Small Town “Crime”

Every week we receive a free local newspaper called Hometown Weekly at our home. The most entertaining part of this newspaper is the police blotter. From this week’s paper:

4/21 – 9:41am – Washington St. & Knollcrest Farm Ln. – A caller reports that there are children on the side of the road selling lemonade without adult supervision.

This sort of thing, thankfully, is not an unusual police blotter item in our town. One of my favorite items of late was about a woman who called 911 in a panic that her husband had gone missing. The police showed up and proceeded to find her husband in another section of the house .

Hollywood Needs An Enema

Now they’ve decided it’s necessary to destroy Speed Racer.

Egads.

The Google Hiring Machine :-)

A friend of mine who works at Microsoft was recently cold-contacted by the Google recruiting juggernaut – I found his/her response more than amusing:

I had a really pompous recruitment effort from Google: Hi, “insert name here” kind of thing. I told them to use their own search engine on my name if they wanted to know why I was famous in the community and why they should hire me.

LOL. Doctor heal thyself!

Child Abuse Is Never Funny…

…unless it’s The Onion writing about it. I know this is what my house is like! I’m pretty sure my son fits this bill:

Some children, mostly boys, have even been pressed into brutal physical labor by their fathers, who demand their sons help them in the yard on Saturdays—one of only two days off for children who spend an average of 600 hours a week at school.

Classic stuff.

The Zen of Leaning

I was first exposed to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was in my early 20s. The Chairman of the Board crooned

love like youth is wasted on the young

and I think that ZAMM might also be wasted on the young. I can tell you for sure that it was wasted on me oh those mumble-mumble years ago.

Why was it wasted on me? The primary reason is that I think I was simply burned out on allegorical learning. Although I wouldn’t trade my liberal arts education for anything (I have a BA in Computer Science, not a BS – go figure), I wasn’t that far out of school when I read ZAMM, and my brain was much more in “geek mode”, if you will.

But two things have happened that brought me back to the book. First, I now have a gaggle more gray hair and children of my own. As Pirsig writes early on in the book:

At age eleven you don’t get very impressed with red-winged blackbirds. You have to get older for that.

Second, I now ride and wrench my own motorcycle.

I had a mentally-draining day today. Lots of stuff going on. Almost uniformly good stuff, but lots of it. I was pretty stressed as I pulled into my driveway this evening. I opened the garage door to see my bike with its rear end in a dozen pieces strewn across the floor (my own doing). The weather forecast for tomorrow is looking yummy, so on a lark I decided I’d put her back together, minus the part I’ve been waiting interminably on. Forty-five or so minutes later, with nary a cuss-word issued, my bike was whole and idling, and I was a new man. Stress gone. Mind clear.

Get thee to a motorcycle dealer, folks! There really is something to this…

[With many thanks to Brad and Dave for exposing me to Pirsig in the first place!]

999 Pricing

So, as previously threatened, I’ve been monitoring 999 prices. All the more so since my FZ6 is in various pieces in my garage, awaiting the never-arriving-part-from-hell. Dealers seem to be willing to move leftover 2006 999s for $13,500 to $15,500 or so (before negotiation). What’s disheartening is that KBB suggests a 2006 999 is worth $9,700 on trade. That’s 30% to 40% depreciation off the lot. Not as bad as your average Bentley, but still…

If anybody out there has a used black 999 available, feel free to drop me a line!

The Tail Is Wagging The Dog

Ari Fleischer (yes, that Ari Fleischer, formerly of the White House) had a scary opinion piece in yesterday’s WSJ (subscription required). In it he dissects the breakdown of who is paying taxes and who is not. The scary bit is that 60% of US households now apparently pay no taxes. Nada. 40% of the US households pay all of the taxes.

If this doesn’t make you shudder, it should. Mr. Fleischer puts it well:

If, as now happens, 60% of the people in our democracy can force 40% to pay the bills, what’s to stop 65% from making 35% pay it all? Since no one wants to pay taxes, what’s to stop 90% of people in a democracy from making 10% pay it all? Or why not let 99% of the country off the hook, as long as the remaining 1% picks up the tab?

While you can argue that his pitch here is reductio ad absurdum, the point is rational and valid. When will the minority become too small to be stable? When will the minority decide they’re not going to take it anymore? How fragile an economy does the country want to build for the long-term?

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statstics

The Wall Street Journal had the moronic graphic below associated with an article about All-Terrain Vehicles. The industry is arguing that teens hurt themselves on ATVs because there are only two flavors of ATVs on the market for them: smallish ATVs (“Y-12″ models) and adult ATVs (for the over-16 crowd). The industry wants to build ‘transitional’ ATVs, for, effectively, the 14/15/16 crowd. Opponents of this argue that ATV accident rates of children under 16 are bad, to wit:

Of course the graphic fails to capture the fact that injury rates are seriously declining. In 1995 the injury (ER visit) rate for kids under 16 was nearly 9/10ths of one pecent based on the number of ATVs in use. In 2000 it was less than 8/10ths of one percent. In 2005 it was just barely 5/10ths of one percent. So in the ten year period from 1995 to 2005, the injury rate for kids under 16 fell by half.

But I guess annoying facts like that wouldn’t have made for as nice a graphic.

Neiman Marcus: Spammer?

Neiman’s is spamming me?

I’ve been known to shop at Neiman Marcus now and then. The Neiman’s at the Stanford Shopping Center is probably my favorite NM – great sales folks, IME. Although I’ve gone into their Boston store countless times over the years, I’ve always encountered chaos and/or truly unhelpful sales people.

So I was very happy to learn in late 2005 that they were opening a store at the Natick Mall, about six miles from home. I emailed them immediately, asking to be kept notified of when the store would open and any opening events and all that sort of jazz.

They responded to my email, with no data whatsoever. Such is life. What was really annoying is that they put me on their email lists. I now get something like an email a day from NM. No problem – I can just unsubscribe, right? Well…

Neiman Marcus, Attn: E-mail Removal, Customer Care Department, 111 Customer Way, Irving, Texas 75039

That’s how you unsubscribe. I have to snailmail them! Huh? Their email is now labeled “Junk” by me and Thunderbird filters it appropriately. I won’t get the notifications when the new store opens or any of the opening events and all that sort of jazz. Frustrating and silly.

PS: If you want top-notch men’s clothing in MA, with top-notch sales folks, hit Louis Boston on Newbury St. and ask for Paul Wade.

So Much For Cheap 999s?

The latest issue of Motorcyclist Magazine, which hit my mailbox today, contained an exceptionally interesting, and revealing, article comparing the 999S with the 1098S in real track conditions, with a real rider.

Doug Polen, winner of three Superbike Championships in the early 90s, suited up at Buttonwillow to put the two bikes through their paces. The track record there is apparently 1:46.5. Net-net, Polen was able to get the 1098S down to 1:53.31. He was able to get the 999S down to 1:52.25. A second faster than the young gun. While the 1098S outperformed the 999S on the drag strip (the power-to-weight ratio is much better on the new bike), Ducati is clearly engineering at the edge, and newer isn’t necessarily better.

So perhaps my prediction from last year was premature and the 999s will retain their values. Bummer.