Recently in Section 27(1) Category

I recalled today that a while ago I mentioned that I was going to do a very bad imitation of the Big Mac Index seeing I haven't been scanning books for a little while. Well, to make the short story shorter, it was a fee comparison for marriage licences between Pennsylvania counties. In all the madness about moving, I forgot that I had this for over six months now lying on my computer's desktop. (It's like adding everything one browses to one's favourites and then forgetting where one put the important link to one's university calendar. Somewhat.)

It may well not be complete, and so on, so, yeah, but it's now uploaded.

The main reason this started my interest is that when I got married in Pennsylvania I was told that any county could issue a marriage licence valid for anywhere in the state. (As an aside, the licensed celebrant need not be domiciled in the county of issue or marriage either, I thought I was also told.) Now, of course one is almost certainly going to go to their nearest marriage clerk (which, for example, in Centre County is the Clerk of Orphans' Court and Register of Wills -- a dual elected position -- in Bellefonte, and in Allegheny County is some non-elected office).

Naturally, costs are going to vary by the cost of living (paying the clerks), cost of the office (the rent or whatever) and the volume of applicants (of both licences and certificates), so I'm not berating the counties that are most expensive, I want to make clear. This was just purely for interest.

The short points are the following, as of roughly June last year:

  • Allegheny County (Pittsburgh, and then some) and Philadelphia City at $75 and $80 respectively are the most 'expensive' counties.
  • The counties of Clearfield and Forest are the cheapest, with both charging $25.
  • If one is thinking long term, sealed copies of a marriage licence that are good for women taking their husband's name -- I never checked if a man could do it -- vary greatly as well. For example, Northampton County throws in a free certified copy after the used licence is returned, whereas to me it appears that Bucks County wants $20. (The married couples, at least in one county, get to keep an 'original' in the form of half of the licence that they keep, that said, but that's not replaceable, so a certified copy is always useful.)
  • Some counties have 'volume discounts' of sorts if one orders more than one sealed certificate at a time, in addition to the counties that bundle a free sealed certificate upon the celebrant filing the completed licence.
  • Some also ask for a stamped, self-addressed envelope, while others build the cost in to their fees.

The spreadsheet, to add a further warning to the disclaimers, is definitely out of date already; I get the feeling, for example, that the fee for the first sealed certificate is incorrect for Butler County. That said, I have no guarantees with my busy life nowadays that I will update the list, but I shall attempt to.

As of right now, http://ngeru.info/eUDaxI here at ibiblio is where you'll find the current June 2010 version of the spreadsheet. It's in Microsoft Excel .xlsx, because that's the easiest format for me to manipulate the data with (so no you-should-have-used-OpenOffice.org, please, which I would have used had it what I wanted). The undated .xlsx files are symlinks to the current file, in case I do upload this. [Update: I forgot about the Google Spreadsheets option, but loading the 'last update' symlink in read-only mode on Google Docs gets rid of basically all of the nice formatting from Excel, not to mention the column sorting that Excel does.]

Um, so, yeah. Enjoy!

Of interest in the last few weeks I noticed pretty much all of the books I scanned for PGDP have appeared in Apple's iBooks store. So far, of all of the major e-book booksellers I've tried, they seem to be the ones that implement the books in the best-formatted way.

Also, I have been putting off mentioning this for some years, so I'm sure someone else has mentioned this now. At http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/kids/presidents/ulyssesgrant.html on the NARA archive of the 43rd president's website, President Grant is said to have been President Jackson's Secretary of War. That would have been quite an achievement, given he would have been between the ages of six and fourteen, and yet to enter West Point.

Of course what the students who wrote the quick biography meant was that he was Acting Secretary of War (give or take) for a similarly-surnamed President Johnson (they even shared the first name Andrew, adding to the confusion mix), but for some reason I found the minor (?) mildly amusing.

(Yes, it's a coincidence my previous entry was about the White House.)

Finally, my next entry I'm currently researching very slowly, but it's a list inspired by the Big Mac Index. I'm almost done with the raw data.

So, apparently the White House's Apple App Store-listed app is rated 12+ (albeit in the United States version of the store) for the reason of 'Infrequent/Mild' references to or use of 'Realistic Violence[,]... Alcohol, Tobacco or Drug[s]'. Overall, I am rather amused by this! I doubt, however, such a government institution would be encouraging illegal drug use or underage alcohol use.

Seriously, I would have thought that such ratings would be thrown out for clearly educational apps such as something from the White House, like with nature documentaries in some countries (otherwise said documentaries like Nature would basically be rated for sex scenes). Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I support the US Government -- the White House in particular -- for making the app, but not the rating they got, presumably from Apple, for their efforts. Anyway, the obligatory screenshots (the first of which is also uploaded to Flickr for some reason):

So, here's the screen shot of the apparent, albeit possible madness. And you're probably not bothered enough to zoom in on the screen shot, so this is the requisite bit.

(There's almost certainly other bizarre examples in the iTunes store, mind, but this one seems rather odd to me.)

And, in other news, I'm looking at getting the 1986 report of the Royal Commission on the Electoral System on PGDP fairly soon, as I now apparently have the clearances lined up for that with their copyright people.

It's a massacre!

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Time for some alarmist titles, methinks. Well, first some disappointing news from my university, then something possibly a bit happier.

And after some more marital bliss-inspired absenses from tph, I wake up to discover that the 2009 papers catalogue for GEND at the teachers' college/university that I graduated from (twice, even) is basically empty. Really. Take a look. (Thanks, Kerry. She's a fellow GradDipArts graduate in GEND.) Trying to finish the undergraduate major might be amusing, let alone an honours year or graduate diploma. Sigh.

And in far more cheerful (possibly) news, Kiwibank now have a Visa debit card with prettier designs than Westpac New Zealand's offering -- and, at first look, cheaper fees, too, especially with regards to the foreign currency fee; 2% versus Westpac's 2.5% might well be worth it. Sigh. Again.

I wonder if I will qualify to receive a card...

Or even if it is worth it. I will have to think about it.

Or, the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand; you might well find my original scans of this inquiry report (also known as the McMillan Report, after its chairperson, a certain Labour politician called David Gervan McMillan) useful. I'll write some comments about it in the next fortnight.

(Disclaimer: And, in case anyone thinks otherwise, the release date of this title to PG had nothing to do with the current NZ general election; I can not and do not control these release dates in any way as I only submit the scans to be proofread and I only keep a small sort of guidance on this process in terms of the quality of the proofed text while it is being proofread. Or so I think that is what I was told to do. Sorry.)

More books uploaded!

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Since the fun of seeing the results of my scan of Hinemoa uploaded to Project Gutenberg, I haven't written much. That said, in the intervening time, three of my scans have been processed, and have been uploaded:

Of the three, I'm most proud of the third book. The scanning may not have been the most time-consuming, but it was significant as the parliamentary response to the Mazengarb Report, which I found to be the most rewarding book to scan (and the first that I did).

Enjoy!

What's happened?

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  1. I got married.
  2. I'm kind of, well, not that close to all the New Zealand parliamentary papers that I've been scanning anymore.
  3. I haven't had much time to do security patches on the copy of Movable Type that I use.
Most importantly, I'm still alive! Some new things shall be up shortly, and older things are still available, such as previous entries. (Obviously the main Atom feeds and index pages from the previous installation will be redirected to here.)

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This page is an archive of recent entries in the Section 27(1) category.

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