Why yes, I am that good.

Just an update on my continuing quest for world domination trivia greatness:  I have a three week winning streak going at The Loft, and won two weeks before I started my streak.*  That's four wins in six weeks. Admittedly, The Gringos, who can beat me on any day of the week and twice on Sundays, were only there for one of those weeks.  On the other hand, there are four of them, and for three of those four wins, only one of me.

I have signed up for the Brainstormer Fall Trivia League.  I'll let you guys know how I do.

Edited to add: and tonight, one day after I wrote that, I will try and extend my win streak to four! If anyone cares, I'll be at The Loft, 90 S. Second Street, San Jose, after about 7.

Edited once more to add: No, the streak ended.  The Gringos were there, and they beat me by four points.  I made up ground in the last round, but it was not enough to overcome the formidable lead they amassed earlier in the game.  Rats.  But again, there are four of them, each with their own specialty.  I bet I could take any one of them individually -- actually, they have almost admitted that.  I seem to get a lot of respect for being (usually) a one-person team facing teams or three, four, or five people.  But respect isn't winning.  As somebody (probably Vince Lombardi) noted, in this sport there are no "moral victories."


*I am appalled to note that in the last game, I knew nine out of ten in the "Madonna Moments" round.  I am less appalled to state that I ran the "match the nickname to the baseball player" round.

I suppose I should be happy he's motivated...

The Red-Headed Menace disclosed his real motivation the other day for learning chemistry: he wants to synthesize human pheromones.

We really should have just sent him to a monastery when we had the chance.

Why is this so hard for some people to understand?

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” 
 Elizabeth Warren.

Amen.  And this is why gas taxes are a good idea, because all of us need the roads, even the rich.  And all of us need educated workers, unless companies can outsource American jobs to third world nations with lax labor and environmental regulation, and very cheap workers.* God knows the very wealthy don't have to rely on public schools to educate their children. Police forces and fire departments are vital to well-being: except when funds are gutted and those wealthy enough can pay for private security and when whether your house is saved depends upon whether you paid the local tax for fire coverage.

Don't get me wrong: I think Warren is right on the money, for now, at least. However, there are segments of this society who either insist that Warren is dead wrong or who would like to make her so. You just have to look at the dissection of the quote on some right-wing blogs to see that.

Social contract? What social contract?

That's only for the rest of us suckers.

*Educated workers are a good idea for another reason: it costs a lot less to educate someone than imprison them.

PSA: This is all about me. Sorry.

I was reading a book about blogging recently.  (I gave it back to the library and I don't remember the title, which shows how much of an impression it made on me.)  One of the points it made was that in order to develop a readership one needs to have a subject matter and consistent point of view to one's blog.

I can sort of manage the point of view, but single subject matter? Ha.

I write this blog to write about things I would want to talk about with my friends.  I use it to express my feelings on a whole host of subjects, from all the various streams than run through my particular consciousness. I use it to exercise my brain, and to remind myself that I am more than the very small narrow boxes I tend to put myself into.  As I struggle with self-definition in the wake of my primary role in the world -- caregiver for three growing boys -- becoming rapidly obsolete, this blog becomes a place of exploration.

I also think, like many people, that I am just as susceptible as others to the illusion that somehow what I say or think is interesting to people who know nothing about me. I keep wondering if this is my own special variant of the national psychosis known as the cult of celebrity; not only that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, but that everyone can and should want to be famous for fifteen minutes.

Mostly, though, it is a place for me to write because I have to write.  I become another person when I write.  My harmless and anxious personality becomes more emphatic. I feel stronger, and freer, and more dangerous on these pages.  I feel more... me.

So, as solipsistic as it might be, this is about me.  This means you may be subject to a mad variety of subjects with no warning, from politics and law to what my kids or family say to rather boring navel-gazing like this.  Please pick what you like, and leave the rest.

And if there is something that speaks to you?  Please comment.  It is nice to talk to people.

Just a note to say I'm still here.  Those of you who know me well may be surprised a the lack of a post concerning the Troy Davis execution, but I'm working on it.  It's taking a while because I have been waiting a few days to get distance from the event itself.  I am trying to be very careful in what I say on this one, because the temptation to engage in hyperbole is almost overwhelming.  Not to mention I want to double check my links to make sure that they are still good law.

It will come at some point.

Today's moment of snark...

... comes via the District of Columbia.  I would have never thought of using license plates for government sponsored protest against another government but I guess they really wanted to make a statement.

Monday morning musings....

Words I never would have thought I would hear in actual conversation: "Then I used a moles to cups conversion...." The Red-Headed Menace, discussing his determination of the chemical makeup of Bisquick.  Yesterday's quote of the day: "I've figured out the chemical composition of Bisquick! Chemistry rocks!"

My little geek.  I am so proud of him. Not that I really trust that he's found the actual composition of Bisquick -- what formulation did he use for flour, given that various flours have differing levels of gluten, for example? -- but more that he thought it was a fun and interesting way to spend an hour.

[Edited to add: A comment in the Resident Shrink's LiveJournal, "It could be worse. If he were a budding mathematician instead of a budding chemist, he would have spent half an hour doing the calculations, declared that he had proven that a recipe for pancakes exists, and then spent the rest of the evening watching TV."]

*****

The Not-So-Little Drummer Boy taught me years ago to listen to the underlying elements of a recording, as well as the whole.  This morning, I am once again struck by how completely kick-ass the tambourine part in the Beatles' "Day Tripper" is.

*****

Speaking of the Beatles, and the Red-Headed Menace, yesterday he launched into an enthusiastic explanation of how the bridge from "Polythene Pam" to "She Came In From the Bathroom Window" was simply incredible, and the best thing the Beatles ever did. Preaching to the choir, kid.

*****

I almost never sign up for extended warranties, especially those that the salesman says "You can cancel at any time..."  I always forget to cancel, and then end up paying more than the actual cost of the item in fees.   When I bought my phone in March, I signed up for the "Total Equipment Coverage" from Verizon just to get my phone shipped to me sooner. "You can cancel this just as soon as you get your phone," the sales manager told me.   Did I cancel it? No, of course not.  The new smart phone had so many additional charges (for data usage plans, mainly) that I completely zoned on the fact that there was an additional $6.99 per month I didn't really need to be paying.

Maybe that was a good thing.  On Saturday, while it was plugged in and charging, a knapsack and a blanket were piled on top of the phone.  (Not by me, I might add.) When I finally discovered it, it was so hot I burned my hand.  I'm just lucky it didn't catch fire -- I have heard of instances where things like this did.  Of course, the phone was completely trashed. But since it was covered, I just had to go to the Verizon store, explain what happened, and my new phone should arrive tomorrow.*

So I will be getting a replacement Droid for $42, which was paid in monthly installments.  I can certainly live with that.

*****

And, once again, it be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! As a friend of mine on Facebook said, "Sheel! Jidee raadin!" (That would be "Stop! Allow search!" in Somali.**)

Here's hopin' you have  a fair wind and smooth sailin'. Arrrgh.


* If you are reading this, and you are someone who communicates with me by phone, just a reminder that I will be unreachable until sometime on the 20th or 21st.
** Yes, I nearly spit out my coffee, too.

Quote of the Day

From Contagion: "Blogging isn't journalism, it's graffiti with punctuation."

Fifteen second review: "Contagion"

Go. See. This. Movie.  It's a horror flick with next to no blood.  I haven't been this filled with adrenaline after a film since Cloverfield.

It will also make you very careful about washing your hands, much the way Jaws made people scared to go swimming.

Well, I could do that, I suppose....

Me, after a frustrating morning dealing with the Red-Headed Menace: "Throttling children is wrong."
The Resident Shrink: "There are species that eat their young...."

9/11, ten years on.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Helen Keller

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.  Benjamin Franklin 


I said on Sunday that that was not the day to discuss my thoughts about 9/11 from the perspective of ten years on.  Today, however, is.

Looking back on that horrific day and all the 3,652 that followed, one thing becomes abundantly clear to me:

The terrorists won.

They won with the assistance of the government, the media, and large segments of the American populace. They accomplished their goal of turning us against each other, of destroying the nation we are, or were.

To be clear, the object of terrorism is not to kill people.  The main object is to instill terror.  Abortion clinics are bombed not just to hurt anyone inside, but to make any woman think twice about going into one, and any health care provider hesitate to work there.  For every abortion doctor killed, there are others who decide to either go out of the business or never begin in the first place.

The 9/11 bombers, and those behind them, managed to make us lose our collective minds.  They made us afraid of anyone who appeared Middle Eastern, resulting in stories like this one of an American citizen being pulled off a plane, held for hours, having to face the humiliation of being stripped searched, all because she was a dark-skinned woman who happened to be seated with two dark-skinned men in the same row, and who had the gall to be using her cell phone.  Suspicious activity, indeed.  Clearly, a terrorist cell at work.

They turned us into a nation that.... No, we turned ourselves into a nation that would be complacent about arresting and detaining people for years without any real level of due process because they were suspected terrorists.  Where individuals that the government admitted were innocent were held because they could not go back to their homeland without fear of death and God forbid that we admit our mistakes and allow them to stay in the U.S.  As everyone knows, if you are taken to Guantanamo, you must be a terrorist, right?

We turned into a nation where a large number of people condone the previously unthinkable.  All of a sudden, for too many people -- especially people in government and media -- torture became an unfortunate but acceptable way of extracting information, rather than a tool of tyranny that we had too much decency to resort to. And the level of fear became such that demagogues and bigots could feel comfortable saying outrageous things, such as "communities should be able to ban mosques if they want to," and where scarily high proportions of people believe that Muslims should not be allowed to sit on the Supreme Court (24% of respondents) or run for President (32%) and that simply by virtue of their religion Muslims cannot be patriotic Americans (25%).  So much for the first Amendment.* Where a blogger can be lauded by his commenters for suggesting, in a calm, rational, sad way that it is not only acceptable to kill children, but a moral imperative to do so.

One of the voices of sanity in an insane world, Paul Krugman, has called the years post 9/11 "The Years of Shame."  He gets it right.  Exactly.

We have allowed our fear to destroy our civic soul. We have placed a frantic need for illusory personal security above the ideals which purportedly underlie who we are as a nation.

The attacks on 9/11 were a challenge to all of us, and in the long run we failed.


We lost.

*I would include links to conservative Islamophobic blogs on this, but just reading the commentary made me ill, and I refuse to give them more traffic. (I know conservatives who are decent, rational people, and I think it is time that those of us in the progressive movement stop using "conservative" in a way that automatically equates to "racist.") I think it was the nicely formatted, very attractive blog which spewed the poison that Islam was by its very nature a threat to the U.S., and that Muslims should not be allowed to be in the country, let alone do anything as radical as hold public office, that bothered me the most.  The nastiest, most virulent hatred phrased in the most genteel, calm language. And I have linked to my post about the "killing children is okay" post rather than the original because the thought of revisiting the sewer that spawned that discussion makes me nauseous.

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!

The Musee d'Orsay is currently holding an exhibition called "Beauty, Morals and Voluptuousness in the England of Oscar Wilde." Pre-Raphaelites, Whistler.... Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy....

How much would a plane ticket to Paris be? Think I could get by by sleeping in Metro stations? I'd need to get my passport reissued....

How to tell you're an art snob

One way is when you look at your son's Art of the Western World book, which he is reading for AP Modern European History, and try to determine how many of the paintings and sculptures you have seen in person.  The answer, for the Renaissance until the mid-20th century, is well over half. (It would be over two-thirds, but I have never been to Italy.)  In some periods, it rises to as much to 5/6 (I've seen a lot of "Golden Age" Dutch painting).

You're an even bigger snob when you mentally correct the locations attributed to the paintings.  In 1989, the year that the book was published, The Musee d'Orsay had been open for three years, and a number of the Impressionist and later works listed as being in the Louvre would have been in the Orsay instead. Picasso's  Guernica was returned to Spain in 1981, and therefore could not have been hanging in MOMA in New York in 1989.

That's being an art snob.  Being an art lover is looking at those same pictures as though they were old friends and feeling longing and melancholy that so many of them are so far away and you won't be able to visit them again for a long time, if ever.  And trying to figure out how to get to Italy to see the Uffizi and Vatican collections, and Vienna and Oslo to see paintings by two of your favorite painters whose works you've never seen in person (Klimt and Munch, respectively).

Hmmm.... Frequent flyer tickets to New York aren't that much. Four days should do it -- two for the Met, one each for the Guggenheim and MOMA.... No, five, I forgot the Frick.  Pity I couldn't schedule a day's layover in Chicago.  It wouldn't be enough time, but would give me a chance to revisit the Art Institute briefly. I went to the National Gallery in D.C. last January, so I can wait a while before I go there again.  Of course, there is always driving down to L.A. for the Getty -- I wonder what exhibitions are showing? Next April they begin a show on photography and the "cult of celebrity," which looks really interesting. And ...

To state the obvious, on this day ten years ago, the world changed.

There are many stories of that day of terror and loss, and heroism and hope.  None of them are mine.  I experienced the day the same as most Americans outside the New York and Washington Metro areas did: as horrified and helpless observers.  I lost no one that day, although I know people who did.

There is much I need to say about that day and its aftermath, but that needs to be kept for another time.  Today is a not a day for analysis, but for remembrance of those who died and respect for their families.

The fact of the matter.

Damning facts are still facts.   Steven C. Holtzman*

Truth is difficult. Truth can be slippery, subjective, and in a larger sense unknowable. Facts, however...

Once again in Facebook I am confronted with people with whom I share political views on almost every issue under the sun repeating the factually wrong assertion that members of Congress do not pay for their own health care. What makes it worse, I have already corrected these people several times -- both as comments in their Facebook status updates, and with status updates of my own.

It may seem to be a very small thing.  It is not.

Facts matter.  How much any given fact matters is highly contextual, but whether or not a statement is actually true means a lot.  A worldview not built on reality, which refuses to accept facts that do not fit into its pre-written talking points, is that of a charlatan or a fool.

Confronting facts which challenge what we think is an important part of our intellectual growth. It allows us to develop nuance in our understanding of the world. It also helps us understand those around us: very few people are wrong all the time, and no one has a monopoly on truth.  Listening to truth voiced by those with whom we disagree -- once we have determined it to be true -- forces us to examine our own views, which is always a good thing.  Willingness to allow for facts we rather wish weren't true is vital to critical thinking.

More to the point in this case, facts are how we assess credibility. How better to judge a person's arguments than to see whether they get their facts straight? Far too often these days, many people seem to have that backward:  they decide whether or not they like or trust an individual public figure, then accept as fact statements that public figure makes, without bothering to check their truthfulness.  Those statements get repeated, as though factual accuracy was determined by popular vote or amount of media coverage.

As progressives become an increasingly endangered species in this country, adherence to factual accuracy becomes crucial.  Reality is our best weapon; indeed, our only weapon. Being sloppy with facts opens the door to (occasionally proper) accusations of bias and ignorance which many are only too willing to believe.  It behooves us to be very careful about what we assert to be true.

Facts do not cease to exist simply because they are uncomfortable, inconvenient, or call into question your entire belief system.  This is as true for progressives alleging the corruption of Congress as it is for young-earth creationists asserting that the dinosaurs never really existed, or tin-foil hat wearers who insist the moon landings were faked.

*This is a quote from "Oracle America, Inc.’s Reply To Google Inc.’s Objections To The Declaration Of Fred Norton In Support Of Oracle’s Motion To Compel Production Of Documents, or, In the Alternative Respond To Legal Argument,"  filed August 17, 2011 in Oracle America, Inc.  v. Google, Inc. (found on scribd.com).** I was, ahem, Googling for quotes about "facts," and ran across this gem. It is a) true and b) a nicely crafted sentence, which in my book makes it a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
**Yes, I know this is not proper citation form.  No, I have no intention of looking up the correct form.  Yes, I am being lazy.  Sue me.  The issue of the importance of proper form  is an entirely different post which I fully intend to write sometime in May, 2017.

After all, it *is* 5:00 somewhere...

I am trying to unravel a problem with my email program and GMail.  Looking things over, there is a chance that I -- no, my mail program, without my freaking permission -- may have been accidentally sending my intermediate drafts out to people.  Which means...

I may have sent over a hundred copies of an email out to someone.* And until I figure out what the hell is going on, I am reluctant to email anyone about anything, so sending an "I'm so sorry I spammed your inbox" email is not an option.  Not to mention that it would look very silly in any case.

And if you're the person who got the 100+ copies of the single email?

I am not stalking you.

Really, truly. (Not that you're not stalk-worthy, mind you, but I don't roll that way.  I am certifiably crazy, but I am not THAT certifiably crazy.)

I am having the devil's own time resisting adding whiskey to my coffee right now.  Irish coffee makes everything better, at least until I have to drive somewhere.

*No, I did not rewrite the damn thing 100 times.  My mail program autosaves drafts every little while, and I took time to craft this email carefully.  And see what it got me?

Role models

One of the books on last year's Entertainment Weekly's "Top Ten Nonfiction Books for 2010" is a book, Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, the subject matter with which I have at least a passing familiarity.  Among other aspects of NASA's space programs, it talks about the Haughton-Mars project on Devon Island, which the Rocket Scientist is part of every year since 1998, the second year of its existence.

The Rocket Scientist is in the book.  He comes across as quite irascible, which he can be when dealing with people who annoy him, especially if he thinks they are being idiots.  The fact that he has to go two weeks working long hours with minimal chances for showers doesn't help either.  Roach makes the rather romanticized statement that he looks like Walter Raleigh, except for the ruffled collar.  Which has led to me calling him, occasionally, the cranky Walter Raleigh.  (He actually looks nothing like Sir Walter, except for the beard.)

There is one problem with Roach's book: it is incomplete in a very disturbing way.  She writes about a number of people in camp, including the cook and the guy who fixes the ATVs.... but not one woman. To read her account, Devon is an all-male club, with the men ruggedly braving the elements for the sake of helping mankind along in its search for other planets.

Funny, she missed the fact that RS's assistant -- heavily responsible for the mechanics of his drill and indispensable to his project -- was a woman.  Not to mention my friend Sarah Huffman, who was the sysadmin, the comms person for RS's project, second in command on the traverse mentioned in the book, and the person who changed the spark-plugs on the ATVs when they were in the field.* There was at least one other woman up there that year. A rather large oversight on the author's part, don't you think?

I have not heard Roach speak about her book, nor read interviews with her.  It may be she offers an explanation about who she left out.  I would hope so, but that still doesn't change the fact that women are missing from her account.  I mean, the cook but not the sysadmin? What the hell? The Rocket Scientist points out that she is free to concentrate on whatever people she feels will make her book more interesting.  If that's true -- and I concede that it is -- the fact that she chose a narrative which eliminates women from the picture she paints says nothing good to me about how she views the world.

Sarah was very unhappy with this.  Not because she was left out (she's very level-headed and that did not seem to bother her too much**) but because of the effect on young girls.  Here was a chance for girls to see how possible it was for them to go into the field and do science and engineering in hostile environments.  Here were two women role models for adventurous girls who were totally ignored.

It is true that there are a lot of women who blaze trails.  But for many girls the roles in which they are capable of seeing themselves are influenced by the roles they see women filling. (This is not restricted to women, of course: its simply that there are so many more roles filled by men that they have a wider range of models to emulate.)  Every woman left out of the accounts is one less woman that a girl can point to and say "Yes, her.  I want to do what she's doing."

This was brought to mind by an article a friend posted to Facebook which discussed a report from the U.S. Commerce Department which stated that women who were getting science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees were less likely than men with similar degrees to actually work in their fields, but instead to work in fields like eduction and health care.  According to the TPM website, "The report speculates that reasons for this could be socio-cultural in nature: 'a lack of female role models, gender stereotyping, and less family-friendly flexibility in the STEM fields.'" [Emphasis mine.]

Girls need role models.  While it is true that we need educators and people in health care, we also need women to be scientists and engineers.  We could be missing the next Marie Curie, the next Annie Jump Cannon, the next Rosalind Franklin.  What a waste that would be.

A waste we cannot afford.



*The prior year, Sarah had been the camp cook as well.  There is a reason I call her "the fabulous Sarah Huffman."
** Have I mentioned that Sarah is the person I want to be when I grow up, even though she's two decades younger than I am?

Political Odds and Ends.

I have not been writing much.  No, that's inaccurate.  I have not been posting much, at least not here. I thought I would just check in.

Part of it is that I have been involved with issues elsewhere in cyberspace, mainly over at Facebook, mainly involving relatives.  (You can pick your friends, but...)  I was forced to issue the following statement (for reasons that are too long to go into here, stretching back literally decades):

Note to the world: I am a fierce supporter of LGBT rights. I believe that the right to marry is a right, not a privilege, that belongs to all regardless of race, religion, national origin or *sexual orientation.* You have a problem with that? Unfriend me. Now.

Unfortunately, the person whom I hoped would take the hint didn't, and after further nasty personal attacks on my Wall, I was forced to ban him.  The upshot of all this is there are now people in my extended family with whom I am not on even the most basic of speaking terms (hey, I didn't start this) and I suddenly have a lot more free time around the holidays.

*********************************************************************************

And then there were the Rick Perry signs. This was a much more civil debate -- although no less passionate on both sides.

It started when I posted a picture of a sign from St Catherine's Episcopal Church (where, I do not know) which read: "Gov. Perry.  God here. That voice in your head is not me.  Take your meds." Several people "liked" it, and one person (whom, her political opinions aside, I quite like) expressed unhappiness with "Sigh."

The next day, after much thought, I decided that the sign was in fact unfair to the mentally ill.  Bigotry is not a mental illness, and to lump people who take meds to be able to function in the world in with Rick Perry is just wrong. So I posted a sign from Texas Baptist Church (again, I have no idea where) which read: "I never told Rick Perry to run for anything.  I did suggest he stop harassing gays, Mexicans and Muslims, however.  God."  Along with this, I posted my explanation why I liked this sign better than the other one.

I was then accused of stating that people who disagree with me are mentally ill.  I responded, clarifying my position that I believe no such thing, that in fact it was because he was not mentally ill I thought the first sign unfair in retrospect.  I also added "there are a lot of people with whom I disagree vehemently about a number of things, but whom I like and respect. I have never reserved my affection only for people who viewed the world the same way I do." I also linked to a Ta-Nehisi Coates column about Rick Perry and a particularly troubling case from Texas.


I was then accused of candidate bashing.  You know what? She was right, at least partially.  The first sign was candidate bashing, pure and simple.  Yes, I am suspicious of anyone who claims God told them specifically to do anything, but to some extent that can be -- and in evangelical circles often is -- spiritual shorthand for "I discerned the will of God in this." Far be it from me to say where the will of God lies in anything.  To mock Perry here is to willfully make fun of a man's religious beliefs.


But that second sign? No dice.  When a man or woman runs for President, their statements on issues such as immigration and homosexuality, not to mention their record as an elected official, have every bearing on their fitness for the highest position in the land, and are fair game for all sorts of commentary and, yes, mockery.

******************************************************************************

Speaking of Rick Perry....


I have been trying to get together a post about Rick Perry and capital punishment.  It keeps getting longer and longer... and sadder and sadder. At some point in the next month I will have it finished or abandoned, I don't know.


Part of the reason is that I like to write about things that I feel passionately about but which do not affect me so much that I find it difficult to argue clearly.  Some things just strike me inarticulate with rage.  (This is exactly why I have yet to do a post about the Wal-Mart case from earlier this year.)  Capital punishment is a hot-button topic with me, and capital punishment in Texas more so.  Throw in a man who has publicly criticized the Supreme Court decision that outlawed the execution of the mentally retarded, and it gets very tricky for me to retain enough calm to write about it. 

And then there is the Willingham case. (See the Ta-Nehisi Coates column mentioned above.)  I can't write about this, yet, because as I said on my Facebook "It's kind of hard to write with the foam from your mouth dripping on the keyboard."  (This was, incidentally, the statement -- along with a chart showing how marriage was treated in the Bible -- which caused a flame-war and is the reason I am not leaving California this Christmas.)  Let's just say that I find Perry's actions reprehensible.

Of course, a post on Texas would inevitably lead  to posts about the state of capital punishment nationwide.  There are at least three posts running through my head having to do with that subject -- I just need to catch my breath enough to write them. 

********************************************************************************

A final thought about the death penalty, from Ta-Nehisi Coates (who is a wonderfully thoughtful witer):

Whenever tempted by moral dudgeon, it should be remembered that abolishing the death penalty would mean asking decent people to tolerate the lives of criminals who revel in the abuse of that tolerance. Opposing the death penalty is not rooted simply in the pursuit of justice, but, perhaps more firmly, in understanding the world’s fundamental injustice, and the ease with which an attempt to permanently balance the scales ultimately imbalances them further.

********************************************************************************

I have also been doing my best to stamp out ignorant parroting of talking points, where I can.  And in Facebook, even among otherwise intelligent people, you can see this in action.

For example:  a few weeks ago there was a meme circulating to the effect of "let's show Congress how to balance the budget by first getting rid of their salaries."  Aside from all of the practical political reasons this would be a terrible idea,  cutting Congressional salaries is empty posturing and will do absolutely nothing to close the deficit. If Congresspeople were being paid $200K a year (the highest salary is not that high) and if you were to eliminate all pay for Congress, you would save a staggering.... 107 million per year. We spent 63 times that in Afghanistan in February 2010 alone.* Pretty feeble for a gesture.  Not to mention that, with nearly 50% of people in Congress having a net worth of over $1,000,000, not very effective.

And then, reading yet another article that claimed that Congress gets free health care, this time from a left-leaning publication, I wrote:  

Repeat after me: Members of Congress get the same health care benefits as any other federal employee. They DO NOT get free health care. I have heard this repeated from people at both ends of the political spectrum. There are a lot of reasons to dislike Congress; this isn't one of them. Just because I agree with your political ends does not mean that I am going to let you get away with twisting facts, even unknowingly.

 *************************************************************************

It is not even September 2011.  The nominating conventions are ten months away, the general election fourteen.  I am already tired of Presidential politics.  It's going to be a loooonnnnngggg year.

Heh. Poor Applebee's. Not.

I play trivia at several different venues.  The Loft in San Jose, Applebee's, St. Stephen's Green in Mountain View.  Different venues, different formats, different games.  I've done pretty well this week.  Although my team tanked at the Loft, our dinner was covered by virtue of the fifty dollar gift certificate I won (by myself) last week.  At St. Stephen's Green, I won a pitcher of beer by coming in second. (I got the manager to agree that I could get it at a future date, since I was playing by myself and driving.)

Applebee's is by far the easiest venue.  For one thing, people generally play as individuals.  This eliminates the team advantage.  Secondly, the questions are easier (and multiple choice, usually), and the rounds are timed, which means, by virtue of being fast (thank you, Jeopardy!) and secure in my knowledge (I know what I know) I can do well.  In the past I have cleaned up:  in the past eight weeks, I have won $130 at Applebee's -- and I have not even gone to most of the trivia nights. Of the six nights (out of a possible 16) I have been, I have participated in 15 rounds in two different formats.  I won 13 of them.  I have won more at Applebee's than I have ever spent at Applebee's.

Tonight at Applebee's, I had won the first two rounds when the manager came over, introduced himself, and told me that in the future there would be a "maximum two wins a night" rule, because, well, I had a reputation as winning all the time and "it's more fun if more than one person wins."  I understand that.  Although the rule was not in effect tonight, I took pity on everyone and left after three rounds -- all of which I had won.

I feel like a card-counter in Vegas.

I need a new business card: Pat Greene: Trivia Shark.

That's great, it starts with an earthquake

It's very odd to see all of my friends on the East Coast freaking out a bit about the 5.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Virginia this morning.  As someone who lived through the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, part of me feels really smug, but the larger part of me is very sympathetic to how unnerving it is to feel the ground move under your feet for the first time. [Edited to add: not to mention the problem of unreinforced masonry buildings.  At noon, I have yet to hear any damage/casualty reports, but I would not have wanted to be in a brick building in, say, Richmond this morning.]

Also, an absolutely on point xkcd comic.

And just think, later this week many of them will get hit by a hurricane, as well.  What's next, a plague of locusts?

Hurricane Irene is strengthening into a Category 3. To my friends and family in Florida and along the East Coast, keep an eye out.  I know she's only a Cat 3, but I have a really bad feeling about this one.

Oh, no.

 A First Air 737 crashed just short of the runway in Resolute, Nunavut, Canada.  Although the scientists and staff who go to Devon were home, the Rocket Scientist and the NASA people he work with most probably know one or more of the victims.  Resolute is a community of 200, and some of the people on board were going on to Grise Fjord, a town of 70, where, the Rocket Scientist says, he and his colleagues knew pretty much everyone in the village. My heart goes out to the families affected by this tragedy.

This is exactly the sort of thing that gives nightmares about field season.

School Daze.

One way to know that school has started? I am getting more hits from people Googling the words "little known heroes" or "little known American heroes."  Guys, you really need to go elsewhere than some blog by some person you've never heard of to find your materials.  Especially since your teacher has undoubtedly said you can't use Wikipedia as a source.

Be worried. Really.

According to writer John Batchelor in the Daily Beast blog, the Republicans do not stand a chance in 2012.

Right.

Remember how all of us (all of us liberal Dems, that is) laughed about the possible election of GW Bush?  You can never, never, take anything for granted in presidential politics.  Spin enough embarrassing incidents, cover enough of your previous record, and you can win handily. Or at least with the help of an uncritical media, the Florida supervisor of elections and the Supreme Court.

The thought of any of the Republican candidates being president -- with the possible exception of Mitt Romney whom I do not like but also do not fear -- is enough to make me wake up in the middle of the night with the cold sweats.

Just think of it: President Rick Perry.  Or even worse, President Rick Santorum. Thankfully, I do think that Michelle Bachmann is enough of a flake that she won't win the nomination.

 The time to start getting the message out about these people is now, not when it looks like they do have a serious following.

I know I wasn't going to blog so much about my family, but...

The first day of school....

Chem Honors teacher: Any questions?
Red-headed Menace: Kirk or Picard?

It is going to be one of those years, I can just tell.

The teacher actually gave a thoughtful answer ("it depends who you're fighting -- Kirk is better against the Klingons, Picard against the Romulans"), and then proceeded to liven up the rest of class by demonstrating the properties of flammability by pouring various sized pools of ethyl alcohol on lab tables and setting them alight. RHM describes this teacher (ecstatically) as a "sarcastic Trekkie pyro." Just his type of guy, in other words.

I need to have a talk with RHM about classroom behavior before I start getting calls from the school and emails from his teachers.  It reminds me of the time the Not-So-Little-Drummer Boy, stuck in an Econ class he needed to take to graduate but which he most emphatically did not want to be in, gave a fake name the first day of class. And the time the NSLDB responded to an assignment from a particularly humorless freshman English teacher by writing an essay on how the pot of petunias in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a heroic figure.

Basically, both the NSLDB and RHM have a hard time dealing with lackluster teaching. On the other hand, they appreciate teachers who challenge them, even when other students hate them.  (RHM really likes his Modern History AP teacher even though the guy has a horrible rap among the students: he has a very dry sense of humor, RHM says, and has said that since this can be for college credit he plans to teach it like a college course.)

My kids are many things: boring is not among them. Teachers either love them or want to strangle them -- much as I do, frequently, except that I usually want to do both at the same time.

Vacation. Oh boy.

Yesyerday, I returned from several days in Mexico.  Rah.

I have had better vacations.  Much better vacations. There was a fair amount of crankiness on people's parts (and I'm not exempting myself in this), and not enough time to do what each of us wanted. Because of complications in the Rocket Scientist's field season resulting from issues between NASA and the DOD, sparked off by the actions of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (gee, thanks, JPL!), he had to be later coming home than planned and our trip was cut from ten days down to five.

The night before we left, Vincent, the black Mustang, died of as yet undiagnosed electronic failure. Fine.  We had to simply leave him on the street rather than in the driveway. Of course, there was nothing to steal and since it wouldn't start we didn't have to worry about the car being jacked.

We made it down to Mexico pretty much without incident. I drove through from Mission Hills to Ensanada, primarily because I get so much less cranky than the Rocket Scientist driving in urban traffic. Since I cannot navigate my way out of the proverbial paper bag, he needed to give directions.  The most nerve-wracking part was navigating streets in Tijuana getting to the highway.

Ensanada itself was okay, I guess.  I would have been just as happy -- happier, perhaps -- lying on the beach in Santa Monica.  One of my requirements for this vacation was that we go somewhere near water. Last year, we did deserts, and the year before mountains, volcanoes and forests, so I thought it only fair we hit oceans.

I am an ocean person of the first order, and really wanted to hear the surf.  In a place like Ensanada -- or San Diego, or Key West -- all I really need is a beach, a blanket and a book.  And if necessary, I can do without the book. That I only got to spend about two hours at the beach made me unhappy and unreasonable. Although to tell the truth, the marine geyser at Bufadora was really cool.

One aspect of the trip satisfied totally: the food.  It will be a long time before I can eat Mexican food in the States.  There is nothing like the taste of freshly pressed and cooked corn tortillas.  I normally avoid corn tortillas because I think they taste rubbery, but these were fresh and light, filled with either carne asada or fried fish. Yum.

Then there was the trip back.  We went an interior route, which was dry and desert-like, instead of the coastal route we had come down on.  We spent three hours crossing the border, which drove me batty.  After that barrel of fun, we stopped in San Ysidro to get gas and change money.

At which point the great San Diego curse hit.*

Each of the past four trips to San Diego have had something bad happen, either in San Diego or on the way to or from.  Three trips ago, it was an incident involving a waitress in a restaurant and my middle son, which ended up for a short time being a matter for extensive Internet discussion and which had us contacting the San Diego city attorney and contemplating legal action.  The time after was Echidna Quest, which while it had its amusing moments, also involved the car dying in Pasadena, and the Not So Little Drummer Boy spending an entire day in the hotel throwing up from food poisoning.

The time after that was the worst.  While in the San Diego Wild Animal Park, we got word that my beloved sister-in-law Nadia died.  Before we could get back, I had an asthma attack severe enough to require a visit to an urgent care clinic, so that we were late leaving.  While we driving back frantically so that my husband could catch a ten a.m. plane to Atlanta, the transmission on the van died.  Not only died, but self-destructed so spectacularly that the headquarters of Ford took an interest in it.  At midnight.  In the Central Valley, where the temperature was close to 100 degrees, with the omnipresent smell of cattle.  We waited three hours before a tow truck came and picked us up, then dropped us off at a hotel, where we got two hours of sleep before a friend rented a van and came and picked us up.

This time, the latch on the back liftgate broke.  This may not sound like all that much, until you consider we were packed to the gills with no way to close the trunk.  After various attempts to remedy the situation, we were reduced to tying the trunk closed so that we could go on our way.  When we stopped at Santa Clarita for the day, we had to unload everything through the front and side of the van. Which we had to reverse the next morning when we left.

Next time we head south, I refuse to go any farther than the Orange County line.

We then went to Traveltown in Griffith Park so that Railfan could look around.  I have to admit that was rather fun, especially since RF got to show off his accumulated knowledge of rail cars and locomotives. (And boy, does he know a lot.) I found listening to him highly educational, and he was happy to have an interested audience.

But then we had the long slog up I-5 through the Central Valley. We stopped for dinner at Pea Soup Andersen's in Santa Nella (in spite of my desire to run straight through -- which would have been a serious mistake), and got home at 9.  And then the kids had to get ready (including the Red-Headed Menace finishing up a summer assignment for his AP History class -- he was up until midnight), because school started today.  I had forgotten to take in the mail, and get someone to take in the trash cans (we had had to leave them in place for the trash/recycling pickup the day we left), so I am waiting to get a citation from the city in the mail for leaving the bins out for more than forty-eight hours. Penwiper the cat showed just how happy she was with the situation (even though we had gotten someone to take care of her while we were gone) by urinating all over a basket of clean clothes in my room.  And she chose to do so after we got home -- I discovered the message right after she left it. I love my cat, but sometimes I want to make a throw rug out of her.

Okay, so no one died and no one went to jail.  And I didn't even freak out about the car situation.  But I tell you, I need another vacation.  Near a beach.  By myself.

*Okay, so San Ysidro is not San Diego proper, but it is in San Diego County. 

I know I have a small (but hopefully dedicated) audience...

Perhaps because of the Russian LJ issue, and because of some cases I have heard recently of Google being overly aggressive in freezing people's accounts, I have taken to backing up all my posts here on a mirror blog on Wordpress.  I am playing around with the interface, and may end up moving permanently over there.  I do not know yet.  I'll let you guys know -- and if any of you have suggestions/preferences, comment.

My first introduction to the world of online writing was through LiveJournal in February, 2002.  Even with all the other social media outlets which have come (Dreamwidth, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and gone (MySpace, Vox), I still have maintained my LiveJournal account.  I still use it for talking to a small group of online friends about subjects too personal to discuss on Facebook, let alone here.  (Not to mention that Facebook has that insanely annoying 420 character limit.  Twitter I keep mainly for communicating in emergencies. LinkedIn... I'm not sure quite why I have a LinkedIn account anymore.  God knows that I do not use it the way it is supposed to be used.) When my children were smaller, LiveJournal saved my sanity, allowing me to communicate with people more than three feet tall.  It gave me a forum for writing and communicating in which I was Pat, not so-and-so's mother, or, worse yet, The Rocket Scientist's wife.* I have met friends -- some of them very close -- through LiveJournal.

As it turns out, LJ has assumed a much greater role in the world than I thought.  Far from simply being a place to bitch to your friends about your boyfriend not calling you, reading Criminal Minds slash, cooing over baby and kitten pictures or participating in random online polls, the service has international political importance.

LiveJournal has become a major platform for political dissidents in Russia. Unlike other media, it is totally uncontrolled, which allows for a complete diversity of opinions.  It is an outlet for free expression in a country where the concept is tenuous (even in the post-Soviet era). It allows Russians of all political stripes to communicate and organize.  And, for the third time since March, last week LJ was been hit with a major DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack.   This time the attacks spread out to the carriers Qwest and Verizon, as well.  There are strong indications that these are, if not government-sponsored, being driven by pro-government forces. 

I find all this fascinating. I should not be surprised at the use of LJ as a political tool: blogs and other social media have been used as such by political elements in every country. (It would have been a lot harder for the Tea Party movement in this country to have burgeoned quite as it has without the Internet providing batshit crazies concerned citizens a place to meet.)  A service such as LiveJournal is a repressive government's worst nightmare:  an easily accessible, totally open venue for political debate.  It is a way for people to foster community and exchange information that would otherwise be repressed.

Of course many people outside Russia have been seriously annoyed by these attacks.  If LJ is your primary way to keep in touch with your friends, it can be frustrating.  (On the small filter of people I talk to, a good 2/3 of them live more than 200 miles away from me.  In most cases I met those people through the Internet, and in some cases I have yet to meet them in person.)  It makes it easier to know, somehow, that all of this is about democracy and free speech, not some idiot 4-Chan/Anonymous power play.

I hope that it doesn't bring LiveJournal down in the end; that would be a shame.  But I have no doubt that the dissenters will find a way; the Internet has made political repression much more complicated. Even if LiveJournal were to fall (and at least one Russian commentator believes that these attacks are rehearsals for "cyber-war," to bring LJ down in case of emergency, to shut off dissent without having to disable the entire Internet), people are starting to find other sites and other ways to get their message out. The Internet will win in the end.

It makes this blogger feel all warm and glowy inside.


*I love them, but it does get tiresome when most of the people you talk to want to either discuss your kids or your husband. True story: when you go on Jeopardy!, you fill out a questionnaire about your life experiences.  The last question is "Why do you want to be on Jeopardy!?"  My answer was, flippantly, that it would be nice to have people at cocktail parties talk to me about what I was doing rather than what my husband the Rocket Scientist was involved in.  When you go on the show, they pick one item about you for Alex Trebek to chat with you about.  Out of all the fascinating stories I told about myself, guess what they chose?  Yep, how much I was in my husband's shadow and how this was a chance for my own place in the sun.  I just can't escape this.

All the news that's fit to blog. Maybe.

When I started this blog, it was, for the most part, discussions of the events of the day filtered through my own particular life experiences.  I did not write very much about my family, and, although more, not all that much about my every day activities.

That has changed over the past few years.  I stopped blogging almost completely in 2008 and 2009, posting a total of 20 posts in two years, twelve less that I have thus far in this July alone.  When I recommenced writing in 2010, the posts were mostly about me (with far too much navel-gazing), with far fewer about the world around me.  Although the purpose of the blog remained the same (to give me a generalized outlet for my writing), the subjects and tone changed, and not necessarily for the better.

Lately, I have been trying to figure out why this is. I know that part of it is a result of long-term unemployment: except for last year's four and a half month stint with the Census Bureau, I have not had a paying job since Thanksgiving 2008.  I have worked hard:  I have been important in my teenage sons lives, and have contributed to society through volunteer work.  At the nonprofit where I volunteer, I am greatly appreciated.  Which is great, except that I can't pay the mortgage with it, and they can't afford to hire me. (I know: I have been doing grant research, and filling out online applications, and I see the budgets.)

Unemployment damages your trust in your own capabilities.  I know that I tend to obsess far more over the things I cannot do than the things I can.  I can write clearly and convincingly, but I tend to downplay that ability.  A friend has told me that I seem scared of the possibility of my own success; she may be right.  I am terrified of letting people down, and am a firm believer in the Peter Principle, so I tend to skirt the possibility of rising to a level of incompetence by tending to not rise at all. Even though I am trying, it becomes hard to sell yourself to employers when you don't feel you have anything to sell.   

However, that does not completely explain the shift in focus here.  This blog has never gotten many hits.  I don't expect it to do so. I have no responsibilities to others to live up to, and feel no pressure. Why have my interests shifted here? And it is not only writing about the world around me, to a great deal it has been stopping reading about the world around me, as well.

What happened? Burnout.  Then fear.

Sometime in the middle of 2007, I began to get "outrage fatigue."  So much had happened to change America for the worse, that I found myself saying "yeah?  that's not at all surprising."  (One of my favorite quotes from the 2000s was from Teresa Nielsen Hayden: "I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.")  My expectations for my government had sunk to a level where being angry seemed pointless. In some sense I had done everything that a good conscientious citizen is supposed to do: I voted, I talked to my fellow Americans, I wrote letter after letter to my Congressional representatives.  And the slide continued.

The election of Barack Obama gave me some hope.  But only briefly.  It is not that Obama has done all that badly: there are a great many things he has done right.  (There are things that I am deeply angered at the failure of this administration to keep to its election promises, chiefly the detainee issue and Guantanamo.)  But he is hamstrung by a Congress, media and (if we are to believe said media) a populace that has moved beyond simple self-interest to insanity. 

The conversation about the debt ceiling is insane.  The willingness of politicians to play chicken with the country's economy is insane.  The failure of many of the people to use basic critical thinking skills about these issues is insane.

You don't want any deficits?  Stop the wars, and raise taxes.  Funny, you were all for increased deficits under the prior administration.  There is almost little room left to cut, unless you want to gut wholesale social programs, not to mention things like NASA -- and, even though we are NASA family, if we had to there are other jobs out there for my husband -- and, more importantly, the FDA, Agriculture, OSHA and the EPA.  You gut their budgets, and you have no one to blame but yourself when your next door neighbor's kid dies from e. Coli or salmonella contracted from eating non-inspected food, or you come down with cancer from the toxins in your water, or your son is seriously injured in a workplace accident that was entirely preventable had said workplace been required to meet safety standards, or the drug that your wife takes for her arthritis turns out to cause liver disease.

This idea that there are people who do not pay taxes?  Individuals pay all sort of taxes, even though they pay no income tax.  They pay payroll and Social Security, and sales tax, and property tax in some form, either directly if they own their own home or by proxy when the landlord passes the costs through. And the less money they make, the more these taxes hit home.  (Warren Buffett is, in my opinion, a hero.)

The income disparities between those at the very top and those at the very bottom have not been so large in decades.  Again if one listens to the media, far too many people seem not to know or, if they do know, not to care.

There has been a YouTube video making the rounds about a supposed boondoggle of a housing project in Tacoma, Washington.  All sort of crazy claims have been made (falsely) about how it will benefit foreigners and poor people.  What intrigues me is not the video, but how people put trust in someone they don't know simply because what he is saying fits into their own preconceived notions. On his website, he makes such claims as that the Jesuits are hitmen for the Vatican, that the U.S. was dissolved in 1933, and that the Federal Reserve outlawed money in 1913.  This guy is a complete loony.  That people take anything he says seriously is frightening. (And yes, as I (and Don Marquis) have said before, ideas are not responsible for the people that hold them, but there are or should be limits on what you take at face value. Especially from someone who claims he used to be an ambassador.)

It's not just nationally, either.  California has its own brand of insanity, economic and otherwise.

I can't even talk about health care issues right now, or what is happening in the abortion arena.  All I can say is that, sadly and selfishly, I am relieved not to have daughters.  I am afraid for the future for my sons, I can only imagine what mothers of young women feel.  I have to fight from falling into despair for my country. Part of the way I have done this is by concentrating on the little picture, on my family, on me.

I keep telling myself that there are areas of progress.  The movement on same-sex marriage has heartened me a great deal, as has the pending end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the administration's refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.  The Lily Ledbetter act, the first thing Obama signed when he became president, was a very good thing indeed. In California, recently districts were redrawn to reduce gerrymandering.  And there have been other places where there is burgeoning pushback from thoughtful people.

I keep telling myself the country has seen much tougher times:  we have many protections that people in the 19th century did not have.  The Great Depression was also worse.  The safety net may be shredding, but it is still there.

Somehow it doesn't seem enough. But it will have to do. By trying to insulate myself from what is going on in the country, I am failing in the first duty of every adult citizen, to stay informed so that you can make informed decisions, so you can pressure your government to make intelligent decisions.

A number of the quotes on my sidebar -- especially those from the Book of Micah, Mary Harris, Reinhold Neibuhr and Molly Ivins -- talk about the responsibility to work for, as the John D. and Katherine T Macarthur Foundation says in their mission statement, a "more just, verdant and peaceful world."  Molly Ivins, in particular, talks not only about the work, but the joy that exists in that work.

I think it may be time to pick up the fight again, even in the small way I do so. Molly, I hope you're right.

No to go on about this...

I had talked about how I needed to find a way to make my trivia abilities a paying proposition. Last night, I did, sort of.

The scene: an Applebee's in San Jose. 
The set-up: a local trivia contest (i.e., not from a company such as BuzzTime or Brainstormer). Each round was a timed ten-question multiple choice test. The person with the most correct answers wins the round. In the case of a tie the person who turned their sheet in first wins.
The results: Four rounds. Four first answers in. Four wins. Not even close, really: not only was I the first person to turn their answers in, in each round I had the most correct answers. In the last round, they knew I had won before anyone else turned their sheet in:  I was first, and I ran the round. (I overheard the scorer talking to the manager.)

Fifty dollars in gift certificates: ten for each of the first three rounds, twenty for the last.  The manager did not look pleased.

The Resident Shrink (who was an amused bystander) and I figured out if we can just find other Applebee's with similar set-ups, we could be set.  Of course, it's Applebee's, not a really nice restaurant, but still... I have covered my jello shots and Sangria from last night, as well as the Resident Shrink's lemonade and dessert.  I have also covered next week's -- and the week after's -- drinks and bar snacks.

All of this eases my deep sense of failure at doing so poorly on Jeopardy! all those years ago.  : )

Remember how I talked about my prowess at trivia? It deserted me last night, as Team Echidna came in four points behind the winners (the wonderfully named Empathetic Bullfighters).  Still, we were a team of two, they were a team of six.  Sheer numbers -- or lack thereof -- ought to count for something.

However, the night before, playing Buzztime trivia at Applebee's, my ranking for the next to last game was ... 1.  In the NATION.  It was 11 p.m., but still... from what I could tell from the rankings shown, there were about 4,000 people playing all across the country.

Not shabby.  Not shabby at all.

It's been a day.

The freezer died yesterday.  It is difficult to tell if it is totally gone, or just has frozen up and needs to be defrosted (it's an old freezer).*  So last night I and the Resident Shrink went out and bought dry ice, and spent a while tossing things out of the freezer which were too far gone (i.e., the chicken and thawed frozen french fries) or probably should not have been saved in the first place, such as last Christmas's extra pan of stuffing. (George Carlin has this issue covered, I think.)

This morning was spent cooking hamburger patties on the grill and ground beef on the stove so that we could more easily fit them in the limited fridge space we had left.  (Of course, Sunday had been a Costco run, so there was pretty much no fridge space, except that the self described "horde of locusts" and "zombies that eat everything except brains" had had three days to whittle down the food supply.  Not to mention when they had their teenage-boy friends over.)  Tonight will be spaghetti with meat sauce, tomorrow will be tacos, and lunches all this week will be cheeseburgers. At least for the carnivores: the vegetarians (read RHM, mostly) will eat tortellini and frozen pizza.

One thing did help, though, although I perhaps did not recognize how much at the time: when I was at my most my stressed this morning, Railfan not only helped politely and cheerfully, several times he asked me to look at him, and he smiled to try and cheer me up.

You know, no matter how bad it gets, I have my family.  And I love them.

*It is all the Rocket Scientist's fault.  When he went to Morocco earlier this year, the kitchen sink sprung a major leak.  He goes to the Arctic, and the freezer dies.  He just has to stop leaving the country.

My son, the performance artist

One of the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy's jobs this summer is painting houses.  He came home a few minutes ago.

Me:  You have paint on your ear.
NSLDB: Cool.
Me:  Wait, are you saying this is a fashion statement?
NSLDB: Of course.
Me: Is everything a fashion statement?
NSLDB: Yes... then again no.

I am so going to miss him when he goes back to school.

One Million Lawyers, revisited...

And this time I lost.

It started with the Red-Headed Menace and I talking about, of all things, his birthday wish list which included Princeton Review Study Guides.  (For perspective, he's only a sophomore. Obsessive, much?) Since he hadn't said which review guides, I joked that I could get him the GRE guide, or the MCAT guide.

"I don't want to be a doctor.  I would be a lousy doctor." (I agreed.) "I'd make a good scientist or a good lawyer.  Maybe I should become a patent attorney because it's so cutthroat.  I have a friend with both parents who are patent attorneys, and he says they say it's absolutely brutal."*

So then we're off...

RHM: Okay, what law is involved in phone wires?  Wait, let me guess... zoning law.
Mom: Also FCC regulations, I think.
RHM: Okay, what's the law involved in that tree on our fence?
Mom: I don't know -- nuisance law?
RHM: Okay... what if the tree drops fruit in the neighbors' yard? Whose fruit is it?
Mom: Theirs.
RHM: Aha! Then what if is genetically modified fruit?  What about the seeds? Can they plant them?
Mom: If it's genetically modified fruit, then you are Monsanto Corporation and will likely sue the pants off them.
Mom: You do know that you have no idea whether I actually know what I am talking about or are lying through my teeth to you, right?
RHM: True...Okay... what about this old clock?
Mom: I can't say about that clock specifically, but clock designs generally are covered by copyright.
RHM: This peanut butter?
Mom: I'm sure the FDA has lawyers on staff.
RHM: And if it has salmonella, then there would be lawsuits. Okay, what about that cactus? [Indicates the potted cactus he asked for and got for his tenth birthday.]
Mom: ....
Mom: ....
Mom: Okay, you stumped me. 

I can't tell if I am more annoyed that I lost the argument, or proud that he didn't.  And, more to the point, that he wanted to have it in the first place.

*The the fact that he wishes to be in a cutthroat profession says far too much about his personality.

One of my favorite shows these days is History Channel's How the States Got Their Shape.  It is full of odd factoids that my magpie mind latches onto, and has an engaging and warm host, Brian Unger.  And let's face it, history is just plain fun. (Okay, okay, your mileage may vary....)

Tonight via the magic of On Demand (one of the few advantages to having Comcast Cable), I was able to watch two episodes that I had not seen before and instantly loved: "Culture Clash" and "Mouthing Off."

The first deals with culture clashes within -- as opposed to between -- states.  Since the show discusses both the clash between multiple generation Floridians, mainly cattle ranchers, and more recent immigrants AND the discord between Northern and Southern California, I was instantly riveted.

The second was even more fun: "Mouthing Off" dealt with dialects and accents. Having lived in a number of places with distinctive accents and having had my own at one point,* I found it both fascinating and amusing.  And unexpectedly moving:  as a demonstration of the variety of accents, the show cut between people with various accents reading the Gettysburg Address.  I found myself choking up.

I am mainly bookmarking here, since I would really like to write longer posts on both these subjects. 

There was, however, a small aftermath: after watching the second show, I asked the Red-Headed Menace, who had not seen it, the question that was asked of a number of people about the name of a specific class of items:

"What do you call a carbonated beverage?"

"What regionalism?"

"What do you mean?"

"Usually I call it soda.  Sometimes I call it soda pop. Except for with Grandma.**"

"What do you call it when talking to your Grandma?"

"Coke."

Yep.  He is an All-American kid, all right.

*I still do, given a sufficiently high enough level of exhaustion or alcohol.
**That would be his Grandma in Georgia.  And the show missed an important generational difference: with older Southerners, especially in Alabama, carbonated beverages are often not "Coke," but "Co-Cola."

Isn't that the truth.

The quote of the week comes from the Red-Headed Menace:

"Teenage boys are like zombies, except we don't eat brains.  We simply eat everything else."

Field Season. Again.

It's that time of year again.

The Rocket Scientist left this morning for the Arctic Circle.  Because of an inter-agency dispute that went to high levels of government in Washington, there was a delay in shipping materiel up to camp, which meant a corresponding delay in his departure for the field.

There was one nice side effect: he was home, if only for a very few hours, on his actual birthday.  This has not happened since the Red-Headed Menace was a year old, thirteen years ago.  The field season has become an annual rite in our family, as inevitable as tax day and, as far as I'm concerned, about as welcome.

Summers are always unpleasant for me.  This does not help.  It is easier now, though: when my sons were young, it was much rougher.

I miss him, of course, but it is more than that.  It is hard to spend two weeks trying not to be afraid.  I am not necessarily a coward, but when it comes to field season I worry.  A lot.

The things I worry about are many and various: from the remote -- polar bears -- to the much more realistic: a small plane crash into the Arctic ocean.  I worry he won't be able to get his project done.  But mostly these days I worry about appendicitis.  Well, not appendicitis per se, but any sort of medical emergency which lies beyond the limited supplies at camp.

Devon Island is remote.  If a serious medical emergency occurs, it takes 12 to 24 hours get to a hospital.  That's if the weather cooperates.  Last year, part of the team was six days late getting to camp because the weather was bad enough they could not fly in.

I try not to think about this.  There are steps I take: I don't watch Deadliest Catch (do you know you can only live about 10 minutes in water as cold as the Arctic Ocean?), I don't listen to certain songs ("Brown-Eyed Girl" (his song for me) and this year my favorite new song from Great Big Sea "Safe Upon the Shore."  I avoid pictures of icebergs (even though there are none anywhere near where he will be) and polar bears.

All of this is superstition, I know.  What will happen, will happen.  I trust him to take every precaution to come home safely.

He is not a cop, a soldier, or a fireman.  Those people face danger everyday, and their families must have to live at some level, even low, with fear for their loved ones and put it out of their minds and get on with their lives.  The least I can do is follow their example.

And I would never want him to stay home.  Field season matters a great deal to him.  The work drives him.  He is by nature an explorer, a scientist.  In very many ways, this is the best time of the year for him, even given the stress of preparation and the long hours and cold weather and the worry about the project -- whatever project it is this year -- and being away from the family.

I would never want to change this part of who he is.

Oh, well. I am sure he will come home safely.  And next year he will go to Devon again. And then, from Thanksgiving to New Year's, he will be in the Antarctic.

Oh, joy.

We do this not because it is easy...

“That’s one small concession to deficit realities, one giant blow to the dreams of children who want to be astronauts when they grow up.”

Great Quotes From the End of NASA’s Space Shuttle Era, by Jim Santel, in McSweeney's

Forty-two years ago today, Neil Armstrong descended from the Lunar Module of Apollo 11 onto the surface of the moon.  It seems so long ago and yet like yesterday.

It is one of those "Where were you?"  moments.  I was eight years old, walking barefoot (as I often did, even on the hot Florida asphalt) to a park a mile away when a family member drove up in the car.  "Get in," they said. "We just landed on the moon!" The rest of my family was gathered around the old black and white set in the living room, watching in wonder.

The papers trumpeted the feat and our wonderful future. For one of his birthdays, the Rocket Scientist's mother gave him a framed copy of the Atlanta Constitution from the next day, which she had been saving for years. The sky was no longer the limit -- there seemed no limit to human ingenuity and drive.

The moon.  That seemed inconceivable.  Even today it seems so inconceivable that there are conspiracy theorists who believe it never took place, even though their crackpot beliefs have been thoroughly discredited.* (Thank you, Mythbusters!)  Sometimes, when I look at the full moon hanging in the sky, I find myself in awe.  People walked there.  We left our imprint in that dust.

For many of those who were alive then and remember that era, the history of manned space flight since then has been dispiriting.  The moon was supposed to be the first step: the space station a stopover on the way to other, more distant places.  Build the space station; build colonies on the moon; then Mars; then... who knew?  The stuff of science fiction seemed within our grasp, with the possibility of being turned into science fact.

It hasn't happened.  Oh, space science -- important science -- is still going on, with unmanned missions to planets and asteroids. The Space Shuttle, for all its shortcomings, still produced good science, but was not that first step outwards.

I am pessimistic about whether manned flight to other planets will take place in my lifetime. It is a shame: there are things a rover cannot do that a human can.  Rovers, no matter how well piloted, do not have curiosity.


I think Tim Kreider captures what I feel quite well.  Although I would disagree that manned space flight was frivolous: the space program spurred us on as a nation to do a much better job of teaching our children science and math, not to mention the technological innovations it spawned. Instead, today we have many people in many places trying to force us to expose our children to some insane religiously-based, totally nonscientific belief about the origins of the Earth and of mankind, and who disregard what science is showing us about the future of our planet's climate. Far from being revered, in some circles science is treated with disdain.

It's sad.  For all of us, but mostly for our children, whose visions of flying to stars may have to remain just that.  Visions.

*I would provide links, but I really do not want to give these people more website hits.  It will only encourage them.  Not that they really need encouragement.

Geez, Louise, people, that's stealing.

There is a big brouhaha in some leftist circles today as Internet activist Aaron Swartz was indicted by the U.S. government on a variety of charges. According to the email I got from Demand/Progress, "As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading so many journal articles constitutes felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison."

These people didn't read the indictment.  They could not have.  I, on the other hand, did.

What Schwartz is accused of is not "downloading too many articles."  He is charged with breaking into a locked cabinet at MIT (he has no association with the Institute, being a Fellow at Harvard's Institute for Ethics,  (I think there is a self-writing joke, right there) obtaining access through MIT computers which he had no right to use and accessing the contents of JSTOR, a subscription service for reading and downloading scientific journal articles.

He is then alleged to have downloaded 4.8 million articles from JSTOR, a large portion of their library.  1.7 million of these were potential income makers for JSTOR, being available for purchase from independent publishers through JSTOR's Publisher's Sales Service. All the while taking intricate steps to avoid being caught and stopped.  The intent was to make the information free to the public.

Mr. Swartz is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and I make no stand on whether the charges are true.  Nor do I want to wade into the murky waters of the philosophy behind copyright law, in large part because I lack the knowledge to do so. Nor do I want to discuss the computer hacking charges in detail, because, again, I lack enough knowledge of computers and the law to make reasonable assessments of the situation.

No, what I am seriously annoyed at is this assumption that any time the government goes after someone for computer crimes, the charges are automatically bogus.  Not to mention the incredible misrepresentation of the indictment contained in the Demand/Progress email.

Free information on the Web is a lot  like Marxism: it's a great idea in theory, but ignores a lot of real world  considerations.

Yes, services like JSTOR (and LEXIS/NEXIS) are expensive.  Yes, this means sometimes the information is only available through large institutional libraries, and sometimes you have to pay to access them, depending upon the library's policies.

Yes, these are for-profit enterprises.**  That does not mean that they are parasites, squirreling away materials that would otherwise be at the public's fingertips.  A lot of these articles are in scientific journals, and would no more free online from the publisher than they would be were you to buy a copy of the journal.  Publishers of scientific journals are paid for their work.  Without the journals, where would researchers publish their results? If they did not exist, the exchange of knowledge within and between researchers within and across fields would come to a screeching halt.

[Edited to add: it should be noted here that the Rocket Scientist disagrees vehemently with me on all this.  "Scientific publishers are evil. When you publish a paper you have to sign away all your rights so that they can make money off selling your work to libraries or database companies." The Resident Shrink then pointed out that she is prohibited from posting one of her scholarly papers on the web.  I would argue that this is a different -- decidedly serious -- problem with the system above and beyond the issue presented in the Swartz case.]

Services like JSTOR are incredibly important to the free flow of scholarly information. They make research easier.  Aside from searching capabilities, library space is limited, and JSTOR and its like allow libraries to expand the information they offer sometimes by orders of magnitude. They can also be collators of information:  recently I used LEXIS/NEXIS Corporate Alliance to compile and download a list of all businesses in two cities that had gross annual revenues of more than a million, sorted by income. Could I have gotten this information on my own? Possibly.  Except that I would not have known where to start looking, and it would have undoubtedly taken a great deal longer than ten minutes.

There is a reason they are so expensive.  This access does not come free.  Rights and fee-sharing agreements with publishers have to be negotiated.  Aside from the actual payments, at some point this may mean legal costs. IP lawyers -- even in-house counsel -- are not cheap. All this information has to be stored somewhere, which means server time and space and IT professionals to make sure the servers stay up and running.  And all of this assumes that the information from the publishers is in electronic form to begin with, not anything that has to be entered or scanned.  In the case of the database services I use, someone has to do a lot of interpretation of data.  Someone has to write the search code and interfaces for users, and design, set up and maintain the website. (And users, even the most ardent "information should be free" people, get cranky when websites go down.  Who do they think fixes them, the Internet pixies?)

So, if the charges are true, what Swartz did was abscond with the hard-earned  results of the work of a great many people, from publishers to all the people who work to make sure that information remains in a form that a lot of people can get to (certainly more people than would have access were services like JSTOR to vanish).

That, ladies and gentlemen, is theft.

**Not always: the fee-based databases I am currently using (at least until the trial subscription runs out) are from the Foundation Center, a nonprofit dedicated to helping other nonprofits. These databases are available for free at a some 350 cooperating institutions throughout the country.

Trivial matters.

Often on Tuesday nights, the Resident Shrink and I (and the Rocket Scientist when he can join us), collectively known as Team Echidna, go to a bar called The Loft  in San Jose to play Brainstormer Trivia.  We're pretty good:  of the five times we've played there, we've won three, and one game we lost by tanking the final tiebreaker.  We view it as a form of gambling: if we win, the $50 gift certificate covers our dinner for the evening.

This is not the first place we've played trivia: when Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto ran Brainstormer games, we often won the "small team" prize, which was usually glassware.  At one point we had twelve pilsner glasses and five mugs -- all but one of the pilsner glasses have subsequently bit the dust, unfortunately.

There is another company which does bar trivia, called BuzzTime.  What it loses in the human touch it gains in being able to play against people all over the country at the same time.  Tonight we went to an Applebee's to play BuzzTime.

My standings in the national rankings in the four games I played were 42, 19, 6, and 27.  I won all the games at the bar level.

Then they held a "hosted" game -- same company, slightly different format, with a real live person reading the questions -- and I, with some help from the Rocket Scientist and the Resident Shrink, torched the competition.  We won a $10 gift certificate.

I know it sounds like I'm bragging....

Oh, hell.  Of course I'm bragging.  But it's not like I'm cocky or anything: as my dearly departed Dad used to say:

"You ain't cocky if you can do it."

And I can do it.*

I just wish there were some way to make a living doing it.

[Edited to add, Tuesday night:  I went to The Loft for Trivia: five teams of four and me, playing as "The Lonely Echidna" -- I came in second by one point, after changing at least three answers.  I  need to keep reminding myself to go with my gut.  I lost to the Gringos, who have won something like 15 times in the past few months -- and they have not even been there every week.] 

*The one time I did very poorly at pub trivia, I was highly distracted by other things going on in my life that evening.  Not to mention that that game had an entire round of "identify which Sex and the City character said this."  WTF?  I and my teammate that night (not the Resident Shrink nor the Rocket Scientist) did, however, run the "Princesses" round.

And now for something completely different....

If you've just seen HPDH2, you really need to look at this piece from the Tonys.  Daniel Radcliffe is a wonderful actor, and I am so glad that he is moving well beyond his Harry Potter persona.

[Edited to add: I wonder what he could do with the role of Mark in Rent.]
[Edited to add more: It just struck me how short he is. According to IMDb, he's 5'5". Not that makes him in any way less talented or gorgeous looking.]

Calling Clarence the Angel

I have been given an assignment by my therapist.  After I told her about my list of fifty things that were good in the world, she gave me homework:  list fifty things I have done to make the world a better place. The problem is, I am having a difficult time thinking of fifty.

My first attempt:

1. I have raised three pretty decent human beings.  In some sense it saddens me that the first thing I think about is my kids: I'm not sure it is helpful to be so totally self-identified in terms of other people.  But there it is.  And raising decent human beings is a lot harder than one might think. (Also, does this count as one thing or three?)

2. I have supported Rocket Scientist, and in some ways made his work possible.  His work may well change the future, and in my own indirect way I have made this possible.

3. I have written words which have changed people's lives.  I have written about my experiences, and had other women tell me that my candor allowed them to talk about their own, and start to heal.

4. I have talked to people whose lives are falling apart, and I have been there to let them talk about all the ways in which the loss of their loved one is almost beyond bearing.

5. Given the particulars of the biggest blog hits here, I have introduced a large number of people to the work of Wilfred Owen and the story of Harry Burn and the ratification of the 19th Amendment.  I think both of these are good.  Now if I could only get more people interested in Alice Paul and the women of the Occaquan workhouse.

6. I have written about matters of ethics and morality such as torture.  Whether anyone's opinion was swayed by what I wrote I don't know, but putting things out there is important.

7. On occasion, I have made my friends and the people who read my writing laugh.

8. When I was working as a paid trivia question writer, and later when I ran my LiveJournal dedicated to trivia questions, I provided entertainment and knowledge to my friends and others.  (I suppose my appearance on Jeopardy! could fall under this category, as well : ) .)

9. I have written to my Congressional Representatives and Senators.  I have even written to the President, when I thought a matter of national importance was at stake. Not to mention letters to the editor.

10. In 2006 and 2008, I posted extensive voting information regarding registration, absentee balloting and "Voter's Bills of Rights" (for all fifty states) on this blog and my LiveJournal, at least some of which was accessed by other people.

11. Through my piece in the Stanford Lawyer, I helped other people understand how simply learning law changes lives for the better.

12. In 2004, I was an election monitor in Tampa, Florida, doing my part for democracy.

13. I was a hard worker for the Census, which in its own way was in support of American democracy.  Yes, I was paid, but I put my whole heart into it.  I have a terrific work ethic.

14. I led adult education workshops at my former church.  Whatever my current issues with my faith, I helped others find out more about theirs.

15. I wrote quite a number of Bible studies -- good ones -- that were used in my parish and beyond.

16. I read in church, bringing joy to many, and helped teach others to read aloud properly.

17. I sat on the Committee on Ministry for a women who has gone on to be a priest.

18. I have been a thoughtful fellow student. I am not sure I have done enough with my education to justify its existence, but in class I raised questions that I hope made other people think. Sometimes asking the right question is as important as finding the answer.

19. For several years, I ran a program which brought community leaders into an elementary school to read.  It introduced and reinforced the importance of reading to many schoolkids in an important point in their lives.

20. When I volunteered at the elementary school, for a few months I helped children with memory problems begin to learn to read.  My child was not among them.

21. I have made lots of very good brownies for a great many people.

22. I have taken food to the hungry in the form  of tangerines from our tree for Second Harvest Food Bank.

23. I have helped raise money for charity.

24. I hold doors open for people, usually, unless they are holding them open for me.

25. I am polite to waitstaff.  Correction, I am polite to pretty much anyone. And I have raised children who act likewise.  (In a recent Facebook discussion, a friend called my kids "some of the best-behaved kids I've ever seen.")

26. I helped rescue birds on a couple of occasions.

27. I have made jewelry that has brightened women's lives, including some sold at auction for charity.

28. I have supported the local Starbucks, making it more possible for the only gathering in our neighborhood to continue to be healthy. : )

That's all I can think of right now -- 28.  A little over halfway through.  I don't know how I am going to find the other 22. And I'm not sure if some of them -- all the writing, for example -- should not be lumped together.  If I consolidate all the things that come out of this blog together, that reduces the count to 23, and if I put together the ones involving charitable/volunteer work, that knocks off another two. And all the church ones together, again that removes another three.

At any rate, fifty seems an insurmountable number.  Clarence, are you out there?