this is why...

I don't read Scientific American, I read American Scientist (which is written BY scientists and by and large, FOR scientists) instead:

Oh noes, bugs in our FOODZ, says American Scientist.

It's cochineal. One of the safest red dyes out there. It's been used for YEARS. And by the time they're done extracting it, there are no bug parts left - it's really little different from squeezing beet juice out of beets and using it to color things. There's really no beet in there.

I'd a million times rather eat dye that comes from a bug, that's been used safely for a very long time, than consume some dye that was concocted recently in a lab, which has been tested but not long-term tested. (I have similar concerns about artificial sweeteners)

(And yes, I realize that is somewhat unreasonable given my stance about other things. But I'm not saying aspartame should be BANNED, I'm just saying, label food with it and give me the CHOICE to buy something sugar-sweetened vs. something aspartame-sweetened)

The other thing that really, really gets to me? Scientific American referred to these things as "cochineal beetles." THEY ARE NOT BEETLES. They are scale insects. Different species, different order, different animal. (While this isn't as egregious as trying to reclassify fish as "sea kittens," it's still a taxonomic error and it BUGS me that a publication with "Scientific" in its name did that)

I am also irritated that Scientific American apparently used CSPI - also known as the Chicken Littles of the food world (except, they might say chicken is DANGEROUS!) as their source. Please. They are an advocacy group. They are not researchers. They are big into knee-jerk things, they are big into scare tactics. (Oddly enough, not that different from PETA). If we let them run the show, we'd be subsisting on organic kale and reverse-osmosis purified water. And you better not enjoy that kale too much!

I'm not even going to GET into the issue about "allowable bug parts" under the USDA, but suffice it to say, that box of Corn Flakes is likely NOT 100% pure corn flakes.

Scientific American, you lose.

I really hope this isn't a hallmark of a larger trend - some advocacy group comes out, screaming about something that really we don't need to be upset about (There have been three adverse reactions to cochineal dye in the past ten years - fewer than there have been to gluten, eggs, and many other "safe" food items.). Yet the CSPI apparently wants this stuff banned.

Look, if you're entomophobic - read the label. Don't buy anything colored with cochineal. But trust me - I've been eating stuff with cochineal dye in it since I was a little kid and it is totally safe (unless you are one of those 3 out of probably 100 million people who is allergic). I suspect cochineal is safer than Red 40 or Red 2.

I really hope this isn't the tone for the coming years. I hope the Administration and the Cabinet are smart enough and not easily influenced enough that they don't start doing idiotic, law-of-unexpected-consequences-generating things by banning stuff just because a bunch of hotheads get to screaming that it should be banned.

I can forsee a future where lots of things are banned because of their "potential danger" - not just cochineal but also guns, booze, cigarettes, animal fats, sugar, artificial sweeteners, vaccines, toys....the list goes on. Almost anything that is useful and or enjoyable to someone, there is probably an "advocate" out there with more emotion than brains who is spinning themselves up to start talking about how it should be banned.

(And as Bug Girl cites on her blog post - it's a source of a living wage to poor Central American farmers. So won't you think of the peasants?)

I realize I've ranted about a lot of things this week but there seems to be an unusually great amount of stupidity in the news these days.

COMMON SENSE, people, it's called COMMON SENSE. There seems to be a severe deficit of it these days.

The law of unintended consequences in action...

This is something I really hadn't commented about, though it touches on several matters dear to my heart, because I felt I couldn't find reasonable information.

Well, I think Forbes Magazine is pretty reasonable:

Scrap the CPSIA Act.

This is the act that was apparently fairly quickly passed last year, after the outcry about lead and melamine contamination in certain children's toys, and tiny magnets that posed a choking hazard.

Sounds good, right? Make all the toy manufacturers test their stuff and prove it's safe, so that Chinese Scandal can never happen again.

But. Many of the small American toymakers - in fact, the very companies that profited from the scandal because people realized that, for example, a wooden toy train that was only finished with a wax finish was probably a lot safer than a plastic doo-dad that was painted with who-knows-what - are now going to have to do extensive testing unless they can prove they only use a few "exempted" materials (and even then, in some cases, they might have to test).

I have read on a lot of the craft blogs, how people who used to make children's toys - things like stuffed animals that had NONE of the lead paint, NONE of the tiny magnets, not even buttons sewn on (because buttons can pose a choking risk) are probably going to close down shop. Because testing is too expensive.

Testing can run $1000 per item. And while that might be OK for a multinational corporation, for a small businessperson making toy trains or baby burp pads or knitting baby hats, that's not going to be feasible. (And note that it is per item. Apparently even if you knit two different styles of hats of the same basic yarn, they will both need testing under the law).

That's bad. Especially because a lot of people doing this are people who were downsized from other jobs, or parents who wanted to stay at home with their kids, or retired folks looking for a little more income.

And for the consumer, it's bad: it will, if the law is carried out to the most stringent extreme, sharply limit consumer choice. Consumers will largely be forced to buy from the larger sellers and larger manufacturers.

Even worse? Many, many thrift stores - which are technically not required to test items, but are liable if a "bad" item turns up - are just going to landfill tons of "gently used" children's clothing and toys, rather than face the risk.

So many charitable organizations - like St. Vincent de Paul - are going to lose part of their income. And parents looking for an affordable source of clothes lose too - especially parents who are cash-strapped and maybe CAN'T afford the full price of new clothes or toys.

Another unintended consequence? A lot of libraries are worried. Apparently books fall into this ruling as well. Some librarians whose blogs I read have speculated aloud whether they will have to trash the existing Children's section and buy all new - which is a tragedy, not just in terms of the cost to the library, but in the loss of out-of-print or historical books.

And yet another (and this is the dear to my heart part) - I know a lot of people who make quilts for Project Linus, a charity that provides handmade blankets for children facing serious hospital time or other problems (like being taken to a foster care situation). I have even made one, recently, for Project Linus. They now have a thing up on their webpage noting the act and saying they are trying to "work around it." But I'd HATE to think of all those people's time and care (and money) winding up in a landfill somewhere, because a stupid law said that you can't give a washable cotton blanket to a child, because some toy manufacturer in China cut the paint they used on a toy with lead.

In fact, I was planning on doing more quilt tops for them, but I've put a moratorium on that until I see how it works out, and if they will actually still be allowed to distribute them.

There may even - and I can't find any information on this, but it wouldn't surprise me - be a ban on the selling of "vintage" toys and dolls - even to adult collectors. Because, I suppose, it could be argued they pose an "attractive nuisance" and how are you to know that old teddy bear you're selling to that nice lady is actually going to sit on a shelf in her house and not be given to her 10 year old?

So, in the name of "protecting the children," we may destroy the livelihood of certain small businesses, cause a problem for libraries, make it harder for struggling families to provide clothing for children. All because some factories in China violated laws that were PROBABLY already in place governing what could be used in children's products.

A lot of the crafty blogs are up in arms about this. As are a lot of the frugal-living blogs. I suspect some of the mom-blogs are too, but I don't read any of them.

It just seems to me like so many things: Bad Thing Happens. Someone decides, "Something must be done!" Something is done, but then it turns out to hurt people - in some cases, people who had nothing to do with the original Bad Thing that happened. The people who WERE acting responsibly and not doing the bad thing - the small toy-makers especially, but also arguably libraries and thrift stores (in that they were providing an option for people not able to spend huge amounts of money, and they were effectively recycling goods that still had use in them) get spanked by the law.

Oh, and the kicker? It seems that a lot of the testing facilities that will be profiting from this new law? Are in China. Lovely. Just lovely...

A couple of political thoughts but more than just that...

1. Now that Bush is almost out of office, could people maybe stop with the hate, the "dumb Bush" jokes, the "evil Bush" jokes? (I know, I know - they still sell gag corkscrews of Clinton and that bugs me, too).

2. I can't wait for Obama to actually do something so people have something to comment about other than the sort of crazed celebrity-adulation I've seen. Really, they are treating him and his family much the way Princess Diana was treated - or the way Bono is treated - or the way, I don't know, that guy in the new vampire movie gets treated.

I can't help but think that kind of adulation isn't good for a person. I may bitch and whine about how no one ever seems to notice that anything I do is any good, but I think I'd be very uncomfortable with lots of unearned praise.

Actually, I take that back: I KNOW I'd be very uncomfortable with it. And to veer away (thank goodness) from the political, back to this article that I sadly think I'm going to have to suggest rejection on:

I went through grad school with a very picky adviser. I can't even count how many times I re-wrote my thesis, let alone my dissertation. He was always quick to point out what was not good about something. (But he was also that way about his own work; he was very open about it when something he did was not up to his standards). Praise was very rare. And at times, that got frustrating. I'd start to wonder if what I was doing was any good at all, if I'd ever write something good enough to be considered "finished."

But then, once in a while, I'd do something well, and he'd kind of nod and me and go, "good job" or "that was a well-planned presentation."

And because those words were so rare, you knew they meant a lot - that a "good job" from him was equal to the most flowing and effusive praise of other people. Maybe even worth MORE.

I knew another faculty member who was effusive in his praise. And while it was fun to take a seminar from him - because EVERYTHING you did was great and impressive and innovative, after a while you started to wonder: what I'm doing really can't be that glorious. And wait, last week Dingleberry gave a really cruddy seminar and the prof talked about how great it was. Something's not right here.

And then, I'd naturally begin to wonder: was my seminar actually as bad as Dingleberry's, but I didn't realize it at the time because of the gushing praise?

And then I'd go back to my adviser, and write something, and rewrite it five times, and finally he'd say, "OK, this is good enough." And you actually felt like it WAS. Like the guy wasn't blowing smoke; what you had done was actually worthy.

And I saw other people going through grad school who got praised all the time - and they didn't really develop (or they let atrophy) the sense of critical reading, of being able to look at something and go, "This needs work" (ironically, one of my adviser's favorite phrases).

And I wonder if that's not what happened to the people writing this paper. I've seen it in some areas of the conservation community. For those of you not in the know - there are kind of three (maybe more) levels in the conservation community. Or maybe not levels, maybe just schools of thought. One is the academic. These are people with backgrounds like mine - they came through a tough, traditional graduate program. They had to work hard. They tend to expect good experimental design and quantification. And they really expect experiments be done with things like controls, or with baseline studies done before anything is changed - they are people who don't want to draw conclusions without good evidence. And then there's more of an NGO type community. They've been influenced by academic conservation, they try to use good experimental design and such. Maybe their studies aren't quite as rigorous; maybe they didn't think to take baseline data before removing an invasive species or burning a prairie. But they do want to learn from the academics; they recognize that more rigor is a good thing.

And then there's the "enthusiast" community. For them, every conservation-oriented activity is GREAT. They are SAVING THE EARTH. (and yes, they tend to SPEAK IN CAPITALS.) There's a certain amount of "woo" (to use the Junkfood Science term) at work in some people's thinking - there's a certain degree of mysticism.

Now, don't get me wrong - some kinds of mysticism are good. I like that there are mysteries of the faith, that there are things we don't fully understand. But I don't really believe that, for example, trees "weep" when they get other trees grown up around them. Oh, they may suffer the effects of competition for water or light, but they are TREES. They do not, as far as we have been able to determine, FEEL.

So it bugs me when someone speaks - in a serious and non-jovial manner - about trees "weeping" because they're surrounded by other trees, or how the land "cries out" to them, that kind of stuff.

Partly because it's not scientific - but partly because that kind of attitude is not too far off from setting yourself up as a "special" person, as some kind of "empath" - and perhaps even the "chosen one," the one who is to be the savior of that particular forest or whatever.

And so then the rest of the people working on that project, as great as their skills are, become less, because see, they don't have that "special feeling."

And I hate that.

And it leads to sloppy thinking. People who buy into this concept - who either tip over all the way into the crazy-earth-person enthusiasm, or even the people who aren't that far gone, but who are going to clap and cheer ANYTHING that is done - they tend NOT to do good experimentation. Controls? We don't need no stinking controls! We know that what we are doing is GOOD and RIGHT and we are SAVING THE EARTH!

I've actually had enthusiast-types tell me, "You scientists. Nothing would EVER get done if you ran the show. Step back and let the people who CARE do their work."

And then you get things happening like mongoose being introduced to Hawaii to take care of the rats - and then 50 or 60 years later, the scientists wind up chronicling how that killed off some of the native birds, thanks to the Law of Unexpected Consequences. But of course, the enthusiasts are long since moved onto another project, and anyway, it's not their fault that things got screwed up.

And that's the sense I get from this paper - that it was written by someone who had more caring than scientific background, someone who was so pressed to put their thoughts and feelings down on the paper that ordinary rules of organization and syntax no longer applied.

And sadly - what we are editing is a scientific proceedings, not a fan magazine. So I'm going to make what suggestions I can for improvement but I suspect they will be met with howling anger - with the "how dare this person" tamper with their lovely plan. But whatever. That's life. Unfortunately reality isn't as pretty as hope.

Which is why I'll be glad when the inauguration is over and we get back (I expect) to the work of reality. There's only so much gushing praise of someone I can stand to hear.

ArrrGGGGgggggRRRRhhhhh....

I had left a certain particular channel on (which shall remain nameless but which I will say is one that has gone dangerously off-topic in the past couple years, replacing their normal useful reporting with speculative stories that Could Happen Tomorrow and having extremely nannying programming on how we must change our lives to save the planet).

I was working on something I couldn't immediately get up from to find the remote, when the nannying program came on.

And dammit, my head nearly exploded. It featured a Famous Author, who has apparently made it a Project to eat locally - in fact, to only eat food (with three exceptions; I'll refer back to that later) that she and her family grew.

And of course, there's so much of the self-congratulatory patting-on-the-back I wanted to vomit. How healthy we all are! So much better than ALL THE OTHER AMERICANS who eat their McSlop or the stuff in cartoony boxes from the grocery store! How enlightened we are! We now know where eggs come from! We are just full of goodness and health!

Well, you're full of SOMETHING.

Look. I have no problem with people choosing to do this. But all too often, they get so caught up in it (There is no zealot like a convert, the old saying goes) that they begin to believe that:

a. They can save the world, if they just convince enough people to do as they do. And then everyone will love them!

b. Everyone SHOULD do as they do, even if it means forcing them through taxes or other coercive measures.

Look, Author Lady. I am happy that you were able to raise your own chickens and turkeys and grow your own produce. But you are also Rich Author Lady who can devote many hours a day to tending gardens and poults and do not need to work 5-6 days of the week for 7 to 8 hours most of those days.

Those of us mere mortals, who must do that - there's no way in hell we can raise our own food. I know; I've tried growing tomatoes, beans, beets, and other things. The beans were moderately successful; the tomatoes, either they get eaten by possums, or it's too dry out (and I don't have time to be home watering during the optimal hours of the day) or they get blossom-end rot or something.

And Famous Author Lady? Know what I'm doing in my job that requires me to use the (apparently) Gaia-raping grocery store? I'm helping prepare the NEXT FREAKING GENERATION OF DOCTORS AND NURSES, among other things. So when some of your disciples who live in less amenable climates than you apparently do wind up coming down with scurvy or beriberi or some damn thing because all they have to eat all winter that is locally-grown are a few shriveled turnips and the remains of the hogs they butchered in the fall, there'll be someone out there who can save their sorry asses.

(Seriously, that is something I wonder about with the really hard-core "eat local" folks - will they wind up developing some of the vitamin deficiencies that we haven't seen in 80 years because of the wider availability of produce year-round? Just like the people who refuse to vaccinate their special snowflake of a child against polio - because vaccines are BAD and they know it because Jenny McCarthy told them so - have never, ever seen an actual case of infant paralysis, and would be hieing their kid to the doctor for the needle if they had - this seems to me to be a case of people not knowing history, not knowing what the "bad old days" really were like).

The other thing is - apparently Famous Author lives in some watered valley in New Mexico or somewhere that is apparently a virtual Garden of Eden, where almost anything will grow. As I said, I've tried beans, tomatoes, beets, watermelons, and squash where I lived. The beans were pretty good. The tomatoes, some years they produce, some years the tomatoes wither on the vines, some years animals get them. The beets died. (I can't get the hang of when to plant things here). Both the melons and the squash were taken down by borers. There is some member of the animal kingdom that will kill and eat almost any garden food you try to grow. So for me, honestly? It is more cost-effective to go to the "evil" supermarket and buy my produce pre-grown. (Or go to the apparently less-evil Farmer's Market, though I have it on good authority that some of their food is "imported" from a produce agent - and therefore, not locally grown).

We just do NOT have good growing conditions where I live. We can raise peanuts, I guess, and cattle, and hogs, and we used to grow cotton, before cotton was deemed an Evil Crop (high pesticide requirement). I can't live on peanut-butter covered bacon or steak with a side of boiled peanuts.

And yeah, yeah, by her lights, maybe people shouldn't live here. But we do, and this is where my job is, and I'm unwilling to chuck it to live in a yurt and brew my own yogurt.

Oh, the "three exceptions" to eating local? They didn't mention two of them but one was coffee. And this was brought up just after a big point was made about how the kids weren't able to go and get McDonald's French Fries any more. And I thought, "Nice. They make "exceptions" but they're for stuff the parents eat; the kids remain deprived." (Then again, I don't even like coffee).

The other thing - this was an entire family. The kids, the husband (you didn't see much of him; maybe he wasn't as down with the project as his wife) were available to help out. For people like me, with only me to depend on - I'd starve. Or I'd be shipped off to some kind of communal-living situation where I'd wind up curled up in the fetal position on the dining room floor, quietly sobbing and eating my hair, because I really canNOT stand to live in close quarters with other people I don't know well, to listen to their endless braying conversations, to be subjected to their own personal soapbox issues, to have someone eat my secret smuggled-in stash of chocolate because it's "contraband" (not being "local").

I think one of my biggest frustrations is with people who think because something works for THEM, it will work for EVERYONE - and what's more, everyone should adopt what they are doing, whether they want to or not. And this is usually coupled with a strong evangelistic vigor for whatever-it-is and a sense of their being a "voice crying in the wilderness" - that they are here to drag others, kicking and screaming if need be, into the enlightenment they have found, so that EVERYONE can be as superior a person as they now are.

(Actually, I wonder about that last. Some of the people with this attitude ("I lost weight! You can too!" "I ditched my television and I feel so much better now!" "I stopped buying anything but the bare necessities!") seem to have a need to feel superior to others - and so, when everyone has converted, they may need to find some new cause to follow so they can once again distinguish themselves from the pack.

I know, I know - this person is probably just a harmless idiot and I shouldn't get so overwrought at what she's saying. But it really rubs me the wrong way to hear someone who has more money and free time than I do preaching at me about how I should go to (what would amount for me to) an extreme and time-consuming effort to only eat food grown within 200 miles or whatever the proposed limit is of where I live. (And then have them sit back, smile, and sip their imported coffee while I agonize how I will live in a World Without Orange Juice.)

"Going Laura Ingalls."

Today, on Fox News (yes, I watch Evil Fox News. Hahahahaha. Or maybe, MUHahahahaa) they were talking about "what bailout is next?"

And someone raised the idea of a bailout of credit card debt.

No. Wrong. Fail. Bad. Do Not Want.

How much more could the Bush administration, in its waning days, and the Congress, piss off the American people? Because seriously - I didn't like the bank bailout, I won't like an automaker bailout, but I can kind of see the arguments for them.

But bailing people out because they bought things they could not afford?

And yes, I realize: some people put medical and other "emergency" expenses on credit cards. I know someone who has done it because, "No one would give me a loan in time for this." And I sympathize with that situation. But by and large, I suspect the excessive credit card debt lots of people have is simple bad planning, and simple greed (gotta have that new purse NOW).

So what I "hear" with "credit card bailout" is: "AH HA HA HA HA! You CHUMPS who scrimped and saved to buy stuff! You fools who paid off your cards in full each month! You IDIOTS who believed it's better not to be in debt, even if it means not having things you want....You will eat it now! You will eat a big fat helping of Bad Debt Pie, because we want YOU to bail out the people who tanned their fannies on the beach in the Bahamas when you stayed home because you didn't think you could "afford" a fancy vacation. You will pay for the new boat of some guy who'd never even think to invite you out for a ride! You'll pay for the clothes of the woman who sneers at you because you wear a wardrobe that's not up-to-the-minute. And you'll LIKE it!"

So, as I passed through various stages of rage, I thought: what can I do to protest this?

My first thought was to cut up all my credit cards (if this came to pass), write a very strongly worded and to-the-point letter explaining why I was now opting out of the consumer credit system in this country, and send the shredded cards plus letter to each of the originating agencies.

Only problem with that? If there's a real emergency, like I'm traveling to meetings and get stranded somewhere, I'd be screwed. I'd probably wind up sleeping in my car without a credit card to pay for a hotel room.

So instead, I came up with another plan.

You know how some people have threatened to protest the (supposed) massive Obama tax increase by "going John Galt" - by quitting their job and trying to take part in a barter economy as much as possible?

Well, I could never "go John Galt" because I love my job and a lot of its value to me is far beyond what's deposited in my bank account the end of each month.

But I can "go Laura Ingalls." You remember the Little House books? How the family in there lived by making do as much as possible? By taking rare trips to the general store for the necessities? How they were pretty self-sufficient and rarely (as far as I remember) bought anything on credit? (In fact, I've read that Laura Ingalls Wilder actually grew up to be somewhat of a proponent of Randian philosophy, so perhaps there's a link to 'going John Galt.')

Anyway. If I am required to bail out people who spent unwisely with my tax dollars - especially people who had lots of "fun" with money they didn't have, where I constrained myself to having "fun" within the boundaries of my budget, I will "go Laura Ingalls."

I will stop buying. Oh, of course, I will still have to buy groceries - I live in town, so I can't get myself a milch cow and some chickens, and I'm far to busy with my paid job to raise enough beans and corn to feed myself over the winter. But I will stop buying clothing, shoes (other than to replace those that wear out), books (I already have something like 8500, so I should be good there), fabric and yarn (again, I have what is sometimes referred to as SABLE - stash acquired beyond life expectancy, so again, I should be good there). Everything beyond food, medicine, cleaning supplies, and toiletries - gone. As little spending as possible. And the savings chunked into the safest but highest-interest account I can find.

I won't go shopping - no more trips to Boutiqueville, as much as that may pain me.

In other words: I will pull out as much as possible from the consumer system in this country. (I do reserve the right to support a few small businesspeople with the occasional purchase. And I will still buy gifts for the people I love; I can't quite not do that).

I also won't eat out. Instead, I'll prepare food at home, which is cheaper and probably more healthful.

And I realize no one will care about my little protest. Or they'll think I'm a total crank and lunatic. But that doesn't matter. I am so disgusted by the idea that the money I am trying to put aside for my retirement - money I am trying to save up against, say, the day I need to put new windows in my house - money I might give to my church or the Salvation Army or Heifer Project or Smile Train - money that I MIGHT want to use for something FUN for myself - that some of that is going to go to pay down the debt of people who spent irresponsibly, who, as I said, had "fun" beyond their budget, while I, like a chump, budgeted carefully and avoided debt like my dad taught me to.

So if Congress tells me to bend over and take this new "bailout," I'm gonna opt out. I'll find as many cheap or free sources of entertainment as I can. I might even buy clothes (when I need to replace clothes) at resale shops instead of giving my money to the department stores, who, with their advertising, indirectly affected the culture of excessive and unwise spending. I might even figure out how to barter for stuff I want - like offer to knit mittens for someone who spins yarn in return for enough yarn for a pair for me.

This is my "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it any more" moment.

(I should probably copy this to a letter and send it to all my Congresscritters.)

What ARE they teaching them in those schools, anyway?

A few weeks ago at Youth Group, I made some kind of offhand comment about The Little Red Hen. (I think it was related to the fact that one of the older boys was working to prepare the game for the rest of the kids, while they just stood around like lunks and didn't help).

I was met, by and large, by incomprehension.

Do kids really NOT know the story of the Little Red Hen? I heard it all the time growing up.

In a nutshell (to review, or if you're one of the generation who never heard it): Little Red Hen (hereafter LRH) decides it's time to make some bread. So she realizes she has to plant wheat. She asks her barnyard friends for help...they all have some excuse. "So I'll do it myself" said the LRH.

Then, she has to harvest and thresh the wheat. And no one would help her. So she does it herself. And take it to the mill. Again, no one would help her. So she does it herself. Then, she had to bake the bread.

Again, no help.

(So what happens, children? Repeat after me: SHE DOES IT HERSELF.)

But let that bread come out of the oven, let the LRH comment that it's time to EAT the bread....and suddenly all those mooching animals are there, wanting a slice. Which they didn't help to produce one bit.

And while I suppose you could take a more political view of the whole thing, I tend to look at it more personally.

My friends, I AM the Little Red Hen. I have actually grumbled, "I will do it MYSELF" under my breath in a few instances lately, when someone who agreed to do something poops out, or when I ask someone for help and they suddenly realize they are "too busy."

I'm the one who does the volunteer work that the Youth Group Kids are supposed to do, but they suddenly "have to do" something that Saturday morning. I'm the one who will be showing up to man the fund-raising yard sale EVEN THOUGH I observed I will have to bring my grading and teaching prep with me to work on during the slack times. I am the one who picks stuff up, even after pointing it out to the people who dropped it. I'm the one who sticks around extra long on campus in case people who haven't come in to speak to me about their research paper well before it's due decide they NEED HELP NOW the day before it's due.

Frankly - and I realize this is sending totally the wrong message - sometimes it is easier to just DO the job you asked the pre-teen or young teen kid to do fifteen times and they haven't done yet. While it's true that they have "won" and that they have learned that intransigence wears you down to the point where they don't have to do it, still, it is FRUSTRATING AS ALL GET OUT to ask someone (someone you are technically in a position of authority over) to do something 20 times and have it still go undone. (And I can't leave some stuff undone. I can't leave empty pop cans out on the tables we share with several other groups. I'd be the one to get in trouble.)

And it's the same way with some college students. I have a majority of people who, upon having given an open-ended assignment, run with it - they ask minimal guidance, and then they go. They figure out what needs to be done. They plan their time well. They work mostly independently but do come for help when it's really needed. In other words: they're adults.

I teach a fairly advanced-level analysis class where the students are expected to collect data and analyze that data. Eighty percent of the class is doing great - they're working through whatever problems they encounter, they're learning as they go along, they're figuring stuff out and then helping other people figure out what they need.

But the remaining 20% just shut down. They whine. They say they don't know what they're "supposed" to do (funny, all of the rest of your colleagues figured it out, and you have this thing called a "syll-a-bus" that explains it). They slack off. They take the phrase "Use this class period to work independently on your project" as an opportunity to (a) complain they don't have anything, (b) harass the people who are working, and (c) leave the class early - with nothing done.

I've already warned my co-teacher that if these individuals come back in mid-November, crying poor about how their projects aren't working out and they NEED us to help them RIGHT THEN, I am not giving any help. I am tired of this. I am tired of other people's failures to plan leading to their perception that it is a crisis for me.

Because I work hard. I work hard in teaching - I do extra office hours, I make myself available to assist people. I work hard on the weekends at my volunteer gigs, even when there aren't many other folks there.

I do a lot of the scut work, the dirty work, the crap jobs, the hard labor. And I don't hate it. I actually enjoy cutting brush and stacking it and picking up trash and doing all that kind of good stuff. I just mind that it seems like a lot of people can make excuses for why they NEVER help, and it seems like it's always the same 8 or 10 people who are otherwise really, really busy in their lives that do it.

I really do not mind hard work, provided that one type of hard work is not pulling me from something else I must then finish on my limited "free time." Because few things suck harder than coming home after a long day working outdoors just to realize you've got 20 student research papers to grade.

But by and large, I do not mind the work.

What I do mind? Whenever there's something good, people flock to it. I can guarantee I will receive plenty suggestions on how we "should" spend the proceeds of the garage sale.

I'm doubly sensitive to this because we're sharing the work (and splitting the proceeds) with the day care that works out of the church basement. And I DO NOT WANT the Youth Group to look like slackers or parasites, where the day care folks do the majority of the work. But I also do not want to spend all day Saturday working the garage sale. But when I asked the kids for a show of hands of who would be there Saturday, they all kind of looked away. (And I don't think it's that they had other commitments; they are quick to observe when they have soccer games or stuff and can't do things).

So I feel like I'm forced to go and do the work to make a decent showing for my group. Maybe I should just say "forget it" and let the day care folks get irritated and then observe that they deserve most of the money because they did most of the work, and then just concede that to them, then later tell the youth group, "Sorry, but we aren't getting Guitar Hero or a new ping pong table; we didn't do a big enough share of the work so I told the day care that they could have 90% (or whatever) of the money because that's the proportion of work they did."

I don't know. I do think we should be teaching the Little Red Hen story - the idea that it looks quite shabby for you to show up at the kitchen door, palm outstretched, when the bread comes out of the oven, if you made excuses for why you couldn't help when that grain was being grown, ground, or kneaded into bread.

I have no problem with providing bread for those who, shall we say (to keep the metaphor going) have arthritis and can no longer knead bread. Or those who are too young to safely scythe the grain. But when there's some great galoot of a dog or cat hanging around playing Gameboy and not lifting a finger to contribute to the production of the bread....that's when I have a problem. I get very tired of people who are "takers." I do not mind being a "giver," but I get frustrated with learned helplessness, laziness, and ingratitude...which are all things I see in the various situations where I do do hard work in my life.

So, let's bring back the Little Red Hen. I know, some people think it's overly harsh. I'm sure some people will view it suspiciously as a tool of the libertarians or even the Ayn Rand followers. (Ironically enough, it probably originated in pre-Revolutionary Russia). But I do think we need to remind people that if you've got the capacity to work, it's really ultimately more fair - and ultimately more rewarding to YOU - to pitch in and help out rather than sit on your butt waiting for the bread to come out of the oven, and then expect the Red Hens of the world to give you some.

Because you really, really don't want to piss off the Red Hen. Anyone who can sow, raise, thresh, and grind grain, and then bake it up into bread is someone you want to be on the good side of.

Things off which can flip.

I know it's a day early for Friday, but I'm angry now.

So here's my list of things that can be infested with the fleas of a thousand camels this week:

1. The printers in my building. For capriciously and unexpectedly de-connecting themselves from our networked computers. I can't print anything. I had to punt on giving a review sheet in my non-majors class this morning, because I couldn't print it out.

(1a. I can kind of flip off as well, for forgetting I needed that until the last minute. And for getting behind the schedule, which is apparently about as bad a thing as "crossing the streams.")

2. The whole ugly mess that is emanating from Wall Street and the investment banks. It has actually passed the point where I even want to TRY to understand it. I just want to assign blame, string a few loan officers up by their toes, and move on. My dad reassured me last night that things were going to be "OK" (for our family at least) and he reminded me that I already own my house (no mortgage), so that's one big thing I don't have to worry about.

He also said he seriously doubted we'd have another Depression. His opinion is that what will likely happen is that the dollar will lose more strength, "people's standards of living will go down and that will be unpleasant but not terribly unpleasant" and that I really, truly don't need to stack up on more nonperishable food than the three weeks or so I keep on hand anyway (as protection against bad weather or trucking strikes).

3. But you know? Standards of living going down can flip off. I have a decent standard of living but I'm pretty frugal and the thought of tightening my belt more kind of p*sses me off. Especially if that belt-tightening is necessitated by those who failed to wear belts (figuratively speaking) altogether.

4. People who text and drive and who talk on the cell phone and drive can flip off. See, people - restrictive laws come when people are stupid to behave the way they should. Texting while driving is now banned in California because stupid people did it, some people died, and now a law has been passed. Wouldn't it have been better in the first place for people to decide, "I'm driving now. I need to give it my full attention." and left the blackberry off? I'm sure the families of the folks killed in those accidents would agree.

(I was almost run off the road Saturday by some dangerously silly woman who was talking on the cell phone, strayed over into my lane (it was on a two lane highway), and because of road construction, I had no where I could safely swerve to - swerving to avoid her would have meant either going into her lane (and hitting the truck behind her head on), or going over the "Warning: steep drop off" edge, breaking the axle on my car, and likely flipping it. Fortunately when I laid on the horn and slowed down (but not too much, so the person behind me wouldn't rear end me), she woke up and got back in her own damn lane. But seriously. How many people are going to die or be maimed before the idiots wake up and realize they can't yack and drive at the same time?)

5. Politics can flip off. I just want the election to be over. And I want everyone currently in Congress - especially those who saw this financial mess coming and did nothing - voted out and sent back home. Preferably to spend the rest of their lives mucking out someone else's stables.

6. The fact that for every thing I complete, I get a list of three more things I have to do. Can. Not. Deal. With. Any. More. Thank. You. I already have the "stealth test" to write for next week, and my annual "Can I keep my job, please" document (aka Tenure Review), and an exam to grade, and other grading to do, and prep for this class that isn't supposed to be a new prep but kind of is and why am I writing on my blog because I should be working....ugh. Next person who "needs" something from me with less than 24 hours turnaround gets it.

Yipes.

It's meeting-time here, meaning that you get to hear the admini-speak of all the new administrators. It seems to me that admini-speak has two functions:

1. Obscure the "bad stuff" by cloaking it in mush-mouth words so people are either lulled into complacency or have zoned out by the time you get to the bit about their being no pay raises or that there is no budget for repairing equipment that breaks.

2. Take up the maximum amount of people's time by using eight words to do the job of one.

Oh, and I'm not entirely sure (because I tend to zone out when "verbed nouns" get used heavily) but I THINK one of the speeches used the word "actioning." Ugh.

Also, they're instituting a new "wellness initiative" here which makes me twitch a wee bit because all so often these are strictly tied to BMI and seem to have the goal of bullying people with bigger BMIs into diet plans or some kind of sanctioned exercise plan...now I do exercise, but it's on my own time first thing in the morning and I'll be damned if I'm going to change the exercise schedule I've had since 19-freaking-94 just so I can "walk on a track" under the supervision of some health-nanny. I just hope they don't jack up my health insurance premium because I'm fat - they just have to look at the fact that it takes me until AUGUST of each year to use up my deductible (and only then because I get immunotherapy for allergies) to realize I'm not a drain on their system.

And I'll be got-darned if I'll go on a diet. I know what food is healthy. I eat my vegetables. But I'm not going to count damn points or eat some prepackaged crap from Jenny Craig or cut out carbohydrates or some stupid thing. Been there, done that, I'm too old for it and life is too short.

Ironic, considering the news out this week that it's apparently sedentariness, more than body size, that leads to "poor metabolic health." Of course it will take 15 years for that realization to trickle down to the people who like to bully those with larger than a 28" waist....

Two. Hours.

Okay, this is something that bugs me.

I am in a couple of women's groups (no, not that kind of women's group; we're not revolutionaries in any sense of the word and I think if you showed any of the other women in the group the word spelled "womyn," they'd probably pull out their Red Teacher Pens and correct its spelling).

Anyway, I'm also an officer in these groups. (Don't ask me how that happened. In a couple cases it involves the bad old, "But you don't have a husband or children to take care of" argument which I actually fell for).

So one of the groups had its planning meeting the other evening. (Yes, evening. I wanted afternoon but the other still-employed member doesn't get done with work until 6).

The meeting lasted two hours. Two stinking hours. In that time, we accomplished the necessary planning in probably about 20 minutes.

The rest of the time? Chatting, and one person sharing several rather hair-raising and borderline TMI stories. In the guise of "sisterhood." (DO NOT WANT).

I didn't say anything but I was getting really weary - I had put in a full day over at school, I was staring down another full day starting in less than 12 hours, I had not had any time to myself that day. And I'm sitting listening to stories about stuff I really would rather not know.

(Why, why, why do women do that? Why do they need to share detail of family troubles and gynecological problems and horrific crimes they've witnessed/been victims of with innocent-bystander women? I thought that counselors and therapists served that kind of function in our society).

And this is one of the things that irks me. And almost makes me wonder if I could find some graceful exit from the group...dealing with that kind of thing. The time bandits. The people who, because their lives are relatively unstructured, see nothing wrong with taking hours of other people's time to SHARE.

And yeah, maybe I'm being antisocial and curmudgeonly - but - I was tired, y'all. Tired and hot and thinking about how nice a shower would feel, and then getting into my pajamas and into bed.

Fortunately, most of the meetings are not like that. But sometimes they are. And I want to get up and say, "You retired folks...you stay at home moms....I know for you sometimes time out of the house and away from your husbands or kids is a welcome change. But as for me - I have to get up at 5 am tomorrow, I worked a full day, I am DONE with dealing with other human beings. All my words have been used up - I have no more to share. I need sleep to be able to restore my stock of patience and tolerance."

(As I said, there was one other "working woman" in the group....a local shopkeeper. And interestingly, she was as silent as I was. I'm willing to bet she'd used up her store of words and perhaps patience and lovingkindness for the day (if you're a shopkeeper, I bet you have a lot of days like that). I don't think she was fuming like I was but then again she probably didn't have to be at work before 8:30 or so [her shop opens at 10]).

But I don't know. Maybe this is how I am deeply antisocial and kind of neurologically atypical but I really, really, really cherish my quiet evenings at home and even though I don't MIND taking a half hour or so to do some planning - and maybe 20 minutes for small talk - I'm really not up for the hour's worth of hair-raising stories.

Sometimes I bemoan not having a BFF, because it seems like most of the other women I know do. But if being a BFF means being able to sit on my rump for hours, and do that strained smile-nod thing when someone is talking about something I really don't want to know about, maybe I'm better off with my hermit's life.

I didn't look at my watch the whole time - it was a small meeting and I was afraid of looking rude. So when I got in the car, and turned it on, I thought to myself, OK, what is Mr. Car-Clock going to say the time is.

And that's when I saw that 2 hours of my life had been drained away. And that's when I got a little angry, because at that point it was late enough (by the time I'd be home) that all I'd have time to do was go to bed, especially if I planned on getting up for my usual workout the next day.

I don't know. I like people but sometimes I almost feel like my diffidence and tendency not to say, "Why, oh why, are you sharing this horrible story with us?!? Why can't we just wrap it up and all go home?" means people take advantage of me a little bit and are time-vampires.

This is why I hate medical "reporting."

A medical story being pimped on the local news:

"Neurofibromatosis: the rare genetic disorder that may affect your family!"

Arrrrgh. "Rare" and "may" are the keywords here.

The incidence of NF, depending on the type, is either 1 in 4000 or 1 in 50,000 (there are several different types). According to this website, about 100,000 people in the U.S. are affected. (Which, yeah, is still "rare" considering there are 300 million in the U.S.)

However - the disease is almost always inherited (only vanishingly rarely is it a mutation). It is an autosomal dominant. So people with NF in their families ALREADY KNOW ABOUT IT. A child affected with NF will *almost always* have a parent with it.

I HATE the way my local news channel reports this stuff. I can almost hear the scare-waves going out from the set. (I wonder how many families got worried by that header and started calling their doctors).

How would I present the story? I don't even know. If I were a news director, I'd probably only choose to run the story if (a) there was new information out on treatment/surgery for it or (b) there happened to be a couple families in the area we knew were affected by it, had school-aged children, and wanted to educate the public so that the families weren't shunned. (And even then, I'm not entirely sure that's part of the mission of a news program).

But I hate the trend of Scare Reporting! that comes with medical news. This often seems to center around stuff you eat or drink (just this morning they were telling women to "put down the coffee!" for some reason), or childhood pastimes that are normally safe but maybe one out of 10,000,000 times have some kind of injury ("Next: Killer Playground Slides!"), or talking about how some perhaps-unavoidable condition is going to make you Die Real Soon! ("How having blue eyes increases your risk of Deadly Eye Cancer!").

I'm sure part of it is that without larding the local news with these stories - and their stupid "Relationship Corner" and their recipe-segment and all that junk - the local news would be about 15 minutes long, rather than the 2 hours they stretch it out to every morning. (5 am to 7 am).

And you know? I'm not convinced that 15 minutes of news, and an hour-45 of something else (maybe show old Bugs Bunny cartoons?) would be such a bad thing.

It's Friday, isn't it?

I've got a bunch of stuff to do, so instead of keeping logging on to It Comes In Pints for the FFOT, I'll list a few things that have got under my skin this week here:

1. Ants. Ants can go to whatever kind of Underworld exists for insects. I hate ants. No, I don't hate ants across the board. I only hate them when they come in my house. I had a small plastic bottle of honey that apparently self-destructed some time Wednesday night. Thursday morning I found a few ants walking across the counter. I cursed, wiped them up with soapy water, and went to work. Came home at lunch. There were approximately 10,000 ants streaming through the tiny crack where the windowsill meets its frame, down the wall, across the counter. I figured it had to be SOMETHING attracting them - so I looked and found the plastic bottle of honey with the crack in it. So I wiped up all the honey (and the ants) and proceeded to clean my entire kitchen. Again.

2. Ortho Home Defense "Max," which should be renamed "Min" or "Zero," can bite the wax tadpole. I went outside after finding the ants and saturated the window frame and the wall the ants were walking up with the stuff. And they did not all die. In fact, many of them did not die. This product claims "4 months ant-free life!" if you use it outside. I STILL HAVE ANTS COMING IN THIS MORNING. (Of course, they are out of luck as there is absolutely no food for them to find - everything is sealed up and put away). I don't like using chemicals that could be toxic to me and I especially don't like using them when it turns out they don't work as promised.

Off to the Lowe's today to see if they still sell those "Terro" baits - which are corn syrup with borate in it. Ants eat it, ants die. It worked last year.

3. Vandals. A few towns over from me a bunch of a-hole d-bags have vandalized the senior center. AGAIN. They destroyed a compressor (didn't steal the copper tubing - just destroyed it to be mean) that served the cold room where food for the Meals on Wheels program was stored.

This kind of thing infuriates me. Not just because it's so pointless - I could even understand it better if they had stolen the copper tubing, which they did not. But because I have had elderly relatives (in other parts of the country) who got Meals on Wheels. And it made a HUGE difference in their lives - not just that they got a hot meal when they were not really capable of cooking one (towards the end of her life, my grandma was blind, and she was afraid of using the stove because she feared she might burn herself. And although she had some of her children and grandchildren near, they couldn't ALWAYS be there to cook for her). The other thing that Meals on Wheels does that is valuable is that they check up on a person - when my grandma fell, not too long before she passed away, the person who first found out she had fallen and got help for her was the Meals on Wheels volunteer. So I guess I feel kind of protective of the program and it makes me very angry that some idiot would compromise its ability to help people. Especially elderly people.

I hope that idiot's grandma wasn't one of the people getting food from Meals on Wheels. And I hope they find that idiot and assign him (or her, I suppose) a GREAT many hours of community service to make up for it.

There has been a lot of vandalism in my region lately; it's always that way in the summer. I don't know if it's the heat making people act stupid, or if it's teenagers with no jobs and no parental supervision going out and getting into trouble. (And if it is a teenager who did it, I hope they throw the book at their parents as well. If my parents caught me even PLANNING something like that, they would have tanned my hide - yes, even as a teenager - and then grounded me for several months.)

4. I'm also getting kind of sick about all the complaining about gas and food prices. Yeah, it's bad. But it is what it is and we can't really do a lot to change it. Listening to people gripe about paying $4 a gallon for milk doesn't make paying it myself any easier. I'd rather just suffer in silence at this point, or try to figure out some kind of ingenious way of saving money. (Lentils. I bought a pound of lentils for 94 cents this morning, and I have a recipe that potentially sounds good. I may be using dried beans a lot this summer because they're a cheap source of protein).

(That said? If OPEC does increase production - which was hinted at in the news this morning - and gas prices drop a little, I hope grocery retailers also lower the prices of food that have been affected by the higher gas prices. I suspect they WON'T, but I'd hope they'd cut us a little break.)

5. I know I said I thought stimulus checks were a bad idea - and I still think they are - but where the hell is mine? It still hasn't come. Maybe they're screwing me out of it because (with capital gains) I made just a bit over $75K last year. But I'd at least appreciate a letter from the government saying "HA-ha! Your investments did too well last year!"

But if I am getting one - well, I've done a 180 on this and I'm NOT going to chunk it into my savings account (where it can earn less interest than what inflation eats up). Hell, I'm spending it. I'm going to go out and buy something FUN. What that is, I don't know yet. I'll figure it out if and when the check comes. Because I'm tired of hearing the constant drumbeat from some sectors of the news of "sit in the dark, turn up your air conditioning to 85, don't eat much, don't drive anywhere, save all of your money, don't have any fun, because it's going to get lots, lots worse before it gets better - if it ever gets better."

No. Fun is good. I like fun. I want some fun. So I'm going to spend that check (if it ever comes) on fun.

The r-word.

You may have heard that there are some chains - and it's not entirely clear if it's just in SoCal or if it's elsewhere - that are limiting rice purchases (so far it looks like Costco and Sam's Club.) This is because there's apparently a shortage of rice, or at least rice from parts of southeast Asia.

(the rice I tend to buy comes from Texas; I haven't heard anything about problems with the rice crop there).

The news stories - I'm not going to link any because the few that I found and read irritated me and I don't feel like finding one that doesn't - refer to it as "rationing."

There are also dark allusions to "flour and cooking oil are being 'rationed' in Queens, NY." (I have no confirmation on that last one.)

Okay. This is where I get really irritated at those who write these things up.

The word "rationing" has a lot of connotations to it. Those who remember WWII faced some food rationing (it was MUCH worse in Great Britain than it was here; I'm reading a book currently on conditions in WWII and post-WWII Great Britain and it's moderately shocking how little people were permitted during the worst of it. Oh, I understand the reasons why - it's still shocking.)

I don't see this as "rationing." My understanding of the WWII situation is that in Great Britain, it was because shipping lanes were largely blockaded - and it is a challenge for an island nation to grow enough food to support itself. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the young, able-bodied folk who would normally bring in the harvest were either in the military forces or working defense jobs. (Hence the "Land Girls." My parents have a friend who - though she doesn't use that term - from her description of what she did as a teenager in WWII in Britain, I think she must have been a Land Girl. I don't like to ask her more about it because she doesn't seem to want to bring up those memories, as fascinating as they are to me.)

In the U.S., I think lot of it had to do with companies re-tooling for defense production (no tin cans) and also, the desire to supply the fighting forces (and also land-lease countries) with food.

I suppose you could also make the argument that the sacrifice made people feel more that there "was a war on" (and of course things like gasoline and tires and nylon were rationed as well).

I see the current situation as being a lot more akin to the situation with the Nintendo Wii than I do with true rationing. Here is a product that is in (hopefully) temporarily short supply, you want to ensure that people get a fair crack at getting it, so you limit how much any one person can buy (and I believe the limit was something like 80 lbs. of rice, so unless you're a restaurant owner, you're not going to really face problems. I don't know how fast an average, say, Japanese-American family eats up rice, but 80 pounds is a whopping great lot of rice, in my book).

It's also not unlike what some groceries do with "loss leader" specials - limit quantities purchased so that Jane Doe (who comes in to shop at 8 am) buys up all the cheap hotdogs, and Joe Blow (who can't come in until, say, noon) gets angry because they're all gone.

But I do not see it as "rationing." And I think it was irresponsible for the news outlets - and whoever used it first - to use that word.

(And here is a story (warning: popup ads) that discusses the Texas rice crop. And breathes a little sense into what's going on.

The rice that is "limited" are two "aromatic" varieties (jasmine and basmati) which are grown in East Asia. There is no shortage of Texas-milled rice, the article says, but it is considered a "less desirable" sort by the (primarily immigrant) community that is heavily buying rice.

I don't know - the rice I use is a Texas-grown version of basmati and it's pretty darn good. And I think I've had jasmine rice that was grown in this country. True, you pay a little premium for it - but here is where I tend to get a bit jingoistic - I prefer to buy food grown in my own country whenever possible. Both for reasons of "US farmers get paid" and for reasons of "there's unlikely to be some kind of funky pesticide illegal in the US in there.")

But anyway. A lot of news outlets NOT AS CLOSE to the concept of growing rice as the Beaumont (TX) Enterprise is, are using the "rationing" word.


Because "rationing" is one of those OH NOES! words. One of those words that makes the inner survivalist come out in some people. (I admit it; it nearly did in me when I first heard the news. Before I thought it through, I thought, "Maybe I better run out to the grocery and buy some rice, just to have." Never mind that I don't eat rice daily, never mind that I have a barely-opened 3-pound tub of "Texmati" rice, never mind that were I live, if you don't freeze or refrigerate grain products you're going to store long-term, they will get buggy after a while. It caused that knee-jerk reaction in me and when I figured it out, I got annoyed).

Because that word is going to bring out the same instinct in a lot of people. The limits were put into place to ensure everyone got a supply and to prevent food hoarding. Well, what do you think people - especially 21st century Americans who are used to getting whatever they want whenever they want it, and some of whom take the "screw everyone else; I'm getting mine, no matter what the cost" attitude - will do in the face of "rationing"?

They'll dream up ways around it. (Even in "real" rationing they did - James Beard once said something along the lines of "Everyone knew someone who would sell rationed foods 'under the table.' It was considered chic - somewhat like circumventing Prohibition.")

(I admit some of my admiration for the man died when I read that. Say what you will about WWII food rationing, but people who willfully cheat it - because they can, because it's chic - there's something a little disgusting about that.)

Anyway - by playing up the story, by going with the usual news-instinct to make it sound as bad as possible - it's going to freak people out and possibly make problems worse.

(You want REAL problems? Try being a poor Malaysian who actually depends on rice as a staple and has no other sources for it. Apparently Malaysia was confronting Thailand the other day because Thailand promised to sell them a certain amount of rice and now have reneged.)

And of course, some people run with this - on one blog I read that linked to one of the news stories, there were looming conspiracy concerns. And comments about how "Wal-mart isn't restocking regularly any more; the shelves look kind of bare now." And there are other, agreeing comments: yes, yes, one of the employees agreed, it's because they're not sending as many trucks full of food now in order to save money on diesel. (So: "OH NOES eeeeeeviiiilll Wal-mart is going to starve us instead of making us come in and buy unhealthy food and cheap crap made in China." I almost feel sorry for Wal-mart; they can't catch a break from the haters.)

So, I figured I'd take a look this morning. (I had to buy groceries anyway). I headed out to the local Wal-mart at 6:30 this morning (yes, I get up at the buttcrack of dawn even on the weekends; 6:30 is actually sleeping late for me).

Shelves pretty full.

Even the rice shelves - there were a couple empty slots (I think the brown rice was sold out, but as far as I'm concerned, no great loss there. Brown rice is one of those things that healthists push and which I think tastes like ass). But there was plenty rice. And plenty beans. And plenty meat in the meat case (I don't buy my meat at wal-mart, though, there's a small regional dairy-store chain that sells far better quality meat at competitive prices). Plenty of milk, yogurt, eggs, butter, produce...all the stuff I needed. Nothing seemed to be sold out. And there were few people there at 6:30 am but it didn't seem like any of them were girding up for Food Distribution Armageddon.

Now, don't get me wrong: it's pretty smart to have a certain amount of emergency food on hand. I keep enough canned beans and tomatoes and other stuff I could eat (even if I had no way of heating it up - canned tomatoes may not taste GREAT at room temperature but they are edible). But I don't see any evidence here of a mass freak-out. Which is good. I'd hate to have to go all Zombie Apocalypse on some guy grabbing all the cans of black beans off the shelf because he "needs" them all.


And there are other people using this as another stick to beat Bush with. (heh. Stick. Bush.) One of the newspaper-bloggers said something along the lines of "This coming few months will be BAD but when we get someone new in the White House, they will fix it."

(Actually? The resident of the White House making a move to "fix" temporary shortages of one particular type of food? That scares me more than the shortages do)

But I predict we will hear more "food insecurity" stories over the summer, designed to make people worry, make people begin to say things like "The government should DO something to ensure we are all fed!" And I bed Obama and Clinton and even McCain will come out with grand statements of what they are going to do to ensure "food security"

(and I will eat a bag of that much-hated-by-me brown rice if one of them actually comes up with a phrase along the lines of "a pound of rice in every pot.")


Just you wait.

2 and 1/10 cents per minute

(Added: uh, hi, Joanne Jacobs' readers. I have to make a little disclaimer and point out that the "some people" were the shopkeeper and assistants, not the university. I know rules are in place for a reason and the way things are run economically has to go smoothly....

...I hope this doesn't upset anyone too much...)



....that is apparently what my time is worth to some people.

I periodically have to buy certain lab supplies for the classes I teach. Sometimes this involves certain small businesses in town.

Small businesses that aren't always the tightest of ships, apparently.

We have a credit card issued by the university; it is an immense improvement over the old purchase-order system, where you had to be able to see into the future at the beginning of the semester and (a) predict where you were going to need to buy stuff to get the orders issued and (b) predict how much money you were going to spend.

But the credit card is not without its problems, one of which being that it (apparently) isn't immediately clear to the seller that "I'm buying these supplies for the University" means tax-exempt, even when that same person has made multiple tax-exempt purchases on the credit card in the past, and, in fact, there was a note on file indicating the tax-exemptness.

And being the Absentminded Professor I am, I sometimes forget to remind the shopkeepers. Usually they know, as I tend to buy supplies in the same place every year. But sometimes things get messed up.

Long story short: I was charged tax on something I bought.

$0.44 tax.

So, because that doesn't work given our system, I had to go back and get the transaction re-run. (And yes, the first thing I did was unzip my purse, pull out 44 cents, and try to hand it to the secretary to save myself the trouble. No go; the money is all centralized and there is apparently no entity I could hand my 44 cents to. Apparently the system only works on credit card receipts.)

And no, I did not check the receipt upon receiving it because (a) they never screwed it up before and (b) I was tired, in a hurry, and bordering on having a migraine.

So, having to run other errands, I figured I'd swing by the original store - let's call it The Emporium - to correct the problem.

I explained the problem, noting that while I had not explicitly said NO SALES TAX, she had rung me up before for prior purchases and not charged tax. And my university can't pay sales tax. So the 44 cents would need to be refunded. And I explained my attempt at an end-run around the whole problem, and its failure. "So," I summed up, trying to be jovial and not assign blame, "Because I can't just hand 44 cents to someone at the university and make it good, the charge will have to be re-run."

"Oh" the woman responded. "OhIdon'tknowhowtodothat. OhI'mnotauthorizedtodothat."

I stared at her, gobsmacked.

"I can give you 44 cents" she offered. "Or discount you the next time by that amount."

Um, no. Does not work that way. If you had been paying attention to my initial explanation, you would have known that offering to give me 44 cents does not work.

(I hate being ignored when I'm explaining something.)

I explained that that wouldn't work. She then added, "Yeah, when we switched to this new computer system, a lot of our tax-exempt customers got reclassed as non-tax-exempt."

Um - if you had known that, maybe you could have gone through the list and CHECKED first? Maybe you could have ASKED me when I came in buying stuff and non-tax-exempt popped up?

I said that I really needed the money back, and that would require the transaction to be re-run.

"Well," she offered, "Maybe you can come back when someone else is here."

(I have taken time OUT OF THE MIDDLE OF MY DAY to fix this. And spent the gas to drive down here [granted, I was already out but the Emporium is sort of out of my way]. Telling me to "come back" - especially when there is no helpful schedule of "This is when the owner who can do something is here" makes it impossible for me to plan.)

"Well, you see" I began, "I've already taken the time out of my office hours to come down here. And already probably burned 50 cents worth of gas. To correct a 44 cent error. I really would appreciate getting it taken care of today." (Well, I wasn't quite that calm, and I think I harped more on the "50 cents worth of gas")

So she sighed, and got one of the teenaged dudes out of the back room. And told him the problem. And he kind of stood there, like "Whaddaya want ME to do?"

Finally he said, "I'll TRY to fix it" and took the credit card and the old receipt and disappeared into the back.

I wandered around, looking at the dusty shop displays (The Emporium is the only place in town to procure certain items or else I'd shop somewhere else for them).

I waited.

And waited

And waited.

And looked pointedly at my watch while the original woman ignored me.

And some other teenaged guy came out and tried to strike up a conversation with me but I started giving off my patented "I am not quarry for you no matter what you might think; I am old enough to be your mother" vibe (Yes, I'm old enough to be the mother of a teenaged boy...that thought and all its implications scares me).

And I began to wonder - had teenaged guy #1 run off to Mexico on my department's credit card? Was he downloading all of Aerosmith's oeuvre onto his iPod from iTunes with my department footing the bill? What?

Finally he came out. Handed me a receipt. I signed for it (and as you will see in a moment, had forgotten the original number) and left.

It took - I am not kidding - 20 stinking minutes for the whole thing to get straightened out.

(I HATE, hate, HATE with a burning passion the feeling that my time's being wasted.
And yeah, I know, it's entirely possible the credit card company was jerking him around but considering that there were approximately 18 horny teenaged boy-workers hanging around that joint, you'd think teenaged boy #1 (who seemed more droopy than horny) could collar one of them and send them out to tell me that he was very sorry but it was taking a while and it would be just a few more minutes.)

Got back to the department. Handed the receipt to the secretary along with my tale of woe.

She looks at the receipt, checks something, and says, "The tax was for 44 cents. They refunded 42 cents. There is still 2 cents tax unaccounted for."

I told her I wasn't goin' back, not for anything. She's going to try to call and fix it but damn - I spend 20 minutes trying to get something fixed and they can't do it right? (And yeah, I should have checked the blasted receipt more closely. But at that point my allergies were so bad from the dust-fug that inhabits the Emporium that I genuinely remembered the tax as 42 cents.)

If I have to go back again? I'm taking a book. And sitting down in the middle of the floor. And reading. Just to make a damn point and so I feel like my time's not being wasted.

I really loathe bad, inattentive customer service. I can understand when there's a PROBLEM - if I am apprised of the problem - but I hate sitting around in the dark, so to speak, feeling the moments of my life drain away as no one tells me anything or gives me any hope that the problem will ever be fixed. But with a book to read, I feel like I'm doing something productive.

(And the reading would also take care of having to try to make small talk with the tribal-armband-tattooed, ripped-t-shirt-wearing bad-boy wannabees trying to flirt with me at that store.


Sorry, guys - I just tend to go for the intellectual type is all. If you had glasses and a proper shirt on I'd probably be more willing to talk to you. [well, also if you weren't below my "cutoff" age...])


Update: leave it to the Cats of LOL to capture the discomfort of making small talk with some creepy guy with a wandering eye....


see more crazy cat pics

Back

Break was good.

I do not recommend, however, traveling during a time of multiple "weather events." Mostly due to the floods in Missouri and Arkansas, my trip home was such that I expected John Candy* and Steve Martin to show up at any moment.

(*yes, I know he's dead. At one point while trapped on a bus that was playing the movie "Boiling Point" on endless loop for the "entertainment" of people who apparently do not need sleep, I said to myself, "I've died, and by some horrible clerical error, have wound up in Hell."

And - "Boiling Point"? what the heck? I'm sorry, but is there a WORSE movie to show on a bus when some of the passengers are trying to sleep? Nice, quiet talky parts interspersed by loud screamed obscenities, gunfire, and bad renditions of 40s music played way too loud?

I hate Dennis Hopper EVEN MORE now.)

biting the wax tadpole

I have no idea if there's going to be an FFOT tomorrow today (last night stupid Blogger.com went down like a binge-drinking fratboy after his skateboard wheel hit a crack in the pavement); it seems that "It Comes in Pints" may be disabled a while longer (if not permanently).

So I have my list here. Because it's been one of those weeks, folks.

Because I try to keep the language on here mostly PG-13, or at least no worse than you'd hear on the most strongly-cautioned episode of The Simpsons, I decided I needed a good euphemism for that action that the FFOT alludes to.

It hit me today, as I was pulling out of my drive this yesterday morning (and luckily it hit me, instead of my hitting my pecan tree, which is once again hard to avoid because you can't SEE at 6:45 am now). Anyway: my euphemism for that particular anatomical impossibility is related to a (supposed) literal translation of the brand name Coca Cola in Mandarin.

Mandarin is a tonal language. As far as I understand that, it means that the inflection of your voice when you speak changes the meaning of a phrase or word - sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly.

So anyway, depending on how you pronounce it (supposedly; as I said, this is an apocryphal story), Coca-cola translates to either "bite the wax tadpole" or "Female horse stuffed with wax."

Well, "bite the wax tadpole" sounds unpleasant enough, and it's close enough in spirit (at least, in my twisted psyche), for it to substitute.

So, with no further ado, here is the list of fornicating fornicators (thanks, Val!) who can bite the wax tadpole this week:

Daylight saving time can bite the wax tadpole. Because I do not like driving to work in the dark. Driving to work in the dark feels wrong. It feels like going on a nice date with a guy you met just recently and at the end of the evening, finding out that the "nice guy" was actually Courtney Love, in a suit, with her boobs duct-taped to her chest and burnt cork rubbed on her chin to simulate 5:00 shadow. And that there's an MTV film crew hiding behind a potted palm at the restaurant to tape your reaction. (Shudder. I apologize for that mental image to all the hetero ladies out there. Heck, to all the gay ladies, for that matter - my guess is Courtney Love is probably none of y'alls dream girl, especially not Courtney Love in drag).

And Congress, for extending the horror that is DST, can bite the wax tadpole. I am guessing that many of their days do not start before 9 am, so they are totally unaware of how flipping miserable it is to truck out of your house and feel like it's still midnight, because the sun won't be up for almost another hour.

And anyone who claims it "saves energy" - you may also have a bite of that wax tadpole, because I honestly cannot see HOW. I still am awake from 5 am until about 7:50 am when the sun comes up. Last week I could turn the lights off at, say, 7:15 am. This week I must wait until 8:15 am for it to be bright enough to do that. Yes, when I come home at the end of the day, instead of switching the lights on at 7 pm, I switch them on at 8 pm...but I do not see any net savings. And there actually was a study - I think in Indiana? - showing that it had no effect on heating and a/c, because when you get up early in the cold winter (which is SUPPOSED to be Standard Time), you turn up the heat, and when you come home in the summer, and it's still blazing hot because the sun's still out, you turn up the a/c.

Oh, I also remember reading somewhere that the oil companies liked DST and pushed for it because they thought that extra hour of light would get people out tooling around in their cars in the evening. (Maybe not so much now, in the era of $3.25 a gallon gas). But there's not much energy saved there!

Other things that have been a burr under my saddle this week:

Time bandits can bite the wax tadpole. Look, I don't care that you're retired and have nowhere to go, and so this supposedly 4 pm to 5 pm meeting is your social time and you'd love to stretch it out until 6 - some of us are dead tired from our days and we don't care about your discussion of the arcane members of the town's leading families. We don't want to hear about your other volunteer work. Yes, yes, you get a nice gold star for it, now can we move on?

People who change the rules without notifying the people likely to be affected can take a big hard munch of that tadpole. This happened on campus this week - someone changed something important, something that affects me and several of the other faculty in my department, and I only heard about it second-hand. The claim has been made that the change was made in January, but NONE OF US WERE TOLD. So now we have to scramble to fix things that we could have easily fixed if the power-mad individual in charge of this particular decision could have been non-passive-aggressive for two minutes and actually e-mailed us a heads up. And for that, not only does the person get a bite of that petrolatum tadpole for screwing us over, they also get a second mouthful of wax for being a Time Bandit. Because several of us had to go into emergency find-a-fix mode, which none of us could really afford to do today.

Assessment can bite the tadpole, big-time. Look, isn't it enough that our students graduate, that they get into professional schools (including some pretty damn good professional schools), that they get good jobs in their field, that we have some pretty highly places graduates in various state agencies? Why do we have to keep writing BS "pre test post tests" where we're testing the poor kids to death, and where we now have subtle pressure to "teach to the test" instead of teaching what is really the right thing to teach. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can't spell "assessment" without A-S-S.

People who drive slowly, and wavering all over the street, because they are talking on a cell phone can chomp down on the paraffin polliwog. Just because you are in a RESIDENTIAL area and are not out in the DANGEROUS TRAFFIC of a main thoroughfare, does not give you the right to weave all over the road and be a dangerous block to the people coming up behind you (and for that matter - be a hazard to the kids walking home from school in the neighborhood). If you can't walk and chew gum at the same time, hang up and drive.

So that's been my week. Thanks be to all that is good that next week is my Spring Break.

great googly moogly

If I make it through this week without my head exploding or without my dissolving in tears/anger in front of some random person who doesn't deserve it, it will be a blessed miracle.

EVERYONE around me has suddenly become Super-Demanding I-Want-It-No-I-NEED-It-Now person.

And on top of the fact that I'm running in circles trying to take care of the stupid but necessary things before leaving for Spring Break (like getting to the post office to have my mail held), and the fact that I'm effing EXHAUSTED from the time change and my allergies, I am NOT happy.

No, I will not look up your little gripe in the textbook. You should have been in class the day I defined that term. Yes, it is not in the textbook. But I defined it in class.

No, I will not have the exams graded by tonight. I have to teach a two-hour afternoon class AND do youth group AND find some time to sleep in the next 12 hours. I'm so sorry but my life does not revolve around your grade.

NO, I cannot have a "special emergency meeting" now. It is not my emergency and I do not think it is one bit special, and I don't have time to meet anyway.

Why does all this junk come up when I'm already overwhelmed and running on empty?

Tracey did it...

So I'm doing it too:

Name Five Traits About Others That Drive You Crazy:

(just five?)

Okay, so here goes:

1. Ingratitude when someone's doing something you won't do, or more specifically, the tendency to complain about the way other people are doing something without lifting a finger to help out. I suspect that most people who do some form of volunteer work deal with this on a regular basis. And it drives me CRAZY. Youth group: "The kids are too noisy" (how would you know? You're never down here on Wednesday nights). "They left shoe-marks on the tiled floor; can you please ask them not to wear tennis shoes in the fellowship hall?" (Um...some of these kids may have but one pair of shoes to their names; I will NOT micromanage to that degree. Would you rather see smudges on the tiled floor or a clean, pristine, perfect floor that no one ever walks on, because no one comes to church?). "Can't you CONTROL them better?" (There are two adults with a dozen or more teenagers. I don't see anyone else coming down to help CONTROL them. I am not Wonder Woman; I have no bracelets of power.)

Also, garden-variety ingratitude gets my goat. The people who put a worker in a shop to a lot of trouble for something and don't thank them. The people who treat the people serving them like dirt. (And yes, I do think that's a sort of ingratitude). The people who, when they're served a free meal, complain that the portions aren't big enough or that they really don't like the brand of ranch dressing served.

I also consider rudeness to waiters and shop assistants and people at the post office and checker-outers to be a form of ingratitude.

2. Intellectual laziness. I'm not talking about the occasional "I'm really beat so I'm going to sit down and watch SpongeBob SquarePants instead of reading Hegel" attitude. I'm not even talking about the "I'd rather laugh at SpongeBob SquarePants than cry over Hegel, so I'm not going to read him because I don't have to" attitude. I'm talking about people who are lazy in their jobs or at school. For example, students who, when given a month to write a paper on the current status and biology of a well-known endangered species, they wait until the day before it's due and then consult Wikipedia and some hunting magazine and consider that good enough.

And my attitude is: if you hate what you're majoring in enough to put that minimal an effort on a paper - especially when the prof has specifically outlined what he or she wants and suggested suitable sources to look in, you should consider another career. College is training for the job you're going to do. It's practice. It's also a chance to form good habits of thinking and research. If you're unwilling to put in the effort in college, do you really want to spend the next 40 years doing something similar?

Also: it is not HARD to find good resources. We have a library. We have all kinds of online journal databases with good information. I've offered to help students find stuff if they come to my office hours. I regard all of that as leading the horse to water. If it chooses not to drink, it's not my problem any more.

I select the assignments I give in my majors' classes fairly carefully so as to reflect what people might be doing in a career in the field. So if you can't see that - or if it's not important to you to "practice" what you're going to be doing in your career, find some other career.

And no, I don't buy the "This is my last four years to play!" attitude. You've had almost 20 years to play. Grow up and recognize that there's more to life than "play." Like, for example, the satisfaction of doing something well.

And besides - if you're doing it right, your career should feel like play at least some of the time.

3. People who take every random thing that happens as evidence that the world's out to get them and to thwart their happiness. People like this EXHAUST me. One thing I've learned is that 90% of the time when stupid random crap happens - like there's some directive from a micromanaging administrator which is going to turn out to make us do extra work - it is not because they want us to be unhappy, or they're punishing us, or something - it's just that someone made a stupid decision somewhere. Sometimes campus administrators don't have enough occupying their time and they think everyone is equally free, and so it should be no effort at all to, I don't know, ask us to move our offices so we are all in alphabetical order along the hall or something. There's this disconnect from what people who are actually "in the trenches" are doing every day, and sometimes that leads to things that look like they're being sent down to punish us. There's a great old saying: "Never attribute to malice what stupidity can explain." I use that one a lot. Because sometimes you just have to look at one of those "WTF were they thinking?" directives, and kind of shrug and grit your teeth and comply with it, but accept that it is not directed at you.

4. People who think they are the Most Important Person in the world. This includes the folks who have loud cell phone conversations in otherwise quiet restaurants, people who park straddling two parking places because they don't want their shiny new car to get dinged, people who park in the fire lane because they're "just going to be in the store a minute," people who decide they want to go on vacation so they call their professors up and tell them they have to offer them make-up exams because they're going to be off skiing or something during the scheduled exam. And also the people who think it's perfectly OK to drive their boom cars through the neighborhood at 1 am, waking up every person who actually has a responsible, taxpaying-type job.

The world's a big place and it has a lot of people in it. Things don't work if everyone expects that they always get their way 100% and that other people's desires or even rights don't matter.

5. Needy people. This is probably because I recognize "needy" tendencies in myself, but I tend to squash them down pretty hard, because I know how unattractive that trait is. But I have a really hard time with the student who 'adopts' me as her personal counselor (sorry, dear, but I'm not qualified and it's actually illegal for me to be offering advice on your personal problems). People who need to share all of their pain with everyone else around them - effectively turning the other people into their own personal trouble trees.

There comes a point where so many people are sharing their pain with me that I cannot bear it any more. I walk out of my door in the morning and all I can see are couples that have separated, children estranged from their parents, young adults who have hooked up with characters that aren't good for them, people in trouble with the law, and on, and on. And it makes me want to step back in my house, lock the door, and go and hide in my sewing room for a couple of weeks.

It also may be - and I realize this says something not very attractive about me - that I look at these people who are going around with this seemingly constant need for others to listen to them, to approve of them, to give them comfort, and I go, "No one cares about MY problems so I don't share them [well, except here on the blog, and you're reading this because you choose to]. No one is feeding me constant approval, no one is serving as my Linus Blanket. I'm making it all on my own and I am really no tougher than you. Either "man up" or find someone to give me the good stuff you're getting." Yes, it's a little jealousy. Jealousy because I come home at the end of the day, and if I've had a crap day, I just kind of have to shake it off and prepare for tomorrow - I don't have anyone (well, anyone in the sense of a physically present person) who can pat my head and go "poor sweet baby" and try to make me feel better.

And you know? Sometimes I kind of resent that. So I get frustrated by people who go around looking for random semi-strangers to pat them on the head and go "poor sweet baby."

I can't even believe this.

"911, Can you hold?"

it's this news story.

A woman in Bucks County, PA, died in a fire. She was disabled and could not get out of the house on her own. It's possible the 911 delay contributed to her death - it is said the phone rang 7 times before someone picked up, and then she was placed on hold.

"911, can you please hold?"

I'm sorry, but absent a disaster/event on the scale of September 11, 2001, those are words you should never hear. I'm not big on the entitlement mentality - as you are all well aware - but I do think the ONE government service we should be able to trust will help us is the 911/fire/police/EMTs.

Apparently there were 10 dispatchers on duty. They were not all busy. Apparently there was some "handing off" of the woman's case, causing further delay.


Once the firefighters WERE dispatched, it took them 5 minutes to arrive at the woman's house. Which is why I say the delay only possibly contributed to her death - 5 minutes, in a house fire, is easily long enough for a person to die. But still. Can you imagine the agonizing last minutes, wondering if anyone cared enough to help you. I mean, the people your tax dollars pay for.

And I realize I'm reading this through a very particular set of lenses: I live alone. If there were a major emergency and I needed help, it would be horrifying to be told to wait, to hold, and then have to listen to the balls-up as people try to figure out where I am.

Granted, I'm not disabled, so in many cases I'd be able to take care of things myself. But if I were, say, bleeding to death, I'd really hope that someone would be competent enough to dispatch the ambulance to where I was.

And yeah, I have some prior history with seeing the ineptitude or uncaringness of dispatchers: a woman I know who used to live here, one evening, saw one of her neighbors chasing his adult son up and down the street with a shotgun, cursing at him and threatening to shoot. This was while her children were playing outside. After getting the children in, she called 911. The operator first didn't believe her (???) and then said that it didn't seem like a major problem to her. (Yeah, right: a possibly-drunk, angry man, running through a residential area waving a gun and threatening to shoot it.)

And a couple years ago, when we had a minor fire in my classroom building, the dispatcher sent the firefighters to the wrong building on campus. Because, you know? "Biology Building" and "Science Building" just HAVE to be the same thing.

(The campus safety-guru was pretty pissed about that and I understand he gave that dispatcher a piece of his mind. We had even told the woman the address of our building. And I know, because I was the one who made the 911 call. And I was CALM. I was articulate. I said where the fire was, what the address was, even what the two nearest cross streets were. I verified a second time the building name. And they sent the firefighters to the wrong building!)

So anyway. I have real issues with the idea that when you need help, when it might be a matter of life and death, you can't depend on the people whose job it is to help you. And no, I'm not expecting the paramedics to come out for every little splinter or scrape - I drove myself to the ER the one time when I was concerned I was having a medical problem large enough to merit it (allergic reaction to fire ant bites). But I hope that if I ever wake up some morning and realize that I'm having a stroke, or if some lunatic breaks into my house and rapes and injures me seriously, that I can call 911 and NOT be told "hold, please."

The real kicker? The operators who told her to hold, who basically dropped the ball, are getting "disciplinary letters" in their files, and that's it.

Now, I understand: 911 and the paramedics won't save people in every case. There may be situations where time is just too short for the person for them to be saved. But they should at least make a damn effort!

news

I think everyone's heard about Heath Ledger's death.

Now they're backtracking a little from what was initially said - the news reports, early on (at least on FOX, which I was watching at the time) were "OMG he was surrounded by PILLS and butt naked face down on his bed!!!!111!!!!"

And so, of course, the brain goes to a particular place, hearing that.

Or maybe my brain does, having had a relative who committed suicide. (And yeah, I'm pretty much intellectually over it, but I won't get emotionally over it - at least not with OMG WTF HE KILLED HIMSELF news stories coming out from time to time)

And now, they're backpedaling. And you know what? I'm kind of angry. Why report all the lurid crap? Why give us the "surrounded by PILLS" as the last mental image of this guy. Even if it's not true, it's still hard to shake.

Why not just wait, dammit. Why not say, "We believe he's been found dead. Foul play is not suspected." and leave it at that until you know for freaking sure.

(because this morning, the suggesting is that it was either accidental, or he was already ill with pneumonia - and maybe had a fatal reaction to a dosage that wouldn't have affected a healthy person. Or, hell, maybe pills have nothing to do with it - pneumonia can and does kill even young and otherwise healthy people sometimes)

I think this is, for me, the ugliest side of the 24-hour news cycle - the need to whip things up to some crazy messy froth. Like overbeating egg whites. And then, it just collapses later, but there's still the big mess, the slop, the salmonella. (Yes, I am good at stretching a metaphor nearly to the breaking point).

It's the whole "it bleeds, it leads" phenomenon.

And I find myself wondering: what about his family? What about his 2 year old kid? Two years old is enough to wonder "where did Daddy go" but not old enough to understand ANYTHING about Daddy's death other than a sense of abandonment. What about his friends?

If I had a friend who died in a sudden and unpleasant way, it would be very painful to see it promoted over and over again on the news as some kind of fodder for the sensation-seekers.

And why is it this way with younger stars? Is there some kind of sick fascination with the death of the young and famous, whether it's through an unavoidable accident, or a serious illness, or drugs, or misfortune, or their own hands? Many of the older famous folks who pass on get a brief mention, a nod, and then they're down the memory hole of the news, and only people like the film-bloggers or the music-bloggers actually eulogize them.