Due to the factors mentioned here, I considered the notion that girls have a confidence deficit when it comes to math to be something of a myth. I am less sure that’s the case. The more I work with boys and math and girls and math, there really does seem to be an issue of, if not confidence, something related to it. A lot of teachers, feeling generous to substitutes, will simply give their students review material for that day’s lesson. Or a short lesson. So I tend to spend as much time helping the kids as I do in front of class teaching them. The difference between boys and girls is notable. The girls really do seem to be running a deficit of confidence. Or otherwise, they are otherwise more willing to express their lack of confidence.

I probably spend about 2/3 of my “helping” time with female students. They ask for help more frequently and they request your help for longer. But what jumped out at me was that, in contrast to the boys asking for help, the girls know the material. I keep wanting to tell them you know this! Because they do. Once we get off cluster math and onto the algorithm, they need minimal help. But despite having done it using the same method on the preceding two problems, they demand help on the third. I refuse to lay it out for them, pointing instead to the steps of the previous problems, and step by step they get it. Then they get to the next one and “I don’t know what to do!”

With the boy students, it’s more cut-and-dried. They get it or they don’t. And as soon as they get it, they want you out of their face as quickly as possible. They’re more likely to assume they understand it when they don’t. So while I am having to avoid yelling at the girls “YES YOU DO KNOW WHAT TO DO BECAUSE YOU’VE DONE IT SIX TIMES ALREADY!” with the boys I have the unpleasant task of saying “Well no, that’s not how you/we did it up there.”

I don’t know what the origin of this is. It could be a lingering skepticism towards girls and math that they have absorbed. A part of me wonders if they simply enjoy doing it “together” than boys do. One sixth-grader, I swear, kept alternating between “I don’t know what I’m doing” to “I bet I can do this better than you!” It’s also possible that rather than it being a case of society being indifferent to girls and math, we are concerned about it to the extent that they know they can rely on the help more than boys. So they don’t gain the self-confidence of being able to do what they can clearly do.

I don’t know, but if I have a daughter, this is going to be something that I am going to keep an eye on.

And, of course, it all makes me feel all the more worse about accusing the second grader of faking it.

A while back I read a story about the enormous amount of empty real estate in China. It was an interesting read, but nothing compared to actually seeing it. It’s downright creepy. Like something from a movie.

Adam Meyer of NewGeography, though, thinks it’s overblown:

Quite simply, the demand is there. The booming housing market is a revolution of sorts. This is really the reflection of the emergence of a true Chinese middle-class. The U.S. media, on the other hand, tends to remain focused on a massive China real estate bubble, perhaps as a projection of America’s own recent experience of real estate exuberance.

Yet there are some major differences. For example, few Chinese purchase homes with little or no money down. Banks are not lending ‘creative mortgages’ such as ARMs to homebuyers. Government measures seek to discourage speculation.

For instance, Chinese home buyers are limited to purchasing 2 homes and must put at least 30% down for the first home and 60% down for the second home. Investment by foreigners into the real estate market is strictly regulated in order to reduce the amount of ‘hot money’ coming into the country. Non-Chinese citizens are limited to purchase one home only and must hold onto it for 5 years before being allowed to resell it.

Due to the massive size of China’s population, the majority of homes being purchased are flats in newly-built residential high-rise compounds. The size of these units might be a little too cozy for Americans or even Europeans, but to young Chinese homebuyers (of which most are first-time buyers), it represents an aspiration unimaginable only a few years ago.

If the video is to be believed, though, it’s not a simple matter of more housing than people. Or, for that matter, simply waiting for the Chinese commoner to become a little more wealthy to be able to move in. They’re building real estate that would be expensive in parts of America. They’re not just counting on the creation of a working-to-middle class population. They’re counting on a new professional class. Millions and millions of them. In order for people to be able to move into these houses, wages must go up considerably. If wages go up considerably, they lose one of their main competitive advantages.

None of this is particularly aided by the stringent demands of home-ownership over there. Yes, our bubble occurred at the consumer level more than anywhere else, but it can just as easily occur at the producer level. It’s just a matter of who is left holding the hot potato and not a question of how hot the potato actually is. These things are being built with the anticipation of future sales. Those sales, due in part to the restrictions put on the consumer, have to come. There’s no shortage of people in China and no shortage of people on the countryside that would be more economically situated in urban areas. Building a bunch of housing on spec to accommodate those people might make sense. Or building progressively roomier housing for those working their way up the latter and vacating their housing for people moving in from the countryside. But instead, they’re building for an upper class that is a long way off.

Oddly enough, I am reminded a bit of Deseret. Not the property bubble thing, exactly, but China’s attitude towards their poor and non-urban. The LDS church is notably generous to its struggling members, of course, but there was always an odd (and unexpected) vibe that urbanism/suburbanism is better and that they would rather their country brethren just move to the city, get white collar jobs, and be done with it. A sort of desire to will it into being, but without a clear roadmap of how they plan to get there.

I will confess to having slipped up between Obama and Osama from time to time. Someone I know pronounced Obama as o-BAM-a. I’d be less likely to pronounce it this way of Obama had simply done us the courtesy of using an Irish-inflected version of his name.

A girl poses in a bikini in front of a car that was a school project and the team is barred from competition. The ostensible reason is “misuse of facilities”, but it does seem kind of suspect.

While the results might be interesting, I think this project was out of bounds. You don’t toy with people’s emotions that way. It reminds me a little bit of what I find so offputting about Borat. He went around from place to place, taking advantage of the natural inclination to be non-confrontation. If you lie to people and mislead them, they will alter their behavior according to what they believe to be the case.

The happiest states also tend to have the most suicides. I want to write a post on this, but don’t know if I can without the conversation making a wrong turn.

As if the Washington DC school system wasn’t proof enough, the correlation between increased spending on schools and performance is murky. That being said, one thing I have discovered recently is just how much of that funding is tied down towards specific projects that benefit few – many of whom are exempt from standardized tests. It would be helpful if we compared the amount being spent in discretionary funds from one school to another. If a school is spending money on certain projects or students because of strings attached, it’s not exactly the case that they are not spending their money wisely.

How to fix any computer.

Why are people so efficient when working in noisy, public areas? I wrote my fourth novel at a Seattle’s Best Coffee house. If I ever get around to going back and editing these to completion, I may have to go to one of the local coffee shops around here.

Why China is unlikely to overtake the US.

Americans make the best tourists. Historically speaking, I have loved hating on France. Who doesn’t? It’s sort of a conditioned response. But if you put the superficial tribalism aside for just a moment, you realize that it’s more a sibling relationship than anything else. On the other hand, Albanians profess a love America and Americans (and no doubt the feeling would be mutual if we were really aware of their existence beyond that whole war we had near there a decade or so back). But if we were actually forced to live with them (and vice-versa) the way it is with France on the International stage, we’d probably rather be in Paris. Beyond “Old Europe,” I’d be interested to know what Asians thought of American tourists.

Pterodactyl wrote a post I commented on a little while back. She clarified her meaning in the comments:

The post also considers the parallel case of hypergamy on the part of men, both in culture and history. The observation is that while male hypergamy has the element of the aspirational (seeking to date/marry up), it also has a strong element of the aspersional (casting aspersions and worse, e.g. ill-treatment, on lower-economic-status females).

For men and women both, the nature of what we are attracted to can be mysterious. I’ve often stated that the degree to which looks matter is understated in women and overstated in men. I was going to elaborate on that, but apparently I already have. And I can definitely buy that economic status is something that is understated in male preference. I do have a couple of caveats on that, though. First, while it’s understated for men I don’t think – for reasons that could be purely social conditioning – it is as big an issue for men as it is for women. I know, I know, I’m a guy married to a doctor. And I’m a guy that broke the heart of a girl who spent her first fourteen years in a trailer park. But I’m not a typical guy. And, if we’re willing to use education as a proxy for status, there is some backing on this*:

Our results show that educational homophily is the dominant mechanism in online mate choice. Similarity in education significantly increases the rate of both sending and replying to initial contacts. After controlling for the opportunity structure on the platform, the preference for similar educated others is the most important factor, particularly among women. Our results also support the exchange theoretical idea that homophily increases with educational level. If dissimilarity contacting patterns are found, women are highly reluctant to contact partners with lower educational qualifications. Men, in contrast, do not have any problems to contact lower-qualified women. Studies of educational homogamy generally show that couples where women have a higher level of education are rare. Our study demonstrates that this is mainly the result of women’s reluctance to contact lower qualified men.

This also has ramifications for how women blame male bias against intelligence for their dating woes the same way that guys blame female bias against niceness. But anyway…

This is one of those things where I suspect that the filtering against women of lower economic status happens for ostensibly other reasons. I didn’t care that Julianne was raised in a trailer park. I did care, though, that neither she nor her family had an iota of fiscal responsibility. But the two were probably not unrelated. There have been other cases where I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reason, but it turned out to be a basic incompatibility (not wholly unrelated to the different environments in which we grew up) or intelligence (which links to other things).

Of course, I speak of this as a male from the “upper middle class.” Sheila, who comes at this as a woman from the working class, has an entirely different perspective. So there is, at least, a contingent of guys that are looking to really trade up even at the expense of things that guys are “supposed” to be interested in. It’s possible that it’s something that women of means run into above and beyond whistling construction workers.

Of course, perhaps the most important thing from the Bakadesuyo cite is the fact that educational homophily is preferred across the board. This suggests that at least as far as education goes (and likely, by extension, social class) most people are most comfortable where they are. This makes sense to me. I never really got the sense that my education and my job were a real selling point among women that I would have thought it might be since it would be a chance at a middle class life and all. In a vacuum, maybe it would be so, but in the real life the end result is different interest, different ways of communicating, and overall incompatibility. What would Cinderella and the Prince really have to talk about?

On a sidenote, this all refers to traditional hypergamy, which is in reference to socio-economic status. A lot of what Alpha Theorists are talking about involves something somewhat different, which is sexual status, which is determined by such factors as testosterone and sexual worldliness. And the type of hypergamy that Ptero points to with regard to men has as much to do with sexual status as well, specifically in the domain of looks and non-single-motherhood.

Related link.

* – I hate to blockquote nearly the whole post, but it’s kind of necessary for context. If you’re not reading Bakadesuyo, you should be. I have to prevent myself from simply linking to what he writes every day.

A while back, Mr Hunt asked who I would choose as the “personal narrator” to my story would be. It took me an absurdly long time to figure it out, then I forgot to post on it.

There are really two answers to that question, depending on the criteria. Who sounds like me? Not exactly like me, but the same sort of sound. Like how the voice actors on The Real Ghostbusters aren’t mimicking Dan Aykroid, Bill Murray, et al, but are sort of doing their own version. My answer on that front is Vincent D’Onofrio, most known for playing Detective Goren on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. There’s a sort of heavy-but-not-deep quality to his voice that I share. If one believes in a correlation between voice and appearance (and I do, to an extent), it might be related to the fact that while we don’t really look alike, he and I have similar builds and statures.

The second narrator is not someone who I sound like at all in my dreams, but whose voice I wish I had. That would be Cole Hauser, twice the sidekick on K-Ville and Chase. Though he’s a native of California, his voice has an Arklahomatex accent of sorts that is present but without dominating his voice. About the only connection is that when I’m tired, nervous, or drunk, I develop the same sort of accent (a gift from my father and his side of the family, I think, since few of my peers growing up had any sort of accent). Except his sounds way, way better.

Interestingly enough, D’Onofrio (of Brooklyn) and Hauser (of California) play Chicagoan brothers (along with Vince Vaughn) in The Break-Up.

I had a special ed class the other day. In involved everyone from a step below Down’s Syndrome to… Harvel. I was told by the teacher that Harvel was a special case, insofar as (a) he always knew the answer to any question you ask and (b) he had a tendency to get bored very easily. The first bit was important because it meant that, when we were going through the exercise, that I should call on Harvel if the two or three kids I first call on get it wrong. The second was important because Harvel had a tendency to skip ahead or stop paying attention and preventing that requires constant monitoring.

The lesson plan is, pretty much, goes at a speed just a little faster than the Down’s kids are capable of. I read three or four paragraphs. I ask them a question. I call on two or three kids to try to answer the question, call on Harvel if none of them got it right, then wait a few minutes for them to write the answer down in their workbook. Immediately after we started, Harvel was pounding through the worksheet. I could see him working ahead and though I was sympathetic to letting him do so, I had been specifically told not to. So I called on him. This was ineffective because he could apparently listen to what I was saying on page two while answering the questions on page 7 at the same time.

One of the paras then chided him for “getting ahead” and told him to cut it out. Reluctantly, he did. His misery was quite apparent, but he was compliant and, as the teacher had said, quite useful in being able to answer any question asked of him. In the first ten minutes of the class, he had gotten about half-way through the worksheet. The class as a whole got through a third of it over the entire 50 minutes. After class ended, some of the kids drew crude pictures. A couple of them tried to play on the computer. One of the older kids (I would guess maybe 15) was trying – and failing – to explain the relationship between a yellow light and a red light. Harvel (8th grade) was reading Alas, Babylon, which he had borrowed from his brother who was reading it in his high school class. Having actually read that book myself, he and I talked about it for a bit. He knew what he was reading.

So why was Harvel in this class? Two reasons: he did have a pretty serious speech impediment that made him sound slow, and he did have a physical disability. My guess is that early on he was put on the short bus track and they never took him off of it.

When I was in K-12, I never took any advanced or honors classes. At the time I thought it was cool because it allowed me to put forth less effort and spend more time drawing Vicious Victor comics. Looking back, I really, really wish I had taken normal classes. I would have been challenged, but I would have enjoyed the challenge. At least if college is any indication. It wasn’t until honors classes in college that I realized that school could be interesting. I thought I had it bad. I’ve got nothing on Harvel. That must be hell.

Incidentally, a few weeks ago I was doing a special ed class at the upper-elementary level. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why Leroy was in there. He spoke almost normally (a little too fast and a little too softly to always be understood – but that’s not too unusual in a 5th grader) and followed along in class extremely well. However, when I read his assignment, the reason was obvious. He could think, he could talk, he could listen, but he could not write. Reading was probably difficult, too. He wrote numbers and letters backwards and sometimes incomprehensibly. He was smart enough to compensate for this by writing the answer down over and over again, just to make sure that one of them would be right and he would get credit. Apparently, about four years earlier, Leroy was in an accident and suffered oxygen deprivation, which did a number on him. Prior to that, he was a normal kid.

In a way, Leroy and Harvel are entirely opposite. Two parts of a whole. A kid who can’t communicate verbally very easily but has impeccable reading and writing ability, and then another kid that can seemingly do just about anything but. Illiteracy is almost certainly a bigger handicap than speech difficulties in the long run. Even so, it’s almost more tragic for these kids because unlike the others, they have to know what they’re missing out on. They have to understand the world around them in which they may never been independent participants. The Down’s kids, on the other hand, seem to live in a playground of sorts.

A little over a year ago, I wrote this:

One of the more mixed explanations {for why TV shows tend to take place in “hip” locales} is the notion of targeted demographics. The notion that the young demographic is more valuable than older viewers. To be honest, I think that this is something that marketing departments convince themselves of more than anything. A justification for their own preferences. People that go into entertainment and marketing want more than anything to be hip and with it and I think are more interested than that than they are in selling their product. Even when there is no advertising, such as movies, studios released one anti-war flop after another and continue to have a bias towards Rated-R movies over Rated-G movies even though the latter typically do a lot better in theaters and have more ancillary sales such as toys and cheap straight-to-video follow-ups. I’m actually wondering if the credit card crunch might encourage advertisers to target consumers that actually have money over those whose credit cards are now being cut up.

Honestly, I used to put this in the same category as my belief that Osama Bin Laden has been dead for several years and that Peak Oil bring right around the corner is a myth (I hope I’m not as wrong about the second as I am about the first). I believe it, but in the “conspiracy theory” sense and not out of any special knowledge. People smarter than me have been saying that I am wrong and while, ordinarily I listen to such people on subjects in which I have no expertise, I just can’t get on board (ahem, until they show the body). Everyone needs to believe something considered to be kooky.

It turns out, my belief about TV ratings may not be so kooky afterall:

From then on, the 18 to 49 cohort was the “coveted” demo, and it cost a premium to buy. Eighteen to 34 was even pricier. Older Americans? “Viewers over 55 haven’t factored into ad rates,” says theWall Street Journal, “which made them without value to the networks.” The numbers tell the story: A 30-second ad on Fox’s young-skewing Glee costs $47 per thousand viewers, while a spot on CBS’sThe Good Wife, 60% of whose audience is 55-plus, costs about half that.

But now the jig is up. “Reliance on the 18 to 49 demographic,” Ad Age reports Poltrack saying, “is hazardous to all media and marketers.” It may be just a coincidence that CBS, which these days runs about even with Fox in overall prime-time viewership, is now being killed by Fox in 18 to 49. But it’s no coincidence that 80 million baby boomers are aging out of the desirable demo. To sell air time to reach the fastest-growing part of its audience, the industry needs a new metric.

For years they’ve been saying that the most desirable demographic is “young and affluent” (often citing 18-34 rather than all the way to 49). While this is true, it’s something of a limited demographic. Most young people lack disposable income. Wealth comes with age. The ability to just go out and buy stuff may be the habit of the young, but is more likely to be within the capability of the old. And then there’s the part of the theory that says advertisers should target them when they’re young so that they can build long-term brand loyalty. The problem is that product loyalties change over time. So it’s more of a theory than anything.

So I found (and find) it to be a very self-serving theory since the “desirable” demographic just happens to be the demographic that they would want to target anyway, even without financial considerations. Hollywood used to say for years that they only make smutty stuff because that’s what the audiences demand, meanwhile it was movies rated G not only having huge profit margins but also being more reliably profitable. When’s the last time a kiddie movie suffered the fate of Waterworld? And, of course, in the Bush years the studios were making one anti-war movie after another with big name actors and anemic returns. And power to them for making stuff that they believe in! But they tend to use self-serving metrics (target demographics in the case of TV, prestige/awards in the case of movies). When there is so much ambiguity, you define the rules however you want.

In the case of TV ratings, however, there was another motive:

“CBS’s ratings hold was impregnable {between 1955 and 1976}, but only if one measured the whole audience. It was the genius of Leonard Goldenson, the head of ABC, which routinely finished in third place well behind CBS and NBC, to change the rules. Unable to compete in the big sweepstakes, Goldenson created a smaller one that he could win. ABC, he told advertisers, was getting younger viewers than CBS and NBC, which meant that advertisers with products appealing to that segment would be wise to buy time on ABC. That was akin to a football team saying that it had lost the game, but it had gained more yards…. The network had managed to make itself seem successful despite its consistent third-place finishes. It was all smoke and mirrors.”

As some of you may recall or vaguely be aware, CBS was culturally dismissed at the time because a lot of its success hinged on such shows as Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction (they also did the Andy Griffith Show, but that one I think got a pass). So ABC was apparently the one that declared that the rules had changed and suddenly their ratings didn’t suck anymore.

I commented in the past that the long-struggling NBC should consider targeting shows at underutilized audiences. The networks have historically been historically uninterested in older viewers and, for that matter, boring family viewers (though economics has partially overruled them on the latter). In years past, the network had quite a bit of success with shows like the Golden Girls and its spinoff, Empty Nest. In addition to the age factor, there is a dearth in irksomely formulaic family sitcoms (TBS has more of them than CBS and NBC combined) and conservative dramas like Seventh Heaven and Touched By An Angel, not to mention Walker, Texas Ranger. Shows that the networks want to make end up spawning copycat after copycat, while other shows tend to pull in good ratings and yet never seem to make network execs say “We need to make one of those shows!” It remains a niche for NBC to fill. Including, but not limited to, previously ignored demographics.

{h/t OTB}

Phi looks back, with some regret, on foregoing a relationship in his youth on the basis that the relationship had a sell-by date on it:

Question: would my present self counsel a different course of action to my past self?

Sadly, yes. I say sadly, because I still think my reasoning then was conscientious (or at least, that variety of conscientious that mothers tend to approve of). But I now know the alternative sucks too.

So my present self would say to my past self: go for it! Be honest with her about what your plans are, but if she’s still game for a date-stamped relationship, well then: she’s cute, and she’s making it easy! And face facts: alpha girl isn’t available, especially to your nerdy ass.

And believe me, you really, really don’t want to get to be 23 without having had a girlfriend, without having been kissed, on the grounds that you weren’t ready to get married the next day. Because when you’re 23, the girls, even (or especially) the girls at church, will expect you to have already done those things, and they’ll hold your lack of experience against you. A lot.

I half-agree with Phi on this. I agree with his advice, but I don’t think the new advice is worthy of sadness. Experience is a good thing. I specifically mean relationship experience and not (just) sexual experience. There comes a point of diminishing returns (and, perhaps, negative returns) with a lot of experience. But if you, like Phi and myself, are hardly in danger of becoming jaded and numbed by excessive experience, I believe that you take experience where you can get it.

It’s not just that future partners might “hold [it] against you,” but that experience breeds knowledge. Knowledge of yourself and knowledge of how relationships work. My road with Julianne was rocky early on and barely survived our first year for no other reason than I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what reasonable expectations were. I didn’t know the line between being consciously non-obsessive over a relationship and not taking it seriously enough. I didn’t have a clear idea of the distinction between “we’re having a fight” and “we’re breaking up.” Granted, some of these things vary greatly (and all of them vary a little) from partner to partner, but there are certain baselines.

More than that, though, you learn what your baselines are. I had to learn that the “girl of [my] dreams” isn’t worth it if I am miserable throughout. I had to learn what expectations I was willing to commit to and what was just “too much.” And a lot of this relates back to having to learn what kind of girl I wanted to spend my time with. There is the tendency at least among some guys to underestimate (in some ways) and overestimate (in others) what they want. Prior to Julianne, I really thought just about any girl who fit a certain criteria would do. She fit all of them and more. But I discovered, along the way, that there were scores of things that I had never contemplated. That I could be with a woman that was beautiful, smart, loving, and that still wouldn’t be enough because – much to my shock – I need a particular kind of these things to settle in for life. That some of the things that I thought were really important turned out not to be.*

My relationship with her failed anyway, of course, but for much better reasons. And, of course, every relationship failed until I met my wife. But they all failed for different reasons. I can’t say that I learned something from them all (I can be kind of dim sometimes), but I learned a lot.

Like Phi, I was pretty serious-minded growing up. Starting with a girl named Tracey, I immediately measured up every girl I dated for long-term prospects. Sometimes I knew it wasn’t there. Sometimes I chose not to care. Sometimes I cared when I probably shouldn’t have in part because I feared they were looking at forever. But particularly in a case like Phi’s, where everyone knows the score, I really don’t see much harm in plowing forward. Don’t do anything you will regret, knowing what you do about the finite nature of the relationship, but experience what you can. For guys like Phi (and, probably to a lesser extent, myself), you only get so many opportunities.

* – Which is why a girl holding it against you is not entirely unreasonable. Unfair to you, perhaps, but reasonable for them. If you had the opportunity to enter a relationship with someone that was clueless about relationships, or with someone that knows what they’re doing, you go with the latter. Clancy has benefited immensely from the fact that Julianne and Evangeline and a others came before her. The fact that her romantic history was more restricted was, if not a problem, something we had to work with in the early stages.

Chuck Lorre apparently does not read Hit Coffee (or does – hi Chuck! – but does not heed the advice of its primary author):

Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that series co-creator Chuck Lorre has hatched an idea to reboot the Warner Bros.-produced sitcom with a new creative direction that does not involve Sheen, who was fired from the series in March. Lorre is said to have presented close associates and Men co-star Jon Cryer with the plan, and the studio and network are aware of his intentions. According to an insider, Lorre has told Cryer this reboot would involve a significant role for him and the introduction of a new, yet-to-be-cast character.

Sayeth me:

So I think I am on board with the Darin Stevens solution. Stevens, for those who might recall, was the husband of Samantha Stevens on Bewitched wherein one Dick (York) was replaced by another (Sargent) and nobody really cared. For secondary cast members, I think that this is something that shows should consider more often. To take another example, The Drew Carey Show dropped Drew’s brother to save a few bucks. Dropping the actor wasn’t a problem, but dropping the character was because he was married to another character on the show and the excuse they gave was inadequate.

I watched and/or listened to the eighth season over the past couple of days. It remains difficult to imagine the show without Sheen and almost impossible to imagine it without Sheen’s character. That being said, they could not have possibly designed a better jumping off point for the character. SPOILERS AHEAD. At the end of the episode, Charlie and Rose are boarding a plane to go on a trip to France together. And so the story can simply be that he never comes back. Rose, who conned Charlie into thinking that she was married to someone else, has strong incentive not to come back. And Charlie and Rose ending up together – despite or especially as the result of a con – is perhaps the best ending I can think of for the Harper character. When you think of Harper’s ex-girlfriends, Rose is the only one that was (a) likeable (after a fashion) and (b) appropriate. Charlie’s consistent ability to snag classy women that were too good for him was a bit aggravating. Rose, the psycho with a good heart, I can live with (though I do remain morbidly curious as to the mechanics of the logistics of how that relationship would work out).

I have my doubts about the reboot. Alan Harper is not a compelling character. At the beginning of the show, he was a sort of likable, put upon straight man. As the show progressed, though, Alan demonstrated why he was put upon. You wanted to meet him just so that you could put upon him yourself. And he’s not as funny as Sheen’s character. So putting more of the focus on him is curious. Maybe he will become a more redeeming character. Maybe Lorre will figure it out.

But… they had a formula that worked. It wasn’t high art, but it was successful. And now they don’t have that formula anymore. Charlie Sheen has thoroughly demonstrated that he needs Lorre and a bunch of writers giving him material. It seems as though Lorre is going out of his way to demonstrate that his show needs Charlie Sheen delivering the material.

Just earlier today I was writing a post referencing my belief that bin Laden has been dead for over half a decade. I said he’d been dead “for some time now” in 2007.

Oops.

So while everyone else celebrates, I feel a bit let down. Not just about being wrong, but that he’s been alive this entire time. Some reports say at a luxurious villa. Damn.

So where was I when I found out? Sitting here. I am setting up RSS on my cell phone. So I was going around from site to site – not reading anything – to get the appropriate RSS/atom/feed link, wondering why the heck several sites were showing pictures of bin Laden. Finally I got the RSS set up on the phone and hit “update” and read the titles, which spelled it out.

Anyhow, it’s strategically unimportant. I do believe that bin Laden has been more-or-less sidelined (though maybe not, alas, in some god-forsaken cave somewhere). And it’s really almost too late to take any real joy in it. It kind of passed it’s “satisfying” expiration date. I also disagree with those saying that this is going to be politically huge. Obama might see a bit of an uptick, but it’s too far away from the election to have a sustained impact. And it’s too far from his taking office. If he’d been able to say “We got him within one month or six months of my taking office!”… that would have been something to brag about.

Addendum: So they’re saying he was in a “mansion” in Abottabad, a suburb of Islamabad and according to some “a tourist destination.” Tom Clancy had his bin Laden stand-in (“The Emir”) actually hanging out in Las Vegas, figuring that it was the last place anybody would be looking for him. In other news, some people are actually asking about CIA jurisdiction. Given the givens, are we really going to care? I doubt Pakistan does. This is probably a load off their mind.

Addendum II: I think I may have spoke too soon on the political implications. It does seem to me that this could have longer repercussions if Obama can successfully use this to combat the shadow “whose side is he really on” thoughts that some people have, as well as the argument that he has been in over his head in day one. This will likely earn him some personal good-will, which could throw some votes his way in the event that it is close.