Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

I got the notice in the mail about a month ago. I was instructed to report for jury duty at 8:15am on September 2, 2008. Being a night owl, and a late sleeper, I was relieved to learn, when I made the required phone call the weekend before, that I didn't actually need to report until 12:30pm. I arrived in the cattle yard of the Monterey courthouse on time, but had the devil of a time trying to find a place to park. Me and a good 80-100 other potential jurors. I checked in with the clerk then waited with the crowd for another hour with nothing to do except use the rest room. The one I was directed to required an airport-style security check, which seemed to be more trouble than it was worth, so I decided to grin and bear it. Shortly thereafter I discovered a more easily acessible facility just steps away at the county health office. At 1:30 names were called and the herd was run through the metal detector, then prodded upstairs into a courtroom so crowded that many potential jurors ...

I have corrected a twelve year old sin of omission. The Monterey Peninsula Toy Box Visitors Guide finally has a page describing the many opportunities to enjoy sports & recreation in our beautiful area. Why has it taken so long to include such basic information in my website? Well, sports and recreation just aren't high priorities with me. I was the nerdy kid who was always picked last for the elementary school softball games. As for other sports, I had no interest whatsoever most of my life. But, hey, this website isn't just about me . Its about the community, and I realized , having lived three fourths of my life here, that I actually have picked up a decent amount of knowledge on the subject, even though I've participated in just a few these activities only a handful of times. So the page was launched earlier this week. I also performed a minor remodel of the visitors guide pages by adding a marbleized backdrop outside the text margins, similar to the dark blue b...

Mrs. Toy and I have noticed that the Carmel Pine Cone's editorials have grown more whiney over the last few years. Their August 15th editorial entitled The Front Page confirms that and then some. Their subject of the week was media bias, which, apparently, they felt was important enough to justify a half page editorial. They began with a primer defining what media bias is and why it is inescapable. As proof that media bias is rampant and unavoidable, they offered as an example the fact that very little press attention was ever given to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Reporters who report from the "American perspective" can't help but assume that anything so silly as the American government master minding the 9/11 attacks is just that, silly. So I suppose that, technically speaking, American reporters are biased against anything that is ridiculous on its face. But the Pine Cone extrapolated that sort of bias into proof that all reporting is biased in some way, that such bi...

I've never been a fan of Paris Hilton. Until I saw this. McCain ran an ad comparing Obama to certain mindless celebrities. Here is how one of those celebrities responded. See more funny videos at Funny or Die I'm actually inclined to agree with her. At best more drilling will only postpone the inevitable, but it could buy us some breathing room, a little more time for technological innovation before the oil runs out. Ultimately, though, dwindling supplies and increasing energy demand will force us to get off our oil habit. We had our first warning 35 years ago, but after Reagan took office we pretty much ignored it. Every day we delay is a day wasted.

Thoughtful articles about my favorite political subject, passenger trains, are hard to come by. This one, Train in Vain is a notable exception. The author, Ben Jervey, makes a cross country trip on Amtrak and reports his findings. Jervey seems genuinely concerned that this country hasn't made a commitment to passenger rail, and he shows why Amtrak isn't all it could be. He gently, but realistically distributes responsibility for the problem to all parties involved, including Amtrak itself. In all, I am in agreement with him that Amtrak should be more than it is, and that economic conditions will likely force the matter sooner or later. Which brings me to something I heard last night. Leon Panetta gave a talk to a group at my workplace. He expressed frustration with American political tendencies to govern by crisis. Our leaders habitually wait until a problem becomes so incredibly bad that it can't be ignored before working on solutions. Transportation in general, and Amtra...

The upgrades to the Monterey Peninsula Toy Box continued this week with the addition of our new store! For lack of a better name, it is called the Monterey Peninsula Toy Box Store . It is stocked with guidebooks, maps, history books, art and photography books, literature and cartoons by local writers, locally made music, and our favorite subject, movies made on the Monterey Peninsula. Our little shop is "powered" by Amazon.com, that megasized on-line retailer where you can get just about anything. Mind you, all I had to do was electronically gather a listing of Amazon's offerings of local interest and put them into an attractive home-grown package. Amazon does the rest. For this I'll make a little something off of each sale to help pay the Toy Box's bills. I hope you'll drop in and see if anything tickles your interest. Regular Toy Box visitors may have noticed that I've also started adding those ubiquitous Google ads, both in this journal and in various...

The Business section of Saturday's Herald showed a crowd of people gathered outside the AT&T store in Del Monte Center. The headline read " SOLD OUT, THEN NOTHING." What was all the fuss about? A new phone. Not just any phone. Only the sleek lines of the latest Apple iPHONE can draw such crowds. This thing does everything. No, wait. The first iPHONE did everything. This one can do more than everything. It can do anything ! Even things that nobody has thought of yet! Hence the crowd gathering outside the store to be the first to do anything with a phone. Unfortunately, when people tried to actually use them, the sheer numbers of new subscribers overwhelmed the system and nobody could get them working. Why the rush to get something that will still be there tomorrow? Why not wait until the bugs are worked out? Because Apple has everyone hypnotized into believing their sleek products are the best because they look the best. Hence they must be obtained immediately , before...