I always figured there was something weird about Kevin Drum, seeing as he’s a liberal Democrat who lives in Orange County. But now I see that he’s one of those weirdos who, on the NFL’s opening day, is more interested in tennis.
What a pinko.
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A general assumption of the current economic malaise is that, although the recovery has not yet generated jobs, it’s really only a matter of time and continuing the growth until employers have to increase payrolls. In other words, the business cycle will sooner or later lead to job creation, so the monthly reports job losses will end at some point.
But that might not be the case, unfortunately. The ominous lede is as follows:
The vast majority of the 2.7 million job losses since the 2001 recession began were the result of permanent changes in the U.S. economy and are not coming back, which means the labor market will not regain strength until new positions are created in novel and dynamic economic sectors, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study has concluded.
Color me worried.
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Talk about your “packed posts”. Teresa Nielsen Hayden offers up a long post about New York City that’s a feast of stuff to read and links to follow.
She may not blog often enough, but when Mrs. Nielsen Hayden posts, it’s always a doozy.
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It’s like we’re looking at Wayne’s basement…only, that’s not Wayne’s basement…isn’t that weird?
Sometimes I think that my blog is too far “out there”, and that I make odd choices about what to write about here. Then I see a blog like this one.
And just in case you’re sick of the fact that our so-called liberal media constantly assuages the interests of dog-owners and ignores those of us who love cats, why, this blog‘s got you covered!
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My comrade-in-arms linked a rather disconcerting news item a while ago, about a group of Muslims in London who plan to have an event on September 11 to honor the memory of the hijackers. I didn’t link it at the time, because I simply lacked the words to express the outrage and the inability of my mind to wrap itself around the idea that there are people out there who actually think that Atta and his eighteen friends performed an act of heroism. One of the things about our species that really terrifies me is that no matter what you do in this world, there will always be someone, somewhere, who approves of what you did.
I was reminded, though, of that news item by this post on a blog called Bloggy (which, in turn, I see via Atrios). It’s a post detailing the picketing some Christian fundamentalists did at that new public school in New York City for gay students. There are a couple of pictures, one of which shows the placards these folks displayed. One of them reads, quite incongruously, “Thank God for Sept. 11”.
Fundamentalists: ultimately, no matter which Holy Book they’re reading from, there’s not a lot to choose between them.
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Embarrassing admission time: my “career” as a fiction writer began in fifth grade, when a few friends and I banded together to pretend that we were some kind of amateur film-making company and write scripts for said films. And yes, we were geeky losers. (Some might think that I still am, but that’s a point for another day.) We would write these ten-page action-pieces featuring the great action heroes of the day, most notably James Bond and Indiana Jones. And we’d put the two together, for crossover madness. And, of course, since we were fifth graders not quite on the cusp of realizing that females actually are not “icky”, we’d leave out the Bond-and-women stuff in favor of the “Bond defeats fifty ninjas with the aid of his eyeglasses-laser blasters that Q gave him” stuff. Zap! Pow!
Well, anyway, I recall that one of us — it might have been me, but I honestly don’t recall — had James Bond working to thwart Blofeld’s nefarious scheme to — gasp! — blow up US national monuments. Oh, how lame a plot that was! Oh, the innocence! National monuments, indeed. It is to laugh.
Alas.
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Patrick Nielsen Hayden has some thoughts about blog design, specifically as to the design of the new political group blog Open Source Politics. I confess that I had similar thoughts when I checked it out the first time; I was thinking, “Where’s the content?”
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We aspire to a dusty shelf. (Possession)
I took the daughter to a book sale at the local library yesterday. It was a “buck-a-bag” sale, in which you pay a buck when you enter the door, they hand you a big paper bag, and you then fill it with whatever you want from the books piled on the tables. Library book sales are always fun, because they’re like Mr. Gump’s box of chocolates in that you never know what you’re gonna get.*
Sure, there are always things like Advanced WordPerfect 5.1 Tips or Get the Most Out of Your New Kaypro or TIME Looks Back at 1994. And of course, these sales are heaven if those trashy romance novels with Fabio and his lookalike-minions are modeling the cover paintings. But there are treasures, too, in amongst the crap: those old Disney storybooks, based on the movies, but nevertheless feature more words than pictures, for example. Or a nice copy, almost brand-new, of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and Now We Are Six. (How these got passed over by the other people there with their kids is beyond me.) And I found what looks like a brand-new copy of Gunter Grass’s Danzig Trilogy, which I remember hearing about once before. I had no idea what it’s about – – I didn’t know, until I got home and looked it up in my Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature – – but since basically I’d already paid for it, I snatched it up. And I grabbed a few other items as well, stuff I’ve never heard of but yet possibly deserves better than incineration or life in a landfill.
Of course, when one is an aspiring writer, one cannot attend a library booksale without entertaining the thought that one day ages hence, my own long-out-of-print, long-discarded books will be part of the picked-over piles at some library. In the short term, I dream of selling my books…but in the long term, I can only hope that they will still be read. In the end, my dreams of immortality — or at least, very long life — through my books will probably run up against the more likely scenario of a person many years from now picking up a dusty copy of something of mine at a library sale, and standing there for a second or two, deciding if this author she’s never heard of before is worth the price she’d pay for the book (next to nothing). I hope I don’t come up wanting.
Oh, well…what else is there to do?
* Isn’t that a bad metaphor, anyway? Most boxes of chocolates these days have little diagrams inside the lid that tell what each thing is. A much better box-of-chocolates metaphor comes from The X-Files, courtesy the Cigarette Smoking Man:
Life, it’s a box of chocolates: A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You’re stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there’s nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there’s a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they’re gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-crunching nuts, and if you’re desperate enough to eat those, all you’ve got left is an empty box filled with useless, brown paper wrappers.
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Uh-oh! Seattle has a ballot-initiative coming up that, if approved, would tax the purchase of espresso.
I wonder if anyone at Buffalo’s City Hall is looking on in anticipation of perhaps instituting a Chicken Wing Tax here….
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The NFL is apparently considering going to an 18-game schedule, which would be two games longer than the current 16-game season. (My arithmetic is indomitable….) This is seemingly a reaction to the recent spate of injuries in late preseason games to such players as Atlanta and New York Jets quarterbacks Michael Vick and Chad Pennington. I’m not sure how that would change the possibility of injury, really; it seems to me Vick could have been hurt in the regular season as well. In 1991, the Philadelphia Eagles were picked by some to go to the Super Bowl, until then-QB Randall Cunningham tore his ACL and was lost for the entire season – – in the regular season opener.
Not that I’m against an 18-game schedule, although I’m not all that keen on meaningful football games taking place in mid-August, which would be necessary (unless they push the Super Bowl back to middle or late February, the other option). But if injuries are really that big of a concern, I wonder if an 18-game season might be too much for the players. Football is a violent game, and it takes these guys a long time to recover once the year is over. The current schedule, 17 weeks long (to accommodate for 16 games plus one week off for each team) would probably best be expanded all the way to 20 weeks (18 games, plus two buy weeks – – I think two byes might be necessary). And with the additional games, I’d almost certainly expect the Player’s Union to insist on expanding the rosters, and therefore the salary cap as well.
(And apparently people have been tailgating at Ralph Wilson Stadium, in anticipation of today’s season opener for the Bills, since Thursday. Wow.)