Its Like I've Got A Fever

Reigning Sound is coming to Brooklyn tomorrow and Buffalo on Saturday. A disproportionate number of this blog's readers live in one of those two cities. Do yourselves a favor and check them out. Click here to buy tickets to the Brooklyn show.

Me and My Uncle...West Texas Bound

Dream trip: Fall 2010

Fly to Austin/San Antonio Friday night after work.
Sat AM: Snow's BBQ Lexington, TX
Sat PM: UT football game
Sunday: Austin and travel
Monday-weds: Big Bend National Park See Pyrrhuloxia, vermillion flycatcher, elf owl, and varied bunting
Thursday-mid friday: Marfa, TX see Chinati Foundation Donald Judd installations
Friday night: Odessa, TX. High school football game
sat: return to Austin/San antonio
Sunday: Depart

maybe some day. all i need is a partner who like barbecue, football, birds, and minimalism. because the trip doesn't seem to be quite worth the time and money without all the elements.

What Will Make You Believe Me?

Neko Case performed at the Beacon Theater on Monday night, and it was a fantastic show. As much as I love her recordings, her voice really needs to be heard in person to be full appreciated; she's a virtuoso. It is entirely possible that nobody in indie rock is as good at playing their instrument as Neko Case is at singing. As always, her band - the same four guys who backed her on the album, and at her Nokia Theater concert in April - were tight, and jokey in an old-pro sort of way. She played some deep cuts, including "Star Witness," a personal favorite of mine, and she looked absolutely gorgeous in a shiny red dress, like a 1930's torch singer. You should check her out, but if you don't get the chance, you can always enjoy her on YouTube:


Also of note - earlier in the day, she performed "Red Tide" on Late Nite with Jimmy Fallon.

All of this talk about Neko Case has gotten me thinking. What would be a more awkward place to run into one of your bros than a Neko Case concert? A stationary store? A screening of Twilight? Bed, Bath & Beyond? An Indigo Girls concert?

Reigning Sound Will Rock You If Give Them The Chance

Reigning Sound is on an independent label, but they're not "indie" rock. They're a 1970's-style garage rock band from Tennessee, made up of dudes in their late 40's, who had long careers in music before forming in 2001. On Friday night, they're playing at Southpaw, five blocks from CSD's Brooklyn headquarters, and at Mohawk Place in Buffalo on Saturday. If you're within shouting distance of either of these concerts this weekend, I recommend that you check them out.

Looting GreenPoint Mortgage

I am considering looting GreenPoint Mortgage.

In case you forgot, I work in a big subruban office park. It was supposed to be torn down in 2008 and rebuilt as a luxury office park, so the tenants were largely cleared out. but then financing and commercial real estate tightened up, so it just sits there at about 10% occupancy with two of the three buildings shuttered.

In our building is a large office that once belonged to famed subprime lender GreenPoint. They moved out in 2007 and the office was locked and untouched. it has been unlocked for the last 3 days, and I am considering looting it. In addition to a lot of terrible corporate art, there is a tolerable mountain landscape photograph. there is also a microwave and about 30 reams of legal sized copy paper. I have no idea who owns these things--the building management company or GreenPoint, but given that they have sat for 2 years, whoever owns these things does not value them.

I feel apprehensive, but I am not sure why. Is it stealing? Am I afraid of breaking the rigid norms of corporate culture? If I hang the print in my office, could something bad happen?

This also feels very symbolic--the act of looting a defunct subprime lender. Is this an act of renewal, of appropriating the mortgage crisis and making something good of it. Am I another vulture picking the the economic hulks for something I can make a buck on? Am I badly overthinking this and looking for larger meaning where there is none? (Probably)

I feel like I am in a Douglas Coupland novel. and I really should have read "Then we came to the end" to know how to behave with regard to the etiquette of drones taking corporate property during a business failure. But I haven't gotten around to reading it.

In my plan, I sell the microwave on CL, give away the paper, and keep the print.

Should I do it?

Hate Will Set You Free

I hate the New England Patriots. I hate how the referees protect Brady and never call Moss for offensive pass interference. I hate how Wes Welker's talks trash non-stop, and how his jersey is disproportionately popular because white people think he's scrapy and over-achieving. I hate Bill Belichek's smug demeanor and bad sportsmanship, and how he illegally used a camera to spy on opposing teams. I also hate his wardrobe of gray hooded sweatshirts, which is a deliberate fashion choice intended to say "I work so hard studying film that I don't have time to dress like an adult." I hate how Bill Belichek refuses to make eye contact or say anything to opposing coaches when he engages in the league-mandated handshake after games. I hate how the NFL chose not to punish the Patriots for Spygate, but will fine the Titans' owner for flicking someone the bird. I hated how they ran up the score against inferior teams, yet took no apparent joy in winning. I hate pretty boy Tom Brady and the bullshit hooded sweatshirt-under-sportcoat fashion trend he helped popularize. I hated how Willie McGinest used to fake injuries to stop the clock, and I hate how broadcasters never called him out on it. I hated Rodney Harrison's blatant cheap-shots, and how the Patriots' secondary got away with defensive pass interference penalties so often that the NFL made defensive pass interference a "special point of emphasis."

I love the fact that 'defensive genius' Bill Belichek did not trust his defense enough to punt the ball on 4th-and-2 deep in his own end, which would have forced the Colts to go 70 yards for a touchdown in two minutes against a nickel defense. And I REALLY love the fact that the Colts are 5-1 against the Patriots since the league placed extra emphasis on defensive pass interference.

No offense intended, Paul.

Feedback Wanted

The CSD staff is debating what book to select for our next long book club. Some early suggestions have been:

Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin
The Stand or Under the Dome, by Stephen King
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, by Susanna Clarke
The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

If you have any suggestions, or would like to vote for any of the books already listed, drop a comment and let us know!

Autumn of Dick - A Bye Week

A couple of the people reading along with our long book club, Autumn of Dick, have told me that they are behind on their reading this week, which is good, because so am I. So, rather than half-ass it or wait for a couple of days until we've all caught up, let's just take this week off and come back next week. Deal? Allright, good talk - see you out there.

Where Lazy YouTube Dumps Meet Gushing Fanboy-dom

Another repost, but Radiohead's webcast is just so awesome, and the "Ceremony" cover I posted a couple of weeks ago generated a lot of positive feedback, so The Smiths' classic "The Headmaster Ritual." Not only is it fantastically good, but you get the feeling that Radiohead could have kept playing and blown through another couple of hours of songs by The Smiths and their contemporaries without missing a beat. Radiohead is the best.

You are not the cosmos

I like N+1 generally. it is smart (or at least complicated) and mildly topical, if self-involved. But that self-involvement has reached new and terrifying heights. On the n+1 website, which contains about 10 articles there are TWO articles intellectualizing Brooklyn gentrification. There are certainly some interesting ideas here, and the imagination of the "real" past and the post-lapsarian present is a useful idea in America generally. And calling out your fellow Brooklynites on thier various levels of self-delusion and hypocrisy as they promote a culture of authenticity probably feels incredibly necessary. But you have to look a little more broadly. This is why the rest of the country thinks you are self-involved navel-gazers.


discussion of brooklyn gentrification fiction with a focus on amy sohn and an indictment of jonathan letham

Discussion of gentrification using the wire and SATC

Yo, JOE!

The Ballad of G.I. Joe from Olivia Wilde

Some delightful cameos in this lovingly crafted piece of art. I hate it when I see something awesome on the internet and see hundreds of thousands of hits already awaiting me. Well, I'm late to the party on this one, but am posting anyways since GI Joe had a special place in the childhood of Wade, Paul and I, and perhaps you as well.

We almost lost our fathers in a raging Canadian thunderstorm, thanks to GI Joe, and their own incompetence. At the tail end of a summer barbecue, young Wade was excited to unleash the GI Joe parachute pack. He had dutifully clipped his flag points from the boxes and waited 6-8 weeks--a significant portion of his life at that point. His patience was rewarded, as the nice people from Hasbro sent him a backpack accessory that would allow our Joes to parachute away from danger in any missions our imaginations could cook up. Sadly, Wade and I lacked the arm strength to lift a Joe high enough for the parachute to fully deploy--we needed fully developed arm muscles, or at least someone man enough to sport a Burt Reynolds mustache. Wade's dad fit both those criteria, and was fresh off of Red Sox Fantasy Baseball Camp; surely he could throw our toy far enough. Keep in mind this fantasy baseball was back in the mid-1980s and actually involved dressing up in uniforms and living out Kinsella-esque fantasies rather than letting computers juggle the stats of juice pigs. Confusing the two fantasy baseballs would be a faux-pas likened to mixing up a Civil War reenactor vs. a Dungeons & Dragons player.

So after eagerly waiting 6-8 weeks for the parachute pack to work its magic, on the first throw from Wade's dad, it promptly got caught up in the huge oak tree. Throwing other projectiles up couldn't untangle it. Wade's father and my father agreed: with the thunderstorm rolling in fast, they would need to use the aluminum ladder and metal rake to get the action figure out of the tree. While balancing precariously above us, Wade's dad jabbed at the tangled strings while my father held the ladder steady. The rain started to fall, and the sky grumbled and flashed as if filled with a formation of Cobra Rattlers firing their ordinance. Finally, the womenfolk pulled rank, "FRANK GET DOWN FROM THERE RIGHT NOW! YOU'RE NOT GOING TO GET ELECTROCUTED IN A THUNDERSTORM OVER A GODDAMN GI JOE!"

The next morning we retrieved the long-awaited, once-used parachute--tattered, ripped and ruined--from the ground.

That summer also saw the collection-devastating Desert Mission, where Cobra forces dastardly buried many of our Joes in the sand, never to be recovered even though we swear they were "right around here somewhere". On this Veterans' Day, we remember and honor our fallen comrades fighting for freedom wherever there's trouble over land, sea and air in both plastic and corporeal forms.

Paul Newman Is Going To Have My Legs Broken

Today I went out of his way to buy organic and no-hormone-added groceries on the way home from the gym, then ate a chocolate chip cookie after lunch without really thinking about it. Somewhere, Michael Pollan shed a single tear.

I've been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, and it is a fascinating book. It is less of a polemic than Fast Food Nation or other books of that sort; it is written from the point of view of a person who really enjoys food, and doesn't want to eat any junk - sort of like how book and film critics who most people would view as being overly critical really just love the media they review and are disappointed when new books or movies don't live up to their high standards.

Pollan's books leaves me of two mind, as I expected it would. On the one hand, the statistics he includes are staggering - one in five meals eaten in America is consumed in an automobile, "food products" like Twinkies and Powerbars disproportionately outnumber "food" like produce and fresh grains and meats in most supermarkets, and ingredient lists on packages of food include increasingly long lists of substances derived from corn and soybeans. There's no actual cane sugar in a can of Coca Cola anymore, but there are several different sweeteners, all of which are derived from corn. At the same time, the proposed remedies all include spending a lot of time and money - buying organic products, eating meat from animals that have been fed natural diets (grass for cows, algae and small fish for salmon and tuna, etc) instead of animal by-products and corn and soy derivatives, cooking from scratch more often and eating meals at tables instead of heating up frozen or canned food and eating on the run. I'd like to buy an enormous freezer, buy a whole skinned and gutted cow from a butcher shop, and carve it myself into its various cuts, which I can then cook slowly and flavorfully and serve with sides of organic brussel sprouts and portabello mushrooms, but, frankly, I work twelve hours a day for very little money, and I just don't have the time or the money to do much more than throw a chicken breast on a the Foreman grill and pour some Frank's red-hot sauce on it. And in none of my small New York apartments have I had the space in my apartment to store that much fresh food in a way that will keep it from spoiling or being ruined by pests.

Eating well is a challenge. Michael Pollan's book has prepared me to meet that challege, but until I win the lottery and/or sign a $10 million per year contract to play centerfield for the Boston Red Sox, it is going to be a challenge I will struggle to overcome.

Call me Herzog

Dear Senator Kerry,

I am writing to express my disappointment at the extension of the homeowner tax credit and my hope that you will work to let the extension expire at its current date of May 2010.

The current version of credit, with provisions to increase the household income ceiling to $250k and the provision to extend the credit to current homeowners does not benefit our society, only real estate brokers, who, I believe, are not a professional class undervalued by society and in need of federal subsidy.

While it can be argued that home ownership strengthens communities (but probably not as much as we think), these new credits do not increase ownership. They simply transfer wealth regressively from renters to current home owners (and increasingly wealthy ones at that).

The goal of having the government artificially re-inflate the housing bubble is not a noble or sustainable one. And while i support the federal government's right to intervene in markets, this seems to be a case where it is clearly inappropriate.

If you can explain to me how this credit benefits our society at large, I am certainly willing to listen. Otherwise, I entreat you to represent your constituents, and let this obvious boondoggle die.

Sincerely,
8yearoldsdude

Autumn Of Dick - Week 5

Autumn of Dick is going up a little late this week. These weren't the most exciting chapters in the book, though, thankfully, there wasn't a chapter as tedious as last week's 'The Whiteness of the Whale.' Nonetheless, the chapters in which Melville brings up descriptions of encounters with sea monsters from the Bible and ancient history, and speculates on the reasons why each of these historical or literary sea monsters was probably actually a sperm whale. Needless to say, those chapters don't exactly fly by.

The big development this week was that the Pequod spots a school of whales, its first since setting sail. Ahab had previously taken a gold doubloon and nailed it to the mast, as a reward to the first man who spots a whale. Once the school of whales is spotted, five Asian men emerge from Captain Ahab's quarters to try to harpoon the whales. Ahab sneaked them on board without letting Starbuck, Bildad or Peleg know, and their emergence, dark and wraith-like, spooks everybody on the ship. Clearly, these are the shadowy characters who Ishmael and Queequeg thought they saw through the fog, boarding the Pequod on Christmas Eve. The evidence that Ahab is dangerous and obsessed, concerned with vengence moreso than the safety of his crew, or maintaining traditional lines of authority aboard the ship.

What do you think of the novel so far, and the direction in which it is headed? I think that chapters where something actually happens are fascinating - compelling characters, lots of nautical detail, lots of different types of conflicts, and an impressive narrative drive. But so many chapters are so dry and digressive that the book too frequently loses its momentum. Your thoughts?

As Long As We're At It, O.J. Simpson Is A Free Agent, Let's Offer Him A Contract Too

Forgive me, Darryl, for I have sinned . . .

There are now widespread rumors throughout the NFL that my beloved Buffalo Bills may trade for Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick. If they do so, they would start an offense putting both Michael Vick and Terrell Owens on the field at the same time. If this happens, I may just throw in the towel and start cheering for the New York Giants.

I'm a loyal guy, and, despite their decade of losing teams, the Buffalo Bills have brought me a lot of joy over the course of my lifetime. There are a lot of reasons why we cheer for certain professional sports teams instead of others, but regardless of what geographic, racial, socio-economic, and personnel issues are in play, the bottom line is that we root for teams that we find likeable and fun to watch. With Michael Vick and Terrell Owens, the Bills would be neither of those two things, even if they succeed in winning a few more games than they would with the double non-threat of Trent Edwards and Ryan Fitzpatrick at quaterback.

I will now go say four Hail Marys, two Our Fathers, and watch the second half of the Oilers comeback game on VHS tape three times before going to bed.

The Ten Best Internet Memes of the Decade

Its difficult to argue with Paste Magazine's list of the ten best internet memes of the decade. My love of Rick Rolling is well known; I may have made it #1 on my list, if only because "Lazy Sunday" would probably split the vote with "Dick In A Box." To be certain, "Lazy Sunday" made "Dick In A Box" possible, but "Dick In A Box" is the biggest viral video of all time, and it seems silly to leave it off of the list.

Paste Magazine's List of the Top Ten Internet Memes of the Decade

The Jill and Kevin wedding dance video is a personal favorite of mine; not only is the dance itself a lot of fun, but Jill and Kevin and their wholesome midwestern adorableness brings back all sorts of sentimental memories that I didn't really know that I had, and Paste's color commentary (It's the coolest nuptial ceremony since Slash stormed out of the church in the "November Rain" video and ripped a mournful guitar solo" is a homerun.

An Oldie But Goodie

A friend sent this to me the other day, and though it has been years since it first aired, it still absolutely killed me. One of the best things the Daily Show has every done, and a reminder that, though we at CSD headquarters love The Colbert Report, (and realize that, by the fall of 2005, Stephen Colbert had become too big of a star to continue to play second fiddle to Jon Stewart for much longer) the sort of chemistry that Stewart and Colbert had between them comes along only a couple of times in a generation, and it was a shame to break it up.

evening strategy thoughts

In my travels as new england brewer/patriot, I need to acquire unpasteurized cider for fermenting. It is pretty hard to find. I found a lovely man named Phil who sold me cider. I needed 6 gallons but only had enough money for 3. his response was to hand me an envelope with those free return-address tickers on them and say "mail me the rest. I've only had one envelope not come back" I am convinced that life as a consultant has ruined me because rather than thinking "what a nice man," my first thought was "what a great business strategy." Not only did he upsell me the extra 3 gallons, and I of course paid him, I told everyone about it. I am even going to rep him on my website.
Money is a terrible lens through which to view behavior.

There is a lot of talk about large market and small market baseball teams, but many of the big market teams split their market with another team: Yanks/mets, Cubs/white sox, Dodgers/Angels. I would love to see a normalized statistic about regional GNP per team. Are the Red Sox actually the owners of the best market by this statistic? Or do media revenue not scale linearly with population?

Hipster Hate

So I've been frustrated trying to get from West LA to Hollywood in under 90 minutes during rush hour over multiple times in the past few weeks. Might as well take it out on the hipsters.

Where the Dirty Hipsters Are


Hipster Olympics

I Think We Can Make It

I know I've posted this before, but I can't stop listening to it.

Juliet, Naked

Juliet, Naked is Nick Hornby's sixth novel, and one of his most accomplished. Over the past fifteen years, Hornby has become familiar without becoming boring, not swining for the fences but hitting a frozen rope back up the middle every time he swings the bat. In Juliet, Naked, he explores some familiar themes - our emotional attachment to music, obsession, the influence of popular culture on generation X (and on generation X's ability to love), but with a longer perspective than his earlier novels, and an emotional intelligence that has few rivals.

Duncan and Annie have lived together for 15 years in a sleepy seaside town in the north of England. Duncan, a fortyish academic, moderates a website devoted to the music of Tucker Crowe, an American rock musician best known for Juliet, a break-up album often compared to Bob Dylan's Blood On the Tracks. Crowe quit recording in the mid-eighties, apparently after having an epiphany of some kind, and has not been heard from since. Annie is a fan of Crowe's music, too, but no more than that. As they approach middle age, Duncan's obsession with Crowe - including a bookshelf of bootlegged live performances - seems increasingly pathetic to her, as does the fact that they've lived together for fifteen years without marrying or having children.

Then Duncan, in his capacity as the Crowe website moderator, receives a cd in the mail from Crowe's record label, entitled Juliet, Naked - an acoustic album of rough cuts, before Crowe and his band had polished them into the album's studio cuts. Predictably, Duncan loves it, but to Annie it sounds like a rough first draft. Even if those tracks eventually became something great, how can a rough draft be better than a finished product that professional musicians spent months to produce? The elegant, unstated answer is being one of the first people to receive an unreleased cd from a musician with a cult following is one of the few opportunities he's ever had to feel cool, to feel in the loop. Duncan posts a rave review on the website. Annie posts a much more nuanced, critical one. Then, our of nowhere, Tucker Crowe e-mails Annie and tells her that he agrees with her review, and compliments her on her insights.

Annie and Crowe begin an extended electronic correspondence, and, yes, a love triangle eventually forms, but every time the novel seems to be in danger of becoming a predictable romantic comedy, Hornby throws a curveball and takes the story in another direction altogether. It is a testamant to Hornby's ability as a novelist that none of those changes feel forced, or overly manipulative.

Late in the novel, Hornby describes Gooleness, the town in which Duncan and Annie live, as being the sort of town that people visit because their "parents had misremembered a vacation from their youth or because they had failed to spot the romanticism and poetic license in Bruce Springsteen’s early albums.” That sentence is perhaps the perfect distillation of Hornby's style. The same can be said of Juliet, Naked as a novel.

Autumn of Dick - Week Four Open Thread

We're reading chapters 33-42 of Moby Dick this week. I will post my thoughts in the comments thread sometime tomorrow evening, but in the meantime I wanted to let all of you take the lead this week.

Feeling A Little Ceremonious This Morning

Radiohead isn't webcasting as often as it used to, but of all the bands on the interweb, Radiohead is still the best and most innovative. The idea of webcasting casual, tossed-off-but-nonetheless-amazing cover songs from their basement is awesome and should be imitated by other bands. Who wouldn't love to see The Strokes covering The Velvet Underground, or Arcade Fire covering The Talking Heads?

We've posted this video before, but its been a couple of years, and its just too good not to re-post from time to time.

Weekend Links, Thursday Edition

We haven't done a weekend links in a while. Here are some stories that have captured our attention lately:

Jonathan Demme - director of The Silence of the Lambs and Rachel Getting Married - plans to make an animated feature-length movie adaptation of David Eggers' Zeitoun.

The Onion A.V. Club is profiled by the Chicago Tribune as it releases Inventory.

The Wall Street Journal reviews Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball. Who would have expected the WSJ, of all papers, to be the first to review it?

The New Yorker has published a new short story by Jonathan Lethem.

And finally, just because its awesome:
The Thermals - "I Called Out Your Name"

emo evening thoughts

I knew I was in trouble when I went to a website advertising "weddings on a dime" and the subheading was "customized to fit you $20k budget". This is one screwed up social convention. Zounds, I do not need a carriage, or a tent, or an army of waiters. I just need a half-way decent hall, some tables and chairs, and the right to bring in my own booze and food. you'd think I was an alien.

walking around head of the charles and reading the rowing jackets was like seeing a who's who of expensive suburbs across the country.

Paul Revere was not a particularly important patriot. Or not singularly important. He was one of 30 riders to Lexington and Concord. and was discharged from the revolutionary army for cowardice. He was prosperous in later life, and his family seems to have fought some kind of PR battle in the 1800s to get him into the national cannon. [ed. note:never walk the freedom trail with too critical an eye]

It Never Gets Old

Moe vs. the Lie Detector

In which I review Julie and Julia in four words

Less Julie More Julia


oh who am I kidding. just a few more words.

any time there is a dinner on a new york rooftop strung with white lights and good, creative friends creating warmth and community, bad things are in store. that is the single worst film cliche around these days.

Straight Man, by Richard Russo

The Campus Novel is a favorite genre of mine. In its own way, its themes and cliches are as familiar as those of the vampire story, or the buddy movie, or the underdog sports movie. The protagonist is almost always a middle-aged man. He is a beloved professor who is good at his job, but not as good as he could be. Aside from a new notable exceptions, he is disappointed in the abilities of the students enrolled in his classes. He is a little too clever for his own good, and he usually undergoes some sort of mid-life crisis that makes him re-evaluate his priorities, and realize that, all things considered, he has a pretty nice life. Richard Russo's novels have a similar set of themes, and even similar characters, so perhaps only makes sense that Russo, no stranger to small college English departments, would write one of his own.

The Onion AV Club uses the term "mountaintop" to describe a book or an album that is similar in style to the artist's previous work, but the best piece of work we can expect that style to produce. Straight Man may be Richard Russo's mountaintop novel, and it may be the Campus Novel's mountaintop as well, alongside Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. It doesn't break any new ground, but the characters are so well drawn, the campus so thoroughly imagined, and Russo does such a good job of raising the stakes for his characters, though their world seems so small, that it is really difficult to imagine this particular type of story being told any better.

Henry Devereaux, Jr. chairs an English department full of lazy professors who care more about 'winning' petty conflicts with their colleagues than they do about teaching undergraduates, and who are all paranoid about losing their jobs - fears they only have because none of them have published anything worthwhile in ten years. He is a little too clever for his own good, and has an unhealthy habit of provoking everybody who he meets, merely for the sake of provoking them - an instinct that goes from harmless to harmful when the state government announces that it is going to be making cuts in higher education. His daughter and her husband are having marital difficulties. He is half in love with half of the women on campus, including a bitchy colleague, the daughter of another colleague, and his perpetually put-upon secretary. He suffers from male urinary disorder, the cause of which may be more psychological than physiological. He should really defer to his wife's good judgment more often. You don't have to be a long-time reader of Russo to know that, when his wife goes away for a week to visit her troubled father, trouble begins to brew.

If any of this is beginning to sound familiar, it is because . . . it is. But Russo's greatest strength as a novelist is his emotional intelligence, and, here, his ability to make real human beings out of all of these familiar types makes these old conflicts so much more interesting than they really have a right to be. Russo's campus has a lived-in feel; it is a campus on which students come and go, but a small number of tenured faculty never leave, comfortable as they are in their undemanding jobs. There is a certain sort of over-educated person who, in the absence of anything to legitimately worry about, will create something to worry about, and it is no coincidence that a great number of these people end up in academia. Sometimes they end up on small campuses in rural Pennsylvania, and have a man like Henry Devereaux as their department chair. They become cliches - a wimpy male professor nicknamed Orshee because he chimes in with "or she" every time anybody uses a male pronoun; a failed poet who doesn't quite have the looks to make it through life on the kindness of strangers, a post-modernist who refuses to teach any texts other than television sitcoms - but they all feel plausible. Russo gets the little details right, and, in the process, pulls off a couple of fantastic comic set pieces.

Straight Man isn't a perfect novel - the ending too quickly wraps up too many strands of the plot, and an attempt at a big punchline to a novel-length running joke falls a little flat - but is is an excellent one. Russo's characters are good company. If they remind you a little too much of the characters from his other novels, that's okay - those characters were good company, too.

"Sometimes Shit Just Goes Bad"

Japanese People Are Weird - Watch more Funny Videos
The title of this video is "Japanese People Are Weird," but really, everybody in this video is pretty weird, and only a fraction of them are Japanese. Apparently, somebody scoured the internet for weird photographs, assembled them into a four and a half-minute slide show, and wrote a song to accompany them. The idea is so funny, and so simple, that its sort of amazing that nobody thought of it before now.

A lot of these photographs are just disgusting, but some of them have so many weird things happening in the background that it hurts the brain to even attempt to figure out when or where that sort of scene ever could have occurred. Consider the scene at 4:02, with an enormous obese man, wearing ladies underwear and a blonde wig, is loaded into an ambulance while two people dressed as Oompa Loompas look on in terror, a man in a business suit looks on, confused, and two people in bunny suits console each other by hugging. What the hell had just happened?

Autumn of Dick - Week 3 - Chapters 20-32

I'll say this much about Herman Melville - the man knew how to foreshadow. This week's reading begins with Ishmael and Queequeg noting what appear to be last-minute preparations aboard the Pequod, and waking up early the next morning to board the ship, knowing they may not return to land for two or three years. They wake up early to a very foggy day and, approaching the boat, see what appears to be the hazy outline of a group of sailors boarding the Pequod. And yet, when Ishmael and Queequeg board the Pequod, these sailors are nowhere to be seen, and indeed the entire ship is still and quiet, its sailors still sleeping below the deck. Its an eerie scene, and one, the reader must assume, portends bad things.

Ishmael and Queequeg meet Starbuck, the ship's first mate, a soft-spoken Quaker who oozes competence out of every pore. "I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale" Starbuck says, suggesting his wisdom and "appropriate fear" of the challenges that lay before the crew of the Pequod. Stubb and Flask, the ship's second and third mates, each seem like reliable sailors.

For the first couple of days out of port, the ship's captain, Ahab, is nowhere to be seen, and Starbuck runs things while Ahab lingers in his cabin. His entrance, when it finally occurs, is one of the more memorable entrances I've read - his build is imposing, and he has a white, lightning-shaped scar that runs down his face and, it is implied, the entire length of his body. Ishmael knows that Ahab lost a leg in a whale attack, but is startled to see Ahab limp around on a prosthetic limb made out of 'ivory' taken from a whale's jaw. So far, pretty bad-ass. But some things about Ahab don't quite seem right. Ahab laments the fact that smoking his pipe - once a favorite past-time of his - no longer brings him any pleasure, and, descending a ladder to his cabin at the end of the day, Ahab states that it feels to him as if he is descending into his tomb.

Then, the narrative takes a sideways turn, as Melville begins a series of non-fictional descriptions of the important of sperm whale oil, the whaling industry in general, and the attributes of the various different types of whales. This break delays the seemingly obvious conflict between Starbuck - the cautious sailor who values the safety of his crew and seeks a profitable voyage, and Ahab, who no longer enjoys life's simple pleasures, sees death on the horizon, and, though it hasn't been fully explained quite yet, seeks revenge on the whale that seperated his leg from his body. This week's reading ends as trouble is beginning to brew.

Random thoughts:

-At first, I disliked the way in which the non-fiction chapters slowed Melville's impressive narrative momentum. But, the more I thought about it, the more I figured that, in the days before television and National Geographic, the common person - even the common educated person - may not have known very much about whales, for instance their size, or the value of their oil, or the fact that they are mammals instead of fish. These chapters may very well have been necessary in the 1850's. Today, they annoy us like an extra long commercial break in the middle of an otherwise gripping television show.

-The founders of Starbucks originally wanted to name their company Pequod's, but then decided that nobody would want to drink a beverage from a company that sounded too much like "pee." Its hard to say that they made the wrong decision, but at the same time . . . come on. Besides, Peet's coffee is one of the most beloved brands in the country!

Facebook Abuse

We all feel like this from time to time.


Thanks to Matt Ufford.

This One's For The Ladies

CSD is an equal-opportunity blog, and the ladies in our readership have had just as long of a week as the dudes, and also deserve a love song sung to them by a hot redhead. So here you go.

Let's Face It

Its Friday, you've worked hard all week, and you deserve a couple of love songs from a hot emo redhead.

Jenny Lewis - Trying My Best To Love You and Silver Living

Stuff That Exists

Apparently Terrell Owens has a brand of honey and nut flavored o-shaped wheat cereal that is sold in the Buffalo area and may or may not be an illegal imitation of General Mills' Honey Nut Cheerios. Who knew that these existed? Is Terrell Owens really that popular? Doesn't everybody - even the most ardent admirers of his football-playing ability - admit that he's sort of a jackass? Why would his endorsement make you want to buy a breakfast cereal? He's a far cry from Doug Flutie, whose boy-next-door good looks, telegenic family and all-around good guy-ness helped his sugar-frosted corn flakes (which just so happened to bear a resemblance to Frosted Flakes) sold like gangbusters throughout upstate New York in the late 90's. WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO?


Flutie Flakes (1998)

Terrell Owens' T.O.'s

The more I think about it, the more I believe that it may have been funnier to post only a photo of the cereal box, with no commentary. Would that have been ironic? What does "ironic" even mean anymore? Somebody make me stop talking before one of my loyal readers commits suicide out of sheer boredom.

in which you are suprised at how childish I am and how strongly I dislike the yankees

I really dislike the yankees. It is the organizing principle of my baseball life. It may in fact created the liberal framework through which I view all sports.

Now, the roots of Washington sports fans hating new york run very deep. Douglass Wallop's mid-century novel--The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (upon which the musical Damn Yankees is based)--is all about the depths of the desire of Washington baseball fans to finally best the overlord yankees.

All of this became real for me in 1996 American League Championship Series. With the Orioles leading late in the game, Derek Jeter hit a fly ball to right field. Baltimore Orioles' (Washington had no team so our allegiances shifted 90 mi north)outfielder Tony Tarasco camped underneath it to make the catch. Unexpectedly, A 12 year old boy reached out of the outfield stands of Yankee Stadium and caught the ball.

Now this is not the most scandalous thing in the world, it happens enough that there is a rule for it. When a fan reaches into the field of play and touches a ball, it is ruled spectator interference and in this case the batter would be called out. This is actually more invasive than steve bartman who did not reach into the field of play, but simply refused to yield to Moises Alou's attempt to reach into the stands. but in any event, it is a routine call.

However, the correct call was not made. The fly ball was ruled a home run, the momentum swung to the Yankees who eventually won the game and ultimately the series. And the world rejoiced--or at least the media. Rather than heralding this as an unfortunate tragedy (that a game was decided by invasive fans and umpire error), the boy was cheered as a hero by a new york-centric media and Orioles fans were left with nothing but a bitter sense that the world was focused on New York and we were merely foils to the various forms of their glory.

The fact that this happened in 1996, I was a young teenager, still sensitive to unfairness and still developing a sense of how the wider world worked. Although I admit that it seems childish to carry such vivid memories of this, it was quite instructive that the wealthier, more important team not only received the call but had its unfair advantage whitewashed into an act of heroism and humor. Once one sees this, one looks for it everywhere.

When Michael Jordan threw Bryon Russell to the ground with his left hand in the waning seconds of the 1998 NBA finals, I did not see an act of last second heroism, but rather Jordan, the dominant, favored overdog, being rewarded for the taking advantage of his privilege and then having that unfairness papered over as an act of greatness and glory.

This is where things get murky. I am tempted to try to extrapolate this lesson into something about my political views--why I am outraged about the unlimited upside, socialized downside of wall st. (which happens to be located in new york). That I am, hopefully, sensitive to injustice masquerading as success. but that feels a little foolish if not hypocritical-especially when I could well be considered a bit of a Yankee on social grounds myself. So let's leave that part on the cutting room floor and return to the singular joys of watching the Yankees lose. There really is nothing like it.

Washington baseball fandom is difficult. One cannot root for the Angelos-era Orioles, much as one cannot really root for the Snyder-era Redskins. And the Nationals can be rooted for, but not with any real hope of victory.

and so I turn on the TV all summer and into October hoping to watch the yankees lose. I antagonized a New jersey-ite casual fan girlfriend in 2001 to take joy in Luis Gonzalez's flair to help the Diamondbacks (about whom no one can be passionate independently) best Marino Rivera and the Yanks. I stayed up late and crowded into bars full of unlikable red sox fans in 2004 to glory in the defeat of the yankees again (never bothering to watch the actual '04 world series between Sox and Cards). And so it is this year. I will watch attentively, hoping only to see them fail and try again next year with more money.

Autumn of Dick - Week 2 - Chapters 10-19

Some thoughts on the next ten chapters of Moby Dick:

-How would you describe the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg in the first couple of chapters of this week's reading? It seems more pronounced than last week, but, on the other hand, its almost entirely asexual. Once again, I wonder if this isn't an inappropriate reading of 21st century mores onto an 1840's text - we know that people in the 1840s did understand the concept of homosexuality as we know it. Men spent a lot of time in close proximity to each other, and men would frequently compliment each other's physiques and muscles in a way that would strike us modern readers as "gay." Ishmael seems to like the fact that Queequeg is a muscular, masculine fellow, but it never gets beyond that.

-Ishmael's approach towards Christianity is far more sophisticated than I would have expected. Both Ishmael's discussion of Queequeg's idolatry (and how a Christian God couldn't possibly feel threatened by something so small and insignificant), and his general live-and-let-live, "Christianity means doing unto others as I would have them do unto me; if people of other religions don't bother me then I have no reason to judge them" attitude seems more modern than I would have expected for a character living in the chapter-and-verse culture of early 19th century New England.

-The voyage to Nantucket is more harrowing than expected, and, upon arriving, Queequeg and Ishmael encounter all sorts of ominous omens, including coffins, tombstones in a chapel, a gallows, and two black cauldrons. Then they find an inn and feast on seafood chowder, and begin to feel cozy, but one can't help but feel as if things are about to go badly, that those spooky omens are foreshadowing something nasty that is about to go down.

-I love how the Pequot is introduced to the readers. The ship hasn't even left port, and yet it already seems like a character in its own right.

-I don't care how juvenile this sounds: Whenever Peleg speaks, the mental image that comes to mind is that of Captain McCallister from The Simpsons.

-Captain Ahab is described as "a grand, ungodly, god-like man . . . doesn't speak much, but, when he does speak, then you may well listen." A man to be recokend with. I can see how so many professors compare him to the Judge from Blood Meridian.

The National - Live At La Guinguette

I orginally posted this particular version of "About Today" a couple of years ago, and I have no particular reason for posting it again, except that it is awesome and this song has been stuck in my head lately. It is the third part of a three-part "Live at La Guinguette" video series, recorded in 2006, during their first European tour. The first two parts, "Abel" and "Baby We'll Be Fine" are just as good.

Stuff That Makes You Smack Your Forehead, Saturday Morning Edition

(1)Fillipa Hamilton was recently fired by Ralph Lauren for becoming too fat. She is 5'10", weighs 120 pounds, and wears size 4 clothes. She is gorgeous. If that makes a model too fat to work, then let the record reflect that Wade Garrett loves fatties.

(2)Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Target, and other large retailers are currently in a price war over new hardcover books written by best-selling authors like John Grisham and Stephen King. Amazon is currently selling Stephen King's new novel, Under the Dome, for $9.00 in hardcover, and Wal-Mart is selling it for $8.99, or 83/100ths of a cent per page. Technically, Wal-Mart's price is lower, but it still eight dollars and ninety-nine cents more than anybody should ever give to Wal-Mart. Still, that is $26 (or 74%) off the cover price, which sort of makes anybody who has bought a hardcover novel in the past fifteen years feel like a total dick. But an 1,100 page novel (and a potential CSD long book club selection??) for less than the price of a movie ticket just reinforces our opinion that books are the best thing ever.

(3)Senator Al Franken recently proposed an amendment to a spending bill that would prohibit the federal government from awarding any contracts to companies that make their employees contract away their right to sue their employer for damages if they are raped by co-workers on the job. That clause, included in the fine print of Kellogg, Brown & Root contracts, has prohibitted a young woman employed by KBR in Iraq from suing after she was gang-raped by a number of her co-workers. Sure, she can still sue her co-workers, but her co-workers don't have any money, and KBR has a lot of money. Such an amendment would seem like a slam-dunk, and yet it was opposed by thirty Republican senators. Senator Sessions, who lead the opposition to the amendment, said on the Senate floor that it is not the government's place to interfere in private contracts. Mr. Sessions, the 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statistics! Senator Sessions, a lawyer who served as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi for twelve years, ought to know that the Supreme Court's Lochner era ended in the 1930's and that, while the government is generally prohibitted from interfering in private contracts, the federal government can choose to spend its own money any way that it wants, and can attach as many strings as it wants to the money it chooses to spend. Senator Sessions' attempt to disguise his blatant neo-conservative pandering to government contractors in a half-assed legal language the Supreme Court overturned more than seventy-five years ago is as bizarre as it is reprehensible.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rape-Nuts
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

This Makes Me Feel Better About The World

Tina Fey and David Letterman together is the Reese's peanut butter cup of the tv world. Yes, is is the right conjugation of "to be" for that sentence.

Deep Thoughts With Wade Garrett

When I'm at the office late, I like to take off my wing tips and put on a pair of white sneakers, though I'm still wearing a suit and tie. I hope the effect is more "Wille Brown" or even "Mr. Rogers" than it is "No Jacket Required."

RANDOMLY DEPRESSING UPDATE: No Jacket Required is ranked #1,021 on Amazon.com's sales list. Think about that - in the year 2009, there are only 1,020 albums more popular than No Jacket Required. Its more popular than Boxer, Acid Tongue, or Dear Science.

emo evening thoughts

I object to the name Redskins on moral grounds. but there isn't a lot I can do to influence Dan Snyder economically. And ceasing to root for ones childhood football team seems like the self-conscious action of college freshman. I had an anti-redskins bumper sticker on my old truck. but then I had to get a different car.

I posted a yelp review of my dentist. I noted that she sometimes creates unintentionally philosophical aphorisms due to her imperfect English. I then became self-conscious that she would find the review and edited that part out.

I can't tell if Yelp is a beautiful outgrowth of consumer advocacy or one more obnoxious brick in the yuppie-foodie industrial complex.

My favorite birds--Sulidae edition

Hi all,

time for another installment of "my favorite birds" (this segment is also known by its alternative title "I am not enjoying my job that much").

Northern Gannets are gorgeous birds. The color balance of the cream body feathers, the rusty-orange crest, and the aquamarine eye ring creates a beautiful whole. They are long and graceful soaring fliers (they have a lot in common with albatross in that regard). they have always been a favorite bird of mine.



Northern Gannet's live in the north oceans and are part of the Genus Sula that includes Boobies and Gannets (including the famous Galapagos denizen the Blue-footed Booby). (I am not dignifying your Booby jokes). These birds share a common shape and physiology. They are "plunge divers" which means that they dive into the water from a substantial height and are able to make a move underwater to grab fish. This is a different strategy from the Alcids (e.g., Puffins) that can swim underwater for prolonged periods and from dippers/skimmers that do not reach as deep into the water column.




Northern Gannets nest together in colonies on remote rock outcroppings. This is for the simple reason that bird eggs are tasty, therefore, parent birds have to nest somewhere that land-based predators--fox, rats, snakes, bear--can't get them. This limits their nesting ground habitats to land without mammalian predators--at-sea outcroppings or very steep cliffs.



If you ever get a chance to visit a seabird colony (there is a gorgeous one in newfoundland) you should take it. It is a singular experience.

Stay tuned for eventual further installments of avian ecological arcana

Emo evening thoughts

It is pay day on Thursday. I look forward to pay day so much, it makes me wonder if I still have a soul.

My uncle and cousin stayed with me to visit colleges. They are really nice, but sweet fancy moses is it tiring to have guest you aren't totally comfortable leaving alone to fend for themselves

I am part of an internet music exchange via Dropbox, and I feel very guilty about stealing money from undermonetized artists.

I think Lady Gaga might be a genius. Seriously. She might be the new Madonna.

ok, back to work

Autumn Of Dick - Week 1 - Chapters 1-9

Nine chapters into Moby Dick, Melville is still setting the scene. The narrator, Ishmael, has grown bored in Manhattan, and relocated to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the hopes of finding some excitement on a maritime expedition of some kind. When he arrives, the town is salty and quiet, and Ishmael looks for an inn in which to spend the night. Passing on the first two places he finds, because they are too nice and expensive-looking, he stumbles into a sketchy inn with no vacancies, but where the inn keeper allows him to share a bed with a then-absent, unnamed mariner. The mariner - who we come to know as Queequeg - returns to the inn very late at night and is understandably shocked to find another man sleeping in his bed. Queequeg's physique, tattoos, and creole dialect, as well as the disturbing shrunken heads he carries, startle Ismael. The inn keeper introduces them, both men realize they have nothing to be afraid of, and doze off. Ishmael wakes up to find that he has never slept sounder in his life, and also that Queequeg's arm is thrown over him in an intimate fashion. Surely these details will prove significant down the road, but how so? I've read enough books to tell that Melville is foreshadowing all sorts of terrible things, but he's not giving anything away. I'm hooked.

Scattered thoughts:

-Isn't it funny to think that, in the 1840's, somebody might have left Manhattan and moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts in search of a good time?

-In the first couple of chapters, Ishmael tells the reader that he is bored, and is looking for an adventure, and believes that he might find one of the sees. To a modern reader - if not to Melville's contemporaries - this practically screams "Warning!!! Be careful what you wish for, you just might get more than you bargained for!" It strikes us as a rather obvious bit of foreshadowing. Would readers in the 1840s have recognized it as such, or has it only become cliche in the intervening 150+ years? Do any of you have an opinion about this?

-I love Melville's style, heavy as it is on allegory, symbolism, and foreshadowing. Its clear that William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy read this novel closely - the parralels to McCarthy's Blood Meridian are striking. What do you think of the writing style? Heavy in a good way, or just . . . heavy?

Dear Ralph Wilson . . .

The list of great NFL headcoaches not currently employed by an NFL team includes Tony Dungy, Mike Shanahan, Bill Cowher, Mike Holmgren, and Jon Gruden.

I'm just sayin'.

Added: As long as I'm just sayin' things, I would like to point out that Jeff Garcia is better than at least eight quarterbacks currently starting for NFL teams, and yet he remains a free agent. Who said the NFL was all about winning? If you can save your owner a million dollars by refusing to sign a better player in a season in which you've already determined you're not going to make the playoffs, why wouldn't you do that? Who cares if the team loses two or three extra games? Think of all of the high draft picks we'll get, to use on players like Erik Flowers, JP Losman and Mike Williams!

This Is Like Pulling Teeth

It is halftime in Orchard Park, and the Buffalo Bills trail the Cleveland Browns 3-0 in a football game so poorly played that the NFL should feel a moral obligation to provide the fans with refunds. Buffalo Bills wide receiver Terrell Owens has four catches - a season high - for forty-four yards. Going into today's game, Owens had eight catches for 158 yards and a touchdown.

There is little controversy in saying that Terrell Owens is one of the twenty or so greatest wide receivers ever to play football. There is little controversy in saying that, as a football player, he is aging and on the downside of his career, and that, as a human being, he is shady, selfish, and untrustworthy. However, there is also little controversy in saying that, despite all he is one of the best-conditioned athletes in the NFL, and still one of the ten best receivers in the league.

The two best football players on the Buffalo Bills are Terrell Owens and fellow wide receiver Lee Evans (who, going into today's game, has 10 receptions for 148 yards). Why is it not Buffalo's gameplan to get the ball to their two best players at all costs? Even if it means throwing three interceptions per game, or exposing Trent Edwards to an extra sack or two, why are the Bills not throwing in the direction of Owens and Evans twenty times a game? So far, Dick Jauron is the only head coach whose offensive game plan is more predictable than his predecessor, Mike Mularkey's. And to think, we could have had Marvin Lewis or John Fox.

Update: The game is over. The Bills lost 6-3 on late fourth-quarter field goal. The game was so poorly played that, at halftime, the CBS broadcasters were making jokes like "Seriously, are these two professional teams?" I continue to wonder why I do this to myself year after year.

Overly Detailed Explanations Of The Obvious

I love just about everything David Cross has ever done. Unfortunately, his recent book I Drink For A Reason is directionless, poorly edited, and feels too much like a first draft of something potentially much better. Cross has always had a tendency to beat up easy targets, but the sort of screeds and revenge fantasies he writes about Catholic priests, morning zoo crew disc jockeys, Larry the Cable Guy, Jim Belushi, homeschoolers, and President Bush are more facile than they are cutting. Similarly, several of his 'essays' are more accurately described as rebuttals to people who have criticized him in various ways over the past few years. He has a few bizarre running jokes that never really pay off, and the book's highlights - a free list of character quirks for use by aspiring indie filmmakers, a list of music to listen to while writing about other music - feel buried between loose, baggy essays. Most importantly, his book is just not very funny. We all drink for a reason; some of us just need a better reason that the decades-old scandals of child-molesting Catholic priests, or Jim Belushi's continued popularity.

By comparison, Michael Ian Black's recent My Custom Van: And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face is far superior. Black's trademark blend of surrealism, wordplay, over-explanation and non-sequiteurs translates far more easily to the page than I would ever have expected, and his essays have a consistently rewarding build-up, build-up, funny-but-predictably punchline, unpredictable-and-hilarious punchline structure that killed me every time. For fans of alternative comedy who need something to read on the subway and/or the toilet, Black's book is far superior.

This Would Have Gone Over Huge At My High School

New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens 'It's Gay To Smoke'

Teddy bears are underweighted in your portfolio

I love antiques roadshow.

This is for many reasons. The proximate cause is probably that I have super-cheapskate cable, so it is often the best thing on. It strikes a totally different tone than regular TV. Everyone is earnest and weird-looking, and sincere. and you get tiny 2-minute material culture history lessons which are delightful. and you can being to imagine foggy unspecific ancestors playing with that Stieff rod-bear or drinking from that impossibly baroque decanter set.

the one thing I do not like about the show is the big reveal of the monetary value of the antique. Oh, it is often fun to see the faces of particular owners light up in surprise, but the thing I often wonder about is the effect of inflation. The screen shows a big sparkling number, usually with four or low five digits. What I want to know is, "is that a good deal?"

More often than not, someone bought the antique from a dealer a few hundred dollars in ~30 years ago and it is now worth a few thousand dollars. I wish the roadshow had two normalizing statistics--original price of object adjusted for inflation and owner's purchase price adjusted for inflation. That way we could see if the original buyer got a good deal either at the time of purchase or now.

Perhaps I am being a wet blanket, and one is suppose to regard antique purchases as depreciating decorations, and the fact that they retain value is the equivalent of found money. but I contend that often these are bought as investments, and I am curious to see how it performed.

As my last several posts have shown, I fret about money a lot. It is kindof a bummer.

Stupid capitalism

I hate my landlord, and I think it is capitalism's fault.

I live in an owner-occupied free-standing multi-family house. The owner and his family live on the top two floors, and we live on the bottom floor. We pay slightly below market rate for rent (we shopped around extensively and then bargained), but it still constitutes ~70% of the owner's mortgage payment (assuming standard borrowing rates and comparable pricing to neighbors)

It drives me nuts to see him every day. I feel as if he is free-riding on me. He gets equity in the house, and I pay for it. Now I know all the reasons why this arrangement is so: I am paying for the flexibility of leaving, the rent must account for bad tenants and/or damage, they would pay for any potential problems which have as of yet not occurred, but it makes for a terribly awkward social relationship.

We are nominally supposed to be friends (they are plenty nice people), but every time I see him I think about how he is taking advantage of me.

Would this be easier if I were paying a big corporation to get fat doing the same thing? My landlord is a hardworking blue-collar dude (industrial air conditioners), I should be happy for his enterprising nature. but the fact that there is a face not too much older than my own, profiting so directly from me, is difficult.

Rice

OK Freakonomicists,

Why is brown rice more expensive than white rice? As far as I know, white rice is just brown rice with the hull milled off. Therefore, the act of processing makes it cheaper. This would be like gasoline being cheaper than crude oil. The "scale of demand drives down price" argument doesn't work because they are the same thing at different levels of refinement. Shouldn't demand for either type of rice affect the total demand (and price) for rice? The only reason I can think of is that you can sell lower-quality rice as white rice because you mill off the part that wold be visibly imperfect. Either that or rice producers have figured out what the economist loves to make me feel bad about--that consumers of eco-preferable products (hi!) are price-inelastic morons.

any thoughts?