Late Night Laugh: The Way Things Were

Where The Sun Doesn’t Shine Doesn’t Help

From Anorak:

CAUGHT on camera::

JUNE 23–Meet Jeffrey Barrier. The Ohio man allegedly used a cell phone camera to snap photos of a naked woman at a tanning salon Saturday and then hid the phone in his anus in a bid to thwart police.

Standing on a chair, Barrier, 41, took the photos at Cincinnati’s Aloha Tanning, where a 35-year-old woman was “in the nude in a tanning room,” according to a Hamilton County Municipal Court affidavit.

When cops later confronted Barrier, “he kept denying any involvement of the incident” and claimed to not have a camera. However, a second search of the suspect turned up the camera. As noted in a Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office report, Barrier “did hide evidence in his anus.”

Barrier, pictured in the below mug shot, was charged with disorderly conduct for taking the photos and obstructing official business for hampering a police investigation. Barrier, due in court today, is free on $1500 bond.

I have seen CCTV. I have seen the future…

Source

‘The new Woodstock generation’

From the Spectator:

In late May, New York magazine noted a highly unusual advertisement that appeared on Craigslist. A young Brooklyn couple had decided to sell virtually everything they owned, from electronics to furniture to designer shoes, for $8,500. As it turns out, the couple was planning on taking their two young children and setting out for the open road. Two weeks earlier, the New York Times profiled several other couples who had made a similar choice — to surrender their accumulated possessions and, with toddlers in tow, to leave a dreary, consumption-driven urban existence behind for something nobler and more environmentally sound. One couple, the Harrises, have been chronicling their adventures on a website called ‘Cage Free Family’, a clever reference to the cage-free hens so dearly loved by the ecologically correct. Though Jeff Harris had achieved financial success as a computer network engineer, he and his wife felt very keenly that they needed to reconnect with the land. And so the Harrises intend to leave bustling Austin, Texas for the greener pastures, literally and figuratively, of Vermont.

Now, it could be that these back-to-the-land bohemians are mere curiosities, puffed up by New York and the Times simultaneously to delight and guilt-trip their status-obsessed readership. No one knows how many Americans are embracing ‘voluntary simplicity’, whether by becoming ‘freegans’ — that is, people who dive into rubbish bins for food out of choice, not necessity — or by abandoning suburban ranch houses to live in communes or campers. But my hunch is that these cage-free families represent the coming of a new hippie moment.

The hippies are now remembered mostly as foul-smelling, tie-dye-clad libertines who, when not covered in a thick haze of marijuana smoke or indulging in ‘free love’, could be found protesting against the Vietnam war or some other supposed outrage perpetrated by ‘AmeriKKKa’. At the same time, the hippies represented a very American rebellion against the cultural conformity and political stupor of the 1950s. As the prime beneficiaries of postwar prosperity, the hippies briefly became the first ‘postmaterialist’ generation. After all, it was, and is, easy to be postmaterialist when all your needs are cared for by doting parents. So began a series of occasionally bold, at times ingenious, and often imbecilic ‘experiments in living’, ranging from the proliferation of middle-American ashrams to anti-authoritarian homeschooling, a cause later embraced by socially conservative evangelicals. The downside of all this is by now very familiar. Licence led, inevitably, to licentiousness. The patriarchy the hippies so bitterly opposed had the advantage of providing children with reliable material support, something children of the Me Generation couldn’t always count on.

And yet a great deal of good came out of this fertile moment. America’s technological leadership is arguably rooted in the tinkering of young techno-bohemians like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and software visionary Richard Stallman, who fiddled with computers out of utopian enthusiasm. As the left-wing cultural critic Thomas Frank argued in The Conquest of Cool, Madison Avenue eventually cracked this countercultural code. The hippie quest for freedom was co-opted by the capitalists. Consider the advertisements that, during the age of cheap petrol, showed hulking SUVs breezily wending their way through exotic landscapes, this despite the fact that in real life these monstrosities would inch along congested roads from subdivision to office park to supermarket and back again in a hellish loop of suburban torment.

Read the rest.

Don’t Fence Me In

More road rules don’t make for safer roads. From The Atlantic

Distracting Miss Daisy

There is a stretch of North Glebe Road, in Arlington, Virginia, that epitomizes the American approach to road safety. It’s a sloping curve, beginning on a four-lane divided highway and running down to Chain Bridge, on the Potomac River. Most drivers, absent a speed limit, would probably take the curve at 30 or 35 mph in good weather. But it has a 25-mph speed limit, vigorously enforced. As you approach the curve, a sign with flashing lights suggests slowing further, to 15 mph. A little later, another sign makes the same suggestion. Great! the neighborhood’s more cautious residents might think. »

We’re being protected. But I believe policies like this in fact make us all less safe.

I grew up in Great Britain, and over the past five years I’ve split my time between England and the United States. I’ve long found driving in the U.S. to be both annoying and boring. Annoying because of lots of unnecessary waits at stop signs and stoplights, and because of the need to obsess over speed when not waiting. Boring, scenery apart, because to avoid speeding tickets, I feel compelled to set the cruise control on long trips, driving at the same mind-numbing rate, regardless of road conditions.

Relatively recently—these things take a remarkably long time to sink in—I began to notice something else. Often when I return to the U.S. (usually to a suburban area in North Carolina’s Research Triangle), I see a fender bender or two within a few days. Yet I almost never see accidents in the U.K.

This surprised me, since the roads I drive here are generally wider, better marked, and less crowded than in the parts of England that I know best. And so I came to reflect on the mundane details of traffic-control policies in Great Britain and the United States. And I began to think that the American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.

Economists and ecologists sometimes speak of the “tragedy of the commons”—the way rational individual actions can collectively reduce the common good when resources are limited. How this applies to traffic safety may not be obvious. It’s easy to understand that although it pays the selfish herdsman to add one more sheep to common grazing land, the result may be overgrazing, and less for everyone. But what is the limited resource, the commons, in the case of driving? It’s attention. Attending to a sign competes with attending to the road. The more you look for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be to traffic conditions. The limits on attention are much more severe than most people imagine. And it takes only a momentary lapse, at the wrong time, to cause a serious accident.

Smeed’s Law, or Why Safety Measures Don’t Improve Safety

What matters most for road safety? The quality of the roads themselves? The engineering of the cars that travel them? The speed limit? The answer may be “none of the above.” In 1949, a British statistician named R. J. Smeed, who would go on to become the first professor of traffic studies at University College London, proposed a now-eponymous law. Smeed had looked at data on traffic fatalities in many different countries, over many years. He found that deaths per year could be predicted fairly accurately by a formula that involved just two factors: the number of people and the number of cars. The physicist Freeman Dyson, who during World War II had worked for Smeed in the Operational Research Section of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, noted the marvelous simplicity of Smeed’s formula, writing in Technology Review in November 2006: “It is remarkable that the number of deaths does not depend strongly on the size of the country, the quality of the roads, the rules and regulations governing traffic, or the safety equipment installed in cars.” As a result of his research, Smeed developed a fatalistic view of traffic safety, Dyson wrote.

Smeed’s Law has worked less well since the mid-1960s; traffic deaths have been somewhat reduced by engineering features such as seat belts and air bags. But technical improvements generally matter less than you might expect, because they affect driver behavior. It’s called “risk compensation”: as cars become safer, drivers tend to take more risks. Psychological factors, in other words, appear to play a huge role in road safety, and they often undercut well-intentioned safety initiatives.

I’ve spent my professional life studying adaptive behavior—how changes in the environment lead to changes in the ways humans and animals act. I’d contend that as traffic signs have proliferated in the U.S., drivers have adapted in profoundly unhealthy ways. We may imagine that driver training is something that happens to 16-year-olds in small cars labeled studentdriver. But of course we spend a lifetime on the roads after we get our licenses, and we’re being trained by our experiences every day. Let’s think about what drivers are actually learning on the roads in America.

Read the rest.

Daniel Has Been A Bad, Bad Boy

Intellectuals Condemn Authoritarian Ortega:

Celebrities and intellectuals who backed the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s have accused President Daniel Ortega’s government of stifling dissent.

Noam Chomsky, Salman Rushdie, Bianca Jagger and other high-profile former sympathisers have joined a chorus of alarm at recent actions.

The Sandinistas returned to power in Nicaragua last year after winning an election against a divided opposition, ending 17 years in the political wilderness and raising hopes of progress in central America’s poorest nation. Much of that goodwill has evaporated after controversial decisions that have revived 80s-era suspicions over Ortega’s commitment to democracy.

International donors, including Britain, have threatened to cut funding over what they say is an authoritarian and reckless style of government which is compounding economic woes. One of the most serious rows flared over the electoral agency barring two opposition parties from November municipal elections, claiming they missed a deadline for naming party representatives in all electoral districts.

Dora María Téllez, leader of one of the parties, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), a breakaway group, staged a 12-day hunger strike to protest against the “dictatorship of Daniel Ortega”, her former comrade. A legendary Sandinista guerrilla who led audacious strikes against the Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s, Tellez remains revered by many on the left.

The celebrities and intellectuals who backed the government in the 80s wrote an open letter in her support: “None of these demands is irrational and a government that wants popular support ought to respond to them. Political representation is a right. It is a right to protest against mechanisms that shut down this space. Dora Maria represents a broad sector of Nicaraguan society that ought to be listened to.”

The letter was signed by: Chomsky, a US academic; the British novelist Rushdie; Jagger, a human rights activist and former actor; and several others, including writer Ariel Dorfman, journalists Eduardo Galeano and Mario Benedetti, and human rights campaigner Tom Hayden.

The letter, published last week just as Tellez halted her strike on medical advice, elicited no government response. The office of Rosario Murillo, Ortega’s wife and spokeswoman, did not respond to calls.

Ortega returned to power after swapping fatigues and Marxist rhetoric for white linen shirts and John Lennon peace songs. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, has pledged subsidised oil to his socialist ally but Ortega’s ratings have slumped to 21%, according to a recent poll, on the back of high inflation and enduring poverty.

Many leftwing supporters were alienated by the Sandinistas’ embrace of Arnoldo Alemán, a disgraced former conservative president, and the Catholic church’s drive for a ban on abortion.

The government took a further hit last week when Carlos Mejía Godoy, a famous revolutionary singer-songwriter but now an opponent, demanded it stop using his recordings at events. “I cannot allow songs inspired by the sacrifice of thousands of Nicaraguan people to serve as a musical backdrop for … the most embarrassing tragicomedy in recent years.”

‘The New Model Army Of Sex And The City’

Andrew O’Hagan in The Telegraph:

Why Pre-Adolescents Are Obsessed With Sex

Like many of you, I grew up with the adhesive morals of Blue Peter threatening to stick to my character. It was all about making do and mending, being a good citizen, liking animals and helping others [For more on Blue Peter, see this- SC&A].

Blue Peter seemed to encourage a vision of the world where pre-adolescent children made greetings cards and helped the blind across the road before climbing the wooden hill to Bedfordshire with a glass of milk at 9pm. If life got complicated in the real world, there was always Valerie Singleton to tell you how to handle yourself on a trampoline, and for years British children of all ages seemed perfectly grateful for the information.

Imagine, then, the horror of having to wake up and discover that the former cast of Blue Peter had been having sex all along. Valerie admits she had been intimate with co-presenter Peter Purves, with intermittent snogs along the way with the likes of the actor Albert Finney, and I imagine Valerie has no idea how her cruel confessions will shock an entire generation to the core.

Not since Lulu the Elephant defecated on the studio floor, or since those naughty boys vandalised Percy Thrower’s sunken garden, and not even – for goodness sake – since Petra died, has the wonderfully nice environment of Blue Peter seemed so suddenly to conceal a world of real things.

This news of rampant normality at the heart of English idealism comes at a time when the world’s pre-adolescents seem completely obsessed with everything to do with sex.

Last week, we learnt of 17 girls at a school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who got pregnant at the same time, which would usually cause us to say “only in America”. But it turns out that a third of British schools now have dedicated sexual health clinics, providing information and morning-after pills, all part of the Government’s attempt to reduce teenage pregnancies.

The figures are interesting: they show a smaller-than-hoped-for lowering in the number of teenage pregnancies, but a rise in the number of abortions for under-14s, which means the availability of advice and of contraceptives isn’t really working at the early stage.

I feel the matter is cultural at least as much as it is ethical or political. No one could really mount an argument against advice – though some do, claiming that talk about sex only leads to sex – and I’m sure that contraceptives are generally always a good idea. There will be cases where immature individuals abuse the situation, using easier access to morning-after pills and abortions as a get-out clause from a wilfully unforeseen outcome, but this may simply be an unfortunate corollary of our attempts to do the right thing and give young people all the options available.

But the cultural problem is the one I mean to address: what is it in young people now that makes them so interested in sex?

A person connected to the case of the Gloucester school told me last week that the 17 girls had been “inspired” to get pregnant by their enjoyment of the Oscar-winning film Juno, about a very cool and very young American girl who gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby.

There has been a batch of such films, including Knocked Up, an excellent comedy that shows how your dreams need not be curtailed by finding yourself pregnant. Educationalists and health professionals are often trailing behind the sort of cultural “wisdom” that comes from films and television shows and pop culture.

In this sense, a great many young girls are not victims of ignorance or of male sexual bullying, as used to be thought. Many young girls would laugh at such an idea, not seeing themselves as victims at all, but as girls who seek to follow their own instincts and fulfill themselves in their own way. This often means not waiting for sex or holding out for marriage, but for doing your own thing and seizing what life you can. These girls are not the old graduates of Blue Peter, but the new model army of Sex and the City.

I went to secondary school at a suburban comprehensive of more than 1,000 pupils outside Glasgow. In the six years I spent there, not a single girl ever “fell pregnant”, as the saying used to be. That is not because we weren’t interested in sex, or because we didn’t know about sex. Nor, indeed, can it be put down to the fact that we had no sex clinic.

More interestingly, I believe it was because we didn’t live in a culture where sex was the premier form of teenage self-expression. Everything we knew we learnt in the playground or from mates, which turned out not to be such a swamp of ignorance as is sometimes supposed.

Teenagers had sex, but they weren’t defined by it, and none of the girls I knew thought it would be cool to have a baby. There was nothing in the surrounding culture to make them think so, and, even for unambitious kids, there were other ways of raising yourself up – jobs, mainly – that didn’t seem to leave you out of the adult world.

When you actually look at the lives of pregnant teenagers now, what you notice, beneath all the blather and the hysteria, is that all they actually want is a big task. Sex advice clinics are just a helpful accommodation to the way things are, but the best contraceptive in the world would be for such girls to actually have some prospects.

Meanwhile, the tarnishing of Blue Peter’s wholesome image goes on apace. Nothing is sacred. Today’s teenage generation likes to see itself as being too savvy for sticky-back-plastic, opting instead for alternative comedy.

No surprise, then, that another former presenter, Stuart Miles, who served on the programme for five years, will be appearing this summer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in a show called The Adventures of Pink Peter.

That’s right: cross-dressing and innuendo and a “wicked” sense of humour. The kids and their kids will lap it up, especially given there’s a role for an imaginary woman called Vera Singleton, naughty twin of the not innocent but otherwise busy face of English childhood.