Personal Musings category archive

In Philadelphia, there has recent been a rash (that is, two) accidents in which bicyclers ran into pedestrians and the pedestrians died. At least one was a hit-and-run–the bicyclist is still unidentified.

Philadelphia City Council, which Mayor Green once called the “worst legislative body in the Free World” (it’s not; the Pennsylvania state legislature takes that honor), is considering requiring bikes to be registered, I guess so there will be little tiny license plates that no one can see the next time a biker is involved in a hit-and-run with a pedestrian.

Brendan finds this outrageous.

I find it silly.

Police are overwhelmed trying to keep track of dangerous, inconsiderate, selfish, and just plain stupid drivers of motor vehicles. Dangerous, inconsiderate, selfish, and just plain stupid bicyclists get scant enforcement attention. Registering bikes will not change that.

What will change it is ticketing bicyclists for traffic violations and putting points on their motor vehicle operators licenses for moving violations, such as running red lights and going the wrong way on one-way streets.

It is true that pedestrians often put themselves in harm’s way. It is also true that rude, inconsiderate, and stupid behavior by adult cyclists in their funny clothes seems to be the norm.

I can count on my right big toe the number of cyclists I have seen actually stop at a stop sign or a red light in the past month. There is a reservoir of ill will towards bicyclists amongst motorists (including amongst me), nurtured by cyclists who act as if they are exempt from the rules of the road.

If this very bad bill passes, cyclists can blame themselves.

Full disclosure: I have two bicycles on the back porch. (I haven’t been riding them often. The little hills in upper Delaware look a lot bigger from two wheels than from four.) I look forward to riding them in the flatter terrain of Virginia Beach.

But I always stop for stop signs and red lights, ride on the correct side of the road, and obey one-way street signs.

For 18 years I attended Catholic churches. (My ex was of Catholic upbringing and could not bring herself to abandon that aspect of her heritage, though she had no great brief for Catholic theology per se).

The Catholic Church hierarchy cannot be considered as a source of moral tutelage in any area and its attempts to lecture anyone on morality must be viewed as the most extreme hubris.

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From tearing my hair out every time a media outlet glibly refers to the Friday after Thanksgiving as “the biggest shopping day of the year,” as if that were revealed truth.

It’s not and never has been. Big, yes. Never the “biggest.”

If they can’t get that right from readily available statistics, why do we expect them to get complicated stuff, like noticing when a politician is out-and-out lying, right?

Aside: I did not hear the Friday after Thanksgiving called “Black Friday” until I moved to the Philadelphia area in 1983. Even 135 miles away in Washington, D. C., where I had lived for nine years, the term was unknown in that contest. Even in Philly, it had little to do directly with shopping.

It had to do with traffic. The Wikipedia article is pretty accurate.

And remember the story of the first American Thanksgiving.

No, not in Plymouth Colony. It didn’t exist yet. It just has a better PR department.

The first Thanksgiving occurred when Captain John Woodlief led the newly-arrived English colonists to a grassy slope along the James River and instructed them to drop to their knees and pray in thanks for a safe arrival to the New World. It was December 4, 1619, and 38 men from Berkeley Parish in England vowed:

“Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrivall at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

It started out with replacing the sprayer and hose assembly for the kitchen sink. The sprayer didn’t, and I had already ruled out the sprayer head.

I shut off the water, broad jumped on my back underneath the sink, and decided that I didn’t have the right tools to deal with the cramped quarters right now.

I turned the water back on, turned on the faucet, and nada. I disassembled the handle, adjusting collar, and cap of the faucet–water was getting to it, but not to the spout.

My guess is that whatever was causing the sprayer problem to begin with had, when I turned off the valves, decided to go west permanently (probably to somewhere near Denver).

I replaced the entire faucet. Getting the new one in took 15 minutes, not counting the 10 minute trip to the hardware store after I verified that it did, indeed, have eight inch centers.

Getting the old one off took two hours: one of the retaining nuts holding the faucet in place just would not budge. I ended up drilling the sonuvabitch off.

Also, the lead from the hot water line to the faucet would not come off the faucet; I had to replace it also (if I had finally gotten it off, it probably would have been too deformed to reuse anyhow). Whoever put it on in the first place apparently didn’t know that, with compression fittings, tight enough is tight enough.

Tomorrow, I will give thanks for plumbers, who are willing to make a career out of this sort of frustration. A competent plumber is worth the cost (for those who can afford one).

The New York Times seems to have put its “registered user” wall back up.

Once I did register several years ago, then they kept telling me that they didn’t know who I was whenever I tried to log in.

Not worth the trouble.

I have done without them before. I can do without them again.

There is no moral difference between the high school thug who shoots his classmate for dissing him and the wingnut who wants to bomb some country for every little fancied slight.

The subject was flood protection in that Hampton Roads, Va., area, but the phrase is universal; it refers to a large segment which cuts across the population (emphasis added):

Unfortunately, many of us – particularly card-carrying dwellers of CAVE, or Citizens Against Virtually Everything – have concluded that this is our fate.

For them, no challenge is too minor, no solution too small, no fix too cheap to be insurmountable.

They are the “No We Can’t” brigade.

The creators of the “Got Milk?” campaign are getting ready to make a big push to keep chocolate milk on kids’ minds and on school lunch menus, a plan that has some educators and obesity activists none too pleased.

The new ad campaign from the dairy industry emphasizes that sugary flavorings are ways to get kids to drink milk. Without them, some youngsters won’t drink regular milk and won’t get its nutrients, the ads say.

Left out of the discussion is that

• No other species drinks beverage milk past infancy and
• No other species drinks the milk of whole nother species.

We have an entire industry based on unnatural acts.

Well, we have several, but right now I’m talking about milk.

And if you mention cats, I’ll remind you that milk is not good for cats, no matter what your cat says.

The last couple of evenings, in search of silliness, we have watched a few reruns of AFV on the ABC Family Channel. Stupid pet tricks always amuse.

In those less than three hours, we have seen approximately three million, two hundred thirty-seven thousand, eight hundred forty-two point three six promos for this.

I have never seen it, will never see it, and can honestly say I have never disliked a movie more.

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I’m taking the day off.

When I haven’t been eating and sleeping, I’ve been napping.

The regularly scheduled invective returns tomorrow.

Mithras reports that President Obama went to Dover to salute the fallen and points out that Bush never went to Dover.

Bushes, in fact, tried to hide Dover.

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Parts of a house get awfully dirty in 24 years.

Investment banks making huge profits from fees on trades that they promote are like croupiers skimming bets they recommend.

The Catholic Church has no monopoly on malefactors. For every hinky Catholic priest, there is a Ted Haggard.

But the cover-up, well, that’s something else. Management is culpable for protecting and enabling the conduct. And managment continues to spin and evade its culpability.

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Michael Tomasky at the Guardian discussing some focus groups:

They found that conservatives “stand a world apart from the rest of America” in terms of how they view Barack Obama and how they see politics. There is a continuum, in other words, in US politics, running from those on the left who’ve already concluded that Obama is a sellout, to mainstream liberals who are basically happy with him, to moderates who are approving but with reservations, to centre-right folks who are unconvinced but pulling for him to succeed, for the country’s sake if nothing else.

Then there are committed conservatives. They’re off the continuum, in three basic ways. First, they fundamentally question his legitimacy as president. Second, they believe that a successful Obama presidency would destroy the country and are “committed to seeing the president fail”. And third, they think he is “ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the US and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism”.

At the root of this is that some persons who characterize themselves as “Americans” don’t accept that the rest of us–80% of the population, in fact–are Americans also.

In their world, those who disagree with them are somehow auslanders–outlanders. And they will not concede that an auslander will ever have anything valid to say.

They are the direct descendants of the Know-Nothings, and they live up to their lineage and to that name.

Addendum, a Few Minutes Later:

The Booman nails it:

Traditional Americans are white.

(Follow the link. Read the rest.)

Extending the reasoning, therefore, if you are not white (and bigoted) you are not American.

Pah!

From Thomas Browne via the QuoteMaster:

Be charitable before wealth makes you covetous.

Interesting.

The poor want enough.

It is the rich who want more.

And it is therefore the poor whom the rich vilify for wanting.

A variable speed reversible electric drill with a screwdriver set is a wonderful thing.

Stupid, but typical of American management:

James Krapf, 31, an 11-year veteran of the department, disobeyed an order to clear decorations from the outside of his locker, a policy established in August in response to a cartoon that some found offensive. Krapf took down two other stickers from his locker Thursday but refused to remove a small American flag in the upper left corner. He was sent home.

I saw this type of stuff a lot when I worked for large organizations. Someone does something improper, as in the backstory to this, displaying a cartoon that someone else felt had racist implications.

Rather than dealing with the issue–the cartoon–management makes a blanket rule, no locker decorations. It is classic “punish everyone rather to avoid dealing with the problem.”

At one of the large organizations I worked at, long business trips–often a week or more–were frequent. Employees on trips over five days were allowed to get their laundry done at the hotel.

Now, anyone who has ever used a hotel laundry service knows it is expensive. You are paying, not just for the laundry, but for the hotel to hold the laundry for pick-up, for someone to pick up and deliver the laundry from the plant, and for the hotel to hold the laundry for you to pick up when your work day is over (in some cases, even deliver it to your room), all on the same day.

Then management discovered that one person (who happened to be part of my little department) was bringing his laundry from home to be done on expense–he commonly was putting in for laundry bills in excess of $100.00 ($25.00 to $30.00 was typical for four days worth of laundry back then).

His manager should have been raked over the coals for approving the darn expense reports in the first place. Instead, management responded by disallowing laundry service on all expense reports without advance permission from God.

That’s when we started washing out our skivvies in the hotel sinks (hotel shampoos double effectively as laundry soap).

Now, I’m not a big fan wearing American flag lapel pins or other American flag stuff; ostentatious displays of the symbols of patriotism often fall into the “Methinks thou dost protest too much” category. I have found that those who ostentatiously display the flag on their clothing or belongings often do so in support of distinctly unAmerican ideas.

Besides, most of wearable flag stuff violates flag etiquette (which mandates, among other things, that the flag or representations thereof should not be used as wearing apparel).

But this is a loser for the management of the Chester City Fire Department.

Related to the previous post:

The persons claiming that the government somehow intends to “ration restrict access to” health care clearly do not understand what the phrase “in network” means in the health insurance biz.