After I've been hanging my hat and quill here for who-knows-how-many years, The Column is moving.
For me, this is a giant step. Rather than using a hosted site such as Blogger (brought to you by the friendly folks of Google), the new site is my own.
All of which is good news for this kid.
I've already exported the content from here to the new site, and for a short time I will even remember this site as I post. If I remember. Eventually, though, I will phase this site (and probably the one at Hubpages) out.
Interesting read from MediaBistro. Let's put it this way: How many companies would handle a 36 percent failure rate for its innovations? Without getting all panicky, that is? Without committing hara-kiri?
" ... at any rate, Google, one of the most successful tech companies in the world, has a lot of failures. More than a third of their product launches fail, according to The Next Web ... out of 251 Google projects or add-ons since 1999, 90 have been canceled. Out of 22 major product launches, eight have been huge flops."
As much as I love progress and all things high-tech, there are some aspects of this brave new world I wish they'd killed off in the incubator.
Now, understand where I'm coming from here. This isn't some neo-Luddite railing about progress. I'm pretty plugged in for a geezer. I have my Web-enabled cell phone on my hip, and I do much more communication via text message than I do with voice. I have my netbook close at hand, an mp3 player with headphones dangling from my neck, and a few thumb drives secreted on my person every waking hour.
I'm a great fan of any tech that makes my work and my life easier, and I especially enjoy any such toys that I can play with, take apart, hack the system a little bit, and adapt it to my needs. I'm all for it, and it turns out I'm not the only technophile among my age group.
However, tech shouldn't replace common sense, and I draw the line at erasing the human touch.
OK. So I've become used to doing all my banking online. Sure, I miss those cute bank tellers who know me by name and can continue whatever conversatiuon we'd started the week before. I'll sacrifice all that for something that saves me time or a trip, or makes my life more convenient. But there are still limits.
I think it was a trip to the pharmacy that convinced me where my boundaries lie.
I usually do my grocery shopping at the local Big Box store, and I can do it without feeling guilty about feeding the Chinese economy or the Big Box Conglomerate. I don't much care to visit the place because of my dislike for crowds, but price and convenience trump everything and to compromise I tend to batch my trips there. In this case, though, I made a special trip just to fill a prescription at the Big Box Pharmacy attached to the Big Box Store.
So I submitted my prescription, found a seat on the bench about 20 feet away from the pharmacy counter, and relaxed. Chilled out watching the live version of People Of Big Box, which is a lot scarier than the online version. But I digress ...
So I'm there, relaxing on the bench in the pharmacy department and people-watching when my phone went off. I look at it and don't recognize the number, but I answered it anyway.
Couldn't even get off my standard phone greeting. Some automated voice began talking right away. I can't quote it verbatim nor would I want to, but this automated voice informed me that someone in my household has a prescription ready at the local Big Box Mart pharmacy and I can pick it up anytime.
Call me old-fashioned, but whatever happened to just looking out behind the counter, waving, maybe hollering something, making a public spectacle out of oneself? Whatever happened to just calling on the store intercom?
OK. I admit. I like personalized service, and you sure can't get it when some automated phone call coming from someplace (perhaps India?) tells me my prescription is ready.
Durn it all. Is there any way to bypass this whole process? Like maybe do the whole thing online, including the delivery?
Some folks absolutely must make a simple job difficult, like this guy in upstate South Carolina:
===
SPARTANBURG COUNTY, S.C. -- A man was arrested Saturday after deputies say that he stole meat from a grocery store by stuffing it down his pants, according to an incident report.Deputies said the manager of the Ingles at 2120 E. Main St. called police after an employee said he saw a man, later identified as Terry Campbell, walking out with meat in his pants ...===
But wait, there's more, according to WYFF News:
The perp had several packages of meat stuffed down there.
The store manager himself reached in the guy's pants to recover the meat -- by then you'd better be sure a crime is being committed; 'cause I can't think of any other reason to stage a TSA-style search.'
The perp took off, tried to start his car. The operative word here is "tried," as he had to throw it into neutral and give it a push start.
Finally he took off on foot and was easily captured.
And complained of chest pains after he was arrested.
And you think you have those days at your job where everything goes wrong?
"If I'm writing something while depressed, I am absolutely sure it is going to suck. Really really bad. But here's a funny thing: Often when I look at the work later, I can't tell much difference ... it will take me longer to get motivated and focused enough to write the thing, but other than that I really can't tell."
... and the Center For Disease Control wants you to know what to do in the event of a zombie invasion.
Maybe the whole idea came from all those pepperoni pizzas washed down with way too much Mountain Dew, but the CDC put out a blurb outlining preparedness steps when the undead come a-calling.
"The rise of zombies in pop culture has given credence to the idea that a zombie apocalypse could happen." wrote CDC official Ali Khan. "In such a scenario zombies would take over entire countries, roaming city streets eating anything living that got in their way. The proliferation of this idea has led many people to wonder 'How do I prepare for a zombie apocalypse?' "
One of the first things I think of immediately is that the CDC is a governmental function, and they're screwing off on taxpayer time. But this CDC announcement may actually make more sense than just about any other governmental release. Well, kinda sorta.
"Well, we’re here to answer that question for you, and hopefully share a few tips about preparing for real emergencies too," Khan continues.
OK. Now we're cooking. Khan then outlines some preparedness procedures that could serve you well in a pandemic, a hurricane, or zombie invasion.
Craziness aside, what I get from my reading is that it's hard to sell preparedness to the public. Hurricanes are not sexy enough. Earthquakes don't have that "it" factor. Even a multi-angled event such as a Katrina (featuring disasters such as a hurricane, massive flooding, societal breakdown and FEMA) and Japan's recent earthquake/tsunami/nuclear trifecta aren't enough to sway the populace in the semi-civilized world.
The CDC rationale, it seems, is to come up with something really over the top to garner public attention -- such as a zombie takeover. It is unbelievably tempting for me to say something about how the zombies already took over several years ago and were the difference-maker in the 2008 Presidential election, but I'm not gonna say it. I'm not gonna say it.
Later with these pedestrian hurricanies, tsunami, nuclear mutant monsters from Japan, and even space aliens. All of these have been done to death, and in our ADHD culture, you've got to hit the public hard, frequently, and from a variety of angles.
I can understand that complacency, somewhat. I grew up in California, the place where visitors and new arrivals get scared because of earthquakes. Well, there are a lot of other scary things about California, but right now I'm just going to key on earthquakes. To a new arrival, any shaking of the ground is enough to trigger a full-blown panic attack. However, it takes a Richter Scale hit of at least six-something to move the longtime resident. Don't pester me over a little trembling; if dishes fly out of the cupboards, then call me.
As far as construction goes, whole metro areas are built along earthquake fault lines. The Inland Empire, which for decades saw the fastest growth of any area in California, is nestled along the San Andreas and San Jacinto Faults. The San Jac passed underneath the a) the freeway interchange of I-10 and I-215 that had some pretty big skyhooks, b) the men's department of Fedco, and c) the San Bernardino Valley College campus. Did I worry about getting caught in the mother of all earthquakes during my classes at Valley? Not at all. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
I now live near Charleston, South Carolina, known to outsiders as hurricane country. Every year we go through the same drill here -- pick up a hurricane tracking map at the Piggly Wiggly, and make noises about putting together a plan. Which usually never comes off. Here, life goes on. We watch the hurricanes develop in the Atlantic, note that for a moment Charleston is named the primary target, then relax when the hurricane takes its usual dogleg right turn. We do have an evacuation every decade or so, but the last hurricane of any real consequence to hit the Lowcountry was Hugo in 1989. Since then the wreckage was cleared out, the sea islands were built back up, and everything went back to normal.
For the record, I do have a skeletal emergency plan in case the Son Of Hugo blows the roof off my mobile home. I have a backpack loaded with clothing sleeping bag, rope and tarp, plus some prepackaged rations I'm starting to collect. This is really in anticipation of a hike I'm planning, but if something weird happens before then (fire? Flood? The PC Police knocking at my door?) it's nice to know I'm somewhat prepared.
Standard survival items, straight from the CDC, include:
* Water (1 gallon per person per day) * Food (stock up on non-perishable items that you eat regularly) * Medications (this includes prescription and non-prescription meds) * Tools and Supplies (utility knife, duct tape, battery powered radio, etc.) * Sanitation and Hygiene (household bleach, soap, towels, etc.) * Clothing and Bedding (a change of clothes for each family member and blankets) * Important documents (copies of your driver’s license, passport, and birth certificate to name a few) * First Aid supplies (although you’re a goner if a zombie bites you, you can use these supplies to treat basic cuts and lacerations that you might get during a tornado or hurricane)
Gee, I think I have room in my backpack for the best defense against zombies: A shotgun. Gotta be prepared for anything.
If you use LastPass, be careful. In fact, change your master password. Like right now.
A security incident was reported May 3, and the company says that there is no proof of a security breach but they're "erring on the side of caution." Or something.
Here's how they put it:
LastPass Security Incident Information
Dear LastPass User,
We have reason to believe that LastPass user account information may have been accessed due to an illegal intrusion into our network. Despite not having definitive proof of this, we are erring on the side of caution and alerting you on how to safeguard your data.
Thanks, The LastPass Team
The remedy? Again, change your master password.
From LastPass:
How Likely Is It That My Actual Data Is Compromised?
It's not. If you used a weak LastPass master password, then it is then conceivable that your master password might be compromised.
Even if this occurred, it is still extremely unlikely that your actual LastPass account data (site passwords, form fill data, etc.) will be compromised.
This is because the attackers do not posses your actual encrypted data, and because we prevented access to the actual encrypted data immediately after discovering the potential breach. We did this by denying access to your LastPass Vault if you tried to login from a location that you never used before. Access to your vault from unknown locations is permitted only after you re-verify your identity: LastPass sends you an email and asks you to click on a link within the email.
Why was I not notified by email immediately?
Our existing email notifications were inefficient. In the interest of securing our users we acted quickly, only notifying the userbase via the company blog and interviews with the media.
We recognize that users deserved immediate notification of the situation, and are working to develop a system for the future that will be much more efficient in quickly updating our entire userbase.
I use LastPass, and will continue to do so. It's a solid system. However, I am looking toward other password-keeping programs, such as KeePass (which saves my password data to disk rather than in the cloud).
Upshot: I don't see this as a panic situation. But still ...
It was 50 years ago this week that America's version of the manned space program really began.
On May 5, 1921, 37-year-old Alan Shepard caught a ride on a Redstone rocket and traveling about 300 miles in a Mercury capsule with about the cabin space of a phone booth.
According to Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, he spent that 15-minute suborbital flight lying in a puddle of his own pee, as urine-recovery systems were not worked into the space suits just yet.
But this flight was a short answer to Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first orbital flight from three weeks ago, and proved a few things. Like the U.S. had the stuff to send people into space. Like our rockets could lift off without blowing up first.
Shepard was later grounded due to an inner-ear problem but was reactivated several years later, in time to command Apollo 14 in 1971. Of the original seven astronauts, Shepard was the only one to walk on the Moon. He died in 1998.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first flight, The Atlantic ran an article with a series of previously-unreleased photos. Check it out.
Got these courtesy of talk show host Neal Boortz. Check 'em out -- they're a real hoot.
Remember, though: No laughing in the airport pat-down line. No levity whatsoever. (I found this last part out the hard way while boarding from Kona Airport, but that was too long ago to go into.)
I love air shows, and I was seriously considering going to the one at the Charleston Air Force Base Saturday.
Thought about it, but I believe I'll pass.
You know it's not the same old air force base, not with post-9/11 Homeland Security being a fact of life. You can't just go onto the base without a search.
I got this from the Air Expo website, and this gives me an idea of what to expect:
Prohibited items include:
Coolers
Backpacks
Gym Bags
Glass Bottles
Alcohol
Knives
Fire Arms
Car alarms must be disabled for the duration of the air show
Again, not the same old base.
Back in my pre-9/11 taxi driving days, I used to cut through the base as a shortcut. Make up a name at the gate, and no one was the wiser. "I'm here to pick up Airman Mingus and Lt. Coltrane," I used to say, and no one minded.
Now, without military ID you can't even go on that base.
OK. Fact of life.
Executive decision: I'm going to watch it from the convenience of my front yard. This is the one time I consider myself lucky to live underneath a landing approach pattern.
Not long ago I started corresponding with an old friend, a fellow survivor of the newsroom wars. I hadn't seen him in 20 years, and he had an idea that caused the printer's ink in my veins to flow a little bit faster ... this idea was, why doesn't he buy an old struggling newspaper, call all the old reporters who haven't drunk themselves goofy yet, get them all together in one newsroom, and show the world what real journalism is all about ... stop me if you've heard that one ...
Not long ago I mentioned Thin Mints, the world-famous, to-die-for, to-perhaps-fight-for Girl Scout cookie. Some roommates in Florida fought over them, one whopping the other upside the head with various blunt objects and the roomies chasing one another with scissors because of some stolen Thin Mints. Remember?
This photo crossed my transom the other day:
Here's a little background: Last year some friends and I were hiking up Mount LeConte, one of the bigger mountains in the Great Smokies. Wore my butt out, as I recall. Fairly steep in places, but worth it.
Now, on various trails there are people who make it a practice to hand out goodies to hikers. I saw this at a section of the Appalachian Trail (the trail former Gov. Mark Sanford made famous) by Max Patch in North Carolina. It's tradition, anyway.
On this hike, we're about halfway up when we ran across this lady passing out treats/energy food. Of course I had to make my cookie grab, and fellow hiker Rick Moore recorded the moment for posterity.
Of course, the lady had Thin Mints.
I almost fell in love that day.
What would a person do for a Thin Mint? Climb a mountain, perhaps?
These started cropping up on median strips around Charleston this week. I'm not sure what they are; they may really be some sort of weed for all I know.
But a couple of things about this weed:
I've never seen them grow anywhere else but in South Carolina. I've seen them in the Lowcountry and upstate, but oddly, not on the other side of the North Carolina line.
They come out in the early spring, and are as much an indicator of the season as the dogwood, as the Bradford pear, as the pedestrian walking around in an intoxicated we-survived-winter-and-the-world's-all-right state.
Plus, they hold their color for only a short time. Then they become true weeds; thrown into the fire and burned.
But the colors are very pretty. Weeds never looked this good.
Dogwood! These blooms were seen on mall drive in north charleston, sc. They have the robin up north, and we have our dogwood. whatever your sign, enjoy the day.
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Scientists at the University of Hiroshima discovered it's not that hard to teach a rodent the finer points of wine selection.
Here's the story from some website called io9, and another from Slashdot:
... as the researchers speculate, it might just be the mice liked what they liked, and no amount of rewards or conditioning could persuade them to choose a different wine: More importantly, 2 other mice exhibited lower than 30% concordance, indicating that they were more attracted to the nonrewarded red wine compared with the learned one. This result suggested that the individual mice directed attention to different subsets of volatile components emanating from the rewarded red wine, when they were trained to choose the liquor odor in the Y-maze ...
Now, I'm not making any statements of the veracity of this story, but I just can't make stuff like this up.
These Bradford Pear trees, popular in the South as an ornamental street tree, are usually among the first things to bloom out here. While temperatures are supposed to drop again this week, Charleston boasted springlike weather over the weekend with 80-degree days. This photo was shot Sunday morning off Rivers Avenue in North Charleston.
Seems a pair of roommates in Florida had a real knock-down drag-out, including chasing one another with scissors, because one apparently stole the other's Girl Scout cookies.
"Police say the roommate's husband tried to separate them. The roommate said she gave the cookies to Howard's children ... Howard is charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. She was released Monday on $10,000 bail."
OK. I like Thin Mints myself, and when I get them I tend to protect my stash. But there may be some over-the-line behavior here. Maybe.
I love this. According to Chickasha, Oklahoma police, the guy may have been intoxicated.
Ya think?
But here's the story. Guy walks into a hardware store, sees an Echo chainsaw, and decides to walk off with it. He needs to hide it.
By stuffing it down the front of his pants.
It took a minute for store employee Richard Largent to catch on to what was happening. "I felt sorry for him; I thought the gentleman was crippled." But another employee saw the bar of the chainsaw between the man's legs, and the chase was on.
NBC affiliate KSHB reports it this way:
"Employees cornered Black in a nearby field, where he ditched the chainsaw, climbed a tree, and scrambled down into someone’s house ... when the person inside kicked him out, the Ross employees chased Black to a creek where he dove in—headfirst.
I can't make this stuff up. But just think, that chain saw was this close to causing a little unnatural selection.
Daily agenda (as todo.txt) is shown on this Linux desktop; it works just as well in Windows too. The file is easily accessible from the Fluxbox menu to the left, but you can also create an icon and store that on your desktop.
Quick and dirty productivity is made possible by using a simple text file that anything can read ... check it out.
It's only a stack of index cards, but man, does it get a following from the geeky and GTD crowd.
An excerpt:
It's simple enough to assemble: 1) Grab some index cards and 2) Clip them together with the binder clip. That's it. As Mann puts it in his website, there is no Step 3 ... it's a whole lot fancier than the old Redneck PDA, and it's easier to share information with someone (i.e. give him an index card, which is easier than chopping off your hand). And unlike the old PDA (or smartphones, which picked up where the PDA technology left off) you don't have to worry about batteries, system crashes, or the usual electonics catastrophes.
From Hubpages: Check it out -- if for no other reason than to find out what a Redneck PDA is.
It was one of those oh-the-heck-with-it ideas, and I still don't know if it was an actual fix. But after five days of being semi-incommunicado I am finally able to access my Google Mail box from my cell phone.
For me, it was simply a matter of changing my email preferences to always use https. Whatever that means.
I was shooting wild here, but not completely. I remembered .https was my default gmail setting for a long time, and I took it off because it wouldn't feed into iGoogle. So I kind of worked backward from there. Maybe it will make a difference in how my email loads, I thought.
So what the hey. Tuesday evening as I was finishing up at work (using the wifi hotspot in the office) I went into my Google Mail settings and clicked on the "always use .https" box. If it worked, great. If it didn't, it cost me nothing to try and I can always try something different later.
In truth, I thought so little of the idea I didn't bother to check until I got home an hour later. I cranked on the cell phone and went to my iGoogle home page. There, gmail refused to load:
--The Gmail gadget does not support the "always use https" preference that you selected in your Gmail settings. Learn more (includes a link from there)--
Just like before. Something, obviously, was happening. But just for grins, I went to my mobile bookmarks and tried to get into my Google mail that way, with https on.
And got in. And read my mail. Like I am supposed to.
Later I checked the Learn More link from iGoogle. It seems https is a lot more secure than http, and is recommended particularly if you're using public wireless Internet like I do. I'm not smart enough to figure a lot of this out, but https is sort of a combination of http and SSL, which is a security thing. But it does create its problems with iGoogle, and https is not an exact science yet. According to Google:
- Errors in the Gmail for mobile application may result in enabling this (always use https) setting.
- Errors in Google Toolbar may result from enabling this setting.
Errors in Gmail for mobile? Shoot, I'm getting more errors from not using that setting. And I really don't care for Google Toolbar, the resource hog that it is. So https it is.
So I'm not able to fully use iGoogle with the https setting on. Shoot, I'd rather be able to actually read and answer my email than just look at iGoogle and see what my most recent email communications are without being able to read them.
When I reported the mobile Gmail problem in this space, I did get a suggestion. Open a Hotmail account and forward my Google mail into that so it can be read. I considered that, but I'd prefer not to go through all this forwarding routine just to read some email.
Meanwhile, the folks at Google were working on the problem. Ethan, who identifies himself as a Google employee in the mobile Google support forum, wrote the following missive Tuesday afternoon:
"Thanks for your reports. The m.google.com team has narrowed down the cause of the 404 errors, but we need your help to investigate further.
"Please visit our secure webform to send us your phone's IP address so our engineers can debug:
http://goo.gl/ThpeQ
"Thanks!
"Ethan
And the matter remained ignored by much of the tech media. I subscribe to several: ReadWriteWeb, Slashdot, TechCrunch, and Mashable! While I'm able to keep up to speed on many tech issues with these, I have not found a word in any of these online publications about mobile Gmail access issues. According to MPCS-ProxyMan in the Google forum, we need to resolve this issue, we have over a million customers who are getting HTTP error 404 for your gmail app ... this is also affecting our android app for gmail." While it's hard to take anything mentioned in a user forum as gospel, I don't think this "over a million" is a funny number. Not at all.
But for me, the "always use https" setting seems to work. I'm not going to argue with the results, at least not right now.
Anyway, there it is. My fix, or maybe it's not a fix. Maybe it really is just in how you hold your mouth. Anyway, you're welcome to try it.
[You tell me: Does this little hack work for you? Anything else work? Are you able to get your mobile Gmail? Please share.]
My Google Mail is acting all weird, and answers seem a little few and far between. But I'm not the only one with this particular problem.
For the record, I really like my Gmail. It is probably the best email innovation since ... well, the computer. It's easy to like the search functions, the way it integrates with other Google tools, and the huge storage. A friend turned me on to Gmail several years ago when it was in beta, and I never looked back. What's Yahoo?
When away from a wireless connection I can usually check my news and process my email by phone. I have a Samsung 451 phone with a slider keyboard. It's good with phone calls on those rare occasions that I actually talk on the phone. It's super with text messages, and I can do a lot of things with it. It can surf the Internet, kinda sorta. The phone doesn't have the Java fixins and the browser is prehistoric, so its Internet powers are limited.
Call it what it is. My phone is not a smartphone. At risk of going all non-politically-correct on y'all here, I'm using a tardphone.
But that's OK, too. While I'm not qualified to be a hacker (in this case, meaning programmer), I can whip up a few baling-wire tricks that can make my computers and phone do things do things you wouldn't expect. I get a lot of mileage out of my tardphone.
So the other day I needed to check my email on the phone. I hit the link out of my mobile iGoogle homepage, like always.
No joy. This error message flashed on my tiny, two-inch screen:
HTTP Error: 404 Not Found
At first blush I thought maybe my links got screwed up. Such things happen. So I tried hand-typing it in:
http://google.com/mail
http://gmail.com
No luck. Let's try the mobile site, although that's usually automatic:
http://m.google.com/mail
http://m.gmail.com
Tried again, this time using https:// as the prefix. Even went so far as to try the straight .html version of Gmail, and got the same result. That error message.
What's odd is that I can access many of my other Google services. I can get the search engine, iGoogle, Google Reader for RSS, Voice, my Gmail contacts through Voice, and my calendar. But not Gmail.
It turns out, though, it's not just me. I'm glad to hear that. I think.
A Twitter search using #gmail as the key shows several others having this problem. As far as the mainstream and tech media, not a peep through Sunday.
Several have written to the Google Support Forum, saying they lost access around Feb 8 (my connection went Tango Uniform on the 11th). Some report losing access to all Google functions (Calendar, etc.), and apparently the problem is not just with tardphones. Real smartphones seem to get this problem, particularly of the Crackberry variety.
A fella named Ethan, who identifies himself as a Google employee in the support forum, seems just as baffled as anyone else. Another person on the forum, The C Man, reported this Saturday: "Google employees are investigating the problem and have not been able to reproduce it."
Already this doesn't sound promising.
It was recommended the user clean out the phone browser cache. I did this, and it worked about as well as it did with some other folks who tried -- like, not at all.
I pulled the battery out, reset the phone, even reprogrammed it in case that worked. Again, nothing. At this point I was so desperate that if the Verizon/StraightTalk folks suggested I dance naked in a bucket of steaming chicken guts during a full moon (now that's a visual for you!) I would have tried it.
So far, this error seems awfully random. Some folks report it, others don't. Some have problems getting access to all Google services, some -- like me -- just Gmail. Several cell phone carriers were involved. The whole thing seems like a crapshoot, one of those problems where no one knows exactly what's going on, how it happened, or how to fix it.
I should feel better that it's not just me, and not just my non-Java phone.
I'd hate to think Gmail is revamping its system so that you can't access it from a tardphone like mine. It could be something that corrects itself in time, but you never know.
Knowing all that, I should feel better.
But I don't.
[As this situation progresses and/or finds resolution, don't be surprised if I report back in this space.]
"Here's the beauty of cloud computing: You can conceivably get by without a hard drive at all. Shoot, all you really need for cloud computing is an operating system, Web connection and browser, and perhaps a USB thumb drive for local storage. If you want to do it like a real geek, put your operating system and Web browser on the thumb drive and boot off that. Hard drive? What's a hard drive?"
South Carolina State Senator Robert Ford has been in office for 30 years, moving straight from community organizing into politics (sound familiar?). And he's been known to stick both feet in his mouth on occasion.
The most recent Ford-ism came about earlier this week when he argued against stronger laws against illegal immigration in the state. He told a Senate committee that illegal aliens are a good thing for the state's economy.
Because Mexicans will work hard for their money, he said -- unlike blacks and whites.
"I know brothers -- and I'm talking about black guys -- they are not going to do the dirty work at Boeing, to do that hauling and all that building, that dirty work," Ford said. "A brother is going to find ways to take a break."
White guys, which Ford called "blue-eyed brothers," were not much better, he added.
Whoa, Mr. Ford ... wha'?
Whether he speaks the truth or not here is not the issue. It's not important, just as the truth is seldom important in our Brave New World of Political Correctitude. Rather, what's at issue is whether anyone was offended and who the offender is.
Rather than the expected venom, a lot of the usual screamers are just shaking their heads. Shoot, it's just Senator Ford being Senator Ford.
Ford? Why, he's just messin', that's all. "What am I apologizing for? I made a lot of jokes in my presentation like I always do," he said.
And that's cool. I don't mind politicos who speak their minds no matter what others may think. I don't have any problem with any celebrity who shoots from the hip. That's why I always liked Charles Barkley so much, and part of why the late Sen. Barry Goldwater captured my imagination so many years ago. We need more of that in politics, the corporate world, and everywhere else. And some folks really need to attempt to sprout a life, too.
But check out the reaction to Ford's comments, will you?
The NAACP, which ceased to be relevant decades ago, gave him a flaccid rebuke by calling his choice of terms "unfortunate." Dot Scott, head of the Charleston NAACP branch, said she will not press for an apology, saying it wouldn't do much of anything.
"I am not high on apologies," Scott said. "People usually say what they mean. I don't think it would do any good to even ask him for an apology. There is only one way. It's Robert's way."
She may be speaking the truth here.
Meanwhile, the guilt-ridden liberal crowd seems strangely silent about Ford's comments. I haven't heard a peep from that quarter, and they'd be screaming for scalps if, say, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley made the statement.
So it looks like Ford gets a free drop on this. He just might slip the PC Police noose.
Why is this?
To be honest, I haven't the slightest idea.
I do know this, though. If someone like a Rush Limbaugh, a Bill O'Reilly, a Sarah Palin or a Mike Huckabee said something like this, you just might see a whole bunch of hate mail and inflammatory comments. Even a guy like Tim Scott, the newly-elected black conservative Congressman from South Carolina's First District, won't skate on this, you can bet the hacienda on that.
(Footnote: Later Ford admitted he does need to work on communicating his thoughts better, but his remarks were taken out of context. Standard foot-in-mouth reflex response, yes?)
Where are people losing their butts on their mortgages these days?
I found this in USA TODAY, and it shows that a tick more than 71 percent of the mortgages in Clark County, Nevada, are underwater. That means more is owed on the house than what the house is actually worth.
Clark County, where you'll find places like Las Vegas and Laughlin, has also been one of the highest-growth areas of the country for at least the past decade.
Here is a partial list of counties where home buyers might do well to just junk the mortgage, take whatever lumps they get on their credit ratings, and walk away with what's left of their posteriors:
Rank
County
State
Mortgages under water
1
Clark
Nev.
71.1%
2
Osceola
Fla.
66.5%
3
Merced
Calif.
63.1%
4
St Lucie
Fla.
62.4%
5
San Joaquin
Calif.
59.6%
6
Stanislaus
Calif.
57.5%
7
Clayton
Ga.
56.1%
8
Orange
Fla.
56.1%
9
Solano
Calif.
55.6%
10
Maricopa
Ariz.
54.4%
11
Washoe
Nev.
53.3%
12
Pinal
Ariz.
52.6%
13
Flagler
Fla.
52.5%
14
Pasco
Fla.
51.5%
15
Riverside
Calif.
50.5%
Interesting mix. A whole lot of Florida. Several counties in California -- including Riverside County, where I grew up. Several Arizona counties, particularly around the population centers -- Maricopa County is basically Phoenix.
And unless I'm mistaken, nearly every one of these counties has experienced off-the-charts population growth for about the past three decades. The Inland Empire, which encompasses Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, was THE high-growth capital in the nation before the Las Vegas metro area took over.
Coincidence? Forget it. There ain't no such animal, you should know that.
