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Author: Aaron Weber
More on the Prince of Darkness
Perle, the Prince of Darkness, is getting away with… well, with dodging accusations and not really coming clean. I don’t doubt that there’s something fishy here, but it’s not been proven– nor, I’m afraid, is it likely to be examined in any detail.
Classic PBR Ad
Food and Sarcasm
I went to ultra-fashionable restaurant Oleana on Tuesday night, and noticed that their extensive wine and beer list included Pabst Blue Ribbon!
Yes, hipsters, there really is a line, and you have crossed it.
Right-wing Electioneering
Election-committee control means election control. It doesn’t matter who casts the ballots: it matters who counts them. Well, I guess we’re fucked.
Nickel and Dimed shouldn’t be that controversial. It certainly presents only one point of view, but if a college doesn’t help students get around that, then it’s not much of a college. Besides, those privileged college kids have already seen the other side of the story.
Relative Safety
My brother recently returned from a trip to Bogota and Medellin, only to find that there had been a shooting in Adams Morgan, his DC neighborhood.
The distinction between less-structured “crews” and more-formal gangs is covered in another Washington Post article on the recent surge of gang-related violence.
Big Work News
Steven Levitt
Really neat NYT profile of Steven Levitt, economics supastar. They say, and he says, he’s not the best at math, econometrics, theory, taxes, inflation, or any of those things, but that he asks the best questions, and puts the tools of economics to better use, than anyone else.
It makes you wonder about the nature of success and the abilities and drives of it: economics success for so long has been about long hours of data-crunching, rather than application of insight. So when you take insight to the field, even when combined with slightly less of the nuts-and-bolds stuff, it really makes a great change and opens up new views of the world.
I’m not the best technical writer in the world. I certainly don’t have the attention to detail that the guys from Sun do: I fall asleep faced with the word lists, the style rules, the translation preparations, the charts and tables. I feel that I have a more creative role in our cooperative projects. Although they have more technical expertise, we all (as far as I can tell) regard each other as equals.
Fortune
One of my Spanish profs in college was from Argentina, and had been in college during the Dirty War years. She thought at the time that she had kept herself safe by not associating with subversives, keeping her head down.
After the dictatorship, when she learned who had done what, when she found out just how bad it was, she realized she was totally wrong. Just being in a class with a suspected subversive, knowing the wrong person, being in their addressbook, was grounds for detention, disappearance, death. All her efforts to keep herself safe were useless: only chance averted disaster.
Similarly, although I have tried my best, I recognize the more-than-significant role of chance in my own good fortune. I am not sure if I deserve it, and more importantly, I am not sure how much my own efforts have determined any of it. It makes the phrase “those less fortunate” ring in my ears: in many cases it’s only luck that brings people low.
Much will be expected from those to whom much has been given.
Reviews
Reviewers are at their best when movies are at their worst. My personal favorite insult, although I can’t remember the movie, was from a review in the Philly CityPaper a few years ago: “I’ve seen more coherent ideas in my carpet.”
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