The second half of our special episode is up and waiting for your approval. Jason Sanford, John Ottinger, and Adam join us to discuss the lovely topics in the title above. Here’s the episode. We hope you enjoy it!
Something is amiss at my local Publix. Something…sinister. I’m calling it a conspiracy managed by disgruntled produce workers to screw with customers because it may very well be the cleverest attempt to force us to buy Florida oranges ever conceived. And they’re doing it through grapefruits. First, some back-story. I recently began eating grapefruits as snacks/meals in a sad attempt to lose weight and get in better shape. I suffer from what I’d like to call English Major Body, which is a rare condition that forces you to look something like the image below, but with all of your fat content evenly concentrated around the midsection. This is different from having a beer belly, which concentrates a lot of your fat in your stomach (I have no interest in demonstrating this via a picture). I want to get rid of this shape, and that means I have to start eating things that are supposed to make my insides act like they haven’t been chugging down processed plastic and grease. In all fairness, I am not very good at such things, though I have developed an expert ability to walk and read at the same time, which burns a lot of extra calories while making the act mildly entertaining. The result of this process of de-English-Majoring myself is that I now have grapefruits in my produce drawer. Or so I thought. Imagine, if you will, going into your fridge, searching for that beautiful pale orange (sometimes pinkish) fruit, plucking it from the drawer, and taking your knife to it…only to discover the insides aren’t the bright pink you’ve come to expect. No. The insides are orange, and you soon realize that the fruit you had purchased was, in fact, not a grapefruit, but a cousin by the name of orange (you probably saw this coming). “How did that happen?” you might ask. You picked all of your grapefruits from the grapefruit section. Why would there be oranges there? After all, putting grapefruits and oranges together is silly. Then imagine going back to the store and realizing that the produce department had put the oranges right next door to the grapefruits, but had covered the orange sign so all you could see was “Grapefruits / $1.99 lb.” And imagine being surprised that most of the grapefruits were not pinkish on the outside, which would give away their non-orange status, but surprisingly similarly colored and sized as the oranges next door, and that some buffoon had mixed the two fruits together so that only those in the know would realize what was going on (alternatively, people who make it a habit to smell their fruit would likely not be fooled, but I have never been one for sniffing fruit in public). What about all of this is a conspiracy? Probably nothing, but I like to think that the produce department people have devised a clever scheme to trick customers by mixing grapefruits and oranges together. Somewhere in the back is a guy giggling to himself about all the people he’s fooled, rolling over in fits of laughter at the thought of some unsuspecting customer cutting open a grapefruit and discovering an orange. This is all part of an even greater scheme to get customers to buy Florida oranges, which are, perhaps, the only produce from this State worth buying. (I rarely buy Florida produce, largely because California produce is often of better quality, despite the fact that it is shipped from California. I also don’t eat oranges, because orange juice is better anyway.) But forgive me if I don’t think this conspiracy will end with grapefruit. What’s next? Apples. You watch. One day I’ll go to the store to buy some Red Delicious apples (like the ones below). I’ll pick the best of the lot and head home thinking about the wonderfully sweet flavor of those apples (imported from Washington, no doubt). But when I finally bite into one, I’ll quickly discover that someone has painted over the apple with bright red lead paint in order to disguise the tangy Granny Smith flesh. At first, I’ll be upset, because I was expecting sweet rather than sour. Then it will dawn on me: I’ve just eaten lead paint. And somewhere in the back room of a grocery store sits a giggling produce man, who has managed to trick most of the town with his red lead paint disguise. Ten thousand people will die of lead poisoning and the Florida apple trade (assuming we grow apples here) will blow up. People will come from all over the world to buy our lead-free mediocre apples, and the produce man will get a $5,000,000 kickback for his good work. I’m sure they’ll move on to carrots and strawberries and celery next, because a conspiracy isn’t any good if you don’t expand your horizons. Just think about the Moon Landings, which were faked six separate times in order to make us believe we actually went to the Moon. They couldn’t stop with one! And so the produce people won’t stop with grapefruits or apples. They’ll take on the entire produce department, all for the glory of Florida produce, after which Rick Scott will declare fruit illegal because it’s too liberal looking… So be careful while you’re at the grocery store. You might get tricked and give a little troll in the back room a good laugh. And whenever a troll laughs, a puppy is eaten by a whale. That is all… P.S.: This is a joke I have concocted in order to avoid taking responsibility for accidentally buying oranges instead of grapefruits from my local Publix. Some of the above is true. Some of it is fictional. I won’t tell you which, because it’s funnier that way…for me. P.S.S.: Yes, I am aware that the Moon Landings really happened. That joke would be one of those fictional things…
I have no idea what is going on in this video beyond the obvious. Why did the cat decide to ride on the tortoise? Why did the tortoise have no problem with such a thing? I don’t know. It’s craziness, I tell you! See for yourself (after the fold): What did I tell you? Crazy, right?
The giveaway has ended and we have a winner: R. S. Hunter Congrats to you, sir! Your regular programming shall resume in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…
I may have mentioned this on my Twitter account and certainly on the latest episodes of the podcast version of The World in the Satin Bag (and, of course, in the episode posts themselves). But it seems to me that I should make a more official announcement about it on my blog. As of this moment, The World in the Satin Bag Podcast is available on iTunes. You can click that link or search for the podcast on iTunes (which is simple enough, I’m sure, since there can’t be more than one podcast by the same name). If you have enjoyed the novel thus far, please consider writing a review on my iTunes page. The more happy for the show, the more exposure it might get, which is good, considering I’m trying to make sure I can pay rent next month! And, as always, if you feel like letting me know you like the show, you can donate using the chip-in widget on my sidebar (which uses Paypal). Check out the donation tier to see what you can get at various donation levels. The higher the donation, the more nifty stuff I’ll give you, including really personal things, like bad drawings, amusing updates, and, if you’re so inclined, a character based on you!
I suspect the YA folks have tackled the recent Wall Street Journal article already, but the more I look at the wording of the article, the more I feel like throwing in my opinion. The language suggests (to me, at least) a fundamental misunderstanding of YA and its intended audience, which is, in a lot of ways, an extension of a fundamental misunderstanding of non-adults in general (which I take to mean anyone under the age of 21, since society has a tendency to view anyone who is not fully responsible for themselves as less-than-adult). Our culture seems predisposed, if not subconsciously conditioned, to view non-adults as one group. There’s push against this view, of course, and many parents do try to distinguish between the various age ranges, but culture pushes against these distinctions, in part, I think, because it’s easier to think of a 16-year-old and a 6-year-old as part of the same thing. That kind of thinking doesn’t do teenagers justice, and leads to quotes like the following (from the WSJ article)(after the fold): How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18. We need to get over the idea that the 12 to 18 age range denotes child in the same sense as above. All people under the age of 18 are technically children, but someone who is 16 is from a far different adolescent culture than someone who is 6. There are also exceptional mental differences which make it almost insulting to think of 16-year-olds as children. This is why the category “young adult” exists. Young adult refers to people who are almost adults. A 6-year-old is not almost an adult. They are far removed from adulthood. They are not usually exposed to the adult themes that teenagers must navigate on a day-to-day basis. So when authors write these “dark themes” in their young adult books, they are writing for readers who are already dealing with being “grown up.” The fact that they aren’t actually “grown up” is less an issue for the thematic content of books than a reason to press these issues further and to throw out the old guard’s ridiculous assumption about the mental abilities of young people. Teenagers aren’t just capable people; they are people who often yearn for the independence afforded by challenging literature and themes. They want to be treated as capable people, not because they are arrogant (though many certainly are), but because there is a subconscious desire in all of us at that age to challenge ourselves to prepare ourselves for adulthood. High school does not prepare teenagers for the world around them, and neither do the many parents and cultural icons who try to suppress “adult” themes and reduce young adults to the category of child. Such people hinder the progression to adulthood; I would even argue that such people motivate many young adults to shun responsibility (we might call this “rebelling,” but I think it is deeper than that). But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the level of disdain for the mental faculties of young adults in the article. The author goes on to say things like Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it. Teen problems are pathologies. Remember that. Then there’s this: If you think it matters what is inside a young person’s mind, surely it is of consequence what he reads. This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation, virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new. Adolescence is brief; it comes to each of us only once, so whether the debate has raged for eons doesn’t, on a personal level, really signify. The problem here? Teenagers are already thinking about adult issues. This is undeniable. Pretending for a moment that you can maintain childlike innocence during the teenage years is like pretending you can fly to the moon in a hot air balloon. No matter how hard you try, your balloon (i.e., illusion) is going to pop. But, again, what can we expect from a group that wants to think of young adults as children, as mentally incapable of handling the ambiguities of adulthood and the disturbing realities around them? Clearly young adults don’t live in a world where millions of people die in war, genocide, etc. They don’t live in a world where politicians are involved in sex scandals, where vulgar language is used by people all around them, where there is death, destruction, fear, murder, suicide, rape, kidnapping, child molestation (sometimes by priests), etc. etc etc. Except that they do. This is the world in which these young people are growing up, and if you care so much about their childlike innocence, you’d do more to curb the flow of death and terror in the world than work to keep them blind to reality. But people in this particular camp aren’t interested in putting their money where their mouths are. They are interested in suppression. Then there’s the old-fashioned, scientifically debunked logic found here: Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care. Well, actually, they do think about these extreme measures. You know how I know this?
