I can’t take the suspense

The above appears on the roof of a local coffee stand.

How can they do such a thing to all of us. Bagel sandwich’s what? How can we go on not knowing the rest of the sentence? It could be something scandalous like, “Now serving bagel sandwich’s secret desires.” It could be valuable information that could change my life, a la “Now serving bagel sandwich’s easy ways to get rich quick. No punctuation required.” The words “bagel sandwich’s” could be more than just the simple personification of baked goods. What if “bagel sandwich” is really a code word for some super -secret important person?

How can I go on not knowing? I curse you, damned bagel sandwich. Your secrets shall remain forever unknown.

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The Big (virtual) I

Cocktails

Looking for results? Visit the Division of Elections online. Not quite as fun as multicolored copies in a wire basket, but pretty darn close.

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Is it just me, or is everything buzzing?

The recipe
One triple-shot vanilla latte
One grande chai latte
One 16-ounce caramel latte
One Diet Pepsi

The result
Blogging at warp speed. Like, akin to Beavis. Heh hehehehe. Fire! Fire! Fire!

And you thought it was impossible to mix Star Trek and that infamous MTV animated classic.

“Hey Beavis ... Engage.”

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What’s a voter to do?

I’m just a mess about Election Day. It’s a nearly impossible scenario:

We have one D, one R and one I (for independent).

So, say your worst fear is that Candidate D wins. You would ordinarily lean toward the Candidate R, but you also really like many of the things Candidate I has to say. Still, you know Candidate I, being outside our lovely two-party system, will not likely win and will instead serve as a spoiler either for Candidate R or Candidate D. But the problem is, Candidate I used to be part of the R party, but in some ways speaks like a D.

In order to ensure that Candidate D doesn’t win, whom do you vote for? Do you vote for Candidate I, who perhaps would be the best choice of the three? If you do that, and every vote for Candidate I takes a vote away from Candidate R--your second choice--then you are helping to elect Candidate D. But if you vote for Candidate R, are you missing the chance to elect the person you think would really be best for the job?

I predict that many people will be very angst-ridden at the ballot box, myself included, whether they favor Candidate D, R or I. That or I am overanalyzing things again.

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Too much past blast

Be warned that my young adult life had a decidedly daytime-drama air to it, but my visits from the ghosts of upheavals past this evening were a bit more than I can process at once.

First, it’s pick my kids up at the ex’s trailer, where he lives with the woman who worked for me in high school, who he was dating before we met and who was, for a while after we were married, driving by our house at odd hours.

And if that’s not bad enough, I’m happily standing at the UScan checking out my small basket of groceries when a friendly “how are you doing” reaches my ears. I look up and see the friendly, smiling faces of two people, a couple, I knew when we were all teens. Awww. Nice. Sweet. Yeah, except the deal is that I know him because I had a six-month-long torrid relationship with him. I know her because she is the girlfriend he was “in the process of breaking up with” the whole time. (Note that these two are married now.) I know both of them because they are the ones who eventually ended with misdemeanor convictions for beating the crap out of me after school.

Hi, how are you doing? Whoa! Overload. I mumbled something pleasant and laughed nervously and then left. What the heck are you supposed to say? “Hi! How are the kids? You still wearing those strange, shiny underwear?”

Yeah. I always think of the best things to say after the fact.

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Mergers, diversification and other secrets of romance

I have a dear friend who would argue that relationships between two people--marriage, for instance--are more business deals than anything else. And we have delightful verbal tangos on the issue, with him telling me that I’m a sap (I am) and me telling him he often has the romantic inclinations of a fencepost (he does).

Now in many ways, this friend is correct. From a financial standpoint, a married couple will almost always have more potential for income than a single person. They live together in one house, pay one set of the expenses of living, and generally take advantage of that proven truth of business known as economy of scale. Though it isn’t in any written contract, many of the interactions of marriage resemble what one might see in a relationship between two businesses. If you cook dinner, I’ll do the dishes. If you work full time, I’ll work part time and take care of all of the household duties. It even enters into the most intimate parts of a relationship. Almost every couple who has been together for any length of time is familiar with bedroom bargaining.

So you have financial incentives, de facto contracts and heated bargaining. Sounds like business, no?

It does. But there’s one thing you throw into the equation and it taints the brew, so to speak, and calls into question the businesslike appearances of many relationships: love.

Go ahead, get all the eye-rolling and the “yep, she’s a sap,” stuff out of your system. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

OK, here’s my point:

In my opinion, love is solitary in nature and therefore independent of any business deal. You either love someone or you don’t. Love may grow or fade over time, but it either is or it isn’t. And it is not part of any reciprocal arrangement. There is no, “I’ll love you this much if you love me in return to an equal degree.” If you love someone, it really doesn’t matter whether they love you back or not. Their ability to do so has absolutely nothing to do with your own feelings. I think most people would agree that the statement, “I love you because you love me,” is loaded with all sorts of psychological dysfunction and is not something any of us would strive for. No, the best we can do is to say, “I love you regardless” and then hope for the best. That’s why loving relationships--whether they be a marriage or a friendship or a family--can be frightening at times. That’s why they are so rewarding when they work. That’s why their demise is so traumatic.

In the end, despite all of the wheeling and dealing, we are left only with the enormity of our unconditional love for another human being and the realization that we alone must deal with all that follows. You can’t hire out that task.

Bottom line: Business is dependent on reciprocity. The core of human relationships isn't.

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Friday morning poetry

Sometimes, the spam in my inbox is nearly poetic in its oddity:

Everything grows: your body, experience,
sexual desire but not your penis. Advanced Gain Pro
will make the last one grow too.
Advanced Gain Pro can enlarge your dick so
much that you won’t be scared of ruler anymore.
Try Now very cool


Sexual innuendo, random capitalization, badly translated language. What's not to love?

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History in the making?

A while back, I watched an online animation about the future of the press. You can watch it here.

The basic gist is that several mergers of online giants like Google and Amazon, combined with technology that allows people to create their own news portals, basically made the concept of news a self-selecting enterprise. For example, if you wanted to select, say, only information about pro wrestling and the latest on Pamela Anderson, then that is what would show up each day as the top news. Nothing about Korea. Nothing about a national election. Nothing about crime rates in your town skyrocketing. Only pseudo-athletes and big breasts.

In this futuristic world, what we now know as the giants of the fourth estate have become bankrupt and obsolete. Nobody reads the New York Times or listens to APRN. They simply get their “news” spoon-fed to them via the billions of self-proclaimed “journalists” across the Web. There is not even a baseline assurance that the things that you read are true or well-researched or created with any eye toward basic journalistic ethics. Everyone creates the news. The line between the journalist and the wingnut down the street is gone. The concept of balanced reporting is gone. If you want to hear only that all gay people are evil perverts, then you can set your channels to feed you gobs and gobs of diatribes to reinforce your bigotry on a daily basis.

I can’t help but wonder how close we are getting to this place. And I should state up front that I am a journalist by training and may be a bit snobbish about the journalist’s role in society. Still, the bottom line to this scenario, and to a certain degree this holds true even today, is that people seem to be growing less and less informed. And the scary thing is that they seem to be choosing to become that way. It’s ironic that in this age of so much information, people seem to have less information about things that are important. Perhaps it’s a consequence of information overload.

At any rate, I wonder if this scenario has ever played out in modern human history. What happens to a society that chooses to be ignorant of the things that allow it to govern itself wisely? Certainly we have plenty of examples of authoritarian regimes that block out their citizens’ access to information, but has there ever been a country where the people actually chose to simply look away, where people, even though they could learn about the important things in their society, simply say, “You know, I don’t really feel like it.”

Are we choosing the path to our own destruction?

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Innocence slipping

My 12-year-old son has always been a lot more insightful about human behavior than he ought to be at his age, so I guess our conversation tonight shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to me. Still, it says a lot about all of us when a seventh-grader picks up on the hypocrisy around him.

Our conversation began with him bemoaning the fact that some of the kids on his basketball team were giving him a hard time, telling him he is no good, etc. That was hard enough to hear, since I remember how damn hard middle school was. The worst thing was hearing him say, “The thing is Mom, is if you tell on them or they get caught, it really doesn’t do any good, because they don’t care about the consequences. They probably do get in-school suspension, but they don’t care. Their parents all just come in and say, ‘it was some other kid’s fault’ and the principal maybe believes them. And even if the principal doesn’t believe them, the kids don’t get into any trouble from their parents because their parents believe that their kid didn’t do it.”

What the heck do you say to that last statement? I make it a practice not to lie to my kids about the way the world works and I have to say that, in a lot of cases, he is spot on. I did mention the whole, “You have to live with yourself and your behavior at the end of the day” thing, which I believe strongly in, being a great avoider of guilt. Still, pretty sad that a 12-year-old observes this phenomenon that so many adults are blind to.

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'Its' just hilarious

What do you think it says about someone that said person thinks it's amusing to stand in front of a fridge rearranging the magnetic words and inserting apostrophes where they don't belong a la "It's hinges are so rusted its difficult to open."

Hee hee hee. I mean, that person is just sick. Sick, I tell you. And so is my--I mean that person's--copy editor friend. Freaks.

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No undergrad left behind

I have this uneasy feeling that higher education is about to go the way of K-12.

By that I mean, “Hello, I’m from the federal Department of Education and I’m here to make sure that YOU are accountable.”

And when I say “accountable,” I mean, “Let’s see how much money we can suck away from the classroom to create a huge bureaucracy to administer tests that we have engineered to tell us absolutely nothing.”

Hmm, not sure where that vitriolic rant came from. Years of repressing my true feelings in print, I suspect.

Anyway. “All Things Considered” had an interesting interview with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings this evening. In it, she spoke about a recently released report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. You can hear the full interview here but the message I got out of it was that higher education needed a few things, among them more money for scholarships, more information for parents and students about the education they are purchasing and more accountability for the money the federal government puts into higher education.

All of these things sound fine on their face, just as they did when officials said similar things during the genesis of NCLB. I mean, really, who can oppose things like students learning and public entities spending our money wisely?

But, a couple of things she said made me shudder. First, Michele Norris asked her whether she was advocating testing in higher education. Her answer was to say that she wouldn’t advocate a one-size-fits-all test. The inference here was that the universities or states should decide what type of evaluation system works best for them.

Then later in the interview she said that the federal government needed to offer higher education “incentives and assistance” to meet the challenges detailed in the report.

I’ll go out on a limb here and translate. Keep in mind this is my opinion and is filtered through my more-cynical-than-is-healthy brain, but try this one on for size:

Dear Higher Education (I capitalized that because people in higher ed REALLY like to capitalize things);

Since our recent report found that you are lacking in several areas, we are here to offer you some incentives and assistance to move to a new and exciting age in education.

First, we want you to develop a set of assessments. We’ll tell you what to include in them, what it takes to pass them and how often you have to give them, but we DO NOT want a one-size-fits-all test.

Please develop a large and expensive bureaucracy to administer this new testing system. We can’t afford to give you all the money to pay for this new department, but I’m sure you can find some money in your budget somewhere. Just so you won’t feel alone, we’ll do the same.

Once the testing system is in place, we’ll move on to how to bring every student up to 100 percent proficiency, but that’s a memo for another day.

Oh yes, I did mention incentives, didn’t I? Of course, we wouldn’t expect you to do this without some incentive. How’s this: Do it or we‘ll jerk your funding.

Love and kisses,
U.S. Department of Education

Whack me upside the head with a piece of celery if I’m wrong. I even have one you can borrow. I smell a changing tide in higher education, and if it’s anything like what NCLB is doing to K-12, it’s low tide in Ketchikan when the humpies are running. (Just ask someone who has lived there.)

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Attack of the killer ...

Well, celery, actually. I am now the proud possessor of an absurd amount of celery. As the mercury drops here in Fairbanks, those of us with gardens kick into holy-crap-I-had-better-pick-everything-before-I have-the-low-budget-version-of-flash-frozen-vegetables mode. (Most gardeners, however, probably don’t hyphenate quite as much as I do, though I believe that at least AP style would say that’s correct, no matter how over-the-top.)

But I digress. About these wily, green stalks. Apparently celery thrives on neglect and abuse--great, I have masochistic veggies--because I ignored it for most of the summer and didn’t really even bother to remove the chickweed from around it. The result of my black thumb was an armload of the stuff.

Now I’m soaked from washing all of it and about had to use my feet to stuff it into the bottom shelf of the fridge. What the heck am I going to do with a 10-pound, white-garbage-bag-encased brick of celery?

Perhaps I should fill every stalk with delicately seasoned cream cheese and head out on the town in search of a fancy soiree to crash. Of course I’d need a forklift to carry the trays.

OOO! OOO! I know. I’ll make 20 gallons of cream of celery soup. Yeah, and we can have it for dinner every night. I can freeze it and ... Oh wait. If I do that, a certain 6-year-old in my family will cry because she has to eat green soup and every night the strains of “Mommy, you make yucky food,” will haunt my dreams. Hmm. Scratch that idea. Better just do what I do with everything else I can’t find a use for right away.

Chop it up and throw it in the freezer.

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Shaggy mania

Mushroom saga, part deux: I went just a tad crazy last weekend. I found a field of shaggy mane mushrooms and the owners kindly allowed me to go pick them. I left with two brown shopping bags full and could have filled a couple more. This grassy lawn was just littered with the things. It was amazing. ‘Course, when I got home, I had to clean and process all of them, right away. See, there’s a bit of fine print with these mushrooms. They look all pretty and white in the field, but if you leave them uncooked overnight you will have a stinky black mess. (Shaggy manes belong to a group of mushrooms known as “inky caps.”)

So, the result was four hours of washing, chopping, cooking and freezing. It was, I must say, exhausting work. Still, I’ll have enough for soups and sauces for the winter, which is a good thing. Now if I can only get some ducks to go with it. Mmmm. Duck.

Anyway, as a bonus to this little excursion to someone else’s lawn, I ran across huge bunches of what I believe to be fried chicken mushrooms, shown below, which are also supposed to be a good edible.


The deal with these is you have to be careful because they supposedly resemble some other poisonous varieties. One test, which goes along with a few other things, is to take a spore print. Pink spores=bad. White spores=good. My mother also notes that she has never heard of a poisonous mushroom that actually tastes good. Of course, that’s a little bit more risky.

At any rate, I was elated to find a white spore print and so now will try a tiny bit and see whether I keel over or not. *grin* So if I’m not back within a couple of weeks, I probably offed myself with a mushroom. Kidding. Kidding.

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Equal opportunity elite

For those of us who are feeling left out of the inner circle of power in Alaska politics, Cafe Press now offers a lovely assortment of items for purchase that allow wearers to proudly proclaim that they too are among the esteemed leaders of our great state who, for the past year (at least), have been guiding our government with morality and strength of character.

Er. Yeah.

Check it out here.

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I'll sleep better

This from the "about us" section of the English online version of "People's Daily" in Beijing:

"People's Daily brings you the latest news dispatches of policy
information and resolutions of the Chinese Government and major
domestic news and international news releases from China. It reflects
the views of the Chinese people, expounds on justice and lambasts
various forms of malpractice."

You know, I feel better knowing that someone out there is expounding on justice, because in my opinion, there is just too much silence out there on the topic of justice. And good for them for lambasting malpractice. It's even better that they make sure to practice equal-opportunity lambasting of various forms of malpractice. It would be a shame to focus one's lambasting on just a single sort of malpractice. I mean, really, what good is it to only lambaste, say, the dairy farmer who sells you sour milk when there are lawyers and mechanics and shopkeepers and doctors that are all equally deserving of lambasting? Where's the justice there, I ask you. Where indeed?

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In search of the king

I spent half a day on Sunday wandering in the woods picking mushrooms and now am feeling just a bit obsessed. The sun was shining in my office window this afternoon and what was I thinking? It would be cool to be lounging in the yard? I wish I could go for a long drive with the top down? Nope. I was thinking, "I bet if I could just spend a little time back in the trails I could find some more tasty mushrooms."

I found a small number of regular boletus on Sunday, enough for one meal with steak, along with a few other things that, after looking at the spore prints and the book, to be either poisonous or inedible. Alas, my most prized quarry, the king bolete, has thus far eluded me. These large 'shrooms resemble their cousins, with a reddish/tan cap and spongy-looking gills. But they are much larger and--here's the best part--don't bruise dark when you cut them. They are oh so tasty.

Now if I can just find a place where the dang things are growing, it would simply make my fall, especially since I've been out of the state for most of berry season.

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Hellfire and dumbnation

Here's an amusing exercise:

Let's see who can come up with the best euphamism, expression, metaphor or simile to describe utter stupidity. Hell, I'll even take plain old synonyms, made up or not. A colleague and I had great fun in just five minutes of brainstorming, so I'm sure that, with the eternity that the blogosphere offers, we can come up with some great ones. Now let's see, what did we come up with today...

Dumb as a box of rocks
Not the brightest bulb
Not the sharpest tool
Dipstick
Shallow pool
Sheeple

And, in honor of my love for mixing metaphors:
Can't see the forest for the fog of stupidity
or its variation
Can't see the forest for the tree that fell on his head

I'll add more as I think of them. Now come on people. Let's work together in the name of the dumb.

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It never goes away

It's election night. It's quarter to midnight. I actually know what percentage of precincts have reported results: 66.97 percent. I have the division of elections Web site in the background and have been refreshing it way more than is useful. I know exactly how I would be rewriting my lead to make deadline, because it doesn't look like results will be in on time. Phrases like, "as of midnight" and "was the apparent victor" come to mind. I'm reluctant to go to bed, because I really want to know now.

This is the second election since I left the paper, the first major one. And I do miss the excitement of election night, that and the fun at the Big I afterward. Don't think that will ever go away.

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Belated patriotic mourning

My 6-year-old daughter was questioning me this morning about my recent trip to D.C.

She asked me, "Did you see Washington?"

I said, "Yes, I went to Washington and saw some of the city."

"No," she said. "Did you see that guy. Washington."

I smiled, "You mean the monument?"

"No," she said, a bit frustrated. "Did you see him?"

"You mean the first president?" I asked. "He's dead, sweetie."

"WHAT? WHAT? WHAT?" she exclaimed. "He's dead?"

"Yeah," I said. "He's been dead for more than 100 years."

Her response?

"Oh man."

Just goes to show the context of a 6-year-old's life. ;)

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But ... I was there.

Here's a really strange sensation:

I'm standing talking to my former spouse this evening and mention some not-so-lovely things that happened while we were married. He replies that they never happened. Now, I was there. He was there. We both know the stuff happened. Then how does someone look another person in the eye, knowing they know the truth, and say something like this? And better yet, what the heck is the appropriate response to such a thing? Probably leaving, I guess. Some folks just aren't in touch with reality.

And no, this isn't related to my former post.

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