If You're Hot, You're Hot

Brother Andrew Goodwin -- over there at the Professor of Pop mocking the website RateMyProfessors.com -- has jumped into blogging with both (fill-in-the-blank) shod feet.

That parenthetical blank is TK, "to come" as we phrased it in my newspaper days. New Journalist Tom Wolfe would have said the nature of Brother Goodwin's shodding would be a status indicator, a personality indicator and thus a kind of invaluable shorthand to the nature of the man. Such clever shorthand has about as much actual value as ... Rate My Professors. But both are intriguing and just a little suggestive; you have to give them that.

They are like Wikipedia. They are a starting point, a possibility of a category, a place to find some of the questions that need to be asked, all the while avoiding the temptation to think that here, at the starting point, those questions have been answered.

But who wants to be that subtle? We like quick answers, preferably in a neat hundred-word summary, and we want to move on. But if you regard Rate My Professors as snark and nothing but the snark: It's excellent.

As I suggested to Brother Goodwin, it's a gathering point for those who hate us and those who want us. Without comment, let me just say for some of us that's somewhat short of a crowd.



Editor's Note: And a little FYI on that whole meaning-of-the-shoe business:

The need to preserve class distinction coupled with clerical conscience would seem to have been the two main motivations for sumptuary laws governing shoes. Whilst the fashion for long toed shoes last four hundred years they were not always in vogue. The eventual restriction in length was at first to discriminate "the haves" from "the have nots", as much as to quell the reappearance of the worship of the phallus.

Personally, I like sandals.