Apparently more than one car in the neighborhood got this treatment. I guess I should be glad that this year’s crop of undergrads is supporting a local business like Tedeschi, but it’s still irritating to find a wang drawn on my car’s windshield.
I mean, since they’ve gone with Circus Peanuts as their medium, they could at least have picked Jumbo The Elephant as their subject.
Jeff Jacoby takes the seventh-grader’s approach to politics today by arguing that the “government which governs least, governs best.” I hope this means that he’s headed immediately for Somalia, where nongovernance has turned the nation into a libertarian paradise.
I’ve sent him a snippy letter, of course, and if it doesn’t make it into the Globe I’ll post it here later.
I understand that the WSJ has to appease the bloodthirsty maniacs who constitute its core audience, and that explains (but does not excuse) the publication of editorials denouncing civil rights and social security as the products of drunkenly irresponsible legislatures.
But is there any reason for Jacoby to get a podium in Boston? If the Globe is so hard up for cash, why not drop the waste of space and put the savings into articles on items of actual local interest by decent writers with worthwhile opinions, like Joel Brown?
This one’s going around like wildfire: University prof points out that a significant number of his students think Iraq blew up the World Trade Center.
I wonder if these constant “oh shit, our youth are ignorant” surprises are a way for grownups to feel better about themselves, or if undergrads really are that dumb.
My favorite local artist, Aaron Flynnn, is the cover artist for the “green issue” of The Weekly Dig. On newsstands now. Yaaaay.
I’ve been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the latest book by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s nonfiction, in contrast to her earlier books, and it’s about her family moving to Appalachian Virginia and living on a farm. She tries to do it right: local and seasonal food, sustainable agriculture, all that jazz.
Bookdwarf read it about two months ago and kept going on about how we had to eat locally, especially this summer, since it’s easiest in summer. We already subscribe to the Parker Farm community-supported agriculture farm-share, but she wanted to make sure we got our beef from River Rock (run by the family of a college classmate of mine, who sadly died in a car crash while delivering beef), wanted to make sure we grew at least some veggies from Seed Saver’s Exchange out on the porch, and so on.
I resisted. I resisted a lot. This dream of a pastoral America is easy to have, because people have forgotten just how damn hard farm work is. When I get my vegetables from Farmer Steve (and yes, we call him Farmer Steve) at seven this coming Wednesday, I know he’ll have been up and working since five AM, and won’t get to bed until midnight at the earliest.
Also, I think the people advocating a 100-mile diet have forgotten that healthful food is not some perfect natural state. An all-local all-the-time diet is almost certainly better than the typical American diet in many years, but when you have a bad spring and your harvest fails, you really want some petroleum-based imports from California or Chile. People don’t get scurvy and goiter and rickets much these days, because our artificial-nutrient-laced diet supplanted a local food culture that, in bad years, consisted of lard and whiskey. And while I agree that “food culture” and having dinner with the kids is important, it’s not just a lack of willpower that keeps that out of reach of Americans– it’s our entire economic structure and philosophy of work. France has dinner with its children, but France has an extra hour every day to do it, because France works thirty-five hours a week and has free health care. America works forty if America is lucky: a real salaried professional works sixty if she wants to get ahead, and an hourly worker holds down two thirty-hour ‘part-time’ gigs and doesn’t get sick days or vacation.
Still, I started reading the book, because Bookdwarf said it was important and because she read me some incredibly funny passages (the interactions between Kingsolver and her daughter Lilly are precious: a 7-year-old on a farm says the darndest things). So for the first couple chapters, I reluctantly agreed with everything she had to say: small farms are failing not just because it’s hard work that a lot of kids don’t want to do, but because massive farms and government subsidies tailored to agribusiness are squeezing them unfairly. Our national overproduction of corn and soybeans, and our love of grain-fed beef, are terrible (this I know already, from Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan and King Corn and many others). And then I really began to get into it.
Kingsolver acknowledges that it’s hard, that she’s very lucky in a lot of ways: the farm was already in the family, so they didn’t have to buy it. Her husband is an academic, meaning he gets summers to farm. While working on the farm she was able to write a book about it, which is a contribution to the farmer’s budget that most people won’t have.
She’s just trying to do what she thinks is right, and trying to live it like a normal person. The book is peppered with recipes and notes from her kids and her husband: their Friday night routine involves movies and pizza, like mine does, although they have grown the tomatoes, made the dough, and as often as not made the cheese themselves.
So now I’m halfway through the book and sitting out on the porch with the tomato sprouts and pea tendrils coming up out of pots on the porch, and daydreaming about life on the farm.
It’s a good thing that we swiftly and effectively punish all drug addicts in this country. By succumbing to temptation and addiction they have proved themselves immoral and unfit for…
Yet another reminder that the rules applied to the great and powerful differ from those applied to the rest of us. I suspect that there are many, many sets of rules, bent differently and applied differently in every situation, and that this is sometimes a good thing, but usually not.
In the ongoing category of “horrific video,” I couldn’t bear to watch Saddam getting hanged. I did manage to watch most of this depressing video of two drunk teenagers throwing up in a park while one friend tries to hold them up. Happy new year, everybody. Take care of yourselves.
A company contracted to build the fence along the US/Mexico border just got busted for hiring illegal immigrants. Again.
You can’t make this stuff up.
After a bit of delay, Technorati finally unleashed its relaunched VLog, BuzzTV. What is it? A guy reading the top items from their website. In other words, they’ve has brought the internet and broadcast TV together, and formed something with the worst aspects of both.
Like a blog, it features minimal accountability or fact checking, low production values, slow downloads, and a host who is an ugly couch-potato. Like TV news, it caters mostly to people too dumb or lazy to read, is hosted by vapid talking heads, and makes you sit through ads and product-placement B-roll about dangerous wonder-drugs before getting to the real news about all those dead hookers in Ipswich.
Secretly Ironic 