Subject: Scareconomics

To the editor:

Absent from the Herald’s article about the Pike’s loss of ad revenue (“‘EZ’ Go: Pike to Lose $500G”, Dec. 5) was any concrete discussion of the net gain resulting from the merger. In fact, the merger eliminates redundant positions whose cost far exceeds that of the lost ad revenue.

Furthermore, the article states misleadingly in the fourth paragraph that the merger is forcing the Pike to replace its signs, while burying at the end of the 14th paragraph the fact that the signs are due for replacement anyway.

The Herald advocated for years for the Pike and the Highway Department to be merged to eliminate waste. No Republican governor endorsed by the Herald was ever able to pull it off, but Deval Patrick finally made it happen. If you insist on using facts taken out of context to score political points, the least you could do is try to be a little less obvious about it.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

It all started when I decided to drop off our broken dehumidifier this afternoon at the repair guy’s house in Revere. This was already aggravating, because:

• it’s the second time it’s broken in the past two years;
• it’s been broken for months and this is the first opportunity I’ve had to be able to bring it to the repair guy;
• therefore, our basement has become oppressively humid again and the air, laundry, etc. down there have all started to smell; and
• instead of having a decent number of major repair shops under contract to do warranty repairs, all LG has is little work-out-of-their-houses shmoes in inconvenient places like Malden, Dorchester and Revere.

Having said all that, I decided that since it was 3:30 and the drive to the guy’s house in Revere would probably take about 40 minutes, I could get there, drop it off, and get back before the worst of rush hour. Hah!

On the way there, I idiotically misunderstood the Google Maps directions and turned onto 93North before the tunnel when what I was supposed to do was go through the tunnel and then get onto 1A North. I’d never done that before, and my brain was unfortunately stuck in “It can’t possibly be right that I’m supposed to go into the tunnel, because the only thing through the tunnel is the airport, right?” mode, and I knew that Revere was north of downtown, so I figured either the signage was wrong or Google Maps had simply forgotten to mention the whole 93 North thing.This was stupid.

But it wasn’t too stupid, or so I thought, because I realized my error quickly and told Google Maps to recalculate the route from 93N, and it’s just about the same distance and time than the original route it had recommended. So off I went on my merry way, dealing with Friday afternoon traffic which was not nearly as bad as full rush hour, but bad enough to cause continuous low-grade aggravation and grumbling.

Speaking of which, please let me take this opportunity to say: If you don’t know how to drive, then get off the roads, you idiots. This means you, the old guy who couldn’t see over the steering wheel driving 20 MPH below the speed limit with nobody in front of you. This means you, the guy in the P.T. Cruiser who for some inexplicable reason was driving 30 MPH below the speed limit on a straight, open road. And these were hardly the only morons I encountered on the road during today’s drive. Sheesh.

Did I mention that during this entire drive, my Blackberry Bold, which although it’s only a little more than a year old has decided that half of its convenience buttons no longer need to work every time they’re pressed, kept hanging, arbitrarily turning off it’s display for no discernable reason, etc.? Well, yeah, that was going on too and contributing to the rising aggravation level in the vehicle.

Did I also forget to mention that the one and only way in which the Blackberry is inferior to my old Windows Mobile phone is that on the Windows Mobile phone, my GPS location updated smooth and continuously in Google Maps, whereas on the Blackberry, it seems to only update when it feels like it, which is sometimes after the turn you were watching for on the map because you don’t know the area well enough to be sure of where it is on the street? The significance of this will become obvious in a moment.

Aside from the morons, the drive went OK until I’d just about reached my destination:

My phone picked just this moment to freak out and stop updating my GPS location, so I missed the turn. By this point, of course, I was screaming at the GPS, screaming at the traffic, screaming at my radio…

Oh, wait, I forgot to mention the radio. I was listening to podcasts on my Blackberry through an “iTrip”, which is one of those little FM transmitters that plugs into your car power jack (If I call it a “lighter jack” I’m an old fogey, right?) and your mobile device of choice and broadcasts to your car radio. You need to use one of these devices if your the idiots who manufactured your car declined to include an auxiliary input jack, though why any car manufacturer would do that in this day and age is completely incomprehensible. And, alas, the FM airwaves in and around Boston are so saturated that it’s impossible to find a frequency to set the thing to that doesn’t experience interference, which means that at critical points in the podcast, you get static, clicks, or just silence for seconds at a time. So yeah, I was screaming at the radio too.

Now, you might think that missing my turn would have been no big deal, right? Just make a U-turn at the next opportunity and go back, right? Except by the time I realized I had missed the turn, I was already over the General Edwards Bridge, and that’s when things got real interesting, in a rather morbid way.

Suddenly, there were a lot of cars on the road not moving, and a plume of black smoke came into view. It turns out that these people…

had just carried an unconscious driver to the side of the road after extracting her from this:

I wasn’t going to be turning around and going back in the other direction for quite a while.

The driver of the car and truck involved in that accident were obviously having a much worse day than I was, perhaps even fatally so, so now in addition to all the aggravation coursing through my veins, I had to also deal with the self-loathing resulting from being conscious of the fact that although clearly some perspective on my silly little suffering was called for, I just couldn’t seem to muster up any. I was still less concerned about the accident victims than about my own wasted time driving around in circles. I suck.

In any case, because of this awful accident which failed to activate the perspective center in my brain, instead of being able to get to the repair guy’s house like this:

I had to get there like this:

By now we were well into rush hour, and it took about 45 minutes to drive the 8 miles.

Alas, the location at which Google Maps had placed the house I was looking for was just wrong enough to cause me to drive past it and then not be able to turn around because of all the traffic on Lynnway backed up trying to get onto the bridge, which was by now backed up for miles. So I had to park 3 blocks away from the house, walk back to the house to confirm that it was the right place, walk back to the minivan, get out the dehumidifier, and roll it three blocks back to the house.

On the way there, one of its casters fell off. Really. I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Ah, but here, to my amazement, things started to go right. My first rummaging through the van in an effort to find something I could use to hammer the wheel back on was a failure (no, I don’t carry a toolkit in my vehicle; maybe I should). But just as I was resigning myself to either carrying a heavy dehumidifier for three blocks or pushing it on three wheels, it occured to me that perhaps the handle of the flat-tire jack might be usable as a hammer. Lo and behold, it was, and the wheel was successfully restored to its former glory.

A block later, one of the casters fell apart. But surprise, surprise, I was able to put it back together.

Two blocks later, the dehumidifier was successfully delivered to its destination, and I walked back to the van, got in, and drove home without further incident, if you don’t count the ten minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic in between the 1A South entrance onto 90 West and the 93 South exit from it.

In the “icing on the cake” department, when I got home, I discovered that the washing machine had decided not to do a proper spin cycle on the load of laundry I’d started before I left. And when I clicked the “Publish” button on this blog posting, I discovered that my Internet connection had just gone down (temporarily, thank God).

So, that was my day. How was yours?

PayFlex Systems USA, Inc.
10802 Farnam Drive, Suite 100
Omaha, NE 68154

To whom it may concern:

I am very pleased with your administration of my medical FSA for my employer, Advent Software, Inc. Your Web site works well, I love being able to upload receipts as PDF files, and your debit-card system seems to work quite well. My PayFlex FSA is the best administered of any I’ve had.

However, one recent experience with it was not positive. I am writing to you in the hope that you can improve your processes to make similar experiences less unpleasant for me and others in the future.

Recently, my FSA went into “overdrawn” status because of an unsubstantiated charge. While you were waiting for me to submit a receipt for it, I submitted a properly substantiated $15 claim through your Web site. I subsequently obtained the necessary receipt from the provider and sent it to you. In the meantime, however, my $15 claim was returned with an overdrawn account payment coupon.

After submitting the missing receipt and confirming that my account had returned to “active” status, I sent you a fax on July 15, enclosing a copy of the $15 EOB and asking you to pay me the $15. You ignored it.

Today, I spent over ten minutes on the phone, of which almost four were spent in automated menus. When I finally reached a person, she said that she would submit the claim to your research department for reprocessing, which is of course exactly what I asked to be done in my fax over a week before.

There are three different problems here, in decreasing order of importance:

I shouldn’t have had to contact PayFlex at all. When an account is in overdrawn status because of an unsubstantiated charge and the charge is substantiated, the account can and should be automatically reviewed for claims which were submitted and not paid in the interim, and those claims should be automatically reprocessed and paid. There’s really no excuse not to do this.

My fax should not have been ignored. I shouldn’t have had to call to get this resolved.

It’s extremely annoying that people calling you for help have to navigate several minutes worth of menu prompts before being given the opportunity to speak to someone.

Improvements in these areas will make the quality of your services even more of a competitive advantage than they are now.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

CC: [elided], HR Generalist, Advent Software, Inc.

“WOIO TV reports that Delta Airlines accidentally put a girl bound for Cleveland on a Boston flight last night, and stuck a boy bound for Boston on a Cleveland plane.”

“The situation is a very serious one,” said Delta Airlines spokesman Paul Skrbec.  Yes!  Somebody actually gets that what parents want when something like this happens is for someone from the airline to at least pretend that the situation is serious!

Message to the USCPSC: Pencils contain “excessive amounts of lead.” I would venture to say that at any given time there are more kids chewing on pencils than on basketball-shaped chairs.

Everybody who knows what’s wrong with this picture, raise your hands.

Here’s the letter I sent to the Herald in response:

Well-intentioned or not, these efforts are misguided and extremely dangerous, and Jews should be especially concerned about them.

Numerous justifications for these bans have been proffered.  Leaving aside the ones that are obviously and overtly racist, intolerant, and Islamophobic (all of which essentially boil down to “Go back where you came from if you don’t want to dress like everybody else, you dirty Muslim terrorist scum!”), all that remains are these:

1. The burka, niqab and the like are nothing more than devices for oppressing women, and civilized societies should not allow such oppression to take place.
2. Whole-body garments represent a security threat.  People with illicit intent can hide themselves as well as dangerous objects (weapons, bombs, etc.) underneath them, and thus they should not be permitted.
3. Whole-body garments are not really required by Islam.  They derive from a warped interpretation of Islam practiced by only a few radicals, and therefore banning them is not a question of religious freedom.

Let’s demolish these one at a time, shall we?

The burqa is a device for oppressing women

Yes, it is.  So what?

Freedom of religion includes the freedom to choose to be oppressed by one’s religion.  The women wearing burqas are just that, women, adults, people, and they have the right to choose a religion which requires them to walk around covered head to toe in black.

“But they didn’t choose,” you say.  “They’re forced to wear the burqa by their families!”  Really?  Do you mean to say that a Muslim woman living in Belgium, or the U.K., or Italy, or the Netherlands, all countries where burqa bans have been considered, can’t wake up one morning and say to herself, “You know what?  This is not my religion.  I don’t believe in it.  I don’t want to practice it.  I’m out of here!” and walk out the door?  Of course she can.

“But the social pressure is too strong!  She won’t be able to support herself!  Her husband won’t grant her a divorce!  She’ll be shunned by her community!”  Those are real problems, but they’re not problems that are unique to Muslim women.  They’re shared by anyone in a strong religious community who chooses to leave it.  For that matter, to a large extent they’re problems that are shared by any woman who chooses to walk out of a marriage for any reason.

If you want to talk about instituting better protections and assistance for women trying to separate themselves from strict religious communities or abusive marriages, I think that’s a great idea, but it has nothing to do with banning burqas.

On the question of whether women “choose” to wear the burqa, consider that many, many young Saudi Arabian women are sent to the United States to be educated in American colleges and universities.  The vast majority of them (a) are appalled by American society and culture and (b) happily and willingly return to Saudi Arabia, a country where all women wear the burqa and are not allowed to drive cars, and spend their lives there when they are done studying.

Cultures which are morally offended by the burqa are themselves viewed as morally offensive and corrupt by many of the women who wear them.  “Liberating” those women by prohibiting them from wearing the burqa in public doesn’t free them from oppression.  Rather, it replaces the oppression of the culture they’ve chosen with the oppression of one they haven’t.

Speaking of oppression from mainstream culture, what do you think women who believe they are religiously obligated to wear the burqa will do when they suddenly find themselves living in a country where they are no longer allowed to wear them in public?  No, they won’t suddenly go dancing through the streets wearing jeans and halter tops.  In fact, they won’t go dancing through the streets at all — they’ll be stuck at home, since they’ll no longer be able to go out in public.  Either that, or they’ll continue to wear their burqas and be subject to fines and/or imprisonment.  Does that sound liberating?

Burqas are a security threat

Do I really need to comment on this?  Really?

Requiring police to get a search warrant before they ransack someone’s property is a security threat.

Throwing out evidence seized in an illegal search is a security threat.

Allowing people to encrypt their email and private files is a security threat.

Allowing people to have private telephone conversations that aren’t monitored by the government is a security threat.

“Innocent until proven guilty” is a security threat.

Suicide bombers in Israel have disguised themselves as women and ultra-Orthodox Jews.  Should we therefore ban people from dressing like women or wearing traditional ultra-Orthodox garb in public?

Palestinians have smuggled explosives inside ambulances.  Should we therefore prohibit ambulances from operating in the West Bank?

Robbers in America like to wear pantyhose or bandannas over their faces.  Should we therefore ban the sale of pantyhose and bandannas?

The rights granted to law-abiding individuals in a civilized society make it harder to catch the bad guys.  This is axiomatic, a given, a truism, a tautology that is so obvious that it’s absurd that I have to spell it out, but apparently I do.

Leaving that aside, does anyone seriously believe that prohibiting people from wearing burqas will prevent bad guys from disguising themselves or transporting contraband?  Is a burqa is more effective at transporting explosives or a gun than a backpack would be?  Please, don’t be ridiculous.

In his security argument for banning the burqa, Daniel Pipes offers a few cases of men using burqas to disguise themselves and then absurdly argues that these few isolated incidents justify banning burqas for everyone.  In addition to this argument being absurd from the point of view of statistics and civil liberties, there’s another reason why it should be dismissed out of hand.  Pipes glosses over the fact that the criminals in the two most prominent cases he cites, Maulana Mohammad Abdul Aziz Ghazi and Yassin Omar, were both caught despite their attempt to disguise themselves in burqas. It would seem that law-enforcement authorities are capable of overcoming the challenge of apprehending burqa-clad terrorists.  Some Like It Hot, anyone?

Banning burqas only discriminates against “radicals” practicing “warped” Islam

Question: When, exactly, did freedom of religion come to mean that people who don’t practice a particular religion have the right to tell the people who do that their religion is “warped” or “radical” and therefore they do not have the right to practice it?

Answer: Never.  That’s not freedom of religion.

The majority of Jews in many countries would not care if circumcision, which is described by many people as radical, warped, cruel, inhumane, oppressive, etc., were banned.  Some Jews even agree with those characterizations of circumcision.  Where burqas are banned, circumcision is next.

The large majority of Jews in most countries would not care if shchita (kosher meat slaughtering), which is described by many as radical, warped, cruel, inhumane, oppressive, etc., were banned.  Some Jews even agree with those characterizations of shchita.  Where burqas are banned, shchita is next.

Consider the lesson of Purim:

And Haman said to King Ahasuerus, “There is a certain people scattered and separate among the peoples throughout all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws differ from [those of] every people, and they do not keep the king’s laws; it is [therefore] of no use for the king to let them be.  If it pleases the king, let it be written to destroy them, and I will weigh out ten thousand silver talents into the hands of those who perform the work, to bring [it] into the king’s treasuries.”

The Islamophobic tactics being used to oppress Muslims all over the world resemble those that have been used to oppress Jews throughout the ages.  For us to stand idly by and watch, or even worse to support them, is not only morally wrong, it’s also against our self-interests.  Any tactic used successfully anywhere to oppress any minority group is eventually used against Jews.  We forget this at our peril.

Milka-what?

By now, most of you have probably seen the new E*Trade commercial in their talking baby series, “Baby – Girlfriend”.  If not, go watch it now and then keep reading.

I watched the ad when it first came out, and I’ve watched it several times since then, and it makes me laugh every time.  It’s definitely one of the best ads in the series.

Apparently, not everyone thinks so.  The Boston Herald reported today that Lindsay Lohan has filed a $100 million suit against E*Trade, alleging that “a ditzy toddler appearing in [the ad] is modeled after her and improperly invokes her ‘likeness, name, characterization and personality without permission.’”

When asked for comment, the company that produced the ad said they “just used a popular baby name that happened to be the name of someone on the account team.”

Hey, Lindsay: How about we go back ten years or so to when you were cute and lovable, and just pretend that the intervening years of drug and alcohol abuse, humiliating public behavior, promiscuity, and unbelievable narcissism never happened, eh?

I’m hoping that this is all just some sort of misguided publicity stunt.  The alternative, that Lohan actually believes that she has exclusive rights to the use of the name “Lindsay” in entertainment, is just too painful too contemplate.

*sigh*

One cannot help but admire the courage of any author who strives to follow in the footsteps of Tabart and Jacobs by reinterpreting this timeless classic.  Jeff Macon, Michelle Macon, and Monica Chang apparently could each muster up only a third of the requisite fortitude.  Although their combined courage may be admirable, the fruit of their efforts is not.

The cataclysmic failure of this work is clear from the very first page, where the protagonist’s ill-fated cow is rendered without an udder.  Do the authors fear that the sight of a cow’s udder might irrevocably shatter the innocence of their young readers?  Or perhaps they are attempting to pictorially answer the age-old question, why would Jack and his mother sell their cow when they could milk it and sell the milk instead?  Or perhaps they wished to imbue the cow with a unique aspect to explain the stranger’s eagerness to purchase it.  Alas, whatever their goal, this pictorial device fails to achieve it.

On the same page, we learn that Jack and his mother “were poor and lived in a small house.”  Again, the illustration fails the text, by depicting the “small house” with two chimneys and numerous gables and glass windows.  Later, on page 7, the reader is informed, “Jack went to his bedroom.”  Are the authors truly unaware that poor children in this era did not have their own bedrooms?

Speaking of page 7, how are we to reconcile the round, hollow window quartered by rough sticks of wood visible from inside the house on this page, with the square, glass, mullioned windows visible from the outside on page 2?

Who can forget the giant’s frightening eloquence, immortalized by Jacobs?

Fee-fi-fo-fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he ‘live, or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

The answer, it seems, is Macon, Macon and Chang, who replace Jacobs’s elegant words with the following pitiful verbiage:

“I smell a human,” shouted the ogre.

Later, the reader is informed, “Jack was thinking about climbing the beanstalk again, but he didn’t tell his mom.”  After all that effort protecting the sensitivities of its young readers, why do the authors impart the lesson that if a child is thinking about doing something his mother won’t like, he should be sure not to tell her?!

Upon spotting Jack stealing his golden-egg-laying hen and singing harp, the ogre delivers the entirely dissatisfying exclamation, “Thief!  I will get you.”

Readers would be well-advised to stay away from this edition, lest they find themselves tempted to direct a similar exclamation at its authors for the theft of the real Jack and the Beanstalk and for this wholly inadequate replacement.

(click for larger image)

After the last of our pet mice passed on, the kids wanted to try something a little different, so we bought a pair of female gerbils from PetCo.  One of them got sick a few days later, so PetCo replaced it with another female from the same litter.  Or so we thought.

Small rodents are notoriously difficult to sex, so with all the pairs we’ve been inviting into our home, it was only a matter of time before we got one that was sexed incorrectly.  When the new gerbil, Midnight, began chasing the old one, Twilight, around the cage, and when Twilight subsequently got much larger over the course of a few weeks, we knew what had happened.

Yesterday, I noticed that Twilight seemed a bit more svelte, so I went rooting around in her burrow and discovered the little pink blobs shown above, photographed with a quarter to show their size.  I think there’s another one or two of them hiding in the litter that I didn’t get in the photo — I don’t want to dig around too aggressively to count them until they’re a little larger and less fragile.

We’re just pleased as punch to have new babies in the family without my wife having had to bear them.  The kids are also very excited.

Tomorrow morning we’re going to visit PetCo, ask whether the babies need any special care, and ask what their policy is about taking back rodents born to parents they claimed were both the same sex.  It’ll be fun to watch the babies grow up, but we have no intention of keeping five or six gerbils at once instead of the two we started with.

If you’re in the Boston area and are interested in a free gerbil or two when they’re weaned, please don’t hesitate to ask.  One warning, though: no one in my family has any experience gerbil sexing, so if you take two, you may later end up figuring out what to do with some extra gerbils.

Granted, a dead rat is better than a live rat (nice to see the cat doing her job), but still…

*sigh*