Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/02/spam-count-mail-config/
Since Monday, October 27:
Total Number Folder
----- ------ ------
746632 233 .IN.tuna/
40458402 2303 .spam/
66014448 8323 /dev/null
1144201 104 /home/djh/Mailbox
24251285 1358 /home/djh/Maildir/
51940 15 IN/tuna
2470117 245 spam
----- ------
135137025 12583
Yup, 8,000 messages delivered directly to the trash upon arrival, and another 2,000 detained as likely spam. 1,400 messages deemed legitimate and routed to my mailbox. A lot of those are boring stuff like cron output and legitimate commercial e-mailings and news notifications and whatnot. I don’t actually have folks writing me 2,000 messages every few weeks.
You can also see a shift from mbox to Maildir. I’ve found that Thunderbird isn’t a bad e-mail client for offline, but Courier IMAP requires Maildir, so Maildir I use.
So, just in case this ends up in someone’s search, I’ll share the Thunderbird-Maildir portion of my .muttrc:
# Courier-imapd compatability
# Where does mutt look for subfolders?
set folder=$HOME/Maildir/
# Subfolders begin with '.' -- default value excludes these
set mask="^."
# Where do we store our ingoing / outgoing messages?
send-hook . "set record=$HOME/Maildir/.archive-`date +%Y-%m`/"
save-hook . =.archive-`date +%Y-%m`/
# This is compatible with Phoenix "Drafts" folder
set postponed=$HOME/Maildir/.Drafts
# Mailboxes
mailboxes ! =.IN.tuna =.spam
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/12/01/trans-atlantic-thinking/
I will share a few paragraphs I found recently that help me understand some of the important ways in which European political thinking is different from American political thinking:
At the risk of overgeneralization, we might say that for Europeans (that is, for those Europeans not joined in the Axis cause), World War II, in which almost 60 million people perished, exemplified the horrors of nationalism. Specifically and significantly, it exemplified the horrors of popular nationalism. Nazism and fascism were manifestations, however perverse, of popular sovereignty. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini rose to power initially through elections and democratic processes. Both claimed to speak for the people, not only before they assumed dictatorial powers but afterward, too, and both were broadly popular, as were their nationalism, militarism, repression, and, in Hitler’s case, genocidal objectives. From the postwar European point of view, the Allies’ victory was a victory against nationalism, against popular sovereignty, against democratic excess.
The American experience of victory could not have differed more starkly. For Americans, winning the war was a victory for nationalism — that is to say, for our nation and our kind of nationalism. It was a victory for popular sovereignty (our popular sovereignty) and, most fundamentally, a victory for democracy (our democracy). Yes, the war held a lesson for Americans about the dangers of democracy, but the lesson was that the nations of continental Europe had proven themselves incapable of handling democracy when left to their own devices. If Europe was to develop democratically, it would need American tutelage. If Europe was to overcome its nationalist pathologies, it might have to become a United States of Europe. Certain European countries might even need to have democratic institutions imposed upon them, although it would be best if they adopted those institutions themselves, or at least persuaded themselves that they had done so.
Jed Rubenfeld
“The Two World Orders”
_Wilson Quarterly_, Autumn 2003
So, let us look, once again, at Iraq, through this sort of lens. The American point of view is that many nations of the Arab and Muslim world are failures, and Iraq is the most spectacular failure in the pack. In this time of increased danger, it is necessary for America to impose its style of nationalist popular democracy on a region where it is most needed. This is where we find ourselves at the moment.
The European view is that there is one very powerful nation, a well-meaning, if short-sighted, somewhat ditzy hyperpower called America. America is strongly, even annoyingly nationalistic. America has a fearsome, awesome military. America has a strong nationalist leader in the President, who is democratically elected in accordance with popular whimsy.
The view from Europe and on the American Left is that America is currently led by a drooling idiot who can not pronounce the word “nuclear”, is tutored by powerful, self-serving oligarchs like Dick Cheney, and finds itself in an unanticipated situation where the amazingly complex puzzle of “why did 9/11 happen” is ignored for the puzzle of “on this pretext, how much of our wacko, right-wing, neo-Conservative agenda can we shove down the world’s throat?”
Damn, I just scared ourselves. What do we do? Well, we put our shoulder to the wheel. Let us hope, and if the opportunity presents itself, apply our talents toward these objectives:
- That we successfully remove George W. Bush from office in next year’s election. Hopefully we get someone clever in there, capable of independent, strategic thinking, who can work with Congress and the world on a more progressive nation in a more just world.
- That the occupation of Iraq leads to a democratic government that is able to serve its people. I hope that the next generation in Iraq will look upon this period as one of liberation from tyranny and the birth of a modern, just democracy, and that they may look on us with some gratitude, after the fact, for the meddling we engage in today.
On the one hand, you’ve got a powerful, cocky, reckless leader. On the other hand, you’ve got a capable world that lacks the vision and temerity to offer a better route. The sanctions were a terrible joke that strengthened Saddam’s hand, and the alternative to American Imperialism was something like European Appeasement, where we gradually forgot our hatred of Saddam, and returned to normalcy, as he nurtured his insane ambitions against whomever he could reach. Hussein had to go, and George Bush was an implement of this larger purpose. Now that we’ve removed the one we can free ourselves of the other. It’s a tough world, but once in a while someone has to lead it.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/25/worth-a-chuckle/
From an item in The Register, on Dell’s efforts to off-shore tech-support calls to India:
Customers had complained of “thick foreign accents” and “scripted” exchanges – although this proved to be a winning combination for Arnold Schwarzenegger in his successful bid to become California’s gropenführer last month.
EETS NOT UH HARDAWUH ERA!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/14/frankensteins-laptop/
I’ve spent a little too much time hacking on my laptop lately. And by hacking, I mean hardware, and by hardware hacking, I mean an iron file, wire cutters, trimming off chunks of plastic, and of course carpet tape, electrical tape and duct tape, all in an effort to install an internal keyboard.
You see a good while back, the keyboad controller in my laptop started flaking out. So, I removed the internal keyboard and have been using external devices. One external device is a compact keyboard that fits very well in the space the old internal keyboard used to occupy, so I’d pack that along with the laptop whenever I wanted to go portable. But now I’d like to roam about the house with wireless, without having to drag a seperate keyboard around.
So, I liberated the mini keyboard from its plastic case and plopped it in the hole in my laptop, which it fits pretty well except it has a little printed circuit board connected to it by a couple of ribbon cables … and I really couldn’t fit that IN the laptop anywhere. Well, it sort of crammed underneath the keyboard fairly well. Also, the plastic from the laptop case chewed into the function keys, so, I trimmed back the laptop case somewhat and filed the plastic edges of the keyboard down a bit, but I still couldn’t get the thing in there with the circuit board tucked underneath. Too springy. Hrmmm.
So I puzzled and pondered and hit on snaking the ribbon cables underneath the LCD hinge and mounting the circuit board on top of the computer. Ugly, sure, but it worked! I wrapped the circuit board in a trimmed plastic baggie, and used electrical tape to mount it on top. Mmmm, not quite — the electrical tape, while black, like the laptop, is just a little too weak to keep the thing on. So, today I upgraded to good old-fashioned silver duct tape, reinforced with carpet tape to fasten the back of the circuit board to the surface. And after much dicking around, I was able to trim the three foot cord down to about four inches, that comes out of the back of the LCD and snakes around the corner and plugs in to the PS/2 port.
Much more portable, so now I can wander off to the living room and sit back in the recliner and type, as I’m doing now.
If only I were doing something useful with my little Frankenstein’s monster CPU buddy.
/d
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/11/contingencies/
Exactly two months of unemployment left.
If I’m still collecting unemployment December 10, I’m going to start chasing the local restaurants around for a job. December may not be best time for restaurants, though I could be wrong, but there should also be some New Years / Holiday turn-over to help me slip in to the sector.
A long, strange trip indeed.
Meanwhile, dev.toldme.com now has a CVS repository, and a feed search interface. So, it is coming along, but still has no recommendations, and lots of things I don’t like and want to change around, and lots of clean-up, and some serious work to do on performance and scalability.
I need to share some pictures here. If you’d like to hasten this at all, nag me via e-mail.
G’nite!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/10/the-transporter/
Vern, Richard, Julia and I went out to Old Orchard to see the third Matrix movie on Friday. I don’t think any of us really wanted to watch it, so much as we are all geeks and have to catch the latest installment of geek canon. I could be wrong, though. I was fairly entertaining. It moved better than the last movie, I think, which was all-virtual-kung-fu-all-the-time, but it sure had a bit of drag to it. Julia put it best during a death scene that was drawn out for way too long with horrible, horrible, lame, crappy, formula dialog, by calling out “Oh just die already!”
Julia is a high-strung Asian-American lady, who found the preview for “Last Samurai” where Tom Cruise goes to Japan and shows them how to fight, and of course gets some nooky along the way, to be just way too awful. And I explained that, well, he’s in Japan, so the action scenes are going to be more exotic and interesting, and he’s in Japan, so the love interest is going to be Japanese, and don’t we all know that stuff is sellin’ (out?)
But then Sunday rolls around, and I’m watchin’ HBO, and I stay tuned for “The Transporter” because it beats getting out of the chair. Oh my … I had to e-mail Julia, Richard and Vern:
dudes.
i just saw a movie that would make julia scream, and i just had to share.
the transporter was made in association with canal plus. of course, everyone speaks english. it is about an american man, a soft-spoken, hard-working veteran who knows fast cars, working as a driver for shady types in the south of france. the local detective has his suspicions, but they are buddies. oh, and it turns out he is a pro in hand-to-hand combat.
ooh la la.
but one day he violates one of his own rules. he notices the “package” he is transporting moves. it turns out to be a woman. a beautiful chinese woman who spends the first half of the movie in bondage.
but after the guys figure out that he looked at the package, they blow up his car. he goes back and kicks their asses and steals another car and finds the woman, tied to an office chair, in the back of the car.
they go back to his place, she makes breakfast, the bad guys blow up his house, they go scuba diving from his personal blue grotto and steal some clothes after she offers herself to him in gratitude (i shit you not, and he has to think about it, at first, of course, before he wraps his mouth around hers.) uhmmm, and then there’s a lot of action and violence and action and violence and they meet her dad, who’s a real asshole, that she is trying to rebel against, but her dad doesn’t approve that she’s falling for a low-life american white boy, and then there’s some more action and fighting and violence and action and a hijacked airplane and a final big scene and then they open up the trucks they’ve been race-driving for the past twenty-minutes to rescue the 400 chinese migrants who have been in a pair of shipping containers for the long boat ride over from china.
I mean, I can kind of sympathize with a movie that very obviously tries to appeal to various elements of fantasy that are marketable these days. I mean, it is Sunday night on HBO so some implausible “soft porn” is perfectly acceptable, but then to try and justify it by putting Chinese folks in containers, like its some sort of expose of contemporary geopolitical concerns … I mean, that’s just gratuitous.
Which means that the movie has a little something to offend as many diverse sensibilities as possible. And that’s no small feat. Bravo!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/11/10/dean-clark/
So, last night I figured it out. If Dean and Kerry are the front-runners, at least for me, then you’d balance the ticket with one of the pretty Southerners who are running for Vice President. Since Kerry’s a veteran, and not all that handsome, he gets Edwards, who is pretty enough to be in a girly magazine and can woo women with his Southern drawl. Howard Dean needs Wesley Clark as his wingman. A southerner and a general.
Which leaves me admitting that Kerry-Edwards is the more viable campaign, because Dean and Clark are both pale, white-haired stiffs. But maybe the old folks would feel nostalgic and vote for them anyway because “Dean Clark” sounds like one of those ancient old movie stars. But then John Kerry looks like one of those ancient old movie stars, preserved to the modern day. I don’t know.
As long as we don’t get another four years of George.
How’s this for in-depth political analysis?
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/10/08/recalling-demolition-man/
Those who live in California ought to be grateful, in that when their government is seized in a coup d’etat, the replacement is not a military general, but a Hollywood actor who has played one. At least the rest of the government is still in the hands of Democrats.
Perhaps the classic Stallone-Snipes-Bullock movie “Demolition Man” may be more than just a great movie, but also prophecy. In this movie, Stallone plays a cop who gets framed for a crime, and cryogenically frozen until such a time as he can be reformed by society. He is thawed in to a future in which Los Angeles and San Diego have merged in to a single administrative region named San Angeles, sex is entirely virtual, and Arnold Schwarzenegger has served at least one term as president, thanks to the sixty-second amendment, which was passed specifically for him.
It turns out that in July, Orrin Hatch sponsored an amendment to the Constitution, stipulating that, “a person who is a citizen of the United States, who has been for 20 years a citizen of the United States, and who is otherwise eligible to the Office of President, is not ineligible to that Office by reason of not being a native born citizen of the United States.”
Those who live outside California ought to watch out, for they may be next; Schwarzenegger became a citizen in 1983. I think this might be a good time to invest in Taco Bell, as this was the only restaurant to have survived the Franchise Wars that took place while Stallone’s character was playing popsicle.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/09/28/colin-powell-saddam-not-a-threat-so-why-did-we-lie/
Joe Conason points to a press conference in February, 2001, in which Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed that Saddam Hussein possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction:
“He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”
I am happy to see the administration discredited, since a year and a half after he claimed that Iraq was not a threat, Colin Powell was in front of the U.N. with pictures explaining all the secret weapons Saddam had developed and was ready to deploy right away, and claiming that we have even more secret evidence that we can not share, but it is imperative to go to war now. Personally, I never bought the WMD argument – it sounded to me like the classic American strategy of creating the perception of an imminent enemy threat as a pretext for military aggression. I am unhappy that the administration damaged American credibility with this strategy.
On the other hand, I like to look at the larger statement, as Powell was addressing a question about sanctions:
“… the sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction.“
I agree with the idea that we needed to invade Iraq to free the Iraqi people of their tyrant. Because, much more than other tyrants, we helped make him strong, and unlike other tyrants, we had seen fit to wage war against him, even if I did not agree with Desert Storm.
Wouldn’t it have been nice, if instead of making incredulous claims about WMD, which will likely fall flat, we had enough humility to admit that sanctions weren’t all that effective – that the Iraqi people were being hurt by sanctions, and whether Saddam was actually acquiring WMD or not, they were not an effective tool at keeping his hands off of imported materials? That would have been nice. Sure, the world would question our motives – America is in it for the oil, and to shore up domestic support for the President who seeks a distraction from a recession and his “War on Terror” – but we get that flak anyway. But … wouldn’t it have been nice if our justification for war was to free Arab people from the tyrant that we had helped to install, instead of our claims that the secular Arab tyrant was part and parcel of a wacko Muslim fundamentalist conspiracy typical of brown-skinned men with beards and turbans? I think Arabs might have appreciated the distinction.
I guess you could try and blame Powell’s insistence on a U.N. mandate for this dishonesty. I believe some conservative pundits have. If you go before the Security Council and say “we want to invade Iraq to rid that nation’s people of a bad man” the French, with their economic ties to the bad man, will laugh at you even harder than if your threaten them with fairy-tales about Anthrax and Dirty Bombs. Maybe we lied to the world in a futile attempt to get the U.N. on our side. Why would we do that? Because we weren’t confident in our ability to do such a large and protracted peace-keeping mission after the invasion? Because we were too cheap to shoulder the full financial burden of reconstruction? Given the strain that our military is under today, perhaps this was a laudible strategy, except that it failed.
Being an empire isn’t easy.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/09/25/tora-tora-tora/
Last night I was flipping channels and I caught the excellent war movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!” which was the code sent to Japanese fighters that their mission to bomb Pearl Harbor was to proceed as planned. This is a fantastic movie, which tells the story well from both sides. The Japanese soldiers and the American soldiers are portrayed with equal measures of humanity, in their respective languages. There is even a sense of humor, when one famous Japanese pilot responds to a subordinate that of course the new Zero is even better than the Messerschmitt – he has personally seen the latter in combat over London!
Most of the movie is the grueling preparations leading up to the attack – intercepted Japanese communications, confusion in the American chain of command, ambivalence about how the Japanese should handle America and Japanese commanders voicing their opinions on the wisdom of engaging the sleeping giant. There’s one guy the Japanese nick-named Gandhi as he meditated long and hard in seclusion upon the perfection of the planning for Pearl Harbor.
My favorite scene was just before the attack itself, where the Japanese pilots were heartened by the beautiful image of the morning sun exploding in to light rays from behind a cloud – like the flag of their empire – certainly a good sign! I’ve long been fond of sun rays poking out from clouds, but I’ve never thought to connect them with the Japanese Imperial Flag.
As they make Oahu the first plane they encounter is an older bi-plane, with a woman who is training a kid to fly in the cold morning conditions. They suddenly see squadrons of war planes rushing past them, look around in excitement, and realize that they are surrounded by a foreign armada. “Oh shit,” I could hear the woman thinking, as I wondered if the Japanese would take her down as their first, easiest kill.
In this first, infamous sneak-attack on American territory, the warriors charge proudly past the civilians, their bullets and bombs reserved for the bodies of soldiers and warships. All the same, the woman wasn’t taking any chances, she barrel-rolled away from the Zeros in to the empty air over her home town. This brought me a weird moment of vertigo, as civilian airplanes in the space over our cities were precisely the target of that second, infamous sneak-attack on American territory.
Two years and two weeks ago.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/09/22/wesley-clark-v0019a-not-yet-fully-implemented/
An excerpt from an article on Salon.com:
In an interview with the Miami Herald, he seemed to endorse a moratorium on the death penalty, because there has been “a lot of discrimination and a lot of injustice,” and suggested cases be reviewed with DNA evidence. But when the reporters asked if he’d back a halt to executions, they noted, “Clark sat up straight. ‘Stop. Stop,’ he said. ‘I promised I wasn’t going to take a strong position.’”
In programmer speak, Clark threw an exception when presented with a case he was not yet programmed for. Something like:
ERROR: candidates.democratic.clark: deathPenalty.moratorium not yet defined
The other great catch-phrase from this article refers to the “top-down groundswell” behind Clark … if Howard Dean is from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party, Wesley Clark is from the fully re-programmable wing of the democratic party that yields us charismatic automatons like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Joseph Lieberman. Clark may have the charisma of Clinton to pull it off against his charismatic, right-wing-programmed nemesis, George Bush. All the same, I have a lot of nostalgia for man versus machine … I’d just as soon send Dean in there against Bush and see him inexplicably flailed by Bush’s mighty buzz-saw pincers and lose a little bit more of my faith in America than to see him toppled by the mightier android.
But then I’d also like to just see Bush gone. At any rate, it’ll be interesting to see what Clark looks like a few revisions from now. It’s too bad he’s still in Alpha.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/09/03/bringin-em-on-dean-franken-kerry-bush-and-hill/
So, I’m going to recommend an article published on Salon.com, because not only did it cause me to laugh out loud, but because it also scored a place for John Kerry in my fortunes file:
The swagger of a president saying ‘Bring ’em on’ will never bring peace. Pride is no substitute for protecting our young men and women in uniform. Half the names on the Vietnam Memorial are there because of pride — because of a president who refused to admit he was wrong.
John Kerry
I heard George’s “bring ’em on” on the radio and it made me cringe, and hope that they were somehow targetting that for American consumption and that such dumb sentiment wouldn’t make its way into the Arab press, and into the minds of radicals looking for some hair-brained reason to “bring it on.”
Anyway, the laugh-out-loud funny comes from Al Franken. You can read the article at http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/09/03/franken_dean/.
In other groovy news, a recruiter is presenting me today for a local university job that I think I’m a good fit for. With any luck, September will make up for August, karmically.
At any rate, I was thinking this morning that for D. Howard, Howard Dean is an obvious choice.
Well, since I’m babbling, I’ll mention that I saw a really chilling story in the Tribune today. A former minister is scheduled to be executed in Florida for murdering two abortion doctors. Excellent quote found on Yahoo, from Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood: “It’s sad that people like Paul Hill would murder in the name of life.”
I’m no fan of the death penalty, but a clergyman who is unrepentant about murdering people is the sort of monster that makes the death penalty sort of make sense. He says he’d kill again, because God is on his side. There is no question that he is a menace to society.
But perhaps life in prison would give him plenty of time to think about things. I would think a pious, pro-life Christian like Jeb Bush, who is supposedly going to let the man be executed, would want to allow the man time to repent for his sins before he dies so he could get to Heaven. Oh well.
Then the part of me that is just plain angry at Paul Hill would rather he rot in solitary until his God calls him off of this world. A long life of solitude is more deserved than the free press for martyrdom. But then, maybe that’s what Jeb is thinking.
And the whole idea of Christians in America murdering so that they can become martyrs seems to dovetail with all the Muslim fanatics seeking to be martyred in the Middle East. What with our Energy Consumption, and the vast military and financial involvement in the region that that brings us, most visibly with Israel and Iraq these days, it is like we our cultures deserve each other.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/09/03/recall-thoughts-anyone/
From: Danny Howard
To: tuna
Subject: Re: [tuna] recall thoughts, anyone?
>I signed the anti-recall petition around the same time that the recall
>petition was getting press. I’m certainly voting against the recall,
>because I think this is the biggest sham, and frankly I don’t know
>much about Gray Davis. Unless there is blood in the streets, people
>can stick with the damn candidate they voted for until the term is
>up.
Well, you see, and I was out of the country for much of this, so I never got to not vote for Gray Davis, but the reason Gray Davis got elected is because he smeared the moderate Republican in the GOP primary, who had been leading in the poles until Davis pointed out that that anti-Christ wasn’t solidly pro-life.
So, instead of running against a the charismatic, moderate, and popular Republican mayor of Los Angeles, Davis ran against and just barely defeated his hand-picked opponent: a right-wing ogre.
You claim that Californians should stick with whom they voted, but very few Californians bothered to vote either for Davis or his opponent, because few Californians really wanted either one in office. Very few people in California have ever voted for Davis. Maybe a show of hands on how tuna fish voted in the last gubernatorial?
I, for one, did not vote, because I was in France, drinking wine and trying to explain George Bush to people, but I would have voted for Camejo. Davis is a smarmy freak who survives by his adept political manuevering and otherwise does whatever it is that his money sources tell him to do.
>Right below my vote against the recall will be a vote for Arnold.
I’ll be voting absentee. I never wanted Davis in there and I think his claim on the office is somewhat dubious. I am heartened that Bustamonte is leading Ahnold in the polls, so I may just skip the recall question and Cruz straight to my preferred alternative.
–d
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/08/29/what-happened-earlier-in-the-month/
So, early in the month of August was Grandma’s seventy-fifth birthday. Not my Grandma Howard in da Yoo Pee of Michigan who died in May, who had previously turned ninety herself, but my Mom’s Mom in Chicago, who is pretty healthy and quite spunky. Anyways, since August is a big month for birthdays in our family, we had a big party at Grandma’s house in Chicago.
I also had to move out of the apartment that I was subletting from Dan. Moving myself out of an apartment is easy, because all my stuff packs neatly into a dozen or so boxes that fit into my station wagon with ease. The trick is, that I was also obliged by the terms of the sublease to clear all of the junk that had accumulated over the years in the apartment and store it with Dan’s Uncle Marty, who lives three blocks away. So, it wasn’t enough for me to just pack my stuff in my car, drive up to Chicago to attend Grandma’s birthday party, then continue a little farther North to start a new life at Mom’s house, but I’d have to come back to Urbana and clean out Dan’s apartment. By Tuesday. So I drove up Friday evening with the intention to return Sunday. But I’ll get to that later.
Friday, August 8
Now, being as I don’t drive much and my car is old and I value the occasional Confucian ethic of ritual, I keep a mileage log in my car of every time I fill up for gas. As I drove North toward Chicago with all my belongings and stopped for gas I noted with pride that I had not stopped for gas since May. The car has a fourteen gallon tank and gets a little over twenty miles per gallon on the highway, so you can see that I’ve been putting a lot less carbon dioxide into the air we breathe than your average meat-eating red-blooded American is obliged to. And that made me feel quite good about myself. All the same, since I was low on cash, I paid for the gas with my Busey Bank Visa debit card.
Saturday, August 9
The party was wonderful. We had old ladies, and neighbors, and family, and friends of the family, and plenty other people I don’t really know who they are show up. I invited a few friends myself though none were able to attend. There was lots of food and my sister Jessica brought lots of fancy pastries she home-made herself, and I brought some booze I’d found in the apartment that Dan doesn’t drink, and Aunt Linda brought a lot more booze, to add to Grandma’s booze collection, which was augmented by other gifts of booze, not to mention beer. And I was sent out to purchase ice with the neighbor lady who suddenly decided that we needed eight 22 pound bags of ice instead of 8 pound bags, which struck me as a bit excessive at the time, but what with all the beer and soda pop, there were many many coolers hanging around the place yearning for ice. And well anyway Aunt Linda, twenty-first century Renaissance woman that she is, is studying bar-tending, and was thus mixing drinks in Grandma’s basement. I don’t have to tell you all that we had a good time.
Anyway, I just tried to relax because the apartment was going to be tough, but I pitched in with getting the place cleaned up whenever I was asked. Uncle John and Mom did me the favor of driving my stuff up North in Mom’s mini-van. We pulled our tailgates together and shifted my boxes from my blue Ford station wagon to her blue Ford mini-van. And I proceeded to drive back South on Sunday, and carted several carfulls of Dan’s stuff to his Uncle Marty’s house.
Sunday, August 10
Now, Uncle Marty’s a good guy with an extremely beautiful house, and a good heart, near as I can tell. He asked was there any help we needed and I said maybe you have some boxes, and he said yes, he had some at work, which was in some agricultural research building on campus not far from Allen Hall, which is where I lived many years, so we drove over that way, and I noticed the University Police behind me, and then they were flashing their lights, so I pulled over across the street from Campus Visitor Center, where incidentally a friend of mine recently started working.
Now this here is where the story starts to get a little upsetting. I’ll share with you what I wrote to MikeyA about it:
You know when they pull you over, you have to go to court? They don’t just send you a fine in the mail and stuff. Well, I don’t even remember getting pulled over in Palo Alto, but the other day I was pulled over in Illinois on account of the license plate on the back of my car had no tags, because it was the license plate from the front of the car, because the license plate from the back of the car had been stolen while I was travelling in foreign lands.
Well they ran the plates and found my registration was expired. I’ve been putting off worrying about that because I’ve been kinda broke and not sure do I wanna change the registration to Illinois or renew in California or what. Anyhow, they pulled me over and asked for my license and insurance card. I have insurance but I don’t drive so often so I hadn’t gotten around to putting the new insurance card in the glove compartment yet and the one that was in there was two months expired.
Well, they ran my license through the computer and you know it was suspended!? I did not know that it was suspended. Well, so anyway, they asked if I knew why and I recalled them pulling me over in the Mission District one night when I was driving around, missing my back plate, looking for parking, and they had two cop cars then and they asked me to keep my hands on the dashboard because they didn’t know if I was really there to snuff anyone out, and they seemed nonplussed to find out that I merely had a missing license plate. I’d drove around the peninsula for two months or more and nobody ever wondered about my license plate, and the only reason the cops got excited in the Mission was because they thought I might have been up to something else.
I’ll interject here to explain that the Mission District is one of the less yuppified parts of San Francisco, where I was staying with some friends my last few days in California back in April before I went and drove through the blizzards back to Illinois. The cop told me that the license plates were a fix-it offense, and I’d receive a thing in the mail that I could send back to them after I showed my license plate to an Illinois cop and he signed off on it. For some reason, these past few months, this has not been foremost among the things that I’ve been worried about.
“They do it differently,” the Illinois cop told me. I had the front plate on the back of the car because in Illinois one day I was pulled over twice because I had no license plate and the second cop said put the front plate on the back for cryin’ out loud.
There was much more discussion about my shady story as to whether I live in Urbana or do I live in Chicago and the last time the University Police pulled me over in 1999 I said I was a student just about to leave town so it seems awfully suspicious to them that I had the same story in 2003, except that this time I wasn’t a student. Anyway, they said that since I must have lost my license because I had Failed To Appear that they couldn’t trust that I’d appear there. So they arrested me. The back seat of the cop car was split in half and I had my own little plastic bubble to myself.
Another aside here, but the cop who frisked me wanted to know if I had any Bad Things on me. I forgot about my tiny pocket knife, and he never found it. He examined my cell phone and castigated me that if I had enough to purchase a cell phone, but not to keep my car registered, that my priorities must be awfully screwed up. I couldn’t think of anything to say to that at the time, because I was more preoccupied with getting arrested. In my defense I’ll point out that the cell phone cost me $50, and was purchased when the car didn’t even have a working transmission, which was another piece of really foul fortune that I ran up against early this year, and that anyway, I do use the cell phone a lot more than I use my car, and have a greater need for it, as it facilitates job hunting.
At the Champaign County Jail a guy with a moustache and tattoos who looked like he had experience in such matters smiled and waved at me in the back of the cop car as we waited to go into the secret garage. Then another guy who had been working too long and was slap-happy took all my stuff, and my shoelaces, but then let me keep my credit card so I could bail myself out. I never went in a cell, but got my mug shot taken and fingerprints scanned and then my hands covered with ink so they could have an old-fashioned paper record of my prints.
When it finally came around time to bail myself out, they had me call this service that processes credit cards for people who are getting bailed out, and as soon as I was off the phone a fax came through verifying the payment. But they were confused because it was already signed. Huh? Dan’s Uncle Marty, who had been in the car with me, had bailed me out on his credit card. So we called the service up again and asked that Uncle Marty get refunded and I signed my own piece of paper and I was released.
Now, to get back to the story here, and the task at hand, which is that Uncle Marty had come with Milly, my subletting-from-Dan roommate for the summer, and I thanked Uncle Marty for being such a noble character here, and we drove all together in his Volkswagen Golf and picked up boxes from his office. I had a dinner date to catch up on that evening because Yayoi had baked an Apple Pie that she had wanted to share with me, but she’d been pretty confused when I didn’t show up, why didn’t I call? Because I got arrested. But then, why didn’t you call? Because they don’t let you do that, when you get arrested. And she said oh, because my friend Yayoi is from Japan, and maybe they do things differently over there when you get arrested. I don’t know. But I finally got to her place and we made curry rice together and it was delicious.
Monday, August 11
The next day I dropped by the bank to clear out my account. They had the $220 charge from Sunday recorded as deducted, and I hadn’t wrote any checks lately, so I took the remaining $400 or so in cash. I felt somewhat glad that even though I had had to post $200 in bail, I was leaving Urbana with a little more money than I had when I left Oakland.
Milly’s Dad and Little Sister came down in their own mini-van to help with the moving. Together, we loaded up the rest of Dan’s stuff and made a few more trips and completely filled Uncle Marty’s living room with stuff. Mom and Uncle John were nice enough to register my car in Illinois on short notice when I explained that the title was in a box of my stuff in Mom’s van in Chicago and I was down in Champaign without a license, but the Police Officer wasn’t satisfied to hear that the car was registered, he bitched about “plates on the car” that he never was going to look at anyway so I hopped the Greyhound to Chicago. I told Milly that I’d say that I felt bad about leaving the remainder of the apartment cleaning to her, but that I’d be lying, because I really wasn’t eager to scrub the apartment’s naughty bits, and anyway, I’d already hauled a dozen heavy bags to the trash in removing, among other things, cans of soup from the mid-nineties, and numerous other mysterious things, and all of Dan’s stuff, and I felt somewhat done.
I have my proof of insurance, which was actually in a box that I’d kept in the car when I was originally pulled over, but I hadn’t thought of that at the time, but I can’t get my driver’s license so quick. I called California DMV about twenty times and finally I got through and the lady said two FTAs, here are the docket numbers and telephone numbers in San Francisco and Palo Alto to call. Of course, the San Francisco number went to an automated system that only worked if I had my Courtesy Warning Notice with me, and the Palo Alto number played some new-age space music and said please leave a message. So I looked on the Internet and found an e-mail address for San Francisco that told me that they wanted $250 over the missing license plate, and an accurate phone number for Palo Alto informed me that they wanted $300 for a “traffic-related fine” and a $7 fee for a copy of the abstract that I could send to DMV to get my license un-suspended.
Tuesday, August 12
Anyway I rode back to Champaign the next day, though the surly Greyhound bus driver threatened to not let us on the bus because we must have been deliberately ignoring him when he said Champaign people move to the front of the line to get first crack at the local bus but because we hate his guts we deliberately stood at the very end of the line ignoring him, but he eventually swallowed his resentment, because we never met the guy and hadn’t had anything against him and had never even heard his voice before even when he told us to get at the front of the line, so he moved some people from the local bus to the bus that would get them wherever it was that they were going faster anyway, and drove us down to Champaign.
I needed proof of registration and two licensed drivers so we could all go over together in one car and return with two, but I wasn’t a licensed driver. I got Raad, who is another great guy with a white heart, and Yayoi, who has a great attitude about life, to join me at the Public Safety Building, where I showed them the sticker and my two friends driver’s licenses, and then Raad drove us over to Tatman’s and I got my car out of the towing lot. It had been $75 to tow and $15 / day to store. And since it was two days to get everything together, he wanted $105, but he didn’t have any change, and none of anybody else was around had any change, but the boss was around and said make it an even $100.
We dropped the car off at Yayoi’s and then Raad took us to his place for dinner. We ate a delicious, hand-made, vegetarian pizza, because Raad’s a vegetarian, and drank beer and wine, and Raad shared with us what he believes is the greatest movie ever, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” which I admit was pretty good, but Raad was probably uniquely able to relate to it most vividly because he grew up in Iraq and I don’t think Yayoi got much out of it, but it was a nice way to punctuate everything else that is going on, and I got to see Raad’s paintings and his cats. Yayoi likes cats. And I got to see a picture of his girlfriend in Malaysia, and he was flying to Texas to see his son next week. It was all extremely homey in that comingled diaspora kind of way that makes me smile. Such distances we all have to go to live and to love!
And then as I had further written to MikeyA:
So, I got my car back but I couldn’t legally drive it. My Japanese friend, Yayoi, drove it back to her place, where I stayed for a couple of days, coaching her driving skills. You see, Yayoi grew up in the enchanted land of public transportation infrastructure. And she was kind of scared of the Interstate, but she wanted a ride to Chicago, on the next Friday, so we got along well enough.
Eventually the big day came and we drove up North. We got started kinda late though, and when it got dark I took the wheel, brazenly driving without a license, on the story that it is better I drive than Yayoi deal with my unreliable headlights while driving into Chicago for the first time at night. No troubles … no troubles.
Ugh.
So, you can see, I’ve been kinda slow in getting around to updating my web site. :)
/danny
Post Script
I returned to Urbana for court the other day, and I was the first called. I was charged with insurance, and I showed them my proof-of-insurance card. I was charged with driving without a valid license, and I showed them my driver’s license. The charges were dropped. I’m waiting for the $200 to show up in the mail.
Why did that go so easily? Because driving on a suspended license implies that you were busted for a DUI. It’s a really big deal that I think you actually do go to actual jail for, so unless the cop thinks that you deserve a Really Bad Day, they just charge you with the technically incorrect, but inconvenient offense of driving without a valid license. Apparently my license is valid if you show it to a prosecutor in a court room, but suspended if you have it run by a traffic cop. All the same, I have the CTA at my disposal, so I’m not driving until some unemployment comes through.
Two weeks after I filed for unemployment in Ilinois I was told that I had to re-open my existing claim in California, which had previously been determined invalid, but was subsequently validated when I showed them my earnings from the Coffee Shop. Since I was terminated, I had to do a phone interview, and the lady was able to just pull my account of the story right off of the Internet via a private URL. She was very pleased to have this, because it turns out the Owner lied to her about what had happened, but the burden of proof is on him to show gross misconduct. She has ten days to make a determination in the case, and that was a week ago, so I’ve been anxiously watching the mail for word, and likely cash from the State of California so I can pay off the State of California and drive around Illinois.
Anyways, Busey Bank later called me because they received the charge from the gas station for $19.24 on Wednesday. And they wanted that and $25 fee for overdrawing the account I no longer had. Gah! Anyways, I had put off paying them until I have a bank account, but the other day they called and said, really, the $19.24 would make them happy, so Yayoi said she’d take care of that on my behalf and I get to pay her back. After that call I returned a call from a recruiter who thought I was in California but wanted to present me to a very prestigious University in Chicago. The job sounds good and we’re working to tune my resume, so … things are looking up for a change.
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2003/08/19/curt-tucker-lies/
Which Curt Tucker are we talking about?
Curt Tucker is a tall, middle-aged, white male. He lives in or around Champaign, Illinois. He is co-owner of Verdant Systems, the Verde Art Gallery, and Verdant News and Coffee, all located in Champaign, Illinois. As of July 2003, Curt is balding, wears round glasses, and sports a goatee. He claims to hold a background in social services and psychiatry. (more…)
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