Category: Thoughts

Well, I just quit my job at MeeVee and jumped ship to do communications for American Student Assistance, a student-loan guarantor. I think it’s the right kind of job for me: Useful, not flashy, heavy on writing. I start Monday and I’m feeling a mix of elation and terror.

The isle of Lesbos is home to some 250,000 Lesbians who are gay, straight, and otherwise, and until now it hasn’t been much of an issue that there’s both a place and an orientation named after that place. But at least three Lesbians are annoyed that people confuse people from Lesbos with, you know, lesbians.

They want the national courts to force a name-change on the Homosexual And Lesbian Community Of Greece. It’s not that they have anything against lesbians, of course. They just want them to be described as homosexual women so as to avoid implying an official endorsement of lesbians by the Lesbian government.

Meanwhile, across Europe: The town of Champagne, Switzerland, is having some similar troubles. Their wines and crackers cannot legally be labeled as coming from Champagne, even though they do, in fact, come from Champagne.

This Chinese desert highway, maintained by hundreds of workers who live totally isolated lives for years at a time, isn’t just an incredible public-works project. It also seems like a uniquely Chinese solution to the problem. Drifting sand? I know, we’ll irrigate the desert along the edges of the highway, and post people to live at the roadside every few kilometers to maintain the irrigation system! For years at a time! Labor is cheap, the desert isn’t worth studying, nobody has to do an environmental impact survey, and nobody has any say in the matter, so why the hell not?

I’m probably generalizing, but I guess like everyone else in the West I’ve been thinking about China a lot recently. The Olympics, of course, are the focal point, but it’s everywhere. I’m halfway through a galley of The Last Days Of Old Beijing, by Michael Meyer, which I got from Bookdwarf, and it goes nicely with Peter Hessler’s book “Oracle Bones” and Fuschia Dunlop’s book on Sichuan cooking and Chinese society.

The video and the explanation of the road I found on Fogonazos – which has a convenient English translation for the text, if not the video.

According to the internets, this is a southern white-faced owl trying to appear larger or smaller than other birds by ruffling its feathers in different ways. The first display in particular seems sort of adorably Cthuloid to me.

I told you so! Evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds! Suck it, Ben Stein!

Scary art: One, Two.

Somehow, NYC is not on fire. I don’t know whether that’s a good sign that calm minds have prevailed, or a bad sign that apathy has ruined us all.

The Blue Zone test says I should buy some long-term care insurance. I don’t recommend the test to anyone else though: There isn’t a good way to unsubscribe once you’ve signed up.

I am so part of the problem.

Every time I think I’m a little too crazy, I come across a story like this one. You know, you could run a simple experiment: If medication makes the voices go away, then they weren’t real. Same with that whole Congolese penis-snatching epidemic.

And every time I think I’m a little too dirty, I come across a story like this one. His lawyer’s argument is that he was just crossing the park to get back to his hotel. But if you’re picked up for “loitering” at 3:45 AM in Central Park with a dildo in your boot, a bag of tina in your pocket, and a rope tied from your cock to your neck, Mary, you are not just taking a shortcut home. But you know what they say: Tina is such a bitch. (Although some people will insist that she’s merely a diva).

Mmmm, apocalicious.

So, there’s this incredibly wonderful fancy industrial-grade coffee maker, The Clover. It costs like ten grand, but that’s not too much more than your standard coffeeshop mega-brewing machine. The difference is that with this one you can program in, cup by cup, exactly the temperature and amount of water and how long it stays in the grounds. It’s become the hot thing among coffee-obsessives, and all the really cool shops were all over them. It got profiles in The New Yorker and Slate and The Atlantic as well as the beverage industry press.

And then Starbucks went and bought the company. And now, as Murketing points out, the cool shops hate them.

It’s not that they suddenly make worse coffee. It’s just that now that Starbucks has it, the excellence isn’t cool anymore: “The saga of its rise, embrace, acquisition and ensuing outcry is a precise, accelerated example of how a well-designed product can become a vessel into which people pour their beliefs, expectations and senses of betrayal; the parallels with Apple run more than just skin deep.”

Now, I understand that independent shops don’t want to be buying machines and supplies and support from their biggest competitor. It’s like Barnes&Noble buying up the book distributors and then using that power to screw the independent bookstores (something which should have been, but was not, blocked by antitrust authorities).

Still: Come on, people. It’s a coffee-maker. It’s not an ethos. It’s not a scene. I can see why cafe-owners would be disappointed, but I don’t see why anyone has any reason to feel betrayed.

I’m beginning to think there are a lot of Massholes on the internet. Why?

Background: Melonie Griffiths-Evans buys a house with a terrible loan: $470,000, no money down, an ARM her broker insists can be refinanced rapidly to something she can afford. She should know better, though, because she’s a realtor. Sure enough, the broker disappears and the company he worked for has since been shut down by the state. And sure enough, Melonie got behind on payments and ended up in foreclosure. Now, the bank owns the house and wants her out of it, but city council and CityLife/VidaUrbana help her stay in the house.

It’s pretty much a field day for internet commentators. Theme one: “You liberal jackasses want to use my money to help idiots,” with a thinly veiled “those idiots are lazy black welfare queens” subtext. Theme two: “You heartless conservatives want helpless poor people to be out on the street,” with a thinly veiled “republicans are all racists” subtext. Theme three: “I rent, and everyone who bought a home they couldn’t afford is an asshole, and I hate them personally.” Theme four: “I blame the Jews.”

The first three at least seem somehow related to the topic at hand, but I’m just not sure where the fourth one comes in. Bizarre.