Steven Harper's Blog

 We have Thanksgiving on Friday these days, as we have family members whose work schedules make Thursdays difficult. I like doing it that way--I can watch the parade while I'm prepping the day before, and if I forgot something, the grocery stores are open but dead quiet on Friday morning.

Anyway, it was a small group this year--eight people! Considering that a couple of times I've cooked for more than 20, this was a snap. It was an afternoon of catching up and chatting and everyone being very social. This was quite an accomplishment, since many of our family members are introverts!

In the end, all the leftovers were packaged up and shipped away with the younger generation so they could enjoy my cooking for the next few days and Darwin and I wouldn't have to worry about how to eat everything before it spoiled.

It was a lovely day.


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Okay, I don't have a dog in this fight, but I know people who do:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/25/world/video/ebof-pope-leo-polyamory-polygamy-harry-enten

TL/DR: The Pope spoke against polyamory and polygamy. The commentators went on to say that 21% of Americans find polygamy morally acceptable, up from 6% twenty years ago. Among young people, 31% find it morally acceptable. The commentators were clearly shocked and judgmental.

As for me? The problem I see with this story is that the commentators use polyamory and polygamy interchangeably. They aren't the same thing. The survey the commentator quotes (apparently) also asks only about polygamy, but I'm wondering if the surveyor defined polygamy correctly during the survey.

For the record, polygamy is ONE MAN with MULTIPLE WIVES. Also, the wives are NOT married to each other. This is the Mormon version, and also the version practiced widely in India and the Middle East.

Polyamory is MULTIPLE SPOUSES of any gender. Usually, but not always, the group members are all married (or romantically involved) with each other. (In some polyamorous groups, Person A is married to Person B, and Person B has a relationship with Person C, but Person C has little or no relationship with Person A, for example.)

All polygamy is polyamory, but not all polyamory is polygamy.

I would not support a law that recognizes polygamous marriages. It's not equality if a man can have multiple wives, but a woman can't have multiple husbands.

I =would= support allowing people in a group to all be married to each other, along the lines of, "If it makes you all happy and it works for all of you, then you should be allowed to do it." The logistics of such a law would be tricky, though. In a group of, say, four people, how would medical insurance work? If one of the group died, how would spousal inheritance work? If a child is born to two members of the group, what parental rights would the other two people have? If one person wanted to leave the group (divorce), what responsibilities would the other three have as ex-spouses (alimony or division of assets, for example)? How would it work if one of the people who left was a biological parent to a child that all four of them had parental rights to? Would the law require everyone in the relationship to be married to everyone else, or could you have A marry B and B marry C, but C not marry A? (That last one is a real head-scratcher.)

All those wrinkles could be ironed out. The law loves nothing more than a good set of regulations to explore. But there's another issue here.

If the government did recognize polyamorous relationships, almost certainly the vast majority of such relationships would be polygamous--one man with multiple women who aren't married to each other. As it stands right now, there's no way to talk about polygamy without the work "exploitation." Polygamy exploits women and subverts them to the will of a single man. (It doesn't =have= to work this way, but it always =does.=) It also creates a hierarchy among the wives that often leads to fighting and abuse. Men who practice polygamy overwhelmingly see their wives as (sexual) servants at best, slaves or property at worst. Remember those brothers from Romania? The ones with the toxic, hypermasculine series of YouTube videos who were arrested for trafficking dozens of women? Imagine if they had been allowed to marry those women. Their legal case would become extremely tangled and more difficult to prosecute. Also, every single society that practices polygamy is misogynistic. There are no societies that practice equality (or try to) that also allow polygamy. You have to have strict laws and customs to regulate women when in your household, it's you against six women who don't like you very much.

I know people in stable three-way relationships. Loving polyamory is not the same as exploitive polygamy, but if you legalize the first, you're just about guaranteed to get the second. So while I support legalized polyamory in theory, I don't think it would work in practice.

But you still need to get your terms right!
 

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 Argh!! Massive plot hole!

I'm reading this book I picked up because it's an historical murder mystery set in 1920s Hollywood. The protagonist is also gay. Should be fun! But ...

Despite everything already in this book, author also had to add psychic powers. Not only is the protagonist psychic, but his mother is, too. And so is (real) movie star Clara Bow, who is a large part of the story.

Okay, maybe an author can juggle all that and make it work (spoiler: he can't), but the psychic nonsense adds a major plot hole.

The protagonist can always tell when someone is lying. He can't tell what the truth is, but he can sense lies, including lies of omission.

But for some reason, when the protagonist interviews suspects, he doesn't ask, "Did you kill him?" or even, "Do you know who the killer is?"

Worse, the book doesn't actually need the psychic junk. I've switched over to reading it with an editor's eye, and that whole thing can be airlifted out with minimal rewriting. The protagonist could just have a strong urge that someone is lying (this is a standard trope in murder mysteries). The protagonist's psychic connection with Clara Bow can be changed into fast friendship. The reading of the crime scene that reveals unhelpful snatches of the mystery can be converted to everyday clues.

Ugh! I want to toss the book at the author's keyboard.


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This popped up on my feed:

https://percolately.com/proceed-with-vacation-reddit/

TL/DR: Hubby has a job and a small business that keep him insanely busy. Months ago, he and Wifey planned a trip to Spain with their two children (aged 15 months and 3). Now, a month away from said vacation, Hubby announces his small business has become too busy, so they need to postpone the vacay for six months. Wifey says, "Nope! I'm going anyway." Wifey is asking if either of them is an asshole. Me? I think a trip to Europe with a toddler and an infant would be a nightmare, not a vacation. 

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I've always been a bad sleeper, and these days I take a prescription sleep med every night. I don't like having to do this, but it's the only way I can get decent sleep. I was introduced to an over-the-counter med recently and tried it last night to see if it would be an acceptable replacement. At about four in the morning, I woke up with a migraine headache, so I also took my migraine med.

I've been zonked out all day.

This morning it was really bad. I had to force myself to get up and get dressed, and after breakfast, I slept for more than an hour. Still feeling wonky, I went for a 45-minute walk to wake myself up. Still felt wonky. Dosed myself with caffeine. Helped a little, but still wonky. It's late afternoon now, and I'm STILL zoned out.

I looked up drug interactions for the two meds and found nothing on any of the major medicine sites. I did find a study that showed the two drugs can cause drowsiness and fatigue when taken together.

Either way, I'm not going to take these two in combination ever again.



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Norton Anti-Virus. O! How I hate thee, Norton Anti-Virus.

I had anti-virus software at home free from my job. This, of course, evaporated when I retired. Darwin already had Norton on his computer, so we just extended his subscription to me.

It was a disaster.

Norton wants to run my computer. It refused to allow certain perfectly safe programs to operate. It throttled back my internet connection so badly, I could only visit a handful of sites. It refused to allow me to pause its protection or stop it from throttling (and I wanted to throttle it back). Their customer service is apparently very familiar with this problem (and why, pray, don't they FIX IT, then?). They said the solution is to uninstall Norton and re-install. With gritted teeth, I did this. It worked. For about three days. Then the problem started all over again.

I destroyed Norton on my computer. I mashed it, mangled it, and tore it into bits, which I burned.

Now I have Avast, which works perfectly well, is cheaper, and doesn't take over my computer.

Never Norton. 

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I'm a night owl by trade. When I was younger, I'd happily stay up until one in the morning or later (earlier?) and sleep until eight or nine. I volunteered to work the closing shift at my fast food job. I scheduled my college class to avoid early classes. The few times I had to take an 8:00 class, I was miserable. And boy, do I hate getting up before sunrise!

Then I was hired to teach high school. 

This job required me to be a morning person, bright and cheerful and bushy-tailed at 7:00 AM every school day. It had to be done, so I faked it. For 30 years, I showed up at work. In the dark. Pretending I was thrilled be awake and in my classroom with my students, who were themselves surly and half asleep.

The moment any vacation--winter, spring, mid-winter, summer--started, I'd go right back to staying up late. The trouble was, though, that my body had learned that I'm supposed to be up at 5:30. No matter how late I was up the night before, I would wake up at 6:30 or 7:00, fully awake and feeling like I'd slept way in. Even during summer break, I'd be up by 7:00, 8:00 at the absolute latest. And having kids, of course, meant fewer chances to sleep in anyway.

Now I'm retired, and I've married another night-owl. The two of us are up until at least midnight most nights (the latest Darwin will stay up on work nights). When Darwin doesn't have to work, we're up until 1:00 or later. But I was still waking up at 7:00, feeling like I'd slept too long. The lack of actual sleep meant I'd want a nap partway through the day, and I don't like naps--the sleep hangover is awful. Was this going to go on for the rest of my life?

Fear not.

The last couple of weeks, I've been waking up at 8:00 or later. This morning, Darwin and I didn't get up until almost 9:30! 

I'm loving this, I have you tell you. The two things I disliked most about my job were 1) grading essays; and 2) getting up inhumanly early, especially on dark, freezing winter mornings. Trudging into the school building before sunrise and seeing the sun come up toward the end of second hour was disheartening and grinding. Now? I sleep right through that awful part of the day, and I'm awake only well after sunrise. Same for Darwin. It's a little odd in that we aren't ready for lunch until two or three o'clock most days, but I'm good with that.

My internal clock has finally realized that I'm retired.




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 If you want to see an article filled with corporate gobbledygook:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wendy-close-hundreds-u-restaurants-175351914.html

Some samples:

--Wendy’s is leveraging former Yum Brands’ CEO Greg Creed’s consulting firm to strengthen its brand positioning and enhance marketing effectiveness.

--In October, the company launched a “needs-based customer segmentation study,”

--“We’re segmenting consumers to make sure we have the most relevant segmentations to drive growth. Then we get into relevance, easy, and distinctive(ness), and the culmination is a brand essence.”

Dearie, dearie me.

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I play backgammon against a computer game a lot. One function of the game is to evaluate how well you play. The evaluation ranges from "awful" to "supernatural." Part of the evaluation also shows how good or bad your luck and the computer's luck was, ranging from "bad dice, man" to "go to Vegas."Often, though, I get a strange evaluation. I might destroy the computer with a score of 8-0 or more (though this is rare) and I get a player evaluation of "average" or "casual", while the computer is set at "supernatural." But the luck factor is almost always "none," meaning neither side had particularly good or bad luck.I don't understand this. If I'm an average or casual player and the computer is set at supernatural, I should win only if I have good luck and/or the computer has bad luck.I have noticed that when the computer is in tutoring mode (it alerts you if you're going to make what it considers a bad move), it tells me to make a move that's clearly idiotic, such as leaving two blots in your home base when the computer has a blot on the bar. The computer is probably looking purely at odds and computing that the odds of me being blotted are higher than other moves being a problem. (?)Most of the time when the computer points out a bad move, it's right, but it does have some strange ideas about poor strategy.Anyway, the program is quirky but a good player. I just wonder at its evaluation methods. 

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 I'm losing my taste for breakfast foods.

It's weird, but there it is. Pancakes and waffles--too sweet, too many carbs. French toast--ditto. Eggs--not very appealing, but I'll take them if I must. Link sausage--bleah. Bacon--meh. (<-- I know, right??)

I still like hash browns, hot cereals, and cold cereals. Foods that aren't exclusively associated with breakfast like yogurt, ham, and fruit are still good to go.

Oddly, Darwin says he feels the same way about the same foods. (Except eggs. He's always up for eggs.)

I can't explain it. Taste evolving with age? The cocktail of meds I'm on? No idea. It kind of sucks, though. I like making pancakes or stove-top waffles in the morning. Now? No one in the house wants to eat them.

Weird.


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