I’m an uncle! I’m an uncle! My oldest brother Ollie’s wife Kelsey gave birth this afternoon and he has been on the phone all day passing along the good news.

And she’s home. Sadie Lynn Truman. Seven pounds, 11 ounces, and 18″ in length.

Logtar wants to know how someone becomes an expert on marriage proposals:

What makes him a expert on the subject of proposing? that is the question that still lingers in my head. I could see a jeweler maybe knowing more than him, because he is actually the person that gets to hear the stories of proposal before they happen. I could see maybe someone that did something really outrageous and was turned down… but a cook?

Just being famous does not make you an expert in my eyes, but more and more people with fame get to have a voice. I think that is the real danger of the celebrity culture, that maybe we are getting information from sources that are not very reliable. Be careful of where you get your expert advice, and next time you see one on TV, ask yourself if the person talking should really be considered an expert on the subject.

I’d imagine that proposals is something that it’s very easy to become an “expert” on. Proposals are one of those things that you can ask virtual strangers about and a lot of them will open up about it. Heck, I considered making last weeks Ghostland piece a look back on planned proposals (and the one of course I executed). Collect a few hundred stories, find out which ones worked and which ones didn’t, and voila, you’re an expert. I know that I’d certainly listen to what the person had to say, if only to get some ideas.

That being said, this guy does sound like an idiot. There is no single right way to propose, but he seems to be offering one. Advice should start with questions about him and her and be more in the form of “Maybe you should consider…” or “Maybe something along the lines of…” rather than “You should … You shouldn’t …” Some girls love the idea of being proposed to in a very public place. That sort of thing would horrify my wife.

One such example is something that Logtar says:

I now see that step in a relationship more logically and think it should be a decision made by both and not a surprise… I remember somewhat being pressured to propose on my first marriage, and we all now know it did not work out.

I disagree. I think that surprises along these lines are a good thing. Sure, hint around it, try to make sure you’re on the same wavelength… but once you think that she’ll either say “yes” or at least won’t blow up at the proposal, make it a shot in the dark. But that’s how I wanted to go about it and how I think that the significant significant others would have been on board with. I have difficulty contemplating going about it any other way, but presumably it was just what the doctor ordered for him and his wife.

The other comment is that pressured proposals aren’t necessarily a bad thing. If she wants to get married and wants the relationship to be headed there, I don’t think that she should just wait for him to get around to that mode of thinking. I know a lot of time lost by women being too passive about fishing or cutting bait. It often brings to light issues that could have laid semi-dormant for very long periods of time.

An article in the Wall Street Journal about a cookie that I’ve never heard of called the Hydrox:

“This is a dark time in cookie history,” wrote Gary Nadeau of O’Fallon, Mo., last year on a Web site devoted to Hydrox. “And for those of you who say, ‘Get over it, it’s only a cookie,’ you have not lived until you have tasted a Hydrox.”

Still reeling from their loss, Mr. Nadeau and other “Hydrox people” have yet to accept their fate. Some have started an online petition demanding that Kellogg bring the cookie back. They have collected 866 signatures. Others in recent months have reported Elvis-like sightings — and tastings — of the defunct product. {…}

Eating Hydrox was “a badge of honor,” says 54-year-old Charles Clark, who processes records for U.S. Army reservists in St. Louis. He remembers receiving a package of Hydrox cookies on his sixth birthday and sleeping with it under his pillow. “Oreo had all the advertising, but those in the know ate Hydrox.”

Hydrox eaters tend to be independent-thinkers, favor underdogs and be skeptical of corporate marketing, he says.

I’m not sure I’ve been witness to people identifying themselves by what foods they eat. The closest that I’ve ever come is when my friend Clint and I would make a big deal extolling the virtues of obviously unhealthy manufactured foods. We’d talk about how the breakfast burritos “transcended the genre” of breakfast foods because its eggs weren’t quite eggs, it’s sausage not quite sausage, and where one ingredient ended and the other began is a delightful mystery. We also had something going about Easy Cheese being a scientific marvel (”It’s not solid, it’s not liquid, and yet somehow it’s cheeze or something comparable to it!”) and how we were supporting the scientific community by indulging.

Those are mostly jokes rather than any sort of posturing. It seems to me that when it comes to food, most people posture not by what they eat, but by what they don’t eat. They don’t eat meat or they don’t eat inhumanely grown meat or they don’t eat at fast food restaurants or chains or anything with corn syrup or 100,000 other things. That’s how people set themselves apart.

The Hydrox people are sort of doing that by not eating Oreos, of course, and I suppose with Hydrox gone they too will join the ranks of at-least-I-don’t-eat-_______.

On a sidenote, is it me or does Hydrox sound more like a toilet cleaner than a cookie?

I had to get some parts for Japan for my QA testing. In an email that someone from Soyokaze Headquarters in Japan addressed me as Truman-san.

That is so bad-ass!

I would have even taken Truman-kun!

Maybe my next job will be with a Latin American company and I will be Senor Truman (or Senhor Truman if Brazille… close enough). That’d be almost as cool, but not quite.

Spungen writes on what she hated most about not having money… and it wasn’t the lack of stuff:

The problem with a lot of people who promote the downscale, simple lifestyle is that they assume it’s all about decreasing consumption. They assume that being poor is merely about living without luxury goods. That’s never what I hated about not having money, though. No, it’s the people you have to be around, and the lack of insulation from them. People who have always been around other functional, educated, upper-income people just don’t get it.

Given that Spungen’s backgrounds are in modest in nature and that she’s had to live around less desirable folks, it’s no surprise that you see that as one of the big benefits.

Thus far I have not really used my resources to insulate myself from the undesirables for the most part. I live in a poor black neighborhood right now, lived in an immigrant community in Colosse, and lived among poor (and largely criminal) whites in Deseret. In Deseret we finally did move in part because of how un-safe we felt where we were living, but that was much more the wife’s issue than mine. On the other hand, if we had kids my attitude likely would have been very different.

Which sort of gets to the points of it. Though for a variety of reasons (thriftiness, convenience of location, etc) I choose to live where I do and when I have kids I can choose to live somewhere else. My situation is different from someone stuck here.

The biggest advantage for money to me is also not so much stuff, but rather security. Making the sort of money that we do and being as relatively advantaged in the job market as we are means that we can stockpile some money and if we have to go a little while without a job, we don’t get desperate and don’t have to take the first job that comes around. That right there is worth a heck of a lot of stuff. I’ve lived without stuff and I’ve been fine. I’ve never lived without security (if worse can to worse I always had my folks house to go back to) but the security that the money has bought me is extremely valuable.

For Clancy the biggest thing that money buys her is independence. When she got her full-ride scholarship to the University of Koroa, more important than the money was the fact that her parents couldn’t hold anything over her. Her career path buys her a degree of autonomy at work because of the nature of the medical profession, but the money she makes also buys here the ability to have more choices that fewer people have any control over. She doesn’t need to worry as much about satisfying the government for Fannie Mae, she can afford to pick up and relocate if she doesn’t like her job at any particular place or we don’t like our neighbors. The only person she has to work with on these decisions is me (and, as we’ve come to discover, the various state medical boards).

My primary use for money and Clancy’s primary use for money aren’t all that different in the greater scheme of things. That’s one of the things that makes our marriage work. One of the more alarming things about Julie and I back when we dated was that she loved her stuff. It was an issue with Eva, too, though she liked money for doing stuff and giving stuff to others.

None of this is to say that I don’t like my stuff. One of the better things about having money is that I can get stuff that I want without having to worry too much about it most of the time. My Pocket PC breaks? I can get another. The car stops running? I can fix it or if I have to start putting money down on another. I can do these things without having to worry about being financially devastated. That sort of brings me back to my security thing (I am insulated from the sound of my Pocket PC breaking) and Clancy’s independence thing (we don’t need to ask anyone for money).

Everyone likes a short-term influx of cash. Most people spend it, while some stick it aside for a rainy day. I have no doubt that I would enjoy an immediate “gift” from the government in the form of $600; I certainly wouldn’t mind putting it towards savings and debt reduction.

Of course, the purpose of this package isn’t for that reason; those pushing for it want people to go out and spend more money.

At the same time, however, the average savings of an American are at an all-time low - quite literally expressed in negative numbers by the commerce department. This scares me, because it’s hard to imagine a situation in which that is a desirable outcome. Eventually, there will come a point where people simply can’t spend any more and have to cut back. Some are likely already doing this. The recent number of loan defaults and economic problems seem connected; the more people realize they have overreached, the more people will cut back and spend less, which hurts many people who are overspent and counting on constant spending in their economic niche; and the more people who fail to realize how overspent they are, the more defaults will happen - be it credit cards, mortgages, car payments, or anything else. And it’s getting easier and easier to become overspent these days, between massive credit card offers, “home equity” (aka second mortgage) loans, and those postdated-check “temporary loan/payday loan” mills on far too many street corners.

Part of this, I’m sure, is the consumerist nature of society. Will looks at Wal-Mart and defends them for what he sees as a benefit in offering low prices and a concentration of goods, but I’m not so sure a concentration of goods is a bonus. I try to avoid Wal-Mart partly because I disagree with their practices, but I also try to avoid other “Mart” stores if I can because they make it so easy to overspend; going in for one item only to wind up picking up several more.

Then, too, I suppose the demise of “Home Economics” as a required course in public schools might have something to do with it as well; that and the demise of people carrying cash. When I get to the point of having kids, one thing I’m going to have to work very hard at is being sure I carry cash at all times; to a kid, seeing the adults actually hand over bills and coins means something is trading hands, and you can explain how money works and how to count coins and bills and make change with 1st-grade arithmetic skills. To the same kid, however, your credit or debit card (however convenient for you in not being caught without enough funds on hand) is “that magical thing” and mentally abstracted one too many layers from the economic transaction.

My mother married for the first time in Carolina. Her husband was a classmate at Carolina State University studying to be an aeronautical engineer. As was not uncommonly the case, after they got married she quit her job and supported him through school.

Their marriage was a difficult one from the get-go because of her husband’s alcohol problems. When Mom proposed that they move to California, she talked of “new beginnings.” In fact, she wanted to get further away from her family because that would make leaving him a lot easier from a social standpoint.

They divorced. Mom regretted a lot about that marriage, but one of her biggest regrets was how he got out of it with a masters degree in engineering while she was still a lowly secretary. She had no real career ambitions and hated working, so it irked her all the more that she had to spend so much time clock-punching. Worse, because he was too much of a drunk to hold on to a job, couldn’t even get alimony out of the arrangement.

She met my father while they both worked for McClellan Forrester, a defense contractor. She said early on that if there was one thing that she would never do again, it was pay to send another husband through school. Dad was perfectly fine with that because he didn’t have any aspirations of going to graduate school.

Then California A&M University came calling. They were starting a new military economics major that was available only to folks with engineering degrees. Because he had experience in the defense industry, they would cut him slack and he could do something else (I don’t remember what) in lieu of a thesis. Dad was tired of working on fighter planes and was looking to get into administration and this was his golden opportunity.

He talked to McClellan-Forrester about their tuition reimbursement program. As luck would have it, they’d just discontinued it. Not only had they just discontinued it, they were asking employees to back-pay previous reimbursements that they’ve gotten. There was no legal way for McClellan-Forrester to do this, but all they had to do was lay out the threat of laying terminating their employment.

McClellan-Forrester was in a position of great power at the time. They were a defense contractor and their employees were exempt from the draft. Any employee that happened to lose their jobs that happened to be the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) age was likely not going to be unemployed in the United States for very long. The few coworkers that Dad knew that had tuition reimbursements were scrambling to find the money to give back to their employer in order to stay on their good side.

With hat in hand, Dad came home and explained the situation to Mom. he refused to ask her to support him through school, but it was pretty obvious what he was getting at. She agreed and because he was getting a degree in a military-related field, Dad remained exempt from the draft.

After Dad got his degree he got a job with the Department of Defense almost immediately. The DoD knew just as well as MF that they were in a position of power, so they only agreed to pay him as much as they would if he hadn’t gotten the extra degree. It was still worth going back to school, though, because at this point things were desperate enough that you needed a masters degree to get a bachelors degree job.

Mom was able to milk Dad’s guilt for years. As soon as he got his job with the government, she was able to quit work and be a full-time housewife in a house with no kids. The way she saw it, they both got a pretty sweet gig.

Time-Warner is considering restructuring how it provides Internet service, focusing on use rather than a flat, monthly fee.

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.

I’m the king of that 5%. They do this and I’m hosed.

My feelings about it are somewhat mixed.

On one hand, I am likely costing the company more money than I am paying. At the very least I am paying considerably less for my use than are most users. As such, it hardly seems unfair that I should be expected to pay more.

This is also preferable to one of the alternatives currently in place. Advertise for “unlimited downloads” and then start placing limits on certain kinds of downloads. File-sharing services such as BitTorrent (which has legitimate uses in addition to illegitimate ones) are frequently targetted. Or advertise “unlimited downloads” and then dump users that are actually taking advantage of that offer. I know some people that have had their contracts terminated for that reason.

At least this way I can simply pay for what I use. I don’t have to live in fear that they will decide that I must be a business to be using what I am or simply to note that they are losing money on me and disconnect me. Having above-the-board policies for aggressive users in that sense allows users to choose to be aggressive and pay for it or scale back.

There are at least three hesitations, though. First is that I strongly doubt that light users will be paying much less than they are paying now. I’d imagine the lowest tier would be comparable to current rates. So this would be less an attempt to have a fairer price structure and more an attempt to raise prices on some users and make some extra dough while leaving the rest alone or giving them a relatively insignificant break.

The second hesitation is that this provides a way to really screw some customers over. Presumably if someone buys X-megabytes of downloading, anything over X will come with some nasty charge per meg. The goal will be to get people to sign up for more than they need if only to avoid fear that they will go over. This is what cell phone companies do. They don’t charge by the minute, they get people to buy minutes that they won’t need and then when they have a burst of usage they take them to the cleaners. It’s not a pleasant thought. They could circumvent this problem simply by putting them in the tier of what they used, but they won’t.

The third hesitation is that I’m not sure how smart a decision it is from a business perspective. In the current model, most people don’t have to worry about how much they use it or don’t use it and that’s a good thing. Once they start feeling that they need to limit their usage it becomes less fun and they decide that since they’re doing less they don’t even need it to be that fast at all. I personally adjust pretty quickly when I’m in a situation where high speed Internet isn’t available. Part of the recent success of broadband is that they’ve convinced people that they need it. Attaching a charge to its use might undercut this success.

As most of you know, I work for the small American branch of a Japanese conglomerate. Soyokaze America of Soyokaze International. We have frequent visitors from Japan as they check and see how their investment is doing or they check in for some of the things that we do for the Japanese market (the Japanese company hires Americans to make product for sale in Japan… how bout that?).

It’s considered a really big deal when they come over, so they stay at the finest hotels and are taken to the finest eateries, golf courses, and entertainment venues that we have to offer. Typically, those that come over are the bigwigs. They’re our CEO’s bosses and people that the conglomerate’s board sends over to check up on us. Or if they’re just there to talk about some Japanese product that we’re making, they’re still considered especially important because Japan is our corporation’s home and first and foremost it’s Japanese people that we need to impress for them to look good. Whoever they are and whyever they’re coming, we almost always roll out the red carpets.

Almost always.

The past few weeks there have been some visitors from the corporate homeland that are here for another reason: their crap don’t work. We’ve been having all sorts of problems ever since I arrived with our receipt printers. They jam, they print out in the wrong language (sometimes Japanese, often Spanish or sometimes Vietnamese), they line up wrong, they say that they’re out of paper when they’re not, they don’t acknowledge that they’re out of ink when they are, and on and on. They make some adjustment, they send it over, it doesn’t work, we send it back, and the process repeats itself ad infinum.

So at some point they decided to just go ahead and send their engineers over here. No more worrying about inches and centimeters, whether what works fine with their stuff works with ours. They work on it, they bring it up, we try it out, it fails, they get it back, and they work on it some more.

As near as we can tell, they’re living in the basement of our building. We can see them down there through the ventilation windows. They have cots. No matter how late I am entering or leaving work, they’re down there plugging away at those darn printers trying to make it somehow work. I have difficulty believing that they actually live there full-time, but I’ve never seen them coming or going and they do have the cots and changes of clothes in plain site, so maybe they do.

It seems like they’re being punished for their malfunctioning software. They come to the US but don’t get to see the sights or eat at the nicest restaurants or play golf. I’d definitely like to go visit Japan some day, but boy it’d suck to go there and be stuck in a basement all the time.

* - A citizen of Britain is a Briton. Two or more citizens are Britons. Something that hails from Britain is British. Briton is a noun, British an adjective. Japan has no distinction (nor, does that matter, does America). We’ve taken to referring to people from Japan as Japons. Not sure where it came from and I’ve never heard of it outside my job, but it does make a degree of sense I suppose. It’s pronounced “japone”… took me a bit of time to realize that “japone” and “japon” were the same thing (and that the latter wasn’t a misspelling).

“Walmart” is one of those few words that can inadvertantly change the course of what was previously an unserious conversation. I was reminded of this when I mentioned the store in passing to my brother Mitch. Mitch is about as Republican as they come so it didn’t really occur to me that he might get hot-and-bothered by the fact that I shop at the Great Retail Destroyer.

I have read a lot of good pieces on the reasons that Walmart is a force for evil in this country. I’ve read about a lot of things Walmart does that I don’t approve of in the slightest. I’ve also read a lot of good defenses of Walmart and why they are a boon to the economy overall and a force for good. I honestly think that both sides make very good points. I would support a number of actions by the government to do a better job of keeping Walmart honest, though I haven’t seen enough yet for me to believe that it would be good for the overall economy if Walmart were to be driven off the face of the earth.

I do know, however, that I would not be better off, and the reason has almost nothing to do with prices.

Back when I lived in Colosse, I only rarely shopped at Walmart. It was only if I needed something that I was told that Walmart had and I either didn’t know what other place would have it or I needed to do it at an hour that Walmart was the only place open. Even though I’m sure there are a hundred locations in the area, I could only list off the locations of two Walmart Supercenters. At that point Walmart could have been shut down for good and I would not have cared.

That changed when we moved to non-urban Deseret. Zarahemla and Mocum, the town where I lived and the town where I worked, were (by my standards) small towns with relatively few shopping options and a very early bed time. If you needed to do any shopping at any point past 9 or 10, Walmart was really your only safe option. It was the only place in town to get a whole lot of things on Sundays. Living out there taught me that not every place had all of the options that Colosse did and it gave me a greater appreciation for those options that I had. First and foremost was Walmart.

It is said that Walmart is often the only place to get those things because they drove the retailers out of business. Maybe that’s true. Maybe once upon a time there was a place to get each and every thing that Walmart offers. That may have been true where I was in Deseret. That’s not true in a whole lot of places as well, though.

As Clancy and I look for a place to settle down, we’re looking in relatively remote places. We’re looking in places of 10,000 and 20,000 and 40,000. These are often places that can’t support a Home Depot or a compehensive specialty equivalent. The Mom and Pop’s often have restricted hours and restricted selection. It’s simply not true, out in the rural west at least, that there is always some other place to go. It’s definitely not true that there is a place as convenient as Walmart.

A lot of Walmart opponents like to prop up CostCo. Leaving aside the fact that CostCo is more a competitor of Sam’s Club than Walmart, there aren’t nearly as many of those around. If I’m in a town that has both a Walmart and a CostCo equivalent, I’d be more than happy to shop at the latter. But Walmarts are everywhere and CostCos are not. Whereas CostCo is apparently spending its money paying its employees a more liveable wage, Walmart is pumping its back in to expansion into places that don’t have a whole lot of retail options. It’s great that CostCo has the HR policies that it does, but living out in BFE it’s Walmart and not CostCo that is providing service.

For me it isn’t about price, it’s about convenience. I really like being able to have a shopping list that can almost entirely be satisfied by going to a single place. I can get some headphones, some sliced cheese, some cool aid, and some shoe inserts all at the same place. A shopping trip that used to take me four stops and two and a half hours is now forty-five minutes. I can stop on my way from anywhere to anywhere and if I see that sign, I know that I can get a wide array of products. I don’t even have to know where in the country I am. I know what’s there (for the most part), I know where it is (usually), and I have a pretty good idea what it costs. As we look at different places to live, how close the nearest Walmart is will be a selling point since it would otherwise take a great deal of time to find out what all is available in the area. The fact that I pay less for all this is merely an added benefit. One that I would gladly give up if I got to keep the convenience.

I believe that every independent American that works deserves a liveable wage. I am generally supportive of laws that make that happen. I’d support laws that would hurt Walmart if they are means to that end, but I’m not convinced that going after Walmart explicitly would be a means to that end. With the exception of Mom and Pop stores that they put out of business and people who happen to work for factories being put out of business by their Chinese imports, I am not convinced that anything would improve if Walmart disappeared tomorrow. I don’t see Walmart employees suddenly being able to find jobs elsewhere that pay more. I see a lot of people in a lot of rural places have a lot fewer options. I see people’s paychecks being stretched thinner.

So by all means, let’s close whatever loophole’s Walmart may be using to give it an unfair advantage if it will make the average joe’s life better off. But I don’t give much quarter to arguments about how hurting Walmart is an ends unto itself rather than simply a biproduct of our march towards greater social justice.

Though I only proposed to one woman, I’ve planned scenarios for proposing to three different people over the course of my life. The first was Julie. I hadn’t figured out the specifics, but I was going to go into another conversation about how averse I was to the term “girlfriend”. At first she thought that my aversion was a cute personality quirk, but after one, two, and three years it became cause for alarm. She feared that it was a lack of commitment on my part. There were commitment issues involved, though that wasn’t indicative of them. Anyhow, I would start the conversation about how I didn’t like that term and that I preferred the terms “fiance” and “wife” and then I’d sandbag her with the ring.

As Web pointed out, Prudence’s column from last week didn’t seem to demonstrate the Dr. Lauraesque hostility of some of her more recent works. Web and I both zeroed in on this one:

I was reprimanded once because my boss overheard my conversation with a co-worker about my girlfriend. She poked her way into our conversation, asked me some probing questions, and left, then later confronted me in private. She was disgusted that I was talking about my inappropriate and immoral relationship. She said that because I mentioned my “girlfriend,” she could only assume I’m a pedophile, because a “girl” is a prepubescent woman. As the rules of the office stated, what mattered was that she was “impacted.”

I don’t know if this letter is real or not (I have some doubts), but whatever the case it’s true that if people want to find a reason to be offended they will. This is true of both liberals (”I don’t care what the dictionary says, ‘niggardly’ is a slur and you’re a racist for saying it”) and conservatives (”What, you say ‘happy holidays’ because you hate Christmas and Christians?”).

What was a bit head-scratching is not that someone would be offended by the term “my girlfriend”, but rather that the “girl-” part was what was deemed offensive. I would have thought it would be the “my”. The “my” can imply ownership. When I say “my car” it’s assumed that I have ownership or control over it. I don’t own “my apartment” but I am renting it with my wife. Mine, mine, mine!! It’s not always meant to imply ownership or control (I have little or no claim to “my hometown” or “my country”), but given the long history of male-female relationships wherein the woman was considered property, I could see someone wanting to be offended pouncing on that.

Of course, we talk in possessive terms about regular friends all the time, so that doesn’t make sense, either. Also, anthropological male-female relationships as they pertain to property don’t understand my equal aversion to the term “boyfriend” except there I envision a shrew demonstrating domination over a whipped guy.

In retrospect, my biggest problem with the term “girlfriend” may have been that I never had one and my problem with “boyfriend” is that I never was one.

Yet even when I got my first really serious girlfriend Julie, I still didn’t like the term. I was with Julie for over four years and I maybe called her my girlfriend half a dozen times. A lot of that was a holdover to the whole possessive thing, though the loopy logic there had dawned on me by that point. My rationale shifted from possessiveness and towards another rationale: referring to someone as your girlfriend or boyfriend reduces someone that you presumably care about to a position in your life.

That doesn’t make any sense, either, though. When I call my father my father I’m no more reducing him to a title than I am assuming possession of him. It’s a title, in a certain way, but it’s more of an immediate identifier. I don’t have to say “Bill Truman, military economist” or “Bill Truman of Ouchita”. I call him “my father” and people get a marker as to why he matters in regards to whatever it is that I’m saying about him. Is it somehow less respectful to refer to him as “my father” than it is “this guy I know”? Why would “girlfriend” be any different?

In retrospect, my problem with the term was really that I had gone so long hating the terms that I needed to find reasons to continue hating them.

Eventually that logic began to wear so thin that I couldn’t logically keep it together. I’d gone nearly five years without referring to Julie as my girlfriend and though Evangeline spared me of that whole quandary by keeping our relationship maddeningly ambiguous, the notion that I had and would continue to have people that I date exclusively on a regular basis meant that I needed to stop positioning myself as the romantic outcast. But I still don’t like the term and did not once refer to Clancy as my girlfriend while we were dating (not hard, we were engaged in pretty short order).

So with all logic on my previous two rationales sent out the window, what reason do I give? Ironically, the same reason as the dyke. I haven’t dated a “girl” in an exceptionally long time. Prior to Clancy, I dated women and not girls. Boyfriends and girlfriends, now that I was finally ready to admit that they were pretty useful terms, were no longer remotely accurate. As it turned out, Clancy felt the same way. We settled on “this guy/woman I’m dating” or more frequently “my lady friend” and “my gentleman friend”. I’d introduce her name in pretty short order so I could avoid that awkward phrasing.

Over at Prudence, she seems to tone it down on a poor fool who’s gotten in over his head.

The specific situation: guy works in a workplace with “impact not intent” rules about what is “inappropriate” discussions and attitude-wise. His bosses are as he describes: “One of them is an outspoken radical anarchist vegan ultra-feminist who refers to herself as a dyke. The other is just a feminist.”

He’s been reprimanded for referring to someone as a “wonderful lady”, and discussing his “girlfriend” with another co-worker.

Prudie advises him to look for a job, saying:

Your office sounds like as much fun as an impacted tooth. I don’t see anything “positive and progressive” about older women with more power using the young male in the office as their personal piñata.

The guy had to know going in what his two bosses were. Chances are, it’s the self-described “dyke” who’s been doing the majority of the dressing-down. The attack on the word “girlfriend”, a commonly understood word in normal society to refer to a female one is dating or literally a female friend, without commonly understood connotations of prepubescent age, is fairly transparent - and I don’t think I’m out of line in surmising that perhaps the real “impact” was the discussion of hetero relationships around a woman who’s a self-professed “dyke”, which is a common word for a militantly homosexual woman.

As for the hatred of the word “lady”… again, the umbrage over a compliment and a word that would ordinarily be innocuous. Frankly, while Prudie has the right of it, I have to wonder at the common sense of a young man who walks into an office to work under “an outspoken radical anarchist vegan ultra-feminist who refers to herself as a dyke” and “just a feminist” and doesn’t think it’s going to be open season on anything with a Y chromosome.

I spent this past weekend in Delosa with my folks. Dad had found a few pictures that he was anxious to show me. Most of them were pictures of my ex-girlfriend Julie and I, but a few were of me and another girl named Andrea Carmine. “When were these taken?” I asked Dad.

“I don’t know. There are notes on the back. How’s she doing, anyway?”

Sure enough, on the back of each of the pictures were notes and commentary. “Pretending not to notice that a fake waterfall was fake sure was fun!!” “I call this picture The Giant and the Dwarf because you’re a giant and I’m a dwarf!!” “If vampires can’t have their picture taken, are you a vampire when you’re smiling because you never have your picture taken when you’re smiling!!” She always had to explain every joke that swept through her head.

If I were to have made a list of everything that I could have wanted in a girlfriend, she would have met nearly every bullet point. She had the figure that I craved at the time. She had nice, straight blond hair. She rarely wore jewelry or make-up. She was a spark-plug of energy. She was extremely easy to talk to and had a way of making me open up and smiling. There was nothing in the way of scars, excess weight, obvious disfigurements, or nail polish. My parents loved her. There was just one thing…

Andrea was a freshman when I was a sophomore and we met in theater class. I’d developed something of a crush on her friend Tanya. As I sometimes tried to do when I developed a crush from afar, I made friends with one of her friends and tried to meet her that way. I called it “pivoting”. It was the closest thing that I had to a tactic at the time and it was bolstered by the fact that I seemed to be attracted to shy girls that seemed to have at least one outgoing friend.

One of the stranger things about it all is that prior to putting my plan into action, I never once considered simply grabbing at the shorter-hung fruit… the more accessible one. I saw Andrea as nothing more than a means to an end.

Once everything was in motion, nothing worked out quite like I thought it would. I discovered that not only was Andrea Tanya’s only real friend in the class, but she just about dominated her friends. It was difficult to talk to Tanya without Andrea turning the conversation away from Tanya and back on to me or on to herself. Tanya didn’t seem to mind since she was a pretty quiet person, but it thwarted my plans.

Also thwarting my plan was that Andrea and I became really good friends really quickly. Within a short period of time, Tanya was being frozen out altogether as Andrea and I bonded. Tanya was the ultimate goal, but not only did Andrea steer conversation away from Tanya and I, I enjoyed talking to Andrea a lot more than I enjoyed talking to Tanya. I also enjoyed simply having a female friend where there was nothing else involved. She was teaching me that females are just people, too.

Classmates, who didn’t like either me or Andrea, took notice of the two of us and decided that we should be a couple and goaded the two of us. It seemed less like “you two would make a cute couple” and more like “you two losers belong together”. The class was dominated by jocks and cheerleaders. It escalated when Andrea and I did an emotional duet where she had aborted my kid and we were putting the pieces back together. Our chemistry together was great and even people that didn’t seem to loathe us started asking questions.

Then for the next round of duets I got to work with Tanya. It’s a long story, but the end result was that it became perfectly clear that Tanya was not interested in me and that was fine because after working with her I no longer liked her on any level. By that time there was a fourth person in our group named Laren. Laren always had an acerbic tongue, a cute way of rolling her eyes at anything and everything that lacked sufficient cynicism, and bug spray that she put in her hair. She was just crazy enough that I had begun to dig her a lot. I eventually did ask her out. She declined and extricated herself from our little grouplet.

Since I didn’t want to talk to Tanya anymore and Laren was gone, it was just Andrea and I again. Our friendship lasted up until my senior year when I went off to college, but nothing else ever happened. The strangest thing wasn’t that nothing happened, but rather that despite all the talk of those around us and despite how close we were it took her dating my friend before I even asked myself why that was. For a little horndog like myself, that was very unusual. I’d either want to be with someone or there’d be some very specific reason why I wouldn’t.

Clint and I discussed the matter. Though he got to know her a little bit as well through me, he’d never thought about making a move, either. As I thought about it, the thought of kissing her made my stomach feel quite queasy. I couldn’t figure out why, though, since she met all those all-important criteria. “Something about her face,” Clint noted. I nodded in agreement.

We took a picture of her that I had with me and started blocking out portions of her face. Mouth? No. Hair? No. Eyes? Holy moley… it was totally her eyes. Even then I couldn’t explain what exactly was wrong with her eyes. They were not of any unusual color or shape. The only unusual thing about them was that they almost had a Japanese double-eyelid quality about them, but I didn’t have any issues with Asian girls.

As I looked at the pictures over this past weekend, I asked myself “What is it about those eyes?”

All these years later, I still don’t have an answer.

Tonight I spent 4 hours watching two movies back-to-back on Lifetime.

The first one was about a babysitter that got involved with her employer whose wife ended up dead. At first I thought that the babysitter did it, but no it was the employer and there was a big sequence at the end where he was trying to hunt her down. I missed the beginning of the movie and didn’t realize that I was watching Lifetime. If I’d known I was watching Lifetime, of course, I’d know that the woman couldn’t have done it and that it must have been the man. The wife from The Cosby Show played a detective, the actress for Felicity (prior to her stint as Felicity) was the babysitter, and the pastor-dad from 7th Heaven was the bad guy.

The second movie starred someone familiar with Harry Hamlin of LA Law. Hamlin was a sex addict and it was about whatsername trying to help him through the ordeal. I initially started watching cause I wanted to see her bust him. By the time she busted him for good the movie was halfway through and I was watching by inertia. The satellite went out so I didn’t see the end.

The lesson I learned watching movies on Lifetime is that women like guys that are psycho-killers or sex addicts. I wish I’d known that when I was younger…

(Yes, I’m totally kidding. Not about the movies or the wasted time, though)

I have a fundamental belief that if a person wants to smoke in a business establishment and the owner doesn’t mind, the government should not step in and tell them that the smoker can’t smoke. It’s not so much that I believe in the right of the smoker as I do the right of a proprietor to make those decisions. This has nothing to do with my own nicotene habit. I believed it before I started smoking and I believe it in places where I don’t want to smoke. I never smoke while eating, but believe that it should be allowed at restaurants and bars.

I was so proud of my home city of Colosse for holding out on passing a smoking ban. One city after another started passing bans, but my hometown stood firm. I made the mistake of bragging on that while living in Deseret and within a week of that pronouncement the Colosse city council started talking about it. They’ve since passed it and smoking is not only illegal in restaurants but also in bars to assure that nobody’s lungs are hurt while the patrons destroy their livers. Even before that, though, Deseret (unsurprisingly) passed such a law a while back and Estacado has had such a law since I moved down here.

After having witnessed the distruction of freedom in this great country of ours, I must now loudly proclaim… the destruction of freedom can be awfully convenient. Though cigarette smoke (obviously) doesn’t bother me, it does bother my lovely wife to the point that she doesn’t want to eat anywhere that allows it. We ate once in a Deseretian restaurant that ran afoul of the smoking ban. Once. Now, as we go to live music shows at bars, we no longer have to worry the slightest bit about whether it’s a smoking establishment or not. My wife doesn’t want to leave as early as she otherwise would.

I’d say stuff about our clothes all smelling better, but a pleasant odor is not nearly the justification for destroying our freedom that convenient outings for my wife is.

From a broader social standpoint, I can also appreciate pushing cigarettes further and further to the fringes of acceptable social conduct. I don’t know if it’s really a step towards the eventually criminalization of smoking at large, but I honestly don’t care if it is. You non-smokers might be surprised at how many smokers have less of a problem with banning smoking altogether than all of this piecemail crap… but this piecemail crap may be what’s needed to get us to the point where it can be banned altogether.

So how much crow do I gotta eat? I’m not sure. On an abstract ideological level, I still believe that it should be a proprietor’s choice and I resent the government stepping in and telling a bartender what should and should not be allowed in his place (provided that no outside laws are being broken). I still believe the whole “I shouldn’t have to smell your smoke” argument to be pure junk when it involves people voluntarily going onto someone else’s property and when I hear it it makes me want to light up and blow smoke in their face*.

But good gawd do I love these laws on every practical level imaginable. Clancy and I can go out wherever we want, I have an additional reason not to smoke in her presence, my lungs are cleaner because I’m smoking less, and with the exception of bars it applies to places that I don’t smoke anyway. And it almost hurts me to say it, but if I were voting on a referendum, I’d vote for it**.

Or maybe not. I guess my ideal scenario would be to allow smoking in bars and outdoors, but keep it out of restaurants. The problem with trying to do that is that the distinction is not always clear. What about a restaurant that serves alcohol? What about a bar that serves food? Is a “Bar & Grill” primarily a bar or a grill?

There are two ways to address this. The first is what Delosa uses for firearms, the 51% law. If a venue makes more than 51% of its profits through alcohol sales, no firearms are allowed on the premises. The same standard could be held for cigarettes. Chili’s would be a restaurant, but a bar would still be a bar.

A better and more comprehensive idea than that, though, would be a 18/21-over threshold. Any place that allows people under the age of 18 or 21 cannot allow indoor smoking. Almost no restaurant that is truly a restaurant would forego family business to acommodate the smokers, but bars certainly would. If you made the threshold 18, most bars would still allow smoking. If you made it 21, you’d probably see a mixture which would probably be the best result because some bars would want that 18-21 business and others wouldn’t.

* - I don’t know if there is any issue that inspires normally nice and courteous people to act so rudely as smoking. You can be smoking a cigarette a reasonable distance away from someone and they will loudly start talking about what disgusting people smokers are or will fake coughing fits (smokers cough enough themselves to know when someone is faking). One time I was smoking in the park and a guy driving stopped his car, rolled his window down, screamed at me to put out my cigarette, rolled his window back up, and drove away. Smokers give as good as they get, though. Smokers that would never litter under any other circumstances toss butts everywhere. Smokers are often extremely rude when they are politely asked if they could move their smoking over a few yards. Even I, who takes great pain not to litter my butts and will almost always refrain from lighting up if asked, am uncharacteristically unable to turn the other cheek when someone is rude about it. I won’t even get into the persecution complex that some smokers have.

** - This isn’t the only time I’d vote against my ideological convictions. I voted for the Colosse Spiders arena to keep the basketball team in town even though I don’t think city’s should have to finance stadia. When the original referendum failed, I was actually proud of my city for voting differently than I did, but then I was happy when they passed the next referendum that kept the Spiders in town.

There is the way that the world should be and then there is the way that it is. There is the way that our ideas should abstractly work and then there is how they work in reality. There is the disaster we foresee when our grand ideas are thrwarted, and what we actually see when that happens. When confronted with this dissonance, we are left to admit that (a) our original idea was wrong, (b) whatever unexpected good/bad we see must not be that good/bad after all, or (c) whatever good/bad we see was actually caused by something other than the success or failure of the policy on which we stand so firm or firmly against.

In short, sometimes reality intrudes on our ideas.

I’ve noticed this happen on a couple of issues recently and I haven’t really decided on whether I am falling on the side of (a) or (b).

The first involves smoking bans, which I’ll address tomorrow, and the second involves toll roads, which I’ll address today.

Ideally speaking, toll roads are one of the best forms of government revenue in existence. People that use it pay, people that don’t do not. Most of the time there is an alternate route someone can take if they don’t want to or don’t have the means to pay. In Delosa, there’s always an adjacent frontage road or even a freeway (that traffic usually sucks on). Does it get any more perfect than that? Voluntary tax!

There are a number of ways that toll roads go awry, though. Many have been “temporarily” set up as toll roads in Colosse but in my lifetime I have never seen toll booths get shut down. It’s originally supposed to fund the building of the road, then it’s for maintenance and the extra money goes towards building other roads. So much for the ideal of taxing for use, though the money does have to come from somewhere I suppose. Increasingly, toll roads are privatized and the profits don’t even go into the pocket books of private enterprise than to further expansion, though in that case the toll company is paying the city or state something.

Even setting those aside, though, one thing that I’ve noticed is that toll roads can serious impede development. Santomas, the city where I currently live, is building a toll road look around the inner part of the city. Santomas is a north-south city wherein traffic on the north-south freeway is so bad that half of the time on my drive home I’ll spend half an hour or more on backroads to avoid three miles or fewer in the Interstate.

One of the goals of the loop is to create more east-west development so that the city becomes less north-south and getting from Point A to Point B in the city doesn’t always involve going on the dreaded Interstate. This plan is failing miserably. New developments are going up further north and further south rather than east or west. Why? Because developers don’t want to build houses and then have to tell people that to get to work they’re going to be needing to pay an additional $3 on toll roads.

Even though the economics say that the $3 is a bargain, people won’t do it. They’d rather spend fifteen minutes more on the road going north-south even if the economics say that thirty minutes of your time is worth far more than $3. People’s inability to recognize the economics of commutes are a subject for a different day, but the perception is there. People are used to free roads. It’s difficult to get them to pay for what they’re used to getting for free, no matter how much you explain to them it makes sense.

I generally enjoy the Dear Prudence column in Slate and the videos showing on SlateV. She’s sometimes snarky, but she often gets letters that warrant it.

Today I got caught up and she came across as unnecessarily harsh on a couple of emails.

The first was from a self-described food snob complaining about her husband’s meat-and-potato preferences. I was all set to side with the husband, but for the most part she was just asking him to be a good sport and he wasn’t. My food tastes are much more like his than hers, but Prudence’s advice to be more flexible really seemed more to apply to him than her.

The second was from a single mother that has three strong romantic prospects and wants to know how to choose between them. Prudence gives pretty good advice here, but then in the middle of nowhere tears into her writer for sleeping around and exposing the kids to the men in her life. Maybe the mother was being irresponsible, but there wasn’t any indication in the letter. Then, after this little diatribe, she then gave some more good advice.

What do y’all think?

Barenaked Ladies have a great song called The Flag. The song is about spousal abuse. In the opening, the man says “You should know that by now, when the checkered flag comes down, no one has won the race”… by which he means that he has to chase her and he’ll beat her harder when he catches her and no one comes out the winner. Later in the song after she leaves him, she tells him “You’ve never really known that when the white flag is thrown, no one has won the war”… by which she means that she’s hurt and he’s without a lover and again, no one has won.

Bob Vis, Neil Ralston, and I are having a conversation about whether or not a high school should be allowed to censor its student paper. In the course of the conversation I said that once a lawsuit is filed, the school has already lost even if it wins the case on the merits.

Because my wife is a doctor, I spend more time immersed in the medical community than I ever thought I would. I know doctors, some nurses, and read doctorly publications about the industry and whatnot. One frequent subject is medical malpractice litigation and by and large doctors don’t care very much for it. Part of it is the high profile mega-judgments pinned on hospitals and insurance companies, but that’s only part of it. What seems to really drive doctors crazy are the sheer number of lawsuits filed, often without merit, that are inspired by the mega-judgments.

Theoretically, if a case has merit the plaintiff wins. If the case doesn’t, the defense wins. Sometimes juries will get these wrong and that’s a problem but those are the chances we take with a jury system. The problem is that even if a doctor wins and even if the case has only a scintilla of merit, the doctor has already lost simply by being sued. It costs the doctor in the time he or she has to spend justifying his or her actions. It costs the doctor in premiums down the line because the insurance company had to spend time and money defending him or her. The insurance company may simply find it cheaper to settle even if it leaves a ding on the doctor’s record. It costs the doctor in patient availability, in the stress it incurs, and in fear that their case will be one that a jury will get wrong or where the insurance company will leave them out to dry.

Even if a doctor never makes a single mistake in his or her career, he or she will be sued and will have lost simply by having been so. Of course, no professional ever goes their entire career without making a mistake of some sort. Simply making a mistake is not grounds for a multi-bazillion dollar verdict. The mistake has to be apparent and have more-or-less directly caused damage. Unfortunately, even the appearance of a mistake, even if it can’t be proved by a preponderance of evidence, makes the doctor a loser.

Unfortunately, there’s really no easy way to deal with this. Place tort caps and you deny people that were really wronged their day in court. Force plaintiffs to pay legal fees and you discourage lawsuits by folks that fear that juries will get it wrong the other way. Make cases too easy to dismiss as to not inconvenience the doctor and you dismiss valid claims. I support some of these solutions, but none are without cost and if you want to give plaintiffs their day in court you have to inconvenience defendants. Nonetheless, I completely understand the climate of fear and anger within the medical community as medmal tort lawyers fly overhead waiting, waiting, waiting for them to make the appearance of a mistake that ends tragically.

The medical community (and the Truman household, to be sure) by and large opposes an NHS-style socialized medicine, but I suppose one advantage is that the government would never let its employees get kicked around that way.

One of the more interesting things at Southern Tech (where I work and where Will and I both went through College) is the making-up of the tech support positions.

Suffice to say that in the college where I work, there is an actual tech support department. It’s not called that, and it has a wider breadth of scope than that, but one of its main responsibilities is that it is THE department responsible for hiring, training, and managing tech support for all departments of the College.

The College controls roughly three (and a half) buildings on campus. There’s the main building for the College, there’s a complex that’s really 2 (and a bit) buildings connected to the basketball stadium, and there’s a building on the other end of campus that’s jointly held by the College and another college.

The main bulk of my actual department is in the main college building, along with the Department of Psychology in Education (DPIE), Department of Instruction and Curriculim (DIAC) and Department of Leadership in Education (DLIE). In the two-buildings complex, the Department of Future Gym Teachers (DFGT) resides, and a few of my department wind up with offices there to assist them. DFGT is an interesting department on its own. They have basically three types of students: assletes working on a phony (coaching) degree while they pretend they’re about to be drafted out of NCAA and into pro sports, students too stupid for any other degree who’ve been referred from their respective programs to try to repair their GPA (and transferred so they don’t reflect badly on the other programs’ numbers when they drop out), and (a small minority of) serious undergrad and grad students working on various health-related studies, sports medicine/sports marketing degrees, and research.

At some point, the Chair of DFGT decided that rather than our being computer support, our workers in the building were the “throw anything if you can imagine any possible reason it might in some way vaguely be computer-related, including just requiring the use of a keyboard to type up the form” support. This is actually in keeping with his normal behavior; he makes a habit of abusing the “other duties as assigned” clause in University job descriptions, and between him and 1 or 2 other department chairs (of multiple dozens of departments) the abuses were enough that the University altered that line to read “other job-related duties as assigned” this past year. There is one individual in DFGT who came within two days of filing a complaint with HR and possibly a lawsuit for back pay after their job was completely changed, and a promised title change and appropriate salary increase delayed for a year and 11 months while Chair was repeatedly caught lying about whether or not he’d done the paperwork and about the status of the title change.

As my department went, he tried to fob off inventory management, telephone and power work orders, and even a couple times tried to fob off some construction projects on us (and tried to get our department to pay for everything he tried to assign to us, too).

He also started deciding that his department, following some reasoning nobody else (including the Dean of the College) understands, should have administrative control over members of my department who worked in the building where his department is housed. For a while, it was him directly, then he farmed out every possible administrative duty to the female Financial Officer (FO), who oddly enough is about 10 years his junior, spends much time in the weight room and other “exercise” areas with him, and has a key to his house (draw your own conclusions there).

The tipping point came a bit later. A tenure-track (not yet tenured but one of Chair’s personal favorites) professor asked for advice on whether it was feasible to “clone” a specialized workstation of his to ordinary computer hardware. I looked at the program, and my advice was to have one of his grad students (who actually work on the program regularly) try installing it and see how it behaved.

The next day, I was called in to FO’s office. FO wanted to know “what the situation was” with said professor, and why what he had requested had not been done. I replied that his questions had been answered, and my advice (which was all he had requested) given. She said to “go upstairs to the lab and take care of it.”

What I found was a list hastily scrawled on his chalkboard demanding four things.

One - had he actually asked for it (a simple user-permissions issue), would have been no problem - but he never requested it.
Two - was something that was impossible to accomplish: he wanted me to test whether the program was working. Problems: (A) I did not (and still don’t) know the expected output of his program to know whether it’s correct or not, and (B) his grad students had the related equipment booked solid for weeks to come in order to complete his current project on time.
Three - was to install a bootleg copy of the program;
Four - call the company to try to weasel a license code for his bootleg.

The final two were so illegal that following the instructions would have been justifiable cause for my losing my job. So instead, I did what I could, told his grad students what the situation was, and then reported the incident to my actual supervisors. This wasn’t the first time we’d had “licensing” issues with the professor in question either; a couple semesters back, he ordered a few licenses of a program, asked for it to be installed for use in the student lab, and then started filing complaint after complaint when he couldn’t have far more people simultaneously using the program than he’d purchased licenses. He demanded we “fix” the “bug”: we replied that it was no bug, he had X licenses, so only X people could use it at once and that was that. Repeat ad nauseum.

A couple weeks later, I was told to come to a “meeting” with Chair and FO. They wouldn’t tell me what the meeting was about, point-blank refusing to inform me. I told my supervisor, who then went and had a meeting with Chair, in which he brought an absurd number of faculty into his office. All had been ordered simply to sit and not talk, for an intimidation game; Chair then made false accusations that I wasn’t doing my job and that I was “being difficult” to my supervisor. One of the things they “suggested” was switching me out with another person from the tech support staff who fills (though the term is used loosely) a similar position in another of the College’s buildings. This “suggestion” lasted until they were informed that this other staffer is not nearly as technologically adept (I’m responsible for a decent amount of research equipment that they have lasting much longer than it otherwise would have, because I’ve got a knack for repairing hardware beyond mere desktop computers).

My supervisor and I had a long talk about this… and about the shenanigans of DFGT. The Associate Dean who’s actually directly over us supported us fully, and was none too thrilled with Chair’s behavior (in this particular case, or in many others that have occurred). From that point on, Chair and FO were ordered by the Dean’s office to report any issues they had directly to my supervisor, rather than trying to strongarm me.

At the yearly faculty meeting later in the year, Chair announced that my department’s employees - both myself and the others who he doesn’t have administrative control on - were to be targeted by the DFGT faculty, and that “any complaints” should immediately be sent not to him, and not to my supervisor (as the Associate Dean had required Chair to do when Chair started making false accusations), but instead directly to the Dean of the entire College.

Two weeks later, of the 20 faculty, 7 had pulled me aside to their offices and directly apologized for Chair’s behavior. My supervisor also shared with me a few emails from other faculty who’d made their complaint about Chair’s “orders” directly to the Dean’s office.

Meanwhile, grumblings from the top get louder. One year, Chair blew the entire departmental maintenance & operations budget on hiring FO, then complained all year about “not having money” and tried to get the College to strip funds from other places to pay for basic maintenance & operations things; the next he continued complaining the same even after the College had taken over paying most of FO’s salary. When the end of the fiscal year showed up, DFGT suddenly had money to spare. Chair blew a combined $66,000 on two toys, one of which was basically penis envy of another department’s toy (the services of which were being offered to every department of the College, including DFGT, already) and one of which has only been used by the grant project of one of Chair’s other favorites. This fiscal year, DFGT blew a large sum of money on a “project” which basically has involved a video game.

That last bit is important because all of a sudden, my department isn’t being expected to support equipment for the basic needs, but instead we keep getting called by DFGT faculty involved in said project to explain why their computer (which doesn’t have an expensive video board, but rather a stock Intel onboard setup) can’t run a video game well.

The good news is that I am no longer in the same building as Chair or DFGT any more. As of a few months ago, College has implemented the “suggestion” that DFGT made previously, and DFGT will just have to make do with the guy they didn’t want back at that intimidation meeting. I’m sorry to wind up basically leaving the majority of DFGT faculty (who are great people) with him, but it’s much better from my perspective.

At the outset of the new TV season, I wrote a review of the shows that I’ve been watching. With TV in a lull due to the writers’ strike, I thought that I might review the shows and give my updated opinions.

Back to You - My opinion of this one hasn’t changed much one way or the other. Before I described it as “competent, somewhat interesting, and quite funny at times, but never spectacular” and the description still applies. It’s proven itself to be solid, but has yet to move beyond passably interesting.
Original grade: C/C+
7 episodes later: C+

Big Shots - Most of the other dramas (including Life) have kept me interested with a hook: Detective Crews’s quest to find out who framed him, Chuck Bartowski’s history with Bryce Larkin, and Nick George’s search for his father’s murderer. Big Shots doesn’t need one to have my attention. The mixture of humor and drama works wonderfully. I care enough about the characters to care what happens to them, but not enough not to be able to laugh at some of their problems. Good stuff, if they can keep it going. Dylan McDermott remains flat, but so is his character. Christopher Titus is a jewel, but we don’t get enough of him.
Original grade: B+
8 episodes later: A-

Bionic Woman - Even the gorgeous Michelle Ryan can only hold your attention for so long. I stopped watching after scanning through the third episode.
Original grade: F
2.5 episodes later: F

Carpoolers - This show has proven to be a disappointment. The humor has grown a bit stale and the concept has not lived up to the show that I had imagined. My original grade was padded by what I thought were the possibilities of the program, but it just hasn’t lived up to them. I’ll continue to watch through the end of the season, but I’m not sure I’ll keep going after that.
Original grade: A-
6 episodes later: C-

Cavemen - This show keeps getting better and better as it goes along. I suspect that they were prepared at the start for the concept to get old so they put extra thought into the characters. They’ve avoided making it completely about their cavemanhood but produced something that couldn’t be made without that backdrop. I figured that when it inevitably got cancelled at the end of the first season that I would shrug. Now I’m really hoping it sticks in there long enough to make syndication.
Original grade: B
6 episodes later: A-

Chuck - A wonderful start that quickly slid into a sort of inertia for me. There’s nothing wrong with this program. I watched the first couple episodes but then started falling behind. There wasn’t much about the show that grabbed me. The genre-bending hasn’t worked out remarkably well. The big thing that kept me watching was finding out why Chuck got kicked out of Stanford and to get Bryce Larkin’s backstory. I got some of the latter and all of the former and am debating whether or not to stick around for the rest.
Original grade: B
7 episodes later: C+

Dirty Sexy Money - The characters haven’t become any more likeable, though the plotting has proven even better than I thought it would. The maneuvering between Tripp Darling and Simon Elders has particularly proven to be of interest, as has the nature of the George marriage. I’ve also taken a liking to the son, trying to figure out how to disentangle his best self from the temptation of living as a rich spoiled brat.
Original grade: C+
10 episodes later: B/B-

K-Ville - I was unimpressed with this show at the outset, but it’s grown on me. I might have given it up if my wife hadn’t become interested. They’ve used a good job of utilizing the unrealistic-seeming elements of it to encourage me to suspend my disbelief. I think that the show is chugging along pretty strong, but my wife isn’t quite as sure anymore. It’s hit and miss, but hitting enough to keep me interested.
Original grade: D
9 episodes later: B

Life - I previously complained that the show hadn’t lived up to its potential, but once it got moving it did. Detective Crews is one of the most interesting figures on television as he tries to reconcile his newfound zennish beliefs with his experience as a cop that was royally screwed by those around him. I was originally just waiting to see if they’d bother revealing who framed him. They sort of did and quicker than I had thought, though of course there is more to the story than originally thought. I don’t mind the continuing revelation so long as it doesn’t end up something extremely convoluted. It’s on the right track.
Original grade: B/B+
11 episodes later: A/A-

Reaper - As with Chuck, I couldn’t find much of anything to complain about with this show but had to search for reasons to watch it. I fell behind on this one, too, but unlike Chuck I did get caught up. I couldn’t care less about the protagonist’s romantic interest and far too much time was spend on it early on, but now they seem to be veering in a different direction for a little while so my interest has returned. I’m not positive I’m going to keep up whenever it resumes, but it’s possible.
Original grade: B+
9 episodes later: B-

The Big Bang Theory - Nothing I said in the original review is any different. Best new show on television.
Original grade: A
8 episodes later: A