According Amanda Hess, it seems as though the pot legalization movement is somewhat less than respectful of women.

I think that this is part and parcel of what I might call The Barry Cooper Problem. On the subject of Age of Consent Laws, it might be called The Gannon Problem. That is to say that the people that are often most enthusiastic about pushing back the government to grant us more freedom want it not out of some ideological conviction but rather because the government is just standing between them and what they want. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this except that people that actually want to smoke copious amounts of pot or sleep with young women are not the most appealing advocates for their cause. Or rather, people that want to do these sorts of things and feel the need to make it a part of their public identity are often people that are disrespectful of a wider array of cultural and social expectations. In other words, they can be as annoying as hell and they can make people want to take the opposite position just to spite them.

As Udolpho put it:

I used to be in favor of legalizing marijuana, but the persistent stupidity of marijuana zealots has beaten that position out of me, and now I am against legalization just to spite them. Experience shows that even occasional marijuana smokers are not terribly bright, and it is my belief that stupid people need to suffer. Taking away their pharmaceutical pacifiers is a good start.

On my Barry Cooper post, Last Home Barry commented that a lot of the legalizers are mostly just anti-authority and pot is an expression of that. Take it a step further, and a whole lot of it comes down to a deal of resentment of being told what to do and frustration that society sometimes requests that they check their id at the door. Smoking pot and objectifying women are both expressions of society telling people to behave. Those that object most loudly to corrupt authority, unjust laws, and regressive customs also tend to object to earnest authority, just laws, and reasonable customs when it suits them.

I’ve learned the geography of the local grocery stores reasonably well, which I consider impressive because (a) I am directionally-impaired, (b) I regularly go to three different places with three different layouts, and (c) I am not a veteran shopper when it comes to anything outside the canned food section. However, some of the things that Clancy wants me to get while I’m out are a bit tougher to nail down. I don’t even know what category they fall into some of the time. Does evaporated milk, which Clancy puts in her coffee, go under coffee accessories? With spices? With sweeteners? With regular milk? That sort of thing.

This is made more difficult when I can’t see very well. Last night when I went shopping, I was wearing my contacts. My contacts are hit-and-miss, but have been missing a lot more recently than they’ve been hitting. For some reason, my right eye in particular stays blurry. Not prescription-out-of-date blurry, but a whole new level. If I put my left-eye contact in my right eye, I can see better than I can with my actual right-eye contact. I think it has to do with the fact that they are torics and they’re not adjusting appropriately. When they adjust is when they hit and when they don’t adjust they miss.

Anyway, being able to only see out of one eye when exploring the hinterlands of the market is quite challenging. I have to look twice as close at everything just to be able to read it. Text doesn’t jump out at you when you have to squint to read it. I am thinking that next time I go shopping, I will just wear my glasses.

One thing that is always helpful when cruising the supermarket is to have a really good confused expression. I’ve got this down pat. I never know when to give up and bother an aisleperson to ask to locate something. I don’t know how busy they are. But if you walk around with a good confused expression for a little while, they’ll find you! Incidentally, eyes made uncomfortable with contacts and the squinting that bad contacts require really helps you out in this regard. You can have the confused expression even when it’s not your intent.

I got help with the evaporated milk, which was next to the flour (who doesn’t like a nice helping of flour in their coffee?). The final thing was whole strawberries. I searched high and low for any sign bearing the words fruit, berries, strawberries, or even other frozen goods and found nothing. Where do strawberries go? Or, for that matter, where does fruit go? I first looked in the vegetable section and had no luck. Then I looked in the frozen meals section and found only frozen meals. The strawberries were, oddly enough, with the potatoes. No idea why. Why not with the vegetables? Yeah, yeah, I know that strawberries are not vegetables. But you know what else they aren’t? Potatoes.

One of the shows I watched (or listened to) periodically was Da Vinci’s Inquest, a Canadian cop show about the city’s coroner, which apparently has a mildly different function in Canada than in the US. It’s a pretty good show when it doesn’t get too preachy (interestingly, while US TV gushes over the Canadian health care system, Canadian TV takes a more jaundiced view).

There’s one really odd thing about it, though. Sometimes it feels like the episodes stop before the end of the show. Now, having ambiguous endings is not a bad thing. Sometimes, after all, you don’t get the killer. But they will end it in the oddest places. Like they’ll spend the whole episode trying to prove that so-and-so did it only to find out that he didn’t and then have a lead on who did do it. Before they even interview the guy and before we know how the investigation went, though, the credits start rolling.

I’m not sure if this is just some weird sort of artistry. A way of saying “It’s more about the characters than the investigation” or something like that. I checked like three or four times and I wasn’t missing any episodes. The other possibility is wondering it maybe they just had too many minutes and had to cut something. You see this in syndication sometimes, because syndication reruns typically have more ads than prime-time viewing. On the Niles-Daphne episode of Frasier, for instance, a very important speech by Martin was cut short.

Of course, if that’s the case, then they’re cutting off the ending of the shows. Typically, that’s not the part you want to cut.

It’s sort of like one of my editors when I was a columnist at the Daily Packer, Southern Tech University’s student paper. When my columns ran too long, he would just cut off the end. Sometimes the last paragraph is the most important part that brings the whole column together. Or in other times I may spend an entire column setting up a premise only to devastatingly knock it down in the final paragraph, only to have the last part left off and making the ridiculous point I was mocking. Then I would get all sorts of email in support of the position that I was trying to dismantle.