Stan Taylor

Well, MetaFilter has had its seemingly annual discussion of the value of perpetuating the idea of Santa Claus to children. One thing that strikes me about the discussion is that very few people have recounted what they have done or are doing with their own kids. I think that many MetaFilter members are young and childless (especially the ones posting on Christmas day perhaps).
I remember back before we had kids, I would make statements about what I never/always would do with my future children. My father-in-law would just gently shake his head and snicker. Now that I have kids, I understand my father-in-law’s response. Raising children challenges every preconceived notion you have and destroys many of them. You really can’t imagine what it’ll be like until you are a parent yourself. Things that you thought would be important turn out to be inconsequential and you devote large amounts of emotional energy to issues you never even thought of before.

Yesterday, I put down laminate flooring in the downstairs bathroom. Installing the flooring was as easy as the Lowe’s employee had promised, but I had a few problems figuring out which way 45 degree miter cuts went on the quarter round moulding. Fortunately, a couple of extra pieces of moulding only set me back a few extra dollars.

My family has a history of mangling or chopping off appendages. My grandfather hit his knee with an axe and it was stiff the rest of his lfe; my dad ground the toes off of one foot in an industrial accident; and my mother lost a finger in a recreational accident. Katie lives in constant fear that I’ll be the next victim.
Yesterday I was working with a borrowed power miter saw. With my family history, I should have realized that Katie wouldn’t find it very funny when I came in from the garage with a towel around a finger and saying I’d had a little accident.

This article states what seems obvious to me: readers really do judge a book by its cover:

“BOOK LOVERS MAY NOT BE the most heroic members of the romantic world, but at least, we tell ourselves, we are deep, we are discerning. Well, I have news for you from publishing’s bottom line: we bespectacled creatures of the late-night night light are, frankly, a bit slutty.
All the research shows that consumers are very, very influenced by the covers, not necessarily to buy a book, but to pick it up,” Joanna Prior, publicity and marketing director at Penguin, says.
Studies show that a book on a three-for-two table has about one and a half seconds to catch a reader’s eye. If it is picked up, it is on average glanced at for only three to four seconds.

If you think Heather Armstrong’s dog Chuck is gross, check this out: back when we used to leave Tippie free in the house while we weren’t home, sometimes we would come home to find the bathroom trash can tipped over and Tippie running around with a string hanging from her mouth or bits of adhesive backed absorbent material stuck to her snout. She quickly gained the nickname ‘Kotex.’ For obvious reasons, we now put Tippie in a crate (let’s be real, it’s a cage) when we’re away from home.

In light of the news that the administration has been spying on Americans, John Scalzi posts his thoughts on if and when a president should be impeached. As usual with John, it’s a well written blog post (hell, it should be well written; he’s a professional writer!).
But I take issue with John on a couple of points. He writes:

Now, let’s posit that the president knew his actions were illegal, but didn’t care. Would that merit impeachment? In my opinion, no — if the president could prove that his actions saved Americans from imminent harm that following the law could not have prevented.

In reference to an even more extreme possible circumstance, John writes:

If we granted that the president both knew what he was doing was illegal and that it was determined that such evasion of law was entirely unnecessary, now are we talking impeachment? This is the point where I go “gaaaaaaaaah” and raise a point that will be entirely unpersuasive to many, which is that I genuinely believe that Bush wants to protect Americans, and that matters to a non-trivial extent. I’d be loathe to impeach a president for that, and I would find it difficult to support people who would. There, I’ve said it: I don’t think you get impeached for trying to protect Americans.

That may work with captains of fictional star ships named Enterprise, but I don’t buy it in real life. As some commenters to the post remark, this is the top of one long slippery slope. The law doesn’t account for good intentions (ok, ill intent is a critical part of many laws, but generally, you’re still breaking some law whether you do it with good or ill intent; it’s just that ill intent gets you a harsher punishment).
I’m not sure this is completely relevant, but John’s blog post reminded me of a common parenting situation:

• Child #1 is doing something stupid that could result in harm to child #2.
• Parent tells child #1 to stop because it could harm child #2.
• Child #1 ignores parent
• Child #1’s action results in anticipated harm to child #2
• Parent turns his/her attention to child #1, and even before the parent can open his/her mouth, child #1 is screaming, “But I didn’t mean to harm child #2
• Parent responds: “Well, I’m assuming you weren’t doing this reckless action in order to harm child #2. But the fact remains that you ignored the possible consequences and an order to stop it lest you harm child #2. You’re still just as guilty.

President Bush: go to your room without your dinner. No TV, no telephone!

From the American Civil Liberties Union web site:

When the angry phone calls and emails started arriving at the office, I knew the holiday season was upon us. A typical message shouted that we at the American Civil Liberties Union are “horrible” and “we should be ashamed of ourselves,” and then concluded with an incongruous and agitated “Merry Christmas.”
We get this type of correspondence a lot, mostly in reaction to a well-organized attempt by extremist groups to demonize the ACLU, crush religious diversity, and make a few bucks in the process. Sadly, this self-interested effort is being promoted in the guise of defending Christmas.
…
In truth, it is these website Christians who are taking the Christ out of the season. Nowhere in the Sermon on the Mount did Jesus Christ ask that we celebrate His birth with narrow-mindedness and intolerance, especially for those who are already marginalized and persecuted. Instead, the New Testament—like the Torah and the Koran and countless other sacred texts—commands us to love our neighbor, and to comfort the sick and the imprisoned.
That’s what the ACLU does. We live in a country filled with people who are sick and disabled, people who are imprisoned, and people who hunger and thirst for justice. Those people come to our Indiana offices for help, at a rate of several hundred a week, usually because they have nowhere else to turn. The least of our brothers and sisters sure aren’t getting any help from the Alliance Defense Fund or WorldNet Daily. So, as often as we can, ACLU secures justice for those folks who Jesus worried for the most.
As part of our justice mission, we work hard to protect the rights of free religious expression for all people, including Christians. For example, we recently defended the First Amendment rights of a Baptist minister to preach his message on public streets in southern Indiana. The ACLU intervened on behalf of a Christian valedictorian in a Michigan high school, which agreed to stop censoring religious yearbook entries, and supported the rights of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at their school.

Happy Holidays to all!

A U.S. District Judge ruled today that the Dover, Pennsylvania school board can’t force the teaching of intelligent design. That is welcome news in and of itself, but as an extra bonus, the judge’s finding is very strongly worded (emphasis added):

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.
Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.
To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

You go, Judge Jones!
UPDATE: It appears that Judge Jones was appointed by George W. Bush. Clearly one of those pesky liberal activist judges. Awesome.

Matt Haughey writes that he bought a house this year without the help of a realtor and feels confident that he could also sell a house without a realtor:

We sold our first house and bought a new one this year and in the process learned that we really could do without a realtor, just as the authors described. We staged our old house ourselves, and pushed our realtor to get us on the weekly home tour. I took photos for our listing and helped write it, keeping in mind the lessons from the book and removed every empty phrase like “fabulous” and “wonderful” and replaced them with descriptive terms like “open” and “large”. We did all of our new home shopping online and by canvassing the city and calling builders with works in progress. We found and bought our new house without any realtors involved at all. It was surprisingly easy — whenever I was wondering what we were supposed to do at a stage in the financing/offer/escrow process, I could just punch up google and get all the info I needed. Google searches lead me to offer letter templates, legal ramifications for each document we signed, and how to find the best financing. While I like my realtor and consider her a personal friend, if we ever sell our new home, we’ll do it ourselves and save a few grand next time around.

If Matt feels comfortable handling a real estate transaction himself, good for him, but I think that finding a buyer for your home-for-sale and/or finding a home for you to buy are the least important tasks that a realtor does (or should do). Monitoring the legal aspects of the transactions is the most important role. I would feel very uncomfortable not having an experienced expert monitoring the process and advising me in the legal transactions.
When we sold and bought houses three years ago, we ended up finding the new house ourselves–which is pretty easy these days with everything online. But we needed to close on both houses on the same day, so we were super sensitive to a delay in either deal. Our realtor was in constant contact with the seller’s and buyer’s realtors for each deal, both title companies, and our mortgage lender to make sure everything went smoothly. He knew exactly what should be happening with each transaction at every point and he was hard-assed when necessary with the other parties to make sure they did their tasks competently and in a timely fashion. His diligence and expertise were well worth the fees we paid him (since we used him for both transactions, he waived one of our fees to him, which reduced our total realtor costs a bit).

You know, I fully embrace the principle of doing HTML layout via CSS vs. the old fashion table layouts, but the browser implementations of CSS still differ so much that it’s been a huge pain every time I’ve tried to implement more than rudimentary CSS layouts. As you have surely noticed if you visit here regularly, I recently converted this blog to one the newer MovableType templates, and then have been tweaking it to my liking. But the stylesheet for this template is over 1000 lines long, and every time I’ve tweaked it, I’ve encountered different behavior in Mozilla and Internet Explorer. Frustrating.