I ran across the band Jackpot when I started a subscription to eMusic. This was when there was unlimited downloads, so I naturally downloaded there entire catalog. It was a long time before I would listen to much of it. They’re of an acquired taste. But one by one I started appreciating individual songs.

There reaches a tipping point with musicians where once you listen to enough of their material, you start noticing patterns. Not just in subject matter, but in little intangibles in the tone and descriptions and what a song takes care to mention and leave out. And sometimes you have a singular moment when you’re somewhere doing something and you hear the song and you realize that one moment is what their catalog is about.

There’s a country musician that I happened to hear once while driving on a rural road near the Delosa/Muskogea border. There was a dead skunk on the road, a couple cows munching and looking as bored as cows always looks. The terrain was hilly and there were some crossroads in the distance with every road in sight being only two lanes. I stopped at an intersection, looked around, and said to myself, “This is Jim Skerritt’s Universe.”

A similar moment occurred with Jackpot. I was living in Greenwood Hall on the Southern Tech University campus. Dharla was in a different dorm. We met at a table where smokers tended to congregate. She liked that I was tall and (nominally) Christian and had deep blue eyes. That she was attractive with a smile that could light up the room drew me to her, of course, but she sealed the deal when she said that she knew all of the words to Barenaked Ladies’s “The Last Thing On My Mind” and sang it for me.

From there she would come over the my dorm and we would watch things together. We saw the entirety of Neon Genesis Evangelion over the course of a week. There were these moments that in retrospect were entirely “come-hither” looks on her part met with utter cluelessness on mine.

Maybe it was out of frustration that she decided that she would teach me to dance. Slow dance. Finding music to dance to was always a challenge since college students don’t often cop to having tood slow-dance music. But we got by mostly by listening to music with the appropriate tempo if not the appropriate sentiment.

My MP3 collection was not very large at that point and Jackpot was one of the few artists where I had their complete catalog. So I listened to them a lot. She liked them. So one day when we were tired of dancing to Bare Naked Ladies, we played Jackpot.

It was when the song “Spaceout” came on that it all synthesized and I felt like I had entered Jackpot’s Universe. She was trying to teach me to lead and I was bumbling around on my feet. She would lay he head onto my chest and she found herself searching for a moment that wasn’t really there. Meanwhile, I was thinking that I could give her what she wanted if I would just stop thinking. If I could take command of the situation and be the person that I knew I was capable of being.

She looked at me in a way that was begging me to kiss her. And for once I could see it at the time. But something stopped me. And the moment was gone and the opportunity lost.

Spaceout is a song about two people bring alone together. Sort of in the way that “I’m alone. You’re alone. Let’s be alone together.” and yet not being able to connect and so, even after trying to communicate, ending up together but alone. Alone together in a slightly different context.

But it was more than just the subject matter of that particular song. Jackpot’s Universe is a place where people of potential end up blowing it. Wishing you could be what other people wanted you to be, but falling short and instead just internally slumping, smoking pot, and loafing around. Notably, Dharla and I smoked weed together. While listening to Jackpot. In between her attempts to teach me how to dance.

At the end of the song, it makes a reference to going up to a rooftop and “spacing out”. One time we got the bright idea of holding our dancing sessions on top of Grayson Hall. It was easy enough to sneak up there. I burned the more danceable Jackpot material onto a single CD and we went up there and danced. We tried to recapture the previous moment that I had strictly blown, but we didn’t.

She stopped coming around shortly after that. It suited me fine because I had moved on to someone else for a new start where I hadn’t missed so many little opportunities and one big one. Sometimes relationships are up-or-out and that was one of them. Dharla and I were not done by a long shot. Relationships, near-relationships, and dry patches would come and go before we somehow reconnected somewhere down the line. The next time around it became like that paradox about making up half the distance over and over again and never quite connecting because each movement becomes smaller as half of the whole because half of what it was. Closer and closer, but no connection.

These days when I listen to Jackpot - with the exception of “Spaceout” - I think of the Super Nintendo Legend of Zelda game. That’s another story altogether.

Stylist: How’s that?

Trumwill: Could you take a little more off the back?

Stylist: Taper it a little more, you mean?

Trumwill: Yeah. For some reason my hair seems to grow fastest in the back. When I’m not careful I am the king of the unintentional mullet.

Stylist: Hey, be glad that it’s growing at all.

Trumwill: No joke. Someday I may need it to grow super fast back there so I can cut it and plug it in up front.

Next Ghostland post is going to lean somewhat heavily on a band that you’ve probably never heard before. So I’m putting up this post as a primer. If you’re interested in hearing a rather novel band with a quite unique sound, below is a selection of songs I am temporarily putting out there for your benefit.

I also have descriptions of the subject matter of the songs, which were difficult because they’re one of those bands that are not necessarily straightforward with their lyrics. But they toe rather closely to a common theme where if you hear a few songs, they all start making a little more sense in their own quirky way. They’re also rather hard to classify. They’re usually shuffled under “alt country” but the label really doesn’t fit except in the early Wilco sense. It’s more a cross between rootsy rock and alternative in a haze of copious amounts of marijuana.

I will introduce the band more properly in a couple of days.

—-

This one is, in my opinion, their best song. One of their best sounding songs, anyway, for sure. It involves the narrator who is feeling along and isolated and amidst darkness and trying to, in a sense, break free. He is presumably singing it to the woman who is the one thing (other than a functioning feature on his automobile and maybe an astrological phenomenon) right in his life.

A song concerning what, precisely, happens after a guy with a tenuous grip on domestic competence is left disentangle the woman that held it all together from his life and memories.

Narrator: Man, my life is going down the crapper. My mind is too muddy to even contemplate it all. But you’re free to watch and participate if you would like.

This song will be heavily featured in the post, so I don’t want to say too much about it except that it’s about having difficulty connecting with someone of the opposite gender.

Though this one encapsulates the nature of the band when it chooses to make sense. It perhaps encapsulates the faults of the stereotypical Generation X as the narrator tries to convince his lady-friend to do a plethora of things that she shouldn’t do including but not limited to fornication, illicit substances, and fiscal irresponsibility.

This is a song that encapsulates the band when it chooses to make less sense. A clump of clumsy yet imaginative metaphors that hop around from one to the next while he tries to say “Hey babe, life is tough and I guess things didn’t go the way you might have liked. I’d love to help, but man, that’s just tough. But know that I wish I could help. Totally.”

As mentioned before, I’m reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, a collected of essays regarding pop culture from a Gen-X perspective. In his first (awesome) essay, This Is Emo, he mentions how he was able to translate a Woody Allen schtick into romantic success.

It got me thinking of something I’d been meaning to write about since I told Barry that I would a long while back. I can’t entirely remember what he had to do with it, but in my drafts is a note to myself to write about “Need a hook — for Barry.”

When I was coming into high school, I asked my older brother Oliver what the secret to girls was. My brother Mitch and I had never had a whole lot of success. Mitch had been able to muster up girls for dances, but he seemed to be stuck in the role as that sweet guy that girls got to know and like but didn’t seem to date. Maybe he just never actually asked them out. Ollie, on the other hand, always had a girlfriend from about the tenth grade on.

When I asked Ollie the question, he sort of shrugged it off. It was as though I had asked him how to drink water. You just put it in your mouth and swallow. You just ask the girl and if she says yes then you’re good to go. Presumably he was aware that they could say no, but I don’t think that they ever did. I told him about my difficulties getting to know girls to ask out and he said that they always just kind of hung around him. “The answer to your question,” he said, “is to be really good at basketball.”

It was a frustrating answer, but in its own way it was one of the most stunningly accurate answers I ever got. Be good at basketball. He was good at basketball. Girls befriended him. He asked girls out and they said yes. Mitch and I were both actually good at basketball in our own right, but not in the stand-out way that he was. Had he not stopped growing at 5′10″, he could have played at the college level.

Of course, the secret to success isn’t to be good at basketball. A lot of guys who aren’t good at basketball get girlfriends. But the grand truth behind Ollie’s answer is that the secret is to have something that makes you remarkable. He was a jock. Then, in college, he was a former jock. So he had the kinds of girlfriends that hung out with former jocks.

One of the reasons that fuels the whole notion that Nice Guys Finish Last in love is that a lot of guys that identify as Nice do so because they haven’t much else to rely on. They’re not former jocks or writers or musicians… they’re nice. Often too passive to aggressively declare a personality. Sometimes so eager to fit in they wear an identity that doesn’t fit them. At all.

That’s not to say that they are actually dull people. Sometimes they are quite interesting to certain groups of people. But they are interesting in ways that that are utterly unappealing to girls. I know one guy that I can talk about computers with forever and I think he’s a great guy and would make a great boyfriend… but I have no idea what he would talk about to a girl unless she was also into computers. There’s a scarcity of supply to meet that demand.

Anyway, contributing to the whole notion of “girls like bad boys” is that bad boys quite frequently have a hook. An angle. An identity. So while the actual number of girls interested in that sort of thing actually may be somewhat limited, they’re easy to identify. There are a lot of girls that Ollie could have asked out in high school who probably would have said “no”… but those weren’t the girls that generally hung around him.

One of the bigger mistakes that I made when I was younger was not to do a better job of forming a solid external identity. You could say that I wanted to be all things to all people, but it was more a case of not wanting to be the wrong person for the wrong people. So in some ways I came across as a rather bland fellow. I suppose I still do, but it doesn’t matter anymore because I’m married.

The points at which I had the most success were those in which I was able to play on my home field. Not simply “be myself”, but to play to (and accentuate) my strengths.

When I met Clancy, she had read portions of the blog that I was writing at the time. A blog not too much unlike this one, actually. The most conventionally attractive women that I was ever with (the one that was the most “out of my league”) was attracted to the fact that I was a prolific (if unpublished) writer. Despite all of this, I was always relatively slow to mention the fact that I wrote and even slow to draw attention to the articulate and intelligent aspects of my personality because I felt that both were unhelpful.

And to a lot of people, of course, they were. Willie (and no doubt others) came to the conclusion that I was a pseudo-egghead who was preoccupied with sounding smart. And coming across as anything but down-to-earth has liabilities with a substantial portion of the female population and so my creativity was its own liability.

What I failed to truly appreciate was that these things were liabilities to the wrong people. They were people that I needed to write off in search for right people. I was so scared to death of writing people off that I failed to attract people that would have been interested in the me that it’s most easy for me to be.

It all harkens back to my post a little while back about Drake Mathers and Kenny Chesney. There is a lot to be said for knowing your market. Not only what your market is, but also what it isn’t.

Of course, you have to be careful that your market is some number greater than zero. This is not about “being yourself” or any of that feel-good claptrap. If who you are is somebody that does not cultivate any desire from anybody, you need to change who you are. If your interests are utterly mundane and of no interest to most women, it would help to get some new interests. For one thing, it’s one of the easiest ways to meet people. For another, it helps to have something to put under “interests” that doesn’t repel female-types.

But I think that you have to find something that you are genuinely interested in doing or genuinely good at.The answer for Ollie was basketball in high school. That isn’t the right answer for 99% of most guys. For me it might have been the school paper or {gasp} honors classes. I was somewhat fortunate in that the guy that I naturally became without even thinking about it (a heady-in-cloudy geek with enough social skills so as to avoid embarrassing anybody when meeting friends and family) had its own market. It wasn’t a big market, mind you, but in the end it only takes one.

This post didn’t exactly turn out like I had imagined. I don’t think I even got around to the part that involved Barry (whatever that part was). And it didn’t have quite as tight a central thesis as I might have liked. But such is life, and inexplicably being laid back and patient is one of my hooks.

A lot of my friends are having kids and of course they talk about them a lot on Facebook. I think I am so used to pseudonyms - particularly when it comes to kids of bloggers who themselves are not pseudonymous - that it’s taken a few weeks to sink in that the three-steps-beyond-yuppie name referred to on Facebook is their actual name. Oh, dear…

Most of my heroes are dead. By which I mean most of the DC Comics superheroes that I enjoy the most are either dead or have been significantly changed. It’s always sad when one of them dies, but the alternative is almost worse. I lament the deaths of Ted Kord and Vic Sage and Wesley Dodds, but nothing compares to having lost a character that lives and breathes (to the extent that comic book characters live and breathe) but has been stripped of everything that I liked and admired about the character.

There have been a few times when I’ve wondered if my distaste for Wonder Woman was simply because of her gender and her bucking the gender norms by being strong and commanding and whatever, but that concern folds when I realize that one of my favorite characters of all time, The Huntress, is female. The difference is that Helena Bertinelli, aka the Huntress, is what the writers try to make Wonder Woman, but manages to be so by being a complete character rather than an archetype. Or so it used to be.

A bit of background. The Huntress was originally Batman and Catwoman’s daughter, Helena Wayne. This was in a sort of alternate universe where Batman retired and his daughter took up the family business of crimefighting. Then DC changed their universe system and the character no longer existed. So they brought back The Huntress in the form of Helena Bertinelli, a sort of Batmanesque character but one that was initially kept at arm’s length¹ and allowed to develop her own identity.

The original origin of Bertinelli was that she was a mafia princess whose family was shot down by a rival mafia. In fear of her life, she decided to take the offensive and hunt down her family’s killers. Her motives were not (originally) altruistic but rather practical. She was a very practical person. Unlike Bruce Wayne, she didn’t set out to become a hero. She didn’t decide to cut everybody off because of some obsessive crusade. She was stripped of her identity by virtue of the fact that she was being hunted and her previous identity was as the product of a family that did some pretty bad things. And her childhood was marred not only by being surrounded by relatively backward and dangerous people but also by the fact that her family’s crime games resulted in her being kidnapped and raped when she was seven or so. There were no fond memories of a wonderful life torn away from her. Not to minimize Bruce Wayne’s tragic loss, but she had far less choice to become what Wayne chose to be: distant, alone, and tough as nails.

She was also one of the most truly independent women I have ever seen in comics. Unlike Wonder Woman, she wasn’t shackled by the expectation to be representative of whatever the popular culture decided a woman should be. Unlike Black Canary, she did not have a Green Arrow to latch on to. Originally, she didn’t even have sex appeal as the creators went out of their way to make her look rather plain and unappealing². She had the help of a former family enforcer, but by and large she made her own way. She did hold Batman up as a sort of role model, but even there she elected to be who she was rather than win his approval. Indeed, she remains one of the only costumed characters in the DC Universe to point out Batman’s hypocrisy. and the only character I’m aware of to push back against his dominating character that wasn’t a top-tier Justice Leaguer or a Robin³.

Her series ended after 19 issues and she retired. She resurfaced a little while later when Chuck Dixon dusted her off and put her in Detective Comics. She’d relocated to Gotham City and had found a bit of peace as a schoolteacher, but was drawn back into things. It was actually here when her relationship with Batman was more fully explored as she joined the Batman stable of characters. Her costume was changed up a bit, but it still had the spirit of her original costume⁴. They ditched the plain-looking thing, which was the first real shift from the awesomeness of the original character, but since it was more aesthetically appealing I certainly didn’t mind⁵. And for a while, as a Batman character, she made her way. When everybody else was saying “Yes, sir, okay sir,” to Batman, she was the only one with the gumption to push back. As much as she wanted his approval, she refused to do the one thing she needed to do in order to get it. Batman had a don’t-kill-ever policy and if she did not believe that protecting the life of the guilty was more important than protecting their future victims. Agree with her or disagree with her, she was willing to pay a price for her convictions. Her costume also changed again, covering up the legs into a perfect utilitarian uniform. I didn’t like it at first, but it was hard to argue that trading sex appeal for utilitarianism isn’t something that Helena Bertinelli would do.

The troubles started when they started going in and changing her origin. They moved her early experiences from New York City to Gotham City, which by itself was not much of a problem because it made more sense. But it was the start of a number of unsettling changes. They took away the rape/molestation aspect from her past. This was more significant because it was one of the things that differentiated her from most other characters. And unlike other times where rape appears in popular entertainment, it was the most irredeemable and disgusting sort. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but it’s substantively different than the fact that Black Canary was raped in adulthood. They also had her parents killed when she was eight, just like Bruce Wayne’s. They made Batman her inspiration rather than her more unique path to the mask and cape.

And, of course, they started changing the costume again. First they added the shadow bat ears⁶ that Helena Wayne used to have. I assume that some liked it because it fit in tighter with the roots of the character. I disliked it for the same reason (let’s go forward, not backwards!)… but that’s more a matter of taste. But what really stung was the next change, put forth by the despicable Jim Lee⁷, which left considerably less to the imagination. And unlike the early costumes which showed off leg and (in her first one) arms, there is no utilitarian aspect to showing off her stomach.⁸ Oh, and they added these dangly ornaments from her earlobes⁹. It strikes me that ear rings are not something that Helena Bertinelli would wear in the first place, but that’s more subjective than the obvious problem that hooks in her ears that dangle and are easy to grab is exactly the sort of anti-utilitarian girlification that I had always appreciated that Bertinelli avoided.

Her personality also started changing. She inexplicably supported a presidential candidate on the basis of female solidarity¹⁰ . Thankfully, as far as I am aware she has not completely sworn off her formerly lethal nature. But she has become something of a member of the in-crowd and has lost the outsiderdom that helped me relate to her. She is the field commander for the Birds of Prey, a member of the Justice League for a while, and a participant in Titanesque¹¹ drama.

I suppose to some degree this is an extension of the rape disappearing from her history. Early on, she had a relatively standoffish relationship with men such that I feared that she was a lesbian. My main objection to which is not a revulsion towards homosexuality so much as a desire that sexuality itself be used sparingly in comic books. I don’t like storylines of so-and-so sleeping with so-and-so (even though I do like romantic subplots) and establishing a character’s homosexuality does this almost by necessity (see Montoya, Renee). Well, I got the heterosexuality that I wanted but not the sexual discretion. She ended up sleeping with Dick Grayson (the first Robin) for no other reason than her daddy complex with Grayson’s mentor. She also slept with Arsenal in a rather casual manner. She also hooked up with Vic Sage for a while, though that did not bother me as much because (a) Sage is one of my favorite characters and (b) that was actually something akin to a relationship and he could have easily gained the trust for her to let her guard down. However, since the guarded nature of her character was tied into her early experience with men, I suppose it’s not so much of a reach. But it nonetheless strips her of one of the things that attracted me to the character in the first place.

When I was starting this blog, one of the first things I did was come up with pseudonyms. Mine had its own origin. The final four considerations for my wife included Helena. I’ve always been drawn to women that have a reserve of independence and strength and a willingness to do what needs to be done. And both command respect. Unfortunately, only one still does.

—-

An old superstition states that one should not speak ill of the dead, or at least the “recently deceased.” In some respects this is true - it’s certainly gauche, for instance, to insult the deceased at their own funeral, a gathering at which one expects to find friends and well-wishers.

At the same time, this often takes a macabre and even counterproductive turn when it comes to the death of a public figure. For instance, recently there was the death of Edward Kennedy. For his “friends” and fellow-travelers in politics, he has people who love him. From the other side, especially for those who remember most vividly the time he used his family connections to get off scot free after committing brazen murder, there’s an air of disgust and even relief that he has finally passed. Watching the media coverage, of course, it seems as if he is to be canonized for sainthood… an odd statement to say for a man known more for the amount of alcohol he drank, than anything else. On message boards and similar forums, those speaking an opinion about the “Legacy” of Ted Kennedy are themselves merely 50% likely to see either kudos or boos to their statements, unless the forum itself is particularly politically tilted in one direction or the other.

In a similar vein, Southern Tech renamed their College of Art* after a highly controversial figure very quickly (around two months or so) following his death a few years back. This man was an alumnus of Southern Tech, but had given very little to the university prior to his death and left them a mere pittance in his will. In terms of actual legacy, the man was highly anti-consumer, anti-freedom, and a generally terrible role model responsible for the erosion and in some cases outright dissolution of many consumer rights that ought to have been protected. In canonizing his name and making him a figurehead, the University seemed to be trying more to tag onto the lingering publicity benefit of his name than actually honor him. Though the naming has remained, thankfully many members of the Southern Tech community spoke up against it in the Daily Packer and elsewhere.

I, personally, have never found the prohibition about speaking ill of the dead (recently or otherwise) helpful. If anything, it seems that the “tradition” is most often invoked by those who have an axe to grind in some other respect. Outside of the realm of the funeral, I’d prefer that honesty outweigh unreasonable misrepresentation of a person’s legacy.

There also comes a time when, mourning period or not, honest opinions need to be presented. Discussions with Will indicate that perhaps one good measure is the point at which (at least for public figures) people start sticking their likeness on things, or naming things after them - such as the “Michael Jackson Stamp/Holiday” nonsense, the “Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act”, the attempts to make Obamacare into some kind of “Ted Kennedy Memorial Bill”, or the aforementioned naming of SoTech’s College of Art a mere two months after its namesake bastard’s death.

Thoughts?

*No, not actually the College of Art… names have been changed, as usual, to protect the guilty.

This is an item from a couple months ago, but it nonetheless demonstrates a sense of entitlement on the part of iPhone users.

Their anger revolves around the fast-evolving iPhone. To get one, most consumers committed to a two-year contract. But over that two-year period, since its introduction in 2007, the iPhone has undergone technology enhancements and, like many electronic devices, the price has fallen.

This week Apple introduced its new souped-up iPhone 3GS, with a price of $199 for the 16G version and $299 for the 32G version. However, that’s only for new AT&T subscribers.

If you bought one of the earlier versions of the iPhone and want to upgrade before your contract is up, it will cost you an extra $200. The upgrade price is $399 for the 16G version and $499 for the 32G model. Without a contract, consumers pay $599 and $699, respectively.

“If you are a loyal iPhone user like me, contact them through e-mail, phone, whatever — let your voice be heard,” wrote one upset iPhone user on the AT&T forum. “Let them know you will not be quiet. Do whatever it takes.”

The husband of a coworker/friend of my wife with whom I have struck up a friendship like to talk gadgets. He commented that one Apple guy he knows was complaining about the people complaining about how people who buy early-releases of products pay more than those who wait just a few months or a year. And not a little bit more. The Applehead said that that’s the way it works for all Apple products and people should expect it. My friend replied that if Apple is going to penetrate the market beyond Apple’s enthusiastic base, they’re going to have to get used to people pushing back against Apple the same way that they push back against anyone else.

It actually puts me in the rare position of agreeing with Apple. Early adopters do pay a premium and that should be expected. That Apple makes this premium so steep may be a little aggravating, but the solution is that people need to just wait six months or a year or a couple years. That happens to be what I do all the time!

In this case, though, they’re not just complaining about the price drops and the early-adopter premium. The complaints now center on cell phone contracts and how it’s the new customers that get the cool price breaks. I have no proof beyond my biases, but I suspect that the complainants are not the people that are new to Apple’s business model but people who know it full well, accept it, but then get on their high horse when it seems like it’s coming from someone other than the hallowed Bay Area gizmo giant. On a sidenote, I suppose I should lay off Appleheads a little bit. I’m seeing more of people aiming their barrels at Apple in addition to AT&T and this is a positive development.

Whatever the case, iPhone users are not asking to be treated like everyone else. They’re asking to be treated special. When you sign a two year contract, the words on that paper actually mean something. They mean that in return for the price break that you get on the phone, you agree to be their customer for a two year period. This is the case whether you buy a Motorola dumbphone or an eggheaded iPhone. Once you’ve done this, you have punched your ticket. Their failure to give you anything above and beyond that is not taking you for granted. That is the agreement that both sides signed on to. You’re not giving them your business anymore. They’ve bought it.

Now, when it comes to most cell phone users, you can simply leave after the contract has expired. You may have to buy a new phone, but that’s not as big of a deal because you can get a price break on the new phone. The iPhone is a little bit different because you can’t get an iPhone on any US network except the AT&T one. That’s a decision you made when you sold your soul to Apple because Apple contracted your soul out to AT&T. There are three people to blame here and AT&T is only one of them. So to the extent that iPhone users are being treated differently, it’s because AT&T is merely getting compensation for the rights that Apple sold to them.

But generally, the contract system affects all of us and Apple users have no right to be exempt from it. Anyone that is under a contract with a provider is not in a position to demand generosity on the part of AT&T. As a non-iPhone AT&T customer, I don’t expect AT&T to give me a price break on a phone without getting something in return. Since I’m not under contract (more on that in a minute), I could get a new phone (at a discount) for a new contract. They get something and I get something. What the iPhone people are asking for is to get something without giving anything that they are not already contractually obliged to give.

Now, there are two caveats to this.

First, the article itself is not entirely clear on what AT&Ts policy is towards people like me. It says on one hand that the special, special low rate is only available to “new subscribers” but then on the other it talks about what would happen if you wanted to upgrade “before your contract is up”. I am mostly addressing the case of the latter. If AT&T’s position is that existing subscribers that are not under a contract should not receive the full discount, well, that’s pretty aggravating. Periodicals do that sort of thing all the time, but it’s a bigger problem here because it’s less problematic to stop service then re-start service a month later (which is what Mom used to do with magazines). I know that there are ways that you can keep your phone numbers, though, so maybe it’s less big of a deal. Regardless, it’s an uncool business practice if that’s what they’re doing analogous to an old apartment complex I lived in which raised the rent on existing tenants but kept it the same for move-ins because they figured that they could take advantage of the hassle of moving. However, that does not appear to be what the iPhone users are complaining about. They’re still under contract.

The second caveat is that unlike some carriers, AT&T is different in that they are not as flexible about extending a contract when you’re in the middle of a previous one. With some other carriers, if you’re a year in to a two-year contract, you can get a two year extension along with a phone discount (thus leaving you with three years on the contract). AT&T, to my knowledge, does not let you do that. That doesn’t strike me as fundamentally unfair, though. If they have a flat-rate for cancellations, they have a lot to lose by letting people dig in deep with multiyear contracts that they have no intention of living up to. This is particularly true for iPhone users, many of whom have every intention to leave. And notably, the discount they’re asking for is actually greater than the cost of cancellation. In any event, they’re not even asking for preemptive contract extensions. They’re asking for something for nothing.

Don’t misinterpret me entirely. I hate the contract system that they’re complaining about. In fact, I spent extra money to avoid it. The last time I needed a cell phone, I went on eBay and paid a hundred or two more than I otherwise might have specifically so that I would not have a contract and so that I could take the phone and use it on T-Mobile (or any other GSM carrier) if I wanted. iPhone users are quite free to do the same. Of course, if they do, they will have to pay more than the price they are complaining about. In other words, despite everything above, AT&T is subsidizing iPhone upgrades.

AT&T and other carriers often sell these things at a loss in return for assured business. Think the iPhone is too expensive? Apple is the one that sets the price. Don’t like the way that prices start sky-high and fall just after you bought one? That’s Apple’s, not AT&T’s, business model. By subsidizing upgrades, AT&T is actually doing more than they could be. And for all the complaints about it (including my own), there is something to be said for the subsidized/contract model, it can be good for the consumer who doesn’t want to have to drop a few hundred dollars on a phone from one paycheck and it can be good for the companies because they can more comfortably rely on that income. Win-win. I wish it were not so prevalent, but it is not without its upside. But the deal is what it is. Those words in that contract actually mean something.

Scott Payne sings the praises of How I Met Your Mother, which really is a great show. His emphasis on Barney reminds me of something that I’ve been meaning to write about for at least a couple of years now. In many of the truly great sitcoms, their greatness is defined far less by the main characters than the supporting casts. This is one of the reasons that shows that tend to revolve around someone that is already a star so frequently fail. Particularly when the show is given to someone that has historically played secondary characters (or a single one) and they’re trying to give them a shot at “prime time”.

In some ways, I think that it’s best to reserve your best talent for secondary roles. The main reason for this is that supporting roles are generally allowed to be far more interesting. The main characters of the show are people that we are supposed to relate to, but the supporting characters are people that we know but are laughing at. Main characters have some personality quirks, but secondary characters - by virtue of the fact that they are not the protagonist that we are supposed to somewhat identify with - can be extreme variations of various archetypes.

The best example of this that I am aware of is a show called Davis Rules. It was given the enviable position of premiering after the Superbowl. A lot of money was pumped into making everyone aware of its existence. But it failed despite being given two chances (once on ABC and once on CBS) and is largely forgotten now. The main reason for this is that it relied on the star power of Randy Quaid… but it boxed Quaid in as the role of the protagonist. He was the single father of three, responsible, and all that wasn’t the persona that Quaid adopted and perfected in nearly every role that made him well-known.

On the other side, though, you have the examples of Just Shoot Me. The first was a fantastic show that didn’t find its audience and the second a so-so show that managed to hang in there longer than most would have guessed. Phil Hartmann was the draw to NewsRadio and, because he was a side character, they were able to take advantage of his comedic talent while giving the protagonist role to the more low-key Dave Foley. In the case of Just Shoot Me, the draw was David Spade. Spade’s character was not really secondary, but he was more a part of the ensemble than the protagonist (who was Laura San Giacomo). In fact, the storyboard was written without his character and he was put in there at the last minute.

A David Spade show never would have made it seven seasons. A Phil Hartmann show would not have lasted to the point of his death, much less an additional year. Shows built around a strong name certain can succeed, but they depend on large part on a good supporting cast or another lightning rod for humor, such as David Hyde Pierce as a more extreme variant of Kelsey Grammar’s protagonist in Frasier. But as often as not - even in ensemble casts - the real talent lies in characters that take a bigger role but nonetheless stand off to the side while we’re mostly rooting for someone else. Steve Carrell was the only name actor on The Office, but the role of protagonist was given to the somewhat less interesting but far more likable Jim Halpert character.

And so it goes with Neil Patrick Harris. Harris was, of course, the star of his own sitcom when he was a kid, but attempts to use him as a draw were unsuccessful. He seemed like the sort of guy to be able to carry his own show, and he probably could have if given the right part, but instead ended up playing second-fiddle to a relative no-name on How I Met Your Mother. But with Josh Radnor taking the role of the relatable protagonist, Harris was freed to become a hilarious degenerate.

I think it’s often the case that the bigger names want to be the protagonist in order not to cede the limelight to someone else. I remember being surprised that Harris was willing to take a secondary role, but it turned out to be the best thing he could have done. It’s impossible to know what will happen with Josh Radnor’s career, but the adult Neil Patrick Harris has been immortalized and as a result has become of the few child stars that went on to be a success in adulthood instead of just Doogie Howser grown up.

Susan Lynch was a secretary at McClellan-Forrester in a large city in Southern California in the late 1960’s. She had been divorced for a couple of years and on her desk was a plaque that said “Better Dead than Wed”. Since her divorce, she had been approached by countless guys that felt the need to fulfill the needs she must have as a formerly married woman used to sexual activity but suddenly bereft of it.

A former cheerleader for the Carolina State Bulldogs, she was also one of the few female employees and M-F that was interested in football. Because no guys could be bothered with such menial tasks, she was designated the official secretary of the football pool that she did not technically belong to.

One week, the winner of the pool was a young man named Bill Truman. Being the winner of the pool meant that you got to pick which games next week would be considered. When asked what he needed to do, he was directed to go down the hall on the third story and talk to “some girl named Lynch” and turn in the list and she would take care of it. They didn’t know her first name.

So Truman and Lynch met at her desk, when he turned in the list and she thanked him.

Flash forward several weeks. Susan and her male friend Nolan decided that they were going to a party together. Nolan suggested that they would go together and hang out until one of them found something better. And so the date was set. Shortly after arriving, Ms. Lynch discovered to her great horror that Mr. Lynch was in attendance.

She had not seen her ex-husband since the divorce. He was drinking alcohol and he was a mean drunk. Oh, and he knew and did not like Nolan Gilette at all. She told Nolan to get lost, but she couldn’t tell him why because Nolan did not like Martin Lynch, either. Nolan nonetheless did as requested, which then left Susan in the unenviable position of being around nobody. This was only slightly less desirable than a fight breaking out. Then, in the corner of her eye she saw Bill Truman.

“Mr. Truman!” she said excitedly from across the room. She didn’t know his first name. “It’s such a pleasure to see you.” And for the first and last time, they danced all night. Bill wasn’t much of a dancer. At the end of the evening, Bill insisted on escorting her home because he was concerned. Under most circumstances, Susan would have dismissed this as being similar to the concerns of men about her sexual needs being unsatisfied, but there was something about this yokel from Ouachita that told her that there was more to it than that.

Within a year they were married.

Very well done. The song has been stuck in my head for a couple weeks now. I think I like the Cobra side of the video a little bit better, particularly Zartan. My only complaint is Destro’s costume. Then again, he’s sharing the screen with the super-hot Baroness, so it doesn’t distract me too much.

Hope to see the movie next week. May watch some episodes of the cartoon this weekend if I can tear myself away from Cowboy Bebop.

Over at “The Frisky”, the question is posed: does the “fat acceptance movement” glamorize unhealthy living?

America’s in a weird situation. On the one hand, we overly glamorize people who are WAY too thin to be healthy. On the other hand, the “average American” is definitely heavier than they should be and the trend’s been going upwards.

As far as my weight goes, I’m not dissatisfied. The woman I have been dating recently finds me attractive. I find her attractive (she’s not stick-thin, which I would hate, but definitely does not resemble Mr. Stay-Puft either). I could do to lose ~15-20 pounds, but the methodology by which I would do so is partially related to necessary changes to my lifestyle (a shorter commute, adjustment to my work environment to allow more standing and moving around) that are currently “in process.”

In the Colosse area, we have quite a few (mostly Latino/Black, indicating perhaps a cultural thing) women who walk around in spandex or revealing dresses while retaining body shapes more suited for the aforementioned Marshmallow Person. A fair number of them seem to believe that they are (despite a physical shape indicating extreme unhealth) the epitome of attractiveness.

As one commenter points out, a normal person doesn’t get to 300 pounds on a single bowl of cereal and a sub sandwich each day, unless the “bowl” is a punch bowl and the “sandwich” is one of those party-size setups. If you somehow do manage to get to that size without such, you have a serious medical condition - such as insulin resistance, or PCOS, or some other major hormonal/metabolic/digestive imbalance - that you should be seeing a doctor about quite regularly. And I can’t quite condone the idea that people should simply “accept” these medical problems, and leave them untreated, either - there are simply too many related risks down the road.

I also suspect that much of the supposed self-confidence of the “fat acceptance movement”, much like the (slightly more underground or at least less vocal, though I have seen it through the lens of an anorexic friend who thankfully got help) pro-anorexia movement, is more bravado to hide deep-seated mental issues than anything else. Anorexics don’t try to tell people “I don’t eat”, they try to avoid those social situations or try to appear to have eaten. Bulemics eat, and then try to reverse the process in secret. Likewise, the “fat acceptance” types are probably engaging in a number of lies or even self-hurting tactics (eating in secret, or redefining mentally what a “portion” means, which is an ongoing problem in a culture where “fast food” comes in ever-larger burgers and 42-oz helpings of HFCS that won’t set off the body’s chemical saitety triggers).

In The World According To William, whenever possible people will know how much they are paying for something when they decide to buy, rent, or gain a service. Companies will not rely of costumer error for their profit margins.

Fuel tanks and rental cars are a tricky business. If a person refills his tank, everybody is (theoretically) happy. If a customer does not refill his tank, that can be a real pain for the rental agency because they not only have to refill the tank but also (theoretically) have to pay someone to go refill it. Of course, they’re not going to take that hit. So customers that forget to fill up are charged exorbitant per-gallon rates. Or, if they’re so inclined, they are spared the inconvenience of filling up by agreeing to purchase a full tank at a reduced price. And I guess we learn to accept this as the way things are. Then they throw out a curveball and I suddenly find myself in the role of Angry Consumer. A role I am generally not accustomed to.

Budget Rent-a-Car has a policy (which apparently has been done elsewhere, though I’ve never seen it) where if you drive less than 75 miles, you have to provide a receipt that you refilled the gas tank or you face a $16 surcharge. The reason for this, presumably, is because sometimes a gas tank will read as full even if a person has driven 60 miles. Thus, unless they’re provided with a receipt they just have to send a guy to the gas station and refill it and that costs them (all things considered) $16. Or something like that.

For some reason, this is sort of a last straw for me. I guess the reason is that it feels like people like me are being targeted. People that are pretty conscientious about refilling gas tanks but not always about collecting receipts. It’s sort of like how a big reason behind the whole “mail-in rebate” are because people like me forget to mail in the dang thing so that’s free money for them. I’m not saying that they don’t have the right to do business that way or that such things should be illegal, but… no… any time I have the choice of whether or not to do business with a company that does this sort of thing, I will choose not to.

If someone drives 25 miles and gas gauge still reads as being full, are they really going to refill it? Seriously? I am supremely skeptical. Or are they going to pocket the $16 and let the next guy take care of it? There’s no accountability here. Nobody is looking. The next guy is not going to notice that his gauge went down just a little faster than it should have. First, he’s driving a car that is not his own. Second, if he raises that suspicion, the agency can and will say “Well, there’s no accounting for gas gauges, you know.”

The entire notion that they have to refill it is in fact questionable. I’ve rented cars before that were 3/4 full and in at least one case that was 1/4 full. All I had to do was return it more than 1/4 full. I ended up leaving it probably 3/8 full. I did their work for them… but was not reimbursed for my trouble. Heck, if it costs them that much, they should just offer customers with half-full tanks a rebate if they full the tank to the top. If gas costs $2.50 a gallon, give me $2.75 and I’ll fill it right up. Heck, just give me my money back and we’ll be square as far as I’m concerned. I’d take my chances on losing a receipt for that and would probably prefer it to the opaque manner now in which “full” is determined.

Or if there is this absolute necessity that the tank be full at all times, don’t charge $5 a gallon but charge an upfront fee plus market rates for gasoline. A sign saying “Hey, if we have to refill your tank it will cost you $10 plus the cost of gasoline. That way, people would realize that they’re looking at least at $10 plus whatever the cost of the fill-up is. They won’t have to read the fine print to find out how much they’re going to be dinged. It’s a large enough number that they won’t put the rental agency through the inconvenience of having to fill up nearly as often. Of course, if they did that then they wouldn’t have the poor schmo that forgets to fill up a half-empty tank that they get to bilk for twice the market price.

And that, ultimately, is what this is all about. Hiding costs. Yes, Budget puts up a nice little sign letting you know that you will be charged if you lose your receipt. But a lot of people are going to forget that and when they do… free money for Budget! Or they will lose track of mileage and… free money for Budget! Some schmo forgets to refill his gas tank, they leave it for the next person and if they’re like me they will overdo it a bit because it’s impossible to get right and they’ve collected free money from the schmo! It’s enough to recall the wisdom of Charlie Belcher.

Some people like this business model. My friend Rick and I used to go back and forth on Best Buy’s old mail-in rebate model. From his perspective, provided that you sent the rebate in, you got your money. What’s unfair about that? From my perspective, they’re making money off people paying $100 for a VCR they thought they were only going to pay $80. Or how Blockbuster’s profit margin depended primarily on people forgetting to return videos on time so a video that they expected to pay $3 for instead became $15. When the business model relies on customers screwing themselves over, I find that rather aggravating even in those cases where I come out ahead on the deal.

I don’t like doing business with sneaks.

I decided earlier this year that I am getting my parents wireless Internet for Christmas. Rather, I am giving them a wireless router and a laptop with which to use it. The laptop is a cheap one that I bought off eBay. I plan to be very clear about that when I give it to them. It’s a “starter laptop” to see if they end up using the wireless. If they do, then Dad can go out and buy a better one. Meanwhile, they’ll have a functional one.

It’s a risky gift because it’s not something that my parents have asked for and it’s not cheap by Truman gift-giving standards. Further, it’s one of those gifts that in order to really be worthwhile may require them spending as much (or more) money than I did. Now, the main reason I am getting the laptop is to sidestep the latter part. I don’t want to give them a wireless router and say “Okay, now go out and spend $500 to see this work!” But I can’t afford to spend $500 on the chance that they will like it. So instead I spent $200 on something that should suffice. Impossible to tell for sure because Mom’s computers have a tendency to slow down to a creeping halt for reasons I have not been able to put my finger on.

Anyway, so Clancy and I both brought our laptops to Shell Beach. The condos come with Internet and it’s good to stay connected. Dad commented, as I unfolded the laptop for the first time, about how he doesn’t like laptops. He doesn’t like the eraserhead or trackpad. He would all-around prefer to be at a desk. Of course, as he says this I get that sinking feeling that I am going to have to go back to the drawing board for Christmas. I hope beyond hope that as he uses my laptop over the week that he will at least get to see some of the convenience of a laptop and WiFi.

He did. A little too well, I’m afraid. It became extremely helpful to have Internet access on the trip to the point of nigh-indispensibility. About midweek he said that maybe he should give laptops a chance. Then, by the end of the week, he said that if Clancy and I ever decline to bring our laptops he may need to buy one just for Shell Beach.

So I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that he was just thinking aloud. Because he and I share in common a trait. Once we decide we’re going to do something, we do it immediately. He’s not likely to put off buying the thing until next summer. If he wants one for next summer, he’ll buy it next month. Sort of like how I bought his Christmas gift in March. So I’ll have to see if there’s anything I can do to talk him out of buying a laptop.

Of course, if he does end up getting a laptop, that must means that I will have another one hanging around the house. It’s a long story, but we have quite a few now. There is the one that Clancy had before we got married. It’s functional, if not useful. There’s the one I had at the time which broke down about a year ago. Each were replaced by laptops that we’re using now. Then when I bought Dad’s, I happened to win two bids at the same time and got two more laptops. Then, by shuffling some parts around, I got the laptop that died a year ago working again.

So between the two of us we have five laptops. Not counting Dad’s. It wouldn’t kill me to have a sixth. Clancy might, though.

A while back I got into it with a few folks from Unfogged about the tradition of a father walking a mother down the aisle. It was generally frowned down on there because of the patriarchal history behind it as well as some vague tie-ins about how fathers (and men more generally) inappropriately seek the be guardians of their daughter’s sexual virtue (or sexuality). Some preferred that the woman be walked down by both parents. Others suggested that a woman should not be walked down the aisle.

My perspective on the issue has changed somewhat. I used to believe that nobody should walk anybody down the aisle, for many of the same reasons that many believe that fathers should not walk down the aisle. Since getting married - or a little beforehand, actually - my view has shifted. While I have no desire to migrate to (or back to) a society in which women are a possession passed off from one man to another, I see a particular value in the social tradition. Namely, that when two people get married, one of the relationships that changes the most are opposite-gendered parents and the bride or the groom. For better and worse, over the 20-someodd years, Clancy’s father was the chief man in her life prior to marrying me. Boyfriends come and go, but a father is always there. The baton has been passed and now I am the one that will be there when her father passes on. The same, however, is true of my relationship with my mother. Mom and I don’t have a particularly close relationship, but she was still the most central womanly figure in my life until I dedicated myself to Clancy.

So now my view is this: Women should be walked down the aisle by their fathers… but men should also be “given away” by their mothers. At least, that is my “ideal” setup of the way that I would organize things if I were dictating wedding norms. However, I was not given away by my mother at my wedding. Clancy was given away by both of her parents. Really, though, it’s something that I only think about when it comes up. When I think about my wedding, I don’t think “That didn’t go the way I would have made it if I was king!” or anything like that. My setup, however ideal in the abstract, runs contrary to social norms. What we ended up doing does the same, but it’s more common than my plan. I mention societal norms as they relate to this as a sort of bookmark for a future post.

Despite the (incomplete) movement towards gender equality, weddings are still largely the domain of the bride. This is true even in cases where it’s not the wife’s family that is paying for the wedding. It has outlived one of its original reasons for being. The main reason for this, of course, is that weddings matter more to women than men. This is not universally so and my wife was relatively undemanding despite the fact her folks did bankroll most of our wedding. But when it came to what part of the state we would get married and whether we would get married in a church or not and various other things, if we disagreed she got her preference. The experience of more of my married male friends than not is the same. There were only two things I insisted on (Clancy agreed on one and didn’t care about the other) and beyond that my attitude was “Just tell me where to be and when.”

I periodically read complaints by women about all the things that men don’t do in preparation for a wedding. No doubt that men are slouches when it comes to things that we are not particularly interested in. Weddings fall into that category. By “wedding” I mean the ceremony and not act of getting married. At the same time, though, I wonder if this may be one of those “be careful what you wish for” things. Because men take such a detached attitude towards weddings, women get a lot more leeway than they otherwise might. If I was told from the outset of a wedding (of which I was the groom) that I would absolutely have to take a hands-on role and if I did so, I would insist on a lot more than two things.

We saw a little bit of that when it came to the gift registry. I was more involved in that part and Clancy and I were in frequent disagreement. We have rather different aesthetic tastes. She likes patters, designs, and bright colors. I like dull colors (dark blues, grays, blacks) and do not like patterns at all. So we would go back and forth and get frustrated when there seemed to be an inverse relationship between what she liked and what I liked. There were times when I was really tempted to say “Whatever you want” because the result meant less to me than the discussion. On the other hand, we did work through it and I got more of what I want than I might have expected. In part, I think, because my wife is less insistent than some that everything match and look right together and all that jazz. It’s easier to compromise when it’s an item-by-item basis rather than a full-on motif.

I think that there’s something to be said for spheres-of-giveadarn. I realize that may be easier for me to say when it’s men that often have to do less of the heavy-lifting on these things. But it’s not infrequently the case that women enjoy these things the same way that I actually enjoy stalking out the best computer or smartphone or car. It’s not all that bad of a deal, really. Yeah, you get extra work, but you also get what you want. And hopefully allows the other person to say to carry a little more weight (”I don’t care about t, u, v, w, x, y, and z… but I want a and b.”), when reasonable.

This is one of those posts where I am going to toss away all of the fiction and be as accurate as I possibly can. I’m also going to expose a couple of the fictions that exist on this blog. Anything that I don’t want to reveal will simply be {redacted}.

My mother had two sisters and a brother. The two sisters are eleven and fourteen years younger than she is. The brother was around her age. She described the family as sort of “two families in one” with a real sibling and a couple little ones with whom she shared parents. When Mom was fifteen or so, she got a call from her mother. Her brother Billy had been in a sledding accident. He’d gone the wrong way down the hill into traffic and was run over. Mom was sent back from boarding school and a couple days later, Billy died. It was a turning point for Mom. There would be no more boarding school. In a way, she lost her parents, too, as they descended into alcoholism. Mom was left to half-raise her sisters in their mental and emotional absence.

When Mom talks about Billy, she mostly talks about how much like him I am. He was a creative sort and a big storyteller. His head was always in the clouds. He was kind of an odd duck and a little bit of the black sheep. Much more like her than either of her sisters were. I get most of my traits from my mother. She got a lot of those same traits from the same place that he got them, too.

When I was conceiving of Hit Coffee, one of the things that I needed was a pseudonym. I knew what my last name was going to be (well, I knew it was going to be one of a couple options), but I didn’t know the first.

My older brother and I were both surprises, conceived after a doctor had told Mom that she wouldn’t be able to. In between Mitch and I, Mom miscarried. The pregnancy had never felt right to her. The doctors were dismissive of her concerns, but when she miscarried she was devestated but not surprised. The miscarriage was always something that fascinated me for reasons that I will get to later. But it was sort of like having another brother that I would never know. She talked about it freely, but sort of the same way that she talked about the man she married before she married my father: in the narrowest of contexts. In the case of the brother, when talking about her pregnancies. Often in the context of why I was born in a different state than the one she lived in at the time. There are a few stories of varying degrees of accuracy about that, but one of which was that she did not want me to be handled by the same doctors and health care system that she felt had let her down with the miscarriage (not so much that the miscarriage happened because it was likely to happen anyway, but that nobody took her seriously until it did).

I decided that since I needed a slightly fictional backstory for my slightly fictional blog (that was going to be more fictional than it turned out to be), I decided that I would root it in some sort of reality. Unless I had inherited his name, I was going to use it. And I was going to take his birthday (in my year). It turned out that she was going to name him after Uncle Billy. William Sherwood {redacted}. His birthday turned out to be a bit more complicated than I had anticipated. I was going to take his due date on my year, but it turned out that he was due on Leap Year Day. So “Will Truman” became slightly older than I am.

It could be considered morbid to take the identity of a miscarried brother, but since deciding on it there was something that felt right about it. The thing is, he wasn’t “another brother”. Had he been born it’s exceptionally unlikely that I would have been conceived. In a way, I am alive today because he was never born. So I thought of this as sort of a tribute. And given that he was named after the uncle that I so closely resemble, the pieces seemed to emotionally fit.

It’s not something I think about a whole lot, but when I do there is an odd feeling about being the product of a tragedy. I’d imagine it’s a less severe manifestation of marrying a widow or a widower where you are at once sorry for what happened to the deceased spouse and yet know that you benefited from it. It’s one thing to have a bad thing lead to a good thing within your own life where you took the hit and you reaped the reward, but another when you didn’t take the hit and were just the beneficiary.

Clay Davidson was something of a two-hit wonder. His first song was on the mediocre side of decent. This one, though, was a winner. And it came with a music video with wrestling and wrestlers in it, including Jerry “The Next Mayor of Memphis” Lawler and a trimmer Chris Harris. What’s not to love?

The video quality isn’t great. There’s a sliightly better-quality video that I can’t embed here.

As mentioned before, my contact with Forward Intelligence Resource and Employment Agency (FIREA) ended a short time ago.

Throughout my tenure with FIREA, I have always wondered if I work for a crappy employment agency and it seems as though I do. While their shennanigans with health insurance are apparently pretty typical, their treatment of employees is not. I noticed early on that FIREA seems to have a lot of first-tour contractors while people on their second or third contracts are usually with someone else. A former coworker confirmed this when he said he would never, ever work with FIREA again.

On the other hand, in a way I owe them a debt of gratitude. They were the ones that contracted me. They were the only ones that contacted me. They were the ones that set me up with a couple of interviews. I felt it extremely unlikely that I would ever work for Mindstorm, but they seemed confident from the start that they would be able to find me something. Had they not contacted me, I probably would have found work, but it’s unlikely that without their help that I would have found such ideal work.

The interesting thing for me is that of all of the employers I’ve had, I have at least some semblence of fondness for each. Or at least an appreciation. When I describe my experiences at Wildcat to people, they often don’t understand how I can work for such a jack-a-hole. But I look back at it as an opportunity to work for a genius and I am also appreciative that he was the one that hired me out of college with comparatively little work experience.

The only employer that I’ve had that had practically no redeeming value for me was Bregna. Their totalitarian HR policies and the incredibly boring nature of the job made it an unworkable situation for me. The lack of respect they showed for their employees alternates between making me want to laugh and making me want to scream. Personally, though, they have given me a lifetime of stories carammed into a couple of months.

But more broadly, there aren’t many employers around that will take a kid out of high school with no work experience, give him a battery of IQ and personality tests, and if he does well give them a full-time job with benefits and on-the-job training to become a software developer so long as you’re young, able-bodied, and willing to put up with their draconian employee management policies.. In an employment environment where every employer seems to want you to have five years of experience in whatever precisely it is that they want you to do, Bregna is a refreshing (if insane) exception.

Some of these jobs have driven me completely mad(as readers from the early Falstaff days of this blog will attest), and I’ve at times been overworked and underpaid, but I have always been able to appreciate the fact that I have a job. Considering that with rare exception I’ve been unemployed in really bad job markets either in terms of location or timing, I feel grateful to have anything at all. It’s sort of the internal kids-in-China-are-starving argument.

Of course, having a wife that worked 80-hours a week making the equivalent of $8/hr also helps recalibrate one’s expectations…

I’ve been reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, a collection of essays about low culture and Generation-X culture. The first essay I read (appearing somewhere in the middle of the book) makes some really good points about country music:

You can’t really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn’t work even half of the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretchet people in the world are those who tlel you they like every kind of music “except country.” People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time. All it means is that they’ve managed to figure out the most rudimentary rule of pop psychology; they know that the hipsters gauge the coolness of others by their espoused taste in sound, and they know that hipsters hate modern country music. And they hate it because it speaks to normal people in a tangible, rational manner. Hipsters hate it because they hate Midwesterners,, and they hate Southerners, and they hate people with real jobs.

Now, obviously, this hipster distaste doesn’t apply to old country music, because everybody who’s cool loves that stuff (or at least claims to). Nobody questions the value of George {expletive} Jones. It’s completely acceptable for coolies to adore the idea of haggard nineteen-year-old men riding in cabooses and having their hearts shattered, which is why alternative country is the most popular musical genre of the last twenty-five years that’s managed to remain completely unpopular (if you follow my meaning).

I sort of used to be one of those “except country” people, except back in my day it was “except country and rap.” It was a relatively common reply at the time (with and without the “and rap”). At Mayne High School it wasn’t so much a hipster thing as it was a class thing, to the extent that you can differentiate between the two. I went to an upper-crest high school and suggesting that you didn’t like country music separated you from those folks that came to school wearing the big belt buckles. A special sort of conspicuous country music fan that we called “kikkers”.

The first time I started running into hipsteria was on Camelot BBS. The kind of music you liked was not completely unimportant at Mayne High (though interestingly it was more of a social qualifier amongst guys than girls), it became much more of a market of who you were in Camelot. It makes sense in its own sort of way since the biggest music people at Mayne High School tended to fill the ranks of the not-popular and un-popular. The Homecoming Queen aside, there were few actual popular people in Camelot. If you can’t be good, be different. If people that you don’t believe are better than you are treated as though they are, find your own reason why you are better. Like, cause your taste in music rox and theirs sux.

And that is, on its darkest level, what hipsterism is. The desire of those that don’t fit the standard criteria for social worthiness to create their own. A music critic in a cramped NYC apartment may not make as much as some corporate type with a trophy wife, but by gawd at least he has taste in music. I’m not saying that’s the only reason why people delineate based on musical or artistic tastes, but that’s a part of it.

The noteworthy thing about the Except Country response, is that not only is it hipsterism at its worst, but it’s a particular kind of lazy hipsterism. Are these people really saying that they actually like all kinds of music that doesn’t come with a twang? They would spend their free time listening to African bongo drum music or whatever? Morbid Angel? Del Shannon? Engima? Indigo Girls? You can like all of these things, and yet somehow country music is just beyond you? Yeah, okay. Of course, they often don’t know who Morbid Angel and Enigma are. Or maybe they’re worried that they’re talking to someone that likes Indigo Girls or something and don’t want to say anything mean (country fans, of course, are fair game). But generally I take it to be the response to someone that listens largely to Top 40, doesn’t want to sound like a sheep, doesn’t really care about the specific genres that they’re hearing, and don’t want to sound completely indifferent.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with laziness when it comes to music. Most people are pretty lazy. They eat the diet that the radio feeds them because it’s really not worth their time to go out and find new stuff. I used to be in that category and probably still would be if it weren’t for the R&B-infusion in pop music and the excessive commercials and chatter that drove me away from the radio. I’m hardly an aficionado when it comes to music. I like what I like and I don’t like what I don’t like. So by and large, I am more forgiving of “except country” responses and merely ask them who some of their favorite bands are (which, btw, is the best way to answer the question in the first place).

The smugness of singling out the single sort of distasteful music, however, does particularly grate when they go out of their way to say why they don’t like country music. It’s less of a problem now than it used to be, but it used to often demonstrate in no uncertain terms that they didn’t listen to enough country music to single it out. They will talk about how all country songs are about this and that when really comparatively few are. Almost none, really. Country music stopped being about losing your wife/mother/girlfriend/house/dog a long time ago. If they would simply say that they don’t care much for country music because of the pedestrian themes of the lyrics or because they can’t relate to the glorification of rural America and/or the working class or because they like a more electric sound, I wouldn’t figuratively roll my eyes.

That leads me into Klosterman’s other observation, which is that people that say “except country” will often double right back and carve an exception to the exception for classical country. This flies right in the face of many of the complaints about country music. Half the time, whatever they say they hate about country music applies doubly so to the classical stuff. One of the biggest things to dislike about contemporary country music is how much like everything else it has become. Say you dislike country for the same reason you dislike pop and I immediately understand where you’re coming from. Say that you dislike country because it’s inbred hick music and then mention “But Willie Nelson is okay” and you’ve lost my attention. The twang that they complain about is less pronounced than ever for the most part. Fewer fiddlers, fewer steel guitarists.

Klosterman goes on to sing the praises of country music (which he personally does not care for). I think I’ll post on that at some point, too, so stay tuned.

Lost my farmer’s tan. I don’t mind being pale. I don’t mind being tan. I hate, however, looking like a tan guy wearing a white shirt when I am shirtless. For a handful of reasons, I started picking up a tan my last couple weeks in Cascadia, so one of my goals this trip was to even my skin out.

Other than the degree to which I owe it my life, the sun and I have always had an uneasy relationship. Left to my own devices, I would sleep during the day and go out in the evening, night, and morning. Or I’d live in a place where the sun knew that it was usually going to have to beat through some clouds in order to have its way with the local townsfolk. Yeah, I adore the Zaulem Sound weather.

The worst place for sunburns that I have lived to date has been Deseret. Deseret is “high desert with dry weather and a position mildly closer to the sun than Colosse and that apparently makes a difference.. Additionally, try dryness of Zarahemla and Mocum (where I lived and worked in Deseret) made higher temperatures more tolerable. Ninety-five degrees in Colosse was intolerable. One hundred degrees in Zarahemla merely meant that you should have a lot of water. So it was really easy to get sunburned because you didn’t have your Common Sense whispering in your ear to find air conditionining pronto.

Shell Beach is more similar to Colosse, which makes it relatively unlikely that I would want to be in the sun long enough for my sunscreen to be rendered ineffective.

No, the bigger danger in places like Shell Beach and Colosse is that you’re going to miss an area with your sunscreen. So while most of you will get a very light tan, you’ll end up with a red nose, red ears, or a red line where your hair comes down because you forgot to pull your hair back when applying the lotion. I don’t know that there has ever been a time where I have not missed some area or another. And in the off-chance that there has been such a time, I was still burned on the part where the lotion was rubbed off by the intertube or from the scratching of itches or something like that.

Sometimes, in an effort to get rid of a farmers tan, I will wear a tanktop. So I will have layers of color along with bright spots of missed or rubbed area. My skin looks like it has been tie-dyed by the son, but that’s vastly preferable to a farmer’s tan.

This year what I decided to do was to not wear any sunscreen at all. I would simply go out for no more than a half-hour during primetime or 60 minutes during off-hours. I would revise upward or downward my suntime depending on how successfully the sun was invading my sun tan.

It turned out to work out pretty well. By Thursday I was starting to get a burn, so I started applying a little bit of lotion in the most affected area. The tan was far from even, though that didn’t bother me. Now when I’m shirtless, I have reddish shoulderpads to join my red arms and neck. My stomach is less pale than it was, but didn’t catch too much sun.

The only downshot to all of this is that while I avoided burning, man do I itch. Clancy has been a wonderful wife with lots of backscratches. Typing this from the plane, it’s all I can do not to just rub myself into oblivion. But while I am feeling itchy, I am feeling no pain. Even if I scratch with my fingernails, it doesn’t hurt. It just scratches an itch that will come back shortly.