One Fish, Two Fish

One of the perhaps stranger side effects of the economic downturn is that people from the surrounding area have been using the trash compactor and recycling dumpsters in our apartment complex as a dumping ground, rather than pay the local trash haulers extra when they have large loads of stuff they want to be rid of. Combine this with people who decide to dump most of their world possessions when they move out, and recently, it's been next to impossible to dispose of things.

Anyway, early this evening, a young couple showed up in a big pickup truck, and began unloading as much stuff as they could, placing some of it on the donation box for a local charity. As I cam closer I realized that one of the items they'd unloaded was a fishtank.

"C'mon guys," I said to myself. "You could have at least cleaned it, first." As I walked closer that changed to: "Is it really to much to ask to dump out the water before 'donating' it?" And then it became: "WTF?!"

Yep. They hadn't even bothered to remove the fish first. I know that they're counting on some softy to give the fish a good home, but that's just a bastard move. I suspect that if the tank is still there in the morning, the fish will be done for, unless they're used to relatively cool water.

It's things like this that dampen my tendency to become up in arms when someone suggests that the keeping of animals as pets should be banned.

Now I've Seen Everything

We were in the Calvin Klein outlet store, and came across two Buddhist nuns shopping there. I suppose there's no reason to expect that Buddhist nuns shouldn't shop at Calvin Klein, but they did seem somewhat out of place there. Mainly, of course, because I have this half-formed stereotype of Buddhist monastics that simply puts them... elsewhere.

Layer Upon Layer

What was once a rent-a-hot-tub spa is now a canvas for everyone in Seattle with a can of spray paint and some imagination.

The Inanity Defense

There's a simple way to get people to admit to failings that they otherwise wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. Attach them to a "get out of jail free" card.

This past weekend, the SlutWalk came to Seattle, and generated some news. And some commentary. And, of course, some of this commentary was critical of the women and their activism, falling back on the old trope of "if a woman dresses a certain way, they should expect to get harassed." I've become impressed that any man would actually stand up and say that he has so little self-control. The idea that one loses all sense of propriety and boundaries when confronted with a little female flesh seems a bit over the top. But when one considers that it's basically a way of saying "my heinous criminal behavior isn't my fault," I guess it follows a certain logic.

In a very real sense, it strikes me as being similar to an insanity plea. While being in a rubber room might be preferable to being behind bars, having to claim that you're simply unable to comply with the rules seems to be workable only because of our intense focus on personal culpability in humans. If you're a dog, the outcome of an "insanity defense," or something like it, is that you're put to sleep.

In the end, I guess that any time you fall back on "provocation" as a defense, you're basically claiming that you've lost control of your faculties, something that we normally consider a pretty serious defect. Not as serious, of course, as the idea that you've done something wrong while in full possession of your faculties. But even given that, I'm be hard-pressed to claim a lack of control as the reason why I do things, even when people offer it to me. I'd rather confess to simply not caring about what the law was, rather than claim to be unable to live within it. Of course, neither of those options are particularly appealing, so I'd just as soon stay out of trouble. I'm sure I have enough self-control to manage it.

P. R.

I, along with any number of other people that I work with, are being asked to prove (via background checks) that we aren't potential public relations liabilities, regardless of whether or not we're good workers, because someone else has become a public relations liability. I think. All I know is that someone at the company was arrested on some rather run-of-the-mill-sounding charges, and that only because the company took it upon itself to tell me. Although I'm not a particularly active local news junkie, I do keep up with the local newspaper and Google news, and I haven't heard a peep about this.

Given that whatever event happened is fairly recent, it seems highly unlikely that anyone's been convicted of anything, so I'm curious to see what happens if the police turn out to have arrested the wrong person. (Outside, of course, of the quickly-issued sincere "apologies.")

Anyway, I find myself irritated (here we go, back to things I dislike) with the whole atmosphere surrounding this situation. The public's demand that everyone (other than the public itself) jump though hoops in the name of "public safety," while at the same time not wanting to be treated like criminals themselves, has lead to a environment where everyone is innocent until suspected guilty, at which point everyone suddenly becomes guilty until proven innocent.

I think what really bugs me is the sudden hysteria around the whole thing. I don't even know enough about what is alleged to have happened to be able to speak to it the least bit intelligently, and what little information I do have doesn't seem all that heinous, yet Damage Control is moving ahead. And we're right in the way.

And despite the fact that I understand that it's often unreasonable and/or contradictory public expectations that create fire drills like this, I'm not the least bit certain that there isn't an overreaction going on. If this is supposed to be a damaging local news story, I've managed to miss it, and so did Google news (I think). If I've got to go hunting for the information to have any chance of finding it, it seems unlikely that there would be a huge public outcry over something that seems fairly run of the mill. Still, an overreaction is the result of expectations being in excess of reality, and not all overreactions are unreasonable. So I suspect that we could still do ourselves a favor by toning down the expectation that companies will shun anyone who might be the least bit scary. Or at least the expectation that we'll look the other way until something happens to remind us that we're supposed to be scared.