Today was exhausting. I knew it was going to be exhausting; we have a large number of teachers out at a conference for the next several days (Monday and Tuesday are gonna suck too) and a few who were out for other reasons, and there’s just no way on Earth we’re ever going to get enough subs to cover that kind of absenteeism on a Friday. Miraculously, we got more than I expected– I walked into the building this morning fully expecting to be teaching today, and ended up only having to cover a single class period– but it was a completely ridiculous day anyway, starting off with not one but two fights before the day had even properly started.
Then, during first hour, two kids– a brother and sister pair, clearly having pre-planned this in advance– fled the building. One had a sub in his classroom and just snuck out of the room when she wasn’t looking, the other literally made eye contact with her teacher immediately before fleeing the gym. Both were in a car within about ten seconds of leaving the classroom.
Fun fact: the driver of the car committed two federal offenses today! And we have video of his car! It’s kidnapping even if the kids are okay with it if you take them from school without parental permission. We’d found the girl within about an hour; the boy is still at large.
It was a long fucking day. And there are two more coming before the building gets back to normal.
I am mostly using humans who I know in the real world, and one blog-reserved slot is filled, but I’m looking for a couple more. If your reading schedule isn’t already packed full for the next month or so and you don’t mind providing me with some feedback, either drop me a comment or an email and let me know. Thanks!
EDIT: I think I have enough people now, so I’m no longer looking for more alphas. Unless you know me well enough that you read this and think “Well, he doesn’t mean me,” in which case I probably do actually but drop me an email anyway. Thanks, everyone!
Is America ready for a Sikh Captain America — a superhero fighting hate crimes and intolerance? In the wake of 9/11, the massacre of Sikh Americans in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and America post-Ferguson, my answer is a resounding yes! If superheroes can battle aliens, cyborgs, and fellow villainous superheroes, why can’t there be one that fights for social and racial justice?
In 2013, cartoonist Vishavjit Singh wore a Captain America costume for the first time with a royal blue turban to match his ensemble. The short documentary Red, White, and Beard is a quirky, lighthearted glance into Sikh Captain America and the man behind this growing phenomenon.
What do you think of these two guys? Go ahead, jot down a few thoughts.
Okay.
I hate to break it to you, but you just told yourself more or less exactly what you’d think of Martin Luther King Jr. if he were still alive, or (having just had his 86th birthday, after all) if he’d been allowed to live a normal human lifespan and was no longer with us.
Yes. Really.
No, he wasn’t different. Look at the things white people were saying about Martin Luther King Jr. when he was alive. People say the exact same things about Jackson and Sharpton. Word for goddamn word.
Publicity hound? Outside agitator? Stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong? Communist? White people said all that shit about King, and white people say all that shit about Jackson and Sharpton now. (Okay, Al Sharpton to my knowledge has never been accused of Communism. But Jackson has.) Do you happen to know what King was doing in Memphis when he was killed? Supporting a sanitation workers’ strike. Hardly a national issue, right? He’s just preening for the cameras. Just likes the attention.
Same. Exact. Shit.
Oh, but <insert ethics thing here>?
King was a notorious womanizer who plagiarized much of his doctoral dissertation. These assertions are facts; they aren’t even controversial. Had he not been assassinated, there’s every chance that Coretta would have divorced him eventually. And he’d have had an extra forty-some-odd years for either the press to dig up more dirt or to make more mistakes in his life, depending on how charitable you feel like being about it.
This is not to denigrate King’s legacy. That is unassailable– and, in fact, part of the reason King’s legacy is unassailable is precisely because he was killed. I am trying to point something out that should be obvious: Martin Luther King, Jr. was. a. PERSON.
He was not Jesus.
Hell, Jesus wasn’t even Jesus, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.
He was a man, and white people hated him. Murdered him, in fact.
You are not different by virtue of the fact that you’re alive nearly fifty years after he was shot. If anything, King was more of a leftist than Jackson and Sharpton are now, and given where his rhetoric and politics were going at the time he was killed, maybe I should have included a third picture up there:
(Went ahead and gave y’all a caption, because I know you don’t know what Jeremiah Wright looks like.)
I’m not sure what in particular got on my last nerve about this year’s MLK Day, but… damn. Learn something, y’all. Read some of what this dude had to say– and not just the I Have a Dream speech. Look at what he had to say about Vietnam; muse on the fact that he was calling America “a sick society” as early as 1963 if not before that. King was alive in the sixties, and most white people hated him. If King was still alive in the 2010s, most white people would still hate him. I hate to break it to y’all, but it’s true.
This is Martin Luther King Jr, white people:
An extended quote:
The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support and all the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps, where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women, and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the towns and see thousands of thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the United Buddhist Church. This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible but refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.
What do you think this guy would have had to say about the Middle East? About, really, any aspect of current American foreign policy? In a country where people think Barack Obama is a socialist?
There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, Be non-violent toward Jim Clark, but will curse and damn you when you say, “Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children.”
Go ahead. Replace “Vietnamese” with “Muslim.” And think about how white America would be treating this man if he were still alive.
Here is my normal approach to starred reviews. I admit that this is probably more generous than many, but I’m not worried about it. For every guy like me who hands five-star reviews out to a third of the books he reads, there will be someone else who reserves them for books that should win awards. It balances out.
A five-star book is not only a book that I really enjoyed, but (this is critical) a book that I will evangelize and recommend to others.
A four-star book is one that I enjoyed, but not necessarily enough to be evangelical about it.
A three-star book is a book that I finished.
I usually don’t review two-star or one-star books, because most of the time I didn’t finish them. I have to hate a book to finish it if I don’t like it; generally I finish it with horrified fascination as the overriding emotion. Sometimes I like a book on some levels but abhor it on others; sometimes I just like looking at a train wreck.
I just gave The Three-Body Problem five stars on Goodreads, despite having some reservations about it, and I want to take a minute to explain why. The book was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by Ken Liu, who I understand is of no relation to Cixin Liu. And therein lies the first problem: there is no way to read this and not immediately recognize that it’s a translated work. This is no slight on Liu, who is clear in the translator’s note (there’s a translator’s note) that preserving the Chinese character of the book was a priority, and the book isn’t hard to read, but I feel like the “this was obviously not written in English” character of the text is going to turn some people off. This is especially clear in dialogue; English speakers simply don’t talk like the characters in this novel.
(See what I mean? Not complaints, not flaws. Reservations.)
The plot of the book is occasionally slightly impenetrable, particularly the first 20% or so, which require some background knowledge of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in order to properly appreciate– or, at least, I assume it’s required, since I don’t have it and found the first part a big of a slog. Once the book jumps forward into… now? Near future? I’m not sure– it becomes much easier going. I finished the book in about a day and a half, so it couldn’t have been that rough.
The other thing? The science. My favorite book of last year was Andy Weir’s The Martian, which I recommended enthusiastically to everyone, with the caveat that the book would involve math and chemistry and you should be prepared for that. Half of the characters in The Three-Body Problem are physicists. There’s a whole bit toward the end that is all about unfolding a proton from 11-dimensional space down to 2-dimensional space so that it can be turned into a supercomputer. They fail to do it right twice. That happens.
I am also not quite sure that Cixin Liu has ever played a computer game. I won’t go into that particular gripe any more than that sentence, but there’s a lot of stuff going on with a VR game and it’s… weird.
But here’s the thing: this book? It’s inventive as hell. There are aliens. They’re coming for us. And they don’t get anywhere near us during the first book, which is part one of a trilogy. And the whole thing is just as clever as hell in a whole lot of ways and I can’t wait to read the second book even though there were parts of it I don’t like and I’m going to have to be real careful about who I recommend it to.
So I’m calling that five stars. Your mileage may vary, I suppose, but you should check the book out anyway.
Second: A certain science fiction writer who I am fond of and is enormously more successful than me, to the point where it’s ludicrous to compare us (he’s “more successful than me” the same way the Sun is “bigger than Cleveland”) has a habit of posting pictures of the (many) books that people and various publishing companies send to him on his website. People look at the stack and go “Oh, hey, that one looks cool,” in the comments, and that’s the whole post.
Whaddya think: Worth the postage to send him a copy of SKYLIGHTS?
Today was an insanely irritating day, and I’ve got a blog post nibbling at the back of my brain that I really don’t want to write on account of there will be a high chance of insanely irritating fallout, and I don’t want to babysit the internet today. I’m listening to the new Sleater-Kinney album and so far I don’t like it. So given all that and my general mood of ARRGH LUTHER SMASH, have a blogwanking post.
You may recall that my post “In which the kids are fine, shut up” went Freshly Pressed a week ago Thursday. I’d been notified by email on… the previous Sunday? Saturday? that it was going to happen, but they hadn’t told me which day. So lots of reloading on the FP page ensued.
Notable fact: 164 page views during the first hour it was on FP, which was the biggest single spike of the time period.
GRAPH!:
That big spike in the middle there is actually the second day the post was on FP. Conveniently for me, the week prior to going FP was pretty damn consistent, with an average of 392 page views and 233 unique visitors per day. The FP went live at about 4:00 PM on Thursday.
Over the next four days I had 2873 page views and 1662 unique visitors. The peak day was Friday, with 1085 page views and 610 unique visitors. Subtracting out the average of the previous seven days, I find that Freshly Pressed brought me a total of 1305 page views and 964 unique visitors over those four days. Is this perfect? Not at all, since I have generally been posting less over the last couple of weeks because I’ve been busy with the book– so my natural views would likely have dropped, meaning that FP brought me more than those numbers indicate. In fact, I’m comfortable calling 1305 and 964 the minimum in terms of how much traffic I got. Also important: the page is still getting hits; it’s dueling with the Snowpiercer post from day to day on what the highest-traffic post of the day is. It hasn’t been beaten by anything but the Snowpiercer post yet. Maybe once. Not more than that.
(Why four days? I view FP in grid view, which shows nine posts. After four days, my post got pushed off the page in that view. I figure that’s as good as any other demarcation point. Notice also the drop on day five below.)
GRAPH!:
As you can see, it’s still getting noticeable attention from day to day, so clearly there are people who like to scroll way back on that FP page to see what’s on there.
Other notable facts:
The post had 40 WP likes when the FP hit. It now has 810. It has been Liked on Facebook 42 times, been retweeted 41 times, and reblogged 42 times. There are currently 155 comments.
Since it went Freshly Pressed, I’ve gone from 4550 followers to 5276. It remains to be seen if I see a sustained traffic bump from all those new people once my posting gets back to normal and I stop blathering about the book all.the.damn.time. (I promise! I’ll be interesting again someday!)
I know you all needed that information quite badly. You may resume your normal lives now, if you can.
Today was exhausting. I knew it was going to be exhausting; we have a large number of teachers out at a conference for the next several days (Monday and Tuesday are gonna suck too) and a few who were out for other reasons, and there’s just no way on Earth we’re ever going to get enough subs to cover that kind of absenteeism on a Friday. Miraculously, we got more than I expected– I walked into the building this morning fully expecting to be teaching today, and ended up only having to cover a single class period– but it was a completely ridiculous day anyway, starting off with not one but two fights before the day had even properly started.
Here is my normal approach to starred reviews. I admit that this is probably more generous than many, but I’m not worried about it. For every guy like me who hands five-star reviews out to a third of the books he reads, there will be someone else who reserves them for books that should win awards. It balances out.
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