what will i do with all these leftover pretzels?

i know that for a select few, the new yorker festival just goes on and on and on . . . they have their seminars and dinner parties and galas and elegantly lit corner booths, and the conversations and debates spin out endlessly into the twinkling, mirthful night. but there is nothing select about me, and my expendable income for the month of october is more or less used up, and so my party is all over. i'm so sad that i don't live in an era of public conversational salons and roundtable fêtes; even in college i could feel the loss, but i wasn't in despair. there was still one coffee shop that people sat around and discussed ideas in, there was an art gallery down the street that hosted biweekly potluck suppers open to anyone in the neighborhood, and i could always corner someone at a party and pick a fight about the estate tax or the bohr model or whether there is such a thing as a nonmisogynistic french film (i still can't decide). now everything happens in chat rooms or comment threads or text messages, you can't get anyone to engage in three dimensions, and it's dreadful. the internet will be the death of artistic movements, i'm sure of it. something happens when you put people with a common interest or goal together in a room that just can't occur when they aren't face to face. a spontaneous and immediate reaction to an idea or statement will always lead to a more rewarding discourse. there are more coffee shops all the time, and they're always full of people, but those people are all sitting at their own tables, talking on their cell phones or clacking away at their laptops, and it's a completely dead atmosphere. for me, anyway. i guess the people in the coffee shops feel o.k. about it. but my heart will always long for the communal, intellectual atmosphere of the belle époque, and i know that all of those folks were fairly select, too, but at least they were trying. if i had more than twelve square feet to host them in, i might try to start up some gatherings of my own. well, if i had more than twelve square feet and a chair, and maybe some kind of table, even if it weren't round, you know, an end table or something, or a tray table, and more than one glass. *sigh* someday.

anyway.

the closer to the word-nerd party, featuring ira glass as the ringmaster and susan orlean, chuck klosterman, and malcolm gladwell as themselves, was not officially a new yorker event, though there were, obviously, a high number of references to the magazine and its practices and contents. not to disparage the festival, but i think last night's talk was better than any of the other literary events i attended this past weekend, because it was so lightly mediated and loosely themed, and because ira mostly wanted the writers to talk to each other. the event was both promotion for ira's new book, the new kings of nonfiction (which actually contains a lot of not-new nonfiction that apparently had been piling up on glass's desk long enough for him to feel compelled to do something with it), and a benefit for 826nyc, the local branch of 826, a national nonprofit organization that offers free after-school programs and tutoring in creative writing for school kids from kindergarten on up. i love that 826 exists. i love that dave eggers, john scieszka, and sarah vowell are heavy presences on its board and keep it a little wacky. i love that a young, broadly lauded writer with a good amount of clout chose to start up a wacky nonprofit to help kids instead of buy a $7 million brownstone so each of his own kids could have a private floor (man, foer, you really turned out to be one glaring disappointment after another). and i love susan orlean and fidgety lefties who bite their nails and scrape the labels off of their water bottles and pick at the untucked tails of their shirts (aww, my secret boyfriend fiddles with inanimate objects, too! we're so perfect for each other). until tonight i just kind of felt all right about ira, but now i love him too, and i don't think i'd ever heard of or read anything by chuck klosterman until a few days ago (sorry, dude, but i stopped flipping through spin when i was about 16), but what the hell—i love you too, man! i love your sweeping hand gestures that have probably proven dangerous to passersby, i love that you babble and flail like a vertiginous speed freak, i love that you love what you do. structured, mediated, q&a-type discussions are great for what they're worth, and sometimes they're the only way you can get things done. but ira just threw a handful of smart, eccentric spazzos together and let them gab about why they love writing about smart, eccentric spazzos, and it was brilliant. and i learned some things, too:

• susan orlean and chuck klosterman both think the word "sequelae" is pronounced "suhkweelia." i don't have a problem with this the way i do with "nucular." i had a conversation with my uncle once about which is worse, someone mispronouncing a word but placing it in an appropriate context, or someone speaking a word beautifully but using it inaccurately. we decided that misusage is a greater sin, because someone who knows what a word means but not how it sounds is someone who reads and retains knowledge and wants to enhance his or her working vocabulary, but someone who has heard a word and repeated it without taking the time to find out exactly what it means is basically a blowhard. and "suhkweelia" isn't an unpleasant-sounding word. "nucular," however, is an abomination, especially now that the incorrectness of the pronunciation has been a topic of public discussion for a while. i'll never fold on that.
  
• malcolm's working on a book about, um, something . . . cultural identity? something unbusinessy, i think, anyway, and it doesn't sound as if anyone will be able to use it to sell more chairs or records or crappy movies,* so that's nice. of course, i could be mistaken; all he really told us was that there's one chapter that he interviewed his mother and aunt for, and i have chosen to grab up that nebulous ball and run all the way to juneau with it. i'm open to most any subject matter, really, as long as little, brown prints it in the same font as the first two. the typeface and leading are so refined, and yet also so approachable and calming. very thoughtfully laid out, those books. so there's no birthday article for me this year, but i can totally live with that.
  
• it's entirely true that most people think of men first when they're asked to name people they admire for intellectual or artistic reasons. my cousin asked me the other day for some music recommendations, and i had listed about twenty artists when he stopped me and said, "it's weird that you don't listen to any girls." but i do listen to girls, and am wild about plenty of them. i just didn't remember them until i was prompted to do so. and then i was very disappointed in myself, because no one should ever forget mirah or ani difranco or mary timony or chan marshall. but i had. it's true for writers and visual artists, too, i think of faulkner and ibsen, chuck close and françois truffaut, but when i sit down and concentrate, all kinds of amazing chicks pop into the foreground. it's really strange, that women don't leap out, or really even lodge. i have to dredge them up, even the ones who've kind of changed my life. but i thought maybe it was me, and now i think it's everyone. isn't that troubling. i mean, i'm not a feminist, exactly, and i don't always get along so well with girls, but there are plenty i'd rather remember than forget. and now i'm worried that i won't.
  

susan touched on the difficulty of being a woman and a reporter, as opposed to a novelist or columnist or food writer, something that didn't require travel and weeks of immersion in a subject's life, and i thought, why should it be harder for a woman to travel than it is for a man? but it isn't necessarily; it's just harder for a woman with a home and family, and it's harder for that woman than it might be for a man with a home and family. it's easy to write it off as the result of women's desire to stay closer to home when they have a family, and to then write off such a desire as something inherently female, but what you're implying when you say a thing like that is that men don't love or miss their children as much as women do, and i doubt that. but in the end it's a personal choice, and all of my tiny x chromosomes aren't enough to enable me to muster up much sympathy for women who choose to have a child and then miss their lives. it's their choice, isn't it? you can decide that the other parent should give up a life instead, or you can decide that you will both carry on as usual and hire a third party to raise your child, but someone will have to sacrifice something on one or the other front. it's impossible for me to believe that women who are working at jobs they enjoy and then decide to have a child don't have a rough idea, one way or another, of what's going to happen once the child arrives. you want one thing most, right? and you pick it. it isn't gender-based, it's person-based. susan's still a writer, and an excellent writer, she just writes less. and maybe that's difficult for her, but she has the career she wanted and is positioned pretty highly within her admittedly male-dominated field. (no one was rude enough to ask ira why only two female writers were included in the current anthology, but i'm sure he was feeling the heat for a minute or two.) am i an awful woman? am i a heartless woman? maybe i'm an ignorant woman. it seems that people of both genders whine a lot about how they can't have it all, but nobody has it all. my sympathies are with the people who don't have enough, or who aren't free to make a lot of choices about their own lives, and i think that susan is not that kind of person. i mean, i'm not that kind of person, even without a chair or a table, so what is she complaining about? i like you, lady, but suck it up.

in the same vein, as much as i hate having to jab malcolm in the kidney with my pointy stick, he occasionally drives me to it, and it really irks me when he mocks the wealthy. i mean, the man ain't broke. he's not digging through the couch cushions for enough change to buy a box of spaghetti at trade fair. he isn't on the wrong side of any tracks. rally for the underclass, sure, but don't sling mud at the rich. again, i think that most people have more than they need, but maybe someone with way, way more than he needs will actually be more willing to hand some of it off in a charitable manner, because that handoff is so unlikely to impact his quality of life. someone in the middle class might decide that he shouldn't have to help anyone else, because he still has a lot less than the people with the most. but if what ultimately matters about wealth is how it's allocated, i'm going to side with the obscenely wealthy people who are donating a fifth of their income to social programs and charities before i'm going to side with the people making $30,000 or $40,000 a year who glare at homeless people and toss the jimmy fund can over their shoulder when it's passed around the movie theater. the residents of southampton may or may not ever have done much of anything at all in terms of supporting worthy causes. i have no idea, and i don't think malcolm does, either. what i'm sure of is that i'd rather align myself with the people who are doing something, even if it's only for the tax deduction, than side by default with the people in my tax bracket, because they certainly aren't always the same people. some people make their assets a central part of their character, but i don't think there's any call to do it for them. the rennert saga was moronic, and more than worthy of extensive pointing and laughing, but i want to laugh, you know, at the case, and not the individuals. maybe there isn't a way to do that. i'm kind of struggling, lately, with efforts to prevent my hatred of certain aspects of people from emerging as hatred of those people, period, and i don't know yet how effectively it can be accomplished. i'm looking for the gray areas. and i know that malcolm is also primarily mocking the acts and not the individuals, but sometimes it's just so hard to visualize a firm line. don't worry, though, i'm not going to stop hating people. god, can you imagine? what a boring, wasted life that would be.

chuck, um, didn't say anything that i feel strongly about or moved to comment on. he seemed smart and funny, and fun, and a bit manic. mostly he seemed just plain happy, with his life and what he's able to do with it, and that's such a lovely thing. but, it's just, i mean, he didn't want to write about the strokes, but he did, and i don't want to read about the strokes, and i won't. and i can only keep up with one magazine at a time, and he writes for about nineteen, so i don't know how often we'll cross paths. alas and alack, but there are only so many hours in the day.

i guess i'm assuming everyone knows about ira glass, but for anyone who doesn't, here. love him or hate him, but don't hate him in my house.

so, yeah, the end of this party. but all is not lost: reviews are forthcoming on other festival events, i swear. you'd never know it to scroll through iaaph these days, but i do care about things that are not malcolm gladwell. not many, but enough to shut the hell up about him every so often, and i'm going to. honest. tomorrow. i think i'd like to talk about mark danielewski for a while, too, if anyone wants to stop by, and the new mcsweeney's collection of very, very short stories is filling my heart with love and blood and other assorted substances of varying densities. i know there isn't much room in this place; go ahead and climb on the bed if you want, and i'll perch up here on the counter, and if everyone brings a glass i'll make sure there's enough to drink. it won't be the start of a revolution, but i think we'll all get on just fine.





* update, 10/10/08, 1:21 PM: i was, um, really, really wrong about this. the eternal optimist meets with eternal slaps in the face, i guess. this book is more about the creative process than the process of marketing creations, though, i think, and its projected release date is awfully close to my birthday in 2008; he's trying.

celebrity sighting #2*

i passed jim jarmusch on bowery today. he was rockin' that crazy eraserhead hairdo and drawing hard on a cigarette, taller than i'd thought he was and wearing a signature patterned button-down shirt, looking real cool, even though it was damn hot. i had been walking for about an hour and was dirty and sweaty and bedraggled, wearing an ugly, unevenly faded pair of cropped khaki pants with a blood stain on the leg that are really only good for being dirty and sweaty and bedraggled in, and i did not look cool. but even if i had looked cool, i wouldn't have, because i was also trying to shove half of a very crumbly cookie about the size of my fist into my decidedly un-fist-sized mouth, and this futile square-peg-into-oblong-hole effort had spattered spelty debris all over my chin and chest. in addition to being elephantine, the cookie was fairly dry, which made it that much more difficult not to choke when my brain stage-whispered, "HEY! that's jim jarmusch! holy crap, that's jim jarmusch! jim jarmusch, who made down by law and night on earth and dead man and broken flowers! jesus, don't look at him! not with your cheeks all puffed out like a hamster's around that mouthful of cookie you can't swallow and that trail of grimy crumbs parading into your cleavage, come on, stop looking, he'll know and then he'll look at you, and then he'll see you, and it'll be AWFUL OH MY GOD DON'T LOOK DON'T LOOK!!!!"

but it was too late. i was lost in the beautifully confident ease of the hand holding his cigarette, of his stride, and i stared dead into his face, like a possum in love with a goodyear tripletred. our eyes met and we held the gaze for what seemed like an impossibly long time; what could he have been thinking? perhaps, "i wonder if that homeless girl is going to ask me for money? or maybe even an autograph? either way, i can always burn her with my cigarette and run." or maybe, "jesus, how stoned do you have to be to eat that much cookie in those pants in public?" maybe something less complicated, like, "please don't talk to me."

but then again it could have been something entirely different, something thoughtful or even touching, such as, "now that looks like a girl who would love a juniper titmouse." who knows? no one but jim, which means i will never know, and honestly, since what's done is done and i can't change any part of it, i guess i'd be equally willing to accept any of the above. he didn't try to burn me, anyway, so there's that.





* celebrity sighting #1 occurred a few weeks ago, but i didn't mention it, because really it's only alleged celebrity sighting #1. i am 99% certain that i passed jack mcbrayer in the union square station. for those of you who don't know, jack mcbrayer plays kenneth parcell on 30 rock and looks like this (on the right):


magically geekalicious, no? and i am thrilled to say that, if my sighting was legit, his actual everyday haircut is just like that, only dweebier. awesome.

new york minute

weather: 60°F and breezy—chilly, even.

odor: my street—reminiscent of the underside of a kitchen-sink drain trap; midtown—none detectable.

subway conditions: because people have gone away for the holiday, i was forced into unwanted physical contact with only one person, a young man who slammed into my left hand, which was gripping a center pole, for absolutely no reason as he passed me, causing a significant amount of flesh to be pinched between the pole and one of my rings; aside from this, a pleasant, inexplicable-stop-free ride.

walking conditions: one might think that, because there are fewer people on the streets, it would be easier to get from one place to another, but not so; the more relaxed commute appears to have given everyone the feeling that there's no reason to rush, or move, and all these trendy bitches in their high heels and flip-flops are strolling at a pace so leisurely it is actually causing me pain. i can, in fact, walk in my shoes; please allow me to do so.


i have been trying to take advantage of the fact that i can walk in my shoes, or, rather, that i am not too self-conscious or silhouette-obsessed to wear shoes conducive to walking, to explore different routes between my office on 35th street and the subway stop on canal street, where i catch a train to brooklyn. this is about three miles of walking whichever way i decide to go, and it carries me through what i imagine is a decent mix of manhattan neighborhoods. here is the surprising thing about that:

it's all the same. from lower park avenue all the way to the upper edge of chinatown, the blocks are basically indistinguishable. they all house the same combination of uninteresting stores—usually an h&m next door to a banana republic, next door to either a gap or an express—and the people walking in and out of and back and forth between these stores are also fairly similar and, from the distance and speed at which i am walking among them, relatively uninteresting. wait, that's not entirely true; between 35th street and union square, i get a lot of disdaining glances from the women i pass, because, i've concluded, i am carrying a giant green backpack instead of a stylish handbag and wearing sneakers and chunky sport socks with my work skirt. (i believe it is a sort of love-hate disdain, in that they are disgusted with my indifference but also envious of my comfort and freedom, but, really, no one is holding them back but themselves.) from union square on, where there are more students and fewer women who *heart* calluses and bunions, this doesn't happen so much. also, once you reach the lower east village and start heading into soho, the gaps and expresses are replaced by something called "necessary clothing." i haven't ventured inside one of these stores, but i can only assume that the moniker is accurate and the items being sold inside are utterly essential, because i can't imagine how so many of them could stay in business otherwise. i find myself growing immensely nostalgic for boston, a city i'd never thought i'd love and had actually tried hard not to live in, because it has managed to confine blocks like this, which possess the air of a large open-air mall, to a meager handful of concentrated areas downtown. in most outer areas and bordering neighborhoods, it has resisted brand infestation. manhattan, defying all expectations, appears to have caved almost entirely. this is very disappointing. also, boston, even in its grittiest areas, rarely smells funny.

now, i didn't come here with the starry-eyed expectation that this city would knock me on my ass with its crazy, one-of-a-kind "it"ness and make me regret every second i'd ever spent anywhere else. i had been here before. i knew about the monster whole foods on bowery, and i'd been listening to various residents gripe about the stem-to-stern gentrification and crate-and-barreling of the city for many, many moons. but still, walking through it and realizing that any pockets of true uniqueness of character are holdouts unlikely to survive through 2015, given the current rents in the fricking bronx, is definitely a downer.

i do love being out in it, though, in the noise and the dirt, the clouds of exhaust hanging in the hot, swampy air. no one is a friend, everyone is either rude or insane—and i feel safer and more at ease moving anonymously through the center of that hateful crowd than i have felt anywhere else. it's like a family reunion. the city itself, really, is like a member of the family now—it's got flaws and everyone can see them, and i'll talk down about it all i want, but if you and i don't share a gene or two, i'd sure as hell better not hear you say a bad word. in three weeks, it has permeated me. and i have caved. maybe at this point in its history, the myth of new york, the city the starry-eyed people come here expecting to find, contributes more to its energy and to the mood of its inhabitants than any facet of its physical reality. sure, i can shop anywhere. sure, it is more and more, on the outside, just a city, like any other city, if even that good. and yet . . .

last week, while waiting for the downtown r at atlantic avenue, i saw two rats run out onto the tracks and chase each other around, squeaking and nattering like little kids in a high-voltage game of tag. the lead rat stopped suddenly and turned, and its pursuer, startled, lost its footing and fell off the track into the stagnant pool of murky, rubbish-infused sludge beneath it. it jumped out, shook itself, and resumed the chase, unfazed by the dunk or the dirt, and the two scampered off into the the dingy underground, chipper as the day is long. and i thought,

right on, my brothers. right on.

. . . if by "near future" you mean the present and/or the immediate past

so, it looks like for all the hype and hullabaloo surrounding the new yorker conference--or, at least, all the hype and hullabaloo the new yorker has attempted to create surrounding its conference--there isn't going to be much to it that people who read the new yorker won't already know a fair bit about. i mean, there's plenty of cool shit goin' down--dan barber will be there to talk about his sustainable and community-based agricultural projects; jonathan haidt, a social psychologist who co-authored a delightful paper on the neurological underpinnings of morality with one of the current loves of my life, joshua greene, will be on hand to remind (or at least ask) everyone to be nice; and david byrne is david byrne is david byrne, and i shouldn't have to say any more about that--but then there's will goldfarb, who makes things that are reminiscent of desserts out of ingredients that are mostly food and who was written up by buford last june (the conference page credits him with the invention of "experiental" cuisine, which sounds like what you get when you stir fry blindfolded while listening to early sonic youth albums, but i'm fairly certain that the term goldfarb actually uses is "experiential," which just sounds like a snooty, puffed-up way of saying you can taste it), and will wright, the creator of the sims, who was profiled in the magazine last november prior to the release of his new game, spore. and there's some guy who makes cocktails out of oxygenated water (?!?) whose name i refuse to know, and a bunch of men who know how to make money, and some other men who know how to make money by selling drugs. it'll be good enough, is what i'm saying, but for $1,200 it could probably be better. even my malcolm, whom remnick is pimping over this shindig as if he were a berry-lipped virgin lass and the conference were being held in a corner room at The Enchanted Hunters,* is recycling last year's news and lugging mike mccready,** the dude whose hit-song formula was tucked oh so tidily into the center of last october's epagogix article, back into the spotlight.

that article, as we all (secretly) know, was my birthday present, and a lovely present it was, and here we are at my approximate half-birthday talking about it again, and i don't love it any less . . . but the "hooray for money and formulas!" zealotry of some of its subjects didn't exactly warm my heart, and since this conference is about the future (or so we're told) and, presumably, how grand this select group of individuals is on the verge of making it--i don't know. i guess i was hoping for something a little more optimistic from malcolm than "i know a guy who can tell you how to pad a radio playlist." because if platinum blue is the future of music, boys and girls, well, i don't even know what i'll do. i hated that gnarls barkley song, but it was all around me everywhere i went for months and months, it sat on the crown of my head and thumped its knuckles against my temples in that relentless 2/4 tempo until tears came to my eyes, and i really was crazy . . . and in the land of platinum blue that would be my life. or, no, i guess more accurately my life would swerve helplessly between that and the soul-deadening cruise-liner-lounge "jazz" of norah jones. what is up, america? all the music out there, and you're all, i want to swap my right ventricle for a drum machine! no, i want to be yelled at by angsty boys wearing suits and eyeliner! no, i want to drown slowly in grade b maple syrup!

well, that's your right, isn't it. you can do all of those things. but i want to listen to mirah and the version of love spit love's "am i wrong" where the marching band comes in in the last bridge, and joanna newsom, and anything that involves a banjo or a harpsichord, and if you and people like mike mccready push the sounds i love any farther toward the left end of the dial we're apt to fall off the edge of the earth. so huzzah for math and entrepreneurs--the world benefits greatly from them both, to be sure--but keep them away from my stereo, thank you very much. we're doing just fine on our own.

i don't know why malcolm gets so excited about these things. i tend to chalk it up to a boyish love of gadgetry, the end result of coming of age alongside atari and microsoft, coupled with a very endearing desire to know why any of us likes any of the things we like, and i forgive it. how could i not? after all, i wonder about that plenty myself; i also wuved my colecovision. but all software is not good software, and lately i'm of the opinion that very little progress is good progress. i thought this conference was designed to convince me of the opposite. no dice, new yorker; it's the same old song and dance on a new stage. you don't care about progress, not really. all your pomp and chest-beating about the recycled paper you print your blow-ins on . . . you're not fooling us. the magazine itself is bright, clean, pre-consumer, tree-felling content through and through, and in truth the recycled blow-ins basically negate themselves by coming six to an issue.*** poor elizabeth kolbert, traipsing all over the planet, trying to gather enough convincing evidence to compel the right people to make the right changes in the hopes of constructing an honestly inspiring future--and the future, ungrateful little churl that it is, doesn't even invite her to its party.

well, i'm not going either, lizzie. but maybe you could ask a friend of yours who is going to ask daniel levitin why i and everyone i know can't seem to listen to this song any fewer than nineteen times in a row in any single sitting, and yet have never once heard it on the radio. curious, no? or not. i can't tell anymore. but now that i've got it in my head i must progress into my own private near future, which consists, obviously, of another eighteen listens. and that's enough music math for this evening.



* not that this is all bad; the video promo they've put together shows off malcolm's pretty eyelashes quite nicely. look at them batting all dark and sweet, bat-bat; between them and that perfect adam's apple i'm wobbly enough in the knees that i'd hand over that $1,200, if i had it to hand. oooooooh, what an evil genius david remnick is.

** lest you, as i was initially, be confused, this is not the mike mccready who has been the lead guitarist of pearl jam for the last sixteen or seventeen years--and thank god for that; i'd have been sorely disillusioned by such treachery.

*** really, is that necessary? seriously? i don't believe you.

cheers and jeers

hooray for approximately 70 percent of chicago's city council!

the city council brushed aside warnings from wal-mart stores inc. to approve an ordinance that makes chicago the biggest city in the nation to require big-box retailers to pay a "living wage."

the ordinance, which passed 35-14 wednesday after three hours of impassioned debate, requires mega-retailers to pay wages of at least $10 an hour plus $3 in fringe benefits by mid-2010. It would only apply to companies with more than $1 billion in annual sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet.

"it's trying to get the largest companies in america to pay decent wages," alderman toni preckwinkle said.

the proposed wage is $3.50/hr more than the minimum wage in illinois and $4.85/hr more than the federal minimum wage, and is, in my opinion, absolutely just, considering wal-mart has an annual profit margin of over $10 billion and top executives earning close to $30 million a year. it's a very sneaky game that store is playing; by keeping its workers so painfully impoverished, it ensures their inability to afford to shop anywhere but wal-mart, thus increasing its profit margins, and so on and so forth in one of the most evil corporate circles in existence today. bad, bad folks, who, despite their sponsored-documentary efforts to convince the american public otherwise, are so far from being on the side of their workers they've more or less circled back up behind them, from which point they can more easily kick them in their benefit-deprived asses:

wal-mart spokesman john bisio said earlier that if the measure passed, "we'd redirect our focus on our suburban strategy and see how we could better serve our city of chicago residents from suburban chicagoland."

in english please, mr. bitchio?

"um, we ain't payin' you suckers shit."

well, that's just rude. and it's shameful that opponents to the wage mandate are probably right in saying it will hurt employment rates in the city rather than improve the lives of those already employed by the company, since wal-mart knows it can set up a ring of stores along the city's borders at which it can carry on in its current unscrupulous fashion, probably without losing a penny in revenue. but if all of illinois were to demand a wage increase from megastores, they'd have to cave, right? there's no way they'd lose an entire state's worth of sales. and once one state had done it, others would work up the courage to join in, until we were living in a coast-to-coast utopian mecca of minimum-wage fairness. don't back down, chicago! stand up and start that wave! i'll be right behind you waving my giant pom poms, which were not purchased from a chain store of any sort.


source

you killed the minimum wage increase! YOU BASTARDS!

WASHINGTON - the republican-controlled senate smothered a proposed election-year increase in the minimum wage wednesday, rejecting democratic claims that it was past time to boost the $5.15 hourly pay floor that has been in effect for nearly a decade.

the 52-46 vote was eight short of the 60 needed for approval under budget rules and came one day after house republican leaders made clear they do not intend to allow a vote on the issue, fearing it might pass.

the senate vote marked the ninth time since 1997 that democrats there have proposed - and republicans have blocked - a stand-alone increase in the minimum wage. the debate fell along predictable lines.

"americans believe that no one who works hard for a living should have to live in poverty. a job should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in it," said sen. Edward M. Kennedy, d-mass. he said a worker paid $5.15 an hour would earn $10,700 a year, "almost $6,000 below the poverty line for a family of three."

now, i never really believed that the increase would pass, just like i don't really believe that all of that recycling i take the time to wash and separate every week ends up anywhere other than on a garbage barge headed for some impoverished nation where $5.15 an hour is an unattainable eden. but i keep on washing and separating it, just like i keep on hoping people will get it together and do right by each other. and so does ted kennedy. look, look how sad he is:

that is the face of a man who can no longer see the sense in fighting the good fight. i know, because i make it every time i rinse out a plastic cup. but the day i don't rinse out the cup is the day i realize i have nothing to live for, and that's what it'll say on my suicide note: "i decided to stop rinsing out the cup." and if teddy could see my suck-it-up-and-keep-recycling-you-crybaby face, he'd recognize that expression, too; it's the one he was wearing when he said this:

"when the democrats control the senate, one of the first pieces of legislation we'll see is an increase in the minimum wage."

you and me, teddy bear. we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams. you should come over some time and lick some wallpaper with me. i think you'll especially like the mural of the current republican majority beating a gaggle of malnourished children away from a mound of food and clothing; the heartless fuckers taste like heartless fuckers.

ready for round 2!

who will the bigots and homophobes point their hateful fingers at this time?

PAM EASTON, Associated Press: Galveston, low-lying parts of Corpus Christi and Houston, and mostly emptied-out New Orleans were under mandatory evacuation orders as Rita sideswiped the Florida Keys and began drawing energy with terrifying efficiency from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Forecasters said Rita could be the most intense hurricane on record ever to hit Texas, and easily one of the most powerful ever to plow into the U.S. mainland. Category 5 is the highest on the scale, and only three Category 5 hurricanes are known to have hit the U.S. mainland - most recently, Andrew, which smashed South Florida in 1992.

Military personnel in South Texas started moving north, too. Schools, businesses and universities were also shut down. Some sporting events were canceled.

go ahead, repent america, tell us all, and especially texas, how much god hates soldiers, students and athletes.

i have a feeling that what this and other despicable groups will actually say is that these cities are about to be smote for their willingness to harbor the sinners of new orleans, thus defying god, who so clearly wanted them out of the game. houston wound up sheltering the greatest number of katrina evacuees, and at least 1,500 have been bused out of the galveston community center already in anticipation of this next storm. it's twisted, but it isn't more twisted, and it certainly wouldn't be out of character. somebody will say it, you watch. and then you cry. and then you, i don't know what. i don't know what you do then.

at least some people have learned something, even if that something is only to avoid being spanked:

Government officials eager to show they had learned their lessons from the sluggish response to Katrina sent in hundreds of buses to evacuate the poor, moved out hospital and nursing home patients, dispatched truckloads of water, ice and ready-made meals, and put rescue and medical teams on standby. An Army general in Texas was told to be ready to assume control of a military task force in Rita's wake.

why did we have to hit bottom before realizing that this was the way to go? well, as long as they can keep FEMA* the hell out of there, it sounds like there's more to be optimistic about this time around. i won't make any stronger declarations than that, for fear of bringing the jinx down on a lot of heads.


update, 9/22/05: god damn it! either i did jinx us, or the bastards secretly love the spankings.



* this does not apply to the FEMA dolphins. they can do no wrong.

and now the news. and now the news with more syllables.

these are the top four headlines (out of five) in the u.s. news section of my earthlink start-up page:

• Hurricane Rita Lashes Florida Keys
• Rita strengthens into hurricane as it lashes Florida Keys with wind and heavy rain
• Galveston Calls for Voluntary Evacuations
• As Rita takes track across Florida and Gulf, Galveston calls for voluntary evacuations

i don't know why the lengthier headlines don't follow the same capitalization rules as the shorter ones; maybe those headlines are aware of how throughly unnecessary they are and are too ashamed to draw any extra attention to themselves. i did peek at all four articles just to make sure and, yes, they are redundant. no cake for you, earthlink! and if the blame lies more with the ap press feed, then it goes to bed without dessert as well.

i did learn from the last article that oil companies are evacuating employees from oil and gas platforms, including some that are already undergoing repairs for damage they sustained during katrina. while it makes my palms a titch sweaty to think about what we'll be spending on heating oil this winter, in a grander-scheme sort of way this beating the drilling rigs and refineries have been taking could be a good thing. more people will conserve fuel or take advantage of public transportation, and maybe someone will finally figure out a way to wean us off of that black tar for good. i'm not numb to the negatives, though; my household can afford a spike in heating costs, and a lot of households can't. here in massachusetts we have the citizens energy corporation, which helps supply heating oil to low-income and elderly residents, and i'm sure other states have similar programs. but with the cost being as high as it is, they aren't likely to be able to help as many people as they usually can, and i think a lot of people who might have donated won't be willing to because they'll be paying so much themselves. shoddy attitude, sure, but the one that tends to win out. this is the problem with nature taking the initiative in thinning the herd--the survivors are the ones who managed to be the most self-serving. positive attribute when you live in the jungle, but less positive when you live in what we keep telling ourselves is a civilized, humanistic society. i've said it before and i'll keep saying it, there are way too many of us, but even from a purely ecological standpoint i would have to be concerned about the character of the ones who pulled through, because they're going to shape things from that point on. i keep hoping for some kind of karma-sucking supervirus that will only kill assholes, but all i get is a whole lot of unjust nothing.

can you guess a person's age based on their idealism, the way you can count the rings of a tree? people twice my age tell me i'll outgrow my current inclinations, and i'm convinced that such statements are driven by sour grapes and schadenfreude, but i could be wrong. time will tell, i suppose.

see what happens when i read the news on rainy days? i babble like the world's mopiest brook. but there, i'm finished. yell at the ap for absentmindedly brow-beating us, help someone who needs help, and tell me to shut the hell up.

outstanding. really, bravo.

it's good to know everyone's on the ball. water's been diverted from the thirsty, rescue workers from those in need of rescue--we thought these were acts of new stupidity. but the folks at the top have been steadily herding resources as far away from their true targets as they could get them since, quite possibly, the beginning of time:

Sept. 11 recovery loans loosely managed

By DIRK LAMMERS and FRANK BASS
Associated Press Writers

The government's $5 billion effort to help small businesses recover from the Sept. 11 attacks was so loosely managed that it gave low-interest loans to companies that didn't need terrorism relief - or even know they were getting it, The Associated Press has found.

And while some at New York's Ground Zero couldn't get assistance they desperately sought, companies far removed from the devastation - a South Dakota country radio station, a Virgin Islands perfume shop, a Utah dog boutique and more than 100 Dunkin' Donuts and Subway sandwich shops - had no problem winning the government-guaranteed loans.

Dentists and chiropractors in numerous cities, as well as an Oregon winery that sold trendy pinot noir to New York City restaurants also got assistance.

"That's scary. Nine-11 had nothing to do with this," said James Munsey, a Virginia entrepreneur who described himself as "beyond shocked" to learn his nearly $1 million loan to buy a special events company in Richmond was drawn from the Sept. 11 program.

italics mine; what dunkin' donuts anywhere deserves government assistance? these things are spreading like a supervirus without anyone's help. i can't believe this crap.

well, yeah, i can. but i wish i couldn't.

update, 8:25 pm, 9/11/05: as a somewhat related aside, kenneth feinberg is on book-tv right now talking about his work with the september 11th victim compensation fund, which he's written a book about. he managed the fund pro bono for 33 months, in and of itself a tremendous act, but listening to him talk about some of the people he met and stories he heard, i'm really quite taken aback, and a bit desperate to wrap him in something fleecy and feed him tiny cupcakes. he seems genuinely confused about why there was no public outcry at the massive compensation offered to these victims when there was no such offering from the federal government for victims of other terrorist actions, such as the oklahoma bombings and the 1993 attack on the world trade center. he also spent a lot of time discussing how incredibly difficult it was to extrapolate the financial value of each lost life (he was not permitted to give everybody the same amount, and had to take the victims' salaries into account as a starting point for compensation), when, in his mind, all lives should be of equal value, and he suggested that in the future, if this sort of thing is ever attempted again, everyone involved should receive a flat sum. (i agree with him, but i do not think that that flat sum should be $2,000; this is most likely irrelevant, since i also agree with him that the odds of congress approving another program like this are slimmer than an olsen twin.) in an interview from july 10 of this year, he had this to say about the surprising amount of support the program received from the american people:

AMB: You did talk about Senator Schumer sidling up to you at one point and saying, can you get me some money from the ‘93 bombing of the World Trade Center? Now what kind of pressures like that did you have and how did you deal with them?

FEINBERG: Not much pressure. As I said earlier, I would have thought going in that the families who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center in ‘93, Oklahoma City, the African embassy bombings, the USS Cole, anthrax, I would have thought all of those people would have been demanding similar generosity on the part of the fund. No.

There were a couple, I would say a handful from Oklahoma City. One from Kenya. One, Senator Schumer, for the ‘93 World Trade Center. I think 9/11 was different. It was certainly different from the perspective of the American people, of that I have no doubt.

But I think most families, for whatever the reason, didn‘t come running to me asking for similar treatment. The public certainly was behind the program.

LAMB: Why shouldn‘t all of those have gotten the same kind of consideration as the 9/11 people?

FEINBERG: From the perspective of the victims, I don‘t see any distinction. If you try and justify my program on the basis of the victims lost, I can‘t convincingly explain why 9/11 yes, ‘93 World Trade Center no.

I think the only way you justify this program as a special carve-out is from the perspective of the nation, a recognition that 9/11 was, along with the American Civil War, Pearl Harbor, maybe the assassination of President Kennedy -- and 9/11, its impact on the American people was such that this was really a response from America to demonstrate the solidarity and cohesiveness of the American people towards these victims. That‘s the only way to explain this program I think convincingly.

the solidarity and cohesiveness of the american people does not, apparently, extend to the financial managers of the small business relief funds, who would ho out their own mothers for six chocolate munchkins.