Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe has recently made a stink about the political blogosphere, or at least that fragment of it she covered at the Kossack Konvention, being lilly-white and able to pee standing up. She stopped short of demanding that federal funds be spent on teaching blogging skills to schoolgirls, but not very far short, and the whole thing left me scratching my head.
Or rather, her puzzlement about it did. See, I know the reason for all this. I've mentioned it before, as a matter of fact. The reason is this: If you are reading this blog on your own computer, on your own time, you are at least a little bit of a geek. Now, I'm not saying you own a pair of foam rubber Spock ears, but chances are that you have watched at least one episode of Star Trek (or Firefly or Battlestar Galactica or The X-Files or whatever.) The reason I say this is because you have your nose against a computer screen on your own time rather than being out shopping with your friends at the mall or playing pool at the bar or dancing at a club or working on your old Corvette or whatever, and that is a very geek thing to do.
If Ms. Goodman had been a geekette herself, she would have known that, for whatever sociological reason, geekery is still largely a white male preserve. If you go to the geek Mecca, DragonCon, and peel off the Klingon costumes, the crowd is about as sexually and racially diverse as the cast of Dead Poet's Society. While those of us who are geekettes don't seem to mind this (after all, the odds are good, even if the goods are odd) it must drive levellers like Ms. Goodman into a tizzy, especially when the geeks take keyboard in hand and start writing political blogs, and folks actually pay attention to them.
Let the nerds have their revenge, Ellen. Let them glory in their spark. There was something quaintly touching about the Democrat candidates coming to tug their forelocks in respect before a convention packed full of the very people whose heads they used to flush down toilets in high school.
(H/T to Captain's Quarters.)
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10 comments:
"the odds are good, even if the goods are odd"
Recommended procedure for reading missives from VFTP Command Central:
1) Rack keyboard beside computer, under desk.
2) Hover mousepointer over bookmark in one's browser list.
3) Drop mouse into ziploc baggie, sealing same (assuming cordless rodent).
4) Drape transparent plastic bag over monitor.
5) Place wad of paper towels on space previously occupied by keyboard.
6) Click mousebutton through baggie.
Any unannounced re-routing of beverages due to sudden hiccough of laugher will now merely result in a sodden mass of coffee-soaked Kleenex Dual Quilted being dumped in the trash, rather than half-an-hour using same to get mainly-coffee out of one's keycaps and monitor control buttons.
This has been a public service announcement....
"the odds are good, even if the goods are odd"
Heh. Hadn't heard that one before.
Capt. Ed was even gracious in his response to Miss Goodman... who is whiny little bitch.
I recommend Beth's snark available at http://cotillion.mu.nu/
being lilly-white and able to pee standing up
http://nbtsc.org/~ganimede/stp.html
Inventorying my blogroll, I find:
19 blogs with gentleman writers.
11 blogs with lady writers.
So, sure-- there's a discrepancy in which sex blogs more, but my blog doesn't reflect it all that heavily. Plus, the guys in my blogroll are people like LawDog, Don Gwinn, and John Shirley-- hardly misogynists.
But they're White Males! They must be misogynists!
"the odds are good, even if the goods are odd"
Bwahahahahahahahahaha!
Thank you, wiping away a tear, here.
And the "popular" girls at my daughter's high school wonder why she's liked by so many guys...she worships video games and spends much of her free time on the computer, duh!
Odds good, goods odd...
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
for Tam.
But back to Ellen Goodman's point...
Just what was Ellen Goodman's point?
gvi
"Yes, this is the kettle of the MSM -- mainstream media -- calling the pot of the netroots male. In fairness, half of all 96 million blogs are written by women. But in the smaller political sphere, what is touted as a fresh force for change looks an awful lot like a new boy network."
Did somebody forget to tell her that bloggers actually get to choose for themselves what they write about?
It's true. The Patriarchy really doesn't hand out topics, we pretty much let people choose for themselves!
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