The welcome screen

During my semester in DC, I took a journalism class. The instructor had a really strange set of professional experiences before becoming a teacher, including a stint with the USA T(otal crap)oday sports section, an unspecified something that led to a close personal friendship with the America's Most Wanted guy, and co-editorship of the AOL welcome screen. She told us that editing the welcome screen was the pinnacle of her journalism career, because it's one of the most-read news sources anywhere. Serious thought goes into selecting headlines that will be irresistible to AOLers--and make them click for more.

Yahoo! Mail has a similar screen full of headlines--most of them leading to trite and annoying stories. And yet I still get suckered in to clicking, even as I'm thinking "no, no, resist, resist!" I hate to let the welcome screen people win, but I did find these two recent stories pretty interesting:

• Divorce Wars
  

• The Slump: It's a Guy Thing

On Michael Vartan

I heart Michael Vartan. He's hot, he speaks French, and he's a kickass spy (okay, so the last one is just in the dreamworld where he exists for me). Given my love for Michael Vartan, I was very sad when I saw him on Jimmy Kimmel Live once (which I taped just to see MV, oh yes) and learned he is kind of a ditz. He made Kimmel look like a good conversationalist. It was so bad that I had to rewatch two seasons of Alias to get MV back to the dreamworld state of hotness that I rely on.

The whole incident reminded me of my last crush gone bad. I'm not a crush kind of girl, and I don't get them really ever. But somehow during college I developed a very girlish crush on a guy I knew vaguely--he was a friend my roommate's friends and when some of us started playing four-square in front of Kagin after lunch he joined in once or twice.

At the Alma if you didn't start drinking by at least 2pm on Saturdays you were woefully behind. Not being much of an afternoon drinker, I often got roped into driving drunk people around on Saturday nights--being the only one sober enough to even consider operating machinery.

This is how I came to be driving the object of my crush to a famous (although apparently hard to find) skinny-dipping spot in Minneapolis. He rode in the passenger seat, with a bunch of his drunk-ass friends in the back. Perfect opportunity, right? Not so much--within minutes I realized he was completely uninteresting and unhot. Conversation was painful, which made the 40 minutes of driving around to find the skinny-dipping spot (don't worry, he "totally knew where it was") highly annoying. Needless to say, that was the end of the crush.

"Better a bleeding heart than none at all"

I saw that on a bumper sticker recently (next to an Ole decal). For my fellow Mac-ites and other interested parties, here is a Katherine Kersten rant about the alma. I actually agree with her basic premise (it really would be helpful if conservative viewpoints were included in the debate over there), but find it poorly argued and rather hypocritical coming from someone who was hired solely to write a politically one-sided column.

I particularly enjoyed:

• Basing the "good old days" reference on one 60 year-old guy's memory of an event that took place over 40 years ago
• The idea that an American studies department that focuses ("overwhelmingly") on race, gender and ethnic minorities is closed-minded (I'm sorry, has she read standard history texts? It's not like people are hurting for knowledge of white male political/war history).
• The whole sentence: "Religious holidays are still respected at Macalester, but the concept has expanded." Isn't that the definition of open-minded?
• Taking the president's comment, "We work hard to see that the college is a safe place for all reasonable points of view to be expressed" to mean he does not value greater intellectual diversity.

She tried to argue the "Macalester is too closed-minded" point, but really only had support for the unspoken "Macalester is an easy target because it affirms everything I'm paid to write against" point. Anyway, it's too bad she so thoroughly distorted this Peterson guy's valid case for improving academics by promoting intellectual diversity.

Caller ID killed the annual fund

I feel like a bad person every time the screen on my silver razor pops up a number starting with 651-696-XXXX. I feel bad because calls with this area code and prefix originate from my alma mater. Said alma mater is a very pricey school that desperately wants to play with the big boys when it comes to alumni giving and endowment-building. Too bad said school pumps out teachers, social workers, nonprofit directors, academics, activists, ascetics, and all manner of other people who don't make enough to repay their expensive educations.

Since graduating from this illustrious institution, I have done Americorps, temped, and tortured myself with an additional 2 years of expensive education. For this reason (not to mention some residual emotional scarring left from my college days--not related to the wonderful people I met there!), I am just not ready to write that first check to the annual fund. Undaunted by my 4 years of call-avoidance, sweet young freshmen working for pennies and free pizza keep calling me from clearly recognizable numbers. Maybe next year, girls.

Always one to give credit where due, I must admit the alma has some creative ideas on how to suck in alumni. Unfortunately, few are up my alley. I have recently received colorful emails or print mailers inviting me to:

• Travel with the school bagpipe band to a Scottish fair in Canada
  
  
• Attend a "Sale of Arts, Crafts and Creative Ventures by and for the college community"

Needless to say, these are not my kind of events. But finally the tireless alumni relations staff found a way to hook me. Next week they are hosting an event titled, How to Find Great Bottles of Wine under $10. Tickets are only $13, food is provided, and since the focus is on Spanish wines they'll even throw in a professor to lecture on the Spanish wine culture. Congratulations alumni relations staffers! If I didn't work all the time these days I would seriously consider going.