matthew’s alibi

Virginity or Death! : And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time
Author: Katha Pollitt
Release Date: 13 June, 2006

Driving home one night last week, I got all geekily excited to stumble across Tom Ashbrook’s talk show On Point when one of the guests was Katha Pollitt. I cranked XMPR all the way up. (Is it even possible/appropriate to crank up XMPR?). Pollitt is one of my absolute favorite writers: she’s the reason I subscribe to the Nation. She’s smart and snide and insightful and funny. She’s got a new book coming out in June called Virginity or Death: and Other Social and Political Issues of our Time, which, if it’s in the same vein as Reasonable Creatures and Subject to Debate, will almost certainly be on my top 10 books of 2006.

Too bad she was paired off against Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, whose new book Manliness has stirred up lots of annoying culture wars sound and fury.

I felt bad for Pollitt having to face off against this goon - he was smug and unabashedly reactionary, and Pollitt’s ideas and arguments are so much better than the nonsense Mansfield was spouting.

The fact that Tom Leykis has such a huge audience is evidence that Mansfield’s type of thinking is still frighteningly widespread. Even so, it’s one thing to hear sexist garbage on scummy talk radio, and quite another to hear it from an Ivy League professor.

Poor Katha Pollitt, who should really be discussing her own positions, was forced to take the quixotic offensive on Ashbrook’s show, and so she had my sympathy. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine someone better suited to challenge such foolishness. I refrained from calling in, deciding that support for Pollitt from West Hollywood would probably only confirm people’s suspicions about her politics. Also, I try really hard not to call talk radio shows, on the premise that this would make me irredeemably lame.

In any case, I only mention all of this for two reasons: first, because I just came across Katha Pollitt’s blog, and I’m pretty excited about that, and second, because I’ve been reworking the web page some today, and it occurred to me that I may well be the only blog on the internet that links Katha Pollitt and David Mamet side by side. I can’t imagine there’s very much overlap between the fan bases of the two writers, but I’m pleased to be squarely in the middle of that particular schizophrenic Venn diagram.

Years ago, my mom got this clunky little PDA at work that she quickly decided that she had no use for. So, she passed it along to me. It was a brick of a thing, weighed more than an iPod. It barely fit into my pocket. I carried it for a week or so, got really adept at using the stylus, and then gave up on it. Turns out the life of a college student (well, mine, anyway) just wasn’t involved enough to warrant digital organization. I’ve resisted the temptation to get a newer model in the years since because despite my big talk about “our digital future,” paper works just fine for me.

But I am a sucker for anything from google; seriously, give me a couple of gigs of storage and decent tagging and search capability, and I’ll just hand over the keys to my email to you and whatever creepy government spook you’ve got handy. So, much as I hate to admit it, I’ve been checking every couple of days to see if google calendar was public yet.

And then, it was! O glorious day last Thursday when Google Calendar went public.

But, frankly, I don’t think it’s that impressive. It seems to have a fairly limited feature set, and it still seems like an awful lot of work to figure out how to get events to repeat properly (which is important when you work in a theater. Or even if you don’t).

It doesn’t really integrate stuff from other web calendars very well. For instance, there are issues with upcoming.org. If you add it as a feed or web calendar, you can click the imported events on and off en masse, but they’re not a part of your calendar unless you manually copy them - which is a problem for a service like upcoming.org, where the majority of events I’m “watching,” not “attending.” The current solution is all or nothing.

Upcoming.org has bewilderingly has added a CL2 export feature - way to support the competition’s product! - but the exports are fairly unreliable when it comes to special characters and tends to truncate event descriptions, so I’ve found it easier just to add events fresh to CL2 rather than export them.

I have confidence that Google Calendar will improve over time, particularly if we can look to Gmail as an example, which was developed fairly rapidly and is still adding features and functionality. The most sorely needed feature is a batch edit feature so that multiple events can be edited and tagged at once (wouldn’t it be cool to keep a running tally of how many concerts you saw this year by searching for how many times you used the tag?)

Whenever I try out a new calendaring tool (like the half day I spent last week with 30boxes), I end up documenting the smallest minutiae of the most recent couple of days, which is what I can remember off the top of my head. So I’ve got insanely specific accounts of a few very mundane days on about four different web sites. I imagine some day, far after we’re all dead, these will be discovered, and will bore the hell out of some poor cultural anthropologist who’s excavating the millennial world wide web.

In the meantime, I can generally keep in my head what I’ve got coming up in the upcoming week, but it’s handy to have a place to store upcoming stuff that’s further away, and to remind myself of important birthdays. And I like to think that if I ever need an alibi for a particular day, all this time spent meticulously entering events into google calendar might pay off, but that may just be me watching too much Murder, She Wrote (again).

Here’s hoping Google Calendar fulfils its promise. In the meantime, I’m not quite ready to ditch the pen and paper.