For anyone mourning the untimely demise of hottie singer and actor Will Smith, please take note: He’s not dead. In fact, the news of his death came from a simple, silly site called FakeAWish, where users can plug in random celebrity names and generate false news stories about them. According to the site, it’s one of the greatest hoax generators on the Internet—and given the crazy Facebook posts about Will Smith’s not-death, it looks like it’s pretty successful.
I’m not sure what I think about this site. It’s definitely another terrible waste of time, for sure; and I haven’t played around with it to see if it could actually be any fun. But couldn’t it be used as a form of libel or something? It’s not exactly fanfiction, after all; it presents itself as a fake news source.
But then again, so does The Onion, and they’re still well and thriving. In fact, today’s top story is that Prince William has already divorced Kate Middleton, which is also completely fake yet believable (sort of). And we all know about how many people believe that The Onion is a source of real news—some people are so taken in by the stories that it’s a combination of terrifying and hilarious.
Seriously, if you think The Onion is a real news site—and I know people who previously did before I posted that it wasn’t on my own Facebook page—could you at least stop voting?
So as much as I dig satire—and I really, really do, though I won’t profess to always understand deeply satirical works by authors who are much more talented than I am—I’m still wary about faux-news sites that only serve to further confuse our already mind-boggled population who thinks that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs, evolution is a fairytale, and Jesus is coming so we should all look busy. Isn’t Fox News enough?
Honestly, we don’t need a bunch of fake news generators to further muddle our minds and spread false gossip; just head to the supermarket checkout line or a junior prom and you’ll get plenty of that stuff.
Anyway, we can all at least celebrate that Will Smith is still alive. I am completely unafraid to admit that I love his music, I love his movies, and I certainly love those eyes. Here’s a bit of good Williness to brighten your day.
Sleater-Kinney was one of the best bands of the ‘90’s. I’m not going to say all-girl band because their gender is both irrelevant and relevant. It was irrelevant because they were as good as any band—their dueling guitars and wailing vocals outpaced any stringy-haired lead singer's Adam’s apple-ly yells and audacious guitar strumming. Their gender was relevant, however, because they were one of the most popular bands to emerge from the “Riot Grrl” movement in the early ‘90’s giving women and girls a radically feminist voice in arenas—like rock music—from which they had long been restricted.
But enough about their gender. More about you deciding that they are damn good. Here’s “Jumpers” from their last—and best—album, released in 2006:
Sometimes the prospect of the progression from dorm room to apartment to house seems so limiting. Not to mention that it seems so permanent and certainly is expensive. Box to bigger box to a couple of boxes put together. So it’s a comfort to know that some intrepid folks are living outside of the box (I couldn’t resist…) and doing it in style and, sometimes, on the cheap.
Houseboats became well-known in the 1940’s with movies and the like making them extremely popular. I didn’t really know how commonplace they were until I moved to Seattle. Lake Union is home to dozens, if not hundreds, of brightly painted houseboats complete with front porches and window boxes full of flowers. Some houseboats have a motor so they can be pulled across bodies of water to a new location or for recreation, but others are tethered to land so that the houses can be outfitted with utilities.
This one isn’t very uncommon, but it’s certainly a different, and earlier, departure from the traditional house with a backyard and a front lawn. Row houses were common in the early decades of the twentieth century and feature a complete, thin house butting up to the houses next to them. They were built mostly in large cities, especially in New York, and were first built for immigrants and in ethnic neighborhoods. Now, row houses are coming back in style and many, with their unique touches and personal embellishments, are selling for quite a pretty penny. Many row houses in the South were painted in pastel or tropical colors to distinguish them from their neighbors.
Some intrepid environmentalists aren’t letting any part of the train go to waste. Instead, they convert railcars to small, economical living spaces. Cabooses are often a popular choice, but some converters even choose subway or metro cars that are now out of commission. Train cars cost between $8,000 and $45,000 dollars to purchase, plus the money to outfit the house and put it on their property. This is still significantly less money than a conventional house. Some people even put their converted cars onto the tops of buildings.
Again in Seattle, I’ve heard about groups of hippies in old school buses. I didn’t realize that buses were housing options for more conventional people, taking old buses from junkyard dumps and giving them new lives. In one account, a man was tired of his credit card debt and decided to make the 200 to 300 square foot of livable space in a bus work for him. He got his hands on a retired school bus, changed the bus’ fluids and ripped out the seats. For about $12,000, he outfitted the bus to be his living space. Today, he spends around $400 a month for utilities and other housing costs. This particular bus owner says that a benefit for making a bus house is the comfort in knowing that his house is a sustainable way of living.
All of these unusual dwellings illustrate that it is possible to create a unique living space, minimize the need for material things and contribute to an environmentally conscious way of housing yourself and your family. Old shipping crates, forgotten grain elevators, abandoned warehouses…the potential for reusing old spaces hasn’t yet been tapped to its full potential.
Richard Dawkins first coined the word meme in his book, The Selfish Gene published in 1976. Basically, Dawkins posed the idea that memes are the cultural version of genes—they are the transmission of ideas and information, cultural norms and societal expectations. For example, a baby is never taught that folding his arms signifies anger, but he sees others in his life crossing their arms in anger and therefore recognizes what it means in his society. Essentially, Dawkins' definition of memes puts ideas and actions into cultural contexts; without memes, humans wouldn’t know, most often subconsciously, that anything meant anything.
In addition, Dawkins said that memes are essentially equivalent to Darwin’s evolutionary theory—only the most productive ideas survive. However, the replication of memes is not as transparent as the production of genes. Oftentimes we cannot trace the originator of the meme like we can in genetics. For example, in genetics, we know that a chromosome codes for a specific trait. But in memetics, we do not, and will never know, exactly who thought it would be best to put a salad fork on the left side of a plate. In this way, too, memes are not as perfectly replicated as genes. Memes can be amalgamations of two ideas, reactions against older memes, better, worse or essentially different from the meme that is being copied.
In some ways, the coining of the term Internet meme fits with Dawkins’ original idea and in some ways it doesn’t. First of all, Internet memes certainly are more easily understood than Dawkins’ idea. I have been looking at the new meme of Princess Beatrice’s hat (you know, the god awful one with the bow that stood straight up) from the recent Royal Wedding being put on different politicians’ heads or with cats crawling out of it. This example follows Dawkins’ theory in that we don’t know where the first picture of Beatrice’s hat removed from its original context came from, but it certainly has spread throughout the Internet. In addition, we know that the original meme was not perfectly replicated; in fact, that is not the intention in Internet memes. Each replicator must take the original idea and change it for Internet memes to become sensations.
However, in some ways, Internet memes are not aligned with Dawkins' ideas. Originators of Internet memes seem to know what they are doing—I am putting Beatrice’s hat on a cat; I bet everyone will want to copy me—which does not follow the idea of cultural natural selection. I could be wrong on this point; the creators could be less self-referential than this and just think they are putting a hat on a cat. In addition, memes are generally considered to be a subconscious reproduction of an idea or behavior. Internet memes are always very purposeful—and, when they begin to pick up steam, replicators consciously decide to add to the viral nature of the original meme concept.
Even though Internet memes may be a subversion of Richard Dawkin’s original idea, he probably doesn’t mind too much. Dawkins himself has kind of given up on hypothesizing about memes, too, leaving much of the research to others. Also, the very act of surfing the Internet for Internet memes is a meme in itself—people see their friends and family surfing for Internet memes, so they do it, too.
What can we say about social norms in our poor amalgamation, America? What can we cling to in this place that was built from nothing but fractured ideologies? Do we ever know how to behave properly or do we have a sense of shaky awkwardness imbued in us from our first playground mistakes?
All you had to do to distinguish yourself was wear a piece of purple silk in Ye Good Olden Days of Shakespeare’s England. Gentlemen were gentlemen and ladies were ladies then. If you had money, you had a golden spoon popped into your mouth and a guidebook on how to behave properly placed into your hands. With a five course feast of hare, pork, cream, and wafers, you married off your fourteen-year-old daughter to her twenty-one year old cousin. If you were poor, you made sure your mother didn’t throw you out with the bathwater and you learned your place through a rough and rabble childhood. You stood in the floor of the theater so that the smarter higher classes could practice patrician paternalism and figuratively pat your stupid little head from their private boxes, high above you. Social decorum came straight from Queen Elizabeth. Social customs were drawn in stone.
Modern Europe also has solid social customs because it has the histories, or nostalgic renderings of history. They have Before-Dinosaurs customs, dusty books of fantastical fables and feasts, and Moses-wore-white-only-before-Labor-Day standards of behavior.
In Austria, the age old customs and attitudes are still heaped with reverence, even as new innovations seep in. The Viennese were appalled and protested the arrival of a Starbucks into their Mecca of Kaffeehaus Kultur. White-haired ladies and young people in tall boots know how to behave in the intellectual atmosphere, how to play up opportunities to see and be seen, and how to drink little coffees off silver platters. They preserve the dreaded Austrian stare (all Austrians acquire it at birth)-- an unsmiling, cold stare that makes the unlucky recipient drop dead (or want to). The stare exemplifies their haughty, reserved attitudes and is used to keep the Viennese who know the cultural standards (quiet, refinement, appreciation of tradition) in and the foreigners who don’t, out. Their social platitudes may not be as cut and dried as they once were, but they have hard and fast rules which once existed or they believe once existed on which to cling.
We tried to build unified cultural and social norms in the 1950s. An America rocked by World War II clung to traditional ideologies, creating for itself a conservative American ideal. Religion gave everyone a grand narrative, a stable rock in the storm to counter the uncertain future of war-- “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance and people fought Communism through Christ. Girls played with epitomes of femininity, the Barbie doll, while boys played with her perfect counterpart, the man’s man Davy Crockett. Teenagers “pinned” their sweethearts and perhaps grabbed a quick smooch at drive-ins. Families piled into their Frank Lloyd Frank family homes. Men could talk about the latest TV around the water-cooler at work; everybody could yuck-yuck about I Love Lucy because everybody watched it.
Men were men and women were women then, or, perhaps we like to think so. In our modern society grasping for behavioral straws, the ease of men knowing how to behave like men and women knowing how to behave like women in any situation seems quaint to us today. Surely it isn’t anywhere near a whole truth. This nostalgic retelling of history attempts to give American social behaviors a historical basis. Some even offer these norms as behavioral standards to follow in the modern day.
Still, America is a place of ever more fractured factions built with the pieces of already fractured factions. How can anyone learn how to behave with a group of philosophy majors, stay-at-home mothers, when you were fifteen, in an independent movie theater, at a museum? Each arena one enters has its own ever changing set of rules and potential pitfalls. I know I never got an Emily Post etiquette book for anyone of them. America’s fragmented culture has its own historically ambiguous, often-unspoken rules that we each try and master again and again, hoping for a degree of improvement with each failure.
Do you think Americans will ever learn how we are supposed to behave? Or are we better off without a system?
The other day my freshmen students were talking about weird coincidences and secret government plans to take over the world. They folded a $20 bill to show that it illustrated how the planes would fly into the Twin Towers and demonstrated how you could link the buildings in the Pentagon to form a star worshipping the devil. I had heard about the lewd Disney cartoon drawings in undersea castles or whispered underneath spoken words, but I hadn’t heard that President Obama apparently, like his House, thanked the devil during his presidential acceptance speech. Some of the conspiracies are so ludicrous that you can’t help but laugh, but some of them seem a little more plausible. See for yourself. Here are the CONSPIRACIES OF THE UNITED STATES as told by high school freshmen:
Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy’s assassinations were a little too similar for comfort!
I’d heard this one before, but I didn’t know all the details. They really are a little eerie. Here are a few:
--Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846; JFK, 1946.
--Lincoln was elected President in 1860; JFK, 1960.
--Both Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s wives held their heads in their laps after the men were shot.
-- Lincoln was shot in a theater and his assassin ran to a warehouse; JFK’s assassin shot him in a warehouse and ran to a theater.
The Denver Airport is really the headquarters for the Illuminati so they can take over the whole world!
This conspiracy theory posits that the Illuminati (which I still don’t really understand) is using the Airport as its headquarters to kick off the global genocide that will begin the New World Order. The Denver Airport was built in 1995, but it has fewer runways than the perfectly good airport it replaced, Stapleton International. The conspiracy theorists say that five buildings for the airport were completed and then buried underground. No one knows why. Barbed wire around the airport is pointed in, to keep people in, rather than out like at other airports. In addition, the runways are revealed to be laid out like a Nazi swastika. Also, the Queen of England (a member of the Illuminati) is buying up land around it anonymously. I don’t know about this; it definitely sounds kind of creepy. On a practical note, I always get nauseous flying into this airport because the air currents around it are so choppy. Why would they put it there and make everybody sick during every flight? I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I still hate flying into this airport.
Rihanna’s “Umbrella” song contains occult messages!
I’m not too up on the popular songs of high schoolers, but I guess this one (and only this one) isn’t about sex. Instead, it is allegedly about being possessed by the devil. Conspiracy theorists say the “umbrella” means that the person is under protection or possession or something. In other words, they are equating protection and possession, which seems wrong and not necessarily true. The theorists say that Rihanna plays the devil trying to take over Rihanna in the first part of the song and then Rihanna trying not to get possessed in the second part. Look at the video’s clothes or something--she's wearing black and then white. This one is just dumb. Maybe she just wants to look like Madonna.
Obama’s “Yes, we can!” slogan contains a message thanking the devil for Obama’s presidency and eventual world takeover!
This conspiracy theory seems more sinister than the others because it is saying that if you don’t like the president, you can just pretend that he is a devil-worshipper rather than say you don’t like the amendment he just passed. It makes these conspiracy theorists seem like uniformed idiots with no legitimate case against the president. But, the idea of this conspiracy theory is that if you play Obama’s presidential acceptance speech backwards, his “Yes, we can!” slogan actually says “Thank you, Satan.” Other hidden messages played backwards include, “The Lord said the new Arab sins are with him” and “So birth the mark that’s now sooner.” Most of these alleged hidden messages don’t make any sense logically or structurally. It seems strange that the man entrusted with creating the devil’s new world on earth wouldn't be as well-spoken thanking the devil as he is "pretending" to be the president.
After we discussed these conspiracies, I asked the freshmen how they could know if something was real or made-up. They said you could never know for sure. Leave it to freshmen to say some crazy stuff, but you have to recognize that some of the time, they have a lot of sense.
I have noticed so many boarded up storefronts that were once home to many a small business. It makes me sad in the core of my being when I really the shuttered up storefront may have contained that persons physical manifestation of their pursuit of the American Dream.
The American Dream,as a concept, means many things to many different people. Back in the 50's it meant owning a single family home, having a few kids, and owning a car. To many Americans it means the right to have large houses, live like movies stars, and to have the things you 'deserve.' But thats another article..
To some though the pursuit of the American Dream means being your own boss by owning a business in something you love doing, that is profitable, and/or very few people can do. To these few an empty storefront is an opportunity to turn their luck and life around. They realize that one of the amazing things about America is that you are able to change your luck or your past by doing something different.
It used to be a shoe maker's offspring would become a shoe maker, not ant mire. Now an heiress to a billion dollar hotel fortune can decide to be media fodder instead of training to take over the family business. A fisherman's son can become a tailor and discard the family tradition and stigma's their fathers could not.
Thats the thing about walking past those shuttered windows, covered by graffiti and illegally pasted ads, potentially that was home to a dream that was crushed or the last ditch effort of a failed entrepeneur. Don't get me wrong they could be large "evil" corporations, but I am betting not.
No, I think like most of us these people dreamed high and decided that trying and failing is better then never trying at all. That the ability to be their own boss for just a month is worth it. Because they understand the real dream that many people had when they immigrated here, the luxory afforded to all of us that live here freely. I'm not saying it won't take time or that it won't be hard. Not at all. But I am saying you can TRY.
Our generation is unique in that it’s the first to take imagery from the past fifty or so years and dilute it down to an easily packaged brand of “cool”. The cutting edge of the present is saturated with fake vintage aesthetics and cheap recreations of 20th century art. Browse around Tumblr awhile and you’ll see what I mean. There are blogs, run mainly by girls in their 20s, dedicated entirely to pictures of an idealized “bohemian” lifestyle. Apparently, the perfect life for a young, fashionable person these days involves owning lots of books, a guitar, some indiscriminate art, and a bunch of hippie clothes.
The trend scalps the surface off of several counterculture movements of the 20th century. Aesthetics that used to symbolize real political beliefs have now been heavily commercialized and sold to well-off young people who want to feel amorphously rebellious. It might have sprung from the fact that all wealthy white children are told that they will be special, unique forces in the world—that they are creative and beautiful snowflakes no matter what. They then grow up to eat up products that reinforce this feeling, that give the base satisfaction of feeling ambiguously “unique”.
These are the same people who own walls full of very intellectual books but have only really read Dave Eggers. They love feeling smart, postmodern, and on the cusp of literary trends, but are unwilling to do the work to get to that point. They enjoy looking like they love art by hanging prints of mock-Roethke on their urban apartment walls.
Urban Outfitters knows their market all too well. Their clothes and home products are cheaply made, but they rack up the prices because they know consumers will pay a lot for a well-tailored hipster aesthetic. They know trust fund babies in skinny purple jeans will pay a hundred dollars for a fake plaster deer head or an abstract wall decal. Because these products are edgy in their aloof irony, they sell.
I’ve seen custom pieces on tattoo blogs that were taken out from an Urban Outfitters “painting”. Every third rich adolescent seems to have an owl tattoo these days. Our generation has devoured the vintage counterculture aesthetic and now we’re crapping out cheap plastic imitations. We pay a four hundred percent markup for brand new products that look forty years old. We have gone completely insane.
What bothers me the most is the disregard for the ethics that accompanied the original looks. We want to dress like hippies, but we have no interest in being activists. We don’t watch the news. We have no political affiliations. Anti-war college students died protesting Vietnam. Real hippies lost their friends to a real-world struggle. Now, our biggest problems seem to be that our iPhones are too slow sometimes.
Our generation is all surface, no substance. The powers that be know this and will sell us the images of generations past indefinitely. They profit from our vague imitations of movements that actually meant something. Nike bought Converse and sells the iconic All-Stars to pseudo-punks who don’t know any better. Ours is a spoiled generation of aesthetics without ethics. Who will become the monsters in our kingdom of kitsch?
I had never heard of the AVID program before I started AmeriCorps this year. Now that I serve in a school where more than half of students are on free or reduced lunch in a district near Seattle, I see how a program like AVID can work. AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) takes middle-of-the-road students—first generation college students, students who do poorly in school, but have a willingness to work hard, students who are from poor or minority families—and put them on a path to attend college.
AVID is an elective for students in elementary school through seniors in high school. It works because students want to take it (at least in theory). At most schools, students are interviewed to make sure that their college and academic interests match with those that AVID wants to foster. The AVID curriculum is based on the idea of the WICR—Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration and Reading—method. In class, students learn study skills, note-taking, organization, as well as critical thinking skills and how to ask questions in the form of tutorials, in which they bring in questions they are struggling with in their other classes. Students take the skills they learn and apply them to other classes.
Collaboration applies to the AVID leadership, as well. School districts enter intoagreements with the AVID Center, which sends them materials, membership and provides professional development. The schools then appoint an AVID coordinator to make sure that all teachers of AVID are following AVID protocol. Each AVID teacher will have a tutor to run tutorials, most often college students. Many times, AVID tutors took AVID themselves in school and want to show their fellow AVID students that they can make it to college, too.
The AVID model has statistics that are almost indisputable. AVID is present in 47 states, as well as in D.C. and has a presence in 16 countries or territories. Many different types of schools use AVID, from poor urban schools to richer suburban schools. Since 1990, more than 85,500 AVID students have graduated from high schools. In 2010, 91.3% of AVID’s 22,210 seniors intended to attend a postsecondary school, with 58.3% attending four-year institutions and the other 33% enrolling in two-year schools.
AVID’s ethnic breakdown is 49% of students labeled as Hispanic/Latino, 21% white and 20% black with the rest of the population being made up by other minority groups. Of these, in 2010, 88% of students applied at four year universities and 74% were accepted. On Advanced Placement tests, Hispanic AVID students made up 53% of test takers, as opposed to 14% of Hispanic test takers in the national average. The same goes for black AVID students, with 17% of test takers as opposed to 8% nationally. Most telling, perhaps, is that 91% of AVID students completing college entrance successfully as opposed to a 36% national average.
