Not a Potted Plant

So I’m watching TV tonight after work. I make it through a few episodes of the Daily Show. Then I’ve got several Bond movies and a couple episodes of The Americans that I’ll need to wait for Mrs. Likko to watch with me. And for some reason the live channel is on ABC which is showing The Bachelor and Celebrity Wife Swap and I can just feel my intelligence eroding in the presence of these shows.

My solution: Spike TV has a marathon of World’s Worst Tenants. It’s quite a lot like work. No, seriously. The TV show has some dramatic moments that may have been played up for the cameras some. But I have at least one case a week that qualitatively compares to the situations depicted on the show. It’s not a freak show.

…Well, okay, it is a freak show, but so are the cases I handle in court. More than a dozen of them a week.

Much as I’m irritated at the New York Times’ paywall* a throwaway line in this recent article about the same-sex marriage cases pending before the Supreme Court caught my interest so I spent one of my ten free articles a month on it. It seems that a rather large group of Republicans who once held prominent political offices have signed on to an amicus brief advocating the finding of a Constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry.

These include former governors like John Huntsman, Christine Todd Whitman, William Weld, and Jane Swift, former Cabinet level or near-Cabinet level executive officers like David Stockman and Carlos Gutierrez, former RNC chair Ken Mehlman, former legislators, and so on. So you might think the throwaway line that caught my interest was “the presence of so many well-known former officials … suggests that once Republicans are out of public life they feel freer to speak out against the party’s official platform.” But no.

This is the line that raised my eyebrows: Continue Reading →

In law school, I was taught that to change someone’s behavior, you need to appeal to a very basic, very powerful emotion. And there is no more basic, no more powerful emotion, than fear. If you can scare someone enough, you can get them to willingly submit to all sorts of stuff.

Consider dentistry.

Continue Reading →

I have a question for y’all. Lain does not look overwhelmingly like Clancy or myself yet. She has my eyes, Clancy’s mouth, and we figure it’s all going to come down to the nose. Temperamentally, she appears to be taking a bit more after Clancy. At least so far, to the extent that you can tell such things from an infant.

I take after my mother, both in looks and in temperament. It’s mostly in the facial shape and the nose. My eyes, hair, and lips I got from my father, but the shape overwhelms everything else. Even a woman who had a stroke and was half-oblivious to the world immediately identified me as my mother’s son (long story). And temperamentally, Mom is a writer, has a real internal stubborn streak, an innately hot temper, loves to tell stories, was never big on school (though did well). It’s an odd sort of bond that actually prevents us from bonding because we find ourselves spinning in the same direction and feeding off one another in some not-great ways. (I love Mom, Mom loves me. That’s not the issue. We understand one another better, I think, than anyone else on the planet.)

Clancy takes after her father in a pretty big way. Again, in looks and temperament.

It’s been an interesting thing that I have noticed, actually. If a child takes after one parent in appearance, he or she is more likely to also take after that parent in temperament. It also seems like most people I know are more likely to take after the opposite-sex parent. But obviously this is often not the case. (My brother takes after my father in looks and temperament, one of Clancy’s sister takes more after her mother in looks while in appearance both sisters are more middling than she is.)

So my question, dear readers, is which parent you take after (if one more than the other, “both equally” is an acceptable answer). And have you generally noticed a correlation between which parent someone takes after visually and which one they take after temperamentally?

Preamble: If you know anything about towing and trailer hitches, I could use your counsel. I need a hitch ball for my Forester because the towing package inexplicably did not come with one. The problem is that I can’t find specs for the life of me. My specific concern is something called the “shank diameter.” If this is what I think it is, then it looks like it’s the 5/8″ one. I’m measuring the hole in the hitch. Is that right? Should I be able to get one by walking into an auto parts dealer with the hitch and saying “I need a hitch ball for this?” Or it is more specialized than that and I need to order it online? I should add that the nearest UHaul store is out in Redstone, which I’d rather not drive to. I will update this section when I go out tomorrow, but if you can give me any insights here before I do, I’d greatly appreciate it.

So, on with the show…

So, here’s the thing. Last weekend, I made a reservation on UHaul’s website for a moving van. I decided I needed a reservation when I drove by the local lot and saw that there was a real dearth of vans. In fact, there was only one. When it went through, I figured that either (a) I got dibs on either the van I saw or one that wasn’t in the lot, or (b) if there wasn’t one, they’d send one out. I was giving them a week’s notice, after all.

I had decided to stop by the UHaul place and confirm that everything was a-go and find out how I was supposed to pick the car up on a Saturday when they are closed on Saturdays. Unfortunately, the one day I stopped by there was nobody there. I forgot to stop by again. But I figured we’d work it out.

Yesterday morning I got a call from UHaul’s Arapaho dispatcher or whatever, and they called to inform me that there was no van available for my reservation. I would have to pick one up from Redstone. It would cost an additional $20 because it would be considered a one-way move. Or I could still do “in town” but I would be paying for mileage ($.89/mi). The second option would mean that we would be paying for over 100 miles for a move that is four blocks over. The first option would mean that somehow I would need to get over there without driving because I couldn’t leave the car over there because I wouldn’t be going back. Or I could get a ride back to pick up the car, but that was problematic, too.

Adding to this, if I was driving solo (second option) I couldn’t take the baby with me because you can’t put a babyseat in a UHaul. Which would mean that Clancy would need to watch the baby, which she doesn’t have time to do because of work obligations*. Further, she can’t drive me to Redstone (first option) because she is on call this weekend and that means she can’t go beyond a 20-mile radius. It also means that leaving her with the baby is problematic because if she gets called in, there is nobody to watch her.

So that just wasn’t going to work. Unfortunately, due to the fact it took them a full four days to inform us that the Callie location has no vans, we were hard-pressed to find someone to loan us a pick-up truck. Our neighbor had offered, but when I asked her I found out that their pickup is broken down. Clancy could ask around the office, but it was short notice and pickups are not as big with the doctors as they are with everyone else in town (and everyone else in town we know well enough to ask are doctors). The realtor had also vaguely made such an offer, but that was before we signed the lease and also before we turned down his brother-in-law’s offer to move us. So I wasn’t sure if that was an option, even forgiving the short notice.

Before calling him to find out, I decided that maybe we would just get a trailer from UHaul. We have the Forrester, and we got the trailer hitch package for a reason. The only problem is that the trailers we needed maxed out at 1,800lbs and the theoretical maximum for the Forester is a scant 1,500lbs. Now, we’re pretty sure that the 1,500lbs is more of a liability limit rather than an actual limit as to what the auto can actually pull. The maximum tow capacity is listed as much higher in other countries (3,200-4,400 lbs) and I don’t think it’s because they’re getting that much a tougher model. Rather, I think they have more to fear from lawsuits and so they are more conservative in their American estimates.

So I called UHaul and I lied. I said that the maximum tow capacity is 2,000. It turned out this wasn’t a lie. Even though it’s advertised at 1,500, the hitch itself says 2,400. Whatever, it’s four blocks. UHaul bought it and we made the reservation.

So yesterday I get the hitch out only to be reminded that I don’t have a hitch ball. I am quite glad I looked tonight so that I can go around town and look for one tomorrow. Now, theoretically I should be good to go. The hitch package on the Subaru is supposed to be complete (with break lights and so on – I’ve seen the cables). I am crossing my fingers and hoping-hoping-hoping that they don’t take one look at it and say “That won’t work.”

Because if they do, we’re hosed.

* – She has a job interview on the east coast next week. Rather than let her use her vacation time, they basically put the week’s worth of clinic in the first three days of the week. That means that it will be nigh-impossible for her to get all of her paperwork done before she leaves and that’s if she’s caught up from this week’s. She can’t catch up from this week’s without my giving her every possible moment to work on it (and even then, it’s iffy, because I’m going to need her to help me move some of the heavy stuff).

Here is a tip: If you are getting a call from an unknown phone number that is a Utah area code (385, 801, or 435), there is a really good chance it is a telemarketer or pollster. Utah and Idaho are both really, really popular with call companies. If you call customer support for any number of major commenters, there is a good chance the person on the other end of the line – if they don’t have an accent – are from one of those two states. People are willing to work very hard for very little money. They tend to come out of high school with a solid grasp of English. They are probably smart enough to be able to get a better job, but they just can’t find one. Also, the Mormon work ethic.

They do a lot of outbound calls, too. Polling firms love them due to their neutral accents. There is also an entrepreneurial spirit out there which means you have a lot of small companies that are contract-based. That means that they are contracted by a polling firm. Or they are contracted by a fly-by-night company that will go underground again and pop up under a different name and therefore don’t want to go to the trouble of hiring their own.

What they don’t do as much of, however, are outbound calls from companies trying to reach people with whom they have a business relationship. I don’t know why, but of all of the phone bank people I’ve known since moving to the mountain west, I have never met anyone for whom this is their job. The calls I get from my bank are from Arizona and Kentucky. If I call the satellite company, my call will often go to Utah. But if they call me, it’s probably coming from Florida. I really don’t know why. But if you are getting a call from a phone number you don’t recognize that appears to be from Utah (particularly Ogden, West Jordan, or Orem), don’t bother answering.

Unless, as you will hear below, it’s the difference between a sleeping baby and a crying one.

I have a dislike/hate relationship with telemarketers. I disliked them until somewhat recently, when we got a series of handsets so I am not running up the stairs to find out how much some credit card company can save me on interest rates. Before that, when I had to make the sprint, I hated them. I also hated them when they were inundating my cell phone with telemarketing calls.

That last one really drove me nuts. And nothing worked. Press 2 to be taken off the list, and I wasn’t taken off the list. Press 1 to talk to a representative and ask to be taken off the list, and I wasn’t taken off the list. I’m not proud to admit what I did that finally worked: I started harassing them. Rather, I started berating the person behind Press 1. I don’t like being anything but nice to working schlubs. But these guys people do work for a disreputable company (or series of companies) offering bogus deals on auto reinsurance.

Berating them worked. It was the only thing that did.

I am considering doing something like that again. We are on the do not call lists, and they are blatantly disregarded. Now, because we have a phone within reach, this didn’t bother me all that much (hence, dislike rather than hate). What changed? The baby. When some telemarketer calls and wakes her up from a precious nap, it makes me livid. It takes a lot to make me livid. But that does it.

Rather than berating them, I think I might record my baby’s loudest cry. Then, when they call, rather than talking to them. I just stick an audio device in front of the phone so that they can hear.

In the Memphis Flyer, Chris Harrington writes about attempts to change the name of various parks named for the Confederacy. In it, he states:

The parks issue is essentially a localized proxy war in a larger conflict over the past, present, and future of Southern identity. Memphis’ Confederate parks and monuments, like most remaining emblems of the Confederacy throughout the South, are essentially political. They were not and are not about remembering the Civil War but were and are symbols of resistance to what came after, namely the long, hard slog toward the equality that the Confederacy was organized to deny. Anyone clinging to long-corrupted memories of the Confederacy in 2013 is not doing so out of a respect for history or fealty to ancestors but out of their own present resistance to changing demographics and other impingements of modernity.

The most common and most eye-rolling complaint about the prospect of renaming these parks or removing these monuments is the contention that to do so is to erase or whitewash history. In fact, that’s exactly what the parks and monuments were designed to do.

This suggestion is an affront to the very notion of historical seriousness. As if these inherently political 20th-century monuments to racist defiance are somehow akin to the sacred battlefields of Shiloh or Gettysburg. The monuments are part and parcel with the immediate attempt by the Confederacy and its descendants to rewrite the meaning of the war. And few were so flagrant in this regard as Jefferson Davis, whose three years living in Memphis late in life in no way justify the blight of his visage along Front Street today.

I spend time here at the League trying to explain, and in some cases defend, the South. So I don’t write a whole lot about the above. Not because I disagree with it, but because I more-or-less assume that everybody here does. And the only relevant discussion is whether this sort of thing is detestable or whether it makes the entirety of the region it occurs in detestable. But Harrington is quite right. That I don’t write posts saying so should not indicate otherwise.

There is a thin line between recognition and exaltation. Though I sometimes wish we could, we cannot with any honesty write away that period from our history. It was important. It should not define us as it sometimes does with people on both sides of the line, but it’s there. One of the six flags over Texas is the Stars & Bars, and it should remain there. One of the four stars on the Arkansas Flag is for the Confederacy, and I don’t advocate changing that. Using things like Rebels as mascots is tricky and needs to be done with care. I’d probably advocate doing away with that, too, actually, but it’s not essential so long as we strip it of its cultural reference. Statues of Jefferson Davis should not necessarily be deconstructed, but should not be displayed in places of prominence (or anywhere outside of a museum, really). Schools, counties, and parks should not be named after people whose primary claim to fame was fighting for the continued enslavement or subjugation of others.

Such things are not always easy, and sometimes not for the reason people might think. People grow attached to certain things, for reasons other than what the names actually represent. Such an attitude carries, at best, a tin-ear towards real concerns. But it’s there. It’s also no excuse at all for continuing to try to lend respectability to disreputable historical figures. Which is, undeniably, exactly what groups like Sons of the Confederacy are trying to do. They’re doing more than trying to preserve history (a fine goal), but trying to add a veneer of respectability. That we were in the Civil War is an undeniable fact. So, too, is the fact that we were on the wrong side of it. It shouldn’t define us, but it should be recognized. And recognized as the dark smirch it is.

(On a last note, I should point out that this is happening because Nashville is making it happen. Good for Nashville.)

As a lot of you know, American Airlines is merging with US Airways. Actually, it’s the latter that is more or less incorporating the former. More on that in a minute. Matthew Yglesias says that this means the end of cheap airfare:

But now the party’s over. A key stated goal of this merger—as in the Delta/Northwest and United/Continental deals—is to reduce “excess capacity” in domestic passenger aviation. That’s a polite way of saying less competition and less service. This will take a few forms. There are currently a half dozen US Airways flights from its hub in Philadelphia to Dallas. Dallas is a key American hub, so American also flies six times a day from Philadelphia to Dallas. The combined entity probably won’t need 12 flights a day to serve the route and definitely will have more power to raise prices than either airline would separately. Smaller cities will also see the pinch. Right now, US Airways and American both serve Tallahassee, the former seeking to route passengers through its Charlotte hubs and the latter through its Dallas and Miami hubs. A merged airline might cut that Charlotte service, figuring that network access through Dallas and Miami is ample to compete with Delta’s service through Atlanta. By the same token, when airlines merge the smallest hubs in the new larger airline tend to lose out and shrink.

It’s been a good ride, but I am inclined to agree that it wasn’t going to last. My hope is that they basically find a way to insert price discrimination where possible. There’s a solid argument that they will. They can charge for carry-ons, for instance, and keep working towards variable seating arrangements so that those who are inclined and have money can spend it on more legroom while those who are hard-up don’t have to.

I am, I should say, less enthusiastic about plans to upcharge for window and aisle seats, primarily because for families it means spending extra money to sit together and that doesn’t sit right. I also have serious issues with cancellation fees because that’s not a variable expense so much as punishing someone for having a change of plans.

This could theoretically be mitigated by reducing the costs borne by redundancy. Which is to say, empty seats ultimately cost passengers money. But, really, it sure seems like most flights are full these days. Or something close to it. I think they’ve figured out the empty seat problem (another reason I am not big on cancellation fees – they don’t seem to have trouble putting a new passenger in that seat.

Anyhow, I don’t really fly American and I avoid US Airways when I can. US Airways, see, isn’t US Airways. It’s America West. And now American Airlines is America West, too. The thing about America West is that I have flown with them once. Due to various mishaps, it was a trip that took about 36 hours and six airports. I can’t blame them for the weather problem that got the ball rolling, but after that it was mechanical failures, missed connections due to delays, no available flights to rebook me on, and the continuous adding of more legs to get me where I wanted to go

And those people will be operating the largest airline in the country.