11 Great Things About Baltimore

You know, Baltimore gets a lot of bad press.  Much of what people know about it comes from Homicide: Life on the Street or, more recently, The Wire.  It's not unusual for visitors here to expect little better than a war zone, instead of the few bad neighborhoods that all cities have.  It doesn't help that our (now former) mayor was recently convicted for stealing gift cards from needy children.  Even when we top a "best-of" list, the news story is how surprising it is that we're not "worst-of".  However, in the six-plus years I've been working and/or living in this city, I've grown to love it, and here are a few reasons why.

Duty to God

Exactly one hundred years ago last month, Chicago publisher W. D. Boyce incorporated the Boy Scouts of America, several months after being helped on a foggy London street by a boy who refused a tip, explaining that he was simply a Boy Scout doing his daily good turn.  Much has changed over the past century, but much has not.

I've mentioned before that even if I wanted to get back into Scouts as a leader I couldn't, not without being dishonest with them and with myself.  See, I'm an atheist, and the Godless are one of the three "G"s not allowed into the Boy Scouts, along with Girls and Gays.  I was only just starting to figure this out in high school, after I was well into Scouts (and had earned the Methodist religious award).  Even though I've only started calling myself an atheist within the last few years, at the time I was definitely at least an agnostic, and became pretty uncomfortable with the religious aspects.  I kept my mouth shut, though, because I loved Scouts, and wanted to see it through to my Eagle.

Of COURSE I Knew That....

The majority of my posts have been of the "lengthy diatribes on serious social issues," and I've been snowed in for the past five days, so I think it's time to lighten up a bit.  (Don't worry, we'll get back to the social commentary soon enough.)  With that in mind, here's a brief list of pretty obvious things I didn't realize until well after I should have, along with the age of realization.  Note that they are all from my late teens or later.

1. "The Beatles" is a pun, not just a creative misspelling.  I remember realizing this, and thinking back to the old episode of The Simpsons where Homer is in a barbershop quartet.  The whole story was a reference to the Beatles, I understood that at the time, but when they were thinking up a name and Professor Skinner said they needed "a name that's witty at first, but that seems less funny each time you hear it," and Apu suggested "The Be Sharps" it sailed right over my head.
   Approximate age of realization: 18
2. The lead singer of Rush is male.  All right, to be fair about this, I never really listened to Rush all that much.  Honestly, they kind of annoy me.  Not that big of a deal.
   Approximate age of realization: 19
3. My grandmother has a New York accent.  And boy, do I mean a strong one.  It's not like it's subtle or anything; it's full-on New Yawker.  She's just always talked (tawked) like that, and I never really gave it a second thought.  She just had Grandma voice, that was all.
   Approximate age of realization: 22
4. The song "Black Velvet" is about Elvis.  This one was really more a case of never actually listening to the lyrics outside of the chorus.  I do that a lot, actually.  I usually have to make an effort to listen to lyrics, and not just drift off during songs.  I was driving home one day and the song came on the radio for the billionth time during my lifetime and I thought "Hey, I wonder what the rest of the song is about?"  Turns out it's obviously and blatantly Elvis.  Huh.
   Approximate age of realization: 25
5. The word "segue" is pronounced "segway."  See, okay, I knew the word pronounced "segway," and could use it properly in a spoken sentence, and I knew the word spelled "segue," and could use it properly in a written sentence, but I thought the former was spelled "segway" and the latter was pronounced "seeg" (long "e", hard "g").  I guess I thought they were synonyms or something.  I finally realized it when someone else mentioned to me that they were once confused on that point.  I kept my mouth shut.
   Approximate age of realization: 26
6. The term "upwards of" a number means "more than," not "almost."  I have no excuse for this one whatsoever.  This is also one of the few where I was caught out by someone, and had to be convinced of my error, because my version was so ingrained in my head by that point.
   Approximate age of realization: 27
7. The old joke "I don't trust anything that bleeds for three days and doesn't die" is talking about women. This is one that I first heard long before I knew what a period was, and by the time I did know had long since relegated it to the back of my mind, in the "weird crap that makes no sense" bin.  It was revived years later while watching Mel Brooks's High Anxiety, but since the joke in the movie is that the guy had actually been bleeding for several days without dying, it didn't help.  It only popped up in my head and clicked into place for no apparent reason I can remember maybe a year ago.
   Approximate age of realization: 27 
8. The cookie brand "Chips Ahoy!" is a pun on the phrase "Ship ahoy!"  Nothing special triggered this one.  A commercial came on TV, and it just suddenly clicked.  This was maybe a few weeks ago.
   Exact age of realization: 28

So there you go.  All minor things, to be sure, but still.  So what sort of things did you not realize until embarrassingly late in life?

Jack Chick Is My Inspiration

If you know or live near some seriously conservative Christians, or have a predilection for snarking on crazy conservative paraphernalia, then you very likely have, at some point or another, stumbled across the Chick tract.  If you aren't familiar with them, check that link to their Wikipedia page for a brief introduction or, better yet, read a few at random from the official website, where they are all freely available.

Briefly, they are small, short booklets containing a comic-book-style story that usually tells how a certain thing (such as Halloween, Harry Potter, Catholicism, and homosexuality) is horrendously evil, will make you go to hell, and that Jesus is the only salvation.  Now, as you can surely guess, these things are pretty much completely antithetical to my personal philosophy.  As such, it would be easy for me to write a post here making fun of a specific tract, decrying how horrid his strawmen and stereotypes (used for "humorous" effect, of course), or going point-by-point through one to show how inaccurate it is.  Many people online and off have done so, much better than I can.  So instead, I want to tell you why these tracts, and by extension, their creator. Jack Chick, are an inspiration to me.

Let me tell you a story.

Pixar's bitch

I am Pixar's bitch.

Everyone who knows me even a little knows this about me.

I have seen all but one (A Bug's Life, their second) of their movies in the theatre, and own all but one (Cars, the A student's only B+) thus far available on DVD, in addition to the collection of their shorts.  Last night I bought and rewatched Up, and it was still superb.  Not necessarily my favorite, but then it's so difficult to pick a favorite.  All of their movies have such original stories (except for the aforementioned Cars), such believable characters, such complex themes that don't talk down to the audience, child or adult, such incredible attention to detail, such brilliant visuals, that they make nearly every other American animated movie seem positively amateurish by comparison.  My ticket to Toy Story was one of the first I kept.  Toy Story 2 pulled off the nearly impossible feat of being a sequel that is arguably better than the original.   Monsters, Inc., perennially overlooked, cracks me up, and has one of the greatest child movie characters ever.  Ratatouille had one of the most effective character moments I've ever seen, in thirty seconds without dialogue.  Last year, I sat literally open-mouthed through nearly all of WALL-E.  Up managed to choke me up within the first ten minutes.  It can be safely said that I am, indeed, a huge fan, and have been for a long time.

However.

With each successive movie they've put out, I've had a growing unease.  Not because of the quality, or the themes, or the messages, or anything like that.  No.  It's because, over the course of ten feature films, they have yet to have a female protagonist.  Woody (with Buzz as second lead), Flik, Woody and Buzz again, Sulley (with Mike as second lead), Marlin, Bob "Mr. Incredible" Parr, Lightning McQueen (with Mater or possibly Doc as second lead), Remy (with Linguini as second lead), WALL-E, and now Carl Fredericksen (with Russell as second lead).  Now, don't get me wrong, these films have had many wonderful, strong, believable female characters, some of them even second leads: Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl, Dory, Helen "Elastigirl" Parr, Collette, and EVE immediately leap to mind.  They're all fantastic characters, and none have been there purely as a romantic foil, even the one in the (robot) romance movie.  But the story hasn't been focused around any of these characters; they at best play a major role in the story of the male protagonist.  Their story arc, even if it's a good, strong, compelling arc, is still secondary to his.

Over the last several years/movies since I noticed the pattern, it's been getting increasingly embarrassing.  It's like when your dear, loving grandmother, who taught you so much about treating everyone with respect, refers to your adult black friend as "a colored boy," and locks her jewelry box when he visits.  You find yourself making excuses, because you know she obviously doesn't mean to be offensive, and all of her other actions show that she's not racist, and she just doesn't really know him yet, and she grew up in a different time, and and and....

And yet, there it is.   Nine protagonists, no women.

But wait!  There, in production!  No, not Toy Story 3, presumably starring Woody and Buzz, due out next year.  Not Cars 2, presumably starring Lightning and Mater, due out the year after.  After that, in December 2011!  It's The Bear and the Bow!  Written and directed by a woman (both also a first for Pixar, which is telling), and starring Reese Witherspoon as Pixar's very first female lead character... Princess Merida.

  

Well, crap.


Okay, look.  There's nothing inherently wrong with princesses as lead female characters.  And yes, I have faith that Pixar will put an interesting spin on it (already we can see that she wants to stop being royalty and become an archer, which has promise).  They could turn it into a "take that" against the very idea of animated female leads needing to be princesses, much as Up took a shot at the idea of the hero needing to be young.  They could end up turning the whole idea of princesses upside down, somehow.  We can't really judge now, a full two years before it's even released, can we?

And yet....

She could've been anything. They specialize in unlikely heroes: an old cloth doll, a rat who likes to cook, a lonely garbage compacter, the monster in your closet, a clown fish.  Ed Asner.  Do something else gosh-wow adventurey, like The Incredibles and Up: make her a time-traveler trying to fix the past.  There can be dinosaurs, because everyone loves dinosaurs.  Something else with animals, like Finding Nemo or Ratatouille: she could be the elephant who actually never forgets, and sees some sort of classified information.  Something offbeat, like Toy Story or Cars or Wall-e: she's, I don't know, a sentient vacuum cleaner or something.  I know, I know, my ideas suck (erm, no pun intended.) I'm not a writer.  But come on.  I could have come up with "princess."  It's been done, it's played out.  Disney even has a new animated movie with "Princess" right in the title!  You folks can do so much better, I know you can.  This is what you guys do.

Because no matter how well they handle it, no matter how much subversion they put in there, no matter how great a fighter she is, even if she saves him (though Pixar's been pretty good about such things so far, there most likely will be a "him") instead of the other way around, even if the entire point of the movie is about how girls don't have to be princesses and can be anything they want to be, even stereotypically male-dominated occupations, it doesn't really matter, because she's still a princess.  She'll still be folded into the vastly disconcerting "Disney Princess" line, togged out in the dress she probably hated wearing at the beginning of the film.  She'll still be made into a dress-up doll, likely without the archery outfit as an option.  She'll still end up, somehow, irritatingly and horrifically pink.  Hey, it happened to Mulan, and she's not even a princess in-story, through marriage or otherwise.

So I'm sure it'll be a fantastic movie.  It'll be funny, touching, mature, beautiful, original and everything else we've come to expect of them, and I'll be there to see it in the theatre.  I just wish that for their first female lead, after twelve movies, they could've picked something other than a princess.

Note: This was originally posted in slightly modified form last summer on Facebook.

Privilege

I've been thinking a lot about privilege lately.

See, I'm a very privileged person.  Oh, I don't mean I'm wealthy or anything; far from it, but the simple fact is that I have advantages that many people simply do not have, unearned advantages that I was simply born with.  I'm a straight, white, naturally-thin male who was raised Christian and who, while not wealthy, has never been exactly poor.  There are doubtlessly many other privileges I have that I don't have space to list, or that I don't even know I have.  Because the thing about having privilege is that... well, it's hard to see, when you have it.

There are, of course, many things that can go wrong when one has privilege, especially when one can't see it.

Starry-eyed

I had the best of intentions Thursday night, I really did.

I had the evening to myself, no chores or work that required my immediate attention, and I was going to make the best of it.  I was going to update this blog, or finally organize my backlog of photos, or revive my essentially-defunct photo website.  I was going to be productive, and not just spend another evening playing around on the internet.*  I really was.

But I got home from work and found a telescope on my porch.

Now, it wasn't precisely a surprise, since I had ordered it myself back in August and have been waiting for it anxiously ever since, just a little disappointed every day I came home and there was not a package on my porch.  It's a Galileoscope, developed as a cornerstone of the International Year of Astronomy (which, as I'm sure you already know, is/was 2009) and specifically designed to be a high-quality but affordable telescope, with an emphasis on education (discounts for bulk orders, classroom activities, etc.)  Assembly is purposefully required, both to save on cost and as a learning experience (while the assembly is pretty easy, the included directions are incredibly terrible.  The expanded directions online are highly recommended.)  It can be used in three different configurations: 25x, 50x, and 17x, the last of which closely mimics the view through Galileo's original telescope.

I've always wanted a telescope.  I could never quite justify the expense, though, and didn't want to settle for a piece of crap, so I never asked for one growing up, and never went out and got one myself.  But still... I've always wanted one.  And now, with the good reviews this has gotten from trusted sources, I was willing to shell out the thirty-some-odd bucks including shipping and treat myself for my birthday (as I said, it took a while to get here.)

So, instead of doing something artistically productive, I built myself a telescope (which took longer than it should have, because of the aforementioned terrible instructions) and within minutes was in my backyard, looking at Jupiter, Callisto, Io, and Ganymede, all clearly visible at 25x, even in the middle of light-polluted Baltimore.  Once Annie got home, we went up on the roof and looked at the waning gibbous moon and the Pleiades.  I can't wait to show her Jupiter and it's moons, which had set by that point, and Saturn, which doesn't rise until about 3 AM right now, and whatever else we can see in the glare of the city.

But, really, this post isn't about my shiny new toy.**  It's about why I was so excited, why I was out late in the cold on my front porch to see if I could find the Orion Nebula (I couldn't).  Astronomy was the first science that I remember really, truly loving, and it remains my favorite of the sciences.  I majored in physics, spent five years doing school programs on a variety of scientific topics including biology, paleontology chemistry, and currently -- exclusively and inexplicably -- do classroom programs on embryology, but it was the astronomy programs in my college's planetarium and in the portable Starlab during those five years that I think I liked best.

See, astronomy, in many ways, is a gateway science.  I can't tell you how many science people (researchers, educators, or simply dedicated geeks), regardless of their field, have told me about simply looking up at the stars when they were kids and wondering.  It sparked something in them, a humbling awareness, a questioning, a yearning of some sort, though obviously they didn't recognize it as such at the time.  They, and I, simply looked up and went "Wow."  Many of them went on to apply those same feelings to other areas, whether it's stem cell research, organic chemistry, nuclear physics or, yes, astronomy.

But astronomy opened so many more doors than that.  It's no exaggeration to say that the human race itself was introduced to science via astronomy.  Many, many thousands of years before we could view or measure much of anything else scientifically, we could do it to the heavens.  The sky is enormous (many of us forget, since we usually focus on what's right in front of us), and mysterious.  Few things are so universally spread out through ancient myths across the globe as the stars, sun, and moon are.  They were gods, spirits, demons, heroes, life-givers.  They were omens, portents, signs, symbols.  They were patterns, stories, histories.  And they were predictable.  These incredibly important things that everyone could see, things that supposedly could determine our future, or give us a clue as to the workings of the gods, could be understood.  From these superstitions came the very first systematic scientific observations and recordings.  Those ancient astronomers/astrologers (for at the time, there was little distinction) viewed and charted when the sun rose and set, how it rose higher in the sky during summer and lower in winter, the phases of the moon and when it rose and set, how they could interact to cause solar and lunar eclipses, the positions of the stars relative to the sun throughout the year, what constellations were visible when, the movements of each of the planets, and so many, many other things that could be seen simply by looking up and paying attention.  So for millennia, these observations were recorded, and all the while we wondered what, exactly these lights in the sky actually were.  How far away are they?  What are they made of?  Why do they move as they do?  How do they relate to the Earth?  Do they affect us?

Four hundred years ago, in 1609, an Italian scientist named Galileo Galilei made significant improvements to a new Dutch invention for seeing across long distances that would later be called the telescope, and turned it skyward.  The observations he made through those simple, early telescopes and the theories proposed based on those observations are easily among the most important in the history of science, and inarguably helped kick-start the entire field of modern science.  Even more than that: he forever changed how the entire human race views itself, and its place in the universe.  It had been assumed that all of the heavenly bodies were perfect spheres manufactured by God hisownself, but Galileo saw rough mountains on the Moon.  Even the supposedly all-perfect Sun turned out, under Galileo's watchful eye, to have the occasional spot on it.  Everyone knew as well that everything in the sky rotated directly around the Earth, but Galileo saw four moons going around Jupiter.  Ah, but the major things, like the planets themselves, they still went around the Earth!  But Galileo saw that Venus had full phases, new, crescent, half, gibbous, full, and back again, while never going very far from the Sun.  The Morning Star, the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon, was orbiting the Sun, not us.  We were not the center of the universe.  This was, to put it lightly, a humbling discovery, and affected every single aspect of our lives, far beyond science.

And now, four hundred years later, a dozen human beings have set foot on the Moon.  We have sent probes to land on and orbit around other planets, to leave the solar system itself and report back to us.  We now know that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, untold numbers of stars (septillions?), black holes, quasars, pulsars, nebulae, and more.  Over just the last decade and a half, we have discovered hundreds of planets going around other stars, and it's only a matter of time before our observations are keen enough to find ones that are Earth-like.  We are learning more and more every single day about the entirety of the universe, everything that is, about the nearly 14-billion-year history that brought us here and about what might happen next.  And when I go out amidst the glare of city lights and look through my cheap, plastic telescope to see shadows on the Moon, and the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn, to see them, to really see them, not as a picture, not as a video or computer animation, but to really SEE them, right there before my eyes just as Galileo did, I feel a sense of awe at being part of such an unimaginably vast cosmos, and feel connected to all those who went before me, looking up and wondering and thinking, turning the world around and upside-down, even back to the dawn of civilization, and forward to all those who will come after, and look up at the stars, and wonder.

And that's why this post is late.

*Likely would have ended up spending it playing around on the internet.
**But, seriously, I've got a shiny new toy.