Living La Vida Del Boca Vista

On one of the Seinfeld episodes where Jerry visited his parents' insane retirement community Del Boca Vista Phase II, a map showed that it was in North Florida in the vicinity of St. Augustine.

I was reminded of that yesterday when I faced lines 10-15 people deep to buy two-cent stamps and mail some overdue bills. First-class stamps increased from 37 to 39 cents on Sunday because of a 2003 law requiring the Postal Service to put $3 billion in escrow. There's no stated need for this "rainy-day fund" -- I'm guessing Congress wants another stack of money they can borrow for other purposes, carrying on the pretense that Republicans never raise taxes.

Two post offices and a bookstore that mails packages were a sea of seniors. One in five residents of St. Johns County is retirement age. All of them wanted two-cent stamps.

These 50-per-dollar stamps are so cheap that it seems like you're getting a great deal, so people can't resist the urge to horde them after a rate increase. A post office in Arizona sold its entire allotment of 10,000 in less than an hour.

I don't want to speak ill of my gray-haired homies, because they're generally a nice group of people who share my belief that five miles over the speed limit is plenty fast. But when you take rambunctious kids around large crowds of senior citizens, there's always a few who greet the children with a look of abject terror, fearing that they'll be bowled over and break another hip. The boys don't always allay this concern -- at a Publix supermarket, they once staged an impromptu obstacle course race using several of them as human traffic cones.

Lining up for stamps yesterday, everyone but me was empty-handed, so I know they weren't urgently mailing letters. They were just being conscientious by getting the stamps promptly, which annoyed the hell out of me. That's exactly the kind of thoughtful foresight that stuck them with a bunch of 37-cent stamps.

Florida · Jacksonville · 2006/01/10 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Mexico Bars Canadian over U.S. No-Fly List

A story today in the Canadian media ought to get more coverage in the U.S.: American fighter jets intercepted a Air Transat plane flying from Toronto to Ixtapa, Mexico, on Thursday because a passenger appears on the U.S. no-fly list.

Canadian citizen Sami Kahil, 38, was denied entry to Mexico and detained one night in jail, then sent home in the company of Royal Canadian Mounted Police:

U.S. fighter jets shadowed Kahil's flight after American officials declared the plane was not cleared to travel over the U.S. with Kahil on board.

While his wife and sons were sent home on the next flight to Toronto, Kahil was told he could not board the flight because U.S. authorities would not let him fly over U.S. airspace.

Kahil, a shoe store owner in Ontario, was vacationing with his wife and two young sons. He has not been charged with any crime related to the incident.

During the flight to Mexico, which did not have a layover in the U.S., the pilot informed the passengers:

Kahil, who was taking his family on a sun vacation to celebrate his 10th wedding anniversary, said his flight was approaching Ixtapa when the pilot announced over a loudspeaker that "they had two people who are not allowed to fly over American airspace.

"You should have seen the faces of the passengers," said Kahil.

NORAD monitored the flight and it was accompanied by either F-15s or F-16s, according to the Toronto Star.

The Washington Post reported in April that the U.S. was considering a measure to demand passenger lists and enforce no-fly rules of all foreign flights that pass through U.S. airspace. This would affect as many as 1,000 international flights and 3,000 domestic flights each week in Canada, because domestic routes often pass over the U.S..

Politics · 2006/01/08 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

Art Bell's Wife Dies Unexpectedly

Ramona Bell, the wife of syndicated radio legend Art Bell, died unexpectedly Thursday at age 47 while vacationing with her husband in Laughlin, Nev., according to an announcement by Coast to Coast AM, the program Bell founded and still occasionally hosts.

"At present, the exact cause of Mrs. Bell's death has not been determined," the announcement states. "It apparently took place during her sleep." An asthma sufferer for years, Ramona Bell reportedly experienced an attack before her death.

The Bells married in the early '90s after meeting as coworkers at radio station KWDN in Las Vegas. Art Bell broadcast his show from the couple's home in Pahrump, Nev., a remote desert town 50 miles from Las Vegas near Area 51, where Ramona booked guests and handled many other duties. The couple also own FM radio station KNYE, an eclectic oldies station they began in Pahrump four years ago.

Though Bell has not been an everyday radio host since 2002, he appears weekends on Coast to Coast, engages regularly in ham radio chats at call sign W60BB and is frequently seen on his studio webcam. The photo of the Bells ringing in the New Year was one of dozens contributed by fans to an Art Bell online forum since Ramona's death.

As befitting a host who became famous for covering paranormal subjects, Bell once claimed to have seen a UFO while driving with his wife, according to a July 13, 1998, Newsweek article:

Four years ago he and Ramona were driving around 2 am. on the lonely stretch of road leading to their house. "Coming up from behind us. oh my God, was a gigantic triangular craft," says Bell. "It had a strobing red light on the front and a white light on each back point. We watched it float across the valley for five minutes, before we lost sight of it."

Update: Art Bell remarried in April and announced plans to leave the U.S.

Radio · 2006/01/07 · 818 COMMENTS · Link

Stone Cold Lock: Jacksonville Over New England

I'm one of the founders of SportsFilter, a 4,500-member sports community weblog built on the MetaFilter code base that's been football-crazed as the NFL playoffs begin. I wrote a column this afternoon on Saturday's Jaguars-Patriots wild card game:

Before Super Bowl XX in 1986, all-pro defensive back Raymond Clayborn predicted that his New England Patriots would defeat the Chicago Bears.

I don't know who Clayborn likes in Saturday's wild-card playoff between the Patriots and Jacksonville Jaguars, but the visiting Jags will defeat the league champs and end Tom Brady's perfect 9-0 record in the postseason. Mark it down. Stone cold lock. Guarantee of the year. Clean out your 401K, steal grandma's retirement savings, max out the credit cards, rob your coke dealer and put all of that money on the 8-point underdog to win.

Florida · Jacksonville · Sports · 2006/01/06 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Serenity Doesn't Have a Prayer

Joss Whedon, the creator of the film Serenity and the Firefly TV series that preceded it, offers a correction to an Entertainment Weekly item declaring an end to the franchise:

EW is a fine rag, but they do take things out of context. Obviously when I said I had 'closure', what I meant was "I hate Serenity, I hated Firefly, I think my fans are stupid and Nathan Fillion smells like turnips." But EW's always got to put some weird negative spin on it.

Geeks love Serenity, a great space western that's now a role-playing game, comic book and action figures with 14 points of articulation.

The rest of the world keeps trying to kill it off. The TV series was cancelled in 2002 after only 11 episodes and the $40 million film earned only $25 million at the box office.

Wikipedia still harbors a grudge against Fox:

Firefly was promoted as an action-comedy rather than the more serious character study it was intended to be. Episodes were occasionally preempted for sporting events, and episodes were not aired in storyline-chronological order as the creators had intended.

Television · Movies · 2006/01/06 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

My Guid Could Beat Up Your Guid

Workbench was named Feedster's Feed of the Year, leading Greg Knauss to send this congratulatory e-mail:

I've thought for a long time that Workbench's RSS 2.0 feed was really well-formed, and its use of optional attributes exemplary. He's got a well-designed guid format, and his output in areas where the standards document is ambiguous* is always consistent.

What? They were talking about the content, too? Even better!

* No, I couldn't resist.

I've been hoping for years that someone would peek beneath Workbench's HTML representation and notice the cut of its guid. I was so excited about the Tag URI scheme back in 2004 that I gave myself one: People may describe me unambiguously throughout the world as tag:cadenhead.org,2004-05-17:Rogers.

Under the scheme, an item in a syndicated feed can be given a globally unique identifier like this:

tag:cadenhead.org,2004:weblog.2839

The tag consists of four things:

1. The text "tag:"
2. A domain you control, followed by a comma
3. A date or year you controlled the domain, followed by a colon
4. A unique ID you don't use for an item on any other site

For this weblog, the unique ID is "weblog." followed by the entry's primary key in the MySQL database. If a service like Feedster reads this guid, it won't save the same item from Workbench more than once in its database, no matter how many feeds the entry turns up in.

In October, the TAG URI scheme was published as RFC 4151.

Journalism · 2006/01/04 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Little Red Book, Big Fat Apology

New Bedford Standard-Times Editor Bob Unger has responded to the Little Red Book hoax that ran in the newspaper, acknowledging that the original story should not have run until they interviewed the student making the claim:

We -- reporter and editors -- failed here because we put our faith in what two college professors told us. We should have held off publishing the story until we had a chance to judge the student's credibility for ourselves.

The student's name continues to be kept private, to the chagrin of bloggers calling for his head. I originally believed that he should be named, like any confidential source who burns a journalist with knowingly false information, but it's worth noting that the student didn't talk to reporter Aaron Nicodemus until after the first story ran.

Politics · Journalism · 2006/01/04 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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