One of the long list of things that made me unpopular in junior high school was that I refused to wear jeans and would instead wear slacks (among other things, see below). It wasn’t a fashion decision or a desire to go formal and look sleek. Had it been that, I would have showered and groomed, two more reasons for my unpopularity. No, the main reason was that I thought jeans were the most uncomfortable thing ever. So from about the fifth grade to about the eighth, I wore no jeans.

It’s funny how little things can have a disproportionate effect on things. The things that you didn’t know that if you had… Looking back, I think that the reason that jeans were so uncomfortable was that they were tight. They were tight because I have large legs in comparison to my waist size. Slacks generally allow for more leg-room, so they were more comfortable to me. They may have made Relaxed Fit jeans back then, I really don’t know because I didn’t shop. Or they may not have because baggy pants weren’t all the rage back then.

Whatever the case, I didn’t have access to them. I want to say “Gosh, if they’d only existed” or “If I’d only known about them” as if it would make all the difference in the world. Looking back, by itself it likely would have made very little difference. I was unpopular for a lot of reasons, my jeans only being a part of it.

The local fashion scene broke a little luck in my favor when I was in the seventh grade with these pants called (I think?) Skidz. Skidz were these thin, baggyish, colorful, stylized non-jean pants that from my recollection were more similar to pajama pants than actual pants. For hot southern summers, they were great. Increasingly, I also pestered my mother for at least a couple shirts that were “in”.

So at least a couple days a week, I was dressing not too far off from some of the most popular kids at school. Yet… somehow… it didn’t help… at all. My tormentor at the time (who later became a friend when I figured out how really to win those people over) accused them of being fakes and so I was one big, fat fake. Also, and this certainly came as a shock to me, Skidz were unbelievably easy to pull down. So even when I was doing things the way I was supposed to, it was still somehow turned around to my disadvantage.

That’s not to say that my aversion to jeans made no difference. The most popular kid could have gotten away with wearing slacks, but not someone like me. It was merely another thing that cemented my level of popularity with other people that couldn’t wear jeans because their mommas wouldn’t let them (like Orson Millard).

Several years later, I was in an English class where we had to write a paper about ourselves. My teacher didn’t like any of my papers and that one was no exception, so I was called in to class early to discuss it. One thing he didn’t understand was my usage of the fact that I wore slacks instead of jeans as indicative of my unconventionality. Out of nowhere, this girl who was serving morning detention interjected and explained exactly what I was trying to say.

When the teacher moved on to someone else, she moved to the desk in front of me and struck up a conversation. She was asking me all sorts of questions about myself in small talk that I would later figure out was the sort of chit-chat you involve yourself in before asking someone out. I think the kids call this “flirting”. I was of course utterly oblivious at the time. She mentioned in the course of the conversation that I reminded her a little bit of this guy that she knew. I jumped onto the familiar name and expressed how completely and awesomely cool the guy was. Turned out that they’d dated and it didn’t end well. Oops. That remains one of the missed opportunities that I’m sorry that I missed. She was a lot more interesting than the girls I actually wanted to date.

Watching movies with my father is one of the pleasures in life. This is particularly true when it’s one of those caper films that he loves so much or any movie with plots and counterplots. We are both the kind of people that like to stop the movie and share our thoughts and observations. It can be hard to follow all the goings-on when watching by yourself, but it’s great fun (and great father-son “quality time”) to wade through it together.

Last night we watched The Departed, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Anthony Anderson, and others. The basic plot of the movie is that Colin Sullivan (Damon) and Bill Costigan (DiCaprio) graduated from the state police academy together (though they didn’t know one another). Sullivan is under the thumb of a big-time mobster named Costello (Nicholson) and basically acts as a double agent for Costello as he works his way up through the ranks of the police department. Costigan, on the other hand, is recruited to infiltrate Costello’s gang and act as a double agent there.

The title of the Hong Kong movie that it was based after was Infernal Affairs, which is a better title. Both characters are thrust into roles as double agents where their public faces and private faces oppose one another. In a sense, they’re both in their own form of hell. Costigan is more-or-less recruited against his will with the threat by his superiors (Sheen and Wahlberg) of being tossed from the department. Further, it is known that there is a leak within the department and so he has very little institutional support and every day is a new day that he may be discovered. Damon, on the other hand, works for a rather skummy individual and since he is not devoid of a conscience that presents a hell of its own.

The movie suspensefully watches the play and counterplay between the mob and police department as each tries to use their inside guy and find out who the infiltrators into their own respective ranks are. This is where the movie is at its strongest. In fact, this premise could really be turned into an ongoing television show as there is so much potential. Still, the movie does an excellent job of utilizing it as best it can within a couple of hours.

My biggest complaint about the movie is that once this is all settled, the movie keeps going… and going… and going… as Damon and DiCaprio face off against one another. It’s actually reminiscent of the movie Face Off, which features Nicolas Cage and John Travolta each being thrust into opposite sides of the law. As with Face Off, if The Departed had ended half an hour before it did, it would have been perfect. There was actually quite a bit about the ending that I didn’t like. My second biggest complaint is that they share a relatively pointless mutual love interest. Something could have been done with this, but they never explored this threat to its full potential.

Though I am left with the not-infrequent frustration of a great concept not fully lived up to, the movie is still worth seeing if you like suspense/intrigue movies.

Regarding a recent Supreme Court decision - I’d like to steer this discussion towards the points of law and constitution, rather than personal feelings on the death penalty as such.

Points of law involved:
#1 - Constitution, 10th amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

#2 - Constitution itself, Section 3, Clause 2: “Clause 2: The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason…”

#3 - 18 USC 2381: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”

This is interesting because in the opinion, in order for the Supreme Court to basically abolish the 10th amendment, the majority opinion reads as follows:

Our concern here is limited to crimes against individual persons. We do not address, for example, crimes defining and punishing treason, espionage, terrorism, and drug kingpin activity, which are offenses against the State. As it relates to crimes against individuals, though, the death penalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim’s life was not taken.

Now, “the State”, as such, is a collection of individuals - namely, the collective individual persons (as Justice Kennedy conveniently forgets) who make up this nation. One of the whole points of the US system of government is to prevent monarchical “The State” setups that arbitrarily relegate us “individual persons” away.

One gets the feeling the framers of the Constitution are spinning in their graves. Maybe we could hook them up to a generator for some free electricity.

Writing about The Big Bang Theory, Orson Scott Card makes the following comment {link via Abel}:

The weak spots in the show are the ever-randy weenie, Howard (Simon Helberg), and the Indian guy who can’t talk when a woman is present, Rajnesh (Kunal Nayyar). These are throwaway characters that Lorre himself treats with contempt when he writes the scripts.

I disagree with with Card about the alleged contempt that Lorre treats Rajnesh (Howard is pretty contemptable, though), but I very much agree with Card about the proper role for these characters. They’re indicative of something that I’ve noticed as I’ve been pouring through a lot of old television shows with my Bluetooth and Pocket PC. Some characters — even good ones — are meant to be temporary. It seems that few sitcom writers seem to realize this.

Somewhere around season six or so of Just Shoot Me, the producers wanted to add an actress (Rena Sofer) to the cast and more-or-less forced the writers to come up with a character for her (Vicki Costa). to make room for her they more-or-less abandoned a regular guest character named Kevin Liotta who had become really popular. The audiences hated the new character and Costa was dropped from the show after half a season and Liotta came back for more regular appearances towards the end.

Costa was a pretty awful character. The writers never seemed to get a good idea of what to do with her and it showed. But what I found interesting was that Kevin was a lot less interesting when he came back. In retrospect I think that dropping him (at least to more irregular appearances) was a good thing. In fact, I think that dropped characters, even ones that aren’t necessarily bad ones, can be a good idea. Shows, however, are pretty reluctant to ever do it. That’s a shame, though, because cast changes can really reinvigorate a show. Cast additions, which they usually try instead, can also help… but sometimes you need to create room by subtraction.

I recently finished watching the TV show Becker all the way through. In the first season a character named Bob was introduced. Bob was a loser in high school that had made good and felt that his success should have made Reggie, a former model who landed as the proprietor of a crummy diner, feel regret over rejecting him. He was a good character. For half a season. The problem is that they kept him around for five well past the point that he was remotely interesting. For the last season they replaced him with another character named Hector (played by Jorge Garcia, who plays Hurley on Lost). I wish they’d added Hector a whole lot sooner.

Another example of a cast change being good for a show was borne of tragedy. When Michael J Fox’s illness became too much for him to handle while doing Spin City, they replaced him with Charlie Sheen. Sheen’s character may have been better than Fox’s or may not have been, but Sheen’s character in the two seasons he was on the show was a lot better than Fox’s was in the last season he was on that show. The show had started to become stale and Sheen brought new life into it. Spin City didn’t last but a couple seasons with Sheen, but Sheen did well enough on that show that they gave him a part with virtually the same character on Two and a Half Men.

Speaking of Two and a Half Men, they dropped the character Rose somewhere in the third season or so. Rose was a girl that Charlie Sheen’s character (also named Charlie) slept with who had become obsessed with him. They should have gotten rid of Rose sooner than they did, but at least they got rid of her. They did bring her back for more periodic appearances as a sort of scheming mastermind, but it worked. I think that the break was needed and the lessened frequency of her was a net gain for the character and the show.

There are cases where lost cast members hurt a show, of course. News Radio never recovered from the death of Phil Hartman, Spin City lost more than just Michael J Fox and never were able to replace them, and The Drew Carey Show needed Kate, but I think that had to do with inadequate replacements more than anything else (Does anyone consider Jon Lovitz funny?).

In general, though, I think that shows should have more fluid casts. Most casting changes are done by simple addition or because an actor left or was fired. It’s usually in response to something rather than saying “Hey, this is a good character, we should make room for them” and “This character has run its course, it’s time for something different.” It would be even better if they’d audition characters to see which ones the audience takes a liking to or which ones fit and then use them for a while until the roles have run their part. One example of auditioning working out is Mimi from The Drew Carey Show, who was meant to appear for one episode and instead became a staple for the series.

Overall conservatism is one reason that they likely don’t make cast changes that aren’t absolutely necessary. They’re also probably afraid of losing actors to other shows if they don’t lock them in as a regular. Even so, I’d like to see more experimentation in this regard and less simple reaction.

Things I find annoying about the way that Windows names files and moreso how it sorts files:

• It would be extremely helpful to allow question marks in filenames and it’s annoying that it won’t let me. I’d say that it’s actually even more important than periods.
• By default, Windows does not include extensions on filenames. You can change this, though, which is good. Unfortunately, when you show extensions it changes the order in which files sort because the period is sorted after the space. So if you have an MP3 entitled “Troy Thomason - Black Coffee.mp3″ and another entitled “Troy Thomason - Black Coffee (live).mp3″ the former will appear first if you’re hiding extensions but the latter will appear first if you’re showing them. This comes up more often than you would think. If you have the American Pie movies on your computer, “American Pie 2.mov” will show up before “American Pie.mov” if extensions are not hidden.
• Windows 2000 does not sort numerically. If you have a file named “Test Document 2″ and another named “Test Document 10″ the latter will appear first in Windows 2000. This actually wasn’t a big deal because I could fix it using filename trickery. So this isn’t a complaint so much, particularly since they fixed it for Windows XP, but it’s kind of annoying that Windows XP and Windows 2000 treat this differently. There are supposed to be ways that you can get Windows XP to stop figuring out numbers, but I want to have my cake and eat it, too. I wish one of the Windows 2000 SP would have addressed this issue. Yes, yes, I know that’s not what SPs are for, but still.
• On the other hand, there are some discrepencies between Windows 2000 and Windows XP that have no logical explanation. The way that non-numeral and non-alphabetic characters are sorted changed. I had found a filename trickery way around previously mentioned problems by sticking certain characters in front of the filenames like !’,-…. but Windows 2000 puts them in a different order than XP, so the order changes depending on what OS I’m using and that’s pretty lame.
• Also lame was Microsoft’s decision to make the dash a non-sorting character for XP. I wanted to add a dash to put certain files ahead of other files because it’s less intrusive to the exclamation point that I had been using (if I wanted a file to appear at the top of the directory, I simply renamed Filename.ext to !Filename.ext).
  Most of these could be fixed if I could go into the registry or some other setting place and change how the files are sorted alphabetically.

I’m not up to date on the whole airline industry, but here’s something that I don’t understand:

Starting Oct. 6, most United fares will require a one- to three-night or weekend-night minimum stay, spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said.

The new rules, which apply to nearly every ticket, are bound to be unpopular with business travelers who prefer to catch a flight out early in the morning so they can make it back home in time for dinner.

Major carriers scrapped most minimum-stay rules — put in place largely to discourage big-budget corporate travelers from snatching up the cheapest seats — years ago, although a number of airlines have been tightening up restrictions and tacking on fees in recent months as the price of fuel has soared.

Does this mean what I think it means? Cause I think it means that the airline is trying to dictate your travel schedule. But that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way that I’m going to stay somewhere longer than a couple of days because the airline won’t sell me a ticket home. I’d buy two one-ways with two different airlines first. I’d certainly never buy United. Even apart from the hotel costs, it’s not worth it to me to stay some place that I don’t want to stay.

I also don’t understand how this would do anything except alienate business travelers, who are often the most lucrative set. I mean I guess it would mean fewer people trying to get flights at prime times since they won’t try to game the clock to leave Thursday and be home Friday, but wouldn’t an easier way to do that to be to just raise the costs of morning and evening flights?

The only logical reason I can think of this policy is to make pricing a lot more complicated. Allow people to think that they’ve purchased tickets for $X and then to apply a surcharge for breaking some inane and pointless policy about minimum stays.

The more logical thing is that this is about something other than what I think it’s about and that I am a fool for misunderstanding. So can anyone tell me what the heck is going on here?

This post will contain massive spoilers for the Battlestar Galactica TV series, so if you’re not up to date, don’t read forward. Note to the people that I ruined some spoilers from the end of last season, please don’t let that prevent you from watching. Those events are nothing compared to some of the surprises dropped at the end of this half-season. (more…)

Sucks to be proven wrong. Some people are speculating that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was born in Kenya and not the United States. A person that I was talking to - making an argument about media bias - said that several months ago the media was saying that John McCain might be ineligible for the presidency because he was born in Panama and is thus not a “Natural Born Citizen”.

I called BS, but he was right and I was wrong. There were in fact a couple of articles on the subject that suggested that there could potentially be an issue, though the tone of the articles leaned towards the notion that it was likely that McCain was eligible but that it wasn’t a “slam dunk”.

It’s all a pretty silly question. There is no way that any court would ever rule that someone is ineligible for the presidency because he was born overseas while his father was serving our country in the military. It’s also extremely unlikely that if Obama was in fact born in Kenya that Republicans - who also nominated a foreign-born candidate - would suggest that neither of the two party’s nominees could Constitutionally be elected president.

What is a bit distressing, though, is reading a few blogs and whatnot where people have actually invested themselves in the argument that McCain is not eligible. It’s such a transparently political argument (made both by Democrats and anti-McCain Republicans) dressed up as Constitutional scholarship.

A few months ago I posted a scenario in which I ended up marrying old flame Evangeline rather than my wife. This post is sort of like that, except involving Julie, a girl that I dated for about five years prior to Clancy and Evangeline. Evangeline Road was prompted by Eva in an effort to convince me that things weren’t going to work out. This post is a sort of narrative indicative of the fears that were going through my mind that ultimately convinced me to break things off. I realized that not only was I unhappy, but I was unhappy in a desperate and reckless sort of way that if left unchecked would have lead to bad results for anyone that had emotionally invested anything in me, which at the time included Cecilia, Julie, and my potential family with Julie.

—-

Despite my reservations, I proposed to Julie in the fourth year of our courtship. It was a difficult decision to make. From the moment that I began saving up to buy a ring, my mood towards the relationship shifted from comfort to agitation. A weird feeling of dread started overtaking me. The closer I got to proposing, the worse the feeling got. The turning point involved my lusting after someone else. It didn’t get rid of the feeling so much as it made it clear that I was destined to my fate.

At an anime convention in Ephesus, I watched Cecilia dancing with another guy. The thought that it could have been me kept running through my head. The thought that I wanted it to be me was never far behind. They were both over 6′0″ tall and hard to miss on the dance floor. That’s what I told myself as I drank the liquor. Though I knew it was possible that I could, I never intervened. Never acted. Came close to talking to her the next day, but instead accepted that it was Julie that I was supposed to marry.

And so we did. We married at St. Jude Episcopal Church in Southfield. Her mother wanted us to marry at her Presbyterian church in Phillippi, but she hadn’t been to church but three times in the previous two years. I’d been eight times, so I won. Our honeymoon was a cheap cruise with lots of screaming children and so much food that typical honeymoon activities became difficult. We had fun, I guess.

I started law school the next fall. I was hoping to get into the University of Colosse Law School, but I narrowly missed out. the Delosa Christian University Law School didn’t have U of C’s reputation and was a lot more expensive, but it would have to do. I dropped out after the first year, $25,000 in debt. Julie was upset, but since she’d dropped out of undergrad at that point, there wasn’t much that she could say.

I managed to get a job at SouthStar, where I’d worked prior to law school and where her mother worked. Slowly but surely I worked my way up the ladder until we could buy a house. We ended up getting a house in a blue collar community in Phillippi. Our marriage was utterly unremarkable at that point. We more-or-less skipped right past the honeymoon stage into a settled marriage. I wasn’t enthusiastic about that, but I knew that it could be worse. I didn’t realize at the time that it was about to get worse.

A part of me hadn’t let go of Cecilia and during a business trip to Ephesus, where she was living at the time, I re-established contact with her. I don’t know if it was Cecilia herself or simply the need to feel alive in a way that I didn’t in our married life, but we embarked on the sort of relationship that we’d managed to avoid a half-decade before. I never suggested that I was considering leaving Julie, though in my heart I knew that she wanted to and I knew that I was taking advantage of that. I’d actually managed to compartmentalize the whole thing with respect to my marriage and I didn’t feel particularly guilty about what I was doing to Julie.

We did what a lot of couples with a dull marriage do, we started trying to have kids. Though I was oddly indifferent at the thought of having kids with Julie, it at least gave me the feeling that we were a normal married couple doing what normal married couples do and that was nice. In fact, “normal marriage” became a banner for us of sorts. To that end, we started attending church regularly. About that time I managed ducking business trips to Ephesus and Cecilia moved on.

We named our first son William Sage Truman at the urging of our friend (and the child’s godfather) Walt, who had informally changed his last name to Sage. To avoid confusion with his father being called Will and his grandfather Bill, we called him Sage. A couple years after that came Claire and then a couple years after that little Bailey.

My career was actually going remarkably well, though ironically that would be the cause of a great unraveling. The further I got ahead at the office the further behind we kept falling financially. Before we could afford it we moved into a bigger house in outer Corinth. We needed the place so that Julie could get her fledgling pet training business off the ground. It was cheaper than any of the alternatives. Unfortunately, it later became a point of contention when it became apparent that she would rather spend her days watching daytime television and spending our money than working on her business. She blamed the lack of progress on her child-rearing duties, which to be fair I never did give her enough credit for it. I was too busy working my ass off to pay for a mortgage on a house set up for a career that she’d lost interest in.

The biggest problem was that my mind became increasingly warped with respect to my position within my marriage. I became more and more resentful of being saddled with my wife at a time in my life when I had more relationship currency than I had ever had. I had a successful career, was in relatively good physical shape, and had even managed to become somewhat personable. She, on the other hand, had gone from a promising honors student to a college drop out to Peg Bundy without the cigarettes. In fact, everything that was keeping me back in regards to finding someone else had to do with her. I was married with children and even if I left her I would be divorced with children. In short, I felt cheated. I’d met her at a point of relative weakness and now I was in a position of relative strength and had nothing to show for it.

In some ways the worst of it all was that I had no one to talk about it. I knew how vile my thoughts were. My best friend at the time was Walt and he was closer to her than he was to me. My other friends thought that I had the ideal marriage and I didn’t want to disrupt that image. I wasn’t willing to let my misery get in the way of my pride. So with nowhere else to turn, I turned to Cecilia. As luck would have it, she was in a transitional period in her life. Her boyfriend had moved out and she couldn’t afford rent in Appalachia, where she was apparently living. The job market there was crap, so I volunteered to help her move to Colosse. Needless to say, it wasn’t a particularly benevolent gesture.

Cecilia smoked and Julie could smell the cigarette smoke when I would come home late. I told her that I’d picked up the habit, which not long after I really did. Julie was so irate that she threatened to leave me. It was an empty threat, though, and we both knew that she’d come to accept it as she came to accept so many things before. Our ability to accept things was one of the strengths of our marriage.

Cecilia and I were off and on for about six years or so, but as she approached thirty she took stock of her life and understandably found that I was not a healthy part of it. She never asked me to leave Julie and I knew that I could salvage things with Cecilia if I were to do so, but we both knew that wasn’t going to happen. So we called it quits and I resolved that I wasn’t going to cheat on my wife anymore.

Looking back, I should have been more ambitious and resolved to try to fix my marriage. Instead I simply let it keep circling the drain in perpetuity. I started smoking more and smoking cigars. I no longer had an affair to cover up, but it was simply an excuse to go to the back porch and not have to deal with her. Sage would sometimes come out with me. He and I were always the closest because he was old enough to remember me before I became the person that I became. Our late night conversations on the back porch while I smoke and drank were disturbingly reminiscent of my conversations with my mother while she was doing the same.

Julie made me sleep on the couch when I reaked of tobacco and booze. She didn’t fully realize that was a feature rather than a bug.

Claire and Bailey were both considerably closer to their mother than they were to me. While they were growing up I spent a lot more time working and at Cecilia’s apartment and saw more of what I was doing to their mother than they actually saw of me.

I started gaining a lot of weight in my thirties and by the time I hit forty I was substantially overweight. My thinking was that if I was stuck with Julie and I was finished with extramarital activity, what was the point? The point was to avoid a heart attack, which I failed to evade in my early forties. Julie, to her credit, stood by me throughout the entire ordeal at the cost of only a few (okay, a lot) of “I told you so”s.

Our marriage improved after that. The whole incident was enough to get me to re-focus my life on my family. My marriage remained something of a loveless one, but by that point I figured that there were worse things. By failing to ask for more, I learned that we could get along just fine.

None of the kids turned out exactly as I might have hoped, though of course I love them and am proud of them in their own way just the same. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. Bailey met a girl in high school and after about five or six years of dating they got married. After flunking out of three state colleges he eventually got a two year degree and makes a pretty decent living as an electrician. Julie and I provide free babysitting for his kids, but beyond that we inhabit different worlds. He the blue-collar NASCAR world and mine a small world that rarely moves beyond my own thoughts.

Claire got a scholarship from out-of-state. After graduating from law school she got pregnant and married in a casino-slash-wedding-chapel out west. Her husband sends us cards periodically to let us know how our grandchildren are doing. We visit sometimes, though she almost never comes home. It’s apparent that her life in suburban Colosse brought up a lot of unpleasant memories. Either the unpleasant memories revolved around our domestic situation or else they were something else that I never bothered to learn about. Hard to feel slighted by her lack of contact with us, though it seems more unfair to her mother than to me.

Sage attended Southern Tech University and studied computers just like his dad. Also like his father he seems to focus on trying to make unworkable relationships work. He and I still spend a lot of time on the back porch, except now he’s the one smoking and drinking bourbon and I’m drinking iced tea. I hate iced tea, but it seems like the right thing to drink in lieu of alcohol. Sometimes I steal a drag of his cigarette. When I breathe the smoke in, I am transported to a different time and place where I am with Cecilia or otherwise young and alive. Then I breathe it out and I am returned to the porch, listening to my eldest son wonder aloud if things will ever work out for him.

“It all depends on what you mean by “work out”, I tell him.

—

This is all pretty wild speculation, of course. Had I married Julie things could have turned out a heck of a lot better or possibly even worse. I’d like to think that I’m not the kind of guy that can carry on a prolonged affair, though if there’s one thing that I’ve learned about people (especially men) is that when things get bottled up too tightly, people explode in relatively unexpected ways. More than once I’ve said something to the effect of “If you want to be a good husband, find a wife that you’re happy with.”

Every now and again I run into some issue where I say to myself “I can’t believe that there’s not a software application that does this. Surely I am not the only person that would find this extremely useful.”

One such example is file transfering software. Transferring files in Windows Explorer sucks and I haven’t found something that offers all of the options that I want. At the guts of it, what I want is an application that will let me tell files to transfer, go to bed, and wake up knowing all of them have been transferred.

I can’t tell you how many times I have gone to bed wanting to move gigs and gigs of data and woken up and found out that after six files it stopped everything to ask me the question “Filename.ext is read-only, are you sure you want to move it?” I can appreciate it asking the question, but did it really have to stop everything in order for me to ask it? Couldn’t it have put the set that particular file aside and kept going and then when I woke up asked me two dozen questions? That’s too much to ask for apparently.

At the very least, it would be nice to be able to answer the half-dozen potential problems at the outset. I want to be able to tell it “Yes, move read-only files. Yes, over-write existing files. Yes, I know that there is a folder with this name already.” I have found one application that allows me to do this (Total Commander), though it only seems to allow for copying files and not moving them.

Also, when you want to move a file that Windows isn’t sure that you want to move, you are given the following options:
Yes (as in move this file and only this file)
Yes to All (as in move all files with this particular dilemma)
No (as in do not move this file)
Cancel (as in stop moving everything)

Do you notice an option missing? How about “No to all”. What if I don’t want to overwrite any files that might already exist, but I want everything else to transfer? I have to manually say “No” for every instance of the problem. That means that I have to monitor the file transfers. That means that I can’t go to bed and wake up with all the work magically done. Total Commander helpfully has a “Skip All” function that basically does this.

One more bigger complaint and a piddly one. The bigger complaint is that it does not move or copy files in order. tell it to move 25 files and it will start at about the 15th or so and then move down and start back at the top. If I am moving a bunch of files onto a media disk and want it to move all of the files it can, I have to figure out how much space I have and how much I can move. I’d like to be able to say “Move 25 files and if you can only fit the first 15 that’s okay” but instead I get to say “Move 25 files, but if you can only fit 15, move files 16-25 and then 1-5″. I used to think that Windows did this to allow for faster file transfers (it started picking the files it could most easily grab or something), but Total Commander moves the files faster and does it in order.

The piddly complaint has to do with fonts. I used to be a font collector and I regularly install 700 or so fonts onto my computer. When I do this, I have to click “okay” for every instance where that file already exists. I can’t tell it to copy over all files that already exist the way I can with non-font files. This is a more pissant complaint than the rest of my pissant complaints, though, because I only have to do it once per Windows install.

Of course, the fact that I have to reinstall Windows as often as I do is another issue entirely…

On the road again… I can’t wait to get on the road again…

Actually, I am on the road. I’m driving to Colosse so that I can switch out cars. the car that I’ve been driving has well passed the 200k point and Dad has another car (smaller variation of the same model) that I will be taking over. It’ll also be the last chance to visit my folks before I move much farther away. Anyway, posting will be a bit light as I drive and visit with family and friends.

One of the surprises when I relocated to Deseret was that state trooper highway patrolmen would often hide behind large structures waiting for speeders. This surprised me because in Delosa from what I understand they’re not allowed to do that. As I understand the law to be, the police shield, word “Police”, or overhead lights must be visible to oncoming traffic unless (a) The police officer is mobile in the middle of routine business when he catches the violator or (b) they are supervising a construction or school zone and are not visible because they’re behind another vehicle.

The city of Phillippi actually replaced a bunch of police cars and police lighting systems that didn’t have overhead police lights because lawyers were getting tickets dismissed. When the car was parked on the side of the road, the shield wasn’t visible and there weren’t overhead lights. It was a small investment to bring in a lot of future revenue.

Cops in Delosa work around this rule in a number of ways. There was one popular place in Phillippi for cops to hide wherein most of the car is obstructed by brush but there is just enough to see the shield in the right slant of light. Since judges have signed off on it, the local constable’s office used it right up until something was built there. It’s also not uncommon for some police departments to schedule routine operations to involve going back and forth in areas where people frequently speed or red lights are run.

I was informed upon moving to Estacado that the laws here are the same as they are in Delosa where cops can’t out-and-out hide. Santomas cops are very, very innovative when it comes to skirting this requirement. Their highway fleet has no overhead lights and are atypical police car colors (Silver, gray, green). The cars are marked with the word “Police” but you can only see the marking if your headlights on are on and hitting the car. The cars are always parked at a 45 degree angle or so. In other words, despite meeting the letter of the law, it’s difficult to tell that they’re police cars until people know what to look for.

That’s just it, though. People learn what to look for. I’ve already figured it out. The cars are parked at a 45 degree angle, are Chevy Cavaliers or Cavalier-looking cars (adding them to the Camaros, Caprices, Impalas, and Crown Vics as cars to be suspicious of), have a slightly unusual hew of whatever color the car is so that the reflective paint blends in, and are parked at a 45 degree angle or so.

But to me, though, the really odd part is that they don’t actually have to cheat. The average flow of traffic on I-31 is above the speed limit in all but the right lane. The city of Santomas has lower speed limits than the freeways in surrounding counties. It is nearly impossible for me to believe that they couldn’t find speeders without resorting to such tricks.

Of course, the law that protects us from cops is a bit silly in and of itself. It’s not illegal to knowingly speed in front of a police officer. It’s unlawful to speed at all whether a cop is present or not. Theoretically, then, the police officers should be able to deploy any means they wish short of entrapment or Constitutional abridgments in their pursuit of “dangerous” drivers. In a sense, laws like this as well as caps on ticket revenue and special outs to avoid your insurance company finding out about your misdeeds underline what a game this all is.

If we were serious about speed limits, there’d be speed cameras placed everywhere. Any time you speed you get a ticket. Even if the ticket is $5, it’ll start adding up and drivers will modify their behavior accordingly. Cars will start coming equipped with a new kind of cruise control where you set a maximum speed so that you inadvertently don’t go over the speed limit. Revenue from tickets would go towards something other than the general funds of the municipality to avoid incentives to set speed limits to low.

None of the above changes are coming down the pipe any time soon, so we’re back to the games of wackily-painted police cars hiding behind not-completely-opaque bushes.

In 1997 an Australian movie entitled Thank God He Met Lizzie was released. It was released in the US under a different title, The Wedding Party. The short rift of this post is that I strongly recommend putting this movie in your Netflix queue if you like bittersweet and thoughtful romantic films.

In the outset of the movie it appears that the relationship is going to be about Guy (Richard Roxburgh) and Lizzie (Cate Blanchett), who meet-cute in the first few minutes of the film. Instead, the movie forwards pretty quickly to their wedding and the focus shifts away from Lizzie and towards Jenny (Frances O’Connor), a young woman that Guy dated and lived with and was trying to get over at the time of the meet-cute with Lizzie. The film cuts in and out from the wedding party to a retrospective on his time together with Jenny and their highs and lows. What it all means is subject to debate.

The question is a classic one about The One That Got Away versus The One You Settle For. Or alternately it’s a question of struggling to make a wrong relationship right and the ease with which things can be right with the right person if you just let it be right. It all breaks down to the question of whether the (original Australian) title of the movie was meant to be ironic or not.

I don’t personally believe that the movie ever answers this question or if they were seeking to answer it they could have done so much more clearly than they did. In this vein, the movie does a remarkable job avoiding the traps and archetypes that they could have saved effort by using. Guy’s relationship with Jenny is not depicted as a never-ending alternating of good and destructive passion. His relationship with Lizzie is also elevated to more than the safe girl to settle down with.

Rather, the movie seems to explore two very different kinds of love, both perfectly valid. His relationship with Jenny seemed to revolve around the premise that a relationship is something that makes one happy while his relationship with Lizzie is built on the notion that the right relationship is one that helps its participants find happiness in all respects. Jenny agitates for children but one gets the sense that the two of them spend so much energy on one another (worrying what’s wrong, trying to repair things, or being enthralled with one another) that it seems unlikely that they would have the energy to rear little ones. On the other hand, a marriage with Lizzie without children or something external for them to focus their energies on is one that seems unlikely to hold on its own. Whether one prefers the first style of marriage or the second is rather subjective.

Then again, ask ten people what the movie conveyed to them and you’re likely to get at least five different answers. This is not a movie that does your thinking for you and it has no grand point where everything comes together and you figure out exactly what it’s trying to say. Rather, it simply weaves together a great story with three interesting characters and allows you to make of it what you will.

The acting and characters throughout are superb. Maybe he can’t shake his Australian accent because that’s about the only reason I can think of for which Richard Roxburgh (Guy) isn’t a full-fledged star. O’Connor (Jenny) was in Bedazzled, but other than that her resume is thin. The only one to go on and make a lot of movies is Blanchett (Lizzie) who had the least demanding role of the three. In fact, for a lot of the movie it seems that Lizzie is going to be a rather weak character, but she has her moments in the end where she makes her mark as more than just the stand-in for the safe choice.

This movie isn’t for everybody, though. There isn’t much in the way of passionate love scene or sparks-flying romance. It’s a relatively realistic portrayal of the mechanics of relationships somewhat at the expense of the magic. Nor are there any dramatic confrontations with dramatic consequences and drama, drama, drama. The pacing is a little bit slow as well and it’s not always easy to see where it’s going, though it gets there in the end. It’s extremely low-key. If you need very eventful movies, I wouldn’t recommend this one. If you ask for good characters and an interesting story and are willing to watch it unfold one piece at a time, I strongly recommend it.

AskMen has the ten worst male-bashing ads on television from a variety of big names (Pizza Hut, Sony) to companies I’ve never heard of (Megasin, Roomba). I’ll go into a commercial-by-commercial below the fold, but the overall sense I get is… is this the best you got? For all the complaining that a lot of guys do how they have giant target on their backs and so on, you can’t find anything more incendiary than these ads? The only two that were was completely derogatory towards men were either really lame or funny as hell and a lot of them didn’t really match the description gave.

Then again… that’s the way that these things work, isn’t it? Sexism (whether aimed at women or men), racism, and so on is rarely a case anymore of people coming out and saying “These people are stupid, malicious, or otherwise worthy of contempt!” Rather it’s things that we do that we sometimes don’t even realize we’re doing, don’t realize that it might be out of line, or believe that it’s justified for one reason or another.

I remember a sexual harassment seminar recently where we were lectured by lawyers as to what was and was not sexual harassment. It was all kind of frustrating because sexual harassment in the abstract was whatever the women decided that it was. Legally actionable sexual harassment, on the other hand, came down to what could be completely devoid of sexual intent. In a sense, I’m not sure that either could be any other way. After all, in the abstract what is harassment beyond being harassed which is a feeling and subjective from individual to individual. On the legal side of things, how do you prevent sexual harassment without having some sort of line that needs to be crossed? Unfortunately, this sort of ambiguity gives a lot of men the wrong idea that sexual harassment is a myth or something simply used as a bludgeon against men in the office environment.

One of the problems with subtle sexism is that there are always alternate explanations. I have an alternate explanation for every one of the ten anti-male ads except one. Some of them are nudged towards making women feel better about themselves at the expense of their husband and kids, but that’s not the whole gist of it. It also gets more complicated because you can’t ask the question “Would things be different if the genders were reversed” because the genders wouldn’t be reversed. Ads where men are running mental circles around their spouse wouldn’t particularly interest men. Men even prefer ads where they are dopes (Cedric the Entertainer’s beer ads come to mind). On the other hand, the sexual objectification that frequently occurs with women in ads (particularly beer ads) wherein a woman’s value only exists in her ability to please men is considered as unoffensive among men as dopey anti-dad ads are among woman.

Getting all worked up about it seems like an over-reaction, even if there are underlying issues of merit. It makes these issues really difficult to talk about. Any time you try to point to an example there is almost always some other explanation that may be true. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the alternate explanations are always true, but any time you point to something specific it is easily dismissed or it can be shrugged off as an isolated incident because all the other examples are dismissible.

Anyhow, those are the thoughts bumping around in my mind. Below are my takes on the specific ads:
(more…)

Michael Scott is a much more sympathetic character than David Brent, his British counterpart on the The Office television shows. Or maybe that should be a less unsympathetic character. I’ve before commented that Scott was two-parts annoying and one-part creepy and Brent was one-part annoying and two-parts creepy. Scott is obnoxious, but Brent is slimy. American audiences don’t do as well with that kind of character, so we got a version slightly watered down with sugar-water. Besides, if we’re going to follow characters around for 100+ episodes over five or more years, we need help chugga-lugging down what might otherwise be digestible in the 12 half-hour episodes and movie special in Britain.

In any case, one of the things that I’ve heard at least a couple people say about Scott (both in comparison to Brent, though it can be said in comparison to Dwight Shrute as well) that he is obnoxious and immature, but basically harmless. I don’t entirely agree with that assessment.

The things that you have to ask yourself about people when assessing how dangerous they are to you is “What do they want?” and “How much do they want it?” With Dwight Shrute, what he wants more than anything is authority. This may make him a more transparently problematic person, but as with Brent at least you can see it coming. The problem with Scott is that what he wants is what we all want: to be loved, respected, and admired. The disquieting part is the second question. How much does he want it? Pretty much to the exclusion of anything else. Honor, morality, friendship, and romantic love are all subordinate to the desire to be included and admired.

The most telling scene with Michael Scott was when he was showing a video of his younger self on a kiddie show of some sort. He is asked what he wants most from life and he says it’s to get married and have 100 kids so that none of them could decline to being his friend. One of the saddest scenes on television pretty much ever.

Frankenstein’s Monster said something along the lines of “I am a monster because I am in pain.” Whenever I run across someone either in real life or in entertainment that has an emptiness in their heart, it makes me very wary.

Michael Scott’s younger years are never spelled out and though he likes to talk about himself he doesn’t really do so in honest or accurate terms, so we’re left to speculate. Nonetheless, it seems relatively apparent to me that Michael hasn’t just been hurt by what social rejection almost certainly took place in his past, but rather that he’s been scarred by it. I see within him a certain darkness in his soul where the part of him that is loved and accepted should reside. That’s not to say that he is completely unloved and unaccepted as his mother seems to love him (if not respect him) and Dwight functionally (if not earnestly) respects him, but it’s clearly not enough.

That’s the crux, for me. That’s the part that drives Michael Scott to be as obnoxious as he is. I don’t see Michael as, once having the love of a wife and the respect of some friends, becoming complete and satisfied. The people I’ve known that have been like him are often more than just missing something, but rather have hunger that is never really satisfied. Michael Scott is quite possibly warped by his own experiences and determined to be satisfied with nothing less than the impossible. People that are this way may be pitiable, but more than that they are dangerous. To become their friend is to in a sense feed a monster.

The monster isn’t Michael himself, but rather his insecurities and his need to be accepted. Give him what he thinks he wants and he will simply try to turn it into more. At your expense, if necessary.

The see the dark side of Michael Scott, you simply need to look at how he treats those whose approval he doesn’t need. It’s a relatively small group, to be sure, but it’s there. His atrocious behavior towards Pam’s landlord is an example. She is not young and not particularly attractive and so she is useless to him. He is nice enough to Dwight only when Dwight has something to offer him and is rather contemptuous the rest of the time. With the exception of her wedding, which I’ll get to in a minute, he is pretty consistently rotten to Phylis. Michael was nice to Phylis at her wedding and Kevin during the cancer scare, but his niceness only existed insofar as to draw attention to himself. Otherwise, they’re dead to him. Meanwhile, Ryan and Jim are useful to him because he admires them and Stanley, Darryl, Kelly, and to a lesser extent Oscar are useful to him because they reinforce his self-perception as a paragon of tolerance and understanding. Pam is invisible except insofar as she is pretty.

Nobody that is familiar with the show doesn’t know the above things about Michael, but it’s easier to overlook them. We pity him and we laugh at his ineptitude, but I think that we can sometimes overlook how toxic such people can be. You’re not even a person to such people but rather a positional lever. Subconsciously, I think he has the Groucho Marx philosophy that he wouldn’t want the earnest friendship of anyone that would sink so low as to want to be his friend. Once he is loved and accepted by a woman given time he will likely aim for more reassurance and look upward.

Despite all this, I have a great amount of sympathy for the character. The same sort of sympathy I have for stray animals and more recently homeless people. I feel terrible for their problem, but the second you involve yourself they become a problem for you. You can try to help homeless people and animals by donating to charities that get involved. Too bad there’s no such charity for giving the Michael Scotts of the world love and acceptance.

At the end of the second season of How I Met Your Mother is a great scene between the lead character Ted and his then-girlfriend Robin. Due to a mix-up at the restaurant, an engagement ring ends up going in Robin’s drink that’s meant for the woman at another table. Robin, upon seeing the ring, completely freaks out and not in the positive way. She just keeps going “No! No! No! Ted, you can’t do this to me! No! No!” Though they both knew that they had different ideas of what they wanted the future to be like, this was the first time where his desires (marriage, family) smashed so much into her desires (freedom, adventure). It was the scene where Ted saw the inevitability of the ending of their relationship.

—

I can’t remember what brought me to the toy store, but once I was there I saw a pink Carebear and thought about my friend Silke. Her birthday was coming up, so I went ahead and purchased it. She was out of town for the weekend with some friends and I knew that, but that made it a bit easier. I dropped it off with her father, who was I met with the first time, and went on my marry way. Silke was upset with me about that. I’d violated some boundary by giving it to her father to give to her. I came short of apologizing for giving her a gift under circumstances that weren’t ideal for her, but I nonetheless was apologetic that it somehow seemed to put her in some sort of awkward position. Or something. The Carebear was meant to be a birthday gift, but instead it became a parting gift. Until last week, other than a few dodged phone calls I hadn’t talked to her or heard from her in over five years.

It’s interesting how people sometimes enter your life, become one of the most central aspects of it, and then wash away with the rolling tide. Sometimes it’s with a bang and sometimes a whimper. I wonder sometimes, if my friend Walt hadn’t died so unexpectedly whether or not he was already washing away. He had fallen off our radar somewhat. The phone call I dialed on the night that he died was in a way an effort to prevent that from happening, but given where he was psychologically and emotionally at that point, maybe it was going to be a futile effort even if he hadn’t died. Maybe if his death had been a year later, it would have barely registered. Instead, when he died, he died a close friend and his ghost has haunted me periodically ever since.

Silke and I met in chat rooms during one of my breaks with Evangeline. I was never convinced that two people could be too good of friends to jeopardize it by going romantic, but Silke rather swiftly found ourselves in that position. We were one another’s “type” to a tee and in any other circumstance the nature of our relationship may have been very different, but because of the peculiarities of when we met and the rhythm that we found ourselves in, what we both needed were really good friends. Someone that we could connect with where we didn’t have to worry about sexual tension or being impressive.

She and I were functionally best friends for two years. The title still belonged to Clint, but he was a couple hundred miles away and Silke and I talked daily and talked about everything. There’s a difference between the friend that you have to catch up with what’s going on in your life and the one that you can just start in on its most recent developments. Silke and I were in the latter stage.

We were there for one another when guys and women would come into and out of our respective romantic lives, when she lost her virginity, when I lost my sanity, when she decided what she wanted to do with her life, and when I decided what I didn’t want to do with mine. There were goth-pagan-bisexuals, attempted restraining orders, homosexuals in denial, and spiritual faiths lost and found. Mine was the ear that she would bend on many, many nights as she waded through the inherent confusion of a young lady going from 18 to 21. She was the one I would go to when I needed to clear my chest about anything and nothing in particular. Talking to her was at times the light of my day.

The whole thing unraveled with something relatively small and unimportant (and, in case you become curious reading on, completely non-sexual or romantic in nature). There was something constrained in our relationship that I couldn’t put my finger on it until I made what I thought was an innocuous request and she freaked out. It wasn’t so much that I was denied but rather in the manner in which she denied it. Like Robin and the ring with Ted. The sudden realization of the limits of our friendship and what became an unwillingness on my part to accept it.

I began to realize that I felt that I had earned what I was asking for. I’d been there for the late night calls tears into my shoulder and putting my life on hold whenever she needed me. I’d not asked half of her what I’d volunteered to give her, but I guess a part of me figured that if I had asked for it, she would have given it without hesitation. I’d thought that the relatively undemanding nature of my friendship meant that when I needed something it would get extra consideration. From her point of view, that I would go from not asking for things to asking for them meant a changing of the goalposts of sorts. A departure from the comfort zone where our relationship had so peacefully existed.

It was only when I saw the limits of what she was willing to give that I realized that I’d been giving too much for too long. It was all voluntary, so I didn’t blame her. I also really want her to be uncomfortable nor did I want our friendship to be one of tit-for-tat and ultimata. But the status quo wasn’t particularly acceptable to me anymore. I tried to mention my dilemma to her, but she didn’t really get it.

A week or two ago I got an email from Silke. She said that she was thinking of me the other day and wondering why it was that our friendship seemed to trail off like it did. She gave me a brief update of her life — she dropped out of grad school, she’s getting married in July — and asked what was going on with me. I sent a perfunctory update on how I was doing. A long story short it lead to the conversation that we should have had a number of years ago. She felt bad that our friendship wasn’t working out for me and that she hoped that I found friends more to my liking. There really wasn’t much left to say to that.

Below the fold is the picture I was considering using for the post, but I decided that it didn’t fit the overall tone of the post. (more…)

A few days ago Clancy came up and said, “Will, we’ve got to do something about the garage. It smells awful in there.”

To which I replied, with not an ounce of sarcasm, “Hot damn! That’s great!” and rushed down there in excitement.

Clancy did not know that I was running a little experiment and the smell in the garage confirmed a relatively best-case scenario. As I mentioned in the original DAMN That Odor post:

Oddly enough, my car has begun to start smelling, too. Clancy noticed it first, but I noticed it almost immediately after. It’s something recent. She thinks it smells like a pee bottle. She really hates that I ever do that and is kind of paranoid about it. Just to be sure I cleaned out the car and there really wasn’t much of anything in the way of likely culprits inside of it. Doesn’t seem to be tied to the air conditioner, though.

With time, that smell only got worse and worse and I was sort of able to pinpoint the smell to somewhere in the trunk. There was a jug of fake fuel or anti-freeze or fertilizer or something (the label came off) and I had hoped that was it. Taking it out seemed to do no good, though. The rest of the contents of the trunk seemed pretty straightforward: Some CDs, a few comic books, roadmaps and atlases, some dominoes, and some gift that was directed to Clancy’s mother that somehow ended up in my car trunk. I thought maybe it was the gift, but it was from a place that didn’t do anything food or perishable. So my fear was that it was the Mystery Bottle and that some had spilled into the trunk and that it was going to smell this way for the rest of the car’s natural life.

So I decided to take the contents of the trunk and put it all in the garage. After a day or two, either the car would still smell and the garage would be fine or the other way around. Whatever the case, the odor was something that I was going to have to take care of before I swapped out cars with my father.

So the garage stunk and that meant that my car was not terminally stinky. Unfortunately, as with the trunk, it was really difficult to isolate the smell. I could tell that it was coming from the trunk, but I could not smell any particular item and notice that it smelled stronger than the other items. That’s what made me think that maybe something had spilled. And so it was in the garage. By process of elimination, I determined that it had to be either the domino can or the mother-in-law’s gift. The domino can contained… dominoes. So we said “screw it” and opened the gift addressed to Clancy’s Mom, which contained… gravy.

Extremely pungent gravy. Noxious gravy. Gravy that, as near as we can figure, has probably been in there since last Thanksgiving. The smell was hard to pin-point because it was leaking out of the sealed box. Even when I held the thing in my hands and sniffed through the cracks I wasn’t sure. It was only when it was opened and the garage exploded with foul that it was settled. The sealed box was likely something that the mother-in-law had simply re-purposed and was strangely thorough about repackaging tightly.

So the car is fixed. Now… if only I could figure out what to do about the damn smelly garage.

Before Sunrise asks:

I was at GAP Kids the other day, buying an early birthday present for my 9 year-old niece. As I was browsing through the clothes, I noticed that there was a “plus-size” section. {…}

When I was growing up there was no such thing. Children who were overweight just bought clothes that were meant for older children. I can’t help but ask myself - does this sort of thing indirectly encourage children to stay fat?

I actually had a conversation tangentially related to this with a coworker recently. My wife and I have had such conversations on multiple occasions. All three of us refuse to buy more clothes or nicer clothes that fit because we are dissatisfied with our weights.

Our thinking goes along the same lines as B-Sun’s. If being heavy (or heavier than you would prefer) becomes too comfortable, it removes incentive to lose the weight. I know a lot of women that hold on to their thinner clothes simply as an incentive to lose weight. I think that there is something to all this, though maybe for women the promise that you’ll buy a fantabulous new warddrobe may be a better enticement.

In regards to childhood obesity, though, I’m less sure. Fat kids still face some pretty harsh consequences for their flab. It strikes me as very unlikely that that’s changed in the last decade or so. Unfortunately, since nothing can really top the social and health consequences inherent with obesity, I’m really not sure what else can be done.

“It’s better to marry young because you can marry a girl straight out of high school, before she gets set in her ways and too comfortable by herself.” -Clem “Golden Boy” Hartford

“You have to get to them when they’re young before they get set to certain ways of thinking.” -Jonas, probably.

Unsurprisingly, Gannon finds it interesting that the honchos behind the FLDS, unconstrained by feminism and social convention, chose to mate with very young ladies. I find it interesting, too, though for different reasons. I actually agree with Gannon that men frequently can be sexually attracted to younger women and even people that we call children (but aren’t in any biological sense). Where Gannon and I differ is that he finds this to be determinative that to struggle against it is counterproductive and unnatural and that’s not how I see it at all. From my perspective, to the extent that it is a natural instinct it is sometimes natural in some men in the same sense that a propensity for violence is natural and the desire for men to have sex with as many women as he can is natural. In other words, it’s an aspect of our nature that we set up societies to moderate.

One of the more disturbing aspects of a lot of Gannon’s comments here and elsewhere and the comments of those like him are their talks about how unsullied young women are. They haven’t been embittered by feminism or a perpetually broken heart or whatever. He talks of how… fresh… they are. Not just in the physical sense, but in the mental and emotional senses as well. This disturbs me the same way that it would disturb me to hear a land developer talk about how natural and pristine a particular place is. He likes it natural and pristine so that he can himself develop it.

Between the ages of 15 and 25, a young lady will do her growing and by the end of that will become the core of the woman that she’ll be for the rest of her life. What Gannon, Golden Boy, and Probably Jonas are essentially saying is that it’s better to get in on the ground floor of this elevator and that the woman that appears at the top is inferior to the one at the bottom. She hasn’t been properly trained. The 25 year old has all sorts of inconvenient ideas and desires.

And I’ll be honest and say that I understand what they’re talking about. It’s nice to able to influence someone into being interested in what you’re interested in and doing the things that you like to do. My ex-girlfriend Julie (who was in the 15-25 bracket) was wonderfully malleable. She came around to agree with me politically, religiously, and we’d watch anime together, play video games, and listen to the same sorts of music and watch the same sorts of shows despite not having a whole lot of similar interests when we first met. It was something of a big deal when she wanted to watch Will & Grace and I wanted to watch SportsNight, which came on against one another.

My wife, I’ve learned, is not nearly so malleable. Getting her interested in a number of the things I am interested in is a longshot. Comic books and anime are out. Playing video games against one another is also not going to happen. Alternative rock? Not so much. Politics? We disagree a lot. Religion? Woooooo boy. Some of it is because I married a much more hard-headed woman than I dated a decade ago, but at the same time I’m less malleable when I was then. Ten years ago I acquired an interest in country music from Julie but I haven’t really made a similar effort with Clancy’s preferences of chick rock and classic rock, to pick an example.

To me there is an inherent problem when it comes to someone that has grown out of their malleable years dating someone that hasn’t. I can agree with Golden Boy’s comment so long as he says that men should get married young, too (which, since the LDS advocates it, I suspect that he does). But people with the wisdom of 25 years experience extolling the virtues of the inexperience of a 15 year old troubles me. It makes me believe that there is an element of control involved. A desire to be Pygmalion and create a statue to fall in love with.

While Gannon sees the FLDS situation and the apparent preference for teens on the part of the old men as supportive of his belief that such relationships should be more commonplace (or at least not illegal), I look at the same and see exactly what I fear about such relationships. The FLDS is built upon the manipulation and control of the young. So it’s not at all surprising to me that they would bite the bullet and take control of their sexuality as soon as they possibly can. Marry them off at 14 and they’ll never have anything to compare their sexual experience as a member of an old man’s collection.

I’ve thought about what I would do if my fifteen year old daughter came home with a twenty-five year old boyfriend and whether or not I could bring myself to approve. In the end, I couldn’t, and more than anything I think that the reason would be that she hasn’t fully discovered who she is yet and he probably has. Further, it is not necessarily in his interest for her to become all that she is capable of becoming. Unspoken would be the corollary that he is in a better position to prevent her from becoming all that she is capable of becoming than some numbnut that she’s going to school with.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been discussing the CPS raids on the FLDS and the subsequent court battles with various people over the last week and I’ve noticed an interesting trend. There is a near even split. The dividing line is not between liberals and conservatives or big government folks versus libertarians. Rather, it’s men against women. Probably about two thirds of the men I’ve talked to believe that the CPS was way out of line and that this is an egregious example of government over-reach. About the same portion of women take the opposite view. Republican voter or Democrat, it doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot. Men seem to look at the situation abstractly as a legal or philosophical issue. Women seem to look at the situation more personally as young women are stripped of their autonomy to become tools of procreation and the playthings of much (and sometimes much, much) older men.

For my part, from what I know about the case and the laws surrounding it, I think that the judges came to the correct legal conclusion. The CPS did a very poor job of getting its evidenciary ducks in a row. Even setting aside the faulty tip that triggered the raid, it seems likely that they could have done a better job of seeking out the women that escaped and the men that were kicked out of the compound. Or maybe even with all those ducks in a row the situation is cloudy enough that they can’t realistically legally intervene. Not sure. It’s frustrating when the prosecution (or in this case a government agency) botches a case that really could have been worthwhile, but when that happens the system needs to do what the system needs to do in order to prevent those botches from happening in the future.

And so I would agree with the men, for the most part. Except that a lot of them take it a few steps further. In their view, the CPS folks are the bad guys and the FLDS - or at least the majority contingent of the FLDS that is not actively sleeping with minors - their victims. More than one person has suggested that the FLDS is being picked on because it’s different, that the belief that all of these bad things are going on is largely the product of prejudice, and that we’re punishing an entire group for the actions of comparatively few.

That’s where they lose me.

From my perspective, the CPS folks are the inept and overzealous good guys in this case. The FLDS members are the victims only insofar as criminals are sometimes the victim of illegal searches. Well that’s the extent to which they are victims of the state, anyway. A majority of them are victims of the system they grew up in, but then they’re also the perpetrators. The moral perpetrators here are not simply the men that are having sex with people that they shouldn’t be having sex with. The perpetrators are the families giving up their young women to this system and raising their sons to be future perpetrators or else allowing them to be kicked out of the compound. While some people wonder why they don’t just take the men out of the picture and let everyone else be are in my mind insufficiently weighing that by participating in the system, their hands are bloody to. The women are victims, but they’re not just victims.

Don’t get me wrong. They have my sympathy. I don’t pretend that if I were raised in that environment that I wouldn’t believe exactly as they believe and support the system exactly as they support it. Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. But while I have sympathy, that doesn’t entitle them to the moral right to perpetuate the system that warped them. Though I don’t have as much of it since they were profiting from the system in a sense, I even have sympathy for the men that are collecting the young brides. As the saying goes, they know not what they do. They believe that they are doing God’s work. That doesn’t mean that letting them do what they were doing is right, either.

I’ve no doubt that the FLDS parents love their children. The problem is that either they love their church more or are stuck so far under the thumb of their church that they are powerless. So in a sense, Warren Jeffs is their parent. Their argument that nothing should be allowed to come between their family loses its resonance when they quite frequently allow their church to do just that:

To reduce competition for wives, the church systematically expels adolescent boys, thus trimming the eligible male population. It’s estimated that the FLDS has thrown out between 400 and 1,400 male members in the last decade.

Church elders excommunicate boys as young as 14 ostensibly for bad behavior—like flirting with girls, watching a movie, listening to rock music, drinking, playing basketball, or wearing short-sleeve shirts. Sometimes called the “Lost Boys,” they’re considered apostates and cut off entirely from their relatives. Parents or siblings who protest are sometimes asked to pack their bags as well. Girls have also been cast out of the church, but this happens much less often. Usually this punishment is reserved for women who don’t wish to be part of a polygamous marriage.

Excommunication doesn’t just mean that they lose Temple privileges or can’t take Holy Communion anymore. The church is the community. They’re not only kicked out of Mass (or whatever the FLDS equivalent is) but kicked out of their homes and their physical communities. Complaints from FLDS members about how wrong it is for them to send these kids into the world at large ring hollow. The church does it and the parents allow it to happen. Either they agree with what’s happening or they’re powerless to do anything about it. The end result is the same either way.

So how well do these young men fare in the world of iniquity that they are thrust into? It’s not a pretty sight:

They aren’t used to remembering when job interviews are or how to pay bills. They don’t know how to mingle with people, and some struggle to talk to girls.

“You’re taught that everyone out here is corrupt and evil,” Steed said. “You have no idea how life works, no idea how to survive in modern society.” They are, after all, only teens, but now they are on their own.

A therapist meets with some boys; some attend self-improvement classes. They are learning to manage money and signing up to take the GED. Fischer evaluates them, asking about future plans and if they want to go to college. He is working to match each boy with a mentor and find them places to live. For now, they live in hotels and in houses that the Fischer brothers own.

Many are highly skilled in construction, a main job in the creek. But all this support from outsiders is confusing. The boys say FLDS members and even their own families often turned on them, so it was easier to distrust everyone.

“In a way, it scares us,” said Raymond Hardy, 19. “I’m not used to it.” Ream wants to know what the catch is. “There’s always a catch. Why are they doing this?”

Of course, one could read this and say that the CPS is just condemning more kids to this fate. This is true, but I am unpersuaded that this is the worst fate. As difficult-going as this was for the Lost Boys, their situation is not unsalvageable. Many of them will grow up and have children and those children will be born free. Their sisters, on the other hand, will have children that will be born into the same machine that they were, believing that free thought and action are stops on the road to Hell. Regarding the kids in Eldorado, as substandard as our Foster Care system is, I’m not convinced that it’s worse than the alternative. I’m further not convinced of the notion that because the FLDS screwed them up so royally that the only responsible thing to do is to return them to that oppressive environment.

The tricky part, though, is the question of “What next?” This is a question where the CPS has fallen woefully short and the question to which I am not sure there is a good answer. Even if they do take the kids and more of them eventually adjust, the women in the compound will simply have more kids. The machine will likely live on. Perhaps the result will be an insurrection among the rank-and-file towards normalizing the church’s relationship with its surroundings. It seems unlikely that such an insurrection can be cultivated where free thought is grounds for explusion and besides, they’ve lost their children before in service of The Cause and no such movement has occurred.

From the CPS’s perspective, this will quite likely result in a retreat from Texas and that may be all the CPS and the State of Texas want. The Creek compounds in Utah and Arizona will continue on, though. Willard has expressed great concern that any attempts to pierce the armor surrounding that will result in rivers of blood. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. After Waco, it seems unlikely that the federal government is going to take that chance and the governments in Utah and Arizona seem to have moved on from their investigations.

This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of all of this. It’s also why I have become so frustrated with those that are celebrating the reunion of parents and child. Even though I believe the courts likely ruled correctly given what they had to work with, I am more inclined to feel sad and angry that moral justice was not done even if legal justice was. This represents not the greatness of our system, but the inherent weakness of it. It is apparent that either our governments are too inept to handle the investigation or otherwise that cults can escape justice so long as their circle their wagons tightly enough. No thorough investigation can occur without ripping the community apart from one end to the other… and we can’t rip the community apart without being able to thoroughly investigate it first.

Further, they’ve managed to win people over people by virtue of the very insularity that keeps them beyond the government’s reach. The fact that they’re so different becomes a reason in itself that they should not be released into the general system. The kids are so brainwashed that they can’t handle the outside world without the guidance of their brainwashed parents. Except that arguments of coercion are shrugged off because you can’t call it coercion when the conditioning begins at birth. The fact that members of the church are so stripped of their autonomy that coercion becomes redundant simply doesn’t make me feel better.