A Thousand Times No

Another day, another cut in the Fed funds rate. Thanks for smacking the interest on my nest egg straight off the tree with them there super-turbo helicopter blades, Ben.

To paraphrase the old Irving Berlin song from the height of the Great Depression:

Mr. Ben Bernanke
Says that now’s the time to buy,
So let’s have another cup of coffee
And let’s have another piece of pie.

Just a reminder, gentle readers, you have one more day to put in your guess for a chance to win a bit of free coffee.

You’re on your own with the pie, though.

Overheard today from someone who will soon release her first novel under a Harlequin imprint: “The thing that bugs me is that their house style does not include the use of the serial comma before the word ‘and’.”

Myself, I hate a bodice-ripper with misplaced hyphens.

This evening I took the first class in a four-part series on bicycle maintenance and repair. For the cost of a spring tuneup, I’ll have the chance to go through everything a bike shop would do, but do it using my own two hands — with help from a nice library of borrowed tools (truing stands, cone wrenches, and other specialty goodies) and a capable instructor. I’ve already taken this class once, which helped me get over my fear of changing flats and tinkering with my derailleur, but it’s been a while since I’ve actually opened up everything down to the ball bearings, so it seemed like a refresher was in order.

Tonight we focused on patching and changing the tubes on our wheels. As the instructor pulled a quick-release wheel off the front of one participant’s bike, he drew our attention to the small bumps at the bottom of the fork tips. “If your front wheel comes off, it’s a catastrophe,” he said. “So bike manufacturers started to build these extra things in to make sure that your quick release wheel won’t fly off, even if you haven’t really closed it properly. It just sort of wobbles around until you take the hint that something’s not right.”

The problem with these nubbins is that they make it tricky to separate the wheel from the rest of the bike; the so-called quick release becomes the whistle-while-you-work release. The nickname in the bike world for these annoying little ridges? “Lawyer lips.”

Then our instructor cheerfully shared his preferred solution for those pesky lawyer lips: “I just file them off.”

Renter’s insurance is one of those things in life that falls in the same category as wearing sunscreen, eating broccoli, flossing, and squirreling away nuts for retirement: sure, we know it’s good for us, but most of us carry on as if we can’t be bothered.

That was certainly the case for me. Over many years, and through several residences, I never bothered to get renter’s insurance. It seemed to me far more likely that I would get hit by a truck, or win the lottery, than ever put in a claim on a renter’s policy.

The first hint that I might be miscalculating the odds came late one night when I heard the blare of sirens moving towards my house from several directions. When you live in a dense urban area, one of the most menacing sounds is the silence that ensues when a fire engine’s siren abruptly cuts off just outside your window. Despite the December chill, I threw open the sash and stuck my head outside to see how close, and how serious, the problem was. The trucks were congregating on the next block.

I quickly tossed on some clothes and rushed to the sidewalk there, where dozens of people were milling about. Many of them were evacuated residents of the building where the fire had started. Several of them looked dazed; one young woman was particularly upset because she had returned home to the evacuated building and had no idea what state her apartment might be in. We later learned that the fire started because one resident thought it would be a good idea to hasten the drying of a damp shirt by draping it over a halogen lamp.

Shortly afterwards, a young married couple displaced by the fire took a furnished sublet in the apartment directly below mine. If we chanced upon her in the hallways, the wife rarely spoke and never smiled. “It’s been difficult for her,” the husband once said in passing. She resorted to frequently tapping their ceiling (our floor) with a broom when she heard people walking in our apartment, an odd chastisement that never happened with our downstairs neighbors before or since. A few months later, before the end of the sublet lease, they quickly departed, leaving my former neighbors to wrangle with our landlady over the status of the vacant apartment.

The next suggestion that misfortune might be closer than I imagined came when a friend confided that she was worried about her mounting credit card debt. She was over $20K in the hole, and deeply stressed over how to clear it away. Her credit card bills had been manageable until a single event ballooned her expenses overnight: during a house party, an unidentified guest had knocked over a candle in my friend’s bathroom, resulting in over $8K in smoke and water damage. Without renter’s insurance, she was left to pick up the entire tab out of her own pocket. “Obviously, I have renter’s insurance now,” she said, “but I didn’t have it back then. It would have saved me so much trouble.”

Despite these clear examples, it still took one more reminder to move me from my inertia. I would never have guessed that it would be a hard-drinking, Goth-loving, tattooed and pierced sybarite who would set me on the path to actuarial righteousness, but enlightenment often turns up in unusual guises. A mix of literary proclivities with a history of military service, his orderly impulses would surface, briefly but repeatedly, out of the waves of hedonism he gamely worked to keep in motion.

Shortly after I met him, he asked if I had renter’s insurance. I replied that it seemed like an odd question, coming from a devil-may-care guy. He then told me the story of how he walked home one night to discover that a fire had destroyed nearly everything in his apartment. “But I wasn’t there, and I had renter’s insurance, so I could start over again,” he said. I nodded, acknowledging that having a policy was the sensible thing to do — and I thought nothing more of it.

From time to time, he would ask me if I’d taken out a policy yet. “No, but I’ll get around to it,” I would say, genuinely intending to get it done someday. I knew it was a good idea, but it never seemed to inch its way up on my to-do list.

One day, he pulled a book off his shelf to show me a brief passage inside. “By the way, you haven’t gotten renter’s insurance yet, have you?” he asked. I shook my head. He opened the book, held the pages just inches from my face, and said, “Take a deep breath. Now.” As I did, an unpleasant, acrid smell leapt off the paper. Reflexively, I winced.

“That’s what the whole place smelled like after the fire,” he said quietly, firmly. “It got into everything. I had to get rid of my clothes, even if they weren’t burned. I keep this book as a reminder — that smell is never going away.”

I took out a policy after that.

I’ve been systematically going through my filing system at home over the past few weeks, actually combing through the contents of various overstuffed manila folders and — gasp! — setting aside mounds of paper to send to recycling. As I sorted through my old tax returns today, I discovered that one year I had actually completed my tax returns earlier than April 13th. Of course, it was all the way back during the first Clinton administration, which would explain why I had forgotten about it during my recent tax ablutions.

Just to make this fun, I’ll entertain guesses as to when I signed and dated my 1994 income tax forms. Whoever names the closest date without being too early will get a $20 gift certificate to Starbucks. (I have to do my share to prop up our flailing economy — please try not to laugh too hard if you’re reading this outside the States and twenty measly American dollars will only buy half a cup of coffee where you live.) You have until the stroke of midnight, Philly time, at the end of May Day to share your conjecture about which day the aliens must have come from outer space and filled my taxes for me.

This just in from the Left Coast:  Possibly mistaken for a seal because of his wetsuit, a 66-year-old triathlete on a training swim is attacked and killed by a great white shark.

If anyone wonders why I haven’t completed my first Ironman yet, now you know.

The folks at the Slate.com’s “Trailhead” blog are running a contest in which they are encouraging readers to submit “a metaphor for why winning among Democrats in the primary doesn’t mean you’ll do better among all voters in the general election.”

My submission?

Riding in on Eeyore’s tail won’t win over Tigger.

After the demise of our beloved neighborhood Wawa, I was ecstatic to learn that a new food emporium would be opening even closer to my house.  Apparently, so was the rest of the neighborhood — when I passed by the newly opened “Food & Friends” after work tonight, throngs of people passing on foot made a beeline from the surrounding sidewalks straight into the shop’s front door.  Folks were milling the aisles, checking out the attractively displayed food selection with approving smiles.

It’s not the cheapest or the biggest place to shop, but the staff is friendly, they have fresh produce, and — this is the best part — they’re open until midnight every night.  I’m looking forward to having the emergency nocturnal pint of ice cream just a stone’s throw away from both me and my neighborhood park once again.

It’s always sunny in Philadelphia, at least on this primary election day — there’s not a hint of rain forecast for anywhere throughout the commonwealth. As I noted earlier, I re-registered as a Democrat in order to jump in the fray today. This made for an interesting morning at the polls.

I walked into the same building where I’ve been voting for over a decade and gave my name to the two election officials at the table. The first one, whom I’ve seen year after year, flipped through the roll book until he located my last name. The second one, whom I hadn’t seen before, looked through the index card-sized box in which the voter headcount slips are maintained.

“I can’t find you,” she finally said. I spelled my name again for her another several times. Finally, I reminded her what the first letter in my last name is — and, sure enough, she had been looking under another letter.

“Can you believe that?” she asked, slightly embarrassed.

“Don’t worry, happens all the time,” I replied. (Which it does — I had just watched the first official do the same thing, but he had just kept flipping through the roll book pages until he found me.)

After I walked into the booth and began working my way through the slate, I heard the first election official call to me through the curtain.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to come back out,” he said. I stuck my head out from between the curtains and asked what the problem was. “You’re not registered as a Democrat,” he answered.

“But I am, actually — do you need for me to go home and get my voter registration card?”

“We have to go by what it says in the records they send us, not by what’s on your card. It says here that you’re registered as ‘unaffiliated’, so you can’t vote in the the Democratic primary,” he said apologetically, pointing to the print on the headcount slip. “But you can still vote on the ballot questions.” At that point, I asked for a paper provisional ballot.

“There are three different pages,” called out yet another official from across the room. “Make sure you have the really dense one with the small print.” The election official who had called me out of the booth began pulling out provisional ballots and a preprinted, oversized envelope. He handed me the envelope, then told me I could fill the provisional ballot in the corner, seal it in the envelope, and bring it back to him. I looked down at the provisional ballot he had given me.

“But this is the ballot for an unaffiliated voter,” I noted. “I need the provisional ballot for a Democrat.” The first election official looked confused.

“You’re listed as an unaffiliated voter, so that’s the provisional ballot you would use,” he said.

“No, I’m using a provisional ballot because my party status is at issue. I’m supposed to fill the Democratic provisional ballot and let the state work it out on the other end by checking my registration against their records.” He paused, then nodded and handed me the Democratic provisional ballot. I walked off to the corner and began checking off boxes on the paper form. Then I heard him calling me again.

“Sorry, we made a mistake. You can go back in the booth. You’re listed in the roll book as a Democrat. We’ve never seen this happen before — usually the slips and the book match. This is strange, because the slips were printed after the book. I apologize for the confusion.” He then added, “Oh, and could you sign your name in the book one more time? We crossed out your original signature.” In the end, I was back in the booth again, where my original voting slate had not yet been erased or reset. I finished my selections and pushed the big ‘vote’ button in the lower right corner.

Rest assured, after years of working as a non-partisan election monitor in the rough-and-tumble world of Philly’s urban districts, I know exactly what outright voting fraud looks like, and this wasn’t even remotely close. But, had I not known better (or had I not been quite so assertive), I might have been shut out of the very primary I went to the trouble of switching party affiliation to join.

Election Day: It’s Always ‘Funny’ In Philadelphia.

…early to rise, makes a PA voter have a fighting chance of getting into the office before 10am on Election Day.

I watched Steven Levitt give an entertaining talk this afternoon in a full auditorium. He made comments from the podium and during a reception afterwards about how little a given individual’s vote mattered during an election. I thought to myself that there are millions of people around the globe who would gladly pay a great deal of money in order to be able to vote in an American election.

That’s when I realized that some of the proposed schemes for paper validation of electronic voting could lead to some sort of open market surrounding election voting. If people walked out of the voting booth with a receipt listing their candidate choices, that could be used like a Proof of Purchase for money kickback schemes. Bazillionaire X decides that they want to sway voters in a few key locations, and announces that they will pay $50 for each receipt from a particular precinct that records a vote for a chosen candidate.

Oh wait, I live in Pennsylvania. They already do that, just without the receipts.