New things for Northern Virginians to be depressed about

Story ideas stolen from The Agitator

 

1. This morning, I are breakfast at Bob Evans.  Five minutes after I was done with my meal, I stuck my credit card out where passersby could see it and read the newspaper was I waited for my waittress to pick it up. 

 

Fifteen minutes later, no waittress.  I'm wondering what's up.  About then it occurs to me, Bob Evans is one of those restaurants where you take your money to the counter. 

 

Luckily, I wasn't paying cash because judging by this story, if you leave your cash on the table at a crappy breakfast restaurant and walk out, it can get your ass killed.
(And even if these kids DID dine and dash, are we really to the point of killing people over $26 restaurant checks?)

 

2. With all the things the VA legislature is doing wrong right now, (like, oh, say, passing an anti-gay marriage amendment so clumsily written that if it passes, domestic violence laws will no longer apply to straight unmarried couples*.) the Washington Post obviously chose the most pressing to write about in an editorial this morning.  A seatbelt law.

 

If I end up a libertarian, blame my state.

 

(OK, AND the people on UU theology who keep asking what's so great about free speech anyway.)

 

CC

 

*Not meant to imply that the law would be less evil were this not the case, but at least it would be better written.

Chutney would be so sad...

This morning, I read Chutney's post about how disappointed he was that
Pizza Hut's "pizza club" is not a real social organization.

Today I was in a department store and looked up to see a sign reading
"Buy six and get one free! Join our Bra and Panty club!"

And I laughed...

ExcomUUnication? (Sorry.)

The Fred Phelps discussion on the UU theology mailing list has progressed to one about the nature of freedom and who is and who isn't welcome in a UU church.

One guy wrote:

Creed: A formal statement of religious belief
Covenant: A formal agreement between two parties with each assuming
some obligation(s).

We (UU's) do not have a Creed.

But we do have Covenant's between our congregation's and the UUA and
between our local church's and ourselves.

Slavery would be a violation of my local church's covenant of
membership and of "most" UU churches.

The result would be not a Vatican style "excommunication", but a
democratic boot out of the UU family for being a "promise
breaker".......

To violate the covenant, would be to violate membership at my local
UU church.

Is this true? Can UU churches do this?

I guess what I'm asking is "when congregational polity fights creedlessnesss, who wins?"

The political view I hold that I think would be most abhorrent to the average UU is that I don't believe in hate crime legislation.

I don't strictly believe in reducing punishments because of motive. (E.g. Jury nullification. If Janie comes home and says "Daddy, the man next door just raped me" and Daddy get his gun and kills the guy, I do think that it is still second degree murder, first degree if Daddy waits awhile. I doubt a jury will agree with me, but I still think so.) That said, this isn't the hill I would choose to die on.

(I do make an exception for insanity or people so mentally retarded that they didn't know what they were doing. There trying to figure out what was in their heads is fair enough.)

But in dealing with someone of normal intelligence and capabilities, I ABSOLUTELY don't believe in adding additional time for hate crimes. I'm sorry, when it is the judge's job to figure out what a person was thinking, then we are effectively giving people additional jail time for what they think. At that idea is pretty disgusting to me as a UU, an American and a child of God.

I don't think any church would collectively find this view so disgusting as to kick me out, but if they did, would I have any recourse?

Just curious.

CC

G'night Barney, sleep well...

Aww... That sucks. Don Knotts died.

Too bad. He was a funny guy.

CC

"We're arresting monks? Oh yeah, send in the SWAT team..."

I realize by tomorrow morning, this news story will be depressing, but I can assure you that at 4:00am, sending in a SWAT team after monks is pretty hilarious.

CC

TheCSO clarifies CC's Phelps post

Last night, I saw Joel's comment and thought to myself "to answer this properly, I'm going to have to write a little essay. Ah, screw it. I'll write it in the morning." I woke up a bit ago and couldn't get back to sleep so I came in here to write and found that my beloved CSO had already written said essay. He posted it in the comments, but I thought it deserved a place on the main pag of the blog.

Because, like it or not, we have a two-party system in this country. Whichever party is closer to the views of a nutjob gets tarred by what they do. The Democratic Party gets associated with every nutjob liberal cause out there, because they're closer to it than the Republicans are. Look at the "legalize all drugs NOW" people. The Democrats don't want to be associated with them, but they are - because they're closer to that groups views than the Republicans are.

Since Phelps' views are *closer* to the Republicans than to the Democrats, the Republicans get stuck with him as a matter of public opinion. He's *their* problem. That's not fair, that's not right, but that's how the American system of political parties works.

I don't see this as a general attack on all Republicans. It's a criticism of Democratic party tactics, nothing more. They should just issue a cursory denouncement for the record that no one will read, then sit back and watch the fireworks.

There *is* a certain minority in this country who basically agree with Phelps. Statistically, most of those people are Republicans. That's NOT saying that all, or even most, Republicans agree with him - just that of the people who DO agree with him, far more are Republicans than are Democrats. That, too, makes him the Republicans' problem.

After two snarky posts, a happy one

Yesterday, in a used bookstore in Michigan, Linguist Friend and I found a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition. He had promised me one for a wedding present a year and a half ago and it has taken us this long to find one. Mine is the reduced edition (meaning the print is like 8 or 9 point) but has leather bindings. A few of the bindings will need work. It's not the most beautiful encyclopedia I've ever seen. But it still has articles written by Swinburne, Rossetti, and T. H. Huxley. I whipped out my cell and called Edie to consult. She said the price was reasonable and we should get it. So we did.

It is so freaking beautiful, kids. We're afraid to mail it, so it's actually going to stay here until this next time linguist friend visits me. (He likes to drive. I can't take it back this trip as I flew.)

I had wanted my own copy of this almost 100-year old encyclopedia for years and years and I finally have one. Some might argue that this is a little silly. As with anything else created before Mickey Mouse*, the 11th edition is public domain, and indeed, putting it online is a big project at Project Gutenberg. Soon everyone will have access to the 11th edition, though it will officially be called "the Project Gutenberg encyclopedia" as the people currently publishing the Encyclopedia Brittanica quite understandably don't want people getting confused and believing that their encyclopedia is available online for free.

I don't care. I still love my copy.

CC


*Disney is the primary enthusiast for copyright restrictions and pays a lot of money to keep them coming. When congress lengthens the amount of time a copyright lasts, you can bet that Mickey Mouse was just about to become public domain.

A look at protesting from the other side

Anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a couple of months has probably read me writing about my distaste for political protest. ((Let's look at that word: "Distate." I don't want to ban it, I won't do anything to stop you from doing it. I just don't like it and think it damages more causes than it helps. So don't write me and tell me I'm a fascist, m'kay?. (My dislike for how we throw the word "fascist" around these days deserves a whole 'nother post.))

When I tell people that protesting is usually a dumb idea*, I'm usually talking to liberals and tend to get accused of not liking it because I'm more conservative than they are. So it's nice to be able to talk about it when conservatives are doing it.

On the UU theology mailing list, I'm getting a chance to look at the protest argument from the other side of the political aisle. A UU from Finland posted an article saying that The Rev. Fred Phelps is back to his old tricks of protesting funerals.

Responses on the mailing list have been along the lines of "What is it going to take to ban them?" and "OOoh this free speech thing. I used to be a defender of it." (Are even UUs starting to say this? That also deserves a whole 'nother post.) And indeed, several states have been moving toward legally banning funeral protests.

As a civil libertarian I'm more or less against banning funeral protests, though the right to protest funerals is not a hill I would typically chose to die on. Besides, these funeral protests are the best thing in the world for liberalism.

Naturally, "how can we stop these horrible protests" is exactly the wrong response. Liberals suck mightily at working together, conservatives do not. If the Democrats could run a political party half was well as the Republicans can, there would be no Green party. I'm sure the conservative extremists seem just as implacable to the Republican party as liberal extremists do to the Democrats, but the Republicans manage to keep a majority of their extreme members just happy enough to stay in the party. The Democrats can't.

Any fissure we see in the Republican party should cause all Democrats to get some popcorn, grab a ringside seat, and shut up.

Needless to say, the Rev. Fred Phelps and his protesters come off as redneck assholes on TV. They look angry and nasty and like no one you would want to join ever. Their arguments are completely illogical to anyone who isn't in love with their cause. They actually look more alienating than hippies, which is saying a lot in my book. Most beautiful of all, they are protesting MILITARY funerals. The military is typically a huge Republican voting block. And here conservative extremists are insulting their dead brothers.

So, no, don't ban these protests. Just sit back and watch and hope Phelps alienates as many Republicans as he possibly can before the Republicans stop him. (And they will. Because they've watched Liberals for years and they know how the public reacts to protesters who act like offensive assholes.)

But the next time someone in your Union or liberal organization says ""Hey, let's close down all the bathrooms in the Chicago airport. That will make people pay attention to us! When little kids, pregnant women, sick people and old people who have to go so badly they are in pain beg us to please let us use the bathroom, we will say "no!" Because nothing gets a cause on the news like pointless cruelty to incredibly sympathetic victims,"" you might want to think about how Fred Phelps is looking on the news these days before jumping on the bandwagon.

Someone stuck up "threatening to close down the bathrooms at the Chicago airport" up at Peacebang one time as an example of a "funny activism story."

What we should really be doing is sending it to Fred Phelps as a suggestion.

CC

*It uses a fuckton of volunteer resources, a cause often as not one comes off in the media looking worse than it did before and political leaders don't listen to them anyway. (Yes, I know what Nixon said. He was lying.)

The Harvard Club wants me, oh yeah, they know they do

Somehow, perhaps through my subscription to the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Harvard University has gotten the idea that I'm an alum. I get regular emails telling me I should attend events like:

El Rufian Castrucho (Castrucho the Hustler) by Lope de Vega

at Gala Hispanic Theatre in Spanish with English surtitles

Date: Sunday, Mar 12, 2006

Time: 2:00PM - 4:00PM ET

cost: $15.00 members/$25.00 nonmembers

and always inviting me to click on the link and join their club.

Of course, there is a fee if nonmembers attend. Part of me wants to pay it for myself and the CSO, show up, and see if we can pass. (What? I know all about Harvard. I've seen Legally Blonde like four times.)

But the truth is, I'm not really one for joining organizations like this one. If my real undergraduate institution, St. Andrews College in North Carolina, had a similar club, there's no way in hell I'd be a member. Linguist Friend (whose Harvard credentials are a damn sight better than mine, meaning they exist) isn't a member of his local Harvard club, though I doubt the one in Ohio is terribly active.

Like with Mensa, something about those clubs creeps me out. It's like a nice but very dumb guy I knew at SA who, after his graduation, got an email address that was something like SAPCgrad@aol.com. All you need to do is look at his email address to know that he thinks "a graduate from St. Andrews" is the best thing he will ever be. Membership in The Harvard club is not that extreme, of course, but it's not a great sign, IMHO.

I have the email I need to send to Harvard to correct the mistake all written in my head. It's brief but a little bit funny about how I couldn't even get in to Barnard.

But somehow, I haven't quite sent it.


CC

Malcom Gladwell gets a blog.

He hasn't written anything very exciting there yet, but hey, give the man time.

CC

UU blogger unemployment rate down this quarter

Just thought you should know.

CC

Now that's good psychology...

CC got a Rorschach test today (long story.)

When I came home, I was telling theCSO about it. I ended up pulling up the site that helps you cheat on your Rorschach test* (No, I don't know what the world is coming to either, but thanks for asking...) and showed him the plate that looks like a frustrated penguin wearing a bowtie. (Plate three, upside down)

The CSO and I saw a lot of different stuff. I liked how on the "mother plate," I saw women in silly hats. As a kid, I had a big argument with my mother over a hat that she loved but I thought unattractive.

Of course, I saw the plate about my dad as a giant plush racoon mascot, so maybe I was having an off day.

CC


*If you read the whole thing, you violate any future Rorschach test you might take. I made sure not to read it until tonight.

Please tell me this is a plant.

I really don't want to believe that actual Democrats are behind Why Mommy is a Democrat.

CC

Opposite Ends

Last night, I taught my class, focusing on strategies for attacking the quantitative section. The first math class, where I focus on strategies, is always hard. Next Tuesday, I will be starting with arithmatic and taking them through test content. But the nature of teaching strategy is that I am using some math lots of them won't be familiar with. I say things like,

"I'm showing you how this strategy can work on an exponent problem. Try to focus on the strategy. If you don't completely remember how to do exponents, no biggie, we will do that next week."

It seems counterintuitive and leads to some worried faces the first math class, but it also means that as they are relearning the content, they will be practicing the strategies and using them. Also, strictly manipulating the numbers is not the point of most GRE quantitative questions. Frequently, it is about reading a word problem and figuring out what the question is asking for. THe hardest math on the GRE, after all, is tenth grade math, but you have a lot of questions like:

A family pays $800 per year for an insurance plan that pays 80 percent of the first $1,000 in expenses and 100 percent of all medical expenses thereafter. In any given year, the total amount paid by the family will equal the amount paid by the plan when the family's medical expenses total which of the following?

$1,000
$1,200
$1,400
$1,800
$2,200

The only math this sucker requires is percents and addition. The math itself would be junior high school level if I gave it to you in an equation. But you have to know how to approach it.

The proper, speedy, approach to this problem is to plug in the answer choices and work backwards. But lots of people don't know to do that or how to do that until they learn it from someone like me.

Happy Feminist said once, "I tend not to think that there are legal jobs that are morally superior to others. After all, our legal system is predicated on the notion that we are all equal before the law and that we all deserve some measure of fairness and justice," later adding the qualifier that those who represented the poor and took less money for doing so were giving more.

She actually said that awhile ago. I've been running it through my head in relation to GRE prep. Education is a good thing, so all teaching is equal, right?

I'm tempted to say, "no." Test prep has to be the lowest form of teaching. Sometimes, I take a returning student who left school two decades ago to raise her kids and remind her of what she already knows. Those are frequently my favorite students. But mostly my students are upper middle class kids who partied too much in college and now want to get politics degrees.

I'm going to visit Linguist Friend for a weekend to recover from the last two weeks and I called him up to make logistics plans. He mentioned that another professor in his department is trying to convince the department to accept a student with mediocre grades, a poorly-written personal statement and low GREs.

And I realized, with some sadness and some glee, that my job was sneaking guys like this past Linguist Friend, coaching these people into getting scores high enough to get them in.

This is not to say that there is not some nobility in test prep. The SAT, after all, was originally concieved as a "test of innate ability." In the 1950's, the large number of Jewish immigrants created a "Jewish problem" at Harvard. Much the way Asian students are sometimes (and wrongly, of course) viewed today, Jewish students were considered ridiculously hard workers who made the most of what intelligence they had. Surely it couldn't be that working class Jews were just as intelligent as the more typical Harvard man?

So the Ivy Leagues (it started at Columbia) used tests with lots of logic problems that theoretically couldn't be studied for. By no coincidence, these tests often used words like "regatta" in the verbal questions that would be far more familiar to the sort of student they wanted.

And then the founder of my company, working out of a basment office in Flatbush, showed the world that they could indeed by studied for.

Like anything else, standardized tests are like a game. As you practice, you get better at them. The SAT ended up doing the opposite of what it was supposed to, becoming a tool for overcoming discrimination. Though there were still, and are still today, some biases in the test, they don't ask kids about regattas anymore.

Anyone who wants to can pay my company an expensive but not completely ridiculous given what they've paid for college sum and learn where and how one works backwards on math problems, the six types of analogies questions and our strategy for figuring out which answer choices have to be wrong in a vocabulary question where they don't know enough vocabularly to be confident of which answer choice is right.

Whether this is a good thing all depends on what sort of discrimination you're worried about.

CC

I don't care, I still love mine

Here's a really spiff article on how the diamond industry made diamond engagement rings mandatory.

I'm glad my ring is antique and predates this advertising campaign.


CC

What I read today at the service

Linguist Friend suggested I put this up:


I was reading an essay yesterday about how America has lost its sense of community. It was standard stuff. The gentleman who wrote it said nobody knows the old skills, we don’t know out neighbors. You’ve probably read such an essay yourself at some point.

Last night, as I tried to write out what I would say this morning, the issues the essay raised had me thinking about my grandmother. Juanita Williams really spanned two worlds. Born a Texas farm girl before the great depression, died an accomplished woman in a suburb of the most powerful city in the world. My grandmother had a job long before it was fashionable for women to have one. She loved to try new things.

But the Welsh say “What’s bred in the bone will out in the flesh” and the old ways of life were definitely bred in my grandmother’s bones. She liked technological things, but her favorites were always the gadgets that helped her to better sew and cook. She was very impressed with the George Foreman grill, for example, and bought them for many of her friends and family.

She retained those farmgirl instincts. My grandmother believed in spanking, sterilizing things, repairing torn clothes rather than throwing them away, getting every possible use out of everything, growing her own food and buying seventeen rolls of paper towels when she found them on sale.

Her closest friends were people at this church and the lady across the street. She loved to dicker at yard sales. She was ambivalent about my husband at first, but became really fond of him when she learned he has a knack for fixing household appliances. To my grandmother, marrying a man who knew how to fix things made a lot of sense.

My grandmother remembered a time when people took pride in what they did and demanded a high standard of the people around her. I used to sit in restaurants with her silently hoping the waiter paid proper attention to her instructions and brought us our food quickly and efficiently. If not, my grandmother would never hesitate to give him a lesson in the proper way to do his job.

Doing things, being active, was a very central part of who my grandmother was and it was very hard to watch her become unable to sew, then to read, then to cook. She moved around her house as though she could see, and kept her independence as long as she could. She was upset when she could no longer wash the dishes. She wanted to be active and useful.

I can’t say I’m sorry that her suffering is over, but I deeply regret the ending of a creative and useful life, a life very much lived on my grandmother’s own terms.

A bit more on Bageant

Chutney wrote in the comments section on my last post:

In the small city where I grew up, there is nothing to do except shop, drink and worship. Sounds like Bageant's home town is the same.

Nope. Bageant says he lives in Winchester, VA.

Winchester, VA is about an hour from me, meaning it's like an hour and fifteen minutes or so from the National Gallery of Art, the Studio Theater and all sorts of places where cool people hang out in Washington DC

But he doesn't have to drive up my way. There are plenty of opportunities in his town. A quick poke around the internet reveals that Shenendoah University is in Winchester, as is Shenendoah Valley UU church.

According to the Shenendoah Arts council, their exhibition of art by local African American artists opened on the third with a reception. If Bageant stayed home and watched TV that night, that's his business, but I doubt the connversation at this event was about consumer products.

In fact, next Friday at the Armstong theater at Shenendoah university, there's going to be a performance of a dance troupe from Ghana.

It costs five bucks. I suggest that Bageant take a night off from surfing the net and go.

Assuming that Bageant's tastes run more to the literary, perhaps he would enjoy joining the Shenandoah Arts council's fiction writing group that meets every other Tuesday in their board room.

Or he could try the Winchester Little Theater, where a Tom Stoppard play opens on March 3.

And he shouldn't forget the first Friday event, where Winchester's six art galleries hold open houses and serve wine and cheese.

Funny, it looks like there are quite a few people who look at the town Bageant describes as "armed and inbred" and think it could be something more.

Too bad Bageant is too busy whining to join them.

CC

CC reads Joe Bageant and goes "meh."

I'm reading the infamous Joe Bageant essay and I'm really underwhelmed.

Robertson Davies wrote that this sort of masochism is a Canadian thing, but I see it in Americans all the time. We never get tired of hearing how stupid, and in this case "inauthentic" we are. I'm sure fans of the essay will tell me that this is my internal dialogue speaking, but I've got my house in the suburbs, and I just don't live the life Bageant describes.

E.g.: When we do "get together with friends," there is little to talk about, other than one form or another of consumption, consuming music, or movies or whatever.

Conversations I've had (offline and in person) with my friends in the last few days.

1. Many, many talks about Margaret.
2. Trying to explain Rothko, and indeed all of abstract expressionism, to some of my friends. Failing.
3. Telling Joe-the-Math-guy about the conclusions Linguist friend came to about the Virgin Mary and consent issues.
4. Talking to Pam's daughter Lisa about the nature of prayer and odd things people pray for and whether God listens.
5. Whether it is a rationalization to say that people who overapply their negative experiences with one race or another and have a loose negative impression that they would never act on, aren't exactly racists.
6. What are the racism implications of dating preferences (e.g. A white guy who only dates white women, vs. a black man who only dates black women vs. a white man who won't date white women vs. a white man who only dates asian women)
7. It's not worth it to date very attractive people. They're not very interesting because they don't have to be and are typically very high-maintenance. true or false?
8. Smoking bans: Does it suck more when the government plays nanny or when inconsiderate people slighly endanger the health of others?
9. The situation in the middle east. Does Israel deserve our support?

And I've been staying with people who live in Laurinburg, North Carolina and watch Fox news!

I'd say that if Joe Bageant feels that he has no community, instead of bitching about the internet, he might want to go hang out with some people and make some friends. I'd suggest that he whine less, though.

I'm sorry, those of us who are going to pay for the air ambulances of guys like that who go off in the woods to commune with nature don't deserve to be insulted.

((Quick semi-related rant:
People who talk about how great it is to live off the land have forgotten what it's like to starve when the crops fail. When Mr. Back-to-nature breaks his leg, my tax dollars and yours will pay for a helicopter to go haul his ass out of the woods. It means that his tent will not leak because if he has any sense he will get camping equipment made of plastic. (For all their tough talk, I don't see most of these people drinking out of a canteen made of an animal bladder.) It means that if he, God forbid, should get some awful disease and shows up in the ER, modern medicine will do it's best to save him and will succeed much of the time. ))

To Bageant's credit, he wants to go live in a really touristy country not owned by America. I don't think he's as cool as he does for wanting to chuck it all and move to a honeymoon destination, and I think showing your objection to capitalism by moving to a monarchy is sort of precious, but hey, at least Queen Elizabeth will be paying his bills, not me. (Somone should really tell him about Great Britan's stand on the war, though. Moving from the USA to a British territory to show you're above such things is just dumb.)

Fifty bucks says his plan to rough it in paradise lasts as long as his Immodium does.

As for the bit about all of us being replaceable now, it's stupid.

If we don't make it, it someone else will. If we don't buy it, someone else will. Some other faceless person will step forward to fill in our place. The same goes for the engineers who created this computer and the same goes for your own job. The machine rolls on. With us or without us.

No more genuine community where people know each other and socialize together and work together exists than a small liberal arts college. St. Andrews is practically a kibbutz. I knew my friend and former professor Margaret very well, but I also understand that my college is going to hire another professor of archeology to take her place.

To look at this more directly, in the "good old days" that Bageant romanticizes, we might have known the guy who packaged our groceries a little better, but people were still replaceable. If the town grocer died in the olden days, his son took over or his wife took over or somebody bought the store. That we are replaceable is a general rule of any economy. Which is why the only people who take a strictly economic view of a way of living are either idiots or trying to make a point while ignoring conflicting facts.

I could go on, but you see my point.

My advice to Bageant would be to build a life he likes and work for a better world right where he is. But he's going to have to quit whining first.

CC

That makes sense.

I've got enough going on in my personal life that I've sort of been ignoring the news. (I do this to the detriment of TheChaliceblog. I'm not sure why with millions of people putting their political opinions on the internet, when I write about politics my page hits go up, but this seems to be the case. Maybe people using search engines mispell foreign leaders' names the same way I do.)

Plus, I haven't really known what to write about. Bush's statement that we (we meaning, NATO, meaning "some other country's troops") should go into Darfur doesn't rock my world. The Cheney hunting this just seems sort of weird and sad*, and I haven't known what to make of people rioting over cartoons.

It's all one thing has some extremely reasonable things to say about the riots.

CC

*And I can accept that people are overreacting to this hunting thing, but Cheney deserved ten times the crap he got for attending that service at Auschwitz dressed for a Packers game. (Related item: I'm at my college for Margaret's funeral tonight and a student cheerfully told me how she'd gotten a Yoda t-shirt from Walmart just for the occiasion. The response that came to mind is not printable even by the rather vulgar standards of this blog.)

Either I like this or it depresses me

Or maybe both.

Check it out yourself and feel free to vote in the comments.

CC