How was your day?

The world is trying to keep me from enjoying my bicycle.

Over the weekend I had it in the shop at REI to have the gear shifters replaced, because they weren't, well, shifting very well. I went to pick it up on Sunday. I failed to pick it up on Sunday because the building had just been evacuated due to a fire in an adjacent shop. Fine. I took the bus to and from work on Monday and picked the bike up after work.

Today I rode to work. Fantastic. It's a nice, short, pleasant ride, and much quicker than walking or the bus. There's no actual bike rack, so I lock it to a stopsign on the corner. Work was 'meh'. I work until 2. Around 2 I go outside.

Now, a word about my bike: I've never had a particularly good seat. The stock one that came with it was terrible. I eventually replaced that with a cheap but slightly better one, one which was basically a metal frame, a slab of foam, and a fabric cover. At some point, after many winters, rainstorms, snowstorms, and so on, the fabric cover began to come apart. Rather than replace it, I bought a gel seat cover kind of like this one. It cost about the same, absolutely no more than fifteen bucks. I think I got it at Wal Mart. I put it on; it made the seat slightly more comfortable and also kept it from shedding tiny shreds of black fabric onto my butt.

So. Today. I go out to my bike after work. It is still there, happily locked to the stop sign.

The gel seat cover is not.

The gel seat cover is probably the fourth-cheapest thing on my bike. The little bell was probably, I dunno, three or four bucks, and the front and back reflectors - together - were probably five or six. Okay, sure, I"ll be generous and say that maybe the actual mounting brackets for my lights are cheaper too, but I don't know that you can even buy them without investing in the lights, which are at least equal to the cost of the seat cover.

Oh, and did I mention that my seat post is the quick-release type? All you need to do to remove it is twist a little lever and you can slide it right out. Amount of time to remove the entire seat post assembly from the frame: fifteen seconds or so at most. Amount of time to find the seat cover drawstring, unwind it, pull the release thing, and finagle the cover off the seat (a tight fit): I don't know, but certainly more than fifteen seconds.

So. The upside is, after months of meaning to I finally got a new saddle, because when the scumbag theives won't even take it you know that it's time. And I'm finding someplace else to lock my bike, and taking the seat inside with me from now on.

And I'm grumpy today now, damnit!

Let's do the tiiiiime waaaaaarp again...

Overnight, what had been some political instability in Honduras has turned into the time-honored classic of 'oh holy hell' borderline chaos.

The [former?] president, Manuel Zelaya, apparently had been trying to rewrite the Honduran constitution to allow him to run for a second term. Both congress and the judicial system said that that was in no way kosher. Zelaya decided to try to go ahead with it anyway, and when the head of the armed forces wouldn't help him out, Zelaya fired him.

Then, Zelaya showed up via Honduran military plane in Costa Rica. Apparently, the military arrested/kidnapped him in the middle of the night and got him out of the country. The supreme court is apparently taking 'credit' for this, and today - since the president is not there - congress should be installing the head of congress as the new head of state.

Apparently the White House has (unsurprisingly) condemned the coup, but I haven't heard anything else, partly because I don't think anyone's quite sure of what's going on just yet. Apparently, this is the first time since the Cold War that a Latin American president has been ousted in such a manner, which is a bit of historical reenactment we could all do without.

Hugo Chavez is apparently a close ally of the Zelaya government, so it'll be interesting to see how he reacts. I think he's already blaming America, of course, but I can't wait to see what further saber-rattling he comes out with.

Vampires

Resolved: Let The Right One In is freaking amazing, and the second-best vampire film I've ever seen.

(Beaten only by Nosferatu, of course)

Strip searches and Advil

The Supreme Court has ruled that the middle-school principal who strip-searched a student in his quest to hunt down contraband prescription drugs was (not entirely surprisingly) in the wrong.

The drugs in question were ibuprofen (technically prescription-strength) and naproxen, which are both available over-the-counter, will not under any circumstances get you high, and at worst may cause some minor stomach upset*. The strip-search in question was rightfully characterized as an unnecessary overreaction, as well as frightening and humiliating for the student.

The only thing I don't like about this decision is that the court opinion upholds that deeply irritating idea that a search of a student and/or his belongings can still be reasonable under the 4th Amendment without having probable cause. I personally think that the perpetual double standard against school children makes no sense at all: we require that they be in school and provide public schools to fill that need, and either a student is protected by the Constitution or not. The latter, obviously, would have some problems, so instead of providing full Constitutional protections there's this weird half-assed gray territory where a search needs to be reasonable but doesn't need probable cause**, and students are free to protest so long as it doesn't disrupt anything, and so on. It just strikes me as jarringly odd.

*Granted, there is an extremely slim possibility that someone could have an allergic reaction, I suppose.
**It's my opinion that if there isn't probably cause a search is by definition unreasonable.

Mmm

Dear Mr. Trader Joe,

As long as I have you I have no need to really ever cook for myself, and I love you so very very much.

Yours,

An adoring, grateful fan.

Okay guys...

Dearest still-world-champions-but-had-best-get-your-asses-in-gear Phillies,

Citizen's Bank Park is your stadium. It is your home field. Have you ever heard the term 'home field advantage'? If not, it means that generally speaking, when a sports team is playing at home, in front of an audience which mostly wants them to win as they are locals, and presumably you've played many more games in this stadium than anywhere else, you have a slight advantage. You may want to make a note of this.

In other words, please stop losing every home game. It's beginning to get a bit embarrassing, and I thought we were over those days.

Why didn't you compensate for my stupidity sooner?

Here's something interesting from our neighbors to the north: a guy is suing a volunteer Search and Rescue organization and the police for negligence. He was out skiing with his fiance. They got lost. It took them nine days to be rescued, and the woman died. He's suing them because they didn't start a rescue attempt sooner.

Now, from the earliest article on it, it's extremely hard to see how the SAR organization has any culpability whatsoever:

In B. C., volunteer search-and-rescue crews do not have the authority to start their missions and must be ordered to do so by a provincial authority, like the RCMP. Golden and District Search and Rescue, one of the busiest in the province, responds to 70 to 120 calls a year.

"We don't self-dispatch. We get hundreds of calls a year. What we have to tell them directly is to contact the RCMP. If they do that, we can head on out," Mr. Foss said.

So if they can't initiate their own missions and need to be 'deployed' by someone else, and that someone else was for whatever reason slow to do so, it's hard to see where the SAR team was negligent. Once they were authorized to do so, they sought him out and rescued him, which makes me think that they in fact did their job rather well.

Now, here's my real thing: they were at a ski resort. The ski resort did not report them as missing, which doesn't strike me as negligent either, unless they have a standing policy to do a headcount when they close the slopes every night or something. I doubt they do because that seems like it would be horribly impractical, but I grant it's possible.

But in this article the guy is painted as having some survival skills, though no matches on him that day, and as an avid skier. And he admits that going off the marked slope was his fault. If you're a practiced skier and you know the slightest thing about wilderness survival, and you're dressed for a day of skiing at a resort and not, say, a cross-country trek, you know what you don't do?

You don't leave the bounded, safe area. Just like if you're out for a nice day hike in a big, say, state forest, and you're not terribly familiar with the area and don't have a map or matches or anything like that, you stay on the damn trail.

If you decide to go wandering off into the wilderness, you're stupid. If you get lost, that sucks, yes. If you get found? Fantastic. You're incredibly lucky, and lots of people put a huge amount of time, money, and effort into rescuing you. If you don't get found? Well, maybe you should have stayed on the trail, hmmm?

Take me out to the ball game...

The Phils just wrapped up a rather odd little interleague series against the Red Sox. The first game saw the Phillies put up a decent fight but lose 5-2. The second game, on Saturday, saw a cataclismically bad reenactment of the Phillies' glory days, and by glory days I mean those occassional times when they collectively forget how to play baseball. The top of the first saw them give up five runs, thanks in large to not one, not two, but three errors. They did eventually remember how to hit the ball, though not how to field it, and really the last run Boston scored in the top of the 9th (taking them to an 11-6 victory) was the final blow in a beheading with a dull, rusty axe.

However, yesterday saw the Phillies - and this is just weird - beat the Sox 11-6, getting six of their runs in the 7th. Either the score was intentional just to poke Boston in the eye (in which case the Phillies are much better than I thought and as such have a lot of explaining to do about Saturday*), or fate is once again just jerking them around.

Either way, they're doing pretty well overall so far this season, with the occasional ass-kicking handed back to them. Way too soon to make any guesses about what will happen come October, but you know, anything is possible...

*Because...seriously, guys? Three errors in one inning? Are you a professional team, or the local seven-year-old 'we use a batting tee after the first sixteen strikes' little league team?

Pixar just keeps getting better and better

Today, in a moment of rain-induced impulse (I was on the bus already, might as well go across town), I took myself to see Up.

Now, I'm a sucker for well-made kids movies to begin with, and I adore Pixar. I think that Cars and A Bug's Life are cute and amusing, and also the only two movies to come from that studio which are not absolutely all-over wonderful. I have at least greatly enjoyed, if not absolutely loved, every film that Pixar has made, and with those two above exceptions, every Pixar movie has had at least a brief period as a favorite of the moment. With that said, I think Up is their finest work yet.

The beginning is, for a few moments, absolutely adorable, and then heartbreaking, as it walks you through a lifelong romance, right up to the end. Mr. Fredrickson is a wonderfuly flawed character who is completely and totally sympathetic; you automatically feel for him. The young intrepid Russell is adorable in his not-quite-adolescence; he took slightly longer to grow on me but you absolutely get there by the end. The other characters are absolutely spot-on, including and perhaps most so the dogs.

It goes without saying that the film is visually breathtaking. The nature scenes have just enough detail and just grab you in the right way. The cloud of balloons is also perfect. Pixar has done so well in avoiding trying to make their characters look real, so it's never creepy.

The story itself is pure Disney/Pixar: heartbreaking to just the right degree, able to unexpectedly summon both happy and sad tears but never too intense. At a few points I heard a mother sitting behind me needing to reassure her daughter (don't know the age) that whatever character was okay, so it's obviously a bit intense for some young kids, but none of the wee ones in the theater seemed totally overwhelmed. The end is poignant but again not too heavy, and overall the movie is remarkably sweet. The movie as a whole definitely works on different levels: I'm sure as an adult I got plenty more from it than the six year olds in the theater, and I'm sure that a parent or grandparent would get yet something more from it.

Overall, this is definitely Pixar's best movie yet, and that seems to be a popular opinion. It has something for all ages, and even if it didn't, it would still be worth watching just for the animation.

"We're not racist, but..."

Mr. Griffin denies that the British National Party is racist, though he admits that it operates a “restrictive membership policy” and that it is therefore not open to all races or ethnicities. (source)

Really? "We bar people from joining based on their skin color, but really, we're not racist!"