Very rarely do I make it a point to unearth hypocrisy on the far left, but this is too much for me to bear:

Rep. Jim McDermott, who represents the coffee houses of liberal downtown Seattle, was treated like a rock star at the Democratic convention. Everywhere he went, he was recognized as the man whom filmmaker Michael Moore threw Bush Bashing softballs to in “Fahrenheit 9/11.” He was especially popular with a group college Democrats, who sobered up one morning when he told them: “Everybody in this room who is 17 years old should know that the likelihood of a draft in a second Bush administration is almost a certainty.”

If a military draft is imminent, it won't be because of George W. Bush or his administration. The only calls for a draft have come from critics of the administration and people on the left like Mr. McDermott. No, not like Mr. McDermott, but rather the congressman himself:

It's true, there is a proposal to revive the draft. Only not from Bush — from Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott.

In fact there he was on CNN last Friday, arguing that Americans aged 18 to 26 should be conscripted into two-year terms in either the military or a civilian service.

"I think every man and woman ought to be subject to service in this country, just like the Israelis or a lot of other countries," he said.

McDermott and five other Democrats first proposed a draft before the invasion of Iraq. His aim was to desanitize the coming war, to get everyone to confront that "going to war means people dying."

Contract? They don't care about no stinkin' contract:

The three-judge panel ruled Thursday that the deal between Joel McKiernan and Ivonne Ferguson -- in which McKiernan donated his sperm and would not be obligated to pay any support -- was unenforceable because of "legal, equitable and moral principles."

Despite an agreement that appeared to be a binding contract, the father is obligated to provide financial support, the court decided.

"It is the interest of the children we hold most dear,"' wrote Senior Judge Patrick Tamalia.

This is nothing new. The basic argument is that someone has to help pay for the child (since the mother can't) and since the father is around, he's nominated for the job. While it seems unfair to the child that he not be afforded the income of two parents, a contract is a contract is a contract in my view.

One ethics professor in the article suggests that this could have repercussions for anonymous donors through clinics. Many feminists don't have a problem with the complete double-standard here because sperm donors are essential to a woman's right to get pregnant without needing a father. But when the mother realizes that she made a mistake and needs some financial help, they're perfectly willing to turn around and argue that it's all about the child instead of anonymous donations, where it's all about the mother.

The article is poorly written, though. The mother suggests that there was no contract, but the article says that the contract was found to be void. So I'm not sure if the existence of the contract is the subject of the debate or whether it's legality is. It appears, if I'm reading the article correctly, that the court basically said that it didn't care if there was a contract or not because the contract would be void.

Regardless, I've read cases where live sperm donors have had their contracts nullified by the courts and I have yet to read of a case where the contract was upheld.

[via Matt Margolis]

... and here it is. The results:

1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%)
2. President George W. Bush - Republican (65%)
3. Michael Badnarik - Libertarian (57%)
4. Senator John Kerry (MA) - Democrat (45%)
5. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (OH) - Democrat (42%)
6. Rep. Dick Gephardt (MO) - Democrat (40%)
7. Gov. Howard Dean (VT) - Democrat (40%)
8. Senator Joe Lieberman (CT) - Democrat (36%)
9. Senator John Edwards (NC) - Democrat (36%)
10. Michael Peroutka - Constitution Party (35%)
11. Rev. Al Sharpton - Democrat (22%)
12. David Cobb - Green Party (22%)
13. Ralph Nader - Independent (22%)
14. Fmr. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (IL) - Democrat (18%)
15. Dr. John Hagelin - Natural Law (17%)
16. Gen. Wesley Clark - Democrat (15%)
17. Lyndon H. LaRouche - Democrat (10%)
18. Walt Brown - Socialist Party (8%)

The only real surprises here are that Kucinich is as high as he is and Clark is as low as he is.

Does anyone know of any other such quizzes?

"I've always refrained from putting political stickers on my car with one exception (Orlando Sanchez's first run for mayor), not because I believe all Democrats are bad people and likely to do mean things, but because there are nutjobs all over the political spectrum who might key a car with a sticker they don't like if they were drunk or angry, and I love my Jeep more than I love any of the silly b@stards pursuing careers in politics." -Kevin Whited

The University of Texas is planning to institute an honor code to, among other things, tackle the growing nation-wide problem of cheating:

Established in 1842, the University of Virginia's honor code is among the nation's oldest. Under it, a student must act appropriately when they are in ''Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and elsewhere at any time when he identifies himself as a University of Virginia student in order to gain the reliance and trust of others."

But the university continues to see high levels of lying, cheating and stealing, said Meghan Sullivan, who chairs the Honor Committee.

Last year, the committee investigated 72 cases, including nine that resulted in expulsions from its 23,000-student campus.

[...]

In surveys done over the past decade of more than 14,000 students at 50 colleges, McCabe found that 75 percent of the students had cheated. He also discovered that schools with honor codes had 25 to 33 percent fewer incidents of serious cheating on exams.

''If you read as many surveys as I have, there is no way they don't have an impact," said McCabe, who worked on the surveys with Duke University's Center for Academic Integrity.

More colleges are learning that honor codes have "a very positive impact" and are introducing them under the leadership of their students, McCabe said.

''Honor codes should be made a student's responsibility — not an administrator's. Through peer pressure, they really give students appropriate ways of behavior," he said.

[...]

The University of Houston has an "academic honesty policy" that encourages professors to ask students to show identification before taking exams or have them sign a pledge that they will not cheat.

I vaguely recall them asking for ID in some of the auditorium classes in my freshman year, but I have no recollection of ever signing any such pledge. While I never cheated at UH, I sincerely doubt any such pledge would have stopped me if that's what I decided to do. Chances are I signed the pledge in between signing up for classes and getting my parking pass.

I'd imagine that such pledges could be extremely useful in smaller institutions where "peer pressure" exists, but the University of Texas has the largest student body on any single campus in the country at 52,000. While there is a vague sense of student comraderie at such institutions, they are simply too big and unwieldy to have "peer pressure" for anything. An individual college or major could probably have more success than this university-wide attempt. While a UH pledge wouldn't have had any effect on me, an Honors College or College of Technology effect might have, since I actually knew my classmates, saw them on a regular basis, and therefore might have felt "beholden" to them to one degree or another. I felt no such obligation to some random junior art history major or sophomore business major. Outside of athletic or campus events and classes with hundreds of people in them during our freshman and sophomore years, for most intents and purposes we were going to entirely different universities and had little in common.

Even Texas A&M, which has almost cult-like solidarity, hasn't had any success with their honor code.

The other aim of UT's pledge deals with student social interaction, which at this point is two vague to comment on.

An American Coup d'État? [via Lex]
If an eccentric Marine hero was to be believed, there was a very serious attempt at a coup to overthrow Roosevelt in the 1930's. This History Today article from 1995 explains the details and wonders and speculates why this story was never fully explored.

Boys "R" Us [via Dustbury]
Some graphic artist for Toys Backwards-R Us was apparently really bored and decided to have some fun. It reminds me of the whole scandal with Disney movies. Lion King in particular where the feathers spell out the word "sex" for a brief moment. I thought it was a hoax or that the righty-tighties were delirious, but we watched it over and sociology and sure enough there it was. Beware the bored animator or graphic artist!

Anti-Bush Graphiti defaces UH campus {Beware: Pop-ups}
Suspect in anti-Bush vandalism jailed {Beware: Chronicle article}
I was going to put this in a separate post about political activity and lack thereof at UH, but it turns out that the vandal apparently wasn't a student. He put up the picture to the right on various university buildings. In the Coogfans forum (with the pop-ups) they're also talking about some cameras they put on the campus parking lot. They've been adding security measures on top of security measures to combat UH's unsafe reputation. While the problem is more perception than reality, perception is important: warnings about security was one of the reasons that Eel dismissed the interest that UH expressed in her.

Kansas group monitors sermons
Preach it, my (Big) Brother!
On one hand, I do understand that legally tax-exempt religious organizations are barred from making political endorsements. On the other hand, religious organizations inherently have core beliefs on social morality (conservative churches) and economic justice (liberal churches) and the idea of figuratively taping the mouth or snitching on religious organizations whose ideas you disagree with is troubling. I believe this as firmly with religious leaders that support Democrats as I do those that support Republicans.

U-M Detroit Arab American Study portrays a complex population [via Judd]
As one might surmise from the title, the University of Michigan (at Detroit?) did a survey of Arab Americans in the Detroit area and found some interesting results and some expected ones. Relatively few (15%) have personally had a "bad experience" post-9/11 relating to their ethnicity despite the broad definition (included name-calling) and over twice as many (33%) have recieved explicit support. Lower numbers of in the ethnic community support our adventures in the Middle East, but higher numbers have faith in law enforcement. One thing to keep in mind is that a minority of those polled (42%) were Muslims, so the controls could vary pretty wildly between Christian and Muslim Arabs (and Childeans). You can read the PDF file here.

Virtual Social Climbing
Psychology Today takes a look at invitation-only websites like Friendster and Orkut and finds it lacking. The only way you can really "validate" people in an online networking service is to interview them personally. Except that such things cost money, which create barriers, which make the pool of applicants smaller, which makes it less useful.

Every day I try to make time to go up and down Red Hill twice. Believe it or not, it's kind of a workout. So anyway, during one trip I decided to take some pictures and post them on the blog. You can click on any picture to see a 1024/768 copy.

[Read More!]

I'm working on a new feature with the blog. The bad news is that it requires me to go over all of my old posts and find references to various people I've mentioned.

The person I've mentioned most on this blog is Kevin, through various linking and talking about going to shows and hanging out with him and Callie. There are over 150 posts that mention him.

Next is Audrey, who has about 75.

But the worst so far has been Eel. Since I've only known her for half of the life of this blog, it shouldn't be a problem. But Nucleus's search feature doesn't go by "whole word only"... which means that any time I say a word with an e-e-l in there, it shows up.

I'd just like to say that I talk about my fEELings way too dang much on this blog.

In about 250 posts or so.

Update: Okay, Ora was hell also. I mention the burntORAngereport, talk about corpORAtions and such things a lot. 400 times to be precise. That's over 1-in-5 posts.

"Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don’t remember anything. My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn’t so much like a new family as it’s like he sets up a franchise…What you see at Fight Club is a generation of men raised by women…My father never went to college so it was really important I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn’t know. When I got a job and turned twenty- five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn’t know so he said, get married. I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need."
Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk

My neighbor Landis is a very fertile guy. As near as I can pick up from what he's told me, this is his story:

Born was born and raised in Gate City. By sixteen he dropped out of school, got a GED, and moved out of his parents house and in with his pregnant girlfriend, also estranged from her family. He decided to be all that he could be and joined the army. While in the service, he picked up another girlfriend and a son. He later reconciled with his first girlfriend, but not before getting into a fight with her then-boyfriend, getting arrested for battery, and being discharged from the Army. Before his second daughter was born, they broke up. He shacked up with a new girlfriend and shortly after his second daughter was born, his new girlfriend concieved another. He just turned 22 and has four children by three different mothers.

One of the more interesting things about his story is how non-chalantly he told me about it. To him, it seems practically normal. He only explained it to me when talking about the two mothers of his children, how one was dead-set on reuniting and the other was busy trying to fix him up with someone. Neither request child support and in fact the latter picks up his grocery bill. I met her this week and she seems like a great girl. I also met two of his daughters, both of whom are absolutely beyond precious.

What's funny is that seeing him play with his daughters while his ex-girlfriend looks on looks as positively normal as he describes it. If I didn't know the back story, I'd swear that they're a family.

In an odd way, they're the only family they've got.

You speak eloquently and have seemingly read every
book ever published. You are a fountain of
endless (sometimes useless) knowledge, and
never fail to impress at a party.
What people love: You can answer almost any
question people ask, and have thus been
nicknamed Jeeves.
What people hate: You constantly correct their
grammar and insult their paperbacks.


What Kind of Elitist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Federal Court OKs Ban on Sale of Sex Toys [via Lex]
I object to the law under nearly every principle except Constitutionality. If Alabamans want to be Alabamans, that's left to Alabamans. As I've said before, the notion that the Constitution protects sexual activity is absurd. There is no privacy amendment.

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? [via Kevin]
New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent says "yes." While I consider the notion of overall media bias to the left to be debatable and worthy of discussion (I fall into the "liberal bias exists" camp), the New York Times is about as "Fair and Balanced" as Fox News, which is to say it isn't at all (though their bias, of course, leans in opposing directions). While Kevin chalks up the bias as more intentional and Okrent says it's more passive, I'm not particularly sure it matters. The point of the matter is that it's there and everything that is read in the NYT ought to be read through that lens (which is not to say it should be disregarded entirely).

Right Stuff, Wrong Staff: John Kerry Visits NASA and Blows a Photo Op
NASA Ordered to Pull Kerry Photos Offline
SpaceRef has been following the non-story of Understandably Goofy John Kerry in the Ultra-Cool Rocket Hatch.

Unhappy Workers Should Take Prozac --Bush Campaigner [via Warliberal]
Speaking on non-issues, this applies as well. The title makes it sound as though it was some sort of policy position or public defense of accusations against the Administration that the new jobs being created aren't as good as the ones that were lost. Rather, it was a private comment made by an assistant on a pay phone that was overheard by a reporter. I make a lot of wry remarks to friends and coworkers and they're indicative of nothing.

The Case for George W. Bush (i.e., what if he's right?) [via Knapp]
Tom Junod makes a unique "vote for the asshole" argument, the asshole being the sitting Commander-in-Cheif. I was going to give this it's own post, but that would mean quoting from it and I kept finding more and more from it I wanted to quote. I disagree with the Bush-is-an-asshole premise so it doesn't sway me one way or the other. But it's an extraordinarily well-written argument that has at least made Knapp think.

Andrew Sullivan on John Kerry's Nomination Speech
Sullivan has apparently decided that Kerry is, contrary to his earlier column about being the conservative candidate, a liberal candidate. Imagine that.

A year or two ago, I had an odd charge appear on my credit card bill. It was only a couple of bucks so I really didn't care except that I wanted to make sure that I wasn't getting charged a monthly fee for something that I didn't want. Hadn't happened with this company before, but better safe than sorry. What followed was the most excruciating half-hour I'd spent on the phone in a long while. I wanted to ask a question, I wanted to get the answer, and I wanted to get on with my day. Instead, I spent 30 minutes listening to one ad after another for a service that I didn't want because of a mistake on my credit card bill. By the time it was done, I wanted to send them an invoice for the time they took from me.

It's always good to learn something about yourself. What I learned that day is that I have little patience for my time being wasted on the phone with sales pitches that I don't want when, unlike with a telephone solicitor, I can't just hang up. I'm a captive audience. Though I didn't work for OmniStar TV for very long, I learned something about myself. I learned what I'm not willing to do for money.

I had always assumed that I was easy-going and capitalistic enough to do just about anything legal. I figured that I wouldn't have a problem working for Big Bad Tobacco, endorsing sexual deviance, or whatever made me a quick and honest buck. It wasn't that I was immoral, I just wasn't, you know, up tight. I am not generally inclined to tell people how to live their lives. I have my ideas of what a proper life consists of, but as long as they're only harming themselves, no harm no foul, right? Well, not so much.

One of the things I take most seriously is financial responsibility. Anna and I almost broke up over a $3,000 debt that she had foolishly accumulated. Another person's $30,000 debt was almost a deal-breaker for me. I am big on money management and people spending their money wisely. OmniStar is a good company with a great product. Though sales was not my primary job, I had no problem selling the product. What I did have a problem with, however, was selling the product to people who couldn't afford it and didn't want. It wasn't sales that got me, it was retention.

Some guy calls in and says that he wants to downgrade from the Caviar Plan to the more sensible Filet Mignon Plan. I can tell that the guy is not particularly educated and I can hear machines running in the background. One guy, I kid you not, was calling while on break working at a fast food joint. He's obviously a guy that doesn't need the Caviar Plan. The only people that need 45 movie channels are those with families (he only had one reciever activated) and/or those that can for whatever reason clearly afford it (he was $200 in the hole and hadn't been current since Clinton was in office). So he's calling in to cancel a plan that he doesn't need. He didn't end up downgrading.

Or I'll take another case of a guy that lost his job and needs to downgrade to the basic Meat & Taters Plan. He might want to cancel altogether, but for now he wants to try to basic channels. He loves movies, but he just can't afford it. It was my job to convincingly read from a script that told him (just like the fast food guy) that he did need this programing package that he could not afford. In my zealousness, I even pointed out that he'd have more time to watch movies since he doesn't have a job. I said it in a half-joking and friendly manner, but he realized I had a point.

Like the fast food guy, I convinced him to hold on to the package that he didn't need for a price he couldn't afford. There's a reason that companies upsell: it works. Like when I called the credit card company some time ago, they didn't call to hear a sales pitch but because they needed to hear me out before I could make the requested changes to the account.

Ethically speaking, I can't make decisions for other people. Nor am I particularly responsible for the decisions that people make. If I hadn't tried to upsell him, someone else would have. The unemployed guy said, "Thanks, Buddy" when we got off the phone. He had nothing to thank me for and I was not his buddy.

After a couple of experiences like that, I became incapable of reselling. I couldn't do it. I deviated from the almighty script. Once you start doing that, you put yourself in a position to be fired. I was let go from my last two employers and I couldn't afford to wait it out and be let go again.

So, just when I was starting to get really good at the job, I quit.

I'd be lying if I said there weren't other reasons. My employment there was temporary from the outset. I even chose the schedule so that I could look for a better job. Unfortunately, the schedule didn't leave me with enough time to do that and I was missing potential leads. Lastly, I would have had to leave anyway because I had a trip planned during a blackout week (no absenses allowed).

But mostly it was reselling an unnecessary (if nice) product to people that called with the intention of financially doing the right thing.

While commenting on dollar stores over at No Girl Friday, I realized that while it's great to save money on some things, on others it's never worth it. Three things come to mind: Cheese, batteries, and toilet paper.

What're your "spoil yourself" items?

Last night, Dundee was waiting for his girlfriend to get back with his car. She had his cell phone, so I loaned him my phone to give her a call. She didn't answer.

RAW: Hey Dundee, your girlfriend called last night. She said the car broke down. I was out and I left the phone here, so I didn't get the message till this morning.
Dundee: Yeah, she told me about that. I told her if she doesn't again I'll beat the shit out of her.
RAW: ...
Dundee: So tell me if she does it again.
RAW: It'll be a cold day in Hell... I gotta go. Talk to you later, man.
Dundee: Seeya, Bud.

Guess my vibes were off the mark.

He told me the other day that he wasn't going to be in the complex long because he was going to be buying a house soon. Something tells me there's another reason he may not be around long.

Surprise surprise, he made friends with Strang pretty quickly. At least that mean's he's not a racist.

That puts him ahead of Corrupt. That's not a pseudonym, the dude goes by the name "Corrupt." Corrupt is an ex-con hobo who's free trips via Union Pacific were put to a halt when he was caught on his way to Oregon. They dropped him off at the next stop (here) and told him they'd have him arrested if they caught him again. He lives at the shelter down the road and hung out here from time to time to soothe his extroverted tendencies. He's pretty popular because he hands out beer like it's candy. He goes into the local grocery store with a duffel bag or a suitcase (!!!) and shoplifts in a pretty flagrant fashion (suitcase!). "Albertson's has a sale," he says with a wink and a smile.

He also said, not realizing that (black resident) Snowflake (who was sitting outside her apartment across the way), "I fucking hate niggers. I know that ain't right, but it sure as hell ain't wrong."

Free beer wasn't enough to keep him in our good graces since. He hasn't been back since. I'm hoping that has something to do with Albertson's.

The Conservative Party -- Kerry's Democrats
I've figured for the past month or so, Sullivan was going to endorse John Kerry for president sometime in September. While Sullivan doesn't endorse Kerry in his latest column, he sets the stage for it perfectly by defining Kerry as the conservative and Bush as the liberal. He starts off by defining conservatism as "against change" and liberal as "for it," but outside of foreign policy he later defines conservatism as "agreeing with Andrew Sullivan" and liberalism as "disagreeing with Andrew Sullivan."

Kerry Iraq Documentary [via Chris]
A damning 12 minutes of footage of John Kerry's various takes on the wars in Iraq. Getting... headache... miss... Howard... Dean...

Morrison v. DeLay
Morrison Poll Numbers
Greg and Kuff are pretty excited about some new polls that have challenger Morrison down by only ten points. The problem as I see it is that ever after the ethics investigation and so forth, DeLay is still at nearly 50%. I'm not sure it can go down much further than that. Their best chance to take down DeLay is proving enough in court to make him resign or make Republicans want to distance themselves so far from him he'll leap over to punditry or (more likely) lobbying.

Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior [via Judd]
Bush is apparently a raving lunatic because a psychologist that never treated him says so and he's taking medication because someone told them so, an unnamed aide confirmed it, and they actually know the name of Bush's physician. Oooooooh!

The 100 Years (Bias) War [via Lex]
Rhetorica reproduces a report on media bias and adds some interesting thoughts. It's a pretty fair assessment, though Rhetorica's criticisms of it are worth noting.


My brief conversation with a McIntosh apple
My second brief conversation with a McIntosh apple
My third brief conversation with a McIntosh apple
My fourth brief conversation with a McIntosh apple
My fifth brief conversation with a McIntosh apple
I'm not prone to eating apples, but Ida eaten that sucker by now. Nothing's worse than tart-mouth fruit.

Belief in hell boosts economic growth, Fed says

The St Louis Fed drew on work by outside economists who studied 35 countries, including the United States, European nations, Japan, India and Turkey and found that religion shed some useful light.

"In countries where where large percentages of the population believe in hell, there seems to be less corruption and a higher standard of living," the St. Louis Fed said in its July quarterly review.

For instance, 71 percent of the U.S. population believe in hell and the country boasts the world's highest per capita income, according to the 2003 United Nations Human Development Report and 1990-1993 World Values Survey.

Ireland, not far behind the United States in terms of income, likewise has a healthy fear of a nether world with 53 percent of the population acknowledging hell's existence.

The basic argument is that a belief in Hell is inversely corrolated with corruption, so the more people believe in Hell, the less corrupt a nation is overall. Since corruption drags an economy, the less corruption the more efficiently an economy operates. These ideas are not particularly new and were in fact advanced by, among others, Adam Smith himself.

An interesting thing to note is that economic success is not corrolated with religiosity itself, but whether that religion believes in Hell. What's even more interesting is that this happens despite an inverse corrolation between education level among individuals and religiosity and that church attendance and economic growth within a society are also inversely related. So it's not a matter of church attendance any societal benefits that come with that (increased community interaction, for instance), but squarely on Hell.

You can read the actual report here.

Tristan in Australia objects to the gratuitous Fourth of July celebration in Victoria:

Really, I wouldn’t’ve given a damn if there were half a dozen American flags and half a dozen Australian flags (actually, I might've found it kinda cute; at worst I would've seen it as an Australian celebration of freedom and democracy and what the US have done for us). In fact, if there had been one very prominant Australian flag and a majority of American flags around it, that would’ve been fine (e.g. in the middle and a size larger). After all, today is a very special day for them and incidentally for the entire world, and I doubt Australia’s current democratic nature has nothing to do with America’s (just look at the Senate, or the organisers of the Eureka Stockade). Flying the Australian flag is simply appropriate respect on Australian soil. I call it manners and etiquette, but I realise a lot of people lack them these days. If nothing else, isn’t Australia a democracy like America? Don’t we deserve to celebrate freedom and democracy here, every day?

The same sort of thing happens in Texas during Cinco de Mayo, though I never thought enough about it to be offended or upset about it.

There are, it would seem, unbelievers:

If you would ask any schoolchild how many states there are in the United States, you will get the same answer: 50. Fifty states in the Union. It is simply an accepted "fact." If you would disagree with this supposed "fact," you would be branded insane or worse.

However, mounting evidence shows that there are in fact only 49 states in the US, and the "state" of Idaho is a baseless myth.

We have been trying to distribute and publish this information for over *two years*, but our scholarship has not been given any respect. We have been censored, vilified, ridiculed and spat upon by the "traditional" geographers and historians, but WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED!

All we ask is that the existence of the state of Idaho be debated, as every other historical and geographic "fact" can be debated. Time after time, our opponents have refused to debate us on the FACTS. This alone should tell you something about the people who support the "existence" of this "43rd state."

Please read the following evidence VERY CAREFULLY, and you will be astonished at the veracity of our cause.

I suppose my existence would count as "proof." Except that when I was first planning the move and before I publicized it, I briefly considered keeping my location undisclosed by using a fictitious name for the state (Deseret, the name the LDS gave for a proposed state that eventually became parts of OR, CA, NV, AZ, ID, UT, WY, CO, & NM), the name of a state proposed by the . I even created a map of sorts for the fictitious state, including Capital City (Salt Lake City, Utah), renamed universities and political structures, and so on. I figured that would be a bit much for a mostly true-blog so I never used it and have instead just declined to name the city in which I live. But creating a state sure was fun! Yes, I'm a nerd, what of it?

Anyway, point being, I made up Idaho for all you (except Eel) know.

[via Tristan]

Cate Edwards must be making quite the impression at the Democratic National Convention. I'm getting a ton of hits with her name on it and two people have commented on this post, voting for Cate over the Bush girls.

Michael Williams on the John Kerry picture below:

Lots of people seem to think John Kerry looks silly in a clean suit, but I don't see what the fuss is about. That's what people wear when they're around expensive and fragile equipment. Big deal.

Some commenters say that it's not the clean suit, but John Kerry's grin.

Dude, if I was in a real live rocket hatch, do you have any idea how goofy my grin would be?!?!

Trust me, you have no idea!

I dunno which is worse, Republicans trying to make hay out of it or Democrats that are angry about it.

Dude, a rocket hatch!!!!

The Height Gap [via MoN]
Fascinating account of comparative heights. Europe is growing taller and America is not. Japan has, in fact, almost caught up! It also explains the relevence of the numbers. The author tries to tie height to income variation (read: socialism), but admits late in the column that there's little to back him up. A lot of it comes down to general health, where the US's standing is not so good.

2004 Florida Voting Machine [via Lex]
Well, I suppose that's one way of making sure "every vote counts."

High-Stakes Convention: Poll Shows Support for Kerry Weakens on Issues and Attributes [via Jen]
I'm only linking to this as a follow-up to a previous RAW Links where the numbers were considerably more even. Though the overall race is tied, Bush is presently polling better on the issues (Bush 3, Tied 3, Kerry 0, a month ago it was 0-2-4) and on personal attributes (5-1-0 compared to 3-1-2 a month ago) (note: I conservatively use a 5-point margin-of-error instead of the poll's 3 point MOE). Standard disclaimer: There's a long way to go between now and November and the numbers are pretty versitile.

They weren't wearing black ties and white shirts....
In the comments section of one of my posts on LDS, Chris said that he'd be posting on his experiences with Mormons and he's made good on his word. An interesting couple of coincidences arise. First, an OmniStar coworker that answered some of my questions about LDS was also the son of a Presbyterian minister, though he was disowned after his conversion. His father's quote about how LDS gets converts is also exactly how my coworker was converted in the midst of his parents' divorce. The second coincidence is how similar his story is to the priceless Mormon episode of SouthPark.

Baby Cons in the Mist [via Amanda]
Jonah Goldberg tackles the idolatry revolving around the youth vote, coins a new phrase, and explains his secret plan to win an economic debate using funny armpit noises.

In case you missed it, Amanda Strassner is back

Who's That Pickin' a Banjee
I haven't picked up 1100 Springs latest, but Jack Sparks has and he can't stop listening to it. 1100's previous effort, Straighter Line, is one of the 10 most solid CD's that I've picked up since getting in to Texas Country. I need to look under my change for some money to get their newest, Bandwagon.

Eel is on an OB rotation, which is one of the most demanding rotations a medical resident can have (30 hours on, 18 off, 30 hours on, 18 off...). As such, she called to ask that I pay her phone bill so that she wouldn't be assessed any late fees. I took one of her phone bills from the mail slot and called the telco's 1-800 number to make the payment. I wasn't positive that I'd be able to make the payment since I wasn't the account holder, a family member, or a spouse. I hoped that there was something on the bill that I could recite in order to demonstrate that I was making the payment with the consent of the account holder. The account number was the phone number with three numbers and a letter after it, but the customer service rep never asked for it. I did tell him the exact amount owed before he told me, which may have helped demonstrate that I was at least familiar with the account. But other than that, I could have made a payment without the account holder's knowledge.

It was official policy at OmniStar not to allow anyone whose name wasn't on the account to make changes, payments, or even inquiries. That was the policy, but it was routinely ignored in the name of convenience. If someone were to say that they were the account holder's spouse or child (over 18, if we felt the need to ask) we'd go ahead and make changes. I occasionally dealt with problems that occured due to this, but none of the complaintants even thought to suggest that we shouldn't have made the change based on a non-account holding family member's request. The only surefire protection that an account holder has is setting up a password, but we don't tell the customers of that option unless they ask because it leads them to the assumption that we are not worthy of their trust.

It's a thin line between convenience and privacy. One can easily pretend to be authorized by an account holder even if their motivations are not benign. In one case at OmniStar, an estranged husband called in to order $200 worth of Pay-Per-Views to spite their wife. But nine times out of ten, the spouse is simply at work or otherwise unable to make the call themselves. In the name of expedience we went ahead and did whatever they asked. Someone can call in and find out a lot about a person simply by asking to "go over a bill" and it's a good way for a stalker to get intimate details about their prey.

When calling the telco, I didn't ask for any information and the only thing I did was make a payment, which few would do against the wishes of an account holder. But I can easily imagine a scenario in which someone would pay the bill for someone with whom there was assymetrical romantic interest so that the person would "owe" them. While legally they would have no standing in court, that wouldn't be the point. Most people like to consider themselves good people and not be indebted to others and would want to make good on any incurred debts. This is particularly true when it's not some faceless credit card company but someone that they once loved, may still love, or acknowledge loves them even if it's not reciprocated. Women in particular are more likely to fall into this line of thinking and a lot of men know this and take advantage of it.

I know first-hand of at least one estranged husband who was trying to win back the graces of his wife by making payments for her. She was strapped for cash and it was appreciated (though not asked for), but it came at a high emotional cost. Ultimately, for good or for ill (I believe the former) it worked and they are still married. This isn't the only case that this happened. ACME had to set up a policy not to allow people to start paying for others' accounts when one young lady had an account paid for her and any time she spent over the allowed 60-minutes per day he would hold it over her head. It wasn't an isolated incident as I paid a few months for Ora's account and while I didn't make an issue of it (in fact, the first couple months it was annonymous), I did feel like I was owed something in return. Even benevolent giving of that sort can inadvertantly lead to trouble.

But then again, 19 times out of 20, such payments are going to be benign. Is the 1-in-20 chance that it isn't worth putting everyone else's convenience at a disadvantage?

It's a good question.

The one policy area where my views are uniformly and radically right-wing is without a doubt K-12 education. I don't know of a single politician whose ideas on he subject aren't well to my left. The President's reforms have only been a disappointment in me because of their lack of scope. As such, it's one of the areas in which my views are nigh irreconcilable with the Democratic Party.

With these two things in mind, it's somewhat heartening to see Kerry surprisingly falling out of the traditional Democratic education policy failings:

Many liberals had hoped that Kerry would attack the testing requirement set forth in Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which has become increasingly unpopular, especially among teachers' unions. But Kerry, who had voted for NCLB, instead challenged two longstanding, and fiercely defended, union prerogatives: seniority-based pay increases and rules virtually guaranteeing veteran teachers tenure. The candidate proposed a "new bargain"--a $30 billion, 10-year plan of federal grants which would allow districts to raise the pay of teachers whose students consistently test above average, while at the same time making it easier for schools to fire bad teachers. "Greater achievement ought to be a goal," Kerry said, "and it should be able to command greater pay, just the way it does in every other sector of professional employment."

As with most issues where my views fall out of the mainstream, I tend to appreciate baby-steps when I see them. This doesn't give Kerry a leg up Bush on education, but Kerry is in a unique position to put changing education out of the Republican Party's agenda and on to America's. President Bush has been a disappointment to me on education (though I do hope that Orrin Judd is right that Bush is taking an incrementalist approach).

If Kerry is elected, he's positioning himself to be a lot better an education president than I would have thought. A recipient, I suppose, of the soft bigotry of low expectations for Democratic politicians when it comes to education.

I've complainted about commented on my surprise at the farmer's tan I've gotten since relocating to Idaho.

Since then, I've purchased suntan lotion to alleviate the problem. I put it on along and with a tank-top went walking up and down nearby Clay Hill for a little over an hour. Unfortunately, I wasn't as thorough with the lotion as I should have been. I got the parts that got hit hardest the last time I went out with a tank-top (top of the shoulders and back of the neck), but didn't get other parts, particularly the area right below the shoulders and neck.

The result?

My tan has gone from a farmer's tan to a tie-died one, easing in and out of tanness depending on how much lotion I put on a particular area.

Weird.

Here's a pretty negative review of the Mormon movie (by an LDS believer):

Whether or not you believe The Book of Mormon is true -- and I should say up front that I do -- many of its stories are prime movie material, full of drama, excitement and inspiration. I suspect one day a good film will emerge that makes use of the book's events and characters.

"The Book of Mormon Movie," now playing at select theaters across the West, is not that film. Produced, written and directed by Gary Rogers, who has no prior film experience, it is obviously the work of someone, well, with no prior film experience. Its screenplay (for which Craig Clyde is co-credited) merely recreates all the events of the first 66 pages of The Book of Mormon without any regard for plotting, storytelling or character development. There is no climax, no clear narrative path. The acting is uniformly bland, as if the actors are merely reciting scripture (which they often are), rather than portraying living, breathing people. The movie is the very definition of "perfunctory," seemingly made just for the sake of making it. It is about as imaginative as if a committee of dull, suit-wearing middle-aged men got together and tried to stage a ballet.

That Rogers made it with the pure goal of bringing a beloved work of scripture to life, I do not question. But the finished product is pedestrian and mishandled. It is a classic case of a filmmaker's love for his material being much stronger than his talent for filming it.

Here's another negative review from a newspaper:

This two-hour installment covers the first 50 pages or so of The Book of Mormon, which, along with the Bible, is the core text of the LDS faith. Church members will find the film to be a faithful adaptation of the story of Nephi and his father, Lehi, Hebrew prophets who lead a journey to a new Promised Land - the Americas - in the sixth century B.C.

It's an echo of the Exodus story, with the movie striving to be the LDS Ten Commandments. But this is strictly amateur hour, mired in wooden acting, hackneyed cinematography and robotic dialogue that makes George Lucas sound like Aaron Sorkin.

"I love you more than any man could love any woman," drones Nephi (Noah Danby) to his bride. Her reply: "I give you all my heart and soul." Blech.

The Other Side of Heaven is another LDS film that the aggregate viewers gave 6.5 stars, though the default review is predominantly negative.

This LDS site is excited that Ocean's Eleven is the biggest movie ever to have two Mormon characters, but then warns people that they shouldn't see it for that reason because their parts are, in the greater scheme of things, pretty small.

I Miss Her
Today
Frank hasn't been blogging as much lately, which is an absolute shame. While his is generally a political blog from a perspective with which I strongly disagree, I can read posts like this all day long. While I don't have a daughter and can't directly relate to that post, it's extremely well written. I can relate to his "Today" post. Not an October 5 comes by that I don't think of Anna.

Bragging Rights
Owning Up To Abortion
Charles Hill has a couple good quotes on the "I Had An Abortion" shirts that Planned Parenthood Briefly Endorsed. It reminded me a bit of a an article that Greg cited in which Barbara Ehrichman used some fuzzy math to get those who've had abortions to be loud and proud. You can see his comments towards the bottom of his multi-topic post.

Adoption
Stuart Buck explains how he and his wife (both white) wound up adopting a black baby and how much of a non-issue it was both for the Bucks and the baby's birth mother..

Quotes of the Day
Alex Knapp has some really good ones.

Pressure of the American Dream [via Judd]
I want to write on this more thoroughly at a later date, but I probably won't get around to it. Robert Samuelson hits the nail on the head on how modern Americans have so much more and yet feel that they have so much less.

Let Us Reason: RLDS
While searching for things pertaining to the Movie of Mormon, I ran across a designation that I hadn't seen before: RLDS. Apparently the Mormons have their own protestants in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The split apparently occured shortly after Joseph Smith's death when most crowned Brigham Young as the church's leader, but some recalled the prophecy that Smith's son (then only 12) should lead. Without the structure of LDS's Utah Vatican, there have apparently been numerous breaks within the LDS over many of the same issues that divide Christians, including homosexuality and the ordination of women. Though the author comes at it with an anti-LDS and anti-RLDS bias, it makes for a solid, objective analysis.

DaveMSC comments on atheism and shares this joke:

You all know about the dyslexic agnostic who suffered from insomnia, right? He stayed up all night wondering if there really was a dog.

Dundee: I'm not from here, I'm just stuck here.
RAW: Where you from originally?
Dundee: California.
RAW: Ahh, cool. I'm from Texas.
Dundee: So what brought you to Gate City? Come here for school?
RAW: Nah, though I'm thinking of going back. What about you?
Dundee: Assault and battery conviction.
RAW: Cool. You should talk to Landis. He's here for the same reason.
Dundee: My Parole Officer told me I had a week to find a new place and suggested this dump, so here I am.
RAW: You know, that explains a lot about this place. They call it Thrifthaven University Apartments, but the parolees I know here outnumber the college students three-to-one. They ought to call it the Thrifthaven Halfway House

Less than a week after Reno left, a new guy is moving in. What's odd is that except for the marriage, the two are strikingly similar. Reno was a biker without actually owning a motorcycle. His look, his demeanor, all biker. He had a customized license plate that said "RENGADE." But the more I got to know him, the more I discovered we could actually relate to one another. Oddly, the self-proclaimed renegade was probably one of the most upright individuals in the complex.

Dundee's license plate says Kowboy. Though after talking to him for half an hour or so, I get some good vibes from the guy despite some unsavory details (which I'll mention next post). Very blue-collar like Reno. Trying to get his life back on track and willing to work two jobs to make it happen (Reno works one job, but it's 75 hours a week or so). Of course, I'm probably biased because he validated what might be a good job lead.

He validated, Reno first suggested it.

Dundee tells me that he won't be staying long, Reno stayed less than two months. Dundee is going to buy a house up in Northgate, Reno already has.

I'm on the Washington Post's website!

Errr... sort of.

Not really.

But sort of!

- 1996, Cafeteria Before School Starts -
Random Cool Schoolmate: Hey Alex, mind if I sit down?
RAW: Yeah, man, that's cool, have a seat.
RCS: So what are you up to this weekend?
RAW: Nothing, really. Trying to find something to do.
RCS: I'm throwing a party this weekend, I was wondering if-
[Chip & Oz enter]
Oz: Hey Alex, sorry I'm late. Traffic sucked. [bitch moan moan bitch moan moan]
Chip: Hey Alex, I wanted to show you my latest issue of Superdestructoman! It has the old granny lady from the third issue going "It's old lady Smithers!" [laugh] [snort]
RCS: Hey, I gotta go. I'll check ya later, man.
RAW: [burying head in hands] Seeya.

- 2004, Earlier Tonight -
Yale: Hey Lex! How's it going?
RAW: Not bad, not bad.
Yale: You good to watch the last 15 minutes of 8mm? I also got some beer if you want to chill.
RAW: Yeah, sounds cool.
Meatloaf: Hey Alex! Check it out! Your a computer geek like me, so only you will truly appreciate this. I was running low on bandwidth when I was rendering some 3D stuff when the computer started dragging real slow. So I went into the registry and [blah blah blah blah]
Yale: Hey, uh, I gotta go...
RAW: [looks for place to bury head] Seeya.

Kevin and Greg point to and criticize a Chron LA Times article that's skeptical of blogging.

For my part, while I didn't find Jones's take to be particularly novel or insightful, I'd be hard-pressed to characterize it as being wrong. The only part that I take issue with is that he feels that the blogs feel that they will replace traditional media. I may have my head buried in the sand (I read the big-league blogs less and less these days), but most of blogdom's self-evaluation has been more along the lines that blogs compliment traditional newssources rather than compete with them. The relationship is as much symbiotic as competitive, though admittedly it does get antagonistic at times, but the proported aims of most blogs I've seen is to make traditional media better, not to replace it.

Greg takes issue with one aspect of Jones's column that I half-agree with:

But his fear is that we will get bought out, presumably by some Rupert Murdoch-type who seeks to manipulate the rest of you nonbloggers. I'm not sure he even remotely gets the concept. A blog can be set up for free. ANYONE can do it. If one wishes to make a more standalone-style blog, it can be done on the cheap (mine coulda been done for $10 a month on my webhost). That sort of open access is a major inhibitor to clogging up the entry fee for these things.

While the entry fees for starting a blog are nil, I think there is some merit to the argument that blogs that follow a particular party-line and/or those that will have a sponsor will rise to the top the quickest. By "party-line" I don't necessarily mean Republican or Democrat, but rather a point of view felt by enough people to garner a significant audience. Right Wing News is the most egregious example I know of that is all about getting hits, stroking the ego of its author, and more recently lining his pocketbook. While I don't doubt that Hawkins agrees with what he's saying, I have no doubt whatsoever that he tailors what he has to say by how well it will be recieved by its intended GOP audience. Another example that comes to mind is the chest-thumping libertarian uberhawks who spent more time trying to impress each other (and generate links and hits) than advancing any sort of actual argument. I felt so at the time and when they all seemed to magically turn against Bush for being too cowardly to just decimate Palestine and invade Saudi Arabia to partition it according to their oh-so-helpful maps at the same time, I felt my view was validated. There is a certain amount of crying to peer approval (and links) that turned me off of a great deal of blogs.

That's not the sponsorship angle that Greg's talking about, but as more and more bloggers start looking for ways to make money for it, I'd say that it's inevitable. Not to mention how helpful getting a benefactor can be for one's exposure, as Wonkette's associate with Gawker has demonstrated quite clearly.

There are, as Kevin points out, a whole ton of great blogs out there. Thoughtful, insightful, and independent blogs. I find it both interesting and disturbing how most of the top-tier blogs that I still enjoy don't seem to be in the top tier anymore, replaced by people with little unique or interesting to say. Amygdala comes to mind from the left and PatioPundit from the right. I think as time progresses. As blogdom spreads wider and wider and as like-minded people tend to go to like-minded sites, the lightest and least original material tends to get most exposure. As the media turns a greater eye towards media, I suspect they won't look too far below the surface and the most visible blogs will be, just as Jones speculates, all sizzle and no steak.

The SSA site has a list of the most popular baby names. It has some really cool indexing features where you can look at the most popular names of any given year or you can see where your name falls on the list. It's somewhat heartening to know that the most popular names aren't Dakota and Laetwynn, but rather time-tested names like Jacob and Joshua (though honestly, hasn't the name "Josh" run its course for a while?). I'm consciously skipping over #2. I was actually a bit surprised to discover that my first name is actually less common than my middle one, which is somewhat contrary to the impression that I've gotten over the years. My first name is apparently becoming less and less popular with each passing year while my middle name is holding pretty steady.

Not surprisingly, parents are a bit more creative with the girls names. Emily is a perfectly fine name, but can we stop naming girls "Son of Maud" just cause there was that mermaid in that movie that went by that name? I wonder if the fascination with that movie has anything to do with Hannah being #4. Probably not, but it's a weird coincidence. Little Chloe Zito should have more than a couple classmates named Chloe and Olivia Kuffner will likely not be the only Olivia, but as Pappa Kuffner says (and I'm sure Mama and Papa Zito would), they like the way it wounds (as do I, admittedly). And both names have historical backing and neither named after mermaids in 80's flicks. In addition to girls named Son of Maud, there are 6,000 girls named "Son of Coinneach." It's pretty messed up when more girls are named Jasmine and Destiny than Nicole and Katherine.

On the upshot, I shouldn't run out of pseudonyms for female characters any time soon.

I may or may not have mentioned it before, but the area in which I live is pretty heavily populated by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church. As such, I've felt the urge to find out more about the Church that so motivates the people around me. As it turns out, they made a movie of the Book of Mormon. Well, it's the first of a series of nine or so, but I'm trying to figure out a way to get to see the movie without inviting unwanted guests to my doorstep to tell me all about the dictates or Moroni and Joseph Smith, so ordering it non-commercial outlets is a no-go. While trying to find out more about the movie, I stumbled across an article and was somewhat amused by this tidbit:

"This is a very unique motion picture," stated Gary Rogers, the film's producer, writer and director. "Virtually every member of the Church I've talked to has told me they have waited all their lives to see a movie about the Book of Mormon! It really is a filmmaker's dream. However, the biggest challenge will be to produce a film that satisfies the audience. Most of the nearly 12 million members of the Church have already "seen" the movie many times in their minds! The prospect of meeting the expectations of millions of people is a very frightening but exciting challenge," say's Rogers.

It brings to mind all the comic book fans that do nothing but pan a comic book movie because "everyone knows that the first Heroman movie has to star Villainman and be done precisely the way that I've been outlining in all of the Heroman movie plotting I've done in leiu of having a life!"

The plot to every political movie ever made:

But that's beside the point as far as the movies are concerned. Modern audiences seem to find it unbelievable that a good man could reach a high office in the conventional manner. Instead we get retreads of a formula that goes at least as far back as Gabriel Over the White House (1933), in which a puppet president survives an accident, sees the light, and starts to stand up for the little guy and fight the powers that be. So there's a disillusioned senator who thinks he's about to die, sees the light, and starts to stand up for the little guy and fight the powers that be (Bullworth, 1998); a slick crook who cons his way into Congress, sees the light, and starts to stand up for the little guy and fight the powers that be (The Distinguished Gentleman, 1992); a lowly alderman who runs for president as a sacrificial lamb, sees the light, and starts to stand up for the little guy and fight the powers that be (Head of State, 2003); and even a lookalike who secretly takes the president's place, sees the light, and starts to stand up for the little guy and fight the powers that be (Dave, 1993).

I'm trying to think of one political movie that hasn't followed this formula to one degree or another. The first that comes to mind is The American President, but even then Shepherd wins in part based on a sympathy vote due to the death of his wife. The rest of the plot follows the formula (he's "standing up for the little guy" by caving in to the environmental and gun control lobbies). The second is My Fellow Americans, which probably has the most realistic portrayal of two antagonistic presidents who spend a great deal of the movie realizing their own vanity and shortcomings. Were it not for the entire plot and especially the ending, it would have made for the best political movie ever!

From page 90 of the 9-11 Commission's Report:

After the Watergate era, Congress established oversight committees to ensure that the CIA did not undertake covert action contrary to basic American law. Case officers in the CIA’s Clandestine Service interpreted legislation, such as the Hughes-Ryan Amendment requiring that the president approve and report to Congress any covert action, as sending a message to them that covert action often leads to trouble and can severely damage one’s career. Controversies surrounding Central American covert action programs in the mid-1980s led to the indictment of several senior officers of the Clandestine Service. During the 1990s, tension sometimes arose, as it did in the effort against al Qaeda, between policymakers who wanted the CIA to undertake more aggressive covert action and wary CIA leaders who counseled prudence and making sure that the legal basis and presidential authorization for their actions were undeniably clear.

That tension isn't nearly as exciting as the horrified president who realizes that the big, bad CIA just killed someone on his behalf, as seen at least once in just about any action movie I've ever seen involving the CIA.

Sssshhhh, no one tell all the hack writers around the world about this. It might deprive them of much needed plot-devices!

From Page 76 of the 9-11 Commission's report:

First, the plan did not obtain the necessary human resources. Despite designating “national and economic security” as its top priority in 1998, the FBI did not shift human resources accordingly. Although the FBI’s counterterrorism budget tripled during the mid-1990s, FBI counterterrorism spending remained fairly constant between fiscal years 1998 and 2001. In 2000, there were still twice as many agents devoted to drug enforcement as to counterterrorism.

I'm hardly a pacifist in the drug war, insofar as I don't favor the legalization of anything beyond marijuana, but that's certainly eye-opening.

From Page 40 of the 9/11 Commission's Report:

The Vice President stated that he called the President to discuss the rules of engagement for the CAP. He recalled feeling that it did no good to establish the CAP unless the pilots had instructions on whether they were authorized to shoot if the plane would not divert. He said the President signed off on that concept. The President said he remembered such a conversation, and that it reminded him of when he had been an interceptor pilot. The President emphasized to us that he had authorized the shootdown of hijacked aircraft.

I find it really odd - though indicative of nothing in particular - that the commission would include the "interceptor pilot" comment.

They haven't mentioned John Kerry yet and I don't expect them to, but I feel the odd sense that it would say something like, "John Kerry, in addition to mentioning that he served with distinction in Vietnam, said [blah blah blah]..."

A week or so ago, Yale loaned me 8mm and in the last 15 minutes or so, it went haywire and I couldn't see the climax of the movie.

Well, I got him back. I loaned him the first season of 24 and the last DVD wouldn't play on his DVD player.

He's goin' absolutely nuts.

The DVD is scratchless, so I'm not sure what the problem is, but I don't care.

Revenge is mine.

I've been making some changes to the blog lately, so here's a primer:

Transfer - Mike and I have been working towards moving the blog to his web space. It's been a long road, but we're 99% the way there. The last trick is going to be to get my current host to turn over the keys to my domains and get them repointed. I'll give you guys a heads up when I'm going to do that (cause there doubtlessly will be some technical difficulties). This doesn't come a moment too soon as the communication between Nucleus and my blog continues to disintegrate. I still can't upload pictures using the interface and now the search function is fubar. In the meantime, don't use my domain (raw360.com) to email me! During the transfer some email may get lost. Those of you know that my bigfoot address please use that. Those of you that don't, my account there is rawhitlock with the bigfoot domain (dot-com).

Cast List - I've updated the Cast List. Since the list of names is getting very long I decided to differentiate between those that are mentioned regularly and those that are more obscure. It also how has the lists up top that you can click on to find the appropriate person. I'm going to add to the profiles of the regulars to provide a little more background and am working on a way that you can bring up all the posts that mention any given person. That's probably going to take a while - even longer, unfortunately, because Nucleus 3.0 performs searches based on accuracy instead of chronology and I was counting on the latter for this feature. It's a great upgrade for most purposes except, unfortunately, this one.

Categories - I've been moving around posts between categories and renaming them over the past week or so.

Entertainment to Culture - Entertainment used to cover all music, movies, and TV that wasn't related to Texas Music (which has its own category). I thought about having two categories, but since a lot of what I write about entertainment gets back to culture, and I haven't had a category for culture, I decided to keep these together.

I Pagliacci to Dramatica - I hate the name Dramatica cause it sounds somewhat pretentious or something, but it's all I could come up with. The nature of the blog has changed so that Pagliacci doesn't quite fit anymore. Besides, no one knew what it meant anyway.

Created Sex and Consequences - Most of the posts here used to be in Land of the Free, though since a lot of it deals with cultural aspects of it in addition to the mere legal/civil rights aspect of it, I decided to give this its own category. The Women and Men category still exists, but it's more about relationships in general.

Created U of H and renamed University to Academia - I have enough posts on UH to warrant its own category and this way it can act as both giving updates to my alma mater and an equivalent to The High School Years where I have stories from high school. I thought about The College Years but I don't have enough there, most of it can go in Dramatica, and it doesn't solve the narrow UH-related posts. I've been using University on K-12 education, too, so I renamed it accordingly.

Re-established Living and renamed it to Living Quarters - With Thrifthaven being the focus of so many posts lately, I wanted to put it somewhere other than the general Apropos El Dia category. It also provides a home for my posts on apartment-living, real estate, and housing matters. It's the housing equivalent to my Office Space work category, a combination of personal experiences and thoughts of the sector.

Created Around the World - I need a place to park posts that involved countries other than the USA. War and Rumors of War covered this for a while, as did This Modern World, but some posts don't fit in to either camp.

Blogrolodexical - It's still MIA until I get everything moved to the new server. To those of you that have added me to your blogroll recently (Dustbury, for instance), I'll add it at a later date. There are also some blogs I want on the blogroll that I will be adding once it's all settled. I'm not adding it now because it's all going to be changing soon anyway. I'm also going to be reorganizing it when I get a chance.

Suggestions? - When I get things moved over I'm going to start thinking about changes to the template. Nothing major, but if there's anything you want me to think about changing (fonts, colors or lack thereof, etc.) please let me know now.

Poker With Dick Cheney [via Lex]
Andrew Northrup has been under fire for being too shrill. I stopped reading him myself a while ago because, being conservative, I simply didn't feel welcome there. Well I hope I didn't miss many posts as hilarious as this one.

Liberal Documentarians Are the Reel Majority [via Susanna]
The Washington Post explores documentaries and comes to the shocking conclusion that most of them are geared to the left. Theories as to why this is the case are put forth and are a neat demonstration about how clueless liberals are about what is liberal and who are conservatives.

The Kids Are All Right [via LegalXXX]
An interesting look on youth culture. I appreciate the author's irreverence and his ability to look at the books he was reviewing critically, but not dismissively. I may have more to say about this one at a later date.

Where Should I Belong?
Biting the Bullet
Unexpected Benefit of Party Affiliation
Alex Knapp's odd road to joining the Republican Party in order to change it.

At the Movies: In"Terminal"ble
Jim over at WorldMagBlog has a rather... interesting... interpretation of the political underleanings of The Terminal. These days, I'm actually pretty sympathetic to anti-consumerist arguments, but that interpretation flew right over my head.

Wha?
Amanda Strassner's blog is temporarily down. I was going to ask where it went, but Kevin saved me the trouble. Amanda responds in the comments section.

Be forewarned, this is not a politically correct post.

I had a dream last night that I enrolled at the University of Montana. I don't know much about UMT except that it has a stellar I-AA football program and a lot of people in Gate City are UMT alums (It's said that when Montana plays the local university, the crowd is split 50-50). So I decided to learn a little more about the university and much to my surprise, they have an African-American Studies program.

Such programs are not unusual and think that they're worthwhile projects over all, but at the University of Montana? One of the most striking things about Idaho isn't so much that it's lilly white (about 90% of the population), but that there are so few blacks here. There are a fair number of Native Americans and Hispanics, but very, very few blacks (I'd say I've seen maybe 15 or so since I got here). So I looked up Montana's racial demographics and African-Americans comprise of a paltry 0.3% of the population with less than 3,000 in a state that has a population of over 900,000, putting it behind Native Americans and Asian-Americans (as well as Hispanics, I'd imagine, but they aren't given their own category).

I can just imagine the first day of class. "Okay, class. We brought in William here so that we can show you what a real live African American looks like...."

More seriously, though, they have a wide array of cultural programs including those for Asians, Native Americans, and others. I find it a bit weird that it's not an African Studies, but rather African American (the Asian Studies is just Asian, not Asian-American). Given our vast ignorance of the continent, I'd imagine that an African Studies course would be a lot more useful.

I am officially calling a ceasefire with Roger "Happy Pills" Ebert.

His running approval rating has finally fallen below 80% and is on a downward trend. Not only that, but he has two great one-star reviews with the priceless Roger Ebert snark that I've come to love.

On Catwoman:

Although the movie's faults are many, the crucial one is that we never get any sense of what it feels like to turn into a catwoman. The strength of "Spider-Man 2" is in the ambivalence that Peter Parker has about being part nerdy student, part superhero. In "Catwoman," where are the scenes where a woman comes to grip with the fact that her entire nature and even her species seems to have changed?

Berry plays Patience Phillips, a designer for an ad agency, who dies and is reborn after Midnight, a cat with ties to ancient Egypt, breathes new life into her. She becomes Catwoman, but what is a catwoman? She can leap like a cat, strut around on top of her furniture, survive great falls and hiss. Berry looks great doing these things, and spends a lot of time on all fours, inspiring our almost unseemly gratitude for her cleavage.

[...]

Stone's character is laughably one-dimensional, but then that's a good fit for this movie, in which none of the characters suggest any human dimensions and seem to be posing more than relating. Take Georges, for example, whose obnoxious mannerisms are so grotesque he's like the "Saturday Night Live" version of Vincent Price.

Among many silly scenes, the silliest has to be the Ferris wheel sequence, which isn't even as thrilling as the one in "The Notebook." Wouldn't you just know that after the wheel stalls, the operator would recklessly strip the gears, and the little boy riding alone would be in a chair where the guard rail falls off, and then the seat comes loose, and then the wheel tries to shake him loose and no doubt would try to electrocute him if it could.

To be sure, Ebert is one of those comic book geeks that is probably overly critical of comic book movies as a whole, but I'm going to take his word on this one. While I generally make an effort to see all Batman-related films and TV shows, this ain't the Bat's Cat and apparently isn't any good in it's own right. Shocker.

On A Cinderella Story:

So I am writing you in the hope of saving your friends, your sister Jasmine, and your mother Toni from going to see a truly dismal new movie. It is called "A Cinderella Story," and they may think they'll like it because it stars Hilary Duff.

I liked her in "Cheaper by the Dozen," and said she was "beautiful and skilled" in "The Lizzie McGuire Movie," but wrote: "As a role model, Lizzie functions essentially as a spokeswoman for the teen retail fashion industry, and the most-quoted line in the movie is likely to be when the catty Kate accuses her of being an 'outfit repeater.' Since many of the kids in the audience will not be millionaires and do indeed wear the same outfit more than once, this is a little cruel, but there you go."

That's probably something your mother might agree with.

In "A Cinderella Story," Hilary plays Sam, a Valley Girl whose happy adolescence ends when her dad is killed in an earthquake. That puts her in the clutches of an evil stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge, who you may remember fondly as Stifler's mom in the "American Pie" movies, although since they were rated R, of course you haven't seen them). Sam also naturally has two evil stepsisters. Half the girls in school have a crush on Austin (Chad Michael Murray), a handsome football star, but Sam never guesses that Austin is secretly kind of poetic -- and is, in fact, her best chat room buddy. She agrees to meet him at the big Halloween dance, wearing a mask to preserve her anonymity; as a disguise, the mask makes her look uncannily like Hilary Duff wearing a mask.

I was at odds with which portion of the review to quote, since the whole angle that he takes is absolutely great.

Update: Harrumph. Maybe my ceasefire was premature.

Guess who just moved in to Stoner's old apartment?

I'll answer the question with another question: Guess who got out of prison on bond.

Yep, Strang is back. Either the rumors of his $50,000 bail were off-base or he's definitely got enough money squirreled away not to need to be asking for cigarettes in the middle of the night. He's got some caseworker or bondsman looking after him. Since Stoner moved in to his old place, I guess it made sense for him to move in to Stoner's.

I'm a bit surprised that the apartment complex let him back in. The owner is an upright Mormon who theoretically wouldn't want to be associated with such things. I'd figured up till now that he was oblivious. On top of that, the apartments here come furnished and when they cleaned out his apartment they discovered that he'd sold all of the complex's furniture, including the full-size fridge. I guess they figured that they didn't want to make any trouble and as soon as his court date comes, he'll probably be going away for quite a while and it won't be an issue.

But, for whatever reason, they've let him back in. He's got an unfurnished apartment this time, though. I'd definitely rather the guy not live two places down. I'm fully prepared for some more late night visits, though. Apparently Saul, Landis, and Yale had similar visits. Landis was holding a baseball bat and Yale a knife, figuring that only trouble would be knocking at 4 in the morning. It appears that Meatloaf (who lives in between Strang and I) and I are the only two non-fans of Strang in the complex, so naturally he gets moved next to us.

Bigger breasts offered as perk to soldiers [via Warliberal]
The title more or less says it all and there's little I can say about it that Warliberal didn't.

Luke 7:36-50 - “Jake & His Guilt”
AltCountry: Interview with Murry Hammond from the Old 97's [via Fat Guy]
A sermon written by a pastor in Wisconsin involving an Old 97s show prompts a response from Murray Hammond, the band's bassist. An interview follows involving, among other things, Christianity and artistic inspiration.

New Channel Challenges MTV [via Longhorn Mafia]
A "fair and balanced" MTV. Drew makes a comparison to Air America, which I think is right on target. There are some areas of entertainment that are more tilted for one side of the political spectrum or the other. I'd have to say that MTV falls into one of those areas.

Study: U.S. Generic Drugs Cost Less Than Canadian Drugs [via Judds]
A study by the Food and Drug Administration says that while first-run drugs are cheaper in Canada, five of the seven most common generic drugs are cheaper in the US apples to apples and only one of the seven brand names in Canada are cheaper than the US generic. Of course, this is a study by the FDA that astonishingly advances the FDA's own interest, but it's interesting nonetheless.


Blockbuster vows to go after Netflix [via Pete]
I don't have accounts at any movie rental places up here. I've been mulling over a Netflix subscription. Now that Blockbuster is getting into the online business, though, I'm still mulling over a Netflix subscription.

Sneak Peek: The Manchureian Candidate
Yeah, it's been on the Internet for a little while now, but I just got around to watching it. I'm really looking forward to seeing this movie. Absolutely loved the original.

New Orleans apparently has deep-fried cheeseburgers.

In fact -- as I had apparently forgotten in the months surrounding my Ochsner visits -- a little danger can be titillating. The deep-fried stuffed burger at Jabba Jaws certainly was.

I ordered the least intimidating burger on the list: The Big Jabba Jack, the one stuffed with sautéed mushrooms and pepper jack cheese. Since only the patty is deep-fried, it looked perfectly normal at first, just a burger between buns. Then I noticed that the meat had a blond, battered shell. Then I took a bite. The burger was juicy as an orange, with cheese spread throughout the patty's interior, as if it were binding the ground meat together.
I'm hungry.

Man, I'm hungry.

[via Lex]

Many moons ago, Jay noticed an abnormal growth in one of his knees. Uninsured, there wasn't much he could do about it except watch it grow while he and his folks figured out what they were going to do. And grow it did.

When he finally was able to see a doctor about it, two doctors called it the largest benign cyst they'd ever seen. It was seventeen centimeters tall.

A couple days after he left the inland northwest to go back to Houston, he had major surgery on that knee.

Barely able to walk, he went to a They Might Be Giants show last night.

You gotta admire a man that knows his priorities.

Next door to me lives Meatloaf

Next door to Meatloaf is Reno.

Next door to Reno is Stoner.

Next door to Stoner is nobody.

Except that only one of them is going to be living next to me next week. Stoner has called dibs on Strang's apartment and Reno and his wife just bought a house.

[sob]

Did I do something wrong?

Is it my breath?

Why oh why must they all leave me alone.

Wait, Meatloaf lives here, too.

It must be his fault!

Andrew Sullivan takes the New York Times to task for using it in their assessment of Illinois senate candidate Obama Barack:

All this fumbling has left Mr. Obama, the smooth-talking, Harvard-educated law professor from Chicago, looking like the only candidate in a race that may make him the only African-American in the Senate. Voters who don't know him yet surely will after the Democratic National Convention, where he will be keynote speaker. But it would be too bad if Mr. Obama cakewalked into Washington. Not just for Mr. Obama, who would take office with an asterisk ("*ran against incompetents"). Illinois voters deserve to see a capable opponent force him to answer tough questions and defend his positions. In other words, they deserve a nonludicrous race.

The most odd thing to me about the passage is not its "racism," but rather that it's the first time I've heard it used as a verb. Sullivan goes on to quote someone defining what exactly the two definitions of "cakewalk" are:

1. Something easily accomplished: Winning the race was a cakewalk for her. 2. A 19th-century public entertainment among African Americans in which walkers performing the most accomplished or amusing steps won cakes as prizes.

The Mirriam Webster online dictionary lists it's most conventional usage last:

1 : a black American entertainment having a cake as prize for the most accomplished steps and figures in walking
2 : a stage dance developed from walking steps and figures typically involving a high prance with backward tilt
3 a : a one-sided contest b : an easy task

I must confess ignorance on this one. I've apparently used the term once, ironically when posting involving racist Georgia politician Lester Maddox. It'd never occured to me that the term might have racist origins. I'm not sure what difference it makes when the term doesn't actually use the name of a race to denote something negative (such as "to jew" or "to gyp" something, or "Indian giver"), I've not heart complaints over the words usage by supposed targets of the racist comment (blacks), and if I was unaware of its origins (and I consider myself a reasonably educated individual) I can't help but wonder if the words origins are even relevent anymore.

In addition to a link to let someone watch a cakewalk, Sullivan also runs a comment by someone with a different definition:

Thirty years ago in the small West Virginia town where my father grew up, I participated in what was billed as a "cakewalk." The contestants simply walked around in a circle. One person standing just outside this circle was blindfolded and held a broom. At his whim he let the broom fall across the path of the circling contestants. If the broom fell behind you, you won the cake. Thus I have always assumed that a "cakewalk" referred to something accomplished by blind luck, without any element of skill. Perhaps this Appalachian contest, helps explain the etymology of the first definition of "cakewalk" provided by your reader.

Interesting stuff.

Chris's friend Sarah helped a boy out with an odd problem:

No lie: today I helped clean what was once a small roach out of a little boy's ear. It had been in there so long that skin had started to grow over part of it, and although we tried for about 20 minutes, we couldn't get a piece of it out. Not a good day for that kiddo!

When Mom was living in California, she lost hearing in one of her ears. She'd tried just about everything that she could, but nothing could get her hearing back. She eventually went to a doctor about it. The doctor cleaned her ear out and quizzically asked Mom to explain what was in his hand: half a cigarette butt.

When Mom would go to music shows or loud bars with friends or dates, she'd often take a cigarette butt, fold it in half, and put it in her ear. Believe it or not, I've done the same at music shows (though not after hearing this story!). At some point she must have torn it in two with her fingernails and didn't realize when she took it out that she'd only taken out half the butt and the other got in there. When it got more entrenched, she couldn't feel what it was and probably assumed it was just wax build-up.

You know, between the roach and the butt, I think I'll take the cigarette butt.

This makes Susanna nauseated, but from a database nerd perspective I think it's way cool!

"You could ask me about any city block in America, and I could tell you how many on that block are likely to be health care voters, or who's most concerned about education or job creation," said DNC Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe. "And I could press a button and six seconds later you'd have a name, an address and a phone number for each of them. We can then begin a conversation with these people that is much more sophisticated and personal than we ever could before."

It is not quite that simple. Models and databases offer better-educated guesses, not certainty, about what a voter thinks and how he or she is likely to behave. But with enough computing power, enough personal details and the right search features, political database pros say they are improving the efficiency of an array of campaign decisions, including fundraising, advertising and get-out-the-vote operations.

Using little more than an off-the-shelf program and the desktop computer in his Washington office, Democratic consultant Hal Malchow shows how to predict turnout and target pools of supporters. Using the 2002 gubernatorial race in Arizona as his example, Malchow is able to match the poll responses of 5,778 likely voters against their database profiles. The program then slices and dices the data to uncover the characteristics -- in this case, middle-aged Hispanic men living in two metropolitan areas -- that defined the biggest groups of people likely to support Malchow's client but still uncertain about voting. A quick search of a voter database would return the names of those who fit this profile, making them the likely recipients of phone calls or a knock on the door by a candidate's field staff.

I was asked by an interviewer on Tuesday what I most wanted to do with my college degree when I graduated. I told him that I wanted to process large amounts of information to help an organization do it's job a lot better. As canned and inauthentic as that answer sounds, it's the most honest answer I've given to that question in a long time. It so happens that was probably the answer the interviewer was looking for, but that makes it no less true. The database I built for UFC handled pretty mundane information, but I really got a kick out of bringing the numbers in from payroll, applying them to jobs and estimating efficiency, profit margins (on fixed-cost jobs), and so invoicing (on cost-plus jobs).

Add my vast interest in politics and that's a friggin' dream job!

Some years back I read a dated novel called The Convention. It dealt with a fictional Republican convention of 1968 in which the sitting GOP president was resigning after four years. The hero is a guy named Manchester who was President Stuart's chosen successor until Manchester went a bit dovish in the nuclear arms race. The other candidate was California Governor Bryan Roberts, who got an unexpected surge and went from being a just-in-case candidate to one likely to get the nomination. Roberts's campaign was "hi-tech" in the sense that it had computers cards on various delegates to the convention. When one Roberts delegate discovered that the very short file on her listed that she'd had a miscarriage, she turned into a Manchester supporter because of the ethical violation of privacy and creepiness of it all.

Look how far we've come, and how far there still is to go. I'd imagine that within the next 25 years or so the political parties will have a pretty lengthy profile on all of us. They'll know if we've ever taken someone to court (potential trial lawyer voter), been sued (potential tort-reform voter), whether we went to public or private school, where our kids go to school, been turned down for a serious surgery, whether any friends or family have been arrested for drug crimes or have any victims of drug or gang violenceand so on and so on. It'd require a lot of effort to get there, of course, but a great deal of information on us is already public and once there is a central warehouse for that information to exist, I'd say it's almost inevitable. It's even possible that they can make deals with grocery stores and start profiling on whether or not we buy organic foods, foods more likely to make us obese, and so on.

Part of me probably should be as concerned as Susanna is, but that part is over-ridden by "Man, I want towork on that database!"

That would be my neighbor Yale. Yale, you see, decided to do a nice thing and lend me 8mm, a movie starring Nicolas Cage. It's not a movie I'd otherwise rent, but since it's there, I figure "Hey, why not?"

I'll tell you why not, because it makes it all the way to the last scene of the movie and then won't read.

So now I'm going to have to go rent a movie I would not have otherwise gotten. Somehow, his friggin' generosity has cost me money!

["Jackass" concept taken wholesale from Last Page -- I really need to come up with a term of my own]

When I first saw the cop pull up and park on the street adjacent to the apartment, I figured it had to do with the couple arguing downstairs. They'd gotten into a pretty nasty tiff about something and she wouldn't give him back his tools. But, I realized, there could be any number of reasons for him to wash up on our doorstep. I've been getting used to them. He saw me watching him and asked, "Room 209?" I pointed to where I thought it was, but a young white woman accompanied by an older black man said "over here" and I was off by a couple apartments. The apartment manager lady also walked up and they congregated for a while.

Stoner was also outside watching all this going on. I asked him, "Is that Strang's place or the other one?"

"Strang's," he said.

The young woman was likely Strang's significant other, or at least she had a lot of stuff that she was taking out of the apartment and putting in her car. Given the extremely low population of black folks up here, I'm guessing the older black man was a relative in charge of taking most of Strang's stuff. What the young white woman or old black man didn't take, the cop did. Sealable Bag after sealable bag of... well... stuff. Someone more well-versed in drug paraphenalia could do a better job of saying what exactly was in those sealable baggies, but unfortunately I can't provide much in the way of specifics.

The process took about three or four hours.

"I guess he doesn't have any reason to look over at that one," I said.

"Don't point," Stoner replied.

"Oh, right."

Less than fifty feet away from where the cop was, at the apartment I was admonished not to point at, is another meth lab.

I left Houston less than six months into Mayor Bill White's term. Before Mayor White, of course, was Mayor Pothole himself, Lee Brown. Since most of my readers are either Houstonians or have spent a lot of time in Houston, I don't feel the need to give a critique of Brown except to say that he was a lousy mayor that lived up to the moniker that Kevin gave him. There was one intersection by my apartment down there that was under construction for over a year and a half. One intersection. This was the rule, not the exception to it. Though White is a business-friendly Democrat as Brown was before him and though he won Brown's endorsement, White's campaign slogan, "Get Houston Moving" was an implicit jab at his predecessor.

So I relocate to Gate City, Idaho, and one of the most wonderful aspects of this town is how quickly and easily it is to get from one part of town to another. In Houston, if you get into your car you're going to spend at least 20 minutes getting wherever you're going. If you're going across town, it's better to allot about an hour. In Gate City, however, you can easily get from one part of town to the farthest other part of town in fifteen minutes even during rush half-hour when there's "traffic." There was also very little in the way of construction and nothing in the way of road closings.

Within a month of arriving, they started sprouting up on all the main roads. I live on Fifth Avenue, which is one of the busiest streets this town has aside from the Interstate that cuts through it. It's down to one lane and if I look out at my apartment, I can see at least five or ten cars backed up. They work on it at night, so I have the choice of either closing the window and facing a stuffy room or listening to the hammer klanging against something. Last night they hit a water main and we lost water all along the street. Then there's Main Street in Old Town Gate City, which has been completely torn up and there's a detour. There's also Gate Creek Rd, near Eel's house, which on any given day is down to one lane or itself has a detour, negating the advantage of not having to slow down for the school zone since school is out of session.

The danged orange cones followed me all the way up here.

"I think he got to the point where it wasn't working in any part of his life. It's the old thing, if you pound your head against the door--if you walk through a door and somebody hits you and keep walking through the door and you keep getting hit, eventually you either are a complete alcoholic or incredibly stupid. And George was sort of walking through that door and getting hit over and over again, and finally said to himself, I don't want to get hit." -John Ellis on his cousin, George W. Bush.

My neighbor Stoner enjoys, among other things, alcohol. He enjoys it in large quantities with great frequency. A couple of weeks ago, he stumbled over to my apartment so that he could show me his scraped knee. He couldn't, for the life of him, remember how he got it. He said, "it looks bad-ass, dudn't it?" as he pointed a little too close to it, making contact and wincing in pain. He stayed hunched over for about fifteen seconds, lost his balance, and banged up his other knee. About a week ago, he stumbled over again to show me his black eye. He said that he got it when he missed his doorway by about two feet trying to walk into his apartment.

A couple months ago, before I got here, he decided he wanted to jump from our second story ledge. He carefully made his way to the other side of the rail, lost his grip, and fell about 12 feet or so onto his back. He laid there for about five minutes saying "Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...." before getting up, walking back up the stairs, and getting another shot. I wasn't there, but I've heard the story from Yale and Snowflake, who witnessed it.

Tonight Yale and Stoner got blasted. I don't mean drunk, I don't mean toasted, I mean blasted. He's barely stumbling and in the fifteen minutes we talked, he fell over twice. His drunkenness is only partially and indirectly to blame. He's hobbling because at some point during the night - and he doesn't remember when - he twisted his ankle. It looks like a dark baseball was shoved into his ankle, with half of it poking out. Right now he's cooking himself some hambugers on the grill. I'm relatively certain that when I see him tomorrow, he will have burned himself somewhere.

Last week I did a pretty good job of watching what I ate. Nothing too fatty, nothing too sugary, and no empty calories. That changed last night when I had an insatiable desire for some cookies. I walked over to the food store down the way and got two packs of generic cookies for $1. I ate them and felt physically ill for the rest of the night. They didn't taste good and I didn't enjoy eating them. Tonight, I felt the same craving, bought two more packs of cookies, and feel sick to my stomach as I type this. Again, they didn't even taste good.

It's the old thing, if you pound your head against the door - if you walk through a door and somebody hits you and keep walking through the door and you keep getting hit, eventually you have to say to yourself, "I don't want to get hit."

Gia is one-fourth sk8r, one-fourth punk, one-fourth ghetto, and one-fourth goth.She has an eyebrow ring, wears an all-black halter top with Oakland Raider basketball warm-up pants. Most of the time she wears whatever head-gear it is that the kids at the skate-parks where. I'm positive that, in her private-most moments, she is extraordinarily proud that she transcends genres and has proven once and for all that she is a Unique Individual. She makes impromptu tattoos on her body with a market. She's quite the artiste (I'm only being half-sarcastic on that part, she does have art talent). She symbolizes her suffering with a mock-up slit wrist, drawn with a red market on her forarm. She is also, beneath the layers of masque, quite attractive.

Dawson is a surfer dude. There's no ocean for several hundred miles from here so I doubt that he surfs, but he still looks and acts the part. Since he's living in Thrifthaven I have to assume that his tan is legitimate, but it obviously took a lot of work. It demonstrates his oneness with nature or something, I'm sure. I don't talk to Dawson often, but every time I've talked to him it's begun with him saying, "What's up, dude," and him ending with, "peace out" with only a couple of exchanges between. He never fails to use the "V" peace sign with his index and middle fingers whenever we part ways. He's also quite attractive.

The only thing Gia and Dawson have in common is their pretentious contemporary role-playing. It's almost painful to watch them together. They've been sitting outside talking every time I've gone out for the last couple of days. They're quite apparently attracted to one another and, on some level, feel as though they should be together since they are both attractive, single people. They're trying desperately to form some sort of connection so that the inevitable sex they will eventually have will in some way be spiritual and authentic.

It's not working yet, but I'm sure that they will try again tomorrow.

Hot Topic: Response to Comments on the Amy Richards Story (Michele Catalano)
Intellectual Honesty (Amanda Strassner)
The topic is the Amy Richards story, in which a woman sought to abort one or two of her would-be triplets for convenience's sake. Michele falls somewhere in the middle of the abortion debates and touchingly discusses the ways in which she's torn about the topic. Amanda, coming from a very pro-life perspective, sympathizes and adds her own thoughts on Michele, the abortion topic, and intellectial honesty. There's more on the topic by James Joyner, Brian S. (no connection with No-Lyfe's Brian S.), Michelle Malkin, Steven Taylor, Vanderleun, Alex Knapp. Ben Domenech, and AllahPundit.

Aladdin expels Ronstadt after political remarks [via Chris]
Linda Ronstadt was shown the door when her show became part of a political crusade. It's hard to be too sympathetic. I'm fully aware that outside Texas Country musicians (whose views very greatly from right to left), I'm well aware that most of the artists I enjoy fall somewhere between John Kerry and Ralph Nader. I don't need to have my engagement of the show interrupted by reminding me that were are political opponents.

Singer on Superman
Alex Knapp celebrates the hiring of X-Men director Bryan Singer to the reinvention of Superman for the big screen. I left X-Men disappointed (admittedly, I had high expectations) and haven't seen X-Men 2 (which I've heard is better than the first), so I don't entirely share Knapp's enthusiasm. That said, Singer will at least take a seriousness to the project that Warner Bros. superhero movies have been lacking for some time.

The Trouble with Libertarianism
James Joyner responds to an argument in TechCentralStation suggesting that libertarianism isn't a coherent philosophy. Libertarianism is, in my mind, the most coherent philosophy on the American political map. The author of the TCS piece clearly conflated libertarianism with libertinism. I'd argue that one would almost necessarily lead to the other, but one is a political philosophy and the other a moral one.*

A sign of another time: ‘For Whites Only’
Ginger is right, this kind of thing shouldn't happen in 2004. The most amazing thing about this is not the racism of the owner, but the blaise response of the neighbors: “It sounds like he might be a little prejudiced. But it doesn’t bother me.”... might be... a little prejudiced?

*UPDATE: Kevin suggests that my summation is a misrepresentation of Joyner and Feser (the TCS author). Re-reading both the article and my summation, he has a point. There's more in the comments section or, better yet, read both pieces and form your own conclusions.

This is a picture of Lance Armstrong's crew in the Tour DeFrance. Like Scott, I get a kick out of seeing the Texas flag flying high out there.



No word yet on whether or not the French surrendered.

It's annoying to have to register on to news sites in order to access articles. The biggest problem is that I lose track of all my passwords and probably have a dozen accounts on certain news sites. I'm creating a spreadsheet to keep track of it all, but it's still a pain. I understand why they do it, though.

What really irks me is when I log on to a site in order to access an article, go through the whole hassle of registration, and then when I'm done they send me to the main page! I went there to access a friggin article and they don't send me to it! Instead of Have to click "back" a couple times and then refollow my links. Even then it sometimes doesn't remember my password, so I have to log in again and they send me straight back to the main page.

Argh!

Several months ago I wrote this about Houston's light rail project:

Instead of getting rail to ease the traffic from the icky sprawling and dumb growth suburbs where all those people who vote Republican live, it goes from inside the loop to... well, inside the loop. In any other circumstances, a multimillion dollar construction project that connected wealthier neighborhoods (Med center) to places that only rich people can afford (downtown) so that they don't have to ride with those icky poor people (bus riders) would be lambasted by liberals. But it's rail, so that makes it okay.

Kevin points to this KHOU article that underlines the last part of my statement:

HOUSTON -- The next line for the Metro rail was suppose to go north, eventually to Intercontinental Airport. Now that may not happen and a lot of people on the northside say they feel betrayed.

"The streets are already wide. All you need to do is run two rails, coming up the middle, one north, one south.,” said Ed Reyes as he surveys Fulton Street just inside The Loop.

That is where Metro had planned to begin phase two of its light rail master plan. Only now, he's hearing that may not happen.

"To leave these neighborhoods out would be terrible at this point.” Reyes says.

He’d hoped Metro's route going past Moody Park, up Fulton to the Northline Mall would revitalize the neighborhoods. But now Metro is considering moving it alongside the Hardy Toll Road.


Unlike many skeptics of light rail, I am a fervent supporter of mass transportation even when it doesn't turn a profit. My view is that a robust public transportation system can help

[...]

Metro is also considering moving its southwest line from alongside 59 and the Westpark Tollway to Richmond.

There are a lot of low-end apartments in the North Corridor and along US59 south. When Danforth and I were looking for apartments, we looked heavily into both areas. There are a number of people out there that can't afford cars or can't afford the upkeep so that their cars are often not functional. These are the people that need transportation, not the cosmos that live near the med center and want to take a trip to the chic stores downtown.

Ever since this light rail mess started, it has been firmly aimed at the people who least need it. The first line only helps those that live inside the loop and doesn't even serve the purpose of keeping drunk drivers off the road because it closes before the bars do. The new line should at least help commuters, though those apparently only make for 20% of the traffic in the new location which conveniently avoids the poor neighborhoods so that you won't get "those people" ruining the cosmos truly world class experience of riding the choo choo.

Meanwhile, they're cutting the and making them walk further to get to their stops. Their cutting the convenient (and surprisingly non-intrusive) trolley rides downtown that helped people get from one part of downtown to another. Why? Because either (a) the rail isn't bringing in the ridership promised and they want to push those numbers up by forcing more people to ride the rail or (b) they deliberately hid the fact that the rail was going to mean cutting down bus lines or (c) both.

I'm not against mass transportation. I'm not even necessarily against rail, but who is public transportation supposed to serve? The commuters that clog up the freeways for five hours a day? I suppose the new line will help with that somewhat - although I should point out that congestion on North US59 is nothing compared to I10 and south I45 and US59 since they (horror of horrors!) added lanes to it. Is it supposed to help those that don't have transportation of their own? Apparently they're trying to avoid that. So who? Oh yeah, the cosmos that wanted a toy train to prove that we're modern and, of course, "world class."

A number of conservatives , libertarians and even liberals are decrying a recent decision by the government to redefine obesity an illness.

Obesity, per se, doesn't kill. But then again, as I understand it, neither does AIDS. Rather, AIDS-related death is caused by AIDS killing the immune system so that it can't defend itself (and is killed by) something else. Similarly, obesity doesn't kill, but it does cause a host of health problems that lead to premature death. On the other hand, does something need to kill in order for it to be considered an illness? Not really. The personal discomfort, social stigma, and decreased physical ability are all significant in their own right when associated with some other impairment (the flue, deformity, and lost limbs respectively).

The biggest question I have is "What does this mean?" As I understand it, the effects of obesity (heart disease, diabetes, etc.) are already covered. Most of the known cures for obesity involve alterations of private behavior and not drugs or medical treatment. Does this mean that the government is going to start picking up the tab for liposuctions and whatnot, as many opponents suggest? Or is this a semantic battle for the acceptance of the obese and for the justification of a War on Obesity? James Joyner links to a lot of articles on the subject and wading through all the effects it could have, should have, and shouldn't have, I have little idea of what effect it will have.

The most interesting theory on the matter comes from one of his commenters:

As someone with intimite contact with Medicare from the consumer’s point of view (my lady companion is on total disability) I can tell you the REAL meaning of the above coded phrase.

We ARE treating obesity in this country, we merely label it by its secondary complications: heart disease, sleep apnea, diabetes type II, and so on. Virtually any “review” of treatment options by Medicare is, and has been since 1980, merely a hunting expedition to find those options for which any excuse can be drummed up to cut or eliminate coverage.

The shell game goes like this. When “obesity” was not recognized by Medicare, the intelligent preventative treatments—diet, exercise, ect.—were “not medically necessary”.

Now that this language is being abandoned, a whole host of treatments for other diseases with medically valid diagnoses can be bureaucratically reclassified as “due to obesity” and therefore a “non-covered expense”, just like diet, exercise, and so forth.

So don’t expect any taxpayer money spent for Jenny Craig or Victory Fitness anytime soon.

That actually makes more sense than any other theory that I've heard. And I have no idea what to think about it.

Father/Daughter Relationship
A cute story about Frank and his daughter.

Bush vs. Kerry on the issues: Iraq War
PatioPundit puts his finger on just about everything I don't trust and don't like about John Kerry on the issues.

Dark Horse on the Third Ballot [via Instapundit]
My views fall somewhere between the Republican Party and the Libertarian Party. I've yet to vote for a Libertarian presidential candidate. Harry Browne's been the nominee and he never sat well with me. Somehow, they managed to find someone worse. I guess this won't be the year that I do. So it appears I need a new fall-back candidate if for some reason I decide not to vote for Bush. I wonder who the Natural Law Party's nominee is going to be?

How Much Worse Off Are We?
Arnold Kling takes on the doomsayers that believe that things are getting worse for the average American. He makes some good points comparing the last thirty years, but I found the comparisons to the 1870's to be largely irrelevent. Very few are arguing on that long a timeline. I'd be really interested to see some of those work/sleep/liesure pie charts comparing the 1970's to now. I emailed Kling about it but he said that he didn't have those numbers available.

Coming soon to a Republican table near you
Apparently some Republicans have decided to make Republican-friendly ketchup to counteract Kerry's nefarious Heinz brand (Kerry is married to Theresa Heinz, heiress to the Heinz ketchup fortune). This reminds me of the right-wing ice cream (which is bad) more than the "It's a Bush!" 2000 election cigars (which was kinda cool. Besides, weren't Republicans giggling not so long ago that the Heinz company supports Bush?

Turning the tables on Nigeria's e-mail conmen [via Greg]
Hehe.

Campaigns Use TV Preferences to Find Voters [via Judd]
An interesting look at where Bush and Kerry are spending their campaign dollars on television. Nothing particularly surprising except that the party that championed campaign finance reform to get rid of soft money and independent advertising are essentially doing the same thing that the law they support was supposed to prevent.

Resource: Nationmaster.com, Where Stats Come Alive
An interesting web site with all kinds of useful international statistical information.

Norway holds the honor, at least according to the United Nations Development Program. The US scored eighth, which came as a bit of a surprise. I would have expected France (#16) and other countries to score ahead of us because the deck is usually stacked against the US in these sorts of studies. Not maliciously, necessarily, but their priorities are not ours.

It brings forth some interesting questions, though. For instance, why did Scandanavia do so much better than Western Europe? If increased socialism is the answer according to their criteria, why did more socialistic France score lower than the US?

[Part One]

---11:30pm---
[phone rings]
RAW: Hey, Loren, could you pass me my phone?
Loren: Sure. [passes phone]
RAW: Hello?
Eel: Hey, did you try to call me?
RAW: Not since we talked earlier.
Eel: Oh, well I got a call and you're one of the only people that has the number of the hotel down here, so I was thinking...
RAW: I take that back. I didn't call you but I think my guest over here did.
Eel: Your guest?
RAW: Yeah.
Eel: Alex. Please, please, please tell me that the weird guy didn't come back.
RAW: Not again, still.
Eel: He never left?!
RAW: Yeah.
Eel: Alex!!!!
RAW: Yeah?
Eel: Tell him go to away.
RAW: You know I can't do that.
Eel: Stop being so nice and tell him to go away! He invited himself in, he wouldn't leave you alone, he made you feel uncomfortable for hours and hours. Then he made you leave your own apartment for three hours. Why did you let him back in?!
RAW: Same as... uhh... [looks over at Loren] last time.
Eel: Alex, if a dog made you feel uncomfortable, would you let it inside?
RAW: Of course not.
Eel: Then why are you letting the human in?!?!
RAW: My personal frailties, I guess.
Eel: If you don't say "no" to him now, it's just going to get worse.
RAW: Theoretically that might not happen.
Eel: It will.
RAW: Might not.
Eel: Will.
RAW: Mi-
Eel: WILL!
RAW: Yeah, I know.

---1:30am---
RAW: Hey man, I need to get some sleep. I'll see you around, okay?
Loren: Coo.

---3:00am---
[RAW goes outside to get something from his car]
RAW: Oh, uhhh, hi Loren. What are you still doing here?
Loren: Just hanging out. Stoner went to sleep, so I'm kind of bored.
RAW: Seeing as how everyone is asleep, I can see how that would be the case.
Loren: Yeah, it sucks. So what are you doin'?
RAW: Oh, uhh, couldn't sleep. Getting some sleeping pills from the car so I can go to sleep and sleep for many hours while everyone in this apartment sleeps.
Loren: Coo.
[RAW goes down to get something from his car]
[RAW comes back up]
Loren: Hey man, can I come and hang out in your apartment?
RAW: Sorry man, taking sleeping pills so I can join all of the other sleeping residents in this apartment and sleep.
Loren: Hey, can I crash at your place tonight?
RAW: Uhh, sorry man. I don't let people sleep over at the apartment.
Loren: So what's the inflatable mattress for?
RAW: When my back hurts.
Loren: Ahhh. Coo.
RAW: Night, man.
Loren: Night.

---11:00am---
RAW: Hey, what was Loren doing here all day yesterday?
Stoner: I don't know, he just does that. You can't get rid of him.
RAW: So I've noticed.
Stoner: I told him he couldn't crash at my place last night. Last time I let him do that I couldn't get him to leave for six days.
RAW: Wow, I'm really glad I didn't let him.
Stoner: Good move. He'll stick around for days if you let him. You know that rule in the lease about not letting people sleep outside at night?
RAW: Yeah?
Stoner: I'll give you three guesses when and for who that was made.
RAW: I think I'll only need one.

Alma Adams is asking on sexual history of those on Texas's State Board of Education that promote abstinence-only policies. While I agree with Adams on the larger point, I feel an obligation to point out that this is a rhetorical trick that can make a hypocrite out of... well... just about everyone. Well, out of me anyway.

According to this logic, you see, I'm going to be a Grade-A hypocrite. When I was a about ten, I stole a pack of baseball cards from the local dealer. When I was in junior high, I stole a t-shirt from the lost and found in PE. But despite this, you see, I'm going to try to teach my children not to steal.

Isn't the hypocrisy unfathomable here? I mean obviously, since I stole I should focus my efforts on teaching him how to avoid getting caught. We'll call this "safe-stealing," an effort to accept immoral behavior in order to evade more dire consequences of said behavior. Since I did things I shouldn't have when I was a kid, the emphasis needs to be on avoiding the consequences of that behavior, right? To avoid hypocrisy, it's the only thing to do, right?

Obviously, it's not. If learning from your mistakes and trying to get others to avoid them is hypocritical, then hypocrisy isn't all bad. If it's not hypocrisy, then we need to avoid insinuating that it is.

Sex and theft are two different birds, obviously. One applies under the "harm principle" and the other doesn't. But if one believes that morality is defined by more than just the harm principle (the Bible, for instance) then they actually aren't all that different. They're both immoral and my comparison stands.

For my part, I agree with conservatives that consensual sex that does not harm anyone but those partaking in it can be wrong and I agree with liberals that abstinence-only policies are not the best way to go from a pragmatic standpoint. But there is a debate here to be had and one that doesn't involve the word "hypocrisy."

Warning: This is the most pointless post I've ever posted!

One of the questions on Slate's red/blue quiz involved membership in the Big 12 football conference. While thinking about politics and college football, it occured to me that the Big 12 is entirely located in "red states" which went for Bush in 2000. Upon further reflection I realized that was untrue because of Iowa State. So I pondered if there were any conferences that were entire red or blue state conferences. It turns out that (using 2005 alignment) there are three all-red I-A football conferences:

SEC: [Arkansas (1), Louisiana (1), Kentucky (1), Tennessee (2), Mississippi (2), Alabama (2), Georgia (1), South Carolina (1), and Florida (1)]

Conference USA: [Oklahoma (1), Texas (4), Louisiana (1), Tennessee (1)Mississippi (1), Alabama (1), West Virginia (1), North Carolina (1), and Florida (1)]

Sun Belt: [Texas (1), Arkansas (1), Louisiana (2), Tennessee (1), Alabama (1), Florida (2)]

While they don't shut out these conferences, Red States also dominate:

Big 12: 11 Red [Colorado (1), Nebraska (1), Kansas (2), Oklahoma (2), Texas (4), Missouri (1)] and 1 Blue [Iowa (1)]

ACC: 10 Red [Virginia (2), North Carolina (4), South Carolina (1), Georgia (1), Florida (2)] and 2 Blue [Massachusetts (1), Maryland (1)

Mountain West: 9 Red [Nevada (1), Utah (2), Wyoming (1), Colorado (2), Texas (1)] and 2 Blue [California (1), New Mexico (1)]

Blue States, however, only dominate two conferences:

Pac 10: 8 Blue [Washington (2), Oregon (2), California (4)] and 2 Red [Arizona (2)]

Big Ten: 8 Blue [Minnesota (1), Iowa (1), Michigan (2), Wisconsin (1), Illinois (2), Pennsylvania (1)] and 3 Red [Ohio (1), Indiana (2)]

One is tied:

Big East: 4 Red [Ohio (1), Kentucky (1), West Virginia (1), Florida (1)] and 4 Blue [New York (1), Pennsylvania (1), New Jersey (1), Connecticut (1)]

The other two lean red:

WAC: 5 Red [Nevada (1), Idaho (2), Utah (1), Louisiana (1)] and 4 Blue [Hawaii (1), California (2), New Mexico (1)]

MAC: 7 Red [Ohio (6), Indiana (1)] and 5 Blue [Illinois (1), Michigan (3), New York (1)]

This amusing Slate quiz pegged me about 3/5 the way down the line in the red area.

[via Amygdala]

Annie Jacobsen recounts a harrowing tale on a recent flight in which 14 Syrians acted very suspiciously:

The take-off was uneventful. But once we were in the air and the seatbelt sign was turned off, the unusual activity began. The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag.

Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.

For the next hour, the men congregated in groups of two and three at the back of the plane for varying periods of time. Meanwhile, in the first class cabin, just a foot or so from the cockpit door, the man with the dark suit - still wearing sunglasses - was also standing. Not one of the flight crew members suggested that any of these men take their seats.

The laws and regulations against racial profiling are taken to task (even if they'd felt the need, airport security cannot question more than two people of a single ethnic group regardless of the suspicion level of their behavior).

Tom Veal and MartiniPundit have their doubts about the story and try to poke some holes in some of the less credible aspects of it. Most of the "holes" I can fill up pretty quickly with some easy explanations (Why 14 of them? To put down any Flight 91-style rebellions, Why more than a couple air marshalls? Because putting more marshalls on the flight might have been the only thing they could do, and so on.) The most suspicious aspect of the story involves the stewardess, who acts like the love interest to the action hero who's going to take down the terrorists single-handedly in some action movie.

Even if the author made it up (which she didn't entirely, some of it has been verified), she does to go great pains to point out the regulatory roadblocks that would prevent authorities from doing anything about it. Some suggest that his is a good argument for racial profiling. I'm not entirely at ease with that idea, but I don't see a problem with nationality-profiling. While the most obvious targets would be those from Arab nations, I'd say the same for Irish foreign travelers if the IRA took to attacking Americans.

[via Chris]

Because my apartment has no AC, I have to leave the window open. Because my apartment is located directly by one of Gate City's most prominant roads, a lot of traffic passes through and I get to hear that through the window. As such, I have to keep English subtitles on as I watch it.

I must say that when ominous music is playing, it makes it a lot less ominous when it says "[Ominous Music Playing]" across the bottom.

Update: Kim Bauer is still an idiot.

I have two televisions. The first was bought by Danforth and I when we were living together. We split the cost of the TV and a washer/dryer combo. When we parted ways, he got the W/D and I got the TV and the cost difference. It's a nice 20-something inch television with three inputs. Unfortunately, it wouldn't fit in my car on the drive up so I had to come with the second television.

The second TV was given to me by my grandmother when her mind became incomplete and she had to move into a special facility. I thanked her for the television, but I don't know if she knew who I was anymore by that point. It's a very old television and not a particularly good one. To give you an idea, there are thirteen numbered buttons up front and you have to program them to go to a certain channel with a screwdriver. So while I was down there, channel 26 was on 12, 20 on 10, and so on.

As you might imagine, it doesn't have three inputs like the other one does. In fact, it doesn't have any RCA inputs. I brought up a co-ax cable. Unfortunately, because of Macrovision's idiocy I couldn't plug in my DVD player and watch the DVDs that I legally purchased. If it goes through the VCR, it gets distorted and without a special device it can't go in to the co-ax. Thanks again, Macrovision. I could, however, plug my VCR in again, which I did. Unfortunately the picture was quite snowy. I had to confront the possibility that I wouldn't have a working TV up here. I borrowed a co-ax from Stoner and the picture came in worse.

If the problem was the co-ax cable, I'd just need a new cable and an RF Modulator so that I could use both the VCR and DVD player (to watch DVDs that I legally purchased, need I remind you). If it was the television, I wouldn't have any use for it. I went to Walmart and looked for the RF, but couldn't find it. I asked Walmart clerks on two different occasions and they looked at me like I was crazy. "Why don't you hook it up through the VCR again?" "If it won't go through the VCR, you'll need to buy a TV with multiple inputs." The only other place I thought to look was Radio Shack, of which there were none in this town that I'd seen.

While visiting Linus in Jackson, he told me there was a Radio Shack there, so I decided to go ahead and risk a purchase. When I got back to Idaho and started looking at Walmart for some cables and lo and behold, I find the RF Modulator at half the price that I paid. Oh well. Since I'd already bitten the $30 bullet, I bit another $10 and hoped that the problem was the cables and not the television.

It paid off. The picture on the TV looks better than it has any right to. I've had DVDs running in the background non-stop ever since.

The RF Modulator is pretty cool, too. There isn't a switch, it moves back and forth depending on which device was turned on last. It actually helps me make sure that I turn off the devices as soon as I'm done with them. On the other hand, I want a switch. I like switching switches and the RF deprives me of the ability to do so.

Oh well. I'm at 5:35 watching the first season of 24 again. Half-watching it, anyway, while posting and avoiding creepy glances.

I met Loren last week. He was hanging out with Stoner, Gia, Snowflake, Meatloaf, and Yale when I was feeling more sociable. He seemed like a pretty okay guy. I tried to strike up a conversation with him, but he's not much a conversationalist. I found Yale (whom I had also just met) a lot more personable.

Loren was hanging out in the parking lot when I got back from the Job Center today. He asked if I'd seen Stoner and I told him that I hadn't. He made his way up to the breezeway up here and we started talking for a painful thirty minutes. I say "painful" because he is the worst conversationalist I have ever been around and I started getting the willies every time we were quiet for too long. I told him that I was going to go inside and watch some DVDs.

When I walked inside he was hovering around the doorway and I felt guilty about the prospect of closing my door on someone's face, so I left the door open (which is common in the summer in this complex - no AC). He just stood there for about five minutes before he asked if he could come in and hang out while he waited for Stoner to get back.

I said "sure" and let him in. I was planning to do some computer work while the DVDs ran, but I felt bad about being multitaskily occupied, so I just watched the DVD. Or at least I tried to. He, meanwhile, just sat there staring at me. He would try to make conversation, but we have nothing in common. A couple times I tried to make conversation, but it had the same result. So he just watched me watch the DVD.

For two hours.

I needed to get out of the apartment, so I relocated to the balcony where, lo and behold, Stoner was. Loren didn't even initiate contact with Stoner. Stoner markedly didn't initiate contact with Loren. Stoner talked to me, I talked to Stoner, and Loren just stood there watching the sunset.. When I came back into my room, he followed. So I watched DVDs again and he watched me. Until he fell asleep. I was only mildly less comfortable. On one hand, he wasn't watching me anymore. On the other hand, he was asleep on my floor.

For another hour.

Finally, I'd had enough and told him that I was going to go see Eel and I'd be leaving in about ten minutes. He said "okay" and then fell back asleep. I spent the next ten minutes watching the clock and at the end I told him that I needed to get going. He asked if he could use the restroom. I said "sure" and he went in.

For half an hour.

When he came out, I promptly left and took refuge at the park. I waited there for about three hours so that it would seem like I was with Eel. I got back about half an hour ago.

He's looking at me right now.

Note: Title was changed when second part was added.

Update: Kevin asked for a picture and against my better judgment, I delivered!

[Read More!]

This is the 1910th post on this blog, which includes archives of my posts from the No-Lyfe Journal, Disagreement Inc, and the old blogspot site. There are 1909 comments. This doesn't include the comments on NLJ, DI, or the blogspot site, but we'll pretend those don't exist for now. This will definitely be the first time I've had more comments than posts on a single blog. The next person to post will make it a tie, the next person to post after that will be the first person with a higher comment number than a post number on the history of the blog. Since comments appear at a faster rate than posts, this will likely be the last time that the comment number is lower than the post number.

So someone comment!

Someone came to my site looking for Division I-A schools without university in their name

This happens to be a piece of trivia that I know. There happen to be a total of five schools in I-A that don't include the u-word. Anyone want to hazard a guess?

I'll update this post tomorrow with the answer.

Update: Answers posted in the comments.

James Gore has a piece up on Blogcritics about the cost of parking in Canadian hospitals:

The problem is that what would happen if the hospitals would give away free parking. I mean, I don’t think there would be anyone dishonest enough to use the free parking at the hospitals rather than have to pay at a private parking lot maintained by some guy named Guillaume. I mean, wouldn’t you rather have a nice comforting parking spot in extra wide lines maintained by someone named Dr. Guillaume?

Ok, sorry for that, but I think that if you give away free parking at the hospitals people are obviously going to take advantage of it for other purposes other than going to the hospital. If they offered the parking there cheaper than the private parking lots, people are still going to use them. Only by charging more for their own lots will guarantee that people who want to use the parking lot for hospital purposes will actually get a spot.

I wish there was a better alternative. I mean, going to the hospital is not the most emotionally easy thing to do and charging someone $14 is not the greatest way to help the anxiety. If we only had teleporters…

The dude is so close to putting his finger on what's wrong with both Canadian and American health care systems. So... close...

Pitney Bowes battles America's broken health care finance system [via Chris]
The interesting thing about this little write-up is that liberals will look at it and say "This is why we need to nationalize health care!" and conservatives will see the exact same information and say "This is why nationalized health care would be so disastrous!" I know I take the latter view, but I can see liberals nodding with approval as they read it.

Non-Fathers Need Not Support Non-Kids
Who would expect such common sense to come from California? That parents don't have to support kids that aren't there's shouldn't be a development. The most amazing thing to me about this state of affairs is how NOW and similar organizations can say "We don't care if he can prove he's not the father, someone has to take care of this kid" and a "moderate" Gray Davis actually vetoing the last attempt at this with rationale that "the state can't afford to take the burden wrongfully put on these men, so we'll just leave the burden with the men."

Damned to Hell [via Warliberal]
Ousted former Alabama Supreme Court Cheif Justice Roy Moore uses his direct line of communication to negate all that namby-pamby stuff about believing in Jesus and/or leading an overall good life and/or repenting sins being the Christian path to Heaven. Apparently the path to Heaven is by not pissing off Roy Moore.

The 30-Year Secret
An immensely disturbing account of the mayor that put Portland, Oregon on the map. In the 70's he had an affair (if you can call it that) with a 14 year old babysitter. The story follows her life, his, and the consequences that ruined her life and his political career.

Jake's squirrel idea is not just a drey-dream [via Arkanssouri]
A little boy wins a contest with an obstacle course of sorts to train squirrels. He calls it the Assault Course. I hope that the Renegade Squirrels at the University of Houston don't stumble across this. They'd become unstoppable!

How school reform is altering classrooms [via Judds]
Reports on the No Child Left Behind* law and the effect it's having on the classrooms. The good news is that it's doing a great job of compiling data and letting schools that are coming up short know that they're coming up short. The money quote is "'We called it 'CSAT hock,' 'says school superintendent Joyce Bales of Colorado's student assessment program. 'eople thought they were doing a lot better than they were.'" One of the biggest arguments in favor of standardized testing is that it gives a more realistic assessment of where the kids are. I don't like the top-down aspect of this all, either, but if there's another way I can't see it.

Kuff laments Conroe's attempts to shift from rural to suburban and predicts it's failure.

See, the problem as I see it is that everything Conroe wants the Woodlands already has, and with its relentless northern expansion it's already pretty close by for Conroe residents. It's not inconceivable to me that any restaurant chain that might consider locating in downtown Conroe could wind up concluding that doing so would cannibalize an existing franchise's business a few miles south on I-45. Sure there's plenty of growth in Montgomery County, but I'm not sure there's enough in Conroe proper to support an Olive Garden or Bennigan's that isn't located right on the highway and probably wouldn't have much of a customer base outside of Conroe.

Now, I'm just supposing here, and I certainly could be underestimating the growth potential of that part of the county. I still wonder if enticing chain restaurants to an authentic small-town downtown is a good use of Conroe's assets. Unlike the Woodlands, which is an entirely aritificial creation, Conroe has a past to draw on. Its downtown has actual historic small-town charm. I don't understand the allure of turning it into a mini-version of the Woodlands' strip-center monolith, especially when the real thing is less than 15 minutes away. I'd think that if Conroe can make a go of it, a downtown Main Street of mom-and-pop shops would be a competitive advantage over its nearest neighbor, which doesn't have anything like it. I'd think long and hard about throwing that away.

Of course, they've already tried the mom-and-pop approach without much success so far. Maybe they need to give the smaller approach more time, maybe this is a sign that they've alread lost the economic battle to the Woodlands, I don't know. But I'd want to be really sure that the national chain approach is the best, if not only, option before I took it. There's no going back if it's wrong.

The most important part to me, which he notes, is that Conroe's mom-and-pop places aren't really succeeding. It would be one thing if they were trying to get rid of one to replace it with the other, but it seems to me that they're trying to get anything they can. One isn't working, so they're trying to other. Taylor Lake Village, Nassau Bay, and Seabrook have managed to have a combination of both (with their own Woodlands, Clear Lake City, nearby). Conroe doesn't have to be antithetical to Woodlands to survive.

But I do understand where he's coming from. I'd much rather live in a Conroe than a Woodlands (or an Humble to a Kingwood). Unfortunately, people like me are in the minority. Also, as a commenter points out, if you want "history", "authenticity", and and "old time" feel, you can manufacture it as the Woodlands has and no one really seems to care. Jackson, Wyoming is a similar in that regard. All kinds of touristy places with zoning regulations and whatnot requiring a mountain village feel. The result is an log-pavillion Albertson's. I thought it was neat at first, but the artificiality of it almost made me long for the inauthenticity of other tourist traps.

One (sorta) birth control method of which the Catholics would approve:

The necklace is a tool that helps a woman track her menstrual cycle: Slide the little black gasket onto the fat part of the red bead on the first day of a period. Then advance that gasket across the brown beads, at the rate of one a day. When the gasket reaches the 12 white beads, pregnancy is likely if a woman has unprotected sex. (This danger zone is easy to confirm in the darkness of the bedroom, since the white beads glow in the dark.) After the gasket slides past the white beads, it resumes its march across brown beads, and pregnancy is unlikely once more.

According to two studies in the peer-reviewed journal Contraception -- one published this year and one two years earlier -- the method, used correctly, is more effective than a diaphragm and nearly as effective as a condom. This summer, the Standard Days Method and CycleBeads will be inducted into the bible of contraception, "Contraceptive Technology." Being included in the latest update of this family planning reference book used by health care professionals could feed demand for CycleBeads, which retail for $12.95, and never require a refill. In the 13 months since they became available, 30,000 women have started to use this method, according to the IRH. CycleTechnologies, the New York-based company that's manufacturing CycleBeads, projects that figure will double by the end of 2005.

CycleBeads are the latest variation on one of the oldest methods of birth control: periodic abstinence, commonly known as the rhythm method.

One of the biggest factors of birth control failure seems to be failure in use rather than the mechanism with everything from the Pill to Withdrawal. I suppose anything that helps people use their chosen method more effectively can be considered a good thing. Assuming, of course, they're comparing apples-to-apples with the beads, condom, and diaphragm all used correctly.

[via Judds]

I've looked everywhere and I don't see the ability of Thunderbird to mass export messages. Unfortunately, this is somewhat non-negotiable to me. So I ask the two of you that I know that use T-Bird (Kevin and Adam) as well as anyone else that happens to:

Is that feature available and I'm missing it?

Is there a plug-in you know about?

Is this on the slate of things-to-come?

Update: I'm installing OpenOffice right now and it wants a "Java Runtime Environment." I've not run in to this before despite having used OO before. I'm wondering if the Java was supplied by Opera, which I installed last time around. This time I went ahead and installed Mozilla instead.

Anyone have any ideas?

I made another round of glop today.

This stuff is amazing. One half can of beans and a half can of Tyson's chicken. I didn't add the egg this time since that was such a bust last time around. 360 calories, 32g of protein, and 3g of fat (none saturated).

The best part: I don't think I'll be hungry again all day. It was a bit bland, but the chicken really helps.

The worst part: Definitely going to need to find a way to spice it up if I'm going to make this a staple in my eating habits. Oh yeah, and I consumed enough sodium for the next three weeks.

-Yesterday Evening-

[Two men are walking around the complex, looking in to the office building, which has a "Sorry, We're Closed" sign. The older man is wearing an Iowa Hawkeyes cap and the younger has sunglasses on]
RAW: You guys looking for someone?
Hawkeye: Yeah, do you know Shane Smith?
RAW: Can't say that I do...
Shades: Short black guy?
RAW: There are a handful of black guys here.
Hawkeye: Do you know where the apartment manager is?
RAW: They're out of town this week. You can try the buzzer just in case, but I don't think they're around. The buzzer's by the door.
[they try the buzzer and it doesn't work]
RAW: I can get the complex's number for you if you want.
Hawkeye: Yeah. One minute while I get a pen and paper.
[I give him the number of complex and he called the owner]
[I went back inside]

-This Morning-

Stoner: Hey man, did you hear about Strang?
RAW: No. I actually just met the guy the other night. He came by at like 4:30 in the morning.
Stoner: He want money, cigarettes, or beer?
RAW: Cigarettes.
Stoner: Well, they busted him last night. A couple of cops were sniffin' around his place and they found a meth lab.
RAW: Did you see the cops?
Stoner: Yeah.
RAW: Plainclothed?
Stoner: Yeah.
RAW: Was one of them wearing an Iowa Hawkeyes cap?
Stoner: I don't know, what does it look like?
RAW: Black and yellow.
Stoner: Yeah, you saw them?
RAW: I think I inadvertantly helped them find Strang's apartment. I thought they were saying "Shane." It's weird that they didn't tell me they were cops.
Stoner: Nah. Ever since they planted a couple undercover narcs in a couple of apartments here, I think they figure we don't trust them. They're probably right.
RAW: Makes sense, I guess. Meth, huh?
Stoner: Yep.
RAW: Then he definitely should have had money to buy his own damn cigarettes and beer.
Stoner: Yep.

[sound of knocking on door]
[sound of door opening]
RAW: Yeah?
Neighbor: Hoog moog, hoog yoog soog stoog?
RAW: Huh?
Neighbor: Hoog moog, hoog yoog soog stoog?
RAW: Oh, no, I haven't seen Stoner [?]
Neighbor: Aug moog, aug noog tau toog to hiug.
RAW: Yeah, I haven't seen him all day.
Neighbor: Boog thoo woog, aug Sauog.
RAW: Good to meet you, I'm Alex.
Saul: So youg froo roug hou?
RAW: I'm sorry, could you say that again?
Saul: So youg froo roug hou?
RAW: Oh, no. I just moved up a couple months ago from Texas.
Saul: Auh, I woog urn Tegoog laug yau urn dur Mesgoog arau. Thau wuthoo i' rau noo doog thau.
RAW: Uhhh, yeah.
Saul: Mau eg-woog oos tau loog doog ig Lubbug.
RAW: Uhh, ahhh... [?]

This conversation went on for about ten minutes until I found an excuse to come back inside. I think I understood about fifteen words of it.

I suppose that it was bound to happen sooner or later. Terry Bohannon asks which first (or would-be second) daughter is cuter: Barbara Bush or Cate Edwards.

I'd have to go with Miss Edwards. I appreciate her slightly fuller frame and she has a nice pleasent approachable look. Miss Bush is probably more conventionally attractive, though, with a petite frame. Her eyebrows are less defined, however, and there's something unappealing in her expression in the given picture and those presented here. I actually consider Jenna the more attractive first daughter, though I can't say that I agree with her fashion sense. Between Jenna (sans fashion) and Cate, it's a close call.

[via Kevin, who votes for Barbara]

I'm reading more about the return of Hal Jordan. I'm getting a headache. When Eel and I were at the convenience store, I was thumbing through a comic book thinking that it would be nice to get back in to it when/if I get in a financial position to do so. Nevermind, it seems, because DC just curbed any enthusiasm I might have had for it. I'm not sure I can blame DC for this, though, as they're just giving the narrow-minded, obstinate fans what they've been wanting since Jordan died.

Except, of course, when Jordan did have his own series they weren't supporting it.

Hal went out in a blaze of insane glory when he was understandably pushed over the edge by the destruction of Coast City. But no, they couldn't have him go out as a villain (despite the *gasp* originality of it), so he came back and saved the world one last time. But no, people wanted Jordan back, so they put him in the ill-suited role of Spectre, screwing up both GL and Spectre history and contributing heavily to my leaving comicdom. But all these years later they still can't let it go and DC caved in.

I can't give DC a complete pass on this because a lot of this is Kyle Rayner's fault. Rayner, of course, is the current and soon-to-be ex-GL that never stood a chance of filling Hal's boots not just because of fan petulence, but because he was a stale white male Gen-X slacker-type that we've only seen a hundred million times before. I was sixteen when Rayner was created and I could have easily come up with a more compelling character.

But nonetheless, Rayner could have been the coolest character ever created and he still would have been resented for being Hal's stand-in. Comic books are first and foremost a victim of their own stringent continuity and the backwards-looking fans that are still upset there isn't still an Earth-1 and Earth-2.

That's about all I have to say about this at the moment. I have more thoughts on comic books in general, but I can barely think coherently on the matter at the moment.

Update: After reading through too many pages of responses, I find it interesting that I am, for once, with the majority on Hal Jordan's return. This is a new development as I'm used to being alienated from the faithful on this issue. I guess since Kyle has been GL for a decade or so now he has developed a following of his own.

Update II: Wow, I've apparently missed a whole lot in the comic book world. Tim Drake has resigned, Spoiler has become Robin, and Impulse is now Kid Flash. I guess you really can't go home again...

When I said that Green Lantern would be good material for a movie, this is not what I meant!:

No sooner have HEAT got Hal Jordan back as Green Lantern than... well... this happens.

Oh you have to feel sorry for the poor guys.

Not only is the planned "Green Lantern" movie featuring the Kyle Raynor Green Lantern character, but the executive in charge of making the Green Lantern movie wants to make it a comedy. The choice for the ring bearer?

Jack Black.

And, naturally, people at DC may wish the comic to resemble the film when it's released...

Like Pete, I don't make much of this rumor, but it will haunt me in my nightmares.

Three years or so ago, the No-Lyfe crew was holed up in an Austin hotel while we started the script for what became (for now, anyway) our last production. The cohesion of No-Lyfe had started to wear thin by the time we started on this script. There was already talk of reshuffling how we did things and Brian was talking about leaving the group. The start of a project was always the hardest and most tense part and this time around was no different. While I didn't know that Audrey and I were only a couple of days from collapsing, I felt the end was near.

I was walking the hotel courtyard when I saw what appeared to be a modern-day hobo. He had a blanket laid out in a portion of the yard that wasn't particularly visible to hotel guests or, more importantly, the hotel staff. I smoked a couple of cigarettes and paced back and forth collecting my thoughts about the project and problems with Audrey back in Houston. I wasn't too surprised when the hobo walked up to me and asked for a cigarette.

Three years or so later, I can still remember him very clearly. He was attractive enough to be in movies were it not for a brown tooth up front. He had a very shaggy beard and his curly hair grew up instead of out, giving him a white man's afro. When I gave him a cigarette and light, he asked where I was from. Unfortunately, I was distracted and didn't particularly have an interesting story to tell. While No-Lyfe is an interesting thing for anime fans and conventioneers, I gathered it was probably not the type of thing that he was interested in. I told him anyway, and the only two things he asked me were, "Never been to Houston, is it nice?" and "Have you found the Lord?"

I consider religion and spiritual belief to primarily be a matter between a person, their church, and God. I've never been one to open up too widely to strangers about my faith, my doubts, and my questions. I can't remember how I evaded the question, but I managed to do so and he started talking about his travels. I got the distinct impression that he was excited and appreciative that I didn't avoid him like most probably did. "You ever hear of Phoenix, he asked?"

"The city or the bird?" I asked, figuring that he'd assume that I'd heard of the sixth largest city in the nation.

"The city. I came out from that way. I'm on my way to Illinois."

"I've heard of that one, too," I said with a smile. He laughed.

When he told me his story, it actually didn't occur to me until much later that I could have gotten in trouble for helping a fugitive. Well, "fugitive" might be putting it strongly, but the Arizona parole board would not approve of his little trek. He'd gotten into some trouble about four years back with drug addiction and held up three convenience stores before he got caught and arrested for, insterestingly enough, only the first armed robbery. He found Jesus shortly after incarceration and spent most of his three years in prison spreading the Word to other inmates before being released on parole, good behavior, or whatever it is that they have out there.

I asked why he left Arizona if he wasn't supposed to and he told me that he wanted to see his father for the holidays so that he could apologize and make amends for what he's done. I have no reason to necessarily believe that anything that he told me was true, but there was something in his demeanor that told me that it was. He talked about his troubled relationship with his father and how he'd come to realize that he was the source for most of it. "Just as I walked away from Jesus and His teachings, I ignored my father and his."

After he finished talking, there was a slightly uncomfortable silence in the air. Suddenly I felt like I was waiting for his sales pitch for money and that threw just about everything off-kilter. Instead he asked if I was headed north and if I was, could I give him a ride. I thought briefly of Audrey back in Houston, some of the tension up in the apartment, and the sincerity of his voice combined with a lack of obvious nafarious reasons for wanting to go to Macomb, Illinois, and I honestly considered it. If I didn't have classes and work to attend to, I might have even driven him all the way up to Macomb.

But I had my responsibilities and all that I could give him was my best wishes and the $40 in my pocket. He accepted the money with some hesitation and said, "God be with you." As he went back to his blanket and I went back upstairs to the hotel room. "Thanks, I think I need all the help I can get these days."

"Then I will pray for you!" he yelled across the courtyard. I waved goodbye, swiped the keycard, and returned to my responsibilities.

The Friendly Critic
I've been continually updating my chronicles on Roger Ebert's adventures with the Happy Pills. He's been remarkably consistent. For what it's worth, I'm not doing this to pick on Ebert specifically or to be a movie snob. In fact, before the blog I used to harp on the Houston Press when it badmouthed 9 out of every ten movies for a while before it eventually got better and it started endorsing one out of every three movies or so.

When will we learn? [via Andrew Sullivan]
Zionics has a great collection of the empty The-Forthcoming-News-Will-Vindicate-Us posts of one Josh Marshall. I used to read Marshall pretty regularly, but after a while it became impossible to take him seriously. It really doesn't matter how "moderate" you are when you're that partisan.

African-Americans Unsure About Kerry, New Poll Says [via Bros Judd]
According a poll, 17% of blacks are leaning towards Bush in the upcoming election. It is, however, an article run by a conservative newssource about a poll taken by a conservative group, so take it with a grain of salt. Bush was supposed to do well among blacks (for a Republican, anyway) in 2000, but it was high turnout among blacks that made Florida so important. I don't see a particular reason for a change in that regard.

New Experiences
Jennifer Larsen lost her job. For lack of something more profound to say about it, that really bites.

It's a Generational Thing [via WoC]
Alaskan Bulgarian has an interesting piece on the nature of citizenship, nationality, and how differently Americans and Europeans view it.

Exploiting Reagan
A writer to The Corner brings up an interesting point about Ron Reagan Jr. being slated to speak at the Democratic convention. It is interesting that they invite him to speak on the heals of his father's death.

Is a third party the Great White Hope or the Great White Whale?
Jane Galt writes about the pro's and con's of third parties. When I wrote on the subject back when I was starting out, Miss Galt gave me the first of two links from her page.

Results of AP-Ipsos poll [via Bo Cowgill]
This isn't so much a Bush v. Kerry poll as it is a gauge of the public's perceptions of each of the candidates. What I find most interesting about it is how comparable these perceptions are. Bush has a couple things going for him (decisiveness, optimism) and Kerry has a couple (intelligence, non-arrogance), but outside those the numbers are nearly identical.

Time: 3:45am
Location: Thrifthaven Apartment Community

RAW: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
[sound of someone ferociously knocking on the door]
[sound of door opening]
RAW: Yeah?
Neighbor: Hey, I'm Strang. I live over there. You got any cigarettes?
RAW: No.
Strang: Oh, man. I'm sorry. You ain't Mormon, are you?
RAW: No.
Strang: Okay, good. Do you know anyone that has some cigarettes?
RAW: No.
Strang: Shit. Okay, nice meeting you, man.
RAW: Take care.
Strang: You too, man.
[sound of door closing]
[sound of RAW posting]
RAW: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

*- Hasn't happened yet, but will very momentarily.

This reminds me of those cool Spark quizzes that I spent obscene amounts of time taking in college.

----

Wackiness: 38/100
Rationality: 56/100
Constructiveness: 46/100
Leadership: 32/100

You are an SRDF--Sober Rational Destructive Follower. This makes you a font of knowledge. You are cool, analytical, intelligent and completely unfunny. Sometimes you slice through conversation with a cutting observation that causes silence and sidelong glances. You make a strong and lasting impression on everyone you meet, the quality of which depends more on their personality than yours.

You may feel persecuted, as you can become a target for fun. Still, you are focused enough on your work and secure enough in your abilities not to worry overly.

You are productive and invaluable to those you work for. You are loyal, steadfast, and conscientious. Your grooming is impeccable. You are in good shape.

You are kind of a tool, but you get things done. You are probably a week away from snapping.

As most anyone who reads enough to bother reading this blog knows, Bill Cosby has made some waves with some stern criticism of black youth culture. Many on the conservative side of the aisle are smugly praising Cosby for saying what "black people need to understand." The fact of the matter is that Cosby isn't saying anything particularly new and the points that he's raised have been brought up in the black community before. Even BET, in between rap music videos that praise violence and objectify women, regularly discusses the topic with a great deal of sobriety. There is some reluctance to bring the discussion to the public sphere because they (rightly) believe that many will argue that this proves that black poverty is a black problem. Cosby, because of his celebrity status, is just letting the rest of us in on the conversation.

Tom Hanna has a fantastic post about how it actually isn't black culture, per se, but youth culture that affects youths of all color:

Now I understand that Cosby is especially incensed that after the real struggles of blacks of his generation in the Civil Rights movement have taken this nation so far that black kids aren’t working harder. So many barriers to black achievement are gone and his generation worked so hard to achieve that for the upcoming generation that their laziness, with black male dropout rates approaching 50%, is a slap in the face. On the other hand, all that dropout rate really says is that a higher percentage of white kids are warming seats long enough to get a basically meaningless piece of paper and still not having any better grasp of their language. White men of Cosby’s age or a little older who won World War II and held the line against Communism in Korea and Berlin cetainly have every reason to feel the same way he does. I’m not even “old” since, apparently, 40 is the new 30 and I can’t imagine ever wanting my life to be in the hands of most of the white teens I meet.

Being less than a decade away from being a white teenager, I might should take offense at Tom's remarks, but I really can't. I'm still in contact with very few of the people that I went to school with in Seabrook. Most of the ones I am in contact with I'm generally proud of in terms of who they are and what they've accomplished. But sample-selection plays a great role in that and I think of a lot of the others and while I hope that they've grown up, it's somewhat hard to when you spent your most formative years MIA developmentally.

This isn't a "black problem," though a case could be made that blacks are disproportionately harmed by it due to their economic status coming in to this world. But before whites start smugly nodding their head to Cosby's words, it would do us all a great deal to look more objectively at their factors and how they've influenced us and how they might influence our children.

Yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theater is considered a classic example of when free speech is curbed in the name of public safety.

Can we please extend that to radio commercials that use a honking horn sound in order to get our attention?

I swear that I hear one every time I turn on the radio.

RAW360 is now running on Nucleus 3.0 (but not the new server).

We've finally got Nucleus 3.0 working in our undisclosed location. I'm working on moving everything over so that RAW360 can be upgraded at what I hope will be a more reliable server.

Except that I swear my current host knows what's going on. I can't think of any other reason that it would suddenly forbid me to FTP to the site unless they know I plan to download all of the pictures and files to re-upload them to the new server.

Bastards to the end!

Even as I became more liberal in my high school years, I never much cared for Jesse Jackson. While I even supported a lot of what he proclaimed to stand for (including affirmative action), there was something about his demeanor that put me ill-at-ease. But while I never cared much for Jackson, I was generally able to vaguely, ambiguously feel that his heart may not be entirely in the wrong place. Then, in March of 2000, he came to Houston and everything changed.

Texas Southern University was a wreck at the time. Night after night there would be stories of how students were getting dropped for classes for lack of payment even when the remaining balance was owed by the university's own scholarship fund. The University's president had somehow managed to get the undying support of of the students getting screwed in the process and attempts to keep him from getting fired were wrapped in a civil rights flag. They were ultimately able to get rid of him in 1999, but things had not improved when Jesse came to town in early 2000. I suppose it shouldn't have been a surprise that he blamed the entirety of the problem on white racism, but it certainly came to a surprise to me that he blamed it on white universities and he declared, of all schools, University of Houston to be white.

The University of Houston was then and is now one of the most ethnically diverse campuses in the nation. Nationally, every ethnic group except whites are overrepresented. Locally, only blacks lagged seriously behind their Houston numbers and one of the big reasons for that was TSU, the historically black university located right across the street. Not only was the school diverse in numbers, UH's College of Technology remains one of the least segregated places that I've ever been. I recall one class that amazingly had twenty students: five whites, five blacks, five Hispanics, three Asians, and two of Middle-Eastern descent. Not only were the groups not clumped together, but when we had to break off in self-selected groups of four, no group had more than one person of any given race. This was not done in the name of diversity, but rather based on where we were sitting. I was probably the only person in the class who noted the ethnic breakdown of the groups and I only did because Jesse Jackson had been on television calling UH a "white school."

There were, at the time, nearly as many black students at UH as there were at TSU. Of course, since UH is the 25th largest campus in the nation and about four or five times the size of TSU, no argument can be made that UH was more "black" than TSU. That's what it all came down to and how Jesse reformed UH into a white "have" to TSU's black "have not."

"When I ride down Scott Street and look at UH on one side and look at TSU on the other, I see two school systems under one state flag and in one nation," Jackson said. "On one side, the grass is green, the flowers are blossoming, the research is abundant, and the growth is phenomenal.

"On the other side, inadequate computers, old dormitories, not enough teacher pay," he said. "We want equal protection and equal funding."

It was all choreography for a "civil rights march" from the UH to TSU and UH was a convenient target due to its close proximity. A more fitting demonstration would have been some sort of "freedom bus ride" from College Station to Prairie View between two universities in the same system with huge demographic differences and a huge gulf in funding instead of two poorly funded schools in urban areas in which the black school got more money from the state per student than the white school did:

The source of some of the protesters' data remains unclear, however.

For example, proponents of equal funding, including Jackson, have claimed the state spends $14,000 per student at traditionally majority schools vs. $11,000 per student at minority schools. But state budget figures show that TSU receives a larger portion of state funding per student than UH does -- $4,916 per capita in general revenue at TSU as opposed to $3,620 at UH.

No one at TSU was able to explain the source of the larger figures to The Daily Cougar.

But that didn't look as good on television and since national audiences (which he was playing to as Governor Bush ran for president) didn't know the first thing about UH, convincing them that UH was a white school was easier than presenting an even remotely accurate picture of the two universities.

The symbolic march did not lead to equality in funding in Texas academics. The real battle is UT and A&M versus every other university in the state, but that wasn't a battle that Jesse was particularly interested in fighting. He wasn't even really fighting for TSU as much as he was fighting against Governor George W. Bush. He lost that battle, too.

I'd been mulling over whether or not to see Michael Moore's diatribe. Part of me would like to see it in order to become part of the discussion on the movie (I don't generally believe in denouncing a movie that I haven't seen), but money is tight and I'm reluctant to send any of it Michael Moore's way (and I'm reluctant to add to the statistics that many on the left use to suggest that Moore's movie may affect the election).

Turned out to be a rather moot point because the movie is not playing here in Gate City. Theater space is short and a movie of that sort is less likely to take hold here than in Houston. On the other hand, a bunch of local boys and girls are being called abroad as we speak and it's been a rather contentious issue of late. So a part of me has wondered why the movie hasn't been shown.

I'm apparently not the only one that has wondered this as there are a handful of letters to the editor broaching this particular subject, most of which denouncing Idaho has some sort of totalitarian state where dissent is not permitted.

I did get a kick out of this letter and the accompanying ed-note:

Need you to ask the Idaho politicians who say we can't see "Fahrenheit 9/11" ... I asked here in Rexburg when the film was coming to Idaho, and they told me I would have to go to Helena, Mont., to see the film because Idaho politicians and others officials who run Idaho say no to the film. Where can a group of politicians make statements like this.

Is this not a free country anymore. Do we not have the right to see and make our own minds up? We have the right to see films and a national and/or Idaho party does have the right to not let us have our freedom of speech and the right to see films. Where has our freedom gone?

Darrel La Mar Wakley, Rexburg

Editor's note: Fahrenheit 9/11 is showing at the Edwards Cinema in Tater Falls.

Please note that Tater Falls is the nearest town to Rexburg.

There's been talk of a new bowl game in South Carolina called the Palmetto Bowl. I've been keeping my eye on it because it could be another bowl game for UH's Conference USA. Unfortunately, it's hit a snag because the NCAA has blackballed any new bowl games in states that fly the confederate battle flag, which South Carolina does:

"We've had this issue all along," McQueeney said. "We're sensitive to the flag issue and the boycott issue. Those things are a given, and we are working arduously between officials and those who see the benefit of having the game here for all citizens.

"What's got to happen is that ESPN, which is the major player in this, and the powers in the NAACP have got to come to an agreement that this is a beneficial bowl game for ESPN and the NAACP. That's not in my hands. There are others making that decision."

The Rev. Joseph Darby, first vice president of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said the NAACP's position on its tourism boycott of South Carolina has not changed.

"If Charleston wants that bowl game badly enough, then Charleston needs to talk to its legislative delegation about bringing some lasting resolution to the (Confederate flag) matter," Darby said.

Rep. Bobby Harrell of Charleston said the state's stance on the Confederate flag is unlikely to change.

"I don't expect it to be changed anytime soon," said Harrell, the chairman of the House Ways and Means committee, "because its move (from the Statehouse dome to its grounds) was agreed upon by both black and white members of the General Assembly."

Harrell was the author of legislation that allocated $5.7 million over a 15-year period for expansion of The Citadel's new football stadium to meet the 35,000-seat minimum required for a bowl game. But that money is contingent on the Palmetto Bowl coming to Charleston.

"This is, if you come, we will build it," Harrell has said.

The commenters on the message board almost uniformly argue against the moratorium and the first one to speak in favor of it is quickly tossed aside as a troll. One person points out that it is on the Confederate war memorial and was removed from the statehouse, which apparently was not enough.

With some reservation, I say "Good for the NCAA."

The first thing to remember is that the Confederacy had several flags, two of which are most known and one of which is generally considered offensive within the black community. The battle flag is the best known emblem of the Confederacy. Two diagonal lines containing thirteen stars (the eleven confederate states plus Missouri and Kentucky, which did not ultimately join the Confederacy). This flag has come to represent the confederacy and was co-opted by the KKK and similar organizations. While many people continue to fly the flag without a gleaming eye towards racism and slavery, blacks by and large see it representing a region and era that was, to say the least, not very kind to them.

But the battle flag was never actually the official flag of the Confederacy, though it did become an emblem on later official flags. The most well known official flag of the Confederacy was the "stars & bars," which had three horizontal stripes (red, white, red) with a blue box in the upper left-hand corner of the flag, very similar to that of the United States flag (with less stars and less stripes). While the black community has objected strenuously to the battle flag, it has not had similar objections to the stars & bars. In fact, when Georgia redesigned its state flag, getting rid of the battle emblem in a design that looks very, very similar to the official Confederate flag, it was given a pass. Even though that flag is technically a more accurate depiction of the Provincial Confederate States of America, it doesn't evoke the same feelings within the black community.


There are those that would argue that blacks should not be offended by the battle flag, but given the history I'm reluctant to tell them how artifacts from an undesirable era should make them feel. While I object to revisionist history and fear that the NAACP may at some point turn its guns against Texas to reduce the historic Six Flags over Texas (Spain, France, Mexico, Texas, USA, and Confederacy) to five, I'm in favor of fighting that battle when we get to it instead of using the flag flown over KKK meetings all over the country. While the pro-flaggers make a good argument for the flag flown in South Carolina's memorial (where a Confederate flag is historically appropriate), the continued use of the offensive battle flag instead of the more accurate stars & bars suggests there is more an interest in appeasing southern pride than in accurately mourning the deceased.

My overall feeling on the matter is that you don't want a state flag that includes an emblem that a significant number of its residents find offensive, even if you disagree with their rationale. While I don't support revising history to preserve delicate little minds (Five Flags over Texas, Three Stars for Arkansas), I find the arguments to make an exception for the Confederate battle flag to be largely unconvincing.

Lex:

the Cato Institute has, unsurprisingly, come out with a paper arguing that deterrence works better than preventive war in preventing rogue states from using WMDs. The logic is that even the roguest of rogue states has assets it wants to protect, and which other states can in effect hold hostage (via threat of nuclear attack, if no other way).

Let's say that Hussein (to use an example with which we are mostly familiar) successfully got WMD and bombed Seattle. Bin Laden didn't strike at us because we couldn't retaliate, he did so because he believed that we wouldn't. "Paper tiger" and all that.

And besides that, how credible is the threat of nuclear war against a small and quasi-defenseless nation? Can you imagine Colin Powell trying to justify the nuking of Baghdad in front of the UN? It would also give him leverage to go after Kuwait, Jordan, and wherever else he would want to go. What could we do about it? Risk provoking a nuclear power?

There was also the firm belief among many that the non-nuclear military overthrowing of Saddam would be a lot harder than it was, and is it out of the question for that belief to resonate among Saddam and his allies? Or we launch a land battle against nuclear-powered Iraq and when the tide turns he nukes the country instead of trying to hold on to it. Or he nukes Israel since, at that point, he has nothing to lose and immortality to gain from it.

As it turns out, of course, Iraq did not have the WMD program that many believed he did. If going to war was wrong because our intelligence was bad, I may not agree with that conclusion but I certainly can agree with not liking the effect. But Cato's paper suggests that going to war would have been bad even if he was developing the WMD and that I can't agree with.

Kevin points to an interesting article in the Houston Press about some of the problems with larger shows in larger venues.

All right, let's pretend you live downtown and you've decided to go to the Kid Rock show. You've forked over a hundred bucks in tickets and surcharges, and budgeted an hour each way to get to and from the show. Let's say it rains -- it's been known to do just that a fair bit lately. You and your date are either lolling in the mud or out another $18 for rain ponchos and chairs. You're seated about 500 yards from the Kid -- he looks like a doodle bug way down there on the stage. Since the speakers are nearly inaudible, you can barely hear anything other than undifferentiated racket spewing from the faraway speakers on the stage. And Kid cuts his show shorter than the one he performs elsewhere on tour -- after all, the good folks of The Woodlands have to get their beauty sleep, so off he goes at 11 sharp.

What other industry delivers so little for so much? Imagine if restaurants started operating like this. A parking lot attendant demands ten bucks for the right to stash your ride about a half-mile from the door. The maître d' searches all your bags, confiscates a bottle of water, demands one bribe to seat you, and then another to "process" the bribe he just accepted, and then tells you to go sit on a patch of grass outside. If you want chairs, that'll be extra. The kitchen bills you for the use of their facilities, and you have to pay your bill up front. Then the waiter brings your order to another table -- you can look at it, but don't get too close! Only those who have paid much, much more than you for far better tables are allowed to really dig in. If you are unlucky enough to be seated outside and it starts to rain, the owner comes over and charges you ten bucks per person to come inside. And then everybody gets thrown out on their ear at 11 sharp, whether they're done with their meal or not.

Is it any wonder that people would much rather go out to eat, or go to a ball game or a strip club -- anything other than a concert? As one poster put it recently on velvetrope.com, "If I go to a restaurant and spend $200, I get treated like royalty. If I go to a concert and do the same, I get treated like cattle."

This isn't to pick on the Pavilion. They do as good a job as anybody in the amphitheater trade, and their regulations and fees are by no means atypical. It's just that fans are getting the short end of the stick at these shows, coast to coast. And there doesn't seem to be an easy solution on the horizon. Promoters, artists, managers/agents, radio stations and venues are all blaming one another for rising ticket prices and slower sales, and all of them have a point.

I've gone to a couple of shows at the Pavillion including a Texas Uprising show and a Matchbox Twenty one. The Texas Uprising show was considerably more enjoyable because it was a day's worth of music and up until prime-time we were allowed to sit in the tents. Once the bigger acts came on (Charlie Robison, Jack Ingram, and Robert Earl Keen) we had to move out back and the show became considerably less enjoyable. I ended up leaving shortly after REK took the stage. The Matchbox Twenty show was enjoyable, though due more to the company than to the show itself. I can't complain about the cost since the tickets were generously provided by Audrey and Ed, but Rob Thomas really was just a speck from where we were seated and I was essentially watching him on the monitor. Even if they can bring the prices down, there isn't terribly much that can be done about that.

That's my big problem with big shows. Unless you have a great seat, you don't really get to enjoy it half as fully as you do a local show at the Firehouse. I remember several years back when Backstreet Boys were at the apex of their success and they were planning to do a "national stadium tour" at all of the big venues. That actually didn't end up happening because their popularity was starting to decline, but I remember thinking at the time "Good grief, who wants to see an act in a stadium?"

But some people love it for the experience. Jay's ex-girlfriend actually felt that seeing the band wasn't a bit deal. Part of the enjoyment for her was being surrounded by fellow fanatics and getting to hear the music played live. For me, studio recordings are generally a better listen than live performances (less background noise). What I like about live shows is the intimacy (which the Pavillion cannot duplicate) and watching the performers. Many, such as Phil Pritchett and Randy Rogers after a few drinks, can make music almost secondary to the experience of the show. I've yet to find a national act that could actually do the same.

While Linus and Jay were in town, we watched a few movies. While I'd love to do a full review of each, I'll probably never get around to it, so I'll just do some quickie reviews:

Death to Smoochy (3.5 stars of 4) - Death to Smoochy comedically explores the depraved and seedy side of children's television. Robin Williams plays a disgraced kid show star, Rainbow Randolph, who has a vendetta against his squeaky clean successor, Smoochy, played by Edward Norton. Williams played the kind of role that Williams is best at: bombastic, charged, and utterly insane. Norton, who usually plays more dark characters believably plays a character so naive and idealistic that it's amazing that he adapts to the real world. Norton's acting is evident in his subtle mouthdrop every single time a character uses naughty language. It is quite telling about the character without being overdone for comedic effect. This movie came close to achieving four stars (which I rarely grant), but a slightly disappointing ending came in the way of that. Regardless, the sheer originality of the movie made me very glad that I saw it. All three of us enjoyed the movie greatly.

Signs (3 stars of 4) - M. Night Shyamalan demonstrates again why I enjoy his work so much in a good, albeit not great, film. Mel Gibson stars as a former pastor who forsakes his calling when his wife dies. His farm is vandalized with the "crop signs" that we see in the news. As with Shyamalan's previous films, the plot turns on itself and what seems important isn't and what is generally viewed as background becomes a lot more central to the plot. Gauging the opinions of Jay, Linus, and myself enjoyment of the film seems predicated on how interested you are in its supernatural elements. The more interested you are, the less satisfying the film will probably be. I'd consider this the Deep Impact to Independence Day's Armageddon, though it doesn't quite carry the credibility of Deep Impact but makes up for it with suspense throughout. Jay and I enjoyed it, but Linus didn't. I give it a solid three stars because the theme development was slightly lacking and little thought was put in to the aliens (which may or may not be central to the story, depending on the view), but it did a good job of keeping me interesting, keeping suspense levels high, and making its overall point.

Waking Ned Devine (3.5 stars of 4) - One of my favorite things about foreign films is how their quiver is filled with a different set of conventions to draw from. The rural Ireland setting reminds me, interestingly enough of Shakespeare, who successfully made characters instantly recognizable to modern audiences to which the setting is extraordinarily unfamiliar. Waking Ned is a quirky Irish film about a small town's efforts to seize the lottery winnings of a resident who had a heart attack upon finding out that he won. Even though there's no heist, it reminds me of a comedic caper movie where folks with varying degrees of scruples try to wade their way through moral ambiguity and make some money that would go to waste in the process. The acting throughout is good and it's a great premise for a story. I debated between 3 and 3.5 stars, opting for the latter due to the sheer originality of the film. Jay, Linus and I enjoyed the film but I never got Eel's opinion on it.

Solaris (3 stars of 4) - This is the second time I've watched this film and the most surprising aspect of it is how much I forgot about it. I say "surprising" because it's a very solid film and not generally the type of movie I find forgettable. I'm not sure whether it's because I was so singularly focused on one aspect of it or because it developed both sides of the film so well that it's hard to absorb it all. George Clooney plays a psychiatrist who is called to a space station orbiting the star Solaris. The crew of the station has seemingly gone insane and he's there to negotiate their return. Whatever it is that affects the crew also starts affecting Clooney and he's forced to confront his grief over his deceased wife, played by Natascha McElhone. Clooney amazingly sheds his isn't-it-cute-the-way-I-can-smile-and-tilt-my-head-like-this persona with very believable navagation through extraterrestial happenings, which is not an easy feat for any actor. This film successfully uses lighting and camerawork without devolving into directorial masterbation that I've ever seen. It also has discipline not often exercised in movies of this sort, not going far beyond 90 minutes, which would have been suicide in a slow-moving film such as this. It was a toss-up between 3 and 3.5 stars, but settled on three as I never felt sure of the direction that the movie wanted to go. All three of us enjoyed the movie.

Warliberal takes exception to Alabama's renaming a stretch of highway after Ronald Reagan. I can't help but get a kick out of his rationale:

It doesn't have anything to do with Reagan, but of course the Ronnie worshippers want to name everything after him. So I-65 between Birmingham and Decatur/Huntsville has been arbitrarily named after the departed.

So apparently it's not right to name something after someone that didn't have anything to do with it. Someone will need to tell that to just about every major city that has a Martin Luther King or MLK street as King didn't have anything to do with that particular street. In fact, I think I was on Cesar Chavez Avenue earlier today and I could be wrong but I don't think Chavez actually had anything to do with it.

I actually agreed with the liberals when it came to Reagan and Bush airports. I don't believe it's a good idea to name things after living people. I always wondered what they would say on the subject when Reagan died.

I guess now I know.

My brother wrote to tell me that my name has appeared on the lost/unclaimed property page on the Texas state website. Until he told me the variation in which my name appears I couldn't imagine why. It looks like I failed to cash some of my checks when I was delivering the Daily Cougar. When I was working at both UH and Nova, I stopped bothering to cash my somewhat miniscule paychecks from UH.

I was too lazy to cash the checks, but not too lazy to quit. Go figure.

Miniscule though the paychecks were, I guess they added up if Texas owes me $125.93.

Andrew Olmsted has a great post up about war games and the Constitution

Will Collier has an amusing story about when he got to ask William Buckley a question.

Alex Knapp is covering the security holes in IE. It's really getting more difficult to justify not changing browsers and if Microsoft doesn't make some serious headway on this issue, they could find themselves on the losing end of the next browser war.

Andrew Sullivan thinks there's a civil war brewing within the Republican Party. Does anyone think there's a civil war brewing in the Republican Party that doesn't (a) want to see it happen and (b) want the libertarians to win it?

Kuff has a couple of interesting excerpts from an interview with Harris County GOP guru Gary Polland on how the Democrats in Texas may be able to turn the corner quicker than previously supposed.

Owen Courreges is still dead. Well, he's not dead but his blog seems to be as he's doing most of his posting over at ChronicallyBiased.

Minnie Mouse is apparently quite the flirt.

Lex has some sensible words about the James Dobson/Michael Moore grudge.

[Part I]

More observations:

There are certain jobs that are not easy to get in Houston even if you have a degree. I know two Advertising/PR majors, one of which is working for the clerical in an unrelated capacity and the other gave up the job hunt and went straight to graduate school in Alabama. Up here, however, companies and firms are begging for any education and experience in that area. I know a few graphic artists in Texas having difficulty finding work, but both newspapers and two other advertisers this past Sunday all wanted graphic artists.

Companies in Houston that would hire fourteen year old immigrants with little understanding of English for undesirable customer service jobs require a year or more of sales experience.

If you have a degree in agriculture, move here. Right now. Ditto for electrical engineers.

Companies from North Carolina advertise here regularly. Ditto for Arizona.

The Idaho Job Service considers Salmon to be in "southeast Idaho." That's like saying San Marcos is in "southwest texas."... errr, nevermind.

A company in

Paris, Idaho has been trying to recruit a customer service agent that speaks fluent French since I got here.

In Houston, it's generally not enormously desirable to work for the government. The job security is good, but pay is not. Here, however, they are the most sought after jobs because of pay.

Houston is one of the medical capitals of the world. People with rare diseases or need extensive medical help will often move to Houston. Yet percentage-wise, I'd bet that the health care industry is larger than it is in Houston.

Linus and Jay are playing the Tony Hawk 3 video game for the PC. They're presently using the cheats which can let you be huge or tiny, let's your environment have the gravity of the moon or act like it's ice as well as a number of other possibilities.

I have a proposal of my own: No Pads Mode.

No Pads Mode would be like regular mode, except that whenever you fall the skateboard wouldn't immediately reappear below your feet to start up again. Instead, your head would explode, your limbs would fall off, or one of dozens of other gruesome fates. For people like myself who don't really play video games to see what I can do (but rather play to watch the pretty pictures and neat features), it would be really cool.

I'm sure the PTC and like-minded organizations for video games would have a cow, but the game makers could simply say they're stressing the importance of wearing helmet and pads when one goes skateboarding!

Marine Reservist Eric Johnson takes issue with the media's portrayal of Iraq:

Readers must have concluded that Kut was on the verge of exploding, ready to throw out the despised American infidel invaders and install their new "mayor" as their beloved leader.

What utter rubbish. In our headquarters, we had a small red splotch on a large map of Kut, representing the neighborhood that supported Abbas Fadhil. When asked about him, most citizens of Kut rolled their eyes. His followers were mainly poor, semi-literate and not particularly well-liked. They were marginal in every sense of the word, and they mattered very little in the day-to-day life of a city that was struggling to get back on its feet.

We knew the local sentiment intimately, because as civil affairs Marines, our job was to help restore the province's water, electricity, medical care and other essentials of life. Our detachment had teams constantly coming and going throughout the city, and Chandrasekeran could have easily accompanied at least one of them.

Since he didn't, he couldn't see how the Iraqis outside of the red splotch reacted to us. People of every age waved and smiled as we rumbled past (except male youths, who, like their American counterparts, were too cool for that kind of thing.) Our major security problem was keeping friendly crowds of people away from us so we could spot bad guys.

None of those encouraging things made it into the article. Nor did anything about how we had been helping to fix the city's problems as soon as we arrived. Just a quick-and-dirty sensationalistic piece about a local Islamist thug bravely going toe-to-toe with the legendary U.S. Marines. The general reaction to Chandrasekeran's article was either laughter or dumb bewilderment.

Soon afterwards, a Marine commander met privately with Fadhil and told him he would be forcefully removed if he did not leave the government building. Fadhil, chastened, asked if he could slither into exile without the appearance of coercion, so he could save face. The commander agreed. Suddenly faced with a real confrontation, the "mayor" had backed down, and he left without any riots or bloodshed. The Americans took over the office that Fadhil said we should never occupy.

The Post didn't cover any of that, either.

RAW: Hand me the Easy Cheese!
Jay: Here.
RAW: [it pours out in some creepy liquid form]
Jay: Ewwwwww...
RAW: Yuck...
Jay & RAW: [look at each other]
RAW: [eats it]
Jay: And?
RAW: It's good!
Jay: Woohoo! Pass it over!

Linus: Okay fine. I'm going to try the Easy Cheese just to see what the fuss is about.
Jay: You're going to hate it. It's like salty cheese.
Linus: [tastes] This is not cheese.
RAW: No, but it's good, so it doesn't have to be cheese!
Jay: It's like the breakfast burritos at McDonald's.
Linus: How so?
Jay: Well you know at Whataburger or Sonic, it tastes like what you might make at home with sausage, eggs, cheese, and so on.
Linus: That's debatable>
Jay: Well, compared to McDonald's. McDonald's filling is more like a separate entity. While it mimics eggs and cheese, it really transcends the genre. Modern science has given us a breakfast burrito that has become more than the sum of its ingredients and has become an ingredient upon itself.
RAW: A really good ingredient!
Jay: Damn straight!
RAW: [looking at Easy Cheese can] Hey look, the first ingredient is milk. How do you like them apples!
Linus: [looks at can] This has way too many ingredients. Lactic acid? That's what builds up in your muscles and makes you sore.
RAW: So it's like exercising without ever having to do it!
Linus: Look at that, cheese culture is the last ingredient!
Jay: Embracing Easy Cheese is embracing the modern age!
RAW: Besides, they spell "cheese" with an "S"... you know when they spell it with a "Z" it's as much a disclaimer as being cute.
Linus: Kind of like pasteurized processed cheese food?
Jay: Did you know that there's a cheese making company that calls itself 100% Real so that they can call it 100% Real Cheese?
RAW: That's like the phone companies.
Linus: The what?
RAW: The phone companies that name themselves "I Don't Care" so that when an operator asks you what long distance company you want to use and you say that you don't care, that's the company that you get and they can charge you like fifty cents a minute.
Linus: And I'm sure you believe that's just good capitalism?

In a supermarket in Jackson, Wyoming.

Linus: What kind of cheese do we want?
Jay: American!
RAW: American!
Linus: No, seriously.
RAW: There's not a Sam's around here, is there?
Linus: No. Why?
Jay: Oh yeah! The Sam's cheese!
RAW: Heck yeah!
Linus: The what?
Jay: Sam's has this cheese. We used to make grilled cheese sandwiches at Alex's with Sam's cheese. We'd put one slice on each slice of bread and then be swiping slices off the top and eating them while we wait for the sandwiches to heat up.
Linus: Taking slices off the top?
RAW: Yeah, you get like a foot of it for $5 cause it's not individually wrapped.
Jay: But it's okay because that just means we cat eat it faster!
Linus: [confused look] Oh wait. You're serious?!

Linus: Okay, so do you want this cheese?
Jay: No way! That's generic.
RAW: Trust me, Linus. You never, ever, ever want to eat discount slices of American cheese.
Linus: I can honestly say that I am in no danger of ever doing that...
RAW: Good.
Linus: Okay, so what kind of American cheese is quote-good-unquote?
RAW: If it's not Kraft or Borden, you don't want it.
[RAW and Jay get into three minute debate over the comparative virtues of Kraft and Borden American cheese slices]
Linus: Guys, can we stick to the task at hand, here?
RAW: Okay, this looks good.
Linus: Alex, this isn't even cheese! It's "pasteurized processed cheese food product."
Jay: They all say that.
RAW: Yeah, that doesn't mean it doesn't taste good. Woah! Look at this. A whole stack of bologni for $3!

RAW: Hey Linus, what about some Easy Cheese?
Jay: Dude! Easy cheese!!
Linus: Oh brother...
Jay: I'll split it with you, Alex!
RAW: Hot diggity. Should we get the Chicken Biscuits, Wheat Thins, or Bacon potato cracker chips?
Linus: If you get Wheat Thins I'll eat that.
RAW: With the Easy Cheese?
Linus: If you get Wheat Thins, I'll eat Wheat Thins.
RAW & Jay: That'll work!

RAW: Should we take the suntan lotion with us when we go?
Jay: No need. Up here we really don't need to worry about sweating it off. I remember yesterday we were out all day and I didn't sweat a bit!
RAW: Sweat does exist up here, dude.
Jay: No, this is the land of opportunity for sweaters everywhere!
RAW: You know, they really should market this place to sweaters everywhere.
Linus: No, if there's one thing this place doesn't need it's more people.
Jay: You don't understand, man. Alex and I have dealt with sweating too much all of our life. This place is like heaven that way. No sweat!
RAW: He's right. This is indeed the promised land for us sweaters. Besides, you said that everyone here is in shape. Imagine all the diversity once fat slobs from everywhere descend upon this land! It'll be like Utah for the Mormons, except Wyoming for the Fat People!
Jay: [imitating a sales pitch] Let me tell you about the Promised Land, Brother.
Linus: [sheer look of horror]

Apparently the fireworks in Jackson were cancelled on the fourth of July. They postponed it to the fifth so I got to see a real fireworks show for the first time in a couple of years. The show was great and since it was off the schedule there weren't very many people there so we got a great seat that we didn't have to wait long for.

I also got to see another interesting site. If you've ever wondered how fast a black lab is capable of running, all you need to do is watch him or her running away from a loud fireworks show. If he or she had run in to someone on the way, he or she would have surely bowled them over.

We were shopping at an artsy store today so that Jay could find a gift for his girlfriend. It was a neat place with a lot of neat stuff that was way way too loud for any home that I would be willing to take residence in. There were two dogs sleeping in the store.

I honestly don't believe humans are nearly as capable of ever being as comfortable as those dogs were on that hardwood floor.

Linus, Jay and I are at the library. They're reading my blog as I write posts.

Linus: Your depiction The Corrupting of Linus Stromberg seems quite accurate.
RAW: Thanks!
Jay: Hey, you did partake in the 48-hour marathon, remember? We saw The Iron Giant!
RAW: Oh, right.
Jay: Hey, "Something With Rocks"?
RAW: Yeah, when I got up here I realized that wasn't quite as accurate as I'd thought. I'll fix it.
Linus: No problem.
Jay: Hey, you actually didn't forget anything! Oh wait, yes you did.
RAW: What did I forget?
Jay: [laugh]
Linus: [laugh]
RAW: Really, what did I forget?
Jay: [laugh]
Linus: [laugh]
RAW: What?!
Jay: Your clothes, dude. You forgot your clothes.
RAW: Oh yeah...

[five minutes later]

RAW: Hey guys, reload the site.

I assumed that Linus had an internet connection up here that I could use to post from. Turns out that he doesn't, which makes it hard to post stuff. We're going to be back in town on Thursday so there will be posts some time then.

/\/\ike and Andrie were my first friends to get married.

Now they're my first friends to be parents.

Unfortunately, there were complications with the pregnancy and labor had to be enduced prematurely. But she's here and she's alive.

For those so inclined, please keep little Chloe Zito in your prayers.

For as long as I've known him, Linus has been unusually well-adjusted. Nothing symbolizes that more than his voluntarily late entrance into the dating world. While Jay and I were going crazy over our respective Sarahs and our ability to obtain them, he was working on much worthier and less infuriating and depressing pursuits. I don't know what he was doing, but it must have been more worthy and less infuriating than what Jay and I were.

While Jay and I (and 75% of the guys on the BBS) used ACME as a female-type acquisition tool, Linus oddly chose instead to use it in order to just talk to people. He was philosophical and patient with our whining, but it just wasn't his thing. The more I got to know him, the less right this all was. So Jay and I dragged him practically kicking and screaming into the world of chasing female-types. If he was remotely interested in considering possibly maybe telling a girl that he might could very well be interested in seeing her in a social capacity without other people present, Jay and I acted like we hit a goldmine and used every ounce of effort we had to get him to "go for it" (did I mention that Jay and I were huge hypocrites?).

And eventually he did. He asked a girl out, she said yes. She then proceeded to act really, really weird. He asked another girl out and the process repeated itself. He was understandably agitated, confused, and frustrated.

At that point we were able to relate to him even better than before and our mission was accomplished.

At 3:15, Jay's plane will be landing at the Gate City airport. We're leaving straight from the airport to Jackson, Wyoming. Actually, that's a lie, we'll stop by my place and possibly Eel's because I know I'm going to forget something. But once I pick up whatever I forget, we're heading a couple hours to Jackson to hang out with Linus. Not sure what we're doing when we're getting there, but it won't matter because for the first time in over a year and a half.

The scenery in Jackson is supposed to put the local scenery to shame, which I definitely look forward to seeing. Linus fell in love with Wyoming and we actually had many protracted debates over the virtues of scenic small towns versus big cities (guess he won that one). I really loved eastern Wyoming on the drive up, but was slightly less impressed with the western part of the state. But I didn't go through Jackson or really even leave the interstate, which makes a pretty big difference.

Some time during the week we're coming back to GC. Neither Jay nor Linus have met Eel, so that's on the itenerary. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what we'll do here when we get back here. There's a handful of bars in Oldtown that we may go to. Bars weren't so much a part of our history together since, you know, we were seventeen and such, though we did have a good time the few times we went the three of us and once or twice with Other Third Musketeer Brian. Then there's the only Mexican restaurant to rival the Jolly Science in value.

Eh, who cares what we'll do. It'll be just like old times since we never really had anything to do then, either...

Posting will continue throughout the week, though perhaps at a lighter pace.

Name: Linus Stromberg
Alias: Yes
Type: INTJ/INFJ
Born: 1979
Base of Operations: Jackson, WY
Occupation: Something to do with rocks
Superpower: Intelligence
Loss Vulnerability: Frustratable
Short Version: Friend (1995- ), Best friend's best friend (1988- )
Long Version: Linus started going to our elementary school is about the second grade. I didn't know a whole lot about him at the time except that I remember thinking that he had a really cool name.

Linus became a figure in my life through Jay. I was out to lunch when Jay and Linus became friends, so I don't remember when exactly that was. Usually when I heard his name it was a bad thing along the lines of "Sorry I can't hang out today, Alex, but Linus and I are going to go _______." While I didn't dislike him, he was inconvenient when it came to monopolizing Jay's time.

In a sense, Jay and I were really quite lucky to befriend Linus. With his wit and good looks, Linus could easily have been among the most popular in school. Luckily for us, when such dye was cast Linus had a veritable beard of acne and a plethora of nerdy interests that kept him around the likes of Jay and I. We were even more fortunate by his exceedingly strong sense of self to where he completely removed himself from the social games kids play with one another. He was an unusually well-adjusted kid.

Linus and I became friends in our own right in 1994, when he introduced me to ACME. Since we were both regulars, we started talking quite frequently. He was my first unpaid tech support as all of this happened the first time I'd started using a computer other than an Apple IIe and he was a bona fide computer nerd. When Jay and I found ourselves competing for the same girl, Linus admirably tried to mediate. When he became interested in the dating world himself, that just opened up considerably more avenues of conversation. Once we became comfortable around each other, it became a lot easier for the three of us to start doing things instead of Jay and I and Jay and he doing things seperately.

When it came time for choosing college, Jay quickly chose Baylor, I chose Houston, and Linus went back and forth between the University of Texas and Ohio Tech, a well-regarded private school focused on the maths and sciences. As his girlfriend was headed to Austin I felt comfortable that he would do the same (since it was a finalist anyway), but once again he let that level-headed brain of his do his thinking for him and headed off to Ohio.

Though he was busy at OTU, we stayed in contact and he came back down during breaks when we'd have 24 or 36 hour movie marathons (I believe they had a 48-hour marathon, too, though I didn't partake). When Linus graduated he went out to Jackson, Wyoming on some federal government project. After doing a tour there, came back to Houston for a stint and I got to introduce him to the likes of Phil Pritchett and Bleu Edmondson. After a short time of being a car salesman and auto website programer, he headed back up to Wyoming and his lady friend Lucy later followed.

I was planning to go to the fireworks display tonight. I wasn't sure when it was, but I would have guessed that it'd have been some point after when the sun went down. It's apparently going on right now and it looks like I'm going to miss it.

I guess it's hard to wait for nightfall when it's only night about 8 hours a day here.

Update: Well, I missed the big show, but some residents of Thrifthaven put on a show of their own. They had about twenty little doobobs. I could have lived without the noisy ones, but I'll take a front row seat to a small show like this than one filled with oodles and oodles of people. Besides, Charlie Robison wasn't even there.

Meatloaf had a couple. One of them was one of those that moves around. It went off underneath a car. Thankfully, that didn't create a firework all it's own.

I'm going to go listen to REK's "Fourth of July" and I'm going to bed, barring more noisy fireworks downstairs.

Terry Teachout writes the following on Marlon Brando's death:

The second half of the first sentence of the New York Times’s obituary of Marlon Brando claims that his "erratic career, obstinate eccentricities and recurring tragedies prevented him from fully realizing the promise of his early genius, has died." For what it’s worth, I never cared for Brando, not even in A Streetcar Named Desire—I thought he was a self-indulgent, undisciplined ham—but it strikes me that his admirers, however fervent, ought to squirm at the use of the word "genius" to describe him.

For that matter, I doubt that any actor who doesn’t also write or direct can properly be described as a genius. (One film does not an oeuvre make, least of all One-Eyed Jacks.) I’m not normally fussy about usage, but one thing that does bother me is what I call Definitional Inflation, and if the word "genius" means anything at all, it means Definition 6 in the Shorter Oxford:

Inborn exalted intellectual power; instinctive and extraordinary imaginative, creative, or inventive capacity, freq. opp. to talent; a person having this.

I suppose you might say that certain interpretative artists have had that kind of power or capacity, but when you compare them to the truly creative artists whose works they interpret, you start to see how high the bar ought to be set. In an art form like jazz, where composition and performance are fused indissolubly, the difference between creator and interpreter is radically ambiguous. In acting, it isn’t: Shakespeare would be Shakespeare if John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier had never been born. In fact (and I’m smiling as I say this, though I’m more than halfway serious), it may be that actors have more in common with critics than with playwrights. They serve as intermediaries between the creative artist and his audience, helping to narrow the gap across which the divine spark of comprehension must fly.

Teachout touches on one of my admittedly-biased view of art. Generally speaking, I have a greater deal of respect for writers and directors than I do for actors. That's not to say that I don't recognize or appreciate good acting, but I rarely find myself too envious of someone whose claim to fame is reading from someone else's script. Of course, I'm a writer and so it's natural that I would feel that way.

What immediately came to mind when I read this was not actually acting, but rather it was singing. Teachout touches perhaps on why I appreciate the music that I do. A singer or band is an interpretative artist. But a singer or band that writes their own music are creative artists. No matter how wonderful Faith Hill's voice is, she's singing from someone else's script. She's doing what someone else has planned for her. I can appreciate her vocal talent, but it becomes difficult to connect with the artist herself. Contrary to the assertions of some that otherwise agree with me, it's not that Hill's efforts come across as less genuine. Rather it's that she's simply an intermediary. However talented.

On the other hand, if you take Phil Pritchett and Randy Rogers locally (in Texas) or Counting Crows and Matchbox Twenty nationally, you have artists that are delivering what they wrote and we experience it more in the manner that it was concieved. Because of this, you often get a much more coherent set of music that it becomes easier to connect with if the artist is coming from the same place that you are. If a studio artist has particularly good handlers they can get away with a lot. Gary "bad boy trying to go straight" Allan comes to mind as one that I do appreciate, but even the much-and-deservedly-maligned Kenny "laid back rural boy" Chesney offer a somewhat coherent core (even if some of us find it aggrivating). But more often you end up with a Lee Ann (Rhymes) or two (Womack), where individual songs may or may not be worth listening to but there is little sense of who they are or where they're coming from no matter how on-key they sing. Without the core or the uniformity (which should not be confused with monotony - are you listening Jo Dee Messina's handlers?), artists are only as good as their latest single or their winning smile. It's no wonder people are reluctant to buy CDs where the record label only bought four expensive songs for singles and got generic songs for the rest (all of which, of course, have nothing to do with one another). There is no foundation on which to create an emotional connection.

While actors are emissaries of their script, musicians aren't supposed to be middle-men.

About a month ago, Stephen Bainbridge posted the facts of a fascinating law case regarding a favor that turned into tragedy that turned into a lawsuit:

I'm just editing the section of my forthcoming agency and partnership treatise in which I discuss Gorton v. Doty, 69 P.2d 136 (Idaho 1937), which is one of my favorite cases on the definition of an agency relationship. OnSeptember 21, 1934, the Soda Springs (Idaho) High School football team was to travel to Paris (Idaho, not France) to play its arch-rival. The team planned to travel in private cars rather than by bus. School teacher Doty subsequently related a conversation she had with team Coach Garst, as follows: “I asked him if he had all the cars necessary for his trip to Paris the next day. He said he needed one more. I said that he might use mine if he drove it. That was the extent of it.” Garst thereafter in fact borrowed and drove Doty’s car. On the way home from the game, Garst caused an accident in which Richard Gorton, one of his passengers/players, was injured. Gorton sued.

Gorton did not sue the coach, who had died in the accident. Gorton did not sue the school, presumably because the school at that time (1937) could have invoked some form of sovereign immunity defense. Instead, Gorton sued Doty, who must have been very surprised indeed. Doty must have been even more surprised, however, when a trial court held (and the Idaho supreme court affirmed) that Garst was her agent and that she was liable for his negligence.

And whether one agrees with the verdict or not, it makes sense.

Mozilla Firefox just went up a notch in my book. When I decided to give Mozilla another chance, I asked for help on the following:

I've mentioned this before and no one has commented to my recollection, but I'll go ahead and explicitly ask: Is there any way I can set it not to open up new Firefox windows when someone has their web page set to "open up in new windows"? Opera automatically sets it to open up in a tab and I find that convenient.

Callie send me an email about an Extension and it not only does what I want it to, but it gives me complete control over whether or not a link opens in the same tab or a different one.

Now the only advantage that Opera has over Firefox is the ability to remember which sites were open before it was last closed. I'll have to check that area to see if there's an Extension for that. Even if not, the lack of ads and overall stability of Firefox has just about won me over.

I can announce with a fair degree of certainty that I am the full-time blogger in this town. Considering that my home town of Seabrook has two bloggers, I'd figure that Gate City would have at least a couple considering that it is a college town. The only active blog I actually found is by a university professor from China. He's got some interesting pictures and tech posts, but he is unfortunately an infrequent updater. The most interesting blog was Life in Potatoland written by a college student, but they apparently stopped updating just a couple months ago. Journalist Karen Robb has a really great blog and used to live in the twin city an hour north, but she moved away a little over a year ago. Definitely going to keep an eye on this blog though as she is a phenomenal writer.

Of course, my search largely consisted of looking up the town's name and "blogger" or "blog." If there is another blogger out there that has been as vague about the actual location of the blogger, they wouldn't show up just like I don't. Wouldn't that be ironic?

Lastly, I find it interesting that former Houston blogger Tony Rosen is also now an Idaho blogger, albeit about as far away as can possibly be from here within state lines. Here's a list of other bloggers in Idaho. They're all located on the other side of the state. This guy lived a couple of hours from here for a while, but he's gearing up to go to the Princeton Theological Seminary. This site has some bloggers from the inland northwest, but most are based out of Spokane (where the site is).

This is one of the best sites I've run across so far on electoral college tracking. This is another good one.

I was reading this post by Amanda Strassner and kept wondering what if I was wrong all along about Nice being a city in France and not a republic all its own.

Michael Williams writes on the subject of fairness in abortion and child support law:

A man and a woman have sex, and the woman gets pregnant. There are four possiblities.

1. Both the father and the mother want to abort the baby.
2. Both the father and the mother want to keep the baby.
3. The father wants to abort the baby, but the mother refuses.
4. The mother wants to abort the baby, but the father refuses.

Cases 1 and 2 present no problems. If both parents are in agreement, then they both get what they want.

Cases 3 and 4 are more interesting. Under the existing legal system, the mother gets her way, no matter what -- but is this just? (Setting aside the injustice of abortion itself. I want to focus, rather, on the numerous legal inequalities between men and women, which generally turn in womens' favor.)

Abortion is different from adoption, because if the mother wants to carry the baby to term but doesn't want to care for the baby the father has the legal right to take sole custody. But before the baby is born, he or she is entirely in the mother's power. What this means is that once the woman is pregnant she has many different ways to sever her legal obligations to the baby, but the father has none. If the mother chooses to give birth and the father doesn't want to be involved society will still force him to pay child support.

As the law currently stands, fathers get a bum deal. While the mother can theoretically walk away from the consequences of her sexual actions, the father will have to pay child support for at least eighteen years. However, no matter how you look at it, someone is getting a raw deal.

If a woman is forced to carry a child against her will, she must sacrifice nine months of her life to holding that baby. Pro-life people like Michael and myself would say that's a small price to pay for life, but if one doesn't accept the notion that human life begins before birth (and that's the court's present dictate) then her having to spend nine months so that he can get the kid he wants is unfair. If the father is given the right to abdicate rights and responsibilities over the child, she's the one that has to endure the abortion (and knowing at least two people that have had them, it's not as easy a choice as some on both sides of the debate make it out to be) while he just gets to walk away. Or she keeps the child and the child suffers financially (which would also be the case if she were forced to carry the baby to term) while the only price he pays is knowing that he has a child out there that he can have nothing to do with (which itself may not be entirely inconsequential as he gets older and reflects on his lilfe).

So no matter what the law says, if we accept abortion as a legal right, one party is carrying more burden than the other for the consequences of actions that they both took.

With Roe v Wade intact, I'm disinclined to go with what is "most fair" as I'm certain most men would agree that the woman carrying slightly more of the burden is most fair while women would argue the opposite. My primary concern, rather, is what effect different laws would have on the number of abortions performed with the goal of reducing those procedures. As such, I more-or-less support leaving current law in-tact where men have less rights.

If it's not constitutionally permissable to force a woman to keep a child that she doesn't want because she has legal dominion over her body (over at least the first portion of the pregnancy), it's still impermissable just because the father does want it. So then the only option presently on the table is to give the man the right to walk away just as it is presently a woman's right (potential emotional trauma and cost of an abortion withstanding). That option would almost certainly lead to a greater number of abortions if the mother was aware going into it that she would have to financially take care of the child on her own without the assistence of child support payments.

In response to the Reynolds article that I cited earlier, Michael Williams comes up with this idea:

Rather than pick a certain age, I propose that everyone be required to take a "maturity test" before being granted the status of a full adult. This test will include physical and mental components that can be evaluated objectively -- not necessarily an easy test to design, but set that aside for a moment. The test should be crafted so that the vast majority (80%+) of 18-year-olds can pass.

Those who pass the maturity test will be allowed to vote, drive, drink, gamble, and have sex with anyone else who has also passed the test -- i.e., they'll be "adults". Those who have not passed the test will be considered children, regardless of their actual chronological age, and will not be allowed to marry, have sex, enter into contractual agreements, or make any of the typical adult decisions for themselves.

Michael is being facetious, but he brings up an interesting possibility. When someone is convicted of drunk driving, they can lose their license for an indefinite period of time. What if instead of revoking driving privileges, we revoke drinking privileges? What if, in addition to restrictions on driving (I can't drive without corrective lenses, for example), they were restricted in drinking or at least the purchase of alcohol? It wouldn't be difficult to add space for that on a standard license.

As with those under 21, it would not stop said people from drinking, but it would make it decidedly less convenient. For instance, when carded at bars, they'd get the "X" on their hand that underagers do and suddenly for however long they are limited, bars are out of the picture. For serious drinkers this is no small deal. If the restriction were limited to the mere purchase of alcohol it would still mean that they have to rely on someone else to buy beer, which could be a useful social stigma. I know it would certainly have made my life in Houston considerably more difficult.

In addition to a severe penalty for drunk drivers (say 1-3 years), a more moderate penalty could be applied to those who engage in other illegal behavior with alcohol. Public intoxication could lead to a 1-3 month penalty and assault-while-intoxicated could be 6 months or a year.

It would also have the benefit of making alcohol sellers card everyone. While right now they can let someone by if they "look 27", I was successfully buying beer at 17. It would be inconvenient for those of us that have the right to drink, but it could allow more flexibility to, for instance, lower the drinking age to 18 without fear that 16 year olds will be able to slide through by looking 23.

The only liberty downside I see is that it would give cops more leeway to get identification for "suspicious" people drinking alcohol. The cop would be able to say that they thought one of them might be restricted. While there are already strides in that direction, I'm still not entirely comfortable with the idea. That would be one reason to limit the penalty to the purchase of alcohol.

These penalties would be in addition to any others imposed and would be accompanied by the costs of replacing their drivers licenses with the new restrictions.

What do you think?

Apparently, the Astros have an all-white line-up. Isn't that weird? Richard Justice smells a rat. Actually, he doesn't smell a rat because he doesn't believe the Astros management is racist. But it's a blemish that absolutely positively must be corrected, apparently. Between his desire to pen the entire line-up around which Astros are darn good guys and now his desire to look at things that don't matter on the scoreboard (a player's race) so that management can demonstrate that they're all darn good guys to, I have to wonder if winning is a secondary concern for him. He opines that the Astros could start making up for it by hiring Don Baylor, whom he wrote a glowing column about six weeks back. Of course, he recently wrote a column advocating keeping (white manager) Jimy Williams around cause he's (allegedly) a good coach. Trying to keep a white guy around where a black could be instead? Gosh, isn't that how we got in this not-racist-but-could-be-written-as-such-by-a-columnist-out-of-ideas problem to begin with?

More seriously, this is not a matter of blacks being kept out by racist management. This isn't even a matter of discrimination against black quarterbacks, where latent racism may be responsible. This is a matter of black youth shifting their focus away from baseball and towards basketball. I am absolutely astonished at all the people (including Astros management) lashing themselves asking "What have we done wrong?"

In May of 2002, Glenn Reynolds wrote an article on teen sex and media hype that I would have responded to if I'd had a blog at the time. Since I didn't, I'll take the opportunity to do so now.

Reynolds suggests that the problem with teenage sex is merely a symptom of the the problem of the existence of a "teenage" demographic:

"Young people became teen-agers because we had nothing better for them to do. High schools became custodial institutions for the young. We stopped expecting young people to be productive members of the society and began to think of them as gullible consumers. We defined maturity primarily in terms of being permitted adult vices, and then were surprised when teen-agers drank, smoked, or had promiscuous sex."

No longer adults-in-training, teen-agers became part of their own social class, on the one hand indulged and sheltered, on the other viewed as juvenile, oversexed and somehow dangerous. In fact, far fewer teen-agers were shouldering adult responsibilities. Instead, they had a new, increasingly cosseted role as high school students, social butterflies (and outcasts) and consumers.

Increased sexual activity, research indicated, was directly related to increased schooling and decreased responsibility. Teen-agers may be busy with teen activities, but not with adult responsibilities, and it shows.

Hine is right. We have infantilized teen-agers, and then we act surprised that they behave immaturely. And lately we seem even to be infantilizing 20-somethings: Reports on "Taliban" John Walker Lindh, or Monica Lewinsky, or Louise Woodward, the nanny accused of killing her charge, all tend to feature references to their alleged youth, though at their age historical figures like George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt had been acting as adults for years.

I'm reminded of a conversation that I had with Sally during her stay up here. She was reading a book of Eel's on sexual habits of adolescent girls and found it somewhat bizarre. We joked that she was reading about all that she and I missed out on in high school. I missed out on it because of my non-popularity, but she missed out on it because she was busy with honors classes and athletics. The fact that the Lafitte sisters had an atypical high school experience is largely because they had many of the challenges that Reynolds suggest that kids have. As the saying goes, the idle mind is the devil's workshop.

Whether we're in the "in" crowd or not, most of us spend a great deal of our high school years in idle. No matter how well we do in school, we're held there for seven years of junior high and high school. No matter how much we are capable of academically, those outside of honors classes move at the pace of the slowest student. In adolescent terms, the rewards of freedom will come to us at a set time regardless of what we do and do not accomplish. Few parents attach allowance or even freedom to grade point average. It's all about biding time.

Reynolds wants these kids working and I can understand that. But that's a quickie solution that doesn't take into account that even if their time at school is wasted, that's still thirty-something hours a week. If you add 20 hours of work on top of that plus study time and homework, you're not giving them a whole lot of time to develop their interests without forsaking their studies (which often happens). The issue here isn't that kids don't have jobs but that the high school world is so unserious in nature that they're not learning the rewards of a good work ethic. Most parents aren't teaching it at home, either.

But I'm not entirely sure what the solution is. It makes a pretty good argument for homeschooling (where you can give more challenging instruction at the student's pace) and year-round schooling (so that so much school time isn't wasted relearning the same material). But the "adolescent" stage of life is here to stay for good or for ill. Our entire education system is built around keeping kids together and when that happens, a social hierarchy for advertisers to exploit will exist. As long as kids are determining what's important, you can bet that they will not use the right criteria. As most of us live in this world for upwards of ten years of our life (if we include college) it becomes more ingrained than it did in the past when an eightteen year old had a lot more urgent concerns than who's sleeping with whom this week. I fear that this mentality stays with us as we get into the real world and this has been a factor in creating a society of perpetual me-first adolescence.

I must confess that I only got 9 of 16 right on this quiz. In my defense, there were three times when I whittled it down to one of two elections and got it wrong all three times. I also got one wrong because I didn't realize that the winner's party was on top of the state grid so I was looking for an election where the other party won. If I'd known, I would not have passed over that particular election. I also didn't realize that he had a list of states and when they were admitted to the union (cause I took the test top-to-bottom, meaning I took it backwards).

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I ran across this article on the (forgive the pun) ins and outs of Superman's sex life. I'm glad to have run across it again so I can post it here:

Assume a mating between Superman and a human woman designated LL for convenience.

Either Superman has gone completely schizo and believes himself to be Clark Kent; or he knows what he's doing, but no longer gives a damn. Thirty-one years is a long time. For Superman it has been even longer. He has X-ray vision; he knows just what he's missing. (*One should not think of Superman as a Peeping Tom. A biological ability must be used. As a child Superman may never have known that things had surfaces, until he learned to suppress his X-ray vision. If millions of people tend shamelessly to wear clothing with no lead in the weave, that is hardly Superman's fault.*)

The problem is this. Electroencephalograms taken of men and women during sexual intercourse show that orgasm resembles "a kind of pleasurable epileptic attack." One loses control over one's muscles.

Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he do to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?

It reminds me a bit of one of the best superhero stories ever written. The Hero is trying to track down a serial killer that is raping women, destroying their insides, and killing them in the process. Since I'm giving away some heavy duty spoilage, I'm going to refrain from naming the comic at this time. The culprit, it turned out, was a very sexually frustrated Supermanesque superhero. It was extraordinarily well done.

I'm also reminded of a proposal Alan Moore had called Twilight of the Superheroes. It was never actually done, though Mark Waid's Kingdom Come has striking similarities to it. What Moore does to Captain Marvel is both completely wrong and yet intriguing:

It had all started with little [Captain Marvel's 15-year old alter ego] Billy Batson and his problem. There he was, unwilling to give up being human, still spending a lot of time in a child's body. The unfortunate thing was that though little Billy's body didn't age, his mind did. Trapped in a child's body but afflicted with adult needs, Billy went quietly... well, bats, I suppose. A lot of the problems were sexual. Physically, Billy was not capable of normal sex and thus pretty soon began to experiment with more bizarre variations such as S&M, visiting the appropriate bars in clothing that made him look as grown-up as possible while he still had the face and body of a child.

That's one angle of Captain Marvel that will likely not go explored any time soon.

I came by the original article by way of a Slate column talking about Spiderman's love woes and that of superheroes more generally:

The vow of celibacy in Spider-Man isn't overt. The movie implies that Parker/Spider-Man's decision to rebuff M.J. is made out of a concern for her safety, because Spider-Man's enemies will seek to harm those whom Spider-Man loves. But Parker never considers the alternative: He could abandon being Spider-Man and live a life of normalcy with M.J. No one would be the wiser, and as an added bonus, Parker's roommate, Harry Osborn, wouldn't have to deliver on his vow to avenge his father's death—because Spider-Man would have mysteriously disappeared. (This decision would of course ruin the potential for sequels.) Instead, Parker/Spider-Man tells M.J. that friendship "is all I have to give." Because "with great power comes great responsibility," Spider-Man must be wedded to the world. He can't walk away from the moral obligations his powers impose on him.

Of course, last I checked Peter Parker and MJ were married in the comic books (aren't they?). I suspect the movies will go there eventually. Also, regarding Superman, he and Lois were actually premaritally cohabitating if I recall (or, at the least, were not waiting until marriage). I thought that was a mistake given the midwestern nature of the Clark Kent character, but that's neither here nor there. Apparently somehow Superman is capable of not destroying Lois when they have sex. That wasn't as much the case in 1969, when the original article was written, though.

In the comics, Bruce Wayne leads a monkish life. Every romantic interest seems to come down to what sacrifice he's making in regards to Batman. On more than one occasion, he's lost a girl over that. It's not just a matter of Bruce Wayne not having a Lois Lane or MJ or his own. Under the O'Neill regime, it was actually explicit that Batman sewed his oats in his younger years, is generally asexual, and lives the life of a determined monk of justice. I thought this was a mistake, too, but O'Neill started losing grip on the character in his final years. Since he left, this may have all changed.

You'd be surprised how common these kinds of hours are up here:

I ran across this in the parking lot of my complex:



Someone at my apartment complex has it in for Jesus.