Sacramento area community musical theater (esp. DMTC in Davis, 2000-2020); Liberal politics; Meteorology; "Breaking Bad," "Better Call Saul," and Albuquerque movie filming locations; New Mexico and California arcana, and general weirdness.
A United States man is suing a Florida strip club after he says a performer's shoe flew off during a pole dance, shattering the mirrored ceiling and causing glass, as well as the shoe, to hit him.
The Booby Trap breached "its duty when its employee failed to perform her routine in (a) reasonably safe manner,'' according to the Broward Circuit Court lawsuit filed by Charles Privette, 35. He is seeking at least $15,000 in damages.
Privette's attorney, Omar Demetriou, said his client suffered a small laceration to his eyebrow, headaches and nose bleeds as a result of the Jan. 14 pole dance.
Booby Trap general manager George Gettinger acknowledged paramedics were called. ``A quote from the paramedics was, 'I can't believe you even called us for this,' '' Gettinger said.
Al-Qaida supporters suggested in a Web site message this week they would welcome a pre-election terror attack on the U.S. as a way to usher in a McCain presidency.
The message, posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web site, said if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, "impetuous" Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier," the message said. "Then, al-Qaida will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush."
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
The Best Man
The Russians Are Coming!
Intrepid explorer Jim McElroy visits the East Coast:
I just returned from a fly/drive trip to the East Coast, where I drove from Bay Ridge Brooklyn to Ithaca New York, across Northern NJ and a corner of PA into Central Upstate NY. I thought that the attached photo is of interest. It is located just off Exit 4 on I-280 in Northern NJ. The date was Oct 20.
One would think this station was a outlying discounter, but I saw at least three of them on the trip, all with the same prices. Other stations in the area were displaying prices from $3.339 to $3.399, except for the Chevron station just across the street which showed $2.939. I'd never heard of this company before so I Googled it and found their web page, which was very interesting. It is a Russian Oil Company, which as far as I was able to determine only had refineries in Russia and a few Eastern European Countries. They refine the gas in Russia, ship it to the US by tanker, probably landing it in the New Jersey Ports. They seem to be setting up a chain of retail stations, undercutting the US oil companies by about 50 cents per gallon. There are so many questions about how this happened, or is happening, that it is worthy of further investigation.
In other related topics, the road systems in the East are in way better shape than California roads, especially the smaller state and county road systems. This is in spite of the much more severe weather conditions. They actually maintain the roads. The flip side of this is that you encounter a lot more construction delays, especially in fall before the first freeze. Traffic load is about the same.
The weekend before this trip was spent driving from San Jose to San Diego and back via Santa Barbara and I was amazed at the reduction in traffic relative to a year ago. On a Friday afternoon about 6PM we traveled the speed limit between US101 and I-5 over Pacheco Pass. Most of that was due to the new overpass at 152/156 but even so traffic was very light. The traffic along I-5 south was representative of a mid-week day, not a fall weekend. Also, the endless stream of trucks were all traveling at 60 mph or slightly lower, and few cars were going over the 70mph speed limit. It has finally sunk in that slower travel costs less. The reduction in travel and the slower speeds are sufficient explanation for the reduction in fuel consumption. I am however, still predicting a noticeable bump in prices shortly after Nov 4, maybe as much as 10 percent. We'll see.
Traitorous Accusations
One reason Republicans have been so fond of publicly calling Democrats traitors (particularly since World War II, but especially in Joe McCarthy's days, and since 9/11) has been that there has been absolutely no cost to doing so. The mainstream media he-said/she-said method of reporting imposes no penalty for the most scurrilous of accusations. So, why not accuse your opponents of being the vilest dregs of humanity, if that's the way you feel? Hardly anyone will call you on it, and you might win advantage through bravado.
That standard approach may be changing now, in part thanks to YouTube. Michele Bachmann's views expressed on "Hardball" attracted a wave of money for her opponent and condemnations from many, including Colin Powell. Not what you want when you are in a close race! And her denials of having ever said these things:
Despite the way the blogs and the Democratic Party are spinning it, I never called all liberals anti-American, I never questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism, and I never asked for some House Un-American Activities Committee witch hunt into my colleagues in Congress.
can easily be judged by watching the video - you can bypass the he-said/she-said media baloney and judge for yourself.
(Her defense is perhaps technically true - she said Obama surrounds himself with anti-American liberals, but said nothing directly about Obama, and called for the media, not the HUAC, to lead an investigation - weasel words, to be sure.)
Politicians are like dogs playing on the freeway - they resist crossing to safe harbor, but they are capable of learning discretion if they see enough of their own (like Michele Bachmann) get thrashed in the axles of semi-trailer trucks. In fact, fear is the only way most politicians EVER learn anything!
Scacchi Chess Clay Stop Motion
Thanks, Gabe!
Chess - next to Argentine Tango, the most ruthless of pursuits!
Muslim McCain Voters Respond To Anti-Obama Xenophobia
At one time, Republican strategists like Karl Rove saw in places like Michigan an expanding field of opportunity, by catering to the needs of small Muslim, Republican businessmen.
How long ago that seems! As the McCain campaign sinks into incoherence, those opportunities are being lost.
John Adams - Doctor Atomic: The Countdown
"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Monday, October 20, 2008
Womanizer - Britney Spears (The 100th Foehr Kidz Version)
Via Britneyspears.com's dance page, where several interesting dance versions are also presented.
College Dance Team 2004 University of Minnesota-Minneapolis
“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”
Freddie Mac's Lobbying Campaign
Fascinating article about where the power lies in Washington, D.C.
When Freddie Mac (often construed as a Democratic outfit) found itself the target of unwanted regulation, it aimed its efforts at lobbying not Democrats (who were generally supportive but not of importance) but a faction of influential Republicans - at the time, the only ones who held decisive power. John McCain at the time supported regulation, but anti-regulation leaders now run John McCain's campaign - one big flip-flop!:
Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.
In the cross hairs of the campaign carried out by DCI of Washington were Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. DCI's chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain's campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September.
Freddie Mac's payments to DCI began shortly after the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee sent Hagel's bill to the then GOP-run Senate on July 28, 2005. All GOP members of the committee supported it; all Democrats opposed it.
In the midst of DCI's yearlong effort, Hagel and 25 other Republican senators pleaded unsuccessfully with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to allow a vote.
"If effective regulatory reform legislation ... is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole," the senators wrote in a letter that proved prescient.
Unknown to the senators, DCI was undermining support for the bill in a campaign targeting 17 Republican senators in 13 states, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The states and the senators targeted changed over time, but always stayed on the Republican side.
In the end, there was not enough Republican support for Hagel's bill to warrant bringing it up for a vote because Democrats also opposed it and the votes of some would be needed for passage. The measure died at the end of the 109th Congress.
McCain, R-Ariz., was not a target of the DCI campaign. He signed Hagel's letter and three weeks later signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill.
By the time McCain did so, however, DCI's effort had gone on for nine months and was on its way toward killing the bill.
In recent days, McCain has said Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were "one of the real catalysts, really the match that lit this fire" of the global credit crisis. McCain has accused Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama of taking advice from former executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and failing to see that the companies were heading for a meltdown.
McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, or his lobbying firm has taken more than $2 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dating to 2000. In December, Freddie Mac contributed $250,000 to last month’s GOP convention.
Obama has received $120,349 in political donations from employees of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; McCain $21,550.
The Republican senators targeted by DCI began hearing from prominent constituents and financial contributors, all urging the defeat of Hagel's bill because it might harm the housing boom. The effort generated newspaper articles and radio and TV appearances by participants who spoke out against the measure.
Inside Freddie Mac headquarters in 2005, the few dozen people who knew what DCI was doing referred to the initiative as "the stealth lobbying campaign," according to three people familiar with the drive.
...Freddie Mac executive Hollis McLoughlin oversaw DCI's drive, according to the three people.
"Hollis's goal was not to have any Freddie Mac fingerprints on this project and DCI became the hidden hand behind the effort," one of the three people told the AP.
Before 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were Democratic strongholds. After 2004, Republicans ran their political operations. McLoughlin, who joined Freddie Mac in 2004 as chief of staff, has given $32,250 to Republican candidates over the years, including $2,800 to McCain, and has given none to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.
On Friday night, Hagel's chief of staff, Mike Buttry, said Hagel's legislation "was the last best chance to bring greater oversight and tighter regulation to Freddie and Fannie, and they used every means they could to defeat Sen. Hagel's legislation every step of the way."
"It is outrageous that a congressionally chartered government-sponsored enterprise would lobby against a member of Congress's bill that would strengthen the regulation and oversight of that institution," Buttry said in a statement. "America has paid an extremely high price for the reckless, and possibly criminal, actions of the leadership at Freddie and Fannie."
...Last month, the concerns of the 26 Republican senators who signed Hagel's bill became a reality when the government seized control of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae amid their near financial collapse. Federal prosecutors are investigating accounting, disclosure and corporate governance issues at both companies, which own or guarantee more than $5 trillion in mortgages, roughly equivalent to half of the national debt.
...Freddie Mac's problems began when Hagel's legislation won approval from the Senate committee.
Democrats did not like the harshest provision, which would have given a new regulator a mandate to shrink Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae by forcing them to sell off part of their portfolios. That approach, the Democrats feared, would cut into the ability of low- and moderate-income families to buy houses.
The political backdrop to the debate "was like bizarre-o-world," said the second of three people familiar with the program. "The Republicans were pro-regulation and the Democrats were against it; it was upside down."
Sen. Richard Shelby, the committee chairman at the time, underscored that in a statement Wednesday, saying that with Democrats already on their side, it was not surprising that Freddie Mac and Freddie Mae went after Republicans. "Unfortunately," said Shelby, R-Ala., "efforts then to derail reform were successful."
In a sign of bad things to come, Freddie Mac was already having serious problems in 2005. Auditors had exposed massive accounting issues, so improved regulation was one obvious remedy.
Once Freddie Mac's in-house lobbyists failed to keep Hagel's bill bottled up in the committee, McLoughlin responded by secretly hiring DCI.
DCI never filed lobbying reports with Congress about what it was doing because the firm was relying on a long-recognized gap in the disclosure law.
Federal lobbying law only requires reporting and registration when there are contacts with a legislator or staff.
"To have it stealthy, not to let people know who is behind this, in my opinion is unethical," said James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University who long has taught courses about lobbying.
After "working 88 hours a weeks for 18 years," Dave Haskin, who owns and runs the place with his wife, Gisela, are ready to take it easy.
A liquidation sale starts this week. The business will shut down late next month, leaving Capitol Ace at 18th and I streets as the only remaining hardware store in the downtown area.
Like other family-run hardware operations, Broadway Hardware saw competition from big-box discounters like Home Depot. The economic slowdown made things worse, cutting sales by 25 percent over the past year, Haskin says.
Still, he says, the business remained profitable.
...Speaking of Broadway Hardware, the place boasts a fascinating subterranean surprise: a massive, basement bomb shelter built at the start of World War II.
Taking up half of the store's footprint, its 8-foot-thick walls are made from reinforced concrete.
The Haskins used it for storage. Dave thinks a new building tenant could put it to better use: "It would make a perfect wine cellar," he says.
Early Voting Protest, In North Carolina
This seems almost self-defeating, by nature. People tend to be wary around polling places and would resent being hectored at a polling place.
The Hills Are Alive!
Left: Late September, on Tome Hill, north of Belen, NM. Couldn't ask for a better fall day!
But what's that in the middle distance?
Left: Oh!
Guess I know what I'll be dreaming about tonight!
(via an E-Mail chain from my sister's acquaintance).
Squirrels, Raccoons, Or Sasquatch?
Cleaned about half my gutters on Sunday, and learned that somebody has been leaving large turds on my roof.
E.'s Helpful Health Hints
Lately, I've been getting morose about a bit of popcorn kernel stuck between two healthy, robust molars. Unwaxed dental floss hadn't succeeded at removing the fragment, and in order to remove the gum irritant, I was considering jackhammering out at least one of the two molars.
E. suggested using slimmer, waxed dental floss, and to my surprise, it worked!
A British Muslim convert with a mental age of ten was unable to blow up a restaurant because he'd locked himself in a toilet.
Nicky Reilly, 22, had gone into the cubicle of an Exeter eaterie to assemble the nailbombs from chemicals in bottles. He then planned to rush among the 50 diners - many of them children - and detonate the devices.
However, he found he couldn't unfasten the lock and then one of the bombs exploded, setting the others he was holding off.
Reilly, who was groomed over the internet by extremists into becoming a suicide bomber, was arrested when he staggered outside with serious facial injuries.
...Prosecutor Stuart Baker said: 'He was unable to open the lock of the cubicle door and come out, by which time the first device had already exploded.'
Anti-terror investigators believe Pakistani radicals targeted Reilly because of his history of mental illness.
A plot was hatched involving the Giraffe restaurant in Exeter, where 50 diners, many with their children, were enjoying the half-term break on May 22 this year. Yesterday, Reilly, who has changed his name to Mohammad Abdul-Aziz Rashid Saeed-Alim, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to preparing a terrorist attack and attempted murder.
...Officers are still trying to trace the extremist cell that successfully targeted him via his YouTube page – on which he called himself Chechen233.
The case is a chilling echo of terrorist methods in Iraq, where the disabled have been persuaded to blow themselves up.
...'There was some debate, which is revealed by comments on the computer, about what sort of person should be targeted in due course, whether public servants such as police officers or other public servants or ordinary citizens.
‘In the end the decision was made to target ordinary citizens in a restaurant.’
...Incredibly, Reilly’s YouTube page was still online yesterday. It included clips of the September 11 attacks and a video entitled‘How to make a benzine bomb’.
