Why I Love My Wife

Well, one example of why, anyhow. I'd originally written up this charming little three-line scene in the wake of the initial Swine Flu outbreak back at the beginning of May. Then I lost it in the shuffle. Since we're heading out of town for a friend's wedding (congrats to Nishant and Blythe!), I felt it was appropriate to celebrate love. Here goes:

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One evening a couple weeks back, Melissa and I were chatting about the continuing news reports and press conferences regarding the swine flu.

M: The State epidemiologist was talking today about what people can do to protect themselves, and how to properly wash their hands. She said "We don't want you to just get them wet. You should sing Happy Birthday twice, you know." So I've been doing that. I've been singing Happy Birthday twice every time I wash my hands.
F: That's delightful! Who are you singing Happy Birthday to when you do it?
M: To my hands.

fin

Reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic posted a terrific link today that I wanted to share with you all. It's from Jourdon Anderson, a freed slave in Ohio, to his former master in Tennessee shortly after the Civil War. It is masterfully understated. Absolutely fascinating (click on the opening in the box below):

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Lunatic Fringe

There's a phrase that was tossed around in the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita a couple weeks back, and has now appeared again in conjunction with the killing of a security guard by James von Brunn yesterday at the Holocaust Museum: "sovereign citizen." Both gunmen were self-described Sovereign Citizens, and have left a trail of contacts and presence on right-wing fringe websites.

The first I'd heard of the phrase sovereign citizen was in this Washington Monthly article a litle over a year ago. It's a fascinating read: in recent years, more than twenty African American men charged with violent offenses in Baltimore have invoked their rights as sovereign citizens, claiming not to be bound by the illegal assertion of power by the United States Federal Government. The truly weird part is the origin of the concept, relative to the defendants: the Sovereign Citizen Movement is based in opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery. It claims that the 14th converted sovereign citizens, bound by English Common Law, into federal citizens, or something, and that the Government uses federal citizens as collateral in foreign debt (again, or something). Adherents further believe that there is a specific set of legal verbiage, presented in a certain order on certain forms, that can free you from your federal citizenship and return you to sovereign citizenship; this, it should be noted, is drivel.

Anyway, apparently tied to this is the concept of Posse Comitatus, Latin for "force of the county," which asserts that the supreme law enforecement power in the land is that of county sherrifs, and that the National Guard, federal troops, etc., have no power over the local sherrif. According to the Washington Monthly article, this idea derives from an act passed at the federal level in 1878 to take the teeth out of Reconstruction and prevent the government from protecting civil rights in the South.

Very strange and interesting, all, but not at all to diminish the tragedy of these murders. My sympathy goes out to the families of both victims.

Awful piece on marriage, gay and otherwise

With a hat tip to Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic, whose post alerted me to this editorial, I'd like in turn to draw your attention to a terrible piece of writing on marriage. It's by one Sam Schulman at the conservative website/magazine The Weekly Standard, and is full to brimming with head-slappingly ridiculous claims about marriage between people of different sexes and the same sex. If you don't read all of Schulman's work, read Chotiner's post to get the flavor.

To be honest, I have a tough time with my feelings about the piece. On the one hand, my reaction is so strongly and immediately negative, and almost everything Schulman writes seems wrong in such a glaring, obvious way that it could be dismissed as a self-made straw man of sorts, an extreme outlier. At the same time, however, he lays bare a major undercurrent I've always noted in the arguments against marriage equality: the desire of social conservatives to preserve "traditional" gender roles in heterosexual relationships. How can you keep the work/homemaking spheres separated, after all, if the married couple in question is two ladies or -- added ickyness! -- two dudes?

The answer to those like me who believe in making your home life in the way that you and your loved ones see fit* is that you don't, or need not, keep the spheres separate unless you choose to do so for yourselves. And so, I look at a paragraph like this one Schulman cobbled together from the bones of the past, and after every sentence, I find myself flatly negating the statement he just made:

Even in modern romantic marriages, a groom becomes the hunting or business partner of his father-in-law and a member of his clubs; a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband. There can, of course, be warm relations between families and their children's same-sex partners, but these come about because of liking, sympathy, and the inherent kindness of many people. A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband's family; a woman and her wife's kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.

The assumtion of universality, the "one-size-fits-all" of his model of marriage is staggering. It's not that a groom might partner with his father in law, it's that he does. No he doesn't, Mr. Schulman. It's like he got his idea of family and marriage from all the old comic strips that newspapers only keep to avoid receiving nasty letters from septugenarians.

I feel that mentioning, as Schulman does, that he's been married thrice, is scoring easy points. Honestly, if I didn't think someone would read his piece and bring this fact up in a comment, I'd leave it out.

Anyway, I feel like today is a good day to celebrate marriages of all kinds, as it is Melissa's and my second anniversary. The first two years have been wonderful, and I'm looking forward to many pairs of years more!

* (So long as nobody is being harmed! Gay and non-traditional straight marriages are not a slippery slope to legal incest, bestiality, and polygamy.)

Calling Out, Around The World

Summer's here, and the time is right to see The Robinson Caruso Organization! Old school R&B & soul! Live music!

I was recruited a couple months ago into the horn section of the Organization, and it has been a hell of a good time. We're playing a mix of new & old: original songs written by front man Robinson Caruso himself (James Rone), and hits from the likes of Al Green, The Temptations, Martha & the Vandellas, Jamie Lidell, Otis Redding, Bill Withers & Stevie Wonder. Our first show was last month at Bunker's, and if you go to the RCO Facebook page, you can see photos and videos from that event.

Show #2 is next Tuesday, June 2nd, at the Fine Line Music Cafe in Downtown Minneapolis. There's no cover, and you can go here to print some complimentary tickets in advance. Because you need comps for a no cover show? Here's the word from the Fine Line about the evening:

Darrell Julian 8-9:00

Robinson Caruso 9:15-10:15

Sexy Delicious 10:30-11:30

On Tuesday nights the Fine Line 2 for 1 on all drinks

AND our new kitchen will be open until 10pm serving appetizers, sandwiches, etc!!

So bring your appetite in addition to your dancing shoes...

Do Not Separate

This weekend The Current (the local, hipstery non-classical, non-news NPR music affiliate, for those who are unfamiliar) is doing a "block party weekend." They're taking requests for artists, and playing three songs at a time for each. Last night as I was driving around, I called in to request some Bowie, unawares that they had played a Bowie set immediately before the Beastie Boys set that had just ended. Thankfully, they threw in "Under Pressure" at the end of a subsequent Queen set, so I at least got a little shot of the White Duke.

Later, I caught the tail end of a Led Zeppelin set, hearing the second half of "Black Dog." Afterward, the DJ listed the songs from the set, and said that we'd heard "Heartbreaker." Without "Living Loving Maid," I thought? What a letdown! Those songs go together. It's a direct segue. Had I been listening, I would have sung right along, expecting to go from "Heartbreaker! Heartbreaker! Heart!" to "With a purple umb-a-rella and a fifty-cent hat!"

(Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, the songs were never played together in concert, because Jimmy Page didn't really like the latter. Also incidentally, unless the song is in someway inspired by the writing of Tolkien, Zeppelin lyrics are properly quoted with exclamation points.)

Anyway, this got me thinking of other song combinations that are properly played together:

• The obvious combination is that "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions" need to be together, unless being played as short snippets at a sporting event. The latter can work on its own, but the first does not. Oddly enough, the original singles of these songs had them in reverse order. Topsy turvy!
• I don't know that I've ever heard "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" without "With a Little Help From My Friends" or vice versa, but it sounds like a bad idea.
• Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II" is just dull and repetitive without "The Happiest Day of Our Lives" coming before it. I feel the same way about "Young Lust" without "Empty Spaces." Boring. Like just about any individual track off of The Wall without its surrounding material, other than "Comfortably Numb."

There are other combos that I prefer, but aren't what I'd call necessary. For instance, the end of "Buddy Holly" feels like it should lead into the beginning of "The Sweater Song." And in the alternate universe where They Might Be Giants are a Top 40 hit machine, a DJ would never play "If I Wasn't Shy" off of Apollo 18, without immediately following up with "Turn Around."

Anyone else got examples of necessary or preferred song combinations?

Coffee is for Closers: a terrible board game, reviewed

The following is a review I posted to BoardGameGeek.com of a game Melissa and I bought super-cheap back in January.

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"To make a million dollars it takes more than skill and strategy," claims the cover of The Million Dollar Sales Game by Jim Madonna Marketing. Point of fact, if the game play is to be believed, neither of these things have anything to do with making a million, and pure, stupid luck is all you need.

My wife and I discovered this on the 75%-Off clearance games table at Barnes & Noble in January. This need not have been a sign of the lack of quality: they also had Acquire on this table, and we picked up an Onyx edition of Monopoly for $12.50. That night, over pizza, we tried out Million Dollar Sales.

We expected a variant on Monopoly, wherein we would have to use sales skills somehow to sell properties or goods, or deal with clients, distributors, customers, and competitors of some sort. What we got was Candy Land for salespeople.

You roll the dice, move your car, and do whatever your new space tells you, which may be a good or bad thing (either gaining or losing money, prospective customers, spaces on the board, or a turn), or a Stuff Happens card (which is a bad thing after drawing a card) or an Opportunity Knocks card (good thing). When you have five prospective customers, they may be traded for Actual Customers. When you pass the starting point on the circuit, you get rewarded based on how many customers you have.

The game involves remarkably little decision making. Really the only decision you make is whether or not to leave the main track for one of six Regional Customer tracks. These tracks slow your path to pay day, but each gets you a Regional Customer card, which counts as a customer on payday, and if you have all six customer cards, you get a bonus at that time.

The fact that the mechanics are so simplistic means that if the game is to be any fun, the fun has to come from the theme. And the theme is ham-handed. We quickly realized that this game is designed as a training tool for salespeople. The in-game text uses lots of sales jargon about listening and following up and creating a work plan and closing. All of this is presented in a lifeless and matter-of-fact way that generates exactly zero interest. It also doesn't attach any meaning to the actions described. You may be told that up-selling is a good thing, but you aren't told how you might do this as a real-life salesperson. So the game amounts to $40 flash cards without anything written on their backs [again, we got this on the bargain table; I'd be much angrier at the game if we'd paid $40 instead of $7]. I cannot imagine how this would be useful even if you were learning to sell.

The components in the box are very nice. Everything is glossy, printed in color on magazine-cover-like paper. The board is in full color and well-printed, and the cars are not cheap plastic. The dice are needlessly large. The box is well-arranged, with separate trays for everything and a clear plastic lid that holds everything in place to prevent contents from shifting.

The game was not without its cheesy entertainment value, mostly for meta-game reasons. The sheer ridiculousness of the presentation and the jargon made us laugh on several occasions, especially when a Stuff Happens card penalized me eight grand "just for being stupid." The salesspeak reminded me repeatedly of the play and film Glengarry Glen Ross and made me wish there was a vulgar, David Mamet-themed version of the game ("Mitch & Murray send Alec Baldwin to call you a c********r. Go back ten spaces." [link NSFW and family-unfriendly] Second place in this version would, of course, be a set of steak knives.).

So unless a phrase like "The Power of Listening Avenue" sends you into paroxysms of laughter, this game is eminently skippable. Even if you are trying to learn to sell, this game probably won't teach you anything of value. Go rent the movie and pick up some choice swears from Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon instead.