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In my Face.

If you’ve thrown a trout at me lately, or chal­lenged me to match wits in the there/their/they’re test, or com­pared taste in books and movies, you’ve prob­a­bly not heard back. I’m get­ting acquainted with the Ignore but­ton on Face­book. I’m think­ing of ignor­ing Face­book entirely. Don’t take it per­son­ally.

I’ve just about decided I’m too old to fully under­stand the Face (as the kids are call­ing it), and for once, that’s not a bad thing. I’d rather read a book; pity the soul who’d choose to spend that time on Face­book. Before I joined, I asked peo­ple why I needed to, and they all boiled down to “because you can keep in touch with all your friends.” Well, I can keep in touch with them now, and I don’t have to give up my pri­vacy. I was finally con­vinced by a fel­low jour­nal­ist, who said he used the Face to get a full news cycle jump on the com­pe­ti­tion for a break­ing story. I’m all for that, sure. But once I joined, then I had to learn to use it. The next thing I knew I was adding appli­ca­tions, lob­bing Wall posts back and forth and oth­er­wise wast­ing time. Just what the inter­net needs: Another way to waste time.

Lately the apps writ­ers have been more aggres­sive. Some­one chal­lenges you to a trivia test, you take it, and to get your results, you have to pass a page invit­ing your friends to take it, too. I gen­er­ally uns­e­lect every­body and pass it by, but lately they’ve been requir­ing me to pick a min­i­mum num­ber. Screw that. So: Ignore. Ignore, ignore, ignore. (Like all res­o­lu­tions, I have prob­lems keep­ing this one. Added a friend this morn­ing.)

If any­one knows a secret about the Face that I’m miss­ing, I’m inter­ested.

Link­ish­ness:

Via Eric Zorn: A great This Amer­i­can Life piece on the Jerry Springer you don’t know. Even if you think you did know him — and many Ohioans do — there’s almost guar­an­teed to be some­thing here you don’t. A won­der­ful lis­ten. Click on “full episode” and lis­ten in QT.

I missed this in yesterday’s Freep — an amaz­ing tale of bureau­cratic heavy-handedness, or why you should keep up with what the kids are drink­ing these days. Detroit author­i­ties snatch a UM professor’s 7-year-old away to fos­ter care because the kid was seen drink­ing a Mike’s Lemon­ade at a Tigers game. The father said he didn’t know it was alco­holic (and I believe him).

Short shrift today, but deal — it’s 34 degrees out­side and I have work to do.

Posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 9:11 am in Media, Popculch, Uncategorized. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


49 responses to
“In my Face.”

  1. BOSSY said on April 29th, 2008 at 9:14 am

    Face. Book. Even the name leaves some­thing to be desired.

  2. velvet goldmine said on April 29th, 2008 at 9:24 am

    It’s dis­turb­ing to me that some of my rela­tion­ships seem to be slot­ted into — and formed in the mold of — the tech­nol­ogy we use to com­mu­ni­cate. I write to one friend via a pri­vate mes­sage board nearly every day. Fine. But she’s also a rabid Myspace user, and really wants me to be her “friend” in that capac­ity as well, which just isn’t my thing.

    A for­mer co-worker hates email and the phone, and finds he can really only loosen up via instant mes­sag­ing.

    In turn, I feel fairly com­fort­able with texts — it’s a fun chal­lenge to avoid the vapid emoti­cons and acronyms in favor of pithy zingers. But when I sent my old­est friend a cou­ple of play­ful mes­sages, she expressed con­cern about the “slew” of texts, and made it clear that she didn’t par­tic­i­pate in the grub­bier side of mod­ern times.

  3. Randy said on April 29th, 2008 at 9:46 am

    One of my col­leagues at work has done some research of Face­book. He found that peo­ple 30 and over might open a Face­book account and try it out for a few weeks, but they are quite likely to give up on it at some point.

    I have to admit I looked around a bit to see if any­one was there from high school and fur­ther back. Then I real­ized I don’t keep in touch with these peo­ple any­more because lives go off in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. It seems arti­fi­cial to try and recon­nect through Face­book, so I haven’t been back.

  4. brian stouder said on April 29th, 2008 at 9:48 am

    I always feel like an intruder on the rare occa­sions that I have vis­ited (or peeped into!) places like MySpace or Face or whatever-the-hell.

    It always strikes me as akin to rum­mag­ing through someone’s under­wear drawer….and it is not reas­sur­ing that the per­son is beck­on­ing you to do this!

  5. alex said on April 29th, 2008 at 9:51 am

    A Mike’s Hard Lemon­ade put a 7-year-old into fos­ter care? Please. You couldn’t catch a buzz if you knocked down ten of those wussy things.

    A friend who’s a nurse just told me a hor­ri­ble new­born story. Two days old and near death from poi­son­ing. Turns out the mother was doing meth and the chem­i­cals were pass­ing right through her skin into the baby’s skin when she han­dled it.

  6. John c said on April 29th, 2008 at 9:55 am

    There are a num­ber of inter­net things that remind me of the CB radio craze in the 70s, when old ladies would sit at home talk­ing on their CBs. Face­book is one of them, though I’m not quite as down on it yet. I joined after some for­mer news­pa­per folk in Chicago nudged me into it. I imme­di­ately felt like a loser when it barked at me: John Car­pen­ter has no friends. Now I have a few, NN.c included.
    As for the Ann Arbor dad, it reminded me of an awk­ward moment I had a few years ago at the Park. I was with a buddy of mine and our kids. The older boys were talk­ing amongst them­selves, and my pal was hold­ing his then-three-year old. My friend is a good guy and a good dad. But he’s old school and the son of a tavern-owner. He let his kid take a small sip of his beer. I noticed it and didn’t say any­thing. But he let him take a few more. They were small sips, but still. Then he let him take another one, and I remem­ber think­ing: Some­one is going to call the cops. Thank­fully, it stopped. But it was def­i­nitely one of those, “Um, should I say some­thing?” moments.

  7. whitebeard said on April 29th, 2008 at 10:05 am

    I mostly use Face­book to look at my fam­ily mem­bers’ diaries of what they are doing and what new nieces are arriv­ing (as babies) or post­ing once they leave the crawl­ing stage. And I have a few friends as well that I keep in touch with. Total num­ber for both cat­e­gories equals 15 but I do enjoy Face­Book for the photo shar­ing and photo com­ment­ing. I also enjoy post­ing pho­tos on deviantart​.com (no, not those kinds of pho­tos!) because of the wide selec­tion of pho­tos on my favorite sub­jects: rail­roads and auto­mo­biles.

  8. Terry WAlter said on April 29th, 2008 at 10:27 am

    The lemon­ade story is just another exam­ple of why we need less government,not more. Lots of things they do start out sound­ing good,but they never know when to quit. Like drunk dri­ving. Nobody wants to get plowed by some­one who is plowed. Buuut next thing you know,you are dri­ving down the road mind­ing your own busi­ness when you are las­soed into one of their check­points. WHAT’S THE PROBABLE CAUSE? Oh, we’ve had an above aver­age num­ber of arrests or acci­dents here. SO WHAT’S THAT GOT TO DO WITH ME? The con­sti­tu­tion is based on indi­vid­ual rights, not neb­u­lous num­bers tor­tured by some gov­ern­ment entity. At least it used to be.

  9. Sue said on April 29th, 2008 at 10:28 am

    I wish that sev­eral of my rel­a­tives would just get email. Then I could talk to them with­out the required 45 min­utes of non­sense that goes with it. I don’t know any­thing about face­book – other than I hope my daughter’s future employ­ers are not able to check out her page. And speak­ing of my daugh­ter, since she is a social work major I pray every day that she doesn’t decide to go into the child-protective branch of the pro­fes­sion. The peo­ple in that field are truly damned if they do and damned if they don’t. What got me about the arti­cle was not what hap­pened – that kind of stuff is not that uncom­mon – but the com­ments after­ward. Not a good cross-section of Michi­gan res­i­dents, I hope. And Alex… if I had 10 of any­thing alco­holic, well, I would be asleep after five. Or three. Or in a cou­ple of cases, two. Super wuss, that’s me.

  10. Dorothy said on April 29th, 2008 at 10:31 am

    I too con­nect with fam­ily mem­bers, white­beard, via Face­book. My nieces & nephews and my two adult chil­dren use it, so it’s sort of fun to be “in the know” a lit­tle bit when con­vers­ing with them. And my brother Joe was thrilled that I found his son, who is teach­ing Eng­lish in Ger­many. Joe’s ex did her damn­d­est to keep their 3 kids out of his life, but thanks to Face­book, he and his son are com­mu­ni­cat­ing again.

    But I rue the day my niece got me hooked on crack, err… I mean Scrab­u­lous. It’s a habit I sim­ply MUST break if I expect to get any­thing done in the evening! But I’m cast in a play now and have lines to learn, so maybe that’s going to help me in the dis­con­nect with Scrab­u­lous.

  11. whitebeard said on April 29th, 2008 at 10:44 am

    When I moved to the USA in 1981, I went to one staff party and had some drinks, mostly wine I think, and did not like the care­free (not care­less, just care­free) dri­ving I did. Because I drive a lot, I decided no more drink­ing and dri­ving even though I had been told in Canada that I was a happy drinker. OK, i have had two or three drinks since then, two at par­ties out of state where there would be no need to drive any­where and one drink in 1999 when the Supreme Court of Canada handed us an incred­i­ble deci­sion that gave us cus­tody of our U.S.-born grand­son after flam­ing head­lines against us across Canada.

  12. Danny said on April 29th, 2008 at 11:04 am

    This here, NN.c, is about the only “social net­work­ing” I do. I don’t even do email very much. I pre­fer the phone.

    But, oh, I did just think of this. We do video (web­cam) calls with my sis-in-law and nephews. It is pretty cool. We got to open presents with them vir­tu­ally over Christ­mas and they even took their lap­top to a fam­ily get-together and we got to chat with every­one.

    We actu­ally stayed con­nected for sev­eral hours dur­ing that video call and we had guests at our own house too. Peo­ple could peer into the com­puter and see what was going on at the oppo­site party loca­tion and talk at will like, “Hey, what are you mak­ing there in the kitchen? Looks good!”

  13. whitebeard said on April 29th, 2008 at 11:09 am

    I just checked my fam­ily name on Face­book and I see my grand­son has more friends than I have, 25, to be exact, mostly young girls that seem to cot­ton to him.

  14. brian stouder said on April 29th, 2008 at 11:28 am

    Speak­ing of social net­work­ing, I think we (the mild-mannered inhab­i­tants of NN.c-land) should put our col­lec­tive heads together, and cheat…err, develop a win­ning entry for Laura Lippman’s lit­tle con­test:

    1. Imag­ine that you are the child of an iras­ci­ble clas­sics pro­fes­sor who has an emphatic pref­er­ence for the names of Greek gods over Roman ones.

    2. Fur­ther­more imag­ine that your dad is so cracked that he insists on call­ing Earth “Gaia.”

    3. And keep in mind that, among the orig­i­nal names, one does hark back to Greek mythol­ogy.

    4. Now cre­ate your own mnemonic device for mem­o­riz­ing this trans­posed solar sys­tem. (Dang, I feel like Will Shortz.) I won’t promise to use the best one, by my very sub­jec­tive stan­dards, in the book-in-progress, but there will be a prize for the one I like best — a free unabridged audio ver­sion of ANOTHER THING TO FALL. And, yes, I’m well aware that I haven’t sup­plied the Greek names. Do a lit­tle home­work, y’all.

  15. Sue said on April 29th, 2008 at 11:43 am

    White­beard, I’d like to hear your story. Are you blog­ging some­where? Or can you email me? Nancy can give you my email address if you want.

  16. whitebeard said on April 29th, 2008 at 11:57 am

    Sue, I am slowly work­ing on a blog, but have not put that incred­i­bly won­der­ful deci­sion on it yet. I will rely on Nancy to give me your e-mail address and I can give you links to some of the news sto­ries and some added com­ments.
    As the Chi­nese curse pro­claims “May you lead an inter­est­ing life” and I think this qual­i­fies as “inter­est­ing” and a lit­tle fright­en­ing at times.

  17. beb said on April 29th, 2008 at 1:07 pm

    My wife pointed out the Hard Lemon­aide story to me yes­ter­day when I got home from work. The idea of tak­ing away someone’s child for a cou­ple days over what was clearly a mis­take is just fright­en­ing. You might won­der when the father didn’t ques­tion pay­ing $7 for lemon­aide but it was at a sports arena where prices have always been out­ra­geous. But surely some­one could have short cir­cuited the whole process but tak­ing the respon­si­bil­ity to say “no.”

    Mind you, I think there’s some­thing a bit dan­ger­ous about mar­ket­ing alco­holic bev­er­ages fla­vored to taste like soda pop. Liquor ought to taste unpleas­ant. But that’s just me.

    But get­ting back to child pro­tec­tive ser­vices, I am of mixed mind about the cult that was raided in Texas and all those kids being taken away from their moth­ers. I don’t hold with child brides, or polygamy and cults in gen­eral but I’m not sure that seper­at­ing chil­dren from their moth­ers in this sit­u­a­tion isn’t as bad, isn’t as evil as what the author­i­ties were say­ing about the cult.

  18. susang said on April 29th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

    I’ve had this creepy feel­ing that Face Book was really just a Mary Kay makeup party.

    Then I thought, maybe it’s the first sign that you’re get­ting old.

  19. Crabby said on April 29th, 2008 at 1:29 pm

    Beb – I went to a base­ball game last week, beer was $7, bot­tle of water was $6, hard to tell much from the prices.

  20. Sue said on April 29th, 2008 at 1:30 pm

    Except for the issue with half of the female chil­dren being or hav­ing been preg­nant, I might agree with you, beb. My lim­ited read­ing on this group indi­cates that moth­ers were not encour­aged to get close to any of the chil­dren, so mother love might not be a fac­tor. The boys would have been thrown out even­tu­ally, accord­ing to what I’ve read, and the girls appar­ently were mar­ried off early to men who basi­cally owned them. I’m more wor­ried about author­i­ties not accli­mat­ing them gen­tly enough into our world – the chil­dren have no defenses, such as edu­ca­tion, to help them under­stand any­thing other than what they’ve been cocooned with. And reli­gious indoc­tri­na­tion has prob­a­bly made them very, very fright­ened of us.

  21. Hattie said on April 29th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    Those Face­book pages just look like a big mess to me.

  22. MommyTime said on April 29th, 2008 at 2:54 pm

    I got a Face­book page ini­tially so that I could share fam­ily pho­tos with a friend I made through blog­ging who doesn’t post pho­tos on her site. I felt like a den mother at a girl scout meet­ing, though, when I couldn’t be both­ered to fig­ure out all the appli­ca­tions and wor­ried over the eti­quette of it all: do I throw a sheep back to rec­i­p­ro­cate? or is that like reject­ing a gift? Also, the idea that I was going to “poke” some­one freaked me out, since back in my day that was sex­ual slang…

    I still have the page, but I only check it when gmail tells me some­one left me a mar­tini or some­thing. I have plenty of other ways to waste time. :)

  23. Dexter said on April 29th, 2008 at 2:55 pm

    No Face­book for me, or MySpace , either. My grand­kids use both but I spend my time on polit­i­cal and recov­ery blogs and boards. It’s nice to be able to choose,although trolls ruin every polit­i­cal blog, in time, unless an aggres­sive admin sorts trolls out and bans them.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    I had a friend who gave his kid sips of beer at our soft­ball games thirty years ago…and when I was a sales­man a cus­tomer in Celina, Ohio told me “all these Ger­mans here in Mer­cer county give their kids beer with meals and nobody ever has a prob­lem with it.” Great, unless the kid is a bud­ding alkie.
    I was told Jew­ish peo­ple have no alco­holics in their cir­cles because they are taught to use wine respect­fully, at an early age.
    I never doubted that until I became a mem­ber of Alco­holics Anony­mous.
    Alco­holism affects all groups, German-American farm kids as well as Jew­ish folks.

  24. moe99 said on April 29th, 2008 at 3:59 pm

    In this story: http://​www​.msnbc​.msn​.com/​i​d​/​2​4​0​09286/
    a woman who escaped from another branch of this same sect describes how chil­dren are con­di­tioned, start­ing in infancy, to not fight back against the total con­trol exerted over mem­bers of the sect.

    This in par­tic­u­lar struck me, hard. In fact, I’m feel­ing a bit ill:

    Every­thing you did was mon­i­tored and con­trolled and every­body reported on every­one else,” she said. “It was a police state. You were not allowed to make deci­sions in your life. I had no power over my life or the lives of my chil­dren. It was a ter­ri­ble way to live.”

    The alleged con­trol began in infancy.

    “The method he would use with infants was a form of water tor­ture,” Jes­sop said of her for­mer hus­band. “He would spank the baby until it was scream­ing out of con­trol, and then he would hold the baby faceup under a tap of run­ning water so it couldn’t breathe. He would do this repeat­edly. Some­times, it would go on for an hour, until the baby was so exhausted it couldn’t cry any­more. This method he called ‘break­ing them.’”

    Did I miss some­thing here, or is she describ­ing water­board­ing babies?

  25. moe99 said on April 29th, 2008 at 4:01 pm

    I may be repeat­ing myself here, but as my first com­ment appears not to be posted:

    In this story: http://​www​.msnbc​.msn​.com/​i​d​/​2​4​0​09286/
    a woman who escaped from another branch of this same sect describes how chil­dren are con­di­tioned, start­ing in infancy, to not fight back against the total con­trol exerted over mem­bers of the sect.

    This in par­tic­u­lar struck me, hard. In fact, I’m feel­ing a bit ill:

    Every­thing you did was mon­i­tored and con­trolled and every­body reported on every­one else,” she said. “It was a police state. You were not allowed to make deci­sions in your life. I had no power over my life or the lives of my chil­dren. It was a ter­ri­ble way to live.”

    The alleged con­trol began in infancy.

    “The method he would use with infants was a form of water tor­ture,” Jes­sop said of her for­mer hus­band. “He would spank the baby until it was scream­ing out of con­trol, and then he would hold the baby faceup under a tap of run­ning water so it couldn’t breathe. He would do this repeat­edly. Some­times, it would go on for an hour, until the baby was so exhausted it couldn’t cry any­more. This method he called ‘break­ing them.’”

    Did I miss some­thing here, or is she describ­ing water­board­ing babies?

  26. Mike Harvey said on April 29th, 2008 at 4:36 pm

    Face­book can be use­ful when set­ting up events. You can get a quick count on who and who isn’t aval­able. Don’t sign up for any aps. Fb is much bet­ter than MySpace.

  27. Catherine said on April 29th, 2008 at 5:22 pm

    Any­one have an opin­ion on LinkedIn?

  28. kayak woman said on April 29th, 2008 at 6:05 pm

    A young friend of mine recently took her 4-year-old with her on a short errand to a small­town busi­ness. When they got there, he did not want to get out of the car. She was able to park directly in front of the busi­ness such that she could see him in the car and went in to do her busi­ness, which took a mat­ter of min­utes. He was locked in and the weather was tem­per­ate. When she returned to her car, a cop arrested her for child neg­li­gence (or what­ever, can’t exactly remem­ber the crime).

    A court bat­tle ensued with the usual fees to lawyers and what­not. At the cour­t­house, the cop who arrested her approached her in the lobby to APOLOGIZE! He told her that if he’d had any idea of the amount of trou­ble this would cause her, he wouldn’t have arrested her.

    Life is hard and it is harder when you are a mom with lit­tle kids and very lit­tle help. Twenty-some years ago, I would’ve done the same thing. In fact, I’m not sure how I would have been able to buy gas back in those days with­out leav­ing the kids in the car. I would not have been arrested. When did the rules change?

  29. joodyb said on April 29th, 2008 at 6:40 pm

    the only rea­son for any­one over 30 to be on FB is to mon­i­tor the wan­ton behav­iors of their prog­eny. even then, it’s admit­tedly creepy. i have recon­nected with some folks, though!
    kayak woman, that story makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck! as if life is not dif­fi­cult enough. he shoulda just skipped the apol­ogy too. what an idiot.

  30. moe99 said on April 29th, 2008 at 6:41 pm

    Nancy,
    I hope that tomor­row you can give us the low down skinny on the text mes­sages that were just released involv­ing the mayor and his lady love……

  31. joodyb said on April 29th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    Cather­ine: i’m not sure if they’ve tight­ened things on LinkedIn, but when it started up, i received email solic­i­ta­tions from erst­while col­leagues i would not nec­es­sar­ily have wanted oth­ers (espe­cially w/i my indus­try) to think i was asso­ci­ated with. back then, once you responded to some­one, you were sucked down the rab­bit­hole. IT types advised against it. lots may have changed in 7-8 years.

  32. Jolene said on April 29th, 2008 at 7:10 pm

    I got a Face­book account because my young nephew invited me to be his friend when he joined. He now has dozens of friends, but, at first, I think he was look­ing for num­bers, even if they included bor­ing old aunts. I look at it about once a month, and occa­sion­ally I see that one of my 10 or so friends has added some new pho­tos, which is fun. Oth­er­wise, I can’t say hav­ing the account has had a great effect on my life. It doesn’t seem to offer excit­ing new pos­si­bil­i­ties for com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but, per­haps, I’m just not being imag­i­na­tive enough because, heaven knows, I’m always inter­ested in excit­ing new pos­si­bil­i­ties.

  33. Suzi said on April 29th, 2008 at 7:14 pm

    I don’t have time or make time for Face­book or other such enter­tain­ments, but I do try to make time to read print stuff still, think the kids are read­ing the Wall Street Jour­nal or LA
    Times?

    There was a pretty good piece on the Mor­mon kids on Talk of the Nation yes­ter­day:
     http://​www​.npr​.org/​t​e​m​p​l​a​t​e​s​/​s​t​o​r​y​/​s​t​o​r​y​.​p​h​p​?​s​t​o​r​y​I​d​=​9​0​006302

    Kids from Polyg­a­mous Sect Remain in State Cus­tody

    Talk of the Nation, April 28, 2008 · More than 400 chil­dren remain in the care of the state after reports of child sex­ual abuse prompted a raid on a Texas polyg­a­mist com­pound. Author­i­ties main­tain that they are pro­tect­ing the kids, but fam­i­lies argue there was no evi­dence of abuse. Guests and callers weigh in on what’s best for the chil­dren.

    I believe boys have been dri­ven out of that com­mu­nity already, so there’s the other aspect of child abuse that’s not being talked about as much as the child rape sce­nario.

  34. Deborah said on April 29th, 2008 at 9:30 pm

    I’ve got a Face­book account. I don’t even remem­ber how it came to be. Mostly it’s peo­ple from work that are my friends, no, make that exclu­sively peo­ple from work. I hardly ever inter­act with it. It’s just bor­ing.

    I’m with you Beb about the cult in Texas, I don’t con­done any of it but it seems a bit extreme that they’d wrench all those kids out of the only life they’ve ever known…

    The first com­menter on this thread, Bossy. Is that the real Bossy from the excel­lent road trip I’ve been read­ing so much about? Wow.

    Com­ment­ing on blogs is an inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­nom to me. I spent ages and ages lurk­ing on my favorites, then I com­mented once or twice, then it began to feel like a com­mu­nity that I might in some small, small way have a voice in. Has any­one ever done any research about how this par­a­digm shift hap­pens?

  35. Jolene said on April 29th, 2008 at 9:38 pm

    I don’t know about stud­ies of blog-commenters, Deb­o­rah, but there are numer­ous stud­ies of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in online com­mu­ni­ties. Here’s a list of ref­er­ences, includ­ing at least one book, to the work of <a href"=http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&sa=N&oi=qs&q=online+community+author:n-baym>Nancy Baym, who is a pretty well-known researcher in this field. Of course, there are many other researchers as well. To see other ref­er­ences, just take Baym’s name out of the search box. Or you could check out this arti­cle, which is espe­cially fas­ci­nat­ing.

  36. Jolene said on April 29th, 2008 at 10:20 pm

    Whoops, I got that Nancy Baym link wrong. This one works.

  37. brian stouder said on April 29th, 2008 at 11:06 pm

    Jolene – that WAS an espe­cially fas­ci­nat­ing mono­graph! And; although I may indeed be ‘alone’ on this project (Jolene will get the joke), here is my first hack at com­ing up with a trans­posed solar sys­tem ‘mnemonic device’ (sounds like an Oija board!)

    First, here’s the hom­work part; the Greek names (near as I can tell) for the plan­ets, start­ing from the sun and work­ing out­ward are:

    Mer­cury – Her­mes

    Venus – Aphrodite

    Earth – Gaea

    Mars – Ares

    Jupiter – Zeus

    Sat­urn – Cronus

    Uranus – Oura­nos

    Nep­tune – Posei­don

    Pluto – Hades

    So our mnemonic device has to uti­lize H A G A Z C O P H.

    hmm­m­m­m­mmm…..

    Hillary And Gore Agreed – Zero Clinton-Obama Party Hopes

    Happy Anglers Get All Zeal­ous Con­cern­ing Owens Pup­fish Habi­tat

    Half Assed Geeks Attract­ing Zany Chicks Often Puz­zles Human­ity

    (the damned Z is a killer!)

  38. moe99 said on April 30th, 2008 at 1:10 am

    In this story: http://​www​.msnbc​.msn​.com/​i​d​/​2​4​0​09286/ a woman who escaped from another branch of this same sect describes how chil­dren are con­di­tioned, start­ing in infancy, to not fight back against the total con­trol exerted over mem­bers of the sect.

    This in par­tic­u­lar struck me, hard. In fact, I’m feel­ing a bit ill:

    Every­thing you did was mon­i­tored and con­trolled and every­body reported on every­one else,” she said. “It was a police state. You were not allowed to make deci­sions in your life. I had no power over my life or the lives of my chil­dren. It was a ter­ri­ble way to live.”

    The alleged con­trol began in infancy.

    “The method he would use with infants was a form of water tor­ture,” Jes­sop said of her for­mer hus­band. “He would spank the baby until it was scream­ing out of con­trol, and then he would hold the baby faceup under a tap of run­ning water so it couldn’t breathe. He would do this repeat­edly. Some­times, it would go on for an hour, until the baby was so exhausted it couldn’t cry any­more. This method he called ‘break­ing them.’”

    Did I miss some­thing here, or is she describ­ing water­board­ing babies?

  39. moe99 said on April 30th, 2008 at 1:13 am

    http://​www​.msnbc​.msn​.com/​i​d​/​2​4​009286

    I’ve tried to post this story about mem­bers of a related FLDS
    sect sev­eral times, but I guess I’m not a trusted user. Hope­fully this can get posted because I think the infor­ma­tion is impor­tant.

  40. Dexter said on April 30th, 2008 at 3:13 am

    kayak woman: A friend in Kansas City had the same expe­ri­ence, but with her dog. It was hot and she left the car run­ning with A/C on full blast as she ran into the store for a one-item , three minute shop­ping expe­ri­ence. That’s all it took…a woman saw the dog, flagged down a pass­ing patrol car, and the cop was ready to take some kind of action when my friend emerged from the store and told her story. How­ever, all she received was a stern lec­ture on how this cop had seen a car smash into a store­front when an exited pooch had jumped on the trans­mis­sion selec­tor and engaged DRIVE.

  41. Sue said on April 30th, 2008 at 8:53 am

    The sen­tenc­ing hap­pened this month:
    “A woman from east­ern Wis­con­sin whose mini­van caught fire, killing two of six chil­dren inside is sen­tenced to six days in jail.

    A Kewaunee County judge also sen­tenced 36-year-old Susan Laluzerne of Lux­em­bourg to a year of pro­ba­tion. She was charged with pro­vid­ing day care ser­vices with­out a license.

    State law pro­hibits any­one from pro­vid­ing care for four or more unre­lated chil­dren under the age of seven with­out a license. Police say she left the chil­dren unat­tended in the mini­van last Novem­ber while she went into a store for about five min­utes.

    The fire killed a two-year-old and a nine-month-old child.”

    That’s all they got her for – child care with­out a license.

  42. Dorothy said on April 30th, 2008 at 9:42 am

    Moe that story almost made me feel faint, I swear. I wish like mad they could shut down those freaks and get rid of those kinds of sects.

  43. nancy said on April 30th, 2008 at 9:50 am

    Yep, that’s water­board­ing, all right.

  44. Jolene said on April 30th, 2008 at 10:09 am

    Brian:

    Here are some par­tial solu­tions to your mnemonic prob­lem. I leave it to you and any­one else who might find it enter­tain­ing to try to fin­ish them.

    Heck, All Guys Attempt Zone Cov­er­age Of . . .

    Hooray! A Guy Almost Zeros Com­peti­tors Of . . .

    How A Gay Artist Zapped Crit­ics Of . . .

    How A Giant Adder Zapped . . .

    How A Girl Ate Zesty Cheese On . . .

  45. Jolene said on April 30th, 2008 at 10:19 am

    Re the FLDS sect, I’m sure you’ve heard the lat­est news re how 60% of the 14-17 girls were cur­rently or had been preg­nant. Also amaz­ing, a CNN reporter said this AM that, among the chil­dren taken from the ranch, the num­ber of boys and girls was about equal up to the age of 14. After that age, there were many more boys than girls. I won­der what hap­pens to the 14-year-old boys who get chased out.

  46. brian stouder said on April 30th, 2008 at 11:58 am

    So using Jolene’s starts -

    Heck, All Guys Attempt Zone Cov­er­age Of Pretty Hon­eys
    (works bet­ter than Har­lots or Hussy’s or Ho’s…..or Hoosiers)

    Hooray! A Guy Almost Zeros Crit­ics Of Pink Houses

    How A Gay Artist Zapped Crit­ics Of Paul Har­vey

    How A Giant Adder Zapped Cleopatra’s Older Per­sonal Hair­dresser (these two are my favorites)

    How A Girl Ate Zesty Cheese On Pumper­nickel Hoagys

  47. joodyb said on April 30th, 2008 at 7:30 pm

    Jolene: In “Big Love,” they go off and start their own com­mit­ments. or become rogue prophets. then there is the inevitable rut­ting with the patri­arch.
    the thing i loved about that series is that you were shown the under­ly­ing sub­ver­sive power the women actu­ally pos­sessed in the cul­ture.

  48. Anthony Juliano said on May 1st, 2008 at 6:32 pm

    Yeah, but if you ignored Face­book, I bet you’d miss all of this stuff:

    http://www.adgabber.com/video/video/show?id=546804%3AVideo%3A94292

  49. Marcia said on May 9th, 2008 at 7:13 pm

    Okay, who are all these peo­ple?

    Any­way. Take Face­book for what you will, Nance. You don’t have to be its slave. I check mine when I feel like it.

    I can never close my account, any­way, because I would lose the glass slip­per Ash­ley Mor­ris sent me not so long ago, with the cap­tion “ta-da!”

    I asked him what the point was, and he said he didn’t know; he was just glad he fig­ured out how to send gifts.

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