I don’t normally link to the Globe

But this is just really annoying. It starts out as a discussion of Jane Jacobs’ ideas of urban planning but rapidly devolves into a stock fear-of-gentrification rant about how childless yuppies and queers are ruining our city. Well, no. The poor quality of schools and the scarcity of decent family housing has driven families away, and the childless yuppies (gay and straight, not sure why they keep harping on the gays being childless, urban, and yuppies, since that’s such an obviously wrong stereotype) are the only ones holding the damn city together. If you want to bring more kinds of people back to the city, then build more housing and make the schools not suck.

I don’t know why I read the Sunday paper. It makes me mad every damn time. Don’t even get me started on the NYT style section. Ugh.

Robert Reich

Awesomeness: Former secretary of labor Robert Reich has a blog. It’s a shame a short man can’t get elected in this country, or he’d have made some real changes to the country. Good ones.

Correction– he ran for governor here in MA, but lost out in the primary. I voted for him.

Excellent turns of phrase

The NYT today reviews some new travel-and-food books, providing any number of fun little sentences, some from the books themselves and some presumably from the reviewer.

A book about competitive eating describes a competitor as “a cross between Anna Kournikova, Billie Jean King and a jackal wild on the Serengeti.” Two art-school graduates who search for down-home cooking throughout the US are described as “people who make a point of stopping at prisons to shop at the gift stores.” A tale of a man cooking a giant feast from a 19th century cookbook is “not quite ‘Babette’s Feast,’ but then Babette did not have to stuff half a duck into an antelope bladder.”

I love it when reviewers and pundits write like that. It makes for vastly entertaining reading. Unfortunately, it all too often passes for news. But that’s another story altogether.

This has all the hallmarks of an awesome link

Digg and other social news sites have a tendency to flock to news items with particular characteristics. So, when I saw Drunk Monkeys Mirror People, I thought I’d found the ultimate Digg story. Monkeys doing things like people. Monkeys drinking alcohol like people. It’s better than the proverbial Slashdot item about a movie where Natalie Portman uses quantum computing to send Linux to Mars.

But when I checked it only had a few votes on Digg. Maybe it will become incredibly cool in a few hours, and maybe I’m just wrong about monkeys and booze being the coolest things in the world.

Cult Flyers

Every month or two I get a flyer for the Dahn Yoga group with promises of free brain energy tests or whatever. (Hint: if there’s an energy reading, it’s probably a cult.) And, while brain respiration and the myriad web fronts make me think it’s a pretty weird cult, it’s nothing as bizarre as the one I got today.

The Universe People apparently want to abolish money to … well, there are these evil aliens called Saurians, and these other benign aliens from the Pleiades, led by a guy named Ptaah and also by Jesus. See, and we’re being controlled by the Saurians, who have legions of underground caverns filled with human slaves writing computer software to control the above-ground world. And, um, abolishing money will help us to, um…

Anyway, it’s by far the strangest and least coherent thing anyone has asked me to believe. And that includes the weather forecasting using astrology website I saw yesterday.