Blogging by Bullet Points

In lieu of actual blogging...

• Proposal To Re-Name SF Sewage Plant after George Bush. Utter brilliance. And it looks like they collected enough signatures to get it on the ballot.
  
• What's Obscene? Google Could Have the Answer. A lawyer defending a porn site in court is using Google Trends to show that the local "community" (Pensacola, Florida, in this case) is actually an avid consumer of pornography. The notion of "community standards" to define obscenity has always been intellectually bankrupt. How exactly do you define a "community," and how can you objectively know what its standards are? Well, the answer is, most communities, no matter how you define them, love their porn.
  
• The First Amendment [pdf]. Neely Bruce, a former undergrad professor of mine, set the Bill of Rights to music, in the style of Sacred Harp singing. You can download and perform the First Amendment for free. Anybody here in Philly want to give it a go?
  
• Cody's, Landmark Berkeley Bookstore, Closes. I cannot tell you how tragic this is.
  
• I agree pretty much entirely with GayProf's review of Sex and the City. I do think one strength of the movie was its honest depiction of the psychic damage of betrayal, a subject which features so prominently in mass culture but is always either too sugar-coated or too black-and-white in representation. But beyond that, I didn't find much redeeming value. Remember back when women talking and socializing without men was considered threatening? We used to have lesbian separatism; now we have women coming together for the purpose of talking about men. or buying things with imaginary money.
  
• I recommend reading Dean Dad's two recent posts about the salary disparity between the tenure track and the adjunct class, and also Dr. Crazy's two rejoinders, and especially the often brutal comment threads associated with all of these posts. As a non-anonymous current adjunct, I'm not going to comment myself. But I think this discussion is one of the most important ones in academia right now. The issues are of course different in musicology--unlike English or History, there is not very much part-time employment in our field. Some, but not tons, and therefore I would hazard a guess that a much greater percentage of actual Ph.D.-holding musicologists (rather than moonlighting performers) are in tenure-track positions compared to other disciplines. That's a good thing in many respects, but it does present challenges to those who are, like myself, currently in a rather liminal state. Okay, maybe I will actually do a real post on this subject; stay tuned.

And finally, something to whet your appetite for a future post: