bogen.org

In case you needed yet another reminder of how embarrassingly
stupid our nation’s current airport security is, I offer up the following
true story as reported by the Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel:

A man and his wife get on a plane in Madison on Christmas
Eve.  The man leans around the door to the pilots’ compartment and
says, jokingly, “I hope you haven’t been drinking.”  The pilots then
empty the plane of all passengers.  The passengers wait in line to be
rebooked on another flight while the pilots are subjected to blood tests for alcohol
consumption.  The man is pulled out of the airport by sheriff’s
deputies and charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor that
carries with it a $225 fine.  Meanwhile the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office
are debating whether or not to level charges of “interfering with a flight
crew” at the man.  That particular felony carries a maximum
penalty of twenty years in prison

All of this because of a simple joke.  Apparently, airports –
previously terrible places to spend time because of their scale, atmosphere,
and generally poor aesthetics — are now completely humorless by law. 
That’s your Homeland Security department at work.

If you missed Dave Barry’s year 2002 in
review, here are some excerpts to pique your interest:

…government officials kept issuing alarming, yet vague,
warnings. “We have received reliable information,” an official would s
ay,
“that something bad might happen. We don’t know what, or when, or where. Bu
t
it is very, very bad. Also we are seeing the letter ‘E.’ So we urge all
citizens to continue leading normal lives, while remaining in a state of
stark, buttpuckering terror. Tune in tomorrow and we’ll see if we can’t
ratchet this thing up a notch or two.”

But the big domestic issue is Homeland Insecurity, which is most
noticeable at airports, where the Department of Transportation, having
determined that every single 9/11 hijacker was a young male from a Middle
Eastern country, has implemented a shrewd policy of hassling randomly
selected elderly women.

In the War on Terrorism, security personnel at Chicago’s O’Hare
airport wrestle would-be passenger Merline A. Grelpner, 91, to the ground
after an alert screener notices that she is carrying an object that is later
confirmed, by the FBI, using spectrographic analysis, to be a pretzel. The
Department of Homeland Insecurity places the nation on a Code Magenta Alert
(“A Tad Higher Than Relatively High, But Not Totally High.”)

In other Florida news, police shut down I-75 for hours and
arrest three men of Middle Eastern descent after a woman reports that she
overheard them in a Shoney’s restaurant talking about what she believed to
be a terrorist plot. It turns out to be a misunderstanding: The men are
medical students. Responding quickly, the Department of Homeland Insecurity
orders all 350 Shoney’s to install metal detectors.

Speaking of terror: Saddam Hussein, having campaigned under the
catchy populist slogan “A Vote For Saddam Is A Vote for Not Getting Both
Your Feet Chopped Off Without Anesthetic,” is re-elected with a solid 127
percent of the popular vote, which includes several thousand votes
apparently cast via Internet from Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

The month is almost over and I haven’t written anything here for quite
some time.  Part of the reason is that I was in South Dakota for five
days.  The other part of the reason is that I haven’t had much to say
of late.  The holidays have a somewhat dulling effect on cynicism,
sarcasm, and anger.  Since much of what I write is fueled by one or
more of those emotions, the lack of such sometimes leaves me without
interesting things to write.The drive to South Dakota from our home in Madison, WI probably takes
about eight to eight and one-half hours.  Sarah’s Saturn is reliable,
but certainly not built for speed.  Driving 75mph in South Dakota we
got 24mpg.  Driving 70mph in Minnesota and Wisconsin we got
32mpg.  Also, the lack of traffic in Minnesota and South Dakota on
Interstates 29 and 90 was a refreshing change from driving Interstate 880 in
Oakland and Interstate 80 in Berkeley (or San Francisco, for that
matter).  We would joke about the heavy traffic on Interstate 29 if
there were two other cars in our lane either in front of us or behind
us.

Ira has finally given up on the idea of hibernation.  We originally
planned on hibernating him in the fridge this year, but his weight was a bit
lower than I’d like to see it, so we’ve been trying to keep him awake and
eating.  For a few weeks there in early December we were losing the
battle and he was sleeping like it was going out of style.  In the last
week or so, however, he’s perked up quite a bit.  Yesterday and today,
he was stomping around his box, trying to get out.  We put him on the
kitchen floor for a while, and he proceeded to try and make good his
escape (into the bedroom).  He just doesn’t seem to grasp the concept
that it is really cold outside for a tortoise right now and that his
demands to be let outside cannot be granted.

The holidays did not interrupt the Bush/Cheney administration’s march to
war with Iraq.  Troops and equipment continue to pour into the Persian
Gulf.  Of course, if you believe the current Administration, all of
this is “just in case.”  Right…

I’d respect the Administration more if they weren’t lying to the American
public about Administration’s ultimate intentions and plans.  Are there
three people in America who honestly believe that Bush/Cheney does not want
a war with Iraq?  If Bush/Cheney would just come right out and
say:  “Hey, our kids are not on the front lines, nobody we know
has kids on the front lines, and our buddies and cronies stand to profit
from a war with Iraq.  Bush’s Daddy wants to see Hussein shot. 
Dick likes to run a war (he ran the Panama invasion and the Gulf War). 
Bush likes the idea of being a wartime President.  Chasing bin Ladin is
tough work and we’d like to distract the public from the fact that we’ve had
no luck with that so far.  So, given all of that, we’re going to invade
Iraq.  Any questions?”  I still wouldn’t agree with the
decision, but at least the Administration couldn’t be faulted for playing
the public as fools.

Sarah and I decided that we would buy a new television this year instead
of buying each other Christmas gifts.  Our old television was, quite
literally, old enough to vote (hopefully, it wouldn’t vote
Republican).  The new television is a significant improvement over the
old one.  I did not anticipate how much component video would sharpen
the picture from the DVD player, nor how much sharpness and color was being
lost and distorted by our old television.

Capsule Reviews:

• The
  Emperor’s New Clothes:  An excellent movie that we saw a short
  while ago.  Funny, compelling story.  Excellent scenery and
  acting.
• Y tu
  mamá también:  Spanish with English subtitles.  A
  sexually charged film.  Two Mexican teenage boys and a Spanish woman
  set out to reach the ocean from Mexico City.  Many things are not what
  they seem and many secrets are revealed.  A good, surprising film.
• Die
  Another Day:  We saw this a month ago in Cleveland with Sarah’s
  family.  A decent Bond film, but not necessarily a good film. 
  Excellent special effects, except for one scene that appears to have ripped
  right out of a fifties or sixties surfing movie.

The Federal Government is asking travelers to leave their checked luggage unlocked when traveling by
airplane.  It seems that the government’s agents will be pawing through
checked luggage and the agents find the locks inconvenient.  What’s to
keep others from pawing through your luggage?  That’s right. 
Nothing.  And how will you be compensated for items stolen out of your
checked luggage:

“Complaints of pilferage will be handled ‘on a case-by-case
basis’ by the airline, the [Transportation Security Agency] and the airport
working together…”

Now that sounds like as much fun as a barrel full of flaming,
greased, rabid monkeys.  Can you imagine trying to get any of the
following to pay for something stoles out of your luggage?

1. A large, governmental agency with “national security” concerns
2. A large, impersonal airline
3. A governmental agency that is run by either a city, county, or regional
   government

Good luck!  Such a futile experience would certainly deter me from
ever packing anything of even marginal value in my checked luggage.

Yesterday, we got a little taste of California-style winter: 
fifty-plus degrees and rain.

Four months ago, United Van Lines delivered most of our household
goods to our current home in Madison.  We’re still waiting to be
reimbursed for the costs of replacing the items they lost and damaged.

The movie, Finding Forrester, is surprisingly engaging.  We
rented it and worried that it might be mediocre at best.  However, we
were both entertained by the movie and drawn into the story.

There is a new crime in America:  taking pictures of hotels where the Vice President (and Evil
Do-er Extraordinare) is lodging when he visits your town.  An IT
professional took pictures of the Denver hotel where the VP was
bunking.  He was arrested, held and questioned (without a lawyer) for
hours, and then released without his camera.  The Denver Police and the Secret Service will not acknowledge
or deny detaining the man and violating his civil rights.  That’s
your USA PATRIOT act at work.  Protecting you and yours from IT
professionals who dabble in photography.Is anyone else baffled by the current Lexus advertising campaign on
television?  In these ads (maybe there is just one; I haven’t really
studied them) a helpful spouse manages to sneak a $50,000 automobile of one
stripe or another into the driveway (complete with a giant red bow) without
the other spouse noticing.  Then, the keys are presented with much pomp
and circumstance to the non-Lexus-aware spouse.  Non-Lexus-aware spouse
then proceeds to express extreme gaiety over the fact that they were just
presented with the keys to an automobile with a monthly payment of $750 for
the next five years.  If I gave Sarah the keys to a new Lexus, she’d be
far more likely to have me evaluated for mental diseases than to express
some form of happiness at the fact that there is a $50,000 automobile in the
driveway with a big red bow that needs insurance, gas, and maintenance. 
Who, exactly, is Lexus targeting with these ads?

So, if you bought a $50,000 car, put $5,000 down, and got 0% financing
for five years, your monthly payment would be $750/month for the next five
years.  How do people afford that?  That is more than 150% larger
than my monthly rent payment!  I can’t imagine paying more for a car,
every month, than I was paying in rent.

The setting:  Our house.
The Day:  Thursday
The Time:  Sometime between 18:30 and 22:00.
The telephone rings.
Background:  David curls in a league from 18:30 to 22:00 every
Thursday.
[SARAH] (answering the phone):  Hello.
[AMERITECH]:  Hello, is Mr. David Bogen available?  This is
Ameritech calling.
[SARAH]:  No, he’s not.
[AMERITECH]:  Is this Mrs. Bogen?
[SARAH]:  No, it’s not.
[AMERITECH]:  When might be a good time to reach Mr. Bogen?
[SARAH]:  Any evening except Thursday.
[AMERITECH]:  Thank you.
Time Passes
The setting:  Our house.
The Day:  Thursday
The Time:  Sometime between 18:30 and 22:00.
The telephone rings.
Background:  David curls in a league from 18:30 to 22:00 every
Thursday.
[SARAH] (answering the phone):  Hello.
[AMERITECH]:  Hello, is Mr. David Bogen available?  This is
Ameritech calling.
[SARAH]:  No, he’s not.
[AMERITECH]:  Is this Mrs. Bogen?
[SARAH]:  No, it’s not.
[AMERITECH]:  When might be a good time to reach Mr. Bogen?
[SARAH]:  Any evening except Thursday.
[AMERITECH]:  Thank you.
Time Passes
The setting:  Our house.
The Day:  Thursday
The Time:  Sometime between 18:30 and 22:00.
The telephone rings.
Background:  David curls in a league from 18:30 to 22:00 every
Thursday.
[SARAH] (answering the phone):  Hello.
[AMERITECH]:  Hello, is Mr. David Bogen available?  This is
Ameritech calling.
[SARAH]:  No, he’s not.
[AMERITECH]:  Is this Mrs. Bogen?
[SARAH]:  No, it’s not.
[AMERITECH]:  When might be a good time to reach Mr. Bogen?
[SARAH]:  Any evening except Thursday.
[AMERITECH]:  Thank you.
Repeat ad nauseum

If you ran a normal business, the following might be signs that your
bills are too complex:

• Your cashier cannot understand and explain the bill.
• Your sales representatives cannot understand and explain the bill.
• Your billing department takes ten minutes, sitting in front of their
  computers, to understand the bill well enough to explain it to a customer.

Such was the situation in which I found myself at the local Saturn
dealership last week.  Sarah took the car in to get a new clutch
installed, as well as suffer some other bank-breaking routine car-ownership
maintenance hassles.  We needed to have three tires replaced, and since
they were taking all the tires off the car anyway for an alignment, tie-rod
replacement, and whatnot Sarah talked them into giving us the fourth tire
for free.  I dropped by the dealership the next day to pick up the
car.  The cashier handed me a four page invoice detailing the nearly
$2000 worth of repairs performed on the car.  I stood there studying
the invoice, trying to figure out if we’d actually gotten the tire for free
or not because the invoice seemed to indicate that we’d been charged a
reduced amount for the fourth tire, instead of not being charged at
all.  When I asked the cashier to explain the bill to me, she nearly
panicked (weird…), and asked if she could get me the service manager. 
“Sure, if you’ve got him handy,” I said.  When the service
manager arrived, I showed him the bill and asked him to explain it to
me.  He puzzled over it for a while and conceded that he could not
determine if we’d been charged for the tire or not.  The service
manager then called for the lady in charge of the billing department. 
She puzzled over the bill for a minute before declaring that she needed to
consult her computer.  She disappeared for ten minutes while I stood
there at the service counter reading a book.  Finally, the biller came
back and explained that I hadn’t gotten the tire for free, but I hadn’t been
charged full price for it either.  They were going to take off the
price of the oil change to make up the difference.  When I got home, I
took a calculator to the bill to verify my gut feeling that we actually got
the tire free and then some.  The calculator helped me determine that
we got the tire, tire labor, and the oil change for free; a better deal for
us than the one to which the dealer originally agreed.  If Saturn
wasn’t part of GM, there might be hope that someone, somewhere could
convince them to produce clearer, easier to understand bills.  While we
made out better than we should have, I wonder how many people pay the dealer
more than they should simply because they don’t understand the bills.

Sarah and I came to the conclusion that while we like eating at
restaurants, it is very rare that we like the food we get while
eating in restaurants.  Since moving to Madison, we’ve gotten truly
tasty food at exactly one restaurant.  We ate at a restaurant on Friday
night that is a local favorite.  Uh, huh.  If you like mediocre
food in an ugly, loud, wood-paneled environment with unfriendly service, the
Stamm House is for you.  On Saturday, we made Roasted Squash (with
browned butter and sage) and jalapeno sausage and rice and that was 100
times better than the food we got on Friday night.  So, rather than
eating out once a week and getting mediocre food (I hate paying for
mediocre food), we’re going to make more interesting, creative meals at home
and eat at a restaurant every two or three weeks.  This should spread
the mediocrity out over time a bit better.  Yesterday, Sarah made
chicken and dumplings that were really good.  This week, we’re making
turkey pie, calico beans, a pork loin smothered in a sauce of prunes and
cranberries (or juniper berries, if I can find them) that have been soaked
in bourbon and port and some other, easier dishes.  If nothing else,
the drinks are cheaper at home.

On a side note:  Sarah and I would happily sell ourselves into
slavery for a really good burrito or some really good sushi.

Of course, by their very nature, mediocre restaurants must exist. 
If every restaurant produced tasty, affordable food, mediocre must cease to
be applied as an adjective.  or mediocre would slide up the scale so far th
at
excellent would cease to exist for all intents and purposes and everything
would be either mediocre (currently a good restaurant) or good (currently an
excellent restaurant).

My Schwinn is still having problems with the cold weather here.  The
basic problem is that the chain and sprockets can spin wildly without
affecting the rear wheel’s revolutions.  This has basically rendered
the bicycle non-functional and has forced me onto the bus for the last week
or so.  My current theory is that the cold weather is somehow affecting
the grease between the freehub and the gear cassette on the back
wheel.  As the bike gets colder, the rear sprocket is less and less
likely to be engaged to the rear wheel, even as the chain (driven by the
cranks) spins around and around without encountering any resistance. 
As the bike gets warmer, this ceases to be a problem.  Since the bike
was converted from a ten-speed to a single speed in California, my theory
says, a grease that was never meant to see windchills below zero was applied
to the freehub and the sprocket.  So, now I need to get a chain whip
and some solvent, remove the rear sprocket, and possibly and hub, and soak
them both in the solvent to remove the grease.  Then, I need to get a
high-quality synthetic lube, apply that lube to both components, reassemble
the back wheel, and test the bike.  All this so I can ride my bike
through snow and cold.

Yes, George W., the economy is in the tank because of the people you just
fired, and not your economic policies.  Uh, huh.  We really do
belive you.  Now, if you’ll excuse us, we need to get back to watching
the sky for flying saucers and ICBM’s launched by bin Laden with Hussein’s
backing.  How stupid do you think we are?

Rumor has it that Dick Cheney will leave his undisclosed location and
make an appearance in Madison.  I thought I felt a disturbance in the
Force.

I’m headin’ for Vegas after I get off work today.  My luck is
hot right now.  Yesterday, I got a letter in the mail from a
local Pizza Hut informing me that I’d won a free lunch buffet.  How
did I win such a fabulous prize?  I dropped a business card in the
fishbowl near the cash register.  That’s right.  I’m livin’ life
large now.  A person with luck like mine belongs at the Vegas craps
tables, not drivin’ a desk.My Schwinn suffered through the final stages of some sort of debilitating
drivetrain breakdown yesterday.  For the last couple of weeks, the bike
chain occasionally seemed to slip off the rear sprocket and, as this would
remove any resistance to my pedaling action, would cause my legs to spin
wildly while propelling the bicycle nowhere.  After some investigation,
my new theory is that the sprocket is completely disengaging from the rear
wheel and that the fault does not lie in the chain-sprocket interface after
all.  Of course, this all came to a head yesterday as I was riding to
work through several inches of freshly fallen (and still falling as I rode)
snow.  So, not only hadn’t the roads been plowed, but my form of
transportation was more often than not failing to transport me. 
Eventually, I got to work, but I was forced to put the bike on the front of
the bus to get home after work.  So, today, and for the foreseeable
future, I’ll be on the bus and on foot.  I need to get the bike up on
the rack and arrive at some sort of definitive answer as to the source of
the problem.  Then, I can fix the bike and get it (and myself) back on
the road.

I sent out my first Christmas letters yesterday.  I’m trying to get
a jump on the season by getting those particular items off my mental to-do
list.  Sarah and I are sending Christmas letters and photos this year,
instead of cards.  So, watch your mailbox.  You may already be a
winner!

Airport security:  Frustrating; mostly worthless; hypocritical;
passengers are presumed-guilty until proper subservience is shown at which
time they are allowed to be guilty of less serious offenses, no one is truly
innocent.I was standing in the airport security line at the Madison
airport while waiting to board a flight out of town for Thanksgiving. 
The gentleman in front of me was removing his jacket, shoes, and belt so
that he could walk through the metal detector.  He took the change out
of his pocket.  He took the keys out of his pocket.  He took his
wallet out of his pocket.  A little girl, probably four or five years
old, has to take off her jacket and shoes before she is allowed to go
through security.  While walking through O’Hare in Chicago, I saw a
woman (well past middle age) get wanded to check for metal embedded in her
rapidly thinning hair.  Does anyone feel safer because five year-old
girls are taking their shoes off before boarding the plane?  Were
little old ladies really keeping pistols in their hair styles before 11 Sep
01?  Are overweight men wearing black loafers and belts a real threat
to national security?  And then people wonder why I question the
motives behind, and the efficacy of, more draconian security policies?

You know that TV has taken over your life when a jacuzzi with a built-in television doesn’t sound over
the top.