bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • “There were nine blokes in the place but only one man.”

    Best comment from the thread here.

    I agree with those who write in the comments that Britain's ridiculous laws against forceful self-defense likely contributed to this situation, in which nine younger men stood by and watched while an octogenarian RAC veteran single-handedly tackled an armed robber, successfully enough to drive him to flee.

    Hopefully the robber won't sue for injuries received, because he would have a decent chance of success (cf. the case of Tony Martin, or this video or even you-can't-make-this-up cases like these:

    In 1994 an English homeowner, armed with a toy gun, managed to detain two burglars who had broken into his house while he called the police. When the officers arrived, they arrested the homeowner for using an imitation gun to threaten or intimidate. In a similar incident the following year, when an elderly woman fired a toy cap pistol to drive off a group of youths who were threatening her, she was arrested for putting someone in fear. Now the police are pressing Parliament to make imitation guns illegal.


    I don't fault anybody for deciding not to attack an armed man — that's a call you've gotta make under the circumstances.  But it takes a special kind of cowardice for a young man not to step in to help an old guy who's already gotten the gunman in a headlock, wrenched his gun away and is bashing the robber over the head with it.


    Fear of a lawsuit or of getting charged with assault yourself might do it.  Now that's scary.

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  • Typepad bleg.

    OK, I'm finally admitting that I have a problem.  I'm sure you've noticed how screwy my formatting is, and I apologize for being an eyesore.  

    When I copy and paste stuff from the web into my box, it brings all the formatting with it (and a lot of that formatting bleeds down to the other stuff I write).  If I select it and click the "remove format" button, all the formatting goes away including the line breaks and the text runs off the right side of the page, and I can't get it to accept line breaks anymore.  Adding HTML "p" tags doesn't seem to fix it.  So the only way I have figured out to remove the formats (except for easy stuff like text color) is to go into the HTML and manually remove all the relevant tags that start with "span style."  This is a pain and I've stopped bothering with it beyond fixing things that make the post completely unreadable.  I haven't been able to find the fix in the Typepad help pages.

    I work on an iMac, btw.  Can anyone help me out here? 

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    2 comments on Typepad bleg.

  • Sink into the seat, turn the key, head down that road.

    Am I being fooled by highly noticeable anecdotes, or does it seem that an inordinately large number of fraudulent-schemers use their money to buy a whole bunch of showy fancy cars?

    If it were me, I think I'd want to be a little less conspicuous.  I'm just sayin'.  From the Strib:

    Two federal judges in Minnesota have unsealed 47 documents outlining what federal investigators describe as "a large-scale, multi-year, multimillion-dollar online bid-rigging scheme" that the Coles allegedly used to exploit a flaw in Best Buy's system for buying computer parts.


    Among the items seized were $2.9 million in cars… Robert Bossany, a former Best Buy vendor-relations employee, told federal investigators that Cole referred to his $2 million custom home with its multicar garage as "the house that Best Buy built."


    The federal investigators described it as an "online bid-rigging scheme" but it might be better described as "exploiting a programming flaw in the bidding system to raise the invoice price that was to be paid for a part."   Sort of hacking.


    An interesting story, I thought. I wonder how people like that feel when they're driving their cars around town.  

    Many of the wrong things people do today — some of them a good deal worse than stealing money — you can quite reasonably argue "They didn't know it was wrong."  Sometimes it's willful blindness, but other times it's poor catechesis, poor whole-society catechesis, stuff that tells people in strong terms that they have a right to try to get what they want (even if you have to leave your family, you've gotta be true to yourself) or that the legal norm is the moral norm (hey, we're both consenting adults here) or that what they did doesn't actually hurt anybody  (it's just a blob of tissue).    I'm  trying to give sinners a break here.  A lot of people really, truly, "do not know what they do."  

    But then you look at "stole millions of dollars through many individually chosen acts of deceit" and that's a real head-scratcher.  What on earth could make a couple think this was … something they ought to do?   Or, if they didn't think that, if they never managed to fool themselves into justifying themselves, how?  I don't mean, how can you sleep at night, I mean… how can you do it again and again and again?  How is it that nothing inside stopped you?

    Many other acts are more objectively evil than theft or fraud, even of a large amount of money like this.  I alluded to three of them above.  But we hold and teach that full knowledge and consent (and even in some cases, absence of force of habit!) is necessary to name the perpetrators "guilty of serious sin."  Has it always been so that so many of the evils that surround us, we are so painfully aware that the perpetrator wasn't taught, or has consciously rejected and no longer believes, that there's anything wrong at all?  Has it always been so that pity rather than anger is what we should feel towards most people who do others wrong?  

    That's the case so often, it's almost (I know, I should NOT feel this way) refreshing when somebody comes along and does something so obviously immoral that you are pretty sure there aren't going to be any mitigating circumstances, although the lawyers for the defense, that being their job, will probably try to produce some.

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  • Wanting to keep an open mind.

    It's hard for me to disagree with the sentiments in this post about the stimulus bill.  (h/t Instapundit)

    But maybe I'm just insufficiently aware of the counter arguments.

    Anyone willing to defend it reasonably, or to point me to a link to someone who will?

    (I went googling around, specifically looking for a list of the 11 Democrats who voted no, and got a few places, but the discussion in the comboxes isn't heavy on what I would call a defense of the bill as passed, rather than an argument about how we got into a place where we supposedly needed a stimulus, e.g. here.   I am not saying that is representative of stimulus-bill supporters, and am hoping to see something better.)

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  • Technology transfer.

    This post by Derek Lowe is about spending the time necessary to develop technical skill as a scientist, but I could not resist the impulse to draw the analogy to learning how to raise children.

    Especially the last part (please don't try to figure out the allegorical/analogous meaning of "get[ting] butyl-futiled" in a child-rearing context, you are thinking too hard):

    That said, I take Nielsen’s point about putting in good hours rather than empty ones. As much as possible, I think that we should try to do things that we haven’t done before, learn new skills, and move into untried areas. Try not to get butyl-futiled if you can possibly avoid it; it’s not going to do you much good, personally, to set up another six or eight EDC couplings. There are times that that’s exactly what needs to be done, but don’t set them up just because you can’t think of anything else. This gets back to the point I’ve made about making yourself valuable; anyone can set up amide reactions, unfortunately. Maybe some of the time we spend learning our trade is spent learning how to avoid falling into all the tar pits and time-wasting sinkholes we have.


    I think I'll leave drawing the actual analogy as an exercise for the reader.  But the phrase "good hours rather than empty ones" is resonating with me.

    She said, as she finished up a blog post while her kids begged for breakfast.  Think I'll go make some French toast.

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  • Milestone, again.

    I ran a twelve-minute mile for the first time in my life on the treadmill last night.  Actually I ran two of them, and then some, 'cause I ran for 30 minutes plus warm up and cool down.

    Woo-hoo!

    I still remember being made to attempt a twelve-minute mile in junior high gym class.   I remember (a) thinking that it was unreasonably impossible to get around the track once in three minutes, let alone do it four times and (b) not being able to run the whole distance anyway and having to drop to a walk.

    So!

    After a year my  swimming is still improving.  But I'm at a point there now where occasionally I go through periods of not improving, or I'll have a couple workouts in a row where my 50-yd sprint is slower than the last time.  

    With running, every time I do it I get to go measurably faster and farther than before.  Still a beginner, but that feels so good, to keep turning up the dial.

    Maybe it's just the psychological effect of the big round number causing it, but… last night while cleaning up the dinner together,

    ME:  Ow!  My legs hurt.  I don't remember ever feeling it here before (indicates outside back of thighs).  What is that?

    MARK:  That, my dear, is fitness.  "You know it's working 'cause your legs pound."


    Hmph.  

    Memo to my junior high gym teacher:  You can just forget about me ever shooting ten free throws in sixty seconds.  

    … Maybe.

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  • Where I live.

    One of the more interesting (to me) bit of social research out of the Pew people lately:  Almost half of all people want to live somewhere else.

    It's interesting to me because for such a long time I really marveled at the large number of people (even of people with the necessary means) who, growing up in one particular spot, don't leave the place they grow up in.  It's not that the place I grew up in was particularly constricting or backward — I grew up in the suburbs around Dayton, Ohio, nothing particularly wrong with that — but I can't remember ever having the expectation that I would stay there as an adult.  Where you choose to live, I thought, is an expression of your individuality.  City girl or country boy.  Northeast, Southwest, ocean or mountains or plains.  Leave the country even, live in another place if you want, but find the place that suits you if you can.  It's only chance that planted you where you are; why would anyone expect that this particular roll of the dice is where you'd thrive?

    (People whose family moved around a lot as kids weren't in my calculation at all here.)

    Anyway, I did wind up moving away, and as it turns out the place I picked to settle for the rest of my life does suit my taste extremely well.  I live in a city, and I remained in the Midwest (I guess, some people call this the plains).  As a child I dreamed of living in a big city, New York or San Francisco; I think now that I'm a Midwestern girl, so that Chicago might have worked well but (there being not much else big to speak of) that's about it.

    But this has happened to me before:  When I decided where to live for the rest of my life, I didn't know I was doing it at the time.  I thought I was picking a grad school.  Since then my sweetheart's (unexpected to me) decision to quit his Cincinnati job and follow me, marriage, children, and good friends have gathered around me ("like so much cement!"  no wait, that is not the image I want, hm) and, well, here I am for good, here in Minneapolis, and I'm happy.

    (Sometimes, at night, I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking of what might have been, and want to fall to my knees and thank the good Lord that I did not decide to go to Berkeley.  It was a close call.)

    So:  I left, and I am in a good place.   At first I continued to be astonished at people who didn't leave.  Not, again, that suburban southwestern Ohio is a bad place to be, but just that so many people were happy in the place that chance had put them.  And even weirder, that some folks (relatives for instance) would ask, "When are you moving back home?"  

    I'm not moving "home," at least not home to Ohio.  Home isn't in Ohio anymore, it's in Minneapolis!  Why would I leave…

    …why would I leave my home?

    Anyway, after a few years of saying that, the irony got through my own skull.  I have reasons to live here by now that are not at all about "expressing my individuality" or about "living in the kind of place that suits me."  Not even about where my job is, or where my husband's job is.  City vs. suburbs, there's some leeway there (or at least there will be when the housing market settles down), but it's been long enough that I can say, okay, I get it now.

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  • “Poster at prayer service saves a life”

    Actually, it was a poster still in the print shop, in the hands of a pregnant print shop employee.

    It really drives home the power of a quiet personal witness, and of simply facing the truth.

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  • Gingered red-cabbage slaw.

    One of my favorite potluck offerings.  If you have a food processor, you'll use all three blades, but it'll make short work of everything.

    • 1/2 cup sliced peeled fresh ginger
    • 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar 
    • 3/4 cup vegetable oil (peanut works, also light sesame oil or canola; I often melt coconut oil and use it half-and-half with olive oil to cut the olive flavor, since I rarely have oils other than coconut and olive.  If you like a strong sesame flavor, then toasted Asian sesame oil works here.) 
    •  1 Tbsp sugar
    • 1/2 tsp salt 
    • 1/2 tsp or more black pepper 
    • 1/4 cup sesame seeds
    • 3 cups thinly sliced red cabbage 
    • 6 large carrots, peeled and coarsely shredded or julienned
    • 1 tart green apple, halved, cored, and thinly sliced  

    Combine the cabbage, carrots, and apple in a large bowl.  Toast the sesame seeds in a dry skillet until aromatic.

    Combine the rest of the ingredients in a blender or food processor and puree till smooth.   Drizzle the vegetables with this dressing and toss to coat well.  Top with the sesame seeds and serve.

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    1 comment on Gingered red-cabbage slaw.

  • Conservative creep.

    I entered full communion with the Catholic church at the Easter Vigil in 1993, when I was a freshman in college.  I'd longed to do so through most of high school and didn't feel I could till I'd moved away from home.   (That's another story.)

    A couple of years after that, I had a second conversion in which I was forced to realize that I could not be simultaneously a believing Catholic and a supporter of legal abortion.  (Why it took me so long is another story again.  Hint:  There were some serious problems in that particular RCIA program.)  

    My first vote was cast for Clinton, and my sympathies lay with Democrats in general, and I was in particular strongly anti-capital-punishment (still am).  So I went through a certain period of gritted-teeth mourning about that.  What do you mean there aren't ANY Democrats on this ticket who aren't really strong supporters of abortion?  Does this really mean I shouldn't vote for any of them?  Even the Soil and Water Commissioner?

      I argued with myself about it for a long time, and I read the arguments of Catholics who honestly argued that there were proportionate reasons to vote for candidates despite their support for legal abortion, and I read the arguments of Catholics who honestly argued that the standards for what's "proportionate" have to be very high indeed, and I struggled with it, and ultimately I became convinced that practically nothing else in the current political climate is proportionately serious.   I remain sympathetic to people who have not become so convinced, and I acknowledge that greater or more urgent evils could arise, but I'm certain of my own position now.  Not really happy about it, but certain.

    That was a while ago.    For my whole life, of course,  the power of people to decide how to regulate abortion, how to protect the baby and how to protect the mother, in their cities, counties, and states has been controlled at the national level by the outcomes of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.  There's less variety in approaches than there might have been.  

    And things tend to line up a certain way.  It need not be so, but:  Opponents of nationalized abortion policy as it exists, a.k.a. supporters of expanding the variety of approaches to the problem of protecting both the baby and the mother, are usually opponents of abortion as well, and are usually Republicans.  Supporters of nationalized abortion policy, a.k.a. supporters of continuing the restriction on finding alternative ways to extend legal protectections to mothers and to children, are usually supporters of abortion or at least of the legal right to abortion, and are usually Democrats.  

    I don't really thoroughly understand why this is.  Why isn't it a little bit more mixed up?  Why isn't there a large and vocal bloc of (for example) abortion rights supporters who are also supporters of the right of the people in a state to use legislation to craft an abortion policy that seems right to them?  Why are so few Democrats who oppose abortion?  I don't get that.  I guess part of it has to do with game theory, how people choose to make alliances in different situations.   Right now the situation is controlled by RvW and DvB, everywhere in the country, and in that situation people who might otherwise be ideological opponents are lined up on the same side (e.g., libertarians who don't want ANY national abortion policy and social conservatives who would like to see a national ban can both agree to oppose RvW.)   But this doesn't explain to me why the anti-abortion candidate in a race is predictably the Republican and the pro-legal-abortion candidate in a race is predictably the Democrat.  It does not have to be this way, and yet it is.

    So.  Where am I going with this?

    I find myself voting for a lot of Republicans, and I have been for a while.  When I first started, it was hard to do and I didn't much like it.  But it has gotten easier.  For one thing, as time has gone on (and especially after I had children — I know not everyone has that reaction, but many do, and I'm one) I've felt less conflicted and more confident about my decision to give so much weight to abortion policy when making up my mind about candidates.  

    But another reason it's gotten easier?  Over the years I've started paying more attention to the content of the arguments of the people I've been voting for, and really trying to hear them out.  And a lot of it has made more sense to me than I expected it to, way back when.  Perhaps it's just unconscious human nature:  I've chosen to constrain my votes in a certain way, and I'd like to feel better about my vote, and letting myself feel convinced by them makes me feel less grumpy, because I can be happy about my vote in a more, oh, I don't know, unalloyed way.  And maybe it's just because I'm still not all that comfortable admitting that I've become a "single-issue voter."  Yeah, some of that baggage is still with me.

    Anyway, my point?  If the Democrats had been a little bit more ideologically diverse, they might have kept me.  As it is, the longer I spend voting Republican because I feel I ought to, the more I seem to be drawn towards conservative and/or libertarian policies that are unrelated or only marginally related to life issues, and the more I seem to be repelled by many progressive policies.  

    From the inside, I can report that it certainly seems that the shift in my thinking is the result of being rationally convinced by many of these arguments.   And I still hold a number of positions that are generally associated with liberals rather than conservatives (for instance, I still don't like capital punishment), and I still wind up being pissed off at people I vote for from time to time because they violate other principles I hold dear (hello, expanded domestic surveillance?  excuses for torture?) so it's not like it's been a universal move to the right.  Plus, sometimes the left-right continuum has seemed to spin around beneath me:  I'm practically a free-speech absolutist, and efforts to control speech all seem to be coming from the left these days, what's up with that?  

    But I do think it is fair to acknowledge the possibility that my political positions are at least partly due to a subconscious desire for less cognitive dissonance.  

    Of course, if it's true for me it's probably true for a lot of people.

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    4 comments on Conservative creep.

  • Time with friends.

    Best therapy I know.

    It was doughnut Sunday at church so I got to sit down and talk to people afterwards.  The kids ran away to play in the nursery, and I sat and picked at a doughnut and felt like a human being again.

    Melissa and Chris invited me to dinner last night, and when I got there Hannah and T.O.M. and their kids were there too, and I got to vent for a while and tell Mark's story.  And then someone suggested that we play euchre, which is my very favorite card game, so T.O.M. and Chris and 10-y-o Meira and I played while Hannah read and Melissa put the baby down to sleep.  Every player at the table was at least a little bit rusty, so we played a few open hands and I chattered color commentary to Meira, explaining the differences between the left and the right, the bury and the bowers (bauers?  bars?  depends where you're from), how to keep score with a six and a four, and never trump your partner's ace.   By the end of that game I felt almost normal again, thank goodness.

    And today Margaret in Minnesota invited me and my brood over for lunch!  And I had a lovely time, and she fed me cashews and soup and guacamole and chicken curry salad sandwiches and red bell pepper strips and cilantro-lime-flavored chips and plain chips and peanut-butter-filled pretzels and orange-peel-scented dark chocolate.

    She's an over-achiever, that one is.  Oh, did I mention that she sent me more soup for my dinner?  So now I don't have to cook tonight, which is good, because I didn't go to the store and my house is a wreck.

    And can you believe it?  Neither one of us thought of taking a picture to prove the event really happened.  *sigh*

    ("Mom?" said Oscar as I carried the soup to the car.  "You traded Grandma's peaches for vegetable soup?"

    "Sort of, I guess," I said, since I had brought a couple of quarts of Mark's mom's home-canned peaches to offer for lunch.

    "Mom," said Oscar, "that wasn't a very good trade for us."

    I said, "I don't know, Oscar, it's pretty darn good soup."  You can't eat peaches ALL the time.)

    Anyway… I'm feeling much better now.  Thanks everyone.

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  • He just needs a little room to breathe.

    Mark called me from Salt Lake City yesterday afternoon to let me know that he had gotten caught in an avalanche.

    I'm still in shock.  I just cannot believe he would betray me like that.

    Yes, betray.   "Don't get caught in an avalanche!" is one of those basic rules of conduct that every good marriage is built on.  

    One of those things that countless couples, to their eventual bitterness,  leave unsaid.  

    I thought we were immune to such things.  We've never been the type to leave things open to chance, to the possibility of misunderstandings about the important things.  I know enough not to sweat the small stuff.  But… you see… "Don't get caught in an avalanche" has been out there, on the table, since the very beginning of our marriage.  

    He has always known how I feel about that one thing.  I've always made a point of making it really, really clear.

    I guess I've been taking it for granted.  Maybe I say it so often, it's become… just one of those things you say, you know? Like, thanks for making dinner, or don't forget to take out the recycling.  Mundane.  Every day, or at least every ski trip, it's the same thing.  Have a great time, dear.  Don't get caught in an avalanche.  

    It's only natural.  Before long the words lose their meaning.

    I suppose I shouldn't be angry.  Really… I should view it as a cry for help.  

    Perhaps, although I always struggle with being more flexible, always afraid of taking steps in a new direction… perhaps it's time for us to open dialogue.  Maybe I've been too constraining.  Maybe he needs a little more freedom.  

    Maybe it's time I step back, and rephrase it to, "As an alternative to NOT GETTING CAUGHT IN AN AVALANCHE, know that I trust you enough to allow you the freedom of hunkering against a wall while hundreds of pounds of ice thunder down past your head and vital organs.  I understand, too, that you are a man with needs, honest, human needs. Including perhaps the need to deploy a personal pressurized-canister airbag snow flotation system."

    Of course, a crucial component of any serious work on a marriage with this kind of problem is and always will be communication.

    So I am reminding myself that I should be sure to validate his impulses in that direction, particularly impulses to, say, purchase a set of advanced digital search-and-rescue beacons, and maybe to read the instructions before the next ski-and-ice-climbing trip.    

    After all, it's the little ways of getting through to each other that often mean the most.  Sometimes, a man says "I love you" by taking out the trash or stopping to pick up a bottle of wine on his way home from work.  Other times, he says it in a series of beeps with variable frequency and volume that give an indication of distance, direction, and depth of burial.

    No matter what, it's important for both of us to learn from the mistakes of the past, and move forward.  

    Preferably at less than 80 mph, and not straight toward any really big rocks.

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