Aw heck. I'm sure this has been posted before elsewhere, but I thought it highly amusing that Google Maps could give such terrible directions. It's pretty obvious what the oversight was in the screen-shot below, but it's still amusing nonetheless.
Ali and I went on the weekly Cruiser's Ride this week. We've gone in the past but this is the first time I got to blog about it. Anyway, it's a group of bicyclists that starts from Dogtown Hots (691 Monroe Ave.) — they used to start at Monty's Krown
(875 Monroe Ave.) but everyone kept getting dinner at Dogtown first. We got rolling around 8:30 or so and meandered through the city streets all over the place, covering some 9 miles or so all around (I measured as best as I could remember on a map). I finally got to see The Legal Wall — although I guess it's now the "somewhat legal wall" … perhaps someone in the group wasn't confident of the concept or that something changed. In case you don't know, the principle is that the owners of buildings in this area permit and welcome artists to apply graffiti. Some of it is fantastic. Pardon me if I don't specify exactly where it is because the cops have been on a rampage shutting good things down of this ilk.
The ride "officially" terminates at Lux Lounge (666 South Ave.) although this time, they wouldn't permit us to bring our bikes to the back yard as they had in the past. Ali and I both had custom-built bikes [by me, in case you're wondering] and she didn't want to leave them locked up in front so we went to Solera Wine Bar (647 South Ave.) with John and had a glass of wine so we could sit by them and keep an eye on them.
This past weekend I held a Garage Sale and it went pretty well. I got rid of a lot of things, and then on Monday and Tuesday I took most of the rest of it to the thrift stores and such. I ended up spending all the money I made on a second Argon/Carbon Dioxide tank for the MIG welder. At least I didn't fall behind. Plus, now I can weld all day on Sunday even if one tank runs out — and it always does.
But in regards to my relapse into consumerism, I was thoroughly excited to win an auction on eBay for one Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M (at $100 under Amazon's price). It scans double-sided in color and outputs to PDF files — with additional options to convert to text (with "optical character recognition" or OCR) or to place text-under-graphics so it's human readable like the paper copy, but mostly searchable as well (except for OCR errors). It whips through 18 pages a minute (although my lowly G3 PowerBook can't keep up, especially with its 1/10th-speed USB 1.1 interface). In all: it's awesome so far. My qualms with it are that it doesn't scan very accurately, allowing compression errors to originate in the scanner, and there's no way to set specific scanning resolutions: only interpretative ones like "Best" or "Fast". I was also disappointed to find that Adobe Acrobat 8 won't run on Mac OS X 10.3 — I'd need at least 10.4 for that.
So now my free time is going through old documents, shoving them into the scanner, and getting rid of the originals. I know: I have too much fun.
I got an e-mail from Christine Kristen (a.k.a. LadyBee) that contained a press release announcing the conclusion to the case against Steven Kurtz that I blogged about in January and actually got news that Kurtz was cleared a while back through a post at Glob-a-log titled "The Steve Kurtz case finally dismissed (Another political trial, another pathetic witch hunt: Just business as usual in Bushland)". (If you're curious, it's at the end of this post after the fold).
I gather that the press release was to promote the art show Seized at The Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo) which documents the materials involved in the case (it's on display from June 7, 2008 through July 18, 2008). But way way down at the bottom of the press release was the key part: the [clearly ironically named] Department of Justice had no business even bothering to bring up charges of mail and wire fraud because (as I said before) it's a civil dispute so it requires one person to accuse another of fraud — not a criminal one where the state can bring charges against someone. They clearly overstepped their bounds as part of the Judicial Branch of the U.S. government, as they were acting on behalf of the Executive Branch to execute the laws, then they even did that wrong by misapplying the law.
The thing that bothers me so much is that when I consider why the Department of Justice did this, I can't come up with a reason, other than those with evil purposes.
What crime — of the United States or against anyone or against humanity — did Kurtz commit by his artistic protests? I say there was no crime committed, and I'm left to believe that the Department of Justice was trying to put an innocent man in jail. Why would they do that? Perhaps to justify the "War on Terror" by staging arrests of fake terrorists? I don't know, but it all smells evil. [And let me also reiterate what's not been said enough: "terror" is a concept, not a group of people so it's at best a Quixotic move to try and wage war against it.]
Perhaps they're working to block dissent to the war and to questionable corporate efforts — both topics that Kurtz and his group rallied against. But in a free country … nay, the free country? When dissenters are rounded up and put in prison in a dictatorship, I can at least understand it, but when it happens in a country that prides itself on inalienable freedoms? So maybe the Department of Justice's goals were to steer the United States toward a more totalitarian government. Again, evil.
When I try to apply Occam's Razor, most relevant evidence points to a big conspiracy: that government is trying to bias the delivery of news for purposes of manipulating the will of the people through false information.
It's a thought that I can't bear to stare straight into. I welcome comments that disprove my theory.
I woke up in the middle of the night, and as often happens, the demons in my head took hold and won't let me get back to sleep. This time it's that I'm trying to reconcile killing someone for my own convenience.
The United States is at war with Iraq. What that means is that there are people sent by the U.S. who are encouraged by us to stay. There are a lot of people in Iraq, on the other hand, who want those people to leave. We sent our people there with all sorts of weapons so they can kill the people who want us to leave — and likewise, the people who want us to leave try to kill the people who we sent.
This will continue until our President shakes hands with somebody and people sign some papers and then the people we sent will come back home.
So switching to the concrete, there is someone in Iraq right now whose direct relative has been killed by an American. That is, there is someone whose brother, sister, father, mother, husband, wife, son, or daughter has been killed by an American.
There is no way anyone can convince me that this is a good thing.
The reason that person was killed is because the U.S. sent someone there who killed them. If that American were never there, then that person would not have been killed.
I pay my taxes and I will continue to do so. If I don't, I'll go to jail. My life will be disrupted in an unfavorable way, but there is pretty much no risk that I'll die if I don't pay.
However, those taxes have been used to fund the war. If I had not spent that money, perhaps there would be one person who didn't go to Iraq. And because they wouldn't have been there, then some person in Iraq wouldn't be dead tonight. And their living relative would not have to experience the unbearable loss of their kin.
That's the nature of the faulty logic of my sleepless mind.
However what keeps me from going back to sleep is that someone is dead — and more importantly that someone is being killed right now, and tomorrow it will happen again. And again and again.
Think about the person you love the most in the whole world right now.
Now bang: they're dead.
Somewhere there's a person who knew this was going to happen. What he did to stop it was to write a couple letters to people telling them he thought it would be a bad idea. But he also sent those people money — a lot of money — knowing full-well that they intended to use it to kill your loved-one. To be completely fair, that person would have his life disrupted — he'd go to jail if he didn't pay the money.
So on the one hand, you've got the corpse of your loved-one. And on the other, you've got someone who wasn't willing to spend a couple years in prison to stop it. Both are cases of lost years, but in one case it's the absolute remainder of one's life and in the other, a few years of my life.
I can't figure out the morality of the whole thing, but I sure feel terrible that someone's loved-one is dead because I didn't want to stop it.
Now maybe I can shrug and go back to sleep.
Tamara Jenkins' The Savages played at the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) and Ali and I went to see it. They also screened one of her short films from film school, Family Remains. It had a very stylized veneer and told the tale of a mother and daughter who need to confront the death of the divorced husband. It was generally pretty good, but obviously less skillfully made than Jenkins' later work.
The Savages was an excellent film as in its own right. It tells the tale of two siblings, Jon and Wendy, reunited when their father is diagnosed with dementia. They put him in a nursing home near where Jon lives in Buffalo and end up learning a lot about one another's lives in the process.
I was disappointed to that some scenes felt contrived — although Ali disagrees and enjoyed the organic serendipity of it. In one case, it's important for Wendy to meet with Howard, one of the caretakers at the nursing home. She had brought her cat from New York and is allowed to let it stay at the nursing home. I thought it contrived that the cat gets in a fight with another cat at the home, so when Wendy goes to get it, she and Howard end up cornering it under a couch which and end up having a conversation one-on-one.
In all, though, that's a minor fault. One of the best things about the film is that Laura Linney as Wendy and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jon are both excellent leads. To be completely honest, though, the movie is stolen by a perfectly invisible performance by Philip Bosco as their dad, Lenny.
I went to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Make Way for Tomorrow. Tamara Jenkins gave a brief introduction after Jim Healy — the film was influential when she was writing her own film, The Savages. I liked her breezy, run-on way of talking and identified with "guilty writer syndrome" where rather than writing the script for The Savages, she took a break to see Tôkyô monogatari (Tokyo Story) at a local film house, as it's on many "must-see" lists, particularly for filmmakers.
So upon watching it, she discovered it was based on a film from the 1930's: Make Way for Tomorrow (which, in turn, is based on a play and book). She and her husband sought to find a copy, and after exhausting film and video sources, they turned to eBay where they bought a VHS copy that was recorded on late-night TV, commercials-and-all. Presumably she got to see a private screening during her visit: she quipped that she has greatly enjoyed Rochester even though she's only seen it from the interior of the Dryden Theatre: she spent her time watching movies from the Eastman House archive.
Anyway, Make Way for Tomorrow was the saddest movie I ever saw. It starts out with a family of adult siblings being called to their parents' home. Their father explains that he failed to pay the mortgage and the house is being lost to foreclosure. His kids are relieved to find they have 6 months to vacate, but when they ask, he admits that the 6 months runs out in just a few days. The siblings try to accommodate their parents but all of them also try to maintain their own lives as if there were no disruption.
It's clear that all the parents (Bart and Lucy) want is to be together, but they have no means to do so on their own. Initially they're housed just a few hundred miles away on the East coast so they write letters to one another and rarely call (I guess they didn't have unlimited long distance). The siblings make a ditch effort to house their parents in the much more temperate climate of California with their sister. But when they find she is only willing to take care of Bart, they elect to put Lucy into a nursing home and send Bart alone.
The siblings are welcome their parents' meager request to spend one last day together. They spend it around New York — Bart still trying to find work to make ends meet. In lieu of dining with their children, they visit the hotel where they had their honeymoon and are welcomed by the staff. But alas, Bart's train is to leave and they get to the train station to say goodbye.
Just before Bart boards, he turns back to Lucy and says [pardon my paraphrasing], "and just in case there's a wreck or anything happens and I don't see you again, I just wanted to say that the last 50 years with you have been the best I could ever hope for." Lucy reciprocates — and it's abundantly clear that they will not ever see one another again.
I tried to explain the film to Ali when I got home but I broke down telling her about the last scenes. It's really unbelievable and deserves to be seen by many more people.
I just thought I'd briefly mention that I went to RIT (One Lomb Memorial Dr., campus map) to see Ali run in The JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge this year. She planned on just walking the whole thing but she and some of her coworkers ended up running for a couple miles of it. The food her company catered was really excellent — and they were thoughtful enough to include beer and wine.
I got into a discussion on Tribe the other day about what is fear — specifically, when are decisions made because of fear. I argued that fear never comes into play in decision making because it never gets the chance to be explored. I talked about this with my friend Tony and he pointed out that biologically, fear is the same thing as excitement — the only difference is attitude. So I thought I'd revisit all of it and try and tie it into something coherent.
In the Extreme Honesty Tribe, I made a case for fear never actually being experienced in a rational decision-making process. It's a semantic argument, but important: saying one didn't act because of fear usually means they decided to avoid a situation that might cause fear. For instance, saying "you didn't apply for that creative director job because of fear" doesn't really mean that you were afraid — you just avoided the anxious experience.
In other words, fear is the experience of feeling anxious from taking an action that has a broad and unpredictable set of outcomes. Curiously, it's the same circumstances that cause excitement — except that instead of anxiety, one feels invigoration. Hence, it's all attitude; whether one is worrying about a negative outcome or anticipating a positive one.
Let me start a scenario to work from: running into a busy street, right into traffic. When I think about it, I think, "that's a stupid idea because I'd probably get run over." If I imagine myself actually doing it, there would be screeching tires and people honking their horns and maybe some collisions; I might get run into and thrown over a car; or maybe I get whacked and injured bad enough to lose consciousness and end up in a hospital.
But then I think, "well, I actually probably won't get run over unless I jump right out in front of a moving car." What would probably really happen is that people would honk and yell and stop. If I made my way to the other side, they'd probably cuss and gesticulate angrily and that would be that.
In that is an interesting demonstration: that our reflexive rational sense is often quite flawed. If I say, "why don't you just run out into traffic?" the reflexive answer is something like, "so I don't get hit by a car". However, if you separate "running into traffic" into two cases — "arbitrarily jumping into traffic" and "abruptly entering traffic such that an attentive driver would have adequate time to stop" — you find that two separate risks emerge. In the former, there's a statistical likelihood that you're going to get hit: if cars pass at an average of one every 5 seconds and it takes 2 seconds for them to successfully stop, then your odds are 2/5 that you'll get hit by a car if you randomly enter traffic. But if you only enter traffic when an attentive driver has the ability to stop, your chances of getting hit are much lower — let's say (arguably …. arguably)1 in 200 that a driver is not being attentive — then that's your odds of being hit. It's still not enough to warrant the risk, at least for most of us, but if you add in your own ability to jump clear in the 2 seconds when a driver is failing to stop, then it's really not all that bad.
But that in itself is a flawed argument. While statistical analysis opens up to new ways of understanding the world, it still is not a predictive tool: it can only guarantee the outcome of future statistical analysis. For instance, no matter how many ways I analyze the results of the roll of a 6-sided die, I still cannot predict the outcome of the next roll. If I run into traffic — whether arbitrarily or with caution — I cannot predict whether I will actually be hit by a car.
So now where's our rational mind? Mine says, "Well, regardless: I don't want to piss people off". I'll leave an exercise for the student to chase each risk and reward (to oneself, to the drivers, and to society in general) of such behavior to its nonexistent conclusion.
But what would the point be — of running into traffic, for instance? Therein lies the point of the whole thing: I don't know and neither do you. Perhaps one would grok the behavior of people in cars and find solace in that. Perhaps one would realize that they have been overly cautious their whole life. Perhaps someone turns around and seeks the pedestrian to punch them. Perhaps one would get hit by a car. — I don't know.
I can guarantee, though: that one will face a situation where the outcome is unknown. And that is the root of both fear and excitement.
I can also say that I experience regret whenever I encounter a situation that would force me to face unknown outcomes and I avoid it because of that — that I avoid a situation if I believe myself to be unlikely to succeed without evidence. I regret it because I think it perpetuates a state of childhood — that dispelling the unknowable through experience is the path to true adulthood.
And I think it is indicative in the culture around me. Powers-that-be are drawn to the safe and the statistically demonstrable. We shun risk-takers — and at the same time admire them … in an instinctive way. I think it is our nature to face the unknown to make it understood.
The ultimate, permanently un-shareable unknown is death itself. Only by constantly building confidence in our ability to face the unknown can we even hope to face our inevitable ends with peace, confidence, and grace.
I noted a press release from City Hall (30 Church St.) from May 23, 2008 titled "Mayor Duffy Statement on Court's Approval of Midtown Condemnation Proceeding". The title implies Midtown was condemned, but the body of the release states, "we are thankful for Judge Van Strydonck's decision to grant our motion to take ownership of Midtown by eminent domain." My confusion was directly clarified in the Wikipedia article on eminent domain, explaining that "the term 'condemnation' is used to describe the formal act of the exercise of the power of eminent domain" and that it is "not to be confused with the same term that describes a declaration that real property, generally a building, has become so dilapidated as to be legally unfit for human habitation due to its physical defects."
While I'm no fan of the myriad of ways the government can take away one's earned property, I do give preference to those methods which are a simple if-then algorithm. What I mean by that is things like property tax: I at least know that if I do not pay my property tax, the government will take that property away. As such, I can choose my course of action and understand the reaction.
Exercising the power of eminent domain — condemnation — can happen at any time and without any cause on the part of the property owner. Because of that, I would hope that the government uses it with great care. Let's say you've got a $50,000 house — at least that's what it would sell for on the open market. If the government wants to run a highway through it, I would hope that is done gingerly and fairly — so for instance, one might request $150,000 to find a suitable replacement home in short order and to cover personal losses and such, but it would typically be unreasonable to request $1,500,000 unless there's some unusual circumstances.
One has to remember, of course, that the will of the government will persevere. Realizing that, it should be as cordial a disruption as possible — the government providing the "scooped-up in the hands of God" kind of move, and the property owners agreeing to reasonable discomfort. In theory, the governmental need for the property is so great that paying more than the current market value is a bargain.
Admittedly I'm talking about someone's home. In the case of Midtown, it's commercial property. Regardless of who owned it — [and with great reluctance *sigh*] even if it's a property holding company — as long as they met the requirements for keeping the property, as far as I'm concerned, they have the right to continue to keep it.
So let me go back to eminent domain once more. My recollection is that it's for things like a highway or a railroad where one property owner blocks completion of a much larger project — for instance, a farmer refusing to sell a mile of access across a 1,000 acre farm, preventing the completion of a 500 mile highway, or at least dramatically increasing the cost and complexity. I gather that historical precedent has changed this view, and indeed a project can target only one property.
In the case of Midtown, the whole project has me thinking of the City government with cartoon dollar-signs in their eyes: it's the City gambling with their revenues as if they were a business. I would much rather have had them support PAETEC's efforts to purchase the property themselves — welcome PAETEC to the table and open up the zoning and permit processes, for instance. As I see it, PAETEC has no risk — the City now owns Midtown and PAETEC can set up their world headquarters wherever they please. This is the same perfect-storm situation as the Fast Ferry: the City removed risks to encourage economic development, and caused irreconcilable bad business decision to be made in the artificial safe-harbor.
But I would also like assurance that the property owners have been justly compensated — by definition of the property owners. I guess this will come to be known in the coming months, as the press release says, "the parties affected by the condemnation will have six months to file claims for additional compensation that they believe are not resolved by the condemnation and relocation payments". We shall see.