The end of the fall college semester always brings around our favorite exercise in false self-expression: teacher reviews, the quasi-report-card process in which you get to slip your comments about Professor Crabtree into a closely guarded manila envelope, confident that your finely honed evaluation will be reviewed by university dons at the highest level.
Have you ever wondered what happens to your comments once they're shipped? We got the lowdown from one top-shelf maestro from our own school days, and it turns out teacher reviews are not really read at all but edited into obscurity by faculty politicians. We quote: "They are sent to Goon HQ and collated, and numbers are recorded. Then they're sent back to the department, where they are available to the instructor on request. Bad ones are quite often destroyed by the untenured candidates. Comments, except for a few supposedly representative sound bites, are lost in departmental promotion meetings. Also, all the numbers except that of the overall 'grade' are ignored in such meetings. For example, questions like 'Does he read your written work thoroughly and return it in a timely fashion?' are never counted in meetings. It's just as well, because in my experience students grade teachers exactly as they are graded and will even answer 'strongly disagree' to an objective question like that of returning work on time if they are failing."
While we can't say we're surprised, it's pretty disappointing to know these valuable documents are being lost, if only because the average student kvetch ("This teacher is mean, and she assigns too much homework, and she assumes you just know the material even if you don't, and she thinks she's so smart and acts like you're stupid if you ask a question, and if you miss class on a Friday, she takes attendance even though you missed class because you were sick....") is eminently suited to public reading, preferably in the most mealy-mouthed singsong you can muster.
Lucky for us, City College of San Francisco has come to the rescue by putting its teacher reviews online. They're all here for your delectation: the pointlessly ass-kissing rave, the likable problem teacher you can see in your mind's eye when you read about him, the heated debates between bootlicks and underachievers, and finally the lengthy complaints that make you understand why "Whining Piece of Shit" isn't so much an insult as a distinct phylum of academia.
The only problem with the new all-eyes system is that non-CCSF students might be tempted to try writing reviews of their own. But do you really want to fiddle with something this good? Now that the lioness is down, every jackass thinks he can take a kick at her. With Beloved now playing on 43 screens nationwide (having failed to recoup more than half its production costs), autopsies on Oprah Winfrey's career are beginning in earnest. The New York Times answer man Frank Rich explains that the American people are fed up with the "increasingly preachy" First Lady of Feelings and quotes TV critic Tom Shales as saying, "Winfrey playing national nanny is getting to be a drag." Interestingly, neither Rich nor Shales ever laid into Oprah before she got serious about weight loss.
More interestingly, a poll this week shows 28 percent of Americans would vote for Oprah in a presidential race. Our guess is that the Queen's imaginary decline and fall may have more to do with faulty math than fickle fame. Even with a box-office take shy of US$23 million, Beloved was seen by multitudes more people than have ever shelled out for an Oprah's Book Club selection. The one thing we do know for certain about the American People is that they are always willing to support things (like TV shows and candidates) that they don't actually have to pay for. Even if she hadn't KOed the meat industry, we'd be cautious about beginning the count on Oprah. The last person who challenged her popular appeal was Phil Donahue, and he ended up wearing a dress and getting canceled. There's nothing like the power of music to rescue a kid from the slums -- even when the slums have to be built on an MTV back lot. Bradley Jenkins, a Hamilton, New Jersey, teenager from a good family recently discovered yet another way to get hurt in a meeting with A Tribe Called Quest. MTV filmed nearly 20 hours of Jenkins' home life as background for his FANaticy-league meeting with the still undead Tribe.
But when the show aired, Jenkins found that his star turn had been edited down to a 20-minute sequence that depicted his well-adjusted home life as a struggle for survival in a blighted urban landscape. "When you look at the tape, it looks like my life is really bad and my family is really broken," the cheated teen says. MTV has agreed to make amends and notes that Jenkins -- an A/B student and a member of Future Business Leaders of America -- participates in extracurricular activities and acts at Princeton's McCarter Theatre. In other words, having disgraced his family, the fickle network is now aiming to out Jenkins as a world-class geek. If spams are getting smarter in finding their target markets, we have yet to see the evidence. Despite a few disclaimers about how they're in compliance with some congressional act or other, we're still bewildered by the pitches we're getting. This week we received several promos for A. Marshall's book Brothers Beware: Games Black Women Play, in which the author promises to reveal "many of the techniques used by sisters to get what they want and who they want any time they want."
Most of the Suck staff, as you may have guessed, is pretty much as white as polar-bear mucus. And while Marshall may think he's speaking the truth about a bunch of pregnancy-faking, suicide-threatening gold diggers, why he'd believe we'd buy is beyond our powers of demographic reverse-speculation. A slightly closer inbox hit is UTOPIA Events' spam for the Nation's Biggest Jewish Singles Event on 24 December at New York's Webster Hall (martini bar, "legendary DJ," and a trapeze act). Suck does employ its share of Jewish New Yorkers, who will be happy for a chance to spend a night on the tiles when the goys are presumably out a-carolling. (Rumors that UTOPIA is planning a monster Good Friday blowout could not be confirmed by press time.)
But the spam bull's-eye of the week by far was a pitch from Lakewood, Colorado-based Diamond Enterprises. The product is New Mister Stinky Fartie Pants, a scented panty liner almost guaranteed to imbue your most malodorous foofs with the fresh scent of vanilla, cherry, or potpourri. Diamond owner John Comandari says the company launched its new gag-gift line after bailing out of the vitamin-supplement business. Early results are positive: A bulk mailing of 5,000 promos to a blind postal address list has already yielded a whopping 10 percent response rate, Comandari says.
For a limited time, you can order the product along with a bonus butt-cork by emailing comandarij@aol.com or calling +1 (303) 564 4067. (These products are not endorsed or guaranteed by Suck.) But what impresses us most isn't Mister Stinky himself so much as Diamond's deft guerilla salesmanship, its ability to find a ready market. A product that offers new ways to freshen up pure, noxious flatulence could turn out to be more crucial to our editing process than a spellchecker.
