The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz writes an interesting article on the problems in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Internal rifts and power struggles are not uncommon in campaigns, successful or otherwise. There was one aspect, however, that really did catch my attention:

Behind the facade of a successful political operation, senior officials plotted against each other, complained about the candidate and developed one searing doubt.

Dean, they concluded, did not really want to be president.

In different conversations and in different ways, according to several people who worked with him, Dean said at the peak of his popularity late last year that he never expected to rise so high, that he didn't like the intense scrutiny, that he had just wanted to make a difference. "I don't care about being president," he said. Months earlier, as his candidacy was taking off, he told a colleague: "The problem is, I'm now afraid I might win."

I'm reminded of an idea for a novel that I had a few years back. Since I'm not going to write it, I'll go ahead and share it with you. It dealt with a popular Missouri governor that was term-limited out of office. He didn't deal with retirement all that well. Both senators were members of his own party so other than the speech circuit, there wasn't much for him to do. His suggests that he makes a doomed bid for the White House to get some of his ideas out there. If nothing else, she joked, it would get him out of her hair. His rise and fall was initially patterned after John McCain's, but it actually follows Dr. Dean's more closely. With nothing to lose, he starts throwing out ideas that his party's presumptive nominee (or his presumptive opponent) wouldn't touch. He becomes a media darling and the next thing he knows he's winning primaries (okay, slight departure from Dean here). Tired and exhausted, he starts looking for inconspicuous ways to lose without tarnishing his name or diminishing his ideas. Part comedy, part political exposition, and part character drama. Could have made a neat book.

Unfathomable!

What's the point in having a powerometer on a phone if it's going to say "full power" for two days of chatting away and then dwindle from "full power" to "low battery" less than two hours? My old phone had this problem and, unfortunately, my temp phone has the same thing.

Sean C. Rothstein-Jacobson has an interesting office-place story.

James Bowman of the American Spectator has a column about performers bloviating on the issues of the day. The article is well written, but I've lost count of the number of items I've read (and written) on the subject. Actors and singers are not politicall astute! Film at 11!

Bowman, however, touches on an irritation I often have with such columns:

Not long ago I read that Ethan Hawke -- who is a movie actor, for those of you fortunate enough not to have had to witness, as I have had to do, any of his characteristically hang-dog appearances on the silver screen -- said that President Bush was "probably the least prepared person to be president of the United States that's been elected in a long time, if not ever." The quotation speaks for itself. As does the fact that the Washington Post reported it with a straight face, demonstrating no apparent shame for citing as an authority on the President's preparedness for office a man who has never in his life done anything but impersonate other people in front of a camera.

Does being a competent actor make one more qualified to knowledgably discuss political issues and figures? I think Bowman would agree with me that it does not. So as such, why does it matter if Bowman thinks that Hawke is a bad actor? Sure, being an actor can help a politician be suggessful at getting his ideas across, but it has little or no bearing on whether or not they generate or attach themselves to good ideas. I've noticed that whenever a stupid celebrity utters stupid ideas, one of the first things out of their mouths is "Well they can't act/sing anyway."

I consider Alec Baldwin to be a good actor. Same with Ethan Hawke. I think that Natalie Maines has a great singing voice. But their views are no less idiotic than Ben Affleck, who can't act.

I find it interesting how many people will talk about how presumptuous it is that the artist links their talents to political wisdom and then turn around and imply that their lack of talent makes them less politically wise.

The New York Times has an interesting article on autism. I don't know anyone with a serious case of autism (though my roommate Danforth believes, or at one point believed, that he has Asperger's Syndrom, a less severe form of the disorder). From what I have read about it, it's a dreadful (and expensive) ordeal for a parent to have to go through. It's hard to say from the child's point of view since the more serious it is, the less communicative they are.

The accuracy of my results on Match.com's Ph.D.-formulated Physical Attraction Test depends somewhat on your definition of "large and lovely", but yeah, as I get older I do have more appreciation for fuller figures. I find it interesting that 40% of guys agree with me, but then again I've long told female-types that guys don't generally want girls as thin as girls think guys do. That's a subject for another time, though. The 40% figure could be self-selecting among those that are looking for dates online. Without saying anything negative about people knocking around singles web sites (I've done it before), they are disproportionately (though not exclusively!) people that have difficulty finding dates otherwise. Sometimes it's due to shyness or some personality trait, but I'd suspect that weight would also play a factor. The question then is whether or not the 40% was a part of the original PhD study or whether they're collecting statistics from people like me. On the whole, though, women are much more critical of excess weight on other women than men are on women.

Part of the reason for my attraction might well be due to my own weight, which is larger than healthy to be sure. In yesteryear I tended to be attracted to a vastly different type (short and skinny) than I am now. Whether or not that is a function of my not being as thin as I used to be or whether it's just a matter of growing up and freeing myself from more conventional standards of beauty I'm not sure. At the same time that my desired weight went up, my desired height went up, too. I think that's in part so that being with the person feels natural. There's nothing less natural looking that a 6'5" man dating a 5'2" girl. In college, I had a brief stint with a girl about that height and it was a bit odd. I was also with a girl that was 6' and grew to appreciate her height. My weight preference could have been a similar comfort matter. Of the Big Five girls in my past (and present), three express(ed) dissatisfaction with their weight. Since weight wasn't a factor for me in the relationships (accuracy of the phrase "relationship" varies) I began to have a greater appreciation for a softer structure. That and the aforementioned 5'2" bone-thin girl may have irreversably turned me off of thin girls forever...

Ultimately, I found it rather difficult to gauge attraction from the pictures because it was just a picture. A lot of physical attraction is, to me, about demeanor. Few of the girls in the pictures were smiling and a good smile goes an extraordinarily long way with me. As do factial expressions, body expressions, and the other things that can't be encapsulated in a picture. I include all of this under physical attraction because I can be utterly unattracted to their personality but still be physically attracted to a person that looks, smiles, and acts a certain way.

But I still found it enlightening. There are aspects of the test that I would change. The heightometer wasn't particularly helpful for me because I thought that the first picture was going to be the tallest girl they'd show. She was a bit too tall (if I was the drawing standing next to her, she'd have been 6'3" or so), so I put a low rating. Much to my surprise, she was actually the shortest and the tallest girl proportionally would have been 6'7" or so, which is taller than I'd go.

I did like the "which one would be attracted to you" portion. It harkens back to a phrase that Jay and I use often called "attainably attractive." To put it short, the likelihood that the girl might be also attracted to us made her more attractive to us. It's kind of like going to a discount furniture sail and looking at pieces of furnature for scratches and other imperfections. With those, the value of the furniture goes up considerably. The same is true for imperfections on a girl. Somehow that feeds on he and myself and those very flaws (assuming they're nothing major) actually become somewhat attractive to us. They become more human. We become more equal. We are all, in many ways, defined by our flaws. As such, the Carmen Electras are not generally what he and I are attracted to.

Once I was derailed from the "conventional beauty" train, I began to find that I appreciated some "flaws" more than others. I found that a little extra weight is a good thing, but that disproportion was unattractive. I also found that there are some conventional traits I still look for (long legs, for example). Eventually I carve out what my "type" physically is. Though, at the end of the day, how attractive I am to someone physically is highly dependent on personality. One of the reasons that I'm attracted to a good smile, for instance, is that I wouldn't want to be with someone that doesn't smile (or has a smile that looks fake). Physical attraction is a necessary, but not sufficient, trait.

[via Reactuate]

[Read More!]

Democrat Greg Wythe interestingly appears to be just on my right on the gay marriage issue:

Differing with Dean, I'll point out that "the difference" is not that "some pretty religious people" are freaked out by gay marriage, but that marriage should be left left as defined by religious doctrines over the years (now, if someone wants to point out vagaries and inconsistencies on this point, go nuts ... I have to limit the amount of time I devote to a few things here and there, so I'll spare the reader a discourse on amateur theology). The delineation that might be made is something like "Well, what about a justice of the peace wedding? There's nothing strictly religious about a legal wedding as its defined by law, anyway." Fair enough. But to the extent that it is covered by law, and even non-believers are allowed to engage in this practice, I would argue two things.

One - much of what is written in law is based on religious doctrine (thou shalt not kill ... remember that one?). This firewall we occassionally imagine between religion and state is sometimes too starkly drawn by those freaked out by the religious right. That marriage is codified does not remove it from religious terms. But that the state recognizes a religious ceremony for a wedding indicates a devotion to at least some of our better traditions.

Two - non-believers certainly get a free pass and sometimes that's the fault of the couple, and sometimes the fault of the church. How many of us have friends that have had a church wedding in a church they've never been to? To be sure, non-believers would, if they were more consistent with their beliefs, join in a heterosexual version of civil unions. In fact, one might suggest that commonlaw marriages are effectively similar in many ways (again, I leave the particulars to the diehards).

Update: Republican Martin Devon, on the other hand, is to the left of myself:

It really bugs me that the president is backing amending the constitution to prevent whack job judges from legislating gay marriage. Yeah, I think that the mayor of San Franscisco and the supremes in Massachusetts are way out of line, but what else is new? This is the classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. You don't mess with the constitution for this. No good will come from it.

Just last night Eel and I were talking about Jesus productions (movies, musicals, etc.). She was telling me about the time she saw Jesus Christ Superstar in Oklahoma and that they had the original actors for Jesus and Judas. I'd never really thought too much about that musical and haven't talked to anyone about it since our Austrian exchange student a decade ago. But last night Eel and I talked about it and today the actor for Judas died.

It just makes ya think.

No, really, it doesn't. Weird coincidence, though.

And I thought my life was too dramatic.

Michaels Morgan and Duff have apparently discontinued their blogs.

Bummer.

Update: Or not. Duff's blog is back and Morgan's is being relocated in a couple months. Consider my "bummer" retracted!

RAW: I finally got my CDs ripped today. I need to not procrastinate on that so much. A couple only ripped after MUCH reluctance
Jay: Your CD's?
Jay: Trying to put everything on mp3?
RAW: Yeah. It's my policy
Jay: For break-ins?
RAW: And so I can sort my own CDs
Jay: Ah, I see.
Jay: So you can see what you have?
RAW: So I can get rid of tracks I don't want and put them in a more suitable order :)
Jay: I like having the other ones on there, just in case.
RAW: Other ones on there?
Jay: Other tracks on the CD...and usually the order given suits just fine.
RAW: I don't want songs I don't like to listen to on CDs that I listen to. I'm funny that way...
RAW: AND I can make the CDs longer than a piddly 45-50 min!
Jay: I just skip over 'em
Jay: yeah
Jay: I dunno
Jay: I'm fine with switching 'em out
Jay: Call me non-progressive.
RAW: Reactionary.
RAW: Oh well, I like how my way is just so completely superior to yours. It makes me feel better about myself [nodnod]
Jay: I imagine so
RAW: It depends on the artist. For some I'd be just fine listening to the CDs through.
RAW: But for others I only like about half their songs
Jay: True, true.
Jay: I usually find a smattering of the songs I like and make a disc of it (a la Frank Black and Pixies)_
RAW: For my part, once I have that 80-minute good-song format going, I start liking the plain jane CDs less, so I start collapsing them. It's kinda neat how 2 CDs fits into 1 pretty well for most good artists. 3 CDs fold into 1 for hit-and-missers or 2 CDs if they're really good
RAW: The only problem I've run in to are those with more than 3 CDs... I never know quite what to do. That's why I have no CDs burned for some of my favorite acts (Phil, Great Divide, Counting Crows, etc.)
RAW: It's depressing sad.
RAW: Just not in a way that makes my way of going about it anything less than utterly superior to yours.
Jay: Why don't you just make more than 1 CD with them on it?
RAW: I do... for instance, 3 CDs by a good artist get welded into 2 CDs (Matchbox 20 and Blue October are good examples)
RAW: But once there are four, it gets more spotty
RAW: I could make two 2-1 folds
RAW: I've been mulling that over for Great Divide
RAW: But then you have artists like Phil and TMBG, whose material changes a lot over the years and two sequential CDs may not match eachother particularly well
RAW: And then there are live CDs... oh man, those things screw up EVERYTHING!
Jay: You think about this entirely too much.
RAW: EVERYTHING
[RAW explodes]

As a Republican surrounded by liberals and Democrats, I've gotten to hear a lot about the gay marriage issue the last few days. Most of my friends are aware that this is an issue that I don't particularly agree with Republicans on and so it's used to suggest that perhaps I am really not the Republican that I think I am because President Bush is going out and saying something - loudly and frequently - that I vehemently disagree with. The idea of changing the constitution to specifically ban gays from getting marriage is outrageous to them and, they say, ought to be outrageous to me.

Except that it isn't.

I haven't changed my view on the issue. I still believe that gays should be allowed to marry. But it to referrendum and I will vote for it. I will campaign for it. But while I believe in gay marriage, I believe in democracy more. While I disagree with Republicans on this issue, I agree with them on tangental issues that make me completely uncomfortable with the tactic used by the pro-gay marriage folks (whose ends, less we forget, I do agree with) to ram their issue through the will of a reluctant public.

So while I don't agree with what they're doing, I completely understand where they're coming from.

Right now the public is not on board with gay marriage. If it were the attempts to wrap the gay issue into the non-existent privacy clause and the gay marriage issue into something that's implied in amendments dealing with racial minorities would not be necessary. I firmly believe that in another ten years the public will be on board and it won't be necessary. But right now it's unpopular and those on my side of the issue don't seem to care what the public wants. I believe that this will result in long-term backlash and will do the gay marriage cause a lot of harm. I'd not like to see that happen.

Which brings me to attempts by conservatives to write marriage into the constitution. It's not outrageous - it's exactly what liberals are trying to do without the extra effort of actually getting it into the constitution. If one is against gays being allowed to marry and they're told that the constitution says it's okay, what other recourse is there than to change the document in question? There is none and their response is completely logical.

It is liberals and not conservatives that are making marriage a constitutional issue. As of right now, marriage is legislative. If Alabama wants to make it so that twelve year olds can get married without parental consent and in New Hampshire someone has to be eighteen, that's unfair but constitutional because that's what their respective legislatures agreed on. If New Hampshire wants to expand marriage to homosexuals, then it can do so they same way that they could make it open to sixteen year olds. Or, for that matter, to allow people to have more than one spouse. They chose not to do that and as such I can't muster a whole lot of outrage that Republicans are fighting constitutional fire with fire.

Ultimately, I believe the marriage amendment will fail. I don't believe that there is nearly enough support in blue states to meet the required 3/4 legislatures to get it through. I also believe that Bush knows this and is straddling the issue for largely political reasons. Before one asks what that says about Bush, they ought to note that Kerry's response is even more political. Does anyone truly believe that Kerry does not believe that gays ought to be allowed to marry? Yet he's taking the untenable civil unions stance. So what does that say about him? It says he's a politician. Just like Bush is.

Last night I was ripping CDs. It's generally been my policy to rip CDs as soon as I buy them in case they get stolen. Unfortunately, I didn't do that and I discovered another reason to rip sooner rather than later. CDex, the program I use to rip CDs, doesn't have much in the way of error protection and some of my older CDs are coming up with hundreds of errors. The CDs play perfectly fine and there are no visible scratches on them, but the problem CDs are the oldest that I have (Thrift Store Cowboys being chief among them). Since they play without a problem, I don't think that ripping them should be the problem that it's become, so I have to conclude that CDex is letting me down. What programs do you guys use to rip CDs?

Also, I need to clean my laptop monitor. Anyone know the best way to go about doing that?

My cell phone subscription ran out a couple of days ago. For the remainder of my time down here I get my folks' cell. They just signed a new contract with my brother and sister-in-law that, for obvious reasons, I'm not a part of. Anyway, part of the deal was new cell phones.

It's more than a step up from my old phone. It actually has a lit display compared to my gameboyesque gray and black one from before. Instead of snake, it has bowling! Pretty rad!

The buttons, on the other hand, take some getting used to. Whereas most phones have twelve buttons or so for the numbers and * and #, this one has six buttons. The 1 and 3, 2 and 5, 4 and 6, 7 and 9, 8 and 0, and * and # buttons are connected to one another and which part of the metabutton determines which number you're hitting. It's no problem except when I'm trying to dial without looking. I suppose I'll just have to get used to it.

The rationale for the unique button configuration is for, I think, the games on the cell phone. They've sacrificed utility on the phone's primary function (being a phone) for the tangental functions. Part of me objects to that out of principle, except that it makes the bowling game a lot more fun and easy. And the bowling game is rad!

It reminds me a bit of the TI-8x series of calculators. They were all the rage when I was in high school. In addition to being a graphic calculator (and for many poor students with rich parents in leiu of being a graphing calculator), it was a game console for a lot of Atari 2600esque games. It was enough that I was waiting to find out when TI was going to come out with a Windows 95 version.

So now phones have downloadable games and keyboard-configurated buttons. That's just low-budget phones (which is pretty much all I'm ever going to own). There seems to be some convergence between PDA's and cell phones and I guess that's pretty natural.

Whatever. I wanna go play some more bowling!

You are HOBBES! You are a great friend. You are
also have a little rebelish side to you. You
like looking at the babes but that doesn't get
in the way of your friendship, most of the
time.


Which Calvin And Hobbes Character Are You Most Like?
brought to you by Quizilla

There's a fellow named Richard Florida who has some interesting ideas. Namely that U.S. economic dominance is threatened due to, among other things, it's unwieldy size and "unlivability."

On the latter point, I recall a press conference conversation between President Clinton and Prime Minister Chretein. The latter commented that Canada was "objectively" a better place to live than the United States and that various studies or polls had said so. Clinton, as one would expect of even a Democratic president, disagrees.

It wasn't long after that when I took a trip to Canada. Lovely country. Nice people. There was an article in the Toronto Star about the "brain drain"... the tendency of the most qualified Canadians to emigrate to the US.

Canada may have been an "objectively better" nation in which to leave, but we were attracting their best talent.

Florida suggests that the opposite is about to occur (or is occuring):

"The labour market for creative people is global," he insists. "Quality of place matters. It's not just about low taxes and cheap goods. The message is that we need to invest in people and places. That means schools and the urban realm, not giant projects. We must emphasize what's unique about a place, not what's generic.

"We're moving to a multi-polar world," Florida continues. "Countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, these are the real competitors now. The U.S. lead is not invincible. There is a general sense that the U.S. is a far less tolerant place than it used to be. It's not just a product of the Bush administration. Historically, the U.S. was able to attract the brightest and the best, but we no longer hold that position."

Though Florida has yet to set his sights directly on Canada, he anticipates that will happen within six months. So far, he is impressed with what he sees.

"I expect Canada would do rather well," he says. "At the forefront of countries that have the ability to attract immigrants is Canada. You have the mosaic instead of the melting pot. That means you can keep your identity and still be a Canadian. Europe is as tolerant as Canada in its attitudes to immigrants, but bad at assimilation."

Other major indicators, he adds, are tolerance of gays and minorities. Canada, Florida feels, scores well in both those categories.

I'd be very interested to hear immigration rates to the US vis-a-vis Canada. If, in fact, they are attracting more of the talent then it could indeed pose a problem. Attracting the best and the brightest is something that contributes heavily to my argument.

Florida offers no statistics to this effect, however. Maybe that's what I'm supposed to buy his book for. Regardless, something else he said casts suspicion over the rest:

Though the U.S. and, to a lesser extent, Canada have put their faith in tax cuts as an economic stimulus, Florida claims they are wrong. "The highest tax locations in the U.S. have the fastest growth," he notes. "Low tax rates and deregulation don't attract people. They're looking for economic opportunities and lifestyle opportunities.

How so? With the big exception of California, the fastest growing states are predominantly conservative/libertarian ones. In fact, the 2000 census shifted electoral votes (which are, of course, based on population) away from Blue states and towards Red ones.

People are still trending away from (cheap) towns and towards (expensive) big cities, but that can't be the crux of an article titled "small is beautiful", can it?

My cell phone is out-of-order, so I cannot be reached by it. Emails sent to me are likely to rebound, but I did get the email! I just need to get it to stop sending to my phone.

I'll have a new cell phone and a new number shortly.

Gregg Easterbrook has an interesting thought on why John Kerry's war record resonates with a lot of folks:

Set aside what John Kerry said to a college newspaper in 1970 about Vietnam--anything that anybody said to a college newspaper in 1970, on any subject, is likely to sound silly today. Surely one reason Kerry is doing so well in the Democratic primaries is that he embodies the middle-American consensus about the Vietnam War. That consensus seems to be that Vietnam was a bad war, but there was a duty to serve and those who fulfilled the duty should be admired.

That's fair enough, but most people that I see praising his efforts are much more concerned with the possibility that it would make his utter lack of any foreign policy with which Americans would agree with beyond reproach.

What I find so interesting about the Kerry ascendancy is how much of it is based on polls. Bush and Clinton both used electability as a selling point to keep their respective party's outliers in line and there's nothing wrong with doing that. But whatever your personal feelings on Bush and Clinton are, they came to the table with more than electability. Some people, well, actually liked them. They liked their ideas and the direction that they wanted to take the party. They liked their optomism and ability to inspire. Does anyone have a clear idea of where precisely Kerry plans to take the party?

People seem to settle on Kerry because he's electable without much of a semblence (that I've heard, anyhow) of why he's electable. The only thing I've heard thus far is his war record. His war record has indeed innoculated him to the point that anyone who questions his ideas is accused of questioning his patriotism. To suggest that this will last and that people are not interested in where Kerry would take the country and that they will repeatedly fall for the "How dare you question the Purple Heart?" line for the next nine months is not giving the public very much credit.

Kerry does, however, have plenty of time to establish himself. I think by this point in the race Al Gore still had two complete metamorpheses in him, so Kerry can mold himself into someone with some ideas beyond heel-biting the administration. I think it's a fool's wager to pass over candidates of more style (Edwards) or substance (Gephardt) on such speculation, though.

I've written before about how awful tech support over the phone is. I've said it before and I'll say it again: whether you're a techie or not, you need to learn how a computer works. Or be married to someone that does. Or give birth to someone that does.

Absent that, you need to get the Gold Unlimited Warrantee Plan or whatever that means that you drop your computer off and they have to fix it before giving it back to you. Technical support over the phone is not a long-term solution. Not only is it incredibly difficult to help someone over the phone, but the operators in particular have little reason to help you.

Nothing illustrates that more clearly than this first-person account of working at a tech support call center.

Loni is a great guy. Like me, he keeps track of Ken's more outrageous meltdowns and we compare notes over lunch. We have a good time. I like him. But Loni is a punter. I don't condone it, but I understand. Since hitting the floor we've all learned the sad truth. Actually solving problems is by far the slowest way to handle a call. We've each got 12 minutes from the moment we say hello to find a way to say goodbye, and after two weeks of trying to fix computers he knew nothing about and racking up average call times north of half an hour, Loni decided that if he was going to survive, he was going to have to change his approach. So he became a punter.

A punter is someone who gets rid of problems by giving them to someone else. Punters tell customers that their problem is not really with their computer, but with their software, their printer, their phone lines, solar flares, whatever they can make sound believable. Then a punter will look at the piece of paper hanging above their phone and read you those four magic words. We don't support that. If you want your problem fixed, a punter will tell you, you'll have to call someone else.

[...]

Mr. Davis is threatening to shoot his computer. What this will accomplish is unclear, but he seems convinced it will make him feel better. Looking over his call log, I'm sympathetic. A run of givers have sent him six monitors in the last two and a half weeks, none of which has solved his problem. It seems safe to say that whatever his problem is, it's not with the monitor. Still, that hasn't stopped another giver from offering to send him a seventh one earlier today. When he refused that present he was promptly punted. He's been punted a total of four times today. Now he's had it. He just wants me to bear audio witness as he guns down his system.

Fortunately after a little prodding I discover that Mr. Davis' problem is one of a growing number that I recognize and know how to fix. We go through a few simple steps, and in a matter of minutes I've determined that his video card is bad. I explain what we've done and that I'll be sending a new video card to address his issue. He seems much calmer now, grateful that I've listened, and hopeful that I've really figured out the source of his frustration. All I need to do now is send him the part.

But because the givers have been sending out thousands of dollars' worth of unnecessary parts and equipment lately, it's not that simple. Now I have to call a special inside number and wait for the opportunity to explain to a manager why Mr. Davis needs the part I think he needs. With one manager set up to handle this post and hundreds of techs trying to dispatch parts, both legitimately and otherwise, it turns out that I'm in for quite a hold. So while the problem is actually something I know how to fix, and while I've gotten to the solution in only eight minutes, I now have to wait on hold for 16 minutes just to send out the necessary part. By the time this call ends, it will have taken almost 25 minutes and to anyone studying my stats I'll continue to look completely clueless.

When I finally get back to Mr. Davis his goodwill is gone. The quarter hour of exposure to soft rock he's endured has prompted him to get the gun and begin threatening to murder his machine all over again. I promise him the part is on its way and that his problem is finally solved. But it's clear he doesn't believe me. He calls me an asshole and slams down the phone. I begin to wonder if I might not be better off learning how to punt.

... and still truckin'.

It happened on the way to San Marcos. I was going to wait until I got a picture of the car to post with it, but unfortunately I'm having battery-related issues, so you'll just have to take this picture that I took on my last trip out there.

You are Schroeder!


Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

YOU ARE RULE 11!

You were designed to make sure that attorneys in
federal cases make reasonable inquiries into
fact or law before submitting pleadings,
motions, or other papers. You were a real
hardass in 1983, when you snuffed out all legal
creativity from federal proceedings and
embarassed well-meaning but overzealous
attorneys. You loosened up a bit in 1993, when
you began allowing plaintiffs to make
allegations in their complaints that are likely
to have evidenciary support after discovery,
and when you allowed a 21 day period for the
erring attorney to withdraw the errant motion.
Sure, you keep everything running on the up and
up, but it's clear that things would be a lot
more fun without you around.


Which Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

[via Unbilled Hours]

Yankee or Dixie:

86% (Dixie). Did you have any Confederate ancestors?

Most likely. Both sides of my family have routes that run pretty deep in their respective states (Texas and Virginia).

Since Mom and Dad are both wonderfully healthy, my brother and I have never thought about calling dibs on our inheritance with one major exception. On our back porch is a print of a painting of Robert E. Lee and his generals. I used to think it was the coolest thing ever and told Mom that I wanted that some day. It turned out that my brother did the exact same thing, except that I got dibs first.

On the whole, though, I'm reluctant to call myself pro-south. In some ways I'm quite the opposite. I don't have a whole lot of romantic imagery regarding the Old South and the War Between the States. I'm also, relatively speaking and particularly for a southerner, somewhat hostile to the Confederate battle flag.

But as far as language goes, it's pretty clear. "Y'all" is a word.

Like Adrianne, I didn't realize that "feeder" was largely a Houston term. It's what I've always used. In fact, once upon a time I thought "Frontage Road" was like MLK Blvd... there seemed to be one in every town!

[via Owen "One-third Yankee" Courreges]

Owen has a post up on a couple new movies with anti-gun messages. Anti-gun is nothing new for Hollywood, of course, but both movies target gun manufactures the same way the left has targetted Big Tobacco. Not only as soulless corporations, but malicious ones:

In both these films, the gun industry is portrayed as if it's the new tobacco industry; all-powerful oligarchs perverting justice with the sole intention of placing guns in the hands of criminals (oddly enough, we are led to believe that this is a burgeoning market). This scenario particularly plays out in Runaway Jury, which was based on a John Grisham novel. In that film, the gun industry, rallied together, is fighting a lawsuit claiming that it sold assault weapons to distributors who then sold them to third-parties who then sold them into the black market -- and the manufacturer knew about all of this.

As if to underscore Owen's point, the Runaway Jury movie actually changed the villain from Big Tobacco to Big Munitions. In the original novel, the bad guy was a tobacco company targetting kids and the poor. Apparently the movie changed that to gun manufacturers marketting directly to evil-doers.

Hollywood (and it's defenders) might argue that making the movie about gun manufacturers makes it more "topical" since most tobacco lawsuits have been settled. But it betrays a bias among the left (which Hollywood exemplifies in many ways) that views the two as being somewhat interchangable. The gun lawsuits have been going on a while now, but they haven't taken hold among the public as the tobacco lawsuits did. The general public simply doesn't see the connection that the left does. With enough propaganda they might, though.

I hope not.

Stephen Green notes a town that once required a breathalizer in every bar:

I never saw one of the things in person, but I heard they looked kind of like an arcade game, complete with cute little graphics showing just how drunk you were at rising blood alcohol levels.

That's not exactly how things went. Instead:

Very Drunk Person: I'm not drunk. Gimme that straw. Heh -- lookit that, I'm double the legal limit, but I can walk just fine.
Other Drunk Person: I can beat that. [Blows into machine] Thing says I should be in a coma. Top that!
Third Drunk Person: [Throws up on machine]

I have seen the things. When my brother and I coincidentally converged on Austin (he from Virginia and myself from Houston) we went to this bar called Nasty's that had one. It really does look like an arcade. Actually, it looks a little more like one of those machines where you touch the metal hemi-sphere or a sensor or something and it will give you your fortune or tell you whether or not you're a good lover or whatnot. It's about as accurate, too.

There were a lot of people there, including a number of my brother's frat brothers. For a dollar a pop a few of them tried to test their sobriety.

First Drunk: [Hiccup], see, it says I'm not drunk.

Second Drunk: That's because you have the straw on the coin depository.

First Drunk: Oh.

Third Drunk: My turn.

First Drunk: Dude! Point-six! You're dead!

Okay, okay, I made the first part of this dialogue up, but the dude was technically dead.

This is probably old news, but I just ran across if (via Politics1):

The Pembroke Pines mayor's race is becoming X-rated.

There is talk everywhere about an incident three years ago involving Mayor Alex Fekete, and it's now part of his re-election campaign against Commissioner Sue Katz. That's when he says a virus infected his city and personal computers with pornography. He also says the computers may have been used by others.

I've never heard of a virus that can infect a computer with thousands of porno pictures, but here is the mayor's story:

The X-rated pictures were found when Fekete brought his laptop to city computer technicians to get rid of viruses. The techies found such explicit material that they were embarrassed and offended, according to a memo on the incident.

City Manager Charles Dodge launched an investigation and asked the State Attorney's Office for help. Prosecutors called computer experts from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

The investigation, never disclosed before, found that Fekete had as many as 23,000 computer file images of pornography on his laptop and a city computer. Sexually explicit material was in files labeled "My Favorites," "Temporary Internet Files" and "Cookies," according to documents on the probe.

The page takes a bit of time to load up. Second item.

Hostik was down for most of Wednesday. Sitemeter is still down. Argh.

Andrew Olmsted has a marvelous post that sums up a lot of thoughts that I've had recently:

After two and half years on maintaining this weblog, I often get the impression that people think that what I write is considered (by me) to be some kind of holy writ. While it doesn't happen too often (low traffic can be a blessing of sorts), I will sometimes get comments from people hammering me for taking a position on a topic of interest to them. In particular they seem to love locating some statement I made that is either factually incorrect or that can be compared to a different statement I made at some earlier date that seems to contradict it. Their conclusion is then some variant of 'since I've proved you wrong/hypocritical here, you should recant your opinion and apologize for ever having held it.' I find this line of thinking fascinating.

I'm going to take a moment to let you all in on a little secret: most of what I write here is about things I'm not sure about.

[...]

I confess that I often envy many bloggers. There seem to be a great number of people out there who are absolutely convinced of the rightness of their conclusions. Indeed, no amount of evidence or argument can sway them an inch from those beliefs. I imagine there is a certain comfort in having that level of belief. You make a decision, and it's the right one, come Hell or high water. No need for second guessing or reflection there.

Certainly that sounds a lot better than watching the war continue in Iraq and asking myself over and over again whether I was right to support it. Granted, it's not like my selecting a different position would have prevented the war, but I firmly believe that my decision to support the war carries with it a moral burden regarding the consequences of the war. So the continuous flow of casualties and the numerous (perceived) errors on the part of the Coalition are more than just news reports for me, they're a steady drumbeat of reminders and questions: did I make the right decision?

There are some things that I am certain about. My views on school choice, gun control, the market, free trade, the death penalty, and a host of other subjects are broadly unalterable. I can be convinced of the pros and cons of specific proposals, but by-and-large I expect to hold these views until the day I die.

These are, incidentally, things I don't post on very often. Instead, when I write politics it's about affirmative action where my views are murky, predictions that are often wrong, speculation that can't be proven or disproven, and new issues that I'm not always sure what to make of.

When I look at my Full Blogrolodexical, I find it interesting how rarely I visit many bloggers whose pages used to be a staple in my surfing. The ones that I don't visit much anymore are often the most certain and the most assertive. Even when I agree with most of what they say, when I know their response to any given issue it doesn't tend to keep my interest.

As far as blogging goes, I'm a lot more interesting in reading about personal thoughts and intellectual exploration than I am in personal position papers. That's what the National Review and New Republic are for.

Don't get me wrong, some of my daily reads are strident in tone, but that's not really what I'm doing here most of the time.

In fact, there are times I eat crow and, honestly, I'm happy to do it when I'm wrong. That's what interblog conversation and comments are about. I didn't have comments when I first started, but I can't imagine not having them now.

None of this is to say that I am wishy-washy or perpetually uncertain about anything. Anyone that has argued politics with me in the past will attest to this (Adam and Mike surely will). Sometimes I will post position papers here, but for the most part I'm putting thoughts out there and, often, waiting for them to be challenged.

Brian and Sama don't live on the Texas State campus, but they do live across the street from it. Nearly everyone who lives in this complex goes to the University (or went there, as in Sama's case). Texas State is the sixth largest university in Texas. It's a Masters College and University as defined by the Carnegie Foundation, which puts them on the top of the second tier of universities below the biggest five universities in the state and a few UT and A&M affiliate schools. Up until six months ago, it was named Southwest Texas State University.

They have a number of good programs (teaching and computer science chief among them) that draw students here, but a large part of the student body are students that wanted to party near Austin and couldn't get in to the University of Texas.

Their football program is in Division I-AA and competes in the Southland Conference with smaller schools such as Sam Houston and McNeese State. Attempts to move up to Division I-A are thwarted by, among other things, low attendance numbers.

That said, whenever I'm in San Marcos it's striking to me how - unlike U of H - how few people there are wearing apparel of larger universities. In fact, I see a lot more Texas State (and SWT) apparel here than I see UH apparel on the Houston campus.

I wonder why that is. Neither UH nor TSUSM have the profile that Texas, A&M, and Tech do. Few outside of Texas have heard of Texas State or Southwest Texas (more are familiar with UH). So I find it interesting that a lot more students spend their money on licensed shirts, caps, and so on than do at Houston.

I guess it's largely the function of a traditional student body. I haven't spent much time in Huntsville or Nacadochus, but I would guess the college students there are probably the same as they are here. Given how the three towns are, to various degrees, built around their universities, they are having a college experience more like those in Austin and College Station than those in Houston.

Sama and her previously-quite-serious boyfriend broke up tonight. We got home and she was finishing off a bottle of tequila, toasting her emancipation and then locking herself in her room.

Sama and I used to be a lot closer than we are these days. Our friendship started sliding when we both got significant others. I think she was looking for some comforting words from Brian, but he really didn't have any. She's awake in her room now. Part of me feels like I should knock on her door and lend her an ear, but I'd guess that there's a reason that she's locked herself in her room.

I've been in few traditional relationships, so I've had few traditional breakups. Not that untraditional breakups are easier, mind you. But it does make it harder for me to know what to say.

When I was a kid, during the winter holidays there would be all kinds of bowl games on between schools that my 8-year old self was completely unfamiliar with. Wanting to be involved, I still cheered. I remember once, in Fort Worth, Dad noticed that I had changed the teams that I'm rooting for and he asked which won I wanted to win. I answered "whichever one was winning."

I recalled this when I read Jack Sparks's amusing aside on Yankee fans:

I'll restate what I've said before in this space, coffeehouses, and bars, all across America. If you weren't born in New York, if your parents weren't born there, and/or if neither you nor your parents have spent the majority of your lives in New York, and, you root for the Yankees, you're a fucking no-good front runner. If you own, wear, or have even tried on one of those powder blue and white Yankees caps, you should be killed and left in the street as a feast for vultures.

In addition to remembering Fort Worth circa 1986, I also recall A&M-mania at Clear Lake High School. Everyone wore A&M attire and rooted for A&M. I heard endlessly about how bad UT was (which they were, Mackovic years and all). Of course, few of these people actually had connections to A&M and fewer still would be good enough students to get in to it. They were rooting for A&M and wearing A&M gettups cause it was the school with the best football team in Texas at the time.

I imagine that if I were to go back today, there would probably be a lot more UT and OU attire and I suspect people whose father's actually went to A&M get to hear about how bad their team is.

I'm also reminded of the University of Houston, which amusingly enough had Aggie and Longhorn booster clubs. There were, and presently are, more people with an affection for a university they didn't go to than ones with an affection for the one they were actually attending. Heck, today there's probably a Sooners booster club.

The people with an affection for the Yankees or the Sooners (exceptions for those from New York, live in Oklahoma or went to the University of, and those that rooted for each of these teams during their down-years) in many ways have similar mentalities to my eight year old self. They want to be associated with winners.

It's the male equivalent to the female fashion mafia. A lot of fashion is built around being associated with those more popular, glamorous. or wealthy than those that are less so. Fashion trends born, live, and then die as the most popular, glamorous, and wealthy move on to something new. The rest follow like sheep.

The same is true of athletic allegiances. A&M was big in the late nineties because they were winners. They are less so now because they aren't.

I must confess that I am, in many ways, a fair-weather fan. I watched basketball playoffs for the first time in my life when the Rockets were on top. I'm going to pay more attention to the Astros next year because they might just surpass the first round of the playoffs.

At the same time, though, I will root for the University of Houston over the University of Texas any time they meet. I'll root for the Rockets or Astros over any other team in their respective sports. I hate the Houston Texans name, but I'll root for the team because they're from my home town. Whether or not I watch the games depends on how well my team is doing, but I don't forget where my roots are and my connections are.

Of course, most NFL football games don't involve the Texans. The team I root for in those games is pretty arbitrary. I was rooting for the Carolina Panthers throughout the playoffs because Lex keeps writing about them. When I was a kid I liked the Green Bay Packers because of their colors, so I'll still root for'em. My "system" for college teams is quite a bit more complex, involving where I went to school, where my family went to school, where my lady friend goes to school, in-state schools, schools that I considered going to, ones that my friends went to, and so on. It's an inexact science (sports is meant to be fun and there's nothing fun about science), but one factor I don't consider is whether or not they are the reigning champions.

(attached in the "Read More" section is a loose list of the teams that I root for and in what order) [Read More!]

RAW: Hey, is that 7-11 open?
Brian: Sure. Mountain Dew?
RAW: No.
Brian: Not convenience store hot dogs, I hope!
RAW: Uhhh, no.
Brian: Then what?
RAW: You'll see.
Brian: Uhm, okay.

[pull in to 7-11]

RAW: Now, keep in mind, you said no tacos.
Brian: Uhmm... yeah. Oh no!
RAW: Oh yes!
Brian: Oh no!
RAW: Oh yes!
Brian: Tequitos!
RAW: Yeah. They have two flavors! One that tastes chili-ish... and one that tastes really good!
Clerk: What will you have?
RAW: One of each, please!

From a purely ideological standpoint, this seems outrageous.

Yet, as the technology becomes cheaper and easier to use, it's harder to justify not doing it and saving lives.

Anyone have any idea how much those suckers presently cost?

Update: Eugene Volokh does a comparison with fingerprint recognition on guns. Volokh takes those that oppose the former but support the latter to task. I don't know enough to have a firm opinion, but I think I might have the opposite view (I could find myself supporting the interlocks, but oppose required fingerprint recognition on guns). Interesting.

(Note: I forgot to put the link on earlier. It's there now)

Update II: Both Owen and Adrianne (search "anti-catholic cars") rip the idea. (also, if you haven't already, check out Mike's contributions in the comments section.

The log Mike mentions that it keeps is very troublesome. While I doubt that they will start assigning tickets for "attempted DUI"s, I view that as an invasion of privacy that I don't view the simple breathing into a straw as.

Adrianne argues that the breathalizers for convicts doesn't work. That brings up an interesting trade-off. If they're easy to disable, as Adrianne suggests, then they would be cheap to replace if they start malfunctioning, as Owen fears. On the other hand, if it's difficult to disable, it would likely be difficult to replace. Neither of those situations are particularly desirable.

Getting someone else to breathe into it seems more problematic than Adrianne suggests, though. If you have a person in your crew that hasn't drunk, that person is likely to be the designated driver. If you have a sober person there, you're less inclined to drive drunk in the first place.

Unless, of course, the scenario is that four people go to a bar in seperate cars. Three drink and one does not. The non-drinker then breathes in to all four cars to get them going. That would be a motivation to have to re-validate your sobriety while driving, which Mike says would be required. Such a requirement would, in my opinion, be absurd. On the whole, though, a single person going to three additional cars would be a rather conspicuous way to avoid the test. Would it work? Maybe.

Owen's points (both in the comments here and on his post) about the unsanitary nature of such a device is a very good point. I'd be interested to hear how New Mexico would account for this.

A column by the chairman of the NM House Judiciary Committee suggests that innovations could eventually lead to ways that don't even require a breathalizer:

Current technology will prevent a car from starting if an alcohol detection unit senses alcohol on the driver's breath. New "transdermal" technology detects alcohol on the driver's skin— as simple as touching a detection device.

However, the same column actually makes me more skeptical of the idea as a whole. It implies that if you have "alcohol in your system" you won't be able to start. How much alcohol? The column doesn't say you have to be intoxicated. It would be insane to install a device that wouldn't let a car start because someone took Communion at church (as Adrianne says happened in Germany).

On the other hand, Mr. Martinez may be on to something with the proposed tax incentive. In fact, that combined with the possible insurance break that might occur opens up the avenue for a less invasive (and more market-based) solution: create the financial incentives for such a device, but make it entirely voluntary. Make them more available on new cars being produced and then allow the driver to decide. If someone chooses to then they would likely get lower insurance breaks for the assurances that the person would not drive drunk. If someone chooses not to, such would be their right, but their insurance burden would carry the weight of those that choose not simply because they do intend to drive drunk.

This site claims that such devices reduce recidivism by up to 95%. The Department of Transportation says that the reduction would be 75%.

This, on the other hand, backs up what Mike says about re-validating sobriety and if this is the device they're going to use, Mr. Gallegos is right and it will cause a lot more problems than it would solve:

A Santa Fe distributor and installer of ignition interlocks tells KSFR News that a well-meaning bill that had been discussed in the state legislature may not work. Steve Gallegos manages Santa Fe Preventive Services, a company that has installed interlock ignition devices on cars of convicted drunk drivers longer than any other service in New Mexico. He says a Grant, N.M., lawmaker's bill to install an interlock device on every car in the state would likely cause more problems than it's worth. He says the driver not only has to blow into the device to start the car, but the device requires periodic checks while the car is in motion. That means the driver would have to pull over and restart the engine. And he says the car would have to be brought in for service every month or so, at a cost of $60 a month by today's rate schedule.

Yowzers, according to this, the limit on these things in Pennsylvania is .025, which is ludicrous.

The most startling thing about this is that the New Mexico legislature really does not seem to have thought this out in the slightest. They apparently just started requiring it for drunk drivers in January of this year. They want to go from a pilot program to mandatory without any experience with, you know, actually using them?

With certain possibilities accounted for, I am open to the idea of checking for sobriety before the car starts. Preferably through a market-incentive program. From the looks of it, though, they are nowhere close to where they need to be. Maybe the technology is there (or will be there by the time of the mandate in 2008), but to say that they are jumping the gun is an understatement.

As I said at the top of the post, as the technology gets better, it may be difficult to justify opposing it. Right now, though, it seems pretty easy.

FoxNews.com takes delight that the two frontrunners in the Democratic primaries are wealthy individuals that are pulling from the "people versus the powerful" message of Al Gore (another wealthy individual, incidentally).

Kerry was born into wealth and has consistently utilized it for his own political career, much like the President utilized his for his own business and political career. So does that mean he can't be a populist? Well actually Kerry can't because he's John Kerry.

John Edwards, on the other hand, has made a career out of litigating for the "little guy." He's made his fair share of money doing so, but I'd say that speaks more of his success than of any implied hypocrisy. Unlike Bush, Kerry, and Gore, he was not wealthy growing up and therefore the issue is not quite as theoretical to him.

TheOnion also has its own take.

When I was ardently pro-choice, one of my rationales was how plainly illogical it was to crowd up our foster homes with more unwanted children. Of course, what I failed to realize was that there was a difference between most kids that end up in foster care and those that are born that would otherwise be aborted. A great number of those kids would likely not go into foster homes because there is a premium on adopting newborns to the point that there are waiting lists 7 years long and many would-be parents are going abroad to adopt.

Jane Galt has a thought-provoking post on the legitimacy, or ill-legitimacy, of the argument that these kids would end up in foster homes:

As it happens, I was acquainted, a few years back, with a couple that was trying to adopt; the husband was a research analyst, and his conversation on the topic was, er, excruciatingly thorough. There are a number of children in the system, disproportionately minority ones, who can't get adopted. But that isn't because they're minorities; if you'll notice, many of the couples who can't adopt here end up going to China, South America, or Africa for babies. This couple was desperate for a baby; they were happy to take any or all races. But they were stymied by the system.

The primary reason most children who are eligible for adoption can't be adopted is not that they're black; it's that they're old. Most couples (I'm sure not all) seem to be pretty flexible on race, but they don't want a kid older than two or three, certainly not one older than five. Older children mean you miss a lot of magic moments, such as first steps. Older children also often have active memories of abuse, which makes them difficult to deal with. Or they've been in institutions, collecting bad habits and emotional problems from kids who mostly grew up in extremely difficult circumstances. They are not the happy, well adjusted children that we all imagine we can raise until we actually have the little hellions.

In the post and the comments section, various statistics are bandied about to determine whether every child that is aborted could in fact be adopted.

It's a good question and one without a clear answer.

I'm going to investigate this without regard to my personal views on abortion and while comments on this post are encouraged, I'd prefer it not become about the moral and ethical implications of the procedure itself and keep it focused on the practical implications of adoption vs. abortion.

Also, the numbers I'm going to use are very inexact, but I'm going to use them anyway as a starting point.

According to the CDC, in 2000 there was (approx.) one abortion for every four live births. The statistic I've most heard for medically necessary abortions is around 6%, so using that number there were 238 medically necessary abortions for every 1000 live birth. There were 857,475 legally induced abortions that year

In 1995, there were approximately 500,000 women or couples seeking adoption. Simply using those numbers, that would suggest that if there hadn't been any abortions, somewhere around 350,000 newborns would be without homes (if the number held up to 2000).

Except that there are a number of X-factors involved. First, if abortion were not available, it's quite possible that there would have been more attention paid to contraceptive methods that would have prevented the births in the first place. Secondly, there were probably other potential parents that never looked into it because they immediately planned to adopt from abroad or knew what an expensive process adoption is. Lastly, this assumes that all of the women that had abortions would choose adoption instead of keeping the baby, and that's very unlikely. The process of carrying a baby in one's womb would create an attachment that would make it very difficult to give the child up upon birth.

So with those two factors in mind, chances are that the number of babies needing homes would, in fact, go down significantly.

On the other hand, one must keep in mind that the women giving birth to the children are likely reluctant mothers. Though they may keep the child, there is also a solid possibility that they are unequipped to deal with the trials of parenthood and many of those kids would end up in foster care, too old to be adopted.

If the number of kids kept-but-later-lost exceeds 350,000, it's actually possible that there would be a waiting list for adoptions and more kids put in to foster care. On the other hand, if the number of lost kids is marginal and more kids are contracepted, than it is quite feasible to have a home for every child.

Honestly, though, there are too many X-factors to truly gauge what would actually happen. It's presumptuous to say, as Jane Galt does, that there would be a home for every child. On the other hand, the argument of overloaded foster homes walks is not nearly as clean-cut as many pro-choice advocates suggest.

At the end of the day, it's a value judgment that weighs the (legal and/or moral) rights of the unborn against the (legal and/or moral) rights of a reluctant pregnant woman. I suspect that the way that people interpret the data says a lot more about what their views on the rights scale are than it does anything else.

Owen Courreges has this to say about federalism and constitutional jurisprudence:

People are emotionally invested in [constitutional jurisprudence], and so even if their views are somewhat dubious, they'll generally stick with them in order to help their side achieve political goals. Now I don't believe Barnett believes he is being intellectually dishonest or anything, or that he knows his opinion is wrong. However, I do believe he is driven by a desire for a certain outcome, and that controls his philosophy for interpreting the Constitution.

As for myself, you could argue the same thing, but then I usually tend to argue for a restrictive view of the Constitution where issues are left up to democratic institutions, not unelected judges. In this, I know that history is with me, which I hope gives me an edge over everyone else.

Owen's wording is strange so we may agree if I'm misunderstanding, but the part I emphasized above struck me as completely wrong.

I think if there is any particular political subject where people are *less* loyal to their "cause" it's federalism. Republicans support federalism right up until it comes to the "right to die" or the "right to abortion." Democrats oppose federalism except when it comes to gay marriage.

In the sense that someone often tailors their views of the constitution around their political leanings, he is indeed correct. Liberals argue on one hand in favor of a non-existent privacy clause (which would be a broad interpretation) and then turn around and argue that the second amendment only refers to government-issued guns to military personnel (which would be a narrow interpretation). Conservatives argue that the tenthamendment delegates only those powers to the federal government that are enumerated (narrow interpretation)... except when it comes to certain state's efforts to legalize marijuana.

But that tells me that people are not dogmatic in their views of federalism and constitutional interpretation. Conservatives do generally take an originalist view of the constitution while liberals view it as a "living document" (this disagreement being one reason among many that I'm a Republican). But both liberal and conservative federal judges (that are not subject to being voted out) will often reconsider when it offends their sensibilities (classic example: Gore v. Bush USSC ruling).

There's a recent episode of SouthPark where a Mormon family moves in. They reveal themselves to be disgustingly nice and well-adjusted people. When Stan is goaded to beat one up, the little Mormon boy says that he completely understands why Stan has to beat him up to look good in front of his friends. They end up going to the Mormon household and the family is disturbingly close and obnoxiously earnest. They share their beliefs with Stan and when confronted by his father, apologize profusely for accidentally offending him by sharing their beliefs by answering Stan's question, horrified at the thought that they were "pushing" their beliefs.

Funny episode.

Captain Planet and the Planeteers is presently playing on the Cartoon Network. They remind me of the Mormons. It's such an obnoxiously earnest show. Bad guys are so bad that it's almost funny and yet, when it tries to be funny, it falls so flat that it's like that friend everyone has that thinks he can make up for a bad joke by making a joke about how the original joke was so bad that it was cheesy, but instead of the joke about the joke making up for the lack of humor in the original joke, it makes all the jokes unfunny forever more.

It reminds me of another episode of SouthPark where this group called Butt Out gives a presentation to convince kids not to smoke. Their presentation is (inadvertently to them, but not to the writers of SouthPark) so bad that it is perhaps the two funniest minutes on television ever produced. It's so bad that Kenny starts eating his arm and that, when it's all over, the kids smoke just to spite the group and differentiate themselves from them.

Watching Captain Planet makes me want to go out and litter.

Caution: This doesn't contain any particularly big or surprising twists, but it does vaguely refer to events that occur in the first or second season of 24.

- Keifer Sutherland's character's name isn't actually Jack Bauer, it's Jackbauer, or "Jack" for short. I say this because in the two seasons I've watched this show, I can't recall a single time he's been referred to as "Bauer"... often Jack, often Jackbauer. Kinda weird.

- If you're a black woman and are transferred to the CTU in Los Angeles, your only purpose is to be antagonistic and to seriously undermine whatever it is that Jackbauer's team is trying to accomplish.

- Chapelle took some Rogain between seasons.

- Mason wore a wedding ring during the first season. During the second it's established that he divorced his wife a long time ago while his (20-something now) son was a kid. It was established that he was single in the second season. I suppose last season he was married to a second wife?

- Kate Warner looks WAY old for 29. I was sure that I was going to bust them for trying to use an older actress to play a part too young for her, but it turns out the actress was only 29 or so during filming.

- Marie Warner looks way hotter in that wig than she does with her bleach blond hair. Since I don't have a preference between blonds and brunettes, I have no idea why (particular since the brunette wig looked just as fake as the bleached hair).

- I can count, offhand, twenty people that died and/or were seriously injured due to Kim Bauer's actions.

- Never, ever be a cop transporting Kim Bauer from one location to another. It's bad for your health.

- Government agents never say "goodbye" to one another on the phone.

- Perspective. When the entire city of Los Angeles is about to be blown up, it's hard to garner much emotional impact to the fact of a singular little girl. Even if her father is a real, real meaniehead.

- If this hadn't been filmed prior to the Second Gulf War, it would quite obviously be anti-war propaganda and an egregious example of Hollywood's anti-Bush political agenda.

- If you're a black CTU-LA agent that is not a woman transferred from division to CTU-LA, you might as well be a cop transporting Kim Bauer.

RAW: I noticed something weird the other day. I don't like Chef Boyardee ravioli anymore.
Eel: Yuck. What's wo weird about that?
RAW: I've always LOVED the stuff. I mean it used to be one of my favorite meals.
Eel: Ewwwww...
RAW: It's good! Or, it used to be...
Eel: Well, you'll be all the healthier for not eating it anymore.
RAW: It's not that bad for you.
Eel: [skeptically] Uh huuuh.....
RAW: No, really. When I was watching what I ate, it was one of the few things I could eat! Less than 1/3 fat calories...
Eel: There's more to nutrition than fat, Alex.
RAW: Yeah, but it's not particularly high in carbs, either.
Eel: There's more to nutrition than carbs, too.
RAW: Like what?
Eel: Like fiber, protein. Good stuff.
RAW: Well, even without those things it doesn't have a whole lot of good stuff, doesn't have a whole lot of bad stuff, and it fills me up...
Eel: I can just imagine you talking to my Aunt Selma the nutritionist.
RAW: Ack!
Eel: What? She's a nice woman. She's probably even nicer about this than I am.
RAW: I'm sure, loo...
Eel: You're what?!
RAW: [looks outside and suddenly a doghouse appears out of nowhere on the front lawn with RAW's own name on it] I mean, there's no way she's nicer than you cause you're the nicest person in the whole wide world... I was saying that I'm sure she's a nice person and... and...
Eel: I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
RAW: Good plan!

30 minutes and a goodbye later...

Ring. Ring.
Eel: Hello?
RAW: I hope you hadn't fallen asleep yet.
Eel: No, no. What's up?
RAW: 44% of my daily allotment of protein. 32% of my daily allotment of dietary fiber.
Eel: What?
RAW: Chef Boyardee Ravioli.
Eel: I knew I shouldn't have answered the phone... you've got to be kidding me.
RAW: By calling you again just to prove that I'm right for once or about the health contents of canned foods.
Eel: Yes.
RAW: I... uhmm...
Eel: So how much fat? How much saturated fat?
RAW: 14% and 20% respectively.
Eel: See?
RAW: That's not so bad. A lot less fats than fibers.
Eel: And carbs?
RAW: Well, 22g of sugar. That's not great, I know, but I'm not on the Atkins or anything. But that's equal to the grams of protein...
Eel: [sigh] Goodnight, Alex. Unless there's something else you want to tell me about the health content of Chef Boyardee canned ravioli?
RAW: 50% of my daily allotment of Vitamin A! Sweet dreams...

When I got back home last night, I actually went straight to sleep. Considering that I've been unable to get to sleep before 6am lately, that was quite a feat.

I discovered something, though. There is absolutely nothing to do when you get up early!! Nothing is really open, not that it matters cause I can't leave cause my car is boxed in. Can't go downstairs cause there's a guest on the couch. No one is updating their blogs cause everyone smart is asleep and everyone holy (and with transportation) is at church. Established web sites have closed shop for the weekend.

I'm never getting up early again! Ever!

I've never actually lived alone before. I lived with my folks, then with Adam in the dorms, then with Danforth (and Hutch) in a couple apartments and now with Danforth, Jaquin, and Tigger.

Sometimes I've thought it would be cool to live on my own. In fact, when I was making all kinds of money with UFC, I was looking at getting an apartment for myself. Didn't work out when I got canned, though.

This weekend I discovered a couple plusses and minuses of living with other people.

Plusses: Two nights back, I was headed out the door when Jaquin insisted that I try some soup that he and his girlfriend cooked together. They cooked their first meal together to celebrate V-Day (all together now, "awwwwwww, how cute!!"... they are a really cute couple, though). Anyway, on top of being free, it was quite good!

Minuses: I woke up this morning and had a hankering for some fast food breakfast. Unfortunately, Jaquin parked his car behind me. I measured the width of my car and the width of the space and determined that I had an opening that was about two inches shorter than a disaster waiting to happen and ultimately decided that I was trapped. Not really his fault since I told him I rarely get to bed before six and he probably thought it was safe to park without blocking me in. Given the state my stomach has been in all day, though, it's probably a good thing that I didn't have any fast food.

So, let's see, I had some reasonably healthy and homecooked soup for free, but was unable to go out and spend $5 on food that would have made me sick(er) to my stomach... score one for roommates!

Kim Bauer

Hi! My name is Kim Bauer. Bet you didn't know I was literate, eh?

I just found out that my father has died and a nuclear bomb is about to be detonated. Even though I am safely in a car to my aunt's house in San Jose, I think it would be best if I just get out of the car!

After all, nothing bad ever happens to me! Except getting kidnapped twice last year and starting a domino effect that eventually endangered the lives of both of my parents!! Oh yeah, and the whole getting arrested for that drug deal that I had nothing to do with. Oh yeah, and getting arrested for murder and kidnapping a whopping 6 hours ago and still being wanted by the authorities on both charges and putting my kung-fu boyfriend (and an innocent cop) in the emergency room. Oh, and nearly getting kidnapped by that weirdo woods guy with the bunker. Other than that, why the bloody heck not just get out of the car in the middle of nowhere and watch my only chance of actually getting anywhere safely for once in my entire life drive away?

No, much better to risk it because, you see, I'm dumb as a doornail... err... I mean, I'm sad.

I discovered a neat resource on the University of Houston website that reprints all kinds of articles on higher education and updates every weekday.

Looking through the archives I found a couple of interesting articles that lead me to a question for you guys out there.

Back when I was gainfully employed by UFC, I looked at going back to school to pick up a higher level degree or teacher certification. One of the places I looked was University of Phoenix (on a side note, never contact these people unless you're serious. They will keep calling you long after you've told them you've put your plans on indefinite hold). Before deciding to save money by going to Sam Houston State, Danforth found an online university to his own liking names ACCIS. My boss at UFC picked up an upper level degree at Kennedy-Western. It's no secret that alternative higher education is exploding right now, but even having looked into it myself I had no idea how successful (and controversial) the industry has been until I read this article by Businessweek Online:

If nothing else, the for-profits have shown that there's money to be made in higher ed. For-profit entrepreneurs have struggled in the kindergarten-to-high school arena, as exemplified by the ongoing fiscal woes of Edison Schools Inc. (EDSN ) But Phoenix and others are running financial circles around conventional colleges even though they survive on tuition alone, with no endowments or taxpayer subsidies. In fact, they were one of the stock market's best-performing sectors during the bear market. Five of them -- Apollo, Corinthian Colleges (COCO ), Career Education, Strayer Education (STRA ), and ITT Educational Services (ESI ) -- ranked among the top 25 of BusinessWeek's Hot Growth Companies this year.

For-profit colleges have been a part of U.S. higher education almost as long as Harvard College, the nation's oldest. But as recently as 1990, virtually all of what are still called "career colleges" were little more than trade schools for auto mechanics and secretaries. Since then, a government crackdown on shoddy operators, combined with the economy's insatiable demand for college grads, has sparked a change in the industry. Of today's 4,500-odd remaining for-profits, about 800 now grant degrees (almost all are accredited), up from just 316 in 1990, says John Lee, a Bethesda (Md.) educational consultant.

Essentially, the new for-profits have taken the ethos of the traditional trade school -- delivering specific, marketable skills -- and applied it to higher education. For example, Katharine Gibbs, the century-old secretarial school, has exploded from 2,000 students to 15,000 since it was bought by Career Education in 1997. Gibbs now offers degrees in business and technology to a student population that's 40% male, vs. 2% before.

Gibbs and others have succeeded by focusing on programs aimed at furthering students' careers. Indianapolis-based ITT Educational Services Inc., which teaches technology subjects such as electronics to 37,000 students at 76 sites, created its curriculum after surveying employers to find out what they need, says CEO Rene Champagne. The payoff: ITT placed 73% of its graduates last year amid a jobs drought that savaged the prospects of many grads of conventional colleges. "We benchmark ourselves against the best customer-service organizations in the world," says Brian Mueller, CEO at the University of Phoenix Online, a separate entity from the main university whose 79,000 students take all of their courses on the Internet.

New York Times wrote late last year about the rising costs of tuition. It does an excellent job of putting things in perspective. The good news for Texans is that despite the recent hikes, we're still below the national average. The bad news is that the national average is rising fast in both public and private universities. Without some sort of change in public university we run the risk of a two-tier university system with private universities catering to an increasingly wealthy student body and providing a superior education. But it's still not as bad as many people think it is:

News articles about the Ivy League's $40,000 annual cost -- and reports of 10 and 15 percent increases at state colleges -- have had an effect. Call it panic. Seventy percent of Americans think college tuition is ''beyond the reach of the average family,'' the Republican report says. But do they know what they're talking about? In fact, Americans wildly misstate tuition levels. In 2001, according to a survey by the American Council on Education, the typical American thought in-state tuition at a public college was $11,600. (It was $3,750 that year.) Asked about the full cost, including room and board, they still guess double the actual costs.

And then, colleges are quick to add, you have to remember the role of financial aid. For example, at the University of Maryland -- one of the most expensive public colleges in the country, with an annual cost, including room and board, of $14,000 -- three-quarters of the students get financial aid: an average $7,000 each.

Once you factor in financial aid, the net cost of a four-year public-college degree rose only 7 percent from 1992 to 1999, according to Sandy Baum, an economics professor at Skidmore College. (Note, though, that that leaves out the last few years of erratic increases.) And many institutions still qualify as genuinely inexpensive: San Francisco State University: $2,480 for tuition and fees. The University of Florida: $2,780. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: $3,527. It is still expensive, of course, to forgo work to attend college, and federal grants aren't growing as fast as living expenses. At public colleges where tuition is creeping up to $6,000 and $7,000, debt levels are also inching dangerously close to private-college levels, proving a serious hurdle for low- and moderate-income families. But still, with aid, many more people can afford college than think they can.

There are a lot of interesting questions in both articles pertaining to what a university's purpose is. There are some interesting ideas batted around in the NYT article for how to cut university costs. A number of smaller universities are making cuts in expensive athletics programs while a probe in Massachusetts suggested that smaller universities work together to cut redundant programs (the Texas equivalent would be SFA eliminating its psychology major because SHSU also has one).

So the question of the day is what you would consider important - or ideal - for a university and, to a greater extent, for a university education. For instance, would you consider the University of Phoenix and its ilk less legitimate because they don't offer a classical education? As an employer, would you give greater weight to someone who clocked in more social science and literature hours over someone who had more specialized training? As a student, how much is it worth to you to go to a traditional university with a grassy campus, an athletics department, dorms, and a classical university atmosphere?

My answer is in the "Read More" section. If you plan to answer the question (and I'd like as many responses as possible), think about it before reading my answer.
[Read More!]

With TCU headed to the Mountain West Conference, C*USA has an opening. There are presently four serious candidates:

Temple University - Temple has just been kicked out of the Big East for being an all-around lousy team. But since they have the luster of being a soon-to-be-former BCS team, they're being kicked around as a possible replacement for TCU in the C*USA, and not without good reason. They are the largest of the four candidates with approximately 34,000 students. Like my own UH, they are an urban university (Philadelphia). As the second largest of three major public universities in Pennsylvania, they ought to have a lot of potential, though their football program has never been the equal to Pittsburgh or Penn State. They do have a really good basketball program, but from the looks of it there basketball program would likely be staying in the Atlantic 10. Another factor to consider is that incoming member Marshall University is geographically distant from the rest of the C*USA universities and may wish for more focus on the east coast. As we are lucky to have Marshall joining us, their input should be taken very seriously.

University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) - Currently a member of the Western Athletic Conference, they are also a candidate for the Mountain West Conference. If the MWC invites them, it would be a moot point, but that seems unlikely. Like Temple, UTEP is more well known for its basketball program. Their football program has been nothing short of pathetic over the past couple of years (in a not-very-competitive conference to boot), but they hope to change that with the high-profile hiring of the morally challenged but gifted Mike Price. Price is known for being the Alabama coach that never actually coached when he was let go after a night in the Mobile strip clubs on the company card. Still, Price had some serious success up in Washington and is in a good position to turn the UTEP program around in the short term. In the long term, if he does turn UTEP around he will likely head for greener pastures. UTEP's primary advantage is that they have a large stadium (Sun Bowl) and from what I understand draw huge crowds. As attendance was one of the reasons TCU cited for leaving, it's not something that ought to be overlooked. In addition to that, they are the only I-A university in that region this side of the Texas border and I'm told that they have loyal followings in Houston and Dallas (where UH and SMU are respectively), which would make them a good match. On the downside, they are in a different time zone and are a 6-8 hour drive from the nearest C*USA school. Despite being in Texas, they have more geographical ties to New Mexico than their fellow Texas schools. El Paso is closer to Los Angeles than it is to Houston.

Louisiana Tech University - Lousiana Tech is the most obvious candidate to replace TCU. They've been playing with incoming Rice, Tulsa, and SMU in the Western Athletic Conference. With the departure of those three (and TCU a few years ago) they are the only WAC school in the central time zone and the nearest university is UTEP. The only other conference where they would be a good fit is the uncompetitive Sun Belt, but it's been said that they don't want to be in a conference with nearby University of Louisiana at Monroe. Because of this situation, they are the only candidate actively campaigning to become member. If they are not chosen, however, the WAC will likely pick up another school or two in the area (North Texas and Louisiana-Lafayette are often mentioned). They are the smallest candidate with approximately 11,200 students and have historically had attendance problems. Since they are not located in a major market, TV revenues are likely be negligable. Geographically, however, they are a perfect fit and they have a successful football program for a public university of its size (more successful than the large University of Louisiana at Lafayette). With that in mind, however, they may have maxed out on their potential.

University of North Texas - North Texas only recently advanced to Division I-A, but have successfully made their mark since doing so. They dominate the Sun Belt Conference and the year before last defeated outgoing C*USA member Cincinnati in the New Orleans Bowl. For a university of its size (it boasts more than 30,000 students) it has had a lackluster athletics program until recently. A large quasi-urban university (located 30 minutes north of DFW), they have attendance problems that mirror both those of University of Houston and Temple. They do have the advantage, however, of being in a large media market. However, they share that market with two other I-A schools (SMU and TCU). It's reported that SMU is steadfast against UNT membership, which is a shame. To be frank, SMU is lucky to be an incoming member at all and if TCU had announced its intentions earlier it likely would not be. With that in mind, North Texas is in a lot better position to improve their program in a better conference than the floundering SMU (as well as Rice). However, they are presently the big fish in the very small Sun Belt pond and their ability to build on that is unproven.

There have been other candidates mentioned, but I seriously doubt that Toledo and Miami (OH) would really consider leaving the Mid America Conference. To be honest, I'd just assume they didn't and keep the C*USA a regional conference. If I hear noises from either of those two schools that they're interesting in leaving the MAC, I will evaluate them more closely. The same for Baylor, which is sadly unlikely to be leaving the Big XII any time soon.

As for what I would personally like to see, just take the list above and reverse it. I'd really like to see North Texas included because I believe that they are an upwardly mobile program. They would also be a good counterpart for the University of Houston as the two share a lot in common. This could be a double-edged sword however, as the two draw from the same recruiting base. All things being equal, I'd like to keep the Texas schools together as much as possible.

Absent North Texas, I think Louisiana Tech makes a lot of sense. They'd make a good replacement for TCU in the West Division of the C*USA while providing a school close to somewhat isolated Memphis and an in-state rival for Tulane. However, Tulane has a preference for private schools (they were instrumental in bringing in private Tulsa, Rice, and SMU) and Memphis is making noises about preferring a basketball power (which would be either UTEP or Temple). There is a lot of politics involved and my biggest fear is a deadlock. More on this later.

UTEP and Temple would both bring strong basketball programs to the C*USA, but UTEP is the one more likely to actually bring the basketball program with them. If Temple wants its basketball to stay in the A10, that should be a disqualifying factor. C*USA is on the cusp of being an all-sports conference for the first time since its inception and I don't think that Temple has enough advantages to make an exception. If Temple is willing to bring their basketball program with them, then it would depend largely on Marshall's feelings on the matter. It would be pretty easy to move either Memphis or Southern Mississippi over to the West Division. Given the weakness of the West Division as it exists, it might even be preferable. USM and UM ended up #1 and #4 in the conference respectively last year while the only good team remaining in the West Division is Houston (though Tulane has the capability to improve).

That being said, all things being equal I would probably prefer UTEP over Temple. In addition to being a Texas school, their status as the only school in West Texas in a substantial city without any professional sports teams, they are in a unique position to consistently bring in good attendance and help C*USA where it is most lagging. On the other hand, if I were UTEP's AD I would be cautious about wanting to join the C*USA and I do not prefer them enough for the conference to make special concessions to get them to join.

Half of these dresses look kinda cool to me.

[via Pete]

Old Friend: Alex?
RAW: ??
OF: It's Kimberly!!!!
RAW: Kimberly! Wow, it's been forever. How've you been?!
OF: Eh.
RAW: Eh? Sorry to hear that.
OF: Well, I finally answered a question that's been bothering me a real long time.
RAW: Oh yeah? What's the answer.
OF: Because it's filled with cold, heartless people who have no desire to truly connect with one another. They walk like zombies throughout their entire lives never realizing how really alone they are. They find ways to distract themselves with stupid RPGs or the boob tube so that they avoid the real world and everyone in it. They spend their time trying to prove that they're better or know more about something that no one really gives a shit about so that they can feel all superior and ignore that they have the same problems as absolutely everybody else. All so that they don't have to realize how truly fucked up their lives are.
RAW: I see.
OF: The question is "Why do I hate the world?"
RAW: Yeah, I figured that out. I shoulda been on Jeopardy or something.
OF: Haha! You should have!!
RAW: Uhh, I gotta go.
OF: Bye!! Call me!

Note: This AIM conversation has been edited for obvious grammatical, capitalization, de-"LOL"ing, and spelling errors.

DALLAS - Chocolates are always nice, and a diamond necklace would be delightful. But a Dallas-based ministry thinks it has a better idea for Valentine's Day (news - web sites).

"Her gift for Valentines? Stop looking at porn," proclaim billboards put up by NetAccountability, a nonprofit software company that aims to help Christians confront the "secret sin" of pornography.

If national surveys are any indication, it is a personal battle waged by millions of Christians.

Almost 18 percent of people who called themselves born-again Christians admitted visiting Internet porn sites, according to a 2000 survey of 1,031 adults by the evangelical group Focus on the Family. In a 2002 Pastors.com survey, more than 50 percent of responding pastors reported viewing pornography in the previous year.

It would probably be a good idea to have something to drink around here that doesn't have caffeine. Might help me not consistently be awake at 4:25 in the morning...

When I was 21, I discovered Phil Pritchett. When I was 22, Phil Pritchett left Texas.

When he left, it left a gulf in my life. I don't mean that in some sort of spiritual sense (I do have some perspective, thankyouverymuch), but in the sense that I no longer had musical acts to look forward to. Blind Luck only rarely came to Houston and, except for one gig opening for Reckless Kelly, only with Phil.

So I went on Phil's web site and clicked on the links section, looking for a new act to start following. There I happened on a link for a guy named Dub Miller. I clicked around his site and downloaded some of his stuff off of Napster. It was quite country-ish, but I was cool with that. He was playing at this bar called the Firehouse Saloon the following Thursday. I'd seen the Firehouse. It was right across the street from where I worked, in fact.

I went to see Miller play, but only caught a bit of the show before I started losing interest, getting tired, or both. Over the next month I listened more and more to his stuff and began to really get a feel for the unique kind of country music that he played. When I went to see him again a month later at Blanco's, I was much more prepared. Or so I thought. It turned out that Miller played mostly covers (he had only one CD out at the time). But since it was a Friday show, there was a much more rambunctious crowd that lead to me having a better time and cutting lose. Miller played for three and a half hours with one half-hour break. He never lost steam. It was amazing.

At the end of the show he went on the first anti-Nashville rant I had ever seen. "You call [bleep]ing KIKK and KILT and every radio station you know and tell them you [bleep]ing want to [bleep]ing listen to real [bleep]ing country music! If you do this and you get all your friends to do this you will [bleep]ing never have to listen to [bleep]ing Brian White again!"

Dub always had a way with words.

It was the first time I had become aware that there was another form of country music around in Texas. I went back to the Firehouse's website and started checking out other artists playing there. I ran across a guy named Owen Temple. I went back to Napster and downloaded his stuff. Napster had a neat feature that allowed you to check the folders of those that had particular artists. So I found a guy I'd gotten both Dub Miller and Owen Temple songs from. He also had music from people named Jason Boland, Bleu Edmondson, Adam Carroll, and even Phil Pritchett. I went on a huge downloading spree.

I told my brother about this discovery and he told me about a guy named Mark David Manders who used to play at his frat house. Oh, and there was this guy named Pat Green that was a fraternity brother of a family friend at Texas Tech. So back to Napster I went and discovered Cory Morrow, Roger Creager, Charlie Robison, and Jack Ingram. Before I knew it, I was knee deep in this stuff.

Every time I went to see an artist play, I'd catch a new opening act. I discovered Peter Dawson and Jason Boland that way (I'd heard Boland before, but most of what I'd downloaded seemed to be covers). Through Jason Boland I heard about another Oklahoma act that he was close to named Cross Canadian Ragweed. Through Cross Canadian Ragweed, I heard of Great Divide.

Before I knew it, I was knee deep in this stuff. I had hundreds of songs downloaded (which I later purchased and had signed, if anyone from the RIAA is reading this). I was a fixture at the Firehouse, going twice a week or more. The bartenders knew my beer of choice on sight. The old doorman used to let me in at reduced fair. The waitress would fill me up without my asking (or her charging). Not that I was a freeloader. I was spending more at the Firehouse than I was on food.

All because of Dub Miller and our mutual hatred of Bryan White.

In the comments section on my previous education post, Adam has a strikingly innovative idea:

We should remake schools like colleges in one respect. Take away "grade level" and make moving up dependent on passing certain courses. If you pass Math 1 but fail Reading 1, you take Math 2 and Reading 1 the next semester. Don't initially seperate kids into "grade-levels." Just, have a checklist of classes that need to be passed (much like your graduation pre-requisities in college) before moving from say, elementary school to junior high, enroll the classes that need to be taught and go from there. If there is no official grade level, you don't have to enroll your kid in all the same classes as everyone else and so it would be more normal for Bobby to have one class with Susie but not with Billy, and another class with Billy but not Susie. There is then less stigma to not moving up. You even get more social interaction that way.

Our university system is perhaps the best in the world while, dollar for dollar, our K-12 is seriously lagging behind. There are a number of reasons for this, including self-selection, funding, school choice, and less mandated instructional techniques.

With this in mind, I think that there is a lot that our K-12 programs can learn from our higher level institutions. Self-selection (or lack thereof in K-12) will always be an issue as long as there is compulsory education and unfortunately I don't see compulsory education going anywhere any time soon (but that's for another post). Democrats and liberals like to point out funding, and there is some legitimacy to that claim. Republicans and conservatives point out that colleges have to compete with one another for students and the money they bring and there is some legitimacy to that claim as well. Those that favor charter schools (primarily Republicans, but some Democrats too) make the case for both school choice and less mandated instructional technique.

Adam's proposal deals primarily with the latter (more versatility) and I believe that it has a lot of merit to it. Adam points out how it could relieve the stigma of late graduation and he's quite right on that. One potential flaw in that is that a significant number of the students who can't meet the academic muster by 18 or 19 are those most inclined to drop out anyway.

Personally, I don't have a problem with that as getting rid of those students inherently makes a high school degree more valuable and as someone that believes that compulsory education past the age of 15 or so is bad policy, I have no real problem with it. As this is one of my quirky views that would prevent me from getting elected so much as dog-catcher, I suspect that most people will disagree. My point here is that drop-out rates will likely soar and most people (myself not included) consider that a bad thing.

One other potential upside of a more versitile timeline is probably not what most people are concerned about, but it means something to me: students who are academically ready to get out of high school sooner will be able to get out of high school sooner with a lot more ease. A number of people that I know (Eel, Danforth, Sama, and Ora to name four) got out of their traditional high schools early by going to a gifted and talented school or simply graduating early.

I never did. I wasn't scholastically in a position to because my grades weren't good enough. If I had been told that all I had to do was knock down certain credits and I'd be out, there is a good chance that I would have taken them up on that and it would have made a much better student out of me. In other words, knowing that great grades were never going to get me too far ahead and that I would have to bide my time for four years in high school regardless was a de-motivator for me.

I know a lot of students who did "just enough to get by" that might have had to re-evaluate their priorities when "just enough to get by" could keep you in high school for the six or seven years that some people (ahem, Jay) have been in college. Though, to be honest, this is probably not a high priority in fixing our flawed education system.

There's a potential downside to this as well. With the best and the brightest getting out early, when you graduate could be indicative to future employers about how bright you are. I think this would be offset by the new value of the high school diploma, but it's something to consider regardless.

A less tangible benefit for a number of borderline-but-bright students would be a sense of control over there education. I know I felt quite a bit of that when I was in control of my high school destiny (as opposed to junior high where I was significantly less so). By the time I was leaving Clear Lake they were upping the requirements in the majors and squeezing out a whole lot of electives. I took fourth years of science and english anyway, but that's because I knew I was going to college and wanted to graduate on the advanced plan. It made me take those classes a lot more seriously because I felt like I was a part of the process.

The most important benefit in ways both tangible and intangible is cause-and-effect, a lesson sometimes unlearned by my generation. Because the current system is inflexible, many teachers are loathe to fail students because it ruins their summer or can even hold them back an entire grade. A more flexible system would give teachers the lattitude to give students the grades they deserve. Would teachers take advantage of that? I can't say that I know. If they would, however, a proportional response to academic failure could help motivate students not to fail in the first place.

There is another issue to consider with Adam's plan, however, in the earlier grades: social development. While such a structure would make a lot of sense for high schools and some in junior high, there is a legitimate issue as for what to do with kids during their most formative years. In larger schools you can have a special class made up of students too old to be clumped with the grade their academic performance suggests they ought to be. The difference between a fourth grader and fifth grade is a lot greater than tenth-to-twelfth grade. In smaller schools I'm not sure what the best way to handle this would be.

The other issue is money. Adam is absolutely right that educating children longer would likely cost more. I joked in my reply, but in reality I'm not against spending more on schools. What I am seriously against is the attitude that funding is our primary problem and therefore by throwing more water in the leaking pool, it will cease leaking.

Education is as much an investment as an expenditure. The problem I have with spending more money now is that we're not getting adequate returns. If a better system were in place that could actually make such returns (and make a degree actually indicative of academic achievement), I could very well be on board with necessary increases and a corresponding tax hike.

But not till then.

We apparently have another Che situation on our hands. Mike Ahlf has found an abandoned* cat. He doesn't know her age, but she is a cute little thing! Well, for a cat anyway :).

If you're interested, give Mike a call at 713-862-4333.

* - I originally called it a stray, which is inaccurate. It's housebroken and therefore unable to fend for itself. Kinda needs a home. Hint hint. :)

One of the cool things about Blogs is that not only do most people (that I read, anyhow) blog on general areas of interest (politics, philosophy, life, etc.) but they have a particular area where they go into minutae I wouldn't otherwise be privy to. Warliberal does the fish-blogging thing, I do a lot of blogging on universities, and Dr. Weevil teaches me about Latin (and Rome!):

Megan McCardle ('Jane Galt') ends a long post with the phrase Carpe Couch, 'seize the couch'. If she had put it completely in Latin, it would have been Carpe Lectum. Or perhaps Carpe Pulvinar, especially if those using the couch are gods.

Some Romans had a semicircular couch, rather like the booths in the corners of some modern restaurants, but arranged for lying rather than sitting. They called this kind of couch a sigma, after the Greek letter. This sounds confusing if you think of the standard modern sigma used for mathematical summations that looks like an M tipped over on its left side. In classical times, the Greek capital sigma still looked like a Roman capital C: the angular version is a Byzantine thing. I suppose the Romans called the semicircular couch a sigma rather than a ce (pronounced 'kay') because outside of an alphabetical context sigma is more obviously the name of a letter, not just a random syllable.

Did George W. Bush go AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard from 1972-73?

It's a question I don't personally pretend to know the answer to, and seeing as how I didn't care that Bill Clinton was a draft-dodger, I don't personally care enough to speculate.

But Andrew Olmsted has a pretty good post on the matter. Olmsted is non-partisan (though I think he's registered Democrat) and a military man to boot, so I find what he had to say here and here interesting:

So why the gap in service? There's no way of knowing for certain, but the explanation the President offers does fit with the available evidence. He was serving regularly from January to April 1972. He then stopped while he was in Alabama working on the Senate campaign, although it appears he did put in some limited work towards the end of his time in Alabama. He then returned to Texas and served intermittently until he asked for his discharge to attend Harvard Business School.

What about his flight physical? He probably didn't bother to take it because he wasn't going to be flying any more. As anyone who has ever taken a physical can attest, they're not much fun, and a flight physical is even less pleasant. Since he wasn't going to be flying any longer, there was no real reason to take the physical.

Lex Alexander also poses an interesting question:

Cuz if I got to fly, especially something hot like a single-seat fighter, I'd be borrowing other pilots' hours just to get in more time. Or, as Kevin says, "If I was trained to fly fighter jets and could go down and do so every few weekends ya couldn't [expletive] drag me from the place ... "

Even if all the other folderol about his Air National Guard duty turns out to be groundless, that's the one question I haven't heard asked or answered yet, and it's the one in which, on a personal level, I'm most interested.

Kevin has a glowing review of the new Mozilla browser: Firefox.

The first thing that popped into mind when I read the post was "Firewhat?"

Apparently, I wasn't alone in not thinking very highly of the name. Well, apparently the whole name issue is addressed in detail by a Mozilla head. It makes a bit more sense, though I'm still not entirely sure about the name.

I used Mozilla for Linux and found it to be good-though-unremarkable. It beat the pants off of Konquerer. I don't really have the same problems with IE that many others report, though I put Opera on the system when I was using dial-up and speed became an issue. I've taken a real liking to Opera with the exception of its mail client. Kevin calls it one of the best features in his post, so I think I might give it a try.

Firefox... still can't get used to it. Might make an interesting band name. Better than The Drinks, anyway.

I tendered my resignation to Gattaca.

Mr. Smith seemed genuinely disappointed. He might say that to all outgoing personnel, but that combined with the glowing 45-day review I recieved almost makes me feel guilty for doing nothing but badmouthing the company.

Almost.

When Danforth started working at Gattaca, he was surprisingly upbeat about it. About a month in he said that he could imagine sticking with the company for a while. Eventually the novelty wore off and the grating things began to grate and it convinced him to go back to college. I never really had the honeymoon period. I'm not sure why not. Perhaps it's because it paid less than my previous job (it paid more than Dan's gig at Concord). Maybe it's because I have a college degree and therefore - in true stuck-up fashion - I believe that the job was beneath me.

Or maybe it's because of the classes that I took in college. Particularly the human resources classes. In an odd way it's like they read all the books on effective personnel management and drew all the wrong lessons.

The most tragic thing about the company is that they are extraordinarily close to being a great employer. But the combinations of their negatives make it practically intolerable to work there. When I look around at my OCD coworkers, I can tell you exactly who the good employees are. Several of whom I would hire - in an instant - if I were to start up my own company. They are almost uniformly the most discontented, embittered, and outward-bound employees there. If a company wanted to set up policies specifically designed to drive away the right people, they couldn't do so much more effectively than Gattaca (or at least the OCD division).

For a company that prides itself on "Engineering Solutions" many of their policies are very short-sighted. I don't even mean their big brotherish mentality. In all honesty, if that were all I could deal with it. It's not any single policy, but rather the way that they work together to drive away talent in a way that Gattaca's management refuses to recognize.

In the face of high unemployment in the tech sector, they have made it OCD policy to hire those with college degrees. Taking advantage of a crappy job market might seem like a good idea. In other cases, it is a good idea. Except that the job they offer is so pedestrian that anyone with a modicum of formal training and on-the-job experience is simply bored senseless. Except that people don't get dual degrees in MIS and Computer Science to take a job that pays $24k a year. For what they do, OCD techs are overpaid. But for what their qualified to do, and what they would rather be doing, the pay is pathetic.

But hiring overqualified people can make a positive difference. Even if they're not going to stick around. They can use their extra time to put their skills to work and you essentially get high-skilled labor at low-skilled prices. Except that policies in place prevent this from occuring. The need for companies to have established procedures for getting things done is understandable. Employee initiative can often go awry when it's done in a manner counterproductive to the rest of the business operations. On the other hand, if you're going to hire overqualified people that can program, might it be a good idea to allow them - instead of the internal programming department - to write programs that their department uses?

Rick, one of my coworkers, wrote a in Visual Basic that cut the tape-scratching process in half. It took all of the tapes that aren't there and simply removes them from the list. In addition to that, it tells the tape-puller where the tapes are going to be instead of printing them out in one big, giant list. When Rick unveiled his work, he was scolded for doing things outside of protocol and said that if such a program needed to be written, a request needed to be made to the internal programming department. Several have been but the IPD has other things to do. So in addition to not being paid for their skills, they are prevented from using them to make their job easier or to keep from being bored.

Then the big brother policies come in. In addition to being underpaid and underutilized, they are disrespected. In addition to not getting enough to do, they're told that they can't actually be doing anything else. Not allowing headphones and Internet access is very often smart policy. It can distract employees from doing what they are supposed to be doing. However, when there's not anything to be doing, you are paying them to sit there and be extremely bored and miserable. Whether a happy workforce is an effective workforce is subject to debate, but a miserable workforce is rarely a productive one.

Except that there quite simply is not enough to do. The company purposefully overstaffs to account for an exceedingly high turnover rate and the desire to have at least two people on shift at all times in the case of an emergency. That means three people on shift because any given employee could be sick on any given day. So I can understand the inclination to have people standing by "just in case." But then they turn around and refuse to acknowledge that there's nothing for them to be doing so they require them to be doing something at all times. While I wouldn't advise headphones in most office environments, this is a rare case where you can make a lot of potentially miserable employees' days go by a lot faster.

None of these policies are, in and of themselves, bad. But they create an environment that breeds contempt. Employees are treated like children and begin to act like it. A quick servey of the server room will show many examples of this. There are pencils that are stapled head to tow. Pen clips are removed from pens. People draw on the ergonomic wristrests. There has been memo after memo sent on these stupid matters, but it only encourages more adolescent behavior. At the end of the shift, people will college degrees sit there and watch the clock for fifteen minutes just as elementary school students do.

The company talks a lot of "bad apples." It doesn't seem to have occured to them that their office environment is creating this kind of behavior. As said before, I would hire a number of my coworkers. Some of the same ones that right on the wristrests. There's nothing wrong with these people.

So I said before that they were close to being a great employer. How can I say that after all I just said? Because they are! They do a lot of things wrong, but they do a lot of things right. Unfortunately, their rights often negate their wrongs. Gattaca prides itself on its loyalty. Twenty-five years of business and never a single layoff (exception: when they acquire another company). They promote almost entirely from within. The only executive that didn't start at the bottom used to run a competing business.

The practice of company loyalty is long forgotten, but Gattaca surprisingly has it. You are given a lot of incentives to stick around. OCD promotions are based entirely on seniority. Not only that, but they will train. If someone's job becomes obsolete, they will train that person to do something else before laying them off. They evaluate the employee instead their existing skill sets and determine that a good employee is worth keeping. Hooray!

They could really utilize this by hiring non-degreed personnel for jobs that don't require degrees. The best employees in the OCD were always the ones without college degrees. They were the ones grateful to be getting $11.50 an hour straight out of high school. Those are the ones that are going to stick around. Except that the company doesn't hire them anymore, preferring to hire overqualified personnel that hate the work and the company instead.

They also give semi-annual reviews. That means employees get raises twice a year! It's not much, naturally, but it at least lets the employees know that their contribution is at least modestly valued and they know they won't be making $24k a year forever. Of course, semi-annual reviews would be a lot better if they weren't met with a raking-over-the-coals for every single time you were late, every time you called in sick, and every personal call you took. "You're a crappy employee, but here's a 1.75% raise"... doesn't work.

All in all, I really can't complain. I mean, I got from the company exactly what I wanted. In fact, it was these crappy policies that lead me to Gattaca in the first place. If they didn't hire college degreed people for the OCD (which I believe they shouldn't), I wouldn't have been hired. If they didn't have such a high turnover rate, I would've felt guilty for taking a job with the full intention of quitting. Except that - glowing review aside - I'm precisely the snarky, uppity, and embittered employee that they shouldn't want working for them.

Homer: "I'm not a bad person. I work hard and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?"

God: "Hmmm… you've got a point there. You know, even I'd rather be home watching football. Does St. Louis still have a team?"
Homer: "No, they moved to Phoenix."

God: "Oh yes... Now if you'll excuse me, I have to appear on a tortilla in Mexico."

Via Daniel I ran across an interesting article on the friction between religion and athletics. There doesn't seem to be any real inverse corrolation, but apparently it is a real concern with some franchises:

This is not a new controversy. Because church and team both demand devotion, loyalty and trust, coaches have always been wary of the so-called God Squadders. Back in the '80s, when locker rooms were often split between guys who went off to pray and guys who went off to party, managers and coaches would wonder, sotto voce, to sportswriters if the born-agains were "softer" than the druggies.

Even before that, the Yankees, who always carried their share of borderline alcoholics and numbnut whoremongers, sent private detectives to follow innocent second baseman Bobby Richardson to his YMCA ping-pong matches. The story was always told as a joke, but the truth was no joke -- management was simply not comfortable with a player who was sober and reliable but contracted to a higher authority.

You'd have a hard time convincing me that Reggie White was soft because of his fundamentalist Christian beliefs (White is a Church of Christ minister), so I'm not sure what the issue here is besides Kurt Warner seeming to say something (he was benched for his beliefs) that wasn't entirely true.

Then again, football in particular has always been an extraordinarily psychological game. Most athletes are superstitious in one way or another, so in that vein I guess it's not surprising that superstitions collide.

BBC's website has a swath of quizzes available. These carry a little more weight than do the "which Dungeons and Dragons race are you?" ones.

I actually took the second quiz about detecting fake smiles. I got half of them right, which is statistically about right. I got gradually better the further along in the test I got, though.

I'm going to take more of them next opportunity.

Neither my roommate Danforth nor my best friend Jay have remarkably successful college careers.

Danforth is one of the brightest guys that I know. He got into a fast-track program at Lamar University when he was sixteen. His mind works in extraordinary ways and there isn't an aspect of a particular issue that he won't unearth given enough time.

Unfortunately, he suffered from a serious case of burnout by the time I met him at the University of Houston. He started missing classes and failing to turn in assignments. Danforth lost site of the importance of jumping through the hoops to actually get the grades he needed. The death knell was when his folks told him he needed to move back in with them.

He had trouble getting himself to go to class when it was a ten minute walk. Driving in from Katy day in and day out was asking the impossible. After a semester or two of that, he dropped out.

He'd talked about going to college since we started rooming together, but it was finally Gattaca that made him realize that he wanted a better job than he could get without a college degree. He's now attending Sam Houston State University, which is 90 minutes away from the house. He hasn't missed a class yet. That's awesome.

Jay's college career hasn't been nearly as timultuous as Danforth's. Unfortunately, since the elementary school days that I've known him, he's been tragically unmotivated. I hoped that this would change with college, but it didn't. He's a music virtuouso with a knack for composing that has difficulty passing composition classes. Not just his composing classes, either. He's taken enough hours of German (for his six credit hours) to have a minor if they hadn't all been retaking the same classes over and over again.

He's been going to Baylor University since 1997.

It all reached a head last semester when he faced a potential 1-year probation. It couldn't have come at a worse time. He had four hours left to graduate. His other best friend Linus and I both had long-since given up the hope that he might graduate.

Wonderfully, he convinced Baylor to let him take his remaining four hours and there's every indication that he actually will graduate.

Wherever I am and whatever I'm doing with Danforth and Jay graduate, at the very least I'm going to have a one-man party to celebrate!

Adrianne Truett has a good post on some catch-22's (or is it the win/win equivalent of it?) on the American education system(search "Sheepskin") that's worth reading in its entirety (as opposed to the bits I have quoted below).

Let's tally up what we have here:

-Some people are complaining that high school diplomas mean nothing, since everyone who goes to school a minimum of time and does a minimum of work (if that) gets one.

-On the other hand, school districts where not everyone gets a diploma are criticised, even if those are districts where those who do graduate are uniformly well qualified; districts with high graduation rates are praised, and anyone who points out that their graduating students are often functionally illiterate are generally shouted down.

See a problem here?

[...]

Of course, all suggestions are ridiculous and impossible, given the nature of our public school system. If you have twelve sixth-graders who can neither read nor count to twenty (whether your fault or another's), and you refuse to pass them on to the next grade, your classroom will be over capacity the next year (because, obviously, it is much worse to have as many students as Japanese classes have than to lower standards and make the concept of "education" worthless). People who lack either the inclination or the mental capability to pass a grade are still required by law to stay in school until sixteen, so you have to keep passing them on in order to free up your classroom for the next batch. There's really not much you can do there.

When I took an industrial supervision class in college, they had us read Eliyahu A. Goldratt's The Goal. The Goal was a novel about an plant manager's attempts to streamline his business. Sounds boring, but I actually made it through the whole thing in a week which is fast for me.

Al Rogo's first step towards getting his plant back in to shape was to realize that all the measures of success his warehouse were wrong. Attempts to meet these goals became counterproductive because they created problems that would later not only get in the way of meeting the goals in the future, but also keep the plant from making money.

How to measure educational success is not an overlooked policy debate. It's front and center in almost every debate, in fact. Greg Wythe and I have crossed swords frequently on the merits of standardized testing. He believes that standardized testing (and the common practice of "teaching to the test") get in the way of truly educating students whereas I believe that there absolutely must be some sort of across-the-board measure of whether or not a school is, in fact, teaching anyone anything.

Adrianne confronts those that use graduation rates as a success benchmark and how that attitude has lead to the gradual devaluation of the high school diploma.

While I am an advocate of standardized testing (despite my own poor record in that area), I realize that it's not a comprehensive measuring tool. Neither, obviously, is graduation rates.

So what is? As Adrianne points out, it's a question without an easy answer.

Adrianne Truett is on a roll!

While the US has its past racial wrongs to address, so too does India. Adrianne writes about Indian attempts to address theirs (search "A Solution to Affirmative Action"):

Of course, reservations have worked as well in India as AA has here. I will allow that the system, or something like it, was very much needed to begin with, just as socialism was necessary at one point in Independent India's history (if you've got millions starving, a temporary government food program works better than just providing them with sound economic advice, because, with food, they'll live to be able to implement that advice). However, hordes were clamoring to get themselves registered as members of "backwards" castes/classes (imagine using that terminology here instead of "minority"!!!) because of all the benefits; obviously, there is not much stigma to being officially "backwards," or at least not enough to outweigh the benefits (I'm not talking about being beaten to death for letting your shadow touch a Brahmin; that's illegal and should be. I'm talking about, just same as here, preferential treatment in getting into medical schools and parliamentary seats).

Yahoo Mail let me know that I was running out of space again, so I went through and cleared out the trash folder. I was still pretty short so I also went to the drafts folder to clear it out. There was a series of unsent letters from a couple of years ago in there.

Most of them aren't really worth savings. The utterings of a sad and frustrated fellow addressed to the object of his frustration. There is one item, though, on the tail end of an email that I did sent that I want to keep. I remember writing it so clearly.

I was in Austin. I always seemed to be in Austin - or Waco - when the big things with Audrey hit. I've joked in the past that our time together was defined by the times she wasn't there. When she was alone in her room unable to get herself out of bed. Or when she was out with someone else. Or somewhere, anywhere, but with me.

It worked both ways I guess. It was a night where I cancelled that Michael re-entered the picture. It was when I was in Austin that she told me that I didn't need to call her anymore. I was in Waco when she reconnected with Vince.

Oh, and I was in Austin when, after nearly six weeks of a stone wall, she first indicated - in an innocuous PS to an otherwise depressing email - that things might not be as over for her as she'd thought when she told me to stop calling. There was a party going on in the living room when I read the email. Meanwhile, I was in holed away in Brian's room when I felt a rush of relief, vindication, and anger.
Then I was in the living room, trying to enjoy myself at the party, when I couldn't get the innocuous PS out of my mind. I was on Brian's computer again when I wrote and saved the response. I was in the living room when I pondered whether or not to send it. I was in Brian's room again when I decided not to address it and sent the rest of the response in tact.

It's an interesting combination of traits I'm not sure that I like about myself: judgmental, inflexible, arrogant, and defensive. It sums up where I was just about as well as it sums up where she was.

I wouldn't have posted on this at all except that I want the words saved somewhere that I might see them again. I haven't looked through the Audrey archives in some time and they really only include letters that I did send. It's an odd sort of time capsul - one including the things that I did not say.

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Linux has just gotten a huge concession, of sorts, from Microsoft. MS has, for the first time in my knowledge, altered its business model slightly to accomodate competition with their open source rival.

They're releasing Windows XP-Lite, which will apparently be a lot cheaper for Asian markets so that they can compete with a lot of Linux's efforts out there. Unfortunately, or fortunately perhaps, it will not be available here.

Pierce, who sent me the link, also brings up a good point:

They'll have to be very careful in what they remove from it. Especially since they have told many courts that it's impossible to remove some parts or windows without breaking it.

When I was entering Seabrook Intermediate, there was an effort by district administrators to shift SIS over to Clear Creek High School. Looking back, I wish they had. Well, fifteen years later it looks like it might happen.

The CCISD has just held a bond election and all appearences suggest that it will pass (or has passed). Since I've got one foot out the door I declined to vote in the election, but I voted in favor of the previous, heftier bond election that failed. The main reason I did so was that the district needs a fourth high school and it was included.

Apparently, they've already had the property set aside for it. The curious part is that they set it aside in League City. Clear Lake High School needs some relief pretty badly. Creek might, too, but there obviously going to have to shift people around.

I'm not sure of the wisdom of the placing of the school. I suspect it had a lot more to do with politics than strategy. CCISD's is primarily a Galveston County district and League City seems to get a lot of priority. The district headquarters is there, the alternative high school is there, and now too will a second high school (for a town of 50,000).

The new high school (which I will just call League City High) will obviously pull a great deal from Clear Creek (which is located in LC as well) and perhaps some from Clear Brook as well. Somehow, someway they're going to have to figure out how to get rid of Lake students.

When I was leaving they started sending some students from Space Center intermediate over to Brook (which was odd since SCIS was, at the time, located in the old CLHS freshman building), but that's how bad the situation was. It's possible that they'll move the entirety of Space Center to Brook (if they haven't already).

Or, I suspect, they will move Seabrook Intermediate over to Clear Creek. From a geographic standpoint it doesn't make a whole lot of sense because Seabrook people rarely drive across the Kemah bridge to do anything and Seabrook (as well as my own Taylor Lake Village) are seperated from League City by a body of water (the Kemah bridge being the only pass-through).

While I would have preferred go to Creek, it's not very good for Seabrook, which has always been the "poor town" (most of the troublemakers from Clear Lake High I knew from Seabrook Intermediate) and unless the new high school is in northern League City (and I don't think it is), they'll likely go to Creek (the "poor school" in the district, as LCHS will likely be as well, but it will be the *new* poor school).

It's also not very good for Clear Lake, though I suspect they're pretty happy to be rid of the Seabrook riff-raff. It'll make the school even more selectively wealthy. Snobbery was already a serious problem. Not crime (though as Clear Brook demonstrate even rich schools are not immune), but social development. There was always kind of a bubble at Clear Lake and I think that bubble is about to get a little more firm.

On the upshot, it appears that Clear Brook may finally get the rival it's been craving. CBHS has a Texas Tech complex (they even have the black and red uniforms!). Lake and Creek have been rivals for a long time. Brook only recently moved up to 5A and since they don't have a base (CCHS has League City and CLHS has Clear Lake City) they lack an identity. With the new school, League City High and Clear Creek would be more natural rivals because they'd be so similar and Lake and Brook would also be rather pristine copies of one another (for good and for ill).

On a lighter note, while I call the new school League City High School, it will probably not be named that. They have a name scheme going: Clear Creek, Clear Lake, Clear Brook, and Clearview. The problem is that they're running out of bodies of water. Actually, there is no Clear Brook body of water, they just thought it would be cute to get the name scheme going.

So what other "Clear" is there? Clear Bayou? That seems contradictory. Clear Springs? Other than being disgustingly suburban, I guess that would would. Clearhaven? Sounds like an alcohol detox center.

I just turned the TV off in the main room. They had an infomercial for the Joyce Meyers ministry followed by another one by Dr. Creflo A. Dollar, another TV evangelist.

It reminds me of Pensacola. Cox Cable in Pensacola has so many religious networks it's almost unbelievable. All extraordinarily charismatic and, whether you buy into their message or not, interesting to watch. They even show Houston's own Ed Young and the Osteen kid.

When No-Lyfe Productions was doing scripting for Adjusters, we took a break and listened to some rap music. Playing on the TV (our tape was stopped) was some black evangelist guy who was jumping all up and down. It seemed the perfect visual for the rap song. It was kinda eerie.

In case your wondering, this post does not have any point.

If you have a delicate stomach and/or have just eaten, or don't have a goofy sense of humor, or can't stand curse words, or have something better to do, don't read this post.

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Readers are probably tired of these posts, but it's a subject I've been reading a lot about lately, so you'll have to endure it (or skip this message, whichever). The former president of Southwest Texas (now Texas State) said the following in a convocation speech about Division I athletics:

I believe that because we have a first-class academic program, we should have a first-class athletics program as well. No doubt you have heard Jim Wacker or Jim Studer or me make the "front porch" argument for athletics. The reasoning is that athletics is not the whole house, not even the most important room, but it is what many people see first about the house. It's what makes people want to see more, what realtors refer to as "curb appeal." And nice houses have nice front porches. I don't want to beat that metaphor to death here, but I do believe we must make this important step.

We already compete - and compete very well -at the top NCAA level in 14 other intercollegiate sports and have since 1983. With I-A status comes a higher profile in the media, which brings more media coverage to other athletic programs as well and ultimately to the university itself.

Universities that have made this move before tell us it brings in more student applications, more prestige to the diplomas students receive, better fund-raising leverage. North Texas went from $3 million a year in private donations before the I-A move to $11 million a year afterward. This $11 million is not going to athletics; it's going to academics.

Why is it that high-profile athletic programs seem to advance the entire university? I don't know. I told the regents that in February when they approved this move, I'm really not sure. But it does. That's one of the mysteries of image. Our timing for this move now is fueled by turmoil among some of the Division I-A schools. Of the current 115 I-A schools, about half are doing well in fairly stable conferences. The other half are in potentially unstable situations, likely to look for beneficial affiliation. When the shake-ups come, we need to be able to come to the table where new conferences will be formed. And we can't do that if we are I-AA. We will need a conference to make this move successfully. We promised the regents and ourselves that we won't make the move without a conference affiliation. It would not be smart.

[...]

We don't know how people get images of us. But the image of Southwest Texas is not what it should be. The image of Southwest Texas does not reflect your quality. Bob Gratz was looking at the Dell company website recently. And they had a section where you could click on and it would tell you something about the region. When they talked about the educational institutions in the region, they referred to Southwest Texas as a small teachers college 40 miles south of Austin. That's an image of Southwest Texas. And I don't believe it's an image that serves us very well.

Our image of universities comes from other colleges that are seen as their peers. Universities are known by the company they keep. Who is in our company?

By Carnegie classifications, we are now classified as a Comprehensive I university. Our company here in this state includes Angelo State, Tarleton State, Sul Ross, Sam Houston, Our Lady of the Lake, Dallas Baptist, Texas Wesleyan, and out of state Arkansas Tech, Grambling, New Mexico Highlands. Good schools, sure, but schools that are much smaller and narrower in role and scope than Southwest Texas.

Who are the Doctoral I's? North Carolina-Greensboro, Ball State, Bowling Green, Miami of Ohio, Southern Mississippi. That is more like the company where we belong.

The same goes for NCAA divisions. Who is in Division I-AA? Schools like Sam Houston, Prairie View A&M, Stephen F. Austin, Texas Southern. And who is I-A? North Texas, Houston, UTEP, New Mexico State, Tulsa, SMU, Ball State, Bowling Green, Miami of Ohio, Southern Mississippi. That's an appropriate place for Southwest Texas.

Texas State is at best a few years away from being able to move up to I-A. With the recent scandals there, they're probably at least a decade away.

Interestingly, I did overlook SWT when looking for a college in large part because I thought it was a small university about the size of Sam Houston State (SHSU is half the size of SWT/TXST) and didn't know they had much to offer except being known for producing good teachers.

I am a bit curious how membership in the Sun Belt Conference will particularly alleviate the problem though, as the SBC is constantly overlooked by just about everyone outside the New Orleans Bowl (and an increasingly desperate WAC looking for schools to join their conference). On the other hand, it certainly beats being associated with schools half its size.

Florida A&M is set to become the first historically black university to make Division I-A in college football. As it gets closer and closer to happening, though, everything has been starting to unravel. The university's president has asked the trustees to hold their horses and the interim AD that was the architect of the plan has stepped down.

I'm skeptical of the race to I-A, and I'm particularly not sure what it has to offer historically black universities who tend to stick together and play eachother often in I-AA, but it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Netscape, like MSN, loves making lists. Their lists are generally better than MSN's, though. Presently, they have a list up in their career section about how to make sure you lose your job:

Do the bare minimum – nothing more. So you complete your "to do" list every day, but do nothing more? Employees like this get passed over for promotions and place themselves on the top of the "dispensable" list. There will come a day when a new, enthusiastic over-achiever will come looking for your position. If you've done the bare minimum, chances are he or she will get it.

Is it me, or does this remind anyone else of a certain 90's cult classic movie?

TheYeti is right, though, this is a pretty sorry list.

Ever since I left for college, my folks house has been my permanent residence. It's saved me from having to change my driver's license whenever I move apartments. It also means that a lot of mail sent to me goes there. Since my father and I share the same first name, sometimes there is confusion as to who a particular piece of mail is sent to.

The Harris County Toll Road Authority sent a letter to Rayford Whitlock and since my car is the one with the EZ-Tag, they assumed that it was addressed to me and didn't open it. I assumed that it was probably a charge notification (whenever my account reaches below $10, they pull out another $40 to pay for future tolls), but when I opened it the word "violation" ran accross the top.

Since I generally keep an eye out for the yellow light to flash at me when I pass through, I knew that there wasn't some sort of promise with my account. When I looked at the license plate, it wasn't mine. I went out and looked and Dad's car matched the violation.

I handed it off to Dad and said that it must have been he that went through the EZ-Tag lane. Mom and Dad looked at me confused. I looked at them confused, too. Mom then said, "I have a more likely possibility. Perhaps when you borrowed Dad's car when yours was in the shop..."

She didn't need to complete that sentence.

In any case, the toll road authority gives you ten days to pay the fine. Except that it took them three days to mail it. Except that it was sitting in the mail bin for three days as the folks thought it was for me. So we had about one day to mail it in.

My Aunt and Uncle came in to town and they were all due to leave on a cruise on Sunday morning. So Dad said that we'd drop it off on the way out to eat. Except we didn't.

They thought about dropping it off in the morning. Except that they were headed in the opposite direction from the post office. Mom suggested that I take it in on my way back to Jersey Village. Except that Dad said "No, no. If we give it to him it'll never get mailed."

He knows me so well.

Please note that there will be spoilers in the [Read More] section of this review, but none in the main section.

I was originally drawn to the series by two factors: The format - 24 hour-long episodes covering 24 hours in real time with periodic 4:20 skips for commercial breaks - and the fact that each season has a beginning, middle, and end. The action thriller has never been my thing so I didn't expect too much beyond appreciating it for what it was. What I didn't know though was that it was less an action thriller and more a suspense thriller. Action doesn't do much for me, but suspense does.

It reminded me, in a way, of the movie Executive Decision, a film I believe often overlooked as one of the best of the genre. Unlike most action movies, Executive Decision hits hardest in between action sequences. The same is true of 24. The action sequences are well done, but the moments where it truly got me was when you were waiting to see what happened next because there was always something happening next and they managed to do it in a way that after eighteen hours of run time it didn't get tiring.

The best use of this was the sound of a phone ringing. The director's use of a simple ringing phone was piercing. Even when you knew who was calling whom (and you didn't always) you never knew quite what they were going to say. The plot (which involved trying to work around a mole) was such that you never knew what any particular conversation would entail. Since you didn't know the motivations of the various characters, you also didn't know what would happen with each call.

They also did a spectacular job of keeping the mystery alive. The most obvious point is the search for the mole. Headfakes, double-headfakes, and certain characters rubbing you the wrong or right way made all the difference. Sometimes the initial instincts I had on a character (which I would later toss aside and figure I was wrong) turned out to be right while others didn't. Even more impressive was the gradual unravelling of what exactly the villains wanted as the viewer starts getting a deeper look at how deep and wide the organization is.

The characterization was a mixture between genre stereotyping and very human people. The Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) is almost straight out of a how-to genre on movie covert government agencies. It was almost comical in some ways how they (intentionally or unintentionally) set each character up as a stereotype to avoid wasting unnecessary time on character establishment before moving directly to the development phase. You had the hero, the devoted female number two, the jealous hot-shot, the uptight director, and so on.

The actors played their parts superbly. More than once I went on to IMDB to see where I'd seen them playing these parts before. For the most part, I didn't really find it. The casting was extremely well done (with the exception of getting a very Canadian actress to play the hero's daughter), with a very presidential first black presidential candidate (and, to boot, the approach the subject very honestly and without sanctimony).

The other thing worth commenting on is the use of split-screens so that they could have multiple things going on at once. Sometimes it was more stylistic than substantive, but they way they eased between scenes and split-screens is deserving of praise. It added to the experience (and urgency) tremendously while making the most of what could have been a very limiting format.

That's not to say that the series was perfect. There is a quasi-break after episode 14 and it never quite picks up the same amount steam again in the second half. Certain parts of it seemed redundant. We'd already been there before. By the twenty-second episode, the situation was almost exactly the same as it was in the tenth: Jack under enemy control, searching for a mole, threat on the politician, and so on. In addition to that, I was left with the impression that a couple of the later twists weren't really planned for while scripting earlier sections and instead were an effort to keep the series as high-charged as it had been earlier. There's more on this in the Spoilers section below.

None of this stopped me from enjoying the series, however. And, if IMDB is any indication, more may be revealed about some of the later twists during the second season. There are things that I would have done differently, but I'm the nitpicky kind of viewer that would do just about everything differently if I were given the keys.

If you like suspense thrillers, then you definitely want to check this out. Just make absolutely sure you don't have anything you need to do for the next couple of days.

[Read More!]

I got the DVDs for Christmas. I can't stop watching it. It's the most gripping TV series I've ever seen. At the end of every episode I am asking myself ohmigodwhatsgonnahappennext over and over again.

That's why posting has been down. After season 1 I'm going to watch season 2.

ohmigodwhatsgonnahappennext
ohmigodwhatsgonnahappennext
ohmigodwhatsgonnahappennext
ohmigodwhatsgonnahappennext
ohmigodwhatsgonnahappennext

When I was a sophomore, I took Theater class, which convened in the auditorium, which was perpetually cold (aren't they all?). On one particular cold day I was wearing a jacket and there were a few girls in the class caught in sleeveless chearleader outfits. Well, one girl, I'll call her Tiffany, was asking around to see if anyone wanted to donate a jacket so that she could get warm. Tiffany had never been nice to me, so I withheld my jacket (though I really didn't need it, I was moderately overweight at the time and didn't need a jacket to keep me warm). Then Tiffany had her friend, who I'll call Tara, ask around for a jacket. Tara had always been civil to me, so I went ahead and gave her my jacket to give to Tiffany. Tara contacted Tiffany and gave her the jacket, which she promptly snuggled into. After a few minutes, Tiffany asked Tara who had given her the jacket. Tara pointed to me, at which time Tiffany got a horrified expression, (figuratively) tore the jacket off her body and threw it at the ground, exclaiming "eeewwwwwwww!!"

I snatched my jacket off the ground bitterly and put it back on and got snugly warm. Tara asked for the jacket for herself, which I gave to her, and she was toasty while Tiffany was bitterly cold.

When I was a lowly freshman, I was sitting at a lunch table when I overheard a girl, probably a junior, who was in a cast talking. She was quite distraught, as she had just been in a car accident the night before. Her friend was in the car with her and had her leg-bone almost shattered. She apparently rammed into another car in a median turn lane. There was a baby child in the other car who was also injured, but injuries were minor. The other driver was legally in the right and her insurance policy was in serious trouble. Her car was totalled, as was the other driver's. So, what was she complaining about? That it would take her parents two weeks to buy her a new car.

An interesting article on a lapsed sex ban in the nation of Camaroon

"The cleansing ceremony is very important because the gods of our land are angry with the evil that has gripped the village," said Elizabeth Ewi, a spokeswoman from the Ndouh Fumbwi secret society that called the strike.

During the cleansing ceremony, the paramount chief of Aghem, Bah-ambi III, slaughtered specially-bred fowl and invoked the ancestors of Aghem to pour blessings to the village.

I'd like to point out in the hallowed United Nations, their vote counted as much as ours on the UN Security Council resolution for war (or lack thereof) for Iraq.

Just sayin'...

Ran into a friend of mine just the other day
He complained about college loans and bills he's got to pay
we talked about high school and the days that went before
He said he didn't think they made days like that anymore.

Hometown friends mean a lot to me
but the longer I'm here, the less of them I see
and the further I get it seems the longer I'm away
I guess time equals distance that way
-Phil Pritchett

--- January 30, 2004 - Austin, TX ---

I was walking up the stairs looking for Adam when I saw a familiar face out of the corner of my eye. I looked again and then looked at his name badge. "Chase?!" I asked. I shouldn't have been surprised that he'd be there. He was, after all, instrumental in the founding of the University of Houston anime club. Except that he was supposed to be in Seattle.

He looked over and squinted at bit, trying to place a name with the face.

"It's Alex... Pariah."

"Dude!" he exclaimed.

I met Chase in 1996, through his best friend Kerry. I'd met Kerry by way of my then-girlfriend Christie cheating on him. Throughout that entire two-day drama, Chase could only laugh at us both. "You guys are fifteen. There are so many more important things to life."

The second round - and second heartbreak - with Ora came shortly after that and I was desperate to find something to bide my time. Chase was perfect for that. First of all, no one was less likely to talk about girls than he. No one was more able to help me gain some perspective in life. Lastly, he introduced me to anime.

At first it was late night sleepovers at Kerry's place. Kerry's parents were rarely around and we were able to have our three-man parties. Sometimes four and five. I saw Battle Angel, Doomed Megalopolis, Ghost in the Shell, and a host of other movies. When I went to Florida for my family's annual trip, he loaned me some movies. Jay, who was with me that year, spent late nights watching anything and everything that he'd given us. Except Lodoss War, which was subtitled and by the time we were watching anime we were way too tired to read.

The last time I saw Chase, we talked about the second Crow movie. Shortly after that, the man who thought everyone was too obsessed with relationships stole someone's girlfriend, moved to Seattle, and married her at age 19.

"She left me," he explained. "So now I'm back here trying to hook up with some old friends."

I told him that I was sorry to hear that. We talked about the University of Houston, the anime club (which I was never a member of, but had some connections to), and a lot about ACME. "I've tried the internet chat rooms, but they're all is completely inane."

"Yeah, we're not fifteen anymore, I guess, but the averate chatter still is."

"Not just that, but in the old days only people with a certain amount of intelligence could actually get online. Plus everyone was all from the Houston area."

I nodded in agreement.

"So many of my friends were online."

"I know what you mean. For a while it seemed like with only a couple of exceptions, my friends were all scattered across the city. Most of us had in common how much we hated high school."

"That's not really what I meant. I had a great high school life."

Oh, nevermind, I thought to myself, I temporarily forgot what a loser I was.

"Of course, I didn't go to Clear Lake."

Clear Lake and Clear Creek were, for a time, the only two high schools in the CCISD. There was naturally a rivalry of sorts. In part because of their proximity to one another, but also largely because of the different demographics. Clear Lake was where the "rich kids" went. Bay Oaks, Middlebrook, El Lago Estates, and just about every primo neighborhood in the area was Lake bound. While Creek was by no means poor, League City was no Clear Lake City and Kemah wasn't Seabrook. When the upper middle class meets the middle class, the distinctions seem a lot more stark than they probably are.

"Yeah. I remember thinking at the time that I probably would have been a lot better at Creek," I commented.

"I think all of you Lake people would have been. Most of the ACME people who went to Creek enjoyed it - well, as much as anyone can enjoy school. You Lake guys all hated your lives."

"Yeah, I guess many Lakers were too well off for their own good and the rest of us were left behind because we didn't have new convertibles."

--- January 23, 2004 - Houston, TX ---

"Alex? Alex Whitlock? Alex Whitlock!" I heard in the distance.

I looked over and there he was, Cody Bricker. "Do you recognize me, man?!"

"Hey Cody, how's it going, man!" I said to the boy who was my friend in elementary school but deigned himself too important to talk to me in high school.

"I wasn't sure if you would recognize me. Ed White Elementary, right?"

"And Clear Lake High School," I corrected him.

"Oh yeah! We had that Positive Mental Attitude class together!" He recalled. I was surprised he remembered, considering that he'd talked to me three times the entire semester despite occupying the seat in front of me.

We talked about a wide variety of things. I recalled that in the fourth grade he won a Daughters of the American Revolution award before moving away. I made a comment about the snobs from Clear Lake. I'd forgotten that he moved from El Lago to Clear Lake (which was why we went to high school together). He took it in stride, though. "Man, you're going to be one of those millionaires driving a Toyota Camry while those pricks are going into debt to afford their Porsches."

I laughed. Old grudges die easy, I guess. He showed me off to all of his friends. None of them knew me because none of them had ever talked to me. One, a former cheerleader, surprisingly said that she had recognized me. I thought she'd been looking at me earlier but I thought that I was probably mistaken (I wasn't sure it was my fellow CLHS alum). They all pretended to know me. "Oh yeah! I remember you! You're that guy! Who was... tall! And... you say you work in IT? Yeah! You were that tall guy who loved computers! Good to see you again Eric!"

"So man, who else have you run in to here?"

"I ran in to Pira Whitley last year. Oh yeah, I actually ran in to Darrin Spillman on New Years."

"Isn't he that guy who never stopped laughing?"

--- January 1, 2004 - Houston, TX ---

I was waiting for Jay to finish talking to his newfound lady friend when I saw this guy wearing only underwear run across Fountain View and back to swerving and honking cars. From a black SUV I heard a guy laughing while his girlfriend hysterically told him to stop. "He could die out there!" I heard her say.

He just laughed.

When the underwear dude ran back to the SUV and all was more calm, I struck up some small-talk with a guy in a maroone SUV that was parked next to me. Several minutes later he was talking to Underwear Dude, Laughing Boy, and Crying Girl by the black SUV. "Hey," the stranger said, "Is your name Alex Whitlock?"

"Yeah?"

"My friend Darrin says that he knows you," he explained.

I walked up to the truck and saw Darrin. He looked vaguely familiar. It took me about thirty seconds for me to place the face. He knew he recognized me from high school but couldn't remember where.

In sophomore theatre class, there was a girl named Keri. She was really my first female friend. I got to know her because I had a crush on a friend of hers and before I knew it she had a crush on me. When everything cooled over, we were just good friends. She was not, to be accurate, attractive in the slightest. She had a nice little figure and was a pleasant person, but there was something about her face that didn't work. As such, most of our classmates were pretty ruthless with her. Some asked me why I hung out with her. Others, including Darrin, liked to do nothing but joke about how she and I were together. All day. Every day. For the entire year. And he'd always be laughing. Considering that she and I were friends - that I was overweight and she was homely - there wouldn't have been anything unusual about us hooking up. But he found it funny nonetheless. We were the neverending butt of his jokes.

"We had theatre together."

"We did? Wait... didn't we also have that one class together?"

"A/V class. Yeah."

We had A/V class together. In that one I had a couple good friends (that were slightly higher up the high school caste system) so I wasn't so much the butt of his jokes.

"Yeah. You guys had that killer music video for your final project!"

"Yeah, we did."

"That was badass, dude! [laugh] I don't remember what it was about or what song it was, but it was badass! [laugh]."

"It was Phil Collins's 'In the Air Tonight'."

"[laugh] You made a Phil Collins song badass? [laugh] That's [laugh] badass!!"

"Yeah, I guess so," I laughed.

Old grudges die easy, I guess.

It seems that the Defense Department is switching fonts from Courier New 12 to Times New Roman 14. This is devestating to college students everywhere that would use Courier New in order to squeak their papers past the 3-page mark in a 3-5 page paper. If a teacher ever objected, they could just say "Hey, it's what the Defense Department uses!"

Okay, well most college students probably didn't know it's what the DoD used. I certainly didn't. I actually never used Courier New because I am so wordy that I always had a lot bigger problem getting under the 5 of a 3-5 page paper. I used a smaller Arial font to bring it down. Of course, you needn't mess with the fonts in order to change the length. You can also bring in or take out the margins or, as I did, change the spacing from double to 1.5, 1.75, or 2.25 (2.5 would raise eyebrows).

Some teachers are on to this, though, and specify. Stupid teachers (and/or profs).

---

I actually prefer Courier New over Times New Roman. Nuke's set-up shows me the original posts in CN and I prefered it to the Times New Roman display that I had until I changed it to Arial and Verdana not too long ago. In some ways, though, my favorite font is Arial Narrow, because you can fit a lot more things on it while (unlike TNR) it remains perfectly legible. Arial and Arial Narrow also look sleaker.

---

Times New Roman 14 is huge. TNR 12 is itself a little too big. The DoD says that they determined that it takes up the same page space, which is true only because Courier New is so wide. Courier New is a fixed-width font, meaning that that an "i" and an "h" take up the same amount of width. It allows for easier spacing and also allows you to make the font small while keeping it spaced enough to be readable.

TNR 14 will arguably be more readable than CN 12, but Arial 10 or another small-type san-serif font is readable and you can get more information on it. TNR 12 is also pretty readable for a serif font.

---

For those of you that don't know, a "serif" font is one that has little bendies at the end of the letters and numbers to make them look more stylized. TNR and CN are both serif fonts. A san-serif font will only have the bendies and perpendiculars to tell the 1's and l's apart, but not much else. A san-serif lower-case "l" is a straight line while a serif one has little perpendicular lines on the top and bottom.

---

My first attempt at a novel was written in Apple IIe font before moving it over to Microsoft Works and Times New Roman. When I set out to rewrite it a couple of years ago, I stuck to the TNR.

My first and third finished novel were written primarily in Arial, though I would play around with the fonts for different items. Typed letters in Courier New, written letters in one of my handwriting fonts, and so on.

---

One of my favorite fonts is Raleigh DmBd BT. I rarely see it anywhere anymore. I'm glad to have it saved, though it can defeat the purpose of having a font if no one else has it. The only things it's good for is printouts (I have no printer) or making pictures. It's a beautiful font, though.

---

One day, a bunch of us old ACMEites were in the parking lot of the Galleria. I was all proud of myself because I had 5,000 new fonds on a CD. I collected fonts at the time and, to an extent, still do. I was quite proud.

"My fonts are better than your fonts!" Zito exclaimed.

"Nuh uh! My fonts are the bestest fonts in the world!" I argued back. "And more, so hah!"

We faux-argued about fonts for a half an hour that I still remember almost ten years later.

---

I'm not the only one fascinated with fonts, it would seem. For instance, here's a Behind the Typeface on Cooper Black.

---

There's also a novel with the slogan "He who dies with the most fonts wins."

I made it about 80 pages into the book before I had to move and lost my place. Someday I'm going to go back and read the whole thing. You can read it for free here. There used to be a way to download the Word document to print it out, but I don't see it anymore. It's very funny in a very odd kind of way.

Michael Williams writes on people who don't watch television and/or eat meat and how obnoxious they can be:

What's the number one social activity? Eating. And it's difficult for omnivores to enjoy a meal with a proud vegetarian because their food requirements severely limit everyone else's choices. The presence of a vegetarian (or, *gasp*, a vegan) restricts restaurant selection and even makes it hard to host meals in your home. It's also generally recognized as being incredibly rude to refuse to eat food that's served to you when you're visiting someone's home, and I never appreciated the truth of this until I was a vegetarian myself.

As for TV, like it or not it's the foundation of our modern shared experience. Without a rudimentary working knowledge of what's on TV it's impossible to make small-talk and it's impossible to share allusions and inside jokes. Knowing what TV shows a person likes will give you a lot of insight into their personality and can provide a lot of common ground for conversation. Of course, when someone responds that they don't watch TV I guess that tells you a lot too. I'm not a huge fan of TV, and there are only a handful of shows I enjoy, but you don't have to be a carnivore to be polite company, you only have to be amiable enough to go with the flow.

Some time ago, Michael Duff wrote a review of Friendster that broached the subject:

Two main types dominate friendster: Semi-literate party animals who post pretty pictures and describe themselves in sentence fragments, and pretentious hipster geeks who list authors they read in English class and write screeds about how much they hate TV.

I have lost count of people who use their profile space to denounce television. My favorite specimen is the type who lists six favorite television programs and says, "But I only watch them on DVD." Like it's cool to be three seasons behind.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't need a bunch of Internet addicts telling me how evil TV is. I've been addicted to both mediums in my lifetime, and I'd say it's a tie.

I was reviewing my own habits, and I realized that I don't actually watch TV anymore. I listen to TV while my eyes are glued to this thing -- playing videogames, surfing the web, and combing friendster for people who do the same thing.

In the same vein, one of my earliest posts said the following:

I've been in the new apartment for two months. When the roommate that watched cable moved out, the two of us that remained chose to cancel our cable service due to the increase in rent that two people pay compared to three. Even more interestingly, I did not even set up the television until two days ago, when someone was coming over and we wanted to watch some movies in the bedroom. The new TV we bought and put downstairs is still not even plugged in. From the way people speak, you would think that I would be less isolated than ever from the world around me. In fact, the opposite is true.

I'm not even talking about the news. I get that from the Internet. I'm talking about the TV shows. The fictional ones that we watch to take us to another time and place where a Democrat is in the White House, chefs can afford spacey apartments in New York City, and the most interesting town in the country is a stateless burg named Springfield. How has my (self-imposed) inability to watch these shows isolated me? Simple. Everyone else has seen them. My former roommate and I used to talk about President Bartlett, Mayor Winston, and those coffee-sipping friends in New York City. An ex-girlfriend and I had our first conversation about Frasier Crane and his family in Seattle.

The idea that television isolates us is a holdover from early technophobes who liked things fine the way they were when they were young, thanks. Many people used to say the same about the Internet a couple years back. Some still do. When I was young and very introverted, the television wasn't my escape from the world, it was my window into it. It allowed me to see things and conversations in a way that I never could before. Was it accurate? Was it real? No, but it was a start. Then the Internet (it was a BBS actually, but functionally the same in this regard) came along and suddenly I could start talking to people who couldn't make snap judgments about my appearence or demeanor. Suddenly, I could talk to a lot more people and become friends. I even started making friends with this wierd species called "girls." I can honestly say that television and the Internet helped me make the transition from an introvert to regular member of society within a year. It gave me a crash course in how other people live. Even if they don't really live like they do on TV or talk like they do on the Internet, it's still instructive.

I don't believe (or at least I hope) that the Internet never reaches the point where people are bragging about unplugging themselves, but I suspect that it will. The notion that the Internet is isolating seems to have passed, but it hasn't reached the yesteryear period yet (you know, yesteryear, when everyone was smarter and better and more original because they weren't brainwashed by whatever).

The truth, as Michael and Michael point out, is that people are just looking for ways to be different - to be "better" than the rest of us. That I'm too lazy to plug in my darn TV set does not make me superior. That I go out and see only a handful of movies a year doesn't make me better. That I can't name anyone in the Top 40 right now hardly makes me unique. It just means that I'm someone that would prefer go to bars to watch music and spends more time in isolation writing than in "isolation" watching TV.

Not something to be ashamed of, but hardly something to be proud of.

The Cuban Boat of Car people made another run at it today, converting a vintage tailfinned car into a boat to try to get to the US border.

Marciel Basanta Lopez and Luis Gras Rodriguez, who were brought back to Cuba after they failed to reach Florida in a converted 1951 Chevy pickup in July, were allegedly at the helm of the newest vehicle-boat conversion.

The U.S. Coast Guard would not confirm the status of the tailfinned 1950s car.

Relatives told Basanta's cousin, Kiriat Lopez, who lives in Florida, that they knew the men were planning a second escape attempt.

"My cousin isn't crazy. He wants to be free," Lopez said. "That's how crazy he is."

Once again, it appears that they will be dropped back on their own shores. Perhaps they'll make another Boat of Car and be a source of interest and amusement for us again.

Personally, I'd rather they just be allowed to become Americans.

When I was a kid, I hated science. Maybe it was my many battles with the evil Gravity that made me hate physics or when Mom scolded my for my (fingerpaint-in-jars) chem lab that ended up staining the carpet that made me hate chemistry. But I hate both and Geology and Chem Honors rank as my two least favorite college courses.

The only exception to this is psychology, which is a subject that always fascinated me. In fact, one of the first novel characters I ever created was a psychology teacher. Then I actually got to psychology in high school and was horrified to discover that it was, in large part, scientific. We studied the biology of the brain. Yawn.

Through Duffwire, I ran across an article that was supposed to be about psychology and turned out to instead be about cells, genes, and all the other things I slept through in psych class in both high school and college. Except that it is the most fascinating article that I have read in a long, long time. It's rather lengthy, yet I was able to read the whole thing in a single sitting, which is truly saying something. Since I did sleep through my aforementioned science classes I don't know if I understood everything thoroughly, but I'm pretty sure I did.

It reminded me of someone that I talked to recently about creation and religion and whatnot. She's a lapsed Catholic and not a particularly religious person - though not an outright atheist, either. When we talked about it, she told me that the more she learns about the human body and nature, the more she feels that everything is too intricate for their not to have been a creator of some sort (albeit a likely disinterested one). I thought of her and that conversation as I read the article.

The human body is truly a marvellous thing. Science's ability to uncover it, piece by piece, is absolutely amazing. It's astonishing to take a step back and realize how esoteric current debates on creation, homosexuality, and mental illness often are. The more we learn, the more we realize that we don't know.

*- Future post: "Weird Chemistry"

The Other University of Louisiana has struck a deal with the University of Arkansas for a series of games. It's not unusual for a football powerhouse to play low-grade I-A or even the lower class I-AA opponents. It often helps Big State University get an easy win and prepare for real games against conference opponents. It also helps North By Northeast State Tech because they get a large payout and can tell potential recruits that they play with the big boys (nevermind the 62-0 score).

What's unusual about the UA-ULM deal is that the games are scheduled in Little Rock. That itself is not unusual because Arkansas (based in Fayetteville in northern Arkansas) will often play a couple of games a year in the Little Rock in order to attract UA alums who've moved on to the state's largest city and capital. What is actually unusual (yes, I am actually getting to something here) is that, despite playing in Arkansas, ULM will be considered the home team.

Why does this matter? Because ULM is not meeting minimum Division I-A attendence requirements and unless they can attract more than a paltry 11,000 fans for each game, they will be relegated to the less glamorous Division I-AA. The Indians went 1-11 last year while losing to two I-AA opponents and making ESPN's Worst In College Football list nearly every week of the season. They've gone 7-39 in their last four seasons.

College football is great. It's the only sport I follow with any intensity. Division I-A is, naturally, the pinnacle of college football. It's understandable that most universities in the next level down I-AA are trying to get there. But when you're a college stationed in Monroe, Louisiana, and you have to play home games 200 miles away to meet attendence requirements, it might be time to question whether or not you really want to remain a I-A football program.

From a financial standpoint, football is usually a losing proposition. There are some counter-examples. Texas Tech is poised to become to most obvious choice for Texas students that can't get into the increasingly competitive University of Texas and Texas A&M and their profile is based in large part on their successful football program. Ask the average Texan to name three universities in Texas, Tech will almost invariably be mentioned after UT and A&M despite being smaller than both North Texas and the University of Houston and being located way up on the panhandle outside of a major metropolitan area (UNT is near DFW and Houston in... well... Houston). Ask them to name six and the University of Texas at El Paso will likely be mentioned in front of Texas State, despite State being nearly twice UTEP's size.

Texas State is in the same Division I-AA that Louisiana-Monroe escaped only a decade ago and is presently seeking to avoid.

There's no denying that, to a degree, a university's football profile can be made or diminished by its football program. Two early candidates (UTA and Lamar) when I was looking for a college were scratched off the list in favor of two that had (I-AA) football programs. That the University of Houston was a I-A institution (and a former SWC university) certainly played in its favor. I've probably gone to more games since I graduated than I did while I was there, but the fact that I was going to a school someone in Pittsburg or Richmond might have heard of (because of athletics) meant, to me, that my degree would have longer arms than would a degree from Sam Houston State. It also meant that, unlike Lamar, the games would be there for me to go to if I wanted to and it would be a step up from high school. (I would like to point out that a number of factors went in to my decision to go to UH, first and foremost that they had a College of Technology, so don't mistake my university choice as one of frivolity)

So in that vein it is very easy to understand ULM's stubborn reluctance to drop back to I-AA despite a poor record, poor attendence, and a financial deficit. I can imagine some administrators and alumni in Lafayette right now are probably pretty disappointed. ULM dropping to I-AA would probably help them garner the University of Louisiana moniker they so crave.

At some point, though, football becomes a distraction and a program with the single purpose of moving up the ladder (or keeping from moving down it) ceases to be fun. Baylor University's college football program is miserable. They have a spot in the Big XII that has other Texas universities drooling, but they've gone 5-59 in the conference since joining and 20-70 overall. Recruiting with records like that has to be next to impossible and, speaking as someone that went to UH during the 8-26 Dana Dimel years, it's almost like not having a team at all.

Texas Christian University has recently announced that it's leaving the local Conference USA in favor of the Mountain West conference. The MWC is by all accounts a superior conference with better teams, but the nearest teams they play are in the New Mexico desert and Colorado mountains. Metroplex rival Southern Methodist's coach has announced that he will urge the school to cease playing TCU if they desert the C*USA (which they since have decided to do). TCU may get more money in the new conference, but they'll have higher costs and spend most of their time playing universities that most people still haven't heard of and don't know anyone from.

Another example is the University Idaho, which made the jump to Division I-A about a decade ago. Despite some initial success, they've gone 6-29 this decade in the weak Sun Belt Conference. One might assume they hoped for the success the Boise State had, but instead they've found themselves doing weak in a weak conference where the nearest team is in Denton, Texas! Idaho State, on the other hand, has stuck with D1-AA and have turned in more wins in each of the last two seasons than UI has in the past three. Moreover, their conference is playing traditional rivals in bordering states (Montana, Oregon, Washington). From a fan's perspective, who do you think is having more fun?

On the Coogfans site, as well as other places, Houston Cougar boosters are trying to figure out how to angle U of H back into football prominance. I'd love to see the Cougars stand up with the big boys in the Big XII or Southeast Conference and if we find ourselves a cut above the rest of the C*USA I might support an invitation if it were extended to us. But looking at UH, the students that go there, and the nigh insurmountable recruiting competition with the likes of UT and A&M, I'm content to stick around in a newly configured C*USA against schools where people I know actually attended.

I suppose it's my anti-competitiveness streak, but I'd prefer go 7-5 against Tulane and Rice than going 3-9 against the likes Texas A&M or 6-6 against Wyoming in the hopes that better days are in store. I would much rather appreciate my university for what it is and have fun watching them play universities with similar handicaps. There's nothing fun about going 0-11 against the greats, constantly playing games two time-zones away, or hosting home games 200 miles away.

While researching the ULM post, I ran across some interesting web sites:

This is ostensibly a site for high school football in Michigan, but their NCAA section is extraordinarily in depth with scores to all of the games in I-A and I-AA dating back to 1950! They also have NFL, CFL, Arena League, and NFL-Europe.

This is an interesting article on college football reallignment written before the fact, when it was just rumored that Miami was going to bolt the ACC. It's chalk full of predictions, many of them correct. C*USA became a southeastern regional conference, for instance. Some ideas didn't pan out, but he got more right than wrong.

The Sun Belt Conference site has an ultra-cool Ask The Commissioner feature where the commissioner answers all kinds of questions about where the conference is headed and what they're trying to do. I particularly like what he had to say here:

What we have in this country is at least three "conferences of convenience" for lack of a better term. Conferences that were formed for reasons other than geographic concerns. Thus we have schools that are leaving dollars with airlines and bus rental companies that they should be investing in scholarships, buildings, salaries and other competitive issues that the BCS schools are not having to pay. Now, with that said, at some point in time we will have realignment and hopefully geography will be a significant factor, not the only factor but a significant factor. There will not be more or less conferences, just realignment of the existing conferences. Our challenge as a conference is to continue to improve the quality of our product and position ourselves so that we will be a player. When will this happen? Most likely when the dollars get so tight that people begin to get past their athletic egos...

Helmet Project still will never cease being cool.

Eel had the misfortune to be down in Seabrook with me and my family the night of the New Hampshire primaries. That meant she got to see us all watch the results and whatnot when we got back from dinner and talk all about it. Given the importance of the primary insofar as it has nearly put the nail in the coffin of the Dean campaign, she saw me giggle with glee most ignobley.

"Is it so wrong to take so much pleasure in watching a man lose?" I asked.

Truth be told, the pleasure wasn't so much watching Dean lose. I don't care for the man's politics-of-the-moment, but it wasn't personal. It was, however, a bit personal to his obnoxious legions who believed that the rules of politics were all suspended cause e-Dean and his cybercampaign were so darn open source special. So yeah, perhaps a bit ignoble.

I also knew that Dean's fall cleared the way for John Kerry to win the nomination as I predicted he would even while Dean was approaching the height of his popularity. John Kerry is the Bob Dole of the Democratic Party in 2004. A solid establishmentarian with an unattractive personality and a two-decade vote history in the Senate. Except that Dole was a moderate senator (though not a moderate nominee, it's worth noting) and Kerry is more liberal than Ted Kennedy.

I believed then, as I do now, that Howard Dean posed more of a threat to Bush than Kerry does. Right now most polls are showing Kerry with a slight lead, but I'm inclined to believe that they won't last as Kerry gets more and more attention. For a former frontrunner, Kerry has flown below the radar thus far. The more ones knows of Kerry, in general, the less one likes of him. The press in Massachusetts doesn't like him, many in his party don't like him, and as much as I personally try to find something to like about him (as I succeeded in doing with Dean and every other Democrat this side of Sharpton) I can't find anything.

There is little in his history for him to relate to in order to overlook his borish personality. The man has no narrative. I can draw up a narrative for Bush, Gore, Dean, Gephardt, and just about anyone but Kerry. Few have the sense that they really know the guy. Most that voted for him only did so based on his percieved ability to win. Talk about a house of cards.

I'm not the only one. The Dean-o-phobe writes:

John Kerry takes all the fun out of Dean-o-phobia. Indeed, if there's anybody who could make Dean attractive, it's Kerry. Kerry is a miserable candidate, bereft of political skills, and possessing of a record and a persona tailor-made for Karl Rove. The Republicans will merely have to say about Kerry what they said about Gore--that he wants to be on every side of every issue, that he's culturally out of touch with mainstream America, that he's a pompous bore--and this time the sale will be easier, because all these things are far more true of Kerry than of Gore.

Kerry may well pull out a victory against Bush. I'd say his chances are at 33% or so right now. That's lower than I'd put Dean and a lot lower than I'd put Edwards or Clark.

On the other hand, if he does win, that fends of Hillary Clinton for a while. So maybe that's something to like about John Kerry.

I was considering doing a RAWards type thinger earlier in the year but never got around to it. One category, "most missed former blog of 2003" which would have been a close call between The Last Page and Trivial Pursuits.

Well, it's no contest anymore, Trivial Pursuits is back!

Rad!

As most of you are aware, there is something called the Doom Virus or something like that. Ordinarily virii don't bother me so much, but this one is costing me serious money.

As many of you know, all emails go to several mailboxes, including my cell phone. It used to be pretty simple. All of my email would go to Bigfoot, which would then place it in my mailboxes. I only get the first 200 characters or so, but all I wanted to know was if I got an email and if so who I got it from. Then Bigfoot had to start having a verification process so that you couldn't sign up someone else's email address. Fair enough, except that I couldn't possibly validate it using my phone. So I set up an email address using Hostik (my web host), validated it from there and then set it up to forward to my cell phone. The only problem is that Hostik, in a neverending quest to help you out whether you want it or not, will break the message up into five messages of 200 characters or so a piece. So my cell phone started going off 5 times for every email instead of one. I could deal with that.

Except one thing.

I get charged 10 cents for every incoming message. I signed up for a plan to get the first 100 messages for $2, but that lapsed a couple months ago and I haven't renewed it yet. So this service is costing me about $10 a month, give or take. I'm actually cool with that because it's unbelievably convenient never to have to worry about whether or not I've gotten any email.

The only trick has been to avoid spam. For the most part, I've done it successfully. I get, on average, three spam items a week.

Except for the MyDoom virus. Now my cell phone is going off 3-5 times a day, 5 messages a piece. That's almost $2.50 a day! While it's worth $10 a month for the cell phone service, I'm not so sure that it's not worth $75. So I've gotta either disconnect the service or pay a buttload for messages from random people with random gibberish.

Harrumph.

You are Pope John Paul II. You are a force to be
reckoned with.


Which Twentieth Century Pope Are You?
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When I worked the overnight at Nova, there was a Jack-in-the-Box down the road. It was very convenient for whenever I needed to eat (which was often). One of the things I remember enjoying most was their new breakfast sandwich, the Extreme Sausage. But I liked a couple of things on their breakfast menu. Since I often ate at 4 or 8 in the morning, that's usually what I wanted.

When I stopped working the overnight and wasn't around that Jack's anymore, I would only eat there during dinner hours. When Eel and I were looking for a place to eat when we were leaving New Braunfels I saw that Jack had started serving breakfast 24-hours. I ordered the Extreme Sausage and...

it was awful. It was the worst breakfast sandwich I had ever had. I've had it a couple times since and it is still absolutely awful. First off, it was served on a regular soppy bun. Was it always served in a bun or is this a victim of their wanting to serve it 24 hours? Whatever the case, sausage in a bun did not work. Worse than that, they've somehow even made the cheese taste bad. That requires a lot of effort!

The worst thing is the sausage itself. It's undercooked. Every. Single. Time. For a restaurant that had to settle a series of lawsuits for millions upon millions of dollars several years back, you'd think they wouldn't even toy with not fully cooking meat. I haven't gotten sick from it or anything, but geeze!

That's about all I have to say about that.

Click.

[via Duffwire]

Redneck Bear


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[via fellow redneck Lee Ann]

Kuff links to an article about a copyright (or is that trademark) infringement case between a DFW rodeo and the University of Wyoming.

I can't bring myself to be too interested about the case itself, but it reminds me of an oddity when it comes to sports logos. Namely that the trademarks don't seem to be enforced very much and I am curious as to why they aren't. This is particularly true between colleges (Delaware and Michigan have identical helmets) but also between professional and college (Georgia and the Green Pay Packers have the exact same ovularly enclosed "G") and professional to high school (My own Clear Lake High School swiped the NFL Atlanta Falcon logo).

In some cases (such as the Rams logo of St. Louis and Colorado State) the basic design is simple enough that perhaps it's unenforceable. In others I don't understand why the NFL teams allow college teams to swipe their logos (or perhaps the other way around, I don't really know). It can't be out of the goodness of their hearts. Their similarities are hardly a coincidence. It's not as if there aren't fifty thousand different ways to draw a cat (Clemson's paw logo is used in variation by dozens of schools).

Does anyone know why this is the case?

In Austin, Brian, Jay, Adam, and myself found ourselves watching a college basketball game. None of us are college basketball fans, but we were taken aback by the old graphics that ESPN used to use way back when. We sat there and watched the game trying to figure out what game they were replaying. That's one of the fun things about ESPN Classic: the old-style graphics that were soooooo cool at the time.

Jay commented that the fans didn't seem to be particularly dated, so it was probably more recent than early.

I noted that the commentator doing the interviewing had hair that was waaaaay 80's.

The half-basketball on the semi-circle between the free throw and 3-point line was decidedly 80's, too.

Indiana was coached by someone other than Bobby Knight, though. Wasn't Bobby Knight at Iniana forever before departing 3 years ago? I convinced myself that perhaps he had coached somewhere else with a red uniform, too. Nebraska, maybe?

We asked the guy at the bar with us. Turns out that ESPN is doing retro graphics for their 25th anniversary.

Y'know, if we'd noticed the fact that we weren't actually watching ESPN Classic, that they had current scores flashing across the bottom, that Michigan State had their new logo on the court, who Indiana's new coach was, and that there was a big game scheduled between Michigan State and Indiana scheduled that night (and who was on each team), we might have just saved ourselves fifteen minutes of utterly ignorant speculation.

Fun guesswork, though.

So Superbowl 38 was played in Houston on Sunday. There were parties everywhere. Even some aliens came down for the game. I'd been rooting for Carolina since I've been inadvertently following them because of Lex. Of course, thanks to Lee Ann I've been on top of the Patriots' season as well. I suppose one could say that it was going to be an interesting game against two teams that I know reasonably well and all that.

But really? Isn't the Superbowl a bit pase'? I mean geeze, this is #38... 41 if you count the AFL/NFL championships, I think. Ho hum.

I mean yeah, I didn't get to see the historic 85-yard touchdown pass, but who needs that when I'm stuck at work trying to solve The Mystery Of The Missing Tape Label (bum dum dummmmmmm)?!

I may have missed the last scramble of the game where the Patriots won by kicking a field goal in the closing seconds of the game, but I did get to fill out a Service Request for our broken intercom connection to the lower dumpster gate.

I may have missed a performance by Tom Brady that is drawing comparisons to Joe Montana, but I got monitor duty, where I could watch with fascination the janitor take a garbage sack, windsock it, and carefully line it around the trash can. Six times.

I may have missed the Superbowl parties, but my coworker and I did have a "gawd-do-we-hate-this-fraggin-company" party of our own.