No more posting until early next week. There is a multipart post below. It's long, but since I'm going to be out of town, you'll have more time to read it since I won't be updating.

Please note that I am not the author of all of the parts.

[Next]

Today's question of the day is whether or not, if they really tried, the people replacing the rafters across the way could be just a little more loud?

I don't think they could...

You know, if they spent just a little more on books and a little less on shelf space, maybe they'd have the right to complain...

(yes, I'm joking).

I had a conversation yesterday about grammar. The indirect question was to what degree proper English was necessary and demonstrative of intelligence. For a writer-type, I somewhat surprisingly come down on the side of laxivity. As far as I'm concerned, if the idea is coming across, then the rest is just specifics. She, on the other hand, felt otherwise.

The specific object of our disagreement was y'all (plural) and ya'll (singular). I only use the former, though I don't get particularly annoyed when I head the latter. I actually only rarely hear ya'll in the singular and wasn't even aware of its existence until relatively recently.

Of course, there are those in the north that argue that neither is a word, but until they can come up with a contraction for "you all" I figure we're in the clear.

In the case of "ya'll" (or "You will" or, in the sense it's its used "you should" or sometimes just plain "you") it's a regional dialect that she feels gives credence to those that feel that the people from the south are lacking in intelligence.

Maybe so. It's an interested question in regards to language integrity. Perhaps people will never all use perfectly correct grammar and vocabulary as defined by the Oxford dictionary - in fact, I think the world would be a more boring place is everyone did - but there is a case to be made that there ought to at least be a standard with which every dialect is drawn from and dialects that deviate from that ought to be considered abnormal so different spices of the same language remain the same language.

Theo Dalrymple bemoans the dumbing down of English in Britain:

I have noticed the same phenomenon on various wireless stations as well. It is clear that certain announcers have been told to use the short ‘a’, the long ‘a’ having unacceptable connotations of social superiority. Moreover, in railway stations that have no compunction about using as announcers incomprehensible Nigerians and Punjabis for whom English is their seventh language, the announcements giving the good news that the stations are no-smoking areas and that something nasty will happen to those who infringe this regulation is always given in what one might call exaggerated standard pronunciation, just as in Hollywood films the cultivated English voice always stands for unspeakable evil. Thus our population is being subtly indoctrinated with the idea that received pronunciation means prohibition and restriction. The glottal stop means liberty.

It seems to me unlikely, however, that the changes that have come about are the result of any welling up of an insistent or irresistible demand from below. Even the bolshiest Briton is so idle that he will not protest at received pronunciation, however much he might hate it. No: this is yet another sign of that peculiar combination of self-hatred and pusillanimity that characterises what Marxists used to call the ruling class.

It's an interesting hypothesis and one that I don't actually doubt, to a degree.

A long time ago I made the acquaintance from Pasadena. I found out later that he didn't like me very much at first because he felt I was a little stuck up. Why? Because of my word usage. That is to say that that I spoke English above the Pasadena standard (it ought to be noted that my friend's grasp of the language is strong and that is not the issue) and he felt that I was a bit stuck up. Because of my control of the language.

He's not the first and he probably won't be the last. As I've gotten older, my English has actually gotten a little bit worse, in a way, because I've made efforts to start using more simplistic language (in person, at least, you won't see much simplicity on here) in large part to avoid turning off my fellow Texans that don't place a particularly high value on fancy-talk and intellectualism.

The alternate course of action is to declare it "their problem" and keep speaking as I so choose (with precise wording and generally correct structure). On the other hand, language is, to me, about communication. If what I'm saying is colored negatively by the words I choose - even if those words are wholly inoffensive in their intent and, indeed, their actual meaning - then I am failing to communicate. If I exhibit an accent in order to make someone more comfortable talking to me (which I frequently do when meeting someone knew that is obviously of limited education - at the old truckstop for example), then I don't percieve anything particularly wrong with that.

It's the Marxist in me, I guess!

Microsoft has started showing off the Longhorn, which is supposed to be its next big thing. From what I understand it's likely to be a pretty big departure from XP. The file system looks cool enough that I want to see how it works:

At the heart of the next Windows will be a new format for storing data that Microsoft has worked on intermittently for more than a decade. Rather than each software application saving information in a different format, a new standardised file system known as WinFS will create a single, unified system.

That means users will be able to find any information on their own PCs or across their corporate networks with a single search, then collate different types of data, whether in the form of text documents, spread sheets, video or audio recordings, Microsoft executives said.

It looks rather dreadfully proprietary, which I would imagine that MS views as a feature and not a bug. If it works, this could set the Linux movement back a long, long ways. On the other hand, if it's the equivalent of WinME or worse, then it could immediately throw Linux into the ballgame.

Michael Garza poses the question of identity:

How much of you is you? When you hang around people for long periods of time you begin to acquire some of their traits. You may pick up part of their attitude, sense of humor, motivations, accents, grammar, and body language. Sometimes you have situations in which two mutual friends are around you at the same time, and your personality is thrown off a bit.

I often wonder how my life would be different if my parents hadn't moved down to Texas. Would I still be to the right-of-center? Would I still enjoy the cold weather as I do? These are, of course, the smaller questions.

If I'd stayed up there, I would have made different friends. I would have known different people and would have, to an extent, lived a different life. Or maybe I wouldn't have. My experiences certainly feed in to who I am, but the question is to what extent have the warped me rather than contributed to me. There are numerous instances in my past where I've found "lessons learned" to be more obfuscating than direction. Forget what I know, don't feel what I feel, and so on.

It brings to mind the notion that "it is, therefore it ever was going to be" which is my guiding principle which states that I am who I am because of what I have chosen to be. The seemingly chance encounters were destined to happen, in a way.

I don't mean fate. I mean that what comes back around is directly in relation to what goes around. For instance, I think of the first girl to hurt me. I could fixate on the fact that she hurt me (and I did just that for quite a while) or I could point out that I had put myself in a position to be hurt, and if she hadn't done so, someone would have because of who I was.

Unfortunately, this type of thinking lends itself to trying to change oneself and pulling yourself away from your true identity. Of course, the inverse of that is to accept every limitation you have, keep inviting the vampires in, and completely fail to grow and begin viewing maturity as the high crime of authenticity failure.

The subject reminds me of a story I have in mind called The Many Lives of Desmund Usher, which stars Kara Rhodes and Desmund Usher. Rhodes is a CIA agent whose job it is to weave through alternate timelines (closely knit to our own) in order to retrieve a password from Usher, a different CIA agent who was buried with a password in Rhodes's original timeline.

Without getting too much into the details, one of the interesting revelations is in all of these closely knit timelines, Rhodes is exactly the same person. No matter what curveball her life was thrown, she walked the straight-and-narrow. Usher, on the other hand, is someone completely different in every timeline. With each flap of the butterfly's wing, Usher pursues an entirely different path from media magnate to Texas Supreme Court Justice to career criminal. Usher succeeds at whatever he chooses to do while Rhodes can seemingly only do one thing (and does it well). Usher's identity is a big question mark while Rhodes's is as clearly demonstrated to her as humanly possible.

Between these two people, who would you consider yourself more like?

Doc Weevil translates "Shit Happens" into Latin.

The internet is so cool.

Once upon a time, The Joker tried to pull one over on the fish, and people, of Gotham City:

With a diluted form of his toxin, the Joker has mutated the fish stocks of Gotham's waters so that they all carry his ghastly grin. Then, since they bear his visage, he tries bullying the copyright office into granting him royalties off the sale of all fish products—potential millions are his to fund his "happily hedonistic" lifestyle, he exults. So Batman has to protect the threatened bureaucrats, and there unfolds an battle of wits as the one attempts, and the other thwarts, ingenious and unexpected assassination attempts.

Now, he's apparently trying the same thing in Texas!

Researchers at Baylor University have found traces of a pharmaceutical antidepressant in the livers, muscles and brains of bluegills in a Denton County creek, raising concerns about the welfare of the popular sports fish and people who eat them.
The chemical is fluoxetine -- the primary component in Prozac. It likely came from a city of Denton wastewater treatment plant, which discharges into Pecan Creek and flows into Lake Lewisville in North Texas. Traces of the drug that are not absorbed into the body can flow down the toilet and through wastewater treatment plants, which are not designed to filter out pharmaceuticals.

[Found via Warliberal]

watch my brother get married. I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for the interview and then straight to Austin from there for the wedding. There is a pretty big (and non-depressing) post/series coming up, so stay tuned!

Tami and I first became friends in late 2001. Truth be told, I needed friends. That was about the time that Elciem and I needed a new start. We hit it off immediately. She has a flambouyant personality that mixed well with my more subdued (particularly at the time - given my mood) manner. Through her I met a host of other people and found myself in a circle of friends.

There was Dre, Jason, Robbie, Carl and Martin, a friend of Jason's that was on probation at Texas Tech. Martin would often bring his little brother Dave and when he got back in to Tech, we kind of inhereted Dave into our circle, to some of our chagrin.

The group was cool, but Tami was by far my best friend from the group. I helped her wade through her problematic relationship with Robbie and she was good at keeping me upbeat during a period of great confusion in my life. If you'd have asked me then, I'd have told you that Tami was a treasure and not only the best friend a guy could ask for, but one of the best people I'd ever met.

The story really begins on Memorial weekend in 2002 when we were all going to go see "Sum of all Fears", but unfortunately one by one we all had to back out. I was moving into my current complex and had fallen behind on that. Jason's parents dragged him on a vacation and Dre got an opportunity to go to San Padre. I can't remember Robbie's reason offhand, but it wasn't unreasonable.

I'd gone to work early when Tami called me in hysterics. Wanting to make the best of a bad situation, she ended up going out with Dave that night to see the movie. They ended up drinking some liquor in his car in the park. He was pouring and she wasn't paying attention.

Tami has always had a good alcohol tolerance level, so she was surprised when a couple shots of vodka started taking a pretty serious toll. She asked Dave to pull over so she could vomit. He pulled in to the nearest parking lot and got out to help her get out of the car to vomit. When she finished he gave her a soft drink and they sat there for a bit while she cleaned her mouth out. The vomit had taken its toll on her physically, so when he pushed her into the back seat and jumped on top of her, she blacked out.

She woke up in torn clothing on the staircase of her apartment with bruised wrists.

Let me tell you a couple things about Dave. We never really cared much for him and only really brought him in cause of Martin. I'm not sure what Dave's medical condition is, but he kinda jerks around a lot and very often will mutter incomprehensible things under his breath without any context. His mutterances were usually cuss words and often violent in nature.

Let me tell you something about Tami: she made it all up. She physically hurt herself (although not severely) tore her clothing to give herself credibility. I would find out several months later why she did it: She was mad at us for cancelling and wanted us to feel guilty.

It worked because we all felt absolutely terrible for leaving her along with Dave. The phrase "shoulda known better" popped in and out of our minds in self-defeating cycles.

And, of course, there was Dave. She chose her mark very well. Dave did seem like the kind of person who wasn't in control of himself. We didn't like him and the story and his behavior didn't seem too far out of character.

Tami didn't want to go to the police because she "blamed herself", "was asking for it" and a ton of other things that would make us jump to her own defense and tell her what a great person she is.

Perhaps that should have been a tip-off that something was wrong. But the thing about Tami is that she was the type of person that would never lie. She was a tell-it-like-it-is kinda person and yet would never hurt a soul. It was no contest as to who we should believe.

Tension and anger ran so high that a couple of our friends jumped Dave and gave him a very severe beating. I was not a part of that group, but I knew they were going to do it and I didn't try to stop them. It was, in my mind, the least that Dave deserved.

As time passed, her story and recollection of the events starting having holes. With time and distance, we had time to more logically consider her version of the events and some of them were downright weird (she only added the "he gave me coke" part of the story when Jason commented that it was weird that Dave'd stick his mouth all over someone who undoubtedly reaked of vomit smell) and the part about leaving her on her staircase was a bit odd because that didn't sound like Dave.

It's embarassing that it took me as long as it did to start puncturing holes in her story, but I was more-or-less of the mind that women don't lie about that sort of thing - at least not without a serious motive (a broken heart or money) which was never present. Even once I knew for certain that she made it up, I was so uncomfortable in believing that she would do that that I'd have found any way to deny it if I could have.

But I couldn't. Others, strangely, chose to continue to believe despite the mountain of evidence.

The lies continued from there and got worse and worse. Eventually she crossed one too many people and she ended up leaving Houston. Once she got out of Houston, the lies magnified. She had a LiveJournal that I'd read on occasion. It was one thing after another. Her father died (he didn't), she got cancer (she didn't), her family has this dark, abusive history (I saw no sign of it), and one thing after another when she kept winning friends by way of sympathy and pity because life was just so difficult for her.

Via LiveJournal, I watched an entire new batch of people believe all of her lies. She was doing the same things in San Antonio that she did in Houston, only more frequently and with the exception of crying rape, more substantial lies. She eventually got a boyfriend out there who fell for it hook-line-and-sinker.

What's striking to me is not only how grossly immoral it all was, but also how incredibly stupid. Did she really think that her boyfriend wouldn't find out that her father was still alive? That she never had cancer? Did she think she could do the same things to people there that she did here with different results?

But the biggest problem is indeed the moral one. She was inventing situations to garner sympathy, love, and gifts. She found peoples' weak points (such as our protective instincts) and exploited them to make us feel bad for cancelling and give her the status of "ultimate victim."

When I think of the five times in my life that I've been the most angry, she has to be the only one of them that has two slots dedicated to her. Words can't describe how angry I was at the rape - nor my anger that she made it all up cause she was hurt that we had other things to do on Memorial Day.

She was discovered again in San Antonio. From what I understand, she was dumped a couple days before she did it. My opinion of her is such that I wonder if she just did it to teach her ex-boyfriend a lesson.

For those of you that are confused as heck as to my site going wacko (and those of you that aren't), I just updated the template.

Let me know if there are any oddities.

Oh, and I am now a cool kid, cause I offset the time correctly to Texas Time.

I took my meat out of the freezer last night. I figured I would eat as much of it as I could and then toss the rest since I gotta clean out the fridge and have nowhere for it to go.

But I'm not in the mood for it. Wonderful, fatty before-I-started-watching-what-I-eat beef, butter, chicken, tortillas, and cheese... and I'm not in the mood for it!

What's wrong with me?!

Dear Holey Pants & Incomprehensible Formerly Black Shirt,

We've been through a lot together, my friends.

Holey Pants, we've both changed a lot over over the years. I was almost five inches shorter when we first met. I was wearing you when I first met Sarah Goddess and fell for her in New Braunfels. You were there during my timultuous junior high years. You held together.

Of course, over time the wear and tear took its toll on you and eventually that wear deemed you against the dress code. I know, I know, you tried as hard as you could, and I have accomodated you as best I can. Unfortunately, the hole has gotten so big that it exposes the pocket which looks like underwear. And though it pains me to say it, I must be honest with you. You've been replaced. Another pair of pants have worn thin and holes have formed. I now have a new friend to keep my legs not-so-warm-because-of-holes when I'm doing laundry, and your services are just no longer required. You have Sarah Goddess, but those pants have someone else. Time marches on, my friend, and it's time for you to go.

Incomprehensible Formerly Black Shirt, please don't think that this is easy for me. Remember when we first met? You were in the unclaimed clothes bin in the Seabrook Intermediate PE dressing room. I needed a shirt that day and I adopted you. I don't know what you said then, and I don't know what you say now. Something about "Peace NO Piece" and "Peace makes the world go round."

It seems our politics are at odds, but we've been good friends. You've turned gray with age, your letters faded more than they were even faded when we met. The lettering at the bottom, which appears to be a series of colors only emphasizes your colorlessness over the years.

Unfortunately, your collar and sleeves are fraying and you've become stretched so thin that you feel more like an undershirt. Remember Tim's wedding? When I forgot my undershirt? You made such a good one... for a (formerly) black shirt. You caught all the sweat, and the sweat you carried I'm sure has worn you down. You were there for me, and I will never forget you.

Say high to the High Holey Maroon Football Undershirt and Boston Bruins Unintentional Spaghetti Shirt for me, if you would. I'd greatly appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Author of the Block You Cannot Read

Holey Pants 1992-2003, RIP
Incomprehensible Formerly Black Shirt 1990-2003, RIP

Where does one buy cardboard boxes?

David S. Bennahum has an article in Slate about how the Internet might drive phone companies out of business:

For those of you who haven't heard of Skype, the latest white-hot Internet technology and new social phenomenon, here's what you need to know: It's a free piece of software (of course!) that you can download to your PC; suitably armed with speakers and a microphone, you'll then be able to "call" and talk to anyone else in the world who's on Skype. In the less than two months it's been available, 1.6 million people have downloaded the software, setting a world record for this kind of thing. As a crude measure of buzz, after six weeks of life the word "Skype" generates more than 2.8 million pages on Google. As a point of comparison "KaZaA," which is Skype's progenitor (the two Swedes who invented KaZaA invented Skype), appears nearly 4.4 million times.

The most amazing thing to me is not that phone companies are in trouble, it's that they're actually still around (in their traditional capacity, anyway). There were programs and applications to do this sort of thing years ago.

Laid-off take survival jobs to pay the bills

They're people such as Michael Bierman, 36, who earned a six-figure income as a senior product manager at Adobe Systems. He took a buyout package in 2001, believing he'd quickly find another job.

But weeks turned into months. Bierman needed money, so he applied to be an usher for Cirque du Soleil. More than a 100 others showed up for the mass interview.

Bierman was lucky. He got the job. He also has made money dog sitting and doing home repairs.

"I used to work 60 or 70 hours a week in my former life, but I never felt the kind of stress I do now," says Bierman of Santa Clara, Calif.

Two weeks left of unemployment.

Final interview with Gattaca on Friday morning.

Via Michael Duff, a great article in EGM that introduces the youngest generation to the classics.

Tim: Mario dies way too easy. Oh, grab the umbrella. Those are cool. Unfashionable, gay, but cool. Oh, 300 points. That's it? All you get is points? That's lame. Can't you do something with the umbrella?

Tim: They just put totally random stuff here for points. Oh, you've got an umbrella. You've got a purse.

John: Watch out, Tim—fire. It's smarter than you think.

Tim: It's strange that fire moves in this and has eyes. Oh no, the fire's coming. It's going to eat you. Are these barrels alive, too? Everything's alive. And Donkey Kong's mouth is made of pluses. Look: Plus, plus, plus, minus. They're trying to teach you math by brainwashing you.

Brian: How can you die from a fall of a whopping 3 inches?

Kirk: He's only an inch tall. He's a little short fat guy who eats way too much pizza.

EGM: Who's that chick Mario is rescuing up there?

Brian: It's Princess Peach.

Kirk: It's a hooker.

Niko: She looks cut in half.

Tim: Oh wow—she's one of those pole dancers.

CG Hill:

In his effort to avoid implicitly insulting other religions, Carroll explicitly insults one. Those "exclusivist claims" are at the very heart of Christianity; you take them out and you have — what? Certainly nothing recognizable as Christianity. What Moses brought down from Mount Sinai did not read "I am the Lord thy God, one of a panoply of such, all interchangeable."

Well put.

Hehe.

This is from the UT system's legal department. I found it informative.

The rather copious research I had to do on the sizes of the schools was a bit surprising. I figured that there'd be a single source for that information, but not as near as I can tell. I did an interesting slideshow by UTD

An few interesting tidbits:

They're about as competitive as Texas A&M!

UNT is not only bigger than Tech, but it's more academically competitive.

The school is some 75% male. I wonder why.

The University of Houston students have lower scores than University of Texas at Arlington, but have a lower admission rate (meaning that they accept less than apply).

UT and A&M apparently accept more than 50% of those that apply. Wouldn't have thought that. I guess a lot of people aren't bothering to apply anymore?

UH pays its professors better than Tech does and male professors more than A&M.

--

I also talked about the movie Necessary Roughness, which features the Texas State Fighting Armadillos. They also have a fictional rival (Texas University Colts), but from what I recall the rest of the universities were real. One of them was the Kansas Jayhawks and the other was... Southwest Texas State Bobcats (who, incidentally, beat the tar out of the Dillos). So apparently Texas State beat had the tar beat out of it by its future self.

This might seem less profound at a time of day other than two in the morning.

--

Did you know UTPA existed? I didn't know UTPA existed...

--

Universities.com is a very helpful site though their alphabetizing is weird to the max. For instance, UT is not under "U" for University and you can't find it by looking for "Texas"... it's under "The".

Southwest Texas State University is the sixth largest public university in Texas. Stop for a moment and try to figure out what the higher five are.

UT and A&M are pretty obvious as is Texas Tech. The University of Houston is also obvious to me, but I'm biased. So what is the fifth largest university in Texas? If I had to guess, I'd say either North Texas or UTEP.

It's actually Texas Tech and even then only barely. In fact, before I looked up to verify student populations, I jotted down a list of what I thought the biggest public universities in Texas were and then looked them up. The results are in the "Read More" below.

I'm not nearly as big a college football fan as Kevin is, but I'll be honest in admitting that my list of what I thought the biggest universities were was directly related to athletics.

A couple months ago my roommate and I were talking about Texas State and how they dropped the "Southwest" and have their eyes on the prize. They believe they're destined to become #3 (of course, so does UH, Tech, UNT, and just about every other university) and they wanted to drop the Southwest in large part for that reason. Now that they have the most coveted vacant college name in the nation (it's no mystery that Necessary Roughness chose Texas State or that Texas Tech practically had riots trying to get the name) and boast the third most college applications in Texas, they have a shot at it.

Except for one thing: They're lackluster Division II-A football program.

It may sound silly to go to a university just because of its football team (because it is), but football programs buy credibility like nothing else. Without it, you're the University of Texas at Arlington, a school with a population the size of Texas Tech's that no one has heard of (I only know of UTA because of some relatives that went there).

For UTD, that may be perfectly fine because they have a fixed demographic. Honestly, it would probably be okay for UH as well for the same reason. Also, Southwest Texas State could have just decided to stay in league with Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin. In reality, though, no university president ever gets appointed to his position by vowing to keep a university small and regional.

And so it is with the University of South Florida in a not-so-recent NYT article:

he University of South Florida sprawls over nearly 1,500 acres in a once sparsely populated section of Tampa, close to where the city bleeds into unincorporated Hillsborough County. The campus is pancake flat and in desperate need of more trees and shade. Grass comes up in stubborn clumps through sandy soil. I can't say that I was shocked when I learned of a previous use of this parcel of land: a practice bombing range.

In many other ways, though, the University of South Florida is attractive -- and useful. It has produced about 170,000 graduates in its four-decade history. It has a medical school and some well-regarded academic programs. Current enrollment stands at 39,000, and students tend to be grounded and hard-working rather than rich and entitled. (A professor told me that one challenge of his job is teaching morning classes to students who may have worked the late shift at Chili's.) What U.S.F. does not have is any kind of national profile. It has no standing. No buzz. The latest edition of the Princeton Review's ''Best 345 Colleges'' does not rank it low on the list -- it leaves it off entirely.

University officials want U.S.F. in the guidebooks. They want fewer commuters, more out-of-state students, more residence halls and more of a ''traditional'' campus feel, by which they mean a campus with a soul and some spirit. It is a big job, and the burden for getting it done has fallen, largely, to [USF coach] Jim Leavitt.

The article goes on to basically call it a fool's wager. I'll get to the specifics in a bit, but it paints a rather devestating picture of what trying to build a first-tier athletics program (of which football is always the cornerstone) can do to a university financially. It ain't pretty.

But the article's author ignores how important a football program can be for reasons that I outlined above. Size and prominance come with a football program. In the current collegiate environment, if USF wants to expand to get more national merit scholars and whatnot, then it's only going to have limited success without a football team (which USF lacked until 1997) in Division IA playing against the big boys.

As it happens, the University of Houston has a very aggressive program to attract national merit scholars. It also has one of the best Hotel & Restaurant Management programs in the world as well as various other specialties. Perhaps an argument can be made that it ought to be enough to bring people there, but outreach and specialization can only accomplish so much. A very large number of people want to go to a school with a real profile. They want to be able to go across the country and say "I went to State University" and people be immediately familiar with that. There's no better conduit like that than football.

To put a finer point on it, if people see the University of Houston as local or regional university, it's not even going to enter the minds of someone out of that region that they ought to check it out. I live here and it the University of Houston didn't even enter consideration until the 10th hour or so. The two universities it beat out, Texas Tech and Louisiana State University, were considered much sooner because of their profile (which again, is related to sports). If I hadn't already known what I wanted to major in and wanted to stay in the area as much as I did, I probably would have gone to Tech.

Why? Because I'd decided I wanted to go to a big university and Texas Tech seemed like the biggest that I could have gotten in to. I didn't know UH was larger at the time and if they hadn't had an a former SWC athletic program, I'd not have had a clue that they were any bigger than Stephen F. Austin State.

It probably sounds frivolous to choose a university on such a criterion, but when there are so many options available, the ones that are already in your consciousness get a head start and if you don't have a clear idea of what you want to do, stand a real chance of crossing the finishing line before you look anywhere else.

As the UT and A&M become more and more competitive (as UCLA and Berkeley are in California), those looking for a broad university with a lot of options, a great campus life, and school pride are going to look at athletics programs as a touchstone. The more of those people you get, the higher the admittance requirements and the more competitive the school becomes. Nearly every school in Texas wants to be the one those people choose.

Personally, I think it's increasingly going to be Texas Tech and it's going to be because of their athletics program.

Coming tomorrow, part two.

[Read More!]

Slate does an admirable analysis of Susan Estrich, one-time scolding feminist and now defender of Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger from their respective muckrakers:

Back in 1987, when Estrich wrote her elegant, tightly argued book Real Rape, she was pretty hard-core. She wrote that not only does "no" mean "no" when it comes to sexual advances, but that "yes" sometimes means "no" as well: "Many feminists would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing a 'yes' as a sign of true consent is misguided. For myself, I am quite certain that many women who say 'yes' to men they know, whether on dates or on the job, would say 'no' if they could. I have no doubt that women's silence sometimes is not the product of passion and desire but of pressure and fear." But that was then, and this is now.

As it turns out, Estrich's unlikely support of Schwarzenegger has a precedent: When Clinton had his difficulties with Paula Jones, Juanita Broderick, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinksy, et al., Estrich rallied to his defense. She said in Slate and elsewhere that she was sure that he would not have done it. Why? For one thing, "Bill Clinton was my friend." For another thing, "He didn't have to." This type of reasoning would never have made it past the Estrich of Real Rape, the Estrich who passionately supported Anita Hill, the Estrich who coined the phrase "the nuts and sluts defense."

It also talks about the retreat of the feminism movement in general:

The hysteria surrounding sexual crimes had abated. All of a sudden, the idea that the office was full of lurking male sexual predators ready to pounce on delicate, offended career girls was no longer everybody's obsession. People began to wish that the "personal" could be personal again. Writers from David Mamet to Michael Crichton wrote works of art devoted to the excesses and absurdities of the feminist preoccupation with sexual harassment. By the time a towheaded 6-year-old was suspended from school for kissing a little girl on the cheek, most of the country had come to think the women's movement had gone too far; and the movement retreated from the absolutism surrounding issues like sexual harassment and date rape; feminist pundits began to muse on the paradoxes of sexual power.

Comics kept: 2,114 (57%)
Comics tossed: 1,588 (43%)

Hardest comic(s) to get rid of:

The Young Justice serial. Great serial, very tough to watch it go.

Hardware #1

Easiest comic(s) to get rid of:

X-Men Movie Adaptation. Worst. Comic. Ever. (and no, I'm not making any commentary on the actual movie with this summation).

Extreme Justice. How can a comic with Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, and Captain Atom be so awful?

Comics I never considered getting rid of:

The Watchmen

The Question

V for Vendetta

Vigilante

Keith Giffen's Justice League work

Comics I need to go out and buy ASAP:

The rest of Jon Ostrander's Spectre series.

The rest of Green Lantern Mosaic

Green Arrow #100

Comic(s) I'm surprised that I kept:
I kept a lot more Robin and Nightwing than I thought I would.

Comics I Thought I Had:

I could have sworn that I'd kept the Demon serial last time I did some comic house cleaning. It turns out that I didn't. I was actually really looking forward to getting around to reading them.

I'm two comics shy of having the entire Impact run. I really thought that I had them all.

I thought I had more Flash and Punisher than I do.

Comics I didn't realize I had:

During our seperation, Tanya gave me custody of a handsome collection of Ultraverse comics.

I also apparently have the Green Lantern part of the Return of Barry Allen storyline.

I apparently have Johnny Walker's (currently USAgent) entire run as Captain America.

Comic that could have been the greatest ever made but wasn't:

Chain Gang War

Comics that other bloggers need to read:

Owen Courreges needs to read Vigilante. Vig is a lot like Punisher and it explores the issues he talks about on his blogs as they pertain to Mr. Castle (and in Vigilante, Messrs Chase, Winston, and Wells.

Daniel Goldberg and Lex Alexander should read The Question and V for Vendetta.

Frank Martin should read The Spectre.

Michael Morgan needs to read Batman: Seduction of the Gun cause getting pissed off can be fun.

Everyone should read Watchmen.

Everyone who liked Watchmen should read Marshal Law.

Other notes:

When I was younger, I used to keep money behind comics in my room. I didn't have enough to have a bank account so I had to hide it somewhere. Of course, I'd constantly forget which comics I had them behind so I'd have periods of panic ("Why do I only have $80 saved up?!") followed by joyful surprises ("Action Comics #588, I love you for giving me $30!"). I actually didn't find any money this time around and thought that I might. Of course, whoever ends up getting my comics (right now Mr. Morgan if he wants them) might be in for a joyful surprise.

I didn't find any money, but I found a couple of letters from Jessica I'd apparently stashed away. Go figure.

I'm not sure whether I'd rather have found $30 or the letters.

I thought that I'd have more isolated issues than I did. By that I mean issues that I had part 1 but not part 2 or vice-versa. Don't get me wrong, I had a number of them, but I was thinking that I'd be getting rid of 2/3 of my collection in large part due to inflated expectations of how many I'd be getting rid of just because I didn't have the whole story.

Comics that haven't been touched in over a year and a half come with a lot of dust.

I don't buy comic books for the art, but there were a few cases where I did get rid of them because of the art.

Early issues of Catwoman definitely qualify as soft porn. Jim Balent's artwork has the costume so tight that I think he just drew Catwoman nude and then colored it purple. If I were in Playboy's legal department, I'd be checking the poses to see if he ripped off any issues that were out at the time.

Those issues of Catwoman were very popular with guys, if I recall, for a story with a female writer writing a female lead.

Chuck Dixon's stock went up considerably. I kept more of his Batman-related work than anyone else's.

The first comic I ever bought (Batman #481) was written by Doug Moensch, interestingly. I bought it before going on a 3-week trip to Europe. I read it so many times it's now restapled together. Looking over the issue, it's actually somewhat mediocre.

My best friend Jay used to be obsessed with the smoothness of comic book paper. It became an ongoing joke... "The paper! It's so smooooooooth..."

Regardless of the aesthetic qualities of high-grade paper, the difference in how well they've held up over the years as compared to their standard brethren is considerable.

Crossovers are hell to catalog.

I only kept Dark Knight Strikes Again because it was a sequel to the classic Dark Knight Returns. There was no other reason.

I'm actually somewhat surprised on the strident responses to letters of the editors in Flash and Batman in particular. Conservative readers who objected to a gay character in Flash and a virulently anti-gun issue of Batman were outright called stupid and worse.

In one series, it's almost amusing watching them ratchet up a black character's ethnic bonafides by bringing up OJ Simpson.

I spent more time looking through the comics than I probably should have.

I've had a couple days to wrap my hands around it now, but unfortunately the initial impression hasn't changed very much. The reason I asked the question before was that I wasn't (and am not) very comfortable with how I do feel about it.

I'm angry. I'm still mad about what she's done. There are other emotions involved, but all roads seem to come back to that. When I'm sad because I remember when we had a close friendship, I then remember that the person I cared for deeply was a lie and I get even angrier.

I'm also angry because she took the easy way out. Not because she ran away from life but because she ran away from the life that she made for herself. Keith was on hard times when he took his life, but they were largely unintentional and not of his own making. Tami, on the other hand, must have known that they'd figure her out. She must have known that you can only use people, and lie to them, for emotional gratification for only so long before the story starts straining credibility.

I figured her out, albeit very reluctantly. Some of her other friends around here did the same (and others chose not to), which is why she left for San Antonio to begin with. But it doesn't count as a new start when you do the same things that ruined your life in the previous one.

So I'm angry at her exodus and I'm angry that she made such a rotten bed that she couldn't sleep in. I wish this anger were tempered with sympathy, but I can't seem to muster it right now.

She's dead and I'm still angry. I don't like to think about what this says about me.

Sorry if I'm being obsequious. I'm going to explain everything when I'm ready to. I'm just not quite ready yet. Remembering it in detail to type it out will just make me angrier.

I wrote this shortly after our falling out:

It's a bright new day in your dark little world
as you sing the song of a tortured little girl
With all those monsters under your bed
and the voices screaming in the back of your head
But now all your lies are coming at you again
The net has been cast and the walls are closing in
But I knew that you'd escape, you'd get away somehow
and we're never gonna get you now.

I wrote it when she was moving to San Antonio, but it seems almost more applicable now.

Her father called me personally today to invite me to her funeral. Fortunately, I'm going to be out of town.

Regardless, it was a very nice gesture, but I guess he didn't know we were on the permanent outs.

I read this article some time ago and meant to comment on it, but never quite got around to it. There isn't much to say, really, except that I believe that it's the only story where I've ever felt sorry for anyone named Brittany.

Some of you may be familiar with it, but I refer to the University of Alabama at Birmingham football team sex scandal, which involved a fourteen year old prodigy, twenty-six student athletes (allegedly), theft, drugs, and, of course, sex.

According to an e-mail from Hale attached to the complaints, he states, having heard the rumors, that he called Brittany in for a meeting with a UAB police officer. They asked if she was having sex with football players. She said no. The complaints allege the school didn't investigate any further, nor did it notify the Benefields or Alabama's Department of Human Resources of their concerns of drugs and sexual activities, despite a state law requiring they do so in the case of a minor. However, the e-mail reflects that Hale did talk to the Benefields regarding Brittany "hosting guests." The Benefields acknowledge Brittany stopped coming home as much, and that she slept all weekend when she did return. But they say they figured she was just overworked.

An e-mail from Hale, included in the complaints, indicates that he did meet with Blazers special teams coach Larry Crowe, letting the coach know that school administrators had heard rumors about his players and Brittany. According to the e-mail, Hale told Crowe that a girl Brittany's age could not consent to sex. No matter the situation, it was statutory rape. Later that week, the complaints allege, Brown told his team to stay away from Brittany. "If this gets outside of me," he said, "I can no longer help you." He allegedly added that it could mean "jail time."

A Dutch priest has left the church because he is allergic to the wafers used in Holy Communion.

Father Stefan van Dierendonck, 30, from Nijmegen, felt sick every time he took communion, reports De Morgen.

Tests revealed he was allergic to gluten - but the Catholic Church does not allow gluten-free wafers to be used for communion.

When Father Stefan was still studying for priesthood, he says he felt sick each time he took communion.

When he was fist ordained a priest and celebrated three masses a day, it made him so ill he had to spend the rest of the day in bed.

"It only got better when I went in a retreat in another abbey. The diarrhoea stopped and I had no more complaints. Than I realised I was allergic to gluten," he said.

Do you know how much longer it takes to catalog comic books when a certain comic book company doesn't put the year on its covers?

Of all the problems regarding discipline and sexuality of youngsters, I'd have to say this is pretty low on the totem pole.

Or am I woefully naive, here? My experiences at these lock-ins are pretty bland. Of course, mine weren't at the school...

Michael Williams, Joe Katzman, and Donald Sensing all bring up good points about marriage and divorce.

Katzman points out that divorce law is presently stacked against men. Sensing in turn argues that people shouldn't go in to marriage with an eye for the door. Williams says "Divorce happens."

I think Katzman's point isn't quite right. I don't offhand know any men whose reason for not marrying is directly related to divorce law. I do think that there is some reticence on the part of Gen-X and Gen-Y men and women to get married, though, and I believe that divorce plays a role in that.

As divorce becomes increasingly socially acceptable, the draw for marriage to young girls with divorced parents isn't entirely there. Of the women I know that are luke-warm (or worse) about marriage, I'd say 3/4 of which come from homes where divorce occured during their cogniscent youth. It's going to take a heck of a lot more than adjusting marriage law to fix that.

Michael's point is good and could be better made by pointing out that it's not always the man (or always the woman) that chooses the divorce. Even if the man has every intention of sticking with the marriage, how does she know that she will? I mean, how does he know?

If the divorce laws are stacked against men and that is in fact a reason for lower marriage rates, then Sensing's seeming dismissal that such people shouldn't go in to it with such doubts would in fact push marriage rates even further down.

To quote one of Sensing's own sources:

Michael Broder, a Philadelphia psychotherapist and author of The Art of Living Single, decries what he calls the "perfect-person problem," in which women refuse to engage unless they're immediately taken with a man, failing to give a relationship a chance to develop. "Few women can't tell you about someone they turned down, and I'm not talking about some grotesque monster," he says. "But there's the idea that there has to be this great degree of passion to get involved, which isn't always functional. So you have people saying things like, 'If I can't have my soul mate, I'd rather be alone.' And after that, I say, 'Well, you got your second choice.'"

It seems to me that waiting until you meet the person that is unquestionably perfect, you're going to be waiting a long time.

Michael's comments section is awash with good stuff about backwards priorities (being "in love with being in love" and marrying based on passing emotions).

The questions of the day are how these priorities came to be, what priorities they replaced, and what priorities people ought to have (and why).

Lex Alexander:

Boyd is correct to believe that journalists are losing touch with real people. But the reasons that's happening include the facts that journalists, research has found, tend to be younger, better educated, less religiously observant, less likely to have served in the military, less likely to have worked in a non-journalism business, less likely to own their homes and less likely to be married and have children than the people they write for and about -- and because they fail to realize how those differences can add up to create a world view very different from those of their sources/subjects.

From one who knows...

I've spent most of the last five hours pacing outside trying to answer a question.

I've been trying to think of other things to post. I posted the second installment of the Lyrigraph Week, but it doesn't seem right. I've done my usual round of reading blogs, but it's not getting my mind off of it. I've tried to think of a creative way to explain what's going on, but I really can't right now.

A couple years ago I met a girl named Tami. We got along enormously well. We were very close for about a year when I discovered that she wasn't who I thought she was and, in the end she was not only someone that that I didn't care for, but someone that I actively despised - unusual for me.

We last talked about six months ago. She asked me when we might be able to be friends again. I told her "never."

Last night, she took her own life.

I've spent most of the last five hours trying to answer a question: What am I supposed to be feeling right now?

It was our last night together before I left for the anime conference in DFW. In any relationship, there are times when you are perfectly in-sync and others when you are not. Seeing as how we weren't going to be able to see each other for at least another week, we were both disappointed that we had an off night. A couple things I'd said rubbed her the wrong way and her failure to understand what I was trying to say frustrated me.

I'd thought about staying the night to get an early start the next morning, but the longer I was there, the worst things got. She was worried about me driving in the harsh weather, but I didn't see it being much better the next day. "Well then," I said with a smile, "it's probably a good thing that I'm going to Dallas because I'll be getting out of the monsoon."

She was not amused.

There are angels all around us with snakes at their feet
It's been raining now for thirty-nine days
and there's garbage floating down the street

By the end of the evening, I left without so much as a kiss goodbye.

I didn't want to be your downfall, I just couldn't help myself
You wrapped your arms around me and the stars shattered and fell

It was my first Anime conference and as such, probably the most enjoyable. There was a girl there in a Juri costume that caught my attention. She was attractive enough, but that wasn't what grabbed my attention. It felt like I knew her. I wondered if perhaps she'd come from the Houston area like myself. Maybe she went to UH. Strange, though, I felt like I'd known her all my life, though I'd never spoken to her.

Adam, Jay and I were waiting in a long line the second evening when the girl behind us struck up a conversation. Since she was in line alone, I guessed that we were all she had to talk to. Nonetheless, it was a pleasent enough conversation that I'd felt that I made my first friend there in Jessica.

After the Cosplay later on that evening, I was wanting to get away from the gang a bit and hoping to get to talk to someone. I was actually looking for Juri to ask her if I knew her from somewhere when I saw Jessica in the corner of my eye. A guy dressed in a Kuno outfit was hitting on her. I was a bit reluctant to interrupt, but once I did, I'm not sure what came over me. Perhaps it was competition, which sometimes tends to bring out my uglier side, but I was able to dispatch Kuno in doubletime. It was kind of a shame because Kuno struck me as a nice (if a bit socially inept) fellow and he was obviously available while I wasn't, so I was denying her the opportunity to meet someone. It didn't stop me, though.

I was a little reluctant to tell her my age. I was wearing gray hair-dye and figured that she probably thought I was older than I was and I'd figured I was younger than she was. When we finally exchanged ages, we were both a bit flabbergasted. She'd thought I was twenty-eight and was off the mark by seven years. I thought she was twenty-four or so and I was off the mark by a whopping nine years.

She was fifteen.

I hadn't told her about Anna yet and found it somewhat peculiar that she would even be talking to a guy she thought was twice her age.

Not that it mattered, after all, as I was unavailable.

I wish I was innocent
There's blood on my hands
I wish I was innocent
We've gone too far and seen too much
to ever get back to innocence

After having spent the rest of the convention together, we exchanged some contact information and talked substantially afterwards. I hadn't known for certain that she had any romantic designs on me at the convention, but she spilled the guts pretty quickly afterwards.

I wasn't sure what to say. I was a little reluctant to tell her about Anna because I didn't know how I'd come off at the convention. I wasn't intending to flirt (okay, maybe a little during my competition with Kuno), but while I'd never given her the indication that I was interested, I never really know how I come off (and inversely I was quite dim about whether a girl was flirting or not). I told her that a relationship was unworkable due to age and distance.

Both very good reasons.

The more I found out about her, the more I really began to respect her. I was (and am) generally suspicious of girls who claimed that they were "mature for their age" as most girls self-evaluate their maturity inaccurately high. In her case, though, she had grown up a lot. Having spent her early formative years being tossed around between her alcoholic father and mentally-troubled mother, she'd basically raised herself.

The subject of us came up again and I came clean. She oddly respected what she'd falsely considered candor (it was truthful, but rather seriously delayed) and even apologized for misunderstanding me. Shortly thereafter, she got a boyfriend.

The letters and conversations, however, didn't stop. In fact, since I finally came clean about it, I was able to talk to her more honestly than before. I didn't have anything to hide anymore and I could tell her that in a different time and place, she would in fact be exactly what I was looking for. That lead to more and more intimate, though not damning, conversation.

It wasn't until a few months before the next convention that she made a proposition for the next convention. I didn't want to cheat on Anna, but it came at such a unique time and place, I had difficulty throwing it completely out of my mind. Before I had too much time to think about it, I recieved a threatening piece of mail that provided me an easy out of a conversation that I wasn't comfortable in.

She respected my decision and agreed to cease correspondence. Everything was okay again.

There's a preacher on the corner
I just walk away
He's throwing grace all around the place
Am I too far gone to save?

It wasn't much after that when Akon rolled around again. With the whole Jessica situation resolved, I started increasingly looking forward to the trip away from my Houston troubles.

When we saw each other again, she was with friends that didn't know about me and it was hard to act as though she were just a casual acquaintance from the previous year's convention, but I managed to. I was depressed and angry for unrelated reasons, and I was a bit surprised how much her presence at the convention, and my inability to so much as talk to her, bothered me.

It reached the low point at the dance. Being six feet tall, she wasn't hard to spot. I couldn't tell much about the guy that she was with except that he was extremely dopey looking. Dopey looking, and older than me.

I had no right to be jealous. I was the one that cut things off, after all, cause of the mail. No, not really. I wasn't that concerned about the mail. I was concerned about my relationship. The previous convention Anna and I had left on a bad note. That one we had a better run on that, but the relationship that I left was vastly different. It wasn't the letter, but the emotional turmoil that was rapidly infultrating the relationship.

So there I was, watching the only other girl in my life, dancing with some other guy. I had an unhappy relationship at home and a formerly would-be girlfriend dancing with Dopey while I looked on, alone, drinking whiskey. I was on my sixth glass. I hate whiskey.

The next morning, I woke up not with a hangover, but with a mission. I found Jessica before Dopey did and we started talking. When Dopey finally arrived, he was given the could shoulder in double-time and Jess and I had won yet again. We spent the rest of the day together. A few hours before the end of the convention, we were in a room watching crazy Japanese commercials when she put her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her. We kissed.

I think I have good intentions, I never wanted to be this way
I just wanted to be the air you breathe and I watched you suffocate

It was that moment that any semblance of deniability in regards to my relationship with Anna was shattered. The kiss was not only a turning point between Jessica and I, but between Anna and I again: the beginning of the end.

I wish I was innocent
There's blood on my hands
I wish I was innocent
We've gone too far and seen too much
to ever get back to innocence

[Lyrics from Peter Stuart's "Innocence"]

Name: Jessica Youngblood
Alias: Yes
AKA: "Private Mitchell"
Type: ISFP
Born: 1983
Base of Operations: Uknown
Occupation: United States Armed Services
Superpower: Self-directed
Loss Vulnerability: Older and otherwise unavailable men

Jessica comes from about as unfortunate a family background as one can imagine. Her parents divorced at a young age and she ended up splitting time between her alcoholic father and mentally unstable money. As such, she primarily raised herself and so grew up about as quickly as kid can.

We first met on the second day of the Akon convention at the Hyatt hotel in the DFW airport. She wasn't very much an Anime fan, but her friend had brought her along and she would use any excuse she could to get out of the house. I first met her while we were waiting in a rather long line. She struck up the conversation, but I was pretty happy to have someone - anyone - to talk to. The fact that she was a seemingly nice 6' redhead didn't hurt, but since I was in a serious relationship, it didn't help all that much.

She seemed pleasant enough, so when I was looking around for someone else and saw her in the corner of my eye, I decided to go talk to her instead. I ended up having to fend off a would be suitor, which I felt kind of bad about since I wasn't looking for anything but someone to talk to and he was obviously looking for a bit more.

I'd consciously avoided mentioning two things to her. First, I was afraid to bring up my age because I figured that she was older than myself and didn't want to give her the impression that I was this little fanboy hitting on her. I was older than a large number of the people there, but I figured she was twenty-four and girls can get very condescending very quickly when dealing with guys younger than themselves. Eventually she came out and asked and I told her: I'm twenty-one.

When she told me she was fifteen, my mouth dropped to the floor. Of course, once she told me I could start to see what I had missed before. I thought she just had kind of a young-looking face, but it was actually the real deal. It also should have served as a warning sign that she thought I was twenty-eight. I asked her why she, being fifteen, would be talking to a twenty-eight year old without being the least bit creeped out and she said that she's used to old guys hitting on her. I actually made a point to say "You think I'm hitting on you?" to which she replied "of course not."

I don't think either of us knew if the other was being sarcastic, or, for that matter, if we were being sarcastic ourselves. We ended up talking quite a bit and hung out together for the rest of the trip. Before we left, she took my picture and we exchanged contact information.

Over the next several months our correspondences became much more intimate. She was, it turned out, quite interested in me and I used about every excuse I had to get out of the relationship. Two excuses, the age difference and distance, were really quite valid - not all of them were so. The longer I went without telling her about Anna, the more embarassed I felt about not having told her. It was a conscious decision at first, but I had certainly intended to tell her prior to that point except that I hadn't, therefore I couldn't, and so on.

The next year our conversations became increasingly intimate until finally the subject of us came up again. It was less than a month after I'd made the decision that I was going to propose to Anna. The initial euphoria of the intended engagement had worn off and I started feeling an overwhelming sense of dread. In other words, her timing was perfect. We abstractly discussed the possibility of a rendezvous under the cover of flirtation and unseriousness.

Then she told me she was serious.

Before I could even wrap my hands around the situation, I recieved an anonymous letter. There was no signiture, no return address, and most strangely, no postmark. It contained xeroxes of the statutes regarding illegal sexual activity with minors with applicable portions highlighted. Until I'd gotten that letter, I'd actually forgotten the whole age issue.

In any case, I called off everything the next time I talked to Jessica. To be honest, I was relieved. It was increasingly weighing in my conscience and had already been looking for a way out. The sense of dread regarding my impending engagement had also severely intensified and I felt the need to figure things out there without letting a would-be successor in the wings cloud my judgment.

She respected my decision and agreed to cease correspondence. The only request she would not comply with was getting rid of my letters.

For unrelated reasons, the next convention was an unmitigated disaster that ended up costing me seven hundred dollars, severely damaging a close friendship, and leaving the shadow of Houston looming two-hundred and fifty miles over me. I tried to make new friends that trip but had no real success. I eventually tried to salvage the weekend by reconnecting with Jessica just to get to talk to her. I did and it resulted in a kiss that was the beginning of the very long end of my relationship with Anna.

A month afterwards when she asked me to leave Anna. I refused and explained that what happened would not happen again. My mission at that point was to figure out what was wrong with my relationship with Anna and correct it. It was undeniable that there were problems, but I was going to fix them.

I never did. We broke up three months later.

Two years later, Jessica was living in Arkansas with her grandmother as her mom dropped her off for a summer trip and never came back. She hadn't money for college. I was still trying to make the unworkable work with Elciem without any success. There was a point when I considered inviting Jessica to come to Houston. That stone would have killed two birds. It would make what had happened before okay and it would give me an out with Elciem, whom I'd already tried to leave two times before.

She won a scholarship to the University of Arkansas and our sins were left unrectified.

My friend Pierce sent me a hilarious dissection of the following terms-of-usage contract:

“Sellyourmama.com knows that you care about how your personal information is used and shared. We value your privacy and we appreciate the trust you have placed in our company. At Sellyourmama.com we collect only the information necessary to provide you with our unique services, such as your name, email address, and a credit card number. We store this information on a secure server using SDRAWKCAB encryption technology. We do not share this information with any other company, nor do we use it within our own company for the purpose of sending unsolicited advertising e-mail or other solicitations to customers, potential customers, or any other oxygen-breathing bipeds with whom we have or do not have a business-like or retail-type relationship.”

I have an enormously busy week this week. I'm going to try to write regular posts, but in addition to those posts I can get out there, I'm also presenting a series of six Lyrigraphs. Each will be followed by a profile of the particular person the story is about. In my efforts to improve the blog, I am essentially adding profiles for regular cast members so that I don't need to repeat myself explaining who people are.

[Note: In case you can't tell, I did not write this from my point-of-view]

I first met Alex when I worked at the Starlight 16 theater. I was in a relationship with Sergei at the time, so it wasn't love at first site or anything. Still, there was something about him that I was really drawn to and I could feel that he was drawn to me. We really didn't know each other, but he still kept following me out stopping where I stopped so that he could keep talking to me. He wasn't very subtle.

I never really even got the chance to tell him about Sergei. Starlight fired him after a couple of weeks.

From the day we met
You made me forget
All my fears
Knew just what to say
And you kissed away
All my tears

When he lost his job at Starlight, he'd mentioned to our mutual friend Millie that he was interested and Millie, being the loud-mouth that she is, told me. So when things with Sergei collapsed, I naturally thought of him and asked Millie how he was doing.

As expected, Alex called a couple of days later. It was amazing how things between us just kind of folded together. We were coming from a similar place because he'd been hurt recently, too, by a girl named Ora. It was one of the many things that we talked about. We really has so much in common that neither of us had with Sergei or Ora.

A few months into the relationship, it occured to him that we might have been a rebound thing. He was actually worried that he was just the "redundant sequel" after Sergei. He was so happy when I told him that it honestly felt like Sergei was just the warm-up for him.

I knew this time I had finally found
Someone to build my life around
Who'd be a lover and a friend
After all my heart had put me through
I knew that it was safe with you
And what we had would never end

Over the months, and then years, of the relationship, Alex managed to tear down the walls that I'd built up to protect myself from Sergei. He was amazingly patient. He never got mad or jealous, which seemed to be all Sergei ever was. I was also perfect for him and he said so repeatedly. I was unquestionably faithful and I didn't lavish in attention the same way Ora had.

What more could we want?

Wrong again

It hit me like a freight train. He'd never given the slightest indication that there was something wrong. In fact, I thought things were going better than ever. Sure, there were a couple of gripes that I had and maybe I repeated them too often, but couldn't he have said anything before he did?

I've always had a jealous streak. I don't really know why, but I would get nervous any time he mentioned a female friend or Ora. But I'd finally gotten beyond it and when I told him that I wasn't jealous over him anymore because I felt I could trust him completely, he simply said, "I see."

I asked him what he meant by that and he told me.

Everybody swore
They'd seen this before
We'd be fine
And you'd come to see that you still loved me
In good time

I was sure that we could make things work. I was also pretty sure that this was just a mood. It wasn't until we really started talking about it that I began to understand that he'd been thinking about it a lot. A whole lot.

And they said there's nothing you can do
It's something that he's going through
It happens to a lot of men
And I told myself that they were right
That you'd wake up and see the light
And I just had to wait 'til then

We argued about it fiercely. Looking back, I'm not even sure what I was trying to save, but at the time I was certain that he loved me, I loved him, and that if we stayed together, things would just work, dammit. I eventually sent our friends Pierce and Sola to go see him so that he would realize that a mistake he was making.

He talked to Sola first and she came out of it agreeing with him. When she and I started talking about it, we both realized that it had been there all along. He had been growing dispondant. I saw this, but I mistook it for quiet comfort, much as I'd thought his jealousy was out of trust and not because he wouldn't allow himself to love me completely because he was afraid of me leaving as Ora did.

But didn't he realize that I wasn't?

Wrong again

I don't know that it really mattered, though. If he couldn't see that, what hope was there for the relationship, anyway? I looked around the room and he was everywhere. His picture; gifts he'd given me. After talking to Pierce, he called me to let me know he was coming over.

One by one, I started taking the pictures down.

And it seemed to me the pain would last
My chance for happiness had passed
With nothing waitin' 'round the bend
I was sure I'd never find someone
To heal the damage you had done
And my poor heart would never mend

I told Alex that if he ever changed his mind, I wanted to know. He'd said that he'd been keeping his feelings so controls that he couldn't feel freely. I felt if I could just love him enough, it would be enough for both of us or at least for him to find what we once had. He said that he buried his emotions when things with Ora ended and that he needed to find someone that could touch that emotional nerve to bring him back - or he'd need to find someone as emotionally dead as himself.

I told him that at that point, I was every bit as emotionally dead.

Wrong again

We had decided to keep in contact since between Sergei and Alex, I hadn't been single in over five years and he hadn't been single in four. Things didn't really work out that way. He met a girl named Elciem that seemed to be occupying all of his time and energy. He was never really the same person after our relationship ended and it felt like, in a way, the person that I loved no longer existed.

I started hanging out more and more with Pierce. Alex was very sweet about it when I brought up what I thought was happening. he even offered to help find out if Pierce felt the same way that I did. I thanked him for it, but he said that he owed me at least that and a whole lot more. His unique form of alimony, I guess.

Pierce and I moved in together less than six months later and have been living happily ever since.

[lyrics from Martina McBride's "Wrong Again"]

Name: Anna McLoed
Alias: Yes
AKA: "Tanni"
Type: ISFJ / ISTJ
Born: 1978
Base of Operations: Webster, TX
Occupation: Techical Support
Superpower: Trustworthy
Loss Vulnerability: Stubborn
Short Version: Serious relationship from 1996-2000.

Long Version:
We met at the Starlight 16 theater in Pasadena, TX, where we both worked. We were scheduled together for my first couple of shifts there and got along pretty well, as far as I could tell. She's a very quiet person until you get to know her. It was thanks to a short conversation during this short period that I began looking at the University of Houston as a possible choice for college on her recommendation. I took a pretty immediate liking to her and when Starlight fired me for losing fictional money, I talked to Millie, a mutual friend, to try to get her schedule to meet her after work and ask her out. Unfortunately, she had a boyfriend at the time.

A few months later, Millie told me that Anna was asking about me and passed along her phone number. I called her and saw First Kid on our first date. She wore a pink shirt, blue jeans, and tan hiking shoes and we talked outside the theater for about three hours before finally parting ways. We went on a second date and a third. I fell in love with her at about the two month period. It took me about five minutes to sputter out the words because after being hurt by Ora, I'd lost sight of what they meant.

There were a few bumps in the road, but the relationship on the whole was very positive for both of us. For my part, she provided a sense of stability that my life was sorely lacking. She was my first serious relationship and therefore gave me a lot of experience on what makes relationships work. For her part, she'd come off a pretty nasty relationship and I helped her bring down the emotional walls that she built.

In early 2000, I began preparations to propose. I asked for her parents' permission and it was granted. I also started quietly saving up for a wedding ring. There was an initial period of euphoria that started turning sour after about a month. I started withdrawing from my friends as I started getting a nagging feeling that the impending engagement might be a mistake. Though I refused to acknowledge it, a series of events that summer and fall made the relationship impossible.

I had failed to properly deal with the heartbreak of my former love when she entered my life and the problems, which I'd been suppressing, started surfacing sporadically. There was a part of me that was desperately unhappy.

I was still pretty confident that I would get things worked out until August when everything began to unravel. During the preparation process, I'd made certain decisions as to what our relationship would require to become a successful marriage and that lead me to start considering law school. The pressures of law school admissions combined with full-time employment eventually lead to exhaustion that caused a serious car accident that made me rethink my priorities. Suddenly, in addition to the emotional discomfort, I started getting the sense that we were incompatible in other ways.

In the end, however, it was the emotional issues that pulled the relationship asunder. It was only after I began to peel at the ways that we were compatible on a practical level did I realize that there was something missing beyond that. I loved her dearly, but I'd kept certain parts of me bottled up and for some reason, she wasn't able to touch the emotional nerve to bring me back. To this day, I don't know whether it was an inherent emotional incompatibility between us or that she was simply in the wrong position at the wrong time to be able to do so.

In early December of 2000, I finally shared my concerns with her. Within a two week period, she discovered my previous intentions to propose, was informed that much of the stress I'd been experiencing over the previous couple of months was related to our relationship, and was emancipated from the relationship. The relationship ended on December 17, though we decided to wait until the New Year to announce it. Word got out and it lead to the most uncomfortable Christmas Party I've ever spent with her family that year.

Within a month or so, she became involved with Pierce, a mutual friend who was in the middle of a prolonged divorce. Anna and Pierce dated for roughly three-and-a-half years before they parted ways. She is presently single and living in Webster.

I screwed up this weekend. Back on the wagon now, though. Unlike last time, I'm going to let you know when I falter, so in regards to the Quitter's Diary, no news is definitely going to be good news!

I debated whether or not to go see Bleu Edmondson in Wharton, Adam Carroll at the Mucky Duck, or the Coogs. I chose the latter.

There was no reason we couldn't have beaten this team. They played a good game (few penalties, no turnovers), but their offense kept running the same three plays over and over again. Their idea of variation was to send three running backs rightward and then pick which one of them to hand off to. Their defense was an inch deep, all lined up within ten yards of the line of scrimage every play (even the safeties) and if we could have passed them, it would have been an easy touchdown.

Unfortunately, QB Kolb looked like he was stoned throughout most of the game. The offense gave up seven points, set them up with a turnover for seven more, and forced the Memphis team to actually march the ball more than 50 yards for a touchdown only twice (of their six touchdowns and two field goals) due to turnovers (fumbles, interceptions, and 4th down failures). And, of course, there was me. At the game and watching.

So, to all of the UH fans out there, I apologize. It seems that yet again my desire to see a team that I'm rooting for has cost them a game. For this reason (okay, others also), I will refrain from going to watch their game next week against TCU.

On a side note, Monday at 8PM UH coach Art Briles answers questions on a talk radio show. I might have to listen, as I could use a few answers.

The weather around here has gotten cooler. We've even been turning the AC off during a particularly cooler spell. Additionally:

I haven't been cooking as much as I have in the past.

I only keep two of my computers on instead of three.

Half the lights in our apartment are burned out. They haven't fixed them so we've just left them that way so we have less light usage.

Yet, inexplicably, our electricity bill went up $30.

So did we use any more electricity? Though I'm not sure how, it's possible.

Of course, I can't check because our electricity "bill" is handled through the apartment complex and we don't get to see out watt usage.

Of course, it's also possible that our usage didn't go up, but the complex's did. It's an interesting thing that from what I understand, our electricity bill includes our proportion of the parking lot and street lights and in addition to re-painting the dive, they've turned up the lights and footed us with that bill too.

When walking around the Firehouse on Friday night, I found this napkin on the floor. I wonder who wrote it and why:



My guess?

Roger Creager is a Texas country musician who comes from Corpus Christi and the Houston area. His father lives here, I think (or at least is present at a lot of his shows. He often goes on stage to sing "Rancho Grande" with him.) My guess is that it was a message from someone to someone else saying that "Roger Creager is his son" except they misspelled, of all words, "his."

I'ts the only thing I can think of.

During my junior high football career, I had one penalty called against me. It was, for all things, equipment failure. The chinguard on my helmet hadn't been fastened.

Nebraska (18) is slaughtering Texas A&M (~45) at the moment 34-6. Nebraska had an interception, but there were flags on the play. We were talking about what a shame that would be for Nebraska (since the guarded reciever was apparently not the victim) to have an interception brought back on a penalty that had nothing to do with the interception.

Well it turns out that there may have been a connection. Nebraska had 12 men on the field. Not 12 men insofar as one hadn't made it off the field or whatnot, but rather that there was a formation, and then a 12th guy standing there, breaking all the symmetry and perhaps should having some indication that something was amiss.

So A&M gets the ball back plus fifteen yards and find themselves on the 20 yardline or so. A&M gets nowhere and has to kick a fieldgoal. They miss but there's another flag on the play.

Twelve men on the field. Again.

Methinks someone thinks they made first string when they actually did not.

Methinks a coach needs to get up the gumption to tell said muscular athlete that he is not, in fact, on first string as he thinks he is.

Methinks a player who realizes that his spot is being taken up by someone else needs to vacate the field or at least call a time out.

As it was, A&M got the ball back, got 10 yards or so, and had first and goal at the 10 (or so).

Of course, given the crummy game they played, it was no surprise that they had to kick another field goal.

This time they made it, bringing the formerly 34-3 game to 34-6. For shame, for shame.

I've been of the mind that a lot of people have gone rather batty in their objections to the addition of other colors on our greenbacks. While I'm against moving too far away from the distinctive green, I'm also in favor of doing what we have to in order to deter counterfeiters.

Well, last night I got my first New Money in the form of a $20 bill.

Good grief! I didn't even see the new color, though I had to assume it was the addition of yellow. But it wasn't the new color that freaked me out. Rather, it was the distribution of color, which had yellowish in the middle and then a more solid green color on the outside.

To be crude, it looked like someone pissed on a $20 and the green bled to the sides with a nice yellow middle.

I was talking about it with my folks this morning and pulled out another to make an example and... it was completely different. There was a light blue eagle watermark on it and the color distrobution was not nearly as disturbing.

Whew.

But wait a minute... if that's what the new $20 looks like, then what the heck was it that I was I had last night?!

To give you an idea of what I'm up against here:

As near as I can tell, I quit collecting comics in late 2000.

As near as I can tell, I stopped buying comics in early 2002.

So I'm not only sifting through a bunch of comics, I'm sifting through a bunch of comics that I have no idea what happens inside of them.

In case you guys can't tell, Master of None is a daily visit for me. Both the political and observational posts are thought-provoking and interesting. Its proprieter, Michael Williams, has invited his friend Mike Northover to guest-post and he's only added to the already interesting site with gems like this one:

I'm not sure when this whole everyone-is-fake-and-stupid thing actually started, but I feel it's reached epidemic proportions. It's reflex. It's probably universal, and could probably go back to "three amoebas were sitting in a bar, and damnit, the amoeba chick went home with the jerk amoeba, what the heck is wrong with the world". No mention of the jerk amoebas huge pecs and chisled chin, of course. He was probably gay anyway.

I'm reminded of a good friend of mine who's about 22 and has been dating this guy since the begining of time (or 5.5 years ago, whichever is more recent) and is in the process of becoming single again.

Part of me is happy for her because it's a relationship she should have been out of some time ago, but force of will to make it work or fear of the unknown kept her with it. A year or two back I was trying to convince her to get out and she elected not to.

It's strange, though, but now that it's happening I'm having second thoughts in regards to whether or not it's the right thing. The idea of some guy flirting with her, all the self-doubt and wondering on whether or not the dude is interested, the falsity of the first several dates... the thought of it all bothers me more immensely (more than it has for myself, actually, when I've been in the "market").

Ironically, the dating process, which is supposed to be about finding that other person and becoming more complete, stands next to college hazing as one of the most humiliating activities in existence, even when things go well.

While looking for Salon's article on medical residencies, I ran across this interesting one on the sexual tensions that arise in Hospitals:

Any adult knows that sex is, in fact, the best way to relieve frustration, with masturbation a distant second. Furthermore, it serves as an excellent means of taking control of some part of one's life. When everything else around you seems to be falling to pieces, the ability to choose another person and experience intimate physical proximity with that person is a great reminder that you are still able to affect at least some of the daily events in which you are involved. These events were frequent for a tall, square-jawed resident I once knew, who was uniformly lusted after by every young nurse in the hospital and some older ones as well. After his first few distressing weeks on the wards, it became well known that if you caught him at the end of a bad day, especially one in which he had lost a patient, you could coax from him a trip to the call room. In fact, the nurses even began to send spies down to the E.R. on busy afternoons, just to see how he was faring.

It reminds me a bit of a comic book series called Authority originally written by Warren Ellis.

What struck me most about the serial was its realistic portrayal of characters. Marvel afficionados talk about how much more realistic the dispositions of Marvel characters are compared to DC. Truth be told, they have a point if that's what you're looking for. Of course, if that's what you're looking for, then The Authority is (was?) bar-none.

The serial is pretty old and I haven't kept up with it, but one of the scenes that sticks in my mind is when, after a looooooong day, two superheroes are smoking a cigarette on the roof of their headquarters. The handling of that issue and that scene made poignant that a bad day at work for them was a bad day the likes of which the rest of us could only dream of. They use whatever they can to get through the day.

Due to the nature of the genre, it's really something most superhero stories seem to have steered clear of. I'm sure there are some, but I can't recall offhand any superheroes addicted to painkillers, for instance. Green Arrow's former sidekick had a heroin addiction and Hourman was addicted to the pill that gave him superpowers, but that's cursory to what I would imagine being a real epidemic among a truly realistic superhero community.

And, of course, sex romps. To be sure, sex is referred to and alluded to and in some cases shown in various serials. But in some ways that, like Hourman's pill addiction, was pro-active rather than reactive. The emotional toll of failure always seems to take on a different manifestation than what would seem to me to be a pretty obvious one.

The idea first crossed my mind when I was trying to explain why a superhero in one of my ideas was carrying on with a villainess over the course of several years, despite their other difficulties.

It reminded me of a famed psychological study done in which two sets of men were to make it across an obstacle course and then talk to an attractive female surveyer at the end who would give the man her card for follow-up questions. The men who walked across an easy course were not as likely to call as those whose courses brought forth adrenaline rushes. The excitement of the course seeped over into sensual excitement over the surveyer.

I'm probably mucking up the details on it, but it very much made me wonder if romance between superheroes that work tightly together is to some degree unavoidable. While superhero-with-superhero relationship viability has never been great, I often wonder if a Clark Kent truly would be able to keep contented with Lois Lane and keep his hands off Wonder Woman for a prolonged period of time. Of course he would, he's Superman, so I suppose I'd have to put the question more abstractly or aimed towards more human subjects: Wally West (Flash) and Linda Park or pick you own. It's an interesting issue to explore.

I can think of only one serial that really focused on the romantic lives of its superhero characters, and that would be Young Heroes In Love, which was essentially a soap opera with costumes. It was well done but never quite found its niche and died after eighteen episodes. That's a shame cause it really could have developed into an unforgettable series.

To bring the post back around, the YHIL name was taken off the spoof on soap operas with stethescopes, Young Doctors in Love.

An interesting article in Forbes about medical residency.

Under the system today, say the plaintiffs, residents are woefully underpaid. "Despite their advanced education, long work hours and valuable patient care services, first-year residents earned an average wage of about $35,700 during the 2000-2001 employment year, equating to about $10 per hour. Resident physicians generally earn less than other hospital employees such as nurse practitioners and physicians assistants, and...adjusted for inflation, the average first-year resident physician salary has remained virtually unchanged for more than 30 years."

On top of this lousy, stagnant pay comes an atrocious work schedule, argue the plaintiffs. "Employers impose oppressive, dangerously long work hours on resident physicians, endangering both residents and patients.... Residents routinely work 60 to 100 hours per week or more, including 36-hour and 48-hour shifts." (Since the residents' suit was filed, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, one of the defendants, has reduced the maximum allowed workweek to 80 hours.)

I'd read about it a while back on Salon, but unfortunately can't find that link.

I always thought it was an odd jump from "[old and uneducated] People don't understand punchcard ballots" to "let's replace it with computers."

Having experience in data integrity, I'm very uncomfortable with computers replacing any physical form of ballots. The thing about physical ballots is that they'll always have a margin of error, but it'll generally be a small one. Innocent digital errors, on the other hand, can occur by orders of magnitude. Physical and digital ballots can also both be tampered with, but regardless of the security measures taken, it's easier to do the latter without a paper trail.

Lex Alexander has recently editted a book on the subject:

The book documents many, many performance problems with the machines. It explains why they are not secure -- and how the makers knew this fact but sold them as reliable anyway. It documents how security procedures supposedly in place to ensure the security and reliability of voting machines aren't being followed. It explores the conflicts of interest among many of the voting-machine makers' owners and executives. And it offers solutions to these problems -- but because voting machines are typically purchased by elections officials at the state or county level, it will take a true grass-roots effort to educate these officials so that they'll do the right thing to protect your right to vote and to have your vote counted.

You divise ingenious ways to save time so that you can catalog consecutive issues without having to go through each one.

When working three hours past the time of the paper cut, it starts to bleed.

You find the bleeding papercut to be fascinating.

In the "Month" and "Year" columns, instead of tracking down where you missed a month thirty issues back, you simply type type "Screw" and "You"... and mean it.

Despite the fact that you did this in part to preserve your collection and read those comics you own but haven't gotten to, you never want to read a comic ever again in your entire life!

You think of a million interesting thoughts you had while droning away... but as soon as you finish, your mind shuts down and you have an unprecedented desire to watch Flintstones reruns.

And you will remember:

How dust gathers over time

How it's been a long time since you've looked in some of these comic boxes

How dust in the eyes makes them red and itchy

What it feels like to sneeze every ten seconds.

A little while back Gregg Easterbrook wrote a controversial entry about rape.

In contemporary society, the problem may turn on the language women use if they decide they want to leave. "No" doesn't cut it, unless it's a top-of-the-lungs "NO!" However often theorists assert that the single word "no" is all that's required--"what part of 'no' don't you understand," etc.--the reality of human interaction is that "no" does not always mean no. Maybe half the sex in world history has followed an initial "no," or more than one "no." (Whether such sex is regretted later, or simply not much fun, is irrelevant to the rape debate.) What ends up as consensual sex, however unsatisfying, often begins with the woman saying "no."

Because men know this--because in the real world "no" does not always mean no--speaking the word "no" is not the ideal way to communicate to a man that what is happening has changed from persuasion, or pressure, to compulsion. Men not only want sex, the male mindset holds that overcoming the woman's "no" is part of manliness. Few men will rape if that's what they think they are doing. Many try to push past "no" and tell themselves that what they are doing is manly persuasion of the naturally hesitant female. "Had we but world enough, and time/this coyness, lady, were no crime:" Andrew Marvel, circa 1650.

Pete did not approve:

Here's a good rule of thumb for any guy who is afraid, as Mr. Easterbrook frets, that they will be falsely accused of rape: STOP. If there is any ambiguity about the consent issue, if the woman you're with seems like she may be uncertain about the encounter, if there is ANY FUCKING QUESTION that what you're doing might be construed as non-consensual sex...get up and leave. That's right: zip up and walk out the door. The ignominy of jerking off in your bathroom is a thousand time less repulsive than taking things too far when you don't have explicit permission to do so.

Easterbrook asserts that, because it's such an ordeal for women to accuse a man of rape, prosecuting attorneys (and jurors) automatically assume such accusations to be true. He then goes on to bemoan the hordes of victimized men who suffer false accusations at the hands of vindictive women, which is the same manner of chauvinistic paranoid bullshit that Joe Eszterhas put forth in "Basic Instinct."

Bo Cowgill also makes some good points that I wasn't sure how to articulate in Pete's forum:

Here's my $.02: No definitely means no. If someone meant something other than "no," she'll find a way to communicate it after you back off. In the meantime, no means no. Its a shame more men don't realize that.

But here's a question for rape-awareness activists: How serious are you about preventing rape, as opposed to "fixing" men? If you are serious, it seems to me as though you might want to spread the word: "No means no" isn't working as well in practice as it is in theory. That is a sad fact, and one society needs to change. But in the meantime, we need to adjust in order to minimize nonconsensual sex.

Anti-rape activists should care about making sure women know to do more than say "no" when they are about to be raped. It seems to me that the, "I was conflicted" and "I was at a loss for words" defenses for low resistance should be roundly criticized by anti-rape activists themselves. They should also care about sending the message: "Even if you can't make up your mind, acknowledge that you can't make up your mind. Wait until you can, and resist the advances clearly, completely and unambiguously."

And Bob at the Carnival Collective also makes a good point (that was earlier made by a commenter on Pete's blog):

Perhaps one area where Amanda and I disagree is in whether we are talking about the ideal, Platonic form of rape, or whether we are talking about establishing rules for a crime for which people will go to jail. When discussing the definition of a crime, it's also important to include pragmatic concerns about things like the perceptivity of the perpetrator and their awareness of whether they are committing a crime. It's almost impossible for body language alone, even in the presence of total information, to establish communication of something beyond a reasonable doubt, especially when other, far less ambiguous means are available and no more costly. In practical terms, a standard where body language alone can define rape would become the kind of standard where verbal permission is required for every sort of sexual activity. The only way to avoid that is to put some burden on the woman to vocalize non-consent (except in obvious and, for acquantaince rape, pathological cases).

I have a rather big post on rape coming up, but in the meantime check out what they've got to say.

Michael Williams had an encounter on an airplane trip:

If we meet on a plane and then flirt through the whole flight, that's cool. Then, if you give me your phone number, I'll probably call you and see if you want to go to Knott's Scary Farm -- a guaranteed fun time. This is your cue to tell me that no, we can't hang out, because you have a boyfriend. But take note: you should have considered mentioning that during the two hours we spent talking on the plane, or perhaps when I asked for your number.

It reminds me of something that Jay and I came up with a long time ago. It would be a nice superpower if you could visualize a traffic light above the head of a person of the opposite sex and that their interest level in you would then light up the red, yellow, or green light, so you would know how cautiously to proceed or if you should at all.

Once upon a time, Elciem and I were on the outs and in an effort to mend our fences, she invited me out with some of her friends for a night out. I accepted. Along with the group was a girl that bore a more than passing resemblence for Alanis Morissette.

We were pulling in to Jillian's when somehow my traffic light idea came up and I explained it.

Alanis immediately looked me in the eye and asked, "So what's your color?"

I was tragically underrested. I was already cranky and irritated with just about every person in that group for one reason or another. In fact, Alanis had been the only person who'd been demonstrably nice to me all evening long.

I wanted to scream or jump out of the car and run, but unfortunately they were my ride. While Alanis was a nice enough and attractive enough person, something about her (a searing insecurity crossed with dramatic tension oozing from her ears, most likely) told every bit of me not to pursue it further.

Having no idea what to say or how to respond, I said, "I'm sorry. I didn't hear you. Could you repeat that?"

"Never mind," she said.

WHEW!

Except that it wasn't over. Her light was radioactive green the rest of the evening. She knew I wasn't interested, so she kept trying to be more and more subtle about it hoping that I wouldn't notice when she tried to hold my hand or put her arm around me.

That evening would probably rate as one of the ten most uncomfortable in my life.

Given how enormously charismatic I am with downright irresistable charm, quick wit, and looks to die for, I'm certain that my red-light-green-light powers would probably just make my life a lot more uncomfortable since I'd just see so many women who have the hots for me everywhere. So I'm glad I don't have it, I guess.

Or something...

Anyone wanna guess where I'm headed?



Wish me luck...

This is the weirdest story I've read in quite some time.

On the day of the scheduled protest, Grumbine printed 400 brightly-colored Matrix-like fliers, purchased a black suit and dark sunglasses from a local thrift store, and borrowed his company’s ultra-light powered para-glider.

On the afternoon of May 29, Grumbine took off from Whittier Hills with his para-glider, just as his daughters and several other youth were preparing to hand out literature on the sidewalks outside the school.

Grumbine flew over the school a couple of times, dropping the [pro-life] leaflets on the school grounds and the sidewalk.

One side of the fluorescent green triangle-shaped leaflet read: “Fight the Matrix!” The other side, written in the ominous voice of the villains of the Matrix, demanded that the students submit to the lies of the Matrix.

While his heart might be in the right place, Mr. Grumbine sounds like a weird, weird person.

Despite his left-leaning tendencies, I am a Gregg Easterbrook. He's about as honest as they come and despite any disagreements I may have with him, he's very much my kind of people.

He's written recently on Quentin Tarantino and this time I am very much inclined to agree with him. I believe Tarantino to be one of the most overrated men in Hollywood and while I found Pulp Fiction to be a fun movie, it was never all it was cracked up to be:

Tarantino does nothing but churn out shabby depictions of slaughter as a form of pleasure--and that, for decades, has been what the least imaginative and least talented of Hollywood churn out. Supposedly it's "revolutionary," or something, that Tarantino films revel in violence to a preposterous degree, but that's like saying it is revolutionary for a presidential candidate to revel in complaints against Washington bureaucrats. Nothing about Hollywood is more hackneyed or trite than preposterous violence--and that's all Tarantino has ever put onto film.

Set aside what it says about contemporary Hollywood culture that the supposed liberal progressives of this city now ceaselessly mass-market presentations of butchering the helpless as a form of entertainment, even, as rewarding self-expression. Why do we suppose that, with Hollywood's violence-glorifying films now shown all around the world to billions of people--remember, mass distribution of Hollywood movies to the developing world and Islamic states is a recent phenomenon--young terrorists around the globe now seem to view killing the innocent as a positive thing, even, a norm? Set that concern aside. Tarantino's films are simply trite as regards adoration of violence. In Hollywood, nothing could be less original.

I think he's a little hard on Tarantino, but I'd consider this a bygones-be-bygones issue... if it wasn't for the last paragraph:

Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message--now Disney's message--that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself.

That has to be the oddest closing I've read on a blog entry or movie review in a loooooong time.

It is now extremely unlikely that John Edwards will be getting my vote in 2004. Howard Dean now actually has a bigger chance.

Not having had much luck with the car radio/AC, I've turned my attention towards my comic book collection. I'm going to be unloading half of my collection or so (giving them away, probably, if I can find a recipient). Right now I'm going through and cataloguing them all.

It's extraordinarily tedious which is only aggravating my need for a "cigarette break", but I'm getting through it and it's also kinda fun in a way. It's like a trip down memory lane and it's reminding me of the comic book universes that I have sadly forsaken.

There is one thing though... I have comic books that I swear I did not buy. Why would I buy a Lenore collection?! Until I saw it down there, I thought it was a doodle of Michele's cause her web site was the only place I'd seen the pic before.

Then there's Blink. I have part three of the "Blink" miniseries, which was put out by Marvel. I don't have parts one, two, or four. Just part three. Who in tarnation is Blink?! I've never heard of this character. Why would I get the third issue of a four-issue miniseries of a character I've never heard of from a company universe that doesn't interest me starring a character with the dumbest codename I've heard in a long time?

I weighed myself last Friday. I weighed 232. My weight has been a yo-yo since I was thirteen or so. I was about 6'0" and 255 lb. when I was a freshman in high school. I'd grown to 6'3" and 190 lb. when I graduated from high school. By the middle of my senior year in college, I was 6'5" and 260 lb. Six months later I weighed 230. Four months or so ago I was at 245.

Curse of crash dieting?

Not exactly. The strange thing is that it's never been a diet that's taken the weight off. My eating habits have changed for better and worse, mind you, but it's always come down to that: habits, lifestyle changes, and never any low-fat or low-carb diets.

Not that I haven't been on them, mind you, just that they've never worked for any prolonged period of time.

In fact, I have a long history of wild and interesting diets. I've never done the Atkins (Adkins?) diet because no matter how much I love cheese, I can't imagine doing that indefinitely and if there's one thing I've had reinforced about dieting over and over again is that it's not a matter of going on a diet, losing weight, and getting off - it's an ongoing stuggle. In other words, never get on a diet you couldn't stay on indefinitely.

That said, I've had more confidence in my ability to stay on some odd diets. They were frought with gimmicks. One of them, The Water Diet, involved drinking 3/4-gallon of water before being able to eat anything. Whatever the merits of the diet, it ran into a wall because of the havoc it reaked on my system.

Another notable diet was the 5300 Diet, so named because it consisted of 5 meals of 300 calories or so. I'd heard that eating more small meals is better than one big one, so I figured that was the way to go.

Unfortunately, it's antithetical to the way that I eat. I can't eat half a cupcake. I can't eat just a little bit. It's not a matter of appetite, as you'd be surprised how rarely I actually get hungry (more on this later), but rather a matter of self-control, or lack thereof. You can lecture me all day long on how you might have better luck with this than myself, but it doesn't fundamentally change the fact that if I eat a little bit, I want more. If I skip a meal, I don't go hungry. Any diet that doesn't take that into account will fail.

I've also tried the Jared diet (or some derivative thereof) since I like sandwiches, but that quickly went bust when I realized that the only sandwiches I like aren't so good for me and the rest get pretty boring pretty quickly. I also did the Slim-fast thing for a while and my problem with that was, believe it or not, liking those shakes too much.

Anyhow, I've made some serious dietary changes over the past couple of months. When I started, I weighed about 245 lb. I got on the scale Thursday and I am now at 232. The real question is whether or not I can slip below 230, which has been my wall in recent years. I'm actually pretty confident that I can (I'd be almost positive if it weren't for metabolism changes that are going to come with quitting smoking, I might hit 245 sooner than 230, but not having anything to do with the dietary changes). Amazingly, I'm never ever ever hungry (quite the opposite, usually), the only thing I miss is the Coke (which, while I miss it, is an ingredient in any serious diet), and caters pretty well to my eating habits.

In other words, a diet that is a lifestyle change that I may be able to pursue indefinitely (or at least until I have more money to upgrade it).

So what is it? Check in tomorrow.

Update: Day after tomorrow.

The New York Magazine has a devestating article on the evils of pornography.

It's funny. I just used the term "evils of pornography."

And I wasn't being sarcastic.

The article underscores a lot of what's been going through my mind on the subjects of pornography, prostitution, and teen sex in recent years. It's more than I intend to post at the moment, but I'll just say that the older I get (and it's not like I'm that old, the more keenly aware I am becoming of the victims of "victimless" crimes.

I discovered this via Susanna, who has a good write-up on it. In her comments sections there are a couple of dissenting voices:
Kris Hasson-Jones:

So, do you think I-porn is preventing these people from resolving their problems because it's so easy compared to the real work of learning about their partners? I think it's certainly easier to distract yourself because of the Internet, be it porn or whathaveyou, but I suspect people who use the Internet would just use something else instead if the Internet weren't available.

[...]

It's not just porn, though, that's my point. The Internet is the easiest delivery service we've got for all kinds of entertainment, if you want to be distracted from the other part of your life. Looking at I-porn isn't that much different from playing computer games for hours, or sitting in your den (or at a bar) watching sports on TV, or reading a book (my personal vice), or whatever you do to keep from engaging with life and the people in your life. If, that is, you are indeed using it to avoid engagement and intimacy. That's the problem to attack, not that it's porn.

There's an old saying: The first thing that you do when you've dug yourself a whole is to quit digging. To someone that has created an "online" life, be it in Everquest or Cybersexland, the first trick is to go cold-turkey on the substitutions you have online for what you ought to be having in person.

For some people (*ahem*... me) it meant not getting on instant messenger anymore so that I might go out and meet new people. For a porn addict, it means deleting the collection and getting a girlfriend. Each of these is an individual problem, but the issue here is what is substituting for what.

At my worst, I was using IM as a substitute for real friendships. That's not to say that I didn't have real friends or that the people I talked to day in and day out weren't really friends. Regardless, I had such a rich online life that I didn't have enough motivation to actually go out and meet someone in realtime. Consequently, the only knew friends I've made over the last year have been Kevin and people I've met through Kevin.

When it comes to porn, it is undeniable that a large number of people are using that as a substitute or model for sexual behavior. It perverts the mind's sexual ideals of both what women should be look like and sex should be like. The story has person after person that has unrealistic attitudes in regards to women and sex (and therapists dealing with the repercussions of them).

Unlike Everquest, it depicts something that is really happening and, therefore, really possible. These women really exist, those positions are aerobically possible for someone, somewhere. It presents a pseudoreality, time and time again, that reality can never match.

Of course, porn has always done this, so what's the problem? Why is it such a big deal now? In a word: availability. It no longer requires a nervous encounter at the grocery or having to go into a 24-hour "newsstand." It's all private, it's largely free, and it's everywhere. Never has addiction been so easy. And so cheap.

Sean Kinsell:

You don't have to approve of porn if it's against your morals, but this article's sampling runs to (1) a bookish milquetoast who's intimidated by real women, (2) a Manhattan sex therapist (!) who says people come to her with weird problems, (3) a feel-your-pain "psychologist who runs a counseling group for men who hope to curtail their cyberporn habits by chatting openly in a half-circle," and (4) a PR chick whose boyfriend discovered he was bored with their relationship after college. Give Katie Roiphe five seconds, and I bet she could produce fifteen articles from a few decades ago that sounded the same alarm about magazines or VCR's. I feel sorry for these guys, who obviously have real problems. But it seems to me that the source of those problems is the idea that getting naked is somehow inherently degrading and not for the serious-minded, which leaves them no choice but to relegate sex to a part of the brain that doesn't grow up.

Kinsell brings up a good point and there are legitimate cause-effect issues at work here. I don't think that pornography is inherent evil though I do believe that in some cases the bad outweighs the good. Cause-effect actually become somewhat irrelevent when they feed off each other.

Let's say there is a study that links cocaine to depression. Does it matter if a person takes cocaine before or after be becomes depressed? Not really, because once the cycle takes hold, it doesn't matter what started, it only matters that it's going to get worse and worse until something is done. Sexual immaturity and phobias are the same way, to an extent. That these people have problems and turn to pornography instead of vice-versa is beside the point (I suspect it happens both ways). The point is that it takes a small insecurity that a lot of people have and feeds it into becoming something much bigger.

I'm not advocating shutting down the Internet cause of porn. Nor am I suggesting that pornography ought to be outlawed. However, I think it's a serious mistake, particularly when dealing with youngsters, to view it as an eventuality that is overall healthy for sexual development.

Some... errrr... demonstrations may be instructive and some erotica is in fact art. Perhaps it's unavoidable in the age of sensationalism that erotica would take a turn for the visual and vicarious, but it's absurd to debate the merits of 99% of the filth being released and argue that all choices (pornography, prostitution, etc.) are created equal if we'd just be more open-minded about everything.

So bad that my father hasn't complimented me on it yet. Liking short and proper haircuts of his kids, he is always very complimentary whenever I get my hair cut. Not this time.

Of course, last time he complimented my hair cut I actually hadn't gotten a hair cut (he noticed something else about it), so maybe he's reluctant to speculate again. Pretty darn hard to miss, though.

So do I now look like someone that Gattaca would want to hire?

Well, the headaches are gone. I got up at 9:30 this morning wherebouts and I'm still awake, so I seem to be doing a lot better this time around than last. Then again, I did take some suppliments today fearing the worst, so it's possible I'd be in bed drooling right now if I hadn't.

The sugar cravings are a lot worse, though. It's a good thing that I don't actually have any sugar around here or I could be consuming the stuff in cups about now.

My hunger for other foods has been a little more spotty. Cigarettes are a great appetite suppressant and I found myself pretty hungry today, but I still slipped by with under the daily recommended 2,000 calories with only 17 (25%) or so grams of fat.

So far answer to the question as to what I'm going to be doing instead of smoking seems to be "chores" and "eat toothpicks."

I've gone through about 35-40 toothpicks today.

Hopefully tomorrow, it'll be "more chores" and "room cleaning" but I'd take "eat more toothpicks" too...

"... I'll die right here on this stage." -Phil Pritchett

If I were to have a single complaint about Texas country music, it's that some songs are so overplayed that whatever affection I had for them has run its course. Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road" is one. Another is Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues".

Last Thursday, I saw Bleu Edmondson. It wasn't a remarkable show because Bleu is one of the most talented musicians in Texas, and a great show for him is therefore unremarkable - it's par the course.

Since it was a Thursday show, it ended a little on the early side. I was actually somewhat surprised when I thought he was done until I saw his manager signal that he'd play one more.

When he started singing Folsom Prison Blues, I was a bit disappointed. He was playing accoustic, but I waited for him to pick up the tempo and the rest of the band to jump back on stage.

That never happened. Instead, he sang the entire song slow, word-by-word. Oddly enough for a guy who considers lyrics the most important aspect of a song, I'd never really listened to the lyrics of FPB before. Stripped of its catchy tempo, it's a really beautifully sad song.

Bleu is the first person to date to play it as such.

He went on to play a song of his second CD that I hadn't heard him play live before. Amazingly, just about everyone that hadn't gone home started singing along. I loved the song, but I figured that since he didn't play it live, most of the people wouldn't know it as well as I do.

They did.

After he finished, he said it was the first time he'd ever played that song before an audience.

Bleu is a truly rocking country musician. Impressively, he managed to outdo himself by letting go and playing a couple accoustic ballads.

Well done.

"Read More" to see the lyrics to Folsom Prison Blues that I'd been ignoring for so long.

[Read More!]

Mark Morford has a rib-splitting and even thought-provoking (for Morford a particular feat!) article on A Casket Full Of Cheese Fries.

Let us all now make the obvious connection. Let us draw the very straight, very short line between the Swanson Hungry Man XXL chicken-strip/cheese-fries heart-attack-in-a-box TV dinner and the Goliath Casket Company of Lynn, Ind. Let us note how one leads directly, invariably, blatantly to the other.

Let us, furthermore, be reminded that there is perhaps no group in this country more maligned and abused and taunted than the overweight and the obese, and yet there is perhaps no group more directly marketed to and willfully miseducated and chronically self-abused. This is the American conundrum. This is the real cultural epidemic.

[...]

All while, simultaneously, an entirely different set of corporate snakes yanks the culture in the other direction, telling you how ugly and hideous and embarrassing obesity is and promoting "healthy" cures and pills and diets and liposuctions and flesh-ripping surgeries and anorexic models featuring sunken hollow chests and scowling eyes and puny little nonexistent asses and 10 Steps to a Firm Flat Tummy Now!

Also, a hilarious review of Swanson's All-Day Breakfast (link found within Morford article):

Usually, whenever something is cooked in this apartment, a fleet of cats line up waiting to see if they can snatch a freebie. As the breakfast became hotter and greasier, they all suddenly appeared from their mystery spots to see what they could con out of me. I smirked to the floor before throwing down the box chart featuring the sadistic nutritional facts about what was being cooked. Two of them did that screechy cat-scream thing, while the other two jetted right through the side wall, leaving two comical cat-shaped holes not unlike those typically found in Roadrunner cartoons. I know you don't believe that my cats can read, but they did the same exact thing when I threw Courtney Love's Vanity Fair issue down at them a few years ago. They're smart cats. Smart enough to avoid Swanson's and stick to the many roaches that stalk the halls of my frighteningly filthy abode.

A stench lifted from the microwave - it was like nothing I've smelled before. It was the kind of odor that had me preparing to lift the wallet off the four-week-old corpse I was about to find. But this stench! This stench was no corpse! This stench was breakfast!

This week:

Monday: I called TAG. The news from TAG wasn't good and I suspect that I'm not going to get the position. Omnitouch, the cell phone company and TAG's client, is sluggish at getting the specs to TAG. The result: Though I'm overqualified for the position, I'm competing with five weeks worth of applicants instead of the "must-fill-ASAP" positions that they were on the outset. By the time their done, they'll have 20 PhD applicants for the call center positions to choose from and I'm likely out.

Tuesday: I called Gattaca and reminded them that they were supposed to call the previous Friday.

Wednesday: They called me that morning and I called them back twice in the afternoon. To no avail. I left my cell phone number because I had to go down to Clear Lake to get a tux fitted for my brother's wedding.

Friday: My roommate informs me that they called me back Thursday morning and apparently had an interview lined up for me on Friday morning, which I of course missed because I was never informed of it. I called the Gattaca, but apparently their recruiting office takes a half-day on Fridays.

I find myself thinking about the Gattaca position later, and much like Homer Simpson's "Lisa needs braces"/"Goodbye Dental plan!" I put together the urinalysis with Gattaca's no-smoking policy.

Basically, Gattaca is a non-smoking employer. Not just in regards to smoking on the premesis, but they don't hire anyone that smokes. Obviously, this is a bit of a problem since I do smoke. Well, my thinking on the matter is that I need to quit, and having a job that doesn't allow me to would help.

The problem is that Gattaca may not see it that way. The other problem is that the thought occured to me that tobacco might get picked up by the pre-employment urinalysis in which case I would have some splainin' to do. So I did some looking in to it and discovered that tobacco/nicotene survives only a couple of days in the system (as for as urine goes anyhow).

The bad news? Since I don't know when I might be tested, I can't smoke between now and then.

The good news? If I get the job, I'll go straight from not-smoking in order to pass the screening to not-smoking because I'm employed by a tobacco-free employer, meaning that by the time my tenure at Gattaca is finished, I could well be a non-smoker for long enough that quitting completely becomes the path of least resistence. If I don't get the job, the quitting may be temporary.

Provided that I can just take it one day at a time.


This week:

Monday: I call Gattaca and have an interview set up for 9AM on Wednesday.

Six hours: I woke up Saturday morning for my weekly breakfast with Dad. Nothing too unusual until after breakfast when we got back to Dad's house and I went straight back to sleep.

Twelve hours: I got out of bed for good at about one, when the headache began to hit. It was strange seeing as how I do twelve hours without too much difficulty. Yet here it was, the headache. It's as if my head knew what my mind had decided last night.

Thirteen hours: I start cleaning out my car. The first wave is picking up the large amounts of trash inside. Once upon a time, I found three portable CD players while cleaning out my car. No such luck this time. Instead, I found a couple cartons-worth of empty cigarette packs, empty cans, and a lot of cigarette ash. As soon as I am finished rubbing, washing, and vacuuming down the car, I put in a new air freshener.

Seventeen hours: I went to Walgreens to pick up some necessary aides. I debated for a good ten minutes whether or not to get ibuprofen. My head still hurt, but I knew that I have aspirin back at the apartment. I ended up passing on the ibuprofen as well as the dietary supplements that I was desperately going to need for energy once the lethargy sets in. I figure I have the 356 should I have an emergency. Oh, and I bought 750 toothpicks and fourteen packs of sugarless gum.

Twenty hours: I ate my second meal, a can of refried beans. When I finished, I felt the tug. Not a craving, mind you, but a tug. It's sort of like driving to work in automation until you have to actually think on your feet because the road ahead is closed. When you try, you don't even know where you are. Autopilot got me there.

In a way, it was like the closed road. It was also like something was missing. Which is true. Something is definitely missing out of my day. It was almost like a conversation with a former love at the precise moment in the conversation where you used to exchange "I love you"s and instead there's silence and you're caught in that moment like a dear in headlights.

"What am I supposed to DO now?!"

I went down to Supercuts today in order to get a "trim" (I put trim in quotation marks because, as a matter of order, no matter how little I tell them to cut it, I get most of my hair whacked off).

My cutter didn't speak English particularly well, so I forewent my usual explanation as to how my hair grows a lot faster on the sides and in back and my usual request to take more off the back and sides than the top. If the average cutter that speaks English (or some derivation thereof) can't understand me, why waste my breath.

She hadn't cut a hair when she said, "Hmmm, dis is intevesting. You hair graus much more on e sides un back din on top. You want I shud cut more off di back thin de sides?"

I knew then that I was going to get a great hair cut.

Turns out I "knew" wrong.

Sigh.

When I was in the first grade, Mrs. Thompkins, the school counselor called my mother in for a meeting. Mrs. Thompkins suggested that Mom sign a document to exempt me from taking the CAT, the standardized test of the day.

Mom asked why she should exempt me if the grades don’t count. Mrs. Thompkins replied that my score would go in my record and could create problems later on.

That didn’t jibe with my astute mother, who pointed out that if I were exempted, that would go on my record, too. She also knew that though my score would have no bearing on any grades, the school’s ratings hinged on how well the students did together.

They were trying to exempt me because I was going to bring the class average down. Also, the document in question would be signing off that I have a Problem, which would likely last on my record longer than a poor standardized test score would.


When I was in the second grade they were teaching more and more reading. I had more difficulty with it than most and one afternoon after school, I talked to my teacher about it. She told me that if I read more, I’d be able to read better. “But I can’t,” I explained.

“Yes, you can,” she explained, not having looked up from grading papers during the conversation.

I missed the bus that afternoon and got a lecture by Mom, who was none-too-thrilled to have to pick me up. She was mad and I didn’t want to make it worse by telling her that I was a poor student, so I never told her why I stayed after.


Apparently, my friend Jay had The Problem. They’d given him some pills that seemed to make it better. I mentioned this in passing to Mom, who told me that she’d been told to get me checked to see if I had The Problem, but she was confident that administrators were using The Problem to justify exempting people from tests and calming down kids with poor upbringing.


In the fourth grade, I was sent to a learning therapist for reasons that were not explained to me until many years later. Throughout my elementary school career, Mom was apparently brought in to a number of parent-teacher conferences.

“Alex is a need kid, but he seems to be in his own world…”

“Alex seems to be very intelligent, but he loses focus and the worse his grades get, the less he seems to try.”

“Alex gets frustrated very easily. When grades start coming in, he stops speaking up in class and stops turning in his work.”

“He’s a bright kid, but he seems to have a Problem…”

“… paying attention in class…”

“… focusing…”

“… doodling while he’s supposed to be paying attention…”

The teachers told me many of the same things.


Every psychological profiling test I’ve taken, attention to detail has always been my weakest score.


By the time I graduated the fifth grade, I’d not failed a single class. I made an inordinate number of 70s (the lowest passing grade), though. I thought it interesting, though looking back I suspect that sympathetic teachers bumped it up so that I wouldn’t fail.


When I was in high school, if I read anything longer than five or ten pages, my mind would start drifting regardless of how interesting I found what I was reading. My reading was reductive. I'd start reading sentences without connecting one to the other. Eventually I'd be reduced to reading words. I would then not only have to re-read what I'd just read, I'd need to find the precise point that my attention drifted. If I started reading what I earlier comprehended, my mind would drift again. If I started later, I'd be lost. I read at about the pace of five pages an hour.


To this day, my reading skills are likely below average. Given my level of education, I underperform extraordinarily.


I failed the reading portion of the TAAS (the old new standardized test) in the seventh grade and had to take remedial reading my eighth grade year. My grades had steadily improved thanks to a lot of tutoring by my father. I made straight As, but I was in remedial reading. During a parent-teacher conference, the teacher told my parents that she didn't understand why I was there and even looked in to my score. That spring, I took the TAAS again and failed the reading portion again.


I spoke to my Algebra II teacher after class one day, asking her to explain something she’d talked about in class that I didn’t understand. She refused, saying that I was looking at everything in the class but her while she talked about it. If I had a question, I should have mentioned it when she was discussing it. I didn’t, so it was my Problem.


In Precalculus I raised a hand to ask her to explain a concept more clearly. She yelled at me and told me that she’d been explaining it for the last fifteen minutes and asked what I’d been doing the entire time. For once, I was paying attention and trying to understand what she was saying. She screamed that I was a degenerate. I never asked any question in any math class again. Nor did I bother trying to pay attention.


An elementary school teacher once remarked that the worse my grade is, the less I try.


I determined at an early age that I prefer learning on my own to formal instruction. That way I can take all the time I need to digest the material.


My math grades in school were my best up until Algebra II. I had difficulty with some of the concepts. They seemed to be slipping through my fingers. One minute they were there, the next they weren’t. The more I tried, the harder it got. I started making errors in long division. Eventually, I was making basic errors in addition and subtraction and then the mistakes were reduced to copying the problem down wrong.


When I was failing a math class in college that I eventually dropped, I was almost recuded in tears looking at a test I’d taken and gotten a D on. It was all stuff I did in high school. If I’d managed to even write the problem down correctly, I would have gotten a B. If I’d kept all my positive and negative signs in the right places, I would have made an A. “What is my Problem?!” I remember asking Anna.


When I was in high school, I remember taking an algebra test, scrambling to figure out everything as quickly as possible. If I could just hold on to the sense of understanding I had for a couple more minutes, I’d be complete. Then it was gone. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore and the work I’d done just ten minutes prior seemed like it was written in a foreign language.


Almost invariably, I did significantly better on the first half of my test grades than I did on the last half.


However thoroughly I knew something, the instant I was asked it in class, my mind went completely blank.

I remember when I was young seeing a man in a white coat on a TV commercial. He was bald, had a moustache, and wore glasses. He explained that some kids had a Problem paying attention. If you visited his clinic, he could recommend some drugs that would help you with them.

I was first offered drugs when I was in junior high. He was selling pot, I think, though he never specified. I declined because I was indoctrinated by DARE, that said that drugs made you someone other than yourself, which I was not interested in.


Several people have commented to me that The Problem doesn't exist. It's an excuse for the failure of lazy and unruly children and the parents that raised them. So if it's definitely not my parents, then it's me.


One of my best friends has The Problem. He takes some drugs for it and it turned his collegiate academic career around.


Main Entry: drug
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English drogge
Date: 14th century
(3) : a substance other than food intended to affect the structure or function of the body (M-W)


"Behind every problem is opportunity" -sign above my 11th grade English teacher's door.


I have a big imagination that propels my fiction writing. If I were to never have had The Problem, how many of my great ideas, taken in stolen moments in class or conversation, would never have been born?


Is it even possible for someone whose never had any treatment to graduate from college despite having The Problem?


In a conversation I recently had, of the seven participants I was one of only two that had not been diagnosed with nor had ever taken medication for The Problem.


When I first became aware of the possibility that I have The Problem, someone I know that has succeeded farther in school and life than I said that she believed they she had The Problem, too.


I don't believe she has The Problem.


Elciem doesn't believe that I have The Problem.


I've never been tested. I don't know.


My parents laughed at the first teacher that suggested that I might have The Problem.


My mother believes that The Problem was largely an invention to sell more drugs.


Pharmaceutical companies and doctors make untolds amounts of money by convincing parents that their kids have The Problem.


"[They] planned, conspired, and colluded to create, develop and promote the diagnosis of... in a highly successful effort to increase the market for its product..." -From a lawsuit filed against drugmakers.


A doctor that I am close to believes that The Problem has become a catchall diagnosis for a plethora of other learning Problems.


My father was originally skeptical of the possibility that I have The Problem, but the more he has found out about it, the more concerned he has become. He has been frequently encouraging me to get tested.


When I was first offered drugs in middle school, I declined. Several years later, I was given a pill by a friend and told to take it.

"It will make you relaxed. Even a little light-headed," I was told.

I took it. It didn't do anything. It was a sugar pill for all I know.


When he brings it up, I tell my father that I've made it this far without drugs or assistance, so it must be okay.


The day I recieved my college degree was one of the proudest of my life. It meant that I'd beat The Problem. Except that it lingers. I still have the attention span of a gnat and the short-term memory of a shark.


I'm afraid that there won't be a diagnosis or that the drugs won't work. I'm afraid that I'll discover that it wasn't The Problem, it was just me, and that The Problem's critics will apply to me. I'll find out I'm either a lazy underachiever or a stupid overachiever.


I'm also afraid that the drugs will fix everything. That I'll be able to concentrate and accomplish like never before, and find out that the person I've always been, and the person I am as I type this now, is an incomplete person.

Over at Calblog, they're discussing the benefits and costs of California splitting in to two (or four or five) states. As any student of Texas history knows, upon being admitted to the union, Texas was given a few special priveledges such as flying our state flag at the same height as our national one and, more pertinent to the discussion, the option to branch off into as many as five different states.

So the question for my fellow Texan readers is why Texas never took advantage of this option. The history is long and winding and at the time largely involved the balance of slave and free states. However, from a purely logical standpoint, Texans would be better represented were it five different states:

Instead of two electoral votes, there would be ten.

Representation in the House would remain constant or possibly negligably improve depending on how the states were drawn up.

Right now Texas is a write-off for the Republican Party. Splitting the state would make them more competitive and therefore (at least the competitive states) would have the attention of both political parties.

And what are the costs and downsides?

We're Texas, dagnabbit.

Well that settles it. Splitting up would be stupid.

DECEMBER 22, 2000 - HOUSTON, TX

It was Phil Pritchett's last regular show in Houston. Brian and Jay had made it down from Austin and Waco respectively, and we were joined by my newly exxed ex-girlfriend Anna, our mutual friend Pierce, and his sister June. It was the largest group we'd ever gotten together for a Phil show, which was usually restricted to just Brian, Jay in myself. In fact, it had become one of the traditions that helped solidify our friendship for some time to come. Phil had become an institution among us, and through the other three we were trying to bring over converts to the religion that was about to move to Tennessee.

Why do all the right songs
speak of leaving and moving along?
This one my dear
says I'm staying here
cause forever with you's not too long.

It came at one of the biggest turning points I'd had in my relatively short life. Anna and I had broken up less than a week before, ending a four-year relationship that had been moving apart for the last few months. It was amicable, as far as these things go, and we'd amazingly survived it as friends. I spent more time that evening talking to Brian and Jay, though, unsure of what to say to someone I loved very much, but already felt like a figure from my last. Jay and Brian, in our relatively newfound tightly-knit three-way friendship, had become my present. The girl that it seemed would be my future was at her then-boyfriend's house, setting her own past apart.

Why do all the textbooks
teach mathematics
or perhaps how to cook?
I'd like to read a few
about loving you
but I just don't know where to look.

Blind Luck, a rock group trying to move away from its country roots, opened for Phil as they had the last few shows. They were noticeably improving every show and this one was no different. They had the advantage of an extremely attractive lead singer, so they grew on Anna and June considerably quicker than they had grown on Brian, Jay, and myself. We'd initially endured them waiting for Phil, but with each show I made more and more of an effort to get there in time to see their act. Before long, I would watch them open for other groups and leave when the headliners took the stage. They had the advantage of an extremely attractive lead singer, so they grew on Anna and June considerably quicker than they had grown on Brian, Jay, and myself.

Phil eventually made it on stage, wearing a two-tone brown cowboy shirt. Pierce wasn't very much in to country - and looking at June, I could tell she wasn't, either - so I had played down the country tone of much of Phil's earlier stuff. Phil's attire wasn't helping my case any. In the end, though, Phil sounds like Phil and he moves beyond genre with his sturdy, distinct voice. I have been to so many Pritchett shows prior and his solo returns since that the particular set he plays escapes me. He did catch my attention by playing his most popular song halfway through the show. He generally would save that song for the end of the show, never failing to impress us with his creative guitar playing that would make the five-minute song a fifteen minute closer or encore.

Why must it always be ending?
I'm always waiting for more.
I've got a cigarette lighter
that I'm saving for the encore.

By that point Jay, Brian, and I were standing off to the side and moving to the music. Pierce would later say that I needed to "learn what rhythm is," but I didn't care. I'd decided to stay relatively sober so that I wouldn't miss a minute of his show, unlike a previous instance where I still can't remember much of what happened that night. Phil signed the back of my CD that night "Quit drinking so much!" I am certain with a few Schlaugers, I'd have been much more impressive. Pierce wouldn't agree but Jay, after an equal number of Schlaugers, certainly would.

Between the show and the encore, my mind tried to absorb the world that was changing around me. Somewhere across town my future was fighting with her future's past. I would glance over at my past; she was sitting at our table talking and joking with Pierce, who would become her future. Phil was on stage playing his heart out in the last show in front of an audience that was becoming his past as he headed for Nashville. Beside me were Jay and Brian, who, despite living hundreds of miles away, were the only ones not going anywhere.

Why do all the great days
have to end in a twilighted haze?
I'd like to see one
hold on to the Sun
and cure it of its setting ways.

It was an exciting time, whether I realized it at the time or not. I think a part of me was there just to forget the doubts I was having about my future across town, the regrets about my past sitting across the room, and living, for once, in the present. It was hard to let go of what I once thought would never end, looking at someone I loved more than I was ever able to demonstrate.

I wondered what Phil's encore was going to be, hoping beyond hope it would be the song that he had never played in all the times that I had seen him perform. Stories had been past around that he would never play it for sentimental reasons because he attached it to a painful memory in his life. It was a shame, because it was one of the best songs in his arsenal. Finally, after his second and presumably last encore song, we were ready to go. That's when we heard the chords. It was the song. He was playing it at last. As a final goodbye to his fans, he finally played "The Encore."

Why do all the right songs
speak of leaving and moving along?
This one my dear
says I'm staying here
cause forever with you's not too long...

It's a song about trying to hold on to what's passing you by. I couldn't help but look at Anna, think of her parents that would never be my in-laws, and purge the memories of the life I had walked away from just five days before. I would hear Phil play the song again, nearly a year later, on my last date with the girl across town that I had thought was my future before I walked away, yet again, under very different of circumstances.

Phil eventually came back. Anna found the happiness she deserves with Pierce. What was then my future disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Jay went back to Waco. Brian went back to Austin. I went back home. We all got on with our lives. Sometimes, there is no encore. Sometimes there shouldn't be.

Why must it always be ending
always waiting for more
but I've got a cigarette lighter
and I'm waiting for the encore...

-Phil Pritchett, "The Encore"

BLEU!!!!!!

Dude, Governor, you need to stop sucking at her. She's deflating!

Item	Calories	Fat Cals	Fats	Sat Fats	Carbs	Fiber	Sodium
Rfrd. Beans	420	35	7%	0%	25%	84%	88%
Crackers	120	0	0%	0%	8%	0%	14%
Burritos	500	180	32%	35%	24%	21%	38%
Soft Drink	120	0	0%	0%	10%	0%	1%
Milk	640	0	0%	0%	32%	0%	40%
Totals	1800	215	39%	35%	99%	105%	181%

Item	Calories	Fat Cals	Fats	Sat Fats	Carbs	Fiber	Sodium
Beef	540	180	33%	45%	33%	0%	100%
Mont. Cheese	160	90	16%	30%	0%	0%	14%
Tortilla	120	0	1%	0%	8%	8%	14%
Rfrd Beans	455	0	0%	0%	28%	95%	70%
Crackers	150	0	0%	0%	10%	0%	17%
Milk	240	0	0%	0%	12%	0%	15%
Totals	1665	270	50%	75%	91%	103%	230%

It's policy here at RAW360 to comment on current events only after we have any chance of getting any linkage. That way, this blog goes largely unnoticed by those that would wish to harm me.

Or something.

Actually, the main reason that I don't have a whole lot to say on the topic is that I don't really know enough about Mr. McNabb or NFL coverage to really have that much to say about it. I was raised in Houston during the Warren Moon years so a black QB is not a novelty to my eyes and Moon was neither overrated or underrated. He was there, he was talented, but by his own admission he wasn't a champion.

Regardless, the debate on the topic has predictably been somewhat distressing. My first thought on the topic was that this was exactly what Rush Limbaugh needed not to do and that he was only adding fuel to his critics' fire by doing so.

The second question was whether or not he was right. That question was obscured by the intentional misreading of what Limbaugh actually said. He neither said nor implied that black quarterbacks aren't as good as white ones. He said two things: (1) Donovan McNabb is overrated and (2) the media hypes black quarterbacks.

Limbaugh's critics have cited it as racist and then proceed to knock down the strawman that blacks don't make good quarterbacks (which Limbaugh neither said nor implied). To suggest that we're at an age where quarterbacks are only quarterbacks and not black and white ones seems to be the only area in which liberals believe that we've made racial progress.

Or at least that's what I've been hearing the last two weeks. Before that Stephen Chapman of the National Review had heard enough that he felt obligated to decry the notion that black QBs aren't given a fair shake:

So what did New York Times football writer Mike Freeman have to say about this? He reached the same conclusion he always reaches when the subject of black NFL quarterbacks comes up: They never get a truly fair shake. "No matter how big a star you become," he informed Vick, "some people will always view you as a black man first and a quarterback second." In this he is in perfect accord with another Times football writer, Thomas George. Last season, after the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb ran for more yards in a game than any other quarterback in 28 years, George worried that he would be dismissed as just another brother who can't pass-"because of pro football's meager history of blacks playing the position and because of the penchant of so many people to pigeonhole them."

So while Mike Freeman and Thomas George suggest that the media pigeonholes black quarterbacks and doesn't appreciate them, Rush Limbaugh takes the opposite position that the media overcompensates the historical biases and gives certain black quarterbacks (McNabb) a free ride. Yet it's Limbaugh that is hammered to the wall for bringing race into the sport.

However, Freeman, George, and Limbaugh aren't really attacking black quaterbacks (in general) or white ones as much as they are the media. That's who Limbaugh was aiming his barrels at.

Of course, I'm loathe to defend Limbaugh in any manner, so I'll at least reiterate that I think it was a stupid thing to say for a number of reasons (whether it was correct or not), first and foremost that people watch sports shows for... well... sports. Limbaugh's pulling the subject over to the politics of sports media was simply attention-pandering that backfired. A discussion on the topic may be healthy, but it was the wrong venue and Limbaugh was the worst possible messenger.

As for whether his criticisms of McNabb were correct, their doesn't seem to be a consensus on the matter. Former 49ers quarterback Steve Young believes that McNabb ought to be benched but Weekly Standard writer Ed Walsh disagrees.

For two great analyses on the subject, check out Alan Berra, who believes that McNabb is overrated and it's at least in part due to media sympathies to a black quarterback:

And even if you say the stats [that suggest mediocre QB Brad Johnson is better than McNabb] don't matter and that a quarterback's job is to win games, Johnson comes out ahead. Johnson has something McNabb doesn't, a Super Bowl ring, which he went on to win after his Bucs trounced McNabb's Eagles in last year's NFC championship game by a score of 27-10. The Bucs and Eagles were regarded by everyone as having the two best defenses in the NFL last year. When they played in the championship game, the difference was that the Bucs defense completely bottled up McNabb while the Eagles defense couldn't stop Johnson.

In terms of performance, many NFL quarterbacks should be ranked ahead of McNabb. But McNabb has represented something special to all of us since he started his first game in the NFL, and we all know what that is.

On the other hand, ESPN Page 2 writer Ralph Wiley believes that Limbaugh is full of hot-air:

The great thing about text, even in an audio/video sound-bite world, is that sometimes it's the only way to closely examine truth and falsehood.

Being correct has gotten a bad name, because all somebody has to do is shout "political!" in front of your correctness, and suddenly it's a bad thing.

Now if Rush had e-mailed me, I would've told him, "Rush, if you want to generalize about unspoken feelings about black quarterbacks, I'd advise against it. But, hey, you're you and you're gonna do what you're gonna do. I'd wait until I had a speaking gig in Chicago, if I were you, then you can questions Kordell Stewart's abilities until your heart's content. At least you'll be right about the football part."

Even if Rush had kept reading his Page 2 R-Dub & Road Dog NFL columns (he probably did) he would at least have been delivered of the opinion that the Eagles were lacking in areas around and other than McNabb. But Rush didn't do that. Or worse, he did, and then flew in the face of it, rendering any prior compliments to me moot. He chose to go after Donovan McNabb and make him the anti-affirmative action baby.

Wrong guy.

Via Pete I discovered this hilarious site that catalogues humorous quotes from IRC chats. Funny stuff and if you keep clicking on it, it'll show you more.

[GokuSSJ4] My first car was free
[Genome] GokuSSJ4 u stole it?!!
[GokuSSJ4] Nah my parents gave it to me
[GokuSSJ4] lol
[Genome] they stole it???

-

[andy] I want to live in a camaro, not a van.
[WIP] You can't put a waterbed in a camaro.
[andy] that sounds suspiciously like a bet.

-

* Kaos legally owns Unknown Artist - Track 3 and doesn't pirate at all!
[Kitsa] oo, I love that song

-

[kindman34] fubar, how do you spend your time off-line?
[fubar-42o] what. you mean like single-player?

-

[goo] 4 steps to a happy marriage...
[goo] 1. It is important to find a man that cooks and cleans.
[goo] 2. It is important to find a man that makes good money.
[goo] 3. It is important to find a man that likes to have great sex.
[goo] 4. It is very, very, very important that these three men never meet.

More selections can be found at the No-Lyfe Journal.

Lee Ann Morawski smacks down hard on the Baby Boomers. As usual with Lee Ann, I love even the parts I don't agree with.

The self-destructive infantilism that is Permanent Adolescence has been rotting modern American society from the inside out. An entire generation has rejected the responsibilities of adulthood and demanded an eternal youth full of instant pleasure and no consequences. Everything and everyone else exists to either subsidize their games or to act as pawns to further the fun. Yes, the Boomers, spoiled beyond redemption by the alleged “Greatest generation” and spawners of the paralytically cynical Gen X, have broken with society as anyone knew it and have striven to remake the ruins in their own image. Viewing the world completely in terms of what will give them immediate pleasure, they and the modern culture they have forged have cast off the necessary duties that make society function. Not just big duties, like child-rearing or caring for aged parents, but little duties as well, like saying “please” and “thank you.” Not that anyone else can shirk these duties. Woe unto any older parent who insists their fully-grown Boomer kid pay his own freight. Woe to any half-civilized trophy child who doesn’t treat his elders with the respect he was never taught.

Good stuff.

This is ingenious!

"The women are issued a receipt for their partners when they hand them in and can pick them up again when they return it to us later," Alexander Stein, manager of the 'Nox Bar' in the northern city of Hamburg told Reuters on Tuesday.

The men are given a name badge on arrival and for 10 euros ($11.80) they get two beers, a hot meal, televised football and games.

Stein said the idea for the Saturday afternoon men's creche, or "Maennergarten," came from a female customer who thought it would be a good way of getting shot of her husband so she could shop in peace.

This has been a long time coming!

For those of you not reading Rob, Kevin, Greg, or Charles, Houston mayoral candidate Bill White is a bit under fire for a proposal he devised in 1997 while the chairman of the state Democratic Party barring military personnel from voting in local elections unless they intended to return to the state once their service was completed.

One of Charles Kuffner's commenters said:

The point was that they weren't living there. They've been shipped overseas. If they're voting, they're voting absentee regardless of the state where their votes will be counted.

Many people who serve our country overseas, including those in the military and the State Department, claim residency in Texas while overseas. Why? Simple--no state income tax.

But unless these individuals intend to live in Texas upon their return, why should they be voting in local elections?

To which I snarkily replied:

Gee, why should he have any say in voting in New Jersey, either? After all, he's not there either when he's serving overseas, and while he's stateside in the military training, he's in a different state, so why let him vote?

How does one declare where they intend to live once they're out? Why should they have to jump through that extra hoop and be forced to know what tomorrow holds because they're defending our country?

Charles entered the fray and asked:

Alex, why shouldn't the state you came from be the default? Surely there's more of a connection there. Again, as an out-of-state student, I was told I couldn't get a Texas driver's license until I had a Texas address, and my college PO box didn't count. That's what was meant by residency, some kind of permanent address, which until I moved to Houston meant my parents' house. That doesn't mean I couldn't drive. I had a NY state driver's license and a NY state voter's registration card. What's the big deal?

Well, because military isn't summer camp or college. People that go off to college are generally still dependents on their parents. This is particularly true if they're living on campus (ie no permanent address) and they're living out of state. If for some reason this is not the case, then they are very unlikely to be living on campus and therefore will have the permanent address they need to vote locally.

Soldiers, on the other hand, come from a much wider variety of backgrounds than out-of-state college students. Once they leave, there is a much greater likelihood that they won't be going back when they are finished. They may stay in the state where they are stationed stateside or they may go to a different place entirely. Regardless, they are emancipated when they leave and to be honest, this is precisely the reason that some join the military to begin with.

Offhand, I know two people that are presently in the military. I'm going to use one as a perfect example (and she's not an isolated case).

I first met Jessica when she was fifteen. She was living in Midlothian, Texas, splitting time between her mother and her father for however long each of them could tolerate a kid around. Then, when she was sixteen, she spent the summer with her grandmother in Horatio, Arkansas and her mother never came to pick her back up. Her grandmother took her in and she stayed there until she won a free-ride scholarship to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Unfortunately in college she had some personal difficulties that spilled over into her school work, nullified the scholarship, and wanted her to get as far away from Arkansas. With no money for college and nowhere to go, she joined the military.

Though she was stationed in Georgia, let's pretend that she was stationed in Texas and The Bill White Plan was put in to effect. She has no intention of staying in Texas or going back to Arkansas when she graduates. Under White's plan, she wouldn't be able to vote here. If something were to happen to her grandmother, she wouldn't be able to vote their either. She has no "home" to go back to.

Now, let's take the other person that I know in the military. Joe graduated from high school in Illinois and didn't have many prospects when he met a military recruiter and signed up. Like Jessica, he was stationed in Georgia, but we'll again put him in Bill White's Texas.

Joe wanted to leave Illinois in large part to get away from his parents. Nothing as bad as Jessica's, mind you, but he wanted to get out. Unfortunately, under the White Plan, if he wants to vote, he would dependent on his parents in order to keep residency to be able to vote their or he'd have to essentially agree to live in Texas/Georgia when his service is done.

Why should this be the case? Jessica is on good terms with her grandmother (again, as long as she's healthy) and Joe may want to live in Texas/Georgia when he's done, but why should it be their burden to have to maintain ties to their home states in order to exercise their Constitutional right to vote?

Because some Hispanics lost in Val Verde County? Because too many of their fellow soldiers vote Republican? Try again.

I'm choosing two real-life example here, but there are a hundred reasons why they may not maintain residency in their old state (or may not be able to) and why their home state (be it Arkansas, Illinois, or wherever) may not be amenable to the idea or if they don't want to live in Texas/Georgia OR Illinois/Arkansas, then they're being forced to vote in a state they consciously left if they're allowed or if they're not, they can't vote. At best, they'll have to spend an undue amount of time just to win a right guaranteed to them in the Constitution.

[This post was edited to alter names]

I'm working on some things, so if it looks odd, don't worry about it. Refresh and it should be fine

I am number three for Mayor Lee Brown Sucks!!

Two nights ago, Buck's Dad hooking up a rented steel pump to the back of his pickup. His wife was working with him, trying to guide the hitch to the hatch. He got it and made a thirteen-point turn to the gate. She punched in the passcode combination to get out of the gate and he started going through.

Most gates have a sensor that prevent it from closing against a vehicle. It'll hit it, sure, but once it feels the pressure it'll reopen to account for the fact that not all cars are the same size. If a complex is too cheap to get that (which of course ours is) then it'll at least let you keep it open by retyping the passcode when it starts to close.

Not our complex's, of course. Instead, it has to close all the way to reopen, making it impossible not to get your car slammed by the heavy metal gate or make you physically hold it open, which they tell you is the equivalent of vandalism because it breaks the gate, which then won't close at all.

So the gate not only slammed against Buck's Dad's pump, but it actually got caught on it. He tried to pull it off, but couldn't. He tried to slowly pull away, but couldn't. At some point he said "Frag it!", went back to his car, put it in reverse, slammed on the gas and crushed 1/5 of the fence.

It was great.

I talked to him a bit later. He'd seen that I saw what happened and wanted to make sure I wasn't going to rat him out. "Are you kidding? I hate this complex. I hate this management. I hate that gate!"

"Sounds like you have about as high an opinion of this place as I do," he said.

"Lower, probably."

"I hear ya."

I've talked to no less than four people about the gate and the reaction is unanimous: "Sweet!"

It's kind of funny, when you think about it. It reflects badly on our apartment homes to have a broken gate like that. It's also incidents like that which make rent cost more than it should. Nonetheless, the reaction seems to be "If it hurts management, I like it."

It takes a lot to create such hostility among residents, but our complex's management has come through. Yesterday morning, I got a letter from the management pusuant to another rent hike. Since we're moving out on the fourth of next month, it won't affect us, but in the year and a half that we've lived here, rent has now gone up 46%.

So quothe my neighbor: "What? They think because they paint the place and suddenly it's the Galla?"

Of course, their idea of "painting the place" means slapping on a new coat of paint on top of the old (as opposed to stripping it so it doesn't look like makeup over a third-degree burn), but it is nonetheless the most expensive paint job in history, I think.

As a new feature, if you can call it that, I'm going to recount my food in-take each day. For me, this provides a great venue for tracking how much I eat and an incentive to remain disciplined seeing as how my mistakes will be posted for everyone to see. For you, it provides nothing except a post to skip each day. Since I have no tip jar, just consider this the price of reading this blog :).

I'll post more on it later, but that's the gyst of it.

Food	Calories	Fat Cals	Fat	Sat Fat	Sodium	Carbs	Fiber
Turkey Chili	400	20	6%	6%	90%	22%	64%
Crackers	240	0	0%	0%	28%	16%	0%
Milk	480	0	0%	0%	30%	24%	0%
Totals	1120	20	6%	6%	148%	62%	64%

Kevin has a post on Dale Robertson's Chron column about Drayton McLane's critics:

But the reality is this: The Astros were upper middle of the pack in both attendance and in payroll. They were one of the few teams in baseball's chaotic solar system whose performance and revenue-stream planets were pretty much in alignment. It is because they collapsed at the finish line -- and because we now know, courtesy of Forbes magazine's latest rankings of the 400 richest Americans, the owner's personal net worth has increased by almost $700 million since Minute Maid Park was voted into existence -- that we are irate all over again.

McLane's insistence upon keeping the Astros' income and outgo balanced, and separate from his other profit sources, ensures him of an ongoing perception problem. While he is determined to run his franchise like a real business, Wagner and the rest of us insist he run it like George W. Bush does the country, with no regard for the bottom line.

Are the Astros a private company or a quasi-public entity? That debate will rage for as long as professional sports exist.

[...]

Whatever happens, Drayton again will hold the line on payroll. Disagree with that? It's his team. Either buy the Astros from him, or don't buy his tickets. Those are your options.

Okay, I'm officially FUMING. If Drayton doesn't want us having expectations of his team, he perhaps should have thought of that BEFORE WE PADDED HIS POCKETBOOK WITH $700 MILLION.

I don't really follow the Astros close enough to have an opinion as to whether or not McLane should be doing more in order to get the team past the finish line. He's done a better job than McMillen (sp?) did way back when, but Kevin makes a credible case that he ought to be doing more.

That Robertson mentions the stadium and that the public/private nature of professional baseball is up for debate, it doesn't qualify as rebutting it when you just move on to tell the fans to quit whining.

Whether we buy tickets or not, we've paid for this team to play here. Because it's funded with taxpayer money and because referenda are held, that moves it out of Drayton-McLane's-own-damn-business and into the public sphere. We have EVERY right to be as LOUD and OBNOXIOUS as we want to... AND EVEN COMMIT THE INTERNET FAUX PAS BY TYPING IN ALL CAPS WITH DOZENS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS IF WE'RE PISSED OFF ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Charles Kuffner has a post about the (relatively) new fitness center at the University of Houston, which has gotten attention from none other than the New York Times:

In the abstract, Kathy Anzivino believes there must be some pinnacle of amenities that universities simply cannot surpass, some outer limit so far beyond the hot tubs, waterfalls and pool slides she offers at the University of Houston that even the most pampered students will never demand it and the most recruitment-crazed colleges will never consent to put it on their grounds.

She just has a hard time picturing what that might be.

Ms. Anzivino should know that the consent of the University of Houston population was dubious, at best. Though the administration really supported the idea. Far too much, in fact.

When I first heard about the Rec Center vote, it seemed like a pretty good idea. The more I read about it (particularly in relation to the fee hike as compared to membership fee for alums, should they elect to join) the more uncertain I became about it. The administration's treatment of the topic, however, was enough to push me over the edge into vocal opposition (I wrote a column for the Daily Cougar opposing the idea).

I could have been convinced on the idea, but all I kept hearing was that we needed it to become a major university - whatever that means. They even mentioned it in conjunction to Tier I status, which was President Art Smith's project. Truth be told, they actually didn't put up much information at all. In fact, their desire was not to facilitate discussion, but rather to suppress it.

It was the administration's intent to hold a vote, get 75% or higher approval, and take advantage of the bond opportunity to get the thing built. The powers-that-be (lead by Dr. Elwyn Lee - husband of Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee) hired an expensive marketing firm for the pitch to the student population and the state.

Much to their surprise, various groups rallied in opposition to the project. Fraternities, campus conservatives, and most importantly, everyday students who thought it was a crummy idea. What was supposed to be a formality became an actual contested election. This was not welcome.

Regulations on signs and fliers that had never been enforced were suddenly justifying the tearing down of every opposition sign. The "line" that people couldn't campaign on was moved further and further back (initially there wasn't going to be a line). The only people who could even hear that this wasn't universally heralded was by way of the honest Daily Cougar.

The administration kept pointing out that the "pro" signs were subject to the same limitations as the "anti" ones, which was true, but neglected the fact that every huge banner encouraging kids to go vote (designed by the marketing firm, natch) listed all the great and wonderful things this would provide without the $75/semester fee hike and stood as advertisement enough on their own.

A couple days before the vote was held, I was informed that whether it passed or not, they were going forward (with asking the state approval) and that the vote was non-binding (note: it had actually always been non-binding. That's not what they changed, they just kept that part of it quiet).

The vote passed by under 300 votes (53%-47%) and the state was pretty quick to approve it, and now it's featured in the New York Times.

Ohio State University is spending $140 million to build what its peers enviously refer to as the Taj Mahal, a 657,000-square-foot complex featuring kayaks and canoes, indoor batting cages and ropes courses, massages and a climbing wall big enough for 50 students to scale simultaneously. On the drawing board at the University of Southern Mississippi are plans for a full-fledged water park, complete with water slides, a meandering river and something called a wet deck — a flat, moving sheet of water so that students can lie back and stay cool while sunbathing.

Well, at least these facilities weren't around when the Wellness Center was concocted. Could have been much worse.

Though I'd like to think I'm a bit more than a quarter practical.



I'm also going to put this link on the post, which talks about the "Big 5" method more thoroughly.

Update: Wrong.


Errrm... maybe? (short test)



This is a little more like it (long test)

I'd like to apologize to University of Texas fans everywhere. You see, the only UT game I've watched this year is the game against Arkansas. Today, I decided to turn it on. We had a 17-3 lead. I have now turned the television off after watching UT's kick returner fumble the ball on the twenty yardline with the Longhorns losing 20-17.

I am apparently jinxing the team. Having turned off the television, I can only hope that they can score and take over the lead again. Unfortunately, I haven't left them as much not-jinxed-by-Alex time as they need, and for that I sincerely apologize.

Update: As Kevin mentioned in the observations, UT came back to win the game. I kid you not, it wasn't two plays after I turned the game off that K-State fumbled and UT started turning the game around and apparently shut the Wildcats down.

And all it took was for me not to watch...

I saw Darkman II last night. I haven't seen the original. To be perfectly honest, I didn't find the movie to be very credible.

Backstory: Payton Westlake, aka Darkman, was in some nefarious accident which left his face seared and gave him superpowers. He affords himself a big lab (I guess Westlake was rich?) in which he produces flawless prosthetic faces that allow him to walk amongst the general population and emulate just about anyone out there.

Understood.

There's just one thing, though. When he's not wearing a mask, he has no lips. So I wonder how it is that he can talk. There are several letters of the alphabet that clearly cannot be pronounced without lips ("M" for example) yet he not only speaks clearly, but with his distinctive accent. I have the same problem with He-Man's Skeletor character. Maybe they explained this in the first movie (or portions of the second that I missed), but that just doesn't seem very credible to me.

That's about all I have to say about Darkman II.


I'm not sure why I watched Darkman III (they were running some sort of marathon, I'd imagine). I guess it's because I'm developing a somewhat similar idea and I could freely incorporate some ideas of the Darkman mythos into it without copying it (which I wouldn't do because I'd like mine to be... well... good).

I was actually pleasently surprised. The whole lip (or lack thereof) issue was there, but I didn't notice it as much because it had much more of a plot and more interesting characters (and a heroine that did not wear nail polish). Jeff Fahey was the bad guy and he makes a very good one with his sleek face and creepy blue eyes. The development of Darkman (Westlake) was also better, though unsurprisingly [SPOILERS] he pretty much ended up in the same place that he began to make room for additional sequels should they see fit.[/SPOILERS]

I had several non-lip-related issues with the movie and the way that they handled certain aspects of it, but grading it on a curve, I actually found it somewhat worthwhile. Not that I'd recommend it, or anything, but unlike some other Darkman sequels, it is actually more entertaining than the informercials it was competing against.

It also makes me somewhat interested in seeing the original, which was done by Sam Raimi of Spider-Man (as well as Evil Dead) fame. Darkman was apparently created when they couldn't get the rights to The Shadow, which was eventually made with Alec Baldwin (and is underrated, in my opinion).

Update: Sam Raimi, who was in charge of the first Darkman and is known for doing Spider-Man and his work on the Evil Dead movies apparently is also responsible for M.A.N.T.I.S., a 90's superhero TV movie and series involving a paralized scientist who invents a supersuit to get around and becomes a superhero. It was quite well done and like Darkman one of Raimi's creations. My desire to see Darkman has just climbed another notch.

I added a picture of Darkman's face in the "Read More" section for those of you who're wondering about my talk on the subject of Darkman's lips (or lack thereof). I thought about using that picture for the post, but it's not the most pleasent thing to look at. [Read More!]

For those of you that really care, you've probably already heard. I've never played Half-Life but it's still darn interesting to me, so I'll post on it anyway.

Apparently Gabe Newell, the founder of the software company that produces Half-Life, had his email account hacked in to and someone located about seventy-eight kajillion dollars worth of code which is now swimming all across the Internet.

Yesterday, it was confirmed:

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.
Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.
Here is what we know:
1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.

Well, this sucks.

What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.

We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.

Gabe

He has a knack for understatement, it would seem.

Yikes.

I don't generally rely on the Houston Press to approach any issue fairly. That's not a knock against it as their articles are often interesting because of the narrative, and narrative is inherently biased. I certainly never expect its narrative to be sympathetic to conservatives as it is an alt-weekly anti-establishment paper.

So it was with much surprise that I found its most recent cover story, on an annual anti-abortion display at the University of Houston, in a quite fair manner and one that was, if anything, sympathetic to the pro-lifers.

The arrival of the fetus exhibit at the University of Houston in March 2001 shook up an otherwise sleepy campus. For the three days the exhibit was on display, classes buzzed with students and faculty debating abortion. Some made signs in protest and struck up chants within earshot of the display. Coat hangers were hung in effigy. The exhibit ran as the top story in The Daily Cougar because, as one editor put it, "We don't get stuff like that here."

It's hard to make generalizations about a student community of 34,000. It's harder still when you have a diverse school like UH with a fairly even mix of white, Asian, Hispanic, black and international students all jumbled about, at various stages of finding their identities. Many from both the left and the right agree with one student's assessment that UH is a "quietly liberal" place, with nearly everyone emphasizing the "quietly" part.

"You can tell on campus when there's something big coming on," says Christian Schmidt, a senior who wrote about the event for the campus newspaper. "I had never seen that many people hanging out in Butler Plaza on the lawn. It was just huge."

I was a student when it first went up a couple years back and remember it very well. It's genuinely rare that there is any large display at Butler Plaza. Really, Butler Plaza is mostly just a large grassy area in the center of campus that I never even realized had a name until I read this article.

So needless to say, it was unusual to see an twenty-foot something-or-other with dozens of people around it on my way to the technology building. I didn't know what it was at first, but I found out soon enough.

It was not helpful.

It wasn't helpful for two reasons. First of all, I'd seen most of the pictures before. I had just come around to the pro-life perspective, though I'd been against late-term abortions for some time prior to that. I didn't need a whole lot of convincing in that regard and its placing was within eyeshot of where I usually ate. Also not helpful.

The second reason it wasn't helpful, and its benefactors might not view this as a negative thing, was the nature of the debate it riled. Abortion is a rather sensitive subject and difficult enough to discuss calmly without a backdrop of bloody imagery.

Instead of facilitating debate, it shut me up on the subject for quite some time. I remember some of the reactions. My RA, who was at least nominally Republican, immediately switched parties. People with whom I was on good relations (that were not bra-burning feminists by any stretch of the imagination) were uttering that my viewpoint fascist and mysogynistic. The backlash was so strong that I don't recall a single pro-life person that I knew mustering the gumption to speak up on the issue.

I was of a mixed mind on the display itself. On one hand, I do agree that they are pictures that everyone needs to see at some point in their life so that they might see what all of the fuss is about. On the other hand, the center of the campus did not strike me as the ideal place to do it. It's analogous to that friend who won't shut up about a particular issue when you have other things on your mind.

University of Houston students in particular usually have a lot on their minds.

Regardless, there are free speech issues at work and since Butler Plaza had been set aside for free speech, then free speech means free speech. UH's (and the state's) attempt to say that some speech is more protected than others doesn't hold up. The "time and manner" clause could be (and often would be) used to suppress viewpoints unevenly.

For anyone wondering, I'd also argue that an anti-war organization with grotesque pictures of war would be equally inappropriate -- and equally protected.

That said, I don't have a problem with "free speech zones" per se and don't believe that UH didn't have the right to disallow any speech in the Plaza, regardless of content. The courts disagree with me on this matter, but some protests and signs are destracting if not downright disruptive (the WTO protests come to mind and their arguments that free speech zones were inherently censorship did not ring true to me there, either).

On another note, one thing I did not realize was that one of my favorite professors at UH, Dr. Ross Lence, was the faculty advisor to the organization that put up the exhibit. He was an amazing professor who taught me a great deal.

Anyhow, the article is long but well worth a read. It does a spectacular job of capturing the political attitudes of the University of Houston as well as how our somewhat sober campus was rocked by the events that transpired.

I'm mulling over whether to go see Owen Temple tonight and/or The Derailers. Kevin and Ed are going to see the latter, and I'd like to, but venturing downtown during rush hour isn't markedly appealing to me (though Ed is coming down from Humble... man am I lazy). Plus tomorrow night I'm mulling over seeing Houston Marchman at the Firehouse. Saturday, of course, is Randy Rogers.

I'm also quite pleased to see Bleu Edmondson playing at the Firehouse next week. I've missed his last two shows (caught him in Huntsville, though). Edmondson remains in the exclusive Top Five Country Bands on my list. Hopefully I'll be able to convince Kevin and Callie to see them at long last.

Some band called Maroon 5 is playing on Monday. Ed has some nice things to say about them and he has good taste, appreciating Phil Pritchett and all.

Phil Pritchett is playing at the Firehouse on November 1, though I won't be able to make it. That'll be the second show in a row to be missed. He's going to be opening for Two Tons of Steel, whom I've not been particularly impressed with on LP, though I've never seen them live (and won't, apparently, sigh).

On the brighter side, though, he's coming out with a new live CD! That'll be his seventh overall and his third live, which is impressive for someone whose first release was in 1998. The recording is going to be in College Station in early November and Dallas a few days later. If Gattaca hires me, I won't be able to make either of them! Arrrrrh!!!

Unforgiveable.

Adam Carroll is coming to the Mucky Duck on 10/18. Adam Carroll is underappreciated as are most folk musicians. He reminds me of the folk side of Scott Miller (or vice-versa, actually, since I knew AC first).

Payne County Line has an interview with Mike McClure that I found noteworthy.

Mike's apparently going to be opening for Honeybrowne on Saturday a week. That's a travesty of justice, but I look forward to finally getting to see his band in action.

The Great Divide is playing some time next month in what should be another great show, if the last one was any indication.

CDs I still need to get: Roger Creager's new one, Thrift Store Cowboys' first release, Alejandro Escavedo's "Gravity" and/or "Man Under The Influence", a Max Stalling CD (I have one, need more), and others that I don't recall, I'm sure.

An interesting article from the New York Times about the increasing presence of God on network television:

This week networks will present a staggering array of new shows, each one painstakingly chosen to tap into viewers' latest moods. A surprising number of executives have put their money on piety, and this season's spirituality is far more peculiar than past feel-good shows like "Touched by an Angel."

CBS has "Joan of Arcadia," a gritty crime drama about a high school student whose visits from God converge with the police work of her father. Fox has two: "Tru Calling," another moody crime drama where God, not forensics, guides the heroine, and "Wonderfalls," a sitcom in which a benevolent higher being uses a sarcastic young slacker to work his wonders. Advertisers who complain that there is no novelty or break-out surprise to the 2003-4 season are not looking closely enough. An eschatological shift in programming can be found all across television, from HBO's "Carnivŕle," a 12-part battle between Good and Evil set in the Depression, to Showtime's "Dead Like Me," in which the dead return to earth to help others make the transition to the afterlife, albeit in a hip, sardonic way. But the spiritual power awarded pretty, nubile heroines is by far the most striking element, a backlash against Buffy, Zena and "Girls Gone Wild."

Unfortunately, as per Times policy the article costs $3, and I only get access to this courtesy of Theosebes.

As network television is nothing if not cynical and I don't watch much TV to begin with, my hopes in this regard aren't that high. Nonetheless, I view it as a positive development for a number of reasons.

I think that religion, if not God per se, is a missing component to a lot of television shows out there. I'd be happier to see shows about people in which God is a component rather than putting God right smack in the middle of it because I usually cock an eyebrow when some studio committee in Los Angeles tries to tell me who God is.

On the other hand, committees in Los Angeles are (and here's my skepticism again) probably going to whitewash it to the greatest degree possible and present religion and faith in the new agey way that they have in Touched by an Angel (and Nashville has in just about every country song ever written about angels). One one hand, that doesn't challenge the mind in a way that I wish television in movies would, one the other I'm probably part of a pretty select demographic of people that actually care about that thing.

Artistically speaking, one of the most compelling aspects of religion is the belief in right and wrong and the conflict between our desires and God's will. Unfortunately, Theosebes doesn't have itemlinks because there are interesting messages about the new aginess of Touched by an Angel and how it doesn't appeal to (Church of Christ pastor) Theosebes and his (presumably agreeing) readership.

My feeling is that even whitewashed messages can be helpful because, as TbaA does, it at least gets people looking somewhat at the greater picture. I recognize that there's a certain danger in the sense of giving people the impression that as long as their nominally trying, everything will turn out just dandy. However, the rest of TV is so bombarded with what I call inverse values that any breaks applied to that notion are on the whole beneficial.

By inverse values, I refer to the sanctification of the vulgar and, more subtle and perhaps more damaging, the sanctification of the decadent. There's nothing more attractive than a writer (myself included) than to glorify the immoral. I don't mean "glorify" in the sense that "Yay, a priest and an underage perishoner are (consensually) gettin' it on!" but rather to put people that are doing something wrong in a sympathetic light.

The reasons why this is attractive are two-fold. First of all, it's lazy because it provides a built-in conflict. Romeo and Juliet wouldn't have been nearly as compelling without the feud between the Montegues and the Capilets. In a similar vein, love affairs between two otherwise married people is automatically more interesting and the conflict is automatically there, saving the writer from the threat of originality. Once such a situation is put in to place, the (adulturing) main characters are sympathetic and the writer then pushes for things to work out, spouses bedamned.

The second reason for the attractiveness of it doesn't apply to me, but used to: It's the general feeling among many liberals and libertarians that any consensual relationship is okay and that the highest power is not some deity, but rather love, and that love (instead of any religion or sense of morality) is therefore the highest power to be obeyed. If Man A meets Woman A, but is Married to Woman B, he is doing everybody harm if he doesn't just love Woman B. Right is gratification and gratification is right. Those that want to get in the way of such gratification are the villains. That's why so often priests make such great villains. In the lazy plot of an immoral affair, they make great obstacles, being the tired scolds that they are. Added to this, of course, is the fact that writers are disproportionately liberal and non-religious, making false morality (ie morality they disagree with) more of a villain than lack of morality.

Without the moral context, this all pulls in to the unseen victims phenomenon. That is to say that as long as we keep the victims out of sight or somehow unsympathetic, there's no need to fret about the morality of the story's protagonists. Owen Courreges and I had an interesting back and forth a while back on the unseen victims of comic book stories and the moral imperative of superheroes to save their lives. While I don't view superhero stories in as realistic a manner (Check the link for a more thorough explanation, it's beyond the scope of this essay), but to the extent that Owen (and the many fans like him) do, he is absolutely, 100% right.

Romance stories (or stories about other things with a strong romantic component) are different and are supposed to represent something universally human in us. Therefore minimizing the victims, for me, make the story less compelling because whereas I can dismiss it in a story about folks with powers wearing leotards, I can't so easily in a story dealing with human people and human emotions.

Their are various approaches to dealing with the unseen victims. One is to make them very unsympathetic (Titanic ) and another is to make them so good and virtuous they're happy for the conclusion that they were jilted in (Sleepless in Seattle). There's something to be said for these methods, but to me they gloss over numerous interesting aspects of the story that could make it a more complete and compelling one.

But if you come at it from a morally neutral point, you're not inclined to explore these things at all. Instead, they become like the unseen victims in comic books whereas the happiness of the main characters (and virtuousness of the heroes) is more important than the happiness of people around them (or the lives of the victims of the villains they refuse to kill). And why not? In a story, screen time matters when there is no universal Truth.

In that vein, the interesting is inherently more virtuous than virtue and nothing is more interesting than vice, making vice more virtuous than virtue. Inverse values.

Take for an example the movie Reality Bites. Wynona Ryder has to choose between two men. Ben Stiller is a network pitchman for a cable television show and Ethan Hawke is a coffee shop philosopher with no job prospects and no future. It would be rather uneventful if Ryder and Stiller were to end up together being as how he is a straight-forward, stand-up guy, so naturally she opts for Hawke. At the movie's end, she and Hawke end up happy together.

Except, of course, that he has no serious employment (or prospects), she pissed off her future career (and a second chance at one by ditching Stiller), so they're likely to end up poor. But that's not supposed to matter because we're supposed to be happy for them because they're slovenly together.

So do I think she should have chosen Stiller? Frankly, I think Stiller is better off without her. So what am I getting at? That they really don't explore the very human dynamics of it and that the idea that Stiller is hard-working and earnest is glossed over for the fact that Hawke is slovenly and "true to himself." They don't allude to the real trouble these two would have in the future and leave the audience with the feeling that what feels right at the moment therefore is right and that's all there is to it.

So what does this have to do with religion? Well, first of all, religion (usually) comes with a set of do's and don't's. Do work hard, do be honest, and being "true to yourself" isn't the highest imperitive when there's a higher power you should try to be true to as well. Religion isn't necessary in this context, but given the lack of probity in writing today, it would generally add some context pretty easily.

That said, I think it's generally a mistake to mass-market fiction on the sole basis of religion or doing what a religion tells you is right because is can be boring. There does need to be some human element involved and the one-way (explicit, anyway) communication between man and God, without a more earthly context, is uneventful. A Los Angeles writer (or committee) putting words in God's mouth is also a somewhat risky proposition both commercially and creatively.

That's why I'm not entirely impressed with Hollywood's resugent (and Nashville's enduring) interest in God and angels. I'd be more impressed if morality were simply explored to a greater degree in the regular stories about every day people that they are more inclined to explore. "Touched by an Angel" did this to an extent and to be honest the shows that they're pitching in the article seem to be in a similar vein, which is a good thing. But what about the rest of them? I'm not asking for a pastor to be introduced to every show, but a more honest exploration of morality would be both beneficial creatively and societally. "God gave me superpowers" is considerably more artificial and I'm inclined to view it the same way that I do superheroes, which is to say there's going to be an inherent disconnect between the protagonist and myself.

Of course, I'm not going to hold my breath on this because as edgy as television would like to think that it is, it tends to avoid any and all controversy when it comes to morality (except when they want to be "daring" in which case they will cavalierly explore how vice is virtue, up is down, and black is white).

But a guy can dream, can't he?

An interesting (and short) article on a study done among men and women from 40-69:

Sept. 29 (AP) — Demi Moore is not alone. Close to a third of unmarried American woman in their 40s through 60s who date are going out with younger men, according to one of the most sweeping surveys ever conducted on the dating habits and sex lives of mid-life singles.

That's the hook, though the (short) article goes over a number of things. A lot of interesting stuff, though some I didn't need a study to tell me:

Sex on a first date? Only 2 percent of single women in the age group approved, while 20 percent of the men were amenable. Frequency of sex? Sixty percent of the women and 45 percent of the men said they hadn't had any in the past six months.

The most interesting part, though, is definitely the women dating down:

According to the survey, 60 percent of singles aged 40-69 are women, a majority of them divorced. Forty-two percent of the men and 24 percent of the women had never been married.

Among the hundreds of findings in the survey, Slon said he was most surprised by the large portion of women who reported dating younger men _ a trend recently glamorized by 40-year-old Demi Moore's romance with actor Ashton Kutcher, 15 years her junior.

One of the victims of the Age of Divorce is women. It's generally easier for an older guy to hook up with a younger woman than vice-versa, so if a couple marries when they're twenty and divorces at 40, he's generally going to be in better shape.

That seems to be changing, though, and that's healthy. Looking at my dating history, I've generally done better with those older than myself or at least really close. Anna and Ora were barely younger but a grade ahead of me (I failed pre-kindergarten... sob), Elciem is roughly 57 minutes older than myself. Lisa was a couple years younger, which illustrates my point even further.

Only once has the age difference been really significant (in that direction). When I was twenty-three I dated a twice-divorced-but-childless thirty-six year old woman. She was a producer for a local television network and a pretty cool person.

In the end, though, it didn't work out. She had some growing up to do.

Over at Reductio ad Absurdum, Owen Courreges has an interesting post on a condescending article in the Chronicle suggesting that the majority party would just be doing so much better if they adopted the minority party's positions.

That's not what makes him a meaniehead, though. In the comments someone from a French IP wrote a response.

This bit of news in the previous comment comes to us courtesy of a French IP address. What do you think, Owen, since this is is in response to your post? Kill the comment, or keep it for entertainment value alone?
[10/01/03 12:38 PM] [Posted by Kevin]

[...]

Kevin,

I've deleted it... It would've been funny for entertainment value if it weren't so blasted long and incomprehensible.
[10/01/03 02:27 PM] [Posted by Owen]

But I like long and incomprehensible. Cause if I've read something long, it makes me feel all smart and stuff. The added bonus is that if it's incomprehensable, I can cease paying attention to it at any time and re-engage later without having missed any of that pesky coherence and "flow."

Mean person.

Update!: Kevin to the rescue! Now that I have read it, I feel smarter (and stuffer) and you can to if you:
[Read More!]

I actually first ran across it on Bill Hobbs's site and was planning to post on it, and then Michael pointed to it below, but here's a more informed perspective on the handling of classified information:

In order for Plame's identification in Novak's column to be considered violating the law, all the following elements of proof must be met:

1. The person who told Novak (or anyone else) had to have had access to classified information that identified Plame as covert. Even if the information is accurate, if the "leaker" did not learn it from classified sources, there is no violation of the law.

2. The disclosure of Plame's covert status must have been intentional; this would seem easy to ascertain.

3. The person receiving the information, i.e., Novak, was not authorized to receive classified information; again, this would seem easy to prove.

4. The discloser must have known that the information identified Plame as covert.

5. The discloser must have known that the United States was taking positive actions to conceal Plame's covert intelligence relationship to the US government.

Note well: all five of these things had to have happened in order for the law to have been violated.

To the extent that this is true (and Sensing has some experience in this area) it does make it surprisingly difficult to net someone on exposing a covert op.

Rob Booth, whom I linked to below and also has some experience in the area, has a different take:

The only possible defense these "two senior administration officials" have is if Ms. [Name Deleted] does not meet the definition of an undercover CIA employee. It would appear she does.

I had a clearance for many years. They make it idiot-proof to know what is classified info. It's stamped in real big letters. They make you sign papers almost daily reiterating that this info is classified, you can't reveal it, and people may die if you do reveal it. Also, you'll go to prison and prisoners are a strangely patriotic bunch who think they will redeem themselves if they make your life hell.

It is worth noting that Rob gets his information from Joshua Micah Marshall, who is no more a paragon of sober analysis than is Andrew Sullivan.

That said, what I've read so far gives me a reading of the situation closer to Rob's than Donald's. In any case, I'm reserving judgment and those that are desirous of up-to-the-minute coverage won't find it here.

If you can't believe that Bush could possibly do something like this, check out Tom Maguire. If you're rolling your eyes cause this is yet another example of the most fundamentally corrupt administration in the history of mankind, Josh Marshall is probably more up your alley. Last, but not least, those of you who are concerned about this and want to get to the bottom of it, I'm finding Daniel Drezner to be the most useful.

I haven't written on the subject because (a) I've been steering clear of politics lately and (b) well, I just don't know!

Right now we're in the cloud of controversy. We hear some anonymous source's brother-in-law heard from an anonymous reporter that the anonymous White House leak was Karl Rove. Liberals hear this and they're just so sure it must be the case. In fact, I've been hearing since the scandal broke "It's Rove, it must be Rove, I just know it!"

A number of conservatives, for their part, have come out defending the President when they really don't know either. They're weaving in the immaterial (that Wilson doesn't care much for the President) with the unimportant (her life wasn't put in immediate danger) with the substantive (nothing has been proven yet except that a law has been broken).

This is not helpful.

It reminds me a bit of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War and the story of Alcibiades [al - sih - bye - uh - deez], the leader of the Athens side for a time during the war. On the eve of a crucial expedition, property crimes were committed and all of Athens was torn into chaos when Alcibiades was recalled at the last moment and the campaign was thrown into chaos and failed.

History will never know if Alcibiades was guilty or not, but the effects of stopping everything as soon as a scandal broke out was demonstrably disastrous for Athens. Instead of investigating what had happened (which would have been more difficult at the time than now), everyone jumped to conclusions. The oligarchs screamed bloody murder without much in the way of proof and Alcibiades and his warriors claimed that he was set up just so that they could tilt the political landscape.

There is no question in my mind that a crime has been committed. Conservatives with credibility on the matter agree on this point. If I'm wrong and this is all just hot air, I believe an investigation will bear that out. The question to me is who was responsible. Liberals are screaming "Rove! Rove! Rove!" and they may well be right about that.

But the conservatives screaming conspiracy and the liberals screaming "Rove!" will have little to no effect on the judicial outcome. If Rove did it, he has to go. Republicans like myself, who are not partisan warriors, will not go to the mat for a political advisor who broke any law related to national security. If Ari Fleisher and/or some lower official(s) are caught with their hand in the cookie jar, then Rove will escape the orange jumpsuit that liberals so crave to see him in.

That brings me to what I find most immediately disturbing about this, which is the politicalization of it. I can hardly fault liberals for it when conservatives were calling for Clinton's impeachment the day after he won re-election before he actuallycommitted the crime he was actually impeached for.

After Clinton's impeachment, I remember watching Bob Barr on CSPAN in front of some conservative group proudly boasting that he was the engine behind impeachment because he was in favor of it before anyone else. He pointed out their ultimate success on the matter (on impeachment, anyway, though not removal) and suggested that he had been vindicated.

He hadn't. He was still an idiot.

But the notion of vindication is what made so many of the conservatives so craven in the 90's. Their pent-up belief that Clinton was just so evil that any and every outrageous accusation was automatically credible might have given them the energy to pursue the matter until they succeeded, but failed to actually remove him from office and in the process did themselves (in terms of the congressional GOP anyway) more harm than good. The only congressional GOPers that were winners in that affair were the ones that weren't screaming to the high heavens (Lindsey Graham and Denny Hastert).

I've been somewhat astounded by the intensity of the anti-Bush sentiment since he's been elected. Not that they don't like Bush, because of course they don't. But rather because I thought the level of vitriol that the right had for Clinton was abnormal. Being too young to be aware during the Ronald Reagan and George H. Bush administrations, I don't have an awareness of how much their opponents hated them.

Perhaps George W. Bush (and/or Karl Rove) and Bill Clinton are both fundamentally corrupt men and presidents. Except, of course, that Republicans will make an exemption for Bush (I presently do) and Democrats will for Clinton. Our guys are honest. Theirs cheat. Round and round we go.

What I find particularly disturbing about this is that the political hitmen often do succeed. Bob Barr and company took a bullet, but Bush's election in 2000 was in part a product of the "collective shower" America took after the Clinton years. In Athens, Alcibiades became a fugitive from justice (though it was still never known if he was guilty) and were not Nicias such a lousy general, he could have won a considerable amount of political capital.

So too may Bush's critics win, whether it's proven that Rove did anything wrong or not and whether Bush knew about it or not.

If Rove did what he's accused of doing, he needs to be booted out of the White House. If Bush knew about it, I would be open to the idea of impeachment. If Rove is responsible and Bush didn't know about it, it would still make things somewhat difficult for me to vote for him next year as planned. On the other hand, if it was a lower-level staffer and there isn't any proof that Rove or Bush knew about it, then he pretty much still has my vote.

What I find depressing about all this is that whichever scenario of the above turns out to be the case, it will affect political discourse not one iota.

I'm awake, I'm awake. Now what?