The Yin Blog

Living without a fridge

Around the time I was deciding whether to move to Oregon, I read a story about a trend among some Oregonians to give up their refrigerators(!).  The theory is that a refrigerator is one of the biggest energy eaters in a house.  You can replace a fridge with frequent trips to the supermarket, a small freezer for ice, and a cooler for milk, etc. (kept cool with ice from the freezer).  Of course, whether this is actually a carbon reduction depends, I guess, on how much gas (if any) is used for those frequent supermarket trips.

Anyway, it seemed kind of crazy to me, but now I'm going to get to experience it.  We decided to replace the old fridge in our house with an EnergyStar model that will also provide chilled and filtered water and ice, etc.  Even better, an Oregon state entity, Energy Trust, was willing to pick the old fridge and give us $30 in the process for improving our energy use.  However, both Energy Trust and the appliance store would only give 4 hour pick-up/delivery windows, and we couldn't risk having the new fridge delivered before the old one was taken, so we scheduled the pick-up for today (Friday) and delivery on Monday.  In retrospect, it would've been better to have those pushed off to Monday/Tuesday, but oh well . . .

So this morning, we cleared out the freezer in the fridge and stashed all that in the upright freezer in our garage.  The remaining perishables went into a big camping cooler with blocks of artificial ice.  Fortunately, the nearest supermarket is just a mile away.

In the meantime, we're going to live like Oregonians!

Disneyland and property rights in tickets

Due to a family matter, I had to head down to Los Angeles last week, so naturally my wife and I took our two little boys to Disneyland as well.  While there, the following two possibly analogous incidents occurred that got me thinking about property rights in tickets.

The first was that we decided to go on California Soarin' (in California Adventures), which is kind of a flight simulator ride with a big curved screen and suspended roller coaster-like seats that tilt with the picture to enhance the feeling of motion.  It's a popular ride, so the line gets long, and it's also one of the rides that Disney offers "Fastpass" to mitigate lines for those willing to work.  The way Fastpass works is that you insert your park entry card into a machine near the ride, and the machine gives you back your entry card and a ride ticket.  The catch is that the ride ticket lets you bypass the "standby" line only for a one-hour period, and that one-hour period is in the future.  So, if you visited the Fastpass machine at 10 am, you might be given a return window of 12 noon to 1 pm.

Anyway, we decided to brave the approximately 45 minute stand-by line, but as we were walking up to the end of the line, a woman approached us, asked if we were going to ride Soarin', and when we said we were, she gave us her Fastpass tickets, which we about to become valid.  Woo hoo!  So instead of having to wait 45-55 minutes, we bypassed the long line and had about a 5 minute wait (basically for the designated simulator to clear out).  I'll get to the potential issues involved in a moment.

The second incident occurred later that same day.  As we were exiting the park (well before closing time), a young woman approached us and asked if we were leaving.  When we said we were, she asked, "Can I have your tickets?"  Naturally, we refused.  It would have been pointless, since the regular Disneyland tickets require a valid hand-stamp for re-entry that day, and you can only get a hand-stamp if you've already been in a park, which of course requires that you already have had a ticket.

Nevertheless, the woman's request struck me as quite wrong for reasons beyond the pragmatic.  It would represent revenue loss to Disneyland, since the only other way she could get in would be to buy a ticket.  But then I started wondering about how I was able to Fastpass the Soarin' ride.  The lawyerly side of me could respond that there was no revenue loss to Disneyland, since the Fastpasses are free (but you essentially can only have one active at a time).  Therefore the situations are completely different.  And from Disneyland's perspective, I would think that is right.  On the other hand, I suppose the other customers waiting in the stand-by line might have had a complaint, since we (marginally) extended their wait, which would not have happened had we gone through the stand-by line.  Then again, the customers were no worse off than if the original Fastpassing woman had used her Fastpass instead of giving it to us, and one can wonder why those customers would care who imposed the marginal increase in wait time. . . .

Sarah Palin and "Prison Break"

For some reason, when I first saw that Sarah Palin was quitting as Governor of Alaska, I wondered if it was an instance of life imitating art -- specifically, "Prison Break"'s season 2, episode 19 ("Sweet Caroline"), in which President Caroline Reynolds surprisingly announces her resignation.  Why?  She was being blackmailed by both the Company and protagonist Michael Scofield, and resigning was the only way out of her dilemma.

Of course, I don't really think this, but the hasty announcement does make you wonder . . . .

The Mall of America and the Minn.-St. Paul airport

So the other day, I was flying from Portland to Iowa City, with a stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport.  Naturally, I arrived in the F terminal and had to head over to the A terminal, which gave me a nice scenic tour of the airport, including that section in the middle that looks a lot like a shopping mall.

The strangest airport store that I saw was one for the Mall of America.

Are you kidding?  The Mall of America has its own mall store in the MSP airport?!?

7 years of separation(s)

I was just thinking today about how 7 years seems to be a defining period for me going back a ways now.  I finished college in 1988 without much of an idea of what I wanted to do for a career.  7 years later, I finished law school in 1995 with a very clear idea (become a law professor).  7 years after that, I started teaching law here at the University of Iowa in 2002.  And 7 years have passed since then, and now I'm about to move on to teaching law at Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon.  Pretty coincidental . . . .

Use of foreign languages in TV shows

So I'm (re)watching season 3 of "24" while I work out, and something occurred to me about the use of foreign languages on TV shows for Americans. . . .  The apparent villains of this season of "24" are two Mexican brothers.  We are repeatedly shown scenes where the two of them speak in slightly accented English.  That got me wondering: why?

I mean, if they really are meant to be speaking in English, why?  Their English is quite good for a second language, but if I were speaking to my brother about my supersecret plans to buy a deadly virus to sell to terrorists, I'd do it in the language I was most comfortable with (i.e., Spanish for these guys).

So instead, maybe they really are speaking Spanish, and it's just been "translated" for viewers.  I wouldn't have a problem with this as a narrative convention.  (In fact, the best use of it that I've seen was in "The Hunt for Red October," where a scene early on starts with a character speaking Russian, and the camera zooms in slowly, then stops, and when the camera pulls back out, he's speaking English.)  But . . . in the very same episode, we see another character speak in some Eastern European language, which is translated verbally for us!!!

I think I'd rather that everything be "translated" for us, with the implicit understanding that conversations are in the appropriate language given the situation.  Good actors like Joaquim de Almeida, who played one of the Mexican brothers, can convey nuance that would be lost if we had to rely strictly on subtitles.  Besides, the subtitles are often sufficiently inaccurate so as to change the meaning of the dialogue -- a fact that my wife noted when we watched the season 6 "prequel," which is available on the season 5 DVD set.

A sad story and a warning for parents

Here on YouTube is one of those heartbreaking stories that makes you want to go pick up your kids and give them a big hug.  It's also an important lesson about the relative safety of booster seats vs. 5 point harness seats.

Revisiting Berkeley

Coming back to Berkeley after having graduated from law school eleven years ago was quite the experience. I had been back a few times during my clerking years, but since then, only a brief visit in 2002 after leaving Munger Tolles and before coming to Iowa. A lot seemed to have changed, or maybe my memory just isn’t what it used to be. Some of the familiar landmarks were still there: the Greek restaurant on College; Top Dog hot dogs; Moe’s used books; and Café Strada. But other places that I remembered were no longer around.

And the law school itself had changed.  I don't remember the bathrooms' having baby changing stations or motion detector-triggered lights.  Or Cal logos on the soap dispensers.

This may be an indication that I’ve been in Iowa a long time, but I was surprised by how many Asian students there were on campus. I don’t mean foreign students (though some might be), just persons of Asian descent. I think our law school (Iowa) does a pretty good job, given obvious constraints of being in a small college town in a Midwestern state that’s overwhelmingly white, but there’s diversity and then there’s DIVERSITY.

The law and terrorism conference was really interesting and fun, and I was able to reconnect with some of my mentor law professors, including Jesse Choper and Paul Mishkin. I also was able to have dinner with Jan Vetter the night that I flew in. And I got to see my law school classmate, David Kaye, who happened to be one of the co-organizers of the event.

I can’t say the entire trip was as satisfying. I was staying at the Beau Sky Hotel, which had the one virtue of being just a few blocks from the law school. Unfortunately, it had a lot of disvirtues – being a block away from the infamous Telegraph Avenue, it was noisy well into the early morning; the supposed wireless Internet access was mostly non-existent; and the bed tilted to one side. But it was a football weekend, so hotel space was tight in Berkeley.

Random question of the day

This question actually came up in a conversation I had with a colleague (I asked the question):

If you had to choose one or the other, would you rather eat a ratburger or an insectburger?

Surprisingly, that colleague and another one that I polled had trouble deciding.  Maybe it's just me, but I'd think it's a really easy choice -- rats are still mammals, not too different from rabbits (which I've eaten once before), whereas insects are bugs (ick!).

Grade skipping

Ann Althouse blogs about how grade skipping is coming back into vogue:

I remember when grade-skipping went out of fashion. It was right around the time when I was in grade school. My mother told me later that they wanted me to skip, and she was adamantly against it. I was outraged that I wasn't asked and that I was stuck with a whole extra year of sitting in a classroom.

Everyone's experience is different, of course, which is part of the point that Prof. Althouse is making (her mom skipped a grade, hated it, and resolved not to make the same "mistake" for her daughter).  There are undeniable benefits to grade skipping, as Prof. Althouse notes: no need for "gifted" classes, more efficiency, etc.

At the same time, I wonder if she discounts too quickly the conventional explanation given for not having kids skip grades: "The whole explanation was a social one, as if life will be so wonderful if only you're surrounded by kids your own age."

I skipped a grade somewhere between 6th and 10th grades (unclear which one -- long story), and also have a birthday late in the year, which meant that I was 14 when I started 11th grade.  Being skinny and also only 5'5" was not exactly an ideal physical state to be in.  By the time I started college at 16, at least I was 5'10", but then I was only 120 pounds.  (Running cross-country that first quarter eliminated any possibility of the "freshman 15," which would have been a welcome gain in my case.)  I can't say that I was scarred irrevocably by the whole experience, since I am quite happy where I am now, and the twists and turns that brought me here almost certainly wouldn't have happened if I hadn't set off for college at 16.

But at the same time, the social aspect of schooling is not an insignificant one, and being a scrawny, small 14 year old amongst a bunch of much bigger 16 year olds -- even when intellectually I was at least their match -- was almost certainly suboptimal in a lot of ways.

Which leads me to wonder whether grade skipping causes more social problems for boys than it does girls.  After all, girls mature physically and emotionally faster and earlier than boys do, so a 14 year old girl may (in general) be more capable of coping in an environment full of 16 year old girls and boys than a 14 year old boy would be able to.