Random Thinking

Dearly Devoted Dexter
by Jeff Lindsay

Poor Dexter. All he wants to do is chop up a pedophile who has a taste for killing young boys and the whole world is scheming to keep him from his one true love… killing. The problem starts with Sergeant Doakes, a fellow officer in the Miami Police Department. Doakes has looked into Dexter’s soul and has seen something he didn’t like so he has been following poor Dexter everywhere. So Dexter has been hanging around with his girlfriend Rita, drinking beer on her couch, and playing hangman with Rita’s kids.

Meanwhile, a new monster has decided to settle into Miami and Dexter’s sister is dragging Dexter into another case. This new monster’s crimes are so horrific that even Dexter is enthralled with them. But being dragged around to help Deborah’s new boyfriend crack this case isn’t exactly Dexter’s idea of fun. And off we go on another adventure with the only likable serial killer in the world.

Once again we find ourselves rooting for the serial killer and once again Jeff Lindsay has written a fast-paced, fun, and funny (unless you get nightmares easily) book. Just as in the first book, the second in the series is written in the first person which lets us pal around with Dexter and become part of his inner thoughts. And his inner thoughts are quite humorous. Dexter knows he isn’t quite human which leaves him sometimes guessing about the things that humans actually think and mean when they speak. For example, the idea that the female police officer who stammers and blushes every time she sees him has a crush on him simply never enters his mind. He simply can’t understand why anyone could love a monster like him.

The best parts of the book are all things that I won’t tell you because I don’t want to ruin the fun. Let’s just say that poor Dexter gets a lot more put upon then he ever wanted. And although I hate to use clich�s too much, this book is really laugh-out-loud funny (just ask my daughter who was in the back seat while we waited for my wife to come out of the store) and a page-turner. I had to pick this book up and keep reading at every opportunity. Is this book perfect? No, there are a few holes in the story here and there but the story moves so quickly they are hard to notice. I can’t wait for the next book in the series.

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File this under don’t underestimate Mikey. We use discrete trials with Mikey. The idea behind this is that children with autism learn better with repetition and rewards. To support using discrete trials, we have software called DT Trainer which Mikey likes to use. The software works by asking a question and giving three choices. When you click on the correct one, the program says, in a pleasant female voice, “Good job” or “That’s right, Mikey”. You can program it with your child’s name so it talks to him or her. If you get the question wrong, it tells you the answer and then asks the question again. It keeps doing this until you get the question correct. This is where the term discrete trials come from. So there are different age and skill levels of questions and it also can be used with a touch screen for children who can’t handle a mouse.

So Mikey goes into our computer room and starts up the program and picks the highest level we have set for him, which is age seven. It asks questions such as pick a number in a series; pick the largest number in a group; use greater than, less than, and equal signs; identify the time on a clock; etc. Mikey was able to answer all the questions correctly. I know Mikey is smart but because he is non-verbal it is so easy to underestimate him. His teachers keep telling us that he will be doing math and reading starting September. Thank goodness his teachers (both at school and at home) have high expectations for Mikey.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter
by Jeff Lindsay

Dexter Morgan is a blood spatter technician for the Miami Police Department. Besides being an expert at his job Dexter is also a vigilante of sort. In his spare time, he hunts down serial killers and kills them. One could almost support Dexter in his hunt for justice except that there is a big problem. Dexter enjoys killing… and he enjoys it way too much. Dexter is, in fact, a serial killer who only kills evil people. He is a conscienceless sociopath who feels nothing for human beings but feels compelled to make them suffer. And he is the hero of the story. Dexter does everything he can to appear normal. He has a girlfriend that he treats well but he cares nothing for her. He has learned to look and act like any other person in Miami.

But sometimes trying to convince everyone he is normal forces Dexter to do things he might not otherwise do. Dexter’s sister, Deborah, is also in the Miami Police Department and she desperately wants to get out of Vice and into Homicide. When a series of brutal killings occur, she sees an opportunity to get recognized. She doesn’t know her brother is a serial killer but she does know that her brother sometimes seems to have an insight into the criminal mind and wants Dexter’s help. But this killer is something truly special… someone that Dexter is not prepared to go up against.

It’s hard to believe that a book that makes a hero of a serial killer could be so enthralling, humorous, and enjoyable but Jeff Lindsay has suceeded in creating a sympathetic sociopath. Writing the book in the first person is ingenious as it lets us see into the mind of Dexter and allows Dexter to talk to us and show us his self-deprecating, sarcastic humor. I could like Dexter (even if he could never actually care about another person) if it wasn’t for that little character quirk of occasionally letting The Dark Passenger, as he refers to his compulsion to kill, take control and drive him to unspeakable acts of cruelty.

My daughter told me about this book and she was right that it is amazingly good. After struggling through the Dante Club for weeks I finished this in three days and thoroughly enjoyed it. Lindsay keeps the story moving so fast that we forget that we are rooting for a serial killer. No, it is not going to win an award for literary genius but as a guilty pleasure it is a great read.

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All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing. – Edmund Burke

Exceptional Parent magazine released a position paper in their March edition covering the question of the respect for the life of the disabled. One of the issues it covers is what is called The Groningen Protocol, named after a pediatric hospital in the Netherlands. The protocol is a written statement used by doctors to justify the active killing of their pediatric patients.

The Groningen Protocol has five criteria: the suffering must be so severe that the newborn has no prospects of a future; there is no possibility of a cure or alleviation with medication or surgery; the parents must always give their consent; a second opinion must be provided by an independent doctor who has not been involved with the child�s treatment; and the deliberate ending of life must be meticulously carried out with the emphasis on aftercare.

Programs like these may start with the best intentions but ultimately we end up with doctors who think that any child that is less than perfect is eligible to be “put down” like a sick animal. All humans, even a new born baby, is different than a cat or dog. Even if you are in favor of physician assisted suicide, there is a huge difference between that and killing innocent people who can’t make their wishes known.

History has shown us that children with disabilities have been victims of involuntary sterilization, institutionalization, and widespread abuse, neglect, and death. Historically, society had little or no expectations for children with disabilities, and their families frequently felt shame.

And there’s the rub. Those without disabilities have judged the lives of the disabled as not worth living. Whether it is because they make us uncomfortable or because we think we are doing them a favor, we have hidden them away in institutions or worse. So when I see a protocol that judges the life of another as not worth living, I wonder who are you to judge. How severe must the suffering be to be killed? Does a child with Down syndrome “suffer”? Do all disabled child “suffer”? What is meant by “no possibility of a cure”? How do we know what won’t be cured in the future? How do we know that parents who are emotionally torn by the birth of a disabled or sick child are truly making an informed decision? How soon before the decision to kill a new born with Down syndrome is made as routinely as killing the unborn with Down syndrome?

The word that best describes the attitude that allows the The Groningen Protocol to become the standard for care is utilitarianism. Human life no longer has value simply because it is human life, but becomes valuable based only on the utility of that life to society. It is this attitude that discards human dignity.

I wanted to wait a bit to post about something that has been bothering me. For those who have been under a rock for the last month, on April 16th a student at Virginia Tech killed 32 students and teachers and then killed himself. The media was all over the story featuring constant, 24 hour coverage for several days. All three cable news networks (CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News) covered the story as if nothing else was happening anywhere in the world. As horrific as 32 deaths are, that happens to be exactly the average number of Americans murdered with a handgun each and every day. But those deaths don’t rate wall-to-wall cable news coverage. A couple of days after the Virginia Tech killings, a man at the Johnson Space Center in Houston killed one person before killing himself. He rated two paragraphs in my local paper on page 20. Also a couple of days after Virginia Tech, a car bombing in Iraq killed over 200 people. Again, coverage of the bombing had to fight with the Virginia Tech lead. I am not trying to say that the Virginia Tech story wasn’t worth covering or that the deaths weren’t a big deal. But Thursday when I came home from work expecting to hear about the Attorney General’s testimony before Congress, the cable news networks were still giving complete coverage to the Virginia Tech story. There are many other things happening in the world and many of them are much more important than the Virginia Tech story, but you would never know it if you got your news from CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News.

Technorati Tags: Virginia Tech, murder, media

As if JetBlue doesn’t have enough problems lately, four of their employees have been arrested for stealing customers’ credit cards. Apparently (and really not a surprise), people are in such a rush when buying their tickets at the counter that occasionally they run off without getting their credit card back. An alert and honest employee would have little trouble getting it back to the customer, but it seems that some JetBlue employees found this as an invitation to go on a shopping spree. Apparently liquor stores and Victoria’s Secret were two favorite destinations. One of the ripped-off customers, a law student, reported that he forgot his credit card at the counter and it had been used to charge $500 worth of stuff.

This is where the story gets confusing. Apparently, the police were notified on June 7, 2006 but the crooks were only charged yesterday. Did it really take almost a year to figure out who were the guilty parties and charge them? I guess the wheels of justice turn slowly.

Technorati Tags: JetBlue, crooks, justice

VH1 Classic recently started a campaign to raise awareness of autism and to promote causes that help people with this condition and to help find a cure. The campaign is called Rock Autism. There isn’t much on their site yet but the video of the PSA is pretty cool. Watch the PSA and see how many classic rockers you can identify. You can then go to the news flash video and see how many you got right!

Technorati Tags: disability, autism

The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl

It’s 1865, the Civil War has just ended, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the other members of the Dante Club are translating Dante’s “Divine Comedy” for the 600th anniversary of Dante’s birth. When a pair of murders occur that seem to take their inspiration from the tortures in “Inferno”, the Dante Club decides to investigate. What is revealed is that 19th century poets make poor detectives and boring characters. Longfellow is treated liked some kind of poet-god, Holmes is a whiny little bore, and Lowell and Fields are interchangeably nondescript. In fact, none of the key characters other than Oliver Wendell Holmes are developed very much and Holmes is not an especially likable person.

Although using historical figures in a mystery can be interesting, the problem is that since we know that none of the members of the Dante Club were murdered by a serial killer in 1865, it’s hard to create much sense of danger. Normally, an author will add additional fictional characters, make us care about them, and then put them in danger so that only the heroes of the story can save them. But Pearl doesn’t go this route, instead putting his main characters at risk but this doesn’t create any real tension. In fact, Pearl seems to realize this so the danger he places his characters in is quickly dispelled. The book starts off fairly well for the first chapter but then drags as Pearl introduces the Dante Club. A big problem is the dialog. Here is a random sample:

*Lowell mumbled, “Did not Dante himself once write that no poetry can be translated? Yet we come together weekly and gleefully murder his words.” “Lowell, peace,” gasped Fields…*

Perhaps Boston poets did speak this way in the 1860′s but it makes for tedious reading. In the acknowledgments, Pearl reveals that much of the dialog is taken from essays written by the various members of the Dante Club. Since people don’t speak the same way that they write, perhaps this is the source of Pearl’s problem. After struggling through the first hundred pages, the book finally starts to move as the mystery deepens and our heroes start their investigation. But the story quickly begins to drag again as the “detectives” reveal their incompetence.

Which leads us to the denouement of the story in which all is not revealed. The holes in the solution to the mystery are vast and the “detectives” make no effort to fill them. So the story seems mostly an excuse to discuss some issues with the translation of Dante. The murders are brutal but poorly described. Boston of 1865 could have been an interesting character (as New York City is in “Ragtime” and “The Alienist”) but instead Boston is barely described. In fact this is the key to the book’s failures… Pearl isn’t a very good descriptive writer which is critical in non-fiction but especially in a mystery.

I should add that the book has a foreword which gives away a key plot point (one of the few of interest in the first part of the book). Skip the foreword and return to it later… you’ll thank me.

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