More to come

If you’re cruising down an open desert road this weekend in a convertible and you start hearing the theme to “The Lone Ranger,” the hot sun isn’t playing tricks with your mind. You’re grooving on the Civic Musical Road – a quarter-mile stretch of asphalt that’s been altered – rhythmically – to produce “The William Tell Overture” when a car passes over it.

Part of a promotional campaign for the Honda Civic, it’s one of only four in the world – and the only such road in the United States.

“I hear it every day. It’s kind of cool to be part of history,” said David Gilroy, 43, a carpenter who lives near the noteworthy strip of highway.

“The way I look at it, there’s only four in the world, and one in the U.S., and it’s right here by my home.”

Some motorists pass through the stretch three, four or five times to hear the sound effect, made by specially cut grooves in the asphalt that emit different sounds as the tires pass over them. The concept is similar to a record player needle gliding across a vinyl LP. The grooves were configured to create the music at 55 mph, the posted speed limit. The road, about six miles west of downtown Lancaster on Avenue K between 62nd and 70th streets west, has attracted curiosity seekers who have seen YouTube videos of the phenomenon.

Lancaster resident P.J. Walker on Friday snapped a picture of her silver 2002 Honda Civic parked next to the sign marking the start of “The Civic Musical Road.”

“It would be fun if they did it in different places all over with different songs,” Walker said. “Something from the Beatles maybe, like `Yesterday,”‘ she mused as she started humming the first notes of the Lennon and McCartney classic.

But the road has not been music to some residents’ ears. In fact, complaints have been so vociferous that city officials plan to pave it over Tuesday. Detractors say it sounds nothing like the classic symphony by Gioacchino Rossini, but an unrecognizable screech that keeps them awake at night.

“I think it’s terrible because it keeps me awake at night,” said Donna Martin, a 53-year-old retired budget analyst who lives about a quartermile from the road. “It’s all I hear night and day, and it’s not a pretty sound.

“You can kind of tell it’s music, but it’s not any tune or notes. It’s a scratchy sound, a high-pitch drone.”

Brian Robin, who lives about a half-mile away, said it sounds like an orchestra that’s constantly out of tune. “When you hear it late at night, it will wake you up from a sound sleep. It’s awakened my wife three or four times a night,” Robin said.

Llano resident Peggy Hager said it sounded like a “high-pitched whine.” She couldn’t identify the score, but knew it was a tune because it had a beat and rhythm. “I think it’s kind of cool,” Hager said. “When you are driving out on Avenue K, you’re going out to the middle of nowhere. It’s kind of a nice surprise to come across this thing.”

Similar “melody” or “singing” roads have been built in Japan, South Korea and Holland. Honda’s ad agency, Santa Monica-based RPA, decided to incorporate the peculiar music-making method into a Civic commercial that will air nationally in late September.

“Honda is an advanced engineering company, and we thought it would be fun to connect that to the Civic marketing campaign,” RPA Senior Vice President and Executive Producer Gary Paticoff said.

Pauline East, the Antelope Valley Film Office’s liaison, said the location was picked after Honda said it wanted a sense of community and city lights from one angle, and a feeling of openness from the other. The city approved the project as part of its overall effort to encourage more film and television production.

Half-inch-deep, one-inch- wide grooves were notched into the road at specific intervals so that a vehicle traveling over them produces various tones, said Ray Hunt, Lancaster’s capital engineering manager.

“It’s similar to the rumble strips along center medians,” Hunt said. “They did test strips to identify the spacing needed to create the sound they wanted.”

Honda spokesman Chris Martin said the singing road was designed to be heard optimally in a Honda Civic. “It’s engineered for the Civic, for that type of tires and length of vehicle,” Martin said.

The roadwork was completed Sept. 5. Soon after that, people started complaining.

The city had been told at the beginning that only motorists inside their cars would experience the sound, but the noise carried farther than expected, city officials said.

“Was it historic? Yes. Maybe the wrong location? Obviously,” East said. “We thought it was far enough away.”

From LA Daily News

John was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young hens, called pullets, and ten roosters to fertilize the eggs. He kept records, and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced.

This took a lot of time, so he bought some tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone, so he could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now, he could sit on the porch And fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells.

John’s favorite rooster, old Butch, was a very fine specimen, but this morning he noticed old Butch’s bell hadn’t rung at all! When he went to investigate, he saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets, hearing the roosters coming, could run for cover. To John’s amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He’d sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.

John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges. The result was the judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well.

Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making. Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren’t paying attention.

Vote carefully this year, the bells are not always audible.

Link to article about the event

Link to article about this here
FactCheck.org backs it up

From the fantastic Flickr LEGO Album Covers pool comes The Beatle’s “Lego It Be” by minifig and The White Stripes’ “White Blood Cells by joanna saves the Earth. Of course, The White Stripes are no strangers to Lego, having worked with Michel Gondry on the Lego-ized “Fell In Love With A Girl” video.

I’m going to hell – thanks Seth

And here i the FactCheck.org post

The Best Analysis of the news on TV hands down

By Anne Kilkenny

Editor’s note: The writer is a homemaker and education advocate in Wasilla, Alaska. Late last week, Anne Kilkenny penned an e-mail for her friends about vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whom she personally knows, that has since circulated across comment forums and blogs nationwide. Here is her e-mail in its entirety, posted with her permission..

I am a resident of Wasilla, Alaska. I have known Gov. Sarah Palin since 1992. Everyone here knows Sarah, so it is nothing special to say we are on a first-name basis. Our children have attended the same schools. Her father was my child’s favorite substitute teacher. I also am on a first-name basis with her parents and mother-in-law. I attended more City Council meetings during her administration than about 99 percent of the residents of the city.

She is enormously popular; in every way she’s like the most popular girl in middle school. Even men who think she is a poor choice for vice president and won’t vote for her can’t quit smiling when talking about her because she is a “babe.”

It is astonishing and almost scary how well she can keep a secret. She kept her most recent pregnancy a secret from her children and parents for seven months.

She is “pro-life.” She recently gave birth to a Down’s syndrome baby. There is no cover-up involved here; Trig is her baby.

She is energetic and hardworking. She regularly worked out at the gym.

She is savvy. She doesn’t take positions; she just “puts things out there” and if they prove to be popular, then she takes credit.

Her husband works a union job on the North Slope for BP and is a champion snowmobile racer. Todd Palin’s kind of job is highly sought-after because of the schedule and high pay. He arranges his work schedule so he can fish for salmon in Bristol Bay for a month or so in summer, but by no stretch of the imagination is fishing their major source of income. Nor has her lifestyle ever been anything like that of native Alaskans.

Sarah and her whole family are avid hunters.

She’s smart.

Her experience is as mayor of a city with a population of about 5,000 (at the time) and less than two years as governor of a state with about 670,000 residents.

During her mayoral administration, most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings, which had given rise to a recall campaign.

Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a “fiscal conservative.” During her six years as mayor, she increased general government expenditures by more than 33 percent. During those same six years, the amount of taxes collected by the city increased by 38 percent. This was during a period of low inflation (1996-2002). She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a regressive sales tax, which taxed even food. The tax cuts that she promoted benefitted large corporate property owners way more than they benefited residents.

The huge increases in tax revenue during her mayoral administration weren’t enough to fund everything on her wish list, though — borrowed money was needed, too. She inherited a city with zero debt but left it with indebtedness of more than $22 million. What did Mayor Palin encourage the voters to borrow money for? Was it the infrastructure that she said she supported? The sewage treatment plant that the city lacked? Or a new library? No. $1 million for a park. $15 million-plus for construction of a multi-use sports complex, which she rushed through, on a piece of property that the city didn’t even have clear title to. That was still in litigation seven years later — to the delight of the lawyers involved! The sports complex itself is a nice addition to the community but a huge money pit, not the profit-generator she claimed it would be. She also supported bonds for $5.5 million for road projects that could have been done in five to seven years without any borrowing.

While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office redecorated more than once.

These are small numbers, but Wasilla is a very small city.

As an oil producer, the high price of oil has created a budget surplus in Alaska. Rather than invest this surplus in technology that will make us energy independent and increase efficiency, as governor Sarah proposed distribution of this surplus to every individual in the state.

In this time of record state revenues and budget surpluses, she recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while she proposed distribution of surplus state revenue: Spend today’s surplus, borrow for needs.

She’s not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideas or compromise. As mayor, she fought ideas that weren’t generated by her or her staff. Ideas weren’t evaluated on their merits but on the basis of who proposed them.

While Sarah was mayor of Wasilla, she tried to fire our highly respected city librarian because the librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the city librarian and against Palin’s attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

Sarah complained about the “old boy’s club” when she first ran for mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of “old boys.” Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the city and as governor, she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people, creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally grateful and fiercely loyal — loyal to the point of abusing their power to further her personal agenda, as she has acknowledged happened in the case of pressuring the state’s top cop.

As mayor, Sarah fired Wasilla’s police chief because he “intimidated” her, she told the press. As governor, her recent firing of Alaska’s top cop has the ring of familiarity about it. He served at her pleasure and she had every legal right to fire him, but it’s pretty clear that an important factor in her decision to fire him was because he wouldn’t fire her sister’s ex-husband, a state trooper. Under investigation for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than two dozen contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded for sexual harassment; when this caused a public furor, she withdrew her support.

She has bitten the hand of every person who extended theirs to her in help. The City Council person who personally escorted her around town, introducing her to voters when she first ran for Wasilla City Council became one of her first targets when she was later elected mayor. She abruptly fired her loyal city administrator; even people who didn’t like the guy were stunned by this ruthlessness.

Fear of retribution has kept all of these people from saying anything publicly about her.

When then-Gov. Frank Murkowski was handing out political plums, Sarah got the best, chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission — one of the few jobs not in Juneau and one of the best paid. She had no background in oil and gas issues. Within months of scoring this great job, which paid $122,400 a year, she was complaining in the press about the high salary. I was told that she hated that job: the commute, the structured hours, the work. Sarah became aware that a member of this commission (who was also the state chair of the Republican Party) engaged in unethical behavior on the job. In a gutsy move which some undoubtedly cautioned her could be political suicide, Sarah solved all her problems in one fell swoop: got out of the job she hated and garnered gobs of media attention as the patron saint of ethics and as a gutsy fighter against the “old boys’ club,” when she dramatically quit, exposing this man’s ethics violations (for which he was fined).

As mayor, she had her hand stuck out as far as anyone for pork from Sen. Ted Stevens. Lately, she has castigated his pork-barrel politics and publicly humiliated him. She only opposed the “bridge to nowhere” after it became clear that it would be unwise not to.

As governor, she gave the Legislature no direction and budget guidelines, then made a big grandstand display of line-item vetoing projects, calling them pork. Public outcry and further legislative action restored most of these projects — which had been vetoed simply because she was not aware of their importance — but with the unobservant she had gained a reputation as “anti-pork.”

She is solidly Republican: no political maverick. The state party leaders hate her because she has bit them in the back and humiliated them. Other members of the party object to her self-description as a fiscal conservative.

Around Wasilla, there are people who went to high school with Sarah. They call her “Sarah Barracuda” because of her unbridled ambition and predatory ruthlessness. Before she became so powerful, very ugly stories circulated around town about shenanigans she pulled to be made point guard on the high school basketball team. When Sarah’s mother-in-law, a highly respected member of the community and experienced manager, ran for mayor, Sarah refused to endorse her.

As governor, she stepped outside of the box and put together of package of legislation known as “AGIA” that forced the oil companies to march to the beat of her drum.

Like most Alaskans, she favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). She has questioned if the loss of sea ice is linked to global warming. She campaigned “as a private citizen” against a state initiaitive that would have either protected salmon streams from pollution from mines or tied up in the courts all mining in the state (depending on whom you listen to). She has pushed the state’s lawsuit against the Department of the Interior’s decision to list polar bears as a threatened species.

McCain is the oldest person to ever run for president; Sarah will be a heartbeat away from being president.

There has to be literally millions of Americans who are more knowledgeable and experienced than she.

However, there are a lot of people who have underestimated her and are regretting it.

Claim vs. Fact

• “Hockey mom”: True for a few years
• “PTA mom”: True years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since
• “NRA supporter”: Absolutely true
• Social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, but vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships (said she did this because it was unconsitutional).
• Pro-creationism: Mixed. Supports it, but did nothing as governor to promote it.
• “Pro-life”: Mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Down’s syndrome baby but declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life legislation.
• “Experienced”: Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska. No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.
• Political maverick: Not at all.
• Gutsy: Absolutely!
• Open and transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at explaining actions.
• Has a developed philosophy of public policy: No.
• “A Greenie”: No. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.
• Fiscal conservative: Not by my definition!
• Pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built streets to early 20th century standards.
• Pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on residents
• Pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city government in Wasilla’s history.
• Pro-labor/pro-union: No. Just because her husband works union doesn’t make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim that she is pro-labor/pro-union.

Why am I writing this?

First, I have long believed in the importance of being an informed voter. I am a voter registrar. For 10 years I put on student voting programs in the schools. If you google my name, you will find references to my participation in local government, education, and PTA/parent organizations.

Secondly, I’ve always operated in the belief that “bad things happen when good people stay silent.” Few people know as much as I do because few have gone to as many City Council meetings.

Third, I am just a housewife. I don’t have a job she can bump me out of. I don’t belong to any organization that she can hurt. But I am no fool; she is immensely popular here, and it is likely that this will cost me somehow in the future: that’s life.

Fourth, she has hated me since back in 1996, when I was one of the 100 or so people who rallied to support the city librarian against Sarah’s attempt at censorship.

Fifth, I looked around and realized that everybody else was afraid to say anything because they were somehow vulnerable.

Caveats: I am not a statistician. I developed the numbers for the increase in spending and taxation two years ago (when Palin was running for governor) from information supplied to me by the finance director of the City of Wasilla, and I can’t recall exactly what I adjusted for: Did I adjust for inflation? For population increases? Right now, it is impossible for a private person to get any info out of City Hall — they are swamped. So I can’t verify my numbers.

You may have noticed that there are various numbers circulating for the population of Wasilla, ranging from my “about 5,000″ up to 9,000. The day Palin’s selection was announced, a city official told me that the current population is about 7,000. The official 2000 census count was 5,460. I have used about 5,000 because Palin was Mayor from 1996 to 2002, and the city was growing rapidly in the mid-1990s.

* Anne Kilkenny is a homemaker and education advocate in Wasilla, Alaska.

When the police shut down the PA on Rage Against the Machine at an anti-RNC concert, the band took to the turf with a megaphone and performed a capella, delivering inspiring commentary between songs. This is must-see youtube — some of the most heartening protest footage I’ve seen in years.

Rage Against the Machine had a scheduled legal concert in the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis tonight. Police and media where sitting and waiting outside during the whole concert in heavy numbers just waiting for something to happen when the show got out. The police got what they wanted. Police pepper spraying going on right now.” Twitter 1, Twitter 2