ThomStratton.com

We watched the latest Disney incarnation of Cinderella the other night (the live-action one with the girl with the blue gown that practically glows). The movie itself was okay–nothing earth-shattering, really. But what stood out for me was the relationship between the king and the prince. It’s rare these days to have a father who is not either a bumbling idiot or a domineering tyrant. This father was neither. He loved his country and he loved his son, and found his desires for each to be in conflict.

Clearly there was tension between them, as “Kit” did seem to feel some measure of disapproval from his father, but he seemed to recognize the love behind his father’s efforts to teach him to be a good king, and acknowledged his own inadequacy. Their conflict was merely present, and did not define their relationship. The scene when the king dies after giving Kit his blessing to marry whomever he wishes was perhaps the most touching scene of the movie. The king knew Kit didn’t need his blessing, but gave it anyway, partly to ensure no conflict remained between them, and partly to show that he trusted Kit’s judgment on that matter as well. It was not some grand, tragic deathbed “repentance” so much as a final acknowledgement of his love.

It was refreshing to see a healthy relationship between father and son where neither of them are jerks and their love for one another is clear. Kit was not really being rebellious in his insistence on pursuing Ella because he knew on a basic level that his father’s love went deeper than that.

It was touching for Kit to unashamedly curl up next to his father to be near him as he died.

Ella was lovely, and Cate Blanchet was delightfully evil, but there was no new ground covered in either of them. If anything at all, the movie was an exploration of relationships between parents and children. And for Disney, notorious for either killing off or marginalizing parents, there was surprising depth there.

I’ve been a little disappointed with Studio C this season. All the funny seems to have drained out somewhere. But this one seems to recapture the comic lightning and managed to surprise me.

Matt Meese nails this one–his mime skills are quite good! And the comic timing and interplay comes together fantastically. Studio C takes Eastwood’s talking to the empty chair and kicks it up several notches. Well done, guys!

On the other hand, you’re probably all aware of my love of creative imagination, especially when it results in largely useless, but incredibly fun projects. Such as using an old bike wheel and a drill to power a DIY Frisbee launcher. Behold!

Our church relies extensively on volunteerism, for everything from ecclesiastical leadership to sweeping the floors. One of those areas is building security. We regularly have multiple congregations using the building most nights of the week, and they tend to focus on their activities, not on securing the building when they’re done. Therefore we need someone to come in after everyone else has left and check to make sure everything is secure.

This week is my week. Every night around 10:00 pm or so I get to go through the entire building and make sure all the lights are out, all the windows shut and locked, there’s no water running in the bathrooms or kitchen, and the doors are locked. Now, I don’t consider myself afraid of the dark, but there is something about dark, empty buildings that I don’t know for a fact are empty that puts me on edge. At the same time, I do feel silly turning on all the lights in the place just to reduce my anxiety–because I’m not afraid of the dark, you see.

So I usually compromise. I’ll turn on the lights in the hallways, but not the lights in each room I check. But it still leaves openings for imagination. As a general rule I find imagination to be a good thing. This is the exception to the rule. In each room I need to cross in low light to the window, check the latch, and then head back to the hallway. This leaves at least two dark corners unexamined until I’m already far from the door. Now, I know there’s nothing there. But my imagination doesn’t. It views it as its job to create things in those corners. Stupid imagination.

Well, and stupid Hollywood, too. The monster is always hiding in the last corner the actor checks. In fact, movies tell us that if there’s a person, alone, checking dark rooms, and is too stupid to turn on all the lights, they’re as good as dead.

But so far this time I’m finding it less anxiety-inducing than previous buildings I’ve secured. Some very thoughtful friends gave us, among other things, a set of LED flashlights of varying sizes and including a head-light. Also, for this building the “Lockup Keys” come attached to a heavy chain set into a thick wooden handle, making it essentially a small mace. These are keys built to instill confidence. Between the head-light and the keys I can see clearly in every room, check window latches with one hand, and still have one hand free to go for the Four Church-Keys of the Apocalypse. As an added bonus, anyone hiding in a dark room to jump me is going to get LED high-beams right in the dilated eyes. Whether it’s my fight or flight impulse that wins out, I’d say I’ve got better than average odds of survival.

Still, you never know. If I fail to post one of the days this week you might want to round up a bunch of young, attractive men and women with tragic character flaws to come look for me–and get murdered one by one in poetically just ways.

I knew it was a bad idea to teach our cub scouts to use knives…

My son Walter decided to join Chess Club at his middle school this year. Last weekend they went to the district chess tournament, which is the culmination of their chess season. There were eight schools there, including his. The tournament went for seven rounds in which each school played every other school. Each school’s chess team consisted of six players, ranked from first to sixth. Each round the first place player for one school would play against the first place player for the other school, and so on down the line. Each round a team would earn one point for every game they won, zero points for every one they lost, and half a point each for a stalemate. At the end of the tournament the team with the highest point total would win.

Walter was third on his team, or their “Board Three” player. I did my best not to watch. Not that we could watch very closely anyway. They did have seating for the coaches and parents, but it was far enough away that you really couldn’t tell what was going on other than watch the growing pile of pieces alongside the boards. Even that was nerve-wracking enough. Walter tends to be a “come-from-behind” player, so it tends to look like he’s losing right up until he clobbers them.

It’s not fun to be a spectator at a chess match at that level. During one round I could clearly see Walter’s board, but my attention kept drifting to the next game over. One of his team mates had his opponent down to his king, and he pushed a pawn to get a second queen. He then proceeded to run out the clock chasing the king around, always one move away from checkmate, but never seeing it. It was painful to watch.

Walter, on the other hand, did well, winning five of his seven games–the best record on his team. He even beat his opponent from the team that got second place over-all. His team, however, struggled and ultimately came in fifth. That was where the real “action” was, frankly. Two of the teams were just dominant. The first place team only lost one of their 42 games. The second place team wasn’t far behind. But the third through fifth-place teams going into the final round were within three points of each other.

I think it was a good experience for Walter. He felt bad about his last game, in which he made some bad mistakes, but for his first tournament I thought he did quite well. Yes, he’s got lots of tournament experience from Pokémon, but there’s definitely a difference. Pokémon is not a team sport, for one. Chess is not customizable; you get the same pieces as your opponent, set up in the same positions and moving the same way. And even though there’s a time limit in both games, chess focuses on time much more. (I’m sure Walter wishes Pokémon had a chess clock to keep things moving–his dear old dad tends to sit and think a lot.)

Perhaps even better, though, was being part of the club to begin with. He met some new boys at school, including one who has become one of his best friends. I think he gained some confidence along the way, as well. And, of course, he had a lot of fun. As a parent you can’t ask for much more than that.

This is just too cool, especially since someone else is risking their lives to bring this to us:

 I guess I’m a naturally suspicious person. Recently I’ve begun seeing billboards such as the one pictured all along the Wasatch Front. My first thought was that there was something radical about William Harrison’s politics that appeals to some political action group today and they’re trying to dupe me into going to their website so I can be propagandized.

The truth, it seems, is much more interesting, and less sinister. The entire “9th President” campaign is marketing research. Reagan Outdoor, a local billboard company, decided to conduct a study to determine the effectiveness of billboard advertising. The began by asking random people to name the ninth president of the United States, and then, as a control question, to name the current lieutenant governor of Utah. About 1% correctly identified William Harrison, and about 16% could name Spencer Cox.

Next they put up the billboards with nothing more than Harrison’s name and picture, his position in the line of presidents, and a website address. As indicated, I certainly saw them–and avoided that website like the plague.

About a month later they conducted a second survey. This time about the same number of people could identify Cox as lieutenant governor. But 27.3% could identify William Harrison as the ninth president. And about 7% of the respondents actually went and found more information on William Harrison because of the billboards (they did not measure whether they researched on their own or visited the website), and could identify the number of days Harrison served in office (32).

I think there is another lesson to be taken from this survey, also. Their campaign did not try to communicate too complex a message. They essentially just tried to connect two facts. Far too often I see billboards that are little more than copies of the company’s newspaper or web adds. As a result, assuming I can read anything at all as you’re zipping by on the freeway, I miss 95% of the information. In short, most billboards are poorly designed, and even repetition doesn’t help. I think about three data points is about all I’ve ever been able to glean from a sign in a few passes. Garth Brooks did a concert at Energy Solutions Stadium on October 31st last year. There’s a movie about ski-jumping coming out and, after nearly causing a wreck trying to read the fine print, I think Hugh Jackman is in it. More than that, and I don’t have time to notice, an even less interest in remembering.

Anyway, I’m relieved to find that William Harrison is not being suborned by some nefarious political movement. Marketing is much more…uh…innocent…and benign…. Yeah. That’s the ticket.

I’ve seen a few posts from people lately essentially stating that they don’t need religion to be a good person. And they’re right–and yet not.

Consider some of the basic principles of being a good person we all still agree on: We shouldn’t lie, we shouldn’t steal, we shouldn’t kill people. Now I suppose it’s entirely possible mankind could have found those particular principles on their own and pushed them into near-universal acceptance, but we’ll never know, because religion already advanced those beliefs to the point of near-universality. It’s much like saying that you don’t need other people to be a good adult. It’s only accurate as far as you may not need other people to continue being a good adult, but chances are it was your parents who helped you define and become one in the first place–or other people who demonstrated a positive contrast to any bad parenting you may have experienced. Whether you need religion to be good or not, religion set the initial definition on what it means to be good–and aren’t we glad it’s been by the ones who don’t believe in human sacrifices?

I will agree that religion has not been the source of immutable criteria for being a good person it once was–or at least Christianity hasn’t. I can’t say I know enough about what changes other religions have gone through over time. It’s safer to speak on what I know, and Christianity has been eroding for some time. You will notice above I only listed three of the basic Ten Commandments. That’s because those are largely the only three everyone still agrees on and makes some effort to enforce. We shouldn’t commit adultery? Well, yeah, but we started allowing pre-marital sex and cohabitation, and have seriously weakened the difficulty and stigma of divorce, so cheating on your spouse seldom earns more than a frown these days–and then only if we don’t find the cheater’s situation sympathetic. We shouldn’t covet? Getting you to covet is Madison Avenue’s primary tactic! Honor your parents? What an outdated notion! We just treat them like roommates and ATMs these days, call them by their first names, and sue them (or at least throw a major fit) if they don’t give you everything you want. Does anyone not take the name of God in vain these days? Sunday is one of our busiest days.

And for the most part churches have shrugged right along with the rest of society. The commandments have become suggestions. Churches, for the most part, will allow whatever they need to in order to get people in the pews. Morality is negotiable.

And yet what do we really have if our moral system is malleable? Does right and wrong really change over time?

And that’s the heart of the matter. Morality is either static or dynamic. If it’s dynamic, then what good is it, really? If being a good person is whatever I define it to be–or even what society at that point in time defines it to be–then what real purpose does it serve? Is morality nothing more than a tool to keep people in line? Is it merely a means of setting up marks for the crooks to take advantage of? Is it only the means by which the majority maintain their majority? Is there really any true benefit from being a “good person” beyond the social grease it provides to help us slide through life with less friction?

And if each person is able to define it for themselves, is there anyone who isn’t a good person? Yes, it’s true that many of us fail to live up to our own ideals on how we should behave and think. Is that because those values have been forced on us? Or is it some sociopathic compulsion that leads us to set expectations for ourselves we cannot live up to? But in that case, why don’t we learn to define our expectations down and give everyone a morality trophy for showing up, so to speak? Society is already headed that direction, so why not accelerate the process? And indeed there are some already leading the charge. It would certainly be easier to be a good person if we can just define good low enough, right?

But as a society I suspect we want to have our cake and eat it to. I want to be able to consider myself a good person with as little effort as I can get away with, while I still want you to uphold the standards that keep our society glued together. Morality is for everyone else. If only this group or that group would just behave the way they’re supposed to, everything would be copasetic. We would be apoplectic if that group tried to force their beliefs on the rest of us, but by golly, if they’re going to have those beliefs they should live up to them, if for no other reason than it’s fun to beat them up over it when they don’t.

In a dynamic morality framework it’s pretty difficult to agree on who gets to judge compliance to that framework. We hear the continual cry of “Don’t judge me!” from everywhere these days, and yet a large portion of our social interactions revolve around judging others (ie. Hot or Not? Who is a true Feminist/Vegan/Fan?). It’s hard to make the case for the individual to be the only judge of their own “goodness” when, once they’re gone, it’s everyone else who gets the final say.

The trouble with a dynamic morality is that it’s just so darned dynamic! If everyone is allowed to decide their own morality, then everyone is moral no matter what they do, and we know that can’t work! At some point we need to enforce some sort of minimal level of behavior, and yet we also want there to be room for extenuating circumstances. I don’t want to get a speeding ticket, because I had a good reason for speeding! Joe shouldn’t go to jail for robbing a store because he’s never had much of a fair shot in life. Justice and Mercy are difficult to balance and still maintain a moral structure.

And yet, people will argue, a static moral framework is tyrannical. Things have changed, times are different. What may have been true centuries ago is no longer true today. Besides, those rules were written by a bunch of religious zealots and hypocrites pretending to speak for mythical beings, and we don’t want them telling us what to do. Some of the things we want to do weren’t even a possibility when those rules were written, so why should we have to live by them now? Preservation of the species is no longer an issue, and preservation of society is an ambiguous objective. Why can’t the rules change with the times? What makes us think the people centuries and millennia ago were any smarter than we are today? We know so much more than they could ever have imagined!

And there’s the paradox. We want a static, universal moral framework, but only if we believe in it and if it benefits us individually. Certainly there are things we can agree on, but we’re willing to renegotiate everything if it doesn’t hurt anyone. And we’re arrogant enough to suppose that we can not only know if it doesn’t hurt anyone, but that we can also predict the long-term results of any and every compromise we make. The wisdom to see where we went wrong and the responsibility to step up and reverse direction where we erred are both incredibly rare. Once an interest group gets a benefit from a change we’ll be hard-pressed to pry it back.

So what’s the answer? It doesn’t matter. The ship has sailed. Dynamic morality is the status quo. Even among religions it’s hard to find any true defenders of static morality any more. Static morality is on its way out, if not already gone. Even those who keep trying to prop up a new static morality can’t muster the discipline to uphold it, and far too often it’s too self-serving and one-sided to gain universal acceptance. Oh, they’ll insist it’s for the greater good, and that everyone needs to just sit down, shut up, and accept it–eggs and omelets, after all–but they invariably step on their own tongues or run afoul of others pressing for their own static moralities. Witness the recent turmoil on college campuses as the Freedom of Speech, Diversity, Equality, Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, and Affirmative Consent crowds fight for limited resources and attention. Not everyone can win, and it’s not going to be pretty. Actual learning, however, seems to have already lost.

At best, I suppose, all I can ask for is some patience and tolerance for those of us still in the traditional static morality camp. Perhaps it’s not perfect, but I’m still waiting for someone to make a strong argument for dynamic morality being any better. I’m willing to listen, but only if you are willing to communicate. Far too many these days prefer to yell, badger, bully, castigate, slander, and otherwise expose their own moral hypocrisy.

In the mean time my stance is this: Let’s look for what moral codes we still have in common. I’ll happily have your back on those, and I’ll try not to be too ornery about the points where we disagree. I think those things we still agree on are worth defending while there’s still something left to defend. Entropy being what it is, it’s hard to imagine society rolling back the changes its been making, short of some cataclysmic event, but we can hold the line as long as possible.

I know this sounds fatalistic, but I’m not blind. I look at all the social advances people are trumpeting these days, and I see why they have reason to hope. But I also see the cost of those advances and it’s hard to believe we really won anything. Equality under the law? Sounds good, but any gains there are swallowed up in the added nastiness of our public discourse and the further fragmentation of society. We’re in the process of burning the house down to make sure everyone has the same size room, even as we keep adding more people clamoring for their own room. This is not progress. This is the result of trying to shortcut real progress. This is the result of biting hands instead of clasping them.

We could do better, and I’m willing to try. But we’re too fragmented to accomplish it alone. If any real positive change is going to happen it’s going to require increasing our common moral ground. And before that can happen we have to find what common moral ground remains and defend it with everything we’ve got.

Huh. I guess I’m calling for a static morality.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield recently recorded a tribute cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” from the International Space Station. He also recorded a brief video explaining how difficult it really was to do. As I love everything Space, I’m sharing:

And then, of course, there’s the cover, which I rather like. I’m sure Bowie would more than approve:

Our dog Sam was sick yesterday. We don’t know what it was. It could have been something he ate off the sidewalk the night before. But in true dog fashion he kept it hidden as long as he could. The first indication was when I took him out to play around midday and he ran out of energy or enthusiasm much more quickly than usual. The first real indicator, however, was his evening walk. Not only did he not do his “business” like usual, but he didn’t want to stop and sniff anything, and didn’t pull. That is definitely not Sam.

Then in the evening after the kids went to bed we found him lying on the couch. That was a total surprise. He’s never shown the least interest in getting on the furniture before. He likes to rub himself against it, but never lay on it. We knew that couldn’t be a good sign, so we let him stay there. His nose was dry and warm. He was clearly not feeling well. We went to bed wondering just what we’d find in the morning.

This morning he was pretty much back to normal. Whatever it was seems to have passed (perhaps literally, as he did his business just fine this morning).

It’s one of the drawbacks of pets that you really can’t know for sure what’s going on with them. They can’t tell you what they’re feeling, where it hurts, or how bad. You’re left to read their body language and hope you’re not over- or under-reacting. I know, it’s that way too with babies. But I haven’t had a baby to care for in nearly ten years. We’ve had cats and dogs be sick numerous times in that time. It’s never fun when a loved-one is sick. It’s even less fun when you can’t even learn what’s wrong. But just because it’s not easy sometimes doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.

It’s certainly a pleasant relief to see them get back to their usual selves.

I often like seeing the videos that go with songs, as it creates an even stronger emotional response for me. But I’ve found one group that, while I like their songs, I kinda wish there wasn’t video along with it. I’ve recently rediscovered The Corrs, a family group from Ireland made up of three sisters and their brother. Their music is light, lyrical, just a little unexpected, and with lush vocals.

The girls are also quite attractive, which the videos seem to want to dwell on. Like the world needed another band known for their attractive girls. I get a little tired of female posing, writhing, and looking love-sick while they sing. Poor Jim looks incredibly out of place. At least they show them playing their instruments from time to time so we can be reminded this is about music, and they really are talented.

That said, their music is quite enjoyable. So feel free to give a listen. Hit play, and then minimize the screen so you can just listen. Trust me. You’re not missing anything. The videos are essentially interchangeable. Oh, incidentally the second song was produced by the same man (Robert Lange) who produced many of Shania Twain’s hits. Knowing that it’s hard not to hear the similarities.

Here’s some of their older work, which I think I like more. Once they went more mainstream they started to sound perhaps too…mainstream. It’s interesting to note the differences in their image between the previous and this video, too.

Okay, I’ve got to add this in, too. Here’s them live at Albert Hall with Mick Fleetwood on a more traditional piece. Too much fun!