Don't drive like my brother

Like millions of NPR listeners, I was truly saddened to hear of the death Monday of Tom Magliozzi, half of Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers of Car Talk. He was 77.

How do I explain Car Talk to those who’ve never heard it? It’s kind of a call-in radio show, mostly about motor vehicles (sort of), but laced with a lot of commentary on life and massive infusions of laughter. Tom and his brother Ray had been doing a version of the program from WBUR in Boston since 1977.

I’ve been listening to it since the 80s, and I don’t like call-in programming and I don’t care much about cars. But I loved Tom and Ray, who had laughs that would cure the common cold.

You can read about the Magliozzis and Car Talk in several stories on NPR. What’s interesting about them is the comments: This is the first time I think I’ve ever seen any online content, no matter how seemingly innocuous (dog reunited with family, flowers planted along a highway, man emerges from 40-year coma) that didn’t engender at least 15% of mean, political or just plain crack-brained contributions by those with Internet access and a keyboard.

But take a look at any of NPR’s stories, and every single comment (as of time of writing) is about how much Tom (and Ray) brightened our weekend days, year after year. People proudly proclaim that they don’t drive and don’t give a toss about cars, but they tuned in regularly because Tom and Ray just sucked us in to a better world, where there was a solution to your problems—mostly car-related—even if it might involve a Viking funeral. Even commenters who regularly spew ideological bile and political vituperation on those innocuous stories here post nothing but sadness at Tom’s loss and happy memories of his broadcasts.

If you never heard them, I’m truly sorry for you. Go stream some of the shows—although the best way to listen to Click and Clack is to be driving around on your weekend errands, laughing and slapping your steering column like a demented seal, and be forced to park somewhere so you can hear out the program to the very end of their wacky credits.

Car Talk stopped original broadcasts two years ago, but NPR has been airing older shows since then. Because it’s not really so much about calling in to sort your 1998 Nissan Sentra’s whoop-whoop-whoop noise it makes when you turn left at 35 MPH as it is listening to these guys…well, just listening to them.

In such an unexpected way, the Magliozzis spread joy, with the pretext of diagnosing and solving mechanical problems. There’s so little of that around these days, so I’m glad that they’ve been part of my weekends for nearly 30 years.

Remember the tiggies

Apparently there are health and safety issues inherent when you’re building bonfires to celebrate the suppression of religious minorities, as people will be doing all over the UK tonight.

(Oh, alright—officially Guy Fawkes Day is about the foiling of a plot to blow up Parliament in 1605. And the plotters were Roman Catholic. Which gave Church of England Protestants reasons to stick it to Catholics in particular and everyone who wasn’t CoE in general for centuries to come. This evolved into the Bonfire Night activities of today.)

So, yes—check under your pile of wood for any cute little critters that might be inadvertently char-be-cued in your death-to-Catholics ritual.

I expect the danger to humans increases with the consumption of alcohol, as well. But the health and safety folks probably reckon that the lager lout crowd won’t be reading caution posters, so they don’t bother with them.

Getting out the vote

It's election Tuesday. As with all such days, it's a major relief to know that holiday ads will replace the political commercials on TV. 

Case in point: They’ve been running a lot of anti-Prop 45 commercials on TV. (Proposition 45 is an initiative requiring that insurance companies get approval from a state commissioner before they make any changes affecting the rates they charge for healthcare coverage.) Their scare campaign revolves around someone dressed up as a physician or nurse intoning that letting a politician mess with healthcare decisions that should be made only by the doctor and the patient is a very, very bad, horrible, terrible thing.

I’ve no doubt that the anti-Prop 45 campaign can afford these ads; it’s extremely well-funded. Its backers include: the California Hospital Association, California Medical Association, and healthcare insurance giants like Anthem, Kaiser, Blue Shield and United HealthCare. That latter group alone have more money than God, in case you’re at all unclear about the matter. As of a couple of weeks ago, they’d spent more than $57M to defeat the measure.

(Of course, you could sweep out $57M from between the sofa cushions in the executive lounge of any of those insurance companies. But still.)

What I find interesting about this “Healthcare decisions should be made by doctors, nurses and patients—not dictated by one Sacramento politician” rhetoric is the foundational logic that this is currently the case. You know, that medical decisions are made only by the physician and patient.

When, in practice, this is a complete crock of moosemilk.

Under the prevailing payment model, healthcare decisions are in fact made by insurance carriers. Both directly—in terms of what they deem is appropriate (meaning “what we’ll reimburse you for”) treatment, as well as indirectly because providers are driven to see three or four patients per hour under terms of their insurance contracts, so they don’t have the time to properly understand patients’ needs, histories or ailments in order to make truly informed decisions.

You know—just the fact that Anthem is coughing up the kale is pretty much all I need to know about the merits of the anti-45 argument. We’ll see how successful they are at gulling the electorate.

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Also on an electoral theme, I noticed these signs for Cupertino City Council candidates.

Cupertino, as you may know, is the home of Apple. That’s where their physical headquarters are, I mean; I think most of their revenues are filtered through offices in other countries, so that their tax liability here in the US, California and Cupertino is considerably smaller that you’d have expected from their sales figures.

Anyhow—here’s the sign I found particularly interesting:

Andy clearly wants the electorate to think of him by his all-American first name, not his surname. In a city where the electorate is 44.4% Asian, I just wonder what’s up with that, because it obviously doesn't bother either Paul or Sun.

Gratitude Monday: Books by the bed

By way of illustrating what I’m grateful for today, I give you…everything I need for snuggling in for the night:

The pile of books on the left comprises several I own, including my two most recent acquisitions, on the British Commandos of World War II. Look, sometimes a bit of light garroting and timed explosives is just what a girl needs before dropping off to sleep.

The stack on the right is books I currently have checked out from the various library systems here in the Valley They Call Silicon. Depending on the subject matter, I plough through two to five per week. This bunch includes a couple of Judge Dee mysteries (which I don’t particularly recommend), the new biography of Elsa Schiaparelli (ditto), several histories (World War I, and the Gurkhas), a collection of Dick Cavett's columns for the NY Times and a deconstruction of wit. 

Many of the books I read have been recommended by friends. About a third of the present occupants of the surface came to me that way. Several—permanent fixtures beside my bed—are gifts, to which I return often by way of connecting with the friend who gave them.

Then there are scraps of paper I use for jotting down pithy phrases or reminders of things I need to do. (Actually, they’re from the Santa Clara County Library; they’re what mark the books they’re holding for pick-up. Each one is a third of letter-sized paper, and they’re only written on one side. Perfect for scratch paper, as my thoughts are not generally Dostoyevskian in length. Or, now that I think of it, in depth. Um.)

And the bookmarks—almost all of which are also from friends, although I noticed one from Hatchard’s Booksellers, marking their 200^th anniversary.

There was a time when I didn’t actually need no stinkin’ bookmark; I could remember where I’d left off when I returned to a book. But that time, alas, is long past.

Anyway—I’m grateful for the pleasure that having stacks of books right by my bed gives me, and for the connections they continually weave with my friends.

Only goats matter

For Halloween, let’s close out the month with BuzzFeed’s take on how the media will report the apocalypse. On the whole, I think they’ve rather holed it in one.

They certainly got the zeitgeist of Twitter right. (Especially that #prayforLondon thing.)

Someone wondered why the Statue of Liberty always seems to figure in apocalyptic visions, which caused me to run through the images again to investigate.

In fairness, it’s only the faux-New York Times that uses that particular icon. And you’d pretty much expect the editors there to conflate Liberty rising from the ruins with the destruction of civilization as anyone worth his fair-trade espresso defines it.

Or else people are just fixated on The Planet of the Apes.

However, I got the biggest charge out of modern farmer’s headline. Because, in the end…

Bad spirits

I’ve reported in the past about the elaborate yard decorations folks here in the Valley They Call Silicon put out for Halloween. There was one house in particular, in Sunnyvale, whose owners took weeks to fill it full of the worst kinds of creepiness around.

You can see the whole thing here, but just to refresh your memory, here are a couple of shots:

Imagine my disappointment, then, to swing by there earlier this month and find in progress…absolutely nothing. I was hoping that they might be procrastinating, but as of this past Monday, this pumpkin was the sum total of their effort:

  

Look, this is the yard that last year was dripping with death:

Yeah—just lawn death this time round. 

And here's spider dog:

I know that last year was much more elaborate than the year before, so perhaps they just got worn out. Even so—they have all those skeletons hanging around somewhere—would it have killed them to perch just one on their roof? Or sprinkle just a couple of spiders on the dog out front?

I don’t know what the Halloween equivalent of “bah, humbug!” would be, but I think my neighbors are communicating it.

Pre-flight

This being the week when people are thinking about weird clothing (or, here in the Bay Area, about weirder clothing), it seems appropriate that those wacky folks at Air New Zealand have released yet another version of the mandatory safety video.

And once again, it’s all about Middle Earth.

You’ll recall that ANZ produced a safety video a couple of years ago featuring hobbits and elves and the orcs I always seem to end up sitting next to in coach. They also have used Betty White and Love Boat retirees, as well as Richard Simmons in their quest to ensure that passengers pay attention.

The production this year features cameos by a few actors from Peter Jackson’s Hobbit film franchise (quelle surprise). It's being touted as "the most epic safety video ever made".  

They’re milking this “airline of Middle Earth” schtick to the full. But you must admit, they've got bags and bags of style.

Coming home

On Sunday, the US and UK withdrew their troops from Camp Leatherneck-Bastion, in Helmand province. The Afghan army will take over the joint base.

This action officially ends Britain’s combat mission that started 13 years ago. Our troops are remaining for another couple of years.

The two coalition forces lowered their flags, and bands played their national anthems, and then troops started loading onto transports.

The withdrawal on Sunday was made under tight security and a media blackout because of fears of Taliban attack. And the Washington Post reported, “On Monday, the last Marines sneaked out.”

You know, the thought of Marines “sneaking” anywhere except up on the enemy is kind of sick-making. What does that tell you about the nature of this 13-year-long war?

I am not entirely confident that the Afghans are fully ready to assume all the duties in Helmand. Since coalition forces arrived in 2001, 350 US Marines and 407 British soldiers have been killed there. I don’t like the thought of ground watered with their blood being lost to the Taliban.

But I’ll bet the families of these men and women are ecstatic that they’re on their way home.

Gratitude Monday: Multiple media

Today I’m grateful for web alternatives to radio.

Because the Bay Area’s only classical radio station, KDFC, is in a fund-raising drive, and they’re reverting to their old, pre-public radio habits.

When I first arrived here in the Valley they Call Silicon, KDFC was a commercial station, possibly about the last one in the US devoted to classical music. Although listening to them for any increment longer than five minutes made me refer to them as “classics lite”, because they never played an entire piece. The most you got was a movement from a concerto or a symphony or a sonata before a commercial came on.

But evidently even that ratio of ads-to-content wasn’t paying off, because in 2011 the station was sold to the University of Southern California, which operates KUSC as a classics-format station for LA.

Ergo the pledge breaks.

Well, fair enough.

But since they started their fall fundraiser last week, they haven’t played more than a movement from a concerto or a symphony or a sonata before they slam you with four or five minutes of pledge hype.

But they jumped the shark, in my opinion, yesterday, when they interrupted “The Heavens Are Telling” twice to ask for money.

Honest-to-Bach—how crass can you get?

Well, no—I shouldn’t ask that sort of thing. They’ll show me soon enough.

Meanwhile, I’ve got Pandora, and my own playlists that will get me through this drive just fine. So, once again—God bless the Internet.

Open air

Welcome to California:

Specifically to the heart of the Valley they call Silicon.

(This is taken from the parking lot of the Cupertino Public Library. It wasn't there last week.)

If you want to smoke, you'll have to drive to Nevada.