Swaggy Slang

When I ordered Radiohead tickets, Ticketmaster threw in a free Rolling Stone subscription (the two companies must be desperate--RS for readers and Ticketmaster to interest me in more concerts).  I've read RS off and on over the years; the journalism is always very good, but the subjects are often uninteresting.  A perfect example of this is the recent article on Justin Bieber.  I'm surprised I even read it, but I suppose it's useful to know what the kids are into these days.

Bieber himself seemed very boring (sorry, tweens of the world!), but I did find interesting his use of the word "swaggy".  I hadn't heard that word before.  The way Bieber used it in the interview, it seemed to mean something akin to cool or awesome.  Apparently, he also uses the word in his song "Boyfriend" but I couldn't stand to listen to it (yes, I have my limits).

I'm not sure where the word comes from.  Perhaps even from Bieber himself but I suspect that's doubtful.  "Swaggy" already exists in English, but it's an older word, which means basically sagging from weight, likely unrelated to the new version.  Pirate culture and associated words have been popular in the past few years, so the word could be an adjective variant of "swag" meaning treasure.  "Swag" has certainly been used in recent years to describe getting free stuff from a convention or whatever.  The word could also come from hip-hop, which seems to delight in wordplay.  Perhaps Bieber picked it up from one of the rappers he occasionally collaborates with.  It could even stem from Canadian English slang since Bieber is Canadian, but that seems unlikely, eh?  The Bieber article also describes one of Bieber's associates as his "swagger coach" so "swaggy" could be related more to "swagger" than it is to "swag".  Bieber and his friends also use the word "swag" to mean cool.  There might be more possibilities of the word's origin, but I'd better "chillax" on the etymology before I catch a case of "Bieber fever".

We'll see if "swaggy" has any staying power or if it will be a fad like Bieber himself will likely be.

TARP Continues To Be A Mess

If you were doubtful about the wisdom of the government bailing out the banks, then a new book suggests you were right.  Neil Barofsky, who worked in the program, points out its shortcomings (all $70 billion of them, the amount the government is expected to lose on the $700 billion invested) in his book Bailout: An Inside Account Of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.

Not surprisingly, his book has proven to be controversial.  The New York Times, of course, defends Wall Street a bit in its review.

I haven't read the book yet, but when I saw the name "Herbert Allison" in the Times review, I have little doubt that Barofsky's version of events is probably the truth.

I have encountered Mr. Allison before.

I haven't been impressed with him.

An employer of mine threw me into TIAA-CREF's retirement plans.

That was nice of them.

I refused to put in any of my own money though after I started reading what ridiculous amounts TIAA-CREF pays its executives.

All Wall Street appears to be insane in terms of salaries and bonuses, but with TIAA-CREF the excessive compensation is especially galling since the company claims to be a non-profit organization, nobly investing  the pension funds of teachers and professors.  In 2008, Allison retired as CEO of TIAA-CREF.  He worked until April of that year and for that he was paid around $13 million dollars.  He also made sure to line up a host of retirement benefits, including an office from TIAA-CREF.  His retirement compensation is described in Wall Streetese, but it looks as if he gets at least a million dollars a year in retirement.  Not bad for a few years of work, eh?

Well!  TIAA-CREF certainly did a great job in helping Allison retire in comfort.  I don't know if the same can be said for me or any of its other average investors (Allison's compensation has to come from somewhere--guess where?).  But Allison's ability to provide for himself at TIAA-CREF has always been noted, even from the beginning of his tenure with the company.

Apparently, the way it works at TIAA-CREF is that the Board of Trustees get paid more a year than I (and probably you as well) do to work what is probably a few days a year and in return they hand out excessive salaries to the executives.

I lost track of Mr. Allison after he left TIAA-CREF, but apparently he unretired and went to work for the government.

He headed up Fannie Mae, and he was in charge of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the program the government used to bail out the banks after the financial crisis of 2008.

Now let me be charitable:  perhaps Mr. Allison felt he could afford to do some public service, and he certainly has a skill-set that would allow him to deal with large financial organizations, but I wouldn't trust him to sit my cat.

I couldn't afford him anyway.

By contrast, Bush and Obama trusted him with billions of dollars.

Wall Street and Washington really are other worlds.

YIP!: Rhapsody

Obviously, I like music.  Therefore, I really like a service that lets me listen to pretty much anything I want for only $5 a month, and that's Rhapsody.  I never liked the whole peer to peer piracy phenomenon because I could connect the dots ("But if bands don't make money, then how can they afford to stay together?" "No, man, it's cool, dude; music wants to be free!").  With such low prices, Rhapsody obviously isn't paying much, but at least they're legal and paying record companies and artists something.  Not everything's on there, of course.  Stuff that's out of print isn't, and some bands such as AC/DC have done the math and figured that they're better off just selling cds the old-fashioned way.  So I still buy records.  But a lot of stuff I only listen to once or twice just to see if I really like it, so Rhapsody is ideal for that.  In general, I like most music, but I only really like a bit of music a lot (this year, only Bobby Conn's "Govt" has done it for me).  So hooray for Rhapsody, which helps me find those rare nuggets!  

Everyone's A Zinester Today!

When I first started researching zines in the 1990s, one of the questions I would ask zine publishers was "What would happen if everyone did a zine in the future?"  I got some thoughtful answers along with some amusing ones ("Xerox stocks would rise" and "There would be no more forests"). 

I thought about that question recently and realized that with the ease of epublishing, even something as simple as a post on Facebook, pretty much everyone does do a zine now.  In the past, one's desire to communicate had to be pretty strong to put up with the hassles of photocopying, stapling, and mailing a zine.  Now, computer technology makes it so easy to publish that almost everyone does so, though they may not be thinking of it as such.  How else can we explain someone sharing with us what they had for lunch on Twitter, or telling us on Facebook that Amishmade pepperoni bread isn't quite as good as Italianmade pepperoni bread, or complaining on a blog that the Dylan Dog movie would have been better if they had actually written a script for it?  Those are all things that we might have shared with friends in the past, but it's unlikely that we would have had such strong feelings about them that we would have published them in print.  Today, no one seems to hold back much before clicking the post or publish button.

Some people might complain that we live in a world of too much information, but if you have a twinge of Freudian thought in you or if you love freedom of speech, then all this babble can only be regarded as fairly healthy for both individuals and society.  Talking is therapeutic, after all.  And, in a democracy, the best way to figure out the right things to do is to argue about them.  There certainly is little repression out there anymore.  And, despite the news splash mass shootings and other violent crimes make, we actually live in a less violent world, according to Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  Maybe people are working out their emotions in a healthier way online.  As a result, on the Internet these days, we all seem to bob around a bit in everyone's consciousness, and that's probably a good thing.

On the other hand, with so many people talking at once, is anyone listening?

Maybe those who really want to have what they say stand out might end up turning to the zine again.

Memo To Future Writers Of Captain America

I just finished reading a stack of Captain America comics (hey, it was July, and I was feeling patriotic!). They were a lot of fun, but the writers seemed to keep running variations of the same plot. So, future Cap writers, please no more plots about something from World War II being secreted away for years and then suddenly popping up in the 21st Century to hassle Cap! I mean I can't get a computer today to read a disk I had from 1992, and you're expecting me to believe that some technology from seventy years ago will suddenly go operational and work perfectly?

If you need an idea, then please try these instead:
1) Cap decides at age 90 that it's finally time to quit running from fatherhood and knocks up Agent 13.
2) Cap tries to bond with the hipsters infesting his hometown of Brooklyn.
3) Cap goes to Pakistan and takes out a couple of American drones that were about to blow up some civilians.
4) Cap goes to a bar and hangs out with Captain Canuck, Union Jack, Captain Chihuahua, and so on, and they watch the Olympics and complain about how hard it is to wear a flagish outfit since they can't go out in the rain without overly patriotic types complaining.
5) Tired of birthers, Cap investigates Obama's birth certificate for himself and is shocked to discover the president prefers Spider-Man.
6) Cap gets people from Occupy and the Tea Party to bond over how much they both hate the government.
7) Cap and The Falcon wear tight pants and go planking in a hopeless attempt to understand the youth of today.
8) Cap beats up lobbyists in Washington D.C.
9) Cap reads too much Ayn Rand and gets brainwashed into raving about the magic of the marketplace (a "plot" of The Red Skull, of course!).
and 10) Cap struggles with going on Social Security and Medicare while he's still healthier than most teenagers.

 I really hope I don't have to resort to writing fan fiction.

That Film Was Delicious!

A film, or maybe not a film, is coming to The Cleveland Cinematheque next month, and, like many of the films shown at the Cinematheque, it sounds interesting.  However, this one sounds even more interesting than the others.  Making any work of art is a struggle, even if it's kind of fun at the same time, but making a movie has to be a particular pain in the wazoo.  There is sound, there is lighting, there is equipment, there are actors, there is the weather, blah, blah, blah.  Now imagine how much harder it gets when your government bans you from making your art.  That's what happened to filmmaker Jafar Panahi from Iran.  Thankfully, he didn't let them stop him from using his freedom of expression (it's a natural right--it doesn't not exist just because some creepy government officials deny it exists).  Panahi, with a lot of help, even got his film shown at the big deal Cannes International Film Festival, though he had to smuggle it out of Iran in a cake.

That's right.  A cake.

His film is called This Is Not A Film.

It's sad that artists around the world still have to fight for things that the Enlightenment should have settled a few centuries ago, but they do.  It's not just religious nutjobs such as the rulers in Iran either.  One can find similar cases in the good old USA.  I'm most familiar with the case of zinester/comics artist Mike Diana, whom the state of Florida forbid to draw or write anything they didn't approve of (he was subject to unannounced searches in his home).  Diana's art is fairly extreme and disturbing, but it's always the extremes where ideas such as freedom of expression get tested.  Nobody ever has a problem with art they like.  It's only with art that is despised.

I'm very happy that I can write and create what I want.  I hope someday that the same can be true for everyone.

Here's the trailer for Panahi's film, er, not a film.      

The "College Crisis" As Represented In The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus And Blog Love Omega Glee

As August begins, summer begins to end.  You have probably already seen multiple back to school advertisements and articles.  What's different this year is that among the excitement is a greater than usual amount of worry and dread, particularly centering around those headed off to college.  We're told that we're on the edge of a student loan bubble, that students might be better off skipping college if all they're motivated by is money, and that, due to a variety of factors, the quality of a college education is not quite what it used to be.

While preparing ebooks of Blog Love Omega Glee and The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus recently, I was struck by how the two novels reflect these issues.  In Emus, the band is enrolled in college whereas in Blog Love Omega Glee, the main characters are college graduates who are underemployed (by the way, five thousand janitors in the USA have PhDs or an equivalent degree).

In fact, Emus might be set in the tail end of the Golden Age of College in the USA.  Even then though, one character drops out of school, deciding that college isn't worth it.  However, his bandmates still seem to be getting some learning out of college as well as having a good time.  Today, it appears that college students are so stressed by the high cost of college that they're working more to pay for college and, as a result, studying less and getting less out of the experience in terms of both learning and fun.  Documenting this phenomenon pretty well is Rebekah Nathan's book My Freshman Year: What A Professor Learned By Becoming A Student.

This situation certainly is a shame.  I had a wonderful college experience, and I hope those days aren't over for today's college students, but I suspect they probably are.  Colleges should hold down costs wherever they can to keep higher education affordable.  That might help.  By the way, it's not faculty salaries causing the costs to rise, as Joe Biden and some others like to claim.  I've taught full time at colleges for years, and I make substantially less than the average high school teacher in the school district I live in makes (and I'm not the only professor underachieving economically.  Many of my fellow PhD graduates are fine scholars and teachers, but are eking out sustenance level livings as adjunct instructors, are unemployed due to the glut of English PhDs, or are employed at marginal institutions on the edge of folding).

The growth in college costs mainly stems from the growth in administration (most of which is probably beneficial, just not necessary), rising healthcare and technology costs (colleges get socked with rising healthcare insurance costs just like every other business, and colleges in the 1960s didn't have computers in every office), declining government subsidies (aside from loans that one can't ever be free of), and having a slightly outdated and inefficient business model (lots of classrooms are empty even on Fridays, not to mention June, July, and August).

With all these academic worries, what would Funnybear do?

Probably just drink another beer.

Some things about college will never change.