This Is the Song That Never Ends...

I suppose it's unrealistic of me to think that I should have gotten some sort of recompense or closure or satisfaction or ANYTHING regarding the death of the EPM, but I want it just the same.

MAIF (the at-fault vehicle's owner's insurance) has finally decided that lo! they are not liable because the owner lent the car to someone who lent it to someone else, so they have supposedly issued a denial letter, which somehow, despite the more-or-less instantaneity of faxing, has not gotten to my insurer since midday yesterday. When it does, my insurer informs me, some dude will have to look at the car (which may already be a paperweight, but the woman I talked to said "I'm sure they wouldn't've done anything to it without contacting us") to determine whether or not it's a total loss. Let's see: back windshield shattered, rear driver's window shattered, frame torqued, bumper missing, trunk smashed to hell, gas tank ruptured, rear door smashed to hell, 120,000 miles... I'm thinking we can skip that step. But no, they need to physically look at the car, which has been sitting outside with two windows missing and the trunk open, for A MONTH AND A HALF, in order to make an assessment of its Actual Cash Value at the time of the crash.

Why do I suspect they're going to come in on the low side of the blue book value?

After they determine that it's a total loss, it gets pointlessly transferred to someone else, and then they start the uninsured motorist claim, which no doubt has some provision by which I will actually owe THEM money, but not to worry, that process won't be done until 2018, by which time I will have died. Possibly from driving my car into an insurance agent while giving myself a heart attack, you know, so I won't be liable...

This is just the stupidest fucking thing I've ever been involved with. My car was parked in a residential neighborhood, some fucking asshole drug dealer got himself shot and wrecked it, and I am the one that suffers. This is going to make it really hard for me to watch My Name Is Earl, you know?

Shallow Pop Psych

The Washington Post staged a "prank" recently in which world-famous violinist Joshua Bell played a $3.5M Stradivarius outside the L'Enfant Plaza Metro stop to see what the result would be.

I'm not sure this is really fair; I used to ride the Metro all the time, and occasionally there would be a very fine musician outside one of the stops, and I would slow my pace a bit, and maybe throw in whatever change was in my pocket if my path brought me close enough, or if I had any change in my pocket. But generally I would take the brief beauty of the music and carry it with me, not stand around and listen to it. Not because I didn't recognize the beauty, but because it's not a concert, it's busking. The set of expectations are different. The Post notes "some people threw in pennies!!!!11!!!" as if people might not have just emptied the $0.58 change they had from buying a croissant. The commitment required to interact enough to pull a bill from your wallet is different than that required to casually fish your pants for silver.

Would I have recognized Bell? Possibly, although I haven't seen a picture of him for about 10 years. I remember when he first broke on the world stage, and he looks older but not much different; maybe a little more like Mark Hamill than he used to. Would I have recognized the sheer quality of the violin? Given how amazing it sounds through the tinny clips on the article, probably, although I certainly wouldn't've guessed it was worth 10x as much as my house. He was playing Bach on the first clip, which is some of my favorite solo violin, and definitely what I am most familiar with. Would I have stuck around for that? Probably, but I would've been very conscious of my standing around listening to him, especially if I were alone in doing so. Towards the end of the clip, you can see that people are starting to stand around and listen; I guarantee you that these people are no different than the other people that walked past, except that one of them didn't really feel like hurrying to work.

An interesting idea, surely, but their findings are almost ridiculously banal. The best parts of the article are, naturally, Bell's own words. And, of course, the clips.

Mean Things You Can Do With a Compliant Dog

Minor Validation

Well, the rest of the little things in my life are still going awry, but I did manage to demonstrate to myself (with only one injury!) that something I've been trying to do for a while is going to be possible, namely:



Or, as it will appear in the dark:



There will be 6 of those tealight things, and I need to rout the holes more carefully so that the tealight things don't wobble around, and then I need to figure out a way to mount it on the wall, but this little exercise demonstrates that I WILL be able to get it to work eventually.

And yes, I know that no one cares except me.

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UPDATE:

Or a bit more like this:

Baltimore, the City That Sucks My Ass Raw

The EPM is still dead, long may it suffer, but my brother has kindly loaned me one of his 9,000 cars for the duration... it's a 1987 Volvo 240 DL, and what it lacks in pickup it makes up in boxiness... I kid, it's better than the Civic (except in turns, where it feels weird), and it's free, which is nice since I still have to pay my parents back for the defunct Civic.

Meanwhile, apparently MAIF (the state insurance of last resort), which insured the defunct asshole that crashed into my car, has a convenient loophole wherein they don't pay their liability claims if their insured vehicle was involved in a crime, which I assume an inordinately large number of their accidents are. This is a global loophole, it would seem, although I can't help but notice that most insurance pays out if your car is stolen, which is, duh, a crime. Objectively, I should have had collision on my car, but when I decided that the car was too big a piece of shit to bother, I did not factor in the "dying drug dealer gone wild" option, which I think is understandable, so I am well pissed that they're trying to weasel out of it. I'm more pissed that they will not OFFICIALLY weasel out of it until the police investigation is concluded, so they know whether or not there was a crime... this means that the inevitable denial of payment that would lead my agency to file an uninsured motorist claim is delayed until they get around to filing it. The homicide desk officer told me the case could be resolved in two days, or could take two years. Nice. So I wrote an appropriately legalese-sounding letter to the Maryland Insurance Commissioner, and they called the next day to tell me they should have a resolution in 2 business days, which makes me wonder, why does this require a letter to the Insurance Commissioner?

Meanwhile meanwhile, the City has fined me for, and I quote "Snow - failure to remove 3 hours after". They don't say after what, and they don't include instructions for challenging the fine, although they did helpfully not send me a first notice (oddly, they claim they did), but did send a 2nd notice that arrived after the last date for requesting a hearing. The fine is only $50, but it triples in 90 days, and is a lien on my property, which means I would have to pay it before I could sell my house and move the fuck out of this godforsaken city. I guess I'd be a little more sanguine about it if I hadn't previously received parking tickets for "parking too close to corner", said corner being a gentle radius that people park on all the damn time without incident, and my personal favorite, "blocking unmarked crosswalk." Next I'll get a ticket for "moral turpitude."

I'd also have less of a problem with these bullshit citations if the city would ever fucking plow my street, or ensure that my local traffic lights worked for more than a week at a time, or kept people from shitting on my back gate, or you know, kept drug dealers from crashing into and totaling my car. I pay one of the highest property tax rates in the country, and yet they raise the sewage rates because they haven't bothered to maintain the plumbing for 100 years. Seems fair.

In other news, I had an extremely pleasant morning, and spent the bulk of the weekend getting the front axle back on the 4.5, and the engine mostly back in (it's attached by one engine mount; the other one was giving us problems). My joints hurt, my nails are black even after much scrubbing, and things are looking up.

I'll get right on mailing that check out.