Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

It's a line from The Music Man . "We've gotta protect our children!" In the movie version Buddy Hackett shouts the line at a town hall meeting, after Professor Harold Hill gets the townsfolk all riled up about the pool table that came into town. What's wrong with a pool table? Nothing. But the little town in Iowa had never seen one before, so its residents were easily duped into believing it was evil because it was different. Professor Harold Hill exploited their ignorance to sell his band instruments to protect the kids. A variation of this tactic is now being used to support Proposition 8. Oh-My-God if men can marry men and women can marry women they'll be telling our kids about it in school! And that would be HARMFUL!!!! Well, they don't actually say it'll be harmful. There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that it would be. So they can only imply it by screaming some variation of the alarm "We've gotta protect our children!...

The arguments against Proposition 2 don't pass my ridiculous test. If something sounds ridiculous it probably isn't true. Do Proposition 2 opponents really expect me to believe that allowing chickens to turn around and stretch their wings will force grocers to import toxic eggs from Mexico? Clearly, they're trying to scare us away from doing the right thing because it will cost them some money to comply. But hey, if Prop. 2 passes they'll have a generous six years to make the necessary arrangements before it takes effect. I think they can manage that. I certainly don't expect that anyone will risk their business by importing bad eggs.

For those of you who just crawled out from under a log, Measure Z is the proposed half-cent sales tax increase to pay for roads, plus a few bus routes, in Monterey County. While there may be some good reasons to support it, I'm not jumping on the pro-Z bandwagon for three reasons. First, Measure Z is not the original version of the proposal as envisioned by the Transportation Agency for Monterey County. The original plan included a small percentage for much needed intercity passenger rail projects which have already been delayed several years for lack of funds. Unfortunately, county agriculture and tourism interests, the two largest industries in the county, said they wouldn't support the tax increase if rail was included. They didn't feel rail would do anything for them. TAMC caved in and now the measure is primarily directed towards roads. Big business has no business dictating transportation policy for the rest of us. Second, roads have traditionally been funded with ...

After four years of delays, we finally have a chance to vote for California's high speed rail program. Please don't be put off by naysayers who say we can't afford it. We can't afford not to connect California's largest cities with the latest, cleanest, most energy efficient, and most comfortable form of transportation known to man. It should be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, people with no brains say we shouldn't be spending money on trains when we have roads to fix and more to build. But that's the whole point. High speed rail is expensive, but building more roads or airports to carry the same growing number of travelers between California's northern and southern cities would cost two to three times as much! Critics call it a boondoggle. They said the same thing about BART 35 years ago, but nobody says that about BART today, because it has proven to be an indispensable part of the San Francisco bay area transportation system. Modernizing California'...

I have known Felix Bachofner for more years than I can remember, and I am happy to report that my good friend is running for a seat on the Seaside City Council this November 4th. Felix will bring a breath of fresh air to Seaside politics. For too long we have suffered through mediocre city councils with little or no vision for our city's future. Several generations of mayors and councils have talked about redevelopment, but we still have little to show for it. Opportunities have been squandered by setting our sights too low. Take the new development at Fremont and Broadway. That property was ideal for a major anchor tenant, such as a department store, to form the foundation of a new downtown which the city has long sought to develop on Broadway. That property needed something that would draw customers from all over the peninsula. Instead, our city council sold it below market value to a developer who gave us yet another Starbucks, a Kinkos, and a failed bank. Other spaces in the ...

I'm glad I moved my website and Mental Notes when I did. For eleven years the Monterey Peninsula Toy Box was hosted at no cost to me on AOL's Hometown service. I was notified today that AOL Hometown will be shutting down on October 31st, along with AOL Journals, which hosted these Mental Notes since 2004. I had a lot of time on my hands this summer when I decided to move the Toy Box to a real hosting service. It took several weeks and many long hours of work to move everything, but it was worth it. If I had to do it now, during the busiest time of the year at work, I might not have been able to do it and the whole thing might have shut down for many weeks if not permanently. My AOL Mental Notes archives may be saved. AOL states they will provide a way to transfer one's entries to another blogging service yet to be announced. Meanwhile, I went back and saved some of the more important entries just in case they get lost.