A list of things that annoyed me today

For those of you that follow me on Twitter, you may have seen a note my son’s second grade teacher sent home with him. He was asked to draw a pattern, so he drew bone-DNA-bone-DNA-bone-DNA.  Little bones and tiny helixes to represent DNA.  It is pretty cool, for a tiny little urchin.  The teacher thought so, too.

Oh, I’m so glad she’s in charge of teaching contractions to the little ones.  I hope she gets her union negotiated pay raise completely unrelated to how she does her job.

The next day, LittleDude brought home a spelling test.  He spelled egg EEG and still got perfect.

Why am I not homeschooling my kids again?  Actually, Pinkie did not attend formal school until she was 9 years old.  She was afraid of being away from me, and I didn’t feel she was going to learn anything particularly useful in the first few years anyways, so I taught her to read and do what I thought was pretty basic math at home.  She had a good handle on multiplying and dividing fractions and was fascinated by prime numbers.

Oh, oops.  That’s the curriculum for the eighth grade around here.  Kids are capable of so much more than what they are mandated to learn in school.  It’s a bit of a joke.  LittleDude, like his father, is an intensely social person.  He loves the presence of other kids, especially other boys,  and he is bored out of his mind at home with just his sister and adults for company.

So I send him to school.  Where they give him perfect grades for doing it wrong.

Le sigh.  Well, his teacher is very kind.  I suppose that counts for something, no?  She didn’t like it when I sent her a note explaining that my son wouldn’t be doing any homework, because it has absolutely no impact on learning outcomes in the primary grades and only teaches him to hate pointless “busywork”.  He’s only seven!  He’s going to learn a whole more from this awesome book of maps than he will ever learn at school.

A moment of praise for authors who write books aimed at boys who enjoy being boys!  Enough with the huggy-kissy crap.  Bring on the adventure and survival challenges!

So begins this delightful illustrated novel and the thrilling adventures of Chuck Duganheroic, resourceful, a great swimmer, and master of disguise. In each cliffhanging chapter, Chuck must grapple with a new set of dangers, from sunken ships and buccaneers to survival on open water and a final race to the treasure ahead of the Admiral and his boys. Illuminated throughout with detailed maps of places, people, and things Chuck encounters along the way, and written with an electric sense of daring-do and whimsy, Eric Chase Anderson creates a totally original and captivating hero, and a swashbuckling adventure story for all ages.

http://www.amazon.com/Chuck-Dugan-Is-AWOL-Novel/dp/0811839206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380059149&sr=8-1&keywords=chuck+dugan+is+awol

I’m going to have cut short my post today for the second thing that really annoyed me.  I attempted to submit my first assignment containing an outline of the more detailed literature review I will be conducting as I prepare to gather the data for my PhD, and it turns out I can’t do that until I have completed the mandatory library tutorial.

Are you fucking kidding me?  I have two degrees already, as does almost everybody enrolled in PhD programs, and you think I don’t know how to use the fucking library?  Is this kindergarten? A mandatory tutorial?  It’s going to take me three hours to complete it, and the biggest joke is that I just spent an afternoon teaching the actual reference librarian how to conduct searches where established models and terms are borrowed and applied in other disciplines.

Try searching for “big data”, “cluster analysis” and “mining”.  I want to see how Porter’s extension of agglomeration effects catalyzes the collection of big data with a mining cluster.  Unless you know that “big data” in this context means “business intelligence analytics” and you want to eliminate the phrase “data mining”, you are going to be awash in technical papers.  Yes, it’s total bullshit that in an effort to appear legitimate, business researchers borrow concepts like “agglomeration” and “cluster analysis” from more rigorous disciplines like computer science and biology and mathematics, but the point is, you can find what you’re looking for if you know how to sub-search the databases correctly.

But please, waste three hours of my life explaining to me what a “keyword” is, and how to use “Boolean” operators.

Assholes.

Here’s another thing that really annoyed me.  I read the column while waiting for the washer to complete the spin cycle and then emailed it to myself and then read it again, and it STILL irritates the shit out of me.

Apparently, the NFL doesn’t like people bringing small bags into the stadiums, ostensibly because they present a “security threat” and it slows down admissions when bags have to be randomly searched.  The real reason is more likely that people like to avoid paying $12 for a pint of beer, so they use the bags to smuggle in their own beverages and food.

Men have been banned from bringing in knapsacks and courier bags for a long time.  Now that more and more women are attending games, the NFL has banned women’s large purses, which is obviously SEXIST because women NEED their purses.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/24/the_nfls_ban_on_purses_is_sexist/

Note that small bags are allowed, so you can bring your wallet and phone and some extra tampons should Aunt Flo be visiting.  Cue the shrieking bitches who are entitled to bring their purses because all vaginas must carry purses and men don’t need purses because patriarchy and the only way for the NFL to be fair and treat their male and females fans equally is to let women carry bags but men can’t.

Excellent logic.  The NFL should treat fans equally by having contradictory rules for men and women.

Two different stories about Patrick the Gorilla have also annoyed me.  Both Jezebel and Salon brand Patrick as sexist because he doesn’t have much love for the lady gorillas, completely ignoring the fact that Patrick is an asshole to the other male gorillas, too.

Patrick gets along well with humans but has problems with his bro gorillas — and flat-out conflicts with females.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/24/what_a_gorilla_can_teach_us_about_fighting_sexism/

Patrick is just a dick, but of course this has to be spun into some sort of PUNISH THE MALE FOR BEING MEAN TO THE FEMALE bullshit.  What are we supposed to take away from the feminist media spin on Patrick?  It doesn’t matter that he behaves aggressively to other males.  Screw them.  Who gives a shit.  He was mean to the lady gorillas so PUNISH HIM, rah rah rah.

Mary Elizabeth Williams flat out calls male humans apes and wonders why we can’t punish them all in the same way.  You know Mary, darling, some of those commenters might actually be black people.  Black men!  Did you just call black men “apes”?

Yeah, if Glenn Beck said that he would totally get a pass, right?

If only all sexist, aggressive apes could be similarly dealt with. Is there room at that zoo for YouTube commenters?

So let this be a lesson, dudes who are not nice to females. You can be replaced, and by someone who knows how to execute a super-fresh spin. And while Patrick’s exile may just seem a fun bit of color from the wide world of animals, it’s also, sadly, one of the few concrete recent examples of a news story in which the abuse of females has any consequences for the perpetrator. A little more of that, please.

Right. Tell all the men wearing GPS monitors after being arrested for domestic violence, less than HALF of whom will be convicted of any crime at all, that there are no consequences accompanying even the allegation of abuse of women.

http://judgybitch.com/2013/07/16/this-report-on-the-use-of-gps-technology-in-domestic-violence-cases-funded-by-the-department-of-justice-will-blow-your-mind-even-when-women-are-enrolled-as-abusers-theyre-still-victims/

And finally, even more rape hysteria idiocy.  Some reality TV star wrote a book about her marriage to a macho Italian guy whom she appears to love to bits.  I don’t know the whole story, I don’t watch commercial television at all.  But the following passage makes me feel like I might like both of them:

[A] woman needs to keep herself in shape. She has to be seductive. She must be willing to try new things for her husband’s pleasure and her own. And, most important, she has to be available for sex.

There’s real passionate sex and maintenance sex. You need them both for a healthy marriage. Maintenance sex keeps the wheels greased, the lines of communication open, and the fights to a minimum.

Men, I know you think your woman isn’t the type who wants to be taken. But trust me, she is. Every girl wants to get her hair pulled once in a while. If your wife says “no,” turn her around, and rip her clothes off. She wants to be dominated.

Okay, perhaps not the most eloquent or poetic description of how their relationship likely works in the day to day lived reality, but all more or less true, in my experience.

Jezebel’s response:

That is rape and it is insane that it got past the publisher.

http://jezebel.com/real-housewife-melissa-gorgas-new-book-advocates-mar-1371722729

Oh fuck off.  Passionate sex within a marriage is not rape.  Is there any kind of sex at all that DOESN’T qualify as rape for these ladies, or are we seeing the realization of Andrea Dworkin’s “all heterosexual sex is rape” coming to pass?

Just a few posts later, a huge discussion erupted around Jezebel’s policy of NOT posting trigger warnings.  The post is titled Powerful Satirical PSA Explains Why Rape Is Always Your Fault and the sidebar stories, in bold and pretty much impossible to miss are India Has a Gang Rape Problem and Brutal Gang Rape in Mumbai Reignites Outrage in India.  What further explanation do you require?  What do you think you are going to read about in a post with the words RAPE screaming from every second word?  Unicorns farting rainbows?

The problem, you see, is that the delicate flowers weren’t expecting there to be any depictions of violence in the PSA.  It was just supposed to be about rape.  Not rape-rape.

WeAreTheLadies

Maybe put up a trigger warning? The women in this video get brutally grabbed and get more bruised and bloodied throughout the video    Yesterday 9:35pm

http://jezebel.com/maybe-put-up-a-trigger-warning-the-women-in-this-video-1381033486

Could it possibly be more clear that North American women have no fucking clue what rape actually IS?  Rough sex between husbands and wives, sex while drunk, sex you regret, sex you went along with because you didn’t feel like informing your partner you changed your mind, sex you had because he was just so insistent, sex you felt insulted by, sex that wasn’t satisfying …. Rape, rape, rape.

http://judgybitch.com/2013/09/14/yale-confirms-it-when-it-comes-to-rape-no-really-does-mean-yes/

Let’s ask those ladies in India what rape actually looks like.  It’s VIOLENT, for one thing.  It’s a crime.  The post needed a trigger warning for depiction of reality, which ought to have sent most of the Jezebel readers screaming in the other direction pretty quickly.

Don’t forget your purses, ladies.  And watch out for sexist apes men on your way back to Delusionville.

Three hour library tutorial.

This better not be a group exercise.  I’ve had my fill of retards today.

Lots of love,

JB