Monday, December 21, 2009

Winter update

Dear Friends and Family,

Greetings from Maple Valley!

Recently, I developed some film and put it up on my photo blog, so I have these lovely pictures that are a little bit dated, but that's how film works, remember? Reminiscing is supposed to include an element of surprise at the stuff you forgot was there. I took pictures of the Fourth of July fireworks show we had in the street, all of which looks really cool with extended exposures. The hovering white blob in the third picture is Jeffrey wearing a headlamp lighting something.


 
 

 Also, back in August, Miri and I got to go on a bike ride around Washington state. It was a 200-person supported ride, and Jeffrey, Patrick, Mom and Dad were there, too. It was six days, 400 miles and lots of lovely scenery. We started in LaConner, Wash., and ended in Kettle Falls, Wash. This ride was gorgeous and challenging, involving crossing Washington Pass in the North Cascades on Day 2. This was Miri's first mountain riding experience, and she did great. Patrick, as usual, went too fast, but did stop long enough to take this picture:
 

We then camped in the Methow River Valley in a small town called Twisp, which, along with nearby Winthrop, seemed like a wonderful place to go relax in a cabin or something. And, there were no huge resort hotels or anything. Interestingly, a major skiing resort company years back had wanted to build a huge downhill resort, and the town said thanks but no thanks, and the company decided to build in Whistler instead, and now we have a laid-back tourist town rather than a crazy one in Washington. I'd love to go visit again.

As we were riding from Twisp to the Grand Coulee Dam, we rode on a high plateau with gorgeous views, and there were these hovering white insects that sounded like rotating sprinkler heads. That was kind of cool.

Shortly after the bike ride was over, we went on a hike in Mt. Rainier National Park with our friends the Powells. We started out at Mowich Lake and hiked up to Spray Park. The weather was gorgeous, and I was so glad to get all these pictures. And, thankfully, the bugs were too small to be photographed. Father Barnabas Powell, and his wife Lela, have two children, Mila and Sava, aged 3 1/2 and 1 1/2.







 Miri and I have been making a little bit of progress with our careers, although it's been kind of fragmentary progress. We are both eagerly awaiting Real Jobs that pay the rent and pay benefits. Miri still has her temp job at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, working with the animals in the Asia exhibit, and she recently got an unpaid internship at the Seattle Aquarium to work with the birds and mammals there. She's left her PetSmart job, which makes her happy.

I have a part-time temporary job at REI right now answering phones in the call center and placing orders for the customers. It is kind of a fun place to work, and we ring a bell whenever a membership is sold, and then everybody applauds. It's also nice when a customer calls in to ask about an item I actually own, and then you can hear their voice really light up. One mother was calling to order a sleeping bag for her daughter going a mission trip to Russia, and was going for major overkill with the bag and accessories, and I was able to reassure her: Yes, the buildings have walls over there. Moms can be so funny.

It's also fun working for a for-profit co-op. I've worked for lots of non-profits in my day, and they've all had meaningful missions, but they've been slow to respond to changes in the communities they serve, and they tend to like to do what the staff wants to do rather than what the communities need. REI has a more definite measure of effectiveness: Is it selling?

This job ends in a few days. I found another bit of short term work recently, doing business and administration work for a news web site, the Seattle Post-Globe, which opened last year. It's staffed by former Seattle Post-Intelligencer journalists who got laid off when the newspaper closed in the spring. Right now it's a non-profit, but thinking about becoming a for-profit co-op, which I think would be really cool.

I am also taking a class in Geographic Information Systems at the University of Washington. I am with a group of five students who are trying to map avalanche paths in the Cascades in hopes of using the maps for prediction and education. It's kind of a fun project, although the software involved with GIS is challenging.

So, that's what's up right now. We hope you are well.

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Monday, September 28, 2009

A lovely day out




Miri and I went to Sequim, Wash., yesterday, and got to see some cool stuff. First, at the Dungeness River Festival, there was an exhibition of driftwood sculptures:




This one is a dreamcatcher inside of a piece of wood. I thought it was really pretty.




And then this one is the column of fire from the Book of Exodus that guided the Hebrews at night through the wilderness. (The wood, not the flower bouquet.)




After the River Festival, we went to the Dungeness Spit National Wildlife Refuge, a 5-mile barrier island that extends out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It's one of the few long beaches walks in Washington state that doesn't make you climb a mountain in the middle of it.




We found a really big piece of driftwood there, and tried to take some artsy pictures with it, but I was using a digital pocket camera that doesn't have a manual mode, so it kept setting its aperture so as to get a good picture of the bright stuff, not the dimmer stuff. Here's Miri sitting behind the driftwood, and my shadow in the middle of it.



Eventually, I made my wife squint so that I could actually get her image exposed correctly.




And, finally, my favorite of the bunch of pictures, in which I was able to keep my elbow-shadow out of it.

So that was our Sunday.

Recently, I have had a few interesting things happen. I got another article published on that news Web site, the SeattlePostGlobe. It's about the Seattle City Council considering a change in its single-family housing zoning laws to allow homeowners to build backyard cottages on their lots.

Also, I had two job interviews last Thursday. One job seemed like it would be quite an adventure, and would be a real career-builder. The other seemed like a pretty good job that might pay the rent. I'm hopeful that one of them comes through.

If you're a PLU alumni, I'll be at homecoming this Saturday, Oct. 3. Come find me and say hi!

That's the news from Ruthfordville. We hope you are well!

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

I'm a news reporter again!

Here is a link to a news story that I wrote. It's about Mary's Place, a women's day shelter in Seattle in danger of closing.

I am a volunteer reporter with the Seattle PostGlobe, an on-line news Web site consisting of former news reporters from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Weekly. It's a non-profit organization, with a big emphasis on the NON right now -- not even the boss gets paid. So if you want to promote a great news site that increases the number of journalistic voices in Seattle, please visit the donation page.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

How to survive a recession

The way that you survive a financial panic is by the stuff you don't do in the two or three years leading up to the recession. There really isn't that much you can do to prepare for a recession unless you're an expert at making short sales several times a day.

I have been unemployed for the past nine months, having quit my job the same week Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. That part may not have been the best-timed decision, but now that I have plenty of time to ponder such things, I can remember a couple of moments when I blew some people off for their outlandish suggestions.

The first was at the beginning of 2005, when I became friends with a mortgage broker.

After he told me what he did, I said, "Sounds cool, but I have no money, just debt. It'll be a long time before I can buy something."

"You could borrow money from family," he said, "and then rent the house to people to pay the mortgage. You can make money off the rent from the increase of the house's value."

And I laughed. My new friend didn't know me that well yet; he was obviously assuming I had some resources I didn't have.

A couple of months later, I opened a bank account at Washington Mutual Bank in San Francisco. I had a personal liking for this bank because they gave my great-grandmother a home mortgage during the Great Depression on the house where my family lived when I was a baby. My initial deposit was less than $1,000. At the end of the initial meeting, the woman in the collared WaMu shirt gave me a certificate saying that I had been pre-approved for a home loan of $250,000. I snorted, quietly. I knew that offer wouldn't hold after I filled out all the forms and put on a tie and came in and tried to explain to a suit-wearing mortgage officer I could pay for a house or condo in San Francisco with my $30,000 salary.

Obviously, these people were talking about someone else. I blew them off. It wasn't a temptation I was resisting, as much as a joke that I thought was mildly funny. I forgot all about it.

As it turns out, they weren't joking. A month ago, I read this first person account by an economics reporter at The New York Times who really wanted to buy a house but was paying two-thirds of his salary to his ex-wife in child support. He found a mortgage broker who told him that wasn't a problem and started descending the credibility scale for types of mortgages available until he found one that would not require that aspect of his background to be put on a loan application. He told the broker he felt guilty asking with such bad history, and the broker told him that the broker's job was to make things possible for the customer, not to judge them. He bought the house and a year later, he had a hard time making payments, and called up the same broker to refinance. "No problem," he said. Calling the broker felt like calling a drug dealer. Eventually, he started missing payments and the mortgage was underwater, but the bank was too busy to foreclose. At the time he wrote the article, eight months after he stopped paying, he still had not heard back from the bank.

Reading this article made me reconnect the dots of some forgotten memories. I was angry over the fact I had been unemployed for eight months and living with my parents, but I hadn't understood that I had been very close to this bad mortgage nonsense without even knowing it. Washington Mutual, a leader in subprime mortgages, probably would've given me a home loan in 2005. Now they're gone, but my checkings account got bailed out by the FDIC. My friend the mortgage broker is still my friend, but isn't working now, either, trying to find a new job outside of real estate.

Now I have just finished a temp job. I have a moderate amount of debt (that isn't growing) and a room at my parents' house where my wife and I sleep. We're doing all right, mainly because of all that stuff we never did.

Thinking in negative terms -- benefits of things not done -- is so counter-intuitive, but now I know what economics professors mean when they tell us about opportunity cost.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Spring news from Ruthfordville

Dear Friends and Family,

I have decided to give up my current occupation as Recession Victim and instead go in to the field of being a Misunderstood Genius. My first foray into misunderstood geniusdom is a photo essay I have put together about signs that you might have too many hobbies and not enough time. There are seven photos, just keep clicking "next" in the upper-right corner.

These days, I continue to apply for jobs. I've applied for seven over the past few days and Last week, I applied for a job as the PR guy for a chemical weapons depot. There's one assignment that won't get boring. Maybe I should get one of those "If you see me running, try to keep up" shirts.



Miri continues her two jobs, one at Point Defiance Zoo as an animal keeper in the Asia department, and the other as a dog-training class instructor at PetSmart. She likes the zoo better, although it's a temporary job and it's minimum wage.

I like the zoo, too. I got to visit Point Defiance earlier this month, and the whole place was really cool. The beluga whale was the most interesting creature there, with the way he squeaked and sputtered at his trainer. If you do want to see him, I'd recommend you go soon because the zoo has decided to send him back to Sea World in San Diego. Beluga whales are social creatures, and this whale had another whale in his exhibit, but he died a couple of months ago. Friendless, this beluga needs other whales to talk with, so they're sending him to Sea World.

Being a recession victim certainly is frustrating, although we have to keep in mind how we've got most of what we need. Our living situation isn't ideal, but at least we haven't been evicted or foreclosed upon like many people have with this burst housing bubble. We are living with my parents, which has been the inspiration for some aquatic land art (the aforementioned photo essay). Every few days I kick myself for having gotten in to this mess, and then Miri points out to me that there isn't any better way it could have turned out: Point Defiance was the only zoo that offered her a job, and despite the one hundred job applications I've sent out, I have not had any offers.

I wasn't crazy about my old job, and it just so happened that I quit during that manic week in September when all the banks failed. That job wasn't paying all the bills either, so it was a good idea to try moving. It's such a self-defeating way of thinking when you compare what you have to what you want -- rather, you should compare what you have to your other options.

I have had a few job interviews, most of which went pretty well, but in the end, I was not the lucky fellow who got chosen. Maybe I need to take this strategy:



With my free time, I have completed two manuscripts, one about the people whom I met in Ukraine and San Francisco when I was in the Peace Corps and working for the homeless shelter. The other is a humorous guide to dating for church-going singles. The second one, I think, has the potential for getting published and making money. Did you know that there are no funny books about Christian dating out there on the market? No wonder the American family is disintegrating -- nobody thinks being a good kid can be fun!

If you would like to read either of these manuscripts, please let me know, and I will send it to you. If I sent you my manuscript two months ago and you haven't done anything with it, hurry up before I start punishing the laggards. Ten lashes with a wet noodle! I am looking for content and context-based comments to answer the question: How interesting is this stuff?

I am also working on a short story right now about a choir director with an impossible singer.

I'm not really sure what's going to happen to these manuscripts, but I had been wanting to get them down on paper for some time, so it's satisfying to have them be real rather than ideas floating in my head.

Last bit of news: I got to see the new Star Trek movie twice, which certainly was exciting. The actors all got their parts spot-on, although Star Trek characters never have been particularly complex. It's not really science fiction anymore, though, as it didn't really raise any ethical questions about how our future should be.

Anyway, that's what's up. Let me know how you're doing!

Your friend,
Eric Ruthford

Friday, April 10, 2009

It's the thought that counts

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your application for the public affairs representative position at the police department, but we're not likely to hire you any time soon. It's quite obvious from your application that you're a slob. Sure, your grammar and punctuation were all correct, and you graduated from a good school, but we could tell that you sneezed on your resume without covering your mouth. What professional would leave a booger on his resume? And don't think that a .025 mm booger would get past us! We're a police department and we can DNA test anything. Don't you watch NCIS? We can figure out far more than Abby can.

Sincerely yours,
The Duwamish County Police Department

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your application to work at Frederick and Nelson's as a loss prevention agent. Here, we mean "thank you" in the same way Flannery O'Connor wrote "she stretched her mouth politely" to describe the reaction of a woman who had just been insulted by a child. Did you really think we wanted to hire someone with a master's degree in public policy and management? What are you going to do, interrogate shoplifters about the socio-economic causes behind their theivery? Obviously you are looking for a crap job that you can leave at a moment's notice when something better comes along.

Sincerely yours,
Human Resources

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your book proposal about your time serving in the U.S. Peace Corps. While we enjoyed it, we regret to inform you that your manuscript is ineligible for publication due the fact that you are still living. We only publish memoirs posthumously. We are sorry to deliver you this disappointing news, but hopefully you can find a different publisher. If not, at least you have something to look forward to when you are dead. Besides Heaven, that is.

Sincerely yours,
St. Vladyka's Press

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your application for position 0009-4332-al@$-q14-SWFseeksSWMforbowling-4562 with the Department of Administrative Departmental Affairs. We regret to inform you that due to our unusually long hiring process that the position you applied for is no longer available. Unfortunately, because of the earth's wobbling on its axis, since you applied for the job, the area of the United States you would have been responsible for examining has gone through severe climate change and is now a desert. Since no one lives there any more, under U.S. Code √1024 x 2.3 relating to places that no longer exist, we cannot offer you a position.
Sincerely,
The Department of Adminstrative Departmental Affairs
$500 penalty for private use

Dear Mr. Ruthford,

Thank you for your proposal for use of stimulus funds to create economic activity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While your idea has merit for producing both results, I think you are a little ahead of your time. It is my hope that some day, we will see old boats refurbished and equipped with anti-gravity generators as a means of alternative transportation, but I do not believe it is the most appropriate means of using the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds at this time.

Sincerely yours,
Barack Obama

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Kooky business idea No. 8

I was pondering a business idea today; tell me what you think. I have lots of time to think about this sort of stuff, being unemployed...

Guilt lockers

Do you have a hard time giving away old stuff even though you haven't touched it in 10 years? Do you feel guilty getting rid of it because you might need it, or because some friend of yours could put it to good use? Do you wish it would just go away on its own, but the act of figuring out what to do with it just too much?

Guilt Lockers, Inc., has got a solution for you: Rent one of our lockers, and put all of the stuff that you're on the fence about keeping or tossing. If you get separation anxiety on some object, come back and get it. Pay rent on the locker until you've forgotten about it, and then we'll take it and find socially and ecologically friendly ways of disposing of it. We keep an elaborate database of secondhand purchasers, charities and recyclers that deal with clothes, furniture, electronics and cute little stuffed animals. If we succeed in selling any of your stuff, you can have 30 percent of the profits.

Clear out your living space free of guilt, sentiment, and decision-making. Help those in need, but in a totally passive manner.

Guilt Lockers -- get rid of it now, because it won't fit in your coffin.


Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know... don't quit your day job (if only I had one). But, you have to admit that it's better than my idea of refurbishing old boats for when antigravity gets invented.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Books I've been reading

Wired for War, By P.W. Singer. This is a book about the current and future of robotics warfare. He talks about our military's current systems such as the Predator Drone that can do both surveillance and shoot missiles at targets, all being controlled by remote-controlled human pilots in Nevada who get very, very bored by their duty. He looks in to the future to robotic ambulances that could come rescue wounded soldiers, load them in to a vehicle and carry them back to a hospital.

He looks further into the future towards a paradigm shift he calls the Singularity, a creation of science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge. It's a moment when all the rules of technology change because the artificial intelligence will become so advanced that it, rather than we, will be creating new technologies in a new constant feedback loop.

As a teenager, I read an assortment of novels and short stories by Issac Asimov about robots, all of which were guided by the Three Laws of Robotics:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
These laws were hardwired into Asimov's robots, and it was impossible for a robot to do anything outside of them. I liked these stories, and I thought that this would help create a much better future. Alas, several practical considerations get in the way of implementing these laws. One is that technology doesn't yet allow the kind of thinking in a machine that would make such decisions possible. As one programmer put it, "They are in English. How the heck do you program that?" Another is that the military provides most of the funding. They want robots that can kill. Sigh.

Singer is a nerd who thinks robots are really, really cool and that comes through in the text, which sometimes makes a poor juxtaposition with the seriousness of the topic he's covering. However, he does cover a lot of really scary stuff, such as this difficult-to-argue-with point:

Marvin Minsky, who cofounded MIT's artificial intelligence lab, believes that we humans are so bad at writing computer software that it is all but inevitable that the first true AI we create will be "leapingly, screamingly insane."

Another was a quote from Senator John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, in which he referred to the high casualty rates of past wars:

"...in my judgment, this country will never again permit the armed forces to be engaged in conflicts which inflict the level of casualties we have seen historically. So what do you do? You move toward the unmanned type of military vehicle to carry out missions which are high risk in nature... the driving force is the culture in our country today, which says, 'Hey! If our soldiers want to go to war, so be it. But don't let any of them get hurt.'"

He mandated that by 2010, one-third of all the aircraft designed to attack behind enemy lines be unmanned, and by 2015, one-third of ground combat vehicles be driverless. And, the Congress passed it in to law.

What's most disturbing about Warner's quote is that the electorate of the United States seems to only care about saving American lives. War is fine so long as Americans don't get killed in it, something of an immature attitude in American foreign policy that the robotics revolution is only going to exacerbate. I remember one of Asimov's novels included a robot that actually did kill humans, but only because its programmers were successful at narrowing the definition of human to the residents of a particular planet. That story seemed to be more of an allegory for us than robots, as our country's guarantees of life and liberty are perfectly dispensable when dealing with "bad people" whom we say are associated with terrorism.

Pretty much every advance related to war, whether it be horses, gunpowder, flight or nuclear fission, has increased deaths. I have a difficult time seeing military robots helping matters much.

Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. This is a book about decision-making, focusing especially on times when we allow irrelavent information to cloud our judgment. I enjoyed this book very much, and it wasn't nearly so scary as the death-robot book.

Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics at MIT, and makes his living performing an assortment of experiments to test people's decision-making. One experiment he did was a taste test of beers -- one was a brand-name beer poured without modification, the other was the same stuff but with a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar in it. With blind taste-testing, the balsamic beer usually won, and then the experimenters told the tasters what was in the beer. When the experimenters told the tasters in advance what they were getting, the plain brand-name beer won.

He also explored the issue of "anchoring," when you make choices relative to the choices in front of you as opposed to relating it to what you can afford or what you want. An example: A real estate agent shows you a nice colonial house, a colonial house that needs work, and a contemporary house. Chances are you won't choose the contemporary house because you don't have anything to relate it to. But, you will like the nice colonial house because it's better than the one that needs work, and the fact it compares better to something else makes it more attractive. The real estate agent is trying to steer you towards the nice colonial, and the fixer-upper is just a decoy.

The most interesting part of this book is about the difference in rates of cheating when your reward is cash and when it is a non-cash item. He starts off the chapter with the following conundrum. Your spouse calls you at work and tells you that your daughter needs a red pencil for a school project. You could...

a. Go to the office supply cabinet and take a company red pencil.
b. Take a dime from company petty cash and go to the drug store to buy a red pencil.

If these are your only two choices, almost everybody would pick a, take the pencil. But why? The company is losing just as much with the pencil as with the dime. The experiments he goes on to describe how cash makes us more honest.

The series of experiments his group peformed involved having students take a test with 20 simple math problems. Test-takers got 50 cents for every right answer. The first group had no opportunity to cheat, making them the control group.

They then gave the test to several different groups, each group getting more opportunity to cheat. The first group got to see an answer sheet before they turned it in, thus giving them the opportunity to change answers, the next got to self-report to the number of right answers to the proctor after seeing the answer sheet, and another got to reach in to a jar of dimes in an unsupervised room and take out the amount of money corresponding to the number of answers they got right. A little bit of cheating took place in all of these cases, on average, test takers exaggerated their number of right answers by 2.7 answers. An interesting thing with these groups was that as the ease of cheating increased, the amount of cheating did not. The exaggeration rate stayed right around 2.7 answers.

The reward for the next group of test takers was not money but a token that could then be redeemed for money on the other side of the room. Then the exaggeration doubled, with the takers claiming to have gotten 5.9 more answers right. These tokens were obviously cash equivalents, but they weren't cash. The conclusion that Ariely draws is that when you separate stealing from cash, stealing becomes much easier.

A statistic he uses to make this point is very telling: Employee theft and fraud at the workplace result in about $600 billion in losses each year in the United States. This figure is much higher than the combined financial cost of robbery, burglary, larceny-theft and automobile theft ($16 billion).

He suggests that the directors of Enron, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, would have been unlikely to mug an old lady for $50. But, when it comes to moving around these large, abstract amounts, or miscategorizing them on financial statements, the association with cash and the association with the people who own it becomes so blurred that it becomes easy to rob your company, your employees and shareholders.

The Secular City, by Harvey Cox. This is a library book I have come to own against my will. I read it with great enjoyment, wrote notes about it in my journal and then put it in my bag and took a trip on a Greyhound bus. The bag was put in the undercarriage of the bus and it rained all day. The luggage compartment sprung a leak, soaking the bag and damaging the book to the point where the library made me buy it. Now I am the proud owner of this wrinkly thing. The librarian warned me not to put it on my bookshelf for at least a year for fear that mold might develop and jump to the neighboring books.

Unlike the other two books, which had been published in the past year, The Secular City was published in 1965, and its main purpose is to define the process of secularization as it relates to urbanism. It was a very instructive, interesting book, better than I thought it would be. What I especially liked was how Cox defined the limits of this movement as it is kind of amorphous and easy to associate with anything that isn't affiliated with an "official" ideology.

Secularization, he says, is the process by which people in a city focuses on pragmatism and profanity. Pragmatism is the question "Will it work?" and profanity literally means "outside the temple" or related to "this world." This becomes a helpful way of thinking for how to have a city that one would like to live in, rather than maintaining the power of an official religious group, regardless of its popularity.

It doesn't necessarily have to be come an anti-religious force, however, and Christians make a lot of mistakes when they try to oppose secularization. One example he gave was of churches that tried to organize prayer groups inside large apartment buildings, trying to spiritually connect the neighbors to one another. This effort mostly failed because it was really an attempt to take away the anonymity that the city offered and turn the apartment building into a village, stuck in the middle of a city. The apartment dwellers who wanted to go to church liked the number of choices that the city provided them, and didn't want to get stuck in a narrow social group. The ones who didn't want religion just didn't want religion.

Cox makes it clear that there are many anti-religious forces out there that aren't secular because they attempt to impose their own new ideology. "The rejection of meanings which do not contribute to one's own group is the opposite of secularization." When the pragmatism of modern people is allowed to degenerate into a system that focuses solely on function, what you have is a new religion, just one without gods in the sky. Nazism, he said, was a kind of tribalism in which only those who were "useful" to the new Reich were allowed to survive.

He gives a couple of other examples of "usefulness" going too far -- the business careerist focusing only on success, never on beauty or enjoyment, or the beatnik's resentment of everything established.

Christians and political conservatives alike have spent the past 60 to 70 years wringing their hands over what to do about secularization, and it's usually presented as a big scary force that's responsible for the general decline in church attendance and loosening morals. Every week I come across some essay about the dangers of secularism or of post-modernism. It's easy to write about it as a hostile, anti-God, anti-beauty, anti-life force because it's more fun to get in fights than come up with solutions. In those rare cases when secularism turns in on itself to become a new, aggressive ideology that seeks to impose itself on society, we should oppose it. (One example I can think of is an opinion I've heard that says contraception ought to be required for poor people because their kids cost too much to the taxpayers.)

But really, it's an opportunity for us to be really honest about our faith and live like real people who aren't trying to satisfy religious standards that artificially got placed on us. I'm trying to write a book about this, presently on version number 3 on how traditional religion can do a better job of speaking to those with a pragmatic, functional set of values. It ain't as easy as I thought it would be.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Decoy Pricing at Safeway

Recently, I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, an excellent book about times our decision-making fails us. One is decoy pricing. This is when someone selling you something presents you with something that is out of your price range, and then shows you something in your price range. For example, a television salesman shows you a TV that's $1,500, followed by one that's $850. The idea is to get you to think, "TV No. 2 is $650 less; what a deal!" Really, you ought to be thinking: "Is TV No. 2 really worth a week's pay?" or you ought to be thinking, "Is this the best deal in town for TV No. 2?"

The same thing applies to stores where you get to see the "regular" price, followed by the "sale," to make you feel good about how you don't have to pay the artificially high "regular." Today, I went grocery shopping at Safeway, where about half of the products have two price tags on them. Only at Safeway, they don't just clutter your eyes with irrelevant information, they force you to get a %$@! card to participate in their stupid decoy pricing scheme. Yes, you have to apply for the right to have your mind messed with.

I find this all rather exhausting. I think next time I am going to fall asleep in the bread section to recharge. If they ask me to explain this behavior, I'll tell them that I was thinking of taking a 30-minute nap, but if they stop this decoy pricing card nonsense, I'll reduce my nap to 20 minutes. They could save 10 minutes of a huge guy behaving weirdly in their store and frightening their other customers. What a deal!

Thursday, February 12, 2009

A bunch of cheesy links

Recently, I checked out a book called American Cheeses by Clark Wolf. It's a light read, and it gives some practical advice about how to store and serve cheese, and it has some tasty-sounding (and absurdly complex) recipes, such as Winchester Gouda and Basil Gnocchi with Porcini and Asparagus Ragout.

But, it also has the names and Web sites of an assortment of small U.S. cheesemakers, many of which I'd like to visit . . . when I have the money for gasoline again. Sigh. I'm picking out the Washington and Oregon creameries that sound interesting:

Sally Jackson Cheeses, Oroville, Wash. Sounds very interesting to me, with Goat, Cow and Sheep cheese. None of the links on the homepage work, though. Too bad she hired a Web designer that went out of business.

The Rogue Creamery, Central Point, Ore. It was founded by a co-op in 1928. They once won a "London Best" award for their cheese. Too bad all of their cheeses are blue cheeses, which make my mouth vibrate if I eat them. But maybe you like blue cheese.

Quillisascut Cheese Company, Rice, Wash. I had no idea there was such a town as "Rice" in the state of Washington, but there is. It's on the Franklin Roosevelt Reservoir. Clark Wolf says that whatever the cheesemaker, Lora Lea, makes, is an ingredient of choice of top chefs in Seattle and Portland. I'm very interested to find out what UFO cheese tastes like (who came up with that name?), but the Quillisascut Traditional Curado sounds the nicest to me, made from raw goat milk and having sweet, nutty and grassy flavors.

Willamette Valley Cheese, Salem, Ore. This sounds kind of interesting, especially the Brindisi Fontina. I have no idea what that means, but the product description assures me that it's "perfect for sophisticated tastes, yet accessible for less adventurous eaters." I think that's marketing-speak for when your Mom says, "try it, you'll like it" without telling you what it is.

Golden Glen Creamery, Bow, Wash. I rode my bike through this town 10 years ago, but was too tired to see clearly, so I must have missed this place. But it's in a very scenic location, just south of some lovely hills that overlook Samish Bay. Chuckanut Drive is the road you take to get here. Their Web site uses actual words I've heard, such as "cheddar," "gouda," and "feta." Maybe that merits a visit.

Samish Bay Cheese, Bow, Wash. Two creameries in the same town! That's kind of neat. They have one called the "Port Edison" that they make from raw milk. I want to try it.

Beecher's Handmade Cheese, Seattle, Wash. One of the few I've actually visited. They have some kind of robot stirer device that you can watch as it makes the milk turn in to curds. They claim to have the world's best macaroni and cheese.

Washington State University Creamery, Pullman, Wash. Another that I've actually visited. Back during the 1930s, they got the idea that it would really help our troops to have cheese in a can. I don't know if the Army really caught on to it, but it's got its own wikipedia page. They say that the cheese could stay good for decades in the can. I bought a can of it a year ago, and am still waiting for the right opportunity to open it. Every time I bring it to an event, someone else brings cheese, and we don't eat it. Maybe I need to throw my own party.

The Seattle Cheese Festival at the Pike Place Market. Who knew we had such a thing? And, how nice of them to plan it between Pascha and Pentecost.

The Oregon Cheese Festival, in Central Point, Ore. Who knew Oregon had a Central Point? Kind of cool, though -- my sister lives in a spherical state. But, unfortunately, it's two weeks in to Lent. Sigh...

The Pacific Northwest Cheese Project. They put on a grilled cheese contest and they give out scholarships for aspiring cheesemakers. And, this site has a whole bunch of links to creameries that didn't make it in to Mr. Wolf's book. Mr. Wolf said that he drove really long distances when he was in Washington state researching the book, and he was astonished at how espresso stands would appear at the oddest places. Maybe he got tired of driving.

Aren't you glad to know all this stuff? Mainly, this blog post is a list of places I want to go, later, when I have employment and money to buy cheese. And, by that time, I'll have given the book back to the library. So I figured I'd write this stuff down, and maybe you could benefit from it, too.

I guess the real summary of what I'm trying to say is, please, I need a job so I can stop thinking about abstract cheese! Somebody fix this economy.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

A true patriot

Here is an article that ran in The New York Times recently by the CEO of Netflix entitled "Please Raise My Taxes," offering a better suggestion to President Obama's restrictions on CEO pay.

I’M the chief executive of a publicly traded company and, like my peers, I’m very highly paid. The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I’d like to offer a suggestion. President Obama should celebrate our success, rather than trying to shame us or cap our pay. But he should also take half of our huge earnings in taxes, instead of the current one-third. Click here to continue reading
This, I think, is civic virtue at its best.

I'm not much of a political blogger, so I don't normally get in to the "see I'm right" kind of snippy posting, but here I've just got to say...

TAKE THIS, YOU SUPPLY-SIDE ZOMBIES! I mean that with all the love possible.

Friday, January 30, 2009

The Manuscript 2.0

Dear friends and family,

At long last, I have completed my a new manuscript entitled Courage in Poverty. It's about the people whom I met as a volunteer in the U.S. Peace Corps in Ukraine and as a staff member at Raphael House, a shelter for homeless families in San Francisco.

This manuscript is 239 pages long in Microsoft Word, totaling about 72,000 words. I would love to have your comments on it. However, I'd like you to tell me that you actually want to read it. I had thought about sending a copy to everyone I know, but reading a manuscript is no small commitment, and I didn't want to foist it upon you.

So here's the deal: if you want it, I will send it to you as an MS-Word attachment. You can make all sorts of corrections and comments in the file if you like, just save it under a different name, for example, sticking your name at the end of the file name. You can enable tracked changes if you like that, use the "insert comment" feature, or simply use different-colored text for your comments. Or, you could use Word's highlighter feature if you just want to draw attention to a paragraph that makes no sense. Any comments you could make would be very appreciated -- even if you don't get through the whole thing.

Paper copies are available by request for free, but those require greater commitment. If you want a paper copy, you have to agree to actually read the thing within a month and mail it back to me. The paper and toner involved in printing a copy of a manuscript adds up to $5-$7, which I can deal with, but I need to know who really wants one. I like paper better myself because computer monitors tire my eyes out and I read faster on paper. Writing all over the margins with pen or pencil is fine.

Dr. Nordquist -- you get a paper one just because you made lectures so enjoyable without ever resorting to videos or Powerpoint presentations, the true thought-suckers of the classroom.

For those of you familiar with the first version of this manuscript, No Earthly Victory, this new one retains some of the stories and characters from that journey, but it takes a different tack, focusing on the stories of the people whom I met, and on the importance of finding a manner of service in which you feel you're really giving your heart rather than having it taken through guilt. It also describes the people whom I met in San Francisco at the homeless shelter, which the old manuscript had not done.

It's a less religious manuscript. The old one had focused a great deal on my spiritual journey and the enigmatic state of the church in Ukraine, which I still think would make a good book, but there are about six Orthodox publishing houses that publish things in English. Five of them rejected it and the sixth one just plain forgot. Still, I take the opportunity to describe the really cool monasteries and cathedrals I got to visit in Ukraine.

The curse of the author is the inner critic, nagging at him about problems in the cohesion of the story or whether it's even interesting. The inner critic tells him to quit and do something more productive. So, here are some of the questions I've been having through it.
  • It doesn't really have a plot. It's non-fiction, which usually doesn't, but the glue that holds the chapter together is simply that I met these people where I was serving in Ukraine or San Francisco, and I really admired them. Is that enough?
  • Is it too long? Are there parts that drag? I remember the middle 300 pages of the final Harry Potter book made me want to shout "Get on with it and stop freezing to death in that @$&% tent!" but I knew I'd miss vital plot nuances if I skipped forward. There's no explanation of Snape's true motivations at the end of this manuscript.
  • Can anyone think of a better title? I'm not exactly crazy about Courage in Poverty -- it sounds too much like the titles of Barack Obama's and John McCain's books about their "vision for America" and stuff like that.

So, if you want the manuscript, let me know. If, by some chance, you have lost my e-mail address, you can click here to get it back. erut...@yahoo.com You have to solve one of those annoying warped-word things to get it, sorry.

In Christ,
Thomas Eric Ruthford

Thursday, January 29, 2009

The Library: Sanctuary for the Unemployed and Bored

Today I went to our storage locker to find a pair of pants for my wife that she needs at her new job. This 10x10 storage locker contains all of our belongings right now and has done this since October. We are still living with my parents. We have found an apartment where we'd love to live, but we lack a certain thing: income that pays the rent.

I spent about an hour there, going through every box I could reach, but not finding the pants, which are part of the uniform at PetSmart, where she is going to lead dog training classes. I did, however, find a CD that has been causing me all sorts of trouble. I checked out "Family Tree" by Nick Drake from the library back in September. I put it in the CD player and enjoyed it very much. Then, when we moved out of our apartment, I forgot the CD was still in the player. We put all of our belongings in the storage locker, and when the "your item is due" notice came, I searched for the CD in the room where Miri and I live at my parents' house, until I had an "Oh no!" moment and realized it was locked up. I renewed the CD three times, and then the library wouldn't let me renew any more and started charging me ghastly fines.

Today, while searching for the pants, I happened upon the CD player, pulled it out, found an electrical outlet in the ceiling of the storage facility, plugged it in and started cycling through the CDs in the caddy and found it. So now I can get out of "library jail."

This storage locker is kind of a symbol for our "in between" existence. I don't like to be "in between;" I like to feel like I am going someplace and doing something. I know that as Christians we have to accept everything that happens to us as a blessing because everything that God gives us -- trial or help -- is so that we can dwell in heaven with him for eternity. So what value does "in between" have? All I can think of is the dragons from the Anne McCaffrey books that my sister used to read and how they'd "go between" and teleport as part of their efforts to save the planet from raining Death Thread. I certainly would be willing to be "in between" to defend the planet against the Thread, so would someone tell me where to go to report for duty?

Alas, it's not that simple. But, I can go to the library and check out books, which keeps me busy. Here are a few that I've been reading recently:

State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America
. This a collection of fifty short essays, one about each state in the union, in tribute to the WPA travel guides written during the New Deal. I had no idea the WPA had made these travel guides, but they seem to be required reading for any rambler seeking the "soul of America." I only actually read three or four of them before I had to give it back to the library (they wouldn't let me renew it with my holds) but I really want to read it some more.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,
by Naomi Klein. This book is liberal brain candy, which goes in to great detail about what happens when developing countries get too much capitalism too fast. The theme of the book is to criticize the effects of Milton Friedman's free-market ideologies. A very telling point is that the U.S. government spent great amounts of money having Friedman and members of his Economics School at the University of Chicago travel the world and spread free-market capitalist thought, and they also funded lots of academics from socialist-leaning countries in Latin America to come visit the University of Chicago. The government saw Friedman and his ideology as a means of combating worldwide Communism, and promoted it through covert means, overthrowing several democratically elected governments.

But, Nixon himself drove Friedman nuts by implementing price controls and wage controls at home, and Friedman ended up calling Nixon the worst president he'd worked with. Klein is a talented writer, and she's also very liberal, which made me feel obligated to read some things from the other side.

In Defense of Globalization, by Jagdish Baghwati. I didn't understand a single of his examples. After 70 pages, I just gave up.

Discover Your Inner Economist,
by Tyler Cowen. Amusing but forgettable.

The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy - If We Let It Happen,
by Arthur B. Laffer, Ph.D, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous. This book's publication date was particularly unfortunate. It came out two months before the market meltdown at the end of September, and spends 300 pages talking about how higher taxes are going to kill the financial system if the Democrats get power. And then, the financial system killed the financial system because a lack of bank regulation allowed the world's investors to kite checks consisting of homeowner's mortgages, and create a whole bunch of wealth that didn't really exist.

It includes such priceless assertions that since the stock market tripled to 3,000 by the time Reagan left office (Reagan was a tax-cutter), and then tripled again to 11,000 by the time Clinton left office and made it all the way to 12,500 in 2008. Therefore, they say, the Dow ought to be able to get to 120,000 by 2020. "If Washington politicians do no harm, and stay on Reagan's road, that could be accomplished," they say.

Rather than teach me much useful stuff about supply-side economics, the book has more taught me why I dislike it -- it's a mathematical solution to a political problem. They talk for chapters about how their way, low taxes, is the way to maximize growth and make people rich. They try to sell me on how this helps the middle and working class by making them a little richer (and they admit that the super-rich become super-super-rich). They talk about how insuring incentives are the way to create a true meritocracy, where the most hard-working and the creative get rewarded. But they operate under the arrogant assumption that I actually want to live in a country with all this new wealth sloshing around. And, while I would agree that hard work should be rewarded, I have to ask how much room does a meritocracy have at the top if everybody takes the bait and works hard?

My graduate school textbook (written by Ben Bernanke, before he was the Fed chairman) made it clear that economists shouldn't offer an answer for which economic decision is more moral, any more than physicists should be deciding how atomic weapons should be used. This dreadful book made it clear to me that the study of economics needs to be put in its place. The question of how to best serve the people, and which consequence of a government choice would be better, belongs to politicians.

Anybody know of a conservative economics book that's written well? Okay, rant over. Now I'm taking this book back to the library.

OTHER NEWS

Uh... you're probably getting the idea from this post that I haven't had a lot to do. This is true. I apply for a lot of jobs. I've had four or five interviews, no offers. Miri is enjoying her part-time job at the zoo, and she's getting a second job at PetSmart and is now in training. She says it's stressful to work with humans again.

I have been delighted to discover the podcast for NPR's Wait, Wait news quiz. My favorite joke I've heard there is that Hilary Clinton listing off facts about the Botswana diamond industry sounded like Hermione Grainger as Secretary of State. So true.

So let me know how you are!