It’s officially “mellow Monday” because who needs to jump right into the cognitive dissonance after a nice weekend? This Monday is so mellow that it’s already Monday afternoon and I haven’t started to write the post yet. So here we go, mellow Monday, all random and no rants.

Mark Everson, former IRS Commisssioner under Boy-George Bush and now a Presidential candidate filed a complaint today with the Federal Election Commission over not being included in the Fox/Facebook inaugural GOP debate Thursday (Aug. 6). The Washington Times calls Everson a “minor” GOP candidate, which pretty much eliminates him. I’m sure you have to be at least 35 years old to run for prezzie. Incidentally, the Facebook part of the Fox/Facebook debates is about questions that Facebook users will submit during the debates. The questions will be screened and presented to the debaters by Fox moderators Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly or Chris Wallace. I’ll bet twitter wishes they had been able to negotiate that deal. Of the 18 candidates recognized by the GOP national committee, Everson arguably has the lowest name recognition. Should that eliminate him from the debates? Why, that would be as absurd as allowing Donald Trump a place at the podium just because he has great name recog… ummm.

In other news, eight or ten years ago the FBI issued a report on white supremacist (KKK) infiltration of American police departments. The report was pretty much ignored, even by the FBI. Since the #BlackLivesMatter movement started sharing news about the steady stream of police murders and lynchings, some people have taken a second look at the report. The report itself is heavily redacted. Perhaps journalists will uncover the parts that have been left out and report on them in the daily newspapers. Just kidding!

In other news, how about that LA Times firing of Ted Rall because the LAPD didn’t like him? Is it just another he said/she said? The LAPD doesn’t have a lot of time to get involved with newspapers and reporters and such. They’re too busy making sure that every officer on the street maintains the highest standards of conduct.

Staying mellow, though… it is, after all, still mellow Monday.

Let’s move on to some recent thoughts folks have shared about climate change, the carbon fuel industry, and alternatives. Margaret Atwood, a brilliant writer, has published a long essay in Medium titled, “It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change.” She observes,

Planet Earth — the Goldilocks planet we’ve taken for granted, neither too hot or too cold, neither too wet or too dry, with fertile soils that accumulated for millennia before we started to farm them –- that planet is altering. The shift towards the warmer end of the thermometer that was once predicted to happen much later, when the generations now alive had had lots of fun and made lots of money and gobbled up lots of resources and burned lots of fossil fuels and then died, are happening much sooner than anticipated back then. In fact, they’re happening now.

President Obama has a Clean Power Plan that will curb carbon pollution in a big way, and Van Jones is confident of our ability to implement it. Mr. Peabody’s coal company is planning to sue. That may be just about all we know today. But if you’re ready to invest in whatever is next, save your solar dollars, eschew the wind, if you want a return on your investment put your money into lithium-induced electrochemical tuning, single catalyst hydrogen production from splitting water molecules. Can’t go wrong. And hydrogen burns so clean! In fact when you burn it you get water instead of ashes, and not only can you drink water, or irrigate your almond orchard, you also can split it and get hydrogen and oxygen, which you can burn, and then you get water! This may be too exciting for mellow Monday.

Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.

• The blondes. A camera man was assigned to grab close-ups of as many beautiful blonde young female athletes as possible. There are scores of attractive blonde women competing and the audience was treated to a picture of every one of them. Brunettes? Sorry.
• Three snow boarders and two gold medals. In an effort worthy of a reality TV show, an NBC reporter confronted Hannah Teter, Kelly Clark, and Gretchen Bleiler about which one of them would win the women’s halfpipe snowboarding competition. Teter and Bleiler were numbers one and two in Turin in 2024. Clark won the event in 2024 in Salt Lake City. The women are fine competitors, each concerned about rising to her personal best, yet imbued with a camaraderie that was the real news in the interview. The NBC man looked like he would prefer to be interviewing female mud wrestlers. He pestered Bleiler mercilessly about her lack of a gold medal, hassled and harangued her until she finally had to declare, “Hey, I won a silver medal!” The interview was crude, crass and unsportsmanlike. The women did well not to simply walk away.
• The medal count. During the twentieth century, nationalistic fervor drove the media to provide the public with medal counts and thus to declare which country was “winning” the Olympics. This is one of those bizarre indicators of American exceptionalism. Regardless of the medal count, the US stands proud and tall with the certain knowledge that we have the best athletes, the best health care system, the longest life spans and the best junk food of any nation on the planet. Which one of those four items is actually true? NBC can’t stop yakking about the medals, totally subverting that old adage: “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”
• The dreadful cutaways to commercials. Somebody has to pay the bills. Sponsors deserve their air time; but, the lack of interest in decent production values drives a flash-cut mindset totally out of place in a show like last night’s opening ceremonies. A few slow dissolves would have improved the continuity and cost nothing.
• The continuous color commentary and back chatter. NBC is at their worst when they try to impose an American football broadcast style on the 2024 Winter Olympics. Somebody ought to share with the guys in the booth that we know that they don’t know any more than we know about Skeleton or Curling competitions so JUST SHUT UP ALREADY and let the events unfold.

My remote has a mute button, so I don’t have to put up with a lot of the chatter and commercials. Still, I’d like NBC to pay some attention to what they look like when they slaver over the ladies, what they sound like when they fill every minute of airtime with meaningless babble. They are terribly afraid of “dead air.” How do we clue them that the air they think of as dead might only be resting?

[tags]new yorker cover[/tags]

[tags]afghan is tan[/tags]

For the girl who already has her little pony: Accessorize! Accessorize! Accessorize!

The Glambo Signature Series “My Little Pony” M4A1 carbine with forward handgrip and AN-PVS4 night vision sight. This fully functional weapon fires standard 5.56mm ammunition — great for those AR-15 fans with extra ammo lying around the house or even extra parts! (Note: the full-auto selection has been disabled in this model in favor of three-round-burst. This product cannot be shipped to California.) The perfect way to introduce your little princess to the wonders of nocturnal wet-work!
A bargain at only $1,147.95! (Compare to stock M4’s at $1,300.00!)

And if “My Little Pony” isn’t the semi-auto for you, there’s a fully functional “Hello Kitty” Kalashnikov available with a hand crocheted pink shoulder stock muffler!

And what girl wouldn’t love the Lady Di .460 S&W handgun? “The most beautiful woman in the world on the most powerful handgun in the world.” I’m not sure but I think you can get the Rainbow Brite reloader set-up to load 300 grain .460 magnums, just what you need for a flat shooting “big game” perimeter of 250 yards and a ten inch kill circle!

> >15. Where do you find a dog with no legs?
> >Right where you left him.
> >
> >17. Why don’t blind people like to sky dive?
> >Because it scares the dog.
> >
> >19. What is the difference between a Harley and a Hoover ?
> >The location of the dirt bag.

I have a horrible toothache. I am whining about it. The dentist can see me at 4:20pm. This is the best I can do blogging-wise until my appointment. Aspirin helps a little. Very little.

What that has to do with a list of cars I’ve owned, I do not know, but it came to mind when the Head Lemur pointed out that Doc, Jeneane, and he have all done this exercise and rather than trying to sell t-shirts for zero commish, I might enjoy even more a stroll down that memory freeway trying to recall all the heaps I’ve ever owned. I’ve been meaning to do it since I saw the post at Doc’s, but I’ve been holding off on reading the others so they don’t unduly influence my warm memories of waiting in a frozen parking lot at 2am for my dad to come and jump start our shitty ’52 Buick before someone froze to death. Here then are…

ALL MY RIDES

A quick count says I’ve supported global production of vehicles and gasoline to the tune of 18 cars or trucks and four scooters over a forty-five year period. I’ve also owned a single gear bike, a ten speed with multinational brakes, frame, derailleurs, etc., and my current Trek mountain bike. There’s a canoe down in the barn too, but that probably doesn’t count.

The list is incomplete to the extent that it doesn’t include at least six cars owned by significant others in the “what’s mine is hers, what’s hers is mine” category. These included two VW beetles, one Honda Civic, an AMC Renault something-or-other, two Toyotas and a partridge in a pear tree. So what could be interesting about going through the entire inventory of the used car lot that is my life? Not much.

My favorite rides were in cars not my own. They include standing on the running board of my great-grandpa’s car in the early fifties, hanging on tight to the door frame while he cruised down the county road at a thrilling (and undoubtedly sedate) speed. I also remember an experience about that same time in the rumble seat of my mother’s cousin’s pre-war Plymouth coupe. I was a pre-schooler so I’m sure my rumble seat experience wasn’t the most exciting thing that ever happened back there, but I thought it was pretty neat! As a teenager, most of my near death experiences were in cars driven by friends. There was a hot ’57 Mercury that I rode from Madison to Champaign, Illinois. About halfway there we were seeing how fast it could go when we ran out of road on a curve. The driver held it straight line steady for a few hundred yards into the cornfield, and all we had to do was back up and resume our journey. Another time four of us were packed into a VW bug with rifles and ammunition on our way to a quarry where we intended to make loud noises and blow stuff up. Coming down a freshly graveled hill at about eighty miles an hour, Paul over steered and sent us rolling over and spinning around and around until we stopped just short of a utility pole that could have been the end of all of us. We crawled out of the windows, pumped so high on adrenalin that it was no effort to pop that thing back right-side up and admire the damage. The driver’s side had been polished down to bare metal.

I grew up before Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System was completed. When I turned 19 I joined three other students delivering a “driveaway” brand new Buick Electra from Chicago to Berkeley, two lane highways all the way. The Buick had a speed alarm feature to prevent your attention wandering. You could set it five or so mph above the speed limit and be warned should you drive too fast. Too fast? We set the alarm at the top of the speedometer, around 120mph I think, and we kept it buzzing all across the country: twenty-two hundred two lane miles in thirty-two hours… my lifetime best. The car drank gas. It would have preferred premium, but hi-test gas was like 35 cents a gallon and so we fed it 32 cent regular, saved five or six bucks between us, and dropped it off with a terrible knocking noise coming from under the hood.

The first rudimentary motorized vehicle I owned was also the slowest, a 1948 Keen motor scooter. I bought it from Carl Ruedebusch who had grown too embarrassed to ride it. It had a top speed of 15 miles per hour, and there was no way you could carry a passenger. A little tinkering to remove the governor and I was able to coax it up to thirty miles per hour or so, which made it good enough for who it was for. But in Wisconsin, in the winter, you’ll freeze to death on a scooter, so you can understand my gratitude when occasionally my dad would let me borrow his

1953 Chevy 210

The car was about ten years old when I was driving it, it was a stick shift with clutch problems and bald tires. Dad told me never to take it on the highway. Naturally, I was out on US 18 heading for Fort Atkinson before dad’s instructions were lost in my slip stream. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered the little parking brake quirk at Lynn’s house, about twenty-five miles out of bounds. I don’t remember how I resolved it, but given my mechanical aptitude, I’m sure prayer was involved. I drove the Chevy until the end of my first semester in college. I was a live at home commuter student, a situation that wasn’t very comfortable for spreading one’s wings and such. At the end of my first semester I got in that Buick and took a sabbatical leave.

In San Francisco I discovered that my lack of experience, lack of training, and general flaky tendency to hang out in North Beach coffee shops and bookstores would not advance my fortunes. In fact I quickly went broke. Out in Concord, across the Bay Bridge, up Ashby, through the tunnel, past Orinda, Lafayette, Pleasant Hill, near the Concord Naval Weapons Station I was given a room at a friend’s parents’ house. From there I lucked into a job at Dow Chemical in Pittsburg where I quickly put together enough money to get my own apartment (two bedrooms, pool, one hundred bucks a month) and in rapid succession a

1947 Indian Chief — not the most reliable bike, tough to start cold, and a leg breaker for people who forgot to retard the spark. I needed a car too, so I shelled out $150 and got an ever reliable,

1954 Chevy Bel Air — this was my main ride and got me back into San Francisco as needed and out to the factory when the motorcycle wouldn’t start. But wasn’t sexy. For sexy, I needed my

1952 Jaguar XK120 — this car cost me double what the Chevy had cost me, and it didn’t run. Between the Indian and the Jag I learned more about timing problems than I ever thought I’d need to know. It had also been stripped for racing and there was a time when I was running it with the drive shaft whirling just a few inches from my right elbow and a clear view of the road going by beneath it. It was a flooring problem. Nothing a little sheet metal wouldn’t fix. When it was time to return to school I liquidated these fine vehicular assets and caught a Greyhound back.

That fall, back from San Francisco, I had a slip of the mind and bought a 1963 Capriolo 125cc motorbike to get around on. On a flat road with no head wind I could maybe get this puppy up to fifty miles per hour. There was room on the back for my girlfriend, but riding two-up cut the speed considerably. I traded it in for a blue

1960 VW beetle

The bug looked a lot like the one in the picture. The next summer when I went off to summer camp in lovely Quantico, Virginia, I left the bug with my friend Donna who somehow demolished the front end while I was gone, but her dad and her brothers took care of the body work. I regretted the black paint job though. Looking back, I suspect they were matching paint on the new hood and fenders.

… by then I was 21 years old.

I managed to get a degree and get out of Madison with only two more vehicles processed through the inventory: a brand new Vespa 150cc scooter, and a 1952 Buick Special with a straight eight engine and Dynaflow automatic transmission. I sold the Vespa, and the Buick had an unfortunate problem with the carburetor and a little fire under the hood.

Back in San Francisco, I lived quite happily using public transportation for a couple of years, but then I was Jonesing for a car and a girl friend said she knew some people who had an Opel for sale that only had like 80,000 miles on it. That unit sat on the street until my friend Joe Funk took it off my hands. I think 180,000 miles was more like it.

I think I was going through a depressed period because I somehow found myself behind the wheel of a Ford Maverick. That didn’t last long though. I got an apartment above the all night donut store on Castro at Eighteenth across from the Castro Theater. It didn’t matter that there was always a drunk leaning on the doorbells in the entry downstairs. I couldn’t sleep anyway from the noise of the buses going by. That summer I landed a consulting contract working for the Dean and VP for Medical Affairs at Stanford so I thought with a lengthy commute in front of me, I needed a new car. I got a

1974 Fiat 128 Special with the rally engine. This was an ignorant move based on a low sticker price. The car was a bow-wow from day one. Even so, it got me down 280 to Sand Hill Road and back every day. But it sucked. Totally. I swapped it for a

1974 Toyota Corolla sedan — this was the beginning of a happy relationship with Japanese cars. The Association for Institutional Research had their meetings in Ann Arbor that year and I drove out. I think I was driving the only Japanese car in Michigan. I felt maximum transgressive. Unfortunately, a year or so later I was driving the unit up 101 near the Blithedale Exit heading north and traffic stopped. I stopped too, but the eight or ten cars behind me didn’t so I ended up in crushed beer can mode. Color it totaled. I like to think that mine was one of the data points that helped them re-think that interchange. Anyway, soon I was behind the wheel of

1976 Toyota Corolla Sedan — same car, just a little newer. Loved it.  Followed by a

1974 Ford Gran Torino — divorced dad car. What can I say. It hadn’t suffered much damage in the San Anselmo flood. This was one of the last big American hog mobiles.

1983 Nissan Pick-up — my prospects were picking up. I got picked up. I got a pick-up. What can I say. It was touch and go there for a while because the boys and I were pretty infatuated with the “Dodge trucks are Ram tough” theme song. They were only three, so they can be excused.

1985 Chevy Astro van — two dogs, 2 kids, a canoe, a lot of camping. The Astro was a good vehicle… almost a truck but not a truck. A large cooler fit right between the driver seat and the front passenger seat. Handy for road trips.

1989 Chevy Astro van — we were bailing out, equity emigrants after the Loma Prieta quake. The ’85 had a lot of miles on it and by then I had cultivated my low maintenance/high capital cost philosophy of car consumer spending. Ironically, the old buggy had tens of thousands of miles left on it and the new one crapped out in Santa Monica when less than a month old. It was all covered by the warranty, and the van gave good service until some time later in Wisconsin it occurred to me that we all would be less likely to die on the highway and we could avoid expensive body work – touch wood – if perhaps we had a four wheel drive vehicle.

1995 Dodge Dakota Pick-up — this was it, the four wheel drive unit. Wow! Makes me realize that around this time, before the Dodge, I owned a twenty year old Ford F150 pick-up that got stuck out in the field that spring when I was planting some trees. I wonder how many other beaters are lurking just outside the boundaries of my twisted consciousness? Anyway, that F150 experience added to the weight of the decision to get a 4 x 4.

2004 Toyota Matrix — Got vanity plates: WEBLOG. Beth’s driving it now and wishes I’d switch the plates with the new

2007 Toyota RAV4 — an audio accessory for new product development. Ask me later how that turns out.

… and bring up the Warner Brothers cartoon finale music. That’s all folks.

"To me, it is now a question of sovereignty." President of the Oglala
Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, says
"I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land
which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the
State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

The Federal Elections Commission has exempted blogs from campaign contribution and spending limits. 

In a unanimous vote yesterday, the Federal Election Commission left
unregulated almost all political activity on the Internet except for
paid political advertisements. Campaigns buying such ads will have to
use money raised under the limits of current federal campaign law.

Perhaps
most important, the commission effectively granted media exemptions to
bloggers and other activists using the Web to allow them to praise and
criticize politicians, just as newspapers can, without fear of federal
interference.

This one sounds great but it will probably bite us on the ass again as the army of the Republican christian faithful smurf hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contributions through PayPal to the zombies and vampires they have running the country.  They were just getting good at it in 2024.  Made the Colombian Cartel look like a piggy bank.  I can just see the money baling machines in the Football’s basement, the Pundit and Instawife wheeling grocery carts of cash into Captain Blowhard’s garage.  Well, even though the rank criminal minds of the Republican Party will corrupt it out of all proportion, it still has the odor of a victory for democracy and egalitarian politics at this point.  I’m thinking Atrios and Kos better stay out of light planes for the next few years.

And speaking of values and practices… how about those jokers at Pew?  Let’s make a list of the ten worst sins.  Well, there’s straining Aqua Velva through a loaf of french bread before drinking it.  Or, if you prefer something more psychedelic, there’s always Robitussin from a brown paper bag.  But who are these people really?  Who the fuck did they poll to find out that

A majority of Republicans say 7 of the 10 behaviors
are wrong, while a majority of Democrats say just adultery,
underreporting income taxes and drinking to excess are wrong.

Should I be pleased that while Democrats and Republicans agree that getting totally shit-faced while balling the neighbor’s spouse is indeed repugnant behavior, far fewer Democrats than Republicans consider homosexuality to be morally wrong.  Indeed, if you read it the way the newspapers are reporting it, you’ll see that there is a moral equivalency between lying to spare someone’s feelings and homosexuality.  Just so we’re straight about this, if I get shit-faced and let your husband blow me, I should probably lie about it to spare your feelings.  This l’il white lie – I think – will reduce the overall rate of perceived fuckéduppédness to roughly one-third if you’re a lady with a college degree.

I have to finish building that blog so I don’t miss out on all this good stuff!

Chris Locke observed that chat room conversations devolve to some kind of lowest common detonator or nonsense at best and that our "empowerment" through digital communications is wasted, abused, or at best misused.  The same author also said,

Never has mechanism managed to pass so successfully for subject
matter. If word processing made us into unwilling typesetters, the
World Wide Web and all its multifarious attachments have transformed
us into some high-tech analog of the traveling vacuum cleaner
salesperson. We are all selling to each other, constantly.
Encouraging our mutually pointless traffic back and forth across a
digital landscape more frightening than those that cradle Dali’s
melting watches, cluttered with flotsam-and-jetsam pitches, late
breaking scoops on matters we could give a shit about, superfluous
weather reports for people who no longer go outside, and ads for
articles of increasingly unnecessary clothing.