Through some odd coincidence, I've recently had the opportunity to be on both sides of the offended/not offended table.

a couple of weeks back, I rented a copy of a movie that's likely to become a cult favorite - Hobo with a Shotgun.

I'd initially planned to write a review of it, figuring that Rutger Hauer as a shotgun-wielding hobo trying to clean up a corrupt town might be good for some Badgering.

The first, I don't know, 20 minutes were pretty well what I expected.  Then it brought in some elements that seemed maybe a bit over the top, and ultimately went down some paths that I found to be grossly unnecessary and just vile.¹

While I ultimately did finish Hobo, it came very close to earning a place on my list of Films That I Couldn't Force Myself To Sit Through.  That list currently has one entry.²

Now, as it happened, fresh off of my encounter with Hobo, there was some mandatory training at work.

We get a lot of mandatory training, including training on avoiding and preventing sexual harassment and sexual assault in the workplace.  I'd been through this training a few weeks back, but some friends in another department were in a later session.  There are some videos that go along with the training, and they're fairly graphic in content and language.

My session showed one of the three.  The other two were "suggested", which I interpreted as meaning "optional", so I took the "don't watch them" option.

My friends saw a different one in their session, and chose to watch the others at their desks.

Now, the video they saw in their session was, according to them, useful and appropriate.  I have no reason to doubt them on that.

The video that they watched at their desks that I didn't see, they both found inappropriately graphic - to the extent that someone watching similar material at work outside of the context of official training could well have been written up for it.  Again, I have no reason to doubt them on that.

The video that all three of us  saw is the interesting one.  When I watched it, I thought that it was somewhat raw and had some crude language in it, but didn't find it unusually shocking.

They did, and they told me about it quite clearly.³

I'm somewhat ashamed to say that my knee-jerk reaction to their concerns was to think "it didn't really bother me much, so it shouldn't bother them."

I hope that didn't come out in my initial response to them, because if it did, I was a complete assclown.

The fact of the matter is that whether I found the video offensive or not is completely immaterial to whether or not they did.  That point took a few minutes to sink in, but part of the reason that it finally did was because my reaction to Hobo was still fresh in my mind.  I don't get to declare my perspective to be the correct one simply because it happens to be mine.

As it turns out, the question of whether or not someone finds a particular video (for example)⁴ offensive isn't even the interesting question.  Why someone finds a particular video offensive is more intriguing because discussion of those reasons offers opportunities for people to learn from one another.

It can be a tricky discussion to have, though, because of the all-too-common view that we have some right to not be offended, and if I dare question your offense, I'm guilty of violating that right.  Such discussions can easily collapse into arguments and personal attacks.

But you have no more right to not be offended than you have a right to drive around in a brand new red Corvette.  Neither do I.  Neither does anyone else.  That doesn't mean that I have a right to go out of my way to offend you just for the sport of it, or that crudeness and vulgarity should be the norm.

I think that deliberate offensiveness can serve a purpose - witness the cigarette warnings used in Canada - because offensive things can stick in your head whereas milder approaches might not.  I also think that it's sometimes a good idea to seek out things that you find offensive and try to understand the other perspective.⁵

Now, the thing that I'm having trouble with is this:  Given that certain things offend me (or you), just how much effort should I put into avoiding those things?  Should I go out of my way to avoid them?  Should I accept that some level of offensiveness is just a part of life and deal with it?  Should I develop a thicker skin?  What's an acceptable daily allowance of offense?

Feedback wanted!

-Jay
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¹It was suggested to me by a colleague that perhaps it was necessary to make the villains in the film extra-reprehensible in order to make a shotgun-toting vigilante vagrant into a more sympathetic character. That's a good point.

²As distinct from the very long list of Films That I Have No Desire To Sit Through Again.  That list includes some excellent films, such as The Exorcist, and some not-so-excellent films, such as anything directed by Uwe Boll.

³If there's one thing I can usually count on these two for, it's brutal honesty.

⁴Or word.  Profanity can be a fun topic to discuss.  Odds are that you use a somewhat different vocabulary when you're by yourself vice with a group of people, and a different vocabulary if you're in a social situation vice a business setting.

⁵Politics and religion tend to be the heavy hitters in this scenario.  Remember that understanding another perspective doesn't obligate you to agree with it.

...so I thought I'd take a cue from this post and re-post (or perhaps re-re-post) this video:

The video is from a blog called Recovering Fundamentalists¹.

I liked this particular video mainly because he gives a very nice visual explanation of the circular reasoning that goes into claims of Biblical inerrancy.

There are a number of flaws in the reasoning, not the least of which is that when books of the Bible refer to scripture, they're referring to scripture as it was understood when the text in question was written.  In other words, a reference to scripture in Psalms doesn't include books like 2 Timothy, which was written much, much later.

This is something that seems quite obvious to people outside of the circle, but can be very difficult to recognize and acknowledge to people who are caught up in it.

He makes a couple of other good points in the vein of not letting fear of the answers² (or of Hell) prevent you from asking the questions that might be bouncing around in your head.

That's important.

It's extremely easy to set aside questions you really need to get on the table simply because you might not like the answers.  Maybe they run counter to what you've been taught.  Maybe they force you to look closely at some doubt or concern that you hoped would just go away.  Or perhaps they make you realize that it's time to set some changes in motion that have been needed for a while.

The take-aways are these:

1. It's often useful to take a step back and look at things from a different perspective than you're used to.
2. Don't be afraid to ask tough questions.  The answers may challenge you, but in the long run you'll be the better for it.

Good advice, I think.

Now, I am slightly concerned that he goes down a path towards the end that may be more aggressive than it needs to be for an introduction type video.  My thinking is that people who are starting to question fundamentalist beliefs are likely to be doing so bit by bit, so perhaps terms like "undermine" and "dismantle" aren't the most useful.  I could be wrong.  I agree with him that the question of Biblical inerrancy is central to the matter, but that's a question that can be addressed with history and scholarship without the need for overt hostility.  I think people would be more receptive to that approach, and more inclined to ask deeper and more involved questions.

-Jay
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¹I haven't browsed around Recovering Fundamentalists enough to get a good feel for what they're all about, so other than saying that it looks like they might have some interesting things to say, I'm not going to get into much about them right now.

²I kind of understand this one...

The previously mentioned job change occurred a couple of weeks ago, and I haven't adapted to the new schedule as quickly as I'd hoped.

Anyhow, I've got a couple of articles queued up that I should be able to finish this weekend, and will hopefully get back into a regular pattern of writing.

-Jay

I bolted home from the bus stop, because I knew that waiting for me at home was The Most Awesome Video Game Experience Ever!  

The object of my obsession was a new offering for the Atari 2600 console, Haunted House.  

Haunted House could be thought of as Resident Evil -20.  The graphics, though looking a bit dated today, were pretty damn stunning at the time.  Since I no longer have access to a functioning Atari 2600 console, I'm unable to get my own screenshots, but I found one that I think beautifully captures the graphic artistry that was possible in home video games circa 1982.  

And Kids These Days Complain Their PS3 Isn't Realistic Enough...

Haunted House put the player, as represented by a pair of googly Cookie Monster eyes, in a, well, haunted house looking for pieces of an urn. Why an urn? I don't know. When I hear the word "urn", the first thing I think of is "ashes", as in "Don't knock over that urn! Uncle Bill is in there!" 

The map, such as it was, consisted of several dark floors that the player could illuminate with a match by pressing the button. 

Yes, Kids, In 1982 Video Game Controllers Only Had One Button. And We Liked It.

In easier modes of the game, the walls were visible, but in most variations they weren't so your gaming experience was pretty much just what you see in the first picture. Until the creepy things came.To give the player something to do other than stumble around bumping into things, the designers included some foes - an upside-down letter "V", a giant sperm, and a lump of steel wool. In the game they were called a bat, a ghost, and a spider, but, well, yeah: 

A Bat? A Ghost? A Spider? Maybe If I Squint...

These things would roam the house, and were accompanied by gusts of wind that would extinguish your match if they came into the room.  If they touched you, you'd lose a life, and I think you'd drop any pieces of the urn that you had accumulated up to that point.  

As simple as the game was, I played it a lot.  In most modes, it was just a matter of memorizing where the walls and locked doors between rooms were so you could run quickly through the house.  I believe on the hardest mode that the locked doors were randomized, but there still weren't that many possible layouts, but even so I can remember getting nervous when the wind in the game picked up and my blocky pool of match light vanished. 

It turns out that Atari has updated Haunted House for the Nintendo Wii, which might be kind of fun.  For $20, it's probably worth a look. 

-Jay

Before long, though, this strange beast called MTV appeared on the cable box.  To be frank, I thought MTV was the stupidest thing I'd ever seen - I mean, really, watching music?

I have a cousin who from the very start became MTV's Biggest Fan In The World!  She would plan her summer afternoons around the upcoming videos as announced by The Rocket at the top of the hour.

For the most part, the MTV landscape of the early 80's, as I recall it, was populated by such artists as Culture Club, Cyndi  Lauper, Duran Duran, and such like, which I really couldn't have cared less about.

However, there were a few videos that I kinda liked.  One of them was the video for Dire Straits' Money for Nothing.

I only recently learned just how many different edits of the song were floating around to work around some fairly controversial (especially for the mid-80s)  lyrics.  The video below is the full, unedited version.  (I'm not out to offend anyone by using this version, but that's how Mark Knopfler wrote the song, and I tend to prefer the artist's original version of things like music and films.  Call me quirky.  The conspicuous exception is that I don't care for George Lucas' endless noodling with the original Star Wars trilogy - I can't decide if he's really pursuing his vision or simply seeing how many times he can go back to the well.)

I liked the computer animation in the video, and I love Mark Knopfler's guitar work.

In later years, music videos became less of a novelty and more of a recognized form of film making, and MTV became much less music oriented and, based on what I saw earlier today (and what inspired me to put this post together) has decayed to yet another channel running trashy reality shows.

We've got enough of those...

-Jay

Some people on the Neighborhood association take these deed restrictions very seriously.  There is at least one lady who roams the neighborhood with a notebook and counts shrubs, and there is one gentleman who set up a motion-activated video camera in his living room to catch teenagers walking in the neighborhood after dark.  Apparently walking while young is a problem that most of us weren't aware of.  He was quite concerned when he offered to give his taped evidence to the police so they could investigate and was met with an official "Meh" from law enforcement.

Right.

We also have an official neighborhood mailbox style.  It's a decorative, cast-metal job with pineapple-looking things (or they could be alien eggs...) on top with some fancy scrollwork.  They are, per the unchanging law of the deed restrictions, painted white, and must be maintained in "attractive" condition.  Once a year, usually about this time, we all get a letter from the Neighborhood Mailbox Compliance Officer, letting us know that some people have allowed their mailboxes to get a little rusty and because of that we all need to get off our asses and clean them up.

This makes perfect sense.  Personally, whenever I drive through any neighborhood, the first thing I do is evaluate their mailboxes.  In fact, just the other day, I cut through a nearby subdivision on the way to Target, and what kept going through my head was:  "This place is going to hell in a handbasket because that dude there has a skanky looking rusty mailbox.  I should stop the car and get whoever owns such a shoddy looking mailbox to come out and fix it up right now!"

According to the letter, it should take no more than 30 minutes for anyone to bring his mailbox into full compliance.  Clearly, the Mailbox Compliance Officer's approach to doing this is to pick up the phone and call someone to do the work, and the 30 minutes includes the time it takes to write a check to the workman.

I prefer to do it myself, which takes a little longer.

Right off the top, I'll say that whoever selected a cast-iron based mailbox with lots of scrollwork and crevices for water to catch in was dumber than a box of toenail clippings.  There is no freakin' way to keep rust from forming on them.  You could encase them in concrete and they'd rust.  This is Kentucky.  It gets humid.  Our rain is acidic.  Stuff rusts.  You can paint it all you want, but it's gonna rust.   Hell, I start to rust if I stay outside too long.

But, metal is what we have, so I try to make the best of it.

The first step in bringing my mailbox into compliance is to clean off any loose rust with a stiff wire brush and a lot of profanity.  The profanity is required because of all the crevices.  These are typically so narrow and deep that no normal wire brush can get down into them, so you end up scraping into them with a nail.  At some point, one of three things will happen:  the bristles from the wire brush will get driven into your hand, a dislodged chunk of rust will somehow get past the perimeter of your safety glasses and end up in your eye, or the nail you're scraping with will break off in one of the crevices where it will form the anchor for next year's crop of rust.

Once the loose rust has been removed, it's time to take a shot at the more tightly bound rust.  This is done by liberally painting the surface of the mailbox with Naval Jelly.

Naval Jelly, for those unfamiliar with it, looks like nothing so much as hot pink, corrosive snot.  When you're done with the first part of this effort, your mailbox will look like it has been sneezed on by a unicorn with a severe sinus infection.²

Let the Naval Jelly set for a while, go drink a beer, and get ready for the next part.

For the next step, you'll need a pressure washer and a blowtorch.

The pressure washer is necessary because the force from a normal hose is completely insufficient to rinse off the Naval Jelly, particularly out of the crevices.

The blowtorch is necessary because once you've rinsed off the Naval Jelly, you have water sitting on exposed metal that you've just gone through the effort of de-rusting.  The only way to quickly remove this water from all the nooks and crannies is with heat.  I think many of my neighbors skip this step.  The decorative parts of my mailbox do accumulate rust, but it's relatively minor compared to a lot of the boxes in the subdivision.  I think they're getting water trapped under the paint.  I suppose you could drive the water off of the mailbox by rinsing the whole thing with acetone or something, but that's not nearly as fun as fire.

Once you've rinsed and dried the thing, the remaining steps are simple:  use a good rust-inhibiting primer paint and cover the entire mailbox.  Twice.  Then deploy at least two coats of white outdoor spray paint.

There you go.  Fried gold.

If you're lucky and didn't inadvertently fail to cover a spot, you should be able to get 2 years out of such a treatment.  Realistically you'll get one, because by the time you've finished the first coat of primer, you'll start rushing and will do something completely boneheaded like not paint the bottom of the mailbox, and by the time you notice that you've got a bunch of rust stalactites growing off the bottom and your brother in the next subdivision over is telling you that they can have wooden mailboxes and they don't rust.

-Jay

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¹I've always been a little puzzled by this one. Was this a pre-emptive clause? Or was there someone in the early phases of the neighborhood who did something to prompt such a restriction? There are whispers of the Gila Monster Incident of '91, but nobody wants to talk about it...

²Learn from my mistakes. Wear gloves when using this crap. The happy hot-pink color belies the fact that Naval Jelly is a fairly potent acid. If you get it on your hands, you won't immediately notice it but within a minute or so you'll feel the burn. And don't forget safety glasses. You don't want this stuff in your eyes.

This year, though, I'm kinda stuck.  I've picked out two books on end-of-the-world myths - A History of the End of the World by Johnathan Kirsh and The Real History of the End of the World by Sharan Newman.  These will feed the interest I have lately in end-times movements and how they reinvent themselves when their central events fail to occur.

Beyond that, I'm at a loss.  I'll finish The Elements of Murder this weekend (thanks to Joshua Zelinsky for suggesting that one), so I need at least one more.  I'd like it to be something entertaining.  I was considering The Bourne Identity, but I'm worried that it might be too dated.

I'd certainly appreciate if either of my readers could suggest something, preferably something that can be read while holding a cold beer.

-Jay

It has been said that fortune favors the prepared, but she also apparently has a soft spot for stupid teen-age boys.

In the spirit of the earlier conversation, I present you with the following tale from my youth:

There were about a dozen boys in my  neighborhood within a couple of years of each other in age, between around 11 and 13.  There was very little through-traffic in my neighborhood, so riding one's bike in the street really wasn't an issue.  There was a small forest at one end of the neighborhood in which older kids with dirt-bikes had made paths, and we spent a fair amount of time riding around back there.  Most of us had BMX bikes by this time (mine was very much like this one, but orange.  And with wheels), which, of course, made us nearly invincible.²

Towards the back of the woods was a wash-out that drained into the runoff creek.  The washout was about two miles wide and at least a thousand feet deep 12 feet across and maybe 8 feet deep (it's actually still there, amazingly, and hasn't been developed into a subdivision...), and after months of being content to ride our bikes through the wash-out, we came up with the totally brilliant idea of setting up a ramp and jumping over the gap.  We envisioned something like this:

Look At Me! I Can Fly!

The reality was rather different:

That's Gonna Leave A Mark...

See, what did us in was physics.  It never occurred to any of us that there was no freakin' way any of us were going to be able to get up enough speed pedaling a bicycle for 40 feet to jump off a foot-tall ramp made of a piece of plywood and a cinder block and have any hope of doing anything more impressive than verifying that gravity still worked a third of the way across the gully.

The saddest part is that each of us had to prove that for ourselves.

The only thing that would have made it worse is if there had been girls there, since by then we were all hitting that part of a teen-age boy's life where our main goal in life was proving to teen-age girls that we weren't all rock-stupid idiots.  (Ironic, isn't it, that the sort of things we did to prove that we weren't rock-stupid idiots are precisely the same things that are likely to have removed any doubt about the matter...)  For illustrative purposes, this is what teen-age boys in 1980 wanted girls to see them as:

One Of The Original Movie Bad-asses

The reality was probably more like this:

Eventually, we figured out that impressing the girls was much more effective if we actually survived to benefit from the results.

-Jay

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¹I should acknowledge the patience of my other co-worker who patiently endured all of this with little more than an occasional eye-roll and head-shake. I see that look a lot from her, actually. She knows me well.

²Nearly invincible is teen-age boy for not very good at thinking things through.

I realized this afternoon that I've been way too stressed out lately.

There are a number of reasons for this - the one I'll use for a concrete example is that I'll soon be changing jobs after 21+ years working for the same agency.  A good part of the stress from this particular issue is that I'm very much a creature of habit, and 21 years is a lot of habit.

Anyway, I tend to deal with stress by sharing it with everyone else.  I typically do this by getting really snappy and short with people close to me.  That's not fair to them, obviously.

Fortunately, I've got a beach vacation coming up ahead of the job switch.  That'll help a lot - the most pressing thing on my mind will hopefully be whether to eat in the condo or at The Salty Dog.

In the meanwhile, I sincerely hope that the folks impacted by my recent surliness (especially the lucky ones who will still have to put up with me after I change jobs) can accept my apology for it and bear with me until I can successfully decompress.

-Jay

If you have spent any time at all on internet discussion boards or on blogs with topics that are in any way controversial,you've probably seen discussion participants who tend to get argumentative, in the manner of the characters in Volume 1 of the Guide to Internet Fauna.  Typically, these gits will eventually get banned, but that's often not the end of them.   

Enter...  

The Sock Puppet - Representative Generic Specimen

The Sock Puppet - This pernicious pest uses a variety of techniques to create new identities from which he can continue his asshattery.  

These techniques can vary depending on whether you run a blog or a forum, and whether or not you require registrations.  There are several categories:  

The Premeditated Sock

The Premeditated Sock - This subspecies of Sock will register for your site, and then (possibly over a period of weeks or months) create several different identities.  The more advanced Premeditated Socks will use multiple IPs and e-mails to conceal their common owner.  These sleeper Socks may remain dormant for years, or they may be active throughout their lifetime, chiming in on discussions from time to time.  It can be extremely challenging to positively identify such users as Socks.  Often it takes comparisons of writing styles or trends within discussions to ferret them out.  An infestation of such Socks can be a nightmare for the administrator of a large blog or forum, since they able to hide effectively amongst the normal users.  One helpful clue is that if you ban someone who has been a heavy participant in discussions, and a user who has rarely or never posted turns up loudly defending the banned individual, you might be dealing with a sock. 

The Impulsive Sock. Note the slovenly appearance

The Impulsive Sock - This variety of Sock is usually easier to detect.  Typically, a participant gets banned, and within a day or so a new user appears that interacts much like the banned identity.  Often, an administrator can figure out what's going on just by comparing IPs or the registrant's e-mail address.  While stamping out Impulsive Socks isn't typically as challenging as dealing with the Premeditated sort, it can be no less frustrating.  Often what the Impulsive Sock lacks in sophistication he more than makes up for in tenacity.  

The Multiple Personality Sock

The Multiple Personality Sock - Occasionally you'll notice several commenters that always seem to interact with each other, sometimes in rapid-fire succession.  They may all agree, or there may be one hold-out that the others gang up on, but you can pretty much count on the fact that if one comments, they all will.  This may be a case of the Multiple Personality Sock.  A recent example of this (which actually inspired me to write this)  is illustrated here.  If you observe what you think might be a Multiple Personality Sock, you can have a little fun by trying to provoke the various faces of the Sock into arguing with each other.  

The Agent Provocateur Sock

The Agent Provocateur Sock - The last sort of Sock to mention here is the Agent Provocateur.  These are rare, but dangerous, and tend to emerge during times of strife.  Despite their innocent appearance, their sole purpose is to foment discord.  Typically, they'll initiate their troublemaking with a private message or an email, maybe something like "I just wanted to tell you that  you're doing a really good job of moderating the Godzilla Back Scales forum.  The other mods are real hard-asses, especially Fire_Breathing_Mama."   Your alerts should start triggering at this point, because: 

 

It's very, very likely that you're dealing with an Agent Provocateur Sock.  It may be someone who, in fact, doesn't like Fire_Breathing_Mama and is trying to dig dirt on her, or it might be Fire_Breathing_Mama herself trying to figure out who her friends on staff are.  Or it could just be someone trying to stir up trouble.  Don't take the bait.  It's much better not to let yourself get dragged into the middle of internet drama. 

And with that, we complete our brief survey of Sock Puppets.  For our next installment, we'll be looking at the vast and varied world of Trolls. 

-Jay