From Couch to 5 K

One Woman's Story.....

Former AVC Writing Center Tutor Abbey Fitting has been an occasional guest writer for this blog. This weekend, she joined 700-800 other brave souls for a Thanksgiving-morning "Turkey Trot." For her, this was proof that she could set a goal and stick to it: loosing weight, gaining fitness, and mastering weather, entropy, and days she had to stay late at work. After her dedicated training was over, it was here. Cold and clear, the big day had arrived.

This was the first formal, organized run in her life. She decided fairly recently to follow the "couch to 5 k" training plan. She arrived at the YMCA that morning proud to have been issued her number.

Other folks were glad to be there too, like these two dogs, re-enacting the play, movie, and tv series franchise, The Odd Couple.

"I think I am in love...."

And after the usual messages and lost children and the national anthem, the runners were off. Meanwhile, some of us had to stay behind and keep the home fires burning. This adorable little girl below I think is saying, "Run faster, Mommy ---- I'm cold!"

The great support volunteers at the YMCA were out on the course helping direct traffic, while others cut up oranges and got the finish line cones lined up. Seeing all of these earnest, slender, well-intentioned people working so hard and selflessly early on a frosty Thanksiving morning made me want to give thanks for the enduring presence of the human spirit. They also made me secretly desire a cheeseburger and a cigarette.

I know that in the modern big marathons, runners can opt to have little tags wired into their shoelaces, and those near and dear to them can follow their progress online.

Here in the Antelope Valley, we're not quite so sophisticated. You lick a finger and test the tail wind, take the occasional look at the cell phone to see what time it is, and make an educated guess when your runner is likely to show up at the finish line. In Abbey's case, encouraged by the crowd and after having trained, ate, and slept sensibly all week, she and her iPod rounded the final bend and came shooting up towards the finish line to clock her best run ever.

WOW, she says --- I did it! And then of course one must take care of necessities. What comes next, directly after a run? Kissing a spouse? Looking for the kids? Going over to the stretching station? No, of course not. What has to happen next is to get a posting up on Facebook......

Others dug around in the pile of oranges, saying (as I did), aren't there any cheeseburgers under here?

Here are her thoughts on the process, in her own words.

"When I decided it was time to lose some weight and gain a little fitness (it's really embarrassing when climbing the stairs in your own house leaves you winded!), I didn't make enough money to afford a gym membership, so I decided to find an alternative. Over beers and burgers a friend of mine mentioned that he'd done this Couch to 5K thing, which takes you from couch layabout to 5K in nine weeks. It sounded really easy (in the first week you start by walking for 5 minutes, then jog for 60 seconds, then walk for 90 seconds, alternating the 60/90 for 20 minutes and then walk for five: piece of cake, right?).  

Plus, since I already owned a pair of old jogging shoes and an iPod, it would cost me nothing but time. So, I downloaded one of the free C25K aps from iTunes, and got on the program. 3 days a week, wind, rain, or (as was more often the case) scorching heat, I went out and did my time. When I finished up the C25K program, I decided to keep it up, getting out and running 3 days a week. The result was a really good (for me) 5K on Thanksgiving day.

As advertised, running has had a lot of benefits. I have amazing energy these days, I sleep like a baby (I'm prone to bad bouts of insomnia), I lost weight, and I got an excellent (farmers) tan from all that time in the sun, but the best thing has actually been the satisfaction of knowing I could set a goal for myself and see it through even when there wasn't anyone hounding me to get it done."

The AVC blog is curated by Language Arts Instructor Charles Hood, who can be reached at chood@avc.edu. It does not represent the views of the AVC District, the Board of Trustees, the YMCA of the Antelope Valley, or members of the Cheeseburger Chamber of Commerce.

The Smartest Man in America Tells Us Who is the Smartest Man in America

Grading the Graders....

One of the pleasures of being around a campus all the time is that I do get to meet smart, interesting people, and of course I do mean on both sides of the podium. That much is natural, and might happen in a public library or even a bank. But in showing content to students, I also get to meet smart people just through the interweb.

One of my heroes is the art and literary critic Lawrence Weschler, shown here on the left in discussion with Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

They were meeting at a lecture by photographer Michael Light. While all three gents have tremendous IQs and quick wits, Weschler himself is often introduced as "the smartest man in America."

He himself though would say, no, it's not him, it is the man most of us best known as the editor behind Apocalypse Now, Walter Murch.

Here is Weschler via a blog relating to the Chicago Humanities Festival:

Every spring, at some point in the semester as I am teaching my graduate Fiction of Nonfiction writing and reading class to the usual collection of journalism and poetry graduate students at NYU (my mission, to help foster a new generation of lyrical reporters and investigative poets), there comes a point in the proceedings where I have occasion to offer up my opinion (which given the rules of graduate education has the momentary force of law) that Walter Murch is the smartest person in America.

“Walter Murch is the smartest person in America,” I’m likely summarily to declare, “and that will be on the test.  The question will be, ‘Who is the smartest person in America?’ and the expected answer is ‘Walter Murch.’  Ten points.”

The link to that, which probably won't be click-able inside the blog, is this:
http://www.chicagohumanities.org/Blog/Lawrence-Weschler/Walter-Murch.aspx

So there we go. High praise indeed, and if you want to explore an extended meditation on Murch and Apocalypse Now (and if you are an AVC student), go into the "Library" part of the AVC website (log in first, go to Academics, then find "library") and use EBSCO Discovery Services to take you to Weschler's article in Harper's Magazine, "Valkyries Over Iraq: The Trouble with War Movies." Via the subscriptions AVC has, you can read the content but not see the pictures, which are though included in Weschler's book, Uncanny Valley, and inside the Harper's site itself.

Basically, Weschler's piece tries to navigate the problem that (as shown in the book and movie, Jarhead) parts of an anti-war movie like Apocalypse Now can have scenes of such heart-bestirring romantic glory that they can be used to be turn an audience pro-war. In short, who wouldn't want to swoop around in a helicopter, playing the record player too loud and annoying the neighbors? Rather than condemn the Air Cavalry commander Col. Kilgore (note the name, a three-way blend of World War Two's comic character "Kilroy," the verb "kill," and the verb and noun "gore") --- rather than condemn the character as Coppola intends for us to do, in experiencing that scene as viewers, instead, we identify with him. The colonel loves the smell of napalm in the morning (it smells like victory), but we love fast machines and a good soundtrack, and if there are guns and naked chicks (both of which Apoc Now has, and especially Apoc Now Redux), so much the better.

That's a fine insight and I like this article a lot, even the parts (especially the parts) I disagree with. What has been fun has been seeing where following him has taken me. In looking at the book and then the original article, I ended up spending time on the Harper's website.

This turns out to be trivia-city, in ways that nearly verge on (but quite enter) the profound.

For example, according to Harper's

--- researchers have found that the five-second rule (ok to eat food that has only touched the floor for a few seconds) is biologically false;

--- Police in Britain apologized for tasering a blind middle-aged man after mistaking his walking stick for a samurai sword;

--- an Orlando man who started having sex with his date on a restaurant table in view of young children, and who then refused to pay the bill, was arrested on a charge of defrauding an innkeeper;

---  Ulaanbaatar took down its last remaining statue of Vladimir Lenin, which it will auction at a starting bid of $280 (though I suspect the shipping charges will be 10 or 20x that);

--- a Danish pornography website announced a contest that would award an iPhone to the entrant with the smallest penis. “It’s a competition which is at the core of manhood,” said site owner Morten Fabricius;

--- a Seattle man was arrested for the 1976 murder of an elderly woman after an undercover policeman obtained DNA from him by pretending to conduct a chewing-gum survey;

and lastly (for now),

--- French president François Hollande announced a plan to ban homework, which he said favors the wealthy. I am sure my own students would appeal to my sense of us all being part of the 99% and would agree with Mr. Hollande.

Go, Harper's! Certainly this is fun stuff. It made me re-visit some of the past AVC blogs to see how we hold up. It's a mixed report card.

One piece of art that I took a skeptical view of at LACMA, the new big rock, remains a crowd-pleaser. Of course, this blog never said it wouldn't be popular, just that as a sculptural presence, it didn't merit the awe and hype being generated. Just go for a hike around Stoney Point in Chatsworth if you want to see bigger rocks, and in their case, since that site has a cultural history ranging from the start of modern rock climbing to the horror of Charles Manson, it has large-as-houses-stones PLUS a human layer of narrative.

But that rock remains deeply popular, so I am glad LACMA put it in. Visitor numbers upticked very strongly, and the current (and fabulous) show on cinema's Stanley Kubrick will keep those numbers high I suspect. Indeed, on a recent Saturday, there was not even anyplace to park, it was so crowded. Here is an art world newsletter reviewing the piece's impact:

Another topic the blog took on was beauty and impossible standards, and it spent a small amount of time with an ad for skylights. AVC wins one again, since apparently that ad was striking to a number of judges, too, and it won awards. Here is the ad, surrounded by some cropped text from Photo District News that explained the ad's appeal.

It is nice to be right, sort of like when I have seen a movie and then gone on Rotten Tomatoes to find out all the film critics who agree with me. (The ones who disagree clearly are drunken fools.) The bed and skylight shot itself was very tricky to do, hence the article about it inside a photography professional journal. It is also just flat out striking, and I feel mildly vindicated that others agree with me. (I still also think it promotes absurdity and criminal levels of consumerism, but whatcha gonna do? The world is what it is.)

I close with something from Weschler, one of the favorite things he has said that I have come across this week. This is from his remarks about Murch from the same site mentioned above. Here he is:

Smartest?  Well, okay, maybe [ Walter Murch is ] not the smartest (I suppose there must be some Nobel Prize winning biophysicist/concert pianist somewhere with an equally plausible claim to that title.)  But surely among the most various and polymath and confoundingly protean.  One recent afternoon, for example, he sat down to puzzle out the answer to a question he’d posed himself: on a per-watt basis, which emits the most energy for its size, the sun or a brain?  (His answer: on a per-cubic centimeter basis, the brain emits 56,000 times more energy than the sun.)  

That seems like great stuff, but what about the rest of us, whose solar factories often feel as if they are in semi-permanent eclipse? Well, for us, luckily, there are videos of dogs giving rides to cats and the results of that Danish contest to see who will win the smallest tallywhacker iPhone.


The Antelope Valley College blog is curated by Charles Hood, Language Arts, who can be reached at chood@avc.edu. These blogs do not represent the opinions of the District nor of the Board of Trustees, nor Harper's magazine or Larry Weschler or anybody else living or dead, past or future, in a time machine or in locked in Tuperware, who might be offended by anything here. Also, this blog is not endorsed by Tuperware, a registered trademark. Thank you for visiting.

Sexy, Loud, and Fast (and other four-letter words)

How Mermaids (Don't) Sell Cars

America can take pride in having brought the world a number of great achievements --- jazz music, the Declaration of Independence, good coffee even at McDonald's, and, more than anything, muscle cars. The Camaro, the Mustang, the Charger: old versions or new, these are as much our legacy as landing on the moon or the whistle-inducing skirt of Marilyn Monroe.

Anybody remember the Pearl Jam song, "Wishlist"? Among other things ("I wish I was the souvenir you kept your house key on"), one of the lines goes, "I wish I was the full moon shining off a Camaro's hood." Ah yes, classic cars indeed. They are still around, of course, and out now in updated versions. (The new ones even have seat belts.) My wife's boss recently got a mailer for the new generations of cars like these, and the brochure combines sex appeal with poetry. One thing that this advertisement has learned is that the sexiest images may have no naked women (or men) in them at all. Less is more, in language and lingerie ads.

Chrysler wants to take ownership of its old Dodge Charger heritage. In this expensive, fold-out packet, each page has a sort of haiku-like text, one page visible at a time, and as you unfold a poster-sized ad, the next page of text opens up a new set of car photographs. Here's the first bit of poetic copy: "Sexy / Loud / Fast / And Other Four Letter Words." (We'll follow academic convention and use the slash mark to show line breaks.)

As with most good ads, this one can be read in a second or two, and the color red (speed, danger, red lips, fire trucks) combined with the technical, silvery grey (and details of pseudo-technical parts, like the lug nuts on the rim) create the impression that we're dealing with fine but complicated racing machinery. What do you get when you cross lipstick with a jet engine? Ads like these. Turn the page and here's the next hit of poetry.

To rely on the taxonomy of classical rhetoric, we can say that this text uses a trick called elision, which is to say, implied words we can skip over and yet still count as being grammatically present. The copy just says "Flat Out," but we understand there is a bit more text needed here, so the invisible, implied verb would be something like "run flat out" or "go flat out." We can skip over these words and just get the compression and energy implied by a tighter, more "driven" line. This is a brilliant choice and one I wish my own poetry students could learn. It's classic "less is more," and too it shows how a bit of colloquial English (flat out) can do wonderful things. In case it is hard to see on the screen, the text says, "Flat / Out / Until You / See God / Then Brake."

And note too here that as we move through the narrative (each page unfolding more cars than the spread before), the cropped perspective implies glimpses: glimpses of cars that are perhaps going past too swiftly to be seen all at once, but glimpses too because of the voyeurism of the perspective. We are spying on the cars almost, watching them through a keyhole. This is much sexier in practice than it might seem just in a verbal analysis, and sexier too than if we had the Laker Girls involved or some other cliche representation of overt sexual presence. The next page works just as well:

Not legible in this blog version may be the punch line: "Cops / Will / Stop / You. / Just To Ask About Your Car." The four bold large-font words are each monosyllables and of course we have an internal rhyme with cop and stop. There is great power and directness here, as well as the implies bragging rights of having a car that everybody covets, even John Q. Law, whose own car, we assume, is pretty quick out the gate itself. When I took delivery of my current car, a limited edition "Baja" version 4 x 4 Tacoma, the sports graphics irritated me but added to the "young-guys" vibe the car puts out. I think the 20-something techs at Toyota who prepped it for delivery did indeed fancy it. (They might think they want it right up until the first time they had to pay $85 for a full tank of gas.) Here's my car the afternoon I took it home.

As with Chrysler's launch of the SRT brand (Street and Racing Team), I intuited that for a shot of my own car the black and chrome style and deep-tread tires would speak for themselves. The ad above continues to unfold with more text and images, concluding with "Blur / Life / And / Everything / Suddenly Becomes Clear." All of this reverses almost a century of car ads, when women were needed to demonstrate sexual potency and speed, not glimpses of fenders or blurred taillights. I first went to an auto show with my dad in 1968. The car model gals were something else back in those strange and troubled times, and I was delighted to find a book at the Peterson Automotive Museum that surveys exactly this. Here is the cover shot from Sirens of Chrome: The Enduring Allure of Auto Show Models by Margery Krevsky.

I suspect most of us find this funny, not sexy. And as the book reveals on page 150, changing from exploiting men to exploiting women doesn't work visually either.

I hope his car has one of those magnetic hide-a-key boxes under the back bumper, since apparently he doesn't have any pockets to keep his car keys in. I graduated high school in 1977 and this ad from that same year brings me more discomfort than nostalgia. The car is as ugly as the pants suits.

I suppose the implied story of the Pontiac shot is "girls night out"? They are not just there as eye candy but somehow are in the middle of an actual evening or event? Maybe they are an under-cover team of super heroines, Charlie's Slacks Angels.

If they are crime stoppers, here's an ad from 1967 that combines The Avengers, the Perils of Pauline, and Bonanza, all in one visual mess.

1967 was the model year the Camaro was released, and so from the same year as the rope and hat ad above comes this shot with these three very mod models. Shag-a-delic, baby.

The ads for sports cars often imply that if a man is driving a car like that, he has a pretty girl by his side (think of the role women play as passengers in American Graffiti). When I'm in L.A. and see ultra hot cars tooling around Sunset Blvd, often as not, the driver is alone. All of the supermodels are in the backs of town cars being driven to their next gig. They know that to drive in a convertible will mess up their hair, and they won't be able to hear what their agent is telling them as they talk on their iPhones. Besides, going fast is always more fun for the driver than the passenger.

To return to our initial 2012 ad, the one with the poetry captions and blurs and glimpses, the cars have converged on Mulholland Drive to make out, but apparently with each other, since again, no humans (naked or otherwise) have cluttered up the clean lines of these latest production models. (A Jeep has snuck in there too, one many SUVs marketed these days too prissy to cross a half-full gutter.)

The ad does work, of course. Zoom, zoom --- I very much want one --- or maybe that is my midlife crisis talking again, since before I settled on replacing my beater truck with a new truck, I did wander around glam car showrooms. I still eye the zoomier cars, when I see them in Malibu or passing me on the long uphill that is the 14 climbing out of Los Angeles. At least for me, something faster off the blocks and louder down the street will have to wait until the loan payments catch up with the stack of paper I signed.

Until then, though, I can always spend my afternoons with my nearly-as-good and very flame-painted substitute: my newest Hot Wheels car.

The Antelope Valley College blog is written by Charles Hood, Language Arts, who can be reached at chood@avc.edu. These blogs do not represent the opinions of the District nor of the Board of Trustees, all of whom collectively scold Hood for the number of speeding tickets he manages to accrue even in a heavy 4 x 4 truck.

This Snow Leopard Wants to Steal Your Wallet

Plush Toys, Marketing Ploys, and Background Noise

It's catalog time: in my house, since I get not only my own junk mail but mail addressed to my late parents, the Christmas catalogs pile up daily. On a bad day, I might get six or ten catalogs. Hard to hear yourself think, over the blizzard of visual static coming in with all that mail.

Today's catalog from the top of the stack comes from WWF, World Wildlife Fund, a conservation group which does, so far as I know, good work. Save the pandas, save the tigers --- that's WWF.

Each year they need a new animal to feature: maybe a koala, maybe a baby gorilla --- something K & K (cute and cuddly). This year's "panda" is a snow leopard. The nature organizations never seem to be interested in trying to save ugly animals, really really tiny animals ("save the endangered polio virus!" --- I think not), or animals that only live in the dark.

I'm all for snow leopards, of course. One of my good friends has just seen one this week I hope: he's on an expedition in the Himalaya right now, and I await his email from the airport, once he's on his way home, to say yes or no if they saw any in the wild.

My problem is that this catalog lies. The group is about wild animals (emphasis added), which is to say, it's not about zoos or captive breeding efforts, not directly anyway, but about habitat enhancement so wild animals stay wild. Their name is not "World (Tame) Wildlife Fund." Yet this photo on the cover almost certainly is a tame snow leopard, in a game park. Why do I say that? The fluffy, immaculate fur, the wispy flakes of snow, the kind yet concerned look on the animal's face, and the tack-sharp focus on its eyes, as the body fades away in a very shallow depth of field...these are all the things that make a perfect shot a perfect shot.

In a wildlife photo course, this is an A+.

Well it is, other than the optional view that in an ethics class, it's an F. All those tigers romping in the snow, in the calendars for sale at the AV Mall? Captive critters, shot in enclosures. Just the reality of reality. You can't get a shot like that any other way. There are very few tigers in places where it snows, and those that are there are so rarely seen that most photographs show animals being tracked from helicopters, woozily dozing under the effects of a tranquilizer dart, dead after having been poached, or auto-captured passing by a camera bolted to a tree. Head-on, perfectly focused, perfectly lit shots just don't happen, not of snow leopards or tigers in the snow, anyway.

But I could be wrong. Never want to be too hasty, especially in accusing somebody of cheating. So I looked in the credits.

The gift catalog doesn't provide credits, but if you check in the back in very small print it says you can go to a particular website and find out. It lists an address.

Google search for their provided address: nothing.

Go to the WWF site itself, nothing.

The catalog lies: they do NOT provide captions, photo credits, or sources. There's no site matching that description or address. (If I were the stock photographer who had supplied this shot to them, I would be annoyed. And in fact, WWF may be violating its licensing contracts with their source photographers. Normally a sale includes specifications on what credit or byline needs to appear. Even the AV Press captions and credits all of its photos!)

Wild shots of true and real snow leopards do exist, of course. I can't say for sure this is a tame animal performing inside a game farm. I can though say it's very suspicious. Even I can go to a zoo and get a good picture, as this shot shows, from Santa Barbara.

There are some technical flaws here, most obviously the blown-out highlights, but still, we all know what it is, right? Hmm, maybe if I photoshopped in a bit of snow, maybe a few prancing fairy elves or a Russian snow panda, maybe I could get my photo delivered to the doorsteps of America, too.

Other pages in the current WWF catalog were taken in nature. Well, kinda sorta.

Here's the spread from pages 4 and 5.

The yearling polar bear on the left almost 99.99 % certainly was photographed in Svalbard, in the Arctic region of Norway.

Here's my shot of a wild cub, probably taken in the same group of rocks.

And not only was this polar bear picture of mine and the one in the catalog each probably taken at the same place, they may even have been taken from the same ship, the attractive and rather famous Noorderlicht.

Looks like a postcard or a brochure, but this is my shot, taken on a lucky day of perfect light.

This is a ship with an ice-breaker hull that each summer does wildlife cruises around the Arctic. Before we were stopped by pack ice, the year I was on board, we got within 600 miles of the North Pole. Probably more published polar bear pictures were taken from its decks than from any other ice floe, helicopter, or National Geographic-sponsored Zodiac on the planet.

What do we make of a shot like this from the WWF catalog? Are we trying to save nature or just getting juiced up for a run to Toys R Us?

The caption says, "Give $50 or more and receive a plush version of your symbolically adopted animal." I get a lot of art museum gift catalogs and wish they had this --- a stuffed Vincent van Gogh, or maybe a late-in-life Picasso, wearing a beret and a striped sailor shirt and about to paint a nude woman, but drawfed down to be pudgy and cuddly-sized, and not at all chain smoking and irritable.

It's not that little stuffed toy animals are not cute: of course they are. So are kittens, too. My wife has a new cat, a demon from hell named Kinsey. As a kitten, Kinsey was cute as a freakin button, I gotta admit. Here she is really small, and then in the dog's food bowl when a bit bigger, and now nearly grown.

Cute kittens work, and so the nature catalogs are going to feature them (if not kittens, then baby unicorns or doe-eyed seal pups or ultra-well-groomed koalas --- whatever it takes). Hard to believe, looking at this three-image sequence, that this is the same cat that can pull extension cords out of the wall or bite all the way through the covers of hardback, first edition books.

In contrast, here's the shot you will NOT see in the wildlife organization Christmas mail.

Yes, not asleep, but dead. As you can perhaps see, it's below the high tide line, and adjacent to this deceased polar bear was a very sturdy tripod with a camera on it. I assume it was set to take a sequence of shots as the tide came in and slowly covered the bear with water. What a great concept, and, potentially, a sober way to end a nature program or a wildlife art show. If anybody has ever seen a published version of that shot, do please drop a comment on this blog.

This shot more than anything else is reality, grim and unadulterated. We used to have a better capacity for reality, and in religious art in Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, people would have themselves painted with skulls or other emblems of mortality visible on the background. (That will be a provocative visual survey, so expect a blog on it another time.)

And now? Now we open the mail, see the panda, write the check. That's okay and all, but what about a chance to provide education? This mailing, as I said earlier, went out to tens of thousands of households. It's a presidential campaign season besides being the run-up to the holidays. We are lied to daily, hourly. Doesn't the American public deserve to see a real snow leopard at least, and not one that eats Purina feline chow and lives in somebody's (very large) back yard?

Reducing nature just to postcards and plush toys diminishes the world for all of us.

AVC's blog is curated by Charles Hood, Language Arts, and does not represent the views of the Board of Trustees on cute animals, bright red sailing ships, or the ethics of keeping animals in zoos in India, as seen in the last shot, above. He can be reached by email at chood@avc.edu.

Doctors, Meteors, Assessment Tests, and When to Wear a Lab Coat

(and a brief note about why your next doctor probably won't be an AVC graduate)

The world is full of sad news --- car bombs, presidential candidates bashing on each other with clubs like two disgruntled cave men, the latest view of prices as you drive past the gas station.

Here's a number that seems especially discouraging: 91%.

We've heard a lot about Romney's 47% and Occupy Wall Street's 1%, but the number 91% refers to something very direct and personal to me at AVC.

That is the number of students who take the AVC assessment test (a fair and validated instrument, with appropriate cut scores, or so various accreditation bodies verify) and who (big sigh) cannot go directly into college-level math.

Nine out of ten folks who start at AVC need remedial math. Most are graduates of high school, and yet most can't do college-level math. In fact, some cannot really do any math. (Is it just me or has anybody else had this experience? Let's say my Coke at McDonald's comes to $1.92. I don't want back more pennies, what I want back is a dime, so I give the clerk two bills and two one-cent coins, which is to say, $2.02. This sometimes causes great confusion . . . "but you have given me too much," etc. I want to say, "Hmm, just give me back the amount the cash register is telling you to give me. It will all work out in the end: trust me.") And so okay, reality is reality and so we offer Math 70 and various stepping stone courses to work up to higher levels.

There is no shame in this: my father had severe learning disabilities, and if I took the assessment test today myself, I only put my own odds of a good score at 50-50. (I do though know what "50-50" means. But maybe that's just because of the 50-50 Raffle I enter each Christmas at the AVC Foundation fundraisers.)

It seems to me from a social aspect this score remains grim for several reasons. One is money: remediation --- this is NOT the politically correct term, by the way, but John Hall told me it was okay to use it --- is expensive. Not that we pay teachers much money (compared to most things, we don't); but we do have to pay them something, and we have to keep on the lights and heat the buildings and buy dry erase markers and all the rest of it. Even the assessment test costs taxpayers money: about five bucks a throw, if memory serves. Education ain't cheap.

And what about lost opportunities? All these non-math-doing folks are presumably also not bringing their own insights and stories and solutions to technical fields. They are not helping to design planes or build bridges or send rovers to Mars. There's an expression, "brain drain," about US firms having to plunder the upper middle class of other countries, in order to get the doctors and engineers they need to run a business. If we won't teach math well, India will, or South Korea, or somebody on Mars. This is not to say that lots of AVC students don't start low and work their way ever higher. They do, and we have very good retention and very good matriculation rates in our entire math sequence. But math-challenged people certainly are less likely to become microbiologists or tax accountants or surgeons: that's just plain truth. Society loses out.

And of this 91%, some or most folks are probably not making good choices as financial consumers, in the credit card rates they agree to or their auto loans or even votes for what they will or won't support on a bond election. Mathematical ignorance costs everybody.

It makes me wonder even who my next doctor will be.

After all, I am getting up in years, so sooner or later I will begin to need doctors on a fairly frequent basis. (Me and about a zillion other baby boomers.) Robots just don't seem like the answer yet. ("Excuse me, but do you have a robot doctor made by Apple? I really don't trust seeing a Windows operating system robot for this visit.") In the ad above from an issue of Life magazine in 1962, a young man, studying to be a doctor, has fallen asleep while burning the midnight oil. I bet his math scores were just fine.

His wife, prim and modest in her buttoned-to-the-neck nightie, hovers above him, worried. The poor dear is working himself to death, she seems to be thinking. (Let's hope this is not the Halloween version, and that she is not thinking, Ah, finally he's asleep! Now I can pour hot coffee down his collar to get even for what a jerk he has been all day!)

One question this ad makes me wonder is what is HER math assessment test score? In 1962, women made coffee and sometimes babies, but were not supposed to be thinking about medical school. Yet let's just be rational: apparently the man here is some kind of narcoleptic slacker who can't stay awake long enough to finish his chem midterm. She in the meanwhile has her hair done and seems alert and ready to go. Let's send HER to school in his place ---- she's the one I want taking care of me during an all-night 12 hour operation.

In fact, in 1962, women apparently solved a lot of problems. Here's another loser doctor, one page later.

He looks less like he has a headache and more like he's been hit on the head with a club during a presidential debate. Luckily for him, God's gift to medicine is steady at hand: there's a woman, right nearby. Of course she's the size of a Barbie doll but she brings with her a plate of magic pills. Frankly, I don't want to go to see any doctor who can't manage to get his own aspirin without assistance, but she looks so happy and confident (in contrast to how he looks so grim and befuddled), that the ad leaves me with hope for the medical establishment yet.

Of course, if I don't like how he looks, that makes me wonder, what should a doctor look like?

Here is an illustration from a medical school textbook in 1899. The doctor handles a difficult birth, and the green post-it is your AVC blogger covering up a rather graphic and distorted vagina. (This is, knock wood, still a family-friendly blog.) Here is the illustration:

He has no gloves (I am old enough to remember when my dentist did not wear gloves, nor his assistant, and nobody in his office wore a plexiglass welding mask, either), our 1899 doctor probably has not used any kind of sterilizing antiseptic, and they are probably doing this delivery on plain household linen. He looks ready for business though, with a determined air and his sleeves pushed back. What's most interesting is the haircut and mustache. He probably rode a velocipede too, and sang in a barber shop quartet. Ah, those were the days.

How would you feel to wake up on an operating table facing this inquisition?

Well, of course, as soon as you got the wool out of your head, you might wonder why nobody has a mask on or gloves. Since Dr. House himself is there, this must be a serious case indeed. It's probably hard to tell in this blog version, but blue eyes predominate (welcome to one of the movie star cliches that Hollywood just won't let go), and on the men three out of the four have a beard or sexy stubble. From a photographic standpoint, I admire the blues and white --- great art direction here on this DVD case for the show House, M.D. --- and I wonder too about the choice to give the women such very striking lipstick. I guess we don't mind if doctors now are women (and to update the first ad, then it would be the worried husband bringing Starbucks to his exhausted wife), but if our doctors are going to be women, then we want them to be 10s, in the lab and out of it.

As these things go, Greg House is pretty hot himself. Is this what we now what our doctors to look like? No tie, no lab coat, gorgeous, maybe able to play the blues (he can, anyway), sexually active? True, his sex partners are often paid companions, but if he doesn't have any guilt about it, then maybe I should not mind so much either. America likes informality, after all. I can't decide if he looks like the new generation doctor or if he's just some bored indy film director about to give yet another press conference at Sundance.

Like the BBC television series of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. House is supposedly some kind of off the charts genius, somebody with an emotional life more damaged than the nerves and muscles in his bad leg and with an on-going addiction issue, but somebody who (we assume) doesn't need a calculator to balance his checkbook. The "real" House, actor Hugh Laurie, grew up in Oxford but went to Eaton and Cambridge, where he was an Olympic-quality rower, and, according to Wikipedia, became somebody who "plays the piano, guitar, drums, harmonica, and saxophone." Well now, top that, Tom Hanks.


When we're not voting with our Nielsen boxes, maybe we don't care what our doctors look like. The actor who played house was making something on the order of a third of a million dollars per episode. Go, blue eyes. He doesn't need to know math, so long as his portfolio broker does. For the rest of us, we will trust the AMA to do the certifying, and trust, too, AVC's fabulous RN program to have done its job. Somebody out there must be able to do some math, and maybe even figure out a pharmaceutical prescription or two, along with how to read an x-ray machine and what to do if a meteor lands on one's head. That doesn't happen too often, true, but you can never be too confident. After all, lightning hardly ever strikes twice, but as Gary Larson points out, there are always those statistical anomalies....

AVC's blog is curated by Charles Hood, Language Arts, and does not represent the official position of the Board of Trustees on meteorites, math scores, or the attractiveness of major movie stars. His email is chood@avc.edu.

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Phantom of the Opera

Life Lessons from Andrew Lloyd Webber

My wife and I have an online Netflix account --- we don't get magic movie gifts in the mail, but occasionally when we boot up the system to download another episode of Dr. Who, the log-in page tells us that something new has been added to the available choices. Last night it said, surprise, you now can see Phantom of the Opera, recorded live at Royal Albert Hall in a special 25 Year Anniversary performance.

Since she and I both have lived in London, various UK venues have a place in our hearts, so as much for the theatre as for the program, we said sure, give it a go.

Now it bears revealing that prior to the Netflix version, I already had seen the play live four times, and I even have endured the movie version too, and in each instance I have come away thinking, "Ummm, so what's the big deal?"

I just don't get the enduring appeal. The problem seems to me that Phantom of the Opera violates the usual laws of story telling.

In a regular hero quest, we have a princess in a tower or enchanted sleep, and to earn her love, the questing knight has to overcome a series of obstacles, usually by combining courage and mental agility with a spiritual purity. He is supposed to be rich and handsome, but that's not why he gets the girl: it's because he tracks down the Holy Grail or locates a Horcrux or blows up a Death Star or two. Society is better off with the hero around: fewer dragons, more talking donkeys.

Phantom violates this. I don't get it. The hero who gets the girl doesn't do much more than stand around and look pretty, and once in a while sing something or other. He is rich, but that's as far as it goes. It's the Phantom himself who solves puzzles, writes operas, overcomes adversity. And apparently he's a hell of a music teacher to boot. He's the force of creative energy, yet in every single production, the creative, ambitious genius is killed (mostly for the crime of being ugly as a baboon's backside) and the standing-around-with-hands-in-his-pockets schmuck wins the princess.

I don't get it.

Of course Andrew Lloyd Webber himself doesn't really need me to get anything. As the man behind Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat, and Cats, he can laugh all the way to the bank. He owns Watership Down (famous for a novel about rabbits) plus has almost as much money as J.K. Rowling --- and a better art collection.

Even in the 25th Anniversary version the audience was weeping with joy when he came out and strutted around the stage. He got more applause than the main actors of that performance.

True, if you Google "I Hate Andrew Lloyd Weber," you will get a long list of hits. That does not negate the enduring appeal of this particular musical.

If you can't beat em, join 'em. So I have decided to embrace my inner Carlotta and live life according to the morals modeled in Phantom of the Opera.

Lesson 1
Never Take Off Your Mask

Phantom's downfall begins when he takes Christine to his secret lair the first time and, ungrateful wench that she is, she rips off his mask. At the end, a second mask removal brings down an angry mob and the end of the Phantom empire, if not his life. (Phantom's final fate remains ambiguous. Perhaps he escapes to Argentina with Evita.)

Moral of the story? Never let anybody see inside your mask.

Even the lead stars know this, during the curtain call. KEEP THE MASK ON.

Do not let people know who you are: always hide your true motives, your real self, the inner you. This is true even while rock climbing, as this shot of a mystery guest below reveals. This is one of the star teachers of the AVC Language Arts team --- but who, who, who is it? Wisely, he does not take off his mask, and all we can do is admire his masculine hands in their athletic tape, and the colorful patterns of his mask. Never let anybody ever see the real you, or they will reject you, marry a dork, and call down an angry mob to defile your secret lair.

Lesson 2
Like Toddlers, Women Need to be Watched Closely

Phantom reminds us that women need to be protected, even duped if necessary. Men need to watch over women, control them, plan their lives for them. Women can be laughed at if necessary and made to croak like frogs but always have to be managed or manipulated. A woman is never intact on her own or allowed to be an autonomous free agent. A woman is never to be trusted.

The Phantom trusted the stern ballet teacher, who initially (since she wears black), seems to be on his side. Nope, in the end, for no particular reason, she betrays him. Typical woman!

Christine Daae (please insert an imaginary accent mark over the final "e" of her name since Blog Spot won't do it for me) has her life managed by a series of men, each in turn. Her dead father has told her she needs an angel of music (presumably, a MALE angel of music), which, luckily for her, the Phantom himself agrees to be. He in some slightly devious, unexplained way can appear to her in her mirror, and without any sexual hanky panky (we assume he is a gentleman and averts his eyes when she's adjusting her nether garments in that same mirror), is able to give her voice lessons. And boy, they really have worked --- Christine can just about sing the chandelier off the ceiling.

Is she now set up, ready to become the next Sarah Brightman and maybe even marry Andrew Lloyd Webber himself? Or maybe she likes girls, plans to run off with the ballet-meister, Miss Giry. Alas no, since the play insists she can't have the world-class performing career the Phantom has prepared her for. Why not? I guess he won't be able to manage her affairs well enough, since he can't go to Wal-Mart in the daylight. (He has to wait until after dark, like the other zombies.)

So instead of a partnership with the angel of music, and instead of, say, a solo career, the plot wants us to think that Christine needs a husband, and so it's implied, once Raoul marries her, she will disappear into the vast kitchens of his presumed estate and then spend the rest of her life in pearls and heels, perfecting her meatloaf recipe. (Rocky Horror Picture Show fans can insert her the famous audience tagline, "What, Meatloaf again?")

The death of the Phantom and the utter ruin of the opera house is somehow the desired goal of the production, the thing we all applaud. That it will put all the ballerina girls out on the streets and deprive the Parisian audiences of a venue for public entertainment is no matter. So long as we get Christine safely busied with Tuperware and tykes, that's all that counts.

Gentlemen of AVC, take note. Andrew Lloyd Webber has sanctified it: the 1950s were right, and whatever happens, keep your wife off the stage, don't let her hang out with creepy older men, and if you meet overweight divas with foreign accents, it's okay to mock the pants of of them.

Lesson 3
It's Not Okay to Kill People, But if You Do Kill People, Kill Fat People

Excluding the Phantom himself, whose fate we are not sure about, in this musical two people die. In the old World War II movies, if there was a squad of soldiers, usually it was the African American soldier who would die first. If that racial profiling is not followed (since this is play without people of color), next on the usual list are social deviants --- foreigners, people of more than acceptable weight, loners. The first death in the play combines a figure who embodies all three deviations from the norm. Alone in the flies, the overweight props guy has been dismissing the possibility of the Phantom being real plus annoying the ballet girls with his hangman's noose antics. He is alone, probably unshaven, and in the productions I have seen, not slim and young but pot-bellied and older.

That's it. He's doomed. If you're not going to be one of the beautiful people, singing on the stairway in a glittery costume in the "Masquerade" sequence, at least try to be FRIENDS with beautiful people. Otherwise, it's a pauper's grave for you.

The other murder victim is Carlotta's partner, the fat and foreign Ubaldo Piangi. His first name even sounds like Pig Latin for somebody who's bald --- another social crime.

So that's it, ladies and gents, that is the moral universe of Phantom of the Opera: keep your mask on, control your women folk, and drink your Slim Fast.

For this we each dressed up fancy and paid a hundred bucks a seat?

Call me Old School, but I am going to stick to the true heroes in this world... people who know their left hands from their right, who live by a cuticle code of honor, and whose light sabers are always ready and bright. Yes, I am talking that most significant of cultural icons, Thumb Wars.