WOTD: Agnotology

Here’s a little something off the request line. I’d like to dedicate today’s WOTD to Cissi, Shark and the other upstanding members of Random Misanthrope.

Today’s word is a relatively new discipline, developed in recent years by two historians of science at Stanford University, Robert Proctor and his wife, Londa Schiebinger. Agnotology is defined as of the study of “culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.”

There sure is a lot of bullshit masquerading as scientific research these days, which is why I’m not surprised to learn that this is such a new discipline. It used to be that scientific cranks could rarely get anything published because, well, they were hacks and quacks, and everybody knew it. Nowadays, thanks to the internet, just about any nut with any nutty idea can publish that belief for the whole world to see. One can find websites that offer definitive proof that 9/11 was a government plot, the Apollo 11 mission was a hoax, vaccines cause autism, homeopathy can effectively treat any disease including cancer, there are huge and powerful “lasers” currently orbiting the earth, and of course that President Barack Obama was not only born in Kenya, he’s also a Muslim.

Just look around. If you want confirmation for any crackpot idea then the internet will provide it.

My ex was a real tin-foil hat club type who was frequently out of work and spent his days reading about various conspiracies on the internet while I was at the office. One day he arrived to pick me up at work wearing a surgical mask. The explanation he gave was that there were a lot of jets flying over head that day and he read on the internet they were secret government planes generating “chemical trails” which rain down toxic chemicals that penetrate our bodies and control our minds.

I said that if that were really the case, then a surgical mask probably wasn’t going to provide very much in the way of protection.

Until next time…

WOTD: hyper-parent

Today’s word is an adjective-noun combination that describes a certain type of parent who takes more than a healthy interest in his or her child’s education and life. The overall subject of generations and the differences between them is the topic of tomorrow’s writing exam, so we’ve been discussing it a lot in lessons. This hyper-parenting phenomenon is associated with the parents of the current generation, sometimes called Generation Y, the ‘Net Generation, or the Millennial Generation.

Many of these parents were latchkey kids. They were left to look after themselves and didn’t see very much of their own parents since they were at work most of the time. Thus today’s parents have swung the parenting pendulum. Basically they want to make sure that their own children are nurtured and given the attention that they lacked as Generation X/latchkey kids.

Of course it’s only natural and healthy for parents to want to nurture their kids. However, making up for their own experiences is not the only reason for this over-parenting. They understand that we live in a very competitive world and they’re willing to do just about anything to give their child the competitive edge, even to the point of doing their child’s homework for them. They seem to be afraid to let their child make his or own mistakes and learn from them. In some of the more extreme examples of hyper-parenting, some parents even go so far as having their otherwise healthy and normal kids injected with growth hormones to increase their height. They’re even willing to pay for plastic surgery.

In the U.S. these hyper-parents are also known as “helicopter parents,” constantly hovering around their kids and overseeing every detail of their lives. In Scandinavia, they are called “curling parents,” seen as frantically sweeping the “ice” in front of their kids. In Japan, there are “education mothers” who have dedicated their entire lives to steering their kids through the education system.

I have mixed feelings about this, since I was one of those latchkey kids, but I didn’t feel particularly neglected or under-parented. I had a key to the house from about the age of ten and I quickly learned to look after myself. Generation X kids are in general quite self-reliant and adaptable self-starters, and as a consequence we tend to work better on our own rather than in groups or teams. This can put us at somewhat of a disadvantage since most employers are looking for so-called team players in the workplace.

My parents divorced when I was a tiny child of four years old. I lived with my mother and occasionally visited with my father. The rest of the time we communicated via old school letters on paper and phone calls. Curiously, he seemed to take no interest whatsoever in how my brother and I were doing in school. It used to drive my mom crazy how he never once asked how school was going for us. While my mother took as active a roll as she could (helping with homework and science projects, without actually doing them for us) my father simply did not care.

It would have been nice if he did, but alas…

As a teacher I have to deal with these hyper-parents all the time. I just wish that they’d allow their kids to screw up a little now and then, and learn from the experience. Kids are pretty resilient. Hell, I screwed up all the time but turned out okay.

WOTD: conflicted

Today’s word is a feeling, one that I think a lot of us are experiencing concerning the death of Osama bin Laden. To feel conflicted is to be full of conflicting and often contradictory emotions or impulses.

Upon hearing that Osama bin Laden, FBI’s number one most wanted bad guy, the one responsible for the atrocities of September 11, 2001, the July 7, 2005 bombings in London (among others) had been killed in a surgical military operation, well, one can’t help but jump for joy and shout, “YESSSS!!!!!!”

But wait, is that really an appropriate response? I mean, should one be filled with joy over the death of a fellow human being? Even one with such a defiantly uncompromising and completely distorted view of reality? Evil or not, he was still a man, who unfailingly believed he was doing God/Allah’s work by ridding the world of the oppressive infidels. Just like Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden hid himself away, and he held on to his misguided convictions until the very end. And like Hitler, he would rather die than be captured by the enemy. And thus he did.

The fate of Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly a fate he wished to avoid at all costs.

Bittersweet Thoughts on Bin Laden

One more bad guy bites the dust,
Yet the moment’s bittersweet,
When people whoop and cheer for blood,
The victory’s not complete,
When ideologies come to blows,
Push sometimes comes to shove,
We’re drawn onto the path of war,
Though we’d choose the path of love,
Lennon, Ghandi, Martin Luther King,
All had good points of course,
But the truth is sadly sometimes,
Force must be met with force,
That truth is somber, sobering,
And as such should be met,
Not with joy and pleasure,
But some measure of regret,
The hawks and doves will argue,
Neither one completely right,
There are times though that safety,
Must be shielded with might,
We wish for peace, and work for peace,
Still this must be reconciled,
With the fact that none would hesitate,
To give their life for their child.

WOTD: a “shower of bastards” and other collective nouns…

With many thanks to Cissi for the idea…

According to the Urban Dictionary (the unreliability of the source notwithstanding), the phrase “shower of bastards” is Irish slang for a “group of not altogether nice people.”

As in, “Look at that shower of bastards over there. They’re not even drinking Guinness.” Oi, what a bunch of gobshites.

Anyway, this got me thinking about how many colorful, surprising, and just plain odd collective nouns there are. Wikipedia of course names all of them but here’s a few of my favorites:

A glaring of cats. (Hehe…I’ve certainly been glared at by my cat)

A coffle of asses.

A shrewdness of apes.

A chin of beards. (This one made me laugh out loud.)

A singular of boars.

A cheat of bursars. (A bursar is the person responsible for billing you at a college or university.)

A threat of courtiers.

A murder of crows.

A busyness of ferrets.

A parliament of owls.

A storytelling of crows.

A drunkenship of cobblers. (You know, those guys who make and repair shoes.)

A neverthriving of jugglers. (Does this tell us something about juggling as a possible career choice?)

A number of mathematicians (Hahaha. This one might be a bit dubious.)

An obstinacy of buffalo.

A scathe of zombies.

An ugly of walruses.

And my number one all time favorite:

A sad of emos. (I shit you not)

Until next time…

Thoughts from a café at T-Centralen in Stockholm (A reality check exercise)

Take yourself out some place. A café perhaps, on a busy downtown street, or ideally to the train station or the bus station.
Now, get yourself a magazine. Screw the articles. Get one with lots of pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. This is not an intellectual exercise.

It’s a reality check that crosses all lines; culture, colour, class, IQ, language, gender, orientation, age. We’re all in this particular boat together baby.

Now, get settled in with those pics in your GQ, Vogue, Elle, Cosmo, or one of thousands of others in the same genre. Soak them in. Admire the pretty people.

Fantasize about their fabulous lives. Wish and dream about being like them, or even just knowing them, and being close to their world. Feel just a little bit smaller.

Now put the magazine down. Leave it open to a picture if you like, it doesn’t matter. It might even help. Shift your attention away from it though, and instead watch the dizzying array of people parading before you. Yeah. You know where I’m going with this don’t you?

Of all the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people walking past you, how many look like the models in the magazine? I’ll tell you. None. Not one. Not a single goddamned one of them. Not even the ones who are desperately trying to look like them. Hell, if one of the actual models from the magazine happened to walk by, even they wouldn’t look like their media image portrays them.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Don’t look away just yet! You’re only half way through the exercise. Keep watching the parade. Watch until you find yourself revelling in the variety, until you realise where true beauty lies, until you realise it’s all subjective and the whole playing field constantly shifts and is only made up of our individual judgements based on our own needs and insecurities. Until you realise that what you see passing before you is an intricate and dazzling display of human beauty in all its forms and that in actual fact it is the media image in its inaccurate simplicity that generally fails to capture that depth.

Repeat the exercise as often as possible, until you really actually get the truth of it. Afterwards, continue to buy those magazines if you want, but for goodness sakes, keep them in perspective.

How to blog successfully

Old School blogging starts at an early age!

If I had a penny for every time somebody asked me: “Shark, how do you become a successful blogger?” I’d be a successful blogger! The truth of the matter is that there’s no real formula for success except a lot of patience and hard work. Sure, you could become an instant hit on the internet, like Charlie Sheen’s Twitter account, but those kind of success stories are few and far between.

My observation on how to become a successful blogger is as follows:

CONTENT, CONTENT AND MORE CONTENT. Like a real estate agent espousing the famous quip, “location, location, location,” so too does a blogger need content, content, and content. I should add “relevant” to the front of that. Most successful blogs on the internet have interesting content, whether that be a political pundit writing about the coming collapse of Medicare, or somebody taking pictures of famous celebrities and using Microsoft Paint to draw funny faces on them; either way, these blogs are visited because people enjoy the content.

POST EVERY DAY. There’s nothing worse than visiting an interesting blog and seeing that it hasn’t been updated since 2007 or something like that. This is a real tragedy if the blogger’s archive contains golden nuggets of wisdom and social commentary. It almost makes you mad to find a brilliant mind that stopped producing. Granted, the blogger might have died, but if he or she just stopped updating their blog, I wish they would either post something to that effect, or just delete their blog altogether. That reminds me, I have several blogs I need to delete, my bad.

HAVE MULTIPLE CONTRIBUTORS. The reason why this blog is destined for success, I hope, is the fact that we have a variety of contributors with differing thoughts, styles, and opinions. In fact, if you came to this blog and didn’t notice that we were different people, you’d think the blogger had a multiple personality disorder or at least ADD or OCD. What other person would write about Texas Tater Twisters one day and post poetry about a well the next? Having multiple contributors also ensures that the content is varied, and takes the stress off one person having to post every day. It really is hard coming up with fresh things, and with multiple contributors I can take a breather knowing that somebody will post and keep the blog rolling. It’s very comforting to know that.

VISIT OTHER BLOGS. A successful blogger is a voracious reader of other blogs. Reading what other people are writing about helps you to formulate ideas of your own. This is particularly useful if you are suffering from writer’s block. When visiting other people’s blogs it’s also important to leave commentary. It’s not only polite, but the blogger gets a real sense of accomplishment from knowing that somebody actually took the time to read what they had posted. Leaving commentary also means that some people might read your comment and click on your link back to your blog. I don’t know how many times I’ve found a great blog just by reading the excellent commentary left on somebody’s blog and following the commentator back to their blog.

BE PROACTIVE. This follows what I previously posted about commentary. Be out there in cyberspace, join forums, link clubs, chat, post and be proactive. Nobody is going to find your blog unless you make yourself heard, or you utilize excellent tag lines or eye-catching topic titles. Twitter is also a great place to get new followers fast, but be prepared for a possible spam storm or an information overload.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your blog!

Word of the Day: obscene, profane, and vulgar

Today’s words are all adjectives and they all have similar meanings, but each word has a different quality.

The word obscene suggests something that is offensive to decency or morality and which is abominable, disgusting, or repulsive. For me the Jerry Springer Show comes to mind as the perfect example of something that is obscene par excellence. However, the word can also be used to describe something that is in greater excess than it ought to be. For example: obscene wealth. A great example of an obscene word is cocksucker, one of the late George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. It’s nicely offensive isn’t it? And it’s certainly indecent and possibly immoral.

Moving on to profane, then. This word in its noun form: profanity, is often used to encapsulate all “bad” and “dirty” words, but the word profane itself has religious connotations. It’s the antonym of the word sacred. Something that is profane is characterized by an irreverence or contempt for God or sacred principles or things. I’ve never been particularly religious, but to me, the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church – pretty much everything they do – but particularly their picketing the funerals of soldiers and marines killed in action. Well, to me that’s just profane. They are the antithesis of everything decent and honest and good in this world.

Finally, the word vulgar pretty much describes much of the content of MTV these days. Vulgarity is characterized by a complete ignorance of or a total lack of good breeding and taste. (See: Jersey Shore) It’s inelegant, unrefined, ribald, low. In Shakespeare’s time, the word vulgar meant “common,” in a Kate Middleton-ish kind of way. Basically not royalty. Even farther back the word vulgar meant “vernacular.” At one time there was huge controversy over the first bible written in a vernacular (non-Latin) language. It was called the “Vulgate” bible. Interesting, huh?

Until next time…

Great moments from The Local

Going to the doctor in Sweden…

There are different ways of getting medical treatment in Sweden. First of all you can call and make appointment with a certain doctor or nurse practitioner, which usually works out just fine for non-emergency stuff. Most of the time there are appointments available the same day or the next day to see a normal GP or NP. Getting an appointment with a specialist takes longer of course (and you have to be referred) but Sweden is certainly not unique in that regard.

However, if you need to see a doctor the same day, and there aren’t any appointments available, you have two options. Option number one is to do what I did this morning and have your name added to the drop-in list. This is like having an appointment without having an appointment. I called my local vårdcentral (medical clinic) this morning and asked if there we’re any appointments after lunch because I needed to see a doctor as soon as possible about these pollen allergies. The person on the phone said there weren’t any appointments, but that they had drop-in hours until noon. Otherwise I’d have to wait until tomorrow. I’d said I’d rather not so she added my name to the list. This meant that they could expect to see me sometime between the time I hung up the phone (around 9:30) and 12. I left work at ten and got the the doctor’s office around 10:30.

After checking in and paying for the appointment, I sat down and waited. And waited. Aaaand waited. There was a full waiting room today so I knew it would be a while. I was wishing I had my Kindle with me, but rather than amuse myself with the small selection of out-of-date magazines, I sat quietly and casually listened to the coughs and moans and complaints of other patients waiting for same-day but not necessarily emergency treatment.

Finally, after waiting for about an hour and a half my name was called, and I was taken to an examination room where I was left for another ten minutes: “The doctor will be with you shortly.” Why do that always do that?

The doctor came in and I told her about how I’d been up all last night and unable to breathe while lying down, and that my eyes and throat were so itchy it was driving me crazy. The two different allergy tablets I had bought last week weren’t helping at all. No, she said, it doesn’t matter how many of those you take, taking more won’t increase their efficacy. She prescribed me some stronger tablets and some eye drops for pollen allergy suffers. I asked about cortisone injections, since that was recommended to me earlier today, but she informed me that they no longer give those injections. (I wonder why not…) They do give cortisone tablets, though, to people who have it really bad. She said to try the tablets and eye drops for a week and then if I was still suffering, she’d prescribe the cortisone. The conversation I had with her lasted no longer than 5 minutes. I then spent another 15 minutes in the pharmacy waiting to pick up my prescriptions.

All in all, the whole process, from the time I checked in to the time I paid for the medicine, took about two hours. This is not bad at all, especially when one considers the second must-see-a-doctor-today option. Of course I mean the so-called emergency room. If you have to go to the ER, then don’t make any plans for the rest of the day. Or night. And you might want to clear tomorrow as well.

And it will cost you three times as much and you’ll end up waiting three times as long as going to the vårdcentral. Thankfully, I’ve had to visit the ER only once since I’ve been living in Sweden, but it was a genuine medical emergency. I was having an allergic reaction to a medication I’d been prescribed, and the person on the ask-a-nurse hotline told me to go to the emergency room immediately. She asked if I needed an ambulance as well, but the hospital was only a short bus ride away so I said I could make it on my own. When I got there I talked to the intake staff who took down my information and gave me some medicines to stabilize me. Then they sent me to the waiting room, where I believe I waited for at least four hours. By the time I got to see a doctor I was feeling pretty much fine, but they wanted to keep me overnight for observation anyway. This was because stopping my medication suddenly (the one I was allergic to) could bring on a seizure.

Everything worked out just fine, by the way. No seizures. Even the nurses knew there was nothing wrong with me. They delivered my medicine in the morning but said I could get up and get my own breakfast off the cart. No problem, I thought. Let them take care of the people who really are ill.