Perhaps by coincidence and perhaps not, my introductions to both comic books and anime involved vacations.

I was about fourteen or fifteen when I first became interested in comic books. I had finally gotten around to seeing the Batman movies of the day and had fallen in love with them. From there I started becoming attracted to superhero mythos on television from Batman to Darkwing Duck. I’ve always been like that: I discover something new and immerse myself into it. To be honest, the idea of actually buying comic books never appealed to me until I stumbled across a rerun of Simon & Simon involving the death of a comic book writer.

I bought my first comic book from the convenience store right down the street from me. They only had Batman, Superman, and a couple others. I bought Batman and the next day my family left for one of those 12 countries in 21 day European tours. The vacation left a lot of time on the bus. While the rest of the family was peering out the window looking at strange (well, Europe, so not that strange) foreign lands, I had my nose in the comic book. I literally read that thing at least 100 times that trip. With that comic book as my only experience, my imagination ran wild with what other comic books might be like. Almost immediately I was creating comic books in my head.

By any measure, the comic that I had ran a mediocre plot with a fourth-rate villain (Maxie Zeus), but I had no way of knowing that. I read the letters to the editor fifty times, too, and my first order of business upon getting back was buying the storylines referred to in the letters. That meant actually going to a comic book store, which blew my mind. It wasn’t all good. Apparently some of the comic books cost a whole $1.75 instead of $1.50. Of course now I doubt you can get one for under $3.

When it comes to anime, I was actually introduced slightly before a vacation. I was introduced by a friend named Zane. I thought Zane was the coolest guy ever and wanted any excuse I could find to spend time with him. So I would hang out at his friend Mick’s house (Mick’s house was cool cause his dad left and his mom was a dispondent drunk) and we watched some anime late into the night as we took turns chatting online. I only got a couple opportunities to do so before the vacation to Shell Beach, but before I left Zane loaned me his collection so that I would have something to watch.

Clint went with me that year and what time we didn’t spend talking about girls and whatnot we spent watching anime. The first one we watched was a show called Ranma, which was about a boy that turned into a girl when doused with cold water (and then back to a boy when doused with warm water). It didn’t seem like something particularly good, but so many of the people we knew online were into it we had to see it for the culture value alone.

In the US, when there is a TV show and a movie with the same characters, it is typical the the movie came first and the TV show followed (think Highlander). So we figured that the movie should be watched first. Generally (though certainly not always), it works the opposite with anime. The movies come after a TV show has ended (which is increasingly the case in the US, too). But we learned this too late and the movie we thought was going to introduce us to Ranma and company literally had 20 or so characters all chasing each other in the first ten minutes as each chasing member would bump into someone else that had reason to chase them until there was a virtual herd. Akane, the female lead, yelled at Ranma, “Ranma, you do this every time!” We had no idea what the heck was going on, but there were enough one-liners to make us start watching the TV show, which slowly started filling in the backstory.

When we got back to Colosse our first order of business was procuring more of this stuff. Clint quickly befriended an anime friend and basically started dating her so that she would make copies of the anime for us (well, that wasn’t the only reason, she was also very unrigid, affection-wise). Piece by piece, though out of order, we started getting the Ranma story filled in. We also soon discovered a video game rental store that also dealt in anime and within a semester we cleaned out their relatively paltry selection.

It wasn’t until the next summer that we finally made our way to a place called Animenian Outpost in downtown Colosse. The video game store had maybe 100 tapes in all. This place had walls and walls of it, including the entire Ranma series and every other series I’d heard people talking about online. Clint was so excited that he was shaking. I looked at the wall, determined that I wanted to rent about 70% of it, and was trying to figure out what bank I was going to need to rob to make that happen.

Even a mysogynist could score pretty high on this test.

You Are 85% Feminist

You are a total feminist. This doesn’t mean you’re a man hater (in fact, you may be a man). You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It’s a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

What are some TV show plots that you have seen so many times on so many different shows that twiddling your thumbs might yield more interest than watching said TV show? Is there any plot on an otherwise really good show that would make you strongly consider turning off the TV rather than watch the show to its conclusion?

One such example is a character falling asleep and dreaming of the cast of the show in the storyline or time period in a book that he or she is reading.

Yesterday I ran across another on the TV show Homicide, Life on the Street: The Domestic Violence episode.

It seems like just about every earnest drama (and some comedies) feels the need to put a spotlight on domestic violence. They never seem to feel the need to make it interesting. Instead, the plot goes like this:

• 1. A new character is introduced that is in a marriage that usually seems happy to all the world. This character will often be an old friend in a principal character. (in Homicide, it was the wife of a principal’s old partner)
• 2. The woman ends up with unexplained bruises, which she lamely attributes to falling on a doorknob or something (in Homicide, she “fell down the stairs”).
• 3. A confrontation occurs either between the principal and either the abuser or the victim wherein the principal Knows What’s Really Going On. The abuser will explain that he just gets so mad sometimes and his work is stressful and she doesn’t listen or some variation of those themes. The victim will say that he’s such a good man and she probably deserves it. (in Homicide, he gave all of the above excuses)
• 4. Principal will try to convince woman to leave man. Woman will put up a great amount of resistence. She’s scared, she has nowhere to turn, etc.
• 5. In the end, one of three things happens: (1) She leaves him, (2) She refuses to and the principal is shut out of their lives for trying to help, or (3) he kills her for trying to leave or she kills him because she believes he will kill her. In Homicide it was the third, to no surprise (or care) whatsoever.

Throughout the entire episode, I was almost mouthing the lines even though I’d never seen the episode before. I was calling it beforehand “This is the scene where she tries to convince the victim to leave him” and “Oooh, her phone just rang. It’s the police announcing that he or she is dead”.

Look, I am not indifferent to domestic violence and believe in prosecuting spousal abusers to the greatest extent of the law. But seriously, there is no “spousal abuse is a-ok” argument being made anywhere except by spousal abusers and their victims, most of whom would probably watch the episode and agree that the dude on the TV is a bastard but their case is Really Different. I don’t object to awareness campaigns, I object to bad television.

I want to see episodes telling me something I don’t know. I would love to see some episodes wherein the man is emotionally abusive or uses the threat of physical violence without ever having to raise his hand. These are things that happen every day that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen on television. These are things that a woman can look at and say “Oh, my God, that’s what’s happening to me!” I can’t imagine there are that many women that are being abused that haven’t already decided that they want to leave or made some false peace with their situation (believing she deserves it, that he’ll change, or that she’s safer getting beat up than getting killed for leaving) that won’t be shattered in 45 or 22 minutes of television.

It’s also more than a little obnoxious how they keep showing the same types of abusers, too. The guy is usually outwardly very sweet and the last person you would expect to be an abuser and so on and so on*. I am aware of at least a few situations of abuse and in most of those cases the guy’s real temperament was a pretty badly kept secret. I’m not at all blaming the woman for being abused because god knows the flaws we miss when we’re falling in love, but an awareness campaign on what we should be looking for** would be more helpful than one about how Domestic Violence Is Bad. In no case that I have been witness to*** has the abused partner been anything but keenly aware of what’s happening to them. Most don’t even try to make the excuses that I see on television, they just accept it as the cost of the relationship they’re in (this is particularly true for women with children, where the cost of leaving is so much greater).

In addition to rarely being outwardly sweet (except in an obsessive way) most cases I’m aware of do not involve the middle class professionals (or above) I frequently see as the abusers on television. Successful men are much, much less likely to be physically abusive than unsuccessful men. Women that marry professional and middle class men typically have the resources to leave him. It’s poor women that are most often stuck with these jerks because they don’t have the means to escape and are less likely to be aware that their situation is as bad as it is (one’s sense of what is normal is greatly influenced by what is going on in their peer-group). Fully half of the abusive men that I am aware of are from an economically strapped suburb of Colosse.

And yet if you see these TV shows you really get the impression that the biggest threat a woman faces in regards to domestic violence is an outwardly appearing well-adjusted man with a steady income. I guess what they’re going for is an “It can happen to you!” theme. Indeed, it can happen to even the most intelligent and aware person, but that person is much less likely to need a television show to inform them of the situation they’re in.

This is more of a meandering rant than I had intended, but good golly that episode irritated me. I couldn’t skip it because there were other plots I was wanting to follow. Thank you all for indulging me.

* – This isn’t entirely accurate. Television does show a lot of trailer trash wifebeaters. But when they show that it’s rarely the point of episode. It’s taken for granted that it’s wrong and the thrust of the show is planning the escape. It’s only when it’s the warm family-man type that gets so PSAish that you expect to see a hotline number appear at the end of the episode. Empirically it seems to me the opposite is more true. The poor woman is more likely to be stuck with the dude and the more well-off woman is more likely going to be the one planning the escape.

** – Most abusive types I am aware of have notable tempers. Even if they’re not exactly hitting things, they’re likely to yell at inanimate objects, be verbally abusive to people in the service industry, and express their temper in a number of ways. There is also a degree of insecurity and jealousy that makes itself pretty apparent pretty quickly. They’re also frequently embittered in general in reference to their economic, social, or domestic situation.

*** – “Witness to” is not entirely accurate but I don’t know another phrase. It’s a combination of past-tense stories I’ve been told and things I’ve been told by a third party about the relationship of someone I know. There have been a couple of occasions where I have known someone in an abusive relationship, though. Most notably, my mother was in an abusive marriage before she met my father. I was also platonically romantically (long story) involved with a married woman planning to leave her husband. She did leave him but went back to him after he sobered up (which is a separate point, in both that case and the case with my mother the abuse likely wouldn’t have happened were it not for alcoholism). Most hauntingly, I could have saved a young lady from an abusive relationship a decade or so ago, but failed to. I’m pretty sure they’re married now with a couple of kids.

There were a lot of things about my former roommate Hubert. There were times I was mad at him and times when it was very personal. But I don’t think I was ever so impersonally disgusted with him as when he bragged about making the girl who fielded his call to American Express cry. His anger and AmEx was justified, but nothing justifies making some poor girl getting paid $7 an hour cry for a mistake that wasn’t hers.

The discussion over lunch yesterday was getting back what you give. It started off with a discussion about how Internet conversation has made our society more less social rather than more. Before I could raise my objection, the conversation turned into the politeness of society-at-large, there we found agreement.

I’ve heard it said that women can partially judge the worthiness of a man by how well he treats people that he is not trying to impress. For instance, even if he treats her like a queen if he treats the waitstaff, his mother, and people on the street like crap that’s something of a warning sign. How well a man treats people above him has as much to do with cunning as genuine kindness, but how well he treats those beside or below him is a mark of his character. This applies to women as well as men, though to be blunt in my experience this is less a problem with women than with men.

There is very, very rarely any reason to become visibly and audibly angry at a food service worker, for instance. I cannot think of a single way that will help anything. If someone doesn’t care about their job they won’t care that you are mad at them. If they do care about their job but are ill-trained or incompetent but well-intentioned, do you think that getting angry will suddenly make them know and understand their job responsibilities better? No matter where they are coming from, it doesn’t help.

From your own point of view, as the customer, it is very rare that you’re going to get anything yelling that you can’t get with more adult behavior, except perhaps a spit sandwich. Sometimes you might get a freebie just to avoid a scene, but is that really worth making an ass out of yourself? Really? How cheap a bastard are you, exactly?

This goes quadruple for yelling at someone at the other end of a help service line. When I was fielding calls at CignalTV, we honestly treated angry customers as sport. You want to yell at me cause your service is out? Have a ball, but I’m not going to do any more to help you than I have to. In fact, I may even do less than I am supposed to. If the higher-ups hear about it, they’ll see the host of nasty comments left by previous call handlers about how irate you are and will assume that you’re a crank. I’ll even add a comment there myself, providing cover for the next guy that doesn’t want to help you with your problem. It wasn’t my job to be your verbal punching bag.

It’s a different thing to be upset or angry at the situation. The other day, for the third time straight, I was given the wrong breakfast sandwich at McD’s. Today on my way home from work I stopped by and told management that they needed to talk to their morning shift about getting the orders right and explained that it makes customers angry when they realize halfway down the freeway that they paid $2.25 for a $1 breakfast sandwich they didn’t want. Now who do you think he’s going to take more seriously, the guy that explains why he is upset or the guy yelling at the cashier that’s probably just looking for a freebie? Whenever someone called Cignal and was angry at the product (an outage or a billing error), I’d do whatever I could to help them. But it’s another matter entirely when you’re taking out your frustrations on the guy standing in front of you.

This really is one of those things that I feel very strongly about. While I disagree with my coworkers about the socially deleterious aspects of the Internet, I couldn’t agree more with them about increasingly uncommon courtesy.

Via Dustbury, the civil war in four and a half minutes:

Whether you are a fan of South Park or not, five of the funniest minutes I have ever seen on television are from an episode a few years back about smoking. South Park elementary invited in this group called Butt Out that put on a presentation so obscenely lame and yet so familiar that I turned red from rambunctious laughter, which doesn’t happen often with me.

Up until my senior year Mayne High School would invite some person to our school to warn us about the dangers of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and/or depression. One year it was this black guy that flung a basketball around a bit and sang some song about a girl named Emily who was addicted to drugs, alcohol, or tobacco or maybe committed suicide or maybe all of the above. The next year was the announcer for that Chicago-based clown… Bozo, I think. He was actually pretty good. A bit schmaltzy, but entertaining enough that we went back to see him that night. The next year was a stand-up comic that was absolutely hilarious.

The next year they had a power forward for the Colosse Spiders professional basketball team. He gave us his life story, which mostly seemed to consist of screwing up (or, as he put it, “making poor decisions”… he never went into detail). So it was something like: screwed up in high school, got into college anyway. Screwed up in college, got to stick around for four years anyway. Screwed up again, ended up in the NBA. The moral of the story was that having a great jump shot entitles you to all the poor decisions you care to make.

When I explained this whole thing to Dad, he laughed. The basketball player in question had been caught with pot in his car and had copped a “Community Service” plea. I guess we were the community service.

So many of the morality crusaders that came to our school were entertaining in their own way. We missed those guys that rip the phone book in half and attribute their success to Jesus Christ* moral living. I guess they figured that as a senior we wouldn’t be impressed or that they would be washing their hands of us sooner or later so no need to give us a lecture at that stage in the game.

The other day I was standing outside a pizza place and looked over and saw a DARE table manned by a black guy in a suit (in unbearable heat). My first thought was that maybe he had been caught with some pot in his car like the basketball player**, but he was way too enthusastic for it. He was walking up to all sorts of people. He was more like a LaRouche fanatic at the airport, a religious missionary, or a military recruiter*** than someone filling out a time card to avoid jail. You couldn’t pay me enough to spend time doing that sort of thing, but I guess it’s good that someone is enthusiastic about it.

* – More than one of these speakers danced the church/state line, particularly (interestingly enough) Bozo the Clown’s right hand man. The Emily guy did, too. Bozo’s Buddy managed to get by by touching on the subject very briefly and then saying that he would talk about it that night for anyone that wanted to stop by (as long as it is afterhours, I don’t think that there are any church/state issues). The Emily Dude got by because after a certain point none of us cared what he was saying. I’m told that the phonebook rippers never mentioned God or Jesus per se, but their speech was riddled with religious terminology (shepherds and immoral temptation and whatnot).

** – I’d like to think the fact that he was black did not enter into my thinking that he might be a criminal. I think not, though, because when I think “pot possession” I tend to think bored suburban white guy.

*** – Interestingly enough, the DARE table was set up caticorner to a military recruiting station. If you ever get a chance to stand outside a military recruiting station, I recommend it. Lots of father’s pulling their sons in by the collar threatening what’s going to happen if they don’t get into a good college.

This has come up in several discussions and I find it difficult to communicate what I mean without explaining the whole scale, so I’ve decided to put it in a separate posts.

I believe that discussions about relationships are incomplete with defined terms of “attractive” and “unattractive”. Most people talk in binary terms, some have scales from 1-10 and some have three labels (top, middle, bottom). After much contemplation of the issue, I have determined that there are four worthy castes.

The way that people end up in one category or the other depends not so much on how attractive they are to me (if they are female) or would be to me (if I were female and they are male) but rather on how many options they have romantically. For instance, a guy that’s really smart may be extraordinarily attractive to a small quadrant of women, but they still won’t have as many options as the guy that is as physically attractive as they are smart (even if the options they have may be better). This was initially a way of discerning someone’s looks, but as I’ve gotten older it’s taken on more in the way of non-physical properties such as income, intelligence, charm, and so on.

The things that matter are too many to mention and some, such as ethnicity and religion, are deeply unfair. But what matters to large numbers of people matters according to the system. The good news is that even if you are in the lower categories there is no reason you can’t find happiness. It only takes one, after all. It does make it harder to secure a long-lasting relationship with someone in the upper categories, however, because they have more options and are more likely to chose someone of similar social standing.

So my system is divided into four categories. I’d call them quartiles, but they’re unevenly distributed. So here we go:

Station One: These are the creme of the crop, so to speak. Some would call the male variation alpha, but very, very few young women hold out for this group. They know better. These are the people that would stand out as attractive in almost any social setting. They’re physically attractive to make it in Hollywood (albeit not usually on their looks alone), have good jobs, are smart and accomplished. They most likely do not adamantly hold any unpopular political beliefs and are not devout towards a non-Christian religion. They comprise of about 5-10% of the population.

Station Two: Rather than being defined as what they are, they are defined as what they are not. They have nothing physically wrong with them (they may have extra weight, but it’s not poorly distributed), they’re not unintelligent, they are not unemployed or in dead-end jobs, they’re not uncomfortable in social situations, and not socially ungraceful. If they fall short in any one of these categories, they make up for it in two of the others (or in categories I haven’t mentioned). They typically excel in one of the catagories above, however. They may hold unpopular beliefs, be a disfavored minority and attractive and yet be hollywood handsome or particularly successful (or maybe both). They comprise of about 25-30% of the population.

Station Three: These are your average joes and joans. They are a mixture of positive and negative and how attractive they are will vary greatly from individual to individual depending on what they are looking for. They may be overweight, but not significantly so. Few would look at these people and say either “wow” or “ewww” (though some probably will). They’re socially awkward but accomplished or unemployed but charming or some combination of traits good and bad. These are the types of people that Hollywood uses Station Ones and Twos to try to portray. As this is the biggest group there is the largest disparity from one end to the other (I sometimes refer to there being “High Threes” and “Low Threes”), but couplings within this group rarely lead to head-scratching among one partner’s social coterie and celebration by the others, as is the case between Twos and Threes, Ones and Twos, and Threes and Fours. They’re about 40-50% of the population.

Station Four: These are people that have overwhelming physical problems or their lives are a reck to the point that they are drug addicts or homeless. At best they live with their parents, have no prospects, and are middling in terms of appearance. Fours are often contemptuous of other Fours even if they don’t hold delusions about their position. The most common characteristic is that they are not just overweight or fat, they are morbidly obese. Often they are not physically ugly but have some piece of their personality that is entirely unconducive to starting and maintaining a relationship. They are about 10-20% of the population.

One of the truisms of office life is that after a while, someone dealing with a catalog or office supply chain will go to that one chain for all their needs. For some things where the market is competitive, this makes sense. On the other hand, it behooves a marketer to pad their bottom line by offering more and more things, many of which are in the catalog priced at levels nowhere near where common sense would dictate.

Example:
Single torchiere lamp, with 55-watt 2000-lumen bulb. Expected life of bulb: 6-9 months. Cost of bulb: $50. Cost of lamp: $125. Supplier: Shoshona Office Supply Office Supply.

Two torchiere lamps, each with a single 20-watt, 1300-lumen bulb. Expected life of bulbs: 4+ years. Cost of bulbs: $5 each (total $10). Cost of lamps: $30 each ($60 total). Supplier: Nördske Furniture.

What’s the difference? Shoshona Office Supply doesn’t expect to sell this stuff. Indeed, I’d be surprised if they ship it that often. Nördske, on the other hand, sells and ships this stuff on a daily basis and competes with other stores in the area that do the same.

There is one other difference. I’ve had Nördske deliver furniture to me, as well as shipping it from their stores. They pack everything heavily, and I’ve only had one thing I ever had to return. Meanwhile, the first thing I ever ordered from Shoshona Office Supply – 5-shelf heavy duty unit – came packed with nothing to protect it but the cardboard in the box itself, 3 of the 5 shelves busted in transit.

[Addendum]: The “replacement” from Shoshona arrived today. It’s missing two of the endpieces, so only three of the 5 shelves can actually be set up.

In 2001, a 12 year old girl in Michigan named Tempest Smith committed suicide to evade her Christian roommates taunting her Wiccan beliefs.

A very sad story, to be sure. Some of you may recall a negative attitude on my part towards Wiccans and Pagans, not so much because of what they believe but because most of the ones I meet are annoying as hell. Judging by her first name, I suspect that Tempest was either born into the religion or born into a screwed up family that turning to the Wiccan faith is a more-or-less logical course of action. What ever the case, I had a lot of goofy ideas when I was twelve and mistreatment on the basis of either thinking differently or just being different strikes a chord with me. The girl was named Tempest*, for crying out loud, she had enough problems without her classmates piling it on.

A guy by the moniker of Electric Angst** wrote an article on the subject in 2001 that I stumbled across. He points to the (erroneous) account of Cassie Bernall at Columbine being killed for professing her faith in Jesus Christ and wonders why the Smith case hasn’t gotten the same amount of attention.

I will argue, though, that the death of Tempest Smith by her own grief-stricken hands has not received as much attention because of a desire to filter intolerance out of view in our society. Rather than remind America that someone can still be treated as less than human for holding a different faith, a different lifestyle, or otherwise divergent from the norm, it is much more comforting to simply ignore the issue.

To acknowledge that Tempest Smith’s classmates were exerting cruel psychological torture on the young woman with the hymns their church had taught them would be to indict not only the school children, but the hymns as well. To make this tragic event public knowledge would be to put a mirror to the face of the majority, forcing them to see the intolerance in their own eyes, crumbling their arguments that it no longer exists.

I just don’t think that this is accurate. Matthew Shephard, for instance, got a lot of attention (much more than Miss Bernall) as the kid killed in Wyoming for being gay. James Byrd and (erroneous) reports of a surge in the burning of black churches for their share of attention. I didn’t even remember Bernall’s name, but I surely remember the names of Byrd and Shephard.

Why knows why press covers some stories and not others. One big difference between Smith and the others is that Gay and African-American advocacy groups and Christian conservatives have substantial press machines that Wiccans lack. Another issue is that Byrd and Bernall were murdered. Smith, on the other hand, was taunted with Christian hymns. As one that was taunted in junior high (and married to someone that was taunted far, far worse) I don’t wish to minimize the psychological impact, but it’s not exactly the same.

I don’t believe at all that we, as a society, sweep egregious cases of discrimination and harassment under the rug. I actually think it’s the smaller cases that we often overlook. It’s not black men being dragged behind a pick-up truck, but the nickel and dime discrimination of a job opportunity lost, a DWB, or a promotion denied. One of the reason that we are often quick to minimize the impact of these things are because they’re so hard to nail down. It’s often unconscious and there are often rational reasons that the discriminator can give.

The good news is that this represents progress. The downside is that the it’s the last ten or twenty yards that are always the toughest.

* – As luck would have it, Tempest is the online name of one of the main characters of my last November Novel, the revision of which keeps getting interrupted. But what makes a cool online handle is not a cool thing to name your daughter.

** – Electric Angst is cool neither as an online handle or, gawd forbid, a birthname.

In a conversation at Bobvis, I referred to something called “dog-bone” behavior as something that some young ladies engage in:

The male-related self-esteem deprived female equivalent will engage in dog-bone behavior. She will cultivate the devotion of a guy (or guys plural, if she can manage it) that she isn’t really interested in (while making sure that she doesn’t give any more than she has to in return)

I forgot to explain what exactly I meant by dog-bone behavior.

The metaphor was explained to me by a formerly motherly figure (long story), Sherri. Sherri was warning me about Tracey, the girl I was interested in. She was saying that Tracey was acting like a dog with a bone with a lot of guys. A dog will sometimes manage to procure possession of more than one bone that the dog doesn’t want to play with (often because they have or have their eye on a bigger and better bone). Even though they’re not using it, they will be fiercely protective of the bone should any other dog or human want to redeploy the bone to better use elsewhere. The dog does not place any value on the bone except to the extent that the dog might lose it.

I’ve spoke of dog-bone behavior in the past. A few people automatically assumed I meant a different metaphor. Basically that owners make dogs do stupid tricks by enticing them with a bone. What’s interesting, though, is that while the metaphor is different, it also applies to most of the above situation. Women engaging in dog-bone behavior will wave the carrot of a relationship as a means of keeping the bone within its stable. Any time the guy talks about moving on or has moved on and she decides that she doesn’t like it, she waves the carrot/bone to get him back.

Even more interesting is another misinterpretation of what I meant by “dog-bone” behavior by Larry. He thought I was referring to this:

I was thinking of it in the context of the morality play where the dog has a bone in his mouth, sees its reflection in the water, and drops the bone he has to get “the other one”

And here is another dog-bone metaphor that also often dovetails with the original, or at least its more benign variations in my experience. The dog risks the bone he’s got for a better looking (or simply another) one in the water. A variation of the “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” theme. For years Tracey would tell me that taking me for granted and letting me go while in pursuit of bigger and better things was the biggest mistake of her life*. Though none were quite as adamant on that score as she was, she’s not the only one that has expressed that sentiment to me. And more generally it shares the connection of hoarding romantic interests that is exactly what Sherri accused Tracey of doing. The main difference between this one and the other two is that this one is a warning to the hoarder while the other two are warnings to the would-be bones in the hoarder’s pile.

* – She stopped saying that about a year or two before Clancy came along. I hope it’s because she moved on and got over it rather than that (a) she’s since made much bigger mistakes or (b) she’s realized what a prick I am and that she did the right thing. All three are possible.