June 2006 Archives

Yesterday, fellow blogger Oren expressed amusement that my mother comments on my blog. I suppose it does seem strange if you don't know my mom.

My veil of pseudonymity doesn't extend to members of my family; mom knows who I am. And my knowing she is out there checking this site daily, I do occasionally feel that I have to self-censor but honestly not that often. That's mostly because I don't do anything even approaching illicit behavior (anymore), but partly it's because of the general coolness of my mother.

As a parent, my mom was always able to achieve that very delicate balance between being a Parent and being a Friend. It wasn't like she was one of those pathetic hipster moms desperately trying to act 20 years younger, smoking pot with her kids and hitting on their friends, but she also wasn't a total oldster constantly eliciting her children's embarrassment over her terminal squareness.

I think a lot of it came from her being a high school teacher. When my sister and I were teenagers, my mom had a hundred others to deal with besides us and she saw just how truly bad kids can get. Nothing my sister or I did -- nothing we pierced, dyed, wore, or listened to -- was anything my mom hadn't seen before.

I've already written about how she used to judge her students' intelligence via Monty Python quotes. She also went to midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with them. It's not like she dressed up as Frank-N-Furter or anything; she just went to have a good time, and, I'm sure, keep an eye on them.

In short, my mom knew how to relate to teenagers and young adults. She didn't try to emulate our lingo, listen to our music, or live our lifestyle. But she kept an open mind about it, didn't judge (well, not often), and kept us pointing in the right direction.

So, true to her form, she's not out there blogging herself, but she's keeping an eye on me. Just like a mom.

The Detroit Tigers continue to kick some Major League ass, but my mother reports that Detroiters are tentative with their excitement. It's not like it was back in 1984 when the town roared with Tiger fever and the "Bless You Boys" slogan was plastered everywhere you looked. I'll admit to also being cautiously optimistic from my remote Tiger Den here in Seattle (where the Mariners are suddenly winning baseball games, too! What's up with that?!)

Detroiters have seen so many promised "renaissances," "urban renewals," and "empowerment zones" evaporate over the last two decades that I can't blame them for not getting their hopes up about having a championship baseball team in their midst.

Living in Detroit is what I imagine it's like to live with an abusive spouse. At first, you're attracted to their raw grittiness and "bad boy" (or girl) attitude. There are hints of their true nature but you're too caught up in the emotion to notice. Then they put the smack down on you and reality starts to set in. But they seem to feel really bad about it, and they apologize, and it's really just that they love you so much they can't help it, and they promise to get help, and they swear to you that they'll never hit you again. Until the next time.

It's nice to see that the Tigers are making good progress, but the bruises still hurt and we're not trusting them just yet.

Now maybe if you show me a (World Series) ring on that finger, I'll believe you!

Major Readers who follow my DVD-viewing habits via the convenient "I'm Watching" segment of the right-hand column know that Netflix recently delivered the romantic-comedy ("romedy"?) classic Sleepless in Seattle to Chez Steel.

It's been thirteen years since this first pairing of Tom "Bosom Buddies" Hanks and Meg "Amityville 3D" Ryan won the hearts of mainstream American moviegoers. Newspapers (even our own stellar local duo) still use "Something-less in Seattle" variations in headlines as if they were ever actually funny. Like it or not, it's part of our local culture and something people identify the city with -- like rain, the Space Needle, and Kurt Cobain's suicide -- so I felt obligated to watch it at least once.

I knew I was going to hate it. I just couldn't know how much....

At every university I've attended or worked at, there are both myths and true tales regarding the network of steam tunnels under the campus. At Iowa, for example, a certain professor routinely disappeared after class in one building only to reappear in another building well ahead of us. We always assumed he held a coveted "tunnel key" and navigated the subterranean world to avoid the bitter cold on the surface. At Wisconsin, stories were told of "Tunnel Bob," a six-foot-six homeless guy who lived in the tunnels and was once given a job changing light bulbs.

Now here, I finally managed to come up with a legitimate reason (and permission) to venture into the dungeons below the ground. While reorganizing our storage room, we came across a bunch of old coaxial and fiber-optic cable emerging from a hole in the middle of the floor. As we're in the basement of the building, the origin of the cables was a bit of a mystery. When we shone a flashlight down the pipe, we discovered an entire room below the floor. The next question was: how do we get down there?

My former boss killed herself yesterday by jumping out of a forty-story building in San Francisco. Those of you who know my True Identity know whom I'm talking about (and others who read the news can probably figure it out).

Despite my professional relationship with her, I didn't know her that well. She left me pretty much alone to run my department, and I rarely needed to bother her with much. She was a strong, confident, intimidating figure and the manner of her death has shocked a lot of people.

The incident that my mind raced back to as soon as I heard the news occurred shortly before she left my university to start a new job in California. She was always very outspoken, and there already had been a lot of controversy and media coverage about some things she had said. She called me in to help her handle her email transition from our school to the other. It was a routine technical matter that my department handles all the time, but when I tried to delegate the task she insisted that I meet with her personally. We spent about an hour determining which messages needed to be saved and which could be trashed.

During that time, she was more animated and excited than usual. She shared with me several messages she had received from reporters and the general public -- some supportive, some critical. She fixated on the critical ones and asked me repeatedly if I thought the writer seemed crazy. "I mean, that's just nuts, right?" she asked of several after reading them aloud. "I can just trash this one, right?" she asked me before every press of the "Delete" key. It was odd to me that she was so interested in my opinion, in revealing this much anxiety -- it just didn't fit the character of the independent and secure woman that I knew. She was also insistent that her deleted mail really would be deleted. I assured her that it would be, and when I returned to my department I asked my sysadmin to securely shred her mailbox. Overall, it seemed she was having fun with it all -- the attention, the scandal, the new opportunities.

As I now know, she wasn't having fun -- not then, probably, and certainly not lately.

It still doesn't add up -- the image of her walking tall and proud through the corridors of our school with the image of her taking those last strides to the edge of a balcony and into oblivion. Only in that single hour I spent in her office staring with her at a computer screen did I glimpse her underlying vulnerability and insecurity. For all her accomplishments, all her victories, she still needed someone to reassure her that she wasn't the crazy one, someone to make all her problems (or reminders of them) go away.

Our house in Seattle is near the border of three neighborhoods: Ballard, Greenwood, and Crown Hill. Which one we're technically "in" depends on which map you look at.

The business district is a mix of trendy condos and run-down buildings. Over the two years that we've lived here, I've taken note of several snigger-worthy shops and just plain weird buildings that I've decided to immortalize in digital photo glory.

I tend to pick on The Seattle Times, but I find it justifiable given that the paper truly is terrible.

Today's review of the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 mobile device started with this sentence:

Unlike movies, where a sequel can be a huge flop, the latest version of the Sidekick could be a blockbuster.

Unlike movies, where a sequel can be a huge flop, mobile devices can be blockbusters.

Unlike Basic Instinct 2, which was a huge movie sequel flop, the Sidekick can be a huge blockbuster.

The comparison is simply ill-conceived and useless, but the real problem is verb tense. The article is a review of an existing device that has been tested and evaluated, yet the first phrase is about movies and it refers to their potential using a modal auxiliary verb ("can"). The second phrase is about the Sidekick and is in the conditional (it "could be a blockbuster"). Is the review telling me what the product is like (i.e. what a review is supposed to do) or whether or not it thinks it might sell successfully?

It's amazing what a mess can be made with just twenty words.

OK, so it look like NO ONE of the five (five!? I get 100+ visits a day. What's up with you people?) quiz-takers got the right answer in the first Major Quiz on this blog.

The red herring was "The Hurons." Neither Amy nor I attended a school that desecrated the memory of Native Americans by naming a football team after a tribe.

Amy's junior high school mascot was the Trojans. When Amy was in sixth grade, her town's two junior schools merged, and the incoming students were called upon to select a new mascot from among several choices. Amy voted for "The Scorpions." Everybody else voted for "The Trojans" and giggled whilst doing so.

Amy's college mascot at UC Santa Cruz was, indeed, the "fighting" Banana Slug. Santa Cruz is known for its iconoclasm and egalitarianism (for example, they don't offer grades). According to the university's web site, "the students' adoption of such a lowly creature for a team mascot was their reaction to the fierce athletic competition fostered at most American universities."

In high school, I had the misfortune of having to root for "The Tractors." Wikipedia has a good write up on Fordson High School, which explains that Fordson was the "name of the tractor produced by a separate company operated by Henry Ford and his son Edsel, which later merged with Ford Motors."

Then, in college, I had to endure my identity as a "Tartar" at Wayne State University. WSU changed mascots in 1999 and became "The Warriors." Undoubtedly, now instead of taunts related to dental hygiene or fried fish sauce, they face calls to "Come out to playeeeyaaay!!!"

I want to see more activity next time. No more lurking. To read this blog, you need to commit!

It looks like we're back online. Dreamhost had been having some issues with DNS and none of the methods they recommended to get things sorted out worked for me. So I cried to them last night around 10:00, and it looks like they (or automagic) fixed the problem.

The site's been down for a couple days, but I've been blogging, so make sure you check out all the new posts.

Amy and I never got married. We are fortunate that our families respected our decision. I can't say that we have faced many hardships due to our unmarried status (except for spousal health care coverage) as we live in a highly liberal community and are surrounded by like-minded folks, some of whom have, likewise, chosen to remain "living in sin."

When we were interviewed by CNN [CNN Transcript; scroll down to near the bottom] a couple years ago for a special feature on unmarried couples, we found it rather hard to report any difficulties or downsides to not being married. The interviewer seemed to press the issue a bit looking for some conflict for the story, but in the end they just featured a quote by Amy (or "UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE," as the transcript and I like to call her) about why how she viewed marriage as a discriminatory institution, and they ran various clips of the three of us happily walking along the canal. (I harbor no bitterness about being left on the cutting room floor; the world is obviously not ready for what I had to say on the matter).

Given that the issue of marriage has become even more politicized over the last several years, I am happy about the decision we made in that it serves as a sterling example that two people can have a happy, stable relationship and be warm and caring parents outside of a "traditional" marriage. In fact, when you contrast Amy's and my relationship to, for example, my previous horrific marriage then the idea that the institution itself bestows some kind of special bond or solidity onto a relationship becomes even more absurd. But my reasons for not saying "I Do" had more to do with a sense that the institution of marriage was largely irrelevant, and not due to any burning desire to make a huge political statement.

The Savage Minds blog -- a site run by students and professors of anthropology -- recently featured an article entitled "The End of Marriage," which addresses many of the fallacies and myths promulgated by the Religion Right in the ongoing wars over the "sanctity" of marriage, but also confirms my suspicions that marriage is not all that critical or important in our society.

I'll let the anthropologists explain:

I haven't written anything for the last couple days because (a) I've been too busy during lunchtime, and (b) I've been spending my evening blogging hours watching "The Sandbaggers".

"The Sandbaggers" is a British TV series from the late 1970's about the special operations section of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service. You don't get fancy cars, gadgets, or super villains with a giant "laser" bent on ruling the world. The spies are all under-paid working stiffs, and their boss, Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden), is constantly at odds with his superiors over the appropriate use of his team. There are some scenes featuring actual spycraft and action, but in the first episode Burnside reminds a Norwegian agent (and the audience) that spies spend most of their time "moving papers from in tray to out tray" and that operations aren't won in the field but in the planning rooms and offices of Whitehall.

I think what I especially like about the show is that it's a veritable primer for management in the public sector. The major battles Burnside fights aren't with the Soviets, but those that involve limited resources, multiple masters, and internal turf wars. The bureaucracy is depicted as a fact of life overlaid upon the strategizing, scheming, and worrying inherent in their work. In several scenes, Burnside is lecturing staff or involved in intense discussion with his agents, and someone will walk up and casually hand him a paper to sign.

He only has three special operatives in his unit and the entire world to cover, so he must constantly evaluate the missions handed down and be prepared to say "No" -- probably the most important skill in a public-sector manager's toolkit. In many situations, Burnside is forced to make critical, perhaps life-threatening decisions by taking an educated guess. These scenarios comprise the most tense moments of the series as, early on, it is established that the writers are not afraid of killing off a main character or two.

"The Sandbaggers" is available on DVD now and is available via Netflix. I highly recommend it.

My usually-rock-solid web host, Dreamhost, is experiencing a bit of a snaggle with DNS, which has temporarily knocked Out of the Mist offline. If you can read this, then we're back up.

Note to those receiving e-mail notifications: you might get this post (and others) in e-mail before the site is back up. Yet another reason to subscribe!

Another landmark from my youth will soon be gone. Venerable Tiger Stadium, the 90-year-old playing field at the corner of Michigan and Trumbell, is on the demolition block, according to the Detroit Free Press:

Tiger Stadium will be demolished to make way for homes and stores under a plan that will save parts of the historic baseball venue, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said Friday.

A portion of the field as well as a small piece of the stadium itself will remain.

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