Family values. I'm sure you're curious about how we spend our happy family Sundays at the Casa. Some families have conversations, some do puzzles, some play video games or watch movies...

Right now we are having a three-way contest to see how well we can type with our noses.

UPDATE: David and the scioness have moved on to foreheads. I just can't compete.

De-greed. As always, I'm thoroughly behind the times on the fashionable blog topics, but I experienced a spluttering neuronal spark re the college gender gap. Have I bothered to verify, analyze, slice, dice, or fricasee any of the actual data on the topic? Well, no, but allow me speculate wildly on one possible silver lining to the shift of the college-attending gender ratio in favor of females. As middle-class parents who will be shelling out for college tuition in the near future, we blanch at the price tag and swoon at reports of the obscene levels of debt burdening new graduates. But many other parents like us must also be darkly reflecting that a college degree - outside an old core of fields where students are still educated in worthwhile things - is often, essentially, just a social symbol obtained by participating in an absurdly over-priced, taxpayer-subsidized racket that exists to keep a proliferating class of parasitic "sellers" in clover, while leaving the buyers in the condition of participants in potlatch, say, or an Indian dowry shakedown. Many can recognize the ruinous irrationality of the game, but no one wants to put his own child at a disadvantage. So the farce continues, as does the rise in cost.

However, it is in the nature of human societies that "prestige" and "feminized" mix like oil and water. (Hey, don't blame me for this. I didn't make the universe, I just live here.) If the boys are, for whatever reason, bailing out, then a degree (outside of fields where the course of study is actually relevant to a career in the field) will lose prestige and currency, and come to be recognized for the pointless acquisition that it often is. And then there will be a huge shaking out and massive downward adjustment of inflated fees to reasonable levels for young persons who really can profit from university training! And middle-class parents everywhere will smile and fall into peaceful relaxed slumber, through visions of hard-earned resources unravaged by social folly!

Hahaha! Oh well, a parent can dream. My economically-literate readers will no doubt assure me that no such subsidized racket will have reorganized itself to my liking by 2010 - when we could really use a nice collapse in tuition rates. (Though by all reason prestigious institutions should be vying to pay us for the privilege of training our extraordinary offspring.)

The Quotable Blogger.

"...I have to marvel at how hard it is to go through this life without attracting deranged, persistent enemies who hate you for no good reason." (Steve H. of Hog on Ice.)

Ain't it the truth? I have been, however, even more bewildered by people who take a shine to me for no reasons I can fathom.

Kennewick Man and Spirit Cave Man.

I've been lax in writing up the latest Kennewick Man and related news. The image above is one of the photos from a Friends of America's Past first report on the taphonomic studies conducted last July. (The image shows a polymer prototype of the skull constructed from high density CT scans.: "The reconstructed polymer prototype of the cranium was the first use of this technology on human bone". The CT scan project also allowed "[t]he projectile point prototype [of the projectile that was embedded in K-man's pelvis] "...[to be] digitally 'freed' so that lithic experts can actually hold, rotate, and discuss the type of point still embedded in the bone.")

Also of interest at the FoAP site is an archive of "The Army Corps Process to Approve Study", which includes the scientists' requests for access and study plans, and the Corps' response. Interesting reading, about which I hope to get around to commenting on soon.

But just when you thought it was safe to take a breather, it's time to gear up for another round of controversy and court battles:

Kennewick Man now has company in testing the limits of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGRA). The Spirit Cave Man, who lived a thousand years before the Kennewick Man, is the subject of a lawsuit filed in Nevada Federal District Court.

In the Kennewick Man case, scientists sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) over its decision to give the ancient skeleton to a coalition of northwest tribes for burial. The ACOE's decision was based on a broad interpretation of NAGPRA. Two courts ruled in favor of the scientists, allowing study.

The Fallon-Shoshone Paiute Tribe has filed a lawsuit against the US Bureau of Land Management (Federal District of Nevada, Reno, CV-N-04-0466). The Tribe claims that Spirit Cave Man is their ancestor and should be given to them for burial. BLM disagrees. A panel of three BLM scientists found that “the remains predate contemporary Northern Paiute tribes and cannot reasonably be culturally affiliated with any of them.” [2000 BLM Determination at 66]. Like Kennewick Man, this skeleton does not physically resemble modern Native Americans. Nor are there any significant resemblances between Spirit Cave Man’s material culture (what little is known of it) and later Nevada populations.

The Tribe and BLM do appear, however, to agree on one assumption: that the Spirit Cave Man skeleton, because of its age, is Native American and subject to tribal claims under NAGPRA. In the Kennewick Man case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that age is not sufficient. The court ruled that NAGPRA applies only to remains that have a proven relationship to present-day Native Americans. Friends of America’s Past filed an amicus brief with the Nevada district court arguing that the same rule should be applied to Spirit Cave Man. Amicus briefs were also filed by scientists, the Ethnic Minority Council of America and the Ohio Archaeological Council.

Cross-motions for summary judgment by both the Tribe and the BLM are currently pending before the court. A decision is expected sometime next year.

Spirit Cave Man background can be found at this page, which includes links to the pertinent goverment documents as well as a Q&A, a preliminary comparison of K-man and Spirit Cave Man, and photos.

(More Kennewick/NAGPRA.)

Quote of (some interval of time), #2: "People sometimes ask why it is that I don't have any permalinks on Chizumatic. It's because permalinks would encourage people to link to me and drive traffic to my site."

– Steven Den Beste

So when do I get my serfs? When we lived on Guam in the '90s, news of the abuse of slave immigrant labor on Saipan was always in the air, a chronic scandal. ParaPundit has a couple of posts pertinent to the current situation, the latter link starring the comedy duo of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff. (Barf bag recommended.) The former contains this interesting bit:

The corrosive effect on the work ethic and morals of the American citizens is so bad that, in 1995, the government actually had to issue a directive prohibiting welfare recipients from hiring foreign maids.

Don't try this if you're not one of the elect. Decades ago, I had a college acquaintance inform me that she was considering doing "telephone sex" to earn some needed cash. (Quaint, no, those pre-internet occupations?) My response was "That's really sleazy." I found her rejoinder to my reaction very interesting - she didn't produce, as I expected, a defense to the effect that such behavior was not sleazy, for reasons x,y, and z. Rather, she argued that it wouldn't be sleazy if she did it, because she was not a sleazy person. This was a wonderful retort, revealing ethical assumptions and moral confusions that I meditate upon to this day.

I've seen my classmate's attitude echoed over the years - most strikingly, until recently, in child-rearing pieties that counsel parents never to lead a child to believe that bad behavior makes him a bad person. (On the one hand, one wishes the child to understand that to err is human and screwing-up now and again our common lot. On the other hand, one questions the wisdom of inculcating in junior the conviction that his character is somehow separate from his actions, that what we do doesn't make us what we are.) In the last couple of days, however, I've come across two splendid samples of the "it's OK for me 'cause I'm not a sleazy person" spin.

First up was Kevin Drum, who can talk about the meaning of IQ because his (liberal) heart is pure and his aim is true, unlike "demagogues" such as, say, Charles Murray, who explore the issue from base motivations. Why, we've always wanted to have a dispassionate, informed discussion on the subject, but unfortunately those other guys fouled the nest before we got there. But we're nice girls liberals, so it's not sleazy when we do it!

Next is one Jim Sleeper (via A&L Daily), who has gotten around to being disgusted by the sheer in-your-face, numbing, ineluctable depravity of a lot of popular culture. But it's important for you to know that his disgust flows from the refinement of his own nature - not at all the source of the complaints of those thugs, those prudes, those capitalists on the other side of the culture wars. Somewhere in this essay, there may be buried a valid point about individual vs. corporate rights, the bottom line, consumerism, and cultural squalor, but Sleeper is too interested in establishing the purity and right-mindedness of his own motivations, contra those fundie fascists who've been saying, well, pretty much the same thing. As with the IQ example, we must establish our complete blamelessness and transfer the guilt to the impure, whom we allowed to muck things up while we sat too passively in our noble uprightness. Conservatives cause the squalor in the first place, because it's all a reaction to their repressive sex-hating attitudes. (D.H.Lawrence, man!) "Liberal permissiveness" has nothing to do with it, because, see, Tipper Gore doesn't like dirty rap lyrics. (No, really. Follow the link.) When they want smut to conduct itself a little more discreetly, they are censorious prigs. When I call for the same, it's because I wish to ennoble Eros and elevate the public discourse. I may sound just like Allan Bloom on the subject, but really, it's not the same thing.

One can come around to admitting that the bastards might have a point about a thing or two, but one must nonetheless not give an inch. They're sleazy, and I am not a sleazy person.

(The above examples are not meant to imply that this is a uniquely or predominantly liberal move. They just happened to cross my browser recently. Feel free to add examples of conservative "nice girls" in the comments.)

Riding the chameleon. === Warning: This is severely computer-geek oriented. ===

As previously noted, we've been having some hardware difficulties hereabouts. The demise of my main hard drive took the OS down with it, so after the replacement drive was in it was time to install the system anew. But I didn't just want to reinstate what I had before, I wanted shiny new powers — support for a wireless network adapter and the new digital camera. It seemed reasonable to install the most recent release of God's own operating system^[1], as surely it would support my surely-not-too-ambitious needs...? Alas, it was not to be – several fruitless days later, my desired new hardware support almost worked, but not quite; the kernel stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existence of my wireless card, and gphoto snubbed my camera, refusing to see the device, even though it was right there. Recompilations, kernel tweaks – nothing helped.

With regret, I turned my back on FreeBSD, and rejoined the fold of Linux users. M. and I learned that SuSE^[2] 10 was now available, and we decided that there would be administrative advantages to both of us using the same OS, so here we are on SuSE, along with other members of the internet's cognitive elite. (Jim – it's a chameleon, not a gecko.)

The one thing lacking in SuSE (and most^[3] other Linux systems), from this ex-BSDer's standpoint, is decent package management. RPMs are better than a pile of tarballs, but still, the dependency checking is pitifully weak compared to the BSDs' port system, and in the past, what initially seemed like simple additions or upgrades to M.'s SuSE system turned into multi-day epics of hacker-fu^[4]. I've started recompiling all the RPMs on my own system with extra dependency information to (hopefully) simplify future upgrades, but that's just a band-aid solution (and an excuse to write scripts). And what's with the lack of mplayer?

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^[1] Certain OSes seem to attract specific personality types. It's impossible to quantify (and may in fact be entirely in my head), but I've found I can often pick out Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux vs. BSD users after just a few minutes of interaction. FreeBSD was my perfect OS – UNIX-like without the unnecessary distractions of Linux.

^[2] Regarding "SuSE" vs. "SUSE": "The name "S.u.S.E.", later shortened to just "SuSE", was originally an acronym for the German phrase "Software- und System-Entwicklung" ("Software and system development"). The company's name was changed to SUSE Linux after Novell's purchase and "SUSE" does not officially stand for anything any more." — Wikipedia. It was SuSE when I started using it and damned if I'm going to change now.

^[3] Debian and Gentoo are exceptions. But people who use those distributions are just weird. (See footnote 1.)

^[4]Possibly, the Yellow Dog Updater may help alleviate this problem. I haven't looked into it yet.

Prog.Reac.'s Sparkling Wine Reviews.

Another January, another cava. This year, spurred on by both the Wall Street Journal, which I fuzzily remember has having said good things about this wine, and also by the little blurb out of the Wine Spectator ("fairly classy and elegant" &ndash "we're fairly classy", M. said) we tried out Segura Viudas (warning: website makes excessive use of noxious Flash animation).

Verdict: ehh. I think it's okay, a two-note sort of bubbly; M. doesn't think it even rates one note.

Note from M.B.: Yes, I thought it was uninteresting, even for the very marginally classy consumers at the Casa. (My favorite bubbly is still a Gosset - "the poor man's Krug", as I once saw it described.) What we lack in class we make up for in sheer geekliness - observe the Feathers McGraw and the copy of a finished workbook of Singapore Math, which K-selectin' Fleck y Breen inflicts on its sole heiress. Yeah, we know what y'all are thinking: "There but for the grace of God..."

Revive my show...or I will destroy you!

[Fox Network] has begun talks to revive the Emmy-winning animated series and produce a limited number of new episodes, thanks to a resurgence in the show's popularity on DVD and in reruns, Variety reports.

(link.) So Futurama may return from the dead. This news has been greeted with a mixture of hope and trepidation — mostly trepidation — at Casa Fleck y Breen. Hope, because Futurama has the distinction of being one of only two television shows whose entire run was deemed worthy of purchase here at the Casa. In fact, we watched one (Season 4, disc 2 – the reanimated corpse of Spiro Agnew!) just last night.

Trepidation, because, frankly, by season four, Futurama was showing signs of decline. While the season was good, the scripts increasingly showed signs of being written by people who were running out of ideas. If the show hadn't ended when it did, it would have risked becoming what The Simpsons is now; an undead corpse of a show, a zombie that will not die despite having vastly exceeded its natural lifespan. (Side note: Remember, back in the old, old days, when The Simpsons parodied A Prairie Home Companion? Homer stares at the TV in confusion for several minutes, then walks up to it and pounds on it with his fist, shouting "Be funnier!" Damned if I didn't feel exactly like that the last time I saw a current Simpsons episode.)

A key part of Futurama's charm was its endless throwaway über-geek humor — the beer in Klein bottles, the googolplex theater — if new shows can preserve that, then retaining the original voice actors might not be so important. But if it descends to the level of current Simpsons episodes – "hey, we're making a joke here; here's the joke! Get it? Get it? Wasn't that funny? We're so pleased with ourselves!" – then residents of the Casa may just be forced to pretend it doesn't exist, as we've pretty much done with The Simpsons.

Not that we want to alarm anyone.

• Social Disruption May Be Widespread


• Being Able to Work May Be Difficult or Impossible


• Plan for the possible reduction or loss of income if you are unable to work or your place of employment is closed.


• Stock a supply of water and food. During a pandemic you may not be able to get to a store.

Some wild-eyed paranoiac survivalist website, gleefully envisioning the apocalypse? Actually, it's the Official U.S. Government's Ahhh-We're-All-Going-To-Die Avian Flu site.

Oh, and Happy New Year!