Category Vintage Tino

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Markets and Planning

Mar 29, ’01 3:00 PM

The Duany/Plater-Zyberk philosophy is that more regulation is necessary in order to reduce sprawl and to produce a decent habitat for people, instead of the car-tailored suburbs we’ve been building in this country for the last 50 years.

I say that this is hogwash. Less regulation of building — certainly less than we have now — will achieve the intended effect. Stiff zoning laws, even when they’re well-intended, result in unintended consequences.

This, above, is Celebration, FL, darling of the New Urbanism set, as seen from a spy satellite. The town was developed by Disney, with the same care given to all of its features as is given to the elements of a Disney theme park — which is to say a lot. People living in Celebration can walk to shopping, restaurants, movies, and all the essential services of the town.

Below is a picture of a London suburb, not far from Wembley Stadium. Nobody in particular planned it, except to make the houses attractive enough that they could be leased. It’s not as beautiful as Celebration — it’s not in Florida, either — but it’s just as functional, possibly more so. Residents of Celebration still have to own cars, unless they can pay for their $400,000 houses with jobs at the (walkable) cinema. There aren’t even any sidewalks leading out of Celebration. But people living in the neighborhood below can (and do) walk to the train station (top right) and go into London.

Here’s a few blocks of Georgetown, in Washington, DC (left), and Beverly Hills, California (right):

Here’s a section of Islington (London) and one of Kenilworth, IL, a suburb of Chicago:

All of these areas, with various levels of planning, built by different people in completely different ways, over a span of hundreds of years, show a certain similarity. This is because they were all built to serve the same purpose: human habitat.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a picture of Jerusalem, a city far, far older than any of those above:

Notice that Jerusalem shows the same general pattern, the same density, the same freedom of flow and the same mixture of uses that you see in London, Georgetown, Beverly Hills, and Celebration. (It’s a bit hard in pictures this small to see the mixture of uses, but you can infer that the smaller buildings are houses, and the larger ones commercial establishments.

These cities were shaped by market forces. People wanted and needed certain things from their cities, and builders and developers answered with what was required.

Now, here’s a picture of Franconia, VA, a suburb of Washington, DC:

(I have been asked about the scale of this photo. The Franconia photo is at slightly larger scale than the London and Jerusalem ones in order to show detail, but not much.)

Notice that this is a complete departure from all the other pictures. There is not a commercial establishment in sight, and the vast majority of houses are on cul-de-sacs, with only one entry and exit. Only three houses front on the road running horizontally across the picture, and I would be willing to bet they pre-date all the other houses. This is a neighborhood built all at once by a developer; the sole goal was to comply with the zoning laws and to sell the houses for the maximum profit possible.

The picture below is of part of Reston, VA, another suburb of Washington. Reston was designed as a single entity, to correct the flaws of places like Franconia.

In Reston, the houses — on the right — are on little cul-de-sacs, but they are in close proximity to shopping, offices, banks, etc. However, the commercial "pod" and the residential "pod" here are separated by a six-lane road (Reston Parkway), to which none of the residential streets connect. A person living in a house near the tennis courts and wanting to visit the huge store (a Harris Teeter supermarket) at upper left needs to get into his car and drive two miles to travel a net 500 feet. If he decides to walk, he’ll find that there are fences and trees and steep embankments to discourage him from even trying to cross Reston Parkway, and that he’s risking his life in doing so. Even from outer space you can see that there are no crosswalks.

Once he survived that, he’d have to cross a giant parking lot before he got to the store. The next time, our pedestrian would take the hint, and drive to the store.

We’ve got to have roads, though, you say. I agree, and I admit that it might be possible to construct a defense (though probably not a good defense) for the Reston design pictured above. But consider this one. I have numbered several points for easy reference:

This is a view, again from outer space, of a ten-story office building (#1) and its grounds. This building was designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, one of the world’s foremost architecture firms. (They designed the Sears Tower, among other things.) The building is located in Reston, a town with strict zoning laws, a strong sense of the merits of planned development, and a heritage (if not a current reality) of dense, walkable neighborhoods.

The site has two vehicular entrances, #2 and #3. #3 is equipped with a gate and is only accessible to certain people (how they’re chosen, I don’t know), in order to keep down traffic on the side road.

#5 and #6 are heavily-used, paved jogging/bike paths. It’s hard to see it in this photo, but the path marked #6 (it runs diagonally across the picture, from the bottom right corner, under the bridge, and off the top of the picture) is separated from the building’s grounds by plants by a 45-degree embankment. At no point does the system of paths on the grounds connect with the other paths.

Path #5 is on the same level as the grounds, but it’s been carefully sealed off from the building by means of a 6-foot-high fence that runs from #3 to #4. From #4 out to the main entrance, a berm and trees keep people out.

All of this means that a person who works in the building and who lives in one of the houses at the bottom of the picture is better off driving to work than attempting to walk. Even though no roads are in the way in the rear of the building, it’s just as effectively sealed off from its surroundings as if it were surrounded by a moat.

(It should be noted that none of this is for security purposes; it’s very simple to get onto to grounds — in fact, I believe that they are open to the public, as one of the conditions of the zoning variance that allowed the building — just not from anywhere you’d actually want to get onto the grounds.)

And it was built according to all sorts of regulations designed to eliminate offensive buildings from our midst. The rear entrance is gated as part of a government attempt to shape the flow of traffic. Most of the ground is left in a semi-natural state as part of legal requirements to mitigate rainwater runoff problems, and to provide a habitat for migratory waterfowl. The paths on the grounds are there because this building is the headquarters of a quasi-governmental financial institutioni (Sallie Mae, if you’re wondering), which has to provide amenities for its workers. (I have never seen anyone using those paths.)

And yet the building is a monstrosity, a gaping hole in the middle of town, hostile to the needs of its neighbors and inhabitants alike. An additional ten feet of paving at #4 would have resulted in another point of access for the building and for the neighborhood at the bottom — thus further reducing traffic at #3 — but that wasn’t done. Eliminating the fence at the rear of the property would have actually made all that open space valuable for the people who live next to it, but that wasn’t done either. The building stands completely apart from its environment, and contributes nothing but property taxes to the community.

The law requires that the builders provide a habitat for waterfowl, but not for people.

The supreme irony is that this kind of design costs more than the rational approach. Every piece of idiocy in this building — and in the other Reston photo, and in the Franconia photo — is a result of wrongheaded zoning.

The builders couldn’t connect #4 to the road, because the county fears that that would increase traffic. The gate at #3 does nothing, because everyone who would otherwise go out the gate instead goes out at #2, makes two right turns, and winds up on the side road anyway. In between, they face four (!) traffic signals, and travel further on the side road than they would if they could use the Forbidden Driveway.

I can’t come up with any reason why the zoning people would require that fence at the back of the property, or the hostile landscaping everywhere else, but I am sure that they did. The builder would not have spent money on them otherwise.

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"New" Urbanism

Mar 29, ’01 2:00 PM

I quote here from an article on cnn.com recently:

For decades, suburban lifestyle was synonymous with the American Dream. Ward and June Cleaver and Ozzy and Harriet Nelson were TV icons for the millions of families who moved to the suburbs to own their own houses, with lawns and driveways and supermarkets, but precious few sidewalks.

The point being that they are equating our suburban lifestyle of today with that or Ward, June & Co. — which is total and utter crap.

(For those of you not familiar with 1950s U.S. television, Leave it to Beaver was a terrible TV show about an perfect family living in the suburbs. June, the lady of the house, always wore pearls while doing the dishes. Ward worked hard, you knew, but he always make sure that Family and God came first. And Wally and The Beav (né Theodore, the youngest child) were always getting into minor pickles but quickly getting out of them, and learning Valuable Lessons in the process. The show has come to symbolize the idyll that supposedly was the U.S. at the height of the Cold War. It has also been pointed out that the show set an impossible standard for people to live up to; ultimately it was this that led directly to The Simpsons.)

But anyway, we were examining the Cleavers’ environment. Force yourself to actually watch Leave it to Beaver sometime. There are shops, playgrounds, and schools within The Beav’s walking or bike-riding range. Ward works at his mysterious profession (international spy? insurance salesman?) nearby, on Mayfield’s — their little suburb town’s — Main Street. He can go to any number of different places for lunch, or he can go home.

And there were sidewalks a-plenty in Mayfield.

I, on the other hand, live in Reston, one of America’s most celebrated New Towns, a town that was New Urbanism before New Urbanism was New. I live in one of the original houses in Reston, in close proximity — a five-minute walk — to Washington Plaza, a square inspired by Venice’s Piazza San Marco and surrounded by shops with apartments above.

The problem is, I can’t buy groceries there, or screws, or a lamp, or any of the other million things required to get through life. I can get my nails done (at two places), or my hair cut at one of three places, or my clothes dry-cleaned, or get something to eat. In this, it’s better than most suburban places in the U.S.

However, the space that was originally a small grocery store is now a community art center. The library is now a Reston museum. The new library is a mile or so away, smack in the middle of a "pod" of commercial space that puts it at nearly 1/2 mile from the nearest large residential area (1/2 mile from any residential space, if you don’t count a single apartment building and an old folks’ home).

I reject the term "new urbanism", because it implies that the goal is some Aldous Huxley Brave New World kind of communal life. The reality is that "new urbanism" is an attempt to move backward, to create something that’s not new at all, but old and functional. And that’s a shame, because when you’ve got the word "new" in the name of something and something goes wrong, people tend to assume that it’s because of your "new", untested ideas.


It’s important to think of cities — and by "city" here I mean any human habitation of more than about 5,000 or 10,000 people — as systems, rather than just plots of land. These systems have evolved over thousands of years, until the design has resulted in something that works well for its purpose.

Look at any city in the world, and you’ll see much the same thing. Across all cultures, architectures, and climates, cities are much the same. In all cities, people work, live, shop, and have recreation in much the same space. In all cities, be they cold like Stockholm or warm like Rome, people walk around in relatively chaotic surroundings, sometimes getting rained on, sometimes sweating when it gets hot. The fact that all cities have evolved this way shows that there must be a particularly elegant and functional system; otherwise every city in a place with inclement weather would have long ago developed into a place with nothing but indoor arcades. Instead, they haven’t. Cities everywhere in the world follow the same basic pattern.

Or, I should say, cities almost everywhere in the world. In the United States, our cities (including small towns, suburbs, etc., remember) have, for the past fifty years or so, followed a divergent path. Consider this map of part of Reston, Virginia, a town in the United States that has generated much controversy over the past thirty years because it’s such a radical place. It was one of the first places in the USA where a lot of the tenets of what’s now called new urbanism were applied:

The red area (some looks orange because of underlying color on the map) is commercial space: shops, offices, hotels, etc. The blue area is government space: police station, library, hospital. It is impossible to live in the red area; there are no houses or apartments there. Outside the red area, there is not a single commercial establishment of any kind. No offices, no shops. The two large roads that intersect on this map are each four lanes wide (at least; they get wider at points, up to eight lanes), with median strips. It is very difficult to cross these roads on foot. (In fairness, I should point out that not far off the right edge of this map, there’s another small commercial area: the one where you can get your hair done at three different places.)

It is actually possible to live in the red zone — if you’re elderly and want to live in a nursing home, located near the library. The old folks’ home, recently built, was put smack in the middle of the commercial area expressly so the residents could do things without driving.

It apparently does not cross anyone’s mind, even for a moment, that anyone other than the very old might want to be able to do things without driving. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to do anything between 5 and 6 pm in Reston, and attempting to find a parking space at lunchtime or in the evening is almost a lost cause.

And Reston is one of the better places.

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Modern American Religion

Mar 28, ’01 3:00 PM

This complaint has two inspirations, neither of them divine. The first is Mr. Frank Sinatra. He sings:

Bet your bottom dollar you’ll lose the blues in Chicago,
The town that Billie Sunday couldn’t shut down.

And I thought, what a different time that song represents! Frank Sinatra, one of the country’s most popular singers, celebrating the failure of the morals police to clean up the country’s second-largest city.

The second inspiration was a terrible made-for-TV movie that I watched a week or two ago. For some reason, the Tivo recorded Lifetime’s mid-afternoon presentation of The Jessica McClure Story: Baby Down The Well (or some such; about Jessica McClure, anyway).

The movie was made in 1988, shortly after the whole Jessica-down-the-well debacle. It is set in Midland, Texas, where the whole thing actually happened. It involves a couple whose infant daughter has fallen down a well.

And the movie features no prayer scenes at all.


If that movie were made today, there’d be praying from before the titles until after the credits. The credits themselves, in fact, would probably contain some line like "The producers would like to thank Jesus, without whose assistance this film could not have been made."

And there’s no way we’d see a mainstream pop star these days — remember that Frank Sinatra was, after all, a pop star — singing anything that denigrates religion, religious life or the dogma of any major officially-blessed religion, however slightly.


The United States has always, in my experience, been the most religious nation on Earth, excepting outright theocracies. Many, many more people go to church here than in any other place I’ve ever been, and a much higher proportion of people profess a belief in God. In public in this country, this almost always means a belief in Jesus (often pronounced "Jeeesuus") Christ. Though this complaint is not specifically aimed at "Christians", people calling themselves "Christians" are usually the worst offenders.

The devout in other countries tend to be quiet about it, seeing religion as a private part of their lives, not as the central piece of their public persona. You can’t imagine David Beckham, for instance, ever shouting, "Thank you Jesuuuuuus!" as Kurt Warner did after winning the Superbowl in 2000. He’d be laughed off the pitch.

(David Beckham plays midfield for Manchester United, an English football team. Kurt Warner is a quarterback for the St. Louis Rams, an American footaball team.)

Recently, though — just in the last five years or so — religious expression has become more and more and more public in the USA, possibly at the expense of the values that religion is supposed to foster.

This afternoon, I saw this car in the parking lot at McDonald’s:

I invite the reader to notice the Jesus fish on the back, the VMI sticker in the window, and the WE <heart> GOD license plate. We may assume from these indicators that this person believes in God and in Christ, and is a general supporter of law and order (VMI is Virginia Military Institute, a legendary military academy in Lexington, VA). Yet:

1. The car is parked on the line. Whatever happened to ‘honour thy neighbour’? People next to you in the parking lot are neighbors, too.

2. This is a $40,000 truck, with a serious trailer hitch on it. Presumably that hitch is used to tow a boat, or a big camping trailer, or something like that. That’s a lot of bread that could have been cast upon the waters.

3. This one is visual:

Not only is it illegal to stick things like that heart on a license plate, but as of the date of the photo, the plate had been expired for almost a month. These people are, in effect, tax dodgers: render unto Casear etc.

Now, I’m sure that the particular people who own this enormous vehicle are perfectly nice people, with no faults. I’m just using them as an example, because they happen to fit my argument perfectly.

The heightened religious fervor in the United States serves no purpose except to provide the religiods — or a vocal minority of them, anyway — a platform from which to attempt to control others.

We’ve got the appearance of religion and constant talk about a morals and ethics, but seemingly no action.

The person with the "WWJD?" bracelet is just as likely, in general, to attempt to swindle you as the next person. Britney Spears talks all the time about being a virgin and about her special relationship with Jesus, but she still appears semi-nude on TV and in magazines, and wears clothes that a hooker wouldn’t have worn in public 30 years ago. And the Republican Party talks about how good it would be to have religious organizations underwritten by the government, only to do an about-face when they realize that "religious organizations" includes the Moonies as well as Jerry Falwell.

And so I am forced to call for a moratorium on all the public religiosity in this country. If you are religious, fine. That’s great, and that’s your right. But scrape the fish off the back of your car, burn your "WWJD?" clothing items, stop talking about Jeeesus all the time, and start expressing your religion through acts and beliefs, rather than chotchkes and marketing messages.



Comments (2)

Office Supplies

Mar 26, ’01 3:00 PM

I am an unabashed office supply enthusiast.  This I will readily admit.  And I am hopping mad.

The entire office supply market in the United States has been taken over by companies like Office Depot and Officemax and Office-o-rama, and they are sorely lacking.

I’ll grant that the average cost of office supplies has come down significantly since all of the little independent office supply stores were pushed out of business.  And, in some areas, the selection has even improved.  The Office Depot stockholders should be up in arms, though, because there’s a huge market going untapped: the office supply enthusiast.

Europe understands office supply enthusiasm.  Whenever I’m in Europe, I hit at least one stationery store and buy huge piles of stuff to bring back.  My favorite place for office supplies is any formerly-Communist country in Europe.  The slavs really understand office supplies.

I’ve got this down to a science.  I reckon that there are four criteria that an office supply must fulfill in order for it to be considered good:

  1. Replaceability.  Office supplies, by their nature, get used up.  Ink, pencils, pencil lead, notebooks, paper, etc. all are consumed.  I find that, if I am not certain that I will be able to replace a given item once I’ve used it up, I am reluctant to use it, and the whole scheme falls apart.
  2. Utility. The item must be useful to me.  Therefore, things like Trapper Keepers (and all other giant ring-binders), comb binding systems, ‘gel’ pens, etc. are all Not Good.
  3. Funkiness.  I have particular taste in supplies, tending toward the archaic.  This strikes a lot of people as odd, seeing as my house is full of computers (with three separate networks tying them together), and that I am a gadget freak in general.  I believe, though, that things function best in the proper context, and that the proper context for office supplies is about 1930. I write with a fountain pen, I prefer hard-bound notebooks to spiral-bound ones, and in general I prefer my supplies to be, well, a bit genteel and old-fashioned.
  4. Cheapness.  These things are intended to be consumed, so, with the exception of nice pens (which aren’t consumed, anyway), I require that supplies be fairly inexpensive, and in any case not priced out of line with their utility.  Thus things like Levenger’s little leather-bound notebooks are Not Good. Anyone with the kind of personality which would allow them to buy those things probably has no thoughts worth writing down, anyway.
Some things are just plain unobtainable: it’s impossible, for example, to find blue fountain pen ink in the standard cartridges around here.  I can get black ink, which I hate; and I can get blue ink in Waterman cartridges, which are much larger and which don’t fit in my everyday Pelikano pen.  And I can get ink cartridges a-plenty in several different colors for the horrible, horrible, awful, miserable, scum-sucking Sheaffer fountain pen that’s sold all over the place in the USA and which leaks all over you at the slightest provocation.

And some things are obtainable, but may not be in the future (ironically enough, this is far more common in the USA than in any post-Communist country I’ve ever been to). The other day, I bought seven notebooks of graph paper at Office Depot, because they usually don’t have graph paper at all — except the very expensive (though largely identical) kind they sell next to their "drafting" supplies.  Because I’m not sure when I’ll next be able to buy graph paper, though, I am reluctant to use any of it.

I have the same problem with the blank books that appear to be generally available at Border’s.  Barnes & Noble sell several lines of blank books, but they all have lines on the pages, or idiotic covers, or are just too expensive.  Borders, in their remainder piles, sell a blank book that’s the right size at 6 x 9 inches (though I would like one half this size for carrying around), pretty cheap, and — just possibly — in open stock, to be offered forever.

I cannot get myself to firmly believe the "offered forever" part, though, so I just keep buying the things and finding myself unable to use them.  At last count, I had about 30 of the things.

I know that that’s not rational, but that’s the way it is.   I think that there is a market for office supply stores catering to people who really like office supplies, rather than people who just need them to get something done.  If you don’t believe me, check out this Google search for "office supply fetish".  There are a lot of people out there like myself, and I’d bet that a lot of them are frustrated, too.

Once you admit that it’s a fetish, it all becomes a lot clearer.

I can see the Office Supply Fetish Shoppe of the future: it’s in a side street, and called something like "Out of the (Supply) Closet".  You go in and find some strange-looking but friendly people behind the counter, probably a fat girl and a very skinny guy; they guy’s wearing a pocket protector and the girl has a pencil stuck in her hair.  You think, "My god, these people live their lives surrounded by supplies!"  You think that the fat girl, though basically plain verging on homely, might be fantastic to have as a girlfriend because she’d be sure, in her line of work, to have picked up some tricks about paper clips that you didn’t know.   In the display case would be some funky pens from Europe that you’d look at, pursing your lips and holding your hands behind your back, wanting a good look but not wanting anyone else in the shop to think you were getting ideas or anything.

There’d be a section over in the corner full of imported items, for people into the whole A4 scene.  In the back would be the Post-It notes and gel pens, for people who are easily bored and need the latest innovations.  There’d be a section near the front full of those 3-way pens and fat little spiral notebooks, for the groups of giggly, embarrassed 19-year-old girls who’ve come in on a dare from one of their friends.  They know, in a vague way, what they want, but they’re not yet sure that it’s okay to want it.  And they’ll be treated well in their naiveté by the clerks, because they know that supplies are natural and beautiful, that everyone’s got their own thing, and that everyone has to start somewhere.

It’ll be a beautiful day.  Until then, though, we’ll have to keep our secrets, keep struggling against the Man, and keep seeking out both supplies and others who understand in our own secret ways.

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The War on Some Drugs

Mar 12, ’01 2:00 PM

A lot of people in the U.S., myself included, are morally opposed to the U.S. government’s War on Drugs. As a method of keeping people from getting high — assuming for the moment that that’s a legitimate function of the government — it’s clearly a failure. Only the most rabid pro-Drug War cheerleaders would maintain otherwise.

Yet it continues. Any attempt to approach the "problem" from another angle is quickly quashed by the government. The same people, Democrats and Republicans both, who crow about Less Government Spending and Less Interference In Your Life consistently approve of the government spending billions of dollars to lock people in prison. Less interference indeed.

The reason that none of this seems to make sense is that we persist in looking at it as a legitimate activity of the government; it’s not. It’s a business.

Allow me to (apparently) digress for a moment: if you live in the United States and own a television, you’ve undoubtedly seen advertisements on late-night TV for things like the Tap Light. The Tap Light is a cheaply-made battery-operated light; it’s electrically identical to a flashlight, but it takes the shape of a little dome of light-diffusing plastic. You put it on a shelf or table, and by tapping the dome (which is also the switch), you turn the light on and off.

There is no demonstrable need for this awful little thing. It’s very poorly-designed, expensive to operate, not very effective (you can’t easily read by its light, for instance), and ugly.

Despite all this, the Tap Light Corporation continues to sell the thing. Its total effect is very small, but the Tap Light is definitely harmful to society. Because the Tap Light Corporation is making money on the it, though, they’re going to continue to sell it. They should do no less.

So why are we surprised that the Drug War continues? On a regular basis, the California Correctional Peace Officers’ Association — the prison guards’ union — lobbies against any measure in California that would reduce the number of prison admissions. Police departments push for greater powers to seize property of people accused of drug crimes. Other agencies of the government save money by, for instance, denying federal aid to would-be students who have been convicted of any drug-related crimes.

If you don’t believe me, read this article from the Seattle Times about an attempt in Washington to require that people actually be convicted before their property is seized by the government. In part, it says:

And the money has become essential for police departments trying to stay on top of rising drug crimes while dealing with tighter budgets.

"That’d put us out of business," said Tacoma police spokesman Jim Mattheis.

There you have it in a nutshell. I believe that this is an adequate explanation for a lot of the drug hysteria in the U.S. (which the U.S. then imposes on large parts of the rest of the world): that the government needs another source of revenue.

Whether this source of revenue would be necessary were the government not spending so much on the drug war is a question I will leave unexamined for the time being.

In any case, this is the only explanation I’ve been able to think of that fits the circumstances. If you look at the government’s actions not as any attempt to arrive at some kind of justice, but rather as the actions of a business with something to sell — police and incarceration services, in this case — the Drug War makes prefect sense.

The fact that the Drug War does nothing to stop drugs is irrelevant; the means is the end.

We will not see any meaningful reform of the insane drug laws in this country until no agency of government directly benefits from them.


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Ding Dongs and King Dons

Jan 23, ’01 5:00 PM

I used to live in St. Louis, which, being the home of the Twinkie, is well-provided with Hostess outlet stores. These stores sell almost-stale Hostess products, Wonder Bread, etc. Never mind how old a Twinkie needs to be to be "almost stale".

Anyway, these stores offered a strange product called "King Dons". They looked, felt, and tasted just like Ding Dongs, but they were, as I just pointed out, King Dons. In normal stores in St. Louis, they’re always Ding Dongs. You’ll never see a "King Don" on a shelf at the 7-Eleven there.

At first, I thought that this might have something to do with Don King, the much-beloved boxing promoter. I couldn’t imagine what the connection would possibly be, though, and besides, there’s a difference:

King Dons Don Kings

Anyway, the good people at Hostess wrote back (with what looks like a form letter; mine is not the only copy of this thing on the web), explaining that Ding Dongs (which appears to be the canonical name for the things) are known variously as King Dons or Big Wheels, depending on what part of the country you’re in. This is allegedly to avoid confusion with some other products offered in those regions.

That’s insane:

  1. If the problem is some other product (presumably Ring Dings, which pre-date Ding Dongs and which are virtually the same product), why are there two alternate names?

  2. Everyone calls these things Ding Dongs, regardless of what the box says. Hostess should in fact be suing or buying the "Ding Dong" name from whoever owns it in these mysterious regions, if that’s the case.

Where I live now, the boxes on the shelves say "King Dons" as often as not. You can’t get Ring Dings — the only thing I can think of that could possible claim a name conflict with Ding Dongs — here.

I think there’s something far more sinister going on.



Thank you for your recent comments regarding the naming of our HOSTESS King Dons Cake.

Many years ago, the HOSTESS product Ding Dongs Cake was introduced with a bell as part of the advertising. So as not to confuse our product with a competitor’s product, in certain regions the name was changed to King Dons, while in other areas the same product was called Big Wheels.

In the past, the original Ding Dongs Cake (with the bell) became Ding Dongs Cakes (without the bell), King Dons, or Big Wheels, depending upon the region.

In January 1987, our Marketing Department decided that in order to have national continuity, one name for a product was necessary, and the original Ding Dongs name was chosen.

This decision was short lived. In June 1987, the name King Dons was added, for the same reason as explained previously, to avoid confusing one product with a competitor’s product which has a similar sounding name.

Comments (35)

Campaign Finance

Jan 23, ’01 2:00 PM

And how we should treat the cause of campaign finance problems, rather than the symptoms.

There is a lot of discussion these days about how best to regulate the financing of political campaigns in the United States. The intention is to remove control from lobbying organizations and corporations, and give it back to the people.

Certainly, the American government is largely bought and paid-for by moneyed interests. It costs an enormous amount to win and retain national office in the United States, and these funds can, for all practical purposes, only be obtained by appealing to those very rich entities in the best position to finance campaigns, be they individual billionaires, trade organizations, or large corporations.

Restricting the ability of any of these entities to give money to the political candidate of their choice is a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, though. You — whether you are Joe Schmo or General Motors — have the right to spend your money to further your political opinions however you wish. Senator McCain’s intentions are good, but I don’t think he’ll be successful, even if he manages to get his legislation passed. It’ll simply be challenged by some large lobbying organization and found unconstitutional.

The problem is not that the government is bought and paid for — that’s just a symptom. The problem is that it’s possible to buy a controlling interest, as it were, in American government.

The Founding Fathers, some of the sharpest people ever to get together in one place, saw this possibility and provided for it in the original First Amendment, which was never ratified. It’s difficult to find the text of this Amendment, so I have included it here:

After the first enumeration required by the first Article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

That is, in the early days of the United States, it was thought that one representative in Congress was ample to represent 30,000 to 50,000 people. This was roughly the level of representation afforded by the House of Commons in Britain in those days. Here are some ratios of representation in the ‘lower’ houses of various countries’ governments (all figures here are derived from the CIA World Factbook, and current as of mid-2000):

CountryOne rep. per
UK90305
Germany126215
France102824
Canada103923
Mexico200699
Russia324447
China423575

The average is clearly around 100,000 citizens per representative for the wealthier and more democratic countries. It’s not really fair to lump Mexico in with China and Russia (or even Russia in with China), but it’s clear that the fact that these countries are not as democratic as Canada, the UK, etc. might be related to the fact that their governments are structurally less representative. Even if everyone in government in China is perfectly virtuous and free, the Chinese government is not going to be able to cater to the wishes and needs of its population as is the government of the United Kingdom.

Curious yet about what the ratio of representation in the United States in 2000 is?

One representative per 633,477 citizens. Or about half as representative as Russia, and one-third less representative than the government of the People’s Republic of China.

(N.B. These figures have changed following the 2000 census — see the update page for that information.)

Each member of the House of Representatives has to account for the needs of over 600,000 people.

Take any large American stadium, the new huge dome kind that hold about 70,000 people. Fill every seat. Now put another eight people on the lap of every person in the stadium.

Now get all of those people to agree on a single political opinion, that can be expressed as a vote in Congress.

It can’t be done, which is why the Congressman will just take money from, and vote on behalf of, the guy who owns the stadium and his friends sitting in the luxury boxes.

Triple the size of Congress, to about 1300 people, and we’d have about the same level of representation as our neighbors to the south. Then it might be possible for a Congressman to attempt to represent his constituency.

Better yet, return some power to the states, where the rates of representation, for the most part, are already where they should be. That’s one reason why the United States’ governmental structure was set up the way it was. Remember when I said, up in the fifth paragraph, that the Founding Fathers of the U.S. were pretty sharp? It’s still true in this paragraph.

The whole point, you see, was to guard against the situation we find ourselves in today. In the 18th century, it was obvious to them that the interests of people in Virginia were different from the people in Massachusetts.

Consider, however, the 10th District of Virginia as it is today:

It includes parts of the Washington suburbs, densely populated places where Starbucks and The Gap are thick on the ground, and most people drive around in shiny new Mercedes. It also includes the Shenandoah Valley and a good part of the Blue Ridge — main ethnic group: Hillbilly.

This district includes a mall anchored by Nieman-Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, with stores like Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and chic European underwear stores in between; it also includes a mall anchored by JC Penney, Sears, and Belk, with a knife store, a place that sells decorative barrels, and a lot of empty storefronts in between. People living in those two communities have very divergent requirements for government, much as the merchants of Boston and the planters of Virginia had different needs in 1790.

Such a diverse group of people cannot adequately be represented by a single vote in Congress. And since the federal government, through coercion of the states, is directly in charge of nearly all policies these days — from medical care to drinking age to marijuana laws to the speed limits on the freeways to who can ride in which seats in a car — this is a problem.

Solve the problem of underrepresentation in the U.S. government — either by expanding Congress or (better yet) by returning to the states the power they’re supposed to have in the first place — and you’ll not only solve the campaign finance problem, but you’ll be able to watch the American popular antipathy toward government disappear.

Multiculturalism is a Load of Crap

Jan 18, ’01 2:00 PM

First off, to ward off accusations of xenophobia or racism: I advocate an open-borders immigration policy for the United States. Anyone who wants to come live here should be able to, and they should all have exactly the same opportunities than anyone else of the same skills, talents, and abilities has. Denying anyone the opportunity to exercise those abilities because of something as silly as their skin color or where they’re from is just plain idiotic, and ultimately it hurts us all equally.

America’s diversity is what has made it great, and it would be lessened by the absence of any of us — black, white, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Russian, Eskimo, etc.

Second: Multiculturalism is a load of crap. I happened across an article in the Washington Post today (I’ve mirrored it here in case the Post does away with the archive) about how Catcher in the Rye is being pulled from school curricula these days. In itself, this isn’t news. What makes it news is that it’s being pulled because it’s not "diverse" enough.

(In case you’ve been living in a cave for the last fifty years, the basic plot of Catcher in the Rye involved our white, upper-middle-class hero, Holden Caulfield, getting thrown out of school, having a nervous breakdown, and being thrown in the loony bin. This nervous breakdown is his coming-of-age.)

The line in the article that inspired me to write this is this:

"Our school is 91 percent minority. We have 52 countries represented," said Keshia Beatty, English supervisor at Bladensburg High.

I just want to see that again: "Our school is 91 percent minority." Ahhhh.

Bladensburg is in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which is about 51% black and 41% white. I don’t think that by "minority" she means white, though. She means that 9% of the students in the school are white, and the others are one big undifferentiated mass of "minority".

And so they shouldn’t be reading Catcher, the multiculturalists say. They should be reading Their Eyes Were Watching God or Things Fall Apart.

Now, while I happen to think that Things Fall Apart (by Chinua Achebe) is a fantastic, worthwhile, and underappreciated novel, I also think that students living in a suburban county of a major U.S. city — a county where the mean annual household income is over $48,000 — can understand a story set in wealthy Manhattan in 1950 than they can a story set in a pre-industrial town in colonial Nigeria.

However, Okonkwo (the hero of Things Fall Apart) is black; Holden Caulfield is white.

Therefore, the (mostly black) students at Bladensburg High have more in common with Okonkwo than with Holden.

And here’s the assumption that seems to be hidden behind this particular brand of "multiculturalism":

Your skin color, more than anything else, defines what you are like, what you can understand, and what you should do.

Perhaps Keshia Beatty (the teacher quoted above) should join the Klan; I understand that they believe roughly the same thing.

We’re all part of the same culture in the United States, whether we like it or not. That culture is made up of all kinds of people, speaking all kinds of languages, and doing all kinds of things. But it’s the same culture. A student in Bladensburg has far, far more in common with a student in Chevy Chase (a nearby, rich, white suburb) than he does with a student in Nigeria.

Our schools — except possibly for a few in the Deep South — no longer attempt to teach anyone to hate other people. But it’s a shame that now, over 30 years since Dr. King was killed, the schools are advocating a curriculum focused on people’s differences, rather than their similarities. That once again, your skin color determines what it is you should study in school.

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District of Columbia

Jan 17, ’01 4:00 PM

I don’t even know where to begin with this quote from the Washington Post, Jan 1, 2001:

Senators Spar Over D.C. Voting Rights



Two U.S. senators took opposing views yesterday before a national audience on the issue of voting rights for the District.



Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said on NBC’s "Meet the Press" that Congress must find a way to allow representation for the District in the House and Senate. He said statehood is a possibility that should be explored.



But Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) said statehood is not an option. The District could be considered part of Maryland during national elections, he said, but it would be a "serious mistake" to allow statehood. Nickles said the District does not have a large enough population to deserve two senators.

(emphasis added by Tino)

Of course, the humor there is that Washington, D.C. has a larger population than Wyoming, and possibly Montana.

I ultimately like Washington, something that will astound many. It’s not easy to get me to venture into that city, mainly because it’s a pain in the ass.

But it’s a very nice city, on a relatively human scale, and some of the things that make it a pain in the ass (very few freeways, for one) are also part of what makes it a good place.

It’s a terribly mismanaged place, of course; this is the cause of the slums you see on TV every so often, and the crime statistics you hear about.

Tony Williams, the mayor who came in vowing to give a damn and to end the Marion Berry years of apathy, has just about given up. He’s finally realized that it’s an impossible task, managing D.C. Instead of trying, he’s now pulling Marion Berry stunts; for instance, the D.C. government recently changed the motto on its license plates from "Celebrate & Discover" (itself horrible) to "TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION".

Which is a good point, and what this complaint is all about.

D.C. is a strange place. Originally, it was ten miles square; since Arlington was ceded back to Virginia in 1847, it’s less — about 70 square miles. About 1/3 of it is downtown DC: much of what you see pictured on the back of U.S. currency is in downtown DC. Not many people live there; much of the center of Washington, like the centers of most American cities, is deserted at night.

About 1/3 of Washington is Anacostia. While Washington is and has long been a Black-majority city, Anacostia stands out as being exceptionally Black. There are a few middle-class areas in Anacostia, and even some very wealthy enclaves, Anacostia is in general very, very poor. The unemployment rate there hovers around 20% — when the rest of the U.S. is at something like 2.1% (and 2.1% in the U.S. unemployment statistics is totally insignificant — it’s just noise).

And the other third of Washington is the western third. The western third of Washington encompasses places Georgetown, Dupont Circle, and a bunch of neighborhoods with names that will not be familiar to you unless you live in or near Washington, which I will lump together as "upper Northwest". Statistically, upper northwest DC is one of the richest places on Earth. DC has a higher per-capita income than any other city in the U.S., despite the fact that the unemployment rate in the city rarely drops below 15%. Upper Northwest is where Washington’s small "middle class" tends to live. Washington’s middle class is made up of people like Congressmen, Senators, Alan Greenspan, etc. They wouldn’t be middle-class anywhere else, though; they live in $700,000 houses, drive Volvos and Mercedeses, frequently have vacation houses, etc. Anywhere else (except maybe New York), they’d be considered rich.

They’re not considered rich in Washington, though, because that title is reserved for the elite of the lobbyists, the TV stars, the royalty who maintain houses here, etc.: the people who count their income in millions of dollars a year. There aren’t many of these, anywhere, but then it doesn’t take many.

So: Washington is populated by poor people, rich people, a very few middle-class people, the U.S. government, and a whole bunch of non-profit organizations.

Poor people don’t pay taxes. Rich people don’t pay taxes in anything like the amounts middle-class people do (the rich have better shelters for their income, and they take up more space, so there are always fewer of them per square mile). Non-profit institutions don’t pay taxes. And the U.S. government certainly doesn’t pay taxes (though it does fork over certain amounts of money to D.C. in return for "services" like paving the roads).

So D.C. is in the position of having to tax the hell out of anyone who does pay taxes. As a result, since World War II, D.C.’s population has steadily dropped.

Of the fifty-two jurisdictions reported in the 2000 census (the states, plus Puerto Rico and D.C.), D.C. is the only one that did not gain population since 1990.

Eventually, there will only be one person left living in Washington, and at the end of the year he’ll be presented with a bill for the entire cost of operating the city. And then he’ll skip town without paying.

The problem is that you pay the same federal taxes, whether you live in D.C., Maryland, or Virginia. But in Virginia, your income tax is about half of what it is in D.C. Maryland income taxes are lower than D.C., but not by much; but the taxes on everything else are much cheaper. In return for the high taxes, D.C. doesn’t deliver a lot. Crime, as I’ve noted, is high. Trash is picked up or not, depending on some whim of the public works department. Streets are not plowed when it snows. And there is precisely one place for all 572,000 D.C. residents to get their cars inspected. And it’s open banker’s hours.

A lot of this can’t be helped. Even with D.C.’s high tax rates, it’s hard for the city to collect enough money. To begin with, it’s an expensive place to maintain. All of D.C. is an urban area, with high-density sewers, water lines, streets, sidewalks, alleys, etc., etc. And quite a bit of D.C. can’t be taxed. You can’t collect property taxes for the Capitol, or the White House, or the Mall, or the Smithsonian museums. The second largest property owner in D.C., after the federal government, is George Washington University. GWU, of course, also does not pay taxes. I’m not sure who the third-largest property owner in D.C. is, but I would bet it’s the Catholic Church (Georgetown University + Catholic University of America). Also no taxes. Fourth is likely American University. And so on.

The President doesn’t even pay D.C. income taxes; legally, he’s considered to be a resident of the state he comes from. Ditto Senators and Congressmen, and many of their staff members. They don’t even have to register their cars in D.C.

And to top it all off, people in D.C. don’t even get a Congressman. Oh, sure, they get Eleanor Holmes Norton, who hangs around the Capitol all day, but she doesn’t get a vote. And this is what’s behind the license plate.

Eleanor doesn’t get a vote because the GOP controls the Congress. Washington, being an overwhelmingly Black city with high unemployment, tends, as you’d imagine, to vote Democratic. (In 2000, George W. Bush got 9% of the vote in D.C.; Nader 5%; and Gore, 86%.) Giving a vote to D.C. would just be adding another Democratic vote to Congress, and the GOP don’t see why they should do that, particularly when they’ve got a Constitutional excuse not to. The first president that D.C. ever voted for was Johnson, in 1964. The District only has a government of its own (such as it is) at Congress’ pleasure. Should Congress decide tomorrow to dissolve the D.C. government, there’s nothing in the law to stop them.

Anyway, D.C. doesn’t have any Congressmen because it’s not a state; and just about all of what the Constitution has to say about the workings of the government have to do with the states. States shall have such-and-so-many members of Congress. Nowhere does it say that D.C. should have any.

This was intentional. Remember that in 1790, rivalry between states was high. The states wanted to make sure that Congress met on neutral territory, so no state would be able to claim that it was more important by virtue of being the home of the capital. And that neutral territory was the District of Columbia.

Obviously, though, the system is breaking down now. Through the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th, parts of D.C. were still rural. There were farms in Washington. Countryside. And what urban areas there were did not require the level of service that is the norm today.

Under the current definition of "city", Washington just doesn’t take in enough money to function properly, whether it’s being run by Marion Berry, Tony Williams, or an omniscient genie. And the reality of the viscious circle of taxation — combined with hostility from a Republican Congress — means that it’s not going to get any better.

But I’ve got a solution! A solution that will make D.C. one of the most sought-after addresses in the world, that will solve the taxation-without-representation problem, and one that will be palatable to a Republican Congress.

Eliminate the federal income tax for residents of Washington, D.C.

The D.C. income and property taxes would no longer be a problem, since they would be much more than offset by the lack of federal tax.

Every high-income person in the U.S. would immediately relocate their primary residence to Washington. The poor people in Anacostia, if they owned their property, could wait a few years until population pressure drove the prices up, sell their house (and the lot is sits on), and move somewhere else, no longer poor.

Any poor people who managed to remain in D.C. would have access to a much better range of services from the city, which would now be flush with cash.

And the capital city of the United States would no longer be a slum. Instead, with so many very rich people living in the city, it would be a center of culture, if not enlightenment. Wealth does not equal intelligence or culture, but rich people tend to give a lot of money to cultural institutions, and they persuade themselves that they like to do things like go to the opera or listen to classical music.

All of this could be achieved simply, though market forces, with only a small cost to the government. (Rich people are not actually a decent source of revenue for the government, even though they pay a higher dollar amount in taxes than others. The real money comes from the vast middle class, which is why you’ll never see a meaningful middle-class tax cut.)

There it is. Remember that you heard it here first, when George Will starts advocating this in a few weeks. Eliminate the federal income tax in D.C., and watch the city blossom.

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The Second Amendment

Jan 17, ’01 3:00 PM

The Constitution is the supreme law of the United States.  Written in 1790 to codify the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers of the USA, a number of Amendments were immediately tacked on to satisfy various issues that were raised in Congress while debating the document.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

That’s all it says.

The popular argument these days is that the Second Amendment is a relic, an antique from the days when there was serious concern that the Crown would attempt to regain control of the U.S., and that "militia" is synonymous with "army reserve".   This is what the official government position generally holds to.

Balderdash, on both counts.

A "militia" is just what you think of when you hear the word, if you’re an American — a bunch of guys in the woods muttering about the government and polishing their guns.

And remember that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written fourteen years after American independence — it’s got nothing to do with the Crown.

The reference is not to "the security of the United States", but to "the security of a free state".  The Second Amendment provides for the people’s ability to overthrow three government should it become tyrannical.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights reads, in part:

[...]government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation or community; of all the various modes and forms of government that is best, which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration; and that, whenever any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.

While the Virginia Declaration of Rights has no legal force outside Virginia, it’s instructive to remember that the people who set up the U.S. government were, largely, Virginians.  George Mason, who, more than any other single person, wrote the U.S. Constitution, also wrote the D. of R.  This helps to show the frame of mind in which they were operating when they wrote the Second Amendment.

They did not see the government, or the state, of being necessarily worthy of preservation; rather, they valued the state of freedom that the government was set up to foster.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that we overthrow the government on a regular basis (for "light and transient causes" as it says in the Declaration of Independence)!   But if there had been 100,000 armed citizens standing on East Capitol Street in December 2000, the Supreme Court might have rendered a more reasoned decision, rather that appointing George W. Bush president.

A lot of people will accept the above argument, but still say that gun control is worthwhile, because:

  1. The armed forces of the United States are, collectively, the single greatest assemblage of brute power ever seen on the face of the Earth and so 100,000 rednecks with guns on the Capitol steps do not actually represent a threat; and

  2. Gun control is worthwhile anyway because a whole lot of people get killed in the U.S. because there are so many guns.

I would answer by pointing out that it’s very rare, outside of certain towns, to see a soldier on duty in public in the USA.  Soldiers (the Department of Defense’s new word for them is "warfighter", but whatever) do not perform police duties in the United States, and I’ve never, ever seen one in public with anything more than a sidearm.  I think that Americans would react very negatively to the sight of soldiers on the streets.  Never mind that those soldiers are citizens too, and have their own political opinions.  Governments that use the army to put down popular rebellion often find themselves on the wrong end of their own army’s guns.

And as for gun control saving lives or reducing crime, it just doesn’t wash.  Most of the highest-crime areas in the United States are also the areas with the strictest gun control laws.  It’s almost totally impossible to own or possess a gun in Washington, D.C., for instance, but Washington’s got one of the worst — if not the worst — crime rates in the country.

I’ll admit that that’s a weak argument, though, because it’s likely that the more crime-ridden a place is, the more people are likely to want tough gun control laws.

(For this to be effective, the would-be criminal has to respect the law banning guns.  Criminals, by definition, do not respect the law — which is why I don’t understand how gun control laws are supposed to accomplish anything.  Killing or injuring someone is illegal, whether you do it with a gun or with a pointed stick.)

But if we compare the United States as a whole to Canada as a whole, we find some interesting figures.

In 1999, there were 291,330 "violent crimes" in Canada, according to Statistics Canada.  The population of Canada in 2000 (I couldn’t find 1999) was 30,750,087.

In 1999, there were 2,530,000 "violent crimes" in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.  The population of the United States in 1999 was 272,700,000, according to the Bureau of the Census.

(I would have much preferred to use "gun-related crimes" here, but neither country categorizes crimes as such.  Suffice to say that these figures can be used as a barometer for the general level of violence in the two countries.)

The statistics here are skewed slightly in Canada’s favor (i.e. toward less violence) because the population likely increased between 1999 and 2000.  They are skewed in favor of the United States because I have not eliminated the very young, who are seldom victims of violent crime, from the numbers.  The USA, having more people, will have more very young people.

The only apparent difference between what’s considered "violent crime" in Canada and in the United States is that Canada explicitly considers attempted murder to be violent.  I imagine that the FBI sees things the same way, but nowhere do they spell this out.  It would only seem logical that if the police think that you were trying to kill someone, you were doing something violent.

All that said, in 1999 there were 94.7 violent crimes per thousand people in Canada.  In the same year, there were 92.7 violent crimes per thousand people in the U.S., despite the fact that we’ve got more guns down here.  That’s right: contrary to public belief, Canada is actually (slightly) more violent than the United States.  Feel free to check the statistics and do the calculations yourself.  I was surprised, myself.

(I provide links to the source of these statistics on another page.)

That difference is so small as to be meaningless, though; it’s likely that it’s smaller than the error introduced by my using Canada 2000 population data, or that it’s nothing more than the difference between the definition of "violent crime" between the two countries.

Which is my point. Statistically, there is no difference between the rates of violent crime in Canada and the United States. Despite the fact that Canada has much stricter gun control laws — to the point that you spouse or former spouse(s) have to sign your application for a gun license — than the USA (read a précis of Canadian gun laws here), the rates of violent crime are the same.

This is because the gun control laws do not affect the criminals.  When Snake or Bluto or whatever villain you think of sets out on a crime spree, he does not ask himself whether the gun he’s carrying is legal or not; he doesn’t care.  He’s not going to have his spouse(s) sign the damned form.  He’s not going to take the safety class.   The whole point of the gun, to him, is that it isn’t safe — for the person on the other end of the barrel.

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