Someone once pestered me about my electricity usage - I ate his liver with some fava beans

SEATTLE, Washington - I'm one of the lucky 20,000 Seattle City Light customers selected to receive condescending lectures about their electricity usage. I'm now burdened with bar graphs and smiley-face ratings concerning my electricity use relative to the use of my neighbors.



These are the people who sell me electricity. They should be lobbying me to use more, not less. They should be trying to sell me my own Large Hadron Collider, not telling me to use CFLs.

The folks who deliver these sorts of lectures don't seem to understand that we don't use electricity for the pleasure of seeing the big number on our bill, we use it because it makes our life better.



The implication of this image is that I'm spending too much on electricity, because look, some of my neighbors are using less. I look at this as me having a better life than my neighbors. How much better? At least $198 better, or else I wouldn't be spending it.

There's so much more to the story of comparing electricity usage than looking at these raw numbers - for instance, I work at home, so I have 2-3 computers and lights burning that many others won't have. Of course the busybodies have an answer for this; their literature implores me and the other victims of this "assistance" to contact them and tell them all about our life, so they can fine-tune their reports.

The real reason this program exists is that some people get a special thrill out of lecturing people, but the putative reason is concern about carbon emissions. (In fact if you go to the city climate web site they'll assign you a "carbon coach"). But if you look at the most recent (2006) figures, the power supplied by Seattle City Light is more than 89% hydro, and only about 2% comes from carbon-emitting sources. My breathing while walking back and forth to Bakery Nouveau probably emits more carbon than my electricity usage.

I'd really rather have a private electricity provider, motivated by good old fashioned "greed", than a public utility that uses me as a captive audience for their lecturing.

Satanism - bad for pedestrians

WASHINGTON, DC - Washington, screw you and your Freemasonry/Satanism based spoke-hub street layout. It seems to take about ten minutes to cross some of these things on foot.

Note below, I shot the photo of that sign from its good side - the sidewalk. Because if you're in a car on the street, the crack DC sign crews planted the sign of parking policies for the street about two feet from the street map, blocking it from view.

The Phone Book is not going down without a fight

SEATTLE, Washington - I got a few more phone books deposited on my stoop last week, bringing to seven the number of phone books I have that are officially "current" (i.e. labeled as being good until June 2010 or all of 2010).

And I tossed a few phone books out last year, so it's possible that if I had checked dates before disposing of (er, recycling) them, I'd have more than seven current ones.

My landline is from Qwest, so I guess I expect a few Dex books, but I have no relationship at all with Verizon yet they deliver three phone books to me. I guess enough people are still putting ads in big yellow phone books to make it economically viable to print and distribute them.

The oddest thing of all - the White Pages. Not only is this useless, but if you think about it a bit it creeps you out - "here's a big book full of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of everyone in the city!" And nowadays, it's not even close to being everyone, it's just older people who haven't abandoned landlines and didn't have the sense to tell the phone company to exclude them from the book.

Black women not making headway with Tiger Woods (or anyone else)

Can't a sister get a break?

SEATTLE, Washington - It was only a matter of time before a commentator would note a certain similarity in the physical appearance of all the women popping up in the Tiger Woods conquest gallery. Eugene Robinson:

Here's my real question, though: What's with the whole Barbie thing?

No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who've been linked to Woods resemble one another. I'm talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.
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But the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes -- some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an "official" standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

Mr Robinson dances around a bit, but we know what your main concern is, sir - none of the women are black.

This reminded me of a comment about Tiger's preference in women that was made back in April of 2002, during the winning call of The Jim Rome Show's Smack-Off for that year. This was after Tiger had bagged Elin but before they were married, and the caller, Jeff in Richmond, made some comments about the relationship and then said "by the way, Tiger... can't a sister get a break?" (clip here)

Let us not single out Tiger for dodging black women - in fact, they're being dodged by American men of all races, at least if this analysis by okcupid.com is representative of the population as a whole. The two matrices below show write-back rates broken down by race; one is for female senders, and the other is for male senders. These are not across the entire population of responses, but only the responses where the sender and the recipient were considered a "match" by okcupid's match algorithm.



I circled the two lines of interest, but I didn't have to as they stick out just by their color-coding - black women are more likely to have their response to an ad ignored, and more likely to write back to someone who initiates contact.

Sounds like, no, a sister can't get a break.

chick gallery from Celebslam

One clue that the golf tournament you're watching is in China

SEATTLE, Washington - It wasn't as big of a moment as Phil Mickelson whacking his ball into a garbage can on the 71st hole of the 2006 U.S. Open, but it was probably dirtier. Tiger Woods hit his ball into a garbage-riddled canal in the final round of the HSBC Champions in Shanghai:

[Woods] looked out of sorts from the start, missing birdie putts of 4 feet and 10 feet, then taking double bogey on the par-3 fourth when he hit into a canal left of the green where residents on the other side routinely dump their garbage.

Did balloon boy Falcon Heene get the Ludovico Treatment?

Troubling question

SEATTLE, Washington - Allegations that the off-kilter Heene family staged the balloon-boy incident were bolstered by little Falcon stating that "you said we did this for a show" when asked why he did not come down from the attic.

Unfortunately, the next two times little Falcon heard questions about why he hid, he immediately vomited!.

What could cause this? It's almost as if he has been conditioned to have a horrible physical reaction upon hearing the very words...

Can we account for the whereabouts of Pat O'Day in the last 48 hours? Has he been to Colorado?

On the Roman Polanski situation

You know what happens to nosy fellows?

SEATTLE, Washington - When the French government bails out on you, that usually means your goose is cooked - at least that's what Roman Polanski should be thinking right now.

Now, I have not exactly been calling for Polanski's head on a spear for the last fifteen years, so I've asked myself - should I have been doing just that?

If you asked me two weeks ago, "why did Roman Polanski flee the United States?", I would have said something to the effect that he kinda-sorta got down with a just-short-of-legal girl, and it came to light, and he left rather than deal with the static.

Polanski in fact had negotiated a guilty plea in 1978 on "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor"; when you read that it kind of settles the issue of whether he had sex with her. So perhaps I have simply been Jedi mind-tricked whenever reading old accounts of why he left the country. Not even old accounts: the story linked above, written today, puts it thusly:

He is accused of having unlawful sex with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey in Los Angeles in 1978, before fleeing the country and spending the intervening period as a fugitive, mainly living in Paris.

That's a bit of a tinted view of the facts, and I suspect everything I've casually read about the circumstances of his flight had a similar ring.

The word "rape" had not entered my thinking, but if it had, I think I (like Whoopi) would have assumed it was a-few-weeks-short-of-legal rape, not "rape rape."

Once you read the details of the legal wranglings, and Gailey's testimony, it certainly puts Polanski in a rotten light. Sounds like "rape rape".

Now, I have also thought about taking a more libertarian perspective on this - specifically, the fact that Gailey has stated that she'd like the dogs called off. Crimes, even a person-on-person crime, are technically regarded as crimes against the state (Polanski v. California, as opposed to Polanski v. Gailey), so Gailey doesn't really have such power. Should she? It is a mainstream libertarian position that her wishes should override the wishes of the state?

Are we (through the government) sticking our nose where it doesn't belong? As Polanski himself said - "You're a very nosy fellow, kitty kat. Huh? You know what happens to nosy fellows?"

Turns out, it doesn't seem to be - I can only find evidence of the most hard-boiled anarchists (and a few Hollywood types) clamoring for a reduced role of the state. Mainstream libertarian opinion (if I may use the term) is much more sympathetic to the government than usual in this matter.

The cruel inevitability of the Seahawks key lime jersey

SEATTLE, Washington - When the Seahawks unveiled their uniform overhaul in 2002, it was noted that there was some really loud lime green piping in the uniform, and in the little eye of the (now slightly edgier, more angry) hawk itself. At the time it would have been absurd to have an entire jersey in such a color.

When Deion Branch arrived with the team in 2006, he was sporting receiver gloves in the lime color. It looked bad, but that's as bad as it could get, right?

A lime jersey appeared this spring as part of a April Fool's hoax... a Photoshopped lime green jersey, ha ha.

The next day, April 2, a more official-looking green-jersey graphic was leaked, and the TNT Seahawks blog wondered whether "that’s the imagery you want to project to an opponent like the Chicago Bears on Sunday."

Now, today, against the Bears, they arrived, and they were the disaster everyone thought they would be.

All you need to know about the "housing crisis" in one press release from nine years ago

SEATTLE, Washington - Via Cafe Hayek, a press release from Wells Fargo in August 2000 (text not bolded in original):

A new home financing program, designed to spur homeownership among California’s educators, may receive an “A” from teachers throughout the state. The program, announced today by Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Inc., the California Housing Loan Insurance Fund (CaHLIF) and Freddie Mac, allows teachers working within the state to purchase a home with a downpayment of just $500.
The program also offers teachers relaxed credit guidelines – making it easier to qualify for the program – and higher qualifying ratios, which allows homebuyers to qualify for more home. Wells Fargo Home Mortgage will be the exclusive provider of these loans; CaHLIF will provide downpayment assistance and mortgage insurance; and, Freddie Mac will purchase the loans.
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A starting salary for a California public school teacher is $29,000 a year, according to the California Teachers Association, while the average teacher’s salary is $44,000. Meanwhile, the median home price in California is $217,520.
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While California educators will only need $500 for a downpayment, the remaining downpayment will be funded by CaHLIF in the form of a 3 percent simple interest loan with payment deferred until the end of the loan term, or when the home is sold or refinanced.

As a commenter at CH noted, a $200K loan under these circumstances would be about $1,300/mo for someone making $44K a year. I make more than triple that and I consider my mortgage of under $1,600 to be approaching the upper range of what I consider acceptable relative to my income.

The "crisis" has repeatedly been spun in the media as crazy, gambling, out of control banks making bad decisions, but in this case all the bank (Wells Fargo) is doing is writing an ill-advised loan, scraping off a bit of vigorish, and dumping the turkey loan off on the only kind of entity that would want such a thing, a government mutant like Freddie Mac.

This particular example is doubly odious, doubly indicative of the danger of having a government entity tinkering in the housing market, because not only was Freddie gobbling up absurd loans, but in this case it was a special for teachers!. Why are teachers making $44K more deserving of cushy loans than anyone else making $44k? At least it was available to both public and private school teachers... cold comfort.

Rolls-Royce keeping it classy in Bellevue

SEATTLE, Washington - The Rolls-Royce dealership in Overlake has a fine red-and-blue neon OPEN sign in their showroom window. What says "we sell dignified $400,000 cars" quite like a neon OPEN sign? As of this writing, they even have a picture of this travesty on their website.

The nearby Jaguar dealership has not stooped to such garishness.

Why not go all the way and drop a Ca$h for Clunkers sandwich board out front?

Time magazine on the end of handwriting

SEATTLE, Washington - Time has an article this week from a twentysomething woman discussing handwriting - her incompetence at it, a bit of history of it, and some hand-wringing over its demise.

Everyone except college professors of literacy understands that computers are the reason for this:

The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says.

This is an example of why it's not a good idea to have "national agendas" driven by professors (or maybe anyone else either).

Penmanship was where I was a consistent underperformer in grammar school, and when the report card would come my father would then assign me writing drills, usually transcribing from a book of essays by Andy Rooney.

I haven't tried to write entire sentences in cursive in many years, so I just gave it a shot:



My hand was sore after this effort. Turns out, the hardest part was crossing the t's and dotting the i's... when writing single letters, you do that right away, but with cursive you have to go over the whole word after writing it. This was old hat for many years, but I just now struggled horribly with it.

found @ Slashdot

Lindsay Lohan's dad attempts hot Tiffani-Amber Thiessen pose

SEATTLE, Washington - A sheer top doesn't work for everyone. It definitely worked for Tiffani-Amber Thiessen back in the day. I thought the pic of her below was just about the hottest pic on the young mid-1990s internet. It has an understated sexiness to it. The clothing is perfect. The hair, perfect.

Now we have Michael Lohan, in what looks like a man-version of the same clothing? Why the hell are there pictures of him on the internet at all? Never mind one where he looks like he's trying to imitate one of the great photos of the 1990s.



I spotted Mr Lohan at Just Jared

Jackson postmortem starting to look like a Howard Hughes re-run

SEATTLE, Washington - I'm well versed on the details of the life and legacy of Howard Hughes, and I know a re-run when I see one. The whole Michael Jackson situation is starting to sound familiar. The large entourage who depended on Jackson for their daily bread, the drug talk, the personal physicians lawyering up immediately after the death - it's all cut from the same cloth as the aftermath of Hughes's death in 1976.

Yet another parallel has popped up - looks like we're now in for a battle over which will, if any, is the legitimate last executed will of Michael Jackson. Michael's father Joe is allegedly not mentioned in the alleged most recent (2002) will, so of course he's now allegedly saying that that will is not valid.

The Hughes will situation became a total circus (with dozens of fakes and alleged wills popping up) that eventually resulted in an award-winning film but never resulted in finding a binding legal will.

A painfully frequent misinterpretation of the First Amendment

SEATTLE, Washington - You see this over and over and over, but in this case it's someone who should know better. The Associated Press has issues some guidelines to its employees regarding their use of Twitter and Facebook. This comes in the aftermath of a comment critical of a newspaper publisher appearing on the Facebook wall of an AP reporter.

The president of the guild representing AP reporters, Tony Winton, responded with this:

“I am unaware of anything else like that... parts of the policy seem to be snuffing out peoples’ First Amendment rights of expression by a company that wraps itself in the First Amendment.”

Grrr. Here is the text of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment speaks to government^* restrictions on speech, not restrictions on speech imposed by one private party on another. An employer restricting the speech of employees is out of scope:

The U.S. Supreme Court has never interpreted the First Amendment as having the same power to alter private property rights, or provide any other protection against purely private action. When considering private authority figures (such as a child's parents or an employee's employer), Constitutional free speech provides no protection. A private authority figure may reserve the right to censor their subordinate's speech, or discriminate on the basis of speech, without any legal consequences. For example, per the at will employment doctrine, an employee may be fired from their occupation for speaking out against a politician that the employer likes.

People make this goof all the time, but people should know better, and anyone working in media really really really should know better.

* I'm using the word "Congress" in the amendment to mean government generally; the actual meaning and scope of the word "Congress" here and elsewhere in the Constitution is actually a matter of some debate

Now they tell us

SEATTLE, Washington - West Seattle Golf Course was built in 1940. I'm betting that the current practice green has been in its current location for a long time, if not for the whole history of the course.

So now, in June 2009, they finally decide to warn people that errant drives from the 18th can pepper you while you're working on your putting? We already know this. In fact I launched a ball there once from the 18th tee myself.

I think an especially wild long-hitter could whack you from the 17th tee, too.

I don't know how you're expected to take "due care" while practicing your putting. Someone yells "fore" or they don't.

The sudden appearance of this sign can only mean one thing... someone got their ass crowned recently.

Fall of a once-proud piece of outdoor advertising

NEW YORK, New York - The large outdoor advertising at Madison Square Garden used to be elite advertising space. Usually, high-powered stuff like the latest Harrison Ford movie or the T-Mobile G1 would be on display in these slots.

Now? This is not a Photoshop. Bob's Discount Furniture is peddling their wares in this space. What the hell? We've gone from summer blockbuster films to Bob's Discount Furniture informing us of their new Poughkeepsie location?

Most of South Jersey is semi-literate - or so it seems on Facebook

SEATTLE, Washington - I now have several people from the Old Country linked up to me in Facebook. I get to see how they write. I also see how the people linked to them write. I also see the writing of people who, like me, have left the area.

This seems to be a fair summary:

• From South Jersey, still living there: semi-literate at best
  
• From South Jersey, moved to Florida: semi-literate at best
  
• From South Jersey, moved to [anywhere but Florida]: often literate
  

I've been bashing anyone younger than John Wooden who moves to Florida for a long time. The people just staying in Jersey.... what can I say. It's probably not fair for me to make these judgments based on brief online writings, but it's just brutal stuff.

There are many possible theories. Could be that the ones who stay where they're born are by definition the dopes. Or maybe there's some environmental factor sapping writing competence out of the people. Or, these people can all form a written sentence perfectly well but choose not to do so on Facebook (but the refugees typically DO write well there).

There could be another angle, the when-I-was-your-age angle. Maybe the schooling just sucks lately. Case in point: my mother, who finished her schooling by graduating high school circa 1960 and has never had a job that involved writing at all.

Six or eight years ago, she briefly got email access at a job she had. So I sent her an email to see her response. I had never seen a written paragraph from her in my life. Many times in the last 15 years, I've seen the emails of people not used to writing, seen the creaky language, brutal capitalization, etc. I was expecting the worst from her.

Well, her email was flawless. Full lush sentences, everything capitalized correctly, none of the common bumblings (its vs. it's, etc.) I could barely believe it. If you had told me it was written by Lionel Trilling, I might have believed you.

I don't have the email any more, it was sent to a work account at an old job. But that writing simply would not fly on today's South Jersey internet.

Who writes the copy for Trilogy's in-cart GPS?

SEATTLE, Washington - This morning I played a round at Trilogy aka Redmond Ridge and the in-cart GPS had a bit of an abuse of the English language in its "Pro Tip" for the par-5 6th hole. Does anyone review the copy for these things? I know English is not easy, synonyms, homonyms, etc. but come on.

Anyway this must have inspired me because I did get the "illusive" birdie on the hole, only my second or third birdie of the whole season.

Laptops for the ladies?

SEATTLE, Washington - Wow... Dell launched a female-targeted site called Della that tried to pitch laptops to women by mentioning its use in calorie counting, watching cooking videos, etc....

And there was a backlash! I'm shocked!

Garbage report on "savings" from ditching car and using transit

SEATTLE, Washington - Economict Thomas Sowell made the oft-quoted observation that economics is not about solutions, it's about trade-offs. Keep this in mind as you read the America Public Transportation Associations's drivel on how much you can "save" every year by getting rid of your car and using public transit instead.

APTA pegged the "savings" at $8,600 per year across the top 20 transit-ridership cities, and $10,483 in Seattle.

Yes, it looks like riding transit will "save" you money - but what about the trade-offs? What are the costs? If you ditch your car, you're probably severely damaging your quality of life. People don't have cars for the joy of burning money - they have them because the benefits of the car equal or exceed the costs. A car gives you sweet, beautiful mobility, it immensely enhances your work possibilities, your recreational opportunities, your potential for community involvement, on and on. Unless you have tons of time to burn making circuitous trips on transit to do what you have to do, or you're just thrilled with everything within walking distance of your house, you're probably making your life worse.

We don't need the American Public Transit Association to tell us what car ownership costs, or for that matter if the costs are worth it - people have clearly voted with their choices. In fact, in recent polling about luxuries vs. necessities in life, the automobile checked in as a necessity with 88 percent of the respondents, blowing away items like landline phones, televisions, microwave ovens, you name it - even though car ownership was by far the priciest item in the poll.

Each of us can make our own decisions on these matters, without propaganda outfits like the American Public Transit Association telling us about the "savings". I'll keep my car, thanks. I don't have a microwave oven, even though I can afford to line my walls with the things if I want, because I've decided the benefits are too modest.

You can make a really shit life for yourself if you want to by eliminating all "costs" regardless of benefit. As a commenter on the seattlepi.com story on the APTA report noted:

Living in a tent would save about $42,000 per year. Giving up table wine would yeild $240 per year. Using old newsprint and forgoing commercial TP would save a whopping $48 per year. Movies? Nix your montly movie night habit with the wife and you would save nearly $1,200 annually. Coffee at Starbucks? Drinking tepid water each morning would net about $600 per year in savings. Want to save big? For go kids. The cute little buggers cost you more than $13K a year...throw in childcare so you can have a fulfilling career...another $8K minium. Everything in life is not always about saving money

which I reproduced here for its sentiment, in spite of the massive spelling, grammar, and usage errors.