Let me start I by saying I love California. I’d seriously consider moving there if it weren’t for goofiness like this reported over at TechCrunch. The short version for those that don’t want to read is that CARB is considering regulating the color of cars sold in California to minimize the increased energy requirement of cooling black cars. Because black paint doesn’t reflect sunlight well. Really. The best and brightest of the California Air Resources Board. That’s what they came up with.

See, the problem is (for anybody who has every worked around bureaucrats*) that they feel like they have to “do stuff” to justify their continued feeding at the public trough. Apparently that’s what they’ve done. The chief of the Paint Reflectivity Studies Section, Heating and Cooling Branch, Research Division of the Office of Living Like Cavemen (sorry Cavepersons) has convinced somebody that black cars contribute to air pollution in some way. So they got a grant to study the problem which means more money and personnel for the PRS section which will eventually mean a cushy new job as branch chief for something or other for the PRS section chief.

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*As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this also applies to middle managers and politicians.

I took this picture a few weeks ago. It was 37 degrees and raining. This guy was soaked. None for me thanks.

I have written about my dislike of cops before (or maybe I haven’t but trust me here). This is the one of the reasons why. This guy writes a bunch of fake tickets because he didn’t like somebody then gets a paid vacation for 8 months. Then once he pleads guilty, he gets 3 years probation and has to pay $600? For fucking real? My personal opinion is that for law makers and law enforcement the penalties should be doubled for any infraction. After all their the one’s that are making and enforcing them, right?

In case I haven’t said so before, most of the cops I’ve had dealings with were guys who were too pussy to be bullies until somebody let them carry a gun around. Then they spend the rest of their days making up for lost time. I actually had one say to  me once while he was writing me a ticket, “you can call me officer or sir”. To which I replied, “I can call you anything I want to” which probably wasn’t the most diplomatic way to go about things but if you know me you probably aren’t surprised.

I saw this in a Cary parking lot the other day. I wanted to get a picture of the back but I was in a hurry. It looks like he took the rear hatch off and welded a wall at the back of the passenger compartment and added a flat window. The cargo area appeared to have rhino liner or something in it. I was never a huge fan of El Caminos because like a lot of attempts at a dual purpose vehicle it seemed to not do either very well. I’m not sure I would want an El CaVetto but the concept is cool.

Yahoo News has a story about New Jersey reversing itself on its plan to ban genital waxing. The reason for the proposed ban was that 2 women (that’s two) recently got infections from being waxed and had to be hospitalized. Read it again…. Two Women. I don’t know how many women in NJ get bikini waxes but the salon owner they talked to Cherry Hill did 1,800 last year. Assuming she’s the only place in NJ that did bikini waxes (and I’m betting she’s not), that would be an incidence rate of 1 in 900 or about 0.11%. If NJ bans everything that has a failure rate of 1 in 900 not much will be going on in NJ.

It reminds me of the times that NC changed the law on swimming pools because some little girl got stuck on the drain or passed a law making it illegal for 12-17 year olds to ride in the back of a  pickup because 2 kids got hurt in an accident.

The danger with politicians, like middle managers, is that they feel like they have to “do sumpin” in order to justify their existence.

ABC is reporting that Bank of America is threatening to sue a former employee who’s willing to talk about which people got bonuses at Merrill Lynch prior to the merger between them and BoA.

Bank of America continues the arrogance previously exhibited by the banking industry by, basically, saying we’ll give out the information about the bonuses as long as you do it on our terms. Here’s a clue for you motherfuckers… if the government gives you $45 billion in bailout money, you answer to them.

Of course the way I’d handle the whole situation is by pulling the money back and letting them fail. Then use the $45 billion to buy them on the open market (market capitalization as of Friday 20 Mar was $39.62 billion) and then hand out the shares to everybody that paid taxes last year (maybe while keeping the proxy rights) .

At issue, is $3.6 billion in bonuses that were paid out by Merrill Lynch on the eve of the merger (keeping in mind that in 2008 ML had losses of $27 billion) and that, of those,  696 people recieved bonuses of more than $1 million.

Keep it up, assholes. We’ll be digging the ditches for your bodies real soon now.

So I’m sitting near the Averett University tennis team (I known, right? Sometimes life is very cool) eating breakfast. Most of the women are blonde. Why is that? I can’t think of any professional women tennis players that aren’t blonde (although to be fair the only one I can think of at the moment is that one from Germany. I’m obviously not a huge tennis fan.

So the House of Representatives passed a bill that would tax the shit out of the AIG bonuses. A similiar bill has been introduced in the Senate. My question is this: The House bill was passed 328-93. The vote breakdown was 243 democrats and 85 republicans in favor and 6 democrats and 87 republicans opposed. I understand that the republicans want to know why these bonuses weren’t stopped before the money was paid out but exactly what is the purpose of 87 of them voting against getting the money back now? If a mistake was made in paying it out, by all means point it out, but don’t then vote to let them keep it.

My personal opinion is that none of this outrage would be taking place at all in Washington if word hadn’t gotten out and the future ditch fodder from Washington weren’t worried about having to find real work at the end of their term.

I was getting my coffee at McDonald’s the other morning (see how often interesting things happen to me getting coffee?) and the guy brought some food out and announced what it was in Spanish (medium something was all I caught). The guy standing next to me asked if it was mine and I said it must be his because I hadn’t ordered a medium anything.

He grabbed it and headed off. A couple seconds later they brought mine out and I went over to the drink machine to get some ice to cool the coffee off. Previously mentioned medium guy was getting his drink and I said something flip like ‘I guess we’ve given up all pretense of speaking English’. He looked up and said ‘I’m a Spanish teacher so I think everybody should speak Spanish.’ I kinda laughed and walked off.

So here’s my take: I have zero problems with people speaking Spanish. I’m a big fan of the hispanics who are mostly doing jobs that Americans aren’t interested in doing. And the fact of the matter is that, unless your name is Running Bear, your family were immigrants at some point. Having said that, there’s a difference between this wave of immigrants and, for instance, the Italians. When they came to America, they spoke Italian at home but learned English for when they were in public so that they could integrate into society.  The Hispanics don’t really have to because there are Spanish versions of a lot of government documents, a lot of businesses have Spanish menus and such…. in short they can get by. The problem is by not forcing them to learn English that’s all they’ll ever do — get by. By making things easy on them, we’re basically relegating them to second class citizen status.

I ran across this piece yesterday about an English village that’s for sale and I swear if I win the lottery before it sells, I’ll buy it. I mean, seriously, how cool would that be?

Here’s a better article. Fer fuckin’ real, Lord James, you’re all invited for a beer. Here’s a map so you can find it.  Seriously that’s a really pretty area. I hope some dickhead doesn’t buy it.

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