Reading

I spend a lot of time worrying that I look like a hypocrite. I wouldn't mind actually being a hypocrite, only if someone thought I was. (Is that hypocritical of me? Well as long as you don't know about it, I don't care.)

Now that nearly all of our books are on display, I worry that the following conversation will happen:

VISITOR: Wow, you've got a lot of books.

A RANDOM STRANGER: Yeah.

VISITOR [pointing at random book]: What'd you think of this one?

A RANDOM STRANGER: I haven't read that one, actually.

VISITOR [pointing at a different book]: What about this one?

A RANDOM STRANGER: I haven't read that one yet, either?

VISITOR [aside]: So this guy has all these books just to look smart.

exeunt.

How possible is this scenario? To calculate it, I went through the books we have downstairs and counted how many I read. The final tally: 257 read out of 635 books, which is slightly more than 40 percent. Things get better if you disregard my wife's books, because I'm probably not going to read any Annie Brashares, Meg Cabot, or Louise Rennison. If you eliminate them, I've read over half my books. But maybe I shouldn't rule out all my wife's books: Persephone says some of Betsey Burke's stuff can get pretty smutty.

Poll

Are my palms bruised because I've been shoveling snow for three days, or is it because I'm developing stigmata?

Are You Ready for Some Internet Updates?

There are two events I have always watched, as long as I can remember: the World Series and the Super Bowl. I've watched every World Series and every Super Bowl since 1985. Sometimes life circumstances have conspired against my continuing this streak, but I have risen above.

• January 1997: I decided I shouldn't watch the Super Bowl, since it was on Sunday and I was leaving for my mission the next week. But since the Green Bay Packers were playing and I was called to serve in Wisconsin, my mother said I needed to watch so I could relate to the people there.
• October 1997: I'd already been beaten down by my mission by this time, so when I found members who would let us come over for the games, we were on it. When Game 7 went into extra innings, we called our numbers in from the members' house and kept watching the game.
• January 1998: Our mission president allowed us to watch the Super Bowl if we had a member record it for us to watch on our next P-day. Since the Packers were again in the game, it would be absolutely impossible to be doing missionary work during the game, so we just went to a member's house and watched it. The four of us missionaries had been in the field long enough to hate everyone in Wisconsin and, by extension, the Packers, and so we actively rooted against them. Not the best way to build relationships of trust, probably.
• October 1998: A single guy in the ward wanted somebody to watch the games with, so we gladly obliged him. Unfortunately, it was only a four-game series.
• January 1999: Home from my mission for a few weeks, I was visiting my sister and her husband. My sister thought we should go to dinner since I was leaving the next day. Across the restaurant, on the muted TV at the bar, was the game.
• October 1999: A series between two teams I hated. But I at least hated the Braves more, and watched to make sure they lost.
• January 2000: The girl I was dating said she'd never watched a Super Bowl. That should have been my first sign that it wasn't going to work out. I nearly let her keep me from watching it, but ended up seeing the most exciting ending of a Super Bowl ever.
• October 2000: Again, two teams I hated, but since neither was the Braves, I didn't really care which team lost. I watched some of Game 1 at least, and then forgot about the series.
• January 2001: I boycotted the Super Bowl, hoping it would keep the horrible Baltimore Ravens from winning. It didn't. But my dedication to my streak forced me to continually check on the game periodically.
• November 2001: By this time I was married, which introduced a whole new set of problems. I missed the end of Game 4 because it had gone long and my wife wanted to watch Felicity. If I hadn't have been all doped up on love like a newlywed, that never would have happened.
• February 2005: Things settled down for a few years. We had cable TV and could watch everything we wanted at home. We even watched the NBA Finals a couple times. But by 2005 I was trying not to watch TV on Sundays again. We had been tricked into living at my in-laws' house, though, and my father-in-law had no problem with it, so I ended up watching the fourth quarter with him.
• October 2005: The beginning of more serious problems. We had moved to Kansas and didn't have cable or a TV antenna. We went to my brother's house to watch Game 1, cramping my sister-in-law's style, since she hates me and the things I like.
• February 2006: My football team, the Steelers, were in the Super Bowl. My parents recorded the game for us and mailed us the tapes. I watched the Super Bowl in early March.
• October 2006: Before the series began, we discovered that our local McDonald's had TVs, so we bought some ice cream and watched the first half of Game 1 there. For the final game, I went to a bar where a co-worker of mine part-timed as a bartender. Their TV reception kept going out all night. He told me, "I swear we've never had this problem before.
• February 2007: I had my parents record the Super Bowl for me again, but since I wasn't a big fan of either team and I was busy with school, I didn't end up watching the game until after my finals in May.
• October 2007: My wife's favorite baseball team, the Red Sox, were in the World Series, so she bought a TV antenna. We had a hard time getting it to work, but eventually found a setup that allowed us to see the picture, but not hear anything. Articulate Joe then bumped into the antenna, knocking it down. It turned out to be better reception on the ground. He was scared he'd done something wrong, so we congratulated him on his discovery to help him feel better, like when he accidentally ate a lightning bug and we told him he was so brave to allow one to fly in his mouth.
• February 2008: My parents were supposed to be recording the game and mailing it to us, but they could no longer figure out how to do it. To cover my bases I watched the nfl.com update, which gives a written description of each play, and then the next day at work I watched highlight clips on the website. Good thing I did, because my mother ended up mailing us a blank tape.
• October 2008: Using the antenna setup discovered by Articulate Joe, we watched the games on our TV at home. It wasn't as effective as previously, and many of the games had no sound. I tried to listen to it on the radio, but the local ESPN affiliate wasn't airing it. No World Series on the radio? What the hell is wrong with this country?!
• February 2009: The Steelers were in the Super Bowl again. Since my parents' grasp of technology had taken a step backwards, it was unlikely I'd be able to watch the game. I was in an elders quorum presidency that had a meeting that night. When I came home, my wife had decided we'd watch the second half on our TV. She made Super Bowl party snacks and we watched the Steelers win. A few months later we went to my parents' house in Saint Louis and watched the Penguins win the Stanley Cup. What a great year in sports. (Disclosure: as I write this, I am wearing a shirt that commemorates the Steelers/Penguins championships.)
• October 2009: We followed the online written updates on mlb.com and watched the game highlights the next day when they were posted.
February 2010: We were going to go to my sisters' tomorrow to watch the Super Bowl, but my son has a strep infection and the largest snowstorm to hit the DC area since 1772 (when there WAS no "DC" to have an area, so that means this is the largest snowstorm to hit the DC area EVER) is currently burying us inside. It looks like tomorrow will be a day spent with nfl.com again.

Final note: I've written before on this blog about how Scott Fujita, New Orleans Saints linebacker, spent most of fifth grade trying to beat me up. Scott commented and apologized. But if Scott reads this blog post, as he's done in the past when I've written about him, I want to wish him good luck.

Snowstorm Death

According to news reports, we're all going to die this weekend, entombed in eleventy billion inches of snow. So far we've received probably two inches, so we still have a way to go.

The good news is that church will probably be canceled again on Sunday. Two weeks in a row! And three weeks so far this winter! If I ever need proof that God loves me, remind me of all these weekend snowstorms in 2010.

Family story which proves I'm not the only heathen in the bunch: once my sister and her husband were asleep on a Sunday morning. The phone rang and my brother-in-law answered it. My sister was still mostly asleep when she asked, "Who was on the phone?" My brother-in-law said it was a call to cancel church because of the weather. My sister mumbled, "Heavenly Father really does love us," and rolled over to go back to sleep.

The Global Economy

I bought a textbook online. The website said it was coming from a bookseller in Washington State. Now that I have a DHL tracking number, I can see its movements:

• Feb. 4: departed Bangkok, Thailand
• Feb. 5: processed for departing Hong Kong

I've got nothing against buying foreign textbooks; in fact, I enjoying using textbooks that have giant labels that read "Not for Use in the United States!" But I think I might have picked a different seller had I known I'd have to wait for a package from Thailand.

This is happening to me more frequently. Last month I bought a book from "Indiana" that came from "Belgium," and a book that was supposed to come from "Great Britain" actually came from "New Jersey."

I wonder if what's going on is that I'm not buying a book, but a futures contract FOR a book. Someone in Great Britain sold me a contract to deliver the book to me by a certain date, and he ended up selling that contract to someone in New Jersey before it matured. It's kind of cool to imagine such a market. I've had a soft spot in my heart ever since my high school economics teacher taught us that, if you bought a pork bellies contact and didn't sell it before its maturation date, a truck of pork bellies would arrive at your door. I liked to spend class imagining that type of thing. The teacher liked to spend class imagining dating some of the girls, which he did the year after we graduated.

Economic Disclosures: I Spent a Billionty Dollars on Health Care Last Year

One of the problems with trying to put a dollar figure on everything is when you have to figure out which number to use. Mississippi juries are known for accepting dubiously-high "pain and suffering" compensation claims. Anytime you try to compensate someone for a non-monetary expense you have to come up with an estimate based on something a little more scientific than asking the guy for a number.

Unless you write for the Wall Street Journal, that is. Then you just say, "How much are you saving?" and repeat the figure. How can someone spend $100 each week on Burger King, let alone save that much when his food substitute is organic vegetables? Wouldn't a $100 Burger King bill be at least 20 bacon cheeseburgers? A week only has 21 meals in it. (Unless you're a hobbit, like Jerome Jerome the Metronome, who's usually finished with Second Breakfast before I wake up on Saturdays.)

Overheard

First, an aside: I'm a firm believer in showing respect to females by only using the term "girl" for those yet to reach the age of majority. High school girls are girls; college women are women. I was about to start this story by telling you it involved three women, though, and I realized you might assume more mental faculty of "women" than the women of this story obviously possess. Although they are college students, they are in many ways still girls. Is this a sign that I'm getting hopelessly old, or that college women don't act like adults? I know those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive, but I'll pretend they are, since there's so much evidence in favor of the second one.

Three girls were approaching a long set of outdoor stairs. I was right behind them and, upon reaching the stairs, decided to pass them on the other side of the railing. When we were all on the top stair, the girl closest to me stumbled. I thought, "This is going to be awesome to watch, but I'll probably have to go get help once she's at the bottom." Two or three stairs down, though, she caught herself and everything went back to boring.

Her explanation to her friends: "Normally I'm good at walking down stairs because I'm very used to them, but my hair blew in my face."

Conflict of Interest

I read this article today and I realized that I can't trust Sec. LaHood's safety pronouncements. He's an officer for the organization that owns Chrysler and General Motors; when he criticizes the safety of Toyota, is he doing it as a public servant, or as a corporate stooge?

And how reasonable is it for Toyota to need safety review from their competitor? What other industry requires competitor approval? Does Pepsi have to sign off on the drinkability of new Coke products?

I can't think of a single reason I'd want to start my own business in America today.

Ohio County Trip

I'm a month late with these maps, but since no one cares except me, they are showing up exactly when I want them to. Also, in the past I used a much better mapping program to make my county maps, but I don't work anyplace that has it anymore. I'm relying on a much older program I have on my home computer, which means the maps are going to look much more rudimentary. If you've got a problem with that, feel free to leave a comment explaining your problem, and then imagine I cared enough to reply, because if I did my reply would read: "Suck it."

On the way there, we went slightly out of our way through West Virginia. I drove a complete interstate from start to finish (I-68), and I peed in what roadside signs described as "West Virginia's Longest Creek." I got sixteen new counties.The creek getting a little longer.

While we were there, Articulate Joe and I went to the highest point in Ohio. I got seven new counties.

Articulate Joe's county trip set-up: front seat reclined with headrest off. On this particular trip he was using my parents' GPS in his window.

The next day my father had to go to western Michigan for business and he asked if I wanted to go along.We stopped at the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, and on the way home we stopped to see the capitol in Lansing.

False advertising: "Grand" Rapids, Michigan.

I also ate lunch at a Bob Evans, where I violated my cardinal rule of food ordering: don't repeat the name of a stupidly-named menu item. At Cold Stone Creamery (which our family gives more street cred by calling Stone Cold Creamery) I refuse to order a "Like It," a "Love It," or a "Gotta Have It." I say either small, medium, or large, and when I say it, I mean it to sting. I have never eaten a Rootie-Tootie Fresh and Fruity breakfast, even though the actual food looks pretty good. But at Bob Evans I was looking at the pictures and reading the descriptions and it wasn't until the waitress asked what I wanted that I noticed my burrito was called a "boburrito." I panicked and just read the name as it was printed, and it still eats me up inside. (Both the shame and the boburrito, which was slathered in neon-orange "cheese" that did not do my bowels any favors.) Sadly, no pictures of said boburrito survive.

Follow Up

If people grew to 3'1", I think car accidents would be less deadly.

The critical question here is how much of our development is driven by people-scale and how much by other things. All the people-scale things will shrink, so houses would be smaller, cars would be smaller, streets would be smaller, buildings would be smaller, and so towns would be smaller. If the distance between towns is also people-scale, it will shrink, too, but if it's scale is determined by other things, such as acres necessary for a certain number of cattle to graze, it would remain the same, which would seem to smaller people to be longer distances.

However, I don't think it would remain the same, because we'd domesticate fewer cattle (since any given cattle would feed more tiny people), or we'd just domesticate smaller animals. Goats would be the new cows and cows would be the new woolly mammoths.

So the end result is everything decreases in scale, towns AND the distance between towns. Now, if we assume that cars go as fast as they now do because we like the distance-to-time ratio, cars will be able to travel at a lower absolute speed while maintaining the same perceived ratio to tiny humans. Instead of 60 MPH, they'll go 20 MPH, but since our feet are only four inches long, let's say, we would still think of that distance as 60 miles.

The force necessary to move something at an absolute speed of 20 MPH is much less than at 60 MPH, so when two cars have an accident, there is less bodily damage done. Thus car accidents would not be as deadly were we all 3'1" tall.

My wife argues that people would still want to travel at an absolute speed of 60 MPH, since the distance between San Francisco and New York would stay the same absolute length, thus appearing to be much longer to tiny humans. However, I think cars will be built to human scale, meaning they would all look pretty much like Power Wheels. The size of the engine will limit the available power, and cars will top out at a lower absolute speed, which will appear to tiny humans to be about the same as our cars are to us.

The more I think about this, the more fun I have with it, but when I mentioned it to my home teaching companion earlier this week, he thought I was an idiot.

Thought Exercise

The other morning I picked up Jerome Jerome the Metronome and said, "I can't believe people come in this size. What if everyone was as tiny as you?"

Here are my thoughts on that question: in some things, we wouldn't notice. Houses would be the same relative size, as would cars and chairs and tables.

What would be different would be the state of technological advancement. For instance, cell phones would just now be invented. Why? Because 80s cell phones would have been too enormous to be practical. Not until circuitry advancement allowed for modern-sized phones would we carry them around, and they would be as clunky to us as 80s phones were to the cavemen who used them.

Also, the list of "world's most dangerous animals" would be totally different. Hippos would probably not be the deadliest animal in Africa as they are now, because they would be the size of a house and only a fool would go anywhere near them. The number of dog-related deaths would be much higher than it currently is. Would dogs have even been domesticated? According to Jared Diamond's ideas, their living in a pack is a plus, but they are carnivores, which is a big minus, so probably not. (Right now Cristin is staring wistfully into the middle distance, saying softly, "For all sad words of tongue or pen....") Instead of being man's best friend, they would probably be our greatest nemesis. Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King would be about a man on a dog hunt.

What else would be different if a full-sized adult could expect to be 3'1"?

Anticipation

My wife got a teaser e-mail this morning from the Relief Society president that church would be canceled and more details would follow. Those details haven't been forthcoming, and I'm starting to wonder if the lady was just toying with our emotions. When I look out the window all the streets look to be as plowed as they can be. If I end up having to go to church this afternoon, it's going to be even worse because I'm going to know there once was a hope of not being there. "Of all sad words of blah blah blah, going to church is lame."

School Bathrooms

At Undergrad U., every men's room stall was covered in solicitations for anonymous gay sex. (This is not a hyperbole; I cannot remember a single stall that didn't have at least one offer penned on the wall.)

Things are different at Graduate U. First of all, nearly all of the men's room graffiti is political in nature. (I say "nearly all" because, after a scary experience I had with a motion-sensing energy-saving light, I penned the warning, "If you sit here too long, you will be pooping in the dark.")

Secondly, most of the men's rooms have diaper changing stations. Coming from Undergrad U., where I wrote a newspaper opinion piece about how the level of campus profanity made it inadvisable for me to bring my children to school, only to receive online comments about how college campuses aren't supposed to be kid-friendly, this was so welcomed of a change that I took a picture.

Thirdly, the toilet seat covers have the brand name "Rest Assured."I think it's wonderful that they managed to fit the word "ASS" in the product name, and I would bet anyone anywhere that it's not a coincidence.

Finally, a topic for discussion: why do toilet seat covers exist? Even if I concede the point that you are incapable of wiping the seat clean with a piece of toilet paper before beginning your business, no orifice makes contact with the seat, so no contamination can occur. The worst that can happen is you have other people's biological effluence on your ass cheeks until you take your next shower. Is that so bad? Are you rubbing your food on your cheeks before eating? You are probably putting your cheeks away inside your pants until your next shower. I cannot think of a single reason to use a toilet seat cover.