Category: Thoughts

I may have posted this before, but it’s still amazing.
“I was raised like a veal in the Orthodox Jewish town of Monsey, New York, where it was forbidden to eat veal together with dairy….”

Recently, a men’s lifestyle blog called The Magnificent Bastard hosted a cocktail contest. Which I didn’t win. (The winners do look pretty amazing, so I’m not actually disappointed to be found wanting.)

Here’s my losing contribution:

Combine the juice of 1/2 grapefruit, 1 lime, and 1/2 lemon. Set aside.

Over Ice:
2oz. gin (Boodles, Greylock, Tanqueray, whatever)
1 oz. mixed citrus juice
1/2 oz. St. Germain
1 tsp Creme de Violette
Dash Bitter Truth Bittermens Grapefruit bitters

Instructions:
Shake, strain, serve up. Garnish with lemon twist.

GE is loving on Ronald Reagan like white on rice.

And I can see it from GE’s perspective – Reagan’s signature accomplishment was spending the USSR into the ground, and it worked, and it helped companies like GE and Bechtel and Boeing along the way. (We’d do well to recall this lesson when setting economic policy, but that’s another story).

The important lesson is that Reagan was, essentially, a terrible president, ignorant and reactionary in the George W. Bush vein. Despite his big smiley friendly veneer, he was a monster. Let us remember his attack on Medicare:

What chain of circumstances lead one to open a joint bank account with a spouse, and then set up direct deposit, and then ask whether it’s possible to hide their paycheck amounts? Isn’t asking that question the equivalent of saying “I’m a terrible person?”

What obligations do we have to art that makes us uncomfortable, or is difficult? Are we morally obligated to seek out, say, headache-inducing exhibitions at the ICA, or watch Oscar-nominated dramas, or listen to music that gets good ratings on Pitchfork? If so, how much? I mean, is there a ratio of serious to unserious entertainment that you have to maintain? Do you have to watch one “Precious” for every “Must Love Dogs?” One blog post about third-world poverty for every ten pictures of kittens? If you fall below that ill-defined ratio of highbrow to everything else, what are the consequences? Do you get exiled from the good dinner parties in Cambridge?

Also, what’s with the sudden proliferation of ballet flats that show women’s toe-cracks? A couple years ago it was about showing the toenails, and now it’s the other end of the toe. Is it the foot-fetish version of low-rise jeans?

When I see things like a registry of plasmids available by mail-order to help the enterprising young bioengineer assemble a novel life-form, I wonder how I can get in on the action, what my role in the awesome future this portends is going to be. Maybe I could build my own awesome new life-form with a second-hand PCR machine I find on Craigslist – liobam chops, anyone?

Then I remember I can’t even figure out the right way to assemble the toe-kicks on my Ikea kitchen cabinets.

Maybe they need someone to write their marketing brochures.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Q & O

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On Tuesday, 1/19, there will be a special election in Massachusetts to determine who gets Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. It looks like it will be close, and it will definitely be important, because every vote counts in the Senate right now.

Fortunately, it’s an easy decision. There are only things you need to know:

• Martha Coakley (D) is in favor of sick people getting health care, and has been known to put child molesters in jail.
• Scott Brown is opposed to helping sick people get health care if they are poor, and has never put a child molester in jail.

Do you wish poor people would just get sick and die? Do you love child molesters? Then vote for Scott Brown. Are you a decent human being? Then vote for Martha Coakley.

Inverse Square illustrates yet again why people such as myself have stopped paying for The Atlantic: an institution which gives a platform to Megan McArdle is doing a grave disservice to our nation.

Most recently, she’s started with a more or less reasonable premise: an awful lot of federal educational aid is wasted on subpar schools which produce degrees but not learning. It is often said that for-profit schools are the biggest beneficiaries of the GI bill, and some of those for-profit schools seem to exist solely to take in the maximum amount of federal student aid (GI bill or otherwise) while producing as little education as possible.

However, she does not proceed to the sane and reasonable conclusion that we need to improve the quality of our educational institutions, perhaps through some sort of accreditation reform. Instead, she argues that we should stop subsidizing and rewarding the education of our military and civil servants.

Jumping to that conclusion (without even a hint of research) is somewhere between preposterous and perverse. Which, of course, is vintage McArdle. (As the Square says: “it’s a pretty good default to assume that pretty much anything she says is false…”)

Now, I do love a cleverly-phrased preposterous conclusion. The best parts of this very blog are preposterous and perverse. I really don’t object to McArdle writing it. I object to anyone paying for it. McArdle ought to get a real job bloviate in her spare time like the rest of us.

Or, you know, put some actual work into her output. Maybe if she had some kind of rigorous training in the craft of writing accurately and not just a knack for a catchy phrase…