BP Reporter Calls Cleanup 'Ballet at Sea'
On May 28, BP-employed reporter Paula Kolmar filed this dispatch from a shrimping vessel hired to skim oil from the Gulf of Mexico before it reached Alabama's coastline:
Over about four hours we, all guests of Gulf Coast native Captain Wade and his local crew, enjoyed the spectacular ballet at sea. ...
Watching the captains weave the long black boom as seamlessly as a professional ballet troupe performs an intricate dance, I found it difficult to believe that the rehearsals only started some weeks ago. ...
Gently caressing the sea surface, the three vessels circled and swirled, guiding the boom without changing the design.
A ballet at sea as mesmerising as any performance in a concert hall, and worthy of an audience in its own right.
If you'd like to see the ballet, made possible by a contribution of 40,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, it will be running through August and may be extended into the fall.
I Fill Random Target Employees with Rage
The seven-week break I took on Workbench, which just ended 11 words ago, is the longest since I began my personal blog in 1999. I'm doing some work in social media these days and thinking about launching a new company to commercialize software I've been developing for my own use the past six years. I also am deep into the manuscript for a new edition of Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours.
My absence did not make Target employees fonder, as a recent comment to my five-year-old tale of shopping humiliation demonstrates:
Lady,
You and your disgusting, obnoxious kids are the reason people hate working at Target. You come in, with your head up your ass, while your kids act like monsters, and then are offended when an employee has the audacity to mention it to you. Is it your goal to come into the store and make everyone else around you miserable? Please, do us Team Member's a favor and take your business elsewhere.
Sincerely,
A Fed-up Employee
Sorry to tell you this, Fed Up, but my kids and I still shop at Target. I'd rather be harangued by teen-aged girls every time I visit the store than get within a mile of Wal-Mart. With your attitude and the fact you searched Google for the term Target sucks to find me, you're never going to become a Leader on Duty.
Professor Wants to Raise His Own Clone
In a draft of his upcoming book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, the economist Bryan Caplan mentions that he'd like to clone and raise himself:
I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally. Not only do they insult the identical twin sons I already have; they insult a son I hope I live to meet. Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I'm sure we'd share. I'm confident that he'd be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me. I'm not pushing others to clone themselves. I'm not asking anyone else to pay for my dream. I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone. Is that too much to ask?
I'm surprised that Caplan takes it as a given that his son would be "delighted" by such a scenario. His clone wouldn't be raised by the same parents that he was, but instead would have a father with an extreme sense of his child's likes, dislikes, talents and flaws. That influence -- likely to be domineering and a little creepy -- would produce a much different person over the span of a childhood than how he turned out.
Caplan writes that he has twin sons, but they must not be very old yet or he'd realize that his clone will reject some of dad's traits on principle. Kids have a natural inclination to do things differently than their parents. With my three partial clones, if I'm trying to persuade them to try an activity or a hobby, the least persuasive argument I can use is that I liked it when I was their age.
So no matter how many genes we share, none of my sons will watch One Life to Live with me.
How Johannes Kepler Discovered Sex
San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Mark Fiore won the Pulitzer Prize yesterday for his animated political cartoons. His work appears exclusively online, so it's the first time a non-print cartoonist has won the Pulitzer in its history.
One of his submitted cartoons was Science-Gate, which mocks the scandal over the ClimateGate emails in the style of an overheated political ad.
All of the quotes scribbled by the scientists in this cartoon are real, including a jaw-dropping one by the 16th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler about how he had sex with a virgin:
I suffered continually from skin ailments, often severe sores, often from the scabs of chronic putrid wounds in my feet which healed badly and kept breaking out again. On the middle finger of my right hand I had a worm, on the left a huge sore. ... At Cupinga's I was offered union with a virgin; on New Year's Eve I achieved this with the greatest possible difficulty, experiencing the most acute pains of the bladder.
This Kepler quote comes from an essay by Evan S. Connell printed in his book The Aztec Treasure House.
Kepler was 21 when he started the New Year off with a bang. He suffered from "boils, mange, smallpox, hemorrhoids, constant stomach trouble, and such bad eyesight that he often saw his world doubled or quadrupled," Connell writes. "He seems to have been impatient, sarcastic, cowardly and stingy, and he almost never bathed."
Candidate Fakes Air Force One Photo
Jonathan Bourne discovered something funny on the web site of David Benning, the Republican running for Congress against Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.).
Take a look at this photo of Benning, his wife and an unidentified couple in front of the famous door of Air Force One:
The photo is displayed on Benning's about page, where it has the filename airforceone.jpg. But as Bourne reveals, Benning wasn't actually rubbing elbows with the president and other high fliers:
Turns out the photo is of SAM 27000, the decommissioned Air Force One that has been an attraction at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley since 2005.
Anyone willing to pay the $12 admission fee can get his photo taken in front of the former Air Force One (copies of the photos are extra). How do I know this? Well, I had my photo taken with the Presidential prop last January.
Not only did Benning spend time on Air Force One, he was also SportsToday magazine's athlete of the year.
Thousands of Consumers Sue Debt Collectors
The web site Credit Reporting & Debt Collection News claims that Chrystal A. Snow's $8.1 million debt collector judgment is a function of Texas law that would not be possible under the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA):
The FDCPA does NOT allow for PUNITIVE damages unless it is a CLASS ACTION.
The lack of punitive damages is a MAJOR flaw in the FDCPA. Debt collectors and debt buyers have NOTHING to worry about in MOST states, with California and Texas being notable exceptions.
The "up to" $1,000 in statutory damages in the FDCPA leaves collectors laughing all the way to their offshore bank accounts.
There's an amazing amount of litigation being pursued in debt collection, both by collectors pursuing unpaid debt and consumers claiming legal violations in how they've been treated.
In January, the Dallas Observer profiled Craig Cunningham, a Dallas man heavily in debt who has made thousands of dollars suing debt collectors:
While most Americans with unpaid bills dread the collector's call, Cunningham sees them as lucrative opportunities. Many collection and credit card companies, intentionally or not, violate little-known consumer rights laws, and Cunningham's favorite pastime is catching them doing so and then suing them. ...
While the FTC gets the bulk of consumer complaints, today more consumers are fighting back with their own lawsuits than ever before. In 2009, nearly 10,000 cases under FDCPA, FCRA or TCPA statutes were filed around the country, mostly in federal courts. That's a 50 percent increase from 2008, and an 83 percent growth from 2007.
A cottage industry has sprung up to counter the flood of cases. Two new companies now offer the credit and collection industries databases of repeat plaintiffs filing under the FDCPA.
Cunningham represents himself in the suits. He's suing one collector for $200,000 over how it pursued a $79.84 Time Warner bill.
Blogger Suggests Debt Collection Story is Bogus
Lambert Strether, the founder of the liberal blog Corrente Wire, has suggested that my story on the woman who sued the debt collector might be a hoax:
The story (cross-posted here) is sourced to a phone interview with the woman's lawyer, Ross Teter. The best I can find in a quick search is this court docket item. I would want to make very, very certain that this story isn't really a way of propagating links to the "credit repair" services and forums, whose links appear further down in the article.
The name of the plaintiff, "Chrystal A. Snow", appears only here in Google news.
I tried to post a comment there but new accounts require administrative approval.
I confirmed the existence of the lawsuit by calling Dallas County Court-at-Law No. 4 and got the details of the judgment in a phone interview with Chrystal A. Snow's attorney Ross Teter. The case number is 08-05810-D for anyone who'd like to track it down.
The reason Strether could not find independent corroboration of the story by searching Google News is because the case has not received any media attention. There's only one blog that found it before I did: The law offices of Dean Malone in Dallas covered the suit last November and published a scan of 16 pages from the jury findings.
I do not have any relationship with the credit repair expert quoted in the article. I found her through the large number of messages on her online forum about lawsuits filed by Midland Funding LLC.
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