Hanging out with a friend, the exposure of breast, mental health problems, the death of a ferry, and the dissolution of the NET

Published on 11 Jan 2006 at 11:42 pm.
Filed under Life,Politics,Rants,Wrestling.

How is that for a title?

A bit has happened within the last few days, and I felt it easier to talk about them all in this post rather than a series of rapid blog entries.

I spent most of Monday with my good friend Christine. She came over, saw the Christmas decorations that are now being taken down, we watched the DVD (Remember the Titans) I purchased for her as a “your Christmas present hasn’t come in yet so I have to get you something” present, and finally gave her said present (the three Anne of Green Gable movies on DVD). Twas a fun to see her, as I imagine I won’t be seeing much of her soon as she is helping getting things ready for her best friend’s wedding, has classes starting soon, a life of her own, etc. Later we hit Media Play to see if they had anything left at good deals (which there isn’t), and following that we hit Javas.

Later that night on WWE Raw, following Edge’s win of the WWE Heavyweight title from New Year’s Revolution and his proclamation of “hot, torid sex” to celebrate they ended the show by having Edge and his skank Lita undress in a bed set up in the ring. During this Lita’s breast was exposed for a few seconds. The America’s USA and Canada’s TSN networks cut to black within a half second of the nipple being exposed, but Britain’s SkyOne never cut away because they aren’t prudes.

Yesterday was uneventful for me, but Rochester’s new mayor announced that he will not approve the continuation of the fast ferry. This is great news! Quite frankly, I have not heard of a single person that is for it that actually looks into the subject. People who don’t are either disinterested on it as a whole or favor it.

OK, a little background history may be in order. For one reason or another, the old mayor’s office pushed heavily for the city of Rochester to bring in a fast ferry to ride from here to Canada (which does not save you any time compared to driving to the same location). We hooked up with a company that brought in a very large, impressive looking boat. The city heavily supported said boat — many highway roads have signs posted for exits that will in some way get you to the ferry, spent money building up the roads around the boat (but cut the street from four lanes to two for some odd reason). For publicity, we first showed off the boat at New York City, where the thing was damaged and needed to be repaired. Upon repair, the boat finally made it to Rochester where it had an OK launch, but after that sales tanked (with only a minor blip during the time that they discounted the price during the summer). The company encountered huge loses (they needed something like 500 riders a day to cover costs, in which they got 25), and went out of business.

Not willing to let this highly publicized distraction from the other problems in the city go (bad economy — caused by the recent string of bad ideas like the ferry — high crime/murder rate and loss of jobs), the city itself purchased the damn thing to try and keep it going. Guess what happens? The thing keeps tanking. They cut the number of trips per day from three to one, the boat gets damaged again. Being part of the city, numbers have to be released, to which it turns out that it is losing at least (they found more money they “forgot” to factor into the original equation, but did not disclose the amount) an average of 1.5 million per month &mdash and that is if you take out the price of the repair. There is no business plan set that will draw in the necessary money to sustain it. Suggestions have been made such as using the ferry as means to import/export goods, but the net gain from such suggestions has been nominal compared to the operating costs. Because of this, to keep the ferry in operation would require 3% of the annual budget for the year. Cutting this thing now will stop the drain on the economy and free up resources.

Today, a nut job was arrested in the parking lot of my local comic book shop. This guy had come into my local comic book shop yesterday trying to sell DVDs to the owner and then to customers in his store. He threw the customer out from his store. He showed up in the parking lot again today, where he tried to break into the pizza shop next door to the comic shop and demanded money when he was caught by the employees in the store. They beat him up and threw him out. He then started to try and sell DVDs in front of the Wilson Farms next door. The cops are called. Because of the vast intelligence of the previous mayor and his cutting down of the police force to two locations (because, as we all know, it’s the evil crooked cops and the “white suburb kids coming into the city to buy drugs” (his words), that are the problem), it takes 45 minutes for some one to show up (the same amount of time it took when there was a shooting here a few months back). Evidentially this person was deemed to have mental health problems and was hauled off.

After finding this out, I asked my local comic shop’s owner (Chuck) about his time in court over refusing to obtain a certificate of use (a little bit of background: the certificate is a $100 fee that was added by the last mayor. Business owners are to give up their social security number, home phone number (even if it isn’t in their name), the names and other contact information of all employees to be kept by the city. It becomes the business owner’s job to protect their business from any crimes that might occur in it or the surrounding area. An appointed city official will oversee the whole organization. The NET office (the people running this dealie) is given the authority to conduct inspections of the business at any time, and if there is anything that they do not like or find offensive then they have the authority to shut the business down. The business owner gives up the right to bring the office to court to challenge the claim. This does not apply to businesses whose are 20 thousand square feet in size (because it’s impossible for large business such as Wegmans to have any problems, right?). Business owners must pass a background check before they are approved. This background check will deny any individual with any problems on their record. Legally, they can deny you for unpaid parking tickets If it is deemed you cannot have a certificate, your business is shut down. The NET office requires 12-13 of the remaining police force to sit at desk jobs to handle things. Essentially, this makes business owners police officers that give up their rights to privacy and due process and is being done on a selective basis. All of this has reportedly resulted in the closing of 8 businesses out of thousands, but has generated a good deal of revenue from fines such as one of the local Wilson Farms staying open 5 minutes past their posted hours because their were still customers in the store). Chuck told me that he had gotten a letter from the city on Tuesday and a phone call today saying that he did not have to appear in court, that the NET office is suspended, and the whole office is under review. Based off the “off the record” comments that has been spread around from local businesses that got together to fight it, it appears that this new mayor is living up to his promise to them to shut the whole damn thing down.

Wow, in under two weeks this guy has cut government waste, returned rights to citizens, and put more cops on the streets to fight crime — and this guy is a Democrat?

Oh yea, and today I figured out that my Sirius receiver can broadcast on a FM frequency and can get it to play on my boom box that way. Only played with it for a bit, but haven’t found an alternative station on there I like. Still, I like what I heard. Next up, getting the car part installed ….

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