Fire! or What NOT to Text Your Dad from School

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My Blackberry rang this morning and when I picked up my daughter, a freshman at West Forsyth High School, asked me, "Dad, did you get my text?"

"Uh, no," I said.

"Oh, well there's a fire in one of the buildings here at school and I don't have first period."

"Okay," I replied, "Is everyone okay?"

"Yeah, it's only in the one building so everyone else has to go to class. But everyone in the 1000 building got out of class."

"Oh, okay.  Well call us back if anything changes and we need to come get you."

"Thanks Dad.  Byuh."

After hanging up I checked my messages and this is the text she sent: "Dad there is a fire!"

All I can say is that I'm awful glad I talked to her before I read the text.  Once again I have proof that my kids know nothing about context.

Anyhow for those with kids at West Forsyth High School there's apparently been a fire in the 1000 building.  Given that there's ongoing construction on the campus I suspect it has something to do with that, but I don't know for sure.  We haven't gotten a robo-call from the school and there's nothing in the news about it so it sounds like it isn't a big deal.  Hopefully that's true.

Save Some Coin at K-Mart With Double Coupons

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Celeste, my financial-genius wife, gave me a valuable tip today: K-Mart is doubling coupons, and doing it to a greater degree than the local grocery stores. The details:

  • You can use up to 75 coupons per trip
  • Maximum $2 face value on a coupon
  • Cannot be more than the cost of the item
  • One coupon per item

Celeste informs me that most grocery stores limit you to 25-ish coupons per trip and not many are doubling up to $2 face value.  In other words this is a very good money saving opportunity.  She also informs me that while K-Mart may not have the same food selection that Wal-Mart has, you can also buy things like cleaning supplies there.

Local K-Mart Locations

Jealous of My Uncle’s La-Z-Boy

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Catching up on my newspaper reading after our trip I came across one of those "What are you thankful for?" pieces in The Winston-Salem Journal, the same article that is done every Thanksgiving day by every newspaper in the United States, and wouldn't have read it except that Laura Giovanelli put it together and since I've met her and like everything she writes I decided to give it a glance.  So what do I find, but a quote from my Uncle Steve:

Sure, Steve Motsinger of Winston-Salem is thankful for his family
and his dog, Sadie. But he wanted to single out the little things that
make his life good: hot showers, Advil, whitening toothpaste, paper
towels, automatic coffee makers, newspapers delivered in plastic bags,
comfortable shoes, relaxed-fit jeans and classic rock 'n' roll, and
most of all, his beloved LazyBoy recliner.

"I admit that the springs are shot and the fabric worn and stained.
I'll even concede that there might be a Frito or two from 1987
mellowing away in some dark interior nook. (I strongly suspect that
there are also one or more pacifiers, which mysteriously disappeared
when the kids were toddlers). But for all its faults, the chair fits me
like a glove. The sounds of springs groaning and fabric straining
whenever I sit down are, to me, the Sirens' call, luring me back onto
the shore of the World of a Thousand Naps. This chair is my friend and
I am thankful for it."

I've sat in that chair and can attest that it's very comfortable and upon further consideration I'm jealous of it.  We've never purchased La-Z-Boy for our house, instead opting for multiple couches in our living rooms and dens.  Thus I have a couch with a favorite spot, which anyone can easily identify because it's the spot with a large indentation that never goes away.  It bothers Celeste mightily so I'm thinking I need to get a chair for my large derriere for two reasons:

  1. When guests come over they don't see a lopsided couch that embarrasses my wife, but rather a battered and stained monument to the American male that my wife can point to and say "Men!?"
  2. I have a place that is all my own, a sanctuary with a male bubble of seclusion that no one will sit in because it grosses them out, and from which I can watch my fill of football and basketball games while gnoshing on various and sundry heart attack inducing snacks, games that I'll never see the end of because I've been lured by the Sirens' call to one of countless naps.

How You Doin’ Doc? DrScore.com Could Tell You

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DrScore.com is the latest entry into the market for physician rating sites, but the reason I find it particularly interesting is that it was started in the Wake Forest University Babcock Demon Incubator. So it's a home brewed web service.

So fare there are a little over 60,000 doctor ratings on the site, which is a nationwide site, not a site dedicated to just this area.  As with other rating sites the real value will come as more people use it, so for it to be of real value the site will need to attract far more users to get a critical mass of data for each doctor. DrScore.com is trying to get doctors to use it as their default patient satisfaction service for a $150-per-year fee, and if enough doctors do that then the site could boost its numbers quickly.

The article in the Winston-Salem Journal about the site points out some of the concerns for such a service (gaming the ratings in either a positive or negative direction being chief among them), but there's a need for more transparency in health care so I think this is a good thing.  Once the site gets much more data they'll also be able to provide some interesting data for researchers and that could eventually lead to more informed health care consumers.  As I mentioned in a previous post about the new "buyer beware" nature of health care in the US this is a necessary step for those of us who are now tasked with managing our own health care costs rather than the insurance companies.

Metal Engraving

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So I was catching up on my reading and I came across a recent post by Helene that mentioned one of those fun online doohickeys that I just can't resist. In this case it's a little quiz that you take and it assigns you a Dewey Decimal number and below is the result for me.  Actually it's one of three results and they're all so random that one of them essentially has to describe you (think horoscope) but it's still fun.  FYI, besides the one below he other two assigned to me were 879-Literatures of Other Italic Languages, and 013-Unassigned.  Here's the one I liked best:

Jon Lowder's Dewey Decimal Section:
765 Metal engraving
Jon Lowder = 054253458 = 054+253+458 = 765

Class:
700 Arts & Recreation

Contains:
Architecture, drawing, painting, music, sports.

What it says about you:
You're creative and fun, and you're good at motivating the people around you. You're attracted to things that are visually interesting. Other people might not always understand your taste or style, but it's yours.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Hangin’ With the Boys in IOP

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As is our tradition we are spending Turkey Day in Isle of Palms, SC with Celeste’s family. It being Friday the ladies have gone shopping with the girls in tow. I’m hangin’ with the boys in our room watching Star Wars with our nephews, which means I’ve avoided the Black Friday plague for at least the 18th consecutive year.
No wi-fi where we’re staying so doing a lot of thumb typing on ye olde Blackberry. Life’s good.

Goin’ Down, Down, Down

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Real estate in Winston-Salem isn't exactly hot; existing home sales in October 08 were 34% lower than October 07, and average home prices were down 7.6%.  From the Journal article:

People in the local real-estate industry had hoped for better
numbers as sales of existing homes started stabilizing somewhat during
the summer.

Glenn Cobb, the chief staff executive for the Winston-Salem Regional
Association of Realtors, says he believes that such factors as the
country's economic downturn and recent presidential election played a
part in helping to slow housing sales in October.

Several people in the housing industry have said that potential homeowners have been in a wait-and-see mood.

"The fundamentals are all still there," Cobb said. "You've got a
great selection. You've got great interest rates and a real stable
market for us ordinarily, so it still should be a good buyers' market
right now."

He doesn't expect the climate to change for the better until the spring.

The Thanksgiving and Christmas season tends to be a slow time for the housing industry.

Julie Poplin, the president of the Winston-Salem Realtors
association, said that business has been sporadic and said 2008 was the
first year that she had consecutive months where she didn't have a
closing.

But Poplin, who is also a broker for Allen Tate Realtors, is ending the year on a good note.

She is encouraged by the fact that she has three closings scheduled
in December. "People are still looking for bargains, and people are
still buying homes."

I've taken the realtors to task in the past for being just a tad delusional with their interpretations of the market and the effect of the economy on real estate, but in this case I actually sense a little bit of realism in their remarks.  My only point would be that Mr. Cobb missed one crucial factor in his comments about the fundamentals being good: while interest rates and prices might be low, lending standards are much, much tighter and until that changes a lot fewer people will be out of the market and not by their own choice.

Cost Cutting for the Masses

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There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about cost cutting measures at General Motors, and some of the highlights include clocks that no longer work because the company stopped paying to replace the batteries, cheaper towels for clean up, and no air travel for employees without written approval from a manager.  Of course the article points to the kerfluffle over the CEO's flying in a private corporate jet to Washington to beg for a bailout from Congress, which points out the obvious: in corporate America cost cutting is for the working masses, not the C-level suite.

When my brother worked in a large, Fortune 500 company, he became highly disillusioned when he and the rest of the workforce were asked to accept salary freezes, no bonuses and the loss of small perks like free orange juice and then when the next quarterly reports were released they found that the C-level execs had gotten raises and bonuses and not one of the company's jets had been sold.

And just today there's a story about 10 senior Wachovia managers who are eligible to get $98 million in severance if the Wells Fargo deal is completed by December 31. So you screw the pooch and you walk away more than a little wealthier, while thousands who worked for you get to enter the Christmas season wondering if there will be pink slips in their stockings.  Nice.

I love capitalism, but when risk and reward are so obviously divorced in business's upper echelons something needs to seriously be changed.  I'm fine with executives being paid handsomely if they run a business well, as long as it's not at the expense of thousands of others' jobs, but I'm not fine with executives being paid handsomely in return for abject failure.  There's something seriously wrong with that picture.

Goode as Gone

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Virgil Goode, the five term US Congressman from Virginia's 5th district who gained some notoriety when he made a stink about an incoming Congressman taking the oath of office using the Quran (apparently he didn't care that the incoming Congressman was Muslim, thus making it much more sensible to use the Koran than the Bible), has probably lost his reelection bid.  The margin is so slim that he's going to demand a recount, but if the count holds up then it will give Virginia more Democrats in Congress than Republicans, a stunning turn of events considering Goode had a 30 point edge in the polls as recently as August and the Republicans entered the election with an 8-3 edge in Congressional seats.

I'm not sure exactly why Goode lost, but I'm sure the economy had more than a little to do with it, especially when Goode continued running ads based on a fear-based campaign strategy straight out of Lee Atwater's playbook.  Well, whatever the reason I'm sure some of the media are going to miss some of the gems that came out of Goode's mouth or pen.  I'll share a couple below.

First, from a letter to constituents about that Muslim Congressman taking the oath on the Quran, who by the way was born and raised in the U.S.:

Thank you for your recent communication. When I raise my hand to take
the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I
do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim
Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that
district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil
Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims
elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. We need to stop
illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the
diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing
many persons from the Middle East to come to this country. I fear that
in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States
if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are
necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United
States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

From a letter to USA Today defending his letter to constituents:

Immigration is arguably the most important
issue facing the country today. At least 12 million immigrants are here
illegally. And diversity visas, a program initiated in 1990 to grant
visas to people from countries that had low U.S. immigration at that
time, are bringing in 50,000 a year from various parts of the world,
including the Middle East.

Let us remember that we were not
attacked by a nation on 9/11; we were attacked by extremists who acted
in the name of the Islamic religion. I believe that if we do not stop
illegal immigration totally, reduce legal immigration and end diversity
visas, we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who
want to mold the United States into the image of their religion, rather
than working within the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us a
beacon for freedom-loving persons around the world.

I wonder if anyone ever pointed out that a lot of illegal immigrants are Christian?  Is a legal Christian immigrant preferable to an illegal Muslim immigrant?  Oh, and as for our Judeo-Christian principles being a beacon I'd like to point out to the good ex-Congressman that many people, including the people we celebrate every Thanksgiving, came to America to escape religious persecution and to practice the religion of their choice without fear.  There's nothing exclusive to Judeo-Christian tradition about it.

What truly kills me about people like Goode is that they seem to not realize that by imposing their religious values on the entire populace they open the door for someone else with other religious values to do the same at a later date.  They also don't seem to see the hypocrisy of our country celebrating non-secular governments in the Middle East, and taking position that Islamic regimes like Iran's are bad and simultaneously calling for government policies at home to be based on Judeo-Christian values. In other words non-secular is good for the rest of the world, but not for the United States.

Of course the cynic in me thinks that this was a policy of convenience for Goode, a red-meat issue that he figured he could use to fire up his conservative base.  Unfortunately for him I think his opponent did a good job of painting him as a political opportunist who's vote was for sale and by implication who's policies were for show only. I'll end this with the ad that his opponent ran that some observers think put the stake in the Goode campaign's heart:

Exception That Proves the Rule?

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P8030311
Last year I got to go see Wake Forest play Florida State in football and I remember two things clearly: seeing coaching legend Bobby Bowden up close (my uncle, cousins and I were sitting in the stands behind the FSU bench) and that the FSU football team was experiencing some embarrassing PR over some of their players' behavior and grades which led to some very funny comments from the jokers in the stands. This wasn't too surprising because, let's be honest, FSU has not had a reputation for stressing the "student" part of "student athlete."

So it was surprising to see this story about starting FSU safety Myron Rolle missing the first half of Saturday's crucial Maryland game because he was busy interviewing for, and winning, a Rhodes Scholarship.  Even more surprising is that Rolle became the third FSU student in three years to win a Rhodes Scholarship, and the second student athlete after FSU's national shot put champion Garrett Johnson won a scholarship three years ago.

But, I'm not going to cut the school too much slack.  One good story doesn't balance out stories like this one concerning 25 players not traveling to a bowl game last year (many due to academic ineligibility) or this one about this year's crop of receivers having all kinds of problems (the word "brawl" is not good for a program).  Unfortunately it's these kind of stories that regularly come out of Tallahassee.