Hit Coffee

A little while ago I mentioned that I have a very poor sense of smell. To which Barry asked:

Do you also have a diminished sense of taste, because those things seem to go hand in hand. Not to overuse a body-parts metaphor…

The truth is that I don’t know for sure, but I think I do. In all honesty, I didn’t realize that I had a poor sense of smell for the longest time. It’s difficult when you don’t have anything to compare it to.

I remember back in junior high when stink bombs were all the rage. Early on, I really didn’t know what they were. While everyone around me scattered in search for cleaner air, I would just stand there and sniff. I’d think to myself, “Hmmm, this smells like rotten eggs or something. Maybe rotten fruit. Definitely smells interesting. Very interesting.” I similarly don’t mind the smell of farts. I sort of have a vague, “This smells bad” feeling, but it’s more of an observation than a feeling. In some ways I like it just because it’s interesting and different.

But with smell, you are eventually notified that you are not smelling things that others are smelling. Clancy frequently asks if I can smell something and I say that I can’t. Something like that happens enough and you start to get the idea.

With taste, though, I don’t really have that. If I’m eating something, I can taste it. It may taste bland, but I know that I am eating something and therefore I think more inclined to be able to taste it. Sort of like I can sometimes smell things only after Clancy points them out to me.

At the same time, when it comes to food, I’m a big texture person. What something is made of is as important as how it tastes. I don’t like rice even though rice has little or no taste to it. I don’t like rice even if it’s mixed with something I do like that should theoretically engulf the non-taste of the rice. I just don’t like eating it. If I’m more fixated on texture than most people, that probably means that I don’t taste as much as they do.

The other thing is that I love, love, love spicy food and food that has any sort of really strong taste. I’ve commented before that the worse a food makes my breath, the more I probably like it. Garlic, onion, jalapeno, you name it. And the stronger the taste, the better. Whenever I eat Thai food I typically go for the spiciest stuff they’ve got or the next one down, which is usually higher than anyone else at the table that has eaten there is willing to go. Since I’m not a particularly tough person when it comes to discomfort, it’s likely that I am not as uncomfortable eating that stuff as the next person… which would bring me back to diminished tastebuds.

Sometimes when I’m bored I think about somewhat useless things that interest me enough to make the time go by. That’s where some of my posts around here come from. Lately I’ve been thinking about what I would do if it were up to me to try to save the comic book industry and DC Comics in particular. I’ve reached a stumbling point in one of my branches of thought and I need your help. If you can answer the below questions, it would help me out. So please give it a try whether you are at all interested in comic books. In fact, it’s those that aren’t very interested in comic books whose help I most need.

I want to know what you know about the various characters. I am going to link the characters names to a picture of them. If you don’t recognize the name, click on the image to see if that jogs your memory at all.

The options are:
A) I know who this character is and I know how he became a superhero
B) I know who this character is, but I don’t know how he became a superhero
C) I recognize the character’s name and, but couldn’t necessarily identify him
D) I know this character on sight, but couldn’t name him
E) I don’t know who this is

Note that if your answer is “Which [character name] are you referring to? The origins differ slightly/greatly from one to the next” then your answer is probably (A).

1. Superman
2. Batman
3. Wonder Woman
4. Green Lantern
5. The Atom
6. Hawkman
7. Martian Manhunter
8. Nightwing
9. Blue Beetle
10. Captain Marvel
11. Triumph
12. Black Canary

Jonas lived with us for a couple of months while I was a sophomore in high school. There are so many stories I could tell about Jonas, but I’m going to try to focus on just one aspect of the story. Jonas was the seventeen year old son of the shadow minister of science and technology from an eastern European country. He stayed with us while he was an intern at the Air Force installation where my father worked. One week out of the couple of months was my family’s annual trip to Shell Beach, which Jonas had gotten clearance to go to. We thought that it’d be great to be a great way to cap off his trip to the United States and to get some downtime while he’s here.

Long story short, by the time that Shell Beach rolled around we were no longer looking forward to it. We were horrified at the prospect of spending a week with him. He was overbearing, obnoxious, arrogant, and extraordinarily immature. His attitude towards women didn’t particularly help. He had a tendency to hoot and holler like a construction worker at women that he found attractive. He also managed to get himself kicked out of the neighborhood pool for reasons he would not explain.

Our annual trip to Shell Beach was usually coordinated with another family from church that we were close to, the Lamonts. The Lamonts have three daughters, about 23, 17, and 12. The older daughter was married (or maybe just engaged at that point) and the younger was only about to turn a teenager, but the middle daughter was not only single but was absolutely gorgeous. Not just gorgeous, but intelligent and sweet as well. Jonas was a relatively attractive guy (solidly in station two), but his brash immaturity was almost certain to clash with her quiet sweetness and not in a compatible way. This was further complicated by Jonas’s seeming inability to read people.

It was on the way to Shell Beach that we discovered that the middle daughter wasn’t the one that we needed to be worrying about. He had his eyes set squarely on The Little Cowpoke. She was named as such because she was the only one eligible to eat off the Little Cowpoke menu at one of the restaurants in the area that was reserved for 12 and under. She was excited because this was the year that she was going to outgrow the menu that had given her the nickname.

You know those scenes in sitcoms wherein half the cast sees something that everyone else is oblivious to? It’s usually the case in these shows that those least affected see it most clearly. That was the case with us. We saw Jonas honing in on her immediately. The Lamonts just thought that it was so nice that he was being so nice to her. We waited for them to figure it out and slowly they did. It started with a slight discomfort with his attention towards her. Then they started kinda mentioning “Isn’t that a little bit weird?” We never said anything because when we complained about him they’d been scolding us for not being more open-minded about people from different cultures. Then, once they figured out what was going on, they showed the same hesitation towards telling Crissy that we showed in telling them.

Their reasoning was different, though. Crissy was oblivious to it all. Jonas would play his games like acting like he couldn’t hear her so that he could move in a little bit closer and you could just see the look on her face “Is this guy really that deaf?” They hoped that once we got to Shell Beach he would find other people to notice. They didn’t want to make any waves when the situation might resolve itself. We all kept our eye on him (and her), though.

Nothing ever came of it. As the Lamonts had hoped, he moved on when it became clear just how oblivious Crissy was. He found some slightly older girls to hit on, which relieved us greatly. We were friends with the Lamonts, but we didn’t know how we would even begin to explain the situation to some random guy on the beach with his thirteen year old daughter. Nothing about that was going to end well.

After Jonas went back to his native country, we started hearing these rumors at the swimming pool. We heard about this guy with this accent who was hitting on ten year olds girls to the point that they kicked him out altogether. We don’t know for a fact that they were talking about Jonas, though if they were they were probably exaggerating how old the girls were. They were probably twelve, too. Anyhow, before kicking him out, they lifeguards pulled him aside and told him to back off. “You don’t understand,” the stranger said, “You have to get to them when they’re young before they get set to certain ways of thinking.”

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one of the scenes revolves around the interactions of Arthur, the “King”, accosting a peasant who is quoting theory of government to him; rather quickly, Arthur’s behavior devolves into beating the peasant while telling him to “shut up” over and over again.

Recently, watching the online mess known as Wikipedia, I realized that this sketch was disturbingly similar to the normative behavior of an administrator (and the administration as a whole). An analysis I did of Wikipedia in 2003 showed a disturbing trend towards administrators behaving much like Prime Minister Botha or maybe the record producer from this episode of south park; today, it’s decidedly worse.

Administrators on Wikipedia, despite the claims that administrator status is “no big deal” and “like being a janitor”, wield unbelievable power in their pond. The so-called “couple of extra buttons” they have allow them to lock pages to a specific version, to block someone off from editing, and even to prevent them from speaking out or remove all trace that someone ever spoke on the site.

The secondary problem here is that becoming an administrator is a result of a “request for administrator status” election, a setup primarily voted upon and adjudicated by… other administrators. In other words, kiss the right butts and be friends with administrators who share your viewpoint, and you can become an administrator in little time. Many have described the wikipedia world as being a sort of MMORPG atmosphere, or otherwise some form of game. Imagine for a moment that regular users on World of Warcraft, for instance, were able to be “elected” to “Gamemaster” status (the paid World of Warcraft employees who do things like watch for Terms-Of-Service violations like bots, gold sellers, etc), and then used their powers with no oversight or recourse for the abused parties to eliminate members of in-game groups who their friends didn’t like.

That’s basically what a Wikipedia administrator is.

Sadly, it’s a bit worse. World of Warcraft is demonstratably a game. Wikipedia has real-world implications, or else abusive administrators wouldn’t need to hide behind pseudonyms. Wikipedia, being sort of a sanctioned link-farm (the likes of which normally search engines would dump to the bottom of the scrap heap, except that it dresses itself up as a “free”, “nonprofit” organization much like $cientology dresses itself as a church), is almost guaranteed to be the #1 hit on any single search term, and if it’s not #1, chances are pretty good it’s in the top 5 somewhere.

Someone using a search as their first point of data collection trying to learn about a given topic, then, naturally will wind up seeing wikipedia at some point. Do we worry about this if it’s about one of the 8 zillion species of pokemon, or a comic book character? Probably not. When it veers into realms of politics, or biographies, or current news, or religion? It becomes suspect. The defrocked editor Essjay (who rumor has it managed to come right back under a quieter pseudonym) had claimed to be a tenured professor and doctor of canon law to disguise and support some pretty virulent anti-Catholic nonsense he’d been inserting into Wikipedia entries concerning Catholicism, and he got away with “disappearing” more than a few people who tried to stop him.

Much like other autocratic/totalitarian regimes, Wikipedia practices the “disappearing” of anyone with whom an administrator has a disagreement. Their usernames are blocked for an “indefinite” duration, their talk page (the one place they theoretically are allowed to post an appeal to any sane administrators still remaining) locked against editing, and their changes often undone. In 2003, users had the right to file an appeal and ask ANY administrator to undo this; in 2006, the process was altered, with administrators prohibited from “wheel warring” (that is, undoing what another administrator did) without exhaustively “discussing” the issue with the acting administrator. The few half-decent administrators of Wikipedia left at this point.

Even if the talk page remains unlocked, a small group (2-3 administrators) tend to quickly deny 99% of unblock requests without any time spent investigating; indeed, these abusers are as often as not the ones locking the talk page themselves. The basis of Wikipedia administratorship: try to sweep any evidence of your, or another administrator’s, misbehavior under the rug as fast as possible. Protect the others, because then they’ll protect you when the time comes.

Wikipedia’s “Arbitration Committee”, while theoretically the “point of last resort” to file a grievance against this sort of abuse of administrator power, is itself made entirely up of administrators. Thus, they have never actually taken a case or sanctioned an administrator, save that they pissed off one of Wikipedia’s even-higher-connected people (usually Arbcom members themselves, or former arbcom members, or on a couple occasions Wikipedia head honcho / sex peddler / coward / embezzler / fraud / who knows what else Jimbo Wales himself).

As a side note: at Jimbo’s direction, they’ve also been on quite the run to rewrite history to get Larry Sanger (formerly known from the original start of the project as the co-creator of Wikipedia) down the memory hole.

The end result is unfortunate, but it makes Wikipedia the worst of the web: a project with lofty goals, but inside which a bunch of petty dictators sit around “disappearing” anyone who corrects their mistakes or the things they want to propagandize about. In fact, it rather resembles the various iterations of UN Human Rights councils, in which the worst human rights offenders (disgusting regimes like China, Cuba, and Sudan) in the world sat in council congratulating each other for their “excellence in the field of human rights” while passing meaningless pronouncements against the countries with the best records.

Typically everyone at work will notice when I’m running low on clean clothes. My attire typically starts moving in one direction or the other on the spectrum of bumware to black-tie. First it starts going down, then when I run out of rattier clothing, I shift towards wearing nicer clothes because they’re all I have left. Today was something of an exception because I wore a dress shirt despite having a couple not-so-nice shirts left in the closet.

The reason being is that tonight I was seeing some friends in the area at a bar downtown. My friend Kyle is about to get married and we went out and had some drinks in lieu of a bachelor party. I figured that with the wedding being Saturday, I could clean the shirt and I would be good to go by the wedding.

I never actually got an invitation to Kyle’s wedding, though he told me verbally too many times to count that I was invited. Not having an invitation, though, I had to ask the rather simple question this morning, “So when and where is the wedding?”

When he said that it was at noon I was rearranging my Saturday for a daytime wedding. The more he talked the more I realized that he was actually getting married at noon tomorrow. Friday. Who has a wedding at noon on a work day? Kyle Quindlen, apparently. With the bar outing tonight, though, that represented a dress problem. Had I simply known I could have worn a more regular shirt, but of course I wore the only nice dress shirt I have that’s still clean and wore it into a smokey bar to boot.

Fortunately I tracked down another one. Unfortunately, I now know what a phrase I heard in commercials all the time when I was young finally means. So that’s what “ring around the collar” looks like!

My boss has been on my tail lately about not giving him enough notice when I need time off. I have my reasons (usually pertaining to uncertainty as to when Clancy is getting time off), but I’m not sure whether he believes me or not. Writing him a note saying that I need a couple hours off because of a friday wedding-over-lunch probably didn’t help my credibility in that regard. Getting an extra hour for lunch is no problem.

I’m just glad that I asked this morning instead of later on, otherwise I would have missed the wedding by showing up a day late. Then again, drove across Delosa to attend my wedding… five days before the actual wedding. He and his then-girlfriend showed up at the farm where we were married to the face of some rather confused relatives of Clancy. We had a Saturday wedding, but for some reason he thought the wedding was on Tuesday. He even took the time off work to come, which is certainly flattering. Unfortunately, after the confusion he had to head on back home and so he missed the wedding.

When I was picking people that would stand with me at the wedding, he was near the top of the list. I ended up scratching him off simply because I was afraid that he would forget that I was getting married. It never occurred to me that he would show up on a Tuesday. I guess weekday weddings just make sense to him or something.

The lede to this article definitely caught my interest:

People who sleep fewer than six hours a night — or more than nine — are more likely to be obese, according to a new government study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies.

Over the past few years I’ve come to believe very strongly that there is a link between sleeplessness and obesity and not because people that are awake more eat more. I think that there’s something about sleeplessness that affects the metabolism. I have no real proof of this theory, but it seems that those people that I know that work insane hours gain weight while eating less. I’d chalk it up to increased snacking on unhealthy foods because they don’t have time to properly prepare a meal, but in some cases (such as medical residents) they don’t even have time to snack and are up on their feet all day (which may not be the same as an exercise bike, but ought to count for something, no?)… yet they don’t lose weight. I can’t help but believe that the two are connected.

Unfortunately, at least one author of the study appears to be an idiot:

Such surveys can’t prove cause-effect relationships, so — for example — it’s not clear if smoking causes sleeplessness or if sleeplessness prompts smoking, said Charlotte Schoenborn, the study’s lead author.

Actually, we do know that smoking causes sleeplessness. It contains stimulants. To put this in perspective for non-smokers, replace “smoking” with “drinking caffeine” except, in my case, cigarettes are much more powerful. The only thing comparable that I’ve ever taken is ephedra. That truly is a breathtakingly dumb statement. Less dumb would be to say that the study doesn’t prove causality, but causality is definitely known in at least one direction. Even in the case of excess sleep, because people that smoke a lot and don’t have jobs need to sleep more hours to make up for the lack of quality sleep that they’re getting.

What about the other direction? Does sleeplessness cause smoking? I would imagine that it’s possible that people that are sleep-deprived are more likely to give in to temptation. There are also cases where someone needs to stay awake and uses cigarettes to aid them in that endeavor. Compared to the provable relationships that the chemicals in cigarettes have on one’s ability to sleep and sleep soundly, though, I would imagine that this is negligible.

If I were more cynical, I would suspect that the study’s lead author is being coy because if you run a study that asks more questions you’re more likely to get funding for future studies (or it would seem to me). But to what end? If we know that cigarettes contribute to a lack of sleep because there is a corrolation and because common sense has a pretty strong suggestion of causality, wouldn’t we just be a lot better off studying things that we don’t know such as the obesity angle?

Slate has a really interesting article investigating why August is such a big month to be born for baseball players.

The pattern is unmistakable. From August through the following July, there is a steady decline in the likelihood that a child born in the United States will become a major leaguer. Meanwhile, among players born outside the 50 states, there are some hints of a pattern but nothing significant enough to reach any conclusions. An analysis of the birth dates of players in baseball’s minor leagues between 1984 and 2000 finds similar patterns, with American-born players far more likely to have been born in August than July. The birth-month pattern among Latin American minor leaguers is very different—if anything, they’re more likely to be born toward the end of the year, in October, November, and December.

I was interested to see if the author knew why. I know that I did. My oldest brother Ollie was born in August. When Ollie held out until August to be born, my father was reportedly ecstatic. “He made the little league cutoffs!” Meaning that by virtue of having been born in August, he would be the oldest rather than the youngest member of his little league teams because the cutoffs in Kingsland where they were living at the time was August 1. Unfortunately for Dad and particularly for Ollie, when they moved down to Colosse they joined the Colosse Regional Association of Baseball (CRAB), which had a cutoff of September 1.

The way that CRAB worked was that each team was comprised of youths from a single year, but each division included two years. So you had third graders playing with fourth graders and so on. It was pretty common for every team to alternate between doing pretty well one year and then pretty lousy the next, depending on whether they were in the lower or upper age bracket of that division. My batting average would typically go from about .175 to .375 then back to .175 and so on. My other brother Mitch was a spectacular hitter who did well against older kids so his performance was relatively unaffected.

Of the three of us, Ollie was always the athlete. Despite being the shortest of us, he excelled at basketball and despite being small for the position he was a good defensive back in football. Mitch was good at baseball and ran track and that was about it. I was good for basketball simply because of my height and I had the same level swing in baseball that Mitch had making me pretty good there, too, though not as good as Mitch. Ollie was also good at baseball, but he was a pitcher. He was also a good hitter every other year.

Whereas my batting average would typically go from about .200 to .400 depending on which division I was in, and Mitch’s average would fluctuate somewhat, Ollie’s experience behind the plate depended entirely on whether he was in the lower or upper bracket of his division. One year he would struggle to get a single hit the entire year, then the next year he would hit somewhere near .500 with loads and loads of extra base hits. Then he’d go back to struggling for a single hit.

When he was in the lower bracket, he would be a full two years younger than some of the kids he was playing against. When you’re in the first, third, fifth, and even seventh grade that is really difficult to do. Sure enough, when he was in the upper bracket and he was basically in the middle of the pack age-wise, he did about as well as Mitch did. We always knew growing up that Mitch was good enough that he could conceivably have tried to go professional if he’d wanted to do all of the work required to get there (one kid from his CRAB team went professional and Mitch was comparably good). In truth, though, Ollie could have been just as good. Unfortunately, because of the structure of CRAB, no one noticed if it was true or not.

Ollie would likely have had the same amount of talent whether the family had stayed in Kingsland that he had in Delosa. It’s possible that he would have developed greater talent by getting more practice against pitchers that he could more easily hit against or maybe not. What might have happened in Kingsland that didn’t happen in Delosa, though, is that his hitting talent would have been better noticed and perhaps cultivated.

Apparently the little league consortium is moving the birthday cut-offs to April/May, which would have been great for Ollie though would have made things more difficult for me. The idea is to have it coincide with the baseball season. That makes some sense, but the problem is that the current model keeps kids that know one another on the same team. Teams are more likely to be divided between two grades rather than all being in the same grade as it was when I was growing up. On the other hand, Ollie and I were both outliers (him because of his birthday and me because I was held back a year in school) that were on teams with kids in the grade ahead of us. So such a move likely would have made it easier for us.

Ordinarily in his blog I represent my employer, Soyokaze America, as the maker of high-powered ATM machines since there is some logistical similarity between the making of ATM machines and what we do. Unfortunately, for this post, that won’t work. So for this post imagine that we sell high-powered printing/faxing/copier units. The sort of ones that go into convenience stores (if they have those anymore, do they?) except that in addition to being able to make copies, you can also get high-quality print-outs from digital media.

Though I can’t find a link for the life of me, I’ve complained in the past about how whenever someone needs some piece of hardware, they just take it from the QA lap. Shipping and receiving will come back and steal a receipt printer so that they can ship it out with a unit, for instance. It creates a bigger problem for the disks we use in order to test our systems’ abilities to read and print documents. Someone needs a thumb drive, for instance, they just come back and “borrow” one. They buy us new supplies every January but they’re always gone by March or April. As part of the job, we’ve simply determined that we have to bring our own supplies from home because they’re not going to replace them.

A week ago I had three thumb drives that I used. A coworker named Carlos was running some tests and I had some great testing documents on two of those three drives. I loaned him one. When I got in the next morning, he said that the thumb drive had gone dead. Not that big of a deal. That particular thumb drive had been through the washer and was probably half-dead anyway. I loaned him another. Ten minutes later he came back and informed me that one too had died. I tried both thumb drives in a half-dozen computers and sure enough, they were toast. I told Carlos to stop using the thumb drives and to test using other media.

That morning we had a meeting. I debated whether or not to say anything since Carlos was the only one using the machine in question, but decided to anyway. “Just FYI everyone, the machine that Carlos is using in the corner is apparently killing thumb drives.” The first question was of the “That’s unlikely. Are you sure it was the computer?” variety. The second one came from Pat who asked “You mean QAM-32?” (the name of the computer).

When I confirmed, she reminded me that there was a PNY thumb drive that had died going into that machine. I’d forgotten about that, having attributed the dead thumb drive to the fact that PNY is a crappy brand. Pat confessed that she had lost another thumb drive from home. Then another member said that he’d lost a prototype 16GB thumb drive that had been sent directly from Japan that he figured was bad, but now that he thought about it he had tested it in QAM-32. Before we knew it, we were up to eight dead thumb drives.

We laughed it off at the time as a failure to communicate. The company was actually initially a little upset that we didn’t put our finger on the problem sooner and that we’d wasted a couple hundred dollars of company supplies. When we clarified that only two of the eight were the property of the company and the rest belonged to us personally, they relaxed.

As word got out about the thumb-eating computer, more people came forward with thumb drives that had been eaten. Before we knew it, we were up to 13. People from the front office had come back to print out documents for personal or work-related purposes because their normal printers were busy. Then word got back to our boss, who had been out for the morning. He’d lost 5 thumb drives. Here was the kicker, though, he’d lost them on two different machines, QAM-18 and QAM-21. Unlike QA-32, though, those were more finicky eaters that didn’t eat everything you put into its mouth like QAM-32 was.

Suddenly we were no longer looking at a defective part. We were looking at a defective model, or at least a defective part on a model that we were sending out. The new model. The one that we hadn’t done as much testing on to discover sporadic problems like the one on QAM-18 and QAM-21. The model that we were sending out to our huge new client. The part that we were sending out on RMAs. The new part that we had decided was going to be standard in everything that we sent out.

The initial response from above was that we would go back to using the previous part and we would RMA any machines that had eaten thumb drives. The most proactive thing the company would do would be to give out thumb drives to anyone that had lost one because of our product. After all, thumb drives were dirt cheap and the company kept a stock to give to people who visited the facilities (even as they were telling us that we had to bring our own from home to do our job).

My coworker Pat and I looked on the whole situation with astoundment. Did they truly not get it? The cost of the thumb drives that our machine ate wasn’t the issue. The issue is that our customers’ customers would come in with documents to be printed out and would leave not just with a dead thumb drive, but with lost data! Business reports, resumes, schoolwork, and personal letters. Had this happened to me at a different point, I would have lost progress on my novel. As it is I lost a letter than I spent considerable time writing.

This is the stuff that lawsuits are made of. This is the stuff that makes me hope that my employer really reconsiders their no-hiring-lawyers policy. Maybe as they mull it over over the weekend they will come to their senses and realize what a potential catastrophe we’re facing. In the meantime, for the first time since I’ve started here I have to caution people against using our product.

My insurance company, having my best interest at heart no doubt, has informed me that they have a Health Evaluation page up on the company website. The basic gist of it is that you fill out a long form in regards to your family medical history, personal medical history, and personal habits, and they’ll tell you what your greatest risks are and how you can improve your health.

So let’s see… I would be wrapping up in a neat little bow all of my genetic faults, my pre-existing conditions, and unhealthy habits for the one organization that would most benefit at my expense from knowing such things. All so that they can tell me that I’m unhealthy because I smoke, drink too much sugar, and eat too much fat. I could have figured that out without loading the gun they’re going to have aimed at me next time I need to make some sort of claim.

This is one of the few posts I am going to write that takes a clear position on current law and tries to make the case for that position. It’s something I generally try to avoid lest this become too politically-oriented a blog, but since it’s not a clear Republican/Democrat issue and so there isn’t any jockeying to justify any particular candidate’s/party’s/ideology’s position on the issue. We’ll see how it goes.

Last week I wrote about why relationships with much older men and younger women are inherently problematic in the United States. Today I am going to try to explain why despite this, the current laws pertaining to adults having sex with minors needs to be relaxed and reformed.

The current Age of Consent (AoC) laws operate with the assumption that minors are not able to legally consent to having sex and thus any sex that someone has with a minor (or someone below a certain age that varies from state to state at any rate) is akin to molestation or rape. I believe that this view is deeply misguided. Whether we like it or not, as they go through puberty young boys and girls start having sexual desires. This is not something to be encouraged, but it is nonetheless present. Unlike an eight year old touched by his or her uncle, it is no longer something that happens to you. It is something that you do or do not do. In cases where it is something completely reactive, that can be considered rape. When it is participatory, it isn’t.

To some degree we know this. When a sixteen year old boy impregnates his sixteen year old girlfriend, we don’t say that it’s something that just happened so there’s no consequences for it. We say that he is responsible for what happened, is responsible for child support (once he turns 18 if not immediately), and whether he likes it or not is a daddy. We say this even as we say that he is not old enough to consent to sex. We say it even when he is the victim of what is technically statutory rap or indecency with a minor if the woman happens to be above 18. Almost nobody I know believes that being sixteen ought to be a legal defense for absolving one’s responsibility to one’s children. In a case of actual rape, few that I know believe that someone that is raped ought to be held similarly culpable to someone that engaged in intercourse with consent.

The laws that govern AoC actually recognize this. In Delosa, it’s a crime if the junior partner is under 17 and there is more than three years difference in age between the senior and junior partner. So if it’s an 18 year old and a 16 year old, that’s fine, but not between a 20 year old and a 16 year old. The laws vary from state to state, but most states have what is sometimes called the “Romeo and Juliet” exception. So in a way the law has the right idea in spite of itself, but its implementation leaves much to be desired.

If you are a person that believes that 15 year olds shouldn’t be having sex (a proposition I don’t necessarily disagree with, for what it’s worth) or if you believe that any and all premarital sex is wrong and anyone having it, including the senior partner in this case, is worthy of legal rebuke, you may be asking what the harm of current law is.

Well, if you’re against abortion, that’s actually one relatively surprising result. I know of at least three cases where a young woman was blackmailed by her mother (always the mother, incidentally) with a threatened call to the police if she didn’t abort. In one case it’s extremely likely that she would have had an abortion anyway, one case I’m not sure about one way or the other (she may have been using the threat as a cover, though I don’t think she was), and one where I am completely convinced she would have had the baby (she went on to marry the guy).

More commonly, though, it’s an unjustly harsh penalty for what sometimes is not a very serious crime. It lumps people across the spectrum — a 35 year old having sex with a 12 year old and a 19 year old with a 16 year old — into the same category when they don’t belong together. It often doesn’t, but it can land a man in prison under some of the worst circumstances or it can put them on probation with unreasonably difficult hurdles (it isn’t easy to have to stay away from all kids). Lastly, in many states it saddles men with the “sexual offender” tag that will follow them around for the rest of their lives as more and more states keep registries.

Some may find solace in prosecutorial discretion, but they shouldn’t. It’s true that prosecutors will often decline to go after people that are guilty of less consequential variations of the crime, but not always. Frank Rodriguez is an example of this. If an ambitious prosecutor get a hold of an airtight case, they have little incentive to show any mercy. In the Rodriguez case it was a mother calling the police after a fight (she tried to drop the charges a couple days later but couldn’t), but a more frequent case is if she winds up pregnant. Sometimes it comes down less to the severity of the offense and more to what they can prove.

Some people, such as Gannon and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, believe that the age of consent should be lowered to 14 and that’s that. I disagree. I don’t see any more of a magical threshold being passed at 14 than I do at 16, 17, or 18. If I were to place an absolute threshold, it would actually be lower. But I don’t see an absolute threshold. There is a substantive problem (within American culture anyhow) with a 24 year old and a 14 year old, but not one between 17 and 14. Okay, well the latter is a little problematic because a 14 year old having sex with anybody is problematic most of the time, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily problematic in an exploitive or predatory kind of way. It makes my stomach churn to say this, but the same is true of people under the age of 14. I would need to consult with psychologists to get a better idea, but unfortunately children even younger freely choose to have sex and so it’s not necessarily true that they’re being exploited. Remember the question here is not whether the junior partner should be having sex but rather where their youth and inexperience is being exploited by the senior partner.

Whether the relationship is exploitive depends on who is alleged to do the exploiting. This is an area that current law has it right, up to a point. Delosa recognizes the distinction of a 14 year old and 16 year old versus a 14 year old and a 22 year old. This distinction is all-important. The problem with these laws is that three years matters more and less depending on whether it’s 14 and 17 versus 16 and 19. The second problem is whether something is illegal or not does not answer the question of how illegal it should be. Here too does the age of the junior partner matter as well as the age difference involved.

So if I were drafting the law, I would look at three different things: How young is the junior partner, how big is the age difference, and how important are these numbers. So instead of looking at it as a single age where one is free to consent to sex, I would have a tiered system with what I would call “misdemeanor” and “felony” offenses. With each year comes a slightly higher age range. Plus, there’d be two age ranges. Off the top of my head, the chart might look like this:

13/16 a misdemeanor, 13/18 a felony
14/17 misdemeanor, 14/20 a felony
15/20 misdemeanor, 15/24 a felony
16/21 misdemeanor, 16/30 a felony
17/25 a misdemeanor, no felony for anyone over 17.

The specific numbers aren’t firm. I could be convinced to go more liberal or more conservative. In some ways my scheme is actually more conservative than the law in many states, though for the most part it’s more liberal.

The reason that I have two tiers is that there would be two primary applications of the law. In the misdemeanor case, it would simply be a tool with which parents can exert control over the behavior of their children. It would give parents the latitude to forcefully keep away people that they believe are exploiting their children’s youth and inexperience. The initial punishment would be something relatively minor such as community service and probation. Something inconvenient, but not as damning as the current law proscribes. The important part of this law is that repeated infractions can result in increasingly harsh punishments. In other words, the first conviction is something of a brushback pitch with more serious consequences if the warning is not heeded.

The felony cases would look much more like what we see today except probably more firmly. They would be dealt with harshly. These are the bounds with which we can hopefully find agreement that the relationships are inherently exploitive. These would involve sex offender registries, jailtime, and so on.

There are two other things that I would change. At least in the misdemeanor case and perhaps (though I’m not sold) on the felony, I would try to make it so that someone has to press charges. If the junior partner and the junior partner’s parents aren’t complaining, then I see no reason for the law to intervene unless it is determined that the parent is unfit, which is a different bird altogether. The other thing is that I believe that if when the junior partner turns either 18 or 21 they should have the right to absolve the criminal partner. I’m honestly not positive if the law allows for either of these things, but if it does I think that it should be so.

In conclusion, let me state unequivocally that I have never broken any of the existing laws. I’m not trying to decriminalize behavior that I have engaged in. This concerns me primarily because I have seen loving relationships fall outside the bounds of these laws and that bothers me. I have a natural discomfort (though not necessarily an inherent opposition to) laws that lack a victim and I believe that the junior partner in some illegal relationships is simply not a victim.

Sometimes I wonder. His understanding of English is imperfect, to say the least. I tend to use my extended vocabulary, which contain some words he probably has to look up. I try not to, but they sometimes creep in. So I wonder sometimes if he just reads the first paragraph and decides that it’s something not worth deciphering.

Today I have the ultimate test.

In the second paragraph of an email sent this morning I tendered my resignation effective next month. The third and fourth paragraphs explain further.

I will report the results as they become available to me.

I was pulling up into a truck stop on my way out of town when I first heard Five for Fighting’s “100 Years”. I was mulling over whether or to stop at that particular truck stop or find something down the road. I didn’t need to stop yet, but the truck stop in particular was where I used to go to smoke when I had a job at the adjacent industrial park. I’d actually decided to stop on the basis of the song that had played before it. The song didn’t impress me and it’s always easiest to stop during songs on the radio that don’t impress me. The song ended earlier than I had projected and 100 Years had come on, immediately grabbing my attention. I’m a sucker for piano ballads.

15 there’s still time for you
22 I feel her too
33 you’re on your way
Every day’s a new day…
15 there’s still time for you
Time to buy and time to choose
Hey 15, there’s never a wish better than this
When you only got 100 years to live

I sat there in the parking lot and listened to the song all the way through. The song only barely made sense, but thoughts of Evangeline, who’d been out of my life for at least a year by that point, rushed through me. The vague sensation of having all the time in the world and yet the time all flying by so quickly struck me. It made me think about how when I first met her when we were in our early twenties it felt in my heart like I’d always known her. When I saw her across a crowded convention hall, I felt torn between feeling that she was somebody I absolutely needed to know and the sensation that I already did. Then we had our romance. It was too early and too late. Timeless but with the time never, ever being quite right. Sometimes making as little sense as the song I was listening to.

I thought momentarily of giving Eva a call. Just to say hello or maybe tell her about the song. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I really wanted to just talk to her. I paused and reconsidered, coming to the conclusion that absolutely, positively nothing good would come with re-establishing contact. Two days later my phone rang at three in the morning. I didn’t answer it. There was a message on my phone from Evangeline. Her almost-quivering voice was telling me about this song that she had just heard about only having 100 years and how it made her think of me.

Prior to that, Evangeline and I hadn’t had a single song that we could both agree on. Our two perspectives of the relationship differed too greatly. She viewed it as sweet and tragic and I viewed it as exasperating and maddening. Things were never good long enough for their to be any positive synergy in the whole song-selection process. For her it was “Falling” by Semisonic and for me it was a song called “Why Do I” by an obscure singer from one of those northern states named Ken Bierschbach.

When will we learn to dance
Grab our moment, take our chance
Seems we’ve been struggling for years
We’ve stumbled a long time not to fall
Hoping in the end we’d get it all

Before everything was done, we each made soundtracks of the relationship that between us filled five CDs.

If Evangeline and I had too many songs between us, the problem with Julie, who came before her, was the lack of a song. Though it honestly never bothered me, the fact that we had no song to call our own just bothered her to no end. I kept trying to come up with suggestions from Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” to Edwin McCain’s “Could Not Ask For More”. We temporarily settled on Phil Collins’s “Groovy Kind of Love” but within a couple weeks she had actually forgotten that we’d settled on that and was bugging me about wanting a song again.

The problem is that she wanted a very specific song that was completely off the table as far as I was concerned.

You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn’t speak
You were my eyes when I couldn’t see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn’t reach
You gave me faith ‘coz you believed
I’m everything I am
Because you loved me

Celine Dion. That wasn’t the dealbreaker, though. The dealbreaker was that before I’d met her, a previous love interest had dedicated the song to me over the radio. I’d never liked it to begin with, but once that dedication went through and our relationship fell through, that song was through. I never wanted to hear it again. Julie kept playing it hoping that I would see how perfectly it fit us. When I told her that I didn’t feel that was the precise nature of our relationship, she was hurt. When I told her that even if I thought it was that song was already poisoned by its connection to Tracey. That didn’t help, either. She kept asking me if my hurt from Tracey was actually stronger than my love for her. At the end of our tenure together, it would become abundantly clear that the answer was “yes”.

Tracey had settled on “Because You Love Me” pretty early on. My choice was “She’s An Angel” by They Might Be Giants. In the end, it became “In Too Deep” by Phil Collins.

Listen, you know I love you, but I just can’t take this,
You know I love you, but I’m playing for keeps,
Although I need you, I’m not gonna make this,
You know I want to, but I’m in too deep.

Ooh I know you’re going, but I can’t believe
It’s the way that you’re leaving,
It’s like we never knew each other at all, it may be my fault,
I gave you too many reasons, being alone, when I didn’t want to
I thought you’d always be there, I almost believed you,
All this time, I still remember everything you said, oh
There’s so much you promised, how could I ever forget

A couple years ago for our anniversary, I gave Clancy a soundtrack for us. It wasn’t easy to choose between some of the songs, but the main song… our song… was not contested. I’d heard it just a few weeks before. I remember liking it, though I had nothing sentimental to attach it to. Then I met Clancy and the song just kept ringing in my head nonstop.

I don’t get many things right the first time
In fact, I am told that a lot
Now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls
Brought me here

And where was I before the day
That I first saw your lovely face?
Now I see it everyday
And I know

That I am the luckiest

Ben Folds. It became the song for more than a couple couples that we knew, but there was from the moment that Clancy and I became an us a feeling that this was the song. Not just that I felt so lucky, though I did of course, but every verse in the song struck a chord. About the love that I’d always wanted to find and the one that I felt so early on that I had. Evangeline and I batted songs back and forth. Julie and I couldn’t find one. Clancy and I had one, without controversy or debate, from the very beginning. It would seem that the choosing of the song can be as indicative of the nature of a relationship than the actual song(s) chosen.

“Jimmy please say you’ll wait for me
I’ll grow up someday you’ll see
Saving all my kisses just for you
Signed with love forever true” -Joni

“Joni, Joni, please don’t cry
you’ll forget me by and by
You’re just 15, I’m 22
and Joni I just can’t wait for you” -Jimmy

-{”Joni”, by Conway Twitty}-

My best friend Clint and I started writing a screenplay when we were in high school. It was about two guys trying to find something to do on a Saturday night and no matter what they did, nothing seemed to work out. That was the backdrop for what was generally a character piece. The two characters were lamenting how it seemed that the girls they found that were right for them were too young (the characters were 17 or 18, the girls 14 or 15). “Where were girls like that when we were their age?” One of the characters asked.

“Flirting with 18 year olds, probably.”

Recently, conversations about anime and sexonomics got flipped into conversations about the appropriateness of Gannon’s pet topic of age-of-consent laws and the appropriate age for girls to start dating, the ages of the guys that they should date, and so on. I’ll tackle the legal question later, focusing today on the social aspects. It is Gannon’s belief that people in their late twenties are more ideally suited to girls in their teens.

I think that a lot of this has to do with culture. I’m not exactly a cultural relativist, but I do believe that something can be right in one culture and wrong in another because cultural norms and history can make something cause harm. To choose a newsworthy example, polygamy makes a certain amount of sense in a culture where there’s an excess of women due to war or whatever. Prostitution makes sense where there is a shortage of women as was the case in the old west. In a culture where no such shortages exist, both (in my view) cause more harm than whatever good the freedom to do these things brings.

I think that the same general rule follows for relationships. In some cultures, it makes perfect sense for 14 or 15 year old girls to start procreating. If life-expectancy is really low, for example, something has to be done to keep the population marching along. Similarly, in a culture where 14 year old girls are accorded the same rights and responsibilities as a man that is 25, such a union might make sense.

That is not, however, the American culture. The American culture is one in which rights are severely limited until one turns 18 and aren’t fully granted until someone turns 21 or often older. At 18 we have the right to vote, smoke cigarettes, leave home and do just about everything but drink alcohol legally. At 21, we’re allowed to drink alcohol and rent cars and with the exception being able to be president, we’re fully free. Right? Well, often not really. Many of us are in college at 21 and 22 (and sometimes 23 and beyond) and though we have all of our legal rights, we’re still indentured to our parents who are paying for college, our apartment, and various other things. Our parents may grant us freedom, but it is in some way our freedom is theirs to grant. That makes a difference.

In American culture, by law and by custom certain ages are roped off from one another. There’s younger than sixteen (and can’t drive) and older than sixteen (and can). There’s high school age and college age. There are those that can join the bar culture (21+) and those that can’t. There are those that are living independently and those that live free at the pleasure of their parents. Dating across the ropes presents all sorts of logistical problems. When I was in college I dated a girl that was attending high school. Even though she was old for a high school student (19), the cultural difference was rather difficult to overcome. She would talk about getting her parents to sign her mid-six-week progress report, and a part of me would vaguely recall “Oh yeah, I remember what that was like…”

When one partner of a couple has considerably more in the way of freedoms and rights than the other, bad things are very often going to be the result. The younger becomes dependent on the older, dependent on getting the booze, getting a ride to the party, having the money for movie tickets, having a place to stay for the night, and on and on. No matter how much the older reveres the younger, the imbalance is ever-present and I don’t know that I have ever seen one where the imbalance didn’t start factoring into the relationship significantly over time.

Even apart from the imbalance, though, comes a difference in mentality. Since young people have not generally been responsible for very much, they take a different attitude towards responsibility. They may handle what responsibilities they have admirably, but they can keep their responsibilities of the periphery of things. They can focus more of their attention on the frivolous and the speculative. They can speculate on what they want to do when they grow up, for instance. They can imagine and seek information on what the “real world” is like. Worse yet, they can think that they know what the real world is like and proceed with their relationships based on those faulty assumptions. When it comes to what high school life is like, they have a lot of information. Adult life, on the other hand, is just plain different and cannot be accurately assessed with pre-adult sensibilities. All of this is ripe for abuse and makes the young person extremely vulnerable to manipulation.

A lot of these wouldn’t be at issue if we started introducing them to adult life sooner. As I said in my post on The Maturity Myth:

I have known some young ladies that were mature for their age. I was vaguely involved with one significantly younger girl that at least acted more mature than most women my own age. But that was because her father ditched her, her mother was never sober, and she was more-or-less taking care of herself since she was 14. Far from being an accomplishment her maturity was instead a sign of tragedy.

Perhaps her case wouldn’t have been as tragic for Cecilia if we expected mid-teenies to start taking care of themselves more and more at that age. It’s never fun to have an alcoholic mother and an absent father, of course, but perhaps had she been in a culture where more of her contemporaries were taking care of themselves, she would have been so isolated and out-of-step with people here age and thus had a stronger social network. But that she had to have unusual circumstances to break out of the age-appropriate mold is significant.

That’s the last problem with age-imbalanced relationships: some norms are most frequently broken by those with less investment in society or those whom society is perceived to have failed. Cecilia was failed by her most intimate social unit, her family. Men in the United States that break the norms of age-appropriateness are typically doing so for a reason. If one is inclined to believe, as Gannon is, that we have natural urges towards the young, they’re breaking it because they lack discipline and/or have an insufficient investment in society to bother playing by its rules. More often, though, they do it for the same reasons that I tried to cast a wider net in high school: because they can’t get someone their own age. When someone is so relationship-unsuccessful that they have to go outside the culturally accepted age range, that is cause for alarm. Yes, sometimes there will be people that just see and fall in love immediately with someone that society has deemed inappropriate and feel so strongly about it that no man can resist, but those cases are greatly outnumbered by the other.

Many of the circumstances that make dating across the ropes problematic in the United States simply don’t apply to other countries. If they give their young people more autonomy at younger ages, then it may work. Or I suppose you can take away the autonomy of the older men. As a typical American my knowledge of the ways that other countries work is limited. I know American culture reasonably well, though, and I believe that most February-May relationships are likely to cause more harm than do good within the backdrop of our culture.

I visited my friend and Hit Coffee contributor Web on my way to the Colosse airport. Even though I’d seen him the day before at Hubert’s birthday party, he had a Christmas gift that had been waiting for me since the turn of the new year. Besides, it gave me an opportunity to visit John “Fuzzles” Fustle and his house, where I lived for a few months prior to getting married and moving to Deseret. When I lived there it was Fuzzles, my ex-roommate Karl, and another guy. Web moved in some time after I’d left. Prior to that he’d had an apartment and prior to that he’d lived at Hubert’s house.

I was at Fuzzles’s place for maybe half an hour or a little more and after I left I stopped to refill the gas tank on the rental car. As I was entering the convenience store, I rubbed my eyes. Then they itched more and I rubbed them some more. Cleared my throat. And sneezed. “What the hell?” I asked. Was I somehow allergic to a Texaco station? Turned out it was something else.

I used to spend a fair amount of time at the house of my friend and college roommate Hubert. this was particularly true when we were doing recording for a creative project. At some point, I can’t remember when, I started noticing that I started feeling kind of sick whenever I was at his place. I’d get all stuffed up, sneeze, and my eyes would itch and water. Hubert and I hadn’t made our peace with one another yet, so I would joke to myself that I’d become allergic to him. Turned out that it was something else.

Sometime after we parted ways, he got a cat named Victor. As far as cats went, Vic was one of the more tolerable ones. He was cute, which most cats are, and friendly and playful, which a lot of cats aren’t. It took me quite a while before I was able to isolate Victor as the cause of my allergies. I had never in my life been allergic to any animal, but for some reason I was allergic to that cat. Once I figured that out, we’d lock Victor out of the bedroom when we had to do our recording and there weren’t any problems.

Hubert married Lorie, who was either allergic to cats or really didn’t like them, so when Web moved out he got Victor. While I was visiting with Web and Fuzzles, I saw Victor there. I figured that since I wasn’t going to be there long and I wasn’t in a room with him as I was when recording at Hubert’s place, that there wouldn’t be a problem. There probably wouldn’t have been, but I petted him. That probably got something on my hands that caused a reaction when I scratched my eyes at the Texaco. That’s the best that I can figure.

It’s very strange to be allergic to a single cat. My coworker Pat first suggested that it might be psychosomatic, but it’s only something that I notice after I start sneezing or getting stuffed up and besides I like Victor. If I was going to choose a cat to be allergic to, it certainly wouldn’t be him. She also thought that it might be a particular shampoo, but unless Web and Hubert always get the same shampoo that nobody else uses that seems unlikely. It’s all very odd. I can understand being allergic to cats and I can understand not being allergic to cats, but it’s odd that a single cat would have some sort of something that my system would single out as problematic.

My father worked for the Department of Defense on the civilian side as an engineer, then an economist, then a supervisor of economists. He was purely civil service and in fact rose as high in the ranks as he could without losing civil service protections. One more promotion and he would have been part of the staff of a political appointee. For the longest time, being a ranking civil serviceman in the DoD meant that he was prohibited from publicly expressing support for a political candidate. No bumper stickers, no yardsigns, and no political donations.

Though a reliable voter, Dad isn’t particularly outspoken about his politics and this limitation meant that he had a built-in excuse any time a politician asked for money or someone wanted him to put up a yardsign or something. He did resent the fact that he had to remain apolitical while people above him could not only express support for candidates, but could even have their support bought and paid for as “campaign consultants”. Eventually, and I’m not sure when, the courts stepped in and said that the government couldn’t prevent people from publicly expressing their views so long as they did not represent their own views as the views of the government organization that they work for. Even after that ban was lifted, he continued to try to hide behind the no-longer existent regulations.

Last weekend I flew back to Colosse to visit the folks and go to my former roommate Hubert’s birthday party. It’s election season in East Oak, the little burg that I was raised in. The election seems to be hinging on a new condominium project that threatens to bring in all sorts of tax dollars. Oh, the horror.

Okay, so it’s a little more complicated than that because it’ll result in more traffic and yet more backyard views of skyscrapers. But the long and short of it from my point of view is that the thing is going to get built, the traffic will get worse, and the only question is whether East Oak wants to at least get a great deal of tax revenue out of it.

My folks see things the same way that I do, so you can imagine my surprise when I drove into the driveway and saw yardsigns of the candidate slate that’s trying to keep the condo out. Particularly since they’ve never put up yardsigns, ever, even after the ban was lifted.

I brought it up under the pretense of asking whether the candidates were really against the development (though I already knew from the yardsigns that they were). He said that they were and that he would be sure to vote against them. So naturally I asked, “Why the yardsign?”

They were asked to by the woman in the house across the street and everyone in the neighborhood knows that is not the person you want to make an enemy of for social reasons. “So wait, what you’re saying here is that you’re caving to peer pressure?” I asked.

Sheepishly, Dad said, “Well yeah, I guess.”

“Too bad I didn’t know about this back in high school when you were telling me to resist the evils of peer pressure. I could have done a lot of drugs, Dad!”

He didn’t entirely get my joke.