Reimagining how we elect our local officials…
7 minute read
October 1, 2020, 11:17 PM
There comes a point where you have to admit that a process is broken. In this case, I have reached that conclusion with the way that we elect the county council and county executive in Montgomery County, Maryland. Our current county executive, Marc Elrich, is the result of such a broken system. Elrich is a real stinker in my book for a number of reasons, and I admit that I didn’t vote for him in the primary or the general election, because I saw his being a stinker from a mile away.
But this entry isn’t about Elrich specifically. Rather, it’s about the process that brought him into office. And ultimately, the problem is that Montgomery County is using a bipartisan process for electing its officials when the county is overwhelmingly one party – Democratic, in this instance. The way that it works should be quite familiar to most of you: candidates of a given party run for office and compete in a primary election in the spring to determine who will be the nominee for the general election the following November, where all of the various parties’ nominees compete, and the winner of that contest takes office a few months later. Many, if not most, jurisdictions use this to choose their elected officials. However, it does depend to a large extent on having multiple viable political parties. It starts to fall apart when one party completely dominates the process, and none of the other parties’ candidates have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being elected. In that case, the dominant party’s primary is the “real” election, and the general election is a formality. In other words, the result is already a foregone conclusion after the primary is done.
This situation is not unique to Montgomery County by any means. DC is similar, with the Democratic Party’s being the dominant political party over everything else to the point that the other parties don’t matter (save for an at-large council seat that is required to be a different party than the others), and the Democratic primary is generally considered to be the deciding contest for the mayoral race.
Continue reading…Categories: Montgomery County, State and local politics
Apparently, this happens to me once a decade…
6 minute read
September 20, 2020, 2:32 PM
Saturday night’s drive home was definitely a more eventful one than I would have preferred. Driving home from work (I currently work out of a division in Virginia), I tend to take Route 267 to the Beltway to I-270 and then to Route 355 (i.e. Rockville Pike) on my way north to Montgomery Village. The details in MoCo tend to vary depending on my mood. Sometimes I take 270 all the way to Shady Grove and cut over there, and sometimes I get off lower down and do more travel on Rockville Pike. Saturday night was the latter, where I got off on Democracy Boulevard and took Rockville Pike all the way from North Bethesda to Gaithersburg.
At the intersection with First Street (the one with the CVS and the Wendy’s with the glass sign), I was sitting at a red light in the middle lane, and I saw a car run the red light at a high rate of speed in the right lane. They were going quickly enough that I could feel their wake as they went by (and I felt them before I saw them). Then a few seconds later, just as the light turned green, a Maryland state trooper went past me, again at a high rate of speed, with lights off, to my left. I kind of assumed that they were related, and that I would see the trooper pull the other vehicle over at some point on my way home. So I had my eyes peeled, as I expected to see blue lights at some point.
Then, just before the intersection with Mannakee Street, a deer darted out in front of me, and with not enough space to swerve to avoid and not enough distance to stop, we made contact. I remember screaming as we hit, and I saw the deer sort of stagger away. I stopped the car immediately, right there in the center lane. I got out, looked at the front of the car, and saw a brand new hole where the grille used to be, pieces of the front of the car sticking out of the front, as well as bits and pieces of the Honda logo on the road. Then, realizing that the engine was still running, and seeing nothing dripping out from underneath, I moved the car to the parking lot of Cameron’s Seafood, and after letting Elyse know that I would be delayed, called 911 to report the accident. Surprisingly, 911 told me that for a deer strike, they weren’t going to send an officer to take a report, and just to follow up with the insurance.
Categories: Driving, Honda HR-V (2018), Rockville
I bought myself a toy…
6 minute read
September 19, 2020, 2:12 PM
Soooooooooo… I recently got myself a toy. I went on Etsy and bought myself a full-size retro arcade machine. Check it out:
Categories: House, Video games
Twenty years ago, Schumin Web started to get noticed…
10 minute read
September 7, 2020, 9:37 PM
It has now been twenty years since Schumin Web really started to get noticed by people. My first four years doing this site, I was having fun, but I always assumed, in those very early days of the Internet, that very few people were actually looking (though I had no way of measuring it at that time). But that was okay, because ultimately, it gave me an outlet to express myself, and I was having fun doing it.
Then, in the summer of 2000, things started to change. I was featured as “Geek of the Month” in the June 2000 issue of the now-defunct magazine Front, a men’s lifestyle magazine from the UK, i.e. a “lads’ mag”. Check it out:
Categories: Netculture, Popular culture, Reddit, Schumin Web meta
Flying over the Shenandoah Valley…
8 minute read
August 27, 2020, 11:25 PM
Recently, Elyse got a copy of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator game, which, among other things, features real landscapes based on map data. However, it’s not without its issues, since, if it doesn’t have good data for buildings and such, it attempts to fill in the gaps by rendering a building, taking a guess as to what kind of building it’s supposed to be. When there is good building data, the buildings look correct, as is the case in much of Howard County, Maryland. Down in Augusta County, that’s not the case, and most of the buildings are rendered by the game, doing its darndest to make a good guess. To accomplish this evening’s field trip, Elyse dropped us at Eagle’s Nest Airport, which is a privately-owned airport just outside Waynesboro. I didn’t have to fly the plane. Rather, we left the plane on the runway, and just flew around with the camera. I didn’t want to have to fly an airplane, after all. I just wanted to have a little eye in the sky. So from Eagle’s Nest, I quickly got my bearings, and made a beeline to Stuarts Draft.
First thing that I took a look at was my old middle school, Stuarts Draft Middle School:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Harrisonburg, Staunton, Stuarts Draft, Video games, Waynesboro
A paint job for the living room…
10 minute read
August 21, 2020, 11:30 PM
Surprisingly, I never posted about the repainting project that I did in the living room, but better late than never, I suppose.
In any case, I embarked on a massive painting project last fall and winter that transformed the living room and hallways into something that looked the way that I wanted, rather than something that previous owners might have wanted. The project was something that I had planned from the outset upon moving in because, while I didn’t necessarily dislike the color of the living room and the hallways, the paint, depending on the location, was either in poor condition with a lot of old nail holes, or, in the case of the upstairs hallway specifically, never painted well to begin with. So rather than try to match the color, it made far more sense to just repaint the whole thing in a new color of my choosing.
In planning this project, I had to figure out how to make my living room look its best. My living room is long and narrow, and only has one window at the front. So most of the lighting would come from artificial sources, such as the overhead lights and the lamp. I ultimately decided to go with a sunnier color than what was there before on three sides, and then I also put a dark blue accent wall on the left side. That left wall is completely blank, which made it a good candidate for an accent color, since I could do just about anything that I wanted with it as far as furniture arrangement and decor went. I extended the new color up and down the stairs, since I found the transition between the tan living room and white stairs to be a bit jarring. Extending the living room color up the stairs and down to the basement just made sense.
Categories: House, Montgomery Village
Some sad looking retail…
6 minute read
August 9, 2020, 11:44 AM
On Saturday, Elyse, Aaron and Evan Stone, and I went out and visited the Kmart store in Aspen Hill, and the Sears store in White Oak. The last time that I had been to either of these stores was in 2017, well before the Sears bankruptcy. I had heard on social media about the way that the remaining non-closing Sears and Kmart stores were being merchandised, and I felt like it was time to see it for myself. What I saw was what I more or less expected based on what I saw online, but definitely not what someone might expect for a retail business that is still a going concern.
We first visited the Kmart on Connecticut Avenue, which is located less than a mile away from my old apartment on Hewitt Avenue. I knew this Kmart well enough, though I was never a regular there by any means. This is also the last Kmart in Maryland to remain a going concern, as the store in Edgewater is currently conducting a store-closing sale, and all of the other Kmart stores in Maryland are gone.
This is the state that the Aspen Hill store was in:
The exterior of the store.
Categories: Companies, Elyse, Friends, Retail, Silver Spring
Is it time to replace the national anthem?
5 minute read
July 29, 2020, 10:18 AM
An article from the Daily Mail was brought to my attention a while back about a few people who want to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem, ostensibly because author Francis Scott Key was a slave owner. Replacing “The Star-Spangled Banner” is something that I have had an opinion about for quite some time, though my own opinions about the song as our national anthem have more to do with the song itself, and not for anything that specifically has to do with Key.
First of all, though, for those not familiar, “The Star-Spangled Banner” originated as a poem about the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812. The poem was later given to his brother-in-law, Joseph H. Nicholson, who put the poem to the tune of “The Anacreontic Song“, which is essentially a drinking song that originated in London. If you’ve never heard the tune with its original lyrics, I encourage you to give it a listen, because it’s a good song. Nonetheless, hearing the way bands play the tune with such flourish as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then remembering that it originated as an English drinking song makes me chuckle.
I take issue with “The Star-Spangled Banner” for a few big reasons. First of all, the song is not about the country, but rather, it is specifically about the flag. Another problem with the song is that it glorifies war. And third, we can’t all see a little bit of ourselves in the song. For the first point, Americans have a very strange fascination with the flag. The thing about the flag is that it’s all well and good as a symbol that is associated with our country, but it’s only a symbol, and not actually the country. Thus I find people who get all up in arms about the way people behave in the flag’s presence to be a bit amusing. Our country is far from perfect. We have lots of problems that we need to sort through as a country, and the flag is often used to represent the country, like when people kneel in front of the flag as a respectful way to express various concerns about the direction that our country is taking. But some people treat the flag like it’s a god in its own right, to be worshipped and adored and held on a pedestal, and that’s not at all what the flag is about. It brings some truth to the meme about the flag that says, “If you don’t stand for the special song, the magical sky cloth won’t freedom.” Because that’s about how it sounds to someone like me, who views the flag as a symbol, separate from the thing that it represents. And then as far as the second point goes, we are altogether too eager to declare war on things. George Carlin put it best when he said, “We like war! We’re a war-like people! We like war because we’re good at it! You know why we’re good at it? Cause we get a lot of practice. This country’s only 200 years old and already, we’ve had 10 major wars. We average a major war every 20 years in this country, so we’re good at it!” And for some reason, people love to glorify it. And in regards to the last point, I feel like the song is distant to a lot of Americans. I can’t see myself at all in that song, being about a battle in a war that happened over two centuries ago, and I see the flag in its standard form most often used as a political statement by factions supporting issues that I don’t typically agree with. It all feels somewhat distant to me. It’s not necessarily the way that I would want to see America represented.
Categories: Music, National politics
Remember, do your research before you post…
3 minute read
July 18, 2020, 8:55 PM
Sometimes, people will share anything on social media without giving a second thought to just what they’re sharing. Recently, with coronavirus all over the news, a few folks that I know shared this:
Categories: COVID-19, Social media
Vegetable smoothies?
4 minute read
July 1, 2020, 5:20 PM
For a while now, Elyse and I had been coming up with ways to use up certain food items in the house that we were not going through. It stems from the way that my eating has changed ever since I had the sleeve surgery back in December. Ever since then, I can’t eat a regular-sized meal anymore, and haven’t eaten off of a regular-sized plate in a very long time. If I’m eating off of a plate, it’s one of the small plates, but more commonly, I eat out of a six-ounce ramekin, or out of a mug. That works for me for the most part, but with such limited capacity, I end up getting my protein in, but I haven’t been as good about vegetables. Typically, for vegetables, I try to throw some in when I make eggs, and then I also get it in when I make that vegan chili that I like. But I want to say that just that is probably insufficient, and so the thought came up about how to (A) get more vegetables in, and (B) use up several large bags of broccoli and California mix that have been sitting in my basement freezer ever since before the surgery.
So Elyse and I thought about making smoothies with what we have around the house. The idea seemed reasonable enough. I have a Ninja blender, and there was food that needed a purpose. The idea was to put it in and grind it up. The bag of vegetables that was on the top in the freezer was the broccoli:
Categories: Food and drink, Weight loss
How should one behave when responding to an unwanted surprise party?
10 minute read
June 26, 2020, 1:50 AM
I recently ran across an older Reddit post on /r/AmItheAsshole where someone asked the userbase to judge their reaction to an unwanted surprise party. This is what the user wrote:
Hi. So I turned 22 yesterday, and I’ve made it clear to my entire family that I didn’t want a party. In fact, I’ve never had a party, not for my 16th, or 18th, or 21st. I hate attention being on me.
So on Saturday, my dad told me he wanted to take me to my favorite bar and I thought that would be a decent compromise to wanting to be alone. However, when we walked into the door, there was my entire family and friends all standing there and they already had me a drink poured. Because I’d spent the last six months telling my familiy I did not want a party, I just turned around and walked right out the front door and straight back to my apartment (about a 15 minute walk), and I ordered Chinese takeout and went to sleep. I woke up to over 50 texts from various family members telling me how ungrateful I was and how I made my parents cry, and I even got a text from one of my family members who had visited from overseas who I wasn’t aware was at the party. I apologized to him for having a wasted journey, and told him we could hang out one day after work if he wanted, and I resolved that issue. However, the rest of my family now will not talk to me, and my mom is demanding an apology.
So, AITA?
A little pressure washing makes the backyard look like new again…
6 minute read
June 20, 2020, 9:40 PM
Sometimes, all that you need to make a space look like new is a little water… at 1,750 pounds per square inch. There’s really nothing like blowing the gunk off of something and making it look great. In this case, I did the backyard and deck in order to make them look like new. As far as “before” photos go, here’s what the backyard looked like when I toured the house in July 2017:
Categories: House
If this turns out to be the end, I think that they had a good run…
9 minute read
June 13, 2020, 11:43 PM
Some of the news that has come out of the various retail groups that I’m in on Facebook has centered around the rather dire financial situation that CEC Entertainment, the company that owns Chuck E. Cheese, has found itself in lately. In short, with the coronavirus pandemic and related closures, that has put the company in a bad financial situation. The articles that I’ve read have indicated that bankruptcy and liquidation are probably in the company’s near future. And really, if that is how it ends, that’s not the worst thing in the world.
First of all, though, I find the moves that the company has made since pandemic-related restrictions put the kibosh on their normal business to be rather curious, because it has tended to lay bare certain aspects of the business that they would probably rather not have everyone realize. One thing that I’ve seen posted online is that the company is selling the prizes outright, whereas normally, they are only available by redeeming prize tickets from the games. The asking prices show what the company thinks that those prizes are really worth, including a profit margin, rather than having the games and tickets as a middleman to obscure the actual value of these things. It makes me think of the mug that I won at ShowBiz Pizza for around 100 tickets, mostly via an arcade version of Bozo the Clown’s Grand Prize Game, played for tickets. I remember that the game was relatively generous with tickets, giving out one ticket per bucket successfully hit. That’s why I played it, because this game gave up to six tickets per play, while most games only gave out one or two tickets per play. Thus if I wanted something good, this was the machine to do it with. So assuming a perfect play every time, to get 100 tickets would have required 17 plays, or $4.25. But it probably ended up costing us a bit more than that because at around eight years old, I was not capable of doing a perfect play every time, and even getting to the sixth bucket at all, let alone making it, was pretty rare for me. A more realistic estimate for my size and skill at that time would be three tickets per play, which would require 34 plays and cost $8.50. And this was not an $8.50 mug, by any means, especially not in 1989 dollars (around $18 in today’s money). The thing was probably only worth a dollar, even back then. We paid a lot more for it because you had to redeem tickets from the games for it. I imagine that if they sold the mug today for cash rather than tickets, it would probably reveal that we paid way more than we should have for that mug. But for the time, I accomplished what I was trying to do, and left with the mug, the satisfaction of having gotten a good prize, for once, as well as a massive headache. I did some major hurling that night, too. Totally worth it.
Categories: Companies
What a washing machine might see…
3 minute read
May 24, 2020, 11:06 AM
I’m currently working on a photography project where I’m going through my old photos from the period before I started using Flickr seriously, which means stuff prior to around September 2013, with the goal of putting more stuff from the back catalog on my Flickr feed. What I’ve noticed is that of all of the photos that I took, I took a lot of stinkers, but there is a lot of good stuff that got passed over in the past, mostly because the Life and Times and Photography formats tend to tell a story through the photos, with various levels of narration, and if an otherwise good photo doesn’t help to tell that story, it typically won’t get used. Flickr is a different format from Schumin Web, and photos tend to be viewed individually rather than as collections, though that capacity does exist. So photos that are good but otherwise irrelevant to the story will “work” there. The recent Journal entry about my trip to Hampton Roads is a good example. That entry used 79(!) photos from the four-day trip, and there was a lot that I didn’t cover because that was already an obscene amount of photos for one Journal entry, and I already found pacing to be a challenge when writing that one, wanting to cover a lot but not go on for too long.
In any case, I found a group of photos that I did on February 26, 2013 that I never used anywhere. I set a camera inside the washing machine and the dryer in my apartment building, and set the shutter timer, and posed for the camera. I believe that my intent was to use one of these as a splash photo, but I ultimately didn’t like any of them enough to run them on the front of the website, so this whole set got shelved. I think that I rejected them primarily because it was rather late at night, and I wasn’t really looking my best. However, in going back through these for the Flickr project, they made me laugh a little bit, because the even though the concept was a bit ridiculous, the results aren’t as bad as I thought at the time.
Categories: Photography
Drive carefully, everyone…
3 minute read
May 17, 2020, 12:21 AM
You may have noticed the photo feature that is currently running on the front of the site depicts a vehicle on its side following its being involved in an accident. First of all, before you ask: we were not involved in this accident. Elyse and I saw a car with a bashed in front in the middle of the road and a second car on its side at the intersection of Montgomery Village Avenue and Lost Knife Road while we were on the way home from dropping off a package at a UPS locker, and, seeing no emergency vehicles around, stopped and called it into 911. Thankfully, no one appeared to be seriously hurt, as both drivers were able to walk away from their respective vehicles. However, I suspect that the driver of the smashed car hit her head on the windshield, as there was damage to the windshield consistent with that sort of impact. Additionally, both drivers did ultimately leave the scene in ambulances, presumably to get checked out.
Once we were finished talking with 911, we got some photos of the scene. Here are some of mine:
The overturned vehicle, an Acura MDX. The driver had not yet turned the car off when this photo was taken.
Categories: Driving, Montgomery Village