What's Wrong Around Us?

Looking for a Spammer with an Ounce of Creativity...

2011-06-29T11:33:00.001-07:00

Unlike most bloggers, I don't really mind when other bloggers (and even businesses) try to piggyback on my posts to gain some traffic for their own sites or draw attention to their services. That's just good marketing strategy, and I'm all about a collaborative environment where potential customers know what their options are and make informed choices. I don't want my law school admissions consulting business to be the only one a prospective student finds online--I want it to be the one they choose after they read the information on my site or talk with me on the telephone. And I certainly don't want my posts on topics I consider to be socially significant to be the only opinion someone sees. So post away--comment, disagree, add supporting points and feel free to include your link.

But add something of value.

I have a lot of blogs, but the two that draw the most targeted spam are my relationship blog and my LSAT / law school admissions blog. That makes sense--one is a competitive area and the other is a money-making venture. That being the case, I'd expect the people who drop spam comments on those blogs to be good at it. I'd expect them to be thinking in terms of marketing their sites or their services when they commented.

If they were, and they made intelligent comments, I'd leave their links alone. Even direct competitors are welcome to add valuable insights and information in my space, and when they do, they should take credit for it.

It's when they show themselves up as lazy and incompetent that I get annoyed. If my subject matter is also your subject matter and you have something related of value that you're trying to draw readers back to, shouldn't you have the ability to craft a sentence or two reasonably related to my content? And if you want someone to trust you with their hard-earned dollars in return for a service, shouldn't you show that you have the capacity to perform that service well?

I'm always torn in this situation. This morning, for example, I found a spam comment on my law school admissions blog from an LSAT tutor. As I said, if he'd added anything at all of value to the conversation, I'd have left his link. In fact, I'm only tutoring a very few students at the moment under pretty narrow conditions, so if he'd impressed me I'd have checked out his site to see whether he might warrant adding to my list of referrals.

If he'd just dropped a link, I'd have deleted it and moved on.

But no--he left a "comment". His comment was that he was glad I'd posted this LSAT information because he had been looking for it for a long time.

And then he left his link. As an LSAT tutor.

Can't you just feel the confidence bubbling over?

I deleted the comment, but I had to think twice about it. Part of me wanted to promote that post all over the place and let his prospective market see that either he was too stupid and lazy to formulate an intelligent sentence to post or that he was reliant for his "expertise" on information found on a stranger's blog.

Inside Information About the Dashing Cody Rhodes and His Disfiguring Injury

2011-06-25T19:45:00.000-07:00

This is the first post from my new co-blogger (and long-time daughter), Tori.

When I was a little girl my daddy loved the WWE. He would watch it all the time and he had all the video games and the t-shirts, so I loved it too. His favorite was always Undertaker. I know all about Undertaker now of course. I had his poster on my wall as a child; I even have an Undertaker teddy bear on my bed. Then, Undertaker brought another wrestler into my life: his brother Kane. Nowadays Kane is the extremely large, half naked, bald man who teams with the Big Show, but when I was a kid he was the menacing, stringy haired, evil masked brother of Undertaker. I remember staring at my television screen in horror as superstars stole Kane's mask from the locker room. I remember the towel he wore on his head until he got it back. I remember him losing to Triple H and taking his mask off. Then his career went on. He wasn't the prettiest wrestler out there, but he got one of the prettiest divas, then he lost her to my favorite wrestler Edge, crashed their wedding, Edge stole his father and tied him to a wheelchair and so on. Everyone seemed to forget about the mask AND the reason he wore it. Supposedly he had been so badly scarred by a fire set by the Undertaker he couldn't show his face, but then he did.

Eight years go by. Enter Cody Rhodes, son of "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes, brother of Golddust. He could have gone in any direction with his WWE career he wanted to. He chose to focus on his looks. He became known as "The Dashing Cody Rhodes" and had video segments on Smackdown sharing his beauty tips for being dashing. His titan-tron featured mirrors and his perfect white teeth. Then it happened. He was in a match with Rey Mysterio when Mysterio, who's had surgery on his knee five times, hit Cody Rhodes in the nose with his knee brace. Cody Rhodes then disappeared to have facial reconstructive surgery. The show's outraged announcer Michael Cole went on and on about how terrible it was and the shame Rey Mysterio should feel (Is it just me or does Michael seem to have a bit of a crush on Cody?) until Cody returned. Suddenly his titan-tron was a mess of newspaper articles about his accident. He started being referred to as "The Formerly Dashing Cody Rhodes". The beauty segments stopped. Then he came out to the ring for the first time since the accident and I saw what was coming; he was wearing a large black cloth over his head and pushing cameras away. "Don't look at me!" he screamed at them. He climbed in the ring and let the cloth fall, revealing a mask.

Now this wasn't just any mask. It wasn't a red and black mask like Kane's. It wasn't star embroidered like CM Punk's. It was a clear, plastic mask with eye holes and a good inch of space around his nose. Everyone gasped. He covered his face with one hand while speaking into a microphone about how ugly he looked. Michael Cole jumped in with him talking about how "disfigured" he was. I laughed. I thought out loud, as I usually do, "That mask is clear." and my mother looked up from her computer. "Yeah?" she said sounding a little confused. I explained to her all about the accident and the knee brace he had taken to the face. I told her how he had called himself dashing and now he called himself disfigured.

My mother had never seen Cody Rhodes. She is NOT a WWE fan, but I went searching for a picture to show her. She looked at it and then the T.V. and she laughed too. Months passed; Cody's gimmick spread to insulting other people's looks and making them wear plastic bags on their heads. I was watching Smackdown last night when they began talking about him again. "I had a long conversation with Cody's doctor yesterday" one of the announcers was saying. He explained that Cody didn't have to wear his mask anymore unless he was competing, but he still wore it everywhere. "Wouldn't you?" Michael Cole asked. He began his usual routine of comments about Cody's ugliness. They zoomed in on him again, showing his mask. I laughed again, because I know something that no one else in the WWE universe seem to have realized: Cody Rhodes hasn't changed a bit.

Week after week since he first came back from his surgery I find myself yelling at my T.V. "I CAN SEE YOUR FACE CODY! YOU LOOK JUST LIKE YOU ALWAYS DID! That mask is CLEAR!!" He can't hear me of course, nor can his millions of fans, but I have to wonder: Why they haven't noticed for themselves that the "Formerly Dashing" Cody Rhodes is just the Dashing Cody Rhodes with a see through mask on?

Headlines

2010-06-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

Complaining about the media is nothing new--for decades we've heard that reporters or publications or the news media as a whole were biased in one direction or another, that they slanted information, withheld details that might have harmed the case they wanted to make and generally acted more as advocates than reporters.

Then, in the past 10 years or so, something even more sinister started to unfold. The news media gradually ceased to be "the news media" at all. Once a supported branch of a major news station, "news" was quietly folded in under the general income-generating umbrella of a television station or publication. While we might have argued for years that the media had an agenda, now it was clear--the mission of a news program was no longer to inform, but to earn its keep at the station. In days gone by, a news program might have earned its keep simply by lending credibility to the station, by providing a source of reliable information for viewers who might then stick around to watch the income-generating programming, but no more. Today, a news show has to pull its own advertising dollars.

That means, in short, that providing accurate, useful information is no longer the job. Getting people to turn on the news program, regardless of how misleading your headlines and teasers have to be to get them there, is job one.

Of course, people have a threshold for drama; after eagerly tuning in to see a story time after time and discovering that it wasn't as compelling as they'd been led to believe, the sense of urgency wears off. The same is true when the target audience is being asked to click through to a website rather than tune in to a news show. And so the media has to up the game. The result is teasers and headlines that have little relationship to the actual news being conveyed. And that's more than just dishonest: it's dangerous and destructive.

News producers know it can be dangerous and take steps to protect themselves from liability, but those steps don't reach so far as to actually protect those who happened to catch the headlines or teasers.

Recently, for instance, it was widely reported in network teasers that a "popular" blood pressure medication might cause cancer. The actual report referred to a narrow category of blood pressure medications, stated that the increase in rates of cancer as compared to the control group had been very small and no causal relationship had yet been identified, and emphasized that people shouldn't stop taking their medication.

Sometimes, the misipressions formed by those sound bites aren't actually dangerous, but simply inflammatory. This morning, for example, an MSN news station ran the headline "Mum aborts baby to end morning sickness". Naturally, the story was reposted in many forums (probably often by people who hadn't actually clicked through and read the story) and outrage abounded...but in fact the woman in question had aborted to put an end to Hyperemesis Gravidarum, a serious side effect suffered by some pregnant women which involves near-constant vomiting, extreme weight loss, strain on the heart and dangerous dehydration.

Of course, it's still open to debate whether or not abortion was the right answer, but that, at least, is the right question. The woman interviewed for the article appears to be telling her story because she was no offered counseling or other options for dealing with the condition and wants to help get the word out to others facing the same difficult situation. The content of the article itself makes that clear. But the overwhelming impact of her choosing to speak out is that her face is now associated in the minds of hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of people as the "mum" who killed her baby because she didn't like feeling queasy in the morning.

We complain that journalists "aren't doing their jobs", but in fact we simply misunderstand what a journalists job today looks like. The person who wrote this particular misleading headline created a page that's already drawn thousands of inbound links and been reposted in forums, across Facebook, Tweeted and otherwise disseminated to people who might otherwise not have visited that site. He or she has helped the station's search rankings and spiked traffic in a way that raises advertising revenues. That journalist, in short, has done a GREAT job of what he or she was hired to do. It just happens that "what he was hired to do" was not "report the news".

She Looks Like a "Susie" to Me...

2010-04-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

I just learned that you can hire an expert to help you name your baby: The Science Behind Being a Baby Namer

No, this doesn't rise to the level of many of the topics I cover here, but I do think it's a sign of the deteriorating times. Are we that detached from our own children and how we see them that we need outsiders to come up with the trendiest name for them? (and the pros say it IS trendy we're looking for, not unique) Do people who have the talent and creativity to compile all that data and discern trends really have nothing more beneficial to do with their time? Is this really the kind of thing we, as a society, want to put a monetary value on?

Yes, it's a trivial complaint...but the trivial adds up. Anyone remember Brave New World?

So It Begins

2010-04-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

This American-born truck driver was handcuffed and detained after weigh-station officials decided that his commercial driver's license and social security number weren't adequate proof of citizenship. Only after his wife left work, picked up his birth certificate and delivered it to officials was he released to go on about doing his job. Good thing he had someone at home to call, and that he knew exactly where his paperwork was. If you don't, maybe you'd better get a copy to start carrying with you now.

Too Stupid to Spam?

2009-12-02T19:25:00.000-08:00

Comment spam is a given in the blogging world, but sometimes it's more blatant than others, and sometimes it's just so flat-out stupid that it's more entertaining than annoying.

About a month ago, a friend and I started a new dating and relationship blog. Of course, online dating is an area ripe for spam, and so we started getting hit almost immediately--so soon that I wasn't sure how they were finding us. One of the places we were getting consistent spam from was called University Love Connection, and it always said the same thing: "This is a great blog, we are going to add it to out free online dating internet and college information blog www.universityloveconnection.com/blog so our visitors can read your news, as you are a reputable source. Thanks online dating" (With a couple of live links, of course--I've stripped them out here not so much to discourage spam as to discourage stupidity)

I initially thought it was all coming from the same person, but I soon learned otherwise: apparently the Director of Comment Spam for the site sends out instructions. But apparently their hiring criteria are pretty lax, because yesterday we received this comment:

Here is the post to Make on every one : This is a great blog, we are going to add it to out free online dating internet and college information blog www.universityloveconnection.com/blog so our visitors can read your news, as you are a reputable source. Thanks online dating

Cutting and pasting, apparently, is an art too sophisticated for some.

Book Burning for the 21st Century (and beyond)

2009-08-01T20:28:00.000-07:00

Book burning--book banning--is generally viewed as a harbinger of evil in our society, past and present. Whether it's an historical account or an imagined future world, most of us shudder at the thought of a society in which information and ideas are torn from our hands, in which the thoughts of the past or the facts of history or daring newborn ideas are concealed from us.

Even in the direst of futuristic visions, books were forcibly removed, destroyed, forbidden. In the real world, we're giving them away.

This thought has been playing in the back of my mind for some time, but it bubbled to the surface this past week when Amazon deleted copies of two George Orwell novels previously purchased by Kindle owners across the United States. Sure, Amazon had a reason for deleting the "books". Sure, Amazon said it would never do it again. But isn't the real issue that they were ABLE?

I've resisted the move toward readers like Kindle for a reason entirely unrelated to the future of our society: I love books. I like the look and feel of them. I like to hold them in my hands. I like the texture of paper and to watch the size of the chunk of pages behind the bookmark diminish as I work my way through a novel. I simply don't WANT to read a digital copy. But there's another, much more significant reason to resist that move--one that unfortunately seems not to have occurred to most of those on board with the "progress" that is a shift toward electronic books.

Imagine that today, some powerful entity decided to do away with the ideas set forth in George Orwell's 1984. Eradicating the novel would be a huge, probably insurmountable job. Physical copies exist in huge numbers, in multiple languages, in countries around the world. And, of course, no one really knows who has all those books...and if we did know, it wouldn't be especially useful information because a book can be easily hidden or handed off. Books are resold, donated, and recycled every day. Some are undoubtedly thrown away; others are destroyed inadvertantly. Even if we knew who had purchased every single copy of the book ever printed--which we don't--that wouldn't mean we knew where they were now, or even how many still existed.

In short, eradicating an existing book in print (particularly a popular one) would be virtually impossible.

Eradicating the Kindle copies of two well-known novels was apparently relatively quick and easy. Today, that's an inconvenience, an outrage to some, a bad move in customer relations terms. But today, Kindle is just beginning to take root. Today, most of us still have the books we treasure safe on our shelves at home, and it would be difficult for someone to make them disappear.

20 or 30 or 40 years from now, when we've all "caught up with the times" and there aren't any of those clunky, old-fashioned paper books lying around, will someone make all of our "books"--all of our history and information and ideas--disappear with the click of whatever has replaced the mouse in that future-world?

Should Satan Have a Gun License?

2009-07-02T19:42:00.000-07:00

Women Scorned - Maybe It's Time We Started Showing Them Some Respect

2009-06-25T17:19:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Eugene Robinson started out an Op-Ed piece by pointing out that "at least" Governor Mark Sanford faced the music alone--meaning that Sanford didn't drag his poor victimized wife out and force her to stand by his side while he came clean.

Where, oh where, is that "/sarcasm" tag when you really need it?

Others, including former President Bill Clinton and former New York Governer Eliot Spitzer, have been accompanied by their wives when they made public disclosures about their infidelities. Notice what I said there? Pay close attention now, because the language is important: have been accompanied by their wives.

What I didn't say, in case you missed the distinction, was "brought their wives along" or "dragged their wives with them" or any of the other things I've seen again and again in news reports, opinion pieces, and even heard in real life discussion. Here's why: I have enough respect for these women to believe that as adults who are often also educated women and parents, they have the power to make their own decisions.

Quick show of hands: Who sees Hillary Clinton as a victim type, easily manipulated by men into doing things she doesn't want to do?

That's what I thought.

Writer after writer has lamented the fact that these men "bring their wives" along with them to make these disclosures, exposing them to public humiliation and such. And every time, I'm struck by the same thought--as an educated, professional woman, I would be far more "humiliated" at thought that the entire country believed me incapable of making my own decision about whether or not to stand by my husband's side than by the fact that people knew he'd had an affair.

Yes, infidelity and dishonesty are wrong. Yes, it's unfortunate that these women are forced to make hard choices and endure tough circumstances based on situations that may not have been in any way of their own making. But are we really improving that situation by disrespecting the choices they do make, by suggesting that they're mindless puppets subjected to whatever course of action their cheating husbands choose?

I Just Don't Give a Crap About Marijuana Legalization

2009-03-29T18:35:00.000-07:00

Really. Not one little bit. I'm not for it. I'm not against it. I'm not worried about it. It just doesn't have my attention. What does have my attention, though, is the level of attention it's getting from other people, and the apparent misconceptions that drive a lot of that attention.

First, let me say that what I'm about to say does not apply to medical marijuana issues. I get why that's an issue some people feel needs to be at the forefront of national attention--particularly with some states having legalized medical marijuana use, only to have their citizens arrested by federal authorities. But the medical marijuana issue is a much narrower one, and one that's fundamentally different from the larger issue.

It's fundamentally different because people who are using marijuana for non-medical reasons are free to stop. Am I saying that they should stop? Nope. I couldn't care less, so long as they're not driving around impaired or operating machinery or any of the things that might be dangerous to the rest of us. Just don't care. But here's the thing--the right to use marijuana (non-medically) is just NOT IMPORTANT. The economy is collapsing. Millions of people are losing their homes. People are dying in Iraq. And somehow "But I really wanna get high NOW" just doesn't resonate with me.

Proponents of legalization will point out (and rightly so) that we waste a lot of money prosecuting and jailing people for marijuana crimes. That deserves a look, but it's hardly the most pressing issue on our plates. The other major argument is that lives are being destroyed over marijuana charges..and it's true. As a former criminal defense lawyer, I can definitely attest to the fact that jail time usually does more harm than good. It' s a tragedy, for sure, when a young man with a family and a good job ends up in prison because he had a small amount of marijuana in his care.

But he has a choice. Until this issue is resolved, every single American is absolutely free to just NOT POSSESS MARIJUANA. Should he have to make that choice? Well, that's up for debate. But as of today, the law is what it is, and everyone knows what it is. And so anyone who doesn't want to risk going to prison can decide not to take that chance. That sort of undermines the sense of urgency in my mind. No one is at risk who doesn't choose to take that risk.

But let's say for a moment that it is a pressing issue, that we should set aside foreclosures and the death count in Iraq and get focused on making America safe for people who opt to use marijuana. If that's the goal, then let's get sensible about it.

First, let's consider the fact that the federal law against possession of marijuana was enacted by Congress--it's not an executive order. The President could, of course, encourage Congress to pass such a bill, but that's it; it's their purview, not his. And then if Congress DID pass such a bill, and the President signed it, the problem would be all solved...except that there would still be dozens and dozens of state laws criminalizing marijuana use--laws the President is ABSOLUTELY POWERLESS to affect. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, state and local prosecutions make up 99% of all marijuana prosecutions.

So...let's recap. An apparently huge movement within the United States wants the President of the United States to make it his priority to tackle something that's Congress's job, in order to repeal a law that will impact 1% of marijuana prosecutions across the country.

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about how disappointed people are in Obama over this issue. Seems to me that if all of those people got out there and rallied and donated money and campaigned to get Obama elected so that he could get the federal prohibition on marijuana repealed, the disappointment should be running the other way.

Why I Wouldn’t Want My Son to Get Off on Watching Women Eat Feces

2009-03-17T19:32:00.000-07:00

Last week, I wrote a blog post called “Two Girls, One Cup, and Your Kids”. In that post, I had the audacity to suggest that the Two Girls, One Cup video (and others like it) might not be the best possible material for our middle-schoolers to be viewing. I’d learned, quite by accident, that a lot of young kids in my area had been viewing this video, and was pretty sure that their parents had no idea. My primary concern was that these kids—some of them as young as 11—were as-yet unformed in their sexuality and just exploring and beginning to understand their own interests and inclinations.

The varied response was very interesting: a clinical psychologist talked about how early exposure to this kind of thing could have a lifelong impact on how a girl viewed her own sexuality and what she thought was expected of her; parents talked about the internet protections they had in place; and a surprising number of people suggested that I was a totalitarian right-wing lunatic who wanted to repress everyone’s sexuality and possibly kill them. One gentleman, whose knowledge of history is apparently a bit shaky, suggested that I probably thought homosexuals should be “gassed like the Jews”—I guess he wasn’t aware that homosexuals were also on Hitler’s hit list.

The general gist of the outraged comments I received was that a person’s sexuality was his own business and it said something negative about me if I didn’t think it was just fine if our kids were influenced by things like Two Girls, One Cup and grew up thinking that women eating feces and vomit was hot. Let me cop right off to the fact that I don’t think those particular “tastes” are “normal”. In no way shape or form am I going to try to tell you that I think that’s a choice that’s “just as valid as any other” or any such thing. I do, however, believe that what consenting adults do in private—assuming that it’s truly consensual—is their own business.

Apparently, some folks felt that my desire not to have our children’s sexual development influenced by this sort of material was inconsistent with the idea that what adults do in private is their business.

Children. Adults.

Get the difference?

Seems like not, so here’s the thing: you may find it hard to understand why, if I wouldn’t condemn an adult for doing something, I’d want to help a child avoid going down that same path. Frankly, that’s just stupid. It’s every adult’s own business, for instance, whether or not he smokes—but we don’t encourage our children to start smoking. And while those of you in the “you probably want to burn people with sex lives at stake” camp are probably fairly popping out of your chairs right now yelling that we ALL KNOW that smoking is bad for you, and you can’t compare that to someone’s sexual choices…

Nonsense.

Here are just a few of the reasons that I wouldn’t want my son (or anyone else’s) to be influenced by something like Two Girls, One Cup and decide that it was really hot when chicks ate feces and vomited:

1. Eating feces is a serious health hazard. I’d hate for my son (or anyone’s) to be in the position of needing to jeopardize someone else’s health and well-being to satisfy his sexual desires.

2. This kind of activity can be damaging to a woman’s self-esteem and even mental health. Argue away, but it’s a well-documented fact, and I would hate to see someone I loved responsible for that.

3. Most of the population doesn’t participate in this sort of activity; I’ve had at least one comment that suggested I should speak for myself and this was a puritanical view, but it’s a simple fact. Most people don’t eat shit for sexual gratification. That means that a boy who does develop these proclivities is limiting his relationship possibilities or setting himself up for conflict in his relationships, perhaps for the rest of his life.

The other argument I received was that kids just weren’t going to see this as sexual. Right. An adolescent boy watching two naked chicks make out—possibly seeing such a thing for the first time—would never associate that with sex, right? And the vulgarity of the feces consumption would ensure that he was far too grossed out to have any kind of physiological response to those naked chicks making out. Right. And sexuality isn’t influenced by our early sexual reactions AT ALL. Right?

Come on.

But What are You Going to DO With My Fingerprints?

2009-03-14T10:28:00.001-07:00

There's been a lot of concern floating around the internet this morning about the new requirement that home sellers in Cook County, Illinois provide a thumbprint. There are, of course, the obvious concerns that always arise when some governmental agency or other starts collecting even more personal data about citizens. We all know about that comprehensive database the FBI is building, and some of us get a little nervous when we notice some new data collection method.

But that's not what bothers me about the thumbprint requirement. What bothers me about the thumbprint requirement is the extreme unlikelihood that it's going to serve any purpose whatsoever. You see, fingerprints are only useful when we have something to compare them with. In a criminal case, fingerprints help in two ways. If you have a suspect, you can match the fingerprints from the evidence to find out whether or not they match your suspect. And if you don't have a suspect, you can run the fingerprints through various databases to find out whether they match anyone whose fingerprints are already on file.

The latter can be a slow process, and it doesn't always bear fruit. After all, most of us don't have our fingerprints on file anywhere. If you've been arrested, applied for certain professional licenses, been in the military, etc., your fingerprints are in some database somewhere. Even finding those is dicey without a full-scale effort, because most searches don't include all of these databases. There's a hierarchy of priorities, and in some cases a backlog.

So, let's imagine that every home seller in Cook County provides a thumbprint. The vast majority of those thumbprints serve no immediate purpose, because there's nothing to match them against. If a problem arises--if it turns out that a home has been sold fraudulently--they may serve a couple of purposes. First, they could help the actual homeowner prove that he wasn't the one who sold the house. That's good...except that when a home has been fraudulently transferred by a third party, this usually isn't much of an issue. The second way it could help is that IF the actual seller's fingerprints were in some database somewhere, and IF the appropriate law enforcement agency ran the thumbprint against the right database, the perpetrator could be identified and prosecuted. The FBI currently has fingerprints on file for about 20% of the U.S. population.

So, the big question in my mind isn't "Is this too much of a burden?" or "Is this a civil rights issue?" or "What kind of liability issues does this raise?" or "Is it really fair to charge homeowners for this?", though those are all valid questions. My big question is this: What's the point?

I haven't seen any reporting thus far that sets forth any practical way in which this measure will help reduce fraudulent transfers.

Two Girls, One Cup, and Your Kids

2009-03-06T09:40:00.000-08:00

Last week, I took a trip across the country with a great bunch of middle-class suburban kids ages 11-14. Over the course of four days, Two Girls, One Cup was mentioned more than once. There were, mercifully, some kids who didn’t know what it was—but there were others willing to fill them in. A troubling number seemed to have actually watched the video. (If you have the good fortune not to know what I’m talking about, follow the link above—or suffice to say that the video sexualizes both the consumption of solid human waste and vomit.)

If I’d overheard one of these conversations in a public place, I think I would have engaged in that kind of wishful distancing that many of us employ instinctively when a child disappears—blame the parents, and that will mean that as long as I do everything right, my child is safe. The thing is, I know these kids and I know their parents, and while none of us are perfect these aren’t disaffected rich kids raised by nannies or latchkey kids whose single moms are working two jobs and forced to leave them alone too much. This is the heartland: family vacations, volunteering at the schools, homework before dinner.

And somewhere in the mix, a little Internet porn.

Two Girls, One Cup (and its ilk), it seems, has become the new millennium equivalent of sneaking a peek at dad’s Playboy…except it isn’t equivalent at all. Playboy sexualized pretty women in various stages of undress—something we might not have wanted shared with our sons too early, but that largely represented what they would eventually discover and experience. Not so Two Girls, One Cup and the like, which sexualize things most people never do—or never did, in the era when getting risqué meant sneaking a peek at Playboy.

The associations formed in the early days of sexuality are powerful and lasting, and there is no question that our kids are getting very different messages about what is sexy and sexual than the ones we were exposed to in our youth. Adolescent boys are going to react to naked women kissing one another—and if those women happen to be incorporating feces and vomit into their make-out session, those images and associations are going to get confused. Sexual triggers will develop where they don’t for most people (or didn’t in the past).

I suspect that we can’t avoid this entirely, any more than parents 50 years ago could prevent their adolescents from spying on the neighbor lady when she bathed or looking at the pictures their older brothers hid under the mattress. But the risk is something entirely different today, and access is a thousand times easier than it was even ten or fifteen years ago.

We all need internet filters, no matter how good our kids are. They’re also curious and subject to the buzz that gets going about something like this. We all need to be aware; parents of today’s adolescents cover a large age-range and have different degrees of familiarity with the Internet. Know what’s out there, and how readily available it is. You can read all about Two Girls, One Cup on Wikipedia, for instance. And we need to talk to our kids about more than how to avoid pregnancy and STDs. Uncomfortable as it might be for everyone involved, they need to know that there’s a wide range of healthy, loving sexual activity that doesn’t involve the sorts of images they’re seeing: images that may, for some, be the first exposure to explicitly sexual material.

NOTE: For those in the "you're a neo-fascist totalitarian" camp, please see my follow-up post: Why I Wouldn't Want My Son to Get Off on Watching Women Eat Feces

Apparently, Barbie Isn't Our Biggest Problem

2009-03-04T11:38:00.000-08:00

State Representative Jeff Eldridge has reportedly introduced legislation to ban Barbie dolls in West Virginia. The idea of zeroing in on Barbie in a time of economic distress, war, and rampant medical coverage issues is a bit absurd to begin with, but Eldridge's explanation as to why he's pushing for this measure is pure gold:

"Basically, I introduced legislation because the Barbie doll, I think, gives emphasis on if you're beautiful, you don't have to be smart."

I'm guessing Eldridge might have played with a few too many Barbie dolls in his youth.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Bearing Unexpected Fruit - Clinton's Questionable Order Deserves a New Look

2009-01-24T10:31:00.000-08:00

Sixteen years ago, Bill Clinton changed the policy on homosexuals in the military and angered virtually everyone in America. Conservatives who didn't think our boys should be forced to share barracks with gays were outraged that Clinton was letting them into the military at all; gay-rights supporters were equally upset by what they perceived as a cop-out that allowed homosexuals to serve in the military but still said it wasn't quite okay and that they'd better keep quiet about it.

But cultural change doesn't happen overnight: it usually happens in baby steps. A representative said earlier this week that President Barack Obama would change that policy. He said it unequivocally.

But more interesting than the announcement itself was the context in which I saw it announced. This brief introduction on Opposing Views reveals that President Obama is operating in a very different cultural context from that in which the Clinton order took effect.

That introduction says in part:

"Don't ask, don't tell" prohibits anyone who "demonstrate(s) a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts" from serving in the armed forces of the United States, as it "would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability." This policy of forbidding homosexuals to disclose their sexual orientation has proven extremely controversial over the years, and now it looks as though its days might be numbered.

Of course, if you were politically aware in the 90s, you know that's not entirely true--"don't ask, don't tell" scaled back a previous military policy that simply didn't allow homosexuals to serve, period. And a lot of Americans thought that was outrageous. In less than two decades, the debate has changed radically--the idea that homosexuals shouldn't be serving in the military has given way to a debate over how that should occur. That's a big change for a relatively short period in history.

Maybe it's time for everyone--including the Clinton camp, which has long acknowledged "don't ask, don't tell" as a misstep--needs to re-evaluate the order in its historical context and think of it as a foundation.

Litigation in America

2009-01-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

Today's Washington Post features an op-ed piece from George Will on litigation in America, and many of Will's points are well-taken. The examples he cites to show how frivolous litigation can grind normal human behavior to a halt are apt: teachers who are afraid to touch students even under urgent or the most innocent of circumstances; playgrounds stripped of the equipment that made them fun after inadequate supervision suits; a ban on running at recess.

But Will overlooks--whether innocently or intentionally--the real culprit in these cases. It's not parents who sue the schools when their children get hurt in ordinary accidents. It's not schools acting to protect themselves from litigation. It's insurance companies. And, unfortunately, the role that insurance companies play in such cases is generally invisible to the public. "Litigation happy" citizens take the blame. The court system takes the blame. But let's consider the anatomy of these cases:

A child is injured on the playground. The parents take the child to the doctor, and the doctor's office submits the bill to the child's medical insurance carrier. A week or two later, the parents receive a letter from the insurance company saying that they can't make a determination as to whether or not they should pay it, because it appears that there might be third-party liability. In other words, the insurance company isn't going to pay the medical bill if they might be able to pin it on the school. The parents then have to complete a form describing exactly what happened, so that the medical insurance company can decide whether or not someone else should be responsible.

Ironic, isn't it? The same medical insurance companies that tell us every day--that spend hundreds of millions of dollars telling us--that litigation is driving their costs up and making them overcharge us and our physicians have to put the brakes on to determine whether there might be someone else to sue.

If and when a lawsuit is filed, the actual defendant has little power over what happens next. For example, Will cites a case in which a teacher placed a restraining hand on the back of an unruly 7th grader and the school district was sued for $17 million and settled for $90,000.

If, in fact, all the teacher did was place his hand on the student's back, why did the school district settle? Of course, I'm not privy to the details of this particular case, but I can tell you how it goes in most cases. The school district has an insurance carrier. It's really the insurance carrier who is on the hook for the payout, and the insurance carrier's attorneys handle the case.

Now, if you were an individual--say, a teacher accused of abusing a student--you'd probably fight tooth and nail to clear your name, to keep that cloud from tainting the rest of your career. But the insurance company needn't concern itself with that sort of thing, and doesn't. The insurance company crunches the numbers and determines that it's less expensive to settle the case for $90,000 than it would be to go to trial and win--and so it pays up. The accused teacher has no say in the matter; the school district itself has very little.

And then the insurance companies come back out to the public with sad stories of how much these silly lawsuits are costing them, and how they're forced to raise prices. Because it's more cost-effective for them in the moment to hand out the cash, they create the precedent that invites lawsuits like this to move forward--as Will said himself, the case settled. SETTLED. Not the result of a rogue judge or a runaway jury, not the result of a slick lawyer playing the sympathies of the good people in the jury box--a conscious decision by the insurance company to maximize profits this quarter and the future be damned.

More on why access to litigation is critical to your safety as an American here: Corporate America Doesn't Care if You Die

Blogs that Appall Me, # 2

2008-10-04T07:26:00.000-07:00

It's been almost a year since I wrote my first Blogs that Appall Me post. As I said then, I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. I was hesitant to provide links and publicity to a blog I found appalling, and pointing out the negative is generally only useful if it leads to some kind of productive action--this didn't seem like it would. So, after that initial post, I let the idea languish. But I've once again run across a blog that so horrifies me that I just can't keep my mouth shut.

Today's nominee is called "WTF Are We Going to Do Now?" It's about having a baby, and it's NOT tongue-in-cheek.

Before I go on, let me remind you that the Internet is forever. Our kids are stuck with what we've written, whether that means someone Googling their names and turning up information they'd rather have kept private or it means making ugly discoveries themselves. We've all seen movies in which some adolescent child hears a story or stumbles across an old letter or journal entry and discovers that the circumstances of his birth weren't what he thought. But tomorrow's kids won't even have to work that hard.

Brad's child, for instance, will only have to visit the "about Brad" page (or the version of it that's archived on the Wayback Machine or some other archiving site) to learn that his father was "not excited about this baby" but had decided to "do his best" to love it since that's "a father's job". Just what every kid wants to hear, don't you think?

I want to give him the benefit of the doubt on referring to his upcoming child as "the new pet". I'm hoping that's just a matter of concealing the news from their older child until he's ready to share.

Brad's wife, Katy, is a little softer. She only refers to this new child as her biggest "life interruption". And she gives her husband props for "giving up most of what he wanted to do with his life" in order to support her and their existing child. My first reaction to that was just a wave of pity for her and that child, to feel that they were an onerous obligation that kept this man from the life he wanted instead of...you know...BEING the life he wanted. But then I thought a little further, and I couldn't even make sense out of it.

You see, in another post, Brad shares that he's been a stay-at-home dad for almost ten years. Apparently at the moment both parents are at home, but he's hoping the wife will go back to work soon. Based on his ten years of experience, he offers all kinds of sage advice about how it's our responsibility as parents to suck it up and pretend that we're enjoying time with our kids when we'd rather be playing xbox.

I have to admit that I feel a little sorry for Brad and Katy. When my daughter came tumbling into my life (also unexpected, and at a very bad time for both medical and financial reasons) it was like a little piece of the sun had unexpectedly landed in my house and just stayed around lighting the place up and spreading warmth. It's painful to think that there are parents who are so focused on what they're giving up that they can't take that kind of joy from their children. But it's all the more troubling that they choose to share it with the world and, ultimately, probably with their children.

For once in my life, I'm glad to see a deluge of full-page pop-up ads. Maybe people will give up before they get to the actual text, and the bots won't be able to wade through the crap and archive these atrocities.

The Biggest Set-Up in American Political History?

2008-09-14T19:04:00.000-07:00

There’s been a lot of back and forth about whether McCain’s outrage over Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment is phony or Obama’s outrage over McCain’s outrage is phony, but I think the outcry from Democrats misses the point…and the outcry from Republicans is intended to ensure that the rest of us do.

In Sarah Palin’s convention speech, she referred to herself as a “hockey mom” and devoted a lot of time to talking about her family and her PTA experience and such. That begged for a response—and McCain had to know it before Palin ever opened her mouth to speak. And maybe that was the plan, because the moment the Democrats (and other rational people) said, “Being a hockey mom doesn’t qualify you to be President”, crises of sexism rang from sea to shining sea. Never mind that NO ONE had suggested that being a hockey mom disqualified one from being qualified for public office. Sarah Palin identified herself as a hockey mom, loud and clear, and then the Republican spin-machine went straight to work repositioning “hockey mom” as a sexist term.

It’s brilliant, really. In her speech at the RNC, Sarah Palin artfully couched her greatest weaknesses in terms that wouldn’t allow anyone to point them out without raising the diversionary cry of “sexism”. Never mind that millions of the people now being accused of sexism were fervent supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton for the Presidency.

It wasn’t limited to “sexism”, either. Palin analogized herself to a pit bull and then when the moniker stuck, Republicans came out in force to protest the way Democrats were attacking her by, among other things, calling her a pit bull.

And it worked. Millions of Americans think those who don’t feel “hockey mom” is a credential worth boasting about in the Presidential race are sexists. Millions of Americans think it’s unprovoked meanness when someone points out that Sarah Palin compared herself to a pit bull. Suddenly, her weaknesses are her strengths, because anyone who points them out must be mean, sexist, or both…and therefore not worth listening to.

Talk about sexism. I can’t recall there ever before being a major-party political candidate at the national level whom we weren’t allowed to find fault with.

And it’s working. It’s such pure genius that I’d almost think Plain was qualified to be Vice-President, in a twisted, Machiavellian kind of way…if I thought for a minute that she was doing any more than reading what was put in front of her.

Universal Truth

2008-09-13T15:39:00.000-07:00

I was struck today by a quote from someone on a blogging forum I frequent. A brief, brilliant, clear, illuminating statement in that, "Well...enough said" sort of way that doesn't roll around very often.

This is what he said: Palin believes a lot of stupid shit.

It was a standalone comment, too. No elaboration, no examples, as if that were all there really was to say.

The author's blog is primarily about atheism. I'm an old school Catholic. The author is a teenage male. I'm a middle-aged mother. In a dozen or a hundred ways our perspectives and foundations and world views differ...and yet, the single sentence is so resoundingly, clearly complete and accurate that both of us can look at it and said, "Yep, that's pretty much all there is to say."

Out of the Mouths of Babes - Sarah Palin

2008-09-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

As we were leaving a store this afternoon, my 12-year-old daughter pointed out a headline saying that Lindsey Lohan and her girlfriend were having a baby. Now that I have a 12-year-old, I know a lot more than I ever expected (or wanted) to about teenage celebrities, but when she talks, I listen and engage. She's an adolescent, and opportunities may be limited.

I mentioned that I'd heard Lohan had been blogging about Sarah Palin, and the tone sounded positive.

"Why am I not surprised?" my daughter asked.

That surprised ME. "I'm very surprised," I told her. You know, Sarah Palin is very conservative and religious..."

"But," my daughter cut in, in that well, DUH tone of voice, "she's a wack job.

Identity politics at work again?

Colorado Amendment Question 48 - What's the Point?

2008-09-09T19:37:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that when I first heard about the proposed amendment to the Colorado Constitution that would redefine "person" to include human embryos from the moment of fertilization, I got a little excited. It wasn't for any of the reasons you might expect from a normal person, though--it was because I foresaw a HUGE legal glitch. You see, if the Colorado Constitution defined "person" in that way for purposes of Colorado law, there would have been a teeny, tiny problem: the state's murder statute would have been effectively rewritten to include first-trimester fetuses and would thus have violated the current interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Just like that, the statute could have been struck down and all murder could have been legal in Colorado.

I guess I wasn't the only one who thought of this, though, because the proposed amendment DOESN'T redefine "person" for purposes of all Colorado law: it only redefines the word as it's used in specific provisions of the Constitution.

Thus, no major legal snafu...just a whole lot of nothin'.

The provisions specified are, of course, those that relate to inalienable rights and such...but what to do? Life, for instance, is an inalienable right. And the Colorado Constitution may well be amended to extend that inalienable right to a fetus at the moment of conception. But then what? The current interpretation of the U.S. Constitution--the interpretation that's prevailed for decades--says that states can't limit the right to elective abortion in the first trimester. Thus, the state of Colorado can deem that unborn child a "person" and say it can't be deprived of life without due process of law, but what due process is available? The only due process permissible under the U.S. Constitution would be a hearing or other process to determine that the woman was, in fact, in the first trimester of her pregnancy. Once that was determined, the U.S. Constitution would prevent any further regulation of her access to an abortion.

Doesn't do that "person" a whole lot of good to have been renamed, does it?

Naturally, lawmakers and lobbyists alike know this. So what are they doing? What's the point of spending time and money and commanding the time and attention of Colorado voters as if this were a serious issue, when they all know that the practical effect of the amendment will be nonexistant?

I guess it looks good on a resume.

Why Would White Supremacists Fear Obama?

2008-08-29T22:20:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, three white supremacists were arrested and, although they haven't been charged, officials appear to believe that they planned to attempt to assassinate Barack Obama. At a glance, the idea of white supremacists wanting to assassinate a black Presidential candidate makes a lot of sense; upon reflection, it makes it appear that they lack the courage of their convictions.

After all, don't white supremacists believe that whites are...well...superior? Isn't it, in their view, a natural superiority, granted by God or nature or some combination thereof?

But if they're so confident that whites are superior and blacks are inferior, then what do they have to fear? Even if a black man could win the Presidency, he wouldn't be up to the job in the way that our "superior" white Presidents have been, right? And wouldn't that just prove their point?

It seems to me that if white supremacists think a black man is enough of a threat that they want to assassinate him, they must fear that he'll prove them wrong.

Who's Raising that "Perfect Child" Now, Sarah?

2008-08-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

In the hours since John McCain announced that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin would be his running mate, there's been a cacaphony of pro and con discourse. Was Palin chosen for her credentials, experience, positions and talents, or was she chosen because she's a woman and McCain hopes to court voters who previously supported Senator Hillary Clinton? Palin is low on experience, but she has a reputation for pulling out all the stops, and just might restore some of McCain's lost maverick image. Perhaps more significantly, she's a good looking woman with the kind of life and history that makes other women nod and say "You go, girl!"

But through all the buzz--positive and negative--one thing has been troubling me: one thing that I haven't heard mentioned by anyone else.

Just this past spring, Palin gave birth to her fifth child, a child with Downs Syndrome. As a pro-life politician, Palin gained points and gathered accolades simply for having her child--after all, many Downs Syndrome babies are aborted. But what is she doing now?

One of the things that has always troubled me about a large sector of the pro-life movement is the idea many pro-life activists seem to have that it's only their business for as long as it takes to make sure that the baby is born alive. Sure, some people active in the movement work to provide support to those new mothers and make it possible for them to raise healthy children, but for many, the victory is achieved and the battle over when a woman safely passes into her second trimester and can no longer obtain an abortion on demand.

It's always seemed to me that if those people were really so "pro life", they'd be worried about the babies and the toddlers and the adolescents, too...not JUST the unborn.

I don't know enough about Sarah Palin to judge her sincerity one way or the other, but her actions right now are reminding me quite a lot of those people who want to bar the doors of the abortion clinic but then consider the child "not our problem" once it's actually born. She's been applauded and patted on the back by all those "pro life" and "pro family" organizations for giving birth to the child, and now she's...going off to run for Vice President. How, exactly, is it "pro family" for a woman with a special needs infant to hit the campaign trail vying for one of the most demanding jobs in the world? Maybe it's just me, but I've always thought that part of being pro family was putting the needs of your family ahead of your own ambitions.

Huh..I Guess 4016 Diggers CAN Be Wrong...

2008-08-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

Yep, 4016. That's how many Diggs a single article on my webzine, Rational Outrage, got not long before Digg decided that the domain was spam and banned us.

My webmaster inquired right away. After all, our site is entirely non-commercial--we're not selling anything, and there's no advertising at all on the site. And to the best of our knowledge, about a dozen of our posts have been submitted to Digg since Rational Outrage launched on March 17. That didn't seem excessive.

The response from Digg stated: As you know, Digg is a community-driven website – our community has consistently reported the domain to which you refer as spam.

Uh huh.

"Consistently", while they were upvoting our school bus rape story 4016 times: http://digg.com/world_news/7_Year_Old_Raped_On_School_Bus_School_Court_Don_t_Care Apparently those 40,000+ Digg visitors who crashed our server and left dozens of comments were just doing spam research.

So then, if that doesn't count for anything, surely the little ones won't, either:

Not the police taser abuse story with 225 Diggs.

Not the maverick composter article with 125 Diggs.

In fact, five of the twelve stories submitted to Digg received more than 100 Diggs. Surprising "the community" could find time to "consistently report" this domain as spam, what with all that upvoting going on.

The cut and paste from Digg also suggested: While we welcome users to submit their own content, overdoing it often incites the users to mark the user as a spammer, the site as a spam site, and otherwise decent content as blogspam.

12 stories. Six months. Submitted by six different people, three of whom have no connection to the site.

I've always pointed out that sites like Digg are private companies and free to make whatever decisions they like within the bounds of the law. If they want to ban us because they don't like our politics or our color scheme, they're perfectly free to do so. But guys...you don't gotta LIE.

UPDATE: On Wednesday evening, August 27, we received a brief email from Digg apologizing for the "confusion" and saying that we should be clear to submit pages from Rational Outrage again. We did not receive any explanation, either from Digg or in response to my requests in the Digg comments for one of the people who had been "consistently reporting us as spam" to explain on the forum or via email. However, we do seem to have been unbanned.

Remember Roe v. Wade?

2008-08-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

Or perhaps the better question would be: Did you ever know what Roe v. Wade says?

I've seen pro-life literature that says, "Did you know that Roe v. Wade allows elective abortions up to the seventh month of pregnancy?" Nope, I didn't know that. And I read the case.

I've seen seen pro-choice people insist that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, the whole country would be immediately cast into a dark world of back-alley abortions...overlooking, of course, the fact that before that happened, each state would have to enact independent legislation prohibiting abortion.

With the Presidential election around the corner, the issue is once again getting a lot of press, but little (if any) of it accurately represents just what Roe v. Wade said or the role it plays in the future of abortion law across the country.

The law that was challenged (and struck down) in Roe v. Wade criminalized abortion in all cases except where it was a life-saving procedure. The United States Supreme Court found that such a restrictive statute violated the 14th Amendment Due Process Clause and that states could exercise varying degrees of discretion in regulating abortion, depending upon the stage of pregnancy.

During approximately the first trimester, states could not limit the right to abortion--that was to be left to the "medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician."

From the end of the first trimester to viability, the state could "regulate abortion in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health".

After viability, the state could regulate--or even prohibit--abortion except where necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.

One interesting point is that the regulation allowed post-first-trimester was required to be reasonably related to maternal health, whereas that shifted post-viability and the state interest in preserving the "potentiality" of human life was deemed sufficient reason for the restrictions.

It is important to note, however, that the Supreme Court ruling only placed a limit upon the regulations a state could impose--it did not impose any regulations itself. Thus, for instance, when pro-life activists say that Roe v. Wade "allows" for abortion minutes before birth, it's technically true...because Roe v. Wade doesn't put any restrictions on abortion; it simply sets forth the circumstances under which a state may do so. And that's as it should be; health and welfare provisions are specifically reserved to the states under the U.S. Constitution (and in any case wouldn't be the purview of the judiciary). What Roe v. Wade said about late term abortions was that states could forbid them, except where the mother's life was in danger. Period.

On the flipside, if Roe v. Wade were reversed, it wouldn't mean that abortion was illegal--it would mean that if states so chose, they could MAKE abortion illegal.

Obviously, Roe v. Wade was a landmark decision that changed the face of abortion law across the U.S. But abortion law is made by the states, within the parameters set forth in Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases. Before millions of Americans--pro-life or pro-choice--base their votes in the Presidential election on the chance that the next President might appoint Supreme Court Justices who might have occasion to rule on a case that might impact the Roe decision, we should all understand what the case says, and what that means to the states.

And Now, For Another Perspective...

2008-07-29T17:07:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I shared with you a touching and reality-based view of Bosnia from someone who'd been there. Today, I can't help but share a much more humorous (but nearly as serious) description of the inner workings of the U.S. Postal Service.

This may have rung especially true with me because of my own past experiences with the U.S. Postal service...experiences that once led my five-year-old daughter to tug on my sleeve as I stood at the counter in my local post office and say innocently "How 'bout FedEx?" But somehow I think that if you've ever tried to ship a package...or pick one up...or figure out why one with someone else's name on it was left on your porch...this post is for you.

Bosnia Up Close and Personal

2008-07-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

This post by an American lawyer who worked in Bosnia in 2001 brings home the destruction wrought by Radovan Karadzic. Maybe his crimes aren't so far away after all--in time or space: Karadzic's Destruction of Bosnia Last Long After War

Are you REALLY entitled to your opinion?

2008-07-01T22:17:00.000-07:00

I'm inclined to say no.

Not to everyone, of course, and not even to those who disagree with me. No, I just want to cut off this whole "right to my opinion" thing for people who don't have a freaking clue and can't be bothered to get one.

Again, whether or not I think you have a clue does NOT depend on whether or not you agree with me. It depends entirely upon whether or not you have a basic understanding of the basic factual information necessary to FORM a meaningful opinion. If you'd prefer not to be bothered with the facts, that's fine: just acknowledge that you don't know enough to have an opinion and SHUT UP. Or, if you really, really feel strongly about your "rights" (even though you're probably misusing the term), go right ahead and form an opinion without any of the necessary information...but then keep it to yourself. Please. Don't confuse others, who might assume that you know what you're talking about.

And here's a tip: it's not a good investment of time to go around forming strong opinions about things that never happened.

Just a few examples:

The Supreme Court did NOT make a recent ruling relating to victims of domestic violence--rather, it made a ruling with universal applicability to the admission of certain kinds of testimony in criminal cases.

A UK court did NOT sentence a man to one day in jail for the murder of a prostitute--it sentences him to one day in addition to approximately thirty months of time already served.

The woman who burned herself with McDonald's coffee did NOT win millions of dollars--and she did suffer very serious injuries necessitating reconstructive surgery.

Bottom line: learn the facts. Or don't. It's your call. But if you choose not to know anything then please, please, please...also choose not to share your ignorance.

Look How Far We Haven't Come

2008-06-07T11:10:00.000-07:00

You've probably seen a lot of press coverage over the past few days concerning the Connecticut man who was struck by an automobile and then lay paralyzed in the street while bystanders went on about their business and passing cars switched lanes to go around him without so much as slowing down.

Despite the outrage all of us seem to feel while sitting in our living rooms and watching the inaction of the people on the street, it's impossible to ignore the fact that there were a lot of people out there--people who weren't together, weren't conferring, were of various ages and presumably various other demographics...and they all behaved pretty much the same way. They are us. And I know the inclination is to immediately protest that WE would have done something. I feel the same way.

But do we honestly believe that those people who stood there on the street and did nothing wouldn't have said exactly the same thing if they'd seen that clip on their televisions instead of finding themselves in the middle of the action? I think the vast majority of them would have.

44 years ago, a woman named Catherine Genovese was murdered in Queens. "Kitty" Genovese became something of a poster child for what's wrong with our society today...err...I mean...what was wrong with our society 44 years ago...because 38 people watched her being attacked and ultimately killed. The attack reportedly went on for half an hour, but not only did no one intervene, no one called the police until it was over and she lay in the street, dead from 17 stab wounds.

The public, of course, was horrified.

And here we are, 44 years later, still shocked by the same kind of reaction.

Maybe it's time to stop shaking our heads in disgust and wondering what's wrong with other people and try to take an honest look at the roots of this kind of reaction BEFORE we find ourselves in circumstances in which we'll have to find out what we're really made of.

What Passes for Inspiration

2008-05-14T16:53:00.000-07:00

I've probably mentioned before that I don't turn on the television very often, but this evening I wanted to watch John Edwards endorsement of Barack Obama and then I didn't turn it back off. Big mistake. What came on afterward involved some soap opera actress who'd gone in for lap band surgery.

Even (insert name of big celebrity magazine), they told us, was covering her "inspirational journey".

In the interest of full disclosure I will say that I have some feelings about lap band surgery, and they're not positive ones. But that's not what this post is about. It's about the "inspirational journey" of someone who paid $12-25,000 for a surgical procedure to make weight loss easier.

Have we really fallen that far in this country, that a 45-minute surgical procedure and the weight loss that follows is an "inspirational journey"? Have we really grown that weak? Are we that short on true inspiration?

We Have a Winner

2008-04-10T21:22:00.000-07:00

Since I started this blog about a year ago, I've written about the outrageous, the unbelievable, and the just plain stupid. It's often seemed that there were so many varied things wrong with our world today that they fell into an undifferentiated mass. Until today, that is.

Today, a co-worker sent me this link, and everything changed.

Yes, that's right. For a mere...well, okay, for several thousand dollars...you can have "the carbon from your loved one" made into a synthetic diamond and...you know...wear pieces of your dead friend or family member.

The process is simple, really. You just have your beloved cremated, ship the ashes off to LifeGem with a small boatload of money, and the company uses its "patented process" to press your loved one's carbon into a synthetic diamond just for you. You can also buy settings, of course, and cases, and everything else you might need to go with your ~~chunk of dead relative~~ beautiful new piece of jewelry.

The LifeGem website contains testimonials that I can only hope are faked. Here are a few excerpts:

"I've requested in my will that my children turn me into a diamond when I die."

"Knowing that my mother is in the stone and I can take her with me is an awesome feeling."

Some are even more...disturbing. I don't want to recreate those here because these letters, if they are real, were written by people who have suffered terrible losses and evidently are finding some comfort. Unfortunately, that comfort is being offered in a way that is not only disturbing, but extraordinarily expensive. The least expensive loved-one-turned-diamond that I was able to find on the website was $2,699. That's just the diamond--no setting or anything--and there's only one that comes that cheap.

Our loved ones, of course, are more than their carbon. It's unfortunate that a company has sprung up to capitalize on the pain of people in mourning by pretending that crushing a bit of their organic matter into a diamond is what remembrance is all about...and that if you REALLY loved your husband (or mother, or child, or wife, or cat), you'd go with the SEVEN thousand dollar diamond....

A Little Entrecard Humor

2008-03-07T20:32:00.000-08:00

If you use Entrecard, you're probably accustomed to seeing those little gold bars at the bottom of the card reading "Drop yours" or "Thanks". If you don't use Entrecard, you may see those cards and not know what they are--some of them are pretty mysterious looking, just images with no explanation or seemingly random taglines.

I'm using Entrecard with varying degrees of seriousness on four blogs at the moment: this one, Catholic Inside, RockStories and The Search Engine Question Pool. Since, as Entrecarders know all too well, each blog requires a separate account, that means four accounts for me--so I'm usually logged in to one or another.

Today, though, I visited one of my blogs from my work computer, and so wasn't logged in to any of my many Entrecard accounts...and I got to see what non-participants see. It wasn't all that much different; I hadn't realized, though, that if you weren't logged in to Entrecard, that gold bar at the bottom of the card said, "Get one".

It might not even have registered with me today, except that my widget happened to be displaying a card with no tagline, no text at all...just a close-up of a very lovely Asian woman. With, you know, a gold bar that said "Get one" under her picture...

Call for Submissions

2008-02-10T21:49:00.000-08:00

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I think there's a lot wrong with the world we live in today.

You also undoubtedly know that I'm not a fan of rhetoric, and I think important messages get lost when people start throwing around dramatic terminology where it doesn't belong.

I'm convinced that I'm not alone in this, and that there are rational people out there with legitimate points to make about the insanity that surrounds us. That's why I'm starting Rational Outrage, a webzine dedicated to identifying the insanity without jumping on the bandwagon.

If you've ever read this blog and thought, "Yeah, and what about....?", you may already have a Rational Outrage article in your brain. Check out the Rational Outrage submission guidelines!

The Accidental Social Networker

2008-01-30T19:33:00.000-08:00

When Alan from The Thin Red Line posted a message on Blog Catalog saying that he and Dane Morgan were running a writing contest at Chain Drop, my interest was instantly piqued. After all, I'll take any excuse to write, and this excuse had the added benefit of being sponsored by a couple of bloggers I like and respect. What a deal. Or so I thought until I read the description and discovered that they wanted me to write about social networking and how to use it to your advantage.

That deflated me a bit for a moment, because...well...I DON'T use social networking. I just kind of go out into the blogging and Internet forum world and do what I do in real life. It took about sixty seconds for me to see the irony in my assessment. There I was, contemplating how sad it was that I had nothing to contribute to the effort set forth by these two interesting, knowledgeable bloggers I'd really come to appreciate in the Blog Catalog forums...you're way ahead of me, right?

So I thought I'd stop over and check out the actual rules, and this is what I found about midway through the opening paragraph: "Dane says to me 'what we need is to bring in all those Writers like in Tiffany’s writing group….They would write good pieces about how they use social networking'. " I guess that writers' group had slipped my mind for a moment. It's part of my non-social-networking campaign, I guess. It currently has 627 members.

So while I'm not doing any social networking, rarely thinking about driving traffic to my blogs, and posting to my blogs when--and only when--the impulse strikes, I am in fact getting regular traffic from a couple of social networking sites, meeting a lot of interesting bloggers, and amassing a writing group of several hundred members. Here's my secret: I show up in online places and do exactly what I'd do in real life. I talk to interesting people whose thought processes intrigue me and I answer questions when I can and lend a helping hand where I'm able. And people respond--at least a fair number of people--by visiting my blog and commenting on my posts and linking to me and Stumbling my posts, and the next thing I know, there's traffic.

Don't get me wrong. I'm quite sure that if I took a more calculated approach, there would be MORE traffic. But I think on some level, the foundation is the same as it was when our parents were whispering advice as we headed out the door to kindergarten or on our first dates: Just be yourself.

Cut the Drama

2008-01-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that there was a part of me--a fairly large part--that wanted to title this post "Please Don't Say Stupid Shit Anymore". I thought I'd reined it in, but apparently not, since I felt the need to share that with you all. Still, "Cut the Drama" seemed appropriate. That's what my mother used to say when I, at 12 or 13, wailed that she was "ruining my life" because she wouldn't let me go to some slumber party or mortally embarrassed me by picking up the phone and saying it was past my bedtime while I was talking to a boy. In my mind, that's a pretty good analogy for the drama that's sweeping the Internet right now.

Just a couple of days ago I wrote about free speech, and how everyone whose language is criticized or whose post is removed from a message board starts howling about the 1st amendment, having clearly missed the little part about how it only restricts governmental agents. And yes, I'll be honest: part of the problem is simply that inaccuracy makes my brain explode. I'd swear that I actually felt my brain melting a little this afternoon when someone in an online forum protested that Paypal had "labeled him a criminal" because they'd asked him to supply proof of identity. But there's a much bigger problem.

Let's take censorship, for instance. Censorship is a serious political issue. Governmental censorship can prevent the population of a country from obtaining accurate information about economics, international relations and much more. It can eliminate the conduits for information that allow people to cast educated votes, and even to make more dramatic decisions if and when they're called for. It once was, and should be, a powerful term. When someone suggests that censorship is taking place, we should all sit up and take notice and take steps to learn whether or not that allegation is accurate. But do we? Of course not. And the reason is crystal clear: every whiny-ass college kid who has ever had an article pulled from his association newsletter because he gratuitously used the f-word a dozen times or bored housewife whose comment was moderated on someone's blog is yelling "censorship!" With all those clamoring voices shouting the same word (and most of them coming to nothing), how would we ever be able to distinguish the occasional true voice in the crowd? Would we be able to reclaim that word and use it correctly if, for instance, the United States government prohibited publication of photographs that might tend to illustrate the number of young citizens we're losing in Iraq? Would we be able to separate out that kind of censorship?

This week alone I've seen multiple references to censorship on message boards and in discussion forums. I've read an allegation that someone's free speech rights were violated when a discussion thread on a privately owned forum was deleted. I've read the sad tale of the man "labeled as a criminal" by the big bad financial company that wanted to be sure he was who he said he was. And I've been asked (in a group setting) whether I'll miss my "free will" because California is considering energy saving measures.

Do we really live in a world where our biggest problems are having comments rejected on blogs and being asked to conserve limited natural resources? I hope so. I really do. And it's not just because that would be an awfully cushy world to live in. It's because we've expended so much energy and drama, used up so much powerful language and overworked our soapboxes on those little issues that we won't have any way of getting people's attention when something more serious rolls around.

Freedom of Speech...Let Me Tell You What It's NOT

2008-01-14T22:12:00.000-08:00

The right we refer to as "freedom of speech" is, as you probably know, a Constitutional right. It's part of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, one of the amendments known collectively as the Bill of Rights. Do you know what it says?

If you do...if you're really, really sure you do...you don't need to read any further. But if you're like the dozens and dozens of people I seem to encounter in online forums every day, you'd better check this out:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It's a short little amendment packed with important concepts, and maybe that's why one of the most critical concepts of all tends to get overlooked. You might have noticed it this time around. Yep, I'm referring to the introductory clause (Who pays attention to those? You just write those to help stretch your paper to meet the minimum page requirement, right?) that MAKES IT CRYSTAL CLEAR THAT THE FIRST AMENDMENT LIMITS ONLY GOVERNMENTAL ACTION.

In fact, if you simply look at the language of the amendment itself, you'll note that it refers only to Congress. What about states? Surely states are limited, too? And, in fact, they are. That's because the restrictions on Congressional action set forth in the Bill of Rights have, in large part, been explicitly extended to the states and other governmental agencies.

They have not, however, been extended to your next door neighbor. It is NOT a "violation of free speech" when he tells you to stop screaming at your wife in front of his kids. It hasn't been extended to your local video store owner--he's free to decide not to offer titles that contain material he considers offensive. It's NOT a "violation of free speech" when a message board administrator or blog hosting company takes down your comment. It's not even a "violation of free speech" when a wholly unreasonable right-wing religious leader points a gun at you and tells you to repent your liberal leanings or burn in hell forever. Some of these things are perfectly legal. Some fall into gray area--for instance, the message board administrators and blog hosts are typically bound by their own terms of service. Some--like the guy with the gun--are flat-out whacked and criminal offenses to boot.

But none of them...not a single one...implicates your free speech rights. Why? Because there was no governmental action. Period. A website cannot infringe on your free speech rights (unless it's operated by a governmental entitity). Another user on a message board or in a forum cannot infringe your free speech rights (unless he acts "under color of law", representing some governmental entity). A restaurant owner cannot infringe your free speech rights...you get the idea, right?

Fifty times a day, someone on the Internet yells "what about free speech?" in a context that has nothing to do with governmental entities--and those are only the ones I see. The only viable answer is, "What about it?"

Taser / MP3 Combo - What More Could a Jogger Ask For?

2008-01-11T21:43:00.000-08:00

Looking for a little gift for the jogger who has everything? Why not a nice taser holster / mp3 player combo? Think of the space it saves! And, if you're on the fence, surely the fact that it's available in a nice leopard print will tip the scales for you. Yet another benefit to the combo is that taser victims tend to make an unpleasant screaming sound, and the mp3 player will help to drown that out.

It's interesting that Taser International, which until recently had successfully defended every lawsuit brought against the company as a result of a taser death, has opted to start quietly settling taser lawsuits at the same time that the company is actively marketing tasers to the general public. Aren't police departments across the country injuring and killing plenty of people with their tasers? Do they really need reinforcements? And do WE really need to hand them an excuse to use force against every kid with an mp3 player? ("I thought he had a taser, your honor--honest I did!")

Customer Service...Need I Say More?

2008-01-06T20:32:00.000-08:00

Recently, I saw a forum discussion on how difficult Paypal was to work with, and I was very surprised. I've done tens of thousands of dollars worth of business through Paypal, and I've never had a problem.

But did you catch what I just said? I almost didn't.

It seemed to me that Paypal couldn't be more user friendly. It was easy to get someone on the phone, and to talk to the same person more than once. Phone calls were returned; emails were answered promptly, and in such a way that it was obvious that they'd been read by a real human being.

That contrasted sharply with my experience of some other online businesses. Amazon.com, in particular, served as a counterpoint to Paypal in my mind. About a year ago, I purchased eight books all at once through Amazon. For reasons I still haven't been able to sort out, seven of those books were correctly billed to my current debit card and the eighth charged to a checking account I'd closed several months earlier. The ensuing nightmare still hasn't been fully resolved, and I'm an attorney with a background in consumer protection work--I can't begin to imagine what dealing with Amazon is like for the average person.

First, because I lived in the modern-day, real-world equivalent of Mayberry, the bank paid the charge despite the fact that the account had been closed for several months. However, the bank also sent notice to Amazon that the account was closed. So Amazon sent the charge on to Certegy for collection.

When I got a collection letter from Certegy (requesting, of course, my original $9 plus a $25 charge), I called them and pointed out that the charge had been paid, and that I had documentation from the bank to prove it. They told me I'd have to take that up with Amazon, because they got their information from Amazon.

Except when I called Amazon, they told me that it was "out of their hands" and I'd have to resolve it with Certegy. They seemed entirely oblivious to (or more likely, impervious to) their potential liability for passing along false information to Certegy and then refusing to correct it. All together, I spent more than four hours on the telephone with Amazon and Certegy. Amazon never budged an inch. No one at either company was interested in seeing my proof that the charge had been paid. Certegy, at least, was a bit more sensitive to the legal ramifications of trying to collect a debt that had never existed, and they went away.

Well, for the moment. I did hear from them again a few months later with a required disclosure letter letting me know that they'd had some sort of breach and personal data had been disclosed (good thing for me this all related to an account that had, by that point, been closed for more than a year, hm?)

So I was loving Paypal. I was STUNNED to hear someone describe something very similar to my story above. Why didn't they just call Jen? She was always such a help. It sounded like we were dealing with two different companies.

And then it hit me.

We were.

I might never have caught it were it not for my experience with Dell. A few years ago, I ordered a computer from Dell, and then just a few months later, my mother ordered a similar computer. There was only one significant difference: I purchased my computer through a corporate discount program offered by a multi-national corporation, and my mother ordered hers all by herself. MY computer was listed under the name of a company with hundreds of locations around the world, and it rapidly became clear that when I called customer service or tech support for issues relating to my computer, I was routed to an entirely different department than when I called about those same issues relating to my mother's computer.

Perhaps "I've done tens of thousands of dollars of business through Paypal and I've never had a problem" isn't evidence at all. Perhaps it's an explanation. And I'm not okay with that.

That doesn't mean that I think your biggest and highest-paying customers shouldn't get special perks. That's only good business. If you want to have a gold circle support team that assists the major accounts, that's fine with me. If you want to send them little gifts at Christmas time and offer small services for free that others might have to pay for, it's all good. But that all assumes a basic level of competent, well-intentioned customer service for everyone. We don't seem to be in a place anymore where the general public gets the basic service and the big spenders get perks--we seem to be in a place where the general public can't get service at all, and the big spenders get what used to be perceived as the basics.

I have a growing list in my head of what I think those bottom line offerings should be, but this post is already so long that it's in danger of being mistaken for an e-book, so I'll save that for another day. Suggestions are welcome.

Who Wants to...Go to Jail?

2007-12-06T15:18:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-12-05T19:06:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-02T19:45:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-01T22:29:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-06T19:00:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-30T22:21:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

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'

2007-10-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-10-13T08:18:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-09-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-08T12:50:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-09-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

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....

2007-08-28T20:45:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-08-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-08-02T18:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-22T17:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-07-13T19:33:00.000-07:00

...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

2007-07-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-06T15:55:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-27T21:39:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-06-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-20T00:23:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-18T21:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-17T13:57:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-12T21:04:00.000-07:00

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 even object to Wilson having been charged with a crime, but 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 outcome 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 they are 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 precations. 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 also a conservative Catholic, which means that 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, exactly, 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

2007-06-01T05:17:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-30T20:34:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-30T07:55:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-28T13:48:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-28T08:51:00.000-07:00

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...

2007-05-27T18:09:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-26T12:11:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-25T06:54:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-23T10:48:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-22T07:47:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-15T20:36:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

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....

2007-05-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-05-02T21:40:00.000-07:00

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.

Do Your Homework...Go to Jail

2007-04-28T17:42:00.000-07:00

Recently, I posted about my dismay at the way all discussion about the Virginia Tech shooter seemed to hinge on the question of whether we should have known that he was a danger to others, with inadequate thought about the human being who was obviously living in an emotional state most of us are fortunate enough never to experience. My post came largely in response to a comment I'd read from someone else asking why the student hadn't been suspended from school--as if getting him out of one particular place would have somehow helped in the greater scheme of things.

On Thursday, the Chicago Tribune ran an astonishing story about a high school student who wrote a "disturbing" paper for his creative writing class. This student wasn't suspended either. He was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

I'm sure it's not relevant, but the student's last name is Lee. Right, like Bruce Lee. Draw your own conclusions.

Astonishingly, Cary Police Chief Ron Delelio reportedly said that disorderly conduct "can also apply when someone's writings can disturb an individual."

Damn. I hope Brett Easton Ellis never visits Illinois. Or Stephen King, even. Or what about Ken Kesey? I think he might be dead, so he's probably safe from arrest, but has ever a more disturbing story been told than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? I didn't think so.

Fortunately, it's just a misdemeanor with a maximimum penalty of 30 days and a maximum fine of $1,500, so for an up-ando-coming writer (or even an established one), the press might be worth the inconvenience. For a reported straight-A high school student in a smallish town in Illinois, I'm not thinking it will pay off quite so well.

So I'm not a Big Fan of Blogs...But I love Disney Princesses

2007-04-26T20:22:00.000-07:00

Let's overlook for a moment the fact that I have five personal blogs and eight professional ones. It's all in a day's work, mostly. I'm not a big fan of blogs. That is, I don't get why a lot of the people who blog blog, and I don't get why a lot of people who talk all the time about how they don't like to blog start blogs, and I REALLY don't get why people read blogs. I mean, industry blogs are one thing. Blogs that provide commentary on recent developments in your field, blogs that provide little informational bulletins about things you need to know about...that I get. I guess if you're a teenager and your favorite rock star has a blog and you don't realize that he actually pays some PR person to write the blog for him and doesn't even know what it says, then you might have an inclination to read the blog. But just wandering the internet reading about how other bloggers burned their toast this morning or had a revelation while stuck in traffic or wish they'd remembered to kiss their husbands goodbye?

Um.

Yeah.

This evening, though, I ran across a blog post about Disney Princesses.

Let me just say that I have deep appreciation for Disney Princesses. DEEP. It's not that I especially like them (or even that I did when I was a child). It probably comes as no surprise to you that I'm not much of a romantic. "Someday My Prince Will Come" is not exactly my theme song. I find happily ever after sort of unlikely, and there's a part of me that thinks it would be sort of cloying even if it turned out to be true. Okay, a big part.

So why the love of Disney Princesses?

It's not the gowns (though I really like the pink one Cinderella has on BEFORE the fairy godmother got involved...I always thought her own dress was better than the magical one).

And it's not the veracity for sure, because I've ALWAYS been bothered by the fact that everything ELSE turned back to what it was before at midnight, but the glass slippers remained. Oh, sure, I told myself it was because they were the only wholly created item, while everything else was some other item or creature in disguise, but I didn't really buy it.

It's this: I have an eleven-year-old daughter. Eleven. You know, BALANCED ON THE VERY FINE LINE BETWEEN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE? And she loves Disney Princesses. She's occasionally tempted by Green Day posters and such, but thus far she has eschewed them in favor of keeping her room Pink. Princess comforter, outrageously priced (but gorgeous) Princess blinds, Princess sheets, Princess lamp, Princess posters, some....Princess THING I can't even identify that scrolls Cinderella and the Prince across a lighted background. You get the picture. And it's a picture of a little girl's room, at least for a minute longer. It's a picture of such excitement over Cinderella III that I end up letting her open the DVD the night before her birthday so we can watch it while it's still the weekend. It's a picture of a child/teen who sometimes tries to get out of the house in make-up, but sometimes plays INSIDE in a tiara with a magic wand.

I'm a fan of Princesses, and especially Cinderella, whom I have always preferred in her apron with her hair loose and her head covered by a scarf. Frankly, until I saw this blog today, I didn't even know that the Princesses were under attack. But this lady, whomever she might be, has it covered. I don't even have to defend those Princesses. And even more surprising, I found myself reading the post before...and the one before that.

Today We're Taking On...

2007-04-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

Content scraping. Which is really just the modern, web-based way of saying copyright infringement. I dislike copyright infringement. I dislike people and companies who opt to capitalize on (read: steal) the creative efforts of others instead of creating something their own damned selves.

That's why I so enjoyed this post, which appeared today on two blogs...which is sort of the point. The original post appears here: The Injury Blog

The premise of the post is that another site, InjurySite dot com, has been stealing the Injury Blog's content on a daily basis for months. And the proof is in the posting. Because the InjurySite dot com's blog has a surprising post heading up its front page today...the headline reads ENTIRE INJURY SITE BLOG SCRAPED FROM TOTAL INJURY BLOG. It's worth checking out, just for a laugh, but you'll have to type in the URL. I'm not giving the lousy thieves an inbound link to help jack up their search ranking--not even one from a little personal blog with no page rank.

The remainder of the post explains that Total Injury employs a staff of designers, researchers, writers, even attorneys to produce its website, whereas the Injury Site simply steals the content produce by Total Injury and puts it on their blog without reading it. In fact, the post says, if you're reading this on the Injury Site, then you KNOW they're not even reading their own content...and as of this posting, you can read all about the shady practices the Injury Site engages in...right on the front page of the Injury Site.

Buying a Gun? Bring a Friend!

2007-04-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the most recent shooting tragedy, I've heard a lot of commentary that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. One writer suggested that "greed" had kept university officials from taking proper action, because a student with this kind of emotional problems shouldn't have been allowed to continue to attend. That may or may not be true, but it's difficult for me to understand how taking a mentally and emotionally unstable young man and kicking him out of school might have made him less dangerous. Tell me someone should have taken more action to intervene, to get him mental health services, and maybe I'll agree. Frankly, I don't know enough about the specifics of his behavior (and neither do you) to know what was reasonable under the circumstances, but those sorts of reactions seem natural. There are plenty of people after the fact to talk about how "off" his behavior was in various ways, and it seems like that's always the case.

And then, of course, everyone says, "We never thought he'd do anything like THIS!"

Oh.

Well.

That's okay then. If you have a guy in your class or your dorm suite or working alongside you every day who seems entirely isolated ("he had no friends"), who seems immersed in violent fantasies (as suggested by fellow writing students and instructors), etc., etc., etc., then that's okay so long as you don't expect him to kill other people, right? I mean, surely someone would have stepped in if...um...they'd known they were at risk themselves.

But the idea that the administration should have gotten him out of the way smacks of so much more avoidance in my mind. It seems to suggest that they should have ensured that if he was going to blow up, he wouldn't kill their students.

The one thing that can't be ignored, though, is that after the fact people are always saying, "he was always a loner". So much so that it's become a kind of sick joke. Someone suggested to me this week that rather than background checks and permits and fingerprints and all that, it might make sense simply to require anyone buying a gun to bring four friends. It made me laugh in the way that unfortunate truths sometimes do, but it also made me think that maybe we're all too focused on the gun.

It's a horrible tragedy when someone implodes to the point of killing dozens of innocent people, and it makes living in our world very scary. But the sad fact is that a lot of people are living on that edge in our society, and maybe whether or not they're a threat to the rest of us isn't the biggest issue. Maybe the biggest issue is that people are living in this kind of anger and confusion and instability and desperation all around us, and we're content to observe those things about them and let them go as long as they don't present a threat to us, or to "innocent people". As if it's okay if they only hurt themselves, or only those close to them, and not something we need concern ourselves with.

As if when people tell us after the fact "he ate by himself at every meal", that's only an issue because it might have been a sign that one day he'd be a threat to the rest of us. Today, a lot of people might be thinking that they should have done or said something because this tragedy could have been averted. But would those same people ever have had the same thoughts if the only tragedy were that a young man passed through his school years having no friends, trapped in violent fantasies he spilled out in stories that scared his classmates, and eating alone every day? Would anyone even remember him?

Some Questions about the Homeless

2007-04-20T06:19:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong.

Homelessness specifically and poverty in general are huge and very real problems in our country, and anyone who claims otherwise has made a conscious decision not to see the truth lest he be required to do something about it. I work downtown in one of the largest cities in the U.S., and I give away a lot of money on the street, in addition to the money I give away by mail and the money I slip into the poor box at church and....you get the point. The homeless are there. There are many, many reasons that they can't "just get a job" and stop pestering us for money. Some of those reasons include lack of contact information to write on job applications, lack of the necessary literacy to fill out job applications, lack of transportation, lack of a place to shower, lack of suitable clothing to show up to fill out a job interview, lack of access to newspapers or internet job banks (don't tell me "they can always go to the library!" You need a DRIVER'S LICENSE to use the internet connection at most libraries!), lack of proper documentation to complete I-9 forms...and much more.

Still, I'm analytical by nature. A lot of people view this as "finding fault" or "picking things apart", but it's not something I DO. It's just the way I see things. Some people love this about me, some hate it, but for better or worse, it is what it is. And so, a few things have been bothering me about the homeless downtown ever since I started my current job.

I'm not talking about the usual things like, "That guy is dressed as well as I am and clean and apparently young and healthy--what is he doing out here?" or "Why is that woman walking down those stairs when she was sitting in a wheelchair yesterday?"

No, I'm talking about real mysteries.

Things like Where do they get the markers?

You know what I'm talking about. Every homeless person on the downtown streets has a cardboard sign written in black marker. Sometimes they're written in multiple colors, which raises whole other issues, but for the time being, let's stick to black.

I work in a thirty-story office building and a lot of times I can't find a good black marker. How is it that every homeless person in town has easy access to one? And, since they're homeless, where ARE their markers while they're sitting there on the streetcorner with their signs, and no apparent marker in sight?

And, on a related note, where do they print out those full-color pictures of Jesus they have taped to their signs sometimes? (Let's leave aside for a moment why they think it's cool to use Jesus as a marketing ploy and stick to the practicalities.) I don't know about anyone else out there, but I never have color ink when I need it. I, of course, have a home, and a computer, and a printer, and a regular income, but it's not all that easy for me to print out a full-color picture...and I think twice before doing so, anyway, because it eats up so much of a cartridge that runs about $35.

So I guess the real question in my mind comes down to this: where do the homeless keep their office supplies?

It's Not About Knitting...It's About SEX!

2007-04-14T17:16:00.000-07:00

Recently, I voted (though no opinions had been solicited) a hearty "NO" when the author of the So the Thing Is Blog wondered aloud whether her blog was becoming a knitting blog. Good news...the latest entry is about sex.

Of course, she did the whole Seinfeld thing; it doesn't SAY it's about sex. But trust me--it's about sex. And maybe it's good that it's done discreetly, because, you know, it's a family show over there. Not so this blog, so I'm going to call it like it is. She advocates, via advice from an unnamed friend, having sex twice a week as a means of improving communication in marriage.

I think it works. Of course, I'm not married, but when I was, I developed a theory that marriage was much happier and easier for everyone if you had sex every day. That's right--not twice a week, but every single day. If you gave it the same priority you gave to things like eating dinner and showing up at work and showering, it could really improve everyone's attitude. I suggested this to other married friends and at various times various of us experimented with it, and it worked. I never heard anyone say that it didn't. Interestingly enough, it seemed to make no difference whether or not one or both partners actually WANTED to be participating--the feeling of closeness increased, regardless. The tension and intolerance for little annoyances decreased, regardless. It seemed, all in all, to be the key to a happy marriage.

So why, then, doesn't everybody do it?

Partly, I suspect, it's one of those vicious circles--the worse you're getting along, the less inclined you are to make love. The less you make love, the worse you get along. And so on and so on. I think that the generally accepted view is that of course you're going to have less sex if you can't stand each other, but my absolutely non-scientific and small-scale study indicates precisely the opposite...you'll be able to stand each other if you just make it a point to have more sex.

You may have noticed that, despite having discovered the foolproof means of maintaining a happy marriage, I'm divorced. So is at least one of the friends who participated in my experiment with positive results. So what went wrong?

It's not so much a flaw in the plan as it is a balancing. It works, but is it worth it? At least some of us, obviously, decided that it wasn't. And that's pretty representative of marriage as a whole, isn't it? There are so many little things that, if we did them consistently, would significantly improve our homes and marriages and the way we live together, but we don't do them. It isn't because we don't know they would help, it's simply that we can't or don't or won't make them a priority. Maybe it's more important to be right. Maybe it's more important to get some fucking sleep. Maybe it's more important to watch the latest episode of X-Files. And maybe that's because we don't view marriage as the framework of our lives, we don't start out willing to work at it, we start out with a fairy-tale vision and never expect that a lot of times, it's going to be as much fun and require as much effort as cleaning up the bathroom after the sewers back up.

But we don't just move out of our houses when that happens, do we?

Recently, I offered the opinion that it's just too damned easy to get married. I still believe that, but Danny Bonaduce provided a surprising counterpoint to my argument this week by...getting divorced. You see, Danny Bonaduce has been married--or so I learned this week--for sixteen years. And if their story is to be believed, he's been married to a woman he didn't know, a woman he married in Vegas while he was drunk so that he could get her into bed, and who introduced herself as his wife the next morning. Sure, the marriage is ending, but they've made it longer than a lot of couples who planned their weddings in advance, stone-cold sober and for what they thought were much better reasons. That doesn't mean I think instant weddings are the way to go now, but it does go to show that if you're committed enough, you can make almost anything work. They must have had sex at least twice a week.

The Bees of Roanoke Island

2007-04-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

Today at work, I overheard that 80% of the honeybees are missing.

It was the word "missing" that made me laugh. I know bees pollinate most of our vegetation and that it's a serious threat to the ecosystem if bees are in short supply and all that, but the idea that the bees were missing made me laugh. They weren't dying off. They weren't migrating away. They weren't failing to procreate. They were missing.

For the hell of it, I Googled "Where have all the bees gone?"

(Sorry Google. I know I'm not supposed to use Google as a verb. I like Google, and I understand trademarks, and I don't want to be a part of the gradual and unwitting move toward common usage that will steal Google's trademark from them...but "Google" is what I did.)

I got 1.48 million results for "Where have all the bees gone?", and many of the top results were local news stories. One of them said, "entire colonies stand empty..."

That's when I wrote the email to one of my co-workers with the subject line, "The Bees of Roanoke Island". He didn't think it was funny, but I couldn't help it. I wasn't WILLFULLY entertained by the imminent demise of civilization or anything like that, I just couldn't help thinking about how "entire colonies stand empty" would be received if these were people.

Well, actually, we knew. Because it happened at Roanoke Island and we're still talking about it a couple of centuries later. We're still speculating.

So forget all the gloom and doom about what's going to happen to us without the bees...let's theorize. Were they kidnapped by aliens? Killed off by a rival civilization? My personal pet theory is that they've gone off together to a remote island, where they're stockpiling pollen and plotting to take over the world once we all die off from lack of vegetation. But I'm sure there are other possibilities. And those ominous colonies standing empty are just begging for a story.

Blogging about blogging about blogs

2007-04-07T17:09:00.000-07:00

I wrote a column once, years ago, about making money writing books about making money writing books about making money writing books. Comical as it was, it was a wholly viable plan, and the column was triggered by my realization that the author--whose name I've since forgotten--of The Well Fed Writer wrote a book about making a living as a freelance copywriter, but in interviews copped to the fact that most of his income (the vast majority, if I recall correctly) came from the book about how to make money as a freelance writer, not his actual work as a freelance writer.
Today, I'm taking on blogs. Recently, a friend of mine commented that she hated her blog, and it came as no surprise to me, because nearly everyone I know who has a blog hates it. Of course, there are bloggers who get paid to blog, and bloggers who have one particular subject they're passionate about and seem to be happy writing about, and bloggers who simply seem to journal online and be fine with it. Some of the most successful of these include naked pictures of themselves, which raises a whole different set of questions. And some include details of their sex lives; in fact, some serious litigation and some Capitol Hill firings recently followed the disclosure by one Congressional aide, on her blog, that another Congressional aide she'd spent some time with like to spank her.
But those seem to be the exception. These days, it seems that the average person has a blog. It also seems that the average person has no idea what to DO with said blog, and fluctuates between annoyance that he has this blog that he's now obliged to keep up with and guilt that he doesn't blog more often.
Interestingly, it appears that no one ever reads, or even sees, most blogs. If you check out the pages you'll find that the vast majority of blogs you find when flipping through blogger or a similar system have no page rank, and that Google hasn't even indexed them. That means no one even knows they're there, unless the blogger has sent out links. Often, he hasn't, because a lot of people seem to be embarrassed by their blogs, when they're not busy being irritated that they have them or shamefaced that they haven't posted in so long. So the source of the guilt associated with not posting is a bit questionable--it isn't as if there's an audience out there who's being let down.
On the other hand...the blogger isn't a blogger without blogging, right? And the prospective blogger must have thought he had something to say when he started the blog, or he wouldn't have taken the time to choose the colors and set up the blogroll and create his log-ins and slect the settings and all that, right?
So go ahead. Post.
No one's looking, anyway.

So the thing is...knitting is ruining the world

2007-04-03T08:15:00.000-07:00

A year or so ago, my sister took up knitting in earnest. If you're having visions of those "lovely" afghans grandma used to make everyone for Christmas...add a factor of ten. For a long time, she knitted only prayer shawls. Then she taught my daughter to knit. The two of them set to work knitting hats for homeless infants (I swear), which was nice, and when my sister would babysit for me I'd come home to find them both asleep in my living room, cuddling their knitting needles--which was not so nice.

Time passed. The knitting continued, but the fervor died down. And then I got a Christmas letter from an old friend, and he mentioned that his wife--a government lawyer--was running a yarn co-op. I made a conscious decision not to think through what that might be.

But this morning, the line was crossed. I'm a big fan of humor columnist Barb Cooper. I know, I know--she's awfully positive for a girl like me, but what can I say? She's smart and she's a mom, and she has an incredible way of pointing out the humor, the irony, and even the hope in those little moments we tend to gloss right over in life.

Until today.

This morning, I dropped by the So the Thing Is Blog (which, I might add, I was DELIGHTED to see being regularly updated for the first time in...ever), and...

it was about knitting.

Not the whole blog, of course, but there are. Um. Photographs of yarn.

I blame the Yarn Harlot.

The Thing About Lawyers

2007-04-03T06:21:00.000-07:00

Is that they can't freaking win.

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of bad lawyers. I worked in the legal field once, and I've seen lawyers compromise cases and lie to clients just to save themselves some work. I've seen lawyers mock their clients and denigrate them to friends and colleagues--even opposing counsel. I've seen trade-offs where one client is sold down the river, so to speak, so that the lawyer can get the deal he wants on another case.

It can be ugly.

But there's ugliness in every profession.

The thing about lawyers is that if they're "only in it for the money", that's some kind of stigma, even though pretty much everyone does his or her job primarily as a means of supporting himself and his family. Lawyers are expected to be somehow more noble. They should help people who need help regardless of whether or not they can pay, because...well...I've never heard an end to that sentence. The theory seems to be that it doesn't cost them anything to help, but of course that's not true. There are a limited number of billable hours in a day, and I'm a firm believer that everyone--absolutely everyone--should give some of them away. But I also know from personal experience that there aren't enough hours in the day to handle all of the problems of the people who come to a law office begging and pleading for free help--people with legitimate needs and cases. Any attorney who said yes to all of them would soon be working 80-100 hour weeks without making a dime, because there wouldn't be any time left for paying clients, and even so would soon have to start turning people away. It's a problem. A serious one. But not one that the average attorney can solve just by saying yes to everyone who walks through his door.

The place it really breaks down for me, though--the thing that really seems unfair--is that lawyers who are "in it for the money" are evil, but lawyers who are in it for something else...something like truth and justice, maybe...are reviled just as thoroughly. I doubt that there's a criminal defense lawyer on the face of the earth who hasn't been asked contemptuously, "How can you...?" and heard the smug, superior, "Well, I could never!" And sometimes it's worse than just an attitude.

For instance, look at the recent radio commentary by former Pentagon official Cully Stimson egging corporations on to penalize law firms providing pro bono representation to Guantanamo Bay detainees. The public outcry over that statement led to Stimson's resignation, but it seems it was only because he was dumb enough to speak up in public. In the wake of his resignation, military lawyers appointed to represent Guantanamo detainees are reporting that their careers are suffering and that they're being actively discouraged from doing the job too well.

So, it seems like if you're an attorney, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Zealous representation is bad--it means you're "on the wrong side". Just doing your job is bad--it means you're "in it for the money".

Don't get me wrong. There are a lot of bad lawyers. I know a lot of bad lawyers. But I begin to wonder if by our current social standards there can be any good ones.

Of Mice and Men

2007-04-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

No, sadly, we're not here to talk about literature. Not that I'm not game, if anyone has a favorite novel s/he'd like to rehash, but that's not what I came here to talk about.

No, I didn't come to talk about the draft, either.

I came here to talk about the mouse that recently escaped from a Maine man...three times...and after it's last escape, stole his dentures. That's right, carried them right into his mouse hole. They had to take out a piece of the wall to retrieve them.

The mouse won that round, I think, and apparently he thinks so, too, because the couple insists that the mouse comes out of his hole and stares at his nemesis.

But it could be worse. Several months ago, another news story reported that a man (clearly of questionable character) had thrown a live mouse into his fireplace. Yes, while there was a fire in the fireplace. Oddly enough, the mouse opted not to stay in the fire. Of course, fire being what it is and mice being a little on the hairy side, the little creature carried some flames out of the fireplace with him...and up the curtains....and burned the house down.

The mice are winning.

Which means this discussion may be about literature after all. Maybe the Hitchhiker's Guide had it right all along, and we're really not running the show.

Maybe the mice will do a better job.

Okay, Okay...I Know There are Much BIGGER Things than This Wrong Around Us...

2007-03-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

But I really want to talk today about trains. Like tens of thousands of other people, I use public transportation to commute to work in a major metropolitan area. For the most part, I'm happy with it. Sure, the train runs over a commuter every now and then or hits a car whose driver couldn't spare the four or five minutes he might have had to wait at the gate, and that holds things up a bit, but for the most part, it's smooth going. The trains are relatively clean and relatively comfortable, having someone else driving means that I can sleep or read or work or knit or create a popsicle-stick rendition of the Golden Gate Bridge on the way to work and back, and most of the other passengers are either Friendly or Unobtrusive.

There's one kind of passenger, though, that drives me to rage every evening. It's not out of self-interest, either--I always manage to find a seat, and if I don't, I'm young enough and game enough to sit on the steps in the vestibule or wherever I might find an empty space. But there are certain commuter trains in the evening that are so packed that people are sitting on the stairs, standing in the vestibules, standing in the aisles...and inevitably in every car you'll see two or three people who have their briefcases carefully set up in the seat to make sure that no one sits with them, or who are sitting in the outer seat and blocking an empty inner seat, or balacing a bag of popcorn there, while people search in vain for somewhere to sit down. Invariably, these people sit up very straight and stare straight ahead, as if they are entirely unaware of the scramble for seats going on around them. They're apparently unable to HEAR in that position as well, because the announcements the conductors make have no impact, either.

Every once in a while someone will stop next to one of them and say pleasantly but quite firmly and loudly enough for those around to hear, "Could you move that, please?"

I love when that happens. I never DO it, but I enjoy it tremendously. I'm in favor of larger action, though. The airlines have a great solution for this kind of problem...if you need two seats, you pay for two seats. So I think the conductors should pass through the cars when the train is crowded and politely inquire of each of these inconsiderate riders whether they'd like to share their seats or purchase an additional ticket.