Spout

This site is full of ideas. Some of them might make you cringe. They may not align with your worldview, perspectives, or experiences. That’s a great thing.

Attending your own funeral

An old neighbor of mine moved away about a year ago because she had ALS (or Lou Gehrig’s disease). She and her husband moved to a location better suited for the care she would inevitably need. In the last few months, she had planned a service for herself at her old church for this past weekend. I had never heard of this before, but she essentially planned her own funeral. It was a gathering of old friends to celebrate her life… with her. This is an idea I’ve been toying with for the past three or four years. I’m…

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Unfortunate timing… almost

I walked into a restroom for obvious reasons. As I was standing there at the stall answering nature’s call, I made one of my own. As I was standing there, I could barely hear the indicator that I was making a FaceTime call. Somehow, I initiated this call with a business vendor I sometimes use. Never one to use, or even hold, my phone while in a restroom (the subject of a different post), I had to dig in my pocket, pull out the phone, and correctly hang up the call. It didn’t occur to me for a few…

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When it comes to racism, lazy thinking prevails

Yesterday, I wrote about racism being behind the propensity of white to be targeted and jailed for white collar crimes. As expected, the point seemed to be lost on many, from the emails I received. It wasn’t about white collar crime. It was about how easy it is to say that racism against whites is to blame. The real point was to mirror the claim that racism is to blame for the proportion of incarcerated blacks. If you read my post on white collar crime and thought it was illogical, wrong, or even ridiculous, doesn’t the same apply to…

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Our justice system is racist… against whites

After a somewhat lazy search for statistics on white collar crime, I finally came up with a few, which are, unfortunately, not very recent. From the January 2006 edition of The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, it was reported that the odds of a convicted white collar criminals being white are 4.51 to 1. In the Oxford Handbook of White-Collar Crime (also 2006), Paul Klenowski and Kimberly Dodson suggest that the great majority of offenders in jail for high-level corporate violations are indeed white. Assuming this is a) true, and b) continuing to trend this…

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Keeping people captive must be exhausting

People who kidnap others… prison guards… soldiers who guard prisoners of war… They must be exhausted. I can’t imagine a job much more stressful than being responsible for making sure a prisoner or captive remains captive. The person you’re guarding is most likely constantly plotting and scheming ways to get out of captivity. Most of those methods probably involve making a move while you, the guard, is gone. But I’m sure some of them involve attacking you when you least expect it. And it’s 24 hours a day. It’s constant. You never know when they may make a move….

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A humanist? Or a speciesist?

Never in my life have I ever found an animal cute. When people gush about how cute a puppy is, or when they melt at the site of a rabbit, I just never see what they’re seeing. It’s not repulsive, either. In my mind, it’s just what they’re supposed to look like. I’ve never understood pet ownership. Why would you have something in your house that may (or inevitably will) pee or poop on your carpet. Once that’s in there, it’s not going away. Sure, you can clean it so you can’t see it. And you may get the…

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Facebook “like” of the year

Guess what? I just won a seasonal “Like of the Year” award for 2019! Yes, I just found this in the comments section of this blog. It says that thanks to a comment I liked back in January, I won an award. Who knew? What a great idea? I didn’t even know there was such a thing. What a great marketing idea. I wish I’d thought of this. It just goes to show that even an unknown, middle-class noticer of things like me can win a major award.

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He’s always been nice to me

Have you ever had a situation where someone is bullying you, or someone you know, and when you circulate the situation to see if people are seeing what you’re seeing, someone says, “I don’t know… he’s always been nice to me.” This is the bullying equivalent of, “I was just following orders.” People who sit by and let someone they know treat another abusively or poorly under the heading of “they’re always nice to me,” are only enabling the antagonist. How many people could say that Jeffrey Dahmer was always nice to them? I’ll bet O.J. Simpson was very…

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Let courtesy be your guide

This morning, I was out running when I saw a woman at a four-way lighted intersection hit the “walk” button. With this particular “walk” button, when you press it, it gives you a 10 second head start before it activates the corresponding green light. So the pedestrian is the only one moving in the intersection. By pressing the “walk” button, this woman stopped traffic so she could walk across the street. When the lights went red, and the walk light activated, she just stood there looking around. The seconds in which she had the intersection to herself counted down,…

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LOL or TAM?

If you work in an open office environment, you’ve no doubt instant-messaged a colleague with something funny, and they replied with LOL (laugh out loud). But then, if you sit near this person, you look and listen and realize they aren’t really laughing out loud. So why write it? It’s not like you can’t see. Perhaps we’ve gotten lazy with our acronyms. May I suggest TAM (that amuses me). That would lower the expectations of the originator of the presumed humorous comment and add some accuracy to the result. Or perhaps LIMH (laughing in my head). This tells your…

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