Jack Hardcastle

Well it’s official. Kudda is public! We launched earlier this afternoon to… quiet nothingness. We haven’t had any hits from Google yet, but I’m going to spend the night tinkering with the advertising and pray that it makes a difference in the morning. Joe left town as soon as we launched, and Tim’s been gone all week so it’s just me holding down the fort for now. Apprehensive, but excited!

I got tired of manually deleting all of the SPAM comments that I get on this site, so I’ve decided to try a little bit of proactive prevention. Instead of letting just any random mindless computer program post a comment, I’ve added a simple Turing Test. It should be absolutely beneath every human being who comes to this site (it asks you to press a single key), but unintelligible for any computer. If you fail the test, you don’t get to post a comment and junk up my site with totally useless advertising.

In other news, Kudda is coming along swimmingly. I’m very excited about the whole project. I do wish I had set my deadline for April 1, not May 1, but that’s my own stupid fault. I’ve been to a half dozen parties and dinners in the last week, and I’ve got a dozen left, but I still have to finish this site before Saturday.

According to a story out today, a Bush-comissioned study on the effects of global warming reported conclusively that there is “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.” The report also says, “the only factor that could explain the measured warming of Earth’s average temperature in the last 50 years was the buildup of heat-trapping gases.”

Apparently there can no longer be any division on the issue, as the report is quite conclusive. Über-conservatives will have to give up the ridiculous claim that there is no global warming. It’s over folks, the “conflicting records” of climate change have been reconciled. Now, let’s start trying to fix the problem.

I found out this morning that I am, without knowing it, officially done with my academic career. I went online to check my grade in my lecture class after Elizabeth told me she had gotten hers, only to find out that the grades for both of my classes have been submitted. The professor apparently does not want a research paper from me for the seminar class, and therefore I am officially done. I have no work left to complete. I got an ‘A’ in POLI 321, American Constitutional Law, and an ‘A’ in POLI 430, Seminar in Texas Politics, the two courses I had left to complete my Political Science degree. I completed the History degree a year ago.

This is also, to the best of my knowledge, the only 4.0 report card I will ever have had in my life. Thank you Dr. Cuthbertson.

Why do we have this notion today that the media is somehow different than it was in the past? Is it because large corporations have taken over, turning the news business into a real business? Perhaps that could explain why stories like this can be so dumb — nobody bothers to investigate them properly because that would cost money.

An 8-year-old student in Modesto, California stole his teacher’s minivan and drove it home. Not only did he drive it home, he adjusted the seat, steering wheel, and mirrors. He also successfully navigated a traffic light at a busy intersection and undoubtedly some stop signs, etc. I think for an third grader, that’s an impressive display of situational awareness. My sister has trouble with some of those things.

What’s more impressive is the lengths reporters will go to drag Grand Theft Auto into the story. Yes, what the child committed was technically grand theft auto, a felony, but that’s not the point. Men like Jack Thompson have made it so that Grand Theft Auto (the video game) is perceived as the sole cause of deviant behavior in children today. I know he was in it for the money, but the blame-it-on-videogames syndrome predates him. Everything from school shootings to cooking accidents have been blamed on the video game culture. Like rock and roll in the 50’s and 60’s, video games are “destroying” today’s youth.

I digress, however. My original complaint lies with CBS13. If you watch the video clip, they show a 9-year-old boy at a go-kart track driving around with his family and playing video games in the arcade. At the end of the piece, the reporter asks the boy if he would consider doing the same thing as the suspect. “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “Why would anybody do that? It sounds kinda fun, but you’d get in really… trouble, and….” Pardon his lack of sentence construction, but the thread is there. A kid that spends time with his parents immediately says, “That’s a really dumb idea. Why would anybody do that?” The 9-year-old plays Grand Theft Auto (which really, despite the title, has less to do with stealing cars and more to do with shooting cops and beating hookers to death). That doesn’t make him a deranged killer. I played Carmageddon as a kid, where you accrue points by running over pedestrians and smashing into oncoming traffic. Does that make me a homicidal maniac?

This story has nothing to do with video games. The kid stole the car because kids want to be grown up and do grown up things, like drive. When I was maybe 12, I stole my mom’s keys while she was taking a nap and drove her car out of the garage into the driveway, and then back into the garage. I wanted to see how different driving a car was from driving a tractor. Turns out they’re not that different. Kids have been doing similar things since long before there were grand theft auto video games, and they’ll still be doing it long after GTA is collecting dust in a drawer next to Pong. If the reporter had spent any time actually thinking about the content of the story and the issues in the piece, she might have said that. Instead, she went for the easy “what sells” angle. If it bleeds, it leads. Nobody wants to hear that what the kid did isn’t really all that unusual. That doesn’t pull enough attention for the 24-hour cable news world.

Nobody’s talking about how the kid’s increased hand-eye coordination made him a better driver.

I decided, before I am to leave Houston forever, that I wanted to visit one of those big mega-churches that only seem to exist here. I figured Easter’s as good as any other time, and by attending “Resurrection Day”, I could hit two megachurches in one service. With around 34,000 people in attendance, the service was about as far from anything I have ever seen as I could imagine.

In addition to being the most unique service I’ve ever been to, it was also the most depressing. The professionally designed programs look more like magazine ads than church bulletins. There was a letter from the head pastor of each of the two megachurches, advising people to come to their conferences and their seminars. Then, on the inside, there were ads for the conferences and the workshops mentioned. The Second Baptist program is “Great Sex-pectations,” including the April 29 lecture entitled, “Sex — Why Wait?” Clearly appropriate material for an Easter Sunday service. The program also discusses the breakfast items for sale at the Concession stands and the books and CDs by the Pastors and the musical guests for sale around the park.

That was just the surface. The actual content of the morning was even more depressing. They drew people to the park promising Grammy-award winning artists and superstar country singers. There was no real content this morning; no bible verses were read, no stories told, no lessons shared. The first order of business was the offering. They encouraged people to fill out the visitor’s information cards by promising that 1000 lucky individuals would receive Astros tickets. There was a recurring theme with the World Series team. Reference was made to how this field was where the championship games were played. The team’s owner (who donated the use of the venue) was mentioned several times by name. For the pre-offering speech, Pastor Suzette Caldwell said “no one should feel pressured to give. God only wants cheerful givers.” She then encouraged everyone present to double their usual contribution, finishing with the statement that “if you cannot find it in your heart to give today, how can you imagine giving your only son for the world?” No pressure.

The first sermon offered up “forensic evidence” for Christ’s holiness. Pastor Ed Young said that Jesus’ life represented a 1:10¹⁷ chance of happening. How he got this statistic (from a real statistician, he claimed), I am unsure. How are you supposed to quantify the possibility that Jesus was the messiah proclaimed in the Old Testament? Pastor Young then said that if you had ever had cancer, or a disease, or you had been raped or molested, you should give back to the church. You read that right. I double checked it on the closed-captioning scoreboard. He worked rape and molestation into an Easter Sunday sermon.

Pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell spoke for the other church, Windsor Village UMC. He said the three most important people in the building were, in order, UT quarterback Vince Young (who wasn’t present, but his family was) because he overcame… UT history to be the first quarterback drafted since 1948. Clearly, that was due to his devout Christianity, unlike the previous 60 years worth of quarterbacks. Then there was Pastor Young, who came from rural Mississippi (“from a town even other Mississippians have never heard of”, like Glenwood, MD) and worked his way through college, “in part,” by measuring sewage pipes. Now he’s a big shot pastor, head of the “largest congregation in North America.” The third person Pastor Caldwell mentioned was… his wife, Pastor Caldwell.

I left before the service was over. There was some lengthy analogy about a 1924 World Series game in which a runner forgot to touch first base, and so his home run was invalidated. They invited anyone who wanted to “touch first base on their relationship with Jesus Christ” to come down onto the hallowed field and stand in front of their peers while they dedicated their lives to Christ. About this time, half the seated audience stood up and only a quarter of those went down to the field. I filed out with everyone else and went home.

So, one more once-in-a-lifetime activities crossed off my list. Only a few things left to do while I’m still at Rice.

P.S. I’m not sure anymore that the Lutheran Church is any better. Silly political squabbles abound there as well.

After hearing what happened to Duke’s lacrosse team, I am reminded of a similar story from Rice last year.

Why is this what people do when they get to college? Plan parties, get wasted, and do really idiotic things. Lack of supervision and first taste of freedom aside, is this really fun? It doesn’t sound like fun. Watching a friend struggle through the day with an overwhelming hangover doesn’t look like fun. Suing the University to graduate doesn’t look like fun.

I guess someone could say the same things about my college career. Sitting on the Parking Committee doesn’t sound like fun. Being one of the only sober people at a party of 1800 people doesn’t look like fun. Getting yelled at by the University President after criticizing his administration’s decision making doesn’t look like fun either.

Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, I guess.

Edit: It appears that there is more to this story than I originally found out. Not only was the victim black and the team white, there are also third-party police reports of racial epithets being shouted. It seems there are motives beyond just “having fun.” Absolutely disgusting.

Edit 2: (March 25, 2007) The story that won’t die. The SuperSpade has an excellent breakdown of the whole “Duke Rape Case”. Apparently the whole thing is almost over. The prosecutor may have committed prosecutorial misconduct, the victim and her friend have been contradictory, the University is making some policy changes, and most of the athletes have moved on now that the indictments have been dropped. I still support my earlier statement that all of this is ridiculous, and it’s disgraceful for these teams to be sponsoring these events. Hiring strippers and tying underclassmen to trees and pouring alcohol down their throat does not sound like appropriate team behavior to me.

Looks like we’re going on a cruise to the eastern Caribbean.

People sometimes ask me why I hate the Bank of America so much. Here’s a brief example.

I lost my ATM/debit/check/Visa card two weekends ago. I called them up and cancelled it — a quick and painless process. They mailed me a new card (to my home, in Baltimore) which my wonderful mother forwarded to me. Upon arrival in Houston, I removed the card and called the activation telephone number on the front of the card. I punched in my card number, expiration date, social security number, and was finished entering personal information within the first 49 seconds of the call. I was told to stay on the line to make sure the information was correct. I then spent the next four minutes and 17 seconds listening to an electronic voice describe Privacy Check, Credit Watch, and a host of other services that Bank of America offers its customers. For each one, I was given an introductory summary and the option to press ‘1’ and subscribe. When I didn’t press anything, the voice said, “Are you sure you don’t want to try ____?” It then waited another 5 seconds before saying, “We’re sorry you chose not to take advantage of ____,” and launched into the next product.

I don’t want to be sold a credit report while I’m on the phone activating my ATM card. I want to activate the card and be done with it. It should have been a one minute call, not six, on my wireless bill. That, my friends, is just one of the many reasons I hate this crappy, crappy bank.

I wrote a column for the Rice Thresher about the diploma screwup that ran (with minor modifications) against an official story.