Detritus on the mean streets of southeast Denver

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A broken jar of pickled carrots on the sidewalk of S. Pearl Street.

My first attempt to blog from Flickr.  I’m working on my photo essay for the class I’m taking but as always discover that I’d much rather shoot photos of random shit than meaningful shit.  This amused me because where else but South Pearl Street would the litter consist of a broken jar of pickled carrots.  If I’d had the patience of a real photographer, I suspect in a half hour or so after this photo, the sun would have caught the orange in just the right way.

More randomness from Pearl Street:

Da Bear

Anyone know why I can’t insert a second photo from Flickr?  Guess you can only blog one photo at a time!  Too bad for you, readers!

Absurdity Slider

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No, it’s not a small, tasty, metaphysical snack.  It’s a review of a review — big time-saver! — and a digression into the meaning of life.  The slider is explained below.  (Look!  A teaser!)

I minored in philosophy.  At Swarthmore.  You’d think this would have trained me to overthink almost anything.  And honestly, I can overthink important things like the font in my email or whether to get the 90 Shilling or the 1554.  But I recently* read a review in the New Yorker of a book that I think may represent the gold standard in overthinking: David Benatar’s “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.”  The thesis: since it’s worse to suffer pain than to forego pleasure and since — in the words of the reviewer, “[e]ven the best of all possible lives consists of a mixture of pleasure and pain” — it is better never to have been born.

Yes, you read that correctly.  As the review notes:

The volume is dedicated to his parents, “even though they brought me into existence,” and to his brothers, “each of whose existence, although a harm to him, is a great benefit to the rest of us.”  (It’s fun to imagine what family reunions with the Benatars are like.)

But I think I’ve found the Rosetta Stone of disability discrimination.  As the reviewer explains it:

Benatar’s case rests on a critical but, in his view, unappreciated asymmetry. Consider two couples, the A’s and the B’s .  The A’s are young, healthy, and rich. If they had children, they could give them the best of everything — schools, clothes, electronic gaming devices. Even so, we would not say that the A’s have a moral obligation to reproduce.

The B’s are just as young and rich. But both have a genetic disease, and, were they to have a child together, that child would suffer terribly. We would say, using Benatar’s logic, that the B ‘s have an ethical obligation not to procreate.

They have a WHAT?

The case of the A’s and the B’s shows that we regard pleasure and pain differently. Pleasure missed out on by the nonexistent doesn’t count as a harm. Yet suffering avoided counts as a good, even when the recipient is a nonexistent one.

And what holds for the A’s and the B’s is basically true for everyone. Even the best of all possible lives consists of a mixture of pleasure and pain. Had the pleasure been forgone — that is, had the life never been created — no one would have been the worse for it. But the world is worse off because of the suffering brought needlessly into it.

Is this guy an android?  Everyone suffers at some point.  In fact, how does life have any meaning without suffering?  Hell, without pain, how do you learn basic things like not to touch a hot stove and not to listen to the Beach Boys?  I suppose if you never existed, you wouldn’t have to go through any bothersome learning processes.  But then, what’s the point?  I guess that is his point.

“One of the implications of my argument is that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad — a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick — is worse than no life at all,” Benatar writes.

He acknowledges that many readers will have difficulty accepting such a “deeply unsettling claim.” They will say that they consider their own existence to be a blessing, and that the same goes for their children’s. But they’re only kidding themselves.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not The Onion and as near as I can tell, this dude expects his theory to be taken seriously.  On one level, it merits only derision.  Or this year’s Hitchhiker’s Guide Philosophy Award, an award I just started for philosophical arguments that measure up to my favorite ever, from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, explaining the existence of the Babel Fish:

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this:

`I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’

`But,’ says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’

`Oh dear,’ says God, `I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

`Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

But on another level, the concept that it is better to avoid all pain than to experience any pleasure explains disabiliphobia.  It explains why the non-disabled world regularly projects on to people with disabilities a far lower quality of life than the latter actually experience.  This, in turn, leads non-disabled windbags like Peter Singer to opine that it is better for infants with disabilities not to be born or to be killed in infancy.  Benatar’s theory is simply the apotheosis of Singer’s: If it’s better not to be born than to be born with quadriplegia, where do we draw the line?  Better not to be born than to be born and later in life get the sniffles.  Perhaps it’s helpful to imagine this scale as a slider of the type I’m just now learning to use in Lightroom.  We’ll call it the Absurdity Slider:

The Absurdity Slider


Benatar took the Absurdity Slider and dragged it all the way to the right — up to 11 — where not only is it best to euthanize disabled infants, but it’s best that none of us ever have been born.

Given the highly accurate “that’s bullshit!” response most people will have to Benatar’s theory, I think he’s done us a service in placing Singer’s arguments along this all-important scale.  If only I had control of the actual slider.  Any coders out there want to help me develop a working Absurdity Slider, one that could tone down the absurdity in an argument the way you adjust the contrast in a digital photo?

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* Yes it was in the April 9 New Yorker, but it is true that I only recently read it, as I have just now reached that archeological layer in the New Yorker pile next to my comfy chair.

Introducing The Cute Puppies’ Guide to Title III of the ADA

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There have been two types of post that have driven most of the traffic on this blog:  photos of my dogs; and my attempt to start an internet meme with the photo of Gus Fring being blown up by the mobster who used a wheelchair (MWD?).   So I try to publish my deep thoughts about disability rights, the practice of law, and adventures in trial technology, and what my immense readership really wants to see is photos of cute dogs and guys with their heads blown off.

This reminded me of one of my favorite Saturday Night Live sketches:  Kevin Nealon with No Attention Span News.  Not the funniest perhaps, but one that was excruciatingly accurate in portraying what it feels like to try to talk about something important but boring.  (Sorry for the ad.  It’s worth it.  Keep watching.)

With these thoughts in mind, I decided that we needed a more attention-grabbing way of presenting the ADA.  Lacking the copyright to the image of Gus Fring, but blessed with two very cute dogs, I decided to inaugurate The Cute Puppies’ Guide to Title III of the ADA:

There now!  Don’t you feel inspired to learn more?  You can check in from time to time on the FoxRobBlog, which will also have scintillating news of our latest case adventures and legal developments.  And puppies!

“Cooking” with Amy

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I’m a recovering picky eater.  From the time I started eating solid food until I was 16, I rarely strayed from the following list of foods:

Pop-Tarts (brown sugar cinnamon)
Orange juice
Peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches (white bread; crusts cut off)
Hard boiled eggs
White rice
Chicken
Flank steak
Junk food

Note that this list does not contain any vegetables or fruits beyond orange juice.  This is not a typo.

During the summer after my junior year in high school, I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks in France, first living with a French family

La Famille Gardey: brother; fellow visiting American dweeb; mother.

and then biking around with a group of American students.

It’s possible that I don’t like camping because this early camping experience involved cows.

I went from picky eater to omnivore in the nanosecond after the mother in the French family put the first dinner in front of me and it became clear that not eating was not an option.  She also tried to convert me to Catholicism and to convince me that I showered too often.  I won the former; the latter was a draw — I was permitted approximately three hard-fought-for showers per week.

Still, I loved being an omnivore, and spent the rest of the trip enjoying my newly-expanded food vocabulary — especially in the bread, cheese, and pastry categories — which was causally connected to my newly-expanded waistline.  If memory serves, my mother had to meet me at the airport in New York with a larger pair of pants.

I was even more of an omnivore during my travel in Asia.  The food in Taiwan is spectacular — from banquets to road-side stands — and saying no to a dish is a major insult to the host[ess], so I ate almost anything.  Highlights:  turtle; sea slug; thousand-year-old egg.

I still eat almost everything — with the startling exception of fruit — but given that I never learned to cook, my day-to-day diet is just the grown-up version of my childhood menu. In other words, I don’t cook; I permutate.

The list:

Buitoni cheese tortelinni
Butter lettuce
Black olives
Grilled red peppers
Near East curry couscous
Steak
Chicken
Annie’s Shiitake Sesame Salad Dressing
Fresh basil
Olive oil
Pesto

These ingredients yield a number of permutations which constitute dinner most nights of the week. For example:

Pasta:  tortellini, olive oil or pesto

Pasta couscous:*  tortellini, coucous, olive oil.

Pasta salad:  lettuce, tortelinni, olives, peppers, coucous, dressing.

Steak salad:   lettuce, steak, olives, peppers, coucous, dressing.

Steak fajitas:  tortilla, steak, lettuce, olives, peppers, basil, dressing.

Steak sandwich:  bread, steak, lettuce, peppers, basil, mustard.

Chicken curry stir-fry:  chicken, curry sauce, peppers.

Chicken salad, fajitas, or sandwich:  you get the picture.

My mother is prone to quote her favorite cookbook that it’s easier to get new friends than to learn new dishes.  I’m at least blessed with friends who are comfortable with predictability  . . . and carry-out!

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* Yes, I know couscous is technically a pasta.  I’m a big fan of carb combos like this.  For example, one of my favorite foods in the world is shao-biing you-tyau, a/k/a shao-bing yu-tiao** a Chinese breakfast that consists of a strip of deep-fried dough inside a baked sesame roll.

** I first learned Chinese at the Middlebury language school in the summer of 1979, when for whatever reason they used a romanization system called Gwoyeu Romatzyh.  GR has two notable features:  it makes more sense than any other romanization system; and it doesn’t appear to have been taught anywhere else in the US besides Middlebury in the late 70s.  I have tried to learn Pinyin, the system that both Chinese school children and American students of Chinese have been using since about 1979, but it just blends with GR in my head into an idiosyncratic romanization that makes sense to absolutely no one but me.

It’s good to be the czar

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Had a nice chat session with Dell technical support.  Little did I know I was talking to the Czar!

Unfortunately, the Czar’s powers did not extend to figuring out why my battery won’t charge, so I have to send my laptop back to Dell.  So I’ll have to spend a couple of days writing with a chisel and a rock, that is, my ca. 2005 IBM ThinkPad.  Sigh.

 

 

Does this make me an Illuminati?

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As will soon be tediously clear, I have started taking photography classes.  Not for the first time, either.  I got a serious 35mm camera* for high school graduation, took a class at the local rec center, and somehow convinced myself I knew what I was doing.  There ensued some deeply meaningful but thoroughly awful photographs, including a few that got published in the Swarthmore college newspaper after I beat out a highly competitive field of approximately zero other people for the title of Assistant Photo Editor.  So not kidding.

Herewith an example of my deeply artistic but pathetically incompetent college photography and dark room skills:


I carried the camera around campus for four non-contiguous years and then around Taiwan and other parts of Asia for the next three non-contiguous years, taking the occasional brilliant photograph, and boatloads of expensive-to-develop 35mm crap.  Actually, one of my funniest sets of travel photos was from a cross-country drive I took somewhere in the middle of law school, in which I guess I discovered real mountains for the first time, because I have close to an entire roll of slides devoted to distance shots of fields, lakes or — most commonly — the road with mountains in the background.  I now call that “the view from my morning commute.”

A few years ago, Tim gave me a seriously good DSLR camera and after spending too long using it on “auto” while trying to remember what the eff an f-stop was, I decided earlier this year to take a class.  I’m having a blast!  The first round of classes — Digital 101 at Illuminate Workshops — reacquainted me with f-stops, shutter speeds, and ISO, introduced me for the first time to the majority of the buttons and data on my camera, and then moved on to a long-overdue introduction to composition.

We had homework, which like a good little student nerd, I did.  For the first class, the instructor asked us to experiment with shutter speed and aperture:

For the second class, we were supposed to take a portrait and a “macro.”  Oh, and I forgot to mention, the instructor displays and critiques our photos.  My classmate Gabriela went first. Her macro was a stunning photo of a jade bracelet on a mirror.  Her portraits looked like this:

The reason her portraits looked like this is because SHE TOOK THIS PORTRAIT!  Why, might you ask, is Gabriela in Digital Photography 101?  No clue, but she is hilarious and asks great questions, so I’m glad she’s there.  For example, had we not reviewed Gabriela’s boudoir photo of a shapely — mostly naked — woman photographed from behind, I would not have learned that to get good photos of a naked tuchis, you have to request the owner of the tuchis to, um, clench.  The class discussed this in a professional manner, while I exerted superhuman effort not to snicker.

But then it was my turn.  Here is my macro homework .

Seriously.  We went from jade bracelets and naked tuchii to, um, a rock. Luckily my portrait homework was of my mother-in-law, so I held my own in that division!  (Though, for the record, she was fully clothed.)  The instructor was very kind to my rock, but did use it to start to teach us how Photoshop can be used to make photos more interesting.

So I’m planning to use the blog to post my photography practice from time to time, and I’m putting all of what I think of as my more interesting practice photos on Flickr, so if you’re really bored, you can hop over there and take a look.  I’m partial to architecture and abstract and averse to portraits, so there will be lots of stuff that looks like this:

Which likely only I find interesting.  Still, the occasional “ooh” or “ahh” in the comments would make me smile!

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* My photography instructor – and most of the world, I gather – would now call it a “film camera,” because of course in 1978, we didn’t have digital cameras.  If I recall correctly, this is called – in the linguistics biz – a “back formation.”  I love back formations.  Think about it: acoustic guitar; snail mail; chicken fried chicken.  I’m not sure about the last, but I love it just the same.

We need a Language Police.

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Of which, of course, I’d be Chief.

Our jurisdiction would be broad:  grammar; punctuation; semantics.  But our most important task would be punishing language abuse.   Today’s perp:  The NYT.  The charges are based on a sentence fragment in today’s Times that is superficially just crappy writing, but is in fact stunningly offensive.  In an article discussing Michelle Obama’s white ancestors, the writer makes clear that the family of the First Lady’s white great-great-great-grandfather owned her great-great-great grandmother.  At the time their child — Mrs. Obama’s great-great-grandfather, Dolphus T. Shields — was conceived, the white slave-owner was 20; his slave only 15.  The article continues:

Such forbidden liaisons across the racial divide inevitably bring to mind the story of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Mrs. Obama’s ancestors, however, lived in a world far removed from the elegance of Jefferson’s Monticello, his 5,000-acre mountain estate with 200 slaves. They were much more typical of the ordinary people who became entangled in America’s entrenched system of servitude.

Just a bunch of random, ordinary people of, you know, a couple of different skin colors, who — passive voice! — became entangled, you know, like you do when you are charging too many electrical devices and the cords end up on the floor, or your dog puts one too many rope toys in front of the back door and, you just, you know, become entangled.  No one’s fault.  That lethal system of violently-asserted racial superiority, oppression, and death was just lying around entangling ordinary people.

Rachel L. Swarns, you are under arrest for First Degree Language Abuse.

Ms. Swarns — who has apparently written a book about Ms. Obama’s multiracial ancestors — goes on to perpetrate this egregious sentence, which may form the basis of a referral to my colleagues with the Journalism Police or possibly the History Police.

[Ms. Obama’s great-great-great grandmother] had more biracial children after the Civil War, giving some of the white Shieldses hope that her relationship with [the white slave-owner] was consensual.

W.T.F.  There is no universe in which the sexual relationship between a master and a slave can be consensual.  Nor did the end of the Civil War magically turn former slaves and their former owners into free agents.

I get the motive for this:  we don’t want to offend the tender feelings of Mrs. Joan Tribble — “a retired bookkeeper who delights in her two grandchildren and her Sunday church mornings” — by suggesting that perhaps some of her distant ancestors were, um …. how can I say this delicately yet factually? … slaveowners.  Because of course “[s]ome of Mrs. Tribble’s relatives have declined to discuss the matter beyond the closed doors of their homes, fearful that they might be vilified as racists or forced to publicly atone for their forebears.”

How the hell can we teach history if we’re unwilling to just tell it like it is?

Headline: White Conservative Gadfly Goes to Jail; Dislikes Gravy

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That’s how the headline should have read in the center, front, above-the-fold article in today’s Denver Post.  I wish I were kidding.

Douglas Bruce went to jail for 104 days and faced cruel and unusual punishment:  the rolls were cold and the gravy tasted funny.  And he’s gonna sue.

I don’t know who to be more furious with:  Bruce for being a selfish jerk, or the Denver Post for devoting so much space on its front page to a middle class white guy who goes to jail for just over three months and fails to receive gourmet-level cooking.

Denver Post, Mr. Bruce, I’d like you to meet Troy Anderson.  Mr. Anderson has been in solitary confinement at the Colorado State Penitentiary for 12 years.  In those 12 years, he has not been allowed to exercise outdoors.

I’d have loved to introduce you to Shawn Vigil but, sorry to say, he’s dead.  He committed suicide at the Denver County Jail in 2005 — after being locked up for a month in solitary without a sign language interpreter.  You see, Mr. Vigil was deaf.  He was in solitary with no way to communicate with his jailers.  Wonder what he thought of the gravy?  Perhaps the Denver Post will write a front page story about that.

Actually, the Denver Post did write about Mr. Vigil’s case when we filed.  This many words.   Though I don’t have the print edition, I’m confident it wasn’t on page one.  Former Post columnist Susan Greene* also wrote about it in more detail, but of course she’s not there any more.  Can’t have someone providing nuanced coverage of marginalized people.

Back in the day, Spy Magazine had an equation for how many column inches a story would get in the New York Times based primarily on the number of people killed and the distance of the event from Times Square.**  Although I’m not a math major, there has to be some sort of equation at work here:  R x C x L x G where R = race, C = class, L = length of sentence, and G = quality of gravy.  In the newspaper world, being white (r = 100) and middle class (c=100) will completely outweigh the length of your sentence and other conditions.

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* Full disclosure:  Susie is a friend.  And also a kick-ass journalist.  The lack of her voice (and other recent departures) in the Post makes it not much more than People Magazine:  Denver Edition.

** Yes, of course it’s on the internet:  the November 1989 issue of Spy Magazine.    The equation is on page 56.  Check out page 55 for proof that Donald Trump has been annoying us for a long, long time.  And generally peruse the issue to take yourself back to a time when being a smart-ass, sarcastic, irony-appreciating young law grad felt fresh and new.  Or maybe that was just me.

[June 2:  Edited for accuracy.]

Legal Research Graph

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The pattern will continue — bouncing between 2 and 10 — up to the moment the brief is filed.  Indeed, I have been known to stop for a game of tennis ball fetch just before typing in the boilerplate “Conclusion” section.

“Whatever” — how have I overlooked this blog?

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I just had to link to this excellent explanation of privilege.  Most of the time when you say something like “nondisabled straight white men are privileged,” you are either accused of being accusatory, accused of overlooking millions of poor nondisabled straight white men, or accused of overlooking affirmative action.  John Scalzi explains that being a NSWM is like playing a role playing game on the lowest difficulty setting.  Note:  I play precisely zero role-play games, but the wonderfully-written extended metaphor is very accessible.

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

His follow-up post responding to comments and criticism is good too, as is his post ridiculing some of the stupid and/or assaholic comments.  From his comment on comments:

2. Your metaphor/analogy is good, except for [insert thing that commenter finds not good about the metaphor/analogy]

Well, yes. Metaphors are not perfect; it’s why they’re metaphors and not the thing the metaphor describes.

What’s even cooler about this post for me is that it introduced me to his blog, Whatever, and I now have the delightful adventure of reading through 15 years (!) of entertaining writing.