Colby Cosh rants today about Edmonton's civic leaders and their ideas for a new slogan. It reminds me of people naming companies these days. Very silly. But I wonder if Palo Alto's recent activities top Edmonton for silliness: the City Council is drafting rules about frowning. This is hardly a scoop -- Floyd McWilliams and LawMuse also blogged about this on Apr 21 and Apr 8.

Another antic I heard about recently concerned Palo Alto and extremely nitpicky noise regulations, applying not only different decibel limits to different zoned areas and different times but also to different frequencies. This is usually done with respect to noise from airports and leaf blowers, but in this case allegedly the city hired analysts to measure the noise level of skateboarders to see if skateboarding ever exceeds the decibel limit, which it didn't (barely). Somebody is so keen to get rid of local skateboarders that he's attempting to get the noise regulations changed to use frequency-dependent adjustments for the sound frequencies generated by skateboarders. I'll take bets that frequency-dependent adjustments will never lead to increasing the noise permitted at any frequency -- this is all about making regulations more stringent. Sorry I couldn't find exact references to the skateboarding hater.