Happy Accidents

Holidays, with a big difference this year. To celebrate the 25 years of our marriage, and some associated achievements like getting the house and car both paid off, we went to France for 2 1/2 weeks of food, fun and sun: Paris, Nice, and Avignon. I don't know how I got to be this old without having seen some of Paris, but that's not an issue now.

We had a range of marvelous times in the three cities, each so different in its ways of being "French."

Many of those times had to do with things we stumbled across getting from must-see place to must-see place. It rather reminds me of one of the concerns in Nora Young's The Virtual Self: the matter of what happens when self-trackers get so linked in to like-minded self-trackers, all sharing their knowledge of their shared interests, so that the "smart city" we live in and the virtual company we keep are all so integrated we end up in a life shaped by like-minded people, in a city so well known there are no surprises, no serendipitous "happy accidents."

I don't think she should worry too much  about this possible outcome of a McLuhanesque / Maffesolian new tribalism.  We still have to get from place to place and experience to experience, which means that even traveling on pre-set routes preferred by our peers, we expose ourselves to time/place combinations that cannot fully be "known," or tracked in advanced. And crossing from one peer group to another takes us down different virtual and "real" pathways.

That's partly because we will not always be traveling pre-set or recommended routes worked out by our peers, because in traveling from place to place, we might well be traveling from one tribal affiliation to another, from one logic of identification to another through a third that is transitional and connective.

The tribe that told us about the great place to end a bike ride, and the route to get there, will not necessarily be the tribe that told us about this great sidewalk pub where we could get the perfect local brew to ease our thirst. So in getting from bike stop to pit stop, we will have to work out a route of our own that is also the space between peer group and peer group and purpose and purpose. The surprises will come in those inter-group transitions. And the biggest surprise will be our own surprise at being surprised--at our own range of identifications, and the connections our varying loyalties create out of the differences. We make common connection out of the previously disconnected.

But as for walking into surprises, having happy accidents, in each city on our holiday, Eva and I had the experience of several times each day, going along and between nodes of known interest on the tour maps. We found places we didn't know we were looking for, and places we had planned to look for another time, but that popped up in the in-between. Not all the streets on these maps are fully identified, and what's on them is anybody's guess, at first.  Not all the angles are quite the same on the street as on the map, and not all the street names are consistently identified for non-locals.

And when we did get disoriented, locals would give us advice that was based on their own imperfect knowledge of their own home towns. At least I think they were locals. Maybe they were just French, which is not the same thing. Maybe they were not even French but other visitors having a laugh, like I did the afternoon two young North American males asked me "do you speak any English," and I modestly answered, "un peu," then gave them arm-waving instructions in French that was sufficiently less wobbly than their own that they could not detect the fraud, on to get to Champs Elysees from below the Eiffel Tower.  If they got my drift, they also got where they wanted to go. If not, they got somewhere else. In central Paris it does not really matter, unless you are crossing of a "must-see" list so you can say, "Been there."

But going from Rue du Louvre to Rue Montorgueil, for example, we were told by one older fellow to go right, up this little street, to the big church, then go behind it to the right and around to get to the street that would connect us. At least, that's what I think he was telling us, from the line he indicated on the map, and the directions he pointed in space. Maybe it had worked once, but there was a big construction project going on that cut the route, and forced us back to the starting point, where we took a left instead of his advised right.

We went up a small connector street, not marked clearly on our map and not named, and found a street of boutiques, orphaned temporarily by the construction. One boutique had in its window a dress in exactly the style and color Eva had been seeking for months. And it was on sale. Now, yes, maybe a maybe a tracker site would have spared us the detour that the maps did not. And maybe a community of trackers seeking the same dress might have got us to the boutique. And maybe there would have been one left in Eva's size after all or any other like-minded trackers of similar taste had got there first. But where would have been the delight of discovery?

I suppose, like Young, I can see how that's one thing I think the "smart city" reduces. Only the first one to make the stumble gets the fun. Everyone else gets the information, which is maybe more efficient, but not as entertaining.

And when we did get to Montorgueil, we did find the old patisserie we had been seeking, Stohrer's, the oldest patisserie in Paris (est 1730), a destination that was on many "must-see" lists (another form of sharing older than digital tracking). And it was worth the trip down mistaken by-ways that only enhanced the eventual success. I had the lemon tart. Eva the pistachio. Then we went back another day for other choices, went by a different route out of Place Bastille, because we took another wrong turn up Blvd Richard Lenoire, through a huge Sunday market, that took us out of a way we hadn't really planned, anyway. On our way through the market, Eva found a red Italian leather purse she didn`t know she was looking for, either. At least, the label said it was Italian. Maybe it was just the label that was `Made in Italy,' but it`s still a nice purse. And unlike the ones up by Sacre Coeur, it really is leather.

While on the topic (well, technically, beside it) of self-tracking and achieving community with like-minded peers of similar tastes and interests, a nit picks at the back of my understanding. What if my preferred activity is finding things for myself. Of haplessly going where others who have gone before have not documented, or have documented in places I do not search, and of not myself documenting it, either?

Try joining our community. It's out there.

We fail to meet each other all the time, all over town, irregularly and anonymously.

Fair's fair

A while ago, came the challenge of a contest to create a new name for Edmonton's summer exhibition, the fair formerly know as "Klondike Days" after a peripheral connection to the Yukon / Klondike goldrush of 1898 and after. A few hundred would be goldrushers tried to make it to the goldfields overland from Edmonton over a trail that was not really there.

More recently it has been unaffectionately known as "CapitalEx."

Today, a short list of finalists, announced by the proud sponsors:

To help us choose the finalists, a selection group including representatives
from the Edmonton Journal, Global Edmonton and Northlands reviewed
all the submissions and narrowed it down to six based on the following criteria:

1. Relevance to the 21st century ahead.
2. Consideration of the incredible historic growth and
continued diversification of Edmonton’s multi-cultural fabric.
3. Defining of the community spirit and outwardly fun
characteristics that make Edmontonians who they are.
4. Embracing of all demographics from new 21st century
babies through to our shining senior citizens.
5. Creative platforms enabling commercial partners to
activate and deliver diverse and intriguing experiences.
6. Agility that will allow a fresh and exciting
new theme to be incorporated every year.

And the finalists are:::

EdFest (submitted by Cynthia Chizen, Leduc County)
The Edmonton Exhibition (submitted by Jon Brenda, Edmonton)
Edmonton Summer Exhibition (submitted by Donna Zaozirny, Edmonton)
K-Days (submitted by Chad Willsey, Edmonton)  [Note: K-Days is a nickname for "Klondike Days]
River City Festival (submitted by Ryan Tomko, Edmonton)
River City Summer Fair (submitted by Joe Romerowicz, Edmonton)

Sorry--but this is the kind of list that gives "prosaic" a bad name.  And it seems to ignore the list of desirable qualities pretty much completely. In fact, if these are the six best, then maybe it was time to declare "No Contest" and revisit the drawing board.

On one Facebook site, only "River City Festival" has a single vote of sympathy. I guess it and the other "River City" option, the "Summer Fair,"  have the advantage of a recurring theme--every year the exhibition can be opened by a big parade featuring seventy-six trombones. But I hope we don't get sued for copyright infringement or have marks taken away for plagiarism. "River City" is not just a nickname for Edmonton, after all. It is the fictional Iowa town setting for Meredith Willson's hit, The Music Man.

And with the name "River City," we can annually focus our need to decorate and costume by picking a different river and its history to centre on. We could be Mississippi river boat gamblers one year, Walt Disney Missouri river pirates another. We could even get ourselves up in marching band regalia.

Courses yet to be delivered, contexts yet to be constructed

I have been planning a course for next January--an introductory course called "English 122: Texts and Contexts." The idea is to build a course around a theme that emerges in different contexts. I have been thinking of "Gold Rushes and Gold Mountain"--two variations on a bigger theme in Canadian immigration history: the "Promise of Eden" theme or the "Promised Land" theme. So many stories of risks taken to make it big in the New World; so many stories of desperation to find a place free of the limitations and restrictions of various Old Worlds.

Gold Mountain is a Chinese name for our "west" that was a long boat ride to their east, across the Pacific to the goldfields and construction camps of California, British Columbia and the Yukon. To Gold Mountain, where they found a future built on building railroads for others, or feeding those who did the building. A future of loneliness and separation from wives and children whose future depended on labours in the fields and valleys of others' dreams.

Coming from the other direction, earlier and as contemporaries, whose stories were those of the seekers of political or religious or economic freedom, those who wanted to find land a resources on which to build or extend family wealth. And of those who were sent over as spouses, servants and slaves to the first (sometimes all of the above, functionally if not legally).

The thing is, are these stories of success or of failure? And according to what standards?

Literary practice, or paradigm, becomes a determining factor as much as does actual physical or financial fate. Write a success story in which the men overcome nature to build thriving farms on the prairies? Write it in the Twenties or Thirties? If your name (pen or otherwise) is Frederick Philip Grove? Or a host of others writing in a naturalistic vein. Not a chance.

Yet my maternal grandfather Elmer Hornby (a man I barely knew, but by all accounts would have benefited from knowing better, knowing for more than the gruff figure I recall) did it. Not a well educated man in terms of years in school, but a man who knew what mattered and what needed to be done. A man whose opinion meant something in the Melfort area of Saskatchewan. A man who came west from Ontario, built a sod house, brought to it his Breton-born wife Victorine (a woman I can scarcely remember, other than as a cancer-ridden figure breathing her last the summer of 1957 from the front lawn of their retirement home on a small acreage along the King George Highway in Surrey, B.C.), herself the daughter of another immigrant settler from farther away but of more recent arrival to the St. Brieux / Pathlow area. Built the sod house in which she gave birth to her first two children. Built with her the farm that supported them and their seven children through a period better remembered for its disappointments than its deliverances.


The fact is, other than the First Nations people who according to their own stories were created here, but according to archaeology were the real first immigrants, we are all in this country the results of people who acted out stories of need for a more promising future, who listened with eyes bright with hope or desperation or illness bred of poverty and want, or a touch of all the above, listened to fabrications about this land of opportunity, of gold or of a golden age--real or figurative--just waiting to open to their ease and make their dreams come true.

And enough of them made truths out of those lies to make homes and histories for the rest of us. To provide contexts for the texts of failure and success we offer our introductory-level students, many of whom, I note from the advance class list, are coming from abroad for another kind of opportunity, or for more of the same kind of opportunity embedded in the latest versions of those stories of a golden land to the east and west of wherever they start from.

Which makes me and people like me, their teachers, their leaders-out-of and leaders-into (I think the word "educator" has roots in the Latin verb "ducere"--to lead), texts and contexts yet to come.

I was sipping a coffee in HUB Mall this morning, the end away from where the shooting happened a week and a half ago, and got waylaid by a "Man in the Mall" interviewer for CPAC. He wanted to know, among other things, what I thought of the current federal government. I mentioned my sense that the current PC government had replaced the older Liberal government mostly by taking on all the negative behaviours the Opposition PCs used to accuse the governing Liberals of: arrogance and bullying. Remember the PC ads a few elections ago, and all the talk of "Liberal arrogance"? Turns out the PCs were mostly concerned with the problematic adjective, not the noun.

What I had been wanting to revel in was the fact that my online bank statement yesterday finally read 00.00 in the line with mortgages and personal loans: the house and car are both paid for. This will be the first time in my adult life I am not paying rent or mortgage to anyone. That didn't take long--merely nearly all of what would have been my "normal working life" a generation ago. I would, in that older dispensation, have a whole year before mandatory retirement in which to put that money away for my old age, before being pensioned off. I'm just enjoying the sensation of not going through the monthly routine of transferring the payment from one line on the statement to another. And the thought that I start a new five-year teaching contract on Sunday.

And my "fence" poem has undergone some transformation--becoming a part of a longer poem on what to do when metaphors present themselves for one's edification and exploration. Yesterday's draft of that portion looks like this:

When a metaphor stretches the idea of a line across

creases in the land, undulates its way straight,determined

through folds, dips, hollows, furrows, gullies, valleys,

across rills and rivers going nowhere

creating borders of everywhere always in

between along the way, the connecting separation

made concrete, inked in by wood and wire and glass-topped

bricks and stones linking points planted along the way,

inviting prolonged unification, purpose as well as place,

trajectory into the out there,

try not to straddle;

centre yourself on your own

ambivalence,

find,

locate yourself

on both sides as the guiding line

disappears in both 

directions

What has been catching my eye is some quotations about the role of ritual and ceremony in life and human relationships:

• We should not, however, be rigid in maintaining a separation of the sacred from the everyday. As already mentioned, many everyday practices are formalized as if they were rituals ( Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary, 75).
•  
• “esthetic feeling is perhaps most pervasive in what may be called the ‘ritualization’ of life” (Harold Osborne “Education in an Affluent State,” Journal of Aesthetic  Education. 20.4 (1986).
•  
• “There is a real element of trust, I think, when you support someone in ceremony…. You create a foundation of trust.”  (Darrell Racine, interviewed by Dale Lakevold, “An Act of Healing” alt.theatre 9.3 (March 2012, 37).

Which also remind me of a phrase from Shawna LeMay, "Talisman": "...the cherished unlivable ceremonies..."

There's something to be getting on with...

Seeking common signage

I’ve been prepping a reading of the first novel in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series for an upcoming “Issues in Popular Culture” course, dealing with the issue of community-building or tribalisms. Part of the motivation for the theme is from Michel Maffesoli, "The Ethic of Aesthetics." Part from John Fiske's idea that we create (or join) popular cultures from the cumulative consumer choices we make from among the products of the "culture industries." Effectively, consumption becomes an act of production as many, many individual choices combine into a community of common interest.

Three quotations rub together in this context: “A work of art only stirs those for whom it is a sign” (J.M. Guyau, Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, trans Mafessoli, I think, in “The Ethic of Aesthetics”: 17);  “In a ceaseless movement of actions and retrospective effects, I recognize a sign by recognizing it with others, and so I recognize what unites me with others" (Maffesoli); and “The combination of widespread consumption with widespread critical disapproval is a fairly certain sign that a cultural commodity is popular” (Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 106). Critical disapproval would be an ironic "stirring" of a different sort, by that combination. We can join with the lovers of the sign, or the haters: with those who see a positive, inviting sign, or those who see a negative, off-putting sign.  Or we can, after Stuart Hall, take a more "negotiated" position that sees or accepts some aspects as having value in our personal circumstances, but only when taken just so far.

 Twilight is certainly in the prime seats of Fiske’s arena of the popular: huge enthusiastic consumption combined with some of the most desperate and disparate critical disapproval. It is just as “popular” a different way to scorn Twilight, as it is to “consume” it. Of course, “consumption” is a loaded term when dealing with a vampire book, in which the heroine gets called a “snack” on one occasion. But the book can be “used up” a variety of ways. One novel option I read of was invented by Regina poet and educator Gerry Hill. He did an exercise with his writing class, giving each student a page torn from a found copy of Twilight, with the instruction to find something in the flattish prose to build a poem around. Not that hard, actually, if you get the right page, since Meyer does have a skill with description--so page 8, for example, provides a rich imagery of an “alien” landscape of too much green. But I have to admit, some of the pages of dialogue would pressure the most willing imagination to find some touchpoint from which to go somewhere metaphorical.

Yes, Twilight could use a serious edit as a single title and as a series. But it also provides so many points of connection and decoding for so many potential audiences, ranging through Hall's schema of reading positions from dominant-hegemonic to counter-hegemonic (oppositional). It develops lines and relationships that are right out of the formula that has made the romance novel a staple since the formula was first used “seriously” over two-hundred years ago. A heroine who has to overcome her own squeamishness about herself and others to accept the finer qualities of herself and of the hero (or to bring them out in him). A darkly mysterious but wealthy and caring hero who evolves into a “perfect” match once he overcomes a problem in the way he behaves or is perceived by the heroine. A “rival” (Jacob), who is also a stud, but not quite “perfect” for her—in this case too young. And, as it turns out, expresses himself through the wrong kind of inner animal to cure what ails her.

Fine. Harlequin has made a fortune off this formula, and it is one that actually does open up a wealth of signs. The solutions (love conquers all, after it soothes and humanizes the beast in the man) are often laughable, but the problems are real enough to stir something familiar in a reader, to stir that “ethical” attachment Mafessoli writes about: “something which leads me to recognize myself in something which is exterior to me” (“Ethic of Aesthetics” 17).

Just consider two of the “critical” points of departure: What do we usually call a 100+-year-old man who hangs about in a high school and picks up a seventeen-year-old girlfriend?  “Hero” is not quite it. (Dorian Grey, maybe?) Then again, Edward is an eternal seventeen-year-old himself, in one sense, having been "saved" to eternal living death at that age. In Washington State, Bella and Edward are at least past the age of consent--Edward WAAAAY past. The age of consent for sex, anyway. I have not been able to fine an age of consent for vampire conversion, for allowing oneself to be envenomed (serpent allusions, anyone) by the love bite of your boyfriend.

What do we call a man who hangs hidden in a girl’s bedroom, watching her and listening in on her when she talks in her sleep? “Hero,” again, is not quite it. Consider what Bella would say if some other classmate, Tyler for example, were found at her window at bedtime? Yet in Edward's case, all she can do is worry about what he might have heard. 

So where is Edward’s “heroic” quality? In his self-control, apparently. When he practices self-control, and prevents Bella from acting on some of her own self-destructive impulses (urges, stirrings---), he is exercising positive choice. Of course, as a 100+-year-old, he has a much bigger perspective than she has. And he is a typical older man in the way he controls her options. Model of self-control? Or control freak? 

Where do I recognize myself in Twilight? Where would I find my contact point with “others”? My "ethical vector"? The logical node would seem to be Charlie, the concerned father/law-and-order enforcer, who wants his child to have a normal and safe life, with lots of friends, but has no sense of what she has attached herself to (he defends the Cullens against local gossip), so has to be protected in and by his own ignorance of what’s really going on. Maybe.

I feel a more common bond with Tyler, I think: The class clown, the eternal optimist who thinks he’s finessed a prom date with the delectable Bella, and shows on the night up all tuxxed out only to be told she’s been taken by that weirdnik, Edward. Any of several of the high-schoolers, actually—maybe a combination of them, even if I’m maybe now almost as close to Edward’s true age as to the seventeen-year-old I once was. They have so much to learn about themselves and each other, our life-long pursuit. The big thing they have to learn is that they have a lot to learn. That's always such a downer.

I think what stirs me most is the sense I am just as glad not to have to be that age again (though it would be nice to be it physically, if I could age eternally like the hard-bodied Edward), needing to go once again through all that awkward socializing into functional adulthood. Then a sense of chagrin mixes in, and I have to acknowledge that we never really age past the need to adjust, explore, reread the signposts, and find our fit; we just move farther along in our starting (over) points. 

coyotes and ravens

I've just been watching the video of the female coyote running around the schoolyard at Marlborough Elementary in Burnaby, trying to find a way back under a portable where she had denned up with her four pups (Jennifer Moreau's blog at blogscanada.com/2012/05/30/coyote-pups-trapped-under-portable-at -burnaby-school/). The place had been boarded up earlier that day, on the mistaken belief the pups and mother were out. It took her a long time, until after dark, to work up the nerve to go back under, where someone had peeled back a board to give her access. Then the pups came out (or she brought them out) and started to play, before she hurried them all off to a safer place. But you sort of have to wonder how on earth she ever picked that spot in the first place--with kids stomping around overhead all day, and yelling and running about in the schoolyard. Maybe the strange indifference of the people walking by the coyote all day as she prowled about, waiting for the pups or trying to find a way back to them, has something to do with it.

We see and hear a lot of coyotes in our neighborhood, a block away from the research farm at the U of A South Campus. Not as many as a few years go, when we could sometimes watch six or more come out in the evening from a dense thicket of poplar and other scrubby bush at the corner of 115 St. and 51 Ave, now largely turned into a deep dug-out park that doubles as a dry pond. But, still, most nights in summer, when we have the windows open, we hear them in the middle of the night. We see them on our street, too, once even sitting under the streetlamp outside our bedroom window. We have seen them in the Community Centre park area in  broad daylight, and in winter trotting along by the community hall. Sometimes we hear puppies squabbling.

Last October, in Terwillegar off-leash park, we heard and then saw one disconsolate young coyote sitting across one of the borrow ponds, on the bank, in mid-afternoon, barking and howling and otherwise protesting being alone. It is that time of year that the mothers leave their pups to fend for themselves, and this one was pretty disappointed or disgusted with the whole process. We kept George, our German Wired-haired pointer, away from that area that day, though it is a lovely area to walk in.

Next day, it was quiet and empty, so we went back along that trail. George wears a bell, since he likes to explore, and we like to keep tabs on his exploration. He went along behind a thick growth of shrubs, and his bell started a bouncy rhythm, like he was trotting, so I went around to see what was going on, and there he was, jogging along behind the young coyote, who seemed to enjoy having another canine to play with. Of course, the coyote was also jogging along over the crest of a hump, into some more shrubs. I hollered "George! Come here now!" And for a change he did. The coyote kept on going. It might have been alone. It might also have been bait for a pack over the hump.

Coyote, of course, is one of the creative/re-creative force figures of many First Nations cultural stories. With Raven, Crow, Hare, Iktomi the Spider, and others, Coyote falls into that misnamed category of "trickster." And, in the words of a song by Ian Tyson, "Coyote is a survivor." Our department Chair is not so enamored of Coyote these days, however. Her family dog, or what was left of it, and its collar, was found at the mouth of a coyote den along the edge of Mill Creek Ravine a month or so ago.

Ravens, technically the largest  songbird in North America as well as the prototype for another important trick-playing force figure, are also very common in our neighborhood, and on the U. of A. main campus. Noisy, large, gregarious ravens. Not so obviously threatening as coyotes, and more entertaining. Mostly to themselves.

Leanna from my writing class a few years ago spent five years in the north, and gathered a number of raven stories, first hand. Her favorite, for a while, was of the day she tricked a raven. She told us how she had been walking home one evening from Arctic College, and a large clump of snow shook loose from an overhead branch, down her neck. She looked up and saw a raven on the limb over the sidewalk. The raven casually flew off down the street to the next tree, and landed gently on another snow-laden limb over the sidewalk. "Couldn't be deliberate" Leanna told herself, but kept a lookout, and sure enough, just as she got under the limb, the raven shook it, and down came a clump of snow, just missing her. And off to the next tree went the raven. Leanna got to just before the tree, then took a detour, into the ditch beside the sidewalk. It meant going up to her thigh tops in snow, but she avoided the avalanche. She bragged about how she had fooled the raven.

 I kind of spoiled the moment: "Let me get this straight. You're up to your thighs in a snow-filled ditch. And you fooled the raven?"  Leanna got this look. And then she groaned and then she laughed. That was a game the bird could not lose.

Getting distracted, Del Mastro style

On Facebook, I get a link to a message from Mike Rilstone, Friend of a Friend, under the title

WAKE UP CANADA!
-----------------------
At what point in time does a party duct tape a buffoon's mouth?
Isn't a used car salesman taking a medical doctor to task in her own field, (albeit something a bright Grade One kid would probably know), a bit much?

What he's talking about is the comment PC MP Dean Del Mastro made on radio to Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett that biology was not science. Bennett is a medical doctor. Apparently she burst out laughing. On blog spots, and comment sites all over the internet, Del Mastro has been pilloried as a bozo, a clown, and, as above, a buffoon. Maybe so. But don't expect him to get the duct tape treatment any time soon, because in making these kinds of comments, he is doing pretty much the job assigned to him. He is not supposed to be an expert; he is supposed to be a distraction. 

Need proof?  Ask yourself, what was the occasion for this comment? Why were these two MPs being interviewed in the first place? About what? What was the outcome for the issue they were debating? 

Discussion of the "Sex: A Tell-All Exhibit" at the museum of Science and Technology and of criticism of the government's  negative response to it, has pretty much disappeared, as amused and irate commentators shift focus to the nonsense spewing from the mouth of Del Mastro. He has become the issue. He has succeeded. And because he has succeeded, he will be rewarded with  more opportunities to be a stand-up distraction in the future.

Del Mastro is not a newby to parliament. He is in his third term, so the Prime Minister knew what he was getting when he promoted Del Mastro to positions of increasing responsibility and visibility. 

That's right: his third term. Somebody in Peterborough likes what he is doing for his constituency--a lot of somebodies.

That reminds me of the third verse of Tom Paxton's satirical song, "What did You Learn In School Today?":

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned our government must be strong.
It's always right and never wrong.
Our leaders are the finest men.
And we elect them again and again.
That's what I learned in school today.
That's what I learned in school.

Within the parliamentary connotations of the word, Dean Del Mastro is doing a "fine job."  Even if a lot of commentators are wondering if he went to school, and if he studied or passed any science courses while he was there.

Another angle he pursued in his analysis of the Exhibit was that if people wanted that kind of information, they should go to an adult video store for it, prompting a few to wonder if he has spent much time in adult video stores, because he seems to need to learn a lot about them, their services and products, too. 

See--a distraction.