"Free-range kids"

So I've been thinking about this whole "free-range kids" thing - see the Newsweek column that started it all, and the accompanying blog for background - and I think there's nothing shocking about it. As I think back on it, I was pretty free-range as a kid. I was walking myself to school - about a quarter mile away - starting in third grade; that became a one-mile walk in middle school. I walked myself to swim and judo lessons at the YMCA (also about a mile), and to my buddy Anthony's house - pretty much wherever I wanted to go, I walked it, because my parents weren't into being chauffeurs. In high school, I commuted from Staten Island to Manhattan, which meant a bus, the ferry, the subway, then a half-mile or so walk, leaving the house at 6 AM and coming home at 4:30, which was after dark in the winter. I survived, and I think I'm a more self-reliant person because of it.

"So," I hear you say, "how are you going to be with Olivia and Audrey?" Well, it's not as easy to get around here on foot as it was on Staten Island, and the neighborhood elementary school is too far away for them to reasonably walk it, so I'm sure we'll be chauffeuring a lot more than my parents did. As with many aspects of parenting, we'll be figuring it out and making it up as we go along. Philosophically, we're more in line with the free-range idea than we are with the so-called "hovercraft" concept. How we will implement that is yet to be determined, but that's the direction I expect we'll choose. Ask me again in a few years and I'll let you know how it's going.

You'd think quiet in school would be a good thing

Would someone please explain to me what's wrong with a silent protest?

In Clear Creek, staff members have been fielding calls and e-mails from parents concerned about students taking a silent vow in support of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth at some schools Friday. And this week, Alton Frailey, superintendent of Katy's school district, let all teachers know that -- though no one asked his district to participate in the silent protest -- if someone did, "my answer is no."

His districtwide e-mail on the subject, which confused and offended some teachers, came in response to form letters from parents complaining about Day of Silence, a national, and usually non-disruptive, silent student protest meant to draw attention to bullying based on sexual orientation.

"The degree of exposure and political posturing currently being generated is bringing more attention to this particular subject than is necessary," Frailey wrote Monday in an e-mail that also instructed teachers not to make exceptions for students taking vows of silence.

The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network has registered five participating schools in Katy, at least two in the Clear Creek school district and more than 20 in the Houston area. The organization estimates that more than 6,000 schools and several hundred thousand kids will keep silent Friday.

Usually these students try not to speak the entire day, although some break their vow if required to participate in class. Many also distribute pamphlets or wear T-shirts, letting peers and teachers know why they're keeping mum. This year, students are protesting in the name of Lawrence King, a California eighth-grader who in February was shot and killed by another student, allegedly because he was gay.

The event began in 1996, but only started getting negative attention recently. In 2005, the conservative legal group the Alliance Defense Fund staged a counterprotest, called Day of Truth, which supports the "free speech rights of Christian students to present an opposing viewpoint to those organizations that promote homosexual behavior in the schools," according to the group's Web site. Then this year, the American Family Association sent an alert encouraging parents to keep kids home Friday if other students at their schools are participating in the Day of Silence.

"There are a lot of misinformation campaigns originating with groups who recognize that the Day of Silence is a very powerful positive thing," said Daryl Presgraves, a GLSEN spokesman.

The AFA did not return a call seeking comment, but one form letter from its Web site notes "by allowing students to remain silent, administrations fail to protect the classroom from intrusive, political exploitation."

Not that the AFA would know anything about intrusive political exploitation. This sounds to me like about as non-intrusive a protest as you could ask for. Short of sending kids home for wearing the T-shirt, which strikes me as being way more disruptive than the protest itself, what would they have the administration do? Punish someone for not talking during the lunch period? That would be pretty ridiculous.

I think this sums it up well:

"I was greatly offended," said a gay teacher with the district, who asked not to be identified because he feared backlash. "What is the worst that can happen? Good Lord, how much instruction could you get done if kids were silent for a day?"

Yeah, you'd think that would be encouraged. We sure do live in strange times, don't we?

How big a house do you need?

The beginning of this article about the state of the seven-figures housing market in Houston fascinated me.

When Ronald and Paige Wardell began shopping for a house inside the Loop, they figured they could find everything they wanted for $750,000 -- tops.

Their requirements: at least 4,000 square feet, a yard for their two young children, and that it be close to Ronald Wardell's Galleria-area law office.

"We quickly learned that for the type of house we wanted and the size of house we wanted, that simply wasn't going to be found," he said.

So they upped their budget and expanded their search.

Last spring, the Wardells moved into a 5-year-old, 5,370-square-foot house, sitting on just under an acre, north of Interstate 10 in the Spring Branch area. The price: $1.25 million.

I'm trying to wrap my mind around a 5000+ square-foot house. That's a heck of a lot of house, especially for four people. It's more than twice the size of my house, and my house isn't small. I'm wondering how you keep such a large house clean - it must be a full-time job. I'm also wondering what the utility bills must be like. I don't begrudge anyone who has the means the privilege of buying such a house. If you want it and you can pay for it, be my guest. Just don't moan about the property taxes, especially if you went more than 50% over your initial budget to buy it - I've got no sympathy for you there. I just don't quite get the allure of a house that big. Am I weird for thinking that way? Let me know.

Whither carpal tunnel syndrome?

Was the epidemic of carpal tunnel syndrome overstated?

"At its height of diagnosis, anybody showing up at a doctor's office with wrist pain or hand pain was being diagnosed with carpal tunnel," said Carol Harnett, vice president of insurer Hartford Financial Services Group's group benefits division.

Since then, carpal tunnel cases have plummeted, declining 21 percent in 2006 alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among workers in professional and business services, the number of carpal tunnel syndrome cases fell by half between 2005 and 2006.

What changed?

First, it may not have been the white-collar epidemic it appeared to be.

A 2001 study by the Mayo Clinic found heavy computer users (up to seven hours a day) had the same rate of carpal tunnel as the general population. Harvard University headlined a 2005 news release: Computer use deleted as carpal tunnel syndrome cause.

"Clearly, if keyboarding activities were a significant risk for carpal tunnel, we should have seen, over the last 10 to 15 years, an explosion of cases," said Dr. Kurt Hegmann, director, the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational & Environmental Health. "If keyboarding were a risk, it cannot be a strong factor."

Blue-collar workers, especially those doing assembly line work such as sewing, cleaning and meat or poultry packing, have a far greater incidence of carpal tunnel than white-collar workers, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

That doesn't mean white-collar workers don't get carpal tunnel and related disorders. But it may mean such disorders were overdiagnosed when they were most in the news, resulting in an artificially high number of cases by the late 1990s. Most doctors have dropped the term RSI, calling them "musculoskeletal disorders" while government agencies like "cumulative trauma disorders."

Now, some experts think some of those patients had "referred pain" from trouble elsewhere, such as the neck. Other theories claim attention to ergonomics has prevented injuries, or that they have become underreported because they lack the immediacy of a broken bone.

For what it's worth, I'm not the most ergonomically correct typist out there, and I've never had any problems. I do on infrequent occasions feel some mild pain or numbness in my fingers or wrists, at which point I back off from the computer for a few hours, and then I'm fine. Maybe I'm just lucky, I don't know. I have plenty of coworkers who've used wrist braces and whatnot, and I'm certainly not doubting the existence of these maladies. But I can't say I'm surprised to hear that they're not as prevalent as they were once said to be.

New frontiers in outsourcing

Giving "Made in India" a whole new meaning.

Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India's mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).

"People are increasingly exposed to the idea of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show," said Dr. Kaushal Kadam at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai. Just an hour earlier she had created an embryo for Gher and his partner with sperm from one of them (they would not say which) and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before in another part of the clinic.

The clinic, known more formally as Rotunda -- The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents. The donor and surrogate are always different women; doctors say surrogates are less likely to bond with the babies if there is no genetic connection.

There are no firm statistics on how many surrogacies are being arranged in India for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp increase.

Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.

"Every time there is a success story, hundreds of inquiries follow," he said.

If you're okay with the idea of surrogacy, then I don't see any reason to object to this. Why not get the best price? Globalization is changing our lives in so many ways.

Do not mail?

We're all familiar with the national Do Not Call registry, right? Well, now some people want there to be a similar thing for snail mail.

Vermont legislator Chris Pearson had a sense that the people were with him when he proposed a bill last November to allow residents to block junk mail.

He got media attention, radio interview requests and e-mails from constituents eager to stop the credit card offers, furniture catalogs and store fliers that increasingly clog their mailboxes.

Then came the pushback from the postmasters, who told Pearson and other lawmakers that "standard" mail, the post office's name for junk mail, has become the lifeblood of the U.S. Postal Service and that jobs depend on it.

"The post office and the business groups are pretty well-organized," said Pearson, whose bill remains in a committee and has not been scheduled for a vote.

Barred by law from lobbying, the Postal Service is nonetheless trying to make its case before a growing number of state legislatures that are weighing bills to create Do Not Mail registries, similar to the popular National Do Not Call Registry.

The agency has printed 3,000 "information packets" about the economic value of standard mail, with specific data for each of the 18 states that have considered a Do Not Mail Registry. It has sent postmasters to testify before legislative committees across the nation.

"The Postal Service has come in and clobbered legislators," said Todd Paglia, executive director of ForestEthics, an environmental group that has collected 289,000 signatures on an online petition to Congress that calls for a National Do Not Mail Registry. "It's really a people-versus-special interest kind of battle."

I have a modest amount of sympathy for the Postal Service here. If my mail is like most people's, then junk mail really is their biggest part of the business, and I can't blame them for fighting to protect that business. Doesn't mean I want to see them win that fight, but I don't think they're evil for engaging it. I should also point out that as is the case with email spam, the catalog problem would largely solve itself if people simply stopped responding to them. This stuff continues to exist because it works.

Despite the Postal Service's efforts, I do think that we will have a Do Not Mail registry some day. This is an idea that's going to be very popular, and once a few states succeed in passing a law, there will be a lot of pressure on Congress to follow suit. It will likely take several years, but I believe it will happen. In the meantime, I recommend using Catalog Choice to reduce your own personal junk mail burden. And contact your state rep and Congressperson if you want to get the ball rolling on the ultimate goal.

The next peeing Calvin

You know those little white-on-black car window stickers that say "W The President"? They were a great achievement in iconography - elegant, eye-catching, and for awhile at least, ubiquitous - whose success is marked by the many imitations (Kinky Friedman's "K The Governor"), parodies ("F The President", "M The Moron"), and variants (Mark Bennett's "V The Amendment" is my favorite so far) it has spawned.

I think we're about to enter a new era for these stickers. I saw the following on a car the other day, and thankfully happened to have my camera with me that day:

I'm not exactly sure what the message is that this is trying to convey, but I don't think it matters. It made me wonder how far from the original image these offshoots will eventually go, and if we'll eventually forget that there was an original image from which these things descended. For now, I just thought it was amusing. What's the most interesting variant on the W sticker you've seen?

Phone hate

I confess, I had no idea so many people hated talking on the phone like this. It's a little weird for me, because much of my professional career has involved phone work - tech support for a software company, followed by help desk work elsewhere; I'd say about half my career has been dependent on the phone, with the rest still using it heavily. Needless to say, if I felt this way, I'd be in the wrong line of work. While I can honestly say there have been occasions where the last thing in the world I wanted to do was answer another call, I've never developed any loathing of it.

There really is no replacement for the phone in the IT support business. Sure, an email with a screen shot can be effective. I have colleagues who use chat heavily for certain tasks. With various remote-desktop-sharing technologies, you as the support person can often do most of the work for the customer, without really needing their involvement at all. But I find that in general, a question emailed to me by a customer or colleague often requires several followups, and not infrequently an ultimate phone call, to resolve because they don't know what information is relevant for me to be able to answer them. The most effective way for me to extract that information is a phone call, where I can be sure they understand what I'm asking them for and I can guide them through whatever steps they need to take to give it to me. This sort of thing can be done by email, but not without a lot more effort.

Obviously, your mileage may vary. For another perspective, let me tell you a story about my mother-in-law, who for years was the office manager and legal secretary to my father-in-law, who is a recently retired attorney here in Houston. Some years back, when they were first getting Internet access installed in the office (which is to say, they got a modem), I showed Sharon some goverment forms online that she could download and submit. I told her that doing it that way meant she wouldn't have to spend so much time on the phone. She looked at me with big eyes, and said in all sincerity "But I like to talk on the phone!" I couldn't argue with that.

Why you shouldn't spank your kids

Yeesh.

Researchers have uncovered another damaging consequence of spanking: risky sexual behaviors, or even sexual deviancy, when the child grows up.

"This adds one more harmful side effect to spanking," said Murray Straus, a spanking expert who was expected to present the findings of four studies at the American Psychological Association's Summit on Violence and Abuse in Relationships in Bethesda, Md., on Thursday.

"I think that it's pretty powerful," said Elizabeth Gershoff, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Social Work. "It's across several studies and across different forms of either risky or deviant sexual behavior."

[...]

A meta-analysis of spanking studies conducted by Gershoff found 93 percent agreement among studies that spanking can lead to such problems as delinquent and anti-social behavior in childhood along with aggression, criminal and anti-social behavior and spousal or child abuse as an adult.

"There's probably nothing else in child development that has 93 percent agreement in results," Straus said.

I confess, I've never been particularly tempted to use corporal punishment on Olivia (Audrey is too young for punishment in any meaningful sense; correction, yes, punishment, no). It's not my style (or Tiffany's), and she responds quite well to things like timeouts. But if the temptation ever presents itself, I'm going to think about this article before I act.

Having said that, I found the tone a tad bit off-putting.

The review being presented at the meeting are the first to look at the relationship of spanking to sexual behavior.

They found that spanking and other corporal punishment is associated with an increased probability of verbally and physically coercing a dating partner to have sex; risky sex such as premarital sex without using a condom; and masochistic sex such as spanking during sex.

There is a "dose response" at work here. "The more parents spank, the higher the probability of harmful side effects," Straus noted.

Of course, there's a similar dose response for smokers. But if someone reaches the age of 65 without developing lung cancer, it doesn't mean that smoking isn't harmful. It means the person was one of the lucky ones.

It's the same with spanking, Straus said. "If a person says, 'I was spanked, and I don't have any interest in bondage and discipline sex, that's correct, but it's not because spanking is OK, it's because they're one of the lucky ones."

I'm uncomfortable with equating cigarettes with B&D. The former is unquestionably unhealthy; the latter, if consensual, seems perfectly harmless. I'm not sure if this is a careless characterization, or if they really do intend to lump B&D with other, clearly more risky, behaviors, but this strikes me as fearmongering to some degree. I don't think it detracts from the overall conclusion, but a little tightening of the message might be in order here.

The urge to conserve

The urge to conserve goes mainstream. Headlines like that are weird to me, because it's always seemed mainstream to me.

A growing acceptance of human-induced climate change and the link between energy and national security has pushed conservation into the mainstream, industry consultant Joseph Stanislaw says, giving consumers more power than ever before.

In a paper to be released during the Deloitte Oil & Gas Conference in Houston today, Stanislaw says energy consumption has become a political issue because of greater awareness of its effect "on our wallets, on foreign policy, the environment and climate change."

In turn, that is changing how governments and companies are answering the world's growing demand for energy. It's no longer a matter of just finding more supplies but also finding ways to use less.

"Conservation isn't sacrifice, it's opportunity," said Stanislaw, a well-known economist and co-founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "The amount of investment that will be made in the coming decades in these areas will be enormous."

There will still be a need for huge supplies of oil and natural gas for decades to come, he said, but the breakthrough in perception means long-term changes.

Consumers "are, in effect, on the frontier of discovering new energy reserves -- since energy not used is arguably the best, cheapest and least environmentally damaging source of supply," he said.

I remember, as a kid in New York in the 70s, seeing a barrage of TV ads (usually featuring a member of the Yankees broadcasting team, like Phil Rizzuto) by Con Edison - the utility company, mind you - urging people to conserve energy. New York was forever suffering blackouts back then, especially in the summer, and the only preventative measure was using less. Then there was the OPEC price shocks of 1973-74 and the resulting shortages, for which I remember waiting on gas lines, something which we got to experience again in 1979. Again, the most viable option was to use less. As such, the idea of conservation has been, for me, a lifelong concept. Maybe I'm the odd one in that regard, I don't know. But if it really is just becoming "mainstream" now, all I can say is no wonder we are where we are.

AT&T to ditch the payphone business

The day in which our nation's youth will completely fail to grasp the whole Superman/phone booth thing draws ever closer.

AT&T Inc. plans to exit the pay-phone business by the end of 2008, company officials said Monday.

The largest telephone company in the United States is pulling out of the market at a time when consumers are relying more heavily on alternatives, such as wireless phones. AT&T also operates the country's leading wireless company.

AT&T's Public Communications unit will continue to honor existing contracts and customer service commitments until the business is phased out. The unit holds numerous contracts at government correctional facilities. All of these customers will receive advance notifications of the company's specific plans as well as information on other pay-phone providers and product options.

[...]

AT&T officials say pay phones in the United States have declined across the industry from about 2.6 million phones in 1998 to an estimated 1 million phones today.

I've racked my brain, and I can't think of the last time I used a pay phone. They just don't register on my consciousness since I started carrying a cell. Do you remember your last time?

Dave Mock remembers scoring some change as a kid by checking coin return slots regularly. I don't think I ever found any money that way, but I do recall a trick a high school buddy of mine used to employ to make free calls from pay phones. There was about a two second grace period after your call connected before your dime (or quarter) was fully consumed by the phone. If you hung up right away after the call connected, you'd still get your money back, as if you'd hung up without a connection being made. I'm not sure why this was the case - answering machines weren't exactly ubiquitous back then, and the duration was too short to ascertain you'd reached a wrong number - but that's how it was. Anyway, my buddy had a prearranged deal when he called another friend of his at that friend's house from a payphone. When the friend answered, Buddy would quickly shout out the first three digits of the payphone's number, then hang up. After retrieving his dime, he'd call again, this time announcing the last four digits of the number, and again hang up in time to get a refund. His friend would then call the payphone to talk to him. Slick, no? File it under Great Obsolete Scams of the 20th Century. Thanks to Dwight for the catch.

Marketing atheism

Looking for a special gift for that devout atheist in your life? It might be harder than you think to find something appropriate. According to Greg Beato, atheists are way behind the entrepreneurial curve.

Look for atheist perfume, and you'll be looking for eternity. Try to find the works of Bertrand Russell packaged like the latest issue of Self or Cosmo, as the publishing company Thomas Nelson does with the Bible. ("Becoming is the complete New Testament in magazine format, but it wouldn't be a culture 'zine if it didn't address men, beauty, fitness and food!") Search for the atheist equivalent to Christian yo-yos and Christian neckties, and you will come up as empty-handed as Mother Teresa passing the plate at Christopher Hitchens' dinner table.

To many freethinkers, the idea of atheist lip balm or atheist jelly beans may be even less appealing than Christian lip balm and Christian jelly beans. One virtue of non-belief is that not every aspect of your life has to be yoked to some clingy deity who feels totally left out if you don't include Him in everything you do. And then there's the logical disconnect: What does candy have to do with atheism? Why not stick with books, arguments, reason?

If today's Christian entrepreneurs thought like that, atheists might not have to be concerned about their own current marginalization. Instead of fretting about "obscene spending bonanzas" or admitting that jelly beans are mentioned in the Bible exactly as often as Homo habilis is, Christian entrepreneurs embrace pop culture. They recognize what the consumer puritans behind efforts like Buy Nothing Day never quite grasp: that the stuff we buy, from lipstick to Star Wars figurines, helps to fashion identities, to build communities, to infuse our lives with purpose and meaning.

Amusing stuff. Check it out.

Paper or plastic?

Are plastic bags evil? Some places think so.

In recent years, countries from Ireland to Australia have passed laws to cut use of plastic bags. But the movement only recently gained momentum in the U.S.

While plastic bags were not used widely in supermarkets and other retail outlets until the early 1980s, they're now ubiquitous, and Americans use billions a year.

Last month San Francisco's ordinance began outlawing plastic bags at large supermarkets, encouraging them to use recyclable paper bags or compostable ones made of cornstarch or potato starch. The ban will be extended later to big chain pharmacies.

A number of other cities are also considering plastic bag bans, including Boston; Baltimore; Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Santa Monica, Calif.; and Annapolis, Md. In Texas, Austin and El Paso have looked at bans as well.

Yet in Austin, and other cities including New York and Philadelphia, discussions recently have shifted toward plastic bag recycling.

"The only thing we all agreed on was a need to recycle more," said Rick Cofer, who runs a Web site called www.bagthebags.com in support of a plastic bag ban in Austin.

Cofer has participated in meetings with city officials, environmental groups and the plastic bag industry since Austin's city council passed a resolution in April calling for a reduction in plastic bags.

Recycling programs have gained momentum amid concerns that bags made of recycled paper or "bioplastics" would cost more to produce than conventional plastic bags, and consumers could end up paying the bill.

A conventional plastic bag costs about 2 cents to make, compared with 5 to 6 cents for a recycled paper sack and 6 cents or more for a bag made of compostable plastic, said Donna Dempsey, managing director of the Progressive Bag Alliance, a plastic bag industry lobbying group run out of Houston.

The plastic bag industry hopes that recycling programs, if passed in some major cities, could serve as models for the rest of the nation.

"We believe New York is the tipping point," said Isaac Bazbaz, whose family owns Superbag, a major plastic bag supplier to Wal-Mart that has its headquarters and factory in northwest Houston.

I think a greater emphasis on reuse and recycling is always a good thing, even if the price of producing a recycled plastic bag is currently higher than it is for producing a new one. I'd expect that cost to come down as the demand for recycled plastic bags increases, and even without it, easing the burden on landfills makes up for the differential. I'd like to see more incentives for recycling as we go. Perhaps there's still time for Mayor White to address that before he moves on.

By the way, we do use plastic grocery bags for pet waste retrieval and disposal. I also use the plastic sleeves that home-delivered editions of the Chron come in for that purpose. What do you do with yours?

Ending euthenasia

This is a worthy project.

A local animal welfare group today will launch an ambitious effort to stop the euthanasia of dogs and cats at area shelters by the end of 2013.

Sean Hawkins, president of Saving Animals Across Borders, said Harris County could be turned into a no-kill area if advocates are able to spay and neuter 50,000 animals a year for five years.

"The shelters don't want to be destroying healthy animals," he said. "And we don't need to be building more shelters to warehouse these animals. We've set a lofty goal."

Last year, about 125,000 cats and dogs were taken into the Houston area's five main shelters -- the city Bureau of Animal Regulation and Control, the county animal shelter, the Houston Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Citizens for Animal Protection and the Houston Humane Society. About 80,000 of those were euthanized, Hawkins said.

About 25,000 of those animals were adopted. Owners picked up the remainder.

The goal of Saving Animals' program, called Fix Houston, is to reduce the number of animals taken into the shelters by 50,000 a year.

To kick off the program, Savings Animals will open its first Fix Houston spay-neuter clinic, which will offer inexpensive sterilizations, near the Katy Freeway in west Harris County today. Four more clinics are to open by the end of 2008.

[...]

"What he is trying to do can be done. It's not going to be easy. But if anybody can do it, it's Sean Hawkins," said Merritt Clifton, editor of the Animal People, a newspaper that covers animal protection issues. "He's worked in a lot harder areas than Houston, such as Mexico and the Navajo reservation."

Cindy Shaw, shelter operations coordinator at Citizens for Animal Protection, a nonprofit shelter on the Katy Freeway, said she hoped Fix Houston succeeds.

"We all want to eliminate the wholesale euthanasia that we have seen in Houston for so long. I think it is a wonderful initiative," Shaw said.

Even if Fix Houston fails to turn the shelters into no-kill operations by 2013, it should increase the number of animal sterilizations in the area significantly, she said.

[PetSmart Charities director Susana] Della Maddalena said Fix Houston may take longer than anticipated to attain its no-kill goal, but PetSmart will be satisfied if the program makes significant gains in eight to 10 years.

About 70 percent of cats and dogs must be sterilized in a region that wants to run no-kill shelters, Clifton said. Della Maddalena put the number at 80 percent.

Among many other reasons why this is a Good Thing is it would have to save the county a bunch of money to see that big a reduction in the number of animals it handles. And even though things are a whole lot better around here than they used to be, you still want to limit the county's involvement in animal control if possible. It's pretty simple - the more spaying and neutering up front, the fewer animals that have to be put down later on. I wish Fix Houston all the best.

Comics curmudgeoning

sigh Why must the Chron mess with my comics?

The good news is that, Monday through Saturday, one page of comics will be printed in color.

The bad news is that, Monday through Saturday, the number of pages devoted to comics will be reduced by one.

The Sunday comics pages will not be reduced. There will be one slight change. Sherman's Lagoon will be added to the lineup, replacing My Cage.

The comic strips that are being dropped can still be found online at chron.com/comics. You can even build your own comics page by using tools available at that site.

Why is the paper doing this? It's a cost-cutting measure. The Chronicle has run more comics than other newspapers for years, but syndication fees and increases in the cost of newsprint make these changes necessary. The decision was made only after other serious cost-cutting measures were implemented at the paper.

I'm one of those hopeless throwbacks for whom nothing quite compares to the experience of reading a newspaper in its original form. I love online content as much as anyone, but I have a longstanding habit of reading the paper at lunch, and you just can't do that on a computer. Fewer comics in the print issue = less enjoyment for me.

Now I know the Chron lets you customize your own comics page, but as I said in a comment on this About:Chron post, I'd much prefer they provide an RSS feed for each strip, because that's something I can get to via Bloglines from whatever computer I happen to be using, which isn't the case for bookmarks. If they're gonna make me read some of my favorite comics online, the least they can do is let me read them in my preferred way.

A considerable amount of thought went into deciding which strips would be dropped and which would remain. Some of the comics ranked poorly in a recent survey of readers. Some were new comics that had not yet developed a following. Some of the older comics that were dropped were no longer being produced by the original author.

On the one hand, while they moved "Shoe" online, dinosaurs like "BC","Peanuts", and "Hagar the Horrible" are still being printed. On the other hand, inexplicably long-running page-cloggers like "Mary Worth" and "Gasoline Alley" are gone as well. It's a little odd when you think about it, since you figure the audience for those strips are the least likely to read comics online, but I'll take it as progress. It would have been nicer had they given some of those newer strips more of a chance, but on balance I think they made some decent decisions. Now if they give me my RSS feeds, I'll quit griping. For now, at least.

How the Candy Man stole Halloween

Happy Halloween, everyone! We're going to be up to our clavicles in Trick or Treaters this evening - I'll post some pictures like I did last year to give you a feel for how busy it gets. But before that, take a moment to read and remember the story of Ronald Clark O'Bryan, also known as the Candy Man, who murdered his son by poisoning his Halloween candy in 1974, thus also effectively killing the Trick or Treat tradition in Houston for a generation. May we never know his like again.

Scaife v Scaife

Oh my God. This story of the incredibly messy, vicious, and tawdry divorce fight between right-wing sugar daddy Richard Mellon Scaife and his second wife Margaret Ritchie Scaife, is the guiltiest pleasure I've had in awhile. Just read this bit, in which Ritchie tries to reclaim the dog that was swiped from her yard:

On the afternoon of April 6, 2006, Ritchie stopped her car when she spotted a housekeeper of Richard's walking Beauregard in the neighborhood. Game on. The cops later said that Ritchie punched 51-year-old Sue Patterson, then tried to grab the dog. A secretary of Richard's, 77-year-old Genevieve Still, saw Ritchie and Patterson on the ground, with Ritchie on top, pulling Patterson's hair. When she tried to intervene, Still wound up with "a swift kick to the lower back," she told police. Then a security guard named Dennis Bradshaw got in on the action and took a slap to the head, which reportedly broke his glasses.

Ritchie did not win this one-on-three suburban cage match, nor did she manage to grab Beauregard. She did, however, get arrested, again, this time for assault. All three of Richard Scaife's employees went to the hospital, where they were treated for scratches and bruises, then released, the Post-Gazette reported. A judge eventually dismissed the assault case, though personal-injury lawsuits by the employees are still pending.

Beauregard, by the way, still lives with Richard.

You just can't make this stuff up. All you needed was a lily pond and you'd have had Krystle versus Alexis, the sequel. Read and enjoy, and try not to feel too dirty afterwards for having enjoyed it. Link via TPM.

Bad fortune cookies

Bummer.

The messages in fortune cookies are typically vague, banal and optimistic. But some cookies are now serving up some surprisingly downbeat advice.

"Today is a disastrous day. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," reads one fortune showing up around the country.

"It's over your head now. Time to get some professional help," advises another.

As the messages, contained in cookies made by Wonton Food in Queens, have spread across the country, some diners have registered their reactions online. As a result, the company has a marketing challenge on its hands.

One blogger, who got the "professional help" fortune, wrote: "I shot the audacious baked item a dirty look and proceeded to eat it. And I hope it hurt."

Bernard Chow, marketing coordinator at Wonton Food, says he had not set out to insult anybody when he asked his team of freelance writers to come up with some new messages.

"We wanted our fortune cookies to be a little bit more value-added," Mr. Chow said. "We wanted to get some different perspective, to write something that is more contemporary."

Well, at least you can still add "in bed" to the end of them. As long as that never changes, I think the republic will survive.

Father, may I?

From the Things I Don't Quite Understand Department: Asking Daddy's permission to marry his daughter.

Before Bob Hunt dropped to bended knee on the famed Cliff Walk in Newport, R.I., and asked his high school sweetheart to marry him, he'd taken her father to dinner at a Chili's restaurant and sought his permission.

''Because I have such a great relationship with her family,'' Hunt says, ''it makes it that much more important that I ask for permission.''

Reviving a tradition that seemingly went the way of the flapper and Prohibition, young men like Hunt these days are talking to their intendeds' parents before popping the question. While there are no numbers to track the trend, call a bridal store or wedding venue or otherwise inquire among the betrothed and the newlywed and their parents and it is easy to find examples. Jenna Bush's fiancé, Henry Hager, reportedly had a private tête-à-tête with her father, the president, before he proposed one summer morning at sunrise atop Cadillac Mountain in Maine. What these young men embrace as a gesture of courtesy and respect has roots in an era when women had few rights and little opportunity.

''It was a fairly common practice based on the notion of making alliances between families and passing the daughter who was legally the property of the father onto the husband,'' says Temple University historian Beth Bailey. ''What we're seeing right now is an odd combination of young people with progressive sentiments and a real desire for conventional gender roles and arrangements''

It never occurred to me to ask permission of Tiffany's dad before we decided to get married. For that matter, I never really asked Tiffany to marry me, either - as she puts it, we had a protracted negotiation. I've had a good relationship with my in-laws from the beginning - our second date was a double date with them to a 50s-style sock hop party - and I consider this a blessing. If Tiffany had told me it was important to talk to her parents before we made any announcements, I'd have done so out of respect for her. But the decision to get married was ours and ours alone.

Likewise, it would never occur to me to expect that a future son-in-law would seek my "permission" before proposing to Olivia or Audrey. Should that ever happen, I'll have two questions for him: Why aren't you asking her, and what would you do if my answer was "No, you may not marry her, I absolutely forbid it"? I understand the desire to ask for a blessing, and if it's couched in those terms (and if both Tiffany and I are approached together), then I won't give him a hard time. But my daughters are not my property. They are their own people, and they will make their own decisions. Maybe some people think this tradition is respectful to the father. Speaking as a father, I think it's disrespectful to the daughter. Link via Feministing.

No more catalogs!

Kos complains about the number of unsolicited catalogs he gets, and shares a solution to the problem:

Enter Catalog Choice, a project endorsed by the NRDC and the National Wildlife Council to help stem this wasteful practice.

You enter your personal information, check off the catalogs you receive from a list, and they contact those merchants and ask that they stop sending you their crap. And the real impact of participating and spreading the word could be huge:

The production and disposal of direct mail alone consumes more energy than 3 million cars.

Over eight million tons of trees are consumed each year in the production of paper catalogs.

Disgusting for a "product" that few people ask for, and even fewer need.

Amen. Years ago, I bought flowers through a national florist. I started receiving their catalog after that, four times a year, even though I only used them maybe three times total. As is often the case, I eventually started getting multiple copies, thanks to a misspelling of my name on one order. It took forever, and multiple calls, to get them to stop. I'm so totally doing this.

RIP, Lisa Moore

As expected, the character Lisa Moore from Funky Winkerbean has died from breast cancer.

[A]s readers mourn Lisa Moore, they may find some comfort in knowing that writer Tom Batiuk promises big changes for the story.

In May, Batiuk returned to a breast-cancer story line he started in 1999. Lisa had a mastectomy, completed treatment, recovered her good health, had a daughter and lived happily with Les.

When Lisa received news in the spring that her cancer had returned, many readers were unhappy. "Don't let Lisa die" was the message they sent.

The messages imploring Batiuk to devise a miracle cure for Lisa tapered off when it became apparent where things were going, he said. Now he's getting e-mails from those who have been touched by cancer.

"They are getting ahold of me and saying they are gratified that somebody is doing this and that somebody is telling the true story, which is very, very nice. And that's the majority."

The response from cancer patients and those who have lost loved ones surprised him a bit.

"Because I certainly could have understood that this could have been coming at the wrong time for certain people," he said. "But I guess it's just human nature. Everyone approaches things differently."

I admit, I didn't like the story line when I heard about it. I'd still prefer to have seen Lisa recover, but I've coped with it.

Batiuk is ready to bring some hope to the story line and will make adjustments to the strip, he said. After Lisa's death, the Funky Winkerbean timeline jumps ahead 10 years.

Batiuk said he didn't want to go though a year or more of mourning with Lisa's widower, Les, and he wanted to move the characters forward.

Les will be a single father dealing with Summer, his 15-year-old daughter. Funky will be 46.

"All the core characters are going to have families," said Batiuk, 60. "I think that reflects the readers who followed Funky all along."

Looking back at what I wrote before, I was right in that Darin and Lisa realized what their relationship was before she died, but I was wrong to predict that Darin and Jessica would follow in her path as teenage parents. I wonder if they'll be a couple in the future story line. We'll see. Meanwhile, rest in peace, Lisa Moore.

Twenty-five years of smileys

So I'm reading this story about the origin of the smiley - you know, :-) - which was first suggested as a way to compensate for the fact that you don't get cues like tone of voice and facial expressions in written communications like email, and I see that even a quarter century later, that can still be a wide gulf to bridge.

Amy Weinberg, a University of Maryland linguist and computer scientist, said emoticons such as the smiley were "definitely creeping into the way, both in business and academia, people communicate."

"In terms of things that language processing does, you have to take them into account," she said. "If you're doing almost anything ... and you have a sentence that says 'I love my boss' and then there's a smiley face, you better not take that seriously."

Um, well, actually, you ought to judge it from the context rather than jump to a conclusion. As Sigmund Freud once said, sometimes a smiley is just a smile. Now if you'd punctuated that sentence with :-P, then the meaning would be more clear. But as with so many other things, the meaning of the smiley has adapted and gained nuance over time, and sometimes it just means "I'm happy". :-) See?

Not good enough for me!

Is it just me, or did anyone else read this Whitney Casey column about "first date deal-breakers" and say to themselves "No wonder these guys are all still single!" I mean, of course there are some traits that should be big red flags in potential mates - lying, manipulativeness, unresolved issues with exes, that sort of thing. But "sporting fingers with nail polish that's partially or mostly flaked off"? Are you kidding me? I think that unless you yourself have been photographed for GQ, you should consider such a thing to be a minor imperfection rather than an unforgivable sin. Call me crazy.

Teaching children to fear

This is the most depressing article I've read in awhile.

Last month, I wrote about how our culture teaches children to fear men. Hundreds of men responded, many lamenting that they've now become fearful of children. They said they avert their eyes when kids are around, or think twice before holding even their own children's hands in public.

Frank McEnulty, a builder in Long Beach, Calif., was once a Boy Scout scoutmaster. "Today, I wouldn't do that job for anything," he says. "All it takes is for one kid to get ticked off at you for something and tell his parents you were acting weird on the campout."

It's true that men are far more likely than women to be sexual predators. But our society, while declining to profile by race or nationality when it comes to crime and terrorism, has become nonchalant about profiling men. Child advocates are advising parents never to hire male babysitters. Airlines are placing unaccompanied minors with female passengers.

Child-welfare groups say these precautions minimize risks. But men's rights activists argue that our societal focus on "bad guys" has led to an overconfidence in women. (Children who die of physical abuse are more often victims of female perpetrators, usually mothers, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.)

[...]

The result of all this hyper-carefulness, however, is that men often feel like untouchables. In Cochranville, Pa., Ray Simpson, a bus driver, says that he used to have 30 kids stop at his house on Halloween. But after his divorce, with people knowing he was a man living alone, he had zero visitors. "I felt like crying at the end of the evening," he says.

At Houston Intercontinental Airport, businessman Mitch Reifel was having a meal with his 5-year-old daughter when a policeman showed up to question him. A passerby had reported his interactions with the child seemed "suspicious."

In Skokie, Ill., Steve Frederick says the director of his son's day-care center called him in to reprimand him for "inappropriately touching the children." "I was shocked," he says. "Whatever did she mean?" She was referring to him reading stories with his son and other kids on his lap. A parent had panicked when her child mentioned sitting on a man's lap.

Olivia and I have already taken one plane trip together; it would have been two had it not been for that meddlesome case of pneumonia. It never would have occurred to me that someone might have seen her with me and called the cops because they thought a 40-year-old man alone with a 3-year-old girl in a public place was somehow "suspicious". Good thing, too, because I fear I'd have become so indignant about it that I might've gotten busted just on general principles. I don't think they refund your ticket when that happens.

This just makes me sad. I didn't grow up with an excessive fear of strangers, and while a certain level of watchfulness is always needed, I don't intend to turn my daughters into paranoid xenophobes. I think the cost of doing that is far too high. But I don't know what to do about this current trend in hysteria. I just hope we come to our collective senses before it's too late.

Is it Halloween already?

It's often said that Christmas season seems to start earlier every year. Maybe that's because Halloween season is starting earlier, too.

(Another view is here.) This will please Olivia, who loved pointing out the Big Pumpkin every time we drove past the Party Boy costume/novelty shop at I-10 and Studewood last year. When the calendar rolled over to November and the Big Pumpkin went back into storage, she was upset about it and kept asking where it was. We told her it was asleep - it's amazing what kind of BS you can get away with telling a 2-year-old. Anyway, even as Labor Day still looms in the future, the Big Pumpkin is back for another long and glorious Halloween season. She'll be so happy.

Name, height, weight, URL

Baby domain names. I keep thinking I've heard it all, and I keep discovering that I haven't.

A small but growing number of parents are getting domain names for their young kids, long before they can do more than peck aimlessly at a keyboard.

It's not known exactly how many, but the practice is no longer limited to parents in Web design or information technology.

They worry that the name of choice might not be available by the time their babies become teens or adults, just as someone claimed the ".com" for Britney Spears' 11-month-old son before she could.

The trend hints at the potential importance of domain names in establishing one's future digital identity.

Think of how much a typical teen's online life now revolves around Facebook or News Corp.'s MySpace. Imagine if one day the domain could take you directly to those social-networking profiles, blogs, photo albums and more.

"It is the starting point for your online identity," said Warren Adelman, president of registration company GoDaddy.com Inc., which sells basic domain name packages for about $9 a year. "We do believe the domain name is the foundation upon which all the other Internet services are based."

It should be noted that the phrase "A small but growing number" usually means "A few people this reporter is acquainted with or has heard about here in New York", which is to say it is more likely to be a phony trend than a real one. I suppose it's at least a plausible one, as far as these things go. But you know, I think I'll let my daughters make their own decisions about this sort of thing when they're ready for it. Who can say what the Internet will be like by then anyway? For all I know, I could be tying them to something that'll be obsolete in a decade's time.

Nice shoes, Counselor

My congratulations to the women of the Harris County District Attorney's office for finally getting a concession on the dress code that should have been theirs a long time ago.

With the dog days of summer in full swing and a written opinion from the Emily Post Institute in hand, District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal is relaxing dress code standards. For the first time, women who work there will be able to show ankles and toes.

After summers upon summers of complaint about the heat, the department's dress code committee has relented. Women at the office and in court no longer have to wear hose under their pants, said Assistant District Attorney Kathy Braddock, a committee member.

According to a change in policy approved by Thursday, pants may be worn without hose with appropriate shoes. "If bare feet are showing in open-toed shoes, the feet should be nicely pedicured."

And yes, "appropriate shoes" are also defined in the policy. Flip-flops are still a no-no.

I must lead a sheltered life, because it never would have occurred to me that this would still be an issue anywhere. At least, not anywhere like here, where an enforced pants-and-hose combination in the summer must surely be in violation of the Geneva Convention. I just get caught off guard now and then by such relics of a less enlightened time, I guess.

Speaking of flipflops, there was an article about wearing flipflops at the office earlier this week. Tiffany always rolls her eyes at me when I say things like this, but I don't see what the big deal is about it. Either the office is sufficiently casual that such footwear can go with whatever else you'd normally don on a workday, or it's not. Maybe my perspective is warped from having a job where I seldom interact with anyone other than a small handful of coworkers - Tiffany would see more people in a day than I'd see in a week. I'm also notoriously unobservant about what other people are wearing in the first place, so I'm the wrong person to ask anyway. Be that as it may, my opinion on the subject is "Aren't there more important things to worry about?" Your mileage may vary.

National Night Out is tonight

Tonight is National Night out, which was conceived as a way of fighting crime by getting people to know their neighbors a little better.

Now in its 24th year, National Night Out is a nationwide event where people are encouraged to meet neighbors and police to help prevent crime and use of illegal drugs.

"Our mantra is 'neighbors being neighbors,' " said Mike Lauber, president of the Ashford Community Association in west Houston.

He said residents are encouraged to attend the event to know who lives in the neighborhood.

Many events are scheduled across Houston, Harris County and outlying suburbs this evening.

Marty Hajovsky has a list of the events going on in the Heights. Tiffany and the girls and I will be out there - I'm going to see about taking a few pictures. The sheer number of little kids at the NNO events in the Heights the past few years has been amazing. If nothing else, Olivia won't lack for playmates tonight.

Finally, via email from Dot Nelson-Turnier, here's an event in Montrose that you should know about:

What: Hate Crime Candlelight Vigil

When: National Night Out, Tuesday, August 7, at 8:30 p.m.

Where: In the parking lot at Montrose Counseling Center, 401 Branard Street, Houston, Texas 77006-5015

Who: All are welcome.

A limited number of candles will be available, so please feel free to bring your own.

Here's a map of the location, for those who need it. Dot's email is reproduced beneath the fold. Wherever you go, have a happy National Night Out.

In recent weeks, Hate Crimes have left their tragic mark on the Houston area, a mark that runs even deeper for two families who lost their loved ones.

In one case, a young man from Spring took his own life because living with the pain, trauma and stigma of being a hate crime victim was unbearable.

In the other case, a Southwest Airlines employee from Pearland left a Montrose gay bar with another man who later admitted he planned to kill a gay man in order to send "him to hell."

The loss of both men and the impact their deaths will have on their loved ones, the loss also resonates with the greater community. A bias crime against one individual is a crime against an entire group of people. When David Ritcheson, a Mexican-American, was brutally assaulted, the attackers were self-proclaimed skinheads who used racial slurs while committing the crime. The language used by the attackers, proclaiming "White Power" lets others - especially those of Mexican-American descent - know that not only are they not welcome, but they, too, are at risk. Add to that recent debate about undocumented immigrants, and the result is communities living in fear.

When Ken Cummings went missing, his family and friends spent weeks trying to find his body, knowing only that he left a Montrose area bar with another man. It has recently come to light that man accused of his murder committed the crime after planning it out for several months. His motive was to hunt down a gay man and to kill him in the name of his religious beliefs. That this could have happened to any gay man who crossed paths with the attacker that evening threatens all members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender [GLBT] community. And so the GLBT community is sent the message to live in fear.

According to Melany Morrison, MA, LMFT-A, LPC-I, Hate Crimes Specialist at Montrose Counseling Center, "Hate Crimes are extremely personal. They impact a person's sense of identity." She adds that, "Most hate crime victims don't report their crimes or seek help for several years due to real or perceived fears. Many experience sleep disturbances, nightmares and flashbacks, a change in eating habits, anger, hatred, denial, frustration, fear, numbness and shock. A person may feel guilt, shame, withdrawal, and begin to isolate himself or herself from friends, family, and society." That is the impact of a hate crime.

Come join us for our candlelight vigil and lend your voice to those who want to put a stop to hate.

What: Hate Crime Candlelight Vigil

When: National Night Out, Tuesday, August 7, at 8:30 p.m.

Where: In the parking lot at Montrose Counseling Center, 401 Branard Street, Houston, Texas 77006-5015

Who: All are welcome.

A limited number of candles will be available, so please feel free to bring your own.

Montrose Counseling Center provides hate crimes services, including an advocate to accompany you to the hospital and/or to file a police report. They may help you file for Crime Victim's Compensation, and be with you through the judicial process if your attacker is arrested. These services are available to anyone who is the victim of a hate crime, not just those who are affected by anti-gay bias, whether or not the crime has been reported, and regardless of immigration status.

Please help us spread the word by forwarding this email to your personal contacts as well as any listservs, yahoogroups, employee groups or diversity programs you belong to. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender: Your quality of life matters.

For more information, please contact Sally A. Huffer, Community Projects Specialist, at 713.529.0037 x324.

Define "full time"

There was this article in the Chron business section earlier this week about how more women with children are saying they want to work part-time these days. I don't know a whole lot about that, but it seems to me we could short-circuit a lot of the discussion that's sure to follow this if we take note of one fairly significant fact that went otherwise unremarked upon:

For Erica Rubach, a 32-year-old mother of two, the findings weren't a surprise. A year ago she felt she couldn't keep her head above water, though to others her life might have seemed ideal: two young kids and a job she loved as director of marketing and business development at a television station.

"But I knew there just wasn't room for both in my life," she says. "It was killing me."

So she left her job, with its 60-70 hour weeks, and with fellow mother Joani Reisen founded MomSpace, a networking site devoted to matching mothers with services in their communities. The two now work on their own schedules.

Well, there's your problem right there! Sixty to seventy hours a week isn't a fulltime job, it's a fulltime job plus a parttime job. You cannot work 60-70 hours a week and be a primary caretaker for a child, at least not without being under enormous pressure, the kind of pressure that makes most people break. I couldn't have done that - I'd never see my kids if I worked those kinds of hours. Maybe if her job had entailed only 40 hours a week of work - which, let's be honest, is all they were paying her for; people with titles like "director of marketing" don't get overtime - she could have handled this.

The irony is that she's probably working about 40 hours a week at MomSpace now. And that probably feels like a part time job to her. I'd say that's a pretty significant part of the problem here, wouldn't you?

RIP-to-be, Lisa Moore

If you read the comic strip Funky Winkerbean, you were probably already pretty sure of this, but here's the confirmation anyway: The character of Lisa Moore is going to die of her breast cancer.

Despite e-mails from readers asking him to save her, "Funky Winkerbean" creator Tom Batiuk says the comic strip character Lisa Moore will succumb to breast cancer.

Batiuk, 60, himself a cancer survivor, said the miracle some readers are hoping for won't happen.

"I honestly don't think readers know what they want," he said. "They think they know what they want. But what they really want is for me to give them a surprise every now and then."

The King Features strip, which is published in about 400 newspapers, will chronicle Lisa's experience through October. It is written and drawn by Batiuk in his workshop above his home's garage in this Cleveland suburb.

[...]

Last year, Batiuk completed the Lisa saga now running in the papers. He has moved on to a different story arc, one that shows what happens to the "Funky Winkerbean" characters a decade after Lisa's death.

He laughed at what he knows is coming in the lives of his characters.

"I have a real leg up on people, because I know how cool the work is going to be and how much fun it is to see these characters as parents," he said. "I'm having a ball with it."

First, though, Lisa must die, leaving behind her husband, Les, and a daughter.

"To me, there is a miracle in Lisa's story," Batiuk said. "It's not that much of a downer. It's a hopeful story, because it shows how a loving couple treats each other under all circumstances."

I guess this means we'll see all of the remaining characters suddenly leap forward in age, as we did when Batiuk moved the strip from Funky and friends in high school to Funky and friends as young adults. (They've aged gradually since then - Funky's cousin Wally and his now-wife Becky were high schoolers when that first happened.) I have a theory as to how this story line will wrap up, which will presumably be one of the foci when the strip resumes ten years later. I'll put it in the extended entry, just in case.

This week in the strip, Darin (the son Lisa gave up for adoption after her teenage pregnancy) and his girlfriend Jessica finally had sex for the first time. I'm going to bet that Jessica gets pregnant as a result of this (you may recall that Lisa got pregnant after her first time). Despite the bad timing of Darin deciding to stop checking his PO box to see if he's heard from the adoption agency just before a response appeared, I believe he and Lisa will realize the true nature of their relationship before she dies. I also believe Lisa will learn that she is to become a grandmother. Unlike Lisa, I believe Jessica will keep her baby; whether she and Darin stay together or not, I don't know.

We'll find out if I'm right in October. What do you think?

Frisbee turns fifty

Happy 50th birthday to an American icon.

In the beginning, there was a metal popcorn can lid. Walter "Fred" Morrison and his future wife, Lucile Nay, tossed one at a Thanksgiving Day family gathering in 1937 and thought it was good. They tried pie tins and cake pans next. They even sold some. Then World War II broke out. Morrison served as a fighter pilot. After the war, he used his newfound knowledge of aerodynamics to build a better disc. Essential to Morrison's creation, American research and development during the war had refined the manufacturing process of a durable and lightweight material: plastic.

At the suggestion of a stranger who spotted him flipping his disc in a Los Angeles parking lot, Walter 'Fred' Morrison took his 'Pluto Platter' to Wham-O Manufacturing Inc. On Jan. 23, 1957, Morrison and his wife signed over all rights to the toy in exchange for quarterly royalty checks. Six months later, Wham-O began marketing the discs under a new name: Frisbee.

According to the timeline at the end of the story, Wham-O submitted the patent application for the Frisbee's design on July 22, 1957. The world has been a better place ever since.

Teen suicide

PinkDome gets serious about a subject that really is no laughing matter: Teen suicide.

Texas is taking a new step to combat suicide, a serious public health problem.

Jeannine Von Stultz, psychologist and director of mental health services for Bexar County's Juvenile Probation Department, says many young people who don't intend to go through with suicide still end up dying as they cry out for help.

"This is an urgent need. It's a crisis. And they're trying to do whatever they can to reach out," Von Stultz said.

Each day in Texas an average of six people take their own lives. For people between the ages of 15 to 24, suicide is the third leading cause of death behind car accidents and homicides.

"What we're concerned about is that we're seeing more lethal methods being used. So kids used to take pills. Now we're seeing higher rates of children hanging themselves," Von Stultz said.

Now the Texas Suicide Prevention Council and Mental Health America in Texas have launched a Web site, www.texassuicideprevention.org, to help educate Texans about suicide warning signs and how to help someone in a crisis.

The Web site is a tool for parents, teachers, counselors, and in many cases, individuals who are suicidal and may use the Internet to look for help.

"The information that's provided is downloadable. So you print it out and then disseminate it," Von Stultz said. "If you are a local agency or a school or a doctor's office -- it's accessible to everybody."

Part of a national strategy put in place in 1999 by then-Surgeon General David Satcher, the site is bilingual and, according to mental health professionals, long overdue.

I consider myself exceptionally lucky that I have had far less personal contact with suicide than PD, who writes very movingly about the people he knew who killed themselves. Take a moment to read what PD has to say, then go visit www.texassuicideprevention.org and be better prepared to confront this issue.

Hu? What?

Are we sure it's time for another debate about gender-neutral pronouns? Because I could swear we just had one.

Okay, here's the thing. It's very easy to invent a gender-neutral pronoun. It's very hard to get anyone to use it, which is why we have this discussion every few years, when some earnest linguist takes another shot at it. What they all seem to not realize is that we've more or less already settled on a perfectly good gender-neutral pronoun:

The most common solution, using "they" or "them," irks grammarians when the subject is singular.

Far as I'm concerned, they can take their irk and stick it, along with every silly attempt at inventing a new word no one will ever use, where the sun don't shine. If you want to be technical, an invented word like "hu", which last I checked ain't in the dictionary, is also a grammatical error, so what's the difference? I say the market has spoken, and it has decided that "they" and "them" (and "their", too) can be singular as well as plural. Deal with it.

Girl Scouts

So I confess I didn't know much about the Girl Scouts, but after being sent this WaPo story by my friend Hope, and being assured that they don't have the same abhorrent politics as the Boy Scouts, I could see encouraging Olivia and Audrey to give them a try.

They're cute, they're smart, they're fun. Why would they be labeled geeks?

Part of it is the earnestness intrinsic to scouting, so at odds with the practiced boredom and casual cynicism that defines teen culture today. Being a Girl Scout requires a lack of self-consciousness. An ability to sing songs with lines like "When you make a promiiiiiiise, consider its importaaaaaance" in a round, without smirking. Being a Girl Scout requires a pure mind, even when singing "The Brownie Smile Song" ("I've got something in my pocket. . . . I keep it very close at hand in a most convenient place") .

So in their public, non-Girl Scout lives, senior Scouts are teased for being goody-goodies.

"It's such a relief to come to the singalong and not have to worry about what people are going to say," says Joanna Pollard, 13, a secret Girl Scout from Troop 1184 in Greensboro, N.C. She doesn't like the teasing--that exquisitely delivered eye-roll--she gets when people learn she's still a Scout, but she'd never dream of quitting.

"A lot of people our age just sit around and watch TV," says Joanna. "They don't care about their communities or the environment." Her troop is actively involved in several service projects, most recently cleaning up a community garden.

"People can't believe I'm still a Girl Scout," adds her troop mate Kristen Cossaart, 14. "Because they don't realize it's about so much more than cookies."

Well, I can certainly imagine worse things, and the "geek" label is not one I shy away from, so I come away from this feeling pretty good about such a future for my daughters. What do you think?

What's the deal with baby dealers?

Was it just me, or did anybody else who read this Press story about shady adoption "facilitator" Jennalee Ryan have a flashback to shady would-be uterus broker Whitney Broach?

If the name Whitney Broach doesn't ring a bell, think back to 1993, when she got 15 minutes of fame that she's been hiding from ever since.

It started when a billboard went up along the Southwest Freeway advertising a "womb for rent." An anonymous woman was offering to be a surrogate mother for what her lawyer said was the going rate of $100,000.

The billboard got worldwide publicity, but when reporters started digging, they found out who the anonymous woman was -- Whitney Neuhaus Broach -- and what she was.

She's been convicted of fraud and money laundering in a New Orleans federal court for filing fictitious health insurance claims in connection with her weight-loss clinic. She's been the loser in a federal suit in which the government alleged she was charging women for tests using a bogus machine to detect breast cancer.

Broach, who has used many aliases throughout her checkered business career, was even arrested -- but never charged -- in the 1983 killing of her then-husband. The Chronicle reported in 1993 that New Orleans law enforcement officials said that Broach, then known as Cherie Ward Werling, "presented a battered-wife defense and was never prosecuted for the killing."

Broach surfaced again locally in 2002 when former Chron columnist Thom Marshall wrote about her "charitable foundation" without having been aware of her past. In googling ol' Whitney, it turns out I may have been a bit harsh on ol' Thom. He apparently wasn't the first writer to fall for her BS:

This marriage is the second round for Roger and Whitney Broach, Mr. and Mrs. Texas. He was divorced, and she was a widow. She has luminescent green eyes that never blink. She works as a paralegal and does tattoo removal and permanent cosmetics in a room that adjoins Roger's law office. "My first husband was abusive and I vowed I would never marry again," Whitney whispers in a petite voice. "But 20 minutes after meeting Roger, I knew he was a genius. And he's fantastic in bed," she adds, without batting a permanently lined lid. They eloped to Vegas on a very low budget. After spending $25 on a marriage license, Whitney talked a chapel owner into marrying them for $12. The honeymoon was dinner at a Mexican restaurant.

While Roger was recovering from heart surgery, Whitney averaged four hours of sleep in order to care for his clients as well as her patients. She wants to remove gang tattoos in exchange for ex-gangsters' performing community service. If they win, Whitney and Roger plan to visit women in shelters and prisons to illustrate that not all marriages are bad.

There's really nothing I can add to that, is there?

Anyway. That's what reading the Press' current cover story reminded me of. Read it for yourself, and if you remember Whitney Broach, see if you agree.

Prom night

I never went to a prom - it wasn't that big a deal at Stuyvesant back when I attended - so perhaps I'm the wrong person to comment on this story, since my general reaction is "who really cares?" But as the father of two girls, I know this is looming in my future, so I'd better be prepared.

In the high school fairy tale, senior prom is the pinnacle of every student's senior year. But that's not the reality everywhere.

Prom attendance throughout the Houston area varies drastically from school to school. At some, a vast majority of seniors attended their final school dance. But at other campuses, including Davis, just north of downtown, and Westbury High School, in southwest Houston, more than one-third of soon-to-be graduates skipped the party.

The reasons vary. Students at some schools say the cost is a big deterrent -- especially as prom has ballooned into an estimated $6.6 billion industry. Prom attendees now dish out about $1,200 for the evening's expenses, said Christa Vagnozzi, editor of PromSpot.com, which offers teens hair and dress advice along with cost-saving tips for the big night.

[...]

In her area of town, Little thinks peer pressure drove up attendance for the Cinco Ranch prom. At that school, it's a given that students will go to the dance, she said. How they arrive is what matters.

"There is a lot of competition: every group is trying to beat the other group," she said.

The 18-year-old paid about $2,000 for her big night. That included her dress, getting her hair and nails done, going to the tanning booth, the limo, buying dinner, helping with rent at the Galveston beach house and, of course, the prom ticket, which at Cinco Ranch was only $30.

She said attending dances -- homecomings and now prom -- is just part of the culture at her school. At first, the cost rattled her parents. Once upon a time, after all, proms were held in high school gyms, not luxury hotels. But Little has worked hard to convince them how important this one dance can be to a teenage girl.

"My parents pretty much think it's ridiculous," she said. "They helped me out, but they think it's ridiculous."

Put me down for "ridiculous". I refuse to get caught up, or to let my kids get caught up, in this kind of rat race. I cannot envision giving Olivia or Audrey two thousand dollars to spend on prom preparations. If they want that kind of experience, they'll have to pay for a significant piece of it themselves. I'd be willing to do a one-for-one match, but to me, this is not an entitlement. If that makes me a hardass, at least I've got about fifteen years to work on the lecture that'll have to go along with it. What do you think?

Define-A-Thon

I confess, I've never understood the allure of spelling bees. I mean sure, they can be compelling enough as entertainment, but (and I say this as someone who is a good speller) who cares if you can memorize a bunch of obscure words? To me, if they're not a part of your vocabulary - if you can't use them, because no one would know what the hell you're talking about - the value of those words is limited. As such, I'm delighted to hear about this.

Now that spelling bees have been turned into a hit Broadway show and crossword puzzles into a movie, the publishers of the American Heritage Dictionary are hoping to create a cultural moment with a competitive game about definitions.

Dictionary publishers typically send out news releases highlighting new entries -- "blogosphere," "instant messaging" and "shout-out" are recent examples -- but struggle to find other ways to get attention.

"I think everyone publicizes new words, so I want to go beyond that," said Taryn Roeder, 32, who as Houghton Mifflin's assistant director of publicity promotes the American Heritage Dictionaries reference line.

So this year Houghton Mifflin created -- and trademarked -- the Define-a-Thon, which is modeled after a spelling bee but instead asks contestants to match words to definitions (and gives them a helpful list of words to choose from). The publisher has dispatched Steve Kleinedler, supervising editor at American Heritage, to hold events across the country.

On a recent Thursday night in Cambridge, Mass., about 225 people filed into the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square to watch a Define-a-Thon. After two heats of 20 contestants each, the finalists were Brandy Jones, a community design planner who picked the correct word for definitions like the ringing or sounding of bells ("tintinnabulation"), and Katherine Bryant, a science textbook editor, whose definitions included head-scratchers like the right to use and enjoy someone else's property without harming it ("usufruct").

[...]

A three-time finalist in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Emily Stagg, was a featured competitor in the movie Spellbound who inspired the Define-a-Thon, according to Roeder, the American Heritage publicist. In an opinion column in the New York Times last May, she wrote, "Why don't we make the National Spelling Bee a 'definitions bee,' where competitors need to know primarily what words mean rather than simply how to spell them?"

Amen, sister. I think that would have a lot more value. And I'm totally going to use the word "usufruct" in a sentence sometime this year.

By the way, for anyone else who thinks that what words are used for is more interesting than what they look like, I recommend the radio show Says You!, which runs on KHOU here Saturdays at 11, which is to say following Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!. Unfortunately, they don't have a free podcast like Wait Wait does, so I don't always get to hear it in a given week. But if you like words, and especially if you enjoy the occasional vile pun, it's a great listen.

A slideshow of racist spokescharacters

Slate magazine has a slideshow of racist spokescharacters for various products. I can't really do this justice in a capsule description - just click and be appalled.

Take this dog, please

Interesting story about how the dog shelters try to make sure that once an animal has been adopted it stays adopted.

In an effort to reduce animal returns, municipal and private shelters tinker with their systems. Harris County, for example, used to give a training DVD to families after an adoption was complete. Now, the DVD goes home before the pet. The agency also is developing a post-adoption survey aimed at heading off problems with animals and their new owners.

Shelter staffs also use the information accompanying a returned animal to help with subsequent efforts. In some cases, they are able to give dogs behavior training to address obedience issues. The local Humane Society once sent a deaf dog for training in hand signals after it was returned four times, none of the adoptions lasting longer than a couple of weeks. The dog has now been with a family for nearly three years.

[...]

The Houston SPCA, which had 536 animals returned from March 2006 to March of this year, started a program last summer called Forever Friends to determine behavioral characteristics of older dogs.

The five-part assessment measures the dog's level of interest in play, how it reacts to someone walking into a room, or how hard it will work for a treat.

It also scores a dog on how it behaves when it's alone, with staffers watching the animal on a video monitor. Does it jump on the furniture? Does it chew on toys? Or does it wait patiently at the door?

Dogs are placed in color-coded categories for high (yellow), average (green) or low maintenance (blue). The personality color is matched with a description -- bed bug, comedian, party animal -- that is placed on the dog's cage.

I've been thinking about this sort of thing lately because our dog Harry (seen basking on our back deck here) is getting up there in years - I adopted him in 1997, when he was about two years old - and I know that the day when he'll no longer be with us is approaching. After all this time, I'm a dog person, and when Harry goes to the great kibble bowl in the sky, I want to find another dog to fill out our family. I was very lucky with Harry - he was more or less foisted on me by my then-boss, who was foster caring for him after a friend of hers found him on the street - because he was a good personality match for me. Next time, as I'll not be operating out of complete ignorance, I'll have to do a little research and kick a few figurative tires to try to get it right. I'll also have at least three more personalities to take into consideration. Which may mean our next dog is more Olivia's or Audrey's than mine, though of course it'll still be up to me to walk and feed him. And you know, that'll be fine, too.

RIP, Johnny Hart

Didn't get to this yesterday - Johnny Hart, the creator of the comic "BC" and co-creator of "The Wizard of Id" has passed away at the age of 76. I haven't read either strip in years, partly because I couldn't stand Hart's politics and proselytizing, but mostly because I hadn't found either of them to be funny in awhile. Which is not to say that they were never funny - I've got an old "BC" paperback (not this one, but contemporary to it), and I'm here to tell you, it's witty and clever. But somewhere along the line, Hart stopped relying on his characters for humor, and started doing gag-a-day strips, which just gets old after awhile. Throw in the religion and the right-wing slant, and there was less than nothing to recommend his work as far as I was concerned.

And unfortunately, it looks like his "work" will continue on past his death:

Richard Newcombe, founder and president of Creators Syndicate, said Hart was the first cartoonist to sign on when the syndicate was created 20 years ago. "Traditionally, comic strips were owned by syndicates," Newcombe said. "We were different because we allowed cartoonists to own their own work. It was because of Johnny's commitment to this idea that made us a success."

Newcombe said "B.C." and "Wizard of Id," which Hart co-created, would continue. Family members have been helping produce the strips for years, and they have an extensive computer archive of Hart's drawings to work with, he said.

Ugh. You already know how I feel about this sort of thing, so let me just quote the Comics Curmudgeon (link via Chad Orzel), who sums it up nicely:

If I have any pull at all in the comics industry, I have to beg and plead for this not to happen. Say what you will for good or for ill about Hart's work, but it has always struck me (despite that note about help from family members) as being indisputably his work. The best way to honor that would be for it to stand on its own, not to be continued by assistants cutting and pasting new dialogue into scans of old strips. Because of the way that comics publishing works, there will be a few weeks worth of Hart-authored strips still to run, but after that it should bow gracefully out. It may be hard to believe for younger folks, but Hart was one of a generation of young turks who shook up the comics page in the 1970s, and letting his strip continue in other hands denies that chance to others and diminishes what went before.

Amen. I'm gonna draft me an email to Kyrie O'Connor and ask her to please please take this opportunity to find a fresh new voice for the Chron's comics pages. Please feel free to join me in this effort.

Finally, since Mark Evanier is always the best source of celebrity obituaries, let me recommend these two posts of his, the latter of which points to this nice obit for Hart. Check 'em out.

How I feel about the state of the comics page today

Lio speaks for me.

A quick plug for donating blood

Yesterday was Debutant's first re-birthday; it was on February 27, 2006, that she received a stem cell transplant courtesy of a donation from her brother. I'm very happy to see that she's doing well. May there be many more re-birthdays (and the original kind, too) for you to celebrate, Deb.

I was reminded of this event by my friend (and regular commenter here) Patrick, who unfortunately also had some bad news: His cousin-in-law Kelly, who is a college student, was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma. Like Deb before her, she is about to become very well acquainted with MD Anderson and its employees, for at least the next six months.

Now, I've not met Kelly, and neither have you, but there's a simple thing that we can both do to help her and people like her: We can donate blood, and especially platelets. There are many fine locations around Houston for making such donations. I've been a regular customer at the Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center on La Concha lately, and I'm about due for another visit. It's good for your soul, it doesn't take long, and you can stuff your face with cookies afterwards, guilt-free. What's not to like?

I will be donating blood in the month of March. I hope you will please think about joining me. Thank you very much.

Why 21?

John M. McCardell Jr. used to be the president of Middlebury College. He believes that current law that restricts drinking to those 21 and over is bad social policy, and he intends to prove it.

With backing from the Robertson Foundation, he has created a nonprofit group, Choose Responsibility, that will seek to promote a national discussion of alternatives to the 21-year-old drinking age. The group is preparing a Web site with studies that challenge conventional wisdom about the advantages of the law, while explaining its flaws. The group will also push an idea -- floated without success in the 1990s by Roderic Park, then chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder -- to allow 18-20-year-olds who complete an alcohol education program to obtain "drinking licenses." And McCardell and others plan to start speaking out, writing more op-eds, and trying to redefine the issue.

The current law, McCardell said in an interview Thursday, is a failure that forces college freshmen to hide their drinking -- while colleges must simultaneously pretend that they have fixed students' drinking problems and that students aren't drinking. McCardell also argued that the law, by making it impossible for a 19-year-old to enjoy two beers over pizza in a restaurant, leads those 19-year-olds to consume instead in closed dorm rooms and fraternity basements where 2 beers are more likely to turn into 10, and no responsible person may be around to offer help or to stop someone from drinking too much.

Any college president who thinks his or her campus has drinking under control is "delusional," McCardell said, although he acknowledged the political pressures that prevent most sitting presidents from providing an honest assessment of what's going on on their campuses. But he said that the dangers to students and institutions are great enough that it's time for someone to start speaking out. While he was president at Middlebury, one of his students died, a 21-year-old who was driving after drinking way too much.

When I started college, the drinking age in Texas was 19. (It was 21 in my home state of New York.) It went up to 21 on September 1, 1986, which was a little less than six months before I turned 21, so I went from being a legal drinker for a year and a half to a potential minor-in-possession charge for six months. I've never been convinced that there's anything magical about being 21. And it seems that McCardell has found there's little empirical evidence to support that.

What was striking about the research, McCardell said, was how little of it conclusively backs up claims about the positive impact of the 21-year-old drinking age. "This is by definition a very emotional issue, but what we need is an informed and dispassionate debate," he said. He said that the major flaw in analyses to date has been false assumptions about causal relationships. If DWI accidents among teens have dropped, that must be because of the rise in the drinking age, proponents say.

But McCardell noted that a range of other factors could be at play, too -- such as changing attitudes about seat belts, the availability of airbags, etc. At the same time, those who see a causal relationship in one set of statistics ignore others -- showing continued drinking by college students (under 21) and substantial evidence of truly dangerous drinking by a subset of that population.

"Data are data," McCardell said. "Facts are stubborn things."

The factors cited above would not have any effect on teenage DWI rates, but a couple of decades' worth of pervasive anti-DWI messaging might. I'd like to know if you can separate out an effect from the overall societal drop in drunk driving from that in the 18-21 age group. It would not surprise me to learn that there's not much evidence to suggest that the higher drinking age has any measurable effect.

Michael P. Haines, director of the National Social Norms Research Center, at Northern Illinois University, said that while large majorities of Americans have reported being concerned about underage drinking, focus groups have found that this view is a nuanced one. When Americans say that they oppose underage drinking, they are thinking of high schools and middle schools, Haines said, not "a 19-year-old who is married and working full time, a 20-year-old in the military, or a 19-year-old in college."

I think this is a key point. I think there's a bigger difference between 16 and 18 than there is between 19 and 21, and I think most people would agree with that. As I recall, the rationale for lowering the voting age to 18 back in the 70s was that kids serving in Vietnam deserved the right to vote. Maybe that same logic could be used today for alcohol.

Anyway, it's a thought-provoking read, so take a look and see what you think. Link via Chad Orzel.

"For Better or For Worse", but not for much longer

The pile of comic strip retirements is about to get bigger. Well, sort of.

First, the bad news: Lynn Johnston needs a break.

The cartoonist has, after all, written and drawn the popular comic strip For Better or for Worse for 28 years, in sickness and in health, without complaint, while Aaron McGruder (Boondocks), Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) and others griped, took extended hiatuses and retired.

"What wusses!" she exclaims.

But Johnston turns 60 this year, and she wants to do things in life that are difficult to do while producing 365 comic strips a year.

"I want to travel and study and paint, and I want to spend some time with friends and family," Johnston says.

"We're starting to get to the stage when you go to funerals and that's where you reunite with friends," she continues. "I want to be able to spend time with friends while they're still alive."

The good news, however, is that Johnston isn't retiring. Instead, the strip -- which appears in more than 2,000 newspapers, including the Houston Chronicle -- will be transformed in September into what Johnston calls "a hybrid" of new and old material.

She will continue to write and draw, but the new material will serve to frame flashbacks consisting primarily of recycled material. These strolls down memory lane also sometimes will contain new material that amplifies, embellishes or completes story lines of old.

For instance, Johnston mentions a character, Deena, who was absent from the strip for a long time without explanation. In her head she knew why Deena disappeared, but she never got around to drawing it. Now she will.

For the most part, however, the continuing saga of the Patterson family will end. Characters will stop aging. Existing story lines will be wrapped up before the change. Think of the new format as a long goodbye.

Well, okay. I'm a longtime fan of FBoFW, so I'm glad I'll still have it, for however long Johnston does it. She'll still be adding some content, and the strip will still be hers, so this is better in every meaningful respect than the continued flogging of old joke-a-day strips where the original artist is long dead. I presume at some point she'll retire fully, and by then I figure I'll be ready to let go.

Just guessing here, but I suppose we'll see Michael and family move into new digs; Elizabeth finally find the right guy (I'm betting Anthony gets his wish); and maybe John join Ellie in retirement. I presume we'll be spared seeing Ellie's dad die as her mom did some years ago. That's about it in terms of major story lines. Anybody want to add to that?

Birthday party wars

This sort of thing alternately amuses and horrifies me.

Birthdays Without Pressure is taking aim at the oneupsmanship that drives moms and dads to throw parties that will really, really impress the kids and the other parents, too.

"We feel there's a kind of cultural runaway going on right now around the birthday parties of kids," said William Doherty, a University of Minnesota professor of family social science who had a hand in organizing the group, launched publicly earlier this month.

Birthdays Without Pressure has started a Web site and launched a media campaign.

Among its suggestions for more modest, stress-free party planning: Hold gift-free parties, with a note on the invitation that says any presents will be donated to charity; eliminate theme parties and gift bags for the guests; instead of organizing elaborate activities, let kids play outside or hold a treasure hunt; and invite children only, not their parents as well.

The organization has also started collecting horror stories from other parents to argue its case. Among them:

_ A birthday party for a 1-year-old featured a gift-opening that lasted two hours. The child slept through most of it.

_ Seven-year-olds were picked up in stretch limos to attend the birthday party of a classmate.

_ A 6-year-old guest at a St. Paul birthday party didn't like the contents of the gift bag and declared: "This is a rip-off."

So far, Olivia's birthdays have been immediate-family-only affairs. We've sent her to daycare with baked goodies on her birthday to share with classmates, but have not yet held any by-invitation events, or provided any gift bags. At some point, maybe when she's four or five, we'll have something where she can invite friends, but I foresee a simple play-outside-then-eat-cake kind of thing. Maybe do something like take 'em to a McDonald's that has a play area - the whole purpose of those things is to provide a place for the kids that the parents don't have to clean up afterwards. I don't want to deny her the opportunity to be sociable, but neither do we want her to get the message that it's all about spending boatloads of money.

To the parents among my readers, how have you handled the birthday party issue? What would you do differently if you had to do it all over again?

The reason why parents get gray hairs

On the one hand, I'm glad that both my children will be girls, because I won't have to worry about stuff like this. On the other hand, I'm not happy that both my children will be girls, because I will have to worry about stuff like this. Oy vey.

I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes in a fetal position under my desk. Leave me a message and I'll get back to you when I emerge.

Habla espanol?

Via Stace comes this article about Houston immigrants, especially business owners, learning Spanish. Stace covers the main points, to which I just have this to add:

Though there's often a push for immigrants to learn English, the growing Hispanic population is prompting many immigrants in Houston to focus equally, if not more, on their Spanish.

The changing demographics of their customers and employees make knowing Spanish a must for many immigrant business owners who often thought English would be the only new language they would have to learn.

"This is extremely common," said Betsy Gelb, a marketing professor at the University of Houston.

"What we teach is you need to be market-oriented to be successful, but how can you even find out what your customers want if you can't communicate with them? It's the first step to being market-oriented, and sometimes that means learning another language."

I took French in middle school and high school. I even briefly contemplated a minor in French after getting an A- in an advanced grammar class in my first semester of college. I came to my senses after I realized that it was all literature courses from there, but it was close. I can't say I was ever truly fluent, but if I'd spent a semester in a francophonic country right after taking that class, I'd have come home fluent.

And if I had to do it all over again, I'd take Spanish classes instead. Back then, we were somehow convinced that French was the language that everyone needed to know. (Why? Don't ask me. I say it was a conspiracy dreamed up by the French teachers' cabal.) How silly that seems now. When the time comes for Olivia to pick a language to study in school, I plan to do everything in my power to convince her to take Spanish. It just makes sense.

The Human Baton

Okay, this is cool.

A recent Sunday comes and Cherish Pageau (Internet handle: gifa) is so amped up with anticipation she hops out of bed early.

In only a few hours the 30-year-old redhaired Kansas City, Mo., production artist for Hallmark, will be the 12th relay driver in what began as a wacky winter-break college adventure but has since turned into, well, a sorta semi quasi half serious Internet experiment of national scope:

The trek of the "Human Baton."

The experiment:

Take one college student -- shy 22-year-old Luke Vaughn of the University of Oregon, who, while chatting on an Internet forum at zefrank.com, asks whether he should drive or fly home to California. Instead, a plan is hatched to pass him like a human baton, car by car, Internet stranger by Internet stranger, not only to California but also cross-country to New York and back to Oregon by the start of classes Jan. 8. It's the ultimate college road trip.

The serious part: For almost 300 Internet faithful who have signed on as relay drivers, it's to show that the Internet is not some spooky, dangerous place populated by lurking pedophiles, frauds, e-mail scammers and identity thieves -- OK, maybe it is sometimes -- but it's also a friendly "community," they say.

"This is kind of a proof of concept," Pageau says. "There's a lot of trust involved. I want it to be successful."

I hope you're successful, too, but I didn't think the matter of the Internet being more than just a den of iniquity was an open question. Be that as it may, I love stuff like this. It took awhile to load on my computer, but you can see a Google map of his route hereand a bunch of pictures from the road her