Omanhene

I've been eating a square of Omanhene Dark Milk Chocolate for Baking each day for a while now, more for nostalgic reasons than for the health benefits of flavonids. That and it's tasty.

Phone Call

A phone call from an old friend today made my week.

Edgefest 2007

I went to Edgefest 2007 today with Dan.

Good times.

I went to see the Plain White T's, who dutifully played Hey There Delilah, which was okay but not quite as awesome as I had unrealistically expected.

Dan wanted to see Mute Math but with the parking and traffic we weren't quite in time to hear them.

However, we were in time to catch the second half of the Eisley act, which was awesome.

Then we caught Hot Hot Heat, a band I hadn't previously been familiar with. The Bravery was kind of cool, but Fly Leaf was definitely not my kind of music. Reminded one of the angst of Ruby developers.

The last act we caught was Louis XIV. The mannequin they brought with them onto the stage more or less summed them up. Talented, though.

Corks and Cactus

This evening I went to the Desert Botanical Garden Corks & Cactus wine tasting after work.

I'd never been to a wine tasting before. I learned a bit and it was a good time. Sipping wine amid beautiful plants was pretty cool. Beautiful evening for it, too.

Since I know basically zero about wine, I did the Wine Diva pre-event. It was a "Fabulous Finds for Fifteen" class involving tasting six wines and a whole shtick. The Mionetto Prosecco NV (Italy) (sparkling wine) was very good and as the instructor, Christine Asnbacher, impressed upon her audience, effectively quenched thirst created by spicy food. I don't usually care for spice in my food, but when it's there, I want it quenched, so I could see ordering this again. Second on the slate was Erath Pino Gris (Oregon, 2006). Tasty. Bonny Doon Cigare Volante (California, 2004).

The reds were Marques de Caceres Rioja (Spain, 2003), Nine Stone Shiraz (Australia, 2004), and Septima Malbec (Spain, 2003). They were all enjoyable enough. I'd need several more classes to be able to say anything intelligent about them.

I also got a copy of the instructor's book, Secrets from The Wine Diva, autographed no less, out of the deal. I'm a lot more likely to get into book collecting than wine collecting as a hobby.

After the Wine Diva class came the Corks and Cactus event proper.

I liked the Weibel Brut Sparkling (California) very well, but part of that was running with the "try sparkling wines" cue from the class preceding. The Clos LaChance Violet-Crowned Merlot (California) was good, the Lolonis Lady Bug White (California) less so, but with a cooler name. I did not get to try the Two Hands Brilliant Disguise (Australia), but I was told by people I met at the event who seemed to share my tastes that it's something I should try sometime.

By far the most fantastically excellent wine I tasted this evening was Deco Chocolate Port (Portugal). I thought it was far better than the Desiree Chocolate Desert (California) (and they must have meant "dessert", right?) and I liked its more complicated flavor than that of the Smith Woodhouse Lodge Reserve Port (Portugal).

Dennis Rowland & the Jazz Experience provided neat background entertainment. I'll look to hear them again.

Picasso pottery was on display -- very neat stuff and I hadn't even realized this was visiting Phoenix.

Since I didn't know what to expect, I took a taxi to and from the gardens, so as to not be driving after having tasted the assorted wines. In actuality I think I was entirely sober and driving-able by the time I would have driven home -- there was a good long post-tasting area involving decadent deserts and delicious decaf coffee, and I just didn't take in that much volume of wine at this event -- for me it was all about tasting with a sip or two, though I noticed other participants adopting a more voluminous approach.

Taking the cab turn out to have been a worthwhile investment in discovering effective local small business. I like small personable cab companies, and in Union Cab I think I have found a suitable local one. Came quickly, polite, knew his way around, I got the same driver both directions, dispatcher was intelligible. Met my cab needs; I'd use them again and recommend them to others.

A day off for reflection

I took today off from work to think, and to catch up on local errands not finished during my very enjoyable weekend visiting family in Colorado.

Dinner at Big City Barbecue, suggesting to me that I'm more of a small town barbecue or even a country village barbecue kind of person.

Gave blood

Today I gave blood. Success at this for the first time while in Arizona. I'm feeling it, but I'm not feeling too badly.

Furniture and Oregano's

After work today I helped Drew Wills move in some furniture he'd purchased off of Craig's List. Then we went out to Oregano's for dinner.

Weighing in on K-9 case

On Thursday the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office released an updated report explaining what happened when Sgt. Lovejoy of the Chandler Police Department abandoned the police canine Bandit in a vehicle, discovering the animal dead of heat and dehydration over 12 hours later.

My take: Sgt. Lovejoy through negligence destroyed approximately ten thousand dollars of government property entrusted to his care and caused an animal to suffer and die in so doing. This is rightly a crime of some kind, worthy of an arrest. Lovejoy may have already "suffered enough" from his mistake in handling Bandit, but arrest was never about visiting suffering upon human beings, it is about recognizing, recording, and responding to reality. The reality is, there was consideration, there was duty, there was negligence, and a police canine died because of it. I'm not saying Lovejoy should spend a single day in jail out of all this, but it's reasonable to presume under the circumstances that Sgt. Lovejoy has committed a crime under these facts and an arrest is justified.

However, a *full custody arrest* was neither customary nor appropriate, and is rightly called out as more grandstanding by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It is increasingly clear that the Sheriff wields power irresponsibly and capriciously. Power corrupts. I see this as more evidence that it is time for Sheriff Joe Arpaio to step down and someone with less existing wear on his soul to step under the sword of Damocles and serve for a time.

Incidentally, there are a number of extenuating circumstances in this case. The sergeant had a number of demands on his attention and was operating on a reduced amount of rest. This doesn't necessarily excuse the incident -- rather it points to to a totality of circumstance that a prosecutor will need to consider in filing charges, offering plea agreements, or dismissing the case entirely.

Larry Craig and excesses of criminalization

Apparently ex-Senator Larry Craig didn't watch much Law and Order. The take-home message of that show, it seems to me, is that you should have a lawyer when being interrogated by the police. (Further, if that lawyer just sits there like a dead insect while Vincent D'Onofrio paces around looking at your crosseyed, get a new layer.)

(Actually, this incident suggests to me that the time has come for another step beyond Miranda and Gideon v. Wainwright. If a United States senator doesn't have it together to insist on his right to counsel while being interrogated by police (and it is clear on reflection that Craig would have benefited by counsel, given his gross misapprehension of the stakes involved and his recent vacillations regarding his confession and plea), then no one can be reasonably expected to effectively invoke and exercise counsel. Being smarter, more legally adept, and with greater presence of mind than a US Senator is too high a standard to expect of the average person. I think the time has come to go beyond affording suspects the right to an attorney if they ask for one and advising them that they may do so. The time has come to require that anyone interrogated by police have a capable attorney present with all reasonable celerity. Confessions not rendered in the presence of and with the assistance of legal counsel should be inadmissible.

This would be expensive, but it is in the interests of justice. Law is sufficiently complicated that can be expected to be in no one's interest to interact with it outside the context of active and vigorous legal advocacy.

--

If the ex-Senator Craig really was soliciting sexual activity, then I agree that act was wrong and is scandalous. The man is married and attempting to cheat on his wife is not to be admired.

However. I'm not sure I believe the actions of Mr. Craig should be criminal. There is a difference between what is moral and what is legal, and all things that are immoral should not necessarily also be criminal.

Mr. Craig is accused of and plead to engaging in activities typical of someone soliciting homosexual activity. As far as I can tell from the press around this case, that involves pretending to drop something on the floor, reaching down for the floor, maybe feet wandering across stall barriers. Not all that clear on what's involved here, but it doesn't appear to involve bloodshed, or exposing oneself, or anything, well, criminal.

If someone in a stall next to me were engaging in these behaviors, would I even notice? I rather doubt it. Seems like it could be mistaken for having dropped something and having some rude misapprehensions of appropriate personal space. Rude? Probably. Criminal? I don't buy it.

I object to this being criminal. The August 31 Arizona Republic editorial vilifies Mr. Craig, asserting "It is illegal to troll for sex in public places, making those places repellent to the public."

What I don't notice won't repel me. It's not clear to me that any behavior here is actually repellent, or even noticeable.

Mugging someone should be criminal. Hitting someone should be criminal. An official's mishandling and destroying government property entrusted to him should be criminal. Stealing money by bilking investors should be criminal. Defrauding the taxpayers should be criminal. Lashing out at those exposing that criminal defrauding of taxpayers should also be criminal.

But reaching down while in a men's room stall? Putting your shoe in the wrong position? I don't see a compelling reason for these actions to be criminal. I have rather more faith in consenting adults. Certainly I trust people to more capably navigate the men's room than I trust them to capably navigate the extraordinary experience of being interrogated by an belittling and misleading police officer without legal counsel.

I read the necessary and proper clause differently than has become popular.

--

Mr. Craig was arrested for activity in an airport men's room.

What I want to know is, what wasn't that police officer policing because he was attending to Mr. Craig's foot position? Was there a threat of violence in a school that could have been responded to by the presence of another law enforcement officer? A lead in a kidnapping case that could have been followed up on? Could this officer have been enforcing some crime that causes actual harm? Maybe somewhere someone was littering.

The cost-benefit analysis here doesn't add up.

Here in Chandler there's a serial rapist in the news. He apparently preys on young girls. That's a crime, a terrible, vicious, horrifying crime, deserving of police response. Maybe we could have one more police officer looking for him, instead of attending to perceived signals on the floors of airport bathrooms.

Southwest Airlines and Inappropriate Clothing

Apparently Southwest Airlines felt the need to harass a 23 year old female flier about her clothing, which reasonable people on review did not in fact find "lewd, obscene, or patently offensive", as reported in this column.

This is another example of excessive (and discriminatory) organizational paternalism -- and that's paternalism of the pejorative sense, not in the sense of the wisdom you may have enjoyed from your own parental units.

This relates to the Thumper principle: if you don't have anything kind to say, don't say anything at all. It is not an airline's, or an airline's customer service representative's, place to dispense fashion advice, or to create a problem where none need exist.

You might wonder: what *wasn't* that CSR attending to while he was engaged in harassing this passenger? Not too long ago I was at Phoenix Sky Harbor and had the opportunity to assist someone distressed on the brink of tears because she couldn't *find* the Southwest ticketing area. (As one would expect, it was a Midwest ticket agent who eventually helped her recover her composure and find her way.) Addressing these minor but real issues seems a better use of CSR time.

"We don't feel like our employee was in the wrong," Chris Mainz, a spokesman for Southwest Airlines, told FOXNews.com

Then the error in judgment of a few employees is an error in judgment of an entire organization.

Would you like to fly on an airline that attends to real air travel safety issues, or would you like to fly on an airline that harasses its passengers?

On Respect for Peaceful Protest

Reported in today's Arizona Republic: Mesa police intend to discipline an on-duty uniformed police sergeant who made an obscene gesture at pro-immigrant protesters while driving by in a marked police vehicle.

Police spokeswoman Holly Hosac felt the need to explain that his gestures were "due to general distaste for protesters" and not out of an anti-immigrant viewpoint, and that the sergeant didn't even know what the protest was about.

This gives me a couple of distasteful choices. I can believe that Mesa has a police sergeant driving about with uncontrolled distaste for the peaceful exercise of civil rights generally and who is so unobservant, even while on duty, as to fail to notice the signs carried by protesters he is flipping off or so dim-witted as to be unable to intuit from these signs what the protest is about. Or I can believe that Mesa has a police sergeant driving about with uncontrolled distaste for the peaceful exercise of civil rights specifically around immigration and who further will along with his police spokeswoman then blithely lie about his observations and understanding to the public. (Leading one to ask, because the stakes are oh so high, does this mean this officer will fib about other things he has observed? How about under oath? As a witness to a crime?)


I find in my personal life that telling fibs and lies eventually catches up to me and causes me much more anguish than had I faced reality from the get-go. The same experience applies to government. Please, stop lying to the governed. It is a step down a road that it serves no one to tread.

Drawings of Guns, sense of proportion

I've been disturbed to read in the local papers of students suspended from school for having drawn stick figures with guns, vague drawings that might be interpreted as an impressionists "aura of gun", etc.

Certainly violence in all its forms, physical, psychological, and its conceptual pre-cursors, should be addressed with seriousness and attention. This is one lesson of the Virginia Tech tragedy -- that there may be premonitions of violence peoples' lives -- in their writings, their drawings, their speech -- and that there will be opportunities to intervene to bring people back into balance and coping rather than spiraling out of control with tragic results.

This isn't news. The statistics of the incidence of mental illness are astounding, surprising to many, and ought to lead to a recognition that many troubled people are not evil but rather are ill, that they cannot be treated as rare exceptional outliers but rather need to be considered as part of the mainstream "care for the masses" provided through such institutions as public schools.

Violence is part of our culture. This isn't a good thing, but it is a fact. Presently my government is engaged in military action in Afgahnistan and Iraq about which there are varying political viewpoints but no one can disagree with this fact: there are a whole 'lotta guns involved. Popular culture is filled with such concepts as MOAB ("Mother of All Bombs", a particularly large yield conventional weapon), occasional consideration of the use of tactical nuclear devices against terrorists holed up in tunnels, Russia resuming strategic flights of nuclear bomb armed long rage bombers. It is a fact that the United States Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms. It is a fact that in the United States, in contrast with other countries, most police officers are armed. It is a fact that the army is paying an unprecendented twenty thousand dollar signing bonus to young people not much older than this eighth grader to do more than draw stick figures of guns -- to be that stick figure, dragging a gun into battle. To fire a gun and potentially kill other human beings or be killed by gunfire.

Do we suppose denying all of this is in the best interest of schoolchildren?

The most recent case leading me to write here is that of an eighth grader who drew a stick figure pointing a gun at another stick figure. Neither of these stick figures was labeled, but a neither pointing nor targeted stick figure was labeled with the name of a school administrator.

Disturbing? Yes, absolutely. Worthy of attention and intervention? Yes. Not my attention or your attention or media attention. Worthy of a guidance counselor's attention. What is leading to these drawings? Are there guns in this child's life being ignored? Is the implicit message that the school administrator would ignore one student visiting violence upon another? Is this child reacting to the violence of Iraq and Afghanistan? To the gun violence here in Phoenix? Did he see a gun and hasn't told anyone because he was afraid of what would happen next with that information?

What is the purpose of school? I see the purpose of school as that of educating, of assisting society's children to grow into thinking, moral, capable, responsible citizens. And so legitimate school activities are the diagnostic, curative, supportive activities that promote learning.

No doubt disciplinary measures must needs be in the array of tools available to schools. Sometimes suspension will be a necessary response to express the seriousness of an offense to the standards of the community, to protect students from credible threat of harm.

But suspension must be reserved for those circumstances that necessitate it. The continuity of presence in school is, unless our schools are totally without value, of importance to the quality of education experienced by a child. We go to ridiculous lengths to encourage "perfect attendance". There is a disconnect, then, to whimsically suspend students.

Reserve suspension for circumstances that actually warrant it, and with the extra school time thereby recovered, refer students needing intervention to capable professionals capable of diagnosing and remediating this sort of acting out.

I am concerned that the generation of students resulting from schools without a sense of proportion, with draconian or capricious discipline, will be at a disadvantage in providing appropriate leadership. The lesson learned here is "the response to drawing stick figures will be disproportionate, because the bullies in charge have no shame." When this or other students are in a position of power over others later in their lives, how will they have learned to behave? Will they apply power consistent with principles of minimal force, of understanding and support, of offering the benefit of the doubt and trust, of sound diagnostic and curative action? Or will they have learned to jerk the reigns of power to force those below them to comply without making an effort to understand the situation or what less severe force may prove helpful?

Cline said that school officials do not thing Joshua meant for any physical harm to come to anyone, but that the school had to discipline him for the safety of the other students and faculty.
- As reported in Aug 31 Arizona Republic

This is the sort of 1984-esque doublespeak that disappointingly too often comes from public officials. Say what? No physical harm was meant. Clearly none was actually imparted. ("Oh no! A stick figure! And you, Brutus?!") Yet school officials needed to discipline him "for the safety of other students".

I object, sir. Nods to Virginia Tech do not excuse disproportionate punition. "Safety" and "Security" have become buzzwords excusing official an institutional cowardice and failure of judgment. Instead of disciplining the student, apply efforts to discovering and addressing the underlying problem. Instead of useless random punishment that doesn't actually improve safety, do things that will improve safety, such as verifying emergency exits will actually work if needed, and getting to the bottom of where these gun images are coming from. If there's actually some guns around, that's an interesting problem worth addressing. Punishing the messenger to discourage future early warning of guns encroaching on schools won't help.

"It is our hope this young man learns from this and comes back to school."

I doubt that's the lesson the student will learn here. The lesson I learned here is to have less confidence in the sound judgment of the officials involved.

Is this dog still under warranty?

Dogsitting. Brady has started a weird behavior where he'll decide he's had enough with walking, pick a spot on the grass wherever he wants, and lay down. Sometimes he rolls around in the grass, but in any case it's very hard to cajole him into finishing the walk.

I'm not sure whether there's something wrong with him (I doubt it -- he happily bounds and otherwise seems to enjoy the walk in between wayward lying down), whether he's confused about when it's appropriate to lie down (we've been working on "lay down" as a follow on to his pretty reliably "sitting" on command), whether this is his idea of a game ("Andrew sure is funny when he's trying to get me to get up, I want to see that look on his face again"), or whether it's a response to being over-walked. I try to walk him twice a day and we go for forty minutes or so each walk, but he's a big fellow and I figure he needs the exercise.

I switched to long walk in the morning and a shorter walk in the evening, but he's still doing the lie down thing. Not sure what my next move is. I don't have him lying down reliably in the house, so it's hard to drill getting up again after having lain down.

A big beautful dog, full of bugs and stuff

Continued dogsitting today. Woke around 6 to take Brady out. We had a good run, made it out to Hanger and back, refilling the canine at the doggie drinking fountain.

Then I went back to sleep and woke noonish. Not feeling so good - I hope it's just odd allergy symptoms from being around the dog and cats. Must get some more Claritin. Though that probably won't help with the drowsiness.

Went to Taqueria Mi Casita last night and had leftovers from there for "breakfast" this "morning". Washed down with some prune flavored Activia.

I've been working through The Amazing Dog Trick Kit with Brady. So far we're still working on mastering sitting on command. I think we're just getting back to the maybe 50% effectiveness of the command we were at before I started in with the kit. The clicker is a lot of fun, though. He's tired out and naps between play sessions, so I must be doing something right.