Wow! After the speed trap ticket, the gutter installation, the unexpected pool repair, the purchase of three pair of $14 shorts (what an extravagance!), the two service calls from the locksmith to remove and reinstall the complicated lock so the painter could refinish the door, and the unplanned lock repair, I’ve overrun this month’s credit-card budget by an astonishing $747.99.
No, wait; that doesn’t even count the speed trap rip-off. As it develops, the traffic school doesn’t charge the $188 gouge to your credit card until it receives a signed piece of paper from you. This month’s AMEX cycle ends on the 20th, and so if I delay mailing that thing another couple of days, the charge will go on next month’s bill.
Fortunately, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc. owes $608 of this, for hosting, computer supplies, incorporation costs, and the solid-core door and hardened lock I put on the office. Having received several payments from clients, the little corporation actually has that much to spare. Even more fortunately, because I’ve come in under budget for three of the past four months, plenty of “extra” money has collected in the account that I use to pay credit-card bills. I hate to have it go away, because I was counting it as part of the savings that I hope will ease the transition to permanent unemployment. And pushing the speed trap rip-off forward means I start next month $188 in the hole.
Oh well. At least right this minute there’s enough to pay this month’s bill.
Check out Room Farm’s report on what’s going on at Twitter about the Iranian election and what tweeters can do to support people demonstrating for fair voting there.
Will someone who can get into RF let Chance know the post that tells what other things people can do has been taken down, allegedly for nonpayment (yeah, right!). Maybe she has a record of what was said in that post?
On the way home from GDU, I trekked up and around to Paradise Valley Community College, site of my next part-time gig. From there the nice new Costco at Cave Creek and the U.S. 101 is sorta on my way. So I dropped by to pick up a few tomatoes and a bottle of wine.
Two bottles of wine. Tomatoes. Cantaloupes. Prepared osso bucco (!). And what have we here? A pair of Lizwear shorts, one heckuva far cry from the ill-fitting Levi shorts the Costco here in the ghetto had a couple of weeks ago!
Dang!
It was hard to miss the bright orange kayaks on display near the front entrance. We don’t got no bright orange kayaks. We don’t got no kayaks at all…
That Costco has a whole lotta things us poor white (and brown, and black) trash don’t got, including an array of very fancy single-malt Scotches, ranging from the tacky Glenlivet to stuff I’ve never heard of at $75 a bottle. Not to mention the Veuve Cliquot champagne…happy Fourth!
Garrrrh! Cuter clothes (some nifty shirts that have never been brushed by eye-rays from the downscale set). Fancier booze. Fancier food. More choices of kitchenware. KAYAKS!
Okay, it’s true: we’re in the middle of the desert about a zillion miles from navigable water, and no, you’re right, noooo I do not need a kayak. Just saying. That’s all. Just sayin’.
Once I get started driving over to PVCC three times a week, I believe I’ll be making Costco runs at the 101 and Cave Creek.
Given a choice, we fossils would have preferred that the Cretaceous had lasted a while longer. All these little mammals running around—pesky things, and they make all sorts of nimble demands.
Last night I went to log on to my credit union accounts and instead got a message informing me that henceforth the CU will charge a fee to deliver paper statements to customers who have online access. To get statements free, we have to agree to accept e-statements.
Fine, I’ll figure this out later; leave me alone and let me get my chores done, thought I.
But nay…the only way you can move forward into your accounts is to click “accept” or “decline.” There’s no “I’ll think about it” choice. When I tried to back out, up popped an error message informing me that Safari no longer will suffice to navigate the CU’s site, and that I must have a new version of IE or (hang onto your hats, folks) Netscape.
Netscape? It went down in 2008.
So I sent a query. This morning comes this reply:
If you are using a MAC the only browser we support is Safari, versions 1.2 and 3.0. You must use this browser in order for all the options to work properly.
Huh? Safari 1.2?? I thought the last surviving copy resided at the Smithsonian. Safari 3.0? That came out…when? In the Mesozoic? I’m at 3.2.3, and a more recent update keeps bouncing at me like Cassie the Corgi with a ball, begging to be installed.
They say you can view your accounts with any old version of Safari, but you can’t perform the functions you may need.
Meanwhile, nothing said about the fact that you can’t proceed to your accounts without accepting or declining their “offer.”
Well, I guess we can say good-bye to the old-fashioned, customer-friendly service that is the specific reason some of us prefer credit unions to banks. Sic transit gloria mundi.
My criminal career proceeds apace. The other day I breezed past a camera in a Tempe speed trap and got a nice candid portrait of myself behind the steering wheel.
Get this: when you turn north off University onto Rural Road, you turn onto a seven-lane thoroughfare. It’s large, it’s broad, it’s well marked, it has a center lane devoted solely to left turns. It goes past no schools, no residential neighborhoods: it’s flanked solely by light industrial development and mini-shopping malls. Everyplace else along Rural and Scottsdale (as the road is called after it passes under the freeway a few blocks to the north), the speed limit is 40 to 45 miles an hour. That’s a reasonable and prudent speed for the entire length of the large main drag.
But right around the intersection with University, the limit on Rural drops to 35 mph.
Nowhere near the turn, as far as I can tell, is the speed limit posted. The first speed limit sign appears several hundred feet north of University…on the far side of the traffic camera!
In other words, you don’t get to see what the speed limit is until the camera snaps your photo!
If that’s not a speed trap, I’d like to know what it is. Indeed, the worthies of the Tempe City Council have actually described it in so many words. According to the minutes of their April 9 meeting….
Councilmember Shekerjian stated that this has been one of the top three things she has asked about on a regular basis and she appreciated staff’s efforts. People assume these are speed traps for revenue….
Mayor Hallman added that most people think a reasonable and prudent speed between University on the south side and the 202 Freeway is not 35 mph but 40 mph. Priest Road [the next main drag to the east of Rural, similar in size and design] is an example of being signed at 40 mph, just as University used to be, and part of his concern is the way in which staff’s memo suggests that maybe this was a City Council-driven matter when in 2004, Council requested that staff review speed signs.
He continued that in looking at a chart that shows 120,000 violations between December 2007 and January 2009, it doesn’t look good that the next southbound location gets only about 35,000 citations.
Doesn’t that frost your cookies? Today a ticket arrives, grâce à this bureaucratically sanctioned speed trap: $171.
In Arizona, you can keep points off your driving record and avoid having your insurance shoot through the stratosphere by taking a Mickey-Mouse “defensive driving” course. For a person who hasn’t had a fender-bender or a traffic ticket in over 30 years, such an activity amounts to a mind-bending waste of time. The face-to-face class occupies an entire day; the on-line version is said to consume a mere 4 1/2 hours.
Not only that, but if you opt to take the course rather than just paying the ticket, the cost adds up to more than the fine! Which itself is steep. This wee fiasco is going to cost me $188, plus a minimum of $270 worth of my time.
For nothing.
It’s pure extortion. They set up cameras where no limit is posted, give you a ticket for going a speed normal everywhere else on the road and on roads similar to it elsewhere in Tempe, and then force you to cough up a gob of cash if you don’t want to see your insurance rates skyrocket.
UPDATE
Okay, I’m forced to admit it: Rural Road actually is posted before the camera, just a few feet north of the intersection with University. Baaad dinosaur! But that notwithstanding: everywhere else the road is posted 40 or 45 mph, and in the absence of a school zone or residential area, there’s no reason to suddenly drop it to 35 mph along this seven-lane stretch. Posted or not, it’s still a speed trap.
As we noted yesterday, journalism—even its most prominent avatars—is fading away like the Cheshire cat. Money Beagle left a winsome comment to that post, in which he remarks,
I guess great blogs like yours and mine will eventually have to save the day. 🙂
Can’t let that one lay! It’s a broad concept that raises all sorts of questions and issues. I was about to respond in the comments field but found myself going on at post length. So:
@ Money Beagle: Eventually, something vaguely like that is about what will happen. It’s not a good development, because…
First, there’s no organized way to get whatever news or newsoid we produce to a coherent audience. Audience is ultimately what matters.
Second, we have no editors! Reporters need editors for a variety of reasons, all of which apply to bloggers. In the absence of editorial guidance, discipline, and help, we’re not really doing journalism.
Third, we have no real, widely accepted code of journalistic or bloggerish ethics. While reporters often stray from the SPJ code, we have no code at all. At least journalists try.
Fourth, bloggers do not have funds for investigative journalism, the single most important function of the Fourth Estate.
Money, of course, is at the root of print journalism’s troubles. What I’d like to see is a combination of public and nonprofit funding similar to what supports PBS and NPR, only modified for the needs of print magazines and newspapers. Publications would continue to run as many ads as they could get, but advertising revenue would be supplemented by foundations.
Donations to journalistic foundations would be tax-deductible, whether or not the groups were government or, strictly speaking, charitable entities. This policy would be put in place because of the crucial importance of the Fourth Estate to the continuing education of voters, to the health and safety of the public, and to the survival of a free society. As a more or less democratic republic, we can’t afford to lose high-quality journalistic enterprises. Just as donations to schools are deductible, so support of journalism would be deductible, for much the same reasons.
For bloggers to morph into true journalists—not Play-Nooz yappers but real journalists of the sort you find at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Yorker—we would have to organize into networks that incorporate the best organizational features of large print publications and adapt those features to a diffuse online operating model. We would need training to understand the principles of investigative journalism, political and science writing, community journalism, and basic ethics. We would need a centralized set of editors who could establish an overall mission and keep the enterprise moving coherently according to that mission, assign bloggers to “beats,” assign specific stories and projects, and oversee accuracy, quality, and integrity. We would need a master site with a layout that would effectively direct readers to content. And we would need a lot of money, which means we would need ad agents and a system of advertising that generates serious revenue. Each blogger’s site or contribution to the larger site would have to earn enough for her or him to make a living.
Few of us earn enough from blogging to live, even modestly. Those individuals who do are, by and large, not journalists. Whatever it is you can say they’re doing, it isn’t journalism.
Most of the heavy-hitting journalists in this country today are products of heavy-hitting schools—many have degrees from the Ivy Leagues. Although some highly educated and sophisticated writers reside in the blogosphere, they’re not organized and few earn enough from blogging to justify the cost of that sort of training. In a word, they have paying day jobs. If blogging is to replace print journalism, it will have to generate enough money to support more than just a few writers—full-time, not as hobbyists.
Image:
Henry Louis Stephens, “Black Man Reading Newspaper by Candlelight”
The painting is said to represent a man reading the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation in the paper
Public domain, U.S. Library of Congress
From Wikipedia Commons
