Category: Thoughts

Renters Gloat Over Housing Slump: WSJ.com. I’ve been looking forward to gloating about this for quite some time. But to be honest, it’s not all that pleasant. Gloating rarely is. I don’t like to see other people in trouble, even if they took some part in creating the mire they’re in– whether that’s someone who took out a loan they can’t afford, or someone who ordered the US military into a desert quagmire.

And while a steep drop in house prices might let me afford to buy one, it’s not as though my rent is dropping right now. In fact, shrapnel from a housing collapse is as likely to hurt me as it is to help me.

In California this past summer Bookdwarf and I had the chance to try a lot of wine we’d never heard of. One of the best– and best values– was Shooting Star Blue Franc. It’s made from a weird grape called Lemburger, which I think is from the same area as the stinky cheese, but is otherwise unrelated. Anyway, some guy from Washington State thought it was fun and makes some great wine with it. When we got back to the east coast we were glad to find it at the Wine and Cheese Cask in Somerville for about $13/bottle. Now, if you buy twelve bottles of wine at once, most places will give you 10 or 15 percent off, so that’s effectively in the under-twelve-dollar range. We stocked up on it– a twelve-buck bottle isn’t an every-day wine, but it’s not a giant expense.

With a value like that, people will eventually catch on. Shooting Star has since been endorsed by blogs (Dr. Vino) and journalists (New York Times) and cooking websites (Star Chefs), and social shopping networks (ahem, StyleFeeder). Today at the wine shop, the price was up a dollar.

That moves it in my mind just across the line between “nice” and “special,” so I only bought two bottles instead of six.

Thanks to Gethen, I’ve got the header image and RSS issues sorted out. She showed me how to redirect the feeds using a .htaccess file, and edited the header image so that it’s a smaller download but looks infinitely wide. Although it’s now just 626 pixels wide, she adjusted the image to repeat without obvious seams.

Now, to think up some kind of content or something.

This is a pretty clever video, and I’m sure NBC is congratulating itself on putting together an “edgy viral campaign.” But it’s 2006, and they’ve just discovered that they can say “dick” on the Internet, and Saturday Night Live had its best moments before I was born.

Shorter Jeff Jacoby: Without angels on Christmas cards, our society is amoral.

(See Busy Busy Busy for a long evolution of the “Shorter …” concept).

Greenwald compares popularity, and finds that the war in Iraq is less poopular than every third rail issue out there: gay marriage, legalizing pot, banning handguns… everything.

I guess that tells you more about political reality and the fickle nature of human opinion than it does about the war, though.

Studies suggest that friends having dislikes in common is just as important– if not more important– than having likes in common. I don’t remember where I read this, but I read it just this weekend.

Possibly in the same place I heard about the LibraryThing UnSuggester, which given a book you did enjoy tells you what books you should not read. For example, if you liked the Critique of Pure Reason, LibraryThing suggests that you avoid Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Although I have to say it strikes me that The Devil Wears Prada probably has a lot more in common with Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom than fans of either book would be willing to admit.

Brooklyn-based rockers The Affair (hear sample songs on their MySpace page), are coming to Boston. Should be a good show. I might even manage to drop my tightfisted ways long enough to buy a ticket and see it myself.

JFleck points out that nuclear-power industry welcomes the acknowledgement of global warming with open arms. That makes sense, although that doesn’t do anything to make it more or less true. But then John makes an observation that’s quite a bit broader. He quotes Roger Pielke Jr. saying “There is no such thing as decisions driven by science. Decisions are always driven by values.”

While it’s true that decisions are driven by values, you can’t have a genuinely values-based decision until you are honest about the science, and let the science form the bedrock for your decision.

For example: tobacco. A reasonable decision about tobacco would begin by acknowledging that tobacco is bad for you, and would weigh the right of individuals to endanger their own health and the state’s obligation to provide for the common welfare. You might come to any number of decisions from that debate, but you would start with the science. As we know, the tobacco debate in the US instead was a circus in which the tobacco industry funded dishonest studies and denied the truth as much as possible. We’ve seen similarly dishonest attacks on the science that underlies sound policymaking in the case of alcohol, marijuana, asbestos, leaded gasoline, birth control, sex education, abortion, and global warming, to name just a few.

Obviously, politics and values and belief influence all policy debates and decisions. But to attack the foundation of a just decision, to tamper with evidence, to corrupt or deny the truth for partisan gain– that is beyond the pale. That is what we condemn when we speak out in favor of science-based policy.

I remember listening to these tracks on repeat and crying and crying.

Kristin Hersh, “Your Ghost” (yes, that’s Michael Stipe on backing vocals)

Cranes: Shining Road