The Really, Really Big M's

On All Things Considered last night, Adam Davidson talked about what would have happened if Fannie May and Freddie Mac had failed, and I was shocked to hear that the amount of debt that they’re in for is $5 trillion dollars, which puts them at a larger debt than any other country (aside from the credit-riding US of course). What that means is that if Japan or the UK went bankrupt, it would have a smaller financial impact on the world than the potential bankruptcy of Fannie and Freddie. This is pretty scary news and really gives a perspective on both how important and how crazy these two companies are. As someone who’s averse to any kind of debt, it seems to me to underscore a lot of what’s wrong with our American culture.
One thing to note is that I was surprised at how much debt Fanny and Freddie were carrying, but at least I know that they were private institutions. That’s more than I can say for Sarah Palin, who seems to think that they’re taxpayer funded but doesn’t see her complete ignorance of important issues (among many other things to be covered in an upcoming blog rant) as a problem.

Primaries

Yesterday was Primary day, and I was unprepared. As I said in my prior post, I've been a bit distracted, and although I am the PCO* for a neighboring district and spent a couple hours leaving Primary-day endorsement pamphlets (i.e. cheat sheets) on the doorsteps of Democrats in my precinct, I hadn't had a chance to read through and mark up my voter's pamphlet the way I usually do. Plus, at around 7pm I was at C's house as per my normal Tuesday night tradition and realized I had totally forgotten to go to the polls! Luckily, C was understanding so we hopped into my car, drove home to get my voter registration card, voter pamphlet, and one of my left-over cheat sheets, and walked to my polling station.

We arrived in good time - there didn't seem to be many people there and the older women who always (wo)man the sign-in tables seemed excited to see us. I think I was a little more excited than most people who come through there, because they asked me if it was my first time voting, and then were very excited that C was there as an international observer. The poll worker reminded me that if I didn’t want C to look over my shoulder, I had a right to tell her to go away, which was not necessary but kind of cute. We decided to try the electronic voting machine again just for kicks, and headed over to the one machine available. (During this time, perhaps 5-10 people came in and voted, all using paper ballots.) Some things I noticed beyond what I shared during last November’s election:

• This was the first (and I really hope, last) year of the top-two primary. In this new system, Washington voters who for some reason have missed the fact that the purpose of the primary is to let party loyalists choose their candidates for their own party can now vote for anyone they want, with the top two vote-getters ending up on the general election ballot. Although in most cases this means a Democrat and a Republican will end up there (which cuts out the smaller parties completely) there are some areas and races where, after the election yesterday, two Democrats or two Republicans will end up on the ballot. This seems pretty dumb to me because if you have, for instance, three really capable Republicans and two really capable Democrats on the ballot, and assuming you have approximately a 50/50 split of voters for each party, you could end up with each Democrat receiving 25% of the vote and each Republican receiving 16.5%, and then end up with two Democrats on the ballot because the Republican vote got split amongst more qualified people. I don’t get why this is an improvement.
• As part of this top-two primary, each candidate has to say which party they associate with, but there’s no way for you to tell which of the “Democratic” candidates is the one that the party is really backing. However, the Republicans have figured out a sneaky system. I’d heard that Dino Rossi, the main Republican gubernatorial candidate, was planning to say “supports the GOP” instead of “supports the Republican Party” to avoid negative connotations about the Republicans in this election year . It turns out that all the “official” Republican candidates were doing the same thing, while the unofficial ones didn’t seem to get the memo. For the Democrats, though, you had to rely on your cheat sheet, if you had one.
• Last November I said that my printed-out ballot was hidden behind a plastic cover so I couldn’t review it. It turns out you can lift the cover to watch it print out. I have no idea why they wouldn’t have just used a clear cover so you could see it at all times.
• C and I tried to select a write-in candidate for one office, and it turns out you need to type in the candidate name and also their party affiliation. I found this very odd – I guess you could just type in your party affiliation and hope, but what happens if you got it wrong?
• I was amused at how uncomfortable C was about looking over my shoulder while I voted, despite the fact that I’d invited her to do so. I don’t know if it was because the whole “secret ballot” thing was drilled into her as a child or if it’s a Canadian thing (always a good place to put the blame) but either way, you should know that if C comes to the polls with you, and you haven’t done your research on a particular candidate so you hand her the voter pamphlet and tell her to read it and tell you who to vote for, you will be privy to a pretty funny look of shock and horror.
• Finally, some voting machine humor from XKCD for your entertainment:

*Precinct Committee Officer (or something like that)

The Gumdrop's Progress OR Why I've Been Too Distracted To Post

Come January J and I will be welcoming a new NPR listener to the planet, known currently as "The Gumdrop". Over the past months I've been updating my messenger picture with Office Online clipart to track the gumdrop's size and thought I'd share the collection so far with you. I find it pretty astounding myself.

Here's to many more years of growing and learning and excitement to come!

Cell-etiquette

Today on Morning Edition there were two stories back-to-back about California’s new cellphone driving policy. I was pretty confused about what the actual policy was, but it seems to boil down to this: as of today, drivers can’t hold their phones while talking. That’s it. If you want to text, dial, play solitaire, read your email, or use the vibrate mode in a way other than it’s intended, that’s fine. But if you’re talking, you need to be hands-free. So I have a few issues with this, as usual:

1. The goal of this law is to reduce accidents, and I can understand that cell-phone talking causes distractions. But it seems like there’s no specific data that backs up the fact that talking on your Bluetooth headset is any better for distractions than holding your phone. I’ll agree it’s more comfortable, and I’ve enjoyed using mine the last year or so, but less distracting? And certainly, it seems like if anything dialing and writing on your phone take a lot more concentration and are therefore even more distracting, so why not ban them too?
2. My real goal with this law (and it’s all about me, of course) would be to enforce J’s cellphone etiquette. I read on Slate.com that the currently accepted rule is that you should only be talking, texting, or playing with your phone in the same circumstances under which you’d be solving a crossword puzzle. When I brought this up to my group of symphony friends they suggested you could do a crossword puzzle in a collaborative way, so we decided we should really go with Sudoku. So if you play Sudoku while driving (and it is still legal, remember) then talking while driving should be fine too. But I certainly don’t play Sudoku while out to dinner with friends, and I wish J wouldn’t either. Also our same friends decided that while C’s husband’s “other girlfriend is his boat”, J’s “other girlfriend” is a “regularly changing set of small electronic devices” so I think it’s a good sign that he needs to keep his cellphone in his pocket where it belongs…but that’s a whole other matter.
3. California has had gubernatorial press conferences, ads, and public statements galore regarding this new rule, to make sure people understood what was coming. But Washington apparently implemented the same law today as well, and I haven’t heard a peep about it anywhere. Are we not worthy of a couple quick commercial announcements, or have I been living under a rock and just not noticed?

So for those in California, and those in Washington state, I bid you good driving, with your cellphone firmly ensconced pretty much anywhere but next to your ear. Enjoy.

Emerald or Jade or Maybe Even Olive

I am green with envy. Perhaps even chartreuse. And I deserve to have my NPR-groupie credentials taken away from me. All because Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me was filmed right here in Seattle this week, and I didn’t go. Oh, I tried to go, in a wishy-washy way. I think back in September some time I realized they were going to be here and found out tickets were already sold out and never thought about it again. But my friends A, R, and M were not so dismissive. They had foresight. And they also checked the website in August and bought tickets. Last night on our way to see Joshua Roman’s last concert with the Seattle Symphony (we’re also Joshua Roman groupies – such nerds) the three of them told me all about it. I believe M is writing about it in his blog so I’ll post to that as soon as I see it, but the short version: it was really cool. Karl Kassel had a bodyguard. He also apparently manages to do all his impressions without moving anything below the neck – a true radio professional. Apparently there was quite a bit of lewd humor, which the three of them assume will be cut out of the real show. And the show must have been good, because this morning while J was “running errands” he ended up spending most of the time in his car listening to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me instead. So the moral of the story is – if you hear that Wait, Wait is coming to a town near you, don’t delay. Green is not a color that goes well with most outfits.

*Update: M's blog post can be found here. He says he or A may write more about it since he just covered a couple specific bits, but at least you can get a bit more detail.

Milk Madness

In more catch-up blogging, Sasha Khokha did a report on Marketplace a couple weeks ago about raw (unpasteurized) milk. He discussed a growing trend for people to spend $12 a gallon buying raw milk for its supposed health benefits, and quoted a mother who'd been giving her daughter raw milk since infancy saying, "I knew if breast milk is all natural, there has to be another all natural way to feed your baby." Obviously if it's "natural" it must be okay (see previous rant about "natural" radiation).

Statements like this are so disappointing - it's clear that well-educated people are being deceived by so-called “experts” who prey on their skepticism or disappointment with real science and medicine. Somehow they don’t start thinking that there was a reason Louis Pasteur invented the process named after him - people were getting sick from bacteria in their milk. Why on earth would drinking raw milk be healthier? This is the same false logic that people use when they get conned by vitamin salesmen or “doctors” selling a treatment with no scientific backing.

I feel a bit hypocritical in that I've always thought the fact that we don't allow unpasteurized cheese in most states is silly, but then (a) I am a bit cheese-obsessed and (b) I’m sure you can get different flavors from unpasteurized cheeses, but I certainly don't think they're healthier. And now that I’ve heard this story, I might have to reconsider my stance. As proven by the pasteurized La Tur I had this weekend during my visit to Berkeley, you don’t need to raw milk to get some exquisite flavors.

Sci-Fi Story in our Midst

Pickings have been slim on NPR recently – few things have stood out enough to make me want to take a break from all the hecticness (to coin a word) and catch-up sleep I've been indulging in recently. But I did want to catch up on a couple stories that made it through the noise.

I’ll start today with a story on Weekday a few weeks ago. I came into it part-way through, as I was heading to work from the gym in the morning, and assumed that Steve Scher was interviewing a sci-fi author. They were discussing these clearly fictional communities where the local newspaper only prints happy news (which reminds me of this site) and children need visas to visit because only older people are allowed. But then I realized something horrifying – this wasn’t actually fiction. Apparently these communities are real, and springing up all over the US. They’re geared towards retired people who want easily accessible social activities and clean, well-maintained neighborhoods, which is fair enough. What’s creepy is that they want this with no children around. Andrew Blechman, who was the guest on the show, suggested that in addition to the obvious reasons for not wanting children (lower noise, crime, etc) there are more devious ones – you avoid having to fund school districts with your taxes, and you’re less likely to have minority families because they tend to live in multi-generational households, which wouldn’t be allowed. I think many would agree that this society does not generally treat our elders with the respect they deserve, but is this really the answer?