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.

I Found the Bees

Not long ago, I made a post about the incredible disappearing honey bees, and how their absence was going to destroy the world as we know it. I suggested in that post that since no bee carcasses had been discovered, it seemed likely that the bees had not in fact died off, but had relocated to a remote island to lay out plans to attain control of the planet.

You scoffed.

However, today I found a clue on Dave Barry's blog. Barry himself did not allege any connection between this incident and the missing bees, but the story speaks for itself: "Missing" Bees Plot to Take over the World.

Get Out of Jail Not So Free

Not long ago, I wrote about the Illinois high school student who was arrested after writing an essay that his teacher and school officials found disturbing. Now, it's certainly understandable, especially in the shadow of the Virginia Tech shooting, that school officials and law enforcement should be sensitive to violent tendencies. The problem is, it's not a crime to write an essay, and while there's a good argument that it shouldn't have been ignored, there's a better argument that we shouldn't charge people with crimes unless we have at least a reasonable belief that they might have committed them.

Allen Lee was charged with disorderly conduct, which the Cary police chief said could apply to writings that "disturb an individual".

Now, the charges have been dropped. That's not a big surprise, because when a charge actually goes to court, the prosecutor is expected to prove the elements of the crime. This is what the "disturb an individual" provision of the Illinois disorderly conduct statute actually says:

(a) A person commits disorderly conduct when he knowingly:

(1) Does any act in such unreasonable manner as to

alarm or disturb another and to provoke a breach of the peace;

I guess the chief of police forgot about the "and".

So the charges have been dismissed, though Lee's early enlistment in the marines has been cancelled and it remains to be seen whether or not he's eligible for re-enlistment.

The most disturbing aspect of the story, though, comes straight from the mouths of law enforcement, who apparently indicated that the arrest had been justified based on "fear of an imminent attack on the school". That might or might not be a reasonable fear--I'm not even going there. What bothers me is that Lee was charged with disorderly conduct, not "presenting an imminent threat to the school". Why? Being a potentially dangerous person is not a crime. So law enforcement officials arrested Lee for a crime of which he was clearly not guilty, then admitted that they'd really arrested him for another reason entirely. The charges were dropped, they said, when it was "determined that he was not a danger".

Um.

Wait.

I thought we were talking about whether or not he'd committed the crime of disorderly conduct?

In fact, Allen Lee was arrested for a Future Crime (Anyone else see that Tom Cruise movie? Oh, right. Everyone. Well, except the Cary chief of police, that is.) And then it was determined that the Future Crime wasn't going to occur, so they let him go. But it still looks like a slippery slope to me.

Corporate America Doesn't Care if You Die

There's a bill before the Governor in Illinois right now that would allow juries to award damages for grief in wrongful death cases. I've heard the bill criticized as "an end run against damages caps" and here's my thought on that: Please, God, let it be so!

There are many things that I periodically refer to as "the root of all evil", including calculators, but in terms of American society today, the reduction or elimination of punitive damages and the capping of personal injury, product liability and medical malpractice claims truly is a significant root of a large portion of the evil. You may recall that the original quotation said, "the love of money is the root of all evil", and that's exactly the reason that punitive damages are so very important.

We hear a lot about "greedy trial lawyers" and I'm sure that there are many. But for better or worse (regardless of what the insurance industry lobby would like you to think), greedy trial lawyers have little impact on your quality of life. Corporations who value profits over people have a lot.

More than 20 years ago, as you may know, Ford made the decision not to mention the fact that a design flaw made the Pinto prone to explosion in low-speed, low-impact collisions. The company applied a formula set forth in an earlier court case, one that weighed the burden of making corrections against the harm of not making them, and decided that it wasn't worth the investment to fix the Pinto. Sure, some people were going to die, but it wasn't a LOT of people, and it would be expensive to fix the defect, so it would make more sense just to pay wrongful death claims for those who died than it would to make the necessary changes.

This isn't spin. That's what Ford executives reported, and they seemed to think they'd done the right thing. The formula was right there laid out for them in an opinion by the revered Learned Hand. They'd made a cost benefit analysis, and changing the design would have cost about $137 million, while the deaths, injuries, and property damage claims associated with the faulty design would likely not reach $50 million. In short, it made no sense to make the changes.

I hope that you're all shouting, "But...but..." right now and asking whether we really want to live in a society that assigns a monetary value to human life ($200,000 in Ford's case) and considers it a good trade if killing off a few people saves some money. The answer at that time was a resounding "no". But that answer seems to be changing, and it's changing as a direct result of the fact that judges and juries no longer have the discretion to make sure that it's not profitable for corporations to make this kind of decision.

The evidence in one of the many recent cases against Merck over the drug Vioxx was in many ways similar. Merck apparently made an assessment that indicated that the company could save $229 million by delaying revisions to its warnings. Naturally, some people who would have benefitted (as in, lived) if those warnings had been available to them and to their physicians earlier would be harmed, but not $229 million worth.

A Texas jury took a dim view of the analysis and awarded $229 million in punitive damages. Some coincidence, hm? The jury sought to wipe out the profit derived from the conscious decision to risk customers' lives in favor of the bottom line. Unfortunately, Texas law limits punitive damages, and the award was reduced to $5 million. While many were crowing about this "victory for common sense and proportion" and all of that, I'm sure no one was more delighted than Merck...because that punitive damages cap ensured that no matter how egregious their behavior, it would remain more profitable to kill people off it that were the economically efficient thing to do.

The jury awarded $229 million not to compensate the plaintiff, but to punish the defendant, to make sure that its bad behavior (murder) wasn't profitable, and to put other companies on notice that it wasn't acceptable to consciously decide the bottom line was more important than human life. The Texas punitive damage limitations wiped all of that out and instead delivered this message: When you decide to let people die so that you can make more money, you might end up profiting only $224 million instead of $229 million.

Probably not much of a deterrent.

It's nice to think that corporations will avoid killing people simply because they're operated by human beings and we'd like to think that avoiding killing people is sort of programmed into our hearts. But it hasn't happened that way.

It would be nice to think that the market will take care of this kind of problem itself, and that when a company shows itself to be willing to kill off its customers, people will stop doing business with it. But it hasn't happened that way. In the case of drug companies, in particular, it sometimes CAN'T happen that way, because those companies hold patents on life-saving medications.

In the past, we could at least count on the fact that when a company made its cost-benefit analysis, the threat of crippling punitive damages if they opted to kill people would go into the scales. Now that they're largely insulated from that risk, there's just no good reason to give much thought to keeping people alive.

Lies Elementary School Teachers Tell

About six months ago, my fifth-grade daughter came home from school concerned. Her teacher had told her class that "I" was a proper noun. Distressing as this was to me, my daughter, and the roughly 768 writer and teacher friends I shared it with, it was probably an honest mistake. It might even have been a sort of verbal typo. There's a big danger in those when they come from teachers, because most children won't recognize them as mistakes and won't think to share them with parents, and so will move forward throughout life with that misinformation planted firmly in their minds. You may be thinking that this will straighten itself out somewhere along the way, that during the next year or even the next lesson, these kids will get accurate information and question the conflict. But my experience preparing high school students for the ACT indicates that's just not true. We can't create a national force of elementary school teachers who never make a mistake, but perhaps we could create one that doesn't lie for convenience, and that would go a long way.

Some of my "favorite" elementary school lies:

1. Never start a sentence with "because". For example, "Because my third grade teacher told me never to start a sentence with 'because', I will erroneously deem this sentence incorrect when it appears on the ACT." You may be thinking, "Well, that's different--it's an introductory clause." EXACTLY. But the vast majority of students who passed through my classroom--college-bound students--had never learned "that's different". Instead, they'd been told in elementary school not to start sentences with "because", and they'd believed it, internalized it, and were still living it and getting wrong answers on the ACT because of it at 16 and 17.

2. A square is not a rectangle. A rectangle, of course, is a four-sided figure with opposite sides parallel and four 90 degree angles. A square, of course, shares all of those characteristics. But a surprising number of high school students in upper-level math reject the idea of a square as a rectangle. Why? I've heard tell that it's intentional. Apparently, if the legend is to be believed, some curriculum expect somewhere along the way decided it would be "confusing" to young students to be told that all squares were rectangles but not all rectangles were squares. Again, they were obviously expecting someone to explain later on, but no one did.

3. A prime number is a number that has only one and itself as factors. Close. SO close. So close that it's almost semantic. A prime number is a number that has exactly two factors. Even at the college level, even with adult returning students who are preparing for the GRE and GMAT, I often get a shrug in response, as if the distinction were merely one of expression. But there's a big difference: the number one, which is NOT a prime number, fits the first definition and not the second. Yeah, that's right. One is not a prime number.

I'm sure that when the second or third grade teacher makes a statement like, "Never start a sentence with 'because', she doesn't mean 'never'." I'm sure that it's shorthand for "don't talk in fragments" when a child says, for instance, "Because I want to." But the child doesn't get the distinction. It's the words that stick in his mind. And stick. And stick.

A Few Questions about Spongebob Squarepants

I ask these questions of my daughter on a regular basis, whenever I come upon her watching the goings-on of Bikini Bottom, but she always says, "Mom." She says it in a tone that's a mix of patience and eye-rolling, a tone that says that she understands that I just don't get it and she DOES find me sort of endearing, but she'd nonetheless prefer that I...well...shut up.

I can't help it, though. Some of this stuff really bothers me. And since my daughter refused to discuss this intelligently, like an adult, I'm hoping that someone else out there has some insights that will let me sleep at night.


1. Why do Spongebob and Patrick require glass domes over their heads when they leave the water to visit Sandy the Squirrel, but did not when they visited Karate Island?

2. Why do normal household objects that FLOAT just sit on the table or ground in Bikini Bottom?

3. How can Spongebob and Patrick go to the beach, even walking up to the edge of a body of water that's...well...under water? Likewise, how is it that there are there sometimes puddles on the ground?

4. In the episode in which Spongebob and Patrick spend the entire day playing in a cardboard box, why doesn't the box fall apart? Why is there a cardboard box at the bottom of the sea at all?

5. Why, when Spongebob and Patrick suddenly "fly" through the "air", is Patrick much smaller than Spongebob, when he's larger the rest of the time?

6. How do they pour glasses of milk and such under water?

Yammering about Yammering about Yammering

I never claimed to be sweetness and light, but some days I'm crankier than others. Today, I'm a little peeved about the endless blogs about blogging and alleged writers writing about writing instead of writing.
I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of humor columnist Barb Cooper, and she's right in the middle of a couple of "writers" who are too busy talking about what makes a writer and who should get to say what makes a writer to...well...write anything of substance.
In fact, the whole Rockstories blog seems to be (in its own words) writing about writing about writing. And we never find out what in the hell it has to do with rock.
Light. Sweet. Crude. has a little more variety--its author takes a break from her stand on how she's a real writer even though she's just blogging to tell us about how her husband comes in (I'm dead serious--check it out yourself) and shows her his penis while she's writing.
If I had more time on my hands (like some bloggers obviously do), I'd start counting the number of bloggers out there blogging about writing instead of writing.

Maybe I Was Wrong About Lawyers....

About a month ago, I wrote about how lawyers seemed to be damned if they did and damned if they didn't--in short, that good lawyering brought on another version of the same bad rap bad lawyering prompted. And I still believe that. Really, I do. But yesterday I was reminded that some lawyers really, really earn the rap they get.

Apparently, an attorney in Chicago got it into her head that a good way to drum up business would be to slap up a billboard of some scantily clad folks (equal opportunity here--one man and one woman) and suggest that life was too short to waste it with your spouse.

Read the full story and see a picture of the billboard (which has since been torn down over the attorney's objections) at The Divorce Blog.

About Cab Drivers: They're People. I'm Pretty Sure.

About a month ago, I walked out of the train station near the end of the commuter rush, about 8:30, and stepped into a cab. I said "good morning" and offered my destination, and the driver said, "You're about the fortieth person I've picked up this morning, and you're the first one who has said good morning."

Now, if I haven't mentioned it before, I'm the least social person in the United States, and no one who has ever met me (or even spoken to me on the telephone) would accuse me of having a social grace to my name. But isn't "good morning" automatic? Shouldn't it be?

To make matters worse, the driver asked me a moment later where I was from. I named a nearby suburb. "No," he said, "I mean what country are you from originally?" When I said that I'd been born and raised right here, he asked, "Have you lived overseas?"

I said that I hadn't and he said--really--"So where did you learn to say 'good morning' to the driver?"

Is that who we are? Really? A country of hundreds of millions of people who can't even be bothered to say good morning, who don't even see the cab driver or the man who sells us our newspapers or the woman who serves our coffee? Is it that we don't value people in certain occupations enough to really look at them, or is it even bigger than that? Do we see other people at all?

My cab experience this evening would indicate perhaps not. Traffic was dense and I got out of my cab about a block before the train station and walked. About halfway there, I passed a man standing next to a cab with the back door open. The driver of the cab was walking along the line of stopped cabs with a large bill in his hand, trying to get change from one of his colleagues. As I walked, I saw him approach 2 or 3 other cabs without success, so when I drew near to the man standing next to his cab--obviously the owner of the large bill the driver couldn't change--I asked, "Do you need change?"

He looked at me for a minute and then said, rather tersely, "Well, my cabbie is already trying to get change, so no, I don't."

I looked at his "cabbie", who was standing at the window of yet another cab waiting to see whether that driver could produce change. He smiled at me and held up a hand in a sort of "just a minute" gesture, understandably wanting me to wait until he found out whether his colleague had what he needed.

I waited.

The man whose money he was attempting to change stood there, looking a little put out and not acknowledging either one of us. I stood there thinking, "cabbie"? Maybe it's me. Maybe it's regional. Maybe "my cabbie" is a perfectly acceptable way to refer to a grown man making an honest living. But even if it is, I can't get my mind around how it's acceptable for the man with the large bills to dismiss an easy solution to the problem (me, standing there with the change he needed in my purse) and stand there watching "his cabbie" knock on windows along the row of parked cars trying to get him change.

Fortunately, the other driver--at least the third one he'd approached--had the change. The "cabbie" thanked the other driver. He brought the change back to his passenger, and then he thanked me, too.

So far as I could see, the passenger didn't thank anyone. Not the driver who produced the change, not the stranger who stopped to offer help unsolicited, and certainly not the "cabbie" who walked a line of cars at the stoplight searching for his change.