A few years ago, when we were living in Deseret, we were visiting its capital where there was a guy talking about… well, I can’t remember what now but I heard every word. He was very loud. Someone at another table commented, also with a voice loud enough that I could hear, “You know, there’s one at every table.” I laughed, they saw me, our tables acknowledged each other, and we all collectively rolled our eyes at the really, really loud guy at the other table. Ever since then, “There’s one at every table” has become a staple of the sort of long-term couple private dialogue that occurs between Clancy and I.

Clancy and I were eating out at a restaurant on our move out here to Arapaho when there was one at the booth behind us. It was a guy talking about… well, everything. He was talking disapprovingly about sluts and waxing philosophical about the failures of his generation and the poor prospects of marriage out there because of all of the sluts. To be fair, he was disapproving of guys that sleep around a lot, too, though I don’t remember what word, if any, he used to describe them.

He was sitting at the booth behind Clancy and was alone with a young woman. He looked to be somewhere in his early-to-mid thirties. He apparently dated a girl for quite a while. One night, she went to a party that he didn’t go to because he had to work and the next day she broke up with him. He thinks that she had perhaps been unfaithful. He thought she was a promiscuous sort - or at least had taken a step in that direction while he was working. That seemed to be his defining story. He talked about her alot.

The young woman was more attractive than he was. She wasn’t stunning, but looked like of like Aubrey Plaza with less even skin. He was a stocky - but not fat - fellow. But he was kind of funny looking. Sort of like his face was put together by an 8 year old on one of those rudimentary face making applications on the web. His nose was a little too big. His eyes were a touch too close together. Something… off. Not ugly, just… ah, well, the words escape me.

And there was something about how his story, and the way he told it, and the way he looked, and the way he looked while telling it, all failed to match up quite right. It sort of felt like the guy was trying to invent a personality and was failing. It was impossible to tell whether he was on a date with the Aubreyesque young woman or whether it was just a dinner out between friends, but he seemed to be putting on a show of sorts. Either trying to get a date or a second one. In a Michael Scott sort of way, he struck me as a guy with a certain, sad darkness in him trying like hell to compensate and just be… normal. Not even spectacular. Just normal. Well, sometimes to be impressive and sometimes to be normal. You get the feeling that at first he wants to be accepted but then the second he is, he wants to be admired.

She got maybe 100 words in all night. The conversation was completely and entirely about him. Not just his previously failed relationship, which itself took up half the conversation, but about his thoughts of sluts, sexual promiscuity, marriage, and so on.

After we left, Clancy and I speculated as to whether it was a date or not. She said it sure came across to her like one and I couldn’t disagree. I said that if it was a first date, though, it was one of the worst performances I’ve ever seen. I then cited that in addition to being something of a bore, he also completely overlooked the cardinal rule about never dominating the conversation too much or talking too much about yourself on the first date. She and I related some of our experiences. I talked about a couple of opportunities that I really fouled up. She told me about a couple of dates that couldn’t end soon enough for her.

She also told me about several years ago with this one guy she’d recently met that drove her to Pontchartrain once who wouldn’t stop talking the entire way and how she thought, “Gosh, this guy sure talks a lot.” Thankfully, she said, it didn’t stop her from eventually marrying the guy.

We spent the last night before our arrival in Callie at a hotel on the state line about three hours from our new home. The idea was that we wanted to arrive in Callie during business hours so that we could pick up our keys with minimal inconvenience to Erick, our property manager.

When I called Erick, we got a rather unwelcome surprise. The house we’re renting has been sold. Our rental agreement remains in tact and the buyers knew that when they bought it, so it’s not as bad as it could be. Still, though, when we signed that contract we had a pretty good idea of where we stood: One year lease, possible extension for a couple months or at least until they sell the place.

Most importantly, if we really took to Callie we would have the option to buy it. That option is now gone. It’s likely, though not certain, that we’re out of here a year from now. To say that it dampered our enthusiasm was an understatement. We had been looking at this house previously in the short and long term. A lot of “if we buy it…” upgrades and modifications. That it was a house we could see raising a family in did not escape our attention.

Erick’s impression of the new owners is that they never had immediate plans to move in but something on the horizon like a job or retirement or something. Obviously, it’s not his place to ask specifics. I’m not sure what the protocol is to say that the specifics of their plans, if they have any specifics, matter a great deal to us.

If they want to move in after six months, it might be in everybody’s best interest if we start looking for an alternative and move out whenever we find one. If they plan on moving in the day after the lease expires, we’re going to need to start keeping an eye out months ahead of time. If they’re flexible, maybe we can get a three month extension and take advantage of housing opening up around the summer time as it often does.

Against our best efforts, we still like the house. Not quite as much as we liked the house we remembered, but lawrdy it’s a nice house. We’re kind of deciding what will go where and we’ve more-or-less found a place for everything. It’s not ideal (we’re going to have an ethernet line going from one room to the next), but it fits together.

What we really like about it, though, is the multitude of storage space. There are closets that a midget could live in. Part of it is frustrating because if they’d just designed it a little bit differently the room would be a third larger, but it makes for a bunch of pleasant surprises. Then, you open up what you think of going to be a small pantry and see a compartment almost the size of an elevator shaft.

Clancy gets her library. I get a spacious computer room and an intense TV viewing area in the basement. The living room itself is not quite as big as I would like and the layouts of some of the rooms are a bit odd. Those are really our only complaints, though.

Oh, and the mirrors. The house has these intentionally distorted mirrors built into the wall and the mirrors in the bathroom were not meant to be looking at someone as tall as myself.

As my mother-in-law is apt to say, things have a way of working out. The upshot to all of this is that we were going to face a tough decision a year from now as to whether or not to buy this house (and stay in Callie) or lose it. Now we won’t have to worry about that. We’re left, though, with larger questions about what we’re going to do after this house.

If I get pets, that could limit our renting options in a town without many to begin with. The negotiations over pets was the hardest part about getting this place and almost had us walking away from it (to a house that, in retrospect, may have been a better fit knowing what we know now). They’d put in new carpeting and we worried to death about what a puppy or two would do to it. I’m king of agitated to discover upon arrival that the carpeting is not constant, which means that for them to have to replace all of the carpeting, the puppy would have to pee in just about every room and that’s simply not going to happen because they’re not even going to have access to large swaths of the house. Until they’re trained, they’re mostly going to be in the basement.

Anyway, after all this, pets may not make sense as they have failed to make sense up until now. But I’ve literally been waiting years to get one. I’ve reached the point where being “sensible” is making me unhappy.

So we could yet be left where we buy a house in an area that we’re not sure we’re going to stay. The housing market out here is really pretty good if you’re buying. Sensibly, we’ve up to this point not to buy one. Sometimes sensibility, though, is less about keeping options and more about failing to make a firm decision that requires taking any sort of chance.

I can’t remember the last time I read an article as obtuse as this one. Here is basically what it says:

• Major League Baseball players are increasingly falling into the “obese” category according to their BMI.
• Obesity is linked to all sorts of health problems including higher early mortality rates.
• John Kruk (1986-95) and David Wells (1987-2007) are fat. So was Babe Ruth (1914-35).
• Home run hitters are particularly likely to be “obese”.

Here is a word that appears nowhere in the article:

• Steroids.

The actual information from the study is interesting, though unsurprising. Players are getting bulkier and have been over the last 15 years. In fact, you can see it with the some of the exact same players who started off their careers in relatively trim shape and retired notably large men. Is the culprit Cheet-Os… or something else? Steroids would also account for the increased mortality among athletes.

Even if the steroid problem is exaggerated by the media and we leave that aside for a moment, you still have a case that most of the bulk is muscle. The game has changed. Even those that are not on steroids have to compete with those that are. No allegations have been made against Curt Schilling, but he has nonetheless bulked up through an intense workout regimen. The talent pool for Major League Baseball has grown considerably. Not only has MLB failed to keep up with the growing population in terms of team-to-potential-spectator ratio, but whereas they once recruited from a smaller United States, they now recruit the top talent from multiple continents. While interest in baseball in the US has diminished and that would in turn leave fewer American athletes competing for the Major Leagues, that is more than compensated for by the talent coming out of South America and the Carribeans where competition is incredibly fierce. We all want to venerate Babe Ruth, but he played in a different league. It’s quite possible (likely, in my view) that he would not be the star today that he was back then.

The study says that the mortality rates increase exists whether muscle or fat because you have the cardiovascular system trying to support a larger body. Fair enough. But the health differences overall between being fat and being muscular are pretty significant. The BMI is a fair measurement in the aggregate, but it’s nonetheless a crude measurement and nowhere is this more apparent when it comes to muscle vs fat. Obviously, if you’re looking at MLB players, you’re getting a very, very skewed sample. Generalities that could be made about the general population simply cannot be made from the athlete population. Even if we are talking about baseball players.

I’m not married to the notion that baseball players are no less generally healthy today than they were decades ago or a century ago. This could be particularly true when players reach retirement and they’re big, bulky, and not exercising nearly as much as they used to. That’s a recipe for problems. However, (a) that’s not what they were looking at and oddly enough (b) John Kruk aside baseball players don’t seem to do much worse than any other athletes (I’m having difficulty coming up with Charles Barkley chubbing examples). And ultimately, I just don’t buy it for the reasons above. I am open to being convinced otherwise. I would bet that the steroid-free professional baseball players of today are in better shape than ever.

Even if I’m wrong, however, you simply can’t take (the article’s portrayal of) this study as a good counterargument without considering steroids and the ill-effects thereof.

Pittsburgh Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger is in talks with Georgia police about a sexual assault allegation. This is hardly the first time that a professional athlete is accused of such a thing. People tend to line up according to their loyalties and ideologies whenever it happens. Fans of the athlete in question, those that believe that fake accusations of rape are commonplace, and often men more generally assume that until proven otherwise any sex that occurred was probably consensual and the woman is looking for cash or publicity. Women’s groups, rape victims, and often women more generally assume a degree of validity to the charges.

What’s interesting about Roethlisberger is that this is actually the second allegation against him. Part of me thinks that if you’re accused once, it’s possible that you just slept with the wrong person. If you’re accused twice? That represents a much greater likelihood of a control problem or a sense of sexual entitlement or, more simply put, a rapist. On the other hand, there’s a reason that the prosecution is prevented from bringing forth prior accusations and convictions to trial. It can create an unfair prejudice. Further, a woman that is aware of Roethlisberger’s first accusation knows that she will have a lot more credibility than if she goes and accuses Eli Manning. Back on the first hand, if you’re the type of person that sleeps with a professional athlete then makes accusations, you don’t really get to choose the athlete. If she’s that type of person, it is possible but strains credibility a bit that the pieces would fall into place for such a move.

Also noteworthy is that Roethlisberger has a reputation for control issues outside the bedroom. He is known for tempting fate by engaging in risky and possibly injury-inducing behavior. Besides the allegations and his performances as a QB, he’s known for a motorcycle incident wherein he wasn’t wearing a helmet and a bowling accident shortly before a playoff game.

None of this is to say that he’s necessarily a rapist (or sexual assaulter). But he’s going to have a hard time finding a jury that is unaware of at least the previous sexual harassment accusation. He’s only 28 and should have a long career ahead of him. At the rate he’s going, by misdeeds or misfortune, it’s at pretty substantial risk.

A bit of religious inclusivity argumentation in Denver makes for an interesting discussion.

On the one side, we have a little girl. Probably too little to understand much of what’s going on, but not too young to be used as a pawn by the cynical.

On another side, we have the parents of the little girl - in this case, biological mom and lesbian partner. Who, reading through the lines of the various news stories, probably (a) lied on their initial application to the school, (b) were pushing to tell other kids about how it was “not wrong” to be gay, and (c) did enough that the school administration’s attention was called to the situation.

On another side, we have other kids in the class. Who probably are too young to care, but again were probably turned into pawns being made to discuss the “two mommies” situation.

On another side, we have the other kids’ parents. At least a few of who, sending their kids to a private, religiously based school, were (at least statistically speaking) likely to have a problem having to have the “well this is why Daisy having two mommies is not a good situation” discussion with their 4- or 5-year-olds.

On another side, we have the school administration, likely caught between church doctrine, the lesbians, the other parents, and trying to work things out so as not to cause untold misery to a 4 year old girl. More on that in a minute.

On the final side, we have… well, I personally would have stronger words regarding them, but let’s just call them “the usual round of outspoken, opinionated advocate groups who happen to have a deep-seated and preexisting hatred for the Catholic church.” The ones who the lesbians enlisted for an attack.

The school came to a decision, one which I believe was probably the best they could come up with. It’s obvious that the “two mommies” were pretty outspoken about their lifestyle choice. Whether you consider it moral or immoral, the Catholic Church believes it is immoral, and it was obviously causing enough consternation at some level or other that they believed having the kid exist in the school long-term would be seen as a “signal” that they were condoning the behavior in question. On the other hand (and having been through it myself, I can say from experience that it does indeed suck), uprooting a kid in the middle of semester causes hell. Social cliques are formed, and the kid gets hit with the “oh that’s the interloper” stigma. Bring a kid in at the beginning of a new school year, along with the usual classroom shuffling, and there is much less in the way of social integration trouble. So the school made what I consider a generous offer: the kid could stay through the end of school year, giving the lesbian moms >6 months to study and investigate and apply to new schools and be all prepared for next fall.

The response from the lesbians was to enlist the usual hate groups. I consider this saddening, and not a little indicative of ulterior motives on their side.

As far as churches go, Will’s spoken of his friend being kicked out of one for being in an unmarried, cohabiting relationship. Some new-age-ey churches say “gay, straight, bi, poly, whatever the hell you want.” Some protestant churches are openly dealing with schisms surrounding their ordination of openly gay individuals. Some churches struggle with the married-vs-unmarried priesthood concept. Some churches are dealing with the whether-or-nots of ordaining women. Chances are if you look hard enough, you can find a church that doesn’t care on your “particular” issue of choice.

Generally, however, a church or church-based entity is going to be subject to different rules than society. There are things society condones/tolerates/”puts up with” that they may say are immoral. They may ask you not to bring these up within their doors. They may pull you aside and say “for the good of your soul, you really shouldn’t be doing that.” Occasionally, if someone is really, really insistent on making a public jerk of themselves about some point or other, they may ask them not to attend church services. If you are working for them or applying for a job with them, and it comes out that you are consistently doing something they consider seriously immoral and are unrepentant about it, they may refuse to hire you or even let you go.

In the case of a 4 year old girl in Denver, her “two mommies” apparently made the situation untenable enough that the school/church’s response was, “please find another school for your child.” The sad side of me says it sucks to be the little girl. The cynical side of me says, given what’s being “left unsaid” by both sides, that most likely the little girl is an unwitting pawn in a very, very cynical ploy by the “two mommies.”

Everything takes longer than we think it will. Our moving was no exception and neither was the cleaning. We took two more hours than expected and that didn’t include the trip to the landfill. It was my third trip to the landfill that day and, because it was a weekend, the landfill was busy. By the time we got all that completed, it was already 5:30.

We had reservations at a hotel in Deseret that was about 8 hours away. We didn’t have the heart. The hotel was really cool about switching the days. We decided that we were going to just get the heck out of the Zaulem area for Saturday night. We’d make a three day trip out of it. Kind of pathetic, but we were exhausted. It turned out to be the right move because the second leg of our trip, which took place yesterday, Took Longer Than Expected.

Too much to do in this hotel room in too little time. I wanted to take advantage of the hot tub. I wanted to watch the last available vestiges of cable TV available to me. But mostly I want to surf the Internet because it’s going to take the local ISP two weeks to get me hooked up. It’ll also take me a bit of time to get cable/satellite hooked up (if we go that route). I absolutely have to find some sort of way to make sure that I don’t get behind on Lost. Any romantic notions of being unplugged go away when I’m really looking at the prospect of being unplugged.

I am writing this from the hotel in Deseret near the Arapaho border. We lost an hour due to the time change. My body has adjusted remarkably well. I will have no trouble sleeping tonight.

My voyage was going to be spent listening to the audiobook for Bourne Ultimatum, the third of the series of novels that the movies are very, very, very, very loosely based after. It’s 20 hours and the drive is barely more than half that. So I decided, when I had a trip out to Western Shores to pick up a couch, that I would start listening early and maybe get it finished on the drive. I did one better, listening while I cleaned and waited in the landfill queues and finished it before my drive even began. It’s the only think that did not take longer than expected. So I’ve spent the trip listening to one of what was supposed to be two audiobooks. I’ll barely finish the one. You would think that given a finite amount of time in the car that I would be able to plow through the audiobooks at a predictable pace, but not really. I lost time when driving through areas that require concentration. I lost an hour or so because I was getting sleepy and couldn’t listen to an audiobook, drive, and stay awake at the same time.

I was getting sleepy because I had a blood-sugar crash, which is pretty rare for me. I ate a whole Chick-Stick. I didn’t even want it all that much, but I used a convenience store restroom and like to extend patronage to those places that allow the public to use their restrooms. It was the cheapest option. I did the same thing earlier tonight (3/7), getting a candy bar. Using convenience store restrooms is bad for my waistline.

One of my earliest crushes was to a girl named Clementine Giovanni. Clementine was a tall, slender girl that was really pretty for a fifth grader in the eyes of a fifth grader. She was the first girl I ever asked to “go with me” and, of course, the first girl to shoot me down.

Mom, ever-present and all-knowing, knew about all of this despite my never having told her. I know that she knows because she would tell other people about it. This girl that I had a crush on that {in Mom’s mocking tone} didn’t even know [I] was alive! Fortunately, she didn’t tell people of this until I was well good and past it. Even so, I felt the need to object.

“Mau-aummmm… she knew I was alive. She just didn’t care…”

That was an exaggeration. She knew I was alive and moreso than any of the other rejections I got before I ever got a yes, she was really nice about it. I made it kinda easy on her, slipping a note into her desk and accepting, without confrontation the little note that she wrote back. I didn’t even ask if she would go out with me when she was no longer going out with the guy she was going out with, even though that was a standard question at the time. Not sure we talked after that. Not sure we talked before that. I was that kind of nerd. The only girl I could easily talk to was one that I didn’t find very cute and girl classmates whose moms were friends with my mom. My Mom didn’t know Clementine’s parents very well, which of course made Mom’s ability to know everything all the more eerie.

The guy that she was going out with at the time was a dude named Grick. Grick actually confronted me about it, though not in a very confrontational way. I don’t think they lasted long. He was kind of a nerd himself. We would later be on friendly terms and probably would have been friends if we’d had any classes together. He was the closest thing I had to a friend on my junior high basketball team because we were collectively the non-jock jocks. Clementine herself went on to be quite popular, quite beautiful, and on drill team.

Clementine added me as a friend on Facebook not long after I joined up. She looks almost exactly the same now as she did in high school, which come to think of it is very close to how she looked in elementary school. She has one of those faces and a featureless figure. I was surprised to see that she wasn’t married because she struck me as the type to be married shortly after college. She’s engaged now. Anyway, part of me wants to print out a copy of the friend invitation and send it to Mom.

“See. I told you so!”

I forgot to mention that I will be without regular Internet access for a shocking two weeks after tonight. That’s how long it’s going to take them to hook me up. Here in Cascadia they had it in under three days. I was hoping that it might be faster in Arapaho because they would have a less formalized queue, but I was wrong about that. Way wrong.

I will probably be making daily trips to some WiFi spot or another, to the extent that any exist in Callie but my participation will be limited in the overall.

I’m putting together a series of posts about the worst and most interesting job I’ve ever had. Or one of them, anyway. I also have some content between now and then and hopefully Sheila and Web can lend a hand, too.

Half Sigma points out the Pentagon shooting as an example of yet another computer programmer going “postal.” He highlights a comment from a post about IRS-flier-intoer Joe Stack, yet another “postal” programmer:

IT truly is a ’soul destroying’ profession and is certainly no place for an older white guy like Joe Stack. I think Joe was probably pissed off about his inability to make a decent living in his profession, but at the same time he was too much of a brainwashed liberal pussy to really identify the reason his businesses became unprofitable…that reason being the influx of H1-B brown people over the past 15 years or so.

There’s been a lot of mostly negative discussion of H1-Bs over at that site, which is itself run by a programmer. I am not a programmer. But I’ve noticed the huge difference, for whatever reason, between “a career in computers” in the mid- to late-1990s, and the way it works nowadays. I’m not sure if “tragic” is too strong a word. I can sympathize, as someone from another career field — reporting — where I built my life on rules that changed quickly and horribly. (I wonder why journalists never commit any of these grand homicidal gestures?)

In 1998, it seemed any young man who had half a left brain was learning computer stuff and landing jobs that made $60,000 a year. In my world, that was a lot. A guy who actually had a tech-related degree did even better. But no degree was necessary, and certainly not one from a prestigious university. I knew a few young guys who made similar salaries as recruiters, luring other young men with computer skills to quit college and immediately enter the corporate technology workforce. My younger brother quit community college at 20 to program for a company that paid him more than twice what I was making after 5 years in journalism. His last job had been at a department store.

Such was the meteoric rise the computer field provided back then. I knew, or knew of, many men in their 20s who went quickly from being financially and socially adrift to being middle-class and married, thanks to computer knowledge. It was like being a hooker in Alaska: There was an insatiable demand and a short supply. Many guys who were struggling in fields like journalism or film made themselves instantly useful, and profitable, by learning the new technology.

The computer boom stood in stark contrast to what was already happening in journalism. In newspapers — unless you were the IT guy! — management was constantly rubbing in how grateful you should be that you had any job at all. And the only way to rise a little bit above the low-paid, abusive drudgery of community journalism was to become management at those same community papers. The main problem was that the big metro dailies had all but stopped hiring people with degrees from lower-tiered schools. But this was not immediately obvious, first because papers don’t provide reporters’ bios, and second because it went against what J-professors had told us based upon their own experience in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, it wasn’t hard to start at a small paper with a state school degree and work your way up within a few years. You could get married, buy a house in a nice suburb, have kids, and otherwise make a middle-class life in journalism. You weren’t destined to marginality.

By the 1990s, it seemed the only way for a rank-and-file reporter to move up to a big paper was racial affirmative action. You probably think reporters are liberal, right? Not when affirmative action was the topic. It was especially bad in the Sports departments, which tended to be all white men, because they had an even harder time finding jobs than the regular reporters.

The hostility reminds me of the H1-B discussions. In journalism’s case, it turned out the larger issue was the dwindling economy for what we did. There were so few reporting jobs that “diversity” hires were among the few people who even had a shot. I figured this out after seeing how differently things worked for white kids from expensive schools back east, like Northwestern. They could work a few months at some BFE suburban paper and then get scooped up to, say, the Baltimore Sun because a professor made a phone call. But those people hadn’t always locked up the market either. It was the changing economy. Oh, and I saw plenty of the “diversity” hires still got treated like crap and spit out despite that one break.

And for IT, the change started with the 2000 tech bust.

My brother was out of work for more than a year. Things eventually rebounded for a while, and he had one of those independent contractor gigs for several years that pays you six figures. But it was harder to get work than it had been the first time around. And then we hit 2008. At least half the IT guys I know are out of work. A lot of men built their lives around an economy that may have turned out to be a glitch. No wonder they’re angry.
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HS updated with another post on programmers who go postal.

I am writing this post from a mostly empty room in a mostly empty house. We still have a lot of cleaning that we need to do, but the truck is finally packed. Clancy and I have collectively decided that this is the last time that we pack ourselves. I think I decided that last time, though the 18 months in between then and now I kinda sorta forgot why it was so important. When we moved out of Estacado, a bit part of the problem was a simple lack of preparation on our part. This time, both to avoid the problems of last time and because we had so much time, we were much more organized.

So by the time the truck rolled around, we were going to be good to go, right? Well, no. It turned into this weird sort of thing where every time we finished half of what need to be done, there was still half to go. We did half of what was needed and there was still half to go. Then we did half of what was left, which should have left only a quarter to go… but there was still half to go. Then we did the next half and instead of their being an eighth or a quarter left… there was still a half to go. For everything we accomplished, something new entered the calculation. Well, it wasn’t actually that because we had a list. Rather, it was that the stuff that we (or at least I) calculated as taking up a bulk of the time went by pretty quickly but that which we thought would be more quick ended up taking a lot longer. Invariably, it was the early stuff that fell into the first category and the late stuff in the second. Getting everything (or most of everything) on to the truck took no time flat. Getting it organized, on the other hand, took forever and a week. Twice as long as it has ever taken in the past, due to a number of factors including a moving truck not nearly as conducive to stacking stuff as the last moving truck and the fatigue that came with having already done so much. Adding 20% to the stuff we had to move ended up adding far more than 20% to the loading time.

The hope was that since we were giving ourselves more time that we could be more relaxed about it. The result was not only that we were not more relaxed, but we were stressed for that much longer.

It’s a funny thing about leaving a place. I was not thrilled about leaving Estacado because I really liked it there and though I was looking forward to Cascadia I could have spent the rest of my life in Santomas or Almeida, Estacado. So I wasn’t in a hurry. Until I was so tired of the moving process that I just wanted to be gone, gone, gone. The same applies doubly this time around. There are so many things that I love about the Zaulem Sound area and that I’m going to miss in Callie and Arapaho. I believe that I will find new treasures and delights in Arapaho, but what’s going to be missing is a little more apparent and I know that it may take me a while to find it. But I am so tired of packing and moving and this whole damn process that I cannot wait to see the “Welcome to Cascadia” sign in the rearview mirror and when I see the “Welcome to Arapaho” sign I will indeed feel welcome.

We put off the leave date for Saturday so that we can do a little recuperating while cleaning. We also want to visit an area attraction that we never got to go to while we were living here. The drive should take two days or so. Since it falls on a weekend, it shouldn’t affect Hit Coffee much except that I will be unplugging the Internet at some point later today and it will take a little bit of time to get it up and running in Callie. I have been relying on Sheila and Web to keep HC flowing and will continue to do so for at least another week.

TL catches us up to speed that the US Supreme Court has a ruling. A ruling that comes out at least in part as a judicial version of an Ass Pull; it has been decided that all the cops need to do to “convince” you to waive your Miranda rights is come bother you every 14 days.

Nevermind that cops are, shall we say, very good at slipping someone incriminating information and cajoling people into incriminating themselves, often when they are not even guilty of anything.

It isn’t precisely the nightmare scenario that I expected, but it is still pretty bad. Imagine that the cops want to get a “confession” from you: they can now toss you into jail on a “nonassociated” charge, leave you in legal limbo, and city police can then come bug you at the county jail (because you’re not in “city” custody) until you crack.

No, seriously. That’s the law of the land, as per the Supreme Court. And where do they get this “14 day” time limit?

From which clause, you may ask, does the arch-textualist Antonin Scalia derive this 14-day rule? None. None at all. He pulls the 14-day period straight out of his assthe air and bases it on his own assumptions, academic knowledge, and personal experience about what it’s like to be arrested and interrogated by the police. (Did I just say “experience?” Hmm, bad word choice there, TL, it’s quite unlikely that Justice Scalia has ever been under suspicion by the police for anything in his entire life.)

It strikes me that what we have here is a very, very bad case. The SC obviously decided based on what I feared (a very, very unsympathetic defendant) rather than on points of law. Sigh.

According to the ISPs and other folks, Net Neutrality is a threat to future Internet service because as the networks get bogged down there won’t be any way to distinguish between valuable and non-valuable transmissions. According to Silicon Alley, we’re going to hit major bandwidth shortages sooner rather than later on cell phone networks. If true, will this provide an opening for service differentiation on cell phones that can then be ported to regular Internet?

Nobody cleans their fridge anymore and the fridge-makers are trying to compensate.

There are concerns that recidivism rates will climb as ex-cons are unable to find work in the current economy. It’s better if they can find work on getting out, though I have to admit that they are a lower priority than the others. There is an argument, I suppose, that they should be made a higher priority because they’re more likely to misbehave if unemployed, but on a visceral level alone getting people to the front of the line because they committed crimes is just a no-go.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, less women (or men, for that matter) majoring in stupid studies is a good thing. On the other hand, before we get too carried away trying to get women into geek careers, how about we find jobs for the men already there?

It’s not easy to make a whole lot of sense of this. Of the various things I had to offer in a relationship, knowing my way around technology was not among them. Nor did it seem was my reluctance to shave as often as my facial hair declares I should. Nor my extra poundage.

A while back I wrote on the subject of height differences and the effect that has on romantic success. The long and short of it is that tall women believe that they are discriminated against because guys are intimidated. Guys argue that tall women are disadvantaged because they cull their dating pool to only include guys that are taller than they. I took the position that there is probably some merit to both, but that the bigger issue is that women want guys taller than they are (or at least roughly the same height) and therefore the fewer guys taller than they are, the fewer options they will consider.

The discussion was launched on an article from The Frisky. Well, another article from The Frisky and a poll suggest that the guys are more right than wrong. They took a poll and nearly three out of four respondents said that they would only date a guy taller, the same height, or only slightly shorter than they are.

The only caveat to this is that if you polled only tall women, you might get different results. It’s easy for 5′5″ women to say that they will only date taller guys than them because they’re only excluding pretty short guys. I don’t know how long a 6′1″ woman has to go lonely before deciding that there are more important factors in height, but I doubt it’s an indefinite drought. On the other hand, a 6′1″ woman is more likely to be self-conscious about her height than a 5′5″ woman and so height may be a bigger deal.

Either way, three out of four is a much higher number than I would have expected on a self-reporting survey. At the least, I would have guessed that more women did it either subconsciously or would deny it even in an anonymous poll. We have to accept the poll, though, because Internet polls are always accurate.

A very dishonest “professor” over at ISU has released a so-called “Metastudy” that claims to “conclusively prove” that so-called “violent video games” desensitize people to violence.

Your first clue that he’s dishonest is that he used the words “utmost confidence” and “regardless of research method” in the same sentence. A quick look at his past research reveals him to be an agenda-driven “researcher”, precisely the sort of person you don’t want to let anywhere near “meta-analysis” methodology.

In the medical world, the phrase “metastudy” is quickly getting a bad name, for precisely the reasons that make the ISU study completely dishonest; more and more “metastudies” are turning out to be paid for by drug/treatment companies, for the specific purpose of promoting their products. Meta-analysis is also vulnerable to drug company tactics in pushing Publication bias, wherein studies that do not find certain drugs/treatments to be useful tend to not be published.

Put bluntly, a metastudy is one of the most easily abused “study” methods in terms of the how to lie with statistics phenomenon. Though I hate posting links to it, the Wikipedia page (concerning weaknesses, dangers, and the “file drawer problem”) as of the time I write this is a reasonable start concerning the problems of “metastudies.”

I’ll be referencing the ISU study throughout, but I shall do my best to make this post generic to most metastudies in the risk of this rather lousy “scientific” tool:

#1 - Metastudies are incredibly vulnerable to cherry-picking and confirmation bias. For instance, the ISU study references 130 “previous studies” for its work. Unfortunately, 130 studies is a very small part of the work done in the field of “violent media” and “violent play” in the past 50 (or even 20) years, and the ISU study only references studies that agree with the prepicked conclusion they want.

#2 - Metastudies are very vulnerable to the GIGO problem. Many of the aforementioned studies the ISU “metastudy” references, have previously been found to be unreliable, failing to account for confounding variables. With bad input, the eventual “conclusions” cannot be considered valid.

#3 - Following up on the GIGO phenomenon, “metastudies” quite often work to prove a correlational, rather than causational, relationship. The problem here is simple: by failing to account for confounding variables, and hiding the effects of poor study methodology by claiming an arbitrarily large sample size (ignoring the quality of data, similar to a “market security” that turned out to be backed by garbage loans in the money sector) , they mistake a correlated phenomenon for a causational factor.

To put it in layman’s terms, they reach the conclusion that exposure to beach towels and swim suits cause skin cancer, because people at high risk for skin cancer happen to have a high correlation of long-term exposure to beach towels and swimwear.

After a 2005 APA report regarding video games, one of the authors of the report made it very clear that all of the studies analyzed were merely correlational, not causational after a number of inaccurate media reports regarding their 2005 report. A major problem in the dishonest ISU “metastudy” is that much of their “study data” are the same studies referenced by the 2005 APA report, and yet the ISU report tries to claim a “causal” link.

#4 - The final problem is that when doing a “metastudy”, the individual studies are not controlled with regard to each other - in other words, they’re not studying the same phenomenon with the same methods and the same definitions. Got studies in the mix that are not properly blinded? Oops. Got studies that used a wacky definition of what you’re hunting for? Your dataset is, again, skewed.

“Metastudies” are, in the hands of a dishonest person, a tool for the “money laundering” of discredited, poorly conceived, or outright dishonestly contrived “study data”, hiding defects and bad methodology behind the term “large sample size” in order to lend a credibility that it ought not have.

Supposedly cast members of Jaime Escalante are trying to raise $25,000 to pay for his cancer treatment. They say the family can’t afford it otherwise.

That seems odd. Let’s put aside whatever he made from the movie, the book, and speaking engagements. Escalante taught for Los Angeles Unified School District and I assume he retired from there. L.A. Unified’s pay and benefit scales are among the top in the nation. Teachers can start out as high as $70,000 a year (if they have graduate degrees). All public schoolteachers from any district generally retire with full medical insurance for life.

I wonder if he’s doing some weird alternative therapy not covered by insurance. Or if he’s incapacitated and someone … less than ethical … is involved.

The IIHS makes the case for tighter speed limits in Q&A form.

Crime keeps getting better, but we keep thinking it’s getting worse . Given the vested interest that everybody from government (We need new laws! Elect me!) to corporations (Buy our security system!) to media (If it bleeds, it leads!), I suppose it’s no bit surprise.

This is just wrong. Not just because I hate, hate, hate “LOL” but also because we shouldn’t teach young people to type one way and then force them to learn another. Trial by fire, I say.

Steve Jobs says that adding Adobe Flash to the iPad would reduce battery life by 85%. If true, that says more about the iPad than it does about Adobe Flash.

My father got a MagicJack and likes it a great deal. Here’s a mostly winning review. It’s something to consider if we can get an Arapaho area code. Then again, everybody there speaks in 4-digit phone numbers.

Some dude in South Africa bought a ticket with the winning numbers just a little bit too late.

Deaf hardware store cleaner Stanley Philander had the numbers that won the record $12 million rollover (91 million rand) lottery in South Africa on Friday.

Problem was, he bought it after the numbers were selected, which means, that if those numbers just happen to come up again in next weeks drawing, Stanley is golden. Not quite as golden as if he had won this week, however. {…}

Let’s face it, not only is poor Stanley in the midst of a huge letdown at the moment, but that ticket of his is useless. The chances of the same numbers being drawn in back to back lotteries are astronomical.

The chances are, of course, just the same as any other set of six numbers!

On the other hand, if they did pick the exact same numbers back to back, Stanley probably still wouldn’t see any of that money until a lengthy investigation had concluded.

Anyone remember that “Seinfeld” episode where Kramer put a hot tub in his apartment living room? Did you ever wonder how he actually got it in there?

In the real world, hot tubs don’t fit through doors. The hot tub that was almost mine is inside the living room of a custom-built home, which was built around the hot tub. Anyway, litigation, yadda yadda, husband’s firm now owns this place with a hot tub in the living room. They plan to rent it out, and apparently leaving the hot tub there is not a sensible option, even if Kramer himself were the lessee. The humidity would cause rot and mold.

So, it seemed the sensible thing to do was move the hot tub. What better place than our own backyard? We started making plans for transport. Unfortunately, we discovered there’s no way to get it out in one piece. It will cost us $450 to have it sawed into four pieces and carted away.

It’s not as if hot tubs are ridiculously expensive, the way building a pool is. They start in the low four figures. So if a hot tub were a priority, one could be purchased. But that won’t happen, because once one starts talking actually purchasing a hot tub, it brings up the cumbersome subject of backyard improvement, which involves an in-ground pool with a built-in hot tub and other coordinated, architecturally pleasant amenities that are not happening anytime soon. Mr. Tone has purchased fancy, hardcover books on the subject and drawn up plans on his computer. The serendipitous hot tub would have done an end-run around the whole mess.

I feel like Elaine in that episode where she lost her sandwich card. I don’t want just any hot tub. I want my discarded hot tub.

One of the things that Clancy and I decided we wanted to do while we were here is pick up some furniture for the move. It’s kind of risky and not necessarily cheap because we’re having to get extra moving truck space, but there is a wealth of stuff available here on Craigslist where there is no counterpart in Arapaho. The two big things we wanted were a recliner and a sofa. We’ve been hobbling along on a single recliner throughout our time in Cascadia when we left my old one behind in Estacado (may it rest in peace) as it fell apart.

This was particularly inconvenient because our other piece of living room furniture, the futon, did not survive the trip. I mean, it didn’t break into a million pieces, but the wood panel on the bottom broke and so the futon sagged somethin’ fierce and was not easy to get in and out of with any real ease. Well, I guess gravity assisted with the “in”, but since you land on the injured would, you have to live with the guilt that each time you sit down, you’re making it more difficult to get back up. It’s a tough burden, man.

A couple months ago, a neighbor was getting rid of his loveseat and was asking a woman who lived across the alley if she wanted it. I volunteered to take it on the spot. I shifted the living room around a bit and we had the futon which had been transferred to stuff receptical duty and a coach one step away from the graveyard. Clancy says that there is a minor smell on Not-Futon, though I can’t smell it. There are a couple of minor tears. The idea was that we would take the couch cover from The Futon and put it on Not-Futon. Still, though, it was not something we were going to want to display prominently in our future living room. Still loads better than The Futon.

So we set out on Craigslist for some new furniture and ran across a La-Z-Boy recliner. Now, LZBs are not the most comfortable of chairs, but they’re still not bad. Clancy’s recliner is a La-Z-Boy and we like it fair enough. The big thing, though, for packing purposes is that the top comes off and that makes transfer easy. And what do you know? We’re transferring stuff in a few days. Someday I’m going to want the recliner of my dreams, but it’ll do for a while yet.

Searching for a sofa was a little bit harder. The hangup was that we found the perfect sofa/love-seat early on and couldn’t get our minds off of it. Nothing else came close. It was more than we wanted to spend and it came with a love seat, but the biggest issue is that we would have to pick it up from Western Shores, a rich-person community a couple of hours from here. Setting aside my distinct lack of enthusiasm about driving for five hours a couple days before driving for a dozen, that made the vehicle rental situation much more difficult.

UHaul has those nice signs on their trucks that say $19.99 or somesuch, but in small print is “plus mileage.” In fact, with a 50-mile minimum and required insurance (unless you have a $10k credit line), there’s no way that you can get out of there paying less than $60. However, we were looking at far above and beyond the minimum mileage. And at 60c a mile, it was going to get really expensive, really quick. Budget was the same way except that they charged more for mileage. So we went with Enterprise.

Enterprise, it turns out, has a bizarre definition of the word “reservation” and “confirmation.” Whereas I interpret these words to mean “You are confirmed! You have a reservation for a truck with us!” what they mean is “Oh, we may or may not actually have the truck we confirmed with you. And if we don’t, well, that’s just tough luck” because they feel absolutely no obligation to live up to the reservation. They refused to upgrade us for the same price, which is what businesses typically do. They called around, but when they found one, it was too much trouble to have it transferred to their location. And it was more expensive than our reservation and they would not compensate the difference. So for the honor of using Enterprise (which was, prior to this week, my rental agency of choice) we would have to drive half an hour to pick it up and we would be paying $10 more a day than what we had reserved.

Sadly, this was still better than our alternatives. Enterprise charges a lot more by the day, but gives you unlimited in-state miles. Since we were going to be putting some serious miles on it, they could have charged us a lot more and still been cheaper than UHaul or Budget. That being said, getting an Enterprise through the website is a really bad idea. Apparently, they make reservations without regard to availability. This was a real sore point in the Paulsboro Enterprise, even though in this case they had what we wanted. It would have been a sore point at their Soundview Location, if they’d cared. I’ve noticed this before with Enterprise in that I will reserve one model and end up with another in the same class. As long as they have something, I don’t care about the particulars. This was different.

What Enterprise does not have is CD players in their vehicles. Clancy warned me about this, but it was still odd to see a car - any car - without CD players. I mean, how much could it possibly cost to have one installed and though most people won’t care, for some people it means spending hours in the car in between municipalities with no entertainment. Some people like me.

Last move, I kind of bugged my mother-in-law with my need to burn a bunch of audiobooks for the trip at the last minute. It was actually one of those things that was supposed to take only a few minutes but because of technical difficulties distracted me for a couple hours. This time she wasn’t around while I was scrambling to set up my audio entertainment. I took one of my old Pocket PCs and transferred the audio books to it and I’ll listen on bluetooth on the drive. I managed to mostly do this while resting in between taking boxes out, but man it would have been easier with a CD player.

So yesterday I picked up the recliner, which turned out to be closer than the one that we originally decided on. We had initially decided on one that was nearly the exact same as the one we had, but it was out in Enterprise City (no relation to the rental agency). Then one opened up at the next town over and that was more appealing. It was a different color, but I actually decided that I liked that because it wouldn’t look weird if they were two shades of faded.

Later today I’m driving out to Western Shores to pick up the couch and love seat. I’ll be wishing and hoping and praying that it will all fit into the cargo van. I think it will. I packed up most of my clothes yesterday, so I’m sort of slumming it today. The impression I get from these people and where they live and their wonderful couch that they’re getting rid of that these people have money and lots of it. I’m oddly self-conscious about it. Like I’m not worthy of the couch that they are bestowing upon me. Okay, not really. But sort of. No, not really. A little. I never claimed to be entirely rational.