Worky.

Back to work this morning, after an uneventful and mostly slept-through pair of flights got me from LAX to BWI yesterday. Already the annoying microdrama kicks in, with Lazar Pestke and Neal Evil and Rocco Martine all quibbling about an acquisition that's been postponed for, well, more than a year now, one week or one month at a time. The latest draft documents to be published (late January? early February?) ask bidders to include something called a 'Statement of Work—Solution (SOW-S)'; and while proposals often must include a Statement of Work (listing out in organized outline fashion all the things you intend to do for your client) and sometimes a 'technical solution' (a more discursive examination of how you intend to accomplish the work), the term 'Statement of Work—Solution' is not a recognized piece of jargon and it seems clear the customer just made it up. It's kinda like asking for a 'Grilled Cheese Sandwich—Pizza.'

Now, because the agency hasn't answered any questions about the acquisition for three months and because they have never defined what they mean by 'Statement of Work—Solution', arguing about how to develop one is a little like the Jews in Salome bickering endlessly about the more obscure points of scripture. Which, ok, you go ahead and debate unanswerable questions, but PLEASE don't bring the argument into my office. We only talk about real things in here. *Sigh*

Separated at birth?

On that other site where one posts less richly narrative bits about oneself, I completed a 5-things meme naming 5 famous persons with whom I share a birthday. One of them I selected was Iggy Pop, and the image the meme engine found of him was strangely reminiscent of something... it took me a while to figure it out... and then POW: he looks just like Agnes Moorhead in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, only a little more strung out:

"That's some kind o' DRUG, ain't it?"

"Mmm, that's SOME kinda drug, ain't it?"

A point cross-posted from elsewhere...

Seeing as how ptownnyc was recently tellin' stories out of (hippie Sunday) school and how touchy-feelie beastie-priesties came up and were smacked down, I found myself in the weird position of opposing the attitude that 'priests are creepy'. At least from the paedophilic angle: I think it's fundamentally wrong to judge an entire profession-ful of people by the untoward acts of a few.

Then, a tangent, made of matter that's been wandering around and around in my head since the offspring-over-protective Lord Broccoli was staying with me, if not much longer:

I have a pretty Bertrand Russellish approach to children and sex education. I can't go so far as to put myself in the NAMBLA camp, because I have no particular desire to shop for, find, and adopt any young boys and tutor them in literature and buggery; but I believe we do our society an injustice whenever we deny frank, objective knowledge of human sexuality to young people whose bodies have started giving them hormonal grief. I think it is perfectly evil to insist, on the basis of the presumed will of an unsummonable deity, that children must be shielded from carnal matters until some ridiculous age post-sexual-maturity.

And I believe post-pubescent children should be given a lot more credit than this society currently affords for having active sexual drives and alert, complex minds to weigh the consequences of their actions. True, a lot of teenagers are idiots, but then so are some senior citizens. My point is, treating a 14-year-old as a clueless, powerless victim in ALL cases of sexual contact with an adult (even including with another so-called minor!) is idiotic and insulting. Yes, some adults victimize children and I'm not suggesting that's ok in the least. When I was 14, though, oh my dog, did I ever want to do my freshman year algebra teacher something fierce!

[Oh, yeah: and my dad. Yeah, I know that's kinda way over here on the bell curve, but my first hot, hairy daddy crush was my hot, hairy daddy. He was 37 when I was 14 and his middle-age spread had barely started. RrrrrrrUFF!]

A decade later, on the day I turned 24, a 16-year-old friend whom I'd just had sex with claimed to have, at age 9, seduced his church organist. Given some of the brilliant, fully conscious children I've known over the years, this does not necessarily sound like rubbish to me. I only wish I'd been a little less shy and a little more knowledgeable about such matters as a kid.

What I'd like to know from folks whose opinions are stridently opposite mine: what, exactly, is the would-be universal prohibition of sharing sexually explicit information with children supposed to be protecting them FROM? Lord Broccoli used to claim his 13-year-old daughter was 'too young to be able to emotionally deal with that sort of thing' but I strongly believe he was recycling old Puritan-era baggage that he himself had long ago discarded. I have yet to hear an argument about how sexual matters harm children that does not come down to (a) the will of a deity or (b) subconscious fears and prejudices about the mythologized 'purity' of childhood.

So I have just two words left as palliative:

Disney porn.