Monthly Archives: September 2007

Zombies, Guns, Manliness

Posted on by

My brother passes along the following story with the admonition to “Stock up on shotgun shells, everybody — the zombie outbreak is upon us”:

“Officials Confirm Meteorite But Question Sickness Claims,” Associated Press, 19 September 2007.

A fiery meteorite crashed into southern Peru over the weekend, experts confirmed Wednesday. But they were still puzzling over claims that it gave off fumes that sickened 200 people.

…

Jose Mechare, a scientist with Peru’s Geological, Mining and Metallurgical Institute, said a geologist had confirmed that it was a “rocky meteorite,” based on the fragments analyzed.

He said water in the meteorite’s muddy crater boiled for maybe 10 minutes from the heat and could have given off a vapor that sickened people, and scientists were taking water samples.

“We are not completely certain that there was no contamination,” Mechare said.

Jorge Lopez, director of the health department in the state where the meteorite crashed, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that 200 people suffered headaches, nausea and respiratory problems caused by “toxic” fumes emanating from the crater, which is some 65 feet wide and 15 feet deep.

Undoubtedly the headaches and nausea will give way to a strange gate and an unquenchable desire to “eat brains.” So stock up folks.

Disparaging Comparisons Between Washington, D.C. and New York

Posted on by

16 September 2007, the Financial District from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway

Every visit I make to New York is a painful reminder what a grim and slender existence one leads living in Washington, D.C. For some time now two large comparisons have been part of my usual refrain.

  • The people in New York are so much more interesting and varied than in D.C. In Washington, D.C. it seems as if there is one perfect model and everyone is judged according to how closely they can approximate that one right way to be. To be fashionable in D.C. is about conformity. In New York everyone is struggling to differentiate themselves and people are judged by how unique they are. Every aspect of personae and identity is part of the pallet (though beyond one’s creative control, most unusual or inscrutable combination of ethnic background is in play).

  • People talk about a New York minute: everything in New York is so fast paced. But when I’m in New York I feel like I may as well be in Paris. New Yorkers understand joie de vivre. They do it in enough ways that it would be difficult to catalog. People take time to enjoy themselves. Everywhere you go there are little cafés where people are having a leisurely meal and talking with a friend or watching the crowds pass. Kitchens are small so food is most commonly very basic, focusing on quality of ingredients rather than labor in preparation. People lavish a lot of attention on their animals and are almost universally excited about the pets of others. The city may be gigantic, but the neighborhoods are small and everywhere you go there are meetings, planned and accidental and people talking. Everyone has an avocation to which they are very devoted.

A few other observations about New York and D.C.:

  • New York is a city with a staggering number of restaurants. On Saturday night S. and I were out wandering and decided that we wanted some Italian food. We simply wandered, confident that in a short time we would stumble upon exactly what we wanted. And in a few blocks we came to a tiny Italian place with tile floors, dark walls, little tables, a cramped bar half-way back surrounded by about a dozen older male waiters in white shirts and black ties running in every direction. The food was unpretentious, but quality. There are probably so many restaurants like that in New York than one couldn’t locate them all without the aid of technology. In Washington, D.C. there are maybe three or four such restaurants and they may be a dying breed (I’m thinking Giovanni’s Trattu on Jefferson Place or Trattoria Italiano in Woodly Park). Probably just the number of new restaurants that open and old restaurants that go out of business in New York exceeds the total number or restaurants in the entire District of Columbia.

  • While I was away for the weekend, Matthew Yglesias made an exuberant post about a new place in town serving late night breakfast (“Late Night Late Night Breakfast Blogging,” 16 September 2007). This is indeed a very big deal in D.C. To date, just about the only place in the city where breakfast was available at any time other than breakfast time was The Dinner. In fact, just about the only place that anything was available late — or at least later than the post-last-call places on bar rows — was again, The Dinner. This is unbelievable in a major city. In New York, as is well known, the opening or closing of such a place is a nonevent, so common are such places. And in New York they all deliver with a $5.00 minimum order. In D.C. the standard minimum for delivery is $20.00.

  • Both New York and Washington, D.C. are noisy cities. I find that increasingly I like the noise of New York. It is the noise of life and work: delivery trucks dropping things off, garbage trucks taking things away, crowds of people. In Washington, D.C. the noise is that of the delusions of the national security state: police sirens, emergency vehicles rushing around from one nonevent to the next, convoys for VIPs.

  • It’s amusing the degree to which New Yorkers match their city. New York is crumbling and second hand. So are a surprising number of its residents.

  • For months now I have been wanting to get to Mark Israel’s Doughnut Plant. Their signature, the Tres Leche, is indeed one dope-ass doughnut! When I walked up, there was a “back in five minutes” sign up in the window and a small crowd gathered around outside waiting. The store is completely inauspicious, consisting of just a little counter and a window back to the kitchen and some storage overflow, but if you find yourself in the Lower East Side it is definitely worth a jaunt.

Starry Night

Posted on by

The Reigning Queen of Everything, Starry Night, 13 September 2007, 216 Franklin Street, Greenpoint, New York

I probably won’t be making any posts over the weekend as I will be up in New York for the opening of a friend’s burlesque / variety show.

In case any New Yorkers stumble across this page, the show is on Thursday, 13 September 2007 at 9:00 PM at the East Coast Aliens’ Studio at 216 Franklin Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Tickets are $12.00 at the door. After the first show, there will be a new lineup every month for the next six months.

September 11th

Posted on by

In the days after 11 September 2001, as the disbelief and shock began to subside in favor of a sense of what had happened and what came next, CNN uncovered an old documentary, Building the World Trade Center, made by the New York Port Authority and aired it’s entire twenty minutes. I was lucky to catch it and it has since become a favorite piece of film for me. The first ten minutes of the video are an interesting, if stylistically dated, discussion of some of the features of the site and novel construction techniques and design features employed in the building. What makes me return to the film again and again is that at about time 10:05 — on the factual tidbit that after the foundational structures were in place construction proceeded according to a formula at the rate of about three floors every ten days — the film switches from informative documentary to whimsical art film. Set to Johann Strauss, Jr.’s Vianna Blood is an uninterrupted five minute dance of building rising. Watch a crane operator rotate a huge section of sheet metal at 12:25-12:36, the pan around the partly completed towers at 13:44-14:00 or the documentary makers themselves at 14:20-14:25 — it could be Stanly Kubrick. It’s a wonderful little paean to labor and ingenuity and capitalism.

The Disconnect

Posted on by

Paul Krugman makes a seemingly notable observation about the recent economic expansion (“Where’s My Trickle?,” [$ | free], The New York Times, 10 September 2007):

As far as I can tell, America has never before experienced a disconnect between overall economic performance and the fortunes of workers as complete as that of the last four years.

It is a strange fact that throughout the Twentieth Century the benefits of industrialization, productivity gain and comparative advantage have been so well spread among workers. It is also a strange fact that over perhaps the last thirty years this has so progressively ceased to be the case. One might think that some serious analytic attention could be brought to bear on this transformation, but instead it seems that more tightly squeezed shut eyes and more urgent repetition of past dogma has been the response.

Oddly enough it is the center that is most in denial here. On the far left there is Robert Brenner and others around the New Left Review and the world-systems people like Immanuel Wallerstein and on the far right (the paleoconservatives) it seems like Patrick Buchanan and the people around The American Conservative are genuinely concerned about theses issues as well. Where are the neoliberals who will squarely face the problem and propose neoliberal remedies?

And in his usual fashion, Mr. Krugman doesn’t shy from a boldly leftist position, at least of a sort:

Guaranteed health insurance, which all of the leading Democratic contenders (but none of the Republicans) are promising, would eliminate one of the reasons for this disconnect. But it should be only the start of a broader range of policies — a new New Deal — designed to turn economic growth into something more than a spectator sport.

That’s all fine and good but I hope that Mr. Krugman will devote a future column to an outline sketch of what such a policy would look like, because short of direct redistribution — with all the problems that entails — I really don’t know. But Mr. Krugman is an economist and remains at least half-beholden to the idea of economic efficiency. Perhaps some Robert Reich-like scheme of investment in labor plus grand bargain between trade liberalization and labor entailing significant deals of the same, not the pathetic job retraining micro-initiative included as a part of the NAFTA legislation. But what programs, specifically? There’s only so much job retraining the government can do.

Hard-Line in a Smart Way?

Posted on by

In case you were in need of some sort of a litmus test on Thomas Barnett, here is what he says in response to Michael Ledeen’s new book on Iran (“An Interesting Book on Iran,” 8 September 2007):

Ledeen’s a hard-liner on Iran but in a smart way.

Yeah, kinda like Austria-Hungary was hard-line on Serbian separatists, but in a smart way.

And while we’re at it, hey, “some self-confidence, America, please!” I’m going to vote for less self-confidence and more circumspection.

Attack on Peoria

Posted on by

One might be prone to get worried about the fact that after fifteen years of dormancy, Russia has resumed regular, long-range bomber patrols (Troianovski, Anton, “Russia Resumes Its Long-Range Air Patrols,” The Washington Post, 18 August 2007, p. A7). Soviet era prop-driven TU-95 “Bear” bombers have been intercepted by Norwegian and British fighters (“British Jets Intercept Eight Russian Bombers,” Reuters, 6 September 2007) and have buzzed Guam and other U.S. targets.

One might be so inclined — were the United States not buzzing itself with nuclear bombers. On 30 August 2007 a B-52 took off from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, and flew to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, unknowingly carrying five (or maybe six, but what’s a nuclear warhead between friends) armed W80-1 nuclear warheads (5-150 kiloton yield) in under-wing mounted air-launch cruise missiles (Hoffman, Michael, “Commander Disciplined for Nuclear Mistake,” Military Times, 5 September 2007). The missiles were being transported to Barksdale along with 400 others to be decommissioned and should have been without any munition but were somehow — no one knows how yet — inadvertently loaded with the nuclear armed variant. The most disturbing part is that to accomplish this fuck-up a number of heretofore though foolproof safeguards had to be foiled. Presumably no malfeasance was at play — which would only go to show that stupidity is a significantly greater danger than ill will — but a huge investigation, rising all the way to Defense Secretary Gates, the President and Congress has ensued. And rightly so. Though the probability of a nuclear detonation even in the event of a crash was vanishingly small, this is the first time since 1968 that armed nuclear weapons have flown and there is some concern that international treaties may have been violated.

Here (Philips, Alan F., “20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War,” NuclearFiles.org) is a list of nuclear accidents, including the 1968 Thule, Greenland crash that brought U.S. armed airborne alert flights to an end. It’s a fairly disquieting list that just grew to twenty-one.

Running on Empty

Posted on by

How the hell does one possibly move yet another book on the Bush administration? I am thinking here of Robert Draper’s newly released Dead Certain (see the Washington Post write-up, Abramowitz, Michael, “Book Tells Of Dissent In Bush’s Inner Circle,” 3 September 2007, p. A1). What more is there possibly to reveal? That the administration is a dysfunctional cage match between a bunch of 800 pound gorillas, that the President is too immature and clueless to exercise any adult-like responsibility over the mess, that the interagency process has been completely trampled under their turf wars, that this or that decision was taken with almost no consideration, or in complete disregard for all of the consideration that had been shunted aside, that yet another swath of officials turns out to be half-wits placed for fealty to some right-wing mania, that yet another critical governmental function is being run into the ground, that the good of the nation has yet again taken a backseat to partisan gain? Sacrebleu! Say it ain’t so!

I suspect that as the archives are opened up and as the perspective of history comes to fruition, rather than the Bush Presidency being vindicated an entirely new level of tawdriness and tragedy will be revealed. But until that day comes, each new gloss on the subject seems to be subject to the diminishing returns of our depleted capacity for another round of outrage.

The metaphor here is so addled that it is hard to believe this is the guy who invented the internets, but as Al Gore said in a recent interview (Born, Kim, “Man on a Mission: Al Gore,” 02138 Magazine, September / October 2007, p. 84), he is feeling it too:

I have a lot of friends who share the following problem with me: Our sense of outrage is so saturated that when a new outrage occurs, we have to download some existing outrage into an external hard drive in order to make room for a new outrage.

On the one hand, it is incumbent upon the left to keep up a relentless focus on the dysfunction of this administration and its master ideology. This is what framing looks like and the moment that it flags, the right-wing revisionism will start in. But on the other hand, instead of another book or expose article, I just which they would hand out a rod to every American to bite-down on for the next year and a half.

Popcorn Workers’ Lung

Posted on by

This is potentially very bad news for K.:

Harris, Gardiner, “Doctor Links a Man’ Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit,” The New York Times, 5 September 2007

A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a 53-year-old Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition that until now has been found only in people working in popcorn plants.

Lung specialists and even a top industry official say the case, the first of its kind, raises serious concerns about the safety of microwave butter-flavored popcorn.

Apparently many brands of microwave popcorn use a chemical called diacetyl to create their buttery flavor and inhalation of diacetyl is strongly associated with an inflammatory lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans or “popcorn workers’ lung” (I hear a neo-Dickensonian tale in there somewhere). This guy had consumed at least two bags of microwave popcorn a day for the last ten years and when doctors measured the levels of diacetyl in his house, they found them comparable to those in popcorn factories.

K.’s tastes are so bland that he may have saved himself by not bothering with the buttered brands, but on the offhand chance that you have, K., the FDA might want to get in touch with you.

A Root Extravaganza

Posted on by

5 September 2007, crockpot root extravaganza

Something that has been on my list for the longest time is a crockpot. I have been fantasizing about being able to come home, chop up a bunch of vegetables, throw them in a pot, and put the pot in the refrigerator. Then, before leaving for work the next morning, put it on low, leave for ten or twelve hours and come home to hot, stewey goodness.

5 September 2007, crockpot Mediterranean stew with squash

Anyway, S. and I finally picked one up this weekend. Yesterday it was Mediterranean stew with yams, tonight it’s Mediterranean stew again, substitute squash for yams (pictured above). The best will be in a few days though. I’ve never eaten a turnip before and have been dieing to try one for months now, but been at a loss as to what to do with one (is it like a giant radish, or is it more like a potato?). Anyway, next up on the crockpot experiment schedule is root extravaganza: turnips, rutabagas, beets, parsnips, carrots, potatoes, leeks and onions. Throw ’em in a pot and cook em’ up, yum!

The model we bought even comes with a canvas tote bag so next time MoveOn hosts a meeting of the neighborhood activists or we volunteer at the retirement community we will be all ready to go. Now if only they would make a combo bag for both the crockpot and my yoga mat so that I could go strait from yoga class to whatever volunteer opportunity / activist get-together I had in store, it would be perfect.

Before I leave the subject of the crockpot, a word of defense regarding structure food versus smash food is in order. Structure food is all the stuff that you see on the cooking shows: a tremendous amount of energy is given over to fussing at how all the different little pieces and individual flavors are arranged and laid out in often elaborate designs on the plate. Then there’s smash food. Smash food is where everything is just jumbled together in one admixture of flavor. The quintessential smash foods are all lowbrow. Nachos, burritos, Italian food, breakfast foods are all perfect examples. For a greasy spoon breakfast you take your egg and hash browns and run them all together and use the toast like an extra utensil to fork it all down. Even eggs Florentine is smash food masquerading as structure food. I mean, come on, the poached egg yokes and the hollandaise sauce are calling out to be all stirred around and mopped up with the English muffin.