Category: Everything Else

The Rude Pundit has a really good obituary for the late great Arthur Miller.

There’s a rumor floating around the blogosphere that the famed Deep Throat, who (if you’re too young to remember) helped Woodward & Bernstein investigate Watergate and take down President Nixon back in the day, may be dying.

That’s good news for folks like me, who are really curious to finally find out who the guy was. However, I do not think it’s Rehnquist.

I’m less concerned with whether or not the Iraq elections get held as much as I am with what happens after the elections. That said, Juan Cole has a couple of excellent posts about the past 48 hours in Iraq, particularly this one, that are worth a read.

If you ever doubt that one person can’t do anything to change things, here’s an example to the contrary, albeit not necessarily a very positive one:

A fire that began with a homeless person trying to keep warm by igniting wood and refuse in a shopping cart has crippled two of the city’s subway lines, which might not be restored to normal capacity for three to five years, officials said today.

The Sunday afternoon blaze in Lower Manhattan was described as the worst damage to subway infrastructure since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It gutted a locked room that is no larger than a kitchen but contains some 600 relays, switches and circuits that transmit vital information about train locations.

“This is a very significant problem, and it’s going to go on for quite a while,” said the president of New York City Transit, Lawrence G. Reuter. He estimated that it would take “several millions of dollars and several years” to reassemble and test the intricate network of custom-built switch relays on which the two lines rely.

In the meantime, long waits and erratic service are likely to be the norm on the A and C lines.

[snip]

In a statement, the transit agency said there were “no plans for the restoration of C service in the near future.”

If I were still living in my old apartment in NYC this would have directly affected me; the Spring Street C/E station was half a block from me and I took the C several times a week.

Apparently the city of San Francisco, where I reside, is considering imposing a bag tax on grocery bags in an attempt to “eliminate waste” and recoup some of the costs of waste management.

As a shopper on a budget, I’m pissed off. Scott and I generally go grocery shopping two times a month, and we tend to stock up on stuff when we go. Our groceries get packed into anything from 8 to 12 bags – some of them double-bagged to take the weight. My rough calculation is that this new tax would cost us about $6 a month. And that’s just the cost for our Safeway trips. It goes higher when you add in the odds and ends we pick up from other local stores, runs to the greengrocer, etc. All told this bag tax could cost us $100 a year. That’s not chump change anymore. Especially when I’ve just cut back my work hours for school.

Big grocery stores will also hate this because it will slow down their lines and increase their labor costs. If they have to count exactly how many bags are used for each customer and then charge for them, you won’t be able to close out one transaction and start the next one until after all the groceries are bagged. Plus, self-bagging will no longer be an option unless you bring all your own bags. That’s workable when all you’re buying is a few items, but not when you’re buying two weeks’ worth of stuff.

And need I point out that this is a classic regressive tax? People with even smaller budgets than ours will be hit harder by this.

It’s great that the city of San Francisco is trying to be a good manager of our natural resources, but this is a crappy way of doing it.

Dare I say, dynasty? The Patriots stomped the Steelers tonight and are going to the Super Bowl again.

YAY!