BusinessWeek’s Vivek Wadhwa thinks that fears that we’re falling behind in the sciences are misplaced. First a snide observation, but I’ll follow it up with some actual thoughts:

The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, “In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.” President George W. Bush addressed the issue in his 2006 State of the Union address. “We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations,” he said.

You ever get the sense that for a lot of people (myself included, I must admit) it’s not so much about their being too few science/math majors but rather there being too many liberal arts majors? I half consider talk like this to be the public policy equivalent of “Quit your band, cut your hair, and get a real job!”

So, there isn’t a lack of interest in science and engineering in the U.S., or a deficiency in the supply of engineers. However, there may sometimes be short-term shortages of engineers with specific technical skills in certain industry segments or in various parts of the country. The National Science Foundation data show that of the students who graduated from 1993 to 2001, 20% of the bachelor’s holders went on to complete master’s degrees in fields other than science and engineering and an additional 45% were working in other fields. Of those who completed master’s degrees, 7% continued their education and 31% were working in fields other than science and engineering.

There isn’t a problem with the capability of U.S. children. Even if there were a deficiency in math and science education, there are so many graduates today that there would be enough who are above average and fully qualified for the relatively small number of science and engineering jobs. Science and engineering graduates just don’t see enough opportunity in these professions to continue further study or to take employment.

This confirms my biases, so it absolutely must be true. Perhaps it’s because of the type of people I hang out with and maybe where I went to school, but I see a whole lot of mathematical, scientific, and engineering talent being underutilized. At the least, I see a whole lot more of that than I see companies unable to staff their payroll.

I think that part of the issue is big companies complaining that they don’t have the very specific skills that they need, rather than that their aren’t enough math people out there. The cause of this is not too many people majoring in Comparative Folk Dancing (though too many are) but rather the fluctuation in demand. My brother majored in aeronautical engineering despite being warned by everybody not to because there was such a surplus. By the time he graduated enough of his peers had listened that he was quite in demand… and a new generation of future engineers were being told to start majoring in aeronautical engineering… and round and round we go.

Some of this is unavoidable. Who knows what we’ll need five years from now? Things are always, always, always changing. But some of it is the expectation on the part of employers that they get their employees already trained and ready to start on the first day. For a variety of reasons (not all unreasonable) they don’t want to train. In some cases, they’d rather import talent from abroad that already knows exactly what they need to know.

I have many not-very-nice things to say about my former employer Bregna, but one of the things that they did that I really respected was that they were looking for good people (as they defined it, anyhow) rather than people that had all the right skills. It helped that they primarily used an obsolete programming language and that this was determined in part by necessity, but even so they had the right idea. They’re not requesting people have just the right experience with Fortran… they’re requesting that people have demonstrated that they have the ability to learn it.

As someone with a lot of experience in a lot of different areas but always falling short of the “__ years experience required in _______” threshold, this is an issue of importance to me. I’m biased, but I think that employees like me are great. I’m a utility infielder with the demonstrated ability to learn just about anything given the time. But alas, people like me (even ones that are smarter, more ambitious, and more reliable) are frequently overlooked.

I wish that undergraduate majors were a lot more broad than they are. In my mind, graduate school ought to be the area for specialization. This is something that I think the medical field does right. Clancy came out of medical school with a broad education and from that she chose her specialization (which turned out to be broad, too, but by her own choice).

Though I don’t have nearly the kinds of problems that my wife does, there are some mornings that I just don’t want to get out of bed. Fortunately for me, my office is generally flexible about such things and I just have to shoot my boss an email letting him know when I’m going to be in and I can go back to sleep. Typically, the extra hour of sleep benefits everyone. It benefits me because the sleep feels so good, it benefits my employer because I am more awake and alert throughout the day, and it benefits the drivers on the road because I am not driving half-asleep.

The dangers of sleep deprivation are well known and I needn’t go over them here except to say that I really think that we really need to consider adding weight to them. That’s a topic for another time. The purpose here is not to talk about sleep, but to talk about waking up.

It is my fervent belief that our bodies are at least partially programmed to rise with the sun and I think that we do ourselves a tremendous disservice when we try to jam this programming.

Above I talk about the benefits of getting an extra hour of sleep. The thing is, though, it’s not the extra sleep that I believe does it but rather when it is that I am getting out of bed. I average probably about six hours of sleep a night. If I go to bed at 11 and wake up at 5, I am a lot more tired than I am if I go to bed at 1 and wake up at 7. In the former case, it can make me upwards of 45 minutes to “wake up” and in the latter case I am out the door in fifteen minutes. If I can get out of bed at 8:30 or 9, I am in awesome shape.

This is regardless of when it is that I go to bed.

In a case of Adventures of Missing The Point, I refer you to the comment section of Megan McArdle’s blog. McArdle points to a study suggesting that starting school later helps students achieve more. She talks about nocternalism and hours of sleep, but comment after comment says - completely ignoring the cited study - that starting school later wouldn’t actually help the students because they would just go to bed later. The term I have for this is “rhetorical autopilot” wherein a person has already come to a conclusion on a particular issue and when confronted with someone that disagrees with them, they do not listen to the grounds of disagreement but rather explain their point of view as if the other person had said nothing but what they’d heard before.

The issue is not how much sleep a kid will get under the new regime, but rather how well they wake up. I think that some people really need just a little sunlight (I fall more into this category, I think), some people need a few hours of sunlight to slowly wake up (my wife, for instance) and some people need practically no sunlight (my father). In other words, the later in the day we get started, the more people we have at their best.

Unfortunately, we’re moving in the opposite direction. Commute times to work are getting longer and longer, for instance, necessitating earlier and earlier bedtimes. As school schedules get larded with more and more after-school activities and kids take after school jobs, high school students are expected to get up earlier rather than later.

Obviously, we do have to draw the line somewhere. Even if 10% of the population cannot get up gracefully at any point before noon, we can’t just start the workday at that time for their benefit. What the heck would people like me do in the morning? It’d split what little recreation time we have in half. Also, scattering scheduling is also somewhat complicated. It’s helpful to have everyone in an office during the same general hours. Sometimes this is not the case and employers are obstinate in their refusal to give employees more leeway, but much of the time a standard 9-hour day makes sense.

Unfortunately, the one thing we can do from a public policy perspective is something we not only don’t do, but are actively doing the opposite. I speak of Daylight Savings Time. Daylight Savings Time is built around the notion that we want to save the daylight for later in the day. That’s all well and good, but we’re taking it from where I honestly believe that we need it more: the morning. Last year, congress even went so far as to lengthen DST making the number of weeks where we have to go to work groggy increased by four.

They say that decisions are made by those who show up. I’d be willing to bet that the kinds of people that get elected to congress are more naturally energetic than the rest of the population. They’re also I’d bet much more likely to be morning people. As too are their contributors and advisors. Unfortunately, they probably equate nocternalism with laziness or instant-gratification. That’s unfortunate, because they make things more difficult for everyone else.

-{Note: Some of this post was touched on back in March, particularly as it related to the 8th grade trip. The whole thing was so traumatic for me I don’t mind sharing it again for those of you that have forgotten or weren’t here back then.}-

When I was in the 8th grade, our class took a trip to Washington DC. As we toured the Capitol, I got one of my time-twitches, wherein I needed to know the time at all times. Unfortunately, my freebie Colosse Canes watch had been met with a drop of water the day before and no longer worked. I kept asking my friend what time it was, so frequently that he stopped telling me what time it was. He thought it was unbelievably weird that I would repeatedly bend down to look at his watch on his wrist and decided to keep it in his pocket. The thought of those times, in corridor after corridor without a clock, still sends shivers down my spine. Why there isn’t a clock in every room in our nation’s capital I do not know, but there will be in every room of any house that I live in. Even the bathroom, if I can arrange it.

I’m a time-nut. I need to know what time it is or I go… well… nuts. I have a watch-tan on my wrist, wherein you can see the watch that is always there all but tattooed in white. I literally can’t imagine how I maintained my sanity back when I was without a watch back when I wouldn’t be able to immediately replace a broken one. Back in the day watches were not nearly as water-resistant as they are today, so that was not infrequently an issue. During our 8th grade trip to the nation’s capital, I asked my friend the time so often that he eventually refused to tell me and kept it in his watch to haunt me.

Anyhow, right now these great sources of personal comfort — that would be clocks — are all betraying me. Clancy keeps the clocks in her room roughly 1:47 fast. The one in the guest room is starting to break. My atomic clock is forever in the wrong time zone despite being in the same time zone as its syncronization source. As most of you know, the clocks were supposed to change yesterday but didn’t because of a new law passed last year. As a result, half of my computer clocks did change and half did not. So the one source of reliable timekeeping… the clocks on my computer… are wrong and will be for the next week.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s missed opportunity.

Any other time I could have parlayed this manufactured confusion into an excuse to be late from work. I don’t generally need an excuse, but it’s great to have one. Anyhow, I actually had to be at work on time today so that I could take customer support calls for our newest product (not in my job description, but I’m one of only a handful of people familiar with it so it goes from tech support to us).

Fortunately, the clock on my computer is correct. Sanity is at least momentarily restored.

When I met Julie, she was dating Astin, but as soon as they split, she contacted me and we began dating. I was weary from the start of being a rebound boyfriend, but she was pretty assuring that that wasn’t the case. I was also concerned that she would go back to him. It seemed too easy after all the struggling to find a relationship to have one just land in my lap that way and I was looking that gift-horse as far down the throat as I could managed.

Part of my concern was their breakup sounded pretty spur-of-the-moment. It wasn’t the product of a long conversation or a long break, but rather of Astin losing his temper and saying “We’re through!” Julie was pretty adamant that she was perfectly fine with his proclamation, but I wasn’t so sure about that. I became particularly uneasy when Astin returned to the picture and was asking around about this new guy she had been dating (ie me) and whether she might be interested in getting back together with him. She said that she wasn’t, but… well… one can never be sure what one will say until one is put in that position.

I was talking to her on the phone when Astin finally got around to calling her. She said that she needed to talk to him. I told her to give me a call whenever they were done and we could finish the conversation that we were having. I didn’t honestly care about the conversation that we were having, I just wanted to make sure that I was still on solid ground. So I got off the line and tried to occupy myself until she could call back.

And I waited. And waited. And waited. Four hours later I hadn’t heard back from her yet. By this point I had abandoned the facade of doing anything else and was pretty much staring at the phone. I didn’t want to come across as being nearly as insecure as I was, so I didn’t call her back. I even did something unprecedented and opened up to Mom about it when she asked what was wrong. When I explained the four hour conversation with her ex, she comforted me by telling me that I would surely find someone else and get over her in no time. Till hour five came and I broke down and called her.

She and Astin had talked for all of fifteen minutes, during which he asked to meet her over lunch and she declined.

The five hours since had been spent playing solitaire on her computer because she was bored.

She had simply forgotten to call me back.

I was pretty much too elated to be upset at all the needless worry.

Slate’s Justin Peters has a piece on cell phone games and why they just aren’t what they used to be (namely… free):

In the early part of this decade, cell phones started to become less about the phone call and more about the ring tone. Mobile-gaming types began to realize two things. First, if kids were willing to pay $3 for a 10-second snippet of a 50 Cent song, they’d probably be willing to pay some nonzero amount for a game. Second, consumers aren’t going to buy the cow when they can play Virtual Milkmaid for free. It’s obvious where this line of reasoning leads: Goodbye Tetris, hello $7 Tetris. But Tetris isn’t the industry’s endgame. Established gaming companies—images of a potentially multibillion-dollar market dancing in their heads—have bought out mobile-game studios and set to work manufacturing slimmed-down versions of full-platform games. (Electronic Arts paid $680 million for Jamdat Mobile in December 2005, for instance.) If you’ve felt a primal need to play Age of Empires II in an elevator (just $19.95 on a Windows Mobile Smartphone), your long and burdensome wait is over.

Like Peters, I used to spend hours and hours playing snake on my cell phone while waiting in line, waiting on the elevator, and various other in-between-with-nothing-to-do points in my life. I became quite the enthusiast! Slowly but surely the games stopped being included. My assumption was that, as Peters notes, they simply started wanting money for the games. Here’s the rub, though, I can’t buy games for the phones. I go to the little “store” and it says that none are available. Quite aggravating.

I think that the cell phone people overestimate the flexibility of their product. It’s like when they started trying to sell music (not ring-tones, but DRM-protected music files) at $3 a pop (in part to show Apple that their iTunes were not charging enough). It was a complete flop. As long as we have to change cell phones whenever we change providers, or we are forced to change to an incompatible model or brand when one breaks, the uses of a cell phone as anything but a cell phone are limited. I’m simply not going to invest in something that dies with the device that I am using it with. This is something that the record labels and movie studios are going to have to learn when it comes to selling digital copies of their product. This is especially the case for a cell phone which is likely to be changed out with more frequency than an individual computer or TiVO-like box.

Ever since I got my Pocket PC I’ve taken to using that when I used to use my cell phone. Jawbreaker is the new Mindsweeper (which was the new Tetris). I don’t mind buying applications for it because I won’t have to change Pocket PCs on a corporate whim and I know whatever Pocket PC I get in the future, there is little chance that it will stop working.

I do miss Snake, though.

Every now and then, CNN and other newsmedia run puff pieces on people who are exonerated of previously convicted crimes, usually through DNA evidence and the work of groups like Innocence Project.

In this one, however, I found something that disturbed me.

Sometimes an Innocence Project client is confirmed to be guilty by DNA evidence, but the group doesn’t make the number of those cases available. Theoretically, If key DNA material in a case is properly preserved, there’s no time limit on revisiting old cases, according to the Innocence Project.

At the same time, the question this passage raises is, is Innocence Project wilfully exaggerating the extent of “wrongful” convictions for their purposes? What other purpose does hiding the record and ratio of guilty/innocent determinations by their DNA testing serve, except that it may come out that most of the people they test are in fact guilty, and that the justice system may be mostly working as it should?

And if they were getting a whole lot of exonerations, wouldn’t they be willing to say, perhaps, that “over 50%” or “over 75%” or even “over 25%” of the people they tested were innocent? Heck, 10% or even 1% (1 in 100) would be a not-inconsequential figure and better evidence for their cause. Instead, they only list “208 exonerated.”

There’s an old rhetorical fallacy from the baloney detection kit known as “Observational Selection” (aka “counting the hits but forgetting the misses”) and I submit today that Innocence Project, in presenting the statistic of “208 exonerated” on their webpage while refusing to tell us how many of their subjects are confirmed guilty, are very guilty of this.

The folks over at Slate think that this season of Office has been little short of a disaster. As I read their critique and suggestions for improvement, I had to ask myself: What the heck are they smoking? The Office is better than it has been since Season 2, which may be one of the best seasons of any comedy ever made. If anything, Season 3 represented a backslide and Season 4 is a recuperation. Further, some of their complaints are some of the best things about the show.

Their first complaint is the (temporary) one-hour episode structure. Watch carefully and you will see that these are not hour-long episodes, they’re a combination of two-part episodes that break pretty evenly about the middle (for syndication purposes, most likely). As someone that plowed through the first two seasons in the course of a week, I don’t have a problem with back-to-back episodes. This might have presented a problem last season when the show was not at its best, but I’d take two hour episodes of the stuff they’re putting together this season.

The most puzzling thing, though, is their disappointment at the relationship of Pam and Jim:

PB & J are a disappointment for those of us who saw the couple as a worthy successor to Ross and Rachel, NBC’s will-they-or-won’t-they couple of yore. But their relationship is also a bad sign for the show. Jim and Pam’s thwarted love gave The Office a narrative arc that transcended the episode-to-episode hijinks of the other Dunderheads. Pam and Jim provided emotional ballast for a show that has always been in danger of keeling over into the absurd. Now, especially with these first episodes running to the hour, the show feels adrift and, at times, pointless. When Michael finally learns that Jim and Pam are together, he malaprops that “this is a day that will live in infamy.” Let’s hope that doesn’t turn out to be the case.

Good grief, the last thing I wanted was for Pam and Jim to devolve into a Ross-and-Rachel situation. Ross and Rachel were, though likable, vain and rather self-centered people. Part of the magic of Pam and Jim is that they have never, ever been that way with one another. Their hurdles were not indications of character defects, they were external. They were the perfect couple-in-waiting. It would be beyond disappointment if they suddenly decided to start screwing it up. It’s quite possible that it will happen in future years, but I hope not. Tim and Dawn in the British Office had two seasons and a movie and their happy ending. The concept behind Jim/Tim and Pam/Dawn simply wasn’t meant to go on forever. I for one am very glad that the writers recognized this, made it happen, and are moving on. Problems will surely arise as they do in any relationship, but I am glad that they didn’t leave them twisting in the wind forever and I’m going to be pretty pissed off if it devolves into a drama-fest.

Besides, their partnership gives room for the Dwight/Angela/Andy situation, which even the Slate people seem to be liking. It also gave room for the last episode with an extraordinary scene with Michael and Jan that was both heartfelt and funny. If Pam and Jim were still hovering about, that would have been a lot more secondary than it was.

The verdict for Ryan’s new position at corporate seems to have a lot of people nonplussed and thus far I’m the only person that likes it. I thought that the entire reason for putting Ryan in New York was to make him a foil for the gang and that’s exactly what he’s been. Yeah, it doesn’t quite have the chemistry of Michael and Jan, but it works to me.

The overarching thing is that the Slate people apparently wanted The Office to stay frozen in amber at about the second or third season. They’re complaining about the jokes that they can’t do anymore, but like the Budsweiser frogs sometimes it’s best to move on before something got way too old. I want movement and development. It makes the characters more relatable and it makes the jokes more new.

The blog Kissing Susie Kolber has a great, foul-mouthed post listing the obnoxious nature of Boston fans. This one is the big one:

11. Adopt the attitude that you, yes you, DESERVE this success. “Hey, we Pats fans know how it used to be back in the day. We earned these titles.” Don’t treat your team’s good fortune as the stroke of good fortune it happens to be. No, no, no. Your championship has to be deeper then someone else’s championship. It has to mean something more. Why? Because you fancy yourself as being introspective. {censored}. Treat it like some sort of karmic reward for Len Bias dying, or some other twisted, idiotic explanation.

Back when both the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs were in their respective league championships, I was one of the relatively few rooting against both teams because I got so sick and tired of all of the stories about how these poor teams have had it so rough. It was hard to deny the Chicago Cubs their pain, but the Boston Red Sox had so much less to complain about. They made the World Series in 1986 and almost won it. They put up more winning records than losing records and aren’t a case like the Buffalo Bills were for a stretch wherein they make it to the championship but just can’t win it. They are a team, like the 30-some-odd other teams.

The year after the Red Sox won it all, the Chicago White Sox did. There was no grand theory about how accursed this team was even though they had gone two years longer than the Red Sox without winning a World Series. The Milwaukee Brewers have posted exactly one winning record in the last fifteen years, the Pittsburgh Pirates last posted a winning record in 1992, and a handful of teams have never won a World Series in the history of their franchise (granted, it’s mostly teams from 1960 and after, but even so that’s coming on 40 years). Yet it’s the poor, poor Boston fans we’re supposed to feel good for because that scrappy young team of 100+ years and one of the better records in MLB history finally got their championship.

I actually have nothing against the Patriots or the Celtics except for the contaminated fan-pool.

Every now and again I will find myself stunned that a TV series has not yet made its way to DVD. It seems like every show has, so those that haven’t have become the exception rather than the rule. More and more, I’m finding that those shows that haven’t made it to DVD haven’t done so for one of two reasons: (1) They want to get their stuff together so that they can have cool extras and whatnot, or (2) there are copyright issues, usually involving the soundtrack.

Back when TV-to-DVD transitions were new, the studios were somewhat reluctant to release entire runs on to DVD because they were worried that it might conflict with syndication spoils and they felt that by releasing an entire TV show on to DVD they would either have to charge more than anyone would want to pay or alternately that they wouldn’t charge enough, essentially charging the same amount for an entire season that they otherwise would for the Best Of release that they would sometimes release on VHS.

Specifically, I remember a lot of fans of Friends and Frasier were irate that you could get the entire runs in Britain but not in the US. NBC was concerned about the above syndication spoils and cost analysis and they held out for a very long time, despite having the DVDs all but ready to go because of their British releases. Eventually, they gave in and got a second wave of profits because the same desperate people that purchased the Best Of collections ran out to the stores to buy the entire seasons. They got the best of both worlds, but the bean-counters at NBC mostly looked at the windfall of DVD season releases and noted that individual DVD prices had fallen, so now they (along with everyone else) opt almost entirely for full-season releases.

Meanwhile, there are various TV shows that they haven’t put together because they’re worried about releasing DVDs with insufficient new content, be it behind-the-scenes interviews, commentary, out-takes, or deleted scenes. It’s a rare case where they have decided to forego immediate profit for a quality product… and I wish they would stop.

It seems to me that they have an excellent opportunity for two waves of profits like NBC had for Frasier and Friends and like the movie studios frequently do with movies: Release something adequate right away and then come back later with something that the fans are going to kill for.

I would love to buy or rent legitimate copies of the ABC show The Practice, but I couldn’t. I either had the option of recording episode-by-episode to VHS (or digitally) or downloading poorly ripped copies from the Internet. The first option requires far too much work and the last option results in their consumers giving them not a single dime for their production. ABC is finally getting around to releasing the show on DVD bit by bit while they get their extras in order, but I really don’t want to wait. I would like them to offer me what they have right now and then later I will consider what they really want to sell.

I think that they’re actually underestimating the willingness of fans to pay a pretty penny for their material, twice if they have to. It’s the same problem that made record companies so reluctant to change their models to the extraordinarily successful iTunes model. They overestimated the patients of the buying public, believing that they would still be willing to purchase entire CDs for single songs, and they underestimated the willingness of people to pay for their product even if they could get a free version online. They finally acted because their hand was forced, and I really think the end result will be a renewed rather than destroyed record industry.

Similarly, if they simply released a run-of-the-mill release of TV shows like The Practice and Picket Fences years ago, some people would have bought them or at least rented them. Not a whole lot of people, but once you take out the cost of master-producing the DVDs, you don’t have to sell as many. Even if people knew that a better version would be coming out, they’d still take what they could get rather than wait a half-decade for the juiced up version… and they’d end up buying both.

I think this is especially true for those shows where the hold-up is music. Content owners are racking their brains trying to figure out whether to bother trying to figure out whether or not to hold out for the original music or to simply put cheaper music on the DVDs. The owners of the music know that they have very high leverage, so they are often holding out for obscene amounts of money trying to call the TV content owners’ bluff of using different music. So shows like WKRP in Cincinnati, Alli McBeal, Daria, and a host of others are either being released slowly or not at all during negotiations.

Why does it have to be “and”? Why can’t they just release something now with music they can get their IP hands on and then come out with the real stuff later? The main objection is actually from the fans, but I really think if you put it out there, they’ll still buy it. If they don’t, they’ll buy the second wave anyway. In many cases they’ll buy both. Meanwhile, a lot of the leverage the soundtrack content owners have goes away. DVDs are being sold and they’re losing money. And honestly, most of the time the specific song can be replaced by something less expensive and just as good. The power of the soundtrack is often because it was new and relevant at the time and has since become dated. On the TV show Daria, they actually wrote the scenes without any paticular music in mind and just filled in a Top 40 hit when it came time to air the episode. It’s a little more complicated with Alli McBeal where many of the songs are sung live by Vonda Shephard, but I think it could still be done with some creative editing.

I can understand how people want the unvarnished, original run of whatever show it was that they’re buying, but I really think at the end of the day they will get the opportunity to do so. I think what’s often at stake is the Authenticity Police who object to anything done on the account of money. To go back to Daria for a second, people were crying bloody murder when they released some episodes on VHS even though the scenes weren’t written for the music (and vice-versa) and few of them actually claimed that the new music used was wrong so much as it wasn’t what they remembered. Again, I can understand the desire to have what they remembered, but I really, really prefer something rather than nothing and right now nothing of Daria has actually been released.

Meanwhile, those of us that don’t want to wait have to go get copies where nobody gets paid even though we are perfectly willing to pay for it in some way or another.

I got a kick out of this headline on MSN.com:

On a banner for an article wherein there is pride in being flawed, in rebelling against strict social norms and learning to love yourself for who you are… they model a woman that seems to be to have roughly zero (o) flaws.

Harry Potter author JK Rowling made some waves by confirming speculation that Albus Dumbledore, the Headmaster at Harry’s school, was gay:

She was asked by one young fan whether Dumbledore finds “true love.”

“Dumbledore is gay,” the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. “Falling in love can blind us to an extent,” Rowling said of Dumbledore’s feelings, adding that Dumbledore was “horribly, terribly let down.”

Dumbledore’s love, she observed, was his “great tragedy.”

This has lead to some pooh-poohing on both sides of the aisle. On the right we have conservative Catholic Ross Douthat:

A writer confident in her powers wouldn’t feel the need to announce details like this after the fact, and a writer who understood the strengths and limitations of her creation would recognize that trying to smuggle this level of psychological realism into the Potter series is a fool’s errand that can only diminish her achievement…

And someone from the left in his comment section replying:

For a set of novels all about diversity and driving home the message of tolerance to not have an openly gay character, or deal with the issue at all, was a significant lapse and an act of either willfull, or ignorant, omission.

Personally, I think Rowling handled it exactly right.

(As a disclaimer, I am pretty liberal on the subject of gay rights. Though I respect the American right to condemn behavior that they find immoral, I personally support gay rights up to and including gay marriage. Once again, I’m just getting my biases out there for context.)

I’ll start with explaining why I agree with Rowling’s decision to leave Dumbledore’s sexuality out of the book. It’s pretty simple: it doesn’t belong there. The insertion of homosexuality in a book would only serve as a lightning rod which would detract from story for a significant portion of its readership. Even supporting Rowling’s view on the subject, it would have been analogous to the Very Special Episodes of sitcoms that detracted from the humor by hammering home some social issue of the day. Let sitcoms be sitcoms, and let children’s books be children’s books.

Further, those points that Rowling was trying to drive home she was doing with allegory. The notions of tolerance, morality, and egalitarianism are expressed through half-breeds and muggle-borns, not by making an issue of the Patile twins’ Indian heritage. There’s no grand point in bringing real-world issues into a story that is looking at things in a fantastical setting. No doubt that the commenter feels that homosexuality shouldn’t be an issue because it would be settled… but if that were the case than the omission wouldn’t be a big deal, either (Almost none of the Hogwarts faculty’s romantic histories were discussed).

On the other side, contrary to Douthat’s speculation that Rowling did it to try to emphasize something that her book (in his view) was not, she was simply answering a question. If anything, her recent talk about her faith and the religious allegory is more along the lines of his accusation of self-importance on Rowling’s part, but that either met with Douthat’s approval or at least did not garner his attention. The fact is that in Rowling’s mind Dumbledore is gay and the homosexuality was there when Rowling was writing it whether she mentioned it or not.

As a fiction writer, I would expect Douthat to understand how that works. I guess it works differently for him. When I’m writing fiction, for every fact I put in about a character and his or her backstory, there is a fact or more that I leave out. For instance, I can tell you how each of my main characters vote. I can tell you what their religious views are. Whether or not I put it in is a combination of whether there is the place to put it in and how it will come across. If a character’s atheism is likely to make the character less sympathetic to a large swath of the audience, and his atheism does not come up in the normal course of the story, I’m not going to bring it up. Less controversially, even if I know in my mind who a character’s first kiss was I’m not going to mention it unless I have reason to. I come up with a character’s backstory before I write the story and I am not going to jam everything in there, but after having written it if anybody asks I’ll be glad to answer. But that I withhold it from the story or answer it after the story is written and read is not necessarily indicative of any grand agenda on part.

Blender has a list of the 50 worst songs ever. Sure as rain, there are some songs on there that I really like:

#44 - I’d Do Anything For Love (Meat Loaf)
I think Meat Loaf has an unjustly bad reputation. He has an amazing voice whether you like the actual music or not and Jim Steinman (who wrote all of the songs on the Bat Out of Hell CDs as well as other hits) has a grand pageantry in his music that I have a great deal of appreciation for. The man writes musical comic books. To answer blender’s question of what ML won’t do… he won’t lie to her in order to hold on to her (or get her into bed… either way). He says it at multiple points throughout the song.

#43 - Follow Me (Uncle Kracker)
This song is just too catchy not to like.

#42 - The Sounds of Silence (Simon and Garfunkel)
Are you kidding me? Great song! A little pretentious perhaps, but it’s one of those “moment” songs where if you listen closely you can hear it playing in the back of your mind at specific points in your life.

#41 - We Didn’t Start the Fire (Billy Joel)
Catchy and nostalgic. Not Joel’s best, but a good listen from time to time.

#31 - Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm (Crash Test Dummies)
The Crash Test Dummies have a bunch of songs that sound the same and get tiresome pretty quickly, but this is one of the memorable ones. And not in a bad way.

#29 - Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Deep Blue Something)
Someone once said to me, at the point where it became obvious we were beyond the point of reconciliation, “This isn’t Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Neither of us were willing to fight at all to keep whatever it was that we had, neither of us really lamented what we were losing, and we had no “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” moment to harken back on. Ever since then, this song has taken on a special meaning for me.

#22 - Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (Toby Keith)
This song captured the moment like few of the 9/11 songs did. We were pissed off and no artist at the time seemed willing to say so.

#21 - Two Princes (Spin Doctors)
I doubt I would like this song if it came out today, but I did like it at the time and get a good feeling when I listen to it now.

#19 - Broken Wing (Mr Mister)
Yeah, yeah, it was suburban angst… but it was quality suburban angst… and I was an angsty suburbanite.

#13 - Illegal Alien (Genesis)
I don’t know what possessed them to write this song given its politically incorrect content, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I find it funny. And I don’t know of any way that I could fairly be described as anti-immigrant.

{Via Dustbury, who is equally guilty of liking some of these songs.}

Like most youngsters, when I was a little kid I wanted to be a big kid. Big kids at St. Jude’s Episcopal School had Ms. Mencker as their teacher. She taught kindergarten at a school that only went up to kindergarten, so her students were just as big as big kids could be. Except my brothers, who were really big kids of course but that escaped my attention because they wanted to be even bigger kids. So they weren’t really big kids in my mind, even though they were bigger than the big kids in Ms. Mencker’s class. Cut me some slack, my mind was only capable of managing pre-school thoughts at the time.

Whenever I brought it up, they’d just say “you will in time” or somesuch, they just didn’t get it. So I found another way of telling Mom that I wanted to be a big kid: I told her that I wanted to be in Ms. Mencker’s class. My logic was that Mom would give me what I wanted since it didn’t cost money and then I would magically be a bigger kid. I’d found a loophole in the system! Unfortunately, Mom denied my request but did file it away for future use.

When I was about ready for kindergarten, my teachers privately expressed concern with my parents that I was behind the other students. I would stare blankly when I was supposed to be finger painting, I ate inordinate amounts of glue, and other stuff like that. They wanted to hold me back a year and figured that the best way to do this would be for me to attend kindergarten at St. Jude’s (and perhaps by coincidence, pay an extra year of tuition) and then attend it again at West Oak Elementary, the local public school.

When I asked how come I was not going to West Oak like everyone else, Mom said that she was granting me my wish: I was going to get Ms. Mencker just like I had asked.

—-

When I was in the second grade, standardized testing was becoming all the rage. At the time, Delosa elementary students were taking the California Achievement Test Test (The word “Test” being in there twice because it was called the CAT Test). Ms. Nolan, the counselor at West Oak Elementary was concerned because I was now staring off into the distance during mathematic lessons and still eating more glue than my teachers would prefer.

So Ms. Nolan called my mother in for a conference and outlined her concerns. She said that she was worried that my self-esteem would be hurt by failing the test and that I should refrain from taking it. It would also go in my Permanent Record, which was bad. And perhaps by coincidence, West Oak Elementary would look better on the standardized test scores, though I’m not sure that she was very upfront about that.

Mom said she would take it into consideration and looked further into it. As it turned out, the deferment Mom was being asked to sign would have put me in a special group that would have required my taking special instruction classes for the rest of my tenure at West Oak Elementary. If I deferred from taking the class a second time, I would be put in a special category that would, at the completion of my 12th grade year I wouldn’t receive a diploma but would instead get a “Certification of Attendance” which is more like a GED. So if I didn’t take it in the second grade and the fourth grade, or even if I didn’t take it in the second grade and was sick that week in the 10th grade, I would likely have to start my college career out at the local community college.

When Mom brought this to the attention of Ms. Nolan, Ms. Nolan said that this was true but that it was probably for the best. Quite bluntly, Mom said that deferment was basically for the mentally handicapped kids and I was not a handicapped kid. Nolan condescendingly responded that of course I was not stupid and of course I was a very talented and smart young man, but that it would be best if I were put with other kids that were uniquely smart and talented like I was. In short, she was saying that I was “short bus special” and Mom needed to come to terms with that. Mom declined, I took the test, and as it turned out my self-esteem was not hurt because my Permanent Record was so secret that even Mom and I couldn’t find out about it (this law was changed shortly afterwards and my folks were given access to all of my later standardized tests).

—-

Flash forward about five years or so and Delosa no longer takes the CAT Test but has now switched to something called the Delosa Assessment of Knowledge (DAK). Students who didn’t pass the DAK were relegated to remedial reading in the 8th grade while other students got to opt out of reading and take an elective. I failed the DAK and ended up in a class with hoodlums, misfits, and the folks I would have gotten to know at West Oaks Elementary had Mom not opted for me to take the CAT Test.

Mom was quite distressed when the reading teacher asked for a student-teacher conference. I’d failed the DAK and she was probably going to ask that I not take it the next go-around. Mom got all of her evidence in order and went to see Ms. Cordoza. Turned out it was quite the opposite. Despite reading being my worst subject, I was blowing the other kids out of the water. In fact, I was positively bored and was drawing and writing comic books, which in turn was distracting the other students. Whereas other teachers were bothered by my looking blankly out into space, Cordoza apparently would have liked me to do more of it. Cordoza asked if she could have me teach other students or, if there wasn’t anything I could do for that, go play around in the computer lab across the hall.

Cordoza could not believe that I had failed the DAK and actually looked up my test scores, which were apparently just shy of passing. At the end of that year I took the DAK again… and failed it again.

—

Over eight years later, I graduated from Southern Tech University with honors. When I got the piece of paper, Mom asked if she could borrow it to have it framed. She did frame it for me, for which I am grateful. What she also did was photocopy it and send a copy of it to Ms. Nolan, for which I am also grateful.

A story on News.com has the US Congress trying to pass a law that offers victims of identity theft the “right” to sue for restitution. As anyone who has or knows someone who’s had their identity stolen, there’s a lot of expense and effort involved in putting your credit score back together once it’s been trashed.

Unfortunately, the law as currently written is (at least to my mind) horribly flawed, in three very important ways. It counts as an excercise in misdirected effort.

The first problem is that the law addresses the problem of identity theft in a backwards manner. It presumes that thieves can be deterred by passing more punishment. The problem here is that it assumes the criminal has been found, and the vast majority of identity thieves are very hard to track down. Just as one example, recent IRS statistics place between 10 and 12 million duplicated (or worse) Social Security numbers in the tax system due to fraudulent SSNs used by people ineligible to work in the United States. Each of these is a serious enough problem to start with (try applying for college loans and finding out you’re an 18 year old with a 25 year credit/work history), but becomes worse when bank accounts and credit cards start to get involved.

The second problem is that even if you do find the criminal, and convince the authorities to prosecute, you’re then having to go back to the court a second time to get restitution. The way the law is worded, it’s not something that the judge can simply order; you have to sue the criminal in civil court. By the time you can get a civil judgement, there is likely no money left to have it paid from. It will all be gone, spent on the defendant’s lawyer in the criminal case or otherwise vanished/confiscated by the authorities, or even repossessed by credit companies trying to make back the money the criminal will never pay them.

The final problem is that this law doesn’t address the real root problem of identity theft, which is the credit companies themselves. A couple decades ago, credit was harder to come by. People started with a gas card or store card, a bank account, perhaps an ATM / Debit card, and worked their way up. Now, the credit agencies are offering credit cards to everyone and their dog, the sooner the better, and with much less requirement of proof of identity and ability to handle money. It goes without saying that the less verification the credit card agencies do, the more fraud slips by them until it’s too late. Ultimately, if the law held the credit agencies (rather than the merchants who don’t get paid and the consumers who currently suffer increased interest rates and fees) responsible, you’d see fraud go down significantly as they started to pay attention to who they were giving credit cards and credit lines to.

I’d be very interested in a real law that could crack down on identity fraud, but I don’t think this law does anything at all.

Atlanta Constitution-Journal:

The days of nightclubs hosting “18 to party, 21 to drink” events may soon come to an end in Atlanta.

The Atlanta City Council unanimously passed an ordinance Monday prohibiting anyone younger than 21 from entering or working at businesses where alcohol is consumed. It should go into effect next week.

Councilwoman Cleta Winslow, who wrote the ordinance, said she is troubled by the city’s law that allowed 18-year-olds to work in businesses where people are drinking. It does not affect restaurants where alcohol is served, nor supermarkets or convenience stores.

Winslow worries about teenagers drinking in strip clubs or bars and endangering themselves.

“Since a person under 21 can’t drink in a nightclub, they should not be in these establishments,” said Winslow, chairwoman of the council’s public safety committee.

How utterly retarded. Underage drinking is already illegal. If the laws aren’t being enforced, start enforcing them. If the laws can’t be enforced, then explain to me how this new law is any more enforceable.

First, there are reasons to go to some bars even if you can’t drink: entertainment. People 18-20 are now going to be shut out of the live music scene. Since live music often caters to the younger set, that’s not an insignificant demographic. I once went to a local wrestling event at a bar, too. If there’s an exception for bars that display entertainment, the article doesn’t say.

Even if there is such an exception, it makes life more difficult for barely-of-age patrons. A lot of bars are already 21-and-over, but some aren’t precisely because they know that people that are 21 or 22 have friends that are 19 or 20. The underage can have a coke while his friends drink beer. Bars face enough competition with coffeehouses as a third-place venue and this makes it worse. This also encourages more drinking in apartments and dorm rooms, which is entirely unregulated and much, much more likely to result in severe drinking and the alcohol poisoning that comes with it. At least in a bar you’re limited by the underage drinking laws, public intoxication laws, and a high price-tag.

On top of that, people that are 18-20 make great designated drivers and keep drunk drivers off the street. Kyle did his job keeping us drunkards taken care of and in return we paid cover and bought him cokes. It was a win for Kyle, a win for us, and a win for the late-night drivers of Colosse.

I might be able to understand if they were concerned about underage people serving a product that they cannot consume, but (1) there are better ways to do that and (2) this doesn’t even take care of that. Eighteen year olds will still be serving alcohol as waiters in restaurants and 16 year olds will be doing the same at grocery store check-outs.

So what problem does this solve? What does this little piece of legislation do other than give the appearance of tackling a problem while not only failing to do so but actually making it worse in some cases? Oh… “appearance of tackling a problem”… I guess I answered my own question there.

New York Times:

About 4 in 10 immigrants are moving directly from abroad to the nation’s suburbs, which are growing increasingly diverse, according to census figures released yesterday.

The Census Bureau’s annual survey of residential mobility also found that after steadily declining for more than a half-century, the proportion of Americans who move in any given year appears to have leveled off at about one in seven.

“For blacks, especially, it mimics the 50s-style suburban movement, most pronounced for married couples with children, owners and the upwardly mobile,” said William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer.

Dr. Frey’s analysis of mobility patterns found that while Hispanic and Asian immigrants were more likely to settle first in the nation’s cities, “after they get settled, they follow the train to the suburbs.”

A couple days ago I was in Colosse and headed to the airport to take a quick flight back to Estacado. Unfortunately, due to inclement weather I didn’t beat the outbound rush hour traffic and was stranded in the northwest part of town. Northwestern Colosse and Corinth, the suburb, is an area that I’ve spent a lot of time since I was about sixteen. My friend Kaye Brown lives out there, I’ve had two jobs out there, and I lived out there myself with my friend John Fustle with whom my benevolent Webmaster lives now. Since I had already missed my flight anyway, I decided that I would just get off the road and bide my time. I decided to call either the Browns or Webmaster and spent some time with them. Since the Browns were retired and the chances were even that Webmaster himself was stuck in the same traffic, I decided to call the Browns.

The development out there over the past twelve years or so has been absolutely astonishing. As such, all of the landmarks I was going to use to navigate myself to the Brown’s house was, if not gone, obscured by being surrounded by all sorts of other things. It used to be that there were trees, the Bregna building, then more trees. I couldn’t count gas stations anymore, either, since there was one at each corner of every major intersection. So I got lost and ended up driving around Corinth for about half an hour trying to find them (lest you’re worried about the flight, I had already made alternate arrangements with the very helpful person at the airline).

Corinth used to be an industrial park and housing for those that worked at the industrial parks. Most jobs were blue collar and retail. As Colosse pushed ever-outward, though, the commuter and white collar suburbs have grown tremendously to the point that it was becoming simply a lilly-white suburb. Then things turned again as outer-Corinth became home to the master-planned homes that people wanted to own and Corinth and northwestern Colosse became home to the new suburbanites.

The long and short of it is that despite all of the development out there, what was perhaps the biggest surprise was how much less white Corinth as a whole has become (at least until you get to the outer reaches of it). The other thing, and I’m not sure what precisely to attribute this to, is that inner-Corinth and northwestern Colosse now have a look and feel of purely working class rather than the working-middle class it had when I first started making my way up there or professional class which is where it looked like it was headed. I’m not sure whether the reason for the change in perception is latent racism on my part (blacks live there, must be lower-class…) or whether it simply looks worse now because it’s more easily compared to outer-Corinth, the “new suburbs”, compared to which they are considerably more modest.

The question I had while reading the NYT article was how they define suburbs. It’s wonderful that minority families are increasingly able to escape the city just as whites have been doing for some time, though of course it always leaves things ever-worse off for those that they leave behind. Unfortunately, it appears that the goalpost is being moved as they move into inner-ring suburbs largely replacing homeowners that have moved to the outer-rings and exurbs. It’s one of those trends you can’t help but think will hit a wall at some point, but never really does.

Did anyone catch last week’s episode of The Office?

In the opening sequence, the gang is in the conference room for a meeting. While Michael Scott, the clueless boss, talks, they’re fixated on the TV set. On the TV set is a screensaver DVD logo moving around and bouncing off the edge of the set and the only way they keep themselves sane during the meeting is to watch it bouncing around waiting for it to bounce off the corner.

I laughed my posterior off. Why? Because I’ve got a DVD player with a bouncy logo and whenever Clancy and I are talking after watching something, I watch it bounce around waiting for it to bounce straight into the corner.

I had thought that I was alone in this OCD preoccupation of mine, but The Office has demonstrated that this is not the case. I am suddenly no longer so alone…

I’ve been keeping an eye out for interesting shows that I can listen to while I am working, watch while I am exercising, or watch with my wife. So I gave more new shows than usual a chance this season, and these are my thoughts:

Back to You - Those of us that have been going through Withdrawal since Frasier left the air have a new weekly dose of Kelsey Grammar. As a fan of Grammar’s as well as Patricia Heaton (of Everybody Loves Raymond fame), I was definitely looking forward to this one. The basic storyline is that after having left a TV news show in Pittsburgh, Grammar has been forced to return because of an embarrassing broadcast that became a YouTube sensation. Heaton is an old contentious colleague who before Grammar’s departure conceived his child. Back to You is the season’s new old school sitcom. While sitcoms in general are moving away from live studio audiences, Back to You has embraced the sitcom formula. The show is unremarkable in every respect. It’s competent, somewhat interesting, and quite funny at times, but never spectacular. Grammar’s character is much less likeable than Frasier Crane, which some people really don’t like but that I didn’t have a problem with. Heaton’s character kind of falls flat, but the side characters (the webmaster-turned-manager, the weatherslut, and Fred Willard) help compensate for that. On the whole, the show is quite watchable but not very engrossing. I will continue to watch it mostly because Dad’s watching it and it provides a TV show for us to talk about, which we haven’t had since Frasier went off the air. Grade: C/C+

Big Shots - Some are calling this the male version of Desperate Housewives, and from what I know of DH the label fits. The basic storyline centers around golfing group Christopher Titus (of Titus fame), Dylan McDermott (from The Practice), Josh Malina (Will Bailey from The West Wing), and some other guy that I am not familiar with. The first episode centers around Unknown Guy’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity, Malina’s own marital infidelity, McDermott trying to kick dirt over a prostitution arrest that could hurt his glamor company, and Titus as the henpecked husband. This may be one of my favorite shows of the new season. It’s a nice balance of drama and comedy that keeps me interested. It’s funny enough to keep from being too self-serious and dour and it’s dramatic enough that you really care what’s going on. I also enjoy the cast, which consists of a lot of people where I’ve literally thought to myself “Hey, I like this guy, I wonder what he’s doing now?” at some point this year. Grade: B+

Bionic Woman - Terrible script, mediocre plotting, lacking direction, there isn’t much good to say about this show. I watch it for one reason and one reason only: Michelle Ryan is exceedingly pleasant to look at (the promos actually make her look less interesting than she does in the show). Whereas I typically make a habit of listening to shows without watching them, this one is actually better watched on mute. I doubt that even Ryan can keep my interest for the entire season, but I’ve watched the first three thus far and I’m not sure if the show will last the entire season. Humorously enough, a lot of the fanboys wanted them to Katee Sackhoff because she’s sooper kewl in Battlestar Galactica, but in doing so they would be taking away the only thing on the show I can conceive of as worth watching. Grade: F

Carpoolers - This is the sitcom version of Big Shots. I saw some ads for this from football and caught the first episode and enjoyed it. I enjoy shows that can mash together people that don’t generally hang out with one another and make it work. Too often shows hang on to a certain demographic, be it the swinging twenties, the nuclear family, or the workplace. This is just a group of guys that need each other to access the HOV lane and do what guys usually do when they’re stuck around one another on a daily basis: find ways to get along. It’s goofier than Big Shots so far and I wouldn’t recommend it to people that don’t like outright comedies, but I thought it was fun and funny at times. It has a quirky sense of humor up my alley, meaning that it probably won’t last more than a single season. Grade: A-

Cavemen - I had to catch this one just because there was so much hooplah. I can’t imagine that ABC expects this show to last, I think that they figure that it was the kind of show that made its own publicity and that they could ride that out for a season or maybe two before moving on to something else. I missed the first ten minutes of this show and didn’t particularly enjoy it, but when I went back and watched it from the beginning I found it a bit charming. I’m not sure that I’ll continue to watch it, but I’m going to give it a chance. They could turn this show into something special if they were willing to take some chances on it, but it probably won’t last if they do. Grade: B

Chuck - A computer nerd saves the world, what’s not to love? Very little. The basic premise of Chuck is that a lowly computer retail technician downloads all sorts of secret intel into his brain and does double-duty as a secret agent. It’s implausible, but it doesn’t ask you to take it too seriously and focuses more on lovable characters that a certain brand of viewer can relate to. I’m not sure this one has the audience to make it, but I hope that it does. Grade: B

Dirty Sexy Money - Another one from the files of “What’s he doing now?”, Peter Krause plays a lawyer for an eccentric, wealthy northeastern family. Krause’s father was the family lawyer before him and he didn’t want to follow into those footsteps, but working for the family is the only way he can find out who killed his father. This show is mostly a string of gags in drama format, but they find a way to make it work reasonably well. There is unfortunately a dearth of likable characters and for the most part they aren’t even that interesting, but they partially make up for it with good plotting and the mere presence of Peter Krause and my favorite Baldwin brother. Were it not one of those shows that I could listen to without watching, I would probably drop it, but right now it’s hanging on as a show that I listen to while I am working on my computers, cleaning, or at work. Grade: C+

K-Ville - A post-Katrina New Orleans cop show. What’s not to love? A lot, actually. It stretches the bounds of being realistic but doesn’t compensate for it by being intriguing like The Shield does. I haven’t been given any reason to like the protagonists yet (I’m one episode in) or care about their fate. It also got unnecessarily political along the way. I’ll give it another chance, but I’m not optomistic. Grade: D

Life - Of all the new shows, this one has the most potential. Unfortunately, it hasn’t lived up to much of it yet. The premise is a cop that was convicted of murder is exonerated and as part of his legal settlement he’s back with the police (LAPD, I think). Being in prison has twisted the protagonist somewhat and he’s having trouble adjusting back to the real world. There is a present darkness in him that mixes intriguingly with the thrill of being free. This show could be one of the best on TV and I hope it gets there. Unfortunately, as with Dirty Sexy Money, I fear that they’re going to leave the who-really-did-it thread dangling in perpetuity. It’s been a fun ride thus far, though. Grade: B/B+

Reaper - I saw this one this morning. It’s a bit of a risky premise in the political environment of the last few years, but I thought that Kevin Smith handled it adeptly. He manages to sidestep the questionable theology of it with humor and handles God in an interesting but not preachy way that he failed to in Dogma. As with Chuck, this premise could get old pretty quickly, though. Grade: B+

The Big Bang Theory - Funny, funny. It looks lovingly at Geeks but at the same time doesn’t treat them with kid gloves. There is a tendency when portraying geeks and nerds to treat them with kid gloves where the viewer thinks that they would be great people to get to know if people would just learn to be less superficial. The thing is that geeks and nerds are quite frequently as annoying as heck even when they are good people. TBBT did a great job of balancing the obnoxiousness required for accuracy and the gentleness required to get us to care about them. The best comedies are ones that are willing to be brutal with their protagonists without forcing us to stop caring, and Big Bang manages it beautifully. Grade: A

Spungen has a post up about ice trays and marital communication. Her last paragraph got me thinking about a related subject less about specific things like ice trays and more about addressing the problems that any relationship or marriage has.

In a relationship, nothing important to the other person is irrelevant, unfairly prejudicial, or lacking of foundation. And there’s no independent trier of fact that will declare one of you the winner.

I’m not sure how much I actually agree with this, though I suspect that it’s one of those things that vary a great deal from individual to individual.

My marriage, like every other marriage, is not a perfect one. My wife and I are both flawed people and having lived independently from one another for 25-30 years before meeting, we’re having to evaluate how we’re set in our ways and in what ways we can be more accommodating.

Periodically, an issue will arise that I am not really sure whether it is truly an issue or not. I often think long and hard about whether or not it’s a legitimate issue before I say anything to her about it. A lot of the time I realize that it’s not an issue, or at least that it’s one of those things where it’s best that she approach it her way and I approach it mine and we simply accept how the other person approaches it hopefully so that they will accept some of the ways that you approach things that aren’t in accord with their view of the way that the world should be.

In other words, I try to avoid saying, “This is how I feel” about something unless I believe that there is a foundation for that emotion. By having a foundation it doesn’t mean that my feelings are indisputably justified in an objective sense, but that it at least has the foundation that I cannot simply look at it another way and it will all be okay. There are a lot of feelings that I do have that, if I simply look at it differently, really aren’t so bad at all.

Whether or not I come forward with unnecessary information about what I am feeling about something (this obviously applies primarily to areas where I am feeling bad or where my feelings are in conflict with the way that Clancy views things) depends largely on a couple of things. First, are my feelings justified or am I trying to come up with a justification for a feeling that doesn’t have any real foundation? Sometimes I’m in a bad mood because of something at work and that bad mood will project into areas of my relationships where they don’t really belong. I want to weed those things out before I bother Clancy with it. Secondly, is it obvious that something is wrong? If I am bothered by something and I don’t know whether the bother is legitimate or not, Clancy can sometimes see it in me. When she asks what’s wrong, I more or less give up the game because it’s better than saying nothing is wrong when something clearly is.

My main motivation for this is that I don’t want to bother her with things unless I know them to be of some significance. A lot of this harkens back to when she was a resident and a fellow and any domestic pressures I applied (willingly or not) were detrimental to her state of mind in a way that they wouldn’t be with most people (one of my missions the first few years of our marriage was simply not to demand the energy of her that she did not have). Perhaps on the whole it would be better if I just aired how I felt about everything with the proper disclaimers about my recognizing that because I feel something is the case does not mean that it is (which is the disclaimer I attach following “Is something wrong?” conversations). In my experience that hasn’t been the case, but Clancy is not like most of the other people that I’ve dated.

When I was dating Julie, I was much more upfront about any problem that I had (until the end when admitting the problem meant admitting the end of the relationship… so I was upfront until it really mattered… typical trumwill brilliance). Some of the time when I mentioned these problems, they would become very serious problems for Julie long after it passed from my consciousness. She would reciprocate in the “sharing”, except that when she aired her problems, there was no real way of convincing her that her problems were unfounded. She would simply (and fairly) point out the various times I aired something of minimal significance.

After that, and after various run-ins with Eva and others in between Julie and Clancy, I started asking myself before I air any problem what I hope to gain by it. So every time I present a problem to Clancy, I make sure that I am in search of a solution before I do so that we can try to figure out what we can do to mitigate it. Part of me thinks with Julie that had she said “Your feeling of the situation is not an accurate reflection of the situation” that I would have reconsidered. She never actually did that (passive as she was) and honestly if she had I don’t know how I would have responded because I hadn’t learned all that much about conflict management.

Part of it, though, for me is a matter of filtering my complaints to those that are the most serious or if they’re minor they are ways that it can be fixed (or relaxed) without much in the way of inconvenience. That way when I do present to her a real problem and I present it as a real problem, I always have her utmost attention.

We really haven’t had to do this since we left Deseret. It seemed like for the first few years of our marriage we were dictating the terms of it. Now we’ve more-or-less gotten that figured out, save The Children Question, and we’ve found ways to negotiate my life, her life, and our lives together.

When I was in high school, in addition to my mother I had other motherly figures. The widow-lady next door (Mother #2), Kaye Brown (Mother #4), and Cyclone (Mother #3 and the subject of this post).

I was a regular user of BBSes in the 90’s and it provided me a social life that for various reasons I wasn’t getting at school. Camelot, the main board that I spent my time on, was run by Excalibur, a college dropout in his early twenties that was spending upwards of $150 a month on an 8-line BBS. Excalibur ran the board and had various “cosysops” that helped him run it by keeping tabs on other users and performing other various tasks. I was one of the cosysops and Cyclone was another.

Cyclone found the BBS by way of her son and daughter, the son about my age and the daughter about five years my junior. She was only about 20 years older than I was, though, which was young in comparison to other mothers of my peers. Checking up on her kids, she found that she liked the BBS, despite that it was populated by people my age rather than her own, and befriended Excalibur.

At a time when I couldn’t talk to my own mother about such things, when Mother #2 was drunk and Mother #4 was on the other side of town (and I didn’t know her when I met #3), I spent a lot of time talking to Cyclone sorting out my personal problems and talking about life and philosophy. Being a public schoolteacher, Cyclone was used to the naivete of young people and seemed to enjoy her role as mentor. I also had a good relationship with her husband, though I could understand why she liked the BBS. He was a pretty blue collar fellow and many of us youngsters were probably better thinkers than he was.

Excalibur and I were never personally very close. Not nearly as close as Cyclone and I were, at any rate. But he, too, was something of a mentor to me in something like a big brother to me. He was kind of a hard nut to crack and a difficult person to get close to, but I was in awe of the BBS that he ran and, like a real brother, I was his friend by default and requirement more than anything else.

Shortly before I graduated, the World Wide Web was becoming the big thing. A lot of BBS users started logging on more and more to the Internet rather than our rinky dinky little system. It wasn’t too much of a surprise when Cyclone was among those gravitating towards the Internet, though I was missing her presence in Camelot. Excalibur was much more upset about that. It figured, though, because they had a special friendship and he was not the kind of guy that came by friendships easily.

Excalibur and Cyclone’s friendship had more or less evaporated by the time I was heading off the college. The ostensible reason for this was that Cyclone had set Excalibur up with a really nice job at the school district and Excalibur was jeopardizing it and her reputation by sleeping with a student at the high school. She was 17, it was technically legal (because he wasn’t an actual teacher), but it was nonetheless bad stuff.

As their friendship fell apart, I started finding out things. I found out that my motherly figure had actually been cheating on her husband with my brotherly figure and the real reason for the dissolution of their “friendship” was that she had met some dude on the Internet in Chicago that she had taken to sleeping with. Excalibur, who was closer and closer to getting engaged to the soon-to-be-graduated high school student, was torn up about it, and in his pain he started letting more and more things I didn’t need to know (such as the adeptness of Mother #3’s oral sex skill). It was hard for her to be at all motherly as it all started coming out. I started making fewer and fewer trips to Southfield to visit her.

Looking back it should have been a lot more obvious what was going on. The fact that Excalibur’s previous serious girlfriend was about 15 years his senior and even looked a little bit like Cyclone would have provided a helpful clue. They spent a whole lot of time together. But Excalibur had his relationships and she had her husband and it seemed like if they were sleeping together, they wouldn’t have been so open about being so close. I’ve since learned that cheating couples often do hide their relationship in plain sight. In part because people like me can’t believe that they would be so brazen.

I continued to log on to the BBS after the whole revelation, though much of the sense of family that we had had evaporated. I was upset at Cyclone’s infidelity as well as to a lesser extent Excalibur’s (not as bad because they weren’t married at that time), but mostly it was just the incestuousness of it that bothered me. It also made me think differently of all that time I spent with Cyclone. Not that I thought that there was anything sexual about it, but that she wasn’t the honest, devoted person that I thought she was and that her interest in young people generally was a little more suspect than it had been.

I’ve heard it said that drug users stop emotionally progressing whenever it was that they started using drugs. I’ve even heard that emotional development after they stop using is still hindered. Cyclone was a pretty heavy drug user back in her younger years (in fact, her later husband had won her over in part by being the guy that visited her in the emergency room after an overdose). It made me wonder if her interest in young people — not just the BBS but her life’s work as a teacher — had a lot more to do with immaturity (being emotionally on the same page as young people) than it did with influencing young lives.