Anyone remember that “Seinfeld” episode where Kramer put a hot tub in his apartment living room? Did you ever wonder how he actually got it in there?

In the real world, hot tubs don’t fit through doors. The hot tub that was almost mine is inside the living room of a custom-built home, which was built around the hot tub. Anyway, litigation, yadda yadda, husband’s firm now owns this place with a hot tub in the living room. They plan to rent it out, and apparently leaving the hot tub there is not a sensible option, even if Kramer himself were the lessee. The humidity would cause rot and mold.

So, it seemed the sensible thing to do was move the hot tub. What better place than our own backyard? We started making plans for transport. Unfortunately, we discovered there’s no way to get it out in one piece. It will cost us $450 to have it sawed into four pieces and carted away.

It’s not as if hot tubs are ridiculously expensive, the way building a pool is. They start in the low four figures. So if a hot tub were a priority, one could be purchased. But that won’t happen, because once one starts talking actually purchasing a hot tub, it brings up the cumbersome subject of backyard improvement, which involves an in-ground pool with a built-in hot tub and other coordinated, architecturally pleasant amenities that are not happening anytime soon. Mr. Tone has purchased fancy, hardcover books on the subject and drawn up plans on his computer. The serendipitous hot tub would have done an end-run around the whole mess.

I feel like Elaine in that episode where she lost her sandwich card. I don’t want just any hot tub. I want my discarded hot tub.

One of the things that Clancy and I decided we wanted to do while we were here is pick up some furniture for the move. It’s kind of risky and not necessarily cheap because we’re having to get extra moving truck space, but there is a wealth of stuff available here on Craigslist where there is no counterpart in Arapaho. The two big things we wanted were a recliner and a sofa. We’ve been hobbling along on a single recliner throughout our time in Cascadia when we left my old one behind in Estacado (may it rest in peace) as it fell apart.

This was particularly inconvenient because our other piece of living room furniture, the futon, did not survive the trip. I mean, it didn’t break into a million pieces, but the wood panel on the bottom broke and so the futon sagged somethin’ fierce and was not easy to get in and out of with any real ease. Well, I guess gravity assisted with the “in”, but since you land on the injured would, you have to live with the guilt that each time you sit down, you’re making it more difficult to get back up. It’s a tough burden, man.

A couple months ago, a neighbor was getting rid of his loveseat and was asking a woman who lived across the alley if she wanted it. I volunteered to take it on the spot. I shifted the living room around a bit and we had the futon which had been transferred to stuff receptical duty and a coach one step away from the graveyard. Clancy says that there is a minor smell on Not-Futon, though I can’t smell it. There are a couple of minor tears. The idea was that we would take the couch cover from The Futon and put it on Not-Futon. Still, though, it was not something we were going to want to display prominently in our future living room. Still loads better than The Futon.

So we set out on Craigslist for some new furniture and ran across a La-Z-Boy recliner. Now, LZBs are not the most comfortable of chairs, but they’re still not bad. Clancy’s recliner is a La-Z-Boy and we like it fair enough. The big thing, though, for packing purposes is that the top comes off and that makes transfer easy. And what do you know? We’re transferring stuff in a few days. Someday I’m going to want the recliner of my dreams, but it’ll do for a while yet.

Searching for a sofa was a little bit harder. The hangup was that we found the perfect sofa/love-seat early on and couldn’t get our minds off of it. Nothing else came close. It was more than we wanted to spend and it came with a love seat, but the biggest issue is that we would have to pick it up from Western Shores, a rich-person community a couple of hours from here. Setting aside my distinct lack of enthusiasm about driving for five hours a couple days before driving for a dozen, that made the vehicle rental situation much more difficult.

UHaul has those nice signs on their trucks that say $19.99 or somesuch, but in small print is “plus mileage.” In fact, with a 50-mile minimum and required insurance (unless you have a $10k credit line), there’s no way that you can get out of there paying less than $60. However, we were looking at far above and beyond the minimum mileage. And at 60c a mile, it was going to get really expensive, really quick. Budget was the same way except that they charged more for mileage. So we went with Enterprise.

Enterprise, it turns out, has a bizarre definition of the word “reservation” and “confirmation.” Whereas I interpret these words to mean “You are confirmed! You have a reservation for a truck with us!” what they mean is “Oh, we may or may not actually have the truck we confirmed with you. And if we don’t, well, that’s just tough luck” because they feel absolutely no obligation to live up to the reservation. They refused to upgrade us for the same price, which is what businesses typically do. They called around, but when they found one, it was too much trouble to have it transferred to their location. And it was more expensive than our reservation and they would not compensate the difference. So for the honor of using Enterprise (which was, prior to this week, my rental agency of choice) we would have to drive half an hour to pick it up and we would be paying $10 more a day than what we had reserved.

Sadly, this was still better than our alternatives. Enterprise charges a lot more by the day, but gives you unlimited in-state miles. Since we were going to be putting some serious miles on it, they could have charged us a lot more and still been cheaper than UHaul or Budget. That being said, getting an Enterprise through the website is a really bad idea. Apparently, they make reservations without regard to availability. This was a real sore point in the Paulsboro Enterprise, even though in this case they had what we wanted. It would have been a sore point at their Soundview Location, if they’d cared. I’ve noticed this before with Enterprise in that I will reserve one model and end up with another in the same class. As long as they have something, I don’t care about the particulars. This was different.

What Enterprise does not have is CD players in their vehicles. Clancy warned me about this, but it was still odd to see a car - any car - without CD players. I mean, how much could it possibly cost to have one installed and though most people won’t care, for some people it means spending hours in the car in between municipalities with no entertainment. Some people like me.

Last move, I kind of bugged my mother-in-law with my need to burn a bunch of audiobooks for the trip at the last minute. It was actually one of those things that was supposed to take only a few minutes but because of technical difficulties distracted me for a couple hours. This time she wasn’t around while I was scrambling to set up my audio entertainment. I took one of my old Pocket PCs and transferred the audio books to it and I’ll listen on bluetooth on the drive. I managed to mostly do this while resting in between taking boxes out, but man it would have been easier with a CD player.

So yesterday I picked up the recliner, which turned out to be closer than the one that we originally decided on. We had initially decided on one that was nearly the exact same as the one we had, but it was out in Enterprise City (no relation to the rental agency). Then one opened up at the next town over and that was more appealing. It was a different color, but I actually decided that I liked that because it wouldn’t look weird if they were two shades of faded.

Later today I’m driving out to Western Shores to pick up the couch and love seat. I’ll be wishing and hoping and praying that it will all fit into the cargo van. I think it will. I packed up most of my clothes yesterday, so I’m sort of slumming it today. The impression I get from these people and where they live and their wonderful couch that they’re getting rid of that these people have money and lots of it. I’m oddly self-conscious about it. Like I’m not worthy of the couch that they are bestowing upon me. Okay, not really. But sort of. No, not really. A little. I never claimed to be entirely rational.

I actually managed to hear this one on the drive home from Walmart on the Interstate. It always seems that when this one pops up I’m stuck in traffic or on town streets with stop signs and stoplights. There’s a CD by a former front man to a country-but-not-really-country band that was around nearly a decade ago that is the best driving disc ever. In fact, when not in a car, I am lukewarm on the CD. It never fails that when Clancy and I are listening to it on the open road, we’re about to hit snow, traffic, or something else to slow us down.

I’d never actually seen the video for this classic and am actually pretty impressed with it. I used to get into sorta-debates with some people who called this a “racing song”. Well yeah, it’s a racing song if you completely disregard the metaphor. The video, to its credit, doesn’t.

Of course, even knowing it’s not about racing exactly, it sure feels that way when behind the wheel of a car when it comes on.

For those of you that got sick of the song way back when, here’s another Cake song that you may be less familiar with if you’re not a fan about pretentious music scene people:

And lastly, here’s a song associated with someone else. Their version doesn’t stack up with the original, but it’s still fun.

The video is not particularly relevant to the song.

Normally when kid music annoys me, I give it a pass because I’m not the intended audience. But these Weezer guys are older than I am. Rivers Cuomo is 40 and has a toddler. I’ve been hearing them on the radio since I was in college, singing in that snotty little teenage style they have. So no pass, guys.

Whenever the local NPR affiliate does one of its pledge drives, I switch over to the local pop station. It seems like every hour they’ve been playing “I Want You To.” At first I thought I might be misdeciphering the lyrics, then I thought maybe it was one gay dude talking to another:

“So the conversation stopped
And I looked down at my feet.
I was next to you and you were right there next to me
And I said, “Go! If you’re wondering if I want you to,
I want you to,
So make the move,
‘Cause I ain’t got all night.”

No gayness — he’s singing to a girl! What a lazy little turd. I want to grab the collective female audience and shake them: Of course he wants you to. He’s a GUY. It means NOTHING.

I mean, I was willing to walk right up to the door of the car — but the guy better open it up for me and ask me to hop in. Any further effort required on my part was a sure harbinger of doom for the relationship.

For the men, I have the advice I once gave to my little brother: The social penalty for being shot down is virtually nothing for a guy. For a woman, it’s potential ruin. For being a man, being a chicken could mean life on the sidelines. So you really can’t afford not to try.

As readers of HC will be aware, I work at Southern Tech University, in a high-level area regarding IT solutions.

Part of the job deals with Faculty. Faculty are best described - in the aggregate, though there are mild-mannered standout exceptions, and once you get into areas with real-world implications like Engineering, most faculty are in fact exceptions - as giant walking egos with one very specific area of intense knowledge, zero people skills, a roughly third-grade education outside of their specific area of Ph.D-level knowledge, a complete inabiilty to apply their specific Ph.D knowledge to real-world situations (especially in terms of educating others), and the emotional development of a 5-year-old shouting “want it now.”

Maybe a little harsh, but let’s face it: this is how they work. The scenarios that we have to deal with are frightening. These people will take a machine that hasn’t been turned on in a year, stick it in a corner, turn it on, and tell a grad student to start using it. Inevitably, the damn thing gets worm-infected within ~10 minutes, being more than a year out-of-date for patches and attached to the bare network… and of course, since it was off that long, its domain trust was expired, so the grad student hasn’t even managed to log in anyways.

They regularly leave their computer sessions unlocked - not just overnight with their doors locked (though we remind them, just because the door’s locked doesn’t mean the computer is secured) but during the day behind an open door when they walk off to another building. They will give their password to just about anyone who asks for it, including grad students who should in no circumstances have credentials possible to access, say, the answers to next week’s test.

They insist on having admin rights to their machine. So that they can install “research material.” And then, within a few months, we’re cleaning off Vundo and TDSS and all manner of other crap, or even just rebuilding their machine, thanks to their installing the “free puppies screensaver” or clicking on whatever the hell else they were getting into (I gave up asking; 45% of the time they lie anyways, 45% you wind up facepalming over the stupidity, 10% you learn about their interest in things you really, really, really didn’t need to know about).

Often, they don’t give a crap about procedure. Adequate notice time to provide/prepare services - what’s that? Email sent to someone off on their honeymoon, or phone message left to same, rather than use the help ticket system so that our department can work with it? Nasty email to the boss two days later about “why the fuck are your lazy dumbasses not taking care of my stuff.” Sometimes, they don’t even bother talking to us, until we get a help ticket complain about something that has “been going on for 4/6/8 weeks and you haven’t done shit about it” - well, if you don’t file a ticket, we probably don’t know you have an issue.

Sometimes they don’t give a crap about law. You wouldn’t believe the number of times these mental midgets have demanded we hand them free copies of Adobe Acrobat Pro, MS Office, Photoshop, etc… to be installed on their home, personal computers. In violation of copyright law, our site licensing contract, and other applicable regulations all of which would, if we accede to the demands, at very least be justifications for our losing our jobs.

Oftentimes they will lie. To department heads. To dean’s office. To anyone who will listen. I personally had to deal with a blow-up once by an arrogant liar who insisted I was “insubordinate” for “not following a direct order”… to commit copyright infringement of a software package that costs $20,000 per license. This week, it’s an insistence by someone that we are “being deliberately unhelpful” when, in the wake of TDSS infections and trying to clean up the problems of a wonky MS patch that caused certain systems to crash repeatedly, we are “unwilling” to put the campus license copies of WinXP and Office 2007… on his personal home machine that he crashed. Sigh.

The subject of former athletes and weight gain came up in a previous post about former prom kings. It reminded me of something I meant to post on a while back but never got around to doing. Anyway, by coincidence over the course of a couple of days I discovered two former athletes that really beefed up after their heyday.

Buster Douglas is known most for being the first boxer ever to defeat Mike Tyson. It’s difficult to understate how huge this was as Mike Tyson was not only undefeated but was considered to be unbeatable. Most of the betting farms didn’t even bother to take bets on the fight. He lost the next fight against Evander Holyfield and promptly retired. While living off of his winnings*, be ballooned up to 400lb. Mike Tyson himself has gotten husky, though you expect some of that from boxers. Not 150lb, though.

Tonya Harding is known for… well, you guys probably remember. Harding hasn’t become huge, but while you might expect boxers to get kind of big, you don’t really expect that of figure skaters. Of course, she was later a boxer, too.

* - Am I the only one taken off guard that a boxer was able to live off his winnings?

Our discussion of laws gone wrong and Will’s relation of bums taking over the dollar theater veered close enough to trigger another thought from me: the intriguing problem of grifters/panhandlers/”homeless” in cities.

Colosse has what some might call a “homeless problem.” Being a southerly city, it’s warm most of the year, and so it’s easier for people to survive “on the streets” as opposed to cities where it’s snowed in for half the year or more. With the exception of northern metropolises, one rarely sees “homeless” in small-town areas crossing the country until getting below the lower half-mark of the US, and weather has a lot to do with it. By the same token, it’s no coincidence that on the list of the “meanest” cities compiled by two well-meaning but rather ass-backwards organizations, the only non-”southern” city in the top 10 is Lawrence, KS and you only find 5 more “non-southern” cities by expanding to the top 20. Anchorage, Alaska probably counts as an “outlier” since it’s the only city in Alaska that could even remotely support a “homeless” population as-such.

Colosse’s problem has been twofold. The first is panhandlers. Before the passage of a few laws in the Colosse area, it was seemingly impossible to pass a city intersection without some grimy individual trying to ask for money. Driving around with your windows down was asking for trouble, because you’d be subjected to a stream of nasty language and yelling if you (a) ignored them or (b) rolled the window up after saying no. Getting past an intersection sometimes involved waiting for the worst of them to clear out of the street, since a few got so brazen that they actually stood in front of cars and demanded money to move. These days, the same holds true except for the “no panhandling” zones surrounding the business and theater/restaurant areas of downtown. Southern Tech, being on “the edge” of one of those zones, actually gets more panhandlers these days than we did before.

The second problem is the use of public buildings. During the hot months of the day, pro-homeless organizations urge them to use “public” facilities for air conditioning. Will points out cheap dollar theaters as one option; another frequently pushed option is public libraries. A few of Colosse’s libraries became completely overrun with “homeless”, some of whom were making it impossible to reach books because they slept in the aisles; the “straw that broke the camel’s back” was when an enterprising crew of them set up shop in, and then barricaded, one of the library restrooms in a bid to stay overnight. The hygenic level of the fellows taking over the libraries was also… scary.

In a discussion of this at another forum, the following comment stands out to me:

A huge proportion of the homeless suffer from mental illness or are alcoholics/ drug addicts. I think there was a study in NY years back where something like 80% of the homeless they tested had drugs or alcohol in their system. Can you say self-medicating? We have also swung the pendulum too far in treating mental illness. After the horrors of the 70’s in which people with mental illness were locked up as prisoners and treated like shit, we swung it back the other way to make it almost impossible to force people to receive treatment without their consent. I have no problem with erring on the side of self-determination, but there has to be a better system for deciding when someone truly lacks the capability.

It may sound like a cliche, but the scenario in which a homeless person will not enter a shelter because he has to give up his knife (or whatever) is not uncommon.

Based on the panhandler types in Colosse, I can name precisely two. The first are the legitimately problematic and probably “actually homeless” types. As stated above, alcoholics/druggies or otherwise mentally incapable of dealing with society, and having big problems. They’re the ones likely to fly off at someone, jump into traffic, and cause the worst of the problems. I find myself agreeing that for many, some form of analysis on whether they are mentally competent to take care of themselves - or instead should be put under supervised care of some sort - needs to take place. If they really are mentally incompetent, and the reason they can’t hold a job or maintain a place to live is that they are incapable of staying on whatever medication they need, then society it seems has a responsibility to get them off the streets and into some form of supervised care.

The second are the outright scammers. I don’t know if 100% of them are non-homeless, but I do know that they make quite a bit of money from observing them (counting by number of suckers and presuming an average of 75 cents per handout they could be making easily on the order of $50 or more an hour). A number that I have observed either operate in “shifts” with another accomplice, or have been observed walking away from “their” spot after peak hours to some rather ritzy and well-maintained (custom paint-job wise) cars. In the case of one, the shifting signs meant to accommodate various disasters (economic collapse, hurricanes, storms, etc) make it pretty obvious that the person is scamming; one in particular that hangs around SoTech has been a former MCI employee, trailer destroyed by tornado, Hurricane refugee from three different hurricanes, “lost job due to Obama recession”, and so on.

To deal with these people, many cities (including Colosse) have had organized advertising campaigns urging citizens to donate, if they see the need, directly to homeless shelters and soup kitchens rather than giving change to bums. The ass-backwards organizations previously mentioned have called this “mean.” But as research shows, there are quite a few of these “homeless” who will misuse money directly given, and are outright scamming or worse.

The dollar theater is an interesting place. I guess it takes an interesting business model to be able to make it by seating people for a dollar or two. I still don’t entirely know how they make their money. You would think it would be through the concessions, but those are relatively cheap, too. You can get a hot dog for a dollar, which I frequently do. And of course it’s an interesting crowd that goes. Back in the dollar theater near where I grew up, the common theme was that it was really, really cheap babysitting. I guess as a product of the movies that I see, that’s less the case out here. Instead you get an odd mixture of cheapskates, enthusiasts, and poor people.

Back when the weather was colder, that last bit was kind of a problem for a little while. I didn’t mind that homeless people would consider a dollar or two for a few hours a good way to get out of the cold drizzle, but it was obnoxious how they snored.

The place has been going downhill. I hadn’t entirely realized that it was possible, but it seemed that each time I went there, something else was gone. The ticket-taker was replaced by a combo concession/ticket cashier. The bathrooms would lose their soap dispensers. Eventually they just tore the carpet out and decided that the uneven concrete beneath wasn’t really so bad.

Yesterday was my last trip to the dollar theater before we head out to Arapaho. It was a pretty uneventful affair. Not so much a few weeks ago when I went to see an action movie. I’m not generally an action movie sort of guy unless it involves capes and cowls or maybe aliens, but I’m also not much of a theater guy. The two go well together.

So I went to see my action movie and it was not a very good crowd from the start. It wasn’t the worst I had been to, but it wasn’t far from it. There were a couple of people near the front bickering a bit about something. It sounded like one guy was not as conscientious as the other guy would have preferred in terms of making noise. As the movie progressed, the loud guy in a red hat got worse. He was mumbling at the screen. The guy behind him in the hoodie told him to be quiet. This would happen periodically.

It was about the time the movie was reaching its climax that it all came to ahead. The guy in the red hat said one too many things and the guy in the hoodie told him to shut up one too many times. The guy in the red hat darted up and the guy in the hoodie got up and backed up. I would call it a “fight” but it wasn’t much of one. Red Hat lunged at Hoodie who was in a defensive posture. One punch and Hoodie was down. Red Had said to a stunned crowd. “Yo. I’m out. Enjoy your movie.”

This is the part where, if I was braver or more stupid, I might have done something. Not confront Red Hat, but something. Maybe alerted security (while they had fewer ticket-takers, they did add a security guard). Instead I just sat there. It took a couple minutes to process that Hoodie was not getting up. But even then I wasn’t sure what to do. Someone else went and contacted the security guard, who came in with his flashlight. It was impossible to watch the movie at that point. He woke Hoodie up and walked him out. I followed them to say that I had seen what happened. No surprise, Red Hat was long gone by this point. But he knew exactly who I was talking about when I described him. In other words, had I done something sooner, he might have been stopped. Or I might have been knocked unconscious, too.

From there it got a bit murky. The problem was that the people that reported to him initially and I had two different version of events. Theirs was basically that there was a fight. Mine was that there was a one-sided assault. The guard asked us both to wait for the cops to arrive, so we did. In the meantime, Hoodie started getting really antsy and wanted to leave. The security guard tried to calm him down, in effect saying that since he was bleeding profusely (Red Hat was wearing a ring, apparently, and Hoodie’s cheek was gushing through onto a rag) and the other guy walked away that he had nothing to worry about. Even so, Hoodie wanted to go home. I was anxious to get home, too, though I wanted to tell the cops that it was a pretty one-sided affair and that the other guy was disrupting the movie. Considering that I’d let the guy bleed all over the theater floor, it was the least that I could do. Hoodie was acting pretty weird at this point. I wondered if maybe he was high or something. If he was something, it wasn’t drunk. I also wondered if the combination of the punch and hitting his head on the wall from the force of the punch had done a number on him.

When the cops arrived, they pulled Hoodie over and asked him some questions. The next thing I know, Hoodie was in handcuffs. The security guard came over to me and the couple that initially reported the incident to him and told us that we could go home now. I asked what happened and they said that it turned out that Hoodie had a warrant out for his arrest. At this point, the fight didn’t really matter anymore. And with that, they took Hoodie away. To the hospital, I assume, then to jail.

Hoodie had a very bad day.

And I did not enjoy the rest of my movie.

La-Z-Boy Recliner for Sale ($75)
Pros: La-Z-Boy, possibly a detachable top, matches current LZB.
Cons: It’s in Enterprise City
Verdict: I don’t wanna commute no more, but I don’t know that I don’t wanna that badly.

Silver Recliner for Sale ($35)
Pros: Decent looking, functional, nearby, cheap
Cons: Everything else.
Verdict: Nearby? Worth considering.

Gray Recliner for Sale ($75)
Pros: Looks so comfortable I could sink into that thing
Cons: Somewhere north of Zaulem
Verdict: How important is comfort, anyway?

Brown Recliner for Sale ($40)
Pros: Looks almost exactly like the recliner I left in Estacado when it fell apart
Cons: Looks almost exactly like the recliner I left in Estacado because it fell apart
Verdict: Man, I loved that recliner. And I’m thinner now.

Sofa for Sale ($150)
Pros: In Soundview! Looks decently comfortable. Long.
Cons: Long. What would I have to rent to get that here?
Verdict: Will have to confer with wife on level of need for a sofa

Couch for Sale ($100)
Pros: Looks waaaaay comfortable. Like a dream.
Cons: OH MY GAWD THAT PINK IS SO LOUD IT HURTS MY EARS.
Verdict: What? I can’t hear you. My ears hurt. Is that phone ringing?

As I get older, I’m increasingly turned off by certain analogies and jokes. The two that most come to mind are jokes about prison rape and references to butt-kissing being likened to oral sex.

Though I don’t miss the weight, I do miss being able to eat as much as I used to from time to time. Particularly since I’m trying to get my fill of Soundview food before the move.

I made a late-nightish trip out to get some two-gallon bags. they’re handy for packing and organizing computer cables for moving because certain kinds of power cables or devices-plus-cables don’t fit in regular gallon bags. Alas, the types of places one would typically go were closed and the place that was open didn’t stock any. It’s too bad there’s not some national chain that is open late-night and tends to sell things like two-gallon bags. Cause that would have been really handy.

Clancy threw away one of her old poster frames that she never got around to using that got damaged. What she didn’t realize was that I had put my own poster in there. She thought it was the “default” picture that came with the frame. Fortunately, I recovered it in time.

I keep telling myself that it’s okay to take down the computer set-up, it’s okay to take down the computer setup, it’s okay to take down the computer setup. It’s something that I am so used to doing absolutely last (usually with undesirable results) that my foreplanning to be able to take it down sooner is just sitting wrong with me.

Will’s post here reminds me of the situation at Fustle’s old place; the neighbors around his house were an interesting lot.

Across the street, there was the “Stereotypical Mexican Family.” The SMF’s were just about equivalent to racial stereotype as one could get. They had what had obviously been a lovely house once, with a big pool in the backyard, wonderfully grown tree in the front, etc. Though their immigration status was always in the “unclear” category, the head-of-household was a nice guy and easy to get along with. Below him, however, everything fell apart. The older son was constantly in trouble with gangs, repeatedly getting the family’s tires slashed and bringing other trouble home. The younger son was the type who gave you the creeps when interacting with the other neighborhood kids. He rode around on a “Harley Davidson Bicycle” (I kid you not, extended wheel and everything). The house had obviously been lovely “once”, but since they obviously only did the bare minimum to keep it standing, it didn’t really look all that nice. At any point in time there were enough “relatives” staying at the place that there were 7-8 cars parking the driveway up and surrounding it; Doris eventually took to putting out a set of cardboard boxes with a “Do Not Park Here” sign to keep them from blocking her mailbox.

Directly across the street were Doris, a single mother, and her son Ross. Doris and Ross are nice enough, but Ross was really into guitars and rock music, fell in with potheads and dropouts for his “band”, and… yeah. Problem. Our attempts to provide a better male role model seem not to have worked, as he went from being a very nice, well-adjusted, churchgoing 11-year-old to now a nearly 17, almost-highschool-dropout who gets into far too much pot for his own good thanks to the people he spends his days with. Ross worries me and I wish there were a good way to turn his life around.

On the other side of Doris and Ross, is “The Druggies.” Entire family of users of various drugs, pretty much. Their contribution to the neighborhood consists of their son’s bringing people through around 3-4 AM looking to buy drugs, and the fact that another nincompoop from down the street did her fourth prison stint for breaking into the home of The Druggies to steal the aforementioned drugs. The drug-dealing son managed to crash the family car 4 times in one year, get dragged in by the cops each time with drugs on his person, and somehow escape being booked for possession. I have no idea how, save for the fact that most of the locality’s cops were focused on the increasing black-vs-latino gang crime in the schools that year.

Around Fustle’s house, the Corner Lady never so much as said hello to a neighbor. Her daughters were very nice and sweet and personable, provided mom wasn’t around. Word from Doris, the only person she spoke to on occasion, was that she had a real problem with “men” due to a nasty divorce, the fact that she had let her looks go to the point where she was an uglopotamus, and the fact that she was actually jealous of the fact that her (actually attractive) daughters got attention from men that she, hating men, would prefer her daughters not get. She also didn’t actually own the house; it was owned by her sister, who lived in the much-richer neighborhood 5 miles up the highway, and Corner Lady apparently believed she was “too good” for Fustle’s neighborhood and that she would sometime soon be moving up to live with, or nearby to, her sister despite not working. When I last visited Fustle’s neighborhood, Corner Lady was moving out, the house having been “sold” by CL’s sister, but not yet moved into by the new owner (who may possibly have purchased it to make a rental property of it).

And then we get to The Old Bat. TOB is, to be brutally honest, the walking personification of every negative stereotype attached to the “New York Jewish Grandmother.” She was incredibly rude about her inconveniences to others. The trouble began with her being the person everyone knew (because she would brag about it to Doris) was calling the Homeowners’ Association for minor infractions that weren’t usually noticeable. She had piled up dirt around her backyard, supposedly so that “the dog won’t dig its way out” (she had no dog), which caused her backyard to become a swampy mosquito breeding ground and back water up into Fustle’s backyard as well. It got to the point where this rotted the fenceposts, which she refused to pay half on to repair (her responsibility according to state law on shared fences), so instead of having it professionally done, Fustle and his father and I did what we could; we put in concrete-anchored metal posts and fixed the fence ourselves (it went from a 40-degree tilt over Fustle’s backyard to “straight up and staying that way, damnit”. Then, she burned her own house down for the insurance money. Suffice to say I am now 100% convinced of this; she got a complete internal remodel from the rebuilding of her house, walked away with money in her pocket for “depreciated value”, and all this despite there being two contradictory reports… the official fire report singling out a massive fire hazard that was highly unlikely, given her obsessive-compulsive cleaning, to be anything but deliberately set, and the “insurance” report mysteriously claiming that the items found in the official fire examiner’s report “could not be located.” Fustle and I watched her insurance examiner toss them in the dumpster himself.

But it didn’t end there. Oh no. TOB then put in high-power halogen lights around her property. Good enough that the flower gardens on the other side of the street could be seen, in color, at midnight of a moonless night. Powerful enough that I and Doris, who had windows facing her house, both had to set up massive blackout curtains in order to sleep at night. When Fustle sent an email to complain and ask that the lights be turned down, she sent a counter-complaint about the fence between our houses, about how she was going to call the Homeowners’ Association because “those metal posts are ugly and I don’t like them.” A few months later, when two of her lights were mysteriously broken, she blamed us (it later turned out that Ross was the culprit, being tired of the light shining into his and his mothers’ bedrooms). It culminated in Fustle finally having had enough during one of her tirades and launching into a tirade back, detailing every reason why she was an evil, mean, selfish, unlikable old hag, after which any time either of us would come out the front door she would scurry back inside like a rat exposed to daylight.

And yes, TOB would fly into a screaming rage about people parking in front of her house.

I’ve mentioned before that we’re a bit unsure about what to do about our moving truck outside. When we moved in, the truck got a warning about “commercial trucks in a residential zone” or something to that effect. Man, I wish I’d kept that warning. Our landlord thinks that our neighbor dropped the dime on us. They apparently have a history. We were warned pretty thoroughly not to park in front of her house. Legally, there’s nothing you can do to prevent people from parking in front of your house, but as a courtesy we avoided it. Unfortunately, she has not been extending us the same courtesy with one of her cars perpetually parked in front of our house. Ordinarily, this isn’t a big deal because we park around back. But it does kind of rankle a bit. And it’ll inconvenience both us and our neighbor if we can’t park in front of our own place.

We’ve been debating how much trouble to go through to find out what kind of liability we face. I’ve asked around and as far as anybody knows, there shouldn’t be a problem. I mean, people have got to be able to move in, right? And it’s possible that the warning before was a mistake. It was a “commercial” vehicle in the strict sense, but not in the sense that you think of commercial vehicles. Further, it didn’t have any exterior markings to let an industrious officer know that it was a moving vehicle. It looks to all the world like a regular truck. So maybe it was a misunderstanding that we could have cleared up if we’d talked to the officer in question (we had the truck moved the day after the citation - we were done packing. We’ve seen a lot of UHauls around.

Anyway, so nobody was of any help in finding out who we would even need to contact because nobody had ever had this particular problem. So I was leaning towards letting it slide and hoping for the best. The main concern is that since it’ll be parked here over the weekend, we won’t be able to “hurry up” and get it out of here. It’s here from Friday to Monday come what may. As I was eating dinner tonight, I scanned over the document from the company we’ll be using and it said to contact local traffic enforcement if we needed a permit. That made perfect sense. It was our first lead.

So tomorrow I am headed down to the local PD office and I’m going to come out and ask them. It’s a bit risky because if they say something like “Oh, we don’t expect people to have to park a truck overnight to be able to move. There is no permit. You’ll just have to find another way to move” well, I will no longer be able to say “gosh, officer, I didn’t know” and they’ll probably know exactly where to look for any illegally parked trucks. Ideally, they’ll say that there is an exemption for moving trucks and I won’t have to get any sort of permit and I can explain to any officer that wants to ticket the vehicle what is going on. Next best is if they can sell me a permit off right there. Middle-case is that I’ll end up having to go down to the county courthouse or DMV or something.

As long as I get the permit, I really don’t care. I was previously going to set out fliers to our neighbors letting them know the truck was going to be coming and to apologize for the inconvenience. Sometimes, if you are just open and straight with people, they’ll be more forgiving. Especially when they know the truck is going to be gone soon. But I’d rather not have to rely on the kindness of neighbors. If need be, I’d like to be able to politely tell our complaining neighbor who parks in front of our house where she can shove it.

Update: No permit required, apparently. I spoke to a volunteer at the substation as well as an officer there. He said that as long as it’s a moving truck, there shouldn’t be a problem. He is with me that the problem before was that it was not clearly marked. There is some concern of people parking trailers and containers on the street and people living out of them (!!) and that was probably why it got some attention before. If I have any problem, he says that I should just contact the substation and explain the situation.

Part of me wishes that I could have gotten a permit. That would have made me bulletproof. Though the people I talked to didn’t know of any ordinance, an industrious neighbor may know something they don’t. So while I’m feeling pretty good about it now (and can tell anyone upset that I have contacted the police), a part of me takes back my previous suggestion that this would be ideal. Now, if nobody complains, then it will turn out to have been ideal all along. I’m probably just being paranoid here because of my tendency to explore worst-case scenarios, which in this case could be pretty bad. But it seems rather unlikely. So we’ll see. At least on the Callie end of things, they’ll be able to park it on the driveway.

There’s been a sizable backlash against certain methods (largely seen as doing more harm than good) of controlling, or labelling, or watching “sex offenders” in the US recently. CNN has coverage of a “poster child” (perhaps literally) case: the saga of Ricky Blackman.

The summation: Ricky was 16, had sex with a girl he thought was 15 (they met at a teen club). Iowa’s age of consent is 14, one of the lowest in the nation, but their law doesn’t carry a “Romeo & Juliet” provision. Later, she ran away from home. Because the two were known to be dating, the police came to interview Ricky. It’s at this point that he didn’t heed certain very, very sound legal advice and admitted to the cops to having sex with the girl, who as it turned out was actually 13.

From there, the story goes downhill. He pled guilty to having sex with the girl when charged, because his mother believed “the truth will set him free.” The judge in his case agreed the case was unusual and that jail time was simply inappropriate, and set up the terms of conviction so that the Iowa courts would automatically expunge his record of the conviction if he completed probation and “sex offender treatment” (frankly, I find the second part of that to still be overkill, but whatever). Again, this is where “Romeo and Juliet” clauses come into play. Unfortunately, because there is no “common sense” clause in the Iowa “sex offender registry” law (or anywhere else in the country, from what I can tell), a kid barely old enough to shave was tossed onto the registry for having consensual sex with his girlfriend.

The secondary problem comes in when the family tried to move, to get a fresh start. They moved to Oklahoma. Oklahoma’s legislature, in a fit of retarded splendor, ignores the constitutional Full Faith and Credit clause and refuses to recognize the expungements of most criminal convictions done in other states (the law was only recently changed, and only for “certain” crimes). Between that, and the circumstances of “one size fits all sex offender lists” (which don’t tell you WHAT the offender was convicted of, just call them a “sex offender”) his family was harassed wherever they went. The larger question of how society deals with sex offenders post-incarceration is, and always will be, problematic. For those who are truly rehabilitated, sorry for what they did, and trying to rebuild their lives, some of the limitations can make life almost impossible. And we know to a certain extent that when people have difficulty in finding work and reentering society, one common reaction is to go back to the offending behavior.

Of course, the other side - the fact that true psychopaths simply do not respond to rehabilitative methods, and are more likely than the normal population to con their way into an early release - is what has led to these draconian “post-incarceration” controls in the first place. I’d say we need to have a prohibition on letting diagnosed psychopaths into the parole system entirely, or perhaps even a required medical screening for this behavior on anyone’s incarceration, but I’m sure someone would have an objection to that.

{To be clear: this is not an opening for a discussion of “why consent limits should be lowered.” If anything, Iowa’s is already one of the lowest in the nation and maybe that’s why their state legislature decided a “Romeo & Juliet” clause wasn’t necessary.

I don’t have an iPhone. Don’t really want an iPad, iTablet, or any of that.

In fact, I live my life remarkably Apple-free, save for an iPod (and even that purchase I have questioned after finding out how ridiculously hard it is to listen to non-iTunes audiobooks on the damn thing).

Can we admit that Apple’s stranglehold policies with regard to the App Store are getting a little silly yet?

-{I’m cutting my Linkluster posts from 10 links to 5. Since I’m going to be moving, I want smaller posts more frequently rather than fewer posts with more links/content}-

The government is itching to tackle our broadband gap with a whopping 40% failing to have it. It wasn’t long ago when broadband availability was something you had to inquire about before renting a place. I actually asked about it this time around, but it was a pointless question. Even in way-out Callie, Arapaho, broadband is assumed. Only 3.6% of those polled cite lack of availability as their reason for not having it. I have to wonder if they’re just assuming. On the other hand, maybe a portion of the other 36.4% don’t actually have it available and never checked because they weren’t interested.

Alyssa Rosenberg thinks that American TV should become more like British with short, settled story arcs and all that jazz. It’s something that I’ve commented on once or twice on the subject here. I want to write a(nother) post on the subject, but not sure if I’m going to have time. Basically: American seasons may be too long, but British are too short. Sometimes a story arc is good, but sometime single episodes are good, too. With one glaring problem, I think that we actually do okay on this side of the Atlantic.

You can absolutely bet this is going to be a post at some point, but allegedly TV may not be contributing to obesity so much as commercials are.

Should we put some Americans on track to finish school two years earlier? The idea certainly appeals to me, though I am oddly ambivalent to this proposal. It seems geared more towards replacing the last two year of high school with community college. I am smitten with the idea of high school graduation being a target rather than a process.

Should we put all Americans on track to finish college sooner? I’ve got mixed feelings about this one, too. We definitely have a problem with college in this country as we do with high school. But I think rather than a matter of volume or duration, we have a problem of allocation. We may not be the only ones.

From this week’s Onion: “Former Prom King Now Living Anonymously Among Commoners.”

“Right now I’m just sort of working a lot, saving up money,” said the fallen monarch, sitting among the riffraff at a local tavern, his once formidable stature wholly unnoticed by those around him. “I’m full-time at Best Buy, which is actually pretty decent. Plus, I can usually walk there from my apartment, so I end up saving a ton on gas.”

… So great are the changes that have befallen Fowler that few today may even recognize the stubble-faced commoner dining in quiet solitude at Ruby Tuesday’s as the young tyrant who strode so majestically across the Barlow High cafeteria, drawing the fearful gaze of all who toiled in his midst.

“I don’t see a lot of old high school people these days, but I guess people just sort of drift apart,” said the dethroned Fowler, who has struggled in vain to relive his celebrated conquests on the high school field by vanquishing lesser foes in a local recreational football league. “It’s fun to go on Facebook, though, and see what people are up to. Brings back good memories.”

Whoever wrote this article

A) Consumes a lot of mainstream fictional entertainment, such that he or she has absorbed fictional narratives as actual experience, and

B) Either 1) Never goes out; or 2) Never notices anything when he or she goes out, and

C) Believes way, waaaay too much in the uplifting power of college.

The “Al Bundy” myth — it’s indestructible. It must keep a lot of sad folks going.

So the other day I took the Bartle Test. Created way back in 1978, it’s still relevant (more than many would think) in designing MMORPG’s (World of Warcraft, Everquest, etc).

In an overarching format, it does well describing why some games “win” and “lose” in the market. Games targeted to “Killers”, such as Ultima Online, Shadowbane, and Asheron’s Call 2, tend to die off. The problem is, if you populate with Killers and design around them, then the vast majority of players who are not primarily “Killers” will get tired of being picked on and leave the game. An all-Killer game will drive off enough players to not be financially sustainable.

The longest-running game I’ve ever played, MMORPG-wise, is City of Heroes. The nice thing about CoH is that the “Killer” mechanic almost completely vanishes. Player-vs-Player combat is only in certain non-storyline areas against “City of Villains” players (the “other side” of the game), or in the “Arena”, in exhibition matches where no penalty for losing exists in the main game. Meanwhile, CoH has a tremendous amount of room for exploration and the enjoyment of various storylines, quests, and options to try out. The end of my CoH play came when the “social attitude”, by which I mean a personality-based falling out with a guild leader, left me with the option of either shutting down my account, or paying way too much money to move my characters to new servers to avoid this “socially powerful” griefer’s behavior.

For those wondering, by the Bartle test I come up as an ESAK, with a mere 7% “Killer” score:

Description:

Secondary influences
…
Explorer Socializers are the glue of the online world. Not only do they like to delve in to find all the cool stuff, but they also enjoy sharing that knowledge with others. Explorer socializers power the wikis, maps, forums and theory craft sites of the gamer world.

The moving van will be arriving later in the week. Between now and then a lot of packing to be done. Next week will involve limited Internet access and getting settled in out in Arapaho. Then our stuff will arrive and I’ll be unpacking. All of this is the long way of saying that my devotion to Hit Coffee will be limited. I’ve asked Sheila and Web if they can help out. I will still be around and I’ll try to have something up every day, though it’s going to be some relatively decaffeinated content, by which I mean that I’m going to avoid some of the more contentious subjects that result in possible contentious comments because I don’t have as much time to participate and I won’t have the energy to devote towards comment-policing.

One of the things I will be trying is more posts but a little lighter on the content. Stuff that might have been an item on Randomania will instead just be extrapolated on a bit and will become a post. Randomania and Linkluster posts will be reduced from 10 items to 5 so that they will continue to roll out.

I realize that this is probably more than you care about. I just wanted to put it out there so that you have an idea that things are going to be temporarily lighter before returning back to normal.

In truth, I really don’t know whether God exists or not. For a variety of reasons, I have an operational assumption that He does, but the more I really try to pin it down, the more agnostic I become. A lot of agnostics and atheists say that they wish that they were religious, but often do so in a tone dripping with condescension: “I wish I could be such a simpleton as to believe in something that obviously gives your simple little mind happiness.” But it’s true, for me, that I wish that I were more religious than I am. Not so much because it would make things simpler to have all the answers, but because the times when a sort of semblance of faith has touched my life, it has helped me tremendously.

One of the things that I really appreciate about country music is the way that it is able to weave religion and God into its content in a way that is accessible to people like me. Songs purely about loving God or praising Him are about as interesting to me as songs about being soooo in love with some chick or some dude. It has to be done really well to avoid being insufferably dull. So it becomes one of those things where artists that have to write for people that don’t experience God in quite the same way that they do have to go the extra mile in making a song original, interesting, or relatable.

Religious songs in country music are hit and miss, but some of them, when they hit, had a pretty profound effect on me. One such artist made a point of having at least one religious song on each CD that he put out there. In between songs about getting drunk and misbehaving, there would be some of the most interesting songs that were sort of a follow-up for the toll that it is taking not just on his life, but on his soul. The first such song uses great imagery of a bible sitting on his dresser and a woman’s clothes tossed around his floor and between the stained glass on a chapel and neon signs in bars.

In the outset of a bootleg version of the song, he describes it as such: “It’s about being a sinner. And knowin’ it.” That’s also a theme of his follow-up to it, which is about his inability to figure out why, exactly, God would love him.

I mention those songs even though there are others requesting that God give the singer the strength to go on, requesting that Satan kiss the singer’s posterior, or the Devil being challenged to some competition involving classic automobiles. But it’s the songs about being a sinner and knowing it that I think of most because, at that point in my life, that was a message that resonated with me greatly.

When I was listening to these songs, I was doing things that I was not proud of. I was doing things that I simply did not consider to be me, yet there I was doing them. The notion of there being a God that loves me anyway was really appealing on that basis. Not because it allowed me to screw up as much as I wanted, but rather because it challenged me to be worthy of that love.

And in some ways it could be said that it was not even about God at all. It was about having parents that loved me, friends that prayed for me, and so on. It was about having been given all of this, screwing it up, and yet having a sense that things did not have to be this way and that I was not beyond redemption.

It would have been really easy for me to leave it at that. But I didn’t.

Instead, there were moments when I really, truly felt something like what I’m told God’s presence feels like. Like He was there. It was enough to get me going to church again and trying to rap my head around the concept of God as more than just a concept and of Jesus and Jesus’ message of being more than just words in a book.

But, as is often the case when I try to think about God logically, when I would look for Him, He wouldn’t be there. It was light a shadow or a phantom in the corner of my eye. I turn my eyes and suddenly He was gone. Only to creep back in when I was thinking not of Him, but of the subjects that seemed to pique His interest in me.

Maybe it was just an imaginary physical manifestation of the desire on my part to be a better person. But it got me through some pretty hard times when it seemed that very little in my life was going right in regards to what I was doing but also (perhaps mostly) in regards to what was going on around me. And His intrusion wasn’t even particularly welcome. My preferred relationship with God is less intimate and in times when I feel like I have a better handle on things. I don’t like being that guy who only comes to God (or wants God to come to him) when he wants something.

But it was what it was, or wasn’t what it wasn’t, depending. Unwelcome, but ultimately helpful. A helpful delusion, or a momentary glimpse of and connection with a typically elusive deity. The more I try to look at it, the less tangible it all becomes. Not unlike the musical distinction between the off-putting songs trying to convince me to believe in God and the songs in which God is part of a backdrop of a grander narrative.

Ever heard of Caesarean kidnapping, or maybe fetal theft? That’s where someone cuts the baby out of a woman without her permission and kidnaps the baby. It’s almost always fatal to the woman. It’s so rare, and so gruesome, that it always makes big news when it happens. So it’s easy to look up on the Internet and draw conclusions.

You might shrug and think it’s something crazed infertile women just do, but it almost never happens outside America, and it never happened before 1987. Now it happens here about once a year — three times in 2009 alone. Why?

USA Today postulated in 2005 that it might be because it’s gotten harder to kidnap newborns from hospitals. But why only in America? Why never even once in, say, Europe, or Canada, or Mexico, or in England, where they certainly seem to find the crime worth coverage. And why almost always by lower-class women?

You may be thinking: Tone has gone paranoid because she’s pregnant. Who else would bother looking up every instance of something like this and tallying the results? Possibly true, but fortunately I’ve got little to fear because even though I’m American the victims are rarely pregnant women like me: Married, 30-something, and middle-class. What’s weirder is that the perps are never women like me.

Because if someone were to do a TV show featuring a Caesarean kidnapping, you know the kidnapper would be a middle-aged infertile woman who’d been struggling for years with fertility treatments or trying to adopt. And she’d be educated with money, because no one wants to watch a show about ignorant poor people. And everyone likes to think of the psycho infertile being middle-aged career women. But no one like that has ever done this, not once.

The typical fetus-snatcher is: An unmarried American woman, either white or black, under 40. She often already has children. She is unemployed and poor. She would probably need welfare to care for the baby. She has been telling her family and friends, and possibly a boyfriend, that she’s pregnant when she’s not. No evidence that a single one of them ever tried fertility treatments or adoption.

Apparently, those are the women who want babies so badly they’ll murder to get one. And for some reason, no one ever tried it before 1987, even though Caesarean sections were well-known procedures for decades before.

In 10 of the American cases the perp or perps were white, in 6 they were black. That seems like a disproportionate amount of black women. In one case it was an Asian woman and in another, it was two Hispanic women (they used a doctor and the victim survived). The perps are always women (unless it’s a woman with an accomplice), almost always act alone, and almost always go after a victim of the same race.

It’s not as if success is encouraging copycatting. No one ever gets away with this. Yet American women keep trying it. The woman shows up somewhere with the baby, claims it’s hers, people get suspicious. She gets caught and the body of the other woman is found.

I found 18 instances of it in America, counting unsuccessful attempts. There was also one in South Africa in 2000, one in Colombia in 2004, and one in Hong Kong in 2009. In all of the foreign instances the mother survived, in the U.S. the mother only lived through 5 of the 18 instances. It’s a rare crime, but any violent crime by a woman is rare, especially murder of a stranger.

The first instance ever recorded was in 1987 by a 19-year-old New Mexico woman (yes, 19), Darci Pierce, to 23-year-old Cindy Ray. Pierce had gotten her boyfriend to marry her by claiming she was pregnant. She had tricked her whole family by padding her clothes. She must have never undressed in front of her husband, and he must never have never asked to go to a doctor’s appointment with her. She had to come up with a baby fast because it was time to deliver.

She kidnapped the pregant woman outside a clinic, strangled her with a cord, and cut the baby out with car keys.

There are too many to list them all, but here’s the roster from 2009: Korena Roberts, 27, of Oregon, who already had two kids but not by her current boyfriend; Julie Corey of Massachussetts, 35, who faked a pregnancy to her 27-year-old boyfriend; and Veronica Deramous, 40, of Maryland, who had a 17-year-old son. And here are some general links: A summary from a true crime TV show, an incomplete table someone compiled in about 2005, a Wikipedia article with an incomplete list of cases but lots of links to research articles.

Many people offer psychological explanations: The women are possibly narcissists, possibly delusional, who have a fantasy regarding a perfect childbirth and motherhood. Sometimes they believe a baby will cement a relationship with a man. No one discusses why poor white and black American women would be so particularly prone to these problems, or especially willing to kill to resolve them.

I do think there is something different about the way poor, uneducated women view motherhood. I think they feel more of a sense of entitlement to it, despite their circumstances, and feel more of a sense of accomplishment simply for having birthed a child. I could see this leading to a willingness to go to extreme, criminal measures to get a baby. But I can’t think of a reason it would be different in America than in any other first-world country with a generous social-welfare system. Is there some way our society rewards or validates poor, unmarried mothers more than England or Canada does? Or are we just crazier and more violent than anywhere else?