Contrails over Monterey

On Tuesday afternoon I was listening to former KGO talk show host Bill Wattenburg, who has found a new home on KSCO in Santa Cruz. For those who don't know, Dr. Bill often talks about science stuff, because he's a famous scientist and engineer. He had a couple of kooky callers who insisted that jet contrails are a government conspiracy to destroy our lives. They called them "chemtrails" and these people claim that these normal vapor trails that form in the heat of jet exhaust are actually loaded with chemicals designed to make us sick.

The Monterey Peninsula is actually a fertile breeding ground for these theories. In fact, every day large numbers of jet contrails can be seen over Monterey, coming from over the ocean from the Northwest, and headed towards the Southeast. Evidently, some folks can't understand why so many planes would be flying from what appears to be nowhere into California. It must be a sinister government plot!

Long before I ever heard of these conspiracy theories, I noticed the same thing. Binoculars revealed that almost all of the planes were Boeing 747s. And when the light is hitting them just right, I can sometimes make out the airline markings. But where were they coming from? There's nothing out there in the ocean Northwest of here.

Or is there?

It so happened that the front of our then-apartment faced almost perfectly towards the North. This made it really easy to look up and estimate the approximate angle the planes were coming in. I then immediately consulted my trusty globe, which I acquired when I was 19 by cashing in my S&H Green Stamps. I put my finger over Monterey, and traced my finger Northwest at roughly the same angle as the planes flying in over our heads. My finger arched up and over the Pacific Ocean, following a Great Circle, and I found my finger arriving squarely on Japan.

I then returned to Monterey and traced a line in the opposite direction and landed less than half an inch later upon Los Angeles. How interesting! It turns out that Monterey is almost in a direct line between Japan and Los Angeles! What we're almost certainly seeing are flights between Tokyo and LA. That would explain why the planes are almost always 747s, which are best suited to such long overseas flights.

You can do this yourself, but you need a globe. The rules of geometry are different on a spherical surface than a flat surface. If you try it on a flat map you'll end up somewhere in Western Canada or even Nowhere Alaska, where government conspiracies are hatched. I suspect the conspiracy theorists started with a flat map, if they looked at one at all, and jumped to conclusions.

More recently, I noticed a contrail coming over Monterey from the Southwest, more West than South actually. The plane passed over our house and headed slightly Northeast. OK, I asked, what's out that way? Hawaii, which surprised me, because I figured the angle would be farther south. And in the other direction? Denver and Chicago, take your pick.

So, we're in line between Honolulu and Denver and Chicago as well as a line between Tokyo and Los Angeles. That's why we see lots of contrails over Monterey. We're really at the crossroads of the world. Who knew?

KBOQ bites the dust....again!

You probably know by now that our local classical music station KBOQ ceased to exist as of Monday. K-BACH as the call letters were pronounced, suddenly started playing pop stuff from years past. Nothing wrong with that per se, but the same thing has come and gone from so many other stations over the years that I lost count. 

This isn't the first time KBOQ listeners were subjected to an unexpected sound coming from their clock-radios, which, by the way, is a despicable way to awaken loyal listeners on a Monday morning. Back around 1994, K-BACH listeners were suddenly knocked out of bed by the sound of heavy metal on K-ROCK. K-ROCK, we were informed, was the only way the station could continue to make money. Yet it lasted just a few months before changing formats again to a 1970s rock format. 

Within a short time local entrepreneurs revived K-BACH on another frequency with most of the original KBOQ DJs. Despite the former owner's insistence that classical was an unprofitable format, the revived K-BACH remained a steady presence on the dial while other stations changed formats as frequently as the tides. 

Then Mapleton Communications took over KBOQ. Mapleton operates a handful of local stations, including the venerable KPIG, my personal favorite. As media companies go, Mapleton is a pretty decent one. After all, a counter-culture shop like KPIG likely wouldn't last long under just any ownership. 

But when Mapleton got its hands on KBOQ things started going downhill. The station relied on a classical feed from Boston, which was basically a "classical top 40" outfit, playing mostly catchy, familiar selections and avoiding many of the richer offerings. That's when they started to lose me. 

What finally drove me away was the commercials Mapleton was running on KBOQ. They were pretty much the exact same blaring commercials that were on KPIG. Such commercials work fine between sets involving The Waybacks and Dixie Chicks, but were offensively jarring after a Vivaldi concerto. 

In the days when K-BACH was successful, the commercials were low-key and tailored to match the mood of the music. Mapleton didn't seem to grasp the importance of that. I mean, really, who is going to turn on relaxing music if they know noisy commercials are going to disrupt the whole atmosphere every fifteen minutes? Not me. 

In my humble opinion, K-BACH's demise wasn't due to a lack of interest in classical music, not here where we have two symphony orchestras and one of the most famous classical music festivals in the world. In this sophisticated community, Mapleton's line that there isn't a market for classical radio is preposterous. But I couldn't stand the obnoxious commercials anymore, and I'll bet many other people felt the same way. Like me, they probably just switched to public radio, CDs, and Music Choice on Cable TV. 

I'll bet that a local entrepeneur could lure us back with a properly run classical music station.

Who misinformed who?

A recent garbage bill included an enclosure called Monterey County Recycler - Fall 2011 Newsletter providing useful tips and helpful hints about Waste Management's curbside recycling programs. 

One section of the flyer stated that "On April 16, 2011, the Monterey Herald printed a story about recycling in Monterey County that included some incorrect and possibly unclear information about recycling for waste management customers." 

I remember that article. I specifically remember reading that Waste Management was providing curbside recycling of household batteries in all Monterey Peninsula cities served by WM - which means every city except Monterey. All one had to do was place the batteries in a plastic bag and tape it to the lid of the recycling bin where the truck drivers could easily grab it. Great, I thought, no more hauling them to a recycling station. Then I remembered seeing a bag of batteries on a neighbor's bin during my daily walk a few days earlier, and realized that others knew about this even before the Herald reported it. 

Now WM says the Herald got it wrong. The flyer states that "household battery pick-up is only offered in select areas of the unincorporated county as part of their new service package." Shoot. I still have to haul them to a collection center after all.

So the Herald must have screwed up again. Typical Herald stuff, right? WRONG! 

My attitude towards any news report is trust but verify. After reading the article I went to Waste Management's website and looked up their recycling policy for Seaside just to be sure. Lo and behold, it said exactly what the Herald said. I found the same thing for other Peninsula cities as well. The Herald story was confirmed, I believed. 

So, Waste Management, why are you faulting the Herald for repeating what was on your own website??? Take responsibility for misinforming not only the Herald, but also everyone else who visited your website, like me and my neighbor. 

Last night I noticed that the Waste Management website has been completely redesigned since I last looked in April, and it no longer offers curbside recycling of batteries in local cities. The good news, if Waste Management is to be believed this time, is that they now recycle all kinds of plastics, not just those with "chasing arrow" number codes. They'll even take plastic toys. They also accept plastic bags for recycling, along with all sorts of "film" type plastics (such as bubble wrap and plastic wrap), provided they're bundled inside a plastic bag and not just thrown in your bin loose. That makes it easy for the sorters to set them aside. As of now, the only plastic they don't allow is styrofoam.

Did local shops give up too easily?

Conventional wisdom says that when a big corporate superstore moves into town, locally owned shops can't survive the competition. Now that one of those superstores, Borders bookstore, is shutting down, I've been reflecting on this common assumption. Maybe the Big Boys aren't as invincible as many believe, and I can't help but wonder if local shops sometimes give up too easily.

Carmel's iconic Thunderbird, which was the Peninsula's largest and most popular bookstore before Borders, shut down a few years ago. If any local bookstore should have survived the competition from Borders it was the Thunderbird. It's primary customer base, Carmelites and Carmel Valleyites, are not prone to driving all the way to Seaside (the scary town, in their view) or Sand City when a more pleasant option is close at hand. But the Thunderbird's long-time owner was ready to retire. I believe it was her inability to find a suitable buyer rather than corporate competition that ultimately led to the store closing. It may be that potential buyers were afraid they couldn't out-compete Borders. What a pity, because if someone had faith, we'd still have a fair-sized bookshop on the Peninsula after Borders shuts down next week.

But at least the Thunderbird tried. Two locally owned shops actually gave up before the corporate competition even opened up. Does anyone remember H&H? It was a family owned hardware and home center that occupied the building in Seaside where Staples and Smart & Final are today. H&H was arguably the best hardware store the Peninsula ever had. They had everything you could possibly need, PLUS an extensive selection of arts and crafts supplies in the back. It was a wonderful store.

But the owners gave up shortly before Orchard Supply opened up in Sand City. News reports at the time indicated they didn't expect to survive the competition from Orchard, so they didn't even try.

Palace Stationery, an office supply shop on Alvarado Street in downtown Monterey, took the exact same attitude several years later when a McWhorters office supply opened in the former J.C. Penney building a few doors away. Palace owners assumed they couldn't survive so they shut down without even waiting to see how McWhorters would affect them. Funny thing, though, McWhorters had a very brief life in downtown Monterey before it disappeared into oblivion. I'm convinced that Palace acted too hastily because Palace Office Supply's Santa Cruz operation is still alive and thriving. It might still be in Monterey, too, had they not given up so easily.

So I've gotta admire one local business that didn't give up. When Home Depot opened in Seaside, everyone thought M&S Building Supply just down the street would be toast. Not so. Before Home Depot arrived M&S made itself more visible by painting a large red sign on their beige building indicating that they've been around dependably since 1962. More than six years later, M&S is still there and appears to be thriving.

When it comes to corporate behemoths vs. mom & pop shops, I'm thinking that the conventional wisdom may not be so wise after all. Those Goliaths aren't always as invincible as they seem.

Raccoons

The Monterey County Weekly's cover story this week was about the ever present raccoons that prowl The Peninsula. 

I remember my first encounter with a raccoon when I was three or four years old. It was at the Little Red School House, better known as Bay School, in Carmel. This was in the early 1960s. Someone brought a raccoon to show us kids. The one thing that fascinated me the most was their hands. yes, hands, not paws. They are miniature versions of human hands, complete with opposable thumbs. Interesting creatures indeed! 

Three or four years later I learned something else about raccoons. I woke up one morning to get ready for school and saw a huge smear of blood on our sliding glass door. And more blood all over the patio of our home in the forest overloooking Hatton Canyon. It was a disturbing sight to say the least. 

I asked my mother what happened. She said raccoons had attacked our dog Monty in the middle of the night. My dad had to use a shotgun to scare them off and he rushed Monty to the vet first thing in the morning. I slept right through it. 

Thus I learned that raccoons cute faces are deceptive, that they can be quite dangerous. I thought back to that cute creature with the tiny hands at school, and had some trouble reconciling that with the blood-smeared patio.

Ever since, I've had a healthy respect for raccoons. I've encountered a few over the years, and I always give them a wide berth. Sometimes they appear non-threatening and they ignore me. I met one such family about twenty years ago when I worked at the Golden Bough Cinema in Carmel. They would climb onto the roof and eat the bugs that were hiding in the shingles. Other times, they'll act more intimidating, like when they run down our driveway and one stops to stand up and say "Stay back, Mister!"

I always do.

Amazon dumps California

For the last three years I have been an affiliate advertiser for various companies, including Amazon.com. This relationship has allowed me to offer links to books, movies, and other products of local interest. In exchange I get a small commission for every sale the links generate.

On Wednesday Amazon affiliates in California were abruptly notified that due to a change in California sales tax law, all affiliate agreements involving California residents will be terminated effective immediately.

Under previous law, the state could only require on-line retailers who had a physical presence - such as a store or warehouse - in the state to collect sales taxes on sales to California residents. This set up a major imbalance between on-line retailers like Borders, Barnes & Noble, Staples, Best Buy and the like, who have actual stores in the state, and retailers that operate strictly on-line from outside the state, like Amazon. The new law simply states that California based websites that have commission agreements with sites like Amazon, gives Amazon a physical presence in the state. It levels the playing field.

But rather than cooperate with the state, and comply with the law, Amazon threw every single California affiliate overboard with less than 12 hours notice! Evidently, Amazon felt it was easier and cheaper to break business agreements with thousands of individuals than to add the necessary lines of code to their computer system to process California sales taxes. It also appears that Amazon expected their dumped affiliates to call their legislators en masse to get the law repealed.

But that didn't happen. Judging from affiliate reactions on an Amazon message board (one only accessible to affiliates - don't go looking for it) a good many California affiliates actually supported the state and were tremendously upset with Amazon. The phrase "threw us under the bus" was used by quite a few people. I was among them. I figure if other on-line retailers - many much smaller than Amazon - could collect California sales taxes, then so could Amazon. Indeed, Amazon must surely collect sales taxes in states where they do have a physical presence, like Washington, so it's not as if they can't.

This experience shows Amazon's true colors. It was their way of saying their business relationships don't mean squat. If they don't get their way they'll just take their ball and go home to mama, regardless of how important the game is to the other players.

For me, my association with Amazon wasn't particularly profitable, but it did provide a unique ability to provide Toy Box visitors with links to specific books, movies, and other products of local interest. It took a lot more effort than with my other advertising partners, but only generated about 10% of my total commissions from all sources. Still, Wednesday's news was a sudden blow, and it has taken me a couple hours of work to remove all of my Amazon links and replace them with my other advertisers.

Amazon has promised that if the situation in California changes back to their rules, I will be welcomed back into the fold. Fat chance, Amazon. Now that I've seen how you treat your business partners, there's no way in hell I will work with you again.

Paper Feud

It is a source of continual amusement to follow the ongoing feud between Paul Miller, publisher of the Carmel Pine Cone, and the editorial staff of the Monterey Herald.

Miller is well known for his right-wing conservative credentials which, he constantly reminds us, qualifies him to determine whose reporting is biased (The Herald, obviously) and whose is completely fair and objective (The Pine Cone, naturally).

In recent months, The Herald has expressed considerable concern over the management of the proposed Regional Water Project. The project would build a desalination plant in Marina and a pipeline to The Peninsula which would, once and for all, solve our decades-old water shortage. It sounds straightforward enough until you look at the bureaucratic side of the equation. 

The problems are manifold. First, the physical plant's components - intake pipes, desal plant, discharge pipes, and the Peninsula pipeline - would each be separately managed by four different agencies. The plant itself would be run by the Marina Coast Water District, a dysfunctional agency that makes the useless Monterey Peninsula Water Management District (a.k.a. the "water board") look like King Solomon by comparison. But the worst part is that while Peninsula water users would pay for the project, they would have no representation in how it is run. Instead, the Marina Coast directors, would be running the show at our expense. 

And it gets worse, as the Herald reported in detail recently. Someone with a clear conflict of interest played a major role in hiring a contractor for a major part of the work. It turns out that he was employed by both a public agency involved in the project and for said contractor at the same time!

The Herald has wisely asked that this entire mess get cleaned up before any project moves forward. Paul Miller - The Objective One - took this as undeniable proof that The Herald is biased against any water project, and said so in his editorials.

In response the Herald wrote in a June 12th editorial:

We try not to pay much attention to the quaint weekly newspaper in Carmel, but Friday's editorial begs for help. Discussing the Peninsula's need for a greatly expanded water supply, it says "the media — in particular Monterey County Weekly and The Monterey County Herald — do their best to undermine any progress toward a new water supply."

There was no elaboration, no specifics and apparently no understanding of the difference between wanting new water supplies and wanting good ones that result from logical, professional and honest processes.

This Friday, in typical Whine Cone editorial fashion, Miller took that to mean “The Pine Cone is utterly insignificant.” 

No, that's not what the Herald was saying. The Herald was speaking in jest, pushing his buttons(it worked!), and exaggerating to drive home a point. It's not the Pine Cone they consider insignificant. That little weekly does some terrific reporting. It's Miller's incessant editorial whining about The Herald that is insignificant. Really. But I'm biased. I want to know that Peninsula ratepayers will have a strong voice in how the Regional Water Project is managed, so I'm delighted that The Herald is driving that point home at every opportunity.

Miller's "unbiased" mind, on the other hand, completely ignores these serious concerns and in his latest editorial he blows them off as obstructionism:

By constantly exaggerating its costs and downplaying its benefits, The Monterey County Herald is a major obstacle toward getting a new water supply for the Monterey Peninsula, thereby damaging the people and the community the newspaper pretends to serve.

He goes on to say that the only evidence one needs to prove his point is that in a recent water board election the Herald endorsed a different candidate than he did. OMG, how horrible. 

Thus we have the latest installment of the ongoing feud between the no-growth-no-progress-know-nothing Monterey Herald and the all-wise-perfectly-innocent-unbiased Carmel Pine Cone. I still read and learn a great deal from both of them, but these days I read the Pine Cone's editorial page mostly just for laughs. 

Be sure to read my earlier installment on this feud in my August 16, 2008 entry entitled Carmel Whine Cone.