Clancy got some good news from work a week or two back that she would be getting more opportunities to deliver high-risk babies.

Inexplicably, we thought this would be instead of rote clinic work. Our foolishness was exposed when they announced that they were going to be making this time by taking away the one afternoon she gets off every other week. They used to give her the afternoon off before a night-shift, but now she’s going to be working a straight 24 hours.

So generous of them.

I hate these people.

Passionately.

My best friend Clint’s girlfriend Belle told him that he could look into her email account if he wanted to. I’m not sure what she was thinking since the emails in there were beyond incriminating. Of course, she had told him that several months before he ended up finally looking into it. Maybe at the time she wasn’t hiding and once she had something to hide she figured that he had forgotten about the permission he had to check up on her email.

Clint’s first reaction was as it always was: fear. The worst thing about finding out that your girlfriend is cheating on you, if you’re Clint, is not the betrayal. It’s the fact that there is an unavoidable confrontation. He has the ability to overlook an awful lot, but something like this he couldn’t. Could he? He knew that if they talked about it, they might break up. An unfaithful and disrespectful partner was far less fearful than the prospect of being single (or without Belle, anyhow). To understand this you have to understand the depths of Clint’s passive, avoidant personality.

My reaction makes more sense to me, though objectively it probably made little more. I was angry enough about it for the two of us. It was worse than the fact that she had cheated on him. In fact, that part didn’t bother me at all. After all, Clint had cheated on her over and over and over again. In fact, he’d had more sexual partners in their two year relationship than he’d had before the relationship. But Clint at least had the shame to feel guilty about it.

She wasn’t merely indifferent, she was hostile to Clint. And not for Clint’s tomcat ways (which she didn’t know about) but rather that Clint wasn’t enough of a “man” for her. Basically that he was a wimp. He wasn’t the “man” that the other guy she was sleeping with was. He was whiny and emotional and blah, blah, blah. And honestly her complaints were without merit as far as that goes. I could understand a woman preferring someone more like Carlos, her paramour. But if that’s what you want, for god’s sake stop disrespecting Clint, I thought.

Of course, being single was just as scary for her as it was for him.

And of course, if Clint wanted something other than her (which he did), then he should do the same. Of course, I’d been telling him to dump her since before there was a relationship for him to get out of.

I used to worry a great deal about Clint. I worried that he would be a perpetual cheater that couldn’t stay in a relationship and couldn’t be faithful. His father was much that way. The fact that he had cheated on Belle so many times with so many people was disheartening on a number of levels. I told myself that the problem was that he was in the relationship, but really she was his second serious girlfriend and his first girlfriend was so dramatic herself so as to not allow Clint to ever escape panic mode. So I had no real way of knowing. I had to cross my fingers and hope.

The relationship didn’t end with Carlos. Well, it did, but not permanently. They were together again by that fall, and broken up again and reunited the following summer, before breaking up again again the summer after that. The final score was 3-to-2, with Clint as the victor. He dumped her three times with her begging for another chance, while she only dumped him twice to the same response.

And since then he has not cheated on a single partner he’s had. Neither, I would bet money, has she. She never ended up getting together with Carlos, though she did partner up with someone else. It’s funny how for Clint and me it’s always been the shorter relationships that we held on to the longest. I made as quick and clean an exit from Julie’s life after the relationship ended not because I couldn’t take the pain, but because I had nothing left to feel about or for her. We had walked as far as we could walk. We were always civil, I have lunch with her from time to time, but beyond that there’s nothing to say. The same is true for Clint and Belle, his next, shorter-lived girlfriend haunted him for some time to come, just as Evangeline, my next and shorter-lived girlfriend, did for me.

People like to point out that women sometimes enter a relationship with a man with a desire to “change him” and that it’s pointless because it can’t be done. But I think of the way that Clint cheated on Belle so regularly and the last year of my relationship with Julie and I think the idea that a man is as he is regardless of who he is with is as falacious as the idea that a woman can “change” a man to become what he’s not. In a bad relationship we act badly. I was good to Julie until it was no longer a good relationship, then I was bad to her. I was almost as bad to Eva as she was to me. And I’ve been pretty good to Clancy (or so I like to think!). Clint was bad with Belle, better with Belle’s successor (the haunting one), and has been remarkably good with his current girlfriend.

Unfortunately, I think that the answer to this question is a depressing one: A good relationship usually won’t make a bad man (or woman) good, but a bad relationship will often make a good man (or woman) behave badly. It’s sort of the worst of both worlds: you can’t change a person for the better, but you can surely change them for the worse.

At the Toledo Blade, a former US Ambassador advocates for fascism in the name of “stopping gun violence”:

The disarmament process would begin after the initial three-month amnesty. Special squads of police would be formed and trained to carry out the work. Then, on a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building. All firearms would be seized. The owners of weapons found in the searches would be prosecuted: $1,000 and one year in prison for each firearm.
…

That is my idea of how it could be done. The desire to do so on the part of the American people is another question altogether, but one clearly raised again by the Blacksburg tragedy.

Every totalitarian regime in existence has started by trying to ban the population from having weapons for their own self-defense.

I was asked my a coworker (much higher up than myself) what kind of doctor my wife is. I pretty directly answered that she delivers babies.

I need to work in there a wry comment about the inherent dangers of a motherless woman in her thirties spending 80 hours a week around cute little babies.

It’s like my mind works on a 45-minute time delay. It’s sad, I guess, that I have to think of these wry comments and jokelets in advance, but there ya go!

Veronica Nichols comes up with rules for naming kids:

1. If your kid isn’t ever going to live on Middle Earth, then maybe, just maybe, it’s really not okay to peg your child as being the progeny of total dorks for the rest of their lives. +2 to damage for anyone with a little Arwen or Samwise. This applies to all the would-be parents of Celtic royalty, Saxon bards, and assorted Druids, as well.
2. Likewise, if there are no Jedi on your homeplanet, it’s possible that you shouldn’t sell your kid out to George Lucas.
3. Aesthetically selecting a name from a culture you’re not related to, immersed in, or really even vaguely acquainted with is both bad form and an excellent way to end up with a kid who’s name translates to “dog food jock strap.”
4. If you’ve made up a name, please make sure it’s decipherable. It’s one thing to name your kid Shaya or Raydson. It’s entirely another to name your kid Cheighye or Rhaihdghson.
5. Despite deciding that “Danger” or “Racer” or “Steele” would make a totally rad name when you were in the 2nd grade and really thought Transformers were tubular, perhaps you should re-think those long held dreams and opt to not saddle your kid with something that makes them sound like a unpurchased five and dime action figure.

The examples that she comes up with are mostly cases wherein the father probably had a fair amount of input, and many of the really “out there” names may indeed have the father as the driving force behind them. But I’m willing to wager that most of the pretty bad names out there are coming from mothers. They’re too cute sounding to have come from their fathers. I’m willing to be proven wrong on this, if such proof were possible.

As luck would have it, my wife spent time in the urban south delivering the babies of mostly poor black mothers, spent time in the rural Mormon west delivering the babies of mostly poor white mothers, and is spending time now delivering the babies of poor, non-English speaking little brown ones. At each of these locations (well, at least the first two) she has come home with a stream of stories of little tykes named with all the logical thought that one might put into naming a pet or doll. The bad names actually outnumber the good.

The names differed, but the quality of the names did not. It’ll be interesting (and probably depressing) to see how future potential employers will react to stupid white names like Apple compared to stupid black names like Rishanda. I suspect that the price for this will be borne by those that are going to need the most help. Clancy is less sure about the Latino names since she doesn’t know a tried-and-true Mexican name versus one created on the fly or part of some insidious trend. She gets the sense that their names are generally more typical, though some of that can be chalked up to the fact that they haven’t been Americanized insofar as stupid baby names go.

Part of me thinks that these names will actually be a net gain for society. There were more than a couple people with my name in many of my classes and almost all of my jobs. Adding more names into the mix therefore ought to be a good thing. There’s nothing inherently worse about the name Bilbo or Kaden. We’re reaching the point where young girls are going to be named Madison not from a mermaid movie or a hip trend but because that was grandmammy’s name. The only bad connotations of the name thus far are the fact that it comes from a piece of fiction, was made up of whole cloth, or is inane and trendy.

But I just can’t get over the selfishness of the parents naming a child as though it was a plaything, a pet, or a doll. These names will follow the kids around for the rest of their lives. Maybe the best answer is to give the kid a standard first name and a creative middle name. Call them by the latter but then give them the option of reverting to the former. Going the other way doesn’t work as well cause the kid’ll always be called by the first name on the first day of class and on some job applications and all sorts of official paperwork.

Of course, as I say this the only real female name my wife and I have decided on if we have a daughter is front a couple of songs. It’s not really traceable, though. We like the name, we like the association from the song, and we can’t agree on all that many names. We’re still at least a river apart when it comes to male names. She seems pretty certain though that we’d have a daughter, though, so no worries.

I’ve had a little more fun with myself coming up with pseudonyms for the kids if we have them and if I’m still blogging when we do. It’s kind of nice to be able to think about what I would name a kid if I didn’t have spousal approval and I didn’t have to worry about the kid getting picked on because of the name. But that’s fantasy blogland. There’s no way that I would saddle my kid with my own frivolity in real life. I’m irritated at parents that do.

-{via Dustbury}-

GMail has apparently “locked down” my email address due to “unusual usage”.

The listed about six things or so that I might have done to incur the wrath of the GMail gods. Of course I am doing none of them. I am not doing anything that I haven’t been doing since I signed on. It won’t even tell me what it thinks that I’m doing.

It says that it may take up to 24 hours to regain access. Email is not something to be messed with like this.

Holy cow am I pissed off. It took a long time to get back confidence in free email providers, but GMail managed to do it. Now maybe I’m going to have to figure something else out.

The plot of land next to our house is curiously vacant for a plot located in a rather expensive part of town. The house next to that is abandoned. Across the street from us (a different street than the drug dealers) is an aging black guy I’ll call Roscoe that I’ve never spoken to but have always exchanged friendly waves with when I see him. Roscoe frequently has guests over and they hang out on a table in his front yard. Next to him across our vacant lot is another vacant lot and across our abandoned house is a set of… something… being built.

Across a different street, as I’ve mentioned, is drug dealers. I’ve actually gotten used to them being around and have even said “hi” to them on a few occasions. Some of them are suspicious and quiet, but others are friendly. You’d be surprised how used to living with drug dealers you can get whem they’re mostly amenable people or at least quiet. I’ve stopped worrying about them a long time ago.

A few weeks back in front of (and maybe inside) the house next to the vacant lot next to us, a bunch of people started to congregate. I started getting the “suspicious characters” vibe that may or may not be related to the congregation of a dozen or so young, big black men. My main fear was that if they were setting up something in that house that might be a rival to the drug dealers across the street… we would be right in the middle of that. They disappeared after a week or two.

Then a couple of weeks ago we came home to fine a trailer parked in the vacant lot adjacent to Roscoe’s residence across the street. It was Easter weekend so we figured that it was an Easter Party. But Easter weekend came and went and they were still there. Roscoe is a social guy with a lot of friends so we figured it was his. And every night there were 10-20 guys listening to music and talking and maybe dancing a bit to the music. I noticed that the guys were significantly younger than Roscoe so I figured that maybe they were friends of his son.

After a week or so had passed they were still out there partying and I noticed that I hadn’t seen Roscoe and his friends out in a while. The thought had occurred to me that these might not be Roscoe’s guys. They might, in fact, be the people hanging out at the abandoned house a couple plots down from us on our side of the street. The chances of them owning the property they’re on had diminished in my eyes.

For the most part they wrap up the music before it gets to be too late. Eleven or so on weeknights, before midnight or one on weekends. The music is never all that loud, though it’s enough to prevent us from opening our window if we can avoid it. But mostly it’s just a little unsettling to have them out there every day, drinking beer listening to music and partying. Particularly when I don’t know who they are and if they own (or are renting) the property they’re on. Also unsettling, since they’ve taken root I have not seen Roscoe and his friends doing their thing in quite some time.

It’s hard to say to what extent this might be a racial thing. I would be less likely to be as unsettled if it were twenty beer-bellied white guys listening to country music, but instead it’s fifteen or so young black men with only a woman or two around, if any at all, listening to R&B (and a little, though not much, light rap). On the other hand Roscoe and his friends, also black, don’t bother me at all even though they pumped their music just as loud or even louder. And to be honest we are in a historically black neighborhood (it’s not even an economic thing, almost no Latinos, either) and we’ve no real problem with that. But I guess it’s hard not to have some really negative mental associations when it comes to black men, dressed a certain way and acting a certain way for which there really isn’t a white equivalent (except rednecks, who aren’t as scary if you’re a straight white couple).

Not sure what, if anything, we’re going to do about it. Clancy has toyed with contacting somebody, though I’m disinclined to. They have been at least somewhat courteous about closing down at a reasonable time and they might be friends of Roscoe’s kid. Also, to be frank, I’m very much disinclined to make enemies in this neighborhood whether they’re from here or not. We’re pretty conspicuous around here as it is. Also, just as there are stereotypes about thuggish young black men, there are also stereotypes about uptight Yuppie white couples uncomfortable with a borderline racist discomfort living amongst people they see as racial riff-raff. I’m very anxious not to live up to any aspect of that stereotype, if at all possible.

I think I’m going to take a wait-and-see attitude. If Roscoe has been chased inside by these guys then he’s paying a stiffer price than we are and if he’s not stepping forward there may be a very good reason for it. If they own the property then they’ve been hassled needlessly in an area where citizen-police relationships are more than a bit strained as it is. If they’re trespassing then presumably the property’s owners are going to find out about it at some point because they keep the trailer there 24/7.

Right now I’m more curious than anything. Curious about who they are and curious about why I feel the way that I do about them.

My coworker Pat is, not unlike a number of my techie coworkers, the tech support for her extended family. Just about any time she goes back home to Apalachia, she is given something to work on and her reward is that whenever a computer is replaced she gets the defective one to repair and use herself. It’s low pay for the hours of support she provides, but family is family.

One such defective computer used to be the computers of her nephew and niece, both under the care of their grandparents, here parents. Once she resurrected the computer she found a bunch of old chatlogs that she couldn’t help but wade through out of morbid curiosity. Unsurprisingly, since both Cali and Carll are in high school, most of the conversations are pretty asinine. Carll takes mostly after his father who was something of a nimrod, so most of his chatlogs are both dull and stupid. Cali, on the other hand, got her mother’s intelligence (but, thankfully, not her propensity for poor lifestyle choices). But alas, she is seventeen and all which that entails.

Cali is dating some guy named Mark and so unsurprisingly they’re trading IM’s often. Reading through the logs (which Pat knows she shouldn’t do but she is a curious cat without much of a life of her own) gives Pat a headache. Cali and Mark are always arguing over something stupid. She’ll get mad at him for not responding to her IM even though the timestamp reads only thirty seconds before. Cali is angry at Mark most of the time and Mark, who seems like a nice enough guy but is probably not the sharpest tool in the shed) is pretty clueless why. Then he’s mad at her, she’ll talk circles around him and explain why he’s wrong, and he won’t be able to keep up with her logic and will just get madder.

Cali also trades messages with a friend of Mark’s Brad. The remarkable thing about those messages is that they’re never bickering. She’s never mad and he’s never defensive. He doesn’t get mad and he actually articulates why Mark is upset better than Mark does and he seems to understand why she’s mad at him when she is. Brad is dating some girl named Marta, with whom he is always fighting.

“I just don’t understand why Cali and Brad don’t just get together,” Pat said.

“Because if they did, Brad and Cali would have to start bickering and huffing and puffing and sobbing the way that Brad and Marta and Cali and Mark do in their relationships.”

“I’ll never understand young people.”

Of all of the employers I’ve worked for, Bregna was by far the worst. They were so bad, in fact, that most of us Bregna alums believe that a part of their business model was to rotate employees so fast as to prevent them from staying long enough to collect benefits. To succeed at Bregna was not a matter of excelling, but rather enduring. Because of their large presence in Colosse, their international headquarters, it is believed that more tech people have Bregna in their job history than McDonald’s.

Other than the stories I can tell and a steady paycheck, the only reward I got for working there were the short-sleeve button shirts. They were black with two pockets with the Bregna logo on the right pocket. You were given five two weeks after you started (many didn’t stay long enough to earn the shirts). You were given the choice of wearing this button shirt or a coat and tie. These shirts are among the best I have ever worn. I love them. Passionately. Despite my scorn for Bregna, I wear the logo simply so that I can wear the shirts.

I make a point to wear my Bregna shirts whenever I go to Colosse. I wear them to music shows, baseball games, and anywhere else that there are going to be a lot of people I don’t know. Because whenever I do, somebody will walk up to me and introduce themselves. I never served my country in the armed forces, but meeting fellow Bregna employees is much as I would imagine it would feel like to meet a fellow veteran of a particular war. You are instantly friends. You have a common bond.

A stranger will walk up to me and ask if I still work for Bregna. I shake my head and tell them when I served. They tell me when they served. “What year did you work there?” we would ask one another. It was almost never a matter of “years.” People would be impressed when I would give them two years until I told them that it was a November-February thing. We would swap stories.

“Did you work in the NOC?” I would ask (or they would). It seemed like most people that went through the company like a turnstile worked in the Network Operations Center, so the answer was frequently “yes”.

“Did you get that lecture about how you should ditch any friends you have that left the company?” I was asked once.
“I got it from nobody less than Pullman,” I said, referring to the Vice President of Operations. I didn’t even need to give his title. “In fact, he strongly indicated that I needed to move out of my apartment because I was rooming with one.”

“How did you do on the Management Quiz?” After two weeks of employment we had to take a quiz on who all the executives were. We got two chances to pass the test or we were put on probation. I only missed three questions regarding the alma maters and/or job histories of a couple of the executives. It was one of a few such tests that we had to pass, but it was the hardest because we had to remember such details as where an executive went to college or which Fortune 500 company they had worked for.

“Did they still post the most frequent restroom break abusers in the break room?” I was asked. They’d actually stopped doing that shortly before I got there.

“When we worked the overnight, at least one of us would go to the parking lot and piss on the building. Did you guys do that?” I was asked. I nodded. One guy seriously contemplated going the extra mile right in front of the door. We had few ways to retaliate and they invited such juvenile behavior. We also broke the pocketclips off of the company pens. That drove our boss crazy.
“I used to leave cigarette butts in the parking lot.” Bregna didn’t just disallow smoking, they refused to hire anyone that had smoked in the past year. I lied.

“How long did you last?” I asked one guy.
“Eight months.”
“Did you quit or did you get the sign-in sheet treatment?” Bregna refused to fire anyone that might be eligible for unemployment. Instead, they’d put you on sign-in duty, meaning that it was your job to sign people into the network room. When you weren’t doing that, you were not allowed to do anything else but sit there quietly. You were instructed not to talk to coworkers. Few lasted more than a couple of weeks.

“What did they say when you quit?” one asked me.
“He said that he was disappointed because he thought that I was Bregna material.”
“Ouch.”
“I felt the immediate need to take a shower.”

“What did you do with your shirts?” I asked most of them. Despite the quality of shirts, almost no one kept them. Most just threw them out. A couple tried to burn them. One claimed to have put them in a garbage back with some rocks and threw them into a river. They’d ask me why I kept them. I told them that I had only kept four of them. The fifth I gave to a brain-damaged meth addict in Deseret. I liked the idea of a shirt with their vaunted logo being worn by someone wandering the streets of Zarahemla looking for his next hit. Most of the people I told liked it, too.

Will’s mentioned his friend’s earlier encounter with the “Church of Christ” folks, but I’ve had a friend… well, I guess ex-friend now.

Elizabeth Michelle, when I came to college, was a very nice, friendly girl. Some people would have described her as “willowy.” They would have been charitable; Elizabeth had been anorexic for years, required enzyme pills to aid digestion (one of the worst things about eating disorders or unbalanced diets is the loss of the ability to produce certain digestive enzymes, which can lead to food poisoning as undigested food just rots inside you). She was about 5′7 or 5′8 and oscillated between 80 and 85 pounds.

For the first couple years, this was where things continued. She took vitamin pills, ate mostly sugary things (what she could still digest), and her weight stayed relatively constant, if a bit scary. When she’d go home, she got into fights with her parents… with her mother over religion (her mother was a heavy Baptist, her dad was Catholic, she was Catholic) and with her dad because he insisted on trying to force-feed her “normal” food (heavily greasy stuff) that inevitably made her sick.

Enter the end of her sophomore year; around February-ish, she became involved with “Campus Crusade for Christ”, a rather cultish group. Sometimes they went by the name “International Church of Christ” instead, but the groups were one and the same. They seemed to be an “outreach” program of the local “Church of Christ” group, who didn’t have a building of their own but instead rented a large ballroom for their weird sunday services each week.

The good thing about her CCC/CoC involvement was, she got serious about becoming a healthy weight. She reached a more mature 130 pounds (which believe me was an incredible relief: she looked GOOD with curves) over the course of that summer.

Twice after that summer, she tried to drag me to their meetings; once to an on-campus CCC meeting, and once later to the sunday service at CoC (by this point, she was one of their “Sunday School” teachers). The CCC meeting was almost a brainwashing session. The CoC bit had me constantly looking around to figure out where the camera was hidden; they had the smarmy greasy-haired televangelist, his backup dancers (I kid you not), a few people waving fans in the air, and they announced new baptisms like they were doing a TV quiz show, “Just Look What You’ve Won!”

Shortly after the second try to get me involved with this group, Elizabeth started becoming less of a friend… though I was never sure if it was simply her being more involved with them, or otherwise. Eventually, she moved out of the dorms and became a “living assistant” for an elderly member of the CoC. I saw her a few times after that. Eventually, from talking to other mutual friends, it seemed she’d cut off everyone from college who wasn’t a CCC/CoC member.

Last we heard, she’d gotten pregnant and gone through a rather rushed wedding at CoC. Nobody ever heard from her after that. We hope she’s happy, but we somehow doubt it.

I’ve been a bad boy. I managed to get my car and driver’s license registered in Estacado a while back, but only yesterday did I finally move my auto insurance. I’ve been paying lower Deseret rates and was running the risk of not being adequately covered if I’d gotten into an accident. My new agent, however, assured me that they would have covered me regardless. That’s really good to know.

We’d been intending to get married-couple auto insurance, but procrastination has gotten the better of us (just as it has with our separate bank accounts). Anyhow, no more. Estacado law apparently requires us to register together. It’s apparently a community property issue! Without a legal separation we are apparently forbidden from denying access to our cars from one another. Because we have to be able to drive one another’s cars, we have to be insured to. So we have to be registered together.

The good news is that I have been with my carrier for a very long time and I am subject to all sorts of discounts. Clancy is covered by that money saving Gecko. She has been inclined to shop around, but I’ve always gotten very good service from State Farm and am inclined to pay 10-15% more to go with the known quantity. With my discount, I may not even be paying more. At the very least my renter’s insurance history makes me ligable for a 20% discount for homeowners when we buy a home. I don’t often get the impression of being a “valuable customer”, but I do get that impression from each of the agents I’ve dealt with. The fact that my family has been covered by them since 1972 actually seems to count for something.

There was one oddity, however. Apparently according to the driving record they have I was in an automobile accident in 2004. I am almost certain that was not in an automobile accident in 2004. I don’t believe I ever got into one in Deseret, either reported or otherwise. Unfortunately the record didn’t have any details. My new agent struck it from my record, though, along with a 2003 ticket (didn’t matter, I was already eligible for safe driver’s discount). I just don’t know why my record would report me in an accident I am 90% sure I was not involved in.

—-

Speaking of cars, I am considering getting the lock changed on my car. Right now I am keeping valuables out of the car and keeping it unlocked because of the hassle of the current configuration. Essentially I do not have a key to the lock of my driver’s side door, meaning I either have to reach across the car to unlock it or I have to spin in from the passenger’s side door. That’s more of a hassle to do than you might realize. So I don’t leave anything in the car that I’m worried about being taken. But after the last break-in I still find myself worried that someone is going to break in and take my car stereo sans the faceplate. Since faceplate replacement is so expensive that it would negate the pawn value of the radio itself, I don’t know why they would, but I still find myself concerned.

I talked to The Worthless Dealership about replacing the locks on the car. They quoted me at about $300, which was pretty excessive. So I’m thinking about replacing only the driver’s side door and keeping two keys on me. I think next time a lock on my car breaks, I’m just going to get it replaced on the spot rather than spend years making it a hassle to lock my car.

I wonder who else I could get to do it other than The Worthless Dealership, though.

On the other hand, a locked car in Colosse usually just meant a broken window. So what’s the point, again?

-{Note, due to a mishap on my part, this post temporarily disappeared. So if you saw that, you’re not crazy}-

Logtar has given me a Thinking Bloger award, for which I am quite grateful! I’ll put this on the shelf next to Abel Keough’s “Best Blog of 2006” award, for which I was very grateful but never actually thanked Abel for (Thanks, Abel, I really appreciate it!).

Hit Coffee barely stood a chance of surviving when I started it over two years ago. Because of the confidential nature of it I couldn’t built up a readership either by telling people I knew about it or by telling the readership of my previous blog about it. I still don’t have as many readers as I used to on its non-pseudonymous predecessor, but I have a wonderfully active readership that leaves only a minority of posts uncommented upon. So thanks for that. Thanks, too, to my first three regular readers: Barry of Inn of the Last Home, Becky of Searching For Oz and Ethan formerly of The Vision Thing and currently of Ethmar.

As a “thank you” to all of my readers, I would like to make a special offer. Most of you probably won’t need it or want to take advantage of it, but I’ll be sending an email out sometime this or next week. If you’ve commented on the blog and left your email address you’ll be receiving it. If you are an uncommenting lurker or have left a bogus email address, please email me (delete the “xyz”) and you will recieve it, too. I can’t say what it is without giving a little much information about myself.

Over at Bobvis, an excellent post on The Second Amendment, what it means in the context of the other 9 sections of the Bill of Rights, and why it meant what it meant to the Founding Fathers (who has just finished fighting a war against an unjust government).

Mark Steyn, meanwhile, looks at the difference in reality between when someone declares a “gun-free zone”, gives a case example of some killers who chose a place for their killing specifically because the victims were unlikely to be armed, and spends a bit of time comparing the VT massacre to something that could have been worse, but was stopped.

While the two of these - the “reality” for the Founding Fathers, and the “reality” today, are different, they aren’t that different. The Founding Fathers still had crime in their time. Maybe more knives than guns, but there were still muggings, robberies on the highways, theft and burglary. They still needed a police force, and protections.

Back then, nobody would have thought about declaring that nobody could bring a gun to a University.

It is a strange irony that while the lethality of guns has increased - multiple rounds before reload is required, easier-loading rounds to begin with, better range and aiming capability - the basic premise of the need for protection has not. Someone who “goes along” with a mugger is relying on the fact that the mugger, while being bad enough to steal, somehow may still be “good” enough not to actually kill. In other words, they are relying on the mugger being true to their word (if “just give me the wallet and you don’t get hurt” is the kind of dialogue they get) or else relying on the mugger being bluffing about violence.

Playing what-if with bizarre situations is always difficult. The numbers of shootings, especially shootings where someone deranged is indiscriminately killing people, are too small to do a statistical analysis. Some people can bring up anecdotal evidence in which mugging victims had their own guns used against them; some bring up anecdotal evidence where people who had guns successfully stopped (or at least reduced the death count of) crimes; some bring up people who had guns, but weren’t carrying them because of well-meaning “gun free zone” policies, that theoretically resulted in more deaths than had they had guns with them.

One can’t say for certain. One brutal irony of the situation, though, is brought up by Steyn’s final point, in which he derides the VT theater department ( this theater department being the bastion of left-wing thought that most liberal arts departments are) for enacting a “no real-looking weapons on stage” policy:

To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale props department policy, it signals to everyone that you’re not in the real world.

The “gun-free zone” fraud isn’t just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia’s distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality.

I don’t know for sure, but I’ve been wondering this for a long time. Statistics on abductions show that those who resist, live more often than those who are passive; once you’re in an abductor’s car or under their control, chances are you’re dead. Once you surrender your right to self-defense, by giving up a gun, or by mentally presuming that the police or a “gun free zone” (Steyn points out: there were in fact TWO guns in VT that day, in addition to those held by the somewhat-inept police department) will protect you, you’ve already placed yourself in the control of whatever madman may show up.

This is one of the more impressive videos that I’ve seen in a while. A guy reproducing the Mona Lisa using MS Paint.

The most impressive part to me is how quickly he knocked down the meadows in the background.

Last Sunday I wrote about my seven-years deceased friend Walt and then a couple days ago I wrote about an annoying Sopranos character that gave advice out of ignorance. I was reminded of a story in which Walt was given some pretty bad advice by someone that really didn’t know what he was talking about: me.

Despite his parents being non-believers, Walt had joined up with a rather fundamentalist church that my Episcopalian background was completely incapable of fully understanding. Several months before he passed Walt gained some romantic interest in this woman that he knew from church, Suzanne, a divorced single mother. As Walt explained it he really liked Suzanne and she felt the same. But he was very cautious about dating a fellow parishoner for fear of what might happen if things didn’t work out. He was particularly worried about the fact that he was divorced. It wasn’t a problem for him, but he said that the church had some very pointed views about divorce-and-remarriage, allowing the former but forbidding the latter.

This was something of a no-brainer for me. If two people are interested in one another, are healthy together, and are not attached to someone else, I couldn’t of any reason why they shouldn’t date one another. Yes the church would disapprove but what would they ultimately do about it? And how can they have a problem with a child getting a new step-father and a mother becoming a wife again? None of that made sense to me. My then-girlfriend Julie and I pressed Walt somewhat hard on this point. It was obvious to us (and I think we were right about that) that he wanted to do it, he just needed convincing. And convince him we did.

They weren’t dating long before Suzanne could not take the guilt anymore. She went to her pastor and begged for forgiveness, which she received. Walt, meanwhile, was excommunicated post-haste. None of his friends from church would return his calls or see him socially. His boss, who had introduced him to the church to begin with, fired him and blackballed him from all of the local market. He lost Suzanne, he lost his job, he lost the half of his social life that wasn’t us. Apparently not only was remarriage a sin, but sleeping together was as well. I don’t mean “sleeping together” as in sex, I mean it as in sharing a bed. Sharing a bed as husband is wife is behaving as husband and wife is attempted remarriage, or something to that effect.

The haunting part of this story is that he started dating Suzanne at a highpoint and everything that came after was a long, eventual slide that ended off a proverbial cliff. Almost as much as I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to give Walt a call the night he died, I wish I had backed off when he came to me seeking counsel on the matter.

My primary failure was my inability to understand that my world is not the same as the whole world. I expected that his church, that I knew next to nothing about, would ultimately behave as my church did. I figured at the least that if they proclaimed to love Christ so much they might show a little forgiveness (Walt was quite genuinely sorrowful and not just about getting caught). I just couldn’t imagine the church doing as it did because that sort of behavior is so alien to me. Walt, on the other hand, really didn’t seem too surprised about all that happened to him.

So the moral of the story is be humble with the emphaticism of your advice. Just because the answers to someone else’s problems seem clear to you does not mean that they are at all clear. If another kid in your class is scared to death that his parents are going to overreact to something, take that seriously. The idea that “everybody does that” or “everybody knows that” is only true of people in your surroundings (if it’s even true there) . It’s a lot easier to take risks when you’re not the one that pays the penalty for losing and it’s easy to be cavalier about the decisions that others have to make.

Keeping up with the posts on SoTech, I thought I’d offer a quick primer on the dorms they have as such.

First up, we have The Polyhedron. The Polyhedron was built first on SoTech’s campus, back in the 50s. Despite this, it’s probably (overall) the most well-kept of the lot. Solid metal-and-concrete construction, large block exteriors, thick walls, good A/C and ventilation. It’s in The Polyhedron that Greenwood Hall (the Honors dorm that Will and I were in for most of our stays), Lecter Hall, Dredd Hall, Bruno Hall, and Grayson Hall are located. In the normal course of things, Greenwood Hall and Dredd Hall are for Honors students, Bruno Hall is where most of the Assletes (and regrettably, the 1st floor accomodations for handicapped accessibility) are located, and Grayson Hall and Lecter Hall are reserved for the rest who don’t get into a specific one. The rest of the “student athlete” population tends to be in Lecter Hall because Grayson is a 24-hour noise-free zone, something they wouldn’t likely understand or want to be in. During the summers, most of The Polyhedron is turned into paid locations for summer camps, High School Jailbait Cheerleading Camp, and other such events.

Every couple years, they try to “clean” the walls of The Polyhedron, to turn them back to their “natural” coloration. The true natural coloration, however, is Stone Gray. It gets back that way pretty quickly in Colosse’s weather.

The second, and largest-capacity, student housing setup is Sauron Center. Sauron Center is approximately 17 or 18 floors high, and was built in the 70s. It’s more run down than The Polyhedron, the elevators rarely work, and on at least two occasions has been flooded from the top floors downward when some idiot tried to hang their clothing from the emergency fire sprinklers. Sauron Center has another rare feature: students are gender-separated not by suite, but by floor, due to the community bathroom/shower setup.

The third location, built in the early ’80s, is SoTech Plaza. SoTech Plaza is a set of two-story “apartment” setups, with single-person rooms sharing a bathroom. The good news is, you get your own bathroom. The bad news is: everything else. A/C is provided by loud, badly maintained window units, the walls are paper-thin, the metal skeletons are starting to buckle. SoTech Plaza was originally supposed to be a “temporary” setup until newer places were built, at which point it was supposed to be torn down and replaced with a real building, but SoTech are cheap that way and seem to intend to try to patch it until one of the buildings collapses on someone’s head.

The Pines is the fourth location. This was put up in the early 90s, and is what was supposed to replace SoTech Plaza, except that money became tight and they handed the reins over to a private management company to run it as apartments for a while. They got it back about half a decade ago, and seem to be running it about the same as SoTech Plaza now.

Finally, there’s The Forest and The Wood, the two newest ones. Almost brand spanking new, but put up and advertised more as places for the Frat/Sorority types to go than anything for the main student body, because Frat Row is slowly being torn down. They follow much the same philosophy as The Pines, being set up more as apartment complexes (which allow people to remain over summer even if they’re not registered for summer classes) than dorms.

For obvious reasons, Sauron Center is the most inexpensive to live in, and The Forest and The Trees are the most expensive. For those on scholarship, Greenwood is still the place to be.

Web’s post on his experiences with athletes and housing reminds me of my freshman year, which Hugh and I spent in Lecter Hall, the “Athletics Dorm” before moving to Greenwood Hall, the “Honors Dorm”.

For the most part it actually wasn’t that bad. Fortunately for Hugh and I we had one another to room with so we only had to deal with suitemates, who weren’t all that bad all things considered. But even so it was always very… loud. Music was always blaring at volumes that we never experienced in Greenwood. And athletes in general are more loud and rambunctious in their behavior than are honors students or even regular college students.

The worst we ever had was actually with a couple of female athletes across the hall. One of the two was a somewhat quiet, studious sort that defied stereotypes and her roommate was a very loud one that conformed to some rather unfortunate stereotypes about African-American women. I don’t know if the two got along generally or not, but I do know that exams were more than they could bear.

Well, more than the quiet one could. Frustrated with the loudmouth’s lack of an “off switch” the quiet one locked her out of her own dorm. At two in the morning this did not go over well either with the loudmouth or with anyone else on the floor. Studious said that she needed to study and Loudmouth said that she needed to sleep. Studious pointed out that Loudmouth never actually seemed to sleep and therefore was suspicious of that rationale for her to be allowed back into the dorm. Loudmouth disagreed with that assessment and simultaneously compared her to a female dog and a vagina, among other things.

This eventually culminated in the UPD* campus police being called. When they arrived the officer and the loudmouth played a game of “Opposite!”

For instance, the loudmouth would say “Oh my god, you did *not* just tell me to be quiet!” by which we ascertained that the police officer had in fact told her the be quiet. The loudmouth said “You did *not* just force me back on the bed” by which she meant that he had, in fact, physically prevented her from standing up. The climax of the game came when she said “Oh, my god, you did *not* just put handcuffs on me!” and “I am *not* going to put up with this” which meant “You just put handcuffs on me” and “Okay, fine, I’ll calm down” respectively.

The whole thing took a couple of hours. I suppose if this is the worst story I have in Lecter Hall it wasn’t too bad. The worst part about it was the social isolation, really, and constant stream of bass coming from one dorm or another at any given time. On the upshot my suitemate left a primo shirt. I tracked one of the suitemates down the following year. He said that the shirt wasn’t his and the guy he roomed with was in jail. So finders, keepers, I still have that shirt today.

* - Presumably they would shorten the name of the police department and drop the “Southern Tech” from it lest Southern Tech University Police Department be shortened to STUPD.

Picture: Ryoga holding a bottle of Vodka, taken in the Summer of 2001.

One of the most frustrating aspects of car ownership is knowing when it’s time to turn it in and get a new one. Many of us form at least some sort of bond with our automobile, but even if we don’t most of us don’t replace a car the first time there is a serious problem. If the cost to fix a car is more than the cost of a new one the choice is simple. But if a new car is eight thousand and the repair bill is five, is it worth it? There are so many factors that it’s difficult to say much of the time.

Even if you fix the car something else may well come down in a few months and you’ve paid more to have the car fixed than it would have cost to replace it. But if nothing is going to go wrong then it feels wasteful to replace it willy-nilly like that.

My car is fine (knock on wood) but I’ve been running into that question with one of my computers with some urgency for weeks and I’ve been battling the question with the little guy for years. In early 2002 over the span of a couple months I bought two computers, Mousse and Ryoga, of almost identical quality with the latter being just a touch faster. But my experiences with the computers have been anything but identical. Mousse has worked nearly flawlessly. The only time I’ve had real trouble with it is when I’m having to mess with it doing some part diagnostic testing for some other computer, usually it’s twin. Ryoga has gone through three cases/power supplies and has eaten up four sticks of RAM over the past five years or so (most of the RAM was pretty old, though) and I’ve probably had to spend three or four hundred hours simply trying to figure out what the problem is with it this time and trying to get it fixed.

-{If you don’t know or care about technical things, you should probably skip over the next four paragraphs and resume reading where noted}-

The problem has been ramped up over the past couple of months when I took Ryoga off of fileserver duty and put it onto general desktop use. The first problem I had was that it would not recognize the 300GB HD that I was putting into it even though that same drive was moved over from the fileserver. It took a few days of after-work care trying to figure out how to get it to recognize the drive. I ultimately installed some jacked up version of Windows and got it working. A week later it started shutting down randomly. After a few days of investigation I determined the problem to be a power supply (even though the power supply it had should have had ample wattage). I replaced the power supply and it started working again.

A week after that the apartment was consumed with the smell of burnt plastic. I isolated the smell to the computer, which had frozen. Actually it hadn’t “frozen” so much as overheated. I don’t know how hot it got but after I let it cool down for five minutes and booted it up it was registering at 118 degrees Celsius. The video card died in the process and the computer was down for over a week for fear of starting a fire. I downloaded the Motherboard Monitor so that I could keep an eye on the temperature and finally got enough faith to get it going again and for most of last week it was overing between 80 and 105 degrees, well above where you want it to be but safe enough to sleep at night.

Then a couple days ago the temperature was registering at 124 degrees. It was still functional I shut it down for a while to let it cool off. When I rebooted one of the hard drives failed. I booted it using Knoppix and the 300GB data drive was in-tact, which it was, and Knoppix did some automatic diagnostic on the harddrive that fixed the hard drive and it was able to boot back into Windows. Unfortunately the case fan seems to be sputtering. The CPU temperature is reading between 100-110 degrees more than I would like, but for the most part it’s settling in the 80-100 range.

I can’t imagine the computer has that much life in it, but it’s been hobbling along in one form or another since it was less than a year old. Nevermind the inconvenience, if it eats anymore hardware then the “repair” bill will far exceed what it would cost me now to replace it. Of course if I replace it after it does eat more hardware, I’ll have to replace not only the computer but the hardware that it kills, too. Additionally if I want to replace it cheaply now would be a better time than a couple years from now. I can probably track down motherboard-processor that has the right slots (AGP and DDR) for my current hardware. A year from now would probably require the purchase of an additional video card and RAM. And I just bought the video card to replace the one it just killed!

-{If computers ain’t your thing, continue reading here}-

The logical part of my brain says that it’s time to bury Ryoga and buy a new processor. A new mobo/processor would cost about $150 and replacing so much as a dead harddrive could cost as much as $140 (nevermind the inconvenience of lost data). But I am extremely reluctant to do it for a couple of reasons.

Primarily I hate to waste. I don’t like the idea of throwing away a computer that works without incident 95% of the time. I was so excited when I last rearranged my computer setup because for the first time in a long time I had use for every computer I have. Nothing was going to waste! It was a wonderful feeling that lasted a week until Ryoga began acting up. I just don’t want to throw away something that works just like I don’t want to retire a car that can still be driven.

But also I’ve formed a bond with it. It’s been with me a very long time and letting it go would mostly close a big chapter in my computing experience. I still have Mousse, but that’s Clancy’s computer so I don’t get to use it very much. Just a few weeks ago I had Ryoga, born in 2001, running a video card born in 1999 and a sound card born in 2000. I took pride in Ryoga’s spry ability to just continue to chug along with my newer and more glamorous machines. If Ryoga were to just die I’d understand it and move on. But instead he continues to just barely chug along, demanding that I euthanize him.

As Will’s noted before, we both attended Southern Tech. I, upon my graduation, found employment at my alma mater, something I continue to this day. It’s something of a feeling of giving back, something of a rewarding experience (with one or two exceptions, the co-workers are fantastic), and government jobs are always good for job security.

One of the more interesting thing about my position is that it allows me to keep an eye on the student body. My department features a number of degree plans, one of which seems to have none of the graduate-degree potential of the others; I like to call this one “Future Gym Teachers of America.” Whereas most of the other degree plans are dominated by bright kids, this one has the singular distinction of being the home of roughly 50% of the high-profile NCAA athletes for the school. I say “athletes”, but we have a slang term as well, especially come the end of semester and class registration time: “Assletes.”

When I was in the dorms, Will and I had a common friend in Karl. Karl’s troubles with this crowd started early. Southern Tech’s system of assigning roommates is affectionately known as “Roommate Russian Roulette”: they have NO overhead for people to shuffle around, they routinely overbook by 10-20% so that people spend the first couple weeks (or worse) living on cots in the common areas, and in some cases they’ve actually quartered students at another university in another part of town, and bussed them back and forth from there to campus. Getting a roommate transfer (even in conditions where items have been stolen or personal property destroyed) is a matter not of convincing them it’s warranted, but of convincing someone else to trade off in another room.

Karl’s original housing was in the worst section of the dorms, and they gave him an “Asslete” for a roommate; this person ran a nighttime barber business out of their dorm room, and Karl was rightly afraid that the “clients” would walk off with his possessions. This had a highly negative effect on Karl’s studies, but fortunately didn’t last long enough to give him too major of a problem.

When Karl managed (a couple months later) to transfer into the better dorms by moving into the room next door as my suitemate, his studies noticeably improved, because he was able to be in his room with his books and study. This lasted for approximately 1 and a half years.

Then, the housing authority “mysteriously lost” his housing re-signing documents, after cashing his deposit check. They stuck another less-savory individual in Karl’s slot, and moved him to the worst dorm in the place - a dorm known informally as the “Athletics Dorm” but more often referred to in a derogatory reference to a famous movie serial killer the dorm might have been named after. He was shoehorned into a three-person suite, the two others in the place being some of the worst, and yet somehow most representative, examples the Athletics program ever had to offer.

The idea of “College” for Assletes in the Athletics dorm was late-night parties, beer, and skanky girls; basically, it was impossible for Karl to even be in the room, let alone study. He took to spending most of his time in Hugh and Will’s suite, but not managing to study (because his books were in his own room and he usually didn’t want to go back to risk confrontation long enough to get them); at least half the time he crashed on a friend’s floor in our building, because one of their drunken friends was sleeping off their latest binge on his bed, or they were having other “things” going on in the room. At one point, they stole his backpack and one of them toted around a non-house-trained puppy for two days in it, then handed him back his (now thoroughly urine-soaked and beyond salvation) bag without even an apology for the damage.

Regrettably, this was common behavior of student athletes, at least of the high-profile ones. Oddly enough, there was (and remains) an inverse relationship between athletic scholarships and athletic achievement; the brighter the kid, the better grades they made, the more likely they hadn’t gotten an athletic scholarship at all.

Every semester, my department deals with at least 4-5 (this past fall it hit double digits) disciplinary actions concerning cheating on tests. Every semester, all but 1 involves one of the “Assletes.” We’ve had security-camera proof of some of these, and it boggles the mind that they think they’d get away with it.

Every semester as well, a good number of professors get phone calls from the Athletics department concerning team members who are about to fail a class, demanding they be given a minimum grade (usually “C”) or else an “Incomplete” so as not to screw their GPA and fall below eligibility guidelines. These aren’t kids who missed class due to road trips representing the school, but simply kids who couldn’t be bothered to show up for their classes, or do their homework, or their projects, and in some cases who didn’t bother to show up for their finals.

Every semester, the Assletes converge upon the Academic Advisors. The name of the position is not a coincidence: the purpose of Advisors is to give ADVICE, to recommend what courses they take, doublecheck their GPA and recommend they retake something if they didn’t understand it, and make sure they are nominally on-track to graduate when appropriate. The Assletes are given a preferential sign-up time to register for classes that actually (these days) begins before the Honors students. They are given the tools to make sure they have the exact schedule they want, to schedule around their daily practices and whatever else they need. Yet every year, they show up and insist that the Advisors, rather than fulfilling an Advisor role, do it all for them.

It always amazes me how it turns out this way. The largest list of these comes from three teams: Football, Men’s Basketball, and Women’s Basketball. We do not (as a general rule, with only the occasional exception) get these from Soccer, or Volleyball, or Golf, or Swimming, or any of the other sports, but at least a sizable minority of the “scholarship” students from those three seem to think they are entitled to a college degree without ever lifting a finger or exercising a brain cell working for it.

What do you get when you take Two Guys, A Girl, And A Pizza Place and get rid of the Pizza Place? Two Guys and a Girl.

What do you get when you take Two Guys and a Girl and add two more girls and a guy? Two Guys and a Girl still.

The biggest strength and weakness of the Two Guys and a Girl (and a Pizza Place) television show is in its name. Television shows rarely change their name midway through because doing so is confusing and typically bad for ratings*. In the case of this series it was emblematic of a larger problem in that the show did not know what it was about. It originally set itself up as a cross between Friends and Cheers but found the former element worth keeping and by the end of the second season everyone who worked at the pizza joint quit. Then, finding a three-person cast to be a bit light, they kept adding them one at a time until they numbered six.

But what I really enjoyed most about the show comes right back down to the name and the name change. It was a rare experience of a television show that simply evolved of its own accord. Most of the time when changes rock a television show it’s to resurrect sagging ratings. They’ll add another cute kid or two characters that have been playing footsie since the show’s inception will end up getting together. These changes usually come after long periods of stasis. Two Guys and a Girl, on the other hand, continued to evolve on its own accord. They didn’t implant star-power** or a cute kid but rather humorous and interesting characters for the existing characters to interact with.

If you don’t like sitcoms this is not the show for you. It never stops striding for a laugh at the expense of realism and character empathy. Even when I wasn’t laughing at the joke I had fun watching them all try. In fact, the show was at its weakest when it was trying to get me to care about the characters. It succeeded, but only just. They honestly could have skipped most of the scenes where those characters that get together do so and I’m not sure anything substantial would have been lost. To an extent I think the writers knew this because they narrowly dodged climatic confrontations wherein characters express their undying love in a way that you don’t want to laugh at them.

If you didn’t like Friends because it was too unrealistic, you’ll hate this show. If you didn’t like Friends because it was too self-important, you might want to give it a shot if you haven’t already. It is on the WE network in reruns, or was last I checked.

* The only other TV show with a name change that I can recall was Valerie, which was renamed The Hogan Family when Valerie Harper left the show.

** There are only two examples. Tiffani Thiessen of Saved By The Bell fame was on for a little while, but she wasn’t a regular castmember or a Heather Locklear “special guest”***. She was simply there. The other is some Boston Red Sox shortstop that actually made a couple of appearances as himself dating one of the show’s regulars.

*** - Heather Locklear was billed as a “special guest” for something like eight seasons on Melrose Place. Most regular castmembers weren’t around as long as she was.