Recently in Life Category

Me: What's going on here?
Sophia: Nothing.
Me: Then why's there egg all over the place?
Sophia: It's nothing.
Me: Were you playing with the egg?
Sophia: Uh, probably.

I have a few requests in case anyone reading this blog can help. If you've been following my recent submissions and approvals for the Blackwell philosophy and pop culture series, you might have some idea of why I want some of the following information if anyone has it readily available. If you have exact quotes or specific scenes from the movies or issue numbers in the comics, that would be wonderful. I have a large number of X-Men comic books (mostly from the mid-late 80s until the early 90s, but I have reprints of older stuff too), but if it's easy for anyone to find some then it will make my work much easier in two weeks once I'm done grading and begin writing, so I can focus on the philosophy.

1. I'm looking for any instances in X-Men movies or comic books where any character or the narrator uses race-language or species-language to refer to mutants as distinct from humans. This includes when it's morally loaded but also when it's not. I'm interested both in Magneto's elevated view of the rights of mutants as superior beings but also in the factual claim that mutants are a separate race, sub-species, or species.

2. I'm also looking for instances where Magneto has given moral justifications for his questionable or immoral actions, again from the movies or the comic books. (I have no cartoon episodes to verify the information.) I'm interested in his attitude toward humans and the moral difference he sees between mutants and humans. I'm also interested in any general moral principles he might state in the process of explaining his reasons for doing things. Any specific descriptions of Magneto's actions as terrorist would also be nice or descriptions of particular actions he's taken that are morally questionable or outright immoral would also help me.

3. For those more wizard-inclined, I'm hoping to compile a list of seemingly-chance occurrences in Harry Potter, where something not under the conscious control of any character, i.e. lucky occurrences, are absolutely crucial for the major plot of the book to move along, particularly if Harry's success or the bad guys' defeat or frustration in their purposes hinges on it. I'm also looking for specific instances where any characters talk about issues related to destiny, the various prophecies, time travel and changing the past, free will, and so on. If you can give page numbers in the American paperback editions (hardcover for Deathly Hallows) or chapter numbers otherwise, that would be great. But even just mention of the events and how important they are could help me if it's something I haven't thought of yet, especially if it's a really big deal.

Whatever help anyone can offer is appreciated.

We got this message on our voicemail from a number that was listed as RESTRICTED. It was an automated message that must have started before it began recording.

We just need to know what email address we can reach you at. The email address we have for you stopped working. So we wanted to ask you to take a quick second to update your address. You can do it over the phone right now. All you have to do is press 1 and fill out your email address. Just press 1. It just takes a second. That way we'll be able to keep you up to date on the great work that MoveOn's 3.2 million members are doing every day to win back the country from radical Republicans. So please just press 1, and thank you for your time and your continued support of MoveOn. And of course this message was paid for by MoveOn.org's political action and was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

Then the voice changes, and there's a phone number for how to reach them (I assume for when the recording is left on an answering machine or voicemail, and you can't press 1 to get anywhere).

So is this a new tactic or something? Our phone number is associated with only two adults, both members of the Republican Party. No one else has been at this number since 1999. I don't think MoveOn.org even existed back then. (Update: I guess it has.) I'm pretty confident they would count us as radical Republicans. So is there something we actually did that they incompetently assumed would make us prime candidates for giving money to them? Or are they just trying to annoy conservatives by sending them spam phone calls?

U.S. States: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin

other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. government

Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

U.S. States Lost from March: Alaska, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming

U.S. States Gained from March: Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada

U.S. States not seen yet at all: I still haven't seen Hawaii and Mississippi since I started doing this in October.

I wrote before that my proposal for a chapter on mutants and the nature of race was accepted to The X-Men and Philosophy volume and that I'd submitted three other proposals for two other volumes. I haven't heard anything one way or the other about my submission about The Hobbit, but I found out today that one of the two proposals I wrote for Harry Potter and Philosophy was accepted. They liked what I submitted about the limits of authorial intent, but they had a number of good submissions on that topic, and they decided they'd rather go with my proposal on destiny in Rowling's series, so they accepted that one. You can see the blog version of my initial thoughts on the matter here.

Before I even started graduate school, I hoped to be able to write popular-level philosophical discussions about questions that I thought needed serious philosophical reflection that science fiction and fantasy often raise, and I guess now I get to write about two topics I care a lot about in two fictional worlds that I've spent a lot of time in. These will be my first publications besides a book review (although it was a book review that made several substantive points, some of which I thought were genuine contributions to how to think about the issues). That means I need to work hard to submit some parts of my dissertation to journals pretty quickly to avoid giving the impression that I'm a lightweight when it comes to publication. Still, I'm glad to have the chance to contribute to these volumes.

We were out for a walk today, and Sophia and Ethan had gotten ahead of the rest of us. As they approached a road, we called them back. Ethan stopped, and Sophia kept going. So Ethan went over to Sophia, picked her up, and carried her back toward us. Sophia protested in a way that imitated Ethan's usual protesting (which in turn imitates what his teachers say to him when telling him a general rule about not saying no to teachers or some such thing. Here is the exchange that began with that. The first line itself would have been funny enough, but she doesn't stop there.

Sophia: It's not ok to bring little people back to their moms and dads.
Me: Are you a little person?
Sophia: Yeah.
Me: Is Ethan a little person?
Sophia: Yeah.
Me: Is Bear-Bear a little person?
Sophia: Yeah, and so is Isaiah.
Me: Is the baby a little person?
Sophia: Yes, they are.

So she assumes a fetus is a person (whereas some philosophers I know might wonder if Isaiah is a person on their account of personhood, or perhaps they'd think his personhood is just now beginning to emerge now that he's beginning to communicate better). But she also thinks her stuffed bear is a little person. (In both cases it means she's working from a conceptual framework that doesn't require consciousness or the capacity for pleasure or pain for personhood. I'm not sure if there's some condition her assumptions about personhood require, though. I think for the bear she might be speaking in the world of her imagination or something.)

Then she does a third interesting thing. She goes on to use a singular 'they' with the correct grammatically-plural but semantically-singular verb (as opposed to saying "they is", which occurs in some colloquial English dialects even for a real plural "they" but not ever in standard colloquial English, which still says "they are" for a singular referent when gender is unknown). What's funny is that she and Ethan are in full disagreement about whether the baby is a boy or a girl. She wants a sister, and so she must be getting one. Ethan is expecting another brother. [We'll be happy if Isaiah thinks more of the baby than he would a stuffed animal he can throw things at, since that's exactly what happened the last time he was near a newborn. He nailed it in the head with a pretty hard plastic toy. That boy can really aim, but he needs some more discernment of targets.]

Anyway, Sophia isn't going to go out of her way to avoid using male or female terms for this kid. It's just so natural for her that she used the singular 'they' (and got it right) without thinking that she has this view she's putting forward about a baby sister. She's learned the language better than a lot of cranky language prescriptivists who think this expression is some offensive innovation in recent years (even though it occurs in the King James Version of the Bible, not to mention Shakespeare and Jane Austen).

Sam has compiled another list of stuff the kids have been saying and doing.

Meanwhile, the ultrasound technician asked us today if we wanted to know what we're having. I resisted the temptation to say, "What, do you think it might be a lizard or something?"

I've been spending less time blogging in the last few days because I've been working on several things I've been sending off for publication. Actually, they're all for the same series of books looking at pop culture phenomena from a philosophical perspective. I received word on Saturday that my submission "Mutants and the Metaphysics of Race" was accepted for the forthcoming Blackwell volume The X-Men and Philosophy. I'm very happy about that, because it should be a lot of fun to write, and it reflects a lot of the things I'm writing about in my dissertation.

The due date for submissions to two other books in the series is tomorrow, and I've been putting together three submissions, two of them based on things I've written about on this blog before. I've reflected before about destiny in Harry Potter and the limits of authorial intent given some of J.K. Rowling's comments about her stories. The one that took a lot more new thinking was about providence and chance in The Hobbit, which was a lot harder to think through than the same questions would have been for The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion.

I thought about something on race in Harry Potter, but I already had these two posts that I could refashion into abstracts for chapters, and I do have a lot of grading to do and still some class prep for tomorrow, so I went with the quicker path. I think it might have beenm harder to come up with something as philosophically-oriented given that the metaphysical issues wouldn't have been as upfront as the difficulties I'm going to be pointing out with seeing mutants as a race. With ethical issues, there would be much less that's controversial that Harry Potter is suited for pointing out. (The examples Rowling gives are much more clearly wrong in an uncontroversial way than the kinds of racism that really aren't universally seen as bad.) It's probably for the best, because now if any of these get accepted it will be a publication, albeit a popular-level one, on a philosophical topic other than my dissertation, and that shows more well-roundedness.

It remains to be seen if any of these will be accepted, but having one accepted for a different volume certainly helped provide the energy necessary to write up what I'd been thinking about for a while. Now I need to get something published in an academic journal in case any of these get accepted, or potential departments I apply to might think I'm only capable of publishing philosophy for a popular audience.

U.S. states: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming

Other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. Government

Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec

U.S. states lost from February: Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, West Virginia

U.S. states gained (not in February): Alaska, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming

U.S. states seen yet at all: I'm down to just Hawaii and Mississippi. Alaska and Wyoming were on this list after February, but I did see them both during March.

On Sam's picture blog.

Sam has been constructing a list of some cute things the kids have said in the past few weeks. If I'd known, there would be several more that I would have written down.

We've got a working digital camera again, so Sam's uploaded some pictures from Ethan's birthday Tuesday. I also discovered that I'd saved a couple posts from her picture blog to post links to and then never did, of Sophia and Ethan from the summer.

Sam: Hey, stay out of that box!
Sophia: I did.

It's now March, so I've got another set of license plates to post from what I saw during February.

U.S. States: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

Other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. government

Canada: Manitoba, Ontario

Lost from January: Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota

Gained (not in January): Kentucky, New Mexico, Washington, West Virginia

I still haven't seen Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Wyoming since I started this in October. I've seen all the other U.S. states. I've seen four Canadian provinces (the other two are New Brunswick and Quebec) and two U.S. territories (D.C. and Puerto Rico).

I'm going to be experimenting for a little bit on the look of this blog. The new installation of Movable Type has been giving me all sorts of problems with comment submission, archives, and failures in spam prevention, because the changes Wink made to the templates when he did the last big site redesign weren't all compatible with the new features of this version of the MT software. I was hoping we could just make some changes in the templates he designed, but that doesn't look possible without more work than he can do on a level of detail beyond my understanding, so I'm just starting new, and if he gets some time he can implement some of those changes again with the new templates. I'll try to do what I can myself, but I'm sure there are limits to that.

It might be a while before the sidebar and features are all set up the way I want them, so if you're looking for something I once had in the sidebar or header, please be patient. I'll try to get the most important stuff done as quickly as I can, but the spam issue is the most important priority, and I want to get the new spam protection features working first. I've also got real life responsibilities, including some meetings at school for the boys this morning and an application to get out this afternoon, so I might not even get to some of the more important stuff until this evening.

Larry Norman has died. Some called him the grandfather of Christian rock music. He helped develop it before it got all commercialized and processed, and many of the earliest Christian rock musicians (Phil Keaggy, Randy Stonehill, Keith Green, The Second Chapter of Acts) were at least at some time all within his circle. His music was often cheesy but in a fun way, and it clearly challenged the status quo in evangelicalism in many good ways.

It was funny when I walked into my department a number of years ago and heard "Why Don't You Look Into Jesus?" playing very loudly through the hall, expecting that maybe our one evangelical professor had it playing (although he's not the type to play Christian music loudly so the whole department can hear). But it turned out to be a different professor, one who grew up in an evangelical home but is in fact an atheist. He had rediscovered Larry Norman on Napster and downloaded a whole bunch of his albums, and he was playing them loudly to illustrate the excellent music he'd grown up with. He wasn't in the least shy about proclaiming his appreciation for this outspoken evangelical rock musician whose lyrics were quite explicitly evangelistic.

Larry Norman had a hard life in many ways. Despite his significant influence, he never had much commercial success compared with the next generation of Christian rock (e.g. Amy Grant, Petra, Michael W. Smith, White Heart, Steve Taylor). He never became a mainstream artist or even a mainstream CCM artist in many ways, even though most early CCM musicians saw him as an important influence and owed him a great debt for helping get Christian rock going in the first place. He had heart trouble for decades, and to top it all off he had serious relational difficulties with several people close to him, the details of which too often made the rumor rounds in the public domain. His heart problems finally caught up with him on Sunday.

But whatever else is true of Larry Norman, he had a big impact on a lot of people, and I've probably been influenced by him indirectly in ways I don't even know about. I never listened to him much as one of my own favorites, but my brother Joel absolutely loved his stuff, so I have some familiarity with his music, and some of the people I did listen to growing up were directly influenced by him.

Larry was very nice to my brother, and I appreciate that a lot. Joel was in a college band called Mustard Seed that some people thought had all the signs of having a decent chance of becoming a hot new CCM act, just as Jars of Clay had done a few years earlier from the same school. (I won't comment on how Jars of Clay treated Mustard Seed when they had a chance to meet them, however.) My brother had put together a bootleg called We Wish You A Larry Christmas. Many people would have been upset, but Larry thought it was great, and he adopted the bootleg and began to produce it officially himself.

When my brother died in 1997, Larry did a free concert at his college as a tribute and performed one of my brother's own songs (Friendship's End) on a tribute CD some of Joel's college friends made after he died. His version isn't as good as Mustard Seed's, but it was a nice gesture. [I can't sing Larry's praises fully on this score, however. He later put that song on one of his own albums, and I have to think an administrative error took place, because he didn't give Joel any credit for it. Given how he'd previously treated him, this couldn't have been a deliberate attempt to take credit for my brother's work, even if it was disappointing to find out about.]

I've already seen several good tributes to Larry's life by people who know and appreciate a lot more about Larry's music than I can do justice to, so I'll refer you to those:

Charles Norman, Larry's brother
Internet Monk
my friend Gnu at Wildebeest's Wardrobe
Mark Joseph (at, of all places, the Huffington Post)
Steve Camp Jeff Smith posts Randy Stonehill's response
Michael Longinow, journalism professor at Biola University (guest-posting at GetReligion)
Chris Willman has a nice retrospective at Entertainment Weekly
Dennis Hevisi, New York Times
Rupert M. Loydell

I may add more as I discover them.

I received a message today from the college I teach at. In response to the shootings at Northern Illinois, they're implementing a third-party notification system. They give no specifics about this system, but at they end they say this:

This system will be a powerful tool that we will allow us to communicate instantaneously. To maximize effectiveness, however, we will need everyone in the campus community to provide us with their most current cell phone number.

Now keep in mind that this is the institution that pays two-thirds of its adjuncts something like $2175 per course without a Ph.D. and about $500 more to those with one. (They arbitrarily selected some departments to give a raise to at the beginning of this year to equal one-third. Next year they'll pick another few departments to make it two-thirds, and the year after will lead to a raise for the rest.) Keep in mind also that they don't normally allow adjuncts to teach more than two courses per semester (with one in the summer, and those pay based on how many students are enrolled). Remember also that it would be stupid for someone trying to finish a dissertation to try to teach more than that (and I only teach that much to retain half-time work to keep health insurance, which the state, not the college, provides and only to families of at least five at my income level.)

[When the adjuncts at Syracuse University formed a union, the faculty at this college were so embarrassed (because they pay even less) that they passed a resolution urging the president to give immediate raises to their own adjuncts, who get paid about 2/3 as much as the adjuncts at the university. It went nowhere for a year, and then they decided to implement the ridiculous three-stage raise described above, which angered the 2/3 of the adjuncts who were now getting paid less than the people who sit next to them in their office without anyone doing any different work. This attempt to pacify the adjuncts thus led pretty quickly to the very union they were seeking to stave off. Suffice it to say that this is one of clearest cases of white-collar exploitation I've been familiar with.]

So why is it that they're expecting people in this kind of position to have a cell phone? Do they honestly expect people with a family who can't afford to have more than one phone to have that one phone be a cell phone that only one of them can have and that it would happen to be with the one who works for them? I'd much rather have VOIP. It's cheaper, includes the free long-distance, and doesn't bring with it the temptation to leave one's spouse stranded at home with no phone. It also allows multiple physical phones with one connection, so we can charge one while using another or have two people talk at the same time. There are times when I'd like a cell phone with me when I'm out, but it's just not a good idea to expect your employees to have one if these are the working conditions you're going to provide for them. Notice that it doesn't say "everyone who has a cell phone". It says "everyone in the campus community". They really are assuming everyone has a cell phone.

Now I could give them my most current cell phone number. It won't do them much good, though. I'm sure someone else has been using it for over a year. They didn't ask for a current number, though, just the most current one, and I can give them that. I probably shouldn't, though. It wouldn't be nice to whoever has it.

Another month has passed, and my license plate records for the last month are ready for posting. Here are all the plates I saw during January.

U.S. States: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin

Other U.S.: District of Columbia, U.S. government

Canada: Manitoba, Ontario

From last month I've lost Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Washington, and West Virginia and gained Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, and Utah.

I haven't seen Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, and Wyoming since I started this in October. I've seen all the other U.S. states. I've seen four Canadian provinces (the other two are New Brunswick and Quebec) and two U.S. territories (if D.C. counts).

I thought I saw an interesting plate last night. I even turned around and went back to where it was parked on the road to be sure. It said "Native America". I didn't know there were such plates. The frame surrounding it blocked everything else off. But then I did Google search this morning to see what it was, and it turns out it was just an Oklahoma plate with the state name hidden. I already had Oklahoma. Oh, well.

I did see the Arkansas plate yesterday morning, which was a nice last-minute addition. Usually the ranks fill out in the first week or ten days of the month and then new finds are sparse, but those finds are usually choice.

The other day I set out to make a burrito wrap with whatever ingredients I could find. I spread a little sour cream on it, put some ham lunch meat laid over that, sliced some Colby-Jack cheese to put on top of the ham, and topped it off with some of Sam's homemade cranberry sauce spread over the top. When I told Sam, she didn't have any problem until I mentioned the cranberry, which led simultaneously to incredulity and disgust. But it was really, really good. I even went and made myself another one. The next day when we had some rice in the fridge I added that to the mix and had a few more.

It reminded of me of the times I've found myself running out of cream cheese in the middle of making a bagel sandwich. What I do then is spread peanut butter on the rest of the bagel before putting the ham and cheese (ideally provolone) in the middle. Oh, and it's almost always a blueberry bagel unless it's near Christmas (when it's sometimes cranberry). It's nowhere near as good as the cranberry ham and cheese wrap with sour cream, particularly the version with rice. But cream cheese, peanut butter, ham, and provolone on a blueberry bagel has got to be tasted to be judged. Feel free to call it disgusting once you've had a few bites.

It's time for another low-effort post listing off the multitude of license plates I noticed last month. It would have been on the high end even without a trip to New York City and Baltimore at the end of the month, but I got a few rare ones added during those travels.

U.S. States: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

Other U.S.: District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. government

Canada: Manitoba, New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec

There are nine U.S. states that I didn't see any license plates from in December. I saw one of them on January 1 in a supermarket parking lot and another this morning on my own street.

Missing from previous two months: I saw Montana in November and North Dakota and Utah in October. Those were the only three October and November had that I didn't see in December. So there are six U.S. states that I didn't see in any of the three months I've chronicled so far (although one of them is already in January's list, so there are really only five I haven't seen since I started doing this).

Additions not in previous months: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Nevada, Puerto Rico, US government, Manitoba, New Brunswick

Another month has gone by, and I'm now up to my second monthly post recounting the license plates I've seen within the last lunar cycle (or so). Here are all the license plates I saw in November 2007:

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennesee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, District of Columbia, Ontario, Quebec

new from last month: Colorado, Delaware, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennesee, Quebec
not present from last month: Louisiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, Washington

I don't know if I should be disappointed that our trip to NYC for Thanksgiving yielded only Georgia (all the others I noticed on the trip were already on my list or appeared again after our return). It means the motherlode I expected didn't come in, but it also shows how rich the Syracuse license plate hoard really is.

I was impressed that I already had eleven for November at the end of Nov 1. Well, I've already got eighteen for December. That's right. I saw eighteen different license plates just today. It's amazing what you notice if you just look.

I just went out on the front porch to change some light bulbs, and Sophia looked out the front door and said, "Careful, Daddy! It's dark outside!" After the first part, I was expecting some lecture on how it's dangerous to touch light bulbs or to stand on a chair, but she was concerned about the lack of light (which was what I was out there to remedy).

A minute or so later, as I was screwing the cover back on, she looked out again and said, "Careful, Daddy! It's cold and dark and yellow and red outside. And it's green outside too!" Maybe we should put a sign up warning people about the dangerous colors lurking about outside our house.

I never run out of things to blog about, but most of the things I want to blog about take more time than I have. So it's nice when I get an idea to blog about something stupid that takes very little time. All I have to do is keep track of which license plates I've seen during each month, and I get an easy post at the beginning of each month listing the license plates I saw the previous month. Maybe after a bunch of them, if I keep it up, I can actually do some statistics of what I tend to see.

So here are all the license plates I noticed during the month of October:

California (for some reason there are lots of these around Syracuse; I see a few every day; this wasn't true until this semester), Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois (another common one in our neighborhood), Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota (which I may never have seen before), Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah (not all that common around here, but at least two are in our general neighborhood), Virginia, Vermont, Washington (palso retty rare around here), West Virginia (also rare for me), District of Columbia (this is one I hardly ever see), Ontario

I saw one European-style plates also, but I have no idea what it was. It was on the front of a car with a U.S. state plate on the back, so it probably shouldn't count anyway.

This is without doing any serious traveling during October. When we travel, we usually see a lot more states and at least one other Canadian province. I expect December to be high. I've already got eleven for November, though, so it's off to a good start.

Since I'm expecting to be done with my dissertation by summer, I've been applying for academic jobs, and deadlines are mostly between this week and early December, with most of them in the middle two weeks of November. I've been spending about half the day each day getting materials together, revising my writing sample, rewriting my writing sample (long parts new from scratch), writing cover letters, figuring out which jobs have the earliest deadlines, and packaging materials for the earliest deadlines. I've gotten so far behind on grading because of this that, even though the job stuff should slow down a little bit now, I've got a pile of papers to grade and will be getting a pile of exams in a few more days.

So I don't expect to be doing a lot of in-depth blogging in the next week or so, although I do hope to have a couple posts of content besides just linking to interesting stuff elsewhere. We'll see. The post I wanted to write today will have to wait until tomorrow.

Oh, and I have no idea where my sidebar is hiding. It disappeared when I updated a couple books last night, and I can't find any problems in the code.

[Supplement 11:36 pm: I managed to fix the sidebar problem by reducing it to nothing and gradually adding each component back in. I used to have to do that when the MTAmazon code used to act up all the time. It hasn't done that in quite a while, but it never had this effect anyway. All it did was stop some of the books from displaying or occasionally all the books from a certain point down. This wiped out the whole sidebar. Anyway, I have no idea what the problem was, because the code I removed was as far as I can tell exactly the same as the code I replaced it with.]

From a conversation yesterday:

Me: Sophia, do you want to go back downstairs and watch your new Veggie Tales video?
Sophia: Daddy, it looks like a DVD!

If I had any doubts about her biological parentage, I think this would go a long way toward overcoming them.

The following conversation took place earlier today as we were getting in the car.

Ethan: We're going to go see Grammy and Papa.

Me: No, we're going to go drop Mommy off at her workshop, and then we're going to come back home, and we're going to have fun at home.

Ethan: Then we're going to see Grammy and Papa.

Me: No, we're not going to see Grammy and Papa today. We'll see them soon.

Ethan: We're going to see Grammy and Papa tomorrow!

Me: No, we're not going to see them tomorrow.

Ethan: We're going to see Grammy and Papa yesterday!

A friend gave us an ice cream maker. The first two batches came out more like just flavored ice, at least after they sat in the freezer for a while. Another batch was made with actual lactose-free ice cream, so that might come out better. Does anyone know of some good online ice cream recipes for an ice cream maker (especially ones that can use lactose-free milk as opposed to other dairy products that have lactose)? And I don't mean recipes for flavors like these. [ht: Geek Press]

I normally link to pictures of the kids whenever Sam puts them up, but I saved these for later posting and forgot about them in the aftermath of my intensive two-week Human Nature course at the end of last month. They're not as interesting as some of the pictures Sam's managed to take of our kids, but Sophia's always cute, and it's a nice big-hair moment without any of the gussying-up her mommy usually gives her. She's wearing the purple pajamas that she wanted to wear 24/7 for about two weeks straight. She got mad whenever we tried to put anything else on her, even if she knew full well that the purple pajamas were wet. Now she's got some similar pink ones, which had a similar phase, and she isn't fully as attached to the two pairs anymore.

We went shopping with Sam's parents and sisters last weekend. Everyone ended up with some loot, but Ethan's new Spiderman mask and gloves seem to be a real hit. The day we finally got around to opening the package he even wore them to bed. We'll just have to watch out that he doesn't suddenly start wearing a black costume.

I haven't seen him wearing them since, but Sophia insisted that I put them on one night when we were waiting for Ethan to put his pajamas on so we could do our nightly reading time. She then proceeded to tell me that I was scary, giggling the whole time.

From time to time Ethan comes home with some form letter sent from his school. Usually they don't pertain to him. One came home yesterday "reminding" parents of the dress code now that it's warm weather again. Since kindergarten kids never got this information in the first place, it's not really a reminder for us but is simply new information.

One of the items regards the length of skirts and shorts. I find it completely unfathomable:

Skirts and shorts must abide by "fingertip rule" -- shorts and/or skirts should be as long as the tip of your middle finger.

I'm at a loss to understand what that might mean that's remotely in the area of appropriate dress or short length. As far as I can tell, any plausible sense of what "as long as the tip of your middle finger" might mean is still going to be not much more than a few centimeters. They can't seriously mean it's ok to wear a skirt or pair of shorts that's only a few centimeters long. It would basically be a waistband, not a skirt or shorts. So what can they possibly mean?

I've been teaching a Maymester course on Human Nature since last Monday. It's basically an entire semester in two weeks, with a four-hour class every day, five days a week. I've been able to recycle some material I've taught before, probably a little over half of it. Most of that was last week, which was nice because my grades for the spring semester were due at noon on Friday, an hour before my class. I was asked a week ahead of time, right in the middle of heavy grading season, and things haven't slowed down since then. Given that most of what's still to come the rest of this week is stuff I've never taught before, I expect probably to have even less time than I've had. Maybe it will lead to some interesting posts when I do have more time, though, because it's a lot of material that I haven't engaged with carefully before.

This is why I've been doing a bit more linking and a bit less actual discussion for the last ten days or so, and I have no reason to think that will change before Friday at 5pm, when I'm done with the intensive part of the course. I'll have some grading to do after that, because I think it's unconscionable to expect students to do a whole semester's work in two weeks when they're probably not able to put in even enough time to do all the readings carefully, never mind write about them intelligently.

I do have one series of posts planned once I have a little more time. Max Goss, who runs the politically conservative philosophy blog Right Reason, has asked me to do a guest series at that blog, and I'm going to be writing a series on Augustine, evangelicalism, and the role a Christian (and specifically Christian views) can play in politics. I'll probably post some other things there, but at least the Augustine stuff will be cross-posted here.

Other than that, I'd like to get back to my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series once I have a little more time, and I'd like to write some commentary review posts this summer. I still wanted to put some thoughts together on the Republican candidates after the debates, but that's not complete enough yet to do in the amount of time I've got at the moment. There are several posts on various blogs that I had wanted to respond to, and some of those may just slip into nowhere or get a very late response. I do want to use the majority of my time in June to work on my dissertation, however, and I'm teaching a more reasonable but still intensive summer course from July 9 to August 9, so don't expect a major, substantive post every day even during June, and things may get busy again for me not too far into July.

I suppose I should post something on Autism Awareness Month before the month is over. I was going to link to Sam's series on autism and the brain way back at the beginning of the month, but I thought the series wasn't finished, and then I forgot. She's had three posts on autism and the brain: part 1, part 2, part 3. She also posted on autism research and autism on Wikipedia. There's a wealth of information amidst all that.

A friend of mine told me last summer that he was going to make a film. I thought he had in mind something like the home video movies my brothers and I made with some friends when we were in high school. We had:

• a murder mystery involving a Mr. Thurmafer (I don't remember if we had a name for that one, but I thought the character's name was funny)
• Alabama Smith
• Ken the Barbarian (which involved some hokey wooden swords and shields)
• Ken the Destroyer (which we managed to get some real medieval swords and armor for, not to mention a real ATV for the knight's ride-by slaying of the documentary commentator)

Then there were the fake commercials:

•  the product that could start with the skinny, little wimp (me) and end up with my brother (who at the time worked out quite a bit and was on his school wrestling team)
• a Volkwagen commercial where the car that's supposed to stop just before it gets to the two engineers with white robes and clipboards doesn't manage to stop in time
• Foundationland, which made foundations for houses but advertized itself with stock used car sales pitches; we filmed it in the foundation of a house that someone was in the process of building in the neighborhood next door
• two with a character named Gil Isuzu who had a sickly evil smile, wore really loud colors on his shirts and ties, and was trying to sell wide-body trucks big enough to hold three wide bodies (with an arm hanging out the back that he hadn't intended to be shown)

Our friend who engineered the whole thing went on to get a degree in film, but I wouldn't exactly say we were making real films. It was some kids having fun.

It turned out my friend wasn't talking about something like that. He was making a real film, using real film equipment with something on the order of a serious film budget (at least serious for an indie film). He told me he was thinking along the lines of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre in terms of the kind of humor. He's calling it Whip Cracker, and he's not putting out very much information about it yet (even I know only a little more than what's available online), but he has a trailer up in YouTube. So check out the Whip Cracker trailer, and if you like it give it some good ratings.

"Be a egg. You ca' do it, Mommy. You ca' do it. Mommy, be a egg. Mommy, take your glasses off. Now be a egg. Mommy, wanna be a grass?"

-- Sophia, while decorating Easter eggs yesterday