The proposal, Initiated Act 1 (PDF link), called The Arkansas Adoption and Foster Care Act, bans adoption and foster care by families where parents are unmarried.  And, while its primary target is obviously cohabiting gay and lesbian couples, it also affects straight couples who are unmarried.  

Mike Huckabee, while governor of Arkansas, had issued a directive to similar effect, banning unmarried couples from adopting/fostering as a roundabout way of banning gay and lesbian couples from doing the same (as they cannot legally marry in Arkansas, a state that, since 2004, has defined marriage as between one man and one woman–another of FCAC’s political success stories).  

That both these measures are driven by a potent mix of fundamentalist religion, ignorance, meanness, and outright stupidity is only too obvious. Though groups like FCAC do their best to monger fears about gay and lesbian couples as parents, the scientific consensus is that children of gay and lesbian parents are no worse off than those of heterosexual parents. FCAC and their ilk feed on unfounded fears that gay and lesbian people are more likely to molest children than heterosexual people are. 

If FCAC’s banning agenda were based on evidence rather than irrational fears, perhaps they should have considered banning adoption by families where one or more of the parents smoke cigarettes.  Their children are three times more likely to develop lung cancer.  They’re also twice as likely to take up the habit themselves. Banning smokers from adopting and fostering at least has some documented health benefits for the children.

But, thanks to these “defenders” of the (married, heterosexual) family, many the 3,700 some odd children currently vying for placement in homes can continue to sit on their hands in the system, as FCAC, with the support of Arkansas voters, has made it harder for them to find a placement.  

Though I started Wheat’s BassBook back in 1997, for years it just lived at wheatdesign.com/bassbook. Relatively recently, I decided to register a domain name for it.  When it came up for renewal, my domain registrar sent me an email, letting me know.  I starred it in Gmail but quickly forgot about it.  A domain squatting company named maisontropicale.com registered it and put up page full of advertising.  I contacted them via email and offered them $75 for the domain.  

They emailed back saying the price was 5700 euros ($7,260 US, at today’s rate).  I replied, informing them that I had been using the name “Wheat’s BassBook” since 1997 and that, as they had no commercial interest in it (other than trying to swap my ad revenue), that I would file a domain name dispute.  They replied that such proceedings would cost me at least $1,700 US and countered with an offer to sell me the name for 750 euros ($955 US).  

I didn’t reply.  Instead, I did some research on dealing with squatters.  The basic idea is to eliminate traffic from the site the squatters are holding, so it generates no revenue and they won’t be inclined to renew it.  So I registered wheatsbassbook.org (and .net, though I later intentionally let that one lapse) and changed every link on my sites to the new domain.  I emailed anyone linking to the .com site and asked that they change their links as well.  I put the domain’s new expiration date on my calendar, set every sort of notification, and waited it out.  

Luckily for me, most people don’t go to wheatsbassbook.com directly; they hit it via Google.  They put in “bass book” or “bassbook” (with or without “wheat,” “wheats” or “wheat’s”) and it pops us.  Google’s algorithm is so good that, before long, the .com domain wasn’t coming up in any relevant searches, netting the squatters zero ad revenue.  

In the week before the domain came up for renewal, I received two interesting emails from services that offer to buy of domains for you, using some automated process that attempts to grab the name before some other squatter is able to do so.  One, tripodukonline.com, was quite cordial, and offered a range of pricing options (with varrying success rates) ranging from $250-$995, with payment due only if the effort were successfull. This might have been a good option if the domain were in high demand, but it was still too steep for me, so I let it pass.  I’m not sure if tripodukonline.com is a legitimate company or just another domain squatter.  

Then I got a misleading email from Digital Caucus (dcinchq.com), who did their best to make it sound like they had bought wheatsbassbook.com and were willing to sell it to me for $99.  A little web research revealed that they are simply a (ridiculously expensive) domain name registrar.  And they didn’t own the name; it was available.  So I registered it (for a five-year term) with namesecure.com, whose services I’ve been using for as long as I’ve owned domain names.  

So, what did I learn from all of this? Well, I learned not to count on starring an email as an adequate reminder. Renewing the domain should have gone on my calendar an in Tracks.  I also learned that it’s worth the extra cash to register for multiple years, at least for domains that I intend to keep (when my other important ones come up for renewal, I’ll be buying five-year terms for them as well).  

I got lucky this time.  I got my domain back with minimal out-of-pocket expense.  I just had to wait for a while.  I hope never to have to mess with this sort of thing again.  

Possible titles for this post that were considered but rejected:

• “In your face, McCain”:  Lacks class.  Sore winners are almost as insufferable as sore losers.  McCain’s consession speach was, after all, surprisingly magnanimous.  And it would be unintentionally ironic to embrase the sort of partisan divisiveness that Obama himself has been preaching against, these past two years.  
• “The Day After”:  Nice cultural reference to the 1980s post-apocalyptic cold war movie.  But, as I’m of the opinion that Obama’s presidency will be a good thing for the country, the resonance is all wrong.  If you’re a conservative blogger, feel free to use it.  
• “Yes. We. Can.”:  Entirely too obvious.  And the full-stop-as-stylistic-device thing is. getting. old.  
• “So, how will Fox News spin this?”:  A relevant question, as the talking heads there were surprisingly congratulatory last night (in the little bits I caught as I clicked past them).  But, I sometimes think the best course of action with the Fox News is to ignore it as completely irrelevant–as one does with flat earthers and alien abductees–and hope that it withers away.  
• “The times, they are a-changin’”:  Even more obvious than the others.    

I uploaded a few pics from the visit under the zoo tag.  And, of course, all of these are now part of the Haden photoset.  

One of my favorite moments was her reply to a question on global warming, in which she acknowledge some human role before shifting the blame to “cyclical temperature changes” and then trying to put it behind her with “. . . I don’t want to argue about the causes.”  Biden was quick to bring the obvious riposte:  ”If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting.”

It’s unfortunate, for Biden, that Sarah Palin’s recent performances have been so undeniably bad that she gets points for not repeating the same.  But I think her clear lack of knowledge and insight into the issues was on clear display.  Her efforts at home-spun, girl-next-door charm (someone tell me, what is up with all the winking?) were obviously engineered and did nothing to ausage legitimate skepticism about her ability to do the job she’s hoping to attain.  

Biden did an excellent job of taking the fight past Palin and on to McCain and his ties to Bush’s failed policies.  Palin’s cutsie chiding of him for looking to the past in order to determine the future (”Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again”) only underscored her lack of understanding, as Biden himself pointed out later in his reply to the moderator, Gwen Ifill, in a clever allusion to The Tempest “past is prologue, Gwen.”  Palin and her party may not see the value in learning from the past, but I certainly hope the rest of the country does.  

CSV files are text files, but they their contents are often intended to represent numeric values.  Simply setting the data format of a column isn’t enought to transform existing values from numbers-as-text to text-itself (forgive me if I’m starting to sound like Martin Heidegger, I don’t know a better way to put it).  Changing the columns data type won’t help you for existing cells.  It will only help with new cells or cells that you, after changing the format, happen to edit.  

These numbers-as-text are problematic because certain key Excel count functions (COUNT(), COUNTIF()) silently ignore non-numeric values.  COUNTA() can be used to count all non-blank cells.  But, if you’re trying to apply COUNTIF() to these numbers-as-text, you’ll just keep getting zero–which is, actually, the correct answer.    

What you need is the VALUE() function.  It takes things that look like numbers (but, as far as Excel is concerned, are not numbers) and turns them into numbers.  So, if you have a column of numbers that Excel insists on treating as text (say, column G, for example) you just create new column (let’s call it H), insert “=VALUE(G:G)”, and fill down.  Then you can apply whatever COUNT() and COUNTIF() functions you like to column H.     

There are three quick ways to tell if you’re looking at numbers-as-text instead of the real thing.  By defult, Excel justifies numbers to the right and text to the left.  So, if the data is freshly imported, that’s the most obvious attribute to check.  But that setting can easily be overridden.  So, if some other hands have been on the data, you can try counting the column (e.g. COUNT(G:G)), which should give you zero.  Or, if you want to test each cell individually, you can create a new column, insert the T() function and fill down.  T() returns nothing if the value is numeric.  If it’s text, if will repeat the string it finds.  So, if your original column and the one generated by T() are identical, you know you’re looking at text.  

One of you web designers should bid to fix that ALA site.  It needs some work!

I know of families who refuse to vaccinate their children due to the recent hype about vaccines and autism.  Thanks to them, measles is on the rise.  And I resent their position, not only because it is uninformed, but because their children become vectors capable of carrying sickness to other children.  In fact, their relative safety as unvaccinated children is only possible because of the high percentage of vaccinated ones.  So, in that respect, they get by in their irrationality only by the reasonableness of others.  

But, I’ll admit, as a new parent, one of the emotions I’ve encountered most often is fear:  fear that I’m doing my son more harm than good.  And that fear finds refuse in decisions large and small.  Is this food nutritious?  Does he possibly harbor some allergy to it?  Is he on track developmentally?  Is this edge too sharp, this surface too hard, this bath water too hot?  People who willfully harm children are beyond the pale.  No reasonable person wants to harm any child, much less his or her own.  So, the fear, I understand.  But the willingness to jump ship from the established practice of vaccinating to the new fad of abstaining from the same based on a handful of, as it turns out, badly researched studies and a few celebrity endorsements is something I don’t understand.  I will, perhaps, lay the blame on the national press, which, in its endless quest for sensationalism and misunderstanding of what it means to deliver a fair and balanced account (read: it does not mean giving equal time and weight to every crack-pot theory), has under-served all of us here.

So, for any well-meaning but misguided friends of yours who might be on the vaccination abstinence bandwagon, here’s a very readable piece from Salon that gives the lie to the nonsense.  The AMA and AAP concur.  That’s the truth for now.  Scientific truth is always truth with a lower-case “t.”  Its truths change over time.  By all means, maintain your skepticism, even as you guard against the very charlatans who will attempt to use it against you.