I'm all about figuring out new ways to deal with social ills as long as they work. The idea advocated by Rivka seems to yield very positive results:

It's a simple concept: "high-risk" prospective parents get visited at home by a nurse, beginning as early in pregnancy as possible and continuing until the baby is two years old. The nurses provide prenatal care, support, advice, and parenting education. It's a voluntary program, but more than 90% of parents approached recognize a good deal when they see one.

In a 13-year follow-up of the program, researchers found that it reduced child abuse and neglect by 79 percent. Treated mothers (most of them teenagers) had 33% fewer additional pregnancies. The kids, at age 15, were not only less likely to commit crimes (as cited in the first paragraph), but had 58% fewer sexual partners. As someone who has read a lot of intervention studies, let me assure you that these numbers are phenomenal. They're almost unheard-of. This is a program that works, and it has snowball effects long after the active intervention is over.

It's too bad that she opened the post up with something that immediately made me hostile to the idea. I'd be interested in learning more about the program, but preferrably not from someone whose primary motivation seems to be to deride conservatives for his idea of what our reaction to it would be.

This is more than a little bit strange:

“I’m not just changing this restaurant. I’m changing the industry.” —Jack

Maybe he meant the “Jack-themed art” industry, which must have experienced an unparalleled boom during the renovation. One local commentator suggested that the new JBX restaurant downplayed the clown image. Um, perhaps he did not notice the Jack-logoed T-shirts, boxers and hats. Maybe he overlooked the Jack-shaped keychains, mint tins and “Jack Snacks” cookies on the counter. Ditto the Jack-head spiral above the drive-in, Jack murals on the walls, faux-candid photos of Jack relaxing at home, and so on.

Another effusive writer suggested that the interior looked more like an art gallery or a dance club than a fast-food restaurant. (It has been awhile since I wandered into an art gallery, a dance club or a fast-food restaurant, but the tables and chairs seem like a dead giveaway.) Two cushy leather chairs with built-in trays and a matching ottoman, set in front of a see-through fireplace, do give the otherwise cramped dining room a hint of a coffeehouse feel.

The JBX décor also borrows liberally from next-door-neighbor Chipotle: brushed metal, industrial accents and wacky angles. Taking a few cues from Chipotle makes sense, because, contrary to the billboard boasting, Jack-in-the-Box is playing catch-up, not leading the charge. Chains like Chipotle and Baja Fresh started the “fast casual” trend: still quick and cheap, but with an insinuation of higher quality. Oh, and artwork on the walls. But pushing or pulling, a Jack-in-the-Box makeover was long overdue. Despite years of pithy commercials, Jack-in-the-Box is still best known to many people as the source of a major e coli outbreak more than a decade ago.

Jack for yuppies.

Not sure how I feel about this. Here are some pictures.

Update: I mis-typed a rather crucial word in this post, thankfully caught by Amanda. Replaced and bolded.

Michael Williams's The Social Hierarchy reminds me of a common complaint I had about Clear Lake High School:

It seemed that the top 75% of girls would only go out with the top 25% of guys, and the top 75% of guys would only go out with the top 25% of girls. No one seem to notice the discrepency and yet they all complained about being single. This point became particularly clear during Prom season when I would hear both sides of the male/female partnering say something to the effect of "S/He's fine for prom, but I could really do better."

There's a reason that despite spending four years there, I never went out with a single Clear Lake female-type.

It also reminds me of something I've often said about young people and their love lifes: If you're ugly, you better hope you're a boy. If you're shy, you'd better hope you're a girl. It's much better to be a shy girl than an ugly girl and it's much better to be an ugly guy than a shy one. It's on a spectrum, of course. A social-phobic girl may have it worse than a moderately ugly guy and a super-ugly guy will probably have it worse than a moderately shy one.

I generally love the rain. Cloudy, damp, doesn't get much better than that. But I made two exceptions this week. The first was at the behest of a coworker whose troubled oldest son was graduating from high school having gotten to graduation by way of jail. All of his relatives made a point to show up, but the ceremony was set to take place in the small high school gym if it rained. Without the room of the fairgrounds, that meant that each graduate could only have two guests (the rest could watch through closed-circuit television). So, hoping that all of the relatives would get to see the special day, I crossed my fingers.

It didn't work. It rained.

Unfortunately, my new job prevents me from going out to Oklahoma with Kevin and the crew for this year's float trip. The annual rain fall is the one thing that can apparently always be counted on for those trips. Last year I very much enjoyed the rain, but I figure this year - since I won't be there - I would cross my fingers so that the rest of the gang could enjoy the trip.

It didn't work.

I'm going to start crossing my fingers to avoid rain a lot more often. It might make for another record precipitation year around these parts.

Doug Kern pens an interesting article about wussified cartoons:

I always assumed that the threat of litigation had driven violence from Saturday morning. After all, if you show Superman frying a supervillain with his heat vision on Saturday morning, then, sure enough, some idiot kid in Dubuque will fry his little brother with heat vision one fine Saturday afternoon, and then everyone loses except the lawyers. But I was wrong. Federal regulators, rather than nervous trial attorneys, wussified Saturday morning TV in the early seventies. Uncle Sam made our cartoons insipid, in the hope that a nice stiff dose of cultural chloroform would deaden our proto-male violent tendencies and transform us all into prissy poindexters who would eat our vegetables, sit still in our seats, and eventually vote for French-speaking politicians.

That same castrating impulse informs much of our society's approach to violence among teens. God help the poor kid who puts a butter knife in his lunchbox, if he attends a school with a zero tolerance weapons policy. If you squirm in class too often, mouth off too regularly, or act like a boy during mandatory androgyny intervals, expect Uncle Ritalin to move in for a permanent stay in the mischief-making corners of your mind, courtesy of America's peerless public school system. Guns? Behold the spectacle of Rosie O'Donnell at the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, exhorting kids to "never touch a gun," lest they get bullet cooties or something. And what about violent video games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? That game alone is surely responsible for the surge in motor-scooter car-jackings and golf-club assaults on prostitutes, committed by thugs who dress like Ralph Lauren and talk like Ray Liotta.

While I disagree with his later points, whenever Super Friends is playing on some channel or another I marvel at how insufferably bad they are. For all of Warner Bros.'s mishaps on the big screen, at least they cleaned up (or should that be dirtied up?) the cartoons. Despite being twenty-five years old, I still enjoy a great deal of the Batman and Superman animated serials. Of course, I am predisposed to superheroes, but as Marvel's Sunday Morning treats in the mid-90's (as well as, of course, Super Friends) proved, every fan has their limitations. Move it away from the strict superhero genre, other serials like Gargoyles (which I cound as modern fantasy, but some don't make the distinction between superhero and modern fantasy) managed to deal with subjects appropriatedly while being entertaining and, at times, violent. Fight scenes have always generally been my least favorite part of ostensible action serials. One of the wonderful aspects of cartoons is that you're free to coreograph all kinds of super duper fight scenes that cannot be done live-action within a budget (the short-lived Flash TV series comes to mind). If you're constraining all of that to non-violent goody goodyism, you're not using the medium to it's full advantage.

[via Susanna]

I've been handling phone calls for three days now. I may or may not talk about the job more, but there is one interesting aspect of the job I feel more than free to comment on: Politeness.

I always make an effort to be nice to people serving me, whether at McDonald's or on the phone with SBC Communications. Needless to say, not everyone is inclined towards the same courtesies. This is particularly true when they are calling about this problem or that. I must say, however, that some people are exceedingly polite and patient.

Working for a 1-800 number, we recieve calls from across the country. There are some interesting geographic and demographic patterns that I have noticed that I would like to comment on.

Southerners are almost uniformly the most pleasent people to talk to. The more southern, the nicer. I smile when I see that the caller is from Alabama or Mississippi. The only three exceptions to this are Florida, and sadly, Virginia and Texas.

After Southerners, the most polite and patient callers are from, of all places, California. Northern or southern California, it didn't matter. Los Angeles callers have been particularly good.

The worst by far has been the northeast, starting with Virginia and moving northward.

African-American men over the (estimated) age of 25 have been great. African-American women have been either very nice or not-at-all nice. Very little in between. The younger and elderly African-American women have generally been good and the 30-50 year old range have been a little harder to handle.

Judging by packages, there is an inverse relationship between how wealthy and how nice people are on the phone OR there is an inverse relationship between how interested they are in our services and how nice they are.

Keep in mind that I'm working off a somewhat limited sample here, but I found the observations to be interesting.

I signed a 6-month lease with Thrifthaven today. It's no Slumhole, but it does have it's own charm: flexibility.

They dated the lease two days before I actually signed it. When asked about the pro-rated rent, the owner said "Don't worry about it." I have to fill out a form that basically answers their question "Now what furniture do we have in there, again? Y'need any more?" and they said that steam-cleaning the carpet on my way out would be pointless since they'll do it anyway (a very good thing because that's where most complexes rip leaving tenants off on their deposit). I only need to remark on holes in the wall if they "exceed one inch in diameter"... otherwise, don't worry about it (my room has no holes). If I can't pay my rent on the due date, I shouldn't worry about it, but if it's more then ten days late I should prepare for the wrath of all of heaven and earth. Or an eviction notice. Their office is open some days, some weekends, with no real schedule posted. If my light burns out, they give me a new one and tell me to put it in my own damn self.

Texas Could Save on Textbook Price If It Mattered
Democratic State Rep Scott Hotchberg wants to open the textbook purchasing process to the market.

Oil Drop Sparks

No Title
Just after talking about how I don't follow Instapundit closely and rarely link to him, he links to an article and runs a letter that are worth reading regarding journalist bias.

Getting Over Someone
Reasonably sound advise on how to get over being dumped.

Speaking of Media Bias
Susanna Cornett, a staunch conservative, expresses very reasonable reservations about "proof" of liberal media bias.

Who Moved My Cheese
NotMyDesk does a great job of taking down yesterday's paradigm-shifting snake oil.

Thou Shalt be Diligent, Bible Proofreaders Believe [via Theosebes]
This is some Biblical revisionism of which the most ardent fundamentalist would approve.

I first arrived to this fair city at about two in the morning. Eel was working the overnight, so I figured I would just get a hotel and see her in the morning. So I stopped by a Holiday Inn that advertised high-speed Internet. They were booked. So I went across the street. Booked up. I went to five hotels in all and they were all booked up for the weekend. Even one of them that had a half-empty parking lot!

Turns out that there was a soccer tournament in town that weekend.

Naturally.

----

This evening, on a lark, I decided to go to the hotel down the street to apply for a night clerk opening that they have.

Naturally, about five minutes before I got there, a stereotypical bus of Asian tourists pulled in, putting about 100 people between me and the counter.

What in tarnation are tourists doing here? Much less tourists from the other side of the world!

Soccer tournament I can understand, but tourism?!

I filled up my gas tank today.

I still had another 150 miles before I would have run out of gas. The tank was somewhere between halfway and 1/4 full. I am very rarely pre-emptive about getting gas. I've run out of gas on the road on 11 occasions.

But not this week. This week my last refuge went over $2/gal. While apartment hunting I ran across a Shell station that sold below that crucial threshold.

My purity remains in tact.

Fuel Efficiency Standards: What's Next [via MWilliams]
I didn't find "what next" to be half as interesting as "what got us here." I'd always wondered what happened to the Station Wagon. The real kicker of the articule is who is the blame for the SUV, object of hate of liberals and environmentalists. The answer: liberals and environmentalists.

Always Low Prices--Always
A blog devoted entirely to Walmart.

The Jello Man
Bill Cosby has some harsh words for black culture. The most heartening thing about it is that while most people were shocked (unsurprising, considering the venue), his words have apparently been well recieved.

Man Swallows Knife to Avoid Arrest
The title about sums it up. He's lucky to be alive.

Interview With a Vampire [via Pete]
Both the article and Pete's take on the article are worth reading. It was quite unfortunate that I was in high school when Interview With a Vampire came out. I'd never much cared for Goth, but Vampgoth was ten times worse. Both links are great reminders of why I hate the 14-20 set (errr, any readers of mine in that age bracket excluded, of course).

Jen at Work
The poor girl didn't get to see her rainbow.

Wanted: Heroes to Rescue City
I've commented on City of Heroes before, but you can never know too much about the only multi-user online game I may actually play some day.

It's apparently commonplace among insurance carriers that if you've gone more than a certain time period without health insurance, pre-existing conditions are not covered for the first year. Do/did your insurance carriers have such a policy and if they did, how long was the time period? I went roughly a month without insurance last year. Eel (who works in a HOSPITAL) doesn't have any coverage for pre-existing conditions if you went without insurance for a single month in the last ten years. If so, that means I'm going to have to be very careful about when I go to the doctor in relation to possible health problems so that I'm not diagnosed and it's not a "pre-existing condition."

I'm completely ripping this off from Owen, so a tip of the hat to him on this matter. I'm probably going to link to less newsworthy stuff than he does and veer more towards the humorous and bizarre.

The Bunion [via Lex]
MAD Magazine does its take on The Onion.

Oval Office Space [via Kuff]
A clever swipe at the White House using the best office movie in the history of mankind as its guide.

KOS Idiocy Strikes Again
Greg Wythe adeptly takes on the KOS.

Not Unfamiliar [via Reductio]
Donna Hughes makes points to a contradiction between American outrage at Abu Ghraib and American ambivalence towards global sexual exploitation of women.

Healthier Fries Hit The Market [via Rebecca]
The company making the fries is unsurprisingly based in Idaho.

No Particular Love for Longhorns?
Apparently Texas A&M had some fun during the making of the movie Troy.

It appears that I have located where I'm going to live. I turned in my app today and they said to come back tomorrow for a probable lease signing. It's not as cheap as the Slumhole nor does it reak of authenticity, alas. It's a converted motel as are a lot of the cheaper hotels in the area. I object to their calling a 12"x15" room with a minifridge a "studio apartment," but I'll let bygones be bygones. It costs $275 a month with all bills paid, but the big thing is that it offers T1 Internet access for an additional $25 a month.

The bad news?

OH MY GAWD IT SMELLS!

I'll probably have to have incense running for a month before I get that smell out of there. I have a high smell tolerance since I have practically no sense of smell. The smell of cigarette smoke in particular is not troubling given that Mom smoked when I was growing up and I have as well. But wow. Wow. W-O-W.

But it's $300 with high speed Internet included, so I can afford some incense, candles, and an exorcism.

An interesting case at my father's second alma mater, the University of California at Irvine:

IRVINE, Calif. (AP) - A protest wall erected by Arab students at the University of California-Irvine was burned down, and a Muslim group is calling for a hate crime investigation.

Campus police were investigating Thursday's incident as arson, but no arrests were made.

"Because of the ethnic and religious nature of the display and its sponsors, we urge campus police and the FBI to investigate this attack as a possible hate crime," said the Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The 6-by-8-foot wall of cardboard boxes went up in flames after standing all week in the university's main quad, UCI spokesman Tom Vasich said. No injuries were reported.

If the wall were simply a matter of Muslim ritual or cultural this or that, "hate crimes" might be an appropriate description. However, it was a political statement. It is (or should be) protected by law, but to say that its destruction is inherently racist (or anti-Muslim) is to say that one must be racist to hold the political views that would dislike the wall. An opposing argument could then be made by the Jewish community that the wall itslf was a "hate symbol." Either your views and actions supporting your views on the Israel/Palestine conflict are representative of your live/hatred of the two religions/ethnicities involved or they aren't, you can't have it both ways.

[via Chris]

Milton defends his choice of driving a manual transmissions:

My new Acura TL has a short-throw shifter standard on the car, which decreases the ratio between gear shifts significantly. This has multiple effects: one, it makes a bad@ss 'snick' noise every time you shift--highly satisfying. Two, it enables you to shift gears much quicker than in an automatic car, and faster than a MT car with no short-throw. Three, it makes it feel like you are driving a race car (even if you are no speed demon, which I am not, the feeling is awesome).

But the biggest reason is that it actually feels like I am the one doing the driving, instead of passively sitting back and letting the car dictate all the gears, etc. The gears shift when I tell them to.

Nice to know that his preferences are rooted in practicality. The feeling of a race-car is extremely important in getting from Point A to Point B. :)

Seriously, I can understand the attractiveness of a manual transmission. Some of my fondest driving memories are in the old Dodge Colt. Yeah, it's not an Acura TL, but it got me from point A to point B and did so in as unglamorous a fashion as possible. It was a manual transmission and the car that I learned to drive manual on (something I believe everyone should learn). It was truly neat to have such control over the car. When going on one of my random drives, I believe I'd appreciate that kind of feeling again since I'm really just going from Point A to Point A again, taking the long and scenic route so I can sort out my thoughts for the day.

The rest of the time, though, I much prefer an automatic transmission. And cruise control.

I remember getting into an argument with Mrs. Tyler, the widow-lady next door and a second mother to me. She believed that cruise control was a hazard to the road. It made people have to think less when they drive and therefore they were more accident-prone. It's an interesting argument except she lost all credibility when I asked if she thought the same was true for automatic transmissions (which she used). What is true for cruise control is true for automatic transmissions is true for anything that makes driving easier and require less thought.

For my part, I like to put as little effort into driving as I can while driving safely. If I could, I would very gladly have a self-driving car. In fact, if I lived in a place with a good mass transit system that was actually efficient, I would rather take the bus or choo-choo train. I took the bus for jury duty for about four trips to Houston and found it nice to be able to read on my way to work.

In the movie Minority Report, the cars drive themselves with amazing efficiency. I'd love to be able to do that.

Except that I still want to own a car for my Point A to Point A driving.

Never let it be said that Lex is a butt-kisser:

As I've mentioned before, I don't link to Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds. As I might or might not have mentioned before, one of the many reasons I don't link to him is that I think he's dumber than a box of rocks.

I used to really like Instapundit. He's still a very valuable source of a wide variety of links, but I tend to bypass his commentary. There's only so many ways one can say the same thing over and over and over again, but Reynolds does so tirelessly. I'm not knocking him personally, heaven knows if I blogged as much as he did I would run out of fresh opinions after a year or two. In fact, one of the reasons I don't blog as much on political matters these days is that I said most of what I have to say my first eight months or so and if I continued I'd be reduced to saying "Hey! Look how I can repeat the same opinion 100,000 different ways!" or "Lookit whatta fickle independent thinker I am by holding all these ecclectic opinions!"

It makes me wonder how long I'm actually going to be doing this. I've used up most of my political fodder, I haven't much relationship fodder left to use, am increasingly wary of biographical posts, and am aware that few of my readers give even a rat's patoot about Conference USA. Of course, I never let having nothing to say stop me from talking, so who knows? Hopefully I'll find some sort of balance. I find that the longer I'm reading blogs, the one I appreciate the most talk about a wide variety of things.

For reasons bureaucratic, I never walked for college graduation. By the time my graduation was official, both graduates from both the fall and spring had already walked. It seemed pointless to walk the summer after my graduation. It's unfortunate that I didn't walk or attend any commencement because the day I got that degree is the proudest day of my life, bar none. When Ora graduated from UHD, they had Drayton McLane as their commencement speaker. She said that he was very uninspiring, but that's better than at least one alternative:

Doctorow, who spent virtually all of his 20-minute address in Hempstead criticizing Bush, told the crowd that like himself the president is a storyteller. But "sadly they are not good stories this president tells," he said. "They are not good stories because they are not true." That line provoked the first boos, along with scattered cheers.

"One story he told was that the country of Iraq had nuclear and biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and was intending shortly to use them on us," he said. "That was an exciting story all right, it was designed to send shivers up our spines. But it was not true.

"Another story was that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was in league with the terrorists of al-Qaida," he said. "And that turned out to be not true. But anyway we went off to war on the basis of these stories."

Those lines provoked an outburst of boos so loud the "Ragtime" author stopped the speech. Rabinowitz approached the podium and called for calm. "We value open discussion and debate," he said. "For the sake of your graduates, please let him finish."

Some students and most of the faculty responded with a standing ovation, and Doctorow resumed speaking. He attacked Bush for giving the rich tax breaks, doing "a very poor job of combating terrorism" and allowing the government to subpoena libraries "to see what books you've been taking out."

Many parents and relatives of the more than 1,300 undergraduates were livid over the address, saying afterward that a college graduation was not the place for a political speech. "If this would have happened in Florida, we would have taken him out" of the stadium, said Frank Mallafre, who traveled from Miami for his granddaughter's graduation.

Bill Schmidt, 51, of North Bellmore, shared the outrage. "To ruin my daughter's graduation with politics is pathetic," the retired New York Police Department captain said. "I think the president is doing the best he can" in the war against terrorism.

Many students also called Doctorow's speech inappropriate. Peter Hulse, 24, of Manchester, England, said, "He's a bit like Michael Moore," the documentary director who provoked booing at last year's Oscars' ceremony by criticizing the war in Iraq.

I can honestly say that I would oppose someone as important as the President of the United States giving the commencement address at my graduation if it was going to be a policy speech. If a writer is giving the address, I want to hear his or her thoughts on the human experience or his craft. I don't really want to hear what he or she thinks about the war in Iraq whether he's for it or against it. If it's a politician giving the address, I want to hear his or her thoughts on public service or thoughts of government vague enough that those who oppose his agenda can still relate. Even if they're saying what I agree with, I don't like the thought that he or she is upsetting other people on what is supposed to be their day as well as mine. Talk about standing up for what we believe in, sure, but don't tell us what we should believe in.

Freedom of speech is a great thing. It's necessary to function as a democracy. Universities should be a place of free expression of ideas and college administration ought to promote debate, but not at occasions where we should be uniting in celebration instead of picking the same old fights we can have any of the other 364 days of the year.

[via Michael Williams]

As much as I love the University of Houston, I had to deal with my fair share of bureaucratic crap when I went there. That all paled in comparison to the bureaucratic crap I had to put up with when to get out of there. In the summer of 2001 a crucial hard drive of mine was formatted over. I flung into panic about all of the personal writing I'd lost (about a year's worth), the mp3s that I would have to re-rip from my CDs, and the general crap that comes with losing all of one's data. An afterthought was that I lost my academic work. Papers and programs I'd written were gone. I lost something else that would come back to haunt me.

In the spring I had dropped my Chem II-Honors class. I'd had enough trouble with Chem-I and I needed to scale back a little to keep my full-time work and full-time school schedule. A week later I was laid off from Nova, but it was too late. It was just as well, though, because I had no particular love of chemistry. A couple months before I realized that my chosen minor (Business Administration Education) was going to require an additional 30 hours (they'd only told me about 12 hours... some sort of misunderstanding that I probably can't blame them for) and I'd switched to Industrial Supervision. The problem is that Industrial Supervision required one class that was only offered in the fall. The long and short of it was that I would not be graduating until December 2001. So I figured while I was (okay, okay, my parents were) paying tuition for that fall, I'd go ahead and take Geology then.

Before signing up for my final summer and fall semesters, I consulted with an academic advisor to make sure that I got all the credits I would need to graduate. It was about then that I realized that among the other things lost in my reformatting was my class spreadsheet. My regular advisor was off on maturnity leave. I should have realized that this was shaping up to be really, really bad. My new advisor said that my schedule was great and that I'd graduate in December.

Six months or so later, he sent me a form letter saying that I was a Natural Science credit short of graduating.

I looked through the requirements; I needed six hours, I had six hours. What was he talking about? It took me about two days to finally track down the right course guide. Apparently the year before I got there, they upped the requirement to seven hours. Two years later, they dropped it back down to six. Since I declared my major my freshman year, I fell within that two year window and needed that seventh hour of credit. Because of one fraggin' hour, I wouldn't graduate until May 2002. Not only was I an hour short, but it was an hour that had nothing to do with my major and it was an hour the same advisor that said I couldn't graduate didn't say that I needed when I actually could have done something about it. Words cannot convey how low I felt. I called Audrey in a state of despair - something I rarely did given the timultuous nature of our relations - and even called Mom looking for solace. I figured Mom would be the angriest of all, but she really came shining through with a hilarious story about her time at Georgia Tech when a bunch of Montgomery GI's were denied their degrees for lacking a PE credit. I will never forget how supportive she was.

So with the hysteria passing, I had to figure out what I was going to do. Audrey suggested testing out of the credit (I couldn't find the information needed to) and Mom suggested going to San Jac to pick it up (I couldn't, the last 30 hours of credit had to be local). Desperate, I went back to the advisor, who said that I should have thought of that missing credit before I preverbally printed my graduation invitations. The fact that one of his job functions is to alert me of such things completely flew over his head. It wasn't as though I didn't do my part about seeing an academic advisor to make sure. I talked to my de-facto faculty advisor and she told me that I could apply for a waiver. She told me to see the department chair.

I talked to the Chair, who was surprisingly accessible, and told him about my situation. In his immortal words: "This is the dumbest thing I've heard since... well since this morning. It's not easy working in administration."

He gave me the form and said that he would be glad to sign it. I raced home, filled it out, and sent it back in. I asked him how long it would take me to get my degree. He said some time in January, assuming that all the credits had been met. By February, I was getting concerned.

I called the college office and asked them about it. They said to give it another couple weeks and hang up before I could respond. I gave them another couple of weeks and called back. "It was denied. You were missing a natural science credit." I asked who I could talk to about it, and he gave me the name of the advisor who signed off on my remaining credit and denied my graduation application.

The next couple of weeks were spent trying to contact the advisor. I finally had to take off early from work and go down there personally. He said that there wasn't any record of my applying for a waiver. Did I have my carbon copy? No, I never picked it up. It turns out that was a good decision on my part because it was still there. He said that should be sufficient, gave me another graduation application, and sent me on my merry way.

Two months later, he denied my second graduation application.

Not even bothering to try to call, I went down there again. He told me that he couldn't accept the yellow carbon copy (mine). He needed the white one. If I wanted to graduate, I had to get it signed all over again. That required a third half-day at work to talk to the Chair again. He signed off again, I turned it in along with a third graduation application.

Two months later, he denied my third graduation application.

I took my fourth half-day and went down there to talk to him again. He said that there was no record of my being a current student. He told me that I needed to be a current student in order to have a graduation application approved. I asked what I could do and he said I could sign up for a summer course and apply then. Somehow my graduation had been denied from December 2001 until August 2002 because I was missing a credit that I got waived twice (the first time while I actually was a student). This was unacceptable to me so I poured over the Student Handbook to see if I had any way that I could appeal, who I could talk to, and where exactly it said that I had to be currently enrolled. I found no information on any of the three items I was looking for. That was a good thing because it meant that no enrollment requirement existed.

Instead of talking to my advisor, I talked to the aforementioned professor. She told me that she would take care of it. Within a month, I got my degree, dated December 14, 2001. I didn't even have to send in a fourth application.

My mother is a conservative in most respect. She's a proud southerner and the granddaughter of a local judge back in Virginia. However, she has an odd feminist streak about her at times. She either has a keen eye for sexism or is overly sensitive to percieved sexism, depending on your perspective (I've personally found it worthwhile to trust her instincts). One of the Whitlock house's favorite game shows was the Inquizition. It had a mysterious and snarky host that made derogatory comments towards the contestants that put Anne Robinson to shame. Mom swears up and down that he was sexist and overly harsh on the female contestants.

Another one of Mom's soapbox issues used to be "How come male weather people are 'Meteorologists' and women are 'Weather Girls'?"

It was a good point, but I think it had something to do with credentials. If you had a degree or a license or were a doctor or something, you were deemed a Meteorologist and if you didn't you were a Weather Man or Weather Girl. Of course, an argument could be made about how come it's "Weather Girl" and not "Weather Woman." I don't think there's a particularly non-sexist explanation for that one. In the comic book world, I remember similar complaints about Hawkman and Hawkgirl (though they eventually went with Hawkwoman) and Batman and Batgirl (which they resolved by making the new Batgirl in her teens while the old one graduated to become Oracle).

But back to the Meteorologist or Weather Man/Woman/Girl issue, Dan Lovett over at ChronicallyBiased has more on weatherperson naming than you ever wanted to know:

Many of them have the title Dr. as their introduction. There was Dr. Frank Field at WNBC-TV in New York who named his first born son, Storm. And Storm caught the eye of the weather guru’s at WABC-TV where he pranced across the screen on the nightly Eyewitness News shows. Out Los Angeles way, there was Dr. Fishbeck at KABC-TV. Here in Houston there is Dr. Neil Frank at KHOU-TV. Where do all of these weather Doctors come from anyway? They are all goof balls, not meteorologists. Surely they were all born on the road from parents in vaudeville. Funny thing though, the most likeable weather guy in the country didn’t carry the title of Dr. He was just plain old Willard. Why did most of America like Willard Scott? Because he didn’t pretend to know much about the weather, instead relying on his good disposition to humor all of us and not messing around with all those highs and lows. Like the rest of us, Willard would just look out the window and tell us what the weather was going to be.

Today we have to deal with the Doppler Boys. How could we not exist without these guys to burden our day with their bodacious forecasts that are seldom accurate to begin with. Which Doppler do you believe? Big Arse Double Tracker? Rolling Thunder Doppler? Double D-Cup Doppler? Viper Doppler? Damn Big Doppler? Big Bopper Doppler? Dog eat Dog Doppler? Dos Cajones Doppler? This is the Doppler that can track two systems at once

Tommy Kaiser was one of the leading candidates for the UH football coach job that went to Art Briles. Well, if you don't get to be a Cougar, you can make it as a Longhorn. A Dobie Longhorn, anyway:

Tommy Kaiser has bounced around the NFL and college ranks as an assistant coach. Now, the University of Houston alumnus has found a home as the new Dobie football coach.

The Pasadena ISD school board confirmed Kaiser as the Dobie coach and athletic coordinator Thursday. He replaces Mike Stephens, who is the district's new assistant athletic director.

"It's something that we felt like we'd maybe like to do," Kaiser said of his family. "This has worked out well so far. I'm very, very excited."

Kaiser, once a finalist for the UH head coaching position, was an offensive assistant/special teams assistant for the Buffalo Bills from 2001-03. He also had assistant coaching stops at Oklahoma State, Texas Tech and UH.

I'm not sure how Dobie's football team has done historically, but Kaiser could bring it in to prominance. Dobie is the premier high school in Pasadena Independent School District as far as wealth goes and Pasadena Memorial Stadium (assuming that they play there) is as good a high school stadium as I've seen. It sure beats the pants off of Clear Creek's, anyway. Unless UH comes calling, I hope he sticks around. At the very least it would give UH inroads within the community, and it can always use more of that.

I didn't realize until I finished the quiz that it only had Democrats. It only lists 25 of them. I'm not sure if the quiz includes all 49 and just dropped the other 24 off the list, but I like the symbolism of having Ted Kennedy ranked last. I don't like Hillary Clinton rated 12... even among a list that only includes Democrats. I'd dig a similar test for Republicans or one that includes both:

1: Zell Miller (Georgia) (100%)
2: Evan Bayh (Indiana) (93%)
3: Harry Reid (Nevada) (85%)
4: Joseph Biden (Delaware) (83%)
5: Blanche Lincoln (Arkansas) (80%)
6: Thomas Daschle (South Dakota) (80%)
7: C. William "Bill" Nelson (Florida) (76%)
8: John Breaux (Louisiana) (75%)
9: Charles E. "Chuck" Schumer (New York) (66%)
10: Christopher Dodd (Connecticut) (63%)
11: Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (South Carolina) (61%)
12: Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York) (61%)
13: Patrick Leahy (Vermont) (60%)
14: John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (West Virginia) (58%)
15: Robert C. Byrd (West Virginia) (58%)
16: Max Baucus (Montana) (55%)
17: John F. Kerry (Massachusetts) (53%)
18: Joseph Lieberman (Connecticut) (48%)
19: Daniel Inouye (Hawaii) (45%)
20: Jon Corzine (New Jersey) (45%)
21: Richard "Dick" Durbin (Illinois) (43%)
22: Tom Harkin (Iowa) (43%)
23: Robert "Bob" Graham (Florida) (41%)
24: Dianne Feinstein (California) (40%)
25: Edward "Ted" Kennedy (Massachusetts) (40%)

[via Fritz Wythe]

The Clemency process in Texas is kind of a tricky one. Due to some scandals in the earlier part of the 20th century where a clemency grant and/or pardon were often for sale, the governorship lost the power to make such grants unilaterally. They can only grant leniency when the Board of Pardons and Paroles says they can. So taking the high-profile execution of Karla Faye Tucker for example, Governor George W. Bush was literally powerless to save her life. Bush said that he would not have if he could have (and an argument could be made that Bush could have strongarmed the Board on that case), so it's something of a non-issue, but the point remains that even if I (an opponent of capital punishment) were elected governor, I would not have the power to prevent executions if I wanted to. While the law was a reasonable reaction to what was a legitimate problem (pardons for sale), it's creates a lack of accountability when it comes to very questionable cases where a governor can sit back and say that his hands are simply tied. Putting more power in the hands of a faceless committee is generally not a good thing.

When people ask me why I believe President Bush is, at root, a man of integrity, I actually have to look no further than his handling of capital punishment in Texas. He was under national scrutiny during the Karla Faye Tucker execution. He could easily have said that his hands were tied, but he stepped up to the plate and said, "No, I would do this even if I had the choice not to." Considering the following that Tucker had on the right (being a Born Again Christian and all) and the national sympathy she garnered, it was one of the few cases where executing someone could have proved politically harmful. On the other hand, take Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas was a dispicable man than many believe was a serial killer. Yet when it came to the crime that Lucas was convicted of, the evidence against him was weak and tainted by overzealous prosecution. No one would have missed Lucas if he were gone, so Bush could have easily let him be executed with little fall-out. But there were significant problems with the way he was convicted, Bush recognized that and commuted his sentence to life in prison. Whether I agree with the outcome or not (I wish Tucker had been spared and was glad to see that Lucas was), I respect the decision-making process that was at work.

As mentioned before, I am against the death penalty, primarily on religious/spiritual/moral grounds. But as with my opposition to abortion, my view is that if it's going to be legal, it needs to be as fairly applied as possible. Where I cross light-sabers with my fellow capital punishment opponents is that I don't believe in using fairness as a reason to say "it'll never be fair so we shouldn't have it at all," because we then lose credibility of earnest attempts to actually make the system better. Texas has a lot of work to do in the area of capital punishment, mostly pertaining to the appeals system.

Capital punishment has been instituted with a series of goals that vary from incorrect to expedient:

It decapacitates threats to society. If someone is executed, they can't exactly kill again, can they? Opponents would argue that a legitimate Life Without Possibility of Parole would alleviate this reasoning. Then again, the same people who tend to make this argument also tend to lament overly harsh punishments and are often first in line to support rehabilitation-and-release instead of permanent-incarceration-as-punishment.

It acts as a deterrant. If someone believes they could be put to death for committing a specific crime, they are less likely to do so, aren't they? Statistics that it actually does deter are spotty at best, considering how rarely the death penalty is actually applied. People believing they can beat the system by not getting caught also believe they can beat the system by not getting put to death. On the other hand, the it's-not-a-deterrant arguments could also just as easily be arguments for expanding the scope of the death penalty. If the death penalty were automatic, I'm relatively certain that it would act as a deterrant.

It saves the state money. If we kill them, we aren't feeding them. Opponents point out that the appeals process is so expensive that it costs the state more to execute than to send behind bars. However, that's under the assumption that someone convicted with an LWOP sentence would not appeal.

It is a just punishment for a horrific crime. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. This is a value judgment on which the opposing sides of the debate will never agree.

Rightly or wrongly, the public has decided that these four motivations are sufficient to have the death penalty. This is not an example of how "backwards" America is because polls in Europe and Canada (where the death penalty is banned) believe - at least abstractly - support the death penalty (note; both sources are anti-DP). As a believer in democracy even when it disagrees with me, I believe that the government should serve the will of the people as fairly as it can. While I oppose the death penalty, I do not consider it "cruel and unusual punishment" nor do I believe that Constitution - a "living doctument" or otherwise - bans it.

So with both my broad thoughts and beliefs on the death penalties and Texas's specific procedures in mind, I read with interest about a recent case where Texas Governor Rick Perry defied the recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles regarding a mentally ill inmate:

HUNTSVILLE -- Despite a long record of severe mental illness before and since his crime, convicted killer Kelsey Patterson was put to death by injection Tuesday night shortly after Gov. Rick Perry refused to go along with a recommendation by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles that his sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.

Perry said it was a difficult decision given Patterson's mental history, but he noted that numerous courts have reviewed the case and not found a legal reason to bar his execution. He made no mention of the rare recommendation by the board or why he chose to disagree with it.

"This defendant is a very violent individual," Perry said in a prepared statement. "Texas has no life without parole sentencing option, and no one can guarantee this defendant would never be freed to commit other crimes were his sentence commuted. In the interest of justice and public safety, I am denying the defendant's request for clemency and a stay."

Both Jack Cluth and Ginger comment on the matter. Ginger is abstractly in favor of capital punishment (making this the only issue, to date, where she is to my right), though she's not comfortable with the specifics of this case:

I’m a supporter of the death penalty as a legal, safe/not cruel, and rare option, and specifically the mad-dog theory used by Perry to justify executing Patterson. The crimes he is reported to have committed are terrible and the nature of his illness is such that I cannot see a circumstance in which releasing him into the general population is reasonable. But if you can read about Patterson’s execution without thinking there is something wrong with the system that allowed it, you are a colder man or woman than I.

Jack, on the other hand, is against the death penalty and views this is a particularly egregious case of what's wrong with the system:

Greetings from Texas, where frontier justice still rules the day, regardless of virtually any other consideration. Of course, no self-respecting law-and-order Republican is going to question our state's commitment to capital punishment, not when there are elections to be won and donors to be pandered to.

I'm not going to get into a debate on the effectiveness and morality of the death penalty- particularly how it is employed here in the Great State of Texas. I've written extensively on the matter, and my opposition to the both the death penalty and the error-prone, racially-biased manner in which it is applied needs no expansion here. No, what I'm upset about here is the fact Governor Goodhair ignored the clemency recommendation of his own parole board in order to execute Kelsey Patterson. Apparently, the one record that Rick Perry is most concerned about is his unblemished record of executing murderers.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles is disinclined to recommend clemency for any murderer. The fact that they did so in this particular case warrants more of an explanation from the Governor than he has made (or at least than has been repeated in the Chronicle). I don't find it surprising as I do not have the same opinion of Rick Perry the man as I do of George W. Bush the man, but I nonetheless find it disappointing.

That being said, I've never had a particular objection to executing the mentally ill (any more than executing everyone else). It seems to me that if you're going to have a death penalty, it's not at all clear that the level of sanity of the defendant ought to be a blackballing issue. Patterson's victims probably wouldn't care if their killer was developmentally disabled, so the fourth "Eye-for-an-eye" argument still stands. The "deterrant" argument doesn't because Patterson clearly was not capable of rationally considering what his punishment might be if he were caught. The objective costs of housing a mentally unstable inmate are considerably more expensive than it would be for a more sane inmate. The first point that I made above applies considerably more to Patterson than a run-of-the-mill murderer. Should Patterson ever be released again, he would remain a huge threat. So three of the four rationales for the death penalty stick. Whether I agree or disagree with the rationales (the only one I'm sympathetic to is decapacitation), they are the ones that justify state-sponsored taking of life.

On the other hand, the sanity of the perpetrator is considered when it comes to the guilty/not-guilty plea, so I'm curious as to how he ended up on death row if the case for insanity is as clear as the TBoP&P says it is. That does strike me as something that may raise a red flag and a reason to overturn the conviction or alter the punishment accordingly. On the other hand, overturning the conviction or even just putting him in prison increases the likelihood that he would get out some day and that, despite my opposition to the death penalty, puts me at great ill-ease.

Adrianne Truett has finally created a Typepad account, marking her exit from Blogger. Though Blogger is admirably upgrading even their free services, I'm glad to see more and more bloggers leaving for greener pasteurs. Some of the competitors such as MT and even Nuke aren't made for novices, so it's good that Typepad is providing an outlet for worthwhile bloggers like Adrianne, TPB, and Milton (who needs to email me).

My dissatisfaction with Blogger had three main parts, each of which they are addressing with various degrees of success. The first was the lack of a Comments function. This was by far the biggest because it meant relying on unreliable free comment scripts like Haloscan that often slows the blog down and has burdensome character limits. However, Blogger is adding a comments function, which is great. It looks hideous at the moment so they still have work to do, but it's a heck of a start. The second relates to permalink/itemlinks. This is not nearly the problem that it used to be, though it plagued poor Adrianne until she finally abandoned her template. The last issue was a matter of stability, which has gotten better over the past year or so.

I definitely wish Blogger the best because it provides a super "trial blog" for anyone that wants to get in to blogging. Without such an easy (and free) path towards becoming a full-time blogger, I figure there would be less bloggers out there. I would probably not be blogging myself were it not for their services.

But I'm also glad that the more serious bloggers are kicking the training wheels off and leaving Blogger. If we can just get Owen on a more serious platform, we'd be all set.

Eugene Volokh dissects the political differences between gays and polygamists:

I suspect, though, that this won't in fact happen. The gay rights movement has succeeded, both legally and in many situations politically, because of a confluence of reasons. Homosexuals are only about 2-3% of the population; but they also have many more nonhomosexual friends, family members, and colleagues. They have the natural political sympathy of much of the liberal movement, that tends to take a broadly egalitarian and sexually libertarian view.

Homosexuals are generally not very socially insular, at least by choice; while there are some mostly homosexual organizations and social circles, homosexuals tend to work, play, and socialize with heterosexuals. This means that, once there's enough tolerance for homosexuality that homosexuals are willing to identify themselves, many people -- even many conservatives -- find that quite a few of the people they like are homosexual. And this has been especially so in elite circles that have a disproportional impact on law, policy, culture, and even public opinion.

The chief sources of polygamy in America, as I understand it, are likely to be Muslim immigrants and some Mormon sects. (These wouldn't be the only sources, but I suspect they'd be the main ones.) These are relatively socially insular. Few people outside the group are likely to have close friends who are polygamists.

What's more, these groups don't have a natural political home in the Left, because they tend to be highly socially conservative in many ways (setting aside polygamy itself, of course), and because they tend to be devoutly religious. I'm not saying that many people on the Left will deliberately refuse to endorse polygamy because they don't like the politics and religions of polygamists. But I doubt that many of the Left would be eager to go to bat politically for people with whom they have so little in common. And people on the Right aren't likely to back these groups, either, simply because most people on the Right are morally averse to polygamy.

I agree with Volokh's analysis, though as he points out fifty years ago there was no gay rights movement to speak of. It's possible a polygamy rights organization may spring practically out of nowhere and take the country by storm.

What Volokh doesn't address, which I find pertinent, is the particular way that homosexual unions are poised to become legal: the courts. With little or no Constitutional mandate (I'm in favor of gay marriage and I see none) some courts have come to the conclusion that the Constitution ought to say that gays have the same rights as straights (which it does not). It therefore takes a standard legal mechanism (marriage) and applies Constitutional mandates to it. A Constitutional case could be made that anti-polygamy laws are discriminatory on religious descrimination grounds. It's a stretch, but the bands have already been stretched by the court dictates on gay marriage.

As strong as Volokh's case is on "political traction" the truth remains that gay marriage still doesn't have much of it. Both the Democratic and Republican nominees have announced that they are opposed to it. Most Americans are against it, poll approval numbers of homosexuality went down in backlash to the Massachusetts ruling and subsequent sideshow. Simply put, gay marriage didn't need political traction to win. It's possible that the polygamists won't, either.

As for the more general "defining marriage down" argument, though, Volokh's points are on-target. There just isn't the sympathy for polygamists out there. It also has very natural opposition:

I suspect that few American women, for instance, would be that inclined to enter into polygynous (one man, many women) marriages. I suspect that even fewer American men would be inclined to enter into polyandrous (one woman, many men) marriages. I suspect that many American men who might want multiple sexual partners wouldn't be that inclined to actually marry, and in some measure have to support, multiple wives. (Men of course might marry women who are at the same income level as they are, but I suspect that those are the very women who would least want to enter into polygynous relationships.)

I would also point out that polygamy (one man, many women) is a losing deal for men. For every rich dude with ten wives, there are nine men that can't find a wife. Unlike gay marriage, which the other side opposes on religious/moral grounds, opposition to gay marriage would be rooted deeply in self-interest, and self-interest is the most intense motivator that exists in politics anywhere.

The New York Times has a phenomenal story on burgeoning black private schools in New York City. A lot of people will find the sociology of the story interesting, but the most important part of the article in my opinion is how these schools succeed:

Like the Catholic schools favored by many black parents, the Whitfield School has stuck to instruction in basic skills. The other day, the blackboard in Louise Browne-Jackson's first-grade classroom was equally divided into sections about phonics (sh, en), grammar (contractions) and mathematics (place value in three-digit numbers). Classes routinely recite aloud. Every pupil in pre-kindergarten is required to learn to read.

Such methods defy the favored approaches of many public school systems, including New York's, which downplay or altogether omit drilling and memorization. The traditional style appeals strongly, however, to A. B. Whitfield, who taught in public schools for 17 years before founding Trey Whitfield (named for his late son) in 1983. And the curriculum has helped him attract a corps of experienced immigrant teachers, many of them products of the British-style schools in the Caribbean basin, for salaries one-third lower than those in public schools.

Nobody can argue with the results. On fourth-grade math and reading tests, more than 90 percent of Trey Whitfield students meet state standards, while barely one-third do so in the nearby public schools. Graduates go on to boarding, Catholic and elite public high schools, often having won scholarships. While in eighth grade, all Whitfield students are required to collect information about colleges. The assumption, not the hope, is that they will attend.

But... but... rote memorization is sooo passe' and everyone knows that kids can't be educated on less than $10,000 a year.

If you:

(a) have a weak stomach OR

(b) are eating or have eaten within the last hour or so OR

(c) have an affection for very small furry things,

Don't read this post.

[Read More!]

Apparently the University of Houston is advertising in the New York Times. I was reading an article about private (lower level) schools and there it was. NYT makes you register, so they probably have my Houston ZIP code in there. It'd be cooler if they were advertising across the country, but it's cool regardless.

Good ad, too.

To see the ad, click below.

[Read More!]

It’s my general position that it doesn’t matter a whole lot what celebrities think. Even if they’re really smart and politically active. A cushy liberal is the thing to be in Hollywood and it’s interesting how Julia Roberts, for instance, turns up the amplifiers on her liberalism whenever she’s up for a movie award. A lot of them are, I believe, poseurs. They’re liberal because artists are predisposed to liberalism, because everyone around them is liberal, or because it’s advantageous for their careers. Then there are Hollywood conservatives. They are notable because with rare exceptions, the Hollywood conservatives are known for being eccentric in other aspects of their life. As often as not, it says more about them than it does the validity of their ideas (even though I believe that their ideas are more worthwhile than Hollywood liberals’ ideas are).

More recently, Lara Flynn Boyle has apparently joined the few celebrities to be supporting George W. Bush in 2004:

Representatives for George W. Bush are hoping to recruit actress Lara Flynn Boyle for campaigning duties, after she publicly declared her support for the American President. The former star of The Practice, 34, has gone against the grain of a large number of her Hollywood counterparts to pledge her support for the Republican leader. She says, "I'm Irish Catholic, so a Democrat by blood. But I'm 100 per cent for Bush. I want my president to be like my agent: not afraid of people, but wants my best interest." And a Bush spokesman has welcomed the news, telling Us Weekly, "If she's amenable, obviously we would try to find something interesting and useful for her to do."

I remember watching a Behind the Music or whatever E!’s version of that is for actors on Miss Boyle. She had a particularly rough youth and developed the reputation for having a “tough-as-nails” personality in her professional career. When they were interviewing her friends, they pretty much said that she relished the reputation. She quite liked the idea of being an ice princess. I can’t help but wonder if the desire to be seen as cold and heartless - which is an odd desire, but a surprisingly large number of people seem to have it - actually lead her to take this contrarian stance which is, in the minds of people she’s surrounded with, cold and heartless. I’d say there’s a good chance this has a lot more to do with Miss Boyle than it does Mr. Bush.

Edie Singleton writes Mating Call, a blog about her love life (and frequently lack thereof) in New York City. She’s a very talented narrator and I suggest it to anyone of the romantic, hyper-analytic, and angsty sort. A few weeks ago she wrote an interesting post on a dateship that wasn’t going anywhere:

I really do actually like him. There is just no ka-pow, ka-bang!, ya know. There is absolutely nothing to dislike about him, we are just very different people. I am a vegetarian, he doesn't eat vegetables (truly!). He is wearing a gun at all times, I hate guns. He doesn't have adventurous culinary tastes, and I love spicy food, exotic ingredients, and trying new things. He likes Staten Island. I like the city. But honestly, all of that mightn't matter so much if we had fantastic conversations. I need to be with someone with whom feel like I can have an engaging, fun conversation twenty years down the road.

[...]

I really wish I could have told him that it wasn't working for me. But the problem is I really do like him. I am just not attracted to him. I find him attractive, but not attracted to him. I wish I could be. I think I hope that if we continue to see each other, I will learn to be attracted to him and everything will be great. But I fear what will really happen is that while I remain disinterested, he will think, understandably, that I am quite interested.

Part of me thinks I should just continue going out with him because he is not only a great guy, but also sort of seems to like me. So what if I am not attracted to him? They guys I am attracted to never like me, or like me enough to regularly see me. I understand now why women "settle." Maybe it is more important to be with someone who isn't totally appropriate for you, but who really adores you, than someone who you are wild for, but doesn't give you much of himself.

I’ve heard this story 100,000 times before. I’ve unfortunately been in the guy’s shoes, sometimes in Edie’s, and most often as the confidant of the frustrated femalien (or guy) who can’t seem to feel what she (or he) purports to want to feel. I find that often - though by no means always - the lack of chemistry is more her issue than his or theirs. I can think of two rather pivotal people in my past who threw up walls to prevent themselves from fully feeling what they were capable of. That isn’t my analysis, it’s theirs (after the fact). I (inaccurately) strike female-types as super stable and solid as a rock. For a girl in her late teens or early twenties, those are not valuable perceptions. I think more than once I have been viewed as the destination when they weren’t finished with the journey yet.

I’ve seen the same behavior in myself, to a lesser degree. There was a girl in Houston named Rosalinda that I had an sorta-thing with at various points over about three years. Rose made herself very, very available to me. There was a lot about her to like. She was more physically attractive than many of the girls I actually chose to date at the time. She was serious-minded about relationships (at 22, she’s getting married in a month), sane, of strong faith, sane, artistic, sane, and of a solid moral foundation without the sanctimony that often accompanies it. On paper, she was perfect.

Yet every time something came even remotely close to happen, it felt as though a big giant hand would slap me on the back of my head to emphatically tell me “NO!” I never knew why that voice was there, but it was very successful in preventing anything from happening. Looking back, there were definitely some incompatibilities there that I couldn’t quite articulate. Whenever I got close, I would find huge flaws in her that I wasn’t sure I could live with. It all came to an end when she left Texas. I thought I would never leave Texas. Particularly not for a girl. And particularly not to the state where she moved.

She moved to Idaho. She lives less than an hour away from me now.

So it seems to me that sometimes that feeling of chemistry (or lack thereof) is important. Yet it interestingly seems that every time I hear one of my female friends talk about lack of chemistry, they bolster their argument with false incompatibilities such as his owning a gun for work (in Edie’s case) or unwillingness to leave Texas (in mine). Very, very frequently I see them choose a guy with the same negatives as the ones that they couldn’t live with before. Astonishingly, the latter love interests are almost uniformly less emotionally available than the ones whose identical traits they couldn’t live with.

So I’m not sure there’s a strong overarching point to all this. Sometimes the lack of chemistry is self-sabotage and sometimes it’s not. I guess it would be nice if people (male and female) would actually investigate the real problems instead of blaming it on the alignment of the stars, chemistry, luck, or false incompatibilities. It sure would have saved some of my past relationships and sortas if either she or I had.

This is in response to Chris’s response to an earlier post.

The arguments made by social liberals (including political liberals and libertarians) and social conservatives are mutually exclusive. It makes sense that what one would see as the salvation (technology) the other would see as its downfall. One is seeking freedom and the other moral righteousness. As I grow older, I'm begining to see the inherent conflict between the two with sharper and sharper vision.

Whether or not our society will be remembered for its technology is somewhat beside the point, in my view. If the US has a fall from grace for whatever reason, why will we care? I'm sure that democracy became an ideal is of little comfort to displaced and bitter Greeks. Regardless of nation, whether or not freedom will survive is a more pertinent question, and I am of the mind that the technology aiding in this freedom will at least foster freedom in the future until better technology comes along. I don't think that anyone is arguing that the Internet will be "cutting edge" forever, but I do suspect that it will contribute to future technologies (and even the arts) in the same way that the invention of the printing press (which itself is on the way out) has.

The more pertinent argument is that technology increases freedom for us. We are a here-and-now country (which itself is an object of contention for conservatives) with one eye on the future and none on the past and those arguing in favor of freedom as a first priority aren't remarkably concerned with our legacy. To the extent they are they are concerned with our artistic future as you are. I get the feeling that a large majority of socially-conscious writers are striving to be the next Jonathan Swift, screaming to the gods that they don't believe in that history will vindicate them. Chris and I would probably agree that such post-modern, enlightened sensibilities will not, or at least should not, be remembered.

So the questions are whether or not American dominance will continue, how long will it continue, and why will it cease to continue? I don't disagree with Chris that it will come to an end. I even agree with Chris that it will likely come to an end due to internal rotting rather than a totalitarian state. Where I take issue with Chris's perspective is that the end is right around the corner (though that depends on what kind of timeframe that he's talking about) and where Chris and I would disagree politically is what to do about it. The United States has seen a fluxuation between conservatism and libertinism. What we're seeing now is not remarkably different from what I understand about the "Roaring Twenties," but the nation rebounded by the fifties. The sixties and seventies gave way to the Reagan-dominated 80's.

What I do find distressing is that it's typically been tragedy or turmoil that has gotten the nation on track in the past. It reminds me of a Phil Pritchett song about trying to fill the narrative of a resume in which he irreverently that his generation had never seen war or a Great Depression and that he's "still looking for something tough to live through." Our generation saw that with 9/11. What startles me is that two-and-a-half years later, our nation doesn't seem to have changed very much. In fact, some of the trends that existed prior to the attacks - a shortening attention span, celebrity culture, and so on - have actually continued nearly unabated. One of our anthems-turn-cliches after the war was that if we stop being who we are, "the terrorists will have won."

To an extent, that idea makes a lot of sense. If we were to cease being free then an external attack would have let them define who we are. On the other hand, it appears as though America did some soul-searching inside itself and made the determination, “Nope, no improvements needed here. Where did I put my Ikea catalog, again?” It didn’t affect Republican tax cuts or Democratic senior entitlement initiatives one iota. With the exception of a vague recognition that terrorism is a threat, everyone seems to have spent their time in the two-and-a-half years since trying to fit what should be done with their conceptions of what their party ideally is for and against instead of questioning where they really should stand. It would be one thing if it were the clash of ideals, but it’s more related to which political party is more supportive of their chosen lifestyle than anything else. What was true on September 10th is true enough now.

Some studies have shown that the upcoming generation (Gen-Y/Millenials) have been more deeply affected and hold more passionate ideas than the self-centered boomers or irony-obsessed Gen-Xers. I can only hope that those studies pan out. Otherwise, the failure to truly re-assess after 9/11 could really turn to be a turning point in a downward direction.

Bruce Bartlett writes on Senator Zell Miller’s objections to the 17th Amendment, providing for the popular election of senators:

The 17th amendment was ratified in 1913. It is no coincidence that the sharp rise in the size and power of the federal government starts in this year (the 16th amendment, establishing a federal income tax, ratified the same year, was also important).

As George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki notes, prior to the 17th amendment, senators resisted delegating power to Washington in order to keep it at the state and local level. "As a result, the long term size of the federal government remained fairly stable during the pre-Seventeenth Amendment era," he wrote.

Zywicki also finds little evidence of corruption in the Senate that can be traced to the pre-1913 electoral system. By contrast, there is much evidence that the post-1913 system has been deeply corruptive. As Miller put it, "Direct elections of senators ... allowed Washington's special interests to call the shots, whether it is filling judicial vacancies, passing laws or issuing regulations."

Miller also lays much of the blame for the current impasse in confirming federal judges at the door of the 17th amendment. Consequently, on April 28 he introduced S.J.Res. 35 in order to repeal that provision of the Constitution.

Over the years, a number of legal scholars have called for repeal of the 17th amendment. An excellent summary of their arguments appears in Ralph Rossum's recent book, "Federalism, the Supreme Court and the Seventeenth Amendment." They should at least get a hearing before Zell Miller departs at Senate end the end of this year.

[via Reductio]

Sgt. Stryker takes Instapundit to task on conspiracy theories regarding the media and Nick Berg and Abu Ghraib:

Hey, here's a simpler explanation: People don't expect Americans to do the sort of things depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos. People aren't surprised when they hear that Arabs beheaded someone. It's shocking when Americans do it, it's not shocking when Arabs do it. See, not everything is about Bush and the War, although like the "Anybody But Bush" crowd, the Right has lost the ability to perceive any information outside the context of Bush. Facts either hurt Bush or help him. The Left magnifies those things that they believe hurt Bush's chance at re-election, and the Right does the opposite. The Abu Ghraib scandal is a prime example. Almost immediately, most on the Right began the type of equivocation common to the Left since 9/11. Now with the Nick Berg story, they can downplay Abu Ghraib and focus on something that they think supports Bush. This has nothing to do with principle, what's right, or even what's actually going on. It's about politics. It's about keeping Bush in office or trying to kick him out.

[...]

Here's a simpler explanation for the Nick Berg request spike: People heard that a video depicting a man being beheaded was on the internet. Wonder of wonders, they logged onto the internet and searched for it! Why? Perhaps it was morbid fascination. Perhaps it was to see something "cool." Perhaps Fear Factor wasn't on. Whatever the reason, the most likely explanation is that this was something novel, shocking, taboo, and on the Internet, so lots of people went looking for it in the place where it was supposed to be: The Internet. Not to shuffle-off the stifling coil of Big Media. Not so they could get mad at the Arabs and help Bush's re-election chances. And definitely not to help bloggers strike a mortal blow against the elitist, liberal, ivory tower media. At least that's what ten years of crawling around the internet tells me. Hell, I still get hundreds of search requests every month for video of Somalis dragging American soldiers through the streets.

But Common Sense doesn't matter anymore. It's all about Bush now. Why, if he doesn't win, then the terrorists will have won! The War in Iraq will surely fail! Western civilization as we know will fall! I'm sorry, but if the fate of the world rests upon one man's shoulders, then we've already lost. It's a democracy, and the one thing that makes our Republic so damned great and nearly impervious to destruction is this simple fact: All politicians are dispensible. One guy leaves, another takes his place. The nation endures. No one is supposed to to be so vital that their loss would seriously cripple our country or its interests. We don't have kings, czars, or chiefs. We have a President and Congressmen, all of whom could be easily replaced tomorrow with almost no ill effects. We'd just have a new set of assholes to deal with.

Republicans have been claiming that Democrats were “overreaching” on Abu Ghraib since word of it first got out. A lot of liberals and Democrats were (and are) hyperbolic on the matter (“This proves we’re no better than Saddam Hussein!” and the like), but I got the inking sensation that if Bush were caught in bed with a dead, underage boy, it would take about two days for accusations of “overreaching” to crop up.

I don’t really know if this is something that is worthy of Rumsfeld’s political head or Bush’s. I haven’t really said much on the matter because I don’t really know what to say that isn’t bleedingly obvious to anyone who can look at any issue through something other than a political lense. It sucks. It hurts our efforts over there and it was wrong. It shouldn’t have happened; I want to know why it did. I don’t care at the moment what this means for Bush or Kerry. The election is months away and we’ll have more information and perspective by then. All the spinning in the world right now is only going to give us all a headache.

Not a terribly interesting perspective, I know.

Nigh-unbelievable:

A childless German couple finally found out why they weren't able to conceive - they had never had sex.

Doctors at the Lübeck campus of the University Clinic of Schleswig-Holstein (search) in northern Germany described the case in a medical bulletin, according to Ananova.com.

After eight years of marriage, the 36-year-old man and his 30-year-old wife went to the campus' fertility clinic to figure out what was wrong.

Doctors gave them a battery of tests and were baffled - both husband and wife were healthily fertile.

Then came the important question.

"When we asked them how often they had had sex," said a clinic spokesman, "they looked blank, and said: 'What do you mean?'"

He went on to explain that each of the pair had been brought up extremely religiously and had never heard of the birds and the bees.

"We are not talking retarded people here," the clinic spokesman said. The two "were simply unaware, after eight years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary to procreate."

The man and wife are now being given sexual therapy. The clinic is trying to find out if there are other couples in the area who could use a refresher course in human biology.

It's a multi-item article so that's all that pertains to the story. The title of the article alone is worth clicking over, though.

[via Jen]

It’s been two or three weeks and I still can’t call my cell phone from Eel’s house. I paid my provider another visit today. They have officially pawned it off on the telco. They had a copy of the contract handy with applicable parts highlighted and underlined which states that they make no guarantees for incoming calls and servicing the local area. Something tells me I’m not the first person to keep going back to their store about this issue. Apparently, they can’t even file a complaint against the telco since they are not a customer experiencing the problem. They handed me a printed card with the number to call. Something tells me they’re about as sick of this problem as I am.

What’s unfortunate is that even if I do get this working from Eel’s house, I still have no idea what potential employers won’t be able to call me.

I’m not a telco customer, so Eel will have to make the call. Given Eel’s no-nonsense approach to corporate injustice, something tells me that they’d rather speak to me. :)

Houston: Speed bumps and speed humps are the order of the day. In neighborhoods where the residents want cars to slow down, they put up these backbreaking monstrosities to keep us all in check. They've never much slowed me down, though, much to the chagrin of anyone sitting in the back seat of my car.
City in Idaho: They don't do speed bumps here, they do speed ditches. In between nearly every residential intersection seems to be a ditch of some sort. I don't mean that the roads are poorly maintained. As near as I can tell, it's intentional. Unlike speed bumps, these do slow me down. Why? Because if you're going anything over 1mph, the front of your car is going to hit the concrete. Talk about motivation!

Houston: There are four way stop-signs in residential areas. That means that even though it's bloody well obvious that no car is coming, everyone has to stop anyway just in case. Not that we're exactly cruising along with 20mph speed limits, but it's aggrivating all the same.
City in Idaho: There are phantom four-way yields. I say "phantom" because there are no actual signs. It seems to just be assumed. Unlike in Houston where you can generally get a good view of cars going by, the hills here make it so that a car can be twenty feet away and you can't see it and it can't see you. So generally speaking the four way yields are just four way stop signs. Considering the speed ditches, they could put a "go as fast as you want" sign and people will likely stop anyway.

Houston: When someone says they did a mission abroad, the general assumption is that they're military or former military.
City in Idaho: "Mission" has only one meaning: Going abroad (or domestically) to spread the word of Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Houston: No one in Houston is from Houston.
City in Idaho: Everyone in Idaho is from Idaho.

Houston: Boise is Boy-Zee
City in Idaho: Boise is Boy-Cee

City in Idaho: soda
Houston: coke

Houston: Applicable... APP-lick-uh-ble
City in Idaho: Applicable... a-PLICK-uh-ble

Houston: Rain is beautiful. The reflection from off of it where you can see the telephone wires. Beautiful.
City in Idaho: Rain blocks the mountains, dag-nabbit.

Houston: Every bridge and overpass has guard rails. If for some reason there isn't a guard rail, there will be a sign warning you of this every two miles before it.
City in Idaho: You can be driving up a mountain with a 300 foot fall with rocks to your left that if you accidentally drove up would collapse and leave you spiralling down 300 feet. Guard rails? They don't need no stinkin' guard rails.

Houston: There are these things called "feeder roads" or access roads where you can get off the freeway, turn around, or take advantage of city streets.
City in Idaho: No such thing. U-turns? They don't need no stinkin' U-turns. If you miss your exit, it serves you right to drive another half hour before you can turn around.

Houston: Holds diversity parades to bolster feelings of tolerance, diversity, and political correctness.
City in Idaho: The Indian Reservation calls itself, get this, an "Indian Reservation.” The high school’s mascot is unabashadly the Indians. One of the more prominant mountains in the background is called “Chink Mountain.”

Houston: One of the most diverse cities in the nation.
City in Idaho: I’ve seen four black people since I’ve gotten here.

Is there a shift on abortion in the Kerry campaign?

WASHINGTON - Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) said Wednesday he's open to nominating anti-abortion judges as long as that doesn't lead to the Supreme Court overturning the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal.

Kerry, the presumptive nominee of a party that overwhelmingly favors a woman's right to abortion, struck a moderate note as he lashed out at one of the high court's most conservative justices, telling The Associated Press he regrets his 1986 vote to confirm Antonin Scalia (news - web sites).

That's like saying "I'd support abortion rights if women would always make the right decision" or "I'd support the death penalty if we could be assured an innocent person would never be put to death."

The fact of the matter is that every judicial appointment could play a role in overturning Roe v. Wade, to the degree that it's a concern. My general feeling is that Roe v. Wade is not in any danger and it would be political suicide for the Republican Party to overturn the ruling, however flawed. It could be that Kerry knows that it would be suicidal for Republicans to overturn the ruling, and while such a ruling may help Democrats in the long run that makes the assumption that Kerry cares about the long term and that he would be willing to overlook the death of his own career (by betraying the feminists) for the sake of the party.

More likely, Kerry realizes that every vote on the Supreme Court makes a difference and that will prevent him from appointing any judge that's even marginally pro-life. Which mean that Kerry's grand pronouncement is actually yet another polished statement with no bite whatsoever.

[via a more optimistic Greg]

Kuff links to an article about the plight of SUV drivers in a tide of rising gas prices:

"We've experienced a lot of people trading in SUVs for passenger cars or cars with better mileage," said Nate Murphy, general sales manager for Munday Chevrolet.

Nationwide, sales of the larger SUVs were down 4.7 percent in April, Wards Automotive reported.

Instead, motorists are picking smaller SUVs built on car platforms, known in the industry as "crossover utility vehicles" or CUVs. Sales of these vehicles were up 13.3 percent in April.

And car buyers are getting on waiting lists to buy the new hybrid vehicles, which -- thanks to their combination of a traditional internal combustion engine and an electric motor -- get substantially better gas mileage. Take the Toyota Prius, for example, which boasts 55 miles to the gallon for combined city and highway driving. That's four times the fuel efficiency of some of the larger SUVs.

Of course, fuel economy isn't the only reason consumers pick specific models. Many consumers find crossovers easier to drive and park than the larger SUVs, while hybrids are popular in some communities because motorists can drive them without passengers in high occupancy vehicle lanes -- although that isn't the case in Houston.

But gas mileage is certainly on Houston motorists' minds.

I've noticed a number of interesting things since moving up here - and I have more on the way - but I'll go ahead and talk about one right now. Houston has an area population of about 4.5 million folks or so. Parking can be rough, traffic can be rougher, and the larger the vehicle the more difficult both become. I move from Houston to Idaho in a town of about 55,000 or so. There are a whole lot of mountains. My car, which handled Houston just fine, has trouble making it uphill sometimes. A more powerful car would surely come in handy. There's also a lot more opportunity for off-road driving up here and it's over generally rougher terrain (even despite Mayor Brown's tenure of destruction).

Yet, much to my surprise, the SUV quotient up here is miniscule compared to Houston. I never considered owning an SUV down there, but if I were staying here I'd at least think about it. So it's strange to me that the drivers in Houston and Idaho have respectively come to the opposite conclusion than I would.

My brother turned the big 3-0 a couple days back. I gave him a call and we talked for a bit. He relayed the conversation to my folks. Dad decided that communication works both ways and gave me a call. Eel and I were headed out to a movie. Monday was a rather critical day for Eel and I for reasons I won't get in to just yet, so I didn't call back last night. Somehow it figures when I get off my keister today and give him a call, I interrupt his excited watching of Randy Johnson's perfect game. Two outs, bottom of the ninth no less.

Incidentally, Dad and I got to see Darryl Kile's no-hitter nigh-perfect-game in 1993. Along with seeing Barry Bonds hit his 70th home run at Reliant, it was one of the most memorable games of my life.

It's sad when a blog you consider among your inspirations becomes so filled with political hatred aimed at everyone who believes even half what you believe that you can barely stand to read it anymore.

I meant to comment on this a while back, but Adrianne linked to an unsurprising argument that those who advocate strict language are wrong:

When The Times opts for CD's rather than CDs, it's considered house style. But if a shopkeeper mislays an apostrophe, the kind of people who worry about whether anal-retentive has a hyphen are quick to criticize. Cormac McCarthy seems allergic to most forms of punctuation, but his run-on sentences won him a National Book Award. If less-heralded writers forget a question mark, however, sticklers pounce. John Updike and José Saramago have license to splice commas at will; the rest of us are expected to mind our semicolons, lest we be branded illiterate.

In her book, Ms. Truss claims there are a staggering 17 rules of use for the comma alone, "some of which are beyond explanation by top grammarians." Yet still no amount of punctuation would be sufficient to clarify this sentence: "Read John Arthur's explanation." The surest way to distinguish the intended meaning ("read Arthur's explanation to John") from a confusing one ("Read the explanation from John Arthur") is not with punctuation, but by rewriting it altogether.

That's the point of punctuation: not to spin a web of arcane rules, but to remind us to write (and think) clearly. It's obvious that force-feeding the rules of punctuation isn't working. Therefore I suggest a more tolerant approach.

I dare this man to spend twenty minutes in an AIM chat room and maintain his position on this issue. That should demonstrate that it has nuthin' to do with race cause most of the people there are rich white kids and unemployed white Gen-X goths.

Oh, and Adrianne, please email me when you get a chance. parialex&yahoo,com with the appropriate symbols changed.

When I was in elementary school, I did not do particularly well academically. A lot of it was related to the onset of The Problem. Mom recently told me that during a conference with my third grade teacher, the teacher told her that I was great at handling concepts, but the only way to get me to pay attention was for her to sit me at the front and tap on my desk whenever I was in la-la land. It was in the third grade that I took the California Achievement Test. I did so against the advice and preferences of the school administrators. My counseller called Mom in and suggested that Mom exempt me from having to take the test. Mom had done a lot of volunteer with the PTA and was pretty familiar with the workings of the district, so she pointed out that the test was a non-binding one and could be a good gauge of where I was as a student. She also knew that if I were exempted more than once, I wouldn't get my high school diploma and instead would get a "certificate of completion" that might get me in to San Jacinto College, but not much else. The counseller was adamant, though. She warned Mom that it might hurt my self-esteem. Mom was not particularly vulnerable to that argument.

Then the counseller pulled the oldest arrow out of school administrators' quiver: It'll go on his Permanent Record.

Remember Permanent Records? I can't speak for those outside my generation or outside my area, but it was used quite frequently to get us to study or behave. They tried (and sometimes succeeded) in convincing us that something that happened in the third grade could prevent us from getting in to the college of our choice. If I'd known then what I know now (and if I'd been a smart-ass), I would have asked the teacher or administrator to see my Permanent Record under the Freedom of Information Act. But alas, I didn't know much then and was not a smart-ass anyhow.

It turns out, though, that some of the things that we do in our youth will in fact live longer than we expect it to. Most particularly, the SAT test. When we took the SAT test, it was under the assumption that it was in order to get into a good college that would secure us a solid future. Interestingly, many employers are using the SAT test to decide who they want to hire:

In a tough job market, businesses have the luxury of being more choosy about whom they hire. Firms have always had the ability to request SAT scores, but so