Posted 6:41 PM by Floyd

Great article in today's San Jose Mercury News about the horrible Silicon Valley light rail system. Highlights:

• Over a billion dollars has been spent on capital expenses.
  
• Light rail fares pay for only 12% of operating expense.
  
• Light rail is slow, averaging only 15 miles per hour. It takes an hour and twenty minutes to get from southern San Jose to Sunnyvale.
  
• Most damning, light rail ranked last in virtually every criteria when compared against comparable cities like Dallas, Sacramento, and Denver. (Did you even know that Dallas and Denver had light rail? Me neither.)
  

Posted 6:35 PM by Floyd

Cool, I now have outlined blockquotes. I stole the CSS from The Daily Rant.

Posted 1:51 PM by Floyd

Get Your Hits on Route 66

California has some great weird sports team names. Until recently this was at the college level; I live over the hill from the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, and down south we have the UC Irvine Anteaters. But now there is a bizarre pro sports team name: The Inland Empire 66ers.

I was scanning the San Jose Mercury News web page and saw the headline "S.J. Giants, 66ers split". I knew that the Giants referred to were the San Jose Giants, an A minor league ball club, but who were the "Inland Empire" 66ers described in the article? A quick Google search revealed that the 66ers are from San Bernardino, they were called the Stampede until last fall, and that they are a Mariners farm club. 66ers commemorates historic Route 66, which runs through San Bernardino.

Posted 1:45 PM by Floyd

Matt Welch, Quit Reading Now!

A strange manifestation of France-bashing: I was shopping yesterday at Beverages and More, a Bay Area upscale liquor chain. BevMo was advertising Mexican beer using a typical Cinco de Mayo promotion. What was not typical was this description of Cinco De Mayo: "A holiday which commemorates the Mexican victory over the French in 1862."

Now is this a typical way to describe a commercialized holiday? Consider that you could see a million advertisements for Fourth of July sales without learning that the country from which America declared its independence was Britain. I wonder what could have prompted this history lesson?

Posted 2:16 PM by Floyd

California senator Dianne Feinstein wrote an editorial for Sunday's San Jose Mercury News called "How to repair Iraq and U.S. reputation". When I first saw the headline on Sunday, I assumed that it contained the usual nonsense, and gave it a pass. (The headline has enough nasty moral equivalence to keep me seething for an hour. Imagine: Iraq needs to have its reputation repaired because it oppressed and murdered its citizens, it invaded its neighbors and waged chemical warfare against them, and it refused to validate that it would not develop weapons of mass destruction. And the US needs to have its reputation repaired because it solved all those problems, but did not adhere to Robert's Rules of Order.)

Today I read a letter in the San Jose Mercury News criticizing Feinstein's article, which contained this phrase: "Feinstein cites the refusal of the administration to sign the Kyoto Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the International Criminal Court as examples of unilateralism." I found this hard to believe -- did Feinstein really say that? Yes she did:

With the refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the International Criminal Court -- to name but three examples -- the attitude has been one of unilateralism: that the United States knows better than the rest of the world.

Now I am used to the idea that my senior senator is a poisonous fascist hypocrite, but I had not thought of her as a dumb poisonous fascist hypocrite. Yet the evidence is there in black and white. Kyoto was killed by the Senate while Feinstein was in office, and the vote was 95-0. I don't need to dig through voting records to know that Feinstein either participated in unilateral behavior, or stood by and did nothing about it.

Posted 1:37 PM by Floyd

John Jay Ray is doing his bit to defeat Chinese censorship:

MY "CHINA" BLOG

The Chinese seem to have become really serious about internet censorship in recent months. They re-blocked Blogspot some time ago and lots of other sites are blocked too -- including at least some Lycos and some Yahoo. I have therefore decided to do my tiny bit towards keeping communications open by putting a mirror of my blog up on a site that China does NOT block. I keep all my blog entries as a file so once I have written my blog entries for the day, it takes me only a couple of minutes extra to put them up on a second site. So in future my blog will also be accessible at the following address: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~jonjayray/tripod.html. The site concerned is hosted by my local ISP so it may stay too insignificant to be blocked by China. With ISP hosting, the site is also advertising-free, which is a bit of a bonus. I will also be putting up my “China” postings several hours before I put them on Blogspot. Because Blogspot is so trouble-prone, I do not post there until just after midnight, California time, in the hope that the load and the errors will be minimal then. I would be much obliged if anyone with contacts in China would let them know of the new site. I even have some archives there so people can catch up with what was posted in the last 6 weeks or so.

Posted 12:31 PM by Floyd

Eugene Volokh answered a question from an unknown blogger on how he could get more traffic. Volokh gave several suggestions on how to get popular bloggers to link to you.

There is another strategy for getting hits which Volokh did not mention: Comments. Not in your own blog, but others. Your clever or witty comment may inspire someone to follow the link posted in the comment and read your blog.

I have been blogging for about eight months. I have emailed bloggers and gotten links as a result. (The three times I was linked by Instapundit, I got thousands of hits for a day or two.) I have also been noticed by several bloggers when they saw my comment and followed the link to my blog.

Some other advice I would add is it's the content, not the hit count, that's important. When you write a post, or a comment, or an email to another blogger, it should be about what you have to say, not about what will get you the most traffic.

Update: Aaron Haspel had the same thought several hours before me, then taunted me because I live in three time zones west of him.

Posted 8:26 AM by Floyd

Political correctness is stupid; one of the reasons I say this is that people under its influence say stupid things. Consider for instance this review of the movie "Better Luck Tomorrow", written by a movie reviewer at the politically correct Los Angeles Times, and published in the politically correct San Jose Mercury News:

``Better Luck Tomorrow,'' which opened last week and continues to show at Bay Area theaters, doesn't break down the ``model minority'' stereotype of Asian-Americans as straight-A offspring of pious immigrants; it blows it to smithereens with a morally ambiguous tale of sex, drugs and violent death.

In the movie, overachieving Asian-American high-schoolers escape their dull suburban existence by dealing drugs and stealing computer hardware until their fast lives culminate in a grisly murder.

Because this was, well, a movie, I had my doubts as to its veracity. And sure enough I read further:

The plot is loosely inspired by the real-life case of Stuart Tay, a Tustin teenager bludgeoned to death in 1993 by fellow Asian-American teens. Both victim and his killers were from well-to-do suburban families with Ivy League futures.

Lin said he followed the Tay case in the newspapers but describes his movie as a work of pure fiction that draws on an amalgam of influences, including the Columbine shootings, to tell a story about youth violence.

You can only "blow a stereostype to smithereens" by showing many instances where it is not true. Not by creating a work of fiction where the stereotype is violated. Assume that the stereotype about former Buffalo Bills coach Marv Levy is that he could get to the big game but not win it. (For the non-football inclined, Levy's Bills went to four straight Super Bowls in the early 90's and lost them all.) Would I blow this stereotype "to smithereens" by producing a movie in which the Bills won the 1993 Super Bowl?

Posted 12:33 PM by Floyd

We take InstaPundit for granted too much. Here's the latest example of what a cool guy Glenn Reynolds is:

THE PBS NEWSHOUR FOLKS emailed to tell me that there will be a program on weblogs on tonight...

Originally, this was supposed to be a program about InstaPundit, but I persuaded them that InstaPundit had been done to death, and suggested that they branch out to some newer faces, which I gather they've done.

Now how many people do you know who are that generous? I know what I would do in his place: "You want to do a show on The Declarer? There have already been twenty shows this year. Well that makes twenty-one!"

Posted 2:21 PM by Floyd

The Merc likes to print letters from kids on Saturdays. Maybe I shouldn't make fun of them, but this person is 16. Isn't that old enough to know better?

MANY students and teachers have suggested that school hours of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. be changed to 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. This is ridiculous.

Not only will classes start an hour later, but they will end an hour later...

So, they start an hour later, but then they end an hour later? Thanks for clearing that up.

But that's not right, because ....

Oh wait. It is right. I was just confused momentarily.

Posted 2:16 PM by Floyd

Floyd reads the San Jose Mercury News letters page and his blood pressure shoots up, part CLXXVII:

RECENT attempts to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq by invoking photographs of jubilant liberated Iraqi citizens miss the point.

Few ever claimed that Saddam Hussein was not a terrible despot or that most Iraqis would not be better off without him. The primary argument is over whether our nation should be the world's self-appointed police, judge and jury.

Another false argument is that it is inconsistent for Americans who feel rage, fear and contempt for our administration to also respect, pray for, and wish our fine troops a safe and quick victory. Our armed services are doing their duty and doing it bravely and well and are not responsible for the decisions of politicians. Even in the time of Caligula, the Romans honored their legions, and we in our time of Bush II should honor our servicemen and women. But we don't have to honor Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft.

J.J. Magee
San Jose

Hey you liberated brats: You think it's about you, but it's not. It's about whether the judge was biased and whether the jury was fairly selected. We got some new jurors from Paris and Moscow and Damascus, and here's the new verdict: Get back in those childrens' prisons. And get over yourselves!

Posted 2:06 PM by Floyd

Yesterday Sherry and I went to visit our friend Scott. Scott had a skiing accident a few weeks ago when his ski came loose and his knee was twisted. He felt badly injured and assumed he had torn his ACL. Two weeks ago he had an MRI and found that he had not torn his ACL; instead the top of his tibia had broken off! So he had surgery a week ago Thursday to put five screws in his bone; he also had a bone graft taken from his hip.

I talked to Scott the day after his operation and he was unhappy and groggy. By late last week he had recovered to where he could have company, and obviously he's been pretty bored sitting around his condo. So Sherry and I and drove up to Daly City where we met Scott and two other friends. We played a few bridge hands, and this interesting declarer play problem came up:

I held AT832 K3 53 K832. Scott and I play a strange strong club system that he made up called the "Caroline Club". In this system, all major-minor two suiters with 10 to 15 high card points are opened with two bids. So 2 is my system bid with this hand. Unfortunately 2 can show either spades and clubs, or a single-suiter with clubs. (All the other two level suit bids are unambiguous.)

Scott bid 2, asking me to describe my hand. I bid 2, showing the spade-club two suiter. Scott passed and LHO, who was my lovely wife, led the K. Here was dummy:

6 JT9872 AJ94 A4

The straightforward line is to win the diamond, take two high clubs and ruff a club, and then guess hearts. I would then need to take three of my five spades in hand.

Instead I chose to duck the diamond. I figured if I didn't show interest in a club ruff, the defenders might not pull trump. LHO switched to the 5, I played the J, and RHO (my friend Brian) won the A and played back the 6. LHO played the 4 on the second trick so I assumed she started with a doubleton.

I played a diamond and LHO played the ten. I finessed and took a club pitch on the ace; LHO played the Q on this trick. Then I played two high clubs and ruffed a club.

Now I was down to my five trumps in hand, and needed one more trick besides my ace. LHO appeared to be out of both red suits. I played a heart, on which RHO played the Q. I considered ruffing with the 8 but I knew I would be overruffed and then I didn't see how I could take any other spades. So I ruffed low and LHO overruffed.

LHO exited with the thirteenth club. RHO ruffed with the Q and I underruffed! Now I had a chance as long as RHO had the 9. If he played a low card I would play the 8 and LHO would win one of the two remaining honors and then lead into my AT. He chose to exit the 9 (correct on other layouts); I covered with the T, and LHO had to lead from K7 into my A8.