The Wild Winds of Fortune

Hurricane Irene is strengthening into a Category 3. To my friends and family in Florida and along the East Coast, keep an eye out.  I know she’s only a Cat 3, but I have a really bad feeling about this one.

 A First Air 737 crashed just short of the runway in Resolute, Nunavut, Canada.  Although the scientists and staff who go to Devon were home, the Rocket Scientist and the NASA people he work with most probably know one or more of the victims.  Resolute is a community of 200, and some of the people on board were going on to Grise Fjord, a town of 70, where, the Rocket Scientist says, he and his colleagues knew pretty much everyone in the village. My heart goes out to the families affected by this tragedy.

This is exactly the sort of thing that gives nightmares about field season.

One way to know that school has started? I am getting more hits from people Googling the words “little known heroes” or “little known American heroes.”  Guys, you really need to go elsewhere than some blog by some person you’ve never heard of to find your materials.  Especially since your teacher has undoubtedly said you can’t use Wikipedia as a source.

According to writer John Batchelor in the Daily Beast blog, the Republicans do not stand a chance in 2012.

Right.

Remember how all of us (all of us liberal Dems, that is) laughed about the possible election of GW Bush?  You can never, never, take anything for granted in presidential politics.  Spin enough embarrassing incidents, cover enough of your previous record, and you can win handily. Or at least with the help of an uncritical media, the Florida supervisor of elections and the Supreme Court.

The thought of any of the Republican candidates being president — with the possible exception of Mitt Romney whom I do not like but also do not fear — is enough to make me wake up in the middle of the night with the cold sweats.

Just think of it: President Rick Perry.  Or even worse, President Rick Santorum. Thankfully, I do think that Michelle Bachmann is enough of a flake that she won’t win the nomination.

 The time to start getting the message out about these people is now, not when it looks like they do have a serious following.

Yesyerday, I returned from several days in Mexico.  Rah.

I have had better vacations.  Much better vacations. There was a fair amount of crankiness on people’s parts (and I’m not exempting myself in this), and not enough time to do what each of us wanted. Because of complications in the Rocket Scientist’s field season resulting from issues between NASA and the DOD, sparked off by the actions of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (gee, thanks, JPL!), he had to be later coming home than planned and our trip was cut from ten days down to five.

The night before we left, Vincent, the black Mustang, died of as yet undiagnosed electronic failure. Fine.  We had to simply leave him on the street rather than in the driveway. Of course, there was nothing to steal and since it wouldn’t start we didn’t have to worry about the car being jacked.

We made it down to Mexico pretty much without incident. I drove through from Mission Hills to Ensanada, primarily because I get so much less cranky than the Rocket Scientist driving in urban traffic. Since I cannot navigate my way out of the proverbial paper bag, he needed to give directions.  The most nerve-wracking part was navigating streets in Tijuana getting to the highway.

Ensanada itself was okay, I guess.  I would have been just as happy — happier, perhaps — lying on the beach in Santa Monica.  One of my requirements for this vacation was that we go somewhere near water. Last year, we did deserts, and the year before mountains, volcanoes and forests, so I thought it only fair we hit oceans.

I am an ocean person of the first order, and really wanted to hear the surf.  In a place like Ensanada — or San Diego, or Key West — all I really need is a beach, a blanket and a book.  And if necessary, I can do without the book. That I only got to spend about two hours at the beach made me unhappy and unreasonable. Although to tell the truth, the marine geyser at Bufadora was really cool.

One aspect of the trip satisfied totally: the food.  It will be a long time before I can eat Mexican food in the States.  There is nothing like the taste of freshly pressed and cooked corn tortillas.  I normally avoid corn tortillas because I think they taste rubbery, but these were fresh and light, filled with either carne asada or fried fish. Yum.

Then there was the trip back.  We went an interior route, which was dry and desert-like, instead of the coastal route we had come down on.  We spent three hours crossing the border, which drove me batty.  After that barrel of fun, we stopped in San Ysidro to get gas and change money.

At which point the great San Diego curse hit.*

Each of the past four trips to San Diego have had something bad happen, either in San Diego or on the way to or from.  Three trips ago, it was an incident involving a waitress in a restaurant and my middle son, which ended up for a short time being a matter for extensive Internet discussion and which had us contacting the San Diego city attorney and contemplating legal action.  The time after was Echidna Quest, which while it had its amusing moments, also involved the car dying in Pasadena, and the Not So Little Drummer Boy spending an entire day in the hotel throwing up from food poisoning.

The time after that was the worst.  While in the San Diego Wild Animal Park, we got word that my beloved sister-in-law Nadia died.  Before we could get back, I had an asthma attack severe enough to require a visit to an urgent care clinic, so that we were late leaving.  While we driving back frantically so that my husband could catch a ten a.m. plane to Atlanta, the transmission on the van died.  Not only died, but self-destructed so spectacularly that the headquarters of Ford took an interest in it.  At midnight.  In the Central Valley, where the temperature was close to 100 degrees, with the omnipresent smell of cattle.  We waited three hours before a tow truck came and picked us up, then dropped us off at a hotel, where we got two hours of sleep before a friend rented a van and came and picked us up.

This time, the latch on the back liftgate broke.  This may not sound like all that much, until you consider we were packed to the gills with no way to close the trunk.  After various attempts to remedy the situation, we were reduced to tying the trunk closed so that we could go on our way.  When we stopped at Santa Clarita for the day, we had to unload everything through the front and side of the van. Which we had to reverse the next morning when we left.

Next time we head south, I refuse to go any farther than the Orange County line.

We then went to Traveltown in Griffith Park so that Railfan could look around.  I have to admit that was rather fun, especially since RF got to show off his accumulated knowledge of rail cars and locomotives. (And boy, does he know a lot.) I found listening to him highly educational, and he was happy to have an interested audience.

But then we had the long slog up I-5 through the Central Valley. We stopped for dinner at Pea Soup Andersen’s in Santa Nella (in spite of my desire to run straight through — which would have been a serious mistake), and got home at 9.  And then the kids had to get ready (including the Red-Headed Menace finishing up a summer assignment for his AP History class — he was up until midnight), because school started today.  I had forgotten to take in the mail, and get someone to take in the trash cans (we had had to leave them in place for the trash/recycling pickup the day we left), so I am waiting to get a citation from the city in the mail for leaving the bins out for more than forty-eight hours. Penwiper the cat showed just how happy she was with the situation (even though we had gotten someone to take care of her while we were gone) by urinating all over a basket of clean clothes in my room.  And she chose to do so after we got home — I discovered the message right after she left it. I love my cat, but sometimes I want to make a throw rug out of her.

Okay, so no one died and no one went to jail.  And I didn’t even freak out about the car situation.  But I tell you, I need another vacation.  Near a beach.  By myself.

*Okay, so San Ysidro is not San Diego proper, but it is in San Diego County. 

I know I have a small (but hopefully dedicated) audience…

Perhaps because of the Russian LJ issue, and because of some cases I have heard recently of Google being overly aggressive in freezing people’s accounts, I have taken to backing up all my posts here on a mirror blog on WordPress.  I am playing around with the interface, and may end up moving permanently over there.  I do not know yet.  I’ll let you guys know — and if any of you have suggestions/preferences, comment.

My first introduction to the world of online writing was through LiveJournal in February, 2002.  Even with all the other social media outlets which have come (Dreamwidth, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and gone (MySpace, Vox), I still have maintained my LiveJournal account.  I still use it for talking to a small group of online friends about subjects too personal to discuss on Facebook, let alone here.  (Not to mention that Facebook has that insanely annoying 420 character limit.  Twitter I keep mainly for communicating in emergencies. LinkedIn… I’m not sure quite why I have a LinkedIn account anymore.  God knows that I do not use it the way it is supposed to be used.) When my children were smaller, LiveJournal saved my sanity, allowing me to communicate with people more than three feet tall.  It gave me a forum for writing and communicating in which I was Pat, not so-and-so’s mother, or, worse yet, The Rocket Scientist’s wife.* I have met friends — some of them very close — through LiveJournal.

As it turns out, LJ has assumed a much greater role in the world than I thought.  Far from simply being a place to bitch to your friends about your boyfriend not calling you, reading Criminal Minds slash, cooing over baby and kitten pictures or participating in random online polls, the service has international political importance.

LiveJournal has become a major platform for political dissidents in Russia. Unlike other media, it is totally uncontrolled, which allows for a complete diversity of opinions.  It is an outlet for free expression in a country where the concept is tenuous (even in the post-Soviet era). It allows Russians of all political stripes to communicate and organize.  And, for the third time since March, last week LJ was been hit with a major DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack.   This time the attacks spread out to the carriers Qwest and Verizon, as well.  There are strong indications that these are, if not government-sponsored, being driven by pro-government forces.

I find all this fascinating. I should not be surprised at the use of LJ as a political tool: blogs and other social media have been used as such by political elements in every country. (It would have been a lot harder for the Tea Party movement in this country to have burgeoned quite as it has without the Internet providing batshit crazies concerned citizens a place to meet.)  A service such as LiveJournal is a repressive government’s worst nightmare:  an easily accessible, totally open venue for political debate.  It is a way for people to foster community and exchange information that would otherwise be repressed.

Of course many people outside Russia have been seriously annoyed by these attacks.  If LJ is your primary way to keep in touch with your friends, it can be frustrating.  (On the small filter of people I talk to, a good 2/3 of them live more than 200 miles away from me.  In most cases I met those people through the Internet, and in some cases I have yet to meet them in person.)  It makes it easier to know, somehow, that all of this is about democracy and free speech, not some idiot 4-Chan/Anonymous power play.

I hope that it doesn’t bring LiveJournal down in the end; that would be a shame.  But I have no doubt that the dissenters will find a way; the Internet has made political repression much more complicated. Even if LiveJournal were to fall (and at least on Russian commentator believes that these attacks are rehearsals for “cyber-war,” to bring LJ down in case of emergency, to shut off dissent without having to disable the entire Internet), people are starting to find other sites and other ways to get their message out. The Internet will win in the end.

It makes this blogger feel all warm and glowy inside.

*I love them, but it does get tiresome when most of the people you talk to want to either discuss your kids or your husband. True story: when you go on Jeopardy!, you fill out a questionnaire about your life experiences.  The last question is “Why do you want to be on Jeopardy!?”  My answer was, flippantly, that it would be nice to have people at cocktail parties talk to me about what I was doing rather than what my husband the Rocket Scientist was involved in.  When you go on the show, they pick one item about you for Alex Trebek to chat with you about.  Out of all the fascinating stories I told about myself, guess what they chose?  Yep, how much I was in my husband’s shadow and how this was a chance for my own place in the sun.  I just can’t escape this.

My first introduction to the world of online writing was through LiveJournal in February, 2002.  Even with all the other social media outlets which have come (Dreamwidth, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and gone (MySpace, Vox), I still have maintained my LiveJournal account.  I still use it for talking to a small group of online friends about subjects too personal to discuss on Facebook, let alone here.  (Not to mention that Facebook has that insanely annoying 420 character limit.  Twitter I keep mainly for communicating in emergencies. LinkedIn… I’m not sure quite why I have a LinkedIn account anymore.  God knows that I do not use it the way it is supposed to be used.) When my children were smaller, LiveJournal saved my sanity, allowing me to communicate with people more than three feet tall.  It gave me a forum for writing and communicating in which I was Pat, not so-and-so’s mother, or, worse yet, The Rocket Scientist’s wife.* I have met friends — some of them very close — through LiveJournal.

As it turns out, LJ has assumed a much greater role in the world than I thought.  Far from simply being a place to bitch to your friends about your boyfriend not calling you, reading Criminal Minds slash, cooing over baby and kitten pictures or participating in random online polls, the service has international political importance.

LiveJournal has become a major platform for political dissidents in Russia. Unlike other media, it is totally uncontrolled, which allows for a complete diversity of opinions.  It is an outlet for free expression in a country where the concept is tenuous (even in the post-Soviet era). It allows Russians of all political stripes to communicate and organize.  And, for the third time since March, last week LJ was been hit with a major DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack.   This time the attacks spread out to the carriers Qwest and Verizon, as well.  There are strong indications that these are, if not government-sponsored, being driven by pro-government forces. 

I find all this fascinating. I should not be surprised at the use of LJ as a political tool: blogs and other social media have been used as such by political elements in every country. (It would have been a lot harder for the Tea Party movement in this country to have burgeoned quite as it has without the Internet providing batshit crazies concerned citizens a place to meet.)  A service such as LiveJournal is a repressive government’s worst nightmare:  an easily accessible, totally open venue for political debate.  It is a way for people to foster community and exchange information that would otherwise be repressed.

Of course many people outside Russia have been seriously annoyed by these attacks.  If LJ is your primary way to keep in touch with your friends, it can be frustrating.  (On the small filter of people I talk to, a good 2/3 of them live more than 200 miles away from me.  In most cases I met those people through the Internet, and in some cases I have yet to meet them in person.)  It makes it easier to know, somehow, that all of this is about democracy and free speech, not some idiot 4-Chan/Anonymous power play.

I hope that it doesn’t bring LiveJournal down in the end; that would be a shame.  But I have no doubt that the dissenters will find a way; the Internet has made political repression much more complicated. Even if LiveJournal were to fall (and at least one Russian commentator believes that these attacks are rehearsals for “cyber-war,” to bring LJ down in case of emergency, to shut off dissent without having to disable the entire Internet), people are starting to find other sites and other ways to get their message out. The Internet will win in the end.

It makes this blogger feel all warm and glowy inside.


*I love them, but it does get tiresome when most of the people you talk to want to either discuss your kids or your husband. True story: when you go on Jeopardy!, you fill out a questionnaire about your life experiences.  The last question is “Why do you want to be on Jeopardy!?”  My answer was, flippantly, that it would be nice to have people at cocktail parties talk to me about what I was doing rather than what my husband the Rocket Scientist was involved in.  When you go on the show, they pick one item about you for Alex Trebek to chat with you about.  Out of all the fascinating stories I told about myself, guess what they chose?  Yep, how much I was in my husband’s shadow and how this was a chance for my own place in the sun.  I just can’t escape this.

When I started this blog, it was, for the most part, discussions of the events of the day filtered through my own particular life experiences.  I did not write very much about my family, and, although more, not all that much about my every day activities.

That has changed over the past few years.  I stopped blogging almost completely in 2008 and 2009, posting a total of 20 posts in two years, twelve less that I have thus far in this July alone.  When I recommenced writing in 2010, the posts were mostly about me (with far too much navel-gazing), with far fewer about the world around me.  Although the purpose of the blog remained the same (to give me a generalized outlet for my writing), the subjects and tone changed, and not necessarily for the better.

Lately, I have been trying to figure out why this is. I know that part of it is a result of long-term unemployment: except for last year’s four and a half month stint with the Census Bureau, I have not had a paying job since Thanksgiving 2008.  I have worked hard:  I have been important in my teenage sons lives, and have contributed to society through volunteer work.  At the nonprofit where I volunteer, I am greatly appreciated.  I talk about it as my job, which it is, except that I can’t pay the mortgage with it, and they can’t afford to hire me. (I know: I have been doing grant research, and filling out online applications, and I see the budgets.)

Unemployment damages your trust in your own capabilities.  I know that I tend to obsess far more over the things I cannot do than the things I can.  I can write clearly and convincingly, but I tend to downplay that ability.  A friend has told me that I seem scared of the possibility of my own success; she may be right.  I am terrified of letting people down, and am a firm believer in the Peter Principle, so I tend to skirt the possibility of rising to a level of incompetence by tending to not rise at all.

However, that does not completely explain the shift in focus here.  This blog has never gotten many hits.  I don’t expect it to do so. I have no responsibilities to others to live up to, and feel no pressure. Why have my interests shifted here? And it is not only writing about the world around me, to a great deal it has been stopping reading about the world around me, as well.

What happened? Burnout.  Then fear.

Sometime in the middle of 2007, I began to get “outrage fatigue.”  So much had happened to change America for the worse, that I found myself saying “yeah?  that’s not at all surprising.”  (One of my favorite quotes from the 2000s was from Teresa Nielsen Hayden: “I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.”)  My expectations for my government had sunk to a level where being angry seemed pointless. In some sense I had done everything that a good conscientious citizen is supposed to do: I voted, I talked to my fellow Americans, I wrote letter after letter to my Congressional representatives.  And the slide continued.

The election of Barack Obama gave me some hope.  But only briefly.  It is not that Obama has done all that badly: there are a great many things he has done right.  (There are things that I am deeply angered at the failure of this administration to keep to its election promises, chiefly the detainee issue and Guantanamo.)  But he is hamstrung by a Congress, media and (if we are to believe said media) a populace that has moved beyond simple self-interest to insanity.

The conversation about the debt ceiling is insane.  The willingness of politicians to play chicken with the country’s economy is insane.  The failure of many of the people to use basic critical thinking skills about these issues is insane.

You don’t want any deficits?  Stop the wars, and raise taxes.  Funny, you were all for increased deficits under the prior administration.  There is almost little room left to cut, unless you want to gut wholesale social programs, not to mention things like NASA — and, even though we are NASA family, if we had to there are other jobs out there for my husband — and, more importantly, the FDA, Agriculture, OSHA and the EPA.  You gut their budgets, and you have no one to blame but yourself when your next door neighbor’s kid dies from e. Coli or salmonella contracted from eating non-inspected food, or you come down with cancer from the toxins in your water, or your son is seriously injured in a workplace accident that was entirely preventable had said workplace been required to meet safety standards, or the drug that your wife takes for her arthritis turns out to cause liver disease.

This idea that there are people who do not pay taxes?  Individuals pay all sort of taxes, even though they pay no income tax.  They pay payroll and Social Security, and sales tax, and property tax in some form, either directly if they own their own home or by proxy when the landlord passes the costs through. And the less money they make, the more these taxes hit home.  (Warren Buffett is, in my opinion, a hero.)

The income disparities between those at the very top and those at the very bottom have not been so large in decades.  Again if one listens to the media, far too many people seem not to know or, if they do know, not to care.

There has been a YouTube video making the rounds about a supposed boondoggle of a housing project in Tacoma, Washington.  All sort of crazy claims have been made (falsely) about how it will benefit foreigners and poor people.  What intrigues me is not the video, but how people put trust in someone they don’t know simply because what he is saying fits into their own preconceived notions. On his website, he makes such claims as that the Jesuits are hitmen for the Vatican, that the U.S. was dissolved in 1933, and that the Federal Reserve outlawed money in 1913.  This guy is a complete loony.  That people take anything he says seriously is frightening. (And yes, as I (and Don Marquis) have said before, ideas are not responsible for the people that hold them, but there are or should be limits on what you take at face value. Especially from someone who claims he used to be an ambassador.)

It’s not just nationally, either.  California has its own brand of insanity, economic and otherwise.

I can’t even talk about health care issues right now, or what is happening in the abortion arena.  All I can say is that, sadly and selfishly, I am relieved not to have daughters.  I am afraid for the future for my sons, I can only imagine what mothers of young women feel.  I have to fight from falling into despair for my country. Part of the way I have done this is by concentrating on the little picture, on my family, on me.

I keep telling myself that there are areas of progress.  The movement on same-sex marriage has heartened me a great deal, as has the pending end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the administration’s refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.  The Lily Ledbetter act, the first thing Obama signed when he became president, was a very good thing indeed. In California, recently districts were redrawn to reduce gerrymandering.  And there have been other places where there is burgeoning pushback from thoughtful people.

I keep telling myself the country has seen much tougher times:  we have many protections that people in the 19th century did not have.  The Great Depression was also worse.  The safety net may be shredding, but it is still there.

Somehow it doesn’t seem enough. But it will have to do. By trying to insulate myself from what is going on in the country, I am failing in the first duty of every adult citizen, to stay informed so that you can make informed decisions, so you can pressure your government to make intelligent decisions.

A number of the quotes on my sidebar — especially those from the Book of Micah, Mary Harris, Reinhold Neibuhr and Molly Ivins — talk about the responsibility to work for, as the John D. and Katherine T Macarthur Foundation says in their mission statement, a “more just, verdant and peaceful world.”  Molly Ivins, in particular, talks not only about the work, but the joy that exists in that work.

I think it may be time to pick up the fight again, even in the small way I do so. Molly, I hope you’re right.

I had talked about how I needed to find a way to make my trivia abilities a paying proposition. Last night, I did, sort of.

The scene: an Applebee’s in San Jose.
The set-up: a local trivia contest (i.e., not from a company such as BuzzTime or Brainstormer). Each round was a timed ten-question multiple choice test. The person with the most correct answers wins the round. In the case of a tie the person who turned their sheet in first wins.
The results: Four rounds. Four first answers in. Four wins. Not even close, really: not only was I the first person to turn their answers in, in each round I had the most correct answers. In the last round, they knew I had won before anyone else turned their sheet in:  I was first, and I ran the round. (I overheard the scorer talking to the manager.)

Fifty dollars in gift certificates: ten for each of the first three rounds, twenty for the last.  The manager did not look pleased.

The Resident Shrink (who was an amused bystander) and I figured out if we can just find other Applebee’s with similar set-ups, we could be set.  Of course, it’s Applebee’s, not a really nice restaurant, but still… I have covered my jello shots and Sangria from last night, as well as the Resident Shrink’s lemonade and dessert.  I have also covered next week’s — and the week after’s — drinks and bar snacks.

All of this eases my deep sense of failure at doing so poorly on Jeopardy! all those years ago.  : )

Remember how I talked about my prowess at trivia? It deserted me last night, as Team Echidna came in four points behind the winners (the wonderfully named Empathetic Bullfighters).  Still, we were a team of two, they were a team of six.  Sheer numbers — or lack thereof — ought to count for something.

However, the night before, playing Buzztime trivia at Applebee’s, my ranking for the next to last game was … 1.  In the NATION.  It was 11 p.m., but still… from what I could tell from the rankings shown, there were about 4,000 people playing all across the country.

Not shabby.  Not shabby at all.

The freezer died yesterday.  It is difficult to tell if it is totally gone, or just has frozen up and needs to be defrosted (it’s an old freezer).*  So last night I and the Resident Shrink went out and bought dry ice, and spent a while tossing things out of the freezer which were too far gone (i.e., the chicken and thawed frozen french fries) or probably should not have been saved in the first place, such as last Christmas’s extra pan of stuffing. (George Carlin has this issue covered, I think.)

This morning was spent cooking hamburger patties on the grill and ground beef on the stove so that we could more easily fit them in the limited fridge space we had left.  (Of course, Sunday had been a Costco run, so there was pretty much no fridge space, except that the self described “horde of locusts” and “zombies that eat everything except brains” had had three days to whittle down the food supply.  Not to mention when they had their teenage-boy friends over.)  Tonight will be spaghetti with meat sauce, tomorrow will be tacos, and lunches all this week will be cheeseburgers. At least for the carnivores: the vegetarians (read RHM, mostly) will eat tortellini and frozen pizza.

One thing did help, though, although I perhaps did not recognize how much at the time: when I was at my most my stressed this morning, Railfan not only helped politely and cheerfully, several times he asked me to look at him, and he smiled to try and cheer me up.

You know, no matter how bad it gets, I have my family.  And I love them.

*It is all the Rocket Scientist’s fault.  When he went to Morocco earlier this year, the kitchen sink sprung a major leak.  He goes to the Arctic, and the freezer dies.  He just has to stop leaving the country.

One of the Not-So-Little Drummer Boy’s jobs this summer is painting houses.  He came home a few minutes ago.

Me:  You have paint on your ear.
NSLDB: Cool.
Me:  Wait, are you saying this is a fashion statement?
NSLDB: Of course.
Me: Is everything a fashion statement?
NSLDB: Yes… then again no.

I am so going to miss him when he goes back to school.

And this time I lost.

It started with the Red-Headed Menace and I talking about, of all things, his birthday wish list which included Princeton Review Study Guides. (For perspective, he’s only a sophomore. Obsessive, much?) Since he hadn’t said which review guides, I joked that I could get him the GRE guide, or the MCAT guide.

“I don’t want to be a doctor. I would be a lousy doctor.” (I agreed.) “I’d make a good scientist or a good lawyer. Maybe I should become a patent attorney because it’s so cutthroat. I have a friend with both parents who are patent attorneys, and he says they say it’s absolutely brutal.”*

So then we’re off…

RHM: Okay, what law is involved in phone wires? Wait, let me guess… zoning law.
Mom: Also FCC regulations, I think.
RHM: Okay, what’s the law involved in that tree on our fence?
Mom: I don’t know — nuisance law?
RHM: Okay… what if the tree drops fruit in the neighbors’ yard? Whose fruit is it?
Mom: Theirs.
RHM: Aha! Then what if is genetically modified fruit? What about the seeds? Can they plant them?
Mom: If it’s genetically modified fruit, then you are Monsanto Corporation and will likely sue the pants off them.
Mom: You do know that you have no idea whether I actually know what I am talking about or are lying through my teeth to you, right?
RHM: True…Okay… what about this old clock?
Mom: I can’t say about that clock specifically, but clock designs generally are covered by copyright.
RHM: This peanut butter?
Mom: I’m sure the FDA has lawyers on staff.
RHM: And if it has salmonella, then there would be lawsuits. Okay, what about that cactus? [Indicates the potted cactus he asked for and got for his tenth birthday.]
Mom: ….
Mom: ….
Mom: Okay, you stumped me.

I can’t tell if I am more annoyed that I lost the argument, or proud that he didn’t. And, more to the point, that he wanted to have it in the first place.

*The the fact that he wishes to be in a cutthroat profession says far too much about his personality.