wheaton, my favorite ST:TNG actor turned geek, writes about a concert ruined by the behavior of the people near him. The 150+ comments on his post contain many similar stories.

I really honestly wonder: are people worse-behaved, more selfish, than they once were? Was there some mythical, magical time when “common courtesy” was the order of the day? I once read an article that blamed the behavior of modern children on the disappearance of the “neighborhood scold.” Surely that can’t be right. As the comments on Wheaton’s post show, rebuking people who are acting like jerks usually does nothing but provoke more jerky behavior. Do we just concede that the race for the commons has been won by the jerkiest? If not — what?

Commentator on today’s “Morning Edition,” describing the character of Carrie Bradshaw: “Sure, she’s narcissistic, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Today RLP linked to Ann Voskamp’s blog, A Holy Experience. Her lapidary writing and photos took my breath away. In a post about her family’s loss of her sister, she writes:

Maybe in those first few years my life curled like cupped hands, a receptacle open to the gifts He freely gives. But I have no memories of then. For they say memory jolts awake with trauma’s electricity. That would be the year I was four. When blood pooled and I snapped shut to grace.

Standing at the side porch window, watching my parents huddled in horror, I wondered if they had held me, their firstborn, in those natal moments of naming, like they now held my sister in death. In sharp fall light, they rocked her in their arms, not with prayers for sleep but with pleas for waking and wholeness, miraculous and dazzling. It did not come, only the police with accident forms while blood seeped through blankets. I see that too, even now. Memory’s blazing surge burned deep.

The story continues in a second post, and ends with this prayer:

Lord, losses burn holes in the soul retina. Leave us blind to You. And the infection spreads. Heal, Lord. So we can see You, find the well of Your living, spilling waters. And end the drought.

As a fellow sufferer of soul holes, all I can say is Amen.

I’ve always wondered whether it’s better to ignore self-evidently idiotic/attention-getting behavior, or call it out. I guess there’s no one right answer to that: some idiocies deserve to die quietly, and some deserve to be ruthlessly exposed.

Today’s conundrum: model/talk show host Tyra Banks, in a cover story in the New York Times Magazine:

“I think I was put on this earth to instill self-esteem in young girls,” Banks said, flanked by two enormous bodyguards as she walked toward an ever-growing mob of her fans in Union Square.

Via Jezebel, who comments:

She’d have you believe that, ultimately, she’s in this media game to help out 18 – 34-year-old women. How fitting then, that that happens to be the exact demographic coveted by advertisers! It’s not so weird that we question whether someone is only interested in “instilling self-esteem in young women” when that someone built her empire on a competition-based reality show about modeling. [emphasis mine]

I could probably do an entire exegesis on Banks’ choice of the verb “instill” alone, but I’ll content myself (and minimize the risk of turning into Andy Rooney) by noting that either Banks and I disagree wildly on the definition of self-esteem, or the reporter elided a large set of adjectives in that quote. Maybe she really said “to instill self-esteem in gorgeous, thin, poised, perfectly-groomed, popularly-proportioned, fashion-conscious young girls”! Yeah, that’s gotta be it.

Bioscientists use Photoshop to fake results.

“The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal,” says Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with journal editors to help them detect image manipulation.

Via Thers at Eschaton, a lovely bit from Sadly, No!, about the frantic efforts of a right-wing blogger to breathe life into a non-controversy, and the response from the owner of a WWII veterans’ site.

Sara Miles’ “Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion” is the best thing on this topic I’ve read lately. If you doubt that starting and running food pantries can be a holy undertaking, Miles will convince you otherwise. I wish she had written more about the effects of burnout on herself and her family, but it’s an engrossing story nonetheless.

In case you were wondering.