lunacy on Clearwater Beach

I live in a city that was once known as a beautiful small town on the Gulf of Mexico. Lately, it shows evidence of being governed by imbeciles. But first, take a look at the following and tell me what you think:

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/02/01/Northpinellas/Deal_for_beach_parkin.shtml

I think this is lunacy. The city is removing, within the next few weeks, more than 500 of the 755 public parking spaces on Clearwater Beach to make way for a "revitalization" project. If we wait two years (perhaps riding bicycles to the beach in the meantime), we might be allowed to park in some of the spaces to be built for a Hyatt hotel.

Now the city is ready to spend $9 million for 300 spaces in a garage to be built more than a block from the beach for a condominium project. That garage might be available in two years, if all goes well. We are asked to be grateful because the City has set aside more than $12 million from a local tax called "Penny for Pinellas" for a parking garage, and the leftover cash can be spent on other "big-ticket city projects."

The City has a plan for the beach they call "Beach by Design." It is supposed to mean revitalization. I call it slow death. Hundreds of hotel rooms have already disappeared. The parking will all but disappear just in time for spring break and the summer tourist season.

A vast horde of winter (and summer) visitors no longer patronize shops and restaurants on the beach because they cannot stay there. I fear that their absence will be construed as meaning the beach needs less parking - a vicious cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I hope the City does not begin removing parking spaces from the beach until the voters have had their say on renewing "Penny for Pinellas," which comes up for a vote next month. I predict the tax will be trashed by voters who are tired of seeing vast sums of money spent on big-ticket city projects. Removing the spaces now runs the risk that the beach will be left in the lurch with totally inadequate parking, no money in the slush fund, and no relief in sight.

Why should I care, you might ask? I have lived in this town, off and on, since 1955. Every other town in this county looks better than it did ten years ago. My hometown is slowly going down the sewer pipe.

off to see the queen

We went off to see the queen last week - the movie, that is. "The Queen" was nominated for various awards and I think the lead actress won a trophy but I don't keep up with all that celebrity nonsense. But you've got to see the movie.

The royal family probably hated it but it gave us a behind-the-scenes view of what life must be like for Queen Elizabeth and it also lets us know that there is a real personality behind that stoic face. The story takes place right after Princess Diana was killed, which was very stressful for a lot of people including the Queen and her family. She wanted to keep it all private - that is, keep out of it entirely - because Diana was no longer "HRH." Eventually she had to give way, of course. Her ancestors could ignore public opinion, but that isn't the modern way of doing things and Tony Blair was newly elected and anxious to "modernize" UK government.

Who knew that Queen Elizabeth has had ten prime ministers, beginning with Winston Churchill? Who knew that the custom is for the newly elected prime minister to kneel before the Queen so she can ask if he will form her government for her (and the traditional answer is "yes")?

Who knew that she was a mechanic during "the war" (WWII) and is at home behind the steering wheel of a Land Rover, driving over country trails and across rivers?

Who knew that she could become teary-eyed upon seeing a 14-point deer that the hunters (including her grandsons) were after, and would shoo it away? Who knew that she hoped it didn't suffer after being wounded and then killed by somebody from a neighboring estate, in Scotland? Reality or metaphor, the deer scenes are powerful.

And who would know that kilts look like normal clothing when worn by the men of the royal family?

You've got to see the movie to believe all this.

Uncle Jack turns 89!

I hope I look this good at Uncle Jack's age. He has slowed down physically but his mind is still sharp.

One of his nieces gave him a computer game about World War II but his computer needs more memory to run it. It's his computer that has a memory problem, not his mind. That may be what a lifetime of reading can do for you!

That's his sister, Sally, with him. She and several carloads of family showed up yesterday at his and Geri's home for a surprise birthday party. Caught him by surprise, too.

little things

This turned up in my in-box, and it may or may not be entirely true but it makes an important point:

The head of a company survived 9/11 because his son started kindergarten that morning.
Another fellow is alive because it was his turn to bring donuts.
One woman was late because her alarm clock didn't go off in time.
One was late because of being stuck on the NJ Turnpike because of an auto accident.
One of them missed his bus.

One spilled food on her clothes and had to take time to change.
One's car wouldn't start.
One went back to answer the telephone.
One had a child that dawdled and didn't get ready as soon as he should have.
One couldn't get a taxi.

One man put on a new pair of shoes that morning. Before he got to work, he developed a blister on his foot. He stopped at a drugstore to buy a Band-Aid. That is why he is alive today.

Now when I am stuck in traffic, miss an elevator, turn back to answer a ringing telephone . . . all the little things that annoy me . . . I think to myself, this is exactly where God wants me to be at this very moment.

Next time your morning seems to be going wrong, the children are slow getting dressed, you can't find the car keys, or you hit every traffic light, don't get mad or frustrated. May God continue to bless you with all those annoying little things. Remember that there may be some good purpose for your being exactly where you at that moment in time.

thinking ahead to the Super Bowl

It's been two weeks since I last blogged. I wonder if anybody noticed.

It is good, very good, to see Tony Dungy taking the Indianapolis Colts to the Super Bowl. He left a lot of fans behind in the Tampa Bay area when he was fired after the 2001 season. (How can fans fire the owners? Not buying tickets is the only way I can think of.) He is a class act and he knows football. When he arrived in 1996 the Bucs had had 13 consecutive losing seaons. Less than two years later they won a playoff game. He left a Bucs team good enough to win after the 2002 season.

This will be the first time a black head coach has taken a team to the Super Bowl in the 41-year history of the Super Bowl but, technically, he won't be the first. There will be two of them this year and Coach Lovie Smith beat him to it when the Chicago Bears won earlier in the day. Smith is another class act. He and Dungy are going to upgrade the Super Bowl to a nice-guy competition, imagine that.

Dungy hired Smith for his first NFL job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1996. Long-suffering Bucs fans have kept track of former Bucs players who have done good elsewhere and now we have the spectacle of two former coaches who have become head coaches elsewhere in the NFL and they have done just fine without the Bucs' organization and fickle fan support.

I'm not even a huge football fan. But I will be watching the game on Super Bowl Sunday, and I hope Tony Dungy and the Colts go all the way.

go, Gators

Being an FSU alumnus, I don't normally cheer for any team representing slithery reptiles from an institution of higher learning located in Hogtown, Florida. (That was the earlier name for Gainesville, renamed in honor of a Civil War general after the railroad came through. Hogtown is not a dignified name for a railroad station. They have a creek running through town, still named Hogtown Creek.)

Having said that, I'll be cheering for the Gators against Ohio State tonight for a couple of reasons. One is that the Gators are in the game and the FSU team is at home watching on TV. The other is that I still remember the sight of Coach Woody Hayes throwing a punch at a player from the other team when he got too close to the Ohio State sideline.

But if the Gators win, I won't be out in the streets setting fire to anything. I hope I'm still awake by the time the game ends. I'll be mumbling "go, Gators" with my eyes half closed.

Go, Gators.

ZZZzzzzz. . .

my kind of book

The following is borrowed shamelessly from the St. Petersburg Times and the Associated Press:

There's a new book out about messy homes, offices, and lives, just in time for New Year's. The message is, stop worrying about it!

That's the case outlined by Eric Abrahamson, a professor of management at Columbia University, and journalist David H. Freedman in their new book, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder.

Rather than feeling guilty about resolutions you have no intention of keeping, check out this list of New Year's anti-resolutions suggested by Freedman, also a columnist at Inc. magazine.

[condensed version follows]

- Feel fine about having a moderately cluttered house. A moderately messy home feels warmer, and more comfortable and nurturing, and reflects the interests and activities of the family. When people resonding to a survey calculated the amount of time they spent searching for misplaced items, it carved a mere nine minutes from their day.

- Feel fine about having a somewhat dirty house. Overexposure to fumes from cleaning products is a bigger risk than clutter or grime. Studies have found that children with limited exposure to dust and allergens are more likely to develop allergies later in life.

- Be more disorganized with your time. If you pack many rigidly scheduled tasks into the day, you'll shortchange almost everyone you deal with.

[here's my favorite]
- Have a messy desk. "Messy desks can be highly functional, with the most-needed documents ending up at hand and the less-important ones buried. People who said they keep a 'very neat desk' spend an average of 36 percent more time looking for things at work than people who said they keep a 'fairly messy' desk."

- Don't fight with partners or children over messiness. Studies have shown that kids study and function very well in messy environments.

[and here's my second favorite]
- Procrastinate more. "Procrastination is a form of prioritizing, and of letting as many things as possible take care of themselves or become irrelevant over time, without your having to waste effort on them."

I could buy this book but it would get lost in the clutter. I'll wait until the public library gets a recorded copy on CDs that I can play in my car going to and from work.

thoughts on another new year

The calendar has flipped its pages, and once again I am fooled into thinking this is a terribly significant event.

New Year's Day does make you ask some basic questions such as, why am I here, where did I come from, and where am I going, but these are questions we ought to ask every morning when we roll out of bed, or at least every Sunday when a fresh new week begins.

New Year's Day does give you some incentive to get started on long overdue projects like ridding the garage and closets of junk, trash, and unused neckties, but Saturday mornings are just as good a time as any to do that.

New Year's Day also give you another incentive to begin to think about getting ready to commence preparing for income tax day, but hey, not this week. Let's get the Christmas bills under control first.

I like New Year's Day. The shortest day of the year is behind us and the days are getting longer, again. It marks the middle of a relatively slack time where I work, and makes me want to do a little organizing of the debris that piles up during the year. This is why stores sell those huge boxes with lids for packing and storing stuff. What I really want is an industrial grade paper shredder than can handle a shovel full of paper at a time.

Our friends and relatives know not to expect a Christmas card from us before Christmas. We've sometimes mailed them before New Year's Day, but not this year. If we get them out before Valentine's Day, that's not too late. Christmas is something to celebrate all year long, anyway, right? Mailing Christmas cards is another way we celebrate the beginning of a new year. Maybe we'll get them out early next time. Or maybe not.

Merry Christmas from Florida no. 2

Behold the Christmas Cactus. We've discovered the secret for growing one: Hang it in a protected place and ignore it (but water now and then):

Merry Christmas from Florida

This wreath was put together by one of our daughters from Boston using boughs from her brother's Christmas tree in Colorado. He and his wife are due in this evening, so this wreath is perfectly symbolic of having a family home for Christmas, or most of us, anyway. They wanted warm weather and they will get it, all week. Merry Christmas!

Aunt Susie meets Santa

"Meets" isn't the right word, here. When you are 91 years old, you've developed a long-standing friendship with the old boy. She was concerned that she was too old to sit in his lap, but everybody around her told her you are never too old. She almost had him sitting in her lap.

Aunt Susie turns 91

May we all look so good when we are this close to a century! (As usual, click on the photo to enlarge.)

congratulations, me

Time Magazine has named "you," meaning me (and by inference, you, because you are reading this), as "Person of the Year" for 2006. The theory is that I, and my roughly seven faithful readers, are controlling the Information Age. We are engaged in community and collaboration. We are writing WikiPedia, an on-line encyclopedia of dubious integrity, and we are loading up servers and filling the ether with home movies of our pet iguanas and photos of our tattoos on YouTube and MySpace.

Time Magazine has made a serious argument for bringing their silly tradition of naming sombody as the Person of the Year to a conclusion. Now.

Never mind the madmen who are murdering people around the world; never mind people like Bill and Linda Gates who are trying to find a good and humanitarian use for their billions of dollars; never mind . . . OK, you get the point. You could name somebody worthy of the honor.

But seriously, one person? for an entire year? for the entire world? Naming "you" as the person of the year is an easy out, and an admission that the concept is absurd.

If you want a more honest view of 2006, check out the St. Petersburg Times' annual Sour Orange Awards or Esquire Magazine's Dubious Achievements issue.

finally

I promised to stay on the positive side for the rest of the holiday season. As you can see, I haven't been inspired to say much on the positive side.

I could tell you about my new HD television and my new DVD player that will "play" digital photos on the TV screen. We had friends over the other night who put on a spectacular digital slide show with their photos from Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and other places you've got to see to really appreciate. I could tell you how I got my audio hooked up digitally to my surround-sound system. But that would sound like bragging.

No, the good news for today is that we (the city I work for) won a federal lawsuit involving billboards. Not the huge kind of billboard you see along the Interstate Highway, but little mini-billboards that have sprouted up around town like weeds, renting at $7.00 a day. Some of them have been around for years, which was one of their arguments against code enforcement.

This case has been pending in court for more than a year since the last activity in the case. For the past six months, the case has been in an "any-day-now" status and the waiting has just about driven me crazy. (It would have been a very short drive.) We get notices of activities in the case electronically and I've been looking at my email morning, noon and night, waiting for notice that the word has come down from the mountain.

The case is not terribly monumental in the overall history of American jurisprudence but it will help our city look better and the decision meant a lot to me. I am not a gracious loser to begin with, and this one attracted the attention of one of our High Officials. Losing the case could have been career-threatening.

It ain't over yet. The fat lady doesn't sing until the appeal period has expired (or, if appealed, until that's been decided). But I've seen the fat lady in the dressing room, warming up her vocal cords, and she's wearing our costume. She's a very pretty fat lady and I hope she doesn't go wandering off too far.

move over, Sean Connery

I've been a fan of Sean Connery since 'way back, beginning with his best James Bond film, From Russia with Love. That movie is my "gold standard" for Bond films and Connery has always been, in my humble opinion, the best Bond actor. Until tonight.

Tonight we saw Casino Royale, with Daniel Craig as Bond. Our group of six veteran movie fans agreed that this is probably the best Bond film ever and that Craig is (take your choice but you've gotta see the movie first) every bit as good as Connery, or even better. Our six-person jury didn't take a vote on that question.

Craig doesn't look as smooth and urbane as Connery does in a dinner jacket but he is tougher than all of the other Bond actors. They ran him through some extraordinarily difficult and implausible (aren't they all) stunt scenes, but he looks like he could have done it all without stunt doubles, even when he walked through a wall after jumping from the top of one construction crane to another and onto a rooftop. Craig kept reminding me of somebody and I finally realized who: He is Steve McQueen reincarnated with slight touches of Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman when he could play a bad guy with a straight face, and the cyborg from The Terminator. Only tougher. I mean, he could take Chuck Norris.

The movie runs nearly two and a half hours but doesn't drag for one minute, even near the end. It is pure Bond. Chase scenes? Check. High stakes poker? Check. The beautiful woman? Check. One is played by Eva Green, although she's the first I can remember not willing to hop right into bed on first meeting Bond. That role is played by a beautiful Mediterranean actress, Murino, wife of one of the bad guys. We are missing only the underwater Scuba diving scenes, boat chase scenes, sky diving scenes, and skiing scenes. Hmmm, OK, it isn't the composite of all Bond movies but they promise he will be back.

Can hardly wait!

what a hoot!

What a motley collection of characters. Julianne Moore and Gwyneth Paltrow will be offended to be seen in this collection of mugshots, so don't tell them. I hope the government's face-recognition software is better than this. I was hoping Sean Connery would show up as a match:

http://www.myheritage.com

happy holidays - please!

My entries over the past several months have been on the dark side, the result of reading too much about the Current Occupant and the War for Democracy. Enough, already. Between now and the end of December I'm going to focus on good news, no matter what.

Good news from Iraq: In a story the other day about the latest round of carnage, there were a few paragraphs tucked away that sounded hopeful. In "mixed" neighborhoods, where Sunnis and Shiites live, there are Sunni families and Shiite families who are looking out for each other and protecting each other, despite the risk of being called collaborators. Friendship trumps fanaticism, how about that? Let's keep hoping. . .

Good news from Florida: Hurricane season draws to a close in a few days. This year we've had zero hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S. and only three tropical storms in Florida.

Good news from our extended family: We've made it nearly to the end of the year and everybody is doing just fine. That includes Aunt Susie, who will be 91 next month. She's been in hospitals and nursing homes since August but she's feeling no pain and has few complaints. She's getting along.

May we all get along for all of next year.

got it

Got the new TV -- a 42-inch Panasonic plasma TV. It took me all evening to set it up, mainly because I had to disassemble everything connected to the old set (DVD player, tape player, receiver, speakers) to make room for it. All that fun stuff was assembled several Christmases ago when our M.I.T. students were home for the holidays. I don't think they even looked at the manuals. Now I have to wait until the end of next week for the cable company's tech guy to come around and install the HD digital box. Here's what it looks like:
http://www.hdtvsolutions.com/Panasonic-TH-42PX6U.htm

This isn't billed as a 1080p set, but the specifications say it is compatible with 1080i and 1080p with an HDMI device connected to it.

I have no idea what that means. I'll figure it out shortly. I need a new hobby anyway and this TV may become my next one.

high tech

I'm not the highest of high-tech people. I try not to get left too far behind, although I have a tendency to hold on to high-tech toys long after they ought to be replaced. In my defense, I've gotta say that sometimes, if you wait awhile, the prices drop from outrageous to merely unreasonable and it's time to get the new toy.

Case in point: Flat-screen TV's. I don't mean those cathode-ray TV's that happen to have flat screens. I mean the truly flat, plasma or LCD television sets that look like they are painted on the wall and give you pictures that knock you out.

The first one I ever saw was in a showroom in Boston. The price was something like $10-12 thousand dollars and I would have bought one on the spot but it was too big to take home on the airplane. That, and the fact that I couldn't afford the down payment, kept me from enjoying a picture so perfect I didn't know such a thing could exist.

Happily, the prices have dropped over the years to the point that they can fit into the budget if you eliminate frivolous expenses like lunch. Santa Claus has decided that our tired old TV, the one that we fine-tune by swatting it on the side whenever the colors fade to black, is ready for replacement, and he's thinking of making an early delivery before all the stores sell out. Santa is a smart old bird.

I have another high-tech story for you. I work for a government (pronounced "gummint") agency, but I'm not in the main building. I've been wishing I had a TV in my office so I could watch meetings live but that would entail running cable into my office, probably at my personal expense. I was pondering that problem when I discovered that our meetings are now carried live over the computer by means of a thing called "streaming video." This is very cool. I've been able to listen to the audio, which means I can grab my jacket and hustle over if I need to be in attendance for some reason, but now I can watch, too.

We work with computers and e-mail, and rely upon e-mail to get work done. I've exchanged significant work product with employees I've never actually met. The dark side of that is that our system gets deluged with spam, to the tune of 30,000 pieces of spam per month. Our system of moats and dragons keeps almost all of it out. People who generate such garbage should be dragged into the streets and shot, but don't get me started on that.

post-election Blue(s)

A few quick thought before getting into the "river of steel" for the commute home:

The U.S. shifted toward blue (Democratic) last week, although Florida is more purple than blue or red. The lone dissenter on the Hillsborough County Commission, a Democrat, woke up Wednesday to discover she's now a Congresswoman in a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. That means the people who beat up on her during all her time on the county commission will have to deal with her to get favors from Congress. I can hear them pleading for bipartisanship, a word that does not exist in the Republican dictionary. Yuk, yuk,. . .

In our county we had a race between two lightweights for a seat in the State Senate. One of them (my kids know her from high school) ran what had to be the ugliest, nastiest, smear campaign in the country and I am happy to report that she lost. There were several other races that went to the victims of extremely negative campaigning. This year, a lot of voters just got sick the negative ads.

Judging from letters to the editor of the local paper, a common reaction among die-hard Republicans is, okay, let's see what kind of a mess the Democrats can create in the next two years. Two years to untangle the mess than has been created in the past six years? That's asking a lot but here's the curious thing: Some of the Democrats are more conservative that the Republicans they beat. This is going to confuse the people who can't think or speak of public issues without relying on the "liberal" and "conservative" labels.

I just finished Woodward's book, State of Denial. Everybody should read it but I caution you that it will not leave you feeling optimistic.