You’d never-know there was never-snow this year, with our 10-to-20-degrees-above-average season, but Beckers comes through with a report of number two on the season, this time just north of the airport (which is south of the city) on I-5 and also in the suburb of Kent.

Cliff Mass, in his usual exhaustingly breathless style, reports in as well.

As always, these are mixes that represent an intersection of what I think the recipients would like and what I reviewed here on MPL in 2009.  Whether the music was released in 2009 is irrelevant, and in fact very little of it was.  Eligible contributing CDs run from The Nields’ If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now to A Man About A Horse’s Does Not Exist.

These mixes suck. Hard.  Cuz of that lack-of-time-and-energy thing. And because my busy year gave me fewer songs from which to choose.

Volume K
1. Stand Up Comedy - U2
2. Postcards - The Cutters
3. Government Center - Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
4. Twa Recruiting Sergeants - The Old Triangle
5. Girlfiend In A Coma - The Smiths
6. Sex Euro and Evils Pop - Messer Chups
7. Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud? - Elliott Smith
8. Catch A Collapsing Star - The Mendoza Line
9. I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) - The Proclaimers
10. Does This Mean You’re Moving On? - The Airborne Toxic Event
11. Seven Years Gone - Quasi
12. Just To Know You’ve Been Dreaming - Will Johnson
13. Such Great Heights - Iron And Wine
14. The Wrestler - Bruce Springsteen
15. Heavier Than 3 Lbs. - A Man About A Horse
16. Carry On - Spacehog
17. Let Me In - R.E.M.
18. St. Teresa - Joan Osborne
19. (Love Is) The Tender Trap - Frank Sinatra
20. How Deep Is Your Love - The Bad Plus

Volume S
1. 9 To 5 - Dolly Parton
2. Li Li - The Cutters
3. Sometime Around Midnight - The Airborne Toxic Event
4. Barracuda - The Bad Plus
5. Our Haunt - Palomar
6. Wolfman’s Brother - Phish
7. Crazy Baby - Joan Osborne
8. Will The Night - Low
9. Aase’s Death - Grieg
10. Belated Promise Ring - Iron And Wine
11. Then I Met You - The Proclaimers
12. How Soon Is Now? - The Smiths
13. L.A. - Elliott Smith
14. Strangers Out Of The Blue - St. Thomas
15. Try For The Sun - The Old Triangle
16. Preface - Vincent & Mr. Green
17. Mainstreaming - Kaada
18. Flor de Leis - Slow Dazzle
19. Hopeless Bird - A Man About A Horse

2009 MPL awards to follow.

Former regulators hired by Toyota Motor Corp. helped end at least four U.S. investigations of unintended acceleration by company vehicles in the last decade, warding off possible recalls, court and government records show.

Holy crap.

While all automakers have employees who handle NHTSA issues, Toyota may be alone among the major companies in employing former agency staffers to do so. Spokesmen for General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Group LLC and Honda Motor Co. all say their companies have no ex-NHTSA people who deal with the agency on defects.

Possible links between Toyota and NHTSA may fuel mounting criticism of their handling of defects in Toyota and Lexus models tied to 19 deaths between 2004 and 2009.

May?  Uh, consider the mounting criticism fueled.

In one example of the Toyota aides’ role, [Christopher] Santucci [of Toyota's Washington office] testified in a Michigan lawsuit that the company and NHTSA discussed limiting an examination of unintended acceleration complaints to incidents lasting less than a second.

Well, that’s…wait…what?  You got it backwards!

We discussed the scope” of the investigation, Santucci testified. “NHTSA’s concerns about the scope ultimately led to a decision by the agency to reduce that scope. You say it worked out well for Toyota, I think it worked out well for both the agency and Toyota.”

Well I’m glad Santucci has the consumer where s/he belongs on the priority list: below Toyota and the NHTSA.

In Toyota’s case, “the company has built itself on pillars of safety, quality and reliability,” [some random market analyst] said. “A defect in their product is appalling to them, sort of unthinkable.”

Time to get past the cognitive dissonance, fellas.

Toyota spokeswoman Martha Voss declined to make Santucci and Tinto available for comment.

“Anything Mr. Tinto and Mr. Santucci did was in the interest of full disclosure, transparency and openness with regulators and safety experts,” Voss said in an e-mailed statement.

Kind of telling that those two paragraphs are next to each other, huh?

“Their actions have been consistent with our efforts to maintain the highest professional and ethical standards in all of our legal and regulatory practices. Their paramount concern was for the safety of every single owner of one of our vehicles.”

Right, because limiting the scope of an investigation into stuck accelerators to incidents lasting less than one second clearly indicates their paramount concern was for the vehicle owners.  I mean, one the one hand you’re concerned about using the NHTSA’s resources well, and on the other you’re concerned about consumers.  How do those go hand in hand? Ms. Voss, how do you live with yourself after blatant lies like this?  The only explanation is that you are evil.

[Christopher] Tinto [vice president of regulatory affairs in Toyota's Washington office], 46, came to Toyota after about four years at NHTSA. He hired Santucci from NHTSA in 2003, after the two met on opposite sides of the table in defect investigation cases, Santucci said in a deposition in the Michigan lawsuit.

Um, again…holy crap.  Jesus lord this article reads as a damning indictment from top to bottom.

And look, it worked:

NHSTA opted to limit the investigation to unintended acceleration events that lasted less than a second and those where the brake could be used to control the vehicle, or about 11 incidents with 5 crashes.

…

The agency decided to limit the cases to eliminate instances where a driver may have used the wrong pedal, the Transportation Department’s Alair said.

And go figure, but the cherry-picked data exonerated Toyota:

“In each of these vehicles, no evidence of a system or component failure was found and the vehicles were operating as designed,” Tinto wrote in a Nov. 15 letter to NHSTA. He also cited the findings that ended the Camry investigation in 2004.

NHTSA ended its probe of the 2002 Camry in January 2006, citing lack of evidence of a problem and the agency’s need to allocate “limited resources” to other investigations.

]]> http://www.misspiggylunchbox.com/archives/4169/feed http://www.misspiggylunchbox.com/archives/4157 http://www.misspiggylunchbox.com/archives/4157#comments Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:33:30 +0000 KEN http://www.misspiggylunchbox.com/?p=4157 When I was young enough to be young and old enough to be aware of the conversation people who weren’t young enough to be young were having about my age group, I was constantly bewildered. Why did they get it so wrong? Why were they talking so assuredly about what we were like while being so inaccurate? Why were they piecing together a few trends to make blanket statements about what “kids today” were like? Whatever they were talking about, it didn’t have any resonance to the way I saw the world of my friends and me.

That sense of puzzlement will be important for me to remember for the next 20 years or so. Mind Hacks helps by seemingly interpreting the main message of The Breakfast Club directly into parent-speak.

The monologue that bookmarks The Breakfast Club, with the line “You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions”, succinctly captures how society’s view of youth changes and yet always stays the same.

For the current younger generation, the simplest terms are mostly taken from psychiatry. This will eventually change and our recurrent anxieties about the young will largely be expressed in the next most convenient definition.

As a society, we are strangely blind to the complexities of youth.

As much as I like that last line, I do have to quibble with it. Do we need to call youth complex? I’m not saying it isn’t, but what gives those old people the wisdom to call it so? Again, when I was young, I remember being completely confused hearing adults talk about how hard it was to be a teenager. Sure, I had problems, but I didn’t see my awkwardness as such nor did I attribute any of my problems to being young…it was all I knew up to that point in my life. I think a better closing line would have been to say we are blind to the properties, or experience, of youth.

Ten Summoner’s Tales is an exemplar of a type of CD that makes me re-evaluate what a CD review means on MPL.  The tradeoff these CDs pose is whether to write from more of an evaluative perspective or a personal one.  Due to the style of the non-CD review content of this blog, I’ve always come down on the personal side, but coming across a well-executed CD that does not grab me always causes a re-assessment.

When I was taking my reviewing class four(!) years ago, my instructor pointed out that you should review something to give others an idea of whether or not they’d like it.  His gig was primarily movies, so his example was, "If you don’t like horror movies, when you review a horror movie you should evaluate it on whether or not somebody who likes horror movies would like it."  I don’t disagree with that approach at all, and use it as one of many guideposts in my reviews, but for a couple of reasons, it’s not really what I do here.

For one, I think it’s a bit of an old media mindset.  I don’t mean that as a pejorative; I just think that in an era when there were fewer sources of information and opinion, this quasi-objectivity made sense.  Now, though, you can get all kinds of opinions on musical artists and their output, and I feel the only reason to be read is to be interesting.

The main reason I tend to give more weight to my reaction, though, is that this blog is about me.  It’s essentially a public journal.  It may seem like I’m writing about a CD or a politician or a baseball game, but I’m really writing about my reaction to that thing.  Offhand I can only think of one regular reader I’ve ever had who didn’t know me personally.  I’m fine with that because, again, what I want to do with MPL is create a record of my life, and a record of how I’ve felt about collections of music serves as a pretty damned good proxy of my life.

So while I could spend time writing about Sting’s intelligently-written music, the proficiency of his supporting musicians, his clever lyrics, or the expertly-engineered sound, none of that captures the fact that these songs just do not grab me.  Where I should hear passion I hear chilliness and distance.  I respect the music, but I can’t love it.

I have always felt this sense of detachment from Sting’s music, and it’s always amazed me how passionate his fans are about his music.  No matter how much I listen, I cannot understand how he affects so many people so deeply.  I imagine that a KEN who loved Sting would be one that would write a review like this for, say, Faith No More’s Angel Dust, praising its execution and brilliance, but left alienated by the overwhelming assault on his ears.

I like plenty of music that might be described as passionless.  In particular, big chunks of the avant-garde music and death metal I praise do not grab me in the same way this doesn’t.  The difference is that those CDs tend to be more cerebral, exciting the puzzle-solving neurons of my brain, which in turn engage me in a sort of passionate way.  Sting’s music is smart, yes, but it’s not quite at that level of stimulation.

So, in the spirit of my reaction to this album, let’s polish this off professionally but dispassionately.  High points are the clever lyrics in "Seven Days," the emotional depth of "Fields Of Gold," and the nearly emotional "It’s Probably Me."  Low points are the ridiculous spoken portion of "St. Augustine In Hell," the ponderous incessance of "Heavy Cloud No Rain," and Sting’s insertion of his opinions of politics, war, and technology into a love song ("If I Ever Lose My Faith In You").

If I were evaluating this album on its terms, for what it intends to be, I would have no problem giving it my highest rating.  For MPL, though, I’ll just shake its hand, thank it for the occasional stimulation, and be on my way.

Rating:
  
Mixers: "Fields Of Gold"
Keepers: “Love Is Stronger Than Justice (The Munificent Seven),” “Seven Days,” “It’s Probably Me," "Shape Of My Heart”
Filed Between: The Steve Miller Band (Greatest Hits 1974-78) and Stinkfish (…Does It Again)

The world’s tallest living man has unveiled the world’s largest gingerbread man at an Ikea outlet in Norway’s capital, Oslo.

What’s most surprising is that they would allow this event to happen in a Swedish store.  It kind of makes sense, though…they probably had their Swedish slaves bake the cookie.

Scientists are increasingly warning that sitting for prolonged periods — even if you also exercise regularly — could be bad for your health.

Crap.  There go my plans for retirement.

Republican Senator Richard Shelby has put a blanket hold on EVERY one of Obama’s 70 nominations currently on the Senate calendar for confirmation.  Because he can’t get some pork project for Alabama moved through.  Because, yeah, this is clearly what those rules are set up for.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, CongressDaily (sub. req.) reports. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

…

According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track.

…

A San Diego State University professor and “Congressional expert” told the paper “he knew of no previous use of a blanket hold” in recent history.

This is exactly the problem with our government.  Each senator has too much power.  You wouldn’t dream of writing up a system of government where you have 101 Presidents, yet that’s essentially what we’ve got, where any single Senator with a bone to pick can bring the government to a screeching halt.

Break up the Senate.  Blow up all of their rules.  Get rid of this individual hold BS, and destroy the filibuster so badly that it never ever comes back.  Hell, get rid of the chamber all together…what a waste of breath those people are.  Except for Franken, my all-time second-favorite senator.  He’s cool…and he holds the same seat as my all-time favorite senator: Paul Wellstone.

And Jesus H.  This is the group that thinks they’re going to design a college football playoff system?  I mean, even beyond being a waste of their time, I can’t even imagine what a playoff system would look like if it were designed by the same a-holes who crafted the Senate rules.  So let’s see, there’s 8 teams, and one-third of those teams changes every two years, and you have to beat six of the other teams in order to win the championship, and if nobody beats six other teams then there is no champion.  And there’s only a championship held every two years because everybody’s scared to play anybody in the year when the new playoff teams will enter so really there’s hardly ever any change in membership.

I didn’t make it through the 80 CDs I had picked out.  The deadline buzzer rang as I was about in the I’s.  And even then I couldn’t settle on just one, giving My Baby no fewer than three: one jazz, one classical, and one pop/rock.  The winners are…

Bach: Brandeburg Concertos 4, 5, & 6 (thanks uncle J-mez for Our Baby’s first gift!)
Miles Davis: Kind Of Blue
Beth Orton: Trailer Park, which got me through the last couple of days of thesis writing, so it was front of mind.

I’m a bit disappointed I didn’t end up with a male vocalist in there, but the kid’s got plenty of time for that, I suppose.  Besides, if she’s anything like her dad (don’t read too much into that, I don’t know the sex and we’re pretending it’s a girl this month), she’ll take an instant liking to them anyway.

The kid’s a regular music critic, already strongly preferring Bach to Miles Davis, My Baby reports.  I love that the kid’s right.  I mean, Miles Davis is great, but I’m not sure I’d put any musician in front of Bach.  Besides, the Davis and Orton CDs are definitely intended to be the sleepy-time CDs and, apparently, Bach will now be how she gets her exercise.