Importance of Being Earnest, originally uploaded by tdouthat.

I’m sitting in the small gym at Truman High School watching Jill’s basketball practice. This is her first practice with her new team, the Blazers. It’s a big program in Independence with about 22 teams in different age divisions. Most of the teams play in AAU tournaments and some play in local leagues. I’ve only been watching for about 30 minutes but this is a whole new level for me. I’ve never been involved in a competition program before. Practices are run completely different and the kids are completely different. Everyone is much more serious, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s refreshing to see this many people being earnest.

Michelle and I like to laugh at the Horatio Caine character in CSI:Miami because he is so cheesy and earnest, but I also secretly envy the attitude. It’s hard to not be sarcastic, cynical, and ironic all the time. It takes a lot of emotional energy to actually care about what goes on around you, but I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion that maybe people who give a crap are happier, healthier people. Maybe not everything is a joke and an opportunity to screw around.

Jill has more skills than I knew about. At her practices with her winter league IYAA team, she was so busy clowning and mouthing off, that I never noticed that she is actually a pretty good player.

This little discussion reminds me of an article I found a few months ago about
playing to win. It talks about the extra depth that brings to a video gaming experience, but I think you could apply it to any competitive endeavor.

Well, that’s enough for one night. Maybe now that I’ve switched from using Blogger to WordPress I’ll post more often. (Heck, maybe I could become an earnest blogger who competes for readers with other blogs.)

Office Space
Originally uploaded by tdouthat.

The Religious Right is winning the culture war. Mostly because they are the only ones fighting in it. I just watched the latest episode of Frontline on pbs.org. The title is “The Last Abortion Clinic”. It’s about the pro-life movement’s attempts to close down the last abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi.

Now, despite being a dues-paying member of Planned Parenthood, I’m no big fan of abortion. I consider it a tragedy and a failure of our education and healthcare systems that so many women end up having unwanted pregnancies. And I don’t intend to write in defense of abortion. My problem is that there are no moderates addressing the issue. The right-wing thumps their Bibles, screams bloody murder, and gets pro-life candidates elected to office, and the left-wing does all their fighting in the courts going on-and-on about women’s rights. But the elected officials get to decide who the judges are, so you can see how this is going to work out. Abortion will get outlawed soon, but in the meantime a great deal of damage is being done to our public institutions.

The agenda of the pro-life activists is much broader than just getting abortion outlawed and they are getting more politically savvy and making progress on many fronts. These people are just one portion of the Christian Conservatives who are fighting against birth control, AIDS education, evolution, and separation of church and state. They are getting abstinence-only sex education taught in the schools. They are interfering with public health measures like condom distribution and needle exchange that would slow the spread of AIDS. They are getting the Kansas Board of Education to redefine science in the state education standards so that it no longer just applies to natural phenomena. They claim discrimination if they’re asked not to lead the entire audience in prayer at government events or to not put up the Ten Commandments in government buildings, and in many places they just go ahead and do it anyway.

They are just going to win more and more of these fights as time goes on because they are just going to keep getting elected to public office. They have ready-made political organizations behind them in their church congregations. The moderates just don’t stand a chance against that because politically moderate people just don’t go to church much anymore. I hear statistics occassionally about the large percentage of the population that goes to church regularly, but either I live in a neighborhood that is oddly skewed towards the godless-heathen persuasion, or a lot of people are lying to the pollsters. I would tend to believe the latter.

I hate to say it, but people who are less-than-enthusiastically religious should probably consider going to church more often. If not, then you may have to cede the public square and the right to make decisions about public policy to those who are more enthusiastic about their dogma.

Short post tonight: I just found three interesting things on the net tonight that I felt like sharing.

First, an interview with my favorite author, Neal Stephenson at Salon.com provided an interesting quote on the nature of programming: “I think there are common threads between writing and programming. That’s a really easy statement for people to misunderstand and twist around so I’m a little leery of making it. All I’m saying is that the thing you’re making — the novel or the computer program — has got a very complicated and finely wrought hierarchical structure to it. The structure has to work right or the whole thing fails. But the only way you can work on it is by hitting one character at a time. You’re building this thing one character at a time while having to maintain the whole structure in your head. That description applies equally well to programming and novel writing even though they’re very different activities.”

Second, an article from National Review Online on the nature of stupidity and laziness. It starts out with a Jonathan Swift “A Modest Proposal” sort of feel to it that provoked some thought. It declines near the end, but I thought it was worth a read.

Third, an amusing quote from Lance Armstrong: “If there was a god, I’d still have both nuts.”

Home Repair
Originally uploaded by tdouthat. Good morning. It’s Saturday. I got up about half an hour ago, and I’ve done several of my usual morning chores. I didn’t bother with the showering since I’m going to be painting the living room in a little bit. We started having… Actually we had our first family meeting last Sunday and I hope it is the first of regular weekly meetings. We set up days for each one of the four of us to cook one dinner a week, and we talked about the work that needs to be done around the house. The decision was made that the first project for us to work on would be to finish painting the living room and foyer. Jill has a soccer game at 3:00 so I probably won’t get a heck of a lot done before then, but at least I will have started on it.

During the family meetings we also talked about the fact that we need to save some money so that we can buy new siding for the house. I’m supposed to report back every week on how much I’ve paid off the credit cards so we know when we’re getting close to the point where we can run up some more debt to pay for the siding. What would be really nice would be if I could pay off the credit cards, and at the same time, save the money to pay for the siding, but that isn’t terribly likely. The siding is starting to look visibly shitty even from a block away. When I turn the corner from Indian onto Belmont, I can see the patches of rot at the bottom of the hardboard on the northeast side of the house. Board and batten siding is supposed to be inexpensive and easy to maintain, but the fuckers that built this house bought an odd size that you can only get from Sutherland’s lumber around here. Plus you then have to have a table saw to cut the damn thing to size, a ladder to get up on the side of the house, and help from at least one other person in order to hold the thing in place while you nail it up, and then you half to put the batten back on and caulk around the nail holes and seams before you paint it. Does any of that sound easy to maintain to you? Here’s what would be easy: It takes one person with a screw gun ten minutes to take down the existing piece of siding and put up the new one. You’d probably still need a ladder to get up high.

Speaking of ladders, why don’t they make them with a weight limit of more than 225 pounds. Is that some sort of standard weight limit? My 296.5 pound ass is scared to death to get up on one of those rickety little bitches out of fear that it will collapse under me when I get to the top. I need to buy a heavy duty extension ladder, but the ones that will hold my weight are ridiculously expensive. I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to paint the ceiling and upper walls in our foyer. I hate to think it, but I may have to rent scaffolding from Home Depot in order to get it done. These stupid home designers just don’t think about the people who are going to own these houses and about how they are going to have to maintain them. I guess the same could be said of programmers and the systems they write. 11:23

The hotel bar
Originally uploaded by tdouthat. Hey y’all. There was nothing good on TV upstairs in the hotel room, I didn’t feel like reading, and I’m not ready for bed, so here I am at a bar called Chaddick’s in the Plano, Texas Marriott. The place kind of reminds me of the hotel bar in “Lost in Translation”. I feel like Bill Murray in that I’m sitting here lonely watching all these other groups of people socializing. (There is even a bit of the language barrier thing. The Guatemalan bartender is talking to the lady a few stools down in Spanish telling her how to get to a bar in Dallas. The bars in Plano close at midnight, but Dallas bars close at 2:00.)
The television is playing Best Damn Sports Show Period on Fox Sports but the sound is turned off so its just a bunch of talking heads making funny faces. I wish that they had Comedy Central on the TV in the room, but they only have about 25 channels from the satellite.
I would go swimming but the pool closed at 11:00. It’s a nice pool up on the roof, with a whirlpool too.
I guess I’ll just finish my beer and go back upstairs and read some more of “Altered Carbon”, a science fiction book that Amazon.com recommended for people who like Neal Stephenson. I’ve read all the books that Neal Stephenson has written so far, so I figured I would try something similar to his stuff.
There is apparently some sort of big soccer tournament in town. There are about a half dozen women soccer players sitting next to me trying to figure out where to party tonight. I feel bad about stereotyping but about half of them look like lesbians to me.
There is an old guy (60?) next to me drinking a Dewars and water. Yuck. Give it to me straight up or don’t bother.
A British guy is getting loaded with some friends over at a table. He has on a Homer Simpson t-shirt that extols the virtues of alcohol.
There are an oddly large number of foreigners in this city. I’m guessing that it is related to the large number of corporate headquarters and technology companies in Plano.
Too much information… One of the soccer chicks is talking about the slurping sound that a breast pump makes.
Time to pay and go.

 

Greetings from Plano
Originally uploaded by tdouthat.

Howdy. I’m in Plano for two weeks of training for work. Click on the picture to go to flickr to look at the rest of the pictures that I’ve taken.

 

Here’s dad eating birthday cake at Aunt Faye’s 84th birthday party.

I’m not a big fan of celebrity journalism but I’ve been thinking about Tom Cruise and his Scientology bullshit. He got into a debate with Matt Lauer on the Today show Friday about psychiatry and scientology, and Matt Lauer tried to get on him about it, but wasn’t prepared enough to be able to make Cruise look truly stupid.
Which makes me think of Judge Roy Moore. I read a biography of him that said he was a graduate of West Point and the University of Alabama School of Law and was a Vietnam Veteran. He was somehow smart enough to be able to become the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, but he is stupid enough to think that putting a 10 Commandments monument in the rotunda of a government building is a good idea.
There are a lot of fundamentalist Christians who would seem to have all the bona fides of a smart person, but are fundy nutbags anyway. Is being a true believer really a matter of intelligence? If it were, then rational debate ought to have an effect on these people as they learn the arguments for and against their beliefs and come to the realization that their beliefs are irrational. But these otherwise smart people just don’t budge when confronted with facts and reason. Are they brainwashed? How did they get brainwashed and how do you correct that mistake? I’ve heard of de-programmers kidnapping Hare Krishnas and fixing their brainwashing, but you can’t do that to a whole churchful of Pentecostals. So what do you do?