Burl Burlingame took my photo from earlier today, ran it through Prisma, and came up with this…
Some quick topics to finish off the week:
- North Korean Test Leaves U.S. With a List of Bad Options — Yup. Meanwhile the Post reports that North Korea is inching closer to intercontinental nuclear capability. Think on that while you try to enjoy your weekend.
- Congress passes Saudi 9/11 lawsuits bill — The president promises to veto. Will Congress be able to override him for the first time?
- Judge Rules That Construction Can Proceed On Dakota Access Pipeline — But federal agencies halt work in an area that the tribe was particularly concerned about.
- Three USC fraternities in hot water after misconduct allegations — Could somebody please ‘splain to me why fraternities exist, why they are tolerated? At best, they’re an unnecessary distraction from higher education, and at worst, well… fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
- Fired Richland school deputy wants his job back; sheriff says it won’t happen — We’re talkking about Ben Fields, who threw the student across the room at Spring Valley High last year.
- Facebook backs down, says it will no longer censor ‘Napalm Girl’ war photo — Young Mr. Zuckerberg that it ain’t all that easy being an editor. This was a huge deal in Norway.
Burl’s effort above inspired me to play around a bit with the app, too. I like this one…
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Yeah, why learn art when you got Prisma….
Absolutely!
Oh, wait… you were being dryly ironic there…
Naw, I dropped a watercolor class when I realized how easy Waterlogue is….and so much neater!
The problem with doing watercolor – real watercolor — is you wind up holding your breath the whole time.
You see what cropping can do? My version of Brad’s grabshot leads the eye to the people, while Brad’s version settles on the perspective issues. Same picture!
Yep. Maybe it means I’m antisocial, but since the perspective was what drew my eye initially, I cropped to keep that.
By the way, the filter I used is based on Munch’s “The Scream.”
It may all be ones and zeros, but I really admire the artistry that went into creating the filters. I suppose there’s an algorithm that does all the work, but I respect the work that went into the algorithm…
You *suppose* there’s an algorithm?
Professor Fenner: “If something happens on a computer, there’s an algorithm.”
Sloppy writing. I should have said, “I’ll grant you that there’s an algorithm doing it, but I respect the work that went into the algorithm.”
I was acknowledging the likely objection to my admiration…
Yeah, yours is more like my painting.
I’m glad the agencies have stopped work in the most sensitive areas on that pipeline to try to find a solution. There are ways to avoid damaging culturally significant resources in the upper levels of a pipeine, for example by mechanically tunneling under them, but a company won’t take on that extra expense unless someone tells them they must. My role as an archaeologist in Arizona included not just research and running the Univ. of AZ contract archaeology program for 15 years, but administering the state repatriation laws throughout Arizona on private and state lands for 13 years and I handled NAGPRA (federal burial protection law) compliance for the U of A. Anyway, this issue has really galvanized the Native American communities. My Native friends from Arizona tribes have been posting on Facebook very regularly about this and news sources in the Indian communities are taking it seriously. I hate to be cynical (what am I saying, I lobby at the State House, of course I’m cynical), but part of what is happening is that the many tribes across the west are in a position to make life difficult for the Corps of Engineers on most of the projects they are involved in, and the tribes are very widely engaged on this issue. The Corps doesn’t need years of ill will on every project they manage. If they don’t try to work with the Sioux on this, they will find everyone from the Inuit to the Yaquis making their lives more difficult.
Fraternities and sororities exist to perpetuate privilege: they cost a lot to be in, you have to be a certain sort of person to be selected, and these give you a lifelong imprimitur with other privileged people who are that sort of person (wealthy, reasonably attractive, schooled in the “right” way to be…). This means that you are likely to continue to be wealthy, which means you have the discretionary income to be a significant alumnus/alumna donor, and the social network to ensure that attempts to shut “Greek” organizations down will be met with blowback. Why do you think two days after Jerry Brewer said pledging was not going to happen, Pastides said, weeeelllll, you get one more chance and we mean it this time guys, really, we do! Seriously, guys?
I believe that Pastides, as a public health professor, realizes the harm Greek activities inflict on the health of their members and would be happy to enact a zero tolerance policy for alcohol and other drugs, but cannot.
And odds are that most, if not all, of the male trustees were frat boys.
Ding ding ding
And everything Kathryn just described is what “Animal House” was mocking in 1978 as part of a nearly forgotten, ridiculous past.
I was in college from 1971-75, and the whole Greek system seemed moribund to me at the time. My first semester was spent at USC, where a friend of mine lived in an old, rundown dorm with Greek letters on the outside. It was located at the northeast corner of Blossom and Sumter, and looked like it was about to collapse. I remember going to see him and having to step over puddles of standing water in the hall. I don’t think it was technically a frat house at the time, but somehow it symbolized the state of fraternities at the time. (Where WERE the frats at USC in 1971? I have no idea. Some of you may know.)
I spent the rest of my college career at Memphis State, where I knew all sorts of people, but had no friends who were in fraternities or sororities there. They just seemed so… atavistic, so reflective of old, out-of-fashion values. (Ironically, I met my wife at a sorority house over at Southwestern, later called Rhodes College. The party was there just as a venue. One of her best friends — one of the least likely people I could imagine belonging to a sorority — was a member, purely because she gave in to pressure from her mother to join HER old sorority.)
When National Lampoon sent up the system in 1978, it seemed perfectly in tune to the times. We were never, ever going to be like THAT again, were we? College students were too cool to go in for such nonsense… right?
Yes, some of my contemporaries belonged to fraternities and I suppose were into it. I remember them forming a significant faction in student government. But all that just seemed so alien to me at the time, something more suited to 1962 (when “Animal House” was set) and earlier. My Dad had been in a fraternity, but that was OK, because that was in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when people did such things.
To think of kids today being part of such a throwback system is to me just really weird and disturbing…
I experienced college in the 70s wearing jeans and T-shirts, with long, unruly hair. Maybe those people I saw in the doubleknit pants and huge-collared disco shirts, with the helmet-like sculpted hairdos, were in fraternities.
This is sort of what I’m trying to describe…
You know what? Maybe I was an anomaly. It’s easy to find guys who look like that on Google, harder to find guys who just had natural long hair (plus facial hair, of course — I went for mustache and sideburns), jeans and T shirts. Which is what I remember as “normal.”
It’s like Google remembers the early ’70s completely differently from the way I do.
Could that be because Google was built, and is run, by people who don’t remember the period? That doesn’t seem like a likely explanation, but I’m somewhat disappointed…
I have had to remind several commenters on social media that Animal House was fiction–and do not even bother to explain how it greatly heightened reality for laughs. Unfortunately, many seem to have taken it as a serving suggestion.
My mom was a Chi Omega, and the costs meant she had to drop out of Carnegie Mellon. No way was I going to join the mass of Farrah Fawcett-Majors clones outside my dorm on the Women’s Quad, arrayed in white, and clapping and singing “songs.”
But then I am not a member of the privileged class and had no idea how the privileged class works. When one’s dad wore a vinyl pocket protector in his Dacron “dress” shirt with polyester tie, no jacket, one don’t “get” a lot of these things. I was just talking to my mom yesterday about how, even though it was legal to drink, had I wanted to, I could not have afforded to! I did splurge on an icy glass of red at Greenstreets on the night the Dick Goodwin group played, but otherwise….
Well, since my Dad was a naval officer, I was sort of blind to the social class distinctions that civilians were sensitive to. (I was sort of blind to them in the military as well. I remember in high school, when we were living at an Air Force base because my Dad was part of a joint command there, some friends of mine whose fathers were NCOs dismissed me once saying I couldn’t understand because I was “an officer’s kid.” Which shocked me because I thought we were all the same. To THEM, there was a sharp distinction.)
Interestingly, my one brush with the Greek system while at Memphis State was related to what my Dad did. There was a civilian who worked in the same office with my Dad at the naval training facility in Millington. He urged his son to try to get me into his fraternity. I don’t recall that I ever met the kid, but he dutifully called me a few times to invite me to mixers. I always thanked him politely but begged off. Eventually, to my relief, he quit calling…
Of COURSE “Animal House” was fiction — it was a caricature that I think accurately reflected what the creators saw as a ridiculous element of the past…
Unfortunately, too many seem to view it as aspirational.