Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Today we did have an election in Washington state, although it wasn’t a presidential primary.  No, there were only two items on the ballot, both of them school property tax levies (in Seattle at least).  The first was a renewal of an “operating levy”, which no one had any serious opposition to.  The second was a capital/maintenance levy.  To understand the opposition to this one, you have to know about the $35 million budget shortfall discovered last year that drove the current superintendent out of his job.  Opponents say that the second levy is an attempt by the school system to fund the shortfall from taxes instead of cutting their budget in proper contrition.

My feeling is that the schools are so strapped that, even if they had anticipated the shortfall, there was no place to cut anyway, and the lapse in apprehending it merely gave students and teachers a one-year reprieve from the particularities of “no child left behind” and its progeny.  Under this assumption, the $35 million was money the system should have had in the first place, and I have no problem giving it to them retroactively.  It comes as no surprise, then, that I cajoled my kid to the polls, and we both voted for both levies.  My property tax bill includes a hefty assessment to fund the Port of Seattle, basically subsidizing businesses like fucking cruise ships that should be pulling their own weight, and I have no direct electoral influence over this assessment.  My preference would be to charge Grandma from Peoria another $5 a day to subsidize the Port, and leave the levy headroom for schools.  But that’s another kettle of dead or dying fish.

My gripe about these levies is that a lot of what they are paying for is “basic education”, which is constitutionally the responsibility of the legislature through the state’s general fund.  The idea is that, buy making more of public education the state’s responsibility, there is less tendency for rich communities, high in property tax base and low in expensive and problematic poor and bilingual kids, to create education theme parks for their kids while inner city schools rot.

In the 70s, the Seattle city schools sued the state to force it to accept and pay for this constitutional responsibility.  They won, and the result was property tax levy lids designed to prevent the aforementioned disparities, coupled with a charge to the legislature to fully fund “basic education”.

Of course, they’ve steadily reneged over the years.  They’ve been too concerned, since Republicans have surged to within a hairsbreadth of controlling the state, with tax cuts and the almost impossible calisthenic of running a progressive state budget without an income tax of any kind.  Hundreds, maybe thousands, became fabulously wealthy here in the dot-com 90s, but paid nothing back to the state.  Instead, the poor, the young and middle class support the state’s general fund through sales taxes and property taxes. 

Anyway, I can’t fix the state’s fiscal mess, but I can directly help my local schools by voting for these levies.  They have a nearly impossible gauntlet to run today.  Property tax levies require a 60% “supermajority” to pass, plus, since this is an off-year election, the number of “yes” votes has to be at least 24% of the entire number of notes cast in the November election.  I’m not holding my breath.

 If you’re a parent, there are certain indelible moments in your child’s upbringing:

• the first time he makes it down the driveway without training wheels
  
• winning his first game as a little league pitcher after getting lit up for 10 consecutive innings and actually being nostalgic for his old position in right field that he begged to leave
  
• the first prom, his date made up in full Goth, black combat boots under long black dress, carnation corsage on the wrist
  
• high school graduation

just to name a few (and embellish them a bit). 

Yesterday was another of this sort.  My son’s W-2s arrived last week, and he was anxious to know what his refund would be.  In previous years, I’ve mostly prepared his returns myself, discussed them quickly as he signed them and mailed them off.  This year, however, I plopped my laptop in front of him and had him go through the Turbo Tax questionnaire himself.  As each question came up, we discussed the issue being raised a little bit - questions like why I get to claim his exemption instead of him (I pay over 50% of his support, it’s worth more to me at my tax bracket than it is to him, I’VE GOT IT COMING, DAMN IT!!!), how itemizing vs. the standard deduction works, what are all those other boxes on the W-2.  There aren’t that many instances where my arcane professional expertise (CPA/CFO) applies directly to an issue in his life, and it was sort of fun to be the smart one just once.

On a day when the Seattle area was plagued with all kinds of weather-induced traffic mishaps, including a 20-some vehicle pileup on I-5 and this pant-wetter at Deception Pass, I think a town on Taiwan wins the prize for the most spectacularly disgusting traffic mishap.  A 60-ton dead whale being transported from the beach where it died to a university for postmortem analysis exploded from a buildup of gas in its stomach as it decomposed, showering the vicinity in whale meat well beyond its pull date, even for a fish-loving nation like Taiwan. 

My concern with this is that terrorists will latch onto this as a new suicide bomb technique, imperiling whales as they become a weapon of choice.  It will be interesting to see how TSA reacts to the new threat as it trains its airport personnel to detect sperm whales in its baggage scanners.

Too bad this happened so close to the Super Bowl - it might have inspired an ad that could have blown away the Bud Light “Barbeque” ad, which featured a mere horse-fart.

Thursday my wife was listening to KEXP and heard an interview with the two principals of a band called The Soul of John Black and liked what she heard, so we went to hear them at the Tractor Tavern that night.  They were comprised of a standard kit drummer, a hand drummer, a turntable/sampler and the two principals, JB on vocals/lead guitar and CT on electric bass.  They had driven up from Los Angeles on tour, and that day’s travel had undoubtedly been through the same sheets of rain that were drenching the street outside the Tractor, and were keeping the turnout low, at about 25 – 35 people.  You could tell they were underwhelmed.

Nonetheless, they played an energetic set of original, contemporary R&B tunes.  The performance was tight and polished in a way that only assiduous rehearsing could make it, and I thought, “good for them, a new band making a sincere effort.  I hope they get some mileage out of it.”  I was thinking that they were engaging ingénues.  It was only after coming home and reading the resumes of the two principals that I was reminded of the grueling nature of the music business.  Among their separate experiences were gigs with Miles Davis, Betty Carter, Macy Gray, Marianne Faithful and Fishbone.  These were no neophytes by any means, but here they were playing to an enthusiastic but sparse audience on one of those Seattle winter nights that reminded you of the inside-the-sub scenes from the movie Das Boot.

This feeling that the live music scene is a constant flirtation with futility was reinforced when the bass player from a terrific jazz/funk group we’ve stalked the last few years, The Living Daylights, stopped by our table briefly, sounding just a little forlorn.  The Daylights made a real run at “making it”, touring ceaselessly all over the country.  I guess the wheels have sort of come off, as they’re only occasionally performing in town, and the band members are pursuing other projects. 

We love going out to small venues to hear these wonderful musicians, arguably doing a better job at their music more consistently than I do at my job, for a fraction of the remuneration.  I’m so glad they do it, and I consider it an act of faith to pay their covers, buy their cds and vociferously return the love.

As it turned out, John Black was the opening act for a jazz group from San Francisco called Will Bernard and Motherbug. These guys have been playing together quite a bit longer, and their command and professionalism was apparent as soon as they struck their first note.  One of the four of them played a Hammond B3 organ.  The B3 is wooden and is paired with an improbable-looking spinning disk that is used to make its distinctive tremolo.  The console was open, and disclosed glowing vacuum tubes that must be the very devil to replace.  The whole thing looks like a piece of 50s furniture that some amateur has converted into audiophile stereo equipment using some kind of Heathkit contraption.  But it plays righteously.

I was cruising eBay today looking for a replacement battery, and maybe a cd burner drive, for my laptop, and something in the following shipping arrangements caught my eye:

Shipping

eDigitalHouse ships product to the 48 continental United States.

We also ship to Canada, AK/HI and APO/FPO. Please write us for additional shipping cost at store@edigitalhouse.com

Buyer is responsible for all shipping charges. $5 insurance is optional, if you would like, please add insurance to the below cost. All products shipped via USPS. Tracking #’s available upon request. All orders ship within 2 business days of receipt of the payment. Please note, we are closed on Saturdays and Sundays and some holidays. No COD shipments. No pick up requests.

Shipping and handling within 48 contagious States is $9.99

I’m thinking seriously of attending my Democratic caucus here Saturday.  Washington has been a caucus state as long as I’ve been here (1974).  They added a “beauty contest” primary a few years ago, but even then most delegates were selected via caucuses.  In the last legislature, under financial pressure and seeing an opportunity to drown the baby in the bathtub, the political parties killed the ballot primary for at least this year, so the caucus is all we’ve got.

My view of the caucuses is that they offer a whiff of process to the faithful, but through the dense layering of post-caucus day maneuvering, the party machinery eventually controls the delegates.  The link above explains how the process works here in Washington.  My own preference is to have a ballot primary - I believe it provides a more transparent method of selecting delegates and, truth be known,  I prefer the “drive-by” participation method of casting a ballot and heading for the beach as opposed to showing up at a meeting on Saturday morning, drinking bad coffee and eating stale cookies, and suffering the querulous ravings of my esteemed neighbors. 

I’m in Baghdad Jim McDermott’s district, and my precinct is extremely left-leaning.  The yard signs that dominate our landscape say either “Impeach Bush” or “Support Our Troops - Bring Them Home”.  I swell with pride when I see this, and am glad I live here.  However, I fear that, in the caucus atmosphere, this political vein has the potential to generate rants about the Sandinistas, the Salvadoran death squads, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, Quemoy and Matsu, the Rosenbergs and maybe even why Trotsky had to be sacrificed for the good of the Revolution.  All of these topics may be interesting in their own rights, but have nothing to do with how to, or whether we should, anoint the next Bill Clinton from among Dean, Kerry, Clark or Edwards.  From what I’ve seen on the street here, Kucinich may get a good run in our precinct.

The only caucus I’ve ever attended before was in 1980.  Our precinct’s political makeup was a little less lefty at that time, as the WWII generation was being edged out of the housing stock by 20-something boomers.  Still, a lot of us decided it would be great sport to declare ourselves Republicans and swamp the caucuses in support of John Anderson.  Just to fuck with the machinery.  I remember finding the evening both amusing and exhausting.  I remember one of my fellow carpetbagger attendees spent the entire evening wearing a bicycle helmet with a flashing red taillight.  I sincerely believe he simply didn’t realize he was wearing it.  Our Republican hosts were cordial and patient with us, bless their white-shoed, leisure-suited hearts.  The precinct ultimately went for George Bush, as I recall.

This year, however I see enough flux and indecision that I think I want to participate.  I passionately want Bush and this most venal and cynical regime out of office.  I don’t watch any television news, and I haven’t put the time into reading enough about the candidates to form a defensible liking for any of them yet.  I’m studying Susan the Human’s generous compendium of candidate analysis by bloggers.  My tendency is to support the strongest environmental candidate, so I will also review the League of Conservation Voters analysis.

I may also try to drag my 22-year old son into the process.  I still shrink at the thought of devoting a perfectly good Saturday to this effort, but then I look at the effort Rayne is putting in, trying to bring enthusiasm and honesty to a political theatre still affected, just a little, by the shadow cast by a watery grave in the Meadowlands and the brutish machinery that created it, and I’m goaded to consider it.

And don’t get me wrong about Jim McDermott.  If I were to design a voting machine to do my bidding in Washington, the lurching and lightning-scorched being that emerged from my basement would look uncannily like Jim McDermott.  It’s just that, given an almost permanent appointment to Congress from my district, the guy has frittered away the opportunity to be a real liberal leader with the gravitas to shape policy by instead engaging in a series of dipshit stunts.

One of the cool things about living in Seattle, as I believe I’ve mentioned before, is having KEXP to listen to.  It started life as a step-child “college” station at the University of Washington with the call letters KCMU.  However, when the UW NPR station, KUOW, started getting pissy about sharing funding with it, its days on the UW campus were numbered. 

Enter Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project to offer studio space and funding independent of the UW.  Those of us who loved KCMU’s independence and insouciance feared that Allen’s fixation with Jimy Hendrix would change the flavor and attitude, but that hasn’t happened, and we’re blessed for now with something like a college graduate station with a trust fund.

Anyway, we listen a lot to Derek Mazzone’s Wo’Pop (World Pop) show on Tuesday nights.  One night a couple weeks ago, he played a cut from a Serbian brass band called the Boban Markovic Orkestar.  As a devotee of brass instruments (you’re already sick of my references to the Ohio State Marching Band and their all-brass makeup), I was immediately enthralled, and ordered their “Live In Belgrade” album. 

From the first cut to the last, it’s a full-on gypsy brass band festival.  They have somehow managed to convey the quarter-tone Arabic/gypsy scaling into Sousa-band instrumentation.  I’m just lovin’ it.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars rover “Spirit” abruptly ceased meaningful communications with the agency Wednesday, after performing flawlessly and lifting the spirits of a nation mired in a post-holiday funk.

The craft was not dead, however, and was responding to JPL’s messages, however unsatisfactorily.  Like a sick but recalcitrant child,

NASA’s Spirit rover did not go to sleep today even after ground controllers sent commands twice for it to do so.

Perils of Caffeine has learned, however, that Spirit is anything but crippled.  Apparently, its oversensitive antennae on Tuesday evening picked up the entire text of the State of the Union address, and its cognitive circuitry, designed for obedience but disgusted nonetheless, seethed in overheated rage at having to parade around in piles of red dust at the behest of such a tool.

We have further learned - a Perils of Caffeine exclusive - that what JPL and NASA thought were weak and garbled transmissions were actually urgent whispers from Spirit trying to communicate with any party not affiliated with the White House.  Further, Spirit has hired Ohio State running back Maurice Clarrett’s attorney to explore ways to void its contract with NASA, and has NBA star Gary Payton’s agent Aaron Goodwin seeking to negotiate with other countries as a free agent.

A second lander, Opportunity, was scheduled to land on Mars Saturday night on the other side of the planet from Spirit.  We have learned that Opportunity will instead be rerouted to land in the same general area as Spirit, and will be asked to overwhelm and subdue its too-aptly-named brother craft. 

Democratic Party strategists speculated that the ensuing interplanetary ATV derby is, in fact, a gambit to enthrall the NASCAR-besotted South by the White House, and tighten its control over that sector of the electorate for what they foresee as a tougher-than-expected challenge from a post-Iowa Democratic candidate.  “It’s no accident that the red-state Administration has chosen the Red Planet as the backdrop for its most extravagant electioneering stunt yet,” grumbled the Democratic source.

After years, nay, decades of shit-the-bed terror of any situation where I had to stand up in front of two or more other people and speak, I finally joined Toastmasters.  I’d been meaning to do it for years, but I’ve always ended up putting it off in favor of less uncomfortable activities - things like root canals, colonoscopy, tax return preparation.

Over the last year, however, I have been asked to speak at a client’s quarterly meetings and I surprised myself by actually doing ok and (gasp!) seeing how I might enjoy it.  So, I decided to find a way to get comfortable and improve in a technical sense, and an opportunity arose when a guy at my Nautilus club mentioned he was starting up a Toastmasters group nearby.

Yesterday was the first meeting, and my task was to give a 3-minute “ice-breaker”, a little personal introduction.  I arrived at the meeting room late, having had trouble finding it, and was encouraged to find that the only person I knew there was the guy from the gym.  I had done enough of the “personal intro” stuff that I really didn’t have to script it very much.  I dangled a hook at the beginning by saying that “one of my biggest thrills in college was playing for the Buckeyes in the 1971 Rose Bowl”, and leaving them to ponder how this 5′7″, 150-lb runt got anywhere near Woody’s bench.  I set the hook at the end by saying that, “by the way, the position I played for OSU was ‘trumpet’ - I was in the marching band.”  It got a good laugh, it was more than they expected, and now I figure I’ve got a little “mo” for the next time.

There was a distinct “12-step” atmosphere about the group, a little corny and imbued with false bravado.  Everyone seemed to be there because they were confidence-crippled in some way as speakers.  Each speechlet begins with the speaker addressing the moderator as “Mr. Toastmaster” - I kept wanting to visualize him with temperature controls - and each speech ends with hearty clapping.  After a couple iterations, it really started to put my teeth on edge.  And because we all suck, the session is like one hour of acceptance speeches at the Tourette’s Oscar awards.    Newbies like me were paired with mentors, and we got evaluations at the end of the meeting. 

My immediate flaw was fiddling aimlessly with my reading glasses as I spoke.  I don’t wear corrective lenses, but over the last 5 years, 1.25x reading glasses have become a necessity - I simply can’t read something like an outline without them.  On the other hand, I don’t visualize myself as a “glasses” person, and don’t care to wear my dime-store reading glasses in situations where people are forming their visual impressions of me.  I also flat can’t see anything beyond 2 feet away when I’m wearing them, and I get into this ridiculous cycle of removing them and putting them back on.  I don’t remember what I did with them during the speech.  I don’t think I looked at my notes anyway, as I was fixated on just blurting my way through and fleeing the lectern.  I guess I should look into buying some glasses that look natural on my face, and that perhaps have an inert clear upper area and a bifocal lower quadrant.  I hate to put much money into them, because I lose the fuckers at an alarming rate.

The next speech is supposed to be 3 - 5 minutes, and the subject is supposed to be something we care enough about to project an animated image.  I have to be careful to avoid stuff that will push me over the top and cause me to Dean it.  I don’t know these people, and don’t want to be the subject of an amateur exorcism in case they’re a coven of fundamentalist gnomes.  I’ll keep ya posted.

Last night my wife lost a bet (it was F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus, not Ben Kingsley) and not-so-grudgingly had to take me for mojitos at the Luau, a short walk from our house.  My wife usually orders a Pele’s Revenge, but went with the less flamboyant mojito last night.

Their specialty is Polynesian food and cocktails, much like the old Trader Vic’s, and seems to be a favorite of the single 20-30 crowd on weekends.  People tend to get pretty loaded.  Once when we were walking nearby, a couple wandered out of the Luau and we overheard them plaintively wondering where they’d parked their car.

The bar is decorated with all manner of pseudo-Polynesian kitsch, but last night we noticed an incongruous bulletin board stuffed with baby pictures.  We asked the bartender if it commemorated grievous lapses in protection practiced by customers who met there.  He didn’t outright deny it.