I voted recently in the primary. I knew that I lived in a Republican county, but was somewhat surprised to discover that there is not a single Democrat running for office in Dent County. And nobody is running for County Attorney on either ticket.

I’ve been watching a number of cop shows lately. It’s getting to the point that if there is a Catholic priest involved, it’s a plot twist if pedophilia isn’t an angle.

I wish that Microsoft would let me just update all of the Windows updates required over a sustained period of time. Like, I say “update to current” on my laptop and let it sit in the corner over a weekend and then it will be done. I want to be updated and I can go a while without using it, but it can’t seem to just do one without the other and I don’t want to have to hand-hold it.

I upgraded one of my laptops to Vista and that thing is going to be upgrading until next year. Plus, it’s Vista. Wish me luck.

I’m going to keep saying this until I am blue in the face, but that Google Docs cannot handle documents greater than 500kb makes it impossible to take it seriously. Come on. 500kb? From the same people that trailblazed 2GB worth of email space?!

I would be remiss not to point out iPhone’s latest failing. But it’s not a failing, says Steve Jobs. As long as you hold it with three fingers while standing on one leg and hopping up and down it works perfectly. Non-issue. Somehow this is AT&T’s fault.

Arapaho, like Deseret, does not rely on air conditioning the same way that the south and southwest does. We happened to get a house with AC in it anyway. If the last few days have taught me anything, it’s that air conditioning will not be optional in the future.

Two days in a row I’ve gone to the local barber shop and two days in a row I’ve been told that they can’t see me today. They don’t take appointments. Maybe I’ll just grow my hair out shaggy. When it gets cooler, that is.

It seems that whenever I am travelling, I do so in bunches. I’m heading out to Delosa as we speak to spend time with relatives and see friends in Colosse. Then, two weeks after I get back, I’ll be flying out to the east coast for my cousin’s wedding. I’ll go from not having seen my parents in six months to seeing them twice on two different coasts!

I am leaving tonight for a return trip back to Delosa for a week or two and will only have intermittent web access during that time. Heading to Genesis to spend some time with my folks and the in-laws. After that, I’ll be in Colosse for a spell. No access in Genesis and I should be kept pretty busy in Colosse. I’ve got a backlog of posts and some time to write more on the plane, though, so there’ll be new content on a daily or bi-daily basis.

Back when I was in high school, I was driving a bunch of people home from a party. This included drunk teenagers. Underage teenagers. There were so many of them that they were laying on top of one another. Forget seatbelt laws. One of the little pricks in the back decided that it would be a hilarious time to use some flashy-thing he got that emitted a flashing blue light. I wanted to throttle him before I dropped him off.

—-

Web wrote a post a while back about LED Abuse, a subject that has taken a particularly importance to me in recent weeks.

The offending electronic right now is a power-splitter adapter for my car. It’s a neat device that I got at a good price. It even has a USB port, which I am presently putting on cell phone duties. The problem is that the LED on that sucker lights the whole car at night. It’s not as bright as the overhead light, but it’s much sharper. I thought that was bad, but it’s gotten worse. Now the light is going out. This would be good news, but until it burns out it’s basically flashing off and on. Off and on. Off and on.

When you’re driving, when you see a flashing blue light, this is cause for a heart attack. I wonder if I could sue…

A fascinating story about how MetaFilter helped combat human trafficking. Well, helped out some of the trafficked, anyway.

Richard Florida and Nate Silver think that we’re coming down from the peak of our car-centric culture. Their evidence is pretty thing, though. People under 18 are driving less because there are more restrictions put on their licenses and parents are getting more and more paranoid. The big about declining mileage between 1995 and 2009 is interesting, though.

Fanboyism and Brand Loyalty. Am I the only one that finds myself in a position of really wishing I could like a product but being unable to climb aboard? I want to use Linux, but can’t really. I want to switch to Android, but can’t, really.

If a casino machine malfunctions, why doesn’t the winner get to keep the proceeds? If the machine breaks in the other direction, the casino keeps the proceeds because nobody knows there is a problem (or they don’t until it’s too late). Fair is fair, I say. The McMahons should be millionaires.

Then again, who needs to be a millionaire? Apparently all it takes is $60k a year.

A blog about a guy watching Lost backwards. I wonder if it makes more or less sense that way? Not sure I’m going to find out as he is not being very snappy about it.

Will vanity press mark the end of the publishing industry? I doubt it. Publishers are too valuable as filters. It does have the potential to shake things up, though.

China’s road to economic world dominance promises to be a rocky one.

If America doesn’t like soccer, it’s cause of racism. But if they take enough interest to route for their team? Jingoism. {Via}

Read no further if the subject of bowel movements, toilets, and plungers puts you off.

As I’ve mentioned before, up until a couple years ago having a purely solid BM was a rarity for me. Since going on my fiber diet, it’s become pretty common. Also, toilets have moved in the direction of less powerful to conserve water to save on water bills and due to environmental concerns.

This has created a game of sorts.

If after your deposit, you flush the toilet and it all goes down without incident, the toilet wins and you lose.

If you have to flush twice with no or minimal toilet paper (using toilet paper on the first flush is cheating), you score a mild victory.

When you break out the plunger, you have won handily.

But… you know the game of Hearts? For those of you that don’t, in Hearts the goal is to avoid getting hearts (and the Queen of Spades) in your pile. You get a point for each heart and 13 points for the queen and the person with the fewest points wins. However, if you get all of the hearts and the queen, you get zero points and everyone else gets 26. It’s called Shooting the Moon or Running the Deck.

Well, there’s a scenario in the Toilet Game like that. If you flush and the toilet gets overwhelmed out of sight and the next time you flush you end up with (thankfully not brown, but still icky) water overflowing and flooding the bathroom and kitchen… you can call that a victory. In reality, though, the toilet just Ran the Deck and kicked your patootie.

Yeah, I had my patootie kicked. Fortunately, the deposit was far enough down that the water that overflowed was not obviously contaminated (with #2 and fortunately it was a very light #1 that instigated this) as long as you look at it as the “out of sight, out of mind” sort of way.

I’ve tried to convince myself that I defeated the toilet with mere urination, but it’s really hard to position this as any sort of victory.

Bakadesuyo points to a study I’d heard about a while back that fell into the “no duh” category:

In all three data sets people in self-assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less happy than unmarried people, and people in self-assessed good marriages are even more happy than the literature reports. We also find that the results differ importantly between women and men, with members of the former sex showing a greater range of responses to marriage quality than do men. A final set of results is that, when marriage quality is controlled for, the apparent marriage effects on other outcome variables, such as self reported health and trust, change significantly.

This is a great argument to those who say “Better to be in a miserable marriage than single!”

Except that I don’t really hear people saying that. The closest I hear is along the lines of The Case for Settling. Whether that qualifies as the same argument is dependent largely on what that statement means. It can mean anything from “Find someone! Anyone!” to “Don’t expect a partner to be absolutely perfect or meet every criteria.”

It’s worth pointing out a couple of things, though. The first is that this is sort of at odds with some studies I’ve read about the effects of divorce on happiness. Namely, those in unhappy marriages that get divorced are unlikely to be any happier than those in unhappy marriages that stick it out. I say it’s “at odds” but it’s a contradiction that can be explained. First, the reason that the divorce studies say what they do is that when it comes to divorce to have loved and lost is not better than to have loved at all. Divorce disrupts one’s life far more than never having married (whose life is, by definition, un-disrupted). Compounding this is that there are often kids involved and dealing with kids between two parents is stressful. The other factor is that marriages that are unhappy in one stage become happier later on. In this vein, it’s quite possible that some of the unhappy people in poor marriages will be happier people in better marriages down the line. Or not in many other cases.

Another factor is self-selection of single people and people in unhappy marriages. The general studies that find that married people are generally happier than unmarried people can be at least partially accounted for that married people are, in general, more likely to be more functional on the whole than unmarried people. People that are highly disfunctional are unlikely to get married. So that’s going to skew the data somewhat. But this also applies to people in poor marriages. They are, generally speaking, more likely to suffer from depression and be generally dysfinctional than people in happier marriages. You would think that they would be a better group than those that were never able to marry at all, but a lot of people these days choose not to marry for reasons other than not being able to find a mate. Really, though, even if you account for that there is simply no denying that being in an unhappy marriage is a very, very stressful thing.

It’s important to note, though, that the original points made by the general studies of marriage and happiness (that do not differentiate between happy and unhappy marriages) stand insofar as enough people fall outside of the “poor marriage” category that one is, statistically speaking, probably more likely to be happy in a marriage than not. If they end up in a poor marriage, they are likely to be unhappy, but this is a subset that few enough people fall into that it doesn’t affect the overall data.

The thing about marriage is that it is a personal and highly variable thing. One marriage is not like the other. Nor is one individual like others. Someone that is generally unhappy is unlikely to be made happy by marriage as they are more likely to end up in the “poor marriage” category. Similarly, someone temperamentally unsuited for marriage should not get married just cause because they too are more likely to end up in the “poor marriage category.”

I think the same general thing is true when it comes to parenthood. A lot of people cite studies that parents tend to be happier than non-parents and that, in the aggregate, having children decreases happiness. Unless there is some flaw with the methodology of which I am unaware, you go with the information you have. However, some people look at this the same way they might look at marriage data and assume that all parents are created equal, that a happy parent would be even happier without children and an unhappy childless person would be even unhappier with children.

This could be true, but we don’t know it to be. Tell a couple that tries and fails to conceive for years that they are really happier for it is not only a crummy thing to do but probably wrong. If you look at the subset of parents that really, really want children and have them, they are likely a happier lot than those that want them equally much and don’t have them. And then of course you have those with children that never particularly wanted them. Those are likely to be a pretty unhappy lot as well.

You could, in fact, look at the data and suggest that a number of people that have kids do so to fill a void in their life and the children do not do so. Really, though, I think this is something of a cop-out.

I do, however, think that the data is skewed by people that did not realize until it was too late that having children was not a bad idea for them. If you’re married and do not have them, you get badgered about it. There also comes a point where the social scene around you changes and suddenly you’re somewhat socially penalized for not being a part of the parenthood club. If, despite this, you are still adament about not wanting children, there is a really good chance that you are making the right decision. They made a more conscious choice. They have a better idea of what they want.

The thing about having children is that it is the social default. People that don’t have a firm idea of whether or not they really want to be parents are more than otherwise going to go with that default decision. People who don’t have strong ideas are particularly susceptible to social pressure. And when a husband and wife have different desires on whether or not to have children, it’s the partner that wants to do what everyone else is doing that is likely to wind. They have society on their side. That’s why, I think, more people make the mistake of becoming parents when they shouldn’t than make the mistake of not having children when they really should. And I think it’s people in the former category, across all sorts of social and economic lines, that drag the averages for parents down on the happiness scale.

So what does that mean? It means those that want to have children should not look at the statistics and think that their urges and desires are wrong and/or the path to unhappiness. But as importantly or more importantly, it means that when a couple talks about how they do not want children, their desires should be respected. The tendency of people to tell them that they are wrong or that they will change their minds are more likely to be wrong than right and are basically inviting people to drag down the happiness statistics on parents. And it means that the man or woman that really wants kids, when confronted with a partner that doesn’t, probably ought to be the ones to give in or move on.

It partially pains me to say all of this because my wife and I have a bunch of siblings that do not want children but who we are sure could make good parents. In the case of my brother Mitch, he does want children but married a woman that does not. Of course, we want her to change her mind. But when she says that she would not be happy being a parent, she’s probably right.

Christian Bale has taken some flack for the voice he uses as Batman in the most recent Batman movies. Kevin Conroy, who did the voice in The Animated Series, had some pretty critical things to say about it:

He said: “[Bale is] an excellent actor. He just got steered wrong. Obviously someone should have stopped him and said ‘You sound ridiculous.’ But no one did. As actors, you have to trust the people on the other side of the camera, because you can’t see what’s going on. You’re working in such a vacuum that you can convince yourself that anything is great. So you need a third eye to tell you that you’re way off base. Unfortunately no one stopped him.”
Conroy’s voice in The Animated Series stands out in what is already an amazing cast. His ability to make Bruce Wayne and Batman sound like distinct but credible people is phenomenal. It is compared to that Bale sounds so awful.

That being said, Bale’s voice doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as it annoys others. The difference between Conroy’s Batman voice and Bale’s Batman voice is the difference between a mask that is supposed to look like a face and a mask that does not bother. Bale’s voice sounds pretty much like somebody trying to mask his voice, which in effect is what Bale is doing. On a screen, it sounds goofy, though as a criminal being approached by the mythic Dark Knight, you’re probably too scared to really notice. The most important part, that his voice sounds distinct from Bruce Wayne’s, is accomplished.

Video Below: (more…)

Some people laughed at Kevin Costner testifying before congress that he had a solid way to separate the oil from the water in the gulf. They’re not so much laughing now.

It makes me think of my former boss, Calvin. Calvin was an inventor that made most of his money off the patents. Well, he made money off of engineering and fabrication, but the only reason people hired him to build things was because he was the only person that could make his inventions. Though a man of many flaws, he was (is) a genius.

One of the things that he had been working on was a mechanism to prevent flooding in Colosse. Colosse is particularly prone to flooding, particularly when a hurricane or tropical storm hits. He claims to have figured out a system that, if implemented, would prevent the vast majority of flooding in the city. Furthermore, he wasn’t actually looking to make any money off this invention. He was trying to work through his alma mater, Southern Tech University, and all of the proceeds would have gone to their engineering department. While it’s possible that his plan would not have worked, he very much believed that it would.

But over and over again, he found that nobody (except Southern Tech) was really interested in his ideas. Then-mayor Ron Washington was mostly just interested in digging more ditches and other things that, according to Calvin, only really worked when the flood was never going to be a real problem. It’s all somewhat beyond me, but outside Southern Tech nobody gave it a hearing despite there being millions upon millions of dollars at stake and the city still recovering from Hurricane Adrianne.

Maybe it would have been better if he had been trying to make money off of it because they he might have lobbied Mayor Washington with money (as the contractors for the ditches were surely doing) and that might have worked. Maybe there was some devastating technical flaw that made it unworkable despite the various simulations and tests that were run. Maybe he’s just the wrong messenger, being something of a nut in some respects. Maybe if its website actually worked. Who knows?

Though I’ve never seen Adams play, more than once I’ve heard this song covered as the last song of the last encore, when the frontman is still on the stage and the band has left. It’s an amazing experience.

A year or so ago, I was in the Mindstorm parking lot at 11pm wanting to get home after a very long day. The world stood still when Crayola, my tweener compact, didn’t start. Didn’t try to start. Just sat there. I took a deep breath and said to myself, “Oh, wait…” and a couple minutes later I was pulling out of the parking lot.

Six months or so before that, I was at a gas station in Newcastle, Cascadia, when my car refused to start. I freaked out. Got out of the car and paced around trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. Then it occurred to me. A minute or two later, I was back on the Splinterstate.

About two years before that, I was stuck in Ephesus, a couple hours away from Colosse. I was borrowing Crayola because at the time I had a different car (though same make, model, and year). In a panic, I called Dad since he knew a lot more about the car than I did. He was really worried, but then said, “Wait, have you checked…” and I was back on the road within a few minutes.

Yesterday, I was at a gas station in Meriwether, Arapaho, when Crayola refused to start. I wasn’t too worried, because…

About a month ago, Crayola didn’t start when Clancy was wanting to drive home from work. I went down there, we jump-started it, and it was fine.

Several months before that, Crayola didn’t start, but we jumped it and it was fine.

The fear didn’t start to set in until the gas station attendant tried to jump start me and it didn’t work. It didn’t even try to work. The battery was fine, though, if the lights were any indication. My fear wasn’t all that great, though, because I figured it was jump some piddly problem with the start. The only mechanic in town was closed, though. I was stuck in Meriwether until then. It was a bummer, but I could deal. They pointed me the way to a Super 8 next door. It was the only hotel in sight and it had NO VACANCY posted on the door. I had visions of sleeping in my car in the cool Arapaho weather.

The folks at the gas station were great. They tried to jump me and then when that failed, they let me park in some space they had across the street. And they helped push the car over. So I was not surprised that they continued to be helpful after I told them the Super 8 was closed. There were two more hotels in town, they said. They even called them for me. No vacancy in one, three vacancies in the other. I shuddered when they told the guy of my situation. They had me up a creek and could charge whatever they wanted for a room and I’d have no choice but to pay whatever they asked. Always better to sound like you’ve got options. The clerk offered to drive me over. I told her that was great but that I would need to collect some stuff from my car first and buy some provisions from the convenience store to get me through the night.

Fortunately, I didn’t need to buy any food because I had gotten a to-go Santa Fe Chicken Salad from Applebee’s. I’d had a sizeable burrito for lunch and had intended to bring it home and refrigerate it. However, having guessed that there would be no fridge in the hotel room I was going to need to eat it that night. I figured that eventually I would get hungry.

I couldn’t have been more wrong about the hotel guy knowing about my situation. He actually gave me a discount for the night. And he had a dog that I could pet while he was punching data into the computer. Unfortunately, I realized only after I was settled in that I had my contacts in and no glasses handy. There were glasses in the car, though, and maybe some contact pods, too. Unfortunately, my days of wearing contacts overnight have long since passed. So I had to walk about a mile each way to get the dang things from my car.

Nobody in Meriwether was anything but really nice to me, though it was hard not to notice some patterns in the town. I would say right-wing patterns, but that isn’t entirely right. I saw no fewer than three (I think it was four) Ron Paul for President signs in yards and windows. One car and one house (and it wasn’t a car in front the same house) had “9/11 Was An Inside Job” bumper stickers (it was on the window of the house) and a third bumper sticker on a car for Infowars, a web site run by 9/11 conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The local church had a sign that said “STOP SOCIALISM NOW!” and the community rec center saying “All we want is our freedom” or something to that effect.

Where, I had to ask myself, had I put my Census Bureau name badge? If it was visible in the car, I would have to remove it from sight. No way I wanted these folks to know I was a Bean Counter for Obama. Yeah, I wasn’t seriously afraid. But still.

The hotel had a bar attached to it. The bartender was the same guy that checked me in and the bar was kind of open whenever someone came to the front desk and asked it to be. The beers were cheap and the guy and I chatted for a while. A few things I did not consider:

(a) Weighing less means one can hold less alcohol.

(b) It was about 10:00 and I hadn’t eaten since noon.

(c) I hadn’t had a drink in six months or so, so I had absolutely no tolerance to begin with.

I was stumbling out of the bar after two drinks. It wasn’t such a bad thing, though, because without melatonin I was worried about falling asleep.

The room was something to behold. Non-smoking sign aside, the cigarette stench was almost unbearable. At least, I thought it was cigarette stench. The hotel advertised that it had Dish Network, but did not advertise that it was something I would have to order. I had kind of looked forward to watching Law & Order. As it turned out (of course), there was an episode on Fox and an episode of Cold Case on CBS besides. I had to turn the AC off to hear it, though I considered it a plus that they had AC to begin with. Around midnight I just couldn’t stand the aroma of the place. My eyes were watering. That was when I realized that the problem couldn’t have been cigarette smoke. I’d been in some pretty smokey bars and never had it been a real problem for my eyes unless I had my contacts in. It was a combination of cigarette and cat odor. And it was a kind of cat I am allergic to. But by this point it there were no rooms available. I opened the window to see if that would help. When I woke up the next morning, my eyes were swollen and too red and tender to put my contacts in until I got out of there for a while.

It was a short night’s sleep and I walked a very long mile back to my car (which, in addition to being across the street from the gas station, was also across the street from the town mechanic). Fortunately, the sun was hiding behind some clouds so the lack of sunglasses wasn’t a problem. I say it was a “long” walk because I was feeling pretty sick. I am not sure if it was the beer or the salad I’d had for dinner after the beer, but it was something originating at my stomach (my allergies improved immediately with the fresh air).

By this point I was really worried about the car. My initial confidence that it was something simple had long-since been replaced by a fear that it wasn’t. Why would it just suddenly stop working like that? I was pretty sure the timing belt had been replaced, but miraculously that was what I was thinking rather than the situations that I opened this post with. The mechanic was dumbfounded. He had never seen a car with a good battery and an engine that had been good enough to drive a couple hundred miles without registering any complaint could simply refuse to even try to start up.

The thing about Crayola is that it has a transponder key. That was what Dad told me about when I was in Ephesus. Well, told me about again, that is. He mentioned it before he even loaned me the car. We always keep the thing in the socket, but I am a big guy in a small car and I sometimes knock it loose. It is almost always among the first things I look at when the car doesn’t start. For some reason, this time I didn’t. I think I was so prepared for the car to break down that I didn’t look at the most simple and obvious solution. It’s a good thing that I am a software troubleshooter and not an automobile troubleshooter. The mechanic was understanding and only charged me $25, which was nice since he had to push the car with his ATV up the service ramp. He could have gotten away with more.

After that, I ate breakfast at a restaurant recommended by the gas station clerk and had one of the best omelets I have had in a very, very long time. Perhaps ever. The wisdom of eating eggs the morning after having gotten inebriated eludes me. But I was in the mood and willing to risk it. My stomach will forgive me eventually.

So anyway, the good news is that Crayola is doing just fine. The bad news is that my wife married a moron.

A conversation about gay marriage gravitated towards the question of what marriage should be and the tension between marriage of passion and marriage of commitment regardless of passion. Jason Kuznicki complains that only gays get taken down a peg for getting married for “love” and is suspicious of this rationale. Rufus F counters that straights do get it, though differently. What happens is that newlyweds get junk about the honeymoon phase and how they’re not “really married” until, well, until they can’t stand each other?

I know where Rufus is coming from on this. There seems to be the need of people to be intrusively realistic when it comes to the lives of others. Killjoys. I have complained in the past about writers panels whose first advice when it comes to being professional writers is “Don’t!” Not because they don’t want the competition, but because folks have these romantic and unrealistic ideas of what being a writer is. And many writers do I’m sure. But the advice, as put, is monumentally unhelpful. The only purpose is to kill the enthusiasm that the speaker apparently lost some time ago

And so it goes with love and marriage. It can be helpful to tell a high school kid who has his first girlfriend to relax and that “this too shall pass,” but some feel the odd need to tell them that it isn’t really love. And looking back, it isn’t generally. It’s not adult love. But you know what? They’ll discover that for themselves. Don’t be an ass just to be right.

When I was working in Estacado, I many of my peers were of the age where they were getting married. In the nearly two years I was there, at least a half-dozen colleagues got married. Each and every time there was an already-married employee who felt the need to tell the guys that once they get married the sex stops and the wife becomes a pain in the ass. At some point I wanted to smack the guy and say “Dude, I get it, you’re in a sexless marriage and you married a frigid woman. I get it. Now cut this spit out.” If I were feeling particularly mean and brave, I would have suggested that he brought it on himself by marrying a super hot woman (which he did) that likely settled for him.

Leaving aside for a moment that the notion of marriage being the end of sex is statistically unsound, it’s purely unhelpful advice. It’s mostly just inappropriate venting as with my former colleague or sometimes, when stated by single guys, sour grapes and/or a blind justification for their lifestyle choices.

There are two cities of any significant size near Callie, Alexandria and Redstone. Redstone is a little closer, so when I need a “big city thing” like a Walmart, I go to Redstone. My doctor’s appointment, however, was in Alexandria. A lot of people prefer to drive the extra distance to go to Alexandria anyway. I am coming to prefer Redstone and all of is decrepit rustic authenticity to Alexandria’s yuppie charms.

I will say this of Alexandria, though. Toenail polish here is kept to a minimum. Maybe only half the women in open-toed shoes (common in this season) seem to be wearing toenail polish. I applaud this development. Callie has more in the way of nail polish than I would have guessed. Deseret didn’t have it nearly as much and Callie is only a couple hours away from Mocum. I was thinking, hoping, that it was a western thing. Nail polish was less frequent in Estacado, too. It’s nigh-universal in Colosse and Delosa, alas.

I had to drive Crayola, my almost-teenager of an economy car. Since taking on my Census Route, I have been driving Ninjette, Clancy’s fully-teenager (but really quiet and smooth) full-size. Unfortunately, she had to visit a doc in Redstone the same day I had to visit a doc in Alexandria. Since I was the one that arranged this little inconvenience, I volunteered to drive Crayola. It’s good to get some quality time with him before we swap him out in August (we think/hope), though I had gotten quite used to (a) cruise control and (b) the ability to accelerate.

But I’m not really thinking about that as I drive. Instead, I am thinking “Man, I wonder what happens next?!” Tom Clancy audiobooks will do that.

Cartoon Network is apparently prepping a Green Lantern series to accompany the coming movie. Looking forward to the movie, looking forward to the cartoon. The folks at DC Comics will probably use this opportunity to do something drastic to Green Lantern so that anybody that enjoys the movie will find the comic unrecognizable. Yeah, I’m still more than a little agitated that they decided that the successful Batman movies were a great time to dislodge Bruce Wayne as Batman.

The problem with the government going after cell phone carriers for nickel and dime charges for Internet access is that it provides them the perfect excuse to demand that everybody be on a data plan to avoid any confusion. Nevermind that they could simply turn the Internet off.

After killing Mercury, Ford wants Lincoln to go green. But is there that much overlap between luxury car buyers and eco-conscious ones?

Peter Serafinowicz pirates movies. Even ones he is in. There really is some avoidable tension between paying for something inferior compared to getting something superior. I think the long-term trick is to make what they’re paying for good enough that it won’t be worth stealing. I think streaming video is ultimately the solution. I know that for music, a few tweaks from Rhapsody could make music ownership obsolete for all but my most passionate music interests. For videos, casual interests would mean Hulu or Netflix Online but intense interest would mean Blu-Ray or what-have-you. It’s the most sustainable model that comes to mind.

An interesting look{PDF} at cigarettes, black markets, gray markets, and prison.

No great surprise, but in an economy where nobody is hiring, nobody is quitting, either. My father worked for a Defense Department contractor during the Vietnam War, which gave him an out. They completely took advantage of the situation, knowing that none of their employees could quit without losing their draft exemption. The result was that when the war ended, nobody stuck around. I can only hope that some employers taking advantage today will meet the same fate.

San Fransisco is trying to get innovating with parking meter pricing. Some have suggested that this needs to be done with traffic congestion as well. I am a little unsure. The thing about parking is that you can stop and decide if the new price is worth it. For congestion, you can’t really respond to increases or decreases in pricing quite so easily.

All of the universities have playgrounds, but not BYU.

The party’s over. I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life being one of those people who grills chicken breasts and eats salads for my main course. Oh, and white wine spritzers. I’m sure a lot of it is the liquor.

I think I’ve been kidding myself that the type of calories made a difference. This is classy, expensive fat I’m wearing. Sushi fat, foie gras fat, gourmet home cooking fat, fancy cocktails with muddled homegrown herbs fat. And lots of vegetables! Unfortunately, vegetables don’t have negative calories.

I had figured after I had the last baby, the weight was just going to drop off. Or, I’d find all kinds of time to work out on maternity leave. But, no, I’m going to have to waddle back into a courtroom full of Size 2s next week and face the music in whatever suits still fit me.

The times in my life I’ve been thin, I didn’t work all that hard at it. My lifestyle just kind of made it happen. More natural activity; fewer opportunities to eat. I was figuring that eventually, things would shift my way again. I don’t think it’s going to happen. I’m just going to have to be less fun. A low-fat life. Maybe even non-fat.

Isn’t a big part of the good part of being married coming home to a nice meal, with your wife shaking up cocktails? I bet no one fantasizes about coming home to a salad. Well, maybe Phi does. Maybe he’ll give me his Mediterranean Chicken Salad recipe.

If only I were married to this guy. My husband is an ectomorph who jumps rope in the living room at 6 a.m.

The thing about nowadays: Anywhere I go, I’m in good company. I don’t know if there’s anywhere with all skinny people anymore. Maybe Manhattan? But certainly not Los Angeles. Even trendy Los Angeles, even rich Los Angeles. Hollywood, Rodeo Drive*, even the opera. Lots of women of all ages rocking the Meghan McCain look, or more.

————————————————————————–

*I was there buying cheese.

Inflation happens, but it’s truly astonishing what has happened to soft drink prices over the last decade or so. I suppose these things stand out more to me than many others because I live in a world of technology where things tend to get cheaper rather than more expensive over time. But if you look at other food items, it doesn’t seem like they’ve gone up nearly as much as soft drinks.

I remember bottles reached 99 cents. This was significant because it marked the first time that soft drinks were cheaper from a vending machine than a convenience store. Once you accounted for sales tax, anyway. I thought that it was this bizarre anomaly that wouldn’t last. The reason, it seemed to me, was simply that the vending machine people like the nice round $1 and would be slower to move it up from $1 to $1.25 than they were from 75 cents to a dollar. But it’s more or less been that way ever since. I guess the vending machines are cheap enough to maintain that they don’t have to charge as much to make a profit. In fact, the disparity has increased. Soft drink prices in convenience stores seem to be around $1.70 or $1.80 most places I look.

One thing that’s been happening more recently, though, is a lot more variance among different brands. It used to be that Coke’s lineup and Pepsi’s lineup would be similarly priced and no matter what you got a bottle of you were paying about the same amount. The first big exception I remember to this was back when Mountain Dew had the Pitch Black flavor that sold abysmally. By the end there, the local convenience store on my way home in Deseret was selling those three for a dollar. It was tough to decide whether or not the price break was worth drinking that awful, awful drink. At first it was, but quickly became wasn’t.

Some of the local convenience stores have been selling the Pepsi Throwbacks at a significantly reduced price. Usually about $1 to $1.79 for the regular Pepsi and Mountain Dew. Unfortunately, I don’t like Pepsi of either variant from a bottle and I find the sugar Mountain Dew to be utterly inferior to the corn syrup stuff. The real steal right now for Mountain Dew fans is Vault. Vault would be Coke’s answer to the product. It’s not as good as Mountain Dew, but isn’t so bad and only costs a whopping 80 cents a bottle out here. I had initially assumed that the low pricing meant that Vault was being discontinued. Vault is Coke’s third try (that I am aware of) at unseating Mountain Dew, intermittently trying with Mello Yello and once a product called Surge.

But they keep making the stuff and selling the Vault stuff. Maybe they figure that if they can just get people to try it that they will realize that it tastes pretty good. Maybe they’re armed with blind taste tests giving them this idea. Honestly, I consider straight Mountain Dew and Vault to be comparable in quality, but I think Vault gets a grading curve because I don’t get it all that often and if I was stuck on a desert island there’s no doubt which I would prefer. What Coke needs to do next time around, if Vault doesn’t make it, is contract out the formula for Kroger’s Big K Citrus Drop product. That stuff is goooood. That it’s a house brand and cheaper is just icing on the cake. I would pay full price for it. This is in stark contrast to any of the other house brand options out there (Mountain Breeze, Mountain Lion, Mountain Lightning, etc…), most of which taste like flattened or watered down Mountain Dew.

We are actually pretty well stocked with soft drink cans. Outside of convenience stores, I’ve become a real bargain shopper for soft drinks at Safeway. They often have buy-two-get-two-free deals or buy-one-get-subsequent-cases-cheaper deals. So whenever they have those, I go crazy. They are encouraging you to buy as many as possible and I comply. It’s not like it’s going to waste. The result is that I keep some half-dozen flavors of stuff in the fridge. I used to try to avoid keeping anything more than one or two cans in the fridge for fear that I would just keep drinking, but I seem to have developed a natural stop-point where after I drink one I don’t want another one for a while. Sometimes I don’t want to drink a whole can at once. I’ve decided that given the cheapness and the fact that unhealthy food is no more wasted dumped into the sink than dumped into my mouth that I can poor out can remainders.

And on one last thing when it comes to soft drink prices, it is enormously irritating how cheap they make those 1-liter bottles. At the local truck stop, they’re only 10 cents more than a 20oz drink. Ten cents. What really had my head exploding was when they were cheaper. I was not as good then as I am now about just throwing away what I don’t want. So I would end up paying more to get less and would get quite irritated with that. Beyond which, those bottles are inconvenient on the whole due to their size. That’s less a factor for me now because I’m driving Clancy’s car which does not have cupholders able to accept a bottle of any size. I think it came out right before that was an absolute necessity.

Since getting my new widescreen TV, I am torn on the virtues of widescreen video versus regular video. I am coming around to widescreen. However, it really does a number when there are subtitles. They have to put them all over the faces of the characters.

One of the funny things about Facebook is discovering the political leanings of people you had no idea. On at least a couple of occasions, I’ve found myself saying “Wait, you’re a Republican? No way!” (two girls I didn’t know very well but still wouldn’t have guessed and one guy I knew reasonably well but was a socialist back in high school) and on one occasion was stunned to find out that a guy I knew was (a) a Mormon and (b) extremely liberal. That frankly surprised me more than the high school buddy I found out was gay.

Verizon placed a $40 for “Verizon Wireless’ and Other Charges & Credits” with not much in the way of explanation. The description they gave, which was pretty vague, left me with the impression that this was going to be a regular thing. Like “Yeah, we got towers to build and so we’re passing the charges on to you.” Which is sorta the kind of thing you want to know before you sign a contract. So I waited to get my bill and found out that, whew, it was a one time charge. But it was a restocking fee for having replaced my phone. The thing is, I replaced the phone because it wasn’t working. I replaced the phone with the exact same model. I thought that was uncool and wrote Verizon saying so. They wrote back within a day and said that the charge had been removed. Well, it shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but I’ll take the result.

Shame on the makers of the car air fresheners who release different smells with the same color. I thought I was buying something piney but now instead the car smells like there’s breeding Jolly Ranchers inside.

I can’t seem to get the hang of the whole “going to bed” thing. I’ve been staying up really late and sleeping till noon. This isn’t very much like me, but every night I plan to go to bed around midnight and something gets lost between 12:30 and 3:30 and by 3:30 I start getting a second wind. I need to start taking my melatonin earlier in the day.

I was at Walmart the other day. The closest one is in Redstone, an hour away, so it’s a big deal when I get to go and I have to make a list and everything. One thing that’s always on the list is Dove Sugar-Free Dark Chocolates, which Clancy absolutely loves. The last three times I’ve gone they’ve been out. This time around they had a bunch of them there. But they were out of them as soon as I left the aisle. Clancy is well-stocked for some time to come.

It’s really annoying how people that genuinely like vegetables tend to believe that just about everything but vegetables will kill you.

I was eating at a fast food restaurant in Redstone the other day. The place was empty. So why did the group of loud young people feel the need to sit in a booth adjacent to mine? Seriously, they had the whole place! Muttermutter.

I’ve been making more regular trips to Redstone lately. I think it’s in part because the audiobook I am listening to got really interesting.

I think The Hangover is one of those movies that I’m going to end up watching once a year or so.

I’m on season five of the TV show Las Vegas. Sam Marquez, one of my favorite characters, is getting more screen time to compensate for some cast departures after season four. Unfortunately, I can’t even enjoy her increased presence because for some inexplicable reason they’ve got her wearing nail polish all the time. Boo.

While checking out of Safeway the other day, I noticed that they were selling a paperback of one of the Twilight novels. I have neither read any of the books or seen any of the movies, so that’s not what this post is about. Rather, this post is about the fact that this particular version of the paperback had Kristen Stewart’s photo on it with the familiar “Now a Feature Movie” or somesuch along the bottom.

While I have not seen the movies or read the books for the Twilight series, I have read (or more accurately heard) the book and seen the movies of the Jason Bourne series. It’s really pretty difficult to get a copy of the paperback of any of the books that have become movies without a picture of Matt Damon on the cover. The problem is that the books and the movies have almost nothing in common. It’s not simply replacing one cover for the book with another cover for the book that happens to include an actor from a movie based on the book. It’s replacing the cover of the book with another cover that includes an actor based on an entirely different movie with the only things in common being a few character names and a plot involving amnesia.

This is particularly true for the second book. The movie takes place in Germany, the book in Asia.

I know full well why they do it. I still find it irritating. Even though I assume that the Twilight movies have more in common with the book than the Bourne movies, and though Kristen Stewart is incredibly pleasant to look at, that one bothers me because the original covers to the book are particularly visually interesting and compelling. I can’t tell you how many times a book’s cover jumped out at me only for me to look at it and see “Oh, it’s a Twilight book” and start looking elsewhere.

Though I do understand why they do it, I wish that they would at least keep the original covers available for those of us that don’t want to mix media. It’s almost enough to make me want to go ahead and buy the fourth and fifth book while the covers are still Damon-Free.

Germany’s president announced his resignation not long ago. Germany, like Israel (and almost Australia) have a distinction between their elected head of state and elected head of government. The Head of State is supposed to sort of be above the fray and thus a less partisan figure. The republican equivalent of monarchy. I have to admit, the idea has a certain appeal… but does it get lost when most foreigners (even those that keep up with current events) don’t know who your Head of State is?

I meant to write a full-on post about this New York Times article about a young woman drowning in student loan debt, but others did the job better than I could. My main contribution is this: At 26, the girl showcase in the article as a precautionary tale, is left with more after rent and student loan repayment than I was left with after rent when I was 26.

I have in the past defended little leagues and youth sport organizations placing sportsmanship above competition, but no way to I defend a team forfeiting by scoring too many goals. Mercy rules accomplish the same thing without the perverse incentives (scoring on your own goal to win a game!).

Time-Warner is defending the privacy rights of its customers… if only because they can’t be bothered to track them down and give them up.

Subway allegedly fires an employee for giving his courtesy sandwich to a fire victim.

Starbucks is finally offering free WiFi. This was really put them at a disadvantage compared to other coffee places up to and including Seattle’s Best, which Starbucks owns but which has always had free WiFi. Payfor WiFi could work, but you can’t ask people to sign up for a subscription or a significant daily charge.

My ex-roommate Hubert used to have a computer fantasy baseball league where we would draft up press releases for our team. Mine were generally humor-based and regularly featured the local politicians. One had them trying to justify calling a day off work to celebrate my team winning the pennant. That’s not nearly as bad as changing the name of your county.

More than half of identity theft cases are committed by parents. Credit card companies don’t check ages. Now, technically I am sure Mom thefted my identity at some point or another for simple expedience, but I doubt that’s what is being talked about here. Via Costa, who has a good take on it.

Are best friends bad for development? I don’t even think this is a case of development theory gone awry. Once again, I agree with Costa. I think this is about control.

The State of New Jersey has a lot of work to do balancing its budget. As far as I know New Jersey is not quite in the same league as California but it’s not far from it. Republican or Democrat, it’s good for states to get their houses in financial order. I’m not sure about the way that NJ Governor Chris Christie is going about it, though:

In February, the Republican governor ordered the freeze of $475 million in school aid payments in 2010 by requiring districts to use their excess surplus instead of state aid. The cuts were made at the time to help plug a deficit in this year’s budget. Christie has had to cut more than $2 billion from this year’s budget to keep it balanced. {…}

A large part of this year’s cuts involved withholding money from schools that have budget surpluses. All but 17 of the state’s 581 districts have surplus money.

Lest anyone think this is a partisan swipe, consider that I celebrated the man’s victory (sort of) and besideswhich his predecessor had a rather similar plan (withholding 75% rather than 100% of surplus funds).

I mean, on the one hand this sort of thing makes so much sense that it’s bleeding obvious. On the other hand, doesn’t this kind of discourage responsible spending? I mean, these districts had money that they could have spent and chose not to. Is that the sort of thing that you want to punish?

It’s a natural tension, I suppose, between wanting to reallocate what isn’t being used and encouraging people to use everything they have. My father’s work in the Defense Department was full of those things (an accountant, of sorts, my father was particularly familiar with the phenomenon). I suppose the counterargument in this case is that these are drastic times that call for drastic measures. But I hear that in California, too, where they are withholding tax refunds (temporarily, they say). While it’s got to be tempting to hold on to money you have, you’re also making sure that people do not overestimate on their withholding in the future and thus the government will lose an interest-free loan.

In the interest of equal time, I did kinda sorta get a kick out of this:

Sorry, I just have to get this off my chest.

A Facebook friend was singing the virtues of the iPhone 4’s new OS. Including…

Multitasking, screen rotation lock, 3-D Style dock bar, background (Home Screen) backgrounds, Folders for multiple apps, Option to turn off vibration when in ringing mode, multiple email accounts under one inbox.

With the exception of the 3D-Style dockbar, Windows Mobile has been able to do each of these things since Windows Mobile 2003 (okay, that last one may have only come around for WM6, released in 2007). I wish I could go back in time six months or a year so that I can brag about WinMo on that basis so that I could get some Applytes on record as saying that none of those things matter.