My alternative: Happy Birthday Song

I recorded this song for people who are not law breakers or pirates to sing at their next birthday bash.

Creative Commons Happy Birthday Song by Michael Foody is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at michaelfoody.com

The Ricci case in brief: The New Haven Fire Department sought to fill captain and lieutenant positions. Union contracts required the promotions to be based on the results of an examination. A city regulation states that promotions must come from a pool of the top three scorers. In this particular case this would preclude any blacks from being promoted. Additionally the pass rate for blacks was much lower than the pass rate for whites. Fearing legal action there was an investigation where another testing service representative stated that a  test could be created that would have less disparate results while admitting that the test’s disparity was within legal limits.

There was a vote and the test results were not certified. Some of the top scorers sued. (If you want a better summary read the linked wiki. I’ve found news reports to be uniformly terrible focusing primarily on the public interest angle of Mr. Ricci studying really hard because of his dyslexia which really has nothing to do with the merits of the case.) The legal question of the case is whether it is legal to disqualify a test for having a racial disparity of results, this is separate from the comparatively complicated moral question of whether it is fair to disqualify the results of a test because it would promote less equal outcomes.I think it’s necessary to compartmentalize what’s going on with the Ricci case as it relates the the Sotomayor nomination. What’s going on is not a legal argument. The merits of the legal argument are too nuanced and require an expertise that the pundits don’t have. So the debate that we’re actually engaging in is not about the merits of the case, it’s an argument about versions of fairness. Let’s not be coy, Sotomayor was chosen (in part {and I’ll be repeating this structure so please give me the benefit of the doubt when I don’t qualify every single statement}) because of her gender. Sotomayor was chosen because of her ethnicity. Sotomayor was chosen because of her narrative. All these things are true. The question then becomes, does this make the nomination inappropriate? Based on her resume’ Sotomayor is at least as qualified as Samuel Alito. In fact I would argue that much in the same way Sotomayor was selected by taking into account her identity or narrative in a way that might elevate her over another candidate with a more prestigious resume, Alito was selected by taking into account his fringe ideology especially as it relates to executive power.

Theoretically it would be nice if we chose people solely based on their merits. That’s not going to happen any time soon. The fact is of the nine supreme court justices only one is a woman and it would be difficult to argue that women are somehow innately less qualified then men (theories of greater deviation in the aptitude of males relative to females, and increased monomania in males might provide some kind of cognitive framework for a level of asymmetry). Clearly in the broader society someone is making or has made decisions that create an institutional framework that is favorable to men. The difference between these biasis and the bias exhibited in Obama choosing Sotomayor is that the bias in favor of white men is so normal as to be rendered invisible. Alito was chosen without the same sort of whisper campaign about his intellectual meddle that Sotomayor has had to endure despite having almost identical qualifications, and this difference itself can be taken as evidence of the pervasive bias that Sotomayor’s nomination is seeking to correct for. You can call it discrimination or reverse discrimination but unless you are willing to actually come out and say a group is somehow actually just inferior to the dominant group you have to admit that there has to be a reason, either historical, cultural, or institutional for the inequality of outcomes. Maybe the test itself was not littered with white culture shibboleths in a way that was responsible for the racial disparity in the pass rate, maybe the difference was instead in the school systems funded by property taxes which are lower in a black neighborhood for no other reason than because it was a black neighborhood. Is it valid to correct for one bias and not for another?

Growing up my father was fond of saying “life isn’t fair” this, as a descriptive statement supremely uncontroversial, but there is a powerful temptation by those who have benefited from the unfairness to take the descriptive as proscriptive: “life isn’t fair” can easily become “life ought not be fair”. The fact that life is unfair is not an excuse for its unfairness anymore than “people cheat on their wives” is an excuse for adultory. Absent proof of inherent inferiority (and be cautioned to be deeply suspicious of such proof  {as history is littered with examples of such proof being torn to shreds with the advance of science}) the equality of outcomes is the only fair way to judge the equality of oppurtunity.

I did the rope ladder before, with my feet hooked under the ladder, so that if it rotated I would hang from the bottom and continue to climb. It was really hard but it totally worked. Then the kid running the game said that it didn’t count because I needed to complete the game upright. Only it didn’t say that anywhere. I got so mad. I’ve probably never been so mad at a stranger. I was just furious. I asked to see the supervisor and another guy came out, he was such a dufus. I expected him to cave but he said that I wasn’t the first person to think of it, lots of people try it, and “think that they’re so clever”. I really wanted to punch the guy in the face. I did one of those things where you kind of twist your shoulder back reflexively. Like I was actually going to punch the guy. I don’t know if I wanted to be threatening or what, or just to psyche him out but I didn’t swing and he didn’t flinch. I probably could have been happy with a flinch.

I know this is stupid, like this is one of the worst things about me, but I really regretted not punching a kid in the face. I thought about the alternate world where I do, and I hit the kid, and I get arrested and feel incredibly stupid. In that world I regret hitting him, and recriminate myself for being incredibly childish, what did I want with a stupid stuffed animal anyways? Did it make any difference whether my victory was somehow sanctified? But I was pretty sure that that regret at being an idiot would feel less bad than the regret I felt. One time I told a girl that I was seeing this story and that she shouldn’t cheat on me with anyone too big, because I would probably try and fight him. She said that was really weird and she was right. I think she probably would have broken up with me eventually anyways, but this story probably speed things up.

I didn’t like carnivals or theme parks any longer. I went to one, and I saw a rope ladder. I didn’t want to try again. I don’t have any interest in vindicating myself. I didn’t think it would help. I was waiting in line for a roller coaster for a long time. When I got to the front of the line I remembered the rope ladder and I sort of relived that moment. I was so preoccupied with it that I didn’t really pay attention to the roller coaster. My mind was somewhere else, the ride didn’t even register.

This girl that I was with at the time of the rope ladder incident was talking to me a couple years ago. She brought up the rope ladder incident and how mad I had gotten like it was a comic incident, which realistically it should have been. But I told her about my bizarre preoccupation with the event. I don’t know why. I try and keep shit under wraps. I think I used the phrase “cuckolded by the universe” and she didn’t sound particularly sympathetic. I felt stupid for having mentioned it.

A week later A package arrived it was a trophy, it was of a guy climbing a mountain. The inscription had my name and it said “Carnival Rope Ladder Thing Champion”. It totally made me feel better. Better and silly all at once. Since I didn’t think about it all that often I didn’t even really realize the number it did on me. But the trophy fixed it. Whatever it was.

Twitter is sort of stupid. The character limit is really restrictive and bars all but the most banal information from being disseminated. The community is has an off-putting self-promotional streak where there’s this implied quid pro quo of follow me and I’ll follow you tit for tat. The trending topics are almost always stupid and easy for spammers to game. And at this point not all that many people I know use it.

Still I use twitter and I like twitter here’s why:

• There’s  no friends in twitter. Myspace and facebook have friends, but friend is a word that has a meaning in the real world. A pretty big important meaning. Most people don’t have all that many friends but at the same time it’s a big deal to specifically not be friends with someone. This social pressure creates a clutter where people who don’t matter at all to you anymore if they ever did monopolize most of your social bandwith.
• The previous reason is dumb. Realistically once more of my acquaintances start using twitter it will be like facebook only an even bigger pain because I can’t just accept them as friends and then block them forever when they’re wall to wall boring.
• On the other end of the spectrum is the fact that it’s sort of fun to follow people that are kind of famous. Like Aziz Ansari or Mindy Kaling basically young comedians that are on Thursday night NBC sitcoms who are ethnically Indian. This is where the character limit is golden. I can get little manageable voyeuristic insights into the lives of people who do things more interesting than I do but still not feel like I care too much about them.
• This is the biggest one. I try and write jokes and twitter gives me a reason to try to be funny, but it also is dumb enough that I don’t feel like I have the expectation to actually be funny. This is a goldmine. Really. I twittered this: While watching the man standing on the building’s ledge contemplating his own death I grew to regret my Kriss Kross ringtone. Jump Jump. See it is only sort of funny. If it wasn’t for twitter I would have no use for things that were sort of funny. I would have to wait for inspiration to strike me. And it probably wouldn’t. The freedom to be mediocre most of the time is something that is necessary to be excellent ever and twitter gives me a way to be mediocre. And that’s why I like twitter.
  

How is the above situation like nuclear proliferation? Nations with nuclear weapons are very unlikely to attack one another. In fact it has never happened that two nations with nuclear weapons have went to war with one another (directly). The fact that both the United States and the former Soviet Union both had substantial nuclear arsenals is a big part of why the two nations never went to war with each other. But the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons is directly tied to the extreme severity of the consequences. And just like in the case of the credit marks it is an easy mistake to pay insufficient attention to unlikely but catastrophic outcomes when weighing them against likely but less serious costs. 

His mother was crying already. Exhausted with stray hairs plastered to her forehead with dried sweat. She looked at him and rasped for help. The father looked on and expected to feel something, love or duty, besides sadness. A weight. The nurse called for a doctor. The father squeezed his wife’s hand, a pulse, a message in a new Morse code. A lie that things would be all right. A deceitful smile. She whispered to him a word that sounded like “please” but could have been something else.

X-rays illuminated the situation. A hole. Not a complete puncture exactly. A small structural defect in the child’s heart a section of muscle so thin that blood could, with enough pressure, permeate it completely. Soak through him like a dish rag. The calipers held against the fluorescent lit monochrome map of the child’s chest said it was 22 millimeters in diameter.

For almost nine months he was kept in an incubator with rubber gloves in the walls while the doctors, the nurses, the parents, waited for him to be carried away by ghosts. His mother would reach in through those rubber gloves and tickle him with the softness of a moth’s wings. Sometimes so delicate was her touch that the rubber prevented her from realizing she wasn’t actually touching her child at all, her finger tips hovering; a tremor above his skin.

They read to the child. They told him stories. They wondered to him aloud. The child was a confessor. He would hear their sins, their fears, he would listen, turning his head toward the sound or not, listening without judgment, placid or delighted, or miserable, but detached from their monologues. He wouldn’t issue penance. Instead he was a battery for their pain. He would store it in himself for a time when it should be called upon. He would quiver sickly with its potential. He was naked but unembarrassed. He would drift in and out of sleep constantly. His arms and legs would twitch as though he was having dreams of running. Dreams of living in the world. He could scarcely lift his head upon waking.

As far as size, mass and measure, the child grew normally. And they moved him to larger and larger incubators like he was a plant in need of re-potting. During his brief transfers from jar to jar he was exposed to the air we all breathe instead of his temperamental bespoke blend and he would smile and take it in with his eyes closed. Like a poet encountering the ocean mist. He would flick his tongue at the air like a curious snake.

He didn’t die and he kept not dying. And eventually he was brought home, or something like we think of as a home and he lived and kept not dying and it was called a miracle. He kept not dying and he learned to speak on time, his first word, in a feat of uncontested diplomacy, was parents, and walk only a little later than children who never lived in jars and he was cautioned against running or jumping or rough housing. When he took his first steps his father holding his little hands above his head as though the child was a trapeze his mother wept smiling into her hands and clawed a bit at her own eyes tearing at the tears like they were a veil. She wanted to pray to god but she had grown cagey from heartbreak and felt of thanks as a preamble to this belated gift’s repossession. Still part of her sang. And she did pray in a fashion just not to god. She prayed to the boy.

As he grew and wondered and spoke his parents grew necessarily less vigilant, their worry retreating as a barrier island moves by the patient depositing and withdrawal of sand. He had already lapped his ordained life time many times over like the lyrics of a round and so all time being borrowed it was to be spent increasingly freely. That he fell in love young was not terribly surprising. 

She was a plump girl who laughed easily and called him by his first and last name in a sort of patronizing manor that was comfortingly maternal. When I say plump I don’t mean fat. Just plump. She was pink cheeked and long haired and had a nose that, while big, only looked big from the side. She was in her way lovely and his love for her was perfect and generous and untroubled by the fact that he was more handsome than she was beautiful or the fact that she was likely to be made a widow before he had the chance to memorize her.

He grew a beard for the wedding. His bride to be protested a bit but then concocted a story in her head about how the beard was somehow a proud act of defiance against the currents of destiny which were supposed to carry him from womb to grave with the alacrity of the fingers of a magician. She didn’t use those fancy words in the story. Those are just for you dear reader. Her parents paid extra for a little groom with a beard to join her daughters doll a top the cake. They danced together slowly and clumsily though no one at the wedding noticed. Her head on his shoulder and his head on hers. Sleepily swaying with their eyes closed. The scent of each other alive in their minds. They both listened for heartbeats. She was surprised how perfect his sounded. A metronome.

The guests felt something at the wedding. A peace. A calm. A stillness. It was in truth not so much a something as a nothing. An absence of noise, of light, of distraction, even of thought, so powerful was this absence that it was only after they went home that they decided it was true love, a cure to the placebo of what they thought of as love before. The magic love that turns frogs into princes and wakes sleeping princesses. The groom’s hands felt as though they were pricked by pins in his every pour he felt a tingle of a mild electric shock, the taste of copper. He felt a vacuum behind his eyes. And he smiled through it because it was best.

He had a child of his own. His wife was terrified upon discovering her pregnancy. She kept it secret and was troubled by dreams of the baby inheriting the debt that his father had successfully shirked. She woke sweating and shook him awake. She whispered in his ear that she was pregnant. She was haunted no more by the specter of her child’s fate. Not even the ordinary worries of a mother. She tapped on the stomach like it was the glass of an aquarium filled with colorful fish. Upon his waking he didn’t remember what she had said to him. It was only days later that he was again told about his impending offspring. It was a girl and she was born and she was beautiful. And he held her and he smiled at her and she felt hot to the touch, like a stove not a fever, but he didn’t drop her or look panicked, he just held on to her because he had grown used to these feelings.

It was a Thursday when he died. He had to work late and driving home he stopped to fill up his tank. It was late and he went inside to pay. The bells on the door twinkled as he entered and a man in front of the counter turned to him and fired one shot. The bullet found his chest. He sank to his knees and the crawled to his back then giggled then died. An autopsy revealed that the bullet was lodged in the dilapidated wall of his heart.

He was cremated and the smoke rose into the clouds and fell again as rain and people looked out there windows at the storm and were unwell and closed their eyes and saw pictures of snakes and spiders and smelled rot in their noses and felt a tickle in their throats and tears in their eyes and they learned things that they would rather have not known and they slept when they weren’t tired and dreamed of their children and the ghosts that would carry them off.

The window, the outside window, was made from the same two way mirror stuff as they have in interrogation rooms. It was Lettered in white and it caught the reflection of the snow and the white winter sky and it was difficult to read. It said Hazeltown Post Office. The detective had known the postal clerk who worked there for some time. They thought of themselves as friends but didn’t think of each other often enough for it to be true. The wrestled together in high school and saw each other when the detective bought stamps. 

He was a big guy but with an amazingly gentle manor, he just radiated good will and patience and understanding. He sold used books on the internet and made some pretty decent money that way. The post office tried to keep him busy during the day and he tried to make himself useful but he still found himself with a lot of free time which he filled by keeping a novel jammed into a thin drawer under his desk. The spine was cracked and the cheap cardboard cover was threatening to come off. It was a cheap old book the kind with bright yellow edges. A western. He wore braces on his wrists for carpal tunnel and sat all day in a chair that was the envy of all his peers. He saw the detective in the distance and pretended not to see him so that he could rise from his work and offer a warm smile when he finally entered.

The detectives entrance was signaled by the tinkling of black iron bells which seemed to startle him as he turned sharply to confront his imagined jingling pursuer. He noticed the bells and blushed with embarrassment and saw the postal clerks smile and smiled back sort of jealous of his inability to convey the same beatific warmth with his own smile.

“Good to see you, what can I do for you Hank?” said the postman.

“I’m actually here about a case.”

“Oh no. Is everything ok?” 

“Yeah, things are fine, I just want you to look at something for me. See we got this letter the other day. I can’t get into the whole story, but we need to know if the postmark is accurate.”

“Mail fraud?”

“Maybe, but like I said I can’t get into it. You know how it goes.” The opened his brief case and brought out a manila folder containing a bag with the envelope in. He lifted it gingerly took a look at it himself, nodded, and place it on the counter. The postman eyed it suspiciously.

“Um, what exactly is it that I should be looking for?”

“I want to know whether the postmark was doctored. Whether the date is accurate.”

“It looks real Hank, it’s not like there’s any secret way of telling. We’re not to concerned with people faking post marks. There isn’t even a standard postmark that’s used everywhere sometimes they just get stamped by hand or x’d out in marker. This one looks like it was done by machine, but it doesn’t really mean anything, if someone was inclined they could just print their own.”

“So it might have just been doctored and hand delivered?” 

“Do you mind if I touch it? Just the bag. Not the letter. Fingerprints.”

“Sure. Knock yourself out.”

The postman lifted the bag delicately as though it would crumble and and spun it around to look at the other side. He pointed to a yellow sticker with a little bar code on it and said, “This here is a from one of the machines we use to process the mail. It’s pretty easy to take off though so it could have just been stuck on. I’ve never heard of anyone going to that much trouble to fake a date though. Thing is, if it’s real it should have another bar code like it but in florescent ink right under it. They use them when the machines send a letter to the wrong place so that other machines won’t keep sending it there over and over again. This letter looks like it’s been sent around a lot so if it was a fake it was a damn… thoughtful fake.”

The detective smiled, “That’s some good detective work, it’s a big help. Honestly. Thanks.”

The postman smiled. Proudly. “Glad I could help. Anything else?”

“Nope, got more stamps than I know what to do with. Pay my bills online now.”

“That online bill payment really cuts into the business.”

“I’d imagine so.”

“Take care now. Good luck with your case.” He said the word case with a tone of voice, a face, that revealed his real envy for the imagined excitement of police work. It was an honest sentiment but he revealed it almost entirely for the detective’s benefit. The postman had a gentle manor. He radiated good will.

He walked down the halls deliberately, he wanted to communicate with his walk. Almost a march. The walk it meant something. Business. It was brisk. He didn’t look at his feet. When he saw a coworker he smiled. He was courteous. But it wasn’t a warm smile. It was brief. It was an acknowledgement of the fact that a smile was called for. It meant nothing beyond it. The smile. 

He walked like this often. He liked it. He imagined people seeing him. He imagined what they were thinking. It felt like reading minds. In his mind, in his mind’s voice they said things like “whoa where’s the fire?” or “ut oh, someone’s in trouble.” If it was a girl his mind’s voice was higher in pitch. Like a bad impression. Like reading the dialogue of a bedtime story to a child. He didn’t have children.

In truth there was no urgency. There was no fire. He had only chores. Reports to type up. His most pressing case was a robbery. While technically true the word conjured up a falsely grandiose image of the crime. In fact the robbery was a lawnmower stolen from an unlocked garage. An old lawnmower. The owner had said, that he was “pretty sore about the thing.” The detective said he’d do his best but he couldn’t promise anything. The detective wished that the owner had used the phrase “violated”. 

He had a folder. With Polaroids of footprints. Of tracks in the snow showing where the lawnmower had rolled. They led to the side walk and to the street and he could tell that the lawnmower had been loaded into a truck with chains on the tires. He had told the man this and the man had seemed hopeful. That was a shame. It wasn’t much of a clue. He had asked the neighbors if they had seen a truck parked there. No one had. It was a small town, but it wasn’t one of those small towns where everyone knew one another. It was a small town of a few thousand strangers who drove in their cars and watched television at night. The lawnmower was gone.

He got called into the sergeant’s office and he did his walk. He knocked on the the frosted glass panel lightly and heard no reply he knocked harder and harder until he grew concerned about striking the glass and instead wrapped against the wood. “Come in” said a voice.

The Sargent was a slight man mostly bald, pig pink. White hair sprang from his ears like cumulus clouds. He wore a thin moustache curiously darker than the rest of his hair meticulously trimmed so that it extended exactly to the edge of his mouth and no further. He spoke in a halting and deferential manner incongruous with his elevated station.

“We’ve got something here, might be a murder, might be not. Can’t say for certain. Tell you it spooks me though. Kid, his brother fresh buried, died in a car accident, calls says he got a letter warning that his brother going to die. Now sure that’s odd but here’s the parculier thing about it. The letter was dated before the crash and only arrives now. So thing is, if the letter was really written before the accident that’s a ’spicious thing isn’t it?”

The detective frowned and traced the topography of his cauliflowered ear delicately with his fingers. “Do we have the envelope? The letter?” 

“Yeah, got them right here. Gloves?”

“Not just yet, I’m just looking at the writing. Awful penmanship. The letter and the envelope match. I thought maybe someone just took an old envelope stuck a new letter, found it in the trash maybe, but no. Or recycling, I guess, kids recycle these days. Plus the envelopes torn all to shit. If that’s the way the kid opens his mail good luck finding some trash you can pass off as new.”

“Maybe someone sent a letter before the accident, found a way to get it back. Then replaced it?”

The detective shook his head. “Why would anyone do that unless they knew that brother was going to die. What use is a post dated envelope to a person? Either the letter is real and a warning, or it is fake and a trick. It could be a forgery.”

“You mean the writing in the letter forged to match an envelope?”

“Could be, but I expect a man would remember getting a letter with such distinctively bad handwriting twice. No, I meant the postmark. It looks real enough but I can’t imagine it would be so hard to forge or doctor.”

The sergeant smiled, “That would explain the whole thing, but what about all the stickers and such, the not at this address, are they forgeries too?” 

“Could be. They’re not currency they look right, but I can’t say I could tell a real from a fake. We’ll take it to the post office and check. Seems much more likely that someone doctored an envelope than someone warned about a car accident weeks in advance through a letter. What kind of man thinks ’someone’s going to die let me write a letter.’ It isn’t the 1800s. We have phones, we have cars. There’s another option that we haven’t talked about though. That the prank isn’t on the kid, it’s on us.”

A troubled look crossed sergeant’s face like a suspicious man walking under a ladder “I thought of that too, if it was the kid doing the prank it would be much less trouble. He takes an old envelope, writes a fake letter in the same shitty hand writing, calls the police giggles well we pull our hair out. What’s left of it at least. Thing is it would take a sick fuck to use his own brother’s death as cause for a joke.”

The detective rubbed his ear and grimaced “If it’s a joke at all it’s a sick fuck.”

“I know, but it’s easier to believe that someone is being a sick fuck at… to the kid, than the kid is being a sick fuck to us.” 

“Lots of sick fucks out there.” ”Your too right on that one. How’s the lawnmower case coming?” ”The lawnmower” said the detective “is fucked.”