I'm a "bad" driver. Take 1

Ahh, flashback to the I'm a Bad Neighbor series.
A few Friday's ago, i was driving a child to school. I moved into the right lane on the local poseur-highway to get around a slower driver. I drove and then shifted back to the center after I passed him. Then a cop pulled me over claiming that I performed an unsafe lane change, cutting off the other car by 1/2 a car length.

I was accelerating, he was dropping back...I looked in my mirror and over my shoulder. There was very little traffic. After the lane change he didn't flick his lights, honk his horn or flip me off. Nothing. There was nothing wrong with what I did so I was a bit taken aback. I told the officer (nicely) that I checked and felt I was safe. He said I wasn't "even close." Yay for police.

The tyicket is $85 and 2 points on my pretty clean record. I'm not so happy about that but I could swallow it if I felt that the 2 points wouldn't kill my insurance premiums. The company refuses to tell me what it would do to my rates, though. Maybe nothing, maybe a lot. Yay for companies.

So I plead not guilty and asked for a court date. I went in today and wandered through the maze that is the court house. I found the right office and eventually was called in by the prosecutor. She said that I could plead to "unsafe driving" which would remove the points, but would cost me $450 up front. Yay for governments. The beauty is that my rates could still go up if my license is audited and I am found to be an "unsafe driver" -- it wouldn't be a point surcharge but I wouldn't qualify for the preferred rates so same difference. Thus, the plea was no solution. So now I have to wait till the cop can be in court so I can get called back to take more time off and state my side of what is effectively a "he said, he slapped me with a ticket." Joy.

Literacy 2.0

I have been hearing about and reading about people bemoaning the state of reading these days. They complain that with all the phones and videos and tv's and the like, the next generation will not have the skills to sit and read. We are become, they complain, an oral culture again. Our story tellers record their ideas, film their world, and share via the voice and the eye. That's why our students never read books. They can get their visual news with a click of the mouse and can watch movies on their phones. Why read.

Hogwash.

What I think we are entering is a post-literacy generation and, strangely enough, it is the same progression which each era has engendered. When my students 15 years ago tried to read novels from the 1700's and 1800's they had trouble making it through the lengthy description. But they could breeze through a 1000 page 20th century work. Our eyes and brains become accustomed to new modes of writing, not NO modes of writing. I bet that a student from 1900 would have had trouble reading old English or that the rise of the penny press and its sensationalist writing, or the dime novels and their pulp stories held, for the older generation then, the promise fo the demise of "real reading."

Living on the web, using wikipedia, texting incessantly (all signs of the new apocalypse) are all reading intensive activities. They demand a new skill in reading and writing and a different approach to text. But this need not be seen as inferior...simply different. Did you ever compare a letter home from a Civil War soldier to one from a Revolutionary War soldier? How about one from a Gulf War soldier? An in 20 years, an email from a soldier to his family will look even more different. This isn't bad. It is just different. Maybe there will be a reduction in the formal writing and reading (which we define as "the way we did it properly when I was growing up") and maybe the language itself will change to allow new phrases, words and spelling which will look so non-traditional as to be abhorrent to traditionalists. But that's how language works. We split infinitives these days. And we end with prepositions. Our parents might have used what was then slang and what is now standard. Life and language move on. Our children will read and write. We may not get it. We may force them to keep doing it "our way" because our way is "real" or "right" and they will grow up living in more than one world linguistically. And that will make the next generation exactly the same as we are. The gap has always existed. We just see it accutely because we are on the other side of it now.

Word of Face

I remember a line used by some comedian in the way back when. He said "I am responsible for spreading all the new jokes -- I know one sophomore in every high school in the country." Humor was simpler back then. But his point was clear -- to spread a piece of information like a joke required a human network and the youth, with its penchant for not shutting the heck up, is an effective tool for the passing of that data.

It seems to me that now, social networking like Facebook has become the new word of mouth. All those little lines, jokes and jabs that we would say around the water fountain and which would get into wider distribution only if someone in our peer group decided to repeat them (often to his own gain...attribution skills are sorely lacking amongst the younger set) can now be spread over the internet. I make a pun and instead of having to keep it to myself (which would often be the prudent course) I can tell the world so it can appreciate my brilliance. Computers, it has been said, make human contact unnecessary. They replace one grapevine with another more powerful one. I can force others to hear what I say instead of waiting for an opportunity when they are willing to listen.

Neat, huh?

Oh, Anna

Do you think my cleaning woman knows that she has become the local bogey man, the threat by which we keep our children in mind? Right before she comes to clean, we tell the kids "you'd better clean up your stuff or Anna is going to come and clean it for you and you'll never see it again!" And eventually all I need to do is to hold up the book, paper, sneaker or such and look at the offending child and whisper "Anna's gonna get this." Soon, just the mention of the name "Anna" will be enough to get them to sanitize the house.

Is this wrong of me? Anna doesn't know that we harbor such deep feelings about her attempts to clean by stuffing everything in one drawer after she has finished folding the garbage and shining the videotapes. Am I wrong for having a cleaning woman? Are there people who use an invocation of my name to inspire fear and revulsion in their children?

I hope so.

Because I seem to react to the use of certain words angrily, I have been asked to present a list of words that bother me.

You may not use the following words:

******
****
****
****
****
***
************
*****
****
*******
*****
****’*
***-*****-****
*****
******
*****
**
*** *******
****(*)
**** ******
Episcop*lian

**** (*** **** **********)

cool things i may have seen

So anyway, I saw a UFO this evening. I was walking outside at 5:17 PM local time and I look up to see a bright light (a bit brighter than a planet but that's what I assume it is) overhead. Then I realize that it is moving slowly north. My second guess is that it is a space station or something similarly high up because it is moving slowly and there is NO noise. I watch as it dims to a small light, like a space station which has caught the sun and attracted my eye and then moves to a different angle and loses that brightness. That small light continues north and there are no blinking lights anywhere on or around it. There were other airplanes visible and this looked like none of them. Pretty weird but also, underwhelming. No weird noises, no grey aliens...none of that. Disappointing. Strange to think that even otherworldly creatures let me down. And yet somehow comforting. Dare I disturb the universe? No need. It is already disturbed.

Planning for the future

I guess at some point, we all like to sit back and dream...we think "what if I won the lottery?" Sometimes we even sit around and start to think about what we would do with all that money. Well, I was inspired by the Barenaked Ladies and their "If I had a million dollars" song to think it through. Actually, I was much more inspired by Bruce Cockburn's "If I had a rocket launcher" because it more accurately reflects my mood and is musically much better but whatever.

The first and most important thing in this fantasy exercise is to create a minimum I would need to win. I settled on 100 million dollars. A nice round number, and I figure I'd pay half of it in taxes, so I end up with 50 million dollars.

Next -- I tell NO ONE. Sorry family and friends...if I do this right, you have no idea that I'm flush with capital. I immediately hire a lawyer to represent me etc, and I never come forward. No reason to make myself or my kids into targets.

Next, I work out a spreadsheet...sort of like this:

2 million for each girl bank account to pull 2% per year -- $40,000 to pay for HS and college for each girl
10 million bank account to pull an annual 2% -- $200,000 as annual income
500K payment to pay off mortgage
1 million construction on the house expand 3 levels out (basement - music studio, library; first floor - den/diningroom/kitchen; upstairs - master suite)
1 million investment (high yield) lawyer/acct on retainer to manage funds, do PR and make payments - fee tied to interest
100K 3 new cars
1 million creature comforts (furnishings, electronics)
35k sefer torah
2 million payment construction of a house in israel
100k donation to shul to ensure hot kiddush every shabbat (off of interest) - sponsorships would become donations for operating
1 million donations to alma maters, schools and employer schools just because


This quick reckoning takes out about 21 million of my 50 million, leaving me with 29 million in mad cash to be charitable, risky or stupid with. The beauty is that I have set up investments to cover the rest of my life even without a job, and still put my kids through private school for years to come.

If you can think of other things I need to budget for (remember, I'm getting back 2 percent on my bank accounts, so my annual salary is 200k but I can give myself a raise by putting more into my endowment) let me know.

Now, can I borrow a dollar for a lottery ticket?