Loud Music is a $40 Fine

It’s getting about that time when employers waste their employees’ time by having some of them hit up their fellow employees for donations to this charity and that charity.

My employer has a big deal every fall where they anoint someone in each area to do this. They give you this pre-printed form with your personal info already on it (that info used to include your social security number) and, even if you don’t want to give anything, you still have to fill it out.

Then there are the countless “walks” and “food drives” and I don’t know what all.

It’s annoying at best and a waste of time. I’m looking at my health insurance costs going up (again) in January, and they want me to pledge a monthly amount to United Way? Forget it.

And then you’re kind of made to feel guilty because you haven’t been “charitable”. Give me a break.

I’ve finally gotten to where I tell them that I give to the charity of my choice, and what that charity is is none of their business. It irks me that countless man hours are spent collecting this money and pledges, when those same man hours could be used for normal business operations. I wonder if the productivity that would be gained by having those folks actually do their job instead of beg for money would help the company enough so that they didn’t have to raise my health insurance costs every year?

Look, if people want to give money to the United Way or whatever their employer is hitting them up for, then that’s their choice. If it makes them feel good, great. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t give to charity; they should. But on their own terms. You shouldn’t need a third or even fourth party collecting the money to hand out to the charity.

As everyone knows, today’s the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Perhaps fittingly, I won’t be at work today; I’ll be helping our democratic process by working at my local precinct for the Nashville run-off election.

I’ll be a “machine operator”, which means that I take the application to vote, activate the voting machine, and instruct the voter on how to use it. Then I get out of their way.

I was supposed to work in the general election in early August, but that was the day we flew out of town to go west. The last election I worked (last November) was a busy one. It was the first election with the new machines, so no one was familiar with how they worked. To add to the confusion, there were about 13 or 14 screens that the voters had to go through in order to cast their ballot for all the races.

Even though our precinct had 6 or 7 machines, the wait time to vote was an average of 45 minutes. By law, anyone in line at the time the polls closed is still allowed to vote. So we didn’t finish voting until 8:00 pm or so. I think I finally got out of there around 9:45 pm, after having gotten there at 6:00 am. By the time I left, my voice was gone and I was wore out, since I didn’t have much of a chance to sit during the day.

Still, I’m looking forward to working the election again. And on this day, of all days, it’ll be more meaningful.

Quite a few major changes have been going on in NASCAR lately. Here’s my take on a few things:

• Toyota’s first year in the Cup Series hasn’t been much to write home about. The teams they signed up weren’t very good with their prior manufacturers, so I’m not sure why anyone figured they’d do any good. But this week they announced that they’ve signed Joe Gibbs Racing to run the Toyota next year. Gibb’s seems to change manufactures every few years (if memory serves, he started out with Ford, then with to Pontiac, then to Chevy). This should give Toyota a good benchmark for how good their cars really are.
• Little Earnhardt will be driving the number 25 next year. Teresa didn’t want to give up the 8, and Yates didn’t want to give up the 38. I wonder why they didn’t go to Team Red Bull and try to get the 83?
• Another former F1 driver is looking to make the move to “real” racing. Jacques Villeneuve will be driving for Bill Davis Racing next year. I have to say that Juan Montoya is doing better than I expected, and that bodes will for Villeneuve. I guess it’s now official: you can pretty much write off the local stock car tracks as breeding grounds for new NASCAR Cup drivers. Teams seem to want to go with what to me seem illogical choices for drivers. I’d think the learning curve for a driver with several years of oval track stock car experience would be less than for a driver with several years of road course open wheel experience. But what do I know?
• There’s an Edsel in NASCAR’s future. Edsel Ford II is set to become the newest director on the board of International Speedway Corp. I wonder if it’s wise that NASCAR’s sister corporation have a Vice President of one of the auto manufactures on its board?
• ESPN’s coverage of the NASCAR Cup races this year has not been up to the standards they set when they were in it before. Jerry Punch is good, and Rusty Wallace is OK. But Andy Petree should go back to being a car owner; he was better at that than announcing. Please, please, please, someone go get Buddy Baker.
• Speaking of ESPN, they really need to take a page out of Fox’s book when it comes to high definition. They’ve got so much wasted space in the crawl area at the top it’s ridiculous. The crawl should go all the way across the top, not stop about a third of the way from the left side. Plus it’d be nice if they brought back the old scoring pylon that showed the top 10 or 15. They could put that on the left side of the HD screen and not really take up any more screen real estate.

NASCAR returns to Saturday night racing again this weekend with the Cup race at Richmond. It’s on ABC, so it should be interesting to see what the ratings are. TV ratings for races have declined over the years after the “Earnhardt death bump” had inflated them to higher than normal ratings. NASCAR was smart to take advantage of that from a financial standpoint, but I think the racing coverage has suffered as a result of the TV deal. That combined with just the excruciatingly boring racing has caused a drop off in folks watching. Not sure if I’ll be among those watching this weekend. I usually don’t remember Saturday night races are going on until it’s too late. Wonder how many other folks have that problem?

What is it about death anniversaries that makes people want to “celebrate” them? Every August at Graceland Elvis fans flock there on the day of his death. And with the 10th anniversary of Princess Dianna’s death a few days ago, the media went crazy.

Fox News showed some kind of memorial service for Dianna during their morning show. MSNBC actually reran the whole funeral.

And of course, every December 8th John Lennon fans gather in New York and burn candles for some reason.

I don’t get it.  I mean, I guess I do in a way, but why not do all this stuff on their birthday instead? Why highlight the saddest day of their heroes’ life, that is, the day of their death?