Gender gap in college widens.

Report says American women graduate from college far more than men. And the gap increases every year. Women now make up 60% of all graduate students, too.

What does this mean for America?

(((shrugs shoulders)))

Damned if I know. More mechanics and refrigerator repair specialists? Those men have to be doing something.

I'm sassy. You're bored. Together we make a blog.

And for that I say thanks.

This month has been the most read month ever at The Toolbox. Each month is seemingly read more than the last, and this month is no different.

Maybe it's all the shut-ins from (non-)Hurricane Irene. Maybe it's a Sally Field moment. (1985 Oscars. Google it.) Whatever it is, it's nice you bother to read.

Thanks.

China bans Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and others for raunchy lyrics.

The Chinese government is as confused as the rest of us as to what a "disco stick" refers to, and as a result banned Lady Gaga's music for offensive lyrics. They've also banned Katy Perry, The Backstreet Boys (a timeless band by Chinese standards), and a variety of Chinese ballad singers.

Apparently it's sexuality in song lyrics that really has Chinese officials irked. "Poker Face" alone has set back international relations by twenty years.

Babar turns 80. Potentially has forgotten something finally.

They (they--the random nameless experts in the world used to back up any baseless fact I choose to throw out there for your consumption) say that elephants never forget a thing.

Babar, the French fashionista of an elephant and beloved children's book character, turns 80 years old this month. A little old age forgetfulness has had to kick in by now for the old guy, right? Does a green tuxedo seem like a normal thing to strut in?

I liked it by the fifth time I read it.

A comic inspired by literary figures is making rounds on the internet lately. It's from Hark, a vagrant, a website by a woman named Kate Beaton. She's from Canada, which means she's probably amazingly nice, abnormally polite, and really hardy in cold, inclement weather.

She also makes comics of famous historical subjects. Like this one, where Edgar Allan Poe gets a letter from Jules Verne.

Philip Levine was named poet laureate of the United States.

A worthy honor, no doubt.

But let's look at comments from average Americans left at the bottom of the AP news story (typos all their own):

Says a guy named Jim from Wisconsin:
Why is this a paid position? In fact why do we need some dude being the national poet? The position was created in a time when the Art & Culture events were not widely available. We have thousands of poets every day blasting through the Ipods and MP3's. Time to retire this position in the name of cost cutting. If I want a left wing poet, I toss on some Bob Dylan or Neil Young. If I am in a right wing mood, out comes the Ted Nugent with a little Cat Scratch Fever poetry. If I am in the party wing mode out comes the AC/DC poetry.

That's right. The Ipods.


Says a guy nicknamed Geomonster:
A poet laureate? This administration would have done better with a Fairy tale laureate.No matter the political party,why in the world do we need a Poet laureate in the first place?Give me a break, a poet laureate!.What exactly does a poet laureate do for 35 grand a year?.Does he hop out of bed in the morning and get right down to the serious business of writing poetry?
OOOH,I better write some good poetry(if there is such a thing) today or the president will fire me.
Not one second should be spent on lunacy like this while the country is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Or maybe we just need a poet laureate to remind people posting comments on online news stories not to use periods after a question mark or exclamation points.

That degree you paid for through the 1-800 number on TV is becoming less popular these days.

Remember when the University of Phoenix was still thought of as a joke? Usually there was some fair-haired, pretty young woman lounging in bed, wearing pajamas, tooling about on her laptop, telling us how she could get her degree through casual online classes. Just call today!!

Well, it seems for-profit colleges and universities (University of Phoenix, DeVry University, Vinny Boombatz's School of Higher Learning--all the usual suspects) are still jokes, and now they're sucking wind. According to the Wall Street Journal, new-student enrollment is down across the board, in some cases down by 45%.

If it wasn't sad enough that you tried to pay for a degree through a 1-800 number, it's even more pathetic when your school might tank before there's even a school reunion. (A reunion most likely held online, in a chat room, although maybe a message board if the budget is extra tight.)

Old Navy is confused about grammar, decides apostrophe is overrated.

Old Navy has a licensing agreement with 70 colleges and universities, generally to emblazon the school logo on a paper thin t-shirt that'll last 10 rounds in the wash before it needs to be replaced.

To save time, Old Navy washed out the apostrophe on all their t-shirts. Someone in the t-shirt design department apparently missed class in second grade when we all learned how apostrophes work.

I know, I know. Do I want to be that guy mocking someone for not using an apostrophe correctly?

Yes...yes, I do.

Amazon.com amps up attempt at entering publishing biz, signs self-help guru.

I guess if you're the publishing business, which isn't doing so hot, you might look for help. And help is to be had in the self-help section of your own industry. If you can't help yourself, then really, who can you help?

Remember Tony Robbins? The swarthy looking self-help guru with banana hands that did infomercials throughout the '90s?

Picture his younger, blonder, more obnoxious brother. Timothy Ferriss is his name, and he is out to change your life, preferably through 4 hour increments. He's the author of The 4-Hour Work Week and The 4-Hour Body, both New York Times bestsellers. Now he's decided we all stink at cooking, so he's teamed with Amazon to release The 4-Hour Chef. (Notice the subtle decline in what you can accomplish in 4 hours. The work week...your body...a casual task. Soon we'll be down to The 4-Hour Cat Nap.)

Mom and pop bookstores aren't too thrilled with this idea, for they fear Amazon will wipe out independent booksellers. Many are choosing to refuse any shelf space to the new book. Why help the competition that helped popularize eReaders, which is looking to crush you?

Let's just assume Ferriss's next book will be aimed at booksellers: The 4-Hour Unemployment Line.

Harry Potter is morphing into Farmville.

Pottermore is J.K. Rowling's new website that deals with everything Harry Potter. But if you dressed up as a wizard in the middle of summer to watch the final movie--don't get too excited. Pottermore.com is still in beta stage. To non-geeks, beta is generally a fancy way of saying "We're seeing if this website works by trickling people in very slowly." Picture Facebook before your mom joined.

So what will Pottermore be once you can join? It's supposed to be a free experience of becoming a student at Hogwarts, without all the silly socialization and human interaction you might expect by walking away from your computer and attending a school.

Thank God. Ever since I had to read 16,000 pages per book to end the series, I haven't had any friends.

Obama summer reading list lacking any serious attention to Jackie Collins.

First off:

The White House says President Obama has five books to read in nine days of vacation on Martha's Vineyard. Five books?? Because I know when I go to Martha's Vineyard I want to make sure I never once lay my eyes on the ocean.



Second off:

Four of five are fiction.

What? No biography of Lincoln or Washington like every president reads?

Third off:

Where's the Jackie Collins? Or even Danielle Steele in a pinch? You need to reach the average voter!

Fourth off:

Even the president doesn't read poetry.

Cornell student is potentially only Ivy League student tight on cash.

Cristina Lara attends Cornell University--also known as the "Wait, is that a Patriot League school?"--and she's taking umbrage with Cornell charging for internet bandwith beyond 50GB. Which is reasonable, because Cornell University charges $57,000 a year. Endowment? $5.3 billion.

According to a lot of websites though, 50GB equals a 2.3 month nonstop phone call using Skype. So Lara is really making an effort to crack that 50GB limit in a month.

Lara contends that limitless internet access is important because Cornell is located in Ithaca, NY, and Ithaca is...lame. Like Lawrence Welk lame. And I say that as a cult fan of Lawrence Welk.

Her argument is mainly that when you live in Ithaca, it's either you use the internet or you're apt to turn to a seedy life of drugs. Which is a natural leap in logic to make. I've often found myself entering crack dens whenever I can't find a dependable wifi signal.

College librarian was the Deep Throat of opera world.

And that didn't sit well with The Met, New York's premier opera house.

It seems Bradley Wilber--head reference librarian at Houghton College in upstate New York--loves opera. So much so, he created a website where he'd break news about potential singers for upcoming shows, mainly at The Met.

This is big news if you love the opera, I guess. I don't know how operas work beyond lots of loud singing in Italian by people wearing Charlie Chaplin makeup. But, hey, whatever floats your boat.

The Met didn't appreciate Wilber's passion, and didn't like being upstaged on breaking news within their own house. So, according to Wilber, The Met politely (his words) asked him to stop the website. And he did.

This is how college librarians and opera houses scuffle. It's polite, reserved, and sort of anti-climactic. Kind of like dating me when I was 16.

Village People singer fights for ownership of Y.M.C.A. song lyrics.

Victor Willis, former lead singer of the Village People--and who, I assume, moonlights as a casual motorcycle cop on occasion--wants to own the rights to his share of the lyrics he wrote for "Y.M.C.A."

In essence, Willis wrote the songs while under the thumb of a big, bad record company. The record company owned the copyright for 35 years, per United States law. Now it's been 35 years since "Y.M.C.A." became a staple of low rent weddings and third rate bar mitzvahs, so Willis filed paperwork to get his ownership share back for writing parts of the song. It could be worth $120,000 a year in royalties for him.

Of course, the big, bad record company doesn't want to give it up--even if Willis is partly the author of the song. They wouldn't be a big, bad record company otherwise. They say Willis wrote the song while he was essentially a work-for-hire employee, that the group was a concept they created, so Willis's words are not...well, his own.

So, now the case goes to court, and should be critical in deciding copyright law over what right an author of song lyrics has over his work while working for a company.

But the one thing the Village People never have to fight for? Staying sexy in leather.

"Drunk people start doing strange things when Shakespeare starts occurring right at their feet."

So says actor Fred Jones about the scenes from Shakespeare he and his fellow actor, Paul Marino, perform on New York City subways.

Let's be honest here--no one really thinks they're any different than your usual New York City subway rider. Men wearing costumes? Screaming Renaissance English? Thrashing about on the floor of the subway car?

Sounds like a usual Friday night in New York.




*Can we just point out that this photo from the New York Times shows a subway passenger, on the right, casually taking a call on his cellphone, as if there isn't a guy openly weeping and holding a pair of maraschino cherries (?) in front of a wannabe Dumbledore.

Photo: New York Times

Man creates petition for Bert and Ernie to wed on Sesame Street.

A Chicago man has posted an online petition for Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie to get married. His reasoning?

1.) Gay marriage is legal now in New York City.
2.) It would give gay and lesbian children role models to look to.
3.) Let's face it, we all know Bert and Ernie are lovers.

I support this idea, if only because I believe all puppets should be in love, even the gay ones.

Kermit and Miss Piggy? If their love became any more blatant, Sesame Street would need black bars across the screen and a "very special episode" where Big Bird explains the birds and bees. At least Bert and Ernie wear clothes. Kermit doesn't even afford us that much.

Famous Last Words: Virginia Woolf couldn't keep things pithy even in death.

The Huffington Post has a photo slideshow about famous author's last words.

Half of them are probably apocryphal. I can't believe that Oscar Wilde is glib and sassy just as death awaits, or that poet Walter De La Mare's last words just happened to be so poetically stated as: "Too late for fruit. Too soon for flowers." Sure, pops. Whatever you say.

But I do believe that J.M Barrie was pretty straight-forward and said, hey, you know what? "I can't sleep." Sounds logical when your lungs are filled with pneumonia.

Or Franz Kafka losing his mind and screaming at a doctor to kill him. "Kill me or you are a murderer!" Sounds like a logical thing to say when tuberculosis is starving you. It's short, it's to the point, and you kind of get the subtle gist he's pretty ticked.

Anton Chekhov? "It's been a long time since I drank champagne." He apparently downed the drink, went to bed, and died. Did he toast his death? ((shrugs shoulders)) Sure, why not?

But Virginia Woolf--ahh, Virginia. Her suicide note runs 294 words. 294 final words. Shockingly, it wasn't written in a one sentence long giant block of text that lulls you into a mild state of unconsciousness.

Maybe John Denver can get a jet plane named after him instead.

College professor JP McDaniels really loves her '70s folk singers, because she's collected over 2,300 signatures to name the eastern slope peak of Mt. Sopris in Colorado after John Denver. Naturally.

Her reasoning? He loved Colorado, he donated land to environmentalist causes, and his "Rocky Mountain High" was a really killer track. But I think she's really pushing the environmentalist angle mostly.

Folks in Colorado aren't as eager to jump on board with this idea, though, saying that pop culture has no place in naming mountains. That and, admittedly, they're not sure how they feel still about Oh, God.

You are what you eat.

The New York Times had a cute little story recently about what famous writers ate while working on their craft. What they ate conjures images awfully similar to how they wrote. But the article is best surmised in the following drawing that was part of it:

Let's analyze the food choices for what they casually say about the writer:

Lord Byron:  Vinegar.
What it says about him:  Smelly dude, silent pickle lover.

Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket): Raw, unpeeled carrots.
What it says about him:  Wow, there's a party.

Marcel Proust:  Espresso.
What it says about him:  Figures.

Joyce Maynard:  Lime popsicles.
What is says about her:  Less weird than JD Salinger.

Michael Pollan:  Tea out of a glass and roasted almonds during breaks.
What it says about him:  Someone just haaaas to be a little different, huh?

Walt Whitman:  Oysters and meat for breakfast.
What it says about him:  Aphrodisiac lover.

Mary Roach:  Pretty near-raw beef pho and corn nuts.
What it says about her:  Pretty gassy.

Truman Capote:  Coffee, mint tea, sherry, martini.
What it says about him:  Pees a lot.

John Steinbeck:  Cold toast and stale coffee.
What it says about him:  Potentially wrote at a booth at Denny's.

F. Scott Fitzgerald:  Canned meat eaten from the tin and apples.
What it says about him:  Possibly Hawaiian.

Franz Kafka:  Milk.
What it says about him:  Superhuman bone strength, kidney stones.



Photo / Drawing: New York Times, Wendy MacNaughton

Phillips Andover Academy has its own sanctioned hip-hop song.

In other news, hip-hop passed away last week after a long battle with lameness. It was 32 years old.

Yeah, it seems the Buffy and Giles crowd over at Phillips Andover Academy made a hip-hop video. Somewhere, Tupac is wondering where it all went so horribly wrong.

I made it to about 1:30 in the video before the throbbing in my head was too much. Having Abercrombie & Fitch rejects tell us how down-to-earth and normal they are gave me indigestion on par with eating bad chorizo.

"Coming to Andover basically enlightened me!" raps one young woman at around 1:10. As my grandmother would say, if you need to tell someone you're enlightened, you're probably not enlightened.

At 1:20, some middle-aged teacher at the school starts dropping beats and knowledge--and that's when I knew rap and hip-hop officially had been laid to rest. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the Red Cross.

Best/worst part: the comments on the Youtube page. One person says "It gave me chills."

((rubs temples furiously)) Can't pretentious rich people just stick to country clubs and ruining the economy?

Your effort on that Wikipedia page for REO Speedwagon has been a little lackluster these days.

So says Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales*, who claims his darling child is not replenishing its editor ranks nearly as much as it should.

Is Wikipedia dying? Is there disinterest? Why do I look so good in a tuxedo? Can my baby blue eyes look deep inside your soul? These are questions for other people to answer. Possibly in the form of a Wikipedia page.




* "Jimmy Wales" sounds like the name of some Scottish mobster with a penchant for Siamese cats and trafficking heroin. Or maybe a 1970's rock guitarist. Sadly, the man in the above photo can't be either of those because neither would be seen in a white-dotted olive green sweater with bacon neck.

Boston Globe writer wants you to stop saying something is "literally" this or that.

According to the July 19th Boston Globe (eh, we're slow here) headline:

Misuse of the word has spread to Stanley Cup celebrations and even a sitcom character.

No--not a sitcom character!!

Now my faith in the linguistic stylings of Hollywood is truly ruined.

"When it's time to thrown down, Jane is ready to destroy you."

So says some video game developer about a Jane Austen video game. Yeah, that Jane Austen, who is always the first person I imagine with Ivan Drago tendencies.

The game will be like the illegitimate lovechild of Scrabble and Street Fighter, with you living vicariously through a variety of literary individuals--like Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe--as they spell and fight their way to supremacy.

According to the developer, "Simply put, Jane is a princess who doesn't need saving. She's beautiful, and she can also kick your ass."

Pssh, obviously. And don't even ask what Agatha Christie might be capable of. It probably involves brass knuckles and the ability to kill a man just by throwing a verb at him.