|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I tend to forget, with how much gore is permitted in R-rated films these days, how much more gory they can get when they are unrated. Good grief. "Bad Catholic! Bad catholic!" scolds the Vatican, hitting Catholic politicians on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. "No human flesh for you!" If they're going to be dicks about it, excommunicate the guy and deal with the fallout. But the Pope's not going to do that. He's just going to let Arinze grandstand, because maintaining theocratic PNTR with Africa is too important to Rome these days. Africa is too big a market a market to ignore. There's talk of an African as the next pope, with Arinze (Nigerian) at the top of the list. This will yank the Catholic church viciously to the right, undoing any little reform that can be credited to the current administration. No, better to keep the membership rolls flush. Support the Nigerian church as it teaches that watching porn gives you AIDS. Nigeria is one of the most religiously screwed-up places in the world. Boys' eyes are being plucked out for use in witchcraft, and Sharia law is sentencing women to death by stoning for adultery. The climate offers a great chance for the Catholic church to be a moderating, modernizing, progressive force. But that's not going to happen. The Catholic church will respond to religious radicalism with -- surprise! -- more religious radicalism. They can disagree with abortion; that's fine, even though I disagree with it. But they're not just doing that. They are shunning American politicians for their views, while American clergymen abuse over 10,000 children. Thursday's New York Times misidentified GOP Senate candidate Pete Coors as a Ku Klux Klan member who murdered a black sharecropper. This boggles the mind. This is supposed to be funny? The official spokesman of a Republican saying that it's better to be seen as a Klan member then a Democratic senator and presidential nominee? The Love Song of J Alfred Crew. Note that the site goes on to explain the joke. Just a heads up, guys: The reason they're not laughing is not that New Yorker subscribers don't read their Eliot. It's because the joke's not funny. Two weeks ago, Weird Al's parents died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in their home. They had been burning a fire with the flue closed. Today I read a "joke" article in The Onion: Weird Al Honors Parents' Memory With 'Tears In Heaven' Parody Sometimes I'm offended by The Onion, but after a while I realize I'm being a little too uptight. But the more I think about it, the more I'm upset by this. Death of parents (Weird Al) and children (Clapton) is off limits. It's not funny. It's tasteless and repugnant. It's also offensive to suggest that Weird Al, an all around nice guy, would touch "Tears in Heaven". I won ten of the 17 games of Magic I played tonight, which is cool, but of those 17 games, three were against the new deck my friend Nathan was proudly showcasing. I won all three of those games, which is not cool. I felt like a jerk -- I always do when that happens. The first two times I played the decks I call Conduit and Mask, which are both among my top 3 best decks, but the last time was a lite Onslaught-block deck I call Flippy that happens also to be my only netdeck (I think it's even unmodified), taken from an article by Mark Gottlieb. The San Gabriel Valley in Perspective, or, Why You Shouldn't Feel Sorry for How Much the Wedding in Father of the Bride Cost Here is a comparison of median household incomes in the San Gabriel Valley, where I live:
Yes, that's almost a factor of four range, and yes, San Marino (where Steve Martin and family live in Father of the Bride) is twice its nearest competitor. All of these towns are are close enough to drive to for a movie (not that San Marino has any theaters) or a meal (San Marino has exactly twelve restaurants, each located on one of only two streets.) To help visualize the towns, El Monte and Rosemead are pretty grimy, Alhambra is beginning to see a renaissance since the rebuilding of its downtown, Monrovia is fiercely small-town America and has some turn of the (last) century homes, South Pas and Arcadia have nice, big, new homes, Sierra Madre is a nice foothills community with a charming downtown, San Marino is clannish, conservative, and opulent, and the rest are fairly basic L.A. suburbs. For comparison, Los Angeles proper (across its communities, including inner-city areas and the San Fernando Valley) has a median household income of $36,687, right near the bottom. "Toni Collette has proven she can do about anything -- but she can't do this." Ebert, with whom I sometimes disagree but whom I almost always respect, pans Connie and Carla, reassuring me that I don't have to go see this movie despite, along with 98% of Americans, having liking Vardalos's previous effort. Among his other new reviews, he gives Kill Bill: Vol. 2 a perfect four stars. No, I'm not going to link to it. You shouldn't read it. I sure didn't. It's my most anticipated movie for this year. The only reason I haven't seen it yet is that Jenn wants to see it and we haven't gotten the first one from Netflix yet. (Come on, red envelope. Come on, red envelope.) Why was I at Ebert's site to begin with? I wanted to see what he thought of Eyes Wide Shut, which I just saw. And his response surprised me: he seemed to pan it in his review, then gave it 3.5 stars. If this was mailed to him blind, with no identifying information, and if he was hypothetically dense enough not to recognize the director screaming "I'm KUBRICK!" through the whole thing with bizarre lighting and endless cart shots, I wonder how he would have scored this auteur piece. I think we give A-list, brilliant, directors a little too much credit when interpreting their works. Not that I thought it was terrible. I'm trying to be really careful not to ruin anything, so I can't really discuss the good parts in detail, but I'll stick to the stuff everyone probably already knows about the film. The orgy scene was incredibly eerie, and had the potential to be world-class if the ham-handed digital insertion of black silhouettes to earn it the R Rating hadn't been done. (And to digress for a moment, let me say that was completely unconscionable. In no way should someone under 17 see the film. The studio forcing the edit is pandering to our societal stigma of adult-labeled material. Our society, on a general level, wants to see adult material: sex, nudity, action, violence, but for some reason we're only comfortable seeing it if no one reminds us that kids shouldn't be seeing it. We're adults, they're kids. We're allowed to like things that are inappropriate for them.) The costumer should have won an Oscar. I get the Homeric bit -- the episodic nature of the story, the "variations on a theme" composition -- but that's been done to death. It didn't work for me. It's been thousands of years. Not every protagonist needs an Odyssey. But to its credit, the film did something a bit unusual for plots of this type, which was to maintain a perfectly planned plot arc via these disconnected vignettes. I'm venturing a bit close to the material. Sorry. Let me try to step back. Stepping away from the details, my main complaint with the film was the following. For all the hype of it being ground-breaking, edgy, and artsy, it was one of the most morally parochial films I've ever seen. (I won't go into more detail here, but I'll take this to email with anyone who is interested.) The juxtaposition of the filming and the philosophy is bizarre, and I think irreconcilable. Kubrick was both screenwriter and director, so it's not a case of mismatch between two people. If Kubrick really is as parochial as the plots and the too-tidy resolution indicate, then it's inappropriate to show the images he chose to show to his audience, even -- especially -- for shock value. If he really was post-traditional morality enough to believe the stuff belongs on celluloid, he should get off his puritanical high horse and admit that relationships are more complex than the pencil sketch he committed to paper and film. Not too weird to be quoted in a scotch whisky forum. Weird to be quoted in a British Mac forum, a British "silver surfers" forum for older internet users, a New Zealand religion forum, and a forum for O.J. Simpson fans. The online demo of the Analogia face recognition system determines what celebrity you look most like. It's very flattering. Good way to sell face recognition systems, I guess. I submitted two headshots: for the first, older picture, the closest matches were Val Kilmer, Pierce Brosnan, and Ben Affleck. For the second, later, creepier picture, Russel Crowe, Bruce Willis, and David Duchovny. The only person among the list that I think I look anything like is Duchovny. (I don't have the beard any more.) I somehow missed a great Onion A.V. Club interview of Eddie Vedder from November 2002. Aaargh. Lose. LOSE. LOSE. The damn word is spelled LOSE. That word that means "misplace", or "become deprived of", or "fail to win"? LOSE. L - O - S - E. I know it has an "oo" sound in it, but it's not that hard to remember the exception. Why can so few people spell this word? It's four little letters. I'm hoping to get some financial advance from my readers. Here is the situation: I am financing a 2000 A6 sedan. I really like the car. But I've just been saddled with a $2,000 repair. I've already authorized it, so that's unavoidable. This brings the total maintenance cost thus far to around $5,000 over two years. With my financing arrangement, the total amount of money I will pay for the car is around $28,000. I have approximately $17,000 left to pay off the loan. When I bought the car, it had 55,000 miles on it and was in excellent condition. The KBB value was around $30,000, so I got a pretty good deal on the car at that time. Now, two years later, I have put 55,000 more miles on it for a total of 110,000 miles. Its current KBB value, if it still had just 55,000 miles on it, would, interestingly, be $17,000, the amount I have left on my loan. My payments would have just kept the principal in line with depreciation. I would essentially have been paying $464 per month to lease the car: I have pumped $9,000 into it, but would not have seen my equity increase at all. However, since it has twice that milage, it is now worth just $13,000. This has left me in the rather odd situation of having to come up with $4,000 cash for the privilege of selling my car. To do a little math, the maintenance costs (and that includes everything, including oil changes, scheduled maintenance, and tires) work out to about $0.10 per mile. With a car that gets approximately 25 m.p.g., this means that I'm adding $2.50 per gallon of gas to the operating expense of the car. Since the car only takes 91 octane and higher, and since I live in Southern California, what I have essentially done is, thus far, double the price of gasoline, compared with the hypothetical car that requires no work whatsoever. Following this logic, my maintenance costs on the car are equal to the costs to operate the car without maintenance with gas at $5.00 per gallon, or about what they pay in Europe. So the question is, Is it worth it? The $5000 in repairs includes the pricey 100,000 mile scheduled maintenance (which might be a scam, I don't know), and with the amount of driving I am currently performing, that won't have to be performed again for another two and a half years. But as it's unlikely for the maintenance cost of an older car to be lower than when it was newer, I can pretty much expect at least this same expenditure. More, actually, because while 55,000 over the span of time I've owned the car works out to around 530 miles per week, I'm currently putting closer to 700 per week on the car. That, conveniently but dishearteningly, works out to around $200 per month: about the amount I pay for gas, as mentioned above, and almost half what I pay to service my loan. Thing is, despite owing $4,000 more on the car than its current value, depreciation has probably stabilized somewhat. To wit, in three more years, it won't have lost another $25,500, the linearly projected rate at which it has depreciated thus far. That would give it a value of -$12,500, which is absurd. Even if the car's not running, it will be worth more than that. And the only way a good car like the 2000 A6 would not be running three years from now is a catastrophic accident -- and that I'm insured for. So in three years the car will be worth, what? That's one of the questions. Projecting my future mileage over three years gives me a total of 220,000 miles. A 1997 A6 (that's the year 2000 minus three years: follow?) with 220,000 miles books at $7,280. Now figuring in inflation and the fact that the 2000 A6 is a better car to begin with, could we project a value in three years of $9,000? $10,000? Let's pick $9,000. Another wrinkle is that even though my payments will have the same absolute dollar price over the next five years, in an inflationary market the dollar is constantly losing value, so the relative cost of my car payments is going down (this is part of the effect that gives your grandmother $300 per month house payments while her neighbors pay $2,000.) I'm unsure if I've compensated for this effect fully by increasing the projected resale value of my car in three years to $9,000. Can you tell I've never taken an accounting course? Thus, my current situation is $4,000 negative equity in my car. Projecting future trends as best I can, I will pay $7,500 (that number is subject to radical change) for service and $17,000 (that number is fixed) in car payments over the next three years while the car loses another $4,000 in value. But then the car will be paid off, and I'll own something worth $9,000. So, drum roll please, the car will cost me $24,500 over the next three years, but then I'll have a positive equity of $9,000, which seems like a net expenditure of $15,500 over the next three years, or an annual operating budget of $5,000. But there are many questions in my mind. Perhaps most significantly, I've rather haphazardly included inflation in my calculations wherever the whim struck me. How do my calculations need to be refined to figure that in? Also very significantly, how valid is my projection of future repair costs? Every part in a car would seem to have a certain lifespan, so as the car gets older my intuition suggests that the repair costs will go up and up (for instance, if a part lasts 150,000 or 200,000 miles, I haven't had to replace it yet, but I will in the future, whereas if it goes out every 30,000 miles, I've already had to replace it and I will continue to have to replace it on a regular basis.) A lot of this is just experience. I don't have a lot of experience repairing cars. I've owned cars for eight years now, but I used to buy junkers for $1,200 and just drive them until they died. So, what's the model of the curve of a car's repair costs, f(x), as it ages? Intuition suggests that f(x) > x, but does f(x) = x2? ex? OK, just forget that: how much more will the cost of my car go up to maintain? Anyone? In a sense I've already answered my own question. From year 0 (when I started owning cars) until year 6 (when I got the Audi), I've owned [counts in head -- Buick that doesn't count because of the insurance payout after it got wrecked, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, Buick -- maybe the Toyota shouldn't completely count as it's still running] 4 cars. As they were each about $1,200, and lasted one and a half years apiece, and since I would buy a new car any time I was faced with a repair bill of $700 or higher -- OK, that's actually not enough information yet, but let's say I paid $800 total for maintenance for each of the cars -- that's $2,000 over a year and a half, or about $1,300 per year annual operating cost. All of that's loss, by the way, because in all but one of the cases I donated the car to a charity after I was done with it, and since I didn't (and don't) itemize my deductions all I got was a warm fuzzy feeling. But that's terribly facile: there are other, major factors that increase the worth of the Audi. Safety, for one. Reliability, because each of the junkers would leave me stranded at the side of the road far too frequently, and that's just a lot less attractive with a small child. Third, comfort. I'd lose the "cool" factor in my own estimation: Audis are my favorite cars. And I'd like to say the prestige doesn't matter to me, but it's worth a certain amount to not have valets snub you, not get as many stares and honks, and not have Thousand Oaks' completely corrupt police force pull you over because you're driving an older model car and obviously don't belong there (Yeah, they do that. They'll make up a problem, like saying your tail-light is broken when it isn't, then tell you charming things like the fact that they almost pulled their gun on you. And they'll ask you repeatedly if you have guns or drugs in the car, because they're "sure" they saw you "stash" something. Foreign readers take this to heart. American police in affluent areas really are this corrupt, it's not just media hype.) Help me fix my numbers, please, but even if I got my numbers right, I don't think the question is just whether it's worth a $3,700 per year (or about $300 per month) surcharge for the benefits I enumerated above. That I'd have to answer without your help. The questions are more "Is there a car with a lower-than-$1,200-per-year annual operating cost?" I don't know. And "Is it worth my gathering up $4,000 cash, plus ponying up at least $1,300 to fix a body problem that's Audi's own admitted fault that they refuse to compensate you for, just so I can sell my car?" That is, "Is is it worth $5,300 now for projected savings later?" You should know that, while I'm not comfortable telling everyone what our annual household income is now that Jenn's staying at home, it's lower than it was two years ago. But Jenn will go back to work before the three years is up. And my pay will go up, and if it doesn't outpace inflation, there will be more serious problems. And finally, Yes, I guess I am asking you to help me make the value judgments of whether the safety cum reliability cum prestige is worth the extra expenditure. I'd love your help. Link to comments page in the dateline. Weirdest. Thing. Since. ToHearADuckQuackPressSeven. I hate those period-delimited descriptions. Can't. Stand. Them. But nothing else will prepare you for subservientchicken.com. Don't ask questions. Don't Google for information. Just go and tell the chicken what to do. OK, since I've been asked multiple times: You may have gathered from internal syntactic clues, such as the discontinuities in image and lighting between the end of an action and the neutral state; or from internal evidence from room objects jumping around untouched; or from external reasoning such as "with multiple people visiting, he can't be reacting to every person's request in real time"; or from his inability to perform certain tasks; or from Eliza-like errors of extracting keywords from larger phrases and using them in the wrong sense ("turn into a newt" causing him to turn in place); or from the inability to precisely refine or repeat actions ("jump twice" yielding a single jump, "turn around three times" not being performed three times) -- But the answer is, no, there's not a live guy in a chicken suit following your instructions. I love electric power. I don't sing its praises frequently enough. Jenn is out of town. As I pulled up at the house at one o'clock in the morning, home from work, the porch light and entry light were both dark. I specifically remembered having turned the lights on as I left this morning. "Oh, man, please let me just be dumb enough to have specifically turned the lights on then switched them off as I left." I didn't want a power outage. I didn't want to have to fiddle with the breaker box in the dark. I didn't want robbers to have cut the house power to rob the place in the dark. Fortunately, I was just stupid. The lights were off. As a side note, I thought the dumbest thing as I came in, fearing the power to be off. "Damn," I thought, "I'll have to watch TV in the dark. If the power's off, I'll be sure to go to the computer and write a web post about how bummed I am." This is one of the long posts I've been intending to write for a couple of years, along with a planned police harassment post and a medical post. But this post, the scam post, was prompted by the introduction of Snopes' Daily Scam Report. It is really easy to get scammed in our society. Considerate, well-raised people want to help, and want not to be thought poorly of. But there are tons of people ready to take advantage of you at the slightest opportunity. Disillusionment is hard, but necessary. I think more people are scammed than we think, because after a scam people tend to be embarrassed for being made a sucker. I hope to do my part here by presenting a sampling of the scams people have pulled on me, both successfully and unsuccessfully. For the record, I'm listing the races, ages, and dress of the perpetrator, to help indicate that all sorts of people will try to scam you (and to dispel any myth that it's mostly minorities: I've been hit up far more frequently by Caucasians.) The Successful Scams The auto body work scam (2003) Setting: Strip mall parking lot, Rosemead Blvd and Foothill Blvd, Pasadena, California This one is long, and for clarity I'm adding footnotes. Check at the end of this section for the numbered list. The 2000 Audi A6 models have a design flaw which causes front bumpers to become caught on curbs and parking lot cement blocks. There is currently a class-action lawsuit trying to get Audi to recall the cars, but it hasn't happened yet. In 2003, after my front bumper had been mostly detached for about a year, I was stopped in a parking lot by a pair of Hispanic men in their late twenties or early thirties wearing respectable clothes driving a white van. The passenger said "I'm a body shop guy, and I can fix that bumper for you." "Oh, what shop?" I asked "A-1 Auto Body in Pasadena. But our uncle owns it and he lets us do work on the side." I was hesitant. He told me he could go to my workplace and do it while I worked. He could do it in a commercial parking lot if I wanted. We could go to my house and fix it there. He told me that if I didn't like how it turned out "I wouldn't owe him a dime." I told him that the dealership had quoted me a price of $1300 to fix it.1 He thought for a moment and said he could do it for $900. I told him that no, I was busy, but if he gave me his number I would call him if I changed my mind. He rattled off the number, but said that if I did it today he could do it for $700.2 He said he'd do such a good job that at the end I'd want to give him a tip. I was pondering this, and he asked me if I was a Christian.3 I told him that, no, I wasn't. "Well, I'm a Christian," he said, "and I wouldn't cheat you."I relented. We went back to my house4 and they started working on the car. They removed the bumper, and the very nice guys5 explained what they were going to do. I forgot all the steps, but it was something like they were going to fill in the torn fiberglass places with resin, then re-attach the bumper, then putty the joints, then seal the putty, then paint the putty ("I think your paint color is such-and-such," he said. "There are just a few stock colors that cars come off the line with.6 We have that car paint in our van."), then apply a coat of wax. Sounded reasonable to me. It took them a couple of hours, and then they applied a liberal coating of mostly opaque white wax. As this was going on, my mom called and mentioned that she had been in a small accident and would need some body work done. I told her about the guys and asked them if they could handle repairing the bumper on a Ford Escort. They told me that they could, for $300. My mom stopped by and they pounded out the back of her car where it had been hit, allowing the hatchback to close again. The rear bumper was ruined, but they said they worked with a guy who ran a wrecking yard. They would bring by a bumper for the Escort after I gave them the money. There were also a couple minor pieces of the Audi body that they said they could get for me. I wasn't that stupid, I thought. (Yeah, I thought.) I told them if they came by the next day I'd go with them to get the car bumper from their friend, then they could come back and finish fixing the Escort. I wouldn't pay them for that until the job was done. But they wanted payment for the Audi now. But then we remembered it was a holiday Friday. The banks were closed. I offered to write a check. They knew where I lived, so I thought it would be a safe proposition for them (they could come back if it didn't clear), but no, they wanted cash. So I told them to come back the next day, and I'd get the money. That night I started getting suspicious. I doubted that the guys would follow through with getting the parts for me. I was also suspicious about the opaque coat of wax that was covering the bumper, that they had told me to leave on "for 24 hours." The next morning I woke up and soaked a rag in soapy water and began to remove the car wax. It didn't look that bad, but the paint was obviously not the same color, and certainly not the same gloss. The guys showed up, and I got into their van to go to the body shop with them.7 As we drove away, the driver explained to me, "Joshua, if I take you to the auto shop, I'm going to lose my job." He had a somewhat flimsy-sounding excuse that I saw right through, but it was now two against one in someone else's car. They certainly had the upper hand, and I was a intimidated. I was talked into giving them a tip, "like we had talked about," even though we hadn't, it was just something he had brought up the day before. I went in and withdrew $740 from my account and $300 from my mother's account, for which she had given me her ATM card. I gave them the $740 -- that's $700 for this job, plus a "tip". We went back to the house, and he showed me where the bumper would attach on the Escort, and how easy it was. Their friend from the scrapyard would come by and could put the bumper on in about 5 minutes.8 He would come by later that day. After a bit of cajoling, I ended up parting with the $300 as well.9 After they left, I started to get the feeling of a pit in the middle of my stomach. I just knew I'd been conned. Reluctantly, sheepishly, I called the number he had given me. No such number. I called telephone information and asked for a listing for A-1 Auto Body in Pasadena. No such place. Shit. I even waited home for the rest of the day, in case the guys from the body shop came by. But of course they didn't. Follow-up: Their repaired bumper popped back off the next week. I never saw the guys again. My mom had to have work done on the Escort to fix the "repair" the guys did. And since then four more guys have approached me in parking lots offering to fix my bumper. To the last one I just sighed and said "Your the fifth fucking guy who's asked me, dude, give it a rest." The loss: $740 (me), $300 (my mom), several workday hours, and the entirety of a Saturday.
The "I'm a little short for the bus" scam (2003) Setting: Old Town Pasadena, California, an alley between shops. A simple, quick one. A guy stops me and says, "I'm a little short for the bus, could you spare a quarter?" Of course it's a scam, but oh well. I hand him a quarter. "In fact, I'm short by fifty cents, so if you have another one that would be great." Sigh. I hand him another quarter and walk off. The loss: $0.50 and a bit of self respect. The "You're approved for a credit card!" scam (1998) The setting: Thousand Oaks, California This one is common. I was in my first apartment, my senior year of college. I was desperately short on funds, as I was only working half-time. I received an enticement for a free credit card with perhaps a $39.95 sign-up fee. Did I mention that would have been my first credit card, too? I signed up and sent in a check, expecting my Visa or Mastercard. Instead, I get an "in-house" credit card from a catalogue-based seller hawking its own overpriced items by mail-order. I call customer service, livid. They send me a refund check. The loss: $0, thankfully, but it could have been $39.95. At least they were honest crooks. The "Free access, just use your credit card to verify your age" scam (1999) Setting: Global I wanted to visit an access-controlled website. "Just enter your card number, we won't charge you, it's just to verify your age." So I entered my bank check card number, and got access to the site, which sucked. And sure enough, I got charged, I believe $19.95. I called my bank and complained, and they gave a provisional credit. They sent a form to fill out for credit card fraud, which needed to be notarized. I paid $15 for a notary fee and $0.33 for a stamp, and mailed it in to recoup my $19.95, which netted me $4.62 of my own money back for an hour of my time. The loss: $15.33 plus an hour of time, valued at that time at around $22. The Unsuccessful Scams The "I'll give you my eyeglasses for collateral!" scam (1995) Setting: Santa Anita Mall, Arcadia, California This one is absolutely priceless. I was at the Santa Anita mall in Arcadia, and I was in my late teens. There was a stocky black man (This will become important in a moment. I'm white. This will also become important in a moment.) in strong Clark Kent glasses outside B. Dalton Books. He asked me if I could help him with bus fare. "Sure," I said. "OK, I need $48 to take Greyhound back to Northern California. I'll mail it back to you when I get there," he said. I balked. "I thought you meant $2.25 for local bus fare," I croaked. "I'm not going to give you $48." It was a moot point. I didn't have $48. I didn't even have an ATM card. But he launched into this very well-rehearsed sob story. The gist of it, as I remember through the haze of almost a decade, was this. He worked for a company that worked with racetracks. He had come down with his boss to the Santa Anita racetrack to help organize something, with his boss. His boss, an asshole of some garden variety, was called back home, and he left the victim to straighten things out. But he had left him stranded, and if he didn't show up on work on Monday, he'd be fired. "Now, you're probably thinking I'm a criminal because I'm black," he said (I should have socked him.) "But I'm not. I'll give you my eyeglasses as collateral!" It was at that moment I realized that his absurd eyeglasses must have been from a Salvation Army or a Share Old Spectacles program. "No, I'm sorry, but good luck," I said. "Well then, can I have the $2.25?" "No!" The follow-up: My friend told me he had been approached as well. I saw the same guy two more times in front of that same store, wearing a different pair of absurd eyeglasses each time. I guess some heartless bastard took the poor guy's eyeglasses for collateral. The third and last time I found a security guard and told them what he was doing. The tow truck scam (1997) The setting: Movie theater parking lot, Santa Monica, California This is a really common one, I'm told. A well-dressed white woman in her mid-thirties, appearing to be upper-middle-class, approached me and told me her friend's car had broken down. They didn't have AAA and they needed a tow, and she was looking for $20. "Where's the car?" "Around the corner." "Can I see it?" "It's down a ways." "I'm sorry, I don't have $20." It was a lie, but she was lying too, so fuck her. "But you just came out of a movie theater!" "Yeah, I used a credit card." Another lie. But fuck her again. "Well, could you go by an ATM?" What the fuck? If there's an ATM, why doesn't she use it? "No," I said. "I'm leaving now." The "I'm a little short for the bus" scam, redux (2003) Setting: Old Town Pasadena, California, an alley between shops. Another simple, quick one. A guy stops me and says, "I'm a little short for the bus, could you spare a quarter?" Sound familiar? Yeah, same guy, the very next weekend. "Oh, that's really unlucky, " I said. "Two weeks in a row, huh?" He broke eye contact with me and walked away. Heaven help him if he tries again. I have the perfect esprit de l'escalier planned. It will entail being a bit of an asshole, but I'm looking forward to it. The "save the whales" scam Location: Faneuil Hall, Boston, Massachusetts (1997) This was on my first pilgrimage to Concord. I was outside Faneuil Hall and was approached by a white man in his forties with a big bushy beard. He carried a clipboard, the top sheet of which had some cut-out whale pictures photocopied into a collage on it. He asked if I would sign a petition to help protect whales and other sea mammals on the coast of New England. "I'm not a registered voter in Massachusetts," I told him. He told me it didn't matter, this was a public action campaign. OK. I signed his form. Then he asked for a donation. I laughed. "I'm not going to give you money," I said. "But I thought you wanted to help the whales!" he said. "Look, I don't know you. I don't know anything about you." "What, you think I'm ripping you off?" I walked away. "Well, thanks for being an asshole!" he called after me. So I found a security guard. "There's a guy over there soliciting and using profanity," I said, and described him. They hurried over. The food scams These are maybe the saddest. People are apparently hungry. You want to help, you really do. But in the end, it's a dirty, thankless business. The Mikey scam (1996) Setting: Pasadena, California, on a hot summer day. There is a local character (for the record, he's white) named Mikey who always stands on the same street corner asking for change. He has cerebral palsy and is mentally retarded, and seems like a nice but down-on-his-luck guy. He also smokes, but that's another story. One day I was driving by and felt sorry for the guy. But I didn't want him spending the money on booze or cigarettes. So I went across the street to Burger King, where they were having a 99 cent Whopper promotion and bought him one. "Yo, Mikey," I said, driving back. "I got you a sandwich!" He grinned widely. "A Whopper?" "Yep," I said. "Great! Hey, you have any change?" Sigh. "Yes, Mikey," I said, "I've got some change." I handed him about a dollar. What's that they say? In for a penny, in for a pound? The loss: About a dollar. The "piece of cake" scam (1997) The setting: Vons parking lot, Thousand Oaks, California A poorly-dressed, hungry-looking white woman in her late fifties or early sixties approached me as I left the grocery store, looking for taxi fare to Newbury Park (the adjoining city). It was late. She looked tired. She looked hungry. She looked devoid of life. "Look," I said, "I'm not going to give you any money, but I'll buy you dinner if you want." She agreed. We went to the deli area of the supermarket and she picked out a "po' boy" sandwich. The we went to the dairy case and she picked out a pint of milk. I turned to walk her to the checkout line. "Wait," she said. "I'm going to go get a piece of cake." WHAT THE FUCK? I'm going to go get a piece of CAKE? Aargh! If you are a heartless bastard like me, or are rapidly becoming one, tattoo that motherfucker to the inside of your eyelids, then any time you're approached for money, just blink. I was pissed. "No, you most certainly are not," I said. "Now do you want the food or not?" She started pouting, but followed as I marched up to the checkout line. I took out $5 and set it on the counter as I walked by. The cashier didn't understand. I jerked my thumb back. "It's for her food." "Oh, that's really nice of you!" she said. I smiled thinly. "Yeah, thanks." I walked off. The loss: $5, and my remaining faith in humanity. The Church's Chicken dude (2004) I was taking my father to a concert in Inglewood, California. Within three quarters of a mile -- this sounds like a bad racist joke, but I swear I'm not making it up -- there were five fried chicken restaurants. One of them was Church's. I like Church's, so my father and I stopped there. On my way in I was asked by a fifty-or-so-year-old black man for change so he could "buy a piece of chicken.". I told him no. We ordered more chicken than we could eat, though, so on the way out I asked if he was hungry. "Yeah," he said. "You can have this chicken if you're hungry," I said. "OK. Hey, you got any change." "No. But if you're hungry, you can have this chicken." "OK." As we drove off, the box was sitting beside him unopened. In my father's words, "I guess he's looking for a beer to go with it." I hope he ate it. I'd have eaten it the next day myself if he didn't want it. I don't know why the "subscribe" feature is not working, but it's not. It's through a third-party service I like and use on an account basis, but the per-page subscription seems not to work. I'll try to get this fixed soon. The more serious problem is that my hard drive on the mcgees.org server is in the process of dying. Fortunately I have a backup, but the site (and all other sites I host) may be down intermittently during the next few days. For the mathematically inclined reader, we note that a Calabi-Yau manifold is a complex Kähler manifold with vanishing first Chern class. Egads. I thought I was a mathematically inclined reader. You have almost certainly seen the late-nineteenth century motion study work of Eadweard Muybridge before, even if you did not know what it was. There's a great online exhibit. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
