The dangers of tv knitting

All in all, not bad for something I started after work on Tuesday

For the past few weeks, I’ve been watching Eureka as I knit. I tend to watch comedies (or really mindless dramas) when I’m knitting, because they require less attention on my part. I started a new hat today, and I’m feeling a wee bit victorious, since it’s stranded knitting, a style that I haven’t done before. I was finding it surprisingly easy, and really enjoying how fast this hat was going. I said was, because I ran out of Eureka episodes to watch, and switched to Damages. I spent the first half of the first episode watching intently and knitting on autopilot, and now have been unraveling my work for the next hour. Note to self: serious drama and Fair Isle knitting do not mix.

I read the season arcs/spoilers on the wiki, because I suspected that this show was too mean for me. I’m pretty sure it is. Ever character on that show is vile, and I don’t care enough about them to overlook it. I did see that the 5 most recent episodes of Eureka are available on Hulu, so I will catch up and then watch the remaining episodes there.

America: “It’s easier to deal in guns than in wine.”

My new favorite wine.

As somebody who just shipped a boatload of alcohol from California, the proposed legislation talked about in this article makes me very sad.

World’s most expensive parking lots

Do you know what happens when a city or state isn’t finished paying for its current sports arena, but decides to build a new one anyway? If you guessed, the people keep paying for it anyway, you’re absolutely right. Of course, my home state of New Jersey would have to be on the hook for the biggest bill at $110 million, but there are several other areas that are still paying big bucks for stadiums that are either gone or just languishing. Good job, politicians!

Human element, my foot

I’m really sick of hearing the words “human element” used to excuse really crappy calls in baseball, and I’m sure that now Armando Galarraga is, too. Poor guy.

You were born in Puerto Rico. Your existence is invalid.

“Y is a fact, [so] your x is invalid,” is only funny when y = something silly and x = your argument. Then we’re talking about the meme most likely to crack me up. Infinitely less hilarious is when y = you were born in Puerto Rico and x = your birth certificate. Then we’re talking about millions of people being utterly screwed.

The problem is that Puerto Rican birth certificates are somehow extra ripe for being spoofed, forged, and otherwise used for nefarious purposes. The US State Department and Department of Homeland Security estimate that around 40% of forged US passports were obtained using birth certificates from Puerto Rico. That’s obviously a very serious and scary thing. The government’s solution, though, seems particularly ham-fisted: they’re simply going to invalidate any Puerto Rican birth certificate issued before July 1, 2010.

From my reading of the article, it seems that a large part of the problem is the way that birth certificates are passed along to and for in Puerto Rican society. From the end of the article:

Only 45,622 children were born in Puerto Rico in 2008, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. But more than 860,000 certified copies of birth certificates were issued by the Puerto Rican Office of Vital Statistics the same year, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

That is an insane discrepancy between people born and birth certificate copies issued. Over the course of a lifetime, so many people in Puerto Rico request extra copies of their own and their children’s birth certificates, and really have no idea where the extras are now. Of course unscrupulous people are using Puerto Rican birth certificates; well-meaning citizens have made things easy for them by having so many extra copies of real birth certificates floating around. If that doesn’t change, will the goverment’s new measures make any difference in the long run?

Let it go, you lost

Dear Bob McDonnell,

If you would stop bending over backwards to commemorate a violent, racist legacy that has been tirelessly whitewashed (yeah, I said it) and romanticized, you wouldn’t have to apologize for omitting any related mention of slavery.

You’re welcome.

**

I googled Confederacy links to include in this post, but many of them made me want to vomit, weep, or perhaps vomit while weeping, so I’ll just skip those today.

The post office suxxx!

So I went to the post office yesterday to mail out the blanket and booties I had knit for my friend’s baby boy. Little Archer made his appearance today, but since the package was already in the mail, I’m going to consider myself on time with this one. Happy birthday, Archer! It’s going to be interesting to have a St. Patrick’s Day birthday. That kid’s 21st is going to be epic.

I put the items in a handy box, but didn’t seal it, because I couldn’t find my packing tape. I figured that I could just use the tape at the post office. I addressed a label to Joanna, but didn’t include her zip code, because I didn’t have it. I wasn’t worried, since I’ve always gotten them from the post office in the past.

I made it to the post office and spent a couple of minutes using the free tape to eliminate any possibility that the package would open in transit. I took it to the counter and asked the gentleman for the zip code I needed. He told me that they no longer did that, and I’d have to get it on my own. He wrote down a freaking 800 number, as if I would devote that much effort to it. I just looked it up on my phone in about the time it would have taken to dial the number.

So I went back up to the counter with my newly zip-coded package. He looked at it and told me that they couldn’t accept packages sealed with Scotch tape. So why do they provide it???? He suggested that I use the Priority tape, which was on another table. I went to the other table and covered every bit of Scotch tape with the Priority tape.

Once I was finished, I took it to the counter for a third time. Thankfully, there were no more holdups. The guy scanned the package and then told me that I owed $5 for the postage. $5??? For a package to South Jersey?? At first I was confused as to why it cost so much; the contents are small pieces of fabric and couldn’t possibly cost that much to send 100 miles away. And then I realized that with the Priority tape came the Priority price. Devious! I guess that’s why the post office has done away with the plain packing tape they used to carry.

Now that I know the post office is an agent of evil, I will adjust my dealings with it accordingly.

Not cool

As loath as I am to agree with the New York Post on anything at all, I have to say that they got this story right. Why is Mayor Bloomberg’s technology commissioner claiming to live in Florida full time? And to save $3,000 a year in taxes? That’s insane. She makes over $200,000 a year by herself, and I’m sure her husband has income, too. There’s no excuse to be so cheap. Of course, today her husband informed the good people of Florida that she is not, in fact, a full-time resident, and hasn’t been since 2001. It’s not as though this was a case of oversight; they actively claimed that she still lived year round in Florida; she had a Florida driver’s license; and she voted in Florida elections. Seriously???

Was it worth the talk of fraud and loss of reputation? I will never understand politicians.

It made sense to me

Proving that the law  1) doesn’t have a sense of humor and 2) isn’t always about fairness, a judge who made what I thought was a pretty brilliant ruling was censured yesterday. Los Angeles County Judge Brett Klein ruled that the plaintiffs’ lawyer in a class action case, a man who stood to make $125,000 while the members of the class each received a $10 gift card good only at one store, should also be paid in $10 gift cards. That would have given him 12,500 gift cards for women’s clothing store Windsor Fashions, who also happened to be the defendants in this case. The judge thought that if it was legal and fair for the plaintiffs to have to use gift cards to the defendants’ store in order to receive anything, the same rule should apply to their lawyer. I can see where he was going with this, but apparently the state of California disagreed, and Judge Klein, who’d retired before this decision was made, was found to have shown “a failure to be patient, dignified, and courteous to those appearing before him.”

Bollocks. I think his original ruling was a good one, and that the courts should think about it: if it’s not fair for an attorney to be paid in a way that makes him spend gift cards in order to reap a benefit, then plaintiffs in similar class action cases should not be paid in this way, either. It seems wrong to rule that a company has done something wrong, and then reward it with money received from the plaintiffs’ gift cards. How are you going to teach companies that bad behavior will not be tolerated, when it actually ends up being rewarded?

Ouch

I thought my high school volleyball coach was a jerk (and he was), but at least he never hit any of us in the head with a volleyball.