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 some may be likelier actually to do so as a way to sift quickly through an ever-growing number of applicants.

The practice is not necessarily new. When asked how long Goldman Sachs has requested high school test scores, Aaron Marcus, head of campus recruiting, quips, "How long have they been around?" Mr. Marcus says they interview about 4,000 to 5,000 undergrads per semester, which doesn't leave a lot of time to ask detailed questions about how many calculus courses each one took.

Since Goldman Sachs takes students from any academic background, Marcus says math scores of 700 (out of 800) or higher indicate "whether they're comfortable with numbers." Applicants initially self-report test scores and submit a résumé that highlights leadership and work experience. An official college transcript is not reviewed until the company decides to make an offer.

That corporations are weeding out candidates by using available data does not surprise Renee Mazer, creator of "Not Too Scary Vocabulary," a new SAT prep product. "The SAT is a cognitive test - and cognitive tests are the best predictors of job performance," she says.

Well, whatever works for them. For my part, I feel silly putting my high school GPA on my job applications and resumes. Putting down my SAT score would just feel downright bizarre. I didn't do disastrously on my SAT, but I honestly feel better putting down my college achievements. They seem more relevent. It appears, however, that some people in places of power would disagree with my assessment.

I was under enough pressure the the day I took the test. It's a good thing I didn't know that it would appear on my Permanent Record.

[via Owen]

I remember the day I got the envelope in the mail. We'd been waiting at least a few weeks for it. I'd never worried too much about grades, but I must confess that I was nervous as all heck. In that envelope was my college future. The SAT results.

I'd never been a good test taker. I failed the state's standardized test in both the seventh and eighth grade. My penitence for that was taking a remedial reading class in the eighth grade. I'd finally passed the test in the tenth grade, but it didn't bode well for the English portion of the SAT, which was tougher than that. I took a mock-SAT (not the preSAT) my sophomore year and got a paltry 460 on the reading portion with a 970 over all. To make matters worse, I was dumped the night before taking the test and so distracted that I had little recollection of finishing the test when the final bell had rung.

While I was primarily looking at going to a smaller university at the time (Stephen F. Austin or Texas State Technical College) and so I'd probably get in regardless, it was still important to me that I did well on the test. I needed that kind of faith that I'd be able to actually make it through college. I had decided that I was going to re-take the test as many times as I needed in order to score an 1100. Unfortunately, I missed the first opportunity the take the test and so I only had one or two chances left. I believed that I could make it past that benchmark, but I was fully prepared to have that faith rattled by a bad score.

I took the envelope in to my room. I was hoping for some privacy, but my concerned parents followed me. Slowly, I slipped my finger in the open flap on the upper portion of the rectangular seal of my fate and started tearing along the top. The rip went south onto the flap and I got frustrated, so I just tore it open and took a look. My eyes shot wide open.

"It's okay, Alex," Mom told me. "We missed the first chance to take the test, but you can take it again. We can enroll you in classes if we need to."

I just stood there, looking at the muddy text on the blue-and-white paper. The numbers where the score was supposed to be didn't make sense, so I scanned down the page and when I didn't find reasonable numbers, I looked on the back of the paper.

"Alex?"

There was obviously some sort of mistake. I added the numbers in my head five times and came up with the same result. I read the individual scores over a couple of times to make sure they weren't backwards.

"Alex, you can take it again, really..." Mom said, trying to comfort me.

"It says I got a 1240," I told them. "It says I scored a 630 on the English portion. Higher than my math."

"No, no," Mom said as she signalled for me to give her the paper. When I did, she scanned it over similarly to the way that I had and handed the paper to Dad. "Do you think they're going to realize that they gave him the wrong score?"

To this day, I fully expect to recieve a letter from the SAT testmakers informing me, "Mr. Whitlock, it has come to our attention that we mixed up your score with someone else's, your real score is..." which would be followed by the shaking of my fist in the air and screaming to the high heavens, "Nooooooooooooooooo!!"

The letter never came.

Dear Coworker,

I'm not trying to be cruel here, but it's time for a reality check. You are about 5'7" and probably weigh in excess of 250 pounds. Even as far as heavier women go, you're rather unremarkable. I'm not advocating that you crawl into some sort of introverted shell. Outgoing, talkative, and confident can actually be rather attractive. I guess that's what your boyfriend sees in you because, frankly, I don't see much else there - and I'm not just talking about appearence. Regardless, I'm glad to see that you've found someone as I am a believer that everyone deserves someone.

I've spent the last week or so trying to figure you out. Don't flatter yourself, it comes with the territory of a 45-minute lunch that we unfortunately share. I've tried to come up with benign explanations for your behavior, but I have found none. In fact, every one of them that I have found has painted a dreadful picture of either you (or him, making you look bad by association). Here is a list of plausible explanations I've come up with:

Your boyfriend is a worthless, insecure bum. If your expectations of him are not unreasonable and he is failing to meet them, then you should probably find someone that is more to your liking. As you've made repeated derogatory comments about his appearence, I'm assuming it's not a simple matter of feeling that you can't do better in a superficial way. So if you're choosing to consort with an ugly, unemployed (for now, at least) bum, that says as much about you as it does about him. If he's simply down on his luck or just hasn't been able to find a job yet, you should re-think some of the invective that your hurling his way regarding his appearence, job status, and ambition.

Your expectations of your boyfriend are unreasonable. You mention that he graduated from the university last week and has not found a job yet, so that suggests that perhaps your expectations are a tad aggressive in light of an unspectacular job market. I realize that you hold a glamorous job in customer support at eight dollars an hour, so congratu-fraggin-lations on that, but consider for a moment that he now has a college degree and now may be able to get out of such jobs as the one that we have. Or, if he's an English major, see above.

Your boyfriend is a sad sack of manure because you constantly deride him. Maybe there's not much he can do about his appearence, but as mentioned before confidence is attractive and when you are constantly telling him how "fine" Brad Pitt is, I doubt that does very much for him in the confidence department. When you say that it makes him pissed off and whiny and that you "don't give a shit," consider for a moment that some people, somewhere, some times, do actually have feelings. It's apparent that you don't have much in the way of that, but it's something to consider.

Your boyfriend isn't the sad sack of manure that you claim he is and you know it. You simply say these things because it makes you feel like you are in control. It gives you confidence that you otherwise lack to pretend that you are the smart, attractive, and powerful one in the relationship. It's a long fall from that pedastal. I suggest you be careful.

You don't actually have a boyfriend. This one is unlikely, but I can't help but notice that you haven't mentioned his name. It also seems weird that a witch like you would actually have such control over anyone.

If you were reading this, you would probably tell me to mind my own gawddammed business. I'd be glad to. All I need is for you to shut up about it.

Sincerely,
Author of a Blog You Do Not Read

Has anyone had trouble opening this site lately? I have and I think that it's related to Sitemeter. It seems to get hung up there. I've removed Sitemeter from the site, so let me know (a) if you've been having trouble and (b) if it seems to be working better now.

I hope Sitemeter gets their act together soon. I'm actually paying them for their services.

I refilled my gas tank today. The good news is that the mileage in my car has almost returned to normal at about 30mpg after an unfortunate tank that only took me 23mpg or so. The bad news is that my daily mileage hasn't gone down as much as I had hoped it would. I tend to take round-trip road trips once or twice a week to sort out my thoughts, so that's probably why. I am also staying on the other side of town from where I work, which makes the commute a whopping 12 minutes. That has to add up, right?

Anyway, I paid 1.99.9 for the gas. I had to pass four gas stations to find a place that was offering it for even a fraction of a penny (quite literally in this case) under $2 a gallon. Unless the rise in fuel prices abates, I will probably have to pay over $2 for my next tank of gas.

That will truly be a depressing day.

Eel got the opportunity to talk to her mom yesterday, which is always a good thing. As a special treat, she got to talk to her youngest sister, Sally. Sally just graduated with a 4.0 GPA from Clemson University out east with a degrees in French and International Business. She's back in Louisiana while she assesses her job situation and was home when their mother made the call.

Among other things, one of the things that she shared with Eel was the likelihood that she wouldn't have any children. In and of itself that's not a big deal, but it brings something altogether interesting to light: of the four siblings that Eel and I have, none (0) plan to have children. That means that if Eel and I were to make it through and have kids as we plan to, they won't have any cousins.

I actually grew up without cousins, myself. On my father's sides, the first cousins I have are over a decade ahead of me. Their children are between ten and twenty years younger than I am. The only exception is my oldest cousin's step-son who is about half-way between my brother and myself. My mother's youngest sister has seven children, the oldest I think about five years younger than myself. However, due to intrafamily squabble between Mom and my aunt - and that they set roots in Virginia and we in Texas, I never got to know them very well. The oldest daughter is getting married in a couple of weeks (to a man named Whitlock, interestingly), but I won't be able to make it. I remember liking her the last time I saw her, but that was at least five years ago and maybe ten. The middle sister on Mom's side has two children, about two and four years younger than me, and they're probably the ones I'm closest to. Again, though, they live in Virginia so I don't see them very often.

Enough about my cousins and more about Eel's and my siblings. I always figured that my brother would have kids, but when he and my sister-in-law got married they announced that they weren't going to have any. That puts my parents in a spot because that means it's up to me to supply the grandchildren. Not a problem since I want children, but if things work out with Eel that's at least a few years down the road. On Eel's side, Camden said that she'd never even get married (though she did), much less have kids. Eel doesn't expect her to change her mind in that regard as she's not particularly temperamentally suited for parenthood (her husband is, though, which is kind of a shame). It caught me a bit by surprise that Sally didn't want children, because from what I've heard she would make a great mother. She may or may not change her mind in the future, but if she doesn't then that leaves the burden on Eel (who also wants kids but not for a few years). The only other possibility is my quasi-brother Scott (long story). No word on what he wants, though.

What's sad about this is that these are some pretty strong genes in the genepool that won't get passed along. Sally has a stellar academic record (her boyfriend is an enginner), Camden is graduating from Tulane law school this semester (her husband is a doctor), and my brother the master's degreed engineer (my sister-in-law is a licensed pharmacist). Any kids Eel and I would have would have a pretty darn smart mother, but their father would probably be weaker than all of the above mentioned kids that won't likely reproduce. This is under the assumption that Eel and I can reproduce. If one of us has reproductive problems and we have to adopt (which we gladly would), then neither of our immediate families would pass any genes on (Scott's not related by blood).

During my brother's extended bachelor party I met a Gerald. Gerald and his wife are both lawyers. Though I've never met his wife, Gerald is an extraordinarily thoughtful individual and it was apparent that he has a good heart. When the subject of kids came up, he said that he'd always wanted kids, but felt like he wouldn't have the time and energy to devote to them and he wasn't sure about whether or not it was a good idea to raise kids in a "world like this." He's a great guy, but kind of sullen.

With the possible exception of Camden (who really could probably be good at anything she put her mind to), all of the above future childless couples would probably make really good parents. Genes aside, they'd probably have a household in which their children were born to excel and become the doctors, lawyers, and engineers of tomorrow. It's somewhat depressing that they (as well as a number of really smart and capable couples I know) are chosing to do other things. Yet I understand how raising children right would get in the way or their professional goals. For my part, one of my dreams is to make independent movies. If I were to decide not to have kids, that goal would be immensely more attainable. But whether it's making a movie, career goals, or the desire to take a trip to Tuscany at a moment's notice, there is a powerful draw away from reproducing. And it's a shame.

I got a call back from the county today. They said that I made the "initial cut" and invited me in for a test-taking on Friday. Unfortunately, the two times they gave conflicted with the schedule of my current job. That's particularly aggrivating because I purposefully chose this job where I'd be available for interviews. I suppose I was expecting more in the way of interviews and less in the way of more test-taking. Considering that tests were a big part of my present and most recent hirings, I probably should have known better.

However, the guy said that he'd work with me if I could make it there by 3 (the later time they gave was 2). That's good news for a couple of reasons. First of all, it means that I still have a chance. Secondly, it means that either (a) there are few enough applicants or (b) they are sufficiently impressed with my resume that they'll make an exception for me. I'm hoping it's the latter, but I suspect it's the former. He said there was an oral and written part, which makes me wonder if the oral part is a quasi-interview.

It's reminding me a little about when I interviewed with my school district back home. I took a test and they asked me a lot of questions in person. The connection is unfortunate because the questions they were asking were largely technical and ones that I didn't know the answer to (dealt largely with Novell). Looking over the ad that prompted my application, I could run into the same thing here except with UNIX instead of Novell. They downplayed UNIX's importance on the ad, putting it under the "extra consideration for," but it could well prove to be a dealbreaker for me. On the other hand, if the test is more in the way of IQ or language compehension, then I should be in pretty good shape. I score well in those areas.

I have about a 50/50 record with getting jobs when I can score an interview (I have about a .1% record of scoring an interview). It's just unfortunate that the interview it reminds me the most of is one where I didn't get the job.

Dating back to my "Human Situation" courses at the University of Houston, I've long appreciated Greek and Roman classics. Even before that, I had an interest in Greek and Roman gods that I inherited from my father. One of my chief interests since adolescence, comic books, actually sprang from an appreciation of mixing people with superpowered people. As far as Greek and Roman classics, go, though. In fact, one of my favorite books from the Human Sit classes was Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War.

Having said that, it's unpalatable to me to cinematically retell the Trojan War without putting the gods in there. Yes, we (almost) all agree that Zeus and his peers do not exist and therefore their inclusion in such greats as The Odyssey and The Illiad are entirely fictional. Except that most of the retelling is fictional and if we want to dryly recount what we know for sure about the conflict, it could make an interesting military strategy and/or history book like Thucydides's tract, but it hardly makes for a compelling story despite the battle over the heart of Helen of Troy.

The newly released Troy movie with Brad Pitt is devoid of gods, but not devoid of fictional embellishment:

"Troy" is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer, according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue. The movie sidesteps the existence of the Greek gods, turns its heroes into action movie cliches and demonstrates that we're getting tired of computer-generated armies. Better a couple of hundred sweaty warriors than two masses of 50,000 men marching toward one another across a sea of special effects.

The movie recounts the legend of the Trojan War, as the fortress city is attacked by a Greek army led by Menelaus of Sparta and Agamemnon of Mycenae. The war has become necessary because of the lust of the young Trojan prince named Paris (Orlando Bloom), who while during a peace mission to Sparta, seduces the city-state's queen, Helen (Diane Kruger).

This action understandably annoys Helen's husband, Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), not to mention Paris' brother Hector (Eric Bana), who points out, quite correctly, that when you visit a king on a peace mission, it is counterproductive to leave with his wife.

What the movie doesn't explain is why Helen would leave with Paris after an acquaintanceship of a few nights. Is it because her loins throb with passion for a hero? No, because she tells him: "I don't want a hero. I want a man I can grow old with." Not in Greek myth, you don't. If you believe Helen of Troy could actually tell Paris anything remotely like that, you will probably also agree that the second night he slipped into her boudoir, she told him, "Last night was a mistake."

Whatever one thinks of Ebert's taste in movies, and I have my problems with it, he's the best film critic I've seen when snarkily criticizing junk When he snarkily criticizes great stuff, he's way off-base, however. I haven't seen Troy so I don't know how on-target here is here, but with my similar biases I figure that I would probably agree.

It's natural to try to port classic stories into something more palatable to modern audiences. To that extent, I can understand Troy's desire to get rid of the gods as they're - to say the least - not modern. However, as Lord of the Rings demonstrated (evil orcs and all), audiences will definitely flock to the theaters in order to see larger-than-life at the expense of any sort of realism. However, the larger-than-life feel that the Rings movies demonstrated were not just the great fight scenes, but also the fictional creatures and fantastic settings. Since the locations and times of Troy are based on something that happened, I can see the desire to try to display it more historically, but their attempts to modernize it in the ways that Ebert discusses start to ring hollow. The characters themselves appear to be anachronistic and given the huge roles that the Greek gods played in the lives of the people, including them would actually have been less of a deviation, in my mind.

I wish I could find the link, but Brad Pitt commented on the gods absences by questioning, among other things, who they would even get to play Zeus. It's a good point, but it doesn't quite take when part of the appeal of the movie is the glamorous special effects with fifty bazillion soldiers all fighting at once. My guess is that the writers and producers felt it would be taken less seriously if it included discredited gods. I don't know if they're right about that or not, but it sure is depressing if they are.

Two of the best written items I stumbled across last week turn out to have diametrically opposed themes.

Jane Galt takes on the doomsayers on both sides of the aisle:

'm thinking of the purveyors of political and social doom. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a libertarian who was arguing that the Patriot Act was a one-way ticket to totalitarianism. We were violating fundamental rights that had been enshrined in the constitution for 200 years, and once we'd given them up, it was going to be a short step on the slippery slope to a police state. I share her fear of government intrusiveness. But this a markedly ahistorical view of the constitution and the liberties it allows us to enjoy, which is no more accurate for its extreme prevalence in libertarian circles. There is no primal state of liberty, created by the Constitution, from which we have slowly but inexorably been moving away. Liberties have been granted, and taken away, and granted again throughout the history of our country. Just off the top of my head: Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the Palmer raids, the detention of the west coast Japanese in camps during World War II, the committment of anyone FDR or one of his minion's thought was especially dangerous to the war effort to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital during same, the McCarthy hearings--see this wonderful Richard Posner piece for a more elegant exegisis of the history of American liberties. The shape of liberty has changed over the 200 years of our existence, expanding in some places and contracting in others. There is no libertarian eden, located somewhere in the American past, from which we are now fallen, or falling.

Now, this doesn't mean that the Patriot Act is a good thing. But the fact that we have the Patriot Act now does not mean, as many libertarians ardently argue, that we will always have the Patriot Act. If the Patriot Act is bad, we should vigorously fight it. But there is no need to construct doomsday scenarios in which the existance of the Patriot Act consigns us to a totalitarian future.

With my friendship quiver full of libertarians and Greens, I'm particularly used to this point of view. It's my position that - thanks to technology and not the government - we have never been more free in the history of our nation. I'm not crediting Bush or Clinton, Republicans or Democrats for that. There are members of both administrations and both parties that would make the country considerably less free if they could. Rather, we have a Constitution that acts like the rail in those minicars at amusement parks. It allows for some mayhem, but the most egregious offenses are off-limits and are generally adhered to. It keeps us on track. More importantly for us in the here and now, advances in technology have made people more productive, made them more mobile, and given them a platform where for less than $20 a month they can say whatever they want.

Jane goes on:

Not to dump on libertarians exclusively, because everyone seems to do it. Social conservatives think we're doomed because the institution of marriage has been dangerously undermined, and is therefore likely to disappear entirely, along with God, patriotism, and the super-sized big mac meal, if we don't do something, quick. A large number of wonkish types (including, on odd days, me) spend a lot of time worrying about the possibility that our old-age entitlements will drive us into disastrous bankruptcy; few of us stop to reflect on the many, many unsustainable economic trends that have worried policy wonks right up until the moment that the impending doom suddenly solved itself under the inexorable logic of Herb Stein's famous dictum: "If something can't go on forever, it won't." Many liberals, like Paul Krugman, think that we nearly got into socioeconomic eden sometime around 1966, give or take, and have been staging a fast retreat towards armageddon ever since; marginal tax rates and some forms of social spending here take the part of doom-bringer, even though on every measure except simple inequality, the lives of the poor and the middle class seem to be richer in material goods, leisure, and quality of work than they were in the Golden Era of America's Middle Class.

Mainstream conservatives and liberals are not immune to arguments about how the other team is setting us up to become a fascist state. However, as Jane points out, their argument is something different altogether. Liberals have been arguing about the destruction of the middle class for some time now and how, without a change in policy (to their policy, naturally), we will eventually end up with a nation of a super-wealthy elite and super-poor indentured servents. Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that we're one or two anti-sodomy laws away from actually becoming Sodom.

Chris actually combines these liberal and conservative arguments masterfully:

Rome and Greece contributed much technology to this world, but it all ceased to be useful long ago. But the art, literature, philosophy, and political structure of men who walked this earth 2000 years ago are still studied and practiced in our enlightened, advanced culture. As much faith as we all place in our technology and combined wisdom, I believe that the day will come when our nation will crumble from within - just as Rome did. The cancer of “happiness” rotted away the solid core of that great nation. Underneath our thinning, shiny outer shell, the same infection grows at a much more alarming rate.

The rot of ignorance and greed permeate our youth at an ever-younger age. Happiness is drilled into their heads at the expense of all else. The vocabulary of your typical middle schooler comes from beautiful, or provocative personalities like Carson Daly, Dave Chappelle, Eminem, Jessica Simpson, and Eric Cartman. That adds up to a couple hundred real words, and a couple hundred more that have been around for about six months, and that will last almost six months longer. Children are taught to accept a sexual behavior that was considered deviant for centuries. They are taught condom use and oral sex instead of abstinence, because we refuse to forcefully deny them that which they should not handle. Morals are considered an off-limits topic. Denying or delaying gratification is frowned upon. What used to be a time for quiet instruction and study, is now expensive, noisy babysitting with a few computers and flash cards thrown in between. Children fear no one. Not their teacher, not principals, not police, not parents.

I'm not predisposed to "our downfall is near" arguments in the least, but Chris makes his points particularly well.

CBS has a really neat story on the romance between an American GI and a Baghdad native:

Recently, when an American soldier fell in love in Baghdad, his commander ordered him not to marry. What was a heartsick soldier to do? Well, Sgt. Sean Blackwell launched a secret mission to marry the Iraqi woman he loved.

And that’s when the Army came down with both boots, and ordered Blackwell home — 7,000 miles from his bride, Ehdaa, apparently never to see her again.

But there was one thing the Army didn’t count on. It's something else they say about romance – that love, of course, conquers all.

[via FatGuy]

the Tooth Fairie, and, of course, snow.

Some words on Abu Ghraib...

But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.

The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.

In addition to the scores of prisoners who were humiliated and demeaned, at least 14 have died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has ruled at least two of those homicides. This is not the way a free people keeps its captives or wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious world.

How tragically ironic that the American military, which was welcomed to Baghdad by the euphoric Iraqi people a year ago as a liberating force that ended 30 years of tyranny, would today stand guilty of dehumanizing torture in the same Abu Ghraib prison used by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen.

One can only wonder why the prison wasn’t razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime.

from a surprising source.

[via Lex, whose itemlinks aren't working]

Something on a lighter note, though:

The Boston Globe was reeling yesterday after graphic photos of alleged sexual abuse of Iraqi women by U.S. soldiers turned out to be staged shots from a hardcore porn Web site.

"This photo should not have appeared in the Globe," editor Martin Baron said in a statement. "First, images portrayed in the photo were overly graphic. Second, as the story clearly pointed out, those images were never authenticated as photos of prisoner abuse. There was a lapse in judgment and procedures, and we apologize for it."

The "lapse" came after City Councilor Chuck Turner and perennial pot-stirrer Sadiki Kambon called a press conference in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to display more purported abuse photos. Turner claimed they came from "a very legitimate person" but admitted they hadn't been authenticated. Kambon said he got them from a representative of the Nation of Islam. Neither Turner nor Kambon returned calls.

But yesterday, WorldNetDaily.com reported the pictures - which show hard-core sex acts and genitalia - came from a pornographic site.

The Globe ran a picture of Turner and Kambon displaying the images. In a large shot in the paper's early editions, pornographic details are clearly visible. In later editions, the photograph was reduced, making the images slightly more obscure. A number of news outlets - including the Herald and The Associated Press - attended the conference but did not run a story after determining the photos were highly suspicious.

[via Chris]

Owen and Mike can officially say "I told you so."

I don't use Internet Explorer for much. I wouldn't use it at all except that Nuke's console doesn't work with Opera and neither do some Java-based comment programs. I was opening up Lex's site when I was invaded by some rather intrusive programs that have tried to install ten programs in the last ten minutes and have opened up eight windows (four of them the same thing) after I stopped bothering even to try to close them.

As if that weren't bad enough, this was the first site to open up:



This is even worse than those pop-up ads to get rid of pop-up ads. Those at least utilize an existing weakness (no one has ever not dealt with pop-up ads until recently) while this jammed a worst-case scenario (virii excepted) down my throat in order to tell me how to prevent this from happening again.

That said, I still expect Microsoft to solve this problem before I will rely on the government to. It's not an insurmountable one.

I owe Kevin a debt of gratitude. When I was looking at starting a blog without the use of Blogger, Movable Type was the obvious candidate. Kevin was persistent in advocating Nucleus. If he'd been less helpful or MT's boosters more helpful, this blog would likely be a MT one. When we've discussed the possibility of fully relaunching the No-Lyfe Journal, MT remained the leading candidate. No more.

I don't begrudge MT's desire to make a profit, but NLJ would apparently cost $119.95 (after a $30 discount for an introductory offer) according to their new licensing agreement. It would be great to get NLJ to the point where we'd hoped it would get, but $119.95 is a large entry fee to find out. I don't mind investing in a web site (I pay $18 a month with my current host for this site, not including the domains), but this is the second major revision (or clarification) of their licensing terms. Frankly, $119.95 may or may not be worth it, but the limitations on the license alone make it prohibitive. While I am the primary author of this blog, I enjoy the freedom to allow people to guest-post, but MT would place a sharewaresque artificial cap on the number of posters allowed (for both paid and free versions).

Meanwhile, Blogger allows for as many posters as you want even for it's free version. There's not been anything that free Blogger can do that free MT can't do better, but now there is since users of the former lets you have a group blog. Blogger lacks in other areas, to be sure, but it's actually improving. It now allows for comments. More importantly, Blogger hasn't changed the goalposts and lost the trust of valued customers. If NLJ ever gets another go, it'll sooner stay on Blogger than go to Movable Type.

Except, of course, that there's Nucleus, the wonderful system that Kevin turned me on to. There may not be all the user-donated plug-ins, but there's also not the comment spam. It also runs faster and cleaner. In my experience, it was easier to set up as well. If I can do it, most computer-skilled individuals should be able to (those that need something similar can use Blogger, of course, or Typepad, which is run by the same folks that run MT).

In any case, I'm very happy that this controversy is of no relevence to this weblog. Thanks, Kevin.

This looks like it could be an interesting site. It's too bad that they make it so hard to read.

Christian songwriter Jim Morgan has a song called Just Like IBM, about a pastor running his church more like a business.

I'm the senior pastor of a church of 14,033,
I got eight associate pastors and a fast-talkin' D.C.E.
I got a physical plant that covers 4 square blocks
I got high-yield investments in blue-chip stocks
The money's rolling in and we're getting it all tax-free.

My daddy was a dedicated, hard-workin' company man.
He said, "Son you oughta' go into business with your dear old dad."
He thought when I'd become a preacher I had flipped my lid
But now I'm drawing twice the salary that he did
And I'm living up to all those high executive dreams he had.

Meanwhile, Pete points out a Chron article on the Southern Baptist church drawing criticism for its investments in a cruise operation that sponsors gay cruises:

The Baptist board owns about 26,200 shares of Carnival in its Equity Index Fund and 337,600 shares in its Value Index Fund as of Dec. 31, together valued at $14.5 million, according to the Associated Baptist Press, an independent Baptist news service. The board also has holdings in satellite and cable TV companies that provide on-demand or premium-priced pornographic programming.

According to the board's statement, its guidelines prohibit investments in any company publicly recognized "as being in the liquor, tobacco, gambling, pornography or abortion industries." Between 300 and 400 companies are on the board's restricted list, the statement said.

"However, we could go through every stock in the Fortune 500 and probably find some reason why we shouldn't invest in any of them," the statement said. "If the Southern Baptist Convention should choose to boycott Carnival as it did Disney, we would take appropriate action as we did with Disney."

More about Disney in a sec. Lately my church (Episcopalian) has been taking all of the beatings, and as such I'm a bit gun-shy on going after other denominations. However, it's my fervent belief that churches ought to avoid investments altogether except in cases where the money advances religious goals. I don't consider "financially bettering the church" or even "subsidizing the church retirement fund" to apply. Obviously church employees ought to be given some sort of retirement compensation, but that's what donations and congregational offerings are for. As Jim Morgan sings, churches very often do act too much like businesses.

I'm not positive what the Episcopal Church's practices are in that regard, but I would hold it to the same standard. Even if it doesn't invest in public stocks, I've seen individual churches go IBM first-hand. My church in Clear Lake had a pastor a decade or so back who came in with big ideas. He remade the church into a more "professional" organization, relieving many volunteers of their duties and replacing them with professionals. Newer and better things were always being built and the church, from what I understand, is still trying to dig itself out of the debt that he left it in when he went in to private practice. This isn't a denominational problem.

On the subject of DIsney, I remember a fiasco several years ago in Texas when it was revealed that the state (education fund, I think) was investing in the media giant. This caused problems, of course, because Disney has a number of pro-gay policies that don't gibe with much of the Texas electorate. Republicans wanted the stock investment pulled immediately. I recall liberals (including myself at the time) and moderates rolling their eyes at the notion that the government ought to invest based on the morals (or lack thereof) in a company's owner. "It's not the government's business," we proclaimed.

To underline my point, I came up with a company with policies and practices that liberals detest: Cigarette companies. When confronted with the idea that the state should invest in the lucrative tobacco companies, a number of liberals I know/knew either backed down from their original position or said "that's different." For my part, I was uncomfortable investing in a company whose products kill bodies, but if you believe that another product kills souls (which was truly where the difference in perspective lied, liberals including myself just preferred to sound unideological) the logic followed was very much the same: both sides were arguing that there ought to be a moral component in the decisions the government makes on where to invest.

I'm at odds with myself as to what the government should do, but when it comes to churches I feel no such conflict.

Rafe Coburn says the following:

The horror of Nick Berg's beheading is perhaps best expressed in the bizarre conspiracy theories that people are taking solace in to convince themselves that he wasn't just a random victom of brutality and hate. Within the past 24 hours, I've witnessed a discussion among left leaning people who are speculating on whether or not the execution was somehow staged to distract the American people from the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. I could try to explain these theories, but I honestly don't understand them.

I guess this explains why I'm getting a lot of hits from folks googling "Nick Berg" and "hoax."

I'm a bit out of the media loop left and right, so I haven't heard the leftist conspiracy theories yet, nor the "Nick Berg was an al-Qaeda sympathizer" ones that apparently the right is making. Thank gawd for small favors.

Update: A Chron story on the matter with information that has undoubtedly fueled some of the conspiracy talk. It's all very curious, though it's more than a short leap from "Berg was questioned by authorities" to "he was an al-Qaeda sympathizer" and from "FBI agents had him in custody" to "The U.S. government did this!"

Soon-to-be UH graduate Amanda Strassner writes about politics in a cluster of blogs sponsored by World Magazine. Amanda has perhaps the best blog intro I've ever read:

The University of Houston, the most diverse public research university in the country, has provided me with four golden years of people watching. There is this woman who breathes through a flexible straw because the air is dirty, one guy lures squirrels with chips then punts them, and this morning an upper-classman had to ask my Legal History prof what "inalienable" means.

Blogging provides a similar rush. I got hooked during the evolution of warblogs back in 2001. Watching people's posts, linkage, and writing styles is almost as fun as watching people walk by in the rain with frog eyes or pink lace bobbing along atop their umbrellas (or entirely without an umbrella).

People watching is a harmless hobby that allows me to observe other people's quirks - from a safe distance. Half the fun of great literature is that you are actually studying the author himself. Blogs are a candid cross between the two mediums - they are in print, but tend to be less polished.

I link to people who make me think or make me smile. I hope my blog will provide both.

She's apparently under the tutelage of Dr. Ross Lence, who was my favorite political science professor in college.

I need to make a list of UH bloggers. It would, unfortunately, be a rather short one...

I ran across a neat web-site with logos to all kinds of teams, both professional and college. What's really neat about this site is that it has logos from defunct leagues that never got off the ground, such as the one-season Spring Football League (with the Houston Marshals) and the also one-season Regional Football League (with the Houston Outlaws).

Here's a shrine to the latter. I only vaguely remember the RFL because they used to play football at Pasadena's high school field by Sam Rayburn High School, where Anna used to live.

On a last note, it's kind of sad that the Arena Football teams almost all seem to be located in towns that have NFL teams. There's apparently an AFL2, which is sort of a minor league with teams in all kinds of places I've never heard of, but apparently it's not even a notch above amateur. Players on the winning team get $250 and players on the losing team get $200. Coaches seem to do a bit better. More information here. Official website here.

Then again, I'm not sure which Aqua Teen Hunger member I actually do resemble the most.


You're Master Shake! You're manipulative,
self-absorbed, materialistic, rude, lazy, and
easily distracted. Despite all that, you still
think you're the shit.


Aqua Teen Hunger Force - which character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

[via Owen]

I made my first "friend" in Idaho, though I use the term loosely. He's more a coworker than anything, but I could tell after a short conversation with him that he'd get along really well. We were waiting in the lobby for our instructor to show and of all the people there, I gravitated towards him out of instinct. My instincts were quickly proven correct. Bill is at least a few years older than me and a student at the local university as his original college degree didn't prove remarkably lucrative. I could relate. He's married to a paralegal and moved in to town from Boise about two weeks ago. We're part of the same "group" in class, help each other out frequently, and talk about various things when we're on break.

It was during one of these conversations that I discovered a relatively insignificant incompatibility that's plagued me most of my adulthood.

"So you're from Texas. You a Bush supporter?"

"Yep."

Silence.

He was being polite, but it read on his face. It came as a bit of a surprise to me because he sure seemed like a libertarian. Now granted, some libertarians are what can be accurately described as liberal libertarians and others conservative libertarians, so he may actually be a libertarian, but his later reference to Bob Dole (he's a Kansan) as a "right wing lunatic" suggests pretty strongly where he falls on the X-axis of the World's Smallest Political Quiz. He seemed equally surprised that a guy like me could support Bush.

I've never been one to let political disagreement interfere with my friendships or (especially) aquaintanceships. I have few friends that agree with me much politically speaking (and even fewer girlfriends). That's kind of the point, actually. While I value my friends regardless of ideology, I must confess that I was hoping that I might find friends up here that I agree with more politically. Kevin and Callie were about all I had in Houston.

Ah well, of all the people in the lobby to gravitate towards, I chose the unkempt, unshaven dude who chose to wear ratty clothing to the first day on the job. Maybe I should have picked the guy in the business suit?

What Do Bureaucrats, Dr. John Gray, and John Stossel's Parakeet Have In Common?

Apparently, they went to, erm, "non-traditional" universities:

WASHINGTON -- At least 28 senior-level federal employees in eight agencies have bogus college degrees, including three managers at the office that oversees nuclear weapons safety, congressional investigators have found.

The problem is likely even bigger, mainly because the government has no uniform way to check whether employees' alma maters are "diploma mills" that require little, if any, academic work, the General Accounting Office reported.

The findings by the investigative arm of Congress were to be presented to a Senate committee today.

An earlier GAO report revealed how easy it is to buy a degree from a diploma mill; this one shows high-level federal workers securing such degrees at taxpayer expense. The tally was $169,471 at just two of the schools.

The colleges in question often use names similar to those of accredited schools and offer degrees largely on a person's "life experience." Some simply sell degrees for a flat fee.

Among those with bogus degrees in the GAO review were three workers with emergency operations roles and security clearances at the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Department of Energy.

One of those workers paid $5,000 for a master's degree from LaSalle University, an unaccredited school, the report said. He attended no classes, took no tests and told the GAO his degree was "a joke."

Other senior government employees with bogus degrees worked for the departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Transportation and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Small Business Administration and the Office of Personnel Management.

The link was generously provided by Pete.

I learned quite a bit about the diploma mills a while back when I was researching a write-up on accusations that John Gray of Mars & Venus fame. At home I actually have a catalog from "Columbia State University," which actually looked reasonably professional. I knew it was a hoax when I called and requested it, I was just morbidly curious (and it was free). From what I understand, John Stossel's parakeet got a degree from there when he was researching a segment for ABC.

Update: Woah! I missed this part:

Three unaccredited schools -- Pacific Western University, California Coast University and Kennedy-Western University -- provided data showing that 463 of their students were federal employees. Most of those listed were in the Department of Defense. The report did not name employees.

Kennedy-Western?! I've actually heard good things about them - that they're more in line with University of Phoenix Online than they are with Columbia State. At the very least, they're certainly more established than the ones that spring up and go away. Then again, Cal Coast U.and Pacific Western both have nice web sites and report to have been around a while. Neither CCU or PWU claim any sort of accrediting, though. CCU avoids the subject and PWU says that they haven't sought it and makes appropriate disclaimers. Kennedy-Western's web site mentions being accredited by Wyoming as a "private school," but apparently above and beyond that nothing from regional accrediting boards that I'm used to seeing. That's more than the other two had, but nothing compared to Phoenix Online.

The most damning thing is its sales pitch:

Kennedy-Western University has developed an academic model specifically designed for students with busy professional schedules. The result? In as little as 12 to 18 months, you can earn an industry recognized Bachelor’s, Master’s or Doctorate level degree—without attending class.

This suddenly makes sense of how a certain former employer of mine managed to get two PhDs while believing that space is a myth because "up there is where Heaven is."

Update II: James Joyner has some interesting experiences in the area with Troy State University:

When I was teaching at Troy State, I taught some correspondence (“Internet based distance learning”) courses, primarily to military officers, in the Master of Science in International Relations program. It was incredibly popular because of its flexibility—students could take courses from literally anywhere in the world and didn’t have to follow a rigourous academic schedule because the courses were short and offered constantly. Unfortunately, many of the students lacked sufficient time to actually do coursework let alone write graduate quality research papers. Because the program was a huge cash cow for the university, the reaction was to turn it into a tacit degree mill. My then-colleague Steven Taylor and I both resisted this trend and upset the apple cart. Students were befuddled that they had to read more than one introductory level textbook, plus a large stack of journal articles, plus a real research paper. Frankly, it was a losing battle. Fortunately, the program is now under new management and is now a legitimate masters degree. My guess, though, is that this will result in many students taking their “education” dollar elsewhere.

There's more.

IDAHO - R. Alex Whitlock reportedly spent half an hour at Walmart and spent less than $50 at the cash register. This is the first recorded achievement of this monumental feat.

"I feel like a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders," Whitlock explained. "Never in my life have I been able to go into a Walmart without coming out at least $50 poorer."

Short trips to Walmart with a short list of intended purchases in mind have always developed into long trips with purchases being made of items that were not on the list. These items include, but are not limited to, jeans, slacks, button shirts, plain-colored t-shirts, socks, boxers, electronics, and cooking tools and appliances.

"It was an uphill climb, really," says the displaced Texan, "When I moved up here, I only brought five t-shirts, five jeans, five golf shirts, three button-shirts, some dress clothes, and ten pairs of socks. Ironically, it was the item I brought the most of that I needed to get more of. I started running out of socks."

Whitlock attributes his selecting clothes for his trip that, in his words, "actually fit," making the purchase of better fitting clothes unnecessary. When pointed out that having sufficient clothing that fits has never stopped him from purchasing more clothes, he replied, "there weren't any really good deals."

In addition to purchasing the socks he originally went to Walmart to acquire, he purchased five plain white t-shirts "just because."

Some conservatives are trying to make a point over an apparent double-standard in media reports (or, more accurately, media imagery) of the Iraqi prison abuse scandals versus the murder of an American contractor by Islamic militants:

What's even more interesting is how the media is playing the story. It's big on CNN and Fox News, taking up the top story slot on both sites. On the New York Times' main page, it is a small headline tucked beneath larger ones dealing with Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.

Fox News' Shepard Smith showed the first few seconds of the video, where the victim, Nick Berg, identifies himself. The tape stops. Then Smith describes, cut by cut, how Berg is decapitated.

This horrible murder will not be shown on a single American telecast. Not Fox News, not CNN. Not any of the major networks. No newspaper will print a screen capture of the murder or of the terrorists holding up Berg's head for the camera afterwards.

The editors of The New Yorker, The Washington Post and producers of "60 Minutes II" all justified their publication of the images of naked prisoners in piles and being menaced by dogs by claiming that words could not properly communicate the magnitude of the abuse. The pictures were necessary to give Americans the necessary understanding of what was going on in that prison.

In the media's defense, they almost never show anyone in the act of dying (or being killed), so it's not some imaginary line that they drew just so that they could avoid showing something that might rile up Americans. Showing naked people, on the other hand, they will do with live (at the time or recording, not broadcast) footage. Of course, as Hoy points out the media needs to remember that and stop being so outraged when people like Jonah Goldberg suggest that they shouldn't show this footage or that. Restraint is not necessarily evil and those that suggest that the media show more of it are not necessarily censors.

Having said that, when the news revolves around certain images and those images are available to newscasters, I believe there is a journalistic duty to show people what exactly they're talking about. It's one thing to read about the humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners, but it's another thing entirely to see it. I had to see it to absorb it and I am glad that the media made it available to me. The same can be said of Daniel Pearl's similar decapitation a year or two back. I tracked down the video and watched it because I felt I need to - and I was right, I needed to. I haven't seen Berg's death yet, but I'll follow any links I run across that show it, given the time (which is probably a lot of time as I am on a modem connection).

In the past I've written and cited arguments for and against the proposition that it's financially beneficial for a university to have a football program.

David Laramie, the Vice President of Tennessee Tech and a statistician, lays forth the argument that even when a college football program operates at a loss, it's still financially beneficial to the university:

"A similar decision could have been made at Tennessee Tech, a year ago or ten years ago, if not for this presentation to the faculty senate," said Larimore before speaking to a group Friday night at the Carnegie Hotel interested in bringing back the sport to the ETSU campus. "We had people questioning why spend all this money in football, when we have eight students to a worm in the biology department?
"They were also asking about the school exploiting athletes."

Larimore, who was invited to Johnson City by longtime ETSU trainer Jerry Robertson, showed how while the elementary numbers show football losing in excess of $1 million a year, the direct benefits of non-scholarship players paying for tuition, books and other supplies quickly make football a profitable venture.

Based on a school of ETSU's size having 60 non-scholarship football players, Larimore figured in 60 more students coming to the university as friends of the players. He also counted 150 students out of an enrollment of 9,000 being influenced by whether a school has a football program.

"Friends tend to go to college where friends go," said Larimore. "Assume with 120 football players, one out of every two go to school with a friend, that's 60 friends.

"I put the other column separate in case of cynics. The economic professors at Western Kentucky did a similar analysis and the figures of 150 students attending a school because of it having a football program are modest."

Taking the issue one step further, Larimore showed the overall benefits and exposure the university receives through football. It becomes the number one sport financially for a Division I-AA university.

I'm not sure I buy his numbers, but it was apparently successful enough to help keep Tennessee Tech from dropping football.

Personally, I'd be very curious how Lamar University and Sam Houston State would compare to one another. Lamar dropped their football team a decade or two back and SHSU has kept theirs. Both are located just about an hour-and-a-half from of downtown Houston and are part of the Texas State University System. Has Sam's football program helped it attract more students? Has it made any difference at all? Studying these two similar universities would be very useful, in my opinion.

While surfing for something regarding the University of Houston, I ran across this fascinating account of Sangamon State University, an upper-level (Jr. & Sr.) university in Illinois. It was a self-styled "radical university" that over time became the bland and indistinct University of Illinois at Springfield.

Before:

In 1970 Sangamon State University, the smallest of Illinois' 12 state universities, was a different kind of place. Many students were not graded, for example, but received individualized evaluations instead. There were no large classes. No deans or department chairs--in fact, no departments. Interdisciplinary courses were the norm. Faculty were hired for their interest in teaching--without teaching assistants--and had no publish-or-perish requirement. SSU was designated "the public affairs university of Illinois" at a time when public affairs, for many of the faculty at least, meant opposing the war in Vietnam and devising alternatives to mainstream institutions. It was an upper-division institution designed for older students transferring in from community colleges and traditional four-year institutions less suited to their needs; the average age of undergraduates was over 30. Faculty and students who were around at the time describe those days with obvious affection.

In the interests of truth in advertising, though, SSU might more accurately have been deemed a university with at best radical potential and at worst radical pretensions. In hindsight, its initial design was flawed. From the very beginning it was vulnerable both to the external pressures of the market and to reactionary local elites and political conservatives in the state legislature and the governor's office. The radical interpretation that some of the new faculty and students had given to the "public affairs mandate" they had authorized came as a surprise. Within two years of the school's founding, SSU's administrators began to purge policies and personnel that stood in the way of normalization, beginning more than two decades of struggle between competing visions of what kind of university Sangamon was to be. Inevitable faculty debate over educational policy has almost always allowed administrators to selectively claim they were merely responding to those faculty desires most in keeping with their agenda, such as the conversion to a four year university. With the recent transition from SSU to UIS putting the administration and its faculty supporters firmly in control, the initial radical potential has now been almost totally gutted.

After:

Other developments reflect more substantive steps toward replacing the relatively nontraditional past with a rock-no-boats future. The campus is awash with new committees trying to clarify where the institution is headed. Plans to add freshmen and sophomores to the student mix continue, not so much for the educational benefits that some of us imagine but because lower-division students mean larger classes and a better spot on the state's annual ratings of faculty productivity. Inducements for faculty to take part in computerizing the classroom receive more attention than the need for basic support services.

Each year the administration places more emphasis on parading faculty research and publication, which now counts more for tenure and promotion than in the past. Every faculty member who publishes now gets an award certificate at a fall ceremony "proudly presented by First National Bank and the University of Illinois at Springfield." Each year UI grants financial rewards to selected "University Scholars," distributing what for UIS are huge amounts of money--either a $6000 annual award for three years to two individuals or $12,000 to one--rather than dividing the money among more faculty as proposed by the union.

It's a bit on the long side, but I found it worth my time (which may not be saying much). I'm torn between respecting what they were trying to do and realizing that they were trying to do it with tax dollars and groaning at how they felt that they should have been given money with absolutely no accountability. Any state-sponsored university is, by definition, a handmaiden of the state. It's a good and wonderful thing that many universities encourage free thought and personal growth, but at the end of the day that which controls the purse-strings controls the institution. It's more than a bit hypocritical to insist that a university subsidized by the capitalist state remain true to its Marxist and anarchic roots.

I'm not sure I would have personally been interested in attending Sangamon State or Illinois-Springfield either either it's "before" or "after" state, though I can definitely see the appeal to the former and can't find much with the latter. The rush of universities to kick sand over their roots is a frustrating issue as is the franchising of universities, both of which this article discusses.

Kevin confesses his patronage to a much-maligned institution:

There's a franchise of a certain corporate coffee behemoth that's on my way to work, located right by the 59 Diner.

For the last few weeks, I've been stopping there pretty regularly and starting my day with a venti redeye (a large coffee with an added shot of espresso).

It's good. The staff there is really friendly. And I stop there pretty much every day now.

I still prefer the non-chain shops in Montrose for more leisurely stops, and I might even stop in the mornings if there was one as handy as the corporate behemoth.

Coffee has never much been my thing. It always tasted like boiled roots to me. How do boiled roots taste? I don't, but I imagine they taste something like coffee. It's the only drink I'm aware of that I made a concerted effort to like and, no matter how much I tried I couldn't do it. Several years back Audrey took me to a Starbucks and ordered me a Chocolate Caramel Machiatta (sp?), which I actually found that I liked well enough. As I experimented at Starbucks and later Diedrich's, I came to the realization that I really don't mind coffee, provided that it doesn't actually taste like coffee.

Usually, the alarm goes off to tell Eel that it's time to get up and get ready for work. Eel just hits the snooze. The alarm goes off and she hits snooze again. At the third or fourth time, she ventures out of bed to take a shower. I, meanwhile, fall right back asleep.

Today, the alarm went off, as usual. Except that it wasn't talking to Eel, it was talking to me.

I already miss when the alarm was talking to Eel.

Baylor University will bestow upon one Jason M. Paris a Bachelor's Degree in the Arts with a degree Music Composition. We have waited a long, long, long time for this.

Those of us that know him shall bestow upon him our congratulations.

Jack Cluth links to a disturbing article on a cell phone confiscation in Pennsylvania gone amuck:

At issue is an incident March 17 when Nazareth technology teacher Shawn Kimberly Kocher and Assistant Vice Principal Marge Grube confiscated 17-year-old Christopher Klump's cell phone.

Grube, with Kocher's help, searched his text messages and voice mail. Pretending to be Christopher, Grube also used his phone list to call other students and sent a text message to Christopher's 10-year-old brother.

Christopher's parents, Toby and Leigh Klump, went before the school board last month, asking for a public accounting of whether the staff members would be disciplined. Board Chairman Donald Keller said the Personnel Committee was discussing the matter but would say nothing more. School law and union rules prohibit districts from disclosing staff discipline.

Grube and Kocher declined to comment, but district officials do not deny that the actions took place. They have offered to reimburse phone calls ''to anyone who incurred costs because of the incident'' and send written apologies to the parents of any student called.

But they stopped short of saying Grube's and Kocher's actions were wrong. District Superintendent Victor Lesky said Grube had reason to believe, based on a text message on Christopher's phone, that the teenager might have been using his phone to deal drugs, and so their search was justified.

[...]

''Anytime our administrators are facing a situation that's maybe drug- and alcohol-related, they're going to do what they can, within the law, to make sure our kids are safe,'' Lesky said.

The text message came from Christopher's girlfriend, a college student, and was sent while she was driving in her car to pick up Christopher after school let out. It read: ''I need a tampon!''

School officials say it is common knowledge that tampon is slang for a large marijuana cigarette.

They may have been justified right up until they made outbound calls. There rationale for that was to run a sting operation:

When the Klumps first spoke to Grube, they say, she acknowledged that she conducted a cell phone sting of sorts, calling nine students whose numbers Christopher stored in his phone. Later that night, though, when Leigh Klump looked at the online records for her son's cell phone account, she learned Grube had done much more.

The records showed the calls Grube made. They also showed Grube tapped into Christopher's voice mail and text messages — and had even sent a message, pretending to be Christopher, to their younger son.

Well, okay. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't the purpose of not allowing cell phones in the class room is that they might go off? Isn't that precisely what happened when they called the kids? "That" being the precise thing that the policy is in place to prevent? If the students had been called by someone else during school hours, it seems likely to me that their phone would be confiscated. Others wouldn't have their phones go off at all, in which case the administration's attempts led to a net gain in phones going off in class.

And another problem I have with the school's policy:

School policy forbids cell phones on school grounds during school hours. But Nazareth and other districts in the Lehigh Valley area allow students to have phones as long as they remain off and out of sight during the school day. Lesky said this unwritten rule came about after the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks so students have a way to contact someone in case of an emergency.

Because of the written policy, the Klumps say, the district had a right to take their son's phone but nothing more.

It's a generally bad idea to have unwritten rules regarding such things as cell phones. That makes it possible to enforce a rule that kids go to school expecting not to be enforced. It allows teachers and principles that disagree with or aren't aware of the (unwritten) rule to enforce it anyway. If they want to allow kids to have cell phones in schools but make sure their out of site, that's precisely what the rulebook needs to say.

And on a last note:

''I can't remember when a girlfriend ever called me for a tampon,'' Superintendent Lesky said.

I have. In our four years together, I would have to say that it ranks as the nicest thing I ever did for Anna. I think I would have actually preferred to buy her a joint.

While in Walmart, there a little young boy who saw a Spider-man shirt that he apparently had an immense need for. He indicated his immense need in the form of crying "I have an immense need for that Spider-man shirt!" (or something to that effect) over and over again. The mother asked that he be quiet. She then sturnly told him to be quiet. Then she screamed at him to be quiet. Then she screamed at him to be quiet even louder than he screamed about his immense need. Then she agreed to buy him the shirt.

In addition to learning how to get a Spider-man shirt in a crowded store, he has also learned a lesson how how to get anything he wants in a crowded store.

Something tells me that he had already learned that lesson.

A staple to a strong diet that's high in carbs and low in fat can be, of all things, refried beans. While refried beans can get tiresome, there are a number of things you can do to (quite literally) spice them up! Using cajun spices, green salsa, red salsa, and enchilada or taco sauce are great examples.

Today, we decided to make a mega-meal. A "mega-meal" in the RAW lexicon is a meal consisting of more than 700 calories. We discovered that if you drain out the water broth and put tuna in refried beans, you can easily add texture and low-fat meat. While we're not huge fans of tuna in general, when placed in the refried beans it actually tastes as much like chicken as anything else.

We then took it a step further and discovered that if you put an egg inside the tuna bean bowl and cook it thoroughly, you have tuna and refried beans that tastes like... well, tuna and refried beans.

Except with more cholesterol. And fat.

Oh well, maybe next time!

Owen has a provocative link regarding two seperate approaches to combating AIDS meeting two different results:

Now some actual facts:

AIDS victims in 1987: Philippines 135 / Thailand 112

In 1991 the WHO predicted the Philippines would have 80,000 to 90,000 cases and Thailand 60,000 to 80,000 AIDS victims.

Thailand promoted the use of condoms in massive campaigns where Catholic Philippines promoted 'Abstinence' and 'Be faithful'.

The prognosis of the WHO was wrong for both countries:

1999: Philippines 1,005 / Thailand 755,000 AIDS victims

Source: British Medical Journal, volume 328, April 10th 2004

The question here is whether or not the success rate of condoms is outstripped by the increased number of people having sex due to promiscuity. To take a seemingly unrelated example, let's look at rugby and football:

Many people think of Rugby as an exceedingly rough and dangerous sport. However, the instance of injuries as a result of playing Rugby are, in fact, far lower than those sustained in American Football, and are generally similar to that of Football (soccer). The reason for this, first and foremost, is that any of the padding worn by American Football players is not for defense, but for offense. A secondary consideration is that the other side is also without pads, which moderates a large amount of dangerous behaviour. Finally, the rules, unlike in American Football and many other contact sports, as they do not limit the number of times a player/team may be tackled before surrendering the ball, do not encourage situations that exacerbate injuries, such as fighting for the last yard.

A simple example, from personal experience. American Football players are taught to tackle straight into the target's chest, often including significant pushing with the helmet. This is simply asking for neck injuries. Additionally, no serious rules are in place regulating the technique, leading to many dangerous tackling forms, as well as the exceedingly dangerous (due to its unexpected nature) blocking tackle. In contrast, Rugby players' tackles are done at the shoulder, usually against the target's legs, allowing that person's momentum to complete the tackle, rather than attempting to stop them and force them backwards (again, a product of the lack of "downs" in Rugby). Furthermore, a Rugby player may only tackle the ball carrier, and their form is strictly regulated- you can be ejected from a game for dangerous tackling (using the neckline of the jersey or otherwise going above the chest and/or failure to wrap your arms around the opponent's legs).

In comparing rugby to American football, Rory Miller makes a strong case that the increased protections of the latter have, in fact, lead to football being a more dangerous sport. With the protections, athletes are more reckless and rely on their equipment so much that the equipment's success rate at protecting athletes is undone by higher repitition of more dangerous physical hits.

Let's say that condoms have a 10% failure rate when it comes to stopping the transmission of HIV from an HIV-negative individual to an HIV-positive individual and 100 such sexual acts occur. That means that 10 people that did not have HIV acquire it. For the sake of argument, let's say that sex without condoms between an HIV-positive and HIV-negative person have 100% transmission rate. If 100 such sexual acts occur, you have 100 people that did not have HIV acquiring it. Now, if condoms enable 10x the number of people to have sex with people with the HIV virus, then you have 1000 people having sex and 100 people getting the virus. If the muliplier is less than 10, then condoms have proven successful at slowing the spread of the disease. However, if the muliplier is greater than 10, then condoms have actually assisted in the transmission of the disease by making people feel invulnerable and therefore being less cautious about who they are having sex with.

If the British Medical Journal is correct, and if there are not other factors involved to explain why the Philippines had more success than did the Thai, then it seems pretty clear that a condom-based approach is not successful. That does not necessarily say that the Philippine method would translate the same amount of success to the Thai people if the latter are more inclined towards sexual promiscuity. That'ss not out of the question, given that Thailand is known for some unsavory things in the sex industry. That would still suggest that cultural pressures against promiscuous sex are actually effective against extramarital sex, which is an argument that conservatives have often made and liberals deny.

It should be noted that I do not have a link to the British Medical Journal. Shea got them from an email, which means that the numbers could be a hoax. The only source I have found thus far is from a biased organization. I encourage anyone with disputing statistics to please make them available to me. There is more information regarding the low HIV rate in the Philippines here and the HIV problems in Thailand here. They don't contradict the BMJ numbers. It's also worth noting that with all the turmoil with AIDS in Africa, Uganda has had enormous success with an abstinence plus policy.

Regardless of the specifics, the multiplier statistic is useful to remember. I don't believe 10x is a particularly unreasonable number when you're comparing one set of people that believe they are not vulnerable to people with HIV and another set that don't have easy access to protection, but I would not be surprised if the multiplier were significantly higher or lower than 10.

One of the most affecting pieces of art that I have seen would have to be Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I posted on it a while back:

It's funny when a piece of art falls right in to your life at a time when you seem to need to hear it's message. It's happened a couple times in mine. One of the biggest examples in my life was the Key: The Metal Idol anime series. More recently, it has been Hedwig and the Angry Inch. So I've moved on from Key, a little robot girl trying to become human, to Hedwig, a transsexual rock star trying to find herself.

Is my life screwed up or what?

More seriously, Hedwig is by far the more surprising of the two because transsexuality is something that I've never been comfortable with and, for the most part, still am not. Yet by the time I was done with this movie, I felt that I had everything in common with her, minus the musical talent and sex change operation.

I saw the movie ten or so times in the first week that I got it. The DVD came with the movie, a feature where you could skip between songs, and an 85-minute "making of Hedwig" feature that itself I watched a couple of times. I also purchased both soundtracks and recieved the tribute album for Christmas. Some people don't care as much for it, but I can't get enough of it. The only tragedy, I thought, is that I would probably never get to see it on stage. Well, less than a month after I move out of Houston, it's playing at Fitzgerald's. Ulysses Zwiebel has a review:

The band needs work all the way around. Having been privy at rehearsals to the talent on board, I knew that getting them up to speed was going to be a Herculean task. It didn’t get there. I figured it would be a struggle even just to learn a few of the songs, but at least attempts were made on the whole set. The drummer, Tiny Flowers, did in fact improve noticeably from the first practice, but he is still not up to the job. No musical will succeed when the timing on nearly every song is so shaky it’s like Michael J. Fox after a double espresso. Intros and exits from songs are very unstable and these points should be established more clearly even if it means creating minute gaps in the dialog.

Louis Weyrich gamely attempts to reproduce the score literally and should have taken more latitude in giving the songs his own voice. He has not perfected his playing to the point that one can relax with the song in his hands. He is hampered already by a serious lack of rhythm on the keyboards and having an unsettled drummer doesn’t help. Granted, it’s the first performance, but one should be able to play the intro to "Wicked Little Town" without that much trouble. I sat down at mom’s about two weeks ago and played it to better effect having never even tried it before on the piano. (That may sound self-flattering, but I leave open an offer to play it for anyone who asks and will be satisfied to let him or her judge for themselves.) Sadly, this means that the loveliest song in the entire score is DOA. The same goes for "Wig in a Box," the defining song of this show. This beautiful melody was strangled, suffocated and left for dead right there on stage. Very sad indeed.

Okay, so it's not exactly John Cameron Mitchell and needs some work, but I really don't care! If I had the time and money, I'd fly down to Houston just to see it on stage.

Un. Fair.

In all of my various political incarnations (Democrat-sympathizer, independent, libertarian, Republican-sympathizer, and finally Republican), I've never cared much for Tom DeLay. I have voted against him in every election save one and, should I find myself voting where he is running, I expect to continue that streak. I recognize that things DeLay has done for the Republican Party and that as a whole he may be a benefit to it, but there are some lines I cannot cross and Republicans I cannot vote for.

Several years back, I worked for a Democrat that was seeking his seat. I wasn't a Republican yet, but I was getting closer and closer to becoming one. My view on DeLay at the time was more negative than it is now and I was anxious to work against him. On Politics1.com I saw that someone had filed to run against him as a Democrat. I would have preferred a Republican simply because I felt a Republican would have a greater chance of winning, but none had declared (one would later). I wrote the would-be politician and offered my services. We met at the Fudrucker's off US59 and I became the first member of her campaign.

It was a quixotic quest from the outset and I realized it even then. Regardless, I felt that we ought to run the best campaign possible. We made a list of all of the Democratic group meetings in DeLay's district and I took the stump for her on a couple of occasions that she couldn't make it. Trying to rally up support for a Democrat trying to unseat DeLay wasn't particularly hard. I also set up her first web site. I'd never worked for a campaign before, but it seemed to me that there were obvious things that the campaign needed to do if it intended to unseat DeLay. The first thing I told her was that she needed to come up with ten reasons why a Republican should vote for her.

She never heeded my advice.

As the primary election drew closer, it became more apparent that of the two filed candidates, she was the only one with a chance of winning. If Tom DeLay had been caught in bed with a dead underage boy, he still probably would have defeated the other candidate from prison. The Chronicle quickly endorsed my candidate, which was when more volunteers started pouring in and a campaign manager was hired. The campaign manager was a nice woman, but she was a harbinger to my exit from the campaign. When I told her about my idea for "ten reasons a Republican should support our candidate" her big response was "Why? We aren't running as a Republican." Indeed, the mere mention that anyone unseating DeLay would need more than just Democratic and independent support brought forth nothing but scratched heads from a group of well-intentioned liberals that thought it was pretty obvious that Bush (leading in the polls by 15 points at the time) was toast.

I was ultimately asked to step away from the campaign by a conservative organization I was working for that feared a connection might be drawn. Given my increasingly miniscule role in the campaign, it was unlikely, but I nonetheless understood. I still supported the candidate privately and intended to vote for her in the election. She lost in the primaries to the other candidate that hadn't campaigned and whose only noticeable advantage was appearing on the ballot before my candidate's.

After leaving the campaign and before the primary loss, I was trying to sell the candidate to my conservative mother. I talked about DeLay a lot, but it didn't particularly matter because Mom thinks all politicians are crooks. She asked me one good reason that she should vote for the candidate I had worked for, I couldn't come up with one. She'd never made that list.

The heat on Tom DeLay has intensified considerably over the last couple of years. I'm not sure that DeLay will ever be unseated, but if he ever will it'll be either this election or next. His present opponent is an environmental lawyer by the name of Richard Morrison. As I looked over his site, the same mentality thrives. He's not merely running against Tom DeLay, but against the GOP as a whole. The one issue in which he might garner some Republican support - the deficit - he couches in the term "GOP deficits", which negates the positives he might derive by deficit-hawk Republicans on an anti-deficit position by making it a partisan issue. The deficit cannot be blamed or credited on anyone but the Republicans, but is it more important to be right or to win over potential converts? I find nothing on his site to suggest that he is all that concerned with the latter.

Morrison has done a better job with the media than I have seen anyone running against DeLay do. I understand that fundraising has been good. Since all of this comes at a time when DeLay's numbers are lower than they've ever been, he should be in a position to at least pose a challenge. But either Morrison's team is letting the numbers get to their collective heads or they have no idea what they're doing. DeLay has a number of weaknesses in the eyes of otherwise conservative independents and open-minded Republicans, but I see absolutely no effort to exploit those weaknesses. Sharing the NIMBY attitude of suburbanites will only get him so far.

I will probably register to vote in Idaho in the upcoming election, but reading over what he has to say makes me inclined to say that I would probably vote for vote-spintering ex-Republican Michael Fjetland and helping DeLay keep his seat. Instead of just ignoring potentially-converted Republicans, he's downright contemptuous:

Well, first let me tell you why I’ve got to get it out. If I just have the label, “Richard Morrison, Democrat,” all right, then everyone out there that kind of thinks the Rush Limbaugh way, which is “If this guy’s a Democrat, then we’re electing Ted Kennedy.” Ted Kennedy’s not going to get anything out of there, and so I have to be able to get the message out that, “Yeah, I’m a Democrat, but I’m really your neighbor, and I’m just like you.” Those people are Democrats; they just don’t know it.

I went to this deal the other day with the teachers, when they were protesting at DeLay. There were all these ladies coming up there, these three really nice ladies, the Fort Bend County Democratic Women, they’re like a hundred years old, three of them. They were, like, “Oh, we’d like for you to come and speak.” And I said, “I’d love to speak.” And these three or four soccer moms walked up, and they said, “We’re registered Republicans, but can we come to your meeting?” And so they all think they’re Republicans, because that’s the hip thing to be, you know, and that’s where all the rich guys are and all that, but really they’re just Democrats and they don’t know it, ’cause their rights are getting trampled on, they just don’t realize it. And they think, “Oh, the Republicans are going to take care of us.” Well, I’m not sure that’s true.

This is about as close as Morrison comes to giving a reason to potentially sympathetic Republicans to vote for him: They're sheep that are only Republicans cause everyone else is doing it and they don't really know what they believe.

I'm not saying Morrison should run away from his politican affiliation, but he's not going to convince the necessary number of people that everything they know about what Republicans and Democrats stand for is wrong in the course of six months. That's just not going to happen. Selling the Democratic Party in the 22nd District is nigh impossible compared to convincing them that this is an election that they need to vote for the Democrat.

There is also talk of Morrison inviting (or accepting an offer from) Howard Dean for fundraising purposes. I'll just pass that off to Greg:

I suspect that doing a late campaign event with Howard Dean is not a great way to convince people that you're just "one of them" as opposed to Ted Kennedy.

Free, Cheap, & Easy Advice: Run your own campaign, be your own candidate, avoid detracting from your own message. Send Howard a note thanking him for the generous offer, but informing him that you've got the situation under control just fine.

... of course, if "running your own campaign" means informing the "unknown Democrats" of the 22nd that you're in league with Dean, then let's not kid anyone into thinking we want to win this race.

Other than telling Republicans that they're not really Republicans and that he stands with Howard Dean and the opposing party on roughly every issue under contention, what exactly is his message?

Eel is on a low-carb diet. This means that I am being introduced to all kinds of foods that I didn't even know existed. The main dishes that she's made thus far have been quite good, involving chicken and spices. You can't go wrong with ingredients like that (though I am starting to miss beef a bit). We're also getting a lot of mileage out of turkey pepperoni, which I have always thought was quite good for a faux product.

I've never been one for "sugar free" stuff that's supposed to have sugar in it, but this has actually been where I've been most surprised. She apparently really knows her ways around the sweeteners and while her kool-aid doesn't taste as good as the sugary kind, it tastes a lot better than what I'm used to from low sugar stuff. The absolute biggest surprise has been the candies. I actually prefer the sugar free candy to the real stuff. It's only neglegably less tasty than the sugary stuff, except that it doesn't hurt my teeth!

Downside: The sugar gives you the runs if you eat more than three pieces.

Since getting up here, I've been seeing a lot of signs between this town and the town about an hour due north trying to repeal the "Right to Work" statute. It surprised me that Right to Work was only passed recently in a state such as this, but it turns out it wasn't and that there's an interesting story there:

Right-to-work proponents point to a 13.5 percent population increase in Idaho during the decade of the 1990s, with a booming economy to match. The president of the Idaho State AFL-CIO counters that Idaho's per capita income is 44th in the nation, and Idaho women are the worst paid in all 50 states.

These are developments which occurred since Idaho's overwhelmingly Republican Legislature banned compulsory union membership over the veto of Democratic Gov. John Evans in 1985, and voters ratified the law in 1986. They are at issue now because opponents of the law were seeking to get it on the ballot again this November. It turned out they fell well short of the 41,000 required signatures of registered voters to do so, but they vow they'll be back again in 2006.

I come from Texas, which is also a Right to Work state, so I'm predisposed to feel that there's nothing wrong with it. I find it interesting that the union argues that this causes some of the higher taxes that I was recently complaining about:

The consequences of that, according to Idaho AFL-CIO President Dave Whaley, are lower wages, jobs without negotiated benefits, one of the highest-ranking rates of personal bankruptcy and highest rates of taxation, and a struggle in the Legislature to meet the cost of programs that assist the poor. Whaley says business owners would find it in their best interest to pay people "a livable wage with benefits . . . This allows working families the ability to own a home, buy new cars and pass bonds to improve schools and parks, thus improving the overall economic base of our communities."

I always find it interesting when people say that they know what businesses should want more than business do. If businesses found it in their best interest to pay a "livable wage," wouldn't they be doing so without union coersion?

There are really two sides to the issue. On one hand, I don't think it right that a person be forced to pay union dues. It would be one thing if unions focused all of their energies on collective bargaining, but as it stands now a lot of the money goes towards political causes and parties that the individual union members may or may not agree with. That's an argument to get the unions to focus more on dealings with the company, but if people have to join the union then they have little incentive to do so.

On the other hand, as the editorial points out:

The fact is that unions are free to organize in Idaho -it's just that they cannot require all employees of a company to join in order to hold a job. As a consequence, there are "free riders" who get union-negotiated benefits without paying the membership dues, and it is a lot more difficult for unions to organize workers. Union membership has declined sharply in 18 years since the law went into effect.

I haven't noticed wages in Idaho to be particularly lower than those in Texas. If they do rank 44th, as the union leader suggests, then that would have to be off-set by how cheap it is to live here to a degree. I live in the "city" and it's markedly cheaper than towns half its size in Texas (San Marcos comes to mind).

A lot of people are blaming Donald Rumsfeld for the prison abuses going on right now in Iraq. Others are blaming Bush personally for mishandling the situation. Kathleen Parker, on the other hand, has a truly bizarre culprit: The Farrelly Brothers.

But some of what happened at Abu Ghraib, specifically the sexualized humiliations, may reflect American culture, especially in the instance of the naked human pyramid, which is nearly iconographic within the adolescent zeitgeist that spawned our current generation of soldiers.

The images from Abu Ghraib, now irreversibly tattooed on the Arab brain, were every frat-house cliche magnified. The human pyramid, males mooning, masturbation, bags over heads. What we saw, at least in part, was "The Farrelly Brothers Do Baghdad."

How else to explain the giddy photographs of young soldiers mugging for cameras and giving the thumbs-up sign beside humiliated prisoners, naked and masturbating? Another Farrelly movie, "Dumb and Dumber," comes to mind.

I like Farelly Brothers movies up to and including Dumb and Dumber. With No-Lyfe Productions I've actually helped make features of that kind of calibur. So my natural inclination is to reject her arguments outright. Truth be said, though, what she said makes some sense. I think the Farrelly Brothers are an exemplar, but there is a solid argument to be made that a lot of popular culture stunts emotional growth. Does that lead to situations like this? I have a hard time believing so, but I have a hard time saying with certainty that it doesn't.

[note: if the above link doesn't take you to the right article, try this one or look in the archives for "When Dumb is Deadly"]

The author of Untitled, Again writes about how she has a flirting problem:

I, in fact, have a flirting problem.

Susan [a character in a book she's reading] flirted because her dad was not in her life as much. The whole male figure replacement model--child's play.

My problem is much more serious and will never be resolved.

Let's just say that I flirt with guys not because I like them, but because I think it's safe to flirt with them because in the back of my mind I know for sure how I feel about these men and I *usually* know for sure that I am not interested and nothing will ever happen. I can't say that I always know for sure that I am not interested. Sometimes it takes a little bit of playing to figure that out.

I think I'm certifiably no fun. While I used to flirt some in my younger days, I quite simply never got very much enjoyment from it. The fact that people who have a perfectly stable and nice friendship would disrupt that stability by flirting when they're not interested in getting together with the person is, to me, insane. It's one thing to flirt if you're interested in somebody, but there are a lot of people out there like her that like to flirt under "safe" circumstances. Except that, from experience I can tell you, no circumstance is completely safe from one party or the other suddenly - out of nowhere - becoming legitimately interested. If things are safe (and stable), why jeopardize that with flirtation?

The only discernable motive I've found is when one party or the other doesn't actually want it to be stable because they want it to be unstable in such a way that she (or he) will change her (or his) mind. But to a degree they know where they stand because it would be simpler to just confront the issue if he (or she) is interested in going out with someone. The other motive is that some people just plan like tension.

Those people should seek professional help.

Santa Fe, Texas, was one of those places that I always meant to visit. I'd forgotten that SF was ground zero in the school prayer debate and didn't know that they have a long history of "racial strife." In any case, the KKK made their way through Santa Fe to gauge support and found it lacking:

The Ku Klux Klan may no longer have a sympathetic audience in this small community with a long history of racial strife.

Saturday, a group of 10 Klansmen, a few dressed in the traditional white robes and hoods, were in town to promote their group. But while nearly 2,000 people, mostly protesters, came out when the group visited last year, this time around they were pretty much left alone.

Santa Fe police officers were under orders to ignore the Klan with the hope the group would eventually pack up and leave, the Texas City Sun reported Sunday.

That's basically how you gotta handle it, the best that I can figure.

Tomorrow I start at Synchronus.

There were a couple of jobs of interest in the paper, which I'm filling out the applications for today. One with the local university on an anti-poverty project. The job seems a bit over my status, but there were no hard requirements that I didn't meet. The pay looks like it would be quite good, the job looks very interesting and perhaps even rewarding. Unfortunately, as part of the application process, I have to write a one page tract with my "story" and how it relates to poverty. The problem is, of course, that my story doesn't relate to poverty much. There are a couple of things that I can use, however, including my very blue collar junior high, my blue collar university with a lot of first-generation college students, and one of the thesis ideas I explored (not very far) regarding an organization trying to expose technology to the impoverished.

The other interesting job is with the county. I meet or exceed all of the listed qualifications, but unfortunately only meet one of the four "extra consideration for people that..."

There was a third job that I applied for. It was a longshot and sure enough, I was rejected a couple days after I sent in the application. Oh well.

Let me digress for a moment. When I was newly emancipated from Anna and Audrey in college, I did the online dating thing. It was moderately successful in that I did get dates here and there. There was definitely one bad thing about it, though. You could monitor the status of people that things didn't work out with. In fact, it was hard not to. If I went out with Jane for a couple of dates and she determined that things didn't work, suddenly I would see her profile reposted on one site or another and it would make me feel a bit hurt all over again (particularly if she lied about her rationale, saying for instance that she didn't have time to date).

To bring the topic back to the jobhunt, that's how I feel about Norwest. I was declined for employment based on the fact that I moved up here "for a girl" and I couldn't get my last employer to "endorse" me. They couched the language by saying that they were going to go with another candidate. Well, a couple of weeks later they're still advertising for the open position. It's the only one of the four positions that they've apparently yet to fill, and despite my meeting or exceeding every qualification and doing a good job on the in-person interview, they won't hire me.

It reminds me of the question of "is it better to be left for someone else or just simply left?" If you're left for someone else, it hurts to know that someone else is enjoying your ex. But if you're just left, then you know that your former love would prefer to be with nobody than with you.

Hmmm, this post sounds a lot more self-pitying than it sounds. I'm not so much as hurt as dumbfounded and a bit angry. Angry that I couldn't get past whatever presuppositions they had about me that lead them to say to themselves, "It's better that we just go another month without a net admin than we hire this guy!"

Since getting up here, I've not been writing my folks as well as I might have hoped. I wrote them and my brother a longish update last night and found out something interesting:

As for what's going on in Houston, you could have watched Channel 2 news on
Wednesday night to see how our mother is doing! They were doing a feature
on how dirty spa bath tubs can be and Claudia, her friend and my real
estate agent, had "hooked her up" with Channel 2 so they could take some
swabs for a news feature. Well, needless to say they found all kinds of
harmful microbes in there and came back and video-taped her response which
made the 10 o'clock news! She managed to work in a "maybe I'll just sit
back with a drink and say 'what the heck' "when they told her some of the
microbes could be fatal. Of course, there are things outside that could be
fatal, it was just a typical news scare "tactic". The point of the story
was that not matter how much you clean them, the design facilitates
things growing that you can't control.

We're famous!

I'll be honest and state, for that haven't read the below post, that I am opposed to a state income tax. I could theoretically be in favor of one if it closed another taxstream, but that's what a lot of income tax supporters don't want. There is, however, a proposal for a state income tax that involves closing off some local taxstreams (school district property taxes), which I would call a step in the right direction. There's only one problem with this income tax plan: It's the worst income tax proposal I have ever heard.

The Rodriguez Plan shifts the entire burden of funding school operations from the local school districts (who collect the majority of your property taxes) to the State …which will pick up the tab by using revenue collected through a State Education Income Tax.

The Proposed State Education Income Tax would produce about $19 Billion in new state revenue. This money would first be used to replace the most burdensome local property tax … the Maintenance and Operations Property Tax (sometimes referred to as "The Robin Hood Tax"). This will still leave a balance of approximately $5.1 billion for two other key objectives.

They somehow made a state income tax incidental to what is a far more ambitious plan: doing away with the local schoool district. Now granted, I doubt that Rodriguez would phrase it as such and it's true that under this plan that local school districts could, in fact, still exist. In fact, some people would like that very much because they would functionally be another layer of bureaucracy, and for every layer of bureaucracy is another set of Democratic voters that rely on government for a living.

The long and short of it is that this is Robin Hood on a much grander scale. Robin Hood, for those that aren't familiar with Texas politics, was a response to a court ruling regarding inequalities from one district to the next. The idea was that richer school districts would subsidize poorer ones so that the latter could offer a halfway decent education to its students. This was a good idea in theory (incompetent school districts hurt everyone), in practice it lead to a great deal of resentment by the wealthier school districts and very little improvement in the poorer districts. The notion that it is primarily money holding poorer school district back is belied by per-pupil expenditures. My own (largely well-off) school district, Clear Creek ISD, spent approximately $5,500 per pupil in the 90's and for that two of its three high schools were rated Exemplary. Meanwhile, Houston ISD spent roughly $6,500 per pupil and it's become increasingly clear that the investment has not paid off. I'm not arguing that black is white, up is down, and less spending will yield greater results, but instead arguing that more money does not necessarily equal a better education. The point I'm making is that a dollar spent in the suburbs does not equal a dollar spent in the city. This is not a particularly conservative point as liberals could rightly argue that it simply requires more money to teach poorer kids than wealthier ones because the latter are more likely to have attentive parents, a computer at home, and so on.

This is extremely important because that means that state-funded (as opposed to district-funded) education has two options: they can either have a statewide dollar-per-pupil number or they can spend more money in areas that have greater needs. I honestly can't think of a single debate on the agenda of the past year (including redistricting, sodomy laws, and tort reform) that will be even half as acrimonious as this debate will be. People can remain dispassionate about which congressional district they're in, what gays are doing behind closed doors, and even higher malpractice insurance costs that make health care more expensive, but they will never, ever, ever be dispassionate about what kind of education their kids are getting. Never.

The safest bet would be to have a per-pupil expenditure. Given that every statewide office and both houses of the legislature are in Republican hands, this is probably what would happen. That would mean that in comparison to how much an urban school is getting now in comparison with their needs, they will be getting further short-changed in the future. Their needs will not decrease, but their per-pupil money will. This means less in the way of computer labs, instruction materials, and teacher pay differential to get qualified teachers willing to work with those that most need it. The suburban and well-off districts will be fine, though, and the voters whose children go to such districts may (I repeat: may, more on this later) be satisfied getting the same amount for their kid as for one in a crappy district inside the city.

In an ideal world, the districts that need more money would get more money from the state. If such a plan were instituted, I suspect it would take all of two seconds after the numbers are released for the suburban parents to be (understandably) up-in-arms about how the state is spending less on their kids than on inner-city ones. Once you change the per-pupil expenditures, there would be numerical winners and losers in the eye of the public and "but they need it more" is rarely an explanation that flies with the Texas public. Furthermore, it would make suburban voters less likely to support spending more money on education because they would likely feel that the money is going to those "other kids." While as a conservative I might be inclined to say that this would be a good thing, but I suspect that those supporting a state income tax would disagree.

Not only would they be less inclined to want to pay more in taxes for education, but one of the chief fundraising mechanisms of schools would be negated: bond elections. Even conservatives and tightwads are willing to spend more money if it helps their children. That's why bond referenda often succeed in even the most conservative towns even when the bonds are bloated and ill-advised. However, statewide bonds would be a lot less likely to pass because, once again, they would feel that the money was going towards "other kids." Bond issues these days are generally specific to particular needs and the people judge it up and down based on the merits of what is being proposed (new football stadium, new schools, etc.). If a statewide bond issue were held it would either be far too complicated for even the most political nerd to completely go over or it would be towards across-the-board things (a computer in every desk) that would be spent whether a district needs it or not (and if it's only spent where it's needed, you have the "other kids" problem all over again).

On a more ideological point, I would argue that finances aside, schools being financed (and therefore run) on a statewide level is simply a bad idea on its own merits. Local control allows for school board elections to be held and give the people a quite direct say in how their money is going to be spent. Money spent wisely in one location may be money spent foolishly in another. Yet just as national politicians get exposure for proposing money be spent the same way across the nation, the same will be true for statewide politicians. Different approaches for different districts (and comparisons to how well these plans are or are not working) would be replaced by a one-size-fits-all policy.

And on a more particular point, I ask those liberals that would support making education a statewide rather than local issue: Do you trust Rick Perry, David Dewhurst, and Tom Craddick to run your schools? Do you trust the Republicans on the state education board to do so? Do you think that if they control the purse-strings that they won't exert much control?

I've been meaning to write about Texas's budget woes for a while. Though I am presently not living in Texas, I definitely hope to return some day and I think my 23 years of living there give me some right to comment on political matters. So on with the show:

Never a budget woe goes by without Democrats solemnly resigning us all to the necessity of a state income tax. Or trying and failing to, anyhow. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, because the more that Democrats talk about a state income tax, the more confident I feel that they won't be in charge of Texas any time soon. According to liberals, a state income tax has been inevitable ever since the state decided that there wouldn't be one. I took a correspondence summer course at San Jacinto College in between semesters at the University of Houston where we watched a quite dated video on Texas politics. I took the class in 1998 but in the video, they referred to newly elected Governor Clemens, so I assume that the video was made either in 1979 (when he was inaugurated to his first term) or 1987 (when he was inaugurated for his second after being defeated in 1982). Either way, the interviewed a handful of people about the budget and every last one of them agreed that within five years there would be a state income tax and all of Texas's budget problems would be solved. That was either 17 or 25 years ago, meanwhile anyone who had a relative, classmate, or dog that supported the income tax has been mercilessly pummelled for it.

But Texas is in a financial hole again [Update: As Kevin points out in the comments, not exactly a 'hole' since if nothing gets done, the state is still in the black], and like Bart Simpson with the electric cupcake, liberals are back to suggesting that an income tax is at least desirable, at most inevitable. Even though I strongly disagree with them on this point, it's theoretically (if unlikely) possible that I could support a state income tax in Texas if it replaced other forms of taxation. However, many income tax supporters are talking about "more revenue streams," which essentially proposes that Texans get taxed less in more places so they either (if you're liberal) aren't hurt as badly by the taxes or (if you're conservative) don't realize how much they're paying in taxes.

As most readers of RAWbservations are aware, I recently relocated from Texas to Idaho. Idaho is, by most measures, a more conservative state than Texas is. While Texas went around 60% for Bush in 2000, Idaho went roughly 70%. It's a largely rural state with a high Mormon population (about 25% of the state) in the southeast and various militias have found a home in the northern panhandle region. The only remotely metropolitan area is Boise. One would think that Idaho, being a conservative state, would have low taxes. While it's all relative and taxes are low compared to, say, Sweden and California, that really hasn't proven to be the case. My significant other (who makes approximately a public school teacher's salary) pays approximately 5% in income taxes, we all pay 6% in sales taxes, and I have heard no less than six times (without inquiry or prompting) that property taxes here are outrageous. How does a conservative state maintain such high taxation levels? My guess would be the taxation tripod that many income tax supporters are advocating:

An income tax would make possible a reduction in the property tax -- the tax that Texans have most bellyached about in recent years.

An income tax also would eliminate the need to raise the rate for the regressive state sales tax. A higher sales tax rate would disproportionately hurt low- and moderate-income Texans already struggling mightily to make ends meet. An income tax would produce a fairer tax system.

If Texas were to raise its state sales tax by three-quarters of a cent, it would be among the highest such taxes in the nation. A 7-cent state tax, coupled with 2 cents in local sales tax levied by many Texas cities, would mean a combined sales tax of 9 percent. Yikes!

Yikes indeed. That would certainly make folks think twice before raising taxes, now wouldn't it? As far as the "reductions" that Mr. Smith says that Texans would see, I'm not so sure. Before coming up to Idaho, I was sure that the state income tax here would alleviate taxes in other areas, but it hasn't as far as I've seen. To say the least, it's a lot easier to widen an existing tax stream than it is to open up a new one. It appears that's what has happened up here. A temporary sales tax increase from 5% to 6% is about to sunset, and advocates of renewing the tax are arguing that 6% isn't that much. They're right, except for the 5% income tax and property taxes that are also making its way into the state government's coffers. The truth is that a 3% state income tax isn't much, either, but how many would honestly expect it to stay there? 4% isn't much either. Neither is Idaho's 5%. The problem is that it adds up and, by design, people don't often calculate how much of their money is being taken as they would if, for instance, all taxes were eliminated in favor of a 20% income tax. That would really get the taxpayer's attention. But getting the taxpayer's attention is precisely what those that want increased governmental responsibility are hoping to avoid.

Count me out.

Owen calls the Alternative Minimum Tax a "soak the rich" policy, though I can't quite agree with that. The National Center for Policy Analysis has a succinct write-up on a program that I am ashamed to say that I didn't know very much about:

Under the AMT, many deductions that are legal under the ordinary income tax are disallowed. One of the most important is the deduction for state and local taxes. As a consequence, the AMT tends to heavily hit people who live in high tax states like New York. Indeed, some analysts have taken to calling the AMT the "Blue-State Tax," since most of the states hit hardest by the AMT are those where the Democratic Party is strongest -- that is, those that voted for Al Gore in 2000.

The real problem with the AMT is that its income thresholds are not indexed to inflation or real income growth. Thus, many of those who were considered rich in 1986 are simply middle class today. By 2013, according to the Treasury Department, the AMT will raise more revenue than the regular income tax.

Apparently the Republicans in congress are trying to give "temporary relief" to people paying this bill, which may or may not be a good idea. For one thing, this taxes Blue Staters more than Red States, which is always a plus. Okay, I'm joking on that point, but it does help states like Texas that don't have a state income tax. One of the frequent arguments for people who would like to implement a statewide sales tax is that Texans are getting ripped off by the federal government because state income taxes are deductable and property taxes and the like are not.

As far as the AMT raising more revenue than the income tax (by 2013), I'm not as concerned about that one way or the other. I believe in progressive taxation and don't have a problem with the middle class getting taxed a bit more. For one thing, it makes them dislike taxes more and makes them more likely to vote against across-the-board tax increases in the future. More to the point, though, if people are indeed required to pay a minimum, it discourages loopholes and we come at least somewhat closer to a basic tax rate instead of our current variable tax rate where how much a person making $50,000 a year is taxed depends on what kind of life that person is leading (due to deductions and whatnot) and where they are living (income tax or no). I'd favor a more straight (and preferably simpler) tax plan where how much one pays is more in line with how much they make rather than how good their CPA is.

And on a last note, it does seem awfully fair to make the AMT adjust for inflation. Of course, that mentality doesn't seem to carry over to minimum wage workers, does it?

I very rarely link to Robert Novak columns. It's generally been my experience that he considers himself more a "player" an actual analyst. More than once I've seen him talk about "what Republicans are saying" when what he really means is "what Republicans should be saying." That said, this column is fascinating to me and he at least backs it up with some basis:

WASHINGTON -- A specter is haunting the House of Representatives -- the specter of reforming the flawed budget process. Rep. Paul Ryan, a 34-year-old third-term Republican from Janesville, Wis., is advocating an entirely new congressional system intended to put a serious lid on runaway federal spending. The collateral damage from this effort would emasculate the Cardinals, the mighty House Appropriations subcommittee chairmen.

The appropriators will not easily relinquish their iron grip on spending, but Ryan cannot be written off as a mere junior troublemaker. He has more than half of the 227 Republican congressmen behind him, who sooner or later will demand action on the floor. They reflect the growing discomfort inside the congressional GOP over massive federal budget deficits.

The budget process is one of the largely overlooked scandals in American government. The Budget and Impoundment Control Act, passed in 1974 as part of the post-Watergate reforms, has failed to control. That failure has been ignored by both Republicans and Democrats, even in the 10 years since Republicans gained control of Congress. Never before have the Appropriators been less controlled as they pack their bills with pork earmarked to individual needs of lawmakers.

It has been noted in the Republican cloakrooms that Ryan has not been his usual optimistic self lately, but has been voicing concerns about the deepening fiscal hole. Ryan, a former speechwriter for Jack Kemp, is the purest of supply-siders but does not share Kemp's disinterest in balanced budgets. Along with other conservatives, he worries about the present flawed process leading to tax increases rather than spending cuts.

I'm pretty skeptical that such a thing could ever get passed, but I need to feel at least some optomism these days in regards to the budget. There really isn't much to be had. I'm glad to see that my favorite congressman, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-CA), is on board.

[via Reductio]

This is the view from the park.


This is the view from Eel's back yard.

I applied for a job on Tuesday. Today, I got an email back saying that I did not get the position. I'm sorry that I didn't get the job, but now I know I didn't get the job so I can stop wondering. I greatly, greatly appreciate that. No private company I've ever applied for has done me the simple courtesy of sending me a rejection letter even if they said they would. The only two that have are the local university up here and the school district I went through K-12.

So, kudos to the company that rejected me!

Operator-Assisted Dialing via modem. WinXP does a good job with the interface, by the modem protocols are extremely particular about when you hang up. It took six attempts, though the first five were without the headset. On the other hand, it's darn good to be back online. Unfortunately, posts and responses are going to be light today (and until the university dial-up works again) as I'm using long distance.

Any time I'm trying to watch what I eat or drink, milk is a staple of my diet. It fills me up, doesn't have fat (I drink skim), and replaces both soft drinks and sugary foods.

Eel was telling me a year ago that milk was cheaper up here than back in Texas. I was looking forward to that, but unfortunately I get here and I'm still paying between $2.50-3.00 a gallon. Apparently, I can blame it all on pizza:

A gallon of whole milk will cost at least $2.90 — 50% more than a year ago. And in major supermarkets, a gallon could command more than $4.

Dairy farm expert Michael Marsh blames what he calls the "pizza factor." The improving economy has apparently unleashed pent-up demand for pizza and other items dependent on cheese, and a surge in cheese buying by food processing companies and restaurants has sent the value of most dairy commodities soaring on the futures market. California's regulated milk prices are tied to the futures prices of those commodities, especially cheddar cheese and butter, traded in Chicago.

But there's more behind the fortification of milk prices. For starters, there's something of a dairy-cow deficit. Because droughts have made for poor grazing, many dairy farmers have balked at paying for extra feed and have instead sold some animals for slaughter, lured by record prices for beef, made popular recently by the high-protein diet craze.

What's more, the discovery last year of a case of mad cow disease in Canada closed off the U.S.' biggest source of replacement dairy cows, doubling the price of milk calves. And because of manufacturing glitches, there's a shortage of the genetically engineered growth hormone that enables cows to make more milk; that alone is expected to reduce the nation's total milk output by 2% to 3% this year.

I want my frankenmilk!

[via Rebecca Blood]

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Authorities in the state of Washington say an Oklahoma man may have infected up to 170 people with HIV.

Anthony Whitfield is charged with 12 counts of sexual assault in addition to charges of witness tampering and violating no-contact orders. He pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

Eyewitness News 5 first reported on Whitfield in March after Oklahoma health officials said that he might have infected women in the Oklahoma City area. Officials confirmed that Whitfield returned to Oklahoma as recently as 2003 -- after he was diagnosed with HIV.

Washington authorities claim he intentionally spread HIV in that state.

[via Michael Williams]

Via Jane, a weird decision by the Canadian immigration authorities:

Ottawa, ON, May. 4 (UPI) -- The Canadian Refugee Board has denied asylum to a Mexican homosexual because he is not "visibly effeminate" and therefore not vulnerable to persecution.

[...]

The IRB only offers protection to effeminate or HIV-positive men, as well as political activists and whistle blowers from Mexico, the Globe and Mail reported.

A federal court upheld the board's decision in April, and Rivera now faces deportation if his final appeal on humanitarian grounds is rejected.

But the real question is: Can metrosexuals get asylum?

Pete on the Olsen Twins:

As most people know, there are websites and the like that have sprung up around the countdown to the Olsen twins' turning 18. This is something I've always regarded as - at best - borderline creepy, if not outright repulsive. I mean, someone salivating over their impending age of consent hasn't exactly been waiting for the magic date before turning on the impure thoughts.

[...]

Which leads me to New York Minute. Say what you want about the habit of drooling over jailbait girls, the Olsens are obviously keenly aware of this subset of their audience, and play to it repeatedly. The opening scene is Ashley dreaming she's giving a speech naked, then we see her in the shower, then a vagrant dumps a slurpee on her chest, then she and Mary Kate both spend twenty minutes running around in towels, and so on. It all seems pretty innocent, but each sister alone flashed more skin than Amanda Bynes in What A Girl Wants, to take one example. I have to admit, my esteem for them went up a notch when I realized what they were doing.

Just reading about this makes me need to take a shower.

It's 3 in the morning. I should really be asleep right now.

I still haven't decided what area I'm going to specialize in when I start writing novels for publication, but if I decide to go the romance novel route, I have a good primer (PDF) on what I need to put in there. Astonishingly, it appears that romance novels target audience likes men who are muscular and handsome and women who are intelligent and strong.

Writing mystery novels is starting to look pretty good about now.

[via Susanna]

There's really not much I can say about this:

Sichan Siv, the U.S. delegate to the council, accused Sudan of having no right to sit on the rights commission because of ethnic cleansing in Darfur where government troops are accused of backing Arab militia which pillage black Africa villages, raping and killing. The Khartoum government denies it is involved in ethnic cleansing.

[...]

Sudan's deputy U.N. ambassador, Omar Bashir Mohamed Manis, said the United States had no right to accuse anyone of human rights violations after the allegations of mistreatment of Iraqis held in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.

Images of the Iraqi prisoners ``are fresh in the minds of all justice-loving people around the world,'' he said.

The U.S. military is investigating the prisoner abuse after news reports and photos broadcast by CBS last week showed Iraqis stripped naked and tormented by U.S. captors.

Manis also referred to Iraqi civilian casualties during a recent siege in Falluja. ``This (U.S.) delegation is turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the American forces against the innocent civilian population in Iraq, including women and children,'' he said.

It's always fun to be lectured by the Sudanese about human rights.

Luckily, we're not the only ones objecting:

"A government that engages in wholesale abuses of its citizens should not be eligible for a seat at the table, especially a country just criticized by the commission," said Joanna Weschler, U.N. representative for Human Rights Watch, which is part of the coalition.

Freedom House Executive Director Jennifer Windsor said the Asian group also could have nominated better candidates, citing Vietnam's "violent crackdown against the country's indigenous Montagnard people" and "serious concerns" about the rights records of both Vietnam and Pakistan.

The two countries are vying for three seats on the commission along with Malaysia and South Korea.

In recent years, Human Rights Watch has complained that the growing number of nations on the 53-member commission with poor human rights records have been sticking together to cover up abuses.

The coalition has backed a proposal endorsed by over 100 governments to create a permanent United Nations democracy caucus. One of its goals would be to press for more democracies on the Human Rights Commission, said Ted Piccone, executive director of the Democracy Coalition Project.

[via Adrianne]

[I'm not picking on Pete here. He just happened to touch a particularly raw nerve on a sensitive subject and this post provides a good springboard for me to get some thoughts out on a no-win position I frequently find myself in]

Amazingly, a post over at A Perfectly Cromulent Blog involving abortion has turned rather dour. There is one issue on the subject I would like to address. Pete says in his post:

The Bush Administration is loaded to the gills with people who, as Sen. Clinton put it, "consider Roe v. Wade the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history." Even so, opponents have been backing away from the idea of an outright ban and instead have been lobbying for laws and regulations that gradually erode the right to choose. The whole frog in a pan of water concept keeps springing to mind.

Of course, none of this is news to anybody who follows the issue. And while the "mainstream" anti-abortion contingent insists they have no connections to violence or illegal activities, clinic workers and doctors continue to be harassed and threatened. The "pro-life" movement may have begun to adopt a friendlier façade, but it's still fueled by the same anti-woman rights agenda that's always lurked at its core. They can afford to appear magnanimous now that they have like-minded and equally intolerant allies in the White House, is all.

It just gets uglier in the comments section until Kevin finally chimes in:

I love to see that in the view of some commenters who would paint with such broad brushstrokes how evil I am for not being ardently pro-choice -- that I have secret agendas, that I want to wreck constitutionalism, that I cause abortions, that I secretly want to bomb abortion clinics and hurt workers, that I really want to enslave women, and the like.

Some people believe those things, I guess. But guess what, folks -- there are nuts in your midst too! Still, we probably won't get very far as a society if I just decide Ginger and Pete and Denny and the rest of you are all just a-holes because sometimes you might agree with nuts on specific issues. Will we?

To which Pete responds:

Kevin, the problem is that too many mainstream (non-"monster") pro-life supporters have allowed the fundamentalist hatemongers to control their side of the debate. Where are the moderate pro-lifers speaking out? Where are the pro-life web sites that don't scream about babykilers and Sodomites? I'm honestly curious, because I've never seen any.

I accept that there are people out there with moderate pro-life opinions, I've just met precious few of them. Like it or not, the present-day anti-abortion movement is being steered by the same extremists from whom you're seeking to distance yourself.

What more can "moderate" pro-lifers do, exactly? If we focus on specific issues, we're just trying to "chip away" at a woman's right to choose until there's nothing left. Abortion clinic bombers are condemned at every opportunity (even by the evil evil pro-life advocacy groups), but if we're pro-life we're accused of supporting them anyway. If the pro-life movement tones down its language, liberals claim to know "what we really mean" anyway as protecting the life of the fetus gets re-translated into animosity towards women. Whether it's style (language) or substance (more modest legislation proposals), any moderate voice is met with skepticism at best and contempt with a dose of projection at worst. Other than shooting the abortion doctor shooters, what's left?

Or, solely by virtue of disagreeing with you, are we extremists no matter what we do?

Pete says the following about the "Honors Student" bumper stickers:

I've always felt vague annoyance with those "My child is an Honors Student" bumper stickers. I tend to ascribe evil motives to most people, and I always suspected the parents sporting such decoration on their cars were engaging more in one-upmanship with other parents than actually expressing pride in their kids (hard to believe, I know). Now, since that's not enough, they're telling everyone their kids' names and at least one of the extracurricular activities in which they participate. Combine that with the Old English letters spelling out the last name that I've seen on other cars around town and you might as well put the kid out on the curb for pick up.

I have many fears as a parent. Very high among them is that I am going to have a little honors nerd (which would be great!) who is going to come home with one of those atrocious little bumper stickers and expect me to put that hideous thing on my bumper. How am I going to say "no" to that? Why not just tell come out and tell them "I don't have any pride whatsoever about my smart kid and I want to keep it from the entire world bwahahahaha" or, more realistically, "I'm proud of you, but if you think I'm actually going to sully my car with something that's about you, you're on crack."

The truth is that I'm not very much of a bumper sticker person. To date, I've only ever put four on all of the various automobiles I've had primary access to. One of them was the infamous "I wasn't born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could" bumper sticker you see a lot in Texas, one of them was a Virginia flag (Born a Virginian, always a Virginian), and two University of Houston stickers (the second I got right before I left Houston). Oh, and if you want to count the "Don't Give Me a Ticket Cause I Donated To Your Retirement Fund" stickers or the "I Live In TLV And Pay Your Taxes So Go Ticket Someone Just Passing Through" ones, then I guess I've had more than just the four mentioned. However, I did donate to the retirement association, don't want to get a ticket, and have to put that TLV sticker on my car as it's required in case it becomes a disaster zone and I need to get back to my house (no joke, that's what they're for... and to tip off TLVPD officers that I'm not just "passing through").

Other than the UH sticker I got just before I left Houston, I really have no desire to put any more on my car. I can't get a new "Got to Texas as fast as I could" sticker cause I'm not there anymore, don't need the Virginia one to balance it, and I doubt that the Idaho State Patrol care if I donated to the Texas State Patrol's charity. I don't have any desire to wear my politics on my car or put witty slogans on there that people will tailgate me so that they can read. As far as my kid being an honor student, I hope very much that getting into a good scholarship will make up for the insensitivity of littering my car with their scholastic accolaides.

There was one homemade bumper sticker made by a classmate who worked for Putt-Putt that I would love to put on my car if it was a dinosaur like my old `78 "Land Barge" Caprice or a wreck like the `87 "Dimple Darling" LaBaron: "I Won This Car At Putt-Putt Golf"

There are some new pictures for the upcoming Batman flick here and here. It's difficult to get a good look at the Batman costume (which is good, it should be difficult to get a good view of a Batman costume, Schumacher bedamned). But from what I can see, it's a good combination between the Burton/Schumacher franchise and the traditional Year One look touted in Batman: Year One and Legends of the Dark Knight.

Christian Bale looks phenomenal as Bruce Wayne. The pin-striped suit is perfect and gives me a great deal of faith in the direction of the film. A good Batman movie ought to have a solid rustic/30's feel even as it takes place in the present-day. The 1989 Batman movie did a good job of setting that stage with the 1930's-style party in which Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale first meet. One thing that Schumacker and Burton both did right was to give the franchise a timeless feel (albeit each did so in a very different way). It appears that Nolan will be doing the same.

Bale's Bruce Wayne is awfully young - and that's a good thing. While Burton's choice of Michael Keaton to play Batman in 1989 worked out surprisingly well, it presented a logistical problem of having Batman "start" his career in his late thirties. Starting Wayne off so young sets it up well to be a solid franchise that actually follows the career of the character in a more linear and concrete fashion (even if they have to replace Bale somewhere down the line). I haven't heard if this is, in fact, going to be the start of a rebooted franchise or not and the answer to that probably depends on the success of the movie.

The Scarecrow is an interesting choice for a villain. He's probably the best option left untapped by the previous four films and the nature of the villain provides endless opportunities. Also, using a second-tier villain helps keep the focus on Batman, which was something of a problem for 1989 when Batman was upstaged by the Joker. I've never seen Cillian Murphy before and, to be honest, he's awfully young for the part of a professor-turned-supervillian. More intriguing than Scarecrow is the apparent inclusion of Ken Watanabe as R'as al-Ghoul. I've never seen him, but have heard of him. I'm not sure if they're going to use him for a villain in the movie or not, but I'm definitely interested.

The rest of the cast looks interesting. I still think it's a dirty rotten shame that Tom Skerritt never got to play Jim Gordon (a part he was born for, in my opinion), but Gary Oldman provides possibilities (and besides that, Skerritt is too old to play a young Gordon). He probably wouldn't have been my first choice, though. He would have made a better Scarecrow. On the other hand, Oldman never ceases to surprise and is a very gifted actor. Giving the Henri Ducard part to Liam Neeson suggests that it will probably be a more significant role than I would have originally thought. I look forward to seeing Rutger Hauer, though I suspect his part (as always) will be small. Michael Caine is as good a selection for a younger Alfred as any. I'm not exactly excited about it, but not worried, either.

The biggest surprise, without a doubt, is to see Morgan Freeman listed as Lucius Fox. I think it's great that they're including Fox's character, and Freeman is a great actor, but I can't help but wonder what they're going to do with that.

Given the extraordinary cast, it looks like it could easily be the best Batman movie to date or, at the very least, make up for the travesty that was Batman & Robin.

I've never seen a X Worst Songs list where I didn't really like at least 1/5 of the songs listed.

This one is no different. One of these songs - and you'll never guess which and I'm not tellin' - was my favorite song for quite a while.

[via Kuff]

Bad Idea:

Texans would pay a $1 tax on most amusement events, whether it's a Dallas Cowboys game, a live music show or the ballet, under a provision tucked into the 370-page public school finance bill.

The bill, authored by Rep. Talmadge Heflin, R-Houston, includes a $1 flat tax on professional sports events, amusement parks and any live concert, reading or play, including events by not-for-profit groups. Movie tickets were left out.

Only performances for public schools, colleges or charity events would be exempt. The extra buck would earn an estimated $47 million for public schools.

One of the things that the Texas bar scene has going for it is low cover prices. You can't beat seeing a talented act up close for $7. Sure, $8 isn't a whole lot more, but it will probably cost more than $1 simply to process it in most places.

Amazingly, a photo-post over at Dean's World involving abortion has turned into a fruitless argument (I hesitate to even call it a "debate"). I did get a kick out of this comment, though:

It's a smart comment. But how do we do this? We have a society that is inundated with sexual images. It's in our ads, on our TV shows and movies, in our popular music.

We have 13 year old girls dressing like 2-bit streetwalkers, and their parents paying for the clothes. We have a generation of pre-adolescents thinking that oral sex isn't sex. After all, the president said so.

Then, when these kids are knocked up by 16, we lament that we should have "prevented unwanted pregnancies BEFORE conception can occur".

Call me cynical, but how can this happen in this society? After all, we must keep the government out of the bedroom, so any kind of government edict is definitely out.

The problem is that we seem to let everyone else into our bedrooms.

In the past I've gotten up-and-arms about young ladies dressing well above their age. As I've said before, I pity my daughter in that regard ("If it was good enough for the pilgrims, it's good enough for you!"). "2-bit streetwalkers" is a bit harsh, but I do frequently wonder what in tarnation parents are thinking. Heh, if I'm this conservative now I fear to see what I'll be like when I'm forty.

Regardless, Callahan brings up a really good point. Many of the same forces that advocate "open access" for abortions also scoff at modesty, call any standard of decency over the airwaves "censorship," and can't contain their laughter upon hearing the word "abstinence." That's not to say that such idiosyncheses are the sole province of the left and in fact the biggest cultural libertines actually view abortion as morally neutral (or even a positive), so I'm not trying to score any partisan points here.

My shift to social conservatism has come in large part to a recognition that if society encourages immoral behavior, immoral behavior with unfortunate results will then occur. I wouldn't call myself a social conservative, mind you, but I'm much moreso than I was a few years ago. So what's the solution? I'm opposed to most forms of government censorship, except that over the public airwaves. While I support dress codes for school, I don't feel that I have a right to legislate what other people wear in public. Sex sells, we live in a capitalist society, I don't know the solution, and I fear for our cultural and spiritual well-being.

Has anyone here ever won someone over with persistence? I mean that by sheer force-of-will and dogged determination, someone that was previously not interested in you actually went out with you. Inversely, has anyone here ever been won over with such persistence?

It's never happened to me and I've never seen it happen. Though I've been on both sides of that equation. It's weird to intrinsically know that persistence has never worked for you (or anyone around you) and yet feel obligated to just keep trying to show them how wrong they are in thinking that you two are not meant for one another.

Stove. Hot. Stove. Hot. Stove. Hot. I wonder how the stove feels?

But that's just my experience. I'd love to hear your stories on the matter.

New research apparently suggests that gender - as we know it - may be influenced more by biology and less by society than previously suspected in many circles:

The study followed 16 genetic males with a rare disorder called cloacal exstrophy. Children with this disorder are born without penises, or with very small ones, despite having normal male hormones, normal testes and XY-chromosome pairs. Fourteen of these children underwent early sex-reassignment surgery and were raised as girls by their parents, who were instructed not to inform them of their early medical histories.

The researchers assessed the gender identities and behaviors of these children when they were anywhere from 5 to 16 years old using a battery of measures including the Bates Child Behavior and Attitude Questionnaire and the Child Game Participation Questionnaire. Researchers also asked the children whether they categorized themselves as boys or girls.

Of the 14 children raised as females, three spontaneously declared they were male at the initial assessment. At the most recent follow-up, six identified as males, while three reported unclear gender identity or would not talk with researchers. The two participants raised as males from birth continued to identify as male throughout the study.

All of the participants exhibited male-typical behavior, such as rough-and-tumble play and having many male friends.

"If you are looking at the genetic and hormonal male, [sexual identity may be] not plastic at all," says Reiner. "And it appears to be primarily influenced by biology."

Or maybe not:

In a study published in the March 2003 issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (Vol. 88, No. 3), they investigated the gender identity of genetic girls born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Girls with this disorder do not produce enough of the hormone cortisol, which causes their adrenal glands to produce an excess of male sex hormones. As a result, they develop in a hormonal environment that's between that of typical boys and typical girls. These girls tend to have ambiguous genitals, and like the infants with cloacal exstrophy, they generally undergo surgery to remake their bodies in the mold of typical females.

The researchers recruited 43 girls with CAH ages 3 to 18 and assessed their gender-typical behaviors and gender identities using a nine-item questionnaire. One question, for example, asks the child if she would take the opportunity to be magically turned into a boy.

In comparison with a control group of normal girls, those with CAH answered questions in a more masculine way. However, when compared with hormonally normal girls who identified as tomboys, they scored closer to typical girls. And few, says Berenbaum, actually identified as male.

"They behave in some ways more like boys, but they self-identify as girls," she explains.

Science is rarely clean-cut. To an extent what it means to be a boy and girl beyond a basic self-identification is very susceptable to one's environment. A century ago being a woman meant something very different than it means today, not only in terms of a career (or lack thereof), but even what a woman is supposed to want. With the comparitively recent invention of the "new man" the same can be said for men. Many of the left will argue - until the day they die - that gender is a societal construct, but their arguments have lost pull even with other liberals. Similarly, western society has proven that the previously assigned "gender roles" where men were made to do this and that and women were made to do the other thing, have been thoroughly discredited.

So in a sense it's an academic argument at this point as we discuss where the ball is on the genetic 40-yard line or the societal 40-yard line. Regardless, it's fascinating stuff.

Newsday has a weird article about a South Dakota councilman that's planning to undergo a sex change:

RAPID CITY, S.D. -- After getting involved in a fight in the Legislature over a bill to ban civil unions, Tom Murphy decided to reveal a secret he had kept for four decades, through school, an Air Force career and then as a member of the City Council: He feels more like a woman than a man.

In fact, he plans to undergo a sex-change operation. Tom will become Marla.

"I hope to be happy," the never-married, 48-year-old retired master sergeant said in an interview. He said he feels as if he has deprived himself for a long time.

The fact that someone wants to undergo a sex change isn't particularly newsworthy. The fact that he's former military makes it interesting - as well as the fact that he lives in South Dakota.

But the really interesting thing about it is the positive reaction he's gotten. The article reads like an After School Special on tolerance and diversity.

Eel has been giving me a hard time because I've been buying and consuming some Easy Cheeze since I got here. She goes on and on about how cheese is supposed to be solid or something like that. Blah, blah, blah.

Well, she no longer has any right to say anything. I was getting a snack yesterday and saw some peanut butter out. Mmmmh, peanut butter and crackers!

The peanut butter was in liquid form!!!

Worse than that, it's apparently supposed to be that way! You're supposed to stir it or something and then it becomes more solid. It's low fat and one of the ways they cut down on the fat (or is it carbs? whichever) is getting rid of the enamel that holds it together.

I think I'll just hold on to my Easy Cheeze, thanks!

(and never, ever eat peanut butter ever again)

For reasons I won't get in to at the moment, I was looking around at law schools across the country and came across a cool website that has a database of law schools. I was looking at various law schools in various states such as Idaho, Texas, and Louisiana. When looking at Louisiana's, I immediately knew something was missing.



It took me only a second to realize that it didn't list Tulane! How could any law school database not list Tulane?! So I ran it by alphabetical order and it turned out that Tulane was, in fact, there.



New York?! I know two people that attend Tulane law school (Eel's sister and Heidi) and both, to my knowledge, live in Louisiana.

So I clicked on Tulane

Tulane University

6329 Freret St., John G. Weinmann Hall
New Orleans, LA 70118
(504) 865-5930

That sounds right. New York?!

Bar Exam Statistics** 2002 2001
State in which most graduates took bar exam: NY LA

And so the mystery was solved!

Sort of. Why are people from Tulane taking their bar exams in New York?

It reminded me of something that Heidi recently said on a recent post about law school rankings:

Heidi wrote:
Tulane took a dive from first tier (45th, I think) to second (56th, I think), and we students are none too pleased. (Particularly those who intend to work in already flooded markets outside Louisiana--NY, L.A., etc.--because the rankings, for better or for worse, often determine how far down the student ranks employers will look when selecting for interviews and such. Top tier schools=top 50 students, plus ~20%, are "worthy" of interviews; second tier schools=only the top 50, if that. Or so I've heard.)

So how does this effect my day-to-day life?

Well, for one thing, on the slow modem connection here it took roughlyfifteen minutes out of said day-to-day life in order to track down the information.

As near as I can tell, that's about it.

Well, it turns out that the slumhole has more applicants than they have rooms available. Or at least rooms with a bathroom, which is kind of what I'm aiming for here.

The good news is that the "roommates wanted" section of the paper has gone from 0 to 3 ads in the course of a week. That's actually preferable to anything else because it's cheaper than a regular apartment, safer than the slumhole, and hopefully would give me an immediate friend in a town where I have none (except, of course, for the girl who brung me here).

I called one of the numbers and got ahold of a pleasent young lady who gave the impression of being - there's no way to put this nicely - as dumb as a rock.

RAW: How big is the room?
Rockgirl: How big is what room?
RAW: The room for rent...
Rockgirl: About half as big as my room.
RAW: How big is your room?
Rockgirl: Is that any of your business?
RAW: Well, it is if that's the standard by which I'm going to measure my room.
Rockgirl: Huh?
RAW: If the open room is half as big as your room and I don't know how big your room is, then I don't know how big the open room is, do I?
Rockgirl: ...
RAW: Well?
Rockgirl: I don't know. Do you?

[...]

RAW: Can I get cable?
Rockgirl: There's cables all over the place.
RAW: Okay, are any of them for cable television?
Rockgirl: I don't know. There are a lot of cables down here.

You get the idea.

I went by there Saturday morning and saw the place. I figured that way I could see for myself how big the room was and what kind of cables there were "all over the place." It turns out that she's not nearly as stupid in person as she is on the phone. Maybe she was just really nervous? I really don't know.

It turns out the room is roughly 12'x8', which is pretty small. It's a basement apartment and I hit my head no less than four times (which is a clever way of saying that I hit my head four times). It turns out that one of the cables was indeed for cable television, except that it was oddly a male connection coming out of the wall. The place was only $200 a month, which isn't bad. There was also the added benefit that even in person I felt confident that she didn't have the neurons firing to screw me over.

I went ahead and applied for the room. The application process here is apparently both more and less in-depth than it is in Houston. They actually call your personal references! They also don't bother calling in about your rental history or credit history, though.

I got back to Eel's place at around noon and talked to her landlord, Shelly. Eel has a basement apartment and Shelly does her laundry down here. Shelly and her husband have a side-business of renting out properties and so she told me, with good authority, if I were to wait a couple more weeks a lot of rooms would be opening up because college students would be leaving. I decided that $200 a month for a closet apartment with an extremely religious dimwit that has moral objections to alcohol and admits to being very anal retentive might be something worth passing up on.

So it looks like I'm going to be here for another couple of weeks.

There used to be a fault line running through Seabrook. Not literally a geological one or a metaphorical one between rich and poor, but rather a fault line of wires between GTE and Southwestern Bell. SWB handled most of the calls for the Houston area, but GTE handled most of it for Galveston. Seabrook was caught in the middle of the two, with some having GTE and others SWB. Unfortunately, I was on the GTE side of the divide and unless you got a "metro" line you were unable to call Houston. Or, for that matter Pasadena. In fact, to give you an idea, it before 911 came long it was long distance to call the fire department. It was long distance to call our own cell phone. As GTE became Verizon and SWB became SBC, the line fell and the two are nearly interchangeable now.

As my faithful readers know, I bought a cell phone a couple of days ago. I was reasonably pleased with the purchase until I went apartment hunting. I couldn't remember the phone number for my new phone, so I decided to just call it from Eel's landline.

It's a long distance phone call.

I bought the stupid thing about twenty blocks or so from here down the same road. I started getting flashbacks from 1996, when I couldn't call girls from ACME and was at an inherent disadvantage when it came to pursuing the female-types. Except that in 2004 I don't have to worry about getting a girl, I just have to worry that once I get my own place my girl won't be able to call me!

I went down to the cell phone people and talked to them. They said that my prefix was new and that Omni-Touch (yeah, the same one I was looking for work with and apparently the handler of the phone system up here) was dragging their feet to get their system to recognize it. My phone number ending in 0534 it made sense. They said it would get fixed within the next couple of weeks. Then Eel will be able to call me. So all's good, right?

Well, except that I'm looking for both an apartment and a job. So what exactly am I supposed to tell a potential employer? My phone number is 208-555-0534, but it may tell you that it's long distance. Don't worry, though, because it's not. Just dial the "1", pretend it's not a long distance call and just trust me, someone that you don't even know and that is already asking you for something (job or apt.). I'm sure that would go over really well. The only other option is to continue using Eel's landline. Except that I explicitly got the cell phone so that I wouldn't have to do that. It also presents a problem because I have to stay offline on any time or day that I'm expecting a call.

I calmly voiced my concerns with Cellco and they were kind enough to hand me a cough drop for my throat, increasingly sore from yelling - I mean, from calmly voicing my concerns. They said that it was only a problem with a nearby town. Except that's not where Eel lives. So then they assured me that it wasn't a problem. To demonstrate this, they called from their location and to rub salt in the would, said, "If it's not long distance from here, it can't be long distance from your place twenty blocks from here, can it?"

Except that it is. They're not going to charge me for the cell phone until they get the problem fixed. Except, of course, in their eyes the problem is fixed. So they agreed not to charge me until I contacted them. While theoretically that means that I could have a cell phone for free for as long as I don't call them, I'm too honest for that and it helps me not a bit with the job and apartment hunt.

Meanwhile, I'm under contract. I'll go ahead and give them a couple weeks before contacting the Better Business Bureau because I realize their hands are tied.

But really, what are the odds?!