conuly

Communities Learn the Good Life Can Be a Killer

Cars Kill Cities

Both are filled with comments along the lines of "Public transportation in my area is terrible, therefore there is no possible way to make good public transportation, and if people wanted public transportation they'd take it instead of driving cars, so clearly they don't."

Aside from the fact that you can't buy what they don't sell (so you can't switch to good bus service if your area is invested in the idea that this is impossible and nobody wants it anyway), you have to love the narrow little assumption that because this person or that one hasn't seen something, it can't exist. You just want to pat them on their little heads! Twits.

THIS is a good reason to jump onto the tracks, to save somebody's life.

There is absolutely NO other justified reason. Whatever it is you dropped, it isn't worth your life.

( Read more... )

I saw water fountains - real fountains with real water that gets cold when you run it (and you CAN run it, WE have no drought!) and tastes like water instead of like some unholy combination of salt and mud... oh!

Poor Ana had a fit the day we got to California because of the water quality (and the fact that she was extremely tired and hungry). She and Evangeline had so much juice...! Day before we left, I had a bottle of water I couldn't open. My mother couldn't open it. My aged grandmother (pushing 90 now!) got it in a few seconds. We, uh, loosened it for her.

Our garden is terribly overgrown, but that's all right. We seem to have obtained a new form of mint while we were gone that's taking over EVERYthing. Mint will do that, but this is a bit much even for mint - and I'm not even sure what kind of mint it is! Could be mountain mint, but I'm sure I decided *not* to plant that....

Our flight was fairly uneventful. Our flight out - oy. Oh dear god. I asked my mother in the airport terminal NOT to buy the headphones, feeling that they're altogether too interested in TV as it is and conscious of the many things I'd picked up to entertain them. So she... bought them anyway. And gave them to the kids first thing, as SOON as they sat down, before I asked them.

Naturally they squabbled over watching the same show (or not) and I had to find the channel for them, and I had to check periodically to make sure it was reasonably child-appropriate, and they were cranky and annoying the whole way. My mother said she thought she'd be able to help me in the flight - ha! She sat behind me and never switched seats halfway through like she PROMISED she would. Never had a chance to read any book or eat anything of my own.

Our flight back, I knew my mother would still be in California. This time, I got to make the choice - No. Headphones. My lovely mother goes "They'll scream!" at me. How insulting! Not only insulting my judgment - and I do like to believe I know my nieces well enough - but also of the girls. How does she think anybody managed before inflight TV? Does she think we had that when we flew across the ocean?

Guess what? True to *my* predictions they were darlings the whole flight, they helped each other with their craft supplies (Klutz books, how I love you!), they were friendly and sweet, and the crew went out of their way to compliment their behavior.

TV does not make them behave better. (Duh.)

In the airport (I guess I'm doing this backwards) I got to listen to a totally asinine lecture on Evangeline's choice of underwear... or the lack of underwear under her shorts. Apparently you could see that if she flopped backwards and you looked. Whoops.

"Don't you KNOW that children are KILLED every DAY and there are PEDOphiles?" "What, here in the airport kids are killed every day?" "No, not in the airport". Given that she was TSA I decided to stop the conversation there and not point out that, frankly, I simply don't care unless children are routinely being snatched from that particular airport. Isn't that what security is for, anyway? (And even if they were - guess what? It wasn't going to happen. They were holding my hands until we got to the plane, then they were going to sit right next to me.) And what did she think, that cotton panties have magic powers to repel evildoers? They're panties, not chastity belts! Or maybe that pervs only go after children without panties. If *that* is the case, they're even weirder than I thought. Bit of a long shot, waiting for a kid to come along without the appropriate amount of underwear. (Admittedly, I would've put her in panties instead of just the shorts if I'd realized we could have this problem, but not out of fear. I just don't like her flashing people.) I also didn't mention to the TSA woman her grasp of the statistics of the situation was totally flawed. I was Being Pragmatic. (And she meant well, in her wrongheaded way.)

I have to wonder why she was looking at Evangeline's crotch in the first place, though. I mean, even when the kiddo flopped on the floor it wasn't that obvious until you looked for it....

This is no surprise. Even without the irony of my excitement over the new South Ferry station (which has not diminished a whit), I'm not surprised. There's a post about it here.

But the MTA needs the money. Should've added tolls to the bridges, that's the sensible thing to do. Should be better subsidized, that's what the government's for. Can't blame the MTA for that. And I pay attention - for all people are talking about how service sucks, and it's better in other cities, I remember what it was like when I was a kid. It's better now than it was then. I don't know about other cities, but in *this* city the MTA has gotten better. (This may not mean much, but it's still *true*, I do believe.)

Noticed something else. Every train - EVERY train - that I go on now has signs up about the (then proposed) fare increase, saying that with inflation and all fares are actually cheaper now than they were when they were $1.25. That might be true, though I don't see how think they'll get anybody to believe it, or care if they do. But do you know why these signs are up in every train? It's not because they're so big on propagandizing us. It's because a lot of the adspace, for the past several years now, is taken up with public service ads. I don't think this is because the MTA thinks we really need public poetry. I think it's because, for whatever reason, the space isn't selling and they feel they need to put *something* there. So they're not getting as much ad revenue as they really ought to either. That in and of itself kinda indicates the sort of dire straits they're in.

I'm still upset, though. Who can afford another fifty cents a fare? In a way, it was better before unlimiteds - you don't want to pay the fare, you walk. It's easy to save money when you walk instead of taking the train or the bus two stops or three stops or whatever your walking limit is. But now everybody knows that if you're travelling regularly the unlimited card is cheaper, and once you buy it you have no easy way to save that little bit of cash. (Okay, it's already saved through buying the unlimited instead of the pay-per-ride, but that's not the point, exactly.)

For now.

So - article time!

One on how kid's snacks have changed in the past 20 years.

On sharing parenting equally

( Read more... )

Another article on Darius McCollum, who has been arrested again

( Read more... )

Darwinists for Jesus?

( Read more... )