Now that we’ve landed in Cascadia, I’m trying to tackle various tasks associated with moving. We’ve got power, water, Internet, and the other essentials. On to officially becoming a Cascadian and getting a drivers license. We were elated to discover that no written or driving test is needed if you’re relocating with a current drivers license from another state within the US (or, oddly, Germany). Also, unlike Estacado, they don’t require that you do things in a specific order (Insurance, inspection, car title, license in that order in Estacado).

The only snag (or the only snag thus far, anyway) is “proof of residence”. Unlike in Estacado, Deseret (I believe), and Delosa, a lease agreement isn’t considered proof of residence. You have to have a picture ID with the address (such as would be found on… a drivers license) or more simply a utility bill or hookup order with your name and address on it. We contacted the city utility company and they said that they would only send something after the first billing period which will be a month or so from now.

What’s interesting is that to get a DL we need one primary document, two secondary, or two secondary or a secondary and tertiary document. They have long lists of what all this involves. One of them, interestingly enough, is a voter registration card. So I went to the state’s Secretary of State site and saw what we’d need to register to have a voice in political affairs in the area and state (and, in November, nation). Apparently all they want is the last four digits of my social security number. No proof of anything else required.

So the thought occurred to me that if I go and register to vote I might be able to prove where I live (even though there is no accountability, apparently) so that I can drive. I was on my way out to do just that when I discovered that the cable company (who is taking care of our TV, Internet, and phone) had already sent me something. So off to the license bureau I went.

I have never seen such bureaucratized chaos in my life. They have a line, they have a little “Take a number” machine. They periodically have “Now Serving” numbers appear on top of the stations, but customers come and customers go and that number doesn’t actually change. So I got in line and then was informed that I needed to take a number, after which I kept waiting and waiting for the numbers to change above the stations. Instead the numbers disappeared so I got in line. Then a mean-tempered woman said “If you’re in line with a number above 330, you are not supposed to be in line so get out and take a seat. If you’ve thrown away your number, get a new one. If you’ve left the building to smoke a cigarette or get something our of your car, you have to get a new number”… and start at the back again of the numerical/non-numerical line, presumably.

Half an hour passed and nothing happened, numbers reappeared, didn’t change, disappeared again, more people got in line, and the lady spoke with great irritation that we weren’t abiding by the system and they couldn’t help us if we didn’t follow the rules… whatever they were.

After another hour of observation, this is what I determined the rules to be: Everyone picks a number and takes a seat. They call the numbers in blocks and the people with those numbers get in line in order. The first ten or so from that block will be called by number (with the Now Serving signs) and then the sign will stop changing (once they forget to keep updating it) and then go dark after it hasn’t been changed for a particular time interval (out of boredom I timed it to seven minutes and forty-five seconds). From that point the order will be determined by where you are in line if and only if your number is in the number block, which actually isn’t posted anywhere. Once that block is finished, they’ll start again with a new block. Intermittently there will be cow-herd lectures about how we’re failing to abide by the system.

Once I figured out he system, I bid my time (another hour) by explaining this system to everyone else that was confused and irate. One lady actually offered to give me a tip.

There was an interesting back and forth between Barry and Kirk on an old post. I had forgotten about the DVD-watching contingent of BSG and didn’t put up the appropriate spoilers, thinking that it was safe since months had passed since the airing of the actual episode and since the new season was about to begin. Barry takes the position that an hour or two after the episode has aired, it’s all fair game. Kirk, on the other hand, wishes that I would refrain from ruining BSG for him before he can watch it on DVD.

I am slightly more sympathetic to Kirk’s point of view on the issue, my own goof-up notwithstanding, but Kirk says something that I find worthy of note:

And honestly, why pay over $60 a month for an entire cable package, when I can get the basic channels (plus TBS and History) for less than $20/month? Other than BSG, and perhaps South Park, I never watched anything on those extra channels.

Finances aside, shows are often more enjoyable when watched in bulk. From a pure entertainment standpoint, I preferred watching serial action and drama shows in one large sitting rather than spreading it out week to week. Not only did I not have to wait in suspense (I can be impatient), but I also picked up on more things. Week in and week out I forget details. Sometimes they’re seemingly unimportant at the time, though sometimes even more important things.

On the other hand, there are some practical considerations, spoilers being one of them. As time progresses, your chances of discovering what happens on a show go up as more people figure that everyone else interested already knows. When it’s a blog it’s easy enough to put it behind a spoiler warning, but sometimes you just simply overhear things. It’s unavoidable. Back before IMDB started heavily tracking individual episodes of programs, they used to put the years an actor was on a show in parenthesis if the character left for one reason or another. It was really annoying because I’d try to look up an actor on the episode that I’m watching and then inadvertently discover that a character has died or otherwise left the show. It happened with Boone on Lost and Stringer Bell on The Wire. Fortunately, their new way of doing things doesn’t give quite as much away.

But that’s only part of it and that’s not really the reason that I’ve shifted from watching shows in bulk to trying to catch them week in and week out. The bigger reason is that the best shows create communities. I started watching Battlestar Galactica because my friend had hosted weekly watching parties last season and I couldn’t participate because I wasn’t caught up. I would probably have seen it all eventually, but being able to watch it with friends and discuss it with them was what tipped the scales.

My turning point actually involved Barry. His blog showed a still-frame the death of David Palmer from 24 when I hadn’t started watching that season yet. From that point forward I started reading Barry’s blog a little bit less so that nothing else would be spoiled for me and skimming over anything related to 24. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that I didn’t want to avoid discussion of my favorite TV shows, I wanted to participate in them. I came to enjoy the TV show Lost after initially not caring for it very much, but my enjoyment of the show has doubled since I started talking to coworkers about it. I’ve enjoyed reading and trading ideas with Abel and Barry and others almost as much as I’ve enjoyed watching the show itself. You can’t do that when you’re waiting for the DVD.

When you’re ready to talk about it, everyone else has forgotten a lot of the details and has mentally moved on. The DVD is released just before the next season begins, so within a month or two you’re already behind all over again. You can’t go to the websites dedicated the show, you can’t read posts about it, and on and on.

Since getting married to a woman that viewed television and movies as inherently inferior to reading in just about every respect, one of the points that I have tried to hammer home is that television is (or can be) a group activity in a way that reading can’t (or at least for reading circles and whatnot it’s a lot harder to make it so). I could go on and on about this and might in a separate post, but our time together has somewhat opened Clancy to my point-of-view on the matter.

It’s unfortunate that a lot of my hobbies are inherently isolating. I tend to write on my own. I have a lot of great readers and commenters on my blog, but this site is not something that I can tell people in real life because of a lot of what I write. I’m somewhat interested in sports, but it’s not my thing. This all has the effect of making me out-of-step with people in realtime. I often don’t have a lot to talk to people about. When I was having to steer clear of conversations about television, that only added to the problem. Being able to talk about the latest episode of this or that has helped.

A while back I wrote about the conclusion of this half-season of Battlestar Galactica. I had a stray thought that didn’t really fit within that post. This post contains spoilers. (more…)

If Barack Obama and John McCain both get 269 electoral votes on election day, the election goes into the House of Representatives. Rather than an up-down vote, though, which would clearly favor Obama, it is instead done by statewide delegation wherein each state gets one vote, which would favor McCain since he is likely to win more states than Obama (Bush won 30 states in 2000 and 31 in 2004, if I recall) because the unpopulated rural states trend Republican.

So I went to Politics1 and took a look at the delegations, and the likely winner in such an event is… Barack Obama. Despite the fact that Republicans typically win more states in presidential elections, only one Gore/Kerry state has a Republican congressional delegation (Michigan) whereas seven Bush states have Democratic delegations (Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, North Caroline, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia) and the two states with split delegations (Arizona and Kansas) are Bush states.

In order to pull it off, McCain would need to get the split delegations and flip four delegations while preventing Obama from flipping any.

The most likely scenario for a tie has the 2000 electoral map except with Nevada and New Hampshire going to Obama. With this electoral map in mind, there are eight states where the Democrats have only a margin of one vote, so McCain would need to change the minds of congressmen in six of those eight states states (which are Colorado, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia) or turn two of the tied states (AZ and KS). McCain is likely to win the Dakotas and West Virginia by a fair margin, though there is only one congressperson in each Dakota to flip (WV has three so he would have two there) so it would depend heavily on the personalities involved. Indiana is another state that it’s likely that McCain would win handily and there are five Democratic congressmen there. North Carolina and Tennessee are more likely to be closer in a tight race (and Nevada and Colorado extremely close) and without a clear victory in the state it seems less likely that they will be able to play the “vote your state/district” card, though if Obama’s vote is heavily concentrated in urban districts and McCain is able to clearly win the suburban and rural ones he might have a shot as there are more Democratic congresspeople to pick from.

If McCain were able to flip eight of the ten states (and/or gain eight by pulling over more than one congressman from Arkansas or Mississippi), the election would be his. If he falls short of eightstates, though, Obama can get the election back by flipping New Mexico (by persuading one congressman), Nevada (one congressman), and Michigan (two). New Mexico has an open district that is ripe for a Dem pickup and Obama may have that delegation anyway (Nevada, Montana, and Wyoming appear to be other cases where the delegation may flip, though neither seems extremely likely). There doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of volatility in Michigan and unless Nevada changes congressionally it seems unlikely that he would be able to flip a congressperson since he’s only likely to win one of the three congressional districts even if he wins what would likely be a tight race. If McCain flips seven states, Obama would only need New Mexico.

It seems extremely unlikely that McCain would be able to pull off this feat absent some mitigating circumstance such as a huge popular vote victory or substantial victories in all the right districts. If the GOP controlled congress they could convince some Democratic congresspeople to change parties to be with the majority, though it seems unlikely that any would change to be a part of the minority and it seems unlikely that they would be able to remain in their political party if they chose the other guy for president. Even more unlikely that they would do so what would functionally keep the first black president from obtaining office (one of those things that perhaps shouldn’t matter, but will).

It’s actually difficult to imagine any scenario in which a not-insignificant minority are satisfied with the result. In the event of an Obama presidency, we’d be able to look forward to eight years of people saying that he stole it by getting the votes of congresspeople bucking the popular vote in their state. If McCain wins, he will be considered as having done so by making ugly backroom deals. It even gets further complicated by Kansas and Arizona, which could allow for Obama to have more delegations than McCain (25 to 24 or 25 to 23) but still not enough to claim the presidency and the victor (Obama, likely) will only have won because the other side (McCain, likely) did “the honorable thing” by dropping out of a race that they likely couldn’t win (I can see no other way either of these candidates would drop out… Gore, Kerry, and Clinton only dropped out when they had exhausted all other options and they are still varying degrees of martyrs for having done so).

One of the other larger results of such an event would be the reconsideration of priorities among voters in heavily red states. Over the last decade or two voters in the northeast have decided that it’s more important to have a Democrat in office than it is to have a liberal Republican and one by one the Republican congresspeople in the northeast have been losing which is one reason why there are so few Blue States with Republican delegations compared to the inverse. Conservative voters in the south and mountain west have not yet come to that conclusion and don’t have a problem electing Democrats as long as it is “their kind of Democrat”. Watching their kind of Democrat put Barack Obama into office may result in southern voters viewing party label as more important and could ultimately hurt the Democrats in the House and Senate over the longer term.

Below the fold is a list of states under their congressional delegations:
(more…)

When I was in high school, my brother Mitch invited me to a fraternity party at the University of Delosa. The gist of the party was that the entire frat house was flooded by a couple of inches and everyone dressed like a swamp soldier in camo and whatnot. It was a pretty big deal. Being 16 and invited to one of these things was a pretty big deal, too.

My brother was dating a girl named Suzie at the time and Suzie was a member of the fraternity’s sister sorority. One of Suzie’s sorority sisters was a girl named Maggie. Maggie wasn’t gorgeous, but she was curvacious (sp?) in a really good way and she had a spunky personality that I liked. The coolest, thing, though, was that she talked to me. Not as Mitch’s kid brother, but as a guy.

The water came down and the place was flooded and the party began. Having access to unlimited free booze, I did the expected thing and started drinking a lot right away. Wherever I turned, for a while, there was Maggie. She kept… touching me. Not in a sexual way, but in the offhand way that made me feel warm (so maybe the alcohol was helping in that regard).

I kept trying to work up the guts to kiss her. The idea that a college girl could be interested in a dopey high school kid like me was on its face ludicrous, but there really weren’t many alternative explanations for the way that she was acting. I wasn’t sure of anything, but I was sure that to not even try was even more ludicrous than the idea that she might be receptive.

Then, after about my eighth beer or so, she disappeared. Then I was stuck with this other girl who was very, very interested in me. This one didn’t know that I was in high school. Can’t remember a whole lot about her but her name and that despite the fact I was drunk, she was still extremely ugly.

Maggie reappeared and I ditched the other girl with all the tact of a drunk 16 year old kid on the cusp of getting his first kiss or more by an older, hot woman. Before I could spring into action, I was suddenly being talked to by all sorts of girls. One after another. They were introducing themselves to me and lightly flirting and eventually all getting around to telling me the exact same thing: Whatever you do, stay the hell away from Maggie.

Girls of the sort that would never even give me the time of day were suddenly taking an interest in my welfare. Maggie must be a psycho or something, I thought. I was too drunk and too dumbstruck to turn down their advice. Maggie seemed to change a little bit, too, making me wonder if someone had said something to her.

The next day it became apparent to me that Suzie had sent her sorority sisters to be my protector. I asked in as offhanded a manner I could muster why she had done so. She said “I don’t know, I just don’t think that she’s good for you?”

“Really. Why not?”

“I don’t know, she’s just… weird.”

I didn’t say so, but the thought that went through my mind was “Weird? Weird?! You got in between me and a hot chick because you thought she was weird?! Who the hell do you think I am? I know every baseball statistic from the 1986 baseball season. I plot gritty noir movies starring Darkwing Duck. I write comic books during English class and set up paper football leagues. I talk to myself, I talk in my sleep. Weird? Not so much a problem!

But alas, it was not to be. The upshot was that it provided me with a much-needed self-esteem boost (sure she was probably crazy, but a college chick dug me!!) and the whole thing made me feel closer to Suzie who really was looking out for me (why couldn’t Mitch have married her?). Greater opportunities were lost, of course. Then again, considering how much I had to drink, it’s quite possible that they wouldn’t have been remembered, anyway.

One of the best emails I ever read was to my friend Kelvin to the lady friend I was attempting reconciliation with. Before she and I or she and someone else got back together (she was choosing between exes), he threw his hat into the ring. He declared his love for her in some of the most eloquent and engaging prose I have ever read. At the end of it he made one request. She could choose him and they could live happily ever after, she could choose someone else and things would (eventually) return to normal… but the one thing that he absolutely, positively, did not want her to say was “Maybe” and leave him twisting in the wind.

To which she responded, over the next few months, with a series of proclamations of “Maybe”.

—

A while back, Megan McArdle put her finger on something rather important to young men or, at least, young men like I used to be:

There’s a phase most women probably go through in high school or college, when they realize that they have extraordinary power to get men to do things, and they see how many people they can get to chase them at once. Most of us, though, I think quickly realize how pointless it is. There’s something terribly lonely about interacting with someone when you know what’s really going on, and they don’t.

—

The notion of a “Friend Zone” is often fodder for sitcoms. It often goes like this: Guy is interested in girl. Girl might be interested in guy or might have been interested in guy, but they become friends and since they’re friends, she doesn’t want to wreck it by pursuing something more. Thus, he is in The Friend Zone. In the TV show Friends, Joey warns Ross in the first episode that he needs to make his move or he will be in the Friend Zone. In Scrubs, a corrolary is added that any aborted kiss must be rectified within 24 hours or you are relegated to the place where her shy or goofy Asian-American tutor in high school ended up… I don’t think they said The Friend Zone, but they might as well have.

I’ve heard it suggested by some that The Friend Zone (TFZ) is actually a myth. If a woman is interested in a guy, she will be interested in him. The fact that he’s her friend would make it more so rather than less so. the Myth of the Friend Zone exists because women say “Let’s be friends” or “I was interested in you, but now that I’ve gotten to know you I see you only as a friend” when they really mean “Ewwww…” and they don’t want to hurt the guy because he is nice and it’s not good to hurt nice people any more than you have to or they don’t want to hurt him because he’s not nice and they fear retaliation.

Women that say this are… well… correct much of the time. Sometimes guys are left with the impression that they might have had a shot but the friendship got in the way when in reality he never, ever, had anything resembling a shot. Maybe it’s the vast majority of guys that think that they’re in TFZ or maybe it’s just true some of the time. But it’s not true all of the time. Not completely as such, anyway.

It’s true that if you become genuinely close with a girl that would otherwise be interested in you, it’s unlikely or impossible that this will negatively affect her interest except in the outlier case where she’s just cruisin’ for an emotional bruisin’ (in which case the guy shouldn’t want to go there anyway and if he is he’s cruisin’ for the same bruisin’). But there is something else that does happen that young men ought to be on the lookout for.

There very frequently seems to be a time limit between the point where a guy says that he is interested and something actually happening. It’s not the 24 hours from Scrubs, but it’s not indefinite and this is true even if you are otherwise appropriate dating stock for the girl and not searching out of your station. You can glide your way out of this if you immediately start dating someone else or can accurately (and it must be accurately, faking is easy to spot) demonstrate that you have other options that are worthy of pursuit.

One of the worst positions for a guy to be in is to declare his interest and simply not be given any sort of definitive answer. Hearing “no” hurts, of course, but if you’re well-adjusted life goes on. Hearing “yes” rocks. If you get anywhere in between, you are effectively put on Reserve Status. You’re on a shelf. You’re a bone in her collection. This is what McArdle puts her finger on that I find so worthwhile. A lot of young women do this.

I have in the past called this Bone Collecting. The shorter version is that being a human her ego needs regular watering and having a guy interested in her helps supply that and having more guys interested supplies more of that. Logically, she can only be going out with one person at a time, but if she can manage to have a guy or two that are in the ballpark of worthy of her on stand-by, it can help keep her going in pursuit of the best guy that she can get. McArdle focuses squarely on the things that the guy will do for her, but one of the biggest such is emotional validation. That he may completely revoke this if she tells him it’s unlikely to happen or will only happen in the absence of any other immediate alternative provides incentive for her not to say anything even if he’s actually annoying her with his affections.

Note: This isn’t the same as saying she is not and never could be interested. If she feels nothing for the guy than his emotional validation actually means little. She feels (or has the capacity to feel) something, just not enough to forego all other opportunities.

For a lot of girls, once they have that emotional validation, they’ve already gotten everything they need from the romantic transaction. Foregoing other opportunities or engaging in romantic physical activity are costs that she doesn’t even have to bear. A lot of young ladies want more than validation, of course. A lot of young men want more than sex. Nonetheless, there is a not-insignificant portion of each population that is more singularly-minded and both genders should keep this into account.

The reason I can write with such confidence that the girl is interested in the guy and it’s not all a smokescreen for lack of interest is that various times when I’ve seen it happen the two do eventually get together. Importantly, though, this only happens after he has revoked his validation. Evangeline and Kelvin dated for two years before I ruined it. Tracey threw herself at my feet and for years said (to me and to others) that letting me go was the worst mistake that she had ever made.

I am not saying that these women are evil. Sometimes they don’t realize what they’re doing. Sometimes they do, but she just can’t seem to leverage any perspective with him hanging by so closely even as she doesn’t want him to go away.

Whether she admits it or not and whether he wants to or not, it seems to me that the best thing for the guy to do when he finds himself in reserve status is to go on his merry way. Do whatever it takes to move on. Stop seeing her, stop talking to her, find new friends. Whatever. She generally puts up a lot of resistance to this idea, partially because she loses that validation and partially because she likes him in some capacity (even if she’s unclear what that capacity is) and it hurts to see someone you care for go away and possibly hate you.

Prior to that worst case scenario, it really does pay for guys to be circumspect with their romantic intentions until they get some sort of reciprocation. I don’t mean never expressing interest, but I do mean never expressing interest more than one step ahead of what she has expressed and never stay on that limb for too long.

Band members at Mayne High School were expected to wear a Mayne Mustangs Band shirt on gameday or before they were about to leave for a tournament or something like that. It was a pretty simple shirt with the Mustang logo on the left breast and the words Mustang Band written in a circle. For the most part the band members hated it. It singled them out as band people. A quarter of the school would be wearing the same damn shirt. Almost nobody was caught dead in one unless they had to wear it.

I can’t remember how I got a hold of one, but somehow I did. I had it in my regular shirt rotation and wore it quite frequently. People would periodically ask why I wore it or express surprise that I was in band because they’d never seen me before. When I explained that I wasn’t in band but that I liked navy blue and red and breast-logos shirts, I’d usually get a “cool”. The fact that I wasn’t in band made my wearing the shirt okay. Kinda cool, even. In the end I probably got more compliments on that shirt than any other shirt that I wore.

A while back, in response to something that I wrote a while back, Bob said:

You can put the Trumwill in Skidz, but you can’t take the slacks off of the Trumwill. Those things that identify us as losers aren’t the same things that cause us to be losers. Unfortunately, we don’t always appreciate this difference though. Pick-up guides focus on how to *display* high social value. They list attributes and tell you to do those things. Identify those people; watch them; do what they do. Fake it till you make it. (I’m sure there are some exceptions to this, but this seems to be a dominant theme.)

That is of course true. Often true, though is that context matters a great deal. For a mohawk to make a statement, it needs to be rare. My brother has a freckle on his ear where a piercing would be and when he was young he got a lot of looks because it appeared that his ear was pierced. Today, of course, a pierced ear is nothing. Doing the same thing carries a different meaning in a different context. It’s all contextual.

That’s one reason why it’s different when a popular kid wears something dorky than when a dorky kid does the same. For the former, it is adding an element of unpredictability or irony, whereas for the latter it’s simply reinforcing the existing negative perception. A cool kid wearing cool things reinforces positive perceptions about him whereas a dorky kid doing the same is adding an element of desperation and it just totally reeks of effort, which is (or was when I was young) a huge no-no.

This of course boxes the lower high school social classes into their station. Though it’s a risk to liken the man that won the popular vote to become the President of the United States as an outcast, I nonetheless have come to call this The Second Al Gore Dilemma. In 2000, Al Gore was in the position that he could either accept the perception of him being a square with edges made entirely of dull or he could try to change that and then most odiously reeking of effort. According to many in person Gore is a very warm and personable guy but he was effectively prevented from conveying that by popular perceptions.

The second aspect that makes it extremely difficult for lower people to become upper people simply by dressing the part is that there are all sorts of minutiae (if it’s even small, sometimes it’s huge) that someone that is not more intimately familiar with fashion does not know and that will frequently reveal him or her to be someone on the outside desperately looking in, which is about the only thing worse than someone simply slumming it on the outside.

As I was gradually making my way through school baseball caps and football jerseys were going the cycle from Cool to Standard to Banned. What’s to know about wearing a baseball cap? Well, for starters you have to get one of those expensive $20 official MLB caps instead of one of those with the weaved backs. I didn’t realize this and instead wore a Cane Buddies junior cap for the local Colosse Canes if I was wearing an MLB cap at all (and of course I wore it straight rather than cocked to the side). Likewise, my “jersey” wasn’t a jersey so much as it was a simple cotton fake jersey thing (and for the wrong team, to boot) and lo and behold it got me know headway on the popularity front. When I was in college, blue collar gas station shirts with foreign names on them like Habib or Ernesto were all the rage… but it was a no-no to tuck in your shirt as I always did. Being in college I was too old to care and I liked the shirts for a different reason (3 for $1! Relentlessly casual!), but had I been in junior high at the time it was devastating.

As a general principle, if the rules don’t sufficiently favor the haves over the have-nots new rules will be devised to close any loopholes. By the time people like me get caught up on a fashion it’s already on its way out. By the time lower class people can afford to move into a neighborhood the wealthier people are moving out. When a fat girl can look good in something the fashionistas will go out of their way to find something that only the thinnest 1/2 of 1% look good in and it will be the next big thing.

All of these posts are kind of old, but Transplanted Lawyer had a host of good ones last may (one of which in response to a post here):

Age of Consent Laws

Some young people probably do have enough maturity to deal with sex; some people over the age of eighteen do not. The psychological factors that go into that sort of thing are astonishingly complex and functionally impossible for an objective third party to evaluate. That’s why the only possible way to handle the question of how old should we require someone to be before we agree that they can consent to sex of necessity must be totally and completely arbitrary. Maybe as a moral matter we can create constructs to handle particular situations, but as a legal matter it’s simply too big of a mess to ever be anything but an arbitrary distinction that often will have little relation to case-by-case realities. {…}

Eighteen years is as good an arbitrary age as any other reasonably young age one might come up with. Here’s why I think that — the age must of necessity be above the age at which one’s body attains sexual maturity, because the harm that the law seeks to avoid is mental, emotional. One needs some time to come to an understanding of what one’s body is capable of doing, and that takes practical experience, not theoretical knowledge, of what sexual maturity feels like. What does it feel like to be sexually aroused? You can read about it in a book all you like, but until you experience it, the descriptions don’t make any difference and aren’t particularly meaningful. So the law needs to set the line at some point late in adolescence. Eighteen years is an age by which we can be reasonably certain that most people will have entered puberty and picked up a few years’ worth of experience with their newfound sexual maturity and awareness.

I still disagree with TL on the subject in part because he has a lot more faith in judges (and prosecutors) than I do. In order for the judge to be able to look at the situation, it has to get to him. Many defendants will probably plead out simply because the judge has the ability to drop a two-story house on him. Particularly if he’s caught as having done it. It’s low-hanging fruit for prosecutors and there’s no telling how any given judge will read the situation.

No Heart Balm Here

If there was going to be a “heart balm” case, it would be Askew v. Askew (1994) 22 Cal.App.4th 942, referred to here by Eugene Volokh. Basically, the wife admitted that she lied to her fiance about loving him, being attracted to him, and enjoying sex with him. Based on his belief in her statements, he transferred five pieces of property that he owned individually into the marital estate. The couple then divorces and husband sues wife for fraud, asking the court to undo the dedication of the property into the marriage. The court says “no way,” because that sort of thing — even though, in a commercial context, it would obviously be fraud — it would open up a huge can of evidentiary worms for future courts to sort out.

This one is my favorite post of the three as it brought to my mind a subject that I hadn’t thought a whole lot about.

An Hour Of Traffic Court Will Do You Good

The first thing you might want to think about if you have to actually try your traffic ticket is — why would the cop lie? An unbiased traffic judge doesn’t start out thinking anyone is lying, and the police officer gets to testify first. That’s a powerful advantage for the state. The officer gets to set the stage, describing what was going on, and a well-trained officer uses that opportunity to explain why the defendant’s (alleged) misdeeds were dangerous. If you’re going to actually win on the testimony, you need to find some way of getting past that.

Secondly, given that the judge is not inclined to think that the cop is lying, simply contradicting the cop is, as a practical matter, not going to be enough to defeat the state’s burden of proof. Your testimony that the police officer was simply incorrect about something will not be credited. The officer has been to traffic patrol school, the officer is trained in observing traffic conditions and records his or her recollections very quickly after the ticket is written. You very likely have not done this. Therefore, the officer’s testimony about the circumstances of the ticket is likely to be credited over yours in the event of a simple red-light-green-light contradiction. {…}

I don’t particularly like finding people guilty of traffic violations. But it has to be done. I would like to find reasonable doubt if I can, and sometimes I ask searching questions of the officers to see if there is any doubt. But as a defendant, you have to give me something I can hang my hat on. You have to do something more than just say “Nuh-uh” when the police officer says you ran a red light, were speeding, or otherwise committed one of these infractions.

Ahhh, a subject near and dear to our hearts. I agree with TL that even in Ticket Towns the vast majority of the time the people that get pulled over were breaking the law. Sometimes the law simply exists to be broken (”Speed traps”) and sometimes not, but generally speaking there are too many people that are perpetually breaking the law for them to bother to trump up charges on people that are doing no wrong. As for the lack of incentive to lie… well there’s fundraising and the fact that most of the time there is little to nothing that we can do to refute what the cop has to say. There is unfortunately no real way for the system to tell when a cop is acting in good faith and when he isn’t.

I job description has come my way that I meet or exceed all of the qualifications for. My experience at Soyokaze (and to a lesser extent Falstaff) has set me up quite well for the ins and outs of testing of test cases and bug reporting and I even have team leadership experience (thanks, Willard!).

There’s only one qualification I lack. The first one:

• Passion for video games and gaming

I don’t own a Wii. Or an XBox 360. Or a Gamecube or old school XBox. Or an N64. I do have a Playstation 2 with four games on it. One was given to me by a former landlord because it was left behind by a former tenant. Two are different releases of the same EA Sports NCAA Football game and the last is EA Sports NCAA Basketball. When I play those games I literally set everything up, create teams, draft players, and then… let it simulate against itself and watch. I bought the Playstation 2 because I needed a DVD player and wanted to play Bushido Blade II, the only non-Nintendo game I’ve ever loved. Never got around to buying the actual game, though. When I thought that the Playstation was lost in a move, I couldn’t for the life of me justify buying a new one… even used.

Sometimes I do play N64, NES, and SNES games on my computer. During the move I was playing the Zelda game for the SNES, which I’ve conquered four times with the help of of Save State, the ability to freeze a game at any moment so that if I get killed I can go back to that point instead of the beginning of the level. I also use walkthrough guides and cheats. Recently I managed to win the second round of N64 game F-Zero… but my reward was that the game started locking up. Periodically I play Quake II… but always in God mode as it’s mostly an outlet for my male aggressive tendencies. That’s the exception. Mostly I just play these games as a means of relaxation, which means play easier games and cheat, cheat, cheat rather than deal with the stress of losing.

When I was a kid I used to play Tecmo Super Bowl for the NES, one of the best games ever made. The problem is that I couldn’t cheat and that darn game could and did. There was one point where it had decided that I needed to lose so eight of my QB’s nine passes were intercepted and most of those went directly into the other teams’ arms rather than my downfield receiver. I would yell and scream at that game until Dad would come in and threaten to take the game system away from me unless I calmed down. I was sixteen at the time. Ever since then it’s been cheat, cheat, cheat. And for the most part stop playing video games.

I don’t have anything against them in theory. I just (a) stink at them, (b) get frustrated at them and (c) see them as one of the few instruments of timesuck that I can actually avoid.

But… you know… if I was getting paid for it, that might change things. I may stink, but I could be representative of the Novice User! Winning them wouldn’t be a big deal because that wouldn’t be the point. Timesuck isn’t so bad when you’re getting paid for it. Surely I can fake liking these irritating, impossible timesucking devices, can’t I? It’s not like when I was up for a job testing software for a casino where I had moral reservations. I might feel bad about taking the job (if I were to get it) from someone that actually likes games, but then again there is no surer way to stop liking something than to have to actually work with it. So I’d be doing them a favor!

So… uhhh… game on?

A while back I read about an attempt in San Fransisco to rename a sewage plant after our current president:

The measure, if passed, would rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. McConnell said the intent is to remember the Bush administration and what the group sees as the president’s mistakes, including the war in Iraq.

Some people aren’t laughing, including the San Francisco Republican Party, which sees the measure as an embarrassment, even to this famously liberal city. Chairman Howard Epstein has vowed to fight the measure with all means available to him.

A White House spokeswoman, when asked about the measure several weeks ago, refused to comment.

My original thought was that it’s a disservice to a sewage plant to use it in such a derogatory political manner… but that actually gave me an idea.

If the Republicans were actually smart, what they would do is completely embrace the notion. If the local GOP embraced it, it’d fail. Perhaps better yet would be if they continued their objections right up until they passed it then have the President request a tour of the facilities. He could then give a speech on how important waste processing facilities are and how modern plumbing and waste material has perhaps had the greatest effect on our quality of life and longevity than any other individual thing. That would leave the Presidents opponents stammering “It is tooooo an insult! Is too, is too, is too!” and the whole thing will look about as childish as it is.

On the subject of naming things after presidents, the No Child Left Behind law resulted in one of the local high schools where I was living in Estacado being shut down. It’s going to reopen as a new school under a different name this fall. Its temporary name is Northside High School though they’re aiming to name it after somebody. Interestingly enough, they’ve pushed back the naming of the high school to November 7th, which is the first Friday after the presidential election. The high school is in the dominantly black part of town and I can’t help but wonder if they’re angling to be the first Barack Obama High School in the nation.

On a sidenote, I prefer the comment section of this post not become congested with commentary on how terrible/great Bush, Obama, or the NCLB act are. I’ve been considering a post on the lattest (though perhaps that would be more appropriate on Bobvis), but this post is about the naming of buildings and schools and whatnot.

It bubbles up from the System Tray on a seemingly-random basis: “You have unused icons on your desktop,” it scolds, while offering to invoke a Wizard to make things right. Click the X button to make it go away, and it comes back unchanged; wait a few more minutes and eventually it dissolves.

You can actually fix this with the following steps:

1. Go to Desktop Properties by either right-clicking on the desktop or going through the Control Panel
2. Click on the Desktop tab
3. Click “Customize Desktop”
4. Click checkbox that says “Run Desktop Cleanup Wizard every 60 days”

It’s a matter of taste, of course, but I have an aversion to clutter on the desktop. But even if you don’t feel the same way, I have a suggestion.

Some of you are probably familiar with the Quicklaunch button. When Windows 2000 or Windows XP is initially installed, it usually has four or so icons on it (Internet Explorer, Show Desktop, Outlook Express, and Windows Media Player, I think). As Microsoft gives it to you, it’s kind of an annoyance. But you can use it in a way that obviates the need for desktop clutter and even the Start Menu for the most part. If you set it up like I do, most likely you can have all of the applications that you use available at a single click.

Here is what to do:

1. Right click on the Start Bar and either unlock it or make sure it is unlocked. Note that this step is unnecessary in Windows 2000.

If the Quicklaunch Bar is not already on the Start Bar, right click, go to Toolbars, and click on Quicklaunch.

2. Left click the bar to the left of the Quicklaunch icons and drag it to the right side of your screen so that it places against the side. You can do this along top or to the right, though if you do it to the right you will accidentally open programs when attempting to scroll
   Right click on empty spot on the Quicklaunch bar and say “Always on Top”
3. Add shortcuts to all of the icons that you use on a regular basis by copying the shortcut over to the Quicklaunch Bar. You can find the icons in the Start Menu at {C:\Documents and Settings\-Your User Name Here-\Start Menu} and {C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu}. You can also right click to copy straight from the Start Menu, though this is a bit dexterity-requiring for me.
4. Play around with it a few days. Try to use it. Once you start, it becomes really handy. If you like having access to it but don’t like the fact that it’s always visible, you can try using the auto-hide feature.

You can click on the image to the right to get a full view of what it looks like and how much space it takes. There’s no particular reason that my Start Bar is double-stacked except that I use a lot of applications and I like it that way.

Most people, if you ask them what they think of the police, will tell you they respect people who take up that job and protect the public.

Most people are liars.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and admit: my actual respect for police/sheriffs has gone downhill over the years to the point where it is virtually nonexistent.

Where I think this comes from has very little to do with the actual police in question. The job done by the police hasn’t changed that much. I have specific respect for the officers who do the needed things - investigating crimes, dealing with gangs/gang violence, and actually keeping the cities and neighborhoods safe(r). I do not for a moment subscribe the the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton school of “cops are racist”, nor do I believe as Barack Obama does that police who participate in federally-authorized and organized enforcement actions are involved in “terror.”

What has stolen my respect for cops is far more fundamental; a small, day-to-day realization that the lowest level of the system - traffic enforcement in particular - is hopelessly corrupt. Will has spoken on this a couple of times (also most recently).

In my life, I’ve risked traffic tickets precisely twice. Once was on a highway about two hours out of Colosse. There’s a spot where the state highway requires a cloverleaf off-ramp to remain on the highway; unfortunately for unwary motorists, they also “happen” to change the speed limit from 65 to 60 on the segment over the bridge, and there’s a good mile span where motorists will accelerate back up to their original speed before seeing the new sign. Thus I was pulled over by a sheriff on a slow night for “going 63 in a 60 zone” with out of state plates, before he saw my Southern Tech ID and realized that I’d easily be able to make the court date and let me off with a warning. To be fair to this one, he warned me that there was another spot with a similar setup about an hour past where I was, so that I wouldn’t get stopped there too. I’ve no doubt that had I not been a poor college student, however, he simply would have hit me with a ticket and I’d have been stuck in the unenviable position of either (a) trying to get back for a court date or (b) pleading guilty by mail.

The second time, I was coming home to the SoTech dorms late at night, and one of STPD’s rent-a-cops decided he needed to make quota (and/or some time with the new girl on the force). So he pulled me over ostensibly for “running a red light” (not guilty), then called for “backup” and proceeded to “show [her] how we do this paperwork” while his hand was working its way over her derriere. Apparently she was pretty cute to look at, enough so that he got the model, color, and number of doors of my car wrong (the only thing he successfully identified was the license plate number and the fact that it was a Ford).

When I went in for the court date - which he “conveniently” scheduled three weeks after semester’s end, but fortunately I was taking summer courses - I was told in no uncertain terms by the DA’s assistant that he didn’t care how much the cop got wrong on the ticket, because he was confident that the judge would know I had done “something” wrong and that I ought to just pay up.

A few years later, Colosse had a short uproar when the current Mayor let slip in a city council meeting that the city was short on money, very specifically because “CPD ticket revenue has not met its goals.” In other words, while they skirt the federal ban on having official ticket “quotas”, they establish a minimum amount of revenue that the Police Department is required to generate from traffic tickets - by hook or by crook. As everyone in Colosse knows, all the cops have “unofficial” quotas. You can see them when it’s close to monthly review, staking out spots and setting up ambushes, 6-7 squad cars parked in one underpass or in a sequence down the roadway, making sure each officer in their unit meets the “unofficial quota” so as not to get an administrative blemish on their monthly performance review.

The end result of this misbehavior - whether by CPD, by the lone sheriff with a radar gun in rural areas who falsifies the radar speed listed to increase fines, or by a local board or state legislature that passes laws such that it’s actually more expensive to fight such a falsified ticket than simply to pay - is a slow but continual degradation of the respect and trust that officers need to do the rest of their job. Knowing that an officer has in 99% likelihood committed perjury over a traffic ticket by falsifying court documents, am I likely to trust their word on other subjects? I’m pretty sure I am not. Am I likely to believe that a traffic court judge is actually a fair arbiter? Of course not - from experience, I know that even as they lie to your face otherwise, a traffic court judge is going to take a cop at his word no matter what he says and is in the business of getting as many people to pay tickets as possible. They’ve gone from being a brake and sanity check on the system, to being just another corrupt cog.

And since this lowest level of the system is so corrupt, I can at least understand why it is that people believe the higher levels are equally as corrupt. After all, every judge and official in the higher portions of the system started out as either one of, or supporting and rubber-stamping for, the badged highwaymen.

My brother Mitch was the one that followed in Dad’s footsteps, going into aeronautical engineering. My oldest brother Ollie, Mitch, and I all kind of watched one another to see who would follow Dad’s footsteps. It was fitting, I thought, that Mitch the favored son would be the one to do it. I think on some level Ollie and I felt that we might be expected to do the same thing that Dad did. It turned out that Dad tried to dissuade Mitch from going into aeronautical engineering and urged him instead to go into… computers… which Ollie and I both work in.

Mitch graduated from the University of Delosa while dating a Suzie who was in pre-med and unavailable to go anywhere (there are no aeronautical engineering jobs in Ephesus), a girl that he thought he was going to marry, so he stuck around Ephesus for a couple more years and picked up his graduate degree. Suzie left the picture and Brynn entered it, so he ended up having to leave a girlfriend behind anyway. He interviewed at a couple of places in Colosse, but Omicron, the defense contract that he’d interned for, wanted him in Washington DC. Further, he would be contracted directly to the federal government and simply drawing a paycheck from Omicron.

To this day we don’t know exactly what it was that he was doing in DC. We knew that it took him nine months to get started because he needed a very high level of clearance. Though boring, that was great for him because such clearance is money in the bank when it comes to promotions inside and outside of the company. We also knew that he had a rotating schedule working 16-24 hour days and then getting days off. On the other hand, he couldn’t tell us what he was doing or exactly what part of the government he was working with/for.

Interestingly enough, the second Christmas he worked there, his gift to me was a CIA mug.

The morning of 9/11/1 was mind blowing for a lot of reasons, but one of which was that it made what my brother was doing that much more important. Was he working in the Pentagon? It wasn’t a stretch as my father with similar credentials had done some DOD command work with some of it in DC. The chances that he did work at the Pentagon and that he was there at the time of the attacks were microscopic. I knew this, but it doesn’t matter when it’s your brother. It was, of course, fine.

Since he left that position and relocated to Colosse we’ve learned that whatever he was doing involved monitoring satellites.

After his move to Colosse, I’ve still long had little to no idea of what he was doing. He doesn’t work for Omicron anymore. The contract he was working on was bought out by another firm which kept him on in the same job at the same salary with the same seniority and benefits.

I did get a glimpse of what he’s doing, though, because he has a couple quotes in a recent edition of Aeronautical Digest, a Monthly (I think?) magazine for airplane, military, and science enthusiasts. He is apparently a “research engineer” and his team made some sort of discovery about the effect of the sun’s relative strength at any given point and automated flight or something like that. It’s not up my alley so I didn’t understand it.

It’s almost as cool as when my father got to go to the premier of the movie Stealth because of the technical assistance his group provided and rub elbows* with Jamie Foxx and Sam Shepherd.

* - By “rub elbows” I mean that almost literally. He accidentally brushed up against Shepherd. He didn’t actually talk to them or anything like that. He was actually able to go mostly because his boss was unable to so he was given the special pass. Pretty cool nonetheless, even if it is an awful movie.

En route to Cascadia, we decided to swing back to Deseret and Zarahemla, the town we lived in while we were there.

Interestingly, when we got into town both of us independently had the same sort of feeling… “It feels like coming home”.

Had you asked either of us whether we’d ever really consider Zarahemla our home (or a home), we probably would have laughed. We didn’t really dislike the area (it is one of the more palatable cities in Deseret), it was just a place that was very different where we were from and a difficult place to assimilate into for reasons religious and cultural.

What’s sad is that Santomas, Estacado, never really became a home-type place for us. I absolutely love the state of Estacado which is why I am lobbying for her to keep working to get licensure there so we can settle down there… but not so much for Santomas, a city that I figured I would love. It sort of felt like we should be honored to live in such a hip place, which made relatively squarish Clancy and I feel rather… well… square.

It’s possible that the main difference is time. We were in Zarahemla a lot longer than we were in Santomas and it’s possible had we been plucked out of Zarahemla earlier we’d feel similarly indifferent. Another factor is that though we stayed in Estacado for two years, it was supposed to be one, which likely made us less likely to really get settled in.

Out plan is to be in Cascadia for a year. It’ll be interesting to see how well we take to Soundview.

A lot of guys can tell you stories about this girl that they liked that confided in him what a jerk her boyfriend was wherein the confidee silently asked “What about meeeee? I wouldn’t treat you like that!” But no, she stays with the jerk while saying that she just wishes that she could find a guy that’s not like the jerk at all. Some believe it happens all the time and some believe it really truly happens rarely, but whatever we believe about it, we’ve heard it.

Sometimes I feel like the whiny jilted guy when it comes to religion. As most of you know, I am a member of the Episcopal Church, which has been struggling lately. There is the recent schism, of course, but it goes beyond that. Church attendance numbers aren’t very good and growth in the United States is anemic.

Yet at the same time The Episcopal Church is precisely what a lot of people say that they want. Specifically, there is a target group that TEC seems incapable of picking off: disaffected Catholics.

Now there are two kinds of disaffected Catholics: disaffected liberals and disaffected conservatives. I haven’t much advice for the conservatives that are upset about the litergical changes of Vatican II and the like or like my Webmaster are upset about the liberal political positions that the church has taken on issues such as immigration and welfare. Other than perhaps the Orthodox Churches, they really don’t have a whole lot of options.

But the liberal Catholics are a different matter. They have the church that was founded as a reaction to the rigidity of the Catholic Church: My church. I hear a lot of Catholics complain about how the church won’t open its eyes on celibate priests, women priests, homosexuality, contraception, or a host of otherwise. Or else I hear complaints that the church doesn’t respect differences in theological opinion and has such a top-down view on everything.

These are areas in which the Episcopal Church is not necessarily perfect by their reckoning, but at the very least it’s closer to what they say they want than their own church is. Yet they continue to go to Catholic Mass (or make a point of Refusing To Go) and most are dismissive of the idea of converting to Episcopalianism.

This may sound like my simply trying to boost my own church, but it really isn’t that. It isn’t about the virtue of TEC at all. Who am I to say anything? I barely go to church myself. But what I find notable is that I’m not blaming the church for my failure to attend or going despite making a big point about how dissatisfied I am with it. If I wanted more energetic sermons I could go to a Baptist or otherwise charismatic church. If I wanted more rigid doctrine I could convert to Catholicism. But what I wouldn’t do is sit here and complain about how my church has failed me as if it were my only option.

But Catholics, like Pygmalion Girls, often prefer to seek to change what they got rather than admit what they have is not necessarily right for them. Or perhaps more precisely they (and by “they” I am referring most specifically to liberal Catholics as I concede that conservative Catholics are more limited in their options) would rather be indignant than satisfied.

This is all how it seems sometimes, though on a separate level I know that it’s not quite that simple. Catholicism is as much a tradition as a specific belief. So while on one hand it seems to me that to say that the Pope is wrong is to be a 0 in the binary world of Catholicism (in which the Pope is infallible)… on the other hand I can see Catholicism as much a tradition of heritage as it is a tradition of theology. I can move as far away from the south as can be if I find New England to be more to my liking… but it doesn’t stop me from wanting the south to correct its various faults and wherever I live a part of me will always be a southerner.

Nonetheless, it just remains frustrating to me that a great Sorting hasn’t taken place with the rabble-rousing angry conservative Episcopalians joining the Orthodox churches where they belong, liberal heretical Catholics joining the Episcopal Church, and so on and so on.

One minute Clancy and I are driving down the Interstate in Real-life Wyoming going somewhere between 70 and 75 in a 75mph zone.

Several minutes later, a local Sheriff’s Deputy is telling me that I was going 91mph in a 65mph zone.

In between time, I was driving down the Interstate in Real-life Wyoming and noticed that the car behind me wasn’t Clancy. I turned on my right blinker to let the car that was not Clancy’s pass. Instead, there were flashing red, white, and blue lights everywhere. I’d never seen a police car with so many lights.

Also in between cruising at 70mph in a 75 and being told that I was going 91mph in a 65, a Sheriff’s Deputy pulled out of the median. Clancy immediately saw him and saw that the speed limit just dropped to 65 and slowed down. The officer, who half-an-hour later told me that he was initially pulling out to give her a ticket for following me too closely, decided that I was the one to go after since I wasn’t slowing down and in a few seconds I was about to start going downhill.

I cannot say with any certainty how fast I was going when he pulled me over. It’s entirely possible that I was, in fact, going 91 miles an hour. I can say, however, that the entire 1,180 miles I had driven to that point I had a tremendous amout of difficulty getting my car to stay about 75mph. Even going downhill I could rarely go about 82 or 83. This is me with my foot pounding the accelerator to the floor.

So the odds that I was going above 80 (and therefore speeding) were relatively high. If my car could, under any circumstances, go 91mph, it did not let me in on this little secret. Of course, I didn’t specifically ask it to go 91mph, but I did ask it to go 80-85 on various occasions and was almost always denied and was even denied the opportunity to go 75 more than a few times.

That is almost all I will say about how fast I was actually going. I will state unequivocably, however, that Clancy was not following me too closely at any point in our drive. She’s very cautious about such things.

Back to the number 91. Actually, 91 isn’t so important as is 26. I was allegedly going 26mph over the speed limit. In many states, Real-life Wyoming included, this creates what can be termed (if we choose to censor the term) a Spitstorm Ticket, which means that you were not only speeding, but you were actively a danger to other drivers. I should point out that there were not many on a rural Real-life Wyoming freeway at two in the morning. The officer did dutily inform me that there could be some deer around for me to potentially hit in lieu of cars.

So apparently the law in Real-life Wyoming as it pertains to drivers allegedly going in excess of 25mph of the speed limit is that you have to appear in court. This would mean that I would need to fly back to Real-life Wyoming and go before a judge who could fine me in excess of $500 and even throw me in jail for 20 days for this alleged, atrocious danger I posed to deer at three in the morning on a rural freeway in Real-life Wyoming.

But wait! Says the officer. Here’s what I am going to do for you! I will put you down as being able to forfeit a bond rather than have to appear. He should not do this, he explains, but he wants to do me a favor seeing as how I am moving cross country and am such a nice person. Bond would be a mere $230 and would not require my return to Real-life Wyoming.

It’s an interesting turn of events wherein I am pulled over for going a speed that I was hereforto unaware my car was even capable of going that turns out to be one mile-per-hour over the spitstorm threshold that creates such potential for a world of trouble that paying a $230 seems like a great deal and raising a fuss could more than double my fine and, if the judge were feeling particularly cantankorous, land me in jail for a spell.

Fortunately, no deer were hurt in the fodder provided for this post.

My friends thought it was the coolest thing when Mountain Dew went to widemouth cans. I thought it was a sham. The only advantage was that you drank it faster, which was an advantage to them because you’d need to buy another but of no great example to you. If drinking it quicker was a priority, there really was no reason not to just pour it into a glass and drink it that way. Or buy a bottle. But I, for one, appreciated that the cans had limited my intake. That’s one of the reasons that when drinking something with ice, I never use a straw. The ice slows me down. That’s a good thing.

Alas, my view was the minority and before long almost all the cans to almost all the soft drinks were widemouth. It became a moot point, though, because 20oz bottles replaced 16oz cans as the standard anyhow.

In recent months I’ve been looking into getting a new laptop because my current one has about had it. Unfortunately, the ThinkPads have gone entirely to widescreen monitors. Right now getting desktop monitors with good ole 4:3 dimensions isn’t a problem, but I may need to bump up my purchase of an LCD monitor if I don’t want to be forced into getting a widescreen there, too.

This is one of those cases where I simply don’t understand the need for a new standard. I feel the same way about the transition to 16:9 for television, but at least that I can understand because it solves the problem of 16:9 movies and 3:2 TV. Since movies are largely about the visual experience, there are less things that need to be taken into consideration when changing a standard. I still think that 3:2 is superior, but the need for uniformity trumps my minority preference.

When it comes to computers, though, there ought to be more things to consider. First, there is no reason that monitors absolutely have to be standard. Computers by nature are more flexible than TV. People already have different resolutions and even different numbers of monitors on their desktop. Different resolutions isn’t a stretch.

The bigger thing, though, is that I just don’t see why widescreen is at all superior. My friend Kyle points out that they’re bigger. So? Is there any reason that 4:3 can’t be made bigger? Coworkers pointed out that it’s better for watching movies or playing games. Yeah, well, that’s not what my computer is for and my 4:3 computer did that just fine.

For the things that I and most people actually use our computers for, horizontally rectangular display is not particularly advantagous. In fact, if anything it would go in the other direction. In word processors we deal with documents that are usually on portrait paper. When surfing the web it’s easier to read down than it is side-to-side (which is why newspapers columnize their articles). With spreadsheets it’s a wash because some spread downward and others outward, but that just makes even dimensions more preferable to horizontal or vertical.

The only caveat on all of this is that I have not used Microsoft Vista. Is Vista’s interface set up so that widescreen is particular advantageous? That’s about the only thing that I can think of that doesn’t involve computer users being a bunch of idiotic sheep or a group more interested in watching movies on their PC than actually doing work on it.

I wonder if five years down the line a couple years after the 4:3 monitor has been all but retired if people won’t take a step back and realize that the old monitors were better and then turn around and pay a pretty penny for the crap they are now spending money to replace.

Buddhism sees its role fading in Japan (Christian Science Monitor)

When it comes to funerals, though, the Japanese have traditionally been inflexibly Buddhist - so much so that Buddhism in Japan is often called “funeral Buddhism,” a reference to the religion’s former near-monopoly on the elaborate, and lucrative, ceremonies surrounding deaths and memorial services.

But that expression also describes a religion that, by appearing to cater more to the needs of the dead than to those of the living, is losing its standing in Japanese society.

“That’s the image of funeral Buddhism: that it doesn’t meet people’s spiritual needs,” said Ryoko Mori, the chief priest at the 700-year-old Zuikoji Temple here in northern Japan. “In Islam or Christianity, they hold sermons on spiritual matters. But in Japan nowadays, very few Buddhist priests do that.”

Not much to add here, other than that I found the article interesting:

En route to Cascadia, we realized that we were going to have to stop in Cimarron to get some food and refill our gas tanks. Clancy wanted to go to Flingers, a chain restaurant, but the first couple towns we looked in didn’t have one. We were about 50 miles from the next large town, which we were pretty sure would have one, so we soldiered on until I realized that my gas gauge was hovering on the wrong side of Empty. Fortunately, a little strip of gas stations and whatnot presented itself and we pulled over.

So we refilled my gas tank and then discussed whether we wanted to stop again 50 miles down the road or just grab a bite to eat in that strip. The convenience store we were at sold pizza slices and whatnot. I saw that there was a truck stop diner next door and went over to investigate if they might have more selection. Their whiteboards mentioned various sorts of BBQ being the specials of the day, but the guy working there handed me a menu which was six pages long and had all sorts of things that Clancy might enjoy. So we decided to do that instead.

Unfortunately, in my little scouting adventure I neglected to notice that the restaurant allowed smoking and so the whole place smelled like smoke. We’ll call that Item #1.

The next thing that happened was that we ordered water to drink. She came out with two relatively small glasses. She said that she would get some more water in a pitcher for us. When it eventually came out, she only filled the pitcher 1/2 the way up. Item #2.

So we ordered. I ordered the enchiladas. Oh, wait, they didn’t have the ingredients for the Mexican food menu that day. Okay, then, I ordered chicken-fried steak… strike two. I was almost begged to ask what actually was available, but I figured that they would naturally have hamburgers. And they did!

“Would you like everything on the hamburger?”

“No tomatoes.”

“Oh, well we don’t have tomatoes anyway. What kind of fries would you like?”

{Look at menu, see options for regular or curly} “I’ll take curly”

“We don’t have any curly fries.”

“Okay, regular then.”

“We can put the seasoning on regular fries.”

I agreed and it was Clancy’s turn to order. She ordered the grilled chicken and lo and behold they had it.

“What side did you want with that?”

“Mashed potatoes.”

“We don’t have mashed potatoes.” {for brevity I will just skip to the part where she pretty much had to get the same seasoned straight-fries that I got. And she got a salad.} Item #3.

She was going out to the car to get something when her salad came. If you can call it a salad. It was half-brown and was about as appetizing as… well as something less appetizing than a salad. I was getting hungry, so I decided to munch on her crackers, which were six months past being too stale to eat. Clancy ate half a cracker and one bite of her salad and put it off to the side never to touch it again. Item #4.

Our main courses came out. Clancy’s grilled chicken was strongly reminiscent of Subway’s roasted chicken except not as fresh and flavorful. She dumped enough salt on it to get it down, though. Item #5.

My burger actually wasn’t that bad on the merits. It was kind of small, though I have to point out that the lettuce at least simulated freshness in ways that her salad did not. No brown, no anything. The meat and cheese were acceptable. The fries were actually kind of sort of tasty.

The problem was that by the time I got my food I had been in the place too long. You know how some restaurants allegedly spray an aroma to make you think you’re hungry? This place did the opposite. It was its own appetite suppressant. The overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke and fried. The flies that were everywhere. The half-brown salad that was still sitting on the edge of our table. The taste of stale crackers lingering in my mouth. I was starving when we got into the restaurant but by the time my burger came out eating was the last thing that I wanted to do. Item #6.

For dinner we got to eat at Flingers at the largish town of Colorado Falls. She ordered the exact same plate there that she had ordered (or tried to order) at the truck stop diner earlier in the day. Everything in the Flingers in Colorado Falls tasted exactly like the Flingers in Colosse, Mocum, and Almeida-Santomas. And it was beautiful.