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Idle essays

Big Brother in action

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Have you seen the CriminalSearch site? It’s free. You can enter a person’s name and state of residence, click a button, and up will come what purports to be his or her rap sheet. w00t! You, too, can get the straight skinny on all your neighbors. And on that sketchy dude your daughter has been dating! And oh, heck…while you’re at it, why not check up on your daughter, too?

You also can enter an address and get a report showing which of your neighbors in the surrounding area have criminal records, with their names, addresses, and a map showing how to find their homes. And…uhm…yours, if you happen ever to have been caught in the act of turning right at a stop sign without coming to a full stop or failing to yield the right of way.

Problem is, the results seem to be less than significant and less than accurate. A neighborhood search, for example, shows my area rife with desperados: all of them flagrant violators of the traffic laws. Nary a violent criminal or a sex offender appears in the district that includes my neighborhood, the scary slum to the north, and the tenements to the west. Ditto the Investment House’s neighborhood and the bordering crime-ridden area to the west, which is infested with gangs. Well, not quite ditto: one person arrested for theft lives in the general vicinity. Some of the traffic arrests include such heinous crimes as not carrying one’s car registration in the vehicle and not wearing your seatbelt. Now, recently I read that to protect yourself from car theft you should not keep the registration in the car. And when I was pregnant, my gynecologist told me absolutely not to wear a seatbelt in the last trimester, because it would inflict more damage in a minor accident than the collision would.

From the looks of CriminalSearch’s maps, it looks like all is quiet around here.

However, the Sheriff’s office posts maps with the names, addresses, and specific rap sheet details of all registered sex offenders in the county. When you call that up, it’s a whole ‘nother story. The area to the north of me has a half-dozen offenders. The tenements to the west also house several sex offenders. The area to the west of the Investment House, which surrounds a middle school, is awash in sex offenders.

Then there’s what we personally know. Here in the mid- to high-rent district, a state legislator just had to resign after he was arrested for walloping his wife. He lives about six blocks up the road. Right across the street, there’s Carlos the Knife. I know Carlos was arrested the time he cut up his daughter with a kitchen knife when she got between him and her mother. I know he was arrested again more recently, when he went after his wife again. A block north and west, where I used to live, I know the delinquent who lived across the street from me was arrested when he got violent and his grandparents called the police. In Arizona, the police are required to make an arrest in every domestic violence case, even if the victim refuses to press charges. None of those incidents appears in CriminalSearch.

I know that one bright morning 18 months ago the gentleman who rented the house across the street from me was pursued by a small army of cops and brought to ground in his driveway, where it took the occupants of several cruisers and two motorcycle officers to subdue him and carry him off to jail. Okay, so that place is a rental and he’s gone; so maybe the records are up to date and don’t include him. But the current tenant gussies himself up like a Hell’s Angel and rides an unmuffled Harley; somehow I doubt the guy is the Angel Gabriel in disguise. Chances that he has a criminal record are very high.

This freebie, advertiser-supported service comes from PeopleSearch, an outfit used by employers and landlords to do background checks on job applicants. Could your credit rating, your shot at a job, or your ability to rent a home be harmed because you dared to flout some bureaucratic rule that makes no sense? Or because of a minor traffic violation? Meanwhile, the real perps, people who might be inclined to embezzle from the till or bring a street-sweeper to work, they don’t show up.

Invasion of privacy is real. It can get you in your pocketbook and it can get you in other ways, and you may never know why. Fairly or unfairly, it can keep you from getting a job, jack up your interest rates, and even bar you from renting a desirable place to live. Americans need to wake up to this. You should care.

Comments left on the iWeb site:

BeThisWay

You are very right.

Still, I admit to getting titillated by the discovery of an assault case on the record of someone I know very well.Someone who is quite holier than thou in general, and looks down his nose at someone else we both know who got arrested for something shockingly similar.

Heh.

If I won a million dollars . . .

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All right. I confess: I succumbed to the impulse to buy a lottery ticket. A raffle ticket, actually, but the IRS regards it as a kind of lottery. For a hundred bucks, the Health & Wealth raffle gives you a 1 in 18 chance of winning something, most likely a $100 bauble. You get about a 1 in a zillion chance of winning a million bucks. The C-note you toss to the winds lands in the coffers of Barrows Neurological Institute, a world-class hospital specializing in brain and nerve injuries. So it’s far from a total waste.

Go ahead. Click on that link. I dare you to not buy a ticket. Just look at that Mercedes roadster, that stack of cash…hot dang! There are 106 cash prizes ranging from $500 to $1 million. Then there are the cars, which could be resold for hefty amounts. Some are so extravagant that even selling at a deep discount would leave you a nice contribution to the retirement fund: two Mercedes vehicles in one prize, a combined value of $154,000, a Jaguar, a Lexus hybrid. They’re giving away 24 cars plus a motorcycle and several other small contraptions.

There are also a couple of large TV sets that are probably worth a couple thousand. And all those trips. Questionable whether you could sell a Mediterranean cruise, but the contest rules allow you to donate your gift back to Barrows. Obviously, a $30,000 tax deduction would do good things for your finances. Indeed. That’s almost two years’ worth of taxes for me. All very nice. But what I’m going for is that $1 million bag of money. I want the million dollars.

So…let’s indulge our fantasies. What would you do if you won a million bucks? It would translate to about $500,000 net, after taxes were extracted.

Pour moi, five hundred grand would guarantee that I could retire and have enough to support a middle-class lifestyle through the end of my life-no matter how long I do live.

  • I could pay off the Renovation Loan instantly.
  • I’d probably keep my job for another two years, until I can collect Medicare, since I likely can’t get health insurance as an individual. But…that much cash in hand would allow me to take COBRA, which would carry me through 18 months. So I could quit about in December and go on COBRA until I can switch to Medicare.
  • I could sell my house and move to a better neighborhood.
  • I could move to Prescott.
  • I could move to Santa Fe!
  • I could pay off the mortgage on the Investment House and then sell it to my son, collecting principal and interest payments to support myself and then put in my will that the loan is forgiven when I die. This would guarantee that all he puts into it would come back to him as principal, should he decide to move…and then some, if he stays there until die.
  • I could send my son to graduate school.
  • I could give away one of those Mercedes Benzes as a gift on my blog.

Jeeminy. Light a candle to the Goddess!
Are you prepared for the day you win a million dollars? What’s your plan?

Estate Sales: The canary in the mine?

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La Maya and I drove out to Scottsdale this morning, at the crack of proverbial dawn, to attend an estate sale that looked pretty enticing. Pictured on the organizer’s site was a bedroom set in the mode that M’hijito has described as desirable, plus various other interesting-looking loot.

When we got there, we found a half-renovated house in a (relatively!) downscale neighborhood of a ritzy part of town, the pool green and the pickin’s slim. The kitchen was devoid of valuable finds; the tools were old and worn; the bedstead was the wrong size and the bedroom set was cheaply made junk.

That notwithstanding, La Maya is not called the Queen of Estate Sales for nothing. Her discerning eye spotted a handsome loveseat, chair, and ottoman in butter-colored leather. After some study, we decided it probably was a quality product. She nailed all three pieces for $425, a fine 20 percent off the marked price. Not only that, but the estate sale organizer ate the tax.

Although we were numbers 24 and 25 in line to get in the door, no more than ten or twelve people were ahead of us. Evidently the ticket number they started with was higher than 1. It took two trips to haul the furniture. The second time we arrived out there, the furniture-lifting person had gone off for a break, and so we sat with the estate sale company’s owner for a while, helping to calculate tax and hand out bags to the few buyers.

And “few” was the operative word. Over the past several weeks, we’ve found ourselves at the head of the estate-sale line, even when we arrived after a sale was slated to open. This is in vast contrast to the normal experience, where you may arrive a half-hour or an hour early and still wait to get in the door through three or four rafts of people who got there first.

Gina, the estate sale proprietor, echoed other organizers in saying that business was very slow: plenty of sellers but few buyers. She was practically giving things away-name a price for a piece of loot and you could walk with it. Gina said people are not buying, and that times are tough in the estate sale biz. What she does is considered effectively wholesaling. “Retailers”-read dealers in antiques and used furniture-are really suffering. She said her biggest buyers, who indeed are dealers, are in deep trouble.

So, we might add, was her client. They evidently had purchased the house speculatively, figuring to fix it up and turn it around for a profit. Before they were done, though, they fell into bankruptcy. They had completed maybe half their renovation work on the unimpressive little tract house. In one bathroom, blue masking tape around the paint job was still in place, only half-pulled off. A sloppy plaster repair stood out on the ceiling where some defunct fixture had been removed to make way for recessed lighting. The pool water was green, slimy, and evaporated several inches below the tile line. Old dirty carpet remained on the floor.

Understand, an estate sale is a gold mine for two sets of people:

  1. those who are in the business of reselling “antiques” and used furniture (in general, one and the same thing); and
  2. frugalists, folks like you and me looking to furnish our homes and our lives with nearly new, upscale products at second-hand prices.

When neither of these are in evidence, well…it’s not a good sign. It means consumers are not buying. They’re not buying from businesses that sell second-hand goods and genuine antiques, and they’re not buying yard-sale items. When bargain-hunters quit looking for bargains, IMHO, it indicates people are either really hurting or really scared.

Well, at any rate, La Maya scored a lovely pair of luxurious leather seating pieces. They transform her family room, and she is very pleased.

Nevertheless, we worry. We worry.

Real Life: Funnier than the comic strips

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Speaking of the vagaries of megalithic bureaucracies (as we were yesterday), get an eyeful of what visitors see when they park at the Great Desert University, self-styled “gold standard” of our state’s public education system.

The photographer reports that every “compagt” space in the parking garage is so marked. He has yet to discover whether this holds true in all the many newly cleaned and restriped parking garages on the campus.

What are they trying to say to us?

Photo by Todd Halvorsen

Stop the presses…literally

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Word on the street has it that The Arizona Republic, the only daily metro newspaper serving the fifth-largest city in the nation, is laying off most of its photographers and much of its editing staff. A few unseasoned reporters will be retained. In the fall, we’re told, the Republic is slated to morph into a tabloid. Those who will staff this downsized entity, the ghost of our right-to-work state’s flagship newspaper, will have no health insurance and a pension plan that will be, shall we say, commensurately downsized. Thus saith the paper’s present owner, the Gannett Corporation.

The Republic, having abandoned journalism years ago, no longer has much of a readership. It’s losing readers even as the population of the Valley grows. There’s a reason for that: it doesn’t publish news.

This is no exaggeration. One year a mayoral campaign came and went with almost no mention of the candidates. Yesterday (we’ll give it this much), its print edition mentioned that unless Our Esteemed Legislators approve a budget within the next two weeks, the state budget will expire and state employees will not be paid on July 3. Having heard this from La Maya and having a vested interest in getting paid on July 3, I went to the Republic‘s online edition and found not…one…word about the possibility that Arizona’s largest employer may fail to pay its workers and that state government is, as we speak, preparing to shut down all nonessential services. The lead online story concerned the recent opening of a new ice cream store.

Turning this formerly major metropolitan newspaper into a throw-away tabloid will put it head-to-head with New Times, which succeeds because it has verve, sass, only the thinnest veneer of journalistic ethics, and lots of advertising. Lots and lots of advertising. New Times is entertaining but devoid of credibility. On the other hand, it does attempt to follow local politics. You can’t believe a word it publishes about local government, but at least it has some words!

Newspapers that abandon their mission to deliver the truth to the public and forget the importance of that mission have nothing to sell. For a long time the Republic has staggered along with dwindling advertising, but as readers lost interest in the paper’s content, advertisers lost interest in its ballooning space rates. Who reads the local newspaper’s classifieds when you can go to Craig’s List? What’s the point of pawing through page after page of irrelevant retail adds to clip a few coupons when you can download what you want from the Web? And why pay to advertise in a newspaper that nobody reads?

I canceled the Sunday Republic when I realized that the only things I was reading were the front page (part of it) and the funny strips; it felt ugly and irresponsible to throw away three or four pounds of advertising to read a half-dozen pages of ephemera. Just the thought of how many trees were pulped only to be tossed directly into the trash disgusted me, and I decided to stop abetting that kind of criminality. Not long after, I realized I’d rather pay to have The New York Times delivered to my house and so canceled the Republic altogether.

It’s a sad development. There’s a reason journalism is called the Fourth Estate. It’s an important part of the polity of a democratic republic. When we cannot get information about what’s going on down at City Hall or over at the State House, we as voters are in the dark. And our path through the darkness, as we have already seen over the past decade, is inexorably leading us toward tyranny.

Consumer Rant of the Day: Tomatoes

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Argh!!!! Now we’re told that Basha’s, AJ’s, and Food City have removed all tomatoes from all their stores. Why? Because two people in Maricopa County have fallen ill from eating tomatoes with germs on them.

AJ’s is the only store in town that carries edible tomatoes. Every other store, Whole Paycheck included, sells cardboard and styrofoam imitation tomatoes, those fine hard balls that hold up well in transport and when gassed while green will turn bright red, faking out the consumer once again.

Look. I know salmonella will make you sick, and I appreciate that a retailer (under threat of potential lawsuits) is concerned enough to take potentially contaminated produce off its counters. But there’s an easy fix for this, something we all should be doing as a matter of course: WASH YOUR PRODUCE BEFORE YOU EAT IT!

Contaminated and impure processed foods pose a real problem and certainly should be removed from commerce as soon as they’re identified. That’s because the contaminants are mixed in and packaged with the product, so there’s no way for a consumer to get them out of a canned, bottled, or prepared food. Also, it’s reasonable to expect that something in a can, a bottle, or a package is clean and safe to eat.

Not so with produce. Folks. Tomatoes do not grow in sterile rooms. Neither do lettuce, strawberries, blueberries, apples, oranges, asparagus, potatoes, carrots, radishes, parsley, sage, rosemary, or thyme…. They grow in dirt. Dirt is called “dirt” because it’s dirty. If you eat a tomato (or anything else that grows on a farm) without washing it, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get sick.

Personally, I resent being treated like a child. Too much of America’s package designs and marketing policies treat consumers like they were children, and not too bright children at that. I’m tired of wrestling with child-proof caps-and then leaving cleansers and OTC medicaments uncapped or transferring them into other packages-and I’m tired of having to dig out a knife to peel off inner labels intended to keep maniacs from dripping a little strychnine into the cough medicine. Please. Let me take my chances. If I’m too dumb to put dangerous products out of my kids’ reach, maybe the collective gene pool would be better off without my offspring. If I’m the one-in-87-billion who happens to pick up a product contaminated by a lunatic, I won’t be happy, but let’s get real: I’m a lot more likely to be hit by a car as I cross the street outside my office than I am to swallow strychnine in my cough syrup. And take a chance, dear Leaders and Giants of Commerce, that I’ll have enough sense to wash my produce before I gulp it down.

Yes, dear readers. Wash all raw food before you eat it. Wash it even if you’re going to cook it. A few years ago, Consumer Reports published an article saying that when you wash most nonorganic produce, you remove almost all the pesticide and fertilizer residues. This rule is especially important in our splendid era of globalization, when so much of our produce comes from countries that have no rules governing the safe use of pesticides on farms, and where fields may be fertilized with substances that Americans would rather not think about.

Here’s how to do it:

Clean the kitchen sink. Fill it with water and add just a few drops (doesn’t have to be much) of dish detergent. Place the produce into the water and let it sit for a couple of minutes. Agitate the produce around gently. Then drain the sink and rinse each piece well.

With lettuce: break the head of lettuce into individual leaves and wash them, as above, in a sink of weak detergent water. Rinse well and allow the leaves to drain in your dish drainer. Then lay the leaves out on a clean kitchen towel, roll up the towel with the leaves inside, and place the roll inside a plastic bag to refrigerate. This will keep the lettuce fresh for a long time, and your salad is half-made when you’re ready to eat it. Avoid precut packaged lettuce: it costs too much and it’s too difficult to wash.

If contamination on the outside of fresh produce is a serious problem, do what we did when I was growing up in Saudi Arabia: fill a sink with weak detergent water and add a quarter-cup of Clorox. Alternatively, add several camper’s iodine tablets, made for decontaminating river and stream water. Place the produce in the treated water and soak for 15 minutes. Rinse well. Lettuce treated with Clorox must be eaten promptly, as the chlorine will cause it to wilt after you store it. Also, this method does not work on strawberries.

Or, with produce that has a rind, peel, or skin (such as oranges, apples, and tomatoes), wash it under running water using plain old bar soap.

None of this is very hard to comprehend or to do.

4 Comments left on iWeb site

!wanda

With the California spinach scare last year, the problem (as explained by the media) was that the bacteria wasn’t merely on the surface of the plant.The spinach had taken it up through the roots, so the bacteria was inside the leaves, and no amount of washing would get rid of it.Cooking would probably destroy it, but apparently you can’t trust people to cook spinach.Is that what is happening with these tomatoes?

Wednesday, June 4, 2008 – 11:29 AM

vh

N-n-n-o-o. Salmonella cannot get INSIDE the leaves of anything. The little fellas can’t get inside a tomato. They’re on the surface.

Ah, yes. The Great Spinach Scare. The little guys got on the spinach when the fields were irrigated with water contaminated with the…uhm, offal, shall we say politely…from a cattle feedlot, one of the filthiest environments this side of a commercial henhouse. Depending on the part of the country where the farm is located, a field can be flood-irrigated or irrigated by sprinklers. We used to irrigate our fields with mobile sprinklers that connected to untreated water piped in from the Hassayampa River. Whatever li’l critters were living in the river water (interesting, some of ’em, such as, oh, say, giardia) would be sprayed all over the crops.

Yesh. That meant the crops had, oh, say, giardia on them, so if you were to trot out there and pick off a piece of freshly watered greens, you would get very very sick, indeed.

Giardia is as nothing compared to the sewage dumped into the water from a feedlot.

Trust me. Wash your produce. Then stop worrying about it. I know whereof I speak.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008 – 03:27 PM

ih

i’ve got some tomatoes in the backyard, a few are just ripening now.feel free to come over and pick some if you’d like.

Thursday, June 5, 2008 – 07:13 PM

vh

M’hijito! Remember to eat those oranges on your tree! The ones that have survived in the shade of your house are very sweet and juicy.

Thursday, June 5, 2008 – 08:03 PM