Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. --Mark Twain

Procrastination is one of the delights of life.  How I savor these last few days before taxes are due.  Such a rush!  Some people ski, or jump out of airplanes, or surf; I get all that fun and more by waiting until the last minute.  Plus, no special clothes are required.

Favorite activity while procastinating? Either daydreaming or listening to "Daydream Nation". If I'm feeling particularly driven, I may do both simultaneously, not to brag.

Queen Elvis

Perhaps inspired by fried chicken sushi, I decided that we all should listen to some Robyn Hitchcock. Sadly underrated.   What do you need to know about him?  There was a documentary about him called "Sex, Food, Death, and Insects."  Nuf said.



People get what they deserve
Time is round and space is curved
Honey, have you got the nerve
To be Queen Elvis?

Fried Chicken and Sushi

I thought I'd post something not too depressing for a change.   I mean, the sun is shining,  my syringa unknown pink bush, (see below)

is attracting bees, both europeanized and bumble, and miss hummingbird is out.

Plus, a new restaurant, Uchu, that will be serving sushi and fried chicken (!!!!) will be opening soon just a few blocks from our house. I can't wait. Rumor had it that it was to open today, but GeeBee and I just strolled on past and no sushi for me. I really want to see sushi made with rice and a chicken drumstick all wrapped in seaweed, with dots of sriracha. (As an aside, did you know that drumsticks have a butt and a shaft? True Story.) I should be able to think of an amusing name for it, but all I've got is either a "Moon over Tokyo roll", or a "Tombstone Blues roll"; the sushi's not yellow, it's chicken. Sigh.

Or, there's always the McNuggets Roll.

Why I fear for my beloved country, part zillion

Because we're losing the middle class.  And when it goes,we spiral down fast until we're at third world status.  Other countries have gone down the exact same path we're trodding, with dependable--bad--results.

Mexico in the 70's was building a middle class until it slashed spending on transportation, health care, and education.  Poof.  As an article from 2002 in the New York Times said:

The development of a middle class was a shining achievement of the Mexican revolution, said the historian Lorenzo Meyer. Incubated in a closed economy that was driven by state-owned monopolies, the middle class grew steadily from the 1920's to the 1970's. Faced with declining economic efficiency and a mounting public debt, successive presidents opened Mexico's protected economy, igniting an industrial revolution that turned the country into one of the world's leading exporters.
In an effort to reduce its external debt, the government simultaneously slashed spending for higher education, transportation and health care - all traditional pillars of middle-class life.  Found here.

Your defect is a propensity to hate everybody

The inadvertently untrustworthy narrator is one of the joys of fiction. Who can forget Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice who holds such a high opinion of himself:

"My dear Miss Elizabeth, I have the highest opinion in the world of your excellent judgment in all matters within the scope of your understanding." Dear reader feels slightly different. Dear readers, a host  of Mr./Mrs. Collinses! (Hostess, acually; as proper ladies I'm sure they would insist on the gendered form.)  Here is a sample:

"I hope she forgives me my judgment. It comes from a place of love.”

I think I'm going to adopt that as my new meme. Even though it has this slight hint of the off-color; like that time we heard, from a nearby campfire, someone singing "Jesus, come unto me."

(Judgmental--but only because she comes from a place of love--lady to the left.  On edit, this isn't really fair to Emily, over there.  She isn't cruel, she's just a bit inept.)

Of course I have my own bizarre list of reasons to look down on others.  Groups I feel free to mock:  those that wear polo shirts unironically, those that listen to Herbie Hancock (sorry, George); those unenlightened souls that don't realize the color orange is a neutral; heretics--heretics, I say--that use salted butter.  The list could go on. But my mockery should be forgiven, as it comes from a place of love, the place might even be a McMansion, even.

Hummingbirds

My daughter left home, my home, recently. With no children to worry about I've transferred my neuroticism to an innocent little bird. A hummingbird, to be exact. I think it's an Anna's female, but all those darn hummingbird females have metallic green backs and whitish throats. Plus they move very fast.

She flits around outside my dining room window pretty much every morning. I worry.

Picture, certainly not mine, found here.

Thomas Jefferson believed in progressive taxation.

‎"Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785.

I hope we come up with a fail safe plan to piss off the few that forgave us

The Hawaiian Supreme Court in 1993 declared that gay marriage was required by the Hawaiian Constitution. The Mormon Church tried to join the lawsuit in opposition but were not allowed as they didn’t have standing. That is, they wouldn’t be harmed.

The Proclamation on the family was used by the Mormon church to prove to the Hawaiian court, and provided in its entirety as an appendix, that preventing gay marriage was an essential feature of Mormonism. The timing is such that it appears that the proclamation was written to provide standing to the Hawaiian court.

From the the LDS church amicus brief in Baehr v. Miike against gay marriage in Hawaii:

 “A decision by this Court to strike down the requirement that marriage must be between a man and a woman will substantially and irreversibly weaken this venerable and indispensable institution, and thereby cause great harm to society as a whole. Homosexual marriage is
wrong, both from a moral and social point of view. Its recognition will have grave consequences for every individual, for every family, for every community, for every state, and for American society.”
…
"Homosexual relationships will not and cannot provide the essential
benefits to society that the traditional family has, and therefore should not be accorded the preferential status of marriage. Recognition of homosexual marriage will trivialize the traditional family - the basic building block of society - thereby having deleterious effects upon society as a whole. At a time when the traditional family needs more protection than ever before, Hawaii's prohibition on homosexual marriage is surely narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest. This Court should therefore rule in favor of the State.”

The brief can be found here:


For a detailed timeline, see here.

If you're wondering about the post title, see here:

I was at that show, back when I was cool. You can see GeeBee's profile in the opening seconds of the video.

Yet another oil bubble

The price of oil has risen, yet again, because of speculation. How long must we sing this song? True price of oil, currently, without speculation? $32, according to Dan Dicker.

Dan Dicker, who has spent nearly three decades in the oil market, has a profoundly disturbing explanation of why the price of oil, and the gasoline that comes from the crude product, has risen so dramatically in recent months. It turns out, Dicker says, that the price has nothing to do with supply and demand for oil. It's the financial market for oil, filled with both professional speculators and amateur investors betting on poorly understood oil exchange-traded funds, who have ratcheted up the price of gas to such sky high levels.

"There is no supply issue going on here - what you have is the perception of the possibility of a supply issue," Dicker says. "A whole bunch of people are pouring money into an oil market trying to take advantage of what they perceive to be a real risk in supply. It's a marketplace that I argue should not be allowed to be wagered on like a stock or bond."

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/iesPo6

Radiation

I really think that nuclear power has the potential to help man- and womankind by producing clean renewable power. Stuff like this, though, isn't helping.

For the first two days after the accident, the wind blew east from Fukushima towards monitoring stations on the US west coast; on the third day it blew south-west over the Japanese monitoring station at Takasaki, then swung east again. Each day, readings for iodine-131 at Sacramento in California, or at Takasaki, both suggested the same amount of iodine was coming out of Fukushima, says Wotawa: 1.2 to 1.3 × 1017 becquerels per day.

The agreement between the two "makes us confident that this is accurate", he says. So do similar readings at CTBT stations in Alaska, Hawaii and Montreal, Canada – readings at the latter, at least, show that the emissions have continued.

In the 10 days it burned, Chernobyl put out 1.76 × 1018 becquerels of iodine-131, which amounts to only 50 per cent more per day than has been calculated for Fukushima Daiichi. It is not yet clear how long emissions from the Japanese plant will continue.

Found at newscientist, here.

However, here in the states, we're safe, as can be seen using this handy map of radiation levels.

Hipster Trap!

Where's the lp?

Thanks, reddit.

Wells Fargo Behaving Badly

From the San Diego Bankruptcy Attorneys' blog we get this information:

Wells Fargo has an interesting corporate policy, and by “interesting” I mean to say “bordering on the criminally fraudulent.” If you have a regular checking account at Wells Fargo, and file for bankruptcy, the bank will freeze your assets — even if you don’t owe them a dime.

Much more information here.

If that's not bad enough, one branch of Wells steals money. EEEk. !!! A man deposited $10,000.00 in his daughter's account. Wells took the money out of his account then closed his daughter's account, saying that the check was fraudulent, even though they had the money. It took a local news station's involvement to get the money back.

Actual Nuclear Scientist on Japanese Crisis: It's going to be OK + other linky goodness

An English teacher in Japan has a friend that's a real nuclear scientist from MIT. He has written up the most comprehensive, understandable post I've seen. It can be found here.

An excerpt:

The point is that the nuclear fuel has now been cooled down. Because the chain reaction has been stopped a long time ago, there is only very little residual heat being produced now. The large amount of cooling water that has been used is sufficient to take up that heat. Because it is a lot of water, the core does not produce sufficient heat any more to produce any significant pressure. Also, boric acid has been added to the seawater. Boric acid is “liquid control rod”. Whatever decay is still going on, the Boron will capture the neutrons and further speed up the cooling down of the core.

The plant came close to a core meltdown. Here is the worst-case scenario that was avoided: If the seawater could not have been used for treatment, the operators would have continued to vent the water steam to avoid pressure buildup. The third containment would then have been completely sealed to allow the core meltdown to happen without releasing radioactive material. After the meltdown, there would have been a waiting period for the intermediate radioactive materials to decay inside the reactor, and all radioactive particles to settle on a surface inside the containment. The cooling system would have been restored eventually, and the molten core cooled to a manageable temperature. The containment would have been cleaned up on the inside. Then a messy job of removing the molten core from the containment would have begun, packing the (now solid again) fuel bit by bit into transportation containers to be shipped to processing plants. Depending on the damage, the block of the plant would then either be repaired or dismantled.

A Korean (nuclear engineer?) has been posting on somethingawful.com. Here's one of his posts. He also states that the reactors will be safe, mostly.

An excerpt:

Without cooling water, the likely "worst case" will be the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) building up heat, which builds up pressure, which could cause a rupture of the vessel. The fuel rods will spill out radioactive contents, fires might break out, and the reactor is basically a lost cause.

And how does that affect the general populace in terms of radioactive dose?
-Not at all.

The Atlantic weighs in by comparing the Japanese nuclear crisis to Three Mile Island.

Secret Bank of America help line

BofA has (or had) a secret number that actually played fair with customers seeking a mortgage modification--if you were a member of congress.

Read about it here.

By limiting access to the number, BofA is, effectively, offering to help Hawaii's legislators get re-elected, whether because they publicly offer to help constituents or because they use the special access in a targeted way, perhaps to reward campaign contributors or particularly persistent, media-savvy constituents. It's worth noting a legislator's offer to use the unpublished number to help any constituent who calls doesn't change the problematic nature of this lobbying effort. Homeowners shouldn't need their legislators to intervene in order to get their banks to play ball.

...

BofA's letter to legislators concludes: "Your constituents, our customers, deserve a direct response to their concerns regarding their mortgage needs. This communication is just another effort on our part to ensure that we service their needs in an appropriate and timely fashion."

I couldn't agree more. With that in mind, here's the special hot line number and e-mail address that the company reserved for legislators (and specifically requested I not publish): 888-655-7622, poinquiry@bankofamerica.com.

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/ePN1eL

The Internet--not a private club it turns out.

I was against Prop. 8 in California, no secret. I fruitlessly did battle on the internet against it. Just found this write-up of my performance. Amazing.

“Frankly, that’s a trait that MANY lesbians share – a visceral need to challenge authority. One of the main reasons you and I rub Quimby and lorian and (especially) djinn wrong is that we speak with an authoritative voice. They associate that with oppression and pain, so they lash out at it without stopping to read carefully what we are saying. It’s a little worse, actually, for you, since, ironically, they can see me as a “nice guy” who just doesn’t get it fully – but they feel betrayed by you (another woman). ”

When I faced (keyboarded?) my accusers, this followed.

Hmmm – I think some of this conversation used to be whispered – did the whispers become public when you switched over to the new format Alison?

Snicker.

found here