-{Note, this one was sitting in “Drafts” though I thought I had actually posted it. My apologies if it is a repeat.}-

Hugo Schwyzer can’t take a compliment. When people point out that he and his wife are the type of people that should be having children, he feels that’s wrong because it suggests that others should not. When people point out the blueness of his little one’s eyes, he concerned about the view that there’s something wrong with brown eyes. There are, arguably at least, racial implications to this. The implicit assumption that “lighter” is better and that eye colors found generally on whiter people is considered better than eye color on darker people.

I’m not going to say that there’s nothing to the racial argument. Blue eyes are associated in the eyes of some as a sign of racial purity.

But I think that a good part of it at least is that brown is not a compelling color, generally speaking. I personally don’t have strong preferences in the area of eye color, but it’s not hard to see why blue is preferable by many to brown. There’s a reason why this blog’s background is blue. Why blue is used on Hugo’s blog, for that matter, and on our flag and in 100,000 other ways that brown is not. Blue is a special color.

I am relatively confident in discounting race as a motive because I am almost positive that if black folks generally had a beautiful golden color eye, you’d see a lot more attention being drawn to it. I could see my mother, who was vocal about her desire that my brothers and I marry whites, seeing the possibility of our children getting golden eyes as an upside if we were to have defied her on that.

The other thing is that my blue eyes garner notice and there doesn’t seem to be any connection between women that have racially suspect views and women that point them out. The two that were most fawning about them had previously dated a black man and an Arab respectively and neither made any great see-I’m-not-racist point of mentioning it.

The fact that my eyes are blue I guess could be said to make me biased, but my wife’s eyes are brown and if she offered to wear blue-colored contacts I wouldn’t take her up on it (unless it were something that she wanted to do). I am kind of glad that Lain got my blue eyes because I did want to pass that on. I would not be disappointed if the others had her brown eyes or some other variation.

As many of you may recall, I have a rather strong aversion to nail polish. I mean, it just drives me batty. Particularly on the fingernails (I am not fond of toenail polish, either, but it’s so ubiquitous that I have become desensitized). It is worse when the nail polish is particularly designy. Black is the least unacceptable, red is next, some other solid color after that. Then the recent trend of painted tips. Then designs.

A friend’s girlfriend – of whom I am extremely fond – has taken to painting her nails in very conspicuous ways. Designs. Glitter. And then showing off her work on Facebook. Which wouldn’t bother an ordinary and sane person. Which I am neither.

I write this from beautiful Shell Beach, where I am visiting my family. This is a very special family gathering, as my father had a coronary stent inserted into him earlier in the week. He was, as the doctor put it, a heart attack waiting to happen. His artery was 95% clogged. The downside to all of this – and given the alternatives it is nothing at all – is that he can’t hold pick up Lain or much of anything else. Which is unfortunate. But he’s here, and his circulation is good.

I am only barely here. We drove from Royal Crossing to Queen City – by way of Crowns Pointe. The latter is where my aunt lives, and where we dropped off Lisby for dog-sitting. One of the downsides to leaving Arapaho was the dog-sitting arrangement we had out there so that we didn’t have to put Lisby in a Kennel. Fortunately, my aunt is a dog person and is more than happy to take care of her.

Now, on to the story…

Babies make everything take longer. So we were running behind on the drive to CP and QC, which is about two hours in all. We also had some congestion at the tolls. I still felt confident when we arrived that we would make the flight. We had over an hour (arrived at 3:15, flight at 4:30). I dropped Clancy and Lain off and went to find parking. Which took forever. I swear, I am half-inclined to become a graffiti artist if only to improve the signage. It was 3:45 before I found the lot. Then the shuttle took forever. I wasn’t at the airport until 4:05. This created a bit of a problem because you have to turn over your checked baggage 45 minutes before take-off. It sounded like I wasn’t going to make it to Shell Beach that day, until the woman saw that my wife and kid were already on the plane. This spurred her into looking for ways to help.

The solution was for the luggage to go on a later flight and for me to run across the airport. Which I did. I was very apologetic, through my panting, to the woman at the ticket counter. But then four people showed up after me. I can’t remember a time when I was so glad to make the flight. Since the separation from my luggage was voluntary, that meant that I would have to take a separate trip to the airport to pick it up. Which happened today (Sunday). So everybody is reunited, people and luggage. And Dad’s heart is pumping blood everywhere it needs to go.

Whew.

As Detroit scales back its police operations, its citizenry is picking up the slack:

Volunteers given radios and matching T-shirts help officers protect neighborhoods where burglaries, thefts and thugs drive away people who can’t rely on a police force that lost a quarter of its strength since 2009. With 25 patrols on the streets, the city hopes to add three each year. Meanwhile, the homicide rate continues rising.

Kevyn Orr, the Detroit emergency manager appointed by the state to supersede the mayor and city council, has called public safety crucial as he reorganizes a city running a $380 million deficit, teetering on a record municipal bankruptcy and struggling to provide services. Orr has said Detroit’s turnaround depends on reversing a population loss of more than 25 percent since 2000.

“Nobody’s going to move back to Detroit as long as people don’t have a sense of security,” said volunteer Lorenzo Blount during his morning rounds in the west-side Grandmont area. “That’s what we’re trying to add in our neighborhood in our little way.”

Will any of them have carry permits?

I actually look at situations like this and wonder about the viability of increased reliance on reserve officers. Which is to say, officers who are actually trained and certified, volunteering their time?

Back in Colosse, one of the departments relied heavily on that. The deputies even had to afford their own trip to the police academy. But it was something that a surprising number of people wanted to do whether they were getting paid or not.

Fire services in the United States are a blend of volunteer and professional. The City of Colosse has a professional fire force, though most of the surrounding cities (including one with over 100,000 people in it!) rely mostly on a volunteer force. Colosse mixes fire service with EMT and the latter turns off a lot of people who are interested in being a firefighter but don’t want to do the EMT stuff. Those people end up volunteering in the suburbs.

It’s conceptually pretty cool to me that there are places that can so rely on volunteerism to take care of basic civic services. Of course, that sort of thing doesn’t really help those that want to make a career out of it. It seems to me that Detroit might not be an ideal place to set up such a program for police. The danger would be off-putting to some, and it might attract the sort of people you don’t want. Beyond that, though, as cops are being laid off, I’d imagine that the paid police force would go ballistic. Which would be understandable from a standpoint of self-interest.

Via Abel, I found this piece suggesting that such cheap offers – mostly from amateur writers, is destroying literature:

Bowker Market Research reported last week that self-published ebooks now account for 12% of the entire digital publishing market. In some cases, the number actually rises to a very respectable 20%, but is fairly genre specific to crime, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and humor. 95% of these books are insufferable and are written to capitalize on trends in publishing, with authors trying to emulate successful writers such as E.L. James or Cassandra Claire.

At a recent publishing conference in London, Andrew Franklin, founder and managing director of Profile Books, blasted authors who self-publish. “The overwhelming majority of self-published books are terrible—unutterable rubbish, they don’t enhance anything in the world.” He ranted on by saying, “These books come out and are met with a deathly silence, so the principle experience of self-publishing is one of disappointment. I was very shocked to learn you can buy Facebook friends and likes on social media. That is what passes for affirmation in what I think is the deeply corrupt world of self-publishing.” {…}

One thing indie authors have done is devalue the work of legitimate published authors. You know the type that write for a living, who have an editor and are considered accomplished, or at least well-read. The average indie title is $0.99 to $2.99, and the average publisher price is $7.99 – $12.99. Book buyers have been so conditioned to pay as little as possible that often they will not even consider a more expensive book.

I’m not a believer in markets being perfect, but it seems to me that books are one of those things where it will sort itself out. I mean, if one of these book sucks, the loss isn’t the $3 it cost you to buy it. It’s the hours you spent reading it, or trying to. I purchased a cheap book a while back, made it half-way through, and am mulling over whether or not to finish it. But the sunk cost fallacy I am contending with has nothing to do with the $3 I bought it. If these books suck so universally, people will stop buying them. And Mr. Kozlowsky has his own solution: Don’t pay cut-rate prices. Get one from the publishers. If their filtering mechanisms are worthy of the additional $4-10, then it’s really a no-brainer, isn’t it?

Despite the bad experience mentioned above, Clancy and I have a large number of independent books. They’re usually not as good as the filtered stuff, but only one has proven itself to be borderline not-worth-reading. In addition to looking for a publisher’s name, you can also look at reviews and whatnot and get an idea as to whether or not this author has any following. It’s a risk, but the half-illiterate type books he is referring to are not even the ones you need to worry about. Those are easy to identify (samples are free!). The problematic ones are the ones that are well-written but boring. It’s those that you realize half-way through that you only half-care what happens next.

From PaidContent, a new kind of DRM that I can live with:

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute is working on a new ebook DRM dubbed SiDiM that would prevent piracy by changing the actual text of a story, swapping out words to make individualized copies that could be tracked by the original owner of the ebook.

The idea behind SiDiM is similar to the way rights holders have been trying to protect music and video for some time. Instead of trying to lock down copies through technical measures that prevent copying, so-called fingerprinting measures simply add markers to a work that make it possible to identify the original purchaser. In theory, this prevents people from sharing their works for the fear of being caught.

My primary issue with DRM is when it inconveniences my use or protection of a product that I lawfully purchased. This manages to sidestep that because I am pretty much free to do with it what I like so long as I do not mass-distribute it. Which is fine, because I’m not remarkably interested in mass-distributing it. Three dozen changes of single words creates millions of variables, so we’re not talking about having to change very much.

I am skeptical of the extent to which this would work. If I were interested in mass-distributing an illegal copy of a book, I don’t think it would be hard to compare documents to find the different words. Which is the first thing I’d do before putting it on BitTorrent. Then again, maybe that is sufficient, if you can’t easily get other copies to compare it to? I’m really not sure. I do like the concept, though.

I’ve been collecting children’s ebooks for Lain. There’ve been a few that I’ve gotten for free (legally!), though there was less than I would expect. This one has been a favorite. I’ve installed Moon Reader+ on my devices, which is what I use to read them. It’s also handy for me, because it lets me read non-Kindle books and with Dropbox it remembers my progress. With that well having run dry, I’ve basically gone and purchased some Kindle ebooks for a nominal sum. The best piracy prevention is to allow me to buy it for under $3.