I don’t know what R-67 is, but I’ve seen this group – Consumers Against Higher Insurance Rates – running numerous inflammatory ads against it. Google reveals that one of these “consumers” is State Farm, who has given $284K to the campaign. Another is Professional Insurance Agents of Washington. Here’s the whole list – note that it is free for individuals to join, and they have a damn small list. And I wonder how many of these are employees/members of the insurance industry companies/groups?

The duplicity of this campaign pretty much convinces me to vote for R-67, whatever it is.

UPDATE: OK I don’t know why this ticks me off so much, something about these monied interests wrapping themselves in the cloak of consumerism. You can browse all the group’s filings here – you will quickly see that real washington consumers have donated maybe $300 while insurance companies (mostly out of state) have donated millions and millions of dollars to this campaign. The group founders are not consumers but come from this tort reform group. Here’s some Seattle news coverage about the media buying from earlier this summer.

Coaches Hot Seat 2007 – great site, love the detailed stats. Grammar and spelling aren’t always tops but still a great resource. Michigan better start shopping…

Misting Fans and Outdoor Misting Systems – probably too wet but another fog system

The 2007 College Football Schedule Creator : Fanblogs College Football Blog – nice find at fanblogs.

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > World – Chinese miners trapped for 6 days ate coal, drank urine, cracked jokes about their wives – “At the end, we were so hungry we ate coal and thought it tasted delicious.”

The Columbus Dispatch : Buckeyes’ opener to be on DirecTV channel 218

Tempo wireless trash can – this seems like the most awesomest way to steal files from your co-worker on the other side of the cubicle wall – just install the software on their machine and keep the receptacle on your side of the wall. Just a concept at this point.

Protector Boats – not in the market but man these look awesome.

Weekend hike was Mt Catherine, just past Snoqualmie Pass. Cold and rainy, must have been 45 degrees at the base early Sunday morning. This guy had a much better weather day than me – Mt. Catherine, WA – pretty much all I saw was cloud.

Environmental Home Center, Seattle, green building materials. – “We are your most complete source for green building materials—simply the highest-quality choices with the added benefit of being healthy and resource-efficient”

Nice place. Smallish but a lot of interesting supplies. One wonders if there is not space in the home improvement market for a national Whole-Foods-like play.

* “The Night Gardener”:amazon by George Pelecanos. Lots of fancy blurbs, but a weak first half. The characters grew on me, but the setting never came to life. The ending was satisfyingly ambiguous. So an OK read but not my favorite. * “Silence”:amazon by Thomas Perry. Good pacing and situations, well written, but I didn’t like the characters. * “A Great Deliverance”:amazon by Elizabeth George. Great atmosphere, a twisted tale of family and love and hate and sin, detectives who are struggling with their own deep issues – an awesome tale. Very good, I am late to the party on this author. * “The world Without Us”:amazon by Alan Weisman. My one dip into nonfiction. Interesting descriptive essay of our various impacts on the planet and how they will dissipate over time. Not very prescriptive. My own take away is that plastics are the worst thing we are doing to the globe – they are pervasive, long-lived, and there is no good way to scrub them out of the environment.

I’m not really a car guy, but need new tires and wanted good ones. J turned me onto Tire Rack – they do an awesome job of summarizing all the choices for your car model, including review and real usage data for the tires. Painless ordering.

* Windows Live Writer Beta 2 has shipped ? Bogle’s Blog – Phil likes it. Me, I just can’t wrap my mind around installing a blog editor on the 3 PCs and 1 Mac at home that I use regularly, and the 2 at work, not to mention all the public terminals I use. I want all the features but I want them in a roaming web UI * Tip for installing itunes on Vista 64-bit – I wonder if this same approach is generalizable to other pieces of software I try to install. * 3 monitor setup – some good tips here on setup and utilities * Builtwith. Lets you examine the software installed on a site. Kind of fun * MT4 final release. Need to bite the bullet. * Duels.com. Buggy as hell but kind of fun. * Footnote.com. Original historical documents. * TinyXP. Minimal configs of XP. * Google Mashup Editor

Five Plants That Repel Mosquitoes – not a big deal here in Seattle but good to know.

Diary of a Crossword Fiend: How Constructors Try to Trick You – don’t even try to do the NYT crosswords later in the week unless you have embraced all these. I hate the “Phonetics and building blocks” class of clue, they seem cheap to me.