Book Report~ Trust Me, I'm Lying: True Confessions of a Media Manipulator

Ryan Holiday starts his book off with this story: late one night, he defaced some billboards advertising Tucker Max's movie I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.  He then took photos of his act and e-mailed them to several bloggers.

The twist? Holiday was Max's publicist.  The whole thing was a trick to generate false controversy surrounding the comedian and the movie.  It's cheaper than buying ad time, and a whole lot more effective in its spread.

Holiday also works for American Apparel, and spent some time manufacturing shit-storms for them as well.  He made mock-up "ad proofs" that were even more offensive than that company's usual fare and "leaked" them to bloggers he knew would write about it.  The scandal was picked up by aggregator sites like Gawker and finally made it to major media outlets like CNN.com.

On the Internet, news often filters upwards: small time bloggers -> Gawker.com and its affiliate sites -> major media affiliates.  The source tree, obviously, works in reverse.  Cliches are the normal order of business: any publicity is good publicity; being first is more important than being right, etc.

Naturally, when this sort of stupidity worked against him instead of for him, Holiday saw the light and (supposedly) swore off media manipulation and then wrote a tell-all book so we can all be warned.

Two things stood out to me about this: 1) He's a partisan hack (the conservative activist who nailed ACORN is called evil while the author himself was merely savvy) and 2) He places a foolish amount of trust in old school journalism, particularly the New York Times.

Fair warning: I didn't actually finish the book. I tried, oh, I tried.  But the sad truth is, the part after explaining how he manipulated the media is boring and repetitive. It's a catalogue of screeds against the way news works on the internet in general and those who wronged him in particular, and I lost interest long before he allegedly got around to laying out a solution. And I'm not certain I'd trust his solution anyway.

Still, I think it's an interesting read, at least Parts I and II, even though the crazy starts showing in the second part.  I was reading it at the time the Boston bombing occurred, and the rush to be first and wrong was painfully evident.  Reading his explanation of how to create controversies from whole cloth came in handy during the recent brouhaha surrounding the CEO of a company I'll only refer to as Bathercrombie and Titch publicly insulting millions of potential customers.

All in all, it's a handy reminder of the Second Rule of the Internet: Do Not Feed the Trolls*.  Handy reading.

(The first rule? It's all about pussy, be it cat pictures or porn.)

Random things you may or may not have known about me.

('Cause I need blogfodder, and lack cat pictures.)

1. Although I have both a (half-) sister and a brother, I was raised as an only child. None of the three of us grew up together.
2. When I was a kid, I regularly would say I wanted 12 kids.  I've never wanted fewer than four.
3. For a pretty long portion of my childhood, I thought that the world itself had existed in black and white, because of the old photos.  I know one other person who also believed this as a child, but I won't out him/her, because I actually like him/her.
4. I used to own a cat named Tamale, who was brain-damaged because he walked into a fan at my dad's shop.  I also used to own a dog named Hamburger because someone had dragged him down the road behind their vehicle (whether on purpose or not we don't know) and that's what the poor thing's head looked like when we found him.  Other food-based pet names included French Fry and Dorito. (French Fry had a curly tail & Dorito was orange.)
5. I won third place in a short story contest in high school for a pretty overwrought piece of nonsense I dashed off in one night and turned in unedited.  I got nothing but bragging rights and a bound copy of all the contest entries for this dubious feat.
6. I had contacts at 16 and again at 28, but something was off with the prescription for the latter pair so I never wore them. I didn't go back & complain because I'm fairly certain it was my fault they were off.  I have a stupid amount of anxiety over the whole "Which is better, this one...or this one?" part of an eye exam.
7. I am becoming sorely tempted to hold my husband down and give him a buzz cut. Although I dig facial hair, long head hear gets to me for some reason.
8. It took me ten years to learn how to knit competently.  I want to learn how to spin, but all the directions I have read don't make sense to me.
9. I hate watching videos online, and generally won't click on anything longer than about 90 seconds.
10. As a kid I ate frog legs, rattlesnake, and crawfish with no problem, but as an adult the idea of any of those turns my stomach.  Similarly, I used to love bleu cheese but one night when I was around 20 or 21, I gagged on it and can't stomach it anymore.
11. On my own I sing alto, but I sing soprano when doing harmonies, or so I've been told. When we lived in Connecticut I was asked to be in the church choir, but I only went to one practice before chickening out. It wasn't singing in front of people that got to me, but practicing in a room full of strangers.
12.  I've been baptized twice, once in a Baptist church in Ohio and once in St Mark's Episcopal church here.  I have no clue why the re-dunking was done. The Baptist church did full immersion, in what to my five-year-old eyes seemed like a giant swimming pool. It was overly-chlorinated.  My cousin Shane told me to keep my eyes open when I went underwater 'cause it looked cool, so I did and it burned.  
13. Growing up, heavy metal was always just kind of there because this is San Antonio and you can't totally avoid it. I remember a family friend with a rather lurid (and, as an adult-looking-back, highly offensive) G'n'R t-shirt for the song "Sweet Child o' Mine", and my uncle listened to it some as well, but it was mostly country and southern rock in our house and country or oldies with my dad, so I never got into heavy metal.  So it wasn't until I got married the second time and had a second husband abruptly cease to want to listen to country music (and seriously what are the odds of that?) that I discovered how very much of that genre annoys the living fuck out of me.  Probably doesn't help that I want my metal to be truly heavy and Erik tends more toward the brainy/boring prog rock.
14. I can neither swim nor ride a bicycle. I had swimming lessons probably four or five times and never could get it down.  I cannot hold my breath for longer than about 10 seconds, which I think has something to do with it. When it comes to the bicycle thing, I was given a bike with training wheels as a child and no help actually figuring the damn thing out. I had no clue the training wheels were supposed to be uneven to teach me balance.  I actually care more about the bike thing than the swimming thing, and I'm fairly certain I've talked about both on this blog before, but I'm too damn lazy to look it up.
15. I have learned how to sew on a machine two or three times now, but it's not a skill I ever retain for very long. I don't know why this is.  I first learned in high school, where I took a re-named (I no longer recall to what) Home Ec, then taught myself again while pregnant with Bobbie.  I remain fairly handy at hand-sewing, though I have never been able to get my stitches properly even.

In which I overanalyze a song.

(Hey, it's Sunday! Traditionally my music-sharing day anyhow.)

Classic country seems to run in cycles much the same as the more commercial stuff does, and with two classic country stations in town these days (KBUC & KKYX, both of which have live streams; KKYX is much better) I'm hearing a lot of this song, even though it's older than I am:



Here are the lyrics, if like me you have no interest in playing videos online:

Too many times I didn't try to hold you
I never kept the promises I told you
Now it's time I give in I know
To the words that I should have said long

-CHORUS--
Lady lay down beside me
Wrap all your love around me
I need you to stay, don't turn away from me now
Lady lay down


You've been alone, I guess I've known about it
You gave me love and learned to live without it
Now that you've turned to go
Let me beg you to stay the best way I

-Repeat CHORUS 2Xs- 

(By the way: damn, songs were short back then!)

I have this habit of overanalyzing songs, and I'll admit that although I love John Conlee a lot of his hits just don't stand up to strict scrutiny: "Common Man" expects the woman to give up her life for the guy because somehow being rich is inherently wrong, the gal in "Old School" doesn't do a damn thing wrong for most of the song, etc.  Sometime I'll go on a whole rant about how women are looked down on in country music in general (exhibit A: Marty Robbins's "Devil Woman").

But for now, this song.

Read those lyrics, please, if you haven't already. What we have in this song is a woman who has admittedly been treated badly by her lover (husband, presumably) for a long time and has now had enough and is ready to leave.  What's the man's response? "Honey, let's have sex!"

Uh...Look, I know it's just a song, but at their best songs reflect our lives and offer some insight to them.  And this song was a number one hit. It's incredibly popular even now, judging by the number of covers of it on YouTube.  There are probably lots of babies that exist because of this song, and for all the hell I know, I'm one of them.

And the advice in it is just shitty. I hate this.  Men, take note: sex doesn't fix anything. It's the most fun thing in the world, yes, but if you've treated your wife poorly enough for long enough that she decides to leave and you pull this trick, the best you can hope for is to be laughed at as she walks out the door.

I could probably do a whole series on songs with poor advice, eh?

Six months ago

On 15th November, I was the mom of four girls with a baby on the way.  This was a Thursday.  On Wednesday, I had had a midwife's appointment, a non-stress test (wherein I sat in a chair, was hooked up to a fetal heart rate monitor and a contraction monitor, and given a button to push every time the baby kicked), and an ultrasound where the technician said my fluid levels were fine, the baby was head down and engaged, and a little under 8lbs.

I had a c-section scheduled for Monday, when I'd hit 42 weeks.  VBAC patients are not typically induced.

Thursday was spent walking, walking, walking. Nothing unusual. We decided to go to Lulu's Cafe for dinner & by the time I got there I was having regular contractions, each about two minutes apart and a minute long. Now, this had happened before, quite recently, but this was different. How I knew it was real this time remains a mystery (I knew it was real every time I went into labor on my own, and I have no idea how).

A very long story somewhat shorter, shortly after 3 in the morning on the 16th Erik's shocked voice said "It's a boy!" and a very wet critter was put on my tummy.

And my world changed.

I could pontificate on this...But really, most of my readers have kids.  Doug is special and amazing and wonderful, but y'all have special and amazing and wonderful kids.

If you don't know how each kid changes you, how the little ones settle into your world until it is as though they have always been there somehow, it's not something I can explain. If you know it already, I don't have to explain.

As I write this, he is crawling around on the living room floor, fussing. I just put my arms down and said "Come here, Son my sun."  I've been calling him Son-Sun since he was born, I think, and it's so very apt.  I never wanted a boy, but when I had Douglas I realized instantaneously that I wanted him, very very badly.  (Erik can tell you that I spent probably a good five minutes or more right after Doug's birth crying & touching the baby and saying his name over and over again.)

And now I have him. And have never felt more blessed.

Kids today!

You know what's the problem with kids today?

Adults today.

Seriously.  Especially adults involved in the government school system.  Put simply, they are treating these kids like total idiots.

A trio of stories, to illustrate:

Story the First: Remember wearing your Halloween costume to school in elementary? Yeah, that's not so much a thing anymore. The girls' current school forbids it altogether. Why? Not, as you might first assume, because some kids don't celebrate it. (Don't get me started on Jesusween...) No, because some kids might be scared by the costumes. F'r real, y'all, that was the explanation given on the note sent home the week before.  Even the last school they went to that did allow costumes to be worn expressly prohibited anything that might be scary--not ghosts, ghouls, zombies, vampires, etc. (Nothing "promoting violence" either, 'cause guns are bad, mmkay.)

Story the Second: A couple of weeks ago, Bobbie came home and said she'd been disappointed that day in PE because she didn't get to participate. Why not? Seems she'd been one of the kids selected to help monitor the other kids. Where were the coaches, whose job it presumably actually is to monitor the kids? At one certain part of this game, standing there watching constantly to ensure none of the kids cheated. To recap: half the PE class couldn't play the game because they were monitoring the other half of the PE class, except for one certain station where the coaches were monitoring them, because the operating belief was that the kids would cheat.

Story the Third: Mark is working at one of the local playhouses here in SA. He was at work yesterday when a teenage couple came in to watch the show. Seems it was his prom night. So why weren't they at the prom? They had been turned away. Because prom dates who were from different schools had to pre-register and presumably be approved by the school beforehand, and although she actually had registered, no one from the school had ever contacted her to finish the approval process.

Ooh, I just thought of one more thing, so you get a Bonus Story: My oldest two girls are above grade-level in reading. Like, no longer elementary school level (Bobbie hit 6th grade reading level in 3rd grade, and Linda's a better reader).  Their school library has very few books at their level, and most of these they have read already. Not all, though. See, they're only allowed to check out one "difficult" book at a time--for their other book, they have to check out a grade-level book  Also, there is a computerized reading program they use which is actively trying to force them to read more slowly.  See, they read the passage at their normal speed, and the program responds with something along the lines of "There's no way you read that that quickly, try again."

Common Thread? The beautifully-put soft bigotry of low expectations.

I find it incredibly hard to believe that kids today really are that dumb. Mine certainly are not, and although I have the typical parental pride in my offspring, I doubt they're truly that rare. I bet most kids are pretty smart.

But they are being treated, actively, as though they are stupid.  I am reminded again of Neal Boortz's claim that Education majors are basically the dumbest people to make it to college. It's beginning to seem as though not only is this true, but they're actively trying to pull everyone else down
to their level.

Expect excellence from kids, and you're not going to be rewarded with stupid little lumps.

Expect kids to be stupid little lumps, and, well...Self-fulfilling prophecy time.

Some Mid-Week Silliness for You

This commercial holds a special place in my heart, because as much as riding the bus has always been a class issue here in San Antonio, we were car-less for most of my childhood. Also, I watched way too much TV back then.

I feel a sudden urge to crochet a Buppet. I miss those old mascots more than I probably should.  They did sell stuffed ones, I think. I think I even had one at one point, but God knows what happened to it now.

There are still current bus drivers who remember me from when I was a kid, by the way. Not too many these days, but Mr. Bell and Mr. Dugie are still driving.

Oh, and fair warning (which is probably too late--HA-ha!), if you watch that commercial, your brain will be singing "Via via! Via via!" for at least the next 18 hours.

I'm sure y'all know the answer to this problem, right?

Other than forcing Jim Forsyth to take remedial grammar classes, that is.

Stunning Stat: 677 Arrested for DWI in Bexar in April.

Yeah, that's right! Universal background checks for guns!

In all seriousness, I have a problem with this.  In 2010 (the most recent year for which I have been able to find statistics), 1270 people were killed in drunk driving accidents (source) in Texas.  The same year, 805 were killed by guns. (source)

Looking at totals, in 2010, 10,136 total people were killed by drunk drivers in the US.  Total for firearms? 8,775.  (In 2011, now that I've found the info, the totals were 9,878 by drunk drivers and 8,583 by guns--a narrower gap, but still a gap.) (source)

Obviously, the nation has a problem.  Just as obviously, we're concerned about the wrong one.

The same people on my Facebook vociferously concerned about gun deaths have said exactly jack and shit about needing to lower DUI fatalities.  They aren't calling for tougher DUI laws (though that wouldn't help any more than tougher gun laws). They aren't calling for tougher DUI penalties.  They sure as hell aren't talking about effecting a societal change that would actually make a difference as far as DUIs go. (As I've said before, they're socially acceptable.)

Priorities, they be misplaced.

I finally figured it out

It has been my position for some time now that gun control isn't just about control but in fact about keeping certain populations subservient. I've told other women this before. Anyone who doesn't want you to have a gun wants you to be an easier victim.

What is in this for men (not all men, obviously) is painfully obvious. Women who are not empowered to defend themselves are easier to control. Easier to rape. Easier to abuse.  Easier to dominate.

But what never made sense to me was women--self-described feminists, for the most part--who also don't want women to have guns.

How can it be feminist and pro-woman to want women to be easier victims? How can it be pro-woman to want that topless protester chick to not only be still not asking for it (which she isn't; don't get me wrong there) but to be able to say I DON'T FUCKING THINK SO in the most forceful way possible?

It's not.

So for the longest time, I was confused.  I even tried drinking vast amounts so as to lower my cognitive functions to the level where it would seem like a good idea. No dice.

But I finally figured it out this morning as I was loading groceries into the truck, so apparently an acute lack of sleep (weekend Houston trip) is what I needed.

Here it is (and I suspect it will elicit a collective No shit, Sherlock from my male readers):

Left-leaning feminists benefit from keeping women as a permanent victim class.  I am still not entirely certain why this is--God knows there's plenty of misogyny still ingrained in our society without manufacturing bullshit that harms women.  I haven't a clue what the end game is.  Using the government to resurrect some sort of woman-centric society that probably never was?  Continually feeling superior to those of us who dirty our hands?

You know, thinking on it, I think it is more likely to be the latter.

There is an undercurrent of elitism with most of the Progressives I know. From the business-owner bragging about how much Obamacare saved her on her health insurance who doesn't care that it creates a burden for people who aren't magically going to be able to afford the requirement for insurance (especially not once their employer cuts their hours because of the law) to the people doing the "food stamp challenge" to I guess show solidarity right on up to Barbara fucking Ehrenreich and her assumption in Nickel and Dimed that her whiteness earned her a waitressing job, I have seen Oh, you poor thing, you can't take care of yourself so let me appoint someone to take care of you implied so often I could puke.

Much as Progressives love having a permanent poverty class to feel magnanimous toward, it seems that they get a nice little injection of smug every time some poor black woman is shot by the drug dealer next door.  That sort of thing never happens around here is a very common thought (I've blogged about the efforts some women go through to avoid criminals and feel safe before).  A woman gets beaten to death by her ex-husband? Oh, poor dear. But my husband would never do anything like that.

I really think that must be it. Why else concentrate on laws that so increase the cost of gun ownership?

(Mostly) Wordless Wednesday--I forgot to come up with something to write about today...

Some random WTFery I've come across recently, or in a couple of cases made myself:

In praise of narrowness.

When it comes to music, anyway.

My husband and I have pretty similar music tastes, which as I've said before was one of the things that attracted me to him.  I even agree with his position on the importance of genre for categorizing music.  The argument, and I think it is a good one, is that categorizing music is important because it helps you to find music you're going to like more quickly.  For someone who has recently taken to bitching about the lack of targeted advertising on Spotify (really, what part of me listening to Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys indicates I'm interested in the new Selena Gomez album? She's not even the right Selena.), the concept of genre still retains quite a bit of importance. Like I said in my last post on the subject, I like both kinds of music: country and western.  If I bring up Windows Media Player in the Start menu, Chris Knight's self-titled CD pops up twice.

So I'm all for genre, and subgenres for that matter. Especially when you have shitty catch-all genres like Americana. Oh, Americana, how I hate thee. KNBT out of New Braunfels is an Americana station and they will play Hayes Carll, Etta James, and Alabama Shakes all in a row. Now, I do happen to like all of those artists, but sonically speaking they do not go together.  Once you muddy the waters of genre by throwing anything in there, you might as well not have a method of categorization at all.

Which, when it comes down to it, is one of the reasons I dislike calling the modern Nashville sound country music at all. I'd wager that to most people my age and older, the words conjure thoughts of Hank Sr, Waylon Jennings, and George Strait. Now, those three men sound pretty different, but you can draw a line through sonic similarities. And, to be fair, you can draw a similar line through Eric Church, Brad Paisley, and Blake Shelton. You cannot, however, draw a line through Hank Sr to Eric Church, or even a new-New Traditionalist like Brad Paisley, not if you're being honest. (Sorry, Erik, he's still one of the country-est sounding dudes in Nashville, at least if you look at who's getting air play.) I'm not even certain you could draw a line between, say, Alan Jackson and Jason Aldean, and they're roughly contemporaries. However, you can draw a damn near straight line between Merle Haggard and the likes of Jason Boland, or Kris Kristofferson and Chris Knight (er, other than the name similarities). 

Seriously, which sounds more like a pair you'd hear on the same station, this:



and this:



or that first song and this:



Er, well, you should probably trust me on that one.  I wouldn't wish "Dirt Road Anthem" on anyone. I've only ever been forced to listen to it once, and it got Aldean on my list of people I wouldn't pee on to put out the fire.

So yeah, categorization is important when it comes to consumer goods. If you want to sell them anyway.  (Some time I will rant about how frustrating I find it to have Fantasy and Science Fiction so often lumped together.)

Now, here is where my husband and I really differ: he will still rant about the narrow-tastes accusation.  And honestly, I think that sort of concern over image only plays into the hands of the monogenre folks. "Only good music matters." Well, yeah, but odds are any two given people will find all of the same music good are just about nil. (Hell, my husband will wax happy about Rush, while I think Geddy Lee sounds like a squirrel on meth and find the band's subject matter alternately boring and tiresome.)  But "I like all sorts of music" only aids those who want to deemphasize genre boundaries, and when we come right down to it, most of us are really only fans of one or two genres of music.  To again use myself and my husband as examples: in the past few days I've listened to Bob Wills, Everclear, Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, Steve Earle, and Fort Minor (a side project of the rapper from Linkin Park), but what have I bought recently? Well, Corb Lund (a gift for my husband which I fully intended to benefit from), Chris Knight and, well, Chris Knight.  Erik, on the other hand, may boast he owns Kelly Clarkson and Evanescence albums in addition to Merle Haggard and Iron Maiden, but every damn time I've opened his iPod lately to run it through the truck's speakers, I've had to navigate away from either Queensrÿche or Accept, and with one exception (the Charlie Daniels Band compilation A Decade of Hits), the only country music the dude has bought in at least a year has been gifts for me.  Not broad at all, and I strongly suspect that most folks are like that--you may listen to, say, blues and jazz and country and prog metal and bluegrass and hip-hop, but when you go to buy stuff, you're buying only one or two of those genres.  And that's fine. But it's also why saying genre doesn't matter is silly--money tells the tale, and if advertisers want actual return on their money, they would do well to ignore the "just good music" nonsense and put in a little algorithm effort to try to tailor ads for a certain artist to people who might actually buy that person's products.

Ugh..Just, ugh.

I guess one of the overarching themes of this blog is a sense of dissatisfaction with my life.  I try really hard to not fall into the trap of negative thinking. It's not magical thinking or some The Secret-inspired nonsense, just a deep abiding belief that life is more good than bad, on the whole. But I seem to be in a multi-year downward swing, with only little ups if I look at things as a whole, so obviously I'm falling into the negativity trap.

I'm reminded of Borepatch's comments about life talking in its outside voice, and..yeah.  I've been prone to periods of depression probably my whole life, some longer than others, and I am finally starting to pull out of one but it's clinging like tar to my heels.

It is not, I want to be clear, postpartum depression, or even the baby blues. On the contrary, Doug, Marie, and the older girls have been the shining light in all of this.  There is, still, nothing I like to do more than cuddle one of my children close and smell the top of their head. I am certain it will always be so, though there will probably be some wrestling to accomplish this once they're in their thirties. I'll have to get a cudgel to whack 'em on the backs of their knees.

But anyway...

There are conversations I need to have, like those deep meaningful ones that move mountains and such, but I suck balls when it comes to being tactful. I'm edging closer and closer to the point where I don't give a flying fuck about it, though.  Which is going to be bad, and probably just as useless as every other conversation I've had with grownups lately.

I am also sitting here a lot second-guessing myself. I have never pretended to be anything other than a judgmental bitch when it comes down to it.  I know that hobbies are one of those things that should really be all good so long as they're not harmful, but I'm partial to those that produce something tangible. And while God knows I get obsessive preoccupations, there comes a point when that obsession needs to be turned elsewhere because if it's not outright hurting your relationships it's at least causing stagnation in your life when you need to move forward.

But then maybe I'm just being completely fucking shallow and trying to assign deeper meaning to something that is simply standing on my last nerve.  And maybe it's actually okay to object based upon that, but I don't know.;

Oh, also, I'm once again trying to blog more frequently, so you get brain vomit.  I'll go back to bitching about politics and music soon, promise.

Oh, this baby, he is giving me a run for my money

Apparently, along with "boy diapers are easier to change than girl diapers", people were also lying when they told me boys develop more slowly than do girls.

Because Doug started this army-crawling stuff before he was 5 months old (which was the 16th of this month), thereby making him my earliest-mobile baby.

Wordless Wednesday: Doug in a Mug

Let's all play the blame game!

One of my Facebook friends shared a photo this morning pointing the finger at people claiming that the Boston Marathon bombing happened because we're a "Godless country".  I pointed out to her that I could make a similar graphic of people at Fark.com blaming the Right.

Well, I did:

Now, please note a couple of things here.  For starters, Fark.com is a left-leaning site.  That makes it completely unsurprising that most of the fingers are pointed from Left to Right.  Being Fark, the jokes were at least as numerous, I think. That's what Fark does, in both cases.

The takeaway? We like to blame the other guys. All of us.