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DON’T

TRUST

SNAKES

“I know where I'm headed.”
ROGER THORNHILL


Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Greek safety plan

They should just close off the upper floors of all UW and WSU fraternities and sororities. It seems the brothers and sisters can scarcely look at a flight of stairs without being propelled from the nearest third-floor window, fire escape, etc.

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posted at 11:09 PM

Monday, August 18, 2008

Four wheels good, two wheels bad

It is time to consider that the single biggest reason for antagonistic, wary attitudes between drivers and bicyclists in the urban setting is not the thoughtlessness of drivers or the differential outcomes for participants in the typical bicycle-versus-car accident; rather, it is that bicyclists disregard traffic rules at a much higher rate than operators of other kinds of vehicles.

Search your feelings—you know this to be true. If cars broke basic traffic laws at the rate cyclists do, there would be chaos. If motorcyclists went about things like their pedal brethren, motorcycles would probably be illegal. Like cars or not, you must admit that the great majority of drivers are making a solid, good-faith effort to obey major laws.

You can't really say that about bicyclists. Many bicyclists break the law whenever it suits them, ignoring red lights, turn-only lanes, vehicle spacing requirements, the distinction between roadways and sidewalks, etc. Not all bicyclists are like this by any means, but many. Note that I don't mean "running" red lights shortly after they've turned red. I mean ignoring them. In the last 24 hours I've seen two bicyclists blow through steady red lights like the lights weren't there. And I haven't driven much in the last 24 hours.

The bicyclists I am concerned with behave with impunity because, so far as I can tell, the laws to govern their behavior either do not exist, lack sufficient sanctions, or are not enforced. Bicyclists may worry about being killed, but they sure don't have to worry about being ticketed for all the crazy stuff they do, at least not in Seattle. And assuming they were to be ticketed, what would happen to habitual offenders? Answer: nothing. There is no concept of licensing bicycles, of losing the privilege of operating a bicycle. (No license plates also means little citizen reporting of reckless lawbreaking.) As far as I know, nothing a person does on a bicycle—sober, anyway—can affect his or her ability to operate a motor vehicle. You can run red lights to your heart's content and none of it will ever come back to impact your driver's license. Insurance is another inapplicable notion. You could do all kinds of insane stuff on your bike and no one could ever say "you must obtain high-risk insurance if you want to continue riding your bike."

This is a city that wants to tax grocery bags. But it allows the risk of personal injury or death to be the main consideration regulating how bicyclists conduct themselves.

How about some comments on this one?

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posted at 8:58 PM

Monday, June 02, 2008

What should be Hillary's . . . compensation?

I forget which moronic Op-Ed contributor suggested Obama should publicly promise to nominate Hillary to the first open Supreme Court seat. Whoever it was had evidently forgotten that Obama's goal is to win the election (apart from the impropriety of promising to nominate a particular person to the Court.

However, I was just reading about the meaningless results from Puerto Rico, and Hillary's pointless comments thereafter (“In recent primary history, we have never nominated someone who has not won the popular vote.”) and reflecting on how nice it will be to finally have her gone. And I thought of the perfect way for Obama to . . . compensate . . . her for dragging out the nomination process beyond the limits of common sense and, from time to time, decency.

He should do to her (ahem, I mean for her) what FDR did to/for Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., offer her one of the greatest meaningless plums the Executive Branch has to offer, the Ambassadorship to the Court of St. James's. And figure out the details of the offer so that if she turns it down, she really has to come across as snubbing the President-elect. I'd enjoy watching those machinations.

Of course, despite its historic primacy, that ambassadorship isn't what it once was, and she has that delightful (or repellent) "Hillary grit" that might be put to good use in some other diplomatic settings. So, Russia could be an option (and if there weren't a bond of mutual respect forged between Hillary and Putin, it would only be because Hillary longs to rule a country and Putin only likes winners). However, as a poetic posting for Hillary, Russia is mere blank verse to the iamabic pentameter that is . . . Saudi Arabia. Oh, yes. She could see about solving our energy problems at the source, perhaps shaming the House of Saud into giving something back to hard-working white Indianans. For its part, the repressive, socially backward kingdom deserves to have someone like Hillary to deal with. And what a wonderful repository Riyadh would be for Bill.

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posted at 1:08 AM

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Monsoon season


I'm in the process of deciding how much weight to give to the common guidebook advice about when not to travel to India: monsoon season. My initial thoughts are that I should go when I can go, guidebooks to unfamiliar places cater to the risk-averse mean of Western travelers, and the monsoon is apt to be very manageable. It is, as our parents and Peter Gabriel used to say, only water.
Why on earth would you ignore advice that is so, so ubiquitous? A quick google search revealed that Delhi averages half an inch of rain a day during August, or basically a constant downpour. Not exactly amenable to walking around and taking pictures, imo. - MWR's old friend
Well, goodness, MWR's old friend, why on earth does MWR do half the things MWR does? One reason is that I love to dispute accepted wisdom (though long a convert to, and even an owner of, proper evening dress for gentlemen). I'm conscious of how this contraphilia can prejudice me. Still, when writers go on and on about the breadth and diversity of the subcontinent, and then somewhere pronounce "don't go in the summer," it's the irony that always stands out. Shall writers consider whether readers will be somewhere when August means 25 wet days and two feet of rain, or is it more like 12 rainy days and ten inches? I'm not thinking about Mumbai during this period, though it might be epic. Are writers considering that overcast days are best for my photography? No, they are considering that rainy days will reduce my chances of having the guidebook-template trip most readers likely have in mind. I'm an outlier. And I can deal with some rain, for God's sake. I won't have come all that way to sit inside waiting for the Cat in the Hat to come entertain me. My guess is that it's not a "constant downpour," but more episodic and heavy rain. That's the pattern I expect to see in warm areas with high rainfall totals.

A few years ago, though web postings, I was decisive in convincing a NYC-based photographer that he should come to Olympic National Park in October. His impression had been that it would be raining all the time, but I was able to locate historical data suggesting it might not rain much at all on his proposed dates in the park:
Looking at the dates of your trip during the 2000-2004 period, I count 10 days with recorded rainfall and 25 days without. On only four days out of the 35 was there rainfall in excess of two-tenths of an inch. This is in a place that averages about 117 inches of rain a year.

As you can gather, it typically does not rain incessantly on days when rainfall is recorded, so even if your weather were not ideal there would likely be significant periods when it was not raining. It is a safe assumption that it will be cloudy during your visit, but you might get lucky
Here, closer examination showed that an outsider's impression about some of our local weather was way off base. I'm not expecting this level of "clarification" about monsoon season on the central plains, but I'm comforted to read comments like this on a popular bulletin-board site for India travel:
There's really only one answer to any monsoon question: you might get wet, you might not. India's summer monsoon is usually an afternoon cloudburst, though sometimes you catch a spell where it rains for a few days straight. The monsoon is not a constant month-long deluge.

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posted at 12:22 AM

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

MWR violates Seattle's "passive neighbor" policy

On my walk to work this morning I violated one of Seattle's unwritten codes of conduct by confronting a stranger about what he was doing. I had just observed a well-dressed man with two small brown dogs as he waited for one of them to defecate, then walked away. After he was well away from the site, walking somewhat behind me, I addressed him with "You're not going to clean that up?" (Not the friendliest thing I could have said, but my CPU did not display enough other options.) Response: "Yes I am going to clean it up . . . thank you for your concern. I've got two dogs here." Yielding nothing, but in a friendly tone, I said that I was concerned and you saw that all the time these days.

"Thank you for your concern." I think that if you are seen walking away like that from a pile of excrement, showing no sign of returning, the only logical conclusion an observer can make is that you are fleeing the scene of the crime. (It may surprise you to know that I was once briefly responsible for walking two small dogs in an urban setting. When one of them finished, I cleaned up immediately . . . despite the apparently insuperable challenges involved.) I'm not sure what this guy expected, except not to be called on what he seemed to be doing. I have no reason to disbelieve what he told me, although I must say that while I really try to avoid stereotyping, if you showed me a photo of a guy in a black blazer walking a matched set of little brown dogs on Capitol Hill at 8 a.m., the caption "Not a Passive-Aggressive Narcissist" isn't the first that would leap to mind.

Of course, within a block I was treated to a nice view of some other dog's refuse. I do have a solution to the problem. It is a zero-tolerance dog-confiscation policy. If you are observed not cleaning up after your dog, you lose your dog and—this is important—you are never allowed to find out what happened to it. Maybe it was adopted, maybe it was euthanized, maybe it's living on a farm somewhere or toughening up at Vick's Home for Wayward Dogs. Whatever happened to it, you are done with that dog. And, of course, you would be banned from owning another dog for, say, five years.

You might assume this is just another one of my fanciful blog suggestions, but I would love to see this solution implemented. Society has a real interest in having clean sidewalks, medians and parks. As far as I can tell, there is no societal interest in allowing swine in human form to own dogs.

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posted at 9:03 AM

Sunday, June 03, 2007

457 neighborhoods?!?!

BAGHDAD, June 3 — Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “to protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods. New York Times, June 4, 2007
O.K., it's a big, sprawling place, Cradle of Civilization and all that, but what city has 457 neighborhoods? We need to deploy corps of U.S. housing developers and real estate agents over there to get the number of neighborhoods under control, and spruce up the names while they're at it. And perhaps some sci-fi or fantasy writers could help reconfigure the map too. Haven't our planners and commanders ever heard of "optics"? Six months from now, we ought to be reading how we are protecting populations in and physically influencing, say, 147 out of the city's 193 neighborhoods. That's more than 75% of the neighborhoods!

Here are some examples of how it might work in practice:

Old Name

Dora Farms
Sadr City
Al-Kadhimya
Hurriya City
Al-Mansour
Hayy Al-Jihad
Al-Saydiya
Al-A'amiriya
Al-Shu'ala
Al-Ghazaliya
Al-Za'franiya
Hayy Ur
Sha'ab City
Al-Adel
Al-Khadhraa
Hayy Al-A'amel
Triangle of Death
Sadriya
Khalis
Palestine Street
Fadhil
Rasheed district
Al Dura
Risafi
Shorja
Iskan

New Name

Dora Acres
Viewcrest
Hammurabi Hills
Frondhaven
Mansourhurst
Derbyshire
Palmcrest
Canal City
Beacon Hill
Sand Dell
Washington Heights
Sweetbriar
Sweetbriar Corners
Unincorporated Area
Mosquetown
Tigris Park
Triangle of Sorrow (1)
Forbidden Zone (2)
Neutral Zone (2)
Pleurisy Flats (2)
Vale of Peril (1)
Unhallowed Lands (1)
Unhallowed Lands (1)
Unhallowed Lands (1)
Unhallowed Lands (1)
Unhallowed Lands (1)
——————————
(1) Fantasy-writer contribution
(2) Sci-fi-writer contribution

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posted at 9:57 PM

Friday, February 16, 2007

Too slow!

I feel like the word verification feature of blogger comments is showing me up in "high five". It is John Connor to my T-800.

Seriously, it is rare that I complete a comment before the verification word has cycled to the next batch of gibberish. But I can't find out for sure until I have carefully parsed and retyped the first batch of gibberish. I wonder how many person-years have been wasted worldwide by this. You would think someone at Google could take a few minutes of his free-play day (or whatever it's called), and create something that refreshes the word in real time. Surely this is possible, if they can do Google suggest and all the other real-time bells and whistles they have.

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posted at 4:56 PM