Last month, Transplanted Lawyer linked with modest disapproval to a new idea that’s being tried in schools across the country: Pay students to make good grades. Half Sigma has approvingly nodded to the idea.

Whether paying students for performance is effective or not I do not know. The jury is still out and the results we have so far are not particularly encouraging. Kids generally have short time horizons that make it difficult to tell them that if they work hard for the next six weeks they will get a reward then and only then. A more effective strategy might be an approach measuring small gains. Give them a test at the end of every couple weeks and see how they do. Mark Kleimann has actually recommended doing something like that in lieu of our current standardized testing performance-measuring regime. It could well be true that even paying students for performance will never be more effective than other uses for that money, but I’m all about trying new and different things to see what works. If it doesn’t work, move on to something new.

This post is not an endorsement of this particular strategy. Rather, it’s an objection to an objection to it that I’ve heard so frequently that it’s grated on my nerves. The objection goes like this: If you start paying kids to get good grades, they will do whatever they do for the money and not for their future or for the sake of actually learning.

I don’t know what my IQ is, but I think it’s fair to say that I would be somewhere in the top-third of the curve. I am also an intellectually curious person that spends a lot of time thinking about things and probably spend more time than most people out of school learning stuff. My High School GPA was solid if unremarkable at one of the more competitive public high schools in the city and I graduated with membership in the honors college of my alma mater. None of this is spectacular, but even if I’m not remarkable I have achieved more than the vast majority of people my age.

I say this not to brag (again, not spectacular), but to get to an important point: Despite having turned out much like my parents and school system had hoped, I couldn’t have cared a camel’s lick about learning when I was in K-12. I didn’t start enjoying learning for the sake of learning until I was at least a couple years past teachers and professors trying to thrust knowledge upon me. I learned what I learned for one major reason: to get good grades. And I didn’t get good grades to go to a great university or so that I could get a great job. I got good grades for one major reason: my parents expected it of me.

I did what I did for parental approval. My parents (particularly my father) had tremendous moral authority and their approval was very important to me. Getting good grades got positive results. Bad grades got negative results. Had my parents not taken this attitude, I might well have dropped out of school altogether as soon as legally capable. More to the point, had my parents not had the respect from me that they did (a respect that they did not just demand, but earned), I would not have turned out so well. Had my parents not had the time and money to monitor my progress and to assure me that I would be going to college like everybody else, things might have been different. While maybe it would have been preferable if I’d had my own ambitions and thirst for learning at a young age, the fact that I did what I did because I was (in a sense) manipulated to do it does not matter one fraction as much as the fact that I did it, regardless of my motivations. Further, had my parents relied on me to want to learn for its own sake or for my own ambition so that I’d do the right thing for the “right reason”, I would almost certainly have done the wrong thing and my reasoning would be moot.

A lot of kids don’t have my parents. They may have parents that have an abstract desires that their children go to a good college, but they don’t have a clear roadmap of what to expect when. Or they don’t have the time to monitor their kids as my parents monitored me. Or they didn’t have the moral authority to demand it or the consistency to apply the right pressures at the right time. And much like me, they don’t have the future time orientation to do all the right things on their own accord. Maybe it would be ideal if they had any and all of these things, but they don’t. And stripping them of any other motivation won’t necessarily give it to them.

To bring it to something that adults can relate to, it’s like going to work. Ideally speaking, we should go to work because we enjoy it or are making a valuable contribution to society or industry and we should consider that enough. Mostly, though, we do it to get paid. Otherwise, we’d be in a nation of 50 million writers, 20 million musicians, and no janitors. I really don’t know what position we are in to say that money should not be a sufficient motivator.

As I said above, this is not an endorsement of pay-for-performance with students. I don’t know if it works or not or whether it can be tweaked to work or not. Even if it can be tweaked, there are some questions of fairness if you give it to kids that go to this school but not kids that go to that one. And there are questions about whether we want kids to get money bypassing their parents entirely because they could likely find some destructive uses for it. But the notion that it provides bad incentives and is bad on that basis is ignoring the lack of good motivations that the vast majority of young people have.

Spungen has written a post inspired by a comment that I made on Half Sigma about community colleges that left her with the impression that I didn’t think that I would be bothered by being surrounded by people of lower economic and social classes.

One of the constant themes of Spungen’s posts regarding money and class is that the worst parts about not having money is the inability to filter out lower-class people the way that they are automatically filtered out when you grow up in an environment with money and with the seeming impenetrability of the upper classes who are rather difficult to meet when you didn’t have the opportunity to go to the same schools that they did or work the same jobs that they do.

The second aspect of that, the impenetrability of the upper classes, is something that some people can relate to even if they come from more money than Spungen did. When a lot of us get out of college we are suddenly no longer surrounded by peers. One of my earliest jobs outside of college was in an office place where I was the only person under 35 working in the office throughout most of my tenure and I was the only unmarried person ineligible for AARP. Contrast that to my job at Falstaff in Deseret where I was surrounded by young and mostly unmarried people* and had one of the best social atmospheres I’d ever had at any job before or since.

Of course, that’s definitely not the same thing as Spungen’s complaint because I still had my college friends and roommates to lean on. I also had friends in the area dating back to high school. If I’d been more on-the-ball, I could have utilized those friends to make more. The issue for Spungen is that those opportunities were not available to her in the first place. She’d been at that point where I was only temporarily (at a couple jobs in Colosse) for most of her life. Plus, I had the first part. When I was working at Wildcat, I could go out and hang out at the warehouse if I wanted to or I could stay in. It was completely my call. But it at least gives me an idea of what she means and a place to start from when contemplating it.

In the course of the conversation that followed from Spungen’s post, Larry pointed out that the Internet changes this somewhat. Now there’s a way to meet people outside work and geographical boundaries.

I think that there’s an important distinction to make, though, between friendships that start on the Internet and move offline and those that start and end by way of the Internet. Those friendships that have always existed independent of geography rarely last as long as those friendships that you take offline. Part of it is that friendship bonds occur, in part, through common experiences. Having a common background helps, but it seems to me that friendships that occur without something concrete tend to dissipate over time once whatever bond you do have loosens. One of you gets out of the routine of visiting a particular message board or stops collecting whatever collectables you originally started talking about, your paths diverge even if your online friendship once went beyond that to a more personal level.

Where I would expect the Internet to be most useful are ones that may have started online, but eventually moved offline. That requires, among other things, geography. Once a friendship moves offline, it becomes like any other. The fact that you met via computers and cables becomes a biographical detail.

As most of you know, when I was in my late teens I joined a BBS that allowed me to talk to others through a computer. I made a lot of friends on Camelot BBS. I met a lot of those people offline at parties and whatnot. Some I became friends with independent of Camelot. Whether we became friends offline or not share no more than a little corrollation with how close we were online. It would start because we both happened to be free on the same weekend, they needed a ride somewhere, or something like that. More on that in a sec. Yet it’s those friendships that endured. It was through those people that I found my social networks. Those are the people that came to my wedding and I theirs. Those are the people that I talk about here in the present tense. Hubert, Kyle, and Tony were never my best friends on Camelot, but they’re among my best friends now.

That’s one of the downsides of the Internet compared to Camelot. Since calls were clearly marked long and shortdistance in the age before cell phones and VoIP, everybody that called was in the same town. When I was hanging out on the Internet as a single guy, I had to work to filter out-of-towners when it came to meeting girls or guys to boost my social life. In that sense, something like a BBS wouldn’t have helped Spungen back in her day because there was probably not a big BBSing scene where she’s from. Young people growing up there now can make friends all across the country, but not in ways that noticeably improve their social life.

Geography matters a great deal in these things. I remember my freshman year in college when Hubert and I were living in Lecter Hall and most of his friends were in Greenwood Hall. Despite the fact that they were his friends, they kept doing things without him. Not because they were trying to exclude him (he had not yet become nearly intolerable), but because they’d all be hanging around the dorm and they’d decide to do something spontaneously and he though he was a building away he was nonetheless excluded by default because he didn’t happen to be right there. On the other hand, I became friends with Web, Karl, John Fustle, and various other people at first because they were around a lot. They were sort of friends by osmosis. Some of those friendships endured, like Web and Hubert, but others have since become frequent acquaintances. Even with the latter people, though, the point is that we all had ample opportunity to get to know one another due primarily to proximity.

That’s one of the hardest parts for people that aren’t in proximity to people that they’re a good match for. Spungen was born with the sharp, inquisitive, and ambitious mind that was suited for the sort of nice suburb that she lives in now. She just didn’t grow up there and never had the kind of money to have the sort of proximity that she needed until much later in life. The Internet or BBSes could have helped her find those people that did live near her that shared her interests, but only to the extent that those people existed and that they had transportation to form their own network outside their school, as I did with my Camelot friends, or the opportunity to join an existing network.

Of course, even with that, she would still have the Hubert Problem. And she would have the problem that I had in junior high and at other select portions of my life, where she is stuck around people not of her own choosing that often don’t treat her (or one another) well and aren’t generally compatible even if they do. So while it would alleviate the overall problem, it certainly wouldn’t fix it even in the best of circumstances.

This all leaves me a little concerned for the future children that Clancy and I will have. We will be living in a small town. Most small towns are generally speaking undereducated and a lot of them contain a fair amount of poverty. Poverty won’t be a problem in the Truman household, but that may not matter as much as I would like. Clancy once did a brief stint in a small town in the rural northwest.

One of the things that stood out to me when I visited her there was how unusually “middle class” the town was for such a small place unconnected with any particular large places. There was a two-year college there, but it wasn’t a college town. Clancy and I have been looking closer at college towns than other places of comparable size so that, as I put it, I wouldn’t be the only person on the school board voting to teach evolution in science class. Keeping all of the above in mind, finding a town with a substantial educated population takes on more importance because of the effects that it might have on our kids.

* - Yes, I was married at the time, but I was a residency widower. So while I wasn’t in the dating market, I still needed friends moreso than the average married guy does. And they couldn’t be “couples” friends because the other part of my couple was always working.

Will posits the trouble of being middle management, beholden to company superiors and policy and yet also expected to interface with lower level employees and try to work out their concerns to keep the office running smoothly.

The contents of this post also tangentially relate to the Department I Don’t Work For.

I’m in a semi-middle management (in that I can reassign work to “level 1″ and that more and more of my job responsibility is not taking care of every little thing myself, but seeing that whoever I assigned it to gets it done while I work on the Big Things) role now, and moving up shortly to what I will consider a fully middle-management position. My responsibilities have changed from “grunt work” to the occasional small thing (when we’re short staffed) with the rest of my time occupied by keeping abreast of policy issues, changes being done from above, and the ongoing changes in technology so that when people under my pay grade get confused, I can give them the info/training necessary to get their jobs done.

Part of this role, given that it’s at Southern Tech University, involves interfacing with the various faculty/staff and trying to meet their “needs” (or desires) while staying within policy. Only, since it is a government institution, we have the following policies we have to keep abreast of:
- Federal regulations (safety, security, privacy)
- State regulations (safety, security, privacy, information retention)
- Systemwide regulations
- College-level regulations
- Our own department mandate (we have a very specific charter on what we are allowed to spend money on, tied directly to the fact that it has to be either for student use or for educational in-classroom use, and other departments are always trying to find “loopholes” to get into our money).

Where this gets even hairier is that we are in the unenviable position of trying to enforce these regulations on tenured faculty. The thing to remember about tenured faculty is that they are (a) at least 80% completely technologically inept and (b) used to constantly getting their way from students and grad assistants, and even from the College itself if they happen to bring in a particularly large grant and can threaten to take it to another institution.

For many of our discussions, we are (for better or worse) stuck in between a fast-moving object (the faculty) and an immovable object (the various regulations). Faculty that are used to getting the rules ‘bent’ for them on things like the spending of grant money or the deadlines for various applications come to us wanting things changed “just for them.” Things like password reset deadlines or complexity requirements, alterations to the email server so that their Blackberry can function (Blackberry’s server-side software, alas, tries to auto-install a rather insecure MS-SQL setup and eats up a ton of resources), or more unusual requests that often involve a fundamental inability of the faculty member to understand the limitations of technology. Quite often, we are stuck in a situation where we are the bearer of bad news (”I’m sorry, but what you are asking for cannot be done under Regulation X.Y.Z”) or else we are caught between someone asking for something and forced to tell them no on the grounds that (a) it is technologically impossible, (b) it is cost-prohibitive, or (c) it would require the purchase of X and it does not fit within our purview to make that purchase for the intended use.

Some days, they even come back and try to make threats and trouble with us for bringing the response back about regulations.

I doubt most middle-management deals with that; I imagine that most of the time “or I quit” is about the extent of the major threat, unless employees have access to sensitive information or their loss would seriously impact a project in some way. I don’t know that it the IT-side question 100% matches the “middle management” question, but it is always interesting (and sometimes quite frustrating) being the go-between.

There’s been a bit of discussion here and there about men marrying women that have substantial debts. One explores credit card debt and the other student loan debt. As a brief aside, I find it interesting how Half Sigma’s commentariat suddenly finds financial concerns to be of the utmost relevancy when choosing a mate when there is considerably carping about women who choose the same criterion, but I’ll let that be for now. This happens to be an area of great interest to me.

Take the four most significant women in my life and exclude the first because she was too young to have any credit, and there is a distinct pattern. Julie was constantly about $3,000 in consumer debt, which was the maximum allowed by her credit card. Evangeline was roughly $30,000 in debt primarily on credit cards though she racked it up in part as a stopgap to pay for college, and my wife Clancy is (and collectively we are) $100,000 in debt due entirely to student loans. It seemed that with every passing relationship, I ended up more in debt! Ironically, debt became a decreasing factor in each one.

Money was one of the few things that Julie and I fought about with any sort of regularity. In retrospect I cannot believe that $3,000 was such a big deal, but it really was. And it wasn’t entirely the money. The bigger deal was what the money had been spent on. She spent hundreds of dollars that she did not have on Beanie Babies. He used only the best gas in a car that couldn’t really make the most of it. She ate out at every opportunity. Mostly, though, it was the Beanie Babies. For me, failing to live within one’s means (when possible) is more than just a financial failing. It’s practically a moral one. Seeing it as a moral failing as I did, that represented a huge problem. More practically, I worried about what would happen with our potential family finances.

Her perspective was a little different, though. The way she looked at it, it was her money and none of my damn business. She was genuinely angry that I would get upset at a problem that was (at that point) hers and only hers. The whole affair represented to her a controlling streak within me not unlike what she had put up with during her previous boyfriend’s tenure. She was also caught between me and her parents. Her parents told her that it was extremely important that she have money in the bank even if that meant that she couldn’t pay off her credit cards as quickly as she might like. So she could either keep the money in the bank, which would please her parents, upset me, and never actually last long in the bank anyway. Or she could pay off her credit cards, disobey her parents, and get a lecture from that end. I can appreciate the no-win situation that she was in now better than I could back then.

Notably, when she moved in with her next boyfriend Tony, money was constantly a problem in their relationship. They made a combined $90,000, didn’t own a home and had no children and they had debt and not money to divy up when he left her. He made 2/3 of what she did but paid the rent and car notes. To this day he has no idea what she spent her money on, but after he left she was nonetheless in debt.

The most glorious irony of all of this was that before dropping out she majored in… accounting.

After Julie was Evangeline, who was monumentally more in debt. Fortunately for her she let this slip when I was so taken with her that things like debt and repeated abortions were something I could easily swallow. Even so, her debt actually bothered me somewhat less. Partially it was because she (by her own telling, anyway) came by a lot of it more honestly (if very foolishly). On two occasions her father failed to come through at the very last moment on a couple semesters worth of tuition and she put it on her credit card. From there the interest kept racking up. That, combined with some foolish spending habits, created an amount of debt that she was unable to even contemplating being able to pay off. She put it off until she could graduate and when she graduated she didn’t make enough money to pay it off. Once she got so far into the whole, she gave up on the whole “financial responsibility” thing. More than the circumstances under which the debt was accrued (certainly a fair portion of it could be blamed on her), the bigger reason why it wasn’t as big a deal for me was that unlike Julie, she recognized that there was a problem and if things had progressed between the two of us I would have taken over the finances, put her on an allowance, and gotten it paid off. Money, ironically, was one of the only things that we didn’t fight about.

A couple years ago she declared bankrupcy.

Then came Clancy. Yeah, $100,000 is a lot of money, but it’s fraggin’ medical school. Half Sigma and company cannot fathom marrying somebody with loads of student loan debts, but that was a no-brainer for me. Some of it is because it’s medical school and not some liberal arts degree or even law school, but mostly it’s because she’s slightly more budget-conscious than I am. I really am convinced that it wasn’t the money in particular that drove me crazy with Julie (and to a lesser extent Eva) as it was how they got there and how they planned to get out. Seriously, on the question of whether I would pay $40,000 or even $100,000 for the right marriage, it would be a question of whether I could afford it rather than whether or not I would spend it.

On the other hand, there is my brother Oliver. Ollie married straight out of college to a young woman about $40,000 in debt. Whitney had a business degree, so she had earning capacity, but she also had an eye for the finer things in life and together they racked up significant consumer debt. I’m not sure exactly how it came to be, but when she left him after that one year (for a wealthy 40-something man, no less), he got saddled with half of the student loan debts that she had acquired before they were married.

Will points to a hilarious bit on how people take technology for granted; Bobvis opines on the supposedly meaningless advance of shaving technology.

I put myself somewhere in between the two beliefs.

First of all, yes, there is “technology” that is amazing. The fact that humans, in the last century, crafted devices to do everything from imitating birds to automating all sorts of tasks (such as, among other things, slicing bread) should indeed be amazing. On the other hand, an equally amazing amount of technological “advances” are barely advances and are merely the result of the saner portions of the population taking the logical next step, time and again. For one example, the cellular phone - occasionally referred to as a “technological marvel” and descending from the minds of people who watched a lot of Star Trek when they were younger - is not a fantastical creation, but the mere combination of a number of already-existing technologies (voice encoding and radio transmission).

At the same time, so much “time-saving” has been accomplished, and people are so “connected”, that the idea of waiting (or, to use the language of the rant above, not being an impatient brat) has seemed to vanish entirely.

Recently, I had occasion to go a couple weeks without power at my house. Certain things (wash) were annoying. Certain things weren’t available. I wouldn’t want to live like it permanently.

On the other hand… I did start taking a number of things a bit slower. Maybe there’s something to being a little less “connected” in one’s life.

Several months ago, before I left Soyokaze America and the State of Estacado, the President of Soyokaze America was also a fan of our space program. Whereas Willard’s story involves Apollo 13, mine involves the HBO miniseries “Earth to the Moon”.

The whole thing gets started in the aforementioned moment when Jack Kennedy makes the promise that sends everybody at NASA scrambling to figure out how they were going to go about doing it. They drafted up a bunch of things that they would need to do before they could land on the moon (successfully orbit, space-walk, rendezvous, docking, etc) and set those up as milestones towards the ultimate goal.

According to Soyokaze’s president, the lesson here was “Think big! Make big promises! Don’t worry until later how or whether you will be able to actually do it!”

We saw something very different, though. We saw an organization that did not just decide that something was going to be done, but decided how it as going to do it. They set up steps where in each case they would not move on to the next step until the previous step was complete. When they had a setback, they moved not just the date for that segment, but the projected date of the actual landing back. The goal was to get there safely.

Had Soyokaze been in charge of the Moon Landing, it would have looked very different: After the first milestone had been passed, a senior manager at NASA would request that the spacecraft become made Mars-compliant. So everyone would have to start again from scratch, but the first milestone wouldn’t be tested again and instead we’d be trying to get a guy space-walking before they achieved orbit. Oh, well, that didn’t work, so hopefully we’ll hit both of those when we rendezvous! The initial projected launch date of 1967 wouldn’t be moved until we’d already passed it. They’d move it once, they’d move it again. Then, some time six months before the end of the decade aim the rocket as close to the moon as we could, close our eyes, cross our fingers, and launch the sucker! Afterwards, some After-Incident Reports would be filed, and having never successfully gotten to the Moon, we’d take the next logical step of going to Mars. After all, they wanted the rocketship to be Mars compliant for a reason.

About a month later, he had us watch the second part of the miniseries, which involved the Apollo 1 explosion that killed Ed White, Gus Grissolm, and Roger Chafee. It also followed the investigation afterwards into the crash. In the climax, astronaut Frank Borman saved the entire project by saying that Grissom would have wanted the project to carry on and that things were overlooked because not all potential problems were correctly assessed. It was, he said, a failure of imagination.

According to Soyokaze’s president, the lesson was, “Things go wrong when you don’t use all of your creativity to solve problems. Imagine how something can be solved and put it into practice.”

Once again, we saw something different. As in, the movie that he was showing us. The “failure of the imagination” was not a failure in problem-solving, it was a failure to foresee everything that could go wrong! From a QA perspective, this was particularly infuriating because we’d filed report after report of our products defects and over and over again we were told “It’ll work out fine” and “It’s good enough”. The “failure of the imagination” was when they fail to imagine that our alarm that our product destroyed customer hardware was justified or that the software lifecycle is suboptimal.

I’m not sure entirely what it is about space analogies that CEOs love, but they do seem to love space analogies. I think it all goes back to Kennedy. He said “Hey, we’re going to the moon!” and a thousands and thousands of other people worked their posteriors off and it nonetheless goes down in history as something that Kennedy made happen. I guess I can see why that appeals.

Bobvis has never been so wrong.

He is unimpressed with the progress of technology in the area of shaving. Fair enough. He’s right that shaving doesn’t take substantially less time with a lot of the newer inventions than they did with the old. It could also be said that they don’t provide a better shave.

But he goes after my razor of choice:

On November 15, 1904, Gillette (the man) patented the safety razor. I have used one of these types of ancient razors, and I have also used the Gillette Mach3, which the company spent more than $750 million to develop.

$750 million.

To develop a razor with a third blade.

The third blade is not a substantive improvement on 2 blades.

I think there might be some slight benefit to two blades, but if there is, it is still debatable.

I suffered for years with one-blade disposable razors. Years! They were awful and made me never ever want to shave. Years later I would use two-blade disposable razors and they are not nearly so bad. I would rather not shave than ever, ever, ever use a cheapo one-blade razor again. Ever. Maybe Bob doesn’t have this problem because he has a smooth neck or thick skin or something, but the thing about single-blade razors is that they leave you with all kinds of nicks and cuts or you have to spend forever doing so gently enough that you don’t. And even if you don’t, razor burn is not unlikely. The two-bladers I sometimes reluctantly use are very significantly better, though still wildly imperfect.

From the one-blade disposables I graduated to electric razors. Those weren’t very good at actually shaving me. And if I ever did get in close enough for it to actually shave me, I could count on razor-burn. So I suffered along until I found the Mach3. Which was truly a godsend.

The thing about the Mach3 is not that it saves me time, which it actually does. Nor is it that it makes me more shaven, which it does as well. It’s that I can use it without the constant fear of cutting myself or razor burn. It happens every now and again, but pretty rarely. I do think that some of that can be attributed to the extra blades. The extra blades let me apply the blade very softly and be relatively assured that it will shave most of the stubble without replacing the stubble with burn bumps and blood. That speeds me up. And I get more shaven because it allows me to shave my neck daily because it is a much more casual affair. It’s not just the blades, though. The springs help a lot. But even when using multi-blades without springs (like the above razors), it is still worlds apart from the single-blades that I only use when I forgot my blades, at my parents house, when I have to shave to go to church, and don’t have time to go to the store.

But even if it isn’t the blades, the springs, bendiness, and hatch thingees (I must confess I don’t know as much about razors as Bob seems to) of razors should count as “technology”, right? Technological improvement? I would think it does.

I am in many ways a cheapskate. I buy cheap toothpaste, cheap dental floss, cheap hair gel, cheap clothes and cheap most things having to do with my personal appearance. But I do not skimp on razors.

Maybe it’s because I believe in the message of finding contentment in the marvels of modern society, but I thought this was laugh-out-loud funny:

Remember my Unfunny Sitcom Neighbor?

Our new neighbor is kind of like the comedy-relief character you never actually see. I’ve never actually seen her, though her presence looms large in our common back yard. I hear her pretty much whenever I go out to the car, to take out the trash, smoke, or whatever else. A couple times I’ve heard her on the phone through the walls. Her voice carries. Most of the time it carries, though, because she’s screaming. So unlike her sitcom counterparts, it’s not actually funny.

I don’t know. Maybe she has the worst kids on God’s Green Earth. The kids seem decent enough to me. They play with the hose outside, run around, and do most of the things you would expect of kids about 11 and 8 years old (maybe as old as 13 and 10 or so). I see their sister (somewhere in the 14-16 range) less frequently, though she seeks okay, too. They don’t make me nervous the same way that a lot of the neighborhood kids do.

I actually met her shortly after posting that. It turns out that when dealing with people that are not her children she’s actually a rather quiet and soft-spoken individual. She did lose her temper at the trash collectors, though.

When moving in, she (like most people) had a lot of excess trash. The problem is that the trash people weren’t picking it up. Soundview is pretty big into recycling and so we get three canisters: trash, recycling, and natural junk (grass/branches/etc). If you put the wrong thing in the wrong canister, they’ll just leave it behind. Hers got left behind a couple of times because of this and so hers was building up very quickly. She was outside fretting about that one morning and I started talking to her. She said that now that she had everything separated, she had more trash, recyclables, and natural junk than she had places to put them. As it turned out I had forgotten to take care of the trash the night before and they’d already been by my street (which was not her street), so I offered her to use mine.

That was, shall we say, a mistake.

She must have really pissed the trash collectors off, because week in and week out they refused to take either the garbage or the recyclables with a notice that they hadn’t been properly sorted. I looked in the cans myself and didn’t see anything that didn’t belong. There are some gray areas like different grades of cardboard and plastic. Were they really holding her collection back because she’d left a plastic bottlecap (bad plastic) on her plastic bottle? Apparently so. They’d never done that with me.

I felt for her, but at this point my own trash was starting to build up. The bullpen we have out back was getting full of trashbags that I couldn’t use because my cans were otherwise occupied. But I couldn’t ask her to free it up because obviously she had nowhere to put its contents. Finally, after the third week I devised a plan. I took my cannisters with her trash and put them on my street. They took everything with no problem. Then the next week we took her trash cans and put them out on my curb. They took it with no problem. Then, for some reason after that point, they stopped having any trouble taking hers on her street and there hasn’t been a problem since.

Cascadia had a gubernatorial election this year and I think that I was conned.

The election was slated to be pretty close. The Governor had only barely won the last one and despite the leftward tilt of the state as a whole, the sour feelings over her first election and only modest popularity suggested that the Republican challenger might have a shot.

I’ve been commuting for over three months now. I don’t have many nice things to say about Cascadia’s transportation system, but one of the really nice things are the signs over the Interstate informing me how long it’s going to take to get to New City, near where I work. Not only is it good to know how patient I’m going to need to be, what the sign tells me tells me whether I should go straight through New City by way of the Splinterstate or go through Zaulem to New City on to Mindstorm HQ. It was really, really nice to have that kind of information on the road. I don’t think that there were any days that it wasn’t up there.

Until the day after the election. Since then, the signs were only on one day and on two other days only one of the three signs I usually see was lit. Oh, and this morning it was wrong by a factor of three, suggesting a shockingly short day when in actuality it was one of my longest commutes to date. I didn’t even get any notice on the way home the other day that they were cutting the Splinterstate down to one lane for construction. Would have been helpful to know!

So I smell a conspiracy. The Governor needed state government to appear to be working while The Governor was angling for re-election. Now that that’s happened, the state says “screw it” and saves on whatever the lighting and monitoring cost.

Part of me now wishes that The Governor had been unseated, the worm. Then again, if this is what happens when they were re-elected, one can only imagine the havoc that would be wreaked if it had gone the other way!

On one of the earliest episodes of the best family sitcom ever made, Cory’s father keeps him up late to watch a baseball came, making Cory fall asleep for his test the next day. When talking about it with his sage teacher, Mr. Feeny, Feeny tells the story of how he wanted to stay up late and watch President Truman’s address after V.E. His father wouldn’t let him because he needed to be well-rested and go to school. So Feeny went to bed as usual, woke up, and the next day in school he was taught something that he’d long-since forgotten.

The Root had an article a while back by Monique Fields, a mother that planned to wake up her kid in the event of a history-making Obama win.

When I was a kid, my father would never ever let me stay up for presidential elections. The reason, ostensibly, was so that I could go to sleep and be well-rested for school. Part of the Root’s motivation was the fact that we were electing our first black president, but it seems to me that every is history in the making to some extent or another. Except when something like 9/11 or an economic collapse happens, it’s about the most important thing every four years. Maybe not when the kid is three as is Monique’s daughter, but when the kid is at least old enough to have a clue of what is going on. It seems to me that the lessons of the electoral college and the election process and the government itself would be much more likely to “take” if a father is explaining to his son or daughter what’s happening as it’s happening than a teacher teaching it from a textbook.

Imagine reading a book about the rules of baseball or football versus someone explaining to you how the sport works from a book. It’s not exactly the same because elections aren’t so visual, but it’s still part of the difference between being told something and seeing something. And besides, it’s a slightly higher form of “quality time” than most forms.

We’re somewhere between 5-7 episodes into the new season. Here is my impression of the shows that I am keeping up-to-date with:

The Big Bang Theory (Season 2) - After a stellar year last year, it’s been a bit of a let-down this year. But only a bit. Some of the smaller parts (Howard!) have run their course and are due for a replacement. I am enjoying the frequent guest spots of Leslie Winkle (Sarah Gilbert), though, and am not sure of what to make of Penny’s diminishing presence. It’s fallen off the Top Spot of shows I look forward to watching on Saturday, but it’s still up there.

Boston Legal (Season 5) - I decided that I wasn’t going to watch this show anymore at the end of last season, but when I found out that they were wrapping it up I wanted to watch it to its final conclusion. They’re going a lot of what they can to make me regret that decision. Some of the character development is actually better than ever, but the court scenes and moralizing are becoming almost unbearable. It seems like they feel like they should be patted on the back for talking about important issues, but it’s become the opposite of thought-provoking where any thinking other than their thinking is approached with nothing but seething contempt. Every now and again I’ll say “Amen, brother!” to one of Alan Shore’s rants (his discourse on illegal immigration was particularly poignant), but it takes the wind out of those sails when the show suggests any contrary view of mine (gun control, to pick an example, or the belief that pharmaceutical companies aren’t evil) is devoid of any respectability, honesty, and decency. It’s such a tragedy because it would otherwise be an extremely fun show. Part of me thinks that now that Bush is leaving office it would get better so it’s a shame that it’s getting canceled now, but so much of the identity of the show is vested in opposition to our current government that I don’t know what they’d even do in an Obama administration.

Chuck (Season 2)- Chuck has gone completely uphill since last season. I don’t have a whole lot specific to say other than that it’s gotten so much better across the board. They really hit their stride.

Dirty Sexy Money (Season 2) - The show has improved, but with one major caveat. I’m getting more and more interested in the goings-on of the Darling family, but they’re walking a fine line with a long descent into eye-rolling, melodramatic crap with one slip. There really is a fine line between riveting and ridiculous.

The Ex List (Season 1) - The show seems to have gone hiatus, which is just well. It’s interesting, but in a take-it-or-leave-it sort of way. The basic storyline is that the main character is told by a psychic that she has to get together with the man of her dreams or she will live the rest of her life alone. Oh, and the man of her dreams is someone that she’s already dated. So she’s combing through her love-life trying to reconnect with former lovers and having former lovers thrust back into her life. Some drama, but mostly humor ensues. It’s a good show, but not a particularly gripping one. It’s kind of the opposite of Dirty Sexy Money that way.

Fringe (Season 1) - Lost+([X-Files]-aliens), in a nutshell. Except maybe there are aliens, but that’s not really the part being explored. Where Lost succeeded and Fringe is thus far failing is that when it came to Lost I wanted to know what was going on. It started slow and started building mystery. Fringe has announced the mystery at the outset without dedicating a whole lot of time and energy into explaining why we should care. The individual episodes are interesting, but not as good as the average episode of X-Files. I’ll give it a season since it took me that long to get interested in Lost, but my hopes are not high.

How I Met Your Mother (Season 4) - This has become the show for me this season. The Stella subplot really worked in the same way that the relationship with Robin did. You know it’s not going to work and you know that it shouldn’t work, but you’re curious on the “why” and “how” of it not working. And they keep it funny along the way.

Life (Season 2) - The weakest part of the first season was that the individual cases being investigated were gimmicky without being particularly interesting and they were resolved in ways that we did not have much room to speculate ourselves. They’ve improved on that a little bit this season, but not much. No matter, this show easily has the best characters on television in Charley Crews and Danni Reese. I’d watch those two deliver mail together. Plus, the build-up on the question of Who Framed Charlie is getting better with the definite feel that the writers have a plan.

The Office (Season 5) - It’s odd that a couple reviews have talked about the improvement this season has been over last, but I disagree. I thought last season was pretty strong and this one is telling me that the show has probably run its course. Even in its weakened state it’s still a fun and funny show, but it’s gotten too involved in the private lives of the employees and not enough actual office humor.

Worst Week (Season 1) - This show is slapstick and predictable and yet still somehow thoroughly enjoyable. This show is Murphy’s Law embodied where anything that can go wrong in the like of Sam will go wrong. Sam is about to get married and desperately wants to win the approval of his in-laws, but reality finds every possible way to conspire against him. If there is something that his future in-laws express love for, you know that minute that it will be destroyed by the end of the episode. The beauty isn’t in what happens, since that’s always obvious, but how it happens. And the writer’s do a fantastic job of laying the mouse-trap, so to speak, so just about everything that happens can be predicted if you’re astute enough and paying close enough attention. It’s like a puzzle. I can’t imagine that the formula won’t get old by the end of the season, but I’m certainly enjoying it at the moment.

Addendum:

• Becky has a list.
• Whiskey goes all existential in reviewing Chuck.
• Phi has a real problem with the latest season of The Office.
• Listing of TV shows and their current status.
• Write a post about a TV show, get a link here…

The first day of Mr. Hiller’s government class started off like the first day of the five classes that preceded it. He started off taking roll. As anyone that doesn’t go by their formal first name will tell you, you usually spend the first day of the class correcting the teacher. He said “Alejandro” and you say “Alex” or he says Harold and you say “Trey”. So when Hiller said “William Truman” I said “I go by Will.”

He looked at me coldly and said “I don’t care.” It was not the start of a beautiful term in his class. I can’t say that I was his least favorite student because he really didn’t seem to like any of us. The guy who sat next to me, who I came to think of as “Dude”, never knew the answer to any of the questions that he was asked, which of course made Hiller ask him questions more frequently than anybody else in the class. I knew most of the answers and was anxious to answer if only to save my classmates any embarrassment, so he looked at me like a suck-up. Sitting in front of me was my friend Oswald Framingtonand sitting in front of him was a bully who later became my friend named Nick Soele. Nick would spend whatever free time he had trying to humiliate Oswald, which wasn’t hard. Hiller didn’t like Nick because he was a billy. He didn’t like Oswald because he whined that Nick was a bully.

About two-thirds the way through the first semester, some news was echoing through Mayne High School. “Did you hear about Cody Weaver?” I’d be asked.

“Who’s Cody Weaver?” I asked.

“I don’t know, some guy.”

“Oh. What’s the news?”

“He killed himself over the weekend!” someone would say. Everybody wanted to be the guy that told somebody even though as near as I could tell Weaver was no more than some guy to anybody that was so anxious to tell his story.

I happened to see Nick early in the day and he asked me the question that everybody else did except that he left off Cody’s last name. By this point I was tired of saying that I didn’t know who Cody was because as the day progressed everybody seemed to have a closer connection or relationship to the post-humous high school celebrity of the day and the fact that I didn’t know him was suddenly becoming noteworthy to people I was almost certain didn’t know who he was at the beginning of the day. So to get the conversation moving, I pretended that I knew who Cody was. “You should totally go see the school counselor. It’s a total get-out-of-class free card!”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you probably knew him better half of these jackasses saying that they were tight.”

I stared at him blankly.

He got the message. “Man, you liked loaned him your pencil every other day!”

Then the little light over my head turned on. Not just my pencil, but all of his supplies. And not every other day, but every day that he was there. Cody Weaver was Dude. “Wait,” I asked, “he hung himself?” In my own head I added the word “Successfully?”

I hadn’t made the connection for a couple reasons. First, because I’d given him a nickname I hadn’t bothered to commit his actual name to memory. I vaguely recalled it being something like Cody or Toby or Corey or something like that. He definitely didn’t strike me as a Code Weaver, though. I’d been assuming all day that Cody was some sort of preppy white kid. Dude was darkly Hispanic and rarely wore anything more distinguishable than a conspicious earring and typical thuggy attire.

Dude was one of those people that initially came off as cocky from a pretty far distance if only because he was aesthetically like people that were generally (or maybe near-universally) cocky. He had a pretty hot girlfriend and was a good looking guy in spite of himself. From a distance, he wasn’t the sort of guy that you would think would do such a thing. The more I thought about it, though, the less bizarre it sounded. Dude was three things: dumb, irresponsible, and vaguely aware that he was dumb and irresponsible. Every day he would walk in without his book or any supplies. Then, if anything was required, he would freak out over the fact that he was so unprepared and would curse himself out (with frequent assists from Hiller). One day I made sure to bring an extra pencil and some paper to give him so that it might last him for a while and I wouldn’t hear the stream of self-condemnation that was kind of a drag at the end of the day. He took the stuff home with him and I never saw it again. From that point forward I actually kept a Dude Folder with a minimum of supplies that I would give him at the beginning of the class and take back at the end. I’d also let him use my book and I would read off the book of the cute girl that sat on the other side of me or, if desperately in a pinch, Oswald. During collaborative homework assignments, I’d just give him my answers. Turned out that he and I had three of the same teachers, though Hiller’s was the only class we had together. The guy who couldn’t remember a pencil to save his life could remember to bring his homework from those other classes so that I could take a look.

I don’t know what it says about me that I really didn’t think that much of his death. It didn’t really bother me. As I started thinking about the self-criticism that in hindsight sounded more like self-loathing, it was more analytical than empathetic. Word came out that he left a note saying that he couldn’t live without his girlfriend. The thing is that his girlfriend hadn’t left him. A rival of his just convinced him that she was going to (with no substantiation). The guy, someone I was actually friends with in junior high, actually bragged about pushing his rival over the edge in pursuit of the hand of his girlfriend. It didn’t take two months before he and she actually did start dating. Just as Cody became Dude to me, that guy became Jackal.

As mentioned before, he and I had two other teachers in common as well as Hiller. One thing that I remember about that day was that of the three, Hiller was the only one that seemed affected. His sharpness and antagonism were completely gone. Maybe it was because I was there when he had the class with the empty chair where the now-dead student was. Maybe he was upset about something else entirely. Really, though, I’m inclined to believe that it was because the student that he’d spent so much time deriding as worthless had come to the same conclusion about himself. Whatever the case, Hiller wasn’t the same after that.

What do Office Space, The Office, The IT Crowd, and Dilbert have in common? Well, obviously they’re all office-based comedies of some sort or another, but they share something else in common: In all four productions, they are told with a perspective most sympathetic to the grunt and least sympathetic to management. Only The Office serials break this mold at least a little where upper management (Neil in UK, Wallace in US) is just as exasperated by the middle managers as the underlings are. But in all of the cases, the problem is depicted as being with management getting in the way, distracting, harassing, or otherwise denigrating the protagonist grunts.

It seems to me that some comic opportunity is really being missed here.

When I was working for Falstaff in Deseret and early on in my tenure at Monmark, I used to produce a comic strip. No one at Monmark ever knew about it, but it gave me a tidbit of celebrity cred when I was working at Falstaff. I won’t reproduce any of it here, but if anyone is interested I can send you a link to my archives. The somewhat unique thing about the strip, though, is that it is primarily told from the point of view of the middle manager. The character, Gil, was based off of my former boss (and current HC commenter) Willard. Gil was essentially stuck between an exceptionally obtuse corporate managerial structure and at least a couple lazy employees. That’s not to say that Gil is without his quirks and double-dealing, but a lot of it is in response to the pressures he’s under. Management dictates on one hand, common sense on the other or the need to be a tactful supervisor and employees that could care less). By and large it’s more critical of management than of the employees (who are themselves often sympathetic), but I focus on the trials of Gil somewhat because it’s a point of view that is often missing from office comedy.

It’s not entirely missing. It’s often the case where the main character has an underling or two that are quirky, lazy, or somehow agitating. But it’s usually just their personal secretary or something of the like. And most of the time, it’s the “office” part of a comedy that primarily focuses on the main character’s family life or the office is itself an atypical one. An example of this would be News Radio, where the station manager is the straight man with a wacky corporate owner (Stephen Root’s Jimmy James is one of the cooolest characters on television ever) and a bunch of oddball employees (Phil Hartman and Andy Dick being the primary examples). Murphy Brown also followed this mold. But it seems that any show that focuses primarily or substantially on the office and where the office is intentionally generic so that the viewer can relate to it, it’s Grunt vs Management and we’re obviously supposed to side with the grunt.

I guess it’s part of the egalitarianism of the US that this is the way that it’s supposed to be. We supposedly like siding with the little guy. Even middle managers are generally more cogniscent of the pressures from above than the pressures from below and so maybe they’re more likely to laugh at the managers than the employees. Hard to say for sure. In any case, it makes me want to make a show from the manager’s point of view.

Still obviously got work to do, but nonetheless it’s pretty impressive how far it’s come.

Errr, on the science and technology. Not the whole “destroy humanity” thing. Though I guess we’ve come a ways on that, too.

In a post last week, there was a bit of question about whether or not the Episcopal/Anglican Church was properly considered Protestant or not. Last Sunday I went to church and while there got the official “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” brochure, which had the following to say on the subject:

The Episcopal Church descends from the Church of England which evolved from the Roman Catholic Church. Like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other reformers in the 16th century, the Church of England protested the Pope’s authority; these protesters because known as the Protestants. So the Church of England, and the Episcopal Church in the United States, are both catholic (heritage going back to the earliest Christian disciples) and protestant (protesting the authority of any one bishop such as the Pope). We are often called the via media, or middle way.

So you could say “There go those Episcopalians again, trying to have it both ways…”

A little more background, for anyone curious:

The Episcopal Church developed in the United States at the same time as the US government. Many early American patriots were Anglicans (eg Washington, Jefferson, Madison), having come from the Church of England. So as the American Revolution nurtured a new form of democratic government, so, too, a new church was nurtured.

And lastly, since I’m ripping off the brochure, here is the intro:

Episcopalians value thoughtful decision making and personal freedom, while at the same time believing in a strong sense of common good to benefit everyone in society. Our values are rooted in scripture, reason, and tradition. Scripture is at the root of our worship and theology, but we are not biblical literalists; that is, we study scripture in a reasoned way in its historical context. We believe that discernment about God’s will for Creation happens through the tradition of the Christian community in throughful conversation, dialogue, and decision making through the centuries.

A week or so ago John Tierney wrote an interesting piece on advances in weight-loss drugs. He concludes with the following:

Whatever becomes of this drug, there’s so much promising research going on with obesity drugs now — and so much money to be made by whoever finds the right formula — that I think it’s only a matter of time until there’s an easy way to remain slim. I know others disagree and argue that obesity is too complicated to yield any easy cures anytime soon. Do you have any predictions for when, if ever, there’ll be an easy way to control your weight? And if anyone could take a pill to be thin, how many people would want to? Would being “overweight” lose its stigma?

I rather think the opposite. I think that being somewhat overweight is losing some of its public stigma now. It still hurts your dating chances and all that of course, but it’s become so commonplace that it’s become less common for people to say things public about it. That’s been my observation, though perhaps it’s more that I’ve gotten older and as one gets older one finds oneself more frequently surrounded with people infected with this thing called “tact”. But I don’t think that’s entirely it. I think the fact that it’s become so commonplace means that most people know and love somebody that’s overweight. I think that makes people more naturally sympathetic. And, of course, they’re more likely to be overweight themselves. Though really in my experience the people that are most vocal about flub are flubby people themselves. Mildly overweight people are more likely to point the finger at obese people. So I think it’s mostly the know-and-love-someone thing.

Anyway, back to my thinking the opposite. If there are drugs available it seems to me that residual sympathies that people have about the overweight, that they may have a thyroid problem or that it’s just tough to lose weight, will likely go away. Or maybe not completely go away, but people will be less inclined to make excuses and expressing sympathy for people that they don’t know because they aren’t busy making excuses and expressing sympathy for people that they do. It’ll also become even more of a class-marker than it is now, of course, as rich people can afford the drug and poor people can’t. Beyond that, no matter how effective the drug is physiologically, people will be able to out-eat it and stay overweight. Not all or even most, but some. Those people will be in for a lot more scorn than they are now, I’d imagine.

Beyond the health benefits of losing weight and maybe a more aesthetically pleasing world, though, I do see one real positive thing coming out of the drugs. Fashion stratification occurs to benefit the few at the expense of the many. I’ve commented on this before in regards to bathing suits and clothes. The popularity of outfits and fashion seem in part dependent on how few people can get away with it. I think that transcends fashion into thinness. Rank thinness is fashionable (at least among women) in part because it is so difficult to obtain. The drug could change the scenario on that considerably. Make it easier to obtain and there’ll be new criteria. It likely won’t be husky women or anything like that, but could be that curves come back into style. More balance, less skin and bones. Men would have it easier because you can build muscles, which would likely become a bigger deal, but it would become much more arbitrary for women because you can’t starve your way to bigger breasts. On the upshot, young ladies would probably be less likely to starve themselves or more commonly go on crash diets followed by binges as they try and fail to negotiate the ideal with the impossible.

I have a very generous employer. They feed me on a regular basis. I work late, they give me food. I help set up the Halloween decorations, I get food. It’s wonderful that they’re so generous. I gotta tell you though, I’m getting tired of pizza. Cause pizza is what we get. Every time. It’s great because you can order a ton and get a variety without having to take a whole bunch of individual orders. It’s also fungible. Run out of one kind, people will just dig in to the other.

All that being said, last week five of seven consecutive meals consisted of… pizza.

I don’t make enough to turn away free food. And pizza somehow never stops tasting good even when you get sick of it. It’s truly weird how that works. It’s almost getting to the point where I would rather have salad.

Without dressing!

Okay, it’s not really almost at that point. But it’s almost at the point of getting close to almost getting somewhere in the general vicinity of that point. Almost.

I mentioned in a previous post a post of Spungen’s about IT people and how they don’t necessarily fit the stereotype. In the comment section, Dizzy makes a point that I’ve heard before about IT work generally:

Besides, the company hires the IT department to free up other people’s time. If we all knew what he does, the IT guy would pretty much be out of a job. So most people see the condescension as a nose-spite-face thing anyway.

I’m going to paraphrase and expound upon my response to Dizzy.

It’s a very common misconception that IT spends all or most of its times working on employee desktops and because of this they should be grateful that employees don’t know how to fix minor problems (and there is a corollary that IT departments prefer Windows because it breaks down frequently and justifies their job). This perception makes a lot of sense when you think of it from the average employee’s point of view. After all, when they’re dealing with IT, it’s more often than not because they have to set or fix something on their (or a coworker’s) desktop. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that that’s their primary job. A long time ago that was almost as correct as not, but it hasn’t been close to correct in a long time.

When I was the solo IT person for a small engineering and manufacturing company, I spent maybe than a third of my time working on issues that a more computer-savvy employee pool would have rendered unnecessary. That was despite working with an obscenely archaic fleet of computers (ever seen Windows 2000 work on a Pentium 166 with 32 megs of RAM? I have!) in an office where over half the workforce was astonishingly ignorant of computers. I don’t mean that they didn’t know how to do complex tasks that I consider simple. I mean that they didn’t understand concepts like folders, directories, and menus. When they signed on to their jobs, they didn’t need to know those things and in their advanced years never saw the need to catch up. That was, as Dizzy would have it, what I was there for.

But that was the work that interrupted my real work, which was managing a rather complex IT system that not only could I not reasonably expect the employees to understand and work with, but that for security reasons I didn’t want them working with and indeed did not give them access to. I laid cables, set security policies, developed information systems using Visual Basic and Microsoft Access, and a host of other things. Fixing minor problems on desktops, replacing toner cartridges, and tasks like that were irritants. Had the employees known and understood computers, my job would have been safe and frankly more pleasant.

In truth, since then I’ve never seen an IT department spend most of its time working on upgrades and repair. There was usually a single IT person whose job it was to fix it and the rest of the time was spent working on headier issues. My last job at Soyokaze-Monmark was mostly staffed with people that had at least entry-level IT knowledge or better and for the most part we fixed out own problems (and helped out the relatively few that didn’t). In fact, there was a constant tug-of-war where we wanted to fix our own stuff and they wanted to set up policies preventing us from doing so. Despite that, there was still a robust IT department managing the various other aspects of the job.

In fact, since leaving the world of IT management, I’ve found that my most frequent contention with them was their desire to do everything and prevent us from doing anything. One of the things that I absolutely love about my current job is that I have admin rights on my machine and can more-or-less do with it whatever I need. That’s pretty rare these days. One could argue there that they’re setting up these policies in order to justify their jobs, but my own experience in IT is enough to tell me that isn’t true. Mostly it’s a matter of control. It’s difficult to be responsible for something (like an IT network) when so many different people have control over it. Even so, I do get frustrated when they won’t get out of my way and let me do my darn job. That’s my main beef.

When I was in high school, Mr. Hiller, my government teacher, asked every girl in the class to stand up.

Then he asked every student who was not white and whose parents weren’t white to stand up. After some looking at one another, most did.

He then asked everybody whose last name ends in a vowel other than “e” to stand up. They did so.

Then he said requested that everyone in the class that is not a protestant to stand up. The couple Jewish kids in the class and a Catholic or two stood up. It was when he said that anyone that had just stood up on the basis that they’re Catholic can sit down if their parents are millionaires that I knew what he was getting at.

Then, to the three-quarters of the class standing up, he said, “You will never be president when you grow up.”