I found out about Clancy’s pregnancy as I was packing for our trip down to Colosse. I was leaving a coupe days before she was. I was actually getting frustrated with her wondering what the hell was taking her so long in the bathroom, where I needed to retrieve my toiletries. She came out, almost stumbling a bit as though she were inebriated. It took my mind a few moments to shift gears when she shoved the test in my face.

It was the fourth month since we’d started keeping track. That was, as far as we were concerned, ahead of schedule. Though we were trying, it was nonetheless a surprise because we’d missed the ovulation period due to circumstance. It was a case where it was very fortunate that Clancy is who she is, because she noticed after the first month and confirmed after the second that there was a problem with her cycle that would preclude pregnancy. Her background instantly told her what the problem likely was, and her profession likey helped us get an appointment rather quickly. It was only the second attempt after that when she came up positive.

We were gearing up for it taking a while. She is of advance maternal age and I have a slew of things to be concerned about ranging from laptops to diets to a particular health issue. We’re quite aware that we are not out of the woods yet. But with the rapidity that it occurred here, we have reason to believe that if this one doesn’t take, we’ll have a shot again. The ongoing fear was that it would take eight months and then there’d be a miscarriage and we were looking at another year and so on.

The house is in extraordinarily good shape to take in a baby. We have a room that is easily transferable into a nursery. There’s also room in the computer room where I can put a crib if need-be for one reason or another. We still haven’t been able to stuff this house with stuff. That’s to our advantage, for now.

Financially, the time is far from ideal. But hoping for the ideal time has proven to be a fool’s quest, thus far. If anything, I wish we’d gotten started sooner. We just didn’t realize that it would take forever for us to find a stable situation, which itself is a couple years away. Maybe in time for the second…

As the header image, I primarily smoke three different brands of cigarettes: USA Gold, Maverick, and Liggett. When I am out of pocket, I will sometimes go with Winston or Camel. When I first started smoking, I went with the gold standard: Marlboro. Eventually I found suitable cheaper replacement brands in Doral and Pall Mall. Over time, both either watered down their product or they stopped doing the same thing for me. The above three are both inexpensive and either reasonably or very strong tasting.

USA Gold is the cheapest of the set. The problem with USA Gold is that it has the word Gold in the title. This means two things: First, they are similar in name to Old Golds, which are more popular, more expensive and less worthy. Second, as with other brands they come in various strengths. They can’t call the lighter variations lights or ultra-lights anymore, so they go by color. Almost universally, light cigarettes have gold color. I prefer red-color. So I have to specify that I want USA Gold 100s RED. If I leave off the red, the gold is in their minds and if I’m not looking, I just bought a weaker cigarette than I intended to. This happened recently. Very frustrating.

Mavericks and Liggetts do not have the weakness problem. In fact, I think their limited popularity is due to their rough taste. Mavericks used to be Harley Davidson cigarettes and for a while (even after they became Maverick) had an awesome black-and-gold box with an eagle on it that would be different in color depending on what you were getting. Now they’re colored similarly to all of the others. My wife hates Mavericks and can smell them from two miles away. Liggetts fall in between the two. They’re the most expensive of the three. Both Maverick and Liggett take a toll on the lungs more quickly than USA Gold.

Living in a small town as I do, I have an internal catalog of what is offered where. What’s rather frustrating is that all of them seem to lack good inventory control. Which is to say, when they run out of boxes, they don’t get more until they’ve run out of softpacks. The fact that they always have left over soft packs suggests to me that that they ought to stock more of those than the boxes. The same goes for regular size versus 100s. I go to the Supply Store a lot, and would get all of my cigarettes from there, but they go months with only the short packs and soft packs, and so they lose my business for weeks at a time.

Way back in the day, when Mom smoked and I didn’t, I did not understand why the hell cigarette brand mattered. They didn’t offer Kent in our home state, and so whenever we were the next state over she would buy a bunch of them. How different can something you’re lighting on fire and consuming the smoke taste? Pretty different, it turns out.

On a sidenote, I don’t think the main reason for my preference for strong flavor is that I have particularly strong lungs (I don’t) or even my diminished tastebuds, but rather because I don’t inhale. Never have. Didn’t even realize I was supposed to, when I first tried them. Which is not the same thing as saying that they don’t get into my lungs. But not through breaking it in from the cigarette itself. The other big reason is my preference for longer-lasting 100s, which tend to have longer filters.

I have an assignment at Redstone High on Monday. Last time I was there, I took a walk and some pictures of the area surrounding the high school. Here they are… (more…)

Today there was an assignment on the exploration of the Americas for the special ed class I had today. It involved my reading to them a page with four paragraphs and answering a series of questions. When they asked for help, I would tell them what paragraph the answer is in. Sometimes, I’d have to get more specific.

The final paragraph read:

Ponce de Leon returned to Spain in 1514. The king of Spain was pleased with his discovery. He appointed Ponce de Leon governor of Florida and gave him a royal grant to colonize it. In 1521, he again landed in Florida with two ships and 200 men. The Indians there fought with the colonists. Ponce de Leon was badly wounded in battle. He died soon afterwards at the age of 61.

The question was: What title did the king give Ponce de Leon?

Student complained that she couldn’t find the answer.

I told her that it was in the couple of sentences of the paragraph.

Ponce de Leon returned to Spain in 1514. The king of Spain was pleased with his discovery. He appointed Ponce de Leon governor of Florida and gave him a royal grant to colonize it.

Still no luck. I rephrased the question. “What job did the king appoint Ponce de Leon to?”

Spain?

No, it was a job in Florida.

Royal grant?

No.

It says royal grant.

That’s not the answer, though.

But I can’t find the answer.

Keep looking.

Five minutes later… King of Spain?

No, the King of Spain appointed de Leon for a job. What job?

I don’t understand.

If I am the teacher of the classroom, what is Ponce de Leon to Florida?

The teacher?

Keep looking.

It’s in {points} this sentence:

He appointed Ponce de Leon governor of Florida and gave him a royal grant to colonize it.

Five minutes pass.

Is it colonize?

Read it again.

I can’t find it.

This process was repeated with “Who did the colonists fight that were already here when they arrived?” Also, “What did the King of Spain want Ponce de Leon to do to Florida.” I can’t recall that she answered a single question without a significant amount of guidance (though none perplexed her as much as that one).

—-

I figure there are four possibilities:

(1) She can’t read. At all. I’ve had her before and I would think that I might have noticed something like this. But maybe not.

(2) She can read, but doesn’t understand these particular words. The thing about this one is that she speaks at about a 4th or 5th grade level. I never have trouble understanding her. She seems to understand what words mean. Otherwise, I’d just assume this.

(3) She can read, but doesn’t understand the point of reading. That the answer is in the content of the question rather than simply finding the right word. She’s impatient and trying to find a short cut. Though, as with four, it took her longer to hash this out with me than it would have for her to read it.

(4) She can read, but has learned that expressing frustration will get someone to give you the answer. Though, as with three, the whining was more effort than the reading would be.

I’m not sure what the least depressing answer of the four is.

HalfSigma has a post tying together money, class, and race(ism). Obviously, I am going to be focusing on the first two (I may be lightening up as far as this goes, but not that much). As is often the case, he mixes insights with false assumptions. On the latter score, he says:

I think the people who are most opposed to an increase in the minimum wage are those making slightly more than the minimum wage. For the guy making $12/hour, an increase in the minimum wage from $7 to $10 would be a mighty blow to his feelings of success. But people making six figures are so far insulated from making $7/hour that they just don’t suffer the least bit of worry that increasing the minimum wage would lower their own status.

This is, by my experience and observation, entirely wrong. First, because non-minimum low wages tend to go up with the minimum wage in order to differentiate themselves from those making minimum wage. If you’re paying someone 50c above minimum wage, you’re likely going to continue to do so in order to attract the better candidates among those making minimum wage. I was working at near-minimum when it went up from $4.25 an hour. It went up in two increments, I switched jobs between the increments, and both empoyers raise our wages a 45c at a time. Unions, it’s worthy of noting, are generally supportive of minimum wage increases even though their guys (and gals) are not directly affected by them.

The paragraph before and after that one aren’t entirely wrong, but I believe them to be incomplete:

One (but certainly not the only) important differentiator is money. Having more money makes you feel superior to those who have less money. But money just sitting in a bank account doesn’t demonstrate this very well. Thus did Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” But you should also be aware that people who spend money seldom think about conspicuous consumption, because a lot of this behavior works on the subconscious level. Driving around in a ten-year-old Hyundai just causes people to have feelings of inferiority when they see other people drive by in more expensive cars. We are less likely to feel envy of people’s bank accounts because they are invisible and there’s a social taboo for people to speak about them.

This paragraph overlooks a different tendency: to roll one’s eyes at those who buy needlessly expensive cars and other conspicuous items. When I see someone driving a Range Rover, I don’t think “I wish I could afford a Range Rover.” I think “Sucker.” As much as I would like to say that this is a result of my being completely oblivious to conspicuous value, it’s not. At least, it’s not entirely so. I bought the Subaru Forester new because it was the best value for what we needed. However, I am extremely self-conscious about it. The appearance of it actually bothers me, just a little. I’m one of those guys who buys new cars. It’s indicative of a reverse snobbery. I thought more of myself because I drove a lesser car. At the time, I attributed it to my practicality. But here I am self-conscious about a car that I bought primarily because it made sense.

Which brings me to another paragraph…

There are other ways to feel superior to other people besides having more money than them. This is what Class X is about. If you voluntarily (or involuntarily) choose a career that doesn’t offer the greatest monetary rewards, then you look to other ways to feel superior. This is what the whole SWPL movement is about, participating in a culture that makes you feel superior to proles making the same money as you.

I am not sure this is about the proles, actually. To the extent that we’re going to psychoanalyze, I think it’s about other non-proles. If you can’t sing good, sing loud. Let’s say that you are someone who was raised in a solidly middle class household. Let’s say that you are not temperamentally or intellectually suited for the rat race. Well gosh, if you forgo the rat-race altogether, then by-golly you are better than all those other sheeple. You may have less money, but it isn’t because you would have fared poorly in the money-making world if you had tried, but rather it’s because you chose not to race. When you can’t compete in set of criteria, choose a different one. Then, per that other paragraph, look down on the consumption habits of those who lack the insight that you have.

So, you may have noticed over the last couple months in particular that posting has become rather… anemic. One of the main reasons has been the little Jumping Bean. Named such after that ultrasound when the little guy/girl seemed to be jumping around, in and out of the view of the device. Prior to that, we made a habit out of referring to it by whatever size it was (One week it was the size of a lentil, and so we called it The Lentil. Right now it’s the size of a lemon. I initially wanted to name the little thing “Kung Fu” because it looked more to me like it was practicing in the martial arts, but Jumping Bean, or JB, stuck.

A couple months back in Virginia there was a bit to-do about a law that required what is called a Transvaginal Ultrasound. That basically means sticking the camera up in there. It is frankly a rather horrifying concept, especially when doing it to a woman that doesn’t want it done. It took on a punitive air that I was not a fan of. Anyhow, after doing the traditional abdominal ultrasound, they did the transvaginal and Clancy reported that she actually found it less uncomfortable because on the abdominal the tech was really jamming it into her tummy while the abdominal was performed with more care.

Anyhow, what this has to do with Hit Coffee is that I couldn’t write about The Biggest Thing going on in my life. Clancy and I had made the decision before this started that we would wait until the end of the first trimester. The main concern being the possibility of miscarriage. It’s still a very real possibility, but the likelihood greatly diminishes after the first trimester. The only people we told were our respective parents. Mostly to head off the asking of The Question. Anyhow, even things that weren’t directly related to the pregnancy* were difficult to talk about. For instance, we’re staying in Callie until sometime next year, but part of the reasoning involved the little one. Her job situation, my job situation, it seems to come up a lot in any post that talks about the future.

I did comment here about a pregnancy, though I implied it was part of a lie. There would have been a lie involved, as we were not going to see an obstetrician, but the pregnant part would have been true. Ironically, Sheila picked up on it as true, forcing me to imply again that it was not. Initially, we were going to seek obstetrical care in Alexandria, despite the 2+ hour drive. The only other obstetrical doc in Callie is a man that she does not really click with and Redstone’s obstetricians are all male and its medical community worries us for other reasons. Also, as far as Callie goes, Clancy is one for privacy and the clubby atmosphere of Baxter Hospital is such that everyone feels free to walk in on their coworkers.

You may be wondering about Clancy’s age and the risk of malformity. You can never fully account for these things, but the ultrasound was actually an attempt to determine the likelihood of it. They can’t test for it yet, but they can do a blood test and some measurements (something about the naval cavity and excess skin around neck) and give a good estimate on the likelihood of a chromosomal disorder. The ones we’re looking out for are Down Syndrome (Trisomy 21), Trisomy 13, and Trisomy 18. The results on all three were very positive. The likelihood of Down is 1-in-1200 and for Trisomies 13 and 18 1-in-7500. Broadly speaking, you can estimate the likelihood of getting any abnormality by doubling the likelihood of Down. So we’re looking at 1-in-600, which is within normal range. Unless paranoia sets in, there will be no amniocentesis.

I spent last weekend making calls to inform the people I wanted to inform personally. I had to tell Clint that I would not be making his wedding, which is set for two days before the late-October due date. I also called my brothers, a particular Aunt, and my college roommate Hubert (who had called me when his wife had become pregnant - hopefully he will not be returning this particular favor).

Let’s see, what else? We’re going to try not to find out the sex of the baby. The likelihood of succeeding in this is not great, given that ultrasounds will be a regular thing and Clancy looks at these things for gender all the time. But if anyone can do it, she can. We have names tentatively picked out, though they are subject to change if the baby comes out and just doesn’t fit it at all.

* - Don’t worry, HC will not become a daily account of this. There’ll be a number of posts on the subject coming up, but mostly that’s to clear the deck of clutter I have been keeping in.

** - And even that I worded very carefully, implying but not stating that she was going to see the obstetrician. She was pregnant, but we were not actually going to see the obstetrician.

(more…)

While I was ordering a couple of replacement hard drives, I went ahead and ordered a new keyboard. The existing keyboard, purchased in 2003 or so, was still doing its job. But it had, at some point, picked up an odor that even I could smell. Plus, and I will grant that this reason is more frivolous, it was beige and all of my computers have since switched to black.

You never realize how much you’ve gotten used to a keyboard until it’s gone. All of the little things you never noticed. Oddly, this is true even when you regularly switch between keyboards. I have no problem going from laptop to desktop, despite the very different computer configurations. But I guess when I am sitting at the desk, my mind has incorporated one keyboard over another.

So what are the differences? This keyboard has shorter keys. This is a shame. It’s one of the things I prefer about desktops over laptops. The tall keys. I was about to say that it makes typing easier - and it does - though I have gotten so used to the laptop I think I can switch back and forth between modes. But when I in desktop mode, I am expecting taller keys. This has resulted in an unusual number of typos. The biggest ongoing issue is for some reason my failing to correctly tap the letter “L.” The L key works fine, but for some reason I seem to suddenly be missing.

This new keyboard is also much, much quieter. I am not sure if the old keyboard simply got louder over time or if it was just a louder keyboard (this may be related to the whole height thing). I have been told, by a large number of people, that I am the loudest typist that they have ever met. My musician friend Clint actually says I am also the most rhythmic typist he has ever met. I think that’s a good thing. I seem to have gotten used to it. The only key that makes any notable noise is the spacebar, which means that the noise comes in a non-rhythmic fashion.

The biggest issue, however, is the fact that the new keyboard has a sightly different layout. They almost always do, and I consider it frustrating. This has a problem that is more severe, however. Where I am used to the Scroll Lock key being, now resides a “sleep” key. I don’t like sleep keys to begin with, but definitely not where the Scroll Lock is supposed to be. Now, some of you may not even know what the Scroll Lock is. It’s one of the least-used keys on the keyboard. Which is why KVM switches (which allow you to use a single keyboard/monitor/mouse for multiple computers) use it to switch machines. So, without thinking, I tap what I think is the Scroll Lock key in order to switch machines, and the next thing I know the computer I am on is going to sleep.

This will pass with time, no doubt. Maybe I’ll even be able to remap the key. But even if not, I’ll get used to it soon enough. I remember back in the old days how much I absolutely hated, hated, hated the double-decker Enter key. I still don’t prefer them, but it didn’t even occur to me to look for a keyboard without it.

The last thing is that my wrist hurts typing this. I am really hoping that’s temporary.

I was at that media/coffee place in Redstone that I have discussed before, when there was a bit of downtime and the woman behind the counter started talking to a customer that she apparently knew.

The baristess apparently greeted with the news that every mother wants to hear from her twenty year old son: My girlfriend is pregnant! And we just eloped! She had a way with words, it turned out, and said “Something gained and something lost. I gained a daughter-in-law and maybe a grandkid, but lost hope in my son’s future.”

She will no doubt love the grandchild, but she’s not particularly fond of the daughter-in-law. She secretly suspected that this was how things were going to turn out.

Anyhow, her lack of enthusiasm did not go over well with her son. She told him that he had just thrown his life away… just as she had twenty years before. Insert stuff about “Not that I don’t love my children…” here, which she quickly added.

Anyhow, the son apparently had designs on being a police officer. He won’t be able to do that now. So what, pray tell, was he going to do? That’s what she asked him. He replied that maybe he would become a security guard.

This next part (like the “something gained and something lost” quote above) is a direct quote, in part because I had to keep myself from laughing out loud:

“A security guard? Son, we live in Redstone. There’s nothing here worth paying someone to protect!”

If that isn’t the perfect encapsulation of Redstone stereotype, I don’t know what is.

A good part of my formative years was spent in relative social isolation. Or, at least it felt that way, even though I can now point back to a number of people that I would have called friends. Things started getting better by high school, but they didn’t really start to change until I started logging on to a local, multiline BBS with a chatroom and its own sense of community to which I felt like I actually belonged.

In a sense, though, it was too much for me. Going from a transient social network of a couple people here and a couple people there to having dozens of people that I talked to on a regular basis. Some of them… girls! It was, as I have stated before, a godsend. It was through the BBS that I actually started to learn how to socialize with people. There were, however, some bumps on the road. I’d been rejected by girls I had asked out before (I was roughly 0-7 when I logged on for the first time), but I’d never felt the betrayal of being rejected by people that I had gotten to know really well and who seemed to genuinely like me (if not in that way, of course). Needless to say, I didn’t always respond to this with the levity and sense of proportion that I wish I had, looking back.

There were periods of rather tremendous darkness. I was no longer used to being so hopeless, and so when something would go wrong, it didn’t just make me upset at a girl, or girls, but often life in general. And I would respond to this poorly. And things would get worse. Then, eventually, things would get better again. Typically when a bunch of new people would log onto the BBS and I’d have new friends and new fish in the sea.

There was a major turning point that occurred after a while, and it occurred under some of the worst possible periods. I was going through one of my darker times and was acting really, really obnoxious. Nobody called me on it directly, but I stumbled on a conversation about me in which people - people I had considered my friends - were discussing me in the most unflattering of terms. I can’t even remember what they said, but it was along the lines of “If he’s going to be that miserable, he should just crawl in a hole and die.” Now, I wanted to tell them all to go to hell, but for a couple things. First, I was listening in to a conversation I shouldn’t have been.

After thinking about it, I couldn’t at all blame them for feeling that way. Looking it from their point of view, I was shitty company. More to the point, I’d never built up the good will with them to expect them to tolerate it or actually confront me about it. We’d been friendly, yes, but not in the “helping see you through the hard times” sense. And beyond that, a couple of them had tried to help and I… did not reward them for it. It was no surprise then, that (as I’d thought about it further) they’d all been avoiding me lately.

This was rather groundbreaking because, up to that point, I thought that if I wasn’t actively mean to someone, then I shouldn’t have anything to worry about. It was the first time I realized that it wasn’t just enough to be not-mean, but you had to be pleasant. It’s such an obvious concept. Looking at my own behavior, of course I had discriminated against the unpleasant in favor of the pleasant. Who the hell wants to hang out with an anvil?

This revelation did not, in itself, turn everything around. I had to learn, among other things, how to be pleasant. How to bite my tongue not just to spare someone their feelings (that part I knew, at least) but to spare them the discomfort of being around a dark cloud. And that when someone asks you how you are doing, the answer is fine, good, or great, and not an actual answer to the question they are asking if (a) the answer is going to put them off or (b) you have not built up the good will that they are genuinely interested.

Some day, I am going to write A Nerd’s Guide To How To Interact With People. This story will make it in there somewhere.

I recently wrote about the lawsuits involving the MPAA, DGA, ClearPlay, and CleanFlicks. Now I am going to write why the whole thing was eye-opening to me.

In the late 90’s and early aughts, some friends and I (the core group being Clint, Kyle, Hubert, and me, for those who keep track of such things) were a part of an amateur production company. We took Japanese animation, spliced it, and changed the story into something funny. As it happens, three of the four productions we took the initial animation from came from a single studio (in the US). And as it happens, they knew what we were doing and could not have cared less. If they had objected, though, we would have objected to their objection. We weren’t selling them. We weren’t impeding the sale of the original item. Our only compensation was having fun and some comp passes to area anime conventions.

Beyond all that, we were also of our generation and had rather… liberal… views of fair use and copyright. I was a Republican, Hugh was a Democrat, Kyle was a Libertarian, and Clint was rather apolitical, but we all agreed on that.

When the ClearPlay thing came up, I looked at it very much the same way that I looked at our productions. There were some key differences, to be sure: ClearPlay was a business and we were not. People using ClearPlay had purchased the original productions, people who got copies of our work did not. Though we never asked for permission, the content-owners were okay with what we were doing. With them, they were not. On the balance, I thought that if anything, ClearPlay had a stronger case than we would if the producers of the fourth production we used ever came after us.

So I was a bit shocked when almost uniformly, everyone else took the opposite perspective. Not just the other three, but non-core contributors as well. Everyone but me agreed: ClearPlay was wrong here. I tried to liken it to what we were doing, but they argued that it was different. Interestingly, they didn’t argue on the profit side, but on the creative side. It was their view that we were creating something new while they were watering down something existing. I asked about The Phantom Edit. They thought that was fine because they weren’t selling it. Okay, but what if they essentially did what ClearPlay was doing and offered a way to skip past Jar-Jar. This stammered them a bit, but they rebounded by arguing that what The Phantom Editors were doing was art while ClearPlay was destroying art.

Destroying art. Those were the words that one of them used. That, apparently, was what it came down to for them. I asked “What about the person that wants to skip past the scene” and the response I got was that people shouldn’t want to skip past violent or sex-filled scenes and there was something wrong with parents that wanted to shield entertainment from their kids like that. They weren’t exactly advocating showing Nightmare on Elm Street to grade-schoolers, but they did not think it was right to get to choose what to show from a particular movie and what not to. They should either show them the movie, or not show them the movie.

As an aside, we did a lot of our editing in the town of a very conservative university, Southern Cross University, that one of our core members attended. They had “movie night” and mercilessly edited movies, replacing words with rather silly stand-ins. We attended one of the features and heard about a lot of the others. They cut The Matrix down to 90 minutes for content. At that point… what’s the point, exactly? I’d actually suggested, for one of our productions, we should do the a Ridiculous Edit version.

Anyhow, it occurred to me that what a lot of this came down to wasn’t the issues at stake. It wasn’t copyright or fair use. It was the sheer animosity towards the people that showed the sorts of movies that they showed at SCU. It was, in a way, a desire to deprive them of the ability to easily massacre movies the way that they did. It wasn’t about the law, it was about culture. And to an extent, it was about us-and-them. Siding with the likes of Utahns and SCU was simply out of the question.

Which brings me, momentarily, back to the Ridiculous Edit version I proposed. I had suggested that we should do it because we could make it funny. I stand by that. But I did have another motive. I wanted the ability to introduce the movie to people who would be offended by the coarse language of the original. A lot of the cursing was unnecessary. Popular with the fans we had, but likely irritating to potential fans.

I consider this about as far from coincidental as possible: Looking back, I had far more animosity towards the MPAA than SCU. They were raised on good on southern religion while I was an Episcopalian. They (at the time, today they run the spectrum of Born Again to staunch atheism) have a history that I don’t. And for my own part, I had been shifting to the right politically and trying to make peace with the same people. I didn’t then, and don’t now agree with them in regard to movie censorship (nor would they have exactly signed on to the MPAA’s agenda), but at least a part of me was trying to find common ground.

As much as we liked to dress it up as arguments for and against - and there are letigimate arguments for and against - a lot of it came down to that visceral reaction and our deeper minds shifting gears mostly to support the original reaction (it took me years to realize that the MPAA did actually sort of have a point here).

Which is something I can’t help but notice occurring… everywhere else. Here at The League, we take pride in our thoughtfulness and some here take pride in their independence. But we’re human, and I think it is rather impossible to separate what is being said from who is saying it.

I will, at some point, write a more complete post on this. The origins of our ideology. My views aren’t actually this reductive. But I think this is an under-investigated phenomenon. Especially among those of us that pride ourselves on such things. It goes beyond enrolling with a team and taking their views wholesale. It’s something that pervades, I think, our response to virtually everything. Not just Republican or Democrat, but the positions we take and values we adopt that push us in one direction or the other.

In the scene of the second episode of Fringe, a woman is opening a Kia Sedona. I guess Kia isn’t paying them for it, because they replaced the Kia logo with a generic one, but I guess it was too much trouble to replace the Sedona decal?

I don’t know why, but knowing which cars the characters are driving is a subject of interest to me. Particularly since there is so little consistency. One week, FringeDiv drives Ford, the next Lincoln. Those are both Ford products, but I’ve even seen it switch the Chevy, even though all of the vehicles look about the same. But the entire fleet changes from one week to the next.

This isn’t as bad as Chase was, though. On Chase, in three straight episodes, the main character had three separate smartphones. One week, she was specifically given an iPhone as a gift. But the next week, she was using what was conspicuously a Windows Phone 7 phone, and the next week a generic Androidy phone.

I don’t know why I am as fixated on some of this stuff as I am, but it’s something I’ve been keeping an eye out on for a while now. It used to seem that every laptop someone used was an Apple. At some point, I guess, Microsoft started paying up because you would get a black laptop with a generic Windows logo on the back of it. When it’s not one of these things, it’s as often as not going to be some generic-ish logo like on the pseudo-Kia. Usually a globe.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed is how frequently I am seeing a non-standard OS. Maybe this has always been the case and I just never noticed it until recently. We all remember the Mac/PC hybrid in Office Space, right? It seems like a Mac right up until you get to the C-prompt as Peter is shutting down. Anyhow, on Person of Interest, Burke is using a non-standard OS that looks just a little Linuxy. I suppose if you want a generic-looking OS, Linux is a pretty good place to start from. I’ve never seen a brand, though (Ubuntu, SUSE, etc), so I guess the Linux makers aren’t paying up.

Now, if it were me, I would show it anyway. It’s the sort of thing that can get a segment of a show’s viewership talking (”Burke uses SUSE!”). Not a large segment, but a passionate one. Is there a ban on that? I mean, if I was making a movie, would I have to get Microsoft’s permission to show Windows? Lenovo’s to use my Thinkpad (without obscuring the logo)? I am thinking not, provided that you’re not relying on the product. Any Linux distro worth its grain of salt would likely have no problem with it. Nor would Microsoft, though presumably they’re at the point where they would want Microsoft to pony up. I actually wonder if that’s the reason for the shift away from Windows: “We’re not going to use your product in our product unless you pay us to.”

Or something like that.

Speaking of Fringe and endorsements, one of the things I wonder is the usage of Harvard in that show. Now, they’re using Harvard University when it’s actually Harvard College, but I’m not sure that distinction matters. And, in any event, they use college brand names all the time in a way that does actually lean on the product. By which I mean, if they want a super-intelligent (or snooty, for that matter) individual, they’ll say “He went to Harvard.” Which is actually different than happening to use a Thinkpad. You’re relying on the brand to give information about the character. I assume Harvard does not object, but can it? You rarely see the logo, which might be crossing a line, though Chuck’s title character flashed off a degree that looked very much like a Stanford degree. And, additionally, did not call it Stanford University or Stanford College, which might be the dodge that they may be using for Harvard, but rather “Leland Stanford Junior University” which is apparently Stanford’s full name (I did not know until I saw it on TV).

I do wonder how the rules on these things go.

All over Redstone, there have been references to something I’ll call Fight With Rachel. For the longest time, I had no idea what it was. But all over the schools, on flashing signs, and so on, were references to it. I vaguely thought that it was some sort of diet thing. Like the Rachel was Rachel Ray or something and the fight was with obesity (which is kind of a problem in Redstone). I’m not sure why I thought this, other than that it seemed to be positioned towards food-related stuff? At some point, I saw a picture of “Rachel” and saw that no, it wasn’t Rachel Ray. It was a woman that looked like she might be pushing 40 but had taken care to make herself look a lot younger and attractive.

“Okay,” I thought, “so this isn’t a national thing. She’s some sort of local figure.”

She was, it turned out, until she was killed by a drunk driver. And the girl who looked like she was a young-looking 40 year old was actually a rather mature looking 14 year old. The fight is against drunk driving.

Now, I’m not going to come out in defense of drunk driving. It gets people killed, and not just Rachel Rainer. But it’s all rather… overwhelming. I mean, her face is plastered all over the place at elementary schools. I don’t think we’re in any danger of them drinking and driving. I was a little taken aback at the universality of a… particular cause.

I was raised in the era of Nancy Reagan and Just Say No. And I guess that’s the model they’re following: start young. As young as possible, so that by the time they reach the age that it matters, it has been absolutely hammered into their brains. I’m not sure of the efficacy of this approach because by the time I was of age, Just Say No had kind of gotten boring. Not that I was anxious to do drugs, but it lost its sense of… urgency. I knew the “facts” of CHICKEN and later DARE like I knew names from social studies. They were words to be recited, the importance of which I had long since forgotten.

I think the stale factor is particularly salient when it comes to drunk driving. I mean, they started young with us on that, too, even if there wasn’t the overwhelming sense of urgency until right about the time it started to matter. When you start that young, you learn that drunk driving is bad but without a sense of why anyone does it. Then, you discover why people do it: You have to get home, and no you’re not going to call a cab every time you need to do so. And once this realization hits you - the utility of drunk driving, all of those social studies names can lose their resonance.

The most effective thing they did in drunk driving had nothing to do with “starting young.” Rather, it was what they did in high school. One horrific picture after another of somebody’s body being scraped off the cement. The sort of images that, if they were in any other context, we would be able to see. They show us the first Yearbook photo, then they show her mangled corpse. You’re tempted to think “Woah! Cool!” because they’re showing you this stuff in school. By the time they get to the 12th, though, you’re seeing yet another attractive individual and you’re cringing at what they will look like “after.”

Not that it stopped us from drunk driving, but it at least gave us the sense - far more than grade school chants - of the possible horrific consequences of it. Leaving it to our own devices that, if you do this, be friggin’ careful.

It’s in this sense that I remain concerned about equating everything else with drunk driving. Driving tired is drunk driving. Talking on the cell phone is drunk driving. Listening to sports on the radio is drunk driving. And so on. I do think it’s diluting the message. Drunk driving is drunk driving - and with the BAC requirements so low drunk driving often isn’t actually drunk driving - and chatting on a cell phone is not drunk driving.

It’s a bit weird to be writing a post about lawsuits that occurred and were resolved years ago, especially since I am not the lawyer that Burt is. But the cases I am writing about had a lasting effect on my view of politics and its followers. And rather than try to stuff everything into a single post, I am going to write about the cases here, and then later why these cases were significant to me.

Conflict:

Around the turn of the century, there was a push towards cleaning up movies. The push did not come from studios in Hollywood, but rather entrepreneurs in (mostly) Utah (one of which, I should add, was named Huntsman). The two highest profile companies were ClearPlay and CleanFlicks. Both of these companies, as well as a third and fourth, were based out of the Beehive State, so I will occasionally refer to them as “the Utah companies.”

ClearPlay sold DVD players that would (with programming) skip over the more unsavory parts of movies. They would have editors go through, clean up the dirty parts, while being sure not to interfere with the telling of the story. They originally boasted 150 movies with a couple dozen being added each month. Concerned parents would buy the DVD through a regular outlet, download the filters, and then be able to watch movies with their kids (or just by themselves) without fear of seeing something they would rather not see. CleanFlicks was slightly different, having opened up VHS/DVD stores and sold the clean versions directly. There was a third company, whose name I cannot find but will call ATC, wherein you would send in the VHS or DVD you bought, which they would destroy, and send you back a clean version.

Thsi created a lot of consternation in Hollywood, and before long, lawsuits were filed by both the Directors Guild Association (DGA) and a little bit later the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Both rested their initial claim on Freedom of Speech. They were being censored. Their artistic vision was being tampered with. There were various op-eds suggesting that there was a danger in allowing people to automatically avoid exposure to things they found unsettling because there is artistic power in being unsettled.

Resolution:

It was primarily on the copyright argument that they made some headway and won their suit against CleanFlicks. Because CleanFlicks had pre-emptively sued, their case was further along. However, before a decision could ultimately be made with ClearPlay, congress clarified the copyright rules expressly to allow what ClearPlay was doing. ClearPlay is still around. CleanFlicks lost their business model and went under. Trilogy Studios, who had initially tried to sell their ClearPlay-like product directly to the studios, never tried to sell their product directly to consumers. If I recall correctly, ATC folded early under the pressure of the lawsuits and never got a ruling one way or another.

My Thoughts

In the abstract, I actually sided with the Utah companies on this. Which is to say, I believe that they were providing a service and a separate product from the studios (namely, a player). The only one I hesitated to that about is CleanFlicks (which I will get to in a minute). While it was the case that ClearPlay was making money around the studios’ works, the same can be said for the makers of DVD players in general. DVD player producers have to pay all sorts of patents to make their product, but as far as I know they do not have to pay the studios themselves. It is considered mutually beneficial. I doubt that there is even a contract involved. There is, however, an argument that they waived any right to money when they produced a product specifically to be played in a DVD player. I am not sure why that waver would not also apply to a ClearPlay DVD player, however.

With CleanFlicks it is a bit different. They were selling a product with someone else’s trademark on it, that was mostly full of someone else’s material. And they were making a profit by doing so without any sort of contract with the studio. What I don’t fully know is the extent to which you have to have a contract with a studio in order to sell their product, so long as you paid full retail price for the original. I know this applies to individuals (they can’t prevent me from selling my old DVDs) and I’m not sure how it is different for corporations.

CleanFlicks’s major liability, however, should be the original artistic integrity argument. Since ClearPlay and ATC both required an affirmative step and both involve possessing or having possessed the original product, it can be safely assumed that the person who purchases CP’s or ATC’s services are aware that they are not getting the original product. Meanwhile, someone can stumble into CleanFlicks without really knowing what they’re getting. I’m not sure the degree of disclosure required, but that we even have to talk about it makes me understand where the studios are coming from. So I could go either way on this one.

I would support, I suppose, a disclosure requirement for ClearPlay and (if they still existed) ATC, not only to remind people that they are getting an altered product but also so that the clean-up editor gets appropriate credit for his work. As that is an artistic enterprise, I do believe such disclosure should be appropriate. But, as they often do, I felt that the studios simply went too far. Not only failing to offer a service that people clearly wanted, but preventing anyone else from doing so. And as far as the copyright argument goes, while yes ClearPlay gets money off the deal, not a penny is denied to the studios that is owed to the studios for the product they provided. Their argument, to me, has the stench of their common argument that they have a right to control what someone does with a product after they purchase it. I believe this is true insofar as preventing people from copying-and-distributing, but that’s about the extent of it.

While with ClearPlay and ATC, you had to affirmatively send

This is an entirely apolitical post, but I thought I would share it anyway. I am reminded of it every Easter. A family that is close to ours used to have a Crawfish Boil every Good Friday. One year, there was a crawfish in the huge bucket that was talking around injured. His daughter said “That crawfish is in pain. You should kill it, Daddy! It’s hurting…”

To which the father, “Sweetie, how do you think it feels when we put the crawfish into the boiling water?”

The girl paused, looked confused, looked at the bucket of crawfish crawling around on top of one another, and burst into tears. The father burst into panic.

I think both the father and daughter learned something that day.

It’s probably because I don’t have a daughter that I find this story hilarious.

When I was growing up, our pastor was Father Brames. Brames was a very good and earnest man. There were really only two problems with him. The lesser issue was that he smelled so bad that even I could smell him (this was only a problem when I was acolyting). The greater issue was that he was extremely boring. He never had a memorable sermon. As the church grew, and it became apparent that we would need to build a new church, some folks got together and decided that they would donate a significant sum of money under one condition: Brames retired.

Brames was replaced by Father Carren. Father Carren was a convert to Episcopalianism from Catholicism. Carren was the opposite of Brames in many ways. He gave a great sermon. Great sermons. His best was his Easter sermon, which he gave for three or four years before people started tiring of it. But the people who were new and hadn’t heard it over and over again would always comment on what a great sermon it was. What I remember about the sermon is actually not all that flattering. I can’t remember a point to it, exactly. I remember it mostly being emotionally manipulative. But rarely was their a dry eye in the house save for those who had heard it at least a couple of times before.

Carren’s problem was not on the pulpit, but rather in the office (at least at first). Carren’s wife did not make a whole lot of friends with the broadly conservative congregation when she refused to play the role of pastor’s wife. She had a job and she wanted to do that job. That meant that social duties, traditionally split between husband and wife, were lackluster. Carren capitalized on what time he had, though. There were long rumors (that were proven to be correct) that he kept a spreadsheet of donations and only those who donated a certain amount of money would get hospital bedside visits and the like. The other issue was the empire-building. He fired people who had been with the church forever so that he could install his own people. He fired our youth director, who was amazing. He fired the choir director. He fired the front secretary. This didn’t make him a whole lto of friends. Beyond that, he was also big into building things. The new church was a done deal, but he used a much-beloved perisher’s death to push through a columbarium.

After about eight years or so, he moved on. Our church went from being a really attractive one due to its growth and its comparatively well-to-do congregation, to being one that nobody wanted to touch. There was $10m of debt. There was a tremendous divide where half of the people loved the outgoing pastor and half hated him. He left behind a lot of his own people that most never wanted at the church to begin with. Carren initially left the ministry overall in order to go into the construction business (which we found fitting). The best replacement we could find would come with problems of his own* and would prove to be nearly as polarizing as Carren.

Carren would leave the construction business in order to become chaplain here, and there. He got another pastor gig a few hours down the road, where he never wore out his welcome because he left quickly. This became a pattern and the archdiocese grew tired of him. But he gave a heck of a sermon. And there’s a shortage of pastors. The final straw came when it came to light that he was having an affair with a perishoner. Even Episcopalians have their limits. He was called to Charlton and dismissed.

He would later reconvert back to Catholicism, where I guess his extramarital affair was considered better than a lot of what was going on with its priests at the time. He is now a roaming pastor, serving congregations too small to support their own pastor.

* - He was twice-divorced, which was considered problematic. The big thing, though, was that he refused to marry people during lent or allow the church to be used for ceremonies. Carren had a similar rule, but regularly waived it when it came to those who filled the offeratory plates. Father Shelby made no exceptions. A prominent family had three children married in the course of three years and all wanted - but couldn’t - be married during lent. They eventually left the church altogether.

A long time ago, I was saddled with very, very bad Internet. It was unreliable, but even when it was working, so much of the bandwidth was reserved for downloading that my ability to upload anything was severely compromised. My lady friend at the time didn’t have broadband, but rather dial-up. At some point, I discovered that it was actually faster to save what I wanted to upload on a disk, get in my car, drive 15 minutes to her apartment (I had a key), dial into the Internet, upload the file, and then get back in my car and drive home.

Recently I was at a coffee place in Redstone and I got flashbacks to those bad old days. Downloading was fine, but if I wanted so much as to upload the text involved in leaving a comment, it would time out. Sometimes quickly, sometimes taking a while. I tried different browsers, I tried different desktop environments (the laptop was running Linux). I tried emailing the text of the comment to my phone (which itself was struggling, since not much was spent by Verizon on Redstone infrastructure). Finally, I got it through by way of saving it to a text file, emailing it to my phone*, and copying and pasting it onto the browser. It was about two and a half hours after I initially tried to leave the comment.

I could have driven over fifty miles from Redstone to Callie, uploaded it from home, and then driven back to Redstone in the amount of time it took me to get the comment posted.

Now that I know what has to be done, and why it’s not going to work when I try to leave a comment, it doesn’t take me nearly as long. Even so, I think I need to just resign myself to Starbucks, where I can leave comments on blogs without incident. And use the bathroom, too.

* - I actually don’t understand why this worked. This should count against uploading bandwidth as well. But it worked.

Back when I lived in Cascadia, it was always a guess as to what would happen at the (two) dollar theater I frequently. There was the fight, of course. More typically, during the winter, homeless people thought that $2 was a small price to pay to get out of the cold for a little while and would nod off in the back of the theater. Homeless people snore loudly.

Here in Callie, everything is more civilized. And tickets are $7 a pop even though you’re often seeing second-run flicks. Tonight, though, I went to see The Hunger Games, which is new. There was a woman - that I assume was not homeless - who fell asleep right as the movie started. And snored. We were on different sides of the theater, but I could hear hear her all the same. She would periodically wake herself up with a coughing fit. CoughcoughcoughCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHcoughcough… silence…. snore….

Fortunately, I just finished the book two days ago, so I knew what was going on. There wasn’t much divergence. Oddly, the movie sort of outlined a couple plot… problems… from the book that I hadn’t appreciated before. Along the lines of “Why don’t they…” and “Why didn’t they…” On the whole, I was impressed at what they did given the lack of first-person narrative. Alas, my favorite character from the book - who even in the book didn’t get much facetime - was almost absent from the movie. Here. There. Dead. Boo.

I’m working through the second book now.

Oh, also, in a fit of irony, I was hungry throughout the entire film.

I (sort of) beat a mentally handicapped 7th grader in checkers… and I’m proud of myself! Mostly because he apparently plays a lot of checkers and I haven’t played in years (I had to remind myself of the rules). Of course, the kid didn’t realize that I beat him. I had more pieces left on the board than he did, but I overtook him at the last possible second with a double-jump that went from him having a 7-6 advantage to my having a 6-5 one. He went first, so fair is fair.

It was a half-day yesterday, because they are about to get “Easter Break” and so they were let out at 1:00 instead of 3:00. Better still, classes ended at 11:00, followed by an assembly and then a meal-party.

The assembly had various community leaders. The first was a high school teacher who basically said “Bullying is wrong, but when you get to high school don’t be the kind of jackass that is going to make kids want to bully you.” The third speaker was a state senator who used to teach at the school, who basically said that you are all beautiful creatures of god and that you need to act like it. The second speaker was perhaps the most interesting one. He was the owner of a couple local fast food franchises. His lecture was basically how to go about getting a job in the service sector. At my high school, they would have had a guy explaining how to get a job outside the service sector. But Redstone is Redstone.

The second speaker’s advice was relatively straightforward. Be respectful, don’t ever think that you’re better than the job you are applying for, and stuff like that. He tripped over a bit on one point, which is that you should avoid getting tattoos or piercings because you will be evaluated negatively on them. The trip-up was that he was essentially saying that books will be judged by their cover, which books aren’t supposed to be, but they are, and so while you shouldn’t judge a book by your cover, people - especially people that hire and people presumably including him - will most definitely judge you by your cover.

Another difference between the middle school and my own middle school is the assumption, in the latter case, that everyone there will go to college. Every mention of college in this assembly was tempered by “If that is what you want to do” or “if you think that is the right thing for you to do.” Because, well, a lot of the kids aren’t going to college. And I suppose they decided it’s unwise to pretend otherwise. Also, they might worry about getting angry calls from parents who didn’t go to college or something.

I plan to write more about special ed in the future, but the sort of low-capability classes such as the one I had yesterday are actually among the easiest. Not because the kids are easy - they have attitudes that run the gamut but all of them have… quirks - but rather because low-capability kids come with paraprofessionals. They’re far better equipped to run the class than I am. I take orders from them.

Paras in Arapaho are basically one-on-one tutors and supervisors. No college degree is required for the job. One of the paras works nights as a waitress. The cultural distinctions between paras and teachers is white collar versus blue doing very similar jobs. While the paras do not measure up in terms of academic accomplishment, they have a certain… toughness. Some of the toughest people I see within the school system. What they seem to lack in finesse they make up for in a willingness to say - and this is a quote - “Jesse, cut that shit out.”

(Which Jesse does. Immediately.)