Would you take a moment to sign a petition to save Internet radio and save my sanity in the process?

As you may or may not know, there is no jazz station where I live in Rhode Island. There is a jazz station in Worcester, Mass., to which I "listen live" online when I am trying to write, need to relax, reading, what have you. It keeps me calm, which means I’m a nicer person, I’m more polite to strangers, willing to break for animals, and my positive jazz vibes make the world a better place.

But…politicians have decided to cash in on Internet radio. They want to double the rates these stations pay and make it retroactive, costing almost 200 million dollars. This does not just affect my local jazz station, this affects every station, including any you might stream at work or home while trying to retain your own sanity. But with a 200-million-dollar bill, these stations cannot continue broadcasting, and we don’t get to listen to our music online. I don’t get to listen to jazz. Which means I don’t write, or relax, or break for animals!

So save the music and the sanity. Sign the petition, and get a nice banner for your site.

Jennifer Leblanc

Let me begin by saying, I cannot stress enough the importance of a liberal arts education. I would like to thank my professors for teaching me the importance of two crucial things: reading comprehension and backing up your statement, however small, with evidence from a legitimate source. With these elements, you will succeed in digesting the information that surrounds us 24/7, making an informed opinion, and, if you should be so lucky after college as to land a job blogging for free, being armed with cold, hard facts instead of spouting off whatever you please.

Now that I’ve expressed my gratitude, I will show you how to use these two elements. First, reading comprehension. Arguably the most important thing to learn to do after reading and arithmetic. Without this, you cannot understand anything from recipe instructions to boiling down political spin or grasping foreign policy. It’s a lovely skill — the anti-feminists simply must try it! I’m assuming they have not; otherwise, they would not have connected a pitiful rant from a man who cannot get laid to their opinion that feminism and equality have wronged women, and more importantly, men. 

Amanda at Pandagon wrote a great post about this, which is how I came upon all of this. The pitiful man, voodoojock, just seems to have had bad luck with "ladies" who, by his account, seem like selfish snobs, airheads, and drama queens. They also seem like women who just plain weren’t interested in him. "How dare they?" he asked. It must be the fault of feminism. He never mentions the F-word and cannot connect the lack of chemistry or romantic success to any particular woman’s political or social beliefs. Yet his piece has been hijacked by an anti-feminist blogger named KellyMac and labeled, "Ladies, Wonder Why You Can’t Get Men to ‘Talk To You?’" She read this and somehow came to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with women. Specifically, women who believe in, or have been brainwashed by, feminism and equality.

But KellyMac using this piece as an argument against feminism makes as much sense as using a birthday cake recipe to show that the war in Iraq has been a mistake. You don’t need a liberal arts education (or even a middle-school education) to see that one man not getting any in a bar does not equal feminism harming anyone.

Just as the fight to ban birth control and abortion is less about the health of women or children than about giving the government and the church control over the sex lives of others, anti-feminism is not about how or if either gender has been harmed by an ideology. When a person (or gender, in this case) cannot face his or her weaknesses or faults, he or she turns the blame on someone else. If a man goes home alone, it must be the woman’s fault. So, please, Ms. KellyMac — please tell me one more thing that females have done wrong in life (i.e., not wanting brief or long-term contact with voodoojock), therefore making the world a worse place for men to live. It’s been a whole day since I’ve read a finger-wagging article addressed to my gender. 

If only it stopped there.

Further down the webpage, you’ll find a post entitled, "Twenty One Indicators of Systemic Discrimination Against Men." (Wait, wait — let me get into self-flogging position.) There are too many sins to list. Besides the outlandishness of each item, I have a major bone to pick with the list creator. After some, and only some, of the items, the name of a source is listed. However, there is no link to any source. Writing "Forbes Magazine" or "Dept. of Health and Human Services" at the end does not satisfy me. For one thing, I don’t have time to go through the Forbes archive to find the single article from which you’ve extracted this information. Either the anti-feminist blogger doesn’t have time either, has chosen to be lazy, or is lying about the source. Second, while still assuming the fact came from Forbes, if a link can be provided, I would like to read it for myself. Oh darn — more reading comprehension for me. Good thing I reaped the rewards of feminism to be the first woman in my family to get a college education and can wade through big words in intimidating publications to see exactly how, and in which context, the information as used.

If I were the weaker sex I’d be tired by now, but I’m just getting started!

Next up — "Dept. of Health and Human Services?" Which state? Federal? What year?

The item about the war casualties of men vs. women is in reference to the Vietnam War, before women were allowed to fight alongside the men as they do in Iraq. If there were fewer women in that particular, or any, war zone, then there were fewer female casualties of that war. Maybe my third crucial element should be logic.

But all of this questioning is moot anyway, as I took the liberty of Googling one of the "sources" and I did find a connection to Forbes. Except, this was not used in a Forbes article or by a Forbes reporter or even approved by Forbes magazine. It was posted by a nobody on a Forbes message board in response to the absurd opinion piece, "Don’t Marry Career Women." The feminist (or just sane) reader who posted a message after this list went through it item by item, with links to legitimate sources, including the Department of Justice.

Eventually I found the origin of this list: the Christian Party and Fathers’ Manifesto. They do include links in their list — links to another page on their website. And on each page that you’re taken to, there is another link that takes you to another page on their website. For instance, one item reads, "…zero percent of American 12th grade girls were able to correctly answer basic math and physics questions…" Zero percent? As in, none? I clicked on four links, only to be led to four pages of their site repeating this fallacy. One can only assume that the Christian Party itself made this up. (If you’re going to fabricate a statistic, at least make it believable.)

So, boys and girls, today’s lesson has been: do not B.S. a feminist armed with an education.

Jennifer Leblanc

Yesterday Don Herbert, better known as his TV personality Mr. Wizard, died of bone cancer at the age of 89.

Just writing that line makes me sad. It’s odd how you can connect to TV personalities as if they were people close to you, though you never actually met them.

Mr. Wizard was for me what Mr. Rogers was for so many kids. He came before Bill Nye the Science Guy and Beakman’s World — a true original. But most of all, Mr. Wizard was a guy who came into my house and helped me learn about simple scientific concepts in a way I could understand as a young child. He was my first teacher.

I remember watching him perform simple experiments on TV that I could duplicate at home using household items (and let us not forget: parental supervision). My favorite was adding vinegar to baking soda. It was so simple but also a load of fun for a kid like me who was way too into volcanoes. I didn’t have to know why this concoction produced a foamy mess, just that it did and was fun. Thus the lesson: science can be fun (which was better than the lesson: science can build better bombs).

I didn’t know it then, but I was learning a very basic concept of chemistry and, years later, when I was in eighth grade, stupid facts like that were useful.

Sadly, I probably learned more from Mr. Wizard than I would from several teachers that came into my life via the public school system. Odd that people paid to teach me and inspire me to learn were so thoroughly outdone by a guy on TV. But it’s true. He stirred the love of knowledge in a lot of us that came through the eighties.

But it wasn’t just his show, Mr. Wizard’s World, that he gave to us. He also gave us a multi-purpose sarcastic response. His presence is so engrained in all of our psyches that I am sure all of us have at one time or another said, “Hey, way to go, Mr. Wizard.” I know I’ve said it at least once this year.

I know it might seem strange, but it’s that last reason that has me missing him. Plenty of people from my generation couldn’t tell you an experiment from that show if you had a gun to their head, but all of us remember the show itself. Very few things can bind a group of people, but just the knowledge of Mr. Wizard’s existence — in some small way — actually does.

In a world with so many terrible things going on — war, corruption, violence, famine, etc. — it’s hard to find the ties that bind us. And it’s weird, but sometimes it really is just the pop culture around us. Mr. Wizard was part of that.

In light of this loss, hopefully we can all take a minute to remember how learning can be fun, easy, and rewarding and to reflect on some memories from childhood that Don Herbert was a part of.

Patrick Duganz

First off, I'll admit, I don't have cable. I can list a hundred things off the top my head that are worth the $70 a month more than TV. Usually I have no problem waiting for the DVD release, and I have a slight YouTube addiction — you can watch literally anything on there. But those HBO lawyers pounced like hyperkinetic bunnies on those clips. And to all of you whose videos were not removed in violation of copyright, only for me to see one minute of black screen, you're not funny. However, one video of the ending is still alive (I don't know for how much longer, though).

Now that I've seen it, I can defend it. I already knew from online postings, friends, families, and strangers in public places exactly what happened. Initially, I would've been angry, too. But after three days and finally seeing the end, I think it was perfect. It's not satisfying, we don't get closure, but that's the point.

The constant suspense is fitting — how do you think mafia families live? Between possible prosecution and knowing that business rivals will kill you and yours, the Tonys of the world may not even notice that they look over their shoulders every minute of every day. Also, they don't always end up in prison or dead. Life goes on, families eat, the guy at the counter just needs a new jacket. The only real pain involved watching Meadow destroy her tires.

Naturally, the screen went black. It had to eventually. It was abrupt but, again, fitting. Had we seen the Sopranos toast to something, had the camera pulled away from their table, it would've been just another Hollywood ending. This way, their lives go on; our ability to watch does not.

Jennifer Leblanc

I first read this around midnight last night, so I hoped I was dreaming. In the light of day, I was waiting for some sort of Onion-funded "Candid Camera" to point and laugh at bloggers everywhere for believing this. Sadly, no dream, no OnionCam. Just our tax dollars being all that they can be. Once I saw that even the BBC had reported on the "Gay Bomb," I lost all hope in humanity.

The story: "The plan for a so-called 'love bomb' envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among troops, causing what the military called a 'distasteful but completely non-lethal' blow to morale."

How am I supposed to write about this? What am I supposed to say? I can only comment on something so unintentionally comical with real comedy. Only the Brits can supply that.

Lethal blow, people.

Jennifer Leblanc