I had a whole post set up to go this morning, but let’s hold it for a day and declare today the Mission Really Accomplished thread. Living in a big fancy house in Pakistan, getting dialysis? Mark my words: When the truth is well and truly known, it’ll turn out he was dimed out by a pissed-off maid, or some other servant.
Bumper stickers expressing this sentiment are pretty common around here. Most aren’t this obnoxious.
Up early to take Kate to school, thought I’d check in with our London desk. The new Mrs. Windsor is just emerging from Westminster Abbey. Look, she’s wearing a dress from David’s Bridal! Love the veil. Very simple, very I’m-not-a-virgin-but-let’s-pretend-just-for-today. But what’s this? It’s CNN, and NO ONE IS TALKING. This may be a miracle. Call the Pope.
It looks like everything went well, then? It seems… OK, here comes the talking. Oh, God, Piers Morgan, lord save us. The dress is Alexander McQueen, not David’s Bridal. I guess that’s not a surprise. Some woman is going on like an idiot about it. It’s a very nice dress, to be sure. I don’t get the equestrian rig. The bride and groom are riding in an open carriage, with no driver, but drawn by a pair of horses, one of which has a rider. I’ve never seen that. What do they call that? He’s posting the trot, and everyone else is sitting it. But they’re still yakking about the dress and “pageantry.” Well, this is certainly a pageant. Shut up, Piers. Let Anderson do the talking. He’s the perfect guy for this job.
I think I’m going to have to move to the web for the details …oh, here they are. They’ll be the Baron and Baroness of Carrickfergus! Let’s sing it together, shall we? The sea is wiiiiide, and I cannot cross oooo-ver… Fortunately, we have satellites now, and we can watch live from our living rooms.
That’s a very pretty dress, but I don’t see the McQueen there. I guess it’s all in the fit and details, but it’s pretty understated for a royal wedding. No Diana here, except for maybe the tiara. Kate’s not even wearing her hair up. How long did it take her to get dressed? Half an hour, tops.
OK, a closeup of the vows. That’s a designer gown. You don’t get a bodice fit like that off the rack.
Something else I learned today: Kate’s sister is named Philippa, Pippa for short. I’ve always wondered how English girls get called Pippa. Now I know.
It looks like it was a pleasant enough affair. Very 21st century. I turned on BBC America for the last half-hour of my shift last night, and it was All Diana, All the Time. Every time I think I’ve forgotten her brother’s awful funeral speech, there he is again — a gehl who was beloved by the wehld. I’ve been on Team Camilla for a while, especially today in her sombrero hat. You can tell she’s dying for a gin and tonic.
We’ve been waiting for a new generation, and I guess it’s here. Many baby princes and princesses for you, Baron and Baroness Carrickfergus.
So what’s on the bloggage tray today?
After I die, I hope someone is around to write something like this about me. A wonderful appreciation of the unsung heroes of newsrooms — the copy editors. An early spotter of talent in our own Hank Stuever, in fact.
When Viagra came on the market, lots of people knew it would be used in ways many of us never expected, but maybe not like this.
I saw a story last night on the AP wire that said Donald Trump, swiftly approaching She-Who stage in my book, made a “profanity-laced” appearance in Vegas, to a wildly adoring audience of morons. It being AP, none of the profanities were detailed. This being Gawker, they were:
On taxing Chinese goods: “Listen you mother fuckers we’re going to tax you 25 percent.”
Sorry to end on such a vulgar note, after opening with royalty, but what can I say? I am an American.
Happy weekend, all.
The governor unveiled his “plan to reinvent Michigan’s educational system” this week. I’ll give this to Rick Snyder — for a Republican, he sure does love big government.
There have been several unveilings in recent weeks, a veritable night at a strip bar, very top-down, delivered with a subtext of I hate to do this, but you’ve demonstrated you’re incapable of managing these things on your own. He’s tied state revenue-sharing with municipalities — an important source of money for cities and towns, getting more important by the minute as tax revenues continue to fall — to the municipalities’ success at instituting so-called “best practices” in their management, as defined by the state.
To some extent I’m sympathetic. So many things in the state no longer work; it’s time for some fresh thinking. I’m not even bothered by the beefed-up emergency financial manager law, currently being distorted by none other than Rachel Maddow on a regular basis. The Grosse Pointes, as I’ve told you before, are comprised of five municipalities that are home to fewer than 48,000 souls, and we have a preposterous duplication of services. Five police departments. Five street departments. Five parks departments. And so on. We share a library and school system, but any discussion of sharing the rest is tied up in a snake’s nest of status and class anxiety, mixed in with the pervasive fear of Detroit that overarches everything — I mean everything — that happens here. To whatever extent Snyder can use the current crisis to force at least some common-sense efficiencies is fine by me.
However, if this is an in-for-a-dime, in-for-a-dollar deal, my guess is the self-described tough nerd, a moderate Republican who ignores the dog-whistle social issues that inflame the rest of the party, is going to find himself at a loss for support for his latest plan. As I said before, this week’s unveiling is education. You have to go way down in the press release — past the nod to early-childhood and the anti-bullying and the “easy-to-understand dashboard” (huh?) to find this nugget:
One of the most innovative departures from the way schools are funded now is to develop what the governor calls an “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” learning model in which funding follows a student rather than being exclusively tied to a school district.
…The governor also proposed giving parents more options by ensuring every school district participate in “Schools of Choice.” Under the governor’s proposal, residents of a local district will still have the first opportunity to enroll, but schools will no longer be able to refuse out-of-district students.
In other words: Every kid is a walking voucher. In the whole state. Education funding in Michigan is already tied to enrollment; state aid to education is doled out on a per-pupil basis. I’ve mentioned before that Michigan has so-called schools of choice, open-enrollment districts, but the question of whether or not to become one has been up to local boards. Hungrier districts have voted themselves open, but districts like Grosse Pointe’s — and other generally affluent, high-achieving areas — have done anything but. In fact, the No. 1 dog-whistle issue surrounding schools here is “residency,” the belief of some parents that Grosse Pointe’s peaceful, functional schools are being invaded by usurpers with no legal right to attend. I can’t wait to cover the board meetings that will address this issue, should it come to pass. I will pack a lunch.
But what I find most interesting about all of this is: Snyder is a Republican. Republicans supposedly believe in a less top-down government, more local control. Right? That’s what they keep telling me, anyway. They certainly believe in vouchers. He’s calling their bluff. To paraphrase the great star of that party: How’s that tough-nerdy thing workin’ out for ya?
Brian Dickerson, the Freep columnist worth reading, addressed all this in an excellent piece last month:
I wonder how some of those same small-government Republicans would react if a governor with different priorities used the same tools to reward local governments who provide subsidized day care or penalize those who failed to subsidize public transportation. I hear there are federal lawmakers as confident about what makes sense in the realm of health care as Snyder is about what makes sense in the realm of employee compensation.
It’s not the size of the government that matters so much as who is pulling the levers and to what end. And if politics teaches us anything, it’s that one man’s best practice is another man’s socialism.
As they say in the editorial-board meetings: Indeed. (Puff, puff, exhales pipe smoke.)
Today is the last hard-workin’ day of my week, with tomorrow dedicated to some cultivation of future work (as well as my yard, which could use some underbrush-raking). Nevertheless, how about some fresh links?
Bad news out of the South, of course. I don’t know about you, but I doubt I could watch this hellhound bearing down on me and hold my camera steady. I’d be making for someone’s basement. That was an F4, we’re told; the scale goes up to F6, although a 6 is formally described as “inconceivable.”
Wherever you are, I hope you’re safe.
The faces of ignorance and racism: The birther hall of fame.
A few months back, I had Elif Batuman’s “The Possessed” on the nightstand, one of the year’s delights — a collection of essays about Russian literature and the lunatics people who love it. Batuman is still writing. She’s still great.
Off I go. Happy Thursday to all.
Oh, look: The long form is here! This will certainly put an end to birther foolishness once and for all. Let’s check… oh, let’s just drop in on a random site to see how the reaction is. How about Facebook?
Must have taken all this time to “produce” it.
OK, well, that’s not a surprise, is it? Now we can move on to the Afterbirther* movement, who will clamor for a sample of the president’s placenta, as well as a small amount of amniotic fluid, just to put the question to rest once and for all.
* “Afterbirthers” — an Onion story. But you believed it, for a minute, didn’t you?
Because yesterday was a killer and today will be the same, how about some good odds, ends and bloggage? Yesterday it occurred to me my phone might work better if I stripped out some of the old crap cluttering up the innards. I trashed most of the pictures. Here’s one I deleted — my husband with a pair of underpants on his head:
He doesn’t normally wear underpants on his head, but the metadata on the photo tells the story: Taken April 16, 2010. He was scraping and painting the boat bottom, an annual chore. He puts blown-elastic boxer shorts on his head to keep the paint dust out of his ears. If anyone at the boat yard thinks it’s odd, they don’t say anything.
It isn’t just Michigan that lost ground in the 2000s. A Dayton Daily News project looks as the “lost decade” in numbers, and they’re pretty scary:
Since 2000, Ohio’s total annual private payroll dropped by $22 billion, the examination found, a devastating economic implosion that hit every aspect of Ohio’s economy — from grocery stores, restaurants and retail to government budgets and beyond. As one telling indicator, the Ohio Department of Education said the proportion of youngsters receiving federally subsidized school lunches has reached a record high of four for every 10 students.
It’s the same old story:
Driving the lopsided trade is that the Chinese value their currency far below its true value, under-pricing U.S. goods. And that’s not all. Protracted trade disputes that threaten even more local jobs have ensnared key Miami Valley industrial employers such as NewPage and AK Steel.
“I have told one Chinese delegation after another that we don’t like the fact that you manipulate your currency,” (Gov. John) Kasich said in his State of the State address. “And it will stop.”
Really? It will? Send me a postcard.
I don’t follow sports much, although I should, given the amount of public money showered on these zillionaire team owners. But I appreciate a good sneery rant as much as the next gal, and this one, about Frank McCourt, former owner of the L.A. Dodgers, is pretty good:
Frank McCourt bought the Dodgers, a team he couldn’t afford, using money he didn’t have. In a deal that only could’ve happened in the 2000s, McCourt got a $145 million loan from Fox—the Dodgers’ previous owner—to purchase the team, using his parking lots in Boston as collateral. (McCourt defaulted on the loan, and Fox sold the lots.) The team, meanwhile, accrued more than $400 million in debt from 2004 to 2009. In perhaps the most egregious example of McCourt-style accounting, the owner charged his team rent to play in its own stadium, with the proceeds being used to pay the family’s personal bills.
In other words, Frank McCourt was just like every other rich jerk in recession-era America, not to mention the owners of the Mets and the Rangers. The Dodgers fiasco has allowed me to see the greed that caused the financial crisis up close. I don’t have massive investments, and I sold my house before the market crashed. Luckily, I didn’t have a ton to lose in this recession. Instead, I watched someone gamble hundreds of millions that weren’t his, on a baseball team I love, and come up snake eyes.
Via Hank, a great read that should be subtitled: You want the glamorous life of an author? Enjoy one writer’s remembrance of his Uncle Bill, who published 25 books you’ve never heard of:
Bill took great delight in turning any family occasion into a debacle, which I appreciated, kind of:
Florida, 1968–Family vacation. We climb a tower at a scenic overlook. When everyone else is climbing down, Bill grabs me by the ankles and hangs my scrawny, seven-year-old ass, Pip-like, above the Everglades. When I scream and squirm like a psychotic shrimp, he tells me now you know what it feels like to be scared.
Extremely entertaining read, with much truth within.
Tom & Lorenzo on another Michelle Obama outfit, but you should click through for the photos of Malia at the White House Egg Roll, who is apparently growing into a willowy beauty with an inseam as long as her father’s. When did these children do all this growing, says the woman who just went through three years of iPhone photos.
Finally, for you Detroiters: There’s a Critical Mass bike ride Friday night IF IT EVER STOPS RAINING, followed the next day by races at the Dorais Velodrome, both of which I plan to attend IF IT EVER STOPS RAINING. Details here.
But I don’t think it ever will. Stop raining, that is. On to the Mangle. Happy Wednesday, all.
Forty-six degrees and fog as I write this, but it’s supposed to climb to 70 today. Woot, 70 whole degrees the last week of April at 42 degrees north latitude. But with thunderstorms. Always a downside.
Sorry, feeling a little grumpy today. My iPhone is failing. It’s three years old and it’s probably time for replacement, but the idea of getting a new one fills me with resentment. My model is the 3G clearance special that AT&T is now giving away for $50, and I’d be happy to do that, but I’m sure I’d need to sign a two-year contract. I hate two-year contracts. I hate all contracts, frankly. In two years, I could be dead. In two years, the 3G clearance special will be as antique as a four-pound all-metal Ma Bell desk model with the corkscrew cord.
Speaking of which, I loved those phones. I love scenes in movies where someone uses a phone to beat someone else, like Joe Pesci does with the pay phone in “Goodfellas.” He put a serious hurt on that guy, and he only used the receiver. Nowadays, I drop my phone and we all gasp — Is it dead? Is the screen cracked? You couldn’t beat a hamster to death with an iPhone.
On the other hand, I have dropped this sucker plenty, and the worst thing that’s happened is, the SIM card has popped out. It’s been a pretty good phone. But I still resent it, the way I would resent crack cocaine, if that were my addiction, instead of constant phone-checking. There’s been some talk of late of smartphone etiquette — talk about an oxymoron — and I’m sympathetic, really I am, but the goddamn thing is just so convenient, it’s insinuated itself into my life so thoroughly, that I feel I might as well be wearing a tether. We always hate the ones we love.
Since today is already a train wreck, and I have hours of work ahead, let’s go right to the bloggage:
At least it’s spring on the Coozledad farm. Is that Llewd, or Purley? No matter, because today, it’s Ferdinand.
The story is OK, but the headline is one for the ages: Patient emits potentially harmful gas; hazmat called to Ann Arbor hospital.
The problem with The Onion: Real life is always crazier than fiction.
A companion piece to that long-ago news story about the newspaper of the future — remember that one? — is this more recent, though still ancient, report on the newest wrinkle, c. 1994. The tablet newspaper:
It’s useful to watch these, as I’ve been among those who said the newspaper industry was blindsided by the internet. That’s not true. From almost the beginning, we saw the future. We just didn’t see the future business model, i.e., free. Free free free free free. Plus ad blockers.
OK, it’s time to pull the plug on this disaster and set nose to grindstone. A bloody mess, dead ahead.
Mitch Albom has a new play opening this week. The Free Press assigned a reporter, and another reporter, but of course no Albom media event would be complete without a contribution from the man himself.
He modestly says “Ernie” is a wonderful play. Srsly. He really does say that:
You start with stories. His humble roots. His speech impediment. The time he got Babe Ruth to sign his shoe. You move through his World War II service, his early career, his relationship with JackieRobinson, Willie Mays, then on to Detroit, the 1968 champions, the Jose Feliciano brouhaha, the 1984 World Series. You explore his firing from the Tigers, his fondness for Tiger Stadium. And you layer the whole thing with one of the great love stories in baseball, Ernie and Lulu.
And you find there is a beautiful play there, a man about to make his farewell speech at a ballpark, wondering how he could be worth such a fuss.
As usual, this is all played in the key of aw-shucks, all I did was write it all down:
The show runs until June, but already in preview performances, it is amazing how people gasp a little when they hear Will speak like Ernie, how they laugh, nod and even cry at familiar stories, and how, when Ernie talks of his lifetime honeymoon with his wife, they all sigh at the same time.
The first time I read about “Ernie,” I declared that I’d rather be locked in for the overnight shift in a daycare center full of crack babies and poisonous snakes than see this. Add “and 14 little dogs that do nothing but bark-bark-bark,” and you’ve got it about right.
The theater where this sapfest is booked is across Woodward Avenue from Comerica Park, and showtimes are scheduled to coordinate with home game starting times. So you can catch “Ernie,” and then, face still wet with tears, cross the street, pass the statue of Ernie near the main gate, and catch a game.
If Ernie Harwell was really half as humble and self-effacing as Albom and others make him out to be, he is rolling in his grave. As one of my Facebook friends commented, Albom has made more money off dead guys than Yoko Ono.
Next on the agenda: Bread, water and a healthy bowl of high-fiber gruel — a Michigan legislator gets into the spirit of the age with proposed legislation that the state’s foster children should be clothed solely in the castoffs of others:
(State Sen. Bruce) Caswell says he wants to make sure that state money set aside to buy clothes for foster children and kids of the working poor is actually used for that purpose.
He says they should get “gift cards” to be used only at Salvation Army, Goodwill or other thrift stores.
“I never had anything new,” Caswell says. “I got all the hand-me-downs. And my dad, he did a lot of shopping at the Salvation Army, and his comment was — and quite frankly it’s true — once you’re out of the store and you walk down the street, nobody knows where you bought your clothes.”
Caswell is 61. He “never” had anything new. So why should anyone else? Look what it did for him: He graduated from Michigan State! Actually, his Wikipedia bio is intriguing. Graduated high school in 1967 and went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, leaving after two years to finish undergrad at MSU, before re-enrolling and finishing with a master’s in 1976. Nowhere in there do I see the name of a certain southeast Asian country that begins with the letter V. Hmm.
So, it was a weekend for entertainment catch-up. Watched “Game of Thrones,” part 1. This one’s going to be difficult, I can see — I’m already sorting characters by hair color. You can tell the producers had the same idea, giving one brother-sister pair identical shades of peroxide-white, and another familial unit a uniform strawberry blonde. Thank heaven, as I’m certainly not going to catch their names as they fly by, each one ending in -ian or -aeus. What is the appeal of fantasy, I ask you fans out there. Escapism? Must be, although each novel I’ve picked up loses me in endless tangles of family trees, and I always have to check the map on the endpapers to orient me in space. “Game of Thrones” helpfully does this in the credits; although after one episode all I really know is: Winterfell is in “the north” and north of Winterfell is “the Wall,” behind which are monsters and dire wolves. I wonder how many fantasy readers know the dire wolf was a real species of the Pleistocene era. Lived in these parts, even. A 250-pound wolf. Now that would have been a sight to see.
OK, it’s Easter Monday, which means it’s still a quasi-holiday here in holiday-mad Michigan, but I have work to do just the same. Happy week to all, although with rain in the forecast nearly every day, we’ll have to see about that.
Eh, ’twas a rough night. For the second time in a month, I was awakened in the wee hours by overwhelming nausea. Considered barfing, didn’t, and eventually it faded enough that I could sleep again. I don’t know what it might be, and don’t plan to worry about it until it happens again. Chances are, I’m fine. You’re always fine, until you aren’t.
Speaking of which: Courage, Moe.
It’s Good Friday, which means nothing much is going on, here or anywhere else. Further, not much will be going on Monday, either — the cities are closed, the schools are closed, etc. I’m all for adequate leisure time, but criminy, some of these folks need to work in newspapers for a while. We got New Year’s, Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas off. Excuse me while I chomp my cigar and whine about kids these days.
Fortunately, we have some pretty good bloggage today, starting with our own Coozledad. His gander is up to something with his sheep. Drake, I mean: Akbar Brynwaladrllwnin. Wouldn’t you love to be an animal on Coozledad’s farm? It must be all that late-night singing around the campfire.
I know we’ve talked about Kiryas Joel before here, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish village north of New York City. The NYT did a piece on them this week; on paper, they’re the poorest place in America, although in KJ, things are more complicated than they look on paper:
About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold, according to the Census Bureau. Median family income ($17,929) and per capita income ($4,494) rank lower than any other comparable place in the country. Nearly half of the village’s households reported less than $15,000 in annual income.
About half of the residents receive food stamps, and one-third receive Medicaid benefits and rely on federal vouchers to help pay their housing costs.
Kiryas Joel’s unlikely ranking results largely from religious and cultural factors. Ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic Jews predominate in the village; many of them moved there from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, beginning in the 1970s to accommodate a population that was growing geometrically.
My local pet store is my favorite pet store ever. Clean, sweet-smelling, it’s the sort of place where even the creatures doomed to end up as another’s dinner, like the white mice, look happy and healthy. Lately they’ve added a ringtail lemur, just for the amusement of customers. There’s a house tortoise, Franky, who lumbers around the store as an official greeter. And there’s a large pond in the front, where lives two lunker red-tail catfish, an aropawa and some sort of freshwater ray. One of the catfish got sick a few weeks ago. The video on how they figured out what was wrong with it is worth watching. You can see Franky watching in one of the later scenes.
OK, an appropriately somber Good Friday to all. Remember, tomorrow night is “The Ten Commandments” — Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!
And a good Easter, as well. Think I’ll go read for an hour, until I feel fully human.
It took a while, but I got through the Jon Krakauer piece about the “Three Cups of Tea” guy, Greg Mortenson. I guess I feel the way I did after I read about Jack Kelley, the fabulist USA Today reporter of some years back, i.e., I wish I had been reading this stuff when everyone else was. Because I like to think I’d have spotted this.
Or maybe that’s just preening. My sole feat of unmasking writerly fraud came by accident. But some of the excerpts Krakauer quotes at length are simply beyond belief. Like the time Mortenson was “kidnapped by the Taliban” in Pakistan and held for eight days, forced to poop before an audience and given nothing more to amuse himself with than a 25-year-old copy of Time magazine. And just when he thinks this is it, here comes the bullet, oh goodbye cruel world…
Fortunately, as Mortenson was taking what he feared were his final breaths, the truck skidded to a stop, whereupon the commander removed Mortenson’s blindfold and gave him a hug. “We’re throwing a party,” the Talib announced. “A party before we take you back to Peshawar.” Instead of being executed by a Taliban firing squad, Mortenson was feted as the guest of honor at a rowdy Pashtun hoedown featuring barbecued goat, lots of hashish, and boisterous dancing. Throughout the bacchanal, dozens of Taliban embraced Mortenson like a long-lost brother and stuffed wads of hundred-rupee notes into his pockets. “For your schools!” the commander explained, shouting in Mortenson’s ear to be heard over bursts of celebratory gunfire. “So, Inshallah, you’ll build many more!”
Oh, yeah, the old hold-him-in-solitary-for-eight-days-then-throw-him-a-surprise-party trick. Those Pakistanis and their mind games.
I have to admit, I skimmed much of the last half of the journo-novella, although I paused to see how he’d weasel out of the inevitable confrontation. (Plead a sudden cardiac procedure.) In this case, I think LAMary had the right idea: Some people are just bad judges of literature, and that includes Oprah.
Kelley, you probably don’t recall, was also known for his incredibly vivid writing from the Middle East, which is full of people who melt away into the crowded cities after news happens, and can’t be called to verify just how many rupees were pressed into a man’s hand. (Besides, everyone smoked a LOT of hash.) One of Kelley’s many whoppers was about a suicide bombing in which heads rolled down the street, eyes still open and blinking, presumably a detail Kelley saw with his own. And it got past the copy desk? Wow.
Of course, the lies were one thing, and to many readers, unimportant. A good story is its own reward. The financial irregularities were quite another. But as I read on, already convinced of the shenanigans, I became more interested in the Byliner interface, which seems very much made for tablet-style reading. Guess I better order that iPad.
Just a brief bit of bloggage today, an OID like few others, from a Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office press release:
Today Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy has charged Cornell Lowman, 49 of Detroit with Criminal Sexual Conduct 4th Degree and Habitual 4th Offender (upon conviction the sentence can be enhanced up to 15 year in prison because CSC 4 is a 2 year misdemeanor) It is alleged that on April 17, 2011 Lowman went to a nursing home in the 690 block of East Grand Boulevard to visit another person when he went into the room of a 65-year-old female coma patient and had sexual contact with her. He was observed by a witness who immediately contacted the police. The defendant was arrested at the scene.
Finally, it’s pretty obvious what else is new today. J.C. describes the new design as “a retrenchment…with a lot less garbage being loaded behind the scenes. We can add some more splash and dash, but I thought this was a nice grownup way to make a transition.
“It has some nice features…the window resizes nicely to hold the content and when you’re reading in single story mode, there’s an agglomeration…almost but not really a cloud…a PARADE of your commenters in the sidebar that are in fact links, so you can punch through the comment stream by poking the names…and as you’ll see, the sidebar on those pages kinda slides around to keep up with you.”
I know how fervently any sort of change around here is despised, so hey — let the hatred begin!
If you live to the east of me, and the weather we had last night is headed your way, let me just say this: I hope you enjoy rain. It looks as though most of it is off to the south now, the dregs of the system. Maybe a little over central Pennsylvania and… what do they call that big westerly chunk of New York state? The Something Tier, as I recall. You folks there? Bring an umbrella.
It arrived last night after midnight, loud enough that I relocated far from the skylight I normally work under, as the sound effects were like being parked next to a jackhammer. Another tip: If you’re ever tempted to buy a house with a skylight in the bedroom? Don’t do that. There’s a place for skylights, and I love mine, but it’s not over your bed, and not because of leaks. Maybe if you’re an alcoholic, and every night’s rest is aided by bourbon, you can sleep through even an average rain shower pounding on glass five feet above your head. But everybody else should leave skylights for the rooms where you’re not trying to rest.
That said, how was everybody’s Tuesday? Once again, I’m impressed by how well you guys can carry the ball when I’m unable. I was unable yesterday because this is spring break, and I’m celebrating by catching an extra 45 minutes of sleep or so, which cuts into my blogging time on days when I have to get down to campus by 10 a.m. When I saw how late spring break was going to be this year — it’s always wrapped around Easter in our district — I dropped any thought of travel. A mid-April spring break would surely mean a string of days in the 70s here, while the Florida people would swelter in the already unbearable heat of a fast-approaching summer.
No such luck. I guess. That’s what feeding your envy will get you.
So, today, instead — let’s graze a bit. First, a tip for those of you browsing the video selections: “Night Catches Us,” a lovely little film I caught early last evening after finding it at the library. “Criminally overlooked,” says Slate, and I’d say that’s about right. I’m interested in low-budget films that tell urban stories for my own selfish reasons, and this one was such a pleasant surprise. Set in the summer of 1976, it’s the story of an ex-Black Panther home for his father’s funeral, and the way the events of the past won’t let go of the present. Those particular events — the brief flowering of the black power movement before it collapsed into lawlessness — are public record, although like so many of these things, certain people prefer very particular sets of facts about them. What’s wonderful about Tanya Hamilton’s script is that it doesn’t shrink from the pain, while still acknowledging the things about the Panthers that were good and hopeful, even if they didn’t last. And what’s wonderful about her direction is how she makes all this work tonally, how she plays everything restrained and sad while still maintaining the energy. For once, a movie where people talk and act approximately the same way they talk and act in the real world.
Which might be why it was criminally overlooked, but hey, I’m doing my part. Word of mouth, word of blog, whatever. Oh, and a tip of the hat to the great soundtrack, by maybe the only band that can evoke both ’60s soul and contemporary hip-hop with equal command — the Roots.
A few weeks ago I mentioned the prescription-drug problem, only now starting to be acknowledged by those outside the regions it has most damaged — Appalachia and Florida and points between. How’s this for a statistic?
Nearly 1 in 10 babies born last year in this Appalachian county tested positive for drugs. …In Ohio, fatal overdoses more than quadrupled in the last decade, and by 2007 had surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, according to the Department of Health.
That’s from a NYT piece datelined Portsmouth, Ohio, and no, it’s not a pretty picture, but that’s life in Appalachia. It’s never been easy there, but it’s been better than it is now, when there were still jobs in mining and light industry. No more of that. Might as well get high.
The other night I surfed briefly past a Barbara Walters special on the royal wedding that was so stupid it made my brain hurt. It reminded me how careful you have to be about your royal-wedding news. I trust Christopher Hitchens won’t let me down.
Finally, I just registered with Byliner, the latest savior of long-form journalism, to read Jon Krakauer’s piece on the “Three Cups of Tea” guy. I’ll let you know how it turns out. For now, gotta run.