Sunday Burst of Weirdness

If any of my readers were ever regular viewers of the Drew Carey Show on ABC back in the 90s and early 00s, you may remember that one recurring subplot was that Drew and his gang of friends started up a microbrewery in Drew's garage, and that their concoction -- "Buzz Beer" -- which apparently tasted like crap was a blend of beer and coffee.

Which just goes to demonstrate that the incredibly dumb idea on a sitcom five or ten years ago is this year's hot new thing.

Yes, we carry this stuff at The Store. No, I have not tried it. Nor do I have any intention of doing so. Coffee is coffee and beer is beer, and in me at least, never the twain shall meet.

Improving the Aerial Game, III

This week we continue our Google Maps tour of the National Football League, where training camps shall begin in just a few weeks' time, and all records will be set to 0-0, and every team will have a shot at the Super Bowl. (Well, not really. I'm lookin' at you, Arizona Cardinals.)

Here are the scenes of battle for the AFC and NFC South teams, again arranged in order of last year's standings.

AFC SOUTH

RCA Dome (Indianapolis Colts)
Alltel Stadium (Jacksonvilla Jaguars)
Reliant Stadium (Houston Texans)
Adelphia Coliseum (Tennessee Titans)

NFC SOUTH

Georgia Dome (Atlanta Falcons)
Louisiana Superdome (New Orleans Saints)
Bank of America Stadium (Carolina Panthers)
Raymond James Stadium (Tampa Bay Buccaneers)

As I noted in last week's installment, domes aren't that interesting to look at -- especially the "Giant Pillow" domes built in the 80s, like the Metrodome and the RCA Dome.

If Alltel Stadium looks a bit familiar, that's because it was the scene of the last game of last season, Super Bowl XXXIX. If you pull back the zoom a bit, you can see the nearby water where cruise ships that doubled as hotels for Super Bowl week docked.

Reliant Stadium, site of Super Bowl XXXVIII, is still under construction in this image. Again, pulling back the zoom reveals that it's part of a larger sports complex in Houston.

Nashville is one of those cities that surprisingly doesn't have sharp photos in the Google Maps database, so this is what resulted when I plugged in the reported address for the stadium. I'm not entirely sure where the stadium even is, in this photo. I'm guessing it's the horse-shoe shaped construct right above the little "tag" denoting the address.

The Georgia Dome was built in the early 90s (the Bills lost the fourth of their Super Bowls beneath its fabric roof), and it has the "peaked roof supported by guide wires" thing going for it, so it's marginally more interesting from a birds-eye-view.

Not so the Superdome, however, which is as boring from above as it gets. (I'll never forget the scene there when the Packers played the StuPats in Super Bowl XXXI. The NFL decided to string these colorful banners up all around the perimeter of the inside of the stadium, covering up the air conditioning ducts that supplied fresh air into the stadium. This proved to be a questionable decision during the second half, when the smoke from the halftime show pyrotechnics had noplace to go, and the temperatures on the field apparently soarded to over 90 degrees.)

Charlotte's Bank of America Stadium is a pretty standard NFL venue, just a big bowl surrounded by lots of parking.

Raymond James Stadium is kind of interesting, though. I'm not sure how old Google's photos are, so they might have built more since then, but it seems to me that the stadium has very little parking at all. I'm not sure where everyone parks when they go to Bucs games. Seriously: I think that my local Target has more parking than RJS in this photo. Also, if you scroll around, you find that this stadium is closer to a purely residential neighborhood than any stadium I've seen yet.

Anyway, next week we'll wrap this all up with the Western divisions.

Business as Usual

Craig insists that Karl Rove wasn't calling liberals "traitors", and he goes so far as to provide an excerpt from Rove's speech and points out that the word "traitor" appears nowhere and falls back on that good old canard, "He's just questioning their judgement!"

Well, as much as I respect Craig, this is colossal nonsense.

Allow me to scroll down the text of Rove's speech to the really noxious part:

Let me put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts to the region the words of Senator Durbin, certainly putting America's men and women in uniform in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

He doesn't refer to "judgement" there. Rove specifically uses the word "motives". Read that last sentence again:

No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

He's saying not only that Senator Durbin, and liberals like him, are putting American soldiers in greater danger, but that they want this to happen. He's not saying that liberals do dumb things that make things worse; he's openly saying that liberals want American soldiers to die. That's not "questioning liberals judgement", that's an open accusation of treasonous behavior. It's an odious and disgusting thing for him to say; it's odious and disgusting that this man says these things under the rubric of speaking for the President of the United States. And it's odious and disgusting that so many are jumping up to cheer for this man as he does it.

And no, it's not "faux-outrage" that I'm expressing. I do not think that Senator Durbin said one thing that needed apologizing for, and I am outraged by what Rove said.

And if we're really going to sit around pretending that "He didn't call you traitors, he just questioned your judgment", I hope we're not going to forget about a political climate that put this book on the bestseller list, and that I've little doubt that the crowd jumping up and down in glee over Rove's remarks have all read that book and cheered its authors odious claims, too.

The sad lapsing of time....

Iraq War Fatalities provides a time-lapsed look at the fatalities that have occurred as the war has gone on, up until about three weeks ago. It's basically a map of Iraq, upon which little dots appear each time a death occurs, accompanied with a "ticking" noise, with one frame equaling one day and ten frames elapsing to one second. You can also select for which country's fatalities you want to track -- you can watch just the US fatalities, or the entire coalition's, or some other subset therein. (I suppose that data is not available to do something similar for Iraqi fatalities, be they civilian or opposing forces or insurgents.)

It takes a couple of minutes to watch the entire war from beginning, more than two years ago, to the present day; what struck me is how the rate of deaths doesn't seem to drop all that much from those very first days of hostilities. There's a flare-up of "ticking" around late Spring and early Summer of 2004 that sounds like a corn popper hitting its stride, and then you remember what those ticks and flashing dots actually mean.

Sentential Links #7

The poor sentences were screaming. "Let us free!" They shouted.

"You're prisoners?" Dr. Jones asked, unbelieving.

"We can never escape the context!" one of them told me.

Dr. Jones set his jaw, rubbed his stubbled chin, put the fedora back on his head and uncoiled his bullwhip. "You're escaping it now," he said.

"Oh, good," another sentence said. "You see, our writers are always just making this up as they go."

"I know the feeling," Dr. Jones replied, as he began the work of freeing sentences from their blog-post context.

"Say," one sentence began as it awaited its turn, "in 1936, what do you point-and-click?"

"Cameras," Dr. Jones said.

"Ah," said the sentence.

OK, I suppose that wasn't as clever as it sounded before I wrote it. Anyway, here are sentences from posts that grabbed me this week. Click and read.

:: Now, years later, God and I sometimes get along. (Via Alan. That line comes near the very end of a long post that's among the most powerful things I've read in Blogistan. It's posts like that which make me want to give up blogging.)

:: It was George the mailman's last day on the job after 35 years of carrying the mail through all kinds of weather to the same neighborhood. (Not safe for work. It's a joke, headlined by a Norman Rockwell-like painting that gives the whole thing a creepy undertone. Yeesh. And hey, she's from Toronto.)

:: When you see the other side of 40, you'll discover Coltrane isn't just for sex any more. (Wait a minute: Coltrane is for sex? Really?)

:: Every time I'm tempted to wax poetic about the virtues of the original Star Wars movies or how cool the original Legend of Zelda was, I just imagine if my Dad had tried to convince me that those old 12" GIJoe figures he had as a kid were somehow better or more "real" than my little Zartan and Snake Eyes figures. (Tell me about it.)

:: Most people associate the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies with Mom. For me, the mom-smell is more that of wet paint.

:: For you youngsters who may be unfamiliar with how the game works, Match Game was a tv game show that aired (the best version, anyhow) back in the 70's. (I remember watching that show when I was four or five, and enjoying the hell out of it, just because all those people on the TeeVee sure seemed to be having a great time, and to this day I just find something infectious about people having obvious fun. I never saw it again until just a few months ago when I was in the presence of "The Game Show Network" or whatever, and I was astounded that they got away with stuff like this on TV back then. Wow.)

:: My parents are extremely fond of a geothermal concept called The Crossbreeze. (Yup, the Crossbreeze is wonderful if your domicile allows for it. If you're in an apartment whose windows only face two directions, which are at right-angles to one another, fuhgeddaboudit. Game over, and fire up the A/C.)

:: There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people. They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want. (Make sure to follow the annotation links in Jeanne's post. But really: "They're living in the tropics"? That's a selling point? Well, shit, I'm convinced! Hell, Alfred Dreyfus got to live in the tropics too, so what was he bitching about?)

:: So go ahead and hate Buffalo and hate people who don’t hate Buffalo. That and four bucks’ll get you a cup of lukewarm watered-down coffee at the bodega that’ll be down the block from the $3k/month apartment you’ll have in whatever piece of shit southern humidity tank in which you decide to shack up. (Just because a little rantin's good sometimes.)

:: Performance majors who are not attending Eastman or Julliard are not getting a professional degree oriented only to one career choice. (Hear, hear! I was a performance major myself, until I changed for something more financially viable in a rapidly-changing global economy. Well, OK, it was Philosophy. Ya happy now?)

Awwww.

Michelle sent me this link, and I kept forgetting to put it up here, so here it is: a little comic strip with Darth Vader as its main character. Some installments are really funny, others are less so. I liked this one.

Thoughts on the Wizard

OK, as I note in the post immediately preceding this one, The Daughter is watching The Wizard of Oz right now -- it's almost to the very end. And I'm thinking of when I watched this movie, when I was her age. It sort of ties into my Things I Miss From Childhood post, in which I revealed that I don't miss much of anything from childhood.

What I remember about The Wizard of Oz is that it was an event back then. It was on once a year, and that was it: CBS would show it sometime in the springtime, if I remember rightly. And when that final "The End" card appeared on screen, there was palpable heartbreak for us kids, because we knew that was it: a whole year would elapse before we could go to Oz again.

The Daughter doesn't know this. We can check it out of the library any time, or perhaps even buy the thing on DVD. If she wants to see it again in a few months, well, that's fine. In fact, since we have the thing for a week, she'll probably watch it again tomorrow. So that sense of deep sadness when "The End" appears is totally alien to her.

Do I miss that feeling? Not really. I'd rather be able to watch a movie whenever I want, but I do wonder if something is lost when those movies that were events in our young lives become mere options for the current generation. But equally, I suspect something is gained as well. Something's never lost that something else isn't gained, after all.

Anyway.

(And to give this post a turn for the perverse, when you really think about the story of The Wizard of Oz, and think about the film's ending, you realize that whether Dorothy has actually gone to Oz or whether she's merely dreamed the whole thing doesn't really matter. But you also realize that she's right back in the exact same situation she was in when the tornado came. So I'm wondering if, after her heartfelt, "Oh Auntie Em, there's no place like home!", at which point we cut to "The End", Auntie Em's next line had the story gone on would have been, "Well, I'm glad you feel that way dear, but we still have to get rid of the dog.")

Whoa...trippy colors and stuff...and why does Dorothy sound like Roger Waters?

I've mentioned in the past how for more than four years we suffered with a television that didn't render colors properly: its yellows were damaged, so anything yellow showed up pink and greens ended up gray or blue, so The Simpsons were all pink, Luke's lightsaber in Return of the Jedi was "generic bright", and the Bills played on a blue field until we finally acquired a smaller TV with perfect color.

Anyway, the movie we currently have checked out of the library for The Daughter is The Wizard of Oz, which we are now watching for the very first time on the good TV. And since she didn't see the film until she was two, it just occurred to me that this is the first time she's seen the Yellow Brick Road in actual yellow. Pretty cool, that.

Oh, and in the correct color, some dude hangs himself during the "Tinman" scene. That kind of freaked me out a bit.

Enough have I had.

You know what I'm tired of? All of this talk of Democrats "emboldening the enemy" whenever anyone on the Left speaks up. I'm sorry, but I very much doubt that "the terrorists" (as if they're a monolithic group, like SPECTRE or SMERSH or whatever) are spending much time reading American news to see if everyone over here is in agreement, and I equally doubt that they're making tactical decisions based on whatever the latest Gallup poll says or what Dick Durbin said or whatever. Especially when they can find plenty of motivation in the presence of real Americans right down the street. Especially when we're caught doing things like mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

They're making decisions based on how much explosive they've got, how many people they think they can kill, and which suicidal person they've got to deliver those explosives. That's it. Terrorists don't need "emboldening". That's what's so damned scary about terrorists. They're as emboldened as they're going to get.

GAAHHHH!!!

OK, I'm watching one of Buffalo's fine TV news programs just now, and they did a very brief story about the opening of the Shakespeare in Delaware Park festival (in which a company of players puts on free performances of The Bard for anyone who wants to pop by with a lawn chair and get them some o' that high-falutin culture stuff).

Our intrepid anchorperson says something along the lines of "You didn't have to wonder wherefore art thou Romeo tonight, because he was in Delaware Park!"

Oh, gnash, gnash, gnash.

Look, folks: when Juliet says "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" she is NOT asking about his physical whereabouts. She is using the actual meaning of "wherefore": Why is he Romeo, i.e., why has she had the misfortune of falling in love with one of those hated Montagues.

I think the real media bias is not to the liberal or to the conservative, but to the stupid.

Rant over. Nevermore!

Tastes Great! Less Filling!

A few days ago, Alan engaged in some heated debate over the merits of the suburbs versus Buffalo's urban core. I always end up shaking my head whenever this topic comes up, because I just don't get the anti-suburban view. Just saying "The suburbs suck!" seems to me about as useful an argument as if one advanced no opinion at all.

I live in one of Buffalo's suburbs, roughly ten miles or so out from the city limits and twelve or thirteen from downtown proper. What of it?

When I grew up, I lived in Western New York's Southern Tier, which is that segment of the state south of Buffalo but just north of the Pennsylvania state line. This is a segment of the state that few people outside the area know or care about. It's a very rural area. One of my parents' local friends opened a bar up in the hills, and when he saw his clientele, he commented, "My God, it's really like Deliverance out here!" And that was a guy who'd lived in the region his entire life.

It was also a fairly nice place to grow up; the indestructible Mr. Jones relates some memories of the place today. But my parents were city people by birth (Pittsburgh, PA), and thus we'd often hop in the car as a family on the weekends and drive ninety minutes or longer to one of the cities within reach. Sometimes it was Rochester; other times it was Erie, PA; less often it was Pittsburgh to visit relatives. But most often it was Buffalo.

Or what we would call Buffalo.

We rarely actually came into downtown Buffalo, actually. Instead we'd shop at the local malls, each of which is located in a suburb. There's the Walden Galleria, which is in Cheektowaga; there's McKinley Mall, in Hamburg; there's the Boulevard Mall, in Amherst. There used to be the Seneca Mall in West Seneca (it's not there anymore, and The Store where I work is across the street from its former location), and there's the Eastern Hills Mall in Williamsville. We'd spend several hours shopping, and then we'd go to a grocery store around there to pick up items we couldn't find in our small town, and so on.

Venturing downtown, or to the Elmwood strip, became more frequent when my sister attended graduate school at the University of Buffalo, but still we'd refer to all of it as "Buffalo". If our plan was to go to the Galleria, we wouldn't say "We're going to Cheektowaga today", but "We're going to Buffalo".

In a very real way, it's all Buffalo, folks. If a company closes up shop in Tonawanda and eliminates fifty jobs, it hurts Orchard Park. If some other business starts up in Lackawanna and hires twenty people, it's good news for Amherst. And if the City of Buffalo starts to pull itself out of its twenty-five year funk, it will be good for every town and village in the area.

Now, one thing that would help, if it were even possible, would be for Buffalo to exercise what I call the "Columbus option": for the City to simply annex the suburbs, this ensuring that suburban outflight doesn't result in the continued erosion of the city's tax base. It's my understanding that this is not possible under the current structure of the New York State Constitution, unfortunately, and this plan would undoubtedly meet with lots of strenuous opposition. But the suburbs can't sustain themselves indefinitely with a rotting urban core, and the urban core would find a much easier rode back to health if the suburbs stopped saying, "But you're rotting, so why would we help you?"

Anyway, for a bit of perspective here, many of the people I grew up with in the Souther Tier didn't get to Buffalo on average of once every ten days. Many didn't get there more than two or three times a year, and my mother knew one family which would make only one trip to Buffalo each year for Christmas shopping, during which the father would carry a loaded gun in his car. And that was just to go to one of those suburban malls. Imagine that. To those people, it was all Buffalo too -- but not in a good way.

There but for the Grace

Scott, one of the posters at Stokes Kith and Kin, has found a very regrettable motivation for blogging lately: he has cancer. Apparently the prognosis is positive.

Surely if one thing that marks the existence of a "community" is that we feel for people we barely know except for in passing, then Blogistan is a community indeed. Best wishes to Scott for as complete a recovery as is possible.

Colors??!!

Ummm...are the colors of my text suddenly different from what they were before? I'm not sure what's going on there. Will study later.

UPDATE: OK, I've tweaked the template a bit so the front page looks more like it was, plus I've implemented a couple of other small-scale cosmetic changes that you may not even notice. I won't attempt republishing the entire blog for a while, so things may look funky on already existing post-pages. I'm not sure what went awry, but it had to do with the way I had the "blockquote" tag defined in my style sheet. I made a change there, and presto.

Dear Karl

Mr. Rove,

I am a better American than you will ever dream of being, and I am a liberal.

Love,
Me.

PS: Tell that sanctimonious blowhard Bill O'Reilly that I'm a better American than him, too.

(God, I am sick of vomitous shit like this. And what really rankles me is that Dick Durbin apologized for something he had no reason to apologize for. I'm so sick of Democrats sticking their heads in the damn sand it's not funny. Come on, guys.)

(EDIT: Senator Durbin's name corrected. I had called him "Frank", probably thinking of Frank Drebbin. Whoops.)

Stop the Indoctrinating!

The other day the Daughter and I were driving around, and suddenly she spied an American flag flying on a pole in front of a hotel or something. And she said, "Hey, there's our flag! It stands for freedom, and they can never take that away!"

The stuff they're teaching kids these days, I tell you....

Tag'd, am I

I've been tagged by Prince Ali for the "Five Things You Miss from Childhood" thing, and I've been kicking it around for a few days. Trouble is, I'm not one to romanticize childhood or even think back on it with tremendous fondness. I didn't have a bad childhood, by any means; in fact, my childhood was just fine. But I've long believed that I've come to appreciate things in a much better way now than I had available to me then, and I've always believed that people who say of your teen years that "These are the best years of your life!" should be dope-slapped into submission.

Anyway, here's some stuff that I came up with.

1. I miss the wild black raspberry bushes in my parents' hedgerow. Berries are great. Berries you've picked yourself are better. Berries you've picked yourself that grow in the wild are the best (unless you pick the poisonous ones, in which case that's not so good at all). I spent many afternoons out there, picking the berries and eating them right off the bushes. I wonder now how those bushes are doing.

2. I miss that Star Wars was a work-in-progress.

3. I miss...geez, folks. I got nothin'. Seriously. I can't finish this quiz.

You see, here's the weird thing: I really grok adulthood. I don't really pine for the days when I had no real responsibilities and when girls were "gross" (except for that one, because you know, even when girls were gross there was always that one who wasn't), because now I've long since reached the realization that every woman is that one. (Not to be confused with that one.)

I was going to note that I miss not knowing what happened next when I read Lord of the Rings for the first time, but even so, now I like that even if I know what happens next, I'm picking up on other things: "Hey, that's an allusion to the Kalevala". Do I miss sitting around on Saturday mornings, watching Bugs Bunny? A little. But how much better is it that nowadays when I catch a Bugs Bunny cartoon, if it's one I haven't seen in a while, I'm getting jokes that sailed right over my head when I was watching them on Saturday mornings twenty-five years ago? Or how much better is it that I hear Carl Stalling's wonderful musical pastiches in those cartoons and now I know what classical works he's ripping-and-mixing? It's a damn sight better, I think.

Put it this way: youth is watching Casablanca for the very first time, but adulthood is watching Casablanca for the second time.

"I don't like sand" didn't make the cut??!!

Yup, I watched the AFI 100 Years, 100 Movie Quotes show last night, and it was a lot of fun, even if I either didn't totally agree with all of their selections. That's not the point, anyway; it's to generate discussion and whatnot, and it certainly did that. (And yeah, I'll probably come up with a list of my own at some point, just for shits-and-giggles.)

But really, I gotta be honest here: Am I insane or something if I state outright that I think Gone With the Wind blows? I mean, it's just an awful thing to watch. Maybe it was compelling once upon a time, but when I watched it a while back, I thought, "My God, this movie is like a slow-moving train wreck." I'm not sure I've ever seen a film protagonist I disliked more than Scarlett O'Hara, and yet she has something like eight hundred well-dressed Southern gentlemen after her, including the one guy who should be able to see right through her for the empty corset that she is. Ugh. All the racism stuff is bad enough; it's that it takes three hours of film-time and God-knows how many months of story-time before anyone looks at her and says, "God, you're really a spoiled bitch, you know that?"

Anyway. I just don't like Gone With the Wind very much. Max Steiner sure wrote a nice score, though.

A notice (with a bit of whining)

There is a possibility -- a strong possibility, actually -- that Byzantium's Shores will go fallow for a one-week period in the middle of July, roughly starting the 16th and ending the 23rd. The occasion will be that I am accompanying the Family on a cross-country jaunt to observe the Sister-In-Law's entry into one of them "marriage" things. Connectivity will be reliant on what's available at the In-Laws' home, as I do not currently own a laptop. (Nor will I for anything remotely resembling the foreseeable future, unless we can somehow make the case that a laptop is medically necessary for Little Quinn. And even I am having trouble cooking up a rationale for that one.)

I may try to get an update or two posted while I'm out there, but I don't know how realistic that will be. Time will tell.

Oh, and the whine alluded to in the title of this post? Well, the weekend we will be on the opposite side of the country just happens to be the same weekend that this musical event occurs in the Buffalo region. There are times when the Universe gives us that little twist of the knife, just to let us know that the Universe is still there. Yeah, Universe, I see you. You're still not funny.

Queen to Queen's Level Four

Check out this wonderful Making Light post about chess variants. A chess variant is simply that: a version of chess in which the game has been altered in some key way to make gameplay different. Some of these, like Behemoth Chess, alter the game by adding an element of randomness, while others like Omega Chess alter the game by adding new pieces or altering the board or both. Following the links, I find chessvariants.org, a huge index of such variants. I had a great time just clicking through some of these versions of the game, more than a few of which I'd love to play. I have three beautiful chess sets just sitting in their boxes, after all.

(BTW, if anyone can give the proper response to the title of this post, that person will be crowned King Geek for A Week.)

UPDATE: OK, I have now republished the entire blog, so the changes I made to the template yesterday should reflect -- in turn meaning that the comments thread should be accessible from inside the actual post page. I hadn't considered that when I made those changes yesterday.

As for the quote: There's an episode of Star Trek (The Original Series), titled "Whom Gods Destroy" in which Kirk, about to beam down to a planet, decides that it might be necessary for him to have a "password" which only he and Spock, if memory serves, will be able to supply upon their request for Scotty to beam them up. This is because the villain can change shapes or something, so he could theoretically take on Kirk's form and try to beam up and cause all sorts of trouble, unless of course he can't give the proper security password, which is in fact what ensues. The baddie, Garth, tries to trick Kirk into saying the password in his presence by taking Spock's form, but Kirk realizes that something's awry and tells Scotty, "Uhhh...Mr. Spock will give the response." The password they've come up with is a Tridimensional Chess problem.

And here's where I turn out to have egg or something similar on my face: I have the first half of the password wrong in the title to this damn post. Arrrgghhhh! It's actually "Queen to Queen's Level Three", not Four. That's what happens when you combine the wish to be a clever geek with a non-clever geek's faulty memory of the details. Shit.

Anyway, the correct response -- i.e., the other half of the password -- still has yet to be given. Oh, and welcome aboard, Nielsen Haydenites! Stick around a while. There's plenty of beer in the fridge. (But don't touch it. It's mine. You can all have water.)

UPDATE AGAIN: As usual, I forgot that PNH and TNH do not hyphenate their surname, so I've removed the hyphen that I had stuck in there. Thanks to the commenter for pointing out my error (which I nearly always commit when linking them), and apologies to the Nielsen~Haydens. (What? No tilde, either? How about an underscore? Or, since they edit SF, can I turn their names in SF names by sticking in random apostrophes, like this: Niel'sen Ha'y'den?)

I'll take "Evil Retail Giants" for $500, Alex

I no longer shop at Wal-Mart, for reasons that really aren't all that surprising -- I have no problem with "Big Box" retailers, but I find Wal-Mart stores dirty and gross and I find their labor practices abysmal. I'm never all that surprised when I read about the way they treat workers there, but even I was agog when I read about this little policy change one store tried to implement:

Wal-Mart officials in Cross Lanes told employees on Tuesday they have to start working practically any shift, any day they’re asked, even if they’ve built up years of seniority and can’t arrange child care.

Store management said the policy change is needed to keep enough staff at the busiest hours, but some employees said it appears to be an attempt to force out longer-term, higher-paid workers.

...

Workers who have had regular shifts at the store for years now have to commit to being available for any shift from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week. If they can’t make the commitment by the end of this week, they’ll be fired.

"It shouldn’t cause any problem, if they [store employees] are concerned about their customers," Knuckles said.

Several single mothers working at the store have no choice now but to quit, said one employee, who would not give her name for fear of retribution.

"My day care closes at 6 and my baby sitter can’t work past 5," said the employee, a mother of two who has been a cashier for more than three years. Neither of the services is available over the weekends, she added. "I have to be terminated; I don’t know what I’ll do."

...

Wal-Mart corporate spokesman Dan Fogleman said other stores have such rules, but that he did not know if stores are ever required by headquarters to institute them. The officials who did know were attending a conference on diversity and could not be reached, he said.

"This is something that is done throughout Wal-Mart stores," Fogelman said. "The reality of retail is that our busiest times are evenings and weekends, so it only makes sense that we have higher staffing levels at those times."

I found that utterly astonishing when I read it. I mean, I was totally floored. Wal-Mart has managed to become the leading retailer in the world, and yet now they're faced with such a staffing crunch that they have to put the screws to workers who simply might not be able to commit to open availability?

But then I read this report:

Wal-Mart headquarters overruled a policy decision by one of its store's that would have terminated any worker who failed to agree to be available to work any shift between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., seven days a week, according to the Charleston Gazette (West Virginia).

The Nitro, West Virginia, store announced its "open availability" policy to employees earlier this week, drawing criticism from employees and worker advocates.

A corporate spokesperson says the company reversed the store's decision because Wal-Mart has no policy that calls for the termination of employees who are unable to work certain shifts, the Gazette reports.

Well, that's a little bit refreshing, although not really. First of all, there's that spokesman's statement in the first article about the "open availability" policy being in place in other stores besides the one mentioned therein; secondly, there's the fact that the corporate overruling of the policy seems to not be on the basis that the policy is Draconian and cruel but rather that this store's specific policy apparently threatened termination of employees who are unable to comply, which leads me to wonder if such policies are OK with Wal-Mart, as long as noncompliant employees are simply "pushed out" by various managerial means such as slashing their hours to well below their subsistence levels and purposely scheduling them for shifts that make life as difficult on them as possible, thus giving them incentive to quit in favor of newer workers who are compliant (as well as being cheaper workers, which newer workers always are).

I'm glad that store's policy got overruled, but color me unconvinced that Wal-Mart's corporate HQ decided to strike a blow for the families of its workers. More likely they were embarrassed by a manager who went on record as saying that if you work for Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart's customers should be more important to you than your own family. Look at that quote again:

It shouldn’t cause any problem, if they are concerned about their customers.

I'll say this for the guy: he's got guts. There's no way you'd ever get me on record saying something like that.