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
Lordie! So far am I over this month’s budget, I’ve given up trying to restrain the spending. As usual when I decide to indulge myself early in the budget cycle with a sorta expensive but affordable purchase, every damnfool thing that costs money to fix has popped up or gone wrong.
Then the locksmith showed up and miraculously fixed the museum-quality antique lock at the downtown house ($50); the pool went on the fritz ($135); I ran out of pool shock treatment chemicals ($53), the air conditioning company called to inquire after payment of a bill racked up last March for routine annual maintenance, which I mistakenly thought they’d charged on AMEX then and so filed and forgot ($120); Costco blindsided me with a demand for membership renewal ($53); we installed gutters on the downtown house ($353); and FINALLY after a year of stubbornly offering ugly Bermuda shorts and uglier pedal-pushers, Costco came forth with the style of summer shorts I love and that evidently has gone out of fashion ($56 for three pair).
The upshot of these frolics: $702.51 worth of red ink.
All is not lost, though.
Last month, I fronted my S-corporation, The Copyeditor’s Desk, $531 in start-up costs and office supplies, which I put on the card and paid out of my cash flow. Since then, the corporation has earned enough to cover those expenses. As it develops, with careful bookkeeping, you’re alllowed have the corporation repay its debt to you. So, CE Desk will cover about $530 of this month’s shortfall.
That brings the overrun down to a manageable $353.There’s plenty in the Indulgences & Surprise Expenses savings account to cover this.
Meanwhile, M’hijito said he’d pay half the gutter cost, erasing another $176 of red ink, bringing the overerun down to a mere $177. It’s not really necessary for him to do that, though, since a) I didn’t expect it and b) he keeps insisting on paying my bill every single time we go out to eat. By now he’s easily forked over more than $177 in free sandwiches, breakfast platters, tacos, sushi, and beer.
Today is the 14th. Because my budget cycle is set up to coincide with the AMEX billing cycle, it ends on the 20th. I actually have all the food, gas, and supplies I need to tide me over for another seven days, and so in principle I could do a no-buy week to stanch the flow of red. Experiences shows that’s karmically risky, though—the last time I tried that stunt, the dog died, expensively.
Okay, okay, I know: superstitious! But truly, a $702 personal budget overrun passeth all understanding. So instead of vowing not to part with another penny between now and the 20th, I’m just gunna lay low here. Spend normally. Maybe not spend very much. But no no-spend weeks. Maybe Lady Karma won’t notice…
This may not be visible to those of you who view the New York Times Magazine online, but today the Times downsized the magazine’s print version in a big and ominous way. They’ve cut the trim size (the issue’s physical height and width) and, to accommodate the smaller pages, have switched to an eye-straining smaller font with display type that at one heading level looks weirdly smaller than the body type. The effect is…well, depressing. It’s another symptom of the demise of print journalism, a development that does not bode well for a healthy democracy.
They’ve also upgraded to a “brighter and more contemporary color palette.” {gasp!} I woke up this morning with the remnants of a migraine that started two days ago and is only just clearing. Today’s brighter and more contemporary cover consists of a stomach-flipping, brilliant, sulfuric ochre that bleeds off all four margins, with black type against a window of Day-Glo magenta: eyeball-grating! At first glance, it actually caused physical pain. No exaggeration: I still can’t look at it without making my head hurt more. In fact, as we scribble, I’m ripping off the cover, folding it so I can’t see it, and hiding it in the trash.
When a magazine starts out with a large trim size, shrinking it to the dimensions of an ordinary newsstand publication doesn’t sound, on the face of it, like a big deal. But lemme tell you: a publication like the Times Magazine builds much of its appeal through its visual presence and its tactile effect on readers. The magazine was physically pleasing to read and to handle, and that is why one is willing to pay to have such a thing delivered to one’s home. This fact is not understood by management, particularly when management has no comprehension of journalism or graphic design and is interested primarily—one might say solely—in the bottom line. These bozos fail to grasp the idea that when you diminish the magazine, you may save money on production costs, but you lose readers. When you’re already hemorrhaging readers, you can’t afford strategies that drive away those who have stuck with you through good times and bad.
While I was working for Arizona Highways, the publisher decided to save dollars by cutting the trim size and, worse, by going to a cheaper, thinner paper stock. Save money? Yup. Stupid move? Oh, yeah!
Highways was the pre-eminent regional magazine in the country. It also was one of the premier photography publications in the world. For a certain type of landscape photographer—the sort who hauls a hundred pounds of large-format gear 15 or 20 miles into the bush, eschews Photoshop, and rarely if ever does a set-up shot—it was a go-to market that could make a career. For readers around the world, it was a window to the American Southwest and a nice little dream factory. For the state of Arizona, it was the mother lode of tourism.
Cutting the trim size meant they had to cut the size of the photo reproduction. A spectacular scenic looks a whole lot less scenic when you shrink it a quarter-inch or so all the way around—surprisingly so. Cheesying down the paper quality meant ink on one side of a sheet would show through to the other side. This annoyed the photographers, so much so that the real heavy hitters, who did not need Arizona Highways to make or break their businesses, quit submitting their work.
Overall the magazine’s quality dropped markedly: markedly enough to be noticeable to readers. Circulation, which at one time reached every country on the earth but one, went into free-fall. It had been dropping; now it plummeted.
Two editors in a row walked or were fired. The second, who pretty clearly was hired to ride the publication into the ground, fled before it could crash. Highways is still being printed, but no one understands why. Its days may be numbered in the single digits. They were numbered in the first place, but the numbers were surely reduced when management decided to cut production quality.
Hey, guys. Give us NEWS! Give us QUALITY! Real readers don’t want infotainment. We don’t want Play-Nooz. And we’re not gunna pay for junked-up products. If journalism were still journalism, maybe it would survive a little longer.
When I lived in Saudi Arabia back in the Dark Ages, Indian, Goanese, and Pakistani workers would get workers’ visas so they could come on as domestics for American and British oil company employees. Pedro was a Pakistani man who worked as a cook for our friends the Dakers.
Pedro was a past master of concocting curry dishes for American and English tastes. It was a challenge, because many fresh products were unavailable, and so he had to make do with a lot of canned and dried goods. I’d like to share with you two dishes he used to make for his employers: Pedro’s curry and Pedro’s curry puffs.
Curry Puffs
As a little girl, no snack food thrilled me more than Pedro’s amazingly delicious and tongue-singeing curry puffs. He used to make real puff pastry, layer after layer after layer of folded-together butter and dough that took at least a full day to create. Unless you love to stand in the kitchen, substitute the sheets of puff pastry you can get in the grocery store freezer, or sheets of phyllo dough, also available in most supermarkets.
Given his choice, he likely would have used lamb. He was probably Moslem, and if so he wouldn’t have used pork, nor do I ever recall him adding it. He used ground beef. I’ve combined ground beef and lamb in this recipe, to good effect. Try to get the best quality curry powder you can find, or make your own.
You need:
• puff pastry dough or phyllo dough • hamburger, ground lamb, ground pork, or some combination thereof • an onion, chopped • one or two cloves of garlic, minced (Pedro used garlic powder) • a little olive oil • salt and pepper to taste
• a lot of curry powder
Sauté the onion in enough olive oil to cover the bottom of a skillet. Lift the onion out of the pan and brown the ground meat in the onion-flavored oil. Add the minced garlic. If a lot of water cooks out of the meat into the pan, drain the liquid by dumping the meat into a sieve or colander and then put the meat back into the pan. Mix the onions back in to the meat. Season with salt and pepper, and then stir in enough curry powder to raise the hair on your head. Just keep adding and tasting until it’s good and zingy. When the meat is cooked through and the spice combined well, remove from the heat.
Preheat the oven to about 375 degrees.
Roll out the pastry dough on a floured board (if using phyllo, work with a small amount at a time, keeping the remainder moist under a dampened clean kitchen towel). Cut it into pieces about 4 inches wide by about 8 inches long. Place a dollop of the curried meat in the middle of a piece of dough. Fold the short ends inward over the meat, and then fold the longwise ends over those. Pinch to seal. Place on a baking pan.
When the pan is full (leave some space between each packet), cook the curry puffs in a fast oven until nicely puffed and brown. Allow them to cool before eating—the filling can get very hot.
Serve as an hors d’oeuvre, or to small scavenging children who hang around your kitchen.
Pedro’s Curry
This is a stew-like affair, from what I’m told unlike anything real Asians eat. Apparently it was designed for Anglo-Saxon diners.
You need:
A wide variety of condiments:
• grated or flaked coconut •papadums or thin, crunchy crackers such as Wheat Thins • chutney, preferably mango chutney • high-quality plain yogurt (an afterthought; we didn’t have it in Arabia) • toasted almonds or pine nuts • rice cooked with raisins
Ingredients for the curry:
• stew beef (lamb is also good) cut in two-inch chunks • 1 large can of tomatoes • plenty of curry • 1 onion, chopped • 1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced, or 1/8 to 1/4 tsp garlic powder • a little olive or cooking oil (we had no olive oil; Pedro used Crisco) • beef or chicken stock (I have added red wine, but of course we didn’t have it out there) • various canned, frozen, or fresh vegetables: peas, carrots, corn, string beans, etc. • optional: a potato, cubed
In a stock pot or good-sized Dutch oven, brown the onions in the oil. Remove the onions and set aside. Add the meat to the hot oil, a few pieces at a time, and brown on all sides. Put the onions back into the pot. Lower the heat and add three to six tablespoons of curry powder. Stir well; then turn off the heat. Allow the meat to stand for an hour or two, soaking in the flavors of the curry.
Return to the stove and add the can of tomatoes and about three or four cups of broth. If you wish (assuming you’re not living in the Middle East), add a dollop or two of red wine. Simmer for an hour or two to cook the meat well and blend flavors.
If you’re using fresh vegetables such as carrots or potatoes, add them far enough ahead of serving time to cook them through. Add each vegetable with serving time in mind. I like to use frozen veggies, because they’re fresher-tasting than the canned vegetables we had overseas but are parboiled and so needed simmer as long in the pot.
While the curry is simmering, cook up some rice: one cup dry rice will serve three or four diners. Bring 2 1/2 cups water to the boil for every one cup of dry rice you plan to use. When the water reaches a boil, add the rice and turn the heat to medium-low. Add a quarter cup of raisins for each cup of dry rice. Cover and simmer. Length of cooking time depends on the kind of rice you use. I prefer converted rice (sold under the Uncle Ben’s label in supermarkets); it takes about 20 to 25 minutes to cook.
While the rice is cooking, turn the oven to 400 degrees and toast some almonds or pine nuts–again, about a quarter-cup per cup of rice. Lay them flat on a cookie sheet and place in the hot oven; watch carefully, because they’ll brown quickly.
If you’re serving papadums, fry them in hot oil while the rice is cooking.
To serve, place the cooked rice and curry in separate serving dishes to take to the table. Pass the condiments in small serving bowls.
Guests serve themselves rice, spoon the curry over it, and then top the dish with condiments. Waldorf salad makes a very good accompaniment to curry.
