Sorry, guys. Too many obligations collided this morning for much blogging. So until I can break free, here’s something y’all might enjoy: America’s elites have a duty to the rest of us.
Discuss. I’ll be back later.
This, friends, is the definition of what is colloquially known as “some bullshit.”
It won’t last. Doesn’t matter. Last night I took Kate to a concert, a freakin’ long one, and we drove home under a bright full moon. Eighteen hours of high, freezing winds had finally abated, and I thought, OK, that’s over. Evidently, it’s not over. This is what the winds were bringing us. Should have known.
The concert was Anarbor, the same band we saw last November. Actually, it was five bands, with Anarbor in the middle, although we had to stay until nearly the bitter end. This week is spring break, so getting home at a decent hour wasn’t a big concern, but the headliners played for a Springsteen-like interval and they were getting on my nerves. So I discovered one use for text messaging, i.e., contacting your daughter on the other side of the club:
Let’s go. This band sux.
I agree.
So?
We’re waiting for Mike.
Mike being the Anarbor guitarist. All the other members had been out to pose for photos and sign merch, but Mike was the last holdout. I guess you have to stagger these things to maximize merch purchases, an important revenue stream for a young touring band. On the other hand, one more song by A Rocket to the Moon seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. So I walked up to the secured lounge area where I’d seen some of the other acts coming and going, and caught one going.
“Mike in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Send him out.”
Let me tell you, folks, one of the very few advantages to being an old bag is, if you look like someone’s mother, a well-raised young man will frequently obey a direct order. Thirty seconds later: Mike.
“Hey, Mike, thanks for coming out. My daughter wants to get her poster signed. Hang on while I text her.”
“That’s great you’re down with the texting, got the iPhone and everything. I wish my mom was.”
Text: I’ve got Mike at the top of the stairs. On the double.
So Mike and I chatted about this and that, the weather and Phoenix (where they live) and Po, Kate’s band. The look on Kate’s face when she rounded the corner on the staircase with her friends and saw her mother having a conversation with her guitar hero was something to see. Mike signed the poster: “Rock and roll, Mike” and posed for pictures.
Mike is a very nice guy. I only wish he would cool it with the marijuana boosterism.
Mike is 21 years old. In some parts of Detroit, I’m old enough to be his grandmother.
It’s spring break, but I’m still working. So let’s get Monday under way.
Roy Edroso saw “Atlas Shrugged” so you don’t have to:
(As) much fun as it is to slag rotten movies, it is much better to be surprised by a good one, especially when you’ve reached the stage in life where two hours in front of a stinker sets you dreaming of the warm couch and leftover sesame chicken that you left back home. But it is my great regret to inform you that Atlas Shrugged: Part I is neither good nor good-bad, but bad-bad-bad-bad. I dreamed, not of sesame chicken, but of my own swift and merciful death, and that of the director, not necessarily in that order. It is not a pleasurable surprise, not a hoot, nor an outrage; it is Rand’s granite crushed, reconstituted, and spread across the screen with steamrollers.
You’ll hear a certain amount of handwringing over this story — computer out-writes human sports reporter — but I honestly believe it has more to do with sportswriting than journalism in general. Still, amusing, as well as proof that if we could harness the power of pissed-off readers, we could light Los Angeles for a month. (This whole project was touched off by a college-age reporter whose story of a perfect game neglected to mention that little detail until the penultimate graf. Kirk, stop pounding your forehead on the desk. You’ll leave a mark.)
You’ve probably seen this, but let’s give it a little more exposure: Racist Orange County Republicans keep outdoing themselves. Amazing. No, not amazing.
OK, up and at ’em. Let’s hope for a swift melt.
Many years ago, a bunch of my friends and I ended up in Florida for a week. Not spring break, a wedding. What an exciting week it was, of which we must never, ever speak publicly. Daytimes, we recovered in the usual Florida fashion — laying out in chaise lounges by the pool and/or beach.
One day Paul got up to go inside to freshen his drink and didn’t come back. I went in a bit later to freshen my own and found him putting the last touches on a fairly elaborate snack platter — Triscuits with tuna salad, fruit, little cheesy things, etc. Plus a fresh cocktail with a fruit flag on the rim of the glass.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Erica’s getting married,” he said. “I’m having a reception.”
Oh, right. “All My Children.” And there Erica was, wearing a modest red-sequined wedding cocktail dress, marrying for the fourth time, to Adam Chandler. He’d also be the male lead in marriage no. 7, out of 10 as of 2005, the last list I could find, and I’m not spending an extra minute researching Erica’s marriages, let me tell you. Erica Kane Martin Brent Cudahy Chandler Montgomery Montgomery Chandler Marick Marick Montgomery.
I’m sorry Paul died before the internet took over our lives, as I’m sure he’d enjoy surfing the “All My Children” blogs every day, maybe keeping one himself. You know what the big news would be today — it and “One Life to Live” are being cancelled after 40 years or so, part of the slow collapse of the daytime soap. Hard to imagine. I remember my grandmother watching these afternoon stories in the ’60s, when they were in black and white, the action punctuated with organ stings.
Soaps were always the golden handcuffs for actors, steady work that paid very well, but didn’t carry much prestige outside of fan conventions. Although I’m always amazed at how many respectable ones got their start there — Julianne Moore, Marisa Tomei. Demi Moore was on “General Hospital,” although I think we can all agree her technique still has one foot in the Significant Close-up to Close a Scene.
The New Yorker ran a hilarious profile of the showrunner of “Days of Our Lives” a few years back. It was there I learned that the writing on soaps has reached the point where scenes in heaven are fairly routine now. Never watched ’em, myself. Tried, during the Luke and Laura “General Hospital” era, but couldn’t get into it.
So how about a picture? From the Kid Rock cruise:
That’s from the Facebook of Deke Dickerson, whom I gather was a musician in one of the backup bands. Thanks to BobNG for pointing it out. As I said late in yesterday’s comments, I’m disappointed at how much better his album is than any of the many photo galleries published by the Free Press. If you’re on Facebook, you can look it up yourself; they’re public on his wall, but I don’t think any link I’d put here would work. I’m amazed, although I shouldn’t be, by how many guests had multiple Kid Rock tattoos. One had an interesting surgery scar on her thigh, too. I’m sure the story behind that one is something to hear.
A little bloggage for the weekend:
U.S. Postal Service FAIL, as the kids say: The new Statue of Liberty stamp turns out to be a photograph of the one in Las Vegas, not in New York Harbor. Another delightful read by Kim Severson, off the food beat for a while now, and blooming where she’s planted. I saw her speak at a conference in Ann Arbor, and she was by far the most amusing one there.
Finally, something to consider while our American kids are being taught to the test. Tell me if you think these Australian kids will ever forget this lesson about dinoaurs for the rest of their lives:
What does a getup like that cost, anyway? Can I save enough money by next Halloween?
Jolly good weekend to all.
We’re finally getting some competition for Comcast in these parts. As Comcast has recently rewarded my years of customer loyalty with a $20 monthly rate hike, to give me services I don’t use, I listened when the WOW cable guy stopped by yesterday. Most intriguing offer: Real savings on the land line, thanks to the choice of three tiers of service. We use it so little I know that if it rings, it’s likely someone I don’t want to talk to. I’d drop it if it weren’t for my husband’s objections, and the fact the phone mount in my kitchen is huge and will require a large framed portrait of Alexander Graham Bell to hide. So this would work for us, and I’m pissed Comcast hasn’t stepped in with an alternative.
They also offer three tiers of internet service, but in this area I require Maserati-like speed, so no savings there.
But the real elephant in the business-model room would be true choice in cable TV. The doomsday scenario for that industry is when customers can craft their own package from the channels they actually watch. Farewell, Golf Channel, hello AMC, etc. We’re there, more or less, at least with anyone willing to watch TV on their computer. I’m not. I still practice the exhaustion model of TV consumption — slump in chair, pick up remote, surf — enough that it would bug me to not have the option.
Anyone with WOW experience, I’m all ears.
Someone sent me this article, more food apocalypse-porn from Gary Taubes. Headline: Is Sugar Toxic? Let’s see if I can guess what the answer might be, coming from a writer who’s been beating the drum for the low-carb, paleo diet for years. Do I even need to read it? Probably not.
New rule: I no longer listen to anyone who tells me a food that I, and millions of other human beings, have enjoyed for centuries, is “toxic.” If nothing else, I’d like to enforce a certain strict constructionism in language. A toxin is a poison. If I eat this cookie, will I fall to the floor in a writhing heap? No? Then I’m going to eat it. Taubes acknowledges as much in his opening paragraphs:
It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.
If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here.
OK, then!
The longer I live, the more I throw in with those nutritionists. I come from a long line of moderate people who lived into their ninth decade by practicing moderation, and eating a piece of birthday cake ever year.
However. Speaking of food, someone posted this on Facebook yesterday, and while its headline is immoderate — The 20 Worst Foods in America — it’s worth a click-through on your next coffee break. It’s not foods, exactly, but restaurant dishes, compiled by the folks at Eat This, Not That ™, yet another insta-book that became a franchise overnight. I don’t eat at places like the Cheesecake Factory and Blimpie’s often, but every so often circumstances will force us off the freeway and into an Olive Garden or some such. Just last week, Kate and I ate at a Chili’s nearby; I fired up the Fast Food Calorie Counter app on my phone, to get a sense of what we were in for.
And nearly fell on the floor. I’ve never seen so many 1,800-calorie appetizers in my life. Everything seemed to boil down to a fat stuffed into a carb, then deep-fried and glazed with more fat — crispy-cheesey tortilla bombs. I ordered the chicken tacos and ate half. Kate got the sliders and ate half. As these are not foods that reheat well, we passed on the go-boxes, but it reminded me of the other thing that is making us fat — portion size. Do you remember when restaurant plates became platters, when the goal was not to feed you so much as stuff you like a foie gras goose? I do. It was approximately the mid-70s. It started with Chi-Chis. I knew a woman who waitressed there; she was living in a hippie farm commune and asked the dishwashers to scrape the plates into a special garbage bag, which she took home at the end of every shift to feed to their pig. Fitting.
OK, the morning is fleeing, so let’s skip to the bloggage:
Longish, but worth a read, as Hugh Grant — yes, the actor — sits down with a former tabloid hack and gets the download on how prevalent surveillance techniques like phone-hacking and other digital eavesdropping is. Via hidden recording. Brilliant. P.S. And this is a developing story.
Speaking of food, Roy Edroso linked to this, and so am I: A few notes on modernist cuisine and molecular gastronomy, at both the restaurant and McDonald’s-lab level, from the Chicago magazine 312 blog. (Broken link fixed. Sorry.)
It’s not “Sophomore dies in kiln explosion,” but it’s close: Yale student dies when her hair gets caught in a lathe. Something to remember when you’re considering what factory work should pay.
OK, off to the bike, and outta here. The week, it’s nearly over!
There’s nothing sadder than a bookstore on the eve of closing:
Our poor Border’s, currently being stripped to the walls, and beyond — the shelves themselves are all marked with “make offer.” Did you know you can buy a good used set of security towers — the things that sound the alarm when someone tries to sneak merchandise past them — for $500. Every book was $1.99. That was the good news. The bad news: There was nothing to read. I picked up Tom Perrotta’s “The Abstinence Teacher,” but couldn’t remember if I’d read it before. Oh, well — never could resist a bargain.
This is the last day. Any dummies out there looking to adopt a racing greyhound? Or a Jack Russell? I actually looked through that one a bit, then put it back. I could have written that book, and made it a lot shorter: Your dog is smarter than you are. Enjoy! The end.
It’s pledge week on public radio, and our local has been running spots proclaiming their dedication to unbiased news coverage. This is choir-preaching time for me, so I’ve been letting my ears glaze over, but about the third time around, I listened more closely, and heard the news director say that other news outlets claim Dearborn is governed by Sharia law. O rly? Turns out he’s right. It seems to be a truism of some right-wing media, in fact. It stems from an incident last year in which some members of a Christian group got themselves arrested at an Arab-American festival there. All they were did was set up shop at a cultural event and tell people their religion was inherently violent and evil. The police arrested them for disorderly conduct, they fought it, and were acquitted. This is proof enough to some people that if you’re caught stealing in Dearborn, you lose a hand. If only. Dearborn has plenty of strip clubs, a strange institution for a city allegedly run under Sharia law. And its mayor is named Jack O’Reilly. I wonder if his friends call him Osama O’Reilly when he stops by the bar for his 5 o’clock medicine. I would.
Anyway, I hope the police learned their lesson. Next time, stand back and let them get their asses kicked. Although that creates its own set of problems.
Not surprisingly, this case was accompanied by a weenie with a video camera. When did we become such a nation of jerkoffs? Watch the video, and you see a typical summer festival like any one of dozens of others. Then the Bible action team shows up and starts stirring the shit. But the video gives the impression of “truth,” because hey — it’s video. And can we have a rule? A sort of Godwin’s Law, part 2? The minute someone feels the need to say, “Hey! This is America!” we all get one free eye-roll, no penalty.
Oh, the coffee is slow to do its work this morning. Think I best head to the gym. But first, another video treat for the season, as Eric Zorn one-ups the Passover-themed YouTubin’ all up in this joint:
Disapproving rabbits. Because they will have no more of your nonsense.
One-hundred fifty years ago, it’s finally on. Disunion is daily reading for me. Should be for you, too.
Time to cut this short and hope for delayed caffeination. Good Wednesday, all.
My Russian teacher cancelled next week’s lesson. She’s Jewish, and it’s Passover. Which must mean that the ABC network broadcast of “The Ten Commandments” is right around the corner. It’s April 23 this year. Woot! I hope Alan doesn’t have anything planned, because it’s going to be wine time in front of the ol’ tube. I’ve missed it several years running, and I’m feeling it, kittens:
When I was researching the book I wrote last year for the Detroit Economic Club, one of the more interesting files was that of Cecil B. DeMille, who addressed them in 1948 on the topic of right-to-work legislation:
In 1936, DeMille was hired to host the Lux Radio Theater, a long-running anthology series featuring the top stars of the day. He held the position for nearly a decade, until 1945, when he balked at the deduction of $1 for political activities by the American Federation of Radio Artists, of which he was a member. The union was fighting a ballot initiative to make California a right-to-work state. DeMille not only refused to pay the fee himself, he also refused to let anyone else pay it for him. The incident ended with DeMille suspended by the union and out of his $100,000-per-year job as host.
DeMille made right-to-work advocacy a pet cause for years afterward.
The DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom existed for decades, and yet, only a few know it existed at all. But everyone’s watched “The Ten Commandments,” at least part of it. Art endures. Politics is just a luncheon address to some bigwigs in Detroit.
Actually, I found another speech in the club’s archives by a Hollywood type — David Wolper, who came in the mid-60s and gave a talk he titled “The Hills are Alive With the Sound of Money.” He was promoting a film he’d produced called “The Devil’s Brigade.” It was about a little-known special forces unit in World War II comprised of — quoting IMDB here — “Canadian troops and a ragtag group of American misfits.” (Misfits are always ragtag, I’ve noticed.) Anyway, the event seemed to have been coordinated with the opening of the film uppermost in mind, and Detroit chosen because of its proximity to Windsor, given the transnational aspect of the Devil’s Brigade. And yet, when was the last time you saw that one? Sometimes art doesn’t endure, either. It helps if the art is memorable.
I might have to dig up this one, however. Any flick with characters named Rockwell “Rocky” Rockman and Billy “Bronc” Guthrie can’t be all bad. And imagine William Holden delivering a line like this:
Lt. Col. Robert T. Frederick: [to Major Bricker] You’ve been in-and-out of nine different camps because you’re the biggest chiseler, hustler, and scrounger in the whole Army. Well, in two weeks our first recruits arrive, and whatever they need, and whatever this camp needs, you’re going to supply. How you do it is your own business. So start hustling.
Start hustling! OK, then.
It’s almost tax-filing deadline. I’m done and filed, and am expecting a small refund, which I’ve already decided to put toward an iPad, because I can think of a million ways to use it for work, which would make it a business expense on next year’s taxes, right? Anyway, our webmaster J.C. Burns — who celebrated his birthday yesterday, by the way — put together one of his occasional (and invaluable) knowledge dumps for new iPad owners. It’s a little technical for the novice, but still full of many tips, suggestions and whatnot if you’re in the same situation. So read, eh?
Until he sent it to me, I didn’t even know he had a Tumblr. Sigh. Another bookmark.
Via BuzzFeed, 52 Things You’ll Only See in America. Unfair, cruel, probably with a good deal of Photoshopping, and yet I still laughed out loud several times. Bad Boys Bail Bonds is real, anyway. Slogan: “Because your mama wants you home.”
People accuse Yanks of being silly about royal weddings, but don’t count the English out. I stumbled across the Daily Telegraph’s special web section the other day, and it’s exhaustive. Best single feature, however: Royal weddings in history, containing a click-through slide show of every one since Victoria and Albert. Bummer: Prince Albert is wearing tight riding pants, but is seen only in profile, so we can’t check for his Prince Albert.
Off to work I go. A good Tuesday to all.
Well, finally: Spring came in with a great gust of southwesterly breezes. They promised us warmth, but warned it would be mitigated by storms. Instead, the storms were pushed far off to the north, and we got — mirabile dictu — sun. I’m writing with the windows open. I should be outside, but I was already outside plenty, earlier. Got the bike out and rode far enough and fast enough to induce a little fatigue in the legs; ate a hot dog from the grill for lunch; opened the windows. Now I’m getting a jump on tomorrow, because tomorrow will be Monday.
Still, it felt like a full weekend, in the sense that I got a few things done and mostly stayed away from the computer. Got a big chunk of the way into “Super Sad Love Story,” had many naps and cooked a little. Alan and I had planned to enjoy Detroit Restaurant Week Friday night, but nothin’ doin’ — when this town wakes up, it wakes up all at once, and you couldn’t get a table anywhere for love or money, not with the Wings in town and Opening Day and the symphony coming back from a long strike and about a million other things afoot downtown. We ended up at our Mexican taqueria, followed by a couple beers at P.J.’s Lager House with a few dozen drunken baseball fans. And it was fun, because Detroit is fun like all winter-bound towns are, once winter finally goes away.
Milwaukee has a festival pretty much every weekend throughout the summer, because warmth + beer = party.
What did I drink Friday night? Bell’s Oberon. Cuz duh.
The Times did a nice job with the symphony’s return, and I give the writer credit for knowing a few simple facts about Detroit-the-city and Detroit-the-metro-area, but I stumbled over this:
The city’s decline has sapped donations and ticket sales. Its reputation keeps some wealthy suburbanites away. “Downtown is still a tough ticket for people,” Mr. Slatkin said in an interview. “It has some frightening images.”
Much bitterness remains. “I resent what’s gone down,” said Joseph Striplin, a Detroit native who has played violin in the orchestra since 1972. He blamed board members and orchestra executives, “a mix of politically reactionary right-wing figures who never saw a union they didn’t hate” and a leadership with a “distorted vision of what a symphony orchestra should be.”
I guess “some” wealthy suburbanites are afraid to come downtown to park in a guarded garage a couple blocks from the freeway, and walk a few dozen yards, among throngs of other concertgoers, to the front door of the DSO’s lovingly restored concert hall, but it’s hard to imagine who they might be, as well as where they’ll get their classical music otherwise.
As for the angry Mr. Striplin, he’d have a better argument deriding their fiscal management; one of the biggest millstones hanging over the organization is the debt for last decade’s construction binge. But that was a different time here, and it was before I got here, so I’ll reserve judgment. (Although I think he’s got a point. It’s amazing how many people think artists should work free, or for close to it. Even top-tier players like the DSO.)
Oh, well. Let’s move on. Feral swine are taking over the state. That link goes to a column from a agriculture-industry poobah, which means the numbers are probably inflated significantly. But he’s certainly right that there’s a problem here, and it’s getting worse, and guess where it started:
Before a few hunt clubs began importing the nonnative species into Michigan, it was a problem we associated only with places like Texas and the South. Now, herds of feral swine — each averaging around 300 pounds — wreak havoc by destroying land and damaging important crops and plants.
Thanks, Ted Nugent! He owns at least one of the canned-hunt concerns that bear responsibility for wild pigs gaining a beachhead in Michigan. Clubs turned these critters loose on their fenced holdings for their members to “hunt.” A highly adaptable and intelligent species known for its prodigious digging skills; what, really, could have possibly gone wrong?
Mr. Whack ’em and Stack ’em thinks the problem is exaggerated. Let’s put him on a cruise, eh?
Speaking of which, the coverage of the Kid Rock cruise appears to be winding up. Verdict: A huge disappointment. So much potential, yet the stories read like it was covered by telephone. I was hoping for a rock ‘n’ roll version of “Down the Volga on the Ship of Fools,” P.J. O’Rourke’s account of touring the Soviet Union with a group lured through an ad in The Nation.
Alan said of the cruise, “I would have thrown myself overboard by the 15th woooooooo.” And yet, no wooooooos came through in this copy. Just bum-smooching:
Out in the water, a trio of teen girls in a kayak had paddled over from a nearby resort, oblivious that they were 10 yards from one of the era’s best-known music celebrities. A pair from Kid Rock’s entourage crept up underwater and tipped the kayak to the squealing girls’ surprise — prompting the star to swim over and assist them back on their boat.
Situated back in their kayak, one of the soaked girls at last gave him a long look. “Did you know you look like Kid Rock?”
Rock began to swim away.
“I am!”
Ulghr.
OK, time to hit it and get the week going. Hope your day is a cruise. Mine will be more like an upstream paddle.
Kid Rock is leading his own Kid Rock-themed cruise this week, from New Orleans to Cozumel and back. Twenty-seven hundred booze-soaked fans, plus a reporter and photographer from the Free Press, are on board. Tell me if you can get through this paragraph without an involuntary shudder:
For this heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking crowd, it’s an itinerary that includes all-hours bars, pole-dancing classes and performances by 16 acts, including Rev. Run, Gretchen Wilson and two up-close-and-personal concerts by Rock himself.
I guess this is the big thing for entertainers now, particularly musicians, but really, anyone whose work can be easily digitized and stolen. Not cruises, necessarily, but added-value revenue streams. No more guitar-shaped swimming pools and a daily trip to the mailbox for royalty checks, now you gotta werq, hon.The Wall Street Journal did a story a while back about performers doing more private shows (ladies and gentlemen, welcome to St. Bart’s and Mr. Qaddafi’s exclusive New Year’s Eve party. Now put your hands together for Beyoncé!), or offering tiered pricing of tickets, with the big-money level (four figures and up) offering such extras as backstage receptions with the star, photo ops, even short VIP encore sets with branded souvenir chairs.
Not sure what the entertainer known as Kid Rock is getting for this thing, but my guess would be: Plenty. Tickets range from $600 to $3,000. Times 2,700… Minus a few grand for the hot dogs and Natty Light… Equals not too shabby.
Five days stuck on a boat with more than 2,000 wasted rokkers? You’d have to pay ME. But clearly, I’m not the target audience.
Sigh. Another Friday, another rainy one. It’s Opening Day in Detroit, infamous for its nasty meteorological surprises, so I guess this is pretty typical. Still. It would be nice to see my forsythia dare to put their yellow heads out.
So, let’s blog on, shall we:
Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.
The problem, of course, is that to actually make significant cuts in what is left of the “welfare state,” one has to cut Medicare and Medicaid, programs overwhelmingly patronized by white people, and particularly white seniors. So when the time comes to actually pull the trigger on the proposed reductions, the whippersnappers are quietly removed from the stage and life goes on as usual, i.e. with massive deficit spending on defense, upper-class tax cuts, bailouts, corporate subsidies, and big handouts to Pharma and the insurance industries.
One of our lurkers-but-not-commenters, Michael Heaton at the Plain Dealer, has what a friend of mine used to call a Socks on the Lampshades Weekend. I enjoyed this piece because it reminds me of a simpler time, when newspapers found a little room in their pages for writers who didn’t always have to inform, but could simply entertain. One simple declarative sentence after another, no fancy transitions — if you read it aloud it would almost play as cruise-ship stand-up, but it made me smile, and I hadn’t even been drinking.
With that, my weekend beckons. Hope yours is great.
I guess you guys are all waiting for a new entry, so we can start the day’s comment-thread conversation. I don’t have a lot to say at the moment, having spent the last 10 minutes watch the cardinals eat safflower seeds at the feeder. Last winter, they were timid, and would let the sparrows’ superior numbers push them away. Now, they fight back; a particular female has been eating casually for a few minutes now, making threat displays to any finch or sparrow who dares to land on the platform with her. Alan thinks they’ve learned; I think it has more to do with mating season, and the need to hoard scarce food resources.
And you might think: This is so boring I may die. Sorry. An erratic sleep cycle was further disrupted by the need to rise at oh-dark-forty and pack Kate off on a two-day class trip to Our Nation’s Capital ™. The bus pulled out at 5 a.m., bound for Detroit Metro and a 7 a.m. flight to Baltimore. This is an eighth-grade tradition at her middle school, although only about 50 kids are going. I have to assume cost is the reason; even in an affluent district, $700 for a whirlwind speed-tour of monuments might be a pinch to many pockets. We committed and made payments over several months; we don’t travel enough as a family, and like Sinclair Lewis, I believe travel is so broadening. For a kid, travel made apart from parents is even more so. I am reminded of Anthony Soprano Jr., returning from a similar trip, and reporting his most overwhelming impression: “They had PlayStation 2 right in the hotel room.”
Early on, I hoped to go as a chaperone, but it is a parent-free trip — only teachers. Anyway, I couldn’t keep up with the pace, and there doesn’t look to be a spare five minutes in the schedule to, say, meet with your many internet correspondents and have a drink. Although I would have happily scratched the Newseum visit for that.
So for now, I’m just happy they are going ahead of the shutdown.
Let’s jump to the bloggage. Disrupted sleep or no, I still have work to do.
I’ve mentioned here before that Michigan has a form of Vouchers Lite in its public schools. Not 100 percent school choice, but districts are able to vote themselves open to students who live outside their boundaries, and those kids bring their per-pupil state funding with them. (Our district isn’t one of them; if it were possible to put walls and moats around it, I’m sure the residents would happily build them.) One of the things this leads to is marketing by districts, who try to catch the favor of the invisible hand with radio and TV ads touting their advantages. And in one case, it’s looking as though it led to $400,000 disappearing down a rathole in an already desperately poor district that watched its enrollment fall by 50 percent over the time it was paying a company to attract students. Nice investigative work by the Freep there.
I was never a Glenn Beck viewer, so I always heard accounts of his lunacy thirdhand. Dana Milbank explains how utterly off the rails he’s gone in recent months, including two weeks ago…
…when he devoted his entire show to a conspiracy theory about various bankers, including the Rothschilds, to create the Federal Reserve. To make this case, Beck hosted the conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin, who has publicly argued that the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” “accurately describes much of what his happening in our world today.”
These guys were prevalent when I was doing talk radio in the early ’90s in crazy, right-wing Fort Wayne. Until I sat behind a microphone, I had never heard of this stuff. At the time, they struck me as antiques, like those Japanese sailors who crouched in Pacific island caves for years and hadn’t heard the war was over. Guess not.
Lance Mannion finds a new metaphor for Paul Ryan’s budgetary technique.
Off to work.
The day we’ve all been waiting for has arrived: “Sex and the City 2” is now on HBO, and lo, I watched it the other night. I wanted it to be so-bad-it-was-good, but alas. It was merely so-bad-it-was-excruciating. The only good to come out of it may be that it finishes off the series for good, although you never know. The entire production cost looks to have been covered with ham-fisted product placement — did you get a shot of that Rolex? can we get the tech specs for the Maybach in the script somewhere? — and for all I know, it may well have been a big hit among the sort of women who are not you.
I’m thinking of it today because one of my students came by to visit for a while yesterday, a Muslim woman. If you haven’t heard, the main part of the action takes place in Abu Dhabi, to which the quartet jets off as part of a deal Samantha makes with an Arab movie producer. (Samantha’s one-woman PR firm now occupies a glass-fronted office overlooking Times Square, at a fairly low level, too, like the studios for Nickelodeon. I figured this is so she can occasionally get up and press her bare breasts to the window for the tourists, but no, instead we see her sitting at her desk, panties around her knees, applying the various hormonal creams she needs to hold menopause at bay. WIth her back to the window! This makes no sense.)
Anyway, once the gals are in the UAE, a certain number of script pages are devoted to their discussions about Islamic standards of modesty, of which they disapprove. It all comes to a head in one truly appalling scene where hot-flashin’ Samantha (they confiscated her hormones at the airport so they could set this all up) is surrounded by Arab men in a public market who disapprove of her outfit. I wondered why they waited until this one to object, as I’d nearly gouged my eyes out over several others, one of which could literally do the job (No. 2). She responds by pelting them with condoms, until the girls are saved by some veiled and covered women, who drag them into a safe room, strip off their black abayas and reveal outfits every bit as awful as our heroines’.
Then — then! — there is a question of how our girls will escape from the market, still in an uproar over Samantha’s condoms. They actually say this: But how will we get out? I actually said, “Three, two, one,” and as I got to “one” the shot changed:
EXT: THE MARKET, DAY.
A female head emerges from a doorway, covered in BLACK SCARF and VEIL. She turns to look toward the camera, and we see BLUE EYES. She is joined by three others as they look up and down the street. The coast is clear, and they cautiously emerge.
It’s never explained how the Arabic women they borrowed the abayas from got home that day. Perhaps they were stoned to death for those outfits. I was certainly tempted.
And you know what? This wasn’t even the worst scene in the movie. Not by a long shot. I’d nominate the nightclub scene, where the girls sing, “I am Woman” while the Arabic belly-dancers look on with pride and approval, a scene that made me bury my face in a pillow.
The title of the post today is a tribute to my brother-in-law, who christened the series “the ‘ho show” when it was still on HBO, and still somewhat watchable. He also calls Sarah Jessica Parker “Miss Nelsonville” for her family’s brief residency in that Appalachian Ohio town, on their way to Broadway and SJP’s fateful part in “Annie.” You have to have driven through Nelsonville to fully get it, but there’s one scene where we see Carrie putting on her makeup in closeup, and that’s all I could think: She really is Miss Nelsonville.
I can’t believe Salman Rushdie got fatwa’d for “The Satanic Verses,” and every single person who enabled this thing walks free today, with no apparent fear of car bombs and scimitar attacks.
With that bad taste in our mouths, let’s skip to the bloggage:
Paul Ryan’s budget proposal: Splutter, splutter.
Someone needs a heapin’ helpin’ of GET OVER YOURSELF.
Coozledad’s next project: Teach Llewd to jump like Lola Luna. I’m pleased to offer this link in keeping with our theme today (it’s from Al Jazeera):
I’m out. A great hump day to all. And no, don’t do it like Samantha.