Civil Disobedience: Paying Unjust Fines with Truculence Day 90+

Couple months ago I appealed a campus parking ticket. This is the same citation that I paid with pennies and other coins to a bunch of disgruntled passive-aggressive TAPS employees. In the appeal, I listed a bunch of circumstantial reasons why the ticket was invalid, mostly blaming TAPS for being sloppy, and Bel Aired them at the end of the letter in spite. I just got the results of the administrative hearing, and surprisingly, I won by default!

"In your appeal, you stated that the signs to the entrance of the lot are not easily seen and is[are] oriented to only be visible from one direction. You stated that several cars received citations on January 11 in this lot, suggesting that the permit requirements are not well posted. You also included a portion of the lyrics to the TV show "The Fresh Prince of Belair" as part of your appeal. I am dismissing this citation because I did not provide a reply to you within the time limit required (90 days from requesting the administrative hearing). ...
A refund of $30 will be sent...in approximately two or three weeks."

How great is that? The system works, man!

Don't Say It

If you've been listening to the news lately you've heard all about the economic malaise that the media is talking about. Unemployment this and inflation that. Forget all that technical crap. What is really going on here? The state of the economy can be summarized in just one word: Stagflation.

Defined: "A period of slow economic growth and high unemployment (stagnation) while prices rise (inflation)"

A stagflating economy basically means that your money is both worth less and more difficult to obtain at the same time. Everyone gets hurt by this. In effect, everyone becomes more poor.

And there is only one thing powerful enough to bring stagflation to America: A solid spike in oil prices.

So why don't those news reporters just come out with it and say that the economy is stagflating?
(1) Because it sounds stupid to say.
(2) Getting stagflated will remind everyone of the 1973 Panic at the Pump and the hardship of a full blown hitting recession. Who wants to be reminded of that?
(3) old meme

Shhhh!

Extraordinary People (2005 - ??)

Awesome. This is a British documentary series about people with rare conditions or abilities. There's a blind artist, a kid that remembers his past life, a guy that uses echolocation, and a bunch of other people with unique attributes. Some of the distinguishments aren't so good, such as a guy with an enormous tumor, but many are quite extraordinary.

Material like this is gold to eugenics enthusiasts. Genetic dogma believes that new genes are produced by only one thing: gene mutation. The crown jewel of mutations are positively affecting mutations, which are extremely rare. One-in-a-billion maybe. These genes give people traits like extreme intelligence or physical strength, and they are somewhere out there just waiting to be found.

Then you have the people on this show, like a guy who can tolerate extreme cold or a guy that can calculate huge numbers, who appear to have some kind of genetic abnormality. Do they have a 1/1000000000 genetic mutation that gives them vastly superior abilities? Are they the founders of the genome that will take humans into the next state of evolution? I'd like to think so.

Rating: 60%

Frozen Yogurt Boom

I've been seeing a lot of Frozen Yogurt shops in California lately. We're talking about stores devoted entirely to serving "fro-yo" made from the same fermented cultures as conventional Yoplait. Frozen yogurt is the new fad. It is cheap and easy to manufacture, in-line with health food culture, individually customizable with different toppings, and like many fermented foods, has a unique taste. The food business model has found a winner. But this isn't going to be like the fruit smoothie fad of 1998 or the pearl milk tea frenzy back in 2001. Each frozen yogurt franchise has a different system going for them.


YogurtLand in Cupertino serves a variety of fruity flavors and sells by the ounce (30 cents/oz), giving you an incentive to chose light weight toppings. The place is usually inundated with Asian high school kids, and the workers are all super fobs.


Swirl, near UC Davis, uses unpasturized yogurt with high levels of live culture, which is supposed to increases its authenticity and nutritional value. This outlet is only 2 blocks away from another shop called "Yogurt Shack", and is within walking distance of "Yolo Berry Yogurt", a new yogurt place that hasn't opened yet.


Red Mango and Pinkberry are two well established yogurt chains founded by Koreans and based in SoCal. Much like pearl tea places, they have a stamp card that gets you a free cup of frozen yogurt after 10 or so purchases. Because they are upscale, fashion minded, and generally more expensive, I don't know much about them, although I think it's pretty interesting that both titles are potent for sexual innuendo. I mean, "Pinkberry"? That's probably a code word in Vegas.