Not a Potted Plant

Sports:

[S1] Mark Mangino, for my money one of the best coaches in college football, has been reduced to being an assistant coach at Youngstown State. I know there was an air of controversy surrounding his tenure at Kansas, but I would have guessed that someone would have given him a chance by now and figured that the reason he hadn’t coached was that he didn’t want to. He should be UTEP’s head coach right now, or better.

[S2] It has to be a mixed bag for the Tulane Green Wave when you get a highly sought-after recruit, but he is openly admitting that he is only there because his mother made him.

[S3] The case for leaving Lance Armstrong alone.

Environment & Energy:

[EE1] The potential health hazard of reusable grocery bags.

[EE2] Liberals and environmentalists have Gasland and Promised Land to warn of the dangers of fracking. Conservatives now have FrackNation and TruthLand.

[EE3] Some tribes in North Dakota are angry at their leadership for leasing their land to oil explorers too cheaply. The US and China both have a lot riding on shale.

Progress:

[Pr1] Google Glass and the end of privacy.

[Pr2] Did the neanderthals die out because they couldn’t hunt rabbits? Also, the father of all men appears to be 340,000 years old.

America:

[A1] The Episcopal evolution on gay marriage.

[A2] I’m attracted to the idea of region-based visas, as some counties aren’t producing/keeping enough natives, but I think trying to prevent free movement within the US would be difficult.

[A3] Experience tells us that even when there is a pathway to citizenship, immigrants often don’t take it. On the other hand, Mexican millionaires are fleeing to San Antonio.

[A4] Americans are renouncing their citizenship due to tax laws to become… British?!

[A5] Teaching the Eskimos. Or trying to. And the problems with top-down education reform.

Business:

[B1] HP is laying off 15,000 people, but if you quit on them and try to take some people with you, they’ll take you to court.

[B2] It may be verboten at Yahoo, and that may have been the right call, but John Schoen says telecommuting is here to stay.

[B3] Is the USPS’s “welcome kit” for people who just moved a violation of privacy?

[B4] Nobody likes a tattle-tale. Unless you’re Sharron Watkins. But then, she wasn’t actually a whistleblower so much as she played one on TV.

[B5] On the good side, it’s good that American commutes aren’t taking longer. On the nad one, a lot of that is attributable to the economy.

Entertainment:

[En1] I’m still way too excited about Girl Meets World. They’ve cast Cory and Topanga’s son.

[En2] A couple weeks ago, a Spiderman suit. This week, an invisibility suit! It’s actually kind of odd that there’s no iconic invisible superhero (The Shadow coming the closest to ‘icon’ status). Maybe it’s hard to make an icon you can’t see.

Thievery:

[T1] A butt-dial spoils a drug deal. A cell phone thief is caught when several stolen phones ring at once.

[T2] The ruling in Ohio that speed cameras are a scam hasn’t been getting enough attention.

[T3] West Virginia purchased Cisco routers for libraries that, at least in one case, are worth more than the library itself. $22,000. After a stink was made by the auditor’s office and the press, Cisco offered a refund.

Politics:

[Po1] Politicians think we’re more conservative than we actually are. I’ve long thought that the assumption that we were a socially liberal by economically conservative society had it backwards, for the most part. The problem for Republicans is that is that they’re losing the cultural issues that used to be an underestimated strength.

[Po2] If we ever wonder why our politicians are so robotic and distant, it might have to do with the fact that we give them a hard time when they’re not.

[Po3] I knew that a guy got fired from the Republican Study Committee for advocating copyright reform, and I knew someone started a petition that may just let us unlock our smartphones, but I didn’t know they were the same guy. Slate follows him around CPAC.

[Po4] Speaking of CPAC, I loved this ABC article on the attempts to find love there.

I was seventeen when I came to the belief that gays should be allowed to be married. It was the late 90’s. This was not a mainstream view at the time. In my high school English class, we had to write a persuasive essay on our view on one of a number of topics, including this one, and there were three people who wrote against gay marriage and myself who wrote in favor of it. The teacher was a born-again Christian. I did not need a gay sibling or friend to sway me on the issue. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t like most of the openly gay people I knew at the time. Since I was seventeen, my views on abortion, the death penalty, foreign policy, taxation, spending, have all changed at least once. My support for gay marriage never has. Not even when I became a Republican in college.

I’d like to think that I have some credibility on this issue.

For Bob Portman, it did (seem to) require a gay son to come around on the issue of gay marriage. It would be better if such things were not required. It may be, as comment after comment on OTB has suggested, evidence of the moral inferiority or bigotedness of Republicans that this is so. But the nature of the Republican Party is not news. A staunchly conservative senator coming out against his party on this hot-button issue, however, is. And it is a positive development.

Not long ago, erstwhile supporter of gay marriage Laura Bush asked to be removed from TV ads in support of the issue. Like Portman, Dick Cheney has a gay offspring and came around on the issue. But Cheney has been tepid on the issue, even after retiring from public life. Laura Bush has never held public office. Portman is a sitting US senator with (until now?) a real potential future in the party. Rather than being tepid, Portman wrote an advocacy piece in the Columbus Dispatch.

Whether Portman is an opportunist, a bigot who only opened his mind due to personal circumstance, or whatever, really doesn’t matter. Honestly, doing what he (and Cheney) have done when finding out your child is gay is not the only course of action. But even leaving that aside, this is a positive development and I’ve been frustrated at much of the response focused on party rather than the issue at hand.

When it comes to this issue, there are three things I want: First, I want gay marriage to become a reality in all fifty states. Second, I want it to not be the hot-button issue it is right now. I won’t get what I want completely on either front, I don’t think, but on the latter point I do think we can get to the point where Democrats are united and Republicans take a live-and-let-live attitude to make room for forward-thinking politicians not from the South and other select regions. This is why we need Portman and even Dick Cheney. In fact, the more historically conservative the better. The bigger cover created for right-leaners as possible, the better. The more conservative leaders creating that cover (“Hey, fellow Republican, I’m with Dick Cheney on this issue!”) the better.

One of the biggest weapons in our arsenal on this issue is basic decency. While the Portman/Cheney route may not be the only course of action upon finding out about a gay son or daughter, it is the decent one. Over and over again, we need to be asking opponents of gay marriage how they would respond in the shoes of a parent with a gay child. Would they want them to be able to be married? Would they want them to be able to have families to supply them with grandchildren. A great many will remain obstinate, but over time I believe that will become the stated reason why many others won’t. The more we want to see opposition to gay marriage as an untenable and unseemly view, the more we need unlikely people to come around. Regardless of how it happens.

We’re going to win this, at least to some extent. Both in terms of law and the acceptance of that law. I’d rather it be sooner rather than later. It won’t be soon, but I don’t think we have to wait for the younger generation to be the bulk of the population before it can be relegated to, for lack of a better term, oldperson-think or fundie-think to oppose it.

Until we’ve won this, the doorways to changing your mind need to be left as wide open as possible.

Learning:

[L1] I’ve linked to articles about giant squids. Now: flying squids!

[L2] The Middle Ages were not exactly what we were told they were. Here are six myths that most believe.

Entertainment:

[E1] I’ve always found it a bit sad that Hootie and the Blowfish, who actually had a number of good songs, their #1 single will always be “Only Wanna Be With You.” Here is a list of five songs hated by the artists that made them famous or that they made famous.

[E2] I’ve long believed that universities that don’t want to play the football rat-race ought to focus their energy on rugby. I like the existence of college football even at very low levels (I’d rather my school have a team in Division III than no team at all) as a unifying pageant for alumni and students. I don’t think basketball works quite as well. This, though. This would work.

[E3] Everything you wanted to know about hentai!

[E4] The GOP retracted its paper on copyright reform and fired it’s author, but there really is a conservative case for copyright reform.

Psychology:

[P1] The case for forcing extroversion on introverts. I have mixed feelings.

[P2] How confusion can help us learn.

[P3] The good life.

Business:

[B1] Do flattened companies actually consolidate upper management control?

[B2] This is not news, but cable companies that provide internet are sort of at a conflict of interest. It’s cause for concern.

[B3] Work smarter, not harder. No, stop trying to work so smart. Either way, your employers are counting on your productivity.

[B4] Economics are making beef more bland.

America:

[A1] A while back, Dave Schuler explained why immigration and education aren’t going to save us.

[A2] How virtual fences may change the rural landscape.

[A3] Michael Williams and Alex Tabarrok look at right, wrong, and perception. The American public is still lined up behind the death penalty, but perceptions are changing.

[A4] It’s a redneck! It’s a cracker! It’s… Florida Man!

World:

[W1] Uruguay has transitioned from being a country to being a giant offshore bank account. Guam is parashooting poisoned mice to deal with its snake problem.

[W2] The strange story of of German soldiers growing breasts.

[w3] From the Economist, speed limits, local TV channels, prisons, and patriotism in Britain.

Outworldly:

[O1] Very important: The Dos and Don’ts of time travel.

[O2] Megan McArdle had a good point here… where are the bicycles in post-apocalypse?

Technology:

[T1] How odd. Apparently some people run out of GMail space.

[T2] The endurability of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is so expensive that I’ve had difficulty purchasing anything after CS2. Which, btw, they’ve finally killed activation on and released the CD-keys for. Which I appreciate, because they’d stopped letting me install it. If you don’t want to put down the money for Photoshop (or are too honest to use the CS2 without having purchased it), Paint.net and GIMP are capable image editors.

It is really, really annoying to be told to vacate your rental four months before you planned to leave town.

Salt on the wound is being handed a list of cleaning requirements the likes of which I have never seen, such as cleaning the outside of the upstairs windows. We live in the fringes of desert. Clean windows are a myth. All on a rental unit they want us to vacate because they plan to remodel it.

The big kicker are the cleaning requirements for the garage. For those of you keeping score, this is the garage they had us vacate the week after Lain was born because they plan on tearing it down.

I consulted a cleaner today. We may be looking at $2,000.

Dear clients:

Maybe you’ve hired the wrong lawyer. It’s a question of goals that makes me say this.

I want to get you to the best possible resolution of your case. You want that too, of course, but sometimes I think that goal is relatively low on your priority list. What you ACT like you want most is for everyone in the world to join you in directing a firey anger that burns with the heat of a thousand furious suns towards the other party. You don’t need me to say “Fish you” to the other side; you’re obviously capable of doing that all on your own.

When I give you advice to compromise your case and you accuse me of being afraid to fight, that’s actually quite insulting to me on a number of levels.

If a doctor gave you a diagnosis you disagreed with, you wouldn’t accuse her of cowardice. You might reasonably say, “I want a second opinion.” And like that doctor, I invite you to go get one. If the opinion is different than mine (hint: it isn’t likely to be) and you like the other lawyer better for whatever reason, go ahead and fire me and hire that other lawyer. It’s not going to bother me all that much.

I appreciate and understand that you have white hot rage because of the outrageous behavior and incredible lies of your enemy, but I do not share that white hot rage. In my opinion, I ought not to. You have hired me in no small measure to NOT be possessed by volcanic fury and instead to deploy my experience, education, intelligence and good professional judgment on your behalf. By all means feel free to vent your spleens. My great preference is that you vent them outside my presence. Either way, though, when your reservoirs of bile, piss, and vinegar are exhausted, then please follow my advice because I’m not giving it to you for my own benefit.

Yours truly,

/s/

The exhausted Burt Likko.

P.S. Please pay your bill. I didn’t take your case pro bono.

Programmer Mike Mika hacked in to the code for the classic video game Donkey Kong so that his three-year-old daughter could play as Pauline instead of Mario. He writes: “She really did seem to enjoy the game more. For whatever reason, she was more motivated to play as Pauline than as Mario.” Which makes a fair amount of sense. But — men and women alike seem to enjoy playing Tomb Raider, where the protagonist is an attractive woman. Is gender-specific identification peculiar to younger video game players? [Cross-posted on the main page; please comment there.]

So The Wife has a friend at work who decided to spend her tax return money on seeing a medium to check up on her dead grandmother. Mrs. Likko has roughly as much intellectual contempt for the idea of séances as I do, and for all the same reasons, but she feels constrained by a desire to be a supportive friend to this woman, who after all is still mourning a lost loved one. So Mrs. Likko eschews overtly criticizing her friend’s decision to light her money on fire.

How much money? The group session with the medium is $150 a head, with ten attendees and strict rules about attendance and electronic recordation (which was not flat prohibited, to my surprise, but restricted only to one’s own readings). What was described was quite obviously a cold reading, followed by an invitation to each attendee to schedule private sessions which presumably cost more. The friend fell for it hook, line, and sinker, although grandma apparently didn’t actually show up.

Worse, the medium “friended” each of the attendees on Facebook, and they all friended her back, so now the medium has access to all sorts of personal information about them and no doubt will dress up the results of simple- to semi-advanced Facebook stalking as “communion with the departed,” telling the medium things that the subject had never told anyone else (other than that time she told the entire Internet about it just last week).

On the one hand, if people choose to spend their money on this stuff, they’re adults and should be free to do so even if I or my wife are convinced it’s a complete waste of time, money, and emotion.

But on the other hand, the law prosecutes vendors who purport to sell goods and services of a particular quality when in fact they are really selling crap. There’s a reason fraud is illegal.

For the time being, Mrs. Likko is offering only the most gentle of pushes away from this behavior, which the friend is probably too emotionally overwrought to understand or even hear right now. I can’t figure out if that’s the optimal course of action or not. I do know that you can’t save people from themselves, but it’s very dissatisfying to watch them insist on pursuing a course of action like this. Even secondhand.

Going all the way back in his study to the original Dongan Charter of New York, granted by King James II Stuart in 1686, today the Honorable Milton A. Tingling of the New York State Supreme Court, in and for the County of New York, Part 44, has stricken down and enjoined enforcement of New York City’s ban on the sale of large-sized soft drinks as “arbitrary and capricious” and violative of the principle of separation of powers.

As of today, you can once again get a Bladder Buster Special at the movies. An object lesson in the practical impact of Constitutional law in the real world. [Cross-posted at front page; comment there, please.]