Fri, 29 Jul 2005
Semis for Soccer Moms
Back in 1999, after the Lincoln Navigator was introduced, I joked, "Next year, people will be driving semis around town." Looks like I was only off by a few years.
MSNBC has a picture and
details on the 14,500-pound behemoth.
But does anybody really need a vehicle that is nine feet tall, eight feet wide, 21 1/2 feet long and gets about seven miles on a gallon of diesel?
No.
"Anybody can lease a Hummer now for $500 a month. Soccer moms are driving them," he said. "This is not a soccer mom's vehicle."
We'll see about that.
Thu, 21 Jul 2005
Congress to Slow Earth's Rotation
According to the Chicago Sun-Times (via Max Clark), Congress is planning to add two months to Daylight Saving Time.
"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use,'' said U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who co-sponsored the measure with U.S. Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.).
Shifting daylight from the morning to the evening doesn't create more of it. See Wikipedia for more details on DST.
Tue, 21 Jun 2005
I'm an Art Collector
On Saturday, Denisa and I bought our first pieces of art. I took her down to Scala Galleria to show her Carrie Graber's stuff that I liked. She wasn't quite as impressed as I was, but she thought some of pieces were pretty good.
We ended up buying two small, 9x12 pieces, one original and one print. The
original is Room
Full of Blues.
The print is The Letter.
Sun, 05 Jun 2005
Great Beer and Great Art in Los Angeles
I went down to the Scala Galleria on Montana in Santa Monica yesterday to check
out their art by Carrie
Graber. They had about 10 pieces of hers including a couple small original
paintings and a number of giclees on canvas. Her paintings are amazing.
I had never checked out that area of Santa Monica before, so I wandered down Montana towards the beach. It's mostly little boutiques, but there are also a number of coffee cafes and restaurants. I stopped at the bluffs and read for bit. On the way back, I stopped in a little pub called Father's Office. From the "Beer" sign outside, I thought it would be a dive, but it was actually a trendy little place.
It reminds me a bit of City Pub in Redwood City. They have 36 beers on tap, mostly California microbrews and a few international beers. I had a great IPA, Bear Republic Racer 5, and an even hoppier double IPA, Russian River Brewing's Pliny the Elder. Both were fantastic beers. Surprisingly, they had Greene King Abbot Ale. I've never seen Greene King in the states. I asked if they ever get the IPA, which is probably my favorite English beer, but the manager said that it doesn't travel well, which is kind of weird considering IPA's were originally made for export.
The only disappointment was the food. They have an absurd policy of "No substitutions, modification, alterations or deletions. Yes, really." When did beer snobs become food snobs? Since I couldn't get a burger without cheese, I ordered some chorizo which wasn't very good.
Thu, 26 May 2005
Wedding Gift Stagnation
It pays to get married young. From my experience, wedding gifts tend to not keep pace with inflation. My friends, Gina and Kat, recently got married. Since they've been living together for a while, they don't really need kitchenware and linens; so, instead, they asked for cash to help pay for their honeymoon. I don't really like the idea of giving cash as a gift. We wanted to give them a gift certificate that they could use while on their honeymoon, which would show at least some thought went into the gift. But we started a bit late in the search for an appropriate venue from which to purchase a gift certificate, and didn't find anything that we were sure that they would appreciate, so we ended up just giving them cash.
I think the standard wedding gift price is $100. To me, this amount is neither too rich nor too poor. But this is the same amount that I've been giving since 1998 when my friends started getting married. (If you've received a wedding gift valued at less than $100 from me, sorry, I might have been low on funds at the time. Sometimes people don't design their gift registry to optimize the gift value per gift-giver. I wouldn't want to give a $70 frying pan with three washclothes, for example. When picking out items for a gift registry, one should come up with appropriate bundles of items that come close to $100 in value. That said, I've never set up a gift registry. I think it's more tacky than asking for cash. The last time I went through a catalog listing things I wanted someone to buy me was when I listed just about every toy on the market for Christmas, 1984.)
My point was that, in terms of gifts received, you would have been better off getting married in 1998 than in 2005. Unless, of course, you asked for computer hardware or consumer electronics for your wedding, in which case a dollar goes a lot further today. This observation isn't solely based on my generosity (or cheapness) in gift giving. About a year after Denisa and I got married, we had a reception in Slovakia so we could share the joy of our matrimony with her family and friends; and so the Krizan (Denisa's maiden name) family could get a return on the investments they made in the marriages of various cousins. The investments turned out to not be very profitible in real terms though. It seems SKK 5000 is the standard Slovak wedding gift from family members. (This was about $100 when Denisa and I met, but due to the falling dollar was closer to $200 when we got it.) But this is the same amount as Denisa's parents gave the cousins 10 years earlier. Slovakia had double digit inflation for a while which means 5000 Sk isn't nearly what it used to be. While wedding gifts aren't being devalued quite as quickly in the US (unless you're planning an international honeymoon), you're better off getting married sooner rather than later.
What should those considering marriage and those considering attending a marriage keep in mind for the future? If inflation stays low, there's not likely to be a revaluation of the wedding gift anytime soon. A few people might bump up their gifts to be $100 plus tax, but the next big gift amount is probably not until $200. If inflation picks up, gifting might move up to this level ahead of inflation. Those looking to get married would probably be better off during a recessionary period though. It is unlikely that there is much downside in the gift level so a fall in consumer prices would increase their gift values in real terms. Alternatively, a stronger dollar may increase the amount of linens from China that a dollar purchases (and prevent an undergarment war).
Sun, 01 May 2005
The God Delusion
Salon recently published an interview
with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who has written a number of
books explaining evolution. I hadn't heard of Dawkins until a few months ago
when I saw him on NOW
with Bill Moyers. I've been meaning to pick up one of his books.
Some choice quotes from the interview:
For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
You are working on a new book tentatively called "The God Delusion." Can you explain it?
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the "imaginary friend" and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word "delusion" also carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty of those.
Sat, 30 Apr 2005
American Housing Statistics
Mother Jones has collected some interesting housing statistics.
- 1 in 4 Americans want at least a 3-car garage.
- Extreme Makeover: Home Edition recently gave a 6-bedroom, 7-bath, 7-television house to a family of 4.
- 1 in 5 new homes is larger than 3,000 sq. ft. the size at which it becomes unmanageable to clean without hired help.
- Only 2.7% of San Francisco?s teachers, 5.7% of its cops, and 4.2% of its nurses can afford to buy a home there.
Thu, 28 Apr 2005
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
I read Eats, Shoots & Leaves last weekend. I suspect that it's one of the few books on the reference/humour shelf at the bookstore. It's a book about punctuation. Remarkably, it was a best seller in Britain and has received a number of good reviews. The author, Lynne Truss, rants about poor use of punctuation by shopkeepers (and, based on the number of times she complains about greengrocers, she must live in the vegetable capital of the UK), gives some history about how various punctuation marks came into being, and gives some tips on how to use them correctly.
I found some comfort in learning that nobody agrees on the proper use of commas, and, so, I will use them aggressively, as I see fit. I will also try to incorporate more colons and semicolons into my writing; a key that was, up until now, largely reserved for writing code will be set free. I was also happy to learn that British authors, like any programmer, know that it's proper for trailing punctuation to appear without quotation marks.
One bit of punctuation that I would like to bring back is two spaces after a period (full stop). I learned it in typing class in high school, and didn't realize that it doesn't exist in books until Ms. Truss pointed it out.
Mon, 21 Mar 2005
How You Like Them Apples?
- I can't believe that once I've counted four apples, there are no more apples.
Sun, 06 Feb 2005
Excessive Gratitude or the Return of Written Correspondence?
Yesterday, I received a thank-you note from my friend, Mike. He hasn't recently gotten married, had a child, or had a birthday (at least, not that I know of). In fact, I hadn't bought Mike a gift for anything. He sent my wife and me a note thanking us for having him and his girlfriend, Lisa, over for dinner. It was a very nice note, but it seems completely unnecessary.
My mother always told me how important it is to send thank-you notes after receiving gifts, but I'd never heard of sending them after being invited to somebody's home. I would assume that Mike is just extremely polite, but his note was the second such note we've received in the past couple of months. After a little party we had, my friend, Meagan, sent us a similar note.
Did I miss a lesson by Miss Manners? Is American society becoming gracious? Or do people just want to take advantage of the fewer and fewer opportunities to actually use hand-written correspondence?
