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Tesco Genocide

Neil Davenport’s take over at Spiked! on why British liberals hate Tesco seems markedly similar to why American liberals hate Wal-Mart:

Tesco does not impose a blue-and-red homogeneity (blimey, it’s only a shop, not a police state). Instead it sells a fairly staggering array of quality goods at very reasonable prices. By expanding on the ‘one stop shop’ ethos, it actually helps people save on a very precious commodity: time. Would Tesco’s critics prefer us to go back to the days when we had to trudge around different shops for hours on end? It’s hard to see how being chained to the shopping-basket could enable anybody’s individuality to flourish.

Many critics appear aghast at Tesco’s motivation to be the biggest and best. It is interesting to see how the company turned around its ailing fortunes and shook up the retail trade in the process. There was nothing sinister or malign about this development. In fact, you could argue that in an age where know-your-limits modesty and demands to rein in our potential are all-pervasive, Tesco’s ‘bigger, better, stronger’ drive makes a refreshing change. Far from shouting this down, we could do with a lot more of this guile and gumption across society as a whole – including in areas that have a greater capacity to revolutionise our lives than shops which sell food, clothes and cheap televisions.

Okay, I posted this mainly because I wanted to use that Sneaker Pimps reference in the title. Sue me.

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Monday Morning Montaigne

Sorta undermining my whole Montaigne-project, but then bringing it back home, this passage is from On Pedantry:

In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge; of judgment and virtue, little news. Exclaim to our people about a passer-by, “Oh, what a learned man!” and about another, “Oh, what a good man!” They will not fail to turn their eyes and respect toward the first. There should be a third exclamation: “Oh, what blockheads!” We are eager to inquire: “Does he know Greek or Latin? Does he write in verse or in prose?” But whether he has become better or wiser — which would be the main thing — that is left out. We should have asked who is better learned, not who is more learned.

We labor only to fill our memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty. Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in their beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, so our pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds.

It is wonderful how appropriately this folly fits my case. Isn’t it the same thing, what I do in most of this composition? I go about cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouses, but to transport them into this one, in which, to tell the truth, they are no more mine than in their original place. We are, I believe, learned only with present knowledge, not with past, any more than with future.

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Lazyday and Operawoman

I’ve been working pretty hard all week on the March ish, so I’m kinda tired out at this point. Plus, the wound on my right hand has made me contort my typing style all week, and that’s led to a weird pain in my right pinkie-finger. Grr.

Anyway, I finished Snow earlier today, and was much less interested in the last third than I was in the first two-thirds. A lot of what made the character of Ka interesting was lost when the object of his desire returned his affection. It made the rest of his actions driven almost solely by his lust, which drained any novelty from his character. Oh, well.

We’re headed off to Seattle next week for another wedding, so I’ll need to figure out what book I’m taking along with me for the trip. Maybe Dead Souls, which I’ve never read, but which was given to me as a gift on a previous Seattle trip.

Tonight, Amy’s treating herself to opera-night: Eugene Onegin at the Met. I’ll  occupy myself without drinking between 8pm and 11 or thereabouts. I’d like to stay up around Lincoln Center, but I don’t think there’s a ton for me to do, beyond my retailnaut exploration of the Time Warner Center.

So I may head down to the Village and see the Kochalka opening at Giant Robot. Or I can haunt Veselka and get all caffeinated for the evening. Since it’ll be a night-visit, I can’t promise any good pix, but I’ll do my best, dear reader.

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Decade dance

This morning’s dumb lede comes to us from the New York Times. Reporting on Chrysler’s announcement of 13,000 job cuts, Micheline Maynard writes:

Every decade provides a new lesson for the American automobile industry.

In the 1980s, automakers underestimated their Japanese competitors, thinking they would never build anything but small cars. In the 1990s, the Americans focused too heavily on sport utility vehicles, only to see profits wiped out when buyers’ tastes shifted back to cars.

Now, this implies that SUV sales collapsed at the end of the 1990s, forcing domestic car companies to retrench going into the new decade. However, the SUV market collapsed around 2004-2005.

It’s a minor point, but when it’s the peg of the article you’re writing, maybe you should be a little more accurate.

(Note: now that Chrysler has helped drag down the Germany company that bought it, I have fewer issues about buying one.)

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Politics and the Turkish language

I busted out the Eco Chamber twice last weekend, to get to books I hadn’t previously given the time to. For the flight out to San Diego, I took Ella Minnow Pea off my shelf. I’d picked it up around 4 years ago, but never started it up. It seemed like a charming premise: it’s an epistolary novel about a small, independent nation off the Carolina coast starts banning letters from the alphabet. As the weeks go by, more letters get banned and thus the characters have to become more inventive in their correspondence. You’ll note, for instance, that I managed to go through this entire post without using the third-to-last letter of the alphabet. I think.

Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that the novel was even briefer than its 224 pages, since so many of the letters ended a few lines into a page, and several pages were devoted to brief single sentences. So I finished the book during the flight, along with the in-flight mag and its crossword puzzle. I enjoyed it, but now had to find another for the trip home.

During a Saturday morning shopping expedition — tied into my picking up a prescription for antibiotics to make sure I don’t get any weird infections from the cut in my finger — Amy & I stopped in at a Target. I decided to buy something from the Target book section, which I thought would be an interesting challenge.

I soon learned that it would be an uninteresting challenge. I was at a loss, facing either Barack Obama’s bio, or one of several “creative rewritings” of Pride & Prejudice. Or, of course, something by Dan Brown.

Then I noticed a face-out display with Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Snow. I thought, “I have two Pamuk novels at home that I’ve never been able to get into, so it’s into the Eco Chamber with you, Orhan!”

I’ve read a little more than half of the book, and find it compelling despite itself, which is (I think) Pamuk’s intent. The novel is overwhelmingly political, taking place in a border city that’s torn between political Islam and military rule, and Pamuk’s choice of epigrams shows that he knows how weighed-down a novel can become by politicking. He manages to avoid it by (I think) representing the flaws in the various points of view, not championing anyone, and not giving credence to the “artists must be apolitical and free!” vibe that undercuts a lot of novels that attempt to deal with their time.

I’ll let you know if it holds up, but at this point it’s a knockout winner over the leaden, dreadful novel it reminded me of on the surface: Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.

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Diversify toleration!

Neat editorial by Chris Broussard at ESPN, regarding gay players in the NBA. He believes the league is “ready” for them, while also contending that homoesexuality’s a sin.

I’m a born-again, Bible-believing Christian (no, I’m not a member of the Religious Right). And I’m against homosexuality (I believe it’s a sin) and same-sex marriage.

But before you label me “homophobic,” know that I’m against any type of sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman. That includes heterosexual fornication (premarital sex).

Read the whole thing, because he brings up some interesting points about tolerance being a two-way street (as it were). And as long as you can ball (as it were), there’s room for you in Broussard’s rec-league.

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Is 39 the new 26.5?

Happy 39th birthday to the official VM brother! One year till the new 20, Bobo!

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Remember: Robert Parish won an NBA championship at 43! It’s not too late!

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Bizspeak

I read a lot of financial earnings statements at my job. I learned early on that “pro forma” and “adjusted” numbers, intended to give a true reflection of a company’s performance, are usually crap, and that when a company takes a different “extraordinary charge” each quarter, then they’re not so extraordinary, and the company is just fudging its accounting.

So it’s in that vein that I present to you this morning’s earnings statement by Sanofi-Aventis, “In a Difficult Environment, Another Year of Growth in Adjusted EPS Excluding Selected Items”

In order to give a better representation of its underlying economic performance, the group has decided to present and explain an adjusted consolidated income statement for 2006 and the fourth quarter of 2006, and to compare them with an adjusted consolidated income statement for 2005 and the fourth quarter of 2005 respectively.

Which is a bit like saying, “Excluding sectarian violence, our nation-building mission in Iraq is doing well.”