Red Monkey

May 1, 2008

The Island Who Lost Its Name

It's true, Virginia, there really IS a Lesbos.

Seriously. It's a Greek island just off the coast of Turkey, near Ayvalik (which was a Turkish city filled with Greeks until about 1922). Today, it's often referred to as Mytilini - which is actually just the name of the island's capital.

And, they want their name back. They do not wish to be residents of the isle of Mytilini (which sounds vaguely Italian anyway), they want to be ...

Lesbians.

Wait, wait, wait. That came out wrong. ACK! Not "came out" like "came out of the closet" ... I mean, it didn't sound ...

Oh bollox.

It's simple. Waaaaaay back in the 7th century B.C., there was a woman named Sappho. She wrote poetry. Love poetry. Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos. She wrote love poetry to women. Hence, Sappho was a Lesbian lesbian. Or was she a Mytilinian lesbian? Maybe she was bi, we just don't know. At any rate, somewhere along the line, instead of being accurate and calling women who write love poetry to other women Sapphians, which would have been more accurate, they called them lesbians. And then, of course, they attached the word to females who were attracted to other females, instead of being more precise and only referring to women who wrote poetry to women as Sa - I mean lesbians.

So it's quite obvious that the entire process of naming women who happen to be homosexual as lesbians has been very much botched from the beginning. Or at least since the 7th century B.C. Or, to be more precise, B.C.E. (before the common era).

At any rate, the people of the island sometimes called Lesbos and sometimes called Mytilini would actually like to be called Lesbians now. Never mind that there are plenty of people who would prefer to NOT be called a lesbian, these people would like their name back.

It's been badly misused by the media in the United States. All throughout the 1980s, any news story involving Sharon Gless using began in this way: A crazed lesbian broke into Gless' home or perhaps Gless has taken out a restraining order on the crazed lesbian who broke into.

And anyway, why bother to divide the gay community into "gay men" and "lesbians" anyway? Shouldn't the gay community try to band together and show their numbers instead of subdividing into minute special-interest groups? What if the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s had subdivided into Africans, half blacks, quadroons, Baptists, Catholics, etc, etc, etc?

I say, let the island of Lesbos have their name back. I don't want it, anyway.

Now, if the Dutch start demanding "dyke" back, we're gonna have problems ...

You can read the BBC article here.

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:46 AM | Comments (9) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

April 29, 2008

The Dark Side of Belief

Those of you who have read this blog for very long will not be surprised that the news story which has captured my full attention over the last few days is taking place in Austria right now.

A father, Josef, tricked his 18 year old daughter back in 1984, to enter the cellar, where he drugged her, handcuffed her and then confined her in the cellar. He forced his daughter, Elisabeth, to write a letter to her parents stating that she had run away and that they should not look for her. Somewhere between 1988 and 1989, Elisabeth gives birth to a daughter. Then, a son. Nearly 10 years after Elisabeth's "disappearance," she purportedly leaves an infant on the doorstep of her parents' home, with a note stating that she cannot care for the child. This happens again the following year.

The tally so far, a daughter and a son who live in the cellar with Elisabeth. Then 2 infants left on the doorstep for her parents to raise. Four children fathered by her own father. Two she was allowed to keep; two taken from her. All this in the first 10 years of her incarceration.

In 1996, she gives birth to twins, one of whom dies shortly thereafter and her father places the infant in the building's incinerator. The next year, she gives birth to another child who also is left on the parents' doorstep. Then, in 2003, she gives birth to a final son. (source)

Elisabeth and the three children who stayed with her lived in a tiny cellar, which was constantly enlarged over the 24 years that Elisabeth was condemned to the prison. There was a little kitchen, a little bedroom, a little bathroom ... and apparently, a small storeroom as well.

What finally gave Josef away and revealed the four people living in the cellar dungeon? The oldest child became deadly ill and he took her to hospital, claiming she'd collapsed in front of his building. A call went out for the girl's mother ... and eventually it all came to light, quite literally.

When we are confronted with an example of pure malice and evil, our first reaction is generally one of denial and disbelief. Even as we marvel at the evidence in front of us and know intellectually that the buildings at Auschwitz were used in the ways that they were used ... a portion of our mind finds the concept of such cruelty too large to hold and the first words uttered are generally, "no, this can't be."

I spoke last month of Merrily Melson who was faced with a similar situation on a personal level. A partner whom she trusted suddenly began attacking her with an ax. Think about this for a moment. Think about your partner suddenly hefting an ax and come running toward you. What would your first thought be? Would it be "Hey, you're not Jack Nicholson, put that damn ax down before you hurt yourself?" Would the time it took to realize this was NOT a joke mean the first stroke was fatal?

How do you cope with finding out that you are NOT safe?

Merrily Melson was lucky. She reacted to the situation quickly enough to escape with her life and that, trust me, is no small feat. When you are confronted with such an extreme act, your ability to think is essentially cut off. Your brain cooks up a batch of chemicals which rather locks the reasoning areas down and strips you to reflexes. So it's no surprise that in the heat of being attacked by her partner wielding an ax in some bizarre scenario, that it didn't immediately occur to her to grab her son (who was not being threatened at the time). This is an immediate fight or flight response. Had Melson's partner begun threatening their boy in front of her, her instincts would have been to snag him and run.

But without seeing that immediate threat ... we are programmed more toward denial than thought at such a time.

It is the same with child abuse and particularly true of abuse in its most extreme forms. As humans, we accept, intellectually, that some sick people force themselves on children or beat their children or neglect them.

But unless confronted with some concrete evidence or very compelling circumstantial evidence (behavioural clues from the child, perhaps) - we do not believe that it will happen to anyone we know ... to the person next door. To us. It happens to other people. Not people we know and care about. Other people.

It's one of the fictions we live with daily in order to not worry 24/7. Just as we trust that the walls of our homes will not be breached, that our health will not suddenly disappear, that the people we love will care for us. We trust that helicopters will not fall from the sky, that big brother is listening to someone else's phone conversations, that our bosses do not read our blogs.

We trust, essentially, that those around us are worthy of our trust because the world is far too big and dangerous if we have to go it completely alone.

But this trust also means that many people try to say that these cases of extreme abuse don't really happen. Or that they don't happen in the U.S. - and it makes me want to scream. We have an example in Austria where it really shows just how easy this can be. Is it common for abuse to happen at this type of level? No, I don't believe it is common. But I am convinced that it happens more often than we want to think.

What confuses people, I think, is the plethora of wild abuse stories told in the '80s. We had the Atlanta abductions in the news, then there were reports of mass abuse happening in day care centres, and people claiming multi-offender, satanic abuse rings were popping up all over the nation.

If you read very carefully the 1992 FBI report by Kenneth V. Lanning (read the report here), Lanning is pretty thorough and logical with his analysis of the phenomenon. He begins with the history of how the U.S. has handled everything from "stranger danger" to the claims of the 80s. By the fifth part of the report, entitled "MULTlDlMENSlONAL CHILD SEX RINGS," he gets to the core of what I believe has confused the American public.

Lanning, in 1992, had found no evidence supporting a large, multi-offender, multi-victim, multi-murder cult. Look at all the words there. Large. Multi-offender. Multi-victim. Multi-murder.

He states quite clearly that smaller groups are possible and it's possible that smaller groups could even evade the law, particularly (this is a bit more my interpretation, but I think his text indicates he might agree with this) particularly when the victim is a young child, under the six at the onset of the abuse.

An important quote from the report:

Most people would agree that just because a victim tells you one detail that turns out to be true, this does not mean that every detail is true. But many people seem to believe that if you can disprove one part of a victim's story, then the entire story is false. As previously stated, one of my main concerns in these cases is that people are getting away with sexually abusing children or committing other crimes because we cannot prove that they are members of organized cults that murder and eat people.

I think most people in the '80s looked at the extreme allegations made, read the FBI report and came to a sort of conclusion of denial - "he said these things don't happen," when, in fact, the most important part of his report is that the stories of murder and cannibalism and satanic ritual may be exaggerated stories used to conceal very real abuse or crimes.

What he said was, these things don't happen with large groups of offenders and victims.

We have evidence that they do happen on a much smaller scale.

Who would have thought that a father of seven children would kidnap one of his children, imprison her, father seven children on her and then raise three of them himself and imprison three of them (and burning the body of the infant who died)? How did he choose which of the children to raise and which to consign to life in the dungeon? Why did he choose to bring any of them out? Was it simple overcrowding?

The case in Austria simply brings to light all of the questions I have about how humanity treats humanity ... and how tenaciously we cling to the idea that the world is a safe place even as we mouth the words about how unsafe it is.

The dark side of our belief and our hope that such things do not happen ... is that those who perpetrate such things get away with their crimes.

It was unfathomable that any government would kill some six MILLION members of a single group of people and for that to be just one segment of the deaths. Intellectually, we seem to recognize this possibility now - but even as we do, there's a rising number of vocal people who believe that the Holocaust did not happen. Whether that is simple political expediency or not, I think it also demonstrates just how deeply our denial goes.

We do not wish to believe such evil occurs.

The dark side of our belief that evil does not happen is to allow that evil to continue happening.

How do we keep these things from happening? The short answer is that we cannot. Josef and his family were insular. But even if they had been outgoing people, the cellar dungeon would likely not have been detected. Josef was quite good at concealing it and concealing sound. And, not every shy person or introvert is hiding some deep, evil secret.

With the facts we have about Josef's case, I'm not sure that he made many mistakes ... that he gave much reason for investigation. It all sounds so plausible once the daughter was first tricked into her incarceration.

But what about another case where people in the neighborhood knew that dead animals were nailed to the fence and they were pretty sure from which house this was happening? Why did they choose to look the other way? Isn't this a neon sign that bad things are happening?

Or were they just grateful that strays and vermin were gone from their neighborhood? Did the dark side of their belief in humanity convince them to be grateful that's all it was? that what they saw was the worst of it?

How do we balance the need to believe we are safe ... with the evidence that we are not?

Why do we choose to believe some stories ... and not others?

Why do we often choose to believe in grand, large conspiracies ... and ignore the smaller contrivances around us?

Why do we hear so often "I knew how I was treated ... but I never thought 'Pat' would hurt the children"?

Our belief can be a very power and positive agent in our lives ... but it also has a darker side which can cause us to completely deny actions we should take or allegations we should investigate.

We cannot live in a constant state of suspicion ... but there are times when we need to take out the cloth of our beliefs and shake it, examine it carefully and analytically before once again cloaking ourselves in it.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:55 AM | Comments (2) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 24, 2008

Why Is It Always Texas??

Recently, I've run across a fair number of people online who seem quite adamant that the disaster at the Koresh compound in Waco was somehow an unfair persecution of a religious sect. Of course, this conspiracy nonsense has been much fueled by the current issues with the break-off sect of the Church of the Latter Day Saints who have built a community for themselves in Texas.

Why, oh why does this crap only seem to happen in my home state??

(Okay, okay, so in Texas and California. Still. I do NOT want Texas equated with California!!) So let's look at some of the pertinent facts and laws which apply to one case or the other.

First, let's start with how works in Texas.

Upon receiving a report of possible abuse or neglect, CPS first goes to the home or school and must speak with the child and do a visual exam. The child will be removed by the case worker investigating only if one of four scenarios exist or there is sufficient reason to believe one of these four is true:

• immediate danger to physical health/safety
• the child has been sexually abused
• the custodial adult is using a controlled substance and that is causing an immediate danger
• the custodial adult allowed a child to remain on the site whilst meth was being cooked

Two, weapon laws at the time of the Koresh standoff with the ATF. Automatic weapons were considered illegal at the time of the Koresh standoff, including the following weaponry found at the compound:

• M-16 type rifles, modified for automatic use


• AK-47 type rifles, modified for automatic use


• Heckler & Koch SP-89, modified for automatic use


• M-11/Nine, modified for automatic use


• AR-15, modified for automatic use


• silencers


• live M-21 practice hand grenades

Three, current age of consent laws. The age of consent in Texas is 17. The legal age for marriage is 18. If under the age of 16, the law requires that the couple receives a court order before being allowed to marry. Marriage for ages 16 and 17 may occur with the written approval from a parent or legal guardian. (See the Texas Family Code 2.003 through 2.009)

Now, given these facts, I firmly maintain that there was sufficient cause to investigate the Branch Davidians. Accusations of child abuse had been made for years, but as is often the case, insufficient evidence was found. We know after the fact that while the Branch Davidians ran a legitimate arms business, they also had acquired illegal weaponry as well.

I do agree, as do most people, that the situation was botched and botched very, very badly. However, those people who think that the Davidians were a simple, innocent religious organization are simply wrong, if for no other reason than the illegal weaponry.

Those people who claim this was a violation of church and state are simply wrong. Churches still must comply with the laws of the land. They can work with their lawmakers to obtain exceptions and the like - as the Amish have done and done quite well - but there are some hard-and-fast rules. Physical safety of the members is one such rule, particularly in regards to children. Another is that gun laws must be obeyed.

(Side note - and it absolutely boggles my mind that any truly Christian organization would run an arms business and stockpile that inventory at the church. To me that goes against everything Christianity is - but, that's just my personal opinion.)

In the current example of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints with their ranch in Texas, a similar set of circumstances has arisen which is drawing criticism from people who believe the group is being persecuted.

In this particular case, there is a documented history of statutory rape and illegal marriage. Their leader is in prison as an accomplice to rape after he forced a girl under legal age to marry her cousin. One of the group's tenets is that a man must marry at least three women in order to get to heaven. We can make all the lame jokes about how being married to three women sounds more like hell, but that simply neglects the real issue: polygamy is illegal in the United States. Marriage to a relative is illegal in Texas. Marriage to someone under the age of 16 without court-granted permission is illegal in Texas. In addition, sex with someone under the age of 17 is illegal.

The state of Texas allowed the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to move into state because it was not illegal for them to do so. They changed a few laws (updating some antiquated marriage laws such as the marriage age). And they left the group alone to practice their religion.

Now, they have received a complaint that a 16 year old was sexually abused.

Whether that complaint is true or not, they must investigate it. Since they have not yet found the teen who made the complaint, they are left with an evaluation of the home life of the other children at the ranch as well as a deep concern for the originator of the call.

Let's look at this in a smaller scale. Two brothers are quite close. One forces his sister's child to marry another sister's brother-in-law. This brother is taken to jail for abetting the rape of a child. The other brother, who believes the same as the jailed one, continues on about his life. One of his five children call CPS and claims abuse. When CPS gets there, that child is missing.

This constitutes a reasonable concern for the safety of the other children and, in my opinion, necessitates their removal from the home until the situation can be better assessed.

Drastic? Yes. Traumatic? Most likely.

I see the same situation with the Yearning for Zion ranch.

This is not a "human rights violation," as I have seen some argue. Their right to practice their faith is no more being curtailed than any other faith. As a nation, we also don't allow practitioners of certain forms of Santeria to commit human sacrifice. Nor do we let the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints commit child abuse.

There are simply times when we have to step in and say, "We are not flexible about this law. You must obey it."

To call this persecution by the government is laughable.

Does it remind us of the failures at Waco? Of course it does. However, this has been handled in a different manner.

There is reasonable cause to think that laws have been broken. Investigation must occur.

Now, if we find out that the call from the 16 year old was in some way faked, we have a different kettle of fish. And the DNA testing? The assertation that this is to discover which child belongs to which adults seems reasonable to me given the Texas legal code. Legally they will need to place the children back with their biological parents when the investigation is over and since many of the adults aren't sure who is who's parent, they need the DNA tests. The Texas code is not set up for group families - they're set up for "traditional" families (meaning biological parents or legally adopted children). I suspect they also want some verification about incest and inbreeding, but that's just my suspicion and is probably only secondary to their legal directive to return the children to the biological parents after the investigation is concluded.

At the end of the day, there is no more persecution going on here than the Catholic Church was persecuted during all of the allegations of sexual abuse.

When the law is being broken ... it's not persecution, it's prosecution.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:44 AM | Comments (4) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 9, 2008

Still Breathing

I was, apparently, a good baby. (I know, what happened, right?) As the first-born, of course, my parents had no real idea what they were getting themselves into, and like all new parents, they thought I probably cried too much. I was put on the very healthy soy formula, since that was the thing at the time. Apparently I was congested so much of the time as an infant, my mother was just certain that I would be claimed by SIDS. Part of that fear was "just" the paranoia of a new mom, part of it was my congestion. But it wasn't long before I settled into a fairly quiet routine. I'd play in my crib, gurgling and goofy in the morning until Mom was ready to get up - a note in my baby book says that it was a great way for Mom to wake up in the morning, greeted by baby's smile.

Despite my determination to play no matter how I felt, by the time I was three, it was obvious that something wasn't right. After a myriad of tests you don't want to give to a three year old in 1971, I was diagnosed with both allergies and asthma.

A partial list of allergies:
Foods: soy, tomatoes, green beans, peanuts, peas, broccoli, most every green vegetable and I believe every legume -- luckily I do not get the anaphylactic shock reaction, so I can tolerate some amount of these things
Outside: grass of multiple varieties, ragweed, pine trees, cedar trees, cottonwood trees, most flowers - pretty much everything that grows outside, I think
Animals: cats and dogs and bird feathers
Inside/Misc.: mold, mildew, dust mites, cockroaches, ampicillin

The asthma could be triggered by humidity, cold, smoke, and "excessive" activity. Yeah. What's excessive activity to a three year old?

The doctor told my mom the bad news: she needed to keep not just a clean house, but an ultra-clean house. My parents needed to stop smoking. And they'd have to watch me carefully outside. And, of course, I'd have to start getting allergy shots.

I started allergy shots.
Mom covered my box springs in a plastic allergy bag. And my mattress. I think we tried the pillows, but I couldn't sleep for the noise it made.
Mom gathered every single stuffed animal and doll that I owned, put them in bags and into the car. I thought Mom and I and my toys were going for a car ride - we did - straight to the Salvation Army. Stuffed animals and dolls were dust catchers. (Try explaining this to a heart-broken, screaming three year old. Doesn't work very well. Obviously, as I'm still whining about it.)
Mom began a cleaning regime which developed into a full-fledged OCD drama. Vacuum on Mondays and Fridays. All clothes, including the bedding, washed on Thursdays. I don't recall a specific day for the dusting, but it was also done often.
Mom was nervous every time I went outside, exhorting me to not run (didn't work).

Out of those two lists, what didn't get done?

I know it was the early 70s. Everyone smoked. Including my parents.

I can recall going clothes shopping (against my will) with Mom and everyone smoking in the mall. The clothing stores had ashtrays in the dressing rooms and I recall one time in particular when I was a bit older. Left alone in the dressing room while Mom went to hunt down another size (I was "saving" the dressing room so someone else couldn't take it), Mom left her lit cigarette in the little stall with me. Brave, I picked it up, surprised a bit at how warm it was, and I carefully stubbed it out, trying not to damage it, just to make it quit stinking up the place so bad. She came back, went for a drag, and was stunned to see that it had "gone out." She re-lit it, took a few puffs, tried on some stuff and again left me there while she went back out to find something else. This time I broke the cigarette and when Mom came back, I was really surprised, but she wasn't really mad. Just said she didn't realize it bothered me so much. That was the only time I ever held a lit cigarette.

So much of my childhood was structured around avoiding triggering my asthma and allergies - but the smoking was something that drove me crazy. I could feel the "dirt" in my lungs from it. The smell got up into my sinuses and drove me crazy. But it really started to get to me when other people assumed that I smoked simply because everything I owned smelled of it, and I smelled of it. The breaking point was the evening I went to babysit for a new client and the mother literally turned up her nose at me and said, "You smoke." I replied that I did not smoke and never had. She sighed dramatically and pointed to a remote location of the backyard. "Smoke over there, where the children can't see you. They are not allowed to see people smoking."

It didn't matter how I protested, I was a teenager, I smelled of smoke, and she was a judgmental woman. Of course, by then, the mid 80s, smoking was becoming a habit to restrict and to drop. I began a "quit smoking" campaign with my mother, but it wasn't until she decided to rejoin the workforce and was afraid that being a smoker was one strike against her too many, that she decided to quit smoking. And she did it, first time, with the help of the nicotine gum.

I know that in the early 70s, it was not easy to quit smoking. Hell, I realize that for most people, it's not easy to quit now, even with Zyban, the patch, the gum and all the rest of the quit smoking aids.

But it was truly one of the great frustrations of my childhood to know that I was expected to not run track, not join a swim team, have all of my stuffed animals given away in front of me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera - and still have my parents smoke in the house, the car - constantly.

It was a constant mixed message. We care so much about you we wrapped your bed in plastic and we restrict what you can do - just so you stay healthy. On the other hand, my food allergies were completely ignored and the most frequent household chores I had (besides doing dishes) was to dust and vacuum. Even though particularly dusting the house was prone to give me a terrible sneezing fit, clog my sinuses and irritate my eyes.

You have asthma, you can't run track. Go dust the house.
You have asthma, you don't need to be building a clubhouse. Go weed the front yard.
We want you to be healthy, as they blew smoke in my face.

Don't mistake me. I'm actually not trying to vilify them for this. I'm trying to understand it.

Mom once told me that when the doctor told her that she and my father needed to quit smoking, she knew that Dad never would. She made the decision at that time to do everything else possible. I told her, but the smoke wouldn't have been as bad if it had just been Dad. He was only home evenings and was outside most of the weekend during the warm months. Her unspoken answer was plain on her face: if he wouldn't give it up, it was unfair to ask her to give it up.

And to a certain extent, I get that. I can imagine how difficult the craving would be with no patch or gum, the moment Dad walked in the door with a lit cigarette. I have no doubt it would be maddening, and I am pretty certain that Mom simply didn't have the willpower at that time in her life to quit smoking under those conditions. I do get that.

But it doesn't really touch the double standard of how my allergies were handled.

Anything that impacted my parents in a serious way was ignored. Mom literally forgot that I had food allergies until I was digging through some paperwork one day and found the results of one of my old allergy tests. I was stunned at how many of the foods I really, really seriously hated were on that list. I tried to point this out to my mom, to point out how unfair it was that we bent over backwards to avoid using cow's milk because my sister was lactose intolerant - and yet I was told to eat food I was allergic to almost every day.

It was a few weeks after finding that paperwork, that I began to have a recurring dream, one that I would have until a few months after I moved out of my parents' house. In the dream, I was at my pediatrician's office (instead of my "grown-up" doctor) and he was listening to my lungs and tsk-ing. I just knew I was in trouble. I'd done something wrong, but I couldn't figure out what.

"She's got to stop breathing," the doctor told my mother. "It's going to kill her." Mom stood across the examining room and looked disapprovingly at me - as if I should have known better. As if she'd been telling me for years that breathing was bad for me and now I was making her waste precious time and money by having to go to the doctor - only to have him tell me to quit doing this.

In the dream, I am too shocked to say a word. How can breathing be killing me? Not breathing is what kills; not continuing to breathe! But they are both looking at me so seriously, so gravely.

The dream cuts to a return visit to the doctor. This time I'm attempting to hold my breath as the doctor examines me. To breathe on the sly, taking stolen tokes of oxygen. It's to no avail. He sighs, shakes his head and again ignores me to look at my mother. "She's been breathing again."

It's a pretty simple dream, really. Obviously by the time I was a teenager, I believed I was being held to impossible standards that other people were not held to. Some twenty years later, I can see that feeling was pretty accurate. I was expected to do everything exactly right, no matter how much that inconvenienced me, whereas my parents were very much allowed to take any shortcut they chose.

Of course, a portion of that is simply the difference between being an adult and being a teenager, but I can also see where my parents were simply not ready to take responsibility for their actions - to think through how what they did affected their children.

I see on a variety of blogs over at Cre8Buzz how different parents today are thinking through what they do and how it affects their kids. Of course, these parents are my age or younger. They've learned from their own mistakes and the mistakes their parents made. I've seen some amazing parents say, "Eh, ya know what? I'm spending too much time online. I'm going to take charge of my life and ration the time I allow myself to be online. I need to go play with my kids more." I've seen them discuss quitting bad habits, talking to their kids about serious issues, pulling their kids out of crappy schools and agonizing over whether to home school or take on an additional job to pay for private school.

I find that introspection and self-examination and honesty a breath of much-needed fresh air.

Ultimately, what many of these bloggers don't realize is that not only are they in conversation with other parents when they share a story about parenting or their kid. (Because by no means are all of these people "mommy bloggers" or "daddy bloggers" - many of them are "regular bloggers" who happen to include their family life in addition to everything else they write about.) They are also, in an odd way, helping those of us who did not have great parents or a great childhood to gain some perspective and attain some healing. Reading one parent say how they tackled a problem with their kid can lead to me thinking through how my parents handled a similar situation - and in spending time analyzing that it becomes easier to see what is a normal bump in the parenting road, and what was perhaps a freaking boulder from the sky.

I suppose, then, that this post is really a thank you to all the folks who brave the stigma of being branded a parent-blogger. You're not only helping out other parents with tips and techniques, you're not just making us laugh with you - you're also helping us to re-evaluate our own childhood and parents.

And that's a good thing.

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:46 PM | Comments (0) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 4, 2008

The Bottom Line

A legal entity known as a corporation, must, in its charter, protect the bottom line. Their legal charge is to make money for the shareholders.

After WWII, many companies and corporations began offering health insurance as an incentive to attract better workers - it sounded like a good idea at the time. Help the bottom line by attracting good workers and do a good thing for employees at the same time.

Today, in order to pad the bottom line - and to be quite frank, the pockets of the executives - there's a clause many companies and corporations are adding to their health insurance policies. It's a simple clause. If you are injured and you sue the party who injured you, the health insurance company wants the money that they paid out back. In some cases, this makes sense - why should you get "paid" by the insurance company and then paid again for medical expenses and pain and suffering.

However, as in the case of the Debbie Shank, sometimes this just means you get screwed again. Shank was hit by a semi and left with brain damage and the kinds of medical bills no one wants to think about. WalMart's insurance company paid her bills as they were supposed to do. Bully for them. The family sued the trucking company and received about $417,000. Enough to put money in trust for her long term care and make sure they had a house wheelchair accessible (instead of their 3 level home). The trucking company carried a maximum liability of a million bucks. Should be plenty, right? Yet somehow, after legal fees and everything else, the family only received $417,000. Well, okay. Accessible house, set up the trust for her continual care - of course, no more health insurance from Walmart since she wasn't working there anymore. They thought they'd be able to use the trust they set up to take care of her.

Three years after the fact, after they are starting to get some normal routine together, NOW Walmart & their health insurance provider wants their money back. The money they originally paid out for her immediate care - some $470,000. More than they'd received to begin with.

And then, as the court decides that Walmart can't have $470,000, but they can have all of the money left in the Shank's trust for her care. No job. No prospect of ever working again. And to top it off, their middle son was killed in Iraq - but with her short-term memory shot from the accident, Debbie Shank "learns" this fact anew every time she asks where he is.

Walmart "apologized" but essentially said, hey, the clause was there. We gotta protect the bottom line and we're required by law to enforce this clause or we set a bad precedent.

I wrote about this the day before Christmas last year. This week, after months of bloggers agitating on the web, and finally getting the main stream press to pick up the story in a serious way. Now, this week, Walmart finally says, "Oh, we guess you can keep the remaining money for her ongoing care."

"We wanted you to know that Wal-Mart will not seek any reimbursement for the money already spent on Ms. Shank's care, and we will work with you to ensure the remaining amounts in the trust can be used for her ongoing care," Curran said. "We are sorry for any additional stress this uncertainty has placed on you and your family."

Gee, how nice of you.

You see, while individuals at Walmart might have wanted to help, the corporation as an entity, simply wanted to protect its bottom line. And it's cheaper to let the Shanks keep their measly $275,000 than take the hit on their PR. Their reputation, it would seem, is worth a bit more than a quarter of a million dollars to them.

What sickens me is this: what IDIOT didn't realize this sooner? If we look just at the corporation's bottom line and ignore the human element as corporations are wont to do - why did they think they would get away without a smack to their reputation for pulling something that is sure to tug at people's heartstrings? Do they often do such things and get away with it? Does it happen often enough to work for them?

And, if we DO look at the human element, what is wrong with every person who touched the case and decided that it should go to court? Did any of them stand up and say, "if nothing else, our reputation is worth more than the money we might gain?"

I know, I know, I'm talking about Walmart's reputation, meh.

The bad thing is, how many people at Walmart who were involved in this case were too damn scared for their own jobs to question policy? How many of them did and were told to shut up?

Well, at least the Shanks have their trust fund to help care for her.

What about the cases we don't know about?

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:44 AM | Comments (1) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

March 14, 2008

Don't Feed the Trolls

My bedroom in high school and the first year of college, was, more often than not, pitch dark. It wasn't for the lack of trying to lighten it up - my mom bought the most sheer curtains she could find. And when I demanded "bed dressing" that matched my personality, Mom made matching curtains out of an extra set of the sheets. (White, with a stripe of rainbow down each long side ... yeah, I know. Early indicator?) Stark white walls, mostly white comforter, sheer curtains which let in the light from the street light at the corner of our front yard. But my favourite way to be was laying on my bedroom floor, all the lights out, just the glow of my "jambox"-stereo's equalizer dancing up and down. And that last year of high school when I scrounged together all of my money to buy my prized Magnavox Videowriter, I would sit at my desk, adding the amber glow of that cheesy word processor to the dim light of my room.

When my creative writing teacher first told us how he would go to an all-night Waffle House to immerse himself in the biomass (to borrow Stephenson's word), I was appalled. How could anyone write with all of the cacophony of activity and light around them? F.J. insisted that it was a valuable way to observe characters, to practice dialogue. Being far too much of an introvert, I could not really wrap my head around this enough to do it. That was about 1986 or 1987.

A few years earlier, my dad brought home a stunning new toy - a Commodore 64. He was amazed and gleeful like a little boy on Christmas morning discovering his new Red Ryder BB gun or Radio Flyer sled. He practically squealed as he opened up the package and pulled out that brick of a keyboard/computer. A whole 64k stored in this sucker! He explained to me, in one of our rare actual conversations, it used to take a machine the size of about half our house to do what this little sucker could do. I remembered one of those rooms - Dad took me to work with him once ... an icy air-conditioned room filled with huge metal cabinet-things. Punch cards. Later, rolls of paper tape.

Mom forbid the acquisition of a modem as efficiently as she'd forbidden cable television - but the boy across the street had a modem and I watched as one letter after another would pop onto the screen from some distant person. Heh, and watch those letters disappear as the person hit backspace to correct a typo.

But it wasn't until I was nearly done with my seven year stint at university before I discovered MUDdog and email and just how fascinating this online Waffle House could be. That was somewhere around 1992-4.

I've been hooked ever since.

This morning, once again, I've turned off all of the lights. I have the band Sick Puppies blaring on the stereo, though not as loudly as I'd like - my neighbors are still sleeping. The glow of my keyboard and laptop screen - and the blue glow of the stereo are all I want. I'm writing against the deadline of sunrise, remembering how easy it was for me to get lost in my introspection as a teenager and 20something in the dark. How much easier it was and is to reflect honestly on myself and my actions as well as the biomass I observe around me.

I recognize that I'm damaged
I sympathize that you are too
But I wanna breathe without feelin' so self-conscious
But it's hard when the world's starin' at you

To me, this is the most interesting thing about the internet. You have all of these people with their foibles and faults and strengths ... you have these intercies, these nodes, of common interest where this diverse mass of individuals pour their thoughts into shared pixel representations.

Why do we do this? Why do we strive to share our experiences and thoughts with everyone else? Why do we strive to get people to understand what we're thinking, feeling, wanting?

It seems to me that no matter how introverted or extroverted an individual is, we all are reaching for some connection beyond just our self - to know that we are not totally alone in our thought or experience or feeling. That someone groks at least a fraction of who and what we are.

What I constantly strive to understand, and I'm not sure I'm capable of really understanding it, is why some people are literally so lost in their own individuality that they cannot hear the experiences and feelings of others.

I can't even begin to recall how many times I have read the pixels of people who define their world by "I'm right" and you're either 100% with me or 100% against me. So when I see one of these people laying their pixels down in a frantic dance of light and dark dots, I'm sucked in by my own curiosity and confused fascination. When I watch as they blithely ignore the community around them and choose to take disagreement as attack; when they insist on reading a helping hand as condemnation.

And, then, of course, all of our shared human foibles come to the fore. The helping hand and the civil disagreement becomes frustration and anger - which does become attack and condemnation. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves the outer edges of the community in confusion and often shock. It's like seeing the "perfect couple" have a real fight finally. You see sides of these people that you never suspected lurked beneath all the letters they've strung together on the internet.

And when the smoke clears and all the participants who are able to do so actually sit back and take a look at what happened and how they contributed to the explosion, they are left with this conundrum:
How do I both "protect" my self, ideas and beliefs ... and balance my emotional reaction ... and walk away from the trolls who only want a fight and to get everyone riled up?

How do we differentiate motive on the net without body language and tone of voice to help us decipher our pixelated world?

In my experience, it becomes about building a context. If one person's response to disagreement is to always either ignore or attack, with no middle ground attempting to bridge differences and create understanding, then that person is probably simply trolling for trouble. It's a subjective thing. And, in online communities, it's a dangerous field to walk across. Newer folk are going to tend to side with the troll when the old hands attempt to slap down the troll out of frustration. The old hands know the history and have often decided to take a stand to defend their community and hunt the troll until they've left the community. New people, not knowing that the troll may be currently presenting the mask of the maligned victim in order to garner support and thus keep the battle going on longer, may openly side with the troll in an effort to defend their new community from bullies.

The term troll is highly subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. The term is often erroneously used to discredit an opposing position, or its proponent, by argument fallacy ad hominem.

Often, calling someone a troll makes assumptions about a writer's motives. Regardless of the circumstances, controversial posts may attract a particularly strong response from those unfamiliar with the robust dialogue found in some online, rather than physical, communities.

Experienced participants in online forums know that the most effective way to discourage a troll is usually to ignore him or her, because responding encourages a true troll to continue disruptive posts — hence the often-seen warning "Please do not feed the troll".

Frequently, someone who has been labelled a troll by a group may seek to redeem their reputation by discrediting their opponents, for example by claiming that other members of the group are closed-minded, conspirators, or trolls themselves.

No matter how even-handed ... how just ... we try to be, the fact of the matter is, we are not perfect. We snap. We jump to conclusions. We get tired and cranky. And what separates us from the trolls? We are able to step back and re-evaluate our behaviour, to try to learn from our mistakes, to learn when to stop reacting next time and walk away from what we feel is trollish behaviour.

To creatures who seem to intrinsically need to be understood, it's a hard thing to walk away from that chance at communication. But some battles are won only when they aren't fought at all ...

The light is beginning to make the curtains glow ... so now I leave you with this ...

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:26 AM | Comments (3) | Blog | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Sketches | Stumble

March 7, 2008

March Showers?

So, our shower has some issues. First, it's the only fixture in the bathroom which is an almond colour. And I don't think we can actually wrangle a new tub in through either the doorway OR the window. Bugger. So, we did the nice tub paint thing on it. Except the paint was a little "stiff" on the last coat ... and somehow we never got around to buying another can of it to finish up. Then, turns out, you're really not supposed to leave your wet shower curtain on that paint forever and ever in the corner. Cuz now all the paint in that corner has worn off.

Next, and more important on a day to day level ... is the showerhead. We were getting next to no water pressure for the last couple of weeks. And the hot water was just not wanting to get hot - but ONLY to the shower. No drippy pipes.

Today I decided I'd had enough. I carefully took the showerhead down. Easy fix, there's a pressure adjuster in there that we don't need since there's only adults in the house. And, it was gunked up a bit with some rust particles. Yank that sucker out and screw the showerhead back up.

Good news? We have hot water which is actually hot. We have water pressure. I fixed the showerhead.

Bad news? Then I broke the showerhead.

GAH! I had to take it off with a wrench, but I started putting it back on by hand. I pulled out the hand wrench to give it the infamous "last little twist" - trying to gauge the force correctly since I didn't want to --

Oops. I didn't want to break the damn plastic screw-on connection, but guess what? Literally one twist with the wrench and POP!

Dammit.

Now I have to go buy a new showerhead. Frankly, the other half is ecstatic as she didn't like that one anyway.

Just what I wanted to do today! WOOHOO!

(Maybe I'll go to Chipotles for dinner ... mmmm ... burritos and REAL guacamole.)

UPDATE: I didn't go to Chipotles ... wound up not on that side of town. And you know what? We're out of food now. I ate chicken fajitas tonight ... without any tortillas (or guacamole). Damn.

Anyhow, I installed the new showerhead shortly after getting home. Works like a charm. :)

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:04 PM | Comments (5) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

February 19, 2008

Nerf Sniper Rifle

My first Nerf basketball hoop, back around 1972 was not a whole lot more than a wire about the thickness of a coat hanger (a wire one, of course, not that plastic crap we have now), with some yo yo string to make a net. The foam was so lightweight you could hardly shoot with any kind of accuracy at all.

I loved it. A ball I could throw in the house!!

Soon thereafter, my dad brought home another Nerf product. This was a foam plane. Think paper airplane "grown up" a wee bit. Another toy I could throw in the house without getting into too much trouble, although my mom cringed every time, I think. I had friends who had the little Nerf "cars" as well.

Eventually there was the obligatory extra Nerf balls ... Nerf football ... and then Nerf got really cool. Nerf ping pong! You could set up the Nerf ping pong on ANY table and not damage it. Nerf pool! One of my all time favourite games ... and we had never had a pool table. Once again, you set it up on a regular table and played without damaging it. Nerf "air" hockey! Eventually there was even an outdoor set which included Nerf badminton, volleyball and "tennis." Nerf mini-golf.

Of course, there were then Nerf soccer balls, different kinds of Nerf basketballs, included correct weight ones to use outside.

So far as I was concerned, Nerf could do no wrong. Their toys were creative and fun.

Then came the Nerf bow and arrow set. Crossbow. These were also fun ... shooting darts at targets. And then Nerf "guns." Nerf tag. All good fun.

But over the last five years or so, it's gotten completely out of hand. Nerf has turned more and more to only weaponry, various styles of guns. This past year, in my opinion, given the number of school shootings the U.S. has experienced, Nerf has gone too far.

Their new N-Strike Longshot is, plain and simply, a sniper rifle for children.

I don't want to hear "we make what people buy." Children do not need play sniper rifles which actually fire 35 feet. Children do not need a play sniper rifle with a targeting scope to increase accuracy at 35 feet. Children do not need 2 quickload ammunition clips to increase their firepower.

Now look. If we're talking about adults playing with it ... I have somewhat less of a problem. I own two airsoft pistols and an airsoft "machine gun" (sadly, not an automatic, though). I enjoy playing target games. I have no issue with people who hunt and eat what they kill (or sell the meat to others).

But if we are serious about reducing gun violence in schools, then I'm not sure children should be practicing with toy weaponry which can hone rapid-fire skills.

A sniper rifle has one clear purpose. Long range assassination. I do not want my child on the ground, N-Strike Longshot set up on its fold-down bipod (for stability and better accuracy) and practicing sniping. Now, my kid grows up and goes into the armed forces and wants to be a sniper ... you know, I may not always agree with it, but there is a serious purpose for that. I'm fine with an adult making that decision. Police snipers ... there are damn good reasons for those. That's fine.

My 10 year old laying down in the backyard firing at the dog? No.

I know about Nerf Wars and Nerfers. As with airsoft wars and bb guns wars and paintball, there are fun war/shooting games you can play.

The difference is that airsoft guns, BB guns and paintball guns are all marketed in the sporting goods section ... there are restrictions and most parents (certainly not all ... and I've heard plenty of abuse of the system) but most parents treat the stuff as equipment that needs some rules. You really need safety gear to play paintball and while sure, your 15 year old can get away without it in the back lot, if the kid wants to go to a paintball tournament, the kid will have to wear the gear. It's a sport with protective gear. Got it. BB guns and airsoft are a little different, but most parents tend to treat them with some amount of respect.

Nerf guns are sold in toy stores and the toy aisles. Their name at one time meant Nerf basketball and safe indoor toys. Even some of the first dart weaponry was kind of a safe, indoor extension of squirt guns or cops-n-robbers.

Now they have gatling guns and automatic revolvers.

And a sniper rifle.

Look at the commercial. (Will pop up in new window)

Now, the Nerfers are modifiying their Nerf guns ... I've seen several people who have developed darts which are more accurate and fly further. There's a way to modify the guns to get better airflow to the darts so they will fly further and faster.

I do not have an issue with this. I love playing paintball, and Nerf Wars sounds like fun to me, too. It can be cathartic to play such games ... but they can also attract unstable people as well.

I do not have a problem with Hasbro/Nerf marketing directly to the Nerfers. Perhaps actually making Nerfer guns for the sport. But sell them in the sporting goods section. Sell them next to the paintball guns and the airsoft pistols. Because even though the modified guns are safer shooting darts than a paintball or airsoft weapon ... they are still weapons. Give parents that much of a reminder that the kid is not idly looking at some funny little foam version of a squirt gun. Shoot, develop a new logo for Nerfer Guns or Nerfer Wars. Something, anything to remind people that these are not the little foam balls we threw into a wire hoop. A new logo will help parents and kids differentiate between the inaccurate, low-powered toys that kind of throw darts around ... and the more accurate, more powerful guns which shoot darts.

A subtle difference, perhaps. But if we are going to squawk about our children shooting each other ... I feel it's a step we need to take. One that might remind us to look at ourselves and our lives and lifestyles ... and reflect on what we're really teaching our children - that we are paying attention to them and their interests ... and that we are teaching limits and boundaries ... and the morals we want them to espouse.

This, for me at least, is not about left-wing/right-wing. It's not about gun control. It's about taking responsibility for our actions on a personal level (really thinking about our children and their toys) ... and most especially, about corporate and marketing responsibility.

If you didn't view the commercial before, please take the 30 seconds to view it now. Do you want your child practicing to be a sniper?
Look at the commercial. (Will pop up in new window)

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:41 AM | Comments (7) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

February 8, 2008

Crass Commercialism

I live in Northern Indiana. Home to the University of Notre Dame, St. Mary's University. There's a Catholic convent here. Retirement home for priests. In some areas, there's literally a Catholic Church on each of the four corners of an intersection. (Apparently so there could be a Hungarian Catholic Church and a Polish Catholic Church, and a regular one and who can remember which group the fourth is.)

AM General, a good-sized factory, serves fish every Friday, year round in the cafeteria. There are other food choices as well, but during the Catholic season of Lent, they only serve fish in the cafeteria.

Lent is a big deal around here. You see signs like this one on nearly every fast food joint - and even many larger restaurants:

So when I drove to the grocery store last night (sans camera phone, dammit), I could NOT stop laughing at the Arby's sign. You see, Ash Wednesday was this week. Lent has begun. Today is the first meatless Friday for those observing the practice.

And my Arby's had this sign up:

Yeah, I had to go back there today with the good camera (so I suppose it's lucky I didn't have the cell with me last night) just so I could snap this shot. I'm still snickering.

With everyone else catering to the Lenten practice of meatless Fridays, I'm sure the local manager thought it would be good to cater to the many people in the area who do not observe this practice. And while the absurdity of the entire situation - fish advertisement as well as free roast beef - still makes me chuckle ... in light of one of the online community explosions this past week, it also makes me sad that so many can boil down other people's fervently held beliefs into an opportunity to sell more crap.

But I still can't stop giggling, either. It's just all too surreal and absurd. Almost as if the fast food joints are now announcing at the drive-through window - "Hey, you want religion with that?" I know for a fact that one chain around here already offers politics with their food - they required all of their employees to wear shirts hawking the chain owner for local government in last fall's elections.

My issue is that I want my politics and religion separate from my retail experience. It's not that I think someone should put their religion in a box and leave it there - most faiths ask exactly the opposite of you - that you live your faith. But selling your faith - to me - simply cheapens it. Proselytizing tends to turn off a far greater number of people than it "helps" because it often (sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally) disrespects the beliefs or opinions of the person having to listen to it.

For example, I bought something off eBay quite a while back and received a little "business card" with my order. Only it was a Bible tract printed on it and an "invitation" to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour. It pissed me off and I never ordered from that person again. Why? Because it implied that

1) I had not already done so
2) that I did not have my own faith
3) that their belief system was better than any I might already subscribe to

They may not have meant it that way. I don't know nor care. My brain ... oppositional as it often is ... immediately thought how offensive this would have been to me had I been Jewish.

To me, it's simply about respect. If I am conversing with someone and a topic or issue comes up which touches on faith beliefs or political beliefs, then we can discuss such things. Throwing a confetti of religious tracts around in the hopes of helping all the poor people who do not believe as you do ... it's arrogance. Discussion with mutual respect is one thing. Scattering your seed EVERYWHERE is something else entirely.

Ooops. I kind of strayed away from the original intent to post a funny sign. Meh, I think it's a better post for having opened up the field a bit.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:06 PM | Comments (9) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Vacations and Photos | Stumble

February 7, 2008

The Tower of Conceptual Babel

Back in 1993, I was finishing up my bachelor's degree in English in a state school. Not the fancy-pants University of Texas at Austin - known as UT. But the school we perceived of as the poor cousin, University of Texas at Arlington - known as UTA. It wasn't that the school wasn't as good, but we simply didn't get the press that UT did. We didn't have a football team. We were a commuter school. We weren't in a cool town like Austin, but out in the 'burbs between Dallas and Fort Worth. Our concept of ourselves was based on what others thought of UT ... we were obviously a poor outlying satellite.

Despite our concept of ourselves, we had some cool stuff going for us. One of the other tutors at our writing center told me about this nifty thing she'd discovered. It was called a MUDdog ... you got on one of the dumb terminals over in the computer science lab, logged in, entered a few commands and you were suddenly immersed in this text world. I was unimpressed. I had Zork on the Commodore-64 at home, thank you very much.

This was different, she insisted. Through the campus connection, this text world was populated with real people from around the globe. You could talk with them and interact with them in real time!

I tried it for a lark one Saturday when I didn't have anything else planned. Walked up to campus ... logged in ... and eight hours later I finally looked at my watch.

I've been hooked on various types of online communities ever since.

As someone who is always fascinated by human interactions, as someone who can't help but be an observer as well as a participator ... as a writer ... I am utterly enthralled by the microcosms of society that we set up online.

MUDS, chatrooms, IRC channels, "Web 2.0 sites," blogs, shoutboxes, forums (technically that's fora, but I try to go with the flow).

General public, special interests, moms, dads, writers, non-writers, artists, dog-lovers, cat-lovers, extroverts, introverts, introverts who become extroverts online.

Invariably it happens.

Invariably someone trots out their fervent belief in X. And X might be a product, a method of doing something, a religion, a favourite actor or politician or writer ... or whatever.

And just as invariably, someone else takes a polar opposite view.

Now, things can go a couple of ways at this point. It might be we have a nice, logical, rational discussion about the pros and cons of X. Of course, this is the least likely scenario, but it does happen.

Another option: things get heated. X is vilified. X is extolled. Vilified. Extolled. On and on and on. Neither side listens to the other and you literally get an extremist jihad, crusade, holy war of whatever flavour you wish to call it. Sides are drawn up. The inevitable rhetoric gets trotted out: "you're either for us or against us" ... "there is no middle ground" ... "well you know what I mean."

The option that goes one step beyond that is this: X is vilified and so is "that damn dipshit who said X was good." "You're delusional and anyone who thinks like you is delusional."

It seems that even when we speak the same language, we still live in a tower of babel. We still struggle to make our words understood ... to feel that we are being respected and heard and believed. And often, despite what we are sure is plain language and crystalline logic ... other people fail to get our point ... fail to agree. And obviously, the failure is almost inevitably theirs, as we have been perfectly clear and rational.

Over the last two weeks I have watched as two of the three online communities I participate in had serious melt-downs. Honestly, it's nothing I haven't seen before. Ideas being denigrated, people being denigrated, people feeling sure they were denigrated when they were not ... all because emotions were running high.

Often, it's like watching a bunch of junior high age kids (13-15 or so). Kids that age are still learning the finer social mores and how to converse without pissing people off. They speak plainly and say exactly what they mean ... but often their vocabulary does not include any grey area at all. The idea that words have connotations generally escapes them. The concept that words, despite our best efforts to deny this, words do hurt us. Or at least they frustrate us. (And please note that there are plenty of teens who do get this concept ... and there are plenty who don't learn this concept ever. This is merely a developmental stage and a generalization.)

Online, we add to this type of social group the fact that there is no good way to discern body language and vocal tone ... and often we misinterpret words that were not meant in the ways we see on the screen. And, sometimes, no matter how hard we try to craft those words to elicit in every person who reads them exactly and precisely what we mean ... all that work is simply lost in the babel of pixels and previous experience and the mind of the individual reader.

It is in watching these explosions happen online, where you can see each piece of the misunderstanding beginning to unfold and then to blossom and the fruit to explode, spreading its pollen of dissent over the entire participatory community ... it is watching this microcosm mushroom online that we truly see the babel of concept and idea which in the so-called "real world" leads to fighting and war. It's an amazing and, when put in this light, terrifying event to watch.

It starts so very simply.

And it is played out over and over and over again. As soon as one segment of a community finally "gets" how these things get started ... when a few people suddenly realize that they ways in which they phrase things matter AND that they become more capable of trying to take the other side's ideas as something to respect despite disagreeing (and perhaps disagreeing vehemently) ... as soon as this happens, another group comes along who has not yet learned these concepts ... and the battles begin anew.

It is the curse of our relatively short life spans and our frequent procreation and our different rates of learning and comprehending - as a race we seem compelled to play this scenario out over and over and over again.

Whether it's the mud-slinging of an American presidential "season" ... whether it's "your tree's leaves are falling in MY yard" ... or "your people are creating problems" ... or "your actions are eroding the atmosphere" ... "we don't want your sort here" ... "you don't believe as we do."

We bag and tag and categorize each other out of existence so that we don't have to listen to the conceptual babel and weigh all sides.

And even when we have learned the lessons and we try to stay calm and rational ... there is always human frailty, exhaustion ... and a point when someone else's rhetoric finally crosses a line beyond which we feel a moral imperative to call them on it because to not call them on that particular phrasing or concept is to allow an intolerable situation to thrive.

It doesn't ever end. And it feels like "we" never learn.

But whether the babel is language based or conceptually based, it is a constant of human existence. We are locked into our own skulls with wiring and operating systems only somewhat compatible with the others around us.

Our lives are never-ending attempts to connect and to forever try to understand and be understood in the face of failures and partial compatibilities.

Our strength lies in our stubborn certainty that we can finally find the right cord for connection and the right version of the operating system to achieve a true and deep melding.

I'm reminded of a book I never really liked, but I adored one single line. (Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero)

"People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter.

We are individuals afraid to merge ... and yet seeking to be understood so fully that we do merge ... which frightens us more and makes the need to be understood more fervent and powerful.

People are afraid to merge. To lose some aspect of their true selves? Fear that to understand all is to dislike? To find out some idea we might have about that person is false?

People are afraid to merge so we build these towers and walls to protect our thoughts and minds and feelings ... our individuality.

And then we wonder why others do not see things our way, not realizing that the bricks and stones and concrete of our towers and bunkers are simply not transparent. They don't just protect us and shield us, but they blind us to where others are.

Even our most fervently held beliefs are simply stones in the wall, often preventing us from understanding someone else. And when someone doesn't understand us when we think they should ... so often we begin casting our stones at them, trying to bury them in our beliefs - sometimes without even realizing we're doing it. Of course, this only makes us build our own walls thicker and higher ...

... and people are afraid to merge.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:51 AM | Comments (12) | Blog | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

January 7, 2008

Tagged!

Gotta love the "low risk" tagging in San Francisco. Bored in class? Draw a tag on a sticker and then label your way to tagging fame out on the street!

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:26 AM | Comments (3) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Vacations and Photos | Stumble

December 29, 2007

Hardest Thing I've Ever Not Done

I don't know what day it is anymore. Yes, the calendar tells me that it is currently 7:18 a.m. on a Saturday. But I don't know if this is still today or if it's yesterday.

You see, my partner has to be at work by 5 a.m. Needs to be up by 3:45 a.m. to make it to work on time. Neither of us are morning people. At. All. So you can probably extrapolate that needing to go to bed by 8 p.m. in order to get close to 8 hours of sleep a night is not a particularly easy task.

After seeing a neurologist for migraines a few weeks ago, the doctor re-iterated that getting regular sleep and enough of it, was vital to helping stop the migraine cycle. He said that if we were having a constant struggle to be able to go to bed at that hideously early answer, to NOT go to bed then. Instead, he said that we should stay up later and later and later each night over a vacation. Stay up later every evening. He said it would reset the internal clock better than trying to force ourselves to go to bed at 8 p.m. every night.

So, we stayed up to 2 a.m. ... and then we made a jump to 6 a.m. ... we were going to shoot for 10 a.m. the next day ... but then we realized we had hair appointments and would not get 8 hours if we stayed up until 10. So, we went to bed at 6 a.m. again.

Tonight we are trying to hold out until 10 or 11 a.m. before we go to sleep for the "night."

Not going to sleep at this point, is the hardest thing I've ever done. Which makes it the hardest thing I've ever not done.

I think.

My brain is fogged, my eyesight is blurred and I'm starting to shake. But if we can get our internal clocks to reset, it'll be worth it. I think.

But I dunno, because I can hardly think at the moment.

All I can think right now is that the neurologist said "If you have to take a nap, it can't be any longer than 20 minutes. You'll wake up refreshed after 20 minutes."

I'm thinking this dude never tried this technique himself and tried to take a 20 minute nap. Cuz I just took a 20 ... and I'm telling ya, I don't hardly know what I'm doing anymore.

Am I sleep-blogging?f

The question is beyond me at the moment.

But if you don't hear much from me ... or see too much activity ... then you know I'm prolly off hoarding another 20 minute nap.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:16 AM | Comments (12) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

December 24, 2007

Cannon Fodder

Their commercial states: Know what I love about WalMart ... they really know how to help me drop the hint.

Know what I hate about WalMart ... they really know how to hit below the belt.

So, this woman works full-time for WalMart. She buys into the health insurance plan offered by the company. There's a clause there, that's in most health insurance contracts currently ... and really, what choice do you have? Do without health insurance ... attempt to get individual insurance ... or simply accept the crazy clauses added by the company you work for. Not a lot of choice when you're working for the types of wages available to most retail workers.

At any rate, she's out and about one day and the unthinkable happens. She's hit by a semi-truck. Hospitalized ... eventually the dust settles ... she's a paraplegic and brain damaged. Will need a respirator to continue breathing. Special wheelchair. Probably at least some hospice care when she returns home. Definitely the house will need to be remodeled to accommodate her new condition.

The family sues the trucking company and wins enough to pay for the home renovations. Pay the hospital bills.

And then WalMart's health insurance carrier exercised the clause which allows them to sue the Shank family to recover the $470,000 dollars it paid out for her care following the accident. Now, the victim of this accident owes WalMart's health insurance carrier another $10000 ... after they've already given them all the rest of the money from the settlement.

Quoted from:
The Shanks and WalMart

Few such cases have attracted as much attention in legal circles as the Shanks'. Mrs. Shank took a job in 1999 stocking shelves at a Wal-Mart store in Cape Girardieu, Mo. She jumped at the shift from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. so that she could spend days at home with her three sons, Mr. Shank says. After a probation period, she qualified for benefits under the Wal-Mart health plan in February 2000.

One day about three months later, as she and a girlfriend were touring local yard sales, a semi-trailer truck plowed into the driver's side of her minivan. Her friend's injuries were minor, but Mrs. Shank suffered major brain trauma and spent the next several weeks in intensive care. She drifted in and out of a coma, and the hospital, for months.

"One doctor didn't give her any chance," says Mr. Shank, a maintenance worker at Southeast Missouri State University. Her medical bills climbed past $460,000. The health plan paid them promptly. "They were terrific in that respect," he says.

It also sent Mr. Shank several notices that he was to inform Wal-Mart's health plan before he settled any suit. In 2002, the Shanks did sue and won a settlement from G.E.M. Transportation Inc., owner of the truck. The firm had only $1 million in liability coverage, though. For his own losses, Mr. Shank received $200,000, of which $119,000 remained after legal expenses. He says he spent most of it toward a one-story house fitted with ramps and wider doors, which is more accessible than the family's previous three-level home.

Mrs. Shank's own settlement was $700,000. After legal expenses and attorney fees, the remaining $417,477 was placed in a court-created special trust designed specifically for Mrs. Shank's future care. The Shanks' lawyer, Maurice Graham, wrote the Wal-Mart health plan informing them. Mrs. Shank had received no funds directly, he said, and therefore had nothing to pay Wal-Mart back.

Nearly three years went by, Mr. Shank says, before they heard again from Wal-Mart. Mrs. Shank struggled a year rotating in and out of the hospital and rehabilitation programs. She could no longer use her right arm or three fingers on her left hand because of neurological damage. She couldn't feed or dress herself and conversations with her family were limited to all but simple questions. Eventually, her husband moved her to a nursing home for around-the-clock care. Medicare and Medicaid pay for the nursing home. Mr. Shank used some of the trust's proceeds to continue paying a private aide to care for her there.

"We wanted her to have a decent quality of life, and we still had the money," he says. He hoped he could also use it to pay the roughly $130,000 in bills for Mrs. Shank's rehabilitation and a return hospital visit after her coverage expired.

But in August 2005, Wal-Mart re-emerged with a lawsuit against the Shanks demanding repayment for $469,216 in medical costs out of their settlement. It charged that the Shanks had violated the terms of the health plan by not reimbursing it. The company also demanded payment of legal fees and interest for the cost of suing the Shanks for the money.

Mr. Graham, the Shanks' attorney, says he approached Wal-Mart's attorneys about negotiating a compromise, but was told the health plan wanted to proceed with the lawsuit. "We're not contending that Wal-Mart isn't entitled to a payment. We're saying they're entitled to one based on equity," he says. Since Mrs. Shank wasn't fully compensated for her damages in the first place, he argues, Wal-Mart should also expect only partial reimbursement.

Administrators of employer-financed health plans "have an obligation to participants to be impartial," the Wal-Mart spokeswoman says. "Virtually all health plans include subrogation provisions as a way to control health plan costs."

In August last year, U.S. district judge Lewis Blanton sided with Wal-Mart, ruling that when Mrs. Shank signed on to Wal-Mart's health plan she was obligated to abide by its terms.

The ruling came six days before the Shanks' 18-year-old son, Jeremy, was killed in September last year in Iraq shortly after he arrived in the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry Division.

"I wanted to give up at that point, tell Wal-Mart they won," Mr. Shank says, but his lawyer, Mr. Graham, said he'd continue with appeals.

Mrs. Shank went to Jeremy's funeral. But because of memory problems due to her injuries, she gets confused about what happened. On a recent morning, she cried several times and asked what had happened to her middle son. Mr. Shank says that he obtained a divorce from Mrs. Shank this year, partly because of advice from a health-care administrator that she might be more eligible for public aid as a single woman. Mrs. Shank, who has been declared incompetent by a court, hasn't been informed of the divorce by her family.

What kills me is that WalMart insurance carrier let three years go past before deciding to pursue "their" money. Three years in which the family attempted to put their lives back together. To make sure that Mrs. Shank would have a good quality of what remained of her life.

Now, the family is in pieces. Changed beyond the telling of it.

They thought they were lucky to get a settlement out of the trucking company. And, they were to a certain extent. But since that point, their luck turned back to the same luck that led to Mrs. Shank being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the semi came plowing into her mini-van.

The luck of so many Americans who are forced to live on small income and seen as simply "cannon fodder" in the war of the corporations to gain gold and power.

That sentence is not meant to be as over-dramatic as it may sound. Instead, it is meant to reference early times. When the powerful simply didn't think the underclasses mattered. That they were simple cannon fodder, meant to be sacrificed so that the powerful might live well and heartily.

Sadly, this seems the one lesson in history that we are condemned to repeat in some kind of Sisyphean cycle of hell.

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:08 AM | Comments (4) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

December 14, 2007

Edicts

My mom went to Catholic school. I think this is where she picked up her intense love-affair with edicts - rules which were written in stone and were absolutely iron-clad. And they worked for her throughout much of her life ... when I was first diagnosed with asthma and allergies at age 3, her love-affair with organization and rules (commonly known as OCD today) rose to the challenge. Monday and Friday were vacuuming days. The ENTIRE house was vacuumed those days. Since one of my allergies was dust, the doctor told Mom that the house had to be very clean - I had a box springs covered in plastic. Actually, I probably should have been in a bubble.

Anyhow, Mom had her set days to vacuum, to wash clothes, to wash the sheets. In time, it went from a routine to a full blown obsession, as did most of Mom's edicts.

Many of her edicts didn't make sense, however. Not long after we'd moved away from my beloved Austin, my new school had "Hat Day." I was in third grade now and after so many peer group moves in short succession, (kindergarten and first grade in one school, second grade in another, a new peer group when I went back to my old school for third grade ... and then moving to Arlington after just the first six weeks of third grade), I was struggling to make friends. I was eager to participate in Hat Day. This just seemed perfect for my Donald Duck baseball cap. It was a nice red ballcap with a circle appliqué of Donald's head. Not too kiddie, but cartoons are a great way to start conversations when you're eight.

Mom's edict: no Donald Duck hat for school that day. I was too old for such things and I would be teased.

I was in shock. I argued. I presented cogent arguments. When I realized that logic would not budge her, I whined, wailed and threw everything short of a full-blown fit.

And then I got stubborn. I shoved the cap down the back of my pants. (I had no homework and so I never had a bag to take stuff home ... and if I'd had one, she would have checked that.)

I went to school and my hat was a huge hit, just as I'd known it would be.

All hell broke loose as I attempted to smuggle the hat back into the house. She'd gone looking for it whilst I was at school. I denied, quite plausibly. She couldn't see where I'd hidden it. She screamed. She hollered. She told me she'd invaded my inner sanctum and conducted a thorough search. She KNEW I had worn it to school explicitly against her wishes, and by gum, I was to cough up that damn cap NOW!

I fished it out (and wasn't she just HORRIFIED to discover it was keeping my li'l ass warm when it wasn't on my head) and I handed it over.

It went into the kitchen trash.

I fished it right out.

YOU ARE NOT WEARING THAT AFTER WHERE IT'S BEEN!

She yanked it out of my hands and threw it in the trash again. This time I did throw a complete and total fit. I had disobeyed and been caught and I fully expected punishment. But this? This didn't seem like a punishment to fit the crime to my about-to-turn-nine-years-old mind. Grounding, no TV, no hats for a month. But throwing away my favourite Disney World souvenir because I wore the cap to school on Hat Day????

(And no, I'm still not over that hat. I see a red ball cap like that to this day and whine about my Donald Duck cap.)

There were other edicts passed down through the years. A favourite one is that you have to make a recipe EXACTLY like the recipe card or book says. If an ingredient says "(optional)" next to it, that comment you ignore. Everything on that card goes into that recipe, darnit! It got to the point where I hated it when my mom made "Grandma's Chocolate Cake" ... because she always put nuts in the frosting. I like nuts, but not in that frosting. And they made the roof of my mouth itch, which didn't make for a pleasant birthday cake, really.

Once, after a hard day at high school, I decided I wanted some chips and dip. We didn't have any dip. So I thought for a moment. Most dips were either cheese based or sour cream based. I got out the sour cream, dumped some in a bowl and headed to the spice rack. I don't recall now everything I dumped in there ... it was more of an open the jar, sniff and dump kind of thing. Hey, that smells good, put some of that in there.

I sat down to enjoy my snack and my little sister waltzes in. I share, not super willingly as I really hadn't made enough for two people, but I do let her have some. We're chowing down happily.

INT. HOUSE - KITCHEN - AFTERNOON

ENTER Mom

MOM: Where did you get that?
LI'L RED MONKEY: From the fridge.
MOM (horrified): That wasn't in there this morning. Where did you get it?
LI'L RED MONKEY: I made it.
MOM (panicked now): Where's the recipe? (looks around frantically)
LI'L RED MONKEY: There's not one, I just added stuff to it until I liked it.
MOM: You can't DO that!
LI'L RED MONKEY: Why?
MOM: You have to have a recipe! You'll get food poisoning and die!

I think I was about 15. You can imagine the snotty teenaged reactions after that. Unfortunately, my sister did get a stomach upset after eating it, which just further codified Mom's belief that You Must Always Have a Recipe Created By a Licensed Chef.

Never mind that my sister was lactose intolerant and just ate a bunch of sour cream ....

Don't confuse Mom with facts. It's not nice.

The interesting thing to me, though, is how all of Mom's edicts were supposedly designed to keep us as collectible children in mint condition ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:15 PM | Comments (4) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

December 10, 2007

WTF is WRONG with People?

So here's the deal:

I'm pissed off. Like seriously pissed off.

I have a friend who has not had the world's easiest life. Dealt a crap hand in terms of parents. Neighbors who knew and did nothing. Left home before finishing high school ... and yet still finished high school. Had to work to support herself. Did so. Did good, valuable and helpful work ... but day care teachers don't make a whole lot. If I'm remembering correctly, she was working two jobs when we met. A nursery school during the day and a drop-in day care in the evenings.

This is someone I admire a hell of a lot. She kept trying to pull ahead to do everything she needed to do to take care of herself and be independent. Took classes at the junior college as she could afford it.

But when I say dealt a crap hand in terms of parents ... I kind of understated that. A LOT. Which created some issues. Which to be perfectly honest, she tried her best to deal with. And she was doing the work that needed to be done. But, as they say, shit happens. Better described, various health problems happened.

And, despite there being real health issues, the doctors apparently decided she was just another hysterical female. The blew off things that they should have pursued. Hospital stays finally cost her her jobs. And the shit continued to happen. And she continued fighting and trying to do everything possible to stay independent and together.

Finally, she was getting dizzy and falling. Back issues. The docs kept putting things off. She wasn't a priority. She could wait.

She tripped in her living room and fell. Not down a flight of stairs or anything. Just fell.

Blew out three vertebrae. Paralyzed. Stuck in a nursing home.

Now to be perfectly honest, I'm pissed off enough about all of that. I wanna holler that little kid plea, "It's not fair!" And it's not fair, but it's life. That's the way this shit goes, I guess.

But what has me really hot now is that she's dependent on the nursing home. Despite all these years of trying to make sure she stayed independent. And they are NOT taking care of her; they're making it as difficult as possible for her to do much of anything.

And the last straw for me is this:
She was using a transfer board to get from her bed to her wheelchair. Fell. Broke her tibia.

I found out last night that the doctors didn't even bother to set the leg. It's still swollen. She may be in a wheelchair, but she's paralyzed - and still has feeling in her legs - and the leg still freaking hurts. They put a short boot on her and called it done. Last night a nurse told her the only way to set the leg was through surgery ... and with a pulmonary embolism, dead spots on the lungs ... surgery is not really an option.

But I just can't believe that this is the best care. I just can't believe that just putting a short boot on someone and calling it good enough is standard care in this situation.

I'm tired of people treating people like crap. Why can't they just do their damn jobs? If you're in a profession to HELP people, then freaking HELP THEM. What the hell is with this ignoring them or thinking that crappy care is "good enough" for those people? I mean really. Why do people have to be like that? It's not that hard to do what's right, especially when it's your job. Why do so many people have to take this "easy" out of just being lazy?

WTF is wrong with people anyway?

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:58 PM | Comments (6) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

December 8, 2007

Paddington Bear ARRESTED

Prime Minister Brown is set to take on illegal immigration in the U.K. and has served notice by going after one of the most loved and well-known illegal immigrants in the U.K. - Paddington Bear.

"It's an outrage!" claimed Paddington from his home West London after his initial release pending further investigation. "I was a mere cub and was forced onto the boat by my auntie. I knew nothing of immigration papers or applications."

However, a neighbor in Notting Hill recalls a gleeful young Paddington bragging about beating the system. "He was constantly laughing at me and telling me to call the Border and Immigration Agency but that it would do no good. He said he knew someone on the inside and that I was simply a cranky curry to be tossed in the bin and thought of no more."

"I may be from darkest Peru," the angry bear stated early in the day from his holding cell, "but I know this is just a ploy to boost his polls. I don't understand why the government must persecute me in this way."

The Home Office had this to say: "We are taking a robust approach to tracking down people who have no right to be here and removing them from the UK."

However, Mr. Bear's family and friends claim this is all a dark plot to paint Mr. Bear as a terrorist. "We just don't understand why the government would make these claims! Certainly his fur is a sand tan colour, but he is Peruvian, not Middle Eastern. This is racial profiling at its absolute lowest form - because it's not even based on facts, just the appearance of a different ethnicity."

Long-time friend and companion, Pooh Bear of 100 Acre Woods, declared he overheard two bobbies claiming Paddington Bear quite obviously fit the profile of a suicide bearer. "I mean, indeed!" exclaimed Mr. Pooh Bear. "Everyone is quite well aware that the phrase is suicide bomber, not bearer. This is simply gross bearism in its most heinous form."

Mr. Bear has resided at 32 Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, west London since his arrival in the U.K. some fifty years ago.

BBC article regarding the arrest here.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:59 AM | Comments (5) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Storytelling: She was, of course, supposed to be sleeping. | Stumble

November 10, 2007

Geeked Redux

I love Apple. I do. But they have really pulled a Micro$loth this time.

I finally got everything backed up, wiped the hard drive and did a clean install of Leopard. I am seriously contemplating going back to Tiger.

Firefox is acting squirrely: it won't download; it crashes the program. If I do a restore session after the crash, some of the tabs will not reload, giving a Server not found error, even though the page had been loaded earlier.

Thunderbird is still not working right. Messages with an attachment will not open; if I do try to open the message, it crashes the program. I've re-installed. Same issues. Made a new profile. No joy.

YIM and AIM are both problematic. AIM is completely doa. YIM works for a while and then will quit unexpectedly.

I've flitted around the Apple discussion boards and the Mozilla boards and found no joy so far. However, it does seem that the issue might be something that Apple apparently "added" at the last minute. Besides the usual "permissions" for various folders and files in an Apple machine, there are now also ACLs (access control lists). Apparently there are conflicts and they're not easy for the computer novice to untangle. In fact, I'm not really sure that I want to try to tackle this issue myself.

My guess at the moment is this: there's a file or directory that Thunderbird requires for attachments whose ACL is set to something it shouldn't be. Why do I think this? Because when the issue first began, I noticed that the Library directory had a permission which was set to Read Only. I reset the entire directory to Read/Write permissions. It worked for a while, then it locked back down. Fixed it again. Worked for a while. Now the permissions appear to be set correctly, but the issue is still there. Unfortunately, I have no idea what file or directory might have a conflicting ACL from what Thunderbird thinks it should be.

So, until someone creates a third part app to help us manage the ACLs (so we don't have to delve into the command line) or until Apple fixes the mess they made at the last minute, I guess I'm just going to limp along until I get so ticked off, I re-install Tiger. Hopefully there will be a fix before that.

Apple? Ya listening? Here's a big hint. No matter how much we might wish a new operating system might come out sooner ... please, please, please ... we'd much rather deal with it coming late than it shipping before it's truly tested and done. I mean, you guys know better. You're not Microsloth. Sheesh.

Oh, and my opinion of Leopard minus the issues? Dunno. I'm still fighting it too damn much to notice what the changes have been. I haven't fired up any of the new apps like Time Machine or Spaces.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:37 PM | Comments (2) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

November 9, 2007

Geek Alert

*sigh*

So, I thought I had the computer straightened out. Was waiting for Super Duper to be upgraded for Leopard, and was gonna run a bootable backup, delete the hard drive and then get everything all settled again.

Thunderbird started acting goofy again. Checked the permissions ... they'd reset. Grr. That's what I get for running a "repair permissions" utility. So, I reset the permissions, Thunderbird worked again. For about four hours.

I decide to get out my new USB Snowball mic from Blue and see how it works. I'm not gonna get into podcasting, but I have been thinking of performing one of my short stories and putting it out there. Hmm, it's a plug and play mic. Plug it in ... suddenly flurry of "this extension and that one aren't properly installed." The sound drivers are, apparently, fried.

Frustrated and ticked off, I said, screw it. I'll just back up everything I can on the new 500 gb backup drive. Plug it in.

Flurry of similar messages. No firewire capability either.

So, now I am truly in computer hell. I have the older laptop hooked up to the new one via firewire. Starting the old one in "firewire target mode" works fine since that really bypasses the screwed up OS.

But I only have the one firewire port on this old machine. So that means I'm hooking up to the nifty backup harddrive by USB 2.0. Shit. Slower than hell.

So, I now have 2 17" laptops on my drawing table, wires everywhere, the backup hard drive. Oh, and the extra power cord for the old laptop? That has to be plugged in exactly right or it won't register. It is actually taped down in one spot to help keep it from jiggling around too much.

It took about 6 hours to back up the Applications directory. It has taken over 15 hours so far to backup the Users directory and I still have about an hour to go on that folder. I still have the Library and the System Folder to go.

And, ultimately, this is what I get for loading some "haxies" on my machine. This is not a typical Mac kind of upgrade problem. However, I had APE loaded on my machine ... and then had promptly forgotten about it. APE "hacks" into the core systems of the computer ... and there was a new version out. I didn't know. Didn't pay attention. (Bad computer user, BAD!) Apparently, this old version of APE causes the upgrade to Leopard to misfire, which has caused the bulk of my problems.

*sigh*

So, once everything looks to be upgraded, I'm going to wipe the drive and then do a "clean install" of Leopard. Then slowly move all the pieces back over. At least by then I'll be able to move the second laptop back into the "server room" and get the printer hooked back up.

What a mess. And all for two reasons:
1) I did not keep all my software updated
2) I did not have a good, solid, bootable backup

Bad, bad computer user. The sad thing is, I know better. And I'm lucky. I kept my old laptop to use as a server, so I had something of a backup plan going. And I do know how to pull files off of an apparently "dead" computer without wiping down the hard drive and starting over again. I'm lucky. I'm sure there are plenty of Mac users out there who are pulling their hair out trying to figure out what to do. I know there are, I've been to the discussion boards at Apple.

And here's the deal about that. Most of us Apple users have become too complacent. Apple upgrades work. Apple hardware rarely fails. We're used to small company software and shareware because so many of the "big boys" haven't wanted to develop for the Mac. And we're used to these "hobbyists" being at least as professional as the second tier software makers for PeeCees. We're used to automatic updates.

The Mac market is getting larger now. More machines means more hardware failures ... that's a fact of our manufacturing and capitalist life. Apple delayed the Leopard release some this year, but apparently not quite long enough. (And hey, it's still a damn sight better than that Vista crap.) Apple has warned us for years to be careful hacking around in the system ... that things could change that would make the machine behave erratically. And, as the Mac market continues to grow, we're going to get more viruses as well ... and spyware ... we've been incredibly lucky so far.

We've got to stop being so darn complacent and remember that if we really want to continue relying on these machines ... we need to be more vigilant and protect our data actively.

*sigh*

Another 53 minutes is the latest estimate on that Users directory. At least I'm getting caught up on my reading.

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:45 AM | Comments (0) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

November 6, 2007

Politically Correct

Oh, how most of us just dread that phrase, including me. It's become an epithet of everything that's wrong with Western society ... with people too frightened, too cowed, too weak to call a spade a spade. (I was in college before I understood that the previous phrase was not really talking about shovels and then I was horrified ....)

The way most of us now use the phrase "politically correct" came about in the 1970s. At that time, it was used to begin a movement to use neutral language with regard to sex (the he/she issue). But it goes beyond that original s/he issue and has truly attempted to move into neutral language. And here is where complexity meets intentions and confuses the whole damn mess.

An attempt to use neutral language is an attempt to be polite, to consider the feelings of other people. It is not an attempt - or it shouldn't be - to dilute experience and identity. It is not an attempt to emasculate anyone. It is not an attempt to do away with "plain speech."

And yet, over its evolution, it has often become those things by misguided people eager to right every wrong and react to every word in a far too sympathetic way.

Wikipedia discusses the word "deaf," for example. Often described as "deaf and dumb" - an obvious value-negative phrase - doubtless some well-meaning group decided that "hearing-impaired" was a better term. But like many do-gooders, they forgot to ask those within that group what they thought of each label. As it turned out, the deaf preferred that word and were offended by "hearing impaired."

Does it really matter if I call someone who can't hear me "deaf" or "hearing-impaired"?
Does it really matter if I call the latino kid down the street a "wetback" or "hispanic" or "latino"?

If I walk into a job interview and say something about the "spics" down the street, am I likely to get the job?

There is a time and a place for all kinds of language. We humans have, through centuries of development, found ways of communicating with different groups of people. We speak differently with our grandmothers than with our best friends. We do not necessarily speak any less truthfully with Grandma than with Tim, but we do not use the same word choices.

Using value-neutral language is the same concept. When we are with people we do not know, we revert to a more value-neutral language than that which we might use with close friends.

Another example:
homosexual, gay, gay woman, lesbian, dyke, queer, lesbo, friend of Sappho, fag, faggot, fairy, queen

In the company of people I don't know, if someone who loved a person of the same sex became a topic of discussion, I would assume that most people would default to a more value-neutral word. They would probably use one of the first four phrases to talk about this individual. Our society has, by general consensus, declared those terms as the least negatively charged phrases to describe someone who loves a person of the same sex.

However, whilst I was in high school in the mid to late eighties, I heard news report after news report with the phrase "crazed lesbian." "Today, a crazed lesbian broke into Sharon Gless' home." The two words seemed to always be paired together. For me, "lesbian" became a very value-negative word. As I went to college, I met a fair number of people in the field of writing and rhetoric. They were all about the power of words and the taking back the power of words as symbols. Thus, I heard the word "dyke" used in a very positive manner. Because of this set of experiences, my personal "value-neutral" phrase for a woman who is homosexual is not homosexual, is not lesbian. Either the word gay or dyke seems the most value-neutral to me.

Do I correct the random person on the street for saying "lesbian"? No! Not at all! I know that for the largest segment of the population, that word is fairly value-neutral. (Or as neutral as the topic itself can be.) I might grit my teeth a little because the word annoys me, but that's it. The random person on the street using the term "lesbian" is usually attempting to be either friendly or non-judgmental.

Among friends, I will use the word dyke. Not with all of my friends, just those who are relatively like-minded.

Why? Why do we put ourselves through these gyrations of multiple words all meaning the same thing? Why are we afraid to call a spade a spade?

It's about respect.

As a word comes into our common vocabulary with a new definition (gay, for example), it also begins growing its own history. With that history comes emotional ties. I respect someone I do not know enough to want to choose a value-neutral word in regard to them. I don't wish to upset someone I don't even know just by a sloppy choice of word. Of course, given the varied experiences of every human, it's impossible that I will always choose the correct term. But I try to make the effort and I try to listen and adapt my vocabulary when the language, once again, shifts.

For me, choosing one term over another has nothing to do with being "politically" correct. It has to do with being polite, with being empathetic, with being cognizant that our words can hurt.

Consider the shift from Indian to Native American. The people already indigenous to North America were called Indians because the whites thought they'd landed in India ... the term Indian, therefore, was grossly wrong and reflected a heritage completely different. And, while it might not be as fun for kids to say they're playing Cowboys and Native Americans ... it would be, in my opinion, even better if the kids said they were playing Cowboys and Comanches instead.

You see, I think that even referring to all the indigenous people as Native Americans is a disservice. There are at least 335 recognized "tribes" in the U.S. alone, many of them sharing few similarities. Those 335 can be subdivided into bands which don't necessarily have a lot in common. I would rather talk about the Navajo or the Acoma Pueblo than talk so generally about such a diverse group.

And absolutely ALL of this mess goes back to our biological and psychological imperative to categorize. As humans we are creatures of patterns. We look for the patterns in life, events, people and we attempt to box them. We know, intellectually, that people fit into multiple boxes, and yet it's easier to categorize Catholics one way, Jehovah's Witnesses another. To categorize latinos one way and whites another.

But I am more than any of the boxes one might stick me in.
The English teacher in me cringes at the dangling preposition in that previous sentence. The writer in me knows that this more colloquial way of speak-writing finds a larger audience.

To my mind, attempting to use a value-neutral term is to respect and acknowledge that while we are discussing a generalization (people born in Latin America), we are not necessarily putting someone in a derogatory box. We are attempting to acknowledge that we are all more than just one box.

And people ask me why I hate About Me boxes ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:06 AM | Comments (2) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Stumble

October 13, 2007

Serenity: Oh God, Oh God, We're All Going to Die

Martin Lee Anderson was sent to a boot camp for juvenile offenders at the age of 14. The first day there, he threw a fit at the exercises, like most 14 year olds faced with what looks to them like pointless indoctrination. He wanted to stop, he called it bullshit. Typical 14 year old rebellion. And, of course, you can't have that in a boot camp. You have to have fast discipline. So, the guards jumped the kid and "forced him" to continue the exercises. They held him down, they put him in take-down, they applied pressure points ..