A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
The official VM wife & I are headed to St. Louis for the weekend to visit family & friends, so it’s another quick-n-dirty Unrequired Reading, dear readers. It’s chock full of posts I didn’t have time to write about!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Jan. 5, 2007”
As you know, I’ve been interested in the development of the new Airbus A380 (the really big plane) and all the production problems Airbus has been having with it. The fact that I fly between 25,000 and 35,000 miles each year is a key contributor to this interest.
Barbara Peterson at Popular Mechanics takes care of my addiction with an article on the engineering issues Airbus is running into:
Will the A380 be the next Concorde — an engineering breakthrough with little chance of breaking even? Certainly, the problem the jetliner was supposed to help solve — airport gridlock — still exists. The world’s major hubs already operate at full capacity during peak hours, and traffic is expected to increase 4 percent annually, from 4.2 billion passengers in 2005 to 7 billion passengers in 2020. Building new airports or significantly expanding existing ones, though, is a practical and political nightmare.
The Airbus solution: Increase capacity with a plane that carries up to 900 passengers — nearly twice as many as the 747. “It is this big monster,” says Hans Weber, president of Tecop International, a San Diego-based aviation consulting firm. “And Airbus has struggled with the nightmare of making something this big economically efficient.”
Meanwhile, Boeing has gambled that the market is most interested in a fuel-efficient, midrange widebody that gives airlines flexibility. Its flagship project became the 250-passenger 787 Dreamliner, slated to go into service in 2008.
Virtually all experts agree that the A380 will eventually join the civilian fleet. (The plane’s maiden voyage — a planned Singapore Airlines flight to Sydney, Australia — was recently pushed back, again, and is now slated for late 2007.) But the problems facing the most expensive, ambitious nonmilitary aircraft project in history are mounting.
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The AV Club interviewed Steven Wright this week. Turns out he and I share thoughts on travel:
AVC: What are the best and worst parts of touring?
SW: The best is definitely being in front of the audience, that rush in front of all those people. And then the other part is, “Oh my God, I’m in another hotel.” I say to my friends, if I won some contest, it would be like, “You have won five weeks in your own house!” Oh my God! I’d be jumping up and down hugging the host, hugging the other contestants.
AVC: So you’re not a fan of hotels?
SW: There’s just so many of them. It’s not that I don’t like hotels. This sounds kind of simple, but it’s true: The fact that you’re in a hotel means also that you’re not home. So as the time keeps going, and the experiences keep going, it’s like, “Man, I have not been home in this giant amount of time.”
I wonder if he was really enthusiastic and energetic in the interview.
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Five teams of finalists have been named by the New Orleans Building Corp. for the project of rebuilding the city’s waterfront. Unfortunately, Frank Gehry’s on one of the finalist-squads.
The potential development zone includes a largely derelict 4.5-mile stretch of the north bank of the Mississippi River between Jackson Avenue and the Industrial Canal, which now includes mostly wharves and port facilities. It borders the Lower Garden district, the warehouse district, the French Quarter, Marigny, and Baywater.
The RFQ calls for new commercial, cultural, park, and transportation uses for the area, and for maintaining cruise and cargo operations. This, says Cummings, could include a continuous park with walking and bike paths, museums, a large performance venue, a culinary university campus, and modern cruise ship terminals. He stresses that the area will be oriented to public facilities, not â€Âcondominiums and private property.â€Â
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In the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” category, Sheldon Silver helped shut down the West Side Stadium project, for which I’m quite thankful. As this City Journal article points out, Rep. Silver’s done a lot of stuff I don’t agree with:
Until last year, New York had an 80-year-old law that held auto-leasing companies ultimately responsible for accidents caused by drivers who leased or rented their cars. The law made about as much sense as, say, holding Chrysler responsible for accidents caused by the customers who buy and drive their vehicles. The law drove many auto-leasing companies out of New York, and it forced those that stayed to protect themselves by asking customers to jump through expensive legal hoops. The law had no constituency save the trial lawyers.
But the law stayed on the books thanks to Silver, who used his control of the assembly to block its repeal repeatedly. Silver said that he got in the way to protect victims of car accidents. But the more likely explanation for his obstructionism is that he himself is a trial lawyer and is beholden to the trial lawyer lobby. In fact, it took blanket federal legislation last year to nullify the auto-leasing law and similar if more limited laws in a few other states.
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Rumsfeld et al. obviously mangled the postwar planning for Iraq, but I think he had some revolutionary ideas about how to execute a war-plan itself, sorta like being a good in-game basketball coach who has no ability to manage his players between games. The Iraqi army, one of the largest in the world, with months of preparation, was flat-out annihilated by a relatively light force of troops. That’s nothing to sneeze at, even with all the disastrous consequences. I think military theorists (and practitioners) will have plenty to learn from his mistakes and his successes.
Victor Davis Hanson goes a lot further in his praise for Rumsfeld.
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Speaking of the election, Brandon Arnold at the Cato Institute contends that gerrymandering is still a major force in Congressional elections:
Consider that there were 435 races in the House and Senate with an incumbent trying to retain his or her seat. Only 26 — 6% — of challengers in these races have won. That’s pretty low for a “throw the bums out” election. Pending the outcome of three or four yet-to-be-determined races, this year’s 94% incumbent reelection rate appears to be slightly higher than the 90% rate of 1994.
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Pop music stars should not write children’s books. Only Ph.D.’s formerly at contract research organizaztions should write children’s books.
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According to Theodore Dalyrmple, New Zealand once had excellent used bookstores but now has a crappy penal system.
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And finally: “A chicken, with two asses!” (thanks, Tina!)
Not that anyone comes here for political wisdom, but I sure am glad to see the pendulum swing this morning. It’s gratifying to me not because of any leftover leftist tendencies from my college years, but because it demonstrates what it is that works about our democracy: our ability to throw the bums out, or at least to wrest power from one group of bums and bestow it on another.
In the gratifying / infuriating department, it’s good to see that the 2004 sentiments like “we live in a permanent Republican majority,” “right-wing Christian fundamentalists have hijacked the country,” and “gerrymandering has rendered all elections meaningless” have proved to be utter bullshit. I never take it well when someone takes the present moment and decides that it’s an indicator of how everything will be for the rest of time.
Which gets me back to that pendulum. It swings. In my opinion, which is likely wrong, the end point of the pendulum’s arc (is that called its period?) was the moment at which the federal government intervened in the Terry Schiavo case. Plenty of other people will contend it was the Iraq war, while others will contend it was “the economy.”
So the pendulum swung in one direction, and now it’s swinging back. Let’s see some gridlock-induced compromises in the next two years! Go, Team America!
Official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon & his brother Whit sacrifice themselves to The Guiding Light in order to chronicle the soap opera’s tie-in episode with Marvel Comics.
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Two tax articles from Slate: the continuing phenomenon of Bushenfreude — those who benefit from the Republican tax cuts but contribute to Democrat politicians, and Bono/U2’s decision to reduce its tax burden by moving its music publishing company out of Ireland:
“Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market … that’s a justice issue,” Bono said at a prayer breakfast attended by President Bush, Jordan’s King Abdullah, and various members of Congress earlier this year. Preaching this sort of thing has made Bono a perennial candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He continued:
Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents . . . that’s a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents . . . that’s a justice issue.
And relocating your business offshore in order to avoid paying taxes to the Republic of Ireland, where poverty is higher than in almost any other developed nation?
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Dan Drezner examines the importance of China in negotiations with North Korea. I believe I’ve said it before: When you manage to get the U.S., Russia, China and Japan on the same page against you, you have severely messed up.
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BLDGBLOG remains one of the most eerie/haunting sites out there. This post about offshore oil rigs proves my point.
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When we gaze into the Barack, does the Barack gaze back at us?
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In honor of the premiere of Borat, the UK press has been doing interest stories from Kazakhstan.
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Reason on misreading the Beats.
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I know enough small publicly-held company execs who would agree with this post: SOX sucks.
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And in honor of the NBA season kick-off (as it were): Kieran Darcy gives up on the Knicks, about 10 years after I did.
An Italian TV show has been surreptitiously drug-testing 50 members of parliament, allegedly finding that 12 MPs tested smoke weed and 4 tested positive for cocaine:
The programme sent a reporter to interview lower house deputies allegedly for a programme about the 2007 draft budget currently going through parliament. . . . But unbeknown to each of them, the make-up artist employed by the show was dabbing their brow with swabs, and their perspiration was later tested for cannabis and cocaine.
Any guesses how our own House of Reps would fare?
But this story freaks me out a lot more than this one.
(Update: add a small dose of this story for an extra dose of creepiness)
(More update: looks like Ron Rosenbaum concurs, which makes a world of sense, given its echoes with the murder of Fritz Gerlich)
George Will on the Democrats’ strategy of attacking Wal-Mart:
Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America’s political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce — yes, announce — that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.
Stuff I meant to post about in the past week:
Writing about restaurants in New Orleans (with a go-to mention of Finis Shelnutt):
“When people are still mucking out their houses, chefs are living in FEMA trailers, and others are finding out they are going to get screwed by their insurance company, I don’t want to be the guy who is writing about how the foie gras is not quite up to snuff,†he said.
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Why bashing Wal-Mart is not a good strategy for the Dems:
By restraining inflation, intense competition of the sort that Wal-Mart provides eases pressure on the Federal Reserve to do the job with higher interest rates. Note the paradox: At one level, intense competition destroys jobs, as some companies can’t compete, but the larger effect is to increase total job creation by fostering favorable economic conditions.
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Get your picture taken with Jesus.
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NO,LA: It’s the civil engineering, stupid!
Why didn’t the Corps design a consistent, redundant system? In large part, the reason was foot dragging — or worse — by pols on the state, local, and federal levels. In some cases, political opposition prevented the Corps from seizing land to build sturdier foundations. Plus, Louisiana’s local levee boards were lousy stewards. Levee officials were political animals, not engineering experts, and sometimes proved more interested in running ancillary “economic development” projects than working with the Corps to make sure the levees were up to their task. (It’s not because New Orleans is poor and black: the levees protect New Orleans’s richer, whiter suburbs too.) In addition, the Corps warned that many of New Orleans’s manmade canals, obsolete for years, should be closed or at least gated - to no avail. Moreover, when the Corps, along with state officials, came to understand that wetlands restoration is a vital part of the flood protection system, not a tree-hugger’s afterthought, Congress balked at spending the required $14 billion over several decades for coastal restoration.
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The Chinese village of Dafen is like the opposite of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions:
In just a few years, Dafen has become the leading production center for cheap oil paintings. An estimated 60 percent of the world’s cheap oil paintings are produced within Dafen’s four square kilometers (1.5 square miles). Last year, the local art factories exported paintings worth €28 million ($36 million). Foreign art dealers travel to the factory in the south of the communist country from as far away as Europe and the United States, ordering copies of famous paintings by the container. [. . .]
Some five million oil paintings are produced in Dafen every year. Between 8,000 and 10,000 painters toil in the workshops. The numbers are estimates: No one knows the exact figure, which increases by about 100 new painters every year. But it’s not just professional copy painters who are drawn to Dafen — graduates of China’s most renowned art academy also come here. They complete only a small number of paintings a month and earn as much as €1,000 ($1,282).
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Go see Little Miss Sunshine when you get the chance. We caught it yesterday. So did a couple of children sitting in the row behind us. They were less than 10 years old, and I’m sorta wondering if their mom noticed the “R” rating on the movie, or just thought it would be a fun flick about children’s beauty pageants, with that guy from The Daily Show. She may’ve been a little surprised when Alan Arkin was snorting heroin in one of the opening scenes. Anyway, it was a really wonderful flick, with a punchline that almost had us crying with laughter.
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And have a good holiday.
At the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland has a column on Gunter Grass, while George Will writes about the Japanese shrine to war-dead, which drives China into a tizzy.
It’s interesting, how we can’t bear to forget and we can’t bear to remember.
Here’s Hitchens reviewing a book about the moral issues of firebombing Hamburg, Dresden, Wurzbeg and other German cities during the war.
Meanwhile, I just finished re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which is (in part) about the German rocket bombardments of England. And behavioral science, organic chemistry, kaballah, Argentine politics, the afterlife, zoot suits, pinball, cinema, the tarot, Nixon, and the respective extinctions of the dodos and the Hereros. I’m still juggling and re-parsing What Went On.