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Saturday, September 27, 2003
A show of hands, please 
| | Sheila, Dan and others are all over the black box voting situation. My vote: open it all. Voting tech needs to be transparent, and countable. If that means paper, or cardboard, or snaf, or whatever, we just have to deal with it. |
One small step for sanity
| | Amina Lawal won't be stoned to death for committing adultury, although there are still plenty of zero-minded zealots ready to carry out the sentence anyway, apparently. Hope she stays clear of them. |
| | Thanks to Sheila for the link |
Piracy, cont'd
Just another Saturday in Paradise
| | Fun day today. We went out to watch oil and gas seep into the ocean under the fog by an oil platform, then headed twelve miles over the mountain for a lunch and some live tunes in in the Sun in a place called Paradise. Didn't suck. |
| | Down at the Harbor in Santa Barbara we joined fellow members of the Channel City Club in a guided tour by boat of the oil and gas seeps that pour thousands of gallons of oil and cubic acres of gas up through the ocean off the coast of Isla Vista, where the University of California at Santa Barbara Airport locates itself. |
| | We took the Condor Express, a dual-hull hydrofoil mother that seriously hauls ass. At thirty knots it's drawing about 18 inches of water. |
| | Our guides were from Venoco, which owns oil platforms off the coast, and which go out of their way to paint the situation in the most natural and virtuous of terms. (There was almost no mention of the Great Oil Spill of 1969, for example.) Which I suppose is fine and understandable. Heck, I'm in favor of oil exploitation. I say get all of it out of the ground and burn it up so we'll finally find something renewable to replace it. Should take a few more decades, but we'll get there. Meanwhile the platforms even have a few good effects.) |
| | As it turned out, the seeps produced some beautiful effects in the water, even if most of us would rather not swim in it. Or smell it. And the platform was pretty darn interesting, too. It was fun to see one up those things up close. |
| | Afterwards we went home, changed into clothes suited for the warm microclimate on the other side of the hill, and headed to Paradise Store, on Paradise Road, off Highway 154. |
| | There we had some giant sandwiches and listened to a great local band called The Fog. They played oldies, surf music, and other bluesy and swingy stuff. They're for hire, of course, and highly recommended. |
| | If you're headed up or down this way, the other requisite stop is Cold Spring Tavern, on the uphill end of Stagecoach road from Paradise Store. They have live music there too, plus a fine rustic restuaruant, all in a perfectly run-down setting that's sure to die in a fire or a landslide one of these decades. |
| | By the way, Paradise Store has free wi-fi. I would have posted this from there, but the system wasn't hooked up to the Net today, for some reason. |
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