Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz hates superhero movies:

The comic book film has become a gravy train to nowhere. The genre cranks up directors’ box office averages and keeps offbeat actors fully employed for years at a stretch by dutifully replicating (with precious few exceptions) the least interesting, least exciting elements of its source material; spicing up otherwise rote superhero vs. supervillain storylines with “complications” and “revisions” (scare quotes intentional) that the filmmakers, for reasons of fiduciary duty, cannot properly investigate; and delivering amusing characterizations, dense stories or stunning visuals while typically failing to combine those aspects into a satisfying whole.

Contra Seitz, I disagree about the quality of superhero movies that have been coming out. In fact, I think that one of the reasons they have become such mainstays is that after twenty years they finally figured out how to make these movies. They’ve been catching up ever since. I mean, these movies are not high art. But they’re not throwaway either. For a cartoon analogy, compare He-Man to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Airbender isn’t exactly high art, but it’s obvious that between then and now studios have finally figured out how to make this stuff good. Good for what it is, anyway.

Seitz comes at this from the perspective of a movie critic and movie critics come at movies from a different perspective than the general audience. When you see so many movies, a movie’s originality takes on a whole lot more importance. Formulas become not just a negative, but actively painful. Formulaic-but-good becomes an oxymoron or sorts. I also have an appreciation for the different. It’s one of the reasons that I stopped watching superhero movies as they came out unless it was a character I really wanted to see or it was highly recommended. But that doesn’t make the movies I am not seeing bad. Nor is it, I think, damning of the genre itself.

This is the part where superhero movie fans say “If you don’t like them then don’t watch them.” The problem is that, as Ross Douthat points out, they’re affecting cinema whether you’re watching them or not.

It’s a good question, but of course once you start asking questions like that it’s a pretty short leap to wondering why we couldn’t have a movie about a Tony Stark-like figure — say, a screwball comedy about a billionaire’s romance with his omnicompetent assistant, which is basically the best thing about the “Iron Man” franchise anyway — in which he isn’t a superhero at all. And from there, it’s an even shorter leap to questions like, “what kind of movies would a clean-and-sober Robert Downey, Jr. be making if he wasn’t already signed up for ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Iron Man 3’ and the sequel to last’s year ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (which was basically a superhero flick dressed up in Victoriana)”? Or “what kind of films might Jon Favreau/Bryan Singer/Sam Raimi/Christopher Nolan have directed if they hadn’t been sucked into the superhero vortex”? Or “wouldn’t it have been nice to see a Heath Ledger/Christian Bale confrontation in which they weren’t saddled with the grim conventions of the comic-book blockbuster?” Or … well, you get the idea.

In this sense, I think that superhero movies are a sign of a larger problem. The studios are risk-averse and little without an automatic audience is getting made. Comic books have that audience. So do remakes. Further, they want a little something for everybody. Superhero movies are actually a somewhat flexible genre. They can have great romantic angles, fantasy origins, scientific origins, straight up action origins. You’ll notice that most of those appeal to a particular audience, but that’s another factor in and of itself.

The movie audience has changed. While I am skeptical of TV advertisers claiming that the young and hip demographics are the most important, I believe it when it comes to movies. As home entertainment systems get better and better, educated professionals see take themselves more and more out of the theater-going demographic. You’re left with a larger portion of your audience as young people looking for somewhere to go to, young adults with the movie for moving tickets but not surround-sound in their house, and older people that never became educated professionals. That’s not to say that smart folks over 30 have stopped seeing movies entirely, but they’re not as strong a demographic as they used to be. They are for television, though, which is why television is increasingly becoming the medium for higher art.

A 33-year-old Disney secretary and her 29-year-old boyfriend were arrested and charged for this pitiful little attempt at insider trading:

Insider-trading networks are typically close-knit groups that go to great lengths to shield their activities. Hoxie and Sebbag, by contrast, allegedly sent anonymous letters offering early peeks at earnings reports to nearly three dozen hedge funds, which promptly tipped off the authorities.

“This is the insider trading equivalent of the bank robber who drops off the demand note and comes back in an hour to pick up the money,” said Robert A. Mintz, a former federal prosecutor who is a partner at McCarter & English in Newark, N.J. “It’s mind-boggling that somebody would even try to get away with something like this.”

The FBI set up a meeting May 14 in which agents posing as hedge fund traders gave Sebbag $15,000 as payment for a 107-page confidential document on Disney’s quarterly earnings.

The arrest shocked Hoxie’s father, who said her Disney job was the best one she’d had in a decade of living in Los Angeles.

“It can’t be for financial reasons that I could understand. It’s got to be, for lack of a better word, for love or a relationship with this guy,” said Patrick Hoxie, contacted in Jackson, Mich. “She lives in a dinky apartment, drives an old car. She has a real basic lifestyle.”

Here’s a link to her glamorshot photo, compare with a normal photo nabbed from Facebook. On her Facebook, she says she “will marry rich — extremely rich,” and “i love, love, love to shop.”

I always think it’s a red flag as to bad character when a person has a flattering, professionally taken photo of themselves. (I don’t mean art photos, I mean where you go into a studio to get a head shot.) The only exception is if you have to do it for business. But she’s a secretary, and there’s no indication this was required for Disney.

One time this guy I was seeing gave me only a card for Christmas — with a wallet-size, soft-focus glamorshot of him inside, wearing a red blazer and white T-shirt. We were in our mid-20s at the time. It was pretty clear that the picture hadn’t been taken for me, since I only got a wallet-size. He was a sports reporter, so it definitely wasn’t taken for business. No one cares what reporters look like and if they do, they’ll usually be disappointed.

I had given him a book and a bottle of Scotch. When we stopped seeing each other, he mailed me the book back. But not the Scotch. Asshole. He’s still single.

Dave Hackinsack and I were commenting back and forth recently on the redundancy of Ford’s Mercury brand. It looks like Ford is coming to the same conclusion. There is some question about whether or not Ford would lose customers, but why would they since unless they have a Grand Marquis they can get the same car with a different logo on it for cheaper? Besideswhich, Ford’s brand name has never had a better reputation since I got my first learner’s permit. What do to about Lincoln, though. I forget that the brand exists, sometimes.

How student loans destroyed America. Pretty hyperbolic, but there is little doubt that the system has not produced the desirable results. At the same time, I can’t get on board with the notion that those without money should lack options by virtue of that fact. So what to do? Focusing student loans on those students entering areas of study where they are likely to be able to pay them back is one idea. Unfortunately, since we’re unwilling to limit college availability based on academic records, and we’re (rightfully) unwilling to limit college availability based on financial means, we’re kind of in a pickle.

Speaking of college, a while back we were discussing whether or not it is best to go to the most selective school that will have you or whether you should prefer to be one of the smarter kids in the room at a less selective institution. According to Study Hacks (who primarily cites Half Sigma), the former is definitely true. I think that this is very much right when you’re looking at the cream of the crop versus the next one down. I’m not sure if matters quite as much if you’re looking at a state’s flagship university versus its land grant school.

I’m not a very good Episcopalian, but things like this upset me. As much as I would like to have gay bishops if left to my own preferences, there has to be a degree of give-and-take with the Anglican Communion. Without a strong theology, our tradition is one of our key assets. That tradition runs through Canterbury. Just as I don’t want the conservatives bolting the more liberal Episcopalian Church for failure to abide by TEC’s leadership, I don’t want The Episcopal Church bolting (or getting kicked out of) the international church for failure to do the same. Broad Church, people, Broad Church.

From the “Everything Bad Is Good For You” files, being bad at relationships is good for you as is having enemies. In both cases, being put upon helps you learn how to deal with being put upon, in a sense. Part of me agrees, but the other part of me says that this is like saying poor is good for the soul. It’s typically said by people that have never been poor and poor people that are looking for some sort of silver lining.

Some feminists are objecting to Flag Football as a Title IX sport because there is no collegiate-level play. I agree with Christine Hurt that these views are misguided. In some ways, I think that Title IX has really given girls the better deal. Because there are fewer candidates per slot, it’s much easier for a girl for play sports at any given level than guys. In other ways, of course, Title IX does not adequately compensate for what male athletes have. Nor can it, really. I think that there is value in attempted equality, but I also think it’s a mistake to think that actual equality is an issue. My main concern about flag football for girls is if the girls like it. If they’d rather the money be spent on some other sport, go with the other sport.

The End Of The Wii Era? Perhaps, but I still say I have been hearing of Nintendo’s imminent demise since the Turbo Grafx 16 came out. The argument here is the argument I have always heard: the competing technology is better. And it usually is. But is it funner? Some gamers, I think, fail to understand what really makes Nintendo successful. On the whole, I do agree that Nintendo will have to step up its game.

Speaking of video games, do they cause less crime? As we all know, correlation is not causation. Even so, if the alleged criminal-inducing nature of video games were true, things would be looking a lot different now than they do. There are two schools of thought. One is that video games condition violence into the young psyche. The other is that they provide an outlet for natural aggression. It’s something worth keeping an eye on, but not something to get hot and bothered with.

Law & Order’s days are finally numbered and Jon Last writes about what we’ve learned from it. It really had an amazing run and found a very successful formula that automatically compensates for the inability to keep cast members indefinitely. It defined “formula” and yet also kept formula interesting. I shouldn’t even be using the past tense, though. L&O is simply being replaced with a new one taking place in Los Angeles. Besideswhich, there are currently three spinoffs still on the air in the meantime. Kind of odd that they didn’t go one more year to break the record.

Arapaho is Mountain Dew country. You go to any convenience store and you see more real estate given the Mountain Dew than you see to Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Unfortunately, Arapaho is also partial to homogeneity. They like things plain. Nearly every restaurant in Callie is a burger place. Even the Mexican restaurants here eschew spicy. I could go on and on, but this has repercussions when it comes to Mountain Dew. Namely, they have rows of the stuff but they only have one flavor. Sometimes they don’t even have diet available, much less Code Red, Voltage or (dare to even hope) Livewire. Oh, well they do have the Throwback stuff, so maybe that’s taking up the slots they’d otherwise be giving Diet or Code Red.

I am a big fan of Mountain Dew Livewire. Unfortunately, during my tenure in Deseret it was nowhere to be found. Coworkers at Falstaff would let each other know when we were crossing state lines to get some. Whomever is in charge of Deseret distribution apparently really doesn’t like the stuff. Arapaho seems to be in the same orbit, except that because of the above it’s also missing Code Red and Voltage.

Mountain Dew has recently begun its second Dewmocracy, where they introduce three flavors and allow people to vote on which one to keep. The last time they did this gave us Voltage, though I liked all three options. Unfortunately, Arapaho is undewmocratic because the three flavors are nowhere in sight at convenient stores. Absent some sort of sale, the prices at Safeway are extremely high and the sale they were running was only if you stock up on the same product (no “mix and match” between Pepsi products). So I had an itch to try some of these new Mountain Dew flavors but no means with which to do so.

While driving my route for the Bureau, I stopped at a convenience store in Bass. Much to my shock and amazement, they had Mountain Dew Game Fuel. I never cared all that much for Game Fuel, but it was still at least something different. So I got it and it was my prized possession. I held on to it a couple days for an opportunity that I knew I would be able to completely enjoy it. And… it was flat. It had a sell-by date from last November.

Fortunately, last night I stopped by Safeway and they had a mix and match special going. So I bought all three. Here are my thoughts, for anyone interested:

• Whiteout - It’s billed as smooth citrus. The smooth (which is really just sweetness) kind of overwhelms the citrus, though. I think it’s too sweet, honestly. Kind of cool that it was actually white rather than clear as I had expected.
• Distortion - My ex-roommate Dennis called it. It’s like Mountain Dew Baja Blast that they sell exclusively at Taco Bell. I didn’t like Baja Blast when it first came out but it grew on me. Distortion, possibly by virtue of it following the too-sweet Whiteout, I liked coming right out of the can.
• Typhoon - Very fruity. My least favorite of the three. Whiteout grew on me after a little while but Typhoon really hasn’t. It honestly reminds me of the cheap sugarwater juice that Mom used to pack in my lunch when I was younger.

Right now the vote is tilting in favor of Whiteout. Typhoon follows closely behind. Distortion is toast. Oklahoma and Arkansas are apparently Distortion’s base. Whiteout is carrying few states, but they are dominating California and running up a serious total there. Of course. Now I’m thinking that I might start need to voting strategically. Since Distortion can’t win and Whiteout is the more preferable of the two, do I pick the lesser of evils? Or do I say “I don’t need another flavor of Mountain Dew” and vote my conscience?

Back in the early days of Hit Coffee, there was a vote at my former employer. Winning that vote probably ended up gaining me 10 or 15 pounds. Free soft drink fountains are bad for you. Especially when they have Mountain Dew.

The blog Mama Pundit has, unfortunately, become a lot more interesting over the last few months. I say “unfortunately” because the action revolves around her eldest son being assaulted in a drug deal gone sideways. This lead to the disclosure that her son has been struggling with addiction for years, the attempts at piecing together what happened, and the uncertainty as to how much “H” will or will not recover. This day and age you get used to assuming that people will recover. It’s hard to come to grips with a case where a series of bad events leads to an 18 year old kid with middle class bearings that never will. All in a time when the family should be happily preparing for their soon-to-be (God willing) fifth child into this world.

The author, Katie Allison Granju, is a self-declared non-expert who nonetheless has written a book on parenting. She comes from a pretty liberal mindset when it comes to parenting. One of the things haunting her right now is their failure to act more forcefully when the drug problem first started to develop. It was chalked up to experimentation when in hindsight it was obviously the onset to something much more serious. As one might expect, a lot of people are telling her that this is not her fault (it’s not) and many are backing this argument with claims about how much more counterproductive “tough love” can be in cases like this.

None of that stops Granju from knowing that if she had responded differently when the problem first surfaced that they might not be where they are now. Having responded how she did, of course, we know exactly how things turned out. So if the chances are less than 100% that the kid would not have ended up in a hospital unable to walk and speak coherently had she approached the initial indications with more vigor, then the odds are better with that route than the route that occurred. Hindsight is unmerciful that way.

When you hear a story like this, you think to yourself that as a parent (even if you are not yet one, but especially if you are) that you want to do absolutely everything in your power to prevent that from happening. You want to do whatever the opposite that Granju did that may have allowed this to happen. But then you hear about some awful result that occurred after a parent did something different, and you wonder what if anything you can do.

When Clancy and I have children, a common theme of our disagreements is that I will be the more permissive one and she will be the less permissive one. This story makes me want to be nothing more permissive than a jailhouse warden. Eventually, the thoughts of it will fade and my more natural inclinations will return and 15 years from now (God willing) I will be arguing the merits of childhood freedom and experimentation while Clancy argues the dangers of these things.

What is so immeasurably frustrating is that when it comes to the questions of giving kids room to make mistakes and tough love is that there is no right answer between the two. Or rather, there are cases where either will work and other cases where neither will work and some cases where one will backfire and others where the other will. And nobody knows which is going to be true of your kid.

Assuming that our future children share our genes, on the subject of substances I am likely to be more liberal than Clancy but more conservative than most parents (I was going to be the “fascist” parent when contemplating kids with the other three women I ever contemplated kids with). One of the main questions as to whether or not experimentation should be accepted or not is whether the Addiction Switch will be flipped or not. Our gene pool is stacked. We both have addictive personalities. We both have parents that have been borderline alcoholics on one point and family trees bearing ill fruit.

At the same time, though, a part of me will want to approach the issue the same way that I would approach other issues. Even if the statistics bear out that parental zero tolerance policies are generally more effective than looser policies, it’s nearly impossible to determine what that difference is because there are so many other factors to consider. And (spoken like a true non-parent, check back with me fifteen years from now) there are other things to consider than safety when no matter what you do safety is not insured in any event. Even leaving aside what happens when they go off to college, raising kids in a bubble means that they are raised in a bubble and that is a bad thing in itself. So the choice is not just more risk or less risk, but higher risk/reward and lower risk/reward.

It’s not clear which is superior. Different kids will thrive better in different environments. My life was thoroughly enriched by the fact that I was going to parties and getting drunk at 18. That my parents gave me the freedom, if not to drink, then at least to be far enough away that I could get away with it. Other kids, given the same freedom, end up in a hospital unable to speak and walk. Some kids go to military school and learn structure and others go to military school and gang up with all the other kids in military school. Would that you know at the beginning what you learn at the end.

Regular readers will remember FIREA, the Forward Intelligence Resource Employment Agency. They’re the former employer that threatened to blackball employees if they didn’t accept their reneging on their contract. After my employment there ended, they proceeded to play games with with my accrued vacation/sick pay so that they could get my unemployment terminated on grounds of fraud. Then they changed insurance administration agencies, leaving us temporarily uninsured during the changeover (though retroactively insured once the changeover was complete. And they prevented me from getting my old job back at Mindstorm unless it was through them (which, because of the above, I would have been disinclined to do even if I hadn’t been about to move - though, in their defense, they were within their rights and it was in the contract that I signed and unlike them, I don’t get to change provisions of the contract and then take a pound of flesh if they don’t accept them).

Well, now they’re at it again. I got a letter a couple months back from a company claiming to represent them announcing that they were doing an audit of insurance benefits. They would be auditing suspicious accounts to make sure that the dependents were eligible. Well, what do you know, we are being audited. So now I am going to have to dig up some tax forms or a marriage certificate to prove that Clancy and I are in fact married. If we can’t demonstrated it, we are once again guilty of that F-word. Fraud.

Of course we can prove it. It’s just a real inconvenience having just moved and still not knowing where everything is.

The whole thing at first struck me as bizarre because I am rather positive that they have made money on us. We’re not good rescission candidates. We didn’t get cancer and we’re not insured through them anymore so even if we did get cancer they would not be on the hook for it. However, looking at the documentation more closely, they don’t want to cancel me. They want to just cancel her policy. It’s possible that they lost money specifically on her (while they made enough on me to compensate for the both of us). I’m sure someone somewhere ran the numbers. The F-word is probably just leverage to get me to quickly admit that I am up to something (if I am) and then rescind her policy. At which point, we would have to pay for all the health care she has availed herself of minus what we’ve paid in premiums. It might be worth it if we could retroactively cancel my policy, too, but obviously that wouldn’t work for them. And it probably wouldn’t work for me, either, since it would open me up to a PEC problem.

An interesting story about Elie Wiesel (artist and Holocaust survivor) objecting to being a character in a fictional play despite being portrayed as the exemplar of decency and morality:

[Playwright Deb Margolin] says she used Wiesel’s persona in her three-character play (which includes Madoff’s secretary) because “his name is synonymous with decency, morality, the struggle for human dignity and kindness, and in contrast to the most notorious financial criminal in the past 200 years. That’s why he was there, and I felt I had treated his character with great respect — the respect that I genuinely have felt for him.”

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had all its assets, $15.2 million, invested with Madoff and lost them when the Ponzi scheme unraveled. In addition, Wiesel personally lost several million dollars to Madoff.

Theater J Artistic Director Ari Roth said the Wiesel Foundation was uncomfortable with having its founder’s name used in the play, but early on Wiesel had not objected. “It wasn’t until Wiesel read the play and found it to be exactly as Deb purported, a work of fiction . . . [that] Wiesel didn’t consent to it,” Roth says.

It reminds me a bit of a difficult conversation I had a few years ago with Evangeline about a blog I was writing at the time. I had given her a pseudonym then as now, but unlike now the readership largely consisted of people that knew her. As such, mutual friend Kelvin had discovered the site and I needed to tell her about it before he did. She was not depicted as evil, but she was depicted as someone that had treated me poorly and left me in a pretty wrecked state. It was kind of the opposite of Wiesel in that the portrayal was mostly accurate but her persona was not specifically her. And unlike Wiesel, she was definitely not portrayed as an exemplar of decency.

Anyhow, after I explained it to her, she actually had no problem with it and looked forward to reading it. She said, “I am a creature of ego and not self-esteem.”

Despite the many differences with Wiesel, my mind makes the connection because of that distinction. Despite the fact that Wiesel was portrayed positively and his presence was put in a place that it never was in real life, he objected to it. He didn’t need the ego injection that Evangeline did, I suppose. The sense of being important - whether as the villain or the hero.

From a writers’ standpoint, it’s an interesting question what liberties we are and are not allowed to take. What kind of protection should celebrities and public officials have in protecting their likeness from being fictitiously portrayed? What kind of protection should private citizens have? And on citizens and public personalities, at what point does a fictional portrayal become capitalizing on someone else’s likeness, which is something we generally frown down upon. Living in a predominantly black neighborhood, Obama’s likeness was everywhere and available on every possible article of clothing. A movie was made about a fictional assassination of George W. Bush but that was okay because it was art. And obviously, a lot was fictionalized in Oliver Stone’s W. and Nixon for the sake of story. And that’s okay because, again, it’s art.

Is it different for public officials than it is for celebrities? The show 30 Rock had a plot where Jenna was going to play Janis Joplin in a biopic but they couldn’t secure the rights. What kind of rights are required (other than the rights to Joplin’s music, which the show addressed differently)? Or was 30 Rock just having fun with copyright elements that don’t actually exist?

For a writer, I really don’t know the answers to any of these questions and more like I probably should. I am in the camp of fictionalizing as much as possible. This is not news to Hit Coffee readers, but it’s also true in my fiction. The President, if portrayed, is never the actual president unless he absolutely has to be. Microsoft doesn’t exist. The movie stars will never be Tom Hanks and the dirty celebrities Paris Hilton unless it’s such a passing reference that I need the instant recognition.

I recently found a promotional catalog of art by a relative of mine. In her biographical blurb, she claims that as a child, her home:

1) Was religious.

2) Was abusive.

3) Art and music were considered Satan’s work, and she therefore was denied art supplies.

4) This denial of art supplies (due to religious abusiveness) spurred her creativity by forcing her to create art on “found” materials.

As I read, I remembered the following:

1) Her dad was a yeller and a hitter.

2) Her dad was a generous, grandiose man who loved to show off his money, and bought his kids everything they wanted.

3) Her dad was a Mexican immigrant doctor who emphasized discipline and achievement.

4) Her dad was a Seventh-Day Adventist, and her mom was Roman Catholic. I never heard a religious-based objection to anything by either of them, except for matters regarding the atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

5) We attended her brother’s music recital, to which both parents reacted proudly.

6) By the time she was in her early teens, her mom, the Roman Catholic (the Church has a grand artistic tradition, whatever its other faults), had left her dad and moved the kids far away.

Realizing my memories might have faded, I emailed the blurb to her brother. His memories matched mine. Abusive, yes. Enemy of the arts, no. Religious nut, no.

But I guess if you’re trying to sell your art based upon your personality — and what artist doesn’t? — overcoming a plain old abusive background isn’t enough of a lure. Especially not one where you were materially indulged.

This is the type of thing that bothers me a lot, and bothers my husband not at all. He figures that’s just how it is — people lie to sell things, including themselves. He doesn’t, though. So why doesn’t it make him mad when other people do it?

I hate liars. I especially hate liars who make up lies about things that happen to them. I especially hate liars who make up lies where popular enemies — like religious nuts who hate art — do bad things to them. If a story is too satisfying, it’s probably a lie.

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I had some other relatives who told Satan-related lies that were very satisfying and validating to a large segment of the public. A man spent years in prison because of it. (It’s a big family, but let’s hide from Google just in case.) They got to go on Oprah.

Arapaho is a Rights Restorative State, which means that felons get back their right to vote and participate in the system once their sentence is complete. In my view, this should be the case in all states. I might be more sympathetic to barring felons to vote if felonies were still limited to only the worst of the worst crimes. I was on the fence on this issue until I lived in Belle Rieve for a while and got to know people that would never again be allowed to vote or run for office (in Deseret, anyway) because of a mistake they made when they were 18 or 19.

I only know about Arapaho’s law because there is a local state assembly race that has garnered some statewide attention. One of the candidates, Steve O’Reilly is on something called the Violent Offender’s Registry. Arapaho’s sense of forgiveness apparently only goes so far. Far from being a fringe candidate, he has been endorsed by some powerful conservative groups in the state. The current assemblyman, who happens to be the brother of the first real estate agent we talked to in the area, has a reputation for being something of a squishy moderate.

O’Reilly attributes his crime (the equivalent of a bar fight, except that he found something within arm’s reach to use as a weapon) to an alcoholism he has since conquered. In addition to being an independent businessman, he has apparently been doing some good works in the area. He can appeal to be removed from the VOR, which he evidently plans to do.

I haven’t decided whether I am even going to vote in the next round of current elections. I haven’t really been in the area long enough to know the issues at play. But the Rights Restoration issue is another in a string of rather pleasant things I have discovered with regard to state law that make me feel better to be an Arapahoan than I expected.

One of the last things I read last night was a comment on a blog that said “DUDE! You weren’t watching Lost?! I was busy getting my mind blown. It was Claire the whole time?! What the f*ing Hell!” Knowing that the Internet was discussing the final episode of Lost that I had not seen yet, I determined that the Internet was a dangerous place to be.

Now, I didn’t know what to make of the comment about Claire. I pass it on precisely because I can inform you that nothing was ruined by that comment. I half thought at the time that it was mostly a head fake. But the next one might not be. So I spent the entire day off the Internet except for an email I sent. It turned out well because there was something that I really needed to get done. The downside is that Hit Coffee was dormant. Anyway, so lest anyone fear because I did not do my weekly Ghostland post and was silent all day today, all is right with the world.

I discovered right after having watched said episode of Lost that a friend of mind apparently ceased to exist. I know this because his Facebook profile was gone. And as we all know, if you don’t exist on Facebook you don’t exist. Fortunately, I got a Friend request from someone with the exact same name and a profile picture that was shockingly similar to my departed friend’s. So I don’t think that the old guy will be missed.

As for the episode itself… I need to think on it more before sharing my thoughts.

UPDATE: Uh oh, the third website I went to was Galley Slaves, where they had a post up about the season finale of Fringe, which I have not yet seen.

A while back, Stan (OneSTDV) wrote a post about odd and unusual baby names and what they mean:

But as with most SWPL phenomenon, this younger cohort is mirroring black behavior in a parallel opposition to mainstream white culture. Extreme Hollywood examples such as “Apple”, “Suri”, and “Pilot Inspektor” reflect a growing trend amongst the SWPL class. These effete urbanites eschew mainstream/traditional choices in favor of “unique” and “special” names like Aiden, Elijah, Jayden, Nevaeh, Makayla, and Hannah. Are these choices outrageous? Not really, but they represent a conscious effort to individualize their children by opposing “boring” names that harbor historical sentiment.

I think that there is something to what he’s saying, but I think that he over-universalizes it. Frequently the names are not attempts at individuality at all but are simply following the pack. They heard a name, they like it, they apply it to their child. At least, I believe that’s the case for a lot of the names that he mentions. Elijah and Hannah are in the Bible and names don’t go back much further than that. The fact that they have a sudden resurgence has a lot more to do with herd behavior than an individuality banner.

I think for some of the really original names, that goes under the individuality banner. I don’t know how much of that is actual hostility towards middle America and what is not. When it comes to African-Americans, it obviously plays a role. That they would be unenthusiastic about perpetuating names from a culture with whom they have had a historically contentious relationship is no surprise. With swipples, I think it’s more of a mixed thing. I think some do want to distance themselves from middle America, though I have to say that it has always been thus. Names work their way down the SES-chain. In some cases, it’s less about differentiating from Middle America as it is differentiating from People Poorer Than You. The ultimate rebellion against middle America would be to adopt names that are a poke in the eye of their perceived enemy. If they really wanted to state their opposition to American culture, they’d adopt black names. Few, however, do. That’s why I think it has more to do with basic class dynamics than it does a desire to differentiate themselves from one particular group (”Middle America”). Even though it would not be inappropriate, I would be surprised if we have a whole lot of white Baracks graduating high school 20 years from now. And that guy is not only hated by the people they are supposed t0 be hating, he’s the President of the United States.

And another puncture in the theory is that it’s not just poor blacks and rich white swipples that are adopting these names. The first time I was introduced to a lot of outlandish names, it was in… Deseret. Not rich. Very white. Not hostile to middle America. 70% Republican. And no, they weren’t specifically Mormon names. Indeed, it wasn’t just the Mormons doing it.

Heather Horn from The Atlantic has another interesting post on “original baby names” in which it points out… they’re not that original. Not just insofar as they’re copying others by trying to break the baby norm, but the names follow certain patterns:

You end up with those six names that rhyme with Aidan in the top 100 names of the 2000s, and 38 of them, from Aaden to Zayden, in the top 1,000. The irony is that classic English names such as George and Edward, Margaret and Alice — the names that used to be standard-bearers — all have distinctive sounds. They aren’t prisoners to phonetic fashion; each of them sounds instantly recognizable. Contemporary names, by contrast, travel in phonetic packs. More than a third of American boys now receive a name ending in the letter N. (In decades past, the most popular boys’ names were more evenly split between a number of endings, including D, L, S and Y.)

This strikes at the one reason that I am ambivalent to unique names. Basically, there is value in throwing more names into the mix. As someone whose had name(s) shared with classmates throughout school, I can appreciate the diminished confusion by adding a Laetwyn in with a Lenny. Of course, it’s never worked out that way and the result is that you get classes with 27 Jennifers (a name that was not all that common before) and 15 Jasons. But I thought that the names that were punched up at least offered an alternative to that. Even they, though, have become entirely contrived.

Memo to Mozilla,

It’s great that you’re doing all of this legwork about how to improve Firefox. I have an alternate proposal: before worrying about improving, fix whatever the heck is wrong with it! It’s finally reached the point that I can barely recommend Firefox to anyone anymore. It’s not like it used to be with few other options. Internet Explorer has suddenly become a pretty good browser. Google Chrome is pretty cool, too, and is expanding it’s plug-ins at a pretty rapid clip. Meanwhile, it’s gotten to the point that if my computer has stopped responding with reasonable diligence, closing Firefox is the first thing I do and it fixes the problem 90% of the time. Even right now, with only 14 tabs open and a window I opened just a few hours ago (and no instances of Adobe Flash open), you are taking up 65% of my CPU usage and nearly a gigabyte of RAM. I know I type fast, but I do not type that fast. This is unacceptable. It did not used to be this way.

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Memo to Plantronics,

Your Explorer 330 Bluetooth headset is the best Bluetooth headset the market has seen before or sense. Why, oh, why, did you stop making it?

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Memo to Verizon,

Just because I am now your customer does not mean I have decided to stop hating you.

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Memo to Garmin GPS Maker,

I wish you would allow me to set View Map as a default. Instead, you put up a screen asking if I want to View Map or Find Route. It’s a fair question. Sometimes I do want to Find Route and other times I just want to View Map. However, if I want to Find Route I can hit the screen an extra time to get to that menu. Really. I can. It’s not likely to create any greater a safety risk because if I am going to find a route I am going to be focused on the GPS anyway. Anyway, while sometimes I want to Find Route and sometimes I want to View Map, I never want the device to simply ask the question indefinitely. At the very least, switch to the map after two minutes of no response. Or add a feature for it to turn off. Cause sometimes I don’t want to use the GPS, and sometimes I want to Find Route, and sometimes I want to View Map, but I repeat I never want that question just sitting there indefinitely.

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Memo to Bloggers and Website Administrators,

Unless you’re actually updating your blog every five minute, you do not need the blog to refresh every five minutes. I can hit F5 for myself.

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Memo to Electronics Makers Everywhere

Stop the LED abuse! Do not underestimate the power of LED! The power splitter for my car has an LED that lights up the entire car at night. My old Pocket PC docking station had an LED so powerful I had to place black electrical tape over it and it’s still distracting.

Ever wonder what goes through the minds of cows? I see a lot of them on my route. The other day I found a valley where I get data coverage on my phone in a generally-black area. I pulled over to an area on the side of the road and surfed away for a bit on a personal break. The cows just stood there looking at me. The next day I did the same and they completely ignored me. Okay, I figure, they saw me yesterday and I am no longer a curiosity or oddity. But then the next day I was suddenly all fascinating again. Today while I was taking a break, the whole lot of cows were having a… well… cow about something. I don’t know what, but they were all mooing for no descernable reason.

One of the attendees of my church growing up, Humboldt Ford was something of a local big to-do. He was a black man that had to overcome a lot to get where he got. Raised in the South, in order to get an appointment to a military academy he had to get an endorsement from a congressperson from the midwest. He made an interesting point about his experiences in the South and in the North. He said that being in the North made him a lot more nervous when he was younger. Why? Because in the South, as unacceptable as the rules were, he knew what they were. With gritted teeth, he could follow them. He knew what restrooms to use. He knew what he could and could not say. In the North, a lot of people had a lot more liberal attitudes and he could do a lot more. The problem was that the rules would be unevenly applied and what was acceptable in one place would get him hurled epithets and threats in another. So he ended up following the rules of the South wherever he was.

The above story should not be considered an apology for the South. On the whole, we had to reach the inconsistency of the North as a middle ground to minorities being able to do everything they’re rightfully allowed to do today.

Rather, it reminds me of some of the values of social norms. The most obvious value is when they encourage good behavior. Few would contest that there is value in that except to the extent to which we can agree what “good behavior” consists of. Norms also hold great value in those with the influence to be able to set them. I mean, you get to tell people to do what you want! But sometimes the norms are pretty neutral. Or they can be extremely negative, grossly unfair validating behavior that should be unacceptable. But when that’s the case, the problems are with the norms themselves instead of their existence.

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? What about those norms, however, that are either completely arbitrary or difficult to really justify on an objective basis? Those kinds of these where we look at the people trying to enforce them and want to say “Oh, come on, just deal.”

When Mom was raised, it was common for young ladies to go to finishing school where they would learn how properly to be a lady. A good portion of the instruction there involves teaching things that are, in the end, of pretty minimal importance. The objective rationale for never putting your elbows on the table or holding your fork just so are pretty weak.

Fashion norms are themselves are often completely arbitrary. How should you dress? Well it changes from one decade (or shorter) to the next. We judge one another on how we dress not by any objective criteria but rather by how it fits in to a bunch of arbitrary norms. Middle-aged conservative folks see a kid with a dog collar and role their eyes even though a collar is objectively not much different from a necklace. And the kid wears the collar precisely because she wants to be seen that way (whether she admits it or not). All of these communications take place because of shared norms. Arbitrary ones.

In the last half-century or so, there has been a gradual shift away from respecting cultural norms and considering their arbitrariness to be a reason to ignore them. Society obviously has not succeeded in this venture, as the collar demonstrates, but significant headway has been made.

This benefits the individual insofar as they can look, dress, and act as they prefer with far less harassment than they might have seen in yesteryear. This is the upside. The downside, however, is that with loosened cultural norms, it becomes much more difficult for people to know how to behave in the most socially acceptable way. It creates a sort of chaotic landscape.

Dressing and acting however you want, even when you’re not hurting anyone else, will never be entirely okay. There will always be a segment of the population that wants its norms. There will always be a segment of the population that considers what they and those around them do - whatever they and those around them do - to be normal. These are variations as to what has always been the case.

But one thing that is done is that in a void of shared, arbitrary norms of acceptable behavior, acceptable behavior can be conveniently defined and redefined and enforced in an even more arbitrary manner. So in the old way of thinking, wearing a hat indoors was impolite. In the new way of thinking, it’s polite. Until someone you don’t like does it, then you can suddenly decide to enforce that norm as you talk about him behind his back with a bunch of friends that can’t really remember or don’t care that they have done the same. And even if it’s pointed out to them, they can draw whatever arbitrary distinctions that they want.

At least when society draws its arbitrary norms and distinctions, it’s something collectively agreed upon by a group of (granted, wholly unrepresentative) people. People can write a book about it. People that want to know what to do in “polite company” can read that book. It can be taught in finishing school. While these norms were typically written by the privileged, it gave the outsiders an opportunity to learn and abide by them. They probably wouldn’t get it right, but they could try.

In a world where arbitrary norms are derided, they rules can be written and rewritten as often as is convenient for the keep the walls as erected as possible between acceptable people doing acceptable things and unacceptable people doing unacceptable things. Dressing correctly shifts away from standards that can be adhered to and be defined entirely by who is and is not engaging in them. By the time people far down the social pole get word, you can change it all over again. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as communication has increased, fashion not-quite-norms shift faster and faster to the point that it’s impossible to keep up.

By and large, chaos benefits the powerful. Kids in black and red shirts saying “ANARCHY RULEZ!” are often the very losers who would fare the worst in a more anarchic environment. Rather than creating an environment where the norms of the least among us would be regarded as just as legitimate as those among the most powerful, it creates a system where acceptable behavior is defined precisely around who is doing what. Even if there are no right and wrong things, people will make darn sure there are right and wrong people.

We can’t bring down barriers and norms until and unless we can actually get people on board. When being considered too judgmental (even and especially on arbitrary things) is a bad thing, you get people that quietly judge (which is unfair to the judged because they don’t even know how they are falling short) and you get those that make a big point of judging to be disagreeable and to register their protest at their preferred state of affairs being challenged. The latter folks are often asshats by nature, thus further silencing the first group.

Of course, when a social norm is affirmatively wrong and needs to be challenged, you have to plow forward. It’s hard to argue that a period in time where Humboldt Ford doesn’t entirely know how to act isn’t worth it for Hum Ford to accept a high-level appointment in the administration of the first black president. When a social norm is affirmatively right, it should be defended. In the in between, though? Sometimes having arbitrary-but-harmless rules is better than not.

Last week I was spotlighting some bad press that Sprint was getting. Verizon was getting some bad press by pursuing an $18,000 charge on data usage from a single month. On one hand, it’s obvious that the family screwed up and I believe Verizon when they say that the family should have known what the bill would look like. But seriously. $18,000 because they neglected to sign up for a $30 plan? Well, Verizon finally backed off… but decided to do so in a manner that will destroy the customer’s credit rating.

William Shatner is worth nearly $600,000,000 dollars and largely has Priceline to credit for it. Seems a little ridiculous until you consider that he took a chance on stock options rather than simply demanding money up front. Apparently, pre-priceline, he was living in a trailer making only a little money on party appearances here and there.

We tend to think of television’s affect on culture in the negative, but there’s an argument to be made that soap operas are making the lives of women better.

The most recent election in the United Kingdom has put the issue of fair democracy back into regular conversation. The New Scientist makes a great point that there is no fair system. It goes back to an idea that’s been riding around my head more and more loudly, which is that fairness itself is inherently subjective.

How the economy is affecting our movie choices. More than just economics, this is an area where it will really be quite interesting to see what, if any, effects piracy has. It’s the same sort of thing. The potential is there to force studios to become much, much more conservative on what movies they will greenlight.

A star high school athlete in Texas was actually 22.

In an article I’m stunned that Half Sigma has not capitalized on, SMU is paying firms to hire their law school grads.

The Internet makes up happier.

I signed a deal with the Devil. The contract included a provision that I can change my mind in thirty days. The Devil is nothing if not reasonable.

When I last visited Galaxy Mobile, a regional wireless carrier about to be snapped up by AT&T, the clerk commented that he hadn’t seen me in a while and he had wondered if I’d gone to The Dark Side. I laughed because I was in the middle of choosing between Galaxy Mobile and Frontier Cellular. Verizon was not under consideration. The truth is that I had stopped stopping by the Galaxy store because the clerk had expressed some frustration over my constant questions without actually signing a contract. Of course, I was asking these question precisely to do decide who to sign with. And speaking of the contract, Galaxy refused to let me see one until I was ready to sign it. I was able to catch it online, though.

I could understand his frustration at my indecisiveness. I was getting frustrated with it myself. On the one hand, Galaxy Mobile had good phone policies (no data plan required with data phone), the best data coverage around, national coverage without ratio quotas, a handful of numbers you can call without eating into your minutes, and was soon the be bought out by my favored carrier. They also had phones that were going to be useless as soon as the changeover occurred, requiring a significant investment with an expiration date of under a year. On the other hand, Frontier Cellular had better policies (they use GSM and don’t lock their phones at all), had rollover minutes, would require no phone investment since my AT&T phones would work fine with their network, and was the kind of local business I was more enthusiastic about supporting. They were too local, though, as they only had home coverage in Arapaho and Minnetaria and they had usage quotas that allowed them to drop me if I spent too much time out of Minnetaria.

It was really a close call. However, for reasons I won’t get into AT&T kind of pissed me off so Galaxy lost their primary advantage in that I was going to switch to AT&T as soon as they let me. I decided to go with Frontier, which was about the same price. Except when I went to their website, it was no longer about the same price. It was 60% more expensive than it had been the previous month! Plus they got rid of rollover minutes. So then I decided I was going to go with Galaxy… only to discover that Galaxy had raised their rates and gotten rid of the calling network option.

Then, out of nowhere, I heard the specifics on what Verizon was offering in terms of employee discounts. It was really quite remarkable. Suddenly, Verizon was cheaper than either Galaxy or Frontier and not by just a little. In fact, their prices were suddenly comparable to AT&T’s, making my likely switch (once I got over being really pissed off at them) seem less imminent. The question I had to ask myself at that point was how much I hated Verizon. Enough to cut off my nose to spite my face? Would refusing to sign with Verizon despite it being in my best interest be a sign of sticking by my principles or being petty? How could I sign with Verizon when I had flipped into a rage when AT&T emulated just one of the policies that makes me dislike Verizon so?

What AT&T had done was revise their policies so that if you had a smartphone, whether it was subsidized or not or whether you were under contract or not, you had to have a data plan. Now, I planned to have a data plan anyway, but I absolutely loathe that they give me no choice. Frankly, it’s none of their damn business what phone I choose to use as long as they’re not subsidizing it. But once I calmed down, I realized that even with this policy change they were still better than Verizon because at least AT&T will let you use any phone you want and since they have the International phone that includes a whole lot of phone options.

Ultimately, though, that wasn’t enough. I wrote AT&T a nasty letter explaining that they may or may not have lost my business but they have lost my loyalty. And in this particular case, that meant that I wasn’t going to wait around for them to come to town. My choice was not between Verizon and AT&T, a competition that AT&T may well have won. It was between Verizon, Galaxy, and Frontier. And tough signing on with either of the latter two probably meant getting AT&T down the line, since AT&T was no longer worth waiting for and because Verizon was offering such a deal, I signed with Verizon. I even let them subsidize my phone since getting the deal required a two year contract anyway.

The upshot is that I got a worldphone that is both GSM and CDMA compatible. With a simple unlock code, I can take my phone over to AT&T if I so choose. If I do so a year from now, I end up having saved money even when accounting for the termination fee. However, after having spent so much time deciding (and failing to decide) on a carrier, it’s not something I relish doing again any time soon. Verizon probably has me two years due to sheer exhaustion.

I’ve been gradually getting better since my whine last week. There is a bit of a lingering cough, but I can finally sleep in the bed again rather than relegating myself to the couch. The combination of the build-up and Arapaho’s extremely dry weather has resulted in an unprecedented number of boogars. I mean seriously, they just keep coming. This, too, is an improvement over what was happening with my nose when I was sick. It’s not just that there was build-up, but the constant dampness in the nose was giving me acne inside the nose, which is not a comfortable feeling.

Clancy has been getting a little more sick as I have been getting better. I can’t claim all the credit for that, though. For a couple days last week, her entire afternoons were spent treating people with symptoms similar to mine. So I choose to blame them.

The subject of gifted and talented programs has been coming up, which reminds me of the story of Lamar Heston and the Superstars program. The Superstars program was a Southfield-Mayne Regional School District invention that took the brightest kids from each of the district’s elementary schools and, once a week, bussed them out to take an afternoon of classes together. West Oak Elementary School had four slots, two for boys and two for girls.

My older brothers are both in the same grade. There was no way that two brothers were going to be chosen for the two slots, so Mom didn’t expect both to get in. She wouldn’t have been surprised if neither got in. She was a bit surprised that of the two Truman boys it was the lower-achieving Oliver that got in rather than Mitch. Ollie was an achiever, but not in any standout sort of way. Indeed, the reason that he was in the same grade as his younger brother was that he was held back a year (for maturity rather than academic reasons, but still). That, however, wasn’t nearly as much of a surprise as the inclusion of Lamar Heston.

The main thing that you need to know about Lamar Heston is that the last time I saw him, two years ago, he worked at Wendy’s. And not because he was a Rick Rosner, not in a position of authority, and not because of any temporary setback. He wasn’t a terrible student, but he had some pretty serious behavioral and attitudinal problems. To say the least. Not only was he working at Wendy’s in his mid-30’s but nobody I know that knows him is surprised that he is working at Wendy’s in his mid-30’s.

Mom was baffled. She was actually somewhat indifferent to her kids getting into the Superstars program because she was concerned about our being too sheltered. But why Ollie over Mitch? And why the hell Lamar? The answer was pretty simple and you have probably already figured it out. Mitch was perfectly behaved and Ollie was a chatterbox with an attention problem. Oh, and Lamar was a disciplinary nightmare. Why the hell should the teacher put up with Ollie and (to a much, much greater extent) Lamar if she doesn’t have to? Lamar was black and possibly the only black kid there and there was nobody in the Superstars program that was going to single him out as undeserving of being there.

The next year Mitch and a similarly bright student were invited into the Superstars program. Mom declined.

When I was going through, they actually had three boys and three girls. The main reason being is that they couldn’t just accept the Weatherby Brothers and they couldn’t pick between the identical twins.

The LA Times has a story about female bloggers touting the “traditional” housewife lifestyle.

None of these are blogs we read around here. But they seem like kind of a mainstream female counterpart to some of the male voices in the HBD-sphere. Where they imagine that if women would just be chaste, docile, marry young, we’d all have this relaxed happy world with no career worries, no financial stress, no interpersonal conflict.

One of them isn’t even married. And it goes without saying she doesn’t have kids, if you read her stuff, because no one with kids has the time to live like that:

And then there’s Taryn Cox, who isn’t afraid to put it all out there, unabashedly writing about stereotypically uxorial topics ranging from themed baby showers and creating her own cocktail-style dresses to the art of ironing a newspaper and how to clean with vodka at a blog she has titled TarynCoxTheWife.com.

Cox’s posts showcase classic glamour and gorgeous parties as songs such as “Sunny Side of the Street” play in the background.

“I’ve always just been so completely fascinated by the idea of marriage and dedication,” says Cox, a trim 26-year-old with a penchant for pastels and an e-mail address that starts with “stepfordwife.”

No, she’s not married and she doesn’t have kids, but “this [blog] is for those dreams and fantasies. I believe my own vision. I believe there’s an art to being a good wife.”

I’m with Lady Raine on this one, I think most of this stuff is way, waaaay down on the list of what most guys care about. Not because of feminism, not because it’s right or wrong, but because it’s about everyday life and how you get through it. Having your wife practice her penmanship and write beautiful thank-you notes is just not going to improve a man’s quality of life much. There are better uses of her time for your mutual benefit. And most of these little domestic arts are ways to drop a lot of cash. What man ever said wistfully, “Gee, I wish my wife would shop more?”

So why do so many men seem to share similar 50’s-TV-flavored fantasies about subservient, domesticated women? Because what it really is, is a fantasy about being rich. It’s a fantasy about having all the time and money you want — hence the ability to focus on garnish like penmanship and thank-you notes. You can’t live on a diet of garnish. You couldn’t in the 1950s, either. That’s why no one actually has a wife like this.

At its worst, it’s a hysterical blindness to the real world. Or maybe a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, where you think if you focus on tiny details (”MUST have newspaper ironed!”), you can control your real problems.

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From taryncoxthewife.com

The perfect wife finds the energy to pick up the piles of clothes, socks strewn about and the glasses that never make it back to the sink. Instead of clearing up after everyone and feeling like a maid, the perfect wife is proud of her home. It will drive her nuts to have the little messes here and there. She cleans up without a second thought as to who did it last time or why everyone around her can’t seem to walk to the kitchen sink.

Except, in real life, he’d probably rather you come to bed instead of staying up until 1 a.m. to finish the dishes from that fancy meal you made. And tomorrow, someone has to do them — or take care of the kids while you do. Even in marriage, there’s no free lunch.

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OK, this sums up the problem perfectly: “Women who might inspire THE WIFE would be: Jacqueline Kennedy, Grace Kelly and June Clever [sic].”

The first two were married to very rich men. They had extensive domestic staffs. Grace Kelly was not a housewife, she was an actress. And for crying out loud, June Cleaver IS NOT A REAL PERSON.