Alternate Entries

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Another kind of map

On the first day of 5th grade, my teacher, Mr. Petzel, announced to the class that as he would be correcting us if we made mistakes, he wanted us to know that we should also feel free to correct him if he made a mistake. In the next sentence he used the word "mischievous," pronouncing it "mischiev-i-ous". My hand shot up. He had made an error. I knew this because my 4th grade class had looked the word up in the dictionary, and I knew it had only 3 syllables, not the 4 he had just uttered. The outcome was predictable: I was sent to a corner to consider my actions, something that was to happen so frequently that year that I had my own corner. Poor Mr. Petzel, he never knew what hit him.

I bring this up in introducing a new set of maps. Seems there's a whole dialect thing around this word. And so, a different kind of red and blue (and green): the Mischievous Maps.

Mischievous: 3 syllables

US using mischievous

Mischiev-i-ous: 4 syllables

US using mischiev-i-ous

Write mischievous but say mischiev-i-ous

US writing 3 but saying 4

I'm sure Mr. Petzel would be relieved.
Want more dialect fun?

posted by jeev | 9:08 AM |

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Gee, I've seen this iconography somewhere.

A billboard proclaiming Dubya Our Leader

Via Blue Lemur

posted by jeev | 11:46 AM |

Monday, November 22, 2004

Tom Shales goes for it in this essay on Michael Powell, Colin's son, and the chair of the FCC:

Tired as the topic is, one must mention the nipple when recounting what might be called the Sins of Michael Powell, since it's a highlight of his bumpy, disgraceful tenure as FCC chairman. The furor it generated resulted not only in a $550,000 fine to be paid by CBS, which aired the Super Bowl (and is owned by Viacom, whose MTV produced the halftime show), but in more and more punishments meted out over more and more alleged infractions, many involving naughty words that had previously been uttered without incident (no cases of shock reported in trauma units, for instance, and no outbreaks of rioting in the streets).
[]
Jeff Jarvis, TV Guide's last good TV critic and now prominent in the blogger universe, uncovered a stupefying example of how the process works and how unfair the FCC's actions are. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see the 159 complaints supposedly received at the FCC because of an April 2003 Fox special, "Married by America." Now 159 seems like an insignificant enough number, but when Jarvis checked further into the case, he found that most of the letters were identical, produced by an "automated complaint factory," and that the number of authentic, actual, original letters of complaint was not 159 but . . . three. Yes, three.

Result: Powell's FCC slaps Fox with a $1.2 million fine.

Making America safe from nipples and the F word.

posted by jeev | 1:54 PM |

Sunday, November 21, 2004

From a thought-provoking post by David Niewert:

People listen to their radios a lot in rural America. Maybe it has something to do with the silence of the vast landscapes where many of them live; radios break that silence, and provide the succor of human voices.

If you drive through these landscapes, getting radio reception can sometimes be iffy at best, especially in the rural West. Often the best you can find on the dial are only one or two stations.

And the chances are that what you'll hear, at nearly any hour, in nearly any locale, is Rush Limbaugh. Or Michael Savage. Or maybe some Sean Hannity. Or maybe some more Limbaugh. Or, if you're really desperate, you can catch one of the many local mini-Limbaughs who populate what remains of the rural dial. In between, of course, there will be a country music station or two.

That's what people in rural areas have been listening to for the past 10 years and more. And nothing has been countering it.

If Democrats want to come to terms with what happened to them in the last election, they're going to have to confront this reality and its larger implications and ramifications. Chief among the implications is the hard truth that Democrats have largely abandoned rural America, and in so doing have ceded the field to right-wing propaganda and even extremism. Among the ramifications is the fact that at some point, Democrats are going to have to start fighting back on rural turf.

Doing so will not, as some have suggested, require them to compromise their core beliefs -- it will just require them to rethink their priorities and perhaps, in the process, rediscover their identity.

Via Digby, who also has some good things to say about all this.

posted by jeev | 6:05 PM |