Thursday, June 30, 2005
Summer Squash
I’d forgotten how good it is!
Better still, one out of one Sadies agree; it’s almost as good as broccoli. Sadly, it’s not something Deb eats, so more for me and Sadie.
Supper was chicken Rice-a-Roni, broccoli, summer squash, frozen mixed vegetables, and salad. No salad for Sadie, of course, except some of the cheese from ours, which she went crazy over after it had been covered in the bleu cheese dressing. She got to have some more of the barbecue shredded beef I made night before last. It’s one of her favoritest things ever.
Mmmmm… summer squash.
So how about you? What veggies do you like? Or especially dislike? Talk to me Goose. Blog talk for a quiet, pre-holiday Thursday night…
Cool Expression Engine Trick
Expression Engine allows you to make as many different templates as you want, to be embedded on the page as a shortcut. We use them for the various blogrolls, one each.
Manually adding the links to the existing templates would mean updating in six places. Six!
By using a template for each blogroll, every change need only be done once to appear in each of the six places. We’re much better about doing updates since generating the blogroll templates.
So recently I have been posting tons about the Kelo case; meatier stuff than I’ve tended to write lately. In order to give it all more exposure and tie it all together, I started adding something like what I have seen at other blogs; a list of related links at the bottom of each post. Then I retrofitted it to each of the posts, so each of them would link the others. Yikes! That’s a lot of work, however good it may be for turning site hits into extra page views.
I was thinking… how does this work on other sites? Some have it built in, apparently. Well, if it can be automated, or semi-automated, could I at least make it easier? Would the template features of Expression Engine work?
Yes!
All I had to do was create a new template, put my accumulated links in there, and at the end of each Kelo post use and “embed” tag referencing the template. Each time there’s a new post I want to cross-link between Kelo posts, I can add it. This doesn’t address the fact that eventually it’d get out of hand, but I could easily start a new version of the template for newer material, or rotate older links out of it.
It’s a cool trick, in any event, and extremely easy.
Reason and Revelation
Scof has an interesting take on the Supreme Court’s Ten Commandments decision, on which he would appreciate comments.
Update:
The post link doesn’t seem to work properly with Firefox, but is fine with IE, which is a new one. It’s currently the top post, so easy enough to get it via the main page.
Sama on Kelo, Disney, and Boston’s West End Tragedy
Rob Sama has one of the best Kelo reaction posts I have seen: Remember The West End.
For some reason I was unaware or forgot the whole West End debacle. It’s Scollay Square and the Government Center disaster that always got the press and was talked about in my family. Yet another example of unconstitutional yet court-approved takings. Or to put it another way, blight my ass. It doesn’t matter whether your name is Moses, Rappaport, or Pfizer; the Constitution means what it says and no number of black-robed oligarchs dancing with words can change that.
I am aware of the manner in which Disney approached property acquisition for Disney World, doing it the right way, the way it should be. Trying to avoid the holdouts is always a problem, but it still comes down to the market and whether your value of the property for the intended use matches the current owner’s value perception. And these things are perceptions, not objective facts one can pull out of the ether and grandly pronounce. I’m going to quote some of the meat of Rob’s post:
The issue in Kelo is not whether or not developers could have undertaken such a large-scale project in New London, but whether or not they could afford to do it at market prices. Evidently, they either couldn’t or felt that it would be cheaper to use government fiat instead. But the idea that the development couldn’t otherwise happen is rubbish. If you want proof, I can point you to a San Francisco sized theme park in central Florida.
Consider also, the fact that in an eminent domain taking, the opportunity for competitive bidding is eliminated from the assessment consideration. Imagine for a moment that the developers in New London decided to go the Disney route instead of the eminent domain route. They could have bought up land over time, and developed it as they saw fit when they had acquired enough. But perhaps that timeline is too long for these developers, so instead they make a public offer to all the residents of the area for their homes. They announce that they’ll pay an X% premium over the current market value, contingent on everyone selling, and perhaps with a deadline on the offer. That would enable the residents to band together, and to collectively bargain with the developers. They could solicit competing bids from alternate developers with different visions of what should be built there. And in the end, they would have the opportunity to determine a real market value for the land.
It is impossible, however, for a government to determine what that real value would be without letting market forces do their thing. That’s why this is a real violation of the eminent domain clause of the constitution. Because when transferring private property from one private owner to another private owner, it is impossible to determine what the real market value of the land would be. And therefore, determining just compensation becomes impossible.
That’s what it’s all about: what is just compensation?
When the usage is public and will remove the property from the market for the forseeable future, as in the case of roads, the market value of the property will become null, and there’s justification to using available market data (similar properties in the area, etc.) to determine a value to pay the final private owner, add a modest premium, and call it a deal. When the usage is private, paying the current owner less than the highest paying prospective next owner would be willing to pay is indeed government sponsored theft.
I like the creative option Rob suggested of making a conditional tender offer to a group of property owners. That makes sense, keeping politics out and thwarting extreme holdouts.
Returning to Boston’s West End, Rob linked to this series of pictures, of which the below two show starkly the sheer scale of the theft of the West End property:
Before
After demolition
“Blighted” is not a valid reason to take property for another private, or even a gratuitous public, purpose. One man’s blighted is another man’s castle, which is the topic of another post I have been planning. What we’ve had has been bad. Kelo just made it worse and more open. Yet the awareness it’s generated might have set us on the way to reducing the abuse of eminent domain. We can hope.
Kelo-related posts:
Will The Supremes And Bad Lawyering Perpetrate A Constitutional Travesty?
United States Constitution, 1788 - 2005: Promise Unkept
Bad Precedent
Additional Kelo Fallout Thoughts
Will the Money Be Followed?
Kelo and Raich: The Root of the Supreme Court Problem?
Olek V. New London Case
Kelo and "Fair" Value
Boycotting Can Be Hard
Becker and Posner on Kelo and Eminent Domain
Kelo, IOLTA and Drugs - Oh My
Sama on Kelo, Disney, and Boston's West End Tragedy
Was Kelo The Lost Battle That Won The War?
You Thought The Kelo Outcome Couldn't Be Worse?
Update:
Added to today’s Beltway Traffic Jam
Recipes: Rhubarb Pie and Crust
I love rhubarb pie, and rhubarb sauce for that matter. We always had rhubarb growing in our yard, and at my grandmother’s. Of course, that means I see rhubarb in the store and can’t imagine actually paying for it. Heh. Actually, I think the same thing happens with strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries because I grew up picking them from the source. The retail prices they achieve astonish me.
Anyway, since I haven’t written up a recipe of my own, I thought I would post more from my stepmother’s collection. Specifically, her mother’s rhubarb pie, and where there’s pie, there’s crust. In this case, her sister’s recipe for pie crust. I haven’t tried either of these, but it’s good to know I have the recipes and could, and I trust the source.
Rose’s Double Crust Rhubarb Pie
1 ½ cups sugar
¼ cup of flour
¾ teaspoon nutmeg
3 eggs slightly beaten
5 cups rhubarb
2 tablespoons butter
Mix sugar, flour and nutmeg well. Add eggs beat until smooth. Add rhubarb, mix and pour into pie crust lined pie pan. Dot with butter. Bake in hot oven 400 degrees for 50 to 60 minutes.
Beverly’s Pie Crust
3 cups flour
1 cup shortening
¾ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon white vinegar
1 egg beaten with water to equal ¾ cup of liquid
Mix flour and salt cut in shortening. Combine beaten egg with water as above and mix in vinegar. Add to dry ingredients and mix.
Makes 3 pie crusts.
150,000 Hits
Visitor number 150,000 was referrer “unknown,” meaning probably someone who has us bookmarked. They are on Comcast, using Windows XP and IE6, time zone unknown.
Well, how exciting.
Your Daily Sadie
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Cooking Under Fire *SPOILERS*
We usually watch Cooking Under Fire on Thursday night, but the timing and TV reception worked out, so we saw it tonight right after we all got home from the office. If you don’t want to know what happens until after you’ve seen it tomorrow night, stop reading and avert your gaze.
We’re increasingly convinced that Katie will win and deserves to. She seemed obnoxious at first, but has bloomed and become more personable, while also standing out as especially capable, versatile, and teachable. I still have a soft spot for Autumn, and she certainly stands a chance, but she doesn’t stand out the way Katie does.
So it was that Katie being one of the two weakest ones this week was nerve wracking. In the end, the judges made the right decision. They took the best food and a bold violation of the rules over lousy food and really a weaker-willed contestant in Matt. I’m sure he didn’t help himself last week, when he was blown away as supervising chef versus Katie. Katsuji’s dishes looked and sounded especially good this week, with only Katie’s really sounding better. I know nothing about bamboo steamers, except that such a thing exists. I could kind of see what Matt was trying to accomplish, presentation-wise, by serving his crisped fish in them. Presumably he should have known better.
The scenes from next week looks more like Hell’s Kitchen than Cooking Under Fire has to date. Apparently they will actually be on a line in a New York restaurant, making food for customers. Ouch.
If you’ve not been watching this, you’ve been missing out.
Overpriced Housing and Hollywood Woe
Chan invites discussion on why the movie industry seems to be in trouble with respect to theater attendance, but doing well with respect to DVD consumption. “Nobody has any money to take their families to the movies because it’s all tied up in paying for their overvalued homes” is the possibility that amused and intrigued me.
I’d never explicitly thought about it before, but why wouldn’t mortgages and rents that are, say, double what one might rationally expect or be able to afford have an impact on discretionary spending? It might not be huge, but hey, something to think about.
Go over, read the whole thing and chime in.
You Know What Today Is, Right?
Count ‘em… Nine months. As I told Sadie last night, she is now “three-quarters” in age.
It amazes me how old she is at this age. She’s not abnormal so much as I just didn’t know. And she changes daily.
We’re still waiting for her to walk. She does all but walk and it almost feels like she’s toying with us.
A week from Friday, on the 8th, we’ll get an official height (we think she’s 27") and weight (we have no idea, but it’s all muscle) when she has her nine month checkup.
Blast From The Past
I happened to stumble upon this old post, which was my “question of the week” on baby names. Since it’s mine, I will quote in full, copyright be damned:
Question of the Week: Baby Names
This question was not inspired by Kim Crawford, whose related post I just saw. It was inspired by this post and my comment to it over at Acidman’s.
Those of you who don’t have any kids yet, do you already have any names picked out? If you never had kids after all, or now don’t expect to, do you find it disappointing not to be able to use the name(s)?
Those of you who do have kids, did you have names in mind as much as years beforehand? Is that what you ended up using, or something else?
Was there any particular inspiration for the name(s)?
Feel free to give us details! What names you like or dislike, why, what you used or planned to use, what you actually did use. I bet some of you came into a marriage with baby names already in mind, only to have to haggle with the spouse who also had names in mind.
The first comment on that post? Deb of course:
Hmmm...I don’t expect to ever have children. If I had a daughter, though, I’d want to name her Sadie, which is the name I *almost* got, after a relative of mine who was a wild woman before wild women were cool. I wouldn’t exactly say I’m disappointed that I’ll probably never get the chance, but that’s a whole ‘nother comment, as they say.
Heh. Little did she know…
So how about now? Any new or additional responses to this? The commenters included Ian, Candy, Kate, Ith, Jennifer, Rob, Ken, and Dave.
More boring pregnant stuff.
I was going to look for one of those “your pregnancy at six weeks” update dealies to post yesterday and didn’t get that far. Luckily, Margi’s got my back.
I Just Noticed…
That we are at 149, 653 hits as I start typing this. That means if we get especially good traffic today, we will hit 150,000 before midnight. More likely it will be tomorrow morning, probably in the wee hours overnight.
Either way, very cool.
What, you thought there would be a prize for the 150,000 visitor or something? That’s just sooo 2004.
V For Vendetta
Via Ian Hamet, by way of AICN, the new poster for one of my most looked forward to movies ever: V for Vendetta. I find it amazing that it’s even being made.
I bought the set of Alan Moore comics when it came out back in the eighties. Having learned my lesson after letting several people read my first printing of Dark Knight Returns, damaging it and seriously reducing its value, I bought a second copy of “V” for loaning aggressively. Which didn’t end up happening much, because who cared about a long standalone set of comics featuring characters and settings nobody ever heard of. I did, despite the book’s inspiration being fear of Thatcher, Reagan, and conservatism. I thought that was just silly, but fighting totalitarianism is always a worthy theme.
I think Natalie Portman makes a good Evey. I am not sure what I think about Hugo Weaving as V. On some level my reaction is “yeah, that works.” On another level I am thinking “but I never stopped seeing him as anything but Agent Smith when he played Elrond.” Perhaps it will have been long enough for my mental typecasting to have faded.
I agree with Ian on the poster. Sweet! It’s completely in keeping with the comic source.
This fat, we are built for it.
You know, it’s a sign of how mind-bogglingly successful we are as a society that we spend all of our time lately bickering over having too much to eat. I mean, what a problem to have, right? And let me tell you, I’ll take a stroke at 70 because I’m fat over dying of malnutrition when I’m 6 any freaking day. Perspective, you know?
Anyway, here’s another round of it: yet another study suggests that losing weight may not be always and forever the best thing to do.
I’m not fat, I’m well adapted. Pffffft.
Link via JunkScience.com, which is one of my very favorite places.
Happy Birthday
To “spelling-impaired” blogger Xrlq.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Your Daily Sadie
Rest In Peace Edloe, A Very Special Cat
Edloe is Deb’s wallpaper, and she’s very attached to Laurence‘s cats. Thus even though I am teary too, I’m doing the honors. Well, that and Sadie woke up crying and wanted Deb after I rescued her from that horrible crib.
It’s a sad day. The news is here, but the main page is currently a memorial. Bring the tissues, folks.
Poor Edloe, coming off the triumph of a superb job hosting Carnival of the Vanities. Earlier reports and updates, in order, were here, here, and here.
Rest in peace, Edloe. We’ll miss you.
For all of those who think we’re idiots to move right now, I offer this:
I just looked out my kitchen window, because I saw Creepy Guy (formerly known as Tinpot Redneck) pull up in his truck and I could hear him creeping around in the yard and I was a bit curious about what he needed to be over here at quarter after nine on a Tuesday night for, and discovered Creepy Guy staring right in the window at me.
*shivers*
I. Cannot. Move. Fast. Enough.
Anybody who has a problem with that can kiss my fat white ass.
Seriously.
There is absolutely no scenario in which it makes sense for the maintenence guy to be staring in my kitchen window. No scenario. Completely un-fucking-acceptable.
Period.
Ah, six weeks.
So the nausea finally really kicked in.
Yeah.
I still feel better than I did with Sadie, though, so far.
Hmm.
Yeah, it makes me boring, too.
Maybe something interesting later. I certainly hope so. Sheesh. Even I think I’m sort of impossible today. Heh.
Kelo, IOLTA and Drugs - Oh My
I’ve been sitting on these links for a couple days, waiting to get around to composing a post and making connections between disparate government policies encroaching on property. The people who say Kelo V. New London is just another brick in the wall are right, as far as it goes, but wrong in the “why be excited?” department. There’s always a last straw. There’s always the step that takes you over the cliff, where the previous steps merely walked you to the cliff’s edge. Sometimes the first step is the cliff. Sometimes the first straw is the backbreaker. Not always though. Perhaps not even frequently.
What we have here is a variant on what one of Jeff Goldstein’s commenters, George Gaskell, brilliantly wrote:
First they took our right to secede from the Union, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Southerner;
Then they came to take our money and instead issue only paper, and I did not speak out--
because I did not have very much gold;
Then they came for a tax on our incomes, and I did not speak out--
because I was not wealthy;
Then they came to socialize my retirement and health care, and I did not speak out--
because I was going to be old one day;
Then they came for my property--
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
You could rewrite that with steps specific to the last part: property.
Are you familiar with IOLTA? I work for lawyers, so I knew there were checking accounts called IOLTA accounts. I’ve long wondered what the acronym stood for, finally remembering to Google it last week.
It stands for “interest on lawyer trust accounts.” Not the sort of thing I was expecting. All I knew was that one of their purposes was to handle real estate transactions, and that they absolutely had to balance impeccably or something was wrong in an “I could be in big trouble for this” sort of way.
There’s more to it than that. CATO has some history, and this article by Skip Oliva has more, particularly regarding a Supreme Court decision in a case called Phillips v. Washington Legal Foundation.
IOLTA accounts were created as a scheme to generate interest on transient client funds handled by lawyers, funneling the money to organizations run by state bar associations. Technically the interest belongs to the clients. The combination of the interest not existing until the advent of IOLTA, and presumably never had it not been created, and the fact it goes to the “good cause” of legal services for the poor means the government-sponsored theft was upheld.
Is there something worse than eminent domain, even used for unconstitutional purposes or without adequate compensation? Indeed there is, and it’s all in the name of the drug war for our own good. No more cash for you. If you carry an amount of cash the authorities deem too much, they can simply take it. They don’t even have to find drugs or charge you. If you have a lot of cash, it must be from drugs. This is outrageous on the face of it, without even looking to the Constitution for guidance.
Perhaps in the post-Kelo world, people who are outraged by one type of property rights destruction will pay attention to all of them. Think “fundamental interconnectedness of all things” people. Just because your pet violation of property is for a good cause doesn’t make it right while another is wrong. They all amount to the same thing: Evil. Anti-human, anti-life evil.
Kelo opens the floodgates of private projects that can’t bear the market, so enlist political help instead. A form of welfare, if you will. Freeport, for one, barely let the whiteout on the Fifth amendment dry before employing its license to steal.
It’s all related. It’s all wrong. Never forget that.
Kelo-related posts:
Will The Supremes And Bad Lawyering Perpetrate A Constitutional Travesty?
United States Constitution, 1788 - 2005: Promise Unkept
Bad Precedent
Additional Kelo Fallout Thoughts
Will the Money Be Followed?
Kelo and Raich: The Root of the Supreme Court Problem?
Olek V. New London Case
Kelo and "Fair" Value
Boycotting Can Be Hard
Becker and Posner on Kelo and Eminent Domain
Kelo, IOLTA and Drugs - Oh My
Sama on Kelo, Disney, and Boston's West End Tragedy
Was Kelo The Lost Battle That Won The War?
You Thought The Kelo Outcome Couldn't Be Worse?
When Veggies Attack
How’s this for healthy? Supper last nice was herb Rice-a-Roni, freedom style green beans, corn, and broccoli. No meat.
This after coming home from the supermarket with seven vegetables and five fruits.
Sadie loves this stuff. Our biggest challenge is actually feeding her enough fat. Good thing she likes cheese and sour cream so much. Heck, she even likes rather strong pepperoni, never mind every other meat product she’s given. It’s just that it’s fruit, veggies, bread and crackers she gets the most of, and often as not the bread is wheat or multigrain.
Speaking of fruits, we got a couple of golden kiwi to try, rather than the regular kind. Never heard of them before. They also had star fruit, which is unique looking, but I know nothing about. Is it any good? What’s it like? How is it served?
I pointed out to Deb that having kids means that at some point we will be required to buy a whole pineapple, even if it’s nothing we’d normally do, and a coconut. There’s nothing memorable about apples and pears, but it’s fun to have an exotic fruit in the house when you’re a kid.
Happy Birthday
To my sister, Lynn, who remains four years older than me. I learned from her, or her kids anyway, that I didn’t want sons exclusively, and that three is better than two by at least the degree that two is better than one.
Actually, to digress a bit, from my own childhood and watching others, I’ve learned it’s better for kids to be closer together rather than farther apart. That on top of the dynamics of how many there are, which is affected by relative ages.
King Kong
I had absolutely no interest in this movie, Peter Jackson or not.
Until I saw the trailer. Now I am more than a little intrigued, even eager.
Grand Rounds Is Up
The latest Grand Rounds is up at Health Business Blog. It’s a roundup of weekly medical-related blogging, including this strange case of a 16-year old boy carrying his partially developed twin brother in his body.
Monday, June 27, 2005
Your Daily Sadie
HK! *Spoiler Alert*
Anybody watch Hell’s Kitchen tonight? I’m not sure whether I want to punch Michael or hail him as a genius. I was totally unsurprised by Chef Ramsay’s decision. Chis thinks he’s way more brilliant than he actually is. Michael had better watch himself, though, because if he thinks his game-playing is going unnoticed, he’s wrong.
You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Elsie wins this thing just because she seems to be the only level-headed one in the group. Jessica sees things in terms of friends or not, Michael is a schemer, Jimmy’s a mess, Andrew’s going to blow a fuse sooner or later, and Ralph is, well...Ralph. He’s not as on-the-ball as he thinks he is, either.
You notice how many of these guys smoke? Has to be a personality-type thing. (Which is why I think that businesses who won’t hire smokers are shorting themselves by the sort of type-A people you need a few of, but I digress.) Seems to be a correlation between the love of a high-pressure environment and the tendency to use tobacco. Not that I somewhat recognize myself in that description or anything. Heh.
Cutest thing ever.
Except that it’ll get old quickly, but oh well.
So Sadie is in the process of learning what “no” means, and Jay is currently leading that charge, because when I tell her no the little shit giggles at me. Giggles! It’s more difficult than I thought it would be to teach her that it isn’t a game, it’s a command. She’s in an odd in-between phase where she thinks that being told no and stopped from doing what she’s doing is my way of asking her to do it again as soon as I set her down. Heh.
Anyway, for some reason, the other night she decided to take Jay seriously when he told her no. And she crumpled her little face up and broke into tears.
I think he broke her heart.
Poor kid. This getting older stuff is rough.
Cruisin’ for a bruisin’
Is it just me or is Tom Cruise looking a little unhealthy these days? He’s got that look like he needs to take up eating again.
Hmmmm. Maybe he ought to take some vitamins. 
Running for President, or Just on Crack: You Decide
I saw this almost a week ago, and just now got a chance to post it:
Massachusetts residents who choose not to obtain health insurance would face tax penalties and even the garnishing of their wages under a proposal Governor Mitt Romney unveiled yesterday.
If you incur medical costs you can’t pay because you’re uninsured, Romney has a deal for you:
Currently, people without health insurance often go to hospitals and receive care they never pay for, because the hospital and the state pick up the tab. Under Romney’s proposal, uninsured Massachusetts residents would be asked to enroll in a plan when they seek care.
If they refuse, the state could recoup the medical costs in several ways, Romney said yesterday: The state might cancel the personal tax exemption on their state income taxes, which is worth about $175. It could withhold some or all of their state income tax refund and deposit it in what Romney called a ‘’personal healthcare spending account.” Or, it might take money out of the person’s paycheck, as it does now to collect child support.
Why?
Although Romney began rolling out his healthcare proposals last fall, he has never before called for an individual mandate. In a telephone interview with the Globe after yesterday’s speech, he said he decided to include the requirement after concluding that his other proposals could make private insurance affordable for everyone. (Emphasis mine.)
Uh, huh. But that isn’t even the funniest bit. This is:
‘’It’s the ultimate conservative idea, which is that people have responsibility for their own care, and they don’t look to government to take of them if they can afford to take care of themselves,” Romney told reporters after his speech.
Oh, yes, it’s terribly conservative to create elaborate schemes to subsidize your madness your Presidential bid insurance so you can claim that you’ve made it affordable for everyone. And it’s terribly conservative to mandate that people buy it since you know so well what people can and can’t afford. Because, you know, Mitt’s looked at your checkbook and he knows you’re holding out on him. See?
‘’No more ‘free riding,’ if you will, where an individual says: ‘I’m not going to pay, even though I can afford it. I’m not going to get insurance, even though I can afford it. I’m instead going to just show up and make the taxpayers pay for me,’ “ Romney told reporters after a healthcare speech at the John F. Kennedy Library.
Because that happens so often. Because most people go buy a Mercedes instead of health insurance. Because everyone relishes being chased by bill collectors. Because if you’re uninsured, you’re uninsured because you just don’t think you ought to have to pay for things. Because...oh, never mind.
The sad part is, he’s what passes for a Republican around here. It’s like the worst of both worlds. Sigh.
Via Libertyblog, where they’re also unimpressed.
