All you gotta do is call the police and say that your parents both molestered you

More reason to hang Australians:

Air New Zealand and Qantas have banned men from sitting next to unaccompanied children on flights, sparking accusations of discrimination.

The airlines have come under fire for the policy that critics say is political correctness gone mad after a man revealed he was ordered to change seats during a Qantas flight because he was sitting next to a young boy travelling alone.

Auckland man Mark Worsley says an air steward approached him after take-off on the Christchurch to Auckland flight and told him to change seats with a women sitting two rows in front. The steward said it was the airline's policy that only women were allowed to sit next to unaccompanied children.

"At the time I was so gobsmacked that I moved. I was so embarrassed and just stewed on it for the entire flight," Mr Worsley said.

The 37-year-old shipping manager, who has two-year-old twins, followed the incident up with the airline and was told Qantas wanted to err on the side of caution.

Via BOTW.

Milbarge noted a related case here in the states last week.

I think you can state the black-letter rule this way: A Florida court holds as a matter of law that not all men are inherently predisposed to rape.

The issue arose when a male attendant from a rehab clinic was assigned to transport a female patient to a doctor's appointment. During the return trip, when she was still under sedation, he raped her. She sued the clinic for negligent hiring or supervision, even though the guy had no record or anything to put the company on notice that he might be dangerous. Her argument was essentially that the clinic should have known that leaving a man alone with a sedated woman would lead to rape -- that it was per se negligent to do so. The court understandably rejected this contention, noting that to accept her argument, "we necessarily would have to approve of the underlying premise of her argument that there exists in the male species a substantial, immutable flaw of the first magnitude."

Matters of life and death

The world is boring. I can't find anything happening worthy of comment.

Blogs are similarly boring. And surely nothing is more tedious and less worthy of thought than a trivial issue like the death penalty. After all, as the esteemed Harry Hutton observes, if you can trust Steven Levitt (p. 13) and you really care about the welfare of street level drug dealers you should condemn them all to death for their own safety. H^2 also has wise words on the impending execution of an Australian for drug transportation by Singapore.

[W]hich of us can honestly put his hand on his heart and say that we haven’t at some time wanted to hang an Aussie? I know I have.

Update: Alas, speaking of deaths...

Uncivilized

Hi, my name is Dylan, and I've been clean for 22 hours.

On Saturday I went out to eat, came back, and started an absurd Civ IV marathon. I slept little that night. On Sunday my incredibly bare cupboard yielded only a pair of Poptarts and some ramen noodles. I never breathed fresh air, went to bed ill around 9 p.m., woke up feeling better around midnight, made a snack, and never went back to bed. Finally around 2 p.m. yesterday I left to eat my one meal of the day and read to clear my mind...until 11 p.m. Honor required that I stay awake more than 24 hours, so I reacquainted myself with assorted blogs until I'd achieved that mark. I think was supposed to have called a friend about going out and seeing some live music last night. As I took out the (smelly) trash at midnight last night, I was so disgusted with myself that I sprinted back the 50 yards or so back to my apartment. I imagine I looked pretty stupid doing so in jeans and Timberlands. Good.

I have a lot to do today. I'm going to have to kick his ass into gear again. I understand this phenomenon called "weather" is rather nice today, too. And if anyone has an idea for an 80's costume theme party, do let me know. I'm afraid my parachute pants haven't fit in 20 years.

Update: As usual, most of a week off does wonders for my pushups, not so much for my situps. Note to self: situps no less than five days a week, pushups once a month. Kitchen cleaning - about right.

Personally, I blame Julian Macassey

The kiss of death!

A 15-year-old girl with a peanut allergy died after kissing her boyfriend, who had just eaten a peanut butter snack, hospital officials said Monday.

Christina Desforges died in a Quebec hospital Wednesday after doctors were unable to treat her allergic reaction to the kiss the previous weekend.

This reminds me of one of the happier episodes in the heyday of alt.peeves, the Great Peanut War, wherein various cheerful mothers from misc.kids and annoying busybodies from some airline group threw themselves en masse onto the rhetorical barbed wire in a futile effort to persuade the nastiest and most callous people ever gathered together that airlines and other service providers should ban peanuts to avoid harming a tiny minority. It only took the fourth post to hit the right tone.

Obviously you think getting the world to change because you spawned a defective brat is OK.

What makes you think I or anyone else should change their life because your wife pumped out a freak?

It only got better from there.

'Cause you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

Except Blogger employees with their stupid word limit on titles. I mean,I mean, I mean, would an extra thirty so I could get in the full sentence have really killed you? It's not like I wanted thirty pages for the full "song."

Black out

I saw Walk the Line yesterday afternoon.

Given the necessarily formulaic and essentially pointless nature of entertainment biopics, my only fair complaint is that it was well over two hours long. This might have been tolerable if I wasn't sitting next to a jaded, self absorbed lady who twitched and sighed throughout the last half like a six year old girl who desperately has to pee during church services.

Yet I could have born that with a certain grace if my mother hadn't called my silenced phone four times in 45 minutes, clearly indicating she hadn't gotten the message I wasn't going to be there last night. Still, I would have calmed down once the movie ended and I could call her if she hadn't left me a stalkerish four in a row actual voicemails asking me to do exactly that. Does she think I'm stupid? At least panic and pretend you're worried I'm dead on the highway! Repeating "Dylan, this is your mother, call me" in a monotone just makes Wayne Brady wonder if he's gonna have to choke a bitch.

Still, I was ready to try to enjoy the rest of the evening until the blonde I was assiduously trying not to get caught checking out in the lobby walked up to me and proved to be a former law school classmate who I used to talk to a bit on the phone, was the roomate of a pretty close friend, got a fair bit more attractive since I last saw her, and whose name I could not for the life of me remember. I'd been remarking to miss ants in her pants a bit earlier about how for shit my memory is lately; I seem to subsconsciously purge all details about people who have no continuining impact in my life or worthwhile reminiscence value.

God help me if I ever get a bitter divorce from someone I have kids with. I'd hate to explain to them at their weddings that I have no fucking idea who this "mom" lady is they're talking about.

Keep hope alive!

She was out of town; he misplaced my paperwork and resubmitted it.

I've still got it

I don't like going out to bars, especially nice ones. Every episode tends to be much like the other ones, and it just wasn't that much fun the first time. But when a nice new friend of a friend (especially when the latter is Italian Girl) invites you to her little get together at a joint five blocks away, you go.

Scenario 1: Fight for a drink

The sign over the door said the capacity was 62 persons. There were never less than 100 after I got there, and at the peak we threatened 150. Most of these were at the bar. I'm not really an aggressive sharp elbows type, so I planned to spend more than five minutes waiting. The first time it took me 20. The second, 15, but only because one of the girls I met last Monday intervened. The third, 10, but this time I somehow ended up paying for everyone's drinks. $19 for a $4 beer is a pretty steep service charge.

Scenario 2: Fight off embarassing come ons

One of the beneficiaries of my unwitting largesse was a blonde whose best days were behind her; I have my doubts they were all that great back then. I'm not entirely sure what she said, although I think there were some insincere apologies. Mostly there was a wandering hand on my chest, followed by something about a piece of meat. I confessed that guys like me just had to become used to being treated like that and made my escape.

Scenario 3: People watching

I have excellent hearing, which means I can't carry on a conversation in a bar - all I hear is the background music. So mostly I people watch, trying to school my face into ironic amusement or drunken cheerfulness, but usually settling for creepy leer. I never really got even much of buzz so my expressions were all over the place, as were the objects of my scrutiny. Perhaps a quarter of the attendees had not been born in the United States; three times as many parents' weren't either. Arabs, Indians, and Nigerians were particularly well represented among the women. Probably among the men, as well, but who cares?

Scenario 4: Field awkward questions

Job talk was remarkably easy to avoid - most of the people I talked to already knew me, however casually. More troublesome were the three people who asked me the whereabouts of someone else, culminating in my last conversation on the subject.

Nigerian #4: Where's your girlfriend?

Dylan: [Thinking of Italian Girl and adding quotations marks to her query:] Which one?

Nigerian #4: Which one?!? K.

Dylan: Oh, her. I wouldn't really know, I just met her Monday. We'd talked about doing something this week, but after trading a few emails early this week she didn't respond to the message I left her Wednesday or the email yesterday. Your guess is as good as mine.

Nigerian #4: Really? I could tell she fancied you.

Dylan: I guess she got over it. They always do, and often this quickly. She's moving in a few weeks, anyway.

Nigerian #4: Still, she obviously liked you.

Dylan: [world weary shrug]

Scenario 5: Initiate awkward conversations

IG showed up rather late, tapped me on the shoulder, and apologized for not calling me on my birthday. I decided not to tear her clothes off and take her right there on the bar, and instead talked to her boyfriend at some length. He seemed to have missed me. Woo hoo! But really this was sufficiently different from the normal plot, as the preceding had been, that I was still enjoying myself.

I knew it was over and I was trapped in my usual patterns when I ran into a law school acquaintance.

JB: Hey!

Dylan: What's going on? Hey, congratulations on...wait, did you pass the bar?

JB: No.

Dylan: Uh...okay, good luck!

The amazing thing is that I made it two hours without reverting to form. I guess I am growing up.

Update: Thank you, BBC! I kept being distracted last night by a brunette who looked very familiar. She was a dead ringer for one of the cheerleader restroom lesbians.

Mom! Dad! There's something I have to tell you...I'm black.

Having spent Monday evening with (among others) four female second generation Nigerian lawyers, I was intrigued to see Razib post this short bit on the grossly disproportionate number of recent black immigrants at Harvard. The results of survey of 170 blacks at Harvard:

Ethnic self-identification of Harvard black students

Black American, 57.1%
Afro-Caribbean, 21.2%
African, 13.6%
Bi-ethnic or biracial, 25.9%

Generational status, Black Harvard vs. US aggregates

1st generation, 8%, 6.1%
2nd generation, 41%, 3.3%
3rd generation, 6%, 0.9%
4th+ generation, 45%, 89.7%

The source is here.

In June, a New York Times article raised a long-simmering issue: the origins and ancestry of Harvard's black students. The piece described the celebratory mood at a reunion of African-American Harvard alumni, who applauded Harvard's progress over the past three decades in enrolling larger numbers of black students. But it also noted that this mood was broken when "some speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those black students are." The question arises because, even though in recent years 7 to 9 percent of Harvard's incoming freshmen (8.9 percent for the class of 2008) have been African Americans, some studies suggest that more than half of these students, and perhaps as many as two-thirds, are West Indian or African immigrants or their children. A substantial number also identify themselves as children of biracial couples.

What I wonder is whether this means that the actual preference given to aggregate blacks has shrunk as they substitute more qualified Nigerians, Carribeans, etc. Alternatively, "native" blacks as a whole are even more woefully underqualified than I ever imagined, and it's only by using this dodge that they keep things only mildly insane. I suspect the former, because it's hard to imagine this was the pattern thirty years ago.

A third theory that I don't give much credence would be that they actually do take the "diversity" thing seriously and that's why so many immigrants from assorted countries. I'll believe that when I see the white gentile/Jewish/immigrant numbers, at which point I won't believe it at all.

Incidentally, Soul Man was the first movie I ever saw alone. This says much more about the awful chickflick crapfest my mother and sister wanted to see than it does about me at ten years old. I think. Certainly I recall agonizing long and hard about the other movie choice available to me about which I knew nothing. I wish I could remember what it was.

Addendum: Scrolling down at Gene Expression, I saw this post that raised an interesting question - why are US Jews so heavily concentrated in banking, law, and medicine, and not, say, engineering? (Or are they?) The accompanying chart shows that Israel has twice as many engineers as a percentage of the workforce as the US does. I'm sure there's a sociology thesis to be written on how the bloodthirsty right wingers are more likely to be engineers than other professionals. Whether that's what's really going on is another question.

Just wait until you meet my friends

I'm all in favor of misdirection and tricking others into committing your own sins in a much bigger and more flamboyant way in order to provide social camouflage, but if anyone has raised the pretention charge against Will Baude lately I haven't seen it. And in all the history of Crescat, I very much doubt the cumulative weight of the accusations was so painful to him as to justify putting his coblogger up to this nuclear smokescreen.

When I speak to my parents, I am Jeremy (or occasionally, if rude, Jeremy Barnett). With my brother, I am Goosh. Old friends, roommates, travelers attempting to be cute: Jer (rarely though-it's a shortening I much detest). A few professors, some more affected club friends: Mr. Reff (thank God my father is Dr. Reff, so I don't have to look over my shoulder in the drawing room). As there are three Jeremies in my close circle of friends, we are, when together or in context, usually Reff, Funke, Blocker (or if we are feeling particularly cruel - Barney, Bob, and Bill). On the dotted line (for checks and health insurance), my middle name, graft gift of a great-grandfather makes its appearance as a B with point, Jeremy B. Reff. In work correspondence sometimes descibed: Jeremy Reff, [job title]. In slacks, I go by Lola.

continue reading "Quibbling" »

Christ. Should anyone see Mr. Reff in the drawing room, please beat the living shit out of him with a tire iron. Or silver spoon, if no better implement presents itself.

Addendum: I am, of course, no stranger to self absorbed navel gazing. I simply believe it should be accompanied by an appropriate amount of self loathing.

The long dark tea time of the soul

I was told I should have heard by today. I didn't expect he'd care much either way. I guess I'll have to go ask him tomorrow.

I think I've read all the Chandler I care to. The Little Sister was probably my favorite. A title I can identify with; a plot consisting of meandering, confusing, ambiguous, overly complex events not unlike my own life in form if not shape; and for the first time the smoking brunette did it and all the blondes were innocent. Playback was disappointing. Too much sex, too open about it, and a dame causing rather uninteresting trouble because just she wasn't smart enough to explain her rather trivial troubles upfront. And why such a different ending, bringing back the old flame? Did he know he was going to be dead in a year and wanted to wrap up the character?

It's too cold to run if I don't want to strip my lungs and too dark too early to want to do anything else.

Thanks to the unrelated request of a friend, I have rediscovered a cinammon tea source after going years without. Thank god, I need it.

In the land of the shamed the shameless man is king

Unlike Kaimipono D. Wenger (really), I don't think this sort of thing will be very effective.

Tasha Henderson got tired of her 14-year-old daughter's poor grades, her chronic lateness to class and her talking back to her teachers, so she decided to teach the girl a lesson.

She made Coretha stand at a busy Oklahoma City intersection Nov. 4 with a cardboard sign that read: "I don't do my homework and I act up in school, so my parents are preparing me for my future. Will work for food."

My mom tried a low level version of this on me in high school, telling me to prepare myself for enrollment at Bee County College, the regional joke school - it's a community college, it's in the middle of nowhere, and it has cheesy radio ads!

She even went so far as to buy me a small yearbook ad that ended, "P.S. - Good luck next year at Bee County College!" This amused my friends, confused a lot of dimwits who took it seriously, and boosted my contempt for my mother. Hey, I stayed off the booze and grass and actually graduated from college. Barely. Eventually. And even law school!

For whatever it was worth in the end.

Five for fighting

I suppose this "pick the 5th line from the 23rd post of your blog" meme that Amber has passed my way is supposed to possibly reveal your inner soul or at least what your blog is about.

Sure, "rugby," that's it.

How disappointing. Both the preceding and following sentences from that post were more interesting.

I pass it on to the same people NDC did.

Ding dong, the witch is dead?

I have done my best to remain ignorant of local politics everywhere I have lived. I could pick at least half a dozen African presidents off any list you could you draw up to confuse me, but not a single Houston city councilman. It's only with a certain amount of shame that I know the previous mayor of Houston was a chap named Brown, who was black, and the current one is a fellow named White, who is white.

But I know all about Betty Brock Bell, the most incompetent and worthless public official in the Houston area. For 20 years she's served as a Justice of the Peace, which as far as I know involves nothing but running a small claims court and conducting weddings. JPs need no qualifications but an election win, and B3 is one of several without a law degree. This needn't be much of a handicap, as small claims courts are more about equity and fairness than the legalities, at least when neither party has enough money to go to "real" court and have the decision nullified.

Bell, however, is infamous for arbitrary, stupid, and lazy rulings, when she can be bothered to show up and hold court at all. Some fellow students in my mediation clinic tell me that was rarer than you'd believe. How does she manage to keep being reelected? Well, she's the first black female JP and sits in a very black area. As far as I can tell, those are her only qualifications. Whether the black community is well served by such a person is their question to answer wrong, I suppose.

Or it was until now. An appropriately shabby and petty crime by a shabby and petty person may finally rid us of her.

A longtime Harris County justice of the peace will spend the night in the county jail after a jury determined today she illegally used her dead mother's name to obtain handicapped parking placards.

Betty Brock Bell, 56, was fingerprinted by sheriff's deputies, then escorted from District Judge Mary Lou Keel's courtroom through a side door into a confined area. Bell's purse and personal belongings were handed to family members for safekeeping.

A small entourage of well-wishers urged Bell to stay strong as deputies led her away.

``Judge, it's going to be all right,'' one woman called out.

Bell's punishment has not been determined. Jurors will continue hearing evidence today in the sentencing phase of her trial.

The jury deliberated more than three hours today before convicting Bell of tampering with a governmental record, a state jail felony. She could face up to two years in state jail or five years' probation.

Because Bell has been convicted of a felony, the county attorney is empowered to seek her removal from office.

Please.

My life was misspent, don't let me be misunderstood

Eighteen-hundred miles from this old nightclub
A girl is turning 22 today.
How am I supposed to entertain you?
My fingertips are useless when my mind's so far away.

I was debating when and how to get back to Too Far to Care blogging and finally decided to skip ahead to Niteclub. It's one of my favorites, although it did take some time to grow on me once I got beyond a literal focus on the lyrics. I understand it was written while the lead was stuck in his hotel getting ready for a gig while his girlfriend was halfway across the country on her birthday. Abstracted from that, it's a pretty good song for thinking about any sort of burden or mistake that's kept you from somewhere you'd rather be.

Beyond the lyrics, it's sung with that perfect Old 97's mix of energy and angst, what might be inexpertly described as enthusiasm about being depressed, as well as a couple of those verbal catch/swings that always get me, here on the "angel" line.

Eighteen-hundred miles from Manhattan
The nightclub yawns and opens up it's doors.
Thank god that I don't have to pay the cover,
'Cause every night I'm broker than I was the night before

Yeah this old nightclub stole my youth,
This old nightclub stole my true love,
It follows me around from town to town.
I just might get drunk tonight and burn the nightclub down,
I just might get drunk tonight and burn the nightclub down.

(I've always wondered if the insurance companies object to them singing this one on tour.)

Telephones make strangers out of lovers,
Whiskey makes the strangers all look good.
Well my angel of the morning is in mourning.
My life was misspent, don't let me be misunderstood.

And this old nightclub stole my youth,
This old nightclub stole my true love,
It follows me around from town to town.
I just might get drunk tonight and burn the nightclub down,
I just might get drunk tonight and burn the nightclub down.

Balance

Guilt reduction: Finally calling my grandmother.
Guilt addition: Hearing her nearly gasping for breath because she "ran" to get the phone.

Stereotype rejection: My cousin living with his girlfriend, her five kids, and his new illegitimate baby is working.
Stereotype confirmation: He's about to go see a guy about adopting a pit bull.

But who is really behind alien anal probes?

Important new research at MIT reveals:

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

Via Samizdata.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people

"I was sitting about with my friend talking about dumb films we'd seen, dumb books we'd read and I said, 'I've got this idea for the dumbest alternate history book ever'. The next thing I knew I had the Americans on the phone throwing money at me."

Truer words were never spoken. John Birmingham's dumbest book ever, Weapons of Choice, took one of the most awesome ridiculous movie premises ever, a US nuclear powered aircraft carrier mysterious travelled through time to WWII, and took it to 11. I've never been so simultaneously insulted and entertained.

"Multinational task force" engaged in a 2021 War on Terror that looks like the wet dream of Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn? Check. Spooky experimental physics ship conducting wormhole experiments that go horribly wrong in a plot device that would make Michael Crichton barf? Got it. Ridiculous future technology married with wildly overoptimistic prediction of social trends? Not only do these guys have toys the Pentagon hasn't even dreamed of, one of the (US!) ship's captains is female, black, and lesbian. Top off the absurdity by naming the aircraft carrier the USS Hillary Clinton after "our most uncompromising war time president in history"? Yes, biatches, he did it. It makes bringing Prince Harry along as an SAS captain seem almost obvious in retrospect.

Despite (and sometimes because of) all that, it was a pretty good book. The man can write in that hair on fire, jumping around Clancy style dumb red meat eatin' Americans love, and hit some interesting sociological points, with the 2021 guys appalled by the bigotry of the "contemporaries" and they revolted by a future of all these darkies, dames, and queers running things. So despite the most appallingly unlikely series of events to make sure the newly reinforced Allies don't just wipe out the Axis in no time at all, you can't help but go along with it.

Alas, the second book, Designated Targets, which I guiltily skimmed the other day, is much better and therefore makes me feel even more dirty for enjoying it. It's like Dumb and Dumber for right wing bloodthirsty techno-history geeks. And they agree - it's the first time I've seen the first 21 Amazon reviews of a book come in with a total of 103 stars.

It's got furious efforts by all sides to develop all this newfangled technology, race riots, J. Edgar Hoover pissed off at being outed, hundreds of traitors and spies on all sides being executed for being outed, some clever bad guys, some dumb good guys, and people who actually act like real people in entirely unreal situations. Intellectual property disputes (hey, we would have developed it), celebrity cameos (JFK paints "The Grassy Knoll" on his PT boat, Elvis and Marilyn get signed up by a time travelling lawyer), and what-if war scenarios (Operation Sea Lion and a really successful Japanese attack on Hawaii).

I found myself pretty impressed by a lot of things that would "really" happen that Birmingham put in, but most interested by the many dropped hints of the dark 2021 from which all of these wonderfully ridiculous people came from. Dirty bombs in Marseilles, European intifadas, punitive expeditions in every significant Middle Eastern country you'd care to name, mass slaughter and chaos all around, dogs and cats living together, etc.

Given all the Geneva Convention whining going on, it was fun to see Birmingham understand his audience and put in a newly elected President Hillary signing an executive order requiring US troops to execute in the field all enemies known to have committed violations of human rights. Due process? Some drone video footage and an officer's signature if you can be bothered. Hooah! Con: it stretched credibility that this sort of thing would really shock the folks who firebombed civilian populations. (I can well believe they'd be puzzled by the modern obsession with rescuing prisoners, though.) Pro: the ambiguous last line indicates the modern guys do something more than just shoot the fuckers in the head for the exceptionally bad cases. Punitive torture? Going after their families? I guess we'll find out in the next book.

Uh, if I'd read this sort of trash again, that is.

Update: Groan, the author explains some of his jokes. I didn't realize the "Senator O'Reilly" mentioned as being a hardass in a committee hearing was Bill O'Reilly.

Who dares wins

Alas, the available prize on a Monday night isn't as great as on some others.

I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news

Of all the objections raised to the International Criminal Court before its creation, surely none is as a damning as this: its continuing failure to indict Madonna for her cover of American Pie. Or has she wisely not sung it since July 1, 2002?

Dude looks like a lady

Ick, not the birthday present I wanted. At least I took "her" off my "Exciting" list on the blogroll. Incidentally, DO NOT submit a Google image search for "David Lat." Especially if you're at work.

You're so vain, you probably think this post is about you

A friend subjected me to mild criticism some time ago for reveling too much in ambiguity. This is possibly a fair charge, although it's hard to be sure.

I do enjoy lacing my speech and blog posts with deliberately vague references that encompass rather more than I mean, or that deliberately suggest things that are not actually true. I think I do this primarily because it's fun - the rare completely successful head fake in football or basketball is just about the only maneuver I really enjoy anymore when watching those sports. I also do it because I detest lying and find it much easier to say something literally true that entirely avoids the spirit of the question being asked.

There are, of course, downsides to all of this. When having fun, I might be teasing a couple of different people to differing degrees, each unaware of the other, and then unexpectedly pull in a third party with a guilty conscience who thinks he or she's the subject of my little dig. It's still fun of a sort, but hard to explain away without violating other people's confidences. Oops.

A lesser problem, but one that irks me more, is when people caught out by my truthful evasions take umbrage. One even accused me of being manipulative! I suppose this is rarely true, in the sense that Truman tried to manipulate the Japanese into surrender by dropping the Bomb on them, or a little boy manipulates an ant pile by poking it with a stick. This particular accusation was more of a romantic nature, but I stand by the ancient wisdom that all is fair in love and war. False flags to get you close to your target are forgivable so long as you strike them before the final approach, say I.

The most common problem, however, of engaging in all of this shadow play is that I assume others must be doing unto me as I am to them. I spot 300% of all attempted evasions aimed in my direction, which does at least have the merit of amusing the proponents of the 200% that are only in my head. It also forces the real ones to commit to an outright lie.

Addendum: I'm so misunderstood (see guilty consciences, supra). But it's usually good for a laugh. A big, belly aching, slightly bitter laugh. Ah, good times.

Young girl, get out of my mind

The worst part of every new birthday is acknowledging the young women I can no longer date. While I was taught the rule is you may not go below half your age plus six, a reader of this blog and Google do not agree with me - it's actually plus seven. So as of today 21 year old women are off limits, putting college girls on the cusp of total ineligibility.

But don't weep for me; save your tears for them. At least until they turn 22.

You forget some, you lose some

I neglected to take my birthday card with me when I left my mother's house yesterday. That's unfortunate, because having the check presumably inside would have made me feel better when I got home last night and confirmed that yes, my $400 digital camera had been in the armrest compartment of my car, not in my desk drawer.

Adding insult to injury, the thieves who took advantage of my carelessly unlocked door dropped my sun visor to more carefully inspect my music collection but chose not to take any CDs.

n++

I'm leaving town shortly for my sister's 28th birthday. My 30th is Monday; a cousin will be 28 on the same day. I just remembered another cousin's was yesterday. My recently deceased uncle's would have been this coming Wednesday, when, coinciding with a somewhat different but nevertheless appropriate event, I'll probably get my answer. Baby sister will be old enough to vote on the 29th. I've surely forgotten someone else.

Personally, I blame Valentine's Day.

Mañana

For perhaps four years a pair of cardboard poster tubes have lain unopened in a corner of my room. I know one of them reads "Procrastination"; I don't recall what's on the other, but I'll get around to checking one of these days.

In late July I was told I had to submit some paperwork to get something I wanted. I just dropped it off.

We'll call this progress.

Oh, I love you more today than yesterdayBut not as much as tomorrow

After several weeks of fairly infrequent but, for me, rather hard running, I decided to time my 1 mile pace a week ago. Good news: I trimmed 20 seconds off my best ever recorded time, and 30 off the wall I used to be stuck at for most of the summer. Bad news: I still suck.

But after returning after yet another full week off, I trimmed...a whole second and a half off! At this rate, I'll set the world record just after my 40th birthday. I'll trade that for a minute in the next six weeks, though, and two over the next few months. Time to go back to 4-5 times a week and get unspoiled by those nice 60s we had throughout October. This is the town of the 80+ Christmas Day, after all, last year's snow notwithstanding.

It's always funnier when you explain it

Men, women, humor, etc.

When it comes to humor, women may have lower expectations.

Scientists are finding a myriad of differences between the way men's and women's brains function. In one of the most recent studies, researchers watched brain activity as men and women read cartoons and found that women's brains show higher reward activation when they find something funny.

This suggested to the researchers that while the men and women found punch lines equally funny — or unfunny — men's brains expected to be amused and women's didn't.

"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon," said Allan Reiss at Stanford University's Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. "So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it."

Women tend to come in two kinds: those who thing I'm hilarious, and those who don't think I'm even mildly amusing. I'd always assumed the first group had taste; I now see they just had a lower opinion of me to begin with. Great.

Another article on the research suggests men prefer one liners, women narratives. So I guess I'll stick to the cheap consistent laughs from the guys by posting simple gems like this:

Home Depot is defending a lawsuit filed by a man who claims the chain's Louisville store ignored his cries for help after he fell victim to a prank and was glued to a toilet seat.

Bob Dougherty, 57, of Nederland, said he became stuck to a bathroom toilet seat last year after somebody smeared glue on it.

"They left me there, going through all that stress," Dougherty told The (Boulder) Daily Camera. "They just let me rot."

His lawsuit, filed Friday, said Dougherty was recovering from heart bypass surgery at the time and thought he was having a heart attack. A store employee who heard him calling for help informed the head clerk via radio, but the head clerk "believed it to be a hoax," the lawsuit said.

Home Depot spokeswoman Kathryn Gallagher said she could not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit said after about 15 minutes, store officials called for an ambulance. Paramedics unbolted the toilet seat, and while wheeling a "frightened and humiliated" Dougherty out of the store, he passed out.

The lawsuit said the toilet seat separated from his skin, leaving abrasions.

"This is not Home Depot's fault," he said. "But I am blaming them for letting me hang in there and just ignoring me."

Addendum: As far as one liners vs. narratives, well, duh.

Ton of fun

Um, this puts my modest weight loss and efforts to get in shape to shame.

When a recruiter stopped by to talk to his son, Roderick Evans was the one sold on the military. The Detroit home health care specialist had a passion for helping others and a desire to make a difference.

A military medical career sounded like a perfect fit.

The recruiter, on the other hand, saw a different picture. He took one look at Evans and said, "You're just too big."

At 5 feet, 7 inches and 418 pounds, Evans could hardly disagree.

But instead of easing the rejection with his usual overdose of comfort foods, he went on a weight-loss crusade. Fueled by sheer willpower and a determination to join the military, the 36-year-old finally conquered a lifelong battle with his weight. Three years and 230 pounds lighter, Evans again saw a recruiter. This time, he was met with a much different reception.

"He had me come down to his office for a (fitness) test," said Evans, now 39 years old and a svelte 165 pounds. "I passed with flying colors and signed up for the Reserves on the spot."

The older of my two sisters recently had stomach surgery after topping out a bit over 300 lbs at 5'11". I guess all she really needed was a recruiting brochure.

It was better in the old days

As a one-time fan of Robert Parker's detective novels before he turned them into a form of ad lib he could easily regurgitate every 9 months, I'm upset that I waited so long to read Raymond Chandler's stuff. It's embarassing how shamelessly the man has been ripped off, and sad how far his imitators fall short.

The plots have the same level of implausibility and not much mystery or problem solving to them, but the atmosphere is thick enough to choke on. My only complaints are that books originally printed in the 30's-50's really should be reprinted with an inflation chart in the back (a $500 fee is how much today?), and that I simply can't understand how people ever thought it was acceptable to spell "okay" as "okey" (I keep wondering what people from Oklohoma have to do with anything). Has there been a shift in pronunciation?

Still, the books seem to onfirm a couple of things I've always suspected - America was a much better place during the Depression, and blondes are always nothing but trouble, buddy. Although to be fair, I suppose it's still just barely possible one of these things isn't true.

The unkiss of death

Muahaha! There's possibly no more guilty pleasure than grabbing your 1L facebook and searching the bar results to find out who didn't pass.

My top male enemy - bzzt, thank you for playing! Top bitch? Oh, well, maybe she'll have to move to California soon. What was the top predictor of bar failure in my class? Being a woman I flirted with. They only threatened 50% if you count the four ladies on my journal. All of my male friends passed, with the exception of the guy who didn't call me back a couple of months ago. Tsk, tsk.

I know the type

This blog and its previous incarnations have been remiss in focusing almost exclusively on brunettes. To partially redress this I share with you the definitive passage on blondes from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.

There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial.

There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindemith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quater of a beat too late. I hear Toscaninin can also. That makes two of them.

And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to this butler.

The dream across the way was none of these, not even of that kind of world. She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color.

Guiliani, eat your thumb off

We may have a new contender for America's favorite tough mayor.

The mayor of Las Vegas has suggested that people who deface freeways with graffiti should have their thumbs cut off on television.

"In the old days in France, they had beheadings of people who commit heinous crimes," Mayor Oscar Goodman said Wednesday on the TV show "Nevada Newsmakers."

Goodman said the city has a beautiful highway landscaping project and "these punks come along and deface it."

"I'm saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb," the mayor said. "That may be the right thing to do."

Goodman also suggested whippings should be brought back for children who get into trouble.

It's so crazy, it just might work! But some disagree.

Another panelist on the show, state university system regent Howard Rosenberg, said cutting off the thumbs of taggers won't solve the problem and Goodman should "use his head for something other than a hat rack."

Alas, Mr. Rosenberg is guilty of a common liberal mistake - arguing something that is morally debatable (or even wholly reprehensible) can't possibly achieve its desired result. I sometimes get the idea that if the Holocaust were proposed today the first liberal objection would be that it wouldn't actually "solve" the "Jewish problem"; the evil of the suggestion would be rather secondary in importance.

I'm quite certain cutting off thumbs of offenders would have a big impact on graffiti. But that's not the point.

Beat the holiday rush - get fat now!

Be advised that Walgreens is selling their seasonal candy at 75% off. This includes some good candy dressed up in seasonal motif, although I did make a mistake and get dark chocolate Reeses cups. Still, not actually bad with peanut butter.

This seemed like a good idea because I've pulled out of my late summer stall on the weight front and dropped something close to ten pounds since then. The bad news is that my gut isn't visibly smaller, but I do think some came off my face.

For now. I'd better throw it all away tomorrow; it only cost me $2.40 for three bags, after all.

I keep getting in my car, but I'm not going anywhere

It's time once again for the return of that great American pastime, demonizing oil companies for "excessive" profits. But are they?

The Houston Chronicle notes that ExxonMobil's record $9.9 billion profit last quarter was only 11% of revenues, not unusually large for major corporations. Consider these for comparison:

33% - Citigroup
32% - Microsoft
14% - Procter & Gamble
11% - General Electric

Now to be fair, it is highly unusual for a company that does the "dumb" work of extracting resources in a competitive market to make a profit margin this high. Walmart, the top operator in the dumbest market of all, retail, earned 4% last quarter. Profit margins should be related to how much brainpower the work requires, how competitive the market is, and (related) how specialized the product. By all measures, oil companies rank relatively low.

But are the major oil profits, even if relatively large, anything to get excited about in absolute terms? Not really. A chart in the Chronicle article shows the combined profits of the top US oil majors last quarter, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, were $17.3 billion. According to this article, we use an average of 380 million gallons of gasoline a day; times 90 gets you 34.2 billion gallons in the last quarter, probably an underestimate give that it was the "summer driving season." Let's assume a price average of $2.50 over that period, for total gasoline sales of around $85.5 billion.

So 20% of the price of a gallon of gasoline, about $0.50, was profit to the oil companies? Well, no. The combined revenues of the big three oil companies were $192.4 billion. So domestic gasoline sales were less than 45% of their total revenues. Furthermore, they only captured a fraction of that submarket, with the rest going to retailers and independent refiners. How large that number is, I don't know. But is a profit of perhaps 10-20 cents a gallon something to drive drivers into a rage, and lead politicians into foolish responses that will only harm the oil industry in the long term?

Of course not.

I really am so misunderstood!

Via NDC.

You Are a Retrospective Soul

The most misunderstood of all the soul signs. Sometimes you even have difficulty seeing yourself as who you are. You are intense and desire perfection in every facet of your life. You're best described as extremely idealistic, hardworking, and a survivor. Great moments of insight and sensitivity come to you easily. But if you aren't careful, you'll ignore these moments and repeat past mistakes. For you, it is difficult to seperate the past from the present. You will suceed once you overcome the disappoinments in life. Souls you are most compatible with: Traveler Soul and Prophet Soul

What Kind of Soul Are You?

Hurricane Mohammed

After simmering for several days out of sight of the big media, some finally start to notice that Paris area Muslims have been rioting now for seven days, most recently burning dozens of vehicles.

PARIS, Nov. 3 -- Violence continued for a seventh night Wednesday in immigrant-dominated towns on the edge of Paris with gangs of youths taking over a police station, vandalizing a shopping center and setting fire to businesses, buses and cars as feuding French officials struggled to devise a plan for halting the unrest.

Youths clashed with police in at least nine towns and communities, most of them concentrated in Paris' northern suburban areas, according to local police and news media. In the town of La Courneuve, two shots were fired at police but no one was injured, according to the Agence France Press news agency. Most of the rioters have used rocks, sticks and Molotov cocktails in their attacks.

President Jacques Chirac met with his cabinet Wednesday to map out a strategy for combating the continuing violence, but officials failed to announce any decisions.

"Zones without law cannot exist in the republic," Chirac told his cabinet in a closed meeting, according to his spokesman, Jean-Francois Cope. The president declared that law would be enforced "firmly" but also acknowledged frustrations in immigrant neighborhoods and urged dialogue.

Chirac has not personally addressed the French public about the unrest that erupted last Thursday night when two Muslim teenagers of African heritage were electrocuted in a power substation while dodging a police checkpoint in the impoverished town of Chichy-sous-Bois northeast of Paris.

A rapid escalation of the violence Tuesday night appeared to shock France's leadership. Gangs set fire to as many as 228 vehicles in 13 poor, immigrant towns and communities, according to local police and news media.

Predictably, state and local officials squabbled with FEMA the prime minister and interior minister are squabbling over the appropriate response.

Because of the violence, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin postponed a planned visit on Wednesday to Canada and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who oversees domestic security, canceled a four-day trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan scheduled to begin on Sunday, according to statements issued by their offices.

Chirac's cabinet members met throughout the day Wednesday, but announced no concrete plans for countering the spiraling violence. De Villepin and Sarkozy have blamed each other for inaction in a series of nasty public barbs.

Both men are competing within Chirac's political party to run for the French presidency in 2007.

No word yet on how long President Chirac's spent at his ranch mistresses' home before returning to the White House Elysee Palace.

The BBC is probably the best English language site for news on the situation. Their reader comments are hilarious.

Addendum: The more I read about this, the more it looks like a "typical" isolated minority/underclass problem, not entirely dissimilar to the Watts riots or similar incidents in the US. Related, I found an excellent article by the bard of Western European decline, Theodore Dalrymple, on the growing crime problem in Paris...three years ago.

She wanted a snake charmer, not a charming snake

The Economist ran an interesting article ($) on Indian online dating last week.

SOME 18 months ago in southern India, the parents of a software engineer working in Chennai began to despair of finding him a suitable bride. They were, truth to tell, rather picky: “Our requirement is a suitable Hindu Nadar girl of Sivakasi /Madurai side origin, preferably employed as a software engineer in Chennai, age between 21 to 24, height 5 feet 2 inches to 5 feet 6 inches (157cms to 167cms) and sufficiently good-looking.” She also had to speak Tamil.

There was, however, a happy ending. They ventured online, to a website called Bharatmatrimony.com, which now flaunts their story. They identified a girl, received a message from her father, matched horoscopes and, having introduced the happy couple to each other, will celebrate the wedding next month.

Online marriage-broking is one of the successes of Indian e-business, used by the single looking for “love matches” as well as by their parents and siblings. So complex are the requirements of Indians seeking a partner that the internet might have been designed to meet their needs. Bharatmatrimony's boss, Janakiram Murugavel, says that language is the biggest criterion. His site is divided into 15 linguistic sections. Then comes status and caste, which divides Indians at birth into thousands of groups. About 70% of his customers want to marry within their caste. Most still also use astrology. Bharatmatrimony offers an online horoscope service.

Things aren't quite that complicated in Houston, but the local Indian community remains quite insular when it comes to marriage. The three ladies I'm acquainted with dabbled more or less exclusively with family inappropriate boyfriends before switching to some nice Indian guy they married mostly because, as far as I can tell, he was Indian, not because he was nice.

This is regrettable. I used to spend most Friday nights observing and commenting on a group I dubbed the Indian Mafia at my local watering hole. The women were almost all elegant and beautiful; the men looked like particularly swarthy extras from the Godfather. How do you say "lay off the pasta, Guido" in Bengali?

Of course, I may just be bitter. An Indian lady was the only woman to ever actually laugh in my face (loudly!) when I asked her out. I like to think it had more to do with her past experience as my former boss than my being white, though.

Addendum: Hmm! It just occurred to me that when playing Civ IV (must...stop...) I inevitably run Hinduism as my national religion. I tell myself it's because it's at a convenient point on the tech tree, but I wonder.

I've still got it

Various friends and family members periodically try to convince me to take the February bar exam as a fallback, if nothing else. I've been pretty adamantly against it. After all, if I'm going to have to do anything as a fallback, why not pick some sould crushingly boring job I can get that doesn't require that much of an investment of time, emotion, and money?

Still, stung by the repeated laughter of two young ladies a couple of weeks ago when I responded that I wasn't sure I "had time" to take the bar (I meant to file), I thought just now to check the filing deadline, which I knew had to be the end October or November. Sure enough, it was last Saturday. My sense of timing never fails. Or succeeds, depending on your point of view.

Ironically, I will, if all goes well, have to collect most of this information anyway for other purposes. But no one is quite as big a pain in the ass as the bar examiners, and even for a more reasonable approach to completeness and accuracy, I doubt a week and a half would have been enough to get it done.

General assistance

I've become somewhat disillusioned with blogging recently. I suffer from two problems: a dislike of specialization and a greater willingness to help others than myself (negligible being greater than zero).

The specialization problem came into focus recently when I was found wanting for something. To skip over the good parts directly to the lesson - I'm a moderate nerd and a fair "cool kid," able to mix with and understand either crowd, but I don't really excel at either social persona or completely fit in with any group. Given my general dilletantism, this shouldn't really be a surprise, but I'd never thought of it before in those terms.

Alas, any pretentions to "significant" blogging, whatever that may be, are doomed by the same lack of focus. I'm sure there's a meaningful number of readers out there who would be interested in any of several things I could do well if I really focused, but I'm not willing to forgo the personal angsty posts, political rants, random commentary, and assorted other recurring, well, "themes" does them too much credit, but comes closest.

So be it; I can still have a respectably disreputable generalist blog with no focus. Alas, here's where my tendency to help other people out comes into play. I've had any number of good ideas or source material for slightly odd economics posts or legal topics of late, but I generally end up farming them off to Tyler Cowen (several, most of which he uses), A3G (a few, all of which she's used), or Eugene Volokh (some, with increasingly fewer submitted or used).

Could I do something "better" with the material than they ultimately will? Sometimes, by my own standards, I suppose. But why bother when they're going to be read by orders of magnitude more readers? I'd rather a few thousand people read a good take on the idea than a few dozen read mine. Ego can only take one so far in the harsh light of Sitemeter.

But now I'm thinking it's hardly worth having a blog if I'm not ever going to write about something that I think someone else can do just about as well. Tyler Cowen's giving a talk here tonight that I'm attending. Maybe it's time to tell him the affair is over.