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Tuesday, August 05, 2003

psssst...wanna re-read The Secret Life of Walter Mitty? 10:31:28 PM    comment []

Railroad Bob   During one ugly 3-year portion of my life, I worked at Graybar Electric. It’s probably okay if you fit in there. I didn’t, but still I tried. It was a valuable lesson in learning how to deal with clueless people day after day.   Not the people I worked with. They were not your average bibliophiles, but they were honest and hard working. One good example was Bob the former railroad man, biding his time as a contractor while he waited to reach the proper age to get his railroad pension. His natural intellectual curiosity stopped once the boxes were properly loaded in the Graybar truck, which is probably a good thing because he got them all delivered on time.   At the time I was a shipping clerk, he would sometimes enter the warehouse from the loading dock with his right arm lifted high above his head. He would walk serpentine over to the staging area and gravitate to a set of boxes while his arm swooped down like a hawk to prey. He’d pick up the targeted box and say, “Don’t pay any attention to me, I’m crazy!”   Sometimes he’d have questions about items to be shipped. While ridiculously simple-minded, even the responsibilities of a shipping clerk do not have Manichean boundaries. Just because something is in the staging area, it doesn’t mean it should be immediately shipped. A box might be sitting there, apparently ready to go, but the contractor is not planning to be at the job site until a couple days hence – so you gotta just hang onto it a while. These subtleties were beyond Bob’s imperatives and he only heard explanations as excuses.   “Do you want to ship this box out to the Diller site?” he would ask. The answer could only be “yes” or “no.”   “Not yet,” I’d say. “The credit department has placed a hold on orders going to the Diller site until their last check clears…”   “That’s okay,” Bob would say, “I fuck up myself. Everybody fucks up sometimes.”   “Well,” I’d say, “I didn’t really fuck up. They placed the order and it’s probably okay, we just have to wait.” But that only compounded the fuck up in his one track mind.   “Don’t worry about it, “ Bob would say,trying to put a little fatherly frosting on the fuck up cake. "I even fuck up myself."   At first these exchanges infuriated me (one of the reasons I didn’t make it at Graybar) as an affront to my personal competence, but after a while I began to anticipate them and even enjoy them.   “Is this pallet of blenders ready to go to Lazarus’s?” he’d ask.   I’d say, “No, it’s only a partial order, which they won't accept, so we have to wait for the backorder…”   “That’s okay. I fuck up too. I fuck up all the time.”   “Me too. I’ve fucked up 7 times today already and it ain’t even noon…”   Then he’d laugh, and I’d laugh too. Two people who fuck up all the time, brothers in arms. Hey, everybody fucks up sometimes. 9:46:37 PM    comment []

As long as they're not beheading anyone, who really cares what Episcopalians do? 3:48:00 PM    comment []

The Producer   Maybe after all the brush is cleared (Yo! How about napalming it? That would free some time to read intelligence reports.) on the Bush Ranch, he’ll still have enough vacation time left over to produce another movie. The Bush resume circulating email around the internet does list this accomplishment:   I produced a Hollywood slasher B movie.   Most Google hits take the lowest road and nail him for giving “tacit approval” for The Hitcher, starring Rutger Hauer, which gets a not-so-bad 6.8 user rating on the IMDb scale. That movie also features a character named “Trooper Donner” (have you ever noticed that “Donner” is one letter removed from being “Dinner”?) played by one Billy Green Bush (no relation) who also got third billing as  “Elton” in Five Easy Pieces (7.4).  Over at Amazon, Art Snob has put together a list of 20 movies produced while GWB was on the board of directors of Silver Screen Management. Here is the complete list with IMDb ratings:   Volunteers                                              4.8 The Hitcher                                             6.8 Down And Out In Beverly Hills                  6.0 The Color Of Money                                 6.8  Ruthless People                                     6.7 Outrageous Fortune                                 5.8 Tin Men                                                  6.4 Stakeout                                                 6.4 Good Morning, Vietnam                            7.1 Cocktail                                                  5.2 D.O.A.                                                    6.0 Shoot To Kill                                            6.3 The Good Mother                                     5.6 Blaze                                                     6.0 Disorganized Crime                                 5.0 An Innocent Man                                     6.0 Where The Heart Is                                  5.6 Pretty Woman                                         6.6 Betsy’s Wedding                                     5.7 The Marrying Man                                    5.1   This produces an average user rating of 5.995, so let’s just call it 6.0. It isn’t all that bad, but you have to wonder whether he watched all those movies or just had some lackey read the scripts. Still, The Hitcher is one of his better movies.   It is decidedly reassuring, given the prospect of 5 more years, that the coprotactile hand that made Spectrum 7 and Harken what they are today is not universally ruinous. When it was allowed to flourish in a purely nominal role, it was only below average. Cheer up! 2:26:14 PM    comment []

"Mr. Sharon...Tear Down This Wall!" (...) Well, not quite. Here's the deal. The US granted Israel $9 billion in loan guarantees, meaning they can borrow at a rate backed by the full faith and credit of US taxpayers. First of all, we'll cut that amount by the billion added for Israeli expenses from the Iraq war, which were apparently nil. The remainder will reduced by a rate estimated at $2 million per mile of fence built. Since the completed fence will be 370 miles long, that would be about $740 million. So the above headline should be amended to include "or you'll likely pay higher interest rates on $1.7 billion." 8:35:31 AM    comment []

On Food: Delicate mâche is upscale salad makings By HSIAO-CHING CHOU SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER FOOD WRITER You probably have tasted mâche (say "mosh") in a restaurant or bought it from the farmer's market. But it's not always easy to find in the grocery store or in quantity. Now, Epic Roots has solved that problem by bringing mâche to the masses as the latest, "upscale" bag salad. (NPR is doing a piece on this stuff. I'm so hungry even salad sounds good. If you know what I mean when I say Colyte tastes better than Nulytely, you'll know why I haven't eaten for 36+ hours...it's practically a spiritual experience: fast, purge, then Demerol)) 8:02:32 AM    comment []

Me? A GoogleSlut?     Sure thing. It’s easy. You’re looking for Cherie Blair, the dance floor sensation at holiday resorts. The story is here. Or just read it below…       Cherie - the dancefloor diva 16.42PM BST, 4 Aug 2003 The singing skills of Cherie Blair have hit the dancefloors of Europe. The Prime Minister's wife warbled a few bars of The Beatles 'When I'm Sixty-Four' on a recent trip to China. Now her dulcet tones have been sampled on a dance track which is proving a hit with British holidaymakers in popular resorts like Ibiza in Spain and Ayia Napa in Cyprus Cherie stepped in to help her husband when he was asked to sing during a grilling by Chinese students in Beijing last month on the case for war in Iraq. A music industry source said: "The tune has taken off in a big way in the nightclubs all over Europe. It was treated as a joke but it's now a big favourite on the dancefloor. It's hilarious to think it but Cherie could become the sound of the summer." The track made it onto the turntables after it was mailed anonymously to key figures in the dance scene, according to report in the press. 7:09:41 AM    comment []

Kristof and Krugman at the NYT   Op-Ed Tuesday, a special day A double dose of Special-K!   Kristof: Ripples of Hiroshima One of the great tales of World War II concerns an American fighter pilot named Marcus McDilda who was shot down on Aug. 8 and brutally interrogated about the atomic bombs. He knew nothing, but under torture he "confessed" that the U.S. had 100 more nuclear weapons and planned to destroy Tokyo "in the next few days." The war minister informed the cabinet of this grim news — but still adamantly opposed surrender. In the aftermath of the atomic bombing, the emperor and peace faction finally insisted on surrender and were able to prevail. No surprise here, people being tortured will say anything to make it stop. Ironically, McDilda’s revelations served the Allies’ cause. Wonder if there are any modern day analogies to the waves of fear our own government pumps across the land, not unlike those at the Wild Blue Yokohama Surfing Pool in Tokyo. This all is tangential to Kristof’s main point, which is that the still controversial nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved both Allied and Japanese lives. I agree as long as the pro-nuke argument stops there. Krugman: Tax Propaganda For his June 22 interview with Howard Dean, Tim Russert asked the Treasury Department to prepare examples showing how repealing the Bush tax cuts would affect ordinary families. Presumably Mr. Russert thought Treasury would provide a representative selection — that is, like many in the media, he doesn't yet understand the extent to which Treasury has become an arm of the White House political machine. In any case, the examples Treasury provided to Mr. Russert and others in the media were wildly unrepresentative. To give you a sense: the Treasury's example of a "lower income" elderly household was one receiving $2,000 a year in dividend income. In fact, only about one elderly household in four receives any dividend income, and only one in eight receives as much as $2,000. Not surprisingly, the "Russert families" gained far more from the Bush tax cuts than a representative sample. As Mr. Sullivan put it, "If this continues, the Treasury's Office of Tax Policy may have to change its name to the Office of Tax Propaganda." It’s no longer a secret that previously healthy sources of informational feedback, such as the CIA, NIH, and EPA have been transformed into a politburo to justify wild-eyed neocon theories more deeply rooted in dogma than reality. Historically, high concentrations of wealth in the pockets of the upper 1% have been universally catastrophic, leading to economic phenomena such as The Great Depression. By ignoring history, these guys seem hell-bent on repeating it. No wonder. Look at who fills the campaign coffers – and I’m talking about both the Tweedle-dee-dum and Tweedle-dee-dumber (I stole that from somewhere) political parties. Also historically, the upper 1% does quite well in deflation. Cash is king in falling markets. Prices fall, but the intrinsic value of property remains constant. No wonder these guys regard an open press conference as a form of torture. A single misspoken word could blow their cover. 3:59:53 AM    comment []