Tiffany and I depart today for a week in Switzerland, so there won't be anything new here until next Tuesday. I recommend all the fine links on the left to hold you off until then. See you next week!
Playboy is inviting current and former Enron employees to audition for a Women of Enron pictorial. I heard the teaser for this on the news but didn't catch the segment, which was no doubt presented in a restrained and dignified manner. Is there anything I can actually add to this? Probably not. Good night.
Patrick points me to this article by Dan Gillmor about the SSSCA. It's interesting that Dan doesn't hope that a President who is committed to free trade would step in and lobby against this obviously obstructionist bill. Of course, we don't have such a President, so I guess the point is moot anyway.
(Yeah, I know, the DCMA passed on Clinton's watch. A pox on his house for it.)
There are many things I hate about moving. Near the top of this long list is dealing with phone and utility companies. Today I spoke to my local telco about switching service. I had no trouble getting through to an actual human, and he was quite helpful for the most part. The problem is that one cannot ever deal with the phone company without having them try to sell you a bunch of useless crap that you'll never use and barely comprehend in the first damn place.
Case in point: We've taken care of the basics, and now my guy launches into his spiel about the two different options for local calling. Option One is where you get a limited amount of local calls for a fixed fee, then you pay a per-call charge. This option, my rep solemnly intoned, is Not What He Would Recommend. Option Two is the Full Package, which includes unlimited local calls, call waiting, caller ID, caller ID for call waiting, phone repair insurance, moon roof, whitewall tires, and a year's supply of Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco Treat).
"Well," I say naively, "I have most of these things already. What I want at the new house is exactly what I've got at this house. Can you do that?"
"Okay," Phone Rep says brightly. "That's Option Two. Your monthly bill with that service is $84.95..."
"WHAT??? My current phone bill is nowhere near that expensive. What is all that crap?"
"Well, it's caller ID, call waiting..."
"Yes, yes, yes, I got all that. What I want is what I've got now. Give me exactly what I've got now."
We get that straightened out. As far as I could tell, the only difference between his Option Two and my Status Quo was that I do not currently have phone repair insurance. There was some gibberish about CallNotes as well, but I couldn't tell if it was a subscription to CallNotes or "access to" CallNotes, whatever the hell that means. Not that I care, since I have a perfectly good answering machine and a phone bill that's a lot cheaper than Option Two.
At this point, I thought I was in the home stretch, but I had one more hurdle to clear. Phone Rep had a sales script for some whizbangy feature-rich phones that supported all of the features I subscribe to and which were on sale at really amazingly mind-bogglingly stupendously how-can-you-not-succumb-to-my-siren-call low prices. I tried to interrupt as soon as I realized that this was a sales pitch to say that we have all the phones we need thankyouverymuch, but Phone Rep was undeterred. He got right back on track and by god he finished his sales pitch. Having to listen to this and decline as politely and firmly as I could made me a bit late for a team meeting, which is the very definition of a mixed blessing.
So local phone service is in place. Now I have to deal with electricity (which means switching companies), gas, water, cable, installing DSL...
Chron politics columnist John Williams explains how State Supreme Court judge Xavier Rodriguez, the lone Hispanic GOP candidate in Texas, lost the nomination to retain his position to a guy with a simple American name.
This isn't the first time a serious candidate with an ethnic name has been tripped up by an unknown with a familiar name. In Illinois in 1986, two followers of right-wing nutball Lyndon LaRouche won the Democratic nominations for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State by capitalizing on ignorant voters and easy-to-pronounce surnames. And this sort of thing happens all the time here.
I have to say, I like the fact that Indiana made it to the Final Four while Bobby Knight once again got bounced in the first round. For several years, one of my hard and fast rules for handicapping the NCAA Tournament was "always pick the Hoosiers to lose in the first round". May you never see the Sweet Sixteen again.
It's awfully tough for a non-BCS conference school to make it to the Final Four. Since Marquette won the championship in 1977 in a Final Four that included UNLV and UNC-Charlotte, only 17 of 104 participants in the Final Four have come from non-BCS conferences. Four of those are UNLV and three are Houston in the Olajuwon/Drexler years. Only Cincinnati (1992) and Utah (1998) have done it in the last ten years.
Personally, I find that I'm more interested in the early games, when the little guys are still around. I know there have been some great games this year, but to me it's like watching the NBA playoffs: You know in the end there aren't going to be any surprises.
So last night Tiffany and I attended an Oscar party thrown by our friends Pete and Tory. It was one of those parties where guests are asked to dress up as if they were attending the actual Academy Awards. I've never quite understood this, and it's not just my normal phobia of wearing nice clothes talking here. I mean, do people ever put on cleats and shoulder pads to watch the Super Bowl? What's up with that?
The good news is that we were not expected to take the whole pomp-and-pageantry thing seriously. We were not there to worship the stars (okay, one woman had a pretty huge crush on Denzel Washington, no big surprise there) but to be snarky about them. That was fun.
What was the deal with Tom Cruise's spiel before Whoopi came out? None of us could figure it out, though we were too distracted by his retro Risky Business look to really concentrate on the question. When he talked about seeing 2001:A Space Odyssey at the age of six, I blurted out "Holy crap! He's gonna be forty this year!" (On July 3, in fact. Mark your calendar.)
Oh, and if the idea of Tom Cruise turning 40 doesn't make you feel old, go check out Modern Maturity's movie awards. They call them La Chaise D'Or (The Golden Chair), but it's pretty clear from the picture that "chair" is a bit underdescriptive. How do you say "Barcalounger" in French?
Nobody, and I mean nobody, liked JLo's hair. She looked like she was channeling Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched. If the sprinkler system had gone off, her dress would have remained dry. Second-worst hair of the evening went to Cameron Diaz, who appeared to have driven to the awards show with all the windows down in her car.
Okay, Woody Allen was funny, but his intro went on waaaay too long. And I agree with Jeff Jarvis - Any decent film montage of New York City should include the Twin Towers. It would have been a nice moment, not a bad one.
(Side note: I was channel surfing awhile back and caught a few minutes of Working Girl. One of the scenes I saw was of Tess on the ferry going back to Manhattan after she's just caught her boyfriend in flagrante. There's this gorgeous nighttime shot of the skyline from the ferry, including the Towers, all lit up. Seeing that churned up all sorts of emotions, but none of them was anger at the filmmakers or editors who could have cut that in order to spare my delicate sensibilities. It is respectful to remember the dead, to talk about them and all the things about them that we liked and loved and put up with and miss. It is disrespectful to ignore them and to pretend that by ignoring them we are helping ourselves to "get over" them.)
Second biggest reaction of the evening, right behind the reaction to JLo's hair, was to the clip from Saturday Night Fever. Admit it - you heard the guitar lick, you saw Tony Manero strut down the street, Barry Gibb's voice kicked in - your hips started to sway.
I don't know whose knee Ian McKellen had his hand on, but wowzer. Success does have its rewards.
We didn't stay very late - I get up very early (5:15 AM) for work, and Tiffany needed to be up almost that early today because her whole company is moving to a new office that's 15 miles farther away from our house. There's only so much of that I can take, anyway, even with all the smack talk to keep me occupied. So yeah, I missed out on Halle and Denzel getting honored. And no, I don't care if their awards were partially motivated by racial guilt. They did good work and they were rewarded for it. Move along, nothing to see here.
Who cares who's going to win Best Picture? The more important news is that Tom Green won five Razzies for his work in Freddy Got Fingered.
Girls in Texas who want an abortion but are required to get parental consent have been looking to courts in Austin and San Antonio for judicial bypass. Houston and Dallas have had almost no such reviews filed since the law took effect in January, 1999 - in fact, Houston has had exactly one case since last September and 19 overall, compared to 191 in San Antonio and 110 in Austin. Dallas has had 13 such cases.
It's somewhat hard to say why this is, because the rulings are sealed and the Texas Supreme Court does not keep statistics. It's understandable to a point in that the judges in Dallas County and Houston's Harris County are all Republican, while the judges in Austin's Travis County are largely Democrat. It's not hard to believe that the petitioners think they're more likely to get a favorable ruling in Austin because of this. The curiosity is San Antonio's Bexar County, where the judiciary is mixed. Houston judges tend to be tied to local uber-conservative activist Stephen Hotze, who brooks no disagreement on issues like this and has no qualms about endorsing someone else in the primary if he doesn't like how you rule. Maybe the Bexar County judges have more freedom to actually interpret the law, I don't know.
In any event, I was surprised that no one was quoted expressing outrage at the prospect of court shopping. Maybe the usual suspects were all out of town. Oh, and one more thing: Go to the Chronicle home page and see how they headline this story there. (For those who don't read this until Monday, the link is entitled "Girls turning to liberal courts to avoid parental notice of abortion".) What would Bernard Goldberg say?
After 30 years, The Last Picture Show will finally play in Archer City, the small Texas town in which it was filmed. The town's lone movie theater had burned down before the film premiered in 1971. The rebuilt Royal Theater is hosting the 30th anniversary celebration.
Well, much has happened since the last update. We have agreed to terms with the sellers of the house we want, and we have a buyer in place for our house. Both houses have been inspected and appriased, so all that's left from that perspective is the paperwork. Closing is going to be fun, because there's a bit of a daisy chain that needs to be resolved. The people who are buying our buyer's house have to close on their house, then they close on our buyer's house, then on our current house, and then finally on the house we're buying. Thankfully, our sellers are long gone and seem to be amenable to letting us take possession a few days early so we can move before all the closings occur. It's still gonna make for a couple of hellishly busy days.
In the meantime, we're about to take off to Switzerland for a week. (Yes, this trip was planned long before we knew we were going to be moving at this time.) We've been doing some packing, but are really going to have to kick it into gear when we return. Then there's a million other details, like moving phone/cable/utilities, filling out a change of address form, and so on and so on. I'm getting tired just thinking about it.
I'm thrilled about the new house, but man will I be happy when this is all in the rearview mirror.
Proponents of the Katy Freeway expansion are howling in protest at a request by Metro to reserve space for a light rail line. sigh This is really painful to watch. We study rail feasibility to death but are chomping at the bit to spend zillions of dollars and more than five years to make I-10 wider than the state of Delaware.
What really galls me is that Metro's critics have a point when they say our transit department has little credibility. Metro is, sadly, not very well run and in dire need of strong leadership. People are finally coming around to the idea that we can't pave our way out of mobility problems. There's never been a better time to make the case for rail, but here we are stuck with Shirley DeLibero and Lee Brown, neither of whom are taken seriously by ruling Republicans like the county commissioners.
Having a GOP-friendly mayor like Orlando Sanchez wouldn't have helped, since he's anti-rail in the first place. What we need is someone in charge of Metro with credibility in the bidness world, someone who speaks the same language as Steve Radack and John Culberson, someone who will aggressively sell the merits of rail to homeowners and businesses. I think we have such a person: former mayor Bob Lanier. Lanier came into office by attacking then-Mayor Kathy Whitmire's plan for a monorail system, but he favored the downtown rail line and I believe is generally for sensible alternatives to more roadways. Could it hurt to ask him to step in and lend a hand before it's too late?
From today's Chron:
[President] Bush touted free trade as a means of lifting the region's economies, and said: "We're going to analyze all options available to help Peru."
More on Brittanie Cecil, the 13-year-old girl who was killed at a Columbus Blue Jackets hockey game after being hit in the forehead by an errant puck. The NHL is revisiting the issue of arena safety. The player who took the shot that resulted in Brittanie's death is trying to cope with what happened. Doug MacLean, the GM of the Blue Jackets, attended Brittanie's funeral, while the team is wearing stickers with her initials and had a moment of silence before their next game in her memory.
Yet another interesting link in the inbox today, to Texas Twisted, a site devoted to Texas roadside attractions and other weird stuff. My friend Margo, who sent the link, was pointing to a miniaturization of the Chinese Forbidden Gardens located just west of Houston in Katy, TX, and which, along with the Cadillac Ranch, owes its origin to an eccentric millionaire, something else we have a lot of in Texas.
Our tour guide also takes us to meet Big Tex, the unofficial greeter at the annual State Fair and the one attraction I'd heard of many years before I came to Texas. Big Tex is so famous the Austin Lounge Lizards wrote a song about his girlfriend.
As they say, Texas is like a whole 'nother country.
I've been toying with the idea of adding code to support comments on this page. I like getting feedback, and I strongly suspect that more people are inclined to give comments rather than send email. But then I come across comments like the ones on this post, and I'm reminded why I'm reluctant. Who needs that crap?
If you think I'm being overly sensitive and that on balance I'd find comments to be worthwhile, drop me a line. If you know of a comment system that would allow an all-powerful admin (i.e., me) to wipe out obnoxious comments and ban the IP addresses of known buttheads, so much the better. (I'd probably need my own domain for that capability, but it can't hurt to ask.) Freedom of expression does not give you the right to be a jerk on someone else's blog.
Today Ginger points out this infantile little article in the conservative Cornell Review, in which the author makes the oh-so-original point that we menfolk are just hunks of burning carnal desire who need wimmin around to keep us civilized:
Presumably, women could exercise their true power to tame men by using celibacy (and other ladylike behavior) to induce men into monogamous stable relationships and eventually into marriage.[...]
But women have historically been the civilizing forces for men. That is biological. Moreover, several verses in the Scriptures refer to the important role that women have in the moral uplift of men.
Meanwhile, via Jeff Jarvis, I see that Andrew Sullivan has written the following about the growing pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church:
The Catholic Church in America will not endure as we know it unless the current hierarchy is rooted out and unless the issue of a celibate all-male priesthood is addressed head-on without euphemism or denial. Others may differ, but it seems to me that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is the root of the problem. None of this hideous abuse of children would have occurred in the same way if women were fully a part of the institution. Not only would they have blown the whistle on some of this evil, their very presence would have helped prevent it from happening.
Societies built on special privileges -- the all-male Saudi rulers, Catholic priesthood and Taliban, and the boys' club running Enron -- become far too invested in preserving those privileges. They will never do the kind of soul-baring and housecleaning that might raise questions about the kind of secret society that creates that kind of privilege.
I'm not here to defend "the patriarchy", whatever that means. I'm totally in favor of giving women equal access to power, which is to say equal opportunity to abuse it. We're all human, folks. If men have caused the most spectacular screwups in history, it's because we've always been in the position to do so, not because we're inherently any less good or moral than women. Can we please just get over it and move on?
Just when you think you've run out of things to make fun of, someone sends you links like this one. I really wish they'd shown the Martial Arts Jesus and the Ballet Jesus.
The plastic Jesus figurine, of course, has a long and storied tradition among the faithful. My brush with religious statuary came from my grandmother, who had a little ceramic Virgin Mary statue in her beloved old 1969 Nova. This was not just any ceramic Virgin Mary statue, mind you. It had a magnetic base, which kept it firmly in place on her metallic dashboard, and more to the point it had, in the folds of her robe, a tiny car. This Virgin Mary statue was made specifically to be put in one's automobile.
I inherited this car after my grandmother's death in 1986 and drove it down to San Antonio. Both car and statue were an instant hit with my friends, who christened it Our Lady of Automatic Transmission. In 1990, while I was back in New York for Christmas, someone broke into the car. They tried to force the ignition but failed. They broke open the glove compartment, which had a lock on it, but since I was never able to get the key to work on it all they found was some old insurance policies and a windshield ice-scraper. Having struck out on finding anything of value, they wreaked their revenge by stealing the Our Lady of Automatic Transmission statue. I still get depressed when I think about it.
Later that year my roommate went on a trip to Europe, and while there he visited Fatima, where an apparition of the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared in 1917. He visited the gift shop at Fatima and bought a small plastic Virgin Mary statue for me as a replacement. It wasn't quite the same, as this Virgin Mary did not have a magnetic base or a tiny car in the folds of her robe. On the plus side, however, the statue does glow in the dark. I still have it today.
I don't care if it's dark and scary, long as I have my Virgin Mary...
Remember her? In 1989, a 28-year-old investment banker in New York went jogging in Central Park, where a group of "wilding" teenage boys beat and raped her and left her for death. Today she's recovered from her injuries, married, and remarkably bears no resentment towards her attackers, all of whom have served out their sentences. You have to get past the Oprah factor here, but I assure you it's worth your time to read.
UPDATE: Who knew when I wrote this that there'd be all those revelations about how NYPD and the Manhattan DA's Office totally botched this case?
I have always thought that long-distance runners are a bit nuts. Now I have absolute proof. Two words: Antarctica Marathon.
Maxim magazine, which for some strange reason doesn't have its April issue online yet even though the print version is out, named Dallas the "greatest city on Earth". All I can say is that they've obviously never listened to the Austin Lounge Lizards' song about Dallas.
OK, OK, Dallas isn't so bad. Maxim needs to hire some fact checkers, though. They claim Dallas is the "least densely populated metropolitan area in the world". Maybe that's true if you include all its far-flung hinterlands, but according to the US Census, it's not even the least densely populated metro area in Texas. In 2000, Dallas County had a population density of 2521 per square mile, more than double that of San Antonio's Bexar County at 1117 and also more than Houston's Harris County at 1966. So take Maxim's advice about Dallas with the same grain of salt you'd take their advice on how to convince your wife she'd enjoy accompanying you to a strip club.
UPDATE: Larry and Alice tell me that Maxim printed 13 versions of this issue, with 13 different "best" cities. Geez, guys, did you really think that Houstonians wanted to read about how great Dallas is? Get a clue.
Gary Farber, who's been quite prolific of late, adds on to Peter Beinart's piece about freedom of religion, Bush and Ashcroft style. They both attack the underlying theme that one must be religious in order to be moral, and the unstated idea that only certain religions seem to meet the standards of acceptability:
Conservatives seemed genuinely puzzled by the outcry over Ashcroft's words. "I think General Ashcroft was quite inclusive," said Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council. "He made reference to Christians, Jews, and Muslims all recognizing the Creator as the origin of freedom."
Anyway, Farber's had a lot of good stuff lately, like this post about why we should always be suspicious of government officials who want to display religious symbols like the Ten Commandments in public places. I've often thought that the best way to combat people who want to pray at graduations and football games and whatnot is to volunteer for it, then lead everyone in a pagan prayer. Maybe that will drive home the point that there is no such thing as a prayer which is acceptable and inoffensive to everyone.
Just so we're all clear here, I'm perfectly happy for you to practice your religion. I only ask that you leave me out of it. I don't think that's so much to ask.
Via Tom Tomorrow comes this story of how U2 lead singer Bono persuaded Republican leaders to give extra aid to poor countries. It's a fantastic story of pragmatism and speaking the right language. I'd like to discuss a couple of points. First, how Bono got involved:
Is it possible to appear in public with the likes of [Senator Jesse] Helms and [President] Bush and preserve that precious commodity - street-cred? If it's not, says Bono, it's a price worth paying. "Edge was pleading with me not to hang out with the conservatives. He said, 'You're not going to have a picture with George Bush?' I said I'd have lunch with Satan if there was so much at stake. I have friends who won't speak to me because of Helms. But its very important not to play politics with this. Millions of lives are being lost for the stupidest of reasons: money. And not even very much money. So let's not play, Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Let's rely on the moral force of our arguments."
Meanwhile, the US wing of Jubilee 2000 hit on the idea of persuading the Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Baptist, to write a letter to Baptist churches across southern US states explaining the Biblical principles behind debt cancellation. Suddenly, Bono found he had access to a swathe of strongly Christian Republicans compelled by his Biblical theme - what Bono calls "the melody line" of his pitch. "We knew we had to get both sides," he explains. "So we got Billy Graham and the Pope and I went to people like Jesse Helms, who had been very tough on the the concept of foreign assistance and very bleak on Aids. He's a religious man so I told him that 2103 verses of scripture pertain to the poor and Jesus speaks of judgment only once - and it's not about being gay or sexual morality, but about poverty. I quoted that verse of Matthew chapter 25: 'I was naked and you clothed me.' He was really moved. He was in tears. Later he publicly acknowledged that he was ashamed..."
16 And behold, one came and said unto Him, "Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?"
17 And He said unto him, "Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God. But if thou wilt enter into Life, keep the commandments."
18 He said unto Him, "Which?" Jesus said, "`Thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness;
19 honor thy father and thy mother; and, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'"
20 The young man said unto Him, "All these things have I kept from my youth up. What lack I yet?"
21 Jesus said unto him, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven; and come and follow Me."
22 But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
23 Then said Jesus unto His disciples, "Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
24 And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God."
A 13-year-old girl who attended a Columbus Blue Jackets hockey game died two days after being struck in the head by a puck. According to the pathologist's report, Brittanie Cecil died from a rare blood clot in an artery, the result of her head snapping back when she was hit. This was the first reported death of a spectator at an NHL game, though a few have been killed in a similar fashion at minor league games.
That's really awful. My prayers and condolences go to Brittanie's family and friends.
Greg Hlatky discusses Andrew Lloyd Webber and his place in the pantheon of theatrical composers. For my money, I thought the music of Phantom of the Opera was overrated. Yes, All I Ask of You is a great song, but Lloyd Webber uses its theme, along with maybe two others, to death in PotO. It just gets boring after while.
Frankly, my favorite Lloyd Webber show is Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It's lively, it's bouncy, it contains a wide variety of musical styles and themes, and it hasn't a pretentious note in its score. Not that it's impossible to screw it up - Tiffany and I had the extreme misfortune of seeing a local production of Joseph that starred some generic Osmond offspring a couple of years ago. The people who put this show on ruined it in every way imaginable, mostly by taking each song and doubling it in length. It was one climax and reprise after another until you wanted to wrest the baton from the conductor's hand and cut the band off yourself.
The nadir was the song about Pharaoh's Dream, which is done in an Elvis Presley style (he's the King, after all). The song, which describes the dreams that Joseph interprets to mean seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, is early in the second act. It was also the first one they'd done that was true to Lloyd Webber's original arrangement. Just as Tiffany and I turned to each other to marvel that they'd finally gotten one right, Joseph says "I don't understand", which prompts Pharoah to sing the whole damned song over again from the beginning. It's not easy to insult the audience of a pop musical comedy, but they did so in spades. We should have gotten up and left right then, but the seats were way up front and we didn't want to make a scene. And as it turned out, the rest of the audience wasn't insulted anyway - they gave this godforsaken production a standing ovation at the end. Yes, I'm still steamed about the whole thing.
Anyway. Joseph is my fave, even despite this experience. The rest of Lloyd Webber's portfolio I can take or leave.
I got this link from a mailing list I'm on. Somehow, I don't think Hallmark will do any marketing around it.
The proposed widening of the Katy Freeway takes another step forward. It's very much an afterthought, but at least there's still talk about rail as part of this boondoggle.
Hey, Tom DeLay: We're gonna spend zillions of dollars on this. It's gonna disrupt everyone's lives, will imperil businesses along the way, and there's not a clear consensus about how it should be implemented. Why isn't this project being put to a vote?
Longtime Bellaire High School baseball coach Ray Knoblauch died in his sleep yesterday. Knoblauch, father of current major league player Chuck Knoblauch, was 71 and had been battling Alzheimer's.
The article lists his accomplishments (four time state champion) and his innovations (using video tape in the 1960s), and also gives a clear idea of the positive influence that a coach can have on his players. I think a key lesson for anyone in a position of authority is that if you want to be respected, you won't always be liked. How often is "he wanted to be everyone's friend" given as a defense of someone's failings? Sure, you can go overboard the other way (*cough* *cough* *Bobby Knight* *cough* *cough*), but it's definitely the way to go.
I think this is my biggest fear of fatherhood. I don't like being disliked. It's gonna be hard to be the bad cop. Tiffany knows this - I had a hard enough time disciplining the dog. But I have to admit, we're all better off now that Harry knows what his limits are. And by now I've seen enough children of friends, family, and acquaintances to have gotten a healthy dislike of uncontrolled behavior and ineffective parenting, not to mention the fact that Tiffany will kick my ass if need be. So I believe I'll be ready when the time comes. I'd better be, that's for sure.
Newly released information says that questions surrounding Enron's off-books partnerships started surfacing in 1999. This story refers to some "prominent Houstonians" who were allowed to invest in some sweetheart deals. I can't wait to hear more about that.
Can we please add AT&T; to the Axis of Evil for subjecting us to those godawful 1-800-CALL ATT ads with Carrot Top? I swear, I lose brain cells whenever I'm in range of his voice. I would not rule out tactical nukes as a response to this.
I suppose in a world that includes 7th Heaven and The Glutton Bowl, I shouldn't be too surprised to discover that there are actual Carrot Top fans out there. Personally, I'd admit to being a fan of Le Petomane before I'd cop to a fondness for Carrot Top.
Today I was forwarded an email exhorting me to increase my business income blah blah blah. Like most such junk mail that I see, it was done as HTML, with inline JPEG images. This one was supposed to show some sort of cheesy money image, according to the HTML source. However, someone - presumably someone who didn't care to receive this message in the first place - decided a different image was more suitable and changed the referenced JPG file. Now when you open the mail, the image you see is this.
The Astrohall Exhibition Building has hosted its last event and is scheduled to meet the wrecking ball on May 1. A new exhibition hall has been built on the complex that includes Reliant Park. The old site is being cleared for that staple of Houstonian existence, more parking.
The Democratic race for governor brought out Hispanics in record numbers, but Anglos mostly stayed home, according to this report.
The ethnic portrait of the Democratic primary is dramatically evident when this year's voting is compared with 1994, the last nonpresidential election year with a healthy Democratic turnout. The 1998 primary turnout was too low in all segments to be used as a point of comparison.About 1,036,000 people voted in the 1994 Democratic gubernatorial primary when incumbent Richards faced only token opposition.
In this year's race between Sanchez, former Attorney General Dan Morales and two little-known opponents, about 1,028,000 people voted.
I don't usually bother with the Houston Chronicle's Sounding Board editorials, which are written by various members of their editorial board. Most of the time what they have to say is mealy-mouthed platitudes. Today, however, board member James Gibbons lays into a bunch of people, including Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, the Yates jurors, and so-called victims' rights group Justice for All for their inability to tell right from wrong in the Yates case. Go check it out, for who knows when you'll see such an excellent rant on the Chron's pages again.
Andrea Yates' relatives place some blame on Rusty Yates for what happened. Rusty is firing back:
Asked about criticism of his role, Russell Yates told NBC's Today show today that some people "don't understand the biochemical nature of Andrea's illness ... so they'll say there must have been something else going on in that household, or there must have been this or that and it's all false."
(Thanks to Ginger for the link to the timeline of the Yates case.)
Ginger shows no sympathy to Matthew and Mac for not being high up in the results list when Googling on their names. You think you've got it bad? I've not only got to compete against a bunch of famous Charleses (such as Dickens, Darwin, Babbage, Schulz, and Lindbergh, to name a few), I've got to compete against places named Charles as well. Even worse, there's a boatload of other bloggers named Charles out there, namely Dodgson, Murtaugh, Austin, and the winner, found on Page 7 of the Google search, Charles Johnson.
On the other hand, I am the top Kuff in Google. So it's not all bad.
Well, the Spring 2002 NABCs are history. I took the week off from work and spent most of it playing in various events. Sadly, of the three nationally-rated open events I played in (the Mixed Pairs, the Open Pairs, and the Open Teams), I didn't make it past the qualifying round once, though I came close twice. There were a number of reasons for this, but the glaring one is simply that I'm not as good a player as I wish I were. It's easy to be successful against a certain level of competition, where you can make mistakes and not pay a high price for them. At this level, every lapse cost me. A round of tournament bridge lasts for about 3.5 hours, in which you play between 25 and 30 hands. You have to concentrate and pay attention to every card on all of those hands. It's hard to do.
But I had a lot of fun. I got to see some old friends and got to compete against some great players. I'm already thinking about attending the Summer NABC in Washington, DC (only for a weekend, though). We'll see.
Back to work and reality tomorrow, though only briefly for the former as we have a trip to Switzerland planned for Easter. Woo hoo!
Tipper Gore in Tennessee (maybe), and Robert Ray in New Jersey. I'm gonna break my own rule about prognostication (which is: Always wait until the event you're attempting to forecast has already occurred before making your pronouncements) and say there's no way in hell these two get elected. Admittedly, Ray is taking on a tainted candidate in Bob Torricelli, but I don't think New Jersey will care for a former persecutor of Bill Clinton. Besides, you think the Torch will go down without a fight? Ray versus Torricelli would be one seriously ugly and expensive campaign.
UPDATE: Josh Marshall, who knows a lot more about these things than I do, says Tipper is seriously considering it. I really should know better than to make predictions.
UPDATE: Turns out I was right after all - Tipper has decided not to run. Thus, I stand by my original prediction that she will not get elected. Whew!
Jon Jerome has a long post about racism which stemmed from a conversation with a coworker. (Note: Jon's been having some hosting problems, so try hitting Refresh if you get a "this page cannot be displayed" error.) He lays out a case for why "hidden" racism (as opposed to the overt, codifed racism of the Jim Crow era) is not necessarily why nonwhites don't get ahead in the workplace, citing among other things economic factors:
Systematic workplace discrimination on irrelevancies like race is unprofitable - it’s just bad business practice. If blacks could really be paid less than whites for “the same work,” such an arrangement would create high unemployment for whites and low unemployment for blacks, as firms competed to snap up the same quality labor at cheaper rates. (This simple economic truth also demolishes the idea of the “glass ceiling” for women.) Similarly, if the owner of a firm refuses to hire candidates on the basis of productivity and instead hires on the basis of irrelevant factors, he provides a larger pool of available talent for his competitors, reducing his competitiveness in the market, said uncompetitiveness in the end being fatal to the business. If the best man for the job is a black woman, and you won’t hire her because of that, your competitor will get her, to his benefit and your detriment. Businesses that make consistently irrational decisions don’t last very long - the market weeds them out in favor of those that are more rational.
You may say that this sort of practice cannot continue, both for the reasons Jon cites as well as the fact that this sort of behavior inevitably ends up with a large EEOC judgment against the offenders, but the point is that it does still exist today. When it finally disappears in a puff of logic, we'll all be better off.
It was Houston-based law firm Vinson & Elkins' turn to get spanked by the Tauzin Tribunal yesterday. As with executives at Enron and Arthur Andersen, they applied the we-know-nothing defense, which was about as well-received as Jeff Skilling's last performance. They also demonstrated why Top Executives are not the same as the rest of us.
The firm's lawyers were grilled at length about their work investigating allegations raised by Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins in an Aug. 15 memo to former Chairman Ken Lay, warning the company could "implode in a wave of accounting scandals."In addition to numerous accounting issues, Watkins' portentous memo warned about conflicts of interest and questionable dealmaking that threatened to topple the company.
Derrick, a former partner at V&E; who recently retired from Enron, asked the firm to conduct a limited probe of Watkins' concerns.
Under sharp questioning from lawmakers, the V&E; lawyers said they never talked to many of the potential witnesses named by Watkins.
They also did not pursue Watkins' claim that bankers may have been pressured to invest in questionable deals with Enron as a condition of future business with the company.
Instead, the firm talked to accountants at Arthur Andersen and executives at Enron, who assured them that issues raised by Watkins were well-known and being managed, the lawyers said.
[...]
For months, V&E; has been defending its work on the Watkins probe, saying the firm was not asked to look at Enron's accounting practices."If a transaction is not legal and it's been approved by the appropriate levels of a corporation's management, lawyers ... may appropriately provide the requisite legal advice," Dilg said. "In doing so, the lawyers are not approving of the business decisions that were made by their clients. Likewise, lawyers are not passing on the accounting treatment of the transactions."
[Rep. James] Greenwood [R, PA] took the firm to task for apparently accepting the assurances of former Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow regarding the partnerships and his own conflicts of interest.
"I don't understand why you didn't feel responsible for Enron and its stockholders and make those calls right away," Greenwood said. "You just took Andy Fastow's word for it."
My boss has a few simple rules for his employees. Follow these rules and you do well at evaluation time. His #1 rule is "Verify the facts". Too bad he wasn't in charge of the Enron/Andersen investigation at V&E.;
Charles Krauthammer explains why he would have voted to acquit Andrea Yates. I don't think you can say it any better than he does here.
I don't follow the Republican primaries very closely, as I am not a Republican. There was one race that interested me, and I'm glad to say that the right guy won. That was the race for State Senator in District 17, where State Rep. Kyle Janek defeated former Harris County GOP chairman Gary Polland. Janek has a decent record as a pragmatic non-ideologue, while Polland is a total party hack who sees the world as Us Good and Them Bad.
I wish yesterday's Election 2002 section were still online, because the wrapup of this race shows exactly why we should all be glad that the vile Polland was defeated. I'll quote from the fishwrap version:
The campaigns' hard feelings were evident as the votes came in. Marc Cowart, Polland's campaign consultant, said his candidate fell behind because of "a combination of negative campaigning and being overwhelmed by a bunch of lobby money."
Later, Polland demonstrates very clearly why he was in fact a lousy candidate:
Polland laid into Janek, saying he received poor ratings from conservative groups, including the American Eagle Forum and the Young Conservatives of Texas.Polland has accused Janek of often voting with Democrats.
"He's just part of the get-along gang in Austin," Polland has said. He's not part of the solution, he's part of the problem."
The Houston Chronicle reports that no one is paying attention to the new 55 MPH speed limit, partly because there has been no increase in enforcement efforts. Who woulda thunk it?
Here's the really annoying part:
[Lt. John Denholm, who commands the Harris County Sheriff's Department traffic division] put the priorities bluntly: "Our focus is on traffic safety issues, not pollution control. We try to put the enforcement where we're having accidents."That emphasis is no surprise to local transportation department spokeswoman Janelle Gbur, who noted the reduced limit did not come with any new state or federal funds for enforcement.
"We were hearing prior to the decrease that law enforcement was strapped for manpower, and that even with the (previous maximum) 70-mph limit, they were pushed to the limit to enforce speed laws," she said.
Samizdata Illuminatus (Arkham) responds to my tax protester followup, in which I take him to task for assigning credibility to We the People. I'd also received a very polite note from Illuminatus/Arkham (how should I address you, anyway?) about this. I/A says that I misrepresented him; he says he agrees with me that WtP have no legal credibility.
In retrospect, I think he's right. I was too harsh on him here. I guess I didn't think he'd disavowed them strongly enough. That's hairsplitting and it's not really fair. I still maintain that Dale Amon did more than merely point out what WtP are saying, and I stand by my response to Joshua Trevino, but I retract my criticism of Illuminatus/Arkham. I appreciate the feedback, and I hope this sets the record straight.
(Yes, I'm up really late. Too much caffeine between sessions at the bridge tournament, I'm afraid.)
There was a lot of schadenfreuding going on when Winona Ryder was busted for shoplifting. Now it appears that the videotape which supposedly showed her cutting off the security tags on several items in fact shows no such thing. If anything, the tape is quite exculpatory, and the LA District Attorney's office has backed off its original claims.
Don't you just hate it when an excellent story is ruined by an ugly fact?
Tony Sanchez crushed Dan Morales in the Democratic primary for the gubernatorial nomination. This wasn't a surprise. What was a surprise was that Ken Bensten failed to make the runoff in the three-way race for the Senate nomination. The unsinkable Victor Morales, who did essentially no campaigning, came in first with 34% of the vote, followed by former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk at 32% and Congressman Ken Bentsen at 27%.
I voted for Bentsen, which was a tough choice since I like all three candidates. I'm leaning towards Morales in the runoff but will have to think about it. Congrats to all the winners. I remain excited about Democratic prospects in November.
It took the jury only 3.5 hours to reach the verdict, which surprises me. I thought they'd be in there a lot longer than that.
Joshua Trevino, who doesn't use permalinks, critiques my critique of Dale Amon regarding tax loonies We the People. Here's the crux of Joshua's argument:
Dale clearly doesn't harbor an opinion either way on WTP's specific agenda -- he provides a link and urges readers to decide for themselves. No editorializing at all, which is a rarity for Samizdata (or any blog, really). That's not good enough for Kuffner:
Had Dale Amon taken a few moments to do some research, he would have discovered what kind of arguments, legal and otherwise, that We the People use against the income tax.
What? Okay, Amon's post wasn't a model of thoroughness. But Kuffner is positing a blogging standard that I'm willing to bet he doesn't always meet. (Heck, I know Yglesias doesn't meet it.) The crux of his critique of Amon is that Amon simply didn't do adequate background research on his subject. Come on. Posting links of possible interest is what blogs do. Heck, I put up a link for chihuahua vindaloo, and I'm afraid I was suckered into posting a fair amount about the probably-baseless allegations of Israeli art students-cum-spies. So what? Live and learn. It's blogging, people. Just because we're better than the New York Times doesn't mean we're Real Journalists.The real motivation behind this trio of leftist bloggers is, I suspect, a generalized dislike for Samizdata and its ideology per se. War Liberal says it "drives [him] crazy," Kuffner discusses the "tooth-grinding factor" inherent in his reading of it, and Yglesias simply engages in routine petty mockery against it. The result is cases like this, wherein War Liberal is unecessarily caustic; Kuffner is inappropriately condemnatory; and Yglesias is a pathetic bandwagoner. While two of the three mount effective assaults on WTP, none of them can build a realistic case against Dale Amon.
US income tax is illegalThe We The People Foundation held their own hearing as the US Federal Government broke its word to do so. They claim testimony taken under oath shows the entire income tax system to be unconstitutional.
Decide for yourself. The hearing webcast is available here.
Even if Amon had hedged, I'd still consider him to be at best disingenuous in pointing out this so-called "argument". Let's take a look at the introduction to the Tax Protesters FAQ to see why:
[T]he assertions addressed in this FAQ are not merely false, but completely ridiculous, requiring not just ignorance of law and history, but a suspension of logic and reason.In this FAQ, you will read many decisions of judges who refer to the views of tax protesters as "frivolous," "ridiculous," "absurd," "preposterous," or "gibberish." If you don't read a lot of judicial opinions, you may not understand the full weight of what it means when a judge calls an argument "frivolous" or "ridiculous." Perhaps an analogy will help the attitude of judges.
Imagine a group of professional scientists who have met to discuss important issues of physics and chemistry, and then someone comes into their meeting and challenges them to prove that the earth revolves around the sun. At first, they might be unable to believe that the challenger is serious. Eventually, they might be polite enough to explain the observations and calculations which lead inevitably to the conclusion that the earth does indeed revolve around the sun. Suppose the challenger is not convinced, but insists that there is actually no evidence that the earth revolves around the sun, and that all of the calculations of the scientists are deliberately misleading. At that point, they will be jaw-droppingly astounded, and will no longer be polite, but will evict the challenger/lunatic from their meeting because he is wasting their time. That is the way judges view tax protesters. At first, they try to be civil and treat the claims as seriously as they can. However, after dismissing case after case with the same insane claims, sometimes by the same litigant, judges start pulling out the dictionary to see how many synonyms they can find for "absurd."
And Joshua? My "motivations" were to point out a stupid argument. You are correct that I don't much care for what the Samizdata folks have to say. A big part of the reason for that, as you must have read since you cited my "tooth-grinding factor" comment, is the way in which they present their arguments. I'm willing to listen to people with differing viewpoints until they insult my intelligence. What Amon did here was like citing the Clinton Death List or Alien Autopsy.
Oh, and surely now that several people (myself, Matthew Yglesias, Mac Thomason, Max Power) have pointed out the idiocy of WtP the Samizdata folks would admit that they were wrong in assigning them any credibility, right? Not quite.
I stand by everything I said.
Today is Primary Day in Texas. I did the early voting thing last week, so I can play bridge with a clear conscience today. The latest polls showed Tony Sanchez with a comfortable lead over Dan Morales, and a three-way tie in the Senate race. Of course, in the latter race about 60% of the voters were undecided, so take that as you will. I fully expect there to be a runoff, it's just a question of who the odd man out is.
Well, as expected, we were eliminated from the Vanderbilt last night. I thought we played well, but the other team was better. The way this works is that each team is made up of two partnerships. Each partnership plays a pair from the other team. The same hands are played at both tables, with the respective pairs playing the opposite hands at each table. The scores from each table are compared and added, then coverted into a scale called International Match Points (IMPs).
We lost by 28 IMPs, 78-50. That doesn't sound very close, but if your team bids and makes a game at one table and defeats that same game at the other, you can get 10 or 12 IMPs, so the real difference comes down to about 3 hands out of the 32 we played. Sure enough, there were about three hands where if we'd done the right thing we could have won the match. Of course, it's easy to play the woulda-coulda game. The opponents could point to a couple of hands on which they clearly did the wrong thing. Had they avoided those errors, they would have beaten us handily. It's always easy to overlook that in the postmortem.
We had our chances and came up short. On to the next events. I expect to play in a pair game today. For the dinner break, a large group of bridge players and local friends are going to our favorite hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. Asya, my partner from yesterday, is taking the day off from playing today so she can go on an eight-mile jog in preparation for dinner. Mmm, dumplings...
I'll be spending this week at the 2002 NABC bridge tournament right here in Houston, so I may be a little light on the posts. Today I'm playing with some friends in the Vanderbilt Knockout Teams event. It's probably the most prestigious national event. We have no realistic chance of advancing to the second round, but it's way cool to butt heads with world-class players. If you're a golfer, it's like getting a foursome together and shooting a round at the Masters.
So anyway, I'm a bridge bum this week. Don't let anything too important happen without me.
Chronicle technology columnist Dwight Silverman calls the proposed HP buyout of Compaq a bad deal all around.
Jeff Skilling's lawyers announce that he did too tell the truth to Congress. They went on to denounce as "scurrilous" a report that the HFD had been called to battle a three-alarm blaze in his trousers. "At no point were Mr. Skilling's pants on fire," they did not add.
It's official: the Houston Chronicle is not endorsing Tom DeLay in the Republican primary for his Congressional seat. They're not endorsing his GOP opponent Michael Fjetland, either, but they still give DeLay a pretty good spanking for his "irrational opposition to mobility options" and "win-at-all-costs lust for power". Be still my heart.
Max Power notes my response to Samizdata and provides a link that I'd overlooked to the Tax Protesters FAQ. This is a thorough overview of the idiot arguments that We the People advance and why they are not just wrong but from another planet altogether. The link I gave is a collection of legal citations with a few footnotes, whereas this is a genuine FAQ with complete sentences and all that.
Thanks much for the assist, Max. I had actually seen this FAQ before - it's how I knew that "frivolous" is a very strong term for a judge to use - but couldn't remember enough about it to do a coherent search. Nonetheless, I missed it and you found it, and for that I thank you.
After my post about the geography of blogging, I got a note from Jon Jerome, who's a blogger from Chicago. Go check him out.
Via War Liberal, we get this silly post from Dale Amon of Samizdata. Dale cites a "public hearing" by a group called We the People which claims to prove that the income tax laws are unconstitutional.
Here's a blurb from their web site which discusses the "startling, compelling, disturbing and irrefutable" proof of their thesis:
The record of the hearing proves conclusively for history:
- The Internal Revenue Code does not make most Americans liable to file a tax return and pay an income tax.
- People have a right to the fruits of their labor; the income tax is a slave tax, and is prohibited by the 13th Amendment.
- Congress lacks the authority to legislate an income tax on the people except in the District of Columbia, the U.S. Territories and in those geographic areas within any of the 50 states where the States have specifically approved it, in writing. No legislative jurisdiction means no taxing authority.
- There is no income tax exception to the 5th Amendment's guarantee of the Peoples' unalienable right not to be compelled to be a witness against themselves; individuals do, in fact, waive their 5th Amendment (Miranda) right not to be a witness against themselves when they sign and file a Form 1040 tax return.
- Personal income taxes polarize and divide an otherwise united nation and promote class warfare and mistrust of our government.
- The IRS, the courts and even the NY Times cite the 16th Amendment as government's authority to impose a tax directly on the People's labor. However, the 16th Amendment did not come close to being lawfully ratified by ľ of the states as constitutionally required, and was fraudulently declared to have been ratified in 1913 by Philander Knox, the Secretary of State. The 16th Amendment is null and void.
- The IRS routinely violates the 4th Amendment due process and privacy protections of Americans by seizing assets without lawful authority or a court order and by denying citizens their right to statutorily-prescribed, administrative remedies.
- The IRS willfully and illegally manipulates taxpayers' Individual Master Files for the purpose of creating time-barred assessments, creating and providing fraudulent certificates of official records to the court to support illegal assessments, manipulating master files to short-pay taxpayers' legal interest owed by the government, collecting social security from taxpayers via levy in direct violation of the law, willful and intentional creation of fraudulent penalty and interest against taxpayers, and willful and intentional violation of taxpayers rights to due process.
- The IRS, without legal authority, routinely and illegally prepares "dummy returns" with inflated assessments for taxpayers who legitimately do not file a tax return as a means of punishing those who stand on their legal rights in choosing not to file.
Had Dale Amon taken a few moments to do some research, he would have discovered what kind of arguments, legal and otherwise, that We the People use against the income tax. Setting aside the parts of their attack which are merely personal opinion (i.e., the tax "polarizing" an otherwise united nation), a few more minutes of research would have led to the inevitable dicsovery that all of these arguments have been shot down in court multiple times, with many of them attaining "frivolous" status. Go take a look at the Casebook for Dealing with Extremist Legal Arguments. See how often the arguments that the income tax only applies to Washington, DC, or that the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified, have been tried and thoroughly rejected.
You want to argue that the IRS does and has done Bad Things to ordinary taxpayers, I'm there with you. It's a million miles from there to the notion that the 16th Amendment is illegal and has been for nearly 100 years, and the journey you have to take to get there goes straight through Crackpotville and Kookytown. People who advocate these arguments are either criminally obtuse or just plain criminals. People who cite these advocates favorably are dupes. Shame on you, Dale.
From the USS Clueless we get this remarkable story about Barbie dolls and their apparently subversive effect on Iranian girls. It's hard to imagine Barbie dolls "sowing the seeds of feminist rebellion" as den Beste suggests, but when you read quotes like this from the WaPo story
Another toy seller, Masoumeh Rahimi, said Barbie was "foreign to Iran's culture" because some of the popular Western dolls wear revealing clothing. She said young girls who play with Barbie, a doll she sees as wanton, could grow into women who reject Iranian values."I think every Barbie doll is more harmful than an American missile," Rahimi said.
George Will breaks out the Conservative Pundit Weapon of Mass Destruction by comparing Dubya to Clinton for his apostacy on protectionism. You know, I just want to say that I don't think conservative scribes and talking heads fully appreciate the great debt they owe Bill Clinton. He's the easiest and most convenient shorthand they've ever had for expressing their moral outrage. Whenever they want to spank one of their own, they just have to say he or she is equivalent to or worse than Slick Willie in some respect, and they can rest secure in the knowledge that everyone - especially the target of their wrath - knows exactly what an insult this is.
As an Extra Added Bonus, they get to dismiss or diminish accusations of bad behavior from the Left by saying that whatever it is their guy is supposed to have done, Clinton did it first and did it worse. Now how much would you pay for this? If they gave out awards for this sort of thing, the Houston Chronicle could finally shed its title of Paper With The Largest Circulation To Never Win A Pulitzer Prize.
So let's hear it for Bill Clinton, people. What would the Ann Coulters and Andrew Sullivans of the world do without him?
Oh, and for the record, I agree that this was a bad call by Bush. I agree with Virginia Postrel that this decision was made primarily out of political calculations. I also agree with Charles Dodgson that Bush's record on free trade is not very good to begin with.
The turnout for early voting in the primary has been heavy so far in predominantly Hispanic counties, thanks in large part to the Democratic race for governor. I'm excited about the prospects for the general elections. I still don't know if enthusiasm for Dan Morales or Tony Sanchez will produce extra votes for the other Democratic candidates (let alone whether it will be enough to win the governorship), but for the first time in awhile I feel like there's a reason to vote other than civic duty. Amazing how nice the thought that your vote might count can be.
In other news, the Chron has still not endorsed Tom DeLay. Time's running out, guys. The primary is Tuesday. I'll remember this nonendorsement in November.
The DVD for Say Anything, one of Roger Ebert's Great Movies is now finally out on DVD. I've been meaning to host an all-day John Cusack Movie Marathon, so I really need to get this. Obviously, The Sure Thing will have to be one of the movies involved.
Whatever happened to Ione Skye? She just disappeared after she made this. I don't get it.
It occurred to me recently that the author of almost every blog I read is on one of the coasts or in Texas. (I'm only speaking of US-based authors, so for this purpose Damian and Mike don't count.) Here's a quick rundown:
Which all makes me wonder, where are the Midwestern bloggers? Are there no bloggers out there from Chicago? St. Louis? Detroit? Cleveland? What about the Mountain time zone - where are Phoenix and Albuquerque and Las Vegas and Salt Lake City?
I don't know if any of this means anything. I just thought it was interesting. If I'm missing any good blogs from these underrepresented parts of the country, feel free to let me know.
Virginia Postrel, who seriously needs to start using permalinks (it's The Future, dammit!), makes a good point about what is and isn't censorship:
NOT CENSORSHIP: Andrew Sullivan and others are making much of this Telegraph report that left-wing British publications are rejecting articles that support the war on terrorism.The Telegraph calls this "censorship." I'd call it "editorial judgment." That judgment may be stupid. It may support bad policy. But it's no different from The New Republic's party line on Bush's economic policy (bad, bad, bad) or The Weekly Standard's line on biotechnology (end of humanity). I don't remember a lot of articles opposing gay marriage when Andrew was editing TNR. Was that "suppression of dissent"? Or was it an editor doing what he was supposed to do, and making judgments he felt strongly about?
You have the right to speak your mind. You do not have the right to force a private entity to provide the forum.
From Glenn Kinen we see this rather mind-boggling story about a giant bronze statue of Prince Charles being unveiled in Brazil. The statue, which depicts Gnarly Charlie as a winged world-saving avatar, "shows him with bulging muscles, pinned back ears and only a loin cloth to protect his modesty." I cannot begin to tell you how thankful I am that this photo was cropped just above the loincloth line. As it is I'll have this image burned into my brain forevermore.
Having read Josh Marshall's response to Natalija Radic, all I can say is that he was a lot nicer than I would have been. That disturbs me a bit, since like Ginger, I'm not in this for the pissing contests. I must be at least somewhat of a milquetoast, as I've only ever gotten three even moderately unkind emails. That's fine by me. I think if I were getting a steady stream of invective I'd quit. Who needs that crap? Real Life is full of frustrations. I've no desrie to seek out more.
Which is why I don't bother reading certain blogs. I don't read Sullivan or Samizdata. I don't doubt that they have useful things to say, but their tone simply turns me off. The way I described it to Ginger at the blogmeet last night was that the tooth-grinding factor was too high. Life is too short for that.
I certainly don't mind disagreeing with someone. That's a good thing, for it forces me to think about why I believe what I do. But if you want me to read you and engage you, you've got to maintain some kind of civil tone. There's plenty of intelligent and reasoned blogs out there - I consider that to be true of every blog I link to. I've no qualms about looking elsewhere if I feel I'm wasting my time.
Don't get me wrong. I'm perfectly capable of being an asshole (or, as I like to put it, a member of the Asshole-American Community), and sometimes I'm more than willing to be one. Overall, though, I've mellowed with age. I'm not ready for easy-listening radio just yet, but I'll leave the blog mosh pit to the kids, thanks very much.
As Ginger notes, the second Houston blogmeet was a very pleasant experience. She and Michael and I were the only political bloggers there, as Ted and Jack were unable to make it. (I'm not sure if Craig is involved in H-Town Blogs or not.)
Turns out we all have a fair amount in common. Hanna is a coworker of Tiffany's. Elaine and her husband are also buying a house. E.J. and Sherry are both techies whose career paths have had some overlap with Ginger and Michael, and Dave has worked for a company run by an former Rice colleague of theirs. For a large city, Houston can be a pretty small town sometimes.
I look forward to our next meeting. There's still quite a few folks I've not met yet.
Damn. I've already lost count of how many people have found me in the past two days by Googling for "Amber Kulhanek". (Note to the person who found me by searching for "+boobs +actress": Perhaps a more specific query will yield results that are more to your liking next time.) Quite a few other bloggers have made note of Amber and her legal travails as well. The comments on this blog entry, if true (how much do you trust an anonymous comment on a weblog?), add an interesting angle on Amber's claims.
Tony Adragna at QuasiPundit shows his love for John Madden's color commentary by citing this Ben Domenech post. I'm quite fond of John Madden and look forward to his pairing with Al Michaels on Monday Night Football next year, but I believe it's a grave disservice to praise him by comparing him to Dick Vitale. I'm hard pressed to think of an announcer whom I'll mute faster than Dicky V. He's a complete shill who offers zero actual insight into whatever game he's shouting about.
Madden, even as he has more than occasionally lapsed into self-parody, is still a topnotch analyst with something to say about the game. Listening to Dick Vitale just makes me remember the late Al McGuire, who was the best former-coach-turned-analyst in college basketball. McGuire, who won the NCAA championship in 1977 with Marquette, was amazing in his ability to tell you not only what was happening, but what was about to happen.
I still remember a game that McGuire called years ago. It was North Carolina against an opponent that I can't recall. The other team hit a shot with about five seconds to go to take a one-point lead. McGuire first noted that no fewer than three Tar Heels called timeout as soon as the ball hit the net, a demonstration of the discipline Dean Smith's coaching instilled in them. During the timeout, McGuire predicted that the Heels would pass the ball to midcourt and call timeout again. When that happened, he predicted that the opponent would insert a tall player to guard the inbound pass, and he predicted which Carolina player would take the final shot. He was right each time. When was the last time you saw Dick Vitale do that?
So please. If you're going to praise John Madden, compare him to Al McGuire and not Dick Vitale.
I'm off to meet my fellow Houston bloggers for a Happy Hour tonight. It's the second such get together but I missed the first one, so these will be mostly new faces to me. I'll have a report tomorrow.
I got a nice note from Fritz Schranck today with some comments about my recent post about Amber Kulhanek's default judgment against Arco Media. Kulhanek claims she was coerced into entering a wet T-shirt contest where she was filmed flashing her breasts by Arco, who then used the footage in an ad run on the E! network. She won a $5 million judgment when Arco never responded to the lawsuit.
Fritz tells me that it's not uncommon for default judgments to be removed so that a case can go forward on its merits. Usually, though the defaulter needs to have a reason for not responding in the first place. I'm guessing "I overslept" is not a good reason here.
Fritz also suggests that Arco Media is likely to have no real assets or insurance and thus be judgment proof. If all their revenues essentially went towards marketing the product and they went out of business when sales dropped, there won't be anything to collect. I think this is dead on. I mean, how high is the barrier to enter this market? All you need is a camcorder, a couple of VCRs, a Mailboxes Etc account, and a web page. And let's face it, the proprietors are unlikely to be Chamber of Commerce types.
Anyway, I suspect this is the last we'll hear of this case. The article I originally linked did mention a different lawsuit against another such video company, one which is being challenged. That will be worth watching.
News Corp President and COO Peter Chernin claims that the public is illegally downloading a million pirated movies a day. Good grief. Do these entertainment industry bigwigs take stupid pills or something? Has anyone reading this ever illegally downloaded a full-length movie onto their PC? Geez.
UPDATE: I've gotten a couple of messages from people who say they have indeed downloaded movies from the 'Net. Some are ripped from DVDs, some are filmed by people in theaters (bet that's high-quality). So, I guess this is more common than I thought. Call me an old fart with a slow connection, but it would never occur to me to do this. I still think that Chernin is being hysterical - as the article notes, he doubles the industry's high estimate of piracy when even the low estimate is criticized for being too much - but I concede that it's an issue.
I happened across a copy of Fast Company magazine today, and inside found this interesting article about a British TV show in which corporate CEOs are invited to spend time doing a low-level job within their company and are filmed while doing so.
You might not think this would be a hit, but the show Back to the Floor is in its fifth season and is a prime-time ratings success. As with all so-called "reality" television, I suspect its anything-can-happen potential contributes to its winning formula:
Not every story has a happy ending. Some suspect that Dino Adriano's departure from the top job at Sainsbury's owed something to his poor showing on Back to the Floor. Millionaire restaurateur Luke Johnson, head of the popular British chain Belgo, decided that he'd peeled one onion too many for a moody chef, ripped off his microphone, told producers to "Shove your program!" and refused to allow the camera to keep filming.
Bosses, though, often return to the boardroom ready to right wrongs. Take the Radisson Edwardian managing director who nearly halved the prices of his smallest rooms or the head of Wedgwood, who sued the supplier of the robots that were dropping his cups. Even Johnson agreed to hire six more chefs.Almost without exception, CEOs learn a lesson in communication. "We find people at the heart of every organization who know exactly what's right and what's wrong with it," says [producer Robert] Thirkell. "But between them and the bosses is a layer of people -- those whose careers depend on sanitizing that information. Bosses are always surprised at how much knowledge exists further down the ladder."
From The USS Clueless comes this article about how China is upset that American and European Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are blocking email from China, Korea, and Taiwan to combat spam. Spammers routinely relay mail through servers in these countries because their own IP addresses have been blacklisted.
"The majority of the junk mail (is) not created in China, so why (should) they block mail from China?" said Zeng Xiaozhen, a professor at Jilin University in the northeastern province of Jilin. He said spam was a global issue and China should make a law to punish creators of junk e-mail.
Nowadays this is unnecessary, but a lot of poorly-configured mail servers still allow open relaying. This allows spammers to hijack these servers, using them to send their mail and/or to make it look like the mail originated there. There's absolutely no reason for this - it's well documented how to prevent this kind of open relaying. If these countries want to respected members of the Internet community, they need to start pushing their user base to clean up their act.
I deal with a lot of spam as part of my job. I do indeed see a ton of mail relayed through the .cn, .tw, and .kr domains. I also see a bunch of spam originating from domains registered in those three countries, some of which are simple .com and .net sites. If we didn't have affiliates all over the globe, I'd be happy to push for blocking most mail from them, but I cannot. I have no sympathy for any of their complaints.
March 4 was Inauguration Day up until FDR's administration. When he was first inaugurated in 1933, he appointed the first female Cabinet member, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins.
Take a look at today's birthdays from Yahoo! Daily News and see if you see anything odd:
Folk singer Miriam Makeba is 70. Actress-singer Barbara McNair is 68. Actress Paula Prentiss is 63. Movie director Adrian Lyne is 61. Singer Bobby Womack is 58. Rock musician Chris Squire (Yes) is 54. Singer Shakin' Stevens is 54. Singer Chris Rea is 51. Actor Ronn Moss (``The Bold and the Beautiful'') is 50. Actress Kay Lenz is 49. Musician Emilio Estefan is 49. Movie director Scott Hicks is 49. Actress Catherine O'Hara is 48. Actress Patricia Heaton is 43. Actor Mykelti Williamson is 42. Actor Steven Weber is 41. Rock musician Jason Newsted (Metallica (news - web sites)) is 39. Actress Stacy Edwards is 37. Rapper Grand Puba is 36. Rock musician Patrick Hannan (The Sundays) is 36. Rock singer Evan Dando (Lemonheads) is 35. Actress Patsy Kensit is 34. Chastity Bono is 33. Actor Nick Stabile is 32. Rock musician Fergal Lawler (The Cranberries) is 31. Country singer Jason Sellers is 31.
Ever see those ads on TV for the Girls Gone Wild videotapes? You know, the ones of coeds on Spring Break and at Mardi Gras flashing their boobs? Well, a girl who was seen in an ad for a similar tape made by another company that ran on E! has won a judgment against the makers of the video.
SAN MARCOS -- Southwest Texas State University student Amber Kulhanek went to spring break in 2000 on South Padre Island for her 21st birthday and ended up taking off her shirt at a wet T-shirt contest in Mexico.A few months later Kulhanek saw herself in national ads for a "Wild Party Girls" video on the E! cable network, a red strip proclaiming "Too hot for TV" stamped across her naked breasts. Kulhanek, now a senior, said she was mortified when friends and relatives saw the ad and strangers began asking her to take her top off.
Claiming she had been targeted by the video's makers, who she said plied her with alcohol at a Matamoros bar, Kulhanek sued E! and the Florida-based Arco Media Group Inc. for invasion of privacy and emotional distress.
On Wednesday morning, Kulhanek won what her lawyer says is the first judgment of its kind against the video makers and earned a $5 million default judgment in the 22nd District Court. Lawyers for Arco Media never officially responded to the lawsuit and could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
[Kulhanek's lawyer David] Sergi said Kulhanek was put in a barbershop type chair where liquor was poured down her throat."Before she knew it, she was dead drunk," he said. "The people from Arco were egging her on to enter the wet T-shirt contest. The next thing she knew she was in front of a bunch of people with her shirt off."
I'll stipulate that the business of videotaping drunk coeds who flash their boobs is sleazy. I'll concede that people do stupid things while drunk which they later regret - Lord knows I did while in college. I'm certainly thankful that none of them were caught on videotape and put up for sale. The thing is, though, no one ever forced me to get drunk. That was my choice. The dumb things that followed were therefore my responsibility.
It's possible that Amber Kulhanek was coerced, and if so then the judgment is legitimate. Given that the Arco Media forfeited the issue, we'll never get to hear their cross-examination of Ms. Kulhanek, so we're left with only her version of what happened. Perhaps Arco Media will appeal, assuming you can appeal a default judgment. And given how much they were willing to spend on their legal defense, I wouldn't budget for that money just yet, Amber.
After reading Gary Farber's thorough takedown of The Guardian's resident idiot, I got to thinking how a presumably intelligent person could be so utterly off-base. It's not so much that Mary Riddell and those like her are guaranteed to be wrong about their conclusions - the US-Iraq situation could very well turn into the kind of disaster that she seems to be rooting for - it's the way they get to those conclusions.
Alarmists in general seem to be extremely adept at tailoring logic to fit their conclusions. They ignore or shout down opposing views, and when the facts come in against them, they shunt them aside and hunt for any dark cloud they can point to as proof of their inevitable correctness. We saw this behavior quite a bit in the weeks leading up to the successful invasion of Afghanistan, and I daresay we'll see more screeds like Mary's in the future if and when the US decides to act against Iraq.
This line of thinking led me to another event for which doom was frequently, loudly, and incorrectly predicted. I'm speaking of the once-feared Y2K problem, in which outdated computer systems would melt down on January 1, 2000, causing worldwide chaos and destruction. I think it's instructive to look at what some of the Y2K doomsayers were saying then, and what they said afterwards when it became clear that they weren't just wrong but not even close.
The Y2K doomsayers made claims like the following:
Ed Yourdon was one of the big Y2K doomsayers. If you poke around his website, you can find some hindsight from him on this issue. On this index page, he admits he was wrong, in a roundabout way, anyway:
I was wrong about Y2K. Not about the magnitude and pervasive nature of the problem, and not about the likely consequences if millions of computer systems and embedded chips around the world had not been repaired or replaced. But I was wrong about the likelihood that enough of the repair/remediation would be finished in order to prevent serious disruptions. Indeed, it has gradually become apparent during the first few weeks and months of 2000 that Y2K has caused a number of moderate-to-serious problems in various parts of the world -- but it has not turned out to be the crisis that some of us had anticipated.
If the lights are out, if the phones are dead, if the banks are closed, if the airplanes are not flying, and if the hospitals are not accepting patients, I can assure you that the average citizen will not be spending much time wondering whether he still has more computer power than MIT.
[...]
[P]lease tell the American people that several of the oil companies are terrified of the problem they face here, because many of the chips are down on the bottom of the ocean floor -- and thus incredibly difficult to find, fix, or replace. If the oil rigs shut down, our supply of oil is threatened; if we don't get enough oil, you're going to be faced with the alternative of rationing gasoline or shutting down the oil-fired electric utilities.
In any case, we didn't know how Y2K would work out in 1998. Perhaps there are a few who can honestly say that they absolutely, positively knew that Y2K would be a non-event, but the vast majority of us had to admit, if only in private, that we wouldn't really be absolutely sure. And, in the context of this postmortem, I'm not sure if it would work out the same way -- i.e., a Y2K non-event -- if we had it all to do over again. Indeed, my mental image of the whole situation is that God flipped a coin to determine whether to decide whether to make Y2K a disaster or a non-event. This time, the coin came up heads, and God shrugged and let the world off with only a few glitches. But if we rolled the calendar back a couple years and went through the whole process again, that same coin-toss might come up tails -- in which case, God might have decided to let a few electric grids shut down, a few banks collapse, and maybe even a few airplanes fall from the sky. I know that this is an area of intense debate and controversy, and that many people are deeply convinced that there was no possible way -- no way, no-how -- for the incipient Y2K bugs to have caused a serious disaster. But there are others of us, myself included, who feel that we were incredibly lucky, and that the outcome could easily have been much, much different.
The people who forecast doom in Y2K were actually right about a few things. They were right in that the problem was widespread, and that fixing it would be a massive and expensive undertaking whose success would be in doubt. They were wrong in assuming that the problem had to be fixed, or more to the point that it had to be fixed on the problem's terms. From my experience inside the IT department of a large multinational company, the problem was largely fixed by getting rid of the problematic pieces.
For example, rather than upgrade our mainframe systems that ran a non-Y2K-compliant version of VM, we migrated all the applications off it and onto client-server systems, then retired VM a good six months before 2000. This also obviated the need to edit those oft-cited millions of lines of COBOL code, since most if not all of that code lived on VM. Rather than upgrade BIOS chips on older PCs, we threw them out and installed new PCs. What's more, a lot of this work was done well before "Y2K" became part of the national consciousness. It was done as part of our normal cycle of upgrading old systems and installing new technologies. By the time we got around to creating a Y2K team (in 1997 or 98, I forget), most of the problem had already been solved.
Given that, it's pretty clear that while no one could truly say what Y2K would be like, the vision of God tossing a coin is ridiculous. Ed and his ilk never clued in to the fact that they were looking at a vastly different problem than the rest of us were.
Now think about the people who predicted doom when the US was preparing to invade Afghanistan and take out the Taliban. They threw around words and phrases like "quagmire", "VietNam", "failed Soviet invasion", and so forth. They talked about how the Taliban troops were master guerrila warriors who could hide in the mountains and inflict massive casualties on ground troops. They dismissed air attacks as being ineffective and vulnerable to ground-based missiles. They warned about how the locals would be against us because of the number of civilians we'd kill with our bombs. They scared us with visions of the "Arab Street" rising up to take arms around the world.
In other words, they saw the strengths of the enemy and assumed we would have to fight them on their terms. They didn't give the people whose job it is to solve these problems any credit for thinking of ways to use our strengths and to fight these battles on our terms. They drew on our failures of the past without realizing that we did in fact learn from them. That their predictions were invariably wrong should surprise no one.
Now I'm not saying that any future invasion of Iraq will be as quick or successful as the invasion of Afghanistan was. Nor am I saying that we've licked the whole problem in Afghanistan - we're still fighting, and we will be for the forseeable future. Many people, such as Steven den Beste and Sgt. Stryker have written intelligently and in depth about how things could go in Iraq. I just want to point out that the people who raise the loudest alarms are not necessarily the best sources for how to resolve the problems we face, usually because they're not talking about the problems we are actually facing.
(By the way, Ed is working on a new book called Byte Wars, in which he discusses security, risk management, and the "strategic implications of September 11". You can read the introductory chapter here. Ed also has a blog, which he supposedly updates "most every day", though the latest entry is February 10.)
There's one final thing to consider about doomsayers in general, which is that some of them are not making an honest attempt to predict the future but are instead merely rooting for the outcome they wanted. This was especially true with Y2K doomsaying, as many people interpreted the beginning of a new millennium as the beginning of the end times described in the Book of Revelations. Some people saw the possible breakdown of technology, commerce, and government as being necessary to restore God's rule on earth. Surely some people who predicted dire consequences for the United States if it invaded Afghanistan did so because they hoped to see the imperialist oppressor humbled. For these people, what was true about Afghanistan will be true about Iraq and wherever else the war on terror may lead.
So what happens to these prognosticators whose forecasts turn out to be so wrong? Well, most of them seem to just keep going. No one ever remember these things, right? And surely, they figure, one of these days God's coin toss is bound to come up favorably for them. So they go on with business as usual. As this Wired article notes about Gary North, someone Yourdon frequently cited and whose web site is very different now than it was three years ago:
What will the Internet's best-known doomsayer do if Y2K results in just minor disruptions? "A few years later he'll reappear with another apocalyptic scenario," Berlet predicts.
I was going to comment on the recent spate of sequels to classic animated Disney movies, but Oliver Willis beat me to it. What he said.
The Chronicle has endorsed Dan Morales in the Democratic primary for Governor. This is unlikely to mean anything, since the Chron is a lead-pipe cinch to back Governor Goodhair in November, and since Tony Sanchez is virtually certain to be the Democratic candidate anyway.
There are a couple of sentences from this endorsement which interest me:
...the party needs a strong gubernatorial candidate who has more than deep pockets with which to unite and energize the party....his record of service to the state is long, substantial and familiar.
Except, of course, when the rich, folksy outsider businessman is a Republican and the experienced professional with a clue is a Democrat. You know, like in 1990 when they endorsed Clayton Williams over Ann Richards and in 1994 when it was Dubya over Ann. Some things are more important than having a clue, after all.
More interesting than the Chron's endorsement of Dan Morales is their strange silence regarding the Republican primary for US House District 22, which is Tom DeLay's home base. Their master list of endorsements from last week includes a pick in the District 22 Democratic primary, but as of today they've not given their blessing to either DeLay or challenger Michael Fjetland.
You may say that the Chron has better things to do than to waste ink on a race between a longtime officeholder who's never been seriously challenged for reelection and a no-name opponent with an axe to grind. (*) Maybe, but the Chron did bother to endorse Sheila Jackson Lee against her community-activist opponent. Why Sheila and not Tom?
The Chron has bashed DeLay several times in recent memory, mostly for his anti-rail stances. That sort of thing has never before stopped them from lining up behind a well-known incumbent, especially one who is a strong ally of a member of the Bush family. Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Maybe they haven't gotten to it yet. Whatever the reason, I find it odd.
(*) - Fjetland ran against DeLay in 2000 and got 17% of the vote in the primary. Later, he sent a letter to DeLay saying he wouldn't run against him if DeLay helped him get a job in the Bush administration. Apparently, he wanted to be US Trade Representative, or US Ambassador to the United Nations. You know, something small. DeLay, not too surprisingly, put this request in the round file. All this is in today's Voter's Guide section, whose online version is either infuriatingly slow or down.
One of the things I like about the primary season is the annual game of finding the perennial candidates. The Republicans have one who makes it more of a challenge to spot him because he runs under a different name each time. I speak of Sam Texas, also known as Sam Fayad, Texas Sam Fayad, and Sam Texas Fayad, now running for the Republican spot in State Senate District 15. He claims to have officially changed his name this time, but the Chron sees through his little ploy.
Sam, a word of advice. If you want to fool voters by presenting them with an appealing name, why not go all out? Call yourself "Sam Houston Texas" or "George Bush Texas" or "God Bless Texas". Think big, man.
We got an offer on our house today, a mere five days after the For Sale sign went up. It's in the ballpark pricewise, and the prospective buyer already has a contract on his house and wants to close on April 15, two weeks before our contingency contract expires. This is a good thing, albeit a bit head-spinning in its alacrity.
We'll be consulting with our broker tomorrow and will make our counteroffer. It would be awfully nice to put this to bed before we go on vacation later this month. Stay tuned.
The Linda Lay Award for Sycophantic Interview Least Likely to Generate Hometown Sympathy goes to Jeff Skilling for his pathetic appearance on Larry King Live.
And to think that the Brits call Dubya a dummy. Here's the latest wisdom from Prince Philip:
LONDON -- No one would ever accuse him of political correctness. In his long career as Queen Elizabeth II's consort, the Duke of Edinburgh has mastered the princely gaffe with ill-considered remarks about Indians, Scots, women and deaf people, among others.The tongue that spares none struck again Friday. During a tour of Australia to mark his wife's Golden Jubilee, Prince Philip added Aborigines to his verbal hit list when he asked a tribal leader, "Do you still throw spears at each other?"
William Brim, the entrepreneur whom the prince addressed, replied politely that, no, they didn't do that anymore, and he told reporters in Queensland that he was more surprised than offended by the question.
An Austin judge has cleared the way for the 55 MPH speed limit signs to go up starting on Monday.
I had an argument with my friend and coworker Andrea about this on Friday. She believes the lower speed limit will help acheive the NOX reductions for which it is intended, as well as reducing auto fatalities. I'll stipulate to the safety benefits of a lower speed limit, but unless the cops are out in force writing tickets, I don't think too many people will really drive slower. The 55 MPH speed limit was routinely ignored when it was the law of the land. I see no reason why people will go along with it now that they're used to going faster.
Gary Farber makes a good point about Matthew Engler's much-derided Guardian piece about The Olive Garden, which is that Brits have a legitimate beef with the timing of our entry into WWI and WWII. Check it out.
Well, things are really moving along. We have a signed contingency agreement on the house we want, which means we've put up earnest money. On Wednesday we did an inspection of the new house. It's in pretty good shape, but there are some issues. The roof is 15 years old and will need repair or replacement soon. The cooktop in the kitchen doesn't have a shutoff switch. There's a support beam that needs repair. Nothing that can't be fixed, but we're likely to do some further haggling on price.
The owners of the house now live in Michigan. A former neighbor of theirs, a woman who buys fixer-uppers and renovates them for resale, is currently housesitting. She gave us a lot of practical advice about the place, which we greatly appreciated. She also told us that there hasn't been an offer on this house before ours, which makes me more confident about further price negotiations.
In the meantime, our house is now officially on the market. The For Sale sign went up on Tuesday, and the first prospective customer came by yesterday. Dealing with the dog is an issue, since Tiffany and I are both at work some 20 minutes away during the day, but our broker has a good relationship with Harry and has volunteered to swing by and take him for a walk when the house is to be shown. Harry is fully recovered from his little accident though he did have some nausea from the anesthetic.
We've had to reassure a few neighbors that we're not leaving the area. Everyone knows the house we're buying, and they've all expressed happiness for us.
Today our broker put out pull sheets for the house. He told us that the first few dozen would be taken by people in the area, but we knew that from our own experience. Looking at houses and going to open-house showings is practically a spectator sport around here. It's a bit weird looking at advertising for your own home. There's something unreal about the pictures. I can't put my finger on it.
Normally, the best reason to read Ann Hodges, the Chronicle's bluenosed critic - she makes the Church Lady seem hip - is to take whatever it is she's haughtily condemning and set the VCR accordingly. However, for once I've got to agree with her. I can't think of any good reason to watch Monica in Black and White on HBO's America Undercover. It doesn't even hold ten-car-pileup fascination for me. Sorry, babe. Your fifteen minutes expired back in 1998. Go get a job and leave us nice folks alone.
Tonya Harding will take on Amy Fisher in the Fox Network's Celebrity Boxing special. to be broadcast on March 13. The undercard, as it were, will feature Danny "Partridge" Bonaduce versus Barry "Greg Brady" Williams.
What surprises me is that no one at Fox thought to pair this up with their May sweeps special Who Wants to Pose for Playboy. I mean, do these two have "double feature" written all over them or what?
