As Dan and I have taken to watching the Nightly News, we’ve seen quite a lot lately about the rising rate of foreclosures and the mortgage crisis. Even after such prolonged exposure to the trauma that families are facing, no longer able to afford their homes, I remain hardhearted to any kind of bailout. I believe that the crisis arose from the fact that a large percentage of the people now losing their homes had no business taking out mortgages in the first place. But more on that in a moment.

The other day, I led a discussion with my students about the rhetoric of advertising. We were examining an ad from The Body Shop that had the tagline “There are 3 billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only 8 who do,” accompanied by a photo of a naked, Rubenesque plastic doll with a Barbie head stuck on her, posed seductively on a couch. By a very large majority, my students were repulsed by the image and could not wrap their heads around the message of the ad: that women need to become comfortable with not conforming to supermodel standards. Instead, a significant portion of my female students argued that it’s not that hard to look like a supermodel, and that there are more than 8 women who do, and, essentially, “I’m as hot as a supermodel, so don’t try to tell me I’m not.” There was nothing I could do to get them to even open their minds, let alone change them.
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I’ve noticed lately that when I look at the Weather Channel’s ten-day forecast, it occasionally has hints underneath the temperature bar. When they’re things like, “Get the Golf Forecast,” I tend not to pay attention. But today, TWC is advising me to “Get the family out of town” three times in the next ten days. Do they know something I don’t?

I could see if they always used that tag for weekends that maybe they’re trying to promote some of their vacation sponsors (the link does, in fact, go to their “Family Travel Destinations” section). To use it on weekdays, though, and three times over the next ten, seems a little weird. This, coupled with their recent banners that “Something is going around” (which links to their flu report) and “Aren’t you glad we predict more than the weather?” makes me feel like TWC is moving into sensationalist territory.

Trying to get to Einstein Bros. for lunch today, we saw some Clinton supporters at the corner of Hawthorne and Montrose. They were vigorously holding up signs and shouting out “Hillary!” at the passing cars, and they were getting a few honks. The first time we passed them (entering the parking lot), I simply shook my head at them. Finding the parking lot full, Dan circled the block and headed for Boston Market instead, which meant that we passed them a second time. As we were about to come upon them again, I asked Dan, “Should I give them the finger or an ‘O’?” He just chuckled, but as we passed, I this time held up both hands to the car window in a big “O.”

On my way back to my car after teaching this morning, I noticed along the way that there was a trail of lost Gummi bears on the ground. Every few feet was another bear, rolled in dirt. They weren’t scattered like a whole bag had exploded; they were more like Hansel and Gretl’s breadcrumbs, one here, one there. It was very sad. (Those of you who know about my former addiction to sour Gummi bears will understand how sad.) Bears overboard!

I got a phone call from my brother while I was at the library Saturday morning. He was calling to invite us to go to the zoo with them, but I informed him that I was working at least until lunchtime. His reaction: “Loser!” My response: “Grad student!”

Tomorrow in class, I’ll be talking to my students about framing the debate — how to control your reader’s reaction by selecting words, choosing which pieces of evidence to present, etc. I was looking this evening at the website for the Greater Houston Partnership, which is sponsoring presidential debates before the Texas primaries on March 4, and I couldn’t help noticing how they’ve chosen to frame their presentations of the Democratic candidates.

On their Meet the Candidates page, they have short blurbs about each of the contenders still in the primaries on both sides. The difference between the way Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are presented, however, is rather glaring:

Hillary R. Clinton is a Democratic Senator representing New York, and is the former First Lady of the United States of America.

Barack Obama has served for eight years on the Illinois State Senate and is a member of the Democratic Party.

So, Clinton is noted for her time in the U.S. Senate as well as in the White House — the points she tries to emphasize in her talk of “35 years of experience.” Obama, by contrast, for all someone could tell just from reading this page, is presented as no more than a state legislator. While their “More” links go to the candidates’ profiles of themselves on their own campaign websites, I have a hard time believing that these blurbs were submitted to the GHP by the candidates’ campaigns. I can only assume that the organizers at the GHP are Clinton supporters, hoping to undercut Obama.

Thanks to Amanda, I have a new time-waster blog to mess around with: Ikea Hacker. They invite hacks from people around the world on how to improve upon Ikea’s already useful and elegantly simple designs. The most common hacks are ways to contain or maintain pets in a minimum of space with the maximum aesthetic appeal. There are also desk improvements, lamps, media centers, etc. I’ve already spent at least an hour marvelling over people’s designs, and I’ve only gone through the past two months’ hacks.

As observed on campus: When did it become OK to wear brown shoes with an otherwise black-hued outfit? Seriously, over the last few months I’ve started seeing this with alarming and increasing frequency. And it’s a phenomenon contaminating both sexes: I see girls in black skirts with black tights and then brown boots; I see guys with a dark blue or black sweater, black pants, and then brown shoes. Aren’t there sort of basic rules of fashion, and isn’t black-and-brown-don’t-go-together one of them? I thought that was right up there with stripes and plaid.

This is not a generational thing, either. I see this among my colleagues as much as I do among the students. I’m baffled.

In front of Cloverfield yesterday, we again saw the preview for 10,000 B.C. As usual, I just had to laugh at all the anachronisms in it. For example, I have a hard time believing that in 10,000 B.C., there were large-scale city-states with military forces that could be marshaled against other large armies, as the film seems to depict. The consensus in the academic community seems to be that the first civilizations arose about 4000 B.C., and I doubt the Sumerians had thousands of warriors with coordinating outfits and matching spears. None of this is to say I won’t see the movie, but it will be with large grains of anachronistic salt to put on my popcorn.

But aside from all that, the marketing of the film itself is laughable. The opening tag is “Before everything we know lies a legend never told.” I can’t even quite parse what that’s supposed to mean. How do we know there’s a legend if it’s before everything we know? And if it was “never told,” where did we get this “legend” from? As always, I started giggling immediately, and I leaned over and mentioned this to Dan. He replied that it must be part of the “silent” oral tradition, which set me off. I couldn’t stop laughing until well into the next trailer, which I think was for Iron Man.

[NB: The "silent" oral tradition thing is very funny, because for my research I study the clash between the authority of the oral tradition (like folklore) and its diminishment in the face of the rise of print culture in Britain. I guess in the "silent" oral tradition, if you listen very carefully ... you will hear nothing at all. But there's a legend in that silence, apparently.]

I have to figure out how to tell my students this semester about my pregnancy. It seemed a bit much to bring it up on the first day today: “Hi, I’ll be teaching you this semester, and also, in about six months, well after our semester is over, I’ll be having a baby.” On the other hand, I feel like I have to comment on it at some point, so they’re not just thinking, “Hey, she’s getting really fat.” It’s not the kind of thing that I want to have a discussion with them about, either, so to make announcement at some point seems like making too big a deal out of it.

Incidentally, I had a student come up to me after class, after I had just finished my speech about how there are no excused absences in my class and how I’m not flexible about that, to tell me that his girlfriend is going to have their baby any day now, and he’s going to be out for a week, and to ask whether I’d make an exception for that. I winced internally, out of sympathy, but still had to say, “No, I’m sorry, there are no excused absences.”