An awesome reason to not have a credit card

Credit card companies will fuck you.

Money that lights up!

There is nothing about this commercial that makes the remotest amount of sense. (The video is small, and the quality isn't great, but it's the script that matters - so listen carefully.)

Least appropriate use of departmental email

The nominees are .... yeah, I wish I had the time to come up with a shortlist, but it's a no-brainer: the winner is one of our department's admin personnel, who today emailed to the entire listserv a 7.5MB PDF advertising a house for rent in Roseville. Built in 1976, the 2,044 sf split-level home has been remodeled from top to bottom, and features "a HUGE eat-in kitchen," 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 2 fireplaces, and "a sunroom overlooking the in-ground pool." Every grad student should seriously consider paying $2,400 a month (plus utilities) for housing. Cuz, y'know, they have all that money and free time to entertain friends in their spacious back yard and pool.

Postcard from Bizarro World

Hi all, having a great time. Installed MS Office 2007, and am loving it! The new interface is quite a bit different, but pretty intuitive and (gasp!) easy to use. If Vista is this much better than XP, they may give Apple a run for their money. Word to your mother!
XOXO
B

Randomness

The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks made the Blogs of Note list today! This is far more exciting to me than it ought to be. Or rather, it is "far" more "exciting" to me than it "ought" to "be." iscanbe. Money.

I was contemplating something on the way over here this morning, something that was a "ponderable" or a "musing," (not to be confused with "amusing," though the two characteristics might intersect at times, and share ancestry), and it's completely gone now. One imagines it was something about school, or cities, or something else that's been on my mind a lot of late.

One of my classmates has passed out blank CDs to the rest of us with the request that we burn her a disc of our favorite music. While I presently lack the technology, I've started a list (every time I hear a song that I want to include, I write it down), and after the first few days, I had to get a 2nd disc from her. I might need to snag a couple more before this little side project is finished - which might not even happen until Christmas break.

I saw that billboard again this morning that says "Embryos are just tiny babies!" All I can think when I see that is "and you can sprinkle them on salads or breakfast cereal, just like Bacon Bits(TM)!"

I was thinking the other day about making a bumper sticker that says "Jesus Loves You - Unless You're Black or Gay." I don't think I'd put it on my car though....

Darwin Award, Emmy, or both?

While we're on the subject of " 'reality' 'programming' ".....

Every once in a while I hear about a new reality program and think, "Surely, this is the bottom of the barrel." I am always wrong. I would be this time too, I assume, so I'm not going to say it.

Ben told me about this new show on CBS called Kid Nation. (Apparently it's been all over the news lately, but I've completely missed out on it.)

The premise is simple: 40 kids, aged 8-15, are left to fend for themselves in a "New Mexico ghost town" for a month and a half. You know, so they can "creat[e] and [sustain] a (sic) 'idealized' society free from interference by meddling adults. Show creator Tom Forman said the goal is for 'kids to succeed where adults have failed.'" (I'm curious what Mr. Forman means by "success" and "failure," but I would be shocked if those terms were ever defined in even the vaguest sense.)

Are these people even remotely capable of anything resembling a thought? The 'noble savage' is not a new idea, but these children are hardly 'pure' - the real experiment would be to take them from their parents as infants - before they absorb any cultural programming - drop them in the Amazon with a box of Pampers and a paring knife, and see what happens.

Somehow, this experiment "went wrong" - several kids (allegedly) "accidentally" drank bleach (though not enough to kill them - I'll take "Carefully Placed Household Cleaners and Camera Crews" for $10 million, Alex), a girl was badly burned (allegedly), -- gosh, who could have foreseen such a thing!?

The waiver that parents had to sign is available for your perusal. I suppose one could make all manner of assumptions about the type of parent who would sign such a thing. Who leaves their kid in the care of a corporation, and agrees to "[waive] the network’s liability for emotional distress, HIV, pregnancy and death, among others" - all in exchange for $5,000 (the up-front compensation for participants)? Should such a person be considered responsible? With parents like that, who needs pedophiles? If these are the value systems those parents intend to pass on to their children, maybe the kids would be better off as part of an innovative solution to a potato famine.

Poll results

Results of the most recent poll:

Q: The most exciting thing(s) about Fall semester is:
A:
....Learning new stuff! 4/6 (67%)
....Seeing classmates! 2/6 (33%)
....Commuting! 1/6 (17%)
....Living away from home! 0/6 (0%)
....The excessive workload! 3/6 (50%)
....Borrowing thousands of dollars! 5/6 (83%)
....Fast food and sodie pop! 5/6 (83%)
....Did I mention the commuting!? 1/6 (17%)

....Total! 21/6 (350%)

New poll up as soon as I think of a question.

I can has explanation?

From Language Log, we learn about this memo from the Walt Bettinger, President and COO of Charles Schwab:

On August 16, you may have experienced difficulty accessing Schwab online or through our phone centers as a result of our systems slowdown. We want to apologize and let you know what happened.

In the process of expanding system capacity earlier that morning, a systems slowdown occurred. As a result, if you tried to access Schwab online or via the phone, you may have experienced slower-than-normal service, or in some cases, may have been unable to access our services at all.

Read Geoffrey K. Pullam's reaction and (and explanation) here.

Phone home

Today we dumped Sprint and switched our phone service to Verizon (but our numbers haven't changed, fortunately). We've got 30 days to decide if we like the service (though I really don't know who we'd switch to if we didn't) and the phones. After spending several minutes transferring my numbers, I don't know how I feel about the keypad, but I imagine I'll get used to it. I'm not interested in spending a lot of money on a phone, and I don't need much (at least not right now - eventually it would be nice to cram everything - phone, internets/email, palmtop computer/PDA, camera, video recorder, music/dvd player, time machine, hope chest, meds dispenser, etc etc etc - into a single portable package). The camera is a nice bonus, but wasn't vital - of course, try finding a phone without a camera in it, and good luck to ya.

I was kind of excited about the new hardware, but I feel a little let down, for some reason. I imagine if we'd gone in for the whole phone/text/picture/web/music thing, and the requisite equipment, I'd be spending the next few days like a giddy kid in some kind of store. But like I said - why would I need that?

I'm in love

Okay, I know I need to get this coursework finished for the summer, but I have to tell both of my readers about this: I'm in love with Linden Hills. Really. This place has everything. If I could afford it, I would pay $1200 a month to live in a 600 sq ft studio apartment in this neighborhood (and I'd probably have to - the one downside is that this is an affluent, mostly white neighborhood; efforts to revive poor neighborhoods often result in gentrification, which looks similar).

They have everything. Employment, shopping, housing, green space, historic buildings, multimodal transit....

They're right on Lake Harriet (on the left side of this pic, taken from linden-hills.com).


It's what New Urbanists wish they could achieve, but it's been there for over 60 years. (And time is a crucial element here, so maybe some NU neighborhoods will eventually be like it.)

The commercial hub at 43rd St W and Upton Ave S makes the 50th and France retail node in Edina look like a turd wrapped in burnt hair. (And don't even get me started on those suburban shitholes like Arbor Fakes.)

If I were Jewish, I'd be waiting for a call from the Egyptians

Remember this spring, when I apologized to my Jewish classmate for the Holocaust? (I have German ancestry from mater and pater, though my progenitors were in the U.S. during WWII. But hey, these days, you can't be too careful, right?) In another pointless, idiotic gesture, the Danes have apologized for the Viking invasion of Ireland (thanks to Mary for pointing this out). For those of you who can't remember your high school world history class, this event happened over 1000 years ago. Yes, that is the right number of zeros. No, this story was not reported in The Onion. (I wonder if they'll apologize for those blasphemous cartoons of that religious guy...or did they do that already?)

Other apologies I'm looking forward to hearing:
-- The South, for slavery - Oops! That's happened several times.
-- Napoleon, for invading Russia.
-- The British Royal family, for (a) inbreeding; (b) Prince Charles's ears; and (c) the Revolutionary War.
-- Bigfoot, Nessie, and El Chupacabra, for not existing.
-- Corporate bigwigs, for being greedy bastards.
-- India, for slamming into the Asian continent and creating the Himalayas.
-- God, for hating fags.
-- That asteroid, for killing off the dinosaurs.
-- Powerball, for me not winning the jackpot last night.
-- Bush/Cheney, for -- ahh, forget it. I should keep this realistic.

Ignorance was bliss

Down in Rochester, we've had quite a few pretty strong storms come through this summer. We have a huge (about 48" diameter at breast height (DBH)) silver maple next to our house, and need to get a couple of low branches off so they don't crush our house (or the neighbor's), but we want to wait till winter so it'll cost about $800 instead of $1500+. The tree's healthy, so likely if we got a storm strong enough to tear off its branches, we'd have other problems too, but now every time a strong storm comes through I get paranoid. My main concern is that since it's a fast-growing tree, the wood is softer and a bit weaker than, say, a typical oak of comparable size. Realistically, the tree's been there for years, and nothing's happened yet - it should be find for another 4 months, right?

Why are people so dumb?

I guess I need to save up my rants about a particular thing (a radio programme or whatever) and then post them all at once.

Some guy called in and said something to the effect of: "Why are you spending $5 million dollars on Raspberry Park? Where are your priorities?"

To his credit, Mayor Coleman answered the question(s) correctly. The gist of his response was that you need to build the whole city, including the amenities that make it a more desirable place to live. A city is more than just a collection of individual components - its residents, physical infrastructure, schools, commerce and shopping, industry, parks, and so on. It's a real example of synergy between multiple elements to create something greater.

What's in it for ME?

They're talking to the mayor of St. Paul on MPR about this whole bridge thing, and one big issue is how infrastructure is/shouldbe funded. At least two non-metro residents called in and asked questions like, "Why should our tax money be used to keep the Twin Cities running? We have problems here too."

All I could think was, "If that's the way you'd like it, let's set things up for you. We'll eliminate all state-level funding, and each county or municipality will have to look out for itself. You guys handle your own schools, and roads, and everything, and we'll take care of ours. Good luck!"

EDIT (8/13): I've since found out that the specific topic of conversation for that hour was the St. Paul budget; the bridge collapse entered the discussion by way of the "money for infrastructure" angle.

Infrastructure costs money

This comic says it better than I could.

I think the fundamental question raised by this issue is, "What is the role of government?" Implicit in that is the more specific "What should the government do with our tax money?"

I'm working on a paper right now about the rise of suburban sprawl, and the most fascinating part, to me, is the fact that in the 1920s-1940s, the federal government established the following housing policy:

The federal government will subsidize private developers. These developers can build vast tracts of single-family housing with little to no attention to creating good communities, then take their profit, and, when the septic tanks they installed (cuz they were cheaper) fail, we'll jump in with federal money to install a sewage system. In addition, public housing ("a breeding ground for communists," according to Joseph McCarthy) will be provided only grudgingly, and built poorly.

Apparently, the federal government is supposed to ensure massive profits for a few people with the power to buy -- I'm sorry, influence -- policymakers. Making sure that every citizen has a decent place to live is not the government's role, I guess. (Same goes for adequate healthcare and education, it would seem.)

"Do as I say, not as I do"

I was thinking last night that I'm a big fan of that philosophy in most cases. While I totally understand the opposing viewpoint of "Physician, heal thyself," I don't necessarily think it's the most helpful in dealing with real-life issues. If a bum on the street approaches me and asks for a dollar so he can get food or booze or whatever, and he tells me, "You should be saving up for your retirement," does his poverty negate the value of the advice?

I really need to stop reading the newspaper

... and by "read" I mean "skim the headlines and maybe read a third of every other story."

Overweight children face widespread stigma, unhappy lives, new analysis concludes Overweight children are stigmatized by their peers as early as age 3 and even face bias from their parents and teachers, giving them a quality of life comparable to people with cancer, a new analysis concludes. [And now, let's play rumor-monger: Being fat = cancer.]

Eagan teen charged with running prostitution ring

Baby needs a new pair of SHOES [The phrase "Too much disposable income" comes to mind.]

Those record overdraft fees

World's tallest man marries a woman two-thirds his height The world's tallest man married a woman who's two-thirds his height and half his age.... [It doesn't mention the story of how they met, but I imagine they were on two trains, one leaving from Beijing at 8:40 am and traveling south at 97 km/h, and the other leaving Shanghai at 9:03 am and traveling north at 94 km/h.... Also, I like how the end of the story dissolves into random babbling about dolphins.]

Suburban Melting Pot (I'm not sure if this URL will stay put or not, so if you have problems with it, let me know.)
[My fave line from this article is "Coming to America was a good thing. Nigeria was home, familiar and dear in so many ways, but the West African country was in political and economic disarray." Whereas America, apparently, is not.]