The Red Monkey

By Meg Marco, 1:12 PM on Tue Sep 29 2009, 1,780 views

A class action lawsuit has been filed against the City of Chicago on behalf of people whose cars were impounded as part of a police investigation — and then charged outrageous fees to get their vehicles back. The lawsuit covers 15,000 people whose cars were impounded by the city over a five year period.

WBEZ Chicago interviewed someone whose car was impounded in a case of mistaken identity:

JARRETT: I come down, half of the Chicago Police department got the whole sidewalk blocked off.

The police wanted to know about her car. She was talking to the cops in the blue shirts when a commanding officer joined the conversation.

JARRETT: The white shirt got out. He said this car has an “APB” out on it. I said an “APB” for what. He said to seize the car and seize all occupants.

The car was taken and Jarrett says she spent about 26 hours in jail for what was essentially a case of mistaken identity. The detective who had put out the APB came to interview her.

JARRETT: She looked at me, she said you’re not who I’m looking for. I said I know I’m not who you lookin for. I said, “who are you looking for?” She said, “your sister Sharrice Jarrett.”

Jarrett says her sister is a drug addict who often uses her name when she’s picked up by the police. Once that was figured out, Jarrett was released but she still had to get her car. She thought it was a simple mix-up that could be sorted out easily. She went to the impound lot and talked to an officer in the trailer by the gate and asked him for a hearing.

JARRETT: He said okay, I’ll give you a hearing. So I’m thinking he fenna go get a judge. Somebody with some authority. He asked me, your name Vivian Jarrett…

PETERS: They’re not hearings. You can call up and say you have my car and you should never have taken my car and I really shouldn’t have to pay you any money for my car and by the way I have 25 witnesses including my priest and my husband’s rabbi, it makes no difference who the witnesses are. You always lose.

From personal experience, I know that this can also happen if someone steals your car. After it’s recovered — it can still mysteriously wind up in the impound.

Vivian Jarrett did eventually get her car back though it took almost two months and at $35 a day the storage fees added up quickly.

JARRETT: I got to pay you $2000 dollars for something that’s legally mine and I broke no laws. That’s crazy.

No, that’s Chicago.

Lawsuit Critical of Chicago Police Car Impound Practices [WBEZ]

Household incomes fell 4 percent from 2007 to 2008 in Sacramento County as the slumping economy left more residents making do with less, new census figures show.

The numbers, which cover economic conditions in 2008, came out today, but they’re already out of date. Since the start of 2009, thousands of local state workers have been furloughed � the equivalent of a 14 percent pay cut � and the area’s unemployment rate has kept climbing.

Still, the figures offer the first comprehensive glimpse of local incomes after the housing bust � and it’s not pretty.

The median household income in Sacramento County last year was $56,984, down from $59,249 in 2007, adjusting for inflation, the census figures show. Suburban counties fared better; the median household income for the entire metropolitan region was $61,029, down from $62,018.

Sacramento County’s poverty rate jumped sharply, going from 12.1 percent in 2007 to 13.3 percent in 2008.

All of these trends were mirrored across the state and nation.

“It’s not too surprising,” said Thomas Williams, a Sacramento City College student looking for work Monday after losing his part-time job.

Williams wants to help his parents out with bills while he pursues a business degree, but he’s had no success in the last few weeks finding something to replace the restaurant work he’d been doing.

“I’ve turned in so many applications,” said Williams, of North Highlands. “I don’t think applications work. I think you have to know someone, and you have to speak to someone.”

North Sacramento resident Kevin Monahan is in a similar situation. The restaurant job he worked until a couple of weeks ago wasn’t giving any raises, and business was sluggish many days.

“Mondays and Tuesdays were so dead, I’d get let go half of the time anyway,” Monahan said.

So Monahan decided to look for a good job. He spent Monday walking from restaurant to restaurant downtown, carrying a notebook with a list of about 10 places he hoped to visit. He likes working as a cook, but “warehousing, cooking � I’ll take anything,” he said.

A few blocks from where Monahan walked, Charlie Selleck sat on the sidewalk. He came here from Las Vegas a couple of months ago with family, hoping for something better. It didn’t work out, and now he’ll settle for a job mopping floors somewhere. He doesn’t think that’s going to happen.

“I don’t even know what I’ve gotten myself into,” Selleck said of his move.

The census figures show that people across the region’s income scale have been affected, from the lower end to those earning six figures.

Local children were especially hurt by the trends. Roughly 190 of every 1,000 Sacramento County children lived in poverty during 2008, up from 174 per 1,000 during 2007.

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The Obama administration wants to remake the health insurance market so millions now without health coverage can buy private policies through a proposed government-run insurance exchange.

California has gone down this road before � and stumbled.

The state’s failed 13-year experiment with a health insurance exchange could be instructive, experts say, as Washington debates the direction it will take to revamp the country’s health care system.

A national insurance exchange is the centerpiece of overhaul legislation that aims to provide the country’s estimated 46 million uninsured � nearly 7 million in California � access to health coverage.

All three leading proposals currently include an insurance exchange, from which the uninsured and small businesses would be able to buy health coverage for themselves or their employees.

Insurers don’t reject the concept of a government-run insurance marketplace but are far from willing to embrace it because all of the details aren’t yet known.

From the start, California found its experiment with a health insurance exchange rough going.

The program folded in 2006, partly because health insurers, small businesses and consumers were never fully on board.

John Grgurina Jr., who headed the program known as Pac Advantage from 2001 until its demise, branded the program a failure and mostly irrelevant. “It went into a death spiral,” he said.

The exchange could not get the volume and participation required to reduce insurers’ risks and spur the market to lower premiums.

As a result, the program became a de facto high-risk pool that mostly insured those in poor health and cost insurers the most money.

When it folded, Pac Advantage was left with only three insurance carriers.

The state’s failed exchange aimed to give small businesses the collective clout to demand better insurance rates. Because of their purchasing power, huge companies generally can negotiate lower rates on their own.

“If you could pull together all these small businesses, they could achieve better rate negotiations with the insurance carriers. If you could get those better rates, it would lead to more joining the program and less uninsured,” Grgurina said.

In hindsight, the model was flawed, he said, primarily because it was voluntary. Insurers and companies did not have to participate.

Indeed, most didn’t.

At its peak, Pac Advantage enrolled 150,000 Californians � barely making a dent on the woes the program was intended to fix when it launched in 1993.

In contrast, the federal model would be mandatory � a key difference, and one that experts say could make the difference between success and failure.

All the major congressional proposals would require Americans to carry health insurance � obtained either through work, current government health programs or the exchange. Two of the proposals would require insurers to take part in the exchange if they want to offer policies to individuals and small businesses.

A proposal by the Senate’s health committee has a somewhat watered-down version of the exchange concept and refers to its marketplace as regional “gateways.”

The leading versions would set minimum coverage standards to make it easier for consumers to shop for policies. The industry now offers a dizzying array of plans that critics say is difficult for consumers to understand because of the numerous differences in benefits, deductibles, co-payments and other out-of-pocket expenses.

As proposed, those taking part in the exchange could not be denied coverage because of pre-existing health conditions, and subsidies would help the poor afford coverage.

Initially, only the uninsured and small businesses would be eligible to participate in the exchange.

“It would bring order to chaos,” said John Ramey, a former senior health policy adviser for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The chaos that now exists is that people who want to buy the product cannot because they have pre-existing conditions. And there are so many different products that it is hard for consumers to decipher which products are more advantageous to them, because there’s really no apples-to-apples comparison,” Ramey said.

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New Xbox 360 Elite holiday bundle and Wireless Controller Game Pack announced

by Nilay Patel

posted Sep 29th 2009 at 11:05AM

We’d been hearing that Microsoft had a new Xbox 360 holiday bundle in the works, and here we go: $299 will nab you an Elite, Lego Batman, and Pure. Not a bad deal — and if you already have a 360, you can score a new controller, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, Lumines LIVE!, Bomberman LIVE! and Ms Pac-Man for another $60. The new Elite pack should be shipping to retailers today, but you’ll have to wait until November to snag the controller bundle. Now if only Microsoft would see fit to bundle in some freaking WiFi, we’d be all set.

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Filed under: Gaming

Tags: 360, Bomberman LIVE, breaking news, BreakingNews, bundle, controller bundle, ControllerBundle, elite, geometry wars, GeometryWars, lego batman, LegoBatman, Lumines LIVE, microsoft, Ms Pac-Man, MsPac-man, pure, xbox, xbox 360, xbox 360 elite, Xbox360, Xbox360Elite

By Ben Popken, 12:57 PM on Mon Sep 28 2009, 2,660 views

The supposedly classy New York Times Magazine had a 2-page ad for the Amish Heater this weekend, so with that and the cold times a-coming, now is a good time to remind everyone that the Amish Heater is just a standard space heater plus overpriced particleboard faux-wood mantle on wheels.

Consumer Reports tested the “miracle” Heat Surge Roll-n-Glow Electric Fireplace back in March and found it performed the same as a normal electric heater.

The device is currently $349 online, or you can, as the Heat Surge VP told the NYT, get a space heater for $29.99 from a big box store. You can answer for yourself if you the fake fireplace and rollability features are enough of a “miracle invention” to be worth the extra few hundred bucks.

Note: purple scare-quotes photoshopped.

By Jason Fitzpatrick, 3:00 PM on Sun Sep 27 2009, 3,608 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

With little more than a month left before Halloween, if you’re intending to set up some underwear-destroying, adrenaline-spiking Halloween props, you’re going to need to get cracking. Thankfully the Monsterlist of Halloween Projects has hundreds of how-to guides.

The projects on the Monsterlist vary in skill and commitment levels. Typical descriptions range from “You’re going to need two buckets and a hose…” to “Have 32 red LEDs and a solenoid valve from a washing machine? Perfect! Let’s get started.” Chances are, you’ll be able to find a project among the 854 (listed at the moment) that covers your range of ability and ambition.

Although the web site’s design is a bit old school, it is functional. The Monsterlist has a basic key which indicates things about the projects listed, such as how new it is, whether or not it’s considered an advanced project, if the prop you’ll be creating is animated or static, and if the project listing has an extremely detailed guide and/or movies included.

We found a variety of interesting projects ranging from simple, such as using mirrors and a barrel to create the illusion of a pit, to workbench-worthy endeavors like building an outdoor room with a moving ceiling. If you find a particularly novel guide while browsing the list, share a link to it in the comments.

Monsterlist of Halloween Projects [via MakeUseOf]

Actor and stuntman Dick Durock — best known as Swamp Thing in both movies and the TV series — passed away on September 17th after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. From the South Bend Tribune: [Dick's older sister Judy] Schenk said her brother never expressed an interest in acting or stunt work, but she was never surprised by his chosen profession. He was always handsome, she said, and at 6 feet 5 inches tall and about 225 pounds, he had the physique to withstand the physical abuses inflicted upon stunt professionals. He also had an amazing drive, his brother-in-law said. “He was single-minded,” Frank Varrichione said, “and when he went after and pursued something, he expected success.” Dick Durock’s early work included stunts for “The Beverly Hillbillies” and a bit part as “Guard #1″ in an episode of “Star Trek.” He would go on to do stunt work in hundreds of films and television shows, including “The Poseidon Adventure” and “A-Team,” and act in hundreds more, including “The Rockford Files,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Married with Children” and “Stand by Me.” But Dick Durock’s most memorable work was as the DC Comics character Swamp Thing, a plant-like humanoid charged with protecting the natural world from the abuses of man. He played the character in two feature films, “Swamp Thing” (1982) and “The Return of Swamp Thing” (1989), and in a subsequent television series, also called “Swamp Thing,” that ran for 71 episodes in the early 1990s. Dick Durock was practically unrecognizable in the physically taxing role, which required him to don a heavy body suit and endure hours of makeup. “At the end of the day you’re wearing 80 pounds of wet latex,” Dick Durock said in a 2008 interview for the Web site Mania.com, “plus all the chemicals on your face. It sure isn’t sunglasses and autographs, I’ll tell ya.” But he enjoyed the work, Schenk said. “He loved it,” she said. “He loved doing those crazy things.”