My father turned 90 today. There was a party at his church, and many members of the community showed up. One old friend brought a dinner from the Community Hall Annual Chicken Feed for my father. Lots of people signed a large card, and even included money. One of the organizers of the event gave an amusingly apt gift: a pack of Cherry Cokes! My father has a passion for only one soft drink, really, and that's Cherry Coke. (Of course, he remembers the Fountain version of this drink, from days of yore. There are few fountain bars left.) I met some of my cousins, old and new, and talked with neighbors and relatives from the area.

Robert Michael Pyle stopped by, and gave my father a signed copy of his new book, Sky Time in Gray's River. He added a very nice inscription.

Bob spent a fair amount of time mingling with the nice crowd, and then left as the party started to wind down. But he had noticed me talking to my aunt, Alma, who is herself over 80. He walked back in the door and asked to be introduced. I introduced the two, and explained that my aunt is the mother (step-mother, really, but who's particular at such times?) of someone Bob knows: Bob Saari, local tree-climber extraordinaire.

What impressed me about this little chat is how socially adept author Bob Pyle was. He made time for an ancient woman whom he'd never met. He was polite, interested, complimentary.

Most people wouldn't try. I think that some of that interest in real people is detectable even in his book, which might remind people to be good neighbors, even in places where there's more anonymity than in Grays River Valley.

I missed most of the Don Imus Issue when it was big in the news and the pundit circuit. I saw moments of the Jackson/Sharpton sharp rebuke, and I saw the send-up of same on Saturday Night Live. I read a few paragraphs here and there about the event, from the commentators, pro and un-.

And, well, maybe it's just me, but when somebody says something as dumb as Imus did (not all that funny, not all the perspicacious, rather offensive), polite people should try to ignore the slight. Running somebody out of his job — a job with a fair amount of insult and comedy allegedly built into it, strikes me as going a bit overboard.

Of course, in less modish times, calling a group of women whores who were not, in fact, sex workers, would have been quite offensive. And even perhaps worth kicking someone out of his public job. But, as everyone seems to remind us, a whole community of men do call women and even girlfriends hos.

The great divide of our times, regarding language, appears to be racial, and black men have more freedom than white men.

We could call this divide the Tough Row to Ho, or simple the Ho Row.

Hi ho, hi ho.

When I was very young, I was fascinated by other peoples, such as Indians and Mongolians and the like, and read as much as I could about them. This led me into the strange problems associated with classification by race.

In a conversation with my uncle and cousins, one evening when I was about nine, I used the term "Mongoloid."

For my trouble I got a lecture from my uncle about tolerance. He thought I was talking about what nowadays we call people featuring Down Syndrome. I appreciated the lecture, though it also annoyed me to think that my uncle thought that I was a nasty name-caller. I was simply using the anthropological term (not in itself without problems or controversy) for the skeletal and facial features of many people who live in Asia.

I don't think my uncle understood that a 9-year-old could be interested in physical anthropology, and was actually fairly well read on the subject. He thought it more likely that I was speaking ill of disabled kids.

Funny thing was, it was he who demonstrated prejudice!

But no great matter. I never harbored ill will towards him, and was even rather happy that he felt compelled to lecture me on tolerance. Tolerance and good will seemed like a good idea to me even at nine.

I was beyond tolerance at that point, however: surrounded by white people, I found people of other color and other character fascinating. White people were, comparatively, boring.

Children are a lot safer than people think. Most sexual predators are not lurking in alleys or on the net, waiting for kids, asking for naked pictures or a teensy-weeny peak: they are at home, demanding far worse.

That is, most sexual predators are parents.

But most parents aren't sexual predators.

Perhaps one problem with instilling good sense in kids is that the ability to just say NO FUCKING WAY to someone who asks you to do something you don't want applies against teachers and parents as well as against strangers. Train a kid to resist suggestion, and the kid may be less willing to toe the line in class or at home.

I mean, if you have been taught independence, that independence may very well show up against authorities at home and in school. Neither parents nor teachers really want that. So, despite many efforts to inculcate such a good habit as resistance, the inculcation gets muted at the start. It's not in the interest of authorities to make their charges GENERALLY less compliant. So the mute their lesson, and may even be a bit lax on training. Or spin it, espcially in the case of teachers, who sometimes do manage to impugn parents, but try to exempt themselves.

I'm glad I'm not a kid any longer. I'd hate to be at the receiving end of a modern education. But, if I were a kid again, I would be a lot bigger pain in the ass to my teachers than I was when I was corralled into the classrooms. My biggest regret with my schooling was that I was too compliant. As it was, one teacher called me the worst influence in the school. She was surely wrong, but she was not appreciative of my open criticism of her teaching methods. Her methods? Yes, they did suck. But my criticism were unexpectedly harsh.

I wonder, when I was in high school, had I been approached by someone asking for my picture, naked, what would I have said?

I wouldn't have said fuck off, because I did not use that kind of language. But I do think that a nervous and disgusted bout of laughter would have communicated my response well enough.

Why would any other kid do otherwise? Why do some kids complly with goofy, off-the-wall sexual come-ons? Because, perhaps, in some sense they wanted the attention? Because they might want sexual attention of that sort?

That's probably not the answer we're supposed to give. Kids are impressionable. They aren't SEXUAL.

As the kids say: Yeah, right.

Eric D. Dixon, right-columnist of the Shrubbloggers, took up a strange subject, recently: my name.

Earlier I had posted regarding my Christian name, largely to explain my variant uses. Eric's response convinces me that I have more explaining to do.

But rather than write a coherent essay on the subject, I'll let this go with a few jottings. Make of them what you will.

Apparently, my attitude towards names differs from most people's. I expect names to change as people change.

I started out in life as Timmy, of course. This evolved to Tim, naturally, as my friends realized that a childish name like Timmy just wouldn't do. I grew to like my given name, my Christian name (quite literally, eh, since it means honoring God and was used by the sidekick to the Apostle Paul), and began using it in introductions as well as on the page. And then I noticed resistance. I got none from Tim, but a lot from Timothy.

Women tend to use the full name, if prompted, more than men do. I think all of my sisters call me by my Christian name. I'm not sure what my brother calls me.

My father calls me Hey, you.

Growing up, I was taught to address adults with the honorofic prefixed: Mr. So-and-So; Mrs. Such-and-Who. Then came feminism: Ms. You-Know-What. I still use these. I usually address my aunts and uncles with Aunt or Uncle prefixed. At least one nephew of mine does that to me. It makes sense.

The worst thing about growing up, it seems to me, is the widespread abandonment, in American manners, of honorifics. I like them enough to often refer to one of my best friends, Jim Monteith, as Mr. Monteith. (Besides, I like his last name.)

Do kids still use honorifics?

On the Web, I prefer to use honorifics. But even I have gone slack.

Eric objects to stuffiness. Apparently, I do not. This may be one of my many paleo attitudes.

I probably did introduce myself as Tim to Eric. Why? I had pretty much given up on Timothy by that time. Still, R. W. Bradford — the big banana in our place of work — was one of those who did call me Timothy with some regulatiry. For all his faults, he was a libertarian, and he did agree with me that persons should be called by the name they want (in fact, he insisted on it, in other contexts — perhaps because he truly hated his first name, Raymond, and wanted people to use the nickname version of his middle name).

Old friends get away with all sorts of pet names for their friends. C. S. Lewis was called Jack, though no part of his formal name included that familiar name. You can see why: if you were called Clive Staples, wouldn't you want a completely different nickname? (Though, when I think about it, Clive ain't horrible.) My friend Monteith (I really do like that last name!) started calling me by my never-used initials, T.V. He doesn't read my writings, and so never saw the familiar-to-others trio of initials, TWV.

Women have this especially rough, in a culture that used to expect a wife to adopt the family name of her husband. What happens in cases of serial polygamy? I've known at least two women who married often enough that it became hard for their friends to keep track of their last names! So, one of these women got divorced and changed her last name to the hotel she and her previous husband had stayed in on their honeymoon. My friend Dee, a travel writer, changed her last name to Tour du Monde . . . yes, Tour of the World! And she revels in her nickname, Detour.

Some people in the area where she lived hated that name change, and made fun of it and her. I defended it.

Eric and I met in Port Townsend, a place where name changes were quite common, at least for women. A little girl, no more than age eleven, introduced herself to me once, in Port Townsend, using a name I'd never heard of before. I asked her where her parents had found that name. She said, Oh, they didn't; I chose it myself. In Port Townsend, that was not at all weird. It was almost de rigeur. (A Latin phrase we should perhaps be thankful my friend Dee had not focused on!)

Prior to meeting this girl I had figured that a good Coming of Age ritual would be to expect a person to choose his or her adult name. Were this a common cultural practice, perhaps parents would no longer give middle names at birth; it would be expected that a person add a name in front or in the middle itself. Eric explains that I think a primary reason I've always felt hesitant to adopt name changes is that names are so tied linguistically to identity. But since identities change over time, a name change should be expected, no?

My nephew Jacob, when he switched to a new school, understood this. One day my sister, his mother, went into the new school's office to pick up her son, Jacob. The office staff was puzzled. Jacob?!? Oh, you mean Jake, came the response. Jacob had taken the opportunity of a new environment to switch to a less formal name. It suited his personality.

At Liberty, one of our interns looked very Jewish, and had a very Jewish name: Michael Levine. We never called him Mike; or at least I didn't. I, who love the ancient Hebrew language, would sometimes pronounce the name somewhat in the ancient manner, bringing out the Hebrew word for God embedded in that name: El. He asked me about the Finnish version of my name, and began calling me Timo. I especially enjoyed that. (It is important not to pronounce it Timmo though: the i in Finnish is halfway between a short i and a long e in the Enlish language, but said very quickly, not drawn out; think of it as Teemo but said very quickly, far more quickly than American speakers usually speak the long E vowel.)

I would prefer, in print, to be referred to as Eric now does on his blogroll: Wirkman Virkkala. Or as TWV. But when he or other friends refer to me, the name they actually and traditionally use is just fine. I'm not in the least bit insulted.

I did something very odd today: I drove to the city and watched the Academy Awards on the Big Screen. The Kelso Theater and Pub brightened up the silver screen with all the stars of the "firmament."

Maybe it was illusion, the illusion of seeing the big spectacle in a theater, not on a small TV screen, that has me judge the 79th Anniversary Academy Awards as one of the most professional I've witnessed yet. Or maybe it's simply that Ellen DeGeneris is the perfect host. Hostess.

I saw so few of the nominated films that it was hardly worth bothering, in its way. Oh, well. This is part of our culture, and to not watch the Oscars is to blind oneself to an integral part of the world's aesthetic life.

Like everybody else, I was pleased by the "international" and "diverse" flavor of this batch of nominees. Unlike everybody else, I'm getting tired of being preached at about global warming.

Leo and Al and Melissa all reiterated this theme, on stage. With some good jokes, I admit, but . . .

Here's my complaint: This "moral issue, not political" rap is ready-made for sanctimonious Hollywooders. And it's simply not true. If climate change is truly a worldwide problem (and I suspect it is) then it must be a political issue, too.

The "moral issue, not political" slogan is a way to sugar-coat the issue for people who can't think. And since most people can't think, when it comes to science or politics (or religion, or even art, for that matter), this kind of sloganeering seems necessary.

And yet it's the wrong way for environmental prophets of doom to convince skeptics of their doomsaying. At least, it certainly turns me off. (But then, I'm not normal, so maybe this whole rant of mine is pointless.)

The right way might be to not trot out patent nonsense (which is very hard for people in Hollywood, or politics . . . and that includes Al Gore), not make too much of current trends, always pretending that the shape of every curve is always even, or increasing. Admit when they are wrong. Confront the obvious truth, like "sure, environmentalists have been wrong about the ice caps before (Ehrlich saying that increased pollution would cause global cooling and therefore an increase in ice at the poles, causing the Arctic cap to SINK and THEREFORE the oceans to rise!), but telling us why THIS scenario they NOW tout is RIGHT.

Tough to do. I guess that's why they stick with the simplest of models and the simplest of mottos. Anything more, and people might think too much. Brains would explode.

And the planet would heat up even more, with all the emissions from exploding brains.

Oh, well. At least Jerry Seinfeld made sense about morality at the movies. In theaters, the theaters sell us junk food at horrendous markup, and we leave the trash on the floor. That's the deal.

Yes, Jerry, that is the deal.

And when we view the Oscars, we get preached at with absurd messages in exchange for seeing a few of our favorite moviemakers get honored, and a few of our favorite actresses parade on stage in stunning (and, most importantly, revealing) dresses.

That's the deal.

Stevan Kinsella is one of the more interesting thinkers in the libertarian movement. I disagree with him often, but I usually learn something. And about our recent debates (here and on mises.org) regarding intellectual property (IP) he may indeed be right. I've not yet settled my mind on this subject. I'll have to give this issue more thought.

But there's one type of intellectual property that I have a lot to say about: names. Proper names. He made fun of my Wirkman on the Mises Blog. I thought it was a pseudonym (and they bug me), he later explained in the commentary on this blog. Name-changes also bug me, he elaborated. Hey, I'm used to it. My friends don't much like Wirkman, either. The simple fact that it has been part of my public presence (embedded in those initials TWV for nearly 20 years, for example) doesn't matter to them. They know me as Timothy.

Except, of course, that they don't.

Here's the main deal about this name, Timothy.

Say I introduce myself to a man. I call myself Timothy. And only one in ten men will use my name. Without prompting, they'll call me Tim.

With women, this is about half and half. Half of women, or perhaps a few more, when prompted with Timothy will respond with Timothy. To the rest I'm automatically given (and without asking permission) the name Tim.

So usually I give up. I'm Tim to people I meet. I even introduce myself as such, especially in business. It's just not worth a struggle with every man I meet. It is hard to go up against an in-grained bigotry.

To Finns and some others I've pushed the Finnish version: Timo. That's a lark. It's certainly preferable to me than Tim. It more accurately echoes the Greek origin of the word: honor.

But the point is, by common practice in American manners, I am not allowed my given, Christian name, the name my parents gave me. My use of it for writing became a pen name, a pseudonym, without my intention. All because people have their preferences, and Timothy bugs them.

That it doesn't bug me bugs them, too.

It is not manly enough a name, I gather. It implies weakness. And when I'm firmly shaking another man's hand, this man doesn't want to say Timothy, he wants to say something shorter, harder.

This is, you guessed, sexual politics. The positioning of people in the social environment according, as some theorists would have it, to notions of gender (by which they mean the social layers constructed around the natural division of sex).

I loathe the bulk of this aspect of social life. I loathe many of the prejudices built into our culture, whether passed on by tradition or arising out of early biases latched onto in childhood. I do so because some of these gender biases have deeply affected the course of my life.

Because of biases I picked up as a child, picked up as implied from my parents, from my church, from my teachers, from my fellow students, I accepted for too long something that had disastrous impact on me. I accepted the idea that it was sissy for a boy to study piano. And, so in my childhood I had nothing to do with music for about ten years.

This may mean nothing to people who listen to rock. Or country. After all, a late bloomer can easily make it in pop music. But my earliest inclinations, as well as all later ones, were to the fine arts, especially in music. In classical music skills need early development, for a career. By the time I took up the piano, and especially by the time I discovered Grieg, Haydn, Stravinsky, et al., there was no real hope for me to become any kind of respectable musician.

So my attitude towards others' dislike of Timothy (and hey: it is a deep aversion, I can feel it, it's as strong or stronger than Mr. Kinsella's aversion to name changes and noms de plume) is one of cynical defiance.

How so? It occured to me some time ago that I had been naive to use Timothy. I had simply thought it was my name. But it was not. According to your average American, at least American male, it was definitely not. It was my pretentious nom de plume. My real name was Tim, of course, not Timothy.

So, I later realized, if the name I was known by beyond my immediate social world had been a pen name all along, then why not choose something that would at once annoy others with its alien nature, but somehow, at the same time, conform to their sense of masculinity? So I went with that other name, Wirkman. In writing.

So I should forgive Mr. Kinsella his sleight. After all, I am at war with much of the world on a cultural level. I despise values expressed regularly in society, values that most people never even think about. I uphold other values that seem foreign to Americans, especially those of a conservative temper.

And in war, respect goes begging. This is simply the way of the world.

Still, respect is the hallmark of a peaceful society. Calling a person by the name he (or she) prefers, that's a sign of respect.

And since respect for individuals is at the heart of the libertarian idea, I do expect libertarians to be a little more sympathetic to my switch.

Still, Timothy is a lost cause. Only a few people use it. Call me Timo. Or Wirkman.

Or if you know me from the past, in the flesh, Tim will have to do. For most of you.

But you might want to give respect a chance.

In The Racial Politics of Speaking Well, we learn how important context is. The author, Lynette Clemetson, chooses her context very ably, and puts one over on the reader.

Why would Barack Obama's ability to speak well, and maintain poise, seem so amazing? Why would any black object to such a characterization, by Senator Biden or anyone else? Well, here's the nut of Clemetson's argument:

Being articulate must surely be a baseline requirement for a former president of The Harvard Law Review. After all, Webster’s definitions of the word include “able to speak” and “expressing oneself easily and clearly.” It would be more incredible, more of a phenomenon, to borrow two more of the senator’s puzzling words, if Mr. Obama were inarticulate.

That is the core of the issue. When whites use the word in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment. It is similar to praising a female executive or politician by calling her “tough” or “a rational decision-maker.”

“When people say it, what they are really saying is that someone is articulate ... for a black person,” Ms. Perez said.

Well, maybe. There sure are a lot of black entertainers who speak profanely and act like clowns, sort of one-upping the minstrel show in modern, Live at the Apollo form. So there's good reason to notice a difference in style. With vulgar rappers and stand-ups prancing around in public, one does want to make note of the more acceptable alternatives. Who to blame for this? (Maybe we should ask Chris Rock.)

But the context that amazes many of us who observe politics is this: politics. (Shocking, eh?) Barack Obama is articulate, well-spoken, poised. Yes. Oh, dear, yes. Amazing to behold in a . . . politician.

We've suffered through several years of a bumbling boob in the White House, a man who can barely put two words together without making a fool of himself. A man, no less, who gets cranky easily, and comes off defensive at the merest provocation. His unease in public is embarrassing, a national disgrace.

Next to Obama, he appears as a hillbilly nincompoop ignoramus ultramaroon. (Come to think of it, even without that context he may appear as a hillbilly nincompoop ignoramus ultramaroon.)

Previously we endured a more articulate man, an obviously smarter man, as president, Bill Clinton. But this man's poise was so phoney that you could see the con coming a mile away. That is, you could see it if you hadn't sold your soul to the Democratic Party.

Before that we suffered from four years of the bumbling, foot-in-mouth stylings of our current president's inept father. This man was horrible as a communicator, and left a bad taste in one's mouth. One had to spit out invective after every speech. Egads, what a mentally disabled verbal catastrophe in a suit. He should never have been elected president.

Now, Reagan was called The Great Communicator, but his grasp on the facts — and even on the theory behind his own ideology — was weak. Very weak. And so his articulations were often silly. And his stance, his poise? Problematic at best. He convinced few people by reason, and those, mainly, who wanted to believe ahead of time. He spent eight years preaching to the choir. He ran in cowardice when challenged on issues that required real communication skills, like his positions on property rights.

Before that we had James Earl Carter, an almost pathological case, a man who didn't learn how to speak until long after being booted from office. Apparently, he couldn't set his mouth in order until he set others' houses in order, literally. He didn't stutter so much as stammer, pause long enough for half his audience to writhe in their seats a few times. He's the one who began our current streak of unacceptably bad political rhetoricians.

Now, when you look at the current Democratic candidate list, you see at least one other articulate person, the boy ex-senator from the Carolinas. How many others, really? Let's face it, Hillary may not be the bozo at speaking that our current Chief Executive is, but she's no Bill Clinton. Her voice is unpleasant and she does not have that mystical thing, poise.

Listen, Lynette Clemetson. You've done your de rigeur public service, channeling the old anti-racist scolds of the past. But this is the context that matters: Barack Obama is exceptionally articulate and poised for a politician. Not to see this, not to understand the yearning in some Americans' souls for a leader who speaks well and doesn't seem like a used car salesman at the same time, is to miss the most important part of the story.

Years and years ago, when I rode the bus, I had no trouble. But I moved the from the big city for just a few months, and when I came back to visit the city, the buses had changed. Routes and schedules had changed. I was a bit at sea.

And the number of the bus I thought I needed, and which I thought stopped where I needed to go proved to be illusory. There was some sort of split routing on that busline, and the first number of the bus of the seemingly correct number turned out not to go where I needed to go. So I got off and waited for the next bus of the same number.

It finally got there, opened its doors. And so I asked the driver, does this bus go to Gresham? (Or wherever I wanted to go; it's been quite some time.) He burst into utter disgust: What does the sign say on the bus? and then began cursing at me as I wandered on.

Nowadays I'd have the gumption to respond back, in kind. The man deserved more than a good tongue lashing; he deserved a little physical abuse, like, say, a stink bomb or a rotten egg. But who has rotten eggs at the ready?

My late aunt once told me a similar story. She asked the bus driver if the bus were going to . . . wherever. And he, too, burst out: What are you, blind?

She burst out into tears and sniffed Yes, walking away. She was legally blind. Oh, she could walk about. But she couldn't read bus signs.

What a contemptiple example of swine that bus driver was. And so many are. Not most, surely; but far too many.

Oddly, now that I think of it, in my episode, it may have been an improperly displayed bus signage that confused me originally. Bus drivers should remember that the cause of many questions are, indeed, the result not of inattention or stupidity of bus riders, but problems arising from other bus drivers' mistakes . . . or from bad planning, or simple natural problems, like poor eyesight.

Regular riders sometimes wonder aloud why most people don't like riding the bus. The answers are many, including the usual: that buses rarely go where we want them to, when.

Often, though, it's because other bus riders are stinky, dangerous, and rude. And this, too often, applies also to the professionals who drive the buses.