To whom it may concern:

My family and I visited your center on July 27, 2007.  We had a nice time and enjoyed every part of our visit except for the end in your gift shop.  Apart from the annoyance of it being blisteringly hot in the shop, we were accosted by an individual whose name I don't recall, but I'm sure, once you read this letter, you will know exactly who I am referring to.

Your shop was selling polished stones and magnetic stones "by the bag".  The listed prices were $4 for a small bag of polished stones, $7 for a large bag of polished stones, and $5 for a bag of "sticky stones".  There were no other signs posted indicating how many stones should be in a bag or any other special requirements. We had purchased some bags of stones just like these at the Polar Caves the day before where we were encouraged by the staff to "stuff the bag".

While I was sweating in the heat (it was 90 degrees outside) and selecting stones that might look good in my still life photographs, I was approached by an elderly gift shop employee who said to me "Just to let you know, you aren't allowed to overfill the bag, it has to close."  My bag was not overflowing, but it was bulging because I was trying to pack it tightly.  I took a few stones out of my bag and closed it.  I was then informed that the bag must close "comfortably" and that if I tried to buy the bag as it was "they will catch you at the register".  Given the heat (and the miserliness of your staff) I was running out of patience and said "I'll just pay a couple of extra dollars at the register if it is an issue."

I'd like to point out that having already spent well over $50 just to get my family into your center for the afternoon, and another $15 in the café for snack food, and being about to spend about $60 for gift shop items, I was offended that I was being hassled over a few pennies worth of rocks.

When I arrived at the register, the cashier was completely unfazed by my bags of stones and began ringing them up.  Within seconds the same woman swooped in and informed the cashier that I could not purchase my bag of "sticky stones" because it was overfilled.  I immediately said to the cashier "it's hot, I'm not going to go fill a second bag, please charge me two extra dollars."  I could have easily closed the bag by removing only a few stones, but I figured that offering far more than the extra stones were worth should be good enough.

The cashier seemed to think that would be fine and repeated my offer to the officious employee.  I was being more than generous, and yet, it wasn't good enough.  I was informed I would have to buy a second bag of stones.  So I set the bag aside and informed the cashier that I wouldn't be purchasing it today and made clear with my tone that I felt the entire exchange was patently ridiculous.  At this point, the officious employee launched into a speech about how your center is a nonprofit organization, as if I needed that explained to me.  I didn't appreciate the implication that I was somehow being greedy.  I am an Audubon Society member, and I always donate when I visit wildlife sanctuaries even though as a society member I am not required to do so.  Someone was being greedy that day, but it wasn't me, having sunk a total of about $125 into your coffers for a 3 hour visit.

I waved the obdurate woman away and reminded her that I had just offered to pay extra.  Nonprofits don't turn away money when it is offered without strings, so this had nothing to do with your center's nonprofit status, and everything to do with someone who doesn't have enough important things to worry about.  Nonprofits are typically very flexible, because flexibility equals greater donations and thus allows the nonprofit to do more for the greater good.  I'm sure I don't have to explain that to you, but clearly you need to explain it to a certain intransigent member of your gift shop staff, because it cost you $7 during my visit, and since I was so insulted and angered, I don't really see myself or my family returning to your facility again, which means it probably is going to cost you quite a bit, considering that only minutes before my wife and I were talking about purchasing a membership.

The irritating woman left and the cashier apologized to me and made clear with her expression that she too felt the other employee was being unreasonable.  At the very least, if you are going to sell items "by the bag" and are going to impose stringent restrictions on what a bag can contain, there has got to be a more sensible way to do it than to have an employee hovering over customers and pestering them.  Like perhaps a sign that says "No More Than 12 Stones Per Bag" or an example bag with a sign saying "Your Bag Should Look Like This".  Or simply sell the stones individually.

Though in the future I will certainly encourage folks to visit your facility, I'll be cautioning them about the gift shop.  When folks visit such shops we know we are paying too much given the value of the goods, but we do it anyway because it is for a good cause.  The last thing one should do in such a situation is harass the visitors and needle them for more money.  I would have thought that was obvious.

Okay my geeky friends, what's so funny about this?

Republican college students unite!  Demand your right to a campus free of transgender bathrooms!

BSU takes heat for 'transgender bathroom' (The Oregonian):
..."We don't want the university to label this a transgender bathroom," said Jonathan Sawmiller, 22, a BSU student senator and president of the school's College Republicans. He raised the issue in an April radio broadcast on a Boise AM station. "Since the media got hold of it, the university was told to stop referring to it as a 'transgender bathroom,' and to start calling it 'unisex,' " he said.

Sawmiller, who in early 2007 confronted BSU President Bob Kustra with a complaint that the school invites mostly liberal speakers, has enlisted the assistance of the Idaho Values Alliance, a conservative Christian group.

"Our view is, gender is assigned at birth," said Bryan Fischer, the Idaho Values Alliance leader. "There's no third or fourth or fifth option."

Fischer wants to know whether student groups -- BSU's 200 campus organizations include Bisexuals, Gays, Lesbians and Allies for Diversity -- will be allowed to alert transgender individuals to the restroom in their literature...

These guys desperately need something important to worry about.

I really need to add a "WTF" category to this blog.  I had heard about this peripherally and figured it was just an urban legend, but it's not.  In the last few days Sony released its new adult-oriented video game God of War II for the PlayStation console.  Recently they had a big "European launch party" in Greece for members of the press who write about video game news.  They tried to theme the party to match the nature of the game, so the party featured an actor dressed up as the hero from the game (okay, you might expect this), games involving throwing knives and pulling live snakes from pits (?), topless women who hand fed grapes to the guests (WTF?), and as a centerpiece, the decapitated carcass of a freshly slaughtered goat (WTF!!?).

Now it's not the first time Sony has done something amazingly stupid to promote their wares, but, as you can imagine not everyone was cool with a slaughtered animal being used as a "prop" at a party.  Guests were invited to reach into the goat's lacerated body, pull out entrails, and eat them.  The entrails had in fact been replaced with some sort of Greek dish that resembled intestines.  Yum.

If a goat had been killed and served as a dish which guests could eat, that probably would have been fine... I mean anyone who eats meat is eating a killed animal.  But to morbidly lay out a dead animal at your dinner party with its head hanging off as a lurid decoration?  That's just disgusting, cruel, morbid, and a waste of an animal.  According to Sony the goat carcass was purchased from a loal butcher and then returned to the butcher after the party.

Apparently it has finally occurred to Sony that this whole party really wasn't such a great idea.  Mostly because of the backlash from animal rights groups, Sony has issued an apology.

From Sony Apologizes For Decapitated Goat In 'God Of War' Launch (InformationWeek via Yahoo! News):
..."On this occasion we recognize that we fell short of our normal high standards of conduct and apologize for any offense caused," Sony said in a statement. "We are conducting an internal inquiry into the circumstances of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put in place measures to ensure that this does not happen again."...

The article goes on and quotes animal rights activists decrying the use of the goat's carcass, and a professor of marketing who calls the party centerpiece "stupid".

Which is all expected of course, but what I find intriguing is that nobody quoted seems to have any complaints about topless women feeding grapes to the partygoers.  Okay, of course they are performers, and they were paid to perform this service, but it hardly seems appropriate for a video game launch party.  The use of "pretty girls" at product launches or other types of retail expositions is not a new thing, and includes some sort of compensation, typically money, but not always.  But this goes beyond anything I've heard of before.  I would expect something like this at say a strip joint* or something like that, but a video game launch party for the press?  WTF were they thinking?

Here's an article from 1Up.com recapping the event and including a picture which is probably NSFW.

That's effed up, yo.

*: Which is not to say I've ever been to a strip joint.  For the curious, no I haven't.  I have no interest in watching ecdysiasts perform live.  That would be way too embarrassing for me.

...So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did...

-- Allen Lee, Carly-Grove High School Student

 Allen Lee wrote some seriously disturbed crap during a "Free Writing" assignment in his high school English class this week.  Apparently the instructions on the assignment made clear that the students were not to censor themselves and should instead write whatever came to mind.  The point was to keep writing and not to stop until the time ran out.  Allen's essay begins "Blood sex and Booze. Drugs Drugs Drugs are fun. Stab, Stab, Stab, S…t…a…b…, poke."  The end of the essay concludes with a message to his teacher: "No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting." The "cg" refers to "Carly-Grove", the name of Allen's school.

It is evident from his essay that he has an extremely low opinion of his teacher, and English in general.  So I suppose it's possible he selected subject matter most calculated to upset the teacher.  If so, the calculations were spot-on.  Allen's teacher apparently called the police, and now he is charged with disorderly conduct according to the Chicago Tribune.  You can read Allen's entire essay here.

I read the last sentence of Allen's essay as a threat, and therefore I am not at all surprised that some sort of discipline is in order, and I fail to see why Allen would be surprised.  But apparently a lot of people are surprised because they seem to be leaping to his defense and claiming that the teacher/school are overreacting.

In the meantime Allen is planning to join the Marines.

The questions here are, are these the ravings of a deranged mind, or a normal high school student attempting to undertake a free writing assignment and making a poor choice of subject matter?  Was arresting him an appropriate reaction or an overreaction?

What do you think?

I don't even know where to file this one.  It's a serious WTF? thing.  Have you wanted someone to build a giant geostationary banana that would drift around in the Texas sky for about a month?  Well your wishes can come true if you are willing to chip in a buck for the Geostationary Banana Over Texas project...

What a night.  Couldn't sleep much because my temperature kept rising and falling.  I'd wake up freezing and pile on the blankets and even put on a warm jacket and then an hour later I'd wake up boiling.  I took 1000mg of Tylenol right before bed, plus Robitussin CF.  The cough syrup really does suppress the coughing but it does nothing for the fever.  My wife encourages me to take Tylenol Cold with the cough syrup but two of those is only 700mg of Tylenol, so I figure I'm better off taking the syrup and the regular Tylenol caplets for now.

When I get a fever, my mind becomes pretty flighty and I often find myself reasoning out thoroughly a completely ridiculous proposition as if it were true... especially when I am on the edge of sleep.  And last night, for example, I spent many edge-of-sleep moments mulling the fact that the polygons that make up my body each contained too much heat.  The proper thing to do of course was to take my mouse and select these polygons and then edit them to remove the excess heat.  The problem was figuring out how to get all the polygons selected at once.  Apparently there are multiple kinds of polygons in my body and they can't all be selected at once, and selecting only a few at a time is useless because it would take forever and the heat would just redistribute itself. Finally at 3 AM it occurred to me that this notion was nonsense, stop thinking about that crap and go to sleep, I said to myself.

In my sleeping moments I had the most peculiar dream.  It actually makes a halfway decent if odd story.  I was in college again, but for some reason, college was in Michigan (I attribute this to noting a Michigan license plate in a movie I watched recently).  Strangely, James, my trusted college compatriot was also there, and another person who was our friend, but I could not remember his name and every time I looked at him, his face was a blur.  So for now, I'll call him "Blur".  The only thing I remember about blur was that he worked for the school paper.

We were enrolled in a humanities course on archeology, got to get those Humanities credits if you want to graduate with a degree in Comp Sci.  The professor, a gray haired old fellow whose name escapes me, took the whole class out on assignment to a local historic spot that he had gotten permission to dig at.  It was at a rest stop by the side of a Michigan highway.  The rest stop was basically a dirt half circle, on the edge of a pond, with a stone structure near the water, mostly hidden by brush.  It was like the circle of stones that forms a covered well standing about 3.5 feet high and about 3.5 feet in diameter.

The professor explained that this cylindrical structure was built by the prehistoric ancestors of a local Indian tribe.  I don't remember the tribe's name.  The cylinder was full of dirt and a vine-covered tree had grown in it at one time, and this tree was important to these early people for some sort of rituals.  I don't remember most of what he said, but he went on to say that when Europeans settled the area and discovered the tree was used for rituals (which to them were Satanic, since they weren't Christian), they had chopped the tree down.

We were going to dig in and around this structure, which was now partially obscured by brush on the sides and top.  So we cleared the brush away for starters, which revealed the relatively small tree stump and a tangle of vines sprouting from it still bearing leaves.  I remarked that I was amazed the tree was still clinging to life and the professor said we would dig around it.  It occurred to me that with the brush cleared, the tree might actually be able to grow again, and that made me happy.

Then the digging began, gently scraping away soil with trowels and brushing it away with brushes.  We found some small shards of pottery and a clay pipe, and the professor noted that it looked like the soil had been disturbed recently.  That's when we uncovered something that definitely did not belong.  It was a Maine license plate, 682 HG, buried in the soil.  The professor snatched it up disgustedly and flung it away.  Why would someone bury a license plate?  I wondered... I was curious about it so I grabbed it and stuck it in my pack.

For each item uncovered James and I were to write a small report, and I forget why, but for some reason the professor didn't like our reports.  I think he felt we Comp Sci majors were unwelcome invaders in his class.  He made some noise about them not being thorough enough, or some such thing.  And he refused to grade them, and further, refused to explain what exactly we needed to do to fix them, leaving us pretty much in the lurch, with no choice but to keep trying.

Each day we returned to the dig site and did more work uncovering more stuff, and all the while the professor refused to explain what he wanted in these reports.  We had checked our textbooks and had formatted the reports as suggested therein, using Mac Write to carefully lay them out.  They looked as though they wouldn't appear out of place in the book themselves.  The only thing different about them is that they were done on the computer instead of written by hand in a notebook.

It turned out, our professor finally admitted, that this is why he would not accept them.  "True archaeologists don't use computers." he said, accenting the word with distaste.  Clearly the professor was a technophobic nut-job.  I found his argument to be a ridiculous statement in the extreme, utter bullshit, James agreed and we told the professor so.  We had both seen documentaries on TV where archaeologists used computers to catalog or scan finds and so forth.  Our friend Blur concurred.

The professor countered that the reports HAD to be in our lab notebooks.  Okay, fine, James said, and I could tell he was about to deliberately misinterpret the teacher's intentions, just to piss him off, I'll paste these report pages to the pages of my notebook.  That should be acceptable, right?  Because it will be in my notebook.

I didn't think this was going to fly with the professor, and I was right.  It just made him angry.  He said that it was not acceptable to which James immediately and sharply shot back "why?" repeatedly.  At that age James loved to catch someone in their own illogical arguments and then needle them over it, never backing down.  At least, if memory serves.  I always both admired this trait and feared it, because I was afraid it would get him into trouble.  But he survived into adulthood relatively unscathed so I guess my fears were unfounded.

Finally the professor told us that if we didn't want to flunk the course, we would write the reports by hand using an engineering pencil in our notebooks as all of his students had done in the past.  James' argument that archaeologists should study the past, not live in it landed on deaf ears.  We were simply going to have to rewrite them and that was that.

The next day at the dig site there was a bunch of students I didn't recognize protesting.  They were holding up signs and everything.  At first I thought they were protesting the dig for some reason, but it turned out they were protesting the professor for refusing to move with the times and accept reports in the superior digital format.  Blur mentioned to James, Sorry I got the paper involved, to which James said, Are you kidding?  This is great!

I didn't know what they were talking about until Blur handed me the latest copy of the school paper, open to a particular article that immediately caught my eye.  Apparently the student in charge of taking photographs of the dig and the finds, had also shot pictures of the students.  And there was a picture of me, James, and Blur in the paper.  My back was to the camera, Blur was partially obscured behind James, and James was sipping something from a plastic cup and grinning, looking charming with his close-cropped hair, glasses, and bomber-style jacket.  In the background was the dig site and the professor with his back turned toward us.  The article said "Professor Unfairly Threatens to Flunk Students", and went on to describe the situation in unflattering terms.

Needless to say the professor was livid.  He began by accusing me of arranging the whole thing and I said I hadn't known anything about it.  Then he accused James, to which James calmly replied that he too hadn't had anything to do with it, but noted that people don't just sit by when they see someone behaving in an unjust manner.  Certainly we had told other people that he had threatened to flunk us, but we never went to the paper.  Obviously someone had, but not us.  The photographer, upon questioning, said that the paper had called him and asked for pictures of the dig because they were going to write an article about it.  They hadn't mentioned anything about his threatening to flunk us, and so he had happily supplied copies of all of the pictures, figuring the professor would be pleased.

Nobody would admit to anything, and the professor was becoming more and more belligerent.  He actually screamed at an older guy in the class who was apparently back in school in his 40's trying to finally get that degree, something about the proper way to use a trowel.  The guy's name was something Jenkins... his first name began with a D.  And when the professor started yelling at him Jenkins began to look positively scary, like he would snap the smaller man's neck.

After class the professor announced that he was canceling the remainder of the dig.  All reports would be due in his office in the morning, done by hand in notebooks, no later than 8 AM. He knew this meant James and I would be up all night, and clearly relished the idea.  James and I knew that he would be merciless when he graded our reports, and by all accounts no matter how good they were, he would flunk us.

James assured me that the fight wouldn't be over just because he flunked us, and that in the end he would get the grade overturned.  Nonetheless, at this point we needed to play by the professor's rules or it would be harder to get the grade overturned, and we needed to do an excellent job.  So we went to the library and poured on the research.  The library was apparently open 24 hours a day, so we pretty much camped out there, adding all sorts of details to our reports.

James wickedly suggested that we should write a report on the license plate too.  After all, it was found at the dig site and the professor said all finds had to be documented.  The professor wouldn't like it, but I had definitely reached the "fuck him" stage at that point.

In addition I did background research on the vicinity of the rest stop and came across an article in a local newspaper dated ten years prior.  It was an appeal from the state police for information on the whereabouts of D(something) Jakes.  Apparently Mr. Jakes had murdered his family in Maine and fled without a trace.  The police had only one lead in that a couple days later a trooper had spotted a car with Maine plates pulling into the rest stop where the dig site was at about 2 AM.  The officer in the cruiser was off duty, and didn't note the plate number, just that it was a Maine plate.  He pulled up next to the vehicle, rolled down his window and asked the other driver if he was alright.  To which the 30 year old responded, yeah, I'm just tired and I'm going to catch some sleep.

That was good enough to the officer who said drive safe and left. Only later did the officer read a bulletin on Jakes, and wasn't sure but thought the man he had spoken to the day before might have been Jakes.  Hence the appeal for information.  But none was forthcoming.  I went looking for more information on Jakes and found a couple more appeals for information in later years.  Clearly the trail had gone cold.

And I was probably holding his license plate in my hands.  Then it occurred to me that D(something) Jenkins was an anagram of D(something) Jakes.  I shared all this with my friend James who went wide-eyed and noted that Jenkins had almost certainly seen me pick up the plate.  We reasoned that he had possibly ditched his car, maybe dumping it in the pond, or had switched out the plates or something.  This explained why the plate had been buried.

We have to go to the police, he said, right now.

That's when I woke up, and when I went back to sleep the dream did not return.  My wife told me in the morning that I had been swearing in my sleep all night. She said every other phrase out of my mouth had been "eff you".  I told her I was angry at my archeology professor and that got a look as strange as one might expect.

100.5 is my temp now.  I'm so miserable.