My grandfather, my dad’s dad, was probably the more personable, between him and my mother’s father. He joked more, told stories more, loved to talk and hang out. I can’t ever remember him working, in fact, because he retired after 40 years at Ford in his mid-fifties–back when they counted his time served in the Army for WWII toward his retirement. Glory days, eh?

We always knew him, also, as being rather casually racist, in that way that the children of immigrants of that generation often can be. And it’s not that my grandfather hated black people, for instance, he was just basically dismissive about most people that weren’t white Americans. Including, absurdly and most recently, the Polish immigrants who moved in on his street.

He being the son of a Polish immigrant, and all.

Anyway, I can’t remember how it happened, but it was likely my mother pushing him into some kind of defense of his attitude and casual use of the n-word, and he told a story of a guy he worked with at the Ford plant. A black guy, he said, and the best worker he ever had. Only ever missed one day of work. One day! It was July of 1967, and Detroit had erupted in riot around West Grand Boulevard and 12th Street. He got a call from his guy, saying he wouldn’t be into work.

“What’s the matter?” my grandfather said.

“There’s a Sherman tank parked on my lawn,” this guy replied. “I don’t think I’m comin’ out today.”

“Okay,” my grandfather said, “that’s fine. You stay in today.”

I don’t know why it sticks in my head as a particular memory of him. Maybe it’s the lethal absurdity of the image of a tank parked on a working man’s lawn. Maybe it was the sense that he really didn’t hate people, or that there was a nuance and awareness to his out-dated attitudes. Maybe it’s just one of those odd stories that sticks with you for no reason. And I’m sticking it here, so I don’t forget.

My grandfather passed away this morning. He was 88.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

How do you know when a movie has set science fiction storytelling and all that crunchy good progressiveness back a few years?

When it’s used as an excuse to roll out a 10 Sexy Sci-Fi Babes “photo essay.”

Sigh.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

So, before today I hadn’t shaved in weeks, ever since I met with a tech recruiter about some possible work (and haven’t heard anything since). I also hadn’t really gotten my haircut, but I wanted to since I would be seeing some extended family today. And a high ‘n’ tight with a full beard just looks… well… you can see how it looks.

As you can see, this picture also shows of the sheer lopsidedness of my head and the effect it sometimes has on my haircut. Too awesome.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

This review pretty well sums up my apprehension about Avatar, I think. I’d love to go see it for the 3D eye candy and explosions (which, really, are just a subset of eye candy), but I’m afraid the story would make me froth at the mouth.

Although, all elements of plot aside, I think I might have been turned off by the gratuitous use of “You’re not in Kansas any more” in the trailer (and, apparently, the movie itself). As the reviewer says, that line is altogether too stale. Time to bury it down a disused well. Maybe in the actual 2154, it can be unearthed for an unironic renaissance.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Let’s talk about vehicle searches, and those conducting them.

First, let me be clear. I am in no way attempting a cavalier dismissal of Dr. Peter Watts’ claims of mistreatment, though if you’re upset about his treatment, I’ll bet this is almost certainly going to read that way. I sympathize with him, I wish it had not happened, I hope he is cleared of all wrongdoing, and I hope this incident can be used to bring more scrutiny to security practices along the border and the laws that currently support those practices.

Now, vehicle searches. I did this job myself for a couple months outside of Abu Ghraib while working on the force protection detail there. From that experience, and the training behind it, I know one thing to be very likely true about Dr. Watts’ experience: if a subject of a search does anything but sit quietly by while the search is conducted, 99.9% of the time it will be construed as an attempt to distract the searcher from the search, which in turn will be construed as an effort to hide something. Since this is how I would have construed such an action, no matter how harmless or reasonable the words that Dr. Watts used, I can see how things may have escalated from there.

Let me be clear again: I do not have any reason to believe that Dr. Watts had anything whatsoever to hide.

From the accounts given so far, I’ll say that it seems like two things should have happened that did not: one is that Dr. Watts and his passenger should have been separated from the vehicle for the search so that they could search the vehicle without interruption. That was our operating routine in the vehicle inspections chute in Iraq. The other is that they should have been informed, clearly and concisely, what was happening. I could speculate why these two things might not have happened, but they would be baseless speculation, so I’ll refrain for the moment.

So let me be clear one more time: I do think there were steps that could have been taken by the Border Patrol to mitigate this situation long before it came to blows. And it was certainly their job to defuse the situation, rather than escalate it through the continuum of force. If they failed at that, then they failed in their job to protect.

Now, as far as the people conducting the search go: I’m sure there are few jobs that are more thankless than Border Patrol/TSA/etc. The only time anyone pays any attention to them is either when folks feel they’re getting hassled unnecessarily, or when they’re blamed for letting the bad guys slip through. I’m sure it’s got to be a massively frustrating and stressful job. That doesn’t excuse any abusive tactics that some may engage in while they think they’re doing the job, but it also doesn’t justify some (thankfully, a small minority) of the comments I’ve seen around the last 24 hours or so.

They didn’t join because they have an excess of testosterone. They don’t get upset because you are articulate, or speak in polysyllables. I’m betting that the vast, overwhelming majority of them don’t give a damn what you do, beyond how it impacts their job. They’re not jack-booted thug wannabes. Most of them are pursuing their careers for the same reason you are pursuing yours: they believe in what they’re doing. And they believe what they’re doing is essential to keeping you and everyone else safe.

They want to go home to their families at the end of the day. They’re not psychic, so they don’t know how awesome any given person they come in contact with on a given day actually is. And if you think that some snark or sarcasm is enough condescension to get them to fly off the handle, you might want to spend a day in their shoes. Perhaps you’ll want to think about just how condescending you’re being, when you so boldly proclaim that you know what they’re all like, or why they all joined up, or what all of them find offensive or disquieting, or that you pay their wages.

Bottom line: they don’t make policy. The execute it, within a rather narrow lane. You want things to change with how they do their job? Calling them a bunch of ‘roid-fueled jack-booted thugs, while possibly cathartic, won’t get it done. Talk to your lawmaker, assuming you’re in the US, and put the pressure on.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Like a stupid smiling thing, every time I watch it. Enjoy, if it does the same for you:

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

First, a song:

NSFW lyrics, just so you know. Also, my favorite acronym referenced in the song is “OFP” which what I was often: “Own Fucking Program” As in: “Where’s Klecha?” “Who knows, he’s on his Own Fucking Program.” Oh, and EAS means “End of Active Service” which is the end of the Marine’s active duty or select reserve (that is, required to come to monthly drill) portion of his current contract. And in the same vein (by the same artist), The Ballad of Oceanside (referring to the town outside the main gates of Camp Pendleton).

Other links:

• Scalzi on Writers & Money — A good look at what ails the creative types in today’s economy.
• Howard Tayler announces the Schlock Mercenary iPhone App (Beta) — Too bad, so sad, you didn’t get in on the already-filled Beta program. But then, neither did I. This is one of another areas where I really like what Howard has done to grow his burgeoning online empire–sensible, leveraging technology, and doing so to enhance his revenue stream. Now I just need an Apple touch device with a reliable network connection, unlike my much-abused iPod.
• Courtesy of Fark yesterday, Wikipedia’s List of Notable Marines — I mean, I knew Don Adams and Jonathon Winters, but who knew the Everly Brothers, Nate Dogg, Shaggy, and George Peppard were all Marines?

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

As Tarri reminded me last night, this is actually something I’ve been comfortable with for a long time. We started dating back in 1997, and it was shortly after that, in one of those “what do you want to be when you grow up” college conversations that I laid that one on her. I mean, I’ve known since I was a kid that I didn’t want a suit-and-tie 9-to-5 for a career. Back when I was a kid, in my imagination that amounted to being a scientist or a park ranger or something. By the time I finished high school, I figured that meant writing.

That’s where the stay-at-home dad thing came in. In my innocence, I figured if I eschewed the questionable pleasures of soap operas and bon-bons, I could manage to squeeze in enough writing a day to make it an ideal situation. And I was very rah-rah for a stay-at-home parent. I had one, Tarri had one, and we turned out okay, yeah? I may even have gotten into an argument or two or twelve proposing it as some sort of social ideal.

That was until I had to take my kids out of daycare. Not because it’s tough taking care of them at home–that IS more challenging than I figured on when I was 20, but I looked after young Marines 24 hours a day at one point, how much harder can this be? The biggest difference may just be wiping butts. But no, what was hard, what was heart-breaking was taking them away from the friends they had made.

I think there are maybe one or two other stay-at-home parents on our street, but I don’t know them that well, and with the weather getting colder the opportunities for toddler meet-cute are rather small. Otherwise, other than the kids at daycare, they don’t have a lot of friends or chances for other-kidlet interaction. Now, next year Tony will be in kindergarten and I might be able to get Hannah into a local public preschool (though she’ll still only be 2 on Labor Day… but probably potty-trained), but in the meantime we’ve got a whole lot of not much.

So I find myself in the interesting position of hoping I can find a nice 9-to-5 so the kids can go back to daycare and hang out with their friends all day.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

So, three weeks ago, I got laid off from my job of nearly 5 years. (And last night, I had a dream where I was arguing with someone over how long it had been. I was getting really angry.)

The story, as it goes, is kind of hilarious. I started work that Monday morning like I have often, lately, working from home, logging into the servers at work and calling clients who needed help over the phone. One of the women at the office called and said I needed to schedule a new server install with Client R as it was in and paid for and such. A local Dell contractor was scheduled to come over to my house at 11 to fix a computer that I had tried to install at a client the week before, but was DOA. At almost precisely 11, the doorbell rang. I grabbed the PC, headed upstairs and…

Hey, the Dell guy kind of looks like my boss Craig.

Open the door.

Hey, it is Craig, what’s he…?

“I’m sorry Dave, but I have to lay you off.”

Well shit.

Surprising, but not unexpected, is how I’ve been putting it. Unrelated to the downturn in the economy, the company I worked for lost a rather lucrative exclusive sales contract in early 2008, which had brought us a pretty steady flow of new clients. Since then, management had cast about for other things to sell, but none of them really caught on, and we didn’t have the same foot-in-the-door that the big, lucrative contract had gotten us. So, on the one hand, we had become competitors with the people we had been working with, and on the other we were victims of our own success: we were so good at getting things to run smoothly that our clients could rarely justify signing service contracts with us when they only needed us a couple times a year at most.

So, on top of that came the recession, which in reality has had Michigan in its grip since 2000ish and only got worse with the worldwide downturn. All that conspired to make me “redundant.”

I’ve spent the last three weeks getting over it, consoled by my awesome friends and the deaths of many pixellated bad guys. Today I’m embarking on what may well be called the Indefinite Phase of unemployment. No idea when it will end, but for now it’s going to be marked by the company of my children on a regular basis. Which isn’t all bad.

It’s a good thing they’re cute, that’s all I’m saying.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

So, I just watched Stargate: Universe on Hulu because I was watching children’s programming at the behest of my son while the show was on. I also don’t have a DVR in my office, and I like to watch down there, especially if I’m not sure about what’s going to show up on the screen.

Final verdict? Not bad. Still Stargate in many elements, not as much Battlestar Galactica as I had feared. How it goes from here remains to be seen. They did an adequate job of differentiating the characters, which is tricky when you jump from a series with a handful of “opening credits” characters to around a dozen.

Some of my military quibbles remain. Greer (Jamil Walker Smith) is much more believable as a Sergeant or Staff Sergeant in just about every facet–including potential discipline problems–and really doesn’t need the extra rockers. There’s nothing, otherwise, about his character that requires him to be of such high rank. But I am glad that, aside from the one instance of him drawing down on Rush (Robert Carlyle’s character), he’s otherwise a contributory and positive member of the expedition. Well, and the thing with Camile Wray (Ming Na), but I think that’s more natural animosity/tension.

The other quibble, kind of new quibble would be Lt. Tamara Johansen (Alaina Huffman) claiming that she’s a medic. Unless she actually is self-trained, as the character sketch on the website suggested, she should be enlisted, not an officer. Doctors and nurses are commissioned officers, while the EMT/Paramedic types are all enlisted. But, we’ll see more as her character is revealed, I suppose.

Overall, I’m cautiously excited. If the show maintains the largely positive and optimistic tone of the franchise to date, I am readily onboard. If it indulges in “gritty” and “realistic” just for the sake of it, I’ll probably be turned off. Likewise, if Greer’s character trends more one-dimensional in the direction of his “troubled” nature/short temper. So far, they’ve stayed on the other side of that road, and I’m cautiously pleased.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.