I have been the recipient of CC’s of at least three great emails in my time. One was forwarded by a young woman who had a romantic admirer that was basically telling her that he could not have her as a part of her life if she was not willing to take things to the next level. She was not willing. The letter wasn’t blackmail or anything like that. It was a statement of fact. I’ve written those before. What stood out about the letter was the degree to which he expressed exasperation adoration for her. He obviously loved every last thing about her. Even and especially the parts he was clearly imagining.

I can’t get into the specifics without presenting the email or reproducing it somehow, but what stands out most is that there is a disconnect between who she was and how he described her. He described her as this magnificent high society type person with a social elegance and standing that he longed for in a woman. He explained that she had this entire world that was full and complete and that he wasn’t a part of it and that it was killing him.

After she forwarded me the email asking for help on a response, I told her, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but he’s so busy worshiping you that he doesn’t seem to know who you are.”

She wasn’t complete without him any more than she would have been complete with him. She had problems. Sure, she liked the opera, but she also liked crummy anime and Matlock and cheesy romance novels. But he didn’t see the earthly parts in her. He papered over them. He invented things to take their place. She wasn’t stupid. She knew who she was and she knew she wasn’t who he apparently thought she was. As flattered as she was by the compliments, and she was, and as much as he was the kind of guy that she might have gone out with at some point, and he was, as long as he held those kinds of lofty views of her, she knew that reality would eventually make its presence known and she had no idea where she would land once it did. She wasn’t partial to making wise romantic decisions, but that was one of them.

She didn’t take what I said the wrong way. She replied, “Totally.”

—-

Capella discusses her college ex-boyfriend:

My college boyfriend, when he was planning his wedding, told me it’s not who you marry but how they make you feel. His fiancee had adopted a stance of worshipfully vacant adoration, combined with forgetting to take her birth control pills, that made him feel like getting married.

I tend to assume everyone is like me, which seems to be a common fallacy. I like men who are smarter than me in some way, whom I can admire, who inspire me. Anecdotal evidence suggests men are more interested in being the object of admiration. I suppose this is complementary and possibly biological, but I prefer when life is symmetric.

I think that there is a bit of difference between being adored and admired. Admired, to me, has stronger roots in the tangible. You are admired for what you have done and maybe for specific attributes you possess. You are adored for the sum of your parts. I admire celebrities. I adored my dog. I say this mostly because this is the terminology I am using throughout the post.

Men, like women, like being adored. Who wouldn’t? But I think that over the longer term there needs to be admiration. Both ways, I would say, for most people. Who wouldn’t want such a thing?

It would be possible to describe my non-relationship with Dharla along these lines. Her adoration of me was one of the things that kept me around even when I was pretty sure I wanted to go. It was immensely flattering, for sure. And it meant a lot more to me because she was one of the more beautiful girls that I dated and was a worthwhile person in many ways (alas, worthwhile in ways that I knew I could not fully appreciate). It really does make you feel good. It’s also very much an insufficient foundation for a relationship. I think it’s also, as with Capella’s ex, the beginnings of an unhappy future if pursued.

The problem with these relationships is not so much assymetry, though that can cause problems. The problem is that such adoration is, as was the case with my friend, unearned. It could be said to be a great deal to get adoration without having to do anything for it, but that which comes from nothing is ultimately reduced to nothing. As tempting as it is to settle down and settle in with someone on the basis that you can do know wrong… we all know that you will, at some people, do wrong. We know that if they never realize this, they’re either blind and stupid or wading through shortcomings of their own that will, unless you’re equally stupid and blind, drive you crazy.

I think a lot of my wife. I admire her a great deal. There are things about her that I adore. The same thing is true of her feelings towards me, I would wager. The difference, though, is that we have each earned one another’s respect. We have proven ourselves worthy of one another’s affections and admirations. It’s not based on some intangible sort of thing. It’s rooted in specific characteristics in a list that I could write right now with footnotes of specific experiences to back it all up. It’s based on things that she has done for me, things I have done for her, and things that we have each done for others.

Our adoration is built on love and admiration. Both are required. Both, in their own way, must be earned. If not at first, then over time. Clancy and I made commitments before we really got there. But we weren’t doing it because of how we felt at the moment. We were, in essence, betting that there was a foundation to it all. Turned out to be a smart bet.

A while back I wrote a post mentioning how my ex-girlfriend Julie, her mother, and her aunt dealt with their mother/grandmother’s death by wearing a specific pendant dedicated to their mother/grandmother when their father/grandfather remarried. It was meant as something of a jab of disapproval over how quickly he remarried. The whole thing made me squirm a little bit because, while I didn’t care much for the man, he had suffered more than anybody else over the collapse of his wife’s mind under the weight of Alzheimer’s and they were not in a position to suggest who cared more than who.

This is even a little more baffling than that:

A young woman is dedicating her own wedding to her mother. That sounds sweet until it’s revealed that she’s doing it to stick it to her father who apparently re-engaged the dating world faster than she would have liked. On one hand, what makes it more baffling makes it slightly less tasteless. At least she’s ruining her own wedding rather than her father’s. On the other hand, it’s also more tasteless because I believe it is especially wrong to attack someone in a situation that you specifically invited them to (without any indication of what was to come).

Anyone else know of anyone that used their wedding as a chance to “stick it” to an attendee? Presumably there are cases where ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends are invited to weddings as a Nelsonian “Haw-haw”, but generally I think even people tacky enough to send those invites have the decency to hope/figure that the other person won’t show up. Of course, who to invite and who not to invite is one of those risky areas where you can’t win no matter what you do. Hmm. I think that’ll be another post.

It’s been so long that I can’t remember precisely where Alejandro fit in amongst my neighbors at Belle Rieve, but he was in there somewhere.

Alejandro was among the more dramatic of the people that I knew there. When I first met him, he sported a beard, a bandana and was screaming in the parking lot. He was upset at something having to do with his girlfriend. He was yelling something about how impossible women were.

A week or two later, when he moved in next door, I almost didn’t recognize him. He had shaved his beard and his hair was short and respectable and not the shaved head or buzzcut I had been expecting to see. It was only when he started relating to me how impossible women were that I recognized him.

The source of his aggravation was his girlfriend, Nancy. Nancy was very, very skinny in a sort of way that my time in Belle Rieve suggested drugs. That and a genera unpleasantness were the extent of my impressions of her. As far as Nancy was concerned, I didn’t exist. Half of the conversations we had consisted of the following:

Nancy: {after pounding on Alejandro’s door and yelling for him for five minutes} Is Alex here?

Trumwill: No.

Nancy: Don’t lie to me!

Trumwill: I’m not lying.

Nancy: If he’s here, I’m going to kick his ass. Then I’m going to kick yours.

Trumwill: Doesn’t matter because he’s not here.

Nancy: Then do you know where he is?

Trumwill: {insert my speculation here, often involving work, his parents, or sometimes just “out”}

Nancy: Is he with a girl?

Trumwill: Not as far as I know.

Nancy: If he’s with a girl, I’m going to kick his ass. Then I’m going to kick yours.

Trumwill: Well, I don’t think that he’s with a girl.

Nancy: And you’d tell me if he was, right? Ass.

Trumwill: I’ve never seen him with any other woman than you. {God’s honest truth}

Nancy: {biliously} I’ll just bet you haven’t.

Alejandro and I, on the other hand, got along quite well. He kept trying to get me into 1980’s rock music. His mother owned a local Mexican restaurant which he was always pitching to me. Clancy and I already had our Mexican restaurant of choice, so I never ended up going. I’m partially sorry that I didn’t because he would bring home some pretty shocking spices. Not Ghost Pepper shocking, but pretty impressive stuff. As with the ones that came before him and after him, I would periodically store beer (which he wasn’t supposed to have) for him and he’d share it with me.

He was a great neighbor except for one thing. For all of Nancy’s threats to beat kick our asses, it ran mostly in the other direction. He beat her mercilessly. He pushed her around. He pulled her hair. He punched her. It didn’t happen on a daily basis, but enough over the course of his stay that I was able to start guessing what was happening. He wasn’t even “that guy” you see on TV who is all beating up on her one minute and then sweet and apologetic the next.

The other half of the conversations we had consisted of the following:

Nancy: {after pounding on Alejandro’s door and yelling for him for five minutes} Is Alex here?

Trumwill: No.

Nancy: Don’t lie to me!

Trumwill: I’m not lying.

Nancy: I need to talk to him. I think he’s angry with me.

Trumwill: Well, he’s not here.

Nancy: If you see him, could you tell him how sorry I am for screwing everything up?

Trumwill: I’ll tell him you were here.

Nancy: Tell him I’m sorry.

Trumwill: I’ll let him know you were here. I don’t want to get in the middle of this.

And I didn’t. I honestly didn’t know what to do. I’m not proud of what I did. Or didn’t do. Had she been someone I had more sympathy for, I might have tried harder to figure something out. But ratting someone out was pretty serious business and I was reluctant to do so on her behalf. Particularly since if the police got involved, she’d deny it and I would have a neighbor that hated me. At the very least I could have kept my distance from him. Thought him something less than a “great neighbor except for one thing”. But Belle Rieve was a pretty scary environment and frankly you took allies wherever you could find them. Ratting him out for the abuse would have had no effect. I realized later that I could have told his PO about the alcohol and that would have had him tossed back in jail, but even if I’d realized that at the time there would have been the problem of what happened after he got out of his week tosser.

The only thing I really did was something that she wanted me to do. I refused to apologize on her behalf. I didn’t want to get involved, but I really didn’t want to become her apologist. Had he been apologetic, I might have passed that on. But the situation was so warped I just refused to participate in it.

It wasn’t a month or so before his car broke down, he missed an appointment with his PO, and he was tossed back in jail. I never saw him, or her, again.

As I’ve mentioned before, DeVry University has its share of proud alums.

Interestingly, the University of Phoenix has at least one.

On my drive to work this morning, I saw a UoP license plate frame. I didn’t know they sold those. I didn’t know anybody would buy one. I definitely didn’t think anyone would actually put one on their car.

Maybe getting their own football stadium really has helped!

A while back I wrote in irritation about a movie convention wherein the woman leaves the nice, safe (booooring) guy in favor of the character that has been a jerk throughout most of the movie only to see a little glimmer behind that rough exterior which makes him more authentic and virtuous than the man that’s been acting like a good man throughout.

Brandon Berg made the following comment:

I’d argue that the opposite trope—the one where the sensitive new-age beta wins out over the jerky alpha—is equally harmful, because it provides a terrible role model for boys who are confused and trying to figure out how to succeed romantically.

To the extent that one believes that being sensitive is a relationship liability, I would say that the bigger culprit in this are the words of women themselves when they say that all they want is someone nice. I say this but (a) reject the notion that sensitivity is in itself a liability and (b) believe that that any statement that begins in “all I want” in reference to a romantic partner is incomplete at best.

That being said, this reminded me of an area where I think that movies and television do have a detrimental effect on teaching young males the way of the romantic world. One of those things is that being a nice guy and a good friend is (or ought to be) enough for the girl of your dreams to fall for you. But that’s a pretty minor one. The bigger problem is he portrayal of persistence as being a positive attribute.

It’s not an uncommon thing to see in film a young woman won over by the sheer persistence of a young man’s pursuits. Nor is it uncommon for you to see a character harboring an unannounced affection for someone of the opposite sex over a long period of time that (a) remains unnoticed and (b) once a chance is taken, it pays off something big because it turns out that she feels the same way that he does.

In my life I have seen or heard of such things happening. Well, one case. Maybe two depending how you count it. One ended happily. The other did not. At all. But since they did actually date, I guess it counts. But by and large, the notion of persistence as a virtue and of discretion as concealment of feelings are the stuff that restraining orders are made of. The only times that I have really seen a guy keep a wrap on his intense feeling for a girl are when she doesn’t notice his feelings because she barely notices his existence (or the existence of his sexuality). It usually comes across more as a heterosexual variation of this, where the secret-keeper is the last to know that it isn’t really a secret anymore.

But the bigger thing is persistence. I can think of maybe a handful of good things that have ever come from romantic persistence in the fact of rejection or being ignored. In my romantic life, 3/4 of every problem I’ve ever had can be related to persistence. Persistence that kept me interested long after a more rational man would have flamed out. Persistence that made me come across as creepy when I was mostly clueless. Costing me not only the lost cause that was the object of my effections, but of any sort of romantic interest of anybody noticing what the heck I am doing because it would be so impossible notice me without noticing the black hole of patheticism surrounding me.

And this is all from the male perspective! From the female perspective it is arguably worse. At least I can look back and say that I had the opportunity if not the ability to quash my interest. Young women are stuck dealing with these guys bent on the idea that if they just try hard enough and keep coming at her that eventually she will buckle down. They are stuck with the guy that wistfully sighs so audibly loud in her presence that the Archangel Michael’s cat in heaven could hear him, simultaneously being assigned some responsibility for his heartache without having the ability to even confront it. Howeverasmuch I was the prisoner of my delusions, that remains being better than the prisoner of someone else’s delusions.

So I hereby resolve to have every instance of persistence in my writing end up in misery for everybody so as not to convince anybody who reads, watches, or listens to my rhetoric that persistence is ever a good idea.

Let’s say hypothetically that you were in charge of picking out a prison director.

The first is a Sheriff Arpaio type. He wants prisoners humiliated wearing pink and working on chain gangs and living in tents. Maybe he wants to throw them in a dungeon. Or, if you think that’s excessive, pick whatever level of punishment that you feel that the criminals have coming to them. Criminals that have gone through his program have a 78% recidivism rate. In other words, 78% of the time, criminals released from his facility end up committing crimes again and end up in prison again.

The second is a college-professor-turn-prison-director. He wants to feed the prisoners very well and afford them luxuries more commonly associated with a luxury hotel. They sleep in nice beds, get to eat what they want, have free entertainment, and free vocational training or classes in subjects that interest them. No expense is spared in order to keep them busy and they end up being afforded luxuries that they couldn’t afford on the outside. Criminals that have gone through his program have a recidivism rate of 35%.

In this hypothetical scenario (Note: I’m not saying that’s what the recidivism rates would be), assuming that the data you had on each was sound (and it wasn’t that the second’s just learn better how not to get caught), and all other things being equal and the decision entirely in his hands (and not in some judge’s or legislature’s), who would you hire?

If you would hire the first guy, how low would the recidivism rate of the second need to be in order for you to reconsider?

If you would hire the second guy, how low would the recidivism rate of the first need to be in order for you to reconsider?

In other words, how much justice would you be willing to sacrifice for the sake of a crime reduction?

This is a question I’ve been pondering lately in less hypothetical terms and am curious of your thoughts.

Clarification:

AC and Web bring up interesting points as to why the recidivism rates may not be the appropriate statistic. The question, at root, is this: if treating criminals much, much better than they deserve were an effective deterrent against future crime… would it be worth forsaking justice in order to do it? How much of a deterrent would it have to be for you to consider it. Given the openings I laid out for the premise itself to be disputed, I probably should have just asked the question more abstractly.

On the hand, the enthusiasm with which people (and I have no doubt that I am a part of this) would try to realign morality with practicality (making their moral preference also the logical one), which is a separate subject I’m interested in. I’ve been mulling over a post on that subject for months now. This one, admittedly, picks a little on the right. There are other subjects (torture, profiling, etc) that pick on the left. The post has been a long time coming because I am unable to phrase it in a way that won’t become a right vs left smackdown, which I generally try to avoid.

Last weight post. I promise! For a little while, anyway. This post is going to cover some ground covered in my previous post about Inulin. This one was written first and Inulin became a hot news topic before this went up.

I wrote twice before about how people that have never really, truly struggled with their weight (losing 10 pounds to look good for your high school reunion doesn’t count) don’t understand how complex the process of losing weight is. At least from a psychological perspective. Another factor is that people lose weight in different ways. What works for one person does not mean that it will work for another. For instance, if you have one guy that loves cheese and pork and doesn’t have any real use for bread and crackers and put him on the Adkins diet, he’s much more likely to succeed than a bread-lover with a fondness for pastries. Even though they may have will-power, self-control, and discipline in equal measure, the results won’t be equal.

I have personally found that a couple of minor tweaks made all of the difference. What matters most for me is simplicity. Anything that requires me spending a whole lot of time counting points is likely to lose me. I’ll lose track of how many points I have for the day, get frustrated, and put the diet off for another day. Likewise, anything that requires of me to not eat cheese isn’t going to happen. Or a diet that says that if I drink a coke, I’m screwed for the day. I need room for a little bit of sin, lest I end up settling for a lot of sin.

I decided after moving up here to make one and only one major, written in stone change: I will eat my daily allotment of fiber at least five days a week. My initial thought was that I would try to do this, see if it did any good, and then if not I would find some other simple rule. I figured that by then I would have the habit of eating fiber and therefore taking the next step (whatever it might be) might be easier. Turned out that the fiber created a cascading effect of virtue.

Partially, I think, because of how I chose to get those calories: High-fiber cereal. Really high fiber serial. I eat 80-90% (or more) of my daily allotment for breakfast. That has the benefit of getting breakfast into my system at the beginning of the day. As everyone knows, it’s better to eat more meals of smaller quantity than fewer meals of greater quantity. I always knew that, but could never manage to do it. But breakfast set the stage for that. And it prevented me from going out and getting breakfast of a much worse sort. I did have to strike out a compromise and created a compromise: I get to eat breakfast at McDonald’s on Wednesdays. I gave in on this so that I would always have McDonald’s to look forward to without eating it on too regular a basis. To say that I’m never going to eat there is to set myself up for failure. Knowing which day I will be eating there helps solidify the thing to look forward to.

In addition to preventing greater dietary sin, the cereal keeps me full until lunch. For lunch I really lucked out. Another example of how an external circumstance can make all of the difference in the world. Mindstorm, my employer, has a great employee cafeteria. A wide selection of food at reasonable prices. But the biggest thing is that it’s a very short walk away. That’s how I learned something about myself: One of the problems in the past is that I have a psychological fixation on the notion that if I invest time and energy to go some place for lunch, I am going to do some serious eating while I am there. Since going across the street to the cafeteria is no great inconvenience, it’s incredibly easy to just get a quick, relatively small thing.

Sometimes I do get hungry later in the day, so I try to keep a box of cereal at work that I use for snack food. I did this after I realized that I was starting to go to the vending machine to satiate that end-of-day hunger. Plus, Mindstorm has free milk. So that works out. But the important part of this is not what I eat, it’s that by having fewer dietary problems (now I’m eating a good breakfast, eating a smaller lunch) I am better able to identify what the problems are and come up with solutions. It’s not so overwhelming anymore. The more changes you have to make and urges you have to fight off at once, the exponentially harder it gets to make them. I know someone that quit smoking this way, by-the-by. He just got rid of one cig a day per week (the third after lunch, the second in the morning, etc) until it wasn’t worth bothering anymore.

Dinner varies pretty wildly. When Clancy’s not on a horrendous rotation, she cooks and she makes enough for two. Otherwise I usually open something canned or in some cases just have a snack at night. The canned foods are generally not very healthy. But they’re not ridiculously unhealthy either, unless you count sodium. If I’m really hungry it’ll be some sort of pasta like Beefaroni or maybe spaghetti. Chili and/or a burrito is also an option. If I’m less hungry, I’m more likely to eat soup or just get a snack. The snacks are usually not of the healthy sort. They often include Spam.

I’ve recently expanded my attempt to include a morning workout. The workout is actually not entirely for weight. It’s partially an issue of general health and partially in anticipation for my next chore. One thing I don’t mention above is that I still drink three cokes a day and that’s not good. So I’m going to try to make a change there, too. But I know that I have to actually be ready for it in more ways than I currently am.

So for all of you I don’t know how many of these tricks might work for you. I think that it is really important to recognize that overweight people generally have bad habits in different ways. I really don’t think that there is any diet out there that is right for anyone. I think that boosters of one diet over the other (say low carb vs low fat) often mistakenly give people the impression that the way that they lose weight is the only way to do so. According to low carb people, I should be ballooning up about now when in fact it’s my low-fat diets that have historically proven to be more successful. When my wife diets, she has to go all-in. Whenever I go all-in, I burn out and fail.

Of course, what works for me may not work for anyone else. Indeed, what worked for me in the past stopped working five years ago. It used to be that I lost weight by going all-in, spending a couple days eating scratch and then slowly working my way from there. When I lost 70 pounds at the end of high school, that was how I did it (albeit not completely with intent).

Last week I ran across an MSN list about weight loss with a mathematical oddity. In the process of trying to track it down, I read just about every diet-related thing that they have. What struck me as I was reading was how many of their “tips” just didn’t apply to me. It warned against monotony, for instance, but for me monotony is a powerful thing. Creating “defaults” so that if I’m not in a particular mood for something else, I’ll eat the same thing every day. For the author of the article, though, it was a recipe for failure.

Ten years ago little changes were hard for me. Now they’re the only way that I can make changes. Ten years ago eating a little bit of cheese meant that I would go hog-wild. That’s not the case anymore. Ten years ago I could completely steer clear of cheese and sweets. I can’t anymore. Some people need carbs and others need fats and asking them to go without is completely counterproductive.

It seems to me that the best way to go is with an eye towards knowing what your limitations are and what your strengths are. My strength (and weakness) is that I am a creature of habit. I don’t get tired of foods. There are also some ubiquitous foods that I can almost completely eliminate from my diet such as french fries. There are others that I can’t. My wife’s diet includes sacrifices I could never make. Sacrifices I’ve made without little effort are things that would require the world of her.

For me, right now, the path to success is replacing one bad habit at a time.

I’ve commented before that I am a fan of a work place actually requiring people to dress like they’re going to work. I’m not so dedicated this idea that I am going to go to a casual workplace dressed nicely. Hey, I like jeans as much as the next guy. And if nobody else is doing it then it’s best not to stand out. Unless, of course, my boss dressed up. Then I may dress up, too.

Mindstorm, where I currently work, has the most relaxed dress code of anywhere that I’ve been. Makes my life a bit easier because I can re-wear jeans more easily than I can re-wear slacks and it saves me laundry, which is one of my domestic duties. But sometimes I do prefer to wear slacks for one reason or another. It’s a balancing act.

A couple weeks ago, I had missed some of Clancy’s slacks when I did laundry, so I promised that mid-week or so I would do a special load of slacks. I decided that since I was doing a load of slacks, I might as well get my slackwearing out of the way so that I have a full load rather than a paltry one with three of her pairs. So I wore slacks on Monday and Tuesday with the intention of doing landry on Tuesday night. Laundry kept getting put off, but each day I would continue to wear slacks. Slacks, of course, require wearing a nicer shirt, so I was essentially dressing somewhat nicely day in and day out (by Mindstorm standards).

Finally the weekend rolled around and I did the slacks load. I decided that Monday I would wear slacks again, though, because Monday is traditionally slack-wearing day (if I’m going to wear them at all) so that I can get a jump on my week in professional mode. Then on Monday I found out that there was yet another re-org at work and that I had a new boss. One I hadn’t met.

Now, most supervisors at Mindstorm are pretty open-minded when it comes to dress. But who knew about this guy? So I decided that I would dress at least somewhat nicely on Tuesday for the meeting where I would presumably meet him. At least I thought the meeting was Tuesday. Turned out that it was Wednesday. So Wednesday I dress up for a meeting that was on Wednesday but had gotten moved to Thursday. So Thursday, for the 9th work day in a row, I dressed up for work. This time there was a meeting and he was there, but we never actually met.

Friday I said “screw it” and dressed in jeans and an NFL football jersey.

Interestingly, it’s been three weeks and I still haven’t met the boss. We’ve never spoken directly in email or messenger, either. The strangest part about it at all is that the workplace at Mindstorm is such that this really isn’t an impediment to my work.

Harry McCracken thinks that in short order Smartphones are going to become the dominant form of PCs:

The next computer is the smartphone–ones like the iPhone, the BlackBerry, the T-Mobile G1, and many of the handsets that debuted a couple of weeks ago at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

On some level, this is an extremely uncontroversial statement. When I chat with folks about Technologizer and tell them that phones are one of our most important topics, I explain how my former employer PC World launched in 1983, when the PC was new–and I say that for this new era of smartphones-as-personal-computers, 2009 is 1983 all over again. Everybody gets that.

But when I say that smartphones are the new PCs, I don’t just mean that they’re PC-like–I mean that they’re going to become the primary form of PCs over the next few years. The time is going to come when even a netbook will look as retro as a PDP-8, and I don’t think it’s all that far off.

When I was a freshman in college, I was told by not one but two professors that five years hence all applications would be run on the Internet and that local computers would be little more than terminals. It’s been ten years. These days, I hear that within five years all applications would be run on the Internet and that local computers would be little more than terminals. The terminology and likely execution has changed, though, so the predictions remain bold!

I mention internet apps because that’s a part of McCracken’s calculation. He expects that the smartphone computers will thrive because of Cloud Computing, which is the latest way that applications are going to all start being run remotely. As it was going to be ten years ago, it will be any day now.

If you haven’t already picked up on my skepticism of McCracken’s claim, let me say outright that I am skeptical. Very skeptical. What I hate about positions like this is that they are lazy. They are not forward-looking at all. McCracken throws out a few ideas as to how this is going to happen and then nods as if he has proven his case. He hasn’t. He overlooks some rather crucial elements insofar as how people actually use their machines. He doesn’t address the most obvious counterpart: Desktop PCs can do a lot of things out there better and cheaper than any alternative.

The question that McCracken should have asked himself is: Why do desktops still exist today? After all, we have laptops now. Laptops can already do exactly the same things that he’s claiming that smartphones will be able to do tomorrow and have been able to for quite some time. The “clam” he refers to is little more than a laptop docking station, which fell out of disuse a long time ago. Most people don’t need their laptops to be desktops. They have desktops for that. Instead of one replacing the other, they mostly coexist. Further, rather than coming closer together, they’re moving farther apart. The netbooks are the laptop market moving away from replacing desktops and towards laptops that are meant for more specified tasks.

It is extremely difficult for me to imagine that smartphones will succeed where laptops failed. Particularly when laptops were already remarkably closer to desktops in form and functions than smartphones will ever be. Laptops can have the same processing power as PCs. Their screens are in the same ballpark if not exactly comparable. Everything about the smartphone that points to it as being a successor to the desktop, the laptop was closer.

Smartphones are getting faster every day, but they’re still slow. Smartphones are rife with proprietary technology in ways that PCs (and even laptops) are not. Smartphones, by virtue of their need to be compact, have specialized parts for just about every model. They lack flexibility. They lack memory and hard drive space. Oh, and of course they lack processing power. And however fast tiny processors on tiny smartphones advance, it won’t be as fast as PC chips. McCracken is convinced that this will become less an issue because of web-based applications.

Now where have I heard that before?

Actually, I appreciate him bringing it up because I really do think that it’s the same faulty thinking at work here. Web-based applications sound great until you ignore the advantages of having your own software installed just the way you like it on your own computer. It doesn’t make sense to do a lot of these things over the internet. Sure, internet connections will get faster over time… but processors won’t? They’ll never catch up. They’ll never be necessary because it’ll be as easy to just use the laptop that you have the software installed on than it will be to log on to some software site to use the software that you’ve purchased.

Whenever you voice your objections and concerns about having all of your software installed and processing on some network server, you just get a blank look and an assurance of that’s how it’s going to be. Because it makes sense. Tell them why it doesn’t make sense for you and they will tell you why you’re the exception and technical geeks and article-writers like them who find it spiffy-cool are the norm. Linux geeks have less hubris.

What McCracken is saying about smartphones could actually happen. It could. Maybe web-apps will finally take off like we’ve been promised for so long. I certainly use GMail in a way that has made email software redundant. But any prediction that takes web-apps as a given is on some pretty shaky ground.

Whatever the case, I do expect smartphones to get smarter until we start thinking of them as a separate computer. I have long predicted the sorts of things that he’s talking about where you will be able to hook your smartphone into a console sort of thing and be able to do a lot more with it than a PC. Most likely, though, I think what we’ll see is that we plug in our phone to a PC and the PC acts as a conduit wherein you can edit files and use software in an emulation environment taking advantage of the superior hardware of the PC for your smartphone.

Right now, though, my PC doesn’t even like trading files with the smartphone.

We’re some ways off.

How did I not know about this?!

Addendum: And it’s got Lee Adama in it! That’s at least two stars from BSG that landed straight onto another program. Overall, it was a pretty typical L&O order. The accused was a well-to-do white woman. Man, those court wigs sure are something, aren’t they? Seems so silly, but I’m not sure why it’s any more silly than other required vestments like judge’s robes and whatnot. I know that it was all in English, but I really could have used subtitles on this.

Clancy: This job I’m looking at says this town is like Mayberry. Where’s Mayberry?

Trumwill: I think in the Carolinas somewhere. I’m not sure they ever said.

Clancy: Huh?

Trumwill: Wait, you do know what Mayberry is, right?

Clancy: A town somewhere? In the Carolinas? I mean, I’ve heard of it from somewhere.

Trumwill: Like the Andy Griffith Show?

Clancy: The what?

Trumwill: I discovered something disturbing today.

Coworker: Oh, yeah?

Trumwill: Yeah, my wife didn’t know what Mayberry was.

Coworker: Mayberry?

Trumwill: Yeah. Mayberry.

Coworker: Is that some sort of fruit or something?

It’s becoming a more and more familiar story: a young girl sends a nude picture of herself to her boyfriend. The boyfriend forwards it to someone else. Before she knows it, she’s a star in ways that she never intended. Jessie Logan’s story has the twist of the most tragic possible result: death by her own hand.

Logan’s family is launching a public awareness campaign and are seeking to tweak some laws. Personally, I am skeptical that this is something that the law can fix. Transplanted Lawyer wrote up on a story a while back about some girls that took some pictures of themselves that wound up widely disseminated amongst their class. Unlike Logan, the girls weren’t 18, possession and distribution of the pictures was illegal, and prosecutorial discretion is the only barrier between hundreds of people and multiple counts of possession and distribution of child pornography. Laws, even when they exist, don’t seem to do a whole lot of good.

What caught my attention, though, was not this tragic story nor the question of legal ramification. Rather, it’s extremely ugly and meanspirited commentary like this (I lost the link to an uglier discussion elsewhere, so this one will have to do). It’s one thing to be skeptical of passing laws that aren’t likely to do a whole lot of good. I am, too. What really makes me angry is the notion there and elsewhere that their crusade makes these grieving parents worthy of public rebuke. And that their dead daughter ought to be a symbol for sexual licentiousness.

Here is what we know about Jessie Logan:

• Under peer pressure, she did something impulsive and stupid.
• Her trust was violated and this impulsive act became a public skeptical.
• She was bullied and harassed.
• She killed herself.

Maybe it is the case that she had bad parents. Maybe, as some have speculated, they did not pay a fraction of the attention of her alive as they do now that she’s dead. Maybe she was sexually adventurous. Maybe all of these things are true, but we don’t know them to be true. All we know is one stupid act, a community’s response, and her reaction to that. That’s pretty much it.

So why the assumptions about parental incompetence? Why the drive to emphasize and re-emphasize the victims’ culpability?

Some of it, I’m sure, is just political axe-grinding. If someone believes that youthful licentiousness is out of control, it’s pretty easy to view this through that prism. The problem is that there aren’t more parents like them. The problem is the culture that had that girl take the picture of herself in the first place. The problem, in short, is people that they are already inclined to despise and to blame for pretty much all of the ills of the modern world. The Logans are just stand-ins. Bristol Palin becomes a teenage pregnancy statistic and that says nothing about how she was raised and we she is already enduring the consequences of her actions so we should give her room. Jessie Logan merely takes a picture of herself, is driven to suicide, and the focus must be on the role that she and her parents played in all this.

I suspect that there are a number of liberals that want to say that this probably relates to the sexual puritanism of Logan family the same way that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was the fault of her mother’s abstinence-only policy (because, goodness knows, it’s only conservatives that end up with pregnant teenagers because liberal parents teach birth control). This is all somewhat beside the point except to say political axe-grinding in situations like this are utterly distasteful.

Beyond politics, though, I think that there is the overwhelming desire of people to comfort themselves with notions that this sort of thing could never happen to their kid. If you blame Jessie’s parents than you can comfort yourself because you’re a better parent than they are. If you blame Jessie herself or the sex-driven culture that she bought into (as evidenced by… ahem… her shame and horror at being called a slut), then you can say that your kid was raised better than that and has more common sense than that. You can rest assured that while incredibly sad, there is a measure of justice in all this if you just look hard enough. Or, if not justice, then properly targeted injustice.

I’m going to contradict myself here and say that six months or a year ago the Logans themselves probably thought this sort of thing could never happen in their family. Not the suicide, of course, but the “sexting”. And in a lot of cases the never-could-happen-t0-me instincts are right. According to the horror stats thrown at us, 1-in-5 girls have done something like this… so 4-in-5 have not.

But I think that it is really the apex of conceit for any parent to believe that they have that much control over their child. That their child could never do that sort of thing. Parents don’t know nearly as much about their kids as they think. My parents certainly never knew the darknesses that hibernated in the recesses of my soul during that time of my life. I was in fact capable of inflicting any multitude of self-sabotage. Any number of the seemingly remote chances that I took could have blown up in my face. It never did, so my parents never found out about any of it. And I was raised right.

It’s funny for me to be saying all of this when I have, in the past, been critical of parents that seek to eradicate any and all danger. The sort of parents that will read articles like this and watch Without a Trace. But I’m not suggesting that parents lay awake at night imagining every little way that their little precious could get herself into trouble. Nor am I suggesting that there aren’t things that parents can do to make something like this less likely.

Mostly, I guess, what I’m saying is that standing over the body of a dead girl and pointing the finger at her parents isn’t about taking the moral high ground. It’s just being mean. And it doesn’t take a Political Correctness Cop to be disgusted by it.

At work, my “main” machine is a Vista machine. This is not because I wanted one, but because I need to have one on hand in order to test the occasional software package.

Vista has a “problem” with Internet Explorer 7. Rather, it has a problem with IE7 and “certain add-ons” that work just fine under IE7/WinXP, but cause a random-crashing bug inside Vista due to Vista’s so-called “security” features.

The solution for the bug? Disable the add-ons.

This is where it gets silly. One of the add-ons causing the problem is a component of Adobe Acrobat 8. Adobe Acrobat 8 re-enables this add-on every time the computer is restarted. It really, really, really wants to be active in IE7 for some reason. Nowhere can I find a way to disable this add-on, short of removing Acrobat 8 from the Vista box. Adobe’s website help? No help. Third-party forums? No help.

Adobe is quickly becoming as annoying as Realplayer or Apple with their latest software releases.

In related news: iTunes for Windows is incredibly slow. And annoying. More on that another time.

My life has not often provided points of clarity. The end of the second-to-last chapter of the story of Evangeline and I was one of the few points that did. Technically I was driving up to Thessalonica so that we could “talk”. An emergency meeting to discuss the fact that she had been spending inordinate amounts of time with another guy and that she was, by her own admission, waiting for him to ask her out. At which point she would cut me loose. But that hadn’t happened yet, so by her accounting that meant that I had no reason, at present, to be upset. Because it might not happen. By my accounting, we’d been dangling on a string for the better part of forever and something like this was too much. We’d already been at the point where she was spending time with someone else sorting “us” out.

Whether or not I had the right to be upset about something that hadn’t happened yet or whether I was justified in my outrage at her casual openness (and, to be truthful, excitement over) the advances of someone else was only a small component of the argument that would ensue. I would win it quickly. Her defense shifted away from the time-orientation towards the notion that people leave relationships, ours had been struggling for some time, and while she was sorry for my hurt, that’s the way the ball bounces and it doesn’t help anyone to start assigning blame to this inevitable state of affairs.

And in a way, on those grounds, I didn’t entirely disagree. Had I met Clancy at that point, I would have left, too. Our relationship was really at the walking dead. So much so that I had tried to leave three weeks before and, unless something changed, was planning on leaving two weeks hence. In her mind, I was irrationally upset that she had been the first to make the move and bust out. This leaves aside the fact that I was there to call it quits and she was there to try to salvage us… until Vince provided her with a safe landing spot. In her mind, I was upset that she’d had the good fortune of that landing spot and I was about to suffer a very, very long fall. My getting upset about happenstance and chance was irrational and my problem and not hers.

And in a way, on those grounds, I didn’t entirely disagree. I really wasn’t upset about Vince. I wasn’t upset for the emotional dry-heaving that I knew was about to follow. That part would come, but I knew that would be temporary until I had built my own life independent of her. But I knew that in the greater scheme of things, I wasn’t worried about the Alpha-Beta parking lot in Thessalonica wherein she would eventually, in tears, let me go. I would say, somewhere in the course of the night, that I was not upset with her because she was leaving so much as I was too upset with her to care that she was leaving.

I’m almost always skeptical of claims that it’s the “how it” and not the “what” happened that is the problem. Men will complain that he’s not upset that she said no so much as he is upset at how she did so. Of course, there is no way in which a woman can escape this trap. If she is direct, she was brutal. If she was indirect, she was evasive. If she didn’t close the door forever and for all time, she was dishonest. The same applies to breakups. If he was direct, he was an asshole. If he does so upon immediately deciding that the relationship wasn’t for him, he never gave her a chance. If he took the time to contemplate, he coldly left her twisting in the wind. No matter how a man or a woman goes about these things, he or she is subject to recrimination. Because it really isn’t about how they did it but that they did it at all and that it hurt.

The end of the end of the penultimate chapter with Evangeline was an exception. I was too numb by that point to be able to feel any sense of emotional loss. It wasn’t The Alpha-Beta Parking Lot that was crushing to me. Rather, it was the six months that preceded it. Six months of utter hell that could only have been made right by our successfully turning the page. What the ABPL represented was that it was never going to happen. All those wrongs wouldn’t be right. All of my doubling-down left me in more emotional debt than I could pay off for quite some time. All those wrongs, I kept repeating in my head, would not be made right.

I have a somewhat strong intuition of things. I can’t say that it’s ever really been a surprise when a relationship didn’t work out. It’s rare that the breakup of anyone I know really surprises me if I have any insights. In fact, even when I’m not told, I can usually guess what it’s about. So the six months leaving up to that meeting, I knew what was happening. I told her what was happening. She told me I was crazy. She told me that if I just stuck in there that everything would work out in the end. Meanwhile, a ghost was writing on the wall “NO IT WON’T”. Everything she did belied her confidence.

She had a 1-1-1 record when it came to showing up for dates and appointments. A third of the time she would show up on time or cancel with sufficient notice for me to make alternate plans. By “show up on time” I mean simply that she would not be more than an hour or 90 minutes late. A third of the time she would show up late. By “late” I mean anywhere over 90 minutes, though it was frequently a lot over. Sometimes we’d make plans at 7 and she would stroll in at 11:30, too tired to go out and too late to go anywhere peaceful and relaxed. The other third of the time she would not show up at all and not give me any notice. We’d make plans on 7 on Friday and I wouldn’t hear from her again until Monday or Tuesday afternoon, where she would inform me that she had gone out-of-town for the weekend and hadn’t had an opportunity to call.

And I would get upset and angry and the fact that I got upset would then be an excuse for her behavior. She didn’t call all weekend long because she knew that I would be upset. And my being upset upset her. So we were both upset. We were even. Can we just move on now?

For any given transgression, I would easily have forgiven her. That I spent all weekend trying to figure out when and how frequently to try to get ahold of her and try to figure out what the hell went wrong was of course a bad thing in and of itself. The bigger problem, though, was that it represented things slipping away. It represented my importance in her life, or more precisely my lack of it. It represented that we were going to fail. Paradoxically, the more accustomed I got to this behavior, the less I cared about each specific instance and the more I cared about what the diminishing expectations meant. Eventually, the only thing that I had to latch on to was there was nobody else in the picture for her to try with.

Whenever I brought this to her attention, she would deny that there was anything wrong. The problem was my own impatience at the rate at which things would, ultimately, turn out okay. The speed with which we would turn the page. That she would, eventually, start showing up. The biggest threat to us was not her irresponsibility but rather how angry I let it get me. She never fully sold me that this was the case, but she did make me uncertain enough that I continued to try to behave as though things were going to work out.

Then, of course, they didn’t. I had been right all along. Had she told me six months prior that things just weren’t lined up right for her and that things weren’t going to work out, I would have been hurt but not a fraction as angry as I was. And less hurt, because the hurt wouldn’t have been fueled with the humiliation and anger.

But that night I failed to convince her that anything previous had to do with anything. She was sure that I was upset because she was probably going to leave. My protests were just excuse-making along the lines of the above wherein I was trying to equip myself with justifiable rage rather than hurt. I was looking for ways to take what she felt was completely justified, leaving an unhappy relationship for one that had a greater for potential for happiness, and finding something unjustifiable about it. At the time I wasn’t 100% sure that she was wrong about that (not that I would let her in on such uncertainty), but looking back I am.

Had she believed what I was telling her, she had a number of rejoinders that she could have tossed in my direction. Had I really committed to making things work? Didn’t I have one foot out the door all along, too? Weren’t there things I could have done that wouldn’t have put so much pressure on things working out in the end. In other words, couldn’t I have put less faith in her and more faith in my lyin’ eyes. But she was committed to the notion that she had been doing everything she could to make everything work out and anything that cut against that was not something she could use. Mostly, though, she didn’t throw these things at me because she didn’t really think that any of that mattered.

When she would reappear some time later in my life, she was again apologetic for how things ended. Once again, I had to tell her that it wasn’t the end so much as everything that lead up to it. It was then, too late to ultimately matter, that she finally believed me.

One danger of forward-dating posts is that between the point when you write it and when you post it, something hits the news that changes the reader’s perception of everything. Seriously, what are the odds that in the week in between my writing of a post involving fiber and it’s scheduled posting, that fiber would be in the news? Particularly the exact kind of fiber involved in the post?

Slate has an buyer-beware article on faux-fibers such as polydextrose and inulin. These don’t constitute real fiber, Jacob Gershman says, and Megan McArdle agrees. The implication, of course, is that people reading this need to go eat raw roots, nuts, and berries if they want to be healthy.

Unfortunately, I think this attitude has precisely the opposite effect. Instead of telling people what the true and good things to eat are, they sort of lead us to throw our hands in the air and say “What’s the point?” It’s sort of like that guy that, whenever you say so-and-so is bad, points to the alternative and says “that’s bad, too!” And we sort of end in this no-man’s land of nutritional post-modernism wherein whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Boiled roots and steamed beans are good for you. No one really contests that. And I get it. I get the notion that as long as I’m not eating things that I have no use for, I am a dietary sinner. I might as well be eating pig lard covered in triple-refined sugar.

One of the problems I have with the medical establishment in general is that they often have the perfect tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good. I tell my phys ed coach that I’m drinking orange juice, and I’m warned about the sugar. People get excited by new games and game systems like DDR and the Wii that encourage exercise and they go out of their way to say that the exercise isn’t as good as the exercise you might get on the treadmill. I half-expect them to complain that the treadmill isn’t as good as jogging, which isn’t as good as carrying logs, which isn’t as good as pushing boulders in persuit of building a cave.

The problem I have with this is that for most people, the alternative to natural orange juice is not prune juice, it’s Sunny Delight or Mountain Dew Livewire. The alternative to the Wii is the XBox. The alternative fake fiber is not a breakfast of… I actually don’t know of any breakfast that they haven’t told us is killing us at some point in the last ten years. Eggs, bacon, oats, orange juice. Maybe a pear and a grass salad is okay. Or eggs, if you strip it of the part that tastes good and don’t add anything to add taste (cause it probably contains sodium, which as well all know will kill you).

The more personal problem I have with it is that more than any other product I can think of, the one thing that has helped my life more than any other is the fake fiber discussed in this article.

When I moved to Cascadia, I made only one conscious dietary decision: to eat more fiber. I decided to do this with fiber-enriched FiberONE cereal. FiberONE contains inulin, which is discussed in the Slate article. Since making that decision, I have lost 35 pounds.

I drink three or four cokes a day. I eat McDonald’s for breakfast once a week. Donuts once a week. If I really want a burger or a couple pieces of pizza, I eat it. I put cheese in the canned pasta I not-infrequently have for dinner. I have not once said “That’s unhealthy. I shouldn’t eat that.” But the weight nonetheless came off.

It would be silly to attribute it all to the cereal. But what happened was the cereal replaced the far, far less healthy breakfasts that I had been eating. It got me to stop skipping The Most Important Meal of the Day. It kept my bowels regular. It suppressed my appetite. It got me started on the right foot. So when it came to lunch, unless I actively wanted something unhealthy, I would continue the trend that I set myself in the morning and get a boca burger. Since I’m less hungry (or have been hungry for less time), I’ll eat less.

If I had read this article before I’d made that decision, I never would have started eating the cereal. I mean, what’s the point? It’s not real fiber. You might get the impression reading the article that there was nothing worthwhile in the product at all. A waste of time. I might as well be eating at McDonald’s.

McArdle makes the comment that the FDA should release a statement saying “If it tastes that good, it isn’t good for you.”

In some people’s minds, it’s as though something tasting good is immaterial. Or that, if they really tried, they’d learn to like brussel sprouts. Maybe, if raised on it, they would.

But things like taste and convenience matter. They matter a great deal. Because without it, people will not continue to eat it. They will likely default to something far, far less healthy. If putting a cheese on a veggie burger makes me like it, it’s worth the added fat because it means that I will have liked my veggie burger and will eat it again. Struggling with no cheese or soy cheese may be acceptable, but it won’t have me coming back for more. That double cheese-burger, which I know will satisfy me, will call to me evermore loudly.

Granted, I am fortunate in that if I do the right things (and even some of the wrong ones), I will lose weight. I recognize that others don’t have it so easy. For whatever reason, they have to sacrifice a lot more to get a lot less loss in return. So for them, maybe these articles are worthwhile if they wonder why their high-”fiber” breakfast isn’t doing the trick.

But I think that a large part of the problem with obesity in this country has less to do with too many people thinking that faux-fiber is actual fiber and a lot more to do with being made to feel guilty any time they eat something that they didn’t pluck from the ground themselves. Diets are notorious for being short-lived and ultimately resulting in weight gain. They tell us that we need to not just go on a diet, but change our lifestyle. But anything convenient or tasty is off-limits.

That’s a recipe for failure.

A long while back, New York City ended term limits. That allows Mayor Mike Bloomberg to run for a third term. I personally have pretty mixed feelings about term limits.

The effect that they had on Colosse when they were instituted is that they forced a popular mayor out. There were some last minute attempts for a Bloomberg-style suspension, but they were unsuccessful. After the popular and effective mayor was forced out, he was replaced by Ron Washington, who did not remain popular long and was never very effective. Yet because of the term limits (three terms), nobody ran against him after the first term. The idea was that everybody figured that they’d just wait Washington out, so nobody wanted to take the political risk of taking on the mayor who was very popular with a key consistency of the Democratic Party. It was looking at that point like Term Limits was a pretty big mistake.

Then something somewhat strange happened. Washington was only re-elected with 65% of the vote despite running against two people with no experience, no funding, and as far as anybody could tell no campaigning. 15% of the vote ended up going to a man whose nickname (in quotes on the ballot) implied that he killed people for money. Obviously, Washington was more vulnerable than anybody realized and for the next election he did manage to pick up two major opponents. Washington’s supporters actually turned term limits in his favor, suggesting that to look at the bright side Washington could only serve one more term if elected and Hector Vo, his opponent, could serve a whole three and so if you didn’t like either (and there was a lot to dislike both of them, the good guy had been squeezed out in the first round), vote for the guy who can’t do as much damage because he’s only got one term left. Washington beat Vo by a very slim margin. Without term limits, Vo might have won.

What happened as the term limits got entrenched was elections started becoming a lot more partisan. The idea being that if you could only serve on City Council for a limited time, you needed to be positioning yourself for another run at a higher office, which were usually partisan offices. Republicans were able to pick up enough votes to win conservative districts and city-wide elections so long as they didn’t garner enough publicity for enough people to know that they were Republicans to shoot them down.

So it was seeming for a while like term limits were a bad idea. But somewhere along the way something else happened. There was a guy by the name of Ray Clavis who was about as corrupt as politicians got. His name was too tarnished to ever get elected anything above City Council, but he was really popular in his district as he stoked the fires of resentment while enriching only himself and his allies. He was a real kingmaker, but they couldn’t get a conviction no matter what they had on camera and tape. When term limits came, though, he was a man without a job. Longtime allies no longer found it worthwhile to try to turn him into a great civil rights cause. He was tried again and convicted. His allies, on the other hand, soldiered on and were re-elected. But one by one they fell. It became impossible to be on City Council for long enough to become an insulated kingmaker like Clavis was.

Term limits did what federal indictments failed to. I don’t like term limits on principal, but it’s not hard to argue that democracy sometimes needs its limitations.

Clancy and I were talking about baby names the other day. We already have a consensus name if we have a daughter (whenever the time comes, of course). We’re at odds with male names, though. So I was looking up names.

I ran across a couple sites (boys and girls) that had some interesting data on name-frequency rankings. It’s no surprise that you have traditional names that have fallen somewhat into disuse and you have names that came out of virtually nowhere and became prominent. I was curious which names were at the top of each list. So I found a site that has names that keeps track of the most popular names last year, in the last five years, the last twenty-five years, and the last 125 years. The most interesting distinction for me was last 25 vs last 125. I created a spreadsheet and created lists of names that are in the top-100 for the last 125 years and ordered them by what percentage of those occurred in the last 25 years. The list of names will be at the bottom of the post.

I guess it’s no great surprise that female naming is apparently a much more fickle art than male naming. Female names seem much more likely to both suddenly surge and die off. Notably, 13 of the top 100 female names are “dead names”. Only one of male name is dead, and even that name (like one of the 13 female names) may just be on life support because it’s only the last year that it wasn’t used).

The most surprising to me was Jacob, which I don’t associate with being a “trendy name”. I was surprised at the trendiness both ways on Biblical names, which I consider to be more immortal. Part of me would love to dust off some of these unused names. While names like Mildred and Doris seem dated, I don’t see anything inherently wrong with the name Beverly and I think Carol is a fabulous name. Interestingly, prior to even seeing this list, the name Walter was mentioned.

Before I get to the names, a little bit on the limitations of the data. First, only names that made the list are counted. That includes names that are in the top-100 in the last 125 years. I’m sure that there are a lot of dead names that were never as big as the ones listed. Similarly, there are obviously names now that did not exist 25 years ago. So it’s a limited sample. And it’s a bit outdated. By “last year”, I mean 2004. The last five years encompasses 1999-2005. And so on. Lastly, these names are spelling-specific. So a name like Theresa takes a hit because it competes with Teresa. Catherine has three spellings, which dilutes its significance. The dead names are names that have not been used in the last five years. Names that have not been used in the last year are also listed, but with an asterisk.

The trendy male names: Tyler (96.5%), Zachary (94.3%), Austin (92.5%), Brandon (89.1%), Jacob (87.4%), Kyle (86.41%), Justin (85.4%), Joshua (84.8%), Ryan (80.1%), and Nicholas (78.9%).

The dying male names: Fred (2.38%), Harold (3.03%), Ralph (3.42%), Howard (3.59%), Harry (3.63%), Earl (4.3%), Clarence (4.43%), Eugene (4.98%), Walter (5.53%), and Stanley (5.95%).

The dead male name: Fred*

The trendy female names: Brittany (99%), Ashley (96.9%), Samantha (91.3%), Lauren (88.9%), Megan (88.9%), Amber (84.3%), Jessica (83.5%), Amanda (77.9%), Danielle (77.6%), and Emily (76.9%)

The dying female names: Florence (.09%), Mildred (.14%), Lois (.2%), Doris (.68%), Betty (.72%), Joan (.9%), Dorothy (1.16%), Jean (1.31%), Shirley (1.48%), Carol (1.86%)

The dead female names: Florence, Mildred, Lois, Doris, Betty, Joan, Jean, Judy, Debra, Beverly, Cheryl, Tammy, Lori*

Last week I wrote vaguely about the limits of shame. Today I want to approach a particular area where I think that shame is largely unhelpful: weight.

I’m not suggesting that if you have a loved one that is substantially overweight that you should pretend that it’s just as healthy and valid lifestyle as it would be if they exercised regularly. There are certainly times to let them know that you (or people) are noticing and concerned. Offering assistance could be helpful. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen this sort of thing help, but I could imagine it doing so.

What I’m talking about is the sort of broad and loud statements about how disgusting fat people are and how they’re lazy and gluttonous and deserve every last bit of scorn they do for polluting the landscape. I use a more extreme example, but I’ve heard too many people that say too many nasty things about fat people defend it under the pretext that it is something that needs to be scorned and stigmatized because it’s not healthy.

Yes, I think to myself, I can just see how concerned you are for their welfare.

Whatever point they might have in the abstract is undermined, though, by the fact that such posturing rarely induces anyone to actually lose weight. Nor do I see a whole lot of reason to believe that the absense of such moralizing would actually make overweight people okay with their weight.

Things to consider about weight:
Most people don’t know that it’s happening to them until it’s too late. It’s really weight how it happens. Few ever say “Hey, I want to be fat!” and start eating more. Not many say “I don’t care if I become fat” and reach for that extra cupcake. Instead they simply eat and drink more calories than they consume and they gradually gain the weight. Since it’s always so little at a time, they don’t see it happening in the mirror. The only safeguard is when they have to get new clothes, but for people that gain their weight young even that goes by unnoticed because they’re already buying new clothes.
Almost all fat people are paying a price for their weight whether they are specifically targeted or not. You don’t need to inform someone that they are fat and that you find them aesthetically displeasing for them to experience the ill-effects of excess weight. In fact, if nobody ever said anything mean to them, they would still know it. They would still have trouble getting dates. They would still have more trouble making friends. They would have trouble with sports. They would have trouble maneuvering through places in ways that skinny people could never appreciate (unless they’re really tall).
These fat people know that they are paying a price. Sure, there are always cases where the fat guy just can’t realize why the girls won’t go out with him. But talk to him long enough, he knows. He may blame it on female superficiality, but even so he knows that his excess weight is a significant factor in his dilemma.
Keeping all of this in mind, they would lose the weight if they could easily do it.

That last one is a killer and it’s something that a lot of people don’t understand. A lot of people seem to along the lines of “Well, it wasn’t easy for me to lose the five pounds I gained last year, but I did it.” is remotely comparable in kind (as well as scope) as is losing fifty pounds (and, of course, keeping it off). They congratulate themselves on skipping seconds or desert and just don’t understand why heavier people can’t do the same. Then they’ll get on their soapbox and talk about how it’s all about having a little bit of discipline. If they just had some self-control, they would lose the weight.

It is ridiculously more complicated than that. I have known more than a couple overweight doctors. These doctors did everything it took to make it through college with high enough marks to get into medical school, to get through medical school, and to get through residency. Is it really the case that these people lack self-control? Chances are in most ways (perhaps every way but one) they are far more disciplined than your average skinny person.

Self-control is an element, to be sure, but it’s only part of the picture. People can have all sorts of self-control and just have one or two particular blind spots. Getting out of that blind spot is more than a conscious choice. Sure, there are people that have lost weight that say that they just woke up one morning and decided to do it. The difference between them and that guy that failed on his twelfth diet in two years is not that one made the conscious choice and one did not. It’s that one managed to make the choice consciously and unconsciously. You can “decide” on that sort of thing all you want, but there is a sort of internal compass that has to back you up. If it’s not backing you up, you’re going to fail.

Being ridiculed for your weight actually does damage to that compass. It feeds that demon in the back of your head that says “You can’t do it” and “You are what you are” and 100,000 other nasty little thoughts that cause cracks in one’s resolve.

I wish that there was an easy way for people to get that compass pointing in the right direction, but unfortunately there isn’t. I gained some weight in Deseret that I tried to lose in Estacado. I was constantly trying to figure something out. Nothing worked. I kept failing over and over and over again. At the end of two years, I left Estacado weighing 10 more pounds than I did arriving.

Since arriving in Cascadia, I’ve lost 35 pounds. And I haven’t struggled remotely as much as I did in Estacado. There are all sorts of things that I am doing differently, but perhaps the biggest difference is that I got the compass pointing in the right direction. I managed to figure out just a couple of things that were easy and right and once I got moving it became pretty easy to stick with it. Now I have a lot more of the right habits that are conducive to weight loss. But at the beginning something out of my control had to click in to place for me to get those habits in place. And the bad ones removed.

I knew all along what the good habits were. And the bad ones. I knew what I should be doing but I wasn’t doing it. To get myself to do it there required a degree of concentration and focus that is impossible for pretty much anyone. Imagine saying to yourself all day every day “You do not want to eat that tasty food you have in your mind. You do not want to. You do not want to.” It’s sort of like not thinking of pink elephants. What sounds simple and easy for you simply isn’t necessarily easy for the next person. People that have never struggled with this can have to tendency to be really cocky about their ability to fight off bad habits that they don’t have. The most proper solution, of course, is not to get the bad habits in the first place. See above, though: You don’t realize the damage is being done until the damage is already done.

I still have a lot of bad habits, diet-wise. I have bad habits that, if I were someone else, would be preventing me from losing weight. Cocky skinny people may skip desert, but they still do things that they wouldn’t be able to do if they were in the mode of trying to lose 50 or 70 pounds. And if they had to give those things up, they probably could, but that’s because they’re giving up one or two things. Obese people are having to give up entire swaths of their daily life. Replacing not just a few bad habits, but every bad habit until they can get it all out of their system for that intangible “lifestyle change” required to be thin. Food and eating become not just something to be managed, but a hated enemy of sorts that if they aren’t careful will manage them.

Some guy talking about how ugly fat people are at best does nothing. At worst undermines what is already an extraordinarily difficult undertaking.

For the purpose of this question, a “term” is defined as the span of time between a president’s taking of the oath and their leaving of the office. So, for instance, the four years for which Kennedy was elected to serve counts as two terms. Kennedy’s only term and Johnson’s first term.

Presidential terms are traditionally four years in length to the day. There are, of course, some exceptions to this. Twenty presidential terms have been of lengths shorter than one year four years. Eight of those terms were cut short because of a president’s death. Nine because of a Vice President ascending to the office to fill out a term after a death or resignation. So the question is this… to which three presidents did the three remaining terms belong and why were these terms less than four years in length?

Clarification: Presidential terms are usually cut short (in other words, do not last a full four years) because a president has died or a vice president takes office and is only serving the remainder of that term (unless re-elected in his own right). There have been three instances where terms were shorter than four years for different reasons than death or VP ascendancy. Who were the presidents whose terms were cut short and why were they cut short?

When I was in high school, I met Zane Broderick. Zane was almost instantly one of the coolest people I knew. I met him on the Camelot BBS and in an atmosphere where there are three guys competing for every girl, he wasn’t interested in that at all. Not for religious reasons or sexual-orientation reasons, but rather because he saw it making everyone around him miserable. So he figured that he would sit back, learn, and then make his move in college. It struck me as utterly bizarre (Who thinks like that?!) and yet brilliant (he was right, we were miserable). Having him around helped keep me level and aware that there is a lot more out there than Mayne High and Camelot soap operas.

We lost touch for a stretch. Then, when I reconnected with him, he announced out of the blue that he was leaving Colosse for Zaulem. He had fallen in love and they were moving out there together.

Through my future roommate Hubert’s BBS, I met a handful of really good friends. One was a guy named Artur. Like Zane, Artur had a definite lack of interest in girls. This was a good thing because he was an odd enough fellow that girls would have been completely and utterly uninterested in him anyway.

As odd as Artur was, his friend Lawrence was beyond bizarre. He had an odd fascination with blood that compelled him to ask everybody he met what kind of blood they liked best. He described every bloody thing he’d ever seen in detail if you’d let him. He was harmless, though socially toxic if there were any females present.

You can imagine my surprise when I found out that Lawrence had a prom date. Some acquaintence of Artur’s had set him up with a friend of hers. I never specifics, but Artur made the comment that he would never let Lawrence around girls ever again. Artur ended up virtually marrying my friend Velva. Never learned what happened to Lawrence.

I become a columnist for the Daily Packer, the student newspaper of Southern Tech University. My editor was a guy by the name of Kelvin Wharton. He and I would eat lunch together whenever we were in the cafeteria at the same time. We talked about this and that. He would periodically mention his on-again-off-again relationship with a girl named Mindy. That was about all the personal information I got out of him.

At an anime convention, I saw across the room a striking young woman that was there with the Southern Tech University Anime Club. I was so struck by her that every time I saw a young woman that looked remotely like her, I would look closely to see if it was her to start up that conversation I never did at the convention.

My relationship with Julie was rapidly falling apart. Knowing that it was going to end but not yet ready to let it, I started testing the waters. Mostly just to see what all was out there. There was a website that was mostly used for online personals but also to make friends. I ran across a profile that just jumped out me. At three in the morning, I sent a really long letter to a complete stranger just to unload.

It was Evangeline Pierce, the girl from the anime convention that I had looked for and never found.

Her best friend was Kelvin, my former editor.

I met and made good friends with a guy named Rick Gladden. I would eventually meet my wife Clancy through Rick. Rick used to talk about this complete psycho girl that he knew from the university’s Objectivism group. Her name was Mindy and she couldn’t decide whether or not to stick it out with her boyfriend whom I would later find out was named Kelvin.

Evangeline and I had acrimoniously parted. I hadn’t accepted this yet, so Eva did what she always did, which was try to foist me upon someone else. In this case it was her friend Lanisa. Lanisa and I only went out a couple of times.

She told me this interesting story of the nightmare that her prom. Evangeline had set her up with a friend of a friend named Larry. The guy went around asking all of her friends what their favorite kind of blood was.

Evangeline and I had written each other a few times before we each mentioned that we were in a relationship. Prior to that we’d managed to speak in abstractions. Anyway, so I told her about Julie and she told me about Jin. Jin was her boyfriend whose insecurities were driving him utterly insane.

It all went back to a few years ago, she explained. He was engaged to be married when out of nowhere she returned the ring, canceled the engagement, and admitted that she’d been cheating on him over the last three months. Then she left for Zaulem with some guy named Zane.