bogen.org

I spent some time recently getting photos we took during our cross country drive
from California to Wisconsin on-line.  My scanner isn’t the best, so
some of the pictures look better on paper than on the screen.  Also,
I let the filesizes grow somewhat on the these pictures in an attempt to
reduce compression irregularities.  As such, those of you on slow
connections may have to wait a moment or two before the pictures fully
displayed on your screen.

Recently, I’ve been mixing chicory into my coffee.  The chicory I’ve been using
is sold in the grocery store in a quantity designed to be mixed with one
pound of coffee.  This is all well and good except for the fact that
one cannot buy one pound of coffee anymore.All coffee sold in stores
these days is sold in useless quantities like 11.5, 13, 26, 36, and 39 ounce
sizes.  So, if one buys a 13oz. can of coffee, one has to then add
81.25% of the package of chicory to achieve the desired ratio of coffee to
chicory.  If one buys the 26oz. can of coffee, one has to add 61.53% of the
coffee to the chicory.  Of course, one option would be to use the
“bag and grind your own” coffees that are sold in the grocery
stores.  If one used this coffee, one could fill the bag until one
pound of coffee had been dispensed and then one could use the store’s coffee
grinder to quickly grind the pound of coffee.  This sounds like a sane
and sensible solution, right?  Not necessarily.  See, most grocery
stores don’t place a scale anywhere near the coffee aisle.  As such,
one must fill a bag with coffee, wander back to the produce section, weigh the coffee,
go back to the coffee aisle, add some more coffee, go back to the produce
section and weigh the coffee, ad. nauseum.  How did our great nation
arrive at this sad state of affairs?  The current conspiracy
theory says that coffee manufacturers have reduced the size of the cans they
use while keeping prices the same during the last few years.  All of
this, of course, while wholesale coffee prices have plunged
dramatically.  So, big corporations pay less than ever for the coffee
they buy, which they then put in smaller cans (or they put less coffee in
the same size cans), which in turn are sold to us at prices that are
essentially unchanged.  Whee!

Ira has determined that he really likes the month of
October.  Pumpkin is rapidly becoming one of his favorite foods. 
Not only is pumpkin full of fiber, but it is, apparently, full of tortoise-y
good taste.  Sarah and I often joke about how funny it would be to cut
a large pumpkin in half, remove all the seeds, deposit the tortoise into the
seed cavity, and then come back in a few hours.  That would probably be
the highlight of Ira’s life:  surrounded by squash.

Well, I’m still unemployed, so next Tuesday, I’m going to be raking in
the big bucks working as an elections inspector for the city of
Madison.  I’ll show up at 06:15 CST, work until 13:30 CST, and make out
with the princely sum of under forty dollars.  Of course, it should not be
real difficult work, so I can’t expect the pay to be six figures.  If I
can just keep my assigned polling place from going Dade and Broward Counties,
I should be all set.

How about those Vikings?  They won their second game of the season
to run their record to 2-5!  If the team could just schedule a few
(read: 9) games against the Bears and Lions this year, the Vikes might just
squeak into the playoffs.  Of course, maybe a game or two against the
Cincinnati Bungles wouldn’t hurt much, either.

It’s good to see that the Bush administration isn’t concentrating
completely on dragging the country into an unnecessary war with Iraq. 
Putting the wrong person for the job in any given job is still a priority
with our current corrupt administration.  For instance, the new board
to regulate the accounting profession, created by Congressional mandate,
will be headed by a gentleman who has absolutely no experience with either
accounting or the accounting profession.  I’m sure that William H.
Webster is a fine upstanding citizen, but what does he know about corporate
accounting?  The guy used to head up the FBI and the CIA.  Neither
of those particular agencies really is big in accounting circles.  For
all that Webster knows about accounting, the Bush/Cheney camarilla could
have tabbed me for the position.  I know just as much about corporate
accounting as Webster, am currently unemployed, and would save you, the
taxpayer, a heck of a lot of money because I’d be significantly cheaper to
hire.

The problem with public radio fund raising campaigns is that you are not
freed from listening to begging for money after you pledge funds.  In
an ideal world, one would be freed from listening to people wheedle funds
out of other people once one’s own funds had been committed to the
cause.  As it is, there is absolutely no benefit to pledging funds to
public radio at the beginning of a pledge drive, or more than once a year,
because a pledge does not remove the burden of listening to the pledge drive
itself.Why does Wisconsin Public
Radio need to raise $30,000 this evening during

Prairie Home Companion
(PHC)if their WPR’s own figures say that it only costs them
$15,000 per year to broadcast PHC?  Do the listeners of PHC subsidize
less popular programs (which also tend to be less expensive) or does the
extra money go pay staffing costs?  Also, almost all pledge drives
(there are at least three a year now) stretch across two weekends, so WPR
is trying to raise $180,000 ($30,000 for each Saturday broadcast of PHC
during three fund drives that encompass six Saturdays) to bring me
programming that costs a full order of magnitude less than the amount being
raised?

Today, I was looking for information about root cellars on-line.  During my browsing, I found an
interesting page that describes a nuclear fallout shelter built from a steel
culvert.  From that page, I found a link to the homepage of Utah
Shelter Systems, a company that provides detailed information on exactly
what sort of shelter one would need to survive a nuclear blast.  This
was interesting because I did not anticipate that a search for information
about root cellars could lead me to a detailed discussion of nuclear blast
effects in less than three clicks of the mouse.

Oh, don’t forget to check out the Root
Cellar Capital of the World.

We saw the movie The Tao of Steve last night on video.  It was
entertaining, but not as funny as we thought it might be.

Sarah bought an antique rocking chair at a garage sale near our home
today.  For the last few years, she has been questing for a rocking
chair that fit her well and fit her budget.  This particular chair is,
if you believe the people from whom it was purchased, over 100 years
old.  The truth of that statement is obviously not a given, but the
chair is in good shape and does appear to quite old and well made.

My saga with United Van Lines continues to drag on, and on, and on.  Read the most recent details here.  Sensitive Reader Alert:  Sarcasm in copious quantities has been spotted on my United Van Lines saga page. 

Consider yourself warned.We had canned Indian food tonight.  That was a mistake.  I was in one of the local natural foods markets, saw the canned Indian food, and thought, “Hmm, that is either going to be good, or really, really bad.”  As it turned out, it was really, really bad.

Why do natural foods markets feel the need to brand themselves as natural foods markets.  Are there unnatural food markets out there somewhere, too?  What would these unnatural food markets sell?  Twinkies, bologna, rhubarb?

I was standing in the grocery store the other day waiting for the meat department employee to finish splitting a pack of five hot sausages into a two-pack of hot sausages at a glacial pace when I noted a Clearance Meat section.  “Ooo, cheap meat!” my mind thought.  Then, the more rational, less glandular portion of the brain tossed in its two cents in the form of a question, “What, exactly, qualifies meat to be put into the Clearance Meat bin?”  Pawing through the Clearance Meat bin (there’s a sentence you don’t hear very often) revealed that kosher hamburger, various oddly flavored sausages, and beef soup bones apparently were worthy of Clearance Meat status.  Given the general state of the country’s meat packing industry (I’ll have the Listeria on the side, slathered in e. coli, please), I decided not to press my luck with Clearance Meat, regardless of the magnitude of the bargain offered.

We used supposedly professional movers to get our household goods from
Alameda, CA to Madison, WI. The firm that we unfortunately chose was,
Rossiter Relocation Services. Our instructions to
the movers were very clear:

1. Pick up our household goods from our apartment in Alameda, CA on 27 Jun
   02.
2. Deliver those goods into temporary storage.
3. Deliver our goods to our house in Madison, WI on 02 Aug 02.

We contacted several movers before choosing Rossiter and all the movers
made it very clear that these instructions were very clear and very easy to
execute on their part. Rossiter sent over a seemingly knowledge man to
provide us with an estimate (binding, thankfully) based on the inventory of
our apartment. This estimate was lower than some of the other
estimates that we got and higher than others. We weren’t quite
comfortable choosing a mover that wasn’t a “national” mover even
though some of the local companies offered us excellent rates. So, we
chose United Van Lines and their proxy, Rossiter Relocation Services.

The whole moved started auspiciously enough.

On the appointed day, and at the appointed hour, two friendly gentlemen
showed up at our apartment in Alameda and carefully loaded our household
goods onto a moving truck. This moving truck headed out for
Livermore, CA, where the goods were off-loaded into a storage
facility.

Time passed.

On 31 Jul 02, from the parking lot a friend’s apartment in St. Paul, I
called Rossiter on my cell phone. I wanted to check in with our
“move coordinator” to find out exactly when our goods would be
arriving in Madison. Imagine my surprise, rage, and frustration, when
the move coordinator told me that our goods were still in the Livermore
warehouse and that it would take a few weeks to get them to us in
Madison. The goods were still in the warehouse because it was too much
trouble for the move coordinator to ship out the goods before we
called. (If we never called, our goods would still be in
storage!) The move coordinator told us that she had no idea that we
wanted our goods on our about 02 Aug 02, it would take six days for a truck
to be assigned to haul our load to Wisconsin, and then it would take many days,
possibly a week or more, for the truck to actually deliver the goods to
WI. So, after taking a few deep breaths, feeling my blood pressure go
straight up to levels that science and medicine can only imagine, and
deciding to avoid exercising my extensive profanity vocabulary, I calmly
informed the

“move coordinator” that I was frustrated with her failure to
follow through on simple tasks that are very clearly her
responsibility. Then, I asked for her supervisor. When I finally
got the supervisor on the phone, I explained that I would not be satisfied
with the ordinary “six days for a truck, etc.” nonsense that
passes for a normal move timetable. The supervisor tried to sing me a
song and dance about moving mountains and blah-blah-blah. My response
was that I was not interested in their problems, and that this was the time
for moving mountains, not complaining about their size. Also, I
informed the moving company that the next day, 01 Aug 02, I would be
arriving in Madison with no furniture, no job, and nothing to do.

However, I would have a phone. Who did they think I would call
when I get bored? (Thanks, Josh!) The moving company countered with
the line, “If you didn’t want your stuff in July, why are you so eager
to get it now?” This, of course, is just about the stupidest thing they
could have said. That’s like saying, “Well, you didn’t want your
stuff on 28 Jun 02, so there’s no reason you could possibly want it
now.” This was the sort of extra effort that I was getting from
Rossiter Relocation Services: they were working overtime to blame the
customer, pass the buck internally, and hide behind bureaucratic
hurdles.

Anyway, Rossiter managed to get our goods on a truck a mere six days
after this conversation, 06 Aug 02! Wow, talk about speed! They
were really moving mountains out there in Livermore. Ha, ha, ha,
ha.

When I started telling the moving company that I wanted compensation for
the time we were going to be without our household goods, they told me that
their national office wouldn’t let them pay me because the national office
didn’t have a piece of paper with my signature on it that declared what day
I wanted the goods delivered in Madison. When I pressed Rossiter about
whether or not this sort of missing paperwork would be unusual for a move,
they declared that the missing paperwork would, in fact, be a key part of
any pre-move consultation between the mover and the movee. In this
case, Rossiter’s salesman failed to present me with this form to be
signed. Not knowing that I was missing a form, I certainly didn’t ask
for it. So, now Rossiter was trying to screw me because they had
screwed up again!

The Rossiter people also lost a form that authorized them to charge my
credit card for the long-distance portion of the move. Of course, they
tried to blame me for this by saying that I had never sent it to them.
Of course, this was easy to refute since I had faxed the authorization forms
for both the local move into storage and long-distance move to WI on the
same day, and under the same cover page, which I still had. Since the
company had successfully charged my credit card for the local move to
storage, it became obvious that they had received both forms and had lost
one of the two. Not only was moving my household goods across the
country proving to be a challenge for a “moving company,” simply
keeping track of paperwork was proving to be beyond their abilities! I
started to despair for our goods that were in Rossiter’s fumbling
grasp.

About this time, I started talking to the United Van Lines national
customer service center. This center is apparently staffed by one
reasonably competent, informed woman who seems to answer every phone call.
This woman told me that she could pay me $200 as a “delay claim,”
but that she would need approval from Rossiter to do so. So, Rossiter
lied when they said the national office wouldn’t pay me. Rather,
Rossiter chose to blame the national office to try and cover their own asses
when it became clear that they were missing paperwork about my move.
Even more interesting, the nice woman at the United Van Lines national
office found that a bill of lading (a federal requirement for every move)
had never been created for my move. Oops! Yet another screw-up
on the part of Rossiter Relocation Services. Well, I finally got the
check for $200 in the mail, but when I turned the check over to endorse it,
there was writing on the reverse. I paused to read the fine-print, a
useful habit to cultivate if you don’t already have it, and found out that
by endorsing the check, I would unburden United and all their evil
children from any further claims for damage or whatnot with respect to our
move. The check remained unsigned until I got the shipment.

Our household goods finally arrived on 12 Aug 02. The goods were
unloaded into our house and we kept a strict inventory of what came into the
residence. Before the driver left, we noticed that we were missing
a bookshelf. “Nope. It’s got to be here somewhere. We
took everything off the truck,” the driver insisted. We continued
to insist that we were missing a bookshelf. Finally, the driver and
his assistant went out to check the truck. Lo and behold! The
missing bookshelf was on the truck! Now, we went back to our list of
boxes. We were missing five boxes. We had the driver and his
assistant help us dig through the boxes in every room and the basement to
find the boxes we were missing. This process winnowed the list of
missing boxes to three. Of these three, two were subsequently found
during our unpacking process. So, we’re still missing one box and have
unpacked every box. Beyond that, the movers broke one of our carts
(pressboard furniture). The movers tried to explain this away by
telling us (no kidding!) that we had no business moving cheap pressboard
furniture and that having pressboard furniture moved wasn’t worth the
money. When I gave them the look that said, “Do NOT feed
me that line of bullshit.” they backed down and agreed to mark the cart
as damaged. When we took the inventory tags off our kitchen chairs,
the finish went with the sticker. Apparently, it never occurred to the
movers to put the stickers on the bottom of the chairs where there was no
finish and any blemishes wouldn’t be seen. We also found a staple
embedded in the seat of our nice wooden bench.

So, now I’m glad that I didn’t sign the United Van Lines check. We
are going after them for losing a box, damaging our kitchen chairs, and
breaking one of our carts. I’ll post more in this space as these
issues are resolved.

One of the best moments of this whole affair came the day after
our goods were delivered. The supervisor at Rossiter called me up to
say that our goods were going to be delivered the next day, 14 Aug 02.

It has been more than a month since United Van Lines received my claim
forms via the United States Postal Service. Fortunately, I sent them with a
request for a return receipt. From this, I learned that United Van
Lines received my claim forms on 12 Sep 02. According to a letter
dated 03 Sep 02 signed by a “Rhonda Jones” at United Van Lines
(UVL, hereafter):

Once we receive your completed claim form and the above
referenced
information, we will move forward with our review and response to your
claim. You will receive a letter acknowledging receipt of your claim while
will provide you with the name and the telephone number of your assigned
adjuster.

In typical UVL lines style, I have yet to receive such a letter.
However a week or so after getting the return receipt in the mail, I got a
call from a gentleman at a local furniture repair and refinishing
business who explained that he had been assigned by UVL to come over to our
house and ascertain the extent of the damage to our goods. This nice
gentleman came over, examined our damaged and broken furniture, our damaged
garden implements, and the like. He left us his business card and said
that he would be in touch.

Time passes…

From: David Bogen
To: mail_uvl_claims@unitedvanlines.com
Subject: Claim Status?
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 18:01:09 -0500

Hello:

What is the current status of my damage claim on order number xxxx-xxxxx-x?
You have been sitting on this claim for a month now.

Also, a letter I received from a Rhonda Jones dated 03 Sep 02 that reads:

“Once we receive your completed claim form and the above referenced
information, we will move forward with our review and response to your
claim.  You will receive a letter acknowledging receipt of your claim while
will provide you with the name and the telephone number of your assigned
adjuster.”

Of course, in typical United Van Lines fashion, I have not received such a
letter.  In fact, I sincerely doubt that such a letter was ever generated,
much less sent.  I know that you received my claim form because I sent it
with a return receipt which the postal service has delivered to me.  

A gentleman was dispatched to my residence several weeks ago to ascertain
the damage to my furniture and other goods.  However, since that gentleman
does not work for United Van Lines, but for a furniture restoration
company, it seems unlikely that he is my “assigned adjuster” and that he
would know the status of my claim.

Sincerely,

David Bogen

More time passes...

Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 13:13:39 -0500
From: David Bogen
To: mail_uvl_claims@unitedvanlines.com
Subject: Claim Status

To Whom It May Concern:

Since you are apparently ignoring the message I sent to you last week, that
message is attached to this message for your convenience.  Obviously, the
issues raised in that message remain unaddressed.

David Bogen

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Claim Status?
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 18:01:09 -0500
From: David Bogen
To: mail_uvl_claims@unitedvanlines.com

Hello:

What is the current status of my damage claim on order number xxxx-xxxxx-x?
You have been sitting on this claim for a month now.

Also, a letter I received from a Rhonda Jones dated 03 Sep 02 that reads:

"Once we receive your completed claim form and the above referenced
information, we will move forward with our review and response to your
claim.  You will receive a letter acknowledging receipt of your claim while
will provide you with the name and the telephone number of your assigned
adjuster."

Of course, in typical United Van Lines fashion, I have not received such a
letter.  In fact, I sincerely doubt that such a letter was ever generated,
much less sent.  I know that you received my claim form because I sent it
with a return receipt which the postal service has delivered to me.

A gentleman was dispatched to my residence several weeks ago to ascertain
the damage to my furniture and other goods.  However, since that gentleman
does not work for United Van Lines, but for a furniture restoration
company, it seems unlikely that he is my "assigned adjuster" and that he
would know the status of my claim.

Sincerely,

David Bogen

----- End forwarded message -----

Time passes, again...

Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 09:33:25 -0500
From: David Bogen
To: mail_uvl_claims@unitedvanlines.com
Cc: webmaster@unitedvanlines.com
Subject: Claim Status

To Whom It Apparently Doesn't Concern:

My original message to you, now over one week old is below.  Obviously,
every  issue raised in that message is still open since you have been so
astute is either ignoring that message or failing to respond in a timely
manner.

David Bogen

----- Forwarded message from David Bogen -----
    Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 13:13:39 -0500
    From: David Bogen
 Subject: Claim Status
      To: "mail_uvl_claims@unitedvanlines.com" 

To Whom It May Concern:

Since you are apparently ignoring the message I sent to you last week, that
message is attached to this message for your convenience.  Obviously, the
issues raised in that message remain unaddressed.

David Bogen

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Claim Status?
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 18:01:09 -0500
From: David Bogen
To: mail_uvl_claims@unitedvanlines.com

Hello:

What is the current status of my damage claim on order number xxxx-xxxxx-x?
You have been sitting on this claim for a month now.

Also, a letter I received from a Rhonda Jones dated 03 Sep 02 that reads:

"Once we receive your completed claim form and the above referenced
information, we will move forward with our review and response to your
claim.  You will receive a letter acknowledging receipt of your claim while
will provide you with the name and the telephone number of your assigned
adjuster."

Of course, in typical United Van Lines fashion, I have not received such a
letter.  In fact, I sincerely doubt that such a letter was ever generated,
much less sent.  I know that you received my claim form because I sent it
with a return receipt which the postal service has delivered to me.

A gentleman was dispatched to my residence several weeks ago to ascertain
the damage to my furniture and other goods.  However, since that gentleman
does not work for United Van Lines, but for a furniture restoration
company, it seems unlikely that he is my "assigned adjuster" and that he
would know the status of my claim.

Sincerely,

David Bogen

----- End forwarded message -----

Finally, a sign of life from UVL!

Subject: Claim Status U xxx-xxx-x
To: David Bogen
From: Phil_Petersen@unigroupinc.com
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 13:21:07 -0500

Sir,
     I am your new adjuster on your claim for damages related to your
interstate relocation with United Van Lines.  I have reviewed the
inspection report provided by Heartland Furniture ( received in our office
10-21-02) and have giving their office authorization to make repairs to
your claimed items.  Someone for their office will be in contact with you.

     If you need to contact me, I can be reached at 636-305-4783.

Hey, Phil. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to
answer my third e-mail. Your e-mail, of course, is just chock-full of
useful information. My favorite bit is your defensive little statement
about how you didn't get the inspection report until 21 Oct 02. Of
course, this doesn't excuse the fact that UVL ignored me for nearly a
week. But hey, among corporate flunkies, what's a week, right?

From: David Bogen
To: Phil_Petersen@unigroupinc.com
Subject: Re: Claim Status U xxx-xxx-x
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 16:19:55 -0500

What about items that were either lost in transit by UVL or damaged beyond
repair?  How will be compensated for those items and in what timeframe?

Also, just because did or did not receive a report from an adjuster, that is
not an excuse for ignoring my messages for over a week.

Subject: Re: Claim Status U xxx-xxx-x
To: David Bogen
From: Phil_Petersen@unigroupinc.com
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 16:55:35 -0500

Sir,
     The items that are damaged and can not be repaired will be settled
after the repairs have been completed.  At that time the results of the
trace for missing items will also be addressed in a letter with the
settlement check.

Wow, one thing at a time. How do you folks get to work, Phil?
It's pretty clear that you couldn't possibly drive to work because it is
doubtful that you could concentrate on keeping the car "between the
ditches" (a phrase I recently heard), keeping the speed below the legal
speed limit, and listen to the radio, all at the same time. Of course,
the longer you sit on money that rightfully belongs to me, the more interest
UVL makes off that money, don't they Phil? Interest like that can keep
a corporate monkey like yourself pseudo-gainfully employed, right,
Phil? Anyway, it's getting hard for me to write letters to these
clowns without letting sarcasm nearly drip off the letters.

From: David Bogen
To: Phil_Petersen@unigroupinc.com
Subject: Re: Claim Status U xxx-xxx-x
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 17:14:32 -0500

Dearest Phil:

Is the letter you mention below going to be like the one UVL was supposed to
send me upon receipt of my original claim form, that I never got and that I
suspect was never generated or sent?

Perhaps the letter you mention below will closely mirror the letter
detailing who would be handling my claim, which I also never got.

How quickly will repairs be made to the damaged items?  You've been sitting
on this claim for nearly a month now and, quite honestly, I'm sick and
tired of thinking about it.  I'd like nothing better than to finish this
ridiculously long process, and get on with my life, after filing a
complaint with the Better Business Bureau, of course.

How quickly will items that "are damaged and can not be repaired" be settled
after the repairs are made to the merely damaged items?  Will it be another
month of you folks sitting on your hands, followed by a month of ignoring
my queries, before anything happens?

Yours in complete disbelief at United Van Line's complete disinterest in
correcting *their* mistakes and complete lack of surprise at the same,

David Bogen

On Friday 25 October 2002 04:55 pm, you wrote:
> Sir,
>      The items that are damaged and can not be repaired will be settled
> after the repairs have been completed.  At that time the results of the
> trace for missing items will also be addressed in a letter with the
> settlement check.
>

So, it's now 6 PM CDT on a Friday. I have absolutely no delusions
that I'll hear back from UVL before sometime Monday afternoon. So,
until then, I'll just enjoy the weekend.

The current administration doesn’t just lie, it also distorts and
exaggerates.

“This administration is capable of any lie … in order to
advance its war goal in Iraq,” says a US government source in Washington
with some two decades of experience in intelligence, who would not be
further identified. “It is one of the reasons it doesn’t want to have UN
weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the
probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than
they want us to believe.”

Sarah and I took in the UWisconsin/Ohio State football game on
Saturday.  That was quite an event.  It was the first NCAA
Division I football game that either of us had ever attended.  Quite a
different experience from an NFL game.  There was little advertising on
display in the stadium and far fewer television timeouts (though there were
still a few because ABC was airing the game).  The UW band played
during half-time and after the game (during the “Fifth
Quarter”).  Unfortunately, the band chose that game to make a
special tribute to Neil Diamond (of all people!), which meant listening to
the PA announcer prattle on about Neil Diamond while the band assaulted our
ears with Neil Diamond tunes.  Ugh.  Not the highlight of the day,
certainly.

Saturday night we completed our UW sports doubleheader when we watched
UW’s mens hockey team play U-Alabama Huntsville.  By all rights, this
should have been a blowout, but UAH kept the game close.  Hockey games
are actually quite fun to watch because the student section is very
animated and not shy in the least.  Opposing goalies are subject to
unrelenting chants, jeers, and general verbal harassment.  There are
special chants to be used during powerplays, during penalty kills, after goals,
after penalties expire, and various other occasions.  The arena is much
more intimate than a 70,000+ seat stadium, so we get a better view of the
action.

I added a new feature to the website today.  My SpamStats page was designed to showcase the volume of spam that just one e-mail address can receive.  The address that I’m tracking is one that was sold by a disreputable ISP to a spammer and has since been sold and resold.  Putting together this page also gave me opportunity to get more familiar with MySQL and perl’s DBI module.

From the mouth of Ari Fleischer, the Bush/Cheney’s spokesman:

“How many laws can we really have to stop crime, if people are determined in their heart to violate them no matter how many there are or what they say?”

Fleischer was speaking out against a national gun ownership database (at the behest of a major Bush sponsor, the NRA, of course).  Of course, why didn’t anyone ask these same questions when passing the USA Patriot Act and other new repressive laws that limited civil liberties?  The answer, of course, is that Ari’s argument is only valid when it is convenient for the current administration.

Note to self:  If you decide to rid your house of termites, make sure that your
extermination company doesn’t decide to just plain rid you of your
house.As seen in the Wisconsin State Journal:

Drop the big one on peace freaks

I can only hope that
if and when Iraq strikes with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons that
it will be against one of our wonderful “allies” like Germany,
France, or Canada.  If not them, it could be San Francisco, Berkeley,
or Madison.

Perhaps then these peace freaks will see the danger to our nation. 
Yes, the economy is important but job security and retirement funds are not
important if you and your family are dead!

–Robert Linn,
Lyndon Station

If I had any doubts about from whence Bush/Cheney’s support springs,
those doubts are laid to rest.  Perhaps the gentlemen above, who makes
such a…ahh, umm…well-reasoned argument, should be in the vanguard of any
troops sent into conflict in Iraq.  Strangely enough, he seems eager
enough to send others into danger but we don’t get the first hint from his
writing that he’d be willing to sign up today, right now for an extended
tour-of-duty in the desert.

It’s a good thing that I went for a long ride on Friday.  Saturday
was cold and rainy.  Today was even colder, but at least it was
sunny.

Well, the Twins are out of the playoffs.  Their complete inability
to hit the ball in the ALCS was baffling.  Several of their players
(Jones, Pierzynski, and Guzman to name a few) sported batting averages that
could only lead one to suppose that the players in question had never before
encountered major league pitching.

Overcome by rampant paranoia, the EPA has decided to let people poison other people
without first getting permits for this activity.  The poisoning
will involve the unregulated spreading of Malathion over wetlands to,
theoretically, kill mosquitoes.  However, given the nation’s
unfortunate philosophy of “if a little of this stuff works well, a lot
must work really, really well,” it seems unlikely that great restraint
will be shown by those spreading the toxic chemicals on wetlands. 

Also, since only specific areas, theoretically, can be targeted by this
unregulated spraying, it seems unlikely that this will somehow end the
health threat of West Nile disease.  How
does killing mosquitoes poison people?  Unsurprisingly, Malathion, like
many chemicals toxic to animals, is toxic to people.  Even scientists at the EPA admit
that Malathion is a toxin, as detailed in a recent Village Voice article:

One of the EPA’s top in-house malathion experts, senior
toxicologist Dr. Brian Dementi, has spent 10 years arguing from data
provided by Cheminova itself and other companies that the pesticide is a
probable carcinogen, a position contrary to the largely sanguine reports of
his colleagues. As a result, he was bypassed when new malathion issues
arose, and frozen out of meetings until his union intervened.

Needleman, who as an EPA Science Advisory Board member reviewed Dementi’s
reports when he was finally allowed to present them, notes that as doses of
malathion were increased in rats, tumors grew in proportion. “I think
malathion is a carcinogen. I think the evidence is pretty strong for
this,”

Needleman says, who argues the chemical should be banned. In the case of
West Nile, he says, “They were spraying enormous numbers of people to
perhaps prevent a small number of people from getting this
disease.”

But his became a minority opinion at the EPA after a statistical adjustment
ignored higher doses as unrealistic in human exposure, he recalls. That
defeats the laboratory method, which is meant to speed up the process and to
provide a basis for extrapolating downward. The jiggering of numbers in the
EPA’s cancer assessment of malathion “was not bad science,” he growled.
“It
was not science at all.”

The Bush government in action:  killing hundreds to save a
handful.

One particularly bad bit of grammar keeps recurring in both conversation
and in the media.  Athletes play the game good.  You
did really good to get here on time.  He drives really good. 

Almost no one does anything well anymore.  Instead we all do things
good.  The interesting thing is that one almost never hears the word
good used as an adverb immediately after the verb in a sentence.  This
sounds incorrect even to those who misuse good in other forms. 

However, toss a word or five between the verb and the adverb and suddenly
good starts showing up as a round peg adjective in a square adverb
hole.  I cannot even begin to hazard a guess as to the number of times
I’ve heard good used as an adverb on national television.  Even those
television personalities to whom I don’t mind listening (John Madden in
particular) occasionally use good when they should use well.  I worry
that good will have completely subsumed well’s purpose in another ten years
or so.  Such is the evolution of the English language.

Words from a friend in the context of a discussion on the government’s
most recent legal actions:

“Terrorists are
criminals.  They commit criminal acts – they don’t line up in army
formations and fight wars, so they are a law enforcement problem.  Treat
them as such.  I would rather beat/defeat them using our…somewhat
over-forgiving justice system than adopt an autocratic George W. says
‘he’s bad’ so he’s bad system.”

Behind Rick “Chicks Dig the Long Ball” Reed, the Angels beat
the Twins last night.  Jacque “Mr. Not October”
Jones, in particular, has been an out wearing a uniform in this
series.  It might be time for Gardenhire to contemplate replacing his
left-fielder and lead-off man with someone who doesn’t look like he’s never
seen major league pitching before.  Also, it would go a long way
towards helping the Twins get to the World Series if Rick Reed was traded or
released before the next game of the ALCS.

Forward thinkers in Springfield, IL decided to rid elementary school
libraries of those pesky librarians in a cost-cutting move.  As such, some
libraries no longer circulate books.  Other libraries are closed to
students and only teachers can enter and check-out books.  Some
students cannot get the bar-codes they need to check out books if their
library is one of the few that still circulates books.  One library was
closed to both students and teachers.  We’ve got money to build
freeways to support an SUV culture; we’ll spend billions we don’t have to
invade foreign nations to soothe the President’s ego; Enron, banks,
corporate farms, and credit card companies never forget to line up at the
corporate welfare trough.  All of this but no one squawks when we close
elementary school libraries.  Am I the only one who sees a fundamental
problem with our spending priorities?  People complain about low test
scores and the fact that we are supposedly falling behind some Asian and
European nations in subjects like math and science.  Economists and
statisticians routinely state and re-state that a better educated population
is healthier and wealthier.  So, the obvious answer is to close
libraries and spend more money on short-term nonsense, of course.

Want to know how your local or state libraries stack up compared to other
libraries in the United States?  A new index released by the American Libraries Association
dishes the dirt.  South Dakota’s libraries rank significantly
higher than those of California, and somewhat higher than arch-rival North
Dakota.  Ohio leads the index of states.  De Smet, SD has the
fourth best library in the nation for a town of its size, interestingly
enough.

The Twins won last night in the first game of the American League
Championship Series.  I’m a bit puzzled why the manager of the Twins,
Gardenhire, took out Joe Mays in the ninth when he had been rock solid,
however.

The Vikings didn’t lose this past weekend.  Of course, this amazing
feat can be wholly attributed to the fact that the Vikings didn’t play last
weekend…

The Bush/Cheney
administration is moving to classify an unborn fetus as a person so that
poor women can receive prenatal services.  Of course, the real driving
force behind this move is a desire to further the anti-abortion
agenda.  A great response to this move:

“If the objective is for poor women to get prenatal
care, then you don’t need to reclassify the status of the fetus but rather
reclassify the status of the woman as worthy of health coverage,” says Dr.
David Grimes, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of
North Carolina.

Let that stand as a lesson to everyone who says that the Bush
administration has forgotten about everything but the urge to wage pointless
war on Iraq.  Bush hasn’t forgotten the religious right’s war on women and
their bodies.

Proposed motto for the Bureaucratic Workers Labor Union: 

“Paper don’t push itself!”

From the “Beat Goes On Department:”  The government
today won a case before a Federal Appeals court that allows the government
to close any deportation hearing by simply classifying the subject of the
hearing as “of special interest.”  Yes, all of the judges on
the Appeals court panel were Republican (Reagan) appointees.  John
“Lost an Election to a Dead Guy” Ashcroft will be sending those three good ol’ boys
a nice Christmas gift this year, I’m sure.

We got back from an invigorating trip to San Francisco late last night. 
The weather was fabulous.  We flew out to attend the wedding of
friends in Sonoma.  The wedding itself was short and to the point while
the setting was bedecked with flowers.  Good company and good food
contributed to the genial atmosphere.  There was plenty of funk on the
dance floor afterwards, too.  Sarah and I both enjoyed the extensive amount of salsa and
merengue music on the radio as we drove up to Sonoma and back.

Sunday, I attended the Oakland
A’s/Minnesota Twins playoff game in which Minnesota won 5-4.  Oakland
fans started leaving after the bottom of the eighth inning in which
Minnesota held a 2-1 lead.  After Minnesota scored three runs in the
top of the ninth, even more fans left.  Those people must have been
kicking themselves because the bottom of the ninth was exciting (if you were
an A’s fan) and nail-biting (if you were a Minnesota fan).

We stayed
at the
Claremont on Sunday night.  That was something of a letdown. 
Normally, the rooms at the Claremont start at $270/night, and can be as much
as $950/night.  Suffice it to say that we good a really good deal on
our room or we wouldn’t have stayed there.  Our first room was dark,
small, and had a thin door that separated our room from a set of noisy
neighbors.  So, we got a different room.  The second room was
sunny and large, but hadn’t been cleaned very well after the last occupants
of the room departed.  Used soap was still in the bathroom, used
bathrobes were piled on the bed, paper with notes on it was sitting on the
bedstand, etc.  So, I asked them to clean the room while we went to one
of our favorite restaurants.  Management instead volunteered to
have the bell staff move our luggage up to another room (“a significant
upgrade”) while we were out.  As long as we didn’t have to schlepp
our bags any more, that was fine with us.  The next room was on the top
floor of a little tower-like outcropping and had a nice Bay view.  We
had sky-lights in the bathroom and in the bedroom.  However, this room
wasn’t the nicest room either.  One of the wooden blinds covering the
skylight had been fixed (badly) with scotch tape.  There was also a
fair amount of black mold in the bathroom where the ceiling met the
walls.  Having stayed at really nice places like the Boston
Harbor Hotel and the Pan
Pacific, both Sarah and I found the Claremont to be a less than stellar
value. 

HTML is a crazy, crazy language.  For some element classes, nearly
all aspects of that element can be described via cascading style
sheets.  But for other elements, only specific qualities can be
described via CSS and then other types must be described on a per-usage
basis.

How about those Vikings?  Who would have predicted before the season
began that the less-than-mighty Vikings would have the same record as the
mighty St. Louis Rams.  Of course, they both have a record of 0-4,
which perhaps takes a bit of luster off that particular thought.

Somewhere along the line, someone with whom I did business put one of my
e-mail addresses on a list of e-mail addresses that was sold to a
spammer.  Since then, that address has been sold and resold several
times.  Yesterday, that particular address received exactly 50 e-mails,
of which, 44 were spam.  Fortunately, I’m using a piece of
software that
eliminated all but three of those spams, so my inbox for that account was
still usable.  Easy, automated spam blocking:  yet another reason
to switch to Unix.