Bad Hair

Now in convenient book form.

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Big Hair

Still my (and your) Unca Cecil

When I lived in Northern California, I had a Saturday habit. Take Bart to Berkeley (Round trip $4). Spend morning window shopping for books at music on Telegraph and surrounding streets (free). Go to LaVal's pizza and order Lunch special (slice and small salad--$2.50). Order whatever beer was on special ($1.50). Put $1 in jukebox and play three songs--Bob Marley's "Exodus," Creedence's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and whatever 6 minute plus songs struck me...this gave me 25 minutes to eat my pizza and salad and drink my beer. And read The Straight Dope (also free, in the free mags by the door).

LaVal's is gone, along with their killer Garlic Cheese Bread and terrific ambience. Telegraph gets more and more upscale now...Cody's Books is gone, small music stores are endangered or gone. Those $9 days consisting of walking through the streets and checking out the vendors and the books and the music and eating my pizza and drinking my beer exist only in memory.


Slug illustrates Cecil's answer to "Does a pig really have a corkscrew shaped penis?"

The Straight Dope is still around, though. (And Slug is still doing the illustrations.) Cecil Adams is still the smartest man in the world. He is still answering the tough questions. If you ever wanted to know about why men have nipples, if there's really such a thing as cow tipping, why dinosaurs were so big, and if the stories about Catherine the Great and the horse are true, go ahead and find out here.

p.s. This one is my favorite. Don't know why. Just is.

No Life on Mars, which is a good thing

I was pretty pissed off when I heard that ABC was going to do an "American" remake of Life on Mars, the terrific BBC series. I was sure that ABC would screw it up. Guess what? I was right.

With rare exceptions, British TV doesn't translate when reconfigured for the colonies. Okay, yeah, I like both versions of The Office But, for the most part, the American desire to make everything Bigger! Better! Longer! sabotages efforts at reconfiguration.

Life on Mars is a terrific example of why Brit TV works. Know how many episodes there were? 16. It wasn't cancelled or anything; it was planned for 16 episodes. It went 16 episdoes. Great episodes. Then it shut down. Done. The show's main writer said "We decided that Sam's journey should have a finite life span and a clear-cut ending and we feel that we have now reached that point after two series [seasons]." Can you imagine an American show doing that? Not just completing only 16 episodes--that's less than Freaks and Geeks ran, for God's sake--but planning on having only sixteen. Being cool with terminating the series once your story line was over. American TV will never go for that. Not enough revenue. Not worth promoting a show that will be gone so quickly.

The characters on Life on Mars look odd compared to their American police show counterparts. Then it hits you. The BBC show has actors that actually look like normal people. No "special guest star Heather Graham as a CIA plant!" stuff. There's a sense of rumpled familiarity that American TV pretty much never pulls off. Not enough star power for us.

British TV series have lots of cultural references and subtexts. You've got to think while you watch them. The most popular show on American TV right now is Deal or No Deal. It's a show about...guessing. Except you don't guess. You watch other people guess. You watch other people guess how much money they have and/or should win. You could have the same experience by standing next to a retiree playing the slots. American audiences, frankly, don't get British TV and aren't likely to start. We've got Celebrity Circus, thanks.

Brit TV isn't afraid to drop S-bombs and show us the occasional boob or buttock. Funny isn't it...we have a Federal Communication Commission to fine networks if Janet Jackson's Frightening Nipple shows up for a split second. The BBC is socialized, and you get partial nudity and cursing. Nice. Not gonna happen here.

Life on Mars has Gene Hunt. If you've seen the show, you know what I mean. We don't have characters like that on our shows.

It's not as though we don't produce splendid TV series, anyway. Arrested Development. Gilmore Girls. The first few seasons of 24 were just roller coasters of joy. We can make our own damn shows. But we've tried to go to the well again, and it's not working again.

Remember College Instructors, You Can Just Throw Them Out

I teach for a living. (Technically, I'm a professor...but I'm one of those professors that's in the classroom all the time.) Occasionally in this blog, I'll refer to "students," or "the students," or, if I'm feeling unusually possessive and happy/furious, "my students." I love my job, so there won't be a huge amount of Work Related Bitching here. Usually, I'm a pop culture guy.

For now, I want to talk about an issue in Academia that's just as much of a problem as the students. It's the instructors. Many of them are idiots. I recognize that academia is largely self-justifying...academics write articles that are reviewed by other academics that come out in journals read almost exclusively by other academics. It's a big circle jerk. I get it. I go to the conferences where people in ill-fitting suits talk at length about incredibly arcane and tangential subjects to Literature (which is what I've got my Ph.D in and teach). There's a lot of solemn nodding at these affairs, and not nearly enough drinking.

Several years ago, I was at a conference that had a panel on Classroom Authority. As in--how to get authority, how to keep from losing authority, and how to maintain authority in the classroom. I'd like to remind everyone that we are talking about people who teach at the college level, which means they can

1) Swear at students, and

2) Throw students out of class--permanently!

both of which I personally do. So cool!

A man was at a podium nattering on about "sharing authority to gain authority" and how that could be done to keep students in line when discipline became an issue. Lots of solemn nodding. The gist of his--and several others, apparently--argument was that an instructor could regain lost authority in the classroom by sharing power with the students that had, somehow, taken over. I had to ask questions in the Q and A. Had to. "How do instructors lose authority in the first place?"

A natural opening. Maybe I'd missed something. Several people gave me short, staccato bursts of answers. It turns out that college students can sometimes be snotty or rude or actively disinterested and disruptive. Heads turned toward me; I was obviously an interloper of some sort.

"But...can't we just throw them out?" Lots of murmuring. "You know, just kick them out of class." I knew we could; like I said, it's one of my weapons of choice. So I went on. "I mean, we're the teachers. It's our class. We design the curriculum and grade the work. We have the right to boot students who are disruptive. We've already got the authority. Unless we're stupid enough to give it away."

The people on the panel and the listeners in the audience looked at me with expressions that were half poker face (sort of a ten year old look--"Don't tell Mom we put the cat in the dishwasher, 'kay?") and half disbelief ("And you are...?") The general reaction was to make some "Mmm!" sounds and ignore me. These people wrote books on how to teach. They researched it for a living. They were professionals. And, yet, so was I. And I had probably taught more students in the previous five years than any of them had taught in their careers. We were at an impasse. So they tried to ignore me. The furtive glances told me that wasn't working either. And here's the thing; they could have thrown me out. But they didn't. Just by sitting there, I was being disruptive. They had the authority and didn't use it.

Anyway, I let them off the hook and went to the bar. I remember they had Newcastle on tap. And I still didn't have authority issues in my classes. So it was a successful conference all around in my book.