Author: Aaron Weber

From Bloomberg: To say that ex-housing the economy is doing just fine is tantamount to claiming that, ex-Iraq, Bush’s Middle-East policy is a rousing success.

The thing is, I still eventually want to buy something. And if I were absolutely sure I’d be there for more than five years, I’d be tempted to buy, even now. But I don’t have the job security — unless they have tenure, nobody does– to be sure. Buying a house is a bet, it seems to me. And I am not a gambler.

Where do you see yourself in five years? Can you say with confidence that you’ll be able to pay the same amount of money for housing?

Blind items from E! suggest that President Bush has started drinking and smoking again, and that Laura Bush is now living at the Hay-Adams hotel, and using the side door to avoid photographers.

David Beckham just spent twelve million dollars on a mansion in Beverly Hills. I saw a new condo building in Cambridge this weekend that starts at $300k for 500 square feet. With a view of Mass Ave. The noisy, fume-choked units top out at close to a million. The only reason to build something like that, it seems to me, is to sell to people who are too rich to bother with thinking before they shell out that kind of cash, or to people who are so desperate to own something that they’ll pay any price, sign any mortgage, buy at the top of any market, just to be able to talk knowledgeably about mortgage interest deductions at cocktail parties.

What’s the common thread here? I’m not sure. Outrage and absurdity, perhaps? Too much money and not enough brains? Let’s get hopped up and make some bad decisions?

We’re a ship of fools with an angry drunk at the helm. We’re all gonna die.

Saturday afternoon Megan and I made the mistake of trying to be all tough and self-reliant and change the oil in our motorcycles by ourselves. Step one is to turn the bikes on and let them run for a few minutes, so the oil is warm enough to drain properly, and to stir up all the sludge you’re trying to drain out. We did that OK. Step two was a little harder. On my bike we easily located the drain bolt, but it was screwed on so tight that it wouldn’t come off. I stripped a couple corners off it before giving up. On Megan’s bike there was, I swear, no bolt that looked anything like the picture in the manual. It’s supposed to be near a spring on the lower left side of the crankcase, but we didn’t find it. The only thing we ended up with was a burn on Megan’s hand when she touched the exhaust pipe while trying to look underneath the bike. At that point we gave up on her bike as well.

Then we went to the movies: King Corn at the Independent Film Festival Boston. It was excellent– it didn’t tell me a hell of a lot about corn that wasn’t in Michael Pollan’s book about American food systems, but it was very well made and included an interview with Earl Butz, the former secretary of Agriculture who masterminded today’s abundance of corn derivatives. One thing that was good was that the directors were there and they said that doing the documentary had changed the way they wanted to eat, but that it hadn’t changed the way they really ate much at all. To do that, we’d have to start subsidizing fresh vegetables at the expense of corn sweeteners– we’d have to make healthy food cheaper and more convenient.

Crossposted to TTS: another US terrorist attack foiled in the nick of time… of course, since it was against a women’s health clinic, it’s not really news. Women don’t count, you know. Not in this administration. Not when politically motivated prosecutions are the norm.

Oh tempora, oh mores.

What’s the matter with Arkansas? John Fleck pointed out a letter published in an Arkansas newspaper about how daylight savings causes global warming by adding to the amount of daylight we have every day.

The writer is apparently a lawyer, but doesn’t understand the difference between time and the devices we use to measure it.

(As far as I can tell, this is not a joke.) (Update, 5PM: OK, it’s a joke. I should have known.)

There are only a few spots left in the Parker Farm farmshare. Cambridge/Somerville residents who want veggies every week all summer should act now.

Seriously, they’re good veggies. We signed up months ago.

Brilliant: Some guinea pigs might have been daunted by the prospect of four whopping meals a day, rivers of grog and hardly any fruit, vegetables or water for an entire week. But not I. I just couldn’t wait for them to Edwardian Supersize Me.

I’ve been listening to Clipse recently, and I can’t get Wamp Wamp (What it do) and “Dirty Money” out of my head. Their MySpace page has some other good tracks, including “Keys Open Doors,” an ode to wholesale cocaine sales.

No, it’s not really socially uplifting music– hell, the background image for that MySpace profile is a big pile of blow. But it’s got a good beat, and that dirty money knows how to treat the girls.

The trouble with automatic translations is that sometimes you end up with the wrong word. Oops! An honest mistake, and easy enough to fix. It’s not like it was deliberate.

I remember clearly when I learned the n-word. I was a precocious reader and I’d grabbed Huckleberry Finn way before I was old enough to understand it. I must have been about eleven or twelve. I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t know it was a bad word. I told my mom about the plot and the characters, and described them as they’d been described in the book. She set me straight pretty quick. I also learned the word “derogatory” that day.

This is similar to the story of how I learned to pronounce the word “genre” — I’d only ever seen it written down, so I just guessed at how to say it. I would have been in junior high, I guess… right in the middle of my science-fiction obsession. I think I pronounced it jenn-air, like the appliances. In front of my parents and a dinner party of their friends. Everyone laughed. I still feel a twinge of sympathy when people mispronounce that word, although it doesn’t stop me from laughing at them.

On rainy Mondays, people are tempted to resent having to go to work. Especially when it’s a rainy holiday Monday, and you have to work anyway. If you’re one of those people, consider this fact: your job could be to retrieve semen from an elephant. Now, doesn’t that cozy desk seem a lot more inviting? Here’s the video, which I think is a BBC special on zoo veterinarians.