Could the solution to distracted driving be something as simple as a cleaner typefont?

I think there’s a fair number of adjustments we could make to cut down on technology-based distracted driving. In some cases, we’re moving in the wrong direction. I don’t mean by having more and more devices that distract us. Rather, because we’re moving away from physical buttons and knobs, which are easier to manage without taking your eyes off the road for very long, to touchscreens which require more precision and, thus, more attention.

The biggest thing we can do, though, is really ramp up R&D on voice control. I have my smartphone set up so that it reads text messages to me as they come in. I’m not far from being able to reply with little more effort than changing a radio dial. But the last inches seem to be the hardest.

More to the point, though, I’ve had to “rig” my devices to do what I can do.

So hasn’t more effort been put into this? Well, a lot of effort has been. Especially by the carmakers themselves.

Studies have demonstrated that voice systems are actually a hazard in themselves:

What makes the use of these speech-to-text systems so risky is that they create a significant cognitive distraction, the researchers found. The brain is so taxed interacting with the system that, even with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, the driver’s reaction time and ability to process what is happening on the road are impaired.

The research was led by David Strayer, a neuroscientist at the University of Utah who for two decades has applied the principles of attention science to driver behavior. His research has showed, for example, that talking on a phone while driving creates the same level of crash risk as someone with a 0.08 blood-alcohol level, the legal level for intoxication across the country.

The counterargument to this is that, well, people are going to have the technology anyway. Even if you ban them from the cars themselves. Would we rather they be using it trying to tap virtual screens on a small keyboard, or talking back and forth with the device? The latter is obviously the safer in the abstract.

The concern, then, would be that people who wouldn’t pick up a device will talk to the device. So leading to less danger on a per-user individual, but a higher collective hazard because more people are doing it. This is possible, though it starts to move closer to the territory of the argument against ecigarettes (the danger being in its comparative safety).

Keeping this technology out of the cars themselves won’t keep them off the phones that will be in the cars. Laws against texting and driving don’t work. Obama’s former TranSec Ray LaHood wanted to disable phones in cars, but that disables passenger phones as well as driver phones.

The underlying problem won’t really go away until the cars drive themselves.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the popular languages in the US. One of the surprises was that, after English and Spanish, the most popular language spoken was German. I wondered if it might be the descendants of German immigrants learning the language of their homeland or what. We don’t think of German immigrants as a particularly recent thing.

If only I read my own blog. I wrote a post in 2010 about German immigration into the United States. I quoted from an article:

Germans are leaving their country in record numbers but unlike previous waves of migrants who fled 19th century poverty or 1930s Nazi terror, these modern day refugees are trying to escape a new scourge — unemployment.

Flocking to places as far away as the United States, Canada and Australia as well as Norway, the Netherlands and Austria more than 150,000 Germans packed their bags and left in 2004 — the greatest exodus in any single year since the late 1940s.

High unemployment that lingers at levels of more than 20 percent in some parts of Germany and dim prospects for any improvement are the key factors behind the migration. In the 15 years since German unification more than 1.8 million Germans have left.

Anyhow, it’s not just a recent thing, but was more prominent in relatively recent history than I thought of. Pew points out that it’s Germans, as opposed to Italians or Irish like I might have guessed, who Mexican immigrants have displaced as our biggest source of immigration.

As you can see from the map, as recently as 1960 the Germans dominated the immigration landscape (to the extent that any country did), and in 1990 they were right up there with Mexicans.

At Salon, Kim Brooks wrote a piece about the fallout from having left her child in her car:

I took a deep breath. I looked at the clock. For the next four or five seconds, I did what it sometimes seems I’ve been doing every minute of every day since having children, a constant, never-ending risk-benefit analysis. I noted that it was a mild, overcast, 50-degree day. I noted how close the parking spot was to the front door, and that there were a few other cars nearby. I visualized how quickly, unencumbered by a tantrumming 4-year-old, I would be, running into the store, grabbing a pair of child headphones. And then I did something I’d never done before. I left him. I told him I’d be right back. I cracked the windows and child-locked the doors and double-clicked my keys so that the car alarm was set. And then I left him in the car for about five minutes.

He didn’t die. He wasn’t kidnapped or assaulted or forgotten or dragged across state lines by a carjacker. When I returned to the car, he was still playing his game, smiling, or more likely smirking at having gotten what he wanted from his spineless mama. I tossed the headphones onto the passenger seat and put the keys in the ignition. […]

We flew home. My husband was waiting for us beside the baggage claim with this terrible look on his face. “Call your mom,” he said.

I called her, and she was crying. When she’d arrived home from driving us to the airport, there was a police car in her driveway.

Multiple people on my Facebook timeline shared the article with a comment about never taking any chances. A part of me wonders if they even read the article, or how they might have missed the point so badly. Given the specifics of the situation, there was little or no threat from the weather, from thirst or starvation. The only threat was from the authorities themselves. The threat of a child losing his mother because of a culture that says “take no chances.”

Joseph Stromberg argues that spanking should be illegal:

Research, though, tells us that getting spanked as a child can leave a discernible mark on people: it makes people more likely to suffer from addiction, depression, and other mental health problems as adults. This is one reason why 37 countries have explicitly banned all physical punishment of children — even by parents — since 1979.

Even our own existing state laws generally define child abuse as “endangering a child’s physical or emotional health and development.” By this standard — and given what we’ve recently learned from research — any form of physical punishment violates children’s rights, whether it’s done by a teacher or parents.

Making something – like spanking, or leaving your children in a car, is not simply a matter of saying don’t do it. It doesn’t make it go away. Rather, it’s the initiation of a legal process that threatens to pull apart families. The question is not “Should parents spank their children?” but rather “Should we take children away from homes where they are spanked?” and “Should we send parents to prison who do this?” There is an extremely strong argument, in my view, that there lies the road to far more ruin than the initial offense. My answer to the above three is “no” which, in a legal framework, is inconsistent except to the extent that we believe we should allow people to do things we consider to be wrong. In a best case scenario, such laws would be enforced loosely or inconsistently. The former typically leading to the latter, which has its own problems.

Sayeth Michael Brendan Dougherty:

The novel phenomenon of American upper-middle-class helicopter-parenting, in which kids are scheduled, monitored, and supervised for their “enrichment” at all times, is now being enforced on others.

It’s an odd way to “help” a child who is unsupervised for five minutes to potentially inflict years of stress, hours of court appearances, and potential legal fees and fines on their parents. Children who experience discreet instances of suboptimal parenting aren’t always aided by threatening their parents with stiff, potentially family-jeopardizing legal penalties. The risk of five or even 10 minutes in a temperate, locked car while mom shops is still a lot better than years in group homes and foster systems.

It’s only a slippery slope to talk about such things if we’re talking about making laws that have comparatively little teeth.

Heebie-Geebie wrote on Unfogged:

I have a new theory: a contributing factor might be the rise of the horror-story-as-promotional-device. Did this happen much before, say, MADD? I’ve got it in my head that there’s been a shift from private grief and shameful let’s-never-talk-about-how-cousin-drowned-at-the-picnic to the current model, which is to channel your grief into transforming the world and making sure other parents don’t suffer through your hell. It’s basically a good thing – if your child dies due to complications from premature birth, and as part of your grieving process you become very involved in March of Dimes, then that is absolutely good and productive and so on.

But I wonder if the over-parenting vigilance isn’t partly due to the bombardment of individual stories of the child who was only out of sight for three minutes. Like Kahneman says, our brains are really terrible at statistics.

I wonder about a slightly different angle of interest to me. In What To Expect When No One’s Expecting, Jonathan Last explores the various disincentives of people to reproduce. Among them, he talks of the comparatively trivial example of car safety seats. The increased requirements of car safety seats adds a not-insignificant burden to people who want larger families. Every life saved is precious, of course, and it’s wonderful to save them, but requiring them longer and longer means more kids in them at the same time, which requires the expense not only of the seats but of bigger vehicles and more hassle. Making parenthood more expensive, more difficult and less flexible, have an effect on the number of children we choose to have.

A long while back I was in Queen City with Lain. I parked at a parking garage about a mile away. I had to go to the car to get something and took the baby. The problem was that I forgot to take the child seat. The threat to Lain’s life and livelihood on a one-mile drive is probably marginal*. The pain-in-the-ass of walking a full mile back and then forth again was definitely not marginal. One of the things I remember as I stood there on my car was not a fear that something would happen on that straight drive, but that I would get caught and arrested. My decision was made on the basis of the law.

One of the things Brooks talks about in her piece about leaving her son in the car is that in her conversations with people, a whole lot of parents admitted to having done what she did. Some suggested that all parents have. It’s certainly the case that a whole lot more parents have than have been arrested for it. Uncountably more times than a child has died or been hospitalized for it. But the instinctual response – one I have myself – when we hear about something going terribly wrong or getting arrested for it is a variation of putting your child at risk and the unacceptability of ever doing so.

As the article mentions, though, we do it every day. We just draw odd lines on where we should. When we fly, Lain gets her own seat even though one isn’t required until she is two. As a matter of safety, and sanity, we want to do that. Most parents don’t. A lot of people think that it should be legally required. Child safety, after all. But these things come at a material cost. Having to buy a third ticket can be the difference between a family going somewhere or not going somewhere. This matters. It can also be the difference between flying and the more dangerous – with or without a carseat – decision to drive.

There’s something in us that cringes when we see a child in an obvious – even if minute – danger. This is not a bad thing. If we keep it in check.

One of the other things that Last explores in his book is the increasing parental involvement over time.

Here’s where it gets interesting: From 1965 to 1985, mothers actually spent less time taking care of the kids (just 8.8 hours per week in 1975 and 9.3 hours per week in 1985) while fathers inched their numbers up a tiny bit, to 3 hours per week. After 1985, both moms and dads started doing more-lots more. By 2000, married fathersmore than doubled their time with the kids, clocking 6.5 hours a week.

Overall, American fathers have become more involved in raising their children. So much so that, as economist Bryan Caplan jokes, they could almost pass for ’60s-era mothers. But what’s really astounding is what mothers have done. By 2000, more than 60 percent of married mothers worked outside the home. In doing so, they increased their paid work hours per week from 6.0 in 1965 to 23.8. Yet even as they moved out of the house to pursue careers, they also increased the amount of time they spend with their children, cranking it up to a bracing 12.6 hours per week.

Now, on the one hand, this is a happy development. It’s a good thing to have parents taking a more active role in their kids’ lives. But on the other hand, these numbers explain why parents are so frayed and stressed these days: Because however nice it is to be spending more time with your children, it’s also a rising cost. There are only 24 hours a day and if people are spending more time on kids, those hours have to come from somewhere.

The rising expectations of parenthood go beyond money and into rising standards for pretty much everything. Babysitters are not typically required to be licensed and bonded, but I wonder if we’re not too far away from that. There is a lot of movement to make daycare more regulated, and thus more expensive. Which is a mixed bag. Setting aside statutory requirements, though, the pressure parents put on themselves and one another for the right daycare can be quite intense. It sends a message of rising expectation that says “It’s better not to have children if you can’t…” with the sentence ending with an ever-increasing list of demands. It’s a message that arguably resonates most with the greatest tendency towards being responsible. The irresponsible either ignoring the demands, not particularly intending to be parents, or just not thinking that far ahead.

Increased spending on children is typically lauded. It’s more of a mixed bag when we talk about the time we devote to them, however. Almost always, though, we seem to talk about it being a good thing or a bad thing from the child’s point of view. Increased parental requirements to help kids with their homework becomes a statement about how much pressure kids are under. Helicopter parenting, when criticized, is frequently targeted on how it affects children. I used to wonder if this was a rationalization so that parents could give themselves a break. A part of me actually hopes that is the case, because that is important. But whether it’s a rationalization or whether it truly is all about them, it’s difficult to talk about it in any other way.

The cumulative effect of all of this being a level of responsibility that can be off-putting to a lot of people. Which, people who don’t want kids shouldn’t have them. Pushing the level of responsibility ever-higher, though, can have the effect of making people not want children. Putting a chasm between “parenthood” and “not parenthood” that makes the latter more attractive. Not because of car seats, in particular, or restrictions on leaving your kids in the car in even the most benign circumstances, or the increased investment parents are supposed to make, but the aggregate effect of all of these things and more.

In Michael Connelly’s A Darkness More Than Night, Terry McCaleb says that being a father is like having a gun always pointed at your head. Rationale being the knowledge that if anything happened to your child – if you could have prevented it, anyway – you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself. I feel that very keenly. I also feel, though, that driving yourself into insanity is its own problem. I don’t object to all safety laws, by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t favor needless endangerment. I do favor, though, a degree of sanity. For the kids, but also for the parents.

* – The particular issue being her very young age. Even if a time and place with less restrictive child seat requirements, it would be at best logistically challenging and at worst there would be some definite safety concerns insofar as the number of bad things that could happen in even a minor dust-up. The comparative lack of danger coming, primarily, from the fact that it was a short trip. Nothing, really, in this post should be construed as an endorsement of the notion that babies should not go into car seats or that there shouldn’t be laws to that effect.

I don’t understand a word in this song, but it’s a pretty awesome music video.

I actually saw it without hearing it. We were eating at a Mediterranean restaurant and it was playing as part of a loop on the TV. Along with what appeared to be random videos of southern Europe (maybe narrated, no audio). The music is okay, and in French. But it definitely caught my attention and is now on the master playlist at home. (The master playlist being about 300 or so music videos I play when I need to keep Lain occupied.

As most of you know, Seattle has raised its minimum wage to $15/hr. It follows the airport town of SeaTac doing the same, and has made more tangible the federal government’s to raise it to roughly ten dollars an hour by making it seem more modest.

The minimum wage has become a battlefront on the subject of inequality. Even some who support raising the minimum wage to $10 are more skeptical of the higher figure. Even inequality guru Thomas Piketty is concerned.

One of the advantages of having our decentralized systems is that I can eagerly await the results – whatever they are – without having to face any negative consequences if it does turn out to be a bad idea. I feel the same way about Vermont’s flirtations with single-payer.

The other advantage to having a decentralized system is that it can take advantage of what being a good idea in one place can be done there, but other places don’t have to follow suit. If we’re going to try an extremely high minimum wage somewhere in the country, Seattle is actually a pretty good candidate. The high cost of living makes a $15 minimum wage easier to justify than in a city like Boise or Denver. It also has a booming economy, lots of money, and a lot unemployment rate.

Further, Seattle is actually not all that large. It’s city population is above Nashville but below El Paso and Forth Worth. What we think of as “Seattle” is actually a clump of cities. But the minimum wage hike will only apply to Seattle. This could be good if it allows some of the low-wage amenities to exist just beyond city limits but still be accessible to the city’s population. It could be a bad thing if it drives out some jobs. Since Seattle is expensive, though, and more expensive than most of the area that surrounds it, it could make it harder to discern overall effects.

If things go well in Seattle, or are assumed to, we should be wary about talking about rolling it out nation-wide or using it as a justification to angle a national minimum wage towards $12 or something. But if successful in Seattle, then it’s definitely something that similar cities like San Francisco and New York should (and undoubtedly would) look at. These places are far more expensive to live in, and given those employers that are still there are so despite increased costs, it could be that there is quite a bit of inelasticity involved.

Dave Schuler’s concerns, though, are probably pretty well-founded:

I can believe that a $15 minimum wage in Seattle where the unemployment rate is 5.3% can be absorbed by the local economy. Seattle’s local minimum wages incentivizes politicians in Chicago where the unemployment rate is 10.6% to push for our own $15 minimum wage and here it might well throw people out of work or make it harder for them to find work. Not to mention driving businesses on which the poor depend out of the city or even out of the state.

Chicago politicians can always deny responsibility on a “hoocoodanode” basis.

Everyone’s watching.

Commenting management system Disqus has apparently degraded the “downvote” portion of its “upvoting/downvoting” system. For those of you who have never used Disqus or don’t comment on many blogs, a number of them include thumbs up and thumbs down options where you can sort of grade other comments.

Bayard Russell supports the move (and may have been the catalyst for it):

I have to say, I’m grateful not to have anonymous trolls using the down-voting system simply to attack, undermine, and annoy. As I told you all after NCR suspended its comments system some weeks back (you all know comments are back up and running there, right?), when a set of anonymous down-voting trolls migrated to Bilgrimage after that happened, I contacted Disqus to ask if they could turn off the down votes for this site or perhaps make it optional for blogs using Disqus.

If that request (which other sites may also have made) is the reason Disqus has stopped showing down votes here, then I’m surely grateful to Disqus. I don’t see this as any kind of suppression of free speech, but as getting rid of an unnecessary annoyance, since what kind of “speech” do anonymous down votes by people working together to troll a blog site really represent, in any case?

Warner Todd Huston, on the other hand, thinks this is an example of “feminizing America“:

Apparently, Disqus felt that so many Americans were getting their widdle feelings hurt that they had to take measures to return everyone’s self-esteem to tip top condition. Yes, America, each and every one of you are wonderful, smart, and gosh darn it, people love you and Disqus is going to make sure you don’t get your delicate mental balance upset.

Feel free to go through life with your badly spelled, idiotic comment forever emblazoned across the Internet tubes and given the Disqus seal of approval. You aren’t a brainless racist, a grammatical moron, a pointless troll, a dimiwtted liberal, or a knuckle-dragging conservative any longer. You are a shining light driving the world to truth, justice and the new American way where no one gets their feelings hurt.

I used to like the idea of upvotes and downvotes, but the more I saw them in action the more skeptical of them I have become. It was my hope, when I was introduced to the concept, that generally polite and well thought out comments would get upvotes and pointless snark would get downvotes. At least on the sites that I read and participate on which tend to have commenters that are more polite and thoughtful.

However, even “good” commenting sections have their bad apples, of course, who seem to be there to disrupt the discourse. They also tend to have lurkers who don’t comment but do vote who may veer hard on one side or the other. In either case, voting seems to attract people looking for “Boo-yah” comments instead of carefully considered ones, because the upvotes and downvote tallies I see tend to lean towards which side of the argument they’re taking instead of the actual content of their message.

This has a discouraging effect on (ideological) minority voices, which exacerbates echo chambers. I mostly stopped commenting on a particular site for a couple of reasons, but one of the biggest ones was how frustrating it was to write a carefully considered comment explaining that a situation is more complicated than it appears gets two upvotes and ten downvotes and is followed by a “Republicans are soo stupid and you are stupid for giving them cover!!!” gets ten upvotes and two downvotes. Which is, in my experience, how it generally works. Truthfully, the fact that people seem to agree more with “Republicans are soo stupid” guy and feel the need to downvote me is more discouraging than the comment itself, which I can dismiss as a crank. Except I can’t when his view is apparently more popular than mine.

The upshot of this, in a way, is that it does democratize commenting communities. It lets people say what kind of comments they want and don’t want. Yay democracy! The views of a particular commentariat can often differ, though, from that of the people who actually run the site.

That creates something of a problem for the latter folks. If wanting a more positive commenting atmosphere makes me a namby-pamby feminized dude or whatever, I am pretty okay with that. Heaven knows there are more than enough sites that are battle arenas. So eliminating downvoting makes a lot of sense from their point of view. Obviously, Hit Coffee doesn’t generate the sort of comment traffic to make such an endeavor worthwhile, though if it did I would try to go in the upvote direction.

It would be better if Disqus gave siterunners the option of upvotes only, downvotes only, or both. But absent that, I would prefer upvoting only over a requirement for both.

Clancy and I took a trip back home to go to her high school reunion at the Deltona Leadership Academy for Math, Arts, and Sciences.

Clancy went to a special high school, which exist across the south and elsewhere, that caters to the gifted and talented. These state-run schools are usually attached to a second or third-tier college, where the students live and attend class during the school year. Though not a happy time for her, high school was nonetheless a particularly special time for her. Gifted and talented students from all across the state descending on a single institution.

It’s not just about being smart, though. A lot of the students are there for a reason. They’re people who decided, along with their parents, that going to high school hundreds of miles away was preferable to going to their local school. This might mean that their local school isn’t very good. It’s often that they have social problem. There is a very high misfit quotient. Which, for a misfit like Clancy, can be Heaven on Earth compared to a more typical school.

Clancy’s class in particular was of the more revolutionary variety (their class song was, in fact, Revolution) and the school actually clamped down in direct response to her class. They started seeking out kids of a straighter lace. The pendulum would eventually swing back with a discussion about what the school was actually all about, but Clancy’s sister attended a very different DLA than she did. For all of the headaches caused by her class, though, they also boasted by far the highest alumni giving amount of any of the classes that were there. While the gifted and talented aspect of it was relevent, the fact that a lot of kids found themselves at home, in a way, may have been an even bigger deal.

The contrast with my own school, and my own reunion, was stark. At my reunion, they didn’t even bother asking for money. We had a conference room of a hotel where maybe a hundred or so kids out of a class of about a thousand showed up. Her school was an academy while mine was a warehouse.

I don’t mean to sell my own school short. We were largely the children of engineers, doctors, and businesspeople. We were collectively arguably more privileged than Clancy’s class. We didn’t have to go very far.

More to the point, I have always appreciated the sheer size of my high school. It’s one of the largest 100 in the country today, and it’s smaller today than it was when I went there. I was far more prepared for college than most of my college classmates, despite the fact that I didn’t take a single honors course.

But mostly, I appreciated the school’s size giving me the ability to fade into the background and find my sort, which will mathematically exist in some number. I tend to like my large high school like I like large cities. A smaller and tight-knit school is fine, as long as you are a part of the cloth. In a place like the Deltona Leadership Academy, I might have been. But there aren’t many of those. But while I had friends at my school, I actually found “my sort” online (in the form of BBSes). Even in a school that large, I had to look elsewhere.

Schools like Clancy’s get criticism as a stark example of tracking. Removing smart kids from everyday schools. Others question whether tax money should be devoted to schools that cater to people who are definitionally advantaged. I disagree with that, through-and-through. Some of that for personal reasons – my awesome wife wouldn’t be who she is without that school – and partially for ideological reasons (the same ones that lead me to support tracking).

The DLA has a program where, even if you don’t live in Deltona, children of DLA alums can attend that school. I was at once happy and sad to hear that. Clancy has said that if whatever state we end up in has such a program, and our children want to attend, she would want them to be able to. Intellectually, I agree. Sentimentally, that would mean losing the kids right at the point where they are becoming the most interesting! A little piece of me harbored the thought that such a decision may not be necessary because we may not live in a state where such a program exists. Now, it doesn’t matter where we live, and instead of hundreds of miles away it might be thousands.

If I were to argue against it, it wouldn’t be an argument that I would win. It shouldn’t be, really.

During the move from Arapaho to West Q, I listened to the audiobook of Atlas Shrugged. Well, in the 20-30 hours of driving I got through half of it, anyway, and the rest was heard after I arrived.

It exceeded my expectations, though my expectations were pretty low to begin with. A lot of people who are sympathetic to the themes of the book admit pretty freely that it’s not a great book. So I was expecting thing characters, wooden dialogue, and so on. That’s what I got.

I did actually like the story, though, including a lot of the parts of the story that a lot of people don’t care for. Specifically, I refer to the parts of the book about the running of the railroad and the conquering of various logistical challenges and legal/regulatory restrictions. I apparently have an affinity for books, as one of the few college books I have subsequently re-read more than once was Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. The story of which is about a plant manager trying to improve the production of widgets of some sort. Basically, a novelization to convey certain theories about business.

And so it was with Atlas Shrugged, and some of the parts of it I found most interesting.

The biggest weakness was, as I expected, the characters. Ordinary Times’s Jaybird describes the heroes as being ridiculous but the villains as being ripped from the headlines. That strikes me as about right. My interest in e-cigarettes has reinforced this point, as the FDA and CDC compete with one another to sound the most like Atlas Shrugged’s State Science Institute.

But the heroes were stale. They were supposed to be archetypes of all that is good and true and virtuous in the world, and there’s not much you can do with that. However, giving them just a little bit of a sense of humor (of the exasperated variety, if nothing else) would have gone a long way. Humor has a great leavening effect that this novel sorely could have used.

The best characters were actually the female characters. Which is remarkable because there are very, very few of them. The lead is a woman, Dagney Taggart, of course, but she wasn’t the interesting one. Rather, the ones I was fascinated by were wife characters, Lillian Rearden and Cherryl Brooks Taggart.

Lillian was the wife of Hank Rearden, the secondary protagonist. She was obviously a villainesque character, but had an interesting mysterious quality about where she was going from and what was going through her mind (in a book where you find out, at great length, what is going through most characters’ minds). Cherryl Brooks Taggart was a grocery clerk who married Dagney Taggart’s brother (a villain, of sorts) who sort of played the up-by-the-bootstraps mindset in a world with little use for such things (and who, by virtue of her marriage, was actually on the wrong side of the book’s primary struggle).

As far as the ideology of the book goes, I agree with some of it and disagree with a lot of it. But I knew that going in. Nonetheless, I actually enjoyed the perspective presented a great deal. In part because of its relative novelty.

When the movie came out, somebody accidentally or not-so-accidentally referred to it in marketing as “a story of self-sacrifice” when it is, in fact, a story very much against such things. A part of me wonders if basically it was an act of subversion on the part of someone who was hired to to market a product they detested. But a part of me wonders if it was actually an honest mistake, that signals got crossed, and that pretty much any book that involves self-sacrifice is going to be in favor of it to some extent. Which is actually a reasonable expectation when it comes to fiction. One of the things I did really like about the book is that it did turn it on its head.

I enjoy the different, and whatever else I might say about it, this book was.

This weekend was Leaguefest, which was in DC. I won’t bore you with the details of having met up with various people you all don’t know. Instead I am just going to write about DC for a bit.

One of the conveniences of living out here is that my sister-in-law Zoey lives in DC. Which, for those of you who don’t keep track, is not too far from where we live.

She moved there shortly after getting back from abroad and settled in as it’s a great place to be a young person. I was not all that surprised that she chose to sell her car, but after this weekend, I am convinced that I would sell my cars if I lived there. Public transportation never looked so attractive.

We drove there on Friday night and spent about an hour looking for a parking spot, which we found in a garage about a mile away. That turned out to be the best parking situation I’d have all weekend.

I went out by myself on Saturday. Retracing my steps, I ended up walking 8.9 miles. After my bad experiences on Friday, I don’t know what possessed me to wear anything but tennis shoes on Saturday, but I did and have a blister on my foot the size of Delaware. Retracing my steps, I determined that I walked at least 8.9 miles.

There are a number of parking garages in the area, but they’re surprisingly hard to find and Google is of comparatively little help. A lot of them are inexplicably closed on weekend. Actually, it’s quite explicable, I suppose. They cater exclusively to commuters and I am guessing that renting them out to others on the weekends is just not worth the hassle. At a parking garage I ended up in, someone had laid a pie-sized dump on the floor. Ahhh, the majesty of our nation’s capital.

There’s also nothing like spending time in a city to make me appreciate certain aspects of living far outside of one. Besides things like parking (back in Callie, I hated walking three blocks), the lack of public restrooms (hence the poop pie, I guess) and public amenities in general is pretty noticeable. The low-trust environment leads to convenience stores and grocery stores closing earlier rather than later, no restrooms if they are open, and so on.

I was at least a half-hour out of town on my drive home when I stopped off to get a soft drink, and even there the most convenient convenience store had to buzz me in. The others stayed locked and you had to talk to them from the outside, through probably bullet-proof glass.

All of that said, I enjoyed myself until my feet became inoperable. I missed two museums due to the parking situation. I did get to see the Spy Museum, which was pretty cool. I had good – although outrageously expensive – food.

I’ve been wanting to take some trips to DC for a while. Now I realize the extent to which I am absolutely going to have to plan ahead of time so that I don’t spend all my time looking for parking spots.