Also...

I am also very, very thankful that they finally caught Bri's killer. I am thankful for all of the people who put in thousands of hours of work, both the police and volunteers, and am thankful for the technology that made it possible to match his DNA. More than anything, I am thankful for the friend of his girlfriend who was suspicious enough to call in the tip to the police. I honestly cannot believe that they were able to find the man who terrorized our town within a year and before he struck again. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It's a small, scary world.

You may have read about six-year-old Cole Puffinburger. He was kidnapped last week from his home in an awful, drug-related attack in Las Vegas. This all happened literally one street away from my brother-in-law's house and two streets from my mother- and father-in-law's house. As in, Google the street name (I found it on the Review-Journal's story) and their streets are in the same close-up screen. Add to this the fact that my mother-in-law teaches kindergarten and could have been Cole's teacher if he had lived on the other side of a street. And Cole's father was in the same graduating class from high school as Peter. These are, quite literally, the people my husband grew up with.

Thanks be to God, Yaweh, Gaia, Allah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whomever else you'd like to thank, Cole was found perfectly unharmed and is safe now. Sadly, I think he is in the minority for missing children. I seriously cannot believe that he is OK and that they found him so quickly (relatively speaking).

The most frightening part of this for me is that my in-laws want to leave. They already have a house in Michigan waiting for them. But the housing market in Vegas is so awful, they can't leave. They say it seems like everyone on their street is just waiting for their chance to put their house on the market. What if they can't leave in time? What if the neighborhood just keeps deteriorating and there is no option to leave? This scenario has played out in many other cities hundreds of times through history, no doubt, but that never makes it less frightening for those living it.

The Invisible Hand

As someone who really does not understand economics, I can't elucidate the murky dealings that led us to our current state, but with each fresh collapse and merger of another major bank, the same image keeps popping into my head. I see a mansion built on shifting sand whose foundation has been eaten away and is now collapsing dramatically into the ocean. Unstoppable tides tear it down; the only thing that could have saved it was to have built the thing with caution and foresight in the beginning.

I feel as though all of this could have been foreseen. And it is all connected: housing loans, sub-prime mortgages, bank failures and now the collapsing stock market. Each built on the other, and when pieces of the foundation of our economy were washed away by the inevitable tides, the entire house began to disintegrate.

The question is: now what?

Reno Sadness

Sad news out of Reno today. They found the body of the young woman who was kidnapped from her friend's house about a month ago and think it was the work of a serial rapist.

Two reasons (other than the obvious) why this is so sad:

1. There have been *so many* rapes and sexual attacks near the University of Nevada Reno (UNR) campus in the last few years. And it seemed like there were several serial perpetrators in those times. Like, multiple cases of men coming in through open windows/doors, touching a foot, doing very specific things that seemed like an MO. I don't think they ever caught anyone.

2. The girl was taken near an unopened door. Even sadder than the police not catching these horrible rapists is the fact that even after all of the highly-publicized stuff in the past few years, people are STILL leaving doors and windows unlocked. I'm not trying to blame the victim here AT ALL (since he might have broken in the glass door or a window to get her anyway, who knows), but still!

People: Lock your doors and windows at night. In the day. Whenever you don't want some rapist/kidnapper/murderer to come in your house. PLEASE. Especially if you live in an area where stuff like this has happened a LOT, but do this ANYWHERE!

My heart hurts for my hometown and especially for my alma mater and the students/university community who are now trying to grapple with the fact that they have a "serial rapist" in their midst (not like they didn't before, but at least the police are now acknowledging it). Let's hope this tragedy is enough to really change people's ways, both the police and the students.

Speech Acts in the News

For those non-linguists out there, speech acts (or more specifically, illocutionary acts) are when the mere act of a pronouncement causes something to happen. The classic example is when a minister says "I pronounce you husband and wife" and this causes it to be so. The deal with these things is that there are rules. The right person has to say the right thing in the right way at the right time in order for the "act" to be done. I can't say "I now pronounce you husband and wife" to two friends at the mall and have it mean anything because I'm not a qualified person, it wouldn't be an appropriate time and place and my two friends may not want to ever be such a thing as husband and wife.

The problems with understanding these niceties of illocutionary acts became glaringly obvious in an article today in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Jane Ann Morrison wrote in a commentary column that Nevada Supreme Court Justice (I think) Nancy Saitta said "because her students called her 'professor,' she believed she was an associate professor at UNLV, a job that is a tenured position and usually takes six or seven years to obtain." Sweet! If your students call you "professor," or "doctor," or "el presidente," you can just skip all that nonsense of extra schooling, the tedious application process.

I think this will be good news for many of my friends who are TAs and/or instructors themselves! Heck, even Peter's high school students have called him "Dr." on occasion. Thank goodness we now won't have to pay for 4 years of higher education for him!