Indoor Horticulture

Step by step guide to gardening.< /BusterKeaton >

Oh, all right:  One step.

27. Berate yourself for having spent valuable cash money on plant murder and mountain erosion, you sociopath.

Scott Horton, National Treasure

Five Fixes for the Justice Department.

Summary:  

Eric Holder faces a daunting task. If he operates on autopilot, he will be a tragic failure. The current dire situation calls for energetic leadership. Much of the work to be done involves restoring a commitment to justice that disappeared in a sea of partisan political intrigue over the last eight years, in which three different men served nominally as attorney general while the department was run in fact out of the office of Karl Rove in the White House. Bush left behind a vast panorama of wreckage. Holder’s work must start with a clean up.

From Harper's, to which I subscribe for the crossword puzzle.  The article mentions WPA murals at the headquarters of the Department of Justice.  These and their purpose are described here.

Additionally, Avedon Carol refers to this post from 2005 pointing out that the myth of liberal journalism is in fact a myth and more like a psychological experiment result.

Dose of Serious News Analysis

Sy Hersh article in The New Yorker on Middle East peace negotiations.

The United States has been involved in negotiations over the Golan Heights before, notably those brokered by Bill Clinton in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in 2000. Those talks, despite their last-minute collapse over border disputes, among other issues, provided the backbone for the recent indirect negotiations. Martin Indyk, who advised Clinton at Shepherdstown, said that those talks were about “territory for peace.” Now, he said, “it’s about territory for peace and strategic realignment.”

Musical accopaniment by Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr.

Next Week

So, as I've said, I click on things at random, and today I clicked on the Live Journal link of a Total Stranger, which led me to the Serial Sensation community (Victorian Sensational Serial Novels, in the way they were meant to be read), which is serializing East Lynne.  East Lynne was turned into a play and is known these days, if at all, as the ne plus ultra of melodrama, produced theatrically in every nook and cranny of the U.S. and Britain in the late 19th, early 20th centuries.  (There are references to this in '30s movies set in the theatre/vaudeville.)

So I'm looking forward to reading this at my leisure, particularly since I won't have to identify with any of the characters.  I don't much like the Victorian period; it took a sizable swath of the 20th century to escape that mummification, and I note that certain politicians would much prefer a return to it.

Another Voice Heard

Assessment of current situation by a current expatriate, OMYWORD.

Not the money quote but just above it:

So now, as I read the news about AIG and Wall Street crashing, I have to laugh, actually. Nothing at all surprises me. There they go again, those well-he[e]led, over-paid Captains of Industry.

Subway System Maps

I know people who know people, and so I bounced from a post about eating out to this map of the Montréal Métro, which has expanded greatly since I was last in town.  I had heard that Atwater was no longer the terminus of -- I suppose you'd call it the Green Line -- but all the lines except the little one that goes to Longueuil have been extended, and that blue line is altogether new.

Damn, that would almost be an excuse to go to Worldcon.

Thanks to (I think) Hobbitbabe.

Nota Bene

All the big kids have gone out to play, and I'm still here, staring at the screen with a Warren Zevon song on the radio.

Think I'll go enjoy the day.

Omens and Meditations

So yesterday we were doing a walking meditation (my mind was vacillating between "We look like a line of zombies" and "As a New Yorker, this pace is too slow!" neither of which I would have felt comfortable voicing in that setting), and at one point I saw a turtle.  The turtle was ambling toward one of the corners of the quadrangle and disappeared into the shrubbery.

The Vietnamese consider seeing a turtle as good luck.  (When we gave feedback on our thoughts, I mentioned the turtle to my neighbor, who told me this and who turned out to be half Vietnamese.)

La Ronde

Via Arthur Hlavaty, security person vs. disabled man.  I read further and liked this post, so I'm linking to it as well.  This post of Ilyka's riffs off this post of Anna's, which is a continuation of the post mentioned in this post's first paragraph.

And now I'm sleepy.  Tomorrow is a busy day.  

Your Hierarchy Kills

"Bottom-up" advice works better to curb MRSA in hospitals.

Not!

Skippy links to someone who lavishes sympathy on AIG executive:

so when we hear about gazillionaires angry because they can't continue to scam money out of the very system they themselves broke, pardon us if we don't cry.

I'd Just Beat It, Anyway.

Have I mentioned that I have a fondness for Rube Goldberg devices?

(Found via Making Light.)

In Memoriam

John Hope Franklin, historian.

By The Pricking of My Thumbs

I read and comment at Shakesville, and a large part of the reason is the multiplicity of voices [sorry]; Melissa McEwan explains the reason for those voices.  (ETA, 3/26/09:  This was Melissa's extended response to Anna of Trouble is a State of Mind; see this posting by Ilyka of Off Our Pedestals for a different response.)

Here, I'm just one sentient being, aging at the rate of one second per second, with a computer, some friends and family, and an itch to blather in the form of pixels.

Sometimes.

So my voice is largely "Lookatthis!" instead of "This is an insight cobbled up by a cerebrum in desperate need of exercise."  Not that coming up with stuff isn't exercise, but it's using grocery shopping  instead of defined weights to do arm curls.  I suppose my dislike of authoritarianism/totalitarianism has oozed forth, but any sane person shares that dislike.  (A person may be clinically sane but power-hungry; that, for me, tips the scale.)  Theodore Sturgeon writes in his introduction to The Stars Are the Styx:

"He [Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy] said, 'Well, I'll tell you what to do. Write me a story about a guy who goes to the bus station to pick up his wife; she's been away for the weekend. And the bus comes in and the place is suddenly full of people. And across the crowd he sees his wife, talking avidly to a young man. ... She walks across, meets her husband, gives him a kiss hello.

'Write me that, Sturgeon, and everybody in the country will know how you feel about that meathead senator!'

... It was this: that if you have real convictions...it's going to come through, no matter what you're writing about."

(It is instructive that when I dug out the actual quote, I discovered that I'd misremembered almost everything.)  So I don't think I need to explain my political beliefs.

As for my personal beliefs:  That line in Bull Durham about kisses that go on for three days was scripted.  Although Costner does deliver it well.

Also, ants will have parades and shivarees if there's chicken broth in the sink.  Yeeuuuuccccchh!

400

This is the 400th post here.  (That would be Thermopylae plus Cain's Hundred.)

We're two weeks from the baseball season, 2.5 and a half weeks from Passover, three weeks from Easter.  

I am not carrying on about spring training because one year my team did Really Spectacularly Well in spring matches and then proceeded to compile a losing record for April/May (I don't think that was a playoff year).  My attitude is that since it doesn't count, spring training and exhibition games (unless for local bragging rights) should be occasions to Get The Losing Out Of Their Systems.  Not to say they should contrive to lose, but the Grapefruit/Cactus League standings don't really correlate with the end-of-regular season standings.  Better a team lose every game in pre-season and study their losses than win every preseason game and stink up the meaningful 162.

There does not seem to be a matzo shortage this year; I'm thinking of getting a box.

Easter will be special this year.  I'm setting feet firmly on the Journey to God path (I'll still be less than reverent.  I'm not becoming a creationist or intelligent design advocate.  And I'm not interested in arguing; I don't do it well, I don't have that kind of time, and most people are only in it for the gotcha.  Those folks can play with themselves).

I avoided the RaceFail09 discussions (except for a couple pieces of meta), but Rydra Wong's collection of links supplies the source materials in (more or less) one place in approximate chronological order.

When I started this, I wasn't going to get into politics.  Odd how that worked out, eh?

There was something else, but I don't remember what. Besides, if I talk up Trader Joe's broccoli slaw, they'll discontinue it.  So much for statements of purpose.  Where's my super-suit?

The Précis

Driftglass summarizes authoritarianism.

Speaking of Newspapers

Jon Carroll on retention bonuses:

But real retention bonuses: What an idea! You get a job, and then your boss comes around and says, "Do you still want that job?" and you say "Yes" and he says, "Great, here's $100 million."

What a sweet idea. Plus, as I understand it, you could order an extra ficus for your office if you wanted one.

During those years, and I want to make this clear, I never received a retention bonus as such. There were no ficuses slipped under the table.

And the Ink Gets All Over My Hands

What newspapers are learning after 20 years.

Money quote:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

From Media Alliance, which I'd forgotten I'd bookmarked.

Childhood Resurrection

So I fell across myspace.com/4squareeastbay this afternoon.  That is, they had chalked a quadranted square in the park and were playing.  They invited me to play, but I was carrying a sack of groceries, a book, and a white robe and it was cold and windy out.

I last played 4 square in 1962 at the playground in front of the school.  I haven't thought about the game probably since the mid-'60s.  (I wasn't very good at it.)

They might make this weekly (it's not now on their schedule).

ETA:  No, I don't believe in MySpace either.

Question

Why do I have to get my political/disaster analysis from Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone?

(Thanks to Driftglass and probably several other noteworthy folks, because I'm always the last to know.)

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough.

Leaving aside an inexcusable metaphor or so, this article Explains It All For You.

Play Architecture!

The New Yorker's Paul Goldberger on the new stadia in New York (but the Giants and Jets still have to play in New Jersey.  Where's the microscopic violin?) which are totally coincidentally designed by the same outfit and opening in the same year.

ETA:  Metsgrrl had noted this article Monday (3/16) and has since Been Inside.  With Pictures (Club Mets tour).

Classical Musicians with Laptops

Emanuel Ax has a blog, and he'd like you to applaud when you please.

Hat tip & thanks to Iron Tongue at Midnight.

Spring is Here

Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."

Surreal World

CIA recruitment radio spots.

Really.

Highway's susurrus 

Indistinguishable from 

Soft showers of spring.

Resource for African News

Noli Irritare Leones has aggregated some websites close to the source reporting on news from Africa.

Because the BBC World Service might be a tiny bit biased.

A Story. Tell Me Another Story

Stories are important. Stories, in fact, are life. They are what is left of our unique experience in this world. They speak--no. They scream. And when an author sits down and constructs a completely imaginary world in their heads, if people like me, people like us, do not exist in it, or exist only to be ridden like animals or raped or murdered or humilated or destroyed so that an audience can acheive catharsis via symbolic annihilation of our lives, bodies, and souls, well, certainly, we can sit down and look at the floor and say: yes, you're right, that is what we deserve.

Or we can stand up. We can scream back. We can band together. We can demand our right to exist, to take part in humanity, to learn, to grow, to evolve, to self-examine.

Stories are survival.

Serious Business

The Republic of T. sounds off against domestic violence.

Money quote:

Like any parent, I hope it doesn’t, but the day will almost certainly come in your life when someone else thinks you deserve all of the above and more. And chooses to dish it out to you. Perhaps your children will even watch it happen, and suffer for it later.

If that day comes, I hope you are met with a lot more compassion than you are choosing to dish out to Robyn Fenty. She deserves a lot more than that.

Yahrzeit.

Dear Dave:

Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart" is already a cover.

(Dave is doing "Covers From Hell" and has already flayed the covers of Pat Boone.  Was that just Dolly Parton [it was Faith Hill]?  And, oh dear, is that Shatner?  And Cartman, and Sinatra mangling "Mrs. Robinson," and the horrible Pearl Jam version of "Last Kiss."  Britney Spears applying sexy voice to "Satisfaction" is Wrong.  "Light My Fire" is beyond covering [Mae West, not the Feliciano version].  Tiffany sounding like Pat Benatar and adding nothing to "I Think We're Alone Now."  Pat Boone?  "Exit Lights Enter Sandman" in full big band treatment?  Mercy!)

I need to wash out my ears with soap.

(ETA:  That's what I get for not knowing my Metallica.)