TerryTime

2010-07-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

I guess it is pretty obvious I'm not a frequent blogger. Since I'm now exposing my blog to many other people, I thought it was about time I updated it. The following is a portion of yet another APA-50 zine from about a year ago (sans the mailing comments, which no one reading a blog would understand anyway, and the people to whom they are directed have already read them). For those unfamiliar with old fashioned paper APAs, mailing comments are similar to the comment threads on blogs, where members of the apa direct messages to other members, but are read by all.

Bailing Out of Bank of America

I started an old fashioned Depression era run on Bank of America last month, so I guess you can blame me if the rest of the economy continues down the road to chaos. Since I've already taken the first step, I encourage other principled Libertarians to do exactly the same thing. The banking system as it now exists will inevitably collapse without a foundation of trust between the holder of the assets and the owners of them. If one party betrays that trust, it has broken the contract and I am no longer obligated to maintain any kind of business relationship with a person or corporation who has swindled me.

Banks have been failing all over the United States, 60 in the last six months alone. But the biggest banks in the nation, the ones you'd expect wouldn't have this kind of problem, have been bailed out by the taxpayers, including Bank of America. Any institution that failed its customers so spectacularly that it ended up taking by force the money of the American taxpayer does not deserve to include me or anyone I know among its customers. Due to the investment we’ve all had to make—completely without our consent, and against our better judgment—we’ve inadvertently become not a customer, but one of the bank’s owners.

Well, the management of this institution has convinced me that holding any kind of account within their control is a very bad investment, and I want out of it.

The Libertarian Party of California's East Bay Region was formed in 1974, and the first treasurer of the organization opened an account at Bank of America that year to manage the organization's meager assets. When I was elected Treasurer of the East Bay Region in 2002, I became responsible for the account, and BofA never gave me any reason to distrust them. In 2005, due to a change in the bylaws of the LPC, we were required to split our Region into two county organizations, so I opened a second account at the bank for the Contra Costa County LP and maintained the original account for the Libertarian Party of Alameda County.

But when BofA found itself over-leveraged and in danger of failing last year (following the purchase of Countrywide Home Loans) and forced into a shotgun wedding by Hank Paulson to save Merrill-Lynch, it was clear that the bank's assets were seriously mis-managed. BofA changed their policies two months ago on accounts such as ours, which had not been assessed any kind of service fee as long as we maintained a minimum balance of $1,000. This has rarely been a problem in the past, but beginning in June 2009, they raised this threshhold to $2,000, and began charging us a $9.95 monthly fee (the previous fee had only been $8.00).

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was passed by Congress last year to save banks like Bank of America that made very bad loans and lost billions of dollars of their customer’s assets. It was also used to bail out AIG Insurance, General Motors and Chrysler. The taxpayers themselves had no input into how their money was being wasted. According to Network World magazine, the email servers at the U.S. Capitol in Washington crashed under the onslaught of messages sent to congress last September by voters urging them NOT to pass the bailout bill, but they did so anyway, having been threatened by Hank Paulson that the entire economy would collapse if they allowed bad businessmen to suffer the consequences of their bad decisions.

Would the sky have fallen if congress had let Bank of America fail? Did the sun forget to rise the day after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt? No, the world did not end and I doubt it would have if the congress had listened to the voters and rejected Paulson’s hysterical ravings. And, of course, the executives of AIG, Merrill Lynch and CitiGroup were all rewarded for their trouble with multimillion dollar bonuses.

So now, the big bad banks have been saved, and the smaller banks that didn’t have enough money to lobby congress were allowed to die. This is not free market capitalism. This is why the officers of both counties that make up the East Bay Libertarian Parties voted to bail out of Bank of America and deposit our funds at any other bank in the area that did not accept TARP money.

As a taxpayer advocate, the LP must take a principled stand against any institution, public or private, that fails to honor a contract. That is why we stipulated that we would only do business with trustworthy banks, those that did NOT beg for a bailout from the taxpayers.

To compile a list of these institutions, I used http://Bailoutwatch.net, http://Bailout.ProPublica.org, and http://subsidyscope.com to identify every bank in the area that had taken any TARP funds at all. Excluding those, we ended up with a list of seven small but fiscally strong banks to evaluate. Most of the banks that have failed over the past two years have been small banks like these, and there would be no guarantee that the bank we selected to manage our funds wouldn't also fail, but there are ways to reduce your level of risk and evaluate how well you can trust your banker. Of course, the East Bay Libertarian Parties are in no danger of losing our money, even if a bank fails, because our meager treasury falls well below the maximum $250,000 deposit insured by the FDIC. But in August 2009, the FDIC revealed that it may also be running out of money, estimating that it will likely need to pay out $70 billion over the next year and a half not to bail out failing banks, but to pay back the money of the deposit holders of those banks. Last March, they only had $13 billion available for this purpose. Several more banks have failed since then.

To make sure we could trust our new bank, I checked the websites of each of the selected banks' services to find out which ones offered us the most value for the lowest fee, preferably charging no fee at all. At the suggestion of Contra Costa County LP Chair Cory Nott, I then checked each institution's “Texas Ratio,” a numerical grade used to assess a bank's level of risk by comparing deposits held in reserve vs. non-performing loans and outstanding debt that is far more likely to predict a bank's failure than the formula used on Wall Street to calculate the risk of leveraged securities. The lower the Texas Ratio of a bank, the healthier they are. Any bank with a Texas Ratio above 100 is in danger of failing. Any bank above 50 is “troubled.” All the banks on our list had Texas Ratios below 15.

But before I'd been able to rate all the banks, one of them, Fremont Bank, immediately dropped off the list, after they submitted an application to borrow $35 million from TARP last July to prop up their mortgage portfolio. The Hayward Daily Review reported that Fremont Bank held only 43 homes in foreclosure status at the time. "We don't really need the capital,” Fremont Bank Vice Chairman Mike Wallace said. “But we don't know what the future holds.” Fremont Bank has a Texas Ratio of 11, so it was in no danger of failing, but took taxpayer money anyway, just because it was there for the taking. This is NOT a bank we could trust.

I ended up with a list of six candidates and presented to the officers the account options offered by these institutions, and ranked them by their Texas Ratio. The officers of both county parties voted to trust Mechanics Bank of Richmond. Founded in Contra Costa County in 1905, Mechanics Bank has already proved it could survive one Great depression, and their policies suggest they know how to weather our current one as well.

Having lost faith in Bank of America's horrendous management of our money (and yours as well), banks that treat their depositors more as partners than as “customers” are the reason why Mechanics Bank never had to apply for bailout money. They can't afford to fuck around with your deposit, since they are not so big that they cannot fail, and just not quite big enough (or desperate enough) to turn to their customers or the American taxpayer for a hand-out.

As many Libertarians have long been aware (and the rest of the population is slowly learning), fractional reserve banking is a system of commerce based not on real wealth, but on imaginary numbers, increasing debt, and blind faith that a paper note issued by the U.S. Treasury Department represents hard assets. This is similar to the fantasy sequence in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan where the audience is urged to clap their hands to save the life of the beloved fairy Tinker Bell. If enough of us believe in fairies, just wishing she will recover from the poison will make it come true. Timothy Geithner thinks that if enough taxpayers truly believe that Federal Reserve Notes represent real money, then their belief in the fairy tale will likewise make it come true.

But we're grown ups now, and we no longer believe in fairy tales.

Let the Party of Principle demonstrate to the rest of the world that we practice what we preach. If your county party still maintains accounts with banks that cheated the taxpayers, urge them to vote with their feet and relocate their accounts to the banks that stood firm and refused to take TARP funds.

When banks that are too big to fail betray their customers and the taxpayers, it is time to take our money away from them and invest it in a bank that will work for you instead of against you. Free market capitalism thrives on competition, and smaller banks that make better business decisions for their clients should be able to lure business away from the large banks that cheated us. If you maintain any accounts at Chase Bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, CitiBank or any other financial institution that took bailout money, you have an obligation to throw a little love out to the banks that didn't rob the taxpayers.

2008-12-01T23:09:00.000-08:00

About three years ago, I went on my first whitewater rafting adventure with some folks from the East Bay Libertarians. Most of us had never done this before, so it was a new and challenging experience. We took on the Cache Canyon River in Yolo County, a Class III river that our organizer assured us was an ideal option for first time rafters. We had so much fun that this has now become an annual tradition, though we no longer schedule it over the Memorial Day weekend, as it is very difficult to reserve a campsite large enough for all of us, so for the past two years, we’ve done this on the weekend before Memorial Day.
Rivers are classified by the kind of water conditions they offer to recreational boaters. A class I is an easy flowing river with no rapids at all, though as always, people in watercraft should wear safety gear and floatation jackets. This is probably the kind of river you’d wade into with rubber trousers to go fly fishing, or one you’d just cast into from the bank and wait for the trout to find you. Class II rivers have mild whitewater rapids that won’t scare most people who have done this before and are perfect for beginners. Class III rivers have moderate whitewater that provide a good first experience for newcomers to the activity, as well as a good ride for experienced rafters. Class IV rivers have heavy water flow with many large obstacles and should probably not be attempted by first-time rafters. Most companies renting rafts require you to wear helmets on Class IV rivers. Class V rivers have big drops, dangerous obstacles and should only be attempted by experienced outdoor enthusiasts willing to risk life and limb for their thrills. Class VI rivers are listed in my brochure as suicidal, and should not be approached by anyone in their right mind.
Whitewater rafting is like going on a large wet rollercoaster ride such as you might find at any number of amusement parks all over the country…except that it lasts for four to six hours instead of mere minutes. And you can fall out of your boat at any time.
Cache Canyon was quite an experience. We had two-person inflatable rafts and had to be instructed in how to navigate the river this way. I was rafting with my son Nathan, who was 15 years old the first time we tried this. It was indeed a challenge, and we both took a few swims over the course of the day, body-surfing down the river until we could find our way to shore and locate the raft. A part of the river known as Taft’s Tumble was a particularly exciting experience. Our raft became lodged on top of a rock, and while trying to turn it over to bail out the accumulated water, Nathan lost his grip and went swimming feet first out of sight. A helpful couple behind us helped me get our boat off the rock and I continued down the river alone searching for Nathan. He was a good swimmer, so I was confident he would be fine, he really would, but after I paddled downriver for a good half mile without seeing him again, I became quite concerned. To my relief, I did catch up to him after a while. He was just waiting for me on the west bank of the river. He’d lost is favorite AC/DC cap, which really annoyed him, but I was overjoyed to find him safe after all that anxiety. It wasn’t much further downstream that I myself ended up bouncing out of the boat, and Nathan had to fish me out of the rapids.
Hours later, as we struggled through the heaviest whitewater on the river, a roaring passage affectionately known as “Mother,” a group of photographers standing on some rocks snapped a photo to sell us after we finished the trip (see below).
When we finally reached the takeout point, we were greeted with ice cold water and beer. After that kind of a ride, even Budweiser tasted pretty damned good. Once everyone had finally made it out, an old school bus arrived to drive us back to the main parking lot.
That trip was so successful that we repeated it again the next year, this time using it as a fundraising opportunity, asking all participants to pitch in an extra $20 to the Party. We had a larger group join us in 2006, but the river was even more challenging. Finding a campsite was much harder, as heavy winter rains had washed out some roads, and all campsites on the west side of the river were inaccessible, so we had to find a wilderness area to camp on the east shore. And all of these campsites were full as well, so we ended up in an empty clearing alongside highway 16. We were, of course, camping illegally on BLM land, but several park rangers and highway patrol cars ignored us as they passed our way. We had our giant LIBERTARIAN PARTY banner strung across an awning, so it wasn’t like we were trying to hide from them. I guess they had too many other things to keep them busy.
The rains also made Cache Creek a much more thrilling ride that year. Nathan and I joked about how many times each of us had to save the other’s life on this trip. We were both bounced out of the raft at least five times. Three of the other couples in our party didn’t even complete the six mile course of the river, and gave up at the halfway point. This is the place where you must pull your raft out of the water and carry it around a large bridge. Fortunately, the rafting company had people monitor us all through the day, ready to help out anyone having trouble, and they were there to handle just about any problem, including packing up rafters who decided they’d had enough.
Nathan and I completed the course once again, but had some serious problems at the takeout point. The current was flowing too strong in the wrong direction, and despite our frantic paddling, we were swept out past the takeout area and headed downstream. The crew tried to cast us a rope, but it couldn’t reach us, so they directed us to head toward the opposite shore and tie onto a tree. We did our best, but the raft became entangled in the branches and capsized, so we clung to the tree for what seemed like an hour, but was probably no more than 30 minutes. All I know is that my arms were very tired by the time the crew finally reached us and helped us swim to a calm area where we could get to the other side of the river and walk back to the takeout point. We watched them as they worked to free our boat from the tree, but they ended up having to cut the ropes off our raft and retrieve it somewhere downstream.
That was a little bit more adventure than I’d really planned to have, but it didn’t discourage me. The adrenaline rush was thrillingly addictive. I had such a great time that I couldn’t wait to do it again.
Last year, Peter Schoewe, our organizer, decided that we might do better and attract more participants if we rafted down a Class II river, so in 2007 we toured the Stanislaus River in San Joaquin County. Nathan didn’t join us this time, as he had a Senior Trip scheduled on that weekend, so he spent his time at Disneyland instead of camping. We camped out in Knight’s Ferry, a lovely old Gold Rush town on the river. The Stanislaus River was a much different experience than Cache Creek. The rafting company that operated here had larger rafts that could accommodate up to eight passengers. We had seven this time, so things worked out quite well.
The only whitewater we encountered was right around a bend at the beginning of the trip, and it was easy to navigate without even getting wet. From that point on, the water was so calm that we even passed folks in fishing boats. It would be hard to call this a whitewater “adventure,” but we did have fun enjoying a beautiful spring day. It was more of a relaxation exercise than anything else. The next day, we toured Columbia State Park, Moaning Caverns and Mercer Caverns in the Sierra Nevada foothills in Calaveras County.
This year, Peter arranged a trip on the South Fork of the American River, getting us back into some Class III excitement. The tour operator on this river was EarthTrek Expeditions, which has an elaborate compound in Lotus, California complete with hot showers, a full kitchen and a large dining area. This trip was a bit more expensive than our previous outings, but EarthTrek offered a lot for the money, including an all-you-can-eat breakfast and a remarkably good lunch served at the halfway point of the river journey in the middle of nowhere.
Unfortunately, Peter fell ill the week before the trip, and was unable to join us, but we ended up with a crew of six enthusiastic adventurers. Nathan was still in school finishing up his Freshman year at Humboldt State University, so once again he couldn’t join us, but perhaps we’ll be able to go back later in the summer.
We were assigned large rafts again, which had plenty of room for the six of us as well as our guide, Jeannie.
A guided whitewater rafting tour was a far different experience from our earlier self-guided expeditions. Jeannie knew every rock along the eight miles of the Lower Gorge Run, and could tell us stories about most of them. She also encouraged us to jump out of the boat in calm passages so we could practice retrieving our friends in the event they bounced out in the whitewater areas, which helped the newbies overcome any lingering anxieties about getting wet. These boats also had special foot pockets where you could brace your feet to help you stay in the boat through even the most violent rapids. As we were told in the orientation lecture before we were assigned to our boats, if you fall out of the raft and find yourself alone in the water, you first take a deep breath and remind yourself, “This is the most fun I can ever have while whitewater rafting.” Then you use your paddle to reach toward your raft and have your friends pull you back in.
Jeannie takes this run at least four times a week, so she was an expert in navigating the river. She would coach us in how to paddle efficiently, calling “Left side forward, Right side backpaddle” when she wanted to turn us into the correct direction. Then she’d shout “All forward” to accelerate us toward the safest path, and “All stop” when it was time to relax and catch our breath. She pointed out an abandoned gold mine on a hillside and told stories of other rafting trips she’d taken on this river and many others. She said she wouldn’t want to have any other job because this one was so satisfying. EarthTrek Expeditions also has a Costa Rica whitewater rafting tour that apparently takes place every January, and Jeannie described how much fun that one was, so apparently she is able to do this even in the winter months when California’s rivers are waiting for the Sierra snowmelt to fill them up in the springtime.
Just as with Cache Canyon, a group of photographers were waiting for us as we entered Satan’s Cesspool to snap action shots of our team as we rolled through the rapids.

When we finally bounced through Hospital Bar at the end of the run, we joined the other six EarthTrek rafts and each of the guides tied the rafts together and then hooked all of them up to a JetSki, which towed us the rest of the way to Folsom Lake, where we pulled our boats ashore and carried them up the hillside to a truck waiting to return us to camp. It was a great way to end a fantastic river trip.
The next day, I packed up all my camping supplies and spent a leisurely morning touring the nearby Marshall Discovery State Park in Coloma, California, a short walk from the EarthTrek camp in Lotus. This is where James Marshall, the manager of Sutter’s Mill, discovered gold in the American River in January 1848, which set off the great 1849 California Gold Rush. The original mill is long since gone, but there remain extensive historical records from the time and in the 1970’s, a replica of the mill and some of the cabins that surrounded it were re-built along highway 49. The museum displays a great many photographs of Coloma during the boom years of the gold rush, confirming that this sleepy wilderness town of less than 800 souls was once a thriving metropolis that was home to some fabulously wealthy families, as well as thousands of hard luck immigrants and Native Americans hoping to strike it rich by searching the river for precious metals. But times have certainly changed and there are now many empty homes in this area seeking buyers, but most of the wealth that was once abundant here was relocated to the large cities at least a hundred years ago.
While the majority of the gold in the area was tapped out by the aggressive mining practices of the 19th Century, the geological activity of this rumbling earthquake country continues to bring more of the stuff to the surface, though in nowhere near the quantities of the old days. People still do find gold on occasion in the rivers and caves of the area, and with the economy on the skids these days, there are plenty of dreamers hoping to find even a few precious ounces still hidden away in the river.

Diorama of James Marshall's Gold discovery, along with the original tools he used as a millworker

For those who’d like to see all the photos from the 2008 American River Whitewater weekend, I’ve created a photostream on Flickr that you can see at http://www.flickr.com/photos/48152556@N00/sets/72157605131734802/

2007-08-22T23:08:00.000-07:00

Apahelion CXI
Terry Floyd tlfloyd@lmi.net
855 Emerald Avenue
San Leandro, CA 94577
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Children grow up much too fast. All of you should be very careful out on the streets, because my youngest son, Nathan, now has a drivers license. Most of his other high school friends had to take their driving test two or three times to pass, but Nathan nailed it the first time, and we haven’t been able to keep him home at night since. Well, he did have a pretty good driving instructor (ahem, me).

Naturally, he now insists that he must have his own car, so we had to come up with some quick plans to keep ourselves mobile. I wanted very much to give him my Honda Civic so I would have an excuse to buy another motorcycle, but Pam would have none of it. She said he would have to have the Civic, but I would have to buy another car myself, something with a minimum of four wheels.

I’d actually been shopping around online through eBay and visited a couple of cycle shops before she insisted that I had to buy a car. I almost won a 1995 Harley Davidson Shovelhead in an on-line auction, and I also had my eyes on the 2006 Harley Davidson Sportster that was on sale at a dealership in Walnut Creek, but I wanted to maintain peace in the household, so I reluctantly abandoned my search for a motorcycle and returned to shopping for cars.

But not just any car. Since I had been denied my wish to purchase a gas-electric hybrid vehicle back in 2003 when we were last looking at cars, I decided that if I couldn’t have my motorcycle, I will at least try to get a hybrid.

I wanted to buy a hybrid back in 2003, when these cars were cutting edge technology, and I tested a Toyota Prius back then, but the salesman was a huge jerk, and I wasn’t at all happy with the dealership and their inflexible terms, so we next visited the local Honda dealer, only to experience more frustration. Demand for the new hybrid models was so high that they couldn’t keep any of the hybrid cars in stock, and they suggested we order one in advance and wait at least six months for delivery. That just wouldn’t do, so we ended up purchasing the conventional 4-cylinder gasoline-powered Civic.

Much has changed in the past four years, and new hybrids are all over the place and easy to find. Used hybrids, however, are not so easy to find, since the owners tend to like them a lot and don’t want to sell them until they’ve worn out. But I was lucky this time.

It took a while to find a used hybrid car that was in my price range, but thanks to CraigsList.com, I located a 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid in Hayward that was affordable. It was being offered through Honda Kars, a small shop in Hayward that specializes in Hondas. The mechanic who runs the place, Erick Ahmadzai, let me take it out for a test drive and then told me the history of the vehicle.

Late last year, the car had been stolen, and since it was not recovered for more than three weeks, the insurance company, Allstate, paid off the claim to the owner, who ended up just buying another car. Six weeks later, the car was found abandoned not far from the San Mateo Bridge and was towed to Erick’s shop. He paid a token fee for salvage rights on the vehicle and Allstate was only too happy to sign over the title to him. The car wasn’t damaged except for the back fender, which Erick replaced. He then posted the used car notice on Craigslist, where I found it by searching on the keywords Automobiles+San Francisco Area+East Bay+Hybrid. I wasn’t the first person to express interest in the car, but I was the first to show up and make an offer, so I put down a $200 cash deposit to make sure he wouldn’t sell it to anyone else. Once I had the funds to buy it outright, he gave me the keys and all the paperwork. I had to spend an afternoon at the Department of Motor Vehicles getting the title transferred, re-registering the vehicle, and paying the taxes on it, but it is now my new car.

I really like this car. It is a beautiful midnight blue, and clean as a whistle. It had 48,026 miles on the odometer, so the previous owner clearly enjoyed driving it. I haven’t had a car with a manual transmission since 1992, but it was very easy to drive. Once you’ve mastered the art of driving a standard transmission, you never forget, kind of like riding a bicycle.

The hybrid engine is pretty amazing. Toyota has patented their hybrid engines with the name “Hybrid Synergy Drive.” Honda uses a dramatically different technology that they call “Integrated Motor Assist” or “IMA.”

The Toyota Prius and Camry hybrid models have two motors, a 4-cylinder gasoline engine and an electric engine, and the drive train automatically switches from one motor to the other depending on speed and highway conditions. The first generation Honda IMA system, on the other hand, has one 4-cylinder gasoline engine and a smaller 20 hp electric motor integrated with the transmission that reduces the fuel consumption of the gasoline engine by giving it an electric boost whenever necessary, rather than having the carburetor increase the amount of gasoline pumped to the engine. The dashboard of the Honda Civic Hybrid shows when the engine is being assisted by the electric motor and when the battery is being charged by the regenerative braking action. The 5-speed standard transmission also reduces fuel consumption.

The battery pack is behind the rear seat, and consists of 120 D-Cell Lithium Ion rechargeable batteries. This is much smaller than the gigantic batteries in the Toyota hybrids.

Sometimes, when I stop at a red light, the engine will shut down completely, and the car will be absolutely quiet, but as soon as I release the clutch in first gear, the engine instantly comes back online and I move forward just as though I were driving a normal gasoline car. In the second generation IMA models (starting with the 2006 Civic and Accord), the electric motor is supposed to be able to take over completely even at highway speeds and shut the gasoline engine off to save fuel. Alternatively, the new V-6 Accord is reported to be able to sometimes fire only 3 of the six cylinders with the electric motor assisting it at highway speeds to further improve mileage.

The Toyota hybrids do get better gas mileage than the Hondas (62mpg in the city and 55mgp on the highway), but I am still pretty happy with the Civic, which is supposed to get 46mpg in the city and 51mpg on the highway. I only have to fill up the tank about twice a month now, so I definitely feel the improvement in my wallet. The dashboard has a constantly changing gauge that calculates the mileage while I’m driving, and it generally shows 39mpg at the lowest level and up to 48mpg at the highest. I was able to squeeze 36 mpg out of my 2003 conventional Civic under ideal conditions, so getting 45 mpg out of the hybrid may not seem all that dramatic, but with gas prices in California exceeding $3.40/gallon last spring, it gives me confidence that I made the right decision. I can easily drive over 525 miles on a single tank of gas in this car.

One of the unexpected delights of this wonderful new car is the Diamond Access OK sticker. Back when hybrids were first introduced, and fairly expensive, the Government, in its infinitely misguided wisdom, offered tax credits for consumers who purchased a hybrid car to encourage more people to buy super low emission vehicles. But this was, of course, the government and they really couldn’t afford it, so the $2000 tax credit was reduced to only $500 in 2005 and expired completely in 2006. To replace this program and keep the incentives going in California, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) offered Diamond Access OK stickers for hybrid cars, which permit these vehicles to drive in the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) carpool lanes on major California freeways without carrying the requisite minimum of 3 or more passengers. But this also proved to be too popular, and the DMV had to impose a cap on the number of Diamond Access OK stickers issued and in January 2007, they discontinued them altogether. But my Honda Hybrid has them, so even when I’m alone in the car, I can drive in the carpool lane without fear of the Highway Patrol slapping me down with a $275 fine.

I am also learning more about “hypermiling,” a method of increasing the mileage of hybrid cars to an incredible degree, far beyond what the EPA determines in their controlled tests. Some innovative Honda Insight owners maintain a website describing how they managed to hack their cars to get up to 99 miles per gallon (see http://www.99mpg.com) but they don’t indicate whether or not the same hack can be used on the Honda Civic Hybrid. Some Prius owners have managed to modify their vehicles to disable the gasoline engine altogether, and have made their cars completely all-electric plug-in machines. Of course, incorporating any of these hacks will void the vehicle warranty, but that’s just part of the fun of modifying your car. Teenage hot rod enthusiasts have been doing such things for decades. And since mine was a salvaged car anyway, I never had a dealer warranty to worry about.

Nathan is just happy to have his own car now, and is excited about graduating from High School, and finally moving up to Humboldt State University to start college. For his own reasons, he did not want to go to the same college as his brother, and he tells us that at least four of his high school buddies are going to Humboldt, so he decided to go where his friends would be and later transfer to another school in the Cal State system. Humboldt State is in Arcata, way up on the North Coast of California, not too far from Eureka. I guess he wants to get as far away from San Leandro as he can.

We sure will miss him. The house is so very quiet now that he’s gone. Our oldest son Alex and his fiancé Briana moved out of our house in 2006. They still come by to see us a few times each week, since they only live a few miles down the street, but now that Nathan is safely ensconced in the dorm at Humboldt, we probably won’t see him at all except for holidays, since Arcata is about a six hour drive away.

As we moved Nathan up to Arcata the other week, it occurred to me that it has been exactly 30 years since I moved out of my own home to begin college in Austin. I left Amarillo, Texas on the morning of August 16, 1977 in an old Ford Custom packed with most of my essential belongings. I was driving through Lubbock when I heard the news on the radio that Elvis had died. For the rest of the trip down to Austin, I couldn’t find a radio station anywhere in Texas that wasn’t playing Elvis Presley music.

I’m sure we will worry about him constantly. Even though I believe Nathan is arguably a better driver than his big brother Alex (who is already driving his second Saturn, having totaled his first one in 2005), I am still concerned when he’s out late at night and doesn’t come home on the weekends. Before he moved out, he always called us to let us know where he was when stayed overnight with friends, but when we know he’s coming home, neither of us can sleep until we hear him open the door and go to bed.

Pam calls him every day to see how he’s doing, and things seem to be going well. This is only his first week at school, so it will take a while for us to get used to this arrangement. But there are upsides to an empty nest. The whole house is much cleaner than it used to be when we often had gangs of teenagers over several nights each week playing videogames, watching DVDs or simply hanging out. We now have more room to park in the driveway and a lot more room in our refrigerator for beer (now that all the soft drinks are gone).

Mailing Comments:

Ken Gammage: As a martini lover, I was curious about the “dirty martini” you had in Florida, so I did a quick Google search to find out how one of these concoctions is made. Interesting. It’s just a regular martini with extra vermouth. The first recipe Google returned recommended adding 2 Tbsp of Olive Juice to the mixer in addition to the gin and vermouth, but if you purchase standard martini olives, they’re already packed in vermouth, so you’re just adding three times the normal amount of vermouth. My favorite martini recipe (a “classic martini” in the bar book I have), calls for only a very thin film of vermouth on top of the gin. I tried mixing a dirty martini according to that first Google recipe and found it extremely distasteful. I think I’ll stick with my classic.

Jim Bodie: I’m familiar with your description of Christmas at the Post Office. I send out our Libertarian Party newsletter every month at the Business Mail Entry Unit (Bulk Mail Office) at the Oakland Main Post Office, and the four weeks before any election are very busy there. We’re permitted to mail out our newsletters with the Political Mail red tags during the 30 days prior to the election, so our normally 3rd class mail gets delivered as if it were first class (along with all the other candidate junk mail). Political consultants always advise local candidates to use direct mail, since it is the cheapest way to communicate with voters. Only millionaires can afford television advertising, so local candidates running low-budget campaigns can use new data mining software that allows them to target only those voters who actually go to the polls, or only absentee voters, or only female voters, so they won’t waste their funds sending brochures to people who aren’t likely to vote for them or to those who register to vote, but never actually cast a ballot.

Alice Eaton: I loved reading your childhood memories about going to a rural school in the depression. Good luck finding another copy of “Little Black Sambo” though. While I, too, remember reading it in school in the sixties, it fell out of favor in the 1970s when the political correctness movement prompted a purge of many great books from the curricula of public education establishments. Even Huckleberry Finn was attacked as a racist portrayal of African Americans, even though Jim is the most noble character in the book. I also recall Sambo being an intelligent and resourceful young man who escaped from a dangerous situation and turned it to his advantage. As a young white boy about the same age when I read it, I remember that I greatly admired him. I also remember my family dining at Sambo’s Restaurants back then, but the franchise had to change its name when they were targeted by activists who claimed their use of the character as a marketing gimmick was offensive to the community. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, as I can understand how some could be offended, but every time we now have a meal at Baker’s Square (the restaurant chain formerly known as “Sambo’s”), I remember how things used to be when I was a kid.

Allan Beatty: It was good to see you again last month, and I’m pleased to know the difficult transition to the new environment has been relatively painless. Jobs make us do so many things that would not ordinarily be in our nature, but the security of a regular paycheck has a way of making our decisions for us. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, I would never have imagined I’d do some of the things I now have to do just to keep my job. Back then, I had no worries about finding a different job if one position didn’t work out, or I hated my boss, or a co-worker drove me nuts. I had no loyalty at all to whatever employer happened to be paying me from one week to the next. Fuck ‘em all. I wasn’t married to my employer. How different everything becomes when you have a family, children, a mortgage and all the other chains of adulthood!

Jim Bodie: I, too, feel that Johnny Cash did some of his best work in the last decade of his life. I love all of the American Recordings series. I hope your flood dreams are not premonitions, but the past few flood seasons in the South and Midwest have been pretty ominous. Time to look for higher ground?

Kennedy Gammage: It was weird to read about your return to Berkeley. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to hook up during the visit. Even though I work in Richmond now, I still have one office in Berkeley that I have to support several days each week, so I regularly see all those places you wax nostalgic about. You’ve been away from here a very long time, dude. The driftwood artworks in the Emeryville mudflats have been gone for over a decade. Berkeley is no longer much of a haven for artists. The Berkeley City Council evicted the shipyard artists colony earlier this summer, and their solar powered compound may be bulldozed into oblivion any day now (see http://theshipyard.org for details).
Nathan forgot to pack his Sirius receiver when he left for Humboldt, so now he is having to suffer from Howard Stern withdrawal. Frankly, I’m glad he no longer needs to be distracted by the foolishness. He needs more time to study. With the receiver in my control now, I can explore all the other options available with the service. I’ve been a fan of Artie Lange since the old MAD TV days, but he should have his own show, instead of being a sidekick for Stern.

Jennifer Dean: Yes, Second Life is really more about socializing than anything else. You describe it as a “glorified chatroom,” but I think it has the potential to be much more. It has been compared to the “metaverse” that plays such an integral part in Neal Stephenson’s novel Snowcrash, but isn’t quite there yet. I’m constantly amazed at how the SL community has managed to hack the environment in ways that the developers never intended (e.g., the virtual “bombing” of John Edwards’ SL Campaign Headquarters, the popularity of SL prostitution, etc.). I am curious to learn how things may develop with your SL buddy Surya. Keep us in the loop, okay?
SL has a lot of competition in the Web 2.0 world with other kinds of social networks like Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and others. I’ve gotten semi-addicted to digg.com, which has supplanted Slashdot for supremacy in my browser. Oh, yeah, I sent in my resume to Linden Labs since they’re right in San Francisco and apparently have lots of need for systems administrators. I may check to see when you’re online one of these days!

2006-10-30T23:49:00.000-08:00

Economics for the Citizen

I had the privilege of hearing a presentation by Walter Williams at the Smith Center for Economic Studies on the Cal State East Bay Campus several years ago. That presentation was a great introduction to Dr. Williams' style as a communicator, but I never took a course under him. Thanks to the Future of Freedom Foundation, anyone with a computer can now take a very quick course in basic economics presented by one of the best teachers you'll ever meet. Dr. Williams, Professor of economics at George Mason University has put together a ten-part series of lectures he uses for his microeconomics theory course and retitled it "Economics for the Citizen." Williams uses plain language, common-sense examples and his special brand of humor to make the whole thing easy to understand. It's too bad this kind of information isn't taught to high school students, whose grasp of economic principles is often limited or non-existent. Click on the link below to take the course. There will be a test when you finish, as there is every day when you have to make decisions about how to spend your time and your money.

Economics for the Citizen

Your Government on Drugs

2006-09-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

Ã¢ï¿½ï¿½This is drugs.
These are your liberties.
And this is the government.
Any questions?Ã¢ï¿½ï¿½ - Penn Jillette

read more | digg story

Six Myths About Libertarianism

2006-07-08T23:27:00.000-07:00

Conservatives and everyone else should politely be put on notice that libertarians do not believe that everyone is good, nor that everyone is an all-wise expert on his own interest, nor that every individual is an isolated and hermetically sealed atom. Libertarians are not necessarily libertines or hedonists, nor are they necessarily atheists.

read more | digg story

2006-06-30T16:26:00.000-07:00

Some of the films I've seen at the festival have been amazing. Kabul Transit was the first standout documentary I saw (outside of the Future Filmmakers Showcase, which had a couple of very good documentaries produced by high school students). The filmmakers took an unusual approach to document their time in Afghanistan, which conveys the fragmented lives of the people they met, but it works on a deep emotional level. You come away with the idea that the residents of Kabul are amazingly inventive, resilient people who will get through their struggle in spite of the "help" provided by the U.S. military and NATO.

Brothers of the Head is an adaptation of the 1977 Brian Aldiss novella that is presented in the style of a documentary, which is entirely appropriate, as it was directed by Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton who have previously made documentaries about Terry Gilliam films, e.g. Lost in La Mancha. The approach works quite well, especially in that they coached their cast individually to create the characters, helping to generate the spontenaiety of the performances. I can't predict the commercial potential of this film, since it will be very difficult to market to American audiences, but folks like me who feel nostalgic for the British punk rock invasion of the 1970's should find it terrific.

I saw two documentaries back-to-back the other day, Under the Rollercoaster, about Mae Timpano, a woman who, until 1988, lived in the house beneath the Coney Island Thunderbolt ride. I thought the idea of a family living in a house like this was made up by Woody Allen for Annie Hall, but he apparently was inspired by Mae.

The Creek Runs Red is a documentary about the toxic mining town of Picher, Oklahoma, one of the Environmental Protection Agency's first Superfund cleanup sites. After decades of cleanup work, the project has done little or nothing to reduce the levels of lead in the town's drinking water and the EPA finally decided earlier this year to simply buy out all the residents with chidren under 6 years of age. Your tax dollars at work.

Last night, we saw This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a wonderful mystery/detective story/expose about the Motion Picture Association of America, the secretive board that assigns ratings to movies. The film reveals that the ratings board is not at all what Jack Valenti has claimed it was for the past 34 years. Valenti has always insisted that the board consists of average parents of small children, but refused to ever identify them. What director Kirby Dick decided to do was to hire a private investigator to find out who these people were. What he discovered is that while the members of the board are indeed parents, only one of them has any children under the age of 20, and that single board member's youngest child is 17 years old. He even found out the names and occupations of the members of the MPAA's appeals board (the body to whom a filmmaker can appeal if they feel his/her film has been unfairly rated). These folks are all men, and with two exceptions, are all presidents and CEOs of theater chains, distribution companies and other major players in the film industry. The two exceptions turn out to be members of the clergy, an episcopal bishop and a representative of the Catholic church. It is both a hilarious comedy and a frightening glimpse into how censorship is practiced in the free world.

During the Question and Answer period following the film, a woman stood up and mentioned that she had actually been on the MPAA board from 1973 to 1977, and described how 20th Century Fox had pressured them to give Star Wars a PG rating instead of a G rating, because at that time, the stigma of a family-friendly G rating might have hurt the film. The studio felt that a G would have discouraged teenagers from going to see it because the lucrative demographic of teenage boys generally tend to avoid seeing movies targeted to smaller children. Valenti's whole argument for keeping the members of board anonymous was to prevent the studios from putting pressure on the board and influence them to make specific ratings decisions.

2006-06-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

L.A. Film Festival

Plans change rapidly here. Screenings sell out, Nathan changes his mind about what he wants to see, and I just make it up as I go along. I'm still devouring documentaries, but Nathan wants to see the sights. On Monday, we spent the whole day at Disneyland, waiting in line. Of course, since this was the first day that the refurbished "Pirates of the Caribbean" re-opened, that became our first priority.

I have only been to Disneyland four times in my life (the first time, I was 17, the second time when my son Alex was 3 and the last time when Alex was 6 and Nathan was 3). Nathan doesn't remember much about that trip, since he spent most of the time in our hotel room being very sick. He only got to see Disneyland briefly, and was too sick to ride most of the kiddie attractions. But surprisingly, he did find that some visuals in Toontown brought back memories from his earliest childhood. He remembered the Roger Rabbit cars, but has no memory of Captain Eo or throwing up in FrontierLand.

Pirates was an adventure in itself. A one and a half hour wait in line was rewarded with a spectacular ride. The attraction has been skillfully updated to include not only the musical score from the film, but also several animatronic reproductions of Johnny Depp's Cap'n Jack Sparrow and a remarkable appearance by Davy Jones. Word has it that the ride will be updated throughout the season to add new animatronic figures of Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightly.

It was noon by the time we had a chance to explore the other attractions. We walked right into The Haunted Mansion, since almost everyone else was still in line for Pirates. The line for the Indiana Jones Adventure was only 20 minutes long, so that was a great thrill. As we were leaving Indiana Jones, I discovered that the Jungle Cruise had been re-opened. The last time I was in Disneyland, the Indiana Jones attraction was still under construction and I was afraid that it would replace the Jungle Cruise entirely, since it was in the same location and the Jungle Cruise was gone. But my fears were unfounded. My favorite attraction from my first visit is back, and just as good as I remembered it.

Splash Mountain was something of a surprise, since I had never had a chance to see it before. It wasn't around when I was a kid, and the last few times I have been here, my children were too small to ride it, so this was my first opportunity (and because Nathan loved it so much, I ended up riding it three times, while he took four trips through it). What was most surprising about it was that the entire ride revolves around the environment of Disney's Song of the South, a film that the studio pulled from release almost a decade ago due to concerns about political correctness. Most children and teenagers today have no context for the ride, since the film cannot be seen (except through on-line file sharing technology and old VHS tapes or laserdisks). For those who are unfamiliar with Song of the South, it is a clever adaptation of the old Uncle Remus stories about Brer Rabbit, told within the framework of an idealized vision of a Southern plantation and its black and white residents. Uncle Remus is a slave who tells the Brer Rabbit stories to both the black and white children of the plantation. It was a technological marvel in the 1940's as one of the early combinations of live action and animation where the two elements interacted almost seamlessly.

We ended up staying until the park closed at midnight. We were both exhausted by the time the tram took us back to the parking structure and it was a very long drive back to L.A. We ended up sleeping until noon the next day.

2006-06-25T00:19:00.000-07:00

I'm down here at the Los Angeles Film Festival this week with my son, Nathan, whose music video "Help Me Please" is featured in the Future Filmmakers Showcase. There are several very impressive works created by high school students on the program. Some are short documentaries, narrative works, comedies and other music videos. Today's screenings helped to introduce the young filmmakers to each other and several of the festival staff.

It took us a while to get our bearings around the festival area, so we didn't see many other films beyond the short subjects, but we did make a trip to the Century Plaza in downtown L.A. to catch a screening of An Inconvenient Truth. Part media circus, part rock concert and part political rally, the film was introduced by Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, Al Gore and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (who insisted on calling guitarist Sambora "Santora").

Day two will probably begin with more music videos in the morning with some documentary features or narratives in the afternoon. For now, it's late and time to hit the sack.

2006-05-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

Attack of the Click Whores

The essay that follows was posted on my blog http://www.armadillodreaming.blogspot.com/ back in January. It could have been my APA-50 contribution to the March mailing (#179), but I flaked out and missed the deadline. All that mattered to me at the time was getting the thing written and out of my system because I was a bit emotional about it. You’ll understand more once you get that far. That is, if you bother to read beyond this long-winded introduction.

While I started the blog late last year, it turns out that I’m not a very good blogger. I don’t update it very often. If you ever visit my blog, you’ll see that I only post something there every few months. I’m not an obsessive blogger. Most folks with blogs will post almost daily or weekly rants about something or other. Maybe no more than a paragraph or two, or a short essay. Or maybe just some links. In fact, the very first blog, http://www.robotwisdom.com/, created by Jorn Barger, the person who coined the term “weblog,” is really not much more than a collection of links compiled by someone who surfs the web all day long. Even some of today’s most popular blogs, such as http://www.boingboing.net/ and http://dvorak.org/blog do pretty much the same thing, but with some editorial commentary and long discussion threads about each story. That takes a level of commitment I just don’t possess. I will post my apazines up there on armadillodreaming, but asking me to update it daily is asking for just a bit too much. I don’t really care about it, except that I can point people to it who aren’t in APA-50.

But since my earliest days in fandom, from eagerly waiting for the mail to see how many fanzines would show up in any given week, egoboo has been the primary reason for doing any of this, whether it was traditional fanac or this new-fangled blogging. You want people to read your words and respond to them. That is why I have been doing this apazine ever since 1974 when I was a 15 year old high school nerd. That’s why my blog postings tend to be long and include mailing comments to other APA-50 members, even though these are probably complete nonsense to anyone who just happens to stumble across http://www.armadillodreaming.blogspot.com/ and doesn’t know anything about APA-50. But that doesn’t matter either, since no one seems to read my blog. The only comments posted on my entries come from what I call “click whores.”

Click Whore is a term I just made up the other day. Ever since I first sent a message to Wired magazine’s JargonWatch editor seven or eight years ago, I’ve wanted to contribute an original term to the column. I received a response from Gareth Branwyn pointing out that all of the terms I forwarded had appeared in earlier issues of the magazine (I only started reading Wired during its second year of publication). So I have been faced with a challenge for almost a decade of trying to find a new techno-term that was original and meaningful. Click Whore seems to fit the bill to a tee. I’ve done a Google search and the term does not seem to exist anywhere else in cyberspace -- except on my blog, http://www.armadillodreaming.blogspot.com/. Therefore, I am now donating it to the world under whatever free language licenses are acceptable to anyone who chooses to use the term in its correct context (e.g., creative commons license http://www.creativecommons.org/ or GPL, the Gnu General Public License or any one of its several variations you prefer). Just give me credit for inventing it.

Click Whore (klik-hor) n. an internet bot that scans hundreds of thousands of weblogs and posts completely non-sequitur comments to drive traffic to commercial websites much the same way that spammers do. The click whore’s purpose is to tempt the blogger or the casual blog reader into clicking on a link in a comment that re-directs them to a commercial website from which their creator makes money. The folks who write these little programs probably have a different name for them, but I like to call them click whores. These are the only entities that seem to ever come to my blog http://www.armadillodreaming.blogspot.com/. Or at least, they are the only visitors who bother to post comments.

Whores are not prostitutes. Prostitutes perform a valuable service to society. Whores do nothing of the sort, but act as “parasite prostitutes.” Don’t get me wrong. I love prostitutes. Well, not like that. After all, I just got married a year ago. What I mean is, I have nothing against prostitutes, and know several of them quite well. But not that well; come on, get your mind out of the gutter. Prostitutes are generally cool, friendly folks who are just making a living at something they enjoy doing and provide a product that is, and always has been, in great demand. You know, the “oldest profession in the world” and all that. Prostitutes make a business arrangement with their customers and deliver exactly what they promise. That’s why they continue to have regular customers who come back again and again.

Whores, on the other hand, are not prostitutes. Whores promise you things they cannot deliver. They promise many of the same things a prostitute does, such as casual sex, an attractive companion for a night out, simple affection, the illusion of love, or even just a good time. But no one who takes up a whore on this promise ever seems to get satisfaction from the outcome of the transaction. That’s why whores have to keep finding new customers, because they don’t generally have repeat business the way a good prostitute does. Spammers are kind of like click whores, but they have their own name and their own tactics. We all know what spammers do and how they do it. Click whores have a new technique, but it is just as despicable.

Here is a comment posted to my blog by a click whore:

darrelhunor21774890 said...
I really enjoyed your blog. This is a cool Website Check it out now by Clicking Here . I know that you will find this WebSite Very Interesting Every one wants a Free LapTop Computer!

Here’s another one:
sarafisher5428 said...
I read over your blog, and i found it inquisitive, you may find My Blog interesting. So please Click Here To Read My Blog (somethingaboutpennystocks.com)

I’ve deleted the embedded links because you really don’t need to go there. Of course, I didn’t bother clicking on Darrel’s “cool website” or SaraFisher’s blog because I know these came from click whores. The two comments that followed were from other click whores trying to tell me about more great penny stock investments and some unbelievable mortgage refinancing options.
Whores pretend to like you. They want you to like them. Click whores want you to click on their links so the coder who created them can make some money from idiots who think the whore likes them. They say they’ve read your blog, but you know they haven’t. They’re not humans; they’re bots. They don’t have the time. They hit your site just long enough to copy their template comment to your post and then they continue to the next link in the directory on blogspot. They probably only come by for two seconds or less, hardly enough egoboo to even be called a “quickie.” Even the most insincere RAEBNC (Read and Enjoyed, but No Comment) means more than a click whore posting, because something with an acronym so obscure and specific to fanzine fandom can only come from a human being. And a fan.

I’m not much for self-promotion. I don’t include a link to my blog in my standard email signature. I haven’t even put an RSS link on the site so that those few people who do read it can be notified when a new update appears once in a blue moon when an APA-50 deadline looms and I put another post up there. It would be nice if people read the blog, but the people in APA-50 will read APAHELION when the paper mailing is delivered to their home. The other folks to whom I send my zine through email may someday decide to read the blog, but so far no one has left comments on the site except click whores.

This doesn’t bother me. Really, it doesn’t. Well, I guess I have to confess that it bothers me enough to write an apazine about it and come up with a completely original name for the phenomenon. Of course, I would love to see more traffic directed to the site. Perhaps I could put some Google Adsense links there and make a few pennies on the deal in a much more acceptable way than the click whores try to do. But there are so damned many blogs on the internet, it just doesn’t surprise me that my only audience consists of click whores. There’s nothing spectacular about my blog, and in fact, I haven’t put a lot of effort into making it stand out from all the others. As I said earlier, it’s just a way to post my apazines on the web without having to clog up everyone’s email with PDF versions like I’ve been doing for the past few years.

Shameless self-promotion and a good spam filter probably keep http://dvorak.org/blog free from click whores and loaded with interesting discussion threads, but John C. Dvorak is probably the exception, rather than the rule. He claims he gets no spam, yet recently mentioned on his Cranky Geeks podcast that he collects Nigerian 419 scam messages to eventually donate to the folklore collection at U.C. Berkeley. So much for John C. “I Get No Spam” Dvorak.

Welcome to Terrytime at http://ww.armadillodreaming.blogspot.com/. I’m the rule, rather than the exception. I’ve since modified the properties of the blog so that click whores can’t post comments anymore. But now, no one reads my blog and there are zero comments, even on a post like the one that follows, that actually means quite a lot to me. Perhaps that will change if I continue to insert http://ww.armadillodreaming.blogspot.com/ periodically throughout everything I write.

Now, after that long winded introduction, here is the posting I put up there last January 31, 2006:

2006-01-31T01:23:00.000-08:00

Last November, my second cousin, Jimmy Folkes, was killed in Iraq. He was buried in Arnett, Oklahoma, a few yards from the graves of my grandfather and grandmother, my cousin, my uncle, another second cousin, and... Well, you know how these small towns can be. Everyone around knows everyone else and most of them are relatives in one way or another. My grandmother’s two sisters all lived within walking distance of each other in Arnett, the county seat of Ellis County, Oklahoma. Aunt Estelle lived up one block from grandma and Aunt Edna lived down the street around the corner and a block over the other direction. Jimmy Sr. was Aunt Edna’s son and lived in Amarillo, the "big city" 17 miles north of the small town where I grew up. I think Jimmy Jr. was one of two sons in that branch of the family. I probably only met him a few times over the years, though, despite our proximity growing up in the Texas panhandle. I had several other cousins in the area that I saw a lot more often growing up.

Anyway, even though I didn’t know Jimmy all that well, this is the first time that the war in Iraq has touched me in a personal way. I’ve been fighting it from before it ever began, marching through San Francisco with the Libertarian Party and thousands of other people before the invasion, voting in on-line polls to gauge public opinion on the matter, signing every anti-war petition, resolution and declaration I’ve come across, and engaged in voluminous email flamewars over this topic. And still, nothing I could do seemed to have any effect at all. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and more than two thousand American soldiers have died in a spectacularly bloody failure of simple common sense and good judgment, including now, my second cousin, Sgt. Jimmy Folkes.

My niece, Elizabeth Sarmiento, and her uncertain future have been constant sources of stress for Pam and I ever since she joined the Army a few years ago after losing custody of her infant daughter. We have heard from her only sporadically over the years, but she kept us informed of what she was doing and how things were going. She seemed excited, dedicated and committed to the Army and enjoyed her work immensely. She became a maintenance mechanic for Apache, Huey and Blackhawk Helicopters, and was eventually promoted to crew chief. She and her crew flew frequent Medi-vac missions for the local hospitals around Ft. Polk, Louisiana, and did search and rescue operations, since there weren’t any equivalent local resources in that part of the state to perform those tasks. Things sure would have been different, though no less interesting, if she had remained in Louisiana during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. But such was not to be. Liz was transferred out of Louisiana and back to Hawaii last summer, months before Katrina made landfall. She said there was nothing to worry about, she only had one more year left to serve, and her new skills were in far greater demand at domestic bases than they would be in Iraq. For some reason, though, the Army needs more soldiers in Hawaii, Iraq and Afghanistan than could ever be put to use in New Orleans or Biloxi.

But everyone knows how many helicopters we’ve lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, how many we are flying on a daily basis in both countries, and how necessary it is to keep these machines continuously operational in some of the most extreme environmental conditions you can imagine. Of course there is very likely a strong demand for Liz and her skills in a place as dangerous as Bagdad or Mosul, or Falujah. She wasn’t fooling me for a minute with her assurances that they weren’t likely to deploy her to Iraq. I was terrified for her. I was afraid she would die.

And then I got the news about Jimmy just after Thanksgiving from my sister, who drove along with the whole family to Arnett for the funeral. The Rev. Fred Phelps, she told me, had made noises about driving his church congregation all the way from Kansas to Amarillo to demonstrate at the funeral. Something about the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and how it permits gays to serve in the armed forces and was somehow against God’s law and guaranteed us punishment in the middle east. It sounds like the typical fundamentalist bullshit I’ve come to loathe all my life, having grown up with this nonsense force-fed to me as a child, but it had nothing at all to do with Jimmy. Unless he was gay. I don’t honestly know and it doesn’t really matter to me. As I said, we weren’t close and I haven’t seen him since I was a kid. My sister said she’d saved the newspaper clippings about it and would send them to me, but so far I haven’t received them.

All I know is that Jimmy had already served 10 years in the Army and was committed to a military career. Well, he got it, but not with the kind of early retirement plan most of us anticipate. Unfortunately, this is all too often the most frequently used retirement alternative in the military.

So you cannot imagine my joy when we received the following telephone call and email message from Liz today:

Dear Aunt Pam,

Hello, sorry it's been so long, but I've been busy getting out of the military and with the custody hearings. Let me back track and fill you in on what's been going on with me. Well I got stationed out here in Hawaii in May of 2005. Upon my arrival, I hired a lawyer and since then I've been flying back and forth to Maui from O'ahu for court hearings to get full custody of Tehani. It's not over yet but it's looking promising. I've also been Honorably discharged from the military due to parenthood. Parenthood--meaning that I would have no one to watch Tehani while I was in Iraq. You see, I was scheduled to go to Iraq in June of 2006, so upon knowledge of this I made a big fuss, ending result I was allowed to favorably be dismissed from all obligations to the Army. I'm super happy about that! I've been officially out of the Army since December 29, 2005. Fortunately, I've been in long enough to keep my college fund and my GI bill which entitles me to receive monies worth 3 years of college. To top it all off I have my life back!!! It's an amazing feeling of freedom.

Well I'm going to go now, but please write me back and let me know if you got those pictures and let me know how you’re doing.

Love you lots,
Liz

You have no idea how happy I am to know that Liz won’t be shipped off to Iraq to die and leave her daughter an orphan or left in the custody of an idiot father (I’ve met Peter, Liz’s ex-husband, so I know what I’m talking about).

But this doesn’t mean I won’t stop fighting against this insane war. If anything, it has galvanized me to be even more vigorous in opposing the effort.

My second cousin lost his life last year for no reason at all. I almost lost my beautiful niece because she is bright and young and naive and thought the government would take care of her because she signed away all her rights to serve the country. I can't wait to see her again, and to finally meet her daughter, who I only know through pictures sent in Christmas cards and twice-a-year email messages.

I want to know her in a way I never knew Jimmy Folkes. I want to know who she is before she dies. I want to know who she is before I die. I want her to know who I am before I die. With any luck, that will finally happen now. Keep in touch, and I may post some photos of these folks so you will know who I'm talking about here.

2006-01-29T23:46:00.000-08:00

APAHELION CVIII

Twenty-five years ago, December 8, 1980, John Lennon was murdered in New York City. The next day, on December 9, 1980, Philip K. Dick began working on his last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which also begins with the death of John Lennon. Dick himself died scarcely more than two years later.

Twenty-five years later, I woke up at around 2:45 a.m., December 8, 2005, for some unknown reason. I got up and went to the bathroom. I returned to bed, but had difficulty falling asleep again. I tossed and turned, but just couldn’t fall asleep. I heard my wristwatch beep on the table next to the bed at 3:00, and then again at 4:00 a.m. And still I could not fall asleep. Eventually, I must have drifted off, because the next thing I remember was the alarm waking me at 6:30 a.m. It was a major struggle to drag myself out of bed.

I trudged downstairs to make coffee and prepared to go to work. As I headed out the back door to feed the dog, I noticed that our goldfish, Chili II, was floating at the top of our aquarium. I wasn’t entirely surprised, but it still broke my heart. Much as Ken Gammage wrote some years ago about his son Ben’s goldfish, Fat 1 and Fat 2, I must record the history of our elderly goldfish, now that his story has ended on this fateful day. I wondered if my hours of insomnia could have coincided with the last beats of Chili’s goldfish heart. Did we have a bond so strong that his silent watery death would wake me in the middle of the night?

Chili II had to be at least 9 years old, which I thought must be an eternity for a goldfish. We adopted Chili II as a consequence of an elementary school fundraising fair. Nathan was probably in 3rd grade at the time and we had volunteered to work at the Roosevelt Elementary School spring carnival, as we did every year. Alex had brought home some goldfish a few years earlier from a similar event, but they didn’t last more than a few months. But Chili II was different. Chili II was a survivor.

His name has a history of its own. Chili I was a fire belly toad that Alex brought home from school when he was in first grade. His teacher apparently had bred many, many toads for the class science project—so many in fact, that she had enough for each child in the class to take one home. When Alex brought Chili home, we had to find a suitable habitat for him, so we bought a small 5 gallon aquarium. Alex said that he knows chili peppers are red and hot, so it made sense to name his fire belly toad Chili. Unfortunately, we weren’t as successful in raising a single fire belly toad as Alex’s teacher, and he only lived a few short weeks. But Alex had become very attached to him, so his death had a major impact on the child. We buried Chili in our back yard, and Alex wrote a heartfelt eulogy for him and cried as he read it to us.

When Nathan returned triumphant from the 1996 Roosevelt Spring Carnival with two tiny goldfish, we had no other place to house them but Chili’s old aquarium. One of the goldfish died within a few days, so Alex determined that the surviving fish would be named Chili II, in honor of the previous resident of the aquarium. Nathan had no objection.

Chili II was not like the other goldfish or toads we had tried to keep alive in the small two bedroom duplex we rented for 13 years. He didn’t expire after a couple of months, but seemed to thrive. We weren’t really supposed to have pets in the house, but the landlord defined a “pet” as a dog or cat (or goat, as the case may be—long story, perhaps some other time), so he didn’t seem to mind the goldfish. I learned a lot about maintaining the aquarium, which is probably why Chili II lived as long as he did. I changed the water at least every four weeks and went through several different brands of fresh water aquarium filters before we determined the best model. The Penguin Bio-wheel filter system did a much better job keeping the water clean than any other one we used, so when it became clear that Chili needed a bigger tank, we bought a 10 gallon model with a Penguin Bio-wheel filter. With this tank, I only had to change the water every six weeks, as long as I replaced the filter about every two weeks. It was Nathan’s responsibility to feed the fish every night at bedtime, and he became very good at maintaining the ritual and watching the fish as it responded to the stimulus of feeding time.

A fish is not the kind of pet you really bond with, since you can’t take it out of the water to play with it, and it doesn’t respond to the presence of humans unless food is involved, but we became comfortable with Chili II in the family room and he seemed to accept our existence as a necessary part of his life.

When we moved into our new house in 2001, Chili II had grown to a size that required an even larger aquarium. It was hard to call him a goldfish anymore, because he was almost as large as the Koi we saw in ponds all over the Japanese gardens in Portland. Since we had graduated to a larger home, Chili did as well. We transferred him into a spacious 20 gallon mansion when we moved into our new home. And of course, he responded by just growing larger. By the time he died on December 8, 2005, he was at least 7 inches long, and was no longer gold, but appeared pure white.

During the course of his nine year life, we had to deal with a number of fish illnesses. Fungal infections caused lesions on his body that had to be treated with special water additives, and some of these caused his golden scales to fall off, leaving his body with only a few gold spots. By the time of his final illness, a struggle with furunculosis, he had no gold scales at all, but was entirely albino white.

I sometimes joked that Chili II was big enough to make a good meal for our family of four, and if he ever died, we should just fry him up for dinner as I used to do with the bass and catfish I caught in the creeks and lakes of Texas when I was a kid. But I knew we could never eat Chili. And so, now that his time has come, I just put him in a plastic bag and dropped him in the garbage. No sentimental funeral or backyard burial this time. For one thing, it was raining constantly that week. For another, our dog would probably just dig up the carcass and eat it if she smelled it (and she has a very keen sense of smell). And finally, our children are mature teenagers now and while they both displayed different emotional reactions to the death of Chili, they didn’t feel it necessary to write painful eulogies or ceremoniously put the creature to rest in a traditional grave. Nathan assisted me as I cleaned the tank one last time, and helped me carry it out to the backyard to empty the last of its liquid contents onto the grass. All he could say was that it stank worse than anything he’s ever smelled before.

So Chili II is gone, and I guess I miss him. I don’t miss all the work involved in maintaining the aquarium, but I do miss him. He was a part of our family for almost half of Alex’s entire life, and more than half of Nathan’s. All of our friends who have assumed ownership of goldfish from that same 1996 event and similar ones over the years have often remarked about how amazed they are that Chili lived so long while other goldfish died

“Facts from http://www.goldfishinfo.com: The oldest living Goldfish to date was a goldfish named Tish owned by Hilda and Gordon Hand of Thirsk, N. Yorkshire, England. Tish lived for 43 years after being won at a fairground in 1956.

“Goldfish can have life spans up to 20+ years if they are fed a varied diet and housed in exceptional water conditions. They need to be in tanks that are not overcrowded. They need sufficient swimming room and do best if they are kept with their own types.”

I suppose then that Chili could have survived even longer if we had continued to buy larger and larger tanks for him and continued to maintain his environment. But our home is only so big, we don’t have a Koi pond and we can only afford to maintain a 20 gallon tank without contracting the maintenance work out to Deuce Bigalow.

Rest in Peace, Chili II. At least we still have our dog.

The week we lost Chili was the week we gained a new member of the family. Alex’s girlfriend, Briana, moved in with us the day we cleaned Chili’s tank for the last time. Briana is a wonderful girl and I’m very happy for both of them. Alex proposed to her the week before Christmas. Yes, they agree that they are too young to get married, so they plan a very long engagement and promise to wait until they both graduate from college to formalize the arrangement. I am encouraging them to do what Pam and I have done, and live in sin together for at least 20 years before getting married, but Alex is a traditional kind of guy and was encouraging us to get married for at least the last 10 years.

If I failed to mention it earlier, Pam and I finally got married on May 1, 2005, the 20th anniversary of the day we moved in together. Yeah, we’re now legal, thanks to George W. Bush and his tax cuts which have finally made it advantageous for married couples to file taxes jointly, rather than separately. The previous tax code rewarded single, unwed mothers with dependent minor children bigger tax credits than married couples with the same number of children, so we have never before filed our taxes this way, but now the laws have changed so we can actually save money by being married. It also makes things easier when dealing with our mortgage. A married couple has more legal rights in property law than tenants in common, which was the category under which we obtained our mortgage. It’s complicated, but under California law, if one of the “tenants in common” dies before the other, 50% of our home’s value would be re-assessed by the County Tax Assessor at pre-Proposition 13 levels. This would result in a whopping increase in our annual property taxes. As a married couple, however, the property would not be re-assessed in the event of the death of a spouse. This is a major reason to support the legalization of same-sex marriage in California and all other states, for that matter. Why are married couples treated differently than people in a committed, long-term relationship? If all the advantages are given to married couples, why then are gay couples denied these rights?

I’m a firm believer in treating all people equally, but our laws do not seem to follow this same principal. That’s why I’m committed to doing whatever I can to change the laws to make them more fair and less discriminatory. It is, however, an uphill battle.

Mailing Comments:

Having misplaced my copy of #177, all I have at hand is #176, which will have to suffice, since I’m once again pushing up against the deadline.

The Biscuit’s Own Paper (Julianne Chatelaine): Your explanation of the Karelians of Finland and their tragic history was fascinating, especially how you tied it all to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. There is so much of history that falls through the cracks that we in the west never learn about. Your “digression” about it was the first I ever heard Karelia. Thanks!
Heather Havrilesky’s columns were also great reading, and well worth subscribing to Salon. Her past life with suck.com was of great interest to me, since I used to read that site regularly and was deeply saddened when it died. Last year, I met Tim Cavanaugh, who also used to work on suck.com, and is now the on-line editor of Reason.com. They were definitely internet pioneers.

Willy G. & Me (Jimmy Dean): Loved reading about the NHRA Nationals. When I was a kid, my dad used to take us to the Amarillo Dragway in the Texas Panhandle to watch the drag races. He helped maintain a dragster for a local racing team, and sometimes got us pit passes so we could hang out with the other teams and meet the drivers. I was so young back then that I can’t remember many of them now, but I do remember meeting Big Daddy Don Garlitz.
Sometimes we traveled to other drag strips in Texas and Oklahoma with the team, and once we spent a weekend at an old abandoned air force runway that had been leased by a drag racing promoter. It was way out in the middle of nowhere, but they managed to attract a fairly large crowd, but the place wasn’t really set up for drag racing. It was hot and the food was pretty minimal (just hot dogs, popcorn and soda for us kids, beer for the adults). They put boards up on barrels for us to sit on instead of bleachers and there were portable toilets down the road, but the main drawback was the track itself. All the drivers complained about how bad the runway was maintained, and it made for a lousy drag strip.
I like the output of your zine from the free HP Color Laserjet, but it must have taken hours to print. One of the real drawbacks of the older HP model color printers is how slow they are. You also mentioned that they are expensive to maintain. I have to agree, and it is almost more economical to simply junk a broken Laserjet 4500 or 4550 and just buy a new one for less money than these cost when they were new. I’m personally very fond of the Ricoh/Savin brand of color printers, which not only generate much faster output than most H-P models, they cost a lot less to maintain and the consumables (toner, drum, finisher modules) are cheaper as well. Hewlett-Packard uses the old razor-blade technique of selling their printers at very low profit margin and making the bulk of their money from toner sales over the life of the machine.

Brahma’s Breath (Jim Bodie): Public schools in the South also taught us about the horrors of reconstruction after the civil war, how “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” from the North came down to exploit the defeated citizens of the confederacy. In fact, many historians now are re-examining this period and revealing that these terms were coined not by the Southerners who were exploited, but were invented by the folks who wrote the textbooks being sold to school districts in these states.
The modern public school system has been used as a propaganda tool for at least 100 years, and it didn’t start with the Scopes Monkey trial. The history of the Pledge of Allegiance is a fascinating story of how a clever Baptist minister and his publisher cousin came up with a scheme to make millions of dollars from the public school system by selling Old Glory flags to every school in the country through their magazine, Youth’s Companion (a predecessor of the Weekly Reader), and they simply used the Pledge as a way to incorporate their sales pitch into the curriculum of the educational establishment. And sell more flags. Sixty-five years later, so many people had memorized the Pledge through daily school indoctrination that the American Legion lobbied Congress to not only make it an official document of our government, but added the words “under God” to the middle of it. And it has taken this long for someone to finally stand up and question the constitutionality of this poem and its place in our history.
So I’m a bit surprised that you still put so much faith in the public school system, even though all the metrics in use to assess the results of this system for the past forty years indicate that it is a colossal failure. The last time the public school system showed any demonstrable success was after Sputnik lit a bonfire under the establishment and caused a massive effort to improve science education and research.
I could go on and on about the public schools and public school teachers (with whom I regularly play poker these days), but I’ll spare you the sermon. They just don’t work, and the teachers are the first to admit it (at least the ones who are candid enough to talk about how much they hate the teachers union, but love the wages and benefits they’ve negotiated). The best way to improve public schools would be to make them compete for students and funding with private schools. As it is, while they constantly bemoan their lack of funding and resources, they have an unlimited source of money from the taxpayers, who almost always vote to increase their own taxes “for the sake of their children.” And the more money we throw down the public school black hole, the worse things get. But I promised not to go on and on.
You know my Libertarian leanings already, so I won’t say too much about the democrats you proudly support. I will only mention that the current bloody disaster in Iraq could have been prevented if as few as a dozen Democratic politicians had the balls to speak up and say this was a bad idea before it ever happened. The only one who voted against giving George W. Bush the absolute power to wage whatever war he wanted was Barbara Lee (D-Oakland), who demonstrated more balls and a bigger mouth than any of her blowhard male Democrat colleagues. I disagree with her on just about everything she does, but I have to say I was never more proud of her than when she cast that one dissenting vote.
The fact that we now live in a police state with the government spying on innocent citizens without warrants or even reasonable cause, torturing and killing prisoners in foreign lands without ever allowing them to go to trial, and making the nightmare world of George Orwell a reality is largely the fault of spineless Democratic politicians who were afraid to speak up and object to what they knew was going on.
With the latest revelations of what George W. Bush has done to destroy the country, it’s all I can do to keep my temper under control. I can’t trust Democrats to protect my few remaining freedoms, so I’m left with my Libertarian colleagues who won’t compromise their principles for money. But we don’t have enough support to make any difference in Washington. There is no longer a balance of power in the government, and now that it is almost certain that Alito will be confirmed, we’ve got another sycophantic brown-nosing liar on the bench who will continue to let our country slide into the totalitarian nightmare.
Alito padded his resume to get a job in the Reagan administration, and now asks us to believe he is honest and trustworthy enough to sit on the Supreme Court. And he’s going to get away with it, too.
See, now you went and got me started after all.

Apahelion CVII

2005-09-29T00:32:00.000-07:00

APA-50 is an Amateur Press Association that I have been associating with since I was a 15 year old teenager back in the 1970s. It still exists as a bi-monthly publication written by its members, who come and go periodically. This is my latest contribution to the effort.

Apahelion CVII
Terry Floyd
855 Emerald Avenue
San Leandro, CA 94577

We were driving along in the car Saturday night a few weeks ago listening to the radio.  Alex was working at Jamba Juice, as he does almost every weekend and Nathan was partying with some friends, so we had the evening to ourselves, a rare occasion.  We decided to go out to dinner and catch a movie.  The local NPR station was broadcasting a program called “Selected Shorts” where an actor reads a short story before a live audience.  We didn't catch the beginning of the story and so became intrigued by the middle third of it.  Two men, Nachman and Ali, were having an elegant dinner and discussing a paper Nachman was writing.  Abruptly, the story was interrupted by the mandatory FCC identification, so the announcer had to tell us what we already knew, that we were listening to KQED-FM Radio in San Francisco and that we would return to “Selected Shorts” after a brief pause.  He then read a promotional announcement for an upcoming program and after about 15 seconds, we were returned to the short story.  The announcer welcomed us back to continue the story “Nachman from Los Angeles,” by Leonard Michaels.

Pam almost had to stop the car.  “Did he just say Leonard Michaels?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “I believe that was the author's name.”

“I wonder if it's the same fellow,” she wondered.  “We had a patient on our unit a couple of years ago named Leonard Michaels, and he was a writer.  Very nice man, with a wonderful, supportive family.  I wish it had all ended better.”

“I guess I know where this is going,” I said.  “You got him in the end stage?”

“Yeah, it was really fast.  He was living in Italy when he was diagnosed and was only six weeks into treatment when he died.”  She paused.  “Lymphoma.  I'll bet it's the same guy.”

Pam is the Director of Oncology Services for the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland and Berkeley and while she doesn’t do floor nursing anymore, she often deals with grieving families when terminal patients are admitted to her unit.  On the bright side, the ratio of cancer survivors to cancer victims is increasing all the time, and in the last 20 years the oncology field has made some dramatic progress.

We continued to listen to the story in silence.  The conversation between Nachman and Ali grew strange as Nachman realized that his host isn't really interested in discussing the paper, only his girlfriend, Sweeney.

By this time we'd decided on a restaurant and had parked outside Don Jose's in Castro Valley, but Pam wanted to hear the rest of the story.  So did I, but we had less than an hour until we needed to be at the theater for our movie, so we really couldn't stay to listen.  The program would probably go on another fifteen or twenty minutes.  We decided to just go have dinner and look up the story later on the internet.

The next night, Pam confirmed that the Leonard Michaels who died on her oncology unit was indeed the same Leonard Michaels who wrote “Nachman from Los Angeles.” She ended up going to Amazon.com and getting for my birthday an anthology of the Best American Short Stories of 2002 which included this story so I could finally read the entire thing.

It’s a good story, first published in The New Yorker, and it took me back to my own college years.  In the story, Nachman is writing a term paper for a wealthy Persian prince, Ali Massid, who needs to remain in school to maintain his visa, but he has no interest in the classes he’s taking and is wealthy enough to pay other people to do his schoolwork for him.

When I was in college back in Austin in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my roommate Scott Bobo and I would sometimes make extra money by typing up term papers for “Mary Ann Ziveley’s Typing Service.”   All term papers had to be typewritten, but not all students had typewriters or were capable of typing, so there were several competing typing services in college towns like Austin.  Scott was an amazing typist and was tested at 92 words per minute.  I wasn’t bad myself, but the best speed I ever got on a test was 88 words per minute.  Ziveley’s Typing Service paid $1.50 a page, so we could make some nice change doing this as long as we could read the notes or handwritten first drafts of students who contracted with Ziveley’s to have their papers typed for them.

There were other services available to students as well.  One of our friends, Terri McDonald, started out doing the same thing we did typing up other student’s papers, but she contracted with a Research Service, which not only provided typing of term papers, but even hired students to ghostwrite term papers.  Terri told me she made up to $10 per page for writing term papers, just as Nachman does in the story.  Most of the students who paid the Research Service were foreign students whose command of English wasn’t all that great, but like Prince Ali, they were quite wealthy and could pay whatever was necessary to pass their classes.  $10 a page seemed like a fortune to me back then, but in the story, Ali agrees to pay Nachman $1,000 for a single term paper on metaphysicist Henri Bergson.  I guess this is what happens when you cut out the middle man.

The Best American Short Stories of 2002 includes some other wonderful gems.  Leonard Michaels’ story is followed immediately by Arthur Miller’s ”Bulldog.” The other dog story in the anthology, Richard Ford’s “Puppy” is set in the French Quarter of New Orleans, which has been much in the news lately.

The first story in the book is Michael Chabon’s “Along the Frontage Road.”  It was weird reading this story, because it takes place just off the Interstate 80 highway in Berkeley that I drive along every day when I go to work.  It is a heartbreaking little tale about a father taking his four year old son to buy a pumpkin for Halloween.

It’s just very strange to have a personal connection to two writers and two stories in the same anthology that I would have known nothing about if Pam and I had not been listening to the radio that night on our way to Don Jose’s on September 3.

It also reminded me of a personal connection I have with the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  Ever since the tragedy, I just can’t stop thinking about George Alec Effinger.  George lived for over 30 years in New Orleans, and wrote about it often.  While best known as a science fiction writer, George wrote several mainstream novels as well.

One of these was entitled Felicia and this novel now seems oddly prophetic.  It is definitely a story of its own time, and could not take place in this day and age of instant internet communication, but was quite a clever thriller in its day.  It concerns a small town in Louisiana in the 1970s where a meteorologist at the town’s only television station falls in with some dishonest truckers who conceive a brilliant plot to evacuate the town and loot it.  The TV weatherman begins predicting the imminent arrival of a deadly hurricane and convinces the town sheriff to order the citizens to vacate to higher ground.  The truckers plan to simply drive in after the town has been evacuated and load up their rigs with whatever valuables they can steal.  Predictably, the fictitious hurricane Felicia turns into a genuine storm and the truckers find themselves trapped in the empty town with no escape route.
Hurricanes are common in the Gulf of Mexico, and the residents have seen enough of them to know the drill.  You do what you have to do.  Felicia, however, turns into one of those “Storms of the Century” like Camille, which destroyed Galveston, Texas in the 1960s, or Andrew, which tore through Florida in the 1990s.  Katrina, while initially mild by most standards, did what some of those unpredictable hurricanes do and became our first “Storm of the 21st Century.”

We will be hearing stories about this hurricane for years.  Stories from the survivors, stories from the rescuers, stories about the evacuation, the refugees in the Superdome, the incompetent police and federal emergency management personnel who quarantined the city and prevented rescuers from entering for days and days.  Don’t get me started.

I only met George Alec Effinger a few times, but he was always a joy.  We bought him a Greyhound bus ticket to bring him from New Orleans to Austin for our second ArmadilloCon way back in 1980.  I hadn’t worked on the first one, but was assigned hotel liaison duties for ArmadilloCon 2 (a position I continued to fill for 3 and 4).  Our Guest of Honor was Gardner Dozois, who had collaborated with George on a novel, Nightmare Blue five years earlier.  According to Willie Siros, they hadn’t seen each other since then, so it would be a surprise for Gardner to see his old friend in Texas at what I understand was Dozois’ first Guest of Honor appearance.

George was an amazing man.  At that con, he set a record high score on the Quality Inn’s Missile Command arcade machine that endured for months.  And he only spent one quarter to do it.  He was that good.  He described bohemian life in New Orleans in such vivid terms that you could almost feel the excitement of Mardi Gras from an Austin hotel suite.  This was at least six years before he used the French Quarter as a template for the futuristic middle eastern metropolis of his groundbreaking novel When Gravity Fails.

He was never in good health, and I was always glad to see him at cons years later, as I had a gnawing fear that he wouldn’t be with us for very long.  In fact, I’m surprised he lived as long as he did, considering how sick he always seemed to be.  He spent so much time in and out of hospitals, it was a wonder he managed to write as much as he did.  And with the chronic pain he lived with day after day, it’s amazing he was able to keep such a sharp sense of humor through it all.  He wrote some of the funniest science fiction stories of all time.  If you don’t believe me, just read one of them, his Nebula winning knee-slapper, “The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything.”

So with New Orleans so much on my mind, I can’t stop thinking about the man who best represented New Orleans to me as a science fiction fan, and how prophetic his obscure mainstream novel Felicia turned out to be.  In a way, I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened to the city he loved so much, but on the other hand, he deserves some recognition for imagining and even predicting what could happen when a hurricane of that magnitude hits a major metropolitan city.

Mailing Comments:

Vernon Gravely:  Your story of the accident was eerily reminiscent of my son’s tale of wrecking his car last May when he was driving from the Bay Area out to Ione to spend a weekend with his girlfriend.  Ione is about halfway to Yosemite from our place, and it was about twilight when he rounded a curve only to find a deer smack dab in the middle of the road.  He swerved one direction to avoid the animal, then swerved the other direction to stay on the road, overcompensated, and the car rolled on its side and slid down an embankment.  He was in a very similar situation in that while he could extract himself from his seatbelt, the car was still on its side and he was unable to climb out from the passenger door as it kept falling on him as he balanced his toes on the parking brake trying to push it open.  Eventually, some folks pulled over to help him out and they were able to turn the car over, but it was totaled.  Danny Trejo never entered his mind, since all he ever thinks about these days is his girlfriend (they plan to move in together next spring, after she finishes her fall semester at college).

Jimmy Dean:  Glad to know you’re feeling healthier.  I, too, have become more health conscious over the past couple of years after my father and brother both had heart attacks within a year of each other.  We now have a family health club membership and I go work out at least three times a week.  I haven’t lost any weight, but I have transformed my once flabby beer gut into a mild washboard and am sometimes astounded by what weightlifting can do to the biceps and chest.  As hard as it is sometimes to drag myself in for a workout, it is amazing how good I feel when I’m done with it.

Kennedy Gammage:  Having attended a few bar mitzvah celebrations, I can only imagine how much work went into preparing for Ben’s on both his part and yours.  Congratulations!  By now, I hope your remodeling project is done and you are moved back in to enjoy your beautiful home.  Now, let’s see some pictures of the completed kitchen.

Alice Eaton:  Speaking of kitchens, I was delighted to read about the “Compendium.”  Pam likes to buy cookbooks (and occasionally even cooks), so I’m familiar with the three-ring binder Betty Crocker classic as well as the Bible itself, The Joy of Cooking (Pam even has her copy autographed by coauthor Irma Rombauer’s son).  But the “Compendium” sounds nothing like those books.  Having brewed a few batches of my own beer in my kitchen, the Compendium’s beer recipe sounds absurd, but then again, the first time I brewed beer, I was amazed at what went into it and the odd techniques used to arrive at the desired result.  I almost wish you had included the section on Mead, as I have seen dozens of different mead recipes, and wouldn’t mind trying it myself if I had the patience.  Mead requires no less than a minimum of 12 months to age, and the longer the better.  The best mead has been aged at least four years if not longer.

Allan Beatty:  Another website you might want to check out for geek tunes is http://www.deadtroll.com which has a wonderful video of the SysAdmin Song presented live in Las Vegas last spring.  The back and forth discussion on suicide from a libertarian/objectivist perspective was interesting, but a little too close to home for me.  I’m still working through issues with Kent Johnson’s suicide and while he wasn’t a libertarian, he certainly seemed to feel he was responsible for his own decisions and the feelings of his friends weren’t all that important in the end.  He had a wide support network that only became stronger when he told us all about his first attempt to end his life.  I spent an entire evening on the phone with him one night because I felt he needed me for more than just walking him through re-installing Windows98 and I thought he was doing pretty well when all of a sudden we learned he finally made the decision none of us wanted him to make.  I think Wm Breiding hit the nail on the head when he told me he thinks Kent was just paralyzed by fear.  Fear of asking his friends for help, fear of depending on others and finally, just fear of going outside his apartment.  I had other theories that ended up being completely wrong when I read his final suicide note.  He apologized for hurting us, but made it abundantly clear that what he wanted was an end to his pain and this was the way he had chosen to find that end.

Jennifer Dean:  Your tale of co-worker pranks reminded me a of a story I saw posted on boingboing the other day about two legal secretaries in Australia who were sacked after their email flamewar was posted to other law firms in the city for the amusement of the entire business community.  Personally, I think the email administrator should also be sacked for sending the messages out to his friends, but it was so funny and so ridiculous that he couldn’t resist sharing the joke with his buddies.  Always remember, email isn’t necessarily private unless you use reliable encryption.  And if you are going to say things in email you might regret later, you should learn how to encrypt them so they don’t get passed around to embarrass you.

2005-08-27T20:37:00.000-07:00

Ballot Madness

The morning didn’t start out well today. A tragic suicide in front of a BART train in San Leandro during the morning commute disrupted what even under normal circumstances would have been a pretty frantic day. Both my sons ride BART almost daily from that station. Alex normally walks to BART to catch a train to SFSU, where he’s beginning his Sophomore year. He could, however, drive to the Coliseum station since the San Leandro station was likely to be closed for hours. Nathan (who normally rides a skateboard to BART), had no such option. He is in the final week of editing a music video he directed as part of the summer Youth Sounds Factory project in Oakland, and has only a few days left in the studio before it must be wrapped. His partner in the project also had to have some way to get to Telegraph Avenue. It seemed I was their only hope.

Coincidentally, I had also worked a 13 hour day on Thursday night preparing for a major office move taking place today. I felt I’d earned some comp time for that (and for last weekend’s marathon six hour server maintenance day), so I had scheduled time to drive around the Bay Area to get authorization signatures on two Ballot Arguments I had drafted for the Libertarian Party to oppose some major tax disasters coming our way in the Special Election called for November 8.

Because this is not a standard election, but one called by Gov. Schwarzenegger to accomplish things the legislature won’t touch, the turnout is expected to be low. As low voter turnout allows governments to more easily pass stealth tax increases, this is the best time for them to sneak these insidious plots onto the ballot and have them passed with only a modest and inexpensive get-out-the-vote campaign and almost non-existent opposition. The only ones voting on this will be the ones with a stake in it: the proponents of the tax hikes (school districts) and the folks who are lucky enough to know about it in advance, such as the parents who regularly attend school board meetings to keep up with their activities and those like me, who stopped by the Registrar’s office to check what measures had been filed).

I am active in my son’s high school United Parents organization (the PTA having been kicked off campus ten years ago). The parents at the time didn’t feel the national organization --- and the resources it requires of its affiliates --- would benefit the campus anywhere as much as local self-interested parents acting as an independent, autonomous body. So I do know the kind of financial pressures under which our schools operate. But I’ve also seen some tremendous wastes of my tax money over the years caused by ill-conceived projects and incompetent execution.

The folks we elect to school boards are little league politicians still in spring training. They’re just figuring out how the political games are played, and while merely getting elected demonstrates an aptitude for the backstabbing nature of the path they have chosen, they still haven’t had enough practice to be as ruthless as their big league mentors in the state legislature and congress. And like their party bosses, many of them assume the voters really are as stupid as polls tend to indicate. They passed Proposition 39 in 2002, which lowered the threshold required to approve a school bond measure in California from 2/3 to 55%.

It’s not as if bonds in this state have had any particular trouble getting passed over the years under the 2/3 rule. In drafting the ballot arguments, it was very helpful to remind the voters how many bonds they’ve already approved over the past seven years in both communities affected by these proposals, and how only $4 million of the projected $200 million debt has been paid off since 1998. And with only two exceptions, the projects targeted for completion in this bond proposal are identical to the projects that were described in the previous two bond measures that have not yet been completed. The projects had so far exceeded their projected budgets that they could not be completed with first $53 million, so they need another $44 million to finish. Just going over the past history of bond funding for these school districts pretty much wrote the argument all by itself.

It’s like the freshmen politicians on the school boards have been taken in by the credit card companies that prey on young college kids just moving out of their parents’ homes for the first time. You see these companies staffing tables in the stadiums at college football games, signing up one gullible 19 year old after another with the magic of plastic. The temptation of actually having the power to craft a measure that creates a no-limit credit card account for you and your buddies that you won’t have to pay off yourself must be intoxicating.. It is also good to remind the voters what the politicians already know: the burden of paying off this debt is not theirs or ours, but falls on our children.

This is child abuse of the worst kind because it can’t be talked away through therapy or compensated by a multi-million dollar payoff from the Catholic church. It is abuse that requires our sons and daughters to carry the lion’s share of financial responsibility to pay off the high interest credit cards we used to fund their “free” education. As painful as paying taxes is for those of us with modest means, it must be even more painful for those with the resources to afford tuition at private schools, since they have to pay even more to support the mediocre schools as well as the good ones.

Well, Nathan was not able to contact Aimee to coordinate travel plans, and since he didn’t have to be in Oakland until 11:00 a.m., I dashed out to Castro Valley to get more folks to sign on with our argument. Had I known then that the Registrar would accept faxed signatures, it could have saved considerable trouble. I would have had at least two more signatures on our arguments if I had this little bit of extra knowledge in advance of the deadline. But all worked out in the end, and by the time I returned to San Leandro to get Nathan and Aimee, the BART station had re-opened. Nathan still had not been able to get in touch with Aimee, and wasn’t quite ready to leave when I had to get back to Richmond for more move work. He said he would get to BART the way he normally does, on his skateboard. So I dashed off to Richmond to begin the day, with a detour to El Cerrito to get Curt Cornell’s signature on our papers.

The movers had not quite finished unloading by the time I arrived, which was fortunate for me, since my security badge hadn’t yet been activated in the new building, so I could not open any doors the way I can in the other buildings on the campus. But I was able to get to the new office because the security guards already know me and the movers had propped open some otherwise secure doors to deliver their loads. I was able to get all but five computers set up, and Noah Hanna agreed to finish the last ones so I could leave by 3:00 p.m.

I made a mad dash to San Leandro, where Peter Kavaler and Steven Rosenberg agreed to meet me halfway to put their signatures on the argment, and then had to cancel my other appointment at the Westover Winery because I really didn’t think I could get out there and then get back to downtown Oakland by the 5:00 deadline for filing my paperwork. As it turned out, I just made it with only about 20 minutes to spare.

A competing argument had been filed against the Albany parcel tax and the author had contacted me this morning to ask that we use his argument as our rebuttal instead of the one we’d spent several days drafting and editing via email. I’d discussed this with Curt Cornell, our Chair who was the lead signature on both arguments and rebuttals, and he agreed that it was more important to build a coalition with other local tax opponents than submit our rebuttal by itself, which, while clarifying some factual errors made by the proponents, did not take a particularly sympathetic stand regarding the teachers who were behind the measure. I know teachers and know how their union has been able to strong-arm lots of measures like this one onto the ballot, but like it or not, the public feels great warmth toward them when it comes time to vote on tax increases. This is why so many tax hikes like this one pass, because they are sold to the voters as a way to help “the children” while it is actually the teachers who benefit.

Pointing out mistakes in an essay written by teachers is kind of harsh, but someone has to say it. Still, an argument that was sympathetic or neutral toward the teachers has a much better chance of persuading voters to oppose the proposal than ours would have. Add to that some text that agrees with the union in principle concerning “No Child Left Behind” and standardized testing and you gain the trust of voters who might otherwise support the tax. Leon Rimov attends these school board meetings, and has followed the progress of this proposal since its earliest inception. He wrote the other opposing argument and asked me if we could substitute his argument as our rebuttal. While I still like our own argument, I thought it was far more important to have Mr. Rimov’s side published as well. So this is the rebuttal that will appear in the voter information packet:

Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Measure A

Be careful what you vote for – you may get it and have to live with it.

Listen to the words of Albany School Board Member Miriam Walden on June 23, 2005:

“Parcel taxes are very regressive—they disproportionately impact low income families at a time when these families already use a very large part of their income for housing.”

And remember this: the Albany Unified School District has a reserve of approximately $900,000.

The Governor and Legislature have stolen monies from 1998’s Proposition 98 education agreement -- $500,000 stolen from this District’s budget next year!

Hey, up there! Give it back!

Albany, get focused. Get it right! Parcel taxes in 1987…1993…1999. Another parcel tax in 2005?
A basic cause for today’s problems can be found in that clever legislative and unfunded scheme…Leave No Child Behind. This mandate has resulted in military, religious and fraudulent science teachings beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

“Teaching to the test” has become today’s mantra. It’s a flawed standard of education. Its consequence is the dumbing down of our youth.

Funding for “teaching to the test” is no way to educate a productive and responsible citizenry. It fails in the development of positive analytic skills.

Measure A is no answer to the problem. Naïve taxpayers are being pick-pocketed again. This November 8 Special Election Parcel Tax pleading deserves much more thought and transparency.

Vote NO on Measure A.

Signed
Leon Rimov, Architecht
Albany resident , Native Californian

Here is the rebuttal we finally finished, but did not submit, due to Mr. Rimov's more "politically correct" argument:

Original Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Measure A

Proponents of Measure A have fabricated statistics to support their
argument. According to the Census Bureau, California teachers enjoy
the highest average salary in the country ($56K) as of 2003 (the
latest data available) directly contradicting their claims. Note that
the proponents of this tax are themselves schoolteachers and
administrators, who have their own financial interests at stake. They
want to raise YOUR taxes so that they can increase THEIR
paychecks. According to the same Census Bureau report, California
does not rank near the bottom of all 50 states in school funding, but
only 35th. Granted, that isn't anything to boast about, but it isn't as dire as the proponents claim.

Did you notice the advocates want to increase your taxes in order
to "maintain small class sizes." This is the problem. They want
forever more money to just break even. Previous tax hikes have not
increased education quality, nor will this one. If anything, our
schools are worse now than when the last parcel tax passed. The
measure mandates the tax to increase every year at the rate of
inflation. If this remains at 3%, your $250 parcel tax will increase
to more than $300/year by 2012, when this tax is supposed to sunset.
The proponents appear to want housing in Albany to be even less
affordable than it is now!

With all other taxes rising (not to mention the cost of gasoline),
can you afford this tax? Please think of the children and vote NO on
Measure A.

Signed

Curt Cornell, Chair, Libertarian Party of Alameda County

Ralph Hoffman, P.E. (TX), Senior Citizen Representative

San Ramon Valley Unified School District Citizen Oversight Committee

The rebuttal to our argument against Measure B is rather weak, and criticizes our group for having no children in the Castro Valley Schools, but that point is in error, as we now have more Castro Valley residents signing on to our rebuttal.

Rebuttal to Argument Against Measure B

Do not be fooled! We are residents of Castro Valley. Most of those urging you to vote no do not live in Castro Valley. Neither their children nor their property values will be affected by a vote on Measure B. However, every “No” vote will have a negative impact on students and property values in Castro Valley.

The facts are clear: In 1998 and 2002, voters approved local school bonds to begin the renovation of older schools in the Castro Valley Unified School District. The district has been able to repair roofing, build new classrooms, and renovate older school buildings. The 2002 bond allowed the schools to continue renovation, add science classrooms at each elementary school, and build a Performing Arts Center at Castro Valley High School.

But there is more that must be done.

Most of the schools in Castro Valley were built in the 1950s. There have been major changes in education since 1950. Measure B funds will make information-age library access available to students and give students the classrooms and facilities needed to meet today’s educational standards.

Since 1998, all bond funds have been spent only on previously authorized local school projects. None have been spent on administrative salaries. Many of us have served on the Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee and we have seen our local bond funds spent well. If there was a problem or lack of diligence by the district, we would have reported it to the community.

Please vote YES on Measure B.

Signed
Various Castro Valley Teachers, School Administrators and Business owners

Our rebuttal to the argument in favor of Measure B was written by Peter Kavaler, another one of those parents who regularly attends school board meetings. Peter is also a network engineer who has already done tons of volunteer work on the “library information technology” project for his children’s Castro Valley schools that has been in the bond project list since 1998. According to Peter, it has so far been one of the biggest and most wasteful of all these projects. The proponents are correct that of course there is “more that must be done,” because nothing significant has yet been accomplished since the District promised these upgrades back during the dot com boom. They didn’t even take advantage of obtaining cheap network equipment at pennies on the dollar after all those dot com businesses folded and had to sell off their inventory four years ago. That was when they should have kicked the project into high gear and finished it without spending even half of the funds they had budgeted for it. But of course, we couldn’t get those details into this argument due to the 250 word limit.

Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Measure B

Of the $53,000,000 worth of bonds passed so far, only $4 million has been paid off. The total cost, including interest, of all three bonds will be about $200 million, a tremendous sum for our relatively small school district. We will be paying for these bonds with substantial property tax increases for 30 years. They won't be paid off entirely until decades after today's kindergarten class graduates from college!

All campuses have undergone extensive remodeling in the last 5 years. Why do we now need to do it all over again to comply with "seismic standards?" The bond summary omits the fact that the single largest expenditure is for a new athletic complex at the high school. Many other projects, such as library improvements and replacement of heating systems, were explicitly detailed in the first bond's project list in 1998. Why are these items now re-appearing in this bond?

The grandiose plans for a new athletic complex for the High School are estimated to cost over $14 million. Yet the Castro Valley Sports Foundation estimates that a new field, track, and bleachers should cost no more than $3 million. So where is the other $11 million going to be spent?

We must think carefully before approving this third bond. We all want our children to have the best education possible, but let's not burden them with a debt they can ill afford. Please join us, your fellow school supporters, and vote NO on Measure B.

Signed
Curt Cornell, Chair, Libertarian Party of California
Michael S. Dubin, Castro Valley Taxpayer
Peter Kavaler, Castro Valley Parent
Steven Rosenberg, Ph.D., Microbiologist, Castro Valley
Ralph A. Hoffmann, P.E.(TX), Senior Citizen Representative, San Ramon Valley Unified School District Citizens' Oversight Committee

Voters won't see any of these arguments until they receive their sample ballots sometime in late September or perhaps early October. Now the campaign really begins.