Who Wants to...Go to Jail?

It's probably no surprise that I'm no fan of reality TV--I really hoped that the whole Borat lawsuit hurricane would put an end to the industry altogether. But every once in a while I run across something that surprises even me. This time, it's a proposed reality show modeled on the old "Dating Game"...but with a twist. The winner just might get to marry a U.S. citizen and gain citizenship!

Thinking that doesn't quite sound legal? I agree completely: Who Wants to Commit a Crime?

US Energy / NICOR Gas Scam - What They Really Want (and Why NICOR Won't Help You)

Late Sunday afternoon, a man in a US Energy jacket and a NICOR cap came to my door. He introduced himself as being from US Energy, but had a conspicuous NICOR label on his clipboard. He asked to see a copy of my gas bill.

I couldn't think why he would need that.

He explained that NICOR had sent him, because the company was planning a rate hike, but that if I "qualified" they wouldn't be able to raise my rates, and he needed to see my gas bill to determine whether or not I qualified. US Energy, he said, actually supplied the gas; NICOR just supplied the lines. "A lot of people don't know that," he said, and launched into an explanation of the utility's structure. I didn't care all that much and I'm not at all sure that it was accurate, but it sounded very official.

I learned early in my career that letting people know I was on to them was a bad way to gather information, so I asked as innocently as possible, "Doesn't NICOR have that information?" Well, yes, he conceded that they did, but it was up to US Energy to find out whether or not I was qualified to avoid that rate hike.

I couldn't help myself. I asked why they didn't get the information from NICOR.

He said it was because I was the one who had the paper copy of my bill. So, yeah, of course, that made perfect sense. Who would want to get a database import file with sortable information all in one place when they could go door to door on a cold Sunday afternoon, wait on the porch while people hunted up their gas bills, and then check one paper bill after another?

He flipped convincingly through the pages on his clipboard, creating more confusion. See, he'd told me more than once that he just needed to LOOK at my bill, yet someone's gas bills were attached to his clipboard. And he wasn't carrying a copy machine. I guess the gas bills he carried were meant to show me that other people were handing theirs over, but instead it showed me that he was carrying props...if his story were accurate, those gas bills would have been returned to their rightful owners by now.

I told him (truthfully) that I paid my gas bill online and I didn't have a paper copy of my bill. He asked if maybe I could print one out. (So much for that whole "because you're the one who has the paper bill" thing, hm?)

He said he'd come back.

Monday morning, I called NICOR. The customer service rep at NICOR confirmed that NICOR hadn't sent him, and asked whether I'd signed up with US Energy. Apparently, this is the company's standard approach to getting people to switch their service. As soon as I said I hadn't, though, NICOR lost interest. When I pointed out that these people were going around defrauding people in their name, NICOR said there was nothing they could do about it.

"It's fraud," I said. "It's illegal."

"Well, then," she told me, "you'd have to call the Citizen's Utility Board or the Better Business Bureau or someone like that. We have to remain neutral."

They have to remain neutral.

US Energy, certainly, is dirty. The man on my porch told me at least two direct lies in an effort to divert my business, and the extensive misleading props he carried and wore (along with his repetition of the same information in different words in response to my questions) made it clear that it wasn't just a spur of the moment departure or a case of accidental misspeaking. It's clearly a dishonest business practice and very probably a crime.

But who are the good guys? Why does NICOR "have to remain neutral" when it knows that an outside company is using its name to defraud NICOR customers? It seems to me quite the opposite, actually. I haven't had the chance to research it yet, but it seems to me that if NICOR knows that someone is holding himself (or themselves) out as representing NICOR in order to perpetrate fraud and chooses not to act on that, it's a ratification that just might mean NICOR is just as liable to its defrauded consumers as US Energy.

Definitely bears further investigation.

Blogs that Appall Me # 1

I've been debating for a while about whether or not to write about blog like this. On the one hand, I didn't want to give them any "press" or inbound links that might help boost search rankings or traffic. I didn't want to facilitate getting like-minded people together to do evil. And most of the time I'm pretty negative on negativity.

But sometimes you just have to shine a bright light on something and encourage the world to take a closer look in hopes that most people will recoil in horror and give an extra moment's thought to the little things that we let slide by every day, dismissing them as mildly unpleasant or letting them roll off altogether or--worst of all--finding humor in them.

Of course, this happens everywhere in life, including the blogosphere. But some blogs are more shocking than others, just like some of the things people say to one another in person are more shocking than others. For the past few months, my # 1 spot for poor taste and lack of humanity has been reserved for a blog astonishingly named "Counterfeit Humans - How to Maintain Sanity over Everyday Stupidity".

The premise seems to be that the blog's author was gifted (without having done a thing to deserve it) with an above-average intelligence, and that since she already has that little bit of good fortune up on the rest of the world, the general population should get right to work making her already easier-than-average life even easier by having the common courtesy to realize that they're just in the way in her world and, if they aren't gifted with her native intelligence, they don't have the right to participate in everyday activities where they might slow her down.

Oh, wait...did I say "people"? Apparently I misspoke just a little, since (as the blog's title makes evident", Keli doesn't believe that these lesser beings are actually human at all. She doesn't even call them people; she calls them "stupers". Yep, that's right--a term she defines again and again as shorthand for "woefully stupid persons". The whole blog is about stupidity, and the enormous strain of being a superior being forced to deal with "stupers" everywhere she turns. We have stupidity at the holidays, stupidity at the hospital, stupidity field notes, stupidity of relatives, stupidity "behind the counter"...but nary a word about the stupidity of taking the gifts you're given so for granted that you come to believe you've earned them and achieved some sort of moral superiority through your good fortune.

When Brilliant Men Have Dumb Ideas

It was bound to happen someday.

It appears that the guys at Google had a very bad idea.

They were on a streak, what with revolutionizing web search and coming up with that friendly and easily identifiable little logo and becoming so popular that they had to fight to try to keep their trademarked name from becoming a standard-English verb and all that. They did pretty well for themselves making billions of dollars and buying up major players in closely related industries. Their "foothold" in web search became a stairway and then an escalator, and now few people even know the names of the early search engines and Yahoo! threw up its hands last year and said, "Maybe we should do something else."

But for some reason, these guys who understand technology and algorithms and the value of a good, free lunch onsite and the need to encourage employee creativity have missed the boat on Blogger comments. In fact, I don't think they even know where the shore is.

I can think of a lot of possible reasons that the outbound linking process from comments on Blogger blogs has changed (without notice), but they're all guesses.

• It MIGHT be because Google, which uses backlinks as part of its algorithm for determining the value of a page, doesn't want to allow people the ability to create their own backlinks by commenting on blogs--even when the blogger has deleted the default "no follow" tag in the comment section.
• It MIGHT be to prevent non-Google-registered commenters from leaving URLs; this would encourage everyone to sign up for a Google account whether they needed on or not--a solution that won't be of much help to bloggers with multiple blogs, anyway.
  

I'm sure there are other possibilities. And I'm UNsure about whether or not there's any basis in reality for either of these two speculative explanations.

I am sure of one thing, though. Someone has radically underestimated the importance of this functionality to bloggers and to those who leave comments on blogs. It's possible that the hope is that everyone will quickly sign up for a Google account so that they can leave comments with links in them, but it seems more likely that people will quickly move their blogs to other platforms where this issue doesn't exist...and that those who don't will see diminished traffic and a decline in comments.

They've also either overlooked or dismissed the fact that Blogger bloggers who do get visits from comments on other blogs will no longer be able to identify where they're coming from. Since they'll all be routed through the Blogger profile, all stats will show is a lot of referrals from the profile, not the actual source of the traffic.

I hope it doesn't turn out that we all have to abandon Blogger; I hope it mostly for selfish reasons, because I like Blogger a lot from a user perspective and would prefer not to move. But I'm not optimistic.

Of course, from what I've been hearing recently about disappearing blogs and comments, it may just be that after this post, I WILL find myself shopping for a new host...so watch this space. If I'm moving VOLUNTARILY, I'll let you know in advance.

The Biggest Obstacle to Electing the Right President

Like many members of the Skilled Political Debate Group at Blog Catalog, I'm marking the one-year countdown to the election with some thoughts on what's going to make it tough to elect the right President in 2008.


The biggest obstacle to electing the right President is the marketing culture in which we live. It's a culture in which sound bites are powerful and anything we really want people to hear must be reduced to a few-second clip. It's a culture in which the written word has to be formatted in bullet points and short, bold-headed paragraphs if it's to be read. It's a culture in which newspapers are careful to work the key points into the first paragraph of an article because they know that the vast majority of their "readers" never turn to page eight to continue the story. And it's a culture in which most newspapers and consumer publications work to keep their articles at a 7th-9th grade reading level.

On what, then, do voters base their decisions? Note that I did not say, "On what, then, are voters to base their decisions?". The answers to the latter question are myriad and crystal clear. One good piece of information would be a candidate's voting record as a Senator or Congressman--but not the checklist many interest groups or neutral voting organizations put out. That's not enough information, not because the information can't be trusted but because it's meaningless standing alone. Knowing that a Congressman voted "for the bankruptcy bill" or that a Senator "opposed a bill that would have brought our troops home from Iraq" is meaningless unless you know what the bill contained, what its impact would have been or has been, and what information was available at the time the official made his decision. The significance of those votes would also be clearer if you knew whether or not they were consistent with the candidate's previous positions, and if not, what accounted for the change.

And, of course, as our tolerance for dense text and long explanations diminishes, our world is growing more complex. At the very moment we most need to focus deeply, to understand the details, to analyze the connections and to think beyond the sound bite, our time and our patience have all but disappeared. The vast majority of us simply don't have enough information to cast a reasonable vote.

There's a lot of talk every election year about how terrible it is that voter turnout is so low. I'll agree that it's a shame that more potential voters don't participate in the political process, but I don't think that's all about voting. In fact, I think too many people are voting. People who are voting based on ten-second sound bites and whether or not someone "looks Presidential" should either be educating themselves about the issues and the candidates or staying home from the polls. And those aren't the worst votes cast by any stretch of the imagination--they pale in comparison to the voters in the 1986 Illinois primary who made Janice Hart and Mark
Fairchild the Democratic candidates for Attorney General and Lieutenant Governor on the strength of their NAMES. After the election, many voters admitted that they'd had no idea who the candidates were. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about why voters who (by their own admission) knew nothing about the candidates chose Janice Hart over the party-supported Aurelia Pucinski. Because the candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor run on a single-vote ticket like the President and Vice President, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Adlai Stevenson III left the party's ticket and ran as a Solidarity candidate, losing the election by the widest margin in Illinois history.

Just a little rule of thumb: If you've never heard of a candidate, YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T VOTE FOR HIM.

We hear a lot of sound bites about how voting is a right, or a privilege or a responsibility--but just like the politicians' sound bites leave out all of the unpleasant or complicated or conflicting details, the voting sound bites leave out a critical fact: the right (or responsibility) to vote carries with it a responsibility to make educated decisions. A vote that's a guess is worse than no vote at all.

Here are a few of the other posts on this topic so far.

http://capitalels.blogspot.com/2007/11/its-not-ron-paul-and-its-not-hillary.html

http://blog.techfun.org/political-gossip-clouds-the-issues


If you'd like to participate, simply create your own blog post with the title "The Biggest Obstacle to Electing the Right President" and:

-email the link to either libdrone at gmail dot com or TLSanders at gmail dot com
-post the link in the political debate group at the link at the top of this page
-leave your link in a comment to this post

The Most Successful Lies of All Time - # 1

That's not # 1 as in "this is the absolute most successful lie ever". It's # 1 in the Most Successful Lies series. This series has the unfortunate potential to run indefinitely, so I've decided against ranking.

The successful lie I want to talk about today involves the infamous McDonald's coffee case. You probably remember it, even if you weren't born or weren't old enough to understand what was going on when it happened. And if you DO remember it (or heard about it later), you're probably rolling your eyes about now and remembering how some lady CLEANED UP when a jury awarded her millions of dollars 'cause she spilled her coffee in her lap while she was driving and it was--surprise, surprise--hot.

Please understand that I speak with the highest degree of professionalism, both as a writer and as an attorney, when I say: NUH UH!

Didn't happen like that.

What do I mean? A lot of things, and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail because I've already listed the most critical points here: That McDonald's Coffee Thing is Still Bugging Me

Just a few points, though, in passing:

• She didn't get millions of dollars;
• She wasn't driving;
• She had third degree burns over 16% of her body;
• She'd offered to settle for $20,000

If you want to see the really good stuff, you'll have to read that other post, but before we move on to the politics of lying, let me leave you with this question: Can you really put a price tag on skin grafts to your genital area?

That's what I thought.

Now, it's not unusual for mainstream news outlets to get the details wrong when reporting on a court case. There are a lot of technicalities involved, and sometimes the finer points are lost. Sometimes the outcome is reported correctly, but the reporter didn't fully understand the reasoning behind the outcome. Sometimes a word means something entirely different in the courtroom than it means in everyday parlance.

None of that happened in this case. The misinformation about the McDonald's coffee case--misinformation that made such an impression that it's still being mentioned today in support of tort reform and as evidence of our "lawsuit happy" society--was absorbed directly from the misinformation machine that is the insurance lobby. It was perhaps one of that industry's greatest accomplishments that a case in which a woman received fair compensation ($640,000, not millions) for serious injuries (3rd degree burns over 16% of her body, including her genital area) sustained through the fault of a large corporation (McDonald's admitted at trial that it knew that there was a burn risk in serving food at more than 140 degrees, but that it had nonetheless chosen to serve coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees, knowing that liquid at that temperature could not safely be consumed) stands today in the minds of most Americans as a ridiculous abuse of the system.

This Isn't My Post

A few days ago, I read a post on the CapitaL eLs blog asking whether Ron Paul would get "zapped by the WOD third rail". I thought it was a great question, because I think that in today's culture political candidates face a very real problem with tough issues. A complex answer doesn't make a good sound bite, and a thirty-second sound bite pulled from a three minute answer is likely to be misleading and perhaps damaging to the overall cause. So what's a candidate to do?

That's the issue I was expecting the post to confront, and it did--briefly. But the bulk of the post was about the wisdom and ethics of the war on drugs itself, and that seemed out of place to me. If we were going to discuss the possibility that a political candidate in the United States could honestly discuss the real complexities of the issue and perhaps venture to point out--even tentatively--that the war on drugs isn't really working, then the last thing we needed was to allow any distractors in that discussion that might evoke emotional responses just like the ones that made this such a touchy issue for politicians.

At least, that was my take. The author of the original post suggested (fairly, I think), that I'd mentally written an entirely different post by the same name. He said he'd be interested in reading it, and the more I thought about it the more I became convinced that he was right, and that I'd mentally constructed an entire post based on what I THOUGHT a post with his title would say, or should say. So here it is:

Ladies and gentlemen, we've got problems. We've got a monster national debt, a huge percentage of home loans are in foreclosure, our prisons are overflowing, quite a few foreign governments...um...well...hate our guts, we're engaged in a war that most Americans don't support. News flash: No one is going to fix that in four years. If we elect a guy who says he's going to, he's a liar--and we've seen how well that works out. If we elect a guy who tells the truth...oh, but that couldn't happen, could it?

I don't think it could. And here's why. It's very easy to yell, "Be tough on crime!" and that's a concept that people can easily take hold of and nod in agreement--maybe even applaud. That's four words. The truth is that our prisons are overflowing, and building more is a serious economic investment. The truth is that for some classes of crimes, prison does more to increase the rate of recidivism than it does to prevent crime. The truth is that our justice system has been increasingly shown to have convicted, imprisoned and even killed innocent men over the past few decades--and the only reason it goes back only that far is that we don't have the evidence or incentive necessary to look at the rest. I've only just begun...and yet I've far exceeded the amount of time a candidate has to make an effective point. He's tough on crime or he's not. Period. There's no space in an election year to say, "Not all crime is created equal, and neither are all criminals." There's no leeway to ask hard questions like, "Do we spend millions of dollars building new prisons, or do we let people out LONG before the end of their sentences?" TOUGH ON CRIME: Yes or No.

The War on Drugs is definitely one of those issues--complex, multi-faceted, troublesome. There's no easy answer. If a candidate says there is, he is either a liar or a fool. And yet, if a candidate says there isn't, we won't hear the rest of his message and we won't elect him. That seems to limit us to only two possibilities: elect a liar or elect a fool.

Can't Rape the Willin'

That's a phrase I heard a time or two when I was practicing criminal defense law, always from a certain kind of man who thought he was more clever than he really was and tended to have illusions about his desirability to women. I was more than a little surprised to hear the same sort of sentiment voiced by a woman--and a woman judge, at that.

Pennsylvania law defines rape, in relevant part, this way:

A person commits a felony of the first degree when he or she engages in sexual intercourse with a complainant:

1. By forcible compulsion
2. By threat of forcible compulsion that would prevent resistance by a person of reasonable resolution...

In simple terms, by force or threat of force.

Earlier this month, Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Teresa Carr Deni dismissed all sex and assault charges against a man accused of coercing sex from a woman at gunpoint. A few of his friends joined in as well.

At the preliminary hearing, the Judge's job isn't to make determinations of fact, and that's not what Judge Deni did. Rather, she made a determination that even if the woman's account was accurate, the crime the men committed wasn't rape. The reason? The victim was a prostitute. As such, the judge apparently reasoned, the woman had consented to sex. The men's only crime was failing to pay her. In a legal twist worthy of David Lynch, the judge ordered the defendant held on armed robbery charges for theft of services.

Of course, had the defendant PAID for the services, he'd have been committing a crime as well...

Now, it appears (because, of course, there are only a few people who actually know exactly what happened) that the woman did agree to some kind of sexual encounter for a price. But then something happened to change the agreement. The something was that the defendant produced a GUN.

I don't know about you all, but I get a little nervous when I'm in an abandoned building with someone and he produces a gun. Well, I've actually never experienced that precise scenario, but I feel pretty confident in assuming that it would leave me feeling less than amorous. It might even leave me feeling like I needed to get the heck out of there, and whatever business deal we might previously have negotiated was OFF.

The judge's reasoning was that the woman had consented and not gotten paid. That, in her book, looked like robbery. There's an odd kind of logic to it, until you stop and think about the limits of consent. Because what this judge has effectively ruled is that consent, once given, CANNOT BE WITHDRAWN.

Sit up and take notice, moms and dads of high school and college girls, because the legal ruling here wasn't based--at least, not on paper--on the fact that this woman was a prostitute. It was based on the fact that she'd consented. And, it seems, that consent was indelible in the judge's mind. She'd made her bargain. She wasn't allowed to get cold feet. She wasn't allowed to rethink what she was doing. She wasn't allowed to withdraw her consent--not even when the gentleman in question pointed a gun at her.

That's not a precedent I want young women in this country to have to live with...no matter how they make their livings.

Birth Control for Middle Schoolers? I Think We're Missing the Point

There's been a lot of buzz over the past few days about a middle school in Maine that plans to make birth control available to 11-14 year old students without parental consent or notification. Newspapers and blogs and discussion groups across the country and beyond are debating whether or not middle-schoolers should have access to birth control. The recurrent arguments between the "they're going to do it anyway" crowd and the "giving them birth control only encourages them" crowd are in full swing...and absolutely everybody seems to have missed the point.

My daughter is in the sixth grade. Her middle school can't give her a dose of Motrin when she has a headache unless I run up to the school and not only sign a consent, but provide the medication. They can't let her use her prescribed inhaler with her name and her doctor's name printed on the label unless BOTH her doctor and I sign authorizations. And as much of a hassle as those things sometimes seem like, there's a good reason for all of those checks.

What if, for instance, my daughter was allergic to Motrin? At what age should she be expected to know and take responsibility for that, and to learn all of its alternative forms and names and related drugs, so that she would recognize that she couldn't take Ibuprofin if she'd had an allergic reaction to Motrin? It's my job, at least at this stage of the game, to know those things. It's my job to look out for side effects and allergic reactions, too, and to make sure that prescribing doctors and pharmacists are aware of anything else she might be taking so that we're not mixing drugs that shouldn't be mixed.

If we have to take all of that into account in order to ensure that it's safe to give a kid Tylenol, how do the politics of adolescent sex suddenly make it safe to prescribe them hormone-altering drugs with multiple known side-effects without parental knowledge? What if we have a family history of blood clots or stroke or any of the many things that make hormonal birth control dangerous? Is the average 7th grader conversant enough in that information to provide the prescribing doctor with adequate information? And what if she begins to have symptoms and side effects? Is she ready to be wholly responsible for making her own judgment about when medical follow-up is required? She'd better be, because if there's no parental notification and she chooses not to tell her parents, then no one is going to be keeping an eye on her for those warning signs. If she complains about cramps in her legs, no adult will be able to make the connection and tell her she'd better get in touch with the doctor.

If she's having more headaches than usual...well, then what? Because if a child suddenly starts having serious headaches on a regular basis, you take her to the doctor, right? But what happens when you get there? You're asked...the parent, not the child...to complete a list of current medications. You do it, unwittingly leaving off the most important piece of information. Does the child speak up? We can hope, but she might not understand that there's a probable connection, and if she's gone this far to obtain the prescription and use it without letting you know, odds seem to be against her cheerfully adding it to the medications list in the doctor's office.

And the debate rages on--should adolescents have access to birth control? Are they really having sex at that age? Will they be more likely to have sex if we give them birth control? Isn't birth control at 12 better than pregnancy at 12? Aren't we sending the wrong message if we give them birth control? The soundbites fly, and the real issue never rises to the surface. Like every other parent in America, I have concerns and opinions about all of those issues. But none of them have the first thing to do with this issue.

11-year-old children need their parents involved in their medical care. Period. We need to check their temperatures and give them Ibuprofin when they need it, talk with their doctors, understand how their prescription drugs interact, make sure they drink enough fluids when they have the flu...and we sure as hell need to know when they're taking hormone-altering drugs that can have serious short and long-term side-effects.

Race? What Race? Everybody Looks the Same to Me...

A recent discussion thread on Blog Catalog asked the question "Do you care about racism?" The answer to that one was easy, but the next question gave me pause: Do you think about it on a daily basis?

I don't. Answering the question was easy; determining whether or not my answer was the right one was a little more complex.

Racism is beyond me. Maybe that's not a good thing for a grown-up of above average intelligence with a degree in political science and a law degree to admit, but I just can't get my mind around it. So much so that I tend to forget about it except when I'm confronted with it, and when I am, my first reaction is disbelief.

When my daughter, who was born in 1996, first heard about Martin Luther King, Jr., she had a lot of questions. I tried, in six-year-old terms, to explain what he'd done. I lost her fast, though. I mentioned that black people were once prohibited from eating in restaurants with white people and she laughed out loud. She was so struck by the absurdity of it that she started making up what she thought were similar laws: People who wear yellow can't drive cars! People with brown hair can't go to the gas station!

In one sense, I was purely delighted to have raised a child who couldn't comprehend that anyone would ever have distinguished people based on race. As far as I could see, she had it exactly right--the color of a person's skin is exactly as relevant to his suitability to enter a restaurant as the color of a person's shirt is to his ability to drive. In another, I was nagged by that cautionary line about those who forget history being doomed to repeat it. That was five years ago, and I'm no closer to the right answer.

How do we ignore race without ignoring racism? The world is full of good people who work hard to eradicate racism, and they've accomplished some amazing things--but they've also kept the issue of race in the public eye, made it something that we can't forget about. And that's a conundrum, because while we can't forget about racism, we should absolutely forget about race. Or at least, that's my view--maybe those who actively fight racism every day would disagree.
It just seems to me that making decisions based on race is most likely to end when people don't even register race unless there's some reason for it.

A few years back, I worked a table at an event on a college campus for my former employer. The event took place in the field house, and it was packed--there were probably 700-800 people in the building. At some point, the man working the table with me said to me, "I think you're the only white person in this room." A quick scan of the crowd indicated that he was probably right, but I'd been there for about three hours and I hadn't noticed. Unless I'm missing something, that's where we should all be headed. I wasn't making a political statement. It wasn't just that I didn't care about the racial breakdown of the room. I'd simply looked at each person I'd encountered as an individual person and not even registered that I was the only causasian among 7 or 8 hundred blacks and latinos--any more than I might have registered that I was the only person with a brown clip in my hair or the only one wearing a sweatshirt.

So what is that? It seems to me that when we live in a world where everyone is as oblivious to race as I was that day--as I think I am every day--then we'll live in a world that is automatically without racism. Am I ignoring racism, or have I risen above it? Or do they amount to the same thing in practical effect?

Reruns and Superglue

I'll warn you right up front--this is a re-run. Or "rerun", I guess, since Oxford apparently eliminated hyphens within words this month. It's five years old, though, so I doubt that many (any?) readers of this blog have seen it before.

I'm sure we'll all be glad when I'm done sorting through these old files...

Why doesn’t anyone ever superglue his fingers together anymore?

In the seventies, supergluing your fingers together was a story more common than the poodle in the microwave or the terrorist telling the gas station clerk to avoid a certain location on a certain date—but it wasn’t an urban legend. Oh, sure, some superglue legends have sprung up in recent years: the hapless victim unwittingly glued to the toilet seat, the creative revenge against a cheating spouse…but it was different in the seventies. Nearly everyone actually knew someone to whom this had actually happened. In fact, nearly everyone WAS someone to whom this had actually happened.

Superglue, of course, was modern technology in those days. We’d never seen anything like it. In an amazing television commercial, a construction worker dangled from a beam, supported entirely by a hardhat secured to the beam with superglue. We couldn’t believe it.

We couldn’t use it, either.

Personally, I glued my seventy-seven year old grandmother’s fingers together in an effort to glue plastic garbage bags (perhaps the one material on earth to which superglue does not adhere) together to create a home-made Slip-n-Slide. We were able, with a little nail polish remover, to separate her fingers before my mother came home, but a telltale crustiness remained ever after she’d bathed. She agreed not to tell my mother, but I was petrified. Everyone knew that superglue stayed FOREVER. I looked doubtfully at her fingers and contemplated the weighty possibility that I’d ruined my grandmother.

My husband laughed at me when I told him this story. It was easy for him to laugh. He’d never superglued an elderly relative to anything. The nearest he’d come was supergluing himself to a garden hose while trying to repair a cut he didn’t want his parents to find that he’d made.

The stories are endless. I’ll spare you the one from my college days where I tried to repair a broken fingernail with superglue while drinking and ended up getting glue on the rim of my beer can.

“Why,” I asked my husband, “don’t people ever superglue themselves to thing anymore?”

“We’ve learned,” he suggested, and then my six-year-old daughter interjected, “and the ones who are too young to learn hear their parents telling these embarrassing stories…”

It was a good theory, but I didn’t buy it. Everyone knew, back in the day, how dangerous superglue was. The warnings on the package were nothing compared to the ones whispered by people who’d glued themselves to their model airplanes and telephones, or set forth sternly by parents who didn’t think that even teenagers should be using superglue without supervision. It was serious stuff. We knew it. We revered it and feared it, and then we put our fingers into it and stuck.

The Power of...Anonymous Ranting?

I'll be honest. When I first saw the comment from "thechosenone" on my post about rape trials, I was inclined to ignore it. It didn't seem to warrant a response for a lot of reasons. For instance, having worked for years in and with domestic violence prevention programs, I've encountered more than my share of men who hate women but are powerless to do anything about it beyond the occasional burst of ugly language or show of physical violence. They were, as a class, a weak and ineffectual bunch, but even in that company, the Rev in his silly Dr. Seuss mask with his vague plans to finish college at some point seemed pretty irrelevant.

And then, too, there was the fact that no one seemed to be all that interested in his little rant. He posted a cute little attention-begging "I just couldn't resist" on his MySpace blog, and in the week since an overwhelming...um...ONE visitor clicked through. If even his friends weren't all that interested in what he had to say, it seemed to confirm the idea that I shouldn't be, either.

Finally, but perhaps most important to me, his little rant was very poorly spelled.

Still, he'd randomly appeared out of nowhere to call me (and one of my friends, for good measure) a name I haven't been called since some drunken frat boy took issue with my desire to remain fully clothed more than 20 years ago, and then was so proud of himself that he had to post a link to his clever comment. That seemed odd behavior even for a 21-year-old guy in Indiana. More importantly, the issue of anonymous comments and how they affect discussion has been cropping up all around me lately.

Usually, it seems to me, when people use the veil of anonymity as a means of ranting without risk, they show themselves to be fools. That only makes sense, if you think about it. Although there are occasionally valid reasons for anonymity, for the most part what it means is that the writer doesn't want to be associated with his own comment. In short, even HE knows he sounds like an ass. Unable to provide support for his position, he resorts instead to rough language and misplaced gloating.

In the case of my little visitor, he's made his MySpace page private--now that the horse is long gone. Maybe he's worried about anonymous comments. he shouldn't be concerned, though. He should know that anonymous rants only make their authors look the fool, and that if someone DID have the poor taste to drop by his blog and curse and carry on at him, it would only make his position look more cogent by comparison.

The whole experience has clarified my position on anonymous comments. I've always thought opting for anonymity said something about the commenter's credibility, but I don't think I'd fully considered how anonymous negative comments can bolster a writer's credibility. The more vile, incoherent, rude, juvenile (and misspelled) a rebuttal is, the clearer and more level-headed the original statement appears. So I guess I owe the man from Crown Point a thank you...not only did he shed some revealing light on the very mentality the original post addressed, but he gave a little boost to my Technorati authority. So sorry I can't return the favor.

A Word about Buying on Ebay

I have a book that I periodically offer for sale on ebay. It's a collector's limited edition book about Rick Springfield, and when the one and only print run ('cause it's a limited edition) took place, a number of books came out with scratches on the cover. Rick Springfield fans aren't the type who want their pictures imperfect, and no one who is paying for a limited edition wants to deal with scratches, so these scratched books were pulled from the initial sale.

The books originally retailed for $21.95 without scratches, but I've gotten upwards of $50 for the scratched books on ebay. One of them even appeared in the Marketwatch column in discoveries magazine a few years back.

On the surface, that might seem to make sense--it was a collector's edition and the sale is long over, so if someone wants the book, she has to be prepared to bid for it, right?

Well, sort of.

But here are a few things that bother me:

-I have a few unscratched, mint-condition books left, too, and every once in a while I offer one of those on ebay. I find that they don't command any higher a price than the damaged books.

-I often start the auctions with a buy-it-now price of $12 and stagger the listing dates so that when one book has been bid up to $15 or $20, I offer another one with a buy-it-now price of $12--but people will continue to bid up the higher-priced book rather than grabbing the $12 price.

-Worse, this happened even when the unscratched books were still available for sale on my website. People who could have purchased a new, unscratched book directly for $21.95 plus shipping were bidding nearly twice that much on ebay for a slightly damaged copy.

-People start the bidding war days before the auction ends, so that when it comes time for the inevitable last-minute escalation, they're starting from a much higher price than they would have been if they'd held off bidding until near the end.

I make an effort to keep an eye on these auctions and end them early if the prices get out of control. Judging from the reaction I've gotten whenever I've mentioned that, it isn't standard practice to end an auction early because your item is getting bid up too high. I guess that makes sense from a seller perspective, but it leaves me wondering how much too much the average person is paying on ebay, and what other options are being overlooked.

Just a few tips:

-Before you bid on something on ebay, find out how much it would cost to buy that same item from a store or the manufacturer (if, of course, it's something still available)

-Don't start bidding days before an auction ends just because other people have. You can't help yourself at that stage; you can only drive the price up.

-When you want to bid on an item, look at the seller's other items (there's a link right on the item listing page) and then do a search for the item itself and find out whether there's a buy-it-now price available that's lower than the current price on the item you're bidding on.

-Decide how much you're willing to pay for an item in advance, and stick to it--it's very easy to get caught up in the final minutes of bidding and go higher than you're really willing to pay. I've seen some of my items double in price in the last few minutes of the auction.

In the spirit of my last post...

I stop some mornings in the coffee shop at the train station--not the big coffee shop at the downtown train station where people sit and drink coffee and eat, but the little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop at the other end of the line, where one person hustles to play cashier to a long line of people with the same train to catch and keep a fresh supply of doughnuts on the counter at the same time.

Most days, that one person is Kitty, and she not only knows most of her customers by name, she remembers their children, their medical problems, their upcoming vacations, and a hundred other little things.

If you've been here before, you probably know that I'm not exactly a warm and fuzzy kind of girl, and so you may be wondering why I'm telling you this.

It's because IT MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE. I can tell you that from personal experience, from mornings racing in to the train station and missing the train I was chasing, having run like crazy only to find myself waiting 20 minutes for the next train, rain pouring down, two-block walk from the parking lot, and all the while the health issues I've been fighting for more than a year bubbling under the surface, lacing my rushing and frustration with pounding heart and throbbing temples. On those mornings, I walk in convinced that the day has gone to hell already, that there's no turning it around and it's going to be a long one, and I inevitably walk out of the coffee shop laughing, thankful that I missed the damned train because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have had time for that three minute conversation that turned my mood around.

It's not just me, either. I watch the lines move, the high school students digging for their change while she smiles and talks, heedless of the work piling up for her, the slightly disabled man who needs a lot of help to choose a doughnut and a lot of reassurance that he's chosen the right one--everybody gets the same attention, from the high-powered, self-important businessman to the painfully thin old woman who seems to live at the train station. And virtually everyone reacts to it. It's truly amazing the difference a brief kind word and some personal recognition can make in a person's day, whoever that person might be.

Think about it, the next time you have to make a split-second choice between saying good morning to the doorman and hustling by with your head down, the next time you hesitate for a moment over whether to as the neighbor's son how his baseball game went last night. Thirty seconds invested in someone you barely know might make a difference that carries far beyond your imagination.

Oh, the Irony....

Today's complaint about the world around us addresses...complaints about the world around us.

Does it seem ironic to you that I'm complaining about the complainers on a blog that exists specifically as a forum for posts like It's Just Too Damned Easy to Get Married in this Country, Rape Trials and Other Horrific Abominations, and the ever-popular Corporate America Doesn't Care if You Die? If so, you're in good company. If, that is, you consider me good company.

The thing is, I've lately found myself troubled by the themes running through a lot of conversations and online discussions. I was first bothered by a Catholic discussion group where I began to notice that there wasn't much talk about Catholicism at all, but instead a lot of talk about the dangers and/or evils of evangelicals. And then I happened across a couple of threads in another discussion forum--one about as different from the first as you could imagine in terms of both participants and subject matter--that were all about "why do people insist one...?" and "doesn't it bug you when...?"

And suddenly, it bugged me when people sat around and talked about what everyone else could be doing better. I don't usually wax religious on this blog--I have a Catholic blog for that--but I have a little verse about removing the plank in your own eye bouncing around in my head right now.

Am I talking about this in the wrong place? Well, maybe. But the thing is, it's not just about how we all have our flaws and none of us are in a position to judge. It's not just about how critiquing other people is in itself an activity worth of criticism. It's the futility of it all. In every moment, we can sit and bitch or we can act. And sure, there's a lot to complain about in the world, but every moment that we're sitting around complaining and commiserating and wondering why other people always (fill in your own pet peeve here) is a moment we haven't used to make something better somewhere.

My daughter and I learned in church on Sunday that you can build a house for a homeless family in the third world for $2600. Think about that. Take a family that is living in the streets and give it a home for $2600.

Do you have $2600 on hand to send off to Food for the Poor? Well, I don't either. And I don't have a heck of a lot of time on my hands to come up with it, either. But I do think that if I find a free hour here or there, it might better be used thinking up some creative ways to raise $2600 and implementing them than sitting around talking about why everyone isn't doing it.

Semantics, Search Ranking, and Sales

About a month ago, I wrote this post about Pay/Half Stores, and it commanded an amazing amount of attention. In addition to bringing a lot of traffic to my blog, the post briefly enjoyed SERPs higher than those of the chain's official website for both the terms "pay/half stores" and "pay half stores".

Not only that, the discussion thread at Blog Catalog in which I talked about this accidental search placement is STILL commanding two of the top ten slots for those terms.

Since it's a short post not intentionally optimized for anything, I can only assume that the world is full of semantics geeks like myself, walking around deeply troubled by the mathematics of Pay/Half and by an overwhelming desire to call up Alarm Detection Services and ask them to go check out a particular address and let you know whether or not it has an alarm.

If I'm right, then y'all will enjoy this: Children for Sale

Pissy Posts, Six Days a Week

Just what in the hell is Love Thursday?

It seems to be pretty popular; my quest to understand it didn't turn up any meaningful answers, but it did turn up hundreds of participants.

I'll be the first to admit that I might be missing something, but so far as I can tell, Love Thursday is the designation of a special day upon which we should all act EXACTLY THE WAY WE SHOULD BE ACTING EVERY DAY.

Is that right?

Because it kind of seems counterproductive to me, to set aside one particular day to do the right thing and have the right attitude and keep the focus in the right place. Kind of seems like a license to SHIFT that focus on all the other days.

One of the things I noticed in some of the posts I found was people fighting negativity and judgmentalism on Thursdays, in a kind of "I don't have the right attitude for Love Thursday today..." kind of way.

Um.

Yeah.

I'm just thinking that maybe that attitude you speak of isn't the right one for ANY day.

We all have them, of course. But it strikes me pretty hard that if a sentiment "isn't appropriate for Love Thursday", it might well be one that shouldn't be voiced on another day, either.

The Credit Industry, That's What

I know this is probably the third or fourth thing I've said was the BIGGEST thing wrong around us, but the credit industry is a pretty significant force of negativity in our world today.

A really interesting study by law professor Katherine Porter recently revealed that, while the credit industry is villifying bankruptcy petitioners as deadbeats who game the system to irresponsibly run up bills and then walk away without paying, those same bankruptcy filers are being targeted by those same credit companies at a rate nearly three times the rate at which non-bankrupt families are targeted. That's right--if you've filed for bankruptcy, you're three times as likely to get pre-approved credit offers as someone who hasn't filed bankruptcy.

In addition, if you've filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which eliminates most unsecured debt outright, you'll be eligible for more credit--and sooner--than if you filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy and repaid some of your debt over time.

This video presents a great tongue-in-cheek warning about credit and debt in the U.S.: Ruin Your Credit Now!

Which Celebrities Really Enjoy Snakes?

If you care about the answer to the question above, you're in the wrong place. (So often that happens to people who arrive here through search engines...)

One of my writers was searching through blog feeds and news items this afternoon and suddenly read aloud: Mary Louise Parker Not a Fan of Snakes.

None of us much cared, but we were entertained enough by the headline that we spent a few minutes tossing out other related headlines and possible Googles searches related to those headlines. Little did we know, at the time, that the snake story was really about MARY LOUISE PARKER NAKED.

That, apparently, was no big deal. She says in the article that she's been naked a lot. Apparently, this was her first time getting naked with a snake.*

The thing is, when I went back to look for the article to write this post, it turns out that there are pages and pages and pages of articles about Mary Louise Parker getting naked with a snake. I guess, in retrospect, I have to give this particular article credit for leaving "naked" out of the headline.



*Please, please, please do not let there be search traffic for the phrase "naked with a snake. Please.

Is Wikipedia Big Brother?

Big Brother, of course, is the most recognizable concept from George Orwell's chilling 1984, the representation of ever-present big government that sees all and has something to say about most of it. But there was something else in 1984 at least as chilling as the ever-present two-way screen--the ability (and willingness) to rewrite history.

The other day, a conversation about Web 2.0 on Blog Catalog got me thinking about the nature of user generated content, and more specifically about the fact that Wikipedia, the best established and most credible outlet for user generated content, is subject to change at any moment. Unlike the history books of old, the updated version is all that remains. We were neer allies with Eurasia!

Perhaps coincidentally, the discussion was started by an historian who had commented on his history blog about the need to consider history from the perspective of its participants rather than from our own. So, naturally, the issues converged in my mind, and I found myself thinking about 1984 in a whole new way. You see, as chilling as the idea of wiping out history and forbidding the mention of past events always seemed to me, I always viewed it as something conscious. I always assumed that those characters were somehow playing along, were pretending that they didn't remember when Eastasia had been the enemy so as to stay out of trouble.

But suddenly, the combination of thinking about how our perspectives aren't necessarily a valid place from which to assess the actions of others and thinking about how "updated" is coming to mean "replaced", I found myself wondering if perhaps those theoretical future characters from the past weren't playing along at all. I found myself wondering whether maybe, when the records had been thoroughly updated and time went on and the details grew fuzzy, they really didn't clearly remember the history that had occurred in their own lifetimes.

There have been at least two cases of court rulings citing Wikipedia as an authoritative source--this source that can be created by anyone with access to a computer and altered minutes later. Aside from accuracy, it's not a static reference; the information cited by the court might not be there a few years later when the precedent is cited, or even a few months later when the case goes up on appeal. If the authoritative source is continually shifting, what does that say about the truth? And as we move increasingly into electronic media that can be and often is erased with a few clicks or a server failure, where will we find our landmarks. Will Google cache one day be our only source of historical comparison?

Shutting Down Telemarketers...the Middle School Way

Frequently, a certain telephone service provider calls me in an effort to persuade me to switch my service back to that company. My experience the first time wasn't all that great, and I'm not interested, but they don't take no for an answer. When I tell them that I'm happy with my current service, they argue with me, and say things like, "Well, I guess if you want to keep paying more, then that's fine. Me, personally, I like to save my money..." I've asked them to stop calling, but they seem to keep forgetting.

This afternoon, my about-to-enter-sixth-grade daughter answered the phone. When a stranger asked for me, she asked who was calling. The caller identified himself by his company. She said, "My mom doesn't have (major telephone company) service."

"I know," he said brightly. "I'm calling to win her back."

And my daughter, who has heard my end of this conversation several times, said, "She doesn't want you back."

After a moment of silence, the caller asked, "Is there a better time when I could call back and talk with an adult?"

And she said, "Not really."

More silence.

"There's no better time when I could call and talk to a grown-up?"

And she said, "No."

He rattled off the customer service number and hung up. I'm sure we haven't heard the last of them, but that's okay--she says she doesn't mind talking to them a bit, and she got off the phone faster than I've ever been able to. Who needs a do-not-call registry when you have an adolescent?

Quote of the Day

Just in case anyone was unclear, there was a quote of the day yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. That's what "Quote of the Day" MEANS. If you've missed some of them, that's your own carelessness. I post them religiously, every day. 'Cause that's what "of the day" means.

From the brand new Narcissus-X: Narcissus-X, the blog devoted entirely to itself, was created at about 7:00 pm, Sunday, July 22, 2007: a time which is significant, because that is when this blog was created.

The author of Narcissus-X has reached the culmination of the blogging about blogging about blogging about blogging spiral, with a blog entirely about the blog itself.

Pay/Half Stores

Until I started working in downtown Chicago, I'd never seen a Pay/Half store. I've still never been inside one, but I did once teach math, and so these stores trouble me a bit.

Pay/Half =

Pay/.5 =

Pay x 2

Draw your own conclusions.

Two Guys Walk into a Bar...

...and the third one ducks.






Did you come here looking for an explanation? If so, you'll find it here: Two Guys Walked Into a Bar...the Illustrated Version

Rape Trials and Other Horrific Abominations

My friend Barb has a great post--and one totally outside the usual subject matter for her blog--about the Tory Bowen rape case and her own related experience. I strongly suggest reading it, and I'm not going to rehash all the facts here. In case there's anyone who has been away on Mars for the past few days, Tory Bowen is an "alleged" rape victim whose case did not end in conviction after (coincidentally, I'm sure), the judge banned the use of all relevant terminology from the courtroom. That's right...can't use a nasty, prejudicial word like "rape" in a rape case. Can't describe a "rape kit" as a "rape kit", even though that's what they've been called since their inception and the way that all professionals in the fields that use or rely on them refer to them.

As a former criminal defense attorney, I probably find the judge's ruling less shocking than a lot of people. I'm very familiar with the process of pre-trial motions to exclude preducial language and information--even information everyone in the room knows to be true. And there's a good reason for that process.

But it can be equally prejudicial to prevent a victim--or any witness--from providing testimony in terms that make sense to him or her. That's true because the language impacts the way the story is received, the way a jury perceives the victim's (or witness's) actions and reactions, and it's also true because when a witness isn't allowed to express him or herself naturally, it leaves him searching for words, pausing, rephrasing, or using prepared phrases that can impact the perceived truthfulness of the testimony.

There's a legal issue here that will undoubtedly be dissected and determined in days to come. I may even do some of that dissecting myself. But today, my interest is more in the way the human issues affect the legal treatment of sexual assault cases, and the way that legal treatment in turn affects public perception, and the vicious spiral it creates.

Before I'd graduated from college, two of my closest female friends had been violently sexually assaulted, one at knifepoint by a stranger who'd broken into her apartment. Their reactions were very different, and they expressed themselves very differently. Any psychological professional will tell you that's very important, that people who have been traumatized are free to express themselves in the way that works for them. Tory Bowen, obviously, didn't have that freedom, and depending upon whether the case is appealed (and the outcome of that appeal), the case may kick off a long line of cases in which women aren't free to tell the whole truth about what they experienced.

And that will take us another step down the road back to the world where women knew better than to tell.

Teenage girls are molested every day and don't tell their parents because they think they'll be blamed, or because they think they won't be believed. Women are sexually assaulted every day and don't report the assault because they think that they'll be blamed, or that they won't be believed. Often, they're right. And, far worse, often they buy in to that perception.

Many years ago in another state, I happened to see the same man acquitted of two different rapes. Of course, I knew things the jurors did not--most notably, that at least three women had independently accused this man of sexual assault under similar circumstances.

After one of the trials, a juror made this statement: What happens between people of that nature is not our concern.

Of course, I disagree for a lot of reasons. I disagree because all people deserve respect and protection, regardless of walk of life, education, race or anything else you might be able to dream up as a reason to devalue a person. I disagree because even if you somehow believed that some people didn't count, I couldn't see any reason this woman might have fallen into the "no" column.

And--probably most important to those who would make such a statement--I disagree because I know quite well that what we tolerate, what we close our eyes to, what we make acceptable WILL come back to haunt us. Because when we create a culture that says it's okay to force sex on some people under some circumstances, or that it's wrong but really not such a big deal, or that the person who says she was sexually assaulted or molested is probably exaggerating, or any of a hundred other things we like to say in order to close our eyes to ugly realities in this world, we edge our world a little closer to a place where it's just okay across the board.

The woman it's "okay" to assault because she was drunk in a bar in revealing clothing slides into the woman it's "okay" to assault because she was in a bar alone, even though she wasn't really drinking much. And then if it's okay to assault women who went to bars, isn't it okay to assault women who go to big campus parties and drink? And then, is a big campus party really so different from a smaller party of mostly friends and acquaintances, but where you know some people will be drinking? And one day...lo and behold...that middle-class juror who didn't think we should concern ourselves with such things gets a phone call from her daughter, who was raped on her way home from a fundraiser for the College Republicans...and that's perfectly understandable, really, because after all, they served cocktails at the fundraiser, and the girl was walking back to her dorm late at night. And then...

But no. That won't happen, will it? Because that girl will know better than to tell her mother, or anyone else, what happened to her.

The Great Smarties Conspiracy

Not long ago, I was browsing a blog that happened to have a post celebrating "Canada Day", and Smarties appeared on the "Things that are Canadian" list. At first, I thought that was mildly interesting--I hadn't known that Smarties were Canadian. And then the photograph intriqued me even more...Smarties don't come in BOXES in the United States! Even the writing was different!

You see it coming, don't you?

They WEREN'T Smarties.

Closer inspection revealed that these candies were brightly colored and kind of pill-shaped. NOTHING like Smarties.

I inquired.

Just as calmly as you please, that other blogger informed me that those Smarties had been around "forever", and that they were...are you ready for this?

Chocolate.

I wasn't falling for that. Smarties are most definitely not chocolate. They're really GOOD for not being chocolate--quite possibly the most coveted non-chocolate Halloween candy--but Decidedly Not Chocolate.

I investigated further. And I found this: Smarties vs. M-n-Ms

They look just like M-n-Ms, except without the "m"s. They look a little like Skittles. They do not, in any way, shape or form, resemble SMARTIES, however.

These, of course, are the real Smarties*: Smarties

You'll notice that they're disc shaped and concave on both sides. You'll also notice that they're pastel colors, not brightly colored like poster paints. Or Skittles. Or M-n-Ms. You'll also notice that they're...um...NOT CHOCOLATE!

*"Real" in this context shall be construed to mean "the Smarties that Tiffany has eaten all of her life and is comfortable with".

I just got a comment about something called "Rockets", but I'm not going to look. Everyone knows that a "Rocket" is a popsicle, and I'm absolutely firm on that.

Everything I Ever Really Needed to Know...Part II

This evening, since the duck fiasco was on my mind, I tossed out a "hypothetical" to my eleven-year-old daughter.

"If you were babysitting," I asked her (even though she's not quite old enough to babysit yet), "and you took the kid shopping in a stroller, and when you got home you discovered a toy from the store in the stroller, what would your options be?"

"Well," she said, "you could take it back. You could keep it, but that's not a very good choice. Or, if the kid was a little older, like about three, you could take him back to the store with the toy and explain so he'd know you have to pay for things."

Moment of silence. "That's all I've got. No, wait. You could PAY for it."

So.

Um.

My eleven-year-old is better equipped to raise a child than a hundred or so screaming adults in the "mommy blogging" community. And they said there was no hope for the next generation!

You Can't Keep Stuff You Don't Pay For, and Other Basic Life Lessons

I'm an attorney, but I didn't need my law degree to figure this out: when you take stuff home from the store, you're supposed to pay for it.

I actually grew up thinking that sort of thing was apparent to everyone, and then I went into the practice of law and I encountered a lot of people who had hard lives and felt like they were getting screwed by the system, and so thought that justified a little self-help that fudged the rules from time to time.

Recently, though, I've encountered something much more astonishing--another group of people to whom the issue is equally unclear, but for different reasons: reasons that, frankly, I haven't seen or heard adequately explained anywhere.

Since you're reading this, I'll assume that you read blogs. Since that's the case, I'll assume that you haven't been able to escape the recent buzz about the Pennsylvania blogger who accidentally stole a toy duck from The Gap, then rallied bloggers across the country to tell her that there was no reason in the world that she should either return it or pay for it.

There's been a lot of fuss about people on the "other side" (that is, people who think you should pay for what you take home from the store) making such a big deal about a toy valued at less than $7. But that isn't really the point, is it? The point, it seems to me, is the astonishing number of people running, jumping and shouting to justify keeping the duck. The issue in my mind isn't whether or not a small toy is a big deal--it's why so many people are tripping over themselves to convince themselves and everyone else that theft is okay if it's not BIG theft.

The law doesn't really support the distinction, but that's another argument for another blog.

The big question in my mind here and now is, "What part of 'not yours' don't you understand?"

Yes, I understand that people sometimes make mistakes like this. And I even understand that sometimes circumstances don't allow you to immediately correct the situation. Once, when I was teaching at a business college in Indianapolis, I stole a fountain coke from 7-11. I didn't mean to--I just went in and got my coke, and then I noticed that the line was very long, so I started browsing magazines and greeting cards, waiting for it to get shorter. But that took a while and suddenly I looked at the clock and realized I was running late, and I left. About halfway to work, I realized that I hadn't paid for the coke.

No, I didn't turn around and miss my class to pay for it. I stopped in the store on my way home from work that afternoon and paid for it.

Was that overly scrupulous, for $1.19?

The more important question, I think, is whether it would have been okay NOT to pay for it. Of course not. It would have been UNDERSTANDABLE, certainly. It would have been NOT A BIG DEAL to the store, given the value of the coke. But neither of those things would have made it legal. Neither of those things would have made it ethical.

It would have been a minor evil, a petty crime. One, I'm sure, that many people wouldn't have bothered to fix. And I accept that, even though it troubles me. But I never expected so many people taking the position that theft is somehow the right thing to do if it's inconvenient to follow the law and respect other people's property.

Putting Our Worst Feet Forward

Over the past couple of days, I've been blogging about the prurient interest that's driven a lot of search traffic to my blog and others in the quest to find the "dirt" behind Stephanie Pearl McPhee's recent harsh words about blogging etiquette. The Yarn Harlot's blog went down yesterday due to excessive traffic, too--what a coincidence. It's been, frankly, a bit disturbing to see the feeding frenzy that somehow occurred even without any chum being visible in the waters...it was as if someone had passed along a rumor that someone somewhere might be dumping a bucket over the side of some ship and it might happen within the next few days, and the next moment there were sharks charging the bottom of any ship in the ocean.

But today I got a comment on one of those posts that brough home another point, an important point that just might be the POSITIVE lesson in all this. The comment was from a knitter who said that the knitting community had been so very welcoming and helpful to her. And I realized that the welcoming and helpful stuff most often happens in a brief comment, or even behind the scenes. A knitter who posts with a question might get 50 private emails offering help and information, but there aren't going to be dozens of blog posts and comments across the web pointing out that interaction. In a way, that's just as disheartening as the initial mess...it's just a confirmation that bad news is more "worth mentioning" than good, that dirt is more interesting than kindness. But it's encouraging, too, because it probably means that all those people digging desperately to get the inside scoop on the meanness aren't JUST sharks attacking the bottom of the ship. They may well be the same people who reach out to offer a helping hand to a stranger.

It reminded me of something that we all need to keep in mind, and something that's an extension of Stephanie's original reminder that people are READING what we write: the world only sees what we put out there in front of them. There's a vague idea, I think, that people only show their "best" in public, and to some extent that's true. But so often pride and anger inspire people to speak up where kindness has not, where the nice half or 75% or 90% of their interactions have been low-key and private.

And then, inevitably, someone roars "You don't know anything about me!" How many times have you seen that in a blog war, in comments, on a listserve? And it's true. But who controls that? The only way we can know anything about you is if you choose to let it show, not just when you have something to prove, but in the moments of kindness as well.

All these Anonymous Comments are So...Anonymous!

I'm flummoxed as to whether the most recent anonymous comment on my last post is a response to my response to the first anonymous comment, or perhaps a different "anonymous" entirely. It's funny to me that there are so many covert knitters, flying under the radar and unwilling to divulge their true identities. It brings outrageous pictures to my mind, pictures of women in trenchcoats with hats pulled down low over their faces knitting in the shadows and skulking along dark alleys with their yarn hidden in briefcases.

For the past two days, my top twenty natural search entry terms for this blog have related to the Yarn Harlot and the recent controversy I referenced in my last post.

This isn't traffic I want, have any use for, or expect to retain. It's more of a social experiment, and one that's yielding depressing results. Only one visitor--or two, depending upon whether we have one anonymous or two--has commented, but dozens of people have gone searching for phrases like "Yarn Harlot controversy". And then, you know, been indignant that I don't have knitting news to offer when they arrive.

Because, of course, everyone who clicks on a link titled: Stephanie Pearl McPhee is Overrated - My Mean Post about the Yarn Harlot" is looking for knitting news. Just read the comments to my last post; you'll see.

For what it's worth, I don't think anyone made a mean post about Stephanie Pearl McPhee. As I mentioned earlier, I know very little about her, and I don't have the slightest interest in knitting. But I do know that she's a best-selling author, and that even before the "controversy" some of her blog posts were getting hundreds of comments a day. I strongly suspect that she's in a position to roundly ignore anyone making mean posts about her, and that her reprimand was in fact intended for someone who wrote a "mean post" about someone else in the knitting community, someone perhaps less well established and more vulnerable. Just a guess, but I suspect that all those "Stephanie Pearl McPhee is overrated" and "Yarn Harlot bad mother" and "mean post about Yarn Harlot" searches aren't going to find you what you're looking for. Just a thought.

I'm looking forward to this traffic dying down. I want to think this kind of thing blows over quickly. I want to think we all have more important things to worry about. If you're really looking for "knitting news", check this out: Real Knitting News.

Stephanie Pearl McPhee is Overrated – My Mean Post about the Yarn Harlot

I hate to disappoint an audience, but I have a few confessions to make.

I have no opinion of Stephanie Pearl McPhee.

I don’t even know what she looks like.

I don’t knit.

And I don’t have anything mean to say—or at least, not anything mean to say about the Yarn Harlot.

So what in the hell is this post about, you may ask?

It’s about some very interesting search traffic that I’ve seen on another blog over the past few days. Google searches and blog searches for phrases like “Yarn Harlot mean post” and “Stephanie Pearl McPhee is Overrated”.

I assume this is all detective work related to the Yarn Harlot's recent post about blogging etiquette. She advanced the apparently controversial view that bloggers shouldn't go around insulting people in public. I don't know to whom she was referring, and I don’t much care. As I said, I’m not a knitter. I probably wouldn't know the guilty blogger if her blog was pointed out to me, nor would I know the person this mystery post apparently insulted.

I’m fascinated, though, by the concerted effort to ferret out that post and get to the bottom of someone else’s business. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the Yarn Harlot essentially pointed out that some things shouldn’t be aired in public—and although I know nothing of the circumstances, her point was absolutely valid in the abstract—and it…um…generated a lot of publicity.

So what search term brought you to this post? And what were you really looking for?

Quote of the Day # 4

I sincerely apologize for thinking this is funny, but my favorite line of the day is, "I accidentally deleted my blog today."

Please don't think that I find the FACT of that funny--surely it's sending chills down the spine of every writer reading these words. I can only imagine the sinking feeling, the struggle to remember what the most important things posted were and whether they existed in any form anywhere else, the disbelief that there was no "undo" button. But the reverb of those six little words just made me laugh. (Okay, "accidentally" isn't so little, but it's a very ORDINARY word.)

Here's the initial post on the revived blog in it's entirety:


Accidentally deleted the wrong Blog! To pissed off to even Blog about it now lol.


I'd love to know how often this kind of thing happens. Or maybe I wouldn't. Maybe it would make me afraid to touch my blogs.

Quote of the Day # 3

You didn't think I'd make it this far, did you? (Yeah, I'm talking to you, mom.)

From Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda: Laying prone on a dentist chair while you stare at the ceiling and poke your rapidly-numbing face isn’t actually all that much fun after the first two minutes, it turns out.

The rest of the story is definitely worth checking out--I was torn among multiple quotes and nearly opted for: Later, I realized it had been, like, FOUR HOURS and my face was still numb. Because I am calm and rational, I began to wonder if maybe I’d had not just a filling, but perhaps a filling and a small stroke.

Quote of the Day # 2

I managed to resist the urge to say, "Hey, I have that extra quote of the day from yesterday, I don't really have to post one today!" It wasn't ethics or discipline or anything; I just didn't want to use up my buffer so quickly.

Anyway, I wouldn't have wanted to miss sharing this with you. Scrambled Toast reacts to being tagged a "Thinking Blogger": Yes, when other boys aspired to be a fireman or The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I dreamed that someday, somehow, I could exert enormous influence on people's thought without troubling myself to know what I was talking about. Over the years, experience has taught me many lessons, many truths. I have tried diligently to remove them from my writing and from my memory.

Quotes of the Day

Since I know myself well enough to know that my newly conceived "Quote of the Day" will not be a daily occurrence, I'm starting out with two quotes...that way I'll be ahead of the game and I can skip a day without falling behind when life gets busy!

From author Patrick Rothfuss's blog: So profound was my non-productivity that a nearby Buddhist monk was embarrassingly upstaged. He was so thrown off his groove that not only did he fail to reach nirvana, but he broke into a nearby pet store and promptly punched a kitten.

From BubbleDumb: Plus, did you ever notice how the patient in Operation always had his fucking eyes open? You've pretty much failed the game before you've started! Patients are meant to be asleep, not wide awake with a worried expression on their faces.

Genarlow Wilson Prison Time Just the Tip of the Iceberg

There's been a lot of buzz over the past few days about Genarlow Wilson, who two years ago was sentenced to ten years in prison for engaging in consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. Wilson was 17 at the time. Wilson's sentence caused an uproar at the time, and then we all went on with our lives (except Wilson, who was sitting in prison).

Recent developments in the case have brought it to light again, and the moral outrage is flying again. There doesn't seem to be much controversy. A lot of people think that a 15-year-old girl performing oral sex at a New Year's Eve party is a bad thing, and a lot of people don't object to Wilson having been charged with a crime. No one (except apparently the prosecutor, who is fighting hard to keep Wilson in prison) seems to think that ten years in prison is a reasonable response to a consensual sexual encounter between two people only two years apart in age.

But this one prison sentence, which is getting so much press precisely because it is out of line with the norm, is just the tiniest slice of the problem regarding sex offenses in our society. Across the country, young men who once found themselves in circumstances very similar to Genarlow Wilson's are subject to sex offender registration requirements and restrictions for the rest of their lives. Men who at 18 engaged in consensual sex with long-time girlfriends 2 and 3 years younger than themselves have been branded child molestors for the rest of their lives. Their pictures are posted as sex offenders, their addresses disclosed. In some states, they are prohibited from even living near a school, let alone working in any context that might have to do with children.

I'm a mother, which means that however I feel about civil rights and civil liberties, I'm happy to be able to find out whether there's a child molestor on my block and take necessary precautions. But, I don't feel that my child, or yours, is in danger from a man who ten years ago, as a college student, had sex with his high-school-aged girlfriend. And, saddling those men with such designations hurts the "cause" as much as it unfairly hurts them, because it makes it all the harder to identify the real threats.

I'm not waving my hand dismissively and cheerfully noting that teenagers are bound to have group sex on New Years Eve and we should all just learn to accept that. But, I do have to question why sex crimes get this special designation in American society. A mass murderer who is released from prison (and yes, it sometimes happens) doesn't have to register when he moves in down the block from me; local police departments don't maintain websites to help us recognize the armed robbers or con men in our midst. Steal our cars, set fire to our houses, hold us hostage at gunpoint, and when you've served your time, you've served your time. Have sex with your girlfriend when you've passed the magical age line and she hasn't, and our safety requires that we know right where you are for the rest of our lives?

Plant a Tree - Support my Color Scheme

This morning I came across a posting on a discussion group called, "Calling all GREEN Bloggers". It was about an organization that's fighting environmental change and hopes to plant 8 million trees.

I like trees, and sometimes when I'm downtown I look around and really wonder about what we've done to the world, replacing everything God created with concrete and steel, but the truth is that I'm not much of an environmental activist. I'm more of a "feed the hungry, clothe the naked" kind of girl, and my charitable contributions tend to go straight to the food bank or into the poor box at the church or directly to someone I pass on the street. But (sigh)...my blog is green. I didn't know, when I was choosing the template, that it could have such ramifications, but here I am...I have a green blog, and Borzack called all green bloggers, so I'm duty-bound to share this tree information with you.

And, in fact, the lack of trees is definitely one of the things that's wrong around us, from a human perspective and a "keep the eco-system functioning" perspective. I'm no expert, though. If you want to learn more, you should probably read the original post: I Bought a Tree!

An ISM for Every Shape, Size and Color

I happened to read a post this evening called "I Hate Fat People". The title was a reference to something another woman had said on another website that I won't link to because...I don't want to send her traffic or help her Google ranking one little iota.

Corrina Makis, despite indicating that she was stunned and outraged, made a very reasoned response. But the problem is bigger than she probably knows. Corrina said: To determine a person's entire worth according to their physical appearance is obscene.

Yup. No argument here. But my perspective is just a little bit different. You see, although it's been a good many years since I fit into a size 6, I have a sister who's never reached that size and probably never will. She's 5'5" and ranges between 96 and 98 pounds. When J. Crew introduced its size 2 in 1996, the measurements they listed in the catalog were hers exactly. When other women look at her (concave) stomach and say, "I hate you," they don't sound good-natured at all.

But far more disturbing to my mind are the total strangers who feel free to inquire as to whether she has an eating disorder, to tell her that she needs to eat something, or to point out that she "looks like a skeleton".

Sadly, I think it isn't really about fat or thin any more than it was about black or white or Christian or Muslim. It's about hate. That's what's wrong around us. There's just too damned much of it, and it's going to find somewhere to go, whether the target makes any sense or not.

Blog Catalog Donors Choose Challenge Open Until Friday

Bloggers across the country are continuing to encourage their readers to join the first-ever coordinated effort at using social media to raise funds for charity. The effort has already reached 884 children in various schools around the country, providing materials for more than 2,000 hours of instruction and homework. But the effort is far from complete! Even after Total Divorce yesterday matched all donations made during the first day of the challenge, many projects remain unfunded or partially funded.

One project requires only $6 to be complete--that quick and painless donation could allow a teacher to purchase books on tape for her grades 3-6 ESL class! Please, take a moment to donate even that $6, and make a difference to kids across the country!

What's NOT Wrong Around Us

According to Technorati, there are more than 280 posts urging visitors to participate in the Blog Catalog challenge to use social media to raise funds for schoolchildren.

Here are just a few of the most recent posts on the subject--please join in this effort! Even if every person reading one of these posts donates only $10, it will make a tremendous difference in classrooms across the country.

Blog for School Projects

Blog Catalog Bloggers for Good Fundraising Challenge

Donors Choose: Non-Profit Site for Education

Blog Catalog Community Comes Together to Raise Funds for Education


Blogging for Good

Social Media...it Isn't Just for Google Ranking Anymore

Social media started out...social. But it wasn't long before the world of online marketers large and small discovered that it was a natural, inexpensive way to spread the word, place links, build rankings, and much more. Just like Google rankings themselves before it, social media was soon faced with a whole movement to manipulate the system for dollars.

And then Blog Catalog's Tony Berkman had an idea. Why not "work the system" for good?

Now, countless bloggers have signed on to use their blogs to raise funds for Donors Choose, an organization that allows donors to choose the particular project they'd like to fund from requests made by public school teachers and administrators across the country.

Donors choose has collected more than $12 million in contributions to benefit school children since its inception. The organization provides a quick and easy way to make a donation while offering enough specific information that donors can know exactly what they're funding and enjoy a personal connection to the project.

There's an even bigger reason to donate to Donors Choose through this post or one of the hundreds (or thousands) of other posts on the subject. Berkman has indicated that if the effort is a success, Blog Catalog will develop a community service page to promote similar events in the future. While every donation counts, the impact of a widespread social media effort to raise funds for charity could be much bigger in the long run. Please take a moment to follow this link and make a donation--every dollar counts! Donate to Donors Choose

We Interrupt the Serious Issues...

to talk about self-scan lanes at the grocery store. Note that, although I can't begin to understand the distinction, I am talking ONLY about self-scan lanes at the grocery store. The self-scan lanes at WalMart and such seem to work fine.

First, the lanes are set up in such a way that you can fill two bags on the weight-sensitive platform. That would be fine, except that when you have more than two bags worth of groceries, the machine shuts down every time you put one in your cart. It yells, "Item removed from bagging area! Please return item before continuing!" over and over again until you either return the item to the shelf (leaving no room for the remaining groceries) or a human comes over and bypasses the machine by moving through several screens and entering secret codes.

Now, if you've returned the item to the bagging area and have no room to put your next item IN the bagging area, you might as well just give up and go home. You scan the item and then see that you don't have room for it. What to do? If you set it aside, the machine yells, "Item not bagged! Place item in bagging area, or press 'skip bagging' to proceed!"

Don't you fall for it. When you press "skip bagging" it yells "please wait for assistance, re-starting the whole process with the multiple screens and the secret code.

If you don't press "skip bagging", but you hesitate a second too long, you're no longer allowed to bag the item. Instead, the machine yells, "Unexpected item in bagging area! Please wait for assistance!" Then...well, you know the drill by now, right?

And this is small potatoes (no pun intended, I swear) compared to buying produce. When you place an item or bag of produce on the scale, you're given two options--key in the item's code, or choose it from a seemingly handy photographic menu. Usually, there are no stickers on the individual produce items indicating their item codes, so unless you had the forethought to write them down while in the produce section, you're stuck with the menu. On the surface, that seems like a good thing. I mean, how wrong can you go with pictures? Especially when the pictures are also labelled. The only problem is, the prices associated with these items by photograph rarely bear any relationship to the prices indicated on the shelves.

This evening, for instance, I chose, "Whole watermelon". That's what I bought, after all. The picture looked like my watermelon. The sign where I'd picked up the watermelon said, "Whole watermelons, $3.99". It all seemed very straightforward.

I chose "Whole watermelon" with the photograph of a watermelon much like mine (it might even have BEEN my watermelon) above it and the machine cheerfully announced, "Whole watermelon, $8.99."

Sigh. Wait for assistance. Screens. Secret code. Sometimes I don't bother, which might be the point--so far I've never found the produce prices to be LOWER than those indicated on the shelves.