Too Many Mysteries

This is the right thing to do, but it's taken way too much time and energy.   

9:45:59 AM  comment []    

New Car Considered Confusing

I bought it with one contingency: that I be able to take it into my mechanic and have them do what they like to call a pre-sale inspection. If they came up with more than $500 of work, I could get the dealer to fix it or they could choose to void the transaction.

The guys at High Road poked and prodded and identified several "issues", as I fully-expected they would. Yes, it came to more than $500, but that came as no surprise.

Some of the issues:

• Entire car has been repainted. And the right-front door is mis-aligned. And the front-end is out of alignment. And the tires are brand-new (el cheapos from the dealership). What kind of accident was it, I wonder?
• There was brake fluid near the ABS unit, which would amount to a $1500 repair if it's leaking and needs replacing.
• There's some oil blowby in the air intake system, indicating sludgy oil.
• It's just about at 90,000 miles, so it's due for a timing belt & water pump. It also is due for a "full service": a valve adjustment and a tuneup on steroids.
• Clutch master and slave cylinders are leaking and need replacement
• Outer driveshafts need rebooting.

If the ABS needs replacement, this all runs to about $4,600. From my frequent discussions with the High Road guys, I've learned that that's common even for younger cars than mine.

If you think about it, it makes sense. If you've started thinking about a new car, do you feel tremendously willing to do gobs of maintenance? Unlikely. I expected at least $2,000 of work.

But $4,600?

High Road suggested that I could figure out the first problem (potential collision damage) by getting the thing aligned. If it aligns properly, then everything's straight. If they can't get it aligned, then the suspension needs attention. OK.

The ABS mystery amounts to the biggest unknown. The dealership does a pressure test, while my guys prefer to clean it up, apply some substance to the surrounding area, then let it drive around for a couple of weeks to figure out if there's a leak and whence it comes. I sure don't want to wait any damned two weeks.

Then there's the work that just plain needs doing (clutch cylinders, rebooting, & thermostat). That work, with the alignment and ABS unit pressure test, comes to about $1,000. I want the dealer to cover all of that.

They've offered to do the alignment for free and sell me the rest of the work "at cost". Even the service manager offered that he had no idea what "cost" might be. He did offer me a $5.00/hr. discount on labor. How munificent.

If the alignment comes back bad, the deal's off. I don't trust the dealership to have standards quite as high as my guys, so I've got it set up that they'll check the alignment after it's been aligned.

If the ABS comes back good, that cuts $1,500 off of the repair tab, though again, I don't fully trust that they'll be as sensitive to potential problems as High Road. Liability concerns might trump economic incentives in this case.

Sondra's the bad cop in this situation. She wants it all. I'm pretty sure that there's absolutely no chance to get what we want. So I'm tempted to take the car back today, get my check back, and call it good. But from a deviousness standpoint, I'd much rather see the results of the alignment and the ABS test before giving any ultimatums.

If the ABS looks good, I can probably justify paying for the stuff I want above -- it certainly nets out less money. If it's bad, they're now in a position where they need to fix $1,500 total at retail, with a $1,200 (retail) part. I don't think they'd be smart to sell a car with a bad ABS system, but they're a car dealership.

In any case, I think I'll wait, then give my ultimatum.

And then -- maybe -- start looking again.   

1:17:38 AM  comment []    

Parents say kid's thong is just plain wrong

And, taking offense at the idea that some parents suggest Abercrombie is inciting pedophilia, Carney contended the thongs were designed for girls to enjoy, and no one else. He said he could list at least 100 reasons why a young girl would want thong underwear, the need to hide pantie lines being one of them.

via Triboluminescence

12:55:30 AM  comment []    

In Guatemala, a Rhode Island-Size Jade Lode

In the end the scientists made a series of discoveries culminating in bus-size boulders of Olmec blue jade, some astride creeks. "It kept getting better and better," said Virginia B. Sisson, a geologist at Rice University who has recently examined jades in Myanmar as well as Guatemala. The blue jade, she said, "is all over the hillsides."

12:11:10 AM  comment []    

yourish.com: West Wing on Saudi Arabia

Last night's West Wing: C.J. Cregg is asked for her opinion on the Saudi religious police who forced teenaged girls back into a burning school because they weren't dressed correctly to come out in public, causing the loss of 17 lives:

Outraged? I'm barely surprised. This is a country where women aren't allowed to drive a car. They're not allowed to be in the company of any man other than a close relative. They're required to adhere to a dress code that would make a Maryknoll nun look like Malibu Barbie. They beheaded 121 people last year for robbery, rape, and drug trafficking. They have no free press, no elected government, no political parties, and the royal family allows the religious police to travel in groups of six, carrying nightsticks, and they freely and publicly beat women. But Brutus is an honorable man.

Seventeen schoolgirls were forced to burn alive because they weren't wearing the proper clothing. Am I outraged? No, Steve, no Chris, no Mark. That is Saudi Arabia, our partners in peace.

And the reason Allison Janney won the Emmy is evident in her scathing delivery. Whoo. Nearly burned out my television set.

Allison Janney once played my wife in a college play. I had the lead, but she -- of course -- stole the show.   

10:54:11 PM  comment []    

Costello packed lyrical brilliance with high energy

The punk and new wave icon kicked off his two-hour-plus show with "45," a bittersweet rocker from "When I Was Cruel," his first new album in seven years. It's also his highest-charting album, reaching No. 20 last week on The Billboard 200 album chart.

I had a great time at the show. Elvis did nearly all of the songs on the new record, which now seems all the more brilliant. It was a loud show, and essentially unrelenting. I always bring ear protection to concerts; I needed it for this one. His Seattle concert for the All This Useless Beauty record had much more nuance and a broader dynamic range. I like nuance and dynamism in music.

But if Elvis wants to rock, why not? Let Elvis be Elvis. Leave entertaining geniuses to wander, then see what comes out.   

8:04:15 PM  comment []    

Japan Today: China to establish base on moon in 2010

China plans to launch its first mission to the moon in 2010 and to establish a base there, the China Daily said on Monday.

"China is expected to complete its first exploration of the moon in 2010 and will establish a base on the moon as we did in the South Pole and the North Pole," the newspaper quoted Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China's moon exploration program, as saying.

Good for them. Maybe that will get us off of our space butts a little bit. As Ralph Cramden would say: "To the mooooon!"

And if you doubt that they can do it, remember that it took us almost exactly 8 years from Kennedy stating the goal to the first moon landing. And we had less technology at our disposal and faced the unknown.

We've probably got all of the equipment needed fully-designed, so we could probably go back permanently in three or four years. But if we're not interested, why don't we just sell our plans to the Chinese so they can save themselves the time and trouble of doing it themselves?

If you happen (as I do) to think that that's a really bad idea, wouldn't you rather we were already there once they showed up?  

12:29:56 PM  comment []    

Satirewire: Reminder

1:00:22 AM  comment []    

T[H]anks!

And they did. Thanks!

Update.

Spoke too soon. I think they were just in mid-redesign when I looked at the site last night. They're back to the white on black. Grrr. I wish that IE would allow me to modify style sheet settings per site, rather than simply globally. Or they could give me a keystroke to switch between my styles and colors and the site's. I'd have that one memorized in a flash!  

12:38:01 AM  comment []    

Business Week: Five Questions Bush Must Answer

Why, if Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft over the summer, did Justice not issue sterner warnings to airlines and the public about threats to commercial aviation?

Rice says because the Administration believed the hijacking threat was primarily a foreign problem, it didn't caution the public about a possible hijacking of a domestic airliner. Still, Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), at a closed-door Capitol Hill briefing with Rice, raised a Fox News report that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was warned by the FBI in July not to fly commercial. He used leased government aircraft to travel to a summer fishing vacation in Missouri

12:23:29 AM  comment []    

Jerusalem Post: Peres outlines plan for Palestinian state

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres last night released details of a diplomatic plan calling for the almost immediate establishment of a Palestinian state, three days after Labor Party colleagues Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Haim Ramon each unveiled blueprints for a diplomatic solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Peres said that ending Israel's control over the Palestinians is both a Jewish moral imperative and in the state's best security interests. According to Peres, the Palestinians created serious doubts about whether they are a viable partner for peace when they rejected then US president Bill Clinton's proposals at Camp David.

Sounds practical, sounds fair, sounds simultaneously speedy and incremental, let's do it!

Oh, but it has one little problem:

...the Palestinians would recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Bzzt! Wrong answer. Won't happen. Read this interview with Arafat and notice how he is happy to talk about Israel, but when Wolf Blitzer presses him and tries to get him to talk about Israel as a Jewish state, he falls all over himself to avoid putting those two words together...

BLITZER: Two states...

ARAFAT: Two states.

BLITZER: One Jewish...

ARAFAT: One Israeli state, because you have Jews and they have Christians and Muslims.

BLITZER: You see, when you refuse to say a Jewish state, the Israelis think...

ARAFAT: No, I'm not...

BLITZER: ... that you're not going to accept a Jewish state.

ARAFAT: I am not -- I am not refusing. They don't call it a Jewish state.

OK, so they have open media, the right to express themselves and some of them don't consider it, or maybe don't want it to be a Jewish state, so it's not. Or how about this: Israel hasn't ethnically-cleansed the non-Jews from its territory ergo, it's not a Jewish state. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which is clearly a Muslim state by that logic. And what kind of state will Palestine be, I wonder? How should the Palestinian Christians be feeling right now?

How about we get the UN to approve a resolution declaring a Palestinian state alongside a Zionist Entity Occupying Historicaly Palestinian Territory? That'll fly, but better in some places than others. But it would pass the General Assembly, that's for sure.   

1:11:15 AM  comment []    

See car, buy car

Last week, I found one in the paper and had it checked out at my mechanic. They found $5,000 of stuff wrong with it -- $3,000 of which would have to happen immediately. It was down a quart of oil. I made a low-ball offer last Saturday. I haven't heard back. I hereby rescind the offer.

Near the start of my search, I called the dealership where we bought our last car and asked about a car they had advertised on the net. It wasn't what I wanted, but I told friendly Ali exactly what I wanted. He called yesterday evening and described the car to me. I didn't feel a tremendous need to move immediately, but he seemed understandably excited for me to come and take a look at this car. Today. OK. Before our hair cut, Milo and I would take a look.

And so we did. Year, model, body style, trim line, transmission: check, check, check, check, check. Color: check. Price: Ick! I drove it a couple of miles, flipped some switches, glanced under the hood, and told Ali that it was the car I wanted but that I needed to get it for the right price and I needed my mechanic to bless it. I prepared to wait until the end of the month if necessary. And if it sold, then it wasn't meant to be.

He strongly encouraged me to make him an offer very quickly. I'd done my research, so knew the parameters. I gave him a low-ball number: more in the private-party price range than the dealer. I expected him to laugh. He immediately counter-offered, but only $400 higher. Under my bottom-line price. I stalled. I told him I needed to talk with my manager. We huddled. Sondra assented. I called to clarify that I could get the car inspected. He said that would no problem and offered that if they found any problems over $500 that they'd fix it or void the deal. OK. We ate a quick dinner and trundled -- kids and all -- down to the dealership.

Milo and Ella had a great time collecting new car brochures and crawling in and out of showroom models, while we waited for the paperwork. Sondra took it for a quick spin around the block. I would have let Sondra go home, but I wanted to be able to walk away from the deal if they pulled any funny business. Didn't happen. Took a long time, but I drove it home.

In theory, I prefer to buy privately, but I've bought two used cars at Honda of Seattle, and had good experiences both times. We'll see how they react if the inspection finds anything dodgy. More later! Hell, start to finish, this took two hours. Not bad.

And now, I have a grown-up car. Imagine that.

For sale: 1982 Accord 5-speed hatchback, 176K, clean, reliable, lovingly maintained. $1,000.   

11:57:23 PM  comment []    

NPR: Free Books in Public Places

As Neda Ulaby reports [on] an online trend that has people committing "random acts of kindness" and then tracking the results on the Net. The site BookCrossing.com, for instance, links a loosely organized collection of people who share books. It works like this: someone who wants to share a book registers it on the Web site, prints out a label and puts it in the book. The book is then placed (members call it "released") in some public place, and the winds of fate take over. Theoretically, whoever finds the book will go to the site and record where they found it, and what they thought of it. Then they'll pass it on.

So what books would you release?

My list:

• Patrick O'Brian: Master and Commander
• David Brin: Startide Rising
• Martha Beck: Expecting Adam

Listen  

4:48:07 PM  comment []    

Ken Layne: Official Terror Blogs

And I've got a simple solution: all those agencies should create a Terror Blog. A group blog would be an easy way for any office of any agency to post the information and get it to everybody else. The blog would be read each morning in the Oval Office, during Bush's intelligence briefing, as well as at all the agencies and offices that contribute. Put stuff in one place and it's very difficult for information to fall through the cracks.

I don't know. The people, they can't be trusted with anything but pre-digested pap.  

4:39:31 PM  comment []    

Whopper of the Week: Robert Mueller

"There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country."

—FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, at a Sept. 17 Justice Department news briefing about the Sept. 11 attacks.

but

Mueller's agency, which has principal responsibility for preventing acts of terrorism on U.S. soil, knew that al-Qaida was planning a big attack; that there was some evidence Middle Eastern terrorists were infiltrating U.S. flight schools; that Zacarias Moussaoui, then attending flight school in Minnesota, had been arrested on immigration charges and was suspected of being a terrorist; and that President Bush had been warned of an al-Qaida plot to hijack airlines. The fact that Mueller later lied about receiving all these clues is mere icing on the cake.

I couldn't find the author of this sage piece of wisdom, but I let it guide much of my worldview: "Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can easily be explained by incompetence."

In his defense, Mueller was nominated on July 5th and confirmed as FBI director on August 2nd, 2001.

Thanks Sondra for the link.

4:48:29 PM  comment []    

Osama bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth

The story begins in 1998, with an American petroleum corporation called Unocal. Unocal was heavily invested in a planned pipeline that would run from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, and out to a warm water port. From there, natural gas piped down from the Caspian Sea would be made available for sale to American and Asian markets. The deal required approval from the governments of all three nations, including the Taliban. If terms could be met, Unocal and its investors stood to reap enormous profits.

The deal was destroyed along with two American embassies in Africa, victims of terror attacks by Osama bin Laden. Because bin Laden was based in Afghanistan and supported by the Taliban, the Clinton administration forbade any American company from dealing with them. A blizzard of cruise missiles soon followed this order, and Unocal was forced to wait for calmer days before it could continue to pursue the pipeline deal. Without Afghanistan, the puzzle piece at the center of the arrangement, everything crashed to a halt.

OK, this is believable enough. The pipeline stuff is well-documented, Afghanistan is important, and we were paying off the Taliban, ostensibly to cut back on opium production.

Pakistani news agencies reported in the weeks before September 11th that America had threatened war against the Taliban if they did not agree to the pipeline deal. "Accept our carpet of gold," the Bush administration is reported to have said, "or be buried under a carpet of bombs."

How poetic.

The implications of all this are profoundly disturbing. If Brisard and Dasique are to be believed, the Bush administration was actively courting the Taliban, protectors of Osama bin Laden, on behalf of Unocal. That courtship gave way to dire threats of war, believable enough that the September 11th attack could well be seen as a pre-emptive strike by bin Laden and the Taliban.

And here's the leap. The attacks were a pre-emptive strike? In retaliation for the pressure the administration put on them to do a pipeline deal? Please.

Folks, this is a war of civilizations. Except for the Gulf War, the US has flinched back every time OBL hit us. I think they seriously thought that they'd get away with the WTC and Pentagon attacks without retribution. And hell, with the world press as anti-US as it is, did they really think that we could get away with any significant attack on Afghanistan without a provocation? They took our money to eradicate opium because that corresponded with their own views on drugs. They thought they could get away with anything. They didn't care about world public opinion when they destroyed the buddha statues. They knew we wouldn't do anything. They were right.

Now perhaps what we have here is a failure to communicate. Saddam thought we gave him to OK to traipse into Kuwait. Osama noticed a pattern where every time we hit him, we would run away and lob cruise missles at him -- from a safe distance. Like a toddler, he decided to push the limits a little further. And this time he stepped over the line. And he's probably dead now because of it.

Yes, the US government and the Bush administration are unduely influenced by big business and big oil in particular. But that doesn't mean that there's some grand conspiracy going on.   

3:20:45 PM  comment []    

At MIT, they can put words in our mouths

In one demonstration, the researchers taped a woman speaking into a camera, and then reprocessed the footage into a new video that showed her speaking entirely new sentences, and even mouthing words to a song in Japanese, a language she does not speak. The results were enough to fool viewers consistently, the researchers report.

I guess this means that the bin Laden tapes and the videos of the 9/11 celebrations in the Palestinian territories were faked.

via [H]

12:24:20 PM  comment []    

This is cool

Cool Chips will enable many new and improved consumer products. They will enable laptops to run cooler, for example, and make possible in-car soda and grocery coolers. A panel of Cool Chips one inch square will provide enough cooling for a refrigerator; a panel about two inches square will have the capacity to provide the air conditioning for a living room; and a panel about five inches square will supply enough cooling power to cool an entire house.

Most existing cooling systems use compressors and environment-damaging fluids and are 40-50% efficient. Smaller thermoelectric cooling devices, despite more than $1 billion spent on research, are only 8% efficient. Cool Chips are projected to operate at 70-80% of the maximum theoretical efficiency (Carnot) for cooling.

Apparently Boeing has tested and is interested in this technology. And guess what, the technology works in reverse as well: rather than applying electricity and creating cold and hot surfaces, they can take heat and use it to generate electricity. I could learn to like this. This begs the question: can they do it cheaply?

via [H]

12:20:06 PM  comment []    

You Go, Ken!

I don't need to be a Jew to be outraged and repulsed by this kind of primitive bullshit. Americans aren't a race; they're a Nation. I couldn't tell you my full family tree even if you offered me delicious money. Got some English and French and Irish and American Indian and African slave in there and God knows what else. Who cares?

The only thing I believe in is Liberty and basic human decency. I don't believe in Jeebus and I don't mind if you do. And I'm not gonna kill you if you want to worship Allah, Yahweh, Buddha or Boba Fett. But I will defend those who believe in Liberty. It's the only goddamned thing that matters. Whether it's East Timor or the Czech Republic or Mexico or Mars, I'll side with Liberty. I could give a fuck if that means Jewish.

Anybody who thinks it's cute to blow up children and call it politics doesn't deserve to play the game. That goes for Tim McVeigh, ETA, the IRA and the PLO.

5:58:15 AM  comment []