Category: Life

The MLA explains how to cite a Tweet in your academic papers.

((Maetenloch). “There’s now a style guide for citeing Tweets” 5 March 2012, 12:30 p.m. Tweet.)

I am a scofflaw.

According to this can of bathroom cleaner:

It is a violation of Federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling.

And:

1. Spray 6-8 inches from surface to be cleaned.

I am pretty sure that I sprayed from under 6 inches away from a toilet and maybe more than 8 inches, say 8.034 inches, away from the basin.

According to this can, I have violated Federal law several times today.

Now, I know the can is no attorney, but come on, it’s easy to imagine that such a law exists that makes it an actual crime to just let the product sit on a heavily soiled surface for only one minute just because the law says do what the instructions tell you.

Because some regulator or set of legislators saw the problem (what, people huffing aerosols? Using bathroom cleaners on ovens?) and passed/made some burden to put the fear of the Federal Bureau of Investigation into consumers who read the packaging.

Another Federal law that goes unenforced. Unless the prosecutors can’t hang someone for a real crime, and Al Capone goes to prison in the 21st century for consumer-grade solvent misuse.

Sad, isn’t it?

UPDATE Thanks for the link, Ms. K. Hey, if you’re in the IT field, check out my blog QA Hates You. Also note my IT caper novel is available for the Kindle for 99 cents and in paperback. Thanks!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Puma “Clever Little Bag” side-by-side with a traditional shoebox:

The text on the Clever Little Bag reads:

CLEVER LITTLE BAG

Well it’s smarter than an old fashioned shoebox because it uses 65% less paper. Even better, it means you don’t need an extra carrier bag and you can use it over and over again. Clever huh? Follow the Puma eco-table reuse this bag.

www.puma.com/cleverlittlebag

All the grammar errors are indigenous to the bag itself. Apparently, it will also save 40 billion commas and 100 million hyphens to protect the environment.

So. This clever little bag will protect the environment, how?

Instead of a fully biodegradable or fully recycleable cardboard box, we have half a cardboard box and a reusable bag. A reusable bag that’s about the size of a children’s shoe shoebox that I can use perpetually as a carrier bag. Is that what I need? Let me run down the reusable bags I have already: Book bags from every library I’ve ever befriended, a tote bag from the company that buried my mother, little cloth bags that contained linens or something, and a laptop bag. Guess which of these I use. Just one.

No, I have no use for a bag of this size. It’ll probably go right into the garbage can.

Whereas one of those demonic cardboard shoeboxes, when they’re not being recycled or breaking down quickly in a landfill, are excellent storage boxes for mementos from lovers past or gee-gaws of a certain size. I mean, really, who ever gets rid of a shoebox?

I think Puma has outsmarted itself in its quest to have a nice story to tell the environmentally conscious, which is to say, semi-conscious, amongst us.

What’s a good sign that a bubble is inflating? The experts don’t see a bubble inflating:

Even as homeowners and commercial landlords count their losses from the great real-estate bust, Midwestern farmers are experiencing the biggest property boom in a generation.

The rapid run-up in land values is bound to make some people nervous, especially older farmers who remember how property values collapsed during the farm crisis of the 1980s. Farm economists, though, don’t yet see signs of a land-price bubble.

Economists, the experts, are always the last to know.

A consultant says that Springfield can turn $40 million tax dollars into a cool $1 billion:

A consultant’s report estimates that a $90 million investment in the Springfield Expo Center and adjoining facilities could increase local spending over the next 25 years by more than $1 billion.

Chicago-based consultant Rob Hunden, who will present the financial impact analysis to city staff and others Thursday, estimates that public money would need to cover about $40 million of the development costs. But the taxpayers’ investment would be paid back with increased tax revenue within 25 years.

“The groups that get the tax money aren’t necessarily the groups that would invest the tax money,” Hunden said, cautioning that the estimate includes revenue to all the taxing jurisdictions in Greene County.

So, while the city would not recoup the entire $40 million investment directly, Hunden expects the combined tax revenue of the city, county, local school districts and others to increase by about $43 million overall.

Spending $40 million dollars to develop a convention center when the convention industry is in steep decline and conventioneers, those that remain, will find the opportunity to get bargain rates in larger cities as they struggle to populate their tax-funded convention centers.

I’m not sure Bernie Madoff promised this sort of return to his investors. In the 21st century, people are quite right to think that “con man” is short for “consultant man.”

Yesterday’s Springfield News-Leader ran the following two stories on page 1, probably thinking they’re unrelated.

In the first, the governor fights against the legislature’s spending priorities, which place university funding against state payments for the care of under 3,000 citizens who are blind:

Gov. Jay Nixon and disability advocates are criticizing a House committee’s recommendation to cut $28 million in medical services for blind Missourians in order to make up for a reduction in higher education funding.

The House Appropriations Committee on Health, Mental Health and Social Services recommended last week cutting more than $60 million in funding to a variety of programs. Among the reductions was the money used to take care of 2,858 blind Missourians.

But the nut graf is deeper in the story:

Nixon’s initial budget proposal included a reduction of $106 million for public colleges and universities.

Cuts to higher education! Why, the students will have to make due with fewer tenured professors and more itinerant professors. The universities will have to cut staff! Because the universities cannot stop funding expensive amenities:

A new architectural addition to the campus of Missouri State University is only months away from reality.

At the construction site of Foster Recreation Center, workers are installing basketball goals, putting up supports for a climbing wall and completing a swimming pool with a lazy river.

To the tune of:

The university broke ground on the $30 million construction project in April 2010.

I know, that money comes from a student fee and not from the state’s monies, but it’s the state’s monies that make the $30,000,000 “investment” in amusement activities possible.

Because governments don’t have to prioritize spending, and if they do, they’re demonized.

Ah, the words one learns.

In creating the post below, I looked up the spelling of the word algorithm to make sure I was spelling it right (I was), and I encountered the word algorism which does not have to do with the environment or making millions on carbon credit schemes while opposing strange financial schemes that originate on Wall Street.

I’ll have to use algorismic in a sentence today and hope I don’t get slapped. Also, I need to add them both to Firefox’s dictionary since I’ll be typing them on the Internet frequently in the near term.

The editor of TheGloss.com writes for Slate about her experiences working at a bar with a college degree and some degree of literacy. She says, self-consciously:

I was a terrific little snob who thought she knew everything, and subsequently, I was about to learn a great deal.

…

It quickly became clear that I was not the first literate person to don a miniskirt. Sometime during that first week, I was hiding in the backroom reading Margaret Atwood. I was sitting on the counter next to baskets of party mix because my feet hurt, which they did for the entirety of my shot-selling career. One cocktail waitress swept in, asked what I thought of Atwood’s novel “Oryx and Crake,” did a tricky little analysis where she compared it to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” mentioned some other female dystopian writers I’d never heard of, and then went out balancing a tray of shots on one hand.

As ridiculous as it sounds, that was the first time I became aware that clever people are buried in every nook and cranny of life. It is astonishing that no one pointed this out to me sooner. The girls working at the bar — they were so bright. Another shot girl had a journal that she filled with poetry that was — that rarest of all rare things — crisp and clean and very, very good. This was never a bar where everyone knew your name, but the cocktail waitresses came to know one another’s reading lists, and pitch letters, and audition schedules extremely well.

That is, she learned to recognize there in the wilderness of people working for a living that there were other clever people.

Who are the clever people?

The ones who read books like she does, the ones who write poems and other things that have to be pitched through letters, and the ones who want to act.

Take it from me, a literate guy with a college degree who likes to read books (not just the pulp ones) who spent years after college working in a variety of environments, from retail to warehouse to printing plant before entering the “professional” world where kids come out of college into $60,000 jobs without having to first learn how the world works.

Take it from me: There are more types of cleverness in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Cleverness is not just reading and writing. Cleverness can be doing a job well, with sprezzatura, because the person has learned it so well to have innovated tricks into it. Cleverness can be looking at something mechanical and immediately having a 3-d exploded view of it so one can take it apart, repair it, and put it together again without extra pieces. Clever can be so many things.

(Link via Instapundit.)

The Springfield News-Leader today breaks down some of the amounts the various government entities spend during a simple 1″ snowfall, including:

Smith estimated that by the end of the storm, the county [Greene] would spend between $40,000 and $50,000 on highway salt alone.

…

John Drury, superintendent of streets at Springfield Public Works, said the city could spend $20,000 to salt primary and secondary routes in a 12-hour period. During that shift, labor would cost about $12,000 and the cost of operating vehicles and equipment, about $24,000.

That calculates to roughly $56,000 per shift.

Drury said this storm would require two shifts, possibly a third.

The Springfield school district spent an estimated $4,000 in salt for sidewalks and portions of parking lots Monday.

This is the cost of essential government service. Officials admit that this year has not broken the budget, with the unseasonably warm temperatures and precipitation falling as rain instead of snow or ice. But this is what government should spend money on. Not on distressed buildings it wants to spruce up for an urban renaissance, not on diversity co-ordinators and public-private partnership mavens or educational outreach programs or clever advertising for government initiatives. Or clever government initiatives, for that matter.

In Springfield, the voters have voted the wrong way:

As the votes were being counted, a group of opponents of the controversial E-Verify ordinance waited anxiously at a downtown bar.

Marla Marantz, an organizer with Citizens for a United Springfield, watched the results trickle in on a laptop computer on a table near the east wall of Ophelia’s Tapas & Wine Bar.

Mayor Jim O’Neal, who on Friday called the initiative “misguided,” checked his iPhone periodically for the latest results as he mingled with others gathered for the watch party.

And:

Marantz acknowledged she was emotional about the results.

“I care deeply about it,” she said. “I think people were misled about what the ordinance is really about.”

O’Neal acknowledged disappointment.

“How close this vote was demonstrates a great division in the community.”

“But the people have spoken,” he said.

O’Neal said he and city council are now in a “precarious position” – mandated to defend inevitable legal challenges.

O’Neal said taxpayers could now have to pay for “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to defend the measure in court. He cited parts of the ordinance believed to be problematic.

The measure would require employers in city of Springfield to check employee eligibility with a Federal program:

A petition-based ordinance requiring local employers to screen employees using the online E-Verify program passed by a narrow margin Tuesday, although how and when it will be enforced remains unclear.

“We’re pleased that the citizens of Springfield heard our message and agreed with us, but we temper the celebration with the knowledge that this is a contentious issue and people of good conscience can disagree,” said Jerry Wilson, a spokesman for the Ozarks Minutemen.

He said the group hopes both sides now will “put aside their differences and support the rule of law.”

“This has always been about one thing,” Wilson said. “You’re either eligible to work in the United States or you are not.”

Opponents conceded the loss Tuesday but said the fight against the ordinance isn’t over.

The 221 vote difference — less than 1.4 percent of the vote — is outside the 1 percent threshold for a recount. But Mayor Jim O’Neal, who came out strongly against the measure in the days before the election, said he expects the ordinance to be challenged in court.

Not so that you could tell in the radio advertisements that Citizens for United Springfield were running on election day, where the nature of the question was not discussed, but only the impact of the check on local businesses leading to fewer jobs in Springfield.

The election was close:

                                             VOTES PERCENT

City of Springfield Question 1
 YES  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .     8,247   50.68
 NO.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .     8,026   49.32

How different that was from an election a year ago:

                                             VOTES PERCENT

City of Springfield Question 2
 YES  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .    11,201   53.35
 NO.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .     9,795   46.65

Where was the mayor lamenting the lawsuits then? The concerns by the right-thinking crowd about the adverse impact on business? Not here:

Clean air won out over living free Tuesday in an election battle that had been defined as a showdown between public health and business rights.

Springfield voters approved a sweeping indoor smoking ban by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, setting the stage for all businesses in Springfield to be smoke-free by June 6.

“We’re glad to see people decided in favor of the health of the community,” said Carrie Reynolds, spokeswoman for the group, Clean Air Springfield, that had lobbied on behalf of the ordinance.

Opponents, meanwhile, said they intend to support businesses impacted by the ban and remain active through an inevitable legal challenge.

“We’ll basically be a lobbying group for them,” said Live Free Springfield Chairman David Myers.

In both cases, a tiny fraction of voters won a ballot-initiated election, but the reactions from the members of the city government itself are very different.

In my cabinet in the kitchen where we store our pharmaceuticals and supplements, I recently uncovered this curiosity when I tried to find a child’s liquid medicine syringe among the cat pill guns and out-of-date vitamins:

Continue reading “What Is in Brian’s Cabinets, Part 1 in a Continuing Series” →

A History Channel Club bookmark has an interesting bit of inconsistency. Can you spot it?

Click for full size

Continue reading “Eh, They’re Republicans, So They’re All The Same Anyway” →

A couple weeks ago, the NRA sent me a DVD for some sort of self-defense course, telling me that it was a free preview, and I could mail it back in the post paid envelope or I could pay them $30 in gold or silver dimes to keep it.

Well, friends, as you might know, if some manufacturer or vendor sends you something unsolicited, that is a free gift to you, and you’re under no obligation to return it or to pay for it.

As the NRA nag letter that looks a lot like an invoice but can’t be an invoice says:

Although I’m not sure how the required text telling me I’m not obligated to pay for your widely cast net amounts to a “Service Guarantee.”

Good on ya, NRA. You’re stooping to the tricks of the Time-Warner media empire and trying to trick me out of money you don’t think you can get from me honestly. Did I say “good”? I meant a good pox.

It was all the way to January 4th before they started explaining how stupid Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were:

It’s going to be a long election year.