New Years Resolutions

My New Years Resolution this year is to read 52 books in a year. Some have asked me to blog about the experience, so expect to see some, or perhaps, a bunch of book reviews over the coming year.

So far, I've finished Super Freakonomics and started Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw. I enjoyed Freakonomics a lot, the unlikely correlation between things and underlying circumstances that drive human interactions fascinates me. Super Freakonomics book continues in the same direction. The final chapter about how we're looking at global warming all wrong and how what we're currently trying to do could actually be making things worse was immensely fascinating to me.

Strangely though, it didn't really settle into my consciousness like Freakonomics did. Here it is about four days out from finishing it, and I can barely even remember any of the major points in the book. For a "dense" book, it's also a very fast read and seems a little thin. At the end of the day, it seems like the authors had a lot to talk about in the first book, and this is all the stuff that either didn't make the cut or they didn't have time to research. Some of it has also been covered already in a book I read last year -- Malcolm Gladwell's The Outliers. That doesn't mean it isn't immensely fascinating, but if you haven't read either book, start with Freakonomics. It's stronger and more cohesive.

All that said, the chapter on global warming is incredibly fascinating, and it touches on a think tank founded by some ex-Microsoft guys who might actually have solutions that work. Of course, getting environmentalists to try them out is difficult, as some of the conventional wisdom on what might solve the problem turns out to be wrong, and some of it (such as eating organic fruits and vegetables) actually might be making the problem worse. There's also some interesting ideas on building cheap devices that might break down the feedback loop that causes hurricanes. There's also some talk on fighting terrorism that highlights a lot of talking points I've been making over the years -- you can't harden every target, and there are too many possible plots to defend against them all. However, freaking out over an attack not only costs money, it costs lives as well -- for instance, in the three months following 9/11, there were over a thousand extra traffic deaths. Caused, of course, by the people who were afraid to drive or didn't want to be hassled by the TSA and took to the road instead. Which, of course, isn't nearly as safe.

I think I'll find myself rereading this book a year or so from now, as I'll likely reread Freakonomics and want to do some extra reading on the same topic. I think I'd also like to see how the books read as a whole unit rather than the disjointed set. Either way, this one stays on the "good" bookshelf.

I'm going to write about that terror attack, but first ...

...I'm going to talk about my ticket situation. I'd love to talk about the idiocity that is the TSA and what they're doing, but I need to let my rage die down a little and let them shake out exactly what they're going to do. Right now, they're telling us they want things to be unpredictable, which just basically means, "we don't know what to do, so we're just doing stuff". If what they were doing was effective, they'd need to do it everywhere for it to be effective, otherwise, it's just for show. If it's ineffective, then why are they wasting time doing it? The time a TSA agent has to look at a passenger and his luggage is non-infinite. We shouldn't be frivolously wasting it on things that aren't effective.

But I digress. I can't write that post right now.

I'm talking about the ticket I got in March, that I went to traffic court over. After delaying the trial as long as I could and pressing the prosecutor as hard as I could, I decided I was tired of the nonsense and took their "plea bargain". Basically, pay the fine, don't do anything illegal for 90 days, and the ticket goes away like it never happened. I called the court and set everything up. Since there's some paperwork to be signed, they had to send some stuff to my mailbox.

Only something funny happened along the way: nothing ever arrived in my mailbox. I was told it would be about 10 working days, but after nearly a month, I started to worry. So, I called the court again. Got the same lady on the phone, she remembered my ticket and the settlement and said, "oh that's right, I forgot to send it out. I'll do that right away." Me, I'm feeling like an idiot because if I just hadn't called and asked, it would have just disappeared. Oh well, that's life, and peace of mind is worth that, right? Well, it's been another month and nothing's arrived. Actually, almost two months.

So, now what? I don't really want to call again, seeing as how the ticket seems to actually be lost ... again. Or maybe the woman is trying to cut me a break and "losing" my ticket. Either way, I don't care, so long as it stays lost. I've also renewed my license a few weeks back, so it doesn't appear that anything at all is happening with the ticket.

Disclaimer: This is not the first ticket I've had that's been lost. See, when you get as many tickets as I do, sometimes things that are very unlikely to happen still manage to happen. Every day tickets get lost. Someone misfiles something, a ticket book gets lost, a file gets tossed in the trash or falls behind a cabinet. Chances are though, it's not your ticket. But if you get enough of them, it stands to reason that some of them might disappear.

This would be number three, by the way. The first one happened 15 years ago. I got two tickets in the same location on consecutive nights. Bad luck and not knowing where the speed limit actually started. I don't know if someone got confused or took pity on me, but when I went to take care of the second ticket, no one could find it. They also couldn't advise me on what to do, because if it did turn up, a warrant would be issued. On the other hand, they couldn't process any payment or court date for it because as far as they knew, the offense never happened. Strange predicament to find yourself in at 20. The ticket never turned up.

The second one happened in Giddings, TX but it was your standard run of the mill ticket, and I think I told them I would take defensive driving for it. Maybe. I don't know. What I do know is that somewhere along the line, I didn't do what I was supposed to do and someone never took my file out of the right folder and my ticket almost didn't get processed. I say almost, because about three days before the statute of limitations was up (three years), the Giddings Municipal Court called me. Seems they'd found the ticket and they wanted me to settle up. I couldn't remember when the offense happened -- I remembered that it did -- and asked them to remind me. When they told me, I told them that if they thought they could subpoena me and get me into a court of law and render a judgement inside of three days to go ahead and try. They kind of laughed and said, "well, we thought it was worth asking."

Now I'm faced with a similar situation. The ticket seems to have effectively disappeared into the ether. It may surface in the future or it may not. I'll likely call again on Monday, just to make sure, but if they still don't send me anything, I'm going to consider it lost. I will record my conversation though, just in case.