My father worked for the Department of Defense on the civilian side as an engineer, then an economist, then a supervisor of economists. He was purely civil service and in fact rose as high in the ranks as he could without losing civil service protections. One more promotion and he would have been part of the staff of a political appointee. For the longest time, being a ranking civil serviceman in the DoD meant that he was prohibited from publicly expressing support for a political candidate. No bumper stickers, no yardsigns, and no political donations.

Though a reliable voter, Dad isn’t particularly outspoken about his politics and this limitation meant that he had a built-in excuse any time a politician asked for money or someone wanted him to put up a yardsign or something. He did resent the fact that he had to remain apolitical while people above him could not only express support for candidates, but could even have their support bought and paid for as “campaign consultants”. Eventually, and I’m not sure when, the courts stepped in and said that the government couldn’t prevent people from publicly expressing their views so long as they did not represent their own views as the views of the government organization that they work for. Even after that ban was lifted, he continued to try to hide behind the no-longer existent regulations.

Last weekend I flew back to Colosse to visit the folks and go to my former roommate Hubert’s birthday party. It’s election season in East Oak, the little burg that I was raised in. The election seems to be hinging on a new condominium project that threatens to bring in all sorts of tax dollars. Oh, the horror.

Okay, so it’s a little more complicated than that because it’ll result in more traffic and yet more backyard views of skyscrapers. But the long and short of it from my point of view is that the thing is going to get built, the traffic will get worse, and the only question is whether East Oak wants to at least get a great deal of tax revenue out of it.

My folks see things the same way that I do, so you can imagine my surprise when I drove into the driveway and saw yardsigns of the candidate slate that’s trying to keep the condo out. Particularly since they’ve never put up yardsigns, ever, even after the ban was lifted.

I brought it up under the pretense of asking whether the candidates were really against the development (though I already knew from the yardsigns that they were). He said that they were and that he would be sure to vote against them. So naturally I asked, “Why the yardsign?”

They were asked to by the woman in the house across the street and everyone in the neighborhood knows that is not the person you want to make an enemy of for social reasons. “So wait, what you’re saying here is that you’re caving to peer pressure?” I asked.

Sheepishly, Dad said, “Well yeah, I guess.”

“Too bad I didn’t know about this back in high school when you were telling me to resist the evils of peer pressure. I could have done a lot of drugs, Dad!”

He didn’t entirely get my joke.

I ran across this little snippit in something called ShinyGuy:

There’s only one entity worthy of more contempt than the Womanizer, however: His protege, the Hapless Wannabe.

The Hapless Wannabe is the man who truly feels less-than-full when compared to the Womanizer (a lifeform we’ve already established to be a {bleep-bleeping bleepatory} amoeba living only to grow fatter and grosser and increasingly irrelevant with each passing moment). While the Hapless Wannabe buys into the {male cow excrement} of the Womanizer, he lacks the social skills to actually indulge in what he perceives as his “male biological imperative.” (If you have witnessed a single episode of Blind Date (awesome show), you have seen the Hapless Wannabe at work.)

The piece is a slap on Maxim and the lad-mag industry as a whole, but I think that the author touches on an interesting point here. Not necessarily about Maxim (or only Maxim), but something I’ve seen on a lot of blogs that delve into male-female relations.

Trickle-down economics is based on the theory that if enough capital is supplied to (or left in the hands of) the wealthy, they will generate more wealth that will trickle down to those that have less wealth. I believe that this theory is true to some extent, though how much is up for debate. The degree to which it is true may be overwhelmed by the adverse effects of the disparity of wealth. In other words, though the wealth of a wealthy society materially benefits even those that receive only a tiny fraction of that wealth, the psychological harm done to the unwealthy may outweigh the material benefit significantly. The poor may get some better toys, but their comparative lack of wealth is greatly accentuated, leaving them with more worth but feeling more worthless.

My generation and the generation before me and the generation after me has greater access to sex with more people than any generation prior to these in the history of our country as far as I am aware. Sex is everywhere we look. It’s on television, at the movies, in the music we listen to, and in the stories we hear. If we’re not having sex, we’re often left to believe that there is something wrong with us. That we are sexually worthless. The more we hear about how much sex other people are having, the more worthless many of us feel.

In this age of sexual access, those that are denied sexual access for one reason or another can sometimes feel cheated. Even those that do get some sex thanks in part to the sexual revolution and the subsequent overall increase in the availability of sex feel comparatively cheated. More cheated than they would probably feel if they got no sex in a culture where most people weren’t and those that were were expected to keep quiet about it. Objective wealth, subjective deprivation.

The deprived can react in many ways. Some less fortunate people try to fake not being less fortunate. This is where the conspicuous consumption of the poor comes into place in the economic world and where Maxim comes into place in the sexual world. Reality bedamned, they’re going to fake it. If they fake it well enough, people will believe it. In the economic world, maybe they will be accorded the respect that they would be if they had earned the money. In the sexual world, maybe they will be able to parlay the image for a reality. Confidence, they’re told, is sexy.

Another reaction is more in line with what I’ve seen over the last couple years: bitterness mates with feigned moral superiority and gives birth to conspiracy theories. In economics, we have cultivated the image of the honorable yeoman’s successor, the honorable working man. Myths are born such as the notion that the middle and working classes tip better than wealthy people do. The honorable working man stands in contrast to the evil, greedy, rich man that goes to absurd lengths to keep poor people poor. In relationships I have seen over and over again the sexually less fortunate divide the world into meek nice-guy beta males and malicious asshole alpha males. We have meek nice guys that are tossed aside by loathsomely superficial women in favor of the jerks who look cool and drive better cars.

There is always enough truth in these theories to keep them afloat. There are enough jerkly playboys that we can attribute that character to anyone that has easy access to sex. There are enough women holding out for a man that seems to be out of her league that we can attribute that to all women. There are enough women that are generally attracted to the edgy sort of guy that always hurts them in the end that we can see ourselves as would-be saviors or heroes thwarted by the system. Ignore or explain away all counter-evidence and you’re all set. Better yet, you’re permitted to lie and cheat because all you’re doing is playing their game. You’re still better than they are because you are only doing it because you have to and they are doing it because they’re flawed.

I think that it’s these sorts of attitudes that seep into the consciousness of some men that give the unsuccessful the bad reputation that we have. It’s why we’re not seen as the heroes to the women that we so obviously are in our own minds. In the same way that the wealthy often see the poor as a collection of useless dimwits and thieves — and not always completely without reason — the popular see the unpopular as morally or substantively lacking. They see their own success as something that they’ve earned. It’s easy to pay yourself on the back for never having stolen anything when you’ve never been hungry. It’s easy to believe that the game isn’t rigged when you’re always the winner just as it’s easier to convince yourself that you always lose because the game must be rigged rather than to attempt to improve.

So you’ve got people saying that the game is fair and you have those saying that it is impossibly unfair. Neither are entirely correct. The less fortunate in both spheres can often do a whole lot to improve their prospects. Sometimes they’re lazy, though sometimes they just don’t know how and they don’t have the skills to improve nearly as much as they would like to so they get discouraged. And these limits are real. No matter how hard they work they’ll end up in line behind at least some of these people that didn’t have to work much at all to get where they are. These people that have the money and sex that dwarfs whatever incremental improvement they make. Objective improvement, subjective deprivation.

I’m going to try something this week and see how it goes. Because of a trip last weekend to my folks house, I was reminded of various politics-related things that had been bumping around in my mind that I wasn’t sure whether to post on HC. None of them are really policy-related (except one involving condominium constructions), but they do involve Republicans and Democrats. As y’all know, I’m a bit sensitive (maybe hypersensitive) about this becoming a too charged a political atmosphere, so I ask that we refrain about making blanket statements about Republicans and Democrats.

I have worked directly on two political campaigns in my life, one Republican and one Democratic. In neither case was I particularly enthralled with the candidate. In the former case, I had a crush on the campaign manager’s daughter. In the latter case, the candidate was running against Bob Markam, a local congressman that I detest. I managed to find a niche in both campaigns as the moderate guy who can help craft a message that appeals to people outside of the party’s base, which was important because both candidates were running in districts held by the other party.

It’s the latter campaign that I am interested in writing about today.

I was young and idealistic and didn’t realize how much I was wasting my time trying in my own little way to help with the taking down of Markam. I sent an email to the only person that was opposing him that year, a Democrat named Gail Gardner who interestingly enough was a Certified Public Accountant who also worked as a flight attendant. She represented herself to me as a moderate who was fiscally conservative but socially liberal. Music to my ears at the time, not only because it dovetailed with my own views at the time (though since then I’ve become more fiscally liberal and socially conservative) but also because a moderate was needed to win if a Democrat was going to win in the thoroughly conservative district.

The headbutting started almost immediately after I joined. It was my belief that if a Democrat was going to take the district, they would need a message that would say “We may not agree on everything, but I will represent you in Washington better than Markam because {insert reason here}. It was naturally important that she not lose the support of Democrats, but Markam was so loathed among Democrats that there wasn’t much risk of that happening. The goal was to get moderate Republicans and right-leaning independents aboard.

Gail agreed with this in theory. She seemed to really like my ideas. We’d put up a page on the website devoted to why non-Democrats would want to vote for this Democrat. Not unexpected in retrospect, but we had a little bit of difficulty coming up with reasons why a Republican would want to vote for her. The more I talked to her, the more I realized that she may have been economically conservative for a Democrat, but as far as the district came she was moderate-to-liberal. Still, we were able to hammer out support for a balanced budget amendment, middle class tax-cuts, and more transparency in government. It was a little more difficult to come up with things on the social issues, but even there we were able to voice vague support for family values, strong support for gun ownership rights, and even support for English as a national language (if coupled with a federal program for night-classes in English).

The first real problem that we ran into with one another involved plans for an airport to be built on the southwest side of town in her district. She opposed it passionately on environmental concerns, but the idea was popular with her district. I suggested that perhaps we re-frame the issue as one of financial waste. The city has three airports of varying size, what do we need another one for? Wouldn’t our tax dollars be better spent paying down the national debt? That way she could keep her opposition to the airport, but in a way that may not alienate too many potential voters.

Unfortunately, she was having none of it. It was important to her that people know that the correct reason to oppose the airport is because of what it would do to the local wildlife. This was important to her. She said that she was willing to lose the election on this issue if that was what was required. I was getting increasingly frustrated and wanted to say “Look, you’re running as a Democrat in a heavily Republican district. You don’t get many issues that you’re willing to lose over because you’re probably going to lose anyway. I’m not going to ask you to say anything that you don’t believe and feel strongly about, but we’re not in a position here to be heralds of valor if we want any sort of shot at winning. If the point is to bring attention to certain issues and not to win, I have better things to do with my time. Many more important people than you are on the record as saying what you want to say.”

Of course I didn’t and the problem got worse over time. Unexpectedly, she got the endorsement of the Colosse Herald, the local newspaper that rarely ever fails to endorse an incumbent and particularly not an incumbent as powerful as Markam. This was a good thing for her and the campaign in the most immediate sense, but it was a pretty bad thing as far as my involvement with the campaign was concern. The endorsement resulted in an influx of volunteers and money, which was great. The problem is that everyone that came in did so with the same attitude: We’re right, they’re wrong, and we need to convince the voters of that. My perspective remained that that was what the party was for. Our job was to win the election. They felt that we couldn’t lose if we remained principled and right. And I thought that I was naive.

As time progressed, I got the reputation within the campaign as being a Republican mole or saboteur. Rather than being appreciated, my voicing an outside perspective simply told everybody else that I was one of them and that I was more interested in voicing Republican talking points (which became defined as anything that they didn’t all agree on) than I was in winning the election, which would surely happened once people realized how wrong Bob Markam was and how right Gail Gardner was. My voice was increasingly diminished until I was no longer called for meetings and eventually my name and the “Why Independents and Republicans should vote for Gail Gardner” page was removed from the website.

Bob Markam was re-election with a record 78% of the vote.

Epilogue: With the help of my $250, Jim Murali unseated the loathsome Bob Markam in the Republican primary. Since the election that I took part in, more and more of Markam’s bad dealings became known and he was widely viewed as being vulnerable. Regardless of who wins in November, I’m no longer ashamed of my hometown rep. On the other hand, Murali’s campaign apparently misinterpreted my donation as support for his candidacy rather than opposition to Markam, so I get a whole lot of requests for more money for an election I only vaguely care about anymore.

We went out to eat at a BBQ rib restaurant on Saturday. The mutton was particularly inexpensive, so I got myself a pound of it. I figured that as with more rib-based foods one pound wouldn’t go as far as one might think.

I was wrong.

One pound of mutton goes a very, very, very long way.

Perhaps because it stays in the system a very, very, very long time.

A guy named John Paul Koning takes a look at the ever-rising price of comic books and thinks that it defies economic theory:

Basic economics tells us that if the demand for Amazing Spider-Man increases at an existing supply, more will be offered for it and the price will rise. Profits at Marvel, Spider-Man’s publisher, would grow, and managers at Marvel would therefore increase the supply of comics, or competitors would enter the market with similar products. This increase in supply would reduce prices and profits. Conversely, a drop in demand should result in a decline in price, profits, and supply.

Not exactly stellar. Except for the boom years in the early 1990s, the title’s popularity has actually waned. That this hasn’t caused a drop in prices seems to defy economic logic. Even the dramatic plummet in demand for Spider-Man from 1994 to present day has been accompanied by more than a doubling in monthly prices from $1.25 to $2.99. What gives?

Being from the Mises Institute, he is inclined to blame government-controlled dollar supply, but it seems to me that there is a simpler explanation.

If one assumes that there are no or minimal fixed costs, then comic book publishers could respond to decreased demand by lowering price (almost down to cost, if need-be). However, if there are significant fixed costs that they have to recoup, they have bills to pay whether they’re publishing 5,000 comics or 50,000. If you sell 50,000 copies, you can charge less per copy and make it up in volume. Inversely, though, if you only sell 5,000, that means that you need to charge more so that you can meet company expenses.

If you don’t meet company expenses, you basically have two options: raise prices to make more money per unit or lower prices to create enough demand to compensate for making less per unit. Which route you should go depends on whether your product has an elastic or inelastic demand. In other words, how cost-conscious are your consumers? How much affect does the price of your product have on their decision to buy it?

Back when comics were cheap, they were sold in convenience stores, drug stores, and all manner of places. Comic books were usually self-contained, meaning that if you missed an issue it was no big deal. It was a good environment for the casual reader. In this environment, it is likely that comic books were relatively elastic in demand. The potential customer looks on the rack, sees something for a nickel, has a nickel and some time to kill, and decides to buy it. Back then, keeping costs and prices down was extremely important.

The comic book market has not been like that for some time now. Comics are still sold at some convenience stores, drug stores, and gas stations, but not very many. They have been replaced by hobby shops, which transformed the customer base from a casual one to a devoted one. Or maybe they got moved to hobby shops because they had already lost or were losing the casual customer base. Either way, after the shift the comic book companies had a different kind of consumer. And a different kind of product. Storylines now not only span issues of the same series, but cross-over into other series. Once every year or two, they have a storyline that spread over nearly every series in their product line. The result is that devoted fans have more and more comics to buy, but there are a lot fewer of them.

When you have a devoted customer base, though, you have people that are willing to pay more for the product if that’s what they need to do. It’s a lot easier to convince them to pay more than it is to try to bring the casual customer back into the fold. So that’s what the comic book industry has been doing. Has it worked? Not really. Now they’re caught in a cycle where the books are geared to please an ever-dwindling customer base and fail to attract new readers. However, it’s far from clear that the other choice would work out any better. I’ve actually been mulling over a post on what I would do if I were in charge of DC Comics. Maybe I should get around to it.

So anyway, comic book pricing does not really “defy” economic theory in any meaningful sense. The real reason involves laws of demand elasticity and inelasticity , fixed and marginal costs, and profit margins. I don’t think it involves national monetary policy.

It can be a risky proposition, though, because if you raise prices more and more people stop buying, then you’re still not making money. What you have to hope is that your customer base is willing to pay more to keep your enterprise afloat. In economic terms, you have to hope that your product does not have the elastic demand curve. But if your customer base is small but devoted, you can get away with it.

When I was younger, I was a Sprite nut. I drank it all the time. I’m not sure how or when that changed, but it did somewhere along the way. Maybe it was the point when I realized that it wasn’t supplying me with my daily dose of caffeine. Since then, I’ve stopped drinking Sprite everywhere except at restaurants. I think that Sprite from a fountain tastes better than Sprite from a can. Or maybe Sprite just tastes better with food. Or maybe it’s an aversion to drinking caffeine late in the day and I carried the habit over from dinner to lunch. Dunno.

One of the things I miss most about Deseret was the proliferation of Pepsi products at restaurants. Pepsi isn’t very big in the South, where we call all soft drinks by their competitor’s name, leaving them Cannon to Coke’s Xerox. Being a good southern boy, I don’t care much for Pepsi, either, but since the restaurants carried Pepsi products that meant that they more often than not carried Mountain Dew. It wasn’t just a Coke/Pepsi thing, either, because those places that didn’t carry Pepsi products still carried caffeine-punched, citrusy Mello Yello, a brand that all but died in Delosa a long time ago. For a state whose primary religion discourages caffeine consumption, Deseretians like their caffeine.

Since moving to Estacado, I’ve all but stopped asking restaurants if they carry Mountain Dew. I’ve gone back to drinking Sprite. So when a group of us went out to eat lunch yesterday and the waiter asked what I wanted, I said Sprite and didn’t think any more about it. When Pat asked for a Coke and he said that they carried Pepsi, it didn’t raise the flag that it ought to have raised. After the waiter left, the thought did occur to me that I could have seen if they carried Mountain Dew, but the bigger looming issue didn’t confront me until I tasted my “Sprite” and discovered that it wasn’t Sprite at all. It was Sierra Mist.

It seems that whenever Coke or Pepsi comes up with something successful, the other will try to come up with an equivalent. When Dr Pepper was all the rage, Coke came up with Mr Pibb. Coke created Mello Yello as an alternative to Mountain Dew. Then, when that didn’t work, they released something called Surge when I was attending Southern Tech. Surge wasn’t very good (except with a certain kind of cookie), but since Sotech had signed over their soul to the Coca-Cola company and didn’t offer any competitors’ product, I had to make due. I learned to like it the same way that I learned to like beer… relentless conditioning. When they pulled Surge off the shelf, I shed not a tear. More recently, Coca-Cola has offered Vault, which is like Surge but with a more energy-drink feel (like MDX is to Mountain Dew).

One thing that Pepsi has always been missing is a lemon-lime drink to match Coca-Cola’s Sprite. Pepsi can and does sometimes align itself with Dr Pepper, but rather than taking advantage of their strong relationship with 7-up, Pepsi released Sierra Mist. And it is terrible. And for some reason, the waiter who was so conscientious about asking Pat whether Pepsi was okay with her when she ordered a coke, the guy didn’t ask me.

Sierra Mist has apparently been a pretty successful replicate compared to most and for the loss of me I cannot understand why. Seriously, Walmart brand tastes just as good. I remember commenting when Surge came out that it wasn’t as good as store brand Big K Citrus Drop, which at least managed to stake out its own taste. Similarly, Mello Yello has its own distinct taste. Surge was just a rip-off. Sierra Mist isn’t even a rip-off. It’s a cheap knock-off. Yet it has not only survived, but it has eclipsed 7-Up as the chief alternative to Sprite. As Surge and other failed attempts have indicated, a soft drink company can’t force such a thing onto the public (and since Pepsi has a special relationship with 7-Up it was hardly necessary that they try), which means that somebody somewhere actually likes this stuff.

I drank three sips of it and then flagged down the waiter and asked for a Mountain Dew, Pepsi, or anything else they might have instead. The earnest waiter actually bought me both and took the Sierra Mist out of my sight.

The Deseret Morning News, a newspaper owned by the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints (LDS), has a couple of interesting articles pertaining to the Yearning For Zion (YFZ) compound in Texas, and the effect that it has had on Mormons.

The first article is about Mormons in the cities of the area of the YFZ compound and some of the hardships that mainstream Mormons face by being lumped together with the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints (FLDS):

“There are some people here that believe anything bad about Mormons and that’s what they’re going to do,” said Charles L. Webb, who serves as president of the Abilene, Texas, stake.

The LDS Church’s presence in this part of Texas is small. The Abilene stake covers an area 25,000 square miles in size with about 3,000 members. There are only two LDS chapels in San Angelo, but a number of Baptist and other evangelical Christian churches. It’s the polar opposite of Utah, where the LDS Church is the dominant faith.

In repeated statements, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have differentiated between the two faiths and expressed disappointment that some news media outlets have lumped the two together.

I must confess that prior to moving out west I never thought much about Mormons, but to the extent that I thought about them and their history of polygamy it probably would have boiled down to “Mormons stopped practicing polygamy so that Utah could become a state, but some Mormons still practice it.” In a sense that’s true because people that think of themselves as Mormon do practice it, but it wildly understates the fissure between the two groups. It can be likened to the fact that most Christians don’t speak in tongues but some do.

The problem is that the protestant comparison doesn’t apply because protestants are not generally institutional in nature. You have denominations like mine that are hierarchial but not uniform or dogmatic and churches like the Southern Baptists that are dogmatic and somewhat uniform but not very hierarchial. The LDS Church, on the other hand, is more like the Catholic Church in nature, which is hierarchial both in organization and theological substance. The Catholics have their Pope, the Mormons their President. You are either a member in good standing with Salt Lake City or The Vatican or you are not. Protestants can shift this way or that or attend one church or another depending on their personal beliefs, but the Catholic and Mormon churches don’t really operate that way.

So from the outside looking in, we can see the LDS and FLDS as two different kinds of Mormons, perhaps “good Mormons” and “bad Mormons”, from their perspective there are Mormons and non-Mormons, each believing that the other is the non. Unfortunately, this is one of the areas where we don’t have good terminology to differentiate the two without simply adding an adjective in front to point to which group we mean. The adjective suggests that they are two parts of the same thing, which from a structural and theological perspective they just aren’t. Where’s a good term like Davidians when you need one? For purposes of this post, I will refer to the SLC-based Mormons simply as Mormons and the FLDS Mormons as Creeps.

In addition to terminology, one thing that a lot of people (including some that should know better) seem to believe is that Mormons take a nudge-nudge-wink-wink approach to polygamy. That they simply banned it out of political expedience but support it in spirit. I don’t know what goes on in LDS Temples, but far and away the most anti-polygamy people I have ever met were members of the LDS Church. Perhaps they were putting on a show for me or they’re double-secretly instructed to act that way or something, but that’s a pretty big stretch. I never brought it up and the conversations that come to mind are conversations that occurred between Mormons and not speeches directed at me.

I’ve heard them defend their history with it. I’ve heard something about something akin to polygamy exists in the afterlife (Abel or Willard can clear this up if they’d like). But as an institution in the modern-day United States, I haven’t heard a word in support of it even in the context of a theoretical discussion. I know far more non-Mormons that think that it should be legal. We’re all angry about what happened in Eldorado, but well before this dust-up or even the arrest of Warren Jeffs, the disdain for the FLDS when it came up was palpable and primarily on grounds of the polygamy rather than the incest/rape that they could easily hang their hat on if they simply wanted to distance themselves from the Creeps.

I am as skeptical as anyone else about the divine revelation that suddenly overturned their polygamist traditions at precisely the point where it was most politically necessary to do so, but I am convinced that they believe that God has declared it wrong and thus it is about as wrong as wrong can be.

Of course, the real scandal in Eldorado is not the polygamy. We try to be accommodating to religious sects so long as they mostly keep to themselves and don’t present a clear danger to its own members (think Amish). The real issues are the plural marriages involving minors, the scent of incest, and the expulsion of young men into a world that they are unprepared for. I don’t personally think polygamy should be legal, but without these things I would be inclined to let the FLDS be the same way we leave the Amish be.

That brings me to the second article in the Deseret Morning News, which concerns a judge’s inquiry as to whether or not the LDS Church might come in and monitor the FLDS prayer services:

SAN ANGELO, Texas — A judge wants to see if local LDS Church members would be willing to help supervise prayer services at the makeshift shelter where Fundamentalist LDS women and children are being housed.

In response, a local official of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said he was baffled by the judge’s suggestion. {…}

The president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ stake in Abilene, Texas, which oversees San Angelo, was surprised by the judge’s request.

“They think we’re the same ones because we use the Book of Mormon,” Charles L. Webb told the Deseret News. “I’m dumbfounded they would suggest that.”

Webb said he plans to contact LDS Church headquarters in Salt Lake City for guidance before responding to the court’s request. The judge did say in court that if that fails, she would consider other options.

I imagine that the bafflement and whiff of frustration is akin to asking a Vietnamese-American if he can translate for someone that speaks Chinese. “We all look alike to you?”

Be that as it may, I would think that there would be a tremendous opportunity here for the LDS to be a great help for this terrible situation. Though the doctrinal differences between the LDS and FLDS are no doubt legion, the LDS is the closest thing that we have to their faith in the community of reputable religions in the United States. The children of the FLDS are in for some serious theological detoxification that isn’t going to be easy (or likely successful) no matter how we go about it. I can’t help but think that it would be a lot more successful if it started with representatives of a religion whose doctrine that might be at least a little bit familiar.

I may not be theologically in sync with the Mormons, but if teaching these young people that God is good, Jesus saved mankind, and Joseph Smith resurrected the one true church of God will help acclimate these young people to the broader world around them, I think that could be a very, very good thing. Bringing back the lost sheep, as it were.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say because I’m not a Mormon and it’s not my job (or my interest) to protect the church’s interests. And reaching out to the FLDS is quite likely not in the church’s best interest. It could be a PR nightmare that would do their reputation a lot more harm than good. They’re already fighting to differentiate themselves from the Creeps. By inserting themselves into the situation (even at a judge’s request), they’d be sabotaging that differentiation. They’d be further melding into the minds the connection between the two churches that too many people believe anyway.

It sounds crass and cynical to say it, but it’s the church’s leadership that has the responsibility of protecting its image. Whatever church you may belong to, don’t pretend that your church leaders are any different. For a church to be able to reach out and do good work, it must be positively received by the community. Reaching out to lost children of the FLDS would not help in that regard.

So as such, I guess I can understand this passage from the first article:

Webb said he has discouraged members from helping out in the name of the LDS Church to avoid confusion between the two faiths, but said they should offer their services as individuals. The local Baptist congregations have contracts to provide relief services in disaster situations.

San Angelo 2nd Ward Bishop Jeffrey Bushman was contacted by a chaplain helping the FLDS women when they were being housed at Fort Concho. The women had requested copies of the Book of Mormon.

He sent them some copies.

“They didn’t have anything or bring anything with them, I guess, and they wanted some scriptures and they asked for the Book of Mormon,” Bushman said. “I didn’t mind. We don’t ever mind giving out (copies of the) Book of Mormon to people.”

God: It was good to see you last Sunday.

trumwill: Was it?

God: Sure. Like any father I love it when my children come to visit. Even if they do mess up the confessional.

trumwill: Yeah. They didn’t do the usual one. I didn’t know the words to the one that they were doing and by the time I realized that I was lost, I knew that it was more than half way through and that there wasn’t any point to finding the prayer book.

God: If you didn’t know the words, how did you know that it was almost finished?

trumwill: The words change, but the spirit is usually the same. There’s sort of a rhyme and rhythm to the way it works. That’s one of the things that I love about being an Episcopalian. It’s all rhythmic and sure. Even if I get lost, I sort of know where I am. Maybe You prefer the services where people are jumping up and down yelling their devotion to You. I like the rhythm. It took me so long to find it. Remember when I was a kid and I thought that we should say the words more forcefully? For thine is the KINGDOM, the POWER, and the GLORY…

God: You were young and impatient.

trumwill: I’m old and impatient. Back then I was just young and bored. I didn’t know how to join the rhythm of the service. Say the participatory prayers, listen to the Gospels, contemplate the Gospel. I spent so much time thinking that there ought to be ways that it could be done quicker and more interesting. If I could have just taken a step back and go with the flow that was given, slow my mind down and contemplate the reason for the moment, it would have probably given me the speed and interest I could have used.

God: That’s true of a lot of things in your life.

trumwill: It’s the story of my life. I can be so insistent on finding my own way that I overlook the path placed in front of me. I’m so worried about finding that optimal place between effort and result that I ignore the experiences of those around me. I keep thinking that maybe I can get by with doing less or that I will do more and have no more to show for it. That I’ll do my job, to go church, diet, exercise, quit smoking… and it won’t do any good. Wasted effort. I ignore that people that do certain things turn out better than people that do other things. No matter how much life proves otherwise, I never stop thinking that the rules of cause and effect and social rewards and punishments just won’t work for me.

God: That’s quite the dilemma. Moreso because you can see it right in front of you and feel that there isn’t anything that you can do about it.

trumwill: If I do something about it, that might just be wasted effort. In case I am right and what I see all around me is wrong, I mean.

God: I’m not sure what to say to that.

trumwill: Score one for the Willmeister. I just stumped God!

God: People stump me all the time. By not doing what they oughtn’t be doing. By giving you free will, I’ve sacrificed the power to be unstumpable. Stumping me is a dubious achievement. It’s one that comes with something opposite of a reward.

trumwill: So… yeah… what were we talking about?

God: Church. I’m pleased that you chose to sing today.

trumwill: Well yeah. My father… I mean, you know… my other father… and I used to always say that our gift to You in Your house was not singing. If You’d intended me to sing, I figured that you’d have given me a pleasant voice.

God: Your voice is as pleasant as it is sincere.

trumwill: Is it sincere? I mean half of the hymnals don’t mean a whole lot to me personally. They’re just what was chosen by some committee in New York or the Southfield Archdiocese. I never cared enough to even find out.

God: Regardless of the meaning the songs may have to you personally, perhaps it is that you are singing it together that gives it meaning to you. That allows it to become part of the rhythm that you appreciate.

trumwill: Perhaps.

God: Did you enjoy the service?

trumwill: Is the service something to be enjoyed?

God: I’d prefer it bring enjoyment than misery, though I suppose that there is more to consider than enjoyment.

trumwill: Then why do You ask the question?

God: Because you haven’t been to church since Christmas. You even missed Easter this year.

trumwill: Yeah, sorry about that. I was up too late the night before.

God: You intended to go the next week, though, didn’t you? Or the week after? The week before, the week before that…

trumwill: I intend to do a lot of things that I don’t get around to doing.

God: True enough. I just find it interesting that you would place more value on sleeping in than taking the simple steps it would take to visit my house on Sunday mornings.

trumwill: Sorry again. Boy, I’ve apologized twice now. Maybe I’m making up for goofing up the confessional.

God: Or maybe you’re gearing up to tell me why you haven’t stopped by.

trumwill: You know why. You’re omniscient.

God: I know what I know, but sometimes you need to tell somebody something to know it.

trumwill: It’s like Dad when I first moved to Deseret. How I avoided calling him and talking to him. I came up with all sorts of good reasons. Just like with church. I’ll do it later, tomorrow, the next day, next week. In reality, I guess, I didn’t want to talk to him because I didn’t want to face up to my failures.

God: Your failures?

trumwill: Yeah. I didn’t have a job yet. I didn’t have my Deseretian license plate or driver’s license. I didn’t know how long it would take for me to find a job and get settled in. I didn’t want to talk to him and tell him about all the things that I hadn’t yet done.

God: Would you have had nothing else to talk about?

trumwill: I’m sure I would have found things to talk about. But I would have feared that he would have been thinking the whole time of all the ways I’ve disappointed him. He’s rarely tried to make me feel that way, but his patience only makes me more impatient. His belief that I would make right made me feel all the worse for not doing so. My fear of his belief that I am a failure made me not want to call and validate his disappointment in me.

God: I am certain that he would have loved to hear from you. Regardless of what good news you may not have had to share with him.

trumwill: Wait… you know in the omniscient way that you know everything, or you know because you’re empathetic to my cutting him off and sympathetic to how I feel about it?

God: I know because I don’t ask that you have all good news before coming to visit me. Or to talk to me. Or to think about me. Some people come to me precisely because they are incomplete in some fashion or another. They come for help.

trumwill: Sort of like “Dear God, please find me a job?”

God: No. Sort of like the prayer you would sometimes say before taking an important test at school or before embarking on some other test of importance to you. You wouldn’t ask that I got you A’s. You asked that I give you the composure to stand up to the challenge.

trumwill: I left it deliberately vague, but I wanted that A. I just knew that I hadn’t worked enough to earn it.

God: You often got it.

trumwill: Yeah. Thanks for that. I don’t know. I just feel like maybe once I’ve got my crap together and had something to show You that maybe… I don’t know… I’d have something to show you rather than being all empty-handed and embarassed. Maybe once I’m already headed in the right direction, maybe then I can show you what I’ve got instead of standing before You as the sum of everything that I haven’t.

God: Do you remember what eventually happened when you cut your father off?

trumwill: Yeah. He got impatient and found my blog, where I’d written about my guilt about not talking to him. He started calling more often so that I couldn’t keep brushing him off.

God: And what happened?

trumwill: Things got better. My mind cleared from something that had been bothering me a great deal. I don’t know that it helped me find work any faster, but it made the meantime more bearable.

God: Right.

trumwill: Right.

God: Well?

trumwill: Well, right now I’ve fallen behind in so many ways and until I can get right on some of them it’s hard to get right on all of them. Sort of like it’s hard to stop smoking as long as I eat crappy food, but it’s hard to stop eating crappy food as long as I’m drinking crappy drinks because they go together. Crappy drinks go with cigarettes.

God: And once you’re a disgusting sinner, you can just stay there with the idle dream that you can suddenly give it all up at once and become a respectable citizen that can call your father and go to church and face the world.

trumwill: All or nothing, that’s me.

God: How’s that working out for you?

trumwill: One of these days, Lord. One of these days.

God: And nothing scares you more.

trumwill: Not that I can think of.

God: Except that maybe it won’t.

trumwill: Except that.

If you thought you saw a post here about soft drinks, you’re not mistaken. I accidentally posted it instead of saved it. After some revision, it will be posted sometime in the next couple of days.

I’ve got a news story to share, but the link will be at the end. I’m interested in figuring out at what point “the line” is crossed in the situation presented. What follows will be a listing of possible points:

#1 - A 4-year-old child is involved.
#2 - The father is now 19 years old. He has a 4 year old child.
#3 - The mother is also still a “teenager” (age undisclosed, presumably 19 or younger).
#4 - The father is a member of a criminal latino gang called the “Westside Ballers.”
#5 - The mother is a member of the Crips (she’s black).
#6 - The two were arguing over which gang the child should be a member of.
#7 - This was apparently so important to the father that he broke into the mother’s workplace and threatened to kill her.

#8 - Child Protective Services has no interest/has taken no action in this case.

The story’s out of ABC 7 news in Denver.

-{The following is an extrapolation of a story mentioned on an exchange with Phi. The story takes place fourteen or fifteen years ago. Good lord, I’m old. When did that happen?}-

My first kiss was not in a particularly ideal situation. First, she was drunk. Not just drunk, she was thrashed. The girl I really loved* at the time was in the next room, sleeping on the floor by the couch wherein laid the guy that she thought that she loved and whose baby she thought that she might be carrying. The first girl I ever kissed had to kiss me something like fifteen times before I finally returned it.

Her name was Delsie Brown, and I met her a few months before. Until I met her I was unaware that she existed. Her sister Velva lived on the other side of town. We had a common friend in a guy named Matt Jones, a would-be hippie who was rapidly introducing me to a world with which I was utterly unfamiliar. I didn’t know that Delsie existed.

Things with Velva were an immediate bust. Her acerbic nature didn’t come with an ironic or cynical smile like I had hoped but rather with a bothered and grumpy demeanor that I found extremely off-putting. Delsie was very smiley and pleasant, though. That was most of what I took away from that initial meeting.

I still became good friends with Velva and through her kept in touch with Delsie, but on the whole didn’t think much about her until I heard from the winds that she might be interested in me. I was flattered but at that point still crazy about Tracey. She and I talked about it and she understood.

Tracey kept slipping further and further from my grasp and Delsie watched on. I wasn’t sure if she was watching on sympathetically or as a predator waiting to pounce. At a party she could see how distant Tracey and I had become and with the help of large amounts of vodka, she finally moved in.

She was fiercely flirtatious. It startled by already unstable mind. Finally, there came a point where I’d had enough. I’d had it with Tracey and the ones that came before her and everyone that was keeping me on the sidelines. Here was someone that wanted me. Someone nice and cute and pleasant. Someone that I would surely fall in love with once I could expel Tracey from my mind. So I kissed her back. My friend Charlie and his then-girlfriend’s eyes whopped open. They were the only audience we had.

The alcohol got the better of Delsie and she started becoming very tired. Some friends helped her to bed (the party was at her house). She kept calling out to me to “warm her up” because she was cold. It got embarassing after a while, but by that point she was far too plastered for me to do anything with her. The alcohol that smoothed off the edges earlier had worked its way through her entire system, sinking her.

We weren’t in a relationship. I never pretended otherwise. She gently nudged for one, but for the most part was willing to leave well enough alone. Things seemed to go better that way. I kept waiting to start liking her, but it never really happened. She was waiting, too, but unlike me I think that she was sure that it was coming. There was no reason for it not to.

We finally reached the point where we had done everything that we could do without actually having sex**. If the relationship were to progress, either we’d need to have sex or we’d actually need to declare that it was, in fact, a relationship. As you can imagine, I was reticent on the second point. But I was also reticent on the first.

Though she kept telling me to, I kept “forgetting” to buy some condoms. Part of me was embarassed at the prospect of going to a store and buying some, but a bigger part of me saw that as a safety hatch. Just like our not being in a relationship meant that I wasn’t obligated to stick by her, the fact that I kept not bringing protection meant that nothing permanent could happen. She was adament about that.

Then, unexpectedly, she caved. She said that she didn’t care about the condom. I was a virgin, after all, and she had without my knowledge started taking the pill in preparation for this moment with me.

Inside and outside of that room, I was in such a bad place at the time that I held nothing sacred and a big part of me wanted to lose my virginity in such a depraved manner as with a girl that I’d increasingly cared less about but who was falling more and more in love with me. It would have been all too fitting given everything. What was I waiting for. Love? What a damn joke.

I don’t know exactly what happened, but it was like a soft whisper in my ear simply said “No.” I don’t know what possessed me to listen to it, but I did.

I wish I could say that I put my clothes back on, left her room, and never did anything sensual with her again. Instead, there was a tailing off. There were only a couple more instances of physicality. We had nowhere to go. She was losing hope.

One time when we were together in a situation that wasn’t really compromising but it was obvious what we were doing, a friend of mine named Buck walked in on us. A little while later, he let slip how lucky he thought I was that Delsie and I had that kind of special relationship. I started getting the impression that it may not have been an entirely idle comment. I think my bringing it up with Delsie was the last straw for her. She knew that by that point I was trying to get rid of her.

When she and Buck got together, I thought that it was a happy ending for everyone but me, the one that didn’t really deserve a happy ending. Turned out that the hurt was only just beginning for Delsie, and I was left with something else to feel guilty about.

* - “Love” is such a relative concept, but there are four people over my life that I feel I can accurately say that I “loved”. She was the first.

** - At least that’s what I thought at the time. I’ve since learned different.

In a previous post about a friend I had when I was younger, I wrote :

Once upon a time he had smart, witty, and ambitious young ladies swooning over him and girls of modelesque beauty competing for him and the last two girlfriends of his that I met were mediocre-looking art school dropouts crafting the lowest form of amateur adolescent/post-adolescent art… poetry.

My friend Kyle and I went to hang out at a mutual friend’s house last week. The mutual friend’s wife is a professional graphic designer and a visual artist of many stripes. While I feel a bit self-conscious about the bare 12 year old anime character hanging on the wall of our bedroom, our apartment has nothing on their house. Hanging on their wall is some abstract piece with an unclothed woman on all fours. The front half of her is on the bottom left of the piece and the back half is on the upper right. That’s about all their is to the painting.

Kyle’s wife commented that she was unimpressed. They’d also apparently been to an art showing a while back where he was similarly unimpressed. Kyle’s a pretty culturally liberal guy, but there’s only so much art with genitalia placed against a backdrop of this or that before it gets sort of boring.

I responded:

You don’t UNDERSTAND! They’re SPEAKING OUT against our SEXUALLY REPRESSIVE CULTURE. They’re expressing their SEXUAL FREEDOM by exposing our PURITANICAL SOCIETY and all its taboos. If you fail to appreciate their artwork, you’ve been BRAINWASHED by the religious zealotry of our culture that seeks to control us by making us ASHAMED OF OUR BODIES!!!!

Or… alternately…

They’re EXPOSING THE POINTLESSNESS OF LIFE AND MORALITY by taking our most private parts and putting it out there for all the world to see! They are taking that which we see as SACRED and DEFILING IT as a grand tribute to the NIHILISM that is our culture, every culture, and LIFE ITSELF!!!!

I don’t know if that’s what the guy with the painting of the penis in the wine glass was aiming for, and it’s almost certainly not the terminology that he would use, but I’d be surprised it wasn’t along the lines of one of the above options or something else equally inane.

But it’s not the point that they’re making that bothers me. Yeah, sure, exploring what we do believe (sexual freedom or opposition to it) or don’t believe (nihilism) has been done, but there are few areas of art that haven’t. It’s not even the repetitiveness of it within the anti-commercial art world, necessarily. What irritates me a little bit about it is that they do something simple, assign the more complicated task of interpretation to the viewer, dismiss criticism of it as a failure on the part of the viewer, and take credit for the viewer’s ability to see the patterns in the static and find some grand meaning in the image of a penis wrapped around a can of aerosol or a Jesus dumped in a jar of urine or whatever.

The problem with a lot of abstract art, of freestyle poetry, or of any sort of extremely abstract art, is two-fold:

1. Bad art is incredibly easy to make.
2. Good art and bad art are not easily compared or differentiated from one another.

Take the absolute worst action film you’ve ever seen. The worse, the better for our purposes. For me it was a movie called Terminal Impact, about a cop trying to bust an organization that’s taking college students (that look way too old to be college students) and turning them into cyborg warriors. The movie was so bad and so destined for obvious failure that the only hope they had of selling it was to name it similar to a Charlie Sheen movie called Terminal Velocity that came out a couple years earlier, replicate the font of the movie’s title, and cross their fingers and hope that people get confused in the video store and say “Hey, Terminal Impact. That’s the one with Charlie Sheen, right? Let’s not even look on the back and rent it anyway!” Notably, after the Terminal Velocity is forgotten, Terminal Impact was renamed Cyborg Cop III so that they could sell it as a trilogy with two completely unrelated movies with the guy who played the American Ninja in the third and fourth American Ninja movies.

Despite all this, Terminal Impact is in some ways more impressive to me than Piss Christ. Say what I will about the movie, but TI took quite of big of effort to make. Sure, they didn’t have the special effects of the Terminator, but their were motorcycle chases and some explosions. More than that, though, there were sound people and lighting people and people that played their parts (I hesitate to call them “actors”). Production costs I’m sure ran somewhere into the thousands. Money was raised, allocated, and spent. Piss Christ required a crucifix, urine, a jar, and some great lighting.

Further, Terminal Impact can rather easily be judged on its own merits. I judged it and found it lacking. Compare Terminal Impact with its namesake or any Jean Claude Van Damme movie or even American Ninja IV (which coincidentally was the worst action movie I’d seen prior to TI). You not only have something to compare it to, you but you have technical merits in addition to artistic ones that you can judge it with. With the aerosol can, all you can say technically is “Yep, that looks like a weewee. Yep, that’s a spray can that says ‘aerosol’ on it.”

I’m not saying that abstract art isn’t art and that it cannot be really, really good. It really can. The problem is the “e. e. cummings Effect”, wherein the comparatively few good artists are swamped by the lazy ones that don’t want to put any effort into adhering to any guidelines or doing any of the work that less abstract art work requires.

When I was in junior high I used to write comic books. The original ones weren’t very good, but I did put some effort into them and the thought and effort I put into them became the building blocks with which I started producing works that were good (in my opinion, at least). But for a while after the original ones, I got lazy. I found a formula to use to used it over and over and over again (though, to my credit, I was able to use the established pattern to make later deviations more interesting and humorous than they otherwise would have been). By virtue of the comic book medium, it wasn’t hard to tell that they sucked. With abstract art, there’s no way to tell, and thus for people that don’t want to make the effort, it’s an extremely easy way out. Just let the audience to the heavy lifting.

When it comes to the creation of something — most things — there is a mixture of artistry and craftsmanship. Even utilitarian things things such as cars that are meant to drive us places have artistry impressed upon it to make it look like something we want to be seen in. Carpentry is making something useful but also making it aesthetically pleasing. Movies are meant to entertain us, but pre-production requires a lot of thought and the production requires a lot of work. Novels are a mixture of ideas (artistry) and presentation (craftsmanship). Art without craft leads to the proliferation of crap.

And so it is with poetry. I was a bad poet once. I wrote poetry because I didn’t know how to write prose well. A poem is much easier to write than a book and if you go all “freestyle” you remove any effort at all. Maddox nailed it when he offered the following tips on writing (bad) poetry:

Writing bad poetry is easy when you disregard meter, pace, and rhyming scheme. Just make sure to follow a few simple guidelines:
1. Never write about anything cheerful. Remember, you are a tortured artist. Be one.
2. Be sure to use the following words at least once per sentence, no fewer than 50 times per poem: lament, loathe, soul, darkness, bitter, agony, despair, misery, anguish, pain, suffer, woe, hate, death, love, sultry, angel, rose, acrid and nihilism. Nihilism is a good one because it comes up all the time in normal conversations.

It’s easy, here’s a sample to get you started:

fire… burning… agony…
sultry shivers of a dark essence
why am i tortured with this nihilistic existence?
bitter… darkness… despair.

notice the constant lower case? i added that touch to be unique. unique people type in lower case.

That is the tragedy which e. e. cummings has wrought. Generations of young people that can just string together some sentences with some basic idea in mind and allow themselves to think that they’ve created something worthwhile.

It all begins with a simple question: “How long will it take to test this?”

The true answer is “It depends”, but that’s the wrong answer. So to give them the right answer, we start asking questions. Questions that we already know both answers to. We know what their verbal answer will be and we know what the real answer will be. The first question is “Will any more features be added before the project is complete?” and the second question is “What kind of shape will it be in when it gets to us?”

Their answers will be “Of course not” and “There may be minor problems, but we expect it to be in good working order.” They’re lying, of course, but you can’t call them on it because they don’t know that they’re lying. The real answers may have been “Yes” and “Something resembling something that works some of the time” in every single version of every product the company has ever made, but hope springs eternal. Quality Assurance has the reputation of being cynical even without letting loose what we really think is going to happen.

At first they want us to give a number of days that the project will take, assuming no major defects. Major defects are always found. Major defects are expected to be found. Everybody knows that there will be major defects except in the brief window that opens when they ask for a QA estimate and the point that we start actually testing. When the major defects are found, we are told that we should have expected this regardless of what they told us at the time because we should know by now that Project Management is always excessively optimistic. We are told that we made the error in judgment of trusting their judgment. Garbage in, garbage out.

We give them a number of days. Our first estimate is usually rejected. We’re told that if we put the due date that far out, everyone will just sit on their hands and procrastinate until the date comes closer. So we give them a less accurate estimate that they are happier with. These estimated days of work are put onto a calendar based on the garbage estimates of other departments. Our expected QA turnaround then stops being an amount of time and starts being a date on a calendar. You know how sometimes when a plane is late taking off the pilot will say “We’ll make up the time in the air.” In our company, when development starts falling behind, the general idea is “We’ll make it up in QA”.

Development always starts with the lowest hanging fruit. The easiest new features and easiest fixes are done first. We don’t mind because it gives us something to start with and because we (along with everyone else) ignore what we know will happen next. Because they start with the easiest stuff, they by definition do the most difficult stuff last. that stuff involves changes deep into the framework of the software. Inevitably, these changes cause ripples that break something that previously worked. Suddenly all of the testing that we got an early start on is moot. Everything about the quality of the software is called into question and it’s called into question deep into their phase of the calendar.

The date at which the finished product is supposed to arrive at our doorstep comes and goes. We haven’t gotten started on the substantial testing because we’re focused on testing the crap that got broken along the way. The Project Manager isn’t worried, though, because they know we got an early jump with all of that testing of the low hanging fruit (that, along with other previously working features, has been broken by substantial changes into seemingly unrelated aspects of the hardware). They think to themselves how efficient those developers are, allowing us to start testing while they’re still working on the product.

The problem with being the last in line is that when the due date comes, we’re the ones holding the hot potato. We’re the ones that didn’t get finished on time. We’re the ones that keep dragging things out by finding new problems that we should have discovered earlier because every aspect of testing needs to be done in the first half of testing. Because everybody knows that there are always going to be some pretty major defects.

Of course, sometimes we don’t help ourselves with our behavior. The things that frustrate us the most are when we find some inkling of a problem but can’t reproduce it. We have a sort of catch-22 wherein Project Managers want all bugs reported and developers don’t want any bugs that don’t have a rock-solid reproducible case. No one will own up to this unwinnable situation because that would mean that we have to accept the fact that there is a problem that we can’t fix. A problem that’s going to frustrate customers. A problem that’s going to tie up our customer support lines. A problem that we won’t have a solution for unless we can somehow reproduce it.

This part manages to sort itself out as the old deadline fades in the rearview mirror and the new deadline approaches. The Project Managers cave and say that we won’t bother looking too deeply into problems that we can’t reproduce. That means that the 80 bug reports become something like 45. This is good news for the Project Manager because he has a chance of hitting his deadline. This is good news for the developers because they can attribute the problem to something freakishly wrong that we did rather than any problems in their code. This drives QA crazy, though, because we have to work around problems that we know the customer is going to have to work around (and they won’t have our expertise). So sometimes we chase the ghost just so that we can prove that it exists.

QA has the reputation for “causing trouble” because we do this sort of thing. Some suggest that we’re trying to find problems so that we can justify our jobs.

In the event that we find something, we’re all celebrating and slapping one another on the back. The Project Managers are looking at their bonus for hitting the deadline evaporate. The developers are looking at all the hours that they’re going to have to work. We’re looking satisfied. This is not an ideal situation, but by this point we have ceased to care. We’re no longer even trying to do our part in releasing a quality product. We’re just trying to prove that we’re not crazy.

So why aren’t we trying to work together in order to produce the best product that we can? Because it’s become patently obvious that nobody else is interested in such a lofty goal. As we’ve passed the arbitrary deadline, the goalposts keep moving towards just getting this product out the door. We’re creating reproducible cases where systems crash and data is lost and they’re deferring them to the next release. Not forever, just for now.

And yet in their heart of hearts everyone knows that what we have is not ready to be used by a real live customer. The Project Managers don’t want to get chewed out by angry customers. The head of Tech Support reads through the list of Known Issues and estimates that he will have to triple his staff in the six months following the release. The President of the company doesn’t like that idea. Everyone is relieved that we won’t face the customer backlash. No one comes out and says any of this. Instead, release is delayed until we can staff tech support. Funds are never approved for the staffing of tech support. Then the point comes when somebody points out that the next release is due out on some arbitrary date that isn’t too far away.

Ahh… the next release. The next release is when everything will get fixed. The next release is when the product will work and the new features added will be worth whatever new bugs are accumulated along the way. Sometimes in QA we hum “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” quietly to ourselves. Because heaven knows between now and then they will not want to add any new features that will involve going into the code and rendering some feature inert or creating some bug. The deadline will be reasonable. We’ll take the time to do everything right. And there absolutely, positively, won’t be any major problems by the time it gets to QA. They inform us of this as they ask for an estimate for how long testing will take.

Clancy got very sick a couple months back while she was working in Sierra (and I was out there visiting her) so we went to the urgent care clinic.

Now we’ve got a bill from the clinic because my insurance carrier (Blue Cross) is saying that she is not eligible.

I am hoping that the problem is that they contacted the wrong insurance company branch. The bill has the state initials (of where she was at the time) in front of it, though I’m not sure if that’s meant to represent the state’s initials or something else. Even if this is the case, how much effort on my part is it going to take to get all of this straightened out? If I was still paid hourly, would it be worth my time? Probably, but still a hassle.

If it’s not a paperwork problem and they’re actually denying the claim, we’ll survive financially. But I’d have to ask how one is not eligible for urgent care. It is, by its very definition, urgent.

Addendum: Apparently they mistranscribed the account number. It had nothing to do with being in a different state.

I meant to thank Brandon Berg for helping me out with the site. Up until recently, the site did not appear correctly on Internet Explorer. Brandon discovered that the problem, which was over-extended margins. Rather than being something that IE was doing wrong, it turned out that it was something that Firefox was compensating for. I noticed the same thing on a web site of my father’s. He was missing a </td> in there somewhere and Firefox was somehow able to correct for it. Unfortunately, such corrections have made me continually forget that there was something wrong and thus fail to correct it.

Because I comment on a lot of more contentious blogs than this one, I pull in readers who follow the links. I’m very happy that they stop by. However, since this site is different in form and substance from the other sites, I feel the need to express what this site is and what it isn’t and what I want it to be and don’t want it to be. There are all sorts of websites out there where one can express their views on the hot political topics of the day, but that’s not what I’m aiming to do here.

First and foremost, Hit Coffee is not a site for spiteful or contentious social commentary. It is a place where I jot down things that happen in my day-to-day life, thoughts about things that happen in my life, and thoughts on what’s going on in the world around us. The comment section is for people that want to share their thoughts and experiences as they relate to what I’m talking about. I want it to be a place where liberals and conservatives, whites and minorities, believers and non-believers, and Americans and non-Americans can feel comfortable. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that I have to put in place certain guidelines. Not just “everybody be nice” guidelines, but guidelines around what is and is not discussed around here. Some issues must be discussed with affirmative kindness, as Bob has put it, but some unfortunately raise our collective blood pressure so high so quickly that I try to steer clear of in general.

As of right now, those issues are: human biodiversity, immigration policy, George W. Bush, politicians attempting to replace George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, anthropological global warming science, and race politics.

For the most part I practice what I preach and I steer clear of these areas. When I do bring them up, I try to do so in a relatively apolitical manner and try (not always successfully) to kick dirt over my own views. If I mention my political views, it’s only to provide context and more in the tone of disclosure than advocacy. If I take a stance on an issue that could be considered political (copyright law, medical malpractice tort, etc) I try to focus more on the effects that the policy or policies have in the world as I see it. When I do this, I will generally provide more latitude in the comment section.

To some extent, gross generalizations are a function of life. It’s pointless to try to avoid it completely. What I would like to avoid is the painting of entire groups or people as “bad” or “evil”. I keep a particular eye on minorities, women, men, liberals, conservatives, feminists, Christians, Mormons, Muslims, atheists, southerners, immigrants (legal or illegal), or Americans in general. Groups that I am not worried about offending are terrorists, America-haters (as in people that despite America, not those that are critical of specific actions that America has taken or aspects of its culture), racists (as in people that believe that minorities are generally worthy of contempt, not mean people that simply hold political views that minorities don’t like), misogynists (see previous disclaimer, replace “minorities” with “women” or “men”), members of the FLDS, and people supportive of those that are attacking Americans and/or our troops abroad. I’d likewise ask that people that disagree with other people refrain from comparing them to any of these groups.

You may be wondering “Gosh, should I be worried about saying anything that might be considered controversial?” Well thus far, if you’ve commented before, there is not a problem or if there has been I have said something about it. I’ve never banned a reader and I’m not sure if I’ve actually deleted any comment that is not my own. I’ve clipped some, but usually having more to do with the accidental slippage of information about me than about anything inappropriate. At this point, the most action I usually take will be to shut down a conversation if I think it’s veering into uncomfortable waters. The long and short of it is that I don’t want to have to worry about who is saying what about whom whenever I’m away from the comment section for a while.

Thus far I haven’t. Thus far I have loved my commentariat. Every last one of you. I don’t want to do anything to discourage you from throwing in your thoughts and perspectives and experiences. Without an active comment section and the conversations that occur here, I probably would have stopped doing this a long time ago. This stated policy is not an attempt to change anything around here. Rather, it’s an attempt to keep this place as genial and open as it has always been.

Comments that veer off-topic are fine so long as they don’t run afoul of anything above. Comments that belong on one message but are accidentally posted onto another message will be relocated. If I ever get the point that I shut down a thread through WordPress, any comments placed on other posts to circumvent the thread-kill will be deleted.

As a courtesy to Hit Coffee readers, I will sometimes clean up someone’s post. I don’t modify content (except as where mentioned above), but if someone posts an HTTP I will replace it with a link. If someone double-posts, I will delete the first post.

Comments containing more than two links (whether typed out or HREFed) are automatically sent to moderation. I will clear them as soon as I can.

Blockquotes are discouraged in comments for technical reasons. If you are quoting something someone else wrote for reference, use Italics.

Comments that are cross-posted are fine, though I’d ask that you mention that you did so.

A guy named Josh Hosler has a neat website where you can see what the Billboard #1 single was on any given date, so I surfed around. It all reminds me of how out-of-touch I am and even more how long I’ve been out of touch. I look at the day before my birthday and I can’t recall a single song listed from the 00’s. My hipness apparently began in about 1991 and ended after 1996. I can actually name about 7 of 10 from both the 80’s and 90’s… but only one after 1996 (and a “country” song at that).

Alas, I cannot remember the song of my birthday, though interestingly the song in a previous year is Harry Nilsson’s “Without You”, which I’ve always had a place in my heart for (there was a period where I loved piano ballads with powerful voices). That lead to me Rhapsody and listening to the many, many versions of that song. Nilsson made it famous, but Mariah Carey’s is probably better known. Anyway, that lead me to Wikipedia to get more background, which lead me to one of the funniest videos that I’ve seen in a long time. (A video which is probably further proof of how out-of-touch I am).

Apparently, a singer for the Bulgarian version of “American Idol” did a cover of that song. The video became quite the sensation, so you’ve all probably seen it. Further proof of how out of touch I am. Anyway, I’m not a big American Idol person and I’ve frankly never seen the alure of the segments where they show wannabee contestants butchering songs. This, though, is priceless. Perhaps because of the language barrier. The exasperation of the judges and the back-and-forth at the end provide amazing bookends.

Apparently Mariah Carey was asked about it. It’s hard to hear her full response over the interpreter, and I’m loath to say anything nice about Mariah Carey (except that her version of Without You could have been much worse), but on the whole I thought she gave a pretty classy response.

I got a 20% raise at my last review. In one sense it’s no big deal because I went from being very underpaid to only moderately underpaid. 20% of a paltry amount isn’t as impressive as 20% of a significant amount. The whole department got significant raises to try to catch us up before everyone leaves. Roberto and I came on to replace two people that left for jobs that paid 80% more.

My boss was very adamant that I keep quiet about how much I was getting. They usually say something about not telling anybody, but he explained for at least three minutes how bad it would be if I told anyone. The other departments were getting the shaft to afford our raise.

One of our developers is leaving Estacado for Cascadia (as I will be in a few months) so we had a going away party last night. Jim Gutierrez, a product manager that used to work in QA, and another guy were talking about their raise, which amounted to $15 a paycheck. I stayed as quiet as I could, but Jim drew me into the conversation.

“I think that we got so shafted that Will here should buy our drinks,” Jim said.

“Heh… not unless they’re giving me a bigger raise I’m not.”

He laughed. “What, 20% isn’t enough for you?”

Jim, having previously worked in QA, was still close to a couple people in the department. So I wasn’t surprised that he knew. I was surprised that he would come out and say that before God and country. Particularly in a Happy Hour with people from all sorts of different departments. Not knowing what to say, I put on a chuckle and said, “Hush, you.”

Jim’s eyes bulged. “Oh, my God! You actually got twenty percent?! I was being facetious. Holy {excrement}! Hey everybody, Will got a 20% raise! I’ll bet the whole department did!”

Every few months my employer puts up some new webfilter and a few days after they end up having to take it down because it gets in the way of the doing of our jobs. About a month ago they put a new one up and unfortunately it looks like this time it’s going to stick. The way they managed to avoid it inhibiting our work is that the filter only comes on after our work should theoretically be done. At 5pm every day it comes up and then at 8am every morning it goes back down. Except on weekends, where it’s down the entire time.

I’m scratching my head trying to figure out what problem this solves that justifies the problems that it creates. By and large people come to and leave work on time, so I don’t think that we have a rash of people riding the clock and surfing the Internet. People downloading from BitTorrent or whatever would be halted by the new filters, but most of that stuff was filtered out anyway by other means. The same goes for pornography, where people could be waiting until after work… except that it’s filtered out anyway. (If you want to know how I know this, the answer is “false positives”. Udolpho is permanently banned for “adult content” and every now and the site for ISO (as in ISO 9000) was among those banned because the filter thought that it had to do with file-swapping).

So one might ask “If it’s only after-hours, why is it a problem?” Well for me it’s not, really. Except that it encourages me to go home from work early. Previously, I would take a break at 5 or shortly after and work late. Now I can’t do that. Nor can I check my email, so I don’t know if something important is in my email box. Previously, I could be assured that if something important came in that I could find out about it. It’s hard to convince myself to stay late under any circumstances, but it’s harder when I can say to myself “I want to know if such-and-such email came in”. It’s also true that the same problems that some people had doing their job from 8-5 they now can’t do if they’re working late or arriving early.

It’s all rather curious.