Month: March 2005

In the last week, I’ve seen no less than 5 news stories that contend how blogs are growing in appeal and influence in comparison to other such staid formats as the newspaper, TV and radio.

The articles all highlighted the Rather/CBS News mess to show how blogs are changing the way in which people receive and interpret news.

The discussion topic I pose to you is whether y’all be feelin’ that the blogosphere provides value to you as a news source.

My opinion is that there is ZERO value receiving news from a personal blog. Journalism is a media business that relies on professionalism and integrity to bring together readers (viewers) and advertisers. Without an unbiased, professional staff working on collecting, editing and publishing the media, I don’t find sustained value and credibility in the news source. Reporters, editors and fact-checkers go to school for this sort of thing. Yokels throwing up an internet site are, to me, agenda mongols.

I was hanging out recently with an newspaper editor friend who mentioned that his biggest problem is getting younger kids to read the paper. Newspapers are worried about circulation drop with the new generation of internet kids who live online. So, the blog concept represents a challenge to media mainstays worried about losing circulation in the next 10 to 20 years.

What do you all think?

(For the sake of focus, I don’t want to get into the subject of ‘media bias’, even though it’s obvious that The Washington Post and New York Times are the most fair and balanced pubs out there while Fox News is nothing more than psycho, hacks-for-hire whiners bankrolled by Murdoch and his lunacy empire. That is all.)

There’s an interesting story unfolding, about which I’m of two minds. Should a judge who is legally married to only one woman, but “spiritually married” to two others, by whom he has sired many children, lose his job due to being a polygamist?

If you’d like more background from a balanced perspective, please visit the Utah Polygamy Chronology. In summary, the federal government and Utah wrangled for years over illegalizing polygamy in exchange for statehood. Eventually, the practice was repudiated, statehood granted, and the territorial government of Utah was transitioned from a theocracy to a secular democracy.

Heirarchical polygamy, however, continues among some 30,000 people in the western US to this day.

Fundamentalist — read: polygamist — Mormon groups have received a great deal of scrutiny in recent years due to widespread welfare manipulation, poor health care, child marriage, incest, and child abuse (see this article about the Kingston Clan’s holdings and foibles). Utah’s passage of Proposition 3, which defined marriage as a union between “one man and one woman”, was widely perceived as an “anti-gay marriage” amendment. However, it was also hailed by some anti-polygamy activists as another tool in the arsenal to fight polygamy.

The case of this judge seems, to me, to be a test case of Utah’s Prop 3 and anti-polygamy constitutional wording, and important in considering the future of polygamy in the United States.

George Q. Cannon’s 1879 statement upon the conviction of George Reynolds (the polygamist who’s case went to the Supreme Court) seems to summarize the defensive stance of the judge being tried:

Our crime has been [that] we married women instead of seducing them; we reared children instead of destroying them; we desired to exclude from the land prostitution, bastardy and infanticide … Let it be published to the four corners of the earth that in this land of liberty, the most blessed and glorious upon which the sun shines, the law is swiftly invoked to punish religion, but justice goes limping and blindfolded in pursuit of crime.

Do you think the judge should lose his job for being a practicing polygamist? Why or why not?

Will his argument be more credible in today’s environment of greater religious and sexual tolerance than it was a century and a half ago?

Of course, the really interesting story underneath the story is that the attorney general has declined to prosecute him…

So today, I decided to just throw out a few jokes rather than a serious, thoughtful, or insightful blog. Feel free to add your own. The theme of the day seems easy enough to discern; please keep comments as clean as possible 🙂

A firefighter is working outside the station when he notices a little girl in a little red wagon with little ladders on the sides, a garden hose coiled in the middle, and wearing a firefighter’s helmet. The wagon is being pulled by her dog and her cat. The firefighter takes a closer look.

“That sure is a nice fire-truck,” the fire fighter says with admiration.

“Thanks,” the girl says. The firefighter notices the girl has tied the wagon to her dog’s collar and to the cat’s testicles.

“Little Partner,” the firefighter says, “I don’t want to tell you how to run your rig, but if you were to tie that rope around the cat’s collar, I think you could go faster.”

The little girl replies thoughtfully, “You’re probably right, but then I wouldn’t have a siren.

And today, as a special deal, you get a bonus joke!

What do you name a dog with no hind legs and stainless-steel testicles?

Sparky.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: No extensible language will be universal. — T. Cheatham

I sit stunned.

This is a non-spoiler post so I won’t spoil the end of Angel, and I ask that no one else spoil it either.. suffice to say.. I finished Angel season 5 a week ago and I’m still reeling.

This continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes place in LA, with Cordelia, Angel, and eventually much of the Buffy regulars either as main characters or guests.. including the Slayer herself in “I will remember you”, the most emotional episode of either series outside of “The Body” on Buffy.

This series is as good if not beter than the Buffy that spawned it and its in its differences that it shines. On Buffy, Humand good, non humans basically bad unless they have a soul. On Angel.. many more shades of Gray.

The concept is this.. Angel, the vampire with a soul, leads a quest to “help the helpless” in an effort to thwart the plans of the Evil “Senior partners” who are lawyers.. with the devil himself as a client (satan plays a mean game of raquetball). If Angel can redeem huimself, he gets to be human, not a vampire.. and then he can go find perfect happiness.

There’s more, but thats the gist. Angel stunned me, broke my heart more than once, made me laugh out loud, made my wife cry three times, and left me speechless when it ended. Its dialogue is as fresh as Buffy.. its as funny.. but its a grown up show whereas Buffy is aimed at high school to college.

Like Star Trek: DS9, it takes a while to hit its stride – and like Buffy, it can’t be picked up half wayu through very easily.. so lots of folks say “I couldn’t get into it”.. but I assure you, I said the same thing in the first five eps.. and by the end I was more into this show than Buffy.

As for the future of the “Buffyverse”, Joss Whedon has been working on a cartoon taking place during Buffy’s high school years.. but really, we want our grown up shows back. Ther ehas been talk of a “Ripper” show featuring Giles, a show featuring Spike.. but nothing certain.

Today i am trying to watch other shows without holding them to the high standard set by joss Whedon. Buffy, Angel, and Firefly.. all shows that you need to give time to grow on you.. but once they do,, watch out.. its wonderful, terrible, and addictive as hell.

Literally sometimes.

So it appears that someone took some potshots at a railcar full of toxic chemicals, resulting in the evacuation of some 8,000 people (at least, according to my Mom’s report) from businesses and homes in the area.

According to KSL News, “The chemicals involved are hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid and nitric acid.”

Now wait a second… didn’t we play with reasonably-large quantities of this stuff in high school chemistry class? I mean, not a railcar’s-worth, but plenty enough to pose a danger if we weren’t wearing safety equipment. Obviously, several tons of this toxic soup spilling from the side of a railcar in the middle of a metropolitan is a different story, but wow, it shut down a lot of roads.

And we’re just about to head to Grandma’s house, which requires us to go right past the area. Time to find an alternate route, I guess 🙂

What’s the largest non-lethal disaster you’ve had in your area in recent memory? I think this will be the biggest news in Salt Lake City since the tornado hit downtown several years ago. Or maybe the Olympics, though those were kind of a snoozer. But a disaster, nonetheless.

Throughout our married lives, Christy and I have made a few expensive purchasing decisions that, although we frequently needed or wanted to buy something like the thing we ended up buying, was not really what we should have gotten:

• We walked into a piano store one time, “just to look”, and walked out owning an expensive digital piano. Knowing what I know now about sales techniques, we were totally “gamed” into buying it. I often think that I’d have been perfectly satisfied with a piano that looked less “nice” and had a lot more functionality, synthesizer-wise. It’s water under the bridge now, but I still feel conned, nearly ten years later.
• We bought a used car that was overpriced and under-performing. We’d had an immense amount of car trouble with a particular ancient Buick, Christy was many months pregnant, it was summer, and the salesman took advantage of the situation. Again. We ended up trading that one in, and the value was so far underwater that it took us a long time to ever come close to breaking even on value on our subsequent vehicle.
• We attended a timeshare presentation, and got pressured into buying that evening. Although I don’t regret the purchase (much) since it’s been a source of a good deal of family vacation time, I often look at how low the prices are from people selling their shares online and think “if I’d only known that I could buy them used, I could have saved an awful lot of money”.

Finally, last year I read a very good book. Inflence: Science and Practice, by Robert Cialdini. He details what the patterns of influence are in society, and the principles behind so many of our automatic responses to certain situations. That free popcorn and hot dogs at the local furniture store isn’t truly “free”, because in eating it, you invoke a very deeply-programmed response to act charitably toward those who have done a favor for you without thought of recompense. This increases your buying probability.

It’s not something that works all the time, but it works a large enough percentage of the time. Think about some of these situations which are very common today:

• The door-to-door cleaner salesman offers to clean your toilet for you, absolutely free. That act of cleaning your toilet indebts you to the cleaner salesman, thus improving your chances of buying.
• That same salesman will often give a sob story about he/she is from “the ghetto” and “working to pull myself up by my bootstraps”. They thus invoke every person’s fundamental sense that they themselves are a good, charitable person, and that buying this guy’s cleaning product is the way to reinforce that self-perception.
• The car salesman, before committing to a price, tries to get you to put a signature on a piece of paper, with a question like, “is this a price at which you’d buy this car?” This reduces your chances of backing out, even though you know that signature is nothing legally binding. It’s often on a vaguely official-looking “form” that says nothing at all, really. But once you’ve put your signature down, to back out after putting a name in writing makes one appear inconsistent. Humans have a very deep-seated need to be consistent in our past and present actions; to be very inconsistent or unpredictable in behavior is one definition of “crazy”.

Learning from poor purchasing decisions has radically changed the way I now approach any large purchase. These days, I look at what it is I want from something (feature-wise), figure out exactly how much I’m willing to spend in order to get those features, after a great deal of online research, and then begin hunting down vendors who will sell to me at that price. We’ve bought two vehicles using this method, avoiding “salespeople” until we’ve already made the decision to buy at a particular price, and have been pleased with the outcome.

Learning to say “no” has been a long and difficult road, but very personally rewarding.

There’s one purchase that is much larger than any of the others, that many of us have already embarked upon: a house. Christy and I own our home (well, really, we own 9% of our home… the bank owns the rest). That decision worked out for the best, though I think not getting ripped-off partly luck at that clueless and gullible stage of my life. We found a home in our modest price range, got a low-pressure sales presentation by a local builder, and after looking at a bunch of homes decided to go with this particular seller. Though it hasn’t been all roses (particularly, our home’s resale value was in the toilet for several years due to the depression of 2001-2004), we’ve been pleased with our little home.

Unfortunately, even in the home-buying market, there are enterprising realtors who do not hesitate to “game” you into buying something you can’t afford and don’t want. The real-estate industry has its share of hucksters who will do anything they can get away with to get you to buy one of their homes.

If you own a home, how did you go about making your home-buying decision? If you were to do it again, what would you do differently? If you haven’t bought one yet, how do you plan to approach it?

So in the recent spirit of making things “new and improved” around here, I’ve enabled a chat-like interface for barnson.org. It’s called the “Chatbox”.

It’s sort of like Instant Messaging, but I’ve found that, where I work, IM mostly doesn’t work, while viewing web pages does.

So now we have three ways to communicate here:

• Blog postings (the traditional format). One-to-many communication method.
• Private Messages (available via the “view inbox” link when you are logged in). This is one-to-one communication.
• Chatbox: This is many-to-many communication. However, if memory serves for other web sites, real-time chat tends to be slightly under-used.

Anyway, for now I’m allowing anonymous users, as well as those who are registered, to use the chatbox. So if you have important information to relay, don’t use chatbox, but instead send a private message so that only you and the recipient can see it. However, it might be useful for just dropping in and saying Hi if someone else is online. Let me know if you like it, or use it.

So Justin’s blog reminded me that there has alway’s been something that I have alway’s wanted to say but haven’t done yet. It’s about Matt. I have alway’s wanted to tell him thank you for being him. Matt just may not realize how much influence he really had on some of us. More than just being in Wayward Sun.

You see, Matt was Matt.

We all know how bouncy and energetic he was. We all know that he was the drama and cheerleading geek. He went all out in everything that he did. Just like the rest of us, he was odd. He made it acceptable to be odd. He made it easier for us that were self-conscience to be able to live in our skin a little better.

You see, I was the quiet girl that was everyone’s secret. Always afraid of what someone else would say or do. It took a long time for me to get over that and say I really don’t care anymore. Matt made that possible.

I remember the day that Matt told me he was going to be a cheerleader. I asked him, “are you sure you wanna do that?”. Because I knew that there would be talk and repercussions. (And from his comment about his house being egged, there probably was).

But you know what his response was? “Sure, why not?” Then he skipped off merrily. The same way he did when before graduation he announced he was going on mission. When Matt saw something he wanted to do he did it. He didn’t allow anything else to hold him back.

It’s because of that that I think that he has got some of the best friendships around. Matt helped to bring me out of my shell. I want Matt to know that by him being friendly to everyone, happy with the cheesiest grin, alway’s willing to help (and he did that a lot) his true self showed through all the goofiness. A wonderfull Bright being.

Christy, you have a wonderful husband and catch. Matt I just wanted to say thank you.

And to everyone else how has Matt influenced you?

EDIT by matthew: Formatting, tpyos.

From one of my mailing lists, for today’s polling pleasure, I present to you: How nerdy are you?.

My score was…

========== 5% scored higher (more nerdy), and 95% scored lower (less nerdy).

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:

All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!

==========

Dude, when did this happen? I was so cool in high school. Really. I mean, I dressed cool, I acted cool, I was cooler than cool. I was so cool, I was chilling. Hip, ph4t, l33t, and all that good cool, non-nerdiness.

Wait, no. I was a cheerleader. In Drama. And Show Choir. I just dreamed that I was cool and popular. That’s right.

Now it’s time to go back and try to select the least-nerdly answers. I think it was knowing the speed of light in meters per second, and knowing what element Mn was (I memorized the periodic table in high school, and that’s one I remembered) that pushed me over the top…

Post your nerdliness here, if you take it 🙂

Hey Matt, Just wanted to say this looks really great, I love what you have done with the site 🙂