Distraction III: Staying privileged in airports

I have always been deeply skeptical of the big scary machines in which we must all humiliate ourselves when traveling by air nowadays.  It didn't take long for people to start leaking the info that these things were bogus, and that most, if not quite all of the TSA security measures put into effect after September 11th, 2001 were nothing more than security pageantry rather than actual helpful measures.  Recently, an ex-TSA agent wrote an entertaining and disturbing piece on all of this.

Going through careful security screening is something I understand, but I also want it to be intelligent and effective, rather than some faux-CSI bullshit to impress morons unfamiliar with air travel more recent than the Wright brothers.  Since Research Country is one of those places that can set off enhanced security screening all by itself, I understand total ignoramuses thinking that I have to be strip-searched.  Real security professionals, though, ought to recognize that I am not a threat.  (Thanks for rummaging through my books so thoroughly, though, gang!)

My irritation with the pointlessness of most of these measures reached the point at which I was willing to pull bourgeois cultural capital rank as well as financial sacrifice, and basically pay for premium service.  You see, when you try to slip a $20 bill to a TSA agent to keep your shoes and belt on and undergo a more modest search, it's bribery; when you write an $85 check to the TSA, it's advance screening!

Naturally, such screening has its limitations, but really, the whole point of this is to make my life easier when it makes sense to do so.  I'm not going to blow up an airplane anywhere under any circumstances, but it seems to me especially ridiculous to fear I might do so on the Thursday red-eye from Cornstate City to Hometown.  People, no one is gunning for that flight.  If I could gather all TSA managerial personnel in a room and explain to them reasonable suspicion, to say nothing of why you can't hire part-time help and then never give them proper training, I would.  Times being what they are, and I being an obscure academic instead of a rockstar governmental advisor, the best I can do is pay for premium and let the TSA confirm once and for all that I'm not a terrorist.

Now, perhaps they have some criteria to determine who qualifies or not that they don't acknowledge to the general public.  However, looking over all the criteria they list on the website, the basics are:

1. Don't be anyone already under suspicion of having committed treason or terrorism.
2. $85.

It's both amusing and worrisome to me that this is all.  This suggests that anyone planning in advance to do something terrible just has to keep his nose clean, pay the non-refundable application fee, and wait a week or two.  Really, I kind of hope that TSA is being all sneaky and skullduggerish and not admitting to the more complex criteria, just to see if someone dangerous will blithely give himself away at the interview.  Or, you know, maybe they just want to see if the applicant is white and of an appropriately high socioeconomic class.  (I wore my best business casual, just in case.)

Of course, it's possible that it's at the interview stage when they pull out their bag of tricks for sizing up a person and determining if he looks/acts like a threat, and assuming the answer is no, continue to process the application and deposit the check.  That would actually be a pretty good way to run the ordinary security screenings, if only they would invest in the (wo)manpower and the necessary training.  (FWIW, my interviewer seemed considerably more professional and thoughtful than the average TSA agent, most of whom remind me of students who earned Ds in my courses at Ghosttown U.)  But it says nothing positive about either our priorities or our common sense that we have reserved such examination for people willing and able to pay extra for the privilege. 

In short, I'm glad to have the Known Traveler Number, since it will simplify the boarding process when I visit family or go on vacation (ha!).  But I don't exactly feel good about the haunting suspicion that all I have really done is to reinscribe class and racial privilege with the blessing of the U.S. government.

Frivolous P.S.:
Many thanks for all the helpful suggestions for whipping/thickening heavy cream!  I'm getting much better at it, now that I prep the utensils in the freezer for a little while.

Distraction II: When good coffee goes boozy

Since it is going to be damn cold for the next two months, by the odds, I've been fiddling with drinks that suit the weather.  In addition to some experimentation with a variety of liqueurs that have thus far not really paid off, I've been making an occasional vice of coffee cocktails: that is, something like an Irish coffee.  I never learned to like Irish whiskey, though, so my poison of choice of late is a nice aged rum.  Rum goes so much better with coffee than does whiskey, anyway!

For the most part, the drink is hard to screw up.  The steps are blessedly simple, if you don't want to get too fancy.

Step 1: Brew some coffee.
Step 2: Get a mug – because who the hell actually keeps Irish coffee glasses on hand? or why? – and combine a spoonful of sugar/simple syrup/agave syrup and a healthy tot of rum.
Step 3: Pour the coffee into the mug and stir all ingredients briefly.
Step 4: Top with thickened cream and serve.

But hark! Step 4 is what has bedeviled me from the beginning.  If you're the kind of obsessive that wants to get the drink right, then it just isn't good enough to pour in a little heavy cream and call it a day.  The cream must be "thickened," according to traditional recipes; that means heavy whipping cream that has been thickened by beating, but not so much that it turns into whipped cream, per se. 

I still can't do it.  Not by hand whisk, not by hand-held mixer.  I cannot make the bloody cream thicken.  I can't even overdo it and make whipped cream.  I just don't have the patience to whip the cream long enough for any of this to occur, I think.  My best attempt was some very slightly thickened cream that kinda-sorta did what the recipe calls for: it slid on top of the surface of the coffee for a second or two, before melting into the drink.  In theory, the thickened cream should sit comfortably in a layer on top of the coffee, and should only melt into it as the drink is consumed.

So, if anyone has any good tips on exactly a) how long to beat the cream, b) how much cream I need to put in the bowl to start, if I'm making only one mug's worth, or c) how to fix whatever other complications I have created for myself, please shoot me an email or comment below.

My other fiddling with the drink comes in the brewing of the coffee.  I love to flavor coffee with a pinch of cinnamon mixed into the ground beans just before I add the water, so I sometimes try a spice mixture to bring out different notes in the rum.  I haven't hit on any magic combinations yet, but it'll happen sooner or later.  If I don't get totally sick of allspice and nutmeg, that is.

Distraction I: The Desolation of a Perfectly Good Book

You, my good internet friends, have left me in a posting pickle.  Everyone who weighed in on my last post asked for something different in the way of fluffy posts, so I'm back to throwing darts blindfolded to decide.  For no good reason, here is my first distraction post.

[SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ ON IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN UNINFORMED ABOUT THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG!]

So first of all, I am not a hardcore Tolkien fan, nor am I a rigid purist about film adaptations of books.  I don't always agree with the choices that Peter Jackson made in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, but I mostly understand the artistic motivations behind those choices.  (One notable exception: this fucking ridiculous invention.)

I do, however, recognize naked greed when I see it.  The Hobbit is a one-film book — two at the very most, and even that is stretching it, if you ask me.  It's artistically unconscionable to bloat the thing into a trilogy.  The Hobbit is a neat little children's tale: my copy numbers 330 pages, and that's in comfortably large "read me a bedtime story" print.  Sure, there are occasional plot holes, and Tolkien didn't spend nearly so much time working out the inner lives of the characters as he did in his later works, but when was the last time you picked up a story written to entertain children that had airtight plot consistency and rich psychological portraits of the characters?  There's simply no need to spend more than six hours of screen time telling the story.

(And let's be fair here: The Hobbit is hardly artistically shallow.  I'd never have noticed it when I was a kid, but as an overeducated damned intellectual a grown man who knows a little history, I'm intrigued to see the moments in which Bilbo Baggins seems to speak Tolkien's personal feelings about warfare.  This is a subject for a post of its own, but for all his Nordic hero-worship and his racist, Orientalist mentality, Tolkien was also a veteran of WWI who knew first-hand how awful war really was, and how far from epic valor day-to-day soldier's life was.  Sam Gamgee fills the same sort of role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) 

But that's a general critique of the entire concept of a trilogy of Hobbit films.  The matter at hand is the currently screening travesty, The Desolation of Smaug.

First of all, I'll give them this much: Smaug looks more convincing than I expected, even though I can no longer be intimidated by CGI anything.  I kind of feel like they should have let Benedict Cumberbatch just work out the voice on his own instead of altering it digitally, but there's a lot of unfortunate historical precedent for using some goofy echo effect on a dragon's voice.  He's not a bad job, on the whole.


Just about everything else, though, was a fucking joke.  I mean, damn.  I can start with one complaint and let the chain spring thence naturally.

1. TAURIEL.  Okay, I get it, Tolkien wasn't much for female characters, and they want girls to go see this film, too.  I was willing to tolerate this thinking when they gave the literary Glorfindel's lines and plot functions to the cinematic Arwen; after all, in an epic story that size, there has to be some conglomeration and telescoping if you don't want a sixteen-hour piece of cinema.  And, you know, Arwen actually exists in the books.  But inventing a whole new character who has no function in the extant plot?  Tacky.
2. You know what else is tacky?  Inventing an utterly ridiculous romantic subplot between an elf and a dwarf in a story that depends on elves and dwarves distrusting each other and never really bridging the gap outside of battle scenarios.  (See my previous complaint.)  You wanna see elves and dwarves learn to trust and care for each other?  Read The Lord of the Rings!  (Or fuck, I dunno, watch Jackson's LotR trilogy.)  Yes, Evangeline Lilly and Aidan Turner are hot, but it's already cheating to let Turner run around in the films looking like his movie-star-handsome self.  Where's the huge dwarvish beard, dude?  Oh, right, that would get in the way of you looking all pouty and cute.  And since elves are apparently incapable of growing facial hair, one has to assume that Tauriel wouldn't be into anyone with more than a five-o'-clock shadow.
3. Speaking of which: what the fuck is the use of inventing a second romantic subplot with Tauriel?  Do elven kingdoms always have such lopsided sex statistics that there's only one female in sight among dozens of dudes?  
4. Oh wait, I forgot: that provides you with an excuse to throw in Legolas, since everyone liked him in the last trilogy, even though I'm pretty sure that Tolkien didn't even begin to create the character until The Hobbit was already in print.
5. And oh yeah, there's also the convenient heterosexuality that you can drape on Legolas that way.  Don't think I haven't noticed the way that the producers are styling and promoting the film in distinctly macho, heteronormative ways.  Perhaps they were disquieted by the slow-building friendship between Legolas and Gimli in the first trilogy, uninterrupted by any female character.  (Tolkien's assumptions of wartime camaraderie and general homosociality are no doubt puzzling to many younger readers and, especially, viewers.)
   
   (Sidebar 1: I like to think that the last three problems hint at the producers' fears that without the presence of Evangeline Lilly, Legolas and Kili would somehow end up having desperate, furtive sex in a corner of the Woodland Elves' realm, and they had to butch things up to please their audience.  Or the audience's parents, at any rate.
   Sidebar 2: Cue a new generation of gay slash/fic starring Legolas and Kili...NOW!)
6. All of which is pretty weird in light of the film's seeming insistence that every elf besides Legolas and Tauriel act campy enough to be an extra in The Birdcage.  The vocal tone and body language that Lee Pace uses as Thranduil makes me think of nothing so much as Andreas Voutsinas in History of the World, Part I.
7. I dislike Jackson's choice to make a bigger deal of the Arkenstone than Tolkien himself did, but I get it.  I acknowledge that Tolkien's plotting of the burglary and wealth-recovery operation was on the thin side, and that people might start to wonder what the hell a bunch of nitwit dwarves and one hobbit planned to do to get that stuff home.  (In the book, this exact concern becomes a plot device; I suspect Tolkien was banking on small children not thinking this far ahead.)  Obsessing about a single crucial McGuffin is definitely easier for Hollywood-trained viewers to understand.
8. But then what am I to make of Gandalf apparently losing his goddamn mind and telling Thorin, "take back your homeland," when he knows perfectly well that Thorin has only the aforementioned bunch of nitwit dwarves and one hobbit as the vanguard?  The movie only worsens a problem that Tolkien originated: that there is no sane reason to select Bilbo as the company burglar, except the mysterious charisma of the reluctant/cowardly hero.  If Gandalf is as smart as everyone says, then surely he could do something other than to send this pack of chuckleheads off to steal from a humongous dragon.
9. The revamp of the Master of Lake-Town as a despotic unelected tyrant, rather than a canny businessman elected by his fellows like he is in the book, is fucking stupid.  I feel insulted by this entire subplot.
10. The addition of Bard's little children worrying about being killed is even stupider.
11. It's totally bananas that a bunch of orcs are able to raid Lake-Town, get ambushed by elves, and have an entire guerrilla battle without any residents noticing.
12. WTF Kili gets shot!?  There shouldn't have been a battle at that point in the story anyway!!  Why oh why are you sidetracking yourself with this idiotic subplot?  Oh, that's right: it's an excuse to put Evangeline Lilly back in frame.  I get it now.
13. I reluctantly come to the conclusion that the only actor doing a better job than Benedict Cumberbatch in this film is Richard Armitage.  How he's managing this, I have no idea.
14. It kills me to admit it, but much of the original plot in the latter half of the book is so poorly thought out on its own terms that Peter Jackson may well have decided that he had to do something about it,  and if that's the case, then why not sex it up with battles and desperate political struggles and, um, sex?  Kills me, I tell you.

Please distract me!

I'm pretty much too depressed by the moribund state of my job hunt to blog about it.  I made it through my stupid little January term course, so now I have all of four days to enjoy before the Spring semester begins.  I want to write about something, anything other than my fear of professional failure and depression, but it's hard to get going.  I'm hoping that presenting a small poll to my readers will help to focus the next few posts, assuming nothing earth-shattering happens to intrude.  Give me a good fluffy topic to write about!

What should I write about?  What would you like to read about?

1. My recent experiments with coffee cocktails?
2. My developing critique of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug?
3. My formal attempt to stop having to disrobe in airports?
4. Preparation for polar vortex storms, out here in frigid Cornstate?
5. Something else?

Comment away!

What's the point?

I'm feeling stymied.  More job rejections have come in, I'm back to scouring the internet for one-year positions, and I have to teach three courses this spring with a smile on my face while having no idea if I will have any living in six months' time.  I have an article to revise and resubmit, a book review to write, and new articles to prepare.  At some point this spring, I will have to have my book indexed, if the press ever gets around to sending me the galleys.

And I can't make myself do any of it.  I'm starting to feel like the butt of a cosmic joke.  If having years' worth of teaching experience at name-brand universities and a single-author monograph to my name can't even get me a campus interview, then what the hell is the point of any of this?  I feel like I'm being made to jump through hoops that don't even matter.  I have more expenses every year, including some family members who are increasingly dependent on us young'uns.  My savings would be obliterated in short order if I had to move to some other state just to look for work.  I can't afford not to work.  Why is the universe jerking me around like this?

It's too disheartening to think about for long.  Easier to think of Shakespeare and pretend that someone besides me gives a shit about my petty problems and my not-so-petty existential fears.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

Is there a more pleasant alternate universe that I could get transferred to?  This one is getting me down just now.
 

Back to work (and I'm glad of it)

Good grief, but I am tired.  It's been an utterly miserable few days here for weather, as everyone knows from the constant news reports.  I now consider 20ºF to be balmy and pleasant, after several days of -15º to -5º.  I've been on an online shopping binge for heavy weather clothing: boots, sweaters, socks, wool pants.  I'm considering browsing the sites for nice long underwear.  (This may or may not be a cry for help.  I'll see what the going prices are.)

I'm additionally dragged out from playing host to a friend who just moved to the area and pleaded to come stay with me until the deep freeze and snow had passed — zi was terrified by the prospect of being snowed in when zi had no internet and, really, no local contacts as yet in case of emergencies.  The upshot of this was two high-strung, stir-crazy people eating too much, drinking too much, and eventually getting into bizarre fights.  I am heartily sick of hosting, maybe even more so than I am sick of this fucking winter weather.

But I am free now, and can enjoy the solitude of my apartment as an asset.  Plus, tomorrow is the first day of my stupid little January term course, so I'll be getting out of the house regularly for work purposes.  I'd actually be thrilled to be going to campus tomorrow, if it weren't for the frightening road conditions between here and there.  I drove to the supermarket this afternoon to replenish my locust-despoiled post-visit refrigerator, and it was honestly scary.  My little Beetle has some good qualities, but road-worthiness in snowy, icy weather is not among them.  I got stuck once in snow too deep for my wheels to get traction, and I was fishtailing at little about 40% of the time thereafter, even at 20 mph.  I've never been so exhausted by quick trip to the grocery store.

On the plus side, a colleague with a sturdy all-wheel drive vehicle has kindly agreed to take me to and from campus tomorrow, so I don't have to fear dying on the road before I even start teaching this calendar year.  I'm hoping that Cornstate will get its act together and have the roads properly cleared off for Friday's commute, for my poor car's sake.

Enough of this f-ed-up winter vacation.  Get me back to the office!

When does the good part start?

Back from Hometown.  Applying for jobs.  Drinking coffee and rye.  2014 is on track to begin the way so many others have: another one of the worrisome years.  What the hell, I'll wish for a better year anyway.

See you all in 2014.