When Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth (and D.C.)

Further news that the Department of Transportation just doesn’t get it: There is a headline in the NY Times today: “Drop in Miles Driven Is Depleting Highway Fund; Loan From Mass Transit Is Urged.”

What does that mean?

Gasoline tax revenue is falling so fast that the federal government may not be able to meet its commitments to states for road projects already under way, the secretary of transportation said Monday.

The secretary, Mary E. Peters, said the short-term solution would be for the Highway Trust Fund’s highway account to borrow money from the fund’s mass transit account, a step that would balance the accounts as highway travel declines and use of mass transit increases. Both trends are being driven by the high price of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Hey, that’s a good funding idea! Despite skyrocketing demand for mass transit in the US (finally!), and a desperate need to fund mass transit to help it cope, let’s take money away from transit to fund road projects, even though people are driving less!

(Just for kicks, check out Transportation Secretary Mary Peters’ quote about things that are “not really transportation,” like bike paths. Might I humbly mention that I used just such a path for my commute this morning?)

But wait, you say. Maybe we’re over-funding transit. Maybe transit doesn’t really need that money. Let’s see:

Hmm. Nope.

Now, that’s not to say our infrastructure isn’t falling apart, and badly needs help. So … maybe the answer is to wean ourselves off a permanent war economy, stop spending billions to mop up the mess we made in Iraq, and put that money into our own country, where it would do a little good?

John Tierney, the New York Times’ Staff Twit

John Tierney has worked for the NY Times since 1990. Why someone hasn’t fired him is news to me. First, he wrote “Recycling is Garbage,” which argued that it was more cost-effective to throw stuff away than recycle it. According to Wikipedia, that story broke the NY Times’ hate mail record. Imagine.

Unfortunately for the NY Times and the rest of the world, the Times hasn’t figured out what a dangerous dumb-ass he is. Case in point is a story running today, “10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List.”

Granted, some of the 10 are faux scares. But many more of these “scratches” are a thinly veiled libertarian (Tierney’s one) attempt to say “f–k the environment” in genteel Times verbiage. Example:

5. Evil plastic bags. Take it from the Environmental Protection Agency : paper bags are not better for the environment than plastic bags. If anything, the evidence from life-cycle analyses favors plastic bags. They require much less energy — and greenhouse emissions — to manufacture, ship and recycle. They generate less air and water pollution. And they take up much less space in landfills.

True, sort of. If you compare disposable bags to one another, plastic is a less energy-intensive bag. But the way you frame the debate is everything. He’s just comparing disposable bags, as if they’re the only two options. And he’s assuming they’ll end up in landfills!!

Tierney is blithely ignoring the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is toxic swamp plastic debris that’s twice the size of Texas. Let me repeat that: twice the size of Texas. Or this pithy little stat courtesy of Salon.com: “Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they’ve been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It’s equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.”

Or this one: “According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic.”

Or this one: “There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.”

Oh, and while you’re having a good time in denial, might as well ignore …

8. The Arctic’s missing ice. The meltdown in the Arctic last summer was bad enough, but this spring there was worse news. A majority of experts expected even more melting this year, and some scientists created a media sensation by predicting that even the North Pole would be ice-free by the end of summer.

So far, though, there’s more ice than at this time last summer, and most experts are no longer expecting a new record. You can still fret about long-term trends in the Arctic, but you can set aside one worry: This summer it looks as if Santa can still have his drinks on the rocks.

I “can still fret” about that, John? Gee, thanks you patronizing dickhead. I’ll feel so much better knowing “Santa can still have his drinks on the rocks.”

Want to know my biggest worry? It’s that the Times will continue to print Tierney’s asinine stories.

Twice a Week, or Twice a Month?

That’s the (ahem) eye-grabbing graphic for our company newsletter. While the name is unimaginative, it’s been around for a long, long time. We have a whip-smart marketer who hasn’t been around a long time, and she recently sent me an e-mail:

Doesn’t this [newsletter] come out bimonthly (twice a month)?

Speaking of being around for a while, English (it would seem) would have evolved a logical method of dealing with this. Then again, since the opiate-addled writers and performance artists have shown so convincingly, language is a virus from outer space, perhaps not. Here’s what one dictionary has to say about biweekly:

biweekly
(bī-wēk’lē) pronunciation

adj.
1. Happening every two weeks.
2. Happening twice a week; semiweekly.

A publication issued every two weeks.

adv.

1. Every two weeks.
2. Twice a week; semiweekly.

Great! In other words, it’s every two weeks — unless it’s every two months. Good thing your bus and train schedules are more precise than that, eh? So perhaps said marketer is right, and we should change it to “bimonthly.” Should we?

bimonthly
(bī-mŭnth’lē) pronunciation

adj.

1. Happening every two months.
2. Happening twice a month; semimonthly.

adv.

1. Once every two months.
2. Twice a month; semimonthly.

A bimonthly publication.

Hmm. Same problem. Thus and so, since our bulletin appears every two weeks and (in a long month) could appear three times, biweekly is more accurate. Or rather, less misleading. But only just. Semimonthly actually refers to the half-month, but the Semimonthly Sentinel just ain’t gonna fly.

The problem isn’t “weekly” or “monthly,” but “bi.” See, bi being bi (perhaps bi qua bi), it wants to have it both ways — that is, unless it doesn’t. A bisexual, after all, is interested in sex with both genders, not in sex with half of one. Then again, to bifurcate something is to separate it. To make it two, and to make it into half of one. Damned English.

But back to our Biweekly Bulletin conundrum. The most accurate adjective would be “forthnightly,” but I just can’t see anyone saying, “Hey folks, read the Fortnightly Flyer!”

Maybe it should be the Payday Post. Or maybe we should just say the hell with it and leave it as it is. After all, it’s still a lot less misleading than “Fox News.”

My Almost Guest-Blog

Though Nathan Bransford (I hadda crop part of his name) didn’t have the luminous foresight to represent my book, he’s clearly not unfamiliar with them (your blogger writes, harrumphing and buffing his nails on his cardigan sweater). Anyhow, my least favorite du jour is “reconnoiter.”

In case you want to add yours, here’s your chance. (Hint: front-runners include “moist” and “panties.” You have been warned.)

Writing Award for Between Clubs

A slim envelope appeared in the mailbox yesterday. As anyone who submits writing knows, slim envelopes are typically bad news because they usually contain rejection letters.

Howevs, this one was from Willamette Writers, informing me that an excerpt from my novel, Between Clubs, received an Honorable Mention in the fiction division of their Kay Snow Writing Contest.

I was sniffing around the blogosphere, and found out the other Honorable Mentionee, Catherine Karp, writes suburban vampire fiction! And here I thought a novel about a working-class Canadian kid playing college golf at an elite US university was an unusual premise …

The First Bike Beaverton Event

I decided to make a detour on the way home and join Beaverton’s Bike Advisory Committee in its first (hopefully annual) “Bike Beaverton” event. Mayor Rob Drake stood on a bench and gave us the official opening word (he also rode at the head of the peloton for a while), and then we set off on a 7-mile loop.

Word amongst riders was that there were 90 people who had signed up (i.e., signed waivers), including a good number of families with their kids. For the suburbs, it was a nice bit of civil obedience.

Jonathan Maus, who runs the Bike Portland blog, did a little advance journalism about the event:

Beaverton’s Senior Transportation Planner Margaret Middleton says the event came about because the advisory committee wanted to, “invite people to ride their bikes in Beaverton.” She adds that, “The ride will be a little bit of education, of course, a lot of fun and a lot of community interaction.”

That’s a pretty apt description of what happened. The most educational part of it for me was the cultural difference between riding in downtown Portland (where I work) and in Beaverton. On a seven-mile trip, I counted four cars that honked at us. In other words, in Portland there’s occasional friction between cyclists and motorists when sharing the road. In Beaverton, motorists are still secure in their delusion that they own the road.

I also watched one woman get impatient with a trail of cyclists at the side of the road. After honking, she decided to speed up, straddle the middle yellow lane, and pass all of them. That was dangerous, unbelievably uncool (you’re speeding? next to children riding their bikes!?), and also illegal. Oh, and that was so she could wait to turn left on the very next block.

Strangely, I was glad to be there for that. Why? A blogger named Colin Beavan, whom I admire, once mentioned that “biking on city streets is subtly activist (because statistics show that the more cyclists on the streets the safer it is for everyone).” So for this evening, even though I was riding at a fraction of my typical get-there commuting speed, I was happy to be one more cyclist by the side of that road, helping to complete the chain and being a subtle activist.

(One guy I was riding with had a sticker that said, “That SUV Makes You Look Fat.” That’s a bit too confrontational for me.)

But overall, the trip was still fun. One of the great things about cycling is you can ride alongside someone and chat. In a car? Not so much. I didn’t get to meet as many people as I’d have liked to, since I had to scamper home and have dinner and reset for the next day of work, but I was still glad I went.

“Your Car Needed Weeding”

My mom lives in the tropics. But lately she’s been staying much farther north. Thus, her trusty old four-wheel-drive has been parked.

That prompted an e-mail from a friend of hers, who said, “When returning from bridge yesterday I noticed that your car needed weeding…hehehe. So I did.”

Weeds on the Isuzu

I’ve long thought that the quintessential Portland (Oregon) song should be titled “Moss on My Subaru” (inspired by a real-life encounter in traffic one day, when I saw moss on a Subaru’s back bumper).

Considering how much sunshine and rain cars see, it’s a wonder someone hasn’t figured out how to do it on purpose.

FaceBook’s Pronoun Confusion

FaceBook confronted me with this pop pronoun quiz today. His profile? Or her profile?

Ixnay on the oicechay, aceBookFay. I’m opting for (c): “John edited their profile.” (Though I like the absurdity of “John’s profile was edited by John.”)

WTF you say?

Here’s the rub. First, as William S. Burroughs said and Laurie Anderson sang, language is a virus from out of space. (This is apropos of not very much, but it sets the discussion on the right scientific footing, don’t you think?)

Second, as a page deep in the subdirectories of Washington State University so nicely puts it, “Using the plural pronoun (i.e, they) to refer to a single person of unspecified gender (i.e., him or her) is an old and honorable pattern in English, not a newfangled bit of degeneracy or a politically correct plot to avoid sexism.”

Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, the King James Bible, Lord Byron, and even the persnickety George Orwell all went pleural-gender-neutral instead of the clunky his-or-her. So take that, dreary pedants who insist on enforcing that bone-headed belief.

Now on FaceBook, anyone in their right mind (Oops! I meant his or her right mind) would just pick their his or her preferred gender, and let the massive FaceBook database ensure, that from this day on, that their his or her MiniFeed was never again confusing. Of course this too is absurd. How many of my friends won’t know my gender?

But there’s the point: it’s not about clearing up the confusion for my friends. It’s about clearing up the confusion for FaceBook.

True, by opting for the nonexistent (c), “John edited their profile” sounds like I edited a group’s profile, not a person’s. Like, I dunno, the group “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet.” Or, “I Use my Cell Phone to See in the Dark.” Or, “Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex.” Better yet, I should start a new FaceBook group, “I choose a gender-neutral Mini-Feed.”

Meantime, if FaceBook can’t make an educated guess at my gender, and is too timid to risk offending me by getting it wrong, well too bad. I’m just going abstain — at least, until I get lucky on the “Enough with the Poking” site.