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Purple Pipedreams

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:34:13 -0700

Banning has been discussing purple pipe for most of the last decade.

Purple pipe carries recycled water, which is a silly term, since all water is recycled. The supply of water on Earth is fixed, and the planet isn’t likely to get more. You see, scientists have announced that water is not native to the Earth; it may have come here millions of years ago as ice crystals in asteroids that bombarded the planet. The Water Planet originally had no water.

Or, of course, God could have put it here when he created the universe 5,000 years ago, if you’re Sarah Palin.

To be more accurate, purple pipe carries wastewater that has been treated, but is not considered potable (suitable for cooking, washing and drinking). The purple pipe water can be used for watering lawns, which accounts for about 70 percent of the average single family home’s water usage, if you average various expert analyses. Lawn grass is the US number one crop; we spend three times as much water on lawn grass as we do on growing corn, according to a satellite-based study done by NASA scientist Cristina Milesi.

At first glance, it seems like a great idea to get two cycles of use out of the same water before returning into the ground, but those first impressions can be misleading. Purple pipe is very expensive to lay, and pumping that treated water uphill takes a lot of energy.

Beaumont has purple pipe, why not Banning? The answer is very simple: Beaumont happens to be in the Santa Ana River basin, while neighboring Banning is in (believe it or not) the Colorado River basin. In theory, a drop of water west of Highland Springs Road will wind up in the Pacific via the Santa Ana River, while a drop east of the same road in Banning will wind up in the Pacific Ocean via the Colorado River and the Sea of Cortez.

The Santa Ana River is a source of drinking water for many Southern California communities, including some very wealthy, powerful towns in Orange County. The OC has a very dicey water table, to boot; all its underground fresh water is floating on top of salt water. If too much water were pumped out, the wells would produce saltwater instead of fresh. This is considered déclassé in Costa Mesa, my good man.

The lower Colorado River is a swampy part of Mexico, and thus its water quality is of little interest to US legislators, even though it should be.

To keep the beautiful people (a figure of speech) in Orange County happy, the hoi polloi upstream along the Santa Ana River have been given lots of very specific water regulations. One of them is that any town in the Santa Ana River Basin must have purple pipe. Beaumont, not known for spending any money it doesn’t have to, had to have purple pipe, but carefree Banning does not.

Purple pipe is touted as some kind of Green miracle because it recycles water, but all of Banning’s wastewater already is recycled. It flows by gravity, something the utilities have not figured out how to charge for yet, down to the treatment plant at the low point in town on its southeast side. There it gets secondary treatment (Santa Ana River towns must use tertiary treatment, which takes longer and is more expensive).

Then the treated water is percolated into the ground, where most of it slowly seeps back into the Banning Basin aquifer. As it seeps, the filtering action of the soil and the microbes therein perform a miracle of cleansing, so that the treated water is wonderfully fresh again by the time it joins other water molecules being drawn towards the city’s wells. It’s classic recycling cheaply done.

There would be no major ecological benefit in Banning going to purple pipe, since Banning has no major source of drinking water to pollute. The local river, the mighty San Gorgonio, is barely visible in summer above Banning, where it’s the size of a creek, and flows underground below Banning. It flows into the Whitewater River, also a strictly underground operation for all of its course south of Interstate 10. Because the water in those rivers flows underground, it cleans up nicely, and fewer people depend on them for drinking water compared to the Santa Ana (the Whitewater is but one part of a complex Coachella Valley aquifer).

Only one section of Banning is gung-ho for purple pipe — Sun Lakes Country Club, the 55+ subdivision that is Banning’s most affluent neighborhood (no resemblance to Newport Beach, Rancho Mirage or Costa Mesa, however). Sun Lakers want Banning to build a purple pipeline from the treatment plant to their golf course, a distance of almost exactly five miles, according to Google Earth (satellite technology and very accurate). But wait, as the Sham-wow guy likes to say — as expensive as it would be to build a five-mile pipeline (right of way alone could be quite a project), Google Earth puts the treatment plant at 2,130 feet of elevation and the golf course at 2,532 feet. The city would have to pay big bucks to pump millions of gallons of water up 400 feet as it travels the five miles. That’s a huge energy cost, as water is very heavy; according to all the sources Lawrence checked, a cubic foot of water weighs 62.42796 lbs. (slightly less on a hot summer day when density decreases)!

Sun Lakers want the purple pipe water because they think it would be much cheaper than fresh water and thus reduce their irrigation tab — and that’s their real pipedream. If Sun Lakers had to pay the actual costs of importing purple pipe water, it would be quite expensive, and they would be claiming that the city misled them.

Of course, some Sun Lakers want Banning to foot the bill, even though Sun Lakes would be the only part of town to use purple pipe. These tend to be the same Sun Lakers who loudly proclaim their preference for “less government.” Hmmmm…

What Sun Lakes could do to reduce its water bill is to require smart sprinkler systems that don’t automatically water the lawn when it’s raining out. The community could replace existing public landscape with xeriscape, which requires a fraction of the irrigation, and reward homeowners who do the same.

Banning is struggling to balance its budget, and building a tertiary treatment plant and a five-mile pipeline just to appease its wealthiest citizens — who would then be paying more, not less for their irrigation water — would be a horrible waste of money, a bad joke, and a big nothing for the environment.

It’s obvious that the Banning Misinformer Web site, which plans on backing two candidates in the fall city council election — Ed Miller and Lyndon Taylor — was too busy shrieking like a banshee to examine whether purple pipe is a particularly good idea for Banning. It isn’t, and the city has been wise not to build it.
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Whacko Banning “Informer” Inflates More Lies

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:38:01 -0700

In the Wacky World of Wingnuts, the main pastime seems to be taking an iota of truth and running with it — not just a few yards, but a genuine 10k or better.

Poor Banning is blessed with just such a Web site, the Banning “Informer.” A creation largely inspired by the right-wing politics of Joe Lucsko, a former Banning city councilman and GOP hit man (he digs up dirt on candidates and sells it to their rivals), the Misinformer crew consists of a few Teabaggers who helped the successful fight against a sludge incinerator disguised as a Green power plant that Liberty Energy wanted to build in southeast Banning. The incinerator would have been fueled by trucking 158 18-wheelers full of sludge through a residential neighborhood 24 hours each day! Once the project was exposed for what it was, it was not difficult to defeat.

Once these whackos got their taste of political success, they decided they should run Banning. Something as insignificant as the truth, they seemed to conclude, shouldn’t stand in their way. They’ve been manufacturing sludge of their own ever since.

Their funniest joke is “the Botts Cabal.” The Misinformer tries to make the case that all five city council members are part of some Bell-like conspiracy to defraud the taxpayers. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the Banning City Council knows that its greatest challenge is getting the council members to be civil to one another, the members’ politics are so different. The Misinformer’s “cabal” is about as likely as a conspiracy between Rush Limbaugh and Barack Obama.

The Web site’s latest exaggeration takes another tiny sliver of the truth and inflates it to resemble the Goodyear blimp. The sliver is that the city of Banning used income from its water and wastewater utility as collateral for a capital improvements bond. It was considered a conservative investment by those who do these things, because the payment on the bond was well within the existing revenue stream of the utility and not based on some pie-in-the-sky projection of expanded “future revenue.”

The bond was proposed by then-city manager Randy Anstine and okayed by city attorneys before the council voted to build a badly needed police station (the old one was so small that a big part of the force had to work out of a building several miles away from it), a new water reservoir on Brinton Ranch property northwest of the intersection of Wilson and Sunset streets, and two projects for Banning kids — a new swimming pool and a skate park. All legal requirements for the bond issue were met.

The Misinformer wants readers to believe that the council promised Sun Lakes some purple pipe (reclaimed water) for its golf course and then reneged. This is another misrepresentation; providing purple pipe water for Sun Lakes has been on the council’s list — why, Lawrence will never know, as it’s a horrible idea — but never finalized, which hopefully it never will be.

The bond was legal, according to lawyers far more versed than Lawrence, not a “violation of Prop 218” as claimed by the Misinformer. Prop 218, passed in 1996, basically forced governments to submit certain items to the voters for approval. Nowhere in it can Lawrence find any provision that bonds collateralized on water/wastewater revenue have to be spent on water projects. The Misinformer figured that readers would take its (not to be trusted) word for that. You can read the Legislative Analyst’s explanation of Prop 218 here, and if you find any legal substantiation of the Misinformer’s Martian legal interpretations, Lawrence would love to hear about it.

All the projects designated to possibly receive funding from the bond issue were clearly delineated in the bond proposal. In fact, the entire bond issue was done quickly and done well, something the City of Banning is not famous for. And it was completely above-board.

Faux News Channel is proof that if you scream long and loud enough, some people will believe you. That’s obviously the Misinformer’s strategy, and one that the majority of the voting public has begun to tire of. Teabaggism is a classic case of preaching to the already converted, and fortunately for Banning, it’s a congregation as small in number as it is small-minded.
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Next: Why purple pipe for Sun Lakes is an idea whose time has died and should be given a proper burial.

Morons at the Mall

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:04:19 -0700

Parking my ancient minivan The Stinkbomb in a Beaumont mall lot, I witnessed how truly stupid pet owners can be.

A fat old lady and a young man pulled up in a snazzy sports car that no doubt set one of them back quite a bit of dough — a convertible with the top up. Perched between them was an older Chihuahua just a shade less fat than the old lady. Chihuahuas, in Lawrence’s experience, are exuberant dogs with quite a bit of personality, and this old señora was no exception.

The young man lowered his window, as did the fat lady, which is de rigueur when a dog is being left in a Southern California car. Even then the situation seemed dicey; the cubic footage of the tiny two-seater would heat up rapidly in the strong southern sun. Lawrence, who had left Junior T. Dog at home because of the sun and heat, was worried for the old Chihuahua.

Then he was horrified. Instead of lowering the windows enough to let in the wind, but keep the dog inside the car, these two bozos lowered their windows all the way, got out of the car and walked into Home Depot.

The dog jumped over to the passenger side to get a better look at them departing, then hopped out of the driver’s side window onto the car’s tiny window ledge, where it looked in consternation at the receding figure of its owner. Lawrence prayed it had been trained to stay in the car, but no.

In a twink the Chihuahua had jumped off of the car into the busy mall parking lot, with contractor’s trucks, delivery trucks and customers’ vehicles zooming by.

Nobody drives a mall lot looking for critters; they look for parking spaces.

Lawrence didn’t find out what happened to the Chihuahua. The lack of squealing brakes probably meant that the dog made it to the front door of the huge store, where hopefully it reunited with its owner — off-leash in a busy store where the aisles are patrolled by forklifts full of lumber, cement and other improvement goodies.

Fortunately, the sports car was gone when Lawrence returned to the Stinkbomb, so there was no temptation to remind the pair that they are two of the dumbest assholes in Beaumont.

Not that it’s necessary — Lawrence remembers a moment with the great Mike Royko, syndicated columnist for the glorious Chicago Daily News and later for the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. Royko and Lawrence were known to have a few beverages together at the Billy Goat Tap, the Chicago tavern — halfway between the Sun-Times and Tribune in those days — when Royko was in the mood, which was sometimes for the mercurial Mike.

Royko walked down the stairs into the Billy Goat and at the top of his lungs yelled, “ASSHOLES!!”

Once Royko had consumed a cocktail and seemed less agitated, Lawrence casually asked to whom he had been aiming his epithet.

The brilliant columnist fixed Lawrence with a glare and said, “They know who they are.”

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Final Lap: It’s Landis vs. Lemond!

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 11:03:01 -0700

One more blog inspired by the Tour de France, and then I’ll shut up about it (it’s over).

The Lance Armstrong era came to its predictably anticlimactic end today, with Team Radio Shack nailing down the overall team competition in Paris. Of course, when Lance was winning seven General Category championships in a row in Paris, the t.v. coverage rarely reported on the team standings. But the US public is interested in all things Lance, so we got a big segment on the team championship. After all, it’s almost as important a prize as the Team On-Base Percentage Championship in major league baseball…

The near future should determine whether or not Lance will become the Barry Bonds of cycling, a title currently co-held by many, many cyclists. Doping was more prevalent in cycling than in any other sport this side of horse racing (a great thing about racehorses, if you’re a crook, is their inability to cut plea agreements or testify in court). One of the title co-holders is of course Floyd Landis, the Moron of Temecula, who is — appropriately for the right-wing Redneck Ring — a lapsed Mennonite who repeatedly lied about the drugs he took to win the Tour de France.

Branching out from cheating and lying into extortion, Landis sent emails to Lance Armstrong and Andy Messick, director of the Tour of California stage race, threatening to expose Armstrong’s alleged doping if Landis’s team weren’t chosen for the California race. Armstrong and Messick refused to play Landis’ game, Landis’ team didn’t get into the Tour of California, and Floyd — despite pleas from concerned friends — made good on his threat.

As a result, the feds are looking at Armstrong as part of a doping investigation that will probably indict baseball pitcher Roger Clemmons and would no doubt love to indict Bonds, both on charges of giving false testimony to a grand jury (maybe they could hire Bill Clinton as their lawyer; he knows a bit about the subject). Armstrong, a careful guy, has hired a defense attorney and is taking the investigation seriously.

All of this has resurrected the whimperings of Greg LeMond, whom many of us believe is the Bill “Spaceman” Lee of pro cycling: a complete and utter screwball, with the added glitter of loving to litigate. There isn’t much that LeMond has been involved in that he hasn’t sued over. Most recently, he got his line of bicycles back from Trek after a nasty court battle, and Trek’s statements after the fact revealed a huge corporate sigh of relief at not having to deal with the cycling screwball any longer.

LeMond wants to be known as the greatest US cyclist ever, but won far fewer Tour de France GC competitions and fewer stages of that race than Armstrong. LeMond’s only hope is to discredit Armstrong, which Greg has been working hard at for years.

His latest Whacko Attack on Lance was claiming that Armstrong hired somebody for $300,000 to give false testimony that LeMond used a banned substance to win the Tour de France — a charge that Armstrong denied, of course.

Thus, the stage is set for the highly prized Jose Canseco of Cycling contest: Landis vs. LeMond. If Armstrong is indicted by the feds, each will have a strong claim to being the Jose Canseco to Lance’s Barry Bonds. At that point, expect each of them to turn on the other in a flurry of fantastic allegations that Barnum himself would envy.

I would expect LeMond, who has been doing fantastic allegations for years, to be the favorite, but the Moron of Temecula should not be counted out in such a contest, as Bob Ballard never has made it to the depths to which Landis is willing to dive. I see the final lap as Landis blaming LeMond for the Holocaust while Lemond insists that Landis was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center airplane attacks.

All of this sound and fury brings up another key question: who are the most arrested developers in the world, actors or athletes? Freud himself would be hard-pressed to answer that one.
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Lance the Mortal

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:00:26 -0700

The Tour de France is heading for Paris this weekend, its final stage. Lance Armstrong is back in the race, sort of.

Plagued by crashes and no longer a spring chicken at 38, Armstrong is down the standings in 23rd — a position most racers covet, but a disappointment for the seven-time champion. It looks as if he might finish the race, itself no small accomplishment for a bike racer of any age. The Tour routinely discards about one-third of its entrants, and just getting picked for a Tour de France team is a sporting accomplishment comparable to making the NBA in basketball. Only 180 cyclists compete in the Tour each year.

To see how badly Armstrong has fared, look at the racer just ahead of him in the standings — Christophe Moreau, who’s just as old as Armstrong and also riding his final Tour de France (though athletes are never to be trusted when they announce their retirements). Moreau was a great hope of the French, who have gone through a horrible era in their own race when French cyclists won very few stages and no overall victories since the long ago days of Bernard Hinault. But Moreau was no Hinault and never breathed down the necks of Jan Ullrich, Marco Pantani or Lance Armstrong, with whom he was expected to compete. Moreau, to be blunt, is not in Armstrong’s league, yet he is beating Lance in this year’s race.

Armstrong had put together an Over the Hill Gang of racers with Radio Shack as team sponsor — a decidedly over-the-hill retailer (if you don’t believe Lawrence, try using its archaic Web site to shop). Andreas Kloden and Levi Leipheimer are only slightly past their primes, but their age is showing in the latter stages of the race, when older bodies simply can’t rebound like 23 year-old Andy Schleck, currently in second place only 8 seconds behind the imperious Alberto Contador, best stage racer in the world.

Armstrong thought he could take on Contador. The hype on t.v. was, “Is he the old Lance, or just old?” Sadly, it’s the latter. Lance has lacked the speed of Bob Hayes, once billed as “the world’s fastest human,” and looked more like Gabby Hayes.

But it has been a memorable race between Contador and young Schleck, a stringbean who could be a Tour champion once he muscles up enough to compete in the time trial, a stage in which individuals race against the clock. Saturday’s time trial will likely give Contador another Tour yellow jersey for overall winner.

Leipheimer and Kloden should roll into Paris about 15 minutes behind Contador and Schleck. That sounds like a lot until you remember that they will have been racing for more than 90 hours. That means the winner will have cycled 1.6 percent faster than Levi and Andreas over three weeks of racing.

In fact, the loser of the race, somewhere down around 170th place depending on who drops out in the last two stages, will have averaged about 1 mph slower than the first place finisher.

These men ride up the Alps and Pyrenees faster than most of us ride a bike on the flats, and they have done it every day for hundreds of kilometers over three grueling weeks. Ironman triathlons are exhausting, but only for a day. The Tour goes on and on and on, to the point where cyclists have exhausted so much of their energy reserves that they begin to metabolize their own bones. In true European fashion, the continent that gave us bullfighting, cockfighting, and boxing has come up with yet another sport designed to be brutal.
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Great Ways To Beat the Heat

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:21:32 -0700

The weather forecast for the Redneck Ring is dire — temperatures are hovering around the 100-degree mark in the afternoons, humidity is higher than usual, and last night Palm Springs was 103 degrees at 11 p.m.

Strategies are needed to deal with this heat. Some should be active, others passive. Some should be perky, others serene. Some should be pink, to match the tile in the bathroom.

A great way to beat the heat is to wake up at 5 a.m. and do your most active things after a quick cup of coffee. This is the famous Workout in a Coma tactic. Cutting your lawn at 6 a.m. also is a great way to meet those neighbors who tend to keep to themselves — and learn some colorful new language from them.

Running or cycling just before first light can be an exhilarating experience, as rattlesnakes tend to gather on the edge of the pre-dawn roadway to soak up the heat stored in the pavement, and most large predators like mountain lions are at their most active about then. You’ll never go faster!

If you’re a musician, bartender or server, no problem — just swing your hot weather workout to the tail end of your workday, which should be about the same time as the 5 a.m. wakeup crowd’s. There’s nothing quite like gigging all night, eating weird food at an all-night dive along with a few drinks, trying to find love in all the wrong places, and then attempting an exercise regimen aimed at providing you with washboard abs after dropping off that person whose name is right on the tip of your consciousness, maybe. Just make sure your gym provides you with airplane bags.

Do not, repeat, do not attempt to fry an egg on the sidewalk tomorrow morning unless you think you’ll look great in a jacket with buckles and locking sleeves. Besides, the bacon invariably attracts ants.

Some great things not to do in the heat: golf, backpacking, furniture stripping, removing sod, multiple margaritas. Lawrence would include “work of any kind,” but this is the Redneck Ring and there is no work.

Intense heat lends itself more to watching the Tour de France in an air-conditioned room, ice cream, taking a mime class, ice cream, going to a night baseball game as close to the coast as you can get, ice cream, or perhaps just ice cream. Eating it way too fast is an excellent way to prepare for mime class, because you will not be able to talk. If you can’t have ice cream because you’re diabetic or lactose intolerant, chilled fruit is an excellent alternative. Actually, it’s nothing like the thrill of ice cream, but writers in women’s magazines always make asinine suggestions like that to make the ice cream losers feel better.

“I had chilled raspberries for dessert last night,” a matron under blow dryer number three will say after reading such crap, “and it was twice as good as ice cream.” Then the other hair salon women will stab her to death with nail files. This maintains the so-called Balance of Nature.

Bedouins who live in the very heart of the Arabian Desert wear all-black clothing in the heat. No wonder there are terrorists! The Bedouins claim that their shade of black reflects heat more effectively than white. You’ve met those Bedouins; they hang out at the end of the bar and insist that Ron Santo belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame, that Aaron Copeland was a second-rate composer and that Coke II tasted better than Classic. They drive Pontiacs. They make their girls wear veils and cover themselves from head to foot, while Mom is teaching her daughters all kinds of fabulous vulvic muscular techniques for pleasing men in bed (even more interesting than mime class!), a skill Bedouin women are famous for. Bedouins, you see, are stark raving bonkers, and Lawrence can tell you what made them that way: the heat.
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Sad Skies, GershwinTrampled, Luggage Lost

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 23:35:59 -0700

Four a.m. on July Fourth at O’Hare Airport in Chicago is not a particularly busy time there, though for some reason the Delta security line was backed up with hundreds waiting to get through.

Lawrence thought, how lucky I am to be flying United instead! But that turned out to be a total fantasy.

The skycap at United, the only one on duty, seemed angry at the world and was downright belligerent. Did he say, “Good morning, and welcome to United Airlines?” No, he glared at Lawrence and shouted, “I need to see some ID!” as if Lawrence must be hard of hearing.

After checking the ID, he shouted, “I need a credit or debit card!” United charges $25 to check a bag, and the only reasons Lawrence had for checking his bag, which was small enough to carry on, were that he had forgotten the security rules and brought his Swiss Army knife and a nail file to Chicago in Nicole’s car, and that he had to change planes in San Francisco with a fairly long layover there, on which he preferred not to carry a bag around.

The skycap gave him his ticket and baggage receipt and kept shouting the gate number at him, as if the bag check were a terrible burden on the skycap’s time. He had two assistants — three men to check one bag — but they were busy flirting with some United female employees who were arriving to work. Lawrence thought in hindsight that the old guy was probably just angry that he had to work on a holiday and decided to take it out on Lawrence.

So, for the first time in his life, Lawrence stiffed a skycap — just took his ticket and walked away, figuring that his stuff would wind up in Paris or Beijing as the old guy went utterly ballistic and screamed after him.

Lawrence was wrong; while the baggage tag had been issued, the bag itself never was scanned into United’s baggage system. The old skycap either threw it away or stole it.

Lawrence got the news in the Ontario airport from a baggage guy who approached him as Lawrence looked at the last of his flight’s luggage circling on the baggage claim conveyor. Filling out the lost baggage claim made Lawrence miss his train in Rancho Cucamonga, but there was another to San Bernardino two hours later. He got home about 6:30 p.m. California time, or 16 hours after running into the skycap. His Chicago plane had departed late after an onboard United employee collapsed and had to be taken away in an ambulance (hopefully not a pilot), but the long ‘Frisco layover paid off in that he made his Ontario flight, even if his bag hadn’t even made it into O’Hare.

Since there is no sign of the bag a week later, Lawrence is filling out a four-page United Baggage Tracing/Claim Form, and some distant day he may see some reimbursement for the loss of CDs, prized T-shirts, Teva sandals, a phone charger, and many other items. He is slowly beginning to replace the stolen items. Not lost: stolen.

His efforts to get the skycap investigated have so far failed miserably. United was quick to point out that the skycaps work for a vendor, and Ms. Lucas, a skycap supervisor whom Nicole tracked down a couple days later, was very sympathetic, took copious notes and has never been heard from again.

Lawrence could tell you about the sad faces of United employees, who get grief from management even though employees own the company (or at least used to before it went bankrupt — wiping out its employees unions’ investments — and dumped all its pension responsibilities on the US government — i.e., you and me. However, that would be a highly subjective statement — better you should visit www.Untied.com, a site inspired by United’s corporate-wide lack of competency, and read what said employees and other customers have to say. Hint: it ain’t pretty.

Lawrence had been very sad about what United’s ads did to Gershwin’s music. He didn’t realize that it was just another hint of how a corporation can lay down and simply stop caring about people as it lusts after profits.

The latest horniness is a proposed merger with Continental Airlines, which would result in the largest airline in the US. Weirdly, the new airline would be called United.

“Let's just hope that they adopt Continental's corporate culture. It's dramatically better than United's,” Dean Headley, associate professor of marketing at the W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University, told the Houston Chronicle.

The Barton School released its annual airline quality report in April.
Continental moved up to sixth place in the ranking from eighth the previous year, while United dropped to 13th from 11th.

That made the CEO of United, Glen Tilton, also sad, so he built himself a $2.2 million beach house in Florida to revive his flagging spirits while you and I pay for his 46,000 employees’ pensions.
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