1. What is your occupation?
I’m a Quality Assurance Analyst testing the software on what is primarily a hardware product.

2. What color are your socks right now?
White. Always white.

3. What are you listening to right now?
A mix collection of MP3s. Stone Temple Pilot’s Big Empty is play right now. I’ll check back in when I complete this and report that song, too. At the end of this quiz, the Eels’s “Dirty Girl” is playing.

4. What was the last thing that you ate?
Half a spicy hamburger.

5. Can you drive a stick shift?
Yeah

6. Last person you spoke to on the phone?
My friend with whom I have a standing weekly appointment to watch Battlestar Galactica on Sunday nights. I was calling to let him know I was good to go this weekend.

7. Do you like the person who tagged you?
I wasn’t tagged

8. How old are you today?
Will Truman is officially 32 years old, though he’s only had eight birthdays.

9. What is your favorite sport to watch?
College Football.

10. What is your favorite drink?
Mountain Dew

11. Have you ever dyed your hair?
I dyed it gray for a costume once. I also dyed it darker brown once to match my beard, which I also dyed in order to see if it would make my beard look a little more full to avoid having to shave it for a job interview. Didn’t work.

12. Last time you hugged your child?
N/A

13. Favorite food?
Enchiladas

14. What was the last movie you watched?
Iron Man

15. Favorite day of the year?
New Year’s Day

16. How do you vent anger?
Writing helps with that.

17. What was your favorite toy as a child?
Can’t remember. Would a TV count?

18. What is your favorite season?
Winter, unless I’m living up north.

19. Ocean or pool?
Ocean.

20. Cherries or Blueberries?
Those are two of my least favorite berries. No preference.

21. Do you want your family & friends to participate?
No one in my family knows I do this. Few realtime friends do, either. Blogfriends can if they’d like to.

22. Who is the most likely to respond?
Barry and Logtar seem to like memes.

24. Living arrangements?
Live with my wife, though she’s currently spending most of her time in another state.

25. When was the last time you cried?
When I found out that my father-in-law likely had pancreatic cancer.

26. What is on the floor of your closet?
Miscellany that I don’t have room for elsewhere. Lots of shoes and boots.

27. Who is the family or friend you have known the longest that you are tagging?
No taggie anybody. Barry is the oldest reader I have that still reads regularly, I think.

28. What did you do last night?
Watched Lost with crappy reception on my TV cause I didn’t buy the theater tickets early enough.

29. Hawaii or Florida?
Florida. At least then I can drive somewhere cooler if I want to.

30. What inspires you?
I’m not easily inspired.

31. What are you most afraid of?
Waking up someday and finding out that I’ve been living someone else’s life.

32. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers?
Spicy with cheese.

33. Favorite dog breed?
Mutts. I don’t like purebreeds. Smaller dogs, generally. With hair. If Clancy and I live in the country, though, larger dogs may make more sense.

34. Favorite day of the week?
Saturday. Is there any other answer?

35 How many states have you lived in?
Four Trumanverse states, soon to be five. Six if you count the state I was born in, though as soon as I left the hospital we went back to the state where my family was living at the time.

36 Do you like these questionnaires?
Sometimes.

37. What kind of car did your very first date drive?
I can’t for the life of me recall. I want to say a silver Toyota, but that’s what my wife drives, which means I’m probably transposing.

38. What is the last book you read?
The last book I completed was Stephen White’s Dead Time. I’m currently wading through Homicide by David Simon and Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano.

39. What are your hobbies?
Computer stuff. Writing. Collecting things.

40. Can you still make the Hula Hoop stay around your waist?
Never could, really.

A number of posts both here and at Bobvis seem to hit on topics of the behavior of men towards women, and whether it’s cultural or not. As with any case study, there are a number of “exceptions that prove the rule”, but by and large I’ve found that men from middle-eastern or (perhaps more to the point) islam-influenced cultures have a pretty paleolithic attitude towards women. Many times, this is dressed up as insisting that the barbaric, humiliating and isolating behavior towards women constitutes some bizarre form of “freedom” for them. In reality, however, the prevailing attitude seems to be that women are (a) unable to take care of themselves, (b) unworthy of being allowed to, (c) inferior to men, and (d) largely to be neither seen nor heard (”barefoot and pregnant” at home).

This seems to have some startling parallels in the FLDS, given more by the latest round of news in which zombie-like women obviously parroting rote-memorized lines (with a very “yes. we. love. our. mother. russia” scared-of-something vibe) trot around and the FLDS, obviously wiser to the PR game, trots out dog-and-pony-show “visits” with their youngest men (who only have one wife… so far) to show how “normal” their insular society is. In reality, of course, FLDS women have no choice of husbands, no control in their own lives, and have even been referred to as “breeding stock” by the FLDS’s “prophet” Warren Jeffs.

On the Islamic side, the source seems pretty obvious - Muslims are expected to revere the “example” of the “prophet” Mohammed. The problem is, Muslim men try to follow Mohammed’s example with women. Mohammed’s track record shows up with some pretty raw abuses, including a couple of rapes he retroactively called “marriages”, plenty of sex-slave concubines, and draconian laws on divorce, proving rape, and sanctioning violence towards women that would probably even make the FLDS think twice.

Unfortunately, the FLDS parallels this pretty well. In the Islamic world, women are “theoretically” allowed veto power on whether to enter into marriage (though the reality in almost all Muslim nations is otherwise). In the FLDS, you either marry who the FLDS “prophet” says, or you’re kicked out of the group - with wives being reassigned at a whim of the “prophet” should a man happen to fall out of favor. Both groups seem to see women as primarily baby factories; both have standards of “modesty” designed around preventing a significant amount of self-expression in women as well as making it hard for them to differentiate their appearances. Salman Rushdie has famously said that “Muslim society is afraid of women’s sexuality; numerous other scholars concur, noting the incredibly pornographic verses and male-oriented idealization of “heaven” (72 beautiful ‘virgins’ that magically re-virginize and a never-softening erection to match). The FLDS ideas towards women seem similar; multiple wives in heaven with few males, women who must be “submissive” towards men at all times, etc.

In Mohammed’s time, he got plenty of men killed fighting his wars, as did most of the other tribes in the region, and so there was a pretty good abundance of “extra” women; a polygamous society necessitates behavior designed to (a) keep women “in their place” and (b) ensure that enough young men die to keep the desired (at least by the rulers) female/male ratio. Today, many young Muslim males are “encouraged” to “fight jihad against the kafir” by the older males of Muslim society, conveniently getting them out of the way for the older Muslim males to take multiple wives - even in countries where it’s against the law (the FLDS seems to have the same idea). The FLDS answer to the “young men problem” has been by simply kicking a lot of young men out into the world, not caring what happens to them after that.

In both cases, the term “submission” pops up too commonly. So common, in fact, that much of the discussion seems more like propaganda to create a “stockholm syndrome” situation; women are told that being veiled, submissive, second-class and utterly subservient is “true freedom” or “holy”, and even pitted against each other to tattle (and thus gain favor with the male of the house) if one of them shows a bit too much self-respect. Even for monogamous Muslims, the threat of taking a second wife - and relegating the current to second-class status - is all too common in Muslim society.

At root, I submit that what both groups (at least the males thereof) are really afraid of is, in fact, women being comfortable in their own self and sexuality. Too many women being confident in themselves, or realizing “I don’t have to be treated this way”, might just mean that they would stop putting up with the abusive behavior altogether.

-{Note from trumwill: I have a(nother) post coming up early next week on the FLDS raid in Texas. When that post comes up it will be an opportunity to discuss the legal angle of those raids, so lets save that discussion until then. Oh, and believe it or not, I have a post in mind for the AOC angle of religious communities and the FLDS raid, so let’s hold off on that for now, too}-

I broke the law over the weekend.

You ever notice how similar the cans for Coke Zero and Budweiser Select are? Being a regular drinker of neither, I didn’t. Turns out that they both have black cans with red lettering. It’s easy to think that you picked up one when you actually picked up the other. Very easy. I did so twice over the course of three days. The first time I simply thought that I was wondering when Budweiser came out with a cola flavored beer (come to think of it, why haven’t they?). The second time, I broke the law. I grabbed a can out of the cooler, opened it, and hit the road.

I realized my mistake after first sip, of course, but that left me with an open can of beer in my cupholder as I was cruising down the Interstate at 70 miles per hour. There are laws about having open alcohol containers on the road and I’m not sure a cop pulling me over would have understood my explanation (or would have wondered how drunk one must be not to notice the difference between beer and coke, which would have had the same effect). I thought about pouring the contents out the window, but figured that would attract undue attention. As would pulling over to the shoulder just to dump a drink.

That got me thinking, though… what exactly is the rationale behind having a separate open container law in addition to BAC drunk driving laws? I mean, if I was drunk, couldn’t they determine that with a breathalizer? Having alcohol in one’s system while driving is not in itself illegal (yet). The process of drinking from a beer can is no different (or more distracting) than drinking from a coke can.

Delosa was actually one of the last states to have an Open Container law. Not too long ago it was ridiculously difficult for a police officer to pull someone over for suspicion of drunk driving. Having a beer can in one’s hand was not sufficient. They’d usually pull people over by simply finding an alternate excuse (”changing lanes too quickly” or whatnot). So maybe the reason for Open Container laws is simply to provide justification for a pull-over. On the other hand, most of the time open containers are not visible until the car has already been pulled over.

I must confess that I don’t know a whole lot about criminal law, but would it be possible to be able to say that having an open container (if the cop can see it, of course) is justification for pulling someone over, but not an offense in and of itself? I’d figured that a behavior’s legality does not prohibit said behavior from being justification for further police scrutiny if it is otherwise suspicious, but maybe I’m wrong about that?

Another thought is that Open Container laws could be aimed at other people drinking in the car and distracting the driver. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, either, though, because driving someone that is drunk is not only legally permissible, but actively encouraged (lest they drive themselves).

More than once I’ve run onto someone that has gotten on their high horse about the fact that “American” is an imprecise term. After all, Canadians are Americans, too, because they’re from North America. And isn’t it just indicative of our arrogance that we think that we think we can just hijack the entire word for ourselves and blah, blah, blah.

Not that anything they say is technically untrue. The problem is the absence of an alternative. If the term “American” should be used to refer to someone from any nation in the Americas, what do we use to refer to citizens of the United States of America? And with the absence of an alternative, it’s not so much arrogance that keeps us referring to ourselves as Americans as much as it is inertia. If the rest of the world were to come up with some (non-lame) word to differentiate ourselves from the Americans of Canada and Brazil and whatnot, I wouldn’t be opposed to using it.

Thus far the only nation that I’m aware of that has done so is, not unsurprisingly, France, which has dictated that Americans should be refered to as Étatsunien, or as best as I can tell the equivalent of Unitedstatian. Doesn’t quite have a ring to it.

I have a Canadian friend that once made the mistake of referring to me as a “yankee”. He was apparently unaware that “yankee” is a regional designation. One that southerners don’t take too kindly to. He pushed back a little bit saying that Canadians use that term all the time and southerners shouldn’t have a problem with it, but I explained to him that there is a history there that he is unaware of. He relented, though he still didn’t have a term to use.

I honestly don’t think that the terminology comes down to Étatsunien arrogance. We’re called “Americans” because we put it at the center of our name. Had we called ourselves Columbia, it wouldn’t be an issue. Had another nation popped up at the same time called itself the Republic of America or something then we likely would have had terms to differentiate between us. Had the South won the Civil War and had there been a United States of America and a Confederate States of America, different terms would likely have popped up (possibly Yankees and Confederates).

So what is there to do? I think that the most logical explanation is the status quo. When it comes to the continental designations, go with North Americans and South Americans. North and South America may share that little strip we call Central America and Mexico may have more in common with South American than Canada and the US, but insofar as we need continental designations, North American and South American are sufficiently different.

Addendum: Apparently Italy has gone with the term Statunitense, which is the equivalent of Étatsunien.

Will and I have a difference of opinion on the death penalty, but fortunately we’ve never had this argument (and there are even instances where Will admits his anti-Death-Penalty stance wavers, because of people who are “poster children” for the death penalty).

However, a standard attack by anti-Death Penalty advocates uses the “odd” idea that many DP supporters are also anti-Abortion (or, sometimes, the phrase “Pro-Life” is used, since the other size uses “Pro-Choice”).

The attack goes as follows: If you support the death penalty and oppose abortion and still claim to be “pro-life”, you’re a hypocrite. After all, you’re claiming one thing that the “Pro-Choice” people claim isn’t a human yet is worth protecting, but an actual matured human being isn’t.

The alternative is simple, but I’ve never heard it expressed so clearly until a local radio host did. I’ll paraphrase slightly because I can’t remember the wording precisely:

In the first case, you have someone who’s committed a crime so heinous that society needs protecting from that in the most ultimate form we can imagine. In the other, you have an innocent (fetus? baby? child?) that has committed no crime. That’s how I can be pro-Death Penalty and anti-Abortion all at once.

I want to thank y’all for answering my survey about DC Comic characters. For those of you that haven’t, I’d still be appreciative if you did so now. Not a big deal, but I’ve found the results to be interesting. I put in some really easy ones (Batman, Superman) and some more obscure ones (Blue Beetle and the extremely obscure Triumph) as a sort of control, figuring that if you don’t know Batman’s origin you’re atypically disinterested and if you do know Triumph’s you’re as big a DC geek as I am (thus far none of you are). I’m trying to get a gauge for how well people outside of those extremes know their superheroes for a thought experiment on how comic books might be re-launched with a more casual customer in mind.

Anyhow, on the subject of comic books, today I was thinking about the biggest foul-ups that DC comics has made in terms of storylines and whatnot. These are small compared to the much larger mistakes that I believe DC and Marvel have made, but these are things that frustrated me as a fan and contributed to my disengaging from the comic book world a few years ago.

1. Hawkman - When I make a wrong turn, I absolutely hate the prospect of turning back. I will wander around for hours to avoid a simple U-turn. So I understand why DC so royally screwed up one of their better-known properties to the point that the company couldn’t even use him for years at a time for fear of having to explain what, precisely, the hell happened. Then, each time they did try to revitalize the character, rather than just create a new one from scratch they’ve added new layers to explaining who the character is. I don’t know where it is that comic book creators get the idea that readers want to spend issue after issue simply explaining the character’s identity. Here is a rundown of the character’s ever-evolving origin. It’s 4,557 words. Generally speaking, I like the fact that DC has a flexible attitude towards continuity and doesn’t let continuity get in the way of a good story. I like the fact that they go back and update things and fix things because they often make things a lot more smooth in the process. The thing is that revisions should simplify and add clarity. It should not add headaches and it should never make a character unusable.
2. Wonder Woman - If they got too entangled in Hawkman’s origin, for Wonder Woman they went in the other direction. They declared that every previous issue of Wonder Woman never happened. They could have done a reboot the same way that they did with Superman wherein a lot of his history was wiped out of continuity but at least there was a history that could be rewritten or refitted with the new origin, but instead they simply declared that there has never been a Wonder Woman before. Oh… then they got entangled, having a time-travel story where Wonder Woman’s mother went back in time and filled the spot of the Wonder Woman that previously never existed but now always did, which wipes out a significant portion of the New Wonder Woman’s history.
3. Green Lantern Hal Jordan - This one is often cited as one of The Worst Things Ever, but I think everybody else got it completely wrong. A long story short Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern, saw his home city destroyed and went crazy and tried so hard to put it all back together (by rearranging time and destroying history for a better present… sound familiar?) he essentially became a villain. Everyone else hates it, but I think it’s great (though I admit that the execution wasn’t super). Jordan was never really a stand-out character and this, in my view, made him relatively unique in the echelon of heroes… the hero who became a villain because he kept trying to make everything right. Because everyone hated it, though, they kept trying to go back and fix things. They gave him a heroic send-off. Then they turned Hal Jordan into a different hero in a role for which he was entirely unsuited. Then at about the time that the new Green Lantern finally came into his own and became popular, they said… ahhh, forget it, we’ll just make him Green Lantern again… making the whole endeavor look as stupid as their critics claimed it to be.
4. Killing off the Charlton characters - Back when they were inserted into the DC Universe, the Charlton characters were VIPs. A series inspired by them, The Watchmen, became one of the most widely acclaimed comic books in the history of comic books (and assigned reading in some college English classes, though alas none I was ever a part of). Blue Beetle, The Question, Captain Atom, and Thunderbolt all got their own solo serials and Peacemaker got a miniseries. The last couple years, though, they seem to be going to great pains to do away with the few that are left. Captain Atom isn’t Captain Atom anymore, Thunderbolt is no longer owned by DC, and Blue Beetle and The Question are dead. These were some of my favorite characters and now they’re gone. The death of Blue Beetle was actually the news I needed to hear to convince me not to start collecting again.
5. Unkilling Jason Todd - It’s standard fare to bring superheroes back from the dead, but there were two that were supposed to stay dead: Barry Allen (The Flash) and Jason Todd (the second Robin). Jason Todd (like Hal Jordan and Barry Allen, in my opinion) is worth more dead than alive. Todd stood as Bruce Wayne’s biggest failure. The boy who was never allowed to grow up because Bruce Wayne allowed him to become Robin. Now he’s just another character who will guest star every now and then, probably vacillate between being a good guy and an anti-hero, and blah blah blah. For death to mean anything, a character has to stand a chance of staying dead. Not always, but at least some of the time.

In the previous comment section, Gannon asked how come we haven’t converted to the metric system. Before I get to that, I’m going to write about the keys to the Internet.

I’d link to it if I could find it, but a few years ago I ran across an astonishingly dumb column in The Guardian that completely misunderstood the United States of America, the Internet, and most importantly human nature. You may recall a few years ago that there was a big push by other countries to try to get the US to hand over the keys to the Internet from the Department of Commerce to the United Nations. The aforementioned article in The Guardian said with a certain amount of glee that with the world united in insisting that the US give up control over the Internet that we would have (and I’ll never forget this wording) “little choice but to comply”.

That left to beg the question… “or what?” As in, we will have to comply “or what?” The UN will set up the infrastructure for its own Internet? A league of countries will go to the trouble of building an alternate Internet so that it can hand it over to the UN? They’ll invade Washington DC? If there is no “or [insert some consequence that the US could not endure]” then there is a choice. As it turned out, there was indeed a choice and the US chose to hold on to control of the Internet for the time being. Haven’t even heard mutterings about the issue since.

—

A few years ago when I went to a friend’s wedding in Canada, a discussion about the differences between the United States and Canada came up. When these conversations come up with Canadians, it is almost invariably in the form of them asking us “What is wrong with you people?!” about this issue or that. If the subject were to come up today I would probably be quizzed about our warmongering or our president or one of the many problems that they have with the current direction of our country, but given that it was pre-9/11 I was surprised by the two subjects that came up most frequently. I expected that it would be our health care system or gun-loving or something, but instead it was our tort system (a subject I will expound upon at a later time) and… the metric system.

One guy asked why we hadn’t adopted it and a couple more idealistic fellows asked why the conversion process was taking so long and when it was going to happen. My answers were “not sure”, “what conversion process?”, and “it may never happen”.

After I got back to the states, I asked started asking myself why it hadn’t and it didn’t appear that it was going to. I came up with an answer and then forgot the question and moved on to more important things like repercussions of Robin’s flirtations with Spoiler on his relationship with his then-girlfriend Arianna.

When I was in elementary school, I was dutifully informed by my teachers that the metric system was the wave of the future and that the English system they were teaching us would become obsolete. If I needed an excuse not to learn the English system, I had one. The problem is that I had to learn about inches, feet, gallons, and pounds anyway. Reality made me even if the teachers at West Oak Elementary were telling me that it would be useless knowledge.

The teaching of the metric system never entirely went away, though the examples in the math textbooks slowly started moving back to gallons and yards by the time I got to high school. I remember this because I remember thinking that the books must have been out of date, though in retrospect I’m not sure that they were.

In addition to their odd pronunciation of the word “applicable”, their odd-yet-correct pronunciation of the states Nevada and Colorado, their use of the phrase “Oh my heck/hell”, and a million other things, one of the quirks of Deseret (or more likely the corner of it where I worked) the metric system kept coming up along with the question of why we never adopted it.

Remembering the question reminded me of the answer which actually came indirectly from the Canadians which had asked the question to begin with. When they asked, I asked how the conversion in Canada went. They basically said that the government said that they were going to convert everything to the metric system because it was more logical and it was what everyone else was doing and so Canada went metric. They described it about that simplistically, though I kept trying to make it more complicated by asking “why?” like a bored second grader sitting in the back seat on a 600-mile car trip.

The thing is that everyone in the US had decided, once upon a time, that it would happen here, too. It just didn’t. And I think that part of the answer to the “why” is that Americans are extremely reluctant to being told from on high “this is what we’re going to do” even when there might be a logical reason behind it if we don’t feel like we were adequately consulted on the matter. Part of the success of persuasion is to make people think it was their idea or at least that they had a hand in the decision. It’s noteworthy that the many of the most fierce political backlashes come from Supreme Court decisions (Roe v Wade, gay marriage) rather than legislation.

Unfortunately, by its very nature conversion to the metric system is more of a top-down decision.

Beyond that, though, another big reason is the same reason that we held on to the keys to the Internet. No one was in a position to force us to do otherwise. We don’t need to move towards the universal measurement system to do trade with other countries because we don’t have a shortage of countries to trade with (at least not on that particular basis). We’re big enough and powerful enough that we can unilaterally expect other countries to work with us on the matter. In other words, we converted as much as we needed to in order to keep doing global business, but it wasn’t as much as it might have been for other countries. Americans would rather everybody else learn English rather than we learn Esperanto. We don’t know off-hand what’s wrong with them learning pounds and ounces rather than us learning metrics. And so on.

To bring these ideas together, not only do we not like being told by our government how it’s going to be, we particularly hate being told that we need to do it because other countries are doing it. It’s not an uncommon mistake, but generally speaking telling us that everybody else does it differently causes us to dig in our heels (unless, of course, someone can actually apply enough pressure to get us to reconsider).

My favorite example of this is the death penalty. As an opponent of it, I get very, very frustrated with my fellow travelers’ tendency to mention that we are one of only a handful of countries that continues to execute people. That the world does something one way and that we do it another is not, on its face, evidence that we are wrong. If other countries do things a better way, it needs to be explained why that way is better. I think that the metric-advocates placed too much of an emphasis on world community arguments rather than the ease with which one can divide and multiply by ten.

A couple years ago was my 10-year high school reunion. One of the pleasures of which was to catch up with some people that I knew in elementary school. In some ways I had better friends in elementary school than I did in junior high and high school. Partly it was because I was more popular (or less unpopular) in grade school due to my mother’s popularity in the community but also because that was before they started tracking and most of the people that were my friends elevated into honors classes while I was left behind.

Two such people were Jonah and Ezra Weatherby. There were only three Jewish kids that went to my elementary school and the Weatherby Twins were two of them. I didn’t realize at the time what a non-Jewish name Weatherby was, though I later found out that their father was Catholic and that they had been tapped for their mothers religion. Their mother was very, very Jewish in appearance and demeanor. The Twins got some of the dark features from her, but that was about it.

I got to know Jonah Weatherby first because we were in the same kindergarten class together. The two kindergarten classes at West Oak Elementary were mostly separated by age, though they made an exception in the case of the twins in order to split them up. Since Jonah was a few minutes or an hour or whatever older than Ezra, he got to be in the old kids class with me. Always seemed odd to me because Ezra seemed to be the more mature of the two. Maybe he had something to prove. They were identical twins and the only way that you could tell them apart physically was Jonah’s duck curl in back. I suppose that you have to mark some sort of difference to keep from going insane.

By the time they got to high school, their physical differences had become much more pronounced. Jonah got heavy in the stomach and had a slouching posture while Ezra seemed more “broad” than heavy with his weight more evenly distributed. Also notable is that Jonah had become something of a geek with an interest in geeky things. No surprise that he remained the one I talked to most, though since they were both honors students I didn’t talk to either very often. Ezra became a theater dude and developed a winning smile.

Looking at the two of them, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have an identical twin brother. When I look at my own brothers, the differences make comparison difficult. Ollie is adopted so he’s dealing with a set of genes that Mitch and I aren’t. So when Ollie became the more athletic and popular than Mitch, there wasn’t the rivalry that you’d more likely see between two brothers in the same grade. Mitch and I were three or so years apart, so there wasn’t much in the way of competition there, either. He was ahead of me in every way and it was unavoidable. Even if we’d been fraternal, though, our common parents and heritage only goes so far. I got a creative trait that he didn’t and he got… a lot of other… traits that I didn’t.

If you have an identical twin, though, it would seem to me that everything changes. You suddenly have a benchmark with which to gauge your success. It’s difficult to impossible to dismiss your relative shortcomings or have your relative successes explained away. If I had a twin sibling that went on a first date before I did or had a higher GPA that was the sort of thing that would drive me insane. I’m not an inherently competitive person, but that’s partially because ever since I was little I was told that I was developmentally stunted. So in a sense anything I did was an achievement.

Of course, the downside to this is that I never had to try very hard. Because the experts had me pegged wrong, I was left in a situation where I only had to try a very little to meet or exceed expectations. Sometimes I wonder where I would be if my parents had held me to the same standard that they held Mitch and Ollie. Sometimes I’m grateful that they recognized that I wasn’t him (and even if I hadn’t been pegged wrong, I still wouldn’t have done as well as he did), though at other times I think I could have accomplished a lot more if more had been expected of me.

Anyway, back to the Weatherbys. By the time we were all in high school, it was had not to say that Ezra wasn’t “ahead” of Jonah. Ezra was in better shape, was relatively popular, seemed to have more charisma, and was comparably good scholastically. Most of the above thoughts about my brothers and I were the product of thinking about what it would be like to be Jonah and perceptively behind my twin sibling and not really being able to cite any genetic reason why that should be the case.

Apparently in the intervening years between high school and the reunion, their fates flopped. They both went off to the University of Delosa together where Jonah excelled and Ezra did not. Jonah had an advanced degree and was working in some super lab somewhere while Ezra was struggling to get his masters. Ezra had gained something of an acerbic demeanor, more arrogant than actually charismatic. Jonah had become somewhat arrogant, too. Both of them had always been… confident in their abilities… but it was usually inwardly directed pride rather than outwardly directed scorn. Both, interestingly enough, had become anti-government, right-wing loons to the point of making Ron Paul look like a pragmatist.

While at DU, Ezra had ballooned up to 300 pounds or so, though he’d lost a lot of it by the time of the reunion. I don’t know whether it was their builds had gotten more similar or just that I hadn’t had time to differentiate their appearance in my mind, but I had a lot of difficulty telling them apart. Too bad that duck curls have gone so out of style.

Newsweek’s got an article up on PETA (an organization I usually use only for a good laugh) and their stance on the euthanasia of animals in shelters; it brought to mind an article on “rescue” agencies I read a couple years ago, which argued (fairly successfully) that “breed rescue” agencies and people obsessed with “rescuing” animals are responsible for leaving far more adoptable and less-badly-behaved pets to be euthanized by public animal shelters.

The theory goes as follows: these agencies get caught up in being “no-kill” and extolling the virtues of only “their” breed, as well as pride in “rescuing” abused animals… and as such try to adopt out animals with poor socialization and bad habits, sometimes even “food-bowl aggression” (a BIG no-no for any reputable shelter, since it’s the primary way for a human to get bitten). They believe that since their personal animals are delightful, all animals of the breed are like that. Somewhat in reverse, misguided animal control laws occasionally pop up to try to “ban” breeds commonly used in fighting, and most shelters have “automatic euthanize” procedures when these breeds are turned in for fear that they were from fighting rings.

In the process, dogs or cats that ought to be 100% adoptable languish at public shelters (which euthanize after a set period of time), while animals with no business being adopted (or at least not to a registered trainer/breeder with experience in such situations) sit in a “no-kill rescue” custody and eventually wind up being adopted by people who really don’t know what they’re getting into.

Of course, the definition of “no-kill” leaves a heck of a lot of weasel room as well.

Given the whole situation, I actually lean towards seeing PETA as correct on this one. Proponents of “no-kill” shelters insist that an inordinate number of adoptable animals are euthanized every year, but with variance in what you call “adoptable”, there are issues. There are also plenty of humans who are, alas, too irresponsible or immature to responsibly own and train and care for their pets. I know for a fact that every “no-kill” shelter has a set limit of animals they will hold, meaning that if they’re holding on to a less-than-stellar choice, multiple stellar animals may very well wind up in an overcrowded public pound up against a 2-week or less “adopt or euthanize” deadline.

To make matters worse, “rescue” agencies and the idea that a dog is “rescued” are often used as excuses for people to ignore their responsibility to train and discipline their dogs. Irresponsible owner + badly behaved dog + little to no training = recipe for disaster.

For reference’s sake: My two cats, Victor and Chihiro, are from a rescue agency (generic) and local pound, respectively. Both are as reasonably trained as a cat can be and know their place in terms of things like nipping or stealing human food (though part of that also involves “removing temptation”, such as not leaving known attractants like wet food packaging or chicken bones in accessible trash areas). Fustle’s dog came as a puppy from the local SPCA. About the only issue we have with them is the occasional miscommunication between Chihiro and Fustle’s dog, categorized with Chihiro interpreting boisterous dog-speak for “let’s play” as cat-speak for “I’m going to eat you.”

I’m a sucker for Mexican food. Always have been. Whether it’s authentic Mexican or the chili-infused American variety, it’s hard to go wrong. The problem is that Mexican food usually comes with rice and beans. Ever since I was little I’ve never liked rice. It’s a texture thing. Mom the Short Order Cook used to make me Mac’n'Cheese or baked potatoes at rice meals. Rice only gave in to stuffing as the worst side dish that wasn’t green or orange.

So alas, my favorite kind of food is stuck with one of my least favorite side dishes. Worse, the side dish in particular is not always easy to keep segregated from everything else. So for years I’ve been ordering two helpings of refried beans rather than rice. The only problem with this substitution is that while I like refried beans I don’t usually want or need two helpings of it. Also, refried beans can be kind of bland and if you dump it in hot sauce like I do it can get soupy. Nonetheless, I’d usually order two helpings of refried beans and eat a little more than half of it.

One of the habits that Mexican restaurants in Estacado have is that on every plate they offer they stick shredded lettuce and diced tomatoes on the corner of the plate. Usually cheap lettuce at that. This lettuce has the tendency to get enmeshed into the plate and can honestly ruin it for me because it just doesn’t seem like it belongs.

Most restaurants are pretty good about making a single substitution, but once you’re asking for two or more it starts getting a little more dicey. Either you forget all the particulars or they do, but the rate at which your plate complies with your preferences falls from about 95% for one substitution to about 70% for two.

I’d tried mixing the rice and the refried beans before, but in the end the rice was just too much. What I didn’t figure but should have was that it wasn’t necessarily that the rice was too much, but that there was too much rice. A 1:1 relationship of helpings between rice and beans simply doesn’t work, but if you only take half the rice and make sure to save some of the cheese from the main entre, the three compliment each other extraordinarily well. The rice adds structure to the beans, making it a little more solid. The texture that I don’t like in rice counters the texturelessness of the beans wonderfully. The cheese and chili/verde sauce from holds it all together. Best yet, these three things together make something solid enough that you can pretty much add however much hot sauce that you want.

Last Saturday night I had so much hot sauce that my stomach was in agony all day Sunday. It came at a price, but it was nonetheless beautiful.

When I saw the headline of a TIME article that read “Why U.S. Infants Die Too Often“, I clicked over thinking that it would be something about prenatal care or this test or that test that we’re not running but should be or maybe this procedure or that procedure that we are or are not performing. Instead, I got something that made me want to throw something at my computer monitor. Here is the logic of the article and of Marian MacDorman, the statistician that they consulted:

One of the main [factors] is whether the baby is delivered too small or too soon, which increases its chances of death. About two-thirds of all of our infant deaths occur among the 8.2% of babies that are born at low birth weight. Most developed countries have lower rates of preterm and low birth weight deliveries [than the U.S.] and that makes a difference in infant mortality rates. {…}

There are a lot of doctors who say it’s O.K. to take a baby out a little bit early because they’re going to do well — and it’s true. It’s only seven per 1,000 that are dying. Most of them do well. But still I think it’s important to note that the infant mortality rate for late-preterm infants is three times what it is for [full-]term infants.

One gets the image of doctors saying “I am just booked solid next week, so let’s deliver this baby a week early cause I don’t want to have to work late.”

In reality, when babies are delivered preterm, it’s because there is already some sort of problem and not because doctors don’t know as much about medicine as do statisticians. Granted, I am the husband of a doctor (who has done a lot of work in obstetrics) and that influences my perspective. Not because I believe doctors are perfect just cause my wife happens to be, but rather because I get to hear a lot about the ins and outs of following pregnancy and delivering babies. My wife is more conservative than most doctors and has in the past complained about the pro-active attitude some doctors take about inducing labor. What she hasn’t complained about, though, are doctors purposefully delivering babies that they believe to be healthy ‘just cuz’.

Doctors and hospitals make the determination about whether to deliver early based on the baby’s chances of survival in the whom and out of it. It’s quite possible that these calculations are flawed and they overestimate the threat to the baby in utero. If MacDorman has statistics that suggest that our efforts to avoid miscarriages and stillborns and all that are overly aggressive, you are going to have to look at alot more than infant death rates. Without information about miscarriages under this scenario or that, the numbers that McDorman cites are not particularly helpful. When it comes to infant mortality, there have to be infants involved. Delivering a baby preterm that dies counts as a strike against us, but a baby that dies before being born doesn’t count either way.

American doctors and American hospitals are much, much more conscientious of pre-birth deaths than a lot of other countries. A lot of it you can chalk up to the fact that a dead fetus leaves them financially vulnerable than doctors in other countries. To the extent that doctors may jump the gun, it’s because it’s a lot easier to get sued for being perceived as doing too little than it is for being perceived as having done too much. It’s this far more than anything else that might lead to this error. But we also live in a culture with a more protective attitude towards fetuses than many others. Sometimes, as in the case of jury awards, too much so. Also, though, because it leads us to deliver babies using resources that might better be directed elsewhere.

The hospital that Clancy worked at down here had very, very aggressive fetus-saving policies. It lead to babies being delivered earlier than any baby has even a remote chance for survival beyond a few days. But nonetheless they deliver the baby. They do everything they can within (and beyond) reason to prolong the life for as long as they can. The result is a dead baby and a slightly higher infant mortality rate. When working in Deseret, one of the higher ups was a doctor from Britain who commented with astonishment the lengths that American health care goes for (seemingly) lost causes.

While it’s quite possible that we don’t have a greater need for preterm deliveries than other countries, it’s possible that we do for at least a couple reasons that come to mind:

1. Heroic measures: As mentioned above, we deliver babies that other countries may not even try to. This may be unwise on our part, but not necessarily for the reasons that MacDorman implies.
2. Poor prenatal care: A lack of prenatal care can mean that little problems that go unaddressed earlier in the pregnancy become bigger problems later on. We also have higher instances of drug use, which can not only cause natural preterm labor and complications that require induced labor or cesarians, but it also leads to mothers failing to seek out prenatal care because they don’t want to get caught with drugs in their system. This one wouldn’t have occurred to me, but Clancy has reported it on more than a few occasions. It’s probably worthy of a post.
3. Fertilization drugs: Fertilization drugs are very common in the US. Moreso, I’d imagine, than many other developed countries because our religions more vigorously promote procreation than a lot of other countries do. It’s noteworthy that multiple-births are more common in religious conservative states than in blue ones. Fertility drugs cause multiple-births. Multiple-births shorten the expected length of the presidency pregnancy by something like 4 weeks per extra baby.

MacDorman seems to recognize that there may be contributing factors in the last couple of paragraphs but only as they pertain to comparing the demographics of which babies are prematurely delivered most often. Would that she were interested in contributing factors in comparing the US to other nations beyond the simple conclusion that she’s smarter than the doctors.

Not wholly unexpected this time with all the previous talk about sex, but my blog is apparently back in NC-17 territory. So the banner up top has been changed back to the NC-17 one to celebrate. If you still see the coffee mug, click Refresh.

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes argued that humans once had four legs, we were split in part by the angry gods, and love is the reunion of the two souls that were split apart from one another.

In gnosticism, a syzygy is a flawlessly complimentary pair of male and female aeons. In their unity they become a part of Heaven.

Aristophanean Syzygy is defined as the notion that we are born two halves of left to search for our the counterpart to our whole.

The following is a reproduction of a conversation I had with Evangeline when she was agitating for a reconciliation prior to my getting married.

a divine active-passive, male-female pair of aeons, complementary to one another rather than oppositional; in their totality they comprise the divine realm of the Pleroma, and in themselves characterise aspects of the unknowable Gnostic God. The term is most common in Valentinianism.

Eva: If Tracey is the one you love, why even bother trying to find love after her?

Me: I don’t love Tracey anymore. I mean, I love her to the extent to which the fact that I loved her as much as I did makes her a part of me which means that there is a connection that is at least in part an affectionate one the overall sense of which being “love”, but I don’t love her in the sense that I want to be with her or that I really even want to be in her life.

Eva: But you just said that if you were meant to be with anyone it would have been her.

Me: She would have been the one. If you accept the premise of a sort of Aristophanean Syzygy exists between two specific souls, which I told you I don’t. Or at least not to the exclusion of connections to other souls.

Eva: Because things didn’t work out with Tracey.

Me: Because I believed so strongly that I was meant to be with her, more strongly than I have believed anything. It turned out not to be true. So yeah, she’s the reason I don’t believe that there is a single person out there for me. If there was a divine coupling, she and I — two basically good people that did love one another — wouldn’t have made such a hash of things. Syzygy meant for us to be together, drew two people from different parts of a city with three million people together… wouldn’t have simply let things fall apart because of such stupid reasons.

Eva: If the reasons that things didn’t work out were stupid, you should try again. I’m sure you could track her down.

Me: If I believe that there was no other person out there that I could form a romantic bond with, I would. But it turned out that I was happier without her than I was with her. All of this contradicts the notion that I was meant to be with a specific person. If I was, it was her. It was not her, so it was not.

Eva: So it couldn’t be that you were just meant to be with someone else? The whole five years that you were with Julie you never felt that you were meant to be with her? You never once felt like you were meant to be with me when we were together?

Me: I was good with Julie. Then I wasn’t good with her anymore. Then I was with you. That… wasn’t so good. But it was what I needed.

Eva: So you needed to be with me. Like it was… meant… to… be? Do those words sound familiar?

Me: If we were meant to be together, don’t you think that being together wouldn’t have been so infuriating for me and tragic for you? I needed to meet someone like you. Not necessarily you in particular, but someone that could get me out of the terrible place that I’d put myself in with Julie. Someone to, I don’t know, wake me up again. You could do that. Maybe someone else could have, but I know that you could have because you did.

Eva: But it could have been anybody. You sure know how to make a girl feel special.

Me: That’s not what I meant. Definitely not anybody. I meant that I could have been drifting in that daze for another couple of years. Instead I met you. Maybe someone else could have done what you did, but you were the one that did it. I just have a little bit of difficulty believing that had you and I not met that it absolutely never could have been done otherwise. It would have happened differently, I’m almost sure of it. Might have been part of a less miserable relationship.

Eva: Stop. Stop. Stop. Just stop referring to what we had as miserable. Just assume that I know that our time together wasn’t happy for you. For either of us. Stop feeling to need to remind us of it.

Me: {I started objecting, but she was right. That’s exactly what I was doing} Fair enough. My point is that we’re sitting at this table because of something that happened between us a few years ago. The relationship that followed was also a product of that, among other things. I am who I am in part because of what happened. What happened didn’t happen so that we could end up together. Things happen now because of what happened before. It doesn’t work the other way. It wasn’t building towards now. I mean… do you believe that everything is pre-ordained? That the future has already been written?

Eva: No, I don’t think it works like that. Maybe it does. I don’t know. I do believe, though, that sometimes people are meant to be together. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be with you, but I was meant to be with somebody.

Me: Yeah, but somebody specifically?

Eva: Absolutely.

Me: And you don’t know who this person is?

Eva: Well, you know that I think that it’s you. But I don’t know that it is you.

Me: So it could be me or could be somebody else. It could just be whoever you end up with. If that’s the case, why try to find this person at all? If fate is going to bring you together anyway.

Eva: I’m not talking about fate, Will. You can go your entire life without meeting the person you’re supposed to be with. Or by blowing it when you do meet them. {she takes my hand} There is absolutely nothing that I am more afraid of.

Me: It just doesn’t make sense to me that there could be all of these forces working behind the scenes without some sort of… I don’t know… God… which you don’t believe in.

Eva: And you do.

Me: Yes.

Eva: Why is the concept of God so much easier for you than the concept of ethereal syzygy?

Me: How can you believe in romantic destiny without believing that there is someone or something behind it? If you can believe that there is a person that we’re meant to be with, why can’t you believe that God is the one guiding you to certain decisions to make you prepared and right to meet this person, whenever you do?

Eva: I don’t know that there isn’t a God. But if you believe that there is a God, why can’t you believe that he’s doing just what you say I should believe that he’s doing?

Me: Touche.

Eva: {Pause} Well?

Me: At the root of it, I’m just as agnostic as you are. I don’t know with any certainty that there is a God. It certainly seems unlikely to me that God is exactly who I think He is. But I have to operate under an assumption of some sort. You know how I am with ambiguity. So I consider a universe in which there is no God and I look at one where there is and the first makes a lot more sense to me. It provides a sort of peace and understanding that lays out a map for everything I don’t know about life and the universe. The notion that there is no God provides me with neither understanding nor peace. If there is no God, there is no point to our existence. That’s the kind of thing that can drive me insane. If I die and discover that there is no God or if I die and there is no afterlife for me to make that discovery, there’s really no downside because believing brought me peace. If there is a God… well I hope that I got Him right, but if I were to have not believed in God to begin with then I certainly got Him wrong. So it’s a variation of the Pascallian Wager without the direct references to Heaven and Hell. So I choose to believe that I find comfort in God to be God’s way of telling me that I’m right in believing in him.

Eva: And believing that there is a soulmate out there for you doesn’t provide you any peace?

Me: Not believing there is a single one, no. I believe in soulmates, but I believe that the relationship is formed rather than pre-ordained. I believe in syzygy, just that it is something that we create. I believe that the bond is, among other things, a choice.

Eva: But if it all comes down to choices, then why bother with it at all? If you can choose to love somebody, why did you choose to fall in love with me? Why didn’t you just stay with Julie since it probably made the most sense. I have to believe that there exists something deeper than choices. Something outside of ourselves. If it’s something that we create then we can create it with anybody, then why don’t we just marry the first person that comes along? Without the belief in syzygy, the thing that I’ve been devoting myself to for the last ten years is in vain. It’s all pointless. I don’t know how you could believe that and stay sane.

Me: There’s more to it than choices. How strong a bond is depends on the materials that you start out with. Two utterly incompatible people don’t have the means to bond, though you have the ability with more than one person. There are people that you’re more compatible with and less compatible with. More than that, though, there are people that we are differently compatible with. So it comes down to choices. With whom do you want things to work out? Some people have more options and some have fewer. Some may have none because there’s something wrong with them. It seems very unlikely that anybody only has one.

Eva: That doesn’t help. If there isn’t a single person that’s right, how do you know that you’re not going to awake up and find someone that is better for you than who you’re with? Love lives can be nothing more than continually trying to trade up and improve. Or if something doesn’t suit you for some reason, you can just try out something else among the infinite possibilities out there. Or those possibilities that will have you, anyway. Syzygy means that you’ve found the one. You can stop looking. You can just be happy.

Me: Assuming, of course, that you’re with the one. Otherwise, you can simply run into someone on the street and believe that that’s the person that you’re meant to be with.

Eva: But that’s just it. When you’re with the right person, you know you are.

Me: On what basis?

Eva: Faith.

Earlier this year Clancy and I took a trip to Deseret for my cousin’s wedding. While we were up there, my check card stopped working. Apparently, my bank noticed that my account had purchased plain tickets to Deseret and then paid a rash of hotel and restaurant expenditures, and came to the not-obvious conclusion that someone had hacked my card and was using it for nefarious purposes rather than the more-obvious conclusion that I… was… on… vacation.

I discovered that my card had been cancelled at the place where one usually discovers it… at a nice restaurant where they have no use for deadbeats the likes of me. Fortunately Clancy had her card and we were okay. I had to call the bank and talk to them for half an hour as they went through all of the out-of-state charges that had caused them such concern.

When I got back I ranted to my mother about the whole thing. I asked “Do I need to tell my bank every time I go on vacation?” Turns out, that’s exactly what Mom does.

Not long afterwards, I tried to use my card at Walmart and lo and behold it had stopped working. I hadn’t been out of town, so I called up my bank to ask what the dealio was. Turns out that someone had used my card to order a substantial set of computer parts from an online retailer that I’d only ordered from six million times before. Oddly, the sale in question went through but everything after that was declined.

To summarize the next portion which could be a post in and of itself, I had to go without any check cards for a while. The one to the joint account got lost and the one to my personal one was inadvertently destroyed. Then about two weeks ago I got two new cards.

Last weekend, I tried to order from the online retailer again and it was declined. Thinking that maybe I typed something incorrectly, I tried sending it through again and it was denied again. I called my bank and they told me that since people had possibly tried to use my card to order from this retailer purchases that I make from them are considered suspect by the system. I explained that I order from these people every couple of months and that the previous time it had been cut off it was due to a mistake. One that I’d had to call and talk to them to clear up. I reiterated that I’d like to order from this company in the future and I’d like them to release the hold. He agreed and I sent the order.

The thing about ordering from some online retailers is that they split orders up sometimes if they’re sometimes working through an intermediary. So this order got split into two orders. The first went through, and then… the card was cut off again so the second one was denied. I called the retailer, who of course referred me to the bank, who informed me that my purchased had raised a flag. Why? Because over the past week, three orders of mine had been declined when trying to order from this company. After talking it through a little longer, his advice was that I should go ahead and place this order, call the bank back and make sure that the check card isn’t canceled, then refrain buying from this company again for a few months since they seem to be a hotbed of trouble.

I was telling this story to some coworkers and they mentioned that they too had been cut off for one reason or another recently. It seems to be getting to the point where having your card denied is no longer something embarassing because it is happening more and more often as the banks try to crack down on fraud. At least two coworkers, like my mother, actually inform the credit card companies when they’re going out of town.

I appreciate that trying to stop credit card fraud is not an easy thing to do and I appreciate the fact that they’re looking out for me, but aren’t check cards supposed to make my life easier?

A while back, I extolled the virtues of keeping my electronics and a/v system modular and repairable.

I’ve now gone one step further and reconstructed my sofa. Ripped the material off, re-covered the whole thing including the cushions.

I have learned the following things:

#1 - whoever put this thing together was highly incompetent. There are entire areas where things are supposed to be stapled together (but they missed the wood, leaving a line of unattached staples). The anchor points for what were supposed to be easily exchangeable feet were put in upside down, making me re-drill and attach new ones by hand after having to break the old plastic feet off.

#2 - You can build up a lot of sweat taking a sofa apart.

#3 - Cats really like to explore things like halfway-taken-apart sofas. Victor and Chihiro also like to sleep on denim a lot more than they liked sleeping on the old scratchy stuff.

#4 - It took ~1200 staples from a staple gun to attach everything. That number of squeezes will really make your hands sore in the morning.

#5 - No matter how many times you check and no matter how thoroughly, you will miss things between the cushions of a couch. I found 3 sets of house and/or car keys and $0.87 in loose change rattling around once I had the inner fabric areas exposed.

-{High IQ Dating}-

Capella has a post on what she looks for in a man. I’ve got some thoughts on such lists, but I want to mull it over before writing anything more extensive about it. Reading over the first bullet point, which is a thirst for intelligence, the thought occurred to me: There’s got to be a dating service that focuses on people with high IQs. It’s not always easy for these people to meet each other and a relationship with too high an intelligence differential can be problematic. Plus, people with more intelligence often have money. Not super amounts, but perhaps enough to fund a dating service.

Turns out that there is something called IQ Cuties. Obviously I’m not in a position to check out how worthwhile it is. I think that such a service would be better off the internet. I once enrolled in a specialty dating service a while back and got fleeced pretty good. It was of a religious nature. I probably would have been better off going to church. In any case, it’s a lot easier to get sums of money out of people (like me) when you’re brick-and-mortar-plus-Internet rather than potentially some fly-by-night Internet operation.

The specialty operation that I enrolled in went out of business shortly after my term expired. So maybe Lavalife is the way to go, business-wise.

-{Chemistry.com vs. eHarmony}-

Has anyone seen those ads for Chemistry.com that rib on eHarmony? The gay ones I understand, but I didn’t quite understand why “We accept everybody!” is a great selling point for a dating service. I signed up with the aforementioned fleecing agency in part because they did cull the herd, so to speak. Then again, they were probably rejecting people that were more up my alley than the ones I actually dated (except one who was absolutely marvelous though of course I failed to recognize that at the time), so maybe that’s where Chemistry.com would have come in. But while I wouldn’t refuse to date someone that was rejected by eHarmony, I don’t know that I’d jump in the pool with a bunch of rejects. I did that enough in junior high, thankyouverymuch.

-{CrazyBlindDate}-

A while back Unfogged clued me in to something called CrazyBlindDate, where basically you set something up on short notice and in stark contrast to the aforementioned dating services is indiscriminate in nature. Even though it’s completely out of my nature, I might have done something like this when I was single. It’s sort of like the old apartment complex I lived in out in Deseret. It was $300 a month with all bills paid, filled with ex-cons and miscreants, and the most interesting place one could ever ask to live for a little while. Particularly when you’re writing a blog, as I was at the time. CrazyBlindDate probably provides excellent blogfodder.

If you ever feel tempted to get a potato salad tub at Walmart, I would caution against it. It doesn’t taste very good.

Things that don’t taste good usually come in one of three categories. They’re either “bad but guilty pleasure yummy”, “bad but of course good for me” or “inappropriately sweet.”.

This is neither. This is just… bad. I don’t understand. I like potato salad sometimes. It has the right nutrient contents, which is to say that it’s unhealthy but not in an sugary way. It’s not a mishmash or two foods that don’t work together. It just doesn’t taste good.

I don’t understand.

A few days ago I wrote a post about the advantages to being the oldest kid on your little league baseball team. Apparently the same is true of soccer:

In one study published in the June 2005 Journal of Sport Sciences, researchers from Leuven, Belgium, and Liverpool, England, found that a disproportionate number of World Cup soccer players are born in January, February and March, meaning they were old relative to peers on youth soccer teams.

A while back Half Sigma linked to an interesting article in the New York Times about, among other things, the academic advantages of being the oldest kid in your class and how parents are trying to take advantage of this:

However, more recent research by labor economists takes advantage of new, very large data sets and has produced different results. A few labor economists do concur with the education scholarship, but most have found that while absolute age (how many days a child has been alive) is not so important, relative age (how old that child is in comparison to his classmates) shapes performance long after those few months of maturity should have ceased to matter.

The article is interesting as is the topic as a whole. My oldest brother Ollie was held back into my older brother Mitch’s grade and even though Mitch is the smartest of the three of us, Ollie outperformed Mitch in elementary school (getting into the honors program while Mitch didn’t) and did comparably well until they went off to college where Mitch excelled and Ollie didn’t. My sister-in-law was young in her class and struggled for a while as well, though she ended up with a full-ride scholarship and is now a lawyer.

But what this really got me thinking about is the increasing gender gap between young men and young women. Some have suggested that the problem is that schools are increasingly geared more towards natural female behavior with the kids being told to sit down and be quiet and games of tag and dodgeball being banned and all that. I do think that there may be something to that theory. There are also some that believe that female teachers are overly concerned about the female students to the detriment of the male students that just seem to annoy them. That theory is not completely without merit either, though I don’t think that attitude is widespread enough to come close to approaching the problem.

What I thought about as I read the article was if comparative age makes such a difference, what about comparative maturity? It’s somewhat well known that girls are more likely to be ahead of the maturity curve and boys behind it in the early years. What if the issue isn’t so much teacher bias or feminine rule systems but simply a function of teachers teaching at the maturity level of their more mature, predominantly female, students? Then again, is that any different from a curriculum aimed more towards females than males on the whole?

I think that it is. If the study the NYT cites is sound, then that represents a structural problem for boys. One that can’t simply be addressed by making boys less like boys or diagnosing them with behavioral disorders and drugging them. It’s not so much a matter of boys being boys when they need to behave but rather of boys being held to a higher standard of maturity than they are comfortably capable of. Boys may decline to express the maturity and lose out that way or they may try to meet these expectations and expend mental/emotional energy doing so that they might otherwise be dedicating to classwork.

It also means that there may be some solutions to the problems. Half Sigma suggests cutting grades into 6-month groups rather than 1-year, which may help somewhat but wouldn’t address the gender disparity. Single-sex education might be a better example of a remedy. Put the boys all together and there should be less of a maturity gap. Plus you can play around with with more active learning that some believe is more conducive to the ways that boys prefer to learn. Alternately, you could consider different age cut-offs for boys and girls, putting the boys’ cutoff in July and the girls’ in December.

On the other hand, if it is all so comparative, maybe it’s pointless to even try. There’s always going to be a bottom half. A youngest boy as well as an oldest. Would taking these measures simply be shuffling the same deck? Perhaps so, though it would seem to me that the gap between the most mature girl and least mature boy would be less than the gap between the most and least mature boys. You can’t eliminate the problem, but perhaps lessen the effects.

A little while ago I mentioned that I have a very poor sense of smell. To which Barry asked:

Do you also have a diminished sense of taste, because those things seem to go hand in hand. Not to overuse a body-parts metaphor…

The truth is that I don’t know for sure, but I think I do. In all honesty, I didn’t realize that I had a poor sense of smell for the longest time. It’s difficult when you don’t have anything to compare it to.

I remember back in junior high when stink bombs were all the rage. Early on, I really didn’t know what they were. While everyone around me scattered in search for cleaner air, I would just stand there and sniff. I’d think to myself, “Hmmm, this smells like rotten eggs or something. Maybe rotten fruit. Definitely smells interesting. Very interesting.” I similarly don’t mind the smell of farts. I sort of have a vague, “This smells bad” feeling, but it’s more of an observation than a feeling. In some ways I like it just because it’s interesting and different.

But with smell, you are eventually notified that you are not smelling things that others are smelling. Clancy frequently asks if I can smell something and I say that I can’t. Something like that happens enough and you start to get the idea.

With taste, though, I don’t really have that. If I’m eating something, I can taste it. It may taste bland, but I know that I am eating something and therefore I think more inclined to be able to taste it. Sort of like I can sometimes smell things only after Clancy points them out to me.

At the same time, when it comes to food, I’m a big texture person. What something is made of is as important as how it tastes. I don’t like rice even though rice has little or no taste to it. I don’t like rice even if it’s mixed with something I do like that should theoretically engulf the non-taste of the rice. I just don’t like eating it. If I’m more fixated on texture than most people, that probably means that I don’t taste as much as they do.

The other thing is that I love, love, love spicy food and food that has any sort of really strong taste. I’ve commented before that the worse a food makes my breath, the more I probably like it. Garlic, onion, jalapeno, you name it. And the stronger the taste, the better. Whenever I eat Thai food I typically go for the spiciest stuff they’ve got or the next one down, which is usually higher than anyone else at the table that has eaten there is willing to go. Since I’m not a particularly tough person when it comes to discomfort, it’s likely that I am not as uncomfortable eating that stuff as the next person… which would bring me back to diminished tastebuds.

Sometimes when I’m bored I think about somewhat useless things that interest me enough to make the time go by. That’s where some of my posts around here come from. Lately I’ve been thinking about what I would do if it were up to me to try to save the comic book industry and DC Comics in particular. I’ve reached a stumbling point in one of my branches of thought and I need your help. If you can answer the below questions, it would help me out. So please give it a try whether you are at all interested in comic books. In fact, it’s those that aren’t very interested in comic books whose help I most need.

I want to know what you know about the various characters. I am going to link the characters names to a picture of them. If you don’t recognize the name, click on the image to see if that jogs your memory at all.

The options are:
A) I know who this character is and I know how he became a superhero
B) I know who this character is, but I don’t know how he became a superhero
C) I recognize the character’s name and, but couldn’t necessarily identify him
D) I know this character on sight, but couldn’t name him
E) I don’t know who this is

Note that if your answer is “Which [character name] are you referring to? The origins differ slightly/greatly from one to the next” then your answer is probably (A).

1. Superman
2. Batman
3. Wonder Woman
4. Green Lantern
5. The Atom
6. Hawkman
7. Martian Manhunter
8. Nightwing
9. Blue Beetle
10. Captain Marvel
11. Triumph
12. Black Canary