Nobody's Business

One Last Name, Two Words. Is That So Hard?

I don't understand what's so unpardonably exotic about a last name that consists of two words, especially in a country that has long prided itself on being made up of immigrants. Du Maurier. Van Dyke. García-Ramírez. Al-Maliki. Von Statthausen. Da Silva. How many of us are there in the United States? Millions, for sure.

This fact eludes airlines, though. In an era where even the perennial bureaucratic basket case that is the DMV has finally caught up and now issues licenses to drivers with two-word last names, properly spelled, the aviation industry can't be bothered. To the airlines, I don't exist — can't possibly exist — with my family name intact. Van Bakel? Out of the question. In a quarter century of flying in the U.S., I've never had a ticket that didn't say VANBAKEL.

A very minor irritation? You'd think so. Well, ponder this. I'm writing this at the Las Vegas airport, where my wife and I have four hours to fritter away, and not because we'd love to play the slot machines that are thoughtfully positioned all over the place. All we want to do is get home to our kids. To that end, we got up at 5 a.m., returned the rental car, took the shuttle to the terminal, arrived at the Delta check-in area at 6:05, and were greeted by a bank of automated boarding-pass machines.

The idea is that you insert a valid credit card and the robot will print out your tickets. It never works for me because the last name on my credit cards (two words) and the one on my reservation (one word) don't match. I gamely take another stab at getting my ticket printed, the machine predictably informs me it can't find my record, so my wife and I go stand in line to check our luggage and get our boarding passes. When our turn comes, the Delta employee tells us rather sternly we must have a boarding pass in order for her to take our bags. No boarding pass? Managing not to roll her eyes, she directs us to the "special services" desk, a moniker with the same condescending, you-poor-thing overtone as "special needs" and "special Olympics."

There is another line there, of course, and when we finally get to the front and give the special-services lady our IDs, it's 6:22 and she says our 7 a.m. flight is closed and there is nothing she can do; would we please be so good as to come back in a couple of hours? She can probably get us on an 11 a.m flight instead. Oh, and there'll be a $50-per-ticket change fee. When I protest that the fee is surely adding insult to injury, she appears stung and retorts that Delta is just trying to "accommodate" us.

That's fucking wonderful, Delta special-services lady! Thanks for being so accommodating! (When we insist, and persist, a supervisor finally agrees to waive the hundred bucks.)

Now consider this: Last week, on her flight from Portland Maine to Vegas, with a stopover in New York, my wife got into JFK late because, they told her, "the runway is being repaved." This rather crucial bit of scheduled maintenance had not made it up whatever the appropriate channels should have been. My wife missed her connecting flight, and as the repaving is a federal project that is "not the responsibility of the airlines," they left her holding the bag, as it were. Would the airline make her whole for a lost vacation day? Dream on! Pay for a hotel? Heck no! For local transportation so she could stay with a relative in Brooklyn? Nuh-uh! For a meal? Sorry ma'am! 

None of this even takes into account the unadulterated preposterousness that is the entire TSA, and how that agency takes care of business.

The feds and the airlines together are locked in a bubble of heedlessness and arrogance that robs fliers of their dignity, steals their time, and treats them like marks that are suitable for fleecing at every turn. With the possible exception of Virgin Atlantic and maybe Southwest on a good day, customer service is an unknown concept in this alternate-reality field.

I'll put my name on that statement. Remember, two words.

Toyota gets a D; Congress Too.

This post serves to publicly establish a few facts about Toyota, and about the $30,000 2007 RAV4 Limited that I bought at the end of 2006.

I soon had a few reasons to be less than completely satisfied with the quality and reliability of my car. There was the annoying fact that, unbeknownst to me, Toyota or the dealer had outfitted the vehicle with starter tires; and the fact that suddenly last year, the car's engine began smoking and left my wife stranded (turned out the water pump needed to be replaced, after less than half of its projected life. Toyota took care of the repair under warranty, but we had to have the car towed and it was in the garage for several days while we made do with a rental.)

The scariest thing to happen with the RAV4 involved an incident of sudden spontaneous acceleration. I'm putting it on the record here for the first time, but will be sending copies of this post to Toyota's U.S. headquarters; to NHTSA, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration; and to the dealership (Downeast Toyota in Brewer, Maine) that declined to replace the accelerator during the latest service inspection a week or two ago.

Last year, in the late spring or early summer, I took a short drive from Mount Desert Island to Ellsworth. It was a Sunday, late morning, not a lot of traffic on Route 3. I was doing maybe 45 miles per hour when all of a sudden the RPMs went wild, the engine howled, and the RAV sped off as if someone had dumped a boulder on the accelerator pedal. My heart was in my throat as I tried to stop the car. Repeatedly pressing the brake didn't do it. I then stuck my foot underneath the accelerator pedal and pushed up with the toe of my shoe a few times. That worked and subsequently I could depress the brake and it responded normally.

It's hard to know for sure, but I think I was briefly up to 70-plus miles. The V6 is remarkably powerful on this midsized SUV, and when the driver — or "something" — floors the gas, the vehicle tears away like a Daytona contender. That wasn't such a desirable feat in this instance. Sure, the episode was over in seconds, but that didn't make it any less terrifying.

I assumed at the time that maybe the driver's-side floormat had somehow crept up and impeded the free operation of the pedal, a theory that Toyota also seemed to find plausible (though not for the RAV4, apparently). So I threw out the mat and didn't replace it with anything. We have dirty carpeting now, but we are alive.

Of course, in recent weeks, we've all learned that millions of Toyotas are potentially afflicted with a sticky accelerator pedal. Toyota issued a recall that made headlines around the world. Two weeks ago, we drove our car to Downeast Toyota when it was time for its 60,000-mile service anyway, and we insisted that the accelerator be replaced. We discovered later that the dealership hadn't done so, even though we advised that we'd had a potentially life-threatening incident involving a sticking accelerator. The dealership will not replace the accelerator because Toyota says that the 2007 RAV4 has no accelerator problems. In other words, our car is not part of the recall, so we're out of luck no matter what I've personally experienced.

That's where we stand today.

The purpose of this post is to put Toyota Japan, Toyota America, and the dealership in Brewer on notice. I'm addressing them here directly:

If I or my family come to bodily harm due to a re-occurring problem with the accelerator, you will be morally, legally, and financially responsible. If the car spontaneously speeds out of control again, and we end up killing or wounding others, or destroying our car, or damaging other people's property, same deal: You will be responsible in every respect. And either we or our heirs and survivors will hold you to that.

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The rest of this post concerns the unserious Punch-and-Judy show in Washington DC yesterday, when Toyota's head honcho Akio Toyoda testified before the House of Representatives. The Wall Street Journal had a pretty apt description for it: Capitol Hill Kabuki. Newsweek's Matthew Phillips was also less than impressed by the congressional "performance":

It was obvious which committee members have Toyota plants in their district, and which ones do not. California Rep. Diane Watson, whose district is just north of Toyota Motor Sales headquarters in Torrance, beamed and greeted Toyoda by speaking Japanese, while the most blistering questions of the hearings came from Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, whose district is in the heart of the rust belt and home to Ford and GM plants. ...

Next Tuesday, March 2, it will be the Senate Commerce Committee's turn to take its shots at Toyota in a general hearing about the carmaker's safety problems. Senate hearings tend to be more disciplined than their House counterparts. But don't forget: committee chairman Sen. John Rockefeller is from West Virginia, home to Toyota's billion-dollar engine-making plant, which employs more than 1,000 people. Don't be surprised if the questions are softballs.

These are the people who love to portray themselves as the cream-of-the-crop of our nation. At least in part, we rely on them to put our lives and those of our spouses and kids ahead of provincial economic concerns.

Did I really just write that?

I'm sorry. How naive.

True Dat

I want this embroidered on a decorative pillow. It explains (but by no means excuses) the War on Drugs, and pretty much every other prolonged harebrained government policy:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Thank you, Upton Sinclair.

U.K. Again: Cops Arrest Street Photographer

What does it take to be arrested for "anti-social behavior" in the United Kingdom? The idea was that the country's anti-social-behavior statutes would allow police to crack down on yobs and hooligans. But the country's creeping police powers now habitually ensnare ordinary citizens who are guilty of nothing more than, say, pressing a button on a camera.

The video seen here is most revealing. My hat's off to the photographer in question who remains unfailingly calm and polite throughout being stopped three times in a row for the non-crime of taking a picture. The officers in question have nothing to arrest him for, no "reasonable and articulable suspicion" — so they ultimately descend into Kafkaesque nonsense. Even though they may not compel anyone to surrender personal information without what we (in the U.S.) call probable cause, the probable cause they manufacture on the spot is (drum roll please) "anti-social behavior," an allegation they trot out only because the photographer declines to surrender his personal information, as is his right.

Think that his arrest was just a fluke? Hardly. See also here.

Think it's substantially better in the U.S.? Alas. You might want to visit Carlos Miller's blog, Photography Is Not a Crime, for one depressing domestic example after another.

Illegal Porn That Is Neither

When zero-tolerance zealots attack:

An Illinois National Guard soldier in Afghanistan has been charged by the U.S. Army with possessing child pornography over pictures of a young relative his mother says she sent him.

Terri Miller of Galesburg says she sent her son, Specialist Billy Miller, pictures of the little girl to help him get over his homesickness. The pictures show the child in a swimsuit playing in a wading pool and sitting on a truck. In one, the girl is wearing a swim suit and part of her buttocks are exposed.

What, like this Coppertone illustration? (Can you even imagine the tut-tutting and indignation this 1950s ad would provoke if it made its debut today? And for what?)

In the Miller case, it appears that

...the child is a relative Billy treated as his own child when the girl was diagnosed with cancer as her father was going through boot camp. The family notes that the same pictures are on family computers and on Facebook pages, and no one else has been investigated.

Interesting. If justice is blind and impartial, why isn't Billy's mother in jail? She is, after all, the self-confessed provider of the alleged smut.

What I hate about writing posts like these is that you're just about forced to make a disclaimer along these lines: Well, we have no access to the images, and they're not going to made public. Therefore, the photos could be just as objectionable as the military prosecutors believe. Yes, it could be that Specialist Billy Miller specializes in collecting lascivious pictures of undressed kindergartners.

But somehow, I don't think so.

I suspect these are the usual innocuous images that nonetheless get adults in hot water over and over and over. It's what happens whenever some "morally superior" asshole inadvertently lays bare the dark recesses of his own mind upon seeing others' leisure-time family photos and, in a panicky effort to suppress his own boner, loudly decries sexual overtones where there are none.

Even if Billy Miller is acquitted, suspicions will swirl, perhaps even in his own mind. The poison injected into his relationship with the little girl is nasty and ineradicable. In seeking to protect her innocence, investigators and prosecutors are more likely to destroy it, because the success of their actions depends in some measure on whether they can make a prepubescent cancer survivor believe that her loving Uncle Billy, deep down, is a vile, nauseating would-be abuser.

There's something vile here alright, and it isn't that the offending photos were posted on Facebook without anyone raising a stink.

Another Great Milestone in the War on Plants

Don't know about you, but thanks to brave North Carolina cops and their three-year investigation, I'm already feeling much safer from the intolerable evil that is the ginseng plant.

Salt Shake City

More meddling and food moralism from the tiresome Bloomberg administration:

First New York City required restaurants to cut out trans fat. Then it made restaurant chains post calorie counts on their menus. Now it wants to protect people from another health scourge: salt. On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed at encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products. The plan, for which the city claims support from health agencies in other cities and states, sets a goal of reducing the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 percent over the next five years.

Of course there's a solid scientific basis for the plan, and all the pros and cos have been carefully charted and weighed.

Just kidding.

Some medical researchers have questioned the scientific basis for the initiative, saying insufficient research had been done on possible effects. While agreeing that reducing salt is likely to lower average blood pressure, they say it can lead to other physiological changes, some of which may be associated with heart problems. An elaborate clinical trial could weigh the pluses and minuses of cutting salt in a large group of people. But that would cost millions, and it has not been done.

Dr. Michael H. Alderman, a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the city's initiative, if successful in reducing salt, would amount to an uncontrolled experiment with the public's health.