Category: Things

Now states are legalizing Sunday liquor sales to increase tax revenues. I’ve been in favor of this for ages– it’s a religious ban, so it should be revoked, it will increase tax revenues, and it’s a useless restriction on individual freedom to buy or sell whenever we damn well please.

It’s spring and it’s beautiful and the blooming flowers give me hope. But I’m still a little worried about the mideast peace process.

For some reason yesterday I had a headache and sent a rather rude mail to fifty or sixty people after one of them suggested that Jackson Square might not be the safest part of Boston. I’m annoyed by people’s fear of particular neighborhoods, because fear leads to flight and flight leads to decay and decay leads to more fear. Because I think that for a lot of people the fear of particular neighborhoods is an irrational and repressed fear of the residents and all too often of the color of their skin. Also, I wanted to vent about something, and urban decay and stratification was as good a topic as any. I said, more or less:

College kids are getting gentrified out of Mission Hill right now and you think JP is “sketchy?” You Bostonians have no idea what a rough neighborhood is.

Jackson Square, Dudley Square– I’ve been to them and wandered around and gotten lost and never felt uncomfortable. Some people think that a little graffiti or loitering teenagers make a neighborhood rough. Let me tell you about rough neighborhoods. A rough neighborhood is the one where daytime gunfire is a regular occurrence, where more than 20% of the buildings are abandoned or burned-out shells, where the police are afraid to venture after dark, and where driving down the same street twice in the same day without making a drug buy is likely to get you shot.

Now, I know I’m a guy and I can throw my shoulders back and look tough, and I’ve never been mugged either so I’m probably naieve and prone to romanticize the down-at-the-heels parts of town. I know it’s not the same for everyone– a friend of a friend of mine told me she moved out of Eastie because she just got tired of hearing the word “mamacita” a half-dozen times on the way to the train every morning. That’s legitimate– but a piropo is not the same thing as dangerous. It sucks and it’s degrading, but it’s not dangerous.

Common sense, people: if a street has people out and about, you’re probably fine. They may not be people you know, they may not walk or talk or act like you, but they are human beings and they are probably not going to hurt you. Avoid walking alone, avoid dark alleys and huddles of young men on doorsteps. If you avoid entire neighborhoods because you’re a little afraid or a little nervous, you’ll miss the whole city.

Jackson Square, Jamaica Plain, Dudley Square, South or East Boston, the Washington St. Corridor– they’re working-class areas, places where students and artists and immigrants and young families live. If you fear that, you risk giving in to suburban sprawl and isolation, structural classism and subtle racism. That’s not a sketchy neighborhood you’re missing. That’s a portrait of everything that makes our nation great.

OK, I need to organize my bookmarks again. Unfiled items that have clogged up my main bookmarks menu:

One and two from the Guardian on science, plus the paper on depression I never got around to reading, something about core national values and their betrayal plus the war in context and newsbites about Clinton insulting Bush from afar.
Most of the stuff I have is war and politics and God but some of it is more esoteric spiritually and there’s a thing on speculative ethics that’s been floating around for awhile. Some of it is funny, like the rules for drinking too much.
Most recent in the huge pile are the MS PowerPoint template for delivering bad news and the the bad news that does not get delivered. And of course Orwell and dogs in hats.

I enjoy it when a publication addresses something related to, but just outside its normal competency: a political magazine covering factions among economists, or a fashion magazine covers worker’s rights in the clothing industry, for example. Although I’m not quite sure what to make of Fortune Magazine covering trends in the thong underwear industry.

Been very busy preparing slides for Zee Germans. But here is some arbitrary linkage to tide you over:
The Guardian, ever the right-thinking editorialist, has two articles on the decline and fall of the West: Scientific Illiteracy is widespread, and of course superstition and mumbo-jumbo are encroaching. The next thing you know, we’ll have faith-healer MDs.

Fortunately, we can laugh: at other people’s fashion and of course at their drunken shenanigans.

Two other neat things: Guardian Media is just media news. And a study on depression and biology which I haven’t read all the way through but which looks interesting.

Surplus Miscellany! My GOD! Brillaint! BRILLIANT I tell you! I suggest that you not shop here while under the influence.

Despite the excellent graphic design, the beverage inside cans of Steel Reserve High Gravity Lager is basically disgusting. Not to suggest that I failed to drink every last bit.

Went to see The Pilot Light over at The Middle East nightclub tonight. I showed up at a quarter to nine, since they went on around nine-ish, and there was a line to get in. Someone asked me where the will-call ticketing booth was. The crowd was for The Anniversary, which went on at eleven thirty-ish. They had a southern kind of feel, like an ironic Skynyrd cover. The drummer had a mullet and a handlebar mustache. They went on at eleven thirty and amused me for all of twenty minutes, at which point I decided to take out my ear plugs and go home.

During the show, I was gratified to catch some guy in a Get Your War On shirt checking me out. Not as gratifying as it would have been had I managed to catch the eye of any of the well-coiffed indie-rock girls in the audience, who were for the most part way way way out of my league. Or undergraduates. Or both.

But hey, I take what I can get. It’s only Monday and it’s been a long week already, and hearing some loud music and drinking cheap whiskey from a plastic cup was just what I needed. It’s been a long night, too, and I’m sitting at home eating chocolate-covered almonds and hoping that this girl I know will come on AIM and talk to me, but that’s not likely to happen any before my battery runs out, figuratively or literally.

And so to bed.

We’ve got a world of obvious stupidity and blunders today. First up, a new study reveals that… a if kids think their ability is innate, they won’t try as hard. As Jack Handey says, “When you ask a kid a question, and they get the right answer, I think you should tell them it was a lucky guess. That way, they get a good, lucky feeling.”

From the industry that brought you the crispy snacks with an incredibly boring toy surprise inside, the unsurprising news that sugar and corn syrup manufacturers think sugar is not bad for you. Of course they do. Now to see if the WHO can stand up to them and state the obvious fact that the sugar industry ought not to meddle in the affairs of international health organizations.

My comment on sugar is always that price of sugar in the US is artificially high, partly because of the longstanding foolishness that is the Cuba embargo, but mostly due to market-distorting corn subsidies. Once we implement some free trade in this country, we’ll move from high-fructose corn syrup back to sugar. Some argue that corn syrup is worse for you, but it’s a dubious, small, and off-topic distinction.

To round out a newsday of blaring inevitabilities, Our Leader is up to his old strategery, quietly ignoring or crushing the will of the vast majority of US citizens: putting toxins in our water, and of course making sure those hop-head cancer victims keep on suffering.

What kind of person wants to stop a cancer victim from easing nausea and cramps, or even god forbid getting a little high? Ashcroft, of course, who has a sort of puritanical zeal I haven’t seen since I went to see a high school production of The Crucible. He really does fit the cookie-cutter definition of puritan: “terrified by the idea that someone, somewhere, is having fun.” Besides, illness is punishment from Gawd! You know what causes cancer and AIDS, right? SIN! I can’t wait for the old fuck to get bowel cancer. I can’t wait to hear that the chemotherapy made him vomit until he ruptured his diaphragm and tore his esophagus, that he died from massive internal bleeding and suffocation as the necrotic growth from his bedsores spread, suppurating, across his atrophied pudenda.

That was kind of mean. On the other hand, it consists of statements of opinion and/or true fact, so although it violates the rules of taste and prudence, it is not actually libel.

Men. Beer.
Chicks. Games.