The Swell Season for Arnophilia

I got a phone call midday Tuesday (in Berkeley, CA) from an 'unknown' number, & it was Sam Amidon calling from Oxford, England, looking for recommendations for a pub to sit & read in for a while! I navigated him to the Turf Tavern, which is hidden up a windy alley & has a beautiful beer garden & rare ales on tap. Here's a video he just posted of him singing at the Royal Festival Hall (in Bangladesh I think).

List: 141.5 ways to spend $141.5 Million of Meg Whitman's Money

Good morning! This list will keep growing until it reaches 141.5. Meg Whitman just wasted $141.5 Million of her own money to lose by twelve percentage points in the California gubernatorial race to Jerry Brown. I'm open to suggestions on other ways to spend her money. (We're estimating pricing from Amazon & google, &, of course, eBay.)

1) Buy a copy of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland ($5.95 for the CreatSpace edition) for 23.8 Million 9-year-olds (which is probably more 9-year-olds than there are in the whole country).

2) Better yet, buy the cool Robert Sabudo Pop-up version of AAiW ($19.13) for 7.4 Million 9 year olds.

3) Smoke it.

4) Buy 141.5 million lottery tickets (which may give you slightly better odds of getting your money back than of beating Jerry Brown.)

5) Amazon sells a set of 7 fake mustaches for $2.99, which is $0.43 a mustache. THAT'S ENOUGH FAKE MUSTACHES FOR EVERY RESIDENT OF THE USA!

6) A decent Bachelor Party stripper goes for around $200. You can buy strippers for 707,500 Bachelor Parties!

7) Cut out the Benjamin Franklins from 1.415 Million $100 bills, & make an epic collage

across AT&T Park.

8) Looks like a basic civil war re-enactment shirt gos for around $17.99, $5.65 for a good hat, but you need $150 for some sort of replica rifle. That will outfit 814,904 soldiers. The First Battle of Bull Run had less than 70,000; The Second Battle of Bull R

un had about 100,000 soldiers. You see what I'm getting at, you could properly bankroll the re-enactment of a dozen or so major Civil War Battles.

9) Attach a bidet ($50) to 2.83 Million toilets, greatly increasing the cleanline

ss of buttholes in the East Bay Area.

10) I found 20 acres of foreclosed land for sale for $17,663 in San Bernardino County. If you could buy 8,011 acres together, that's enough to succeed & be governor of your own little state. (You may need the soldiers from #8 to accomplish this.)

11) Buy a tractor (7 grand) for every resident of Orinda, California (with three thousand tractors left over.)

12) Buy an iPad ($552) for almost everyone in Sacramento, California.

13) Build the new Berkeley Art Museum ($95 million) with $46.5 Million leftover t

o buy half of a Jasper Johns painting (buy the good half, of course.)

14) Smoke it.

15) A bottle of absinthe from St George's in Alameda goes for $59.99 at its cheapest. You could buy a bottle for almost everyone in Nevada.

16) A dildo is about $7.95, which would outfit every

woman and girl in Connecticut with a shiny new dildo.

17) Sly & the Family Stone's album "A Whole New Thing" can be found used for $3.83, which would greatly improve the morale of every resident in California.

18) A fake rubber rat is $4.95, which is just what everyone in K

ansas could use.

19) A Uniflame WAD820SP 34in Wide Outdoor Fireplace with Slate Mantel with Copper Accents ($154) for everyone in San Francisco.

20) Pay back MF Global, "the world's largest broker of exchange-traded futures and options," the $141.5 Million it lost from unauthorized wheat trading in 2008.

21) Okay, I think I'm getting this right: The width of a penny is 1.4mm. So 141.5 billion pennies stacked would be 10,107 kilometers or 6,280 miles, which is the

distance from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, to Rapid City, South Dakota.

22) To fund a new

Johnny Appleseed project, an Apple Grow-A-Tree kit is $3.5o. That's 40.4 Million freaking apple trees!

23) Or alternately for a Christine O'Donnell project, there are 300 deadly nightshade (atropa belladonna) seeds in a $5 pack. In the unlikely event that all of them sprouted, that would be 8.5 billion plants. With the right potion, that could easily turn the earth's population into newts.

24) On February 13th, 2008, Eliot Spitzer paid $4,300 to spend the night with the hooker Ashley Dupré. He could have kept sleeping with her every night until about March 2098.

25) [suggested in the comments] she could buy her own island and become queen of that island.

26) [suggested in the comments by Gottlob K. Bremselhäcker, M.A. (Oxon.) ] The average cost of making a Hollywood movie is at least $106 million at last count. Use $141 million to make a movie in which a billionaire retired Silicon Valley executive throws a huge part of her personal fortune into running for governor of California. After bombarding every conceivable media with a many-pronged campaign of a scale never seen before in statewide politics, she unexpectedly loses the race by a wide margin to a scrappy veteran politician, but in the process learns the important lesson that money isn't everything, in politics or in life. Sharp political satire in the mode of "Primary Colors," "Wag the Dog" or "Bulworth" but with a touching, cathartic finale in which the protagonist makes amends with her illegal immigrant former housekeeper she attempted to turn into a political prop. Critics will say it is entertaining but somewhat improbable.

27) Speaking of movies, why not make a shot-by-shot remake of Metropolis (1927), which cost 5.3 Million Reichmarks at the time, approx. $200 Million in today's currency, but you could save some money by casting Mel Gibson as Freder.

28) A Bell 429 Heliocopter costs $4.865 Million. You could buy one for me & twenty-eight of my friends.

29) You can't buy a narwhal, & you can also no longer buy the Avenging Narwhal Playset action figures from Accouterments, so, therefore, you can buy infinite narwhals with $141.5 Million.

Only 111.5 left...

I'll keep updating the post with more ideas. Leave suggestions in the comments! We will get to 141.5! If you want to read the boring ways she spent it, read here.

Election Day Endorsements Part 2: Oh, shit, man, what time is it, did the polls already close?

It's probably too late to make proper endorsements, half-way thru election day, since so many people vote early in California anyway. I'm nervous about the fate of Prop 19, which has been behind in the polls, & could be the last realistic time for awhile to end prohibition. The bloggers for itwaslost are more champagne drinkers & hookah smokers, not cannabis connoisseurs, but there's been a lot of good arguments everywhere why Prop 19 benefits the whole state, not just those who ever plan on smoking some pot legally. Former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara has been campaigning from a law enforcement angle, he's written some good editorials & stars in this tv ad:

I also really liked the sound arguments laid down by the New York Times' Nicholas Krystof:

[...]Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did, and California may now be pioneering a saner approach. Sure, there are risks if California legalizes pot. But our present drug policy has three catastrophic consequences.

First, it squanders billions of dollars that might be better used for education. California now spends more money on prisons than on higher education. It spends about $216,000 per year on each juvenile detainee, and just $8,000 on each child in the troubled Oakland public school system.

Each year, some 750,000 Americans are arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Is that really the optimal use of our police force?

In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education. A Harvard economist, Jeffrey A. Miron, calculates that marijuana could generate $8.7 billion in tax revenue each year if legalized nationally, while legalization would also save the same sum annually in enforcement costs.

That’s a $17 billion swing in the nation’s finances — enough to send every 3- and 4-year-old in a poor family to a high-quality preschool. And that’s an investment that would improve education outcomes and reduce crime and drug use in the future — with enough left over to pay for an extensive nationwide campaign to discourage drug use.

The second big problem with the drug war is that it has exacerbated poverty and devastated the family structure of African-Americans. Partly that’s because drug laws are enforced inequitably. Black and Latino men are much more likely than whites to be stopped and searched and, when drugs are found, prosecuted.

Here in Los Angeles, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at seven times the rate whites are, according to a study by the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors legalization. Yet surveys consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks.

Partly because of drug laws, a black man now has a one-in-three chance of serving time in prison at some point in his life, according to the Sentencing Project, a group that seeks reform in the criminal justice system. This makes it more difficult for black men to find jobs, more difficult for black women to find suitable husbands, and less common for black children to grow up in stable families with black male role models. So, sure, drugs have devastated black communities — but the remedy of criminal sentencing has made the situation worse.

He continues with more about crime and gangs and pot's risks.

There's also a really compelling environmental reason which not many people are discussing. It goes something along the lines of: Grow houses use a disgusting amount of electricity & water, much of it pirated from the grid. Let's let the sun do the work growing the state's pot! And if you don't believe there's untold thousands of grow houses peppered around California in every neighborhood, then there's some oregano in a baggy I'd like to sell you.

And lastly, a word about the opposition. Take for instance the wording of the Los Angeles Times' "No" endorsement: "The marijuana legalization measure is poorly thought out, badly crafted and replete with loopholes and contradictions." This is just something its opponents have made up, to make it sound like it was written by irresponsible stoners, knowing most of us aren't political enough to read the details of the bill ourselves. Exactly the opposite is true. The San Francisco Chronicle's Debra J Saunders wrote:

The establishment spin goes something like this: Even if marijuana legalization makes sense, Prop. 19 is so poorly written that voters must reject it.

Bunk. The measure is tightly written to give state and local governments unimpeded authority in deciding whether to allow the sale of marijuana, and if so, how to tax and regulate it.

There won't be a better bill. Marijuana prohibition enables and enriches criminal cartels and gangs. Californians have a chance to end the madness, and voters should grab it.

As for the Stoners Against 19 campaign, led by Dragonfly Whatshername, I don't even want to respond to them. It's naive! When you weigh, on one side, decriminalizing something millions of people do safely, versus, on the other side, things are fine as they are & omg what if tobacco companies want to sell pot!? then there's just no contest. Sure, having millions on non-criminals smoking pot illegally is a copacetic status quo. If you're white.

Special Comment: Salman Rushdie should be more flexible with his grudges

The Daily Beast reported today that Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie criticized Jonathan Stuart Liebowitz for having Steven Demetre Georgiou sing at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear last Saturday. (I use their real names, not for political or racial reasons, but for silly reasons.) Jon Stewart had the artist former known as Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam has apparently dropped the 'Islam' because five of the five letters spell 'Islam', and some Europeans & Americans have islamic allergies) sing his beautiful song "Peace Train" before it was interrupted by Stephen Tyrone Colbert ("I will not ride that train") & John Michael "Ozzie" Osborne singing "Crazy Train."

Yusuf, when he was a fresh convert to Islam in the '80s, stupidly said he'd support the fatwa death sentence placed on Rushdie after he published The Satanic Verses. (As a side note, did you know book stores in Berkeley were bombed because they carried that book?) (Also, if you haven't read it, The Satanic Verses is a pretty dense postmodern novel containing many positive Muslim characters, and the scenes inspired by the life of the Prophet are in a feverish dream by a delusional character, not at all a simple direct criticism of Mohammad.) Today's 62-year-old Yusuf is a different man than the enthusiastic convert thirty years ago, and he's become a face of moderate peaceful Islam, and one of the handsomest beards on Earth or beyond. Witness this lovely performance of Peace Train at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring Muhammad Yunus in 2006:

Sir Salman, as someone who still has a fatwa on your ass, you should know better about holding grudges!

THE GIANTS WIN THE WORLD SERIES

Election Day Endorsements Part 1: FIGHT GERRYMANDERING! Yes on Prop 20! No on Prop 27!

I just talked to some friends who were confused about California Propositions 20 & 27. I will explain as simply as I can:

Gerrymandering (not to be confused with jerrybrowning) is when politicians draw their own districts to keep them safe, often in grotesque ungodly shapes (literally around neighborhoods & houses where voters are unsympathetic. And you better believe it's racial too.) Safe districts = uncompetitive elections, more extreme candidates, more polarized politics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

A previous ballot initiative created an independent commission to draw the lines (after the census) for some districting, & Prop 20 will extend the powers of that commission to state congressional districts! Prop 27 is the politicians fighting back, and will kill that commission before it's even created. Yes on 20! No on 27!

Here are some pictures of perverted pornographic REAL districts to inspire you:

I'd like to point out that the Chicago district above is a single blob, with a narrow sliver on the left.

"NARWHALS": New Favorite Signs from Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity

This is real. And here are a few more ideas I had for rally signs that I never put up:

And here are some featured in the epic Huffington Post slideshow of rally signs that made me feel good:

That last one is a personal campaign of mine. And here! I'm thrilled to see someone was either inspired by my sign suggestions (I proposed "Protect the Third Amendment! No More Quartering!") or came to the same idea independently:

Unrelated plug: Friends Around the Campfire's Stuck Home Syndrome now available as a $5.99 digital album. Narwhals!

Halloween Movie

Hi friends and everyone.

This was/is my costume all the time and especially for Halloween. Dig it.