The Invasion - Part I

Fire ants are mean little critters. I am sure they don't mean to be, that's it's just their nature to want to eat the flesh from our bones while we stand there writhing in agony. And it is kind of clever how they all wait to start sinking their mandibles into our skin until everyone is in place and ready. I realize they serve a purpose in the eco-system, consuming dead meat and all. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind if I woke up tomorrow and found they had become extinct.

I didn't come to this conclusion easily. No, it took many chance encounters from my childhood right into my 50s before it really took hold. What solidified it for me was the last major incident a few years ago...

One evening, I was sitting in my second favorite chair in my living room. I was in shorts and a T-shirt with bare feet. This is, of course, the mandatory clothing of Floridians about 10 months out of the year. It might even be mandated by law... but that's not important right now. I was watching TV when a felt a sharp pain on one of my toes. I looked down and saw this little red ant right where the pain was and immediately reached down and crushed it.

One thing I have learned over the years is that there is never just one ant. There will always be more. With fire ants, many more. So I look down at the gray carpeting and sort of let my eyes fall out of focus in order to detect movement. And there they are, several of them moving about, wending there way through the fibers in search of food to bring back to the nest. Since I am in almost the middle of my house, I begin to get a little concerned. The number of ants roaming about indicate a nearby nest. Which means I have a problem.

I could have a crack in my foundation (the house, after all, sits on a large concrete pad) or I could have a nest in a wall. Neither of these scenarios pleases me. I live in Florida; bugs, ants, spiders are all part of the "joy." They get into your house from time to time. Usually, you can deal with them easily. Ant baits, roach motels ("they can check in but they never check out!"), sprays, powders, etc. Most of the time, you simply set up barriers on the outside perimeter of your house and they don't cross it... unless they can fly.

I dismiss the idea of a cracked foundation immediately. The thought of this is simply too expensive. The most logical explanation is that they have entered through the garage wall, into the kitchen area, and then worked their way to the carpeted area. If this is true, I should find a trail of them from the kitchen across some bare space between. I don't. This means they likely came in somewhere along where outside wall meets the foundation. That is not unusual, small cracks appear there and little crawling creatures often exploit them. It means there will likely be a nest just outside an outer wall. I can find the nest, treat it (a polite way of saying "mass slaughter of millions of ants"), and solve my ant problem.

Or so I thought... Drop by tomorrow for the next chapter of "The Invasion".

Marty

Marty was my best friend, you could say. We met in 5th grade and lived a few houses apart. Marty was a little crazy, I guess. He was always trying to prove himself, it seemed. He took more chances, dared me to go along, and got me into a few scrapes. Marty's parents fought, a lot, and eventually divorced with his father moving to Chicago when he was 15. He got worse after that. His mother took up with a guy who was a bit of a bully which didn't help things.

When Marty and I got arrested at age 12 for breaking into a school, both his parents and mine tried to keep us from hanging out together. Of course that didn't work. After awhile, they seemed to give up. The school burglary thing wasn't much, we found a way into a school store one Saturday afternoon and rifled through stuff. There wasn't much in there that we were interested in. The principal caught us and the police had been called. We were hauled off to the police station where we were eventually handed over to our parents. No juvenile court or anything.

When Marty was 15, he got drunk and stole a Corvette. He was bound to get caught. At 15, he looked even younger and he wasn't all that good a driver. He got caught in Greynolds Park after passing out. Since no damage was done to the car, no charges were filed. But he did spend a few days getting over the alcohol poisoning (yeah, he drank that much) and a week in juvie.

Marty managed to do the wrong thing naturally. We skipped school in the Fall of 1960 and hitchhiked down to Opa Locka where we rented Go-Karts and haunted the game at the G-Kart track. Around 3, as we started back home, Marty tried to call his mother to let her know he might be late getting home. He was trying to get a free phone call at a payphone by shorting a wire on the handset to ground when a car rolled by eying us suspiciously. When the car came back, Marty ran. The guy wasn't from the phone company but owned an ice vending machine nearby. He wanted to know who Marty was and why he ran. I played dumb. The guy said he called the cops (or would). I figured he was bluffing but it turned out I was wrong.

I found Marty a couple of blocks away and then a cop pulled up and we were whisked off to the Opa Locka police station. It took 4 hours to get things straightened out and Marty's father down to pick us up. There was no damage to the phone or anything else, we managed to slide on everything. But if Marty hadn't run, none of it would have happened. Marty wasn't stupid but there were times I wondered...

When he was 16, he took his mother's car out one evening for a little joyride while she wasn't home. When he got home, he went back in the house and watched TV. About an hour later, he took his dog for a walk and realized there was smoke coming from the car. He had thought he had tossed a cigarette out the window but it had blown back in. The rear seat was smoldering. He pulled out the seat and hosed it down then dried it as best he could and put it back. After taking the dog for his walk, he returned to find smoke again coming out of the car. It seems the carpeting had started smoldering and it ran back into the trunk. He got that out just as his mother and her boyfriend pulled into the driveway. Within a few days, Marty ran away.

He didn't run far, he stayed in houses that were empty. There were a few houses in the neighborhood that were only occupied during the winter months. I helped him out when I could, kept in touch. The cops naturally talked to me, trying to find him. I negotiated a surrender of sorts where he would be sent to live with his father in Chicago. Marty agreed. I wouldn't see him again for a couple of years.

When he returned, I had taken an entirely different direction in life. I had moved to Orlando and back, I had taken up surfing, I had cast off old friends for new ones. I had a more positive view of life. Marty had come back with a couple of acquaintances from Chicago, traveling on stolen gas credit cards. I helped him find a place to live and a job. I kept in touch but we had drifted apart. We no longer lived in the same world.

Snippet of Life - Junior High

[After writing this, I wondered about posting it. You see, this was the late 50s and in a small city. We weren't poor, didn't live in a depressed neighborhood, or in tenements. We had plenty in our favor, a few of us chose to play "disaffected youth" and pretend to be "bad kids" when we had no reason to. What we did was minor, looking back, but it created an impact on our lives that some of us didn't overcome easily]

Junior high is something we don't see anymore. It disappeared in favor of something called "Middle School". The concept is similar. A transition between elementary school and high school. Junior High was grades 7, 8, and 9. Like high school, you went to different classes each hour. Unlike high school, you went as a class. That is, your entire class moved from home room through each class period. It was kind of silly. Might have been simpler to move the teachers around. Well, there were a few elective classes where you would have different classmates so that might have caused some problems, I suppose.

Junior high was supposed to prepare you for high school. How, I never quite understood. Nor did I understand why you needed to be prepared.

My brother, being two years older than me, had already paved the way at the junior high I went to. After being sent to the dean's office the first week of school, for gambling, I was asked a simple question by Dean Rubenstein. "Are you going to be a problem too?"

I answered in the negative but that turned out to be untrue. I wasn't as much of a problem as my brother but I definitely became well acquainted with the dean, the principal, and the office staff. My friends and I were basically hoodlums in training. We smoked, skipped school, and caused trouble in class and before and after. We "bummed" (extorted) money from smaller and/or younger students. We also took their desserts. Well, they "volunteered" them.

After school, we hung out at the local shopping mall. We shoplifted, we loitered, we talked girls out of soda money (that wasn't too hard), and made general nuisances of ourselves.

We hung out weeknights at the local bowling alley where we'd play the pinball machines all night on a dime. This wasn't hard to do. First, you would jack up the low end of the machine until it was just a tiny bit short of tilting. Then you'd put in a dime and catch a ball in a rollover and rack up points until you won the maximum number of games (usually 5) by gently shaking the machine to cause the rollover to repeatedly trigger. Once you have all the games it'll save, you play out the rest of the balls to end the game. Then you lower the low end enough to avoid easy tilts and make play a little challenging. You repeat this when you get down to one game in reserve. Which was rare because we were fairly good pinball players.

On occasion, we wouldn't cheat the machine but each play a game in turn. Anyone losing the last game had to pay to restart. We spent hours entertaining ourselves for a dime or two. Or until the manager tossed us out. Then we'd hang out in the parking lot.

By the time we were in 9th grade, we were drinking at unsupervised beach parties and sometimes at parties where there were no adults. If no one brought any beer, we'd raid the liquor cabinets at the house. We were never invited to these parties but word would get around at school and we'd find them. Beer and liquor was easy to get. No drugs then, just not available at the time (late 50s).

We were also taking cars for joyrides. But that was fairly rare. A little vandalism here and there. We hitchhiked most places. We'd head out to the beach on weekend evenings to pick up tourist girls. They always had extra cash and didn't seem to mind sharing. We'd gamble on pinball games or those quarter pool tables with the tourist boys. If we lost, we never paid off. We'd bluff them or fight them, but we never paid them. We knew how to break into pinball machines and most soda machines to get at the coins.

We thought we were "cool." During the summer, I would be out all night. I rarely got home before 4 AM from the time I was 13 on. I slept most of the day, getting up around 2 or 3 in the afternoon. I'd be gone before supper. When school started up again, that would only happen on weekends. Weekdays, I'd get home by 11 PM.

Occasionally, a friend would get arrested and end up in juvenile court. A few spent time in juvenile hall. One or two spent a few months at the places for the more incorrigible. I managed to avoid these things. Mostly luck, I think, but I also was more careful than most of my friends. That didn't mean I wasn't picked up from time to time for curfew violations. We didn't actually have a curfew in our town but a 14 year old out at 3 in the morning was definitely suspect.

I did get in trouble for bringing a BB gun to a dance once and another time when I was caught with a starter pistol (do not ask what that was about). Confiscation of said items and turned over to my parents was all that happened. Nothing serious. I always carried a switchblade but never used it. Switchblades were common but no one wanted to actually use one. I lost a lot of them when I'd get picked up for those curfew violations.

In school, I never did any homework. I did the classwork and I always did well on tests. Sometimes I would get a girl to do some of my English homework in exchange for my checking their math homework. Still, my indifference to school showed in my grades and eventually caused me to fail the 9th grade. I wasn't alone, so did most of my friends. We were now even more in charge since we were older than everyone. And we took advantage of that. We also took advantage of the cumulative effects of school credits. In other words, we only had to pass two or three classes in order to go to tenth grade since we managed to pick up 3 or 4 in the failing year. Not a lot of incentive to turn ourselves around.

By the time, I went to high school, I wasn't about to succeed. I had already stacked the deck against myself.

Thoughts on Objectification

I've done a bit more thinking about the study I wrote about yesterday. The more thinking I did, the less sense the study made as useful scientific endeavor. Think about it. Very small number of test subjects, apparently only pictures of "sexy bikini-clad women" were used, and this was the basis for certain assumptions (I won't call them "conclusions" though that seemed to be what the author wanted us to infer).

The test did show that a certain part of the brain of these particular young (they were all college age) men reacted to the visual stimuli. That part of the brain is the area that goes active when a man is contemplating using some device to accomplish a task. This implies something, obviously. I think the study's author made a huge leap from that observation to a man's objectification of women. She, the author, then goes even further by saying this may be linked to behavior of some men toward women in the workplace.

I have to wonder if she might have easily proved this assumption with a simple test. Show the same men pictures of women, dressed properly for office work (for example), while watching what areas of the brain "light up" (her term). That was not done, apparently.

I thought of other tests that could have easily been run:

Show the men these pictures of bikini-clad women.



















Show them these pictures.




Or this.

















In fact, maybe this last picture ought to have been shown to young women college students and see what part of their brains "lights up."

I first ran into women working in a previously all male work environment when I first hired on for Southern Bell in 1970. One of the women was in her mid forties, the other in her early twenties. Neither was particularly suited to the job nor having an easy time adapting to it. The interesting thing was the reaction of the men in the office. The younger one, though not especially pretty, was helped more often than the older one. I also noticed that the younger one sought help more often and seemed more at ease doing so.

The above behavior was repeated in every office I worked in over the 34 years I spent with the Bell System and its post-Divestiture manifestation. I also observed it at other businesses I visited or worked at. The women who feels more attractive will use that to their advantage. The women who do not feel that attractive will do more on their own. The same is true of men, in my opinion. This, of course, is not a scientific observation with controls in place and is completely subjective.

Still, we do behave differently when interacting with attractive people than unattractive people. We may flirt a bit, smile more, feel a little nervous around, more shy or bold, than we do with people we see as equally attractive or less attractive than ourselves.

It's only human.

Bikinis, women, and men

Women as sex objects is the title of a podcast from the Scientific American website. I found it interesting. Of course, the title alone might intrigue us but what I found interesting was a bit deeper. Not laid out in black and white was the details of the study, its methodology. This is important.

In a CNN report I found a bit more detail. What was implied in the podcast was confirmed in the CNN report: only males viewing bikini clad women were studied. This is important. You cannot make any real judgments by studying a tiny sample of any population. Well, you can, but they will be highly questionable.

There were a number of comments at the podcast site. The majority seemed to be suspicious of the study. Some thought it pointless (as in "Duh! What were you expecting??") and some saw value. I am with the majority.

Of course men will objectify women in that context (pretty and bikini clad). There's nothing surprising in that. As one commenter stated, what about the message implied by the woman posing in the bikini? Isn't there an intent to be objectified? We learn in the CNN report that Professor Fiske was looking beyond the study toward examining how this objectification in this context might spill over into, say, behavior or perception of women in the workplace.

I am reminded of all those cartoons I saw (mostly in my father's girlie magazines) of men with imagining women they see passing by as naked. Oddly, I have never done that... probably a poor graphic imagination factor in my brain. Not that I cannot conjure up such an image but that I don't do it with the random female I see, no matter how pretty. I digress... sigh.

I suppose the 21 males enjoyed themselves anyway.

I wonder if this study was done with federal grant money?