Beloit College professors Tom McBride and Ron Nief annually compile a list of assumptions that first-years bring with them based solely on the year of their birth. It's fascinating:
This month [August 2008], almost 2 million first-year students will head off to college campuses around the country. Most of them will be about 18 years old, born in 1990 when headlines sounded oddly familiar to those of today: Rising fuel costs were causing airlines to cut staff and flight schedules; Big Three car companies were facing declining sales and profits; and a president named Bush was increasing the number of troops in the Middle East in the hopes of securing peace. However, the mindset of this new generation of college students is quite different from that of the faculty about to prepare them to become the leaders of tomorrow.
The class of 2012 has grown up in an era where computers and rapid communication are the norm, and colleges no longer trumpet the fact that residence halls are “wired” and equipped with the latest hardware. These students will hardly recognize the availability of telephones in their rooms since they have seldom utilized landlines during their adolescence. They will continue to live on their cell phones and communicate via texting. Roommates, few of whom have ever shared a bedroom, have already checked out each other on Facebook where they have shared their most personal thoughts with the whole world.
For these students, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Henson, Ryan White, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Freddy Krueger have always been dead.
- Harry Potter could be a classmate, playing on their Quidditch team.
- Since they were in diapers, karaoke machines have been annoying people at parties.
- They have always been looking for Carmen Sandiego.
- GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
- Coke and Pepsi have always used recycled plastic bottles.
...and 55 others that will make you say, "huh."
After tooling around other years' lists, I say: Xers unite! (As if...)
I have a Daily Dilbert desk calendar. Here is today's strip:
Had to share.
Despite my joking about the inconveniences an Obama Presidency will bring to us in Chicago, we really are ecstatic that our guy won. It's so good, even the New York Times has acknowledged it:
In 1952, when an article in The New Yorker derisively referred to Chicago as the Second City, little offense was taken. It became a marketing pitch, with the thinking that second fiddle was far better than no fiddle at all.
But that gawking, out-of-town amazement — gee, there really is a city here! — has long outlived its currency. Well before Mr. Obama was elected as the nation’s 44th president — a fact that was proudly amplified by Mayor Richard M. Daley, who ordered up banners with a sketch of the president-elect to hang throughout the city — Chicago was experiencing one of its most blossoming periods in food, fashion and the arts.
Now, people around the country and the world are simply noticing.
And we're glad the world did.
It seem as if Attorney General Michael Mukasey may have had a stroke during a speech this evening:
The 67-year-old Mukasey was rushed to George Washington University Hospital, where his condition was not immediately known.
Mukasey was delivering a speech to the Federalist Society at a Washington hotel when "he just started shaking and he collapsed," said Associate Attorney General Kevin O'Connor. "They're very concerned."
Mukasey was 15 to 20 minutes into his speech about the Bush administration's successes in combatting terrorism when he began slurring his words. He collapsed and lost consciousness, said O'Conner, the department's No. 3 official.
I hope it isn't as serious as it sounds.
Late update: Fortunately, it wasn't.
First my U.S. Senator got elected President. Then he picked my Congressman to be his chief of staff. Now my state senator has gotten elected president of the Illinois Senate.
Cool.
Missouri goes to McCain by 3,600 votes of 2.9 millions cast, ending the 2008 Presidential election and Missouri's streak of picking the winner.
So, final tally, Obama 365, McCain 173. And that's the ball game. FYI: The electors transmit their ballots on December 15th, and then Vice President Cheney preside when the Senate counts them January 8th.
I must say, the new terminal at RDU looks great. I hardly believed I was in North Carolina. And the last time I was here, it was a red state. Now it's blue. Tempus fugit.
Actually, I'm kind of sad I'm not staying longer. My host couldn't stay tonight (the S.O. is unewell) so I'm on my own until a 9:00 meeting tomorrow morning, about which more later, and after which I'm back on a plane to do work related to the trip for, like, ten days. Everything from this trip is due on December 1st.
I could like Durham for a while, I think. But I won't leave Chicago until the revolution comes, absent a tremendous bribe.
Sorry I'm being cryptic. When things settle down, I'll fill in the details.
Salon has a sublime ode to the "I can haz cheezburger" crowd:
By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated. Readers upload over 5,000 homegrown submissions every day, of which six or eight are posted on the site. And in October, the lolcats got their very own coffee table book, "I Can Has Cheezburger," published by Gotham Books.
What makes lolcats different from the cat porn of the past -- the motivational posters of the '70s and '80s featuring furry kittens hanging from tree limbs, covered in toilet paper or in some other kind of adorable predicament -- is that lolcats aren't trying to be cute. In the cat-based imagery of ages past, cats retain their iconic traits: curiosity, skittishness, the tendency to curl up in a ball and just lie there. Even the YouTube cats of today perform characteristically catlike actions, repeatedly flushing toilets, dragging their paws along piano keys or getting flung off the ends of treadmills.
Lolcats are different in that the characters they portray -- and yes, they are portraying characters -- don't represent cats at all. They're a completely different kind of beast, mischievous (if incompetent) rascals, scheming for cheeseburgers and stopping at nothing to get them.
Take the lolcat that started it all, created by a Hawaiian blogger named Eric Nakagawa, who posted it in January 2007. The image features a cat with a crazed look of pure animal hunger, its eyes maniacal with desire, asking, "I can has cheezburger?" Underneath is the comment: "The Internet's piece de resistance, the website's raison d'etre."
This ur-lolcat created such a sensation that Nakagawa turned it into a blog, spawning not only the eponymous Web site but also a whole mythology. The cheezburger has become the Philosopher's Stone of the lolcats mythos -- the most prized, cherished and elusive object in their universe. It is for this reason that, when a tiny kitten being sniffed by a Great Dane 20 times its size needs a quick escape, it says, "I iz not cheezburger, kthxbai." It is for this reason that when a user finds a photo of a cat sitting by the window with its paws in its lap, the caption reads, "I iz waitin for cheezburger man. Does you have a money?"
The Web is now spawning a wave of next-generation lolcats sites that take the lolcats concept and run with it. There's lolpresident, loldogs, and even lolhan, a site devoted to Lindsay Lohan that includes such classics as "I layded you an egg but I'z hidin it."
On that note, I turn in to see y'all in the morning.
MSNBC reports that convicted felon and Alaska Republican Ted Stevens has lost his Senate seat to never-indicted Mark Begich:
Stevens' ouster on his 85th birthday marks an abrupt realignment in Alaska politics and will alter the power structure in the Senate, where he has served since the days of the Johnson administration while holding seats on some of the most influential committees in Congress.
Tuesday's tally of just over 24,000 absentee and other ballots gave Begich 146,286, or 47.56 percent, to 143,912, or 46.76 percent, for Stevens.
This brings the Democratic majority to 57, or 58 if you include Bernie Sanders who, I think, voted with us about 102% of the time in the last Congress. (Should we count Maine Republican Susan Collins as well and call it 59? And how about that Franken-Coleman battle in Minnesota? Hmmm....)
The other of "there were two" is the contest in Georgia, which we'll find out about in two weeks.
In unrelated news, Talking Points Memo reported today that Senate Democrats expelled Joe Lieberman (R-CT) from their pilates class. Yuk yuk yuk.