we recommend this upcoming week to you

I thought about giving some structure to this blog, because my life lacks it lately. Therefore, this upcoming week - loosely defined, temporally speaking - I'm going to re-recommend and revisit some albums that I'd, you know, like, recommend to you and stuff.

I don't really consider myself a music writer in the traditional sense. That's the purview of my better half and everyone I know.

But lately I feel pretty discouraged by academia and academic film / media writing, so I'll escape back to my old reasoning, which is that the best writing, all good writing, has a natural rhythm, cadence, and tone to it which relates it so closely to music that there's no real difference, if there's anything good about either of them. That's media, that's patterns. That's light on a screen, that's narrative - that's stories; that's chiaroscuro lighting; that's all art. It doesn't matter by what medium you call it or what studio you enter.

Wow, that was pretentious.

I might have synesthesia.

Firefox doesn't know that word.

Anyway.


I'm not really an album person.

HERE BE DIGRESSION

I suppose I am a dreaded, hated "millennial" in that until I discovered Ye Olde Internet, music, or what I understood music to be, did not affect my life much. Music was the crap on the radio that the really dumb kids at school listened to; even I could tell, at the age of 13, that top 40 was contrived by corporations and nothing was spontaneous or populist.

I grew up in a town with no book store and no record store.

It was a town 100% devoid of any culture whatsoever, like a mark of pride, or maybe the mark of the beast. The town library had shelves & shelves of purple prose romance novels, but not one book by Faulkner. Everyone there knew who I was, because, in a crazy bizarro version of the village idiot, I was the Village Smart Person. I am not saying that to be smug or arrogant. i am saying that because that's how it was.

We did have a mall. It grew and grew, like a cancer, a crazy, gauche, grotesque microcosm of America, or maybe because i'm from The Real Amerikkka or something.

I went away to college; now that mall has to be visible from space. There's an Olive Garden there now. And a Borders, even. That is the most unthinkable milestone I could think of, for the town in which I grew up (note deliberate lack of use of term "hometown") to suddenly have a place where you can just walk in and buy a book, culture as handed down from the executive suites of corporate conglomerates. Oh, and a latte. Crazy. I don't know what the other three horsemen are.

Anyway.

I THINK THAT'S THE END OF THAT DIGRESSION.

It was only when, in the cold basement of the McMansion of my adolescence that I began to devote hours of my life to hunting down songs with 2400 baud spears that I discovered things other than the pabulum given me by post-apocalyptic, post-Reagan corporate homogenized culture. So like my attention span, my understanding of the concept of the album was post-haste assembled, not quite natural. It was really only in college that I began listening to music as discrete albums or wholes. Perhaps it is a mark of my uselessness as a human being, my place in time and history as a member of the most post-apocalyptic generation. The fact that despite my many useless degrees, I still honestly cannot afford to download albums from iTunes or buy them in stores.

Therefore, this week's selections will reflect that, so I ask you - discerning blog readers of excruciating taste! - to bear with me a little bit; I grew up in the cultural equivalent of like Ethiopia or something.

Thus, so this week I'm going to try to revisit, from a purely textual standpoint - because honestly, most music writing annoys me (sorry, everyone I know. YOUR writing is okay) - 5 albums that I Recommend To You (TM). The reason this is different is because:

1. They're not new albums
2. I don't think I'm coming at it from a typical-music-writing-perspective
3. I need to tell myself this because I have nothing else going for me right now
4. As a failure of the music education system, despite ?9? years of music education, I don't know the right ways to use music terms to talk about music anyway and I know just enough to want to die after reading the first 5 pages of Music Theory for Dummies.
5. PONIES


***
That was a really long introduction, wasn't it?

So, I think I'll leave it at that.

FOR NOW.

Thus, right now's recommendation is that You Tune in later (what the hell do you say on a blog? Blog in later? Eyeball in later? Focus your gnat-like attention span in later?) for the first recommendation.

I may forget about this whole thing by Wednesday, but, again, in the repurposed words of Will Sheff, put to better use by my better half, its flaws are what made us have fun, right?

if you mean something, say something

Today's recommendation is a more abstract, abstruse one, but it'll suffice.

Today's recommendation is linguistic accountability.

This is an umbrella term I'm using to refer to a whole host of things. Not just proper spelling & grammar, which I'm all for, despite the fact that i embrace change in language & I appreciate language in all forms. I mean, I recommend that you defy the creeping trend of infantilism and entitlement that is apparent even in spoken English.

To wit, two of my biggest annoyances:

It is believed that it's perfectly common & acceptable to say, "I'm going to school to get such-and-such degree."

I disagree. Despite what my students think, you are not a customer when you enroll in an academic institution (unless it's one of those buy-a-degree, fly-by-night, for-profit schools that advertise on websites). You are WORKING on a degree. You are EARNING it. If you cannot understand the semantic distinction, then in my estimation, at least, you imply don't deserve the degree.

This is not just my grumpy, overworked grad student self showing.

I find it kind of off-putting that people my age and older refer to themselves as kids, as boys, as girls. In a society as schizophrenic as ours, in a society as hyper concerned with the sexualization of children and as terrified of pedophiles as ours, this seems a curious phenomenon. Yeah, 30 is the new 12 or something, but step up. You're not a kid. I realize that it's a bit stilted and words like "woman" and "Man" come with their own baggage, but if you're old enough to get married, to vote, to reproduce, to get drafted for a war you don't believe in, you are old enough to refer to yourself using the word that properly describes you, no matter how immature you are.

Again: today's recommendation is LINGUISTIC ACCOUNTABILITY.

If you practice this - if give yourself over to the simple act of speaking in a way that reflects not entitlement but responsibility & accountability, I believe that it will come across in your actions. Everyone is scared of responsibility, but I think that maybe words come first. By uttering it, one gets used to the idea. By getting used to the idea, you become accountable. Right?

math is hard; let's go shopping

Today's recommendation is Pretty Charts & Graphs.

I realize that seems pretty insipid, but wait.

As a female living in the virulently anti-intellectual America, I have had a complicated relationship with math & science my entire life. This is not why I went into the humanities, but there you go. Anyway, despite the fact that I haven't made a career of math or science (much to humanities-haters' lamentations), I still respect elegant ways to organize information. I prize optimization, and I respect ways to visualize and organize said optimization.

Therefore, I'm something of a meta-hobbyist. For me, half of the fun of Netflix is using Feedflix and trying to get my cost per disc into the green (current cost per disc: $1.06). Thom introduced me to the Gas Cubby app for the iPhone (Aren't we yuppie douchebags? We have iPhones) and now I compulsively check to make sure that overnight, my Buick didn't suddenly start getting a better MPG or that I didn't drunkenly soup up the rims. If it costs me 9 cents a mile PLUS gas to go somewhere, do I really want to go?

The other day, I was extremely excited (not nerdily excited, not geekily excited - I'm sick of having to qualify & pathologize excitement just because it centers around things mainstream society considers uncool) to hear about the premiere of Wolfram Alpha, a promising new site that, if it develops right, will kinda change everything. For one thing, it is the most unfortunate URL ever. It is difficult to remember - is it that hard to get a straight WWW? - and egotistical on a level that competes with Stephen Colbert. I, too, hope my name is someday a verb, but I also have a name less cringeworthy than "Wolfram." I like to think.

Anyway - Wolfram is pretty much in alpha / beta (parking lot?) mode but once it's up and running it will be rather revolutionary. It unites computational knowledge with something close to natural language searches.
And
PRETTY GRAPHS.
This means, for me, that all the math questions I ripped my hair out over in 11th grade, I can suddenly enter natural-language-type inputs- like - "volume cylinder height 3" and see a PRETTY CHART and a multitude of other information.
Wolfram Alpha has gotten a lot of hate. I see both sides, and I suspect I would disagree with Stephen Wolfram on a lot of things. I am still puzzling out how to use Wolfram, and at least 90% of the time it doesn't work, but this is also how I remember the early, all-textual Internet working.

The Internet was built on binary. It is a system in which things are either on or off, 1 or 0, right or wrong; yet in this system, in a short period of time, a Wild West society of freedom, libertarianism, acceptance, and a multitude of other things has sprung up. In this society, free information is key. Wolfram's pompous project uses the very form/ media of the Internet to subvert it, refusing to divulge information or to buy into trendy, world-changing notions such as open-source software.

But, they have pretty graphs. And charts.

I decided long ago that if I was going to spend a long time puzzling over something, it would be something vast and unknowable. I decided this long before I really knew that mathematics and physics and biology could be vast and unknowable; I'm the product of a sub-mediocre public school education where science meant memorizing boldfaced words and literature meant spewing plot details onto a quiz; however, I'm telling you this so you understand the framework in which I made this vague decision. Words were infinite and I'd spend hours puzzling in frustration at the dining room table only to be left with a hollow and unsatisfying number.

PRETTY CHARTS AND GRAPHS.
I recommend them to you!

Reissue! Repackage! Repackage!

Today’s recommendation: a moratorium on musical revisionism.

Before going into this post, I need to get this off my chest: I am an old fashioned, album kind of guy. I suppose in that sense, I have never really fully bought into the digital age. I mean, yes, I own an iPod, and I occasionally will use the shuffle all songs feature when I’m in the car. For the most part, though, if I am listening to music – not just putting music on in the background, but actually listening to it, which is an activity that I am not convinced more than 25% of the populace actually engages in,, but that is the subject for another post – I likely know what it is that I want to listen to, and so that is what I will listen to. Perhaps I am feeling nostalgic, and I want to listen to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. I will not just put on “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Idiot Wind” and move on, I will listen to the entire album. It doesn’t matter that I really, really hate “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” and that that song prevents this from being a perfect album (again, another post) – it is part of the album, and therefore when I listen to Blood on the Tracks, I listen to it.

The whole concept of skipping tracks on an album has always been somewhat alien to me. Perhaps it is due to my musical taste usually lying outside of the sphere of manufactured pop, where only three singles are needed to make an album, and the rest is filler. A lot of the bands that I listen to seem to have more of an album-based aesthetic rather than a singles-based aesthetic, and the albums seem designed to be enjoyed as a whole (otherwise, I would only purchase the singles). Even if I hate one or two of the songs, it is part of the artist’s original vision and who am I to second-guess that?

But second-guessing seems to be done all too often these days. I shouldn’t say “these days,” really – this has been going on at least since the ‘60s, when the UK and US versions of Beatles and Stones records carried completely different tracklistings (and, in almost every case, the original UK version was superior – even in the case of the Stones’s Aftermath, “Paint It, Black” be damned). Now, though, there just seems to be a more malicious edge to it. Then, as now, the rationale came down to money – the UK albums eschewed singles, assuming that the fans already owned the singles. Singles and albums were viewed as entirely different beasts. When the US version of the album would be issued, The singles that had been released prior to that album would be inserted into the tracklisting, at the expense of some album tracks. Under this philosophy, the single was seen as a way of selling the album, the assumption (probably not entirely incorrect, granted) being that if the American record-buying public did not have the instant gratification of a recognizable hit single, they would not purchase the album.

(N.B.: I have not researched this, so this description may be entirely composed of naïve simplifications and misunderstandings, and may in fact be entirely inaccurate. If this is the case, then I want you to please feel free to just turn your head the other way and ignore it; this is not meant to be academic writing, after all!)

This trend seems to have abated quite a bit by the time the 70s rolled around, though it still reared its head every now and then, most famously in the case of the first album by The Clash (do you want to guess how I have that one tracked in my iTunes?) After CDs had been around on the consumer market long enough to feel safe and established (probably the early to mid 1990s), we began to enter a long age of revisionist reissues that is still raging on.

One of the most egregious examples of recent revisionism is The Cure. Their debut single was called “Killing an Arab,” and was based on the novel, The Stranger, by Albert Camus. It is pretty much a narrative clone of that novel, in fact; there really seems to be no racial hatred involved in the title; the novel just happens to be set in Algeria, and the man the narrator shows is, indeed, an Arab. In any case, when the collection Staring at the Sea: The Singles was released in 1986, the band and label were pressured into placing a disclaimer sticker on the album stating that it was based on a novel and that The Cure neither endorse nor condone racial prejudice or violence. Silly, but fair enough.

The real revisionism began with the issue of The Cure’s Greatest Hits CD in November of 2001. “Killing an Arab” was conspicuously absent from this disc. Fair enough, I thought at the time; after all, it wasn’t a big radio hit, even if its status as a fan favorite would likely be enough to warrant its inclusion here. Then, in 2004, The Cure began their reissue campaign of the old albums. When they reissued their first album, Three Imaginary Boys (which had, of course, originally been issued in the US at Boys Don’t Cry with “Killing an Arab” inserted into the tracklisting and a handful of album tracks removed), the song was nowhere to be found on the second disc, in spite of its status as a contemporaneous single. The Faith reissue did include “Charlotte Sometimes,” a contemporaneous single, as a bonus track, so the argument cannot be made that the label chose not to include standalone singles. No, this looks to me like a case of the label trying to act like this song has never existed. Because both Staring at the Sea: The Singles and Boys Don’t Cry are out of print, the song, which is of no small historical importance, remains out of print.

Of course, this is a rather extreme example, and most cases of revisionism are not so political as that. Most of them involve merely tacking bonus tracks onto the end of an album. I am torn over this practice. While having bonus tracks is nice, there is something about the completeness and stasis of the album that is disrupted when one tacks track at the end. In the ‘90s, the Rykodisc Elvis Costello reissue campaign left ten seconds of silence on the disc after the album proper before the bonus tracks began, which at least gave you a subtle aural cue that the album was done. The early-aughts Rhino reissue campaign added several bonus tracks to each release and put all the bonus tracks on a second disc, leaving the album proper, well remastered, on its own, unadulterated disc. This reissue campaign, as well as Rhino’s subsequent Cure reissue campaign, seems to respect the original forms of the albums. (For the record, this particular Elvis Costello reissue campaign may be my favorite reissue campaign ever. We will see how The Beatles reissues measure up this September.)

Rhino is not above making a few mistakes, however; just look at their recent reissuing of the entire catalog by the notoriously reissue-aversive band, The Replacements. First of all, it is incomplete; certain b-side recordings and rarities are missing for no discernible reason. Second, the bonus tracks are tacked on to the end of the album; once again, no respect for the original album. Third, Rhino have seen fit to excise things such as bits of studio chatter at the beginning of some tracks; this is not a big deal to me, and I take no issue with it whatsoever, but some purists who have grown up with these albums have called Rhino out on this, and although this is not my battle, I stand firmly in solidarity with these people. But the biggest problem with this reissue campaign is the way they signaled the transition from the album to the bonus tracks. Here’s how it goes:

• First, five seconds or so of silence.
  
• Then, footsteps.
  
•  Next, the sound of a vault door creeping open.
  

 Yes, seriously. This is what they did. Fortunately, I have Fission on my computer, so I was able to excise this, so that I don’t have to hear these footsteps and vault door opening every time I want to listen to “Answering Machine.” Still, though, I should not have had to do that. The extra sounds should not have been there. They are not cute. They are grating the first time you hear them, and they get progressively worse with each subsequent listen. It’s a shame, because Rhino’s remastering really sounds terrific on these albums (Tim and Pleased to Meet Me in particular really needed badly to be remastered). For the record, the last bonus track on each album ends with the vault door slamming shut and the footsteps walking away. Unbelievable.

So here is what I am proposing: why alter an album that has already been established? As much as I enjoy getting more songs, I also want to respect and preserve the album. When bonus tracks are to be had, record labels can follow the model Rhino used with The Cure and Elvis Costello and put the bonus tracks on a second disc. Or they could issue a CD of b-sides and rarities, or a double CD, or even a box set. Either way, this tendency toward changing the albums as they were originally recorded and released seems to me tantamount to disrespect for the artists, and disregard for the art they produced.

I had some more thoughts, but they are gone, and this is already three (single-spaced) pages in word, which means I should have stopped long ago. I will be expanding this into a longer and more academic think piece on my solo blog in a couple of weeks, so hopefully those thoughts will be back by then.

conspicuous consumption begins within you

Hello there, Internet. I'm not sure at what point today I'll post this, so I will refrain from temporally-bounded greetings.

I soldier on with final papers and the general malaise that I like to call "semester endgame clusterfuck blues." On top of finishing papers, grading my students' work, and worrying about the world, I am also scrambling to apply to jobs.

Anyway, without further ado...
Today's Recommendation is....Watching horrendous reality shows about FrankenFamilies on TLC.

Yes. I know. I am able to hide my true love for reality television under the guise of being a "media scholar." You may not be in this situation, although I hasten to point out that since I am a media scholar, watching this crap is the sort of thing that passes for "pleasure time" in my life. But read on.

TLC used to be The Learning Channel. Now, apparently, they are trying to be The Life Channel and thus, approximately 90% of their programming revolves around baby shows and freak shows portraying ginormous families (the other 10% involves fashion crap). Because clearly, this is the best way to Celebrate Life: portray hideous American excess by showing us super-sized wealthy families and how they do such-and-such activity with ZOMG SO MANY PEOPLE!

I am being unkind when I say these shows are freak shows, but let's call a spade a spade. I am referring, of course, to the following TLC offerings: Jon & Kate Plus 8; to 16/17/18 Kids & Counting, and to Table for 12. These are shows that fetishize large families. And not kinds that involve selfless people adopting tons of kids - no, not at all. I mean people who:

1. were intent on reproduction at all costs - This is the subject for another post, but I feel that invasive fertility treatments are more of a class marker, an attempt to demonstrate class and social standing than anything else;

2. who would not selectively reduce when they had high order multiples - their
choice, I'm not criticizing that at all - what is important to realize is how these shows present these people as martyrs for not/making that choice, and never portray anyone who makes different choices (such as someone who chooses to adopt special-needs children, for example). It is in keeping with TLC's subtle rebranding into what is effectively the Anti-Abortion Network.

3. who subscribe to completely bizarre, marginal ideologies, such as the completely insane and hypocritical Duggar cult from Arkansas, who adhere to the "Quiverfull" movement and don't believe in hand-holding before engagement or kissing before marriage, even though they cake makeup on their daughters for all their one-on-one interviews.

Now, let me say right off the bat that I have some unpopular opinions, especially for someone who doesn't have any kids, and I really do want to qualify that, because maybe if I ever have children (which also means adoption), my opinions may change. I believe strongly in adoption. I think that overpopulation is a huge crisis, and one few people want to address. I know that climate change is a big problem, and Western levels of personal consumption (including: food / food miles, medical care, etc., as well as cars and the other crap you buy) are largely to blame.

Frankly, I don't know how people can have 10 kids and still get to sleep at night knowing there are babies starving elsewhere. I barely can sleep at night knowing this; apparently the guilt is dissipated if your DNA is personally consuming 10 times as many resources as it would be. Hell of a legacy.

I also want to qualify this essay by noting that I'm sure all the families involved are good people who simply want only what's best for their kids, although the reality show structure / editing often does not portray them that way (Kate Goselin, I am looking at you).

Anyway, so that's my position. It breaks my heart that instead of portraying some people who very worthily adopt special-needs children, TLC instead persistently focuses on wealthy products of IVF and other fertility treatments. If they are to be the "learning" channel in name, it is too bad that they cannot be so in practice by presenting things that are really in the public's best interest to learn about (e.g., the environmental impact of having enough kids to have 2 softball teams). It is too bad that they reinforce the American dream-world that ignores virtually everything outside its own borders.

Moreover, the shows really have no redeeming features other than the fact that, at least within America with its shrinking family size, they are freak shows. The editing style fetishizes shots that emphasize, holy shit, that's a lot of people: sped-up footage of a long line of people walking out of the house. CLose-ups on feet as they do so just so, hey, in case you weren't paying attention? That is a BIG family. Pop up stats smarmily informing us how many diapers have been tossed into landfills due to these people, or how many pizzas they consume in a sitting.

So let's examine each of these shows briefly, and then I may or may not make another recommendation...If you're a hater, keep in mind that I'm writing about these shows because I watch them, and that in and of itself is a punishment.

Jon & Kate + 8: Institutional Child-Rearing

This show horrifies me. Not just the fact that they have 8 kids, not just the fact that they built a set into their home to enable their reality TV dream, not just the fact that TLC seems to subsidize every aspect of their McMansion-y existence...it's the fact that, at least the way the show portrays them, the children are not allowed to have m/any individual personalities. Or just to be children. The high-strung, castrating Kate Goselin freaks out whenever the children, you know, act like children, spilling ice cream or stepping in mud or something. The children dress alike. The children receive the same Christmas presents. The children are only "the children."

I guess my interest in this show revolves around how stunningly banal it is. Once you get past the ZOMG 8 KIDS factor, there is nothing remotely interesting about these people, other than the fact that the parents gleefully seem to play their faults to the camera, bickering constantly. The only reason this is not a collection of incredibly boring, yet professionally-produced home movies is that there are ZOMG 8 KIDS.


16,17,18, whatever kids and counting
I really don't understand what TLC is doing with this show, because lately, the editing and time slot (right before Toddlers And Tiaras, the subject of another blog rant) seem to suggest camp. The non-diegetic sound effects, the Jim-Bob-and-Michelle-visit-a-head-shop episode, the constant professed cluelessness / "innocence" of the Duggars - it all seems to come across as rather mean-spirited on TLC's part.

I have always had a healthy disgust for the stunningly self-righteous, self-absorbed, holier-than-Thou media whore Duggars. Their reality show reads as an ethnography. An ethnography about a primitive group of people whose income essentially comes from providing media to the mainstream, all of which they sneer at and think are going to hell and live a worthless existence (as well as selling used cars and being landlords, presumably to the same hell-bound people). A lifestyle of "modesty," which like I said earlier apparently involves caking makeup onto 11 year olds, selling images of your kids to the entire nation, and fetishizing the virginity of all your children on public in camera. A lifestyle that involves prescriptive approaches to family life, complete with recipes for barf-inducing "American casserole slop" like - get ready with your barf bucket - tater tot casserole. Yes, with Velveeta.

Anyway, again, the show basically revolves around the trope of ZOMG WE HAVE TO KEEP CHANGING THE NAME OF THE SHOW BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM and then the whole Fundamentalist Quiverfull vaguely-separationist aspect. The Television Without Pity forums skewer this show way better than I ever could, so I'll leave that to them and again say: the show is exploitative for all involved. I don't know if that makes it brilliant or dangerous, or maybe both, but frankly, I think these people get way too much attention as it is, and if you are concerned about the overrepresentation of Fundamentalism in American cultural politics, the best thing to do is to ignore crap like this.

Do as I say, not as I do, and I'd love to hear suggestions for better things to watch on Tuesday nights on basic cable.


Table for 12
The newest of TLC's FrankenFamily lineup, this show is the only one that deals with a seemingly middle-class family. Because it's the newest, I've only seen a few episodes. They're from South Jersey (I'm from northern NJ and Thom is from South Jersey), so I guess I'm predisposed to like them more, but at the end of the day it's the same thing as the other 2 shows. The show's episodes do little more than answer gawker questions like, "How do you do _____ with ZOMG TEN KIDS including one with cerebral palsy?" This show at least addresses children with special needs, and I think TLC should be commended for that. However, at the end of the day, this is still another freak show based on scale. Nobody's interested in watching a family of four have a pizza dinner; a family of 12 does it and suddenly, you get a reality show.

I do want to reiterate that my problem is not with any of these families' lifestyle choices. I really believe that like virtually all parents, they truly have what they think is best for their children in mind. My problem is with TLC for reiterating, fetishizing, and promoting this stuff as though it's perfectly natural, feasible, and sustainable. I think most people realize it's not, but TLC could use its position to promote more positive change in the world. They could add shows to their lineup that promote more sustainable lifestyle choices, or that address issues of world poverty and empower the viewer to take action, even by doing something token like donating to a charity. I realize it's a classic liberal move to tell people what I think is best for them, but that's not really what I'm doing. I hope. I think. I think most people will agree that the problem of world poverty is serious, and that it needs to become real to people - even Americans, who mostly experience the non-American world through the television set. I think TLC can use its position as a popular network to actually help people learn about things - not just Big Serious Issues, but, geez, I, at least, would appreciate some shows about basic home plumbing skills or how to hang a picture frame or how to mend clothing or just, you know, Things I Always Wanted to Learn But Got Cut Out of my School's Budget when I was in High School.

Ahem. Breathe. Sorry.

While I hate to resort to contemporary mainstream media cliches like "in these times..." Well, in these times, while our conspicuously consumptive way of life has clearly been demonstrated as environmentally and economically unsustainable, I don't think these shows need to show the BIGGERBETTER American way of life. I don't think I"m an authority on What America Needs, but I'm American, and I personally would strongly prefer to see shows privileging adopters, rather than those who reproduce like bunnies, everything else be damned. These shows are about the (human) Hummers of basic cable, when what the public is interested in is the Prius. God, I can't believe i just used car metaphors.


Therefore, my nefarious, secret recommendation is...Write to TLC and ask for programming that does not fetishize conspicuous consumption. Ask for shows that valorize the heroes who take in the children nobody else wants, or at least programming vaguely in keeping with their name as "The Learning Channel."

And, I recommend you keep reading, because eventually I'll talk about the train wreck that is Toddlers & Tiaras.

wow guys! this is so totally tl;dr. Thanks if you read all this.