Will on Wal

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.

This is Your Hometown

I live in my hometown. I’ve been here for about 25 of my 35 years, even though I moved away when I was 17. Most of my neighbors are my parents’ age, which makes for a quiet street. Except for those punk kids who live down the hill, but that’s another story.

I refute the Grosse Point Blank mindset pretty well. Even though I was a hyperliterate misfit in my formative years (as opposed to, y’know, now), I have a fondness for this place, with the Revolutionary War manor houses, the gorgeous gardens, the fantastic pizza, the strange shadow race of orange people who live on the edge of town (that’s a story for another post).

Tonight, I was confronted with the one aspect of living in one’s hometown that I’ve avoided for years: bumping into an old schoolmate.

Now, I’ve seen some of them over the years, but never gotten into a conversation. The last time was in 1997, when I walked into the local barbershop (The Shear Shop). I was going out for a job interview the next day (at the office where I now work), looked like the Unabomer’s little brother, and needed to clean up. The stylist at the counter took one look at me and said, “Gil?”

I replied, “Ericka?” It was she. We talked while she cut my hair, reminiscing over our barely shared high school experiences. But that encounter was almost a decade ago. I’ve bumped into almost no one since.

It’s not that I’m averse to talking to people from my youth; I have plenty of friends from that stage of my life. I’m just averse to getting into conversations in supermarkets or convenience stores, which is where these little recognitions take place. I’m usually pretty tired by the end of the day, and I tend to have many excuses in my arsenal to keep from talking to people.

But There I Was, standing on the deli line at the supermarket, while Amy was getting some other fixings for dinner. The guy working behind the counter looked a lot like someone I met in kindergarten or thereabouts, and his nametag pretty much sealed the deal.

But did I say anything? Oh, no. I figured it was fine just recognizing the guy. There was no need to actually start talking to him. I could just tell Amy that I saw a guy from grade school at the deli counter.

He turned to take my order, paused a second, and said, “Gil Roth?”

“Rick Bolt?”

“Wow! I thought it was you! How you doing?”

“Living in Ringwood,” I told him. “You too, huh?”

“Been around a lot, but I ended up back here,” he said.

“Not a bad place to be,” I said. I introduced Amy to him, and he mentioned that his wife had just stopped by to see him.

Fortunately, he avoided the awkward, “So what are you doing?” question, which would’ve been fine in theory but would’ve contrasted with his, “I’m working behind the deli counter, cutting a half-pound of cheddar for you” response.

But I don’t want to address any class-oriented issues in this post. No, I’m more concerned with a very basic question:

How the heck did someone who hasn’t seen me since 1989 identify me at a goddamn glance?!

Seriously! You’ve seen what I looked like around then! (masochistally speaking, I love breaking out this picture)

I’m 40-50 lbs. heavier, I don’t wear glasses, and my hair is a bunch shorter. Moreover, it’s been almost 20 years! I mean godDAMN!

Unrequired Reading

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.

* * *

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).

* * *

A guy used the graphics engine of the computer game Half Life to make a video tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house.

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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.

* * *

And have a good holiday.

Dark Saturday

Well, the cassuolet was well-received, as was the chocolate cake. It was a nice evening all around, until the blackout around 8pm. We busted out a ton of candles, drank and bantered till around 11pm, at which point all 4 of us crashed out.

Still no power today, so we’ve stopped in at my office to check e-mail, look up movie schedules, and figure out if our favorite dim sum place is open on Sunday.

Rainy Saturday

It’s some godawful weather here in the northeast. We’re expecting a pair of Amy’s friends this afternoon for an early dinner. She’s been cooking and cleaning all day while I’ve been cleaning and trying to stay out of her way. It seems to have worked out okay, provided her friends are on the right bus out here from NYC.

We spent yesterday at this giant-ass outlet mall in New York state. I’ve written about this place a few times before, including one of the first posts I ever wrote. No Hugo Boss clothing this time around, but I found a couple of pairs of decent pants for the fall/winter.

Our routine for visiting this mall is that we

a) go on Saturday

b) leave a half-hour before the place opens

The latter enables us to get together before buses from NYC start showing up and the parking lot becomes jammed with rental cars carrying The Axis: German and Japanese tourists who have come to buy luxury goods on the cheap.

We got a late start yesterday, since Amy had to handle a work-emergency in the morning. When we reached the place, it was around noon, and it was a Friday.

That’s when Amy discovered the importance of going only on Saturdays: Hasidic Jews won’t be there.

As it is, there were enough Hasidim present yesterday to populate Samaria. The place was overrun with head-covered moms pushing multiple baby carriages, two or three more children in tow, while sections of the parking lot looked like a reunion for Country Squire station wagons.

This led Amy to ask, “What exactly are they all here to buy?”

I replied that we should open a headscarf and wig store up there: “And the best thing is, we could take Saturdays off!”

Anyway, we spent a bunch of hours up there, with Amy searching pretty much in vain for fall clothes. On the plus side, we swung by my office on the way home and picked up my new Amazon delivery: a couple of 1gb SD cards for our digital cameras, a gravy separator, and a pair of books, My Horizontal Life, by Chelsea Handler (whose show on E! is a hoot), and Lost Girls, Alan Moore’s pornographic comic book about Alice (of Wonderland), Dorothy (of Oz) and Wendy (of Neverland) meeting in a hotel in Austria shortly before WWI.

I read the first few installments of the comic years ago, and, um, enjoyed it a lot. I’ll let you know how the collected edition (three books in a slipcase) works out.

Once we finally got home, we busted out the gin and our most recent Netflix choice: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. It’s one of the most entertaining movies I’ve watched in a while. Robert Downey, Jr. is typically fantastic, but Val Kilmer’s also pretty fun to watch as Gay Perry, the private eye. Run, don’t walk.

Anyway, our guests swear they’re on the right bus, and oughtta be here in half an hour. Amy’s made a cassoulet; I’ll let you know how it goes (she also picked up some neat cheeses for hors d’oeuvres, and made a chocolate cake for dessert). If it weren’t typhooning out, we’d take her friends on a nice tour of the gardens out here.

That’s the skinny. I hope everyone else is having a drier holiday weekend.

Housing ka-boom

LONG article about how a popular type of mortgage, the option ARM, does not actually provide money for free, and is about to annihilate a lot of homeowners’ finances:

After prolonging the boom, [option ARM] mortgages could worsen the bust. They also betray such a lack of due diligence on the part of lenders and borrowers that it raises questions of what other problems may be lurking. And most of the pain will be borne by ordinary people, not the lenders, brokers, or financiers who created the problem.

Gordon Burger is among the first wave of option ARM casualties. The 42-year-old police officer from a suburb of Sacramento, Calif., is stuck in a new mortgage that’s making him poorer by the month. Burger, a solid earner with clean credit, has bought and sold several houses in the past. In February he got a flyer from a broker advertising an interest rate of 2.2%. It was an unbeatable opportunity, he thought. If he refinanced the mortgage on his $500,000 home into an option ARM, he could save $14,000 in interest payments over three years. Burger quickly pulled the trigger, switching out of his 5.1% fixed-rate loan. “The payment schedule looked like what we talked about, so I just started signing away,” says Burger. He didn’t read the fine print.

After two months Burger noticed that the minimum payment of $1,697 was actually adding $1,000 to his balance every month. “I’m not making any ground on this house; it’s a loss every month,” he says. He says he was told by his lender, Minneapolis-based Homecoming Financial, a unit of Residential Capital, the nation’s fifth-largest mortgage shop, that he’d have to pay more than $10,000 in prepayment penalties to refinance out of the loan. If he’s unhappy, he should take it up with his broker, the bank said. “They know they’re selling crap, and they’re doing it in a way that’s very deceiving,” he says. “Unfortunately, I got sucked into it.” In a written statement, Residential said it couldn’t comment on Burger’s loan but that “each mortgage is designed to meet the specific financial needs of a consumer.”

This is one of those instances where the financial industry is at fault, but they couldn’t have pulled it off without the help of idiotic consumers. Any transaction I get into worth $500,000 is not going to involve someone who put a flyer in my mailbox.

RIP

My parents were worried when Dr. and Mrs. Capers moved in next door; the house they built was shaped like an ark. “Do they know something we don’t?” Mom wondered.

The Capers helped me grow up (sorta like in loco grandparentis) and they showed an awful lot of kindness to my mom after Dad left. Dr. Augustus T. Capers died on Thursday, at the age of 87, after a full life.

Update:

I went to the funeral today in Paterson. The program included the following:

Reflections of Life

Augustus Theodore Capers was born on September 30, 1918 in Charleston, SC, the son of Wade and Anna Morris Simmons. When he was a young child, his mother died and he was raised by his great aunt, Florence Capers, and her husband. They moved to Paterson, NJ with Augustus at the age of 5 years. On Thursday, August 24, 2006 at 6:45 a.m., he entered into eternal rest while watching the sun rise.

In 1943, he graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor of Science in Biology. He received his Doctor of Dentistry from the Dental College of Howard University in 1947 and achieved further distinction with the highest score on the NJ Dental Examination in 1948. This began his dental career in Paterson, which extended over 50 years. During the Korean War he served as a captain in the U.S. Army Dental Corps and was honorably discharged.

Dr. Capers and his wife Gertrude were champions of civil rights. They founded the first black democratic club in the city of Paterson. Both served the community by advancing equality in housing and employment opportunities within the City Administration, the Board of Education and the Police Department of Paterson. Dr. Capers was appointed as the first black dentist to serve on the dental staff of the Paterson school system by the mayor. In 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey sent congratulatory greetings as Dr. Capers was the first black State Assemblymen elected by the citizens of Passaic County, District 14-B, who elected him to a second term. During this same year, he was elected to serve as a member of the Board of Directors for the Paterson Boy’s Club. Dr. Capers was honored by the Bergen-Passaic Howard University Alumni Club and his fellow Paterson Kiwanis Club members for his commitment to community service, consumer advocacy, justice and equality.

His ties to the Paterson community remained strong in his twilight years when Dr. Capers and Gertrude retired to Ringwood, NJ. Both he and his wife, a published author, were honored by the Paterson Public Library. Her poignant memoir, “A Scent from the Blue Ridge,” (under the pen name Trudi Capers) serves as a tribute to her husband’s accomplishments and a reflection of the history and the genesis of the civil rights movement in the City of Paterson, while tracing her family’s roots from slave and American Indian ancestry. In September 2002, Dr. Capers and Gertrude celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary with family and friends.

He leaves to cherish his memory: his beloved wife, Gertrude Stanton Capers; three children, artist Selena James, Superior Court Judge Michelle Hollar-Gregory, and financial consultant Augustus T. Capers, Jr.; as well as three grandchildren, Dr. Robert A. James, Jr., and Ryan and Kyle Hollar-Gregory; sons-in-law Robert A. James, Sr. and Milton R. Hollar-Gregory, esq.; nieces Betty and Virginia; nephews Vreeland and Melville; and many cousins, other family members and friends.

Family album

Despite some dreary weather, we had a lovely day up in Connecticut with my cousins, most of whom I hadn’t seen in 10 years. That span (coinciding with both daughters’ weddings in the summer of 1996) has yielded 5 children, plus a bunch of retrievers:

Amy was pretty happy to discover that

a) I have relatives in the United States

b) I have relatives who aren’t crazy

There was a third dog who couldn’t get into the picture. He has a big “elizabethan” collar on to keep him from chewing on his foreleg. It looked pretty sad, and I opined that they should paint a big sunflower pattern on the inside of the collar, so at least they could be cheered when the dog looked up at the them.

We had to get a pic of Amy with the youngest kid, for obvious reasons:

!rebmiT

During the summer, my office is only open from 8am to 1pm on Fridays. It’s nice of the owner of the company to give us that early start to the weekend. Since Amy doesn’t get out early from her job, I usually take the extra Friday hours to get a bunch of errands done.

Today’s errand-circuit took me to Home Despot (Remington 3.5 HP electric chainsaw), the local Lukoil (a quart of motor oil), and Chik-Fil-A (the grilled chicken combo with the waffle fries is All That).

Then, fortified with Chik Courage, I set to work slicing up the tree last seen lying across my driveway:

Well, first I warned my neighbors across the street, “If you hear the chainsaw stop, followed by a wet thud, give 911 a call, then come over and try to find any limbs or fingers of mine that are still in the driveway. If you could pack them in ice, I’d really appreciate it.”

We all laughed nervously.

It turned out fine, given that it was the first time I’ve ever used a chainsaw (yeah, I wore work gloves and protective glasses), but there was one kickback that almost severed my right leg. And that taught me not to crouch down to the same level that I was cutting.

The glorious results?

Some of the pieces I cut it down to were a litte too large, so my back is sore as heck from hefting them up into the wheelbarrow, but the big work is all done. (I swept up after taking that pic; I’m such a blog-tard.)

Let the weekend begin!