Stan Taylor

We now have electrical utility deregulation in Texas. Sometime toward the end of last year, a salesperson for Reliant Energy showed up on our doorstep. Katie mistook this company for the company to which some neighbors had switched, and she agreed to switch service to them. When I got home that night, we decided we didn’t want to switch after all.
In the packet that the Reliant salesperson had given Katie, I noticed a form to revoke our decision within three days. I faxed it in the next day. I never heard anything from Reliant, so I assumed all was well.
Well, at the end of December, we got a final bill from our previous provider. After several long telephone calls, I determined that Reliant put in the switch request to our old provider, but then never set up an account for us. As far as I can tell, we’ve been getting free electricity since December 16th. Unfortunately, I’m too upstanding to let that continue. I re-established service with our previous provider today (though I think we still get almost a month of free electricity, as they will establish new service for us this week). Gotta love bureaucracy.
P.S. Too bad the free month was in winter, not in August.

From the New York Times:

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.
Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can’t lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.
The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

I don’t buy into this deterministic, hard-wired business, no, not me. :-)
(via Follow Me Here)

Mindless sports team loyalty meets mindless consumerism:

Academy Sports gears up for Longhorn sales
Academy Sports & Outdoors Ltd. is so sure that the undefeated University of Texas Longhorns will win the Rose Bowl that the retail chain already has purchased official Longhorns Rose Bowl Championship merchandise.
Academy stores will open at 6 a.m. Thursday to cater to Longhorn fans scrambling to be the first to buy Texas Rose Bowl Championship gear, including the official locker-room cap.
The Rose Bowl, pitting UT against the University of Southern California, is being played tonight in Pasadena, Calif.
Katy-based Academy is hoping to see the same long lines that formed — at one time reaching 102,000 people in one night — when the retailer was peddling Houston Astros apparel and products during the team’s World Series run.

From the news wires:

Pack of angry Chihuahuas attack officer in Fremont
A pack of angry Chihuahuas attacked a police officer who was escorting a teenager home following a traffic stop, authorities said.
The officer suffered minor injuries including bites to his ankle on Thursday when the five Chihuahuas escaped the 17-year-old boy’s home and rushed the officer in the doorway, said Fremont detective Bill Veteran.
The teenager had been detained after the traffic incident, Veteran said.
The officer was treated at a local hospital and returned to work less than two hours later, Veteran said.

According to a new Harris poll:

Sizeable minorities of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had “strong links to al Qaeda,” a Harris Interactive poll shows, though the number has fallen substantially this year.
About 22% of U.S. adults believe Mr. Hussein helped plan 9/11, the poll shows, and 26% believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded. Another 24% believe several of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, according to the online poll of 1,961 adults.
However, all of these beliefs have declined since February of this year, when 64% of those polled believed Mr. Hussein had strong links to al Qaeda and 46% said Mr. Hussein helped plan 9/11. At that time, more than a third said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and 44% said several of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis.
Currently, 56% of adults believe Iraqis are better off now than they were under Mr. Hussein, down from 76% in February. Nearly half of those polled say they believe Iraq, under Mr. Hussein, was a threat to U.S. security, down from 61% in February.

Can that many people really be that ignorant? At least the numbers are declining.

When I’m driving by myself in slow traffic, I absentmindedly read the license plates of all the cars around me. I chalk it up to boredom and a little OCD. I can’t recall a license plate number a few seconds after the car passes, but I’m concerned my mind is actually storing them all away in long term memory. My fear is that when I’m old and senile, I’ll start babbling out all the license plate numbers I’ve read over the years. I can just see myself slumped in my wheelchair, drooling, and saying “W12-TXL, BB3-56J. Oh! RTL-3S4!”, etc.

Well, MetaFilter has had its seemingly annual discussion of the value of perpetuating the idea of Santa Claus to children. One thing that strikes me about the discussion is that very few people have recounted what they have done or are doing with their own kids. I think that many MetaFilter members are young and childless (especially the ones posting on Christmas day perhaps).
I remember back before we had kids, I would make statements about what I never/always would do with my future children. My father-in-law would just gently shake his head and snicker. Now that I have kids, I understand my father-in-law’s response. Raising children challenges every preconceived notion you have and destroys many of them. You really can’t imagine what it’ll be like until you are a parent yourself. Things that you thought would be important turn out to be inconsequential and you devote large amounts of emotional energy to issues you never even thought of before.

Yesterday, I put down laminate flooring in the downstairs bathroom. Installing the flooring was as easy as the Lowe’s employee had promised, but I had a few problems figuring out which way 45 degree miter cuts went on the quarter round moulding. Fortunately, a couple of extra pieces of moulding only set me back a few extra dollars.

My family has a history of mangling or chopping off appendages. My grandfather hit his knee with an axe and it was stiff the rest of his lfe; my dad ground the toes off of one foot in an industrial accident; and my mother lost a finger in a recreational accident. Katie lives in constant fear that I’ll be the next victim.
Yesterday I was working with a borrowed power miter saw. With my family history, I should have realized that Katie wouldn’t find it very funny when I came in from the garage with a towel around a finger and saying I’d had a little accident.

This article states what seems obvious to me: readers really do judge a book by its cover:

“BOOK LOVERS MAY NOT BE the most heroic members of the romantic world, but at least, we tell ourselves, we are deep, we are discerning. Well, I have news for you from publishing’s bottom line: we bespectacled creatures of the late-night night light are, frankly, a bit slutty.
All the research shows that consumers are very, very influenced by the covers, not necessarily to buy a book, but to pick it up,” Joanna Prior, publicity and marketing director at Penguin, says.
Studies show that a book on a three-for-two table has about one and a half seconds to catch a reader’s eye. If it is picked up, it is on average glanced at for only three to four seconds.