First let me relate something I thought of some time ago. I think the reason you see so much racism in the suburbs is because there just isn’t enough population density to draw different peoples.

And this song popped up on my iPod today. It’s by Machine called “There But For the Grace of God”

One of the lines from the song goes “Lets find a place they say, somewhere far away, with no blacks, no Jews and no gays!”

When this song was recorded, NYC had plenty of each. I really dislike the line btw, as I have friends that are Jewish, a partner who is black, and I’m gay!

Anyhow, check out the graphs here.

Yeah, the higher population density the more they tend to vote Democrat. It’s because we’re exposed to those blacks, Jews and gays more often and we realize they’re normal people, just like us and that there’s no reason for irrational hatred.

The prevailing attitude in the sparsely settled suburbs is one that I term “Fuck you, I got mine!”

And it’s evident in the way they treat others, and how they don’t support infrastructure projects like rail.

So interesting.

This is great news. The great mammals are appearing just off the Verrazano Bridge. Whales most of the year, and dolphins June through September.

The experts say it’s due to cleaner water and anti-hunting laws. But I’ll expand on that, I say the food supply supports those creatures.

The reason behind that is because over the past decade we’ve been cutting back on fishing the eastern seaboard. It’s been terrible for the fishermen but we needed to do so, otherwise we’d have fished several species to extinction. People don’t realize that the vast majority of fish that they buy today is farmed, not fished.

You also have to remember, while the fish stocks are coming back, so too the smaller critters that the whales feed on.

So this is all around good news as far as I’m concerned. We’ll now avoid the future of Star Trek with any luck!

Picked up a 40″ LCD 1080p set for $359. It’s an Element Electronics ELCHW402. Price was right and it’s hooked up to my Wii at the moment. I installed the Netflix player on the Wii and I love it. But I wish hulu, pandora, etc. worked but the resources on the Wii fall just short due to the fact that it uses Flash 7 and the services I’d like to use are now Flash 9.

Probably end up picking up a Roku box. And I’ve been experimenting with the antenna location. If I elevate the indoor antenna to just above the television I pull all the Providence and Boston based stations. But I can sneak a mast and a stepper based rotator controlled by an Arduino out back and snake 75 Ohm cable to it and probably pull stations from Connecticut too though there is that BIG valley that might prevent that.

But Keyron loves it, he’s watched Netflix on it pretty consistently and he gets his daily dose of The View too.

Me, I mostly play games or watch PBS on it. It’ll be a shame if they kill the funding for CPB which is the funding arm of PBS. Right now I’m working my way through Wii Super Mario Brothers. I love this game. Seriously, love it. And I bought $50 worth of Wii Points and installed Xevious on it too. Yeah, the old 8 bit games rocked.

Had three snow days this week. Three! Of course with a net and VPN connection I can still work so it really doesn’t count as a snow day.

But it’s as thought we no sooner dig out and we get more snow dumped on us. It’s ridiculous this year. Last tally brings us to 45 inches total for the season so far.

It’s to the point where there is no place left to put the snow after you’ve shoveled it out.

And I suspect all this snow will probably contribute to some flooding come spring.

So Providence is now at 45 inches so far this season. This will be a second record. I’d predict we get close to 80 inches of total snowfall this season.

Now once again, snow removal has been an abject failure. The sidewalks throughout the city, with the exception of downtown Providence are horrid.

Despite all the new mayor had promised, I don’t see anyone getting fined, or any real effort to clear sidewalks. And I’ve been getting strident with my city councilor about this.

I have heard that snow removal budgets are getting strained. But what did they do with the money on the lean snow years? They should have socked it away to use when the eventuality of lots of snow came again. But no, it gets robbed to pay Paul or Peter or whatever.

So the only option is to publicly shame them. From Mayor Taveras to Councilman Principe – you both have a lot to learn. And I’ll be there to school you all the way.

Why the hell not mandate it at the federal level? Think of the energy savings not just for the business but the employees as well since they wouldn’t have to waste fuel to get to work and then back home.

Think about the medical if you will, the mental health of people. Think about how calm most holiday weekends can be and imagine 52 of them each year.

It could work I tell you. It could work and we’d be as productive if not more so. And while I’m at it, same gross pay for 4 days as if you worked 5.

Yeah, we could do it.

A couple of others I’d like to see turned into full holidays. How about Election days? Both primary and general, and nationals too. What would that do for voter turnout?

How about it isn’t just the Fed and State government who recognize the holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.? That would be progress.

This is purely symbolic, it won’t fly in the U.S. Senate, and the President will certainly veto if it did.

I think the Repugs need to be tarred and feathered with the Tea Bagger phenomenon and the shooting of Rep. Gabriele Giffords.

The health care bill had some good points in it, like the denial of rejection for pre-existing conditions, covering adult children to age 26 under parents insurance, you know, things like that. I do find the obligation to buy insurance a bit on the unconstitutional side but nothing we can’t address with future legislation.

And I side with the California Nurses Association. The U.S needs to be on a single payer system. In the U.S. that would be Medicare. Here’s the dirty little secret, the overhead required to administer the Medicare system is 3%. I’ll give you one guess what the overhead is for private insurers and why it’s that high. Yes, 20% to 25%, and it’s to satisfy stockholder profit, nothing more. Of course the insurance industry would go apeshit if such a thing were to come to pass. Just reading Wendell Potter’s “Deadly Spin” gave a glimpse into the panic that a movie could cause the industry. Imagine a real legislative push.

And while I’m on a rant, let me talk about the banks. An associate at work made the asinine statement that he wants to see ALL regulations taken off banks. I explained to him that if the banks had been better regulated they wouldn’t have gotten into trouble with all the toxic assets which resulted in a run on the credit default swap systems.

I also mentioned that letting banks and insurance companies merge together was an extremely bad move, since insurance companies if they aren’t managed properly end up being money pits.

I made it clear I want to see strong government regulation of banks again. I want them so regulated that if they even fart wrong the government can take over the bank and liquidate the assets. I say this because I know for fact that a certain big bank is teetering on needing yet ANOTHER bailout.

It would be far less expensive to pay out deposits to depositors and liquidate the assets than it is to shore up ludicrous business practices employed by the banking industry. This is looking at it from a long term, not short.

First take a look at this, it was done by Deutsche Bank regarding the price of batteries, in particular Lithium-Ion:

The prices start reaching their lowest payback point around 4 years from now and best with government subsidies. I’ve been saying all along that subsidies were needed to move us to a post petroleum age.

And there’s also a rumor that Rolls Royce may be producing an electrified limousine.

Wouldn’t that be a hoot!

So on the way home with our friends Nick and Beth, Nick and I were discussing potential movie night themes.

I’m thinking of making it special. Now that I’ve bought a 40″ LCD 1080P HDTV with more inputs than you can shake a stick at. It has HDMI, VGA, Component, Composite, and Coaxial. In essence you can connect anything to this new set.

But I got it for $350. My budget for a new television was $800 so that leaves me $450. What could I do with that? Perhaps buy a decent projector and a screen and a blue-ray disc player for maybe $100 or so more than that. Yeah, I think I might just do that.

While reading the list you’ll notice items with a *, followed by a number after the first *. There are notes at the bottom why those particular movies tickled me.

As to themes here’s some of what we came up with:

1) Monty Python
And Now For Something Completely Differnet
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life *
Time Bandits *A

2) Future Dystopic
Soylent Green *1
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
Wall-E

3) Blake Edwards
The Pink Panther
A Shot in the Dark
The Return of the Pink Panth
The Pink Panther Strikes Again *2
Revenge of the Pink Panther
Trail of the Pink Panther
Curse of the Pink Panther
Son of the Pink Panther

4) Mel Brooks
The Producers
The Twelve Chairs
Blazing Saddles
Young Frankenstein *3
Silent Movie
High Anxiety
History of the World, Part I
Spaceballs
Life Stinks
Robin Hood: Men in Tights
Dracula: Dead and Loving It

5) Robert Zemeckis
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
Used Cars
Romancing the Stone
Back to the Future *4
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Back to the Future Part II *5
Back to the Future Part III *6
Death Becomes Her
Forrest Gump
Contact
What Lies Beneath
Cast Away
The Polar Express
Beowulf
A Christmas Carol

6) Kevin Smith
Clerks *7
Mallrats
Chasing Amy
Dogma *8
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
Jersey Girl
Clerks II *9
Reaper
Fanboys
Cop Out

So there you have it, five directors and one actual theme, 50+ movies.

Notes:

* – The Meaning of Life, from Mr. Creosote to the birth segment, to the universe segment it’s great movie.

*A – Time Bandits is included since it had so many of the Python troop in it you couldn’t leave it out. And it’s funny. Crass consumerism playing into the hands of an inept devil. Come on, how can that not be funny?

*1 – It’s people, seriously, Soylent Green is made from people. Talk about dystopic future!

*2 – The pathos of Chief Inspector Dreyfus is fantastic in this movie. The very soul of depravity, right down to the winking eye at the end when he disintegrates himself.

*3 – Young Frankenstein is one of the best send up’s of Mary Shelley’s original that I’ve ever seen. Peter Boyle as the monster is absolutely hilarious, as is Gene Wilder playing it straight, and I-Gor played by Marty Feldman.

*4, *5, and *6 – All that mucking about with time travel in a DeLorean. What’s the hell is NOT to like here?

*7 , *9 – The Clerks movies are a gut buster. Just when you thought Clerks was bad, along comes Clerks II. Two words from that last, Kinky Kelly.

*8 – Dogma – come on, the fact that Smith actually went out and protested his own movie to get into the heads of the idiots makes this guy stand out. And his playin Silent Bob in the Jay and Silent Bob movies, priceless.

It’s the one about the Kapar Carr – Street Thief. I’m in awe that this log seems to e the one most found on searches about the movie but a little chagrined that it’s all that this blog seems to be recognized for doing.