Parking wars escalate

	Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger image.

One of the basic human drives -- after food, sex, shelter and cable TV -- is avoiding parking tickets. In the old days, criminal parkers jammed meters, or, in places where there were no meters, moved their car a few inches so the chalk mark left by the parking officer would be hidden under the tire. Now from Seattle comes word of a new approach to ticket avoidance that keeps abreast of changing technology. Seattle has been switching from its 9,000 parking meters to 1,700 of those new parking kiosks that spit out a paper receipt drivers must stick on their car windows, the Post-Intelligencer reports. (You can sample this new-fangled parking on Schenley Drive near the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland.) The new avoidance tactic: Some Seattle drivers are plastering their windows with old parking receipts (some upside down) in the hope that officers will figure one of the receipts is valid and move on or simply go nuts. In an effort to stay one step ahead, the city has barred drivers from displaying more than one receipt at a time. We're confident the ticket-avoiders will think of something.

Got any spare change?

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Bank robbers have the problem of getting rid of all those pesky small bills. Not so, parking meter robbers. This summer, police in Agder, Norway, found the equivalent of $50,000 in coins in a cabinet at the home of a parking attendant. The coins were conveniently stored in 62 double plastic bags. "It was like entering Uncle Scrooge's safe," said a policewoman, according to Aftenposten.no/english. The man fell under suspicion when he tried to convert a few bags of coins to paper money at a bank.

More time at Penn State

As of next month, State College will give motorists a five-minute grace period at expired parking meters. Now that all the borough's 772 meters are computerized, an electronic option allows expired meters to tick into negative minutes. The borough is setting them to tick back five minutes after the expiration, then bounce back to zero.

Meters passe

The University of California, Santa Barbara, is the first place in the nation to replace conventional, coin-operated parking meters with a wireless, electronic pay-parking system called Intellipay, developed by IBM. You park your car, make note of the space and call a toll free number. Then you give your credit card number and you're off, according to a CNBC report. When the meter's about to expire, you get a call that gives you the chance to feed the meter by credit card. But you have to be quick: The parking monitors gets the same phone call from the meter. The Cal-Santa Barbara system has increased university parking revenue by 37 percent, paying for itself in two years. There are 100,000 spaces in 20 regions nationwide using this system.

They didn't say 'May I?'

The borough of Rochdale in England (Pop.: 94,000) may have to refund about $1.3 million in parking fines. The reason: It sent out more than 28,000 tickets addressed to "the driver" of illegally parked cars rather than "the owner" -- wording which a national adjudication service has ruled invalid. But council bosses, who corrected the wording of their tickets days after the ruling, still say the tickets were valid. No word on whether the borough proofreader got sacked.

A plea for martini purity

We are experiencing a martini craze, have been for some time, and with that good news comes many atrocities -- martinis with all manner of fruit and nuts, the kind "that would have been unrecognizable to James Bond or Nick and Nora Charles, urbane sophisticates who didn't expect to find chocolate or cranberry juice in their cocktails," says Nicholas Pashley in the Toronto Star. These martinis would also offend Christine Sismondo, Toronto academic, retired bartender and author of a book Pashley reviewed -- "Mondo Cocktail: A Shaken and Stirred History" (McArthur & Co). Some tid-bits from the book:

Sismondo has no doubt that Sir Francis Drake made the first cocktail, in Cuba in the 1570s (adding lime, mint and sugar to the primitive local rum to make a prototype Mojito), but he didn't think to give it a name. Sismondo finally pins the origins of the word "cocktail" down to a Masonic meeting in New Orleans in 1795, where an early form of the Sazerac was served in egg cups called coquetiers.

She pays homage to a Pittsburgh group called LUPEC (Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails), dedicated to raising awareness of women's history and of old-fashioned drinks to honor "the spirits of their Forebroads." The LUPEC motto: "Dismantling the patriarchy one drink at a time."

H.L. Mencken defined the martini as "the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet."

Alcohol in the news

People who drink no more than a drink or two a few times a week are less likely to be obese than people who do not drink at all, a study in the journal BMC Public Health shows. Consuming four or more drinks per day, however, increases the risk of being obese by 46%.

Driving under the influence of cannabis (marijuana to you) almost doubles the risk of a fatal road crash, finds a study in the British Medical Journal. However, its share in fatal crashes is significantly lower than those involving alcohol.

San Diego fine again

The Morning File yesterday caught up with the news that San Diego had dropped "America's Finest City" as its slogan after a year of political scandal. Well, cancel that. Jerry Sanders was sworn in as San Diego's new mayor on Monday, and one of his first official acts was to restore "America's Finest City" to the city's official Web site until further notice or the next scandal.

The end is near

A British company has launched a teddy-bear shaped cell phone for 4-year-olds. The Teddyfone has four buttons, one on each paw, to speed-dial four numbers, the Guardian reports. It also has two panic buttons, one close to each ear, that a child can press in an emergency. There is no keypad and no screen. There is also a child-tracking service for worried parents who can find out where their son or daughter is. You can't get your kids started on cell phones early enough.

Words we can use

The other day we printed some useful new meanings for familiar words contributed by Washington Post readers. Here's more from Post-Gazette reader Jim Cataldi of McKees Rocks:

1. Internet, support group for people working for free for big corporations.

2. Database, list of people who might go out with you.

3. Oprah, what gangstas call "Aida."

4. Scatter, a singer trying to be the next Ella Fitzgerald.

5. University, the opposite of diversity.

6. Possibility, what a rapper who can quickly get a bunch of guys to go clubbing with him has.

7. Snowflakes, poor shmucky reporters who get stuck outside to show everyone it's snowing for local TV stations.

8. Mare, head of Pittsburgh city government.

9. E-mail, fourth in line behind the alpha male.

10. Whisenhunt, what a guy with severe prostate problems is on.