Yeah, this is like those horrible boys who were in the Times style section. "They're so fabulous Interview has them host parties for them, even though they're teens!" [Times neglects to tell you their father owns Interview].
This shit is where I just have to gape. I cannot - literally cannot - imagine this kind of lifestyle. I've never interacted with anyone famous* except in the standard "You're famous, I'm not" situation.
But ISTM that these things aren't written for proles like me; they're written for people who may not be Apatows, but who are accustomed to peer-ish interactions with the rich and famous. Gah.
NYT: Court reporting for courtiers.
* for any meaningful definition of "famous." Minor local celebrities and the like excluded.
In unrelated news, at least we don't have to forego food to live long.
5: My dad will be heart-broken. (And still hungry, because he is a creature of habit.)
"Come on you apes monkeys, you wanna live forever?"
But ISTM that these things aren't written for proles like me; they're written for people who may not be Apatows, but who are accustomed to peer-ish interactions with the rich and famous. Gah.
I don't think I quite agree with this, but that still leaves the question of what people these articles are written for. I not seldom wonder if they aren't actually aimed at people like us, with our outrage and our spare time to talk about them.
I not seldom wonder if they aren't actually aimed at people like us, with our outrage and our spare time to talk about them.
That's my firm belief. Also, written because evidence shows that people will read these stories.
I always thought it was just genuinely "Lifestyles of the Rich And Fabulous" type thing.
But they troll our demographic so expertly. Other celebrity lifestyles writing (like OK! and Star) goes in for a different audience, and focuses on different things.
The NYT devotes disproportionate space to the exploits of the extremely wealthy, and also to consumer informaiton pieces of interest only to the extremely wealthy ("what to look for when you're shopping for an island") because of their advertisers. Very few NYT readers shop at Tiffany's regularly, but a fairly high number of people who shop at Tiffany's regularly read the NYT. Tifffany's can reach those few people through NYT ads, and not easily any other way. The extremely rich don't all watch the same tv show or have a special forum on Facebook, and they don't open their junk mail. Articles with particular appeal to this demographic make the high end advertisers happy.
But they troll our demographic so expertly.
(11 aside, even though it sounds right.) But is most of our demographic being trolled? Before I read snarky takedowns of such things, my unconscious sentiment was "Oh, probably people like reading this stuff" and I didn't quite get how obnoxious they were until it was pointed out to me. (Not the "Mo' Yachts, Mo' Problems" kind of pieces. I always got that those were obnoxious.)
I don't actually read these articles, so much as I read threads of people mocking them.
I don't totally disagree with Blume in 10, but it's my experience that a much higher percentage of people than you might expect accepts these kinds of stories at face value.
I've had innumerable conversations with people along the lines of:
- Friend: Did you see that profile of [young artist]? It's so amazing how these breakthroughs happen.
- Me: yes, although I thought it was weird they didn't mention how she got her record deal
- Friend: What do you mean?
- Me: Well, her father owns the company.
- Friend: ?!?!
I feel like a conspiracy theorist, but articles like this seem like propaganda for the idea that success through connections or inheritance really is merit -- they're not so much hiding the connections, as mentioning them as part of what makes the successful subject so deserving of their success.
I'll bet it wouldn't take too much looking to find similar connections between regular writers of the articles in the Style section and the subjects. Or at least the editors of the articles. They probably accept this stuff as normal because they don't know any better. 15 sounds reasonable too, though.
But they troll our demographic so expertly.
The authors of these things basically are "our" demographic. "Our" demographic (and people with even more disposable income than our demographic) likes both to read this kind of fluff and to scorn it, which is exactly what the NYT does. In terms of selling papers and keeping the NYT relevant on the internet, these kinds of things are a gold mine, though the NYT has to avoid looking to much like US Weekly so as not to undermine its brand.
The unfoggetariat have a lot of commonalities, but are we really a single demographic? We have a pretty wide range of ages, I think. (Is L. currently the youngest? I believe she said she was a hot new graduate student.)
I thought that this was the prose equivalent of a photoshopped fashion magazine photo. The ideal being depicted is a life of ease and casual admiration from everyone, people loving to do favors for the deserving, a warm circle of mutual admiration.
People read these because they enjoy the ideal, the advertiser-friendly side effect of creating discontent is an epiphenomenon-- one that feeds the publisher and so encourages more articles, but it's not a top-down phenomenon forced on readers.
are we really a single demographic
We are a balding 47-years-old man in a basement. So, yes.
A foreign TV network wanted to do a story about a toy craze sweeping the US. The producer knew my wife, so the crew came to our house, filmed my then 10 year old daughter playing with a toy she'd never heard of before (and played with maybe twice after the crew left it behind) and that was that. There's way more sham than reality in anything other than straight news. IMRUO. And plenty of sham in that, as coverage of Mrs. Romney's invocation of their shared impoverished grad student years shows.
Less insipid media.
We are a balding 47-years-old man in a basement. So, yes.
I object. I am not balding. Nor am I currently in a basement.
articles like this seem like propaganda for the idea that success through connections or inheritance really is merit
Like the term "aristocracy" itself. Rule by the best.
I'm on the fourth floor, bitches!
Age/sex check!
(Which just proves how old I am.)
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Eggcorn encountered in the wild yesterday: "the 12.8% tile".
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(Is L. currently the youngest? I believe she said she was a hot new graduate student.)
She was also the youngest when she was a high school student, which doesn't speak well for our continued relevance to new generations. This blog needs to be turned into a Tumblr.
(Is L. currently the youngest? I believe she said she was a hot new graduate student.)
No, she shares an office with a hot new graduate student who is currently distracting all the undergrads.
Clearly we need to get the next generation on here. The little alameidalings or the HPs or someone.
Nor am I currently in a basement.
I currently live in an attic.
Say "garret." Garrets are sexier.
(On second thought, probably more pretentious and hipstier.)
girl x knows about this blog and my pseud; it's unfortunate. I must have told her or something when it seemed she was too young for it to matter but now it's too late to take back...she's some kind of radical socialist, so that would be nice. I did give her a facebook account last year when she was 10, for xmas. I told her no pictures of herself and her friends, so she just has elaborate selections of her favorite manga characters. I haven't been monitoring it in the way I intended. she usually uses it to chat with friends on message, and I feel she has a right to talk to her friends if she wants. her friends are all real-life friends from school and such. this year she's a prefect and she is so thrilled. she is a very prefect-y kind of person.
27 is cute.
I find it less cute, given that I work in an office that deals with a lot of stats all the time, and people make those kinds of mistakes regularly. The data revolution happened after most of the people here were hired, and there are things they don't understand at a really basic level.
Also, I just watched a very sweet woman I'm doing a little project for manually count fortysomething rows in a spreadsheet rather than just subtract the first row number from the last. I would have said something, but I didn't want to get into the necessity of having to re-add 1.
Also, "a lot of stats" here means basic arithmetic stuff. No calculus or anything.
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New species of penis-head fish discovered in Vietnam
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8524401
Clearly deserving of its own post here, if that doesn't bring the youngsters flocking to Unfogged I don't know what will.
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That would drive me nuts. I one time got into a horrifying conversation about how different professors compute their student's semester grade because they're not clear on the math. None of them used Excel. (Not math/science teachers).
The one I remember most clearly would do this: if grade A counted 30% and grade B counted 20%, etc, they'd add A+A+A+B+B+.... Which on the one hand is fine - I always approve of finding a formula that you thoroughly understand. But on the other hand, they avoided any weights that weren't multiples of 10%.
36: What's amazing is that it comes with condoms over its eyes.
on the other hand, they avoided any weights that weren't multiples of 10%
I was once in a meeting where five TAs and a professor discussed with great urgency what we might possibly do, given that we had nine section meetings and the section participation was worth 10% of the grade. My explanation was met with blank stares, and my offer to give everyone else the spreadsheet I had written was rebuffed. It sort of seemed like they didn't actually believe that my way would work.
I'm about to interview my former TA for a job. If I hadn't gotten an A, this could be awkward.
Say "garret." Garrets are sexier.
I do normally say "garret", actually, and have dubbed my dwelling Fort Raskolnikov. (The "Fort" part is a bit of an inside joke! I am not a git!)
Clearly your TA just gave you an A as a prelude to asking for financial favors.
given that we had nine section meetings and the section participation was worth 10% of the grade. My explanation was met with blank stares, and my offer to give everyone else the spreadsheet I had written was rebuffed.
Oh my god.
So hey: Is the pronunciation NaBOKov pretentious, or is the pronunciation NAbokov embarrassing? I never studied him in a class or really heard it pronounced out loud much. Sting says NAbokov, but he's embarrassing.
I've told the story before about converting my student loan disbursement into a series of CDs for my rent. I went into the bank and explained that I wanted each CD to be exactly the rent amount at maturity, with them maturing sequentially on the first of each month of the year month. The bank people stared blamkly, then told me this absolutely could not be done. I asked for a pencil. They thought I was some kind of evil wizard, buying CDs in very odd amounts.
Seventh grade math. The bank failed a few years later.
44: I have never heard anyone say NaBOKov. In the original Russian I am pretty sure it would be NAbokov. Saying NAbokov is not pretentious - though saying "In the original Russian it would be NAbokov" is.
I looked online - there's some interview where he apparently said that he prefers the pronunciation NaBOKov. I only thought to look it up because a lit friend of mine pronounced it that way and at first I had no clue what she was talking about.
I remember the same accent-in-the-middle pronunciation, and google confirms:
"As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabo/koff/, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say /Nab/okov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-/bo/-kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now."
In the original Russian it is naBOKov.
pwned. I love "heavy open o as in knickerbocker".
The correct pronunciation is KaRAMazov.
I looked online - there's some interview where he apparently said that he prefers the pronunciation NaBOKov.
This is one of those cases where when you're surrounded by people who pronounce it the correct way, you can never go back to pronouncing it the way that 99% of people pronounce it. Kind of like "Honus Wagner". "Honus" is short for "Johannes". It doesn't rhyme with "Bonus".
That's okay. I'm not surrounded by anybody saying "Honus Wagner".
on the other hand, they avoided any weights that weren't multiples of 10%
oh god, not the "living with academics" thread...
34.1:This was not someone behind the times, but a recent master's grad, in applied social sciences.
34.2: In Excel, when you highlight cells in a spreadsheet, it gives their count, sum, and average in the lower right of the window. Google Docs seems to give the count of text cells and the sum of value cells.
oh god, not the "living with academics" thread...
No, it's the "I can't believe those people have jobs with benefits and I don't" thread.
56: The range of cognitive development on stuff like this just continues to amaze me.
Some people have developed the critical thinking/baloney detector skills to analyze whether a result makes sense, while others just seem to passively accept whatever answer the computer gives them. IT'S TELLING YOU YOUR SURVEY HAD A 120% RESPONSE RATE! THAT'S NOT HUMANLY POSSIBLE!
Ahem. Sorry.
Sting says NAbokov, but he's embarrassing.
True dis. I've said NaBOKov for 40 something years, since I was corrected by a Russian.
A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". … The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism
How did Nabokov pronounce "Knickerbocker", I wonder.
I've said NaBOKov for 40 something years, since I was corrected by a Russian.
When you are corrected by a Russian, you stay corrected.
Could somebody explain 27 to me? I was hoping somebody else would ask.
When you are corrected by a Russian, you stay corrected.
If I had in fact attempted to go around pronouncing it exactly as he did, I would probably have been not only pretentious but misunderstood.
I've said naBOKov since first hearing the name in school. Which was in a summer enrichment class for 11 year olds taught by a hardcore alcoholic woman in which we read (and totally failed to get) Lolita. Man was that a weird class.
That is weird to read Lolita when you're actually the same age as Lolita. Although it's probably not that rare.
"Percent tile" is just "percentile"? But who talks about the 12.8th percentile?
Yes, that is the weird part about the quote. Who takes things out to the 10th decimal place?
Mostly I remember the teacher slurring the word "nymphomaniac" all the time and talking a lot about her beer gut. We also read Catcher in the Rye.
No, silly. 12.8000000000th percentile.
I read Lolita in 8th grade because of "just like the/old man in/that book by NAbokov." Sting also made me read Portrait of an Artist and The Deptford Trilogy that year. What a task master!
Where does Sting reference the Deptford Trilogy? Sting has hidden depths.
He said in an interview that he was reading it, and had so far found it, "rather erudite and quite nice."* Little 13yo oudemia swoooooned.
*Yes, I still remember the quote. Shut up.
We are a balding 47-years-old man in a basement. So, yes.
We were a balding 47yo man in like 2004, so surely not. Unless Unfogged is some kind of parasite, serially inhabiting balding basement-dwelling human hosts, like in this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
in like 2004
There's something bleak about having accurate documentation of all the time you've wasted over the last decade, isn't there?
Is it accurate, or were some comments lost at some point? I have recently been unable to find some that I remember. I don't know if I'm misremembering them just enough to miss them with my google terms, or if they're really things I heard in real life, or if I dreamed them or what.
The googleyahoohole comes and goes -- try searching with a different search engine. Other than that, genuine gaps are limited to some of Labs' more alarming efforts, redacted after he was threatened with outing by SdB, and I think two threads that got into indepth discussion of possibly-identifiable and genuinely problematic to reveal real-world events.
If only this venue could be instantiated as a memorabilia room
75: Speaking of the Googley Ahoohole, I see one result for that five-word phrase. This goes up with whoever it was was convinced that Edith Bolling Galt Wilson was a well-known nymphomaniac.
I didn't say "well-known" you blackguard. Just that I had read it. Some day I will find the specific reference, and then you'll be sorry.
81: Ahaha! That's right! Howard's End! Being a teenybopper is illuminating, assholes!
63, 68: I knew if I waited long enough someone would ask those questions. (I got "percent tile" but wondered about the decimal.)
% tile in the wild. I'm kind of floored that this chart is publicly posted.
I had no idea Illinois and Georgia were between 76% and 99% Hispanic tile!
"% tile" isn't an eggcorn; it's just an abbreviation. It's frequently used on charts, where space is limited.
("%-ile" would maybe be more grammatical (maybe), but "% tile" is what you usually see.)
But is that the best measure for what the chart is supposed to show?
I had no idea Illinois and Georgia were between 76% and 99% Hispanic tile!
I'm pretty sure Texas is not between 76% and 99% Hispanic. I mean, it's significant, and in the next ten years, a majority of the voting-age population will be Hispanic. But I have a hard time believing that the under-10 year olds are driving it up to 76%.
In other news, apparently the US has nearly 90,000 state, local, and municipal governments. I'm not all that surprised, probably because I live in a state with 67 counties and 501 school districts.
Cue the Brits to come along and tell us this is why we can't get national healthcare or sensible public education policy.....
The chart is nonsense. Sorry if I wasn't clear. I don't know what they are attempting to measure but it is certainly not accurate by any definition I am familiar with.
More interesting is the Household Names wizard (scroll down) and the illustration of the disconnect between self-identified ideology and party affiliation. Not hard for me to believe there are a lot of socially conservative Hispanics who don't register Republican.
91: Every statistician ever. Or just to the "% tile" chart in 85, which I think has actually counted up the Hispanic population in each state, produced a ranking by population, and then divided the states into "% tile" ranges.
I think has actually counted up the Hispanic population in each state, produced a ranking by population, and then divided the states into "% tile" ranges
Yes. Although I'm not sure why you sound incredulous. What else would it be?
93: One of those counties has 45 school districts and I don't even want to know how many municipal governments.
I'm not incredulous. I think it's needlessly confusing when they could just show the population ranges that correspond to the population ranges (yes, at some cost of having to write larger labels).
second "population ranges" should be "percentiles"
I was misreading it as 76-99%, not percentile. Despite the fact that that was the whole point of the link.
It is a terrible chart. I say that as someone whose job it is to produce clear, accessible demographic data.
It is also highly likely to be badly misunderstood. I say that as someone who spends 20-50% of every speaking engagement attempting to remedy the audience's misconceptions.
Witt says a lot of things as a lot of people. It's a ninja skill.
I don't understand what's wrong with it.
(I admit that I first thought the "swing states" in the chart were supposed to be the states on the borders of the various percentiles, instead of just the normal politically-important swing states, but that's just me being unnecessarily dense.)
I try to be precisely as dense as necessary.
96: That assumption of the chart means it is pretty pointless. Wow! The states that have the most people have the most Hispanic people! I bet they have the most fat people too. And wow, Texas has more gay people than Delaware. Who'd a thunk it?
It might be interesting if the states were ranked by what percent of the state population are Hispanic, rather than the sheer number of Hispanic people. I can not tell which one it means. Also I feel like I should not be capitalizing "Hispanic" but it's too late now.
Maybe it is ranked by percentage Hispanic. When you click on a state, you get the total Hispanic population and Nevada has a larger total population than Oregon and some other states but is in a lower percentile band.
The real point is that a good chart wouldn't have us asking these questions.
Or I'm colorblind w/r/t swing state shading patterns. I think that's the more likely explanation. Not my best day commenting, except as measured according to procrastination quality.
Okay, so I'm a dummy for real, but I disabled the java on my firefox because some of you said so. But now a lot of things don't work. Like some e-mail programs and also pictures and graphics. And also, I had to reenable java in order to post this comment. Please help me o spirits.
Maybe it is ranked by percentage Hispanic.
Yes, it obviously is. I thought that's what you meant in 95.
If only math provided a way to check on those numbers.
According to this census report 8.8% of Georgia's population is Hispanic and 8.9% of Hawaii's population is Hispanic. In the chart we're talking about, Georgia is in a higher percentile than Hawaii.
112: they're plausibly right next to each other, but in two different percentiles. This data makes that chart look basically exactly right.
Thanks, urple. I think it's a clumsy abbreviation, and am not even sure the word percentile ought to be abbreviated, but it does make me feel better about the person involved.
Hawaii is two percentiles away from Georgia in the chart we're talking about. And it's in the lower percentile with the larger percent.
Okay, so I'm a dummy for real, but I disabled the java on my firefox because some of you said so. But now a lot of things don't work. Like some e-mail programs and also pictures and graphics. And also, I had to reenable java in order to post this comment. Please help me o spirits.
Well, Oracle just patched the security flaw, so you can go upgrade the Java plug-in and re-enable it, if you want. But disabling Java really really shouldn't have the effects you describe. Perhaps you also disabled Javascript? I'm posting this using Firefox with both Java and Javascript disabled, to see whether that reproduces the problem.
Ah-ha! It wouldn't let me. Now I'm re-enabling Javascript. If this posts, that's your problem: Java ≠ Javascript, and you want Javascript turned on.
In the chart you link to, Georgia is is not in the same band as California but it is in the same band as Hawaii.
And also, I had to reenable java in order to post this comment. Please help me o spirits.
That was javascript, the dead baby buried in the foundation of the web to make its architecture sound.
Wait, are actual dead babies used for that, or just afterbirths?
Suddenly just calling javascript "an abortion" seems like the more tasteful option.
I'm so pleased to have been right. Someone should really offer me a job in tech support.
Sorry, missed most of the thread, now skipping to the end.
I'll bet it wouldn't take too much looking to find similar connections between regular writers of the articles in the Style section and the subjects.
Well yeah. The only reason I've been paid to write about restaurants for 9+ years is that I happened to marry a woman who once complimented the shoes of a stranger on a bus, that stranger having been the editor of the local alt-weekly at the time. We personally are fairly ethical about how we pick restaurants to review, but there's no actual structure in place to make that true, and I don't doubt that half the content in the paper is more or less amplified social chatter - that is, people doing interesting things who know other people who, in addition to telling their friends about the interesting things, also write it up to fill column space.
