Lyensko and the Bush administration. The more I learn about Stalin and Bush, the more they seem to have in common. Think about Iraq and Stalin’s statement that “everyone extends his social system as far as his army can reach.”
Ah, good ol’ Uncle Joe.
Great analysis of various non-porn men’s magazines. Choice line: “The popularity of Nuts is, in some ways, as hard to understand as the success of the Sun – unless you take it for granted that a frightening percentage of young British men are sociopaths. There’s a very general discussion of what my lit-crit pals would call homosocial desire, and a more specific discussion of why the British ones are so much further downmarket than the American ones.
I got a great note from someone at the Blackstone Valley Housing Development Corporation in Woonsocket, RI:
Hooray on your latest post and, hopefully, soon-to-be-published letter to the globe. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1924 ruling in “Euclid v. Amber Reality” zoning has been used to inhibit, prohibit, or simply malign multi-family housing- affordable or otherwise- whatever the shape or density. Old habits die hard.
I write to you from Rhode Island where our affordable housing crisis is exacerbated by Metro Boston’s as more and more Massachusetts workers flee south to find a house they can afford (on Boston-area salaries) and, in the process, drive Northern RI’s housing prices sky-high.People need to realize that density works, it’s not a new or inherently ugly concept (Beacon Hill? Old Town Alexandria?), and with the right application of impact fees, dense development needn’t unduly burden the community in question.
Keep up the fight in Boston. Rhode Islanders are depending upon it!
He also attached a letter he’s sent to various people with general suggestions for improving zoning in the Providence metro area, and I think they can be useful in general. See below…
Continue reading “Comments on Housing from RI”
Suddenly, cutting healthy babies beacuse they look funny seems like a bad idea. I wonder how many transsexuals are, in fact, people who were born with anomalous genitalia and were then raised as the ‘wrong’ gender.
I bet you could make a good business book out of the Gulag history I’m reading. A project to construct an 806-mile railroad and a port makes a good case study. You could talk about the planning mistakes, the stifling of dissent, whether and when the management team began to realize that their project had gone horribly wrong, and the political issues in that prevented them from quitting sooner — until, in fact, their boss had died. It would be a feel-good business hit, since everything is better-managed than the Gulag!
The decision to start building [the railway from the Vorkuta region to the Arctic Sea] was taken by the Soviet government in April 1947. A month later, exploration, surveying work, and construction all began simultaneously. Prisoners also began building a new seaport at the Kamenny cape, where the Ob River widens out toward the sea…
By the end of the summer… the surveying team had established that the Kamenny cape was a poor location for the port…. The Soviet leadership determined to move the site, and the railway, too… Construction proved nearly impossible in the Arctic tundra. As winter permafrost turned quickly into summer mud, track had to be constantly prevented from bending or sinking. Even so, wagons frequently came off the rails. Because of supply problems, the prisoners began using wood instead of steel in the railway construction, a decision which guaranteed the project’s failure. At the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, 310 miles had been build from one end of the railway, 124 miles from the other end [out of 806 required]. The port existed only on paper. Within weeks of Stalin’s funeral, the entire project, which had cost 400 billion rubles and tens of thousands of lives, was abandoned for good.
Dear Boston Globe:
I can’t deny that losing a cherished view is a sad and wistful occasion, but it is not, as Ric Kahn implied on Sunday (“A Patch of Blue”), a good reason to slow or halt development, even high-rise development. Given the Globe’s ongoing coverage of the regional housing crisis, he should know better. Even in non-real-estate news, like Scott Kirsner’s article in the Ideas section (“Innovation City”), it’s apparent that one of the area’s few major problems is the high cost of housing. If we are to bring housing costs within reason, we need to increase both housing density and volume, and that means taller buildings.
Development does have some negative impacts, but Boston and the surrounding areas have strict regulations to mitigate them, and we need to make sure that anti-growth sentiment doesn’t keep us from housing everyone. Those high-rise buildings Kahn laments are not just for the wealthy, especially since they include subsidized apartments just like the ones he profiles. The fact is that we need a dramatic increase in the supply of housing, and that means compromises. Nobody wants obscured views, increased traffic, or yet scarcer parking, but they’re better than an economy that collapses under the weight of its unaffordable housing market.
Yours,
Verbal
Secretly Ironic Dot Com
It’s hard to speak ill of a dead person, especially one whose failures can be ascribed to a crippling degenerative illness. Still, Reagan was not a good president. He was not as bad as he could have been, he may not have been any worse than his rivals, and he was not the worst ever, but he was not a good president. His were the years when my father bought a book on how to survive nuclear holocaust. His were the years when the word “AIDS” was never mentioned. His were the years of ballooning deficits, the foundations of “soak the poor” policy, the libertarian rhetoric used to destroy basic social services. Yes, he spent the USSR into the ground, but I don’t know that Carter or Mondale would have done any worse. At least he wasn’t as much in the thrall of theocrats and end-times lunatics as our current regime.
Saw the new Harry Potter movie this weekend, ate popcorn, and suspended my disbelief and critical functions to just enjoy the damn thing, with very few exceptions. One, the perhaps inevitable budding romance and tender moments between Ron and Hermione were kind of cliched. Two, butt-and-boob shots that remind the viewer that Hermione is nearly a young woman now, and wearing low-rise jeans (with a long-enough shirttail carefully tucked all the way in, fortunately), also make the viewer feel kind of creepy for noticing it. Three, when the werewolf teacher is resigning because “someone has let slip the, er, nature of my ailment” and people don’t want a teacher “with his condition” to be near their young ones, I couldn’t help but read it as an allegory of homosexuality. You can take the sensitive young man out of the liberal arts college, but he’s ruined for life by even one class in gender studies.
(I did think the Sirius Black prison tats were awesome).
Similarly, I was able to enjoy most of last week’s Somerville Memorial Day parade, except for the Aleppo Shriners Oriental Marching Band. Yes, Oriental. As in, “exotic” purple satin capes, turbans, funny trumpets, and curly shoes you’d thought we’d left in the 20th century, if not the 19th. I can’t have been the only person immediately reminded of Edward Said’s Orientalism and its sound debunking of most of the views espoused by Patai’s The Arab Mind. After all, The Arab Mind has just been reprinted, and is apparently being used as a general handbook for neocon rule of Iraq, which means that it’s also finding use as one more explanation for the international clusterfuck that is the Bush administration. And, when faced with that sort of blind willful fuckupedness, I once again cannot suspend my disbelief.
CT on why upgrading software is bad.
Build your own hi-res LCD projector for WAY less. Want want want.
Rather old article on what Paxil is like, in the style of a consumer-products review. This was reposted recently since Paxil’s manufacturers are facing a lot of arguments about whether it’s helpful or dangerous for children and teens. It got me through high school, I’ll tell you that much.
And since certain French Guys seem to think I’m “militantly gay” I’ll post the requisite gay item: The American Family Association (don’t expect to hear them singing “We are family” though) has been posting web polls about whether the world should have, oh, a gay-oriented TV network. They have tried a number of ways to prevent cheating, but they have found, unsurprisingly, that the majority of Americans, or at least the majority of Internet-poll responders, don’t hate freedom as much as the AFA does. Besides, there’s already a network for (presumably) heterosexual men, and several networks for (presumably) heterosexual religious fundamentalists.
It’s safe. It’s more hygenic. It’s traditional. You want him to look normal, don’t you? Do the words “botched circumcision” mean anything to you?
Secretly Ironic 