Alright alright, I know I promised not to blog about Sarah Palin as much as the big dogs are these days but I couldn’t resist this one. Michelle noted just now that this ad of Sarah Palin has her prominently wearing a Burberry scarf. Perhaps I’m not up on the latest fashions of the common man but isn’t that rather elitist? Hmmm?

For the record, I think getting Vizquel is a mistake.

Jessica Reaves in The New York Times Chicago News Cooperative explains why cab drivers try to avoid taking credit card payments. It’s a nice little read. Reaves reports that the reasons all center around time consumption involved or broken card machines.  I can’t help but wonder though if cab drivers are missing out.

I’d actually imagine they are. Take college students like me. Generally, we don’t carry a lot of cash but often (usually more often than is healthy) we spend with credit cards. In a city like Chicago, where there are a number of universities, I’d imagine if it was common practice to use credit cards more people wanting to get around Chicago but, for whatever reason, against taking the El, would happily wave a cab than is currently the case.

Photo by Cote used under a Creative Commons license.

1. I ask “which channel is C-Span on?” On football Saturday
2. I’m rickrolled “Senate style”
3. On a Sunday night I’m looking for my girlfriend’s best friend’s boyfriend to help me do some CSS design and website development (and I’m excited about this)
4. When I rant it’s usually about fear of a public option.
5. I spend Thursday night with my friends in the computer lab.
6. I’m up to date with the most recent Stargate series.

You know, my RSS was originally meant to help me consolidate and digest my news faster but all it’s done is gotten me to subscribe to more sites which means I spend more time than before reading news.

Via AFP’s Olivier Knox’s twitter:

Today’s somewhat of a college gameday in my family and among my friends. Here at Michigan it’s the Ohio State massacre of Michigan Ohio State-Michigan game and it’s the Harvard-Yale game (my sister goes to Harvard). In light of this I reread one of my favorite New Yorker articles ever, Peter J. Boyer’s “Big Men on Campus” about the Duke Lacrosse team scandal in 2006. The overarching topic of the article isn’t very relevant but there are passages that got me thinking about Michigan which, in mission, is similar to Duke:

When the new campus opened, in the fall of 1930, the university set out to buy itself a championship-level football program and hired the University of Alabama’s William Wallace Wade as athletic director and football coach. Wade quickly made Duke a national football power, winning the Southern Conference title within three years and taking his undefeated Blue Devils to the Rose Bowl for a contest with Southern Cal.

In 1969, Duke’s academic ambitions found perfect expression in the person of Terry Sanford, the state’s famously progressive former governor, who served as Duke’s president for sixteen years. At a time when Jesse Helms was stirring up white resentment toward integration on the Tobacco Radio Network, Sanford wanted to set a national example of a transcendent South. The term he coined for his vision of Duke was “outrageous ambition.”

[...]

It was a Duke provost, Phillip Griffiths, who devised the strategy that cemented that reputation. Griffiths, a mathematician, recognized that the most efficient way to buy academic cachet for Duke was through the recruitment of high-profile stars in the humanities. (Such stars, however high their salaries, were much cheaper than even entry-level postdoctoral hires in the hard sciences, because there were no lab-setup costs.) One of the first big hires, in 1986, was Stanley Fish. He brought an outsized ego, a Jaguar, and postmodernism to Duke, and, as chairman of the English Department, he moved the academy to the front lines of the gathering culture wars. With its debates over campus codes forbidding “hate” speech, and the hiring of such faculty luminaries as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who brought queer theory to Durham, Duke became famous as the home campus of tenured zaniness (and the inspiration for Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal Education”) at a time when the controversy over P.C. orthodoxy was all the rage. By the end of the nineteen-eighties, graduate applications to the English Department had tripled. Fish moved on (he is now at Florida International University), but John F. Burness, Duke’s senior vice-president for public affairs, says, “Duke was put on the map as a result of the English Department being a place of intellectual ferment. And we hear it today. Our ability to recruit faculty, in disciplines that have nothing to do with the humanities, came out of this sense of momentum.”

Michigan is like this in its strategy. It tries to build on the prestige of its football team and expand into other areas. Sports, basically, are a core part of the school’s national identity and like Duke, the hope here is that it’ll bring students together:

The two strands of Duke’s character create an interesting tension—Sparta and Athens, in one package. Brodhead has become a basketball fan, and he makes a point of meeting the students who sit near his mid-court seats at Cameron. One of them last year was a student from China, who was dressed up in Blue Devils fan gear. “A physicist, a violinist,” Brodhead says. “This person came to this country, where he knew nobody, and where he knew nothing about the ways of this country, and, actually, sports on this campus form a community that enables people to come together from all different points of view.”

Orin Starn, the sports-anthropology professor, is less sanguine. Duke, he says, has become “this place that’s sort of divided against itself. On the one hand, you have this university that wants to be this first-class liberal-arts university, with a cutting-edge university press, these great programs in literature and history and African-American studies, that’s really done some amazing things over the last twenty years, building itself from a kind of regional school mostly for the Southern élite into a really global university with first-class scholarship. But then you have another university. That’s a university of partying and getting drunk, hiring strippers, frats, big-time college athletics.”

Via Taegan Goddard, USA Today has a really amazing interactive graph of presidential approval ratings and you know what? Obama’s are pretty unremarkable.

Actually, in comparison to other presidents, they’re pretty similar to Ronald Reagan’s thus far in his presidency, not only in specific number but incline also. Reagan’s popularity had been falling like Obana’s has. I don’t think the numbers are really worth focusing because the real overarching theme of politics lately has been the sausage making of passing healthcare reform. Of course that’s going to bring a president’s approval rating down. It’s major reform that requires a lot of negotiation and slow progress. The dip in approval would be the same of any president in this situation.

Thierry Henry’s handball in the qualifier between France and Ireland for the World Cup is yet another example in worldwide sports of why we need instant replay or box review in sports. I’m sure it’s been said before but for the sake of well…whining until you get what you want, there’s no reason to not have instant replay or box review, as Renard Sexton calls for in his piece for fivethirtyeight.com. I can’t help remembering the many times in the World Series when an instant replay review by the refs could’ve created a more honest and accurate game.

This is one of the problems with the traditionalism of sports, there are stubborn appendages that we really should get rid of but sometimes don’t. Better methods to making the right call is one thing, cheerleaders are arguably another one. But while I think the fight to get rid of cheerleaders from football or basketball would be met with an incredible amount of resistance, would referees reviewing a replay on tough calls be that difficult a change to make?

I just saw the trailer for the new Disney movie with a black princess. The company, and the country, has come a long way. But after watching the trailer I see some potential pitfalls. At moments our hero, Tiana, and the Prince/ love interest don’t look totally black. Maybe it’s just the lighting or the special effects or something. See for yourself:

Doesn’t the Princess Tiana look white at moments? And what about Prince Naveen? Could he be half black like me? Now, I haven’t read too much about the film so I don’t know what Naveen’s exact race is but I do know Tiana is black which makes these moments dangerous. Isn’t that contrary to partially why this movie is being made? The reason it’s a special movie is because it’s one that features a black girl as the protagonist and as the avatar of beauty. Like when my mom gave my sister a black barbie, the idea is to tell black children that to be beautiful you don’t need to have blue eyes and blond hair. If the moments when she’s supposed to look the most beautiful are when she looks the least black that’s contrary to the spirit of the movie.

I’m even more worried about Prince Naveen. His hair looks rather fair to me. Since it’s set in New Orleans I understand that that may be for authenticity’s sake (there’s an old tradition of racial intermingling in New Orleans) but I think it goes against the entire substantial purpose of the film. To be frank, black boys have aesthetic insecurities too. Growing up I sometimes felt that if I didn’t look say, Harrison Ford (I liked Star Wars, okay?) or Leonardo Dicaprio, I wasn’t attractive. I thought that my curly hair wasn’t ‘good hair’ and that my skin was too dark. If Prince Naveen is supposed to represent handsomeness, he doesn’t really reinforce the perceptions of what’s attractive that many black people need today. He doesn’t give the comfort that I needed.

Naveen could be biracial in which case there’s another problem. As I argued before and Adam Serwer has blogged about, American culture today doesn’t differentiate between someone who is biracial and someone who is black which is extremely unfair to us biracial Americans. There is a difference. While I can’t speak to what it’s like growing up black and forming an identity while being black, I can speak to the experience of growing up while being biracial. Being biracial means coming to terms with race in a rather different way than monoracial people —not necessarily a harder or easier way, just a different way. It is a difficult and solitary experience, especially when having any black heritage at all makes you black. Recognizing that is something race relations in America and elsewhere are yet to achieve.

This movie has the potential to do so much but not as much as it could do if it continues the backwards tradition of hinting that for black girls to look beautiful they have to look white or that biracial males are black.