And You Want to Run My Economy?

So I read an article on politico.com today saying that Hillary Clinton is not paying her campaign bills promptly. Apparently some of this is standard practice -- consultants defer getting paid in the heat of the campaign. I assume there's some sort of system where candidates raise money even after they've dropped out to make good on these bills -- or maybe the consultants are willing to take the risk of not getting paid in that case.

But it appears that Hillary's campaign has broken new ground in not paying their bills.

"She owed Iowa’s Sioux City Art Center Board of Trustees $3,500 for catering and venue costs, New Hampshire’s Winnacunnet Cooperative School District $4,400 in event costs..."

Really? Stiffing an art center and a school district? I guess since she doesn't need their votes right now, they can wait.

I know one reason Obama doesn't have the money problems Hillary has is that he has raised a lot more money than she has. And I don't want to see the election necessarily go to the candidate with the most money. But in an election where all the remaining candidates are senators, probably the best test of executive experience is a look at the management of their respective campaigns. Forget 3 AM phone calls --- I'm more worried about a candidate who won't answer the phone when her creditors call.

Never Go Against the Family

Apparently, Bill Richardson's endorsement last Friday of Barack Obama violated a sacred trust in American politics. No, not that you should endorse the candidate you feel is best for the country -- rather, you should endorse the candidate whose husband gave you two high-level appointments. Does this make Richardson a new Benedict Arnold?

No, try Judas, according to James Carville. (Wait, Which candidate is Jesus?) Even Richardson said that his ties to the Clintons almost led him to endorse Hillary.

What kind of a country are we living in where loyalty to a family is supposed to trump everything else? One governed by dynastic politics. No matter how qualified Hillary may be, the idea of handing the country over to the same 2 families for 24 years should give anybody pause. The Richardson endorsement is an excellent example of what's wrong with turning the two-party system into the two-family system. What once was a meritocracy can descend into an aristocracy.

Underwater

Christina's out of town this weekend -- she's up in Connecticut visiting a friend of hers. She sent the following picture from the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel.



I posted the picture to her travel blog. I should probably set it up so that posts to that blog go to her mailing list, too.

So I'm alone for the weekend. Well, alone with the cat and the incontinent dog. Fortunately, Christina talked me into buying a "male diaper garment" for him, so he's a little easier to deal with until we can get him fully diagnosed.

High As a Kite

 

Today we went to Lake Artemesia to try to fly kites. The wind wasn't really strong enough, and the pictures I took don't look so great. Instead, please enjoy this picture from last month of Christina flying a kite with the San Diego skyline in the background.

Presidential Trivia

This political season, I've heard speculation a few times that John McCain might serve only one term if elected, because of his age. That got me to wondering. Who was the last president to say, "Nah, four years is enough. I'm outta here."?

The answer...Rutherford B. Hayes. Every other one-termer since 1880 has said, "Nah, I think I need another four." I found that surprising, but something to keep in mind. Now, we've never had a first-termer as old as McCain, so maybe he'd be different. But 132 years is a lot of precedent.

The 10% Vote

I was watching another clip of a Republican talking about "Barack Hussein Obama" and wondering why they thought the technique of using his middle name would work. After all, it doesn't take much effort to find out, 1) he's named after his father and 2) he's a Christian.

But I was reminded of something I read several years ago. Someone asked one of the movie studios why they put quotes from reviewers you've never heard of before on movie ads. (For example, Sunday's Post had an add for "Jumper" noting that Total Film said "It's 'BOURNE' Meets 'The MATRIX.'" Total Film is "the United Kingdom's second best-selling film magazine," according to Wikipedia.) The answer (I'm paraphrasing from memory) is that their research has shown that 10% of moviegoers will pick a movie based on a quote about that film -- even if the source of that quote has no credibility. This is why Sony got caught making up quotes a few years ago.

So I realized -- the "Hussein" jibes are for that same 10% of the population. Because of the most gullible segment of our population, we will have to endure silly attempts to make Americans believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim or Saddam Hussein's cousin or whatever. Clearly, if you're a reader of this site, you're too discerning to fall for that. But maybe Obama needs to fight back. Perhaps with posters that say "We must elect President Obama -- Time Magazine*"






*(The reader comments part of their web site, that is.)

Geocaching Update: Archived

Since my last update, I've found two geocaches, one in Virginia and one in California. That gives me cause to update my state-by-state map:


On a sad note, for the first time, one of the physical geocaches I've found has been "archived." Lake Lure, which I found last August in Santa Barbara, is no longer an active cache. It was a fairly neat cache...it was on a utility pole in a park. You had to pull on some fishing wire wrapped around a pulley to bring a little capsule down from about 12 feet up. The capsule contained the log, which you signed, but nothing else. In October, someone notified the owners that "a portion of the cache is broken," so they disabled it and promised, "We will get out to fix this one soon." Last month, a reviewer noticed that it was still disabled and posted a note telling the owners to either fix it or archive it. Having heard nothing, the reviewer archived it today. It's no longer available for finding, and people are free to put a new cache in that area as a replacement. (Active caches have a 0.1 mile radius that prohibits other caches.)

Of the 42 caches I've found, 40 are still active. The other archived cache that I've found was the event cache, which, understandably, is no longer available for finding.

Let's take a look at where my geocoins are these days. As you'll recall, geocoins are specially minted coins that have tracking numbers. People are supposed to move them around and log their movements.

• Free State Mover #1. Since September, this has traveled a grand total of 40.9 miles from the West of England into Wales. It was last spotted on January 27. On February 22, someone posted a note on the cache it's in: "Did not find. Clearly, lots of work has been going on at the site - I wonder?" So this one may be MIA.
  
• Free State Mover #2. Since September, this has traveled 6173.5 miles. Of that, however, 5858.4 miles were when someone took it to Kazakhstan, and then immediately brought it back to the Czech Republic, where it continued to bounce around. A Czech cacher has been holding onto it since the 23rd. It's gotten quite a tour of the Czech Republic, but doesn't seem on its way back here.
  
• Free State Mover #3. I put this together with the idea of leaving it in Puerto Rico or Singapore, but didn't find a suitable cache. I'll probably try to drop it off in England next month.
  
• Free State Generic #1. Someone picked this up on Jan. 29 and said, "Retreived [sic] to place in another MD cache". He appears to be in Florida at the moment.
  
• Free State Generic #2. Someone picked this up on Feb. 16 and said, "WE [sic] will move it along shortly." They don't appear to have gone geocaching since Feb. 17.
  

I've had a geocoin I've been waiting to place since Jan. 24, so I can't complain about any of those, but I wish they had more exciting stories to tell.

Around Town

Sometimes it's easy to get caught up in traveling to various places around the country and around the globe and forget about nice locations just around the corner. I'm not planning to go anywhere in March...March 2005 was the last month I spent entirely at home, so this is somewhat of a change of pace for me.

Thus it's a good time as any to enjoy what Maryland has to offer. Today Christina and I walked around University Park; we explored various parts of the town park, as well as the town creek.

Things I don't expect to see on my drive to work...

I was wondering what all the police vehicles were (I apparently drove by about an hour after the accident). Fortunately, nobody had life-threatening injuries.

The Android's Dungeon Endorses...

Well, tomorrow is the Maryland primary, and I'm keeping up a certain symmetry by being out in California for the Maryland primary, just like I was in Maryland for the California primary. My next stop apparently should be California, Maryland.

I did, however, get my absentee ballot in well ahead of time. For the Democratic presidential nomination, the Android's Dungeon endorses Barack Obama. I really like Obama, so I have a number of reasons, but I should go eat breakfast and get to work, so I'll just highlight two of them.

*Dynastic politics. As much as I liked Al Gore in 2000, he was a Senator's son. As much as I was unenthusiastic about John Kerry in 2004, he was the son of a federal government employee. I believe it is important for the health of our democracy to elect people from different families...fresh blood, if you will. As qualified as 'legacy' candidates sometimes are (and sometimes aren't), I think we need to reinforce the idea that you don't have to be related to someone famous to become president. I don't relish the idea of a race between a president's wife and an admiral's son.

*Integrity. God bless Bill Clinton, but the Clintons have come to stand for the idea that, "Hey, if the Republicans will do anything to win an election, we have to be prepared to as well." Think I'm exaggerating? The New Republic, in an editorial that reminds us they're still not sure whom to endorse says,

Looking at their plight with any detachment, it is even possible to develop a measure of sympathy for the Clintons. Or it was, anyway, right up until the point at which Hillary threatened to steal the nomination.

They're referring to Hillary's, "I agree with the decision not to count Michigan and Florida...oh, wait, I won? That changes things," plan.

So I've cast my absentee ballot for Obama, and I encourage readers who are eligible to cast future votes for him to do so. It's an interesting election year; maybe we can avoid making it too interesting (although a deadlocked convention would be fascinating...).

Subscription Services

As a reminder, if you go to my home page, there's a link to subscribe to the Android's Dungeon via e-mail. Now, if you go to Christina's site, you can subscribe to her weblog by e-mail, as well.

For those of you using an RSS aggregator like Google Reader or similar, there's a feed of my site here and hers here.

Countries Visited

I was updating my Wikitravel home page, and I decided to check that the links to other pages were working. This, in turn, reminded me that it was time to update my countries visited map.



Map generated by World66.

Since my last update, I've visited Malaysia and Singapore. The mostly likely country to be added in 2008 is Turkey; we'll see.

Headed home

Had a fun night last nite @ Spamalot.

Tkts

I'm in the 1/2 price broadway tix line. There are lots of people. Many TKTS employees seem only to exist to yell at people to keep the line moving.

All Arted Out

Christina and Mondrians at MoMA
Originally uploaded by jongrantham

Yesterday I headed up to the Guggenheim. I had planned to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but in the end I felt like something more modern. As it turned out, most of the museum was closed for installing a new exhibit...that was fine with me. Admission was reduced to $8, and I still got to see a wide variety of "name" paintings from the late 19th and early 20th century. On the other hand, the paintings seemed to be the "other" paintings by great artists...nothing too inspiring. I did like one Picasso, though. The most impressive thing about the museum was probably the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building.

Afterwards, I turned on my GPS and discovered I was about a third of a mile from a geocache, which looked to be right on Fifth Avenue. As it turned out, it was a "virtual" cache right in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There was another cache another third of a mile away, so I headed into the park to catch it. If the park was semi-deserted the previous day in the cold, it was almost empty in the cold and rain.

Then I took the subway back to Midtown to meet up with Christina after her conference. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has free admission after 4pm on Fridays, so we took advantage. I thought the collection of paintings was the most inspiring I've seen on this visit, with fabulous works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Johns and Lichtenstein.

I was, however, by the end of the day, essentially done with art museums, at least for this trip. I saw a lot of great paintings, but I'm going to turn my attentions elsewhere this afternoon.

Everybody's a Critic

Christina in front of BXL cafe
Originally uploaded by jongrantham

I have been my photos to the blog via Flickr, since that seems to be the easiest way when I don't have access to my own laptop. After I posted yesterday's Central Park picture, I got this comment:
"Nice composition--love the steps; otherwise rather mundane and not too exciting colors. Keep at it, friend! :-)"

Of course, it was from someone I don't know. From my perspective, it seems odd to criticize the colors -- that's not my department, that's Mother Nature's.

After trying a variety of dining options from guidebooks that ended up disappointing, we decided last night to try a place that I had not seen in a guidebook -- rather, it had caught my eye while walking back to the hotel yesterday. It was a Belgian restaurant called "BXL cafe". It was probably the best food we've had yet this trip. Christina's spaghetti bolognese was tasty, and my mussels were excellent. There's a Belgian restaurant kind of near home (in Olney), but we don't get out there often enough.

We had to wait half an hour for the table, so we walked around, and Christina bought a hat.

Dead Laptop in NYC

Central Park
Originally uploaded by jongrantham

So, here we are in New York City. Last night I opened up my laptop to find that it wouldn't boot up. Grr. I can probably fix this with a Windows disk, which is at home. So I'm posting this from Christina's work laptop.

Today while she was at her conference, I first went to Central Park to attempt some geocaching. I did not find the cache, but I took the accompanying picture.

Then I went to the Frick Collection to look at some art. They had some nice pieces by Degas, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Whistler. I bought postcards to show Christina what I had seen. Some of you will be receiving those postcards, since at $1/each, I have to get another use out of them! :-)

License

 

A couple of months ago, I got a letter from the Maryland MVA (other states have DMVs -- we here in Maryland like to be just a little bit different) letting me know that my driver's license would be expiring in a couple of months, and -- good news, everyone -- I'd be able to renew it by mail. So I sent in my renewal, and soon got back a letter informing me that their recent database conversion went really well for most people, but oops, my picture was lost in the move. So I'd have to come in and get the license renewed in person.

I was annoyed enough by this to wait until the day my old license expired to do the renewal. I went in and was told I'd have over an hour wait. So I went out, found a geocache, exchanged some geocoins, came back, and found that I was nowhere near being called. In fact, it took another hour and half, not counting geocaching time.

My new picture's OK -- compare and contrast pictures above. I'm glad I have another 5 years to wait to do this again. As an added bonus, I have another 5 years of being able to drive without glasses, since I barely scraped by the eye exam. (Don't worry, I have driven without glasses only once in the last 12 years.)

In geocaching news, I dropped off a new geocoin (see picture). The cache I found had a bunch of coins in it. I feel bad picking up a coin without dropping one, so I prepared some coins to swap in just such a situation. I don't, however, feel bad taking two when I drop off one, so I have a couple more to move around. I gave no particular mission to the coin I dropped off, so it'll be interesting to see where it ends up. (The two that I asked to return to Maryland are currently wandering around Wales and the Czech Republic, so missions may be overrated.)

Tecate

Tecate

Thursday night, I was walking around the house and noticed a disposable camera on a shelf. Rather than walking past it as I had a number of times, I picked it up. It had expired in October 2006, but I wondered if it could still be developed. The answer...sort of. Many of the pictures were ruined due to brown splotches on them. Some of them were OK, to one extent or another. A few were from a trip we took two-and-a-half years ago to Tecate, Mexico. When we were in San Diego for the summer, we drove down to the border one day and walked across.

Tecate had the advantage that it wasn't really very touristy. We had a nice lunch, then looked around for other things to do. Then, not being touristy became a disadvantage. The brewery was closed (we may have gotten there too late), and there weren't any souvenir shops. We went into a couple of stores and bought some random stuff (I got some plastic playing cards) and then went home.

Geocaching Update: FTF

Here's a geocaching update for you. The latest map I have to show you is my US state map. I added Nevada on my mileage run and Arizona while we were visiting my parents over Christmas. Christina and I had a nice walk through the desert to find that one, although we saw a coyote on our way back!

The morning after we got back, I was enjoying my morning tea before heading out to pick up Teddy & Cheetah from the kennel when I got an e-mail alert for a new cache. It was just a quarter mile from our house. Some geocachers delight in being the "First to Find" (FTF) a cache. It doesn't seem like the most interesting part of the hobby to me, but I thought I'd try to have at least one to my name. Given the time and distance, I had no trouble. I see from the logs that someone else drove in from Virginia to try to get an FTF here. No luck for them.

You know, from that map up there, I'd assume the cacher was from California and had visited a few other Western states, along with a trip to Maryland.