Not a Potted Plant

I am at home visiting family for the holidays. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t have anywhere to go to ring in the new year, so my wife, my father, my mother, and I all watched it on TV from home. And therein my agitation started.

Whether you could consider “Colosse”, the city I come from, to be a “major city” is at least partially a matter of perspective. It’s larger than Birmingham, but also not the largest metropolitan area in the south. (I typically don’t answer guesser questions on what it is, so don’t ask.) Nonetheless, there was a big New Years Party downtown. But even if Colosse is too bush league, there are plenty of great cities in the central time zone. Including the nation’s third (Chicago), fourth (Dallas-Fort Worth), and sixth (Houston) largest cities. Or if those places are not cool enough, you have Austin, Nashville, Memphis, San Antonio, or New Orleans.

There is no shortage of iconic cities outside the eastern time zone. So when we are counting down the new year, I respectfully request that we get to easily watch something other than a rerun (“time delay”) of New York doing the same. Seriously. I don’t care how awesome New York City is. It could be the most awesome place in the entire world. I don’t care. I would rather watch a Spanish broadcast out of Mexico City of people celebrating the New Year than watch a rerun of Dick Clark in NYC.

This is not hypothetical. When flipping through the channels, we ran across a Spanish broadcast. I didn’t actually think it was coming from Mexico City, but thought it might be coming from somewhere in Texas. That maybe the Spanish-language networks had more sense about such things since Spanish-language residents are split between the time-zones and that they might rotate between Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California. No dice. They were all about California.

I went to CMT hoping that maybe they might have something from Nashville. It was a feint hope, but I was getting desperate. There was one network that was coming out of Las Vegas, but they were basically announcing that they were going going to use a “New York Feed.” Which means, unless New York is dropping the ball every hour for four hours, a rerun. So even a broadcast out of Vegas was going to New York.

This is simply unacceptable.

Most of the country does not live in the eastern time zone. We deserve better than a retread of their celebration. It might be too much to ask that local news networks all (or mostly, or just sometimes) go really local with it, but it’s not too much to ask that we get to celebrate it with more than a damn VCR recording of New Yorkers. If we can just get one blockbuster site in each (continental) timezone, I will be happy. New York City, Memphis, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. There. Done. Get to it, you cities. Or rotate it. I don’t care. But middle America (and western America) need more pride than this.

The last time I came here, the drive took three hours in the rain. Today, December 30, is clear and warm for the season. No traffic; I arrive an hour early rather than an hour late.

Navigating the noodle bowl of freeways I dodge other vehicles and merge, from the south 5 to the south 110 to the south 101 which is also the south 5 again, jump a solid line to merge with the feeder ramp from the north 110 so I can use the Temple Street exit ramp. This is actually much more dangerous when traffic is flowing than when it is backed up. But I have done this hundreds of times before and this is within my skill set.

Once I lived downtown. I went to school here. I worked here and even after moving my office to a suburb I still came here for work often. The pattern of streets and freeways and tunnels in the financial and civic centers is tattooed in my brain; it will be among the last things to go should I fall into dementia.

My bladder is full and the parking garage requires my last dollar. There is a thriving cash economy here; electronic money so useful in my exurban home town has not yet penetrated to the businesses here even in the shadows of the towers bearing the logos of America’s mighty financial institutions. It is not they which bring me here though; my concern today is the home of a dead woman from the working class.

Needing cash, the ultramodern yet already obsolete smart phone advises me to go to the Music Center, .11 miles away. It is up Bunker Hill and adjacent to Flower Street, and I am soon ashamed that climbing the top of the hill and two flights of stairs has left me winded, out of breath. For too long have I deferred physical fitness.

Not so the other users of the streets at 7:30 this December morning. Men and women of all shapes prowl the sidewalks, some walking to work in hose and sneakers with good shoes in their purses and others jogging in track jackets and gaudy gold crucifixes. I hear a Babel of languages spoken. English, Japanese, English again, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Spanish again, something I cannot recognize. Everyone carries a face devoid of emotion and appears to move purposefully.

The plaza at the Music Center still has holiday decorations: on the west end a tall Christmas tree with oversized balls and garlands so as to be seen from the street and on the east with a fully-illuminated Menorah standing next to a statue of musicians, everything but the lights obscured from street visibility. The signs for upcoming performances at the city’s cultural summit showcase the blend of entertainments formerly thought discrete both highbrow and low — Broadway musicals based on pop music albums, another stage production based on a movie based on a book, television stars appearing in the opera. Workmen sit and exchange friendly lies over coffee in seats where later tonight the elite will sip overpriced flutes of average Chardonnay and gossip about political sub-luminaries during intermission.

A squadron of attractive young women in good suits and uncomfortable shoes surrounds me walking back across Grand Avenue. They wear the pensive mask of ill concealed anxiety which brands them as lawyers, even were they not going to the courthouse. I flatter myself that I am more relaxed in my appearance than they in theirs. Of such white lies told to oneself is the mask of confidence assembled.

Though I feel unhurried the rest of the city feels differently. There is courtesy of a sort, in the expectation of mutual disregard. A car stops on the street to yield to pedestrians crossing the driveway and I am the only walker to stop and allow the driver to maneuver out of traffic. She does not expect the lawyers on the sidewalk to yield and does not make eye contact with me. The attractive, pensive lawyers walking near me on the sidewalk indeed do not stop walking and do not even turn their heads to look at the car. A security guard, however, turns his head to admire the young women in business suits before resuming his conversation with a heavyset Chinese man buying a copy of today’s newspaper from a battered coin-operated dispenser.

Though I have come to court early, the court is unready for me; I learn that the court assigned to hear my clients’ matter is dark and the substitute court cannot — or will not — see me for another two hours.

It is both faster to live here, and more expensive, than I have grown used to. There seems an abundance of culture, a democracy of smells on the streets. Democracy of this nature is not always pleasant. The rich and powerful commingle with the homeless and mentally ill, and samples of all social strata in between, all seemingly observing the same unstated social contract to only glance at one another and to wear the same vaguely dissatisfied expression. The sunrise cuts through the remnants of fog but I am an attorney and thus not permitted to stop and take photographs of the winter plants in flower, the monumental buildings around me, or the deeply interesting people around me in this most diverse and sleek of cities, this urban sui generis called Los Angeles. No, it is time to wear my game face and act as though I’ve been here before — which I have, yet which I try to see with new eyes this temperate December morning.

-{This old post from Hit Coffee seemed topical.}-

There were three serious Democrats running in 1966. The first was progressive former governor Ellis Arnall. The second was a young state senator named Jimmy Carter. The third was Lester Maddox, a three-time loser in electoral politics that got a lot of publicity for closing down his restaurant rather than be forced to serve blacks. As was commonly the case, Republicans did not have a seriously contested primary. Uncommonly, though, they had a chance at winning the election in the form of Bo Calloway, the first Republican congressman since reconstruction.

The Republicans felt that Calloway had the best chance of beating the inarticulate radical Maddox than the Arnall or moderate Carter, so Republicans one and all decided to vote in the Democratic primaries to serve up the weakest Democrat to face off against what they hoped would be the first Republican governor since reconstruction. Carter was bumped off in the original election and though he won a plurality in the first round, Arnall was put out to pasture by Maddox with the help of the Calloway voters.

The Arnall voters, however, weren’t ready to call it quits. Maddox was an embarrassment and Calloway himself wasn’t good on the issue of segregation, so they hatched a plan of their own. They sponsored an Arnall write-in campaign. Though they knew that they couldn’t win with a write-in candidate, they reasoned that they didn’t have to. If they could prevent either Calloway or Maddox from getting a majority of the vote, the winner would be determined by a vote in the state legislature. Since the legislature was Democratic, they figured that they might be able to get enough Republicans and anti-Maddox Democrats together to pull off a victory.

Arnall ended up with 7.01% of the vote, managing to keep both Calloway (47.07%) and Maddox (46.88%) from getting a majority of the popular vote. By an overwhelming majority, the state legislature tapped Lester Maddox as the next governor of the state of Georgia. Governor Maddox surprisingly turned in a moderate record as governor as far as race issues in the south went, appointing record numbers of blacks into state office and integrating various state agencies, though never renouncing his staunchly segregationist views. He later ran for president under the banner of George Wallace’s American Independence Party.

Arnall never for public office again and Calloway left Georgia in the 1970’s. Jimmy Carter succeeded Maddox as the governor of Georgia, serving from 1971-1975, and went on to run for higher office.

I am not afraid to die. Any time will do, I don’t mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There’s no reason for it — you’ve got to do it sometime.

Gerry O’Driscoll was the doorman at Abbey Road Studios in late 1972. He, like quite a few other random people, was put in a dark room with a live microphone, and asked to respond to questions on flash cards to generate audio samples. This particular bit was sampled in The Great Gig In The Sky. I cannot pick between that sample, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me,” and “Don’t give me that do goody-good bullshit,” as my favorite lines from Dark Side Of The Moon, an album that holds up very, very well indeed nearly forty years after it was recorded (!), and which deserves to be listened to all the way through.

My wife calls Pink Floyd “That strange band that boys like and the more they listen to it the less they get laid,” but I refuse to stop listening to them despite the implied threat in her (sadly accurate) description. And no, I wasn’t smoking anything when I listened to Dark Side again recently; I confess to a enjoying few fingers of Scotch, though.

I offer for your consideration a very recent case decided by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, Wagner v. Jones. The question here is — can a public university legitimately discriminate in the hiring of an employee based on the candidate’s political beliefs?

Continue Reading →

I’m at place that I didn’t know was legal in the city of Colosse or the state of Delosa: A coffee and tobacco bar. Smoking has been banned from most public establishments for at least half a decade now. But here I am and here it is.

Doing a little research, there was some movement to allow for hookah places. For some reason, this was viewed differently than good old fashioned cigarettes. In an effort to be worldly and tolerant, the city chose to allow it. But not cigarettes. That was, apparently a bridge too far. Treating cigarettes as being particularly pernicious as far as tobacco goes is nothing new, of course. But the frame of mind is striking and a reminder that smoker demographics is at least partially a driver behind anti-smoking regs. It’s one thing to tell the imagined stereotypical smoker to beat it, but some of the same people that are more than happy to do that feel kind of bad when it starts seeming intolerant towards other cultures. I still need to write my extended piece on smoking policy, but that’ll have to wait.

Anyhow, it didn’t take long before they decided “okay, we’ll go ahead and let people smoke cigarettes within these small parameters, too. Smoking (cigarettes or otherwise) in tobacco shops was legal, but until recently it was not allowed in places that sold other things (such as alcohol or, in this case, coffee).

It’s actually kind of a neat atmosphere here. You have a fair number of South Asians and Middle Easterners (“Sammies”) here (the Mayne area having notable populations of each). A girl in front of me is playing the violin. A few stoner kids (18, I would assume) are sharing a hookah to my right. At the “bar” area are some good ole boys. The last time I was here there was a black man chatting with them. The Sammies are half-cigarette, half-hookah smokers. The guys at the bar or cigarettes. Periodically a couple middle aged guys come in with (or buy from the store) cigars.

You could totally use this place as a setting for a Cheers-like program, if you could get Lowe’s to keep from pulling its advertisements.

Anyhow, this reminds me of one of the things that really is remarkable about smoking in this country, at least historically: it manages to bring people from all sorts of walks of like together. In a lung-destructive way, to be sure, but in a way that few other things due. And anti-smoking regs helped put all of these people together. A CEO smoking side-by-side with dockworker. Good Ole Boys at the bar talking to young Indian-American men at the table, in this case.

It’s something we’re losing, of course, as tobacco use gets a class marker. Eventually it will be more like Deseret, where the smoker’s circle consisted mostly of the insurgent non-LDS population. Even there, you had born-against next to atheists. But in Deseret, as long as you’re not a Mormon, you have something significant in common with everybody who isn’t a Mormon (even if some of them believe that others of them are hell-bound). But this represents a renaissance of sorts. The CEO long left the smokers’ dock at my former employer. Smoking (cigarettes) increasingly becomes something poor people do. But maybe hookah will provide something people are more reluctant to criticize so acrimoniously.

Postscript: The funny thing is that I am not here because it is a “smoking coffee shop,” but rather because it has better coffee than the other place and much, much better hours (fantastic hours for suburbia). Even here, I go outside to smoke. I’ve apparently been conditioned against smoking indoors even where it is allowed. Actual bars may be an exception, and I would make an exception if it were a hundred degrees or zero degrees outside. But it’s pleasant out. And maybe bad weather wouldn’t make a difference. Yesterday I smoked outside in the rain under the insufficient canopy outside.

Via Alex Knapp’s Twitter, an article in the New York Times about electronic devices in takeoffs and landings:

When EMT Labs put an Amazon Kindle through a number of tests, the company consistently found that this e-reader emitted less than 30 microvolts per meter when in use. That’s only 0.00003 of a volt.

“The power coming off a Kindle is completely minuscule and can’t do anything to interfere with a plane,” said Jay Gandhi, chief executive of EMT Labs, after going over the results of the test. “It’s so low that it just isn’t sending out any real interference.”

But one Kindle isn’t sending out a lot of electrical emissions. But surely a plane’s cabin with dozens or even hundreds will? That’s what both the F.A.A. and American Airlines asserted when I asked why pilots in the cockpit could use iPads, but the people back in coach could not. Yet that’s not right either.

“Electromagnetic energy doesn’t add up like that. Five Kindles will not put off five times the energy that one Kindle would,” explained Kevin Bothmann, EMT Labs testing manager. “If it added up like that, people wouldn’t be able to go into offices, where there are dozens of computers, without wearing protective gear.”

Bill Ruck, principal engineer at CSI Telecommunications, a firm that does radio communications engineering, added: “Saying that 100 devices is 100 times worse is factually incorrect. Noise from these devices increases less and less as you add more.”

One of the things I don’t understand is that while navigation equipment is obviously most important for takeoff and landing, do they turn it off for the rest of the flight? Wouldn’t it be possible to gauge these things during the flight itself and determine what effect, if any, these things have on the navigation equipment? When I talk to people who support this, what they often say (other than “You’re a terrible narcissist for wanting to do something on a flight that I don’t care to”) is that you can’t even find out these things reliably without putting a flight in jeopardy. That all of the isolated tests don’t prove anything because we’re talking about millions and millions of flights. But we have these things on during millions and millions of flights anyway. We just don’t have them during the navigation-critical portions of the flights. Even if the navigation system isn’t being used, it seems to me (and I could be totally off-base here) we can put sensors or something on them during the rest of the flight and check for any abnormalities that occur.

If there truly is a safety hazard, I am fine with turning the devices off. I really am. Safety does matter, after all. But absent some demonstrable hazard, it really is a pain to turn everything off and then back on again for what can amount to a rather substantial portion of a short flight. The average flight home is a one-hour flight followed by a two-and-a-half hour flight. This leaves me with interruptions for what I would rather be doing, but not enough time to actually read a book before I can get to what I would actually want to be doing. The end result is switching back and forth between two novels (one electronic and one paperback), paperback novels never getting finished, magazines I don’t care to be reading but do so to fill the time, and so on. And the question increasingly has to be asked… for what?

Someone who owes somebody some money used to have our phone number (assuming they didn’t choose it at random). We no longer answer calls from “Toll Free” because I’m tired of being pestered by Mike Huckabee and Steve Forbes about this or that (I guess an upside of his run for the presidency is that I used to get pestered by Newt Gingrich and don’t anymore). Historically, none of them ever left a message. But the debt collectors are starting to. They call about twice a day.

The message goes something like “This call is for Jane Jones. If this is not Jane Jones, please hand up now. This involves debt collection and if you are not Jane Jones and you do not hang up, you are guilty of violating federal confidentiality laws.”

Of course, my answering machine doesn’t hang up. So, it’s a felon. I guess I am, too, since I have listened to the message all the way through. Oddly, there’s nothing after the stern warning that tells me anything that I didn’t already know from before the warning except for the name of the debt collection agency and the 1-800 number to call in order to pay up. But you know, that would actually be a helpful thing to tell me before the warning, if only so that I can call them back and let them know that Jane Jones can no longer be reached at this number. If I call back, though, they will know that I listened longer than I should have (and that my answering machine and I are both felons).

I do actually question what legal liability, if any, I would have here. I can’t imagine that it is any. Or any of significance. I’ve read that those disclaimers at the bottom of emails saying “If you are not the intended recipient, you are legally bound to delete this email and pretend that you never read it.” And that has a stronger case than the phone messages, since at least they don’t presume I am going to not read it (or, in the case of phone messages, listen to it).

So no doubt it’s just a matter of covering their posteriors in case they get sued for some confidentiality breach.

Anyway, one of these days I will answer the phone and let them know about Ms. Jones. I already fielded some debt collection calls shortly after we moved in for somebody else. After the second or third time, they stopped calling. These calls from “California State Debt Collection*” have been going on for several weeks now.

* – This debt collection agency – not actually named CSDC – has a very official-sounding name. I think it might be supposed to make it sound more serious. You’re not dealing with a debt collection agency, you’re dealing with a government agency. Even if it’s not a government you actually live in the jurisdiction of. It’s kind of clever, when you think about it.

I’m touring the Southland visiting family and friends. Research takes time and stuff.