Lil' hobby

Um... "Scholar" may be a little strong.

I'm also guessing the huge amount of rain has eased tensions a little.

How does "weathered the worst of its job losses" equate to the possibility of unemployment rising to 11 percent?

Urrrrg

This importing comments thing is not turning out to be easy. Seriously. Tips? Should I just let them die?

Read

I wish I had more to say about Ariel Levy's profile of Caster Semenya, the runner who's probably intersex but raises a lot of questions about how we define sex (genetics? external characteristics? internal examination? Luckily, you can read the whole thing for yourself and probably come up with your own. There's a little much Ariel Levy-ness at the end (it both thrills and disappoints me to see the word "sucks" used freely in the New Yorker), but it's a pretty involved and involving piece.

Hey, Poetry Nerds

Explain to me why Philip Schultz's "The Big Sleep" spells Joel McCrea's last name wrong. The narrator is sleepy?

Lil' hobby

Yeah, stop trying to make up for the commission's failures, Jerry NeSmith! Why you gotta try to make life better for all of us? No, seriously, I do understand where Lynn is coming from. If it's not actually in the regulations and you push it, you probably open the door to lawsuits. I am not a fan of this last sentence though: "A majority of commissioners said they were worried about crime or thought the issue was a waste of time." How about something that says why it might not be?

Or, if they're not moving toward ethics reform and keep fighting with each other over power, that could be a plus, too, depending on which way your politics lean.

Further Thoughts

I kind of meant to go here when I was writing about Blood Diamond yesterday, but I forgot. Not enough coffee. Anyway, what's kind of funny is the mild statement with which the movie ends. Something like, "Please make an effort not to buy conflict diamonds when you're buying diamonds." It seems to me the easy solution is not to buy diamonds, and to water it down significantly when your entire movie has made the point that the entire trade of diamonds is corrupt unless, maybe, you find one in your backyard, reinforces the power of the diamond industry and makes you seem like a gigantic wuss. Now, I'm not in the habit of buying diamonds. I've never even purchased a record player. I've owned a few styluses and I have one pair of earrings, but that's as far as it goes, and it wouldn't kill me to give those up either. What I'm saying is that it costs me very little to take a stance here, but seriously, people are still that into buying diamonds? I suppose Parks and Recreation was right when Aziz Ansari said, "Even the liberal chicks are all like 'Yeah, bitch, gimme some of them blood diamonds! Make 'em extra bloody!'"

Tennis

Oh yeah. We also went to this Rock n' Racquets thing on Saturday at the Coliseum (UGA-affiliated folks could get in for $10). Anyway, no serious tennis being played, and they felt the need to give you your damn money's worth and then some (we left at 6:30 and they had yet to get to the men's singles and the serving contest, plus who knows how many more ads on the Jumbotron), but it was fun.

Lil' hobby

Little time to comment this morning, but you really need to read this story. Please note that Regina Quick is also a former candidate for public office in ACC, which may explain why her statements and decision to take this case may seem politicized. Anyway, I don't doubt that the Board of Assessors screws up sometimes, but you can also easily contest individual cases. I have done so successfully, based on actual evidence, not on "the economy as a whole sucks, therefore my land is worth less" as an argument. We'll see what arguments get presented.

Blargh

So after many years of putting up with the annoyances of Haloscan due to sheer laziness on my part, I find that they're eliminating their free option in a week or so. Any recommendations for a commenting service? Should I just go with Blogger's? With luck, I'll be able to export all 15,000+ comments, but who knows...

Viewing Diary

1) Blood Diamond: It's definitely got flaws (DiCaprio's accent, overdramatized scenes, a little much screaming, length), and yet this really does kind of work as a movie, something I was skeptical about. Despite the now-it's-there-now-it's-not white Zimbabwean accent, Leo's actually pretty good in his morally ambiguous role; ever since he put on a few pounds, he's much more fun to watch onscreen. It's classy enough not to include a sex scene, despite the minor presence of a love story. The action is good and thrilling. Sure, you could say, "Oh, there goes Ed Zwick again, making a white dude the focus of a story that really should be entirely about people of color," but that wouldn't really be fair, would it?

2) Pawn Stars: A.k.a., my new favorite show. How could I not love a mix of American Chopper and Antiques Roadshow? It's a little heavy on the formula (each week includes one doubtful restoration that turns out great and one expert brought in to appraise something the pawn dudes are unsure of, e.g., Revolutionary War maps, antique firearms, etc.), it could get grittier, and the interactions of the family that run it are occasionally stilted (hello, producers! we see you!), but it's rightfully placed on the History Channel, and it's pretty entertaining. Heck, I could watch appraisals packed with historical detail and information all day.

Evidence

Sometimes even I face challenges to my civic-minded spirit, like this parking job in the westside Publix lot.

Viewing Diary

1) Garth Marenghi's Darkplace: Ryan Lewis told us about this show literally two or three years ago. Maybe longer. Why did we take so long to track it down? Oh, because I wasn't good enough at the Internet yet. I think that had something to do with it. Anyway, it's a terrible shame it's only six episodes because they're marvelously done, filled to the brim with all the little details that make a TV show identifiable as low-budget and not very bright. The acting is a wonder, and so is the editing. I highly recommend you track this down on YouTube if you're a fan of television, or bad horror, or the 1980s, or any of innumerable other things.

2) Bright Young Things: Evelyn Waugh is weird. The tone of this period thing goes all over the place, never being too completely comedic (there's always a dark undertone), but always leavening its drama with a touch of self-consciousness. You think it's going to be more Oscar Wilde-ish, and some of it is, but it's rarely silly, or at least not very silly. It's a bit like Gossip Girl, only if more of those characters felt guilty about their lifestyle or had mental breakdowns that weren't just for sweeps week. Fry does a very nice job directing, and any flaws (a jumpy quality as the end nears) probably result from difficulty adapting a novel to the screen. Good acting and lovely parties. It never quite takes off into greatness, but it's a lot of goodness on display.

Okay, let's keep going

Jeff left a long response in the comments below, and I think it's worth looking at this "class war" thing at greater length.

When people use the "hey look what they have" argument to raise taxes on small businesses then the class war seems pretty damn real to me. It's hard enough to run a business and get your income in a way that does not have the safety net of the government or even a big business. It gets even harder when a business owner has to second guess hiring new people or expanding because of the utter maze of tax policy and the sheer piles of cash that must be sent off to the government. It may not seem real to people who don't run businesses. It's very real to me.

I don't believe I'm advocating specifically raising taxes on small businesses. When those businesses are defined as corporations in order to gain tax advantages, well, then maybe I do. I also a) have worked for many a small business, and as badly as the state treats its workers, small business owners often treat them worse. And some of that is understandable. If you promise me health insurance, though, and I take the job because of that, endless delay is not a cool tactic, and it's not honest. You know that I also support government-run healthcare, which would take that burden off the small business owner. b) I'm also a freelancer, which is sort of like being a small business owner in terms of the shittiness of the tax situation. I have maybe gotten a refund once in my life, from the state, not the federal government. So I do understand that it's not fun to pay taxes and that sometimes you get screwed. I'm not opposed to reforming the tax code. Part of the problem is that, right now, small businesses think they're on the same side as the rich. They should be on the same side as the poor in the class war.

At the same time, there are people that get government grants, not to actually create jobs but to talk about the need for jobs, create posters about jobs and have a wine and hummus event to talk about the need for jobs. Sure, you won't get rich doing this but you will get a job where you can make speeches, play graphic artist, throw parties and do anything except actual social work- all the while puffing your chest out like a social crusader.

Yes, there are, but focusing on small problems like poseurs instead of large problems like an economic system that keeps its giant thumb on the head of the underprivileged is not really the best way to go about things. I'm also not necessarily opposed to people having useless jobs. People need any kind of jobs, ones with hummus benefits included.

I know real social workers and I've seen the real poor in a way most people don't. I volunteer in the schools. I've given a lot of time and money to help people and not because someone paid me.

Yup. I know this. I appreciate your vegetable garden food-bank work, for example. In my ideal fantasy world, no one would have a BMW, but that's a socialist paradise I recognize as unattainable.

If we are serious about getting the poor decent jobs then let's speak up about this city's economic development strategy which, at current, they don't have. The poor are not all going to work at coffee shops or web design firms or recording studios. We need an actual strategy and the resources and accountability to carry it out.

I don't think we need more class warfare. I think we need to appreciate that the classes are far more linked than people realize. Instead of trying to turn people on each other, we need to make this into everyone's cause. It needs to be a new war on poverty. That's a war I think more people will support.

"Resources" is the most important word above. I agree. At the same time, you have to work with what you have, to some extent. And the poor does include hipsters, somewhat. Despite my big words, I don't like defining anything as a "war." I just happen to think that what we need is more class consciousness, like the kind that comes with unionizing. Does this lead to corruption and shittiness in some ways? Oh, heck yes. What doesn't? But it also leads to decent health benefits and some power on the part of the worker, which right now is nonexistent in this state. We should keep talking about this!

Read

Augh, Adam Gopnik's article on why we use cookbooks, "What's the Recipe?" which closes out the food issue of the New Yorker, is like as Adam Gopniky as Adam Gopnik gets: full of vague and unsupported pronouncements that purport to apply to everyone, plus a lot of empty theorizing that sounds good until you think about it. He seems to argue that learning from a book doesn't count. You have to learn some things from your mom. But what if your mom can't cook? What if your dad's the chef in the family? What if you're an orphan? Will you never learn to sweat onions properly? What he means to say, and what would have been correct, is that a lot of cooking is learned by doing. Follow the recipe, and you will figure it out, probably. And if you don't, so be it. You can probably make it taste good anyway. Many a recipe has been improved by my inattention to details like how much lemon zest goes in (Jared's mom's rule is to add twice as much of your favorite ingredient as the recipe calls for) or how long to leave the vegetables in the pan (accidental burning can sometimes do wonders). And then there's this:

Simplicity is the style, but salt the ornamental element—the idea of tasting flights of salt being a self-satirizing notion that Swift couldn’t have come up with. The insistence on the many kinds of salt—not merely sea salt and table salt but hand-harvested fleur de sel, Himalayan red salt, and Hawaiian pink salt—is everywhere, and touching, because, honestly, it all tastes like salt. And now everyone brines. Brining, the habit of dunking meat in salty water for a bath of a day or so, seems to have first reappeared out of the koshering past, in Cook’s Illustrated, sometime in the early nineties, as a way of dealing with the dry flesh of the modern turkey, and then spread like, well, ocean water in a tsunami, until now both Keller and Peel are happy to brine everything: pork roasts, chicken breasts, shrimp, duck.

Different salts don't taste different? My palate begs to fucking differ. Yes, they do all taste like salt, but only in the way that all apples taste like an apple. There are also differentiations, unless you suck at tasting things. We don't salt because it makes us more like the pros. We salt because salt is the easiest way to make food taste better without adding copious amounts of butter and it's one of the things that, yes, the home cook often neglects. Salt is a flavor intensifier, like MSG. Does Gopnik not want his flavor intensified? Anyway, read it if you want to be annoyed!

Recommendations

Okay, so just because I'm too old to go see Abbanna LeBon on a regular basis doesn't mean you are. Sure, two out of three of them can't play their instruments, most of the songs are screamed rather than sung, the tempo's way too slow, and most of the lyrics are about rape, but look! They're so adorable! Considering they all wore pigtails and their singer was decked out in Christmas footie pajamas and boots (she's family), I was very impressed with the screaming. They're rather punk rock.


The Great American Country Drifters were very enjoyable, too (and also contain a family member, explaining why Team Brown was out at Go Bar on a Tuesday night, drinking Sprite and feeling about seventy-five). If you make enough jokes, some of them will probably be funny, and kind of a lot of them were.

Publication

Off from blogging today, but here's Grub Notes's review of the Farm Cart. Think it's going to be contrarian? Well, that depends on what you think the opinion's going to be. Grub Notes is in favor of delicious food.

Lil' hobby

This project seems, from the few details available, to be an excellent candidate for SPLOST funding.

Holy heck. Not that I pay much attention to local high school football, but I entirely missed this.

Dude, you're not even going to throw in an "I want to spend more time with my family"?

Sending the letters isn't cynical. Sending a press release about them or sending them just so you can get some good press might be. Isn't it important to make the distinction?

Um, yeah. As the comments are already doing a good job pointing out to Jeff, those on the poorer end of the spectrum aren't exactly winning the war on their higher-incomed counterparts. Or doing much damage. If anything, what this country needs is an escalation in class warfare and a realization on the part of the infantry that their chances of becoming generals is slim to none and strongly rigged against them. Believe me, nonprofit social activists aren't in this for the money. There are plenty of better fields to go into if that were their goal.

I'm sure the homeless contribute somewhat to the major problem that is gameday trash, but they're not the ones pooping in trashcans.

Worldview

Frequently, as I walk over to the UGA Library from my office, I encounter small bits of wildlife: a squirrel, dragging something pulled from a trashcan, frozen on the edge of a ledge; a tiny bird, picking around in the dust. And it made me realize the other day how owning an animal has changed the way I perceive these smaller, wilder ones. Sure, I know that wary look in their eyes doesn't mean very much. If my darling genius cat has a brain the size of a peanut, a squirrel or a bird is that much farther from self-consciousness. But that doesn't mean they don't seem to have something going on back there, even if that something is mostly "Who are you?" and "Don't take my food." I suppose what I'm saying is that I'm not a big fan of squirrels and birds wig me out, but it's strange to me to see the similarities in animals that I thought had nothing in common. Primitive desires they do. It's probably the same reason I'm walking over to the library (to get a granola bar or a bagel) or that I'm occasionally startled by someone. We're none of us that sophisticated. I can only imagine how much having a baby around changes perceptions if one little jerk-face adorable kittycat does this much.