Category: Uncategorized

Dale Earnhardt was an asshole.

Just what we needed. A truck for all those guys who like to tailgate and be complete dicks in their overpowered, oversized shiny trucks with nothing in the bed. A truck for those guys who like to do burnouts in vehicles supposedly intended for hauling. A truck for those guys who sit in a cubicle being bureaucratically shitty to their underlings all day and think of themselves as a cross between Walker, Texas Ranger and David Lee Roth.

The Intimidator is here.

Once again pbd is right. At least in Southern California car culture, the Silverado is the truck of That Guy.

Also, Mullah Omar’s copy of “Harriet the Spy” is 438 days overdue.

Congress Pressed to Renew Library-Search Powers

By Alan Elsner
Thu Apr 28, 7:07 PM ET

Congress must keep U.S. libraries from becoming terrorist “havens” by renewing legislation that allows authorities to seize library and bookstore records, Bush administration officials testified on Thursday.

“Libraries should not be carved out as safe havens for terrorists and spies. We know for a fact that terrorists and spies use public libraries,” said Ken Wainstein, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

More…

Back from the Vet

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Back from the Vet, originally uploaded by conradh.

She’s walking funny on a bandaged paw, and likes to hide in the linen closet a lot so far, but she is her usual friendly self. It remains to be seen whether she just had a really nasty bout of gastritis or is in a fatal decline from kidney disease.

History Lesson, Old School O.C.

Orange County has no history. Even within California, we’re ahistorical. Everything happened last week, or maybe in the long ago 1950s. At some point there were some Mexicans? We think? It’s all a fog.

My family has roots here going back to the mid nineteenth century, covered wagons and all, so I’ve heard more of the narrative, but until a few years ago I didn’t know about Santa Ana’s Chinatown. When my father told me about it I was shocked. I have seen exactly one article about this incident ever, which I found in the wayback machine and cribbed a bit for the story.

Until May of 1906, there was a flourishing Chinatown around 3rd and Bush. The Chinese had come to build railroads, dig ditches, and farm. They stayed for that and to run laundries and other small businesses. The city fathers didn’t like them, and although they’d saved some cash by putting the city hall next to Chinatown they wanted the Chinese out. At one point an offer of $400 a person was made if they all left, but it’s not clear who was informed of this. There was good money to be made when the property values went up after the Yellow Peril was gone.

Chinatown had to go. It was obviously full of opium dens and gambling halls. “White slavery” was assumed, and disease too, because it smelled funny. The city sent in a health officer, who duly found a gentleman named Wong Woh Yeh who wasn’t feeling so good and had skin ulcers. He was declared to be a leper. The local paper reported that “The diseased Chinaman occupies a room barely large enough for a miserable bunk, knocked together of planks, with tattered rags for covering. He is able to walk about, although the case (of leprosy) is far advanced, probably three to four months progress. …The feature of much interest to the public of the city is the fact that right in the room of the patient and in other rooms surrounding it are many vegetables, which the yellow vendors distribute from one end of town to the other.”

On May 24, the city council ordered the fire department to burn all of Chinatown, and burn all domestic animals except horses. (Horses are valuable.) The Chinese themselves were to be driven out of town.

On either May 25 or May 28, 1906 this was done. The Fire Department set the fire, and a crowd watched as Chinatown burned. Two hundred or so Chinese were pushed outside the city, homeless. After the fire, only one person of Chinese descent remained in town. Twenty-five years later there were no Chinese at all in the entire county.

Next year will be the 100th anniversary of a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing that occurred ten miles from where I sit. I have never in my life met anyone who knows this happened.

This has not been a recording (slight return)

Every piece of mail I got today was labeled as something it was not. I got an “explanation of benefits”, a “user update”, an “important survey about the future of the environment”, an “annual renewal”, a “service announcement”, and two “membership cards”.

These were actually a magazine subscription, another magazine subscription, a fundraising plea, an attempt to get another annual subscription fee from me after 3 months, an attempt to get me to subscribe to a credit card add-on service, and two more fundraising pleas.