August 2007

Reader Paul wonders why I care about Seattle taxing its citizens in odd and stupid ways when Portland has its fair share of excessive taxation. In the grand scheme of things I really don’t care all that much. Seattle is a nice city and all, but it is home base for a lot of socialist nutballs who think wealth redistribution is a holy calling, and a tax on the number of hours worked per employee really isn’t all that odd when seen in that context.

My point isn’t that I was upset with Seattle specifically. Portland is crazy like that in many ways too. What I’m afraid of is that the powers that be in Portland will hear about this tax and think its a good idea to implement too.

As for the business fees Paul mentions, I’ve been a victimcontributor myself. For most of 2005, I was a contractor and ended up having to pay the minimum 100 bucks extortion for a Portland business license. In fact, I just had to send in a letter telling them I’m wasn’t self-employed in 2006 so they wouldn’t shake me down for another 100 bucks.

Yes, Portland has its share of strange taxes and fees. It’s part of why the city has such an anti-business reputation that the current crop of city leader don’t do enough to address, but I’m against all idiotic taxes on general principles and the Seattle one just happened to be the one most visible to me at the time.

I actually found out about the tax from a Jack Bogdanski post. So a hat tip to Mr. Bogdanski, one of the big fish in the Portland blogosphere.

Please observe a moment of silence for the man whose good works and writings brought a greater appreciation for beer. Michael Jackson, the Beer Hunter, has passed on to the great beer haus in the sky, may he rest in a giant vat of IPA.

Mr. Jackson, aside from having the unfortunate luck of sharing his name with a pedophile pop star, did more to increase people’s awareness of beer, showed the world how complex and varied beer really is, and helped expose Americans to the richness of flavor and styles within beer beyond that crap Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Coors peddles.

I have a strong desire to go to Prague precisely because of his Beer Hunter show on Czechoslovakia and the origin of pilsner beer. Thank you, Mr. Jackson.

So hie thee to the nearest brewpub or public house and raise a pint, or three, in his memory.

Slanche’

From this,:

The employee hour tax shall be reported and paid on an annual calendar year basis, at the same time as the fourth quarter or annual tax return is due. The tax applies to employee hours worked inside the City regardless of whether the place of business is located within or outside the City. Persons discontinuing their business activities in Seattle shall report and pay the tax at the same time as their final business tax return is due.

So if you do business in the city of Seattle, you have to pay this tax. Does the city want to drive out all business? How stupid can the city leaders be? Do they have no shame? Is nothing sacred that it can’t be taxed?

The Fetching Mrs. Bixby and I went to the Hall & Oates concert at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall last night. She’s a big fan. Me not so much, mostly because I’ve never been a big fan of Adult Contemporary pop music in my youth. My tastes run more to Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, while hers has always been firmly in the Adult Contemporary / smooth jazz camp.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As I’ve gotten older, my musical tastes have broadened considerably and music from the Rat Pack, Dave Brubeck, and Diana Krall (oh yes, the lovely Diana Krall. Elvis Costello is one lucky man) share space on my iPod with AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and The Who, as well as contemporary rock acts such as Train, Matchbox Twenty, The Vines and Franz Ferdinand, not to mention the large chunk of roots reggae and dub — this could rapidly devolve into a post about what’s on my iPod, putting you all to sleep immediately.

Anyway, when tickets went on sale a few months ago, she was all excited and asked if I’d go with her. I said yes, of course. With age comes wisdom of sorts and I now recognize Hall & Oates place in the pantheon of good music. I figured I’d be in for a good show, especially since the wife splurged and got us seats in the second row.

There was no opening act, thank the gods, the show started promptly at 7:30. We were a little to the right of center and could see a bit of the back stage left wings. A few minutes before the show started, I could see Daryl Hall standing there, quietly strumming a guitar. So could the women all around me. Several of them started yelling to him, offering up their vaginas and other body parts, not to mention the expected bits of undergarments. I looked around at this and realized the female to male ratio was quite high. In hindsight I wasn’t surprised by this, given Daryl Hall’s hottie factor. Frankly, the dude is smoking even at his age of 61, looking and acting like a man 30 years younger. Clearly, he’s still got it, drawing women to the show like sumo wrestlers to an all you can eat sushi bar. When I asked Sally if she saw him in the wings, she said, and I quote, “Oh yeah, that’s working for me.”

So, the boys walk on stage and the crowd goes nuts, everyone jumps up, many holding hand-made signs with song titles. Hall starts singing ‘Maneater’ and I felt a wave of energy roll over me as several thousand women hit an orgasm at the exact same time. For the next 45 minutes, it’s nothing but requests as Daryl and John decide which song to play by which sign has a song that strikes their fancy at that moment. The band is tight, jumping into whatever song is chosen. At one point, Daryl announces that every show is recorded, we are all part of the show, and we can purchase cds of shows in the lobby later. Jerry Garcia would be proud, they have their own form of show taping going on.

They play for the next two and a half hours, the energy is infectious. Hall sings with a big shit eating grin on his face the whole time. He’s feeding off all that female energy and you know at this moment he is the happiest guy on the face of this earth and if asked, would tell you he has the best job anywhere. Looking at him, I could not help but feel a bit jealous. He clearly loves what he does and gives back to the audience an energetic performance. While he might not be able to hit the highest notes, he’s still got soul in that voice. John is a rock, not as demonstrative as Daryl, but you can tell he’s loving it on stage because he’s got this little smirk as he plays. The rest of the band is solid, clearly loving it. The sax player made everyone happy several times with well-played solos. He struck me as an odd duck, not just because of his purple suit, but because he looked exactly like FDR with long hair.

They were pop perfect, playing every hit. They give two encores. We left the show satisfied we got our money’s worth and I left feeling like I’d seen a bit of pop history and was the better for it.

Shamans at Purdue University have taken a different tack from the Danish on generating hydrogen for fuel. Rather than taking it with you in a stable container, these guys have figured out a pretty efficient way of generating it as you need it. Their process splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using and alloy of aluminum and gallium. It’s the same thing you did in High School chem class, but there’s no need for an electrical power source because the aluminum reacts to the water by attracting oxygen and releasing hydrogen. The gallium is used to keep the aluminum from ‘rusting’ which will stop the reactive process.

The gallium is a critical component because it hinders the formation of an aluminum oxide skin normally created on aluminum’s surface after bonding with oxygen, a process called oxidation. This skin usually acts as a barrier and prevents oxygen from reacting with aluminum. Reducing the skin’s protective properties allows the reaction to continue until all of the aluminum is used to generate hydrogen, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.

So basically, you fill a tank full of water. The tank has this aluminum gallium alloy in it. The alloy starts to bleed off hydrogen and you’ve got a fuel source. Pretty nifty, I think. What’s even niftier is that the alloy is recyclable.

The gallium component is inert, which means it can be recovered and reused.

“This is especially important because of the currently much higher cost of gallium compared with aluminum,” Woodall said. “Because gallium can be recovered, this makes the process economically viable and more attractive for large-scale use. Also, since the gallium can be of low purity, the cost of impure gallium is ultimately expected to be many times lower than the high-purity gallium used in the electronics industry.”

As the alloy reacts with water, the aluminum turns into aluminum oxide, also called alumina, which can be recycled back into aluminum. The recycled aluminum would be less expensive than mining the metal, making the technology more competitive with other forms of energy production, Woodall said.

I said it before (not on this blog), and I’ll say it again. When my son is my age, the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine will be a thing of the past, a museum piece, and a chapter in an history text book. Now they just need to perfect the flying car and the personal jet pack.

A team at the Denmark Technical University has figured out a way of storing hydrogen in pellet form. I’m not a chemist in real life, nor do I play one on tv, but it involves ammonia, sea salt and some powerful juju known only to the Guild of Secretive Chemical Shamans, Local 432. Apparently, hydrogen is released when the ammonia is released from the pellet. The beauty of this is that the pellet is reusable, just have your local shaman fill it full of ammonia again.

Here’s a quote that fills me with happiness and joy:

“Should you drive a car 600 km using gaseous hydrogen at normal pressure, it would require a fuel tank with a size of nine cars. With our technology, the same amount of hydrogen can be stored in a normal gasoline tank”, says Professor Claus Hviid Christensen, Department of Chemistry at DTU.

They’ve started a company called Amminex to develop commercial use of this technology. If all goes well, we could very well see the first practical and safe hydrogen-powered cars on the market within a decade. That would be some powerful juju.

I think it started when I got the coffee later than I usually get coffee, at the McDonald’s drive thru funny how, when discussing a restaurant with a means to purchase food from your car, it is a drive THRU not a drive THROUGH, as if with the correct spelling of the word, the tendency is to change the pronunciation to THROW, a large with two creams and three Splendas, I was with The Boy after registering him for school around 10 AM this morning I remember asking where the cream and fake sugar packets were in the food bag and was surprised to find that they were already in the coffee now that I think about it I was wondering why the order taker was so specific in her questions about how many I wanted so anyway I didn’t start drinking the coffee until I dropped off The Boy and I took a sip as I pulled out of the driveway and it tasted burned at first but then that taste went away or I got used to it or something and subsequent drinks the coffee struck me as typical fast food restaurant watery coffee not the Starbucks mud I’m used to but in hindsight this was deceiving because when I got to work and had finished the coffee I wanted some more so I poured a cup from the air pot ha ha air pot which turned out to be a mistake because I ended up mixing two types of coffee which can have the effect of really fucking with your head and ratcheting up the caffeine buzz more than is manageable but by the time you realize it its too late and this time the buzz didn’t kick in it just stayed hidden until I went to get some Indian take out down the street and they had this HD TV hanging on the wall playing a Bollywood musical where the actors were dancing and jumping and every time the actors would jump the camera would go into bullet time like the Matrix and pan from left to right or right to left and the male lead was dancing and singing with the female lead on I SWEAR the African plains because there was this huge herd of water buffalo behind them stretching off into the distance and then it was the beach and then it was the African plains again and I asked the lady behind the counter for a large diet Pepsi to go TO GO and she seemed confused by the concept despite the fact that I had a to go container full of food from her restaurant and she spent five minutes looking for a fountain cup and finally found one under the counter but still had to ask another guy who told her yes that was the only to go cup they had and that concept just bounced around my head five or six times the strangeness of NOT HAVING TO GO CUPS for the soda fountain despite offering to go food I just could not get my head around that and I suddenly realized that DAMN but I’ve had way too much coffee today.