The leaves are turning, apples are showing up at the farmers’ markets, and students are returning to town. Yes, it’s the end of summer, also known as the outdoor homicide season.
But we haven’t slowed down yet: three shootings, one of them fatal, in Boston this weekend. It’s a good thing I didn’t put in for the office pool on it, though. I was totally off by one.
And remember to keep your bung clean.
Starting the day with rosé sparkling wine (you know I’d love to say Champagne or Cava, but I’m just too strict about the international WTO naming rules for DOC products to do that) at Gloria Ferrer.
The PT Cruiser is capacious and comfortable but obviously an American car built on an SUV platform: it has the lines, the turning radius, the handling, and the fuel economy of a small yacht).
Beginning a day with champagne is wonderful.
Bookdwarf, as I knew, is a better driver and a better drinker than I am.
Everyone who thinks about colleges knows about the US News & World Report College Rankings. Maybe they’re fair, maybe they’re not. Slate accused them of fiddling with their criteria to make the numbers change more often than they otherwise would.
Washington Monthly has a different list, rating colleges as measures of social mobility: who helps the most poor kids get good jobs? Whose students are more likely to be working in public service or for the public good? That kind of thing. The results are quite interesting.
It was sunny and not too hot, so Megan and I took the bikes out to Concord today.
We had ice cream at Bedford Farms, recommended by Edible Boston.
I tried to make a dirty face while eating it.
The results were predictably silly.
It’s pushing 100 degrees here, but it could be worse: check out this video of a sandstorm in the middle east.
Boston to Bloomington IN, 950 miles. Bloomington to Tuscaloosa, 500 miles. Tuscaloosa to Smyrna GA, 200 miles. Smyrna to Charlottesville: 550 miles. Charlottesville to Boston: 550 miles. Visit friends in each city, spend about a month doing it. Alone on a bike, etc. etc. Stupid, I know.
Next May, my brother is planning on coming back home from Bolivia the hard way: by car up the Panamerican. I told him I could ride down to Oaxaca or something, meet up and head north, cross the border in some incredibly sketchy town where Bolivian license plates and tinted glass don’t just mean a thorough search by the border guards, but death threats from locals who think you’re a competing coyote.
This is all background to explain the increasing amounts of motorcycle gear in my StyleFeed.
The Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid writes that Hizbullah (as we seem to be spelling Hezbollah these days) attacked Israel to make Israel treat Lebanon as though Hizbullah were running Lebanon, and hope that the appearance will eventually become the reality (that’s what Ezra Klein’s take is, anyway). And Hizbullah isn’t the government there, despite what people think. It’s a force, yeah, it’s there, like the IRA and Sinn Fein are/were in Northern Ireland, and needed to be reckoned with, even though they derived a lot of their support from places like, well, Boston.
It’s not as though most Lebanese really want Hizbullah or the Syrians running the show. They like it when Hizbullah does good stuff for them, and they aren’t exactly fans of the state of Israel, but mostly they want peace; they mostly want to get on with their farming and cafe-running and cedar-growing. This blockade put a real damper on the tourist season– great beaches and historical sites, a vibrant pop music scene…
My friend working with the UN for the summer is looking at an evacuation to Jordan, or possibly to the West via Cyprus, but it’s not clear how it’s going to happen.
The important thing is that the bombings have not let up on either side of the border, that people are spilling blood that doesn’t need to be spilled.
It makes me pine for cheerier subjects like global warming, coal, and slavery.
Maybe you’ve been preoccupied with the Boston tunnel collapses or the Mumbai train bombings, but if not, you might have noticed that the long-standing animosity between Israel and Lebanon has heated up, thanks to perpetual troublemaker Hizbullah.
A friend of mine is doing aid work in Lebanon this summer and writes to tell me just how bad the situation is: her office is closed, so she’s reduced to paying for Wi-Fi at Starbucks.
That is, she’s not near the recent fighting (if you haven’t been paying attention, Hizbullah kidnapped some Israeli soldiers, so Israel dropped some bombs on southern Lebanon, where there is a strong Hizbullah presence. Hizbullah has started firing rockets back into Israel, and threatens to bomb Haifa if Israel bombs Beiruit. For background, see the Reuters chronology of Israeli/Lebanese conflict going back to 1968).
She reports that, at least for now, Beiruit seems safer than certain parts of Chicago.
Secretly Ironic 