In the Clusterflock alphabetical
listing of categories, poop immediately precedes pop culture.
Maybe Texas Democrats
in the minority in the Texas Legislature should learn a lesson from Tennessee.
(via Washington Monthly)
JtWC, 3
[Y]ou don’t need to see what’s happening every day, that’s my personal opinion, you don’t have to share it. But, you know, okay, you don’t have to see, you know, 800 dead, 801 dead. It’s like they drill that in your head…. They want you to sit there saying there are so many people dying. You know these are large, these are numbers, you know I don’t want to take away from that. Let me, uh, think about how to say that again. Just essentially, they keep drilling it into your head, newscast after newscast after newscast.
I think the military should decide what information to give the media and then the media can release it to the public. I don’t believe they need to be in the front lines with soldiers, I don’t believe they need to, uh, you know, be bothering the military for information or for access to certain areas.
A Meal in Venice, 1978
I wanted to comment on Andrew’s recent post—a Dear Clusterflock that posed the question “Where/what was the best meal you have ever had?”—but had to gather some information first. And the story I want to tell is one of a meal I never had. My friends Rick and Teel Sale (poet, artist; writers; world travelers, and two of the most compassionate and insatiably curious people I have known) told me this story. I’m sure I will leave some of it out and perhaps get some details wrong, but here it is.
They were in Venice in 1978 and decided to walk about one late afternoon to find a place to eat dinner. They had heard tales of wonderful seafood to be had in Venice, but had so far found it all far too expensive in the restaurants they visited. They walked down narrow streets and found a small café/bar. Above it was an apartment balcony covered with night blooming flowers. They went in and saw that the place had only four tables and a bar. A boy sat playing chess with a sailor—beating him soundly by the looks of it—and another sailor sat drinking and reading a newspaper at the bar. The owner came out; he was a short but large man, balding, and he wore a rather soiled white apron. Teel asked him if he made a fish soup. The man paused, and then asked how long they could wait for it. Rick and Teel told him—as long as it took, they were in no hurry. Wine and bread was brought to the table and then the man emerged, apron-less, from the kitchen, carrying a large basket; he nodded at them and walked out.
The owner returned in about half an hour with a huge fish overlapping both sides of the basket, which also contained a mass of greens and several bags of clams and shrimp and other things. This he took to the kitchen, and soon the most wonderful smell wafted out to the diners. The owner’s sons (one of them the chess player) and wife all hovered at the kitchen door, cooing sounds of delight. After a while the owner came out with a great platter—the fish cooked whole on the greens—and a large bowl of freshly made fish stock. The kids followed him, all saying “Papa! Papa you did it! You made it!” He cut portions of the fish and put them in shallow bowls, then spooned the broth on. It was astonishingly good. And Rick and Teel’s portions had scarcely made a mark in the great fish’s bulk. Soon neighbors had trickled in, drawn by the aroma, and the owner served family and friends from the platter, pouring wine for all, adding broth to bowls, bringing more bread. He even brought out a bottle of brandy he had made himself and poured small glasses all around. Rick and Teel had a wonderful time, but had begun to worry a bit about the cost, which hadn’t been noted ahead of time, but when the owner brought the bill the amount came to six dollars. They said it occurred to them later that the place was probably more of a bar than a restaurant, set up for a usual fare of light meals. But something had inspired the owner on this night. I asked Rick and Teel if they thought the man’s soup was something he had made in the past, in another place, and perhaps the man thought they had heard of it and had sought him out specifically for that reason. But they didn’t know.
Texas is the Canada of the US
.US states replaced by countries with a similar level of GDP by Christina Broda (via SLM)
cultural baggage
The ass as socio-economic definer:
In mainstream U.S. culture, “bubble butts” have typically been associated with “lowly” subject positions or “vulgar” sexuality. Calling too much attention to one’s behind is considered uncouth in polite society, a nasty reminder of forbidden or distasteful acts. A big butt is associated with “unnatural” sex, excrement, or the excess and physicality identified with “darker” races. This body metaphor helps us constitute social identities and subject positions. Like most females growing up in America, I learned early on that bodily attributes such as butt size, hair texture, skin color, and body shape could convey a woman’s status and desirability. During my teens, achieving the “all American girl” look that graced the covers of fashion magazines meant dieting the butt into submission. A woman’s failure to reign in an unruly butt connoted her lack of discipline and self-control, and by association, her inferior moral character. It also marked her place in the social order: “high class” women did not carry excess baggage in the trunk. A skinny ass identified you with the elegant and never too rich, never too thin social elite, big butts with the mammies and maids.
I think I was out of town that summer*
Obama dined with William Kristol, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and David Brooks.
(*Kudos to whomever catches the reference.)
Callahan Blooms
Bill Callahan (Also known mostly as Smog) put out a new cover of a Kath Bloom song. Callahan’s new album graces us with it’s presence in 2009, and is called Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle.
I mean, come ON, look at this:
Sumptuous, in a word.
(via)
there once was a lady who swallowed a fly
Removal of feral cats on a Tasmanian island to protect endangered birds resulted in a proliferation of rabbits.
Located about halfway between Australia and the Antarctic continent, Macquarie was designated a World Heritage site in 1997 as the world’s only island composed entirely of oceanic crust. It is known for its wind-swept landscape, and about 3.5 million seabirds and 80,000 elephant seals arrive there each year to breed.
The cats, rabbits, rats and mice are all nonnative species to Macquarie, probably introduced in the past 100 years by passing ships. Authorities have struggled for decades to remove them.
The invader predators menaced the native seabirds, some of them threatened species. So in 1995, the Parks and Wildlife Service of Tasmania that manages Macquarie tried to undo the damage by removing most of the cats.Several conservation groups including the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Birds Australia said the problem was not the original eradication effort itself — but that it didn’t go far enough. They said the project should have taken aim at all the invasive mammals on the island at once.
“What was wrong was that the rabbits were not eradicated at the same time as the cats,” University of Auckland Prof. Mick Clout, who also is a member of the Union’s invasive species specialist group. “It would have been ideal if the cats and rabbits were eradicated at the same time, or the rabbits first and the cats subsequently.”
Just good design
A Thom Yorke Grammy Ad (via Austin Kleon)
Blake Butler’s EVER
with illustrations by Derek White is now available from Calamari Press. (And Blake has just celebrated his 30th birthday. Happy birthday!)
Shawn Feeney, Sixty Noses
(via kottke)
Typewriter Ribbon Tin Collection
Flickr set via Coudal.
1937 Bugatti Type 57s
If I owned one of these, I would be fine with driving a car again (via monoscope).
Gigonomics
Who else is in this boat, eh?
The poll helps explain why it now takes a good ten minutes to get the answer to the once-breezy question, “So, what are you up to these days?”
As often as not, a dolorous monologue pours out. It usually goes something like this:
“Well, I’m doing two days a week, at, uh, this airline magazine, which is not bad because it allows me to still do my three days as, like, a consultant with my old company, where now you get, um, paid by the hour. Which works well, because you can even do that when you’re traveling, which I have to do quite a bit of now because I’m also doing this speaker program for a tech company on the West Coast—well, was doing, because they’re cutting back on their off-site stuff because… ” At which point you tune out. It’s all too familiar. The white noise of the free fall.
For a while last year, the downsized people I know went around pretending they enjoyed the “freedom” and “variety” of doing “a whole lot of interesting things.” Twelve months later, nobody bothers with that cover story anymore. Everyone knows what it actually feels like, this penny-ante slog of working three times as hard for the same amount of money (if you’re lucky) or a lot less (if you’re not). Minus benefits, of course.
Awful album covers
A list of some pretty terrible album covers.
a dominant evolutionary force
The impact of human interaction with animal populations is increasing evolutionary changes as much as 300%.
In 1990, Douglas Chadwick wrote in National Geographic magazine how trophy hunting — the practice of selecting only the largest beasts to kill — “has caused a decline in the average size of Kodiak Bears [in Alaska] over the years.”
By harvesting vast numbers and targeting large, reproductively mature individuals, human predation is quickly reshaping wild populations, leaving smaller individuals to reproduce at ever-earlier ages, Darimont explained.
“The pace of changes we’re seeing supercedes by a long shot what we’ve observed in natural systems, and even in systems that have been rapidly modified by humans in other ways,” Darimont said. The study found the changes outpace by 50 percent those brought on by pollution and human introduction of alien species.
“As predators, humans are a dominant evolutionary force, he said.
Dear American Automakers
Your competition, the ones who run circles around you, design and build beautiful, powerful, rear-wheel drive, covetable machines or well-built, efficient, cute cars that retain their value. The companies that do the former are already figuring out ways to produce super-efficient engines that deliver unheard of fuel efficiency in that segment. The companies in the latter, vehicles that are all electric or hybrid and that push them way past the ‘unachievable’ CAFE fuel standards….
These are the options.
Pick one.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Bailout
In response to the Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Rand, Joseph Lawler offers us a better predictive narrative:
Don’t hope for anything better in the next election cycle, though. Adams distills the underlying flaw of democracy in one paragraph:
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Needless to say, Adam’s explanation of the economic situation is much more thorough and accessible than Rand’s. Academics, the media, and especially the recently unemployed have spent countless man-hours trying to understand the failures of the wizards of Wall Street to identify properly the enormous risks of the subprime market in their heretofore impeccable mathematical models. Adams sums it up in a single sentence: “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”
If only the government had known that encouraging over-leveraged banks to increase subprime lending could not possibly go wrong.
Franklin, Jasper and the Chair
This takes a little while to play out, and Jasper is overexposed, but the payoff is nothing to sneeze at.
Adele Services
Someone is charging 25 cents to credit cards across the country under the name Adele Services.
It’s not clear how the numbers got in the hands of the people making the charge, but consumer advocates say it is most likely through either a data theft or someone using a computer to generate numbers.
Former Massachusetts assistant attorney general Edgar Dworsky, who runs ConsumerWorld.org, said the scam reminded him of an old adage: “It’s easier to steal $1 from a million people than $1 million from one person,” he said.
Most people, Dworsky said, are likely to overlook or ignore the small charge. “Isn’t that the perfect scam, when the victim doesn’t even know something has been taken?” he said.
the best job in the world
To promote tourism, Australia is offering someone $105,000 to live on a tropical island and blog about it.
In return, the “island caretaker” will be expected to stroll the white sands, snorkel the reef, take care of “a few minor tasks” — and report to a global audience via weekly blogs, photo diaries and video updates.
The successful applicant, who will stay rent-free in a three-bedroom beach home complete with plunge pool and golf buggy, must be a good swimmer, excellent communicator and be able to speak and write English.
“They’ll also have to talk to media from time to time about what they’re doing so they can’t be too shy and they’ll have to love the sea, the sun, the outdoors,” said acting state Premier Paul Lucas.
“The fact that they will be paid to explore the islands of the Great Barrier Reef, swim, snorkel and generally live the Queensland lifestyle makes this undoubtedly the best job in the world.”
Eliza Furnace Trail
Surface and shadows. Along the Monongahela River, not far from downtown Pittsburgh – the trail is named for the steel mill which is no longer there. (We have a lot of rails-to-trails projects in the region. The Great Allegheny Passage will soon make it possible to bike from my neighborhood to Washington, DC.)
Weekly Picture 138
Deli Wall, New Braunfels Children’s Museum, TX, 12.23.2008
Mike Lee’s Photos of Japan
