Mortaine’s Blog

John and I were watching the LA FOX affiliate this morning, and a mayoral campaign ad came on, extolling all the wonderful things The Candidate Who Shall Remain Nameless would do for LA, like get rid of traffic and schools and crime.

Among the things The Candidate’s ad implies he will do, is take the $100,000,000 surplus that LA brings in every year (how does LA get a surplus when the rest of California is hit hard by state cutbacks? answer: it probably doesn’t) and use 25% of that to hire 12,500 police officers.

This sounds really good. Unless you passed third grade math:

$100,000,000/4 = $25,000,000, budget for these 12,500 officers.
$25,000,000/12,500 = $2,000.

Is that right? Did I do my math correctly? 1/4 of $100 million can buy 12,500 officers if they only cost $2,000 each?

When we did this math in the morning, without a calculator, John didn’t move a decimal and found that they would be paying each cop $20,000, which in my mind is a good way to put a lot of cops on the take. With the calculator, the math is even worse.

So I went to his website, and did some research, just to make sure. I downloaded his ad, and what he actually says is that LA revenue grows $100 million a year, and he’ll use 25% of that to hire more police officers, and then “12,500 police officers” flashes on screen.

The other candidates are arguing to hire 600-1,000 new police officers, and come up with various ways to do this, including small tax increases. Clearly, nobody thinks anyone is going to hire 12,500 police officers. But what do I know? LA is a big city, and they have a lot of crime. Maybe they need 12,500 additional officers– how do I know how big the LAPD really is?

So I looked it up. It took some digging, but the LAPD’s website says they have 13,000 men and women in the organization. I’m sure not all of them are police officers– many are clerks, support staff, dispatchers, and work in non-enforcement areas of the department.

The Candidate, apparently, is going to use $25 million dollars to hire enough police officers to increase a 13,000 person department to 12,500.

Really, it sounds great if you didn’t pass third grade math.

I suspect this is why he also wants to do away with the LA Unified School District.

Personally, I think memes are only useful if they tell you something about the person taking the meme.

I’ll put the one’s I’ve read or partially-read in…. purple!

It’s surprising how many of these I read for school before college, and how many I read as part of my grad program.

#1 The Bible (partial; in progress)
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran (partial, and not in Arabic)
#5 Arabian Nights (any number of doubtless-abridged versions)
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (to be fair, I think I’ve read this one, but don’t remember doing so)
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce (in progress– nobody actually makes it through this book)
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (I seduced my husband with this book)
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (read it last year)
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’ Nest
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker (did a report on this for 6th grade Reading)
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (probably the first banned book I read, though Anne Frank would be a close call– don’t know which I read first)
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I periodically read Theresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog Making Light, and today’s entry was meta-talk about another blog which called attention to the “mothering drive-by.” Very enlightening, especially the comments some had connecting taking these drive-by advice moments with taking critiques on their manuscripts.

For some reason, I am not receiving emails from LiveJournal’s accounts department. I appear to have been blessed unknowingly by the Paid Account Fairy, and my userpics expired, but I never got a notice about either.

So…. can someone tell me? What account does LJ use right now to send out expiration and payment notices?

10 things I’ve done that you probably haven’t:

1. Had Ursula K. Le Guin despise my short erotic horror story… but accept me into her seminar anyway.
2. Drank enough 2% milk to make a non-lactose-intolerant or allergic person vomit (in my case, I believe it was 17 pints?) And, of course, vomited.
3. Sat on the floor of the ocean 109 feet below water for 2 minutes in 59-degree water (at least one of you has probably done this).
4. Completed a marathon (at least 2 of you have done this or will do it soon).
5. Had more than one book published in my own name (at least one of you has done this).
6. Made a cup sleeve for my coffee cup out of yarn I spun myself.
7. Found a mystery letterbox.
8. Watched Jenna Jameson pole dance.
9. Written an original composition in Old English.
10. Actually had a Girl Scouts experience bring out the very worst in myself.