Scrap the Dinosaurs

Monday, August 30, 2010 by Dick.

The aesthetics police are alive and well in Vermont.

Vermontasaurus is (not really) held together with bubble gum and duct tape but nothing really is level or plumb. On the other hand, the Downing’s cross is straight, true, and well lighted. Really well lighted.

Vermontasaurus is a 25-foot-tall, 122-foot-long Americana folk art “dinosaur” that Brian Boland and a host of volunteers found in a scrap wood pile at the Post Mills airport in the town of Thetford, Vermont. The airport caters primarily to hot air balloons and gliders. The Town required a $272 permit for it. The state Natural Resources Board notified Mr. Boland he would need an Act 250 permit.

Richard and Joan Downing built a 24-foot cross outside their private chapel in Lyndon, Vermont. They light it during holy seasons. Lyndon’s development review board limited the number of days it can be lit. Officials now want the cross removed under Act 250 rules.

Blasphemy. Both cases.

Vermont’s Land Use and Development Act, Act 250 of 1970, created nine District Environmental Commissions to review large-scale development projects. The 10 criteria have changed little in 40 years; the reach of the environmental commissions has extended into everything from crosses to parades.

“It’s art, not edifice,” Brian Boland said. I agree.

Mr. Boland, a hot-air balloon designer and pilot, runs the 52-acre Post Mills airfield. He had a pile of broken wooden planks and other debris on the edge of his property. Volunteers spent nine days with splintered two-by-fours, half a bunk bed ladder, the rotted belly of a guitar, and one rule: no saws, no rulers and no materials other than what was in the scrap pile.

The result of random carpentry is a Shelburne Museum -sized slice of roadside American folk art that made the Smithsonian Magazine.

Lyndon’s Municipal Manager Dan Hill said that Act 250 decision came because the cross’ “aesthetics it did not meet the character of the neighborhood.”

Right. The Downings own about 800 acres of rolling Vermont land. They opened the chapel five years ago, in 2005, for their family of seven children and the 35 foster children. The chapel is open to the public. They added the cross two years later. Three other Dozule crosses have been built in Vermont.

The neighbors who apparently do not drive around looking at holiday lights in the neighborhood at Christmas, say the cross looks like a neon sign for a business.

“We just think that they’re infringing on our rights to practice our religion, and I think that they’ve gone a little too far in this case,” Mr. Downing told News Channel 5.

The state has not yet decided if a permit is required or, as Mr. Boland says he might have to dismantle Vermontasaurus entirely.

Lyndon expects a court ruling on the cross in November.

A man’s home apparently is no longer his castle in (liberal) Vermont where the neighbor and the state knows better than the landowner.

Here in Vermont, people believe the ultra-restrictive state land-use law can override the Constitution and that this is a good thing.

The Boland and Downing position is very simple. They have every right to do pretty much anything but spread bedbugs or shoot at their neighbors on their own land.

Posted in Sociology, Politics & News, PC, Big Thoughts, Random Access | 2 Comments »

Wordless Wednesday

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 by Dick.

Posted in Wordless | 2 Comments »

Arithmetic

Tuesday, August 24, 2010 by Dick.

Me berry bad. Me make you do math again.

The number of spam and bot posts arriving in the comments section is steadily rising. Steven Herod’s “simple math question” in the Did You Pass Math plug-in had stopped that dead-in-the-water, so I have to turn it back on.

Here’s the best way to make sure you don’t get caught by the fact that your arithmetic skills are likely far better than Mr. Herod’s: compose your comments in your favorite word processor and paste them into the comment section or simply press [Control+A] to select your prose, and [Control+C] to copy it, before hitting the Submit Copy button.

Cheers!

Posted in Extras!, Welcome | 1 Comment »

Bell’s Blues

Monday, August 23, 2010 by Dick.

Google denied selling out network neutrality with Verizon earlier this month but the ballistic blogosphere bucked that.

You may recall that Google and Verizon unveiled a plan on August 9 that would prohibit wireline operators from discriminating on the open Internet but proposed a second, closed (mobile) Internet where they could do just that.

Turns out that BP’s Tony Hayward has assumed the helm of the joint GOOG-VZ P.R. department.

[Important Note: The following column appeared under this same title in the Burlington Free Press in March of 1997.]

“Hang on. I dropped the phone.”

Like the toilet, the telephone is the household appliance that must perform faithfully every time you need to make a call.

Once upon a time the telephone came one style (Durable Dial), one color (Bell Black). One monopoly served everyone. Local calls were unlimited, operators assisted, phone bills were reasonable, and the phones stood up to the occasional gambol on the kitchen floor.

Then, with a swipe of the judicial pen, “Ma Bell” split into AT&T and all the regional Baby Bells like New England Bell. Phone bills soared. We all had to buy cheap phones that bounce poorly. Trust in the phone company went down the toilet.

Heard at a Vermont IGA, “Their minutes last 53 seconds.”

[Historical Note: New England Bell spawned NYNEX which in turn merged with Bell Atlantic and spawned Verizon which sold out to Fairpoint which went bankrupt. See how that works?]

Thanks to the Vermont Telecommunications Agreement, NYNEX gave us measured service. In phone company parlance, measured service counts each instant of local phone use. Then they bill us. NYNEX sold measured service to Vermonters by saying it controls our local telephone costs.

Sure. The old way, we paid $19.63 every month.

Measured service means we can’t “pay any more that $26.67.” If you manage not to use their minimum daily allowance, you’ll pay only $19.52.

Here’s the scoop. NYNEX “gives” us a $6.95 worth of message units each month. Every message unit amounts to one minute on the phone. More or less. When you use more message units, NYNEX bills you. NYNEX charges you for each whole minute’s worth if you use even a single second. Even if you get a wrong number. If I use less than my allotment, does NYNEX give me a discount? No. They just make more profit.

Who counts those minutes? The electric company puts their meters where we can see them. When I pump gasoline into my car, the readout tells me how much in thousandths of gallons. I’ve always wondered why I need that kind of precision.

I installed a phone timer to record every outgoing call; the log shows whether the call is peak or off-peak. The local usage charge on my bill has never come within 10% of the total shown in the log. Since NYNEX apparently cannot count, I guess I do need the gas pump kind of precision in my phone bill. Wasn’t NYNEX forced to return a $15 million excess profit?

Maybe that’s why they needed an 8.2% rate increase [then].

Measured service is such a delicious oxymoron. It positions its purveyors perfectly in a world where decamping lovers practice “cruel kindness,” a computer crash can cause a “partial shutdown” in your life, and “call answering” leads to a heartfelt conversation with a computer voice.

Almost everyone has a phone story. Your state Public Service Board wants to hear yours. Speak up at public hearings; write to them in your state capitol. If one or two of us sing loud and long, it might sound like a song from Woodstock. If a hundred of us serenade them, they’ll think it’s a movement. And if they get letters by the mailbag, who knows, NYNEX might get some competition. With more than one dial tone provider looking for your business, Vermonters might get nicer phone bills.

There is another way. A NYNEX representative told me she has had measured service for a few years, and it doesn’t cost her any extra.

“How so?” I asked.

“I don’t make any calls.”

Back to Verizon and Google. The Internet will be open but not the mobile Internet.

The big players say it is to protect bandwidth.

Some of the talking heads agree and note it is to protect (phone company) revenue.

The Media and Democracy Coalition, for example, noted that this have-have not system “could further widen the digital divide, particularly for those that rely primarily or exclusively on wireless Internet access, as do many individuals in rural areas, and many low-income consumers. It may also create a barrier to entry by independent creators, entrepreneurs and startups.”

That’s true but there is a bigger issue.

Remember the NYNEX message units? Verizon does. You pay them every time you dial your cellular phone.

Bank of America will test a system that bills consumers for purchases they make with their mobile phones. The initial mobile payments test, beginning in New York City next month, includes BP gas stations, New York City taxis, Burger King and McDonald’s restaurants, Home Depot, and the Walgreen’s and CVS drug store chains.

Mobile payments. Phone company collectors with baseball bats.

Mobile payments are especially popular in Asia and Europe where consumer use smartphones to pay for goods and services. The billing uses SMS-based transactions, “direct mobile billing,” mobile web payments (WAP), or the fastest-growing contactless NFC (Near Field Communication). Most purchases are for digital goods (music and videos, ebooks, online games, and the like), bus fares or parking meters, and burgers.

Experts say the market for mobile payments will exceed $600 billion globally in less than three years. That’s almost as much as the AIG bailout.

And you think Google and Verizon aren’t slobbering to skim that?

Remember the former Soviet republic of Moldova? About the same time in 1997 that I reported the NYNEX fleecing of Vermonters, that tiny country gave us the Moldovan horse, a Trojan horse that hijacked customers’ modems and dialed up Eastern Europe, at tens or hundreds or even a thousand dollars per minute. Victims ended up with phone bills that cost more than their cars.

AT&T’s Fraud Control Group got involved. The FTC investigated intensively. And while that was going on the phone company mafia kept collecting on those thousand-dollar phone bills.

Are these the peeps you want in charge of your Visa bill?

Google says their mobile Internet plan is “compromising not selling out.”

Uh huh. And NYNEX said the check was in the mail and they won’t … well, you know the rest.

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Breaking News:
Verizon Wireless will pay about $90 million to 15 million cellphone customers who were wrongly charged in one of the largest-ever refunds by a telecommunications company.

Posted in History, Business, Tech Toys, Politics & News, Random Access | 2 Comments »

Today’s the Day My Wife Met My Girlfriend

Sunday, August 22, 2010 by Dick.

I am not Yale Marrat.

In that novel, Robert H. Rimmer turned the story of one man’s unconventional marriage to two women into a national controversy. Although my daughter has always said my life is a country song and while my controversy has not played out on the national stage, it does affect people in many states.

My name is Dick Harper and I haven’t cheated on my wife.

But I do love — and am in love with — two women and I’m shouting it from the rooftops!

[This is the final piece in our ongoing polylocution puzzle about boundless love. You really really want to read gekko’s companion piece, Going All the Way (Poly, Part 4).]

If you have hung in through eight or ten blogs and more than a hundred comments, you may have guessed there is something special between Nancy Ahern and me. She gives me great joy.

For the record, Anne not only knows about Nancy, she knows Nancy and she gave us her blessing. They have partied together. Anne stayed in the house of Murphy and Teegan when the girls attended a NASCAR race together without me. With all of that, she does not approve of this lifetime friendship and love.

For more than 30 years, Anne and I have shared the deaths of our parents and the lives of our children and grandchildren and coming great-grandchild, job gains and job losses, old house hassles, used dog stores, baking cookies and fixing furnaces, … and laughter. We have two important things in common: we like elephants and peanut butter. April 1 is our anniversary. No Foolin’.

Dr. Phil calls what we’re doing “right.”

For more than 7 years, Nancy and I have shared the travails of our parents and our children, job gains and job losses, real estate conundrums, used dog stores, hermitting and hanging mirrors, … and laughter. We have two important things in common: we like Mets baseball and we’re both paper-trained. Today is our anniversary.

Dr. Phil calls what we’re doing “wrong.”

The Victorian standard of serial polygamy holds that “one must fall out of love with someone old when he or she falls in love with someone new…”

I disagree. The point is not to lose your love for someone “old” but rather to expand it. Love may give us energy but it acts exactly like entropy.

Entropy measures the disorder or chaos of a system. Energy is finite but the entropy — the carrier of energy — of the Universe is always increasing.

Love can assuredly be chaotic but only those selling unhappiness would want to limit how much love we can have in our lives.

Only those selling unhappiness
would limit how much love
we can have in our lives.

By now, you may think that the people I love or the people Anne loves have somehow lessened my love for her. Nope. She and I have been friends and lovers for a big part of our “grownup” lives. That hasn’t changed.

By now, you may also think you know what is going on between Nancy and me. I won’t tell you if we are sexually intimate, because that is not your business. I will tell you we have been lovers and best friends for seven years today, because that is.

I fell for the beautiful gekko smile; I stay for the conversation.

And that, dear reader, is making love for the rest of our lives.

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[Editor’s Note: Nancy and I are concluding this public conversation about life and love. Please read Going All the Way for her own announcement.] Next week, we return to regularly scheduled political ranting; I’ll report later on some of the difficulties we have faced.

I’m not proud of everything I’ve done.
I’m pretty sure I’d do it all again.
–Jack Nicholson in The Bucket List

Posted in Society, Poly, Random Access | 5 Comments »

Wordless Wednesday

Wednesday, August 18, 2010 by Dick.

Posted in Wordless | 2 Comments »