Here and There

Can anyone out there point me to studies done to determine how much gas is wasted and pollution emitted, in aggregate, from all the cars out there that needlessly idle?

Another concern I have is poorly designed traffic lights that lead to an abundance of cars stopping at many intervals of what should’ve been a simple drive. I see this in Texas a lot, with the green light on the street with no traffic for minutes on end, while the cars that are stopped by the red keep lining up.

But I see it here in San Francisco, too. On downtown’s one-way streets, especially.

This morning, I rode my bike to work a little earlier than normal, and noticed that the cars I was riding with were forced by red lights to stop at 11th, 10th, Ninth, Eighth, Seventh, and Sixth streets, before being granted a green light at Fifth. Seems very wasteful, in terms of energy and time, and all those unnecessary stops have got to be spewing an ungodly amount of emissions into the atmosphere.

Multiply all the stops at all the intersections of any given city by all the other towns across the country, and seems we’ve got a very fixable problem on our hands.

But I need data to back me up here. Anyone?

Just maybe not kickin’.

Just a quick odd thought: It struck me as puzzling and anachronistic yesterday that iTunes still uses a compact disc as part of its application icon. That’s all.

I wish there was a word for the act of picking up a dictionary, and with the hand that lifts the book, using fingers to attempt to open it to exactly the word you’re about to look up.

For example, I just consulted the dictionary to see whether Englishman is one word. I picked it up with my right hand, and my fingers did their best to approximate opening the book to the E section. Lo and behold, the page I opened began with elephantiasis, and ended in else.

* According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Third Edition, Englishman is, in fact, a word.

If John McCain becomes the GOP candidate for president (as this writer believes he will), it will be the first time since Richard Nixon was elected that a former U.S. senator became president. And Nixon was the third in a row: LBJ and JFK had both served in the U.S. Senate.

It’s been mostly governors since Nixon. Ford’s brief two-year term (1974-1977) and George H.W. Bush’s four years (1989-1993) are the only instances since 1974 that a former governor hasn’t been in the White House.

Just got myself a new printer. It’s a decision I had struggled with for a few months. Finally, I needed to print some pages of documents I need to sign for a new job today, and I thought, Why not? I took it as a sign when I held onto a printer at last night’s white elephant for about three rounds, only to see it slip from my fingers (hey, I ended up with a fondue set. not bad), and woke up today determined to purchase this potentially soon-to-be-obsolete piece of electronics.

But I digress.

I want this post to be a simple comment on how freaking impossible it is to open almost all consumer electronics (and some products in other categories as well) these days. I spent the better part of five minutes slicing and dicing the USB cable (seriously, why don’t printers just come with those by now?), slicing and dicing some of my knuckles along the way. How do they want me to open it? Am I missing something?

Then I went to get some paper out of the package to start printing. No luck there, either. Only the far edges of the gift-package-like wrapping would come off, as the adhesive used to close the rest of it was just too industrial. What a mess.

I’m just wondering why these packages are so well beyond tamper proof, and closer to the realm of physical liability. Thoughts?

My very scientific research completed, I am now thoroughly confident in announcing the verified hypothesis I began with. And that is this:

Cellphones have displaced watches worn on the wrist as far as telling time is concerned.

I was on BART yesterday and looked around a crowded train. It was warm, so no one was wearing a coat. Most people had on shortsleeve shirts. I could spot a single wristwatch. But, of course, many people were on their phones, and several others had them clutched, resting on their laps, ready. I even spotted a few people checking their phones, ostensibly to see what time it was.

Just listed an item on eBay, and ran into some unexplainable error, so I went to the help section and, purely for shits and giggles, decided to try “Live Help,” eBay’s version of IM customer service.

After waiting about five minutes (hands-free, of course), I was “connected with a customer representative,” Shelby P. Somethingorother.

Shelby proceeded to robotically walk me through some troubleshooting questions, and I kept wondering, Seriously, is she a human? I was tempted to type a little question, one that would trip her up if she were a robot, but might make her laugh if she were human. I never did that.

Instead, I let her help me solve the problem, issue an apology for a sitewide problem they’re experience, and then I tried to quickly do the equivalent of hang up. I swear, I could hear Shelby’s voice as she sent the following message:

“Is there anything else I can help you with today, Jeff?”

My response? “no k thx bye”

Some may deem me deprived, but one of the top five best things in life is when I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing, and my dog comes over and says hi.

Hi, Gida.

I know I’m late here, mostly due to the fact that I never drooled over nor purchased nor extensively used an iPhone. But I discovered the joy of the touchscreen keyboard the other day, as well as its limitations.

“Key” to this discovery was the ability to turn the device on its side and have the screen rotate ninety degrees with me. Thus the keyboard is larger and, once I discovered two-thumb typing, easier to use.

The limitation comes about in the inability to copy, cut, and/or paste text. I vaguely recall seeing some workarounds for that with iPhone, and they should work on iPod Touch. Details to follow …

PS still annoyed by lack of abundant free wifi in San Francisco.

I’ve watched with an ounce of dismay as politician after politician has thrown their hat into the Hillary Clinton ring. Initially, the endorsements (by the likes of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, among other senators and representatives) worried me that the HIllary camp was gathering too much political credit.

Then I see today this headline: “Clooney: Obama’s Like a Rock Star“***

And I start to wonder, does a celebrity endorsement (depending, of course, upon which celebrity we’re talking about) mean more these days than “I support candidate X” coming from the lips of elected officials?

There may be no objective way to measure this question, at least until after the election next November. Just a curiosity.

*** It should be noted that George Clooney is not endorsing Obama, or any Democratic candidate just yet. The article simply got me thinking about the phenomenon of the endorsement. That’s all.

A few years ago, I was shopping around for glasses, and had simultaneous realizations:

1) I’m a picky bitch.
2) Glasses are particularly hard to shop for.

I won’t go into detail about item 1 here. But it dawned on me that because glasses are worn by glasses-wearers every day (unlike other items of clothing and accoutrement), it is important to find a pair the wearer really likes. No half-assing when it comes to glasses.

There’s also the fact that this was circa 2002 or 2003, before eyewear fashion came back to its senses with modest designs. Everything then was either way too big, or too much those little German rectangular numbers.

Anyway, it also occurred to me recently that shoes (for most guys, at least) are the same way. Most of us tend to wear one or two pairs just about every day. And haircuts too, but less so for people who have enough hair to be able to wear it different styles from one day to the next, a concept that blows my mind.

No matter how bad the crime, seems like there’s always some jackoff around who’ll supply the world statements such as this, from Michael Vick’s lawyer, responding to Vick’s plea of guilty today in hope of receiving a reduced sentence for raising and killing fighting dogs:

“Watching Michael Vick go through this, even for a lawyer with my experience on these types of cases, is very painful,” Billy Martin, one of his defense lawyers, said in a telephone interview. “We find a young man in a predicament that should never have happened.

Watching Vick go through this? Give me a fucking break.

I’ve often wished there were a way to collect and retrieve data about yourself. You know, without diagnosable OCD or autism, a way to tap into such facts as:

How many steps I’ve ever taken
How many times I’ve eaten at my favorite taqueria
How many hours I’ve spent online
How many times I’ve pooped
How long my fingernails would be if I had never cut them

So, if there’s a god (or if anyone from MIT is reading), it sure would be great if this could happen. I mean, wouldn’t that be a great trade-off for having to die?

“Okay, yeah, you’re not gonna live forever, but after you die, you get to know any and all facts about yourself (and hell, while I’m at it, everything else) you could possibly want to know.”

People often abbreviate “casual” and “usual,” but I still haven’t figured out to spell their shortened forms.

cazhe?
uzhe?
caszjhe?

Ideas, anyone?