Dude! Joe's Jottings, Mostly Junk

• here for the storm
• here for the aftermath

• anything melted, even with chemical, stands a chance of refreezing into ice, and in the daytime at that
  
• you won't see it because it will be buried by the continuing snow
• the snow will HURT your face while you're shoveling
• unlike yesterday's solid stuff that shoveled so nicely, this stuff will drift - every 5 inches you shovel will be filled up again by 2 just from what falls next to your shovel path.
• it will also suck for snowballs - kids, you'll have to dig a couple of inches down to get the good stuff
  

MIAMI—Members of both Super Bowl teams, who played the majority of their regular season and playoff games in domed stadiums, squinted in pain and sought refuge from the sun Thursday after walking onto the field at Miami's Sun Life Stadium. "What is that thing? It's not gonna be on during the game, is it?" said Saints running back Pierre Thomas, who experienced lingering spots in his vision after his attempts to look directly at the unfamiliar object.

WASHINGTON—In a landmark decision that overturned decades of legal precedent, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Tuesday to remove all restrictions that had previously barred corporations from holding public office. "This is an unfair, ill-advised, and tragic mistake," Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said before boarding a flight to Arizona in response to primary poll numbers that show him trailing the Phoenix-based company PetSmart by a double-digit margin. "Despite the deep discounts and exciting promotions that they may be able to offer, these huge, soulless entities are not capable of truly serving the American people's—or their pet's—needs." Corporate attack ads have already begun to hit the airwaves in New York, where a new Pepsi commercial set to a catchy modern remix of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" blasts incumbent governor David Paterson as "unrefreshing" and urges New Yorkers to "taste the choice of a new generation this Nov. 2."

And I know, I know, I know you can “jailbreak” your iPhone, (re)gain root access, and run anything that can motherfucking run. And I have no doubt that someone will figure out how to “jailbreak” the iPad, too. But I don’t want to live in a world where you have to break into your own computer before you can start tinkering. And I certainly don’t want to live in a world where tinkering with your own computer is illegal.

Once upon a time, Apple made the machines that made me who I am. I became who I am by tinkering. Now it seems they’re doing everything in their power to stop my kids from finding that sense of wonder. Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world.

I have nothing to say about the iPhone that hasn’t been said already. Apple made it very clear what they were offering: a carrier-locked, closed-development mobile computing device where every aspect of the user experience would be controlled by Apple. I’m told it can also make phone calls. If that’s what you want, then buy it. If not, then don’t. If you want an iPhone without the phone, buy an iPod Touch, but it doesn’t run third-party applications either. (So much for the “network security” argument, but never mind that.)

A true sense of the world of colors took shape over the Paradise Bay lagoon, the future home of “World of Color,” at Disney’s California Adventure park earlier this week following one of our many rain storms. It was captured by one of our building-mounted cameras.

Do bans on held-held cell phones reduce the number of crashes that occur? New research finds collisions are not declining in jurisdictions where bans are in effect.

"The laws aren't reducing crashes, even though we know that such laws have reduced hand-held phone use, and several studies have established that phoning while driving increases crash risk," says Adrian Lund, president of both the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute.

The Highway Loss Data Institute study compared insurance claims before and after bans went into effect in four jurisdictions -- D.C., New York, Connecticut and California. The study finds claim rates steady with neighboring jurisdictions.

"The new findings don't match what we already know about the risk of phoning and texting while driving," Lund says.

"If crash risk increases with phone use and fewer drivers use phones where it's illegal to do so, we would expect to see a decrease in crashes. But we aren't seeing it, nor do we see collision claim increases before the phone bans took effect. This is surprising, too, given what we know about the growing use of cell phones and the risk of phoning while driving. We're currently gathering data to figure out this mismatch."

The research does have some limitations. It looks at all collision claims and does not identify whether drivers were using cell phones when their crashes occurred.

Just how utterly clueless are the religious right intelli-phobes on the Texas State Board of Education? They banned a children's book author with a very common name because one of the dolts on the board did an Amazon search and found a different author with the same name had written a book about Marxism.

What do the authors of the children's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common?

Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.

In its haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

Dictionaries have been removed from classrooms in southern California schools after a parent complained about a child reading the definition for "oral sex".

Merriam Webster's 10th edition, which has been used for the past few years in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (for children aged nine to 10) in Menifee Union school district, has been pulled from shelves over fears that the "sexually graphic" entry is "just not age appropriate", according to the area's local paper.

The dictionary's online definition of the term is "oral stimulation of the genitals". "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

While some parents have praised the move – "[it's] a prestigious dictionary that's used in the Riverside County spelling bee, but I also imagine there are words in there of concern," said Randy Freeman – others have raised concerns. "It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground," father Jason Rogers told local press. "You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?"

A panel is now reviewing whether the Menifee ban will be made permanent. The Merriam Webster dictionary joins an illustrious set of books that have been banned or challenged in the US, including Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which last year was suspended from and then reinstated to the curriculum at a Michigan school after complaints from parents about its coverage of graphic sex and violence, and titles by Khaled Hosseini and Philip Pullman, included in the American Library Association's list of books that inspired most complaints last year.

My concern is that the lack of a spending limit now introduces a pricing war on the advertising firms and media outlets. The amount of air time for commercials and ad-space remains limited, but now the supply of dollars to fill it has no limit at all.

So bingo: bidding war. The networks and local affiliates rake it in, AND eventually one of the two "sides" to a public debate or election, and it WON'T be the side sponsored by the corporations, will be unable to actually meet the price point.

Surely, there should be the occasional time and place when circumstances transcend the usual and free us from the race-baiting and ignorance-pandering panhandling that characterizes so much of American politics: When God and Satan are given a holiday from the news cycle. When a president can be granted the pure motives of a good nation. When science isn't an insult to the divine and no demon earns credit for human misery.