Please Stop Talking to Me -- I Just Want to Buy This and Go

I am a pretty socially awkward person. I'm an introvert, I'm shy, I'm terrible at small talk -- after I know someone well, it gets a lot better, but until then, I'm pretty lost. It's not necessarily how I want to be, but I doubt I'm going to change at this point. This means it's getting increasingly unpleasant to just go to a store and buy stuff.

Every time I go to a cashier nowadays, I get a whole lot of chatter. I don't know if this is a recent phenomenon, but it sure seems like it. Granted, this is a totally first-world problem, if even that. It's never a horrible experience for me. But it does seem like an unnecessary chore. I never know what to say. And then when I do say something, I often say something kinda lame, and on the way home I kick myself a little about it.

Maybe most people love to chat with cashiers. After all, most people are extroverts -- around 75% of the population. But for the 25% of us who are introverts, it's not easy.

There are degrees. When it's a cashier at some mom-and-pop store, it's not so bad. You get the feeling that this is just a chatty person. But when it's a cashier at a big chain, I always assume that this is a sort of store mandate -- that they are forced by corporate dictum to chat up everyone who comes in, because extensive research has revealed that, subsequent to the requisite jibber-jabber, customers will see this local franchise #1432398-3 of Megalofoods as their down-home, aw-shucks meetin' hole. Then they'll bring all their young'uns and grandpappies and have a good ol' time, which will then provide sufficient cash outflow for Megalofoods to purchase the Amazon River and drain it of endangered tree frogs to sell as "beef substitute."

Is that paranoid? Maybe a little bit. But you can't deny that sometimes it is explicitly store-mandated chatter: specifically, when they try to sell you the store credit card or club membership or whatever. I always say "no thank you." I don't want a commitment here. I just want a freaking donut.

This probably goes back to my near-pathological aversion to salespeople. Which in turn might go back to my childhood fear of ventriloquist dummies. You might not see where I'm going with this.

When I was a kid, ventriloquist dummies seemed human but they weren't. I just wasn't sure, and felt like that dummy sitting in the corner of the room could spring to life at any moment. Meanwhile, salespeople are talking to me like they're regular humans -- but they're not, they're salespeople. They're relating to you only because they want something out of you. It's all fake -- fake niceness, fake concern, fake everything, just to manipulate you into giving up more of your money.

I'm sorry, that's a terrible thing to say. It's just how talking with salespeople makes me feel. On the other hand, what I know, intellectually, is that sales is a really tough job that a lot of people need to do to keep any economy afloat. I certainly couldn't do it, not for a day, so I have an admiration for those who can.

A distant admiration, that is. I still have this deep-seated repulsion when I'm in the situation, a repulsion that I do feel guilty about later. I saw a documentary once about a parking lot (I am an exciting guy), in which the workers talked about how people always treated them like crap, refusing to look at them, throwing money at them, arguing with them about the rules -- basically treating them like inferiors.

I don't want to be like that. I want to treat everyone with respect. But I'm also not comfortable enough talking to strangers, and especially not potential salespeople, to go along with the chatter. When I go to buy something I answer all questions briefly and directly and say "thank you" at the end. But I make almost no eye contact and I don't smile. I am capable of doing so, but I'm so devoted to avoiding small talk that I'm willing to make myself seem like a dorky, semi-autistic weirdo.

Some cashiers take the hint. The ones at many big chains don't, perhaps because they aren't allowed to. The worst are at Potbelly Sandwiches, Barnes and Noble, and Trader Joe's. I gave up going to Potbelly because I got so exhausted with the small talk. I rarely go to Barnes and Noble any more -- Amazon.com keeps looking better and better each time the Barnes and Noble cashiers try to push a Nook or a membership on me.

I have to go to Trader Joe's because they're the only place with $3 bottles of wine. But I always buy around two cases of alcohol so I don't have to go again for a long time. (Which then means that cashiers always say either "Wow, I want to come to your house! Ha ha ha" or "You having a party?," to which I always want to say "No, this is just for me, tonight. I'm trying to drink myself to death.")

I'm probably sounding like a jerk at this point, and I certainly don't want to. I don't think I am a jerk --I'm just a severe introvert. There's a big difference. Jerks look down on people. Introverts are afraid of them. Extroverts don't usually try to understand this distinction, so we introverts are usually seen as aloof at best and assholes at worst. But we're really not terrible people. We just are not comfortable talking to you unless we know you.

So cashiers of the world, when someone shuffles up to you, eyes averted and frowning, please, please, take the hint and don't talk to him about the weather. Don't talk about how much you love whatever he's buying. Don't try to push whatever you've been told to push on him. Just let him pay and go. Otherwise, you're going to be scaring even more people towards Internet shopping. If only $3 bottles of wine were available at Amazon ...

The Ten Commandments: A Critique

Like many kids, I had to memorize the Ten Commandments. When you're a kid, you just kind of just accept them as written. God said them, and adults say that God said them, so that means they are definitely right.

I think this childhood indoctrination is why most of us still assume they're a set of pretty reasonable rules. Conservatives take it farther, saying they're the foundation of our government. Which is of course a load of crap: Only a few of the Ten Commandments are even laws anywhere in the United States, much less foundational ones. None are in the Constitution, for example, and some Commandments are directly contradicted by constitutional amendments. (I'm thinking of freedom of religion specifically -- that is not an idea God tends to be big on.) I guarantee I can find one essay by John Locke that has more constitutional principles than are in the whole Old Testament.

But anyway, the Ten Commandments are not only irrelevant to the U.S. Constitution -- some of them are pretty darn ridiculous. Now that we're all grown-ups, with internal senses of morality and abilities to engage in critical thinking and stuff like that, we can take a closer look at the Ten Commandments. Let's go through them one by one.

1. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.

I'm not crazy about the fact that this one starts us off. But I'm not surprised, because this is pretty much the whole thrust of the Old Testament. As Bill Maher has noted, God usually comes across as a very insecure abusive boyfriend. Usually all he says is some variation on "Love me or else." "Love me or you'll all be flooded." "Love me or your city will be burned by the Babylonians." God's main way to gain power and influence is by making mortal threats. He's basically a Bond villain.

Sometimes you get a different spin on it. Sometimes it's more like "Prove that you love me by killing your only son." That's some pretty damn twisted stuff. That's beyond Bond villains -- that's more in the realm of a Hannibal Lecter.

At least this Commandment softens the message, putting in the terms of a neurotic mother laying a guilt trip on you. "You know, I did rescue you from slavery. So maybe you should find some time in your busy schedule to sacrifice a calf for me now and again?"

2. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Yeah, God, we heard you the first time. Worship only you -- got it loud and clear. I realize that you're hopelessly insecure -- or in your terms, "jealous" -- but all you're doing here is giving more detail about how we should not have any other gods before you, which you covered in the first one. It's like if I said "Rule number 1: Don't eat my food. Rule number 2: Don't pick up my food, bite it, chew it, swallow it, pass it through your esophagus, digest it, and eventually poop it out. If you do, holy cow I will beat you up and every innocent person who is related to you."

And moreover, God, you've only got ten commandments here, and you just blew the second one with what is essentially a footnote to the first. You realize there are lots of terrible things people can do, right? Like rape? And slavery? You will find room for rape and slavery, right? OK, sorry, I shouldn't judge too early. Let's keep going.

3. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

Huh. Okay -- again, you only have ten of these. Now you're devoting a whole Commandment to making people say "goshdarnit" instead of "goddammit." I hate to be an armchair quarterback here, but is this really such a huge problem? In my experience, people who neglect to use their turn signals cause more death and destruction than people saying "God!"

Wait, is this just a footnote to the footnote of the first one? Is this still just telling us to love you? Are you going "Number 1: Only me! Number 2: Seriously, only me! No whittling driftwood into statues of Zeus or I'll totally kick your ass! Number 3: Seriously! Don't even say my name with a crappy attitude!" (I think I stole that one from Bill Maher too, by the way.)

4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy

Well, hell, this is actually a pretty good one. Here you're enacting a pretty decent labor law: Once a week, everyone gets a day off. I'm with you 100%. Good work.

However, I must say, if I were editing the Bible, I'd replace the long and boring list of applicable people with just the word "everybody." But I realize that's just splitting hairs. Or who knows, maybe people 4000 years ago needed a list like this. Maybe they were like "OK, yeah, I get to rest, but what about my livestock -- can they go plow the fields by themselves on Sundays? If I trap a sojourner within my gates, can he do my dishes?"

5. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

OK, that's pretty damn vague. I don't know if it's the translation's fault or what, but I have no idea what it's supposed to mean to "honor" your parents. Does it mean to throw them a banquet? Should I give them each a Golden Globe? Or will last-minute, half-assed birthday presents and monthly awkward phone conversations suffice?

As a kid, of course, we were told that it means to do whatever your parents say. But adults tended to turn everything into that message. And when you become a grown-up yourself, you're kind of supposed to break free from your parents and live according to your own conscience. Imagine if you did everything your dad told you to throughout your whole life. You would do nothing all day but buy insurance and do preventative car maintenance.

6. You shall not murder.

Whoa. I take everything back. Color me impressed, God -- that is one hell of a Commandment. Now you're talking! Obviously, God, you took my previous notes to heart. Here you use one of your commandments to disallow one of the worst things human beings can do. You said in clear language, with no ambiguity. It was even concise -- I don't see a long list of people and animals and sojourners that you shouldn't kill. Bravo. Let's have more like these.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

Pow! Another direct hit. I must say, God, you have improved by leaps and bounds at this commandment-writing thing. I'm giving you a Gold Star. If you get twenty Gold Stars by the end of the term, you'll get a bar of soap in the shape of Zoroaster - kidding! Ha ha ha, you have a sense of humor, right, God? Right, God? God?

8. You shall not steal.

Another good one. Stealing is definitely bad. Although, I must say, I'm watching the clock, and we only have two left now, and stealing is ... well, it depends on the amount, I suppose, but most kinds of stealing are more in the misdemeanor category. And I feel like you should really devote your limited space to felonies ... rape comes to mind, and we still have a few crimes against humanity uncovered, like slavery, for example. Just saying. I'm not saying you're on the wrong track -- just hoping to shift your trajectory a bit. Sorry. Go on, you're still on a roll.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

Yeah, see, this is what I was just talking about. Lying is bad, absolutely. No argument here. But I'm getting the feeling that you're running out of bad things you can think up. Like, you're thinking "OK, covered murder, adultery, stealing ... what else is bad? Well, my neighbor did lie to me about what his dog did in my lawn, and that was really irritating. Let's roll with that."

Also, while I've been applauding your recent turn toward conciseness, God, in this case you could actually use a lot more detail. You could give examples of the really bad forms of lying -- perjury, mail fraud, etc. -- and then say something like "But if you get a last-minute, half-assed gift from your kid, you don't have to be honest: Just say you like it. There are shades of gray here, people."

10. You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.

Jesus Christ, God. Now you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel. We're not even supposed to secretly want things now? Was this one thrown in just to make for an even ten?

But that can't be it, because there are so many other things you could have gone for with this one! I don't feel like I could have mentioned rape and slavery more often, but now the list is over, and they weren't in there even in passing!

Sigh ... OK, well, all told, it could be worse list of commandments. I've seen worse. You got at least three and maybe four great ones in there. The rest are pretty dumb, but at least they don't explicitly legalize terrible things (for instance, there's nothing saying "Slavery is awesome! Rape you all want!") There was the long tangent of "love me or else" which bled into three commandments, and you missed some major, major sins. All in all, I give it a C-minus.

Try to apply yourself more next time, and for Christ's sake, no more of the "love me or else" crap. You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Ask your son -- he knows what I'm talking about. (Man, don't you wish Jesus had written the Ten Commandments? Moreover, don't you wish someone had misplaced the Old Testament in a cave somewhere? I guess for Jesus's whole messiah thing to work you had to have the backstory of this God character who is his father and foreshadowed his arrival and all that. Still, I think of the Old Testament like I think of the Star Wars prequels: There are a few good scenes here and there, but it's mostly terrible and just destroys the series as a whole. Anyway, now I'm off on a tangent! God, you're rubbing off on me in the worst way! Oh, that God!)

Mourning the Loss of Java Train

When my family and I moved to this area more than two years ago, we were especially excited to be in a neighborhood in which you could walk to all sorts of great places. Chief among them was Java Train.

Java Train is the kind of place that should be in every residential, family-oriented neighborhood, but I've never seen in any before or since. It has an indoor play area in the shape of a train, complete with an electric train around the top that (occasionally) runs. It has an outdoor play area with a sandbox and a sort of spaceship structure. It has a long row of gumball machines offering everything from candy to rubber balls. It has a row of around a dozen great ice cream flavors, ready to be scooped out for kids. It had a terrific kids' menu of Italian dunkers, chicken fingers, etc.

And it can cater to the parents' every wish too. It has great coffee confections of many varieties -- everything from turtle mochas to chai. It has a solid menu, including genuinely top-notch pizza. It has some idyllic outdoor seating and a lovely, understated interior. And it even has beer and wine!

I've lived a lot of places and been in thousands of restaurants, and I've never seen any other place that has everything a young family could possibly want, the way that Java Train has. Or rather, "had."

This one-of-a-kind, perfect neighborhood spot will be gone soon. In its place, apparently, will be a generic bar and grill, a Champps knock-off (because where else could you possibly find one of those)? The indoor train has already been replaced by a TV locked to a sports channel (original!), with more devastation to come.

I admit, I don't know the whole story. Maybe there's a greater profit margin in cranking out generic food and beer than there is in being a fantasyland for toddlers. Maybe they've done some extensive research that supports this decision.

From where I stand, though, it doesn't even make business sense. My neighborhood is rapidly changing, into one filled with young families. Two of my neighbors are expecting. Even if Java Train isn't making money hand over fist now, it certainly could be soon.

But I can't really know that for sure. All I know is that this decision destroys the place that my two-year-old daughter and I love to walk to to at least twice a week. It shoots down the future I envisioned in this neighborhood, one in which my daughter and possibly future children would grow to adulthood running over to Java Train for muffins, ice cream, and a lot of fun.

I don't mean to be melodramatic. The neighborhood is hardly ruined. We still can walk to both Como Zoo and the fairgrounds, and Coffee Grounds up the street has buckets of toys, having apparently decided that young families are not undesirable.

But I can't help but feel like something has been robbed from me and my family. And I can't help but hope that Boilerplate Bar and Grill, or whatever it will be called, will fail miserably. Maybe then, someone else will take over and bring back the greatest neighborhood restaurant I've ever seen.

Things to Like About America

It's well-known that we Americans don't like to acknowledge that other countries exist, unless, of course, we decide to bomb them. The thing is, looking at other countries can be depressing (especially the bombed ones). Some are much worse off than us, starving and dying and such, and that makes us feel bad, for a minute or so. One mention of Darfur on the radio and you almost feel guilty for speeding your SUV down to the Consume-o-mart to buy your hundredth pair of shoes made by Chinese child laborers. Almost.

And fellow developed countries don't help. They may not be as rich or powerful as us, but somehow, without even letting us know, they sneakily end up solving a lot of the problems that still plague us. No one in England is worrying too much about the abortion issue. There's no health-care crisis in France. And Finland is so wealthy, successful and crime-free that the Finnish have nothing to be sad about at all, which apparently makes them very depressed. Poor guys.

But there are a few things that should make any American's chest swell and heart pump blood colored red, white and blue. There are a few things that make even liberal America-hating baby-eaters like myself shed a joyful tear in the shape of an eagle. Yes, Virginia, there are a few things that the good ol' U.S. of A. does better than all the Finlands and Belgiums and Central African Republics combined. And they are:

1. BATHROOM AMENITIES: OK, apparently Japan does these well. But every other foreign country I've been to had shit for bathrooms. Literally -- every single one had toilets, sinks, and showers made entirely out of shit. When you had to do your business, you'd do it and then carefully mold it so that it fit into the other furnishings. Word to the wise foreign traveler: Always bring lots of plastic gloves. And a kiln wouldn't hurt.

Actually, what you typically get in foreign countries is no hot water. And showers aren't showers so much as they're detachable spigots connected to a tub by a hose about two feet long. So if you like your showers lying down, in cold water, you my friend, are in for a treat.

Toilets aren't much better. Overseas you get a lot of the "eternal flush" thing where the toilet slowly fills up with water for days. How does it keep filling up, but never get full, you wonder? (And then your mind EXPLODES.) There's something quietly sinister and otherworldly about the eternal flush. It's like an axe murderer who's coming at you so slowly that even if you're staring at him you can't see him move. Or maybe not.

2) TELEVISION: If you're lucky enough to get cable in a European country, you know how many channels you get? Twelve! Wow! That's enough to fill, five, maybe ten minutes per day! Meanwhile, in America, even homeless people have digital cable boxes with 5,000 channels each. I'm no math whiz, but I'm pretty sure than 5,000 is about a million times larger than 12.

Now I hear you literati already. "More TV is a good thing?!?" you scoff, nearly spilling your cabernet all over your Harold Pinter fan club T-shirt. "Hasn't television already destroyed American discourse?" To that I say, "No, and you know why? Because you are a poophead. Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh, heh. Poop."

Seriously, though, have you checked out TV recently? It's not wall-to-wall "Three's Company" reruns like in the old days. My cable has two, count 'em two, PBSes. I also have the Discovery Channel, Discovery Health, Discovery Times, Discovery Science, Discovery Philology, Discovery Kazakh Poetry, and a whole channel devoted to nothing but video footage of Bunsen burners. There is a wonderful network called History International, which is just like the History Channel except its shows actually involve history.

Sure, 80% of TV is crap. But 80% of everything is crap. Ever been to a bookstore? Yeah, you can still find Dostoyevsky, but you have to go past several acres of books about how to lose weight by eating only olives, paella, geflite fish and liquid smoke.

And you know what else? You can't blame television for dumbing down America, because America was always as stupid as it is now. You might not remember clearly, because your memories are sugar-coated, but there was no time in history when discourse was actually elevated. Life in the '50s was not all Edward R. Murrow slowly and gray-ly discussing foreign policy with Adlai Stevenson. Most people switched away from that and watched boxers beat the crap out of each other for fun.

But then, as now, there were pockets of smarties smart-ing it up, and God bless 'em. They're always there to work and strive and harangue and every so often, their messages break through to the dummies watching boxing or Ultimate Fighting or what have you. Then the world changes, usually for the better. TV is simply the messenger letting the sheltered smarties know how the rest of America lives. Don't shoot it.

Man, I've gone far afield of my point. My point was that America does TV great and big and bold, and we should be proud of that. And, uh, we got the bathroom thing going for us too. We don't do endings of blog posts well though. At least, I don't.

When It Comes to Orchestras, I'm Kinda Republican

I've been reading and hearing a lot about the labor struggles that orchestras are having lately. I have to admit that I'm a bit unsympathetic.

In most issues, I'm irritatingly liberal. But when it comes to the arts, I can get to sounding downright Republican. In the specific case of orchestras, I feel like the key fact is that attendance has been decreasing for decades. So the market has spoken. That means that salaries will have to go down and some orchestras will have to shut down. Welcome to the world.

Musicians are of course blaming management for not getting asses in seats (they say it differently), but I think that's like blaming the grocery store for a pork shortage. Management might have some influence in getting the pork in the seats (I think my metaphor is getting confused), but in the end they can't get what just isn't out there.

I don't think it's the fault of classical music or musicians that there are fewer fans these days. In fact, I'm sure it's better than ever. But music has changed so much in the last 100 years in particular that there are hundreds of genres and sub-genres. That means that people have so many choices that they will be able to find exactly what speaks to them best.

When the choice was either Brahms or John Phillip Sousa, of course Brahms will get lots of takers. But when the music-listening public is presented with Brahms, Sousa, Springsteen, Ice-T, Wynton Marsalis, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Shitty Shitty Band Band, etc., etc., then there will be a smaller piece of the pie for Brahms.

As I've stated in this space before, music is a matter of personal taste. Some artists are better than others, sure, but I don't ascribe to the notion that some genres are objectively better than others. But that is often the stance, implied or otherwise, of people arguing in favor of these orchestras. The say that it's such wonderful music and needs to be preserved.

Well, to me it's not. I'm not saying it's bad -- it's just not to my taste. Does that make me a philistine? If so, why? Why is classical given this elite status? Because it's old? Sea chanteys are old too, but no one gets upset when sea chantey bands (if those exist) have to shut down.

Of course, it's really because elites have always liked classical. They'll say it expresses sublime, ineffable feelings -- and maybe it does for them. But not for me, and not for increasing numbers of people. I get similar feelings listening to Beck and Iron and Wine and even some hip-hop. Yet if any of those get fewer fans and have to give up, no one cries foul.

I know that classical music has some historical value. Fair enough -- so do sea chanteys -- but fine, maybe that  means that classical should get a little extra support. But for the most part, I don't feel a lot of obligation to prop up an art form that speaks to only a few people (a disproportionate percentage of whom are wealthy, by the way).

And I'm sympathetic to the fact that music programs are being cut in schools, which maybe results in fewer classical fans. But I've always felt music programs should teach all kinds of music anyway. There's no reason classical should get a priority in school programs. I think music programs should teach more guitar. They should teach sampling and record-scratching. People can be moved by all kinds of music, and imposing your personal musical tastes on children seems very wrong.

I could extend this argument to all of the fine arts, but I'll leave that for another time. Anyone got a counterargument that isn't based in the idea that classical is somehow objectively superior?

What I Do When I Get Kids' Songs Stuck in My Head

My daughter Ellie is getting to the age where she falls in love with kids' TV shows and the songs therein. She often wants me to sing them with her. I'm happy to oblige.

The downside is that these songs often get stuck in my head. When this happens, I find it helps to mix it up by singing them to myself in weird voices.

For example, here's the basic version of the Dora the Explorer song that Ellie and I sing together. (If these audio clips don't work, this whole post is worthless. It is surprisingly difficult to get an audio clip in a blog post. I blame the government. I'll work out why later.)

When this version starts to drive me nuts, it helps to shift into the Tom Waits version. It's a new voice I'm just starting to work on, so it probably needs refinement. Any constructive criticism is welcome.

Then there's the Morrissey version. This is a voice I've been doing for years, so I don't think it's getting better any time soon. Most people hate it, saying it sounds like Kermit the Frog doing Morrissey. It makes me happy to sing along to the Smiths in my Morrissey voice, though, so I'll keep doing it.

I've gotten much better feedback for my Louis Armstrong voice, which I'm now realizing is kind of a combination of Tom Waits and Morrissey. Maybe since Louis Armstrong was my first voice, Tom Waits equals Louis Armstrong minus Morrissey. Either way, the three of them are all clearly blood relations in real life. 

My only other impressions are of Hannibal Lecter, former baseball announcer Skip Caray, and Congressman Charlie Rangel, so none of those are terribly germaine here. But, if pressed by an adoring public (and if the audio files work), I can give them all a shot at the Dora theme.

Regulations Are Traffic Laws for Businesses

I've tried not to get too political in the blog, but to hell with that. One thing that really keeps this country back, I think, is the way we think about regulations.

This came up recently when I read a blog post by Bill Maher, who noted that the horrible fertilizer explosion in West, Texas, is a direct result of a flagrant disregard for regulations. To quote Maher's blog:

"And now it turns out that the plant was storing 1,350 times the ammonium nitrate that would normally trigger government oversight. When a plant stores 400 pounds of the stuff, they need to let the DHS know. This place was storing 270 tons." http://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/real-time-with-bill-maher-blog/2013/4/29/culture-matters-1.html

Maher is right about this, but somehow he later concludes that "We don't need more regulations in the wake of Waco. I'm not even sure we need more enforcement. We need a culture that respects our laws – even the ones written by Democrats."

Set aside the starry-eyed notion that we can just somehow magically "change the culture" to make people obey rules, without actually enforcing them. Such blanket statements about regulations, as if they're all a single monolith, is a terrible and harmful way to look at them. It's so oversimplified as to be meaningless. In some areas, we might need more regulations. In others, we might need less. Saying we don't need more regulations is like saying we don't need more laws.

Realize that the category of "regulations" includes everything from how much ammonium nitrate you can store in one place to food safety to housing codes to banking regulations to environmental protection. They're all very different. To discover whether a single regulation is necessary, you have to evaluate in a careful cost-benefit analysis, researching both the good and the bad that results from it.

That sounds very boring and time-consuming, of course, but there are no shortcuts here. Slashing those big bad "regulations" as if they're all just one big thing invariably means taken a hatchet to a lot of important rules. You can't really know whether we need more or fewer regulations until you find out exactly what positives and negatives result from each one.

Obama has launched a program to do exactly this. He took feedback from ordinary folk and found hundreds of regulations that were outdated and wrong. His favorite example was that milk was being regulated as if it were a toxic substance. This is the right approach: Don't go in assuming we need more or fewer regulations, because you don't really know. Instead, find individual ones that don't make sense and get rid  of them -- meanwhile, enact ones in banking and health care that will help people and prevent future disasters. It's a constant process of pruning and building, always with an eye towards making things better, just like all lawmaking is.

Granted, regulations are a unique kind of law. They're not like criminal laws, which come into play after you do something wrong. Instead they prevent you from accidentally doing something wrong. They're a lot more like traffic laws.

Regulations are basically just traffic laws for businesses. Each regulation is like a stop sign. You might find an individual stop sign that doesn't help anything and campaign to get it removed. Or you might find an intersection that needs a stop sign. But saying that we should just slash the number of stop signs, without looking at the validity of each one, is going to result in the loss of a lot of lives.

Take an axe indiscriminately to either traffic laws or regulations and we might move around faster, sure. But we'd also have a lot more accidents. That will likely make the faster speed not worth the cost.

The Great Recession is a great example. Lots of rules for the financial industry have been cut since the Reagan years. It resulted in a few temporary gains here and there, almost entirely for the very rich. Eventually we ended up with a massive, lawless "shadow banking system" of unregulated investments like credit default swaps and collatoralized debt obligations. When this system collapsed because of the drop in house prices, it took the world's finances with it. The benefits of all those cut regulations (not to mention the many that weren't passed because we weren't keeping up) turned out to not be worth the cost. This oversimplified anti-regulation attitude thus caused terrible suffering.

Regulations as a whole get a bad name because we don't realize what they're preventing. We forget about the problems that existed before the regulations came into play and we only see the down side, of having to fill out more paperwork or wait for government approval or whatever else. It's just too easy to forget the terrible tragedies of the past and then take for granted that such tragedies can't happen.

Another example is in order. Before food safety regulations, people died by the tens of thousands every year from tainted food. There was a recent local story about a dairy farmer selling unpasteurized milk. He was spouting the typical "Get the government out of my business" crap about why he should be allowed to do this. Then a lot of his customers got violently ill.

This is why we have regulations. If they solve problems, then many years later, people forget the problems existed. Then they think we don't need the rules. Sometimes they might be right. More often, they're wrong. To find out which is which, it takes a lot of careful work, and some amount of experimentation. It does not take simple-minded presumptions about needing more or fewer regulations.

My New Favorite Basketball Player (And My New Least Favorite Football Player)

As I'm sure you heard, a guy named Jason Collins became the first active player in a major American sport to come out as gay. He is now my favorite basketball player. I don't follow basketball at all, so it's not like he knocked anyone out of the top spot, but regardless, I'll be rooting for him from now on.

I knew that eventually this would happen, but I didn't think the response would be so overwhelmingly positive. President Obama, NBA commissioner David Stern, and almost everyone else immediately lined up to support Collins. There seems to have been a sea change in gay issues since the 2012 election, and it really is heartwarming to see. And in a more general sense, it's quite encouraging to see that basic human compassion (and reason) can eventually overcome firmly entrenched fears and biases. (And, incidentally, it's also a counterpoint to anyone who says that elections don't matter.)

I also discovered that I had a least favorite football player, some guy named Alphonso Smith. (I don't follow football either.) He apparently had some hateful tweets about Collins that he later deleted. Then he tweeted "it's a shame I have to apologize for my TRUE feelings."

I have a different view on a guy named Mike Wallace, also a football player who I've never heard of. (At first I thought they were talking about the legendary anchor of "60 Minutes." Then I remembered that he's dead. Seriously, living Mike Wallace, why didn't you go by "Michael"? Now I have to call you "Living Mike Wallace.") Living Mike Wallace also apparently had a bunch of hateful tweets, but then said "never said anything was right or wrong I just said I don't understand!! Deeply sorry for anyone that I offended."

I'm not particularly happy with Living Mike Wallace right now, but I much prefer his attitude. If he's truly sorry, and truly open to trying to understand, then he should be given every opportunity to do so. Hate the sin but love the sinner, as Christians might say. Anyone can change, and anyone can be forgiven if they do change.

Alphonso Smith's response, though, triggers one of my biggest pet peeves. It drives me up the wall when people say horrible things and then, when verbally attacked for it, act like they're the victims. Getting angry responses for something you say does not make you a victim. It only makes you someone who disagrees with other people. Much like everyone in the history of the human race.

Playing the victim card just because someone contradicted you is just such an obvious defense mechanism, one that allows you to delude yourself into thinking that the sting you felt from the public disdain must be the world's fault, not yours. It's the coward's way out. It gets you off the hook for self-examination, which should be at least one part of anyone's reaction to overwhelming disagreement.

And moreover, it is a horrible injustice to everyone who was ever truly victimized. There are still people in the world who are jailed and tortured for speaking their minds. Getting a few hate tweets isn't even in the same ballpark.

The worst is when people in this situation say something like "Whatever happened to free speech?" I think you misunderstand the concept. You see, free speech goes both ways. You're free to say whatever you like. And I am free to tell you that you're a complete asshole for saying it.

Free speech is not consequence-free speech. Free speech only means you can't be put in jail or be tortured for what you say. But you can be hated, shouted at, ostracized, fined, and even fired for what you say. Your words tell people who you are, and that means words have consequences. Not of the legal variety, granted, but of every other variety imaginable.

And then there's Smith's implication that your TRUE feelings somehow should never be something you have to apologize for. What? When did this happen? So you should only have to apologize for PRETEND feelings?

Your TRUE feelings can still be WRONG and HURTFUL TO OTHERS. People once had TRUE feelings that slavery should be legal. People once had TRUE feelings that witches should be burned. TRUE feelings are not necessarily RIGHT feelings.

It's true -- sometimes your true feelings are wrong. We've all felt things that we had to keep in check because they were wrong and needed to be ignored. I've felt murderous impulses over some jerk tailgating me on the highway. I've felt anxiety at being among a large group of people of a different race. Those were my true feelings, and they were wrong.

Being an adult means learning which feelings you should express openly and which ones you shouldn't. Granted, sometimes it's hard to know which is which. Fair enough. We all make mistakes -- but you have to be at least open to the idea that you may have made a mistake. That's the only way to ever learn anything.

To be clear, I think it's important to express yourself. But it's more complicated that that. Yes, you can express your feelings, but then you have to take responsibility for those expressions. If those expressions offend people, then you have to deal with that like a grown-up. Maybe those people are wrong to be offended. Maybe those people are right. You can engage them further about it to find out. What you can't do is cry foul and pretend you're being victimized just because someone got offended.

While criticism is necessary, I also don't want to see Alphonso Smith and others like him condemned to lives of eternal public hatred because of what they say. I don't think that solves anything -- instead, it just stiffens their opposition and makes progress more difficult. I want to see people like this gently convinced that gay people are no threat. That takes true dialogue, beyond just the venting of spleens that tends to pass for argument.

But for this to happen, Smith and his ilk are going to have to meet us halfway. You have to at least be open to the idea that your feelings may not be right. I promise to do the same. Without that, nothing can ever get better.

Why I Hate Computers, in a Nutshell

I need to know what version of Internet Explorer I'm using. So I search for "what version of IE am I using?" Bing leads me to this page: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/which-version-am-i-using#ie=ie-9

It gives instructions on how to find out what version you're using: Go to Tools and then About Internet Explorer. I went to Tools and then I looked everywhere for something that says "About Internet Explorer." I couldn't find anything.

Then I noticed at the top of that page, it says these are the instructions for Internet Explorer 9. Other versions require different instructions -- for IE 10, I'm supposed to go to Settings and then About. OK, so apparently I was supposed to know what version I was using so that I could get the right instructions to find out what version I'm using. This is moronic.

Why make this different for each version? If there's one thing that should always be the same for each version, it's the method of finding the name of the version in the first place. I'm betting it worked perfectly fine to go to Tools and then About Internet Explorer. Has anyone's lives been enriched by changing that to Settings and then About? Or has it just wasted a whole lot of people's time learning the new location?

I understand that software has to keep improving. But most often, updates add nothing new for me except the irritation of having to relearn everything. It often seems like software companies just change stuff for the sake of changing it, so they can justify selling new updates.

Maybe there are some behind-the-scenes things in each update that make it run faster or whatever. Fine, sounds great. But be very sure that the changes to the interface are worth the trouble.

Grumpy old man rant complete.

I Am Royalty

I have a child. And the child's name of course reflects her status as a member of the English royal family. She was christened "Eleanor I, by the Grace of God, Queen of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lady of Ireland and the Church of England in Earth Supreme Head, Dykhuizen." Amongst playmates she may affectionately be referred to as "E.I.G.G.Q.E.F.D.F.L.I.C.E.E.S.H." She may not be referred to with the vulgar appellation "Ellie." Such calumny shall be considered an affront against God's representative upon Earth, and justice shall swiftly be brought upon the guilty party.

The nature of said punishment will depend upon the progress of my newly engaged effort to restore Eleanor to the throne as the rightful heir to Henry III (1207-1272). You see, I confirmed through Ancestry.com long ago that I am the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King Henry III. It's true. I am one of only ten million or so people to be able to make such a claim.

My task is then simple: Gather an army, hie myself to England, and kill everyone with a better claim to the throne. While such a task may have appeared Herculean in the days of my vaunted forefather, advances in modern weaponry make this a relatively easy task. For too long, the House of Minnesota has been ignored in affairs of state! Once more unto the breach, my good men (and women, because my marauding horde is an Equal Opportunity Employer)!

However, in my extensive studies of my illustrious ancestors (I read two books), I must say I've gained new appreciation for democracy. We may occasionally elect an idiot, but hell, at least we don't have wars to decide it. And even George W. Bush looks like a Rhodes scholar compared to some of England's past rulers. To wit:

Henry VI, who ruled England for about half of the 1400s, was pretty clearly what we would call nowadays "developmentally disabled." He was the immediate successor to Henry V, who was the one played by Kenneth Branagh and says "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers ... come upon this field of glory to kick ass and drink beer, and we're all out of beer ... we must protect this hoooouuuse!" Then he went on to win the Battle of Agincourt, defeating Mothra in ten rounds. I think that was how it went, anyway. I was reading all this as I was watching late-night TV, so I'm not sure I got it all right.

Point is, his son Henry VI had quite a legacy to live up to. And boy, did he ever not. He was not only born into the Hundred Years' War against France; he was also heir to the Wars of the Roses, in which different branches of the royal family, those of York and Lancaster, killed each other regularly and traded the throne back and forth. Meanwhile, Henry VI was terrified by war, which is a problem when you're the commander-in-chief of two of them. 

He was reportedly very meek and gentle, in a way that would be cute if he were a greeter at Wal-Mart, but extremely dangerous for someone trying to lead England. He would blush whenever anyone mentioned sex and sincerely believed his son was created by the Holy Spirit. His solution to the Wars of the Roses was to stage what he called a "loveday," in which members of the York and Lancaster clans would all have a public ceremony together. Mind you, these were people who killed each other's children, a lot. Their beefs are not likely to be smoothed over by a public smooch-fest. Henry thought they would.

The end result of Henry VI's incompetence was that England lost all the gains in France made by Henry V, with Joan of Arc being the symbol of the reconquest. Meanwhile, for the most part, the Wars of the Roses only killed of the members of the nobility, leaving peasants and middle-class folks out of it -- that is, until King Henry's forces looted and pillaged a bunch of towns of Southern England. 

Imagine that for a second -- imagine if the Republicans and Democrats were killing each other over who would be in power. I think our first reaction would be "Yeah! Cool! Is it on TV?" But then imagine if the Republicans, under their leader George W. Bush, decided to just raze and burn Iowa for no good reason. I think even Fox News would have to turn against them then.

King Henry VI came along for all this countryside brutality, but was likely oblivious, allegedly laughing and singing in his private camp during the carnage. The people of London reacted to the spree by literally shutting the door on Henry and the Lancastrians (they had real doors to cities then, with real keys -- hence the term "the key to the city") and declaring a new king, Edward IV.

Normally things weren't as bad as all this -- normally it would just take one civil war to figure out who the next leader would be. Just a few hundred lives lost over a year or two, something like that. In general, though, we see the danger of letting someone be king just because his father was. Well, we see it, but the English didn't. They kept on with the tradition, because they didn't know anything else.

So imagine what a huge step forward it was to try democracy instead. These days, it's old hat, but then democracy was revolutionary in a way that is hard for us to fathom. It was radical. It was a intellectual, long-shot idea based on cutting-edge theory that turned out to be extremely right.

So that's what I hope we all celebrate when we celebrate America: radical solutions to longstanding problems, solutions based on the latest in intellectual thought. That's our true legacy, that willingness to try something that's very new and is based on the creativity of the most probing minds. Innovation, in business-speak. Let's try to keep that in mind before we hate on Obama and the Democrats for trying an innovative solution on health care, or before we reflexively crap on other new ideas in immigration, energy policy, etc. The country is seeming a little afraid of change lately, and fear of change is not what we were founded on.

My Question for White People

White friends, I have a question for you. What is it with you guys and the electric guitar? I don't get it.

Well, that's not fair -- sometimes I do get it. I've always loved Jimi Hendrix. The White Stripes can often be amazing. I love a lot of Beatles. But even with the Beatles, I prefer their later albums, when they brought in more than than just electric guitars and drums.

I get bored with most rock, which seems overly fixated on guitars. Oh, I'm sure you can come up with a few dyed-in-the-wool rock bands that also feature a keyboard or a flute or a sousaphone or whatever. But for the most part, those are novelties -- most music classified as rock is heavy on the guitars and light on everything else.

Granted, if you're going to pick one instrument, the electric guitar is a good choice, no doubt. It can do an amazing amount of things. I'll go as far as to say it's the best instrument in the history of popular music.

My point is that it's crazy to pick just one instrument. The possibilities for exciting new sounds expand exponentially if you have a bunch of different instruments working together. Every other musical genre has been pretty liberal about which instruments get to join the party. Jazz was open to any kind of wind instrument, and then electric guitars and whatever else. Hip-hop has been open to every instrument plus every conceivable sound that can be recorded and looped into a beat. It's only rock that is so conservative: guitars and drums. Eventually even great recipes get repetitive.

Nervous Nellie rock fans have been proclaiming "rock is dead" probably every year since its creation, usually because they are too old to comprehend the new sound. But nowadays they might be right. And I think it's rock's own fault, for boxing itself in as far as instrumentation.

I saw an article on the A.V. Club a while back saying that in 2012, only one album of the Top 50 best-selling albums of the year was a rock album, one by Everclear. You can be sniffy about the list of most popular albums as representing lowest common denominator and just music for 12-year-olds and etc., but you know what, those 12-year-olds eventually grow up. They might develop more sophisticated tastes and move from Drake to the Roots or Blackalicious or what have you. They're not likely to move from Drake to Black Sabbath, methinks.

I like to think that Radiohead was the band that brought the world around on this. They were an extremely good guitars-and-drums rock band, and then all of a sudden they released "OK Computer." The title says it all -- they acknowledged that computers can make some pretty terrific music, and then they went on to prove it. In my admittedly very amateur observation, it seems like music slowly followed their lead, and by now, only a few bands since even try to do much of interest with just guitars and drums.

I perhaps should have mentioned at the outset that I am a white man. It's true -- I'm not proud of that fact, but it's a burden I have to live with. But I am one whose CD collection is probably 90% made up of African-American artists, with the lion's share going to hip-hop. Public Enemy was the first music that I became truly fanatical for, and after them De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. (Other lifelong favorites include the Smiths, Radiohead and Beck. I didn't say that white people can't make good music. Just that they do so less often.)

I certainly didn't gain these predilections from my peers. Like most people who grew up in suburbia in the 1980s and 1990s, I've spent a lifetime among almost exclusively rock fans. I seemed to have similar tastes to theirs in most everything except when it came to music. When they would gush about whatever guitar-based band they loved, I usually felt like an outsider. Sometimes I got it, but more often I just didn't.

That's music, I suppose. It's so subjective that trying to describe why you like something, or moreover, trying to convince someone else to like something, is usually pointless. Occasionally you can learn enough about the context of some song or genre that you can develop a taste for it. More often, though, it just moves you or it doesn't.

So I guess the question I posed at the outset is a futile one. Maybe it's something you just can't figure out -- white people just love their electric guitars, and that's all there is to it. More likely, though, I think it's because you are all racists.

The Nerdiest Thing I've Done in a Long Time

As I asserted in a previous post, I'm a nerd, but not really of the card-carrying variety. I'm not into sci-fi or comic books at all. I've never been to any kind of "con." I tried playing Dungeons and Dragons once, but didn't like it. I have a lot of interests, but none that really dominates my life. And most are things like politics and history which are actually important to know -- maybe a bit nerdy, but in a constructive way.

My wife would tell you that my fascination with fantasy baseball makes me a true-blue nerd. And yes, I do spend a lot of time playing a type of fantasy baseball that is well beyond what you amateurs are into. This involves taking players throughout history and pitting them against each other in simulated games. You choose 1969 Harmon Killebrew and 1921 Babe Ruth and 1987 Keith Comstock and so on, a bunch of other people pick who they want, and then you assemble leagues and let the computer simulate entire seasons, game by game. Regular fantasy baseball was just the gateway -- this is the hard stuff.

But I can quit any time. I have it under control. What I'm really a nerd for is my wife and kid. I would definitely go to a Erin and Eleanor Dykhuizen convention if someone would just start one already. (Neither of my senators have responded to me about this idea.)

When I was a kid, though, I was definitely a nerd, for "Star Wars." The insane fervor that I would later bring to my pursuit of a girlfriend was then applied to ensconcing myself in the "Star Wars" universe.

I was especially fascinated by the "Star Wars" action figures. I lusted for every single figure, for every vehicle, for every playset or beast or napkin that George Lucas spit on or whatever else -- I had to have them all. I would spend blissful hours gazing trancelike at the backs of the toy packages, where they showed pictures of all the available figures. As I marveled at the folds in the Gamorrean Guard's tunic or the odd spots on Boba Fett's uniform, these cheap pieces of plastic became like holy relics, ones that allowed me to touch for a moment the world I desperately wanted to be in. When, several years after "Return if the Jedi" had been released, other kids moved on to G.I. Joe or He-Man or Transformers, I remained steadfastly loyal to "Star Wars," and would not dare betray it for a second to even glance at any of those other toys. (Although, in weaker moments, Transformers did tempt me ...)

By the time puberty hit, (and hit pretty goddamn hard), the "Star Wars" figures were mostly set aside in favor of baseball and hopeless dreams about girls. But most of my adolescence was spent alone in my room, so occasionally, for lack of anything better to do, I'd bring out the figures again. Usually in odd contexts, though.

For example, I fell in love with rap group Public Enemy in ninth grade. Nothing took my away from my sad and frustrating life better than sitting alone in my room and listening to "Fear of Black Planet" on my Walkman (never out loud -- I definitely didn't want my mom to hear it).

But sitting and listening to this music didn't leave much for my hands to do. And I wanted a sort of visual aspect to the experience. So I would make my Ewok figurines act out the raps. I believe Chuck D was played by Logray (Ewok Medicine Man) and Flavor Flav was played by Chief Chirpa. Later I realized that my Ewok stuffed animals were better able to make the many emphatic hand gestures I imagined that Chuck D and Flavor Flav were making, so they took over. I tell you, righteous indignation over racial injustice had never looked so adorable.

At one point in college I did bring a bunch of my "Star Wars" stuff into my dorm room, clearly because I felt I was doing too well with the ladies and needed to scare off a few. I even put my old Star Wars sheets on my bed. I thought I was being kitschy, but I'm sure I was regressing on some level. If a woman had ever been coaxed into that bed, I'm not sure she would have stayed.

The next time I revisited the "Star Wars" toys was after I got laid off from my first real job, about three years after college. I suddenly had a lot of time to kill, was in kind of a depressive state, and worst of all, I had some money to burn. eBay smelled an opportunity and pounced.

On eBay, I could get the figures and playsets I had never managed to get my hands on as a kid. I looked at that stuff online and longed to get that feeling back, that feeling of bliss and contentment and escape that I experienced when I gazed at those toys as a kid. Even if it didn't feel like that now that I was an adult, maybe I could at least achieve a pale imitation. That sounded better than what I was doing at the time, which was very little.

One night after a having a few too many beers, I was on eBay (stories that start this way never end well). I found a auction in which a guy was selling his whole collection, a massive set full of figures and playsets and even many things still in their packaging. Oh my God, I thought. This is how I can make a little extra money. I can buy collections, break them down into individual toys, sell those toys individually, and then ... millionaire.

I paid $3000 for this guy's entire collection. After it came to my apartment in two massive boxes, I had a grand old time sifting through it all, taking inventory, estimating the values, etc. I started by putting on eBay a few of the AT-STs (Imperial vehicles often colloquially known as "chicken walkers" that had a major role in the battle on Endor, though they were originally released as toys after "Empire Strikes Back," because the battle on Hoth had a very brief, almost gratuitous scene where ... I'm losing you, aren't I. Sorry. Back to the story.)

I watched my auctions with bated breath and ... did not get one bid. I tried a couple of other auctions and got the same result. What I neglected to investigate before launching this future Fortune 500 business of mine is that eBay is packed to the gills with this stuff. And often they're sold by licensed dealers that people can trust. I didn't stand a chance.

I did find a major dealer that I was interested in some of it. This guy lived in a McMansion on the coast of the St. Croix River in Wisconsin, and had a huge warehouse of old "Star Wars" stuff. I drove down there with a bunch of stuff still in its original packaging and got maybe $1500.

So I was still $1500 in the hole, with a bunch of toys I'd have a terrible time trying to unload. So much for my brilliant get-rich-slow scheme. I stuck it all in a closet.

Only recently did I get intrigued again. Now that we have a house, I would like to put this stuff on display. At this point, I'm happily married and I don't give a fiddler's fart what people think, so why not? These ugly little things with bizarrely shaped guns still carry a lot of nostalgia for me. For better or for worse, they're woven into my psyche -- I still have anxiety dreams about losing them.

So this is what I've done so far:

Yeah, baby. Jealous? That's almost all the figures from the original lines, released from 1977-1985. The gaps at the bottom are for the figures I don't own -- only 5 of the 95. Not all are complete with their guns and capes and what have you, but most are. I painstakingly wired them all into place, at my wife's recommendation, and even wired most of their guns into their hands. (Those goddamn little guns drive me to distraction -- they seem to be designed to disappear into carpets and get vacuumed up.)

The idea of this is to mimic that back of the toy package that I would gaze at so lovingly:

My creation arranges them in exactly the same order, with a few exceptions. You see, the "Return of the Jedi" and "Power of the Force" card backs would exclude the original versions of C3PO and R2D2 -- what you see in the above is "C3PO with removable limbs" and "R2D2 with lightsaber," whereas the original versions released in 1978 had ... and I'm losing you again. Sorry.

Anyway. I don't know what my point is with all this. I suppose it's just that when you get old and contented, you get to indulge in silly nostalgia, turning the things you loved as a kid into sacred relics. Then your kids can look at them politely, nod at your boring stories about them, and as soon as you die, they can throw them in the trash. Such is life. The end.

Translation Guide for My Two-Year-Old

My two-and-a-half year old daughter, Ellie, is the greatest person in the history of the world (in a tie with my wife, actually). Seriously, she makes your kids look like a bunch of chumps.

My main goal for life has always been to have a loving family. I've also wanted friends, and that worked out too. Occasionally I would half-heartedly pursue a specific career, but that never went well. So now I've settled for a job that I don't completely despise, doesn't make me work during weekends or evenings, and pays enough to support my family. My job sometimes gets me down, but not as often as you might think. I always knew that true fulfillment, for me at least, would be to have a wife and kids. And I turned out to be right. Ellie and my wife are a lifelong dream come true.

That said, my kid really needs to work on her language skills. Too often, she splits infinitives and ends sentences with prepositions. And let's not even get into her Latin -- how do you constantly mix up the accusative case with the ablative? It's very simple: The accusative is used for the direct object of a transitive verb! We say this phrase over and over and she just laughs. Just use the very simple mnemonic device: Terry Adams Initiates Unusual Fur Transportation, Despite Officious Orangutans Allowing Thirteen Valises! How hard is that?

We're constantly giving her poor grades on her chalk drawings and finger paintings, but she keeps just looking at the grades and going "D! Ha ha ha." I'm afraid a strict boarding school may be the only solution. 

Her pronunciations also leave something to be desired. If you find yourself engaged in conversation with her, you may have trouble understanding what she's saying. Here's a guide that may help:

"Cock": If Ellie says "Ellie has cock," don't be alarmed. She means "clock." She does not actually own a rooster.

"Fock": Again, don't be alarmed. She means "frog."

"Matits": For the third time, don't be alarmed. (Seriously, stop with the alarm already.) She means "Muppets." She might also say "Piggy Matits," meaning she needs a movie or TV show that includes Miss Piggy. This is so that we don't put in "Kermit's Swamp Years," which features no Miss Piggy, and is therefore useless to her.

"Strojo": You might think she is referring to famed Olympic runner Strorence Griffith Joyner (or perhaps former Mets third baseman Stroward Johnson), but she actually means "stroller."

"Sha Shank": The first time she said this, I thought she meant she wanted to see "Shawshank Redemption," the beloved story of men in prison. I then got confused and showed her "Oz" instead. She didn't seem to enjoy it.

It turns out she meant "Java Train," a coffeeshop/restaurant we live a block from that is the perfect place for us to live a block from, since it has an indoor play area, an outdoor play area, coffee, baked goods, ice cream, a full menu, gumball machines, beer, wine, gumball machines full of wine, an outdoor play area for baked goods, and everything else a family could possibly need. There should be places like this in every residential neighborhood.

"Ooo ooo aaa aaa": This is her monkey impression. It's pretty convincing -- you do feel like you're looking at a big silly monkey.

"Fuff fuff" (said very quietly): Her dog impression. She apparently thinks dogs are very soft-spoken and adorable. I don't feel the need to break the truth to her just yet.

"Pbbbbbbbttttt" (with upturned hand hear her mouth): Her elephant impression. The hand represents the trunk.

"Pbbbbbbbttttt" (shaking head back and forth): Her zebra impression. This may not be well-accepted as the sound zebras make, but she and I were at the Como Zoo and saw a zebra do exactly this. We were enthralled to have a sound for zebras. (True fact: Giraffes don't make any noise at all. No vocal chords. You'd think there would be room in that long neck somewhere. But no. Jerks.)

"Rarrrrr!": Her lion impression.

"Rarrrrr!": Her tiger impression.

"Rarrrrr!": Her dinosaur impression.

"Rarrrrr!": Her monster impression.

"My daddy!": She yells this repeatedly when I pick her up from day care, as she runs toward me for a big hug. I respond with "My Ellie! My Ellie!" I suppose that one was pretty easily interpretable. But I wanted to mention it anyway for some reason.

"La boo": This means "I love you." She says it specifically to make me tear up with joy. Really manipulative of her, frankly. Boarding school will fix that.

The Nerdiness Scale

Nerd culture is thriving like never before. There was a time when, if you were a nerd, you only had physics experiments or "Lord of the Rings" (the books) to keep you entertained. Now there are dozens of TV channels containing nothing but nerd-friendly content. It is truly a golden age for Nerdish-Americans.

With so much content, you need some organization, so that people can easily find what's most likely to suit them. I think each movie, TV show, book, etc. should come with a label that gives you its degree of nerdiness. There is a spectrum, you see, from 1 (not at all nerdy) to 10 (holy cow, your comic book collection is about to topple over and bury you alive).

Let's take an example. I think we can all agree that "Star Trek" is pretty nerdy. Indeed, it's a sort of standard-bearer for Nerd culture, a touchstone by which people of other social strata are first exposed to the rich diversity of nerdania. But is it nerdier than "Babylon 5"? Ha ha (snort) ha ha -- yeah right, and Captain Pike had no ill effects from delta ray radiation on that J-class training ship! Ha ha (snort) ha ha ... gasp ... oh dear ... I need my inhaler ...

Basically, "Star Trek" is less nerdy than "Babylon 5" because non-nerds can watch and enjoy "Star Trek." It has considerably more crossover appeal than other fields of nerdology. At the same time, nerds can indeed get extremely over-nerdulated about "Star Trek," as we all know. The immense strength of its Nerdic following has to keep its score pretty high.

That's basically how the scale works -- you have to look at the balance between crossover appeal and nerditorial fervor. With those two criteria in mind, "Star Trek" gets a 6 out of 10 on the Nerdiness Scale."Babylon 5" is easily a 9.

So here are some other judgements:

"Star Wars": 4. As with "Star Trek," you can get extremely nerdified over "Star Wars." But I submit that "Star Wars" has more crossover appeal than "Star Trek," and has a smaller Nerdic subculture. Of course, comparing the "Star Trek" nerdiverse to "Star Wars"'s is a bit like saying Jessica Simpson is dumber than Paris Hilton -- you're talking about the two titans of their field. But "Star Trek" was the groundbreaker, and still the champion.

Now if you start talking about the "Star Wars" sub-subculture, the books and graphic novels and Web sites and etc. that explore Greedo's relationship with his mother or Darth Maul's favorite breakfast cereal, well, then you're getting into primo nerditacularity, possibly a 9 or 10.

"Doctor Who": 8. That's the score in the States, that is. In Britain, it gets probably a 5. In the States, you have to be a pretty hard-core nerdist to watch "Doctor Who." I'm happy to say to say my particular nerdicacity stops at around a 6 or so, so I have never seen "Doctor Who."

"Doctor Who" has many factors pushing it in to top-flight, high-yield, weapons-grade, light sweet crude nerdilocity:

1. It's British. (Nerdites are often Anglophiles.)
2. It's on PBS. (related to no. 1)
3. It's sci-fi.
4. It's laughably cheap-looking sci-fi (as I am led to believe, anyway. I haven't seen it, remember? OK, once. But I only watched it because the Doctor's female hanger-on was real hot, and I was 13, and I would've watched an cat-strangling competition if a hot chick was involved.)

"Monty Python": 5. As with "Star Trek" and "Star Wars," there's plenty of crossover appeal here. And it's not sci-fi, which lowers its score considerably.

But it has never really reached the mainstream masses in the States the way the two Star empires have. "Monty Python" crosses over not to Joe Sixpack and Jane Peoplemagazinereader but to Professor Van Nostrand and Chuckles McSlappy (a.k.a. smarties and comedians). That pushes it a bit higher on the scale.

My wife put this one best. She says that post-pubescent unathletic boys tend to go apeshit for "Monty Python" (particularly "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," of course). That's usually a prime sign of Grade-A nerdiciousness. But then many of those boys grow up to be relative non-nerds, maybe 3s or 4s on the scale. And there isn't a huge "Monty Python" nerdastic subculture -- there's not much in the way of fan fiction or action figure trading or sexual fantasies about Carol Cleveland. So that knocks it back a few points. The middle is a good place for it.

"Dungeons and Dragons": 10. I'm sorry, but D&D is really the ne plus ultra of nerdturbation. There's really no aspect that crosses over to legitimate society. There was a TV show once, I think, and some terrible movies that no one but the Nerdeviks saw. Really, the only way you can participate in Dungeons and Dragons is to take out some 20-sided dice, call yourself Mokdur the Impaler, buy some pewter figures of half-orcs, and let the nerdescence burst out of you like a primal scream.

And the nerdalaxy for D&D is massive and fervent. There are entire stores devoted to it, stores that may even be in your neighborhood and you don't even know it. They usually pose as normal storefronts, but if you innocently waltz in seeking out a nice lathe or some liquid aspartame, you will get suspicious and unfriendly looks from the shady, shifty-eyed characters shuffling within. You quickly get the hint, depart quietly, and immediately after you close the door behind you, you get the distinct feeling that a rumbling, growling mob has suddenly re-emerged from the shadows to light upon each other with adamantine battleaxes and Spells of Necrotic Termination.

I admit that I have met a few D&D adherents. I would never, of course, reveal their identities. It is their choice whether or not to come out of the closet and undergo the inevitable repercussions from a world that refuses to accept their lifestyles. I can only support them and hope that some day, somewhere, a society will be born that will permit grown men to freely and openly attack each other's Breastplates of Kaltar with the Orbs of Negative Energy that they have spent their lives accumulating.

So that's the basic idea of the Nerdiness Scale. What other Nerdiflabiflubilations would you bring up, and where would you put them on the scale?

Not to My Taste

My sister tells her kids that when they don't like a particular food, don't say "it's bad." Instead, say "it's not to my taste." I think this is an approach that should be applied to lots of things in life. So many things really are a matter of personal taste.

Not everything, mind you. I wouldn't say that Hitler is "not to my taste." He isn't, to be clear, but I think a most people in the world would agree with that. So it's not really an apt way to express it. To say something's "not to my taste" means that it doesn't do anything for me personally, but I acknowledge that other people can like it, and there's nothing wrong with them doing so.

A better example for me would be Joss Whedon. He's not to my taste. I don't need to go into why. Other people who I know and love and respect (in fact, almost all of the people I know and love and respect) would disagree, as Joss Whedon is definitely to their taste. That's fine. It doesn't mean that Joss Whedon is definitively good, or definitively bad. It's just a matter of personal taste.

In fact, most things that don't really matter should be judged in this way. Entertainment is a good example. I used to get furious when everyone was gushing about some movie or TV show that I absolutely despised. I'd even write long, fervent diatribes in whatever blog I happened to be maintaining at the time, detailing all of the reasons why everyone else was wrong and I was right. I have moved past that now. Calm blue ocean. Calm blue ocean. Serenity now. Serenity now.

By the way, here are a few of things that used to drive me up several walls with manic fury: "Lost in Translation." "Braveheart." "Chasing Amy." Kevin Smith in general. "The Turd Locker" -- I'm sorry, I mean "The Hurt Locker." "House." Diablo Cody and everything Diablo Cody has ever touched. Joss Whedon, again, for good measure. Oh, and your stupid face.

Did my blind, white-hot, single-minded hatred of any of things get you riled up? Well, that's your problem. I am in serenity. I am at peace with what I hate. You are free to hate and love what you will. That has no effect on me. We are just different beings on this small planet, with no choice but to keep hurtling around the same sun until we both pass our atoms into the loam.

Maybe a better example is music. People tend to get especially haughty about music. I don't personally care for Creed or Nickleback or Justin Bieber or whatever act is the latest designated whipping-boy for hipsters. But I don't really care if other people like them. Who can it hurt? Does that really warrant me expending energy berating those who do find something meaningful in their music? I'm not sure I see the point.

Because really, there are so many more important things to be angry about. Republicans, for one. Conservatives, for two. Tea partiers, for three.

I recognize that there's lots of overlap between those groups. My point is, what's the worst that could happen if Nickleback became the most popular group in history? Maybe you'd have to overhear their songs more often when you're in the mall. I probably wouldn't even notice -- I never hear any of their songs now, because I'm a grown-up and therefore don't listen to Top 40 radio. (Assuming they're still on Top 40 radio, or that Top 40 radio still exists -- I don't know and I care so little that I can't be bothered to check.)

Meanwhile, what's the worst that could happen if Republicans and conservatives and tea partiers and everyone else get their way? Well, the gap between the rich and poor would grow even wider. We'd have a new Gilded Age, in which the ultra-rich could wipe their asses with our tear-stained dreams, and the rest of us would become a permanent underclass living paycheck to paycheck if we're lucky -- if we're unlucky, we'd die of starvation or insufficient health care or inadequately labeled food or whatever else because we weren't sufficiently "makers."

You see why I'm a little more concerned with politics than with whatever dumb schmuck is the latest to send 12-year-old girls' hearts a-flutter. I don't care if Justin Bieber sells 10 gazillion records. As long is it means I can still listen to my old De La Soul CDs, I don't see how that can possibly affect me.

Anyway. The point is that so many things in the arts in particular can be boiled down to personal taste. I think professional criticism should acknowledge this more. Critics tend to say that this or that didn't work, when, in reality, it just didn't work for the particular person writing this review.

You assume that this person knows best, because he/she's the one who gets to write the reviews. And this person knows a lot, because he/she sees literally dozens of movies or hears hundreds of songs per week. But that kind of overstimulation could also warp a person. Maybe after that kind of barrage, the straightforward appeals to the heartstrings get turned into cliches. Then anything novel in any way becomes a breath of fresh air, and gets fulsome praise.

Meanwhile, us Joe Sixpacks get off from our jobs punching things with a hammer, desperate for some kind of cultural experience that could make us feel like part of the human race. We read those reviews, go to those French films that are heralded as having ground-breaking mise-en-scene, and then come out thinking "I didn't get it. I am apparently dumb."

A better system, I think, would take what you already like and go from there. That would get more at personal taste. Netflix does this well. You rate what you like. Then Netflix tells you what other people with similar ratings to yours have also liked. I think this approach will have a much better batting average than your local critic.

I'm not saying there's no place for criticism. But I think it's much more useful after you've seen the film or heard the song. Like many people, I loved the late, great critic Roger Ebert. But I almost never read his reviews before seeing a movie. I would read them afterwards, and would then would be left with a brilliant new perspective, one that would only deepen my experience.

This is how literary criticism works, by the way. No one goes to Jacques Derrida's column in Us Weekly to find out what book to read (though, if he had one in Us Weekly, I would definitely subscribe. Get on it, Us Weekly.) You read Derrida to gain a deeper understanding of whatever work you may have only understood on a surface level.

So that's my new plan. Netflix will tell you what to see based on your personal taste. Critics will then be the erudite friends who will give you a new appreciation of artistic endeavors.

And in general, let's stop wasting energy on fighting over things that don't matter. Some things are to my taste. Some things are not. Tomato, tomahto. Bieber, boober. Let's call the whole thing off. And then let's unite to destroy Republicans.

Animals You Have Never Heard Of But Need to See

My lovely little two-year-old daughter loves animals, as do all kids at that age. She does some kick-ass impressions of monkeys, dogs, cats, elephants, lions, tigers, dinosaurs (granted, the lion, tiger and dinosaur impressions all sound quite similar). And she has all sort of little puzzles and books showing all the animals that kids normally learn about, in this country at least.

It strikes me as interesting though, that the animals she gets exposed to are pretty much only from three continents: North America, Europe, and Africa. I suppose penguins often get in the mix too, and sometimes pandas. Australian animals get a page in your more comprehensive books. But it's still not enough for me, because there are so many awesome animals from the other fifteen or so continents (I don't have the exact number on me at the moment).

And I'm not talking about the bizarre little bugs who have 35 eyes on each leg and eat their own genitals or whatever. Bugs are fascinating to hear about, but are no fun to see in person, at least when it's not genital-eating season. I'm talking about the animals that are big enough to be fun to see in zoos.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Chevrotain

That's an adult chevrotain, also known as a "mouse-deer." They are from Southeast Asia. There's one at the the Minnesota Zoo, and it is the cutest thing you've ever seen -- way cuter than that picture. It makes the zoo's much more popular red panda look like a slime mold.

Chevrotains weigh at most 18 pounds and are in the suborder ruminantia, which also includes deer, giraffes, cows, antelopes and goats. They have barely evolved in the past 30 million years, and love the water, so some believe that whales evolved from chevrotains. No joke. Whales, as I hope you know, are mammals, not fish. Mammals evolved on land, so for whales to exist, some mammals had to move back into the water. Of course, the development from chevrotain to whale took millions of years and involved lots of embiggening (an evolutionary term meaning "getting more bigger.")

Capybara

Now we go from a tiny deer to a gigantic rodent:

The capybara's the one on the left. On the right is a species known as a "scientist," identifiable by the white beard, the cheap clothes, the baseball cap with a logo unrelated to any sports team, and the popsicles. (Scientists subsist entirely on popsicles and condescension towards anyone who isn't a scientist.)

I picked a picture that included a more familiar species so that you could get an idea of what really makes capybaras fascinating to see in person: how large they are. They are basically R.O.U.S.es (Rodents of Unusual Size). It is a bit jarring to come across something that looks like a beaver but weighs as much as an Olsen twin, what with capybara adults clocking in at an average of 100 pounds. Most live in South America, but I know they have some at the zoo in Amsterdam. So get on a plane right now, go to Amsterdam, look at the capybara for about 15 minutes, and then fly immediately back. (There's not much else to do in Amsterdam. Assuming that you love Jesus.)

If you're lucky, you'll be able to catch a capybara eating its own poop. Scientists call this "coprophagia," because scientists like to make up very long, difficult words for simple concepts, in an effort to keep science a secret. A lot of animals eat their poop, by the way, and not because they're stupid (though they are, at least compared to me. I am a scientist, by the way). They do it to restore a lot of the gut bacteria that they need to digest all the grass they eat. Ideally, that gut bacteria wouldn't leave with the rest of it in the first place, but, failing that, poop-eating is the Plan B.

It does beg the question, though, of whether poop-eating defeats the purpose of pooping. So you're trying to get rid of bad stuff, but when you do, you accidentally shed some good stuff. Then it's like, oh crap, I need that good stuff. So you eat it all back up. Then you have to get rid of the bad stuff again, and, oh man, who could have predicted, the good stuff left too. So then you have to eat it all again. I wonder if each capybara has only had one poop in their lives that keeps circulating in and out.

Maybe the good gut bacteria sits in a layer on top of the poop, like the icing on a cupcake, and the capybaras just eat that. More likely, they only need to eat a little poop to get enough gut bacteria back. Then on the aggregate they're able to come out ahead.

It is my moral obligation right now to point out that we humans apparently don't eat enough of our own poop. Scientists have recently discovered that injecting poop into people's buttholes (they of course call it "fecal bacteriotherapy" so no one will be interested in it) can cure C. diff infections, which can be very brutal. The good bacteria from the injected poop can then crowd out the virulent C. diff.

Modern life is of course to blame for the C. diff infections in the first place, because modern life is to blame for all our problems. Surprisingly, it's not video games that are at fault this time -- it's the fact that we've gotten away from the simple, small-town values of the old days, values like eating your own poop. When I was a young lad growing up in Mayberry, U.S.A., skippin' stones down by Old Mill Pond, dancin' the watusi at church hootenannies, and systematically oppressing Negroes, we didn't get our britches in a bunch just cuz a few turds showed up in our peach cobbler. Kids today, what with their MTV and lambada dancing and improved but still problematic race relations, just can't appreciate the simple pleasures of a good old-fashioned diarrhea soup, served with nothing but a little salt, a little pepper, a splash of urine, and a whole lot of love. (See "grumpy old man argument" in the previous post about arguments. I'm a bit obsessed with it, as I got a lot of it as a kid and I'm already seeing it crop up among my peers.)

Oh, and also, the antibiotics we take all too often have made the bad stuff even stronger in an effort to survive -- C. diff only started becoming a problem in 2000. These antibiotics may also flush out good bacteria we need for digestion, which perhaps causes some food allergies. But yeah, it's mainly about our society's shocking lack of poop-eating.

How did I get on this topic? Oh yeah, capybaras. Point is, they're real big and sometimes eat their own poop. Moving on ...

Mata-mata

Speaking of poop, the mata-mata looks like a 30-pound pile of it. It's often hard to tell what exactly you're looking at. You see a bumpy turtle shell, and in the picture you can make out an arm. That giant thing in the middle is its head and neck, and he's looking at you. He's actually giving you a come-hither look, and having just bought you a drink, he's expecting to get some action. I recommend you run.

But mata-matas don't look that way to charm the ladies. They look that way to blend in to the leaves and bark and other crap on the bottom of the Amazon. When they see a fish, they suddenly extend their long necks, open their huge mouths, and suck the down fish whole. It's quite a sight -- I saw it once at the Bell Museum in Minneapolis, where they have a huge mata-mata that sits right next to the glass, all the better to scare the crap out of you.

Man, this post is getting longer than I expected. It wouldn't have gotten so long if you all hadn't demanded so much jibber-jabber about poop-eating. We better move on to the next animal, which is ...

Pygmy slow loris

OK, that's a baby pygmy slow loris, so that's hardly fair. But look at that thing. It looks like a Precious Moments figurine, not an actual animal. It's as if it evolved extreme, almost sickening cuteness so that predators would stop and go "Awwwww. So cute! So cute I just don't want to just eat you up!"

And you don't have to go to Southeast Asia to see one -- they have a bunch of pygmy slow lorises at the Como Zoo in St. Paul (you know, it's starting to seem like the Twin Cities are a wonderful place to explore!) Here's what an adult pygmy slow loris looks like:

Adults typically weigh about a pound, so these are tiny little buggers. Lorises are primates, just like us, except that they're among the "prosimians," primates that are considered more "primitive," more like our distant ancestors.

It is not accurate, however, to say that lorises are monkeys. Primates are broken into prosimians and simians. Simians are broken into New World monkeys, Old World monkeys and apes. We are apes, not monkeys. Gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees are also NOT MONKEYS. I feel the need to BOLD that PART because my CAPS lock is MALFUNCTIONING, but it is APPROPRIATE because every damn time I go to the zoo, some stupid parents point at the gorillas and tell their kids to "look at the big monkeys." I then, of course, slap them in the face and scream "They're apes, dammit! Damn you! Damn you all to hell! You blew it up!" I then get forcibly escorted from the premises, and I scream "Get your filthy hands off me, you damn dirty ape!!! Because you are an ape, see, not a  monkey!!! See, you start with primates!!! And those are broken down into prosimians and simians!!!" By that point I usually am forcibly gagged, because the world isn't ready for the truth.

That's enough animals for now. The rest are all boring and delicious. The end.