Nobody's Business

Pumpkin Scare Hits Iowa

Trick, not treat:

The taxman in Iowa is going after jack-o'-lanterns this Halloween. The new department policy was implemented after officials decided that pumpkins are used primarily for Halloween decorations, not food, and should be taxed, said Renee Mulvey, the department's spokeswoman. ... Previously, pumpkins had been considered an edible squash and exempted from the tax.

Attention tax authorities: I'll confess that the pretty bananas sitting in the fruitbowl in my kitchen sometimes go brown, and then I throw them out; at that point, their entire raison d'être has been decoration, not sustenance. Please add the charge to my April 15 tab.

Anyway, it's good to know that there's a recourse for honest-to-god pumpkin-eaters:

Iowans planning to eat pumpkins can still get a tax exemption if they fill out a form.

UPDATE, THURSDAY:

Administrators announced Wednesday that they were backing off a policy of charging sales tax on pumpkins intended for use as jack-o'-lanterns. The decision came after The Des Moines Register reported the state's claim that the big orange gourds did not qualify for the food exemption because they generally are used for decoration. The department said it announced the policy last year, but it acknowledged that many people didn't notice until Wednesday, when the story whipsawed around the Internet and drew scads of derisive comments.

But all is still not well in Pumpkinland. As the Iowa tax kerfuffle died down, British cops told three small boys from South Wiltshire to pack up their pumpkin stand and go home because the lads lacked a trader's license. As photos of criminals go, this one's pretty good:

Terrorists May Hide Bomb in Favorite Kerry Footwear

Via ABC News comes a federal warning about beach sandals: flipflops with flasks in their soles, to be precise. No matter that the sandals leak, and lose their tiny plastic caps — this, apparently, is exactly what Osama's been waiting for.

According to a bulletin issued originally last spring and reissued yesterday the "Dram Sandal" by Reef, is capable of holding approximately 2-3 ounces of liquid in a hidden compartment, located in the heel of each sandal. The Dram Sandal became available March 1, 2007, and can be purchased online and at most shoe stores, the bulletin stated.[...]

"The Dram Sandal contains a flask embedded into the sole of the sandal and is marketed as a 'Polyurethane encapsulated canteen in heel with screw cap.' In addition to the hidden plastic canteen, the sandal comes complete with a mini funnel, church key/bottle opener and a visual gauge embedded in the sole to show how much liquid is remaining in the hidden compartment. The hidden compartment in the Dram Sandal, which was primarily made for storing beverages, could intentionally or unwittingly be used to store and transport liquid explosives."

"Unwittingly"? I see. "Honest officer, I had no idea that I wasn't supposed to board a plane with nitroglycerine concealed in my sandals."

But if you ask me, a bigger threat comes from smallbreasted women whose PMS might, um, flare up in mid-flight. I mean, has anyone been keeping tabs on Richard Reid's wife? She gets hold of the WineRack and next thing you know, poof! The WineRack is "a very comfortable sports-style bra with a special pocket that holds a boob-enhancing bladder filled with the drink of your choice," notes the manufacturer. "Cheaper than a boob job and way more fun."

Make mine a double. D, that is.

[hat tip: Wired's Threat Level blog]

How I Became a Narcotics Fiend

OK, maybe not. For the first time in my life, I'm using opiates, following scheduled knee surgery yesterday. Thanks to a good supply of oxycodone, I'd been looking forward to some pleasant wooziness, maybe a sexy hallucination or two (Lucy Liu waking me up from my post-operative slumbers with a toasted bagel — hmmm, toasted bagel!), but nope. Leave it to medical science to take all the fun out of narcotics.

For the past twenty hours, I've instead been puking my guts out. The first-listed side effect of oxycodone, a serious pain medication, turns out to be nausea. No shit. (Oh yeah, it's been known to cause constipation too). I'm taking ibuprofen now, which probably reduces the likelihood of Lucy appearing at my bedside to zero.

Now that's painful.

My Indecent Proposal at LensCrafters

About an hour before I undertook the 13-hour car journey from Delaware back to Maine on Friday, I walked out of a local breakfast joint when a guy held the door open for me, then accidentally let it slip out of his hands. It slammed into the eyeglasses I was holding in my hand and broke a part of the frame, sending one lens to the ground (the glass didn't break, through). While he apologized profusely, I told him not to worry, it was an accident, and that my insurance would likely take care of it.

But I can't — shouldn't — get behind the wheel without glasses, so after an hour's worth of driving with a couple of pieces of tape on my frames (bringing on a dull headache), I stopped at the mall in Dover, in search of a LensCrafters. Dover is a town that, when seen from the commercial strip, seems to be in business to take advantage of every last non-civilian who strays in from the local Air Force base. There is a depressing number of rundown-looking places hawking payday loans and exorbitantly priced check cashing services.

No such dubious murk was evident in the brightly lit, spotless eyeglasses emporium inside the mall, though. The whole place breathed efficiency. Surely a kindly staffer would make good on the longstanding LensCrafters promise to fashion a pair of custom glasses in under an hour. A chipper sales clerk informed me she would do exactly that, provided I first produced my prescription. I explained to her that I was traveling from five states away, don't habitually carry a lens prescription (does anyone?), and didn't need one because to find out the strength of my desired new lenses, all they had to do was measure the old ones. Easy. I'd done that several times before, every time I had new glasses made over the years.

Suddenly, however, this was an impossible request, because the law in Delaware (and some other states too, apparently) requires a doctor's prescription before a customer may be fitted with a new pair of glasses. Some optical stores have a licensed optician on the premises who is qualified to dispense this vital piece of paper, but in retail environments lacking such a highly trained professional, nothing can be done for the likes of yours truly.

So state lawmakers have decided that it is better to let people with broken glasses get on the highway for multi-state car trips, than to allow them to simply have their lenses duplicated. Or I could put myself and my family up for three nights in Dover in the hopes that I might get an emergency appointment with an eye doctor first thing Monday morning.

It's hard to fathom who is protected by such a law, other than eye MDs, who stand to make a boatload of money off of it. There's no obvious benefit to consumers here — on the contrary. I mean, what would be the downside to having store personnel measure existing lenses and make new ones of exactly the same strength? What do Delaware lawmakers fear will happen — that I'll put one over on them? That I'll bring in a pair purloined from Mr. Magoo and pass them off as my own, so I can have an extra pair of coke-bottle lenses to feed my latent cravings for stronger, more potent glass? Is there an EA (Eyeglass-wearers Anonymous) chapter somewhere around here that I should know about?

Luckily for me and the tens of thousands of drivers with whom I shared the Eastern seaboard highways the rest of the day, a local jeweler was able to weld my broken metal frame in minutes, for $25. Which was a considerably smaller contribution to the Delaware economy than I'd otherwise have made.

Funny how that state-ordered protection racket ends up backfiring sometimes.

(Virtually) No Blogging This Week

No open wifi where I'm staying for the week. That means no blogging (and no e-mail) unless and until I stumble upon an access point.

Speed Limiters Coming to Millions of U.S. Cars

Ah, the magic of satellites.

A few times over the last couple of years, I've written about initiatives to let the government monitor your car's whereabouts at all times. Some of these schemes would also allow human traffic monitors to disable your vehicle from a distance, or to forcibly lower your speed from some operations center hundreds or thousands of miles away. It could even be done automatically.

These proposals were only taken seriously by lawmakers in England and Canada, I thought, but now the United States is getting in on the act, and General Motors is leading the way. With 'enhanced On-Star' becoming a reality in less than two years, it'll be technically possible to eradicate speeding.

A modern car is controlled by computers; the computers are now tied into GPS systems such as OnStar — which have the ability to send and receive electronic transmissions, including instructions that tell the computer how to run the car. "Smart" speed limit signs can now be fitted with transmitters; when a car with "enhanced" OnStar comes into range, the transmitter tells the car's computer what the maximum allowable speed shall be — and ye shall drive no faster.

That may be the best reason yet to refuse to buy a GM car (as if you needed another one). I think I'll be happy with my 1997 Swedish ragtop (which is presumably too low-tech to have such a system retrofitted) for a very long time to come.

[hat tip: Martin Owens]

Cursing At Home Now an Arrestable Offense

Insert your own toilet pun — if you feel this is remotely funny.

A Scranton woman who allegedly shouted profanities at her overflowing toilet within earshot of a neighbor was cited for disorderly conduct, authorities said.

Dawn Herb could face up to 90 days in jail and a fine of up to $300. "It doesn't make any sense. I was in my house. It's not like I was outside or drunk," Herb told The Times-Tribune of Scranton.

"The toilet was overflowing and leaking down into the kitchen and I was yelling (for my daughter) to get the mop." Herb doesn't recall exactly what she said, but she admitted letting more than a few choice words fly near an open bathroom window Thursday night.

The Market Failed and My Town Rescued Me

I'm a big believer in free markets, obviously, but neither markets nor my belief in them are infallible. Take my Internet service. Since I moved to a small island town in Maine in 2005, my choice of providers has been non-existent. No cable or phone company wants to invest a dime in these small communities. Verizon set me up with two basic phone lines and left it at that. Voice mail? Call waiting? Such standard business services are just not available where I live, Verizon representatives kept telling me with a mixture of mirth and boredom. Neither is DSL, obviously. I might as well have requested free back rubs and phone bills printed entirely in Klingon.

So for my web and e-mail needs, I've muddled along with the execrable Internet service provided by HughesNet, a.k.a. DirecPC. I had to pay 750 non-refundable dollars just to get hooked up with a dish and a satellite modem, and after that, Hughes sucked 60 dollars a month out of my account — not a problem except for four things. When it rained or snowed or stormed, the connection went down. Even under the best atmospheric conditions, download speeds were glacial, better than dialup but not dramatically so. Upload speeds were five times worse — transferring a gigabyte and a half worth of images to my photo website would take easily 24 hours.

To top it all off, there was the crap pile of unadulterated idiocy that HughesNet humorously calls its Fair Access Policy. As a $60-a-month subscriber, I was entitled to just 100 megabytes of downloaded material a day. 100 Mb is shockingly little in the era of YouTube, iTunes, webcasts, bit torrents, automatic OS updates, and Internet porn PDF policy papers.

Worse: you have no way of knowing when you've reached your daily limit. Even worse than that: when you do bump up against your 100 Mb threshold, HughesNet ... cuts you off for 24 hours. They don't even send you an automated, polite e-mail at 80 or 90 Mb. Once you hit the limit, they just turn off your account for a day, necessitating calls to some tech support call center in New Delhi or Bangalore on the off-chance that (hope springs eternal) something else is amiss with your Net connection. And no, charging 'à la carte' for any content over 100 Mb won't do, HughesNet has decreed (believe me, I offered). It's not an option. Too much hassle for their billing department, I guess.

A 100 Mb daily limit was perhaps a swell idea in 1998 or thereabouts; in 2007, it is the equivalent of waving a Bumblesque middle finger in your customers' faces.

"Please Sir, may I have some more?"

"Get out of my sight, you rabble!"

So lest we forget: that, too, is the free market.

And now my town has stepped in. Earlier this year, it partnered with a wireless broadband upstart called RedZone, and kicked in 75,000 dollars of tax revenues, thus covering roughly 20 percent of RedZone's initial investment in this town.

The RedZone network has been up and running, and steadily expanding, for a few months now. From a technical point of view, it is an insanely challenging crazy-quilt of small but powerful transmitters; they are supposed to cover the better part of three geographically disparate communities — each easily five or six miles from the other — that together form one municipality. The terrain is hilly, even mountainous here and there, and there are lots of people who live on private roads, well off the beaten path. Though the boonies-dwellers will obviously be among the last to get hooked up, RedZone seems to be pulling its ambitious scheme off quite nicely. More and more of my neighbors, near and far, are coming online, at half the price and double or triple the speed of HughesNet's service.

RedZone kicks a small part of our subscriber fees back to the town, so that in roughly ten years, one hundred percent of the town's cash outlay will have flowed back into its coffers, and any continuing revenues will be profit for the town from that point forward.

Meanwhile, customer service is exemplary. RedZone's founder and owner, a smart and affable entrepreneur called Jim McKenna, has personally been to my home on two occasions to install my receiver and tweak a bunch of settings that had hampered initial reliability. He also promptly responded, often in a matter of minutes, to my phone calls and e-mails while the service was still less than perfect.

Now, for the sake of libertarian purity, I'd have preferred it if RedZone had come in without support from the town. But decades of "letting the market take care of it" had clearly resulted in a lack of options for rural Mainers, and in no competition to speak of. Broadband Internet, in our day and age, is as crucial as telephone service. You could also argue that it is as important to the business health and common good of a community as the local sewer system — a municipal amenity that is pretty uncontroversial (not many people, I'd wager, feel that the sewers should be privately owned).

Of course, RedZone is privately owned; it just needed a partial, reimbursable cash injection from local taxpayers to make it worthwhile to serve us. I'm not crazy about governments correcting the perceived failings of the market, but not every principle can be correctly applied in every situation, and it seems to me that this is a textbook example.

If you don't agree, fine. Let me know, and I'll post a rebuttal — unrestrained, for a change, by slow connection speeds, arbitrary load limits, and sudden rain clouds.

Pediatricians Expect Kids to Snitch on Parents

Bloodboiling nannyism documented in the Boston Herald, with thanks to Nobody's Business reader Kerim for the tip:

“The [pediatrician] wanted to know how much you and mom drink, and if I think it’s too much,” my [13-year-old] daughter told us ... “She asked if you two did drugs, or if there are drugs in the house.”

“What!” I yelped. “Who told her about my stasher, I mean, ‘It’s an outrage!’ ”

I turned to my wife. “You took her to the doctor. Why didn’t you say something?”

She couldn’t, she told me, because she knew nothing about it. All these questions were asked in private, without my wife’s knowledge or consent.

“The doctor wanted to know how we get along,” my daughter continued. Then she paused. “And if, well, Daddy, if you made me feel uncomfortable.”

Great. I send my daughter to the pediatrician to find out if she’s fit to play lacrosse, and the doctor spends her time trying to find out if her mom and I are drunk, drug-addicted sex criminals.

We’re not alone, either. Thanks to guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics and supported by the commonwealth, doctors across Massachusetts are interrogating our kids about mom and dad’s “bad” behavior. ...

Debbie is a mom from Uxbridge who was in the examination room when the pediatrician asked her 5-year-old, “Does Daddy own a gun?” When the little girl said yes, the doctor began grilling her and her mom about the number and type of guns, how they are stored, etc. If the incident had ended there, it would have merely been annoying. But when a friend in law enforcement let Debbie know that her doctor had filed a report with the police about her family’s (entirely legal) gun ownership, she got mad. She also got a new doctor.

In fact, the problem of anti-gun advocacy in the examining room has become so widespread that some states are considering legislation to stop it. Last year, my 7-year-old was asked about my guns during his physical examination. He promptly announced to the doctor that his father is the proud owner of a laser sighted plasma rifle perfect for destroying Throggs. At least as of this writing, no police report has been filed.

“I still like my previous pediatrician,” Debbie told me. “She seemed embarrassed to ask the gun questions and apologized afterward. But she didn’t seem to have a choice.”

Of course doctors have a choice. They could choose, for example, to ask me about my drunken revels, and not my children. They could choose not to put my children in this terrible position. They could choose, even here in Massachusetts, to leave their politics out of the office.

But the doctors aren’t asking us parents. They’re asking our kids.

Read it all.

By the way, my own family, here in Maine, has a local pediatrician who is knowledgeable and passionate and kind, and who is also not above having the parents of his little patients fill out questionnaires inquiring (among other things) about their gun ownership, if any. Vaguely annoyed, the last time he asked, I confirmed my possession of an entirely legal firearm. But enough already. If he ever raises the subject again, I think I'll muse aloud on the vanishing art of people minding their own beeswax.

My Interview With Ayaan Hirsi Ali Is Up...

...at Reason. Despite the fact that I loved her book and that she and I are in broad agreement about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration in Europe, the exchange is, um, spirited at times.

Reason: Explain to me what you mean when you say we have to stop the burning of our flags and effigies in Muslim countries. Why should we care?

Hirsi Ali: We can make fun of George Bush. He’s our president. We elected him. And the queen of England, they can make fun of her within Britain and so on. But on an international level, this has gone too far. You know, the Russians, they don’t burn American flags. The Chinese don’t burn American flags. Have you noticed that? They don’t defile the symbols of other civilizations. The Japanese don’t do it. That never happens.

Reason: Isn’t that a double standard? You want us to be able to say about Islam whatever we want—and I certainly agree with that. But then you add that people in Muslim countries should under all circumstances respect our symbols, or else.

Hirsi Ali: No, no, no.

Reason: We should be able to piss on a copy of the Koran or lampoon Muhammad, but they shouldn’t be able to burn the queen in effigy. That’s not a double standard?

Hirsi Ali: No, that’s not what I’m saying. In Iran a nongovernmental organization has collected money, up to 150,000 British pounds, to kill Salman Rushdie. That’s a criminal act, but we are silent about that.

Reason: We are?

Hirsi Ali: Yes. What happened? Have you seen any political response to it?

Reason: The fatwa against Rushdie has been the subject of repeated official anger and protests since 1989.

You can read the rest right here.

I've had some pretty good feedback on the interview so far, mostly from the right and the center.

Among the reactions:

"...van Bakel in the libertarian Reason magazine seems to be one of the few that's not letting Hirsi Ali so easily off the political hook."

From a made-my-day e-mail: "A less persistent or knowledgeable interviewer probably would have caved, or might not even have recognized her hypocrisies. I'm a big fan of hers (and of atheism) generally, but you exposed the danger of her almost Randian absolutism. ... Congrats on a job very well done."

Aw, shucks.

And then there are some multiculturalism ideologues at Crooked Timber who've apparently convinced themselves that all immigrants, Muslims included, are alike — hard-working, kind, adding color and spice to our drab surroundings, and dying to integrate and become just like us if only closet racists like me would stop futzing the numbers.

Oh well.