The general consensus, as reported by America’s media outlets, is that President Obama’s speech regarding the Gulf oil spill was “boring.”

I missed the broadcast, though I read a transcript, and I wasn’t particularly impressed; while there was some good information there, it didn’t hit the mark for me. I was upset that the call to action for new, renewable, safe energy development he seemed to want to call for never materialized (the best way to avoid further oil disasters like this is to not depend on oil, after all – America really should be pouring effort into alternative energy). I though he mentioned God too much (it felt too much like pandering to people who will oppose anything he does on principle), and personally, it bothers me that he continues to use the phrase “make no mistake” (because I really dislike that construct of language…and I’m far from the only one).

At least he didn’t say “British Petroleum” this time.

Still, while it didn’t have all I would have liked to see, I wouldn’t call it “boring” – it was mostly a calm and measured summary of “what we know so far, and what we’re doing to fix it.” If some consider it boring, though, I’m okay with that as long as the talk leads to results. Which there were, at least the beginnings of them, with the establishment of the twenty billion escrow/reparations account announced the next day.

In any case, what really bothers me about the “boring” characterization is the reports by an alleged language “expert” (who, incidentally is not really an expert, but more of an attention whore), that americans supposedly found the speech dull because it went over the head of much of the audience, because it was, by his judgement, written on a 10th grade level, and that’s apparently too complex for the average American.

Even given the link from earlier, and this particular “expert” being debunked by another expert within the same CNN article, there’s still a serious issue at work here; the fact that, questionable logic aside, there’s enough anti-intellectual, gut-over-brain sentiment in this country that somebody could get traction with the argument that the reading and comprehension levels we use as the standard for your average fifteen year old in this country was too “academic,” too “professorial,” and not “ordinary” enough for Americans.

And further, why are vast swaths of the American public not offended by this assertion?

As big a problem as this oil spill is, and it is a HUGE HULKING PROBLEM that will haunt us for decades, the fact that as a people, we’re perfectly willing to admit, hell, to take pride in the fact that sophomore english is too difficult for us to understand is probably, in the long-term, a bigger one.

While I won’t presume to speak for anyone else, this sort of attitude really concerns me. How are we ever going to solve the complex scientific and sociological problems we face as a Nation if we can’t make education a priority and being educated something admirable? How can someone consider America “the Greatest Nation in the World” while ignoring the asterisk that points out that we’re actually 29th greatest when it comes to achievement in science education?

I want the President to be the smartest person in the room, and for a problem the scale of the Gulf Oil spill, I want the room to be filled with the world’s best scientists, environmentalists, and engineers. I don’t want them speaking “from the gut” or showing anger – I want them to be calmly and logically discussing, planning and implementing solutions to fix the problem as quickly and permanently as possible; not bickering about emotional issues like blame; there’ll be plenty of time for that after the practical matters are dealt with.

Thankfully, for the most part, that seems like what the President is at least trying to do (this is not to say that I think he’s completely succeeding just yet).

But, if Americans can’t come back around considering being intelligent, educated and erudite as positive things, and not things to be looked down on by “real” americans who don’t go in for all that book-learnin’ and pride themselves on approaching everything from gut instinct, we’re going to be in even worse shape when the next disaster hits.

Yes, it’s that fateful Friday every year where I get to start resenting my kids because they don’t have to get up early every Monday through Friday for a couple of months, and I still do…

THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL™!!!

Oh well, nothing to be done about it. Still, it’s cool another year’s gone by, and my eldest is facing the more-demeaning-as-one-grows-older local rite of passage that is the class dance performance on the playground for the school’s “community day” for the last time…yes, officially as of lunchtime today, I am the parent of a middle school student.

I guess that means I’m officially old now. But I already knew that.

Anway, tunes and stuff:

1. “Retreat from the Sun” – that dog.
2. “Halfway to Heaven” – Earth to Bob
3. “Ridin’ in my car” – She & Him
4. “Unsatisfied” – The Replacements
5. “Why Did You Stay?” – The Pipettes
6. “Only Ones Who Know” – The Arctic Monkeys
7. “Virginia Woolfe” – Indigo Girls
8. “Shoelace” – Blibbering Humdingers
9. “Motherless Child” – Wailin’ Jennys
10. “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” – Wilco

According to Sony at E3, it appears that we PS3 owners will finally be able to get our hands on Gran Turismo 5 on November 2, 2010.

Of course, there have been release dates before, and they’ve come and gone. I’m hoping this one sticks. Prologue felt half finished, and while I had lots of fun with the time trial demo, it was one car, one track. And, GT4 doesn’t work on my ‘backwards compatible’ console.

I’m more than ready to jump behind the wheel again and lose hours trying to shave a tenth of second off of my lap time. ModNation Racers is a blast, of course, but as far as console racing games go, GT is a level above*.

I’m going to assume the anal-retentive developers at Polyphony have spent the last several months tweaking the physics engine again and recording more exhaust note sounds, and driving that rented Skyline GT-R around the real track one more time to make absolutely sure that the body roll code module is completely authentic…

…and really, who could blame them?

What probably really got them off their ass though is the fact that the Move motion control ice-cream cone gizmo** was announced, demonstrated, marketed, priced, and scheduled for release in a fraction of the time it’s taken them with this game together.

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* – …even if you can’t build driver avatars that look exactly like Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme and publish them for others to download.

** – Which I will probably end up buying, because it’s cheap, looks like it’ll be a little bit fun (but not groundbreaking – most Wii games barely work, after all), the tech is interesting, and the kids will like it. And, unlike the Wii, it’s an additional interface, rather than the only interface; and it won’t look blocky and washed out on my big expensive HDTV.

Not a terrible weekend; took an extra day, got a bunch of stuff done a day early, which was nice, because of all the end-of-year Girl Scout activites going on.

Also, thanks to the newly-arrived car bike rack, we got a few good hours of trail riding in at the local park. Very nice. Saw an osprey nest with a baby in it. Cool.

Or at least it was cool, until I broke a spoke two miles from the car on Sunday afternoon. One hundred degrees fahrenheit feels much hotter when you’re pushing the bike instead of riding it.

Oh well, at least I have a project to keep me busy one afternoon this week.

Typical work week…ups and downs and not enough productivity.

1. “Speechless” – Lady GaGa
2. “Pool Party” – The Aquabats
3. “One Big Love” – Patty Griffin
4. “Manhattan Project” – Rush
5. “Don’t Tell Me (live)” – Avril Levigne
6. “A Crippling Blow” – The Killers
7. “Miracle of Life” – Yngwie Malmsteen
8. “How Much More” – The Go-Gos
9. “Utopia” – Alanis Morissette
10. “Anodyne” – The Badlees

Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been following the gulf oil spill story with interest. The whole business is unfortunate and generally terrible; it’s effect will likely be immeasurable; it’s already pretty much trashed the entire gulf coast regional economy, and it’ll take decades for the environment to recover, assuming it ever does completely. Honestly, the scale of the whole thing is too big to really wrap one’s head around.

Being emotional beings, many of us are looking for someone to blame for it; an “ass to kick”, as it were. However, getting that kind of simple resolution for something of this magnitude isn’t likely…this isn’t a spilled carton of milk; you can’t just blame it on the kid at the other end of lunch table and have the cafeteria lady give him a cloth to wipe it up. It’s just too big; there are too many people and entities with a hand in causing things, and a whole lot of people trying to work to fix it, and probably a whole lot more working to avoid the responsibility of doing so.

Given our limitations as imperfect humans and institutions, it’s safe to say that the way the world community is going about trying to fix the leak, contain the damage, and prevent futher occurences down the road could be more efficient and more effective. Howver, at the same time, I’d offer that given the immensity of the enterprise, and considering the limitations those in a position to do something are saddled with, the effort we’re getting is pretty much what we’re capable of (and will get better), and eventually hit on a multi-level, all-encompassing plan that will, over time, get things pointed back in the right direction. People, on a macro scale, to tend to rise to the occasion in the face of crisis, and I expect us to eventually do that here, once we get over ourselves a bit.

Having covered my general take on the issue, I really want to talk about a trend I’ve started noticing in the last week or so that’s really starting to make me uncomfortable: I’m encountering lots of chatter from all quarters in America laying the blame for this thing at the feet of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the nation from whence the United States originally spawned, and it’s people.

Many Americans, it seems, are running with this crisis and making the leap toward blaming this crisis, which primarily affects the United States, on another sovreign nation. I’ve seen it in conversation, in stuff floating around on the internet in both uninformed and snarky forums, on television, and in national and international newspapers.

This leap, however, is the wrong leap to take.

I guess the confusion comes from the fact that the leaking well is operated by BP, a huge, nation-spanning multinational corporation with historic ties to the UK. Even if “BP” did stand for British Petroleum (it hasn’t in years – it’s either a meaningless acronym, or stands for the equally meaningless “Beyond Petroleum”), over the last 50 years, BP has gotten so large that it transcends national borders – it has an HQ in the UK, but it also has an equally large one in Texas and interests spanning the planet. According to the wikipedia entry*, BP is the fourth largest company in the world and probably has a larger annual cashflow than several members of the European Union. As such, despite keeping some of it’s offices in London, in reality, it doesn’t answer to national governments at all – it operates on another plane entirely**.

BP is NOT Britain, or even particularly British; it hasn’t been for a long time, though the confusion is understandable. Major media, people in general, and even President Obama have added to the confusion by referring to BP as “British Petroleum”, leading to the assumption that BP is an arm of the British government, or at least blessed by such. From there, it’s a simple matter of turning this whole situation into a transatlantic slap-fight between to historical allies based on a misunderstanding, and uninformed Americans boycotting British products and assaulting pre-teen girls on the street because they were wearing Miley Cyrus “designed” Union Jack t-shirts they bought at the local Wal-Mart.

I’d rather it not go there…the US and the UK have a long history of cooperation and cultural exchange, and despite those couple of wars in the late 18th early 19th centuries, we’ve all gotten on pretty well, and have historically supported each other; even through our various blunders, we’ve always had each other’s backs. Heck, we’re cooperating on a new series of Torchwood now; I don’t want to see that derailed.

Really, don’t go there. My kid owns that shirt I linked to above.

So, to summarize…I understand the need to get angry at somebody about the major disaster in the gulf. If you feel the need to blame somebody, aim it at the large multinational corporation who dropped the ball, not the really cool country it used to be named after that brings us things like Newcastle Brown, Top Gear, Harry Potter, and Doctor Who.***

This crisis, like almost everything else in the modern world, really isn’t about “nations” anyway. In the cases of ideology and commerce, political borders are pretty fluid; you’d think most of us would have figured that out by now.

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* – recognizing that the information on a publicly-editable article relating to a potentially controversial current event is quite likely to have issues with credibility

** – That big multinationals work this is way is part of why BP has been able to so successfully shirk much of its responsibility for cleaning up its mess (and being able to operate in such a way as to ignore regulations of various national governments, leading to substandard equipment and saftey practices which led to the disaster in the first place), but that’s another problem for another discussion.

*** – Feel free, however, to blame England, in a good-natured, friendly sort of way, for reality TV and blood pudding. Ew.

Author Jeremy Robinson in his piece at io9 dealing with conflicting feelings about the resurgence of 80s pop culture treasures in modern media really hits on a common truth for many of us of a certain geeky vintage.

GI:JOE. Transformers. Battlestar Galactica. V. The A-Team. Voltron. Thundercats. The Smurfs. It’s everywhere.

Everything old is new again: the pop-culture of my childhood is being strip-mined and sold back to me. At first glance, looks like it might be a good thing – the world is, on some level, catering specifically to me, and that feels empowering. Plus, given that I never quite grew up, I share a lot of these fun bits of my childhood with my kids…which makes them the go-to experts in their peer groups when something like Doctor Who comes back around, which is actually also very cool for me in it’s own way.

Few of these reinventions and revivals live up to our memories, and often leave what made the originals so endearing out of the adaptations. For every BSG, there are a dozen instances of Transformers 2, which, as Robinson posits, cheapens the coolness factor of the original iteration for many of us.

It’s an interesting place to find oneself: on one hand, all the stuff you held dear as a kid is being embraced as worthy and cool, though at the same time, the modern variants of our beloved pop culture icons will never live up to the memories we’ve nurtured and developed over the decades.

And, it robs our once obscure TRON gag-logo t-shirts of their coolness factor…both because everybody recognizes it now, and because the public at large associates it with the lesser copy. It’s a conflicting feeling for those of us who get into this sort of thing.*

But that doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to play along, and line up for the next big tenpole picture based on one of our beloved childhood playthings, and continue to hope that it will, this time, live up to the lofty standards we’ve set for it in our own heads. For some of us, these delicious feelings of anticipation are worth it, even though we know it’ll never be as good as we’d hope.

Well, except for the Star Wars prequels…that let-down totally overshadowed the anticipation.

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* – Yes, it’s a completely irrational and elitist thing that some of us feel about something losing a lot of it’s appeal once EVERYBODY decides they like it. Those fun little nods of recongition from fellow travellers are actually quite rewarding, and if everybody’s in on the joke, it’s not as much fun for us. To our credit, some of us trend-dodgers are aware of this affectation/flaw, and can poke fun at ourselves for it.

I recognize that this could be considered “old news”, but a while back, Wired magazine put up a link to an Autism Quotient test/questionaire, measuring the extent of autistic traits in adults. The test makes no claims to be a tool for diagnosis, but points out that higher scores correlate highly with diagnosed autism spectrum disorder (like, say, Aspergers); by their numbers, eighty percent of control group testers who scored 32 or higher had been diagnosed with some autism-related disorder (the mean score was 16.7).

I scored a 33.

Not that I’m self-diagnosing myself, but I have noticed that I do exhibit several common traits associated with those sorts of disorders (tending toward hyper-focus, occasional difficult picking up on social cues), but hardly all of them (for example, I don’t necessarily have an issue with empathy – the “putting myself in another’s shoes” definition of it anyway).

Nor am I particularly concerned about posessing some of these traits; some of them make me quite good at my job, for example. Others represent possible weaknesses, but can be overcome with awareness and adaptation. It’s just a matter of self-awareness, and the results of this short, superficial instrument do tend to support observations I’ve previously made about myself.

I’d suspect that most socially-awkward introverts (the nerds, dorks, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies* et cetera of the world) would score in the upper range as well; especially if they tended to overthink the motivations behind questions and potentially break the test (which, I concede, it’s possible I did).

Of course, this test is almost certainly presented mostly for the amusement factor, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t some value in it beyond that.

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*- they all adore me. they think I’m a righteous dude.

Not much to speak of this week, so I didn’t.

1. “Knife Going In” – Tegan and Sara
2. “Jonas & Ezekial” – Indigo Girls
3. “Life and How to Live It” – REM
4. “Crocodile Smile” – Innocent Nixon
5. “No Cars Go” – Arcade Fire
6. “Never Say Never” – that dog.
7. “Lovegame” – Lady GaGa
8. “Answering Machine” – The Replacements
9. “Shook Me Like a Prayer” – Rock Sugar
10. “It’s So Easy” – Guns ‘n’ Roses

All the bot comments in my spam folder this weekend seemed oddly impressed with my “great jeans” for some reason.

In a way, I’m glad my jeans are great, because for whatever reason, I feel like crap…damn these random virii.

The weekend was nothing special, though thanks to the magic of Netflix Instant Watch, I was able to subject my children to the genius of 240 dollars worth of pudding, one of those totally random bits of comedy that has stuck with me for years and years, yet nobody gets the joke when I occasionally allude to it.

This is the story of my life.

I’m outta heeeerrrrrrreeee….