Three weeks ago, NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty recently did a report on Catholics and John Kerry that has raised some temperatures in the blogopshere. I won’t go into all that, but one blog quotes the reporter as telling American Libraries in February 2000, “Reporters should be thinking about big ideas and can get bogged down in detail. I write stories with blanks and let the library staff fill them in.”

Sounds kind of a strange admission to make, and it’s possible that Bradley Hagerty may be, shall we say, over-reliant on librarians, but the context is still interesting.

The article (not apparently freely available online, so no link, my apologies) is about NPR’s library staff. NPR’s library has 2700 books, 125 serials, news database subscriptions, and tons of clippings, according to the article. There are actually 2 NPR libraries (a research library and a program library, which sounds more like an archive). The main NPR librarian has been there since 1974. The other two librarians are more recent. One of them keeps an updated pronunciation guide that she sends around the offices during election season so the on-air talent don’t mispronounce candidates’ names. The same librarian has a Rolodex (now an online database, I suppose?) of the contact info for every press secretary on Capitol Hill. An assistant managing editor says the librarian can “find anyone on the face of the earth, even on weekends.” From the sounds of the article, the librarians at NPR face a lot of the same issues that most librarians face. For instance, how do you preserve or transform the tapes of old NPR broadcasts, many of which are reel-to-reel? How do you preserve material while also accommodating user needs (reporters needing to use the tape for dubbing copies?).

The paragraph above the Bradley Hagerty quote is full of praise from an NPR editor and producer for the librarians and acknowledgment of the fact that they do the “heavy lifting of research.” True enough.

It’s an absolutely lovely night outside. Humid, but a perfect temp, with the Big Dipper directly overhead, night sounds all around—it would be a great night to camp out, if my tent wasn’t in Oklahoma.

And yes, I heard more cicada sounds while I was out there with the beagle. The vanguard of Brood X is out there, staring at us from the branches with their glowing, evil red eyes.

It’s all so exciting.

Frank pointed out the cover of Section E ‘Connection’ of tonight’s Ann Arbor News (Motto: ‘Still the World’s Worst Website). Headlined Highs and Lows of Clothes (ain’t that alliterative?), it’s a discussion of how, for today’s teen girl, ‘less is more.’ I think he regrets bringing it home. It provoked a longish rant, which you’re now going to have to suffer through like him.

Having spent yesterday at a southwest AA high school, I can attest that, for the girls anyway, less is indeed the style. One class had female students who made the denizens of the Blue Moon Brothel of Winnemucca, Nevada, look overdressed, and I had the passing thought: ‘Do your mothers know you dress like cheap whores?’

Okay, it may not be nice or PC or appropriate or whatever, but, quite frankly, neither was the way these kids were dressed.

Now, I’m no prude (as Frank will tell you); wear what you want. I’ve always guffawed when principals and superintendents tried to battle miniskirts and anti-Bush t-shirts by saying they ‘disrupt the educational process.’ No, the educational process is disrupted by collections for Ronald McDonald House and please let these students out of class to go on the field trip to Cedar Point and religious fundamentalist fooling with textbooks and No Child Left Behind and so on and so on and so on.

I saw nothing wrong with miniskirts back in my day; being of a different … orientation … they did nothing for me, or to me, even though they drove the parents and administrators of the 60s and 70s nuts. And now, well, as long as I don’t have to see anybody’s … nether regions, I don’t much care.

My angle, then as now, is just that it shows a complete lack of respect for self, as well as a great deal of ignorance about a whole host of things, not least of which is how they’re manipulated by the industry.

In other words, you wanna dress like the two-bit whores I saw near DuPont Circle my first time in Washington, DC, many years ago, well, go ahead, but … well, you’re gonna look like a two-bit DuPont Circle whore, who’s a slave to fashionistas who seem to enjoy the heroin-wasted, anorexic … whore look.

Is that the image you want to project? Particularly when you’re just 16 and still in high school? Better question: Is that the image you want your daughter to project if you’re a parent?

A mother quoted in the News article says:

‘I struggle with that all the time. How do I get her to feel good about herself? Boys are a focus for them at that age … How do I make her understand … that dressing quote unquote ‘hot’ doesn’t always give you what you want?’

Pause to reach for the Pepto. Excuse me? How do you get her to feel good about herself? How about by not allowing her to go to school dressed like one of Seymour Butts’ actresses?

And dressing ‘hot’ doesn’t give you what you want?! Sorry, sweetie, but it gives you exactly what you want … and more. And the latter half of that is the problem.

Interesting that this mother’s daughter attends … of course, the very high school I guest taught at yesterday. And mommy, who asks the clueless question above, not only lets her kid go to school dressed in short skirts and sometimes midrif-baring skimpy shirts, also has allowed her to be photographed and splashed big-as-life in the News.

But apparently, she’s the soul of discretion; she doesn’t show her belly every day. And her mother says she terms her dress on the ‘conservative side.’

Of course, the News puts the teenager from Ypsilanti on the inside of the section and in a much smaller photo; that’ll put them Ypsi people in their place. Still, the Ypsi entry is showing more cleavage than the Grand Canyon and wearing hip-hugging jeans that I last saw at my sister’s high school graduation ceremony in 1974, looking just as scruffy and dirty as they did back then.

Let me hasten to be clear here: I’m not calling any of these girls whores or questioning their virtue. Just their judgment and self-respect. Not to mention the cluelessness and lack of judgment of their mothers.

I’ve been saying a lot lately (and I’m sure Frank will get tired of hearing it over the next year of grad school) that I as a teacher will have no problem being held accountable for how my students perform on standardized testing when parents in the American empire start being held accountable for how their students dress, act, treat each other and their teachers and whether or not they come to school well-fed, well-clothed, having been kissed good bye, told they are loved and given every opportunity possible to come to school ready to learn.

When we can institute a system of parental accountability, I’ll be more than happy as a teacher to take personal responsibility for my students.

Until then, at least teach your kids to respect their elders (especially substitute teachers) and don’t dress your daughters like Las Vegas hookers.

If I had a teenage daughter, we would SO be having a fight right now …

A bicyclist and I came to the same narrow passageway in the sidewalk on Maynard in front of Ambrosia and Madras Masala at exactly the same moment today. (There were people at the outddors tables in front of Ambrosia, making the sidewalk even more crowded.) Should I have yielded, or should he have? Neither of us did, and he almost ran into me as he barreled past.

On a related subject, it still surprises me when people cuss on the AATA buses here and the bus drivers yell out, “Watch the language!” Tonight a tough-looking guy used a relatively common cuss word (you might hear it on TV, definitely not network but assuredly cable), not one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words, and the bus driver scolded him and blared the bus’s automated profanity warning message (I didn’t even know there was one).

Mister Tough was surprisingly apologetic (even cowed). One of his pals chuckled and said that in California the inappropriateness of the profanity wouldn’t have even been an issue. He was right.

There are signs posted on buses in Oakland’s transit system warning against profanity, but any bus driver who risked enforcing the ban would court bodily harm. There aren’t any anti-profanity signs on San Francisco’s MUNI system, period. I’ve heard profanity on AATA buses, to be sure, but I think I would have heard more swear words on a single day in the Bay Area transit system than I’ve heard on AATA in six months. I still remember the morning I was sitting on MUNI on the way to work and being forced to overhear an entire conversation between two crackheads, carried out in graphic language (they were in some sort of dysfunctional relationship), about their sexual difficulties.

All of the energy that’s spent on trying to stamp out profanity and “wardrobe malfunctions,” it seems to me, could be much better spent on far more egregious breaches—road rage, for example. Some would say it’s all part of a continuum, and I would find it hard to disagree with that argument. But the “no profanity” rule on buses seems an awful lot like using a submachine gun to try to kill a gnat.

Speaking of the local election story, the front page article on the subject mentions that Ann Arbor mayor John Hieftje has a Republican challenger in this year’s election—former City Council member Jane Lumm. It would be nice to know what Hieftje and Lumm’s positions are on local issues. The article doesn’t go into that. Neither does another article on the same subject in the Local section. The Local article quotes Lumm as saying that she knows it will be an “uphill battle” to unseat Hieftje, but other than that, nothing about Lumm, nothing about her positions, nothing about why she’s running other than because—well, who knows? Because the sky is blue? Did the reporter even bother to ask?

In today’s Ann Arbor News, there was a huge (why so huge, I don’t know, but it obliterated a far more important story about upcoming local elections) front-page article about high school kids and their midriff-baring and short-skirt fashions and the “tensions” that said fashions are creating. Apropos of not much, in the midst of the article, one student complains that a school media librarian pulled her aside one day last year and chastised her for wearing a too-short skirt. Whether it was appropriate for a librarian to be giving a high school student sartorial tips is neither here nor there. But what does the librarian’s librarianship have to do with the focus of the article? Is it that only a teacher or a principal should have been scolding the student, if someone was to be doing the scolding? Or is it a way of subtly reinforcing the stereotype that librarians are all shushers and scolders and fussbudgets and nags at heart, no matter where they’re employed or what year it is?