Maine’s vote for marriage holds back the tide
Yesterday, in Maine, voters rejected the notion that marriage is whatever kind of construct we decide it is rather than the union of one man and one woman in a binding and committed relationship. And so, in every state where voters have been asked to vote on the matter—or allowed to (looking at you, Massachusetts)—the answer has been clear. Marriage as the fundamental structure of society is not whatever we decide it is, not any kind of pairing imaginable. And once again, voters have agreed that it’s irrelevant to the state whether two people have feeling for another, that it’s not the business of government to validate love. (That’s the job of religion.)
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A red flag on this story
This is the type of story that is the bread-and-butter for your typical tabloid newspaper, like the Boston Herald. It’s a typical stirring-up-of-emotions that the average reader will identify with. In this case, the story is a level-3 sex offender who was working as a flagger on a road construction site in the wealthy suburb of Boxford, putting the residents on edge.
But there’s more to this story, including an undercurrent typical of Massachusetts politics and a shading of journalistic ethics. First, the background:
A Level 3 sex offender who was working as a state-certified flagger on a busy Boxford street gave horrified residents a Halloween fright this weekend as police officers went door to door to tell them the perv was working nearby.
David Giacalone, 45, was convicted of aggravated rape in 1985 and received his state certification as a flagger at New England Laborers Trust Fund in Hopkinton in June, state officials confirmed.
That’s pretty much all you need to know about the story. It’s not illegal for an ex-con sex offender to work as a flagger, but because of the ruckus he won’t be returning to the job site. I don’t know if the ruckus is justified. The state’s sex offender registry doesn’t provide much information beyond what the article says: He was convicted of a 1985 aggravated rape and the offender registry board considers him a serious threat to offend again. In that case, notification of the community may be justified.
On the other hand, there’s a whole political subtext at work. Gov. Deval Patrick recently ordered that, in certain circumstances, companies employing road crews no longer need to hire off-duty detail cops at very steep rates, but may instead employ civilian flaggers like nearly every other state in the country does to no ill effect. Police unions were understandably upset by this loss of lucrative off-duty work for their members.
Which all leads me to this question: Is it standard practice for police officers to go door to door in a town whenever a level 3 sex offender is nearby? Or did they only do it this time because this sex offender is also a civilian flagger and it would be a useful weapon in their battle with the governor? And why didn’t the Boston Herald reporter and editor ask the same questions? Or if they did, why didn’t they publish the answer?
Once again, I point this out to remind everyone not to take everything you see reported at face value.
His proposal ain’t Swift
A writer in the UK’s Guardian newspaper proposes that children, especially those in the First World are an unconscionable burden on the rest of us.
The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO2 every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess…
In 2050, 95% of the extra population will be poor and the poorer you are, the less carbon you emit. By today’s standards, a cull of Australians or Americans would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis…
He then proposes that in addition to voluntary birth control and voluntary abortion, we should start adopting limits on the number of children people can have, which would result in, presumably, involuntary birth control and involuntary abortion.
In 1729 Jonathan Swift was using satire when he suggested that the Irish sell their children as food for the rich. But these people aren’t joking any more.
Have you ever noticed, however, that the authors of such pieces, even as they tell as that we should “cull” First World children, they never once consider how much they could benefit the planet by offing themselves? How much would they reduce the carbon footpring if they were no longer destroying trees and wasting ink on their offensive and predictable left-wing columns in newspapers, not to mention the rest of their conspicuous consumption?
[Link via Off the Record.]
The Jerk in the Vette
I encountered a jerk driving a Corvette during my commute this morning. Shocking, I know. And yes, I know that not everyone driving a sports car is a jerk, but too many men (rarely women) get behind the wheel of a high-horsepower rocket and think they’re Cole Trickle. More often, they’re Ricky Bobby.
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Fall foliage out my window
I could stare at this all day. This is why I love living in New England. The change of seasons give so much variety. Why would you live in a mono- climate like Florida? It would get boring having the same thing day after day.
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Meeting the bishop at Mass
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Dropbox pulls it all together
Melanie and I are the very picture of the modern web-connected family. We both have blogs (hers and mine), Twitter accounts (hers and mine), and Facebook pages (hers and mine). To those social-media outlets, we post photos from Flickr (hers and mine) as well as videos from our YouTube and Vimeo accounts. And to create all this content, we use our digital point-and-shoot, our Flip Video cam, and my iPhone. That’s a lot of stuff to manage.
In the past, when she was using my old broken-down iBook, Melanie had to rely on me to download photos and videos and then upload them so that she could post them on her blog or Facebook or Twitter, which didn’t always work out so well. Too often she had to remind me a time or two or three. Now that she has a newer MacBook she can edit movies if she wants and manipulate photos with ease. She’s even started using my old iPod touch.
We haven’t solved the entire problem (we’re still doing the memory card dance: “Did you download all the pictures from this memory card so I can delete everything?” “I’m not sure. Leave it on my desk so I can check.”), but a few rough edges of the annoyance of having to manage all this content have been sanded off. Part of the solution is a web-based application called Dropbox.
The folder/directory that follows you around
Dropbox is an amazing tool that I use nearly every day. If you ever have to work on more than one computer or if you ever share files with other people, then Dropbox is for you. Here’s a short video that explains in plain language how Dropbox works.
One of the best features of Dropbox is the shared folder. This is a folder within your Dropbox that you explicitly make available to certain people. If they are Dropbox users it shows up in the Dropbox folder on their computers. If they’re not a Dropbox user, they can signup for a free account. (And if they sign up, you get some extra storage space for inviting them.) Basic free accounts start with 2GB of storage. Not bad.
I set up a shared folder with Melanie called “Dom+Melanie” and we use that to share photos and videos and other files. I recently listened to an episode of the public radio show “This American Life” that had a segment I thought Melanie would like so I cut out that portion of of the show and saved it as an MP3 audio file in our shared folder for her to listen to. The best part is that all she has to do is open the folder to get the file; Dropbox automatically synchronizes the folders behind the scenes.
Dropbox also makes me look good at work. My boss was giving a presentation and as we were getting ready to go to the conference room, I dropped a copy of the presentation in my Dropbox folder, along with other important files. When we got to the room, my boss realized he hadn’t put the presentation on a thumb drive to load it on the computer used for projecting the presentation. No problem, I said. I logged in to my Dropbox account via the web browser on the presentation computer and downloaded the file right there. Problem solved. Hero for a day.
The iPhone app
Here’s where it gets really good. Dropbox now has a free iPhone app. Now you can access the contents of the Dropbox from anywhere, not just when you’re at a computer. You can open several common file types, including PDF, text, Word/Excel/PowerPoint, MP3, video, and more. (You can’t edit them. It’s read only.) Remember that show segment from “This American Life” that I’d saved for Melanie to listen to later? She hadn’t got around to it by Saturday, so while we were driving on a family outing we listened to it, streaming from the Dropbox on my iPhone, which was connected to the car’s audio system. How cool is that? usually you’d have to futz around with putting the file in iTunes and synchronizing it to the phone (and remembering to synchronize the phone before you left), but here it was, available at the spur of the moment.
Going back to the beginning of this blog entry, the iPhone app also helps with the photo problem. When I see a good picture, maybe a cute photo of one of the kids, there isn’t time to run and get the camera. The moment will have passed by then. But I almost always have my iPhone on me. So I whip it out and snap the picture. Great! Now I have to rmember to synchronize the phone with my computer, download the photos to iPhoto, and then email them to Melanie. Not anymore! See that camera icon in this Dropbox app? Click on it and it will offer to take a photo or use one that’s already on the phone and upload it to your Dropbox. So now, I can snap a picture and drop it right in our “Dom+Melanie” shared folder where Melanie can grab it and upload it immediately to her blog. Or Melanie can take photos at home and drop them in the folder so I can see them right away at work, without having to wait until I get home.
Why not just use email?, some will ask. Because email is unpredictable. Sometimes a message gets to your recipient immediately, but the vagaries of the Internet can delay it for hours. In addiiton, most mailboxes have size limits, so sending multiple files or anything over about 5 MB is problematic. And let’s not forget the propensity of spam-filtering software to put important messages in your junk-mail folder.
What else can it do?
The potential uses for Dropbox and its iPhone app are limited only by your imagination. I can see myself at the store wondering if a particular product is the one Melanie wants. So I take a photo, put in Dropbox, and call her. She can look at it right away and steer me in the right direction. (Now, if only I could get Melanie on an iPhone, it could go both ways. Hmmm.) Another way I use it right now is to back-up our kitchen computer. We have an old iMac mounted on the wall in the kitchen that we use for recipes and to keep shopping lists. The only important data on it is the recipe database so I keep that in the Dropbox folder, which is backed up whenever I back up my MacBook Pro. Since every computer sees it as just another folder on the computer, it gets backed up by my backup software. I could go on and on, but I’ll leave it there.
If at the end of this, you’re saying to yourself, “I need me some Dropbox!”, then I offer you this link. If you sign up at my referral link, not only do I get more storage space for free, so do you! And if you find that 2GB is just not enough storage space, they offer reasonable paid accounts starting at 50GB at $10 per month. (They really should have a 20GB/$5 per month level, but that’s a little quibble. It’s definitely worth it.)
Big Apple Farm
Too late to pick-our-own apples, nevertheless on this Columbus Day weekend we went to Big Apple Farm in Wrentham, MA. And, by the way, a Trappistine Monastery happens to be down the street and so we stopped there too.
Bettinellis on CatholicTV’s House+Home
Check this out. My brother and his family were featured in this episode of CatholicTV‘s House+Home show.
This is the house I grew up in. What’s now the girls’ bedroom used to be the room I shared with my brother when we were kids. It looked “a lot” different then. Also look for the steer horns that Melanie and I brought back for my nephews from one of our trips to Texas.
What do I want for my birthday?
What do I want for my birthday? It’s a good question and one I was just asked this morning. I hadn’t given it much thought.
Of all the “things” I could want, most aren’t in the budget: it’s getting close to the time to upgrade to a new MacBook Pro; our old standard-def TV’s audio is starting to go; I’d love to start shooting photos with an SLR. But we can’t afford any of that right now. And as much as I love books, my “to be read” shelves are overflowing with bookmooched and review books. I definitely need new clothes for work. The old chinos are wearing out, especially the cuffs. (Bane of us short guys.) Not sure that’s what Melanie had in mind for a gift. Yeah, there’s stuff on my Amazon wishlist I wouldn’t get for myself either. But when it comes down to it, maybe a special dinner of a favorite dish with my wife, a nice glass of Scotch or Port after, and maybe even a good cigar or pipe would be just fine. At this point in my life it’s nice to get “things” from my wife (and if I got any of those “impossible” gifts I would be ecstatic), but it’s the simple things in life, the important things that make me happiest. C.S. Lewis had an old story about the child who asks her father for six-pence to buy him a present, and while the father was none the richer for having received the gift, he was blessed above riches for the love in it. I guess I feel the same way. It’s the love behind the gift that enriches and makes a birthday special. In a way, I’ve already received my birthday gift.Posted via email from Domenico’s posterous
The amazingly beatiful tabernacle at St. Theresa Parish, West Roxbury, MA
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Senate wannabe AG pooh-poohs Menino computer flap
Political quid pro quo in a potential case of corruption among Massachusetts Democrats. What would this state look like without it? Attorney General Martha Coakley, who hasn’t seen a camera she didn’t want to jump in front of to advance her career and is running for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, is dismissing requests to investigate Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s administration over the destruction of emails by a top aide allegedly connected to a federal bribery probe of state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson.
The facts are pretty straightforward. The Boston Globe requested the email correspondence of Michael Kineavy, Menino’s top policy adviser, for a period of six months starting last October, but he was only able to turn over just 18 emails. Under state law, all work-related emails are public records and are thus required to be archived. The city says it has automated archive system that backs up everyone’s email at the end of each business day. But Kineavy says he misunderstood how the system worked and was deleting his inbox at the end of each workday.
Although public records laws state that municipal employees must keep all but the most inconsequential of e-mails, Menino’s corporation counsel William F. Sinnott insisted yesterday what Kineavy did was not illegal because “there was no willful conduct, no intentional destruction of evidence”
And Menino’s spokesman claims that Kineavy was just unusually thorough.
Dot Joyce, Menino’s spokeswoman, portrayed Kineavy as a man “with a touch of OCD” — obsessive compulsive disorder— who “cleans off his desk with Windex every day” and is obsessed with cleaning out his e-mail bin so “that when he comes in the next day he starts fresh and new. He’s very anal.”“
Ouch, looks like someone is subtly being thrown under the bus. But ignorance of the law—or lack of intent—is usually not an excuse. So while the Secretary of State—an elected position overseeing public records and elections and such—has ordered certain mayoral administration computers seized for forensic analysis, Martha Coakley, the chief law enforcement officer, sits on her hands. Why?
For that explanation, we need to understand that Menino is a key political ally of Coakley. And Coakley has just announced she is running for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in the January special election. Coakley needs Menino to deliver Boston for her and to get the Democrat machine to benefit her and not her Democrat opponents. Former Boston mayor Ray Flynn says he believes Menino has already engineered an endorsement for Coakley from IBEW Local 103. That came down yesterday. Such convenient timing.
This is why the separation of powers is so important. It’s also why it’s good to have federal prosecutors who can take over when state officials roll over.
Photo credit: Flickr.com user 96dpi. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Potty training and vocabulary
Yesterday we took Benedict and Sophia to their 2-month and 18-month doctor’s appointments, respectively. I went in to work late so Melanie wouldn’t have to juggle three kids by herself, including two kids getting immunization shots. Whew, I hate watching them get those. I feel like Judas everytime the doctor or nurse sticks them with a needle and my child turns to me in tear with accusing eyes as if to say, “How can you stand by and allow this?”
So, the doctor asked her usual questions about Sophia’s development, including how many words does she know. “Does she know 10 words?” Melanie and I laughed. Oh, more than that certainly. “Twenty, 25?” Oh yes, at least. The doctor seemed impressed. I puffed up with pride at my brilliant progeny,
Later, Melanie counted up all the words that Sophia knows; not just words she parrots but that she can use in context, and came up with at least 100 words.
I was tellikng my co-worker, Anna, about this, not to be one of those prideful parents who boast of their child’s skills, mind you. After all, kids develop at their own rates, and if my child seems advanced, et cetera, etc.
Anna proceeded to tell me of a friend of hers who has a one-year-old child who is so advanced I swooned. This one-year-old—-I can hardly believe it—is … potty trained! Oh what use are words compared to that?!
I told Anna, “I’d trade 30 words for potty training.” Potty training! At one!
Melanie brought me down to earth later. She reasoned that a potty-trained one-year-old must use the free-standing pot, not the one that sits on the regular toilet. That means it must be cleaned after each use, which is a way dirtier job than just changing a diaper. So I stand corrected. I’ll keep the 30 words and diapers and be happy if we potty train by 3 like Isabella. Three! That’s advanced, right?
Dear Abby: She steals my books
Dear Abby:
I love my wife. I really do. And one of the reasons I married her was that, in addition to being gorgeous and Catholic and open to life, she loves books. Even more than I do. And that’s a lot.
Not only does she love books, but we love the same kind of books in many cases. She likes science fiction and fantasy! Am I lucky or what?
Unfortunately, Abby, that’s where there’s a little trouble in paradise. You see, my wife, “M”, loves books so much that she devours them whole. She goes through 400-page novels in a sitting and she’s often reading three or four books at a time. Not all at once, mind you, like a female, latter-day St. Thomas Aquinas, but they’ll be scattered about the house or in the diaper bag, ready for the picking when the mood strikes. Again, this isn’t so bad in itself: She gets many books at the library or through Bookmooch, so the cost isn’t really an issue.
No, the problem is that … she reads my books while I’m still reading them! For example, say I’ve got the latest book in a multi-volume series that we both enjoy very much. Let’s pick one out of the air, like say, S.M. Stirling’s “The Sword of the Lady”
However, I am not a devourer of books like she is. I savor the novel, creating an image in my mind of what the author describes, hearing the voices of the characters. I take my time with it, especially knowing it will be a long drought until the next novel in the series arrives. This drove my wife nuts. She saw the book laying about while I watched TV or puttered around the house, until finally I started seeing the book seemingly moving of its own accord, from the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen.
A mysterious second bookmark has now sprouted in the novel, stalking my bookmark through the pages of the book. Just today, the inexorable plodding of the tiny card—some defunct doctor’s appointment reminder, I think—overtook my own bookmark—a “repeat customer” card from a local Chinese restaurant with only one stamp on it.
Now “M” has become brazen about her usurpation of my reading material. I would ask if she’s seen my novel and she pulls it from beside her in her chair where she’s nursing our child. I even saw her with it laying upon her lap as I came home from work, unexpectedly early! Oh, how a man can be cuckolded by a stack of paper bound in cardboard.
Abby, I implore you. For the sake of my marriage and my sanity (… and my reading pleasure): What can I do about a wife who has no respect for my books?
Signed,
Bereft of Books in Boston
