Dogged Blog

Farhad Manjoo, get off my lawn!

Farhad Manjoo at Slate was waxing nostalgic about the Web in 1996. Being only 30 years old, he didn't remember it himself, though; he inferred what it was like by, I don't know, visiting the web archive or something.

Dude. You should have called me.

But not to find out what the Interwebz were like in 1996. By 1996, we had the World Wide Web. We had reasonably fast modems. We had search engines.

When I first went online in, I don't know, maybe 1990, it was on a DOS computer, using a DOS version of AOL, which had something like 500,000 members. You could IM Steve Case, or hang out with him in a chat room.

There was no Web. Which was a good thing, given the 9.6K dial-up connection.

That's correct, you cute little young uns. We did have the Internet; we had bulletin boards and email (although if you used AOL or Compuserve or some other proprietary service, you couldn't email anyone on a different service).

But there was no Web. No pictures, no search engines... well, we had 'em, but nothing like what we have now.

Raise your hand if you remember Gopher.

We had Usenet, and believe me, until you've participated in pre-spam Usenet, you don't know the meaning of untrammeled freedom of expression.

But by 1996? Pffft. As Manjoo says:

A few newspapers and magazines have begun to put their articles online—you can visit the New York Times or Time—and there are a handful of new Web-only publications, including Feed, HotWired, Salon, Suck, Urban Desires, Word, and, launched in June, Slate.

Exactly. I mean... they had Salon. He may have called his article "The Unrecognizable Internet of 1996," but I'd argue it was, in fact, recognizable. Basic and slow and featureless, but recognizable.

No, if you want to see an unrecognizable Internet, go back in time to when it was really different. When we had no web at all. Nothing. Zip. Black and white text. Words on a screen. That's what we had.

I didn't even have Windows back then. I typed little white letters onto a black screen. For those too young to remember, if you're on a Windows machine, go open up your DOS prompt window. Maximize it.  That's what we had.

And yes, it did just strike me that I'm just one or two sentences away from saying, "When I was your age" and telling Farhad Manjoo to get off my lawn.

The article is here.

Me and the markets

I own no stocks or bonds, and have no retirement account. I live in a house that one might say I "own," if one were to overlook the fact that I currently have zero equity in said house, and am paying somewhere around half my monthly income to be allowed to live in it.

A year and a half ago, I had substantial equity in this home, not the result of appreciation but reflecting the 20 percent down payment I made when I bought it a little more than two years ago. Sadly, that all vanished in the economic collapse of recent months, and at the moment, I'm underwater on my mortgage for the first time in my life.

I'm 49 years old, and have been in the San Francisco Bay Area real estate market since I was 21 years old, before real estate prices went insane here. Every home I've purchased has gone up in value during the years I lived in it, sometimes as much as 100 percent. I've bought up, down, and horizontally at different times, but have never bought a house the payment on which I couldn't afford, never financed at more than 80 percent of the value of my home and often much less, and never did any of the "irresponsible" things a hundred mortgage brokers tried to convince me to do.

And yet right now, today, if I lost my income, I'd lose everything I have in the world. I can't sell my house to get out of this dangerous position, because I owe more on it than it's worth.

I can't re-finance into a better interest rate (I'm paying 6.75 percent, but rates right now are more like 5.25 percent for a fixed), even though it would reduce my monthly payment by several hundred dollars to do so, because I no longer have any equity.

And I probably won't be able to qualify for the new mortgage assistance program even though it lets you re-fi to 105 percent of your home's current value, because it also restricts you to 31-38 percent of your income in mortgage payments, and in San Francisco, that's simply unrealistic. Nearly everyone here pays more like half their income in housing costs, because this is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.

It's also my hometown. I was born here and this is where my family is. And while two years ago I could honestly say none of my income was tied to my location, now quite a bit of it is.

So, what can I do? If I sell this house and move somewhere less expensive, I'll be left with nothing, and I'll never get back into the real estate market here, nor will I have anything on which to retire.

I will leave my mother, who is elderly and has cancer. I'll no longer live near my brothers and their families, which means I won't see my nephews grow up. They won't know me, and I won't know them.

And I'll lose income, although not all of it.

To make all this worse, quite a bit of my income is coming from the newspaper business, which is not what I'd call in a growth phase right now.

/sarcastic understatement

There's nothing profound about this post. In some ways, these are the breaks, and I guess if I can just hold on to this house for the next 5 or 10 years, I'll be more or less okay after that.

But there's no way out of this place I'm in. In the short term, I can't win, I can't break even, and I can't quit the game.

And you know what's left.

HSUS: We must kill this pit bull to save it

I want to propose a new law: No pit bull or other dog bred or conditioned for dog fighting can be killed without a behavioral and medical evaluation by a qualified person or organization experienced with the rehabilitation of these kinds of dogs. If such qualified person or organization deems the dog to be treatable, he or she must be made available to a qualified rehabilitation or sanctuary organization for care, treatment, rehoming/sanctuary. Only if the dog is deemed to be untreatable, or no such group can/will take the dog, can he or she be killed.

I'm normally against legislative "fixes," but I'm beyond done with the outdated, inhumane, and wrong-headed policy of slaughtering all dogs "saved" from dog fighting situations -- down to puppies born after the bust, puppies taken away from their foster homes to be killed, as was just done in Wilkes County, North Carolina to 145 dogs "saved" from a fighting ring.

And our friends at the Humane Society of the United States? I'm done with you, too, until you rescind your stated support for the slaughter of these dogs. It's been proven with thousands of dogs already, most famously with Michael Vick's rehabbed fighters, that these dogs can and must be evaluated individually, and you will have no credibility with me or anyone else with two functioning brain cells and a drop of compassion until you say: We thought we were right, but we were wrong. Pit bulls deserve a chance, like any other dog.

Either that, or "humane" clearly does not mean what I always thought it did.

More here, from Gina Spadafori at Pet Connection, who also links to some prime rantage on the subject from Nathan Winograd, as well as from Best Friends Animal Society (who have given lifetime sanctuary to some of the Vick pit bulls),  and the brave, good folks at BAD RAP -- from whom I snagged that photo of one of the vicious irredeemable fighting dogs slaughtered in Wilkes County.

Bizarre dreams: I haz them!

I had the strangest dream last night. In it, I was supposed to meet Renee O'Connor to do an interview with her. She asked me to meet her at a salon/day spa, so I did. She was having her hair colored, and the hairdresser didn't know how to touch up the roots and hairline properly, and was leaving big patches of untinted hair all over the place.

Then my mother came in to get a facial, and a lady was there who had been waiting two hours already and was wondering how much longer it would be.

I ended up doing Renee's hair color myself, and I'm not sure what happened to my mom. The dream morphed into some strange thing about an opposum with some kind of horrible skin disease living in my garage.

I have serious doubts about my sanity, not so much because of that dream, but because I just told everyone about it.

Catching up with Design Star's Matt Locke

 As part of my very difficult and important job as a girl reporter, as well as AfterElton.com's go-to-girl (I just typoed that as "go-go-girl" which would be a lot more interesting,wouldn't it?) on all things HGTV, I got a screener for this weekend's upcoming episode of HGTV Showdown, a design competition series.

They sent it to me because, of course, it had the gay. And in this case, the gay it had was last season's Design Star first runner-up Matt Locke, who I'd interviewed a couple of times for AE. I was scheduled to interview him today, and I did, but before that, I put the DVD in and watched it. (See how hard it is to be a girl reporter?)

The announcer introduced the contestants. Team One was Design Star Season Two winner Kim Myles of Myles of Style, paired with Matt, who was the runner-up in Season Three.

Team Two was Design Star Season Three winner Jennifer Bertrand, along with Kim's Season Two runner-up, Todd Davis, a blond surfer dude type.

Just to put what I'm about to say in context, Kim is African-American, Jennifer is, of course, a woman as well as visibly pregnant, and Matt, well... we know about Matt.

So, everyone is chit-chatting and then Todd says that he intends to win because he's not "going to be beaten by a chick."

I thought to myself, Todd, you're going down -- just as Kim was saying the same thing out loud on my teevee.

Oh, and one other thing: you already were "beaten by a chick," Todd dear. That's why you're the sidekick and Kim has her own show.

Journalistic ethics prevent me from telling you how it all turned out, but it will be on this Sunday night at 9 PM ET/PT on HGTV.

Forgive me for bringing the politics to the pop culture, but there's something very, very wrong about the only straight, white man on that stage saying something like that. 

On a happier note, Matt says his career has exploded since his appearance on Design Star. He's been doing design work for clients, pitching a television show to the various networks, and making public appearances all over the country. I asked him what kind of show he wanted to do, and his answer reminded me of the first thing we bonded over when I interviewed him last year: a mutual love of designer Candice Olson, whose Canadian show Divine Design airs on HGTV.

"I tried to pitch something like 'an American version of Candice Olson,'" he told me, "but it will never happen here. The Canadian government subsidizes those shows, and the homeowners pay for at least part of the work she does. We just don't have the budgets here for that kind of work. It will never happen."

Wow, Matt, way to break my heart; I'm sick of all the new "faux drama" reality crap on HGTV, like Property Shop and Buy Me. "That's what viewers like these days," he told me. "That's the direction HGTV is going in more and more."

Then we reminisced about 80s music, but some things are, you know, personal.

Don't forget to watch Showdown, and root for Matt and Kim!

WTF, California?

 What is wrong with this state?

California's budget crisis may be "solved," with news of a tentative agreement leaking out today. Via Kim Thornton at Pet Connection, from the Sacramento Bee:

Multiple legislative sources said Tuesday that it would raise revenues temporarily by these means:

• Increasing the state's sales tax by 1 cent on the dollar.

• Increasing gasoline taxes by 12 cents per gallon.

• Raising the state's vehicle license fee from the current 0.65 percent of a vehicle's value to 1.15 percent, with 1 percent going to the general fund and local law enforcement getting 0.15 percent.

• Increasing the personal income tax across the board, either by assessing a surcharge on tax liability or increasing the tax rate.

Sigh, regressive taxes. Morons.

The vehicle license fee should never have been lowered in the first place -- that Ahnold brainstorm alone is responsible for a good bit of the state's financial problems.

The income tax is a no-brainer, and if we had good public transit across the state, the gas tax, too.

But to increase sales tax and, under the circumstances, the gas tax, is to simply crush people who are already barely making it to what, divert the wrath of the Republicans if they dared increase the income tax too much? Maybe they should read this New York Times op-ed by Netflix founder Reed Hastings:

I’m the chief executive of a publicly traded company and, like my peers, I’m very highly paid. The difference between salaries like mine and those of average Americans creates a lot of tension, and I’d like to offer a suggestion. President Obama should celebrate our success, rather than trying to shame us or cap our pay. But he should also take half of our huge earnings in taxes, instead of the current one-third.

Then, the next time a chief executive earns an eye-popping amount of money, we can cheer that half of it is going to pay for our soldiers, schools and security. Higher taxes on huge pay days can finance opportunity for the next generation of Americans.

[....]

This week, President Obama proposed imposing a $500,000 compensation cap on companies seeking a bailout. It’s a terrible idea. We all want the taxpayers’ money returned, and capping compensation at bailout recipients will just make it that much harder for those boards to hire and hold on to the executives who can lead their companies to compete and thrive.

Perhaps a starting place for “tax, not shame” would be creating a top federal marginal tax rate of 50 percent on all income above $1 million per year. Some will tell you that would reduce the incentive to earn but I don’t see that as likely. Besides, half of a giant compensation package is still pretty huge, and most of our motivation is the sheer challenge of the job anyway.

Instead of trying to shame companies and executives, the president should take advantage of our success by using our outsized earnings to pay for the needs of our nation.

I will never understand why people in this country aren't rioting in the streets.

Barack Obama is letting us down just like they said he would

I'm really disappointed in Barack Obama.

I mean, the man's been president for 14 days... FOURTEEN!... and where the hell is that puppy he promised us?