February 29, '03

It's embarrassing.

I don't mean the Football Scandal, though the myopia and foot dragging that allowed it to blow up into a circus of hysteria certainly is embarrassing. On the evening news, Chancellor Byyny and CU Prexy Hoffman look like deer caught in the headlights. Now Gov'ner Blowins has taken the ball and nimbly appointed a special prosecutor to tackle the mess. What a political spectacle! What will be halftime show be like?

No, what is really embarrassing, and acutely so, is that that Mel Gibson flick has Boulderians seriously discussing whether "The Jews" really killed "Jesus." People who ought to know better debate the "historical accuracy" of the film.

There isn't any. The crucifixion story isn't mentioned outside Scripture. That unprecedented census, for example, which required everyone in Judea to travel back to their hometown to be counted, and which would have been highly problematic had it happened, has escaped notice by contemporary historians. And, strangely, references to Jesus of Nazareth, a trial, crucifixion, and resurrection are absent from the earliest scriptural writings, cropping up only centuries after the time in question.

It's likely that the gospels were never intended by their authors to be collected and read together, but represent a series of revisions as the story, and the theology, were retooled by successive writers to meet changing purposes. Consider the difficulty modern Boulderians are having deciding what happened just a couple of years ago, and whether Coach Barnett is a "pig," as Pamela White says, or "a wonderful role model." And considering that the likelihood of some bombshell archaeological discovery resolving the issue is slim to none, Gibson's cruci-fiction isn't much more historical than "Lord of the Rings."

But there's an even bigger everyday logic problem with the Jewish Guilt Question. I'm not a believer, but as a kid I had to serve my time in Sunday school, and there we were taught that the crucifixion is what made salvation possible; without it, there would be no Eternal Pie In The Sky.

It's bogus to treat religions, ethnic groups and nations as conscious entities, but for discussion purposes let's suppose "The Jews" or "The Romans" had declined to crucify an actual "Jesus," dismissing him as an ordinary lunatic. Would people today be persecuting "The Jews" for not crucifying "Jesus" and thereby thwarting salvation? Would Christianity have fizzled, as so many movements did before and have since? Or would an historical "Jesus" have died in obscurity or continued with increasingly provocative acts, until ... if the Passion was part of a Divine Plan, just how much choice did "The Jews" or "The Romans" have in the matter? Is this a pointless discussion?

None of this will be settled in the letters column of the local papers. But speaking of rings, brace yourself for Passion Fashion. A California jeweler is working overtime to supply Christian bookstores with the line of nail pendants and other crucifixion-themed adornments officially licensed by Gibson's Icon Productions. I have a queasy feeling that we'll soon see Christian skinheads, pious piercing practitioners, and religious S&M freaks picking up the cross.

Me, I'm sticking with "Lord of the Rings." As a movie, and as mythology, it's more coherent.

      —Bozo

February 27, '04

It's tough work, but somebody's got to do it.

It must be Journalism Award Season, because Boulderia's scandal sheets have started sprouting brag pieces about their wins. Usually, it's a bit like a church bazaar, everybody goes home with some kind of prize.

A couple of the Daily Camera's wins inspired wry smiles here at Mondo Boulder's Counter-Intuitive Agency. In the Colorado Press Association sweepstakes, the Camera won a first place for "Web-site¹ design in competition with online editions of newspapers of all sizes" and "first in Web Design, second in Web Community, and third in both Web Advertising and Web content" in the Colorado Press Association's Better Newspapers Contest.

Clearly, speed was not one of the criteria in these contests. Our highly trained information specialists subscribe to the print edition of the Camera, but also use its online version as well as visit the websites of many newspapers in the wide world, and were we asked to devise an award title for the Daily Camera's web edition, it would be "Most Dental" because each page view requires a long, painful extraction.

Clinking on a link on the Camera's site, the status bar at the bottom of the browser window erupts into activity: "Connected to ..."

...and after which, or occasional slight variations thereof, the requested page appears. There should really be a drumroll and crash of cymbals just to complete the effect. If our agents weren't using a browser that kills popup windows, it would be like being mugged. And then, if the hapless Camera web viewer clicks on another link, !lookout! the whole process repeats. Even with DSL, on anything less than a blazing fast computer it's like pulling teeth. About the only news websites worse than this are the ones that make the reader sign up to view an article.

It's another case of too-literal an attempt to translate print ideas into web terms. Of course, print papers have ads. But the adverts don't slow down the reading of the page. A human eye-brain combo, scanning a book or newspaper is formidably fast, beside which web technology already feels glacially slow. Ads need to be used on websites with great care, or they merely frustrate the viewer and threaten to capsize the whole enterprise. Animated ads and popup windows are especially tacky.

Maybe it's a shrewd ploy to make reading the news on the web such time-consuming torture that the viewer will pop for a $78/year subscription. It's unfortunate that those of us who do pop for a print subscription can't view the website without needing to bring along a book to read or a crossword to do.

Or that we can't access articles way, way back in Boulderia's history as far as a year ago ... or even more!

Now, that would be award-winning.

________________________

1. Why capitalized? Why hyphenated? "E-mail" we will go along with, because we like hyphens as much as anyone else, but "Web-site"? Nah. The single lowercase word is overwhelmingly used on the web itself, appears as two words fairly rarely (Microsoft, PBS), is capitalized rarely, and we could find no hyphenated examples in the approximately 5 minutes MB devoted to this burning issue.

February 24, '04

"There are 70 sexual assaults a year on the Boulder campus. Of those students (who committed sexual assaults) that were members of the business school, did the business school dean know those students committed those crimes? It's ridiculous that he (Barnett) should be aware of every behavior of every player."

—CU football parent spokesman Bob Creighton of Niwot, in the Colorado Daily, 2/23/04.

I don't know why, but I've just never considered the problem of sexual assaults by business school students before!

And now that I think about it, there could even be sexual assaults by business school students that are going completely unreported. After all, those biz school guys are pretty physically intimidating in their dark, three-piece suits. And they're constantly trained to be aggressive, to deal with things like hostile takeovers and bull markets.

Not only that, but as the focus of intense attention and adulation, not only from CU's 28,000 students but of business fans nationwide, they've become a tightly knit group with a special sense of entitlement and mission. Attack one biz school student, and the others are sure to close ranks.

Imagine the courage it would take a woman to go up against the high-stakes institution of collegiate business training. Any woman rash enough to complain of sexual assault to the dean of the business school would probably be told he'd "back his MBA 100%."

And both the motives and morals of such a woman could easily wind up shredded by rabid business boosters and business columnists, not to mention those anonymous biz chat rooms.

The football parents have certainly given us all something to think about. And it's a bad business, all right.

         —Bozo

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1.Or, if you are in Texas, "bidness."

February 22, '03

MB got an e-mail recently from local progs directing us to a website, Ralph Don't Run, which urges people to urge Ralph Nader not to run.

That's all moot now that Ralph's tiny hat is in the ring. *yawn* I didn't join the chorus, primarily because I thought Mr Nadir was just yanking Democratic chains for the attention. But, having dealt the Green Party a stunning setback last time around, he actually seems determined to solidify the two-party system for another century or so, and dismantle what's left of his own once-heroic stature.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe called Nader's decision "very unfortunate." Please. The Political Desk here at the Counter-Intutive Agency is fine with Ralph's run. The ignominy he's going to reap this time around is a better spanking than anything disgruntled Dems could devise. Once on the old whopee cushion, a man or woman is more careful where he or she sits.

A more interesting development is mentioned in a recent issue of Chuck Muck's right-wing newsletter: Are you ready for a Ralph Nader of the Right? It seems that Alabama ayotollah, I mean judge, Roy Moore, the 10 Commandments Guy, is beginning to act like a candidate, speaking at Constitution Party events. He could siphon off Bush voters from the religious right.

Once long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, I voted for a third-party candidate. In my debut as a voter, faced with a choice between Goldwater and Johnson, I smoked a joint in the privacy of an actual Boulder voting booth and voted for some long-forgotten Socialist Workers Party candidate. At the time, it seemed like a grand, symbolic gesture. Now, it just seems like sitting out the election.

So go ahead, Ralph and Roy. I won't be voting for either of you in the bleak November, and I doubt if many other people will either.

     —Bozo

February 21, '03

Several big lies float around sports culture like debris around the rotten hull of a sunken ship. Lie No. 1: Athletes play by the rules. Lie No. 2: Sports build character.

  —Lowell Cohn, in The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, 2/21/04

... if so, it must be in overtime play right now. So far this year, the Capitol Gang has been happily busy doing what it does best: making Colorado safe for conservatives and children. After a conscious-raising revival meeting last fall with evangelist of conservatism David Horowitz, Colorado legislators have been getting lathered up for one of their favorite sports, hunting liberal bias at the University of Colorado. Talley ho!

Although it's hard to achieve a conclusive kill --considering that the state government displays a chronic rightward tilt, it's hard to seriously argue there exists any pervasive sinister effect emanating from the liberal profs at CU-- the sport is always a lot of fun, with plenty of baying and chasing. The game isn't really dangerous when cornered, and the legislative hounds can always let their biased liberal quarry escape, to be hunted another day.

They also busied themselves with trying to come up with a Pledge of Allegiance bill the courts would accept, trying to craft a vicious dog bill that the insurance industry would accept, trying to redistrict the state so that even more right-thinking people could be elected, and trying to protect children from sex education in the schools or catching a glimpse of smut on the state's magazine racks. The Colorado legislature has been a busy body.

But while they were thus happily engaged, pretending that a juggernaut of fiscal doom wasn't really bearing down on higher education in the state, something went terribly wrong. It turned out that the threats to public decency, safety and morality weren't coming from those godless liberals at the Nation's Number One Party School after all.

Oh, no. The threats to public decency, safety and morality were coming from the football team. What was once just a persistent local bad odor has suddenly become a major, nationally televised stink.

"O merde, O cher!" as Napoleon exclaimed while the water rose in the loo. Suddenly, Colorado's resident Roundheads, capable of introducing a bill or publicly sermonizing at the slightest pretext, have become terribly silent.

It's going to be tough to pin this one on liberal bias.

       —Bozo

PS Try as we might to shine the cleansing light of absurdity on current events, it's all but impossible to match reality. Hardly was the above written when an impassioned letter to the Camera dismissed the football mess as nothing but the "rants of worshippers of 'political correctness'." See, it's really the coach who's the victim. "It is reprehensible for the university to fail to support and defend him against these ludicrous attacks from the political left."

February 15, '04

Everyone now knows George Washington never said, "I cannot tell a lie," admitting he chopped down a cherry tree with his little hatchet.¹ Also nowadays, George would, on advice of his attorney, employ the 3D Crisis Management Technique.

Since there hardly seems to be an institution, local, national, or global that may not erupt into crisis at any moment, the populace should familiarize themselves with the 3D Method. This technique has long been the mainstay of 3 year-olds, which is about the age that American children become aware of legal and public relations issues.

Lately, the 3D Crisis Management Technique has been perfected by governmental, entertainment, business and sports figures.

It's simple, but effective:

Leave well enough alone. Let sleeping dogs lie. Don't rock the boat. After all, everybody who knows where all the bodies are buried might happen to find themselves on the same airline flight that disappears in the Bermuda Triangle. A great fissure in the earth could open and swallow up the paper trail, those incriminating e-mails, the embarrassing telephone records. Pray that it be so.

You didn't know about it, and if you did, you don't remember. Portray yourself as the victim at your integrity ever having been questioned at all, even if you have to shout to be heard over the rattling of the skeletons with smoking guns in your closet. Interestingly, the SEC is creatively claiming Martha Stewart's public protests of innocence constitutes fraud.² If this zany new legal principle were applied to what has become SOP in public life, it would make most of the nation's leaders indictable.

Let sleeping dogs lie, but if they don't, do it yourself.

...And if the 3D Method³ fails, plea bargain!


_____________________________
1. Actually, it wasn't chopping down the cherry tree that George never admitted doing in Parson Weems' story, it was barking the tree. But who's going to claim the Father of his or her country admitted barking up a tree?

2. Those who've been gloating over the downfall of Martha should peruse a revealing piece in Reason that explains how she's being made a scapegoat while more culpable players in the ImClone case get off. Business as usual.

3. There's actually a fourth D: DEFAME your critics, but this one can seriously backfire, and is not recommended, except by trained professionals.

It's been a long-standing policy of Boulder newspapers (and Denver papers, and many papers elsewhere) never to mention the competition unless absolutely necessary. In the past, the Daily Camera has in rare instances picked up stories broken in Boulder Weekly without ever mentioning the other paper, so you can imagine the surprise of Mondo Boldo's crack media analysts to discover a splashy feature story in today's Boulder Sunday Clump about Boulder Weekly Editor Pam White, aka romance novelist Pamela Clare. They even had to print the name of Ms White's former paper, the Colorado Daily, to do the piece.

There have been a couple of instances in which the Camera actually mentioned BW recently. It's true they gave B-Dub's 10th anniversary a pass as not newsworthy, to the public irritation of Publisher Stewart Sallo. Maybe these increasing acknowledgments that other papers exist occurred just because it would be too awkward to ignore the recent books penned by BW staffers, or sound too silly to say "a certain other newspaper." Or maybe there is some sort of thaw underway in the solipsistic world of Boulder journalism.

Or maybe the nervous corporate types at the Camera have decided Boulder Weekly isn't really competition after all.

      —Bozo

February 10, '04 -- Today (1920) is the birthday of Alex Comfort, author of The Joy of Sex.

Boulder Weekly doesn't call itself "alternative" for nothing.

The latest in a tradition of CU football sex scandals that is now exploding into the national news just isn't happening on BW's pages. In fact, a regular reader might not suspect there's anything at all up there on University Hill.

Windswept prairie.

Ironic, because BW editor and romance novelist Pamela White once edited our independent campus-oriented Colorado Daily and made waves. It's as if by mutual agreement the campus turf has now been left to the Randy Miller-owned Daily, a gang who'll never ruffle the placid surface of Varsity Pond.

People who have no idea, or don't care, who played in or who won the Super Bowel can't stop thinking about Janet Jackson's right breast. How could that have been accidental, yet why would anyone deliberately make their right breast into a pitiful national laughingstock?

Why? Why? Boulderians wrestling with this modern-life conundrum have gotten no help from Boulder Weekly thus far.

It's not as if there's no sex in Boulder Weekly. Last week's issue was like Cosmo for Progressives. The cover story, "Sex as Prayer," (and I thought it was the answer to a prayer) was about Tantra, not the Boulder apartment complex but the ancient eastern art of hooking up. Buddhist monks would offer young recruits everything in the Tantric Pantry to get them to sign with their monastery.

I made up that last part.

The Miller Gang has been pretty half-hearted about pursuing the alternative health, or Pills 'n' Posies, market, and the Pam White BW has made to put the moves on it by adding a new section called Hygeia. The Tantra article issue just happens to have some ads from some pretty dishy looking Tantric therapists, one of whom, Jane, promises nothing less than "the mysteries of sexuality that have remained secret by only the most advanced and persistent in the Ancient Tantric Arts, Kama Sutra and Taoist schools of Sexual Kung Fu." Kung Fu? Yikes! Be gentle with that thing, baby!

The kinder, gentler, hornier Boulder Weekly we've seen since Ms White has been on top has also featured a lot more sex. But this is not the football fan kind of sex, this is sex that, although hot, is romantic, the kind of sex where the man asks the woman first. Sacred sex. The bombastic gun dudes who used to frequent the paper under Wayne Laugesen's leadership seem to have slunk off, pistols lowered, to Shotgun Willie's.

The recent Sex Issue had some pretty hot stuff, including a story of love and weight loss in which the lovers have "ridden this storm of pleasure and survived," her body "drinks the energy released intentionally from his body into hers," and in the end, love triumphs over "vanilla ice cream and oatmeal cookies." Can't we have both?

In another piece, a woman attends "hands-on sex workshops." The reader is left to wonder whose hands are on what, and after she finds a husband at one of these whing-dings, it is described as a "stroke of sheer luck or fate." Isn't that called a hole in one?

All this leaves me feeling horny, but in a spiritual way. Still, I can't help thinking about Janet Jackson's right breast.

Poor thing.

         —Bozo

February 9, 2004 -- On this day in 1894, the world's first striptease was performed by Mona, an artists' model, at the Four Arts Ball at the Moulin Rouge.

Q. Which is more obscene, Janet's breast or Coach Barnett's salary?

A. While they both are out of control, I think that Coach Barnett's $1 million salary, about three times the university president's salary, wins the toss.

 

Q. How do you feel about Janet Jackson's breast?

A. Very carefully, because of that metal thing. The Breast has a lot to answer for, most notably stimulating an effusion of misinformed punditry. One scribe thinks the new erectile drug is an aphrodisiac, another confidently states the human female breast is a mere milk-dispensing appliance. It won't do to be flashing network audiences, of course, we can't have that, but the hysteria of the response seems peculiar in the context of the general crassness of a gladiatorial spectacle. A Mr Ryan Carter, of Highlands Ranch, wrote the Camera:

It's not that I don't like watching football — I love watching football — but I do, however, have enough perspective to realize that the Super Bowl is the world's most prominent showcase for consumption, aggression, substance abuse, materialism, debauchery, decadence and corruption of all sorts.

 

Q. Has the University developed a plan to deal with problems in the football program?

A. The University has drafted a two-stage plan to deal with the problems: 1) Circle the wagons, and 2) Take cover and try to shoot the messenger.

 

Q. And what would you, Mr Smartass Answer Man, suggest the university do?

A. The university must learn to show the courage that Coach Barnett has shown. When things don't go well, he somehow finds the strength to fire a subordinate, even if it is an old friend who goes back a long way. The university must learn from his example. A million bucks is way too much, even in Monopoly™ money, for someone with such a very bad memory.

 

Q. Will the independent probe get to the bottom of it?

A. The university, as well as the nation, must wrestle with the difficult question of whether star athletes should be allowed to take women by force, or if they should have to ask for sex. If Gov'ner Blowins and the boys in the state legislature want to affix responsibility for the continuing scandals involving the football program, they could save the state treasury the cost of an investigation and take a long, hard look in the mirror. They are responsible if the state's "flagship" university is devoting a major amount of its energy to running a farm team for the professional football leagues.

They should't be surprised if it comes to resemble the creature it serves.

February 7, 2004

February 2, 2004

Irony is not dead in the ski industry.

Like their alpine counterparts (manufacturers use the same molds), the gleaming telemark skis on display at Ski Deals and other local retailers just get wider and wider, and shorter and shorter. They're starting to look like dual snowboards. And their prices have climbed into the stratospheric realm formerly reserved for alpine skis.

So fixed has become the current orthodoxy for fat and short that I was able to pick up three pair of high-quality classic AT skis, 189 cm, for $70. The last time I looked, one lonely pair remained, marked all the way down to $30, and I may go and get them, too. These skis are just too "long" and, at traditional alpine ski width, too "narrow" for current tastes.

The fatties that now rule look like they'd be heaven for heli-skiing in the Bugaboos or for season pass holders at Alta. They're probably not much fun for cruising ice, packed powder, and a few inches of new, which is pretty much what goes on around here now that the climate has gone south.

Eventually, someone will "discover" that longer, narrower skis are quicker edge-to-edge, stable at high speed, less work to turn, and can keep the skier from peeling off very steep slopes in the real world of Colorado's current climate. Nowadays, a mere few inches of new that once would have sent skiers back to the eiderdown for another couple of hours' shuteye, can cause a scramble.

Yesterday, reports of 7 whole (elf) inches of new snow sent me scrambling up to Lake Pandora, Boulderia's own ski area, alongside the fat-ski crew. Using the time-tested Thundering Herd Principle, I let the herd thunder off to the more popular attractions, notably Lake Pandora's "back" side, which in a neat topological trick, is on the same side of the mountain as the "front."

To my delight, my favored glades were untouched, with the coating of new snow providing sufficient lubrication to make for fun, if strenuous skiing. The large number of snags had probably helped discourage trespassing, and added a certain exciting, backcountry flavor. But I was anxious to get to the actual backcountry, which I assumed would be much improved by the new snow, so after a couple of trips, I moved on.

Alas, as is sometimes the case, results may vary. On a visit a few days before to this actual "back" side of Mt Pandora, the inevitable sun crust in these south-facing glades was tender enough that it would shatter easily, allowing turning in the underlying sugar. Now I found that although everything looked beautiful with the new snow, the going was actually tougher.

The breakable layer, now buried, was stronger, probably because it was colder. This meant instead of shattering, it would collapse treacherously, dropping the skier into a hollow void. The new snow didn't do much to help, and instead actually helped embrangle the skis. Not only that, the new snow barely hid many of the snags and rocks that previously could be seen and avoided. It made for character-building, ego-slimming, and very tiring, skiing.

And depressing skiing, too, because, as recent reasons have shown, this structure will not go away until the snowpack melts in the spring. It would require a lot more snow than Boulderia is likely to get to render it tolerable.

Would the short fatties handle this stuff better?

Could be. I'd have to beat the bejeezus out of an expensive pair of skis to find out.

        —Wing Commander Bozo