Halloween.

• --On September 13th this year, I turned off the word verification Turing test on my blog. I've put most of the spam that I've gotten into a folder on my email. As of today, there are 444 such spam messages in there. The majority of my email now regards this blog, from "Anonymous," and exhibits one of three different characteristics:

1. It will compliment me as being such an extraordinary writer and providing such a useful blog.
2. It will be full of sentences mined from the net or just put together its own sentences with subjects, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and such pushed together to make a sentence that almost makes sense. Reading a paragraph of such sentences and trying to determine content will drive a person mad. End of line. Jump.
3. It will simply be full of links. Actually, they ALL have links. But this third variety will have nothing but.

• --I propose new legislation banning any October advertisement that includes any variation of the sentence: "[Nouns] so [adjective], it's scary!!!"  EG: "Prices so low, it's scary!!" "Food so good, it's scary!!!" Pull the advert; they're done for the month.
• --My high school freshman is making a mask to go roaming trick-or-treating tonight. She's taking her 10 year old sister, who is making some kind of raggedy witch costume. She makes pretty good costumes. Check out her dead bride costume from last year:

The dress was a costume dress that she'd picked up at a Goodwill for three dollars. The blood was some of her daddy's stage blood left over from graduate level blood spatter experiments.  She's miserable in that pic, because the stage blood, having been left in the garage, was about 55 degrees, and she was made to stand out in the fresh Halloween air to let it dry. She was cold.

• --Kids over 11 who arrive at my door tonight out of costume get no candy. Kids under 11 may get some candy, but they'll be told we disapprove, and that they need to sing for their supper. Also? They get the crappy candy, like Dumdums, or Good-n-Plenty.
• --I will actually be working an off-duty gig this evening for a couple of hours, controlling car access to an affluent community. Seems that the rabble locally less-affluent have discovered that their high-rolling neighbors give out the Good Stuff, and they all like to bring their kids. Problem: left to their own devices, man parents won't walk the sidewalks with their little kids; they will drive along beside them. This results in the hazard of people driving the streets while looking out their passenger side window, on the very night when there is the highest likelihood of a sprog darting out in front of their vehicle. My job will be to direct such parents to park their cars at the convenient lot near the entrance to the 'hood, and invite them to take a stroll with their costumed charge.  Such service will be rendered with a big ol' Officer Friendly grin. I have been assured that I am to be compensated quite well for this.
• --It's to be 73 degrees at 6:00 PM today, with a dry 5 mph breeze from the north, and not a cloud in the sky. The moon is only waning two days past full. It will be a delightful evening for a stroll with friends.
• --When I was about 13, my best friends' parents attended a church that taught that Halloween was evil. I was invited to a Halloween party with their youth group, and found to my dismay that they were all praying for the souls of all those kids who were caught up in the Satan-worshiping that surely accompanied the act of dressing up and unintentionally celebrating dark arts. The television show 20/20 had just done a big exposé on the apparent rampant spread of Satanism and people were wringing their hands all over. In retrospect, I think that there could have been no greater reward for the mullet-wearing teens with cans of spray paint and hopes of getting the townsfolk all scared, than that they would receive such coverage.
• --When I was 12, I was on a Boy Scout camp out on a fall night, when I went for an unsanctioned midnight walk with a friend*. I can't recall now if it was a Friday the 13th, or a Halloween night, but we came across a group of older teens in the woods who clearly were trying to work themselves into a tizzy. They had a girl screaming, and shouted. It was midnight. At one point, one of the young men stepped onto the dirt road near where we crouched and yelled the refrain to "Shout At The Devil!" I don't know about my companion, but I was rather impressed. It was right at midnight. I was pretty certain that if we were detected by the revelers, we would be murdered. I sharpened a large stick and we sat in the shadows, about 80 yards away. I suggested to my friend that we should go rescue the girl. My older friend pointed out that such an attempt would be foolhardy. I permitted him to persuade me. Later, we heard her talking and laughing. We crept away. To quote Robert Earl Keen in "Shades Of Gray": "...these are just some sorry kids/ They ain't the ones."*
• --I've just had that crappy Mötley Crüe song playing in the background while typing. It's no longer scary, nor does it sound that hard (it was mostly unlistenable to teen aged Matt G). It just sounds kind of crappy. Also? The metal umlauts are dumb. Yeah, I know-- I'm getting old.

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*I had seen him get up and walk out of the campsite, and I hopped up and ran to catch up. He was a couple of years older and a minor hero of mine, but I was aware that he also had a naughtier streak, too. To this day, I have no idea if he actually had a destination in mind. I think maybe he was hoping to get the two miles to the highway and get to a convenience store for some cigarettes.

**Yeah, this is the Richard Shindell version with Cry Cry Cry, but I think that the lyrics are clearer than the original Robert Earl Keen, Jr version. Also, yes, I'm aware that the song was written later in 1997, about some kids who almost got implicated for the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, but the phrase has resonated in my head many times throughout my career, when I have run across some light-runnin' malefactors who distracted me from my search for real evil-doers.

23 years gives some new perspective.

Back in 1989, John Cusack starred in a movie called Say Anything...
It is largely remembered for its scene with Cusack's character Lloyd Dobler serenading Ione Skye's character (Diane Court) with a boom box held over his head playing "In Your Eyes". It's also remembered for this scene, when the father of his valedictorian, fellowship-winning girlfriend asks him what he wants to do with his life.

The father (John Mahoney as Jim Court) has an incredibly open relationship with his daughter, and when he expresses his concerns about her underachiever boyfriend, Diane breaks up with Lloyd Dobler to be around her dad more before she goes to her fellowship in England. This breakup is trumped by the serenading by Dobler, and Diane and Lloyd somehow work their relationship out, in spite of everything.

My 14 year-old honors student daughter was watching that movie in her bedroom last night when I came home for lunch. I watched a few minutes of it with her. And man, has that movie changed.

First, I seem to have misremembered that it was called a "romantic comedy." No. There is nothing funny about this movie. It is a tragedy of epic proportions. The real hero of the story, the father Jim Court? He gets locked up for tax evasion. The sweet valedictorian ends up with the villain of the tale, that shiftless Lloyd Dobler.

At least, that's how it looked to me, now.

Minor parenting challenge.

My younger daughter just got back from a week with her aunt. Her aunt is really into eastern cultural knickknacks, and she gave my daughter a cute little figurine display with the critters of the Chinese zodiac affixed to it. "What Chinese sign are you, Daddy?" I was asked. Damfino. I've never bothered to look it up, because my disdain for the whole astrology and zodiac business is pretty deep and broad. But what the hell, let's see.

Oh. Apparently I'm a pig. Oh ho! How ironic.

I'm on record for taking any opportunity to fisk the concept of astrology, so I shan't belabor that theme again here today. (But maybe later, we can point and laugh at astrologists.)

My challenge here is to make clear to my children the stupidity of believing that a person will be imbued with certain traits merely by virtue or damnation of the time of their birth... while not causing them to feel that there is disrespect toward adults in their lives that follow it  (such as a wayward auntie).  Worse, if I push the issue, it becomes an opportunity for rebellion. I don't care to consider a world where my offspring consult their zodiac, be it Chinese or occidental.

Place your bets, now.

When I saw on the Yahoo news page that an unemployed west Dallas man had won McDonald's $1 Million Monopoly game, I grinned when I saw the following:

The old saw is that, if all the money in the country were distributed evenly among all the people here, within 5 years it would basically have been re-distributed to the same people who have it now. Call me a pessimist, but I actually suspect (without any real (non-anecdotal) evidence) that this is true.


But I chastised myself for having smirked, and thought, "maybe this guy has some good plans for the ~$600k+ that he'll get out of the giant cheque, after taxes." I mean, we all could fall on hard times. We all could find ourselves living with our folks for a few months after a lay-off. We all could end up extending that stay for years. And years. Could happen to any of us.

Now let's see-- he plans to repay his folks. He plans to take his nephew to Yellowstone Park. He plans to... um... get a tattoo of a McRib sammich.


He thinks that properly-utilizing this money, he could be set for life.


Bless his pea-pickin' little heart.

Irritating, that.

This year, Toyota aired a big ad campaign admitting that they screwed up big-time. Well, they did-- they installed a whole mess of faulty throttle controllers. Well, a few.

But that needed recalling. The device that controls your engine's power output should work. Absolutely.

But this business of the car with the messed-up throttles being unstoppable is proven to be poppycock. Even if your brakes wouldn't stop the horrendous power of the engine propelling the car, simply shifting to neutral would stop the power from getting to the wheels. Turning off the engine would stop the power from getting to the wheels. ("But that cuts the power steering!" Oh, grow up! A moving car is steerable in a straight line without power steering. )

But the fact is, the brakes DO stop the car. Car & Driver found that, with the throttle wide open and the brakes stomped at 70 mph, the Camry stops shorter than a Ford Taurus with the throttle closed.

Then we come to the single most famous case of the throttle sticking, which now looks like simple fraud in the worst light, and gross driver error in the best light. The problem wasn't the hardware in the Prius-- it was the software between the driver's ears. He's either inept, or a swindler, or, possibly, both.

But if you still are terrified of your Toyota, and don't trust 'em, I'll take one off your hands. Especially if you've got a Tundra that's been threatening to kick in your front door, eat the children, and crap on your rug. I've got a deck to build.

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Hat tip to Les Jones.

Bad day at the office.

I'm going to just go out on a limb, reading this article about the three officers killed (and one critically wounded) in Oakland, CA, and declare that community-police relations are not what they should be.

People lingered at the scene of the first shooting. About 20 bystanders taunted police.
Tension between police and the community has risen steadily since the fatal shooting of unarmed 22-year-old Oscar Grant by a transit police officer at an Oakland train station on Jan. 1.
That former Bay Area Rapid Transit officer, Johannes Mehserle, has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Monday. Violent protests erupted on the streets of Oakland in the weeks after Grant's death, further inflaming tensions.

I know that Community Oriented Police is supposed to be all touchy-feelie stuff that violates the principles of good old basic policing, but it would seem that the second of Sir Robert Peel's Principles is being tested, here:

"The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions."

I feel for those officers. I can imagine the rage of the officers that were working the scene of the death and serious wounding of their brother officers, when the citizenry came out to taunt them. The community there is in trouble, and so are the officers.

Don said it best, so why would I try to upstage him?

I drop by the local convenience store for a Red Bull to get me through tonight's soporific statistics class. Huh. The four-pack is cheaper. Hell, we KNOW I'll drink 'em. So I grab the four-pack.

At the counter is a woman who, while not young, is not nearly old enough to account for her toothlessness. Said lack of dentition is made most evident by the lateral jaw motion that she keeps making to set and reset her dentures, which causes her to do a credible impression of an ungulate chewing cud. I plop down my pack of taurine and caffeine, and give an audible gasp when she rings it up. Sure, it's cheaper than a six pack of my preferred beer, but it runs a little higher than most twelve-packs of cola. Yikes. I hand her my debit card.

She runs it through the swipe strip at about 2 inches a second. Sssswiiiiiipe. Not surprisingly, it does not work. She does it again, running it through slower, this time taking four full seconds to negotiate the 4" channel. I force a smile, and mention that this card likes to go fast. I can feel the line of customers grow behind me. This of course makes her take pause, cocking her hand on her hip as she declares (I just wanted her to go! Go! This card has worked three times today on the first swipe. It's NEVER failed. Ev. Er.) that it does look pretty old, at that. She then goes straight to the plastic bag trick, as referenced by Don Gwinn a year or two ago.

"It really doesn't need that." I protest. "It works fine..."

She swipes it quickly and with a smooth flick, and it works. Just like it was designed to, when the card is swiftly drawn through the swipe slot. She smiles triumphantly and says, "See? Works every time."

"Yes," I say, looking pointedly at my card as I put it back into my wallet. "It does."

I'm sure she's a wonderful person. Kind to children and small animals, and such.
So why do I hate her soooooooo much, just now?

Go listen, learn, and be disgusted.

This American Life put together the most concise and easy-to-digest explanation about how the housing mortgage crisis came about that I've yet heard. It's seriously worth a listen:

And so Mike noticed that every month, the guidelines were getting a little looser.Something called a stated income, verified asset loan came out, which meant you didn't have to provide paycheck stubs and w-2 forms, as they had in the past. You could simply state your income, as long as you showed that you had money in the bank.

Mike Garner: "The next guideline lower is just stated income, stated assets. Then you state what you make and state what’s in your bank account. They call and make sure you work where you say you work. Then an accountant has to say for your field it is possible to make what you said you make. But they don’t say what you make, just say it’s possible that they could make that."

Alex Blumberg: "It’s just so funny that instead of just asking people to prove what they make there’s this theater in place of you have to find an accountant sitting right in front of me who could very easily provide a W2, but we’re not asking for a W2 form, but we do want this accountant to say 'yeah, what they’re saying is plausible in some universe.'"

Mike Garner: "Yeah, and loan officers would have an accountant they could call up and say 'Can you write a statement saying a truck driver can make this much money?' Then the next one, came along, and it was no income, verified assets. So you don't have to tell the people what you do for a living. You don’t have to tell the people what you do for work. All you have to do is state you have a certain amount of money in your bank account. And then, the next one, is just no income, no asset. You don't have to state anything. Just have to have a credit score and a pulse."

Actually that pulse thing? Also optional. Like the case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages.

Shorter version here.

For those of us who rage at the public perception of this "crisis," it's nice to get confirmation of where the problems originated.

Blogging On A Theme: Astrology.

See also Tamara, Marko, Atomic Nerds, LawDog, and Ambulance Driver's take on this theme. I've got no clue what they wrote. Hate the theme but love the idea? Then give us some feedback. But go read theirs, too. They probably did their homework assignment more than an hour before turning it in...
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"A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an 'intellectual' -- find out how he feels about astrology."

--"The Notebooks Of Lazarus Long," Time Enough For Love
by Robert A. Heinlein.

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When I was in police academy, 14 years ago, my otherwise estimable academy coordinator told our small class of 15 that "60% of career police officers are Libras." This from a woman with a couple of degrees, a Master Peace Officer license, and an entire police academy under her. I looked around the room. Two nods, a grimace or three, and a lot of frozen faces. I hope mine was in the last category-- I'd hate to have that good woman (an excellent instructor, and still teaching and serving as a peace officer) perceive any disrespect from me.

I later found out that one of the grimaces was from a guy who was some other sign, which was the foil of Libra (I can't recall which that would be-- what's the opposite of a balance scale? A goat? An arachnid? A pair of twins? Perhaps a crustacean...). He was afraid that this would mean that he wouldn't get or be able to retain a job as a cop, because of his destined contradictory nature to the needs of the task.

Meanwhile, I, who had cinched one of the two Libra billets in my class, thought that the whole concept was utter bunk. First, I knew a few career cops, including my father, and none that I could recall had birthdays anywhere near mine. Second, I knew 'way too many people who did have birthdays near mine, who no more should become cops than I should become an exotic fan dancer at cocktail bars for tips... read: Not at all.

Finally, it would simply have been too remarkable of a fact for me to have just then heard of it for the very first time at the tender age of 22 years, all lived within a cop's family. Ain't no way.

And, in fact, my venerable coordinator was (on that particular facet of her knowledge) full of steaming crap, bless her pea-pickin' little heart.

---

Imagine if we ran the criminal justice system with an eye toward following the "science" of astrology:

We would man extra officers during certain cycles of the planetary and stellar alignments. (Contrary to ever-popular and almost understandable belief, there is zero correlation between crime and lunar cycles. I say again: Zero. Don't believe me? Look it up. Yet I know some cops and more than a few emergency workers who believe in a significant increase in emergency calls when the moon is full.)

We would, while performing field interviews, check the astrological sign of the suspect to determine how to deal with him, and whether or not we should call for backup... you know-- like maybe a Virgo, because this guy's an Aquarius, and thus you *know* this interrogation is going nowhere.

"Your honor, I had to skip that step in the use of force continuum, because this guy was a Taurus, and you know how they can get..."

At the jail, they would segregate populations using a classification that looked not at all to the relative security risk of the given inmate, but more toward whether their zodiac assignments were compatible. Skinhead and Black Panther? Well sure... if they were under complimentary star signs.

Judges would consult star charts before applying indeterminate sentencing.

Voir dires would predictably become attempts to learn what sign the potential juror was born under.

Anti-discrimination laws would be passed for people born under opposing signs.

Finally, anti-defamation civil attorneys would begin to make their nut, defending the rights of the downtrodden signs.

- - -

I've always looked askance at astrology. How the hell did it manage to score the "-ology" suffix away from the real science of astronomy? And why were some otherwise apparently intelligent people giving it any credibility?

I remember how, when in 8th grade and I took Earth Science, my moronic science teacher got to the astronomy portion of the course. We were made to memorize the signs of the zodiac, and repeat them with their dates in a test. For credit in science class. This was the same bitch who gave me a B on my working metal detector that I had entered in the science fair, because I had duct-taped the variable trimmer capacitor (cleverly stolen from an old car radio at a junk yard) to the hoe handle that I had built the whole thing upon. This sucker could detect a 10 penny nail under a yard of dirt, and I had soldered the breadboard myself, but she didn't like the look of duct tape.

Her name was Mrs. Bead. And she can't sue me for libel, because it's all true.