Sockbert: Scott Adams and Metafilter

Last week, it was revealed that Dilbert creator Scott Adams had been trolling the forums of Metafilter with a sock puppet account called PlannedChaos. PlannedChaos, you will not be surprised to learn, thought pretty highly of Scott Adams. Comics Alliance published a good summary of the whole affair, including a close accounting of Adams’ shifting rationalizations, instances of bad faith, and general tacky douchiness. You can read the fateful Metafilter thread here.

I will say at the outset that Scott Adams’ is one of my favorite blogs. You often hear people talk about writers whose work they never miss even if they rarely agree with the writer’s point of view. I don’t have the stomach to read any hardcore right-wing bloggers, but Adams’ libertarian-occasionally-edging-into-heartlessness bent doesn’t really bother me. What I enjoy about him is the way in which he starts with an absurd or wild premise and attempts to follow it to its logical conclusion — this post, for example, on a hypothetical society in which technology essentially eliminates personal privacy. So many times we will get an idea that promises, or threatens, to lead us down logical, ethical or moral paths we haven’t trod before, and we immediately stamp it out with a “that’s a stupid idea.” And it usually is a stupid idea. But sometimes it’s good to let a stupid idea bloom, just to see how close to the sun it reaches. I frankly did much the same thing in my airline security post a few weeks ago.

I don’t defend Adams being an asshole — and what’s more, I don’t excuse assholishness as either an inverted form of integrity or a privilege granted to the especially intelligent or accomplished. Adams deserves the shit he’s caught for suggesting that teaching history be cut back or eliminated, or that discriminating against women and children was “easier for everyone.” So give him his just desserts and move on. As Bill Maher once rhetorically asked, “How can I know where the line is if I don’t occasionally cross it?”.

The Next 30-Day Song Challenge

  1. A song you play solely to annoy your spouse
  2. A song you would want played at your disbarment hearing
  3. A song that makes you churlish
  4. A song that fills you with a nameless dread
  5. Your favorite sea-shanty or prison work song
  6. A song that comes to mind when you hear the word “concupiscent”
  7. Your favorite obscure song that you trot out to prove you were into a popular band way before anyone else
  8. A song you used to have as your answering machine greeting back in the Eighties
  9. A song that was forever ruined for you when you discovered your mother also liked it
  10. Your favorite song about architecture
  11. A song you would have wanted to hear in the last scene of The Sopranos other than “Don’t Stop Believing”
  12. A song you can no longer listen to after seeing its title tattooed on some douchebag’s arm in a sports bar
  13. Your favorite song by a band with three or more consecutive vowels in its name
  14. Your favorite song combining Phrygian modality with lyrics about fucking
  15. A bad song you were introduced to by someone who said, “it reminds me of you”
  16. A song you would like to take back in a time machine and play to Vlad the Impaler
  17. Your favorite song by a woman whom you suspect has some really hot piercings
  18. A song played by your cousin in his shitty bar band, the one that still plays “Sex on Fire” in every goddamn set
  19. A song you would use to corrupt a child
  20. Your favorite song by an artist who used to be cool before she had kids
  21. Your favorite song by an artist who used to be cool before he cut his hair
  22. A song you would sing to stave off madness while sealed in a sensory deprivation tank
  23. A song you would like to beat the shit out of someone to
  24. Your favorite song by an artist you dislike not for their music, but for their profound moral failings
  25. A song you would like to have the shit beaten out of you to
  26. A song you would play to clear a house infested with spiders
  27. A song that somehow sounds orange to you
  28. Your favorite song from a band you once pretended to like in an attempt to get laid
  29. A song you hated in your youth but which you have now come to like, and which now serves as a painful reminder of how adulthood has robbed you of everything that once made you vital and interesting
  30. A song you would like to freeze to death to

Until we meet again, Sarah Jane: Elisabeth Sladen

Like the rest of Doctor Who fandom, I was gutted — the Britishism sums it up as nothing on this side of the pond quite does — by the sudden death of Elisabeth Sladen at the age of 63. I’ve watched Doctor Who pretty regularly since the mid-eighties, and while my estimation of various Doctors, writers and producers waxed and waned, my admiration for Sarah Jane Smith only grew. Brave, loyal, intelligent, unpretentious and really quite pretty, she made for a perfect geek crush, which later morphed into a sincere and growing admiration for the extraordinary unsung actress who brought her to life.

I once wrote an essay on The Doctor’s female companions for a now-defunct website, and this is what I had to say on the subject of Sarah Jane Smith.

First things first: there were in a sense only two companions in Tom Baker’s era: Sarah Jane Smith and everybody else. Originally conceived as a one-dimensional foil for the chauvinist Third Doctor, Sarah Jane began life as a flinty feminist go-getter, Mary Richards with a small helping of attitude. Once Baker began to hit his stride, she lost much of that edge, but what she gained was far more important and interesting. The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane took the mentor/acolyte dynamic established over the previous decade and turned it on its head. Despite — or because of — all the Fourth Doctor’s brilliance, he seemed frequently unable to fully occupy a given situation: he snapped at the people he sought to help, ignored their questions or answered them with callous jokes, or simply gazed off into the ether. It was Sarah Jane who provided the emotional context for the Doctor’s journeys: yes, her presence seemed to say, we are here to help, and it will be all right.

A character is only as great as the actor who plays her, and Elisabeth Sladen made Sarah Jane into far more than what appeared on the page. She invested every moment with a deceptively simple, human believability, and thus remade the character into a common yet fully realized person, quite possibly the most well-rounded character Doctor Who ever had. Her mix of decency, intelligence, and heart gave Baker the freedom to make the Doctor as remote and alien as he dared, and to depend more and more on Sarah Jane in the process. “I worry about you,” she chides him in “The Hand of Fear,” and the beauty of the scene is its truth: The Doctor really is a little helpless without her, and he knows it. Baker himself seemed quite devoted to Sladen, professionally if nothing else: much of his performance was tuned to their chemistry and he dreaded her departure from the show. Indeed, following Sladen’s farewell in “Hand of Fear,” Baker pressed the production team to let the Doctor travel solo; it was as if he knew the ideal balance of the Doctor and Sarah could never be duplicated, and that even to try would be futile.

* * *

Little wonder, when all’s said and done, why Lis Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith still retains her Best Companion trophy all these years later (though Ace’s rapport with the Seventh Doctor makes her a close runner-up). The role of the companion, after all, is to stand in for all us humans watching the show, and Sladen worked her ass off to make Sarah Jane the most accessible, likeable, and interesting human being she could. For all her successors’ talents, they lacked either the scripts or the personality to bring out the best in insecure Tom Baker.

Until we meet again, Sarah.

I never imagined when I wrote that piece that Doctor Who would come back as spectacularly as it has. I certainly never imagined that Sarah Jane and I would, as it were, meet again, let alone with such bittersweet feeling; “School Reunion” is a lump-in-the-throat episode for any fan of the original series. And despite all the drama and heartache that came with Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and their successors, Sarah Jane’s bond with the Fourth Doctor — with all the Doctors — remains pitch-perfect. Some things really are worth getting your heart broken for.

There’s a Place in France Where the Naked Ladies are Discouraged from Breastfeeding

Every now and then you have that paradoxical experience wherein you realize just how much you don’t know about a particular topic. An article on France in the Guardian drove that home in a big way. Consider just this paragraph:

Breastfeeding – particularly after two or three months – is regarded in France as something akin to drinking your own urine. Strange foreigners may do it, but that is no reason a nation brought up to idolise Liberté in the form of Marianne’s perfect breasts should. As a gynaecologist reminded a friend of mine the day she confirmed her pregnancy: “Your breasts are for your husband, not your baby.”

Apologies to those for whom this is old news, but I was incredulous that a First World, 21st-century nation would hold such ideas — so incredulous that the story’s April 1 pub date had me suspecting that I had been punked. (Those Brits and their, um, dry sense of humor.) I would be relieved if that were the case. Do French anthropologists believe that women evolved breasts as a tool to lure potential males, and that their ability to lactate is just a happy biological accident? For whom are, say, a cow’s udders intended, if not her calf? What if you’re a Frenchman who happens to be an ass man? Is your wife’s bottom likewise assumed to be for your pleasure, rather than an evolutionary adaptation to help her walk upright?

Anyway, I have nothing insightful to say about this. Just read the article and be lightly astonished.