Mercury News | 08/31/2003 | Spamming sleazebags ruining e-mail

Dan Gilmore is right. Personally, I’m a proponent of summary executions of spammers. The spammer is a biohazard with no redeeming value.

Japander.com

Check out Ahhnold san in Japanese commercials. Make your day a little more surreal. They’ll make you wish the recall election was today!

Please see All That Arises for tonight’s blog entry.

Pablo Neruda on making a broom, or not. [Poetry Daily]

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books

Poet Mark Strand on Neruda’s life, and a new book of his poems.

Kyle, I gotta tell ya, I don’t agree with some of the items you post and I am lukewarm about a few, but your mini-rant about drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens hits the bulls-eye. I, like you, don’t get it. Absolutely don’t understand the Assembly’s thinking, even after I read the article you linked to and read a couple of others.

I’ll tell you this: If I’m on the lam from a bank-heist in Texas, I’m sure as hell heading to California for a quick new identity. What the hell can these idiots be thinking?

Erik

One of the Texas 11 has gone home, in what looks like a win for the republicans. [news] … He promises a fight on the Senate floor … You can’t really say he doesn’t have guts.

Requiem for a police dog.

You want to know the first thing that jumped out at me from this morning’s LA Times? The passage by the California legislature of a bill allowing roughly two million illegal aliens to get a California driver’s license. Baloney.

I guess I’ve just been so preoccupied by present personal circumstances, and other issues I thought were more worthy of my writing time, to keep an eye on this. I didn’t realize that the Save Davis crew had managed to get this moving so quickly.

Can someone please explain to me why it’s not ridiculous to give a license to drive all over California to someone who has no legal right to be in California? Please explain why these folks aren’t being arrested at the DMV, and anywhere else they’re found.

Look, I’m not anti-immigrant. I’m not prejudiced against Mexicans, or Guatemalans, or Oregonians, or even the French. I belong to an immigrant church. But I support the rule of law, and I believe that someone who wants to work here should do so legally. And if that’s not fairly possible – if we’re betraying the creed on the Statue of Liberty – then that’s where the need for legal reform lies.

Illegal aliens should be required to become legal. Make the rules fair, make everybody play along. Fill out the forms, get fingerprinted, then pay taxes. I’ve done all those things to work in California, and I was born here.

Proponents of this legislation claim their doing it for public safety. Nuts. They don’t give a wet slap about public safety. They’re doing this for one reason only, to pander to the Latino community for their anti-recall votes. I don’t know which is worse in that, Davis’ betrayal of his oath to uphold the laws of California, or his blatant disrespect for Latino intelligence.

This law sucks. It’s aiding and abetting a criminal act. It creates a double standard that puts a whole class of people above the law. And no one, on the far right or the far left, should be allowed to manipulate the law to further a nefarious personal or political agenda.

When I was in high school, back in the mid-second half of the last century, we band kids used to hang out sometimes at the Carrows restaurant here in town. We used to raise a little hell. I remember one time we got kicked out, in perpetuity, for having a food fight with the squeeze bottles of bbq sauce. Curtis M, who played the sousaphone, could hit the ceiling.

Before that, going back into the 1960s, I remember the place as Loops, and going there with my folks. I vaguely remember the canned big band tunes that drifted down from the ceiling. Redish brown vinyl booths.

That place is closed down now, and the rumor was they were going to turn it into a Denny’s. I drove past it today, empty and dark. There’s a big sign facing the freeway, indicating 1.14 acres for sale.

I wish I could think of something poignant and sentimental about this, something about the lost and irretrievable benchmarks of youth, blah blah. But what the hey. Nothing lasts forever, it wasn’t the place I remember anymore, and I don’t really care for Denny’s either.

Yahoo Groups recovers from outage | CNET News.com

If you use Yahoogroups, you may want to see this, about their recent outage.

It’s a beautitul day here in my little beach town, NW of Los Angeles. And here in the neighborhoods a couple of miles from the beach, it’s quiet. The sprinklers are going across the street. Serene.

But just about a mile away, the town is armpit deep in visitors from all over southern California; indeed, the world. Traffic is nasty. The arguably beautiful people have swarmed the starbucks. The trashcans overflow. The ground around the public seating areas is littered with cigarette butts, so that we feel as if walking about in a giant ashtray.

Welcome, welcome. Happy labor day. Enjoy the sunshine and the cool sea spray. (Inadvertent rhyme.) God bless your families, your kids and your motorhomes. Have a wonderful day. Then get out.