“I think a baby seal just died.”  Heh.  ..bruce..

Sandra and I are throwing one of our periodic very-large-scale BBQs this Saturday, January 30th, 2 to 7 pm. If you’re in Colorado (or can get here) and you’d like to come, drop me a line. If you’re wondering what these BBQs are like (and what’s on the menu), here’s a blog post from a few years ago chronicling one. Should be fun.  ..bruce..

Our youngest daughter, Salem (almost 24), moved back in with us a few months ago, due to problems with her roommates in the house she shared with others. She’s a delight — low maintenance and fun to have around — so we’ve been happy to have her back. She’s the manager of a nearby Hot Topic store, has a boyfriend and an active social life, so it’s not like we even see her all that often.

Something over a week ago, however, a box of peach-flavored green tea showed up in our pantry. Some of our kids (including Salem) are inactive, and we’ve made it clear that while their choices are their choices, we’d appreciate it if they didn’t bring some of those choices into our home. They’ve been very good about that, so I was surprised to see the box of tea appear.

A few days passed as I debated whether to bring the issue up and, if so, how. I left on a short business trip to New York without having made a decision. I got back very late Friday night and crashed when I got home, dealing with a worsening cough that I picked up on the trip.

Saturday, there were a few critical things I need to pick up at the store, so my wife Sandra and I ran out together. As we were driving along, Sandra was filling me in on the past few days, then said, “You know, I bought what I thought was a box peach tea for myself several days ago, but when I went to make some on Friday, I realized that I had bought peach-flavored green tea. D’oh! So I threw it out.” I chuckled and told her about having spotted it and trying to figure out how to bring it up with Salem.

Then I realized: the tea sat in our pantry for a week. Salem, if she saw it, knows she didn’t buy it and therefore is likely wondering if Sandra and I are drifting a bit ourselves. Great.

So a day or two later, I did talk with Salem — to tell her the funny story of what Mom did. A nicer talk, all the way around.  ..bruce..

People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor.

The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented Windex.

Katie Liljenquist, assistant professor of organizational leadership at BYU’s Marriott School of Management, is the lead author on the piece in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. Co-authors are Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

The researchers see implications for workplaces, retail stores and other organizations that have relied on traditional surveillance and security measures to enforce rules.

“Companies often employ heavy-handed interventions to regulate conduct, but they can be costly or oppressive,” said Liljenquist, whose office smells quite average. “This is a very simple, unobtrusive way to promote ethical behavior.”

Perhaps the findings could be applied at home, too, Liljenquist said with a smile. “Could be that getting our kids to clean up their rooms might help them clean up their acts, too.”

My wife will be gratified to know — far too late, since our kids are (mostly) gone — that she was right about the need for them to keep their rooms smelling fresh.  ..bruce..

Yeah, I should have written and posted this yesterday, but I didn’t realize it was the 20th anniversary until today (thanks to this post).

Sandra and I, with seven of our nine kids, had moved to Soquel, California in early 1988. Actually, we were five miles outside of Soquel; we bought a home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a long ranch-style house on five acres of land covered with redwood trees. Then we hit the Tech Crash of 1988-89 and worked hard to keep things going, while I was continuing to do contract work at Apple and Sun, as well as writing both articles (mostly Macworld) and books (The NeXT Book, Addison-Wesley, 1989).

At 5:04 pm on October 17, 1989, I had just gotten home about an hour or so earlier from a drive up to San Francisco, most likely to the Macworld offices. I was in my home office, using my NeXT cube and a modem to be on-line on BIX (BYTE Information eXchange). Sandra and most of the kids were home, though Jacqui and Heather (both 13) were over at a friend’s house some miles away making poodle skirts for a school ‘sock hop’. The quake started, that in itself not a big surprise; I was a Californian, and we’d lived here in the Bay Area for nearly 2 years, so we were all quite used to minor shakers. But then it got very strong, very fast. I jumped up and braced myself in the doorway that led from my office to the master bedroom. The shaking was very hard and very long, and all I could think about were the very tall redwood trees all around the house, any one of which could fall over and slice the house into two parts.

Sandra, in the meantime, was near the kitchen, in the middle of the house. She grabbed the kids who were home and tried to get them all into a doorway while the quake was going on. At one point during the quake, our daughter Crystal (age 6) looked up at Sandra and said, “I don’t want to live here anymore.”

The quake finally died down, and I went out through the office’s sliding glass door to the outside deck and saw a glorious, once-in-several-lifetimes sight: dozens of giant redwood trees all swaying in unison in big sweeping arcs, while millions of tiny golden redwood leaves drifted down. None of the trees had fallen over, so I ran back into the house to check on everyone and to see what damage had been done to the house.

The home phone rang almost immediately. It was Sandra’s mother, Nora, calling from Orem, Utah. Sandra’s dad, Andy, had been watching the World Series game, and when the earthquake struck, Nora immediately called us to see if we were OK. It was the last incoming phone call we’d get for several days, as attempts by most of the rest of the country to call into the Bay Area would jam up the incoming phone lines. Sandra assured her mom that we were all OK, and then we set about taking inventory. The kids, while a bit terrified, were all unhurt, so we did a quick assessment on the house itself.

The house actually came through the quake very well. There were a few small cracks in one wall, and a few bookshelves had fallen over, but that was about it. We quickly started filling up sinks and tubs with water; we were on a well and had a holding tank (gravity feed), but we didn’t want to take chances. A smart move, as it turned out — the quake cracked the line from the well to the holding tank. Power was out, so the well was no longer pumping water up to the tank; instead, the tank emptied itself through that cracked line over the next several hours.

We had two water heaters, one in the garage and one in the basement. The one in the garage was tucked into a closet and came through the quake just fine. The other one  in the basement was somewhat freestanding and so had “walked around” a bit, snapping one of the water feeds. I shut things down and walked the tank back into place.  (Lesson #1: if you live in earthquake country, always be sure that your water heater is strapped down quite securely.)

By now, the aftershocks had started. Since (as it turned out) we were only 3-4 miles from the epicenter of the quake, we felt all the aftershocks — and there would be literally dozens of them (“Fifty-one aftershocks of magnitude 3.0 and larger occurred during the first day after the main shock, and 16 occurred during the second day. After 3 weeks, 87 magnitude 3.0 and larger aftershocks had occurred.”) We felt all those aftershocks and many smaller ones as well.

While power was out, we did have a battery-powered radio, as well as the car radio in our minivan. However, we could only find a few stations on the air, and most of them were local stations trying to cope with the aftermath of the quake themselves. (We didn’t have great reception of anything where we lived.)

As mentioned, we had two daughters over visiting friends several miles away. I got into the minivan and drove off to get them. The effects of the quake were  quite visible; there were actual landslides in several places, and obvious structural damage to both houses and buildings. When I got to the house where Jacqui and Heather were supposed to be, it turned out that the family there had already left with them (and the other girls who were there) to drive them all home.

If I recall correctly — it has been 20 years after all — I stopped at one small hardware store on the way home. The large front window of the store was completely smashed out, and the owner was selling stuff (batteries, mostly) directly through the window. I bought some batteries and headed home.

The eerie part at this point is that we had no idea what other damage had occurred or how widespread it was. For all we knew, we were on the outskirts of the damage zone, and much of the Bay Area could be in ruins. Even if we had had electricity, we only got one TV station back in the mountains, and that one pretty poorly. As I mentioned, the local radio stations were either off the air (with power problems of their own) or were mostly just coming up to the mike periodically and saying, “There’s been a large earthquake — as soon as we have information, we’ll let you know more.”

Our house ran entirely on electricity (which was gone and would be for about 24 hours), so I fired up the BBQ grill out back to cook dinner. Afterwards, we gathered all the kids in the living room with sleeping bags and pillows, built a fire in the fireplace, and spent the night there. By now, some of the radio stations were back on the air, so Sandra and I used the battery-powered radio, with each using one earpiece of a standard pair. We spent most of the night listening to live reports of the devastation around the Bay Area, including the fires in the Marina district, the damage to the Bay Bridge, and the collapse on the Nimitz Freeway, all while aftershocks were hitting every few minutes. It truly felt apocalyptic.

Chase’s recollection (age 16 at the time of the quake)

It was an afternoon that I did not have much homework, and I took advantage because I was tired from early morning seminary.  I woke to the violent shaking and watching the windows in my bedroom dance back and forth, as they bounced up and down with the tremors.

I quickly got into the doorway and waited for what honestly seemed like an eternity until the calm finally set in.  Rushing to the kitchen, mom was there heading out the back sliding door onto the deck.  The fear from the earthquake was only the first of many fears that crossed my path.  The next was being outside, watching the giant redwood trees swaying in unison with the only sounds made were from the falling debris, and creaking sounds from the trees themselves.  There were always birds making ruckous and just other sounds of nature, but at that moment, the trees were the lords of the dance.

At that moment, one of the many aftershocks hit and I just remember feeling as if I was strapped into a horrible carnival ride that I was not able to see what might be coming around the next turn.

Over the next few hours, there were many assessments made of the interior and exterior of the home.  For me, the sight of cracked walls and topled bookshelves was beyond what I could grasp.  I knew we were in earthquake country, but no one ever explained the feeling of standing in a doorway as the house groaned all around you.  Or, the many aftershocks that made sleeping close to an impossiblity.

As we all gathered in the living room in sleeping bags and flashlights, there was a little bit of chatter, but no topics could outdo the tenseness we all felt.  Unexpectedly, another tremor would hit, some were huge and felt like the original, some were just enough to break your calm all over again.

What is funny is that all these years later, I still remember that the high school was supposed to have a day off on Wednesday, and I was so excited to go to seminary in my pijamas.  To say the least, we did not have seminary the next morning, and we had several days off from school as repairs needed to be made on classrooms and even the swimming pool on campus.

There are moments, even 20 years later that I cringe or my heart skips a beat when I feel the floor shake from someone walking across or sitting on an overpass when a large truck passes.

Crystal’s recollection (age 6 at the time of the quake)

Right after the earthquake had hit and we were all gathering outside on the deck, when you came out and Mom (I think it was mom) freaked out because a bottle of ketchup had spilled on your birkenstocked foot and she thought you’d been injured.

Wes, Jon and I sleeping outside your bedroom door (after you callously told us we could no longer sleep in your bedroom). I remember being woken up by Mom tearing open the door after an aftershock that I had apparently slept through.

Wes refusing to leave the couch against the wall because of the aftershocks. One night the entire family was sitting at the dinner table, trying to persuade him to finally leave the couch, and just as he gets up, another shock hits and he dives back onto the couch.

Heather’s recollection (age 13 at the time of the quake)

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 20 years! I remember being at the friend’s house (I can’t remember their names, unfortunately) and I believe we were cutting the fabric out for the skirts when the house started shaking. At first I thought that someone was jumping up and down upstairs until I remembered that they didn’t have a second floor. Once we realized what was happening, we all ran to the door that lead to the garage. It seemed like 5 or so of us tried to fit in the door frame together. We could hear stuff falling out of the kitchen cupboards and breaking. It seemed to go on forever. Once the main quake was over, I remember we all went outside. Most of the houses were actually okay, except for the chimneys. Once we got home, I remember all of us staying in the living room together. I didn’t realize how many aftershocks there would be, and how strong many of them would be. I have other random little bits I remember too, mostly visual: the concrete stage broken and partially fallen (I believe it was on the beach at the boardwalk), tree debris (leaves, pinecones, small branches) all over the driveway and road by our house, and some pub in Soquel that had a chimney covering part of one wall that had completely fallen down (we drove by it all the time). And of course, how very easy it was to scare Mom. Even well into our time in San Diego, you’d start shaking the window behind Mom and she’d start to freak out and get mad at you. I’m sure it still works to this day.

Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”

But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.

I am profoundly struck by the wisdom and courage of this woman in how she dealt with a painful and risky situation. I think there’s a lot here for LDS couples who have hit a rocky spot in their marriages. Read the whole thing.  ..bruce..

Latter-day Saints tend be very familiar with the “Christus” statue by Bertel Thorvaldsen, because replicas of the statue are found at several LDS temple visitor centers (most notably Salt Lake [see above] and Washington DC) and photos of the statue itself are commonly used in LDS materials.

Well, as it turns out, a church in Sweeden has build a replica of the “Christus” statue using Legos:

While my first impulse is to wince, I think that children would be utterly fascinated by this statue, and that it might give them an entirely different perspective on their own roles as artists and creators with the materials they typically play with.  ..bruce..

Here’s her first effort. She works part-time at Curves (a women-only fitness center), and her employer was closing down one Curves center and moving all the equipment to another. My wife got several of the local missionaries to help move the equipment. Afterwards, Sandra’s boss made the missionaries do a full circuit on the workout equipment. They found it was a lot harder than they thought:

This was done using her cell phone, hence the jerky quality. ..bruce..

Heh.  Note how we sometimes assume that our departed ancestors really want to get in touch with us? Maybe not so much.  ..bruce..

Tiffany Gee Lewis has a wonderful column this morning about how kids seem to grow up overnight. Kids grow up and grow away, and we deal with that with a mixture of loss and relief (I say that as the father of nine and an empty-nester).

Years ago, when Steven Spielberg filmed Stanely Kubrick’s planned film, “AI: Artificial Intelligence” (2001), it was seen largely as a science fiction movie, and received something of a lukewarm reception. My take on the film was quite different: that is was a brilliant, painful and cautionary story about parents and children. I wrote a review to that effect which is still lodged in the eternal archives of the internet.

Reading Lewis’ column brought that review to mind, so I’ve reprinted the review below. It has spoilers, though, so if you’ve never seen the film, you may want to go watch it on your own first.

AI: A Horrific Fairy Tale for Adults [SPOILERS BELOW]

I have been fascinated by some of the sharp divisions of opinion surrounding AI as reviews (official and un-) have come out in the past few weeks. Today, my wife Sandra, our 18-year-old daughter Crystal, and I all went to see the 12:00 noon showing at the Uptown here in DC (enormous screen, great theatre). I believe that Crys was entertained but not particularly moved. Sandra and I — who between us have 9 kids from our separate prior marriages — both felt as though we had had a dentist with sharp, tiny, hand-held instruments working on our hearts for 2 1/2 hours, with pauses to let us recover, only to dig in again. Why the difference? Because we’re parents and she’s not. And therein, I think, lies much of the great divide.

AI is not hard SF. It is a cautionary horror story cum fairy tale cum myth, probably one of the best examples since Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. It takes a simple premise — what if we could teach a machine to love as a child loves, to think as a child thinks, and to want to be loved as a child is loved? — and carries it through to some excruciating, non-obvious and unflinching consequences that, I suspect, resonate primarily with parents who have had children of that age. As with Frankenstein, the core of AI involved hubris, temptation, rejection, and consequences. Hubris was the unthinking arrogance of Dr. Hobby and associates in tampering with the ecology of family and love without due regard for the unintended consequences — set, ironically, against a backdrop of melted icecaps (frankly, my first clue this wasn’t hard SF) and other unintended consequences of meddling with the physical ecology at large.

Temptation was Monica, watching her flesh-and-blood son Martin in cryonics for five years, not knowing whether a cure would ever be found for him (another fairy tale/myth motif), now being confronted with a machine, called David, that looks like a little boy, that — if and when she says the magic words — will fall eternally in love with her. Monica has a void inside which remains gaping and unhealed because of Martin’s suspension between life and death, which is what makes her temptation so real. In far too many movies and novels, the key temptation is so stupid and the consequences so obvious that I lose most or all sympathy for the character (e.g., King’s Pet Sematary). What made this movie so painful for me was how realistic I felt the temptation was. If I had one child, frozen, near death, with no clear prospect of ever having him/her back and no prospect of ever having another — yes, I might be tempted, and I think my wife even more so, to have something like David to fill that void, and we would stumble into the trap without realizing what we’ve done.

Rejection comes with the realization of the artificial, unnatural aspect of the relationship. Children grow; they mature (usually); there is always a bittersweet aspect to losing the simple, passionate love of a child, especially once they become brain-dead adolescents , but one wishes children to grow and go out on their own. Kubrick/Spielberg first carefully lay out the slowly-unfolding hell of having a child-like automaton with real feelings stuck at that particular emotional age, then accelerate and compound that hell by bringing back the real child, warts and all. Can one love a machine when one’s own flesh and blood is at hand? What are our loyalties, our instincts? Martin’s and David’s reactions to each other are very believable (speaking particularly as someone who has had experience merging two sets of kids together into one family), as are frankly the different reactions to the situation between and her husband Henry (with whom, remember, David has not bonded; a classic parent/step-parent divide, one with strong Oedipal/Freudian overtones). Martin is less pleasant, less pure in his love, less physically perfect, less lovable — but his is Monica and Henry’s flesh, their progeny; having nearly lost him once, can they reject him in favor of something that runs off electric current, something manufactured? What would that say about them as humans, as parents? Yet David really loves Monica, and she has to choose between him and the rest of her very-human family.

Whatever the twists and turns of the future projected, the emotional consequences for all involved, but particularly for David, are as inexorable as they are logical. For me, one of the most haunting lines of the film is when Monica abandons David in the forest (another classic fairy tale touch), shouting cautions even as she does so, then pauses and says — as her final words to him — “I’m sorry I never told you about the world.” There’s a deep, wrenching stab at any parent’s heart, capturing the twin heartbreaks of forcing a child out into the world, away from the safety comfort of a parent’s arms (with a loss of security) and into all the pain and cruelty and tragedy that the child is likely unprepared for. David then embarks on a classic, almost Campbellian fairy tale quest, complete with faithful sidekick (Teddy) and rogue knight (Joe). He’s off to see the wizard (Dr. Know), to win the Sphinx-like riddling challenge and find out what he needs to know to become a real boy so that Monica will love him. But unlike the comforting, Disneyized fairy tales we’ve come to accept, this one holds to the hard truth — there is no blue fairy, David will never become a real boy, and Monica will never love him the way he loves her, the way he so desperately wants to be loved, as someone unique and irreplaceable — and this is where it is most wrenching. David’s hopes are raised to their highest peak by the mysterious message in the Dr. Know booth and its literal unfolding as he and Joe travel to the ‘ends of the earth’ — and then they are utterly smashed as he finds what lies at the end of his quest. His homicidal (robocidal?) rage at finding another, duplicate David is chilling and utterly consistent, calling to mind Henry’s seemingly-overblown worry much earlier in the film that “If he [David] is capable of love, then he is also capable of hate.” And then all his hopes are utterly crushed as he discovers that he himself is merely a simulacrum of Hobby’s own dead son David, and that he is being mass produced for human consumption. It leads to two attempts at suicide, one out of despair, and one based on obsession with his goal leading to indifference to everything else, trapped in a dark prison of his own making.

Some have objected to the third part of the movie, yet I think it was very much keeping in spirit with the old-style fairy tales and myths. It has the irony of robot survival and human extinction (brought on, with further irony, by a profound ice age). It has the resurrection motif, with acceptance into the company of gods or near-gods, not as an equal, but as an honored icon (much as Greek gods elevating heroic mortals to Olympus or into the constellations). And, as gods, they grant not what David wants but what they can — a single day with Monica (Clarke’s third law should be enough to deal with any quibble about DNA), with no competition from Dad or Martin or from the world at all. Again the Oedipal/Freudian overtones may seem a bit blatant, but it’s still utterly true to life, for a child of that emotional age, as to what heaven would be. And David’s choice — that he would rather have that one day, with the increased sense of irrevocable loss afterwards, than not to have it at all — goes to the heart of vast numbers of myths and tales about what is so essentially human. Indeed, David for all intents and purposes now is the human race. And as the day ends and Monica passes away, David — for the first time in his 2000-year existence — sleeps and dreams.

But does he wake?

– Bruce F. Webster, 2001.