The plot thickens

I lost my phone on Friday and on Saturday someone used it to make a bunch of calls to El Salvador. Notice however that 9 minutes after the last call (which lasted 85 minutes) a call is made to a number in Irvine. Unlike the other numbers this one does not seem to be for a Spanish speaker but is instead the number of someone who claims - on their answering machine message - to have lost their phone recently. Could it be that after making some long-distance calls the finder turned it in to the lost and found who used the phone to contact someone who they thought might be the rightful owner? Is this wishful thinking? Perhaps. Think about it, won't you?

Update: The last call is to a number listed for a company called Body Essence Massage Therapy. Perhaps this is an old listing.

Someone found my cell phone...

...but neglected to tell me about it:
Fortunately these long distance calls to El Salvador are covered by my Night and weekend minutes so there is no extra charge. Still it'd be nice if there was even a token effort made to try to call any of the numbers in the phone book. Tomorrow I will get someone with Spanish skills to call El Salvador for me. In the meantime I've suspended my cell phone service.

Lost my cell phone

I think I lost it along with the charger in the LA airport on Friday. Perhaps this is a sign that I should buy a new cell phone already.

Any suggestions for what phone and service to get? I had Cingular (AT&T) before and the reception was never a problem. The iPhone and blackberry are out of the question. I spend enough time online as it is.

Firefly

I just saw my first firefly. The insect not the TV show. I have several observations. These observations may not apply to all fireflies. But they apply to the ones here in Charleston, Illinois:

• Fireflies do not shine most of the time: Most of the time they are completely dark. Who knew?
• Fireflies do not fly around randomly, rather they hover around aimlessly like low-flying June Bugs.
• Fireflies like grass and seem especially fond of shaded areas.
  
• Fireflies are creepy: Generally in movies and TV fireflies are represented as floating pinpoints of light. In reality that ethereal pinpoint of light is attached to a beetle's butt.

The weirdest thing is how the fireflies seem to drop to the ground and then purposefully zoom upwards when they light up. The effect is to make it look like tiny lights are effervescing up off the ground. It looks like soda, or fairy dust possibly.

Maybe tomorrow I'll catch some in a bottle.

Things that happened to me in Montreal

Got up at 3 (EST) for no good reason. This corresponds to approximately 12am Pacific Standard Time and 10pm Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time. However, this also corresponds to 8pm Central European time (where Italy is) which is actually a pretty good time to wake up. In CET I went to bed at 2am though. Whoa! I'm a party animal!

On my way to the clients office I was stopped by a large number of howler monkeys and forced by my good manners to politely listen to their attempts to ask me the time of day in very poor English. At first I took pity of them because, after all monkeys don't have mouths shaped properly to produce human speech but after a while I realized that their real problem is that their first language was French. "It's 8:30! Can't you read the absurdly sized clock tower?" They started to cry when I said this because they all grew up in homes that had digital clocks so they never learned to read analog time very well.

The passport I forgot at home arrived. Thanks Lisa. Hooray! $22!? That's crazy. Next time I'll just stand in front of the border guard and pout until I prove my American citizenship by virtue of my totally unjustified sense of entitlement.

Last night I went to an Italian restaurant. It was not very good. Boo.

Compare and Contrast: Connecticut and Montreal

What's the difference between Montreal and Connecticut? Well, for one thing Connecticut is a state with a crappy senator and Montreal is a city surrounded by water (there's a little link humor for ya). Similarly, when you ask the hotel clerk where you can find dental floss in Montreal the clerk will tell you to make a left on Rue Ste-Catherine Ouest and you will have to walk further than you think to find the pharmacy. In Connecticut on the other hand, you will still have dental floss and will have no need to go looking for it. Instead you will have a prescription for heartburn pills you need to refill and an older gentleman will spend a long time trying to puzzle out your strange Californian health care card before telling you he will have to phone it in tomorrow morning and see if he can get it approved.

In Connecticut it will be extremely hot and humid the first day you are there, then the weather will improve with each passing day. In Montreal, the weather will start out good but turn drizzly toward the end of the week.

This writing style annoys you just as much as it annoys me. So I'll stop.

Next week: East Illinois!

Feeling environmental

(This is cross posted on my political site)

A couple of times on my blog I’ve taken the position that all environmentalism can be defended on selfish grounds. Basically, screwing up the environment is bad for the long-term economic health of the world. Top-soil is good for the American economy and so is a corn belt that’s located here and not in 5 square acres of Canada. Similarly, every extinction is like a million year lab experiment thrown away before we’ve had a chance to learn from the results.

It’s pretty obvious that this argument works for short-term stuff like that affects people’s health right now and in direct ways but I’ve come to realize more and more that it’s not really a useful way of arguing for environmentalism generally. People just don’t get invested in environmentalism for selfish reasons; maybe their selfishness just doesn’t operate on long enough timescales. Instead, I’ve found that most people who favor environmentalism do so for non-selfish "emotional" reasons: a love of the unspoiled outdoors and empathy for the creatures who are killed by environmental neglect and so on. I don’t think I ever appreciated those reasons till I went hiking out by the house I grew up in with my girlfriend Lisa.

Here’s our hike.

When I was a kid I remember the trail feeling wild. This time it just looked abused. There was trash everywhere and the view from the top that used to be inspiring just looked like a view of a lot of sprawl. Developments replaced chaparral, the horse ranch is now a shopping mall, and the clearing where I saw a group of wary roadrunners in my youth now has a driveway in the middle of it. I took Lisa there a couple times but I’ve never been able to show them to her probably because they just don’t go there anymore.

Obviously my family’s complicit in all this. The house we moved into was once a new development which no doubt replaced wild country. But I’m an adult and can recognize the difference between capitulating to the realities of a housing market which doesn’t value lost wilderness and not valuing wilderness in the first place. And I can also recognize that the “realities of the housing market” don’t just appear out of nowhere: they’re the result of government policies (or lack thereof) that we can change.

See, I’m getting emotional.

A public service announcement

When they decided to make a movie version of the musical of the movie The Producers they must have known that they were kind of shooting the moon. Remakes are always a risky propositions and it's even harder when the film being remade is really really good. You don't have to see Johnny Depp make a flop to know it's hard to follow a good act. So when I heard that they were making a movie version of the musical of the movie Hairspray I thought that clearly someone's crazy. It's like watching someone who bet their life savings on red 16 collect their winnings and put it on black 35. Stop them before they remake again.

Independence Day!

I don't post my political stuff here because, quite honestly, it's pretty boring. Today however I'll make an exception. I'm generally not disposed to just sit around appreciating how great our country is in general. Rather, like liberals everywhere, I like to spend my time complaining about what we're getting wrong and how we can fix it.

There are some pretty obvious problem with the United States that pretty much everyone recognizes. Most obviously it is fundamentally unfair that 34 million Californians have to share two senators while the 14 people who live in Wyoming have the same number. This is just a fundamental injustice which was made even worse in light of the fact that Wyoming gave us Dick Cheney.

Our government is also built with too many veto points. If you prefer being oppressed by corporations and rich rather than by the government this is great. If on the other hand you like to have a responsive government that works it's not so great. If you wonder why the federal government can't pass any bills without slathering on the pork look directly to the founding father's insistence no bill could pass unless approved by the house, the senate, the president, the supreme court, one unblemished virgin, and an augur who must affirm that the bones approve.

The many veto points also serve to confound basic responsibility for politicians. I mean, I've often been told that Ronald Reagan would have passed balanced budgets if not for those damn tax-and-spend Democrats in congress. Not true of course but our system doesn't make that obvious. Similarly, Clinton didn't approve of Kyoto but was able to blame it on a Republican senate that wouldn't pass it.

Really we should drop the whole multiple veto point thing and take a look at a parliamentary form of government. Have one big house which is elected with proportional choice, instant run-off elections (like the ASUC only with voters that actually care). This will allow for more than two parties (depending on the cut-off) and the coalition that gets the majority of votes gets to pick the prime minister. This will make parties more accountable and make it easier to pass bills and repeal old ones that suck. And if some prime minister is so unpopular as to be ineffective we'll just hold another election right then and there. Don't you wish we could do that right about now?

Anyhow, those are my thoughts on this fine day of independence. We shouldn't look too harshly on the founding fathers for the shortcomings in the constitution. Democracy was still a new idea then. They were like the first guys on the block to get a satellite dish who ended up keeping the 6 foot giant in the backyard even as their neighbors bought the newer mini roof-mounted ones.

You need to listen to this

Just Listen with headphones. It will blow you away.

Random thoughts

Lisa and I are entertaining guests. Well, actually we're entertaining guest since there's only one but the idea is the same. These are the advantages of having a futon: we're the cheapest place to crash.

When I was growing up my house was never the cool place to hang out at. Perhaps it was just too clean or maybe it was the forbidden living room which was filled with fancy furniture that we never actually used. No really, it's not just an Italian stereotype. Every time someone walked into that room my mom would make me vacuum it to get rid of the foot tracks in the perfect white carpet. Also, my house had thin walls and light sleepers so you couldn't make noise after a certain hour.

Compare this to my friend Amanda and Colin's house. The home of this brother/sister team was often referred to as the "Stronghold". It was ideal for teen-type hanging out: Thick walls, heavy sleepers, laid-back parents, convenient kitchen and carpeted floors (not the cold tile floors in my house). Plus, if one friend wasn't home you could hang out with the other. That house attracted more hanging out than a Denny's after a high school theater production. Zing!

(Just kidding. I know modern day high schoolers would never be found dead in a Denny's... unless they were killed and dragged their by the 90 year old patrons who are the only customers that restaurant has left).

Lisa and I and some friends watched Victor/Victoria last night. Gender confusion was never so funny. I liked it because it worked on two levels: it was a film about the 30s but being filmed in the 80's it was also a commentary on how gays were viewed at that time. There's lot's of "Really? Gay people are basically born that way? What interesting and new information this is!". Granted, this was necessary at a time when the most adult treatment of homosexuality was The Village People's "In the Navy". Like most films involving cross-dressing it was a bit of a stretch to believe Julie Andrews could pass as a dude when really she was a lady. See, dudes look different from ladies in some key ways. Especially the kind of ladies that make it as actresses. Sorry Shakespeare, most women are not Hillary Swank.

Speaking of dudes and ladies. Lisa and I used to go to this flea market at the Ashby Bart stop when we lived by there. I remember I'd always see this stand selling cell-phone equipment that was run by a black dude and a Chinese lady. I thought, "they must have an interesting story about how they went into business together". Later I saw their professionally made banner announcing the name of their company: "Black Dude and Chinese Lady: cell-phone equipment". Hooray for them. Some day I hope to run a stand called "Italian guy and Samoan chick: custom t-shirts" or something similarly cool. I don't know if I can pull that one off though. The only Samoan chick I know is my sister's friend whose just about finishing med school right now. Wait... I think her family was from Fiji. Does that count?

Everyone in Northern California calls them "flea-markets" whereas in Southern California they're always called "swap-meets". Is this a new Coke/Soda/Pop divide?