28.12.06

We spent Christmas Eve visiting with Carleen’s parents, so we had one of the few opportunities to watch cable television. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I’ll leave the reader to decide (bad, if you want my opinion), but one of the programs we watched was Dateline’s To Catch a Predator. Dateline has joined forces with Perverted-Justice, in an effort to bring online sexual predators to justice. Carleen has told me about this show, but I had never seen it. It’s a really neat show, not to mention catching some serious low-lifes. Here’s the setup if you haven’t seen it: People from Perverted-Justice pose online as under-age teens to lure online predators. They give an address where the predators can meet the “teen”. When the predators show up (from what I saw, usually with beer and condoms), they are greeted at the door by a young looking woman, coached on what to say. After some pleasantries, the host, Chris Hanson enters the room and begins grilling the predators on why they are here - holding in his hand the saved transcripts from the online chats. Hanson allows the men to leave after a short while, however, the police are already on the scene, ready to arrest the men.

Now, I don’t question what this show accomplishes, to be sure, as of the date of last nights program they had caught over 160 online predators. And obviously the way in which they lure the predators is perfectly legal. What got me thinking is the legal system in general, and this concept of luring criminals into illegal behavior. I’m not terribly familiar with the legal system in this respect, so I’m really just considering this as a mental exercise. To me it’s a question of intent versus action. If I walk into a convenience store with a concealed gun with the intent of robbing it, but I don’t, have I done anything illegal? Other than carrying a concealed weapon, that is. Shouldn’t I have the opportunity to rethink my actions before being arrested?

It’s things like this that sorta make me rethink wanting to have a girl. I mean, it’s bad enough trying to teach a boy not to be a creep, but having to worry about all those out there that never got taught?

So, I have a phone interview for a young adult position at a library in New Jersey scheduled for the second week of January. New Jersey. Bruce Springsteen is from New Jersey. He’s my secret boyfriend. Atlantic City is my favorite song.

I’ve applied for several more positions in the upstate/east coast area. Unfortunately, there aren’t many in youth services. I think the market is a little swamped now given that it’s graduation time everywhere.

So, I’m trying to put together this reading map website thing for work on a book called The Birth of Venus. The story is set during the Early Renaissance so I’ve been looking up important figures from that time period. In the process, I came across this personality test from Salon magazine which is supposed to calculate “whether you subscribe to the ideas” of the 16th century Italian political philosopher, Machiavelli. My score ended up being high, which apparently means that I am “charming, confident and glib, but also arrogant, calculating and cynical, prone to manipulate and exploit”. And I always thought I was a pretty nice person most of the time.

The Machiavelli personality test has a range of 0-100
Your Machiavelli score is: 63
You are a high Mach, you endorse Machiavelli’s opinions.

Most people fall somewhere in the middle, but there’s a significant minority at either extreme.