A podcast about books & life — not necessarily in that order
What does the President of Belarus do when he’s in New York for the big UN shindig?
Not a lot, according to Peter Savodnik, over at Slate:
If you’re Alexander Lukashenko and you’re the president of a poor, irradiated country and even the thugs call you a thug, with your secret secret police and your thick, peasant patois, then you spend your one night in New York City in your suite at the Waldorf Towers.
I haven’t been watching any of the Senate confirmation hearings for John Roberts’ Supreme Court nominiation, but Dahlia Lithwick’s writeup about it yesterday makes me wonder if Roberts would pass a Turing Test.
I’m insanely busy at work, dear readers, but here’s a short article by Bidisha Banerjee discussing aspects of the devastation in New Orleans as they relate to the novel Dhalgren, by official VM buddy Samuel R. Delany.
Oh, and here’s a separate page of commentary about the article.
Last month, one of my best friends asked me what I plan on doing on Sept. 11. I told her that I was trying to write a longish piece on the Twin Towers and NYC, but the last two weeks have made it pretty tough for me to concentrate on that. I might be able to get to it this month, or maybe I’ll have it finished by next year’s anniversary.
At present, I’m just kinda dazed over the implications of having an entire city just emptied of its inhabitants. Amy & I have wondered about the long-term (as in, generational) implications of a NO,LA diaspora, spurred on by this article about black evacuees being housed on a military base in Utah.
Meanwhile, Winds of Change offers a roundup of 9.11 posts and links.
We’re going to kick back and watch football today. And we’ll cheer for the Saints. (It’s always been futile for Amy, but I bet they’ll have a lot more people cheering them on this season.)
In the interests of making this site a little more interesting to look at, I’m trying to teach myself some web-design stuff. This means there’s a strong likelihood that the blog’s going to get overhauled in the next week or so. It’s really two processes in one: learning technical aspects of design and developing the aesthetic (the look-and-feel) of the site at the same time.
In a sense, they feed off each other. If I get an idea for what VM (and Mad Mix) should look like, I have to go off and learn how to implement it online. So that’s taking up some of my time that I should be devoting to writing. Fortunately, we hired a really good webmaster at my office, and he’s been able to give me some good leads for tutorials and far more advanced stuff.
Meanwhile, I put up a new “cover” page to the site, at www.chimeraobscura.com. Enjoy.
To my regret, I’ve never had a nickname as good as The Hebrew Hercules or The Jewish Tarzan.
Abe Coleman, on the other hand, had both of those nicknames. Abe worked as a pro wrestler in the depression era and beyond, and was reportedly the man who brought the drop-kick to U.S. wrestling (or rasslin’). He turns 100 years old next week. Congrats!
Just walked down the street to the recently-opened health food store for a snack. Standing on the checkout line, I noticed a guy walking into the store behind me. He had a sling on his right arm, made out of a bandanna. He got on line a moment later, and I heard this odd clicking sound, so I turned around to check it out.
He had a bottle of Vitamin Water wedged between his legs, and was trying to open it with one hand. I immediately said, “You need a hand?”
That’s when I noticed that the bandanna-sling was a bit shorter than it should have been.
He raised his forearm-stump, smiled and said, “Well, I bet you know the answer to THAT question, buddy!”
I suck.
The albino alligator at the New Orleans Aquarium survived the flood! Nothing will kill that creepy-ass sonofabitch!
Amy’s parents now have electricity at home! No more generator for them!
Still no phone service, so we can’t prank-call them or anything.
Update: Looks like they got power going in the city, too! Yay!
Peter M. DeLorenzo is an automotive industry consultant who also writes a weekly column at the Autoextremist. He pulls no punches, despite the fact that some of his livelihood comes from the companies he criticizes in the column.
Anyway, this week’s column (it’ll be replaced by Sept. 14, and the archives don’t seem to be online) is all about the effects of the post-Katrina gas crunch on the SUV market. It’s not a pretty picture, and DeLorenzo savages the auto industry for its mega-reliance on these cars:
Detroit marketers in particular created “the need” and “the want” here, folks – and don’t for a minute be misled into thinking otherwise. Detroit single-handedly pushed an egregiously callous marketing strategy that revolved around launching more and more variations of larger SUVs into this market and creating the demand for vehicles that were a dismal combination of laughable space utilization, miserable handling dynamics and piss-poor fuel economy – wasteful mastodons that made little sense even under the most wildly optimistic scenarios. Not only did they push bigger and bigger SUVs and “urbanized” pickup trucks, they made these vehicles drive like cars so that people would realistically consider them as benign alternatives for their transportation needs – even if they were woefully inappropriate choices in every respect.
He doesn’t have high hopes for the industry this fall.