I am so glad I quit my job just before gas hit $4.70ish per gallon, and I’m looking forward to not having a car in a few months. I’m adopting the treehugger hippie position that cars are environmentally unsustainable, and the radical position that a long-term solution to this is not necessarily to improve cars but to alter our way of life entirely, the idea being that there are not enough resources on earth for everyone to maintain their current lifestyle.

I had a discussion about this with a friend, on a long road trip. He disagreed with my idea, which is that everyone needed to live in higher density developments, i.e. cities, stating that he personally loved the suburbs and that I shouldn’t have the right to deny that to him and others who feel the same way. What we seemed to find common ground on is that people will tend to act selfishly when given the choice, and people with money and means to do what they want will continue to do so, consequences be damned.

The problem is bridging the gap between the “experts” and the “commoners.” The state of education in the United States right now seems to be glorification of anti-intellectualism, where if you disagree with what the “expert” says, you are encouraged to regard it as merely an opinion, and you are free to hold up your own opposing viewpoint as equal and factually on the level. Creationism (v. evolution) is a war being waged on one of those fronts, as are many hot-button issues of the day, though with significantly more shades of gray. City planning is one of those fronts, and it’s a large abstract one that has close ties with energy, environment, transportation, the “free market” and the social sciences, and I think there is something that will have to change.

My bet is you’re not going to like it.

Al Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Hajj freed from Guantanamo. I thought this was worth a mention, because American-based (or America-friendly) media has continued to be unreliable when it comes to reporting the kind of shit our country pulls in the name of protecting you (?). I’m not sure I could claim that I felt personally threatened by a Sudanese journalist, whose idea of a suicide bombing is (apparently) prolonged starvation inside a prison, but then again, I’m not the President.

Anyway, most of us have plenty of other things to worry about; I hardly need to distract you with the sexy, underage hijinks of Hannah Montana. That news is positively shocking.

Jeremiah Wright is also dominating mainstream news again, mostly in his anointed role of the The Latest Anti-American Pariah (like the Dixie Chicks), and in reviewing his comments in light of the above, I still think he’s right (wright?).

Genre still going strong: Mockumentaries! Now there’s a whole slew of independently produced shows. Viralcom was featured on YouTube a couple days back; I watched the four episodes that are out and I like it. (I like it a lot!) It goes behind the scenes of viral videos, which, as it turns out, are all elaborate and professional fakes designed to look homemade.

There’s also a series called Jesus People, about a newly-formed four-person Christian music group. I watched the first episode, and it’s good stuff, but the whole premise (though somewhat exaggerated) hit a little close to home. I will probably come back to it later.

A fifteen minute talk from Clay Shirky, who writes books.

…and interviews me in their blog.

check it out (beta).

The quality of your ground transport vehicle’s air filter– a property which is positively correlated to its age– really makes a difference in its behavior, so when your mechanic suggests that it’s time for a replacement it’s generally a good idea to do it. Except, don’t let him do it. If you’ve got what I got, it’s really easy to handle it yourself: just pop the hood, and over in a corner somewhere the filter is being held down with clips. Count ‘em: there’s four, no screws or anything. It couldn’t have been easier if the assembly was designed by a Swedish guy.

Once you got the filter out of its enclosure, the first thing you do is inspect it visually. Okay, it’s probably hella dirty. You could usually get away with just vacuuming the dust out with some powerful suction and then reusing it, but you can only do this once or twice before the paper gets gunked up with oil and grease and becomes chemically inseparable forever. Then you go to the store and stare at the wall of orange boxes back there until you find the one that corresponds to your car. This isn’t actually the secret. If you’ve been a driver of your own car for any length of time you probably know this already.

The real secret is how to get dealer price on Kragen’s backroom stock of air filters, which is different than those orange boxes they have on display, but they’re the same thing, and cheaper.

Here’s what I did, a process discovered by accident: I went on a Friday evening, just before their usual shipment arrives on Monday. It might be different for each store, but at that point they’d run out of filters for a ‘99 four-door four-cylinder Honda Accord EX, which is quite a popular model dontchaknow. So the clerk checks out the back room, finds the one left that they usually reserve for local mechanics, reasons that as no mechanics are working on the weekend and more are coming in a few days it wouldn’t hurt to sell me this one, and gives me their price. Savings of about $5.

So to break it down:

@ Kragen’s, mechanic part price: $12 after tax
@ Kragen’s, consumer price: $18 after tax
Getting your mechanic to do this for you: I don’t know, maybe $30, $40?

Now you know.

Although the oft-repeated “God damn America” soundbite isn’t in this clip, this is fuller context from the same sermon by Jeremiah A. Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor who was taking flack in the media for “anti-American” diatribes:

You know, I’d have to agree with Pastor Wright. When he said, “Because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards! America’s chickens are coming home to roost. Violence begets violence, hatred begets hatred, and terrorism begets terrorism.” — what he said, and what is so controversial about that with conservative beltway folks, is the notion that karma is a nasty bitch. Yet it’s right in the Bible: it is written, in Job 4:8 [+/-]ERROR: You have exceeded your quota of 500 requests per day. Please contact the developer of this application if you have questions. (If you're the developer and have questions about this error message, please contact Crossway.)
, “As I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it.”

There were other people in high positions of spiritual leadership who were quick to say “We deserved 9/11″ or “God punished us for our sins” — not because of anything we did to our attackers, but because of things we did to ourselves. In other words, 9/11 isn’t punishment for decades of covert assassinations and puppet governments and banana republics designed for our own financial gain, 9/11 (they claim) is punishment for gays and abortion and people having sex. Militant Islamists couldn’t be trying to take down a government they despise for its oppressive policies, it is because (they claim) they hate you, personally, a normal American, and for absolutely no good reason. There’s a disconnect here, where point A doesn’t lead to point B, as if people believed that by sowing the seeds for apples you would somehow harvest grapes.

It is always good to hear from churches with faithful leaders, and it is good when a former member of its congregation is shaped so positively and in position to cinch a bid for the presidential race. The question now is whether the church at large with all its disparate arms and entities will be as united behind a truly faithful person as it did with someone who was faking it. There’s three options: (1) the church learns a valuable lesson in priorities and picks someone who actually cares about the well-being of regular people, faithful or not, (2) the church learns a valuable lesson in the dangers of playing politics and decides to have no part in it, and (3) the church decides that admitting its mistakes and looking for repentance is a sign of weakness (and, therefore, God is weak) and awkwardly recommits to more of the same hoping for vindication in the end. I despair in the event of the latter.

Even the Safeway down the street from my apartment had posted hours, so I was not expecting to find one that promised to remain open forever in a sleepy mountain village like Truckee where, for a while, I had stopped believing that it would have a 24-hour anything. I was seriously contemplating how long I could crash there before someone threw me out for turning it into my private bunker, stocked with enough food to last me months. Not that I’d need to be there long, only till Sunday morning.

It seemed like the preferable choice, given:

1. The roads outside Truckee were horribly torn up by a season’s worth of chain-endowed trucks,
2. said roads were slick with ice,
3. not very well lit (it was already 9pm),
4. it would be sixty-plus miles to the next hint of civilization,
5. there would be uphill and downhill driving in inclement weather,
6. and I had lost a tire.

Since I had already spun out once that evening, this seemed (to me!) like a recipe primed to produce the most potent disaster. At that point the wise choice is to expend resources in order to ensure the continued safety of friends, vehicle and self, and so the survival instinct manifests itself in the form of a pocketbook, an earnest bribe to the fates for our very lives. A solid eight hours of sleep, in a real bed, is an effective remedy for frayed nerves.