Beer Run in the Snow

Chris and I. looking for any excuse to get out in the snow, decided to walk down to our neighborhood Food Lion and buy some beer for the winter storm. When we got there, of course, they were closed but fortunately we had foreseen the problem and had a plan. We stood at their locked door and complained loudly that they were closed when we needed them. That was our plan. It went perfectly. After executing our plan (flawlessly) we decided to wander aimlessly around the shopping center (our new plan) and we discovered that the drug store was open and sold beer. Huzzah!

On the way back to the house we were passed by a number of snow plows. I really wanted a photo of myself with a snowplow in the background. But the first one passed before I could get out my camera...

... and so did the second...

... so I gave up on the self-portrait angle and snapped this shot ...

... and got a serious face full of snow as the plow went past .

It was a bit like losing a snowball fight with Optimus Prime.

It's been a long time since I have had an icicle growing on my hat. Marvelous. I do like a bit of winter weather in my winter.

Christmas 2013 Haslup Newsletter

This Page Intentionally Left Blank.

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No, I guess that won’t do.  I must ignore the cursor blinking on the blank screen and get on with this year’s North Carolina Haslups Christmas Letter.  So here goes.

We will start with Liam and Eva who turned two in November.

In other news, Chris and Reid are in the process of moving to the Washington DC area.  Reid is excited to have found a position teaching in a small school near Leesburg, Va. and she and Chris have moved into an apartment near the school.

Chris is still working in Raleigh for the present while he looks for a graphics design job in the DC area.  He does the weekly commute thing – living in Leesburg on the weekends and staying with us during the week – which is a bit of a grind but he is still young and seems to be bearing up well.  It is a treat for us to get to spend so much time with him but we miss Reid.

Amber and Lee have (again) had an absurdly busy but largely successful year.  Amber graduated from medical school in June and was accepted for a residency in emergency medicine in New Jersey.  Lee found a job teaching at a local college nearby.  She and Lee found and bought a charming hundred year-old house in Pennsauken, New Jersey, moved, started work, learned the joys of hundred year-old plumbing – Lee managed to match the original tile pretty well – all while taking care of two energetic toddlers. They are all busy, prosperous and rather too far away to suit the twins’ grandmother Irene.

Lee and Irene celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary twice.  The first celebration was a Valentine’s Day week cruise of the Hawaiian Islands on Norwegian’s Pride of America.  Irene had originally planned to schedule the cruise later in the year to be closer to our (August) anniversary but someone told her that if you want to see whales then February was the month to do Hawaii. The photo at right was taken from a boat that was taking us snorkeling. Irene is in the gray plaid.  Whales were everywhere. We had a wonderful time and Irene is already talking about doing it again in a few years.



The second celebration was a trip to Disney World and the Kennedy Space Center.  Disney is always fun (that’s what they do and they are good at it) but we were surprised by how much we enjoyed the Space Center.  They have a new-ish museum built around the Space Shuttle “Atlantis” and it is a fabulous museum.  We recommend it highly.

This note is sent in the sincere hope that it will find you and yours well, healthy and enjoying a wonderful holiday season and a successful and happy new year.

Lee and Irene Haslup

A Few more photos...

 Lee and Irene about to get really wet in Hilo, Hawaii

 Another shot of Liam and Eva

Chris and Reid's Dog

 A Christmas ornament Amber made out of salt dough at the age of four. 

NC Haslups Christmas Card Newsletter: Electronic Version

NC Haslups Christmas -- 2012

Christmas Day 2011: Lee’s sister Holly returns from Afghanistan

Let me start by wishing you and yours a happy and blessed holiday season -- a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukah, a Kwality Kwanza, or an Agreeable Paid Time-off from Work, whichever you prefer – and peace and prosperity in the new year.

About What Follows: All of the news that follows will be good news.  There were no funerals, divorces, bankruptcies or serious injuries.  Nobody is in Jail. I mention all this here at the beginning because Christmas is a busy time of year and some readers may prefer an executive summary, to wit:  We are fine. Merry Christmas.

Last Christmas and the Grandbabies: Irene and I first saw our new twin grandchildren, Liam and Eva, on Christmas Eve last year.  We had flown to Tampa and first saw the grandbabies in the airport.  They were one month and two days old.  It had been a difficult time for Irene; she had been a grandmother for five weeks and hadn’t been spat up on even once.


We did Christmas at dad’s house in St Petersburg.  When the presents were all opened we headed back across the bay to the airport again to meet my sister Holly when she returned from Afghanistan.  We stayed in St Pete long enough to see in the New Year and flew back on the 2nd.  The photo below was taken New Year’s Day on the Pier in St Pete.  It’s a nice shot of Holly and as for me… well… it makes a useful “before” photo of me for my diet.

The holidays in St Pete offered the usual lovely weather.  It was my turn this year to fall in the water while kayaking.  The camera was in its zip lock bag so there’s no photo.  You will have to take my word for the consummate grace I exhibited.

Irene had two more chances to visit with Amber, Lee and the twins.  They came over for a day at the Animal Kingdom Park when Irene was on her annual Disney Store Alumni retreat in January. Then, in July, Irene flew down again for a visit.

The McPhersons (Amber, Lee and the Twins): Lee teaches chemistry at a local college and to writes “apps” for smart phones and other mobile devices. His apps have won a number of competitive prizes, especially his 3D modeling program for visualizing complex molecules.  Amber will be graduating from medical school in May and is in the process of interviewing all over the eastern US for residency positions in her chosen specialty of emergency medicine.  This photo was taken at Disney World when they came over to visit spend a day with Irene who was doing her yearly Disney week with her long-time Disney Store friends.

Haslup – The Next Generation (Reid and Chris):  Chris and Reid are doing well.  They bought a house four or five miles across town from us. Chris still enjoys his job as a graphic designer at Capstrat and Reid continues to work as a chemistry lab manager at the university.  Most Sunday afternoons Chris and I go to the gym together to work out and then we join the ladies for supper.

In the photo below Chris and Reid have joined us for lunch at Fulton’s Crab House restaurant at Downtown Disney in Orlando.    Irene had arranged a long weekend Disney trip for my 22nd Annual 39th Birthday observation.  I hadn’t known Chris and Reid would be there.  It was a lovely surprise.

Momentary geek out: The photo above was taken with my new Rokinon f/3.5 8mm fisheye lens and de-fished using Image Trends Hemi Plugin installed in Photoshop Pro x3.  Lens and software were birthday presents I gave to myself.  I am very happy with them and am indebted to myself for the generous gift.  I must think of something nice to give myself to pay back the debt. It’s only fair.

Remodeling: Irene and I finally got around to having our kitchen floor repaired this past summer.  We had an icemaker leak a few years ago that had left the subfloor under the kitchen vinyl a bit soft. We had learned to step on the joists in the kitchen to avoid the saggy bits but had been unable to teach the refrigerator the trick. Last spring we noticed that the fridge had developed a noticeable list to port and decided to replace the floor before the fridge fell through altogether.  But you can’t just do the floor.  If you are going to do the floor you might as well do the cabinets at the same time, and if you are doing the cabinets …

Our floor repair wound up costing twice as much as our first house.  We had all of the downstairs floors and ceilings redone and had a new kitchen put in.  This meant that we had to move out of our downstairs altogether.  We rented one of those portable storage pods to park in our driveway and filled it with as much of our downstairs furniture as would fit.  What wouldn’t fit in the pod was moved upstairs and stacked in one of the bedrooms.

Since we were without a kitchen for about two months we turned our upstairs hall bathroom into a temporary field kitchen.

My Birthday at Disney World: My birthday weekend at Disney was an ongoing revelation.  I kept running into more and more people I knew, first Chris and Reid, then other family members, and then friends.  After the first few I knew that Irene had cooked up a surprise party for me but as I kept running into more and more people around the park, on the bus, in the hotel, my notion of the scale of the event kept growing. This slow-motion surprise continued until Sunday’s culminating dinner (for 30) in the Animal Kingdom Lodge where friends I hadn’t seen in years popped up.

It was a wonderful event and I was very touched that so many people turned up for my birthday party.  People came from all over the southeastern US.  Here is a photo of the lady who set it all up.  She did a good job.  I set up a surprise party for her once (a quarter of a century ago) and I may not have been quite as skillful as she was.  Last time I checked she was still mad.

Here is a photo that Irene took in front of the Tree of Life in the Animal Kingdom on my birthday weekend.  As well as being a nice photo of everyone in it – no one has their eyes closed, no one has a rude itch – it is also my selected “after” picture for my diet.

Halloween: Irene and I won prizes for our Halloween costumes at our friends’,  Calvin and Pat’s, party this year.  Mine was won under false colors, I am afraid.  I dressed up as the Monster from Young Frankenstein but everyone at the party thought I was a character from their favorite episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I was the accidental hit of the party.

    
But, of course, we only won because the twins were so far away.  How could we have competed with this?

A few more things quickly:  Here’s a photo from our annual fall foliage photo safari to the NC mountains with friends Bill and Caran:

  (another fisheye shot, by the way.)

In closing, here’s one more shot of Liam and Eva at one year old.

Separated at Birth? A confession:

I won a prize at a friend's Halloween party for my costume. Here it is:

My Prize Winning Costume There seemed to be some confusion about who I was supposed to represent. Here are the two candidates:

The "A. Gentleman from "Hush"	B. Young Farankestein's Monster

My wife and I think "B" but everybody at the party immediately recognized me as "A". I was a big hit. I won the big prize. I first became aware of a problem when someone, our hostess perhaps, took one look at me and said "I love your costume. That was my favorite Buffy episode!" I just stood speechless trying to figure out what she was talking about. That interaction was repeated with everybody I ran into at the party.

They all seemed delighted with my costume, and with the fact that not only did I look like one of "the gentlemen" from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "Hush", but I had the same spooky mute stare. I was mute because I was trying to decide if I should play the wet blanket and straighten it all out, or just go with the flow. In the end, more or less by default, I decided not to correct the universal misidentification.

I had to hit Wikipedia when I got home to remember "Hush". I had seen it when it first ran and it was a good episode (nominated for an Emmy) but I had forgotten it.

Apparently the cadaverous gentleman from Buffy and I were separated at birth and it only takes a dab of grey-green makeup for everybody to see the resemblance. [Note to self: consider backing off on the diet a bit. I may be thin enough.]

This was all quite unfair to the Teleospouse whose costume was better than mine and who had done my make up (which was most of my costume).

So, I am posting my confession here, on my blog which nobody reads. That way I can be on record as having confessed that my brilliance was accidental without raining on anybodies fun.

bride, a photo by bigleehimself on Flickr.

xx

Cheap Critic: Brave

Haven't been doing lots of reviews lately. There have been a lot of uniformly satisfactory movies that don't need more written about them. The Avengers was really good but that doesn't make for much to write about. Hey, that Josh Whedon, he can really direct. zzzzzzzzzzz. Similarly, Hunger Games was uniformly excellent. I didn't want to like the new Spiderman film; Just because you change the actor doesn't mean it is time to start over and the Spiderman franchise wasn't mired in the swamps of canon like Star Trek was. But, despite being cranky about the needless reboot, I liked the film. Nothing to write about there, either.

But Pixar's latest film, Brave, is another matter. It is a very nice little film. No question about that. But it could have been -- should have been -- almost was -- a classic. But they made a mistake -- and just a bit of the wonderful leaked out -- just enough to leave the film a bit flat at the end.

The problem is that you could tell that they were reaching for more than just an amusing story about a likable tomboy princess who takes a dim view of her parent's plans to find her a husband. They were reaching for the sort of high mythology that Disney achieved in, say, Pinocchio. You could tell they wanted mythos because they touched it at several points. But, in the end, they made a mistake in the story and let it get away.

Without giving away too much of the plot I can say that our heroine -- Merida (voiced by Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald) -- makes a thoughtless mistake which unleashes an evil magic. She puts herself and the people she loves in jeopardy and most of the film deals with her trying to put things right.

That is a promising enough plot framework and Pixar obviously had the talent on hand to make it work. But they didn't, quite, get it right. The problem is, that the screenwriter fell in love with his character and, unlike Pygmalion, where the love of the creator brings his creation to life, Pixar's love for Merida turned her to stone -- lovely but incapable of change or growth.

There is a scene near the end where Merida says to her mother, the queen: "Mother, you have changed!" and the response is "We both have." The problem is, Merida doesn't seem to have changed very much. She is sorry to have caused so much trouble but otherwise the film leaves here pretty much where it found her. This is fine for a nice little film... but not nearly good enough for a film that pretends to high mythology. Mythic adventure changes people, thoughtless mistakes lead to real suffering and evil magic always leaves a mark. The logic of myth requires a character like Merida to change in some important way -- to exhibit a slight sadness for a prideful, thoughtless misdeed that can be remedied, but not undone.

When Pixar decided to put Merida back in the end of the film, exactly where she had been at the beginning, their pretentions of high mythos collapsed.

The Two Faces of Mitt Romney

I am seeing a lot of Mitt Romney ads on TV these days. There seem to be two kinds. One is fairly typical, consisting of centrist bromides that are carefully selected to appeal to moderates without hacking off his conservative base. Those ads are OK but dull.

The other ads are more exciting. They show Romney doing necessary, grown-up things, simply because they need doing, even if they are politically difficult -- even if they don't poll well. Those are the ads that make me like Mitt. They are the ones that end with the tag "I am Barack Obama and I approve of this ad."

...

Say, "Obama"... the name sounds familiar... wasn't he running for something, too?

Forty-five Years Before the Higgs Boson

1967: The Disch/Sladek Nullitron Emerges from the Target Chamber.

By now, because of the wall-to-wall news coverage, most people know everything they will ever be able to understand about the Higgs Boson and, in many cases, quite a bit more. But how many of you remember the discovery of the Nullitron, exactly forty-five years ago in 1967?

There are a number of intriguing parallels and some equally interesting differences between the Higgs Boson and the Disch/Sladek Nullitron. I'll let you read the original report on the Nullitron (linked below) for most of them, but I can't resist a few:

i ) The Higgs Boson gives mass to matter but it was discovered too late to give any to the Nullitron so it has none.

B) Producing Higgs Bosons requires the CERN particle accelerator -- a gizmo so big that it straddles several of Europe's admittedly smallish countries -- while in 1967, for the experimental production of the Nullitron ... a "cyclotron one mile in diameter filled with alternate solid blocks of lead and quicksilver" was deemed "useful but not essential".

3) The Boson is a big deal but the Nullitron is physically bigger than the Boson.

IV. The Higgs Boson has no charge, no spin and no color charge while the Nullitron also has no charge, and presumably no spin since it is said to have no properties at all except for being red and rather shiny.

For more information about the Nullitron, see the original report -- The Discovery of the Nullitron -- from Galaxy Magazine, February 1967.

Photo Credit: Random borrowed photo of a red ball, entitled "Red Ball" by Rennett Stowe, on Flickr

Young Man's Car

Cheap but fun -- Italian --
it was a young man's ride
and he could own the highway
with the right girl at his side.

You had to buy them quickly,
a berry fresh with dew;
The sun would quickly fade the paint,
you had to get them new.

And the wind would sing sad love songs
to him at the wheel
and for a while he'd ride in style
on youth's ephemeral steel.

Ground Cover

What I want is some sort of green, hardy, mowable ground-cover (grass would be nice) that is as shade tolerant as poison ivy.

Fusionism, Subsidiarity, Ammendment One and Me

The vast majority of my Social Networking friends are either Liberals, Libertarians, or Conservatives of a non-theoretical sort. I am none of the above. I am what the late Frank Meyer styled a Fusionist -- a conservative/libertarian chimera with the head of a libertarian, the heart of a conservative and no spleen to speak of.

Frequently, when I wander into a Facebook thread on a political issue, I find that I disagree with the general direction the discussion is heading. Often I will make a comment containing a single word, "Harrumph", to remind my friend that not everyone reading the thread agrees. That way if they want to know they can ask. This posting concerns one such topic. Many best friends (and some family members) feel very strongly about the issue so I am posting my dissent on my opinion blog which nobody reads so I can be on record without frightening the horses.

Ammendment One

The North Carolina legislature has passed a bill to put a resolution on the ballot in an upcoming election which, if passed, would, in effect, copy the language of an existing state law -- designating the marriage of one man and one woman to be the only domestic union recognized by the State of North Carolina -- into the state constitution. North Carolina is the only state in the Southeastern US that does not have such language in its constitution and I plan to vote for the resolution. I am almost the only person I know who admits to an intention to do so.

To explain why will require that I cover a bit of tedious background forces and principles. I will try to be as brief as possible but please feel free to stop reading and delete me from your friends list at any point if you feel you must.

Marriage

Marriage is an institution that is universal in all human societies. There are a few differences in details from culture to culture but they are generally minor things that only serve to emphasize the underlying similarities. Marriage answers the same societal needs everywhere and the most urgent of these is to form the basis of multi-generational families which can provide for the care and training of children. The institution of marriage is a scaffolding that society erects around the procreative potential of intimate male-female relations to provide an environment in which any resulting offspring can be reared in a socially-beneficial way.

One hears the argument that the widespread use of contraception and the concurrent "sexual revolution" have changed everything, and there is some truth to that: The social norms around marriage have shifted a bit -- people in first-world countries delay marriage until later in life and there is less social stigma associated with sex outside of marriage. Couples tend to live together until such time as they are ready to have children and only then marry. This is a reasonable-seeming adjustment to the rules and would be unobjectionable if people were more conscientious with their contraception. The fact that illegitimacy rates have gone up instead of down since the introduction of the pill does raise the question of whether the simpler old-fashioned cultural norms worked better, but that is a topic for another day.

Fusionism

As a Fusionist I seek to maximize individual freedom (as do Libertarians) but I also believe that, in the real world, freedom and civic virtue are entangled concepts (like mass and weight in a gravity field) and that attempts to promote the one will succeed only if due consideration is given to the other.

I should quickly point out here that by civic virtue I am not talking about any particular list of Sunday School admonitions and that I am not leading up to an argument that homosexual behavior is morally wrong. Instead, by "civic virtue" I refer to a general sense among the members of a society that all of the following conditions apply:

1) There are shared standards of behavior (whatever they might be) and one ought to observe them;

2) It is sensible to expect that other people will try to follow the rules too;

3) The self-imposed restraints one incurs in following the rules are offset by the mutual confidence in interaction that comes from shared values;

4) When everyone makes a good-faith effort to follow the rules a tolerable degree of order can be expected.

These culturally-dependent rule sets accrete over time by logical induction as people observe the results of behavior and try to codify rules to describe which actions work out well, and which badly. Generally, any rules so derived are claimed to be part of God's divine plan for the world -- an attribution which, if an omnipotent God exists, is fairer than you might at first assume. But even if He does not exist it doesn't follow that the rules are void: The life-experiences from which they were induced are real enough even if the good or bad outcomes had nothing to with God's blessings or displeasure. As I used to tell my son when he was a teenager and was fighting with his mom -- "The fact that you mother told you to do your homework is not a sensible reason not to do it." By the same token, advice one gets from one's Sunday-school teacher is quite possibly good advice, despite its claimed origin in doubtful theology.

I mention all this because I am arguing for a traditional view of marriage and our cultural ideas on the subject are woven through with threads of religious doctrine that are difficult to tease out. I contend that there are sound secular derivations for those threads of reasoning and that one cannot dismiss the whole cloth by an expression of religious disbelief.

Subsidiarity and the Libertarian Ideal

Per Wikipedia, Subsidiarity is an organizing principle stating that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level. The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, cybernetics, management, military (Mission Command) and, metaphorically, in the distribution of software module responsibilities in object-oriented programming. Subsidiarity is, ideally or in principle, one of the features of federalism, where it asserts the rights of the parts over the whole.

There are a number of ways to lay out the details but for the US, where sovereignty originates with the individual, the usual idea is that the delegation of authority looks something like this if subsidiarity is to be achieved.

A moment's inspection shows that while not necessarily a libertarian idea it has libertarian tendencies. Here is the diagram adjusted to express an American libertarian idea.

That is 'an' American libertarian idea, not 'the' American libertarian idea because you have to leave room for those libertarians whose philosophy arises from misanthropy. They might draw the diagram thusly:

But I am not talking about them ... or to them, I expect. Nor am I talking about Liberals/Progressives who believe that problems can be solved by giving power to a few really, really smart people at the top who will straighten the rest of us out.

Only by the centralization of power can Liberals achieve the uniformity they crave. Local differences offend them. If different states have different laws then the a Liberal will assume that all but one are wrong somehow, and quite possibly all of them are wrong since the laws were codified at the local level, far away from the top where the really smart people must be. How much better, they imagine, to put the best brains on the problem, come up with the most sensible law, and drive it in everywhere from the top.

I suspect you have guessed from the previous paragraph that I am more attuned to the (non-misanthropic) libertarian version than the Liberal one. That is true. But, I think the libertarian view has a problem, too. Here is their diagram with one of the boxes re-labeled:

The problem I am trying to point out is that a simple libertarian model that envisions only atomized individuals vs the state doesn't work for all individuals. None of us are born able to make our own decisions, and some of us lose that capacity with advancing age. Without strong multi-generational families, and without a well-supported institution of marriage as the basis of such families, the concept of radical individualism becomes absurd.

When I said "Too much is required" above I was not just thinking about things that the recipients would recognize as aid, but of other government programs that would inevitably follow. In the section on Fusionism above I said that civic virtue is a prerequisite for a minimal state. Or, putting it another way, people will only put up with so much and past a certain point they will demand that the government do something. Among the things that people won't put up with are feral youth and neglected old people. Single parents tend to find taming their kids a challenge. Boys, in particular, who grow up without a male role model find themselves disproportionately in trouble. It's not a problem of their instruction -- they learn. If there is no male role model, generally what is missing is not the model, it is the male role in the family. Part of the expense of dealing with poorly-socialized young males is building jails to put them in.

Doctrinaire libertarians will say that without the prospect of redistributive government aid for their children, or for their aged grannies, people will spontaneously gravitate to social structures that allow their needs to be provided for, and there is some truth to that. But, I contend that the most effective such institutions, and the institutions that people recognize as such and gravitate toward, are marriage as currently understood and the multi-generational families that strong marriages create. I am certainly in accordance with the libertarian goal of cutting entitlements, and particularly in avoiding the perverse incentives offered to fragmentary families where the more disconnected they are, the more money they get.

People think that marriage is in decline everywhere but it is not. Among the more affluent, marriages remain common and strong. It is among the less-well-off, where those perverse incentives have disintegrated families like a Duck Dodgers Martian ray gun, that marriage is rare, and families are fragmentary and powerless.

Here's my model of a libertarian delegation of authority model that interposes the idea of an multi-generational family to deal with the problem that children and the elderly offer to the more typical model. It will not, I'm afraid, appeal to the misanthropist libertarians whose ideology arises from daddy issues. But it makes sense to me.

I plan to vote for Amendment One tomorrow because I think that the purpose of marriage is to facilitate the creation of multi-generational families which serve as intermediaries between children and the elderly on the one hand and society at large on the other. Because gay and lesbian unions do not produce children who must be cared for and trained when young, or who can make decisions for their parents when the parents are in decline, such unions do not serve what I see as the primary purposes of marriage.

I further contend that the "libertarian" case for gay marriage is bogus. While it is perhaps regrettable that our culture has allowed the government to co-opt the definition of what constitutes a "marriage" -- being all about marriage licenses, justices of the peace, documents filed in the courthouse etc. -- it is an accomplished thing. If the legal definition of marriage is changed then the popular notion will change as well and those few hold-outs will be targeted by anti-discrimination litigation. Marriage, as an institution, will be weakened in terms of its social role and since that social role is a necessary precursor to a stable minimal role for government we will all be less free.

Update: I found this short piece on the National Review Online Blog: The Corner. In it Ryan Anderson makes some similar points, only with an ease and clarity that I envy.