|
Off Off Topic
Joshua Tanzer is the founder and editor of Offoffoff.com. He has been a journalist for a really long time and a blogger for a really short time. He likes romantic dinners by candlelight and long walks on the beach. His turnoffs are regressive tax policy and mean people. Being of mixed French, German and Russian ancestry makes him feel like an honorary member of the Axis of Evil.
NOTE: Offoffoff's blog section is in development and will be open to readers soon. If you're interested in starting your own blog, please write to jmt@offoffoff.com.
|
Week of January 30, 2005:
PICTURES | Picture a week #4: Santa Monica
TRAVEL | Cha Cha Chicken
TRAVEL | Santa Monica airport
TRAVEL | Zero Charlie Delta
PICTURES | Picture a week #3: San Francisco
TRAVEL | San Francisco
WORK | The streak ends!
POLITICS | Sorry, we just spent your Social Security in Fallujah
POLITICS | Polish joke
PREVIOUS: January 9, 2005 | NEXT: February 20, 2005
PICTURES: PICTURE A WEEK
Picture a week #4: Santa Monica
 |
 |
| (Click image for larger version.) |
My last day in L.A., we headed out to Santa Monica to pick up Rachel from her job and watch the sun set over the beach — which proved impossible. Two blocks away the sky was clear and blue, but the beach was slathered in fog so thick you could hardly see the surfer boy in front of your face.
The other pictures are from the hidden courtyard of my sister's building in Hollywood.
February 2, 2005 | 1:47 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050130.php#e100
TRAVEL: SISTERS IN CALIFORNIA
Cha Cha Chicken
Best L.A. discovery: Cha Cha Chicken in Santa Monica. We found it completely by accident, while trying to find a friend of my sister's. Once we found him, right in front of this place, we went in for a quick dinner. It was great. Sort of Jamexican cuisine, if you will. The jerk-chicken enchiladas were great, and my sisters gave high marks to the ropa vieja and ropa nueva as well.
With an hour to kill after Cha Cha Chicken and before leaving for the airport, we hung out at this place they have in the L.A. area called Starbucks and took a few more pictures. (The beautiful ones are Rachel and Jessica; the creepy looking one is me.)
Related links:
Now they have an official web site
February 2, 2005 | 1:39 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050130.php#e99
TRAVEL: SANTA MONICA
Santa Monica airport
Cute little kid watching the planes land with his mom at the Santa Monica airport observation deck. We were there listening to the tower transmissions, picking Rachel's voice out of the chatter. Alex figured, what do you do with a kid at the airport but play airplane.
February 1, 2005 | 11:41 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050130.php#e98
TRAVEL: MY SISTER THE PILOT
Zero Charlie Delta
|
 |
| Rachel in the pilot seat. |
My sister Rachel quit her Internet job two or three years ago, got a little severance package, and decided to fly planes. Just like that. She was such a good student at her flight school that they made her a flight instructor. (That's Justice Aviation in Santa Monica, for anyone looking for lessons.)
Last year she got another job, flying around the western states and demonstrating a new small plane, the Cirrus, for flight instructors and potential customers. (Two jobs plus school don't leave her a lot of time for a social life, but she said her job is like having a blind date every day.) As I understand it, this is like the Porsche of single-engine planes — it has all these graphic readouts, GPS, a special side yoke, and an input for your iPod. Plus, it's the only plane with a parachute. If you know you're going down, you pull the handle in the ceiling, a little compartment on the roof blows open, and you float gently to the ground. I'm told there have been four parachute landings, and the occupants survived all of them intact. It's just a great plane. I almost want to fly one myself.
The coolest thing about the plane, of course, was that my own little sister was flying it, explaining all the stuff on the readouts, and chatting with the control towers on the ground. If by chatting, you mean something along the lines of: "Climbing through 3100 to 3500, Zero Charlie Delta." And knowing what stuff like that meant. How cool is that?
I was actually a little antsy for the first half of the trip, not so much because of the little-sister-in-flying-contraption situation — more because my only frame of reference was driving a car and certain things just weren't right. First of all, in a car, you want to feel your wheels on the ground. Second, you don't put your car on autopilot and take your hands off the wheel. So it took me an hour to get over the feeling that we were about to crash into another high-flying car — but after that, I totally loved it.
We flew right down the coast and watched the sun go down over the Pacific. (Rachel says she knows a pilot who likes to climb in altitude so he can watch the same sunset several times in a row.)
The nighttime descent into Santa Monica was beautiful. My sister was pointing out the flashing beacons that indicate the airport, and I spotted a long strip of white and red light that I figured must be the runway. "That's the Santa Monica Freeway," she informed me. Uh, yeah, that's what I meant.
Postscript: Jessica had a little wardrobe malfunction while trying to put on her seat harness, which I did get a picture of, but I think that one is for in-family viewing only. But I would say, in the event of an emergency water landing, Jessica could probably be used as a flotation device.
February 1, 2005 | 8:51 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050130.php#e97
PICTURES: PICTURE A WEEK
(Click image for larger view.)
Picture a week #3: San Francisco
Another picture from Baker Beach in San Francisco — this would be the picture of the week from two weeks ago.
(Unfortunately I missed the shot of the Mexican laborer guy doing cartwheels in the wet sand — that would have been even better.)
February 1, 2005 | 7:34 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050130.php#e96
TRAVEL: SAN FRANCISCO
San Francisco
|
 |
| Jessica and Alex, heavily sharpened. Alex says it's not the camera — he's always this blurry. |
It took me many years to put together the following facts:
1. New York is incredibly cold all winter.
2. California is sinfully warm all winter.
3. I live in New York, while my sisters live in California.
4. They have planes these days that fly from New York to California.
But I finally grasped the obvious and decided to spend a week visiting my sisters every winter. Duh! And unlike last year, this year I didn't pick Biblical Flood Week to go there. I just missed the storms and the mudslides, and I also managed to miss the 15-degree week everybody else suffered through in New York.
I find that if I go visit Jessica in San Francisco first, I'm not ruined yet by the summer-like temperatures of L.A. I caught Jessica in transition — she's recovering slowly from back surgery and was also in the middle of moving from her longtime home in the Haight Ashbury area.
 | |
| Red-eyed people at Alex's birthday party — Katie, Jessica, Alex and Diana. | |
One of her most typical characteristics is that she hates to put anybody else to any trouble, so when there were some boxes and furniture to move, she told me I should go relax instead of helping out. "Did back-injury girl just tell me to rest so she can carry the heavy boxes?" I asked her boyfriend, Alex. That seemed to settle it — Alex and I made a few trips over to the new place in the Twin Peaks area, no problem. It's a plain but quite decent apartment with an AMAZING view of the whole city. It has a very grandma bathroom. (If you saw it, you'd know immediately what that means. Maybe I can get a picture sent over.)
Anyway, here are some pictures from Baker Beach in San Francisco. (The second dog is Jessica's saluki, Daphne.) More on the L.A. leg of the trip shortly.
February 1, 2005 | 7:06 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050130.php#e95
WORK: MET THE NEW BOSS!
The streak ends!
Just when the one-year mark was coming into view, the streak came to an end. I finally met the new boss.
MEET THE NEW BOSS
Wherein we see how long it takes for the new boss to figure out that I exist
- More in this series -
|
| |
|
She happened to be in the lunchroom when I walked in for a bottle of water, and she spoke up and asked me how I was liking things. I gave her an answer, and then pointed out that we had never actually met. "Yes we did," she said. "They took me around to meet everybody when I started."
That didn't happen, but it's fine. We can leave the failure to meet the new boss in the laps of "they," whoever "they" are, for not introducing us sooner.
Anyway, I introduced myself, we had a funny little wet-hands non-handshake, and all was well. So the total number of days in which I did not meet the new boss ends at: 265. Maybe we'll stay in closer touch in the future.
February 1, 2005 | 6:37 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050130.php#e94
POLITICS: SOCIAL SECURITY
Sorry, we just spent your Social Security in Fallujah
I think I know what makes the current Social Security debate so confusing — it's that neither side is giving a straight answer. Republicans are Chicken Littles, clucking about a crisis that requires us to start private investment accounts to "save" the system, while Democrats are Pollyannas, saying there's no crisis. Stop your worrying!
I'm sure better minds than mine can give a more authoritative answer about the "crisis," and I hope to do an interview with at least one of them in this space soon. But for now, here's what I'm thinking.
What Republicans say:
The Bush administration claims that Social Security will go broke in the coming years, and that's why money should be taken out of the system and put into private savings accounts, sort of like an IRA. I think this is the right problem and the wrong solution. The system will run into a deficit as the baby boomers drop out of the work force — that's true. But taking money out of the system will only make the deficit worse. That's like reducing your student loans by not sending the bank a check anymore. It's totally backwards.
I think Republicans are pursuing a privatization plan not because of a crisis but because it fits their ideology. Social Security is offensive to libertarian-minded conservatives because it's government-run; it's burdensome to business conservatives because half the money to fund it comes out of employers' pockets. This is a chance to move us down the road of privatization, and the reason is not that Social Security isn't working; it's that privatization is philosophically preferable. So they tell us we're in a crisis that only they can fix.
What Democrats say:
Democrats are howling that there is no crisis and Republicans are just trying to manufacture panic in order to undermine the system. Like the Republicans, they're half right and half wrong. There really is a crisis on the horizon.
Democrats point to the Social Security trust fund, which is full of not cash but government bonds, and say: Look, there's all kinds of money in there! U.S. bonds are the safest investment in the world! Why worry?
Well, government bonds are nothing but a promise that future generations will pay for what we spend today. What's going to happen 15 or 20 years from now is that Social Security will no longer take in enough in FICA taxes to pay out benefits. Some administrator in the Social Security Administration is going to take a big handful of U.S. bonds over to the treasury and demand cash to pay people with. And sure, you can tell yourself Social Security doesn't have a problem — but that's only because it becomes Treasury's problem instead. Which is to say, your problem.
What's the real problem:
When the giant black hole opens up, how is the government going to fill it? There are three options:
1. Raise taxes
- The Reagan administration already did this to get us this far. Of course, nobody wants to talk about this option.
2. Cut benefits
- Which looks like what the Bush administration is preparing us to do by diverting money into private accounts.
3. Borrow money
- This is always a tempting way of evading the no-win choice between options #1 and #2. The problem is this:
What happens when you go to the bank for a loan? They check your credit report, look at your overall debt load, and determine whether you can afford to borrow more money. Applicant America will presumably have an impeccable record of payments — thus, we can talk about our bonds being the "safest investment in the world." But wait, what about our existing debt?
Well, things change when you have a debt of $7.6 trillion and you're adding half a trillion a year. There's some point when the bank tells you you should reevaluate your lifestyle before you think about taking out a loan. At a minimum, they'll tack points onto your interest rate to teach you a lesson.
So the very first thing we can do to "save" Social Security is to give ourselves wiggle room in the future by balancing the budget now. But instead, the Bush administration — to which we gave a balanced budget and the stewardship of our national Visa card — has opened up a huge new budget hole through a combination of regressive tax cuts and new spending. That $200 billion we've spent on bombing Iraq — that's coming out of your retirement.
You can bet the president will promote his Social Security "personalization" program in his State of the Union Address tomorrow — and in the next breath, offer some vague promise to sorta maybe cut the deficit in half by 2010. The two issues are not as disconnected as his speech will make them seem, and if he were serious about preserving Social Security, he'd be doing something serious about the busted budget today.
February 1, 2005 | 6:05 p.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050130.php#e93
POLITICS: CHENEY IN POLAND
Polish joke
From the International Herald Tribune article on Dick Cheney's trip to Poland to beg for troops in Iraq:
Cheney needs to nurture this American ally, says Radek Sikorski, a former deputy minister of defense in Poland and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
"There is a joke going around the Polish Parliament: We buy F-16s and in return, we send troops to Iraq," Sikorski said. "You don't want to create the impression that being friends with the United States is a costly business."
|
|
Related links:
Original article
January 31, 2005 | 11:47 a.m. | New York, New York
Permanent link: http://www.offoffoff.com/opinion/offofftopic/20050130.php#e92
PREVIOUS: January 9, 2005 | NEXT: February 20, 2005
|
