Taxation without Representation

I previously mentioned that every state issued license plates. The city of Washington DC is not in any stats, so it issues its own plates. Recently, the motto on the plates has been changed to a distinctly political slogan; “Taxation without Representation”.

Let me give you some background to the reason for this appearing on the plates. The US Congress, roughly equivalent to the UK parliament, consists of two elected chambers. There is the Senate, with two members from each of the fifty states and there is the House of Representatives with each state having a number of members depending on population. The state of Wyoming, the least populous has one representative; California has fifty three representatives. Washington DC is not in a state, so its inhabitants have no elected representatives in Congress; this despite the fact that the population of DC exceeds that of the state of Wyoming. It is ironic that a country that prides itself on its democratic traditions deprives over half a million people in the capital city of their right to have elected representatives.

The slogan is a deliberate reference to a rallying cry of the revolution against British rule in the eighteenth century. Americans opposed the imposition of taxation by a parliament to which they did not elect members with the call “No taxation without representation”

Loyalty

Supermarkets in the UK have loyalty cards that give you points when you shop and these points can be traded for goods, services, or money off groceries. The supermarket that we use in the US is called Vons. They have a membership card that produces far more immediate results. They have two prices on many items, with the one for having a membership card often significantly lower. On a recent $130 shop, I saved over $20 by having the membership card. In addition, the card also works like a UK loyalty card by awarding air miles. Fortunately, if you do not have the physical card on you at the checkout, you can give your phone number and still obtain the discounts. I have not taken the time to figure if these are real discounts, or inflated prices for non-members.

World’s Motor Capital

In the UK all license plates for cars are issued from one central authority. Here in the US, each state issues its own plates. Each state plate is different, not only in having the state name but in colour, font used, and numbering pattern.

The standard California plate has a white background with a seven character mix of letters and numbers in blue. (I know they look black in this picture, but they are really blue)

I say standard, because for an extra cost, you can have a different background. Part of this extra cost goes to an environmental or educational fund depending on the plate chosen. Moreover, for a fee you can have any unused choice of characters. These characters can include hearts, starts, spaces, or a half space. A half space allows you to have the full seven characters with a gap, as I saw on a plate declaring the owner to be GEEK GOD. The heart is obviously used to state love, often between two sets of initials; the California equivalent of those green windscreen stickers with a pair of names, which I associate with drivers of Ford Capris. Details of the custom numbering scheme and backgrounds are on the Department of Motor Vehicles website.

Many states also have a slogan on their plates, usually beneath the number. This may be the official state nickname such as New Jersey’s “Garden State” and Missouri’s “Show Me State”. In the case of Idaho it describes that states major export “Famous Potatoes”. The state of Michigan uses this blog’s title, or did, I am not sure if the steady decline in sales of Detroit made cars has forced a rethink. New Hampshire has the slightly bizarre “Live Free or Die”. A full set of plates can be seen at this site, but the pictures are several years old and some may have changed.

Seafood, Tar, and Wine

This is less about reporting differences between the UK and US than it is about simple gloating. I had lunch yesterday at a restaurant called Gladstones; it is located at the end of Sunset Boulevard on the coast at Malibu. The windows offer views across the beach and Pacific Ocean; yesterday there was a school of dolphins just off the beach in a sea that sparkled in the warm sunshine. I had a classic East Coast Fall lunch; clam chowder followed by Lobster roll.

After lunch we went to the Page Museum, a collection of fossils retrieved from the tar pits on the surrounding land. There are over one hundred tar pits on a 23 acre park in downtown Los Angeles. Between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, animals, birds, and insects became trapped in the tar. The tar, or more correctly the asphalt, preserved their skeletons; making the pits. Since excavation of these pits began more than one million bones have been recovered. Over 650 species of flora and fauna have been identified. The scientific value of this site was fortunately known before the city around it was built as intensely as it us today. The park land was donated to the city in 1924 to preserve and exhibit the fossils. The current museum was built with donations from George C Page in the 1970s. The museum is fascinating, both as a display site and as a working research facility.

All US States have an official flower and bird. California has the California Poppy and the California Quail. Not all of the states have an official fossil, but California is one that does; the Saber-Toothed Cat. This is one of the creatures whose fossils are found in the tar-pits.

The list of State Official things is long, California also has an official dance (West Coast Swing) and an official beverage (Wine). I am not sure if it is a legal requirement to partake of the official beverage on a frequent basis, but on matters of law I think it is better to be safe than sorry.

The Movies

Visits to the cinema here are not very different from those in the UK. They are generally out-of-town multi-screen complexes. Granted the pop-corn and drinks are served in even larger portions, one of the two really close cinemas has thirty screens and the other eighteen, and both have ticket booths outside the cinema which would not be compatible with the climate in the UK.

Some films are released earlier here than in the UK; The Devil Wears Prada, for instance, opened on 2 July here and 8 October in the UK. It also happens in reverse with the acclaimed Children of Men having a limited US opening on 25 December followed by general release 29 December. This does make getting my movie reviews from a Radio 5 podcast somewhat less useful, as I will often have seen the film before it gets reviewed.

I have seen ads in the local cinemas for rock concerts, not for actual live concerts, but for one night performances at the cinema of filmed performances. I have not seen this in the UK. For instance, there is a recording of a UK rock festival at the local cinema tomorrow night and one of Kiss next week. Earlier in the month there was a one night concert from a country star called Gretchen Wilson on her Redneck Revolution; I find it strange that people openly admit to being Rednecks, as the term was originally coined as an insult. I believe the correct term is white Appalachian American.

The mobile operator Cingular has started doing a humorous advert, as Orange did in the UK, to remind people to silence their mobile phones. In the ad, a man is making an apology call to a significant other, when Sidney Pollack walks in and starts telling him that the lighting is too bright, that he should be pacing as he makes the call, that he should have red tear filled eyes; then says “Sorry, is my directing interrupting your phone call, how rude.”

The best movie that I have seen recently is “The Departed”, great performances, good story, and a great balance between humour, violence, and pathos. Will Martin Scorsese finally get an Oscar? The one misstep was the use of a Van Morrison cover of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb rather than the original, although it is an inspired choice of song for the scenes that it covered, in a movie with an excellent sound track. At least, it was not the version recorded by Luther Wright and the Wrongs, for their track by track country version of The Wall.

I felt ambivalent about “All the Kings Men”, which at time of writing is a week away from a UK release; there were some great performances and a political subject matter, but the pacing and length and structure left the overall less than the sum of the parts.

Playoffs

The playoffs are a vital part of all the major American sports. At the end of the regular season, the top teams enter a set of play-offs. The structure of American sport, in which there are multiple divisions arranged geographically, requires these playoffs to produce a single winner.

As the NFL, NHL, and NBA start their new season, the MLS (Football or Soccer as Americans insist on calling it) and MLB (Baseball) enter the play-off stage.

For the first time since the start of the MLS, the LA Galaxy failed to make the playoffs. Since eight teams, from the twelve that make up the league, this is a major failure. The other LA team is in the play-offs.

The Angels failed to get into the play-offs. The Dodgers did get “a wild card” spot as the best runner up in the National League, but were beaten in the first round of the post season. The Detroit Tigers have reached the finals of The World Series and will play either the New York Mets or the St Louis Cardinals. The favourites, the much loathed New York Yankees, were beaten by the Tigers in the first round of the playoffs.

There is extensive coverage of the Baseball post season, with TV sets in every bar and restaurant showing the games. One has to go and look for information on the football playoffs, even though one LA team is still involved.

How was the play Mrs Lincoln

I enjoy going to the theatre, I am fascinated by politics in general and US Presidents in particular. Therefore, it was impossible to miss an opportunity to watch a play about the grooming of a Presidential candidate, while in DC. Not only was the subject matter perfect for my interests, but the venue was one deeply involved with Presidential history. The play was staged at Ford’s Theatre, the building in which Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865. After nearly a century of use as a government warehouse, the building was returned to a theatre, furnished and decorated as it was on that fateful night.

Monuments

The centre of DC is based around a cross. At the centre of the cross is the Washington Monument, a 169m tall granite and marble obelisk. To the East of this monument is the museum lined National Mall which ends at the Capitol building; home of the US Congress. To the West is a long reflecting pool, bordered by park land, with the Lincoln memorial at the far end. The North-South axis of this cross runs from the Jefferson memorial to the White House in the North. From the base of the Washington Monument you can see to all four tips of this cross. This vast expanse of open land with the city’s most famous landmarks allows wonderful unobstructed views, which make the clutter around St Paul’s in London even more infuriating.

The Washington Monument; dedicated to the first president and not the city was started in 1848 and finished in 1884, although the idea of building a monument was first mooted in 1783 and official planning began in 1833. Nothing happens fast when it comes to Washington memorials. A long delay during construction resulted in a change in colour about one quarter of the way up, as when building resumed it was no longer possible to source the original stone.

The Lincoln Memorial, which is the most awe inspiring of the three major monuments with its massive statue of Lincoln and engraved walls with his Gettysburg address and Second inaugural address. The statue is not only impressive in scale and the thoroughly human look of the face, but in the clever lighting which is a mix of daylight on the bottom and artificial light on the top half. The building is instantly recognizable from its appearance in multiple movies and it is from the monument steps that Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech”

The Jefferson memorial is less well known and less visited than the other two. It was built relatively quickly, completed in 1943 just nine years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt had suggested the idea to Congress. The design of the Rotunda is based on the Pantheon, a building that Jefferson adored. Inside is a statue of Jefferson looking North to the White House; symbolically watching the current incumbent. Like the Lincoln memorial it bears inscriptions of lofty thoughts; the most famous being from The Declaration of Independence – “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.” It is a noble sentiment, undermined by his holding of slaves until his death in 1826.

Tale of Two Cities

I have returned from a holiday in Washington DC, the nation’s capital. I will probably write several posts on the subject, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the while experience. This post just highlights a few differences between DC and London; which is after all close to the stated purpose of this blog.

One of the most obvious differences between Washington and London is that the city is not populated with closed circuit cameras every few hundred yards. There are units above the doors of government buildings and museums, but not monitoring every inch of pavement. You can still get a lot closer to The White House than you can to 10 Downing Street.

It is perfectly usual to see signs on the doors of museums in the UK banning smoking and food and drinks; but I have not seen one explicitly banning weapons. The bag check and metal detector at each entrance did lead to what might loosely be called queues to get into the museums, as noted here Americans seem to have a less rigorous approach to the noble art of forming a queue.

The taxi-cabs in DC have no meters, but charge base on a zone method. This means that there is no advantage in them taking a circuitous route, as the increased mileage brings no additional fare. There is an additional charge for a ride during rush hour, but apart from the loss in time there is no expense for the passenger if you are caught in a jam. Very unusually a taxi can pick up additional passengers as long as their destination is no more than five blocks off your route. The taxi-driver gets to charge each party the full fare. The cost of DC taxis is extremely reasonable and while nothing compares to London cabdrivers’ “Knowledge”, all the ones we used seemed to know where they going.

Short Break

I will be away from blogging while my wife and I celebrate our anniversary in a city once described by JFK as combining Northern Charm with Southern Efficiency. I shall probaly post about the sightseeing and might actually put some pictures on the blog when I return