What would Beavis and Butt-Head say about the gay marriage tribe's totem poles?

There's been much discussion lately about surveillance and privacy in this electronic age. Is the Obama Administration spying on the Associated Press? Is the IRS out to get conservatives? Is Bloomberg snooping on Goldman Sachs?

Well, sure. Of course they are. 

Still, there are limits to the usefulness of spying because, while data is now cheap, data interpretation skills remain in scarce supply.

For example, consider yesterday's big feature article in the Washington Post about professional clam-diver Heather Purser, a strawberry-blonde Suquamish Indian, who convinced her tribe in 2011 to approve gay marriage. 

It's easily discoverable online that Heather has successfully been peddling this story, sometimes with Rebecca Platter, to major and minor media outlets for years. It's like a cross between a Greg Packer Man in the Street quote and a sketch from Portlandia -- the ones about the staff of the Women & Women First bookstore, combined with the performance artist spoofs.

All this is instantly available on Google, but nobody before ever got the joke. How can they? Gay marriage is serious.

Or then again, the Purser-Platter tale could even be a prank made up by two sniggering Beavis and Butt-headish adolescent sensibilities.

Consider, for example, the above photo from the feature "Same-Sex Marriage Brings Healing to Me—and My Tribe" in Yes! magazine (motto "Powerful Ideas, Practical Actions"). Look closely at the totem poles that Ms. Purser has chosen to pose between. Now think like Beavis and Butt-head:

What animals are carved on them?

And what exactly are those beavers about to do to each other?

That's the $69 Question.

Data interpretation!

Seriously, everybody is supposed to be into Big Data now for pattern recognition, but nobody is supposed to notice stereotypes. So, not much computes.

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