It’s clear who is responsible for cleaning up this mess. Bank of America. But, it’s also clear that they are indifferent and unlikely to respond.

So, what’s the solution? And not just for this lot, but for all the other abandoned homes that aren’t getting their lawns mowed and are falling into disrepair. It benefits the neighborhood more than the bank to maintain these properties. But, if I start mowing Bank of America’s lawn every week, I’m going to feel like a sucker. Why am I doing their work for free? Why can’t they be responsible for their property?

Should the City clean it up?

It would be nice if they did, but I appreciate that they’re busy, and they have procedural guidelines that need to be met. And, the less the City has to do, the better for my wallet.

So, what’s the solution?

Ad Hoc Action Committees, or AHA Committees.

My imaginary solution is that the City of Tampa puts up a page where citizens can post actions they’d like to see taken in their neighborhood. So, for example, I’d write that I’d like to see that trash picked up. Then, good-hearted community-oriented groups can select projects from this list and take action. Girl Scouts, Jaycees, church groups, neighborhood associations, fraternities, groups that put together floats for Gasparilla, etc. All of these groups then have a chance to get into a neighborhood and increase their reputation.

Of course, there’s no reason Florida (or Hillsborough County, or Tampa, or YOU!) needs to wait for the federal government to do something about it. We can start working to improve civic education today.

“If we hope to sustain American democracy, we need to treat civic learning as on a par with other academic subjects. To participate fully in our democracy, students need to understand our government, our history, and our laws. They need to appreciate the skills democracy imposes on us – consensus building, compromise, civility, and rational discourse – and how they can be applied to the problems confronted by their communities and our nation as a whole. Restoring this civic mission of schools will require a concerted effort in school districts, at statehouses, and by the federal government.”

Unfortunately, the end result is that the trash will most likely remain there while the City goes through their procedures to prompt Bank of America (the current owner of the property) to reply.

And, really, Bank of America should have dealt with this long ago. Even if they weren’t regularly checking their property, the person responsible has been contacted several times (and now seems to be avoiding our phone calls).

So, it looks like now that the city will wait until the last month in October to clean up the property. In the meantime they will be citing Bank of America and sending them official letters telling them they need to clean the property.

It’s occurred to me that I could flyer the local neighbors and have us all meet to pick up a bag or two, but the last time I tried removing trash even more got piled on top.

Finally, this brings us to a larger city-wide problem. Are banks doing their job in taking care of foreclosed properties? Is it possible to force banks to be good neighbors?

Computer Entertainment Thirty-Five Years From Today

So, I did some careful research on that subject. I realized that, yeah, for an old-fashioned audience like you, a mid-21st century computer is pretty amazing. So here it is. (Speaker pulls cloth napkin from podium).

This is my General Electric Pocket Mediator. This one’s about five years old, it’s a student’s model. Personal mediators are a stable technology in my time, we don’t have to fuss with them much. Unfortunately it doesn’t have full functionality here in 2008, because we don’t have the cloud yet. As soon as I reached here, my Mediator reached out for the cloud to reload its apps and OS… and it tapped into something called “Window-Vista.” Then it just plain gave up. It’s gone completely limp now. There’s nothing left here but this frozen screen-saver pattern.

So I’m gonna have to kind of walk you through its many functionalities. Bear with me here. Moore’s law says computer power doubles every eighteen months—since I’m from 35 years in the future, that means twenty three doublings. So a laptop from my time is the rough equivalent of about eight million, three hundred and eighty-eight thousand, six hundred eight of your best laptops. But, like I said, this is just a cheap student’s model, several years behind the times. So it’s feeble. It’s no more than thirty two thousand, seven hundred and sixty eight of your computers.

As you can see, my computer is a network. Literally a network, because all the components are woven. It’s all fabric. The power cables are superconductive fiber—they’re charged up with ambient light through quantum solar nanodots. It also has shape-changing piezo-electric threads woven through it—threads that move, they’re a lot like muscle tissue—so it can expand, contract, fold itself up, even flap and fly around the room.

One particular eyesore is just down the street from me. After contacting Bank of America, and the Realtor on the sign out front, I contacted Code Enforcement, and today sent this message to Charlie Miranda, who I believe to be my representative on the council. With any luck he will excel in constituent services and the lot will be cleaned up soon.

Council Member Miranda – I’m hoping you can help me.

There’s house down the street from me that’s been abandoned for some time. About six weeks ago someone came and took all the belongings inside the house, placed them in trash bags and dumped it in the lawn.

Calls to the person on the realtor’s sign out front have been unsuccessful. They claim it’s not their property. (Though the sign remains). Calls to TXXXXX SXXXXX (877-4XX-4XXX) at Bank of America (property preservation) have also not resulted in the trash being hauled away. We believe that Bank of America now owns this property (which they verified on the phone) but hasn’t taken responsibility for maintaining the property. The address is ….

I began to put the bags in my own trash, thinking that over the course of weeks I could get rid of it all. But it looks like someone took that as a sign and pulled even more trash out from the back. Today the pile grew even bigger. Soon it will take up the entire front lawn.

I’ve contacted code enforcement, but I’m not sure what they could do, other than issue some bank a warning.

I’m hoping that you might be able to help me get this garbage off our street. I’m writing to you because I believe you are the representative of this neighborhood on the City Council.

thanks,
dave

We’re halfway through the month and I needs lots more votes.

Don’t be overwhelmed by the number of choices. You aren’t expected to vote in every category. AND, if there’s a category you don’t see, Invent It!

Either vote in the comments here, or send me an email at patadave AT gmail.com.

This week is a pointer to Probe is Turning-on the People!

This is the kind of music site that makes me delirious with joy. There’s no top 40, or classic rock, or indie, or alternative rock, or techno, or any of that other worn-out tedious overly-sincere pop music. This page is all about obscurity, oddness, and fun.

Here’s Chick Webb & His Orchestra, featuring Ella Fitzgerald performing Chew-Chew-Chew (Chew Your Bubble Gum).

And, here’s Martin Denny’s easy-listening-for-the-psychedelic-set version of Midnight Cowboy.

Check it our for hundreds of more little gems of sonic brilliance.

(Thanks to the always wonderful PCL Linkdump for bringing this page to my attention)

1. Voting registration drives in the political off-season. During the heat of a political season, wary citizens are afraid of being bamboozled and would rather just not vote. Non-partisan door to door education about how to register and how/where to vote will increase the number of people registered to vote. Handouts to volunteers will help explain why cynicism (”it doesn’t matter who wins”) and apathy (”i don’t pay attention to politics”) damage the American philosophy of political engagement.

2. Voting parties – regular get-togethers at the polling place to remind and reinforce people of the locations they will visit when they vote. At these get-togethers non-partisan information is made available reminding people of voting days and the offices being voted on, and the responsibilities of people in these offices.

3. Monthly meetings at branch libraries with someone to explain “civic literacy” – where to vote, how to vote, why to vote, what gets voted on, the responsibilities of officeholders.

4. Voting holidays would help. Civic-minded businesses need to close for the day. It’s not just they need to allow their employees time to vote, it’s that an aura of celebration and fun needs to surround voting days. Newspapers, tv stations, blogs can provide free advertising to businesses with the gumption to close to help celebrate voting day.

5. Having a city/region you can take pride in increases public investment in what happens locally.

But, in all candor, I’m not so sure increasing voter turnout would change anything. Uninformed people will make uninformed choices. The best way to increase voter turnout is to invest heavily in public education and prioritize classes in civics. But, liberal ideas like that are not popular in Florida.

But, anyway, it’s a thoughtful post, go check it out. And if you ran the zoo, how would you increase voter turnout?

“So maybe Sarah Palin doesn’t have all that much “experience.” Maybe she doesn’t pay much attention to your fancy-pants “foreign policy” or “domestic policy” or “policy.” Maybe she’s “crazy” and “corrupt” and was picked by a “vetting process” that consisted of “tossing darts at a phone book in the middle of an all-night Ambien-and-Ketamine binge.” But maybe that’s just because Sarah Palin’s just too busy being a real American to hang around with your namby-pamby liberal candidates with their arugula lattes and their east coast Ivy League universities and their “qualifications” while they tax the Jesus Fetus to pay for gay Muslim healthcare!”

And, the Ybor City Stogie has been collecting info about Blair for some time at The Blair Watch Project

Re/Creating Tampa supports transparency in government and candidates who shun lobbyist lucre. Blair’s alliance with developers casts a pall over every decision he makes as commissioner. Hillsborough County will not improve if Blair and the entrenched interests he represents remain in power.

Grow Your Own House.

Here’s an example of a living treehouse.

This chair, grown by John Krubsack, (photo taken in 1919) is an early example of functional arborsculpture.

The Jonathan Levine Gallery webpage is a great resource for this kind of art. Check out these tentacle lamp/chandeliers by Adam Wallcavage. I’d be deliriously happy if I had these hanging from my ceilings.

“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.”

Everything I turned my attention to today turned out to be excruciatingly boring. The stuff I had to read, the stuff I had to write, dull, dull, dull. Even the internet let me down.

So, I’m firing Friday and skipping straight to Saturday morning. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get my Saturday morning breakfast beer.

In the meantime, here’s some zombie puppets performing “Dust in the Wind.”

Overall, though, it’s not ready for prime time. I didn’t realize how many Firefox add-ons I used until I browsed with Chrome. For now Firefox will continue to be my default browser.

That said, right now I am running them both because Chrome resolves a Firefox/Flash bug that’s been driving me crazy for months. There’s something about the Firefox/Flash interaction that causes video playback to fail. Videos will work fine, and then a day comes when only the first two seconds will play and that’s it. There’s lots of “solutions” available on the internet, but none have worked for me. The only thing that’s worked has been defragging my computer, which, sometimes, is impractical.

So, for right now, Chrome is where I go to watch video on the internet.