Ken MacLoed has posted a short elegy for the better days of our nation, and the Gadflyer is writing about Moonies and their theocratic billiionaire leader hanging out with senate types.
Maybe Fafblog! really is the only one that can explain how this world works.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be, at least, not in a market like this.
This weekend I met a guy as involved in motorcycles as I am. Which is to say, when he has a free moment, he browses Craigslist and EBay Motors to drool over the listings. He doesn’t have a motorcycle license, and isn’t going to buy one any time soon. I have a perfectly serviceable scooter, and nowhere to store a larger bike, but dammit, I like looking at them fancy new bikes. In fact, I like looking at the new ones better than I would like having one. I know if I had one I’d grow tired of it, but the longing is sweet.
His wife grew tired of the motorcycle talk, but later admitted to similarly compulsive, aimless browsing on PetFinder. They have nowhere to put a dog, no time for walking a dog, but dammit, she loves looking at new puppies up for adoption. They just bought a house, but they also still look at real estate listings. And so do I, even though I don’t have the time, money, or inclination to buy a home right now.
I guess it’s sort of like looking at pretty girls go by even though I’m strictly on the one-to-one– it’s pretty much just pleasant and harmless. But in the same way, it annoys and disturbs me. You don’t really want that, you know it’s foolish and impractical and she’s probably a horrible person with bad gas mileage and much higher insurance premiums, what with that huge, shiny engine and those long legs, and who’s got eighty grand for a down payment these days anyway? Shouldn’t I be doing something better with my time than aspirational window-shopping? When did I become this bourgeois freak? I could be changing the world, creating art, taking a nap, picking lint out of my navel, any of a million more productive and useful things. Instead I’m shopping for things I don’t want.
Snivelling waste of space, so self-conscious you can’t stand still and be inconspicuous, wishing you could, wishing you could be the center of attention like your rivals, wishing you could be vivacious and bubbly and silly and fun like the rest of them, you stupid shit, why do you care, it’s not like it matters, except to you, painfully, in the pit of your stomach, you feel sick all the time, why do you take it so seriously, have you ever laughed in your entire life?
Good: I’m in Brad DeLong’s Blogroll! I hate the word “blogroll.” It sounds like “bog roll” which in British means toilet paper.
Bad: The Garfield Movie: NYT Review: “I have a feeling ‘Garfield: The Movie,’ which opens nationwide today, is only the beginning. I’m bracing myself for ‘Cathy,’ for ‘Ziggy’ and, of course, for ‘Marmaduke.'” Don’t fail to miss it, kids.
Crazy: Angry man in armored bulldozer. Not just angry, but patient and determined: he spent months armoring his bulldozer, then welded himself inside it, and knocked down the businesses of people who’d done him wrong. Now that is some serious western-style revenge.
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.
