“Large durable hinge is strong enough to withstand repeated openings and closings”

Um, yeah.

For $934.99 (on sale, mind you) I sure hope I can open it more than once. That would be a very expensive load of laundry.

Really people, can you not be a little more creative? Do you think I’m going to say, “Well, honey, it says with this one we can open the dryer door repeatedly. I think that’s worth the extra $500 right there”.

Do people market windows with enticing prose such as “Large window that will allow you to repeatedly look through it time and time again”?

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I should expect the door to fall off the first time I open it unless it expressly advertises that it won’t.

Best Character on The Wire
Omar Little

Over the first season of The Wire, we grew to like Michael K. Williams’ Omar Little–the same-sex-loving African-American tough who rips and robs drug dealers sporting a never-explained scar extending from the middle of his forehead to his right cheek. Omar was a shadowy local figure, a thug who went to Edmondson High School and remembers lacrosse-playing Detective “Bunk” Moreland from back in the day, but who mysteriously moves in and out of the streets almost magically. Omar also had some of the best lines, quotidian observations that Williams delivered with better timing than a Baume and Mercier.

In this past season, however, Omar became a being of complex beauty–a dazzling street-level philosopher deflating a high-priced drug lawyer’s cross-examination as nonchalantly as he sticks a gun in people’s faces; an urban Robin Hood passing his blood money to a blind bartender to save for his peoples; and a killer oddly possessing the most consistent sets of morals on a show that provocatively examines the constantly sliding scales of right and wrong. Rare is the show willing to reach into these crannies of the human character, and rarer still is the actor who can portray it with such bold conviction, creating a man you can’t take your eyes off on-screen, yet who you’d hate to run into on the streets after dark.

Ok, here is where I mainly am coming from. Obviously we need to do something to protect kids and make sure they don’t wind up with parents who cannot or will not adequately care for them. So we need to make sure adoptive parents aren’t criminals, aren’t abusive, have enough common sense and money to take care of a child or children. They should have room in their life for a child and no major relationship or personal problems. They should be loving and kind. Good citizens, good role models. Nurturing. All this makes sense to me, and I know I’ve left out other important attributes. And of course, this is a REALLY REALLY important thing to do. As a society, we have a responsibility to protect our children. So, there is a whole lot at stake here.

Well, here is what gets me. In terms of vetting parents and overseeing the adoption process, there is very little to no oversight by the federal government here in the US. Not only does each state have different rules, but each county within each state has different rules. For example, if I lived in the next county over, I would have to have the fire dept come inspect my house. In my county, the health department comes to inspect (after the adoptive parent pays them $75), and they do various things like look in your closets (because they are not allowed to be cluttered and things can’t be too close to the floor), they check to see if there is a thermometer mounted in your refrigerator (doesn’t everyone have one?), review the fire escape plan, fire alarms, check pet vaccination histories, check water test results (you pay for that separately), and on and on (there are six pages of regulations). And that is just one county requirement.

Another example. After having a background check and fingerprinting done by my state (1) and by the FBI (2), and by Homeland Security (3), I was told by a social worker that I might have to go back to every other state I’d ever lived in and redo the fingerprints/background check for each one. I didn’t (she was mistaken), but it took several days find out for sure. Gee, I think three background checks should be enough…

I belong to several adoption yahoo groups and read a post this week by a director of an adoption agency. It was in response to a prospective adoptive parent who asked if they could still adopt even though they had a criminal record. The director said that it shouldn’t be a problem, except maybe if involved something violent. Maybe? OK, why is it that, with all of the hoops I have had to jump through, someone could have a criminal history, and that is okay? So, does it not matter what shows up on the criminal history (except maybe if you killed someone…), you just have to spend hours in line, take days off of work, spend hundreds of dollars, wait a long time, and then, even if it comes back that you have a criminal record, you can adopt? Oh, that makes sense! The point is to just waste my time and money, not to make sure kids don’t get adopted by criminals.

So, in my obviously imperfect way, what I am trying to say is that it seems like we should be protecting kids, but what we put adoptive parents through doesn’t often seem to have any rhyme or reason to it. What really seems to be lacking is to check up on the parents AFTER they have custody of the child. Just because you don’t have a criminal record doesn’t mean you won’t abuse your child. Wouldn’t it make some sense to put some effort into visiting the child to make sure they are okay after they’ve been placed? Could that be more important than whether or not I have a permanent thermometer mounted inside my refrigerator.

How many adoptive kids die each year because their adoptive parents are too dumb to notice that the food is bad because the electricity went out and they didn’t have a thermometer in their fridge? I just have to say, if I am not going to notice that I’m eating bad food, I don’t think I’ll notice what the thermometer says… How many kids have died because their indoor pet cat wasn’t up on its rabies shots? How many children are injured because of cluttered closets? Poisoned water? I mean, if I’m drinking it and I’m still alive, it probably is okay…

I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t jump through hoops, but I would like the hoops to make a little more sense. During the process of being approved to adopt, I often felt like a criminal. It wasn’t just the three sets of background checks. It was the little things. That I can’t be trusted to decide how to organize my closets. I mean, if you can’t trust me to do that, how can you possibly have any confidence that I can raise a child?

During one of the home visits by a social worker, I was told that I couldn’t decide which spare bedroom my child would be in. The social worker told me I had to put the child upstairs. It was an order. Gee, I think the people I work with get to decide which bedroom their child uses. I also think they can bring home their babies from the hospital without having people look in their closets and fridges. Some of them might not even vaccinate their pets!

A question I struggle with is: at what point as a society do we worry about all children? Is it your right to have the wrong fridge temp and a cat with out-of-date vaccinations if your child is genetically related to you? Why is it ok to have cluttered closets if you gave birth to your kids? Are their lives less important just because they are genetically related to you? Of it is dangerous to have a cluttered closet, and it sure seems like it is, shouldn’t we be protecting biological children too?

So, I ask, what is really important when it comes to evaluating prospective parents? If we were making up the rules, what would they be? I don’t have all the answers, or even many answers. I just know that this is a terribly important thing, and it sure doesn’t seem like the system was intelligently, or even intentionally designed. It is more like a bureaucratic hodgepodge of rules and regulations. We can do better than that.

What’s up, HBO?

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I went to the Newsweek website a few weeks ago and did a search for the past columns. I selected the past eight columns. I selected eight because that is how many showed up on the first page of the search, and because I wanted to limit how much time I wasted in this endeavor. So how many of the eight were male? Eight.

Now, I think I remember seeing a female author now and again, so I’m sure if I dug deeply enough, I would find one. But, last time I checked, women made up about a half of this planet. So, why would they be so underrepresented in the newsweek column? Certainly there are plenty of talented female authors who could be featured.

It was also interesting to look at the books selected by these authors. Since each of these eight authors choose five books, this produces a total of forty book selections. How many of these were authored by females? Three. In other words, 92.5 % of the books in eight columns were authored by men. Wow. I wouldn’t have expected this in 2007. Maybe we haven’t really come as far as we think.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Newsweek is being malicous, or that they even realize how lopsided their column is. But that doesn’t make it any less worrisome. It only shows how insidious our biases can be and how they can operate without our awareness. Which is scary. For all of us.

As I said, I did this research a few weeks ago. A couple of days I got a Newsweek in the mail, and a female author was featured. But don’t get too excited. There was at least another male author featured since I did my assessment. So, I don’t know exactly what the stats are for the entire history of this column (I do have a life, you know), but it sure seems like a huge gender imbalance. And in case you were wondering, the woman who is featured this week in newsweek’s column selected three books by men and two books by women.

Here are some of the questions I ponder. If we did a racial assessment of this column, what would it show? Are these mostly white males? My guess is yes, but I didn’t look at that. It took me a long time just to figure out the sex of some of the authors (who knew Emile was a man?). Of the hordes of people who read Newsweek each week, has anyone else besides me even noticed this imbalance? Does anyone even care?

It is kind of funny that the cover story this week is on gender. Go figure.

So far, season three seems somewhat lackluster, and then there are things that are just preposterous. The drug-slinging Barksdale crew is really using Robert’s Rules of Order to conduct their meetings? Really? OK, I get the point that the guys who run this organization are really smart dudes. And I really like it that they aren’t portrayed as one-dimensional, heartless idiots. But it seems the writers are just hitting us over the head trying to make this point with the Robert’s Rules of Order scenes. Seriously, a little more finesse would be appreciated. My take on it would be that they would invent their own rules of order instead of conforming to something first published in 1876 by some white guy.

I was surprised when I started the second season to find that they kept the same theme song, but it was sung by someone else and arranged differently. At first I didn’t like the second season rendition as much, but then it really started to grow on me. Eventually I loved it. I hope that happens with season three with both the song and the story line, but I’m a tad worried.

Oh, and I thought Ed Norris was awful! I hope he got some acting lessons.

Here is what I believe:

I believe there is no god. I believe that no one died for my sins. And I wouldn’t want anyone to, either. I can’t see or hear or find evidence of a god. I have no empty feeling that would be filled by believing in a god. I simply have no reason and no urge to believe in a god.

I do, however, have respect for other people’s belief systems by not trying to change their views or make them see things the way I see things. I respect them by trying to understand them and by attending important events in their lives, be it in churches or synagogues or temples, mosques or under the trees during the winter solstice. I admire people who have honest and sincere religious beliefs and who live by the principles they hold dear. I believe that all people should have the freedom to believe what they want to believe. In fact, I would fight for the right of others to practice their religion. But I would also fight for the right to not practice a religion.

I believe that when I do something wrong, I should ask forgiveness from the person I hurt, not from a third party.

I believe that when I die, I will be gone. So I try to make the most out of this life by living right, trying to be happy and trying to make others happy. I don’t want to be a martyr, because this is all I get. One shot.

I believe my ethics should come from what I reason to be the right way to live. It makes sense to me to treat others as I want to be treated. If I treat others poorly, I will be treated poorly. If I treat others with love and respect, they will generally show me the same. How I act is not affected by what may or may not happen in an afterlife. It is based on what seems right to do in this world right now.

Some people think that because I don’t believe in god that my life is somehow meaningless. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I am in awe of the world and my place in the world. The more I learn about science and nature, the more amazing it all seems to me, and the more I realize how little I understand. As I get older, I am more and more humbled by what I see around me.

Pascal’s wager says that it makes more sense to believe in a god because the consequences of not believing and being wrong are more dire than the consequences of believing and being wrong. I see the point, but also think there is more to consider. In the first place, what kind of belief is it if you are believing just to hedge your bet? If there is a god, would she/he respect that? Would your god be happy with you if that was the only reason you believed? I have a lot more respect for someone who is honest and wrong, than someone who does what everyone else is doing “just in case”. And secondly, perhaps there might be some cost if it turns out you’ve had an unfounded belief your whole life. Maybe you’d do things differently or make other choices, or maybe not. It is hard to know.

It is a shame that not believing in a god is not generally accepted or tolerated in our society. It is hard to “come out” as an atheist. In fact, there are some people in my life who I am afraid would think differently of me if I told them I was an atheist. Sure, I may have different beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that I am less of a person or any less trustworthy. Unfortunately, it is viewed as acceptable to be biased against atheists. People often don’t even try to hide their prejudices when it comes to atheism the way they sometimes hide their other biases.

They also have a page devoted solely to “how you can help us”. Including things like making them dinner when the child comes, buying them luxuries such as massage gift certificates, and links to Amazon wishlists for books and CDs. If you click on it, you will see that they have identified themselves to Amazon as a charity. They even have a paypal link where you can donate cash to them. Believe me, they have put a lot of thought to how other people can make their lives easier.

Sure, adoption costs a lot. But I would like to ask these people to imagine their child seeing this blog. Exactly how do they think the child will feel? I know how I felt when I saw their blog. Disgusted.

Maybe I’m being too critical. But I have to say, that was my reaction.

Anyway, back to The Wire. McNulty is actually a lame main character. Sure, he isn’t bad looking, but then he’s a whore. You just know he’s crawling with venereal diseases. But Omar, well, he’s the real deal. Probably not envisioned as a love interest for most viewers, but he has a certain cachet that is (in my humble opinion) irresistible. Yeah, this bad guy oozes charisma, even when he answers a question with one simple word (the way he says “In-deed” gives me shivers). And don’t you know, I just love a guy who carries a shotgun.