Bryce Moore's Blog, page 176

I Never Thought I’d Need a Private Investigator

Hmm. Yes. How to begin? You all know that we’ve been steadily working on renovating the space over our garage. Bit by bit over the years, we’ve been tackling it and have been getting ever closer to being finished. At first we did it mostly on our own, and then we found a contractor who had been really helpful for several years. Last year, his team insulated the area, did the electrical work, and ran plumbing up there. At the end of the year, he found a good deal on wood to put up on the walls, and so Denisa and I signed another contract with him to get that done as well. We paid around $3500 (the cost of the lumber.) It was supposed to be delivered around December 28th.

It never was.

He basically disappeared from the face of the earth for two weeks. We called, concerned, and discovered he’d injured his back falling from a roof. He sent that message to us via text. We never actually spoke to him. “Take your time,” we texted him. “Get better, and then we can finish.” We’d worked with him for years, after all. What was there to worry about?

But he didn’t call. And didn’t call. And so we tried to check in again.

The phone was disconnected.

I’ll save you the whole story, as it doesn’t get much better from there. Fast forward a few months, and I’m no longer convinced he was ever injured in the first place. He hasn’t phoned us once, and the last text we got from him (back on Oscars night in February) explained he was going through a messy divorce and had his bank account frozen.

I try to be a patient, understanding person. I try to give the benefit of the doubt. But he still never called. And we still were out $3500. A significant chunk of change for a librarian and a baker.

He’s switched numbers multiple times. He’s been completely ignoring us.

So I asked a friend for a recommendation of a good PI. The idea now is to take him to small claims court and get our money back that way. But we didn’t have an address for him, and we didn’t have a reliable way of finding him.

The PI took pity on us and found both for free. Of course, it didn’t turn out to be too complicated, seeing as how the guy had been arrested back in August, convicted soon after, and is currently on parole.

Yeah.

There might be more to his side of the story, but I no longer really care to hear it. Denisa went and got the paperwork yesterday, and we’ll be having him served by the Skowhegan sheriff’s department. $110 investment total as the first step to getting our money back. I really hope he takes it as a wake up call and contacts us to see if we can’t settle outside of court. I just want this over and done with. It’s been taking forever, and is a constant worry.

So that’s been one of the stressors in my life since January. And there’s no real end in sight. Cross your fingers that he actually shows up and we get the money. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Moral of the story? Always have a reliable address for your contractor in addition to a phone number. And always insist they follow the contract right away, I guess. I thought we’d been careful. I thought we could trust him.

Guess I thought wrong.

Captain America: Civil War Review

I”m definitely a fan of Marvel movies. That’s well-documented. So when I heard the rave reviews about Civil War, I was really excited to see it. “Best Marvel movie yet” is a claim that pretty up there, and I was pumped to check it out in theaters. Did I agree with the assessment?

Not really.

I’m not here to say this is a bad movie in any way. It’s 3/4 of a great film. And to really get into why I didn’t love the entire thing, I’m going to have to delve into some spoilers. So I’ll stay away from that for the beginning and just talk about what I liked.

The film does a great job of establishing the characters and their individual motivations. It realistically sets up why each super hero feels the way they do about the central question: should they be constrained by an outside agency? It’s a great question, because there’s no clean cut answer. There are pros and cons to each side. and you’re never going to be able to have an obvious solution. And because the question has such big ramifications, it’s something both sides feel very strongly about. Strongly enough to result in full on fighting.

The movie has a series of just incredible action scenes. There’s a really long fight between almost all of the Avengers, and it’s a blast. Everything I’d want it to be. Each character using the advantages he or she has, and hobbled by his or her disadvantages. Fantastic effects. great humor. Everything I want from a Marvel movie.

The acting is fine throughout. The story is entertaining. So what didn’t I like?

Again, there are some spoilers here, but I’m not going to full-on spoil the film. Just talk in generalities for the most part, but if you want to avoid anything having to do with knowing the ending, best to skip the rest and come back once you’ve seen the movie.

Ready?

Here’s the thing: the climax of this movie is in the wrong spot. The airport battle with all the Avengers is the pinnacle of the action, and I go to Marvel movies first and foremost for the action and humor. Complex moral questions are nice, but they’re not really what I’m looking for from a Marvel film. So when that airport sequence was so awesome, and they start building things up to one more fight scene, I started to get really excited, wondering how in the world they were going to be able to top what they’d just shown me.

The answer, of course, was that they couldn’t. And instead we get an extended punching sequence between three characters, followed by a morally ambiguous “there are no clean answers” denouement.

In short, I felt cheated. I felt like the movie was promising even better things to come, and then it didn’t deliver on that promise. I still really enjoyed the film, but it was like having my feet swept out from under me. Like being tantalized with something cool, and then told I can’t have it.

So what could have been done to fix the problem? One approach would have been to save the airplane scene for the finale. To move it closer to the resolution of the movie. Another would have been to increase the abilities of the big bad guy. (Okay SERIOUS SPOILERS here, because I can’t discuss this next part without them.)

Come on. The big bad guy? He ends up being some random dude who was sad his family died, and so he constructed this Rube Goldberg-esque plot to destroy the Avengers. I didn’t buy that explanation for a second. If he was so awesome at making this perfect storm scenario, wouldn’t it have been easier to just . . . set the Avengers up to die? He was able to get a bomb near a huge United Nations meeting, for crying out loud. And successfully detonate it!

Having the big finale boil down to “I killed all the really dangerous people, and now you can just fight among yourselves”? Lame. It’s another sign of promising one thing and delivering another. Your villain needs to be more compelling than your hero, and I get that they were trying to say “the heroes are the villains” here, but it didn’t work for me.

And so like I said: 3/4 of a great movie. I’ll give it a 4/5, but it’s a far cry from the “best Marvel movie ever.”

But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I want a certain something out of a Marvel movie that other people don’t want. I’m looking for light-hearted fun, great action scenes, compelling plots, and more great action and humor. Let DC worry about brooding superheroes. I miss the days when Iron Man was fun.

Am I alone?

The Wire 5:6 and 5:7

Yup. I only managed two episodes again this week. It was busier than I expected, with Denisa finishing her teaching, and since I wait and watch with her, it’ll just have to be two. I’ll really try for all three next week, though. I’m also tempted to do an overarching “All the Wire Episodes from Worst to Best” post. Why? Because a friend noted last week that my ratings each week were pretty lame, and I realized he was right.

Rating a Wire episode can be tricky. Do I rate it against the other episodes, or against all television in general? Season 5 has some weak Wire episodes, but it’s still a great show, with great characters. I’ve generally tried to rate them compared to TV as a whole, but I don’t think I’ve been consistent. It would be a fun exercise to rank the entire series, and since I just finished watching them all, I think I could pull it off. There are only 60 episodes, after all . . .

But on to today’s reviews.

Episode 5:6

The homeless “murder” plot is well and truly under way, and it’s to the point that critiquing how it started is no longer relevant in my book. For whatever insane reason, McNulty and Lester got themselves into this mess, and now they’ve roped Sydnor into it as well. With that taken for granted now, let’s look at how things are going for them.

Terribly.

And this, at least, is very believable. Bit by bit, the lie they started to tell is growing. Changing. First it was just rigging a single scene to make it look like a murder, then tweaking a few old cases to make them match. Then there were more bodies. Then desecrating the bodies. Now it’s graduated to full on kidnappings. It’s terrible that McNulty is doing these awful things, and Larry the Homeless Guy doesn’t deserve it at all. To make matters worse, the police work that McNulty’s supposedly helping with this stunt is only getting hurt. Bunk isn’t able to work his cases how he needs to, and Kima is sent off investigating bogus “leads.”

But that’s kind of the point of the season. Lies are easier to believe than the truth, and lies get more money and attention than the truth. The bigger the lie, the more people want to believe it.

In other news, Nick is back for a brief cameo, reminding us all that the construction projects Carcetti is boasting about are coming at the cost of the old way of living represented back in season two. And we’ve got Randy popping up again as well, no longer the innocent boy with dreams of running a store. He’s put on muscle and experience, and he seems just as much a hardened corner boy as any of the other random characters we see.

Carcetti continues to bug me, mainly because he knows just what to say and how to say it to make things look like he actually cares about something. And the thing is, maybe he really does believe it when he’s saying it. But as soon as he’s not in front of a microphone anymore, he’s mainly interested in how he can rig this to make it work out the best for him personally. Maybe I’m too idealized in my view of what politicians could do. Too much West Wing, I suppose.

Omar is back, and we find out that he was injured really badly in his jump (though I’m still skeptical anyone would be able to survive that jump. Then again, this is Omar. If anyone could do it, it would be him.) But this Omar is very different from the old one we knew. It’s like he can tell he’s on a one way journey. Hard to picture him getting out of all of this alive, especially with how injured he is, and how careful Marlo’s crew has been.

And has it ruffled Marlo’s feathers? Not really. Not enough to stop him from taking over the co-op and disbanding it. He’s sailing through life without a care in the world, it seems.

I don’t have much to say about the newspaper crew this time. They’re doing what they’re doing, and they’re new enough to me that I don’t care too much other than to continue to dislike Scott and the chiefs.

It’s a 3/5 for this one. Better than two episodes ago, but still not a return to greatness.

Episode 5:7

Clay. Davis. I hated seeing him get off without so much as a scratch the first time I watched this episode, and I still hate it. Not that I think it’s unrealistic. I hate it because it makes so much sense. Really, I’m stunned at how the writers were able to pull this off. We’ve been watching Davis for years, and we know what a weasel he is. We saw how careful the lawyers were being as they prepped for the trial. I honestly couldn’t envision a scenario where he was able to escape.

And then somehow, they present one in one fell swoop, and it makes sense.

This is what caused me to write my post yesterday on how stories matter, not necessarily the truth. Davis and his lawyer were able to come up with a believable story that explained what the prosecution was attacking him for, and the jury listened. And so he slinks off yet again to be able to ooze his way through Baltimore, bribing and extorting everywhere he goes. And what’s worse is knowing how many of the other Powers That Be in the city know who he is and what he does, and yet they put up with him because of what he can do for them and to their opponents.

Like I said: maybe a bit too true to life.

And why was he able to talk his way out of this? Because the city prosecutor didn’t want the case to go federal. He wanted the glory for himself. Remember: Lester had the “head shot” on Davis. The sure thing that would send him to prison no matter what. But the prosecutor declined to use it because he thought he’d have an easier time grandstanding and making a name for himself.

Sigh.

Lester and McNulty, meanwhile, continue to assume they’re going to have an easier time with Marlo than they actually are having. The clock pictures have them scratching their heads, and now they need a ton of serious back up to get what they want. Sure, they’ve turned on the money by lying about a case, but now all that money is being spent on the bogus case, and it’s difficult to spend any on the case they want to actually do. Especially when there are so many other cops trying to get case work done, and McNulty can’t say no. It’s a microcosm, where McNulty is finding out just how hard it is to spend limited resources on the massive amount of work that needs doing.

Of course, then we’re also forced to see Kima talking to various family members of the deceased McNulty’s been lying about. When he started this “game,” it was easy to think of the homeless men as objects. People who were already dead, and so who cared what happened to them. But they were just homeless, not without families, and these lies hurt families deeply. This is definitely not a victimless crime.

I loved the scenes with Kima putting together the IKEA furniture, and how it calls back to McNulty doing the same thing back in the first season. Very funny, and very well done.

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Omar, though. He’s completely lost his larger-than-life cool factor. He’s out of control, with no friends and no support, and not even full use of his body. So sad to see him hobbling around.

On the other hand, how great was it to see Bubs looking so good? Not caring about making money or angles. Just doing good for other people. He looks a ton better, and it gives me hope for him yet.

Much more I wish I could talk about, but I just don’t have the time. I really like this episode, and it’s the start of the end of the series, which (from what I remember) is some really great stuff. Here’s hoping my memory’s right. 4/5

Stories Matter

I’ve been having a number of thoughts over the last few days, and I haven’t been quite sure how to encapsulate them into a blog post, but today I watched a video by John Oliver on scientific studies, and they all seemed to converge at once. So here you go.

If you haven’t seen the video, you really should watch it. (Warning: language.) In a nutshell, he picks apart our society’s tendency to cherrypick the science we want to believe in. To reduce the complex scientific method into easily-digested nuggets that sound great but end up being wrong. (Ironically, at the same moment he objected to a statement that “people should just find the study that agrees with their point of view and listen to that,” I thought to myself, “That’s the way so many people treated religion back when I was a missionary trying to talk to people about religion on a daily basis. And as soon as I had that thought, Oliver said that the “pick your personal preference” approach wasn’t science; it was religion. But I digress.) Check out the video:

I’m not here to post about science today. I’m here to discuss stories, a principle this video helps illustrate. Our society runs on stories. Narratives. And we make changes to our views and our laws based on which stories capture the most attention. Sure, science can play a part, but it typically only does through as a prop to the story in question.

Take Global Warming, for example. You don’t have two scientific claims at war with each other. You have two narratives that are attempting to describe our present day situation. In one corner, you have the claim that changes we’re making to the atmosphere are causing long-lasting, irreversible harm to the environment. On the other, you have the claim that scientists are using incomplete or inaccurate data to make false conclusions.

Or politics: Trump is playing to a particular story. A story where America used to be this pillar of the world that was the epitome of all that was good and right, and that we’ve fallen from that pedestal by making a series of blunders. By listening too much to minorities and people who would prefer equality for all nations and people. That someone these forces are acting to sully our nation, and that he has a chance to Make America Great Again.

It’s a story. It doesn’t need to be right or wrong. It needs to be believed. And once people believe it, then what else matters?

One of the things I love about today’s technology is how it’s bringing us together. How it makes it possible for me to find out about what other people think on the other side of the globe. Social media has exposed a lot of bad (what your Great Aunt Zelda really thinks about Hispanics), but it’s also done wonders for me in allowing me to see and understand how other people think and what they believe. And (I hope), it’s helped me to better sympathize with who they are and where they’re coming from.

For example, Humans of New York uses stories to present snapshots of various people. It doesn’t need to make political claims or arguments. The stories make those all on their own. By understanding people, we understand issues. It did a fantastic job of humanizing the refugees in Syria. Turning them from a faceless problem that had to be taken care of in the same way as a chore you have to get through (taking out the garbage, cleaning up after the dog) and into a group of individuals who matter and need help.

The current debate and furor over transgender bathrooms is another example where two conflicting stories are attempting to explain a thorny issue. On one hand, you have people who believe transgender is a choice. On the other, you have people who believe it’s something that happens to someone. That it’s out of their control. (The same conflicting stories that happen in the debate over the causes of homosexuality.) To people who believe it’s a choice, it makes no sense to make accommodations for transgendered people. “They wanted to do that, so they can deal with the issues on their own.” To those who believe the opposite, it’s heartless and cruel to do anything but make accommodations.

In church on Sunday, someone asked “What can we do to see the good in others?” My answer was “Get to know them.” It’s easy to make decisions about what to do with people or to people you don’t know. I wrote about that just the other day.

The internet has allowed me to get to know many more people than I would have otherwise, and that helps me be a better, more understanding person.

I’m not trying to reduce everything down into simple stories, and I’m not trying to say that Truth doesn’t matter. I do believe there’s a thing as absolute Truth, and I believe it’s important to try and find it and make informed decisions in light of it. But I also believe that much of what people think of as absolute Truth, isn’t.

It’s stories they’ve heard and seen and experienced that have led them to conclusions that might be well-intended, but which might ultimately be wrong.

Back when Denisa and I were just married, she commented to me how envious she was of the cool stories I had from my mission. “Nothing like that ever happened to me on my mission,” she’d say. And that just isn’t true. I don’t think I walk through a world where interesting things happen to me and no one else. I believe interesting things happen to everyone on a regular basis. But some of us have practice distilling those events down into stories. The difference isn’t in the experiences, it’s in the storytellers.

What does this mean? Why am I writing this? I think it’s important to remember that stories infuse our lives and our society at all levels. Once you see and recognize that, you break some of the magic of the stories, true. But that’s not a bad thing. You make it easier on yourself to make good decisions. To not be persuaded by flash and glitter. Just because someone’s a good storyteller doesn’t make them right.

This is a tool you can use for good or ill. If you see something you want to get accomplished, create a story around it. A narrative. Make it a good one, and bringing other people to your cause becomes much easier. Trump knows this. Almost any national organization vying for attention or money knows this. People listen to stories.

In the Wire episode I watched yesterday (review coming tomorrow), a loathsome politician was found not guilty of crimes we all clearly knew he had committed. How did he get out of it? He created a story that explained how those crimes weren’t crimes at all. He came up with a narrative that justified what he was doing.

I could ramble on about this for a while longer, but I’m not of time. I don’t have a way to tie this all up and make it neat and tidy. It’s a thought. An observation. And hopefully it came through at some point in this post. Stories matter. Truth matters too, but sadly, stories often end up mattering more.

Journaling with Kids

I first started keeping a journal with TRC when he was about four and a half years old. I write a journal every day myself, and I thought it would be a fun way to keep track of what he was doing and how he was changing. The process was simple: I’d have him stand or sit next to me and dictate what he wanted to write, and I’d transcribe it as close to exactly how he said it as I could. Here’s the first entry.

January 3, 2009 This week I’m going back to preschool. That’s happening to me. Also we’ll have a story in my journal. It has very scary things. There are so many ghosts that scare me, and there’s one that says this kind of boo: “moo!” That’s a pretty funny thing, right? I did my workbook today. I did A, a and B. You first come the easy things that you color the letters, and you do what it says to do and color up the letters. That’s what comes first. I am four and a half years old now. My favorite color is purple. I like to do my work.

I’ve continued the tradition with DC, and it’s interesting to see their different approaches to things. TRC loved telling zany stories and saying funny things. DC likes to document exactly what she’s doing at any given moment. I haven’t started one for MC yet, but I will pretty soon.

Of course, these days TRC is in charge of his journal writing himself, and it doesn’t go quite as smoothly all of the time. I’ve wondered now and then why I keep pushing him to do it. The main reason is that I’ve enjoyed being able to look back at my own journal entries from when I was younger, and I wish I’d written more than what I did. But I realize that’s not a fair approach. He shouldn’t have to do things just because I didn’t so them the way I wanted to the first time through. And so I’d considered just backing off completely.

But last night, he got out his journal and spent some time reading his earlier entries and just cracking up. He thought they were hilarious, and he had a great time reading them. So at least I know he’s getting some of the same enjoyment from them that I do.

If any of you are thinking about doing the same thing, here are a few tips to get you started:

Once a week is about as often as I’d go for entries. The times that have worked the best are when we got in a habit of doing it every week at the same time. Habit is good.
If you miss an entry, don’t stress about it. But if you really believe in this, you have to stick with it. Almost all of the motivation is going to come from you, not your kid. Accept that.
I store mine on Google Drive, mainly because it’s accessible wherever I am, whenever I want. (Also, yay for backups!)
You have to remind your kid to speak slow enough for you to type things down. I guess you could also record it and transcribe it later if you’re a slow typist.
Do your best not to interfere with what they’re saying or how they’re saying it. This isn’t your journal; it’s theirs.
You might have to prompt them now and then to get their memories working. Try to do so sparingly, because again, you want to capture what was important to them. Not what was important to you.

I’m definitely glad to have it, and I recommend the practice to anyone. If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them.

You Never Know Who’s Reading

I’ve been writing this blog for quite some time now, but I still never quite get used to the fact that people actually read it. Not that I’m surprised when comments come up on Facebook or here, but in real life when people come up to me and say they were reading what I’d written, my first instinct is somehow always panic. I stand by what I write here, of course, but I’m always worried I said something I shouldn’t. Somehow, the feel of an online forum is distinct from an in-person discussion. I don’t know why it is, but there you have it.

But this week I had a new experience. It wasn’t a friend or acquaintance coming to tell me they’d read what I was writing: it was my son. TRC casually dropped a reference to my blog in one of our conversations, and I discovered that there’s a whole new level of concern and panic you feel when you’ve been writing about someone without their permission for a decade or so.

What had I written? Was he okay with it? Had I said anything I shouldn’t have?

Thankfully, it was nothing alarming. He just liked seeing what I was writing. (The kid would read the phone book if there was nothing else lying around.) But it was an excellent reminder that I need to be respectful of all family members on here, not just Denisa. I know that sounds a bit strange, but what I mean is that when I write something that includes Denisa, I’ve always tried to be cautious about what I say and not put anything up she might object to. And really, I’ve done the same thing with my kids.

As I think about it, maybe my concern wasn’t that TRC had read something, but that one of his friends might read something on here and then give him a hard time about it. That’s where my mind someone immediately leapt: did I do anything that would embarrass him?

Let’s face it: I write a fair number of goofy posts now and then, and I guess there’s plenty of fodder on here for someone to make fun of if they wanted to. Kids have been getting embarrassed by their parents for as long as there have been parents and kids. So I’m not going to really switch anything up here on the blog too much. But at the same time, I keep in mind my audience when I’m writing this. As a writer, the end result is often very different depending on who the audience is. After having written this for so long, I’ve grown accustomed to the things I have to pay attention to.

This just adds one more layer to that.

Anyway. That’s all I have for you today. Have a great weekend, and I’ll catch you on the flip side!

Project Groundhog

Last year, a groundhog wrecked havoc on Denisa’s garden. She really got fed up with the critter. At first, she tried traps that would keep it alive, but by the end, I think she was ready to go nuclear if she needed to. Not that it ended up mattering. That groundhog was nigh unstoppable. Elusive and tricksy, he always got away. In fact, I think we even took some video of Denisa toward the end there. Let me see if I can find it.

She was looking pretty rough, I’ll admit . . .

In any case, this spring, the groundhog was back, and he was living it up in style. Lazing around the property, munching, waiting for Denisa to plant something so he could eat it. She wasn’t too fond of that plan, so she plotted herself. Finally, she discovered where he was living: our woodshed.

We borrowed some traps (the deadly kind) from a friend, and I set them up. Vicious things that you put down wherever the hole of the critter in question is. As soon as they pop up to check on their shadow or something, snap! Dead.

Now, my love of groundhogs is pretty well established. But there comes a time in a man’s life where he has to decide which is more important: groundhogs, or his wife’s sanity. I opted in favor of Denisa.

Yesterday, the groundhog met his end. His days of searching for snacks in the garden are over.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to watch Groundhog Day again with the same level of innocence, knowing that I killed one of them in cold blood.

Please, everyone. A moment of silence for the groundhog.

The Wire 5:3, 5:4, and 5:5

Three episodes in one week! It’s hard for me not to just binge watch the rest when we’re this close. But I’m being strong and sticking to the plan. On to the episode reactions!

Episode 5:3

Let me be very clear: I am not a fan of the serial killer plot in this season. Not even a little. It’s way harder for me to swallow than Hamsterdam, mainly because I feel like there’s something morally wrong in desecrating bodies the way McNulty and Lester are doing, and that the odds of finding not just one but two police willing to do it strains credibility to the extreme. We know Lester and McNulty. They each have issues, but that they’re willing to do this, and all sorts of other police touch on it tangentially, and no one says anything?

I just have a hard time swallowing that.

However. If I just accept the fact that McNulty is deep enough in the bottle and Lester is obsessed enough with Marlo, and I get over my first reaction, I do believe the season continues to be worthwhile. I try to think of it almost as a thought experiment. How bad are things in Baltimore? They’re so bad that an actual serial killer isn’t enough to register more than a yawn or two from the police. McNulty and Lester are certainly smart enough to rig things to be believable. It’s just that nobody cares about what they’re “uncovering.”

Then you have the newspaper folks. Again, they’re a little too easily classified for the show’s normally high standards. Gus is a good guy. Scott is a weasel. It could have been done with a defter touch, but there you have it. Scott is all too willing to throw anyone else under the bus, and he doesn’t care about making stuff up left and right either. Not if it will advance his career. I can’t stand the man.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t dislike other people more. People like Clay Davis. So fun to see the man finally knocked down a peg or five. He’s been a rat for so long, and done so many awful things, it’s great to see it come back to bite him at last, and he seems like he’s really in for it this time.

Joe keeps trying to “civilize” Marlo, but does he really think something like that is possible? Marlo has no real clue what he’s doing. He’s just mimicking whatever Joe or Levy are doing. And then killing anyone who might question what he’s doing or why. Terrible, terrible man. Omar’s heading back to do something about it, though. Think he’ll be able to pull it off? If anyone could, it would be him.

Anyway. It’s solid television, but far from awesome. 3/5 from me.

Episode 5:4

So much for the old way of doing business. Marlo murders Prop Joe in cold blood. Not because Joe’s done anything terrible. Just because Marlo wants to be the king, and Joe is kind of sort of in his way. And Cheese (Joe’s nephew) is the one to sell Joe out. Sad.

That said, the scene seemed to be the one really riveting moment of the episode. It was great, but much of the rest of this one is set up. You’ve got Beadie confronting McNulty (and McNulty not really caring that his marriage is falling apart), McNulty and Lester continuing their serial killer plot (with the help of none other than Gordon from Sesame Street, playing an old cop who’s been used and abused by the system. Maybe there’ll be more Wire/Sesame Street crossovers. Snuffleuppagus is Omar.), Scott trying to find a job at a more “worthy” paper, Omar on the hunt for Marlo, Marlo courting the Greek, Daniels moving on up as Burrell moves out. I wish I had more to say, but I really don’t.

The episode is called “Transitions,” and it feels like that’s all it is. 2/5.

Still, coming from the high of season four, season five is a definite let down thus far for me.

Episode 5:5

Okay. The scene were McNulty and Scott are in the same room, and Scott says that the serial killer called him? That was pretty dang funny. McNulty knows there’s no way this actually happened, and you can see how surprised he is, but then he’s all too ready to play along with it, surprising Scott by letting them know that the serial killer called the police too.

It looks like McNulty’s found just who he needed to make this story soar: Scott the Weasel. Though I don’t think Scott’s quite bright enough to know what’s going on. This is the episode where we see once and for all that Scott is completely full of it, making up a homeless family and using an insane homeless guy’s name to cover it. If there were any doubts, there are none now.

On the other hand, as outlandish as the serial killer plot is, Lester’s plan to wire tap Marlo illegally is all too believable. It’s a well-established fact that none of the other police really have a clue what’s going on with technology, and Lester’s always been the go-to guy when it came to taps, so to have him rig the whole thing up and do it wrong on purpose? I totally buy it, and it seems like it will probably work. Of course, we have no idea what’s really going on with it yet, since Vondas and Marlo’s method is still very much a mystery to us all.

Omar’s leap to freedom at the end of the episode is quite the cliffhanger. Did he get away? Did he die? Has he somehow figured out a way to turn invisible? He jumped from really high up, and it seems doubtful he just landed on the ground and got up and ran away, but the way this season is going . . .

Speaking of distasteful developments, Clay Davis getting so much support from Nerese and Royce just made my blood boil. This man is a human leech, and Royce and Nerese know that, but they’re more than willing to work with him (and Burrell back in the day) because they’re on the same team. It’s the sort of politics I can’t stand, and while I wish it didn’t happen in real life, something tells me it probably does. Sigh. To see Royce have that rally for Davis, and see how much the public buys into it, just makes me cringe.

Dukie, meanwhile . . . Why is he even on the corners in the first place? It’s interesting to see him try and turn to Cutty to get training on how to fight (and nice to see how far Cutty has come in understanding at least somewhat how to deal with these kids), but when that fails, he turns to Michael and guns. But even that’s not working out. The answer is clear to us: Dukie never should have dropped out of school. (It’s something I still don’t really understand. Sure, it was frightening to go to a different school, but Dukie just giving up? Very disappointing, and I really have no one to blame but Dukie.)

3/5 for this episode. Better than the last one, but still nothing like the last season.

I’m out of time for today. Three episodes to review at once  is a lot. Good thing I only have to do it one more time. Five episodes left!

3D Printing: A New Outlook

I posted yesterday that I was skeptical going into my conference on 3D printing. I was far from convinced this was something my university should be pursuing, and I really wondered if it wasn’t just another flash in the pan that people would explore and then abandon a few years later.

But somehow, and much to my surprise, the conference changed my mind.

It didn’t change my mind about 3D printing (and 3D scanning and drones and augmented reality and virtual reality, which the conference also covered), but rather, it made me see the important space in higher learning that these all occupy. I asked the panel the question I posed in my blog post yesterday: if they didn’t think 3D printing was just the next iteration of Second Life. They were candid in their response, saying that 3D printing might ultimately fade from favor (though they saw real uses for it in the here and now and immediate future).

However, they made a distinction between new technology and how that technology is used in academia. “Scholarly innovation” was a term they used that seemed particularly relevant. The thought that new technology can change the way we approach learning and teaching, as well as change the way we interact with our surroundings. There are major developments happening in technology, and they’re coming so fast that it’s hard to keep up with them all at times.

As I think about it after the fact, it seems to me like technology today is one continuous conversation. And at one point, that conversation was focused on Second Life in part, yes. And though the focus of the conversation has moved on from there, that doesn’t mean that the people who spent time exploring that space and understanding it were wasting their efforts. You can’t isolate one piece of the conversation and say it was ultimately irrelevant. That piece needs to be viewed in context, understanding where it came from and where it led.

Our students deserve a chance to be a part of that conversation. To know what’s happening and to have an influence in the future. True, some of the leads will end up as dead ends, but the learning involved in finding that out won’t be worthless. And some of those leads will end up opening huge new spaces of exploration.

The big key to me was changing my perception from thinking of 3D printing as part of a “Maker Space,” which very well might end up fizzling. Popular now, unpopular five years from now. 20 years ago, the big thing campuses were doing was enabling students to digitize content, making DVDs or editing videos for projects. Today, those efforts seem quaint: it’s so much easier to do it all with no specialty equipment needed. Pioneering efforts in 3D printing might well lead to the same place. The technology is exciting and has a lot of potential.

But those students who were able to use university equipment to digitize content went on to use that experience to vault them into their careers. You don’t end up being a major (or minor) player in the conversation by ignoring it and waiting for something you’re sure will be permanent. You dive in and start talking with others as soon as you can.

Interestingly, many of the schools as the conference were small liberal arts schools with no engineering programs. Heading into it, I’d assumed most of the application of this technology would be for science and engineering majors. Instead, presenters talked about how it brought students from many disciplines together: art, archaeology, science, teaching, education.

So at this point, I’ve shifted from the mindset of a skeptic (“is this really worthwhile”) to a believer. The big question, of course, is “how do I pay for it?” These machines aren’t cheap, after all. But apparently there’s a lot of educational discounts and grants available, and presenters noted that if you get students in particular on your side, you’d be surprised what companies are willing to do to meet student demand.

I’m hopeful my university will be able to get something like this off the ground, and not just because I want to play with the technology. I want our students to have as many opportunities as possible, and “Scholarly Innovations” seem like too important of a conversation to pass up.

3D Printing for Fun and Profit

I’m at an all-day conference on 3D printing and Maker Spaces on college campuses today. Not sure what I’m going to find out about them, but that’s pretty much the reason I’m here. Libraries have been doing a lot in the last few years to really push Maker Spaces: areas where people can come to create things, be they printed or pounded out in metal or nailed together in wood. A fair number of libraries have argued that this is the next big thing for libraries.

I’m skeptical. (Or at least, I was going into today. Maybe I’ll see the light at some point during the conference.)

The thing is, libraries a decade ago were trumpeting Second Life. How it was going to be the next big thing, and how they really needed to have a presence there to stay current and relevant.

Tell me: when’s the last time anyone went to Second Life? It was an effort that went nowhere, and all the work libraries put in to having a virtual space there was pretty much wasted.

So the big question I have is if these Maker Spaces are the start of something real and lasting, or if they’re just another Second Life. At the moment, I’d put my bet on Second Life, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t seen the Maker Space in action.

I’m interested enough to drive 3.5 hours to go to a conference about it . . .

Anyway. I’ll keep you posted on what I find out. I’m a huge techie, so I’d be all for creating something like this at my campus, but only if people are actually going to use it. Buying great 3D printers to only have them gather dust . . . not my style.