dispatch from madison

I've come up to Madison, where today I will complete packing up my office. I started putting my back issues of the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review in boxes to move them, and then I stopped. I should not move them. Yet I am having trouble not moving them. Argh. I just took them out of the box and put them back on a shelf. What to do?

For now, I'm going to worry about other things I'm packing. But, what to do with paper copies of major journals? Tossing them feels like a big decision because of its permanence--as in establishing henceforth I will not accumulate print journals. This is, after all, the 21st century. Put them on the free table, where eventually they will get recycled, right?

sex, lies, dogfighting, and videotape

Somebody asked me if I was ever going to write a post about the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal, given my ongoing dilettantish interest in Animals and Society. But a NYT column today seems to have it right:

“I think we are a forgiving people and a sports-loving people,” Lapchick said. “We have the potential to forgive a lot of athletes who do stupid things, or at least the sports they play.”

But, he added, “I don’t think society is going to forgive Michael Vick, unless the charges prove wrong.”

It's perhaps one of the more valuable criminal prosecutions in recent memory, as it has provided an unambiguous signal throughout American society regarding public sentiment for a crime about which there was otherwise much ambiguity. I take as the main evidence of ambiguity that companies with which Vick had endorsement deals at first weren't sure how to handle the situation, and now they can't get far enough away from him. I'm usually skeptical of the deterrent effect of "make an example of him" prosecutions, but I conjecture that this will have a real deterrent effect on dogfighting going forward.

I do think it's interesting that there are all kinds of ways that a football player could murder someone and have a much greater chance for public redemption than Michael Vick has. I think what makes the Vick crime so hard to imagine forgiveness is not just how much people love their dogs, but the way the scope and duration of the operation he bankrolled seems to bespeak a fundamental rottenness of core character, not the kind of thing to be resolved with a tearful televised apology or some anger management classes. Or jail time, I suspect.

Also: speaking of crimes that are unquestionably "bad" but ambiguous exactly "how bad" in the eyes of society, word from Madison a few weeks ago was that the neighbor of a friend of mine was arrested for having secretly videotaped himself having sex with women he was dating over the past five years (with no intent to distribute; the tapes were found in connection with a police search for other reasons). I think he was a graduate student--just so we're clear, not in sociology--and, according to the news story, he certainly gave the arresting officers a graduate student-ly explanation of his actions:

"It's funny, I never thought about asking anybody (for permission)," the complaint says he told police. "It stems from a sense of impermanence of relationships. ... I have the feeling like they aren't going to last. It lends itself to making the videotapes. The emotional need I have is to have a record."

(And saving letters and gifts apparently just wasn't enough.) His court date was set for July 30, but there hasn't been any follow-up story in the paper about what happened. I wanted to see what kind of punishment somebody would get for this crime, as I'll admit I genuinely don't know what I think an appropriate sentence would be. Interestingly, the maximum possible sentence for his crime is a jail sentence nine times longer than the maximum sentence possible for Michael Vick (45 years versus 6).

a portrait of the blogger as a successful half-marathoner and dissatistfied customer

I am so pissed. I got this e-mail today:

90 days ago you made a smart choice by clicking "YES" to accept your ActiveAdvantage trial membership offer when you registered for an event using Active.com.

This is just a quick reminder to let you know that your 90-day trial membership has expired, and you have been extended for a full year [for $50] as stated in the original offer. You are now a part of the fastest growing program for athletes and people with active lifestyles!

We hope that you have had time to review the amazing benefits and values that you receive by being an ActiveAdvantage member, ranging from travel discounts on air, car and hotel to huge savings with big name partners including: Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Wyndham Hotel Group properties, Choice Hotels, Circuit City, Barnes and Noble, Peets Coffee, AMC, Regal/Edwards Theaters, Rewards Network and more! [...]

What I registered for was the Madison Half-Marathon, which Sal and I ran over Memorial Day weekend. There is no freaking way that I would have intentionally signed up for a "trial membership" in an organization that doesn't offer any services that I have any interest in using, so whatever it is I supposedly clicked on must have kept the cost of doing so obscured. According to the site, I received a $5-10 "free gift" for signing up. I have no idea what this is supposed to have been. Anyway, I have sent them an e-mail asking for my money back, as well as a message to the organizers of the Madison marathon expressing my displeasure about their partnering with active.com. So, what's next? Why, write a blog post telling whoever would listen to be careful with any dealings with active.com.

BTW, I guess I never posted that Sal and I successfully completed the half-marathon (Chris did the whole thing, see his post here). Here we are before the race:



We ran at a leisurely pace, and Sal had to endure me being one of the chattiest people on the course. A high point may have been the half mile or so I spent describing the 1960's Australian television show "Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo."

"So, it's like Lassie, only a wild kangaroo. The characters will go 'Skippy, what is it?' and Skippy will make this toothclicky noise and they'll say 'Colin has fallen down a well?!!' But, Skippy will also do things that Lassie can't. Like there's this one scene where it looks like Skippy is cracking open a safe using only his paws. I think that's the mile marker up ahead. So, when they do the far off shots of Skippy, they use a real wild kangaroo, but then when they use the close-in shots of the paw action, it's just this puppet. Then for some mid-range shots, I think they don't even use a kangaroo at all but instead it looks more like a wallaby. Can you imagine if they sometimes switched off Lassie with some closely related dog species? Like one moment she's a collie, the next a coyote. You're not having any problems with chafing, are you?"

dispatch from madison

I've been in Madison the last couple of days, which included Sal's going away party last night. Now I'm waiting for Sal so we can, in fact, go away--drive down to Northwestern for the Cells to Society workshop. I see that Cells to Society is now listing my joining their faculty on their webpage, having taken my photo off the Robert Wood Johnson website. I need to get a professional publicity photo taken or something. Although, as important, I need to make sure that I'm reasonably shaven and that my remaining hair is in order when I have a professional take my photo.

I spent some time today continuing the multitrip project of cleaning out my office. Last time I was here, I spent an afternoon filling half of one of these giant plastic dumpsters of recycled paper and put all kinds of stuff on a free table for any takers. This time I put all my books and various other things in boxes. The experiences moving has been sometimes as if I had chosen an emotion at out of a hat, and then twenty seconds later choosing another emotion out of a hat, only instead of being random it was entirely induced by whatever I happened to have pulled out of the cupboard or file cabinet next.

A general virtue of moving is that it provides the opportunity to reduce clutter, especially if one applies the principle that something one hasn't used or missed since one's last move is something can get rid of. What was different about moving my office, though, is there were all sort of things associated with proto-projects that I don't exactly have any specific plans of going back to, but I hadn't exactly concluded I was never going back to. Some of these I'll move with me, but others I threw out.

Understand in several cases we were talking about materials and ideas from graduate school. For that matter, some of it was stuff from the first half of graduate school, when I did an entirely different kind of research substantively and methodologically from what I've done since. Still, hard to let go. And yet, for the most part, I did.

despite this short segue into badgers nostalgia, my first and eternal loyalty will always be to the iowa hawkeyes

A University of Wisconsin football player was taken third overall in the NFL draft today. While many of the top picks actually went to New York to attend the draft in person, the Wisconsin player did not, opting instead to go fishing. An aunt of his, however, drove all the way from Germantown, Wisconsin--which, come to think of it, is the most Wisconsin-y town name in the entire state--did:



I forgot to mention this, but when I was in New York City the last time, I joined a former Madison colleague (now at NYU) and went to this bar that apparently pulls out all the stops whenever the Wisconsin Badgers are on television*, including putting a big inflatable Bucky Badger out front:



I had heard you can find everything in Manhattan, but I wasn't expecting a bar devoted to University of Wisconsin sports. I don't know how many Big 10 schools are represented by comparable venues in NYC.

* Yes, this was the only full evening I had in New York on the trip, and I spent it watching University of Wisconsin basketball on television.

six floors under

Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin is divided into three areas: archeology, biological anthropology, and cultural anthropology. The image on their homepage is divided into three parts, with pictures standing in for each of the three areas. Am I the only one who thinks it is strange that, for archeology, the selected picture is a grave with "ARCHEOLOGIST" written on it? I don't know anything about archeology at UW, and I don't know if that choice of image is intended to convey anything or not.

wiijected

The big plan hatched on Wednesday night was to have a Nintendo Wii boxing tournament while I was back in Madison. We sent out invitations Thursday for a Sunday party--to a mixed group of people ranging from a couple who have been here thirty years to someone who's only been here three weeks--and we received 20 RSVP yeses. Only on Saturday, though, did I get around to the matter of actually trying to purchase the Wii. I had just been presumed that, where there's a will, there's a Wii, especially around here, since you can't spell "Wisconsin" without "Wii." Instead, a massive wiisearch campaign resulted in our learning there is not a single Wii for sale within 100 mile circle around Madison. Efforts to rent or borrow a Wii also proved fruitless, or at least not until after we sent out the announcement to postpone the party.

We're hoping to reschedule for Memorial Day weekend, when I'll be in Madison for the Mad City (Half) Marathon and the spring 2007 edition of the World's Largest Brat Fest.

The spring 2004 WLBF, btw, was what broke me of five years of pescatarianism (a pescatarian is someone who would be a vegetarian except they eat seafood). Many lapsed vegetarians/pescatarians have some story about being tempted by being in a group of people at a party or a picnic or someone occasion where it would be really awkward to turn down meat. Me, it was that I had to drive by the WLBF on my way to and fro work, and the afternoon of its last day I just pulled into the parking lot and had two bratwurst with mustard all by myself. Even aside from various concerns about the content of bratwurst, it's a weird food to have crush one's pescatarian will, because vegetarian faux bratwurst is a very close substitute for the real thing. (Indeed, according to the WLBF website, this year for the first time they will be serving vegetarian brats for the first time. If only they had done this three years earlier, who knows how many animals lives would have been spared the unhappy fate of being shoved down my postpescatarian gullet.)

now this feels like the madison i know!

I extended my supposed-to-be-brief trip to Madison through today. Which meant I got to be here for snow. Sal has been amused by my lack of patience for such modern contrivances as ice scrapers:



He's also been amused by my winter driving skills:
"We're sliding again!"
"Yeah, do you think we're going to hit that pole?"
"At least we're wearing our seatbelts."
"Hey, I forgot to put on my seatbelt!"
"I know. That was my way of saying something."
All this, and I still had time to put my seatbelt on before we stopped sliding (fortunately, short of the pole in question).

We're up on campus. Our need to work didn't mean that, on the walk from the parking lot to the building, we couldn't take a moment out to see if a stray laundry basket could be pressed into service as a sled.



Suffice it to say there are reasons sleds do not have wheels on the bottom.

don't let's tarts

I went to a dinner party at Nina's, who has recently launched her Ask For An Ocean View companion site. The site's slogan is a spot-on distillation of Ninaness and worth clicking over just for that. Anyway, for the dinner, I bought a bottle over of Bogle wine, and explained that the reason that I bought it was that the name was an anagram of BLOG + E, for Blog Entrepeneur. Nina did a passable job of acting amused.

Not like the time shortly after I began at Madison and was invited to a beginning of the year party. I brought tarts. I said I brought them because "tarts" was an anagram of START and so seemed the rousing choice given the party theme. The person to whom I said this looked at me the way you might imagine someone would look if the seemingly ordinary conversationalist she had been talking with had been suddenly replaced by a two-headed space alien, especially if that alien had something incredibly disgusting hanging out of one of its noses.

Moral: If you are someone who enjoys anagram humor, understand that this is a lonesome joy that will only bring awkwardness and pain if you try to share it with others.