Cancer. I worry about cancer a lot.
I have a bump, that might be just a stye, but that I am not sure isn't actually on or in the eyeball itself. I have spent a lot of time with a flashlight in front of a mirror. I haven't got $500 to have an opthalmologist spend 5 minutes looking at it, tell me it is a stye and put warm compresses on it.
Hippies.
Also, that a ravening-in-sorrow Rex Ryan will eat the tri-state area. It's just food, Rex -- not love.
"What are you worried about?"
How long have you got?
Global warming. Financial collapse. My children. Tenure.
If there is enough gravy, you need to eat it or you can't tell for certain that there isn't love at the bottom of the dish.
The usual things. Money, the prospect of ever finding an interesting/fulfilling job, my own multiple forms of crap-ness, the future [in general], etc, etc. In other words, what 3 said.
My loved ones dying, social programs being cut, and the environment being destroyed.
I'm in for 3 and 7, combining job worries with concern over whether my various character deficits will keep me from ever enjoying or doing really well at even the best possible job. Also global warming and the economic/political effects thereof.
On the other hand, Sally just had her first akido lesson yesterday, and got to throw a man twice her size over her head, so she's stoked about the future. Leverage is an amazing thing.
Leverage is an amazing thing.
You ain't just whistling Dixie.
Where I'm going to stay tonight, since my hosts for a visit to [public university X] are mysteriously not replying to my emails asking about accommodations, and don't have phone numbers on their department website. (Not actually a big deal, though it is what I'm worrying about. I can always just get a hotel room and give them the bill.)
Less immediately, global warming, the 2012 elections, and, again on the more selfish end, job interviews.
Honestly? That my oldest sister and my closest cousin both died at 38 and I'm 36. Also money, debt, job security, my various professional shortcomings, how much I hate my own body, whether I've gotten too old to enjoy videogames other than Civ, my personal creative failures, that the Browns will never rise above sucking whole shipments of donkey cock and, of course, that neither I nor the people I love seem to be capable of just enjoying anything.
Was whistling Dixie some sort of signal to rally the Klan or something? Where does that expression come from?
I'm worried I won't like the ride of my new bike wheels.
That this shirt is unflattering.
14: I thought the expression was just used to indicate doing something unproductive to pass the time.
What if I promised everyone that everything will get better? Would that help?
Worries: Finding another job, finding a job that does not completely suck, finding a job that gives me enough time to do activism and stuff, using my unemployment time wisely, not over-committing myself to activist projects, not getting burnt-out on activism again, having the economy get much worse such that I'm broke and homeless, but not worse enough that we have a revolution, friends going to jail or getting hurt by the cops, getting old and irrelevant and not realizing it.
Also, given the amount of people close to me who've died recently (just lost another one over the weekend -- 32 year-old journalist friend whom I liked and respected a lot ) I really hope there is going to be a break in that cycle for awhile soon.
On the positive side, I am excited about getting to do more activism while unemployed, and I just found out that one of my acquaintances from the activist scene is pregnant, and is going to have her very own tiny baby in July. Also, I went to a birthday party for the daughter of some activist friends yesterday, and it was a great deal of fun.
19. No. Because then we'd have to worry about you being delusional, on top of everything else.
What if I promised everyone that everything will get better? Would that help?
Not helping. Could you try reassuring me that it's all part of God's plan for me?
I thought the expression comments section was just used to indicate for doing something unproductive to pass the time.
Dixie was the traditional anthem of the Confederacy, right? I've always assumed that it originally meant something like "The South won't win the war based on token actions or sentiment (i.e., just because you whistle the anthem)."
Per wiktionary, "you ain't just whistlin' Dixie" appears to mean that you are instead taking affirmative military action to support the institution of slavery.
21: Don't worry about that. Being delusional is the best thing I've done for myself in a while.
22: I checked. It turns out that Knecht is the center of the universe, so the rest of you can all blame him.
What if I promised everyone that everything will get better? Would that help?
Damn right it will.
The usual research imposter stuff. Tenure. When to have a kid. Whether my kid will be stupid because I'm an older father- thanks mom for constantly reminding me of "the studies". When to buy a house. Where my parents are going to live when they retire.
When to buy a house.
Ahhahahahahahahahah.
When I'm going to get enough sleep.
That I'm near thirty and still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. That whatever I do I have to provide for my family. That I will suddenly lose the job I don't know if I want to continue having.
That this thread won't be cathartic enough.
Specifically, how to reconcile my total lack of desire to buy a house with my partner's deep old-school need to own property.
That I still don't know what's for lunch.
Also, now, that the things I worry about aren't cosmic enough.
Where my parents are going to live when they retire.
Oy, I'd forgotten to worry about this. Not retirement, they're both retired, but taking care of them when they need care. This is currently salient because my dad is staying with us while he recovers from getting a new hip, and while everything has gone absolutely swimmingly, no problems at all, and he'll be on his own again shortly, time just keeps on marching on.
35: You could buy a really cheap house in Pittsburgh. You can get some for less than $5,000. It wouldn't have a kitchen or a roof or something, so you couldn't live in it. But, you probably don't live in Pittsburgh anyway. You'd still own property.
I can't say there's much that I actively worry about, except the danger of being shot, and it looks like that's receding.
Dealing with my parents' giant house of accumulated sentimental treasures when they die.
It strikes me that a terrific net increase in calm could be achieved if half the people on this thread agreed to buy the houses of the other half, and if half the people on this thread agreed to employ the other half to take care of their quirky and charming older relatives.
Well, I live in Maine, so there's definitely options like that. But it was -15F last night, so the tar-paper shack option is right out.
That I'm going to have to meet with the provost face-to-face at some point today.
44 to 39.
Also, that I'm giving a lecture in two hours and I'm learning the material for (basically) the first time.
That my posts suck.
That heebie won't post something this afternoon, leaving me scrambling for another pathetic excuse for a post.
The possibility of more football threads.
That I won't remember which color wire is ground.
re: 35
Yeah, I have a bit of this going on too. But since I live in London, it's so far from being a practical possibility that it might as well be a worry along the lines of not knowing which type of yacht to buy.
40: Where do you live? I had you placed somewhere in the UK, generally a fairly low-random-shooting location.
That I will decide to give a serious answer and it will be seventeen volumes long.
When to buy a house.
From experience, let me recommend not buying one three years ago.
When I'm going to get enough sleep.
If my experience is any guide, that is not in your foreseeable future, heebs. I recommend energy drinks.
That I will never get back to being solidly productive.
That I will never be filthy, stinking rich.
55: On the other hand, if mine is, you're good in about six months. Hawaii sounds like a champ, sleeping-wise, and hopefully Hokey will follow in his big sister's footsteps.
56: A bit more fruit and a bit less cheese. Not a problem.
And clean drinking water. That's essential.
Actually, I do worry that I don't drink enough water or eat enough fruit.
Actually, it would be a lot cheaper to buy a decent yacht than to buy a house of any type in London. £40,000 would get you a very nice 36-footer with four berths. Or you could spend the same amount on buying four-fifths of the kitchen of a Victorian shoebox in East London.
53: yes, I live in the UK. It is possible that I am not at any real risk of being shot on most days.
29: No offense, but as a woman it was nice seeing some of the hysteria spread around. I hadn't even known "advanced paternal age" existed as a category! (It's "over 40" -- women get it at 35.)
re: 62
Yeah, I had absurd super-yachts in mind, but yeah, good point. The flat we currently rent would be around £400K, and so we'd need a combined income of, what, £100K plus £100K deposit, or something similar, to even think about it? Not going to happen.
64: I was told the NHS went around giving everyone government-mandated mind-control shots. Are you suggesting us Yanks have been mislead with regards to the UK's health service?
64: Glad to hear the worry's subsiding.
67: Feel free to ignore this since it is prying, but how can you afford to rent something you couldn't buy? Or, to put it a less personal way, is your landlord lossing money?
I have the same general question about many U.S. coastal cities also.
Why does my front derailer constantly need adjustment.
67: no, ttaM, you don't want to get an absurd superyacht. Then you'd have to deal with staff and so on. Nice little cruiser, that's what you need. Or maybe a wherry. Plus, so easy to relocate if you change jobs, assuming you change jobs to something on a sea coast.
I know you weren't actually worrying about this, but I'm pre-emptively trying to relieve your worry in case you start.
69: Glad to hear the worry's subsiding.
If your worry persists for more than 4 hours call your friends and brag about it.
Maybe instead of a yacht, a nice, roomy barge.
re: 70
I presume it works out because landlords have often bought properties a long time ago, when they were cheaper. I know for a fact our landlord's family have owned this flat since, I think, the 70s or early 80s, for example.
And the UK property market is completely bonkers.
Why doesn't nosflow call it a "dérailleur"?
re: 70
Plugging the numbers into a mortage calculator it looks like the amount we currently pay in rent would cover the mortage for a property roughly half, or a little more than half, of the value of the one we are actually in.
Just realized who Mr. Blandings looks like! It had been driving me crazy since the pre-Xmas mini-meetup, and my memory was jogged today by a friend's FB post about reading poetry by an actor-poet.
Unfogged Confidential has found its leading man!
That the refrigerator in our communal kitchen at work runs so warm that the milk will spoil. (I have elaborate systems of putting it temporarily in the freezer, and boosting the refrigeration with freezer packs. The fridge itself is really borderline warm.)
re: 79
Yeah, if we moved back to Glasgow the ratio would be a lot closer together, I think.
78, 79: Right, so why doesn't your landlord sell the thing to some guy who will be too poor to maintain it. In fact, why don't a bunch of landlords sell their units until the rent/ownership costs equal out a bit.
81 seems to really hit the sweet spot sought in the OP: neither excessively trivial nor truly depressing.
71: The issue of down payment causes most people in cities on the east coast to pay more in rent than they would on a mortgage, I think.
83: because right now he's holding on to it in the hope that prices will rise still further.
I don't know. I don't really understand the London property market.
You could buy a really cheap house in PittsburghNorth Dakota, according to Emerson; the obtainment of more information is left to the archivist as an exercise.
Anyway, I'm probably just down on home owning because I have to figure out how to grout sometime soon.
re: 86
To be honest, I have trouble understanding London in general. It makes some sense for my wife's career, but if I moved to Glasgow I'd be earning the same and I'd be paying half as much in living costs, and I'd be living in a place that was objectively less shit.
I have similar difficulty understanding NYC. I can remember when we were briefly considering moving there for my wife's education. This was a dozen years ago and the married student housing was 350 square feet (for two people!) and cost more per money that my current mortgage payment plus utilities.
89: The problem with Scotland, is that it is full of Scots.
re: 90
With London, a lot of the people who sing its praises have never actually spent any time in one of the UK's smaller cities. Which, they might be amazed to find, have thriving music/arts/bar scenes and are a fuck of a lot less unpleasant to be in.
Yeah, we could rent this house out (not in London) for enough to pay our mortgage and maybe have a little bit left over. But our mortgage is for left than half the value of the house.
I am worried about .... whether I can get a plate to replace the one that my friend's toddler broke today.
My London-born-and-raised aunt warned me, incorrectly as it turned out*, that I would be unable to understand the speech of anyone in Lancastershire.
*She wasn't completely wrong. I had a world of trouble understanding anybody my aunt's age.
*less.
Generally, people get nicer the further from London they are.
Did she tell you where Lancastershire was?
I spelled it the way that helps me remember it. I meant, Lancashire.
That's where my grandparents emigrated from. My kid imitation of the accent just involved saying "hurr" for "hair" and "burr" for "bear" and making lots of what to me are one-syllable words two-syllable words (school, plain). Really they just sounded Irish.
96. Everybody knows that, it's the other end of the country from Southamptonshire. And about the same vintage.
62 -- I'm having a hard time believing that you could get a decent yacht for $70,000. Maybe this is definitional, and we're talking about a sailboat with a sleeping berth. Anyhow, I love the wastefulness of megayachts -- there's a megayacht rental site where you can rent one (over teh internet!) for only around $500,000.00 per week.
Here's an extraordinarily random bleg for the Londoners: Do any of you (I'm thinking particularly of Ttam) know of a decent physical therapist/body movement/personal trainer type person who would be willing to work with an elderly American for about a month for a reasonable fee? My 67 year old Dad has decided to decamp to London for two months and spend down my inheritance. He's had some mobility issues that he was working on with a trainer here (and making a lot of progress) doing some basic stretching and movement exercises and I'd like to see if I can set him up with someone over there to do a little bit of work.
A Lancaster Shire is a type of horse ridden by the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Asilon, depending on the value of the plate (to you) and how many pieces it's in, you might want to find a ceramics restorer or conservator near you. If she or her website refers to Hxtal adhesive, she knows what she's doing.
90: This isn't going to be a surprising answer but some days it's worth it; some days not. People obviously don't just live here because we enjoy paying a lot for a tiny space, but there are compensations. This would be more of a fiery and rousing response if it weren't January.
I'm having a hard time believing that you could get a decent yacht for $70,000. Maybe this is definitional, and we're talking about a sailboat with a sleeping berth.
We are. If we're talking about huge floating gin palaces, then, yes, you're right.
where you can rent one (over teh internet!) for only around $500,000.00 per week
I'm now picturing the part of the transaction where the site says, "Checking your bank details. This may take a few minutes."
102 - aw, thanks Cady, but no, it's a very cheap plate. Just a little bit annoying as I bought 8 of them in the sales 3 weeks ago.
Really they just sounded Irish - !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Halford - don't know anyone but could ask around if you like.
huge floating gin palaces
I think an actual cartoon dream bubble appeared over my head upon reading this phrase.
106b: Well, they were Irish (as in born there and moved over) and also this was in the 19-teens and everyone in Wigan was Irish (it seems), and it's likely the accent was very different from now.
re: 100
Sorry, no. I've worked with some people in Oxford on my own creaking injury ridden frame, but not in London. You could probably find someone by searching here:
http://www.csp.org.uk/director/public/accessphysiotherapy/physio2u.cfm
which is a register of chartered physiotherapists. You can select by area and by speciality [including people who work with the elderly].
Oh, well, *being* Irish makes it more likely that they'll sound Irish, I guess!
everyone in Wigan was Irish
Maybe everyone just said that, because they got sick of hearing Patty Finnigan's joke: "Do you have any Irish in you? NO?! Well, would you like some?"
I worry that you guys are just pretending to be my friends.
Here's where you can rent your floating gin palace. Actually, prices seem to have gone down, from what I recall, from about a year ago when I last looked. You can now rent the Sea Dream for only $550,000 per week -- a bargain! With these low prices you can't afford not to rent a megayacht!
109, 106 -- Thanks much, guys. Asilon, if you hear of name let me know and I'll send you an email, but don't put yourself to trouble. Ttam, I'll forward on the website.
That my debts are too high, that my job isn't stable enough, that I'm waiting too long to have children, whether I'm actually depressed or I'm still reacting to having two grandparents die in the last three months because every time I think about kids and my shrinking family I start crying at work (because I'm always at work).
That my main source of employment will finally wither into nothing, and that any attempt to find new employment with my limited skill set will be met only with hoots of derision. Also, that my daughters' teenage years are drawing ever closer.
Patty Finnigan's
I'm fairly certain that should be Paddy.
That I'm finding this thread way too comforting and humanizing.
Also, that my daughters' teenage years are drawing ever closer.
Which means she's that much closer to being old enough to get a job in case you lose yours.
We Irish-Americans are notoriously bad about things that are actually Irish.
115 - I worry that I actually have a 14 year old.
122: I always assumed Di was Greek!
My first reaction was that I don't worry about anything because I don't have much hope for anything. Don't like my job, don't know what else to do, can't get really get going pursuing any interests, doesn't seem like a relationship & kids is too likely. (Could it be that my CRUSHING DESPAIR puts people off?)
Anywho then I remembered that I worry constantly about my dog! I hope she's ok right now.
123.last: If you poked airholes in the jar lid, I'm sure she's fine.
If they had poked more holes in Jar Jar Binks, those Star Wars prequels might have been watchable.
I always assumed Di was Greek!
I always assumed she was American.
Ursyne -- hang in there, for reals. There is always some hope.
Also, I worry about my dog all the time, and then worry about myself because I'm such a horrible dog owner.
I worry about my dog because as far as I know I don't own a dog, so if it turns out I do I must have been neglecting it terribly.
That fence isn't invisible to my feelings, Robert.
You think you knocked up some bitch?
For some reason I woke up today unexpectedly full of nagging doubts and worries (health--mine and others, children--both general prospects and specific issues, job, company, economy, country and world). So, timing!
I should probably worry that my dog isn't going to forgive me for bathing her yesterday -- she really hates it a lot. Something ironic about your female dog looking at you and clearly thinking "Bitch."
Actually, I've been engaging in what is basically psychological torture of the dog, a super-active pit bull who needs an owner who is home a lot more than I am. Over the weekend, I actually was all set to take her on a rare (it's been about 3 months) trip to the off-leash dog trail -- we got out of the car, and were heading up to the trail when a work emergency came up and meant that I had to go into the office. So, basically, I just led the dog to within 5 feet of the promised land and then shattered her dreams without reason or explanation.
I'm now semi-seriously scared that Bob will find me and that I will be eaten by Bob's dogs.
My sister recently got a Chihuahua. She says it is nervous and shaky because it was a shelter dog and had been rescued from an abusive prior owner. I couldn't see how her Chihuahua was any less shaky that any other one, but I didn't mention that because she went on to show me that it had some scars.
I've never met a Chihuahua that wasn't completely bonkers nervous and shaky. People's motivations for wanting one are deeply mysterious to me.
I've met one Chihuahua that was not nervous and shaky but it had the unfortunate habit of springing a boner every time a gay man walked into the room so, y'know, issues were still present. Totally serious.
Oh dear, now I'm worrying about my friend's dog (small poodle) which was run over today by a bicycle. They were on a shared path, dog walking offlead but right next to her, when a bike whizzed round a corner, narrowly missed my friend, hit the dog causing her to be thrown in the air and then land in front of the bike - which then ran over her hips. And then the bloke yelled at my friend for getting in his way.
[boiiiing!]
I'm not nervous, McManlyPants, but you definitely should be.
So, basically, I just led the dog to within 5 feet of the promised land and then shattered her dreams without reason or explanation.
My new area of research is called Monkeytorture. It's psychological.
I worry that my pending home purchase will somehow fall through (financing is going slowly vs. the deadlines for no obvious reason, and we're paranoid that the seller is having remorse and actually wants to back out), or alternately, will happen and then somehow turn out to have been an absolutely terrible idea (This seems less likely).
I also worry that the wedding I'm helping to organize (mine) will do something terribly wrong. I gather that worry is normal, but I feel like I have better than average reason to think this, particularly in the areas where we're departing from standard conventions.
(Name tweaked due to the paranoia in #1)
My friend has two chihuahuas which weigh a combined weight that is less than my cat.
But I'm not worried about that.
I also worry that the wedding I'm helping to organize (mine) will do something terribly wrong. I gather that worry is normal, but I feel like I have better than average reason to think this, particularly in the areas where we're departing from standard conventions.
Generally, people love a quirky wedding. If focusing your worry would help you, I'd identify the people whose feelings could possibly be hurt by a wedding that was "wrong" (probably your parents and hers, but could include other people), and run the plan by them explicitly, so they can either talk you into changing it or not be blindsided by the plan. Everyone else will have a great time as long as there's something to eat and drink.
A dog with gaydar? Awesome.
He would run towards them when they sat down, leap into their laps and schwing. It was, I assure you, extremely distressing to have happen to one's own self but hilarious when it happened to compatriots.
141.2: If it would help to have one detail almost guaranteed to go wrong to relieve your worry about the rest, I have a baker I can recommend.
It's also very helpful to have one guest who is basically guaranteed to get hilariously, unfortunately drunk, thus making everybody else look reasonable by comparison. I can recommend somebody, if need be.
If focusing your worry would help you, No matter what, I'd identify the people whose feelings could possibly be hurt by a wedding that was "wrong" (probably your parents and hers, but could include other people), and run the plan by the Mineshaft them explicitly, so they can either we can give your boatloads of conflicting advice and share wedding horror stories talk you into changing it or not be blindsided by the plan. Everyone else will have a great time as long as there's something to eat and drink they're not you.
Aside from general state-of-the-world worries, I generally worry about work -- both stuff I'm currently working on, and what I would do if I had to look for another job.
Both seem relatively minor, but who would I be if I didn't have something to worry about?
Well, there's intentionally quirky for a point and there's just being weird. Having homemade beer? Intentionally quirky, good, will probably help other things pass unnoticed. Not having any attendants/wedding party at all? Just because we didn't really have good candidates for the job, seems like not having the logistical backup could cause trouble.
147: At my wedding, I was that guest (to a first approximation--there may have been others, fuck if I remember).
Here's the detail that almost went very wrong with our wedding:
We were planning on walking down the aisle to "You're All I Need To Get By". All downloaded and ready to go. Jammies decided to double-check the track maybe an hour ahead of time, and discovers that it plays "I Heard It Through The Grapevine".
I can't even fathom how confused I would have been, with all the adrenaline and emotion, had "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" actually played. I'm pretty sure I would have begun to giggle too hysterically.
144: I agree with the quirky part. I got married in an aviary and served everyone vegan food afterwards. Everyone loved it except my mother who is still horrified that she had to eat this strange thing called tempeh.
152: I started giggling hysterically during the ceremony because I had trouble getting my husband's ring to fit on his finger. Amazingly, though, I just look really happy in the video and you can't tell that I was shaking uncontrollably with laughter.
148: I was talking to someone on Saturday evening who was deep in the details of planning wedding in May. Of 2012. I pointed out that it was good that she seemed pretty ahead-of-schedule, adding something like, "And in the end, what's a wedding but a big party you give to your family and friends?" To which she deadpanned, "No, this wedding is for *me*."
Ah. Good luck with that approach.
150: No wedding party isn't weird. The weddings I've been to lately have been person-of-honor/best-person only affairs. But I guess I am not in a position to speak for your elderly relatives etc. Are you not letting on that you guys are Furries or too-serious SCA types? Will there be fairy faerie wings and chain mail?
152: WHAT ABOUT THE "DETAIL" OF HAVING A BABY BEFORE YOU EVEN HAD A WEDDING? TRAMP.
planning *her* wedding, that should read.
Furries or too-serious SCA types
Can't they be both? Dragons and knights united at last.
156: No, that part went exactly as planned.
I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow.
Having homemade beer? Intentionally quirky, good, will probably help other things pass unnoticed.
Did this, as well as homemade mead, and people loved it.
Not having any attendants/wedding party at all? Just because we didn't really have good candidates for the job, seems like not having the logistical backup could cause trouble.
Kinda did this (there was a best man and a maid of honor, but no one else, and they didn't actually do much useful) and it made trouble. Particularly, the traditional ceremony doesn't have much of a role for the mother of the bride -- all her recognition is in getting fussed over by ushers. So my parents are, to put it mildly, not fond of each other, my father walked me in (yeah, I really didn't think of the feminist implications at the time) and my mother didn't get an appropriate level of fussing. Which I'm describing dismissively, but she was actually perfectly reasonable in having her feelings hurt -- nothing of the sort was meant, but she certainly didn't get treated as a major part of the production.
So that's the sort of thing I'd worry about -- if you're streamlining away parts of the whole song-and-dance that actually matter to someone whose feelings you care about. No reason not to streamline, just to check.
Not having any attendants/wedding party at all?
Aside from the damage to America's satin retailers, the only problem I can think of is that, legally, you need to have witnesses sign your wedding-legalizing-paper.
too-serious SCA types
I've only recently found out that SCA isn't simply the especially geeky cousin of your average Renaissance Fair. They're nuts.
I got married in an aviary
Weren't there birds flying around and pooping and stuff? Better than an apiary, I suppose.
I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow.
Everybody's desperate trying to make ends meet. Work all day, still can't pay the price of gasoline and meat.
I got married in an aviary
Was there a wingbearer?
my father walked me in (yeah, I really didn't think of the feminist implications at the time)
Totally premature and all, but I was thinking the other day that if I should remarry, I'd like to have Rory walk me down the aisle. Too quirky?
Uplifting Thoughts for an Unseasonably Warm Monday
Warm? For what what value of warm, Stanley? I'm not that far from you and upon going outside I note a considerable lack of anything that could be reasonably construed as warm.
It could be that this is some Scalia-style originalist construction of warm which I wasn't aware of.
At any rate, I'm worried that I'll wind up homeless and broke and generally facing total hopelessness in a few years. This is, sadly, not an unreasonable worry.
On the upside, I wound up with a older female dachshund as a foster on Sunday. So now I have a quadumvirate of dachshunds ruling the house.
max
['I don't have to worry about cleaning food off the floor, that's for sure.']
I'm worried someone's going to notice that I don't know how to conjugate verbs in Spanish.
164: Most birds are caged. Peacocks roam freely and there are ducks and pelicans in the ponds, but they don't bother people.
166: For a few minutes I considered having the wedding at home so I could incorporate my birds into the ceremony, but decided it was too hokey.
I got married in an aviary and served everyone vegan food afterwards.
Like, a big metal cage with thousands of screeching birds inside? This is not the Robert Halford dream wedding.
I'm also worried about you guys not being the best.
JUST KIDDING!!!
OK, 171 before seeing 170. The birds may have been caged, but you still haven't justified serving only vegan food.
I guess I would enjoy the aviary wedding if you could kill and eat all of the birds first. Though that's more Moby's thing.
Did you get married at the National Aviary? Because, why not? Other than the fact that most of the birds aren't caged and there is a sign on the door saying, "You will get your head shat upon."
171: It's an outdoor aviary with birds in cages. We were married in front of this building. It wasn't very noisy.
there is a sign on the door saying, "You will get your head shat upon."
It really says that at the National Aviary? They should put it on the currency too.
173: I'm a vegetarian and the best cook in town is vegan. The wedding cake was also vegan and amazing.
167: No, not too quirky. The "give her away" concept is gross anyway, but the "walk her and/or him down the aisle as a show of support" can be lovely. I think it would be a nice way to involve Rory in the wedding as something other than a standard bridesmaid.
167: No.
I worry that I have nothing to say.
177: That may have been my internal monologue.
I went to the National Aviary on a field trip in second grade and sure enough, a bird pooped on the collar of my then-new barracuda jacket. I was upset and scared and my teacher, the well-named Mrs. Gross, laughed. Across, the country, the future ms bill, then in third grade, was visiting the Santa Barbara zoo when a bird pecked her in the nose. Coincidence? I think not.
154: I went to a bridal expo last weekend (ow, probably a bad idea), and that seemed like the timescale most of the vendors there were assuming. The catalog of looks of horror or pity I got when I said "April 2011" would be amazing, if I weren't busy trying to find the less-booked vendors.
there is a sign on the door saying, "You will get your head shat upon."
It really says that at the National Aviary? They should put it on the currency too.
Only on the small bills the unwashed masses use.
max!
Worries: money, and health, not necessarily in that order. Deaths of loved ones hit me hard; I think I'm still in shock, in some sense, over my mom's death, now two years ago, and the shrinking family is a fearful thing (people can just die! Just like that!). So I worry about my brother, and myself -- I should get my affairs in order! in case something happens -- which migrates to a generalized worry about how disordered my desk and paperwork is.
So, worry about death, and aging; and then a willful rousing of self to notice that sunlight on snow is quite beautiful.
Warm? For what what value of warm, Stanley?
For interpretive assistance, please consider that I did not offer uplifting thoughts either.
Only on the small bills
You're not supposed to touch the birds, let alone write on their beaks. For shame.
183: How many people will attend? I made most of my plans with less than a month to go, but only 16 people attended.
184: Whoa. That didn't turn out so well last time around. On the plus side, maybe Dick Cheney will be in Wyoming when it blows up.
Totally premature and all, but I was thinking the other day that if I should remarry, I'd like to have Rory walk me down the aisle. Too quirky?
If you got married in Va, I could perform the cermony for you.
If you get married within a couple hours of my house and hate your guests, I could sing at the service.
If you want to serve brunch at your wedding, and you don't mind microwave pancakes, then I could do the catering.
If you got married in Va, I could perform the cermony for you.
He also offers a package deal to represent you in the divorce proceedings. Buy now and save!
Or throw pennies at the congregation, if you want something less disturbing.
I'm willing to be the token unfortunately over-drunk guest at your reception.
If you want to get married next to someone playing a space-themed video game, I can supply the pews.
198 took me a minute to get and then made me wish I'd used the minute a different way.
I thought wistfully of a long-lost commenter earlier, when I saw that Yahoo today is front-paging a video on the making of omelets using plastic sandwich baggies and microwaves.
I think I would pay to read urple drunk live blogging someone's wedding.
The "give her away" concept is gross anyway
My father, despite being no one's idea of a feminist, handled this admirably. When the officiant at my sister's wedding asked, "Who gives this bride away?", he answered "Her mother and I support her decision."
I volunteer for duty as the maker of the unsolicited, overly long, cringe-inducingly embarassing toast at the reception.
I'm very good at not urinating in inappropriate places, even when I'm falling-down drunk.
I'll supply the babies that won't shut up during the ceremony.
Also I'm about to go teach and then directly to meet with provost. To the OP.
200: I just watched that -- no microwave was used.
Surprisingly, it did require actual eggs.
Di's wedding is exactly what Unfogged needs!
209: Oooh, it would be like Unfoggedcon 2012!
208: Oooh. I'd assumed a microwave. What was the heat? she asked apprehensively.
the best cook in town is vegan.
I worry that Liz has lost her mind due to protein deficiency. Halford can't eat the birds at the aviary, but just a few blocks up the street is Rodizios, a Brazilian place where dudes wander up to your table with giant skewers of whatever meat just came off the grill and slice it onto your plate.
A classmate of mine in a summer course years ago said that she and her husband got married at city hall during their lunch hour. Seems like a good idea to me.
Di:
oudemia likes to slam dance so you might want to warn any elderly guests like Carp.
211: A pot of boiling water on a burner.
Wouldn't the plasticky stuff from the baggie end up in the egg? It's possible the anti-BPA thing has me more nervous about plastic than I should be.
212: Have you been to Sage's or Vertical Diner? Ian Brandt's food is amazing. Este's vegetarian pizzas are really good too, though.
217: I wouldn't go. I'm afraid of wisdom and heights.
dudes wander up to your table with giant skewers of whatever meat just came off the grill and slice it onto your plate
Man, I bet service like that costs a Brazilian dollars.
A skewer here and a skewer there and soon you're talking about real dinero.
Now I am imagining being stuck in Utah with nothing but Tempeh and no booze. Get me out of here!
I don't know if De Niro eats steak, but he certainly chews the scenery. So don't let him make away with any centerpieces.
I've never been a bridesmaid ..... just saying.
My future wife and I were living in the Capital Hill neighborhood of DC at the time, and looked into an outdoor ceremony in a scenic corner of the National Mall. We got as far as procuring the appropriate forms for an event permit from the Park Service. The reservation form had the best wedding planning checklist EVER, particularly , "Will the attendees be carrying picket signs?"
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Stupid local rules varying from district to district. I'm usually in the SDNY, when I'm in federal court, and there letters get sent to the court on paper. When I occasionally have an EDNY case, it takes me forever to remember that I have to file letters electronically. I don't care what the rule is, but there's really no reason at all to have a different rule because you're in a district a mile and a half away.
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You could be living in a district that (generally) doesn't permit letters to the Court AND that has insanely particular formatting and filing rules for summary judgment motions. Keeps a nice stream of local counsel revenue going, though.
Actually, not federalism! Just a more-or-less needlessly subdivided federal judiciary!
225: Don't you have staff to take care of pesky details like that?
district that (generally) doesn't permit letters to the Court
Not even thank-you cards? Because that's just plain rude.
Today's pleading is brought to you by the letter "A" and the number 356.
I have no idea what a "letter to the court" is.
228: I knew I was wrong, but I never let that stop me!
The SDNY (or at least some of its judges, I can't remember whether its a local rule or not) has a practice where, before filing a motion, you write a short letter describing what the motion will be about, the other side sends another letter, and then you talk about that with the judge to see whether you really need to go through the whole motion process. Seemed very reasonable and civilized.
In the future, all legal communications will be handled through social media, and law professionals will be known as Twittigators.
Also, adjourning dates (such as in this case, our time to answer) is done by letter to the court. In state court (in NY, anyway), the two sides would stipulate to an extension, but in the SDNY and the EDNY, you write a letter to the judge saying that you'd like to put a date off from X to Y, and your opponent either agrees, doesn't oppose, or opposes.
I have no idea what a "letter to the court" is.
You're transactional, right? Do you ever interact with courts?
229: [laughs bitterly]. Staff? For this kind of thing? No.
237: They can't even afford binder clips!
236: Of course I don't interact with courts, but I did attend law school, once. I feel like I've at least heard of most of the weird things litigators do.
Back to the OP, I'm worried that there's a maximum number of Altoids a person should eat in one day and that I'm perilously close to that number.
Huh, I wonder if that's particularly New Yorky. Because writing to the judge is a fairly common tactic in state court as well when you're bitching about discovery. "Juuuudge, he won't give me his documents. Tell him he has to give me his dooocumennnts, Juudge." It's the step before making a discovery motion.
240: You know how eating too many hot peppers will continue the burn upon exit (aka the ring of fire)? Let us know if you get peppermint-scented gas tonight, because I think we may have a marketable concept here.
There was an In Living Color sketch with Jim Carrey advertising scented suppositories in various odors. The end of the sketch was Carrey, driving a car, shifting his weight onto one buttock as a friend got in to the passenger seat: "Say, is this a new car?"
241: It's important to be able to convey a certain whininess in the text of a letter to the court. New York judges like that.
based on an LD50 of 25800 mg/kg for glucose (in rats), i estimate the average adult male could eat about 3100 altoids.
243: If you're suggesting Stanley eat upholstery, I'd like to point out that 198 wasn't bad enough to deserve punishment.
I'm worried that the other person in this one-on-one meeting will get some inkling of what I'm actually doing right now.
197: Technically, that is making it hail.
what I'm actually doing right now
What's really impressive is that you're still managing to type while you do it.
237: Right. Well, for lawyers who aren't in private (as opposed to government) practice, so aren't billing by the hour, I guess it doesn't matter too much if the lawyer has to take extra time to figure matters out. Mostly just a hassle.
I wonder if that's particularly New Yorky.
It is. The "letter to the Court" basically doesn't exist in California (and I don't think it does in other state jurisdictions that I know less well).
Have you been to Sage's or Vertical Diner?
Heard of them, but not gone in. A few years back one of my buddies I climbed with was veg and we'd go to Evergreen down on State Street. Not bad but not once did a dude come by the table with a giant skewer of sizzling chicken hearts and ask me how many I'd like.
Now I am imagining being stuck in Utah with nothing but Tempeh and no booze.
Booze rules here I dare say are better than PA. And if you came up you'd have a chance to kill yourself train at Gym Jones.(the guy who trained the actors for 300)
I'd forgotten that the old Utah booze rules are a thing of the past.
There's nothing better than just getting bacon covered sausage after bacon covered sausage until you turn the marker from green to red.
I thought the guy who trained the 300 actors worked in post-production animation.
Gym Jones
A great place to work out, but don't drink the Gatorade.
Actual bacon-related question that came up in conversation today, to which no one knew the answer: Do people in Canada refer to Canadian bacon as "bacon"?
I worry about everything. Seriously. 30 minutes ago I worried that I just cursed inappropriately. Reading this thread made me worry, concurrently, that some day I'll have to plan a wedding, which sounds positively awful to me, and that maybe the situation will never arise, which also doesn't sound wholly pleasant. And now I'm worrying that I took time out of my work day to write this instead of working, and that it's not even on topic anymore, so what's the point?
Further lawyering gripes: I just got some records pertaining to a plaintiff from the SSA (with her consent) and the SSA redacted some confidential information (that I don't need and is irrelevant to the case). I don't have a gripe about the fact of the redaction, but they did it with a black magic marker, and I can read the information with no difficulty at all.
Now, I don't care, I'm not going to use it for anything, and it's not going to go any further. But man, if you're going to redact something to protect someone's privacy, invest in a roll of redaction tape and do it right.
Booze rules here I dare say are better than PA.
Our brand new governor says he will sell the liquor stores. Based on the way beer sales are handled, that might make it worse by some standards (i.e. just as restricted but less of the profit going to the state), but they really can't make it more of a pain in the ass without open revolt.
257: We will plan your wedding for you. No worries.
260: Phew. I should specify that standing up and expressing private emotions in public sounds like torture, so just a party, please. Also, can you find me a groom while you're at it?
261: Assuming 14.2 hands tall at the withers, try here.
Specs?
I'd be really surprised if eyewear is a dealbreaker for (). She seems pretty open-minded.
Things I'm no longer worried about: meeting with the provost.
Definitely one of those occasions where if you sit back, the other person will talk and talk and talk and you are basically being spoon-fed the right answer. Which in this case was "Yes" to "So, I forgot to budget the stipends and there's an extremely small pool of money to divide up and do you think faculty will take it okay if they get a very tiny little bit of money, since we never specified an amount?" Conversation drifted towards the fact that he didn't think everyone worked hard enough, but not in a way that required anything other than polite nodding.
I was way happier on the day of (both of) my divorces than weddings, and there was no need to plan an expensive party! So you can look forward to that.
256: What Americans tend to think of as Canadian bacon is, I believe, called "back bacon" in Canada.
Why we can't have Medicare for everyone?
160 is concerned it's going to become self-aware. Or they designed it and they think it already did and that's why it's so cranky.
269: Or, in some provinces, "pony".
I've only recently found out that SCA isn't simply the especially geeky cousin of your average Renaissance Fair. They're nuts.
Really? What exactly did you find out about them?
266- I didn't find the actual day of my divorce too stressful, but planning for the occasion was certainly a pain. Of course, IANAL.
I'm a little worried that matters of faith will doom the relationship with Mr. Wonderful.
According to wikipedia, they do think the Middle Ages lasted up to the 17th century, which is a little out of sync with what academic historians say, but still well within the bounds of mainstream culture.
I like how there's a distinction in 155 between the beyond-the-pale too-serious SCA types and the perfectly normal casual SCA'ers. Like, they'd do a little on a weekend or at a party, but it never affected their job or family life.
Sometimes I worry that Emerson might have had it right all along.
I've never been a bridesmaid ..... just saying.
You cant get asilon to be a bridesmaid. Arent they required to hook up with the single or kind-of single guys? RDJr isnt going to be there, right?
My greatest worry is that parsimon will enlist Moby to kill all the ponies.
re: 254
Heh. No. I read up on it at the time and there was some before and after stuff of Vincent Regan and the transformation was freakish. But it was a crash training regime -- almost no food, inhuman levels of exercise.
http://www.changingsizes.net/300/images/captain_1_small.jpg
http://www.changingsizes.net/300/images/captain_3_small.jpg
FWIW, I hated 300.
I'm worried I might be deported from the UK within a week, a country I've lived and loved in for nearly a decade now, just as I'm about to submit my dissertation, over a completely fucking arbitrary point in my paperwork.
re: 283
You probably know this, but have you approached?
http://www.iasuk.org/home.aspx
Best of luck.
@284
Hopefully it won't come to that, but I'll bookmark the link, thanks.
283:
That stinks. Good luck in avoiding it!
I'm worried that someone's been editing my comments. MEAN!
Our brand new governor says he will sell the liquor stores. Based on the way beer sales are handled, that might make it worse by some standards (i.e. just as restricted but less of the profit going to the state), but they really can't make it more of a pain in the ass without open revolt.
Look, this is just lazy rhetoric. The beer stores legitimately are a pain in the ass because you can't buy anything under a 24-pack and therefore the places that are allowed to sell 6-packs jack up the prices. The liquor stores are not. There are liquor stores everywhere and most of them, in small towns or places like Wilkinsburg, probably have more selection than the equivalent free-market liquor store would have. At the high end, there is an absence of liquor stores that sell really interesting things. Also, most of them aren't open enough hours. Neither of these factors constitutes a "pain in the ass".
Boy, you guys are GRRRREAT!
(Remember that commercial? I love Tony the Tiger almost as much as I love you guys.)
Halford has been married and divorced twice? NTTAWWT.
I was thinking that was new information -- dollars to doughnuts the first marriage was one of those twenty-something 'Oops' marriages that turns out to have been a bad idea in a couple of months. All sorts of people have one of those.
Speaking of which, if any EU citizens want to try out an 'oops' marriage, I'm also worried about deportation these days...
Yes, and yes to 282.
But the next time, the Ukranian mail order bride is sure to work out
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Speaking of uplifting thoughts, has anybody seen Tim Pawlenty's contribution to the campaign video genre. I was waiting for a baritone-voiced narrator to say "In a world where freedom is under threat from the afro-socialist menace, only one man can save America."
Highly weird moment around 0:06. The visual reminds me of this. Surely that couldn't have been intentional, could it?
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Almost every single person shown after those first few seconds is white. Not very subtle.
T-Paw is the potential GOP nominee that I'm most concerned about. For reals.
I am really worried about a very invasive medical test Mara has to go through tomorrow night. I told myself I wouldn't talk about it online, but apparently that's not stopping me. Usually I'm all cool and shit but sometimes child abuse makes me want to just break down and sob, and watching this sweet girl splash peas all over her plate while pretending to be a robot is one of those times.
298: Really? I saw him interviewed not long ago and he seemed like such a ridiculous nutcase (babbling about refusing to raise the debt ceiling), that I wasn't worried. He was also seriously on the defensive, not in a good way, about his gubernatorial policies in Minnesota, though I've forgotten the details now.
I know someone quite well who is in SCA and I find myself not asking about it much in case it strikes me as across the geek/lunatic divide. I met some of her friends from it and they were, hm, socially off but didn't set off my cra-dar. Heh. Like in "crazy." Just made that up.
If T-Paw goes down, maybe he could bequeath his filmmaking resources to the Tea Party Patriots. My local furniture store has better production values in their tv ads.
300:Hey, E & E Coasts are pretty to visit, and Dixie has faux pride, but it is my center of the country that gives us our Presidents. Sorry Mtt and Srh, you alien weirdos.
Watch out for Bachmann and Perry.
275: Matters of faith? ...Go on.
On the topic of wedding planning: a good friend of mine ended up eloping because her pending wedding to someone of Chinese descent brought out a bunch of unexpected, initially sort of entertaining, and eventually horrible racism in her immediate family. Like, her mother's suggestions for the wedding reception were...epic.
"...I'm envisioning a line of woks."
"We could put the party favors in chinese takeout containers!"
There were others, but I'd have to search my email. I (jokingly!) suggested that the only way to avoid the situation was to have a theme wedding that was more offensive in some impersonal way, unrelated to any of the participants. Like a little people theme, or something. They eloped.
Obviously there are a lot of exceptions, and you may not want to say Reagan is from Illinois, though I would, and you might call Lincoln and Eisenhower Westerners although I wouldn't but it happens often enough that I would bet against Romney.
I am not saying I know why Midwesterners dominate.
289: The liquor stores are too a huge pain in the ass. Wine (and beer) should be sold in the grocery store and that is the case in nearly every state. If "selling the liquor stores" just means the same stores stay where they are with new management, it won't have done much. If the buyers can move them around and put them in the grocery store, it will be huge victory for humanity, justice, and me not having my bi-weekly moment of sounding like a libertarian. But, no details yet and, as noted above, I have my concerns.
299: I'll keep you guys in my thoughts.
I am not saying I know why Midwesterners dominate. David Hackett Fischer thinks he knows. I think he's wrong, but the book is *fascinating*.
Wine (and beer) should be sold in the grocery store and that is the case in nearly every state
Eh, we still have separate liquor stores,privately owned, and to be honest I like it better than when I lived in Iowa where they sold in grocery stores since the selection in the grocery store always seemed lack luster. A couple of our liquor stores are the size of small grocery stores.
Bachmann is too far gone. Forget her. Perry I don't know -- I believe the state is finding itself in a deep hole lately, and despite what some Texans think about their state, the rest of the country looks askance. Sorry.
For Romney, I think it's just the case that the country will not elect a Mormon at this time. And Newt? The Village isn't behind him. Who are the other potential front-runners? I haven't really gotten a read on Huckabee.
I'd be most worried about Chris Christie, but he says he's not running.
295: Highly weird moment around 0:06. The visual reminds me of this. Surely that couldn't have been intentional, could it?
Not sure, but as it is Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay at the time, of course) and two other gold medal winners at the Rome Olympics it is politically weird enough on its own.
311: Impressive recall (or google-fu). Very interesting indeed.
309: There are two big state stores in the whole city. The rest have maybe twice the self space devoted to Franzia as to every other type of wine combined.
312: Just recognized Ali's face and then found a similar pic via Google. Your original suggestion is the great moment in US Olympic history.
Di, my relationship has a religion gap that's about as big as they get, yet we almost never have problems on those grounds. It's totally doable if you're willing to let your beloved believe what he needs to believe and vice versa, no sneaky converting.
The rest have maybe twice the self space devoted to Franzia as to every other type of wine combined
Huh, there appear to be 17 varieties of Franzia. That is about 12 more than I would have guessed.
Hm. The Pawlenty video is odd and creepy. I watched about 1.5 minutes of it; do campaign videos ordinarily follow a pattern that looks very much like the intro to an overblown Hollywood blockbuster? Complete with Pawlenty's name plastered across the screen as though it's the title of the film?
I actually do find the narrative explosiveness, the mounting fervor, somewhat threatening (politically): people really dig that shit.
It might be interesting to look at a transcript and take apart the moves that are being made. Freedom! Freedom is serious shit, man.
There was a recent piece in "Proof" the magazine of the Minnesota Licensed Beverage Association, which made, I though, a very cogent point about the whole "Wine With Dinner"/liquor in grocery stores debate. Namely that there already IS liquor in grocery stores (in Minnesota), and that a number of MN grocery stores are members in good standing of the MLBA. They sell liquor under exactly the same rules as other off-sale establishments, with all of the regulation that implies. Meanwhile, at least here, other off-sale establishments which do not have a grocery store connected to them are prohibited from selling any sort of groceries, except mixers and limes and what not.
Pawlenty is pretty insidious. I don't think he has a great shot at the presidential nomination, but he's in great shape to get the veep nod.
Bachmann is just a nut. She's the Alexander Haig of attractive female 21st century politicians.
The rest have maybe twice the self space devoted to Franzia as to every other type of wine combined.
I guess the freedom fries era is over in PA.
321: Actually, a week or so ago my daughter and I ate at a place that still had them thus listed on the menu.
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It's interesting that this Mark Kennedy stuff has barely made it across the Atlantic. Here's Julian Assange, vilified (and occasionally defended) all over the place for sexually assaulting two women, once each, and it's a huge international cause celebre. Meanwhile, the British security apparat has apparently been sending undercover cops into non-violent left-wing activist groups for YEARS, and instructing them to boink anyone they can, under false pretenses, for the purpose of getting the survivors of these countless sexual assaults to unwittingly betray their comrades.
Despicable.
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320.1: I don't like the narrative he's spinning, which sounds roughly like we're at war, battling the forces arrayed against freedom. Way to confuse people, dude.
304: He' Catholic; I'm not. I was having a bit of a freakout. I have... issues.
316: Thanks. We had a long, challenging talk tonight. We'll be okay. God, this shit is exhausting.
Tim Pawlenty's contribution to the campaign video genre
I hope he's running for President of The West Wing, because he would totally win.
But not Catholic in a Dout/hat, every-sperm-is-sacred kind of way, right? There are Catholics, and then they are crazies.
We had a long, challenging talk tonight.
Why does everyone insist on having relationship talks in Klingon?
Meanwhile, the British security apparat has apparently been sending undercover cops into non-violent left-wing activist groups for YEARS, and instructing them to boink anyone they can, under false pretenses, for the purpose of getting the survivors of these countless sexual assaults to unwittingly betray their comrades.
I'm not sure 'assault' is a good characterization of the wrongness here; at any rate, it seems that the wrongness of the Assange allegations is rather different from the wrongness of what Kennedy did. But yeah. Really bad wrongness there.
Here in HD, this has been the subject of some discussion; my roommates seem really shocked by it. Whereas I'm sort of shocked by their shock; I get that there seems to have been an overstepping of constitutional bounds here, but I've realized that I just sort of assume that this stuff is normal, if also disgusting and indefensible. I guess it's good that the threshhold for outrage is as low as it appears to be, here.
Anyway. Ugh. Just, ugh.
1: why worry about cancer, bob? All the cancer cells are tying to do is slip the bonds of your neo-liberal apoptosis and start a glorious revolution. If a little blood has to run in the streets your stool, so be it-this hypertimid incrementalist bullshit of yours plays right into the Obots' hands.
New worry: wow, I'm going to have a bunch of bruises. I should learn not to move large pieces of furniture across town without more able-bodied help.
And if you came up you'd have a chance to kill yourself train at Gym Jones.(the guy who trained the actors for 300)
I'm not interested in working out but do they perchance have a viewing gallery?
329: Well, legally, in some jurisdictions, they would be sexual assaults. Ethically, I think most reasonable people would be hard-pressed to call it anything less than extreme sexual malfeasance. It's a pretty horrifying betrayal.
It's the state sanction that makes my skin crawl. Individuals misrepresent themselves towards sexual ends all the time; but as individuals they're just scumbags.
Although I guess the ends weren't entirely sexual either, if the stated purpose was to gather "intelligence" or something? Also, didn't one of these guys get married? Very confusing.
I suppose this sort of underscores your earlier point about the lack of media coverage.
Yeah, I didn't mean to be downplaying how horrifying it is. The particular word used isn't the main issue. Anyway. Bedtime now.
I must say that the photo alone of Mark Kennedy makes my skin crawl. And yes, totally reprehensible.
Although, mostly just to provoke conversation, for some reason I don't think I'd feel the same repugnance towards a Matahari/James Bond figure using sex to gain intelligence in foreign espionage as I do with the Mark Kennedy situation. Not sure why. Presumably outside of the movies it's not very common, but the CIA really does keep at least a few people on staff overseas who are having sex under false pretences to get intelligence, right? And that just feels different, but I'm not sure why.
If all the sex was consensual, where's the sexual assault? Hell, there's not even a power differential, so it wouldn't even qualify as sexual harassment. He's not using his power as an agent to get sex. He can't even threaten to do something to them if they don't sleep with him because that would blow his cover.
If merely trying to sleep with as many women as possible is sexual assault, half of the male university population should be in jail.
Apparently Pitchfork Media likes reverb. Knock it off, Pitchfork! You're stupiding up the music!
Appaahhh Pihhhh Mehhhh ksss urrb.
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A disturbing thing -- I was cleaning up some stuff downstairs, where the house fixiting stuff is kept, and found a white plastic trash bag taped up with blue painters tape (both the bag and tape are of the type I have bought). I open it up to see what's inside, and I find a pair of women's blue sweatpants, a women's white blouse (both XS, Merona brand, and unfamiliar to me), and a pair of obviously filthy women's underpants.
I re-taped the bag, took it out to the garbage bin, came upstairs and washed my hands repeatedly. WTF.
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That is not the comment I stayed up hitting "refresh" for. Bleah.
343: Do you have housemates? Either way, that's just plain creepy.
No housemates. My ex-boyfriend used to live here. I guess I also have friends stay from time to time? I have no idea how this came about. I think I'm just going to try to forget all about it.
Yeah, this sounds like a job for whiskey.
Did you wake up with blood under your fingernails and wondering how a framed photo of a stranger got on your dresser?
Did your ex seem to enjoy digging in the garden at night?
That's really disturbing. I don't really have anything to add except that it does sound like a mystery that is best left unexplained if it can be forgotten.
Yikes! I was coming to hear to complain about a self-assigned IP problem, but it doesn't seem like anything to worry about now.
That was weird. "coming to hear" s/b "coming here". This is what travel does to my brain.
I think 347 and 350 are right. 348: no; 349: maybe? This is like one of Tia's minute mysteries, except I don't know the answer.
Those minute mysteries always creep me the fuck out, so yeah. Whiskey for everyone!
To stay on the safe side, avoid all abalone, parachutes, umbrellas, elevators, bullets made out of ice, and fishing with dynamite.
257 Reading this thread made me worry, concurrently, that some day I'll have to plan a wedding, which sounds positively awful to me
We neatly avoided having to do all that by having an emergency wedding in hospital, on the eve of my wife's big operation (and after she had been in for the best part of a year already). That evening, she had to go to intensive care; that was some wedding night....
What Americans tend to think of as Canadian bacon is, I believe, called "back bacon" in Canada.
And in Britain. American bacon is called "streaky".
Di, totally rooting for you, but did you read Doonesbury last week?
Heh. Now I have. Don't worry, "Leo" is on the same page on these getting-ahead-of-ourselves discussions. I've even begun slowly introducing him to the idea that you lot exist...
343 is creepy. (Odd selection of items as well. No socks? No shoes?) Probably shouldn't have binned the stuff though, it might be evidence.
Haven't read the thread: but do you really have unseasonably warm weather there? If so, damn you. It is so frickin cold here that the buses aren't starting and the public transportation was delayed all over and large parts were shut down.
362: see 187. I was making a(n apparently obtuse) dumb joke. It has been unusually cold here.
What? Am I the only person who thinks the bag of old clothes is awesome? Mystery! Adventure! Sleuthing! I would love to find that! (That is not an invitation to leave the clothes of your victims in my home.)
358: she's doing better, still in hospital but slowly workign on recovering. We're doing well enough that she can go outside in a wheelchair and smoke, after a couple of months in which we had to take her with bed and all downstairs.
Speaking of "uplifting thoughts," god bless the young lady I espied this morning who evidently said "convention be damned! I'm wearing a little black dress and a ponytail to work" when dressing today.
366: Ahem. Montpelier has broadband now, my dearest.
366: My Andrew would never even look at such a hussy.
Is it odd to wear a ponytail to work?
365: Whoa. How recent is all of this? What happened?
I've even begun slowly introducing him to the idea that you lot exist...
That's moving quickly. I'm not even prepared to accept that most of this lot exists.
Am I the only person who thinks the bag of old clothes is awesome? Mystery! Adventure! Sleuthing!
I'm with you! Plus, what if they're great clothes?
Am I the only person who thinks the bag of old clothes is awesome? Mystery! Adventure! Sleuthing!
Me three.
I'm with you! Plus, what if they're great clothes?
One might even think it likely they're to die for.
Oh sure. And you will probably all think it's great drama when jms gets dragged in for questioning after the evidence is discovered in her trash.
369: I don't know, maybe it would be if it was paired with a coctail dress. Also would depend on the location. I certainly wouldn't expect that at the Whitehouse. Or, I guess, at Mr. Madison's plantation.
Lawyers are fun's natural predator.
It's a fairly common mistake to call something a ponytail that's not technically a ponytail.
I worked at Grandy's in high school, and was closing one night, and brought back a big tray of dishes. The guy in the back had already run the big industrial dishwasher. So he bagged up the dishes and threw them into the dumpster.
(I'm sure this scene has played out at many restaurants before. I still think it's funny.)
It would be totally creepy to find a bag of clothes that included a ponytail.
381: not in the dumpster at a salon, I would think. But, say, at one's own home? Sure.
Ponytail plus little black dress says eighteen year old at office party to me.
Feed the brute, Dolly.
382: What was the salon doing with the rump of a pony in the first place?
382: What was the salon doing with the rump of a pony in the first place?
'Product' is like sausages & legislation in certain respects. Ask no further.
On the mixed religion relationship/marriage issue: Anecdata! I have two close friends who are Hindu/Jewish and happily married, raising their kids in both religions (Diwali kicks Hanukkah's ass, btw). Another couple I know got together in High School 20+ years ago and are happily married, he a Muslim, she a Catholic. My sister's longest relationship prior to meeting her husband was with a Muslim.
It can be made to work as long as nobody's a prick about it, IOW.
387: Yeah, it was kind of a needless freakout on my part. The subject of annulment had come up at one point, and so I proceeded to overthink it (b/c I kill fun). And then what at first blush seemed like a silly hoop I'd be willing to jump through turned out to be something I realized I probably could never in good conscience do. And then I panicked because what if this proved to be a dealbreaker for him? And WTF, how could I finally find the person who makes me feel comfortable in my own skin and then have something like this get in the way? And if it was going to be a dealbreaker in the long-run, then maybe it's better to run, run away now.
But he's happy to live in sin, if that's what being together necessitates, and serve devil's food cake at our non-marital living-in-sin reception someday.
You all thought I was nuts going through a divorce? Apparently I'm twice the crazy when falling in love.
And of course you could get civilly and ceremonially married, just not Catholically married, while living in sin from a Catholic perspective. I don't know if you'd be comfortable with that, but it's an option.
Apparently I'm twice the crazy when falling in love.
The triumph of hope liquor over experience.
Seconding 387. When I was at school my best mate's dad was Jewish and his mother was Presbyterian and became an Elder of the Church of Scotland, which showed a bit of commitment, back in the 60s. My mate identified as Jewish, which didn't strike me as odd at the time, because I knew nothing.
You could never in good conscience get an annulment? Is that because you could never sincerely claim, or want to claim, your first marriage never happened, and you wouldn't feel comfortable going through the procedure unless you were sincere about it, even if you don't believe any of the associated religious stuff?
If so, that's interesting--I wouldn't have thought so, given that you wisely agreed with me about everything in the jury nullification thread.
392.1: Yeah, more or less. Grounds for annulment would essentially mean I'd be claiming I didn't really mean it when I married UNG. And sure, in many ways it was a horrible, horrible mistake. But it's a mistake I can't pretend I didn't make. And yeah, popular wisdom seems to be that ultimately all it takes for annulment is a big enough check. But it just doesn't sit right with me to basically lie and buy off the bishop under the premise that this would be more pleasing to God. Honesty is more or less at the core of my personal values. (While I am not Catholic... anymore..., I do share a significant portion of his religious beliefs.)
He would need you to annul your first marriage in order to get married? But living in sin is cool? I am reminded of The End of the Affair, where whathisface Greene's stand-in wanders around all incensed because his Catholic lover was cool with having the affair, but when they both survived the bombing she suddenly found it very important to keep that particular promise about ending said affair, and he's all, seriously? That makes no sense.
Ok, on reflection, not the same thing. And applying logic to people's religious thingies sort of misses the point.
I think the thing I see most often is that people tend to overlook or just get over seemingly insurmountable hurdles if they really want to be with someone. I wouldn't worry about it. Except, of course, you're falling in love, so you're going to be a nutcase no matter what. (Side note: awesome!)
Um. Try to pick fun things to be crazy about?
393: Yeah, annulment has always seemed really creepy to me, for all of those reasons and a few others.
389: Sure. I'm comfortable with any of those options. Hell, I'd be comfortable remarrying in the Catholic Church, if I could do so honestly -- it's really the Catholic Church that would have a problem with that.
388: I go through similarly crazy post-divorce hypervigilance about potential problems just thinking about going on a date. What if she's secretly evil? Or a Kenyan Muslim? If there's an awkward pause in the conversation will I find myself suddenly ranting about user interface design or Dominion Theology or why the Space Shuttle sucks donkey balls?
Also 393 makes perfect sense.
Grounds for annulment would essentially mean I'd be claiming I didn't really mean it when I married UNG.
I think, though I'm no expert, you could claim that you meant it but that UNG was so false you couldn't have given meaningful consent.
394.1: It's not so much that he would need an annulment as that the Catholic Church would require it. Living together without marriage or marrying outside the Catholic Church would be equally living-in-sin from the Catholic perspective. Also, it's kind of ironic that you mention Graham Greene, as he just sent me a book by Greene that he especially likes.
On the plus side, I've now had the opportunity to learn that he handles me freaking out really, really well.
399.2 is an excellent sign. Go, Leo!
If you purchase an annulment, are there other indulgences you can get the priest to throw in. Maybe some birth control for an extra $200?
I'm confused. Annulments are for catholics, trying to erase the record of previous catholic marriages. 325.1 says he's catholic, but you're not. The church wouldn't require your previous marriage to be annuled, because you weren't catholic and it wasn't a catholic marriage.
(Althoug now I see that 393 says not catholic "anymore", in which case it's even easier--your last marriage was automatically invalid! No annulment necessary! Unless of course your marriage to UNG was a catholic marriage. Then you've got a problem. (Or, more correctly, as you note, the catholic church has a problem.)
399.1: Greene is, in fact, pretty cool. I mean, obvs some books better than others, but on the whole he manages to make really difficult parts of writing look easy. So, if only from a technical perspective. (I also just kinda like him.) Btw, according to the New Yorker profile a few years ago, he was apparently of the belief that the only reason he didn't get the Nobel was b/c of the presence of a particularly virulent anti-Catholic on the committee.
And 399.2 is excellllent.
403: Catholic vs. other Christian doesn't matter for this purpose. You need to annul any previous Christian marriage*. If UNG wasn't Christian, then an annulment wouldn't be needed.
*We're ruling about anything that would result in a bag of bloody clothes tossed into Robust's yard, no?
402: The Power and the Glory.
403: Yep, married UNG in the Catholic Church. Also, I believe the Church's definition of "not a Catholic anymore" differs from mine. My baptism has never been annulled and I haven't been excommunicated or anything...
I believe the Church's definition of "not a Catholic anymore" differs from mine.
Right, you're still catholic if you haven't been excommunicated. So having married UNG in the Catholic Church presents a problem for any current catholic-church marriage plans, agreed.
On the subject of Jesus: I half-watched The Ruling Class last night. I can't think about Jesus now without picturing Peter O'Toole and laughing.
But, again, this is all way ahead of the game. He hasn't even asked Rory's permission yet.
Is it odd to wear a ponytail to work?
I do it every day.
Apparently I'm twice the crazy when falling in love.
Apparently.
If he's currently an active catholic, the bigger problem isn't the ceremony, but the fact that he technically won't be permitted to recieve the eucharist. I'm not sure whether that would be an issue. And of course I'm sure there's plenty of noncompliance with that rule. But it's there.
Di, come on over to the Anglicans. This kind of problem is -- literally-- what we're designed to solve!
411: Right? I wish I'd given it my full attention. I kept expecting Gussey Fink-Nottle to come charging through before I realized I was mixing up my crazy rich English aristocrats. Then I had some thoughts about falling empires.
Receive the eucharist going-forward, I mean. Unless the two of you are, in the words of the catechism, "committed to living in complete continence".
"committed to living in complete continence"
Does that mean no more peeing on the rug?
I PUT IT IN MY GALVANIZED PRESSURE COOKER! HROOM!
Catholic vs. other Christian doesn't matter for this purpose
It matters a lot. the catholic church doesn't recognize the marriage of a catholic who marries outside the catholic church. No annulment is even necessary.
Um, the Anglican communion is having some trouble of it's own, right? But they're still cool with the divorce? Love that. True to principles, I guess. (Someone tell Africa.)
I'm not sure what complete continence is, but I'm pretty sure I'm not committed to living in it. (Though, I believe my former in-laws purport to be... ) The Eucharist is the part of Catholicism he cherishes the most. God, I would feel horrible taking that from him.
And of course I'm sure there's plenty of noncompliance with that rule.
My mom's super weird on this point. I generally decline to take the eucharist, but she insists that I do if our other relatives are present. I feel it's disrespectful for me, an apostate Catholic, to participate, but she'd rather avoid all the family inquiries as to why I didn't take communion.
essentially mean I'd be claiming I didn't really mean it when I married UNG
Not for a moment to suggest how you run your life, but this too is something Rory might have views on. Living in sin, however, is great, except that after a decade or so people forget whether you're married or not, and TBH so do you.
418: Out of curiosity, does that include Mormons?
Obvs this has been said before, but now I'm really distracted by it, so I'm gonna impose on you all anyway: this whole thread has made me think about the major religions, and I just keep coming back to the idea that they all seem...silly. Except for the killing and dying. But otherwise, just ridiculous.
they all seem...silly
Not just the major ones.
424: Granted, I didn't give Zoroastrianism much thought. But I knew two Zoroastrians in college! TWO!
Still definitely cool with divorce in Anglicanism. Plus, here, you could get married by our local gay bishop and have her consecrate and serve the Eucharist. Totally sweet.
My only hesitation about living in sin is how to introduce him to people -- "My boyfriend Leo" already sounds weird; after 10 years it would just sound pathetic to me....
418: It is easier an easier process in some circumstances, but you still need to get an annulment (see points 7 and 8). And, for a Protestant who marries in the Protestant ceremony, you would still need an annulment, which may be easier.
how to introduce him to people
"This is Leo."
The Eucharist is the part of Catholicism he cherishes the most. God, I would feel horrible taking that from him.
Didn't he begin taking the Eucharist under technically false pretenses the day he lost his virginity?
But they're still cool with the divorce? Love that.
I think the Anglican church is only semi-cool with divorce (I don't know about the American Episcopalians, who seem to be a lot more laid back). The CoE will bless a civil wedding where one or both partners are divorced, but I believe they won't actually remarry them under the rite of Solemnisation of Matrimony. That actually sums up the CoE since Elizabeth Tudor.
423: Mormon doesn't count as Christian to the Catholic Church. This really pisses off many of them.
430 reads as flippant, but it was completely serious.
"My boyfriend Leo" already sounds weird; after 10 years it would just sound pathetic to me....
You'd probably be common-law married by then anyway.
433. If they don't count Islam, I don't see why they should count LDS. Only fair.
427: That does sound pretty sweet.
Of course, given that he finds it a little weird that I have internet friends I've never met in person, he's going to just love that I'm planning our future with you all... So what do you all think about whether we should have kids?
Mormon doesn't count as Christian to the Catholic Church.
Not that I have a dog in this fight, but the Mormons have an entire additional testament. If Mormons are Christians, then Christians are Jews.
434. I know. We did this for 15 years. It was fine, though I think I've told the story of my mother arranging accommodation for my sister's wedding.
434: "This is Leo, the guy with my name tattooed on his ass" would be a good way to make it not serious.
432 is not true of the US Episcopal Church. You are supposed to go through a semi-serious counseling period, meet with the priest, etc. before the marriage (it's not a joke) but two divorced people can be fully married in the church. Also, you just need to be a professed Christian (and even this rule isn't really a rule) and do a public confession in order to take the Eucharist.
441: Really, beheading is the more practical option.
430, 434: Yeah, I'm just thinking about those introductions where you also introduce the relationship. Just like, "This is my daughter, Rory." Hardly the most significant of problems, however, and not an actual point of resistance to living together.
Didn't he begin taking the Eucharist under technically false pretenses the day he lost his virginity?
Not really. Although one should always take communion with as pure a heart as possible, there are only a handful of objective conditions that the church has identified as making a catholic ineligible to recieve communition.
do a public confession in order to take the Eucharist.
"I've been a very naughty boy/girl. Now where's the bottle?"
You could introduce him with song: "His name is Leo, and he fancies me. Hot damn!"
429.1 is interesting to learn. I guess you do technically need an annulment, although it's not the typical process with a potentially uncertain outcome. Prove you were catholic and weren't married in the catholic church, and boom, you're done.
I think 437.2 is completely normal. Most people (ahem: really I mean "women", and a few dudes) I know envision an entire future within 5 minutes of meeting someone. Also, you already like having the one, right? And she appears to have turned out pretty good? Go for it.
whether we should have kids
YMMV, but I'd counsel against it. You're what? Eight years from being able to do whatever you want again? I love my kids and all, but my biggest lesson from the second round of parenthood is that small children are really meant for young parents. Suddenly returning to being broke and exhausted at 40 was... more of an adjustment than I'd anticipated. And now I'm looking at not getting my house to myself or getting to take the sort of vacations I'd like (or some years, any vacation at all) until I'm nearly 60.
and do a public confession
Seriously, WTF? How is this ever a good idea?
And 430 totally works. A lot of people use "partner" for the very committed, nonmarried relationship, but really IMO third parties really don't care much about the label as long as you indicae that this is the person you're really serious about (obviously there are legal and financial consequences of marriage, but I didn't think that's what your concern was about).
I think it's fairly clear that I do not have children and Apo does.
I vote for introducing Leo as your fuck buddy. That is, at least, how you should introduce him to us.
450: I'm not Episcopal, but I'm thinking this has to do with the less common (in current use) definition of "confession" and that they are asking for a "profession of faith" and not for people to say their sins publicly.
450-- "public confession" just means you say the ritualized confession of sins (in the formal liturgy) or some other form of group prayer (in my weirdo church). It's not like you're getting up and berating your personal flaws in group session or whatever.
And now I'm looking at not getting my house to myself or getting to take the sort of vacations I'd like (or some years, any vacation at all) until I'm nearly 60.
Are you going to kick the wife out the instant the last kid leaves for college?
So what do you all think about whether we should have kids?
I say you should get a large bird. The Eurasian Eagle Owl vs. cockatoo/parrot question is a very personal one, though; only you can really know how much you need the ability to call on death from above.
I say you should get a large bird.
Just don't let it look inside heebie's oven.
Me and "We can't sell armed drones to civilians" guy at the Air Force.
Di, you should get an annulment. My priest cousin leads me to believe that it's easier and more common than I'd been taught, and—even better—he's a canon lawyer who sits on the tribunal that rules on annulments in your town, so I could slip him a twenty on your behalf.
377: Lawyers copy editors are fun's natural predator, IME.
Not to quash baseless internet speculation, but this is clearly about Leo's personal accommodation with his faith, rather than Benedict's or Vatican II's, so I'm not sure how helpful our interpretations are going to be (in the absence of more data!).
If the eucharist is his favorite dish in the whole cafeteria, I'd suggest that you take a rather instrumentalist attitude towards making that possible, but again, individual congregations, despite Benedict's best efforts, probably do vary a fair bit about how strictly they enforce this stuff.
458: Birds are very high maintenance. So are dogs. Get a cat.
Well, yes, but less so than children.
Birds can't make sneakers for the export market.
461: Hmmm.... And then we would invite you so that we could tell people about how Jesus made wine for our wedding.
I may actually give that some thought.
Whine = win (or so the kids these days seem to think)
Irrationality usually prevails when thinking about children, doesn't it? apo might well be right in 449 though - my youngest will be leaving school (and will in fact be nearly 19) in July 2021, the same month that our mortgage will be paid off (if we don't manage to do it any quicker), and some days the thought of that is what gets me through till bedtime.
Also, partner is used all the time here, and no one would think it was at all weird to hear that. As Chris says above, I usually use partner anyway because I can't always remember whether people are actually married or not.
As an aside - I find it really odd these days when I hear of, or meet, younger women getting married and they change their surname. It seems bizarrely old-fashioned in my mind and I can't quite understand why people still do it. (Which I do realise marks me as being out-of-step with most of the world, but still, every time it surprises me!)
I find it really odd these days when I hear of, or meet, younger women getting married and they change their surname. It seems bizarrely old-fashioned in my mind
Me too. Even though most of my friends and peers did so.
I find it really odd these days when I hear of, or meet, younger women getting married and they change their surname.
I've occasionally been something of a dick about this. I think I've told this before, but once at a conference I met a married professor couple, and they mentioned how surprised people were by the fact that their names were the same (since most female academics keep their last names). So I asked the husband, "Yes, the name change is unusual; why did you decide to take your wife's name?"
"Yes, the name change is unusual; why did you decide to take your wife's name?"
I was in the army at the time and being "Sgt. Pepper" sounded like a great idea. I was half done with my thesis before the horror of being called "Dr. Pepper" hit me.
Another interesting question! I took UNG's name, having been young and foolish back then, and haven't given it back yet. Should I remarry, it would be really tacky, I think, to continue on with UNG's name, but I wouldn't necessarily want to take on Leo's name or revert to the old one.
Also, what exactly do divorced people do with their wedding/engagement rings?
I've even begun slowly introducing him to the idea that you lot exist...
We've passed the Turing test! Yay! Well, except for Pauly, obvs.
I knew a guy who for years would refer to his "companion", which I don't know if I'd recommend in your case But it did come off as charmingly quirky.
476- A funny thing about keeping names through marriage was that I'd every so often get junk mail addressed to me with her surname.
478.1: You can change your name to McAwesome.
478.2: If the gold/stones are real, you should mail them to me and I'll see ot it that they never bother you again.
I mean, I don't think it's at all productive to engage in feminist-guilt-tripping of women who've changed their names; it can easily turn into a reprise of The Great Feminist Blowjob Wars of 2006. But I think calling husbands on it--at the very least, making explicit the asymmetry, the fact that (by and large) it's never considered, on their part--is both fun and useful.
And DK, as for what to do when remarrying, why not make up a new one? (You could combine, etc.)
478.last: I get those also. And phone calls asking for Mr. Moby's wife's last name.
Suddenly returning to being broke and exhausted at 40 was... more of an adjustment than I'd anticipated. And now I'm looking at not getting my house to myself or getting to take the sort of vacations I'd like (or some years, any vacation at all) until I'm nearly 60.
Heh, that's why I'm thinking it's time to get clipped. I'm 34 with a 6th and an 8th grader and am facing having a kid free house at 42. Although I may have to keep an eye on my wife. She doesn't seem keen on the idea of getting pregnant again but she loves the cheery little Mexican kids running around the neighborhoods we work in and I'm pretty sure she occasionally tries to figure out a way to bring one home.
Also, what exactly do divorced people do with their wedding/engagement rings?
Mine's buried in a drawer designated for stuff I'm not sure I want but don't know what to do with. I'm curious, too, about how others handle this.
477.2: Will just said, recently -- I think you take it to a jeweler, and have any significant stones made into a pendant.
have any significant stones made into a pendant
Solving pv, Di, and gswift's problems simultaneously.
She doesn't seem keen on the idea of getting pregnant again but she loves the cheery little Mexican kids running around the neighborhoods we work in and I'm pretty sure she occasionally tries to figure out a way to bring one home.
Nominated for Low Hanging Fruit of the Day.
I knew a guy who for years would refer to his "companion", which I don't know if I'd recommend in your case But it did come off as charmingly quirky.
Not really recommended unless you are either an aged Edwardian lady or own a Tardis.
She doesn't seem keen on the idea of getting pregnant again but she loves the cheery little Mexican kids running around the neighborhoods we work in and I'm pretty sure she occasionally tries to figure out a way to bring one home.
You're a policeman, right? You can bring home as many Mexicans as you like.
477. I knew a woman in that position who kept her first husband's name on the good and sufficient grounds that she liked it as a name, whereas she didn't much care for her birth name or that of her second husband - second husband didn't give a damn. I think your first consideration must be what you're most comfortable with. If (for example) UNG is called Jones, but your birth name is Cholmondely-Featherstonehaugh and Leo is Knyhynycky, nobody would think it odd of you to stick with Jones for the sake of convenience.
I wonder if foster care would be something to think about. Non-permanent or committed way of taking care of kids, and a good thing to do.
480- I first imagined TGFBWo06 as a Tim Pawlenty type trailer, but then considered that it might be more suited to a Ken Burns documentary treatment.
484,485- No stones, just gold with a sort of celtic pattern that I actually quite like. I wondered if some people would just wear them on other fingers than the left ring finger, but it still seems like it'd be weird to me.
483: It goes in the shoebox of stuff that's important but awkward which your kids will find as they go through your stuff after you're dead. Be sure to throw in a couple of swinger party polaroids from the 1970s just to mess with their heads.
why did you decide to take your wife's name?
His family name was "Faustfick"?
calling husbands on it [...] is both fun and useful
Fun and useful in the same way that walking up to other people's tables in restaurants and tendentiously lecturing them on why they shouldn't eat meat/grapes/etc is fun and useful.
I lost both my engagement ring and "engagement watch," (used as replacement for the ring) which says a lot about me. I would totally sell the ring back and wear the watch if I could find either one.
Fun and useful in the same way that walking up to other people's tables in restaurants and tendentiously lecturing them on why they shouldn't eat meat/grapes/etc is fun and useful.
Yes, basically. ... oh. Should I stop doing that, too?
You know what the most fun of all, though— reminding people that some of us don't even own a television.
496: Stick to telling them how they should be disciplining their children in public.
Uh oh. I'm starting to suspect there's a reason I don't get invited back after dinner parties.
There ought to be a charity which collects no longer current wedding/engagement rings. If there isn't is anybody in for starting one? Sell the bullion and stones and donate the proceeds to somebody doing something useful in the third world.
Uh, thanks for the momentary freakout over not knowing where my wedding ring was, and remembering that the kids were playing with it the other day. But here it is under this pile of magazines, which seems like as good a place for it as any.
You're what? Eight years from being able to do whatever you want again?
This question is sort of gibberish unless "have a baby/small kid" isn't anywhere on the list of things you want to do. In which case, duh, of course you shouldn't have kids.
501: Interesting idea. "Treasures out of Tragedy".
I wonder if foster care would be something to think about.
Yeah, she's already mentioned that and there's also a community center a block away from the jr. high she teaches at. Has all kinds of kid programs, especially in the summer, and with her having summers off I think she'd like to volunteer over there.
I knew a woman in that position who kept her first husband's name on the good and sufficient grounds that she liked it as a name, whereas she didn't much care for her birth name
That's pretty much why my wife took my name. Adopted, didn't much care for her adopted surname (or her adoptive parents for that matter) and thought my surname was objectively more awesome, which it is.
505: Utah particularly needs families willing to care for teens. Probably every state does, but Utah's the only one that's had an article about it show up in my feed this week.
This question is sort of gibberish unless "have a baby/small kid" isn't anywhere on the list of things you want to do.
It's not at all gibberish. If it's on the list of things you want to do, that's great! It's just that you can more or less toss the rest of your list into the trash for the next 18 years. My trashed list includes things like "put money away for retirement" and "occasionally sleep past 6:30 am".
18 years is too wide a window, but the point remains.
On the plus side, sometimes strangers give them candy and you can get a share.
On the upside, I took Keegan to the Hurricanes-Maple Leafs game last night and we had a blast. I'm very much enjoying having a teenager.
I'm all old and I like my baby! so there.
491.2: Wow! We could combine sell ours to some naive couple as a matched set!
370 Whoa. How recent is all of this? What happened?
We've had a kidney transplant back in december 2009; I was out of the hospital inthree days, but she unfortunately has had to deal with the fallout all through last year, due to a combination of very slow healing operation wounds, bad side effects from anti-rejection and other drugs, several trips to the ICU thanks to these complications and so on. Almost anything that could go wrong did, at one point or another, but luckily she's managed to overcome all of them, though it has cost her a lot of stamina and every time it has taken longer to recover...
She had been out of hospital in late may and June of last year, but had an epileptic attack (another side effect of the anti-rejection drugs) and went back into ICU, slowly recovered again and was scheduled for a "cleanup" operation in late August and hence wanted to marry just in case something should happen. Instead she got another attack, the op only happened in early november, complications from that ensure another slow recovery and we're only now finally back to a point where she's in revalidation to actually leave the hospital.
There has been a slow upward trend in the last six months or so, but it has been a question of one step forward, two back at times.
But at least she got an ipad out of it, so it wasn't a complete waste.
I'm with Apo. I love mine to pieces, and having babies is definitely something I wanted to do. But no way would I have another at this age (controlling factor there being 'another' not 'this age'), mmmmaybe unless we won the lottery and had no reasonable economic restrictions of any kind.
But at least she got an ipad out of it, so it wasn't a complete waste.
The Dutch health service gives out iPads? Don't tell the Republicans or they'll go mad. Oh, wait...
514: All my best hopes for the both of you -- that sounds really rough.
We've had a kidney transplant back in december 2009; I was out of the hospital inthree days, but she unfortunately has had to deal with the fallout all through last year, due to a combination of very slow healing operation wounds, bad side effects from anti-rejection and other drugs, several trips to the ICU thanks to these complications and so on. Almost anything that could go wrong did, at one point or another, but luckily she's managed to overcome all of them, though it has cost her a lot of stamina and every time it has taken longer to recover...
Best wishes going forward. I'd be interested in hearing about your experience as a donor--I didn't see much about it on your blog--if you ever feel like writing such. It seems like something far more people ought to do, but from my own experience merely considering it aloud, the very idea seriously freaks people out.
I once went to the ICA in Boston with a roommate who shared my often skeptical views on Contemporary Art. Two things stand out in my memory:
1. The uncontrollable laughing fit inspired by a 13 foot sculpture of a particularly angry, ravenous looking spider created "in honor" of the artist's mother;
and
2. A piece that consisted of two gold wedding rings, melted down and spun into a wiry web to symbolize the entanglements of a relationship, or something. The accompanying card noted, in a somewhat offhand manner (as though not central to the meaning of the piece), that the rings were acquired in a pawn shop.
I found the second thing really upsetting / enraging.
514: I must learn to preview before I post. Good luck. You both sound remarkably resilient.
I'm with Apo. I love mine to pieces, and having babies is definitely something I wanted to do. But no way would I have another at this age (controlling factor there being 'another' not 'this age')
True -- we might conceivably have had three if we'd started young, but won't be doing that in the actual life we have.
I found the second thing really upsetting / enraging.
I like the sound of it. I think Emerson would, too.
... I meant our Emerson, committed opponent of all romantic relationships.
And I don't have much more to say, not having seen the piece, but it seems a rather clever way of illustrating both the beauty and dangers of marriage.
that the rings were acquired in a pawn shop.
People have written songs on the subject (I picked that video because it included the lyrics).
Oh, I wasn't thinking about a couple that had gotten divorced. I was thinking about, like, a poor old widow/er who needed the money, and who, perhaps unrealistically, maybe thought s/he could get them back sometime soon. I don't see how it says much about the nature of relationships in that particular scenario, so much as about the artist being kind of a dick. And since I don't think there's anyway to know...I didn't like it.
I don't think that's how pawnshops work -- they hold onto your stuff and don't sell it until you fail to pay back the money you borrowed. So if they're selling your stuff, you've given up on it.
Kids-wise, we're definitely going to cram a bunch in while we've still got momentum. If you're changing diapers, the marginal effort to go from 0 to 1 is much bigger than from 1 to Many.
we're definitely going to cram a bunch in
That's not how babies get there, heebie.
Like silk scarves in a rubber ball, these are our kids.
One to two is almost a comparable jump to zero to one. I've heard that two to three isn't a big difference, but haven't done it myself.
I found 2->3 > than 1->2 what with the outnumbering thing and all. However, it might also have been characteristics-of-the-children-in-question specific as ours went "difficult", "easy" (of course we thought it was just us getting better at it at the time), 'difficult".
Forget the baby part, however, it passes. It's the long term you should think about.
My parents are divorced, amicably, bought their rings in a pawnshop in Philly shortly after coming to the US (no money for jewelry at home). My mom's is in a bowl with other junk in the cabinet where I go to fetch a beer glass when I visit her. It's got Hebrew on the outside. We're athiests with no family connection to Judaism.
I tell myself that there's no way we'll be changing diapers when we're 40. (Barring developmental problems.)
Oh, I wasn't thinking about a couple that had gotten divorced.
In the song the present-day couple gets divorced, but it never specifies what happened to the previous owners of the rings.
Part of what I like about the song, however, is that it packs a bunch of different, "life isn't always how you want it" details in a way that feels believable.
Best wishes going forward. I'd be interested in hearing about your experience as a donor--I didn't see much about it on your blog--if you ever feel like writing such. It seems like something far more people ought to do, but from my own experience merely considering it aloud, the very idea seriously freaks people out.
Thanks.
As for being a donor, the hardest thing for me was to get below the weight the doctors found safe to operate on, because I've always been a fat fsck and they needed me below a 100 kilos and a bmi
Out of the hospital in three days, an unfortunate opportunistic infection aside, recovery went quite well and I was back at work in less than three weeks, fully recovered in about two-three months or so.
Haven't so far noticed anything different about having only one kidney; as the doctors said before hand, the one kidney can usually take over 85-95 percent of the functions of two kidneys and they always leave you the best one.
I did gain a lot of weight last year again, but that was a combination of stress and not enough time or inclination to go back to the gym.
536: I PREFER TO THINK OF IT AS A KINK, NOT A 'DEVELOPMENTAL PROBLEM', THANK YOU.
But anyway, I was trying to make a slightly different point about kid spacing, not numbers of kids: that going from having 0 to 1 in diapers simultaneously is much more of a pain than 1 to 2 in diapers. Or so I'm guessing. But the idea of being done with diapers and then having to dredge it all up again seems like a pain.
being done with diapers and then having to dredge it all up again
Ewww.
Going from 0 to 2 in diapers simultaneously was a pain utter hell, but it was nice to be done with diapering altogether a couple of years later.
516:
Not quite, it was actually a present from my youngest brother, but about the biggest bill we've had for all of this has been for the in-hospital television, which is ruddy expensive. But the tens of thousands or even hundred of thousands of euros this all would've cost of elsewhere, all paid for by the insurance (200 euro per month roughly, for the both of us).
By comparison, when she had medical trouble on the same scale back in Atlanta in the late eighties, she had to fly back to the UK to actually be treated without having to file for bankrupcy, but on the other hand the NHS basically did nothing much to deal with her kidney situation, when they had been borderline for years and were getting worse.
re: 519
The first sounds like Louise Bourgeois.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8714974.stm
re: 543
Hope the recovery keeps progressing.
You know what I love even more than you guys? Trick question! NOTHING!
540: in diapers simultaneously
Ah yeah, we maxed at two simultaneously.
Liars! Late in life much-younger-than-their-sibs babies get super doted on by both their parents and their much older siblings. (Later they turn spoiled and malingering, but we, I mean they have a pretty good run.)
I'm sorry if I've mentioned this before but it's topical. Elizabeth is a very common first name and my last name is very unique. My husband's last time is also extremely common. If I had changed my name I would have gone from being mostly the only person with my name to come up in Google searches to one of thousands of Elizabeth last names.
Also, I had all those feminist reasons for not wanting to give up my last name especially including having practiced as an attorney for several years with this name. Plus, my last name is awesome.
548: Hah. I'm an Elizabeth too, and went from insanely common to unique when I married. (I hyphenated and so did my husband, so while it was a hassle, it was a gender-balanced hassle.)
I kind of miss being Google-invisible (not that Google existed when I changed my name.)
549: For some reason, I'm determined to be a famous patent attorney. Which means I'll someday be known to 1,000 people instead of 100, right? So I love being Google visible.
Elizabeth too
I thought it was usually written 'II'.
Spigot certainly is a good name.
Di (re 477) - a friend of mine is divorced and kept her married name. She has two children from the marriage, and now has a toddler (the plate-breaker!) with a new partner (unmarried). The toddler has her surname - i.e. the same as his sisters and their father.
Well, now I'm looking up pawn shops and pawning.
It's kind of professionally unfeasible for most women to change their names, no? After the age of, like, 22?
My mum kept my Dad's name when they got divorced. When my brother was born, rather than give him 'our' name [i.e. my Dad's, not my mother's maiden name or his Dad's], he got his own. Which I think he quite likes. I certainly always thought it was quite cool that he had his own surname.
It's kind of professionally unfeasible for most women to change their names, no?
Why? I could change my name right now and it wouldn't effect me professionally at all. Most people work in areas where name recognition is pretty limited.
kind of professionally unfeasible for most women to change their names, no? After the age of, like, 22?
This seems sort of hilariously oblivious. Most people aren't academics, or doing anything requiring comparable name-recognition.* And I believe most women actually do still change their names, don't they?
*Not that I care who does or doesn't change their name or why, but I've actually always been skeptical of the very common argument that it would cripple the career of a female academic to change her name. (Or a male academic, for that matter.) Has this ever been empirically tested? It's not like the prior publications are no longer yours. You can still list them on your c.v., and link to them on your website. Anyone personally familiar with you will know that the former name and the current name are the same person, and that it's all your body of work. Is that much of the typical academic's career really based on random name-recognition by people who aren't personally familiar with you? Again, I'm skeptical.
re: 555
Yeah. My wife is, I assume, pretty well known within her firm but if she changed her surname it'd make no impact at all. If I changed my surname it'd matter even less, since I'd guess I'm barely known outside my department, never mind in the world at large.
556: insofar as searches and citations are important, and insofar as academic work is largely indexed by last name, you seem to be misguided.
Yeah, I think 558 is probably right in that job context. But that's a fairly atypical job context.
553: I think it makes things a lot harder, but I know a ton of female attorneys that have done it. I've never had the guts to ask them whether any clients reacted poorly to the name change. But I distinctly remember working in-house before I went to law school and my boss was completely disgusted when he learned that one of the attorneys at a law firm changed her name.
For professionals, there's a networking issue. I don't know how much it's worth in a quantifiable sense, but I interact with a whole lot of other lawyers who become familiar with me over the course of a particular case, but whom I'm not in steady contact with, and that reputation has some value (for future jobs, for getting clients, and so on). If I'd built up a certain amount of reputation as LizardBreath, and then changed my name to LizardFeet, professional acquaintances who knew me as LB might easily not connect LB with LF.
With the shape of career I've got, it wouldn't be a big enough hit to keep me from changing my name if I wanted to, but it would be something.
At one time it seemed to be good US usage to append your husband's name to your own. Being partly btocked I can only remember Billie-Jean Moffat-King right now, which isn't a good example, but what happened to that? Did the fashion police decide it looked too Mexican or what?
Sure, there are various jobs that depend on a sort of reputational economy. Various freelance jobs, some professional and academic positions, but those are still pretty atypical.
For me, personally, I think people should do whatever the hell they like and if career issues form part of the reasoning, more power to them.
You just wanted an excuse to write "LizardFeeet" in that comment, didn't you? NTTAWWT.
It's a little depressing to realize that changing my name wouldn't matter that much professionally. What about the incredible reputation I've developed over the years!
insofar as searches and citations are important, and insofar as academic work is largely indexed by last name,
pls elaborate, because while I think I understand what all those things mean, I obviously must not, since I don't see how a name change would negatively impact them.
re: 564
Yeah, it wouldn't make any difference to me at all. My wife's job trades to a certain extent on her reputation, but since it's her reputation within her firm and the people who matter for her career are all people she knows on first name terms anyway, if she did choose to change her name it'd make no impact at all. If she left to go elsewhere, she'd be applying for jobs on the basis of her CV, experience, and (impressive) track record, not on any vibe that had accrued to her name over the years.
Various freelance jobs
This honestly seems to me like a clearer case of obviously potentially harmful than the academic.
565: Someone sees work by Doctor Mrs. Jones, and searches for her prior work. When he finds nothing, he concludes that this is the only thing she's ever published. In fact, she has an extensive publication record as Doctor Miss Smith.
Oversimplified, but you get the idea.
re: 565
Well, it's obvious, no? If you search on works by 'Ms. Awesome', or 'Dr Awesome' and you get a list of, say, four papers you might assume that's all Dr Awesome has published. Whereas she, in fact, has another twelve published papers under her married name, 'Dr Meh'.
568/569 the huge obvious piece I guess I'm missing is how an incomplete search by a person for the prior works of Dr. Awesome would impact Dr. Awesome's career. Is this person thinking of hiring her? (Don't they have her c.v.?)
re: 571
Academia is crazy. Huge amounts depend on the 'rep' you build up. It really isn't like other careers. It's utterly pathological in many ways.
I understand 572, but I'm not following why it's respnosive to 571.
re: 573
Because huge amounts of shit work in ways that aren't like a business job application. Whether you get invited to do interesting shit, or present at cool events, or get shortlisted for jobs largely has fuck all to do with your CV.
I'm not an academic, but I think that whether people bother to read, cite, or react to your papers is a function of your perceived status. Meaning that if your latest paper is the only one under that name, it'll get treated with the contempt appropriate to a snivelling post-doc, rather than the respectful awe appropriate to a mid-career professor.
There was a funny story about a transgender biologist: I think FTM but possibly the other way, where some asshole said that Dr Bruce Banner's work was much stronger than his sister's, Dr. Beth Banner, not realizing that they were the same person.
This. Now, that's more extreme than just changing your name, but the possibilities for loss of reputation are the same.
576: There's an added benefit of going FTM.
You only have to be at the tail end of graduate school and see who the people are who the department are going to bat for, or who are getting short listed for jobs to see it's really NOT about the CV.*
* assuming most people applying have broadly comparable CVs anyway.
Whether you get invited to do interesting shit, or present at cool events, or get shortlisted for jobs largely has fuck all to do with your CV.
And this is all generally decided by people who don't know you, and are only familiar with your work from running across one of your publications (rather than through the recommendations of a mentor or colleague), and are interested enough in your work to try to search for your prior works but not to pull up your personal academic website (which, at least to non-academic me, has always been the way I've found additional publications by someone whose work I was interested in*)? I believe you, and that would make sense for why a name change might hurt, but damn that's bizarre.
(I'm still not sure I believe that it actually would
hurt anything, at least in most cases, but I can understand how the possibility would frighten people away from it.)
* Actually, now I'm genuinely curious: what "indexes" are we talking about people searching for your prior publications?
some asshole said that Dr Bruce Banner's work was much stronger than his sister's, Dr. Beth Banner
Look, don't get him angry.
There's a academic-libraries proposal to make a unique-individual-identifier for scholarly papers; the problems are not just Bruce to Beth, and marriages for people who change their names, and name collisions (especially Chinese-language, apparently), but some wildly interesting Latin American ones I can't now remember.
* Actually, now I'm genuinely curious: what "indexes" are we talking about people searching for your prior publications?
PubMed, JSTOR, Google Scholar, Arxiv, others.
575 makes sense. 579 presumably doesn't have anything to do with names, but rather politics or interpersonal factors (which wouldn't change with a name change*, is what I mean).
*Except maybe to the extent that the very act of changing one's name is itself generally strongly looked down upon in academia, which I don't think is a negligible factor here.
re: 580
You'd be surprised. I've ended up talking to people at social events, or seminars and there's been conversations like:
"Oh, you're at $institution, do you know Chinless Poshtwat? I hear he's terribly bright."
Now come the appropriate time, he's the guy who'll get shortlisted. Sometimes that reputation is built on real stuff -- publications, etc -- that might appear on a CV, but often it's just ephemeral crap. It may even be false ephemeral crap. I can think of a couple of my former peers whose names I kept coming across in these conversations who were clearly employing some sort of Elvish PR agency or something, because the sane reply would have been:
"What, Chinless Poshtwat? He's by far the thickest person I've met in my $x years at $institution. I'm amazed he can tie his own shoelaces."
re: 584
Except they would, because they are often second hand. Someone remembers a conversation with someone else, who was bigging up their grad student and then the CV comes across their desk, or their paper to review or whatever, and they remember it.
I think 579 might easily run into the same issues. "Hey, Powerful Academic A, what junior person shall we casually offer this vocational bit of advancement to?"
"Oh, how about Dr. Awesome, Powerful Academic B?"
"I'll think about it." [goes back to desk, is unfamiliar with Dr. Awesome, searches for her papers, and finds only her Awesome papers, not her Meh papers.] "Man, Dr, Awesome sucks. I wonder why Powerful Academic A suggested her. I'm certainly not offering her anything."
588 pwned by 587, but I had comic dialog.
585 conforms with my prior impressions of academia, and also all strike me as things that wouldn't be impacted by a name change.
Look, of course I'm not saying it's impossible that a name change could have an adverse impact on an academic career. It just seems wildly less likely to have a severe impact as most academics I know seem to suggest. Now, they're academics and I'm not, of course, but none of the reasons I've heard have ever seemed very convincing. 275 is the close to a convincing point, but depends on untested assumptions about how adversely a change in name will affect someone's "perceived status".
Again, maybe there aren't any empirical studies, but do any of the academics have any personal stories about academics whose careers were ruined by a name change? A well respected colleague or promising grad student changes here name and then, boom, career dries up?
Others are doing a fine job of explaining the pathologies of the academic job 'market', and don't need my help, but I'll just add that the dawning awareness of the importance of this stuff, often after it's too late to change things, is part of what makes grad school so psychologically damaging for some people.
(Although my own problems were quite different; my vague feeling is that I made a great impression on higher-ups, so long as I didn't have to produce papers for them.)
do any of the academics have any personal stories about academics whose careers were ruined by a name change? A well respected colleague or promising grad student changes here name and then, boom, career dries up?
You'd never know that that was the reason, would you?
re: 592
Yes. I only learned this stuff when it was too late. I don't mean to sound _too_ bitter. It's often quite understandable at the early career stage. People making hiring decisions are often taking a gamble. They don't have enough documentary evidence to know whether or not their prospective candidates are going to do good work in the future. It's a risk. They are betting on whether they will based on imperfect information, and all the ephemeral/reputation/nepotistic stuff is often all people have to go on. Sucks if you don't pick up on that until a while after many of your peers have, though.
Keep in mind the 2nd-order effect, urple: even if the hypothesized impact is much less than what LB & ttaM are suggesting, their views can be taken as reasonably representative of what academic-sorts believe; and if everyone believes that, then changing your name signals that you care more about the various husband-and-family stuff than the expected impact on your career, which would itself change others' judgments about your potential... etc. (And yes, hiring-and-tenure decisions being negatively impacted by a belief that a female academic wasn't serious enough, because she had a husband/family, have indeed been backed up by research, which I'm too lazy to find for you.)
The pathologies of the academic job market cited by Ttam in 572 and 585 don't strike me as being at all peculiar to academia -- ephemeral and misguided and political b.s. about reputation matters for pretty much every job, at least every job that I'm familiar with.
Obviously the academics know more about this than I do, but I'd guess that one difference in academia is that there's a lingering idealistic belief that your reputation should be based primarily on an objectively-correct assessment of your overall smartness, so it's harder to cope with the reality. Another, I'd guess, is that academics take a pay cut in order to, in some sense, escape from the horrors of office politics and posturing and the like, so it's particularly offensive to have to deal with that sort of thing from within the academy.
Yeah, 595 is the asterisk in 584, which strikes me as a very real and potentially signficant factor. But it's not the argument I ever hear put forward. Instead I hear arguments about indexing and citations.
Honestly: "changing your name will hurt your academic career because most academics don't think people who would change their names are serious about their careers" is a straighforward and entirely plausible argument. It's everything else that confuses me.
I don't think it would be impossible to change your name and keep your career on track, I just think it would be way, way harder than not changing your name. Since the whole thing is already hard, why throw any additional trouble into the road?
It's true that people who were looking for you, or willing to devote the time/energy to searching out whether or not you'd ever changed your name, would surely be able to do so. But they probably won't. So whatever contacts & reputation you built for yourself under Name 1 will just disappear as soon as you change to Name 2, and you'll have to start all over building contacts and networks and reputation and whatnot, or spend a lot of time and energy reminding/informing everyone of the change. Way less work, and way more reliable outcome, not to change it in the first place.
597: Seriously, I think a lot of the networky nepotistic stuff involves bandying names casually around among people who don't know all the people firsthand. If it's not easy for someone who's heard your name to figure out your whole record, there's a real risk they won't put in the effort to do it.
||
Maybe I should save this for the next football-related post, but this RBC post strikes me as correct (and which would have relevance even in a Trapnel-approved world without too-dangerous football, since the argument applies to other sports, too).
|>
So whatever contacts & reputation you built for yourself under Name 1 will just disappear as soon as you change to Name 2, and you'll have to start all over building contacts and networks and reputation and whatnot, or spend a lot of time and energy reminding/informing everyone of the change.
So, I'm not an academic, but I'm a professional, and one with a common name. And I just don't buy this. Because it seems very little different than me moving across town and changing from being "urple with Old Stodgy Firm" to being "urple with Younger but Stodgier Firm". It's a reworking of your professional reputation, and you might lose some contacts in the process, sure, but it's a long way from entirely starting all over, and, moreover, people do it all the time.
My field is small and I've met many of the major players in person, but I haven't met them all and I have no idea if most of them are married, or have ever been, or divorced, or anything else personal. I track and keep up with revelant work based largely on name recognition- I know who's doing things that I need to keep up with, so I look for those names. If I suddenly saw an article by someone with the same first name but a different last name than I was expecting, I might read it, but it would not occur to me to google to see if anyone got married or divorced recently- I'd assume it was a contribution by someone new to the field. And I'd assume, after a while, that Old Name had retired or switched focus or something else.
Of course this wouldn't actually matter to anyone since I have no power over anyone or anything, but if I did have power, it could mess things up.
I kind of don't want my fiance to change her name to mine, but she does. She would be changing from a fairly boring last name she doesn't like a whole lot to another boring and even more common one (I'm #3!), though her first name is close to unique. It perhaps seems most strange to me because my mother is on marriage #3 and has yet to change her name.
Is she opposed to the idea of you both changing your names to something distinctive, perhaps a blend of the two?
Probably not - she's more attached to the sameness than to my name in particular, I think. Coming up with such a name would be a bit tricky - boring + boring -> still boring (or completely absurd and unpronounceable). I am attached to the initial, though.
My last name was invented during the war with the primary intention of not sounding Jewish and the secondary one of being unique. My grandmother was rather taken back a few years later when it turned out it was a real, albeit very uncommon last name.
Coming up with such a name would be a bit tricky - boring + boring -> still boring (or completely absurd and unpronounceable). I am attached to the initial, though.
This calls for a dedicated Ask The Mineshaft post!
Regarding name changes in academia, when I was first publishing papers I used several minor variants of my name (eg James B. Shearer, James Shearer, JB Shearer etc.). This later caused me enough aggravation in keeping track of things that I was bit annoyed that I had not realized (or been told) that it is a good idea to make sure your name is exactly the same on all your publications. So all other things being equal you don't want to change your name.
My name is a pain in the ass to spell. I should have married young--like 21 to someone with a good last name and then started on my career.
In theory it's possible to keep track of name changes in indexes and catalogs using authority control. Actually, in practice it's possible too, if everyone had the discipline and time to check up on things. But situations like Shearer describes where someone has not changed their name and yet there is no single version of the name that turns up all cites is more common.
Oh, I missed the academic job market thread? Thank god. (I'm finding the faculty job market to be infinitely weirder and more soul-crushing than the postdoc job market, and my ego is taking a [probably well-deserved] beating.)
My last name was invented during the war with the primary intention of not sounding Jewish
Us too. Except slightly pre-war, I believe. Or at least pre-'42, when my dad was born.
Oh, I missed the academic job market thread? Thank god.
Don't worry. Awl emailed me a soul-crushing academic job search link that I am planning on posting as soon as I have a little time to read it more closely.
My last name was invented during the war with the primary intention of not sounding Jewish and the secondary one of being unique.
McHitler?
I think I've caught up on most of the thread. Anyway, I went back as far as 572, and while I think others have covered most of what I might have said in response to urple's disbelief, there is this:
Academia is crazy. Huge amounts depend on the 'rep' you build up. It really isn't like other careers. It's utterly pathological in many ways.
I think this is...half true, and half incredibly false. I think a more accurate formulation would be
[Any competitive field requiring a minimum level of ambition] is crazy. Huge amounts depend on the 'rep' you build up. [Like any such competitive field,] it's utterly pathological in many ways.
I find it baffling that this isn't self evident. People don't make rational, calculated decisions; they make social ones. Any collaborative field operates according to social rules. I guess I could go look up a bunch of references (the only one I really remember rt now is Cialdini? I think?), but I guess the reason I'm baffled is because this is so very, very clear in every day life. Life works by referral.
I find it baffling
You're pretty new around here, so you may not be yet aware that Urple is the master of the apparently sincerely held but utterly mystifying rhetorical position. It livens up arguments a great deal.
re: 617
Yeah, but academia is still really not that typical. Anyone who thinks that other job markets work much the same as academic ones clearly hasn't worked a lot outside academia. I'm sure there are other fields that are broadly similar, but, really, academia is insane.
I appreciate the kind words, LB, but I don't disagree with DQ's statement at all, and I do think it's fairly self-evident (as I feel like I've acknowledged a few times in this thread). What I don't think is self-evident is how the fact that careers in competitive fields requiring a minimum level of ambition are pathological and depend on the 'rep' you build up somehow implies that a name change is a uniquely damaging thing for an academic's career. I don't think it's self-evident that a name change would significantly affect the amount of 'rep' you've built up*, and I don't think it's self-evident that there's much that's unique about academics vis-a-vis other professionals here. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that's it's far from self-evident to me, whereas most people act like it's completely self-evident.
* Other than by virtue of the mechanism described in 598.
Baffling was the goal! I feel better about that.
And I've worked in a few fields. The details of the exact social rules have varied, and the intensity to specific flavors of bullshit also varies, but...they really have all seemed to operate in a similar way. Including academia. It seems like academia kind of exaggerates some of the bits of bullshit that I personally find least palatable (hey! reason for life choice!) -- the worth of one's work being largely dependent on perceived social consensus while there's an extreme scarcity of official academic positions seems like a particularly nasty combination to me -- but I don't think it's accurate to say that academia is unique in doing so. Every industry emphasizes something, but as long as we're talking about groups of human beings interacting together, there are gonna be broad things that remain true.
Oh, baffling was not the goal. Um, sorry? My brow is furrowed in consternation. Especially because I didn't think it was unique to academia. I think it's true for anyone who's professional rep or advancement depends on publishing stuff, but also for, like, doctors, who're gonna need referrals. And lawyers, I guess. And anyone who wants google to help them in the future, which I think covers a lot of ground. And anyone who relies on (this is a hated term) networking, which I guess covers the rest of the ground. Most of the women I know who have changed their name did so at a very young age (and one changed it back), and those who did it later in life have kept their maiden names professionally.
The mechanism in 598 seems very implausible to me. Especially compared to the mechanism where a quick search of your name in the archives doesn't pull up half the work you've done. At that point, the person doing the search decides not to go to your website, because they're unimpressed, and so they don't read your latest paper. Or whatever.
A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet as my favoritest destination on the whole wide internet. I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!!
I think it's true for anyone who's professional rep or advancement depends on publishing stuff, but also for, like, doctors, who're gonna need referrals. And lawyers, I guess. And anyone who wants google to help them in the future, which I think covers a lot of ground. And anyone who relies on (this is a hated term) networking, which I guess covers the rest of the ground.
These factors cover a vanishingly small part of the working population. It might not seem that way if that's the sort of job you have, but still, it's true.
625: Yeah, this is true. It's an issue for professionals, and not all professionals.
Were P. Diddy's and John Mellencamp's careers hurt by their name changes?
Okay, 622 I'm fine with. It's a hassle for any woman (or anyone) to change her name, and it can be even more of a hassle for a professional, in a way that at least has the potential to be professionally damaging. And maybe that potential is somewhat more significant for an academic than for other professionals, because of the unusually high degree to which their careers can depend on the subjective opinions of people who've never met or interacted with them. I totally buy all that.
The thing is, I've known a number of successful lawyers who've changed their names during their careers. I'd guess they'd all agree it was a hassle, but I don't think any of them ultimately felt their careers were torpedoed by it. And the ones I've known who didn't change their names didn't because they didn't want to, not because they thought it would be career suicide.
Yet I've heard academics time and time and time again say they couldn't even consider changing their name because an academic can't possibly do that because (for some self-evident unstated reason) it would destroy their career. And I've never understood why. And I'll repeat my original comment on this--I don't care who does or doesn't change their name or why, but that just always struck me as a concern being blown wildly out of proportion. I've suspected that in many cases it's less of a reasoned concern about career impacts and more of a way to say 'I didn't want to change my name' without inviting commentary or questions about that fact. But maybe I'm wrong about that.
(This comment is recapping somewhat, but DQ said she'd missed the beginning of the conversation.)
628: And maybe that potential is somewhat more significant for an academic than for other professionals, because of the unusually high degree to which their careers can depend on the subjective opinions of people who've never met or interacted with them. I totally buy all that....
but that just always struck me as a concern being blown wildly out of proportion. I've suspected that in many cases it's less of a reasoned concern about career impacts and more of a way to say 'I didn't want to change my name' without inviting commentary or questions about that fact. But maybe I'm wrong about that.
Urple-
Given your first statement, quoted above, and the fact that any damage to ones career from lost reputation would be very hard to pin down -- if you didn't get some opportunity because the decisionmaker didn't realize how awesome you were, how would you ever know what had happened? -- wouldn't you think it would be more charitable to assume that the concern is genuine, even if possibly overstated, rather than a cover for women who just don't have the guts to admit they didn't want to change their names?
that just always struck me as a concern being blown wildly out of proportion.
Yeah, you're totally wrong in the case of academics (at least in the sciences, which is what I'm more familiar with), though.
I mean, at least in my experience, when people talk informally about papers, they refer to them by the last name of the first (or most prominent) author and the year. Say that, for instance, you published eight papers, including three that were very well received. Say that you subsequently changed your name and published two papers, both well received. Now! Say that somebody who knows you joins a lab as a postdoc. That postdoc is asked to contribute a list of names as potential invitees to a departmental colloqium. They submit your name. The Professor who gets the list, but who doesn't know you personally, and would never have had cause to look at your website, sees your name and says "oh, that person published those two papers that were pretty good, but we'd like to find somebody who's done a bit more work than that," and picks somebody with, say, three well-received papers.
Or say you're at a conference, and you spot Prof. Bigshot whose work you know well. You go introduce yourself, and Prof. Bigshot evidently recognizes your name, and asks you questions about recent work. Hooray! Excellent connection made! Except Prof. Bigshot has no idea that you have other previous work under another name because 1. you didn't mention it and 2. they didn't ask, because why would they? Prof. Bigshot is hardly going to go look at your web site, so you're relying on someboy else to (for some reason) point out to Bigshot that you are in fact the same as this other person whose work they might know. Unless they're really interested in you already, that's not going to happen.
Or say you're at a conference, and you spot Prof. Bigshot whose work you know well. You go introduce yourself, and Prof. Bigshot evidently recognizes your name, and asks you questions about recent work. Hooray! Excellent connection made! Except Prof. Bigshot has no idea that you have other previous work under another name
And what is the consequence of this? If Prof. Bigshot had known about your previous work, he would have gotten in touch with you the next week about a potential collaboration, but now he won't?
And lawyers really don't have the same issues going on. Reputation is something, but for a lawyer I'd agree that a name change wouldn't hurt you badly if you really wanted to do it. That's partially because most lawyers don't build much of a reputation in the years where most people get married: I'd say a lawyer under thirty or so is unlikely to have a reputation to lose at all, and under forty not all that much of one -- you attract clients with your mid/late career work. And partially because your reputation isn't made up of lists of concrete large-scale things like papers, in the same way an academic's is.
wouldn't you think it would be more charitable to assume
It would be more charitable, yes. I didn't realize that was the goal.
It's always seemed to me that one of the reasons not to change your name is the possibility that you'll do something totally awesome (publish books! or whatever) and then be stuck with the husband's name in the event of a divorce.
But I guess that's sort of a pessimistic way of looking at marriage.
These concerns just all seem very hypothetical.
634: Well, you're accusing anyone who cites fear of lost reputation as a reason not to change her name as being a craven liar -- too chicken to state her real reasons, so she bullshits about professional reasons. That's harsh, unless you have a good solid basis for it, and you don't in fact have such a good solid basis.
Charity isn't the only principle to abide by in argument, but where you find yourself badmouthing a wide swath of people based on no or poor evidence, it's a worthwhile principle to consult.
632: so you're just ignoring 630?
637: yeah no shit they're hypothetical. I'm 1. male 2. not an academic and 3. haven't changed my name. It's hypothetically the case that if you walked blindly into traffic a car would hit you, but since it's only hypothetical why even worry about it?
Maybe it's possible that female academics have a better sense of the state of the culture of their disciplines than a lawyer!
640: Woooah, wooah. Let's not get crazy here, and start doubting lawyers' polymathic expertise.
I am starting to doubt the ability of lawyers to spell "whoa".
"Whoa". I suppose you could spell it like that. If you wanted to. Which I apparently didn't.
638 and 629 are way beyond what I meant. I'm not accusing anyone of being a liar, much less a craven one, nor a chicken nor gutless. More just latching onto received wisdom (changing names is suicide) as a explanation for doing exactly what would have been done anyway, because there was no real desire to change a name in the first place.
I was all like "whoah", but then 644 brought some sense.
Gene and Lorri Bauston became famous in animal rights circles as the founders of Farm Sanctuary. When they divorced they each went back to their pre-married names, so now they are Gene Baur and Lorri Houston. Very confusing!
645: So, it's received wisdom, out there to latch onto, before any particular woman seizes on it as an excuse to cover her real reasons for not changing her name. Any idea how it got to be received wisdom if there's nothing to it at all?
I read LB's "Woooah" as a boat horn, like one hears on a tugboat or something.
because there was no real desire to change a name in the first place
Which, to clarify, I don't think they would be afraid to admit. It's just not the reason I hear offered.
And look, I'm not saying there aren't lots of academics who really would have liked to change their names, but didn't out of concerns about their careers. Maybe there are. My point was that those fears strike me as overblown.
And I totally acknowledge 640, which is why I was asking the question--to figure out what it is that I'm not understanding.
And I totally acknowledge 640, which is why I was asking the question--to figure out what it is that I'm not understanding.
A noble but seemingly unreachable goal.
A close friend in college changed his last names to his wife's last name. They had just decided that they wanted to have the same last name and they liked her last name better. Whoa, did they catch a lot of shit! His father practically disowned him.
652: should read "his last name" not "his last names" -- he only had one.
This probably depends on how large one's field is. I would guess that my field is small enough that someone changing their name wouldn't have a huge effect, because most people would know the person. (I can think of only one example, a man who took a hyphenated name, which maybe isn't the best test case.) But if a field is big enough that people might be aware of your papers without running into you at a conference at least once a year? Yeah, I could see that as problematic.
652: We planned to do that (Buck's last name is funny, mine isn't), but I left talking to his family about it to him, and he sprung it on them the morning of the wedding, resulting in a bit of a freakout. Hence the mutual hyphenation solution.
What I'd like to see is an experiment where 40 academics were divided into two equal groups, and one group (20 academics) then had their names changed randomly, and then all 40 careers were tracked and evaluated at 5 and 10 year intervals, to see if there was any statistically significant difference in the career trajectories of the two groups. My hypothesis is that the difference would be more minor than the average academic seems to think it would be.
Now I'm mentally reviewing the women in my field and realizing that there aren't very many of them, and a shockingly high percentage of them are married to men in my field. (That seems pathological, doesn't it?) All kept their names.
656: I'd like to see that too, but mostly because it's just fun fucking with people.
You're right that to prove there would be a big effect, you'd need to do a study like that. (Actually, I think you'd want much bigger numbers than 40.) And no one has, because it's obviously absurd. But that's exactly why people worry -- because they can see mechanisms by which their career could get screwed up, and there's no practical way to find out if it is or isn't likely to happen. You can't even really collect anecdotes, because the harmful events would be harmful precisely because no one knew they were happening.
So what, exactly, is going to happen with the Ocho Cinco News Network?
Of course, the Ocho Cinco News Network, OCNN, isn't an actual television station, but more a grandiose tag for the insanity of Chad Ochocinco, née Chad Johnson, the outspoken wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals. In 2008, Johnson legally changed his name to Ochocinco, as a ridiculous Spanglish homage to his uniform number, 85. Now, Ochocinco says he's reverting back to Johnson. "I've done enough with the Ocho thing," he told ESPN.
655: They told the parents well before the wedding, and it clearly didn't go over well at all with his father, but for whatever reasons this only made my friend more determined to do it.
(Actually, I think you'd want much bigger numbers than 40.)
If you're trying to tease out very subtle effects, maybe. If the effects are even moderately big, 40 would be plenty--you could do it with fewer.
My last name is recognizably ethnic (vowel-endingly Italian) an CA's last name is the plainest, most white-bread name of which one can conceive (that is also a common Scottish name -- you can probably figure it out now!). All other considerations aside, it would be impossible for me to take his name just on the level of personal identity and self-conception. It would be like "passing" or something. (His s-i-l who has a genuinely super-awesome Greek name, with a terrific story to go with it did in fact change her name once they moved out of Quebec, where it's not legal for women to take their husband's names. If I were them, that's the name the kids would have, so awesome is it.)
661: can't you just pick a name and stick with it?
659: This is heartbreaking news, but Chad was not "née" anything. Bugbear!
662: I wonder if you could unpack the statistical justification for that, for the scientists reading?
662: Well, there's going to be super-high variance; academic careers are all over the place, for all sorts of random reasons, including of course ability. Given that, you'd need a big sample to be sure of even a pretty big effect.
Who is this new commenter urple? I'm not sure I trust his arguments.
Do the scientists disagree? Or is that a joke? (Honest question.)
Buck's last name is funny
Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?
670: Lop off the last "e." I mean, it's a fair enough mistake, since folks are basically familiar with it only from wedding announcements and the like.
once they moved out of Quebec, where it's not legal for women to take their husband's names.
Wait, really?
Who wants to marry me? I'll change my name!
672: it was sort of a joke, but if you're going to authoritatively state the sample size you'll need to demonstrate various sizes of effects, my assumption would be that you have a statistical justification for believing those are the necessary sample sizes. If you don't have one, my assumption is going to be that you're talking out your ass, and I'm not going to pay attention to the statement.
academic careers are all over the place, for all sorts of random reasons, including of course ability
What? If I've learned anything from reading threads on academia at Unfogged, it's that ability is never a factor in academia.
673: Not a scientist, but try my 668 as an explanation of what I think Sifu's saying.
674: Not actually all that humorous, but prominently incorporates a slang term for the male genitalia. I actually wouldn't have thought it was really noticeable, but Buck was pretty sick of the giggling.
my assumption is going to be that you're talking out your ass,
Has there ever been a safer assumption?
635: This is why I have made sure to do absolutely nothing of note.
668: I'm not sure what "variance" means here. We first have to figure out some way to numerically code the potential outcomes. You may be envisioning a more complicated coding scheme than I am.
682: Note that the required n, in the formula you link, grows with increased variance.
676: I thought she made it up in order to not seem anything other than totally nice and accommodating to CA's parents, to be honest. But yeah -- it's true.
Oh huh. That link apparently goes to some kind of gross, right-wing site, but it mentions the law, etc.
682: so you did the math? I'd love to see it.
Short of that, what kind of effect sizes are you predicting? How are you measuring career trajectory for this study? I take it you're talking about positive deviation from what the average academic thinks the difference in trajectory would be, so you're going to use d'? What's the standard error of the academic-predicted trajectory? What's your sample size for that metric?
Just trying to nail things down. Not for my sake, though. I am not, as Pauly Shore points out, a scientist.
686: how are you imagining classifying the trajectories of academic careers?
685: If you code it in any way that meaningfully captures success, such that the result is going to tell you anything at all, differences in career trajectories are going to be huge, and are going to depend on a whole lot of variables. You can't take a matched pair of grad students and assume their careers are going to be similar at all.
691: You're the one who proposed the study initially, what were you thinking?
693: Unwarranted assumption in question!
No, I didn't do the math, of course. So I'm not positive. But I'm fairly confident. It's an intuitive guess, based on the sort of thing we're measuring and the sorts of samples typically used to measure similar things.
You still haven't answered--is your instinct that 40 would be too small a sample? Or is this all just for fun?
I take it you're talking about positive deviation from what the average academic thinks the difference in trajectory would be, so you're going to use d'?
I was talking about observed deviation from the control group.
693: I haven't constructed an experiment in detail. I do bet that if you had a sample of 40, that would be more than plenty to allow you to reduce their actual outcomes to data that could be coded for statistical analysis with meaningful power.
I think you've probably want both some objective and some subjective measures of their career trajectory, but again I haven't thought the the details.
the sorts of samples typically used to measure similar things.
What things are similar?
How would you control for wildly varying ability, research interests, and connections among the 40 academics you started with?
Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?
You misunderstand. His name is Buck Funny.
I'd marry all of you! But nobody will even talk to me. :(
I trust you see the mischief potential therein.
His name is Buck Funny.
And how!
And what is the consequence of this? If Prof. Bigshot had known about your previous work, he would have gotten in touch with you the next week about a potential collaboration, but now he won't?
The problem is that this is a huge negative. Not just a mini-negative. If you avoid it happening twice, that justifies keeping your name.
What things are similar?
Research on the effects of anything on career outcomes (mentorships, job performance evaluations, prestige of schools attended, marriage, child-rearing, etc.).
698: Exactly. Among any 40 early-career academics, you'd expect a bunch to leave academia because they couldn't get jobs, a bunch to hang on as adjuncts and put together a career like that somehow, maybe half? am I too optimistic? to get tenure track jobs anyplace, and possibly one or two to develop significant prestige within the profession. Forty seems clearly too small to me to ensure that randomly dividing it into two groups would get you similar results in the two groups even without an experimental intervention.
704 cont: the difference being that those are generally not controlled experiments. (Which is why the second half of 698 is throwing me... we're controlling for all that by having a control group.)
704: Are you thinking about particular studies of those things with Ns around forty?
I certainly acknowledge that 400 would be even better than 40, and that 4,000 would be even better than 400. Since we're not actually designing this experiment, I'm not sure this is useful. How about I retroactively insert an "I'd think" and an "I'd expect" in 662, and we be done with this.
You still haven't answered--is your instinct that 40 would be too small a sample?
Having not done the math, and having no particular intuition about the kinds of sample sizes necessary to show variously sized effects in social science research, and not knowing what kind of effect you intend to measure, I haven't the slightest idea, and neither do you. Which was my point. You were using the language of science to make a rhetorical point but you were using it meaninglessly, which made it a meaningless statement. You told us that you don't believe that it has an effect, despite all the reasons people have offered in this thread for why it could absolutely have an effect: that's fine. Making ill-formed statements about an imaginary study that's never going to happen and that you don't understand how to accurately define adds nothing to your statement of your opinion, and throwing concrete numbers into the mix makes you seem intentionally obfuscatory.
Wait, really?
See here for what I believe to be the background of Quebec's naming law. It's not impossible to change your name upon marriage. You just have to petition a court to do so, just as anyone who wanted a name change would do.
But this study isn't the right approach, because it's the wrong sort of career-damage. It's not that changing your name guarantees damage your career by 5%, it's that there's a 2% chance it could have a catastrophic effect. That one! great! missed opportunity, which hypothetically damaged your by 80%.
711: That was kind of what I was thinking. You can capture that sort of thing with a big enough sample size, but forty doesn't seem anything like big enough to me.
(And of course Sifu's right that this is all bullshitting. I've got a strong opinion, but haven't done any math, and couldn't without first designing the experiment and all that.)
I favor bullshitting meaninglessly without using the language of science, which I don't understand.
And of course Sifu's right that this is all bullshitting
In the future all Unfogged comments will be peer-reviewed.
Regardless of the study, there are enough realistic paths to catastrophic damage that the fear of changing one's name is reasonable. Urple's arguing that the fear itself is silly.
707: no, I was thinking of those things as broadly similar for the sorts of ways you'd need to code the data. They're not generally (ever) controlled experiments, which would allow you to use a lower sample size.
I propose an alternate study: that Urple quits his job, goes into academia, gets 3 papers accepted to mainstream journals, and then changes his name. 5 years after that, we'll check in to see whether or not he has tenure. If yes, he was right all along and everyone will apologize for having doubted him.
I'm all for bullshitting without using the language of science. If somebody says "I bet it's like half as likely that changing your name would hurt your career as how likely you think it is", it's much easier to say "okay, well, I understand that you think that, but you're not making an affirmative argument for a fairly contrarian position. You're just stating your opinion."
717: Urple's career on Unfogged is a test case itself! Note that even with a new name he has maintained a similar level of fame and honor among the Unfoggetariat.
709: Making ill-formed statements about an imaginary study that's never going to happen and that you don't understand how to accurately define adds nothing to your statement of your opinion makes you a 'pataphysician.
715: no, I think the fear itself is completely reasonable. And honestly, if you're characterizing it as a 2% chance it could have a catastrophic effect, that sounds totally right to me. And there's good reason to want to avoid that. The way I've often heard it presented (including in this thread) is something more like a 80%* chance it will have a significantly negative impact. Which is what I'm skeptical about.
* I hate to pick an actual number here, since sifu will think I'm throwing concrete numbers into the mix makes to be intentionally obfuscatory, and using the language of science to make a rhetorical point meaninglessly. But since heebie did it first I hope I'm safe. I would think it would be understand that she and I have both pulled these numbers out of our asses.
718: Separate from this conversation specifically, I agree with this strongly. You can't back up everything you say or no one would ever say much of anything, but unfounded claims of certainty, whether implicit or explicit, are really not a good thing. I certainly do that sort of thing sometimes, sounding as if I have certain knowledge when I don't, but it irritates the bejeezus out of me when other people do it. (And I accept that I shouldn't do it either, I just don't always catch myself.)
no, I think the fear itself is completely reasonable.
WTFingF? So if the fear's completely reasonable, what's the whole conversation been about?
And honestly, if you're characterizing it as a 2% chance it could have a catastrophic effect, that sounds totally right to me. And there's good reason to want to avoid that.
I should have quoted this bit too.
Are 718 and 722 refering to any of my statements other than 662? Because you're right--I should haven't made that statement affirmatively, without having a well defined experiment and the appropriate formulas all worked out. Please see the last sentence of 708. (I do still happen to think it's right, but obviously I'm not in a position to prove it.)
709: You were using the language of science to make a rhetorical point but you were using it meaninglessly, which made it a meaningless statement. You told us that you don't believe that it has an effect, despite all the reasons people have offered in this thread for why it could absolutely have an effect: that's fine. Making ill-formed statements about an imaginary study that's never going to happen and that you don't understand how to accurately define adds nothing to your statement of your opinion
Sorry for the lengthy quotation, but thanks, Tweety. This sort of "Cite! I need to see an empirical study! Show me the proof! Where's the empirical evidence?" thing drives me up a fucking wall.
As you were.
You just have to petition a court to do so, just as anyone who wanted a name change would do.
When my brother got married and changed his name, the Social Security office told him that he'd have to go to court and get a legal name change in order to get a new card. He eventually got them to see reason. This was in the '80's; presumably it wouldn't be an issue now.
725: See the first sentence of 722 for its intended application.
TBH, all Urple did was to say "My hypothesis is that the difference would be more minor than the average academic seems to think it would be." and then you all jumped on him for not being careful enough about his experimental design. It was pretty obvious that all he was doing was stating a more-or-less unfounded opinion that name changing in academia isn't that big a deal, and suggesting that maybe you could do some kind of social science study to figure that out.
Now, why Urple is so insistent on this point when actually-existing academics on the ground who have reason to think about this carefully are telling him otherwise is a little mysterious, but I don't think the sin here was making a false claim of certainty.
So if the fear's completely reasonable, what's the whole conversation been about?
In my mind, it's been about the fact that we're talking about a 2% chance, not an 80%+ chance. I've said multiple times in this thread that sure, it's possible that changing a name would really damage a career, but it didn't seem overwhelmingly likely to me. And I've been getting tremendous pushback about that.
The way I've often heard it presented (including in this thread) is something more like a 80%* chance it will have a significantly negative impact. Which is what I'm skeptical about.
But that's just because people get defensive about their fears, because saying "it's unlikely that something REALLY BAD will happen" makes it sound like your fear is being dismissed, not "and it's reasonable to be scared anyway."
an imaginary study that's never going to happen
DAMN STRAIGHT IT'S NOT.
then you all jumped on him for not being careful enough about his experimental design.
Well, I jumped on him (before the argument about how big the sample size would have to be, which was a side issue, even though it got acrimonious) by pointing out that it's not a study you could possibly do, so academics in the real world had to shape their actions without the sort of solid data he was postulating. Which was, I think, a reasonable point.
But that's just because people get defensive about their fears
Yes! They're human! And the fear is overstated! That's all I said!
I've said multiple times in this thread that sure, it's possible that changing a name would really damage a career, but it didn't seem overwhelmingly likely to me. And I've been getting tremendous pushback about that.
But a reasonable fear, of something there's a good reason to want to avoid, is a good reason not to change your name. Your position hasn't just been that it's not overwhelmingly likely that a name change would really damage a career, but specifically that fear of career damage isn't a good reason not to change your name. The pushback has been against that position -- that that fear of career damage isn't a good reason not to change your name. And now it seems as if not even you believe it.
people get defensive about their fears
...and nearly everything else.
See 591: "Look, of course I'm not saying it's impossible that a name change could have an adverse impact on an academic career. It just seems wildly less likely to have a severe impact as most academics I know seem to suggest."
734:
To nitpick:
The fear is reasonable; the evidence or rationale is overstated (because people are defensive).
...and nearly everything else.
Nuh-uh.
Saying that something is "not impossible" isn't really very close to saying that the fear of that thing is "completely reasonable".
If you said "It's not impossible that you could be hit by a meteor as you sit at your desk," I wouldn't think you intended to convey that my fear of meteor strike was "completely reasonable."
734: I think there was the vague idea that what urple was saying was that women don't want to change their last names because they are just too damn independent and feministic, but they latched onto the excuse that it would hurt their career, rather than just saying, "I am woman, hear me roar, I'm not going to change my name for any man!"
Your position hasn't just been that it's not overwhelmingly likely that a name change would really damage a career, but specifically that fear of career damage isn't a good reason not to change your name.
It has? I thought my position was that I didn't care why any did or didn't change their name or why, but that actual tangible career damage seemed less likely to me than most academics seemed to suggest.
Are you referring to 628.3? That's the only thing that I think comes close to the argument you're suggesting I'm making, and that's only true if it's read out of the context of my previous comments.
Urple's career on Unfogged is a test case itself! Note that even with a new name he has maintained a similar level of fame and honor among the Unfoggetariat.
Ah, but the test case lends itself to the counterargument as well. A Google search on "urple" would rob him of the credit for years of commenting. Doesn't that change his status among newer commenters? I submit that it does.
actual tangible career damage seemed less likely to me than most academics seemed to suggest
This is where I run into my annoyance zone. Who are you talking about? What fears specifically? As I think you agree, a 2% chance (if that's the number we're pulling out of our asses, and of course this is all opaque and not easily quantifiable) of a catastrophic result is a pretty good reason to avoid doing something. Are you actually encountering people who say "Yes, I have concluded that there is an 80% chance that a name change will hurt my career"?" No, you are not, so the whole argument is pointless.
the whole argument is pointless
I think you might be really honing in on something here.
the whole argument is pointless
This is Unfogged, Halford. I refer you to the barbecue debates.
743: You've "always been skeptical of the very common argument that it would cripple the career of a female academic to change her name"; "It just seems wildly less likely to have a severe impact as most academics I know seem to suggest. Now, they're academics and I'm not, of course, but none of the reasons I've heard have ever seemed very convincing."
If you weren't trying to express that you were very doubtful that there was any substantial risk that a name change would have any significant negative impact on an academic career, I (I think excusably) misread you. Given that you've now stated that you do believe that it's reasonable to fear such negative impact, I don't think we disagree about anything.
True, but pointing out the pointlessness of the arguments is itself a form of engaging in pointless argument, so I'm part of the great circle of life of Unfogged.
Academics I know who have first debated changing a last name, and then decided not to, tend to state their position not as "changing my name would be stupid because it would definitely hurt my career" but instead as "changing my name would be stupid because there is a chance that it would hurt my career and this whole career thing is already chancy enough so any minor setback could well be the end of it".
Some of them actually changed their names legally, but continue to work professionally under the original one, so as to reduce the number of stumbling blocks en route to fame and fortune job security and insurance.
750: Man, do I hope there's no record of how often I click on links that get net-nannied.
I'd guess that most Youtube videos with more than a dozen comments would trigger the Net Nanny.
If you weren't trying to express that you were very doubtful that there was any substantial risk that a name change would have any significant negative impact on an academic career, I (I think excusably) misread you.
I'm not sure where you got "any substantial risk". I was trying to express that it's always seemed to me that a significant negative impact was relatively unlikely.
Given that you've now stated that you do believe that it's reasonable to fear such negative impact, I don't think we disagree about anything.
Well, I guess I do wonder how reasonable it is to do too much life-rearranging to avoid a 2% risk. If it's costless (i.e., you're not interested in changing your name anyway), then, sure, it makes sense to avoid it. Should you avoid doing something you want to do in order to avoid that level of risk? I guess it depends on how much you want to do it...
(But even that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to fear the potential negative result, to get back to heebie's point.)
747: Now we can have a pointless "honing" vs. "homing" argument!
In truth, neither pointless nor an argument. Discuss.
Academics I know who have first debated changing a last name, and then decided not to, tend to state their position not as "changing my name would be stupid because it would definitely hurt my career" but instead as "changing my name would be stupid because there is a chance that it would hurt my career and this whole career thing is already chancy enough so any minor setback could well be the end of it".
I'd say I mostly hear it expressed as some variation of "changing my name would be stupid because it would be too risky for my career".
Well, I guess I do wonder how reasonable it is to do too much life-rearranging to avoid a 2% risk.
Depends on a 2% risk of what, doesn't it? I'd do a lot of life-rearranging to avoid a 2% risk of death, for example. If it's a 2% risk of missing a career-changing opportunity, that also seems like it's worth a certain amount of life-rearranging.
I'd do a lot of life-rearranging to avoid a 2% risk of death, for example.
Really?
756: Thank you for making that explicit
"Hone in on" is definitely still right, by the way.
And of course, 2% is pulled out of heebie's ass. 2% that there will ever be any effect is one thing. 2% that someone looking for you will develop a false impression of the strength of your record is another, given that it applies to a repeated event.
2% is pulled out of heebie's ass.
It was a beautiful thing.
2% is pulled out of heebie's ass
This is true. I'd have honestly guessed something more on the order of 5%.
I feel like 2% risk of severe negative consequences is well within the range of risks I willingly accept in order to do lots of dangerous things I like to do. But maybe my sense of the statistics is way off.
I'M CLEVER! LOOK HOW CLEVER I AM!
Come on, guys. Typing things backwards is totally clever. Give me some credit. And a high five, maybe? Please?
766:
"I've been looking forward to this hike for years -- it's so unspoiled! How many hikers do you see go through here?"
"We get about twenty-five hikers on this trail a week."
"Anything else I should know about the trail?"
"We get a grizzly-bear mauling about every two weeks."
You'd still take the hike?
I feel like 2% risk of severe negative consequences is well within the range of risks I willingly accept in order to do lots of dangerous things I like to do.
You do things that carry a 2% risk of catastrophic consequences? I can't think of anything outside of food jokes that might apply.
2% that there will ever be any effect is one thing. 2% that someone looking for you will develop a false impression of the strength of your record is another, given that it applies to a repeated event.
Well, yeah, this is obviously an important distinction. I thought we were talking about lifetime risk from a single event, not an iterated events each with their own catastrophic risk.
I definitely recommend against changing your name regularly, in academics.
772: Driving?
Would you get a mastectomy based on a 2% chance of breast cancer? Lumpectomy? Mammogram? Whether you're willing to make sacrifices to avoid the 2% risk kind of depends on how important the particular sacrifice is to you, doesn't it?
You do things that carry a 2% risk of catastrophic consequences?
25% of the country smokes cigarettes.
Would you get a mastectomy based on a 2% chance of breast cancer?
No, it's about 90% lifetime. 50% before age 50. (Actually higher based on family stats.)
2% is pulled out of heebie's ass.
This just makes me think "low-fat milk".
As to hyphenating last names, my first wife tried to go that route, and when getting her new driver's licence to reflect said name change, there were not enough spaces on the form for all of the letters. When she asked the DMV employee what she should do, the female clerk responded "If you're that damned liberated honey, why take his name at all?"
You'd still take the hike?
I would
CJB is confident that his hiking partner is slower than he is.
We get a grizzly-bear mauling about every two weeks
Don't forget the pepper spray. Otherwise you humans can taste a little bland. No offense.
Yeah, no one in academia is going to say "Hmm, I wonder what Prof. Peon has done. Let me do a PubMed search for his/her name." They don't have the time or the inclination. They're going to say "Hmm, I vaguely remember that one paper of theirs" or they're going to say "Hmm, I remember that Prof. Maiden Name was doing all this cool stuff, but I haven't seen anything from them lately. I guess he* didn't make it/died/wasn't cut out for academia."
Who gets which awards is largely a matter of which name comes naturally to the top of people's heads, regardless of actual achievement. Repeatedly seeing that person's name (in publications or in conference schedules) is one way to ensure that that happens. A name change derails that kind of momentum.
*A guy in my field changed his name to that of his wife. But his is a very small field where everyone literally knows each other so there really is almost no harm in changing your name there.
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Oh holy fuckity-fuck fuck. I overslept this morning and missed my first class of the semester because I was up all night worried that I would miss the first class of the semester, and then I came home to an email saying that hey that student you failed because she turned in a 95% plagiarized research project? Well, she came in and told a sob story about how she really doesn't understand plagiarism or research so we've decided you should change her grade so she can pass the course. If she doesn't understand the fundamental issue of the course, which is how to write your own work and incorporate research, how does that demonstrate her acceptable understanding of the material?
I'm going to go put my head in the blender.
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family stats
Most likely an oxymoron.
Unless there are some broad confidence ranges or an absolutely ginormous family.
Your lifetime odds of dying in a car accident are 1 in 83. Pretty close to 2%.
And this is a population-wide average, so if you drive more than average it obviously goes up.
784: Is there any way for you to push back? If not, that sounds incredibly awful.
784: My experience with every university I've been at has been that it is nearly impossible to fail someone for cheating/plagiarism. If the student can come up with even a laughable excuse/reason, the university has no interest in getting into a legal battle over a single grade and will usually fold like a house of cards.
Even with photocopied evidence that students had altered their exams and then asked for a regrade, the university refused to even allow the professor to give a zero for the exam.
I failed someone for plagiarism and it quite likely prevented the student from transferring from the non-prestigious college-within-the-university in which they were currently enrolled to the famous-the-world-over college into which they had been accepted. The dean of students was entirely on my side. (I didn't know about the transfer until I had already failed the student, but I decided not to let that change my mind. Zir particular form of plagiarism was so pernicious and underhanded and the bullying rage with which ze first met the accusation so outrageous that something really needed to be done.)
790: The one who took a paper in zir native tongue and ran it through google translate?
791: More like 10 or 12 papers, and likely their own translation, but yep. BAH.
a legal battle over a single grade
Under what legal framework does this sort of battle happen, anyway? IANAL, obviuosly, but I'm curious. Defamation of character, off the top of my head?
787, 788, 790: I am used to two kinds of dealing with plagiarism. At my alma mater, even an accidental failure to cite properly meant immediate expulsion. Well, there was a trial and then expulsion, and I lost quite a few college buddies that way. At my other college, plagiarism means failure of the course and referral to the dean, who sits down with the student and has an intense conversation about academic integrity. The whole thing goes into a file and there are no other repercussions unless the student does it again.
At this school, this is the first time I've dealt with it. The paper is seriously almost entirely copied, in a sneaky underhanded way, and is also 2 full pages shorter than the 7-page requirement. The paper is full of all these really intense social-science citations that are nowhere in the works cited. There's maybe one whole paragraph, total, of words written by the student.
And the school's official policy is expulsion, swift and immediate, or, if the student is lucky, failure of the course and academic probation. And they're all the time telling me how too many of my students pass my classes or get A's, and I need to be more of a hardass because our students "need to learn how to fail" etc., and that my job depends on me holding my students' feet to the fire. My problem so far has been that my students there are freakishly hardworking and awesome. Even holding them to standards that are too high for my grad students, they rise to meet the challenge.
But the decision was made after meeting this student that she really is not capable of understanding how copying an entire research abstract as her paper is wrong. I'm doing what I can, sent the paper highlighted to show what was copied and the original article, but this seems to be making everyone think that I am some kind of psychotic hardass all of a sudden who hates this student, which is what she went into their offices and told them. Arg I hate hate hate being contingent labor.
I failed someone for plagiarism and it got them thrown out of the program. I talked it over repeatedly ahead of time with the department head and then at a meeting with the dean, and they both were way more pro-failing than I ended up being. I mean, I thought he should fail the class, but when I found out that if he failed the class he'd be thrown out of the school I was willing to go with an incomplete or a redo or something.
I'm not really sorry, in retrospect, although I was very stressed out about it at the time- there were multiple (2) instances of straight up copying another student's work, in addition to large amounts of uncited material from published works in various homework assignments and papers. And he kept doing it after being warned. Dumbass.
I suppose I should have left out legal, since that was just inferred on my part. I was just looking for some plausible reason that most of the universities I've known have been so weak on the subject.
I was just looking for some plausible reason that most of the universities I've known have been so weak on the subject.
My guess is that the upper echelons of universities are chock full of people who have resumes loaded with thinly veiled bullshit and/or remember that their ascent to their current status involved a lot of shenanigans at least as bad as plagiarism.
645
638 and 629 are way beyond what I meant. I'm not accusing anyone of being a liar, much less a craven one, nor a chicken nor gutless. More just latching onto received wisdom (changing names is suicide) as a explanation for doing exactly what would have been done anyway, because there was no real desire to change a name in the first place.
This would not apply then to married academic women who change their names for everything else but keep their maiden name for their academic work. Which per 752 is not unheard of:
Some of them actually changed their names legally, but continue to work professionally under the original one, so as to reduce the number of stumbling blocks en route to fame and fortune job security and insurance.
771: <grizzly bear hiking example>
Bzzt. Probabilities of catastrophic results cannot be naively compared across differing time scales (or relatedly, different frequency of activity). "Go on this hike every weekend for the next 40 years and have a 2% chance of being mauled" is a quite different thing altogether, for instance.
Sure. See 762, pointing out the same thing.
797: Not necessarily, there are other reasons why universities don't always enforce their rules about plagiarism. It's a victimless crime. The university doesn't benefit in any tangible way from failing a student. Probably most importantly, there's no direct incentive for professors to really go after plagiarism cases -- that sort of thing is time consuming, and doesn't make much difference in getting tenure.
801: The university does benefit, just not economically. The prestige of the university goes up marginally when poor and/or unethical students are prevented from becoming degree-holders. Granted, this is a tiny effect.
695
You still haven't answered--is your instinct that 40 would be too small a sample? Or is this all just for fun?
My intuition is that 40 is too small and a thought experiment seems to agree. Suppose we have two types of coins. Type A comes upheads 50% of the time when tossed. Type B comes up heads 60% of the time. You are given an unknown coin. Suppose you can assume there is 50% chance it is type A and a 50% chance it is type B. How many times do you have to toss it to reliably identify its type. Well the sample means will be .5*n and .6*n with variances .25*n and .24*n. For simplicity approximate .24*n as .25*n. So if we want 2 sigma separation between the sample means we need .1*n > 2*sqrt(n/4) or .01*n*n > n or n > 100. And with 100 tosses you will still classify the coin wrong about 15% of the time.
But you're right that I think Urple was thinking about a 2% lifetime risk of death, which is not all that much given that everyone's lifetime risk of death is pretty stable at 100%
Somewhere I have a half-written Journal of Irreproducible Results-style piece detailing in an understated manner a study that confirms the age-old hunch that all men are mortal.
721
... And honestly, if you're characterizing it as a 2% chance it could have a catastrophic effect, that sounds totally right to me. ...
Keep in mind that most of the time you are going fail at an academic career anyway. Suppose normally 96% fail and 4% hit the lottery. Then a 2% chance of a catastrophic effect means you are failing 98% of the time and hitting the lottery 2% of the time. So your chance of success has been halved which seems pretty significant.
Also note treatment and control groups of size 20 each have no chance of reliably identifying this effect.
I've never loved Shearer more than I do right now.
721.1: I think you are applying the 2% (which number is of course ass-ish in origin anyway) correctly. In your scenario, the vast majority of times that the name change effect would come into play would only serve to further damage a "failure". But of course your 4%/96% is wrong to begin with.
803 is a fairly significantly different experimental design, but since I didn't really have much in the way of specified experimental design, I'm going to decide not to care.
Suppose normally 96% fail and 4% hit the lottery.
I don't think this even remotely approximates the odds of success in an acaemic career. (Which isn't binary, of course, but even leaving that aside.)
811
I don't think this even remotely approximates the odds of success in an acaemic career. (Which isn't binary, of course, but even leaving that aside.)
I chose the 96% failure rate to make it so that your chance of success was halved. However I don't think it is so far off. What percentage of PhDs in a field eventually obtain tenured academic positions (in tier 1 institutions) in that field? It isn't very high.
The prestige of the university goes up marginally when poor and/or unethical students are prevented from becoming degree-holders.
But funding from many sources, including the federal government and groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is directly tied to graduation rates. Completion rates are numbers closely monitored by a many bureaucrats. There is absolutely no equivalent for cheating rates.
The grant our little CC is about to receive for improving completion rates has seven digits. The budget for the academic integrity initiative has four, if it has a formal budget at all yet.
802, 813: The prestige of the university goes up marginally when poor and/or unethical students are prevented from becoming degree-holders.
Which explains the absurdly high graduation rates at almost all of the "elite" undergraduate institutions.
Mandaranism for fun and endowment.
811: I chose the 96% failure rate to make it so that your chance of success was halved.
By your faulty logic.
You do things that carry a 2% risk of catastrophic consequences? I can't think of anything outside of food jokes that might apply.
Active service.
Giving birth (in large parts of the world).
Doing 50 parachute jumps.
Joining the police force, in some areas.
815: I don't know that the logic is necessarily faulty. This is all silly, given that the numbers are ex recto (and even for someone trying to collect data, would be really hard to determine without Urple's experiment), but someone saying a 2% chance of damage sounds to me like they're saying "In 2% of all the cases, results were worse than you'd expect." Now, if the control group were binary, 96% fail, 4% succeed, then there's no way to damage a failure, so you'd never perceive an impact on the 96% expected failure. The only place for a "worse than you expect" result to hit would be on the 4% who you'd expect to succeed.
This isn't a question with a right or wrong answer, because it's all fundamentally bullshitting, but I don't think Shearer made a logical error there -- he interpreted a loosely defined situation in a way that makes sense to me. Your way of interpreting it is also possible, but not inevitable.
Indeed, I am starting to become aware that the very strongly-worded academic integrity policy (published last semester and disseminated in 49 ways to faculty and students alike, which clearly states that students who do this sort of thing are to at least fail the class and at most be expelled) is actually intended to be a magic document, so terrifying in its threats that they shall never need to be enacted. That would be fine if there were such a thing as a threat so clear and so completely understood that no one would ever violate it. Now that it's done been violated, everyone's trying to pretend it hasn't been, because that would mean losing this student's (very high) tuition, bringing shame on the school, getting angry parents involved, etc.
Having been in different academic cultures w/r/t this kind of thing, I far prefer it, actually, when, as at my other school, plagiarism is acknowledged as something that happens and can be dealt with in a sane, rational manner that doesn't induce suicidal responses until the second or third offense. As I tell those students, you don't have to tell your parents you're meeting with the dean. This time, it's just to make sure you understand the integrity policy going forward from here. No need to lie or be crazy about it. The bigger the threat, the larger the likelihood is that students will do this bizarre "I'm too stupid to understand what you're talking about!!!!" stonewalling. I keep saying, I literally cannot believe anyone is this stupid, but if she keeps persisting in her claims to stupidity, why does that mean she should pass the class?
817: I don't know that the logic is necessarily faulty.
Agree. Not necessarily faulty, but my rigorous study with n=1 says 97% likely to be faulty. (I'm thinking if we throw out enough fatuously precise numbers the thread will wraparound the ridiculousness spectrum (which is a closed curve as is well-known since Einstein) and come out profound.
794: At my alma mater, even an accidental failure to cite properly meant immediate expulsion.
Despite my snark in 814, this is madness and any administrator enforcing it should be removed by force and barred from having any further pedagogical role in any educational institution.
818.2 sounds sensible. It is axiomatic that the scheme described in 818.1 will be abused, selectively enforced, what-have-you.
My latent hostility about certain aspects of academia, let me show it to you.
820 is correct. Certain aspects of academia are more than worthy of hostility.
At the older school on the Charles, the plagiarising student was "suspended" for a year. Suspended usually meant traveling through Europe for a year and, shockingly, did not result in failing the class in question. So cheating=free vacation.
At the older school on the Charles
Don't do that thing. I know it's ironic, but don't do that thing.
At my alma mater, even an accidental failure to cite properly meant immediate expulsion.
Back in grad school we devoted plenty of time to the David Abraham case. Conclusion, make sure that when you're taking notes you carefully distinguish between paraphrases and quotes (easy to do if the source material is in a foreign language). Also, make sure your note taking system very clearly shows where you found something. If not you may go from hitting the academic jackpot (rising young star at Princeton) to unemployed and buying LSAT guides.
824: And now a law professor. Maybe because he didn't change his name.
. . . . and then making big money as a NY lawyer and then getting tenure on the faculty of a very good law school, so not really all that bad a life.
822: That was the punishment for nearly any vaguely serious offense at my alma mater -- go away for a year and come back (if you want). A kid who plagiarized really egregiously went off for a year, came back, and was a . . . hmm maybe it wasn't Rhodes Scholar, but one of the just-about-as-fancy scholarships.
825-826
True, but in between he had his life collapse around him. From what I heard it wasn't a happy time for him.
It's also true that Ann Althouse, Glenn Reynolds and Amy Chua are all law professors at good law schools, along with tons of other less famous morons, so, (unlike being on the Princeton history faculty) a law professorship is not exactly a certification of great intelligence.
824
Back in grad school we devoted plenty of time to the David Abraham case. Conclusion, make sure that when you're taking notes you carefully distinguish between paraphrases and quotes (easy to do if the source material is in a foreign language). Also, make sure your note taking system very clearly shows where you found something. If not you may go from hitting the academic jackpot (rising young star at Princeton) to unemployed and buying LSAT guides.
Abraham's problems weren't plagiarism. He seems more like Bellesiles. Inventing support for your theories is a different type of academic misconduct.
829
... a law professorship is not exactly a certification of great intelligence.
Or more to the point of good character.
827, 829: Ahahahah. Googling shows me that the plagiarist in question is now on the law faculty of a very fancy law school. So, perhaps that's just the go-to career for busted cheaters.
I'm not sure why I'm so dyspeptic on this subject, but I really do think that legal academia is a sham academic discipline, designed to propagate money-making schools that (for the majority of the students in non super-elite places) egregiously rip off their students. Something is really wrong with the system.
830 There is some debate on that. To be exact whether or not he consciously falsified one key source or whether the error was inadvertent. He was certainly extremely sloppy in his note taking and there were many, many trivial errors in the original dissertation and book. However, I'm not sure that an article by a prominent late 'revisionist' 'historian' in a wackjob publication is really the best source for the controversy.
Something is really wrong with the system.
Whereas the rest of academia is beyond reproach.
Also, I think the deeper lesson of the Abraham affair may be that it's best to avoid pissing off Henry Turner and Gerry Feldman.
833: It's a funny discipline, certainly. Not terribly interesting to practitioners in the field, and it's not a field that has much independent existence outside of what practitioners are doing. I can't really badmouth legal academia with knowledge, but a lot of it seems pointless for the purpose of training students, and not all that pointful for any other purpose I can figure out.
Indeed, I am starting to become aware that the very strongly-worded academic integrity policy (published last semester and disseminated in 49 ways to faculty and students alike, which clearly states that students who do this sort of thing are to at least fail the class and at most be expelled) is actually intended to be a magic document, so terrifying in its threats that they shall never need to be enacted.
Much like the statutory penalties for copyright-infringement!
My hobbyhorsesponies, let me ride them. Ok, bedtime.
I'm sure the rest of academia sucks too, but in different ways -- law schools have non-rigorous academic standards for a non-discipline that has almost no connection to the profession for which it is purportedly training its students.
Moreover, for the majority of students and schools, the law schools are basically money-making rip off mills, encouraging people to take on loads of debt to pay for a purportedly prestigious degree that is not, in fact, particularly valuable.
a lot of it seems pointless for the purpose of training students, and not all that pointful for any other purpose I can figure out
Any resemblance between the above and other academic disciplines is purely coincidental. Also, no animals or children were harmed in the production of this blog comment.
839: I'm not going to argue, I suppose. But the whole enterprise -- academia -- really is one big cock-up at the moment.
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Overheard unnecessary clarification: "That place is the greatest meat market... for ass."
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823: Can I say, ironically, that I work for the larger university that abuts Panther Hallow?
Tenured professor as evil villain... suddenly the job seems a lot more attractive...
Big Academia. Where learning goes to die.
834
It is true that the source I linked to in 830 has dubious associations (which I was unaware of). For balance here is a defense of Abraham (perhaps also from a dubious source). Plagiarism does not seem to have been the issue.
843: This place is the greatest meat market...for asshorse.
This place is the greatest meat market...for asshorse.
"For the man or woman getting back in the saddle."
Sometimes the meat market for horse is the neighboring field.
They asked the horse's owner if she killed the horse for meat, and she said, "Nay." But no one was really sure she wasn't just talking to the still-alive horses.
"That place is the greatest meat market... for ass."
Perhaps it was just advice on making salame d'asino (not to be confused with donkey sausage).
Close observation of "traditional" academia and "professional" academia (but not law, specifically) suggests that there are real differences between the two tending toward's Halford's observations under a general umbrella tending towards ari's 842.
So cheating=free vacation.
The university also paid their fares and hotel bills (Interrobang). Or is the story that the students at this institution which is apparently so august that Sifu Tweety is shocked at irreverent descriptions of it are all so rich that they can afford to spend a year in Europe without breaking sweat and are only in college to pass the time anyway.
256: Canadians refer to what we call Canadian bacon as ham and do not consider it to be bacon at all.
855: Americans get free vacations instead of health coverage.
My aunt by marriage got her first marriage annulled. In that case, it doesn't really bother me. Her first husband cheated on her from day 1, so the argument went that he never meant what he said at the ceremony which totally makes sense to me.
Americans get free vacations instead of health coverage.
So they can come to Europe and see a doctor?
this institution which is apparently so august that Sifu Tweety is shocked at irreverent descriptions of it
No, that's really not it. Referring to Harvard euphemistically like that is, historically, what not not snobbish Harvard graduates do to avoid upsetting the proles by revealing too much about their Mandarin-y-ness, and I find it grating.
I prefer the way Yale grads tell the joke about the guy with a Swedish accent.
It's more of a family of jokes playing on the way "jail*" and "Yale" sound very similar if the speaker has a thick Scandinavian accent.
*gaol.
It's funny, for Minnesota, which is where that type of thing comes from.
I tell people I went to Harvard only (i) if they ask outright where I went to college or (ii) they are my ex-girlfriend went to some other Ivy and disagree with me about where we should go to dinner the films of Terrence Malick whether Cornell is a "super-safety school something.
I tell people where I went to college unless the Huskers failed to win at least nine games the year before.
839
Moreover, for the majority of students and schools, the law schools are basically money-making rip off mills, encouraging people to take on loads of debt to pay for a purportedly prestigious degree that is not, in fact, particularly valuable.
A recent NYT article on the law school racket.
Also I think it should be easier to discharge student debt in bankruptcy (I believe it is currently almost impossible). The law was changed because a few students were declaring bankruptcy (with no income or assets) immediately after graduating from college and getting their student debt discharged. This was an abuse but the current law was an overreaction. It would be possible to prevent this sort of abuse and still allow an opportunity to discharge crushing student debts. If this made student loans harder to obtain this would be a good thing. But unfortunately many people have magical beliefs about the value of education which the education lobby exploits to influence public policy in malign ways.
868: I agree. There's no reason you can't set a window, X years from your last semester enrolled, where you can't declare bankruptcy and then allow it after that.
Snow day! And what a lot of snow we have.
If this is the pointless-arguments-about-the-academic-world thread, can I complain about IRBs? I went through many years thinking of them as this benign, kindly power that served to protect powerless people from the abuses of powerful academics. And then I started to have contact with them.
So right now I'm in the position of 100% of my experience being negative, and still optimistically wanting believe that they can't all be that incompetent. Should I let go of this dream? Can someone with actual experience running these things explain to me how they can be so utterly pathetic in carrying out their ostensible mission?
(The most recent example, for context, is a researcher for whom I helped design the topic, met with to plan the research, personally introduced her to virtually all of the research subjects and organizations, reviewed and edited her interview protocol, and have just spent two hours role-playing with her to practice appropriate ways to gather sensitive information in conversational interviews. I also showed her an example of another researcher's unpublished work, which he had allowed me to synopsize in a 1-page flyer to aid in dissemination, and explained that I was willing to do the same thing for her final paper as well, subject of course to her approval. To date, the IRB has not made a determination about whether my organization will be allowed to see the final thesis. What on earth? Did I mention the part where I personally introduced her to all of her research subjects? And we're not talking HIV, here -- the topic is mildly personal, but not controversial or shameful. And odds are she'll be using pseudonyms for the subjects anyway. If I wanted to figure out who they were, which I don't. Because a) I already know them, and much more important b) it's irrelevant to my goal of creating a simple summary of aggregate research findings for the public.)
We are about 15 miles west of the heavy snow, so we dodged that bullet.
I'll join your complain about IRBs, except that we have people who do IRB stuff regularly and you do learn the magic formulas. Your protocol could have a couple of sentences on how you will get results out and protect confidentiality, or you listed as a consultant (even if unpaid).
Wow, so, after a while, there's just really not any place for additional snow to go. My car now has piles of snow almost exactly twice as high as its roof on either side of it. Adorable! But not at all clear I succeeded in my mission of digging it out so that it can be driven before April.
I don't have a ton of experience with IRBs just yet, but it definitely seems like a combination of knowing the keywords and figuring out the personality of your contact person is the key.
870. Tell them you're planning to publish it here.
"Participants will be randomized into treatment and control groups using the 16-sided die that I swiped from the grad student who smells like Doritos."
870 is pretty funny.
It never occurred to me to ask to be listed as a consultant. Obviously that would be the way to go.
I admit that a piece of what is bugging me about this is that they are so obviously clamping down with essentially unenforceable mandates. I mean, if they don't want me to see it, they're going to have to make it so that the copy she deposits in the library has to be checked out by people with a signature, and there'd have to be a banned list. That seems extreme, although I guess anything is possible.
My extremely vague sense is that there isn't any practical set of buzzwords for me to know because each IRB would be made up of different people. Right? I mean, I deal with many different institutions and disciplines. There's no reason that something that worked with Penn's anthropology department would work with Haverford's economics department.
I'm so het up about it, I'm losing my vowels.
877: Obviously, after it is published, anybody can do whatever they want with the published report (except copy it without attribution). The buzzwords are pretty similar across IRBs. Some are stricter than others, but that is mostly about the amount of detail they want to see. Regardless of where you are, you need to be very clear about how nobody not listed on the proposal will be able to break the anonymity of the participants.
870 is pretty funny.
You should know, seeing you wrote it.
There are a set of specific laws they have to follow, and in general if you the same wording as the legal definitions, it helps them recognize which bar you're clearing.
That said, I do think there are a lot of differences in level of enforcement between institutions and even in terms of how different departments are handled. So, for instance, those computer science types can get away with anything.
Something like:
All identifying information will be kept separated from the data. It will be stored in a password protected file on a drive (*something about how access to the drive is restricted and that it is backed-up*). Paper copies of research information will be stored in a locked file drawer that will be kept in a locked office.
Whoops, I meant the link in 874 was funny.
879: I'm going to go ahead and guess that 70-80% of the research I deal with never gets published. That's part of my endless obsession preoccupation with dissemination. Without our intervention, it *(!)*#!(^$!^ never gets out.
I still have extremely bitter memories of a thesis defense I attended, in all my naivete, not understanding that when the person left the room and comments were requested, this was a pro forma exercise and no one was expected to do anything as uncouth as suggest that approval not be granted until the person had taken specific steps towards sharing his results.
Paper copies of research information will be stored in a locked file drawer...
...stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
In my experience, 100% of what an IRB does is either create incredibly strict rules for anonymization that require specialized software, create requirements for "follow-up" that make it impossible to recruit anybody because they have to commit to showing up at the clinic ten times over the course of 18 months, or create requirements for informed consent that make it impossible to recruit anybody because you have to find people to agree to sign something saying they know there is a chance of blinding, beheading, sterilization, falling asleep while driving, uncontrollble falling down disorder, flesh-eating bacteria, or most terrifying of all, having their test results for something being known by their insurance company.
These are all important things, but since IRBs for studies that could not possibly hurt anyone in any way put just as much effort into their suggestions and concerns, Witt is right to complain.
881-882: Not to be dense, but isn't that just stuff the researcher has to promise for her own self? I don't understand why they're holding up the approval of letting me see the finished thesis (which isn't even finished yet, but anyway). Presumably the finished version won't have anything identifiable in it, even if it's not intended for publication.
If I were an unscrupulous person I could find so many ways to get around this. If I were on an IRB I would hector everybody else about the weakest link.
886.1: It sounds like your researcher wrote the protocol wrong and still doesn't understand what the IRB is asking for.
886.2: The weakest link is e-mail attachments (leaving aside actual malice). Nobody wants to raise that issue because nobody wants to go back to life before e-mail attachments.
These are all important things, but since IRBs for studies that could not possibly hurt anyone in any way put just as much effort into their suggestions and concerns, Witt is right to complain.
Not that there aren't issues with IRBs, but much of the point of the thing is to not let people with a direct interest in the research decide that the research couldn't possibly hurt anybody. If you communicate clearly ("clearly" having a context-specific meaning in this case) and there is no risk, the IRB will look at your protocol and rule it exempt. This may take a while if the IRB is poorly run or over-booked, but at most places it will be very quick. However, if you aren't clear, it will certainly take a long time because the dude who does the initial reading will flag it for detailed review.
Back to the upthread subthread, many alumni from my alma mater refer to it as simply "The University," which is pretentious as all get out. Of course, many alumni from my alma mater are pretentious as all get out.
Institutional Reputation Boards?
On the name change in academia front, it's important to emphasize that the age the people tend to be thinking about changing their name is a particularly vulnerable time for their reputation. If you change your name right around graduation you could be halving the number of publications you have under your current name. Furthermore, at that age the struggle is just to have people recognize your name so that you'll get pulled out of the stack of 700 applications into the 20 that are being taken seriously. Starting over on getting people to recognize your name is a real loss.
On the other hand, I suspect that at age 40 it wouldn't be as big a problem (you'd have a well established reputation and people would be able to just learn that you in particular changed your name). Also, people who change their name early in grad school it's also not a big deal.
You could try changing your name to "Etal."
Here's an interesting blog about IRBs and the humanities & socail sciences. The author is an historian who just published a book on the topic.
I still have extremely bitter memories of a thesis defense I attended, in all my naivete, not understanding that when the person left the room and comments were requested, this was a pro forma exercise and no one was expected to do anything as uncouth as suggest that approval not be granted until the person had taken specific steps towards sharing his results.
Oh my goodness. That comment just gave me the chills. There's obviously a culture difference here because yes, thesis defenses are pro forma and usually (though not always and depends on your field) not even permitted to go ahead until your supervisor is sure that you'll pass. I would have been horrified if that had happened to me (as the student or the professor). In my field the thesis has made the rounds several times among committee members so it's pretty strong.
Also for graduation, I'm not sure that it's a good thing for it to be tied to publishing the results. The point of a thesis seems to me to do good research and convince your committee you know what you're talking about. Not to get it out there to a greater circle. I mean, sure that's great and what science is about. But for a graduation requirement? No. That's a different goal.
Sometimes there is also a lock put on thesis after they are finished so that you (the general public and other researchers) can't look at them for some period of time (so results can be published and they don't get scooped). I think others can be locked indefinitely (because of privacy concerns).
And finally, going way back because I've been lurking all through this long thread, I would say that the damage (since we're pulling numbers out of our ass) to one's reputation from changing one's name would be about 50%. Scientists are lazy and forgetful especially about people who want something from them.
I didn't know how I'd done until months after my thesis defense. The examiners didn't tell me, and then spent a very long time deciding.* Nightmare time.
* they eventually asked me to rewrite 2 of 7 chapters to include responses to some objections they made, and to include coverage of a recent paper that I hadn't covered but which they thought was too important to be left out. I didn't find this out until about 2 months later.
"The University," which is pretentious as all get out
Indeed, though somehow still less grating than "THE Ohio State University".
898: Which is not the only one, Penn State is "The Pennsylvania State University". I'm sure there are others. Rutgers is officially "Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey"
California University of Pennsylvania, The Official State University of California, PA.
892: Close. "R" is for "Review."
Gee, d'ya think? 891 -> 890/889.
Apparently, I become uncharacterstically literal whenever an IRB is mentioned.
It isn't the simple presence of the word "The" that's grating. It's making it the most emphasized word in the school's name. I tend to notice it when pro football players are introducing themselves at the start of televised games (e.g., "Michael Jenkins, wide receiver, THE [dramatic pause] Ohio State University").
They (the OSU administration) are phenomenally attached to capitalizing "The" in "The Ohio State University." I assume this is because letterhead, newspaper articles, etc. don't have room for a notice saying, "Unlike every other state with an 'X University' and 'X State University', in Ohio the latter is the most prestigious."
Anyway, it is grating, but I learned to repress that feeling long ago.
I don't know what people are complaining about. Søren Kierkegaard defended his thesis, viva voce, in a public lecture theater, against all comers (including his elder, more orthodox brother), for an entire day.
I don't know what people are complaining about.
That he kept referring to THE Copenhagen University.
The only university contained in a small cardboard disk with a metal lid.
"Unlike every other state with an 'X University' and 'X State University', in Ohio the latter is the most prestigious."
Also true of Louisiana. Probably North Dakota and Mississippi (at least in science).
But that's a good point.
I didn't even know there was a University of Louisiana.
I don't see why this is an issue. I natural English usage, any finite number of X belonging to Y is "The" X of Y or X's Y. So if your university is named University of Ruritania, it'll be The University of Ruritania on its notepaper, but if it's Ruritania University, it'll only be The Ruritania University if there's a principle that there can only be one.
See also, this side of the ditch, The University of Manchester, The University of York, The University of Sheffield, etc., all of which are reasonably prestigious Russell Group outfits, far more so than Manchester Metropolitan University, York St. Johns University, etc. but less so than Oxford University or The University of Glasgow.
914: IIRC there's a convention in the US that state universities are the University of X, while private universities are X University.
Doesn't apply over here; I notice that Oxford University is "The University of Oxford" on its website, but "Oxford University" in things like "the Oxford University Museum".
Perhaps people should start insisting that it's not "Balliol College" but "The College of Balliol", "The College of St John", "The College of New", etc.
No, that would be The New College, to differentiate it from all the older colleges which were founded before 1379.
Looking at it, "The College of New" sounds like a horrible slogan for a rebranded college in some sort of privatised-Oxford satire. Along with "Linkin College", maybe.
"MyUni" (I know, loses the Oxford connection).
Well, actually the Oxford, Ohio connection is still there.
IIRC there's a convention in the US that state universities are the University of X, while private universities are X University.
No, that's not the case. Usually the older university is X University, but most universities with a state name are public or sort of public. Pennsylvania is an exception and, because of the whole Ivy thing, may be figuring too largely in your mind.
914: I think we're talking about bigger places (US states), which have a bunch of similarly named institutions. Off the top of my head, there's Virginia Union University, Virginia State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University ("Virginia Tech"), and University of Virginia.
Given that number of schools, claiming you went to THE University of Virginia (and no one does that, AFAIK; I'm just offering an example; OSU is school with the notorious "THE" claimers) would make you sound like a pompous twat.
On the other hand, whoever used to drive around town with a sticker on the back of his or her car that had been rearranged to read "Univinia of Virgersity"? That person caused me inexplicable glee.
OSU is school with the notorious "THE" claimers
OSU is THE school with The notorious "THE" claimers. Anyway, in e-mails to alumni and students, they only use it on the first reference or header.
Doesn't apply over here; I notice that Oxford University is "The University of Oxford" on its website, but "Oxford University" in things like "the Oxford University Museum".
We might also parse that noun phrase as
The Oxford [University Museum]
