If you go to a used car lot, there is a certain class of car that you can get pretty cheaply: The Yankee Car. A Yankee Car is a car that has all the fixins from a CD/DVD player to automatic door locks, but no air conditioning. I call them Yankee Cars because it’s almost a certainty came from points north of my southern home town and almost equally a certainty is that they lived in Dixie for all of two days before they decided it was time to buy a car that wouldn’t give them heat exhaustion.

As it turns out, I spent most of my driving formative years without air conditioning in my car. It takes some getting used to. For instance, if you’re going to be in the car for more than half an hour you have to have a change of shirts. You get used to a stripe of sweat where the seat belt went across your chest. Sometimes you get as involved as to have a particular “driving shirt” that you change into when you get in the car and then change out of as soon as you get wherever you’re going. I remember when I got my first car with air conditioning… I wasn’t allowed to use it in weather under 100-degrees for fear that it would break. 100 degrees in the Gulf weather belt is very, very hot.

So now we flash-forward to the present. It is my new theory that you haven’t lived in a place till you’ve had your car broken into there. I lived in Colosse for many years and my car stereo bills reflect it. My car was broken into three times in the last two years* I was there. It got to the point that I didn’t even bother locking my car in hopes that they’d spare the window. Ironically I never had a problem in my shabby apartment on the wrong side of the tracks… it was when I moved into a slightly more upscale apartment that it started. Then in Deseret my car was broken into**. And yesterdayI officially became an Estocadan

I actually spent a good portion of yesterday waiting for the shoe to drop. Every time I’ve had my car broken into, there was always something in there that it hurt to lose. My laptop, a ZIP drive (back when they cost something and were actually worth something). I was less concerned about the gaping hole where my car stereo used to be and more about the completely cleared out glove compartment. I didn’t have my car title in there, did I? Checkbook? Check from Ed McMahon for a million dollars? Knock on wood, none of the above. They did get my car’s registration papers, though, and maybe a birth certificate. And irony of irony, I actually had some gloves in the glove compartment from when I needed them in Deseret.

They did get my CDs, which is 95% not a problem as they were mostly burned***. There were a couple new ones in there, but I had ripped them… onto the hard drive that died a few days ago. So I have to buy those over again. It includes one CD I don’t even like that much, but it’ll be the third time I’ve had the buy the CD cause it was in my CD player the last time it was jacked. It’s good enough to buy back, though only barely. Part of me wishes that they’d taken a CD of greater personal import. Of course I say that and once upon a time they did: I had the only CD in existence for a band that my best friend was in.

More inconvenient than the lack of a car radio, however, is that the Ford Escort is a dumb car. For some reason they decided that instead of having a CD player like just about every other car in existence, they would put it in a ovular-shaped console and it would share said console with the Air Conditioning, so I’m without AC. It was because of the AC rather than the radio that I needed to take it in pronto. It’s a good time of year to be without AC, but you never know how long that’ll last. So I took it in and had the console repaired… except the AC, which they said they couldn’t do. I wish they’d have told me that I’d have to take it to the dealer anyway $300 earlier.

So I’m still without AC, which should be fine at least for another couple of days. It actually reminds me a bit of back in the day. Except not half as miserable. Yet.

* - This was back in the good old days before the recent PD manpower shortage, population boom, and crime-wave. I’d actually be more worried about my car these days.

** - This was a very instructive thing about living in semi-rural Deseret versus urban Colosse. In Colosse, the cop seemed genuinely annoyed that I called the police about $3000-worth of property lifted from my car. In Deseret I was less than $200 out and the cops gave me weekly updates on their investigation and I got a letter from the District Attorneys office letting me know that if they found the guy they would make him pay.

*** - Technically, according to the RIAA I now have to destroy my CDs because I’ve now illegally distributed their music. No joke, that is their stance on the issue.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been having some unanticipated technical difficulties here at Hit Coffee. The main page is apparently back up, though you can’t access the individual posts, so commenting is out. Though I am apparently able to post right now, regular posting will resume once you can talk back (though I must confess I’ve been feeling a temptation to write a bunch of controversial things since no one can contradict me!).

A special thanks goes out to my webmaster Sam, who has been working hard on getting things back up and running. It has been greatly, greatly appreciated.

I’m not a kool-aid drinker of the concept of Open Source. I don’t think something is inherently superior if it’s open source. Cheaper, for sure, but not necessarily better. I use Firefox, OpenOffice, and GIMP, but not Linux (yet). I appreciate the fact that open source gives me options, but I’ll only use it if it makes my life easier or more better.

Wikipedia is the information equivalent of open source software. It’s the encylopedia that anyone can edit (within certain parameters) rather than experts being assigned in their field (or however it is that regular encyclopedias do it). A 2005 report discovered that Wikipedia is not markedly less accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Even so, when I first discovered Wikipedia I was pretty unimpressed. Basic things like grammar and structure were amateurish at best and the content was frequently biased. You couldn’t use it in a debate because for all you know the person that wrote it was smoking pot rather than doing his homework.

But then I discovered that it wasn’t that Wikipedia was useless, it was that I found the right use for it.

Wkipedia’s critics miss out on its true value: It offers information, or at least a starting point, to areas of interest where no encyclopedia would even think to go. Whether you’re interested in the comic book character Blue Beetle, the anime Ranma 1/2, the Ferengi race from Star Trek, or the political structure in the imaginary world of The West Wing, Wikipedia will give you information that no one else will.

Not all of it will be correct, but the more obscure the interest the more likely it was written by an anal retentive fanatic and the more likely it actually is correct. People think they know a lot more about America’s Founding >Fathers than they actually do. I doubt anyone thinks they know more about the Ambush Bug than they actually do.

It’s helped me a number of ways. When I’ve needed to keep track of characters in the West Wing, for instance, it helped straighten me out. When I wanted to know who Adam Cray in DC Comics was, it gave me the scoop. When I needed to figure out the order of the various Patlabor serials, it gave me the information that I could not find anywhere else after literally spending hours trying to find it.

So yeah, don’t use it if you have something else handy. But next time you wonder where information on a subject might possibly exist, it’s invaluable.

There’s an interesting one going around the web today, about a guy up in Cheddarland (Oconomowakkawakka) who busted down his neighbor’s door over a porn video.

Things against the guy:
- He lives without a phone. With his elderly mom. Creepy.
- He busted in with a sword. Not a baseball bat, not something normal, no, a civil war heirloom cavalry sword. Creepy.
- He “froze” and “freezing”, instead of not doing anything, consisted of scaring the ever-loving daylights out of his neighbor. Bad choice of words.

Things in favor of this guy:
- The neighbor admits to the cause.
- The neighbor admits to having the volume turned up way too loud.
- The neighbor watches some really messed up porn. In an apartment. With the volume blaring really loud.

Were I the police? I’d have to weigh how things were. And I’d probably conclude that this guy ought to be let off the hook, because he had probable cause to believe that someone was in danger right then and there. Calling 911? Good option, but by the time the police were there, if there were a rapist the girl could be dead.

And I’m hoping a jury will find the same, or maybe a grand jury or more sane prosecutor will just let this one pass.

To no great surprise, reports of a possible reunion between the Anglican/Episcopalian and Catholic Churches were premature and ultimately false:

Archbishop Bathersby, who co-chairs the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM), said in a joint statement with Anglican Bishop David Beetge that the London Times report, which carries the headline: “Churches back plan to unite under Pope”, is “unfortunate”.

Episcopalianism will always be thought of as “Catholic Light” and not without reason. They’re both lithurgical in practice, traditional in sentiment, and struggling. They’re sort of like that old divorced couple or that band that broke up and later the former participants think to themselves that maybe it was a mistake. Of course, the more time they spend around each other the more the problems become visible.

None of that is to say that there wouldn’t be benefits. It would give the Catholic Church an easier way to start allowing for married clergy. Back when the Anglican Church started ordaining women the Catholic Church made a deal with Episcopalian ministers that they could convert to Catholicism, still be married, and assume Catholic priestly duties. They remain to my knowledge the only married Catholic clergy. So liberal Catholics could see this as an opportunity to slip through an expansion and ultimately undo the prohibition that has arguably caused quite a few problems in recent years. For the Anglicans it would put butts in pews. For conservative Anglicans it would prevent the church from getting too far off track.

But ultimately there is no way around the fact that Episcopalians and Anglicans will never see the Pope as the infallible messenger of God. A significant portion of the church (including its leadership) disagree with the Catholics positions and emphesis. And to the extent that the church has an identity (at least in the west and in the United States in particular) it’s as the church that doesn’t have strict and rigid demands of its followers. It’s acts as counseller more than leader. That, obviously, isn’t true for the Catholic Church (even if it’s not as rigid as some people would like it to be).

A few weeks ago one of my Pocket PCs had a headphone jack that went on the spritz. So I sent it off to a company to have it “fixed.”

What I sent: A working Pocket PC with a stylus with intermittent headphone jack usage. And $80.

What I got back: A working Pocket PC without a stylus and a headphone jack that doesn’t work at all.

I literally would have been better off just burning the $80. At least then I would have a stylus and intermittently working headphone jack.

I talked to them and they swear that there was no stylus on the unit that I sent, but were apologetic about the whole not-fixing-what-I-paid-them-to-fix-and-in-fact-make-it-worse thing. However, they acted like I should be grateful that it was under warranty. We’ll see how that goes.

—

Apparently, when Windows 2000 said that there was a problem with my harddrive and asked if I wanted to fix it, it meant that there was not a problem with my hard drive and was asking if I wanted to change that.

Before it “fixed” the drive, there were no problems with it. After it “fixed” it, 3/4 of my directories are inaccessible.

Just over a month ago I lectured to Ethan the virtue of keeping all of your data on a separate hard drive (or better yet, a separate computer):

I came by this one the hard way, but I have breathed easier ever since. If nothing else, you can disconnect the second hard-drive if you’re about to do anything potentially hazardous. I’ve twice had partition formatting expand beyond the scope of the partition I had assigned.

Of course, having your data on a separate drive doesn’t do nearly as much good if you leave it plugged in when you reinstall Windows. So it did something to my data drive right after installing Windows 2000. Unfortunately, I was letting it do its thing so I couldn’t stop it in time, but it said that it was fixing it.

Luckily it wasn’t an actual storage drive. I mostly used it as a dumping ground for when I rip and encode video for my Pocket PC. Unfortunately I have been a little lax in getting the actual DIVX files off the drive and some stuff was lost.

News Headline: Romney to Air Presidential Campaign Ad
Clipping: “Republican Mitt Romney, flush with cash from early fundraising, this week will air his first presidential campaign ad to introduce himself to voters in several early voting states.”
My Reaction: So wait, a presidential campaign is going to run campaign ads? That surely is news!

News Headline: Laughs End With Bizarre Britney in Rehab
Clipping: “Britney Spears has been ridiculed for everything from her 55-hour first marriage to backup-dancer second husband and her recent pantyless partying escapades. Now that she’s entered rehab, though, the joke is over.”
My Reaction: I can’t say I’m that interested anymore. Still, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a celebrity implode as quickly and thoroughly as Britney has. Who’d have thought that Keven Federline would be the more responsible parent?

News Headline: Stars Hopeful Oscar Win May Boost Gore ‘08 Run
Clipping: The self-described “recovering politician” has become a star in Hollywood. Now some of Gore’s biggest fans — including some in the entertainment world — are hopeful an Academy Award will boost his chances of entering the 2008 presidential race.
My Reaction: I listened to a discussion on a potential Gore candidacy the other day and they gave a number of scenarios in which Gore could walk in and talk the nomination and maybe the presidency. He continues to deny that he’s going to run, but there is one way to know for sure: If he’s going to run for president, he’s going to need to lose some weight. While obviously not William Taft, he is nonetheless at least slightly above the weight where it becomes uncomfortable: sweating, fatigue, unflattering pictures from many angles. So if you start hearing that he’s going on a diet, it means that he’s running. Otherwise I think we can take him at his word that he is not.

News Headline: Laptop sales help HP gain at Dell’s expense
Clipping: Analysts said the surging laptop sales indicated that HP was making aggressive market-share gains at Dell’s expense in a fast-growing industry segment, and had enough momentum to extend its expansion.
My Reaction: I’m a Thinkpad loyalist but even I had to think twice about passing up HP last time I bought a laptop. HP’s deals are really quite impressive and they’re a slightly more trustable brand than Dell (which isn’t saying much). It’s important to keep an eye on what’s going on with laptop sales. The barriers to entry are so low for desktops that laptops are where the money is going to need to be made for a lot of these companies (though HP will be able to fall back on their peripherals).

News Headline: ASU helps create real face of George Washington
Clipping: ASU oversaw the 3-D scanning of historic artifacts that helped reconstruct the new Washingtons. Researchers used items that best represented his physical characteristics, including a statue, a bust and a mask created from a mold of his face. Guided by an anthropologist, they used computer software to reverse the aging process by filling in teeth, adding fat to his cheeks and smoothing wrinkles. They also aged him slightly for one image
My Reaction: I saw a special on the History Channel about this project. It’s pretty awesome. Contrary to the article, though, Washington really does look about as you would expect him to.

I woke up this morning with a sore tooth. On one hand, it’s a very good thing I just went to the dentist cause it reassures me a bit that there’s nothing horribly wrong with it. On the other hand, since going to the dentist twice within six months causes bad juju, so it’s a bad thing that I just went to the dentist.

Ah well, I think it’ll pass. It’s just weird cause it’s been a while since I’ve had a sore tooth. And I didn’t eat anything hard yesterday. Except for that hard candy. But I eat that once a week. I’m weak.

There is a view of a skyscraper from the back yard of my parents house in Mayne, the sleepy suburb of Colosse. Six months or so ago they started construction of a 30-story condominium. Next month they’re starting on another and a couple years from now there will be five where there once was none. Though I question the wisdom of building 30-story condos near the coast in Hurricane Alley, I mostly just find it interesting that they’re being built there at all.

Progress is a funny thing. You never know exactly where it’s going to go. If I’d guessed that somewhere I lived would be getting a skyscraper condo I’d guess downtown Colosse by the university or even in the mountains of Deseret. I would not have figured the sleepy suburbs where I grew up. And I certianly never would have guessed five.

I suppose it’s a good thing. The condos will bring in more revenue from property taxes. Most of the inhabitants will be retirees so they won’t be crowding out the school system (though seniors pay less in property taxes than do everyone else).

I just can’t believe that I can see the skyscraper from my own back yard.

Usually, sometime around a long-ago day that has ceased to have real meaning beyond being a day mentioned in a Shakespeare play, I have a couple days of nightmares.

The nightmare goes as follows: I am somewhere familiar (home, work, old dorms, etc), and in a very Freddie Kreuger-like manner, I am chased down by an old ex-girlfriend. Inevitably, just as I’m about to die, I wake up in a cold sweat.

I understand these sorts of dreams are fairly common.

What’s bizarre for me is that in the past 4 days, these dreams have repeated 4 times, only every night, I’ve actually died. The end of the dream wasn’t me waking up in a cold fright, but my dream eye hovering over my corpse, like I’d popped out of the dead body to take one last look. The dream that followed after each one was so soothing that when I got up in the morning, I almost forgot that I’d had the prior dream… except that seeing your own corpse in a dream isn’t something you’re likely to forget.

It freaks me out, mostly because I can’t think of a single thing that could have happened to trigger this. The usual stuff that triggers it is a spate of updating my email filters to block out the abusive stuff the ex-gf seems to love to email at that time of year, but that’s just under a month away still.

This story takes place more than a couple years ago. I should state outright that this whole series did not reflect better standards of behavior on my part. Once the initial mistakes were made, I quickly discovered that sometimes there is no right way to deal with something, or someone, that has been wrong for so long.

Libby and I originally connected by way of an online dating service. She shot me a message several months before. The ad was two months old when she wrote me and by the time she did I was already involved with someone else. We nonetheless chatted on Instant Messenger from time to time. She seemed extremely interested in meeting from the get-go.

It turned out that she messaged me when she did because after 60 days a profile goes inactive and she had to establish contact before that happened. She’d been looking at my profile on a regular basis. I was constantly changing it and she would later be able to recite nearly every profile I’d written. Those that she didn’t recite off the top of her head she had saved on her hard drive. I didn’t know any of that when I first met her.

“You’re just not like I expected at all,” Libby told me. “I knew you worked with computers and you were smart so I figured you would be socially inept and that I’d have to drag you into conversation.”

Her eyes had a way of dancing when she talked. That was the first redeeming quality I discovered about her. The previous girl that I had dated had been something of a dimwit, so just seeing cogs turning in the back of her head was an improvement. She also had a certain low-key demeanor about her. A calmness that I hadn’t expected from her based on our discussions online I didn’t realize at the time that she was somewhat subdued because she was tired.

“So does that mean that you’re not going to dump me after two months?” I said with a smile. She had told me that she had never had a boyfriend that she hadn’t dumped after two months. It was a little off-putting, to say the least. When I asked the question, I was mildly hoping that the answer would be “no” and that I might buck the trend. The truth is, even then, on the night we became an us, I was a little indifferent to the whole idea. Three months after that I’d wish that I had met the same fate as her other boyfriends. Nine months later, she found a way to break my heart.

“I was kind of hoping that we could go to the movies tonight,” she meekly informed me. Her voice had never been so soft.

“Well, you didn’t tell me that,” I told her as I tied my shoes.

“Well, I didn’t know that you had other plans.”

“Well, I do.”

“Fine. Whatever,” she said, turning up her nose at me. I could see her glancing my way through the corner of her eye. She was waiting for me to feel guilty. But she had made plans for me without my input. I had nothing to feel guilty about. Be that as it may, I’d somehow manage to feel guilty in a couple months and then in eight more she would find a way to break my heart.

“… so I really don’t know what her problem is,” she concluded. I could see her out of the corner of my eye as I continued to scan the article I was reading. She was usually an animated speaker but she stopped moving. She was waiting for me to say something.

I didn’t.

“Are you even listening to me?” she accused with a stern inflection.

“Marginally,” I evenly replied.

“What are you doing?”

“Reading about the President’s new Medicare proposal.” Not only had I stopped pretending to listen to her when I wasn’t, I stopped pretending I was distracted with something of great personal importance.

“Why don’t you listen to me when I’m talking to you?”

“Because I really don’t care what you have to say right now. You’re venting and I’ve long since learned that I’m really not necessary for these conversations.” It was true. First, I tried offering advice. That just pissed her off. Second, I tried affirmed her feelings, which only recycled her anger and left me absorbing shards from the blast.

“Why do you treat me like this?!”

I finally turn around in my chair and look at her. “Why do you let me?”

“Well what am I supposed…” she stopped herself. She knew what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to have left me by now and I was challenging her to do it. I was asking her to. But she cared enough about the relationship for the both of us and we both knew it. It would be another month before I’d finally do what she refused to. In seven months, she’d find a way to break my heart.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I broke up with you a week ago.” I’d avoided ending it for the first couple months because I was hoping that she would follow through on her tendency to leave relationships after a couple months. Then something happened that made me fear slightly for my safety if I were to end it. I’d spent the next month trying to figure out the most graceful exit I could.

“I’m mourning the week anniversary of the end of the relationship. I’m not ready to let go yet.”

That didn’t set off the warning bells that it should have. “We talked about it until four in the morning. It was over. It is over. So why did you let yourself into my apartment?!”

“Because this is where I belong!” she screamed. I worried that she might have woken up my roommate, but he was working the overnight. I was originally relieved, but it ultimately proved to be an inconvenience: she had no reason to be the slightest bit self-conscious about letting herself into my apartment every Wednesday thereafter for the next two-and-a-half months before a hiatus and her heartbreaking return half a year from that day.

“Why did you password protect your computer?” she asked. She was genuinely angry with me for password-protect my own computer from her prying eyes.

I, meanwhile, was more than a little angry at having to. When I came home a couple weeks before, she asked me who a girl that named Sandra that I had been trading IMs was. That was too much and I told her to read or watch DVDs while she waited if she was going to be so insistent about coming over. The week before the Sandra incident she had gotten angry with me for not letting her know that I’d be working late. She’d waited six hours for me. The fact that she was uninvited to begin with was lost on her. “Because you’re not supposed to be here. We broke up a month ago.”

“You broke up. I just want closure. I just need to understand. I ran out of DVDs and books that interested me.”

“What can I say that I haven’t said in the thirty or forty hours that we’ve spent going over this? Are you just going to keep coming over here? Maybe you’ll start bringing over your textbooks and studying?” I said sarcastically.

“Maybe. Until I figure out your password.” The sarcasm was lost on her, five months before she finally twisted the knife.

“Eva, can I come over tonight? I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“It’s a weeknight. Why?”

“Libby actually didn’t stop by last week so I thought that I was safe. I haven’t mentally prepared for tonight’s bout. And I’ve had a long day and I really don’t want to have to drive all the way to Mayne.”

Eva consented, but Libby was there the next morning when I stopped by to pick up a change of clothes. She was really angry that I didn’t go home that night. After that I started keeping a change of clothes in my car. They stayed there until our final confrontation, which was four months away.

Our Wednesday meetings started bleeding in to other nights. Not only was it not getting better, it was getting worse. I’d see her drive by my work. Evangeline and I came out after an evening together and she was sitting there in her car watching. She only came in on Wednesday nights, but that wasn’t any better because by that point I no longer knew when she was watching me. I gave her description to Eva and told her to call the police if Libby goes anywhere near her. I started looking into a restraining order myself.

Then suddenly it stopped, three months before the end.

“Just when I finally stopped shuddering every time I came home on a Wednesday night. Here you are. Please, just get on with your life!” I was rubbing my head trying to alleviate the incoming headache. It had been months. I really thought that I was safe. I was actually startled when I walked in to find her laying on my bed, reading a book that I’d just received and hadn’t even had a chance to read myself. This was half an hour into the ensuing argument.

“I just wanted to see you again,” she replied, as though she were explaining that she yawned because she was tired.

“That’s great, because for a brief moment I was afraid that since I haven’t seen you in weeks that you might be starting to do things that actually make you happy!”

“What?” I couldn’t tell if she didn’t hear me or didn’t understand what I was saying.

“This is beyond ridiculous. If you want to be miserable, fine. But please, please leave me out of it.”

“Why would I… why do you think it is that I am holding on to you so tight?” It was the first question I’d seen her ask in a long time that she didn’t already know the answer to.

“Because you enjoy being miserable. You don’t know that you do, but look at you. You’re holding on to a 3-month relationship six months after it ended.”

“No! Oh, my god, no. You have it all backwards,” She was visibly stunned by my answer. It was as though I’d answered 25 o’clock to her query about the time. Her eyes danced when she was trying to formulate a response. She did it when she was trying to find a way to say something that come out bad or when she was trying to find a way to be interesting. Her eyes weren’t dancing. She wasn’t thinking about what she was saying at all. She was saying exactly what was on her mind. “Ever since I met you I have been happier than I’ve ever been since I was a kid. I don’t know that I’ve ever been this happy. Well, escept when we were actually dating. Why do you think you make me miserable?”

“Because you’re lashing yourself over a relationship that’s dead and over. Even when we were together I didn’t treat you very good at all. You told me yourself that you’re often attracted to men that treat you poorly. Maybe if I’d treated you with more respect you would have gone away more quietly.”

“Opposite!” she exclaimed. She was breathless. More than just exasperated, she looked like she was having trouble breathing. I couldn’t imagine what she was telling me was true and yet I could tell that she believed it to be.

“What?” It was my turn to be confused.

“I’ve never had a boyfriend treat me as well as you have. Never. You introduced me to people as your girlfriend. You were never ashamed of me… at least not to my face. You paid for dinner sometimes. You weren’t using me for sex. You even talked about football with my dad for half an hour. You were willing to meet my parents at all. You are the first good guy that I’ve ever dated.”

And that was how she did it. I thought of all the ways that I was lousy to her, however deserved it was from time to time. And yet because I even went so far as to go through the steps of a relationship, I was the best she ever had. It broke my heart when she told me that. First because it gave me a full scope of the loneliness and isolation that she had felt for so long. Second because there was nothing I could do to fix it. I despised her like everyone else.

Agent: Thank you for calling Dentex Dental Insurance Group, can I have your name, account number?

Me: William Sherwood Truman, 9941-1219-64

Agent: How may I help you today?

Me: Well I got an “Explanation of Benefits” that informed me that my two cavity fillings were not covered by insurance.

Agent: That is correct, sir.

Me: I’d like to know why? I can understand denying claims on purely cosmetic procedures and whatnot, but cavity fillings are pretty standard dental care.

Agent: Correct, sir, but according to our records you had two cavities on the same tooth.

Me: Well, yes. There was one cavity on the front and then a separate cavity in between that tooth and the one next to it.

Agent: Well, we only cover one cavity per tooth.

Me: Even when they are two distinct cavities and require the same amount of work as two cavities on two different teeth?

Agent: That is correct, sir.

Me: Okay, but according to this you didn’t cover either cavity filling.

Agent: That is correct, sir. You had the cavities filled on the same visit that you had your check-up.

Me: Okay. So?

Agent: So we only cover fillings when a separate appointment is made.

Me: Why is that?

Agent: Company policy.

Me: But in this case it sort of was two different visits, back to back. I was originally going to have to come in for a separate visit but the person whose appointment was after me cancelled so they took care of it on the spot.

Agent: Well in the future, sir, I would suggest you schedule a separate visit for your cavity fillings.

Me: And if I had, they’d be covered.

Agent: One of them would have been covered, yes.

Me: Because the other was on the same tooth.

Agent: That is correct, sir.

Me: So what if I’d visited the dentist and had the two cavities identified and then scheduled two separate visits so that they’re not filling two cavities at once?

Agent: The second one still wouldn’t be covered because we only cover one round of cavity fillings per six months. One cavity filling, one check-up, and one cleaning every six months.

Me: Wait, they had to split my cleaning into two visits. Are you saying the second one won’t be covered?

Agent: That is correct.

Me: Oh, wait, it shouldn’t matter. The first one wasn’t covered anyway because it was periodontal work. I had to pay out-of-pocket for it. So the second one should be fine.

Agent: Not exactly, sir.

Me: How so?

Agent: Well that’s two cleanings within six months.

Me: But I’m only asking insurance to pay for one of them.

Agent: Yes, but you’re asking Dentex to pay for the second cleaning, which we can’t do.

Me: Even though you didn’t pay for the first?

Agent: Correct.

Me: But if you didn’t pay for the first how would you even know that there was a cleaning?

Agent: Because you just told me. And now I’ve put it in your file.

Me: So this call is going to cost me the $117 that you would have paid for the cleaning?

Agent: That is correct, sir. Thank you for calling Dentex and have a good day.

Many years ago, my best friend Clint was angling to take this girl Cho to the dance. He was genuinely interested in Cho, though she was always a little indifferent to him. And any boy, for that matter. But as the day of the dance rolled closer and Cho didn’t have a date, she got Clint and another suitor to stand back to back. Clint was 1/2″ taller and so Clint was her date. Cho was 6′0″ tall and refused to date any guys shorter than she was. But she’d go to the prom with someone an inch shorter, so long as he was taller than the competition.

My wife Clancy and her mother were at a wedding between a very tall guy and a very short woman. “All that height,” Clancy’s mother lamented, “wasted!”

The other day I wrote about the perils of using a woman’s vulnerabilities to try to get the upper hand. Last night I watched Bloggingheads.tv and was thinking about it today. Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt, is something like 6′2″. This actually reminded me of something and I found an issue where I do something like that: height.

I am over 6′3″, which isn’t that tall I guess but it’s definitely tall enough to be useful. I discovered sometime after Clint’s brush with Cho that a lot of taller girls can be varying degrees of self-conscious about their height. I don’t know that my height was particularly useful with the ladies most of the time, but it clearly made a difference with tall women.

And I used it to my advantage.

I would never say anything to them about it, of course. If a 6′0″ woman wasn’t interested, I didn’t lecture her about how tough it’s going to be to find another guy as tall as me to ask her out and how without me she would have to make do with a shorter man. It wasn’t anything like that. If they weren’t interested, they weren’t interested. But what I did do is gravitate towards taller women under the assumption that they would be slightly more likely to be interested. I’m not sure that being taller ever helped me date a woman “out of my league”, but it did help.

Clancy is 5′10″ and she was (as far as what’s coming to mind right now) the fourth tallest woman that I’d ever dated. Clancy didn’t have a problem dating shorter men, but she has told me on more than one occasion how glad she was to be able to wear heels at her wedding.

So the question that is coming to my mind is that is there any moral difference between what I did (considered women’s insecurities about height when deciding who to talk to at parties and who to flirt with) and what Howard did in In The Company of Men? I’d say that there is one major difference because I never acted or believed that they were lucky to have the interest in someone like me whereas Howard (in a fit of rage, perhaps) did. But looking at it in this light still makes it feel a bit unsavory.

On a sidenote, two of my more serious exes, Julie and Evangeline, were 5′7″ and 5′8″ respectively, so my height was probably not much a factor with either of them. What’s interesting though is that Julie’s next boyfriend and Evangeline’s boyfriend after the boyfriend after me were both 6′6″. The taller girls I dated, Libby, Cecilia, and Brook, followed me up with someone significantly shorter than me and shorter than them.

I’m about ready to hop the train on the TV show 24. Last season was surprisingly good considering it was the 5th (order from best season to worst: 1,2,5,4,3). Here are the problems I’m having:

1. President Wayne Palmer. This is not working for a number of reasons. First, there was never any indication that he was politically active except by way of his brother. When he was his brother’s Chief of Staff I’m pretty sure they explicitly said that he got there by way of private industry. Even setting that aside (say he got in on the sympathy vote), Wayne Palmer does not look or act like a president. And even setting that aside, what happened to the shrewd and worldwise Wayne Palmer of season three? He’s been replaced by an airy idealist. If they wanted to give the Democrats back the White House and they wanted a link to David Palmer and someone to keep the charge they should have dusted off former Vice President Jim Prescott. That would have had the added value of a former veep who tried to angle out the president being the victim of another veep trying to do the same. That brings me to…
2. Vice President Noah Daniels. Holy cow, this guy oozes menace. How many disloyal villainous vice presidents are we going to have? I’d say that it’s so obvious that it must be a red herring, but they did that last season with Hal Gardner. Powers Boothe is great, but he would have been better in the Gardner role.
3. Tom Lennox. I realize when the plot takes place over a 24 hour period you don’t have a whole lot of time for nuance, but seriously the hyperactivity with which he wants to imprison all Muslims everywhere is beyond comic book and his demeanor so snivelling that we have no choice but to hate him. Meanwhile, his plan is so outlandish and offensive they should have tried to put as reasonable a face on it as possible to make it seem less so Someone that seems either sorry that what he believes has to be done has to be done or seems coldly analytical about it. Not someone who seems excited about the prospect of throwing brown people behind bars. And how could he have not known that Palmer would be reluctant to implement such measures? And if he feels that way, he should have supported someone like Noah Daniels from the beginning. With President Logan utterly disgraced up against his hand-picked and unelected successor, the election should have been a cakewalk with whomever they nominated.
4. Wayne Palmer’s moralizing. I almost wanted to disagree with Palmer on principle about internment. His argument was predicated on the notion (repeated ad nauseum for emphasis) that America’s best weapon against radical Islam is American Muslims. What a ridiculous argument. If he’s going to moralize, how about: we don’t intern an entire ethnic or religious demographic because we’re America and America doesn’t do that. Yes, there was internment in WW2, but we’ve been hung over from that ever since.
5. Muslim stooges again. Look, I understand reluctance to make Islamic radicals the main enemy every single season, but come on. We’ve had Muslim terrorists that are stooges of the oil companies, stooges of the defense industry, and now stooges of Russian nationalists. If you don’t want to use Muslims then don’t use them, but for heavens sake stop making them puppets for western interests.
6. Jack Bauer. There comes a point where you’re hoping that someone pops him just to put him out of his misery.
7. Graem Bauer. I gotta admit, I thought the revelation for Graem was well-played. But again, do you really have to have such a schmuck in such an important position? They should have made this guy Jack’s evil twin. All of Jack’s abilities plus a little more warpedness in the head. Absent that, let’s have someone with some presence. Though I guess that’s the point of…
8. Philip Bauer. Man, when did James Cromwell get so old? He’s certainly got more presence than his fictional son, but Jack could eat him for lunch (which again is why it’d be better to have his buff brother as the villain). Cromwell is great, but why didn’t this part go to Donald Southerland? I guess cause they didn’t want his villainy to be so obvious? I dunno, I guess I don’t have as much a problem with Philip, except for the whole family soap opera thing. Speaking of which…
9. Joshua Bauer. Kudos on getting a kid that really looks the part of Jack’s son… errr… “nephew”. But seriously, this has got all of the corniness of a dimestore novel without being, you know, interesting.

It’s an uncommon problem this day and age, but we’ve had a lack of credit cards in the Truman apartment. One of Clancy’s cards expired last June and the new one never got sent to her. A couple months ago her debit card went missing. For my part, I have a Discover card and had a bank debit card.

A couple weeks ago I was eating dinner at a restaurant. We got unusually bad service and I did something that I rarely do: left a tip below 15%. He got the last laugh, however, when I left my credit card in the leather sleave and he declined to turn it in. So for the past couple weeks I’ve been getting one notice after another of declined credit cards and time spent on the phone begging said companies not to kill my credit rating.

All I had was Discover, which may be the card that pays you back but it’s only if places accept it, and a lot don’t.

I don’t trust our mailman. Nevermind our neighbors warning us that nothing left on the front porch will stay there more than fifteen minutes, I don’t trust it to get there in the first place. We are constantly receiving mail addressed to someone else. I don’t mean that it went to our 1080 32nd St instead of 1008 or 1078. It’s not even close misses. We’re getting stuff directed to 1024 and 2023 32nd. Heck, we’re even getting stuff sent to 36th street and 42nd. And if we’re getting other peoples’ stuff, I don’t want to anything sent to me that I wouldn’t mind getting dropped off on some other address on some other street.

So I talked to the people at the Bank of the Northern Hemisphere, but they weren’t much help. Due to liability issues, they can’t just send the card to a bank and allow me to pick it up. The US Postal Service doesn’t send mail to my work (another long story). The only option that I had was to have them send the card to my parents house and they could send it certified or I could fly down there to pick it up. I decided to make a trip home of it and will be flying back into town over the weekend.

The credit card arrived at my folks house yesterday. I called my father earlier today to get the information needed to activate the card so that I could make some online payments. My father, who was a deputy chief auditing accountant for a major Air Force installation with an annual operations budget in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, does not understand bank debit cards. Every time I tried to get the information out of him he told me that I was getting a Debit Card and not a Credit Card and that I could not use it to make online payments. His argument was buttressed by the fact that he had read all of the paperwork, which to say the least was unclear. So I tried to expain to him that it was also a credit card even though it was still debiting from the account. Yes, even though it’s debiting it counts as a credit card because as far as the place you’re using it is concerned it is a credit card. We eventually settled on the (false) fact that this was just a debit card and I must be getting a separate credit card and got on with the transfer of information.

I called and activated the card.

Then I opened the mail.

And voila, the bank had apparently sent two check cards, one to my parents house and one to mine. I called and activated the card I have here and now I have two debit cards in my name on my same bank account.

Either dyin’ of thirst of drinkin’ from a fire hose, I am.

My wife married a moron.

I stopped by Walmart on the way home. There’d been some shopping that I needed to do and it was the one place where I knew that there’d be flowers. Unfortunately but not unsurprisingly, the pickins were pretty slim when I got there. After I first got there I decided that I’d get the flowers last so they’d get more time in the water, but after about 45 minutes of non-VD shopping, the pickins were even slimmer. In the part of the place that I was there were only two batches left, both of which were pretty sick.

Then I saw it. Perfectly bloomed flowers sitting on a table. Someone must have gotten them but decided to shed them before entering the line. They were perfect. They cost three times as much as the other flowers, of course, but these had the advantage of not being dead. The only complaint I had was that the vase was a little light on water and I’d have to be careful to prevent the flowers from falling out in the windy weather outside and on the drive home.

My fears, it turned out, were not entirely unwarranted. The wind was awful and it was all I could do to tilt the flowers towards the wind to prevent them from being blown out. On the entire drive home I kept a hand on the vase to make sure that it didn’t tip over, soak my car, and go waterless. It was a bit of a challenge.

I pulled into the driveway at about 8:00. Clancy was on call last night so I knew that she’d be asleep when I got in, so I wasn’t surprised that all the lights in the apartment were out. I carefully pulled the vase out of the car and noticed something peculiar: the water didn’t move. I reasoned that maybe I wasn’t looking at the waterline but rather a line in the vase and the water had, despite my best efforts, fallen out. I looked a bit closer and saw the water and wondered if maybe it had frozen in this unusually cold weather.

Then, of course, it hit me like a frozen water balloon. I took a closer look at the price tag.

Made in China.

Clancy was wonderful about it. Just as she was the last time that this had happened. Flowers are her thing and not mine, she reasoned, and it was the thought that counts. She was happy for me having been so happy when I thought that I had found this awesome deal on flowers. Plus, she said, these don’t die and she can keep them in the bed room so that there will always be “flowers.” Which is great except that every time I see them I am going to be reminded of what a dope I am.

I really do have a wonderful wife. A shame about her husband, though.

Trying to comment over at Bobvis, I learned Blogger’s commenting server is apparently blocked by my employer’s web filter under the category of “sex”. So I can read comments (since those are on Blogger’s regular server), but alas, I have been silenced. I can’t access www2.blogger.com.

A pox on the house of those that talk about sex in Blogger comment sections.

I saw the movie In The Company of Men again over the weekend and it touches on a number of themes that have been explored over at Bobvis and here. The basic plot of the movie is that the very examplar of the “alpha male” breed teams up with a passive middle-manager type on a business trip for some extracurricular activity. Both emasculated and angry at women, they decide to find some vulnerable woman, both pursue her, and both disappear into the night when they go back to corporate HQ. The find a secretary that is beautiful, but very self-conscious about the fact that she is deaf.

This post does contain spoilers, so if you’re planning to see the movie soon, skip it.

As the end of the movie approaches, it’s apparent that the passive Howard has truly fallen for the film’s heroine, Christine. Christine, meanwhile, has chosen the charming but nefarious alpha-dude Chad who hides his seething contempt for Christine underneath a charm and social grace Howard is incapable of demonstrating even when he is sincere.

“Can’t you see?'’ Howard emphatically explains, “I’m the good guy!'’

His sweet talk falls on deaf ears in more ways than one. But the fact that Howard still sees himself as the good guy is instructive. In his mind, he was merely the copilot. It’s Chad that was the enemy. And sure enough, Chad is by far the more evil of the two. Chad revels in the mischief while Howard mostly goes along with it until he suddenly sees a self-interested reason not to. Chad may be evil, but Howard is weak enough to serve the same ends.

I was reminded of the Nietzsche. Howard thought he was good because he was powerless. He was powerless in the face of Chad’s charisma and then was too weak to follow through with it, falling in love with Christine because she was pretty, pleasant, and just vulnerable enough to want him back.

“You! You are [expletive] handicapped. Do you think you get to just choose?!”

Don’t you get it, he may as well have said, you’re a damn cripple and I’m the one that’s okay with that!

You’re in pretty dangerous territory when the biggest thing you have in your favor is your willingness to tolerate some aspect of who they are. A rich guy who thinks that a girl from the other side of the tracks should jump at the opportunity to marry into money cause most guys with money wouldn’t look at her twice is likely in for disappointment. Spungen points out that older guys often think they should have a leg up cause they’re older and they’re willing to overlook age.

I’ve personally come close to falling into this trap. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person and for the longest time I wouldn’t discriminate based on intelligence. Not that I wanted someone dumb, but that I was willing to tolerate a less stunning intellect and I figured that I was smart would be helpful. Boy was I stupid. the couple dim girls I did date were bored to death talking about anything more complicated than the Ross-Rachel-Joey love triangle on Friends.

Most things that we are “willing to tolerate” are things that others appreciate. Some guys would prefer to talk to any of my erstwhile dates about Friends than about anything that I’d like to discuss and they’re probably a more appropriate match. In the case of the movie, another deaf person obviously wouldn’t have a problem with Christine’s deaf person, nor would a lot of people. But even if Howard were the only person on the planet willing to deal with her deafness, that’s still not the basis for a relationship.

Were it not for Chad, it’s quite possible that Christine would have fallen for Howard. He does have a steady job, is congenial for the most part, and isn’t a bad looking guy. But, in the fury of the moment, all that occured to him was that he wasn’t as evil as Chad and was okay with the fact that she was deaf.

The film is several layers of sad and more than a little maddening. This post contains spoilers, but there is relatively little that happens in this movie that you don’t see coming a significant time ahead. That’s not a knock on the movie at all* because it’s a process movie rather than a plot movie. It’s not about what happens but rather how it happens. And how it unfolds, one dreadful and tragic scene at a time.

* - But here’s a knock on the movie: it is the most poorly directed movie I have ever seen, bar none. Heavy dialogue scenes are filmed from afar. Worse yet, the dialogue’s volume is drowned out by whatever else is going on in the scene. A truck passing out back makes more noise than the characters do talking.

Something that I don’t understand:

Sometimes I like to make myself half a sandwich. I take a single slice of bred, put some ham and cheese in there (along with some BBQ sauce or spicy mustard), roll the bread, and eat it. But one is rarely enough. I usually want two.

But if I make myself a traditional sandwich with two slices of ham and cheese in between two slices of bread… I get tired of eating halfway through and don’t want any more.

On Saturday I got a little slip in my mailbox that a parcel had been mailed to me but I hadn’t been around to recieve it and since it was insured it was back at the Post Office. I wasn’t really expecting a package except maybe a CD but I know that the company that sells the CDs does not insure. More curiously, the package was sent to “Will Truman” instead of “William S. Truman”, which is the name on my credit card and therefore the name on most things I buy on the Internet and therefore the name on most packages I receive.

The curiosity of the last couple days has been killing me. But the Post Office was closed on Sunday and I had a couple things I had to do at work early on Monday, so the earliest I could go to pick up the package was this morning.

So I went.

And there is no package.

It wasn’t there, the Article Number came up blank on their database. There is no record of a package having been sent to me. And yet this non-existent package knew my name.