Those noisy birds!

Okay, I was at home this evening, and as I'll sometimes do, I threw an rpg into the computer and was wandering around a town as the famous swordsman Sarbonn the Little. Anyway, I wasn't really intently playing, so I was kind of away from my computer for a bit taking care of some paperwork when I started hearing birds on my roof making serious noise. I've never heard them like this before. There is a huge tree right above my roof, so I figured they were up there. I stepped out of my building and tried to shine a light on the roof, at the bushes, but I couldn't see anything. But they were making a lot of noise. I mean, a lot.

So I went back into my apartment and took a stick that is the end of a broom, and I started hitting the ceiling, trying to see if I could get the birds to just shut up. I realized there was no way in the world I was going to be able to sleep with this racket.

My next door neighbor came out of his apartment and was kind of staring at me, as I guess I was kind of a crazy man with a stick chasing after invisible birds. So I went back into my apartment and decided I was going to have to live with the noisy birds.

Then I decided I was no longer in the mood to play the computer game, so I saved my character and turned off the game. Then the birds went silent. Dead silent.

I then realized the birds weren't on my roof. They were in the game.

So, I put my stick away slowly and then decided to read a book. A quiet one.

Stumble It!

Pushing forward on the thesis

The thesis is taking a lot work, but I'm pushing forward with it. Today, I finished the first draft of my biography section, which was kind of difficult because my biographies require 9 different people, and for some of them there is very little information available.

My next step is to begin the analysis of the artifacts (texts) themselves. It's very time consuming, and it really leaves me exhausted at the end of each day. I've been checking out a study room in the library every day and just working nonstop there. I've discovered the library gets FREAKING COLD, so I've actually had to start bringing a jacket to wear while I'm in the library. Yes, it's roasting outside, yet I need a jacket in order to study in the library. I mean, air conditioning is nice, but an ice box is really not necessary.

A few days ago I read Steve Martin's Born Standing Up. I've always been a fan of Steve Martin, and I was a fan back when he was actually doing stand up, before he did his first movie, The Jerk. I was surprised at how good a book this really was. You think you know a lot about someone, and then you read his memoir, and you find yourself completely surprised. He's a great writer, and he has a great sense of humor, obviously, but the story of his rise and then retirement from stand up was just downright amazing. I am so glad I read this book.

I'm still getting somewhat paranoid about the fall because I don't have any job lined up, and I'm not anticipating anything showing up either. Part of the problem, I believe, is that my MA degree does not get awarded until August, and I get the impression that that makes HR departments think "he doesn't have the required degree". But then I've also applied for jobs in political science, for which I already do have the degree, and I've received nothing but paper thin letters of "thanks but no thanks". A couple of the others, like Bakersfield College, never even got back to me after stating they had the whole application. It's really frustrating. I'm not sure what to do as I get closer to the fall. I am running out of money, and I don't see anything getting better. I've applied to other jobs, like city jobs and all that, but for some reason I can't get past an HR department. I applied to a job in Michigan (for the company where I was before), but I've had zero response from there, even though I am completely what they could use for the position.

It becomes really depressing. My shoulder has also been getting worse and worse every night. It makes it really difficult to sleep, and sometimes my other shoulder tries to compensate for the bad shoulder, and by the middle of the night that shoulder is hurting, too, so there's not a single side I can sleep on without throbbing pain. I'm not sure how much longer I can continue living like this. I contacted Kaiser, and they're setting up an August date for surgery, but I honestly don't think I'll make it that long.

Well, that's about it. I came up with an idea for a screenplay I want to write one day when I get some free time to do just that. The idea keeps growing bigger and bigger in my head, even though I suspect it may be one of those projects that lasts longer than I will.

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Why California's initiative to ban same sex marriage will probably pass

First off, I'm not a proponent of the initiative to ban same sex marriage that is going on in California. No, actually I'm a political scientist who studies political phenomena from the perspective of someone who really understands the statistical impact of movements.

Now, there's an initiative that has emerged since the court decision to allow same sex marriages. As expected, a bunch of people who don't want gay marriage to exist in their paradigm of the world have emerged and reacted in a politically expedient way to curtail activity with which they disagree.

Last time around, they were successful. This time, however, we keep hearing chatter from the pro same sex marriage crowd that Californians are now on their side. I have bad news for them. That's not going to be the case when it comes to the election.

You see, California is one of those weird states where the people who are issue savvy on the pro side tend to erroneously believe that the rest of the state follows in their footsteps. What they don't realize, or just don't ever want to face up to, is that a large segment of California is very much conservative in nature. They might actually vote moderately democrat, but in reality the core of the state is a conservative state. Yes, I know people don't like to hear this, and some will vehemently deny this, because it doesn't fit their personal perspective of what makes their world happy, but that's pretty much the way this state is. It comes from having a lot of wealthy people in this state. They may not register as Republicans, but they do think as conservatives, and until this grass roots population of people realizes this, THAT is the base of people with whom they must identify and convince of anything.

It's not hard to convince a bunch of people who already agree with you about something you want to see happen. But when it comes to elections, the persuasive element requires knowing the target audience, and if you only target the people who are already on your side, you have to make sure you're going to have more of your people show up than their people. I don't perceive that happening because those who are advocates for same sex marriage have already made a massive blunder by reporting that Californians ALREADY support same sex marriage, meaning that the incentive for anti-same sex marriage voters to turn out his higher than those who already think the election is going to be won in their favor. It's Mancur Olson's free rider problem all over again, and it's amazing how people never seem to figure this thing out.

So, what can the pro same sex marriage crowd do to make sure they win this time around? Something they won't. They need to appeal to those who disagree with them and do so with the respect that causes opponents to respond favorably. Instead of trying to play the "you're a bad person for thinking this" card, which way too often happens in this issue, the same sex marriage crowd needs to convince their opponents that their beliefs are respected, and that somehow (how exactly is up to them, as I am not their spokesperson) a same sex marriage paradigm is beneficial to all. If you try to convince people something like "it shouldn't affect you, so vote this way", they're going to default to specific Biblical readings that their particular Church leader has projected as anti-homosexual rhetoric.

Unfortunately, I've seen the grass roots crowd and their rhetoric in this area. For some bizarre reason, they actually think they'll succeed by shaming their opponents. That never works. It just charges the counter base, and you end up with yet another lost election initiative where people wonder why things didn't work out as they were expected.

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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Obscene Profits

I saw the new Indiana Jones movie, and let's just say that it wasn't the greatest movie I've ever seen. I'd place it #3 or 4 out of the four Indiana Jones movies (with 1 being the best, and 3 being second best). There were just so many continuity problems with the movie that I was starting to get frustrated with it.

Now, this movie is put out by two of the most dedicated men in movies (Lucas and Spielberg), so I was seriously surprised at some of the blatant problems in both the movie and the script. Some of the banter between characters was extremely contrived to the point of absurdity. There was one scene where Indiana and Co. are in a military vehicle CHASING after the evil Nazi woman (okay, she was really a Soviet Natasha secret agent, but she was played as a typical Nazi), with Indie saying something like "Catch her!" The camera then switches perspective, and now the evil Nazi woman is BEHIND them trying to catch up to them.

Some of the plot twists were so obvious that I wondered if they were supposed to be tricks that they were going to cleverly turn on us, but no, they weren't. They were just badly scripted plot points. (spoiler alert----> Hey, Indie, if a woman you haven't seen for twenty years has a twenty year old kid who is as free-spirited as you are, perhaps you should think a little bit about the origins of that kid, especially when his "father" is mentioned as someone REALLY ambiguous).

There was one throw-away line that I think was put into the movie for Lucas/Harrison Ford fans where Indiana says: "I got a bad feeling about this." Kind of takes ya back to the good ole' days of Hans Solo when he was coasting towards that moon ("that's no moon").

There was some good old fashioned beat em up action in the movie, which should always be expected from an Indiana Jones movie. There were a couple of references to the practically unwatched television series about Indiana Jones that someone not having watched that series would have caused a question of "when did Indiana Jones fight with Pancho Villa?" That was sometimes a problem with the movie. It expected you to have more knowledge of the insider stuff, yet the asides to those insider moments went so fast that you ended up having to think about it while other things were happening, and you'd miss something else.

It was good seeing Karen Allen again. She's still as cute and bubbly as she was in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. They also showed a picture of Indie's dad, Sean Connery, which made me wonder if Sir Sean got any actual money for having his picture in the movie, even though he, himself, didn't appear.

Two final comments:
1. This movie reminds me that we've pretty much run out of bad guys in movies these days. Nazis are overdone and too far removed from our reality. Terrorists are too present in today's reality that it makes it hard to use them. There is really no evil country that we have to present as the enemy, because even if there is one out there, we still want to sell tickets to people in that country, and you can't market a movie to Chinese people if the big bad enemy is China.
2. University of the Pacific shows up in the movie a few times. You can tell whenever you see Burns Tower, which is supposed to give people the idea that Indiana Jones teaches in some east coast Ivory Tower university. In reality, Burns Tower is in Stockton, California. I don't think they want to give the impression that Indiana Jones is teaching archaeology in the street crime capital of California.

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