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Wherever you are tonight, whatever you are doing, may the blessings of the season embrace you and yours.

Spammers, even you. Give it a rest for one night, willya?

First, GO GATORS for their record-breaking 11-0 start. This is the most unselfish team I’ve ever seen.

Watching the game, I saw crowd behavior that’s always puzzled me: going crazy behind the basket during a free throw, attempting to distract the shooter.

Think about it from the player’s standpoint for a minute.

He sees an ocean of movement, with one fixed point of reference: the hoop.

Brownian-motion crowds are actually quite helpful to a player’s ability to see, and focus on, the basket.

If you want to mess someone up at the charity stripe, tilt yourself to the side about five degrees and sit perfectly still.

Now you must go forth, and use this power for good, not evil.

I’ve been woefully negligent in updating the blog over the last several days. That’s due to the holidays. “Stressmas” I heard a Cincinnati DJ call it.

It won’t be the norm. Hang in there.

In the meantime, I realized that I’d lost one of my pages in the move. I wrote the person with deep apologies; she was very gracious and now Katherine’s page has been restored.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare described his moving-target, things-are-not-what-they-seem Birnam Wood. Gainesville has its own version, the “People Would”.

Like Bigfoot, no one has ever seen this mystical “People Would”, but pundits and politicians have routinely used it to justify all sorts of exciting and insane infrastructural meddling, from downtown parking to bicycle lanes to roundabouts, sales tax increases, bus routes, Wal-Mart placement, East side development… the list goes on.

The problems come when the predicted actions of the “People Would” don’t match up with what the actions the predictor would personally take– especially when the predictor is trying to get “revenue” out of the “People Would”, acting as though that money wasn’t coming out of your pocket and mine.

My favorite is the list of (mostly futile) actions taken to increase bicycle traffic in the city. “If we narrow the streets…”, “If we charge for parking…”, “If we lengthen the wait at stop lights…”, “If we install (hideously expensive) bicycle lanes…”, “If we create a ‘Rails To Trails’ across the area…”, “If we had a ‘Yellow Bike’ system…”

“…then ‘People Would’ ride their bicycles more often, reducing traffic and pollution and America’s dependence on oil and All Sorts Of Other Good Stuff™.”

But the damn “People Would” won’t cooperate.

Possibly that’s because of a certain elephant in the room called Common Sense– for example, the six months out of the year when it’s too insanely muggy to ride to work, or the two months out of the year when it’s too insanely cold, or the distributed two months when it’s raining (insanely, of course).

The two months when it’s nice enough, “People Would” might indeed ride its collective bicycles– or just walk. The rest of the year, it had better get the roadways it paid its taxes for, or else it might start demanding a refund.

Bottom line is, the few of the “People Would” who ride anyway, would and do ride. The rest of the “People Would” don’t, for the wholly valid reasons stated above and others.

Some other great examples of the predicted actions of “People Would” not matching reality?

“‘People Would’ be willing to pay an increased tax to support (insert supposedly popular pet project)”. (Common Sense Reality: History says, no, the “People Would” not– having shut down tax proposals at the polls year after year. Even when the Judiciary put its knee on the community’s throat and said, “You WILL build us a new courthouse”, the “People Would” was looking for ways out of it.)

“If we eliminate free parking downtown and create garages, ‘People Would’ be willing to provide a new revenue stream.” (Common Sense Reality: Or, more likely, ‘People Would’ just go to the mall, where parking is free and usually plentiful– the plan thereby backfiring, with downtown merchants taking the punishment.)

“If we make the traffic lights as inefficient as we possibly can, causing backups, gridlock and delays; then pass insanely high traffic ticket rates on red-light runners, and pipe those revenues to some vital-sounding pet pork like ‘Trauma Center Funding’, then the ‘People Would’ not recognize what we’re doing and form a lynch mob.” (Common Sense Reality: You guys are so busted.)

So I’m driving to the local community college to get my teeth cleaned, and on their flashy billboard I see that they’re hosting a performance by a “Hand Percussion Ensemble”.

My most annoying bad habit is now taught for college credit.

Wottawoild.

:)

Well, another Sanction Saturday has gone by and it seems that the stories are always the same, just the faces are new.

The state NPC chairman dolloped praise on Ian (the now-Official NPC photographer) like whipped cream on pumpkin pie, including crediting him with providing “the best photos we’ve ever had” (that I can live with, it’s an opinion) and “bringing us into the new technology” (that one gets to me a bit– I’ve always tried to stay on the cutting edge).

This isn’t about Ian– I love him to death, we’re gear-heads to the core and spend 95% of our time at the shows talking tech. Apart from a Nikon fixation that I can’t seem to snap him out of, we get on like two peas in a pod– we in fact ate lunch together after the meeting, and have some other plots brewing that I can’t talk about yet (insert demonaical laugh).

But this was the same topping lavished on Doris back in the day, completely plausible and even partially true, right up to the point that it would have to acknowledge I exist.

I have to wonder if the NPC officials are aware of the outpouring of gratitude and support I get from the athletes themselves (and you know who you are: thank you. You’re the reason I do this).

Or that my site’s popularity helps make bodybuilding in Florida look so good to so many people (it’s coming up on 2/3 of a million hits soon– and that’s just the front page!) .

Or my contest search page, that presents in one place all the information a potential competitor or spectator needs to find a local show. (I have asked for this to be put on the NPC official site, but have had no interest– it belongs there, not on my site).

My guess would be, “no”.

I’m reminded of a scene from Die Hard:

Al: “How you feelin’, ‘Roy’?”
McClane: “Pretty f^(#in’ unappreciated, Al.”

So I’m going to think long and hard before I commit too much more to this. When I started, I saw a need. Now Ian pretty much fills that need, and moreover he does a great job at it.

Maybe it’s time to become Official, or just walk away from it.

At least if I became a judge, I’d get a room, a meal, and a couple of bucks for my effort.

Get this… apparently there is legislation before Congress to create a national Department of Peace, which will be tasked with mediating local issues of violence, rehabilitating prisoners, eliminating gangs, and so on.

In other words, it’s another scheme designed to separate hard-working taxpayers from their money, in order to support highly speculative, extremely costly pet projects of people who are having visions… er, sorry, people with vision.

Jumpin’ Jehosaphat, have these people never heard of George Orwell?

Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1984.

You want to deal with the rising prison population? There’s an easy way. No, really. And in my mind, it’s a far more humane solution than locking people up:

Deportation.

As bartenders are wont to quip at closing time, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

Start with the three-strikes laws (though any mandatory restrictions that handcuff our judges constitute a blatant violation of due process, but that’s another post).

There have been valid complaints drawn that someone with two strikes, who has been making an earnest effort to walk the straight-and-narrow, gets hauled in on some piddling traffic offense or minor parole violation and has to be sentenced to some unGodly multi-decade prison sentence. Insane.

Within the judge’s discretion, any offense lesser than strike one and/or two should not count towards the third strike– especially if it’s a reformed felon who bounces a check or some such.

But if someone does pull that third strike, there’s no reason the taxpayers should support them for the next few decades.

Revoke their citizenship. (The felon, not the taxpayers.)

Hand them a check for, say, $50,000. That’s about the cost of keeping them in prison for a year, and it’s more than enough to make a new start in lots of other countries.

Hand them a voucher for, say, another $50,000. That goes to whatever country they decide to relocate to, to soften the blow of accepting a known troublemaker.

Escort them onto the plane. Problem solved, at twenty percent of the cost.

If there was ever any possibility that the felon could rehabilitate, they have one final chance.

After the duration of whatever their prison sentence was, they can apply for citizenship like any other immigrant.

Our American citizenship is a precious gift, and for too long we’ve been taking it for granted. Those who demonstrate repeatedly that they are unable or unwilling to work within our society’s laws should not be allowed to remain. But the taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize their keep for years on end, either.

This seems a far more workable, far more concrete solution, than just creating another big Federal agency.