Author: cdwan

The Filthy Critic reviews “Christmas with the Kranks.” Don’t read unless you like profanity, a lot.

Getting work done on your house is a pain. Nobody is trustworthy, nobody knows anything for sure, and there’s no way to avoid “peek and shriek” moments when you finally get that wall open to reveal the 80 year old work underneath. I’m sure the same is said by contractors about us homeowners.

Here are some resources I had no idea existed until this year:

The Rhode Island Contractor’s Registration Board has a searchable database which keeps track of which contractors have outstanding violations against them, current insurance, permanent employees, etc. They also allow you to search by contractor name instead of company name. This is a nifty way to reveal that some contractors simply accumulate complaints and then change company names.

Vision Appraisal, despite committing web design sin number 3 (Mandatory Flash intro to their site) provides access to their database of home valuations and purchases. We learned, for example, that contrary to popular belief…our house has changed ownership fairly rapidly in the past decade. Grrrrrrrr.

And finally, East Providence has a web site. Doing building code research isn’t hard, it’s easy. These are short, to the point documents that address questions on which contractors have been trying to BS me.

If you’re willing to endure a soul-sucking registration, you can read Frank Rick’s article on the bogus scams currently being run by the FCC against the first amendment. He begins:

Oh the poor, suffering little children. If we are to believe the outcry of the past two weeks, America’s youth have been defiled en masse – again.

And proceeds to make just about every salient point that I’ve heard made about the complete and utter lunacy of the current attempts to make the daytime airwaves save for the children. Summary: We’re not dealing with an honest attempt to clean things up. We’re dealing with pageantry designed to make us watch more TV.

My very favorite line: As in the Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro football is what Pat Buchanan calls “the family entertainment, the family sports show” rather than what it actually is: a Boschian jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, “wife-beating drug addicts slamming the hell out of each other” on the field.

Brewed a Lambic style ale this evening. Traditional lambics are produced in Belgium, and they include “enteric” bacteria. That means, whatever crap is floating around the barn / was already living in those barrels gets into your beer and grows for a while before the yeast makes it too alcoholic to live in. Since I’m a control freak and don’t have oodles of patience for bad batches, I purchased the “Belgian Lambic” yeast pack from Wyeast, which is a culture taken from a mix of several commercial Lambics. Apparently there’s some lactobaccilus in there to give it a tart flavor. Other than the freaky flora, Lambics distinguish themselves by having almost no hop character (no aromatic hops, and the bittering hops boil for 90 minutes rather than the usual 45). Other than that, it’s a pretty boring half-n-half wheat and barley malt brew.

In this case, in a desperate attempt to produce something that my wife might find palatable, I’m going to do the secondary fermentation on top of 10 pounds of raspberries. I’ll be interested to see if that blows up the fermenter again.

Now online at https://chris.dwan.org/pics/2004_fall

Excellent movie. I haven’t actually come out of a theatre laughing, hard, in a very long time. There’s a little something there for everyone. I liked it a lot.

What’s up with getting email when someone posts a comment? I no longer receive email when someone comments on one of my journal entries. Are other people seeing this, or is it just me?

Telecoms lobby against public wireless

There’s a bill on the desk of the governor of PA to prevent the city of Philadelphia from offering ubiquitous, low cost wireless internet. 19 months ago, that bill was just a proposal, drafted by lobbyists for telecom companies.

Issue 1: Corporate interests wrote this law. Nobody is even pretending that this law was written in to serve the best interests of the citizens, or to advance society and achieve large scale goals. This is a law that is going to pass, plain and simple, because government works for the rich and powerful and not for the people.

Issue 2: Head-in-the-sand tactics piss me off. From the recording and film industry spending up until about a year ago pretending that the internet didn’t exist, and trying to legislate it out of utility, through Bush saying “if we don’t do stem cell research, then nobody else will be able to either, and that’s moral!” This law would rather hold back technology than try to cope with the modern world.

I have no problem with small government. I have no idea whether or not, as a nation, we ought to be providing free wireless. However, the fact that a state is going to legislate to *prevent* one of its cities from spending that city’s money on a project like this…that gets me.

Dammit. Once again, a simple home administration task has turned into a multi-thousand dollar fustercluck.

We had the chimney guys out to clean our chimneys. It was *supposed* to be $79 per flue, for two flues. Instead, I’m left with a bid ($2400, thanks for asking) to:

details

This bit of smiling propaganda brought to you by Clear Channel.