Clancy had some paperwork to catch up on, so I watched the Superbowl at a local bar, The Calfway House. I figured, if nothing else, it would help me meet and get to know some of the locals. If we’re going to stay in Callie, one of the things I am going to need to do is get to know people. A bar is probably not the best place to meet likeminded people, but it’s a place, which is better than watching the game at home on my TV.

One of the first people I met was a woman who seemed to be about my age. It turned out that she, like myself, had once lived in Fort Beck, Deseret. I discovered this when someone at the bar was badmouthing the state. It turned out that she was not really “about my age” at all. In fact, the more she and I talked, the older it became apparent she was. At one point, I wanted to ask “Just how old are you, lady?” Her children were out of the house (and I got the impression that they had been for some time) with one of them giving her two grandchildren. I had been under the impression that she had lived in Fort Beck during her college days, but she later said that she lived there from 1968-71, meaning that either she’s nearing sixty or I misunderstood.

I also met a patient of Clancy’s. I found this out the typical way. Basically, he found out that I moved her recently. There was all manner of good food at the Calfway and I asked him if I needed to leave money in a jar for what I ate. Apparently, feeding people (with, did I mention, good food?) is something of a Calfway tradition, and so he knew that I either didn’t live here or that I had moved here recently. So he asked what brought me to Callie, I told him my wife’s work, he asked what she did, I told him that she was a doctor at Dent Hospital, he asked her name, and lo and behold he is a patient. This has happened three or four times since I have arrived. Every conversation unfolding nearly the same way.

I also got to know another guy somewhat, who was about my age and seemed like an interesting guy. The sort of guy I was hoping to meet; the sort of guy I will be able to converse with easily in the future. As often seems to happen, I never did get the guy’s name. Neither of the other two, either (which drove Clancy crazy when she tried to remember the patient). That’ll have to be the next step. Learning their names.

Married GOP Congressman Sent Sexy Pictures to Craigslist Babe

Republican congressman serving the 26th District of New York. But when he trolls Craigslist’s “Women Seeking Men” forum, he’s Christopher Lee, “divorced” “lobbyist” and “fit fun classy guy.” One object of his flirtation told us her story. {…}

He used a Gmail account that Rep. Christopher Lee has since confirmed to be his own. (It’s the same Gmail account that was associated with Lee’s personal Facebook account, which the Congressman deleted when we started asking questions.)

By email, Lee identified himself as a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist and sent a PG picture to the woman from the ad. (In fact, Lee is married and has one son with his wife. He’s also 46.)

Per Alex Knapp (I’m too lazy to look it up myself), Lee’s website doesn’t focus on social issues. So he’s (apparently) a creep, (definitely) a liar, and (primarily) an idiot, but not a hypocrite. For some reason, that inordinately matters to some people.

The Catholic Church has approved an iPhone app that helps guide worshippers through confession:

The Confession program has gone on sale through iTunes for £1.19 ($1.99).

Described as “the perfect aid for every penitent”, it offers users tips and guidelines to help them with the sacrament.

Now senior church officials in both the UK and US have given it their seal of approval, in what is thought to be a first.

The app takes users through the sacrament – in which Catholics admit their wrongdoings – and allows them to keep track of their sins.

It also allows them to examine their conscience based on personalised factors such as age, sex and marital status – but it is not intended to replace traditional confession entirely.

Instead, it encourages users to understand their actions and then visit their priest for absolution.

This is treated as a “news of the weird” sort of thing, but it sounds like a neat app. What kind of surprises me is that they’re charging for it. They being the developers, not the church. This strikes me as one of those things that you do for God or the Church or something.

Thursday will (probably) be my first half-day as a substitute teacher. Friday will be my first full day. I would be a little less terrified if there’d been some sort of training program. Or a real orientation. The only orientation I got was a little get together at one of the elementary schools going over basic expectations. Which is certainly better than nothing. Oh, I also got a video about bloodborn diseases. Beyond that, the entire application and hiring process has been paperwork. Sent in your college transcripts. Submit to a fingerprinting and background check. Tuberculosis test. No interview. Congratulations, you’re hired! Call this 1-800 number and leave your name. I don’t even know how much I am going to get paid.

I’m going to spare you the details, but I will be substituting in Redstone (the “big city”, by Arapaho standards). If it goes well, I may try in small-town Callie. Apparently, Redstone has a real need as I have gotten some sort of offer for every day that I have been on their rolls. Due to the commute, however, I haven’t taken them up on it. The first official call came at 5am on Monday morning. I was having terrible sleep and wasn’t in my right frame of mind. It was for kindergarteners and the thought of my first day being with kindergarteners filled me with dread. So I tapped 2 on the robodial to say that I had a conflict. When a human called at 7:30, I told them I had car trouble. More on this in a second. In any event, the unofficial inquiry I had gotten Friday was for first graders. When I later woke up and thought about it, it became apparent that I might have to start small. That afternoon, I got the call for Thursday and Friday – first grade, again.

I got another call at 7:15 this morning, which I didn’t pick up. Remember that car trouble I lied to them about before? Well, it wasn’t a lie. It was prescient. Even overlooking the fact that they called too late for me to get there at the start of the school day, I didn’t have a working car. But I couldn’t tell them that because, in the course of another conversation I had with the call-out lady prior to the car trouble actually emerging, I told them that the car trouble had been fixed. A tangled web. So I didn’t answer. Car troubles fixed (the real troubles, really fixed this time), I will be ready if they call tomorrow morning and so Thursday may become my second day.

Part of me is wondering if I might get called on a daily basis. It’s sure starting to seem that way. This was intended to be a part-time job and as much an effort to get me out of the house as anything. What I suspect they pay me, minus gas and considering that everything I make is going to have nearly 40% taken out in taxes because it’s in our highest tax bracket, money isn’t the big issue here. And doing this day in and day out is simply not what I had in mind. On the other hand, it’s unlikely I will match for any job they call at 7am or later for because I wouldn’t be able to get there on time (would that I had remembered this when I came up with the car story). So we’ll see how that shakes out. At the very least I am hoping not to get a call for tomorrow so that I can start with a half-day to get settled in on a day where I am mentally ready rather than from a 5am call that has me waking up, looking up the school, rushing my arse down there, and a zombie in front of a bunch of hyperactive kids (if, like all the others, it’s a grade school job).

Or maybe I want to put it off because I am terrified. It’s been forever since I have been in first grade. All I remember about it is that the teacher was awesome, I met my future best friend Clint, and… that’s it. I can only partially mentally imagine what a first grader looks like. And of course all of the uncertainties have come back to me. Crap, what if my small bladder needs too much attention? What do first graders do, exactly? The good news is that the teacher knows that she is going to be out. Presumably she doesn’t want a sub taking care of anything important, so hopefully she has filled it with activities from the more frivolous side of the first grade.

Incidentally, one of the things that has me more worried about the Redstone school system is that there are two high schools in Redstone. The public one and a rather prominent Catholic one, St. Matthews. Given that Redstone is a seriously Catholic town, and a pretty poor one, I am hoping that the public high school isn’t filled with the dregs. On the other hand, it’s not like Redstone is full of scary people. Crime rates are very low. The children of a town down on its luck are less daunting a prospect than than the children of actual poverty.

eHarmony has a list, The NYT Well has the rundown:

When eHarmony members begin to communicate with a prospective date, both sides are required to exchange a list of “must haves” and “can’t stands.” These are the positive and negative qualities that are nonnegotiable and help the couple decide if they want to pursue a dating relationship.

Now eHarmony has analyzed the “must have” and “can’t stand” responses of nearly 720,000 members, identifying the top 10 relationship deal breakers for men and women.

Men and women agree on many of the “must haves.” They want a sense of humor, someone who is affectionate and kind, chemistry, good communication and loyalty. Not surprisingly, both sexes want someone who is emotionally healthy, and who is honest and has strong character.

Yeah. Shocker.

Since this prospective list goes out to people they are interested in dating, its utility is somewhat limited. In a sense, you’re saying what you want someone that you might be interested to hear. If it turns out that the other person is a whale or something, you can figure that out in due course. But if you put down that being overweight is a big factor, you might chase off someone that looks fine to you but is concerned about her weight or just thinks that you are superficial. So you stick to the unobjectionable stuff.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that “can’t stand a conservative” were pulled off the list by equal numbers saying “can’t stand a liberal.” whereas “can’t stand infidelity” is pretty universal. It really is interesting that, out of 50 traits, men and women agreed on 8 or 9 in each category. It makes me wonder what the other 38 and 39 in each category were. I am less surprised that more guys than girls put weight concerns on the list, both because it is likely true but also because it’s culturally easier for guys to admit it. The fact that guys put “patience” on the list (women did not) doesn’t surprise me much at all. Maybe it’s just me, but I read that as “does not expect me to be a mindreader” which is a common complaint among guys. The description for “Emotionally healthy” and “Family Life” make me wonder if the genders were looking at the same thing just a little differently. I’m a little more surprised that guys put “hygiene” as a bigger deal than the ladies. Not because I think we care less, but because I generally consider it one of those things that we don’t think about caring about all that much. I would have expected “lazy” to be higher up there.

Because it’s important that Ben Roethlisberger become a good person again:

Okay, not really. Ordinarily, I do root for the Packers above most teams. I think as a kid I was attracted to the colors of the team. Plus, they’re the only non-profit and community-owned team in major league sports. Given stadium subsidization and the like, I think that ought to be the norm. However…

Back when I was working for Mindstorm, I became friends with a guy from Pittsburgh. He was a huge Steelers fan. And as he explained it, Pittsburghers have a whole lot vested in the Steelers because it’s a town that doesn’t have much else. I’ve historically wished Detroit teams well on this basis, so I find myself incredibly sympathetic to the Steelers for this game. But if the Packers win, I can’t say that I will be to bothered.

The important thing is that the New England Patriots aren’t playing.

Google claims Bing copies its search results

The story began with Google’s team for correcting typographical errors in search terms, which monitors its own and rivals’ performance closely. Typos that Google could correct would lead to search results based on the correction, but the team noticed Bing would also lead to those search results without saying it had corrected the typo.

Next came the sting, setting up a “honeypot” to catch the operation in action. Google created “one-time code that would allow it to manually rank a page for a certain term,” then wired those results for particular, highly obscure search terms such as “hiybbprqag” and “ndoswiftjobinproduction,” Sullivan said. With the hand coding, typing those search terms would produce recognizable Web pages in Google results that wouldn’t show in search results otherwise.

Next, Google had employees type in those search terms from home using Internet Explorer with both Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar enabled, clicking the top results as they went. Before the experiment, neither Bing or Google returned the hand-coded results, but two weeks later, Bing showed the Google results that had been hand-coded.

Does anyone remember (or still use) Metacrawler? Before Google, that was my search engine of choice. It used to swipe from Yahoo, Webcrawler, AltaVista and others. Back then, the problem was as frequently “no results returned” and so it was really helpful to be able to search all in one. These days, though, the issue is relevance. Google, Yahoo, and all of the others return more links than you can possible peruse for all but the most unusual names. I started using Google when it demonstrated the ability to put the most relevant stuff on top.

Some time before I started using Google, Metacrawler became useless. I think that the other search engines were putting something in their code that made Metacrawler stop working for them. Or maybe they threatened to sue. I’m not sure what the IP-repercussions are for something like that, or this Bing-Google thing. But since Metacrawler is back and explicitly advertises that it’s using Yahoo/Google/etc, I would guess either it’s perfectly legal or they’ve come to an agreement.

I was going to write a post to ask if anyone knew of any great resources on the history of and constitutional restrictions on multi-member legislative districts in the United States. Before I could, however, I ran across this, which appears to be a rundown of everything I wanted to know. So if it’s a subject that interests you, have at it.

Britain is looking at eradicating labeling from cigarettes:

“The government accepts that packaging and tobacco displays influence young people, so there is no time to waste. It may take years to pass a new law on plain packs but the law on tobacco displays is already on the statute books and comes into force next year.”

Dr Alan Maryon-Davis, professor of public health at Kings College London, said: “It’s a very welcome statement from the health secretary and a good example of how the government can help people choose a healthier way of life by ‘nudging’ rather than nagging.”

But Simon Clark, director of Forest, a lobbying group that opposes smoking bans, described the move as a “cheap publicity stunt”.

He said: “There is no evidence that plain packaging will have any influence whatsoever on smoking rates. Also, the policy is designed to discriminate against smoking and stigmatise the consumer, which is totally wrong.”

Good.is does a mock-up. Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind that one bit. In fact, I consider it far preferable to the Australian method of putting graphic imagery on packs. I’ve thought to myself if the government ever does the latter, I will probably throw out the box upon purchase and put the cigarettes in something else. That probably means that it’s effective on some level. The Good.is mockups, though, wouldn’t phase me a bit.

More effective than that (though less effective than gangrene) would be to make them less rather than more plain. I don’t want to carry around a box that’s hot orange. Of course, part of the idea is for young people and they might be more likely to respond favorably to wild coloring. Of course, the boys will probably respond positively to gangrene as well. I was vociferously anti-smoking when I was 12, but I might have fished empty boxes out of the trashcan to see how many of the disease-boxes I could collect. Boys are like that.

Does packaging lure smokers? Well, there’s two questions. The first question is whether it entices people to smoke. That I’m not sure about, though it probably does have an effect on the margins. I’m not sure it has enough of an effect to justify the time it takes to enact this law, but maybe so. The second question is whether it entices people to choose a particular brand. It does. There are a lot of brands out there and two of the main brands I smoke, Maverick and USA Gold, got my attention with their box. Mavericks had, at the time, a really sleek black and gold box that was hard to miss. USA Gold had an interesting logo. However, while the packaging got me in the door, it was the taste that kept me there. With other off-brands, I never made it through the pack.

I am sure that the tobacco companies have some research on this. I wonder what it says. Given how opposed they are to the idea, maybe I am deeply underestimating the effects of packaging to youngsters. You might think that they’d be looking at this as a way out of paying marketers money without losing marketshare to the ones paying the marketers. But they don’t, either because it is effective or because they think their marketers are better than the other guys’.

The world’s oldest woman died:

According to that same AFP article, “She has credited her longevity to minding her own business and not eating junk food.” Amen to minding one’s own business as a contributing factor to a long life.

The world changed a great deal during Sanborn’s lifetime, and there’s your understatement of the day. Through it all, though, she gave credit for her good health and longevity to her belief in Jesus and her salvation, and amen to that, too.

I don’t know why, but it seemed odd to me that the oldest woman would be in the United States. Seems like they’re always from Asia somewhere. But her predecessor was from France and the new oldest woman is also from the US. The west, it would seem, is on a roll.