Posted 10:48 PM by Floyd

My wife and I just returned from seeing Harry Potter 2. I thought it was an enjoyable and well done adaptation. I was afraid that the Gilderoy Lockhart character would be dropped as he was not essential to the plot, but there he was in all his incompetent, self-seeking glory. Lucius Malfloy looked too much like a rock star, but in general I was happy with the choices made to present the movie.

However it is not enough to pay the theater $9 to see the movie; we also had to sit through the previews. By the time I was done I was afraid I would need morphine. Here, in order, is a description of the trailers. (By the way, why are they called trailers now rather than previews? Do they trail anything -- that is, are they shown at the end? I wish they were; then I could get up and walk out.)

Preview 1: Kangaroo Jack. A black boy saves a white boy from drowning. Cut to present, where the grown-up black man requests the grown-up white man to help him deliver something to Australia. They find that the package contains $50,000. I'll repeat that so you can gasp. FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. In the Bay Area, that would be a down payment on a house! (Except that it would have to be split two ways, so I guess it would be TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS: A new Camry.)

While driving through the outback, a kangaroo steals their money and the black guy's jacket. The kangaroo can box -- just like in the cartoons -- and speaks English with an Australian accent.

Every year I think that Hollywood has put out the stupidest movies possible. Every year I am proved wrong.

Preview 2: Two Weeks Notice. Hugh Grant has such a cute smile on his face, I want to sucker-punch him. Sandra Bullock has cheekbones that, if combined with Julia Roberts' dentition, would make a scarier monster than anything in the Harry Potter movie. I assume that Two Weeks refers to the amount of time left before Bullock hits middle age.

Preview 3: I can't remember the title; why should I bother looking it up? A teenage girl (whose mother is Meg Ryan, who wears such a concerned expression that I want to sucker-punch her) goes to find her father in England. The father is rich. The other relations are snooty bitches -- but teenage girl stands up to them. Teenage girl becomes fashion model. I need to stop now, before I have a seizure. No wait, I remembered one last thing, and because I had to watch it and there was nowhere to vomit, you must share my pain. A Cute Guy tells teenage girl, "Why are you trying to fit in when you stand out?"

Preview 4: Lord of the Rings 2. (SPOILER FOLLOWS.) You would think I would enjoy this but the action was so jumbled that it was incomprehensible. Also, they gave away that Gandalf comes back to life. I know the audience is 98% Tolkien geeks, but there must be somebody who didn't feel like reading a thousand pages of elf songs and enjoyed the first movie. Why give away one of the surprises?

Preview 5: Daddy Day Care. Eddie Murphy loses his job; no shit Sherlock, what have you done in 15 years that didn't suck besides Bowfinger? (I guess I conflated real life with the movie; sorry about that.) He runs a day-care center with his friend. Mr. Mom meets, I don't know, a worse movie even than Daddy Day Care. Murphy gets the Ruthlessness in Propping up Fading Career Award for dragging toddler into door for laughs.

Preview 6: Some loathsome Disney excrement. I can't remember if it was called Frozen Walter Plots A Communist Takeover or Hawaiians with Hideous Pug Noses or Jungle Book 2.

Posted 5:17 PM by Floyd

The San Jose Mercury News letters to the editor page is a target-rich environment today:

WHY raise taxes? Why cut benefits? How about reviewing the tax benefits that are given to corporations operating within the state? Should not the corporations pay similarly to the citizens who live and work in this state?

I do not buy into the idea that corporations will flee the state if made to pay their respective due in the world's fifth-largest economy. Many companies have relocated, many have stayed and many are being born. This is true in any economic environment.

With all the economic harm done by corporations due to the accounting deception of Enron and the enormous compensation to corporate executives, can we not now let them pay their way? There is no need to raise taxes or cut benefits. Let those who make incredible wealth from the economy pay their due to the system that allows their great wealth.

Rich Medrano
Seaside

I am against corporate welfare, but I hope that if I inveighed against it, I would not commit such basic reasoning errors as denying the existence of specific numbers:

I do not buy into the idea that eating a pound of ice cream a day will cause one to gain weight. Many people are fat, many are are skinny, and many are gaining or losing weight. This is true given any level of caloric intake.

or generalizing from specific cases:

With all the harm done by football players who murdered their wives, can we not now let the NFL pay its own way?

                              

Let's not forget circular reasoning -- or, you can lead a commie to capitalistic jargon but you can't make him think:

WITH the state budget in deficit and given the relatively low price of gasoline, putting an extra tax on gasoline is a rational option. If it were raised a dime a gallon, the state would take in nearly $300 million, as California's use is close to 3 billion gallons annually. The tax could be raised gradually to European levels.

The information value of such a tax would be its greatest value, even if Sacramento could be expected to spend the money very wisely. Gasoline users would be informed through their wallets that consumption of gasoline is very expensive. Options would be explored and choices made that would result in less gasoline consumption, less pollution and less congestion on the roads.

Raymond R. White
Palo Alto

Raymond White dislikes the use of gasoline. So he will impose a punitive tax; this will allow consumers to figure out that gasoline is bad. I'm not sure why this is any more moral than, say, the information conveyed by the Spanish Inquisition, but give Raymond credit for knowing some free-market economic jargon.

By the way, Ray, "raise to European levels" sure is a fancy-pants way of spelling "triple".

                              

Earlier I complained that the Mercury News prints simpering letters from schoolchildren, usually teenagers but sometimes as young as nine years old. The Merc saw fit to publish letters from six-year-olds:

Make the world better

WE should all help make the world a better place in many ways.

Please don't walk on snowy plover eggs on the sandy beach. Don't hunt endangered species. If you find a nest on the sidewalk, bring it to a wildlife refuge because Natalie did that and it helped the baby birds.

Please don't hunt birds for sport because the birds will go away. Please let the birds have a good life.

Please don't pour oil in the ocean because it can kill the birds, the fish and the mammals. It could also kill plants.

Birds and squirrels make the world a better place. If there weren't any birds, there would be a bunch of bugs (because birds eat bugs), and it would be bad to have too many bugs in the world.

Lynn Carter's first-grade class

Bullis-Purissima School
Los Altos Hill

Why stop with the first grade? Why not transcribe the wit and wisdom of two-year-olds?

I wan apple yoos! I wan apple yoos!

Pretty ducky! Wack wack! Pretty ducky!

Eek! Too cold. Want go home. Mommy, go home.

Chelsea Smythe
Age 2
Saratoga

Also, I think it's about time someone stood up for equal time for other religions besides environmentalism. Here are letters from a hypothetical sixth-grade class exposed to different beliefs:

I want California to let Sun Microsystems move into Agnews. Agnews has lots of icky green stuff and I want Sun to get rid of it and make some pretty computers.

Be nice to oil tankers. Sometimes nasty rocks get in their way and spill all the oil. That's a bummer cause someone spent a lot of money on the oil. And the oil is useful. Down with rocks!

If you see a marsh, drain it. There could be mosquitos that would bite you and give you malaria. Then everyone would run away.

A final complaint: What's up with this "Lynn Carter's first-grade class"? It's been awhile since I was in an elementary school but I do believe people are allowed to have individual identities. The only point of publishing this drivel is to put some tyke's name in the paper and make him or her feel like he did something important. But not the faceless masses at Bullis-Purissima, who must have received a rude shock:

Lynn Carter: Class, our letter is going to be published in the paper. Hooray!

(Name redacted): Ms. Carter, will they print my name?

Lynn Carter: No, (name redacted), but mine will and you can bask in my reflected glory!

Posted 9:23 AM by Floyd

I apologize for not having blogged yesterday. But I had an excuse; it was raining. That is stupid, but also legitimate.

Here's the deal: I live in the hills west of (northern) Silicon Valley. I cannot get cable Internet, though I live 10 miles from the former headquarters of @Home. I cannot get DSL. My only option for high-speed Internet access is satellite. Satellite normally works fine, though it is about $20 more per month than DSL or cable. But heavy rain interferes with the transmission.

Yesterday when I woke up it was raining hard, and it rained hard until about 10 p.m. I wouldn't be surprised if we got three or four inches; I put a bucket in my bedroom to deal with a leak there and by the end of the day it had about seven inches of water in it. Today I woke up to grey clouds, but no rain; by comparison with yesterday, it was like bright sunshine.

The rainstorm was torrential but not violent. There was little wind and as always in the Bay Area, no lightning or thunder. I have seen more snow than lightning over the last two years. One of the special moments of the Midwest vacation that my wife and I took this summer was a lightning display over Indiana cornfields, followed by a warm summer rain.

Posted 6:07 PM by Floyd

A Visit to the Employment Development Department

(Now with additional waking-at-6:30-a.m.-powered vitriol!)

A few weeks back when I received my unemployment check, the envelope contained a letter from California's Employment Development Department telling me to appear at the EDD office in San Carlos at 8:15 a.m. last Tuesday. There were two forms to fill out and bring with me; one which I would contain the most rudimentary elements of a resume, and one which would list the employers to which I had applied for work. I assumed that the State of California was keeping tabs on me.

I got up early on Tuesday and drove through the rain to San Carlos. The EDD office was in an industrial area west of 101, actually on unincorporated county land between Belmont and San Carlos. This is not a densely crowded area, but the EDD building had very little parking and I had to park two blocks away.

My paperwork was taken from me and I was directed to a conference room. Sitting in cheap chairs around cheap furniture were my fellow unemployed. At the front of the room, an EDD employee told us why we were there: When we first received our unemployment information, we were told to register with CalJOBS, an online job listing site managed by the state of California. We did not do so, and so were sent followup letters for a special morning meeting. You might wonder why the state could not send us a nasty letter telling delinquents like myself to sign up or stop receiving unemployment. That just shows how little aptitude you have to be a government employee.

The middle-aged EDD lady started telling us about CalJOBS. I know the major online jobs sites for the Bay Area-- Monster, HotJobs, DICE, BayAreaHelpWanted.com -- and CalJOBS has never come across my radar. "I bet it sucks" I said to myself. I expected to find this out when I got to a computer, but confirmation was forthcoming in the next few minutes. EDD Lady asked if any of us had gone to CalJOBS. Maybe two or three people out of the fifteen in the room had. She said "It's hard to enter a resume, isn't it?" Those who had used it agreed with her. Apparently the main problem is that it's very difficult to enter a job objective; you go through a long questionnaire and the generated result is not usually what you want. You then have to go re-answer the questions from scratch.

But the EDD is on the case. They're going to fix the online questionnaire, you ask? Sorry, you still have no aptitude to work for the government! EDD's solution was to look over our paperwork while we were in the lecture and fill out a cheat sheet telling us what answers to give to the questions!

The rest of the meeting was a list of job search resources that I do not need or want. Note that most of the resources -- support groups for the unemployed, information about a business library -- were either private functions or other government offices. At 9:30 we were free to go.

Today I went online to look at CalJOBS, to make sure that I was not maligning it unfairly. It was everything that I expected and more. To use CalJOBS is to be transported back to the halcyon days of the early web -- 1996 or so -- when pull-down selections on all-white backgrounds were the rage. A complete list of CalJOBS' crimes against good UI design would take me all night.

It's not just the presentation that sucks; the content is awful too. I looked for technical jobs and found practically nothing. Here is the only job posting that was remotely interesting:

Job Number: CA3281332
Job Title: DATABASE SOFTWARE ENGINEER
City of Job: Redwood City
Experience Required: 2 years
Start Date:
Starting Wage:
Duration: Long Term Hours Per Week: 40plus Shift:
Education Required: Bachelors degree
California Drivers
License:
Federal Government
Contract: Y

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Job Duties:
Oracle Corporation has openings for Database Engineers. For specific duties, requirements, job reference numbers, and other employment opportunities, see www.oracle.com/corporate


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How To Apply:
URL: www.oracle.com/corporate

I assume that Oracle created this posting for the same reason that I went to San Carlos, because the state has some small leverage over them and would hassle Oracle if they ignored CalJOBS. I've put more effort into one-page book reports written on the bus when I was in sixth grade. (EDD Lady said that employers were paying for CalJOBS through their payroll taxes, so they want to use it effectively. EDD Lady clearly does not understand sunk costs.)

You may have the impression that I am whining because I got up early and wasted an hour and a half of my time for no reason. I am spoiled, but not that spoiled. What really grates my cheese is this: California has a massive budget shortfall -- $24 billion if Gray Davis is to be believed. And people are talking about how the state cannot possibly deal with its shortfall by cutting programs, and has to raise taxes. (Liberals like to raise taxes judiciously -- in years beginning with 1 or 2.) But here is an office full of people who do not seem to do much except enforce useless regulations, provide pointers to useful work done by others, and to maintain a computer application that is already done much better by private enterprise.

Which is more likely -- that EDD will be cut to a reasonable size, or that my taxes will go up?

Posted 2:31 PM by Floyd

You've seen the hysterical projections that war with Iraq would cause gasoline prices of $4 per gallon. But could war cause silk carpets to be priced at $100 per square foot?

I received a circular in the mail yesterday. It was a folded card, and on the front says "Has Your View of the World Changed Lately"? When opened, it says:

Ours Has...

With political unrest in the Middle East, we can no longer travel safely to the areas where we buy fine rugs.

If we cannot personally select each rug to assess its quality, we will not add it to our collection in good conscience.

After advising interior designers on antique and new handwoven rugs for 30 years ...

We Have Decided To Close Our Showroom

(There then followed details of Saroya Rug's out of business sale, offering discounts of 40-60%.)

Posted 5:12 PM by Floyd

On the way back from i2 I drove by an office that had a new occupant; it was a company called Encover. This is a typical Silicon Valley dot-com name, and it sucks. "Encover" sounds like an English word being mangled by, say, a wild and crazy guy from Bratislava.

Colby Cosh tells me that The Onion's imitations of early twentieth century newspapers -- especially T. Herman Zweibel -- are dead-on accurate in tone and style. Why not borrow from this period and name corporations after real people or real places, or the real things that they do?

I went to Encover's web site and found that they provide tools for selling services and support, targeted toward resellers. The president and CEO is named Sridhar Krishnan. Here are some suggested 1900-style names for Encover:

• "Krishnan Service Management"
  
• "Krishnan and Co, Ltd"
  
• "Mountain View Reseller Applications"
  
• "Shoreline Service and Support Tools"
  

Posted 5:00 PM by Floyd

Today I went to the i2 Technologies office in Mountain View, where I used to work until I was laid off at the end of August. When I started my job I worked for Aspect Development, a sharp, fast-growing software company. In March 2000 we merged with i2. i2 had a lot of good people, but it grew too fast and never addressed its underlying structural problems. The result was a company that has the most incompetent infrastructure (facilities, finance, HR, payroll) that I have ever seen.

Here is an example: In August i2 about two-thirds of the Mountain View office were let go. The result was a mostly empty building that i2 could not possibly sublet because the Bay Area commercial real estate market has gone bust. So you would think that the remaining employees would be allowed to score some nice office space. But I found that all workers had been relocated into a corner of the building, and some of the managers who had had offices were now in cubes! An office is a nice perk for an engineer, but a manager needs a place to discuss issues privately with his subordinates.

Why were these managers in cubes? Because i2 decided that vacating their floor space would be a tax writeoff. That would be a smart thing to do -- except that i2 has no profits to be taxed!

You might think that clustering the employees together makes them feel better than having them scattered through a mostly empty building. The opposite is true. A completely full cube space is not normal, because there is always the odd cube here and there used for a test machine or a visiting worker. Also some proportion of a workplace will be absent for meetings, lunch, or personal reasons. So as long as you see occupants here and there, you will perceive a cube space as occupied. But a small cluster of people surrounded by empty space looks eerie and lonesome.

About six years ago I worked for a startup in San Jose. Most startups occupy small, crowed offices. This startup leased space from Stratacom because an angel investor was an officer of that company. There were ten of us in a completely empty space. We were surrounded by probaby 100 empty cubes; there was not a Stratacom employee in line of sight, though you could walk around a corner or down a hall and come in contact with other people. I have never had a more disorienting work environment.

Posted 7:51 PM by Floyd

Something new happened to me at the bridge club today. Eric and I won -- and y'all can shut up, 'cause that wasn't anything new. Then Sherry, one of the better local players, came up and asked how I was doing. She said that she saw me a lot and I said, yeah, I'm not working right now.

Sherry asked if I would be interested in a pro date. I totally missed her intent and asked with whom -- I assumed she was trying to set me up with one of the local pros like Hamish Bennett or Gene Simpson. Then she said "Someone not very good" and I realized she was asking if I wanted to be a pro!

The real money in bridge these days is not playing rubber bridge against rich people. It is playing tournaments, with no money at stake, helping clients win events. If you are extremely good, you can make a lot of money. For instance, Rita Shugart is the wife of billionaire Seagate founder Al Shugart (and I believe rich by her own efforts). She has on retainer Geir Helgemo, the best player in the world under thirty, and Andrew Robson and Tony Forrester, Britain's top two players. I have heard that her total cost for a nationals is $50,000.

I'm not interested in playing pro right now. In the first place, I would be a little embarrassed. I don't think every pro has to be as good as Helgemo, but I would be in the same room as, say, Gene Simpson (20,000 masterpoints, three national championships) and I would feel a little small. Also playing with a client is terrible for your game; if you want to win you have to try to make all the decisions on every hand and you don't trust anything your client does. (If you are playing with someone who really wants to learn that's different, but I have to believe that most clients just want to up their scores by 5 or 10%.) Finally, I like to play with friends and have fun; playing with a stranger who's not very good wouldn't be fun.

Still, it does boost my ego to think that someone might offer money to play with me.

Posted 7:31 PM by Floyd

So I went to my Employment Development Department meeting -- and there will be some scorching blogging about that, let me tell you -- and afterwards did some Christmas shopping at Target. (I made fun of the EDD for spelling resume "résumé", but I do like to pronounce Target as "tar-JEH". Just one of the many things that make me such a witty guy.) Then I went to downtown Palo Alto for lunch. I stopped at Mac's to get a magazine.

I saw some National Reviews partially hidden behind a forward rack of other magazines. I pulled one out and saw:



I gagged and shoved it back. I used to read the American Spectator a lot, and while it was mean and right-wing, it rarely descended into hagiography.

(Wait a minute. Strike that "while". I liked the mean and right-wing stuff.)

Posted 7:32 PM by Floyd

I am an anarchist. I do not like government. One reason for this dislike is my current relationship with the State of California. Over the last 12 years I have paid the Golden State many thousands of dollars in income taxes. One of the alleged services provided by the many-headed beast in Sacramento is unemployment insurance. Now that I am unemployed, I am getting my money back -- at $330 a week.

If I hadn't been forced to send all that money to the Franchise Tax Board, I could have saved up some cash for a rainy day. That money would be invested in some manner, and after 12 years the growth would be considerable. Also I would have an incentive to get back to work as soon as possible.

Most important, it would be my money, to do as I see fit. Currently the State of California keeps tabs on me to make sure I am really looking for work. This was bearable when all I had to do was fill in some circles on a form and mail it in every two weeks. But with my last check I received a notice that I would have to appear before an Employment Development Department employee, with a list of the companies that I had applied to over the previous fortnight. My scheduled appointment is tomorrow, Tuesday. At 8:15 in the morning.

I am able to be self-insured against unemployment, but I can see how others -- including myself ten years ago -- would not be in that position. Suppose there were no government unemployment, and you were someone without a large savings. In that case, you could purchase an unemployment policy from a private insurance company. This would create an adversarial relationship if you filed a claim, and your insurance company would want to check up on you in the same way that the State of California does. But I'd bet twenty bucks against whatever horrid California quarter is released by the U.S. Mint that the appointment to verify your claim would be made at your convenience -- not the convenience of the insurer.

Governments are great at providing things that no one wants. In addition to filling out a form detailing my job search, I am also required to fill out a form so that California can provide a resume for me and enter it in a government job site called CalJOBS. (Just to emphasize its detachment from the world of private enterprise, the Employment Development Department spells the word "résumé". This might impress your local French teacher, but would fill an email with control character garbage.) The resume form is crude, and is sure to generate a primitive and unimpressive resume. Fortunately I was able to check a box that denied prospective employers in the CalJOBS system the opportunity to view the resume. If only it were that easy to decline the EDD's services altogether.

Posted 8:54 PM by Floyd

Damian Penny informs us about Canada's support for war on Iraq:

Meanwhile, a nationwide poll shows that Canadians are almost equally divided on the Iraq issue - 41% are opposed to war, 40% support it. Suppory varies widely across the country - 57% of Albertans are in favor, but only 23% of respondents in Quebec.

Earlier there was sentiment in the blogosphere for making Colby Cosh's excellent (though football-challenged) province the 51st state. I heartily approve. Alberta is the most pro-American and capitalistic of the Canadian prefects, and its star should grace our flag.

But admission to our fair country is not free. Alberta must prove itself by performing a feat that even the smallest American state can do:

Alberta must defeat Walter Mondale in mortal combat.

Posted 3:31 PM by Floyd

From the Mercury News letters page:

WITH the appointment of Henry Kissinger to lead the Sept. 11 probe, the old chestnuts about Vietnam have been resurrected. A New York Times account which you published (Page 1A, Nov. 28) writes of the ``secret 1971 bombing of Cambodia.'' Why not tell it like it was and write of the secret bombing of the North Vietnamese army in Cambodia?

We conveniently forget that it was not President Nixon and Kissinger who got us into Vietnam. They got us out. I was a POW in Hanoi from 1967 to 1973, and I believe I would still be there if it were not for the efforts of Nixon and Kissinger.

Leo T. Profilet
Los Altos

I share less enthusiasm than Profilet about the brilliance of Nixon and Kissinger. But he is right on the money when he complains about the hypocritical indignation surrounding the "secret bombing." Let's try a thought experiment:

It is 1944 and the Allies are attacking German-held positions in France. The Allies have air superiority over France, and use it to ruthlessly bomb any German troop movement. An ostensibly neutral Switzerland allows German forces right of passage to avoid this bombing.

Do you think that it would be immoral or an outrage against international law if the Allies were then to bomb German forces in Switzerland? Of course not. Then neither was it immoral for the US to bomb the North Vietnamese supply line in Cambodia.

Posted 3:19 PM by Floyd

One of Western Europe's most serious problems is demographic. The birth rate is well below the 2.1 children per female needed to maintain a level population; some nations like Spain and Italy have birth rates as low as 1.6. This means that the proportion of elderly people is rising -- and of course modern medical technology extends the life span and further increases the number of old people. A European-style public pension plan is unmaintainable under these conditions.

The only way to get enough worker money into the state's coffers is to import immigrants. (America would also have a declining population without immigration.) So many European states have a large proportion of immigrants. A tenth of Germany is Turkish, and a tenth of France is North African. The mostly Muslim immigrant population is not assimilating well; many of them have militant religious beliefs, and they do not seem to be accepting the more liberal values of their host countries. Foreign communities are most dangerous and alienated in France, but there are similar problems throughout Western Europe and Scandinavia.

Many in the blogosphere have expressed disappointment that Europe cannot assimilate its immigrants. But this is not realistic; America's melting pot is a rare phenomenon, and Europe would need to change considerably before duplicating it.

The typical European nation, just like the typical nation anywhere in the world, is run by and for a particular ethnic group. There is no enthusiasm for attempting to turn, say, Turks into Germans. Instead, Europeans have used the following strategies to deal with fractious minorities:

• Persecution.
  
• Power-sharing. For instance, the Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire by giving the Hungarians equal status with the Austrians. (The Hungarians then had their own minorities to deal with; see "Persecution" above.)
  
• Expulsion. The famous example is the expulsion of Spain's Jews. Less famous was the forced migration of ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe after World War II to their new "home countries" -- for example, some ten million Germans were forced out of the Oder-Niesse region and the Sudentenland.
  
• Redrawing of boundaries. Before World War I states grabbed whatever lands they could, but after World War I and World War II attention was paid to ethnic makeup when maps were redrawn.
  

None of these strategies can help Europe deal with its immigrants. Persecution is immoral and does not work. (In some cases, such as the persecution of Poles during the Partition, there is suppression of a people's language and customs. But this is easily avoided and probably strengthens the bond of peoples to their ethnicity.) Power-sharing cannot really work in a democracy, and never worked all that well for anybody anyway. Expulsion is also immoral -- the majority of immigrants are hard-working and law-abiding -- and takes Europe back to square one of the demographic problem. Finally, where can boundaries be redrawn? Immigrants are scattered throughout Europe and presumably concentrated in large cities.

Can a European country develop a melting pot attitude? In America there is the feeling that while immigrants do become kind of an American ethnic group that speaks a dialect of English and has its own culture, this culture is dynamic and borrows customs and habits from the people it assimilates. Because America has not been around that long, there is a willingness for the culture to experiment and change. Europe is a place with a rich and long-standing history; I don't think they can easily adopt a pro-assimilation set of attitudes just because it might help them with their pension or crime problems.

Posted 2:31 PM by Floyd

Today I set up my first Christmas tree. This may sound strange to you considering that I am 35 years old, but for the first eleven years in California I spent the holidays with my family. Last year Sherry and I went to Cozumel with two close friends.

But Sherry has no vacation left; we went to Michigan for two weeks in the summer, and she spent three weeks in Shanghai. So we are spending the holidays at home, and are enjoying our first Christmas tree.