Today's winner of the Goddamn Idiot Award: Gavin Newsom

The mayor of San Francisco has ordered that the city will no longer provide its employees with bottled water. We'll put aside the economics of the issue, namely that it's a form of compensation for employees like health insurance or paid parking in parking garages, and that when a public official estimates savings, never believe it'll be anywhere near that much.

Just what did Newsom say for me to give him this award? He wrote in his order, "All of this waste and pollution is generated by a product that by objective standards is often inferior to the quality of San Francisco's pristine tap water."

Pristine?!

Who is he kidding? San Francisco consistently ranks with a few other cities at the very bottom of nationwide water quality surveys, always garnering a "poor" rating. The SF Public Utilities Commission tries to pass off this bullshit of "the SFPUC's water met or exceeded federal and state standards for drinking water." But just after bragging about the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir that "the source is so clean and protected that the SFPUC is not required to filter water from [it]," that page glosses over the fact that "Fluoridation, chloramination and corrosion control treatment are provided for the combined Hetch Hetchy and SVWTP water at the Sunol Chloramination and Fluoridation Facilities." If the water from Hetch Hetchy is so good, why bother? Because filtration is only for removing the large stuff, and the water still needs to be disinfected and treated for corrosion. Water might be free of larger particles and in need of no filtration, but I'd hardly call it "pristine" if it needs further treatment.

When my family lived in San Francisco, the water had to be so heavily chlorinated to be "safe" that my father found it undrinkable. My sister and I were young and didn't yet have developed taste buds, so we had no problem. These days, San Francisco uses chloramine instead of chlorine, which doesn't have the taste but is just as bad. I'm hardly a health freak that I worry about pesticides and antibiotics lingering in my food, but goddamn. If people knew what chloramine is and what it can do, they'd never drink tap water again once they found out they ingest it every day.

Then there's the problem of pipes. San Francisco is a city with a lot of old buildings, and a lot of pipes are very corroded. But I guess the rust and minerals add some "texture" to the water, right?

John Stossel and other naysayers think people buy bottled water because it's healthier, but we do it largely because of taste. The house I rent is 20 years old, and between the pipes' corrosion and the local water's high mineral content, the tap water here definitely tastes strange. I'll take Dasani over it, even though Dasani is basically just processed tap water, because Dasani at least tastes normal. Also, I have no idea what water fountain Stossel's cited study chose, but $2 means little to me when it means avoiding the potential health hazard of a public water fountain. Beyond the concerns of pipes and filtration systems, I have no wish to come near the facial and mouth germs of the last person -- or animal, because some people lift up their dogs to drink from fountains.

So Newsom, why don't you give yourself an enema with your "pristine" water, and I'll stick to non-chloraminated bottled water without a putrid green tinge?

A public service announcement

My mother came to live with me several years ago, after my old man died. She's 62 years old with a touch of dementia and admittedly can get on my nerves, but in the end, she's mom, and I'm very protective.

She came home tonight and told me that a couple of women were in their cars and blocking the entire road, yakking away like it were their private henhouse. I think it's the same goddamn cunts who have done this a time or two before.

After my mother blipped her horn at them, they gave her the "go to hell" waveoff. So my mother stepped out and politely asked if she should just call the police. Then one of the bitches actually said that my mother doesn't even belong in this country, that she has small eyes.

Oh, is that so? Number one, English is one of four languages that my mother speaks. Now, wat can the two sluts speak, besides the dialect of white trash? Number two, my mother, being of principally Malaysian genetics, has eyes as big as any Caucasian's. Number three, my mother didn't get her U.S. citizenship as easily as being born here. She had to pass a test to become a citizen, back when tests weren't cakewalks like today's are, and I'd wager money that the two whores couldn't pass either test in their ignorant lifetimes. Finally, my mother had to swear an oath (which she did in English, unlike the bullshit of doing it in "your own language") renouncing her beloved homeland, because she wanted to change her allegiance to a country she grew to love more. How many Americans appreciate how good we have it here, that we're not moving elsewhere and renouncing this country?

My mother lied when I asked if those miserable twats were still there. She lied because she knows what I'm capable of doing, because I was ready to go out and raise some real hell. I'm protective of her, but she has her own way of protecting me.

Those goddamn cunts had better be "brave" only to an elderly woman all alone. If I ever am there when they speak to my mother that way (I doubt they would dare), they will wish they were in hell, for I won't give a shit about their gender and shall bring Gog and Magog upon them. And they won't like it.

Notice has been served. Nobody fucks with my mother.

Happiness is...

ICQing this to one of my best friends, who replied, "Jesse Jackson is irrelevant," and then ICQing each other at the very same time, "He will be assimilated."

Time to deport the whining bitch ASAP

I have no sympathy whatsoever for Zoila Meyer, who has been voting in this country as if she were a citizen and even got elected to the city council of Adelanto, California. I'm pretty open on immigration, but her residential status is completely beside the point. She was never a citizen and broke the law twice, first by voting, then by misreprenting herself as eligible for public office.

How can a person not know if he or she isn't a citizen? Did it ever occur to this brainless woman that you're not a citizen until you take the oath? On a side note, something I read years ago still disgusts me today. Some Mexican family had come to the U.S. years before and were desperate to get their retarded son naturalized. They pleaded with all involved federal offices and eventually got all the testing requirements waived, but officials said he still had to take the oath. The young man, however, had no cognitive abilities at all and couldn't even repeat the words. Why was the family so adamant? It wasn't out of the "noble" purpose of making him an American. I smelled the bullshit from the start, and at the end they admitted it was so he could collect Social Security.

"To be honest with you, I'm scared. How can they just pluck me out of my family, my kids?" Oh, finally Meyer is being "honest," eh? And she can be taken away from her family because she broke a very serious law, one that's rightfully a deportable offense.

"If they can do this to me, they can do it to anybody," she whined. Actually, it can't be done to me, or any of my closest friends, for we were born American citizens. It can't be done to my mother, for she's a properly naturalized citizen. (I say "can't be done" in the lawful sense, not in terms of pure ability to do something despite law and justice.) So what is Meyer's problem? It's simple: she committed fraud.

"I see people writing 'this is my country.' It really isn't. It belongs to the government and they decide who stays and who goes...you think you're free; you're really not." While she has a point about the openness of our immigration policies, it's a red herring: the issue is that citizens have certain rights beyond that of mere legal residents, namely voting and being eligible to run for public office, and she tried to pass herself off as a citizen.

Rather than Canada, I suggest deporting her back to Cuba, the land of free health care (warning: VERY DISTURBING IMAGES) -- preferably with Michael Moore so they can whine together. Just make sure she recompenses Adenalto's residents for whatever salary and benefits she received.

I'm beat, but I didn't quit

My thanks to JP Morgan Chase for hosting another annual Corporate Challenge. I was unaware when I wrote my previous entry that tonight's was the second of two races on consecutive days, with 15,000 entrants each night. The split was necessary to accomodate all those in NYC who wanted to participate: all the major financial, accounting and consulting firms, plus some smaller ones and even city departments. My firm's team participated tonight. Weather conditions were great, not too hot or humid, except when a torrential downpour started around 8.

The Corporate Challenge is roughly 5K. The NYC course this year was a certified 3.5-mile route around Central Park. It's my first 5K ever, and there's always next year. So far I've dropped 33 pounds total and want a bit more yet. Because you must make your way through a huge crowd, the first mile took me 20 minutes -- compare that to how I can walk the mile from Grand Central to work in 15 minutes flat, in leather-soled dress shoes. The second mile was much better, after I passed the pure walkers, but beyond that, things got tough as my left knee finally started to act up, as it typically does when I run. I injured it some months ago, with crowded conditions one morning on Metro-North that had me sitting twisted like a pretzel for 40 minutes, and another day when I got up just the wrong way and twisted my knee.

Before the race, I took a couple of Motrin preemptively, knowing my left knee would give me trouble. It helped that the ibuprofen was already in my blood when the pain began, but that didn't help completely. Halfway through the race, the sharp pains began running (nyuk nyuk) throughout my lower left leg. I even had a slight cramp for a couple of minutes, just after the 3-mile marker. But I refused to give up, no matter what time I posted. There's a point at which you grit your teeth and can ignore such pain, because you tell yourself you must endure and finish, or else. It didn't help later that I walked well over a mile back to the office so I could change into dry clothes, then almost raced down to Grand Central to catch the next train home.

I'm really beat and may need to spend a couple of days in bed, like last weekend when I was suffering from exhaustion.

Federal "fiscal responsibility" nonsense

"Bush Warns He'll Veto Runaway Spending" proclaims the headline.

Let's see. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush couldn't wait to hand out $62 billion of other people's money. It didn't matter if they were able to work or if they weren't really victims in the first place: all Bush, Congress and the bureaucrats cared about was buying support from half of the voters who don't pay taxes, hoping more of them will vote than from the other half who do pay taxes.

Bush had no resistance whatsoever to signing "The Energy Policy Act of 2005". It had a price tag of "only" several billion dollars, depending on the extent of the "tax breaks": such "incentives" for specific people mean the rest of us just pay more taxes to compensate, and who knows how much government would give energy companies in the end? The problem with government spending is that it's almost always just an estimate, whereas the rest of us budget our lives within the confines of definite incomes.

Bush likewise was too eager to sign the 2005 transportation bill, which delivered pork to just about every Congressional district, not just "for [Bush's] right wing buddies" as certain morons believe. Bush initially said he'd veto anything over $284 billion, so what did he do? He signed one that's $286 billion. What's $2 billion? A lot. What's $2 billion of other people's money? Not a lot.

Lest you think I'm cherry-picking only specific examples, I'll remind you that Bush's only two vetoes were a stem-cell bill, not because of the spending but because of his "moral" opposition, and a military spending bill pushed by Democrats, not because of the spending but because it included a timetable withdrawal from Iraq. As one of my friends said when I sent him the link to the article, "What's he been doing the last fucking 7 years?!"

My blogfather and friend Don Luskin has said for a long time that we knew all along Bush is a "compassionate conservative" who isn't for limited government. Be that as it may, it doesn't mean we have to believe Bush when he starts talking like a limited-government conservative. Today's Day By Day is pretty accurate, and it would be completely spot-on if "on immigration" were excised.

Garfield's best diet effort ever

On a personal note, as of this morning, 14.5 weeks after I began, I'm down 31.5 pounds and four inches off my waist. I probably won't lose much more from my waist, since I have wide hips and big legs. This June 21st, come cheer me at Central Park. JP Morgan Chase hosts its Corporate Challenge 5K every June in several cities around the world, and the New York race starts at 7 p.m. this coming Thursday. Among the 15,000 participants in this year's New York race will be several dozen from my firm, including me.

The downside of losing weight is that I'm spending a lot of money on having clothes tapered in, then new clothes when a jacket or pants can't be saved. In an office environment, you don't want to wear a suit that fits like a tent.