Sunday, November 10, 2002
YOU KNOW, IT WOULD have been nice for the Washington Post to mention before an election on a $5 billion tax increase to pay for transportation that part of Northern Virginia's traffic problem stems from the failure of local government to retime traffic lights that were last programmed over a decade ago.
WATCHING TOO MUCH late night television lately. Things I noticed:
* Michael Moore on Oprah repeating the Halloween candy story I had been telling people all last week. (When I grew up in Houston, trick-or-treating essentially ended because of a mass scare over poisoned candy, even though the only incident was a father poisoning his son for insurance money.) I hope people don't think I was just parroting Michael Moore. What was really happening was that we were both parroting Barry Glassner's "The Culture of Fear." Glassner was on the show, too; I won't comment on the irony of Oprah having guests complaining about fear-mongering. (And I wonder how many "TV Nation" and "Awful Truth" segments focused on wildly remote environmental risks?)
* Carson Daly is terrible interviewer. He had Ted Danson on. He gave Danson a shirt as a reference to a joke on "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The gag, not that funny to begin with (it was a different shirt for one thing), was sufficiently obscure that even Danson seemed confused, and the audience didn't seem to get it either. The interview itself was painful to watch: Daly gushing like a little fanboy.
* Ted Danson gave a pitch on the show for the Toyota Prius, though. Good for him.
* The opening credits montage of a 1990 rerun of Saturday Night Live had an awkward number of close-to-identical shots of an Empire State Building bedecked in red, white, and blue, which makes one suspect that they were editing out shots of the New York skyline with the World Trade Center. It was far more noticeable than if they hadn't done the Soviet-style re-editing, and it just seemed wrong.
* Speaking of which, why is it that The Powers That Be pulled the "Simpsons" episode where Homer visits the World Trade Center, but not the "Simpsons" episode where a missile collapses a fictional New York City Mad Magazine skyscraper into rubble?
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
1:30 AM AND IT LOOKS like the Republicans have a 49-48 Senate lead, plus small leads in Minnesota and Missouri, with Thune slightly behind Johnson in South Dakota. (Or, technically, 49 to 46 + Jeffords + Landrieu in Louisiana if she wins her run-off.) Democratic votes tend to be concentrated towards the end of the counting (more votes in larger counties that take longer to compile -- which reminds me of my Student Senate campaign where I was down by 21 votes with 60 left to be counted and somehow caught up with an improbable 41-17 run, or something like that). So we're not going to learn anything 'til tomorrow.
The Virginia LaRouchie got 9% of the vote. That's not funny, even as a protest vote. The sales tax hike lost. Bedtime.
The Virginia LaRouchie got 9% of the vote. That's not funny, even as a protest vote. The sales tax hike lost. Bedtime.
IN THE 1988 Baseball Abstract, Bill James describes how when he first started writing, he got a hate-mail letter or two a week that cheesed him off and got him unduly upset, and that now that he was popular, and read by 100 times more people, he got 100 times more letters like that, and, well, he was fed up with it and taking his ball and going home. "Breaking the wand," he called it.
I'm reminded of this, because Lileks got obnoxious mail a day or two ago, and I hope the jerk who sent him the letter doesn't spoil it for the rest of us. Judging by what he's sent me on the rare occasions I've disturbed him with a note over the last five or six years(and almost always with my real-life identity, so he doesn't know me from Adam -- I don't think he even read this site until Combustible Boy signed up), Lileks does a better job of answering his mail than Max Power does. It's an interesting phenomenon how it takes only a couple of people to befoul the pool for everybody else. There are probably only a few thousand spammers who make e-mail miserable for millions. It's not the vast mass of humanity that forces us to install the door locks, it's the 1-2% of bozos at the margin. And it might take just one bile-ful poison pen letter writer to persuade a writer I've been following and enjoying for years to give up his unpaid hobby.
I'm reminded of this, because Lileks got obnoxious mail a day or two ago, and I hope the jerk who sent him the letter doesn't spoil it for the rest of us. Judging by what he's sent me on the rare occasions I've disturbed him with a note over the last five or six years(and almost always with my real-life identity, so he doesn't know me from Adam -- I don't think he even read this site until Combustible Boy signed up), Lileks does a better job of answering his mail than Max Power does. It's an interesting phenomenon how it takes only a couple of people to befoul the pool for everybody else. There are probably only a few thousand spammers who make e-mail miserable for millions. It's not the vast mass of humanity that forces us to install the door locks, it's the 1-2% of bozos at the margin. And it might take just one bile-ful poison pen letter writer to persuade a writer I've been following and enjoying for years to give up his unpaid hobby.
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
THE DANGER OF being educated as an economist is that you're trained to realize exactly how futile and irrational it is to vote.
Nevertheless, I voted today, and almost immediately regretted it. (Trivia: first time I used a voting machine instead of a punchcard ballot where I had to strip the chad.)
John Warner is running unopposed, and I meant to cast a protest vote for one of his independent opponents. Except that they were an isolationist and a LaRouchie. I voted for Warner.
For Congress, the opposition parties couldn't even find a college graduate to run. Geez, I would've run if they had asked, and done at least as well, and at least I'd have something to say in the voter guide. I voted for the incumbent, but I'm putting my name in the hopper in 2004: there's a greater civic duty to run for office than to hold one's nose and vote for these buffoons.
I voted against the half-cent sales tax increase. If you're going to raise my taxes to build roads, raise gas taxes so that the pollution from the additional roads is at least partially offset from the deterrent to gas guzzling. Moreover, building more roads in the outer suburbs would just encourage more sprawl there, with no net effect on outer-suburb traffic congestion, while increasing congestion in the inner suburbs and the bottleneck bridges into DC. There's also the simple reality that there's no such thing as targeted taxes. Even if every penny from the lottery goes to education or from the sales tax goes to road-building, it just means that there's an offset in the general revenue fund that doesn't have to go to education or road-building. Feh. Let the government learn how to prioritize.
Nevertheless, I voted today, and almost immediately regretted it. (Trivia: first time I used a voting machine instead of a punchcard ballot where I had to strip the chad.)
John Warner is running unopposed, and I meant to cast a protest vote for one of his independent opponents. Except that they were an isolationist and a LaRouchie. I voted for Warner.
For Congress, the opposition parties couldn't even find a college graduate to run. Geez, I would've run if they had asked, and done at least as well, and at least I'd have something to say in the voter guide. I voted for the incumbent, but I'm putting my name in the hopper in 2004: there's a greater civic duty to run for office than to hold one's nose and vote for these buffoons.
I voted against the half-cent sales tax increase. If you're going to raise my taxes to build roads, raise gas taxes so that the pollution from the additional roads is at least partially offset from the deterrent to gas guzzling. Moreover, building more roads in the outer suburbs would just encourage more sprawl there, with no net effect on outer-suburb traffic congestion, while increasing congestion in the inner suburbs and the bottleneck bridges into DC. There's also the simple reality that there's no such thing as targeted taxes. Even if every penny from the lottery goes to education or from the sales tax goes to road-building, it just means that there's an offset in the general revenue fund that doesn't have to go to education or road-building. Feh. Let the government learn how to prioritize.
Monday, November 04, 2002
YOU KNOW, I have absolutely no objection when U.S. forces target and kill al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for previous attacks. I'm even not going to complain that the CIA used a missle to do it. But isn't all this something our Secretary of State criticized Israel for?
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