NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON (THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY)
dropping the bombs of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all those things in your pre-holiday
to-do list that never quite get done. So consider this the days before
Christmas and Hannukah rolled into one, frantic
post...
• First, a couple of follow-ups to yesterday's Barack Obama post... TWM reader and former DeSantis campaign cohort Schultz wrote to say that he now understood -- ah, the power of good communication! -- my criticisms of Obama, even if he still didn't quite agree with them. He then noted that George W. Bush was CEO of an oil company, President of the Texas Rangers, Governor of Texas and asked if that was the kind of experience I really want. To which I replied: Of course not. Because W. was a disaster at all of those things. (Especially the first two.) That's not a list of experience; it's a history of failure. One that, because we did not learn from it, we were doomed to repeat. And repeat again.
• Perhaps I should clarify, just for the record: when I say I want experience in my presidential candidates, I should probably say that I want experience and evidence of success. For short, let's just say I'd like accomplishment. Funny, isn't it, that these days that almost seems like too much to ask.
• One last point from Maureen Dowd's recent Obama column that I just had to address but just couldn't fit into the thrust of yesterday's argument -- consider this a deleted scene, finally released here on the special edition DVD recap of the post -- is this passage, straight out of Senator Obama's mouth, from last Thursday's campaign stop at the Apollo Theater: I don’t want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college. That's a great line. One that he and John Edwards have both used in various forms and at various times on the stump. There's only one small problem with it: it's a complete crock. And it isn't just that it's not true; it's that it's not even close to true. It's been debunked many times, and most recently by Michael Dobbs at the Washington Post: According to 2005 Census Bureau statistics, the male African-American population of the United States aged between 18 and 24 numbered 1,896,000. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 106,000 African-Americans in this age group were in federal or state prisons at the end of 2005.... If you add the numbers in local jail (measured in mid-2006), you arrive at a grand total of 193,000 incarcerated young Black males, or slightly over 10 percent. / According to the same census data, 530,000 of these African-American males, or twenty eight percent, were enrolled in colleges or universities (including two-year-colleges) in 2005. That is five times the number of young black men in federal and state prisons and two and a half times the total number incarcerated. If you expanded the age group to include African-American males up to thirty or thirty five, the college attendees would still outnumber the prisoners. When confronted with these cold, hard, pretty damned clear facts after the last time the senator made this claim, according to Dobbs, The Obama Campaign did not respond to inquiries. Nor, apparently, does the Obama Campaign respond to truth.
• All of which means that, as one local blogger argued almost a year ago, Senator Breath of Fresh Air is as full of it as all his fellow candidates. He and his campaign people have to know the truth by now. (And they should have known it all along.) Which means, of course, that Senator Same-Old-Face is either lying or pandering on the stump. And he knows it. So tell me, Obama supporters: which one makes you feel better? And, well, shouldn't either one make you feel worse?
• Oh, and one more thing: Hey, all you in the mainstream media and not at the Washington Post. Why aren't any of the rest of you calling him on this crock? Al Gore got crucified as a liar, or at least a serial exaggerator, for far, far less. I guess he just wasn't as fun or sexy a story, huh?
• I was thrilled to see this morning's Post-Gazette include a front-page article commemorating the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It will spare us, a few days hence, from reading the inevitable letters to the editor about how the paper's failure to run one proves what a bunch of young, ungrateful, anti-American whippersnappers its reporters and editors really are.
• One of the best -- if not the best -- of the city's young journalistic whippersnappers, the Trib's Jeremy Boren, this week wrote a great piece about the city's failure to properly clean and sweep its streets. The whole article is essential reading -- well-balanced, well-written, and chock full of detail -- and the lede is pure, spun gold: Mayor Luke Ravenstahl -- champion of all things "redd up" -- acknowledges the inglorious but necessary job of sweeping the city's streets isn't getting done.
• Perhaps Jeremy will write a follow-up next week on the city's abject failure to clear and salt its streets during this week's two morning snowfalls. On both days -- and surely this is some minor miracle -- the snow came at the times and for the durations that meteorologists said it would. There were no surprises here, no sudden squalls or early arrivals. Just steady, simple snowfalls. And on both days, Shady Avenue and Beechwood Boulevard -- just to name two major East End thoroughfares -- looked like they were ready for the Iditarod. By time 9am rolled around -- you know, the time most people are supposed to be at work and most of the city's school children are expected to be arriving at their classrooms -- neither street, nor a whole lot of others in the area, had been touched by so much as a single grain of salt or a single blade of a plow. On both days I watched long trails of cars and trucks and at least a couple of school buses labor to get up one street or down the other. These problems are as dangerous as they are foolish. And as avoidable as they are inexcusable.
• On Wednesday, I wondered whether an upcoming mayoral election might have gotten the streets cleared sooner. This morning, I began to wonder whether a previous mayoral election might be having an impact on the road conditions. Shady and Beechwood were, after all, the two East End streets with the highest (and most conspicuous) concentration of DeSantis for Mayor yard signs in the city. If you drove down either of those streets in late October, you'd have been forgiven for thinking you'd left Pittsburgh and crossed over into a city that thinks critically about its mayoral elections. If you could somehow mush your way up either of those streets late this morning, you've have been forgiven for thinking you'd left Pittsburgh and crossed over into the Arctic Circle. Before global warming. But if you'd managed to get as far as Aylesboro -- you know, if your dogs hadn't tired out and you hadn't left any of your own skin exposed to the elements -- you'd have been forgiven for thinking that it hadn't snowed at all. Or that you were living in a city that actually makes an effort to clear its streets during inclement weather. Unless, of course, you remembered that Aylesboro is one of the two -- count 'em, two -- streets in the East End on which you'd actually seen a Luke Ravenstahl for Mayor yard sign. Then, well. You'd be forgiven for wondering just like I've been.
• Yeah, I know it's a stretch. I mean, after all, when have partisan politics ever played a role in city street maintenance?
• Disgusted by what I'd seen and determined to do more than just blog about it, I called the city's Public Works Department (412.255.2790) this morning and politely asked to whom I could speak about major city streets not being treated during this week's snowfalls. The woman I spoke to gave me another number with a city extension (412.255.2621). I assumed this would be another office within Public Works. It wasn't. It was another way to get me to the 311 line. You know, without telling me she was passing me off to Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's 311 Response Line. I was on hold for ten minutes before I got to speak to one of their service representatives, who silently listened to my concerns, robotically assured me she would pass the information on to Public Works (you know, the people who told me to call her), and then sighed heavily in my ear before hanging up on me.
• Lukey, you're doin' a heckuva job.
• One other bit of past-post-follow-up this week: I received quite a few responses to Tuesday's Cotton Candy Dreams post -- every one of them from emailers who shared, if not my dream, at least my disquiet. (My favorite sentence from any of them: I long for the days of dark rooms and pay phones.) I wrote a much longer post on this subject a couple of years ago, after an especially dispiriting experience at an otherwise spiriting U2 concert, and I suggested that the emailers who'd come to TWM too late to read it might enjoy going back and getting caught up. When I reread the post myself, I realized, with a prickly mix of resignation and consternation, that things have already changed -- and for the worse, of course -- in the interim. Because the couple I saw on Monday night didn't spend all their time trying to take pictures of a rock band or the hockey game or some other site better able to be appreciated through the aperture of the mind's eye. No, they spent all that time trying to take pictures of themselves.
• At the risk of sounding like some crusty old curmudgeon, I'm starting to think that our current crop of IMing, Facebooking, cell-phone-cameraing teens and twentysomethings should be known as Generation N. For narcissist.
• It's always a shot of adrenaline to hear that one of your favorite filmmakers is going to adapt a novel by one of your favorite authors, so this week's word that Martin Scorsese's next project will be an adaptation of Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island already has me giddily awaiting the release. Or at least the start of filming. A cast that already includes Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ben Kingsley only ups the ante. And the anticipation.
• While we're on the subject of delicious adaptations... Fans of Scorsese or Hitchcock or just great filmmaking in general should check out this site, in which Scorsese talks about, and then screens, his short film version of the only surviving 3-1/2-pages of a long-lost Hitchcock script called The Key to Reserva. Scorsese films the project as he imagines Hitchcock would have, and you have to admit that, while the action strains credulity a bit, the style and the tone and even the score or just spot-on. The whole clip, including background information on the filming, lasts less than ten minutes, and it's an absolute kick. Worth every second, right down to the last thirty, which may just be better than the film that comes before.
• I should know by now not to be upset by the Grammy nominations. I should have more than enough experience with them to know that, just as Mr. Evans used to advise back in 11th-grade honors trigonometry, I should just consider the source and ignore them. But those rare occasions when they get something right (Foo Fighters' Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace for Album of the Year? bravo!) make me all the more pissed off for the rest of the occasions when they don't (where the hell is Springsteen's Magic -- easily the best, most powerful, and most cohesive of all the albums the academy could stomach). And only one nomination for Wilco's gorgeous Sky Blue Sky? What are these people thinking?
• I know what I'm thinking right now, and that is that these lyrics from Drive-By Truckers' Carl Perkins' Cadillac have never sounded more fresh or appropriate:
Carl drove his brand new Cadillac to Nashville and he went downtown
This time they promised him a Grammy
He turned his Cadillac around
Mr. Phillips never blew enough hot air to need a little gold plated paperweight
He promised him a Cadillac and put the wind in Carl's face
• While we're on the subject of Drive-By Truckers... (and we'll be on this subject again soon; look for a long-form post sometime in the next month, as soon as I have time to write it, in which I'll try to convince you that they're doing for life in the rural south what bands like N.W.A. and Public Enemy did for life in the urban north; they're that good, and probably even better) ... The other great artistic news of the week is that DBT's new CD, Brighter Than Creation's Dark, will street on January 22nd. I'm biased, of course. But something in my gut -- and in my ears, since I've already heard audio clips of all 19 songs -- tells me it's going to be an unqualified masterpiece.
• TWM has long sung the praises of Sports Illustrated's Dr. Z., but in case you need any more convincing, take a look at this column from Tuesday morning, in which he brilliantly -- which is to say, clearly and accurately -- dissects how the Ravens, and particularly defensive coordinator Rex Ryan, royally screwed themselves on the Patriots' game-winning drive Monday night.
• And, finally, because it's all anyone around here seems to be thinking about this weekend, a prediction: the Steelers, whom I've believed all along would beat the Patriots by playing the kind of game the Eagles and Ravens played against them for 55 of the 60 minutes, will put it all together for those extra five minutes. Call it hidden vigorish. And call it Ben Roethlisberger, who's better than A.J. Feeley and Kyle Boller combined, making the difference in the end.
• First, a couple of follow-ups to yesterday's Barack Obama post... TWM reader and former DeSantis campaign cohort Schultz wrote to say that he now understood -- ah, the power of good communication! -- my criticisms of Obama, even if he still didn't quite agree with them. He then noted that George W. Bush was CEO of an oil company, President of the Texas Rangers, Governor of Texas and asked if that was the kind of experience I really want. To which I replied: Of course not. Because W. was a disaster at all of those things. (Especially the first two.) That's not a list of experience; it's a history of failure. One that, because we did not learn from it, we were doomed to repeat. And repeat again.
• Perhaps I should clarify, just for the record: when I say I want experience in my presidential candidates, I should probably say that I want experience and evidence of success. For short, let's just say I'd like accomplishment. Funny, isn't it, that these days that almost seems like too much to ask.
• One last point from Maureen Dowd's recent Obama column that I just had to address but just couldn't fit into the thrust of yesterday's argument -- consider this a deleted scene, finally released here on the special edition DVD recap of the post -- is this passage, straight out of Senator Obama's mouth, from last Thursday's campaign stop at the Apollo Theater: I don’t want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college. That's a great line. One that he and John Edwards have both used in various forms and at various times on the stump. There's only one small problem with it: it's a complete crock. And it isn't just that it's not true; it's that it's not even close to true. It's been debunked many times, and most recently by Michael Dobbs at the Washington Post: According to 2005 Census Bureau statistics, the male African-American population of the United States aged between 18 and 24 numbered 1,896,000. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 106,000 African-Americans in this age group were in federal or state prisons at the end of 2005.... If you add the numbers in local jail (measured in mid-2006), you arrive at a grand total of 193,000 incarcerated young Black males, or slightly over 10 percent. / According to the same census data, 530,000 of these African-American males, or twenty eight percent, were enrolled in colleges or universities (including two-year-colleges) in 2005. That is five times the number of young black men in federal and state prisons and two and a half times the total number incarcerated. If you expanded the age group to include African-American males up to thirty or thirty five, the college attendees would still outnumber the prisoners. When confronted with these cold, hard, pretty damned clear facts after the last time the senator made this claim, according to Dobbs, The Obama Campaign did not respond to inquiries. Nor, apparently, does the Obama Campaign respond to truth.
• All of which means that, as one local blogger argued almost a year ago, Senator Breath of Fresh Air is as full of it as all his fellow candidates. He and his campaign people have to know the truth by now. (And they should have known it all along.) Which means, of course, that Senator Same-Old-Face is either lying or pandering on the stump. And he knows it. So tell me, Obama supporters: which one makes you feel better? And, well, shouldn't either one make you feel worse?
• Oh, and one more thing: Hey, all you in the mainstream media and not at the Washington Post. Why aren't any of the rest of you calling him on this crock? Al Gore got crucified as a liar, or at least a serial exaggerator, for far, far less. I guess he just wasn't as fun or sexy a story, huh?
• I was thrilled to see this morning's Post-Gazette include a front-page article commemorating the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It will spare us, a few days hence, from reading the inevitable letters to the editor about how the paper's failure to run one proves what a bunch of young, ungrateful, anti-American whippersnappers its reporters and editors really are.
• One of the best -- if not the best -- of the city's young journalistic whippersnappers, the Trib's Jeremy Boren, this week wrote a great piece about the city's failure to properly clean and sweep its streets. The whole article is essential reading -- well-balanced, well-written, and chock full of detail -- and the lede is pure, spun gold: Mayor Luke Ravenstahl -- champion of all things "redd up" -- acknowledges the inglorious but necessary job of sweeping the city's streets isn't getting done.
• Perhaps Jeremy will write a follow-up next week on the city's abject failure to clear and salt its streets during this week's two morning snowfalls. On both days -- and surely this is some minor miracle -- the snow came at the times and for the durations that meteorologists said it would. There were no surprises here, no sudden squalls or early arrivals. Just steady, simple snowfalls. And on both days, Shady Avenue and Beechwood Boulevard -- just to name two major East End thoroughfares -- looked like they were ready for the Iditarod. By time 9am rolled around -- you know, the time most people are supposed to be at work and most of the city's school children are expected to be arriving at their classrooms -- neither street, nor a whole lot of others in the area, had been touched by so much as a single grain of salt or a single blade of a plow. On both days I watched long trails of cars and trucks and at least a couple of school buses labor to get up one street or down the other. These problems are as dangerous as they are foolish. And as avoidable as they are inexcusable.
• On Wednesday, I wondered whether an upcoming mayoral election might have gotten the streets cleared sooner. This morning, I began to wonder whether a previous mayoral election might be having an impact on the road conditions. Shady and Beechwood were, after all, the two East End streets with the highest (and most conspicuous) concentration of DeSantis for Mayor yard signs in the city. If you drove down either of those streets in late October, you'd have been forgiven for thinking you'd left Pittsburgh and crossed over into a city that thinks critically about its mayoral elections. If you could somehow mush your way up either of those streets late this morning, you've have been forgiven for thinking you'd left Pittsburgh and crossed over into the Arctic Circle. Before global warming. But if you'd managed to get as far as Aylesboro -- you know, if your dogs hadn't tired out and you hadn't left any of your own skin exposed to the elements -- you'd have been forgiven for thinking that it hadn't snowed at all. Or that you were living in a city that actually makes an effort to clear its streets during inclement weather. Unless, of course, you remembered that Aylesboro is one of the two -- count 'em, two -- streets in the East End on which you'd actually seen a Luke Ravenstahl for Mayor yard sign. Then, well. You'd be forgiven for wondering just like I've been.
• Yeah, I know it's a stretch. I mean, after all, when have partisan politics ever played a role in city street maintenance?
• Disgusted by what I'd seen and determined to do more than just blog about it, I called the city's Public Works Department (412.255.2790) this morning and politely asked to whom I could speak about major city streets not being treated during this week's snowfalls. The woman I spoke to gave me another number with a city extension (412.255.2621). I assumed this would be another office within Public Works. It wasn't. It was another way to get me to the 311 line. You know, without telling me she was passing me off to Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's 311 Response Line. I was on hold for ten minutes before I got to speak to one of their service representatives, who silently listened to my concerns, robotically assured me she would pass the information on to Public Works (you know, the people who told me to call her), and then sighed heavily in my ear before hanging up on me.
• Lukey, you're doin' a heckuva job.
• One other bit of past-post-follow-up this week: I received quite a few responses to Tuesday's Cotton Candy Dreams post -- every one of them from emailers who shared, if not my dream, at least my disquiet. (My favorite sentence from any of them: I long for the days of dark rooms and pay phones.) I wrote a much longer post on this subject a couple of years ago, after an especially dispiriting experience at an otherwise spiriting U2 concert, and I suggested that the emailers who'd come to TWM too late to read it might enjoy going back and getting caught up. When I reread the post myself, I realized, with a prickly mix of resignation and consternation, that things have already changed -- and for the worse, of course -- in the interim. Because the couple I saw on Monday night didn't spend all their time trying to take pictures of a rock band or the hockey game or some other site better able to be appreciated through the aperture of the mind's eye. No, they spent all that time trying to take pictures of themselves.
• At the risk of sounding like some crusty old curmudgeon, I'm starting to think that our current crop of IMing, Facebooking, cell-phone-cameraing teens and twentysomethings should be known as Generation N. For narcissist.
• It's always a shot of adrenaline to hear that one of your favorite filmmakers is going to adapt a novel by one of your favorite authors, so this week's word that Martin Scorsese's next project will be an adaptation of Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island already has me giddily awaiting the release. Or at least the start of filming. A cast that already includes Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ben Kingsley only ups the ante. And the anticipation.
• While we're on the subject of delicious adaptations... Fans of Scorsese or Hitchcock or just great filmmaking in general should check out this site, in which Scorsese talks about, and then screens, his short film version of the only surviving 3-1/2-pages of a long-lost Hitchcock script called The Key to Reserva. Scorsese films the project as he imagines Hitchcock would have, and you have to admit that, while the action strains credulity a bit, the style and the tone and even the score or just spot-on. The whole clip, including background information on the filming, lasts less than ten minutes, and it's an absolute kick. Worth every second, right down to the last thirty, which may just be better than the film that comes before.
• I should know by now not to be upset by the Grammy nominations. I should have more than enough experience with them to know that, just as Mr. Evans used to advise back in 11th-grade honors trigonometry, I should just consider the source and ignore them. But those rare occasions when they get something right (Foo Fighters' Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace for Album of the Year? bravo!) make me all the more pissed off for the rest of the occasions when they don't (where the hell is Springsteen's Magic -- easily the best, most powerful, and most cohesive of all the albums the academy could stomach). And only one nomination for Wilco's gorgeous Sky Blue Sky? What are these people thinking?
• I know what I'm thinking right now, and that is that these lyrics from Drive-By Truckers' Carl Perkins' Cadillac have never sounded more fresh or appropriate:
Carl drove his brand new Cadillac to Nashville and he went downtown
This time they promised him a Grammy
He turned his Cadillac around
Mr. Phillips never blew enough hot air to need a little gold plated paperweight
He promised him a Cadillac and put the wind in Carl's face
• While we're on the subject of Drive-By Truckers... (and we'll be on this subject again soon; look for a long-form post sometime in the next month, as soon as I have time to write it, in which I'll try to convince you that they're doing for life in the rural south what bands like N.W.A. and Public Enemy did for life in the urban north; they're that good, and probably even better) ... The other great artistic news of the week is that DBT's new CD, Brighter Than Creation's Dark, will street on January 22nd. I'm biased, of course. But something in my gut -- and in my ears, since I've already heard audio clips of all 19 songs -- tells me it's going to be an unqualified masterpiece.
• TWM has long sung the praises of Sports Illustrated's Dr. Z., but in case you need any more convincing, take a look at this column from Tuesday morning, in which he brilliantly -- which is to say, clearly and accurately -- dissects how the Ravens, and particularly defensive coordinator Rex Ryan, royally screwed themselves on the Patriots' game-winning drive Monday night.
• And, finally, because it's all anyone around here seems to be thinking about this weekend, a prediction: the Steelers, whom I've believed all along would beat the Patriots by playing the kind of game the Eagles and Ravens played against them for 55 of the 60 minutes, will put it all together for those extra five minutes. Call it hidden vigorish. And call it Ben Roethlisberger, who's better than A.J. Feeley and Kyle Boller combined, making the difference in the end.
Posted: Fri - December 7, 2007 at 03:15 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM