"Dick and Balls"
quoth Julie Newton

A little randomness:

- AOL is now sending their "Version 7.0" [I thought they were beyond this?] CDs in TINS. I'm serious. Little, CD-case sized TINS. The Cd is in there, on a little flier about AOL, and the tin itself is packaged in plastic. The top come off and there you have your little CD-of-satan. I mean, all things considered, it's a neat little dealy-bob, but... ya can't really do MUCH with it, except maybe store a CD or some...flat things...
Anyway, the point is, WHAT A WASTE! I know AOL/Time Warner owns the frikkin' world, but isn't there some way that the government or some hippy tree advocacy group can take them to court for the extremely inefficient and disgustingly wasteful packaging??? It's really gross.

- Last weekend I went to see The Royal Tennenbaums with Justin and afterwards we theatre-hopped to Lord of the Rings. First time I've done that in a loooong while. It was really cool seeing it again, and we managed to walk in during my favorite part, the Khazad-Dum bridge scene. I finally got Justin to acknowledge that Elijah Wood did have a huge zit the last half of the movie that even makeup couldn't cover.

- Afterwards, for some reason, we got to talking about the Statue of Liberty, I think because it was in the Royal Tennenbaums. It somehow struck me that if the terrorists had run an airplane into the Statue of Libery instead of/as well as the WTC towers, America's reaction and retaliation would have been totaly different. We came to the concensus that if Liberty had had her head knocked off, though the loss of life would have been far less (are tourists a life form?), America might have been even MORE pissed off.

No, smashing Liberty would not have affected World Trade or killed countless thousand business people but an icon would have been irreparably damaged. People were worried about attacks on the Oscars and on the Olympics but I think this would have been far worse. The statue is sort of an heirloom, a gift, and not something that can be replaced. It is an icon that the most red-necked, unpolitical, backwater hick can associate with his country. What kind of statement would that have made? It would have been utterly, obscenely personal to America. EVERYONE would have flinched at that one.

- On that note, let me regress. Ah, yes, "dick and balls," quoth Julie Newton. Amazing. This morning VisComm focused on photographs and ethics, like I said above. After being almost horrified by the poignancy of the image of a drowned child and his family, Julie Newton directed us to concentrate on the last Joe Camel ad, the one that got him banned for "trying to sell cigarettes to kids."

"I had to have someone explain to me why this was pornographic," she said.

Well, this was amusing. Clare and I bantered back and forth for a little while over what exactly on Joe Camel WASN'T pornographic but what exactly he looked like was in question. A student in the class piped up and asked what I'm sure a number of people were thinking. "How is he 'pornographic'?"

"Well," said Julie Newton, indicating Joe Camel's head,"you have a dick... and you have balls."

Now I'm a pretty open and sexual person, but the way she said it, was for some reason both offensive and embarrasing. And... unprofessional? Maybe that was what bothered me. It was hella funny, yes, but in some way WRONG for her to say "dick and balls." I mean, aren't professors supposed to say "scrotum" or something? It was really disturbing.

And on that note, class ended.