A Little Darker, Please.

Our present toaster, like so many gadgets, is more of a subscription to appliance world

R. Porrofatto

THESE two  articles in the Sunday Times caught my attention. In the former, the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit, the Briggs Stadium of my extreme youth, where Al Kaline and Norm Cash and Harvey Kuenn played a child's game instead of working summers, where for a while Rocky Bridges enjoyed watching ball games and kept a wad in one cheek that made him look like Dizzy Gillespie with Bell's palsy, is being fully or partially demolished (which being the point of the article) for free, in exchange for the salvage rights; in the latter, the rise of thoroughbred fatalities is linked to a Win the Glamorous Races At Age Three Or You're Cat Food mentality that may be weakening the breed.

[Waymon Guillebeaux, a vice president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation] also turned a measured eye to the present and said that remaining structural pieces are valuable. They are from the first half of the 20th century. “The steel is the highest of the high grades,” he said. “Steel was cheap then.”

Adding that all metal prices had “gone through the roof,” Rottach said the demolition would be a green project with about 85 percent of the materials recycled.

Now, the only thing I know about economics is that Milton Friedman won a Nobel for it by the simple expedient of using the word "freedom" at least twice per paragraph, thereby giving birth to both the Sisyphean School and a generation of David Brooks columns.  

See, I can't understand why 85%  of the materials in every project known to man wouldn't be recycled.  When did it ever make sense to just throw shit in a hole and put a match to it?  How is it that stewardship has never entered into the equation, except as the anti-capitalist agenda of Dirty Hippie, Inc. ?

Here, again, I'm not insisting common sense should necessarily trump statistical investigation, and I'm not saying the degradability of product quality over time, or increased scarcity, hence cost, is strictly attributable to unchecked avarice and its avatars and professional touts. I'm saying we ought to be able to make a fucking toaster that works as well as they did forty years ago, and the fact that we do not is enough evidence to grab these fuckers by the wrist before they turn over another card, search 'em for the gaff, and ride 'em out of town on a rail, suitably tarred and feathered.

It's more than possible, it's likely I'm an idiot, but, then, I'm pretty sure that when the Reagan administration simultaneously oversaw (if I may use the term) the mass consolidation of the meat-packing industry and simply upgraded every slice of cow in the country ("Everyone under sixteen years of age is now...sixteen years of age," and, after all, why quibble about Grades when you aren't really going to inspect anything anyway?) it was not in consideration of some new technology that turned gristle into filet, but one that turned the public's gold into its own. Freely, as they note in the econ biz.

More Songs Strangled Cries About Politics and Food

AS some of you know, every so often I'm struck by the inexplicable desire to turn on cable news, and, y'know, just watch it for some reason. Obviously not for the news, of course. This used to happen to me with fast food, too. Once a year or so I'd be driving somewhere and suddenly duck into Burger Abomination, not because I was particularly hungry, usually, and if so not because I imagined I'd find food there, but because it sounded good. Almost impossible to explain, and certainly impossible to justify in the forty-eight hours following the consumption of a Double with Cheese, Petri Dish of Death Germs, and fries.

As I recall it that didn't last beyond my twenties, and I can't even think of the last time I ate out of a bag. Perhaps the coming of cable replaced it with more intellectual pursuits. That is, very slightly more intellectual.

This morning I climbed on the exercise bike, having placed the remote control on the book holder dealie, because it slides out of the cup holder. It didn't occur to me when I bought the thing to check if the more expensive model had a cigarette lighter, too. And something simply came over me, and without even checking Turner Classics I went right for the McRib Sandwich of cable news, Morning Joe. And I lasted, I kid you not, twenty seconds.

(We spoke yesterday about my Poor Wife's--in fact her entire clan's--maddening fastidio-queasy approach to foodstuffs. The McRib, which has become some sort of seasonal product, like eggnog or lemongrass ale, is the ne plus ultra of gag inducement at our place. This may explain her near-psychopathic channel surfing, now that I think of it--just a glimpse of those slaughterhouse floor sweepings injection molded to look as though it came from a slightly more expensive portion of the animal, then coyly hidden behind some food additive chemist's molecular duplication of the cheapest store-brand barbecue sauce you could find, in the Third World, will put her off her feed for seventy-two hours, minimum. This is, of course, completely understandable, but medical science is at a loss to explain how the entire process can take place faster than the autonomic nervous system is capable of responding even under optimal laboratory conditions.)

It was Tweety. Okay, first, it was a clip of Hillary Clinton and, quite frankly, it's highly unlikely I will sit through anything anymore which involves teevee "talent" talking about either Democratic candidate, or what's left of their race. But for cryin' out fucking loud, why is Chris Matthews on in the morning too? He's got his own show, which, as I understand it, the American public has rather resoundingly declared it will watch for precisely as long as it takes to find fresh AA batteries and get the remote to work again. At one point he had two shows, which apparently gave twice as many people the opportunity to see what a despicable slimewad he is. But he's still Joe's "guest" in the morning. This is, of course, an extension of the hiring of carnival talker ("barker" is incorrect) Barbara Walters to anchor an evening news program, an event which explains everything that has gone wrong since, everywhere in the world, and which is still so raw in my memory it's painful to type. Bob-wah begat Tom Brokaw, whose own stint in the previously-respectable morning "news" game proved that, for The Greatest Generation, it took a man to solidify the acceptability of reading the news with a speech impediment. It's Brokaw who established the practice of anchors turning up on the morning froth-fests to act as "experts", meaning that, unlike the professional blabbermouths who actually hosted those things, he knew which hemisphere Nicaragua was in without being cued. It might have been Dan Rather, actually, but CBS held on to the hard-news-in-the-morning format longer than the others (RIP Hughes Rudd), and anyway, Danny was more like that uncle of yours who came back from the war a little funny in the head. Brokaw was the guy who not only tried to sell you the Extended Warranty you'd already said no to, but did so in a way that let you know he'd be thrilled to death if you'd waste $99.95 so long as it made him look like a complete toad to the Higher Ups.

But I digress. Tweety, over the Clinton clip, says something to the effect that she'd "calculated" she could get by the Democratic primaries with her Iraq War vote and get the nomination "by entitlement, or whatever", before mov...

That was all I could take.

This reminds me that last week's commenters were kind enough to act as though I'd swung a corked bat at both Obama and Clinton supporters, which might have been the just thing to do, but isn't the thing I did, nor, really something I'd ever done. And I spent part of my weekend wondering why that was.

So here, as chronologically as I can relay it without doing any actual work, Why I'm Not As Irritated (In Print) By Clinton Supporters:

1) I'd already rejected the candidacy of Senators Clinton, Edwards, and Dodd after the Iraq War authorization. This meant that, throughout 2007 she appeared to me as Another Democrat I Had No Interest In Voting For Although I'd Vote Against Her Opponent, making her the seventh such, or something like that. The bad news with Hillary was already discounted.

2) Senator Obama, on the other hand, once he started to distinguish himself from the pack, proved far too wedded to a campaign image (end partisanship!) which didn't seem to make sense. You're a student of politics, you're a South Side activist, and you think partisanship is our greatest obstacle? Either tell me how you came by this, or I have to assume it's the result of the image-making that's gone on since 2004.

3) And don't get me wrong; I don't object to image-making, and what if I did? It's the system, although the still-untapped potential of the astonishing Perot vote in '92, which was, what? 17%?--say what you will about the man, even when he was flat-out nuts he sounded like a man trying to be honest and reasonable--seems to me, as time goes on, less like a lost opportunity and more like a political consultant's idea of how to make more political consultants. But Senator Obama ran with this about as gleefully as Tom Brokaw runs with another idea to separate seniors and their money.

4) The Halloween Gang-Tackle and the Lukewarm Response By Clinton Opponents. You know what's great? Elizabeth Edwards excoriating our pathetic Press in the Times. Y'know what would have been greater? If he husband hadn't seen fit to collude with Tim Russert and Brian Williams for the crime of out-polling him.

5) Premature Coronation Week and the Damned Racists crying jag. Is Brooklyn Still In The League? I thought there was nothing worse than excessive celebration by a front-runner, until I witness the deflating loss in New Hampshire being explained as The Bradley Effect by that bunch on MSNBC, who looked like it was the only thing that kept them from hanging themselves en masse. And more's the pity.

6) This, then, would be the beginning of my Tripartite Obama Problem. The eruption of Obamist bloggers I read into what, frankly, struck me as bat-shit Klintoon Khronicles craziness; the Dog Staring At A Ceiling Fan campaign the Senator has run ever since, including Those Reagan Remarks; and the fact that as frontrunner, both his campaign and his campaign supporters should have shown some recognition that sunrise and sunset are regular occurrences they've been familiar with for some time. The front-runner is going to need those votes after the dust settles! Why was that so hard to recognize?

7) In this you may detect a double standard--mine--and you're partly correct. I'd rank Senator Clinton as Just Another Centrist Democrat who happens to be particularly good on national health care. I expected her to say things to get elected. It astonished me to see her get criticized for the simple act of declaring that she thought she'd make a better candidate. I don't deny Senator Obama the same right, but it'd be nice if your political persona, and your published positions, decrying partisanship were matched by a little post-partisan behavior. Unless "blaming old people, women, and racists for not voting for you" is the new post-partisanship.

8) Alternately, if you're a lifelong partisan and an Obama supporter, then you ought to acknowledge the distinction.


9) Of the dozen or so bloggers I try to read everyday, and the dozen or so more I try to get to, some went full-tilt Obamanation in January and never looked back. There weren't that many declared Clinton supporters--Tom Watson is the only one I can recall--and people such as Lance, who may've stated a slight preference, were thoughtful, respectful, and apparently cognizant of the figures on morning sunrises. On the other hand, three blogs I read regularly went insane, and generally not for Obama as against anything Hillary Clinton had ever touched. This is, after all, my movie. Coulda found Clintonistas who angered me as much, yes. As it turned out, though, I'd largely have had to seek them out.

10) I generally do not reply to other people's commenters, and I genuinely try to avoid the truly egregious. But the rolling yahooglianism of "Get out of the way, Old White Woman!" is, simply, beyond the pale. The prospect of sharing a party with you this November fills me with McRib.

re: Inspire® 2-slice model 6328

James B. S. Riley
Global Powders & Notions, LLC
General Delivery
Indianapolis, IN
May 12, 2008


Mr. John Oster, deceased,
Founder
The Oster Manufacturing Company
acquired by Sunbeam Products,
which was bought out by
Allegheny International, Inc., before
the division was cited, along with
its accounting firm which, not surprisingly, was
Arthur Andersen, LLC, now owned by
four limited liability corporations called
Omega Management I through IV,
for accounting fraud and
filed for bankruptcy, only to reemerge
one year later as the privately owned
American Household, Inc. (AHI)
which was purchased by
Jarden Corporation (NYSE: JAH), the former
Alltrista Corporation, which began as the
spin-off of its canning business by the Ball Corporation
Rye, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Oster:

I like toast. In this, as I'm sure you're aware, or would be if you were still alive, I am far from alone; it's a staple of breakfast tables in much of the civilized world. Toward this end I, again like millions of others, employ a toaster, or device which toasts bread automatically on both sides at once. I enjoy its convenience, and, if I may indulge in the personal for a moment, the aroma of toasting bread and the satisfying pop of the finished product, which frequently startles, but in a good way. I like mine with butter (or, more accurately, partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil spread the color of cabbage butterflies); for an occasional treat I'll add some apricot preserves.

I don't know when I first became a fan of toast. As an infant I was fed digestive biscuits, which might serve as a sort of gateway to toast enjoyment; I suppose your marketing department could answer that. I do remember that the toaster was a prominent feature of my family's breakfast table, which, let us clearly understand each other here, was also the lunch and dinner table--we were not one of your fancy breakfast-nook-owning families--but Mother would put the toaster back in the cabinet after the morning meal.

Now, here's the peculiar thing about that, the late Mr. Oster: we must have had that same toaster for at least a decade. If you could remember things at this stage, I'm sure you'd remember that such objects take on a sort of totemic power for young children, being, at the same time, a kind of magical amulet and a provider of warmth and comfort. I can, in fact, close my eyes and still smell the warm brown bakelite of the handles and knobs, with their clearly marked numerical progression, and recall how the Art Deco-ish bulge of its chrome body offered literally hours of enjoyment once I discovered it would distort faces most comically, like a household funhouse mirror. And the redorange glow of its elements was mesmerizing, presaging a lifelong fascination with various forms of flammability, something I would eventually turn into a career of sorts. So I remember it clearly, and it was the only toaster I would know until the late 70s ushered in the craze for throwing perfectly good equipment in a landfill, during which time it made toast.

You may have seen where I'm going with this, Mr. Oster; I'm not quite clear how perceptive people in your situation are. Last fall I replaced my previous toaster, which, at a mere five years of age, had lost a portion of its electrical function. (Here I might explain that in the American economy of the 21st century it is both cheaper and faster to replace the entire apparatus than to contrive with ten cents' worth of wire to repair it.) So I cranked up the flivver, bounced my way to my local retailler, and bought a sleek and shiny replacement. As you may have guessed, or not, an Oster.

Now, sir, like you, I imagine, I find myself living a portion of my life in a century for which I was not prepared, though I imagine the dazzling rate of increasing complexity seemed to you like progress. I get home with this product and spend ten minutes reading the instructions. For toast. I mean, sir, I don't generally swear around the deceased, in case they're not partial to it, but what th' fuck? The thing has a setting for bagels, which is fine in a politically-correct sort of way, but there's also a WARM and a FROZEN button which I can't for the life of me figure why anyone would need. And the dial is a marvel of illegibility. There's no marking on the knob itself, which apparently would have demoralized the design staff no end. Instead it has a small ridge between two beveled sections which serves as a marker supposing one has sensitive enough fingers (and, I might point out, small enough to still read the numbers underneath while fondling it). The scale runs from 1 through 7, with dots in between offering what frankly must be termed the illusion of decimal increments of control. In the actual event numbers 1-4, and their fractional handmaidens, do nothing beyond getting the bread slightly warm, which, while it may be some user's cup of tea, does not actually qualify as "toast", and would seem to raise the question about what that WARM switch is doing there.

All of this in fact, sir, I would have learned to live with without too much bother as, in fact, I had until recently, when the thing began to develop a mind of its own, which, although I haven't checked yet, probably signals the warranty has expired. This may have begun when my Poor Wife, who is a notoriously fickle, sensitive, and, well, no need beating around the bush, half-insane eater, as is the rest of her family (at least she doesn't vomit nearly as much as her baby brother, who can be set off by someone trimming the broccoli too long) decided to have some toast one morning instead of whatever godawful coffeeshop provender she usually indulges (a sensitive eater who readily consumes feedlot-quality comestibles prepared by people who were in prison as recently as last week!). She, you might have been able to guess, favors toast in which the color of the bread remains unchanged, and in pursuit of this started fiddling with the dial which, of course, I didn't discover until the next morning, when my own toast popped up so quickly I thought I'd failed to completely engage the switch. And, of course, since what markings there are are in Hipster Design Braille it took another exercise in warming bread to figure out the problem. As I say, I haven't checked the warranty; perhaps "changing the dial once set" voids it.

So this weekend I planned on fixing club sandwiches for lunch. This means, for two of us, six total slices of toast which I generally toast lightly in consideration of my wife's preferences and avoidance of keeping them all straight during assembly. Six total slices of toast, one unchanged setting, yielding four different visual results, including one piece which looked on one side as though it had gotten a suntan through a picket fence. You may compare, sir, that old chrome model of my youth, which, rescued by some landfill archaeologist, is probably available on eBay as we speak, listed as "works great!"

I write to you, Mr. Oster, not because I cannot contact the company online, or because I imagine that you still have some pull there, but because it is your name on the thing ("Oster: The Quality Goes In Before The Name Of Some Guy Who Died Thirty Years Before His Company Ever Made A Toaster Goes On") and I feel this makes us partners in grievance. And I was wondering if it's true that the dead can shoot laser beams out of their eyes, or cause people to stab themselves with their own letter openers, or raise maps of painful boils, anything the people responsible for this thing deserve? A simple haunting, if that's the one interaction you're permitted, would be satisfactory. I remain, sir, yours in spirit.

Sincerely,


James B. S. Riley

JBSR: dc

Friday Cat Blogging

Slightly Evil Larry™  is not unaccustomed 

to finding himself on a pedestal.

These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)

ON my last raid on Half-Price Books I picked up John Keegan's one-volume The First World War which I successfully dug down to a couple days ago and began reading.  (Keegan is easy to distinguish from the American Kagan tribe; he's the one who writes non-fiction.)

On 4 October an advance guard of the Royal Naval Division, which had landed at Dunkirk on 19 September and had meanwhile roamed western Belgium, arrived in Antwerp by train.  In its wake appeared the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, thirsting for action and glory.

Which is what makes the real Churchill easy to distinguish from the one the Right used to pretend (ah, nostalgia!) was inhabiting the White House:  the object of their respective thirsts.*

________

* The Churchill of the American Right is himself a pretend Churchill in many respects, but that's a post for a day when my gutters aren't clogged with maple droppings.

 

Sure, Everybody Wants To Party, But When It Comes Time To Help Clean Up They're Too Hungover.

I can't tell you how heartwarming it's been for a withered misanthrope to watch as millennial waves of fresh young Democrats adopted "old white woman" as a favored pejorative.

--Doghouse Riley

LEG pain: intermittent. Still bad at night, but mostly manageable with Alleve; kneeling in the garden possible, though I look like a crippled bug trying to get down there, and the pain upon attempting to rise again may be described as "blinding". I actually had this conversation with the orthopedist:

RILEY: The thing I can't do is kneel down.

DOC: Try not to do that.

There goes my conversion to Catholicism, especially under the current regime.

They switched me from Vicodin to Tramadol, which is the methadone of low-rent opioids. Listen, you fucks, I was abusing stuff ten times this strong when you were still cramming for your SATs! I tried to explain. And I got a script for Celebrex®, a medication which, to judge from the packaging of the samples I was given, can only be described as enthusiastic, as you would be too, if you were a Pfizer rep. Celebrex® restricts the user to Tylenol™ for other pain-relief needs, which is like telling me that in case of a splitting headache I can take two pieces of candy corn every four hours.

So Spring is here in extremis, and there are crows nesting in the big pine out back, and flickers and downy woodpeckers in front, and the garden looks as good as it ever will, especially considering that the gardener moves like The Human Torso in Freaks. And my Poor Wife is counting the two weeks to school's end, and her students are already gone, spiritually. There are many things to be said about the anti-unionist forces allied against the teaching profession, but among the most incisive is that anyone who bitches about how much vacation time teachers get has never taught the last two weeks of a school year.

And the carnival left town, which caused me to reflect on the fact that after a full month of unexpected (and somewhat undeserved) national campaigning Hoosiers seem to have come out the other side no more intelligent than before.

How much money do we spend on these things, again?

There was one, surprising exception--Governor Mitch "The Mighty Atom" Daniels, who ran unopposed, is still running campaign ads! And they're new, or else I would have suspected a) a scheduling glitch or b) typical power-structure collusion. And the goddam thing looks like a cross between a super-hero flick trailer and a sports aid drink campaign:

Lord, their internal polling must be even worse than what the Racist Star reported.

This may, or may not, have been why I got up this morning, but then catching up with yesterday's news has become something of a habit at this point, and I was shocked, shocked! to discover certain Obama supporters beginning to ask Democrats to move past Hillary, beginning, not surprisingly, with Hillary supporters, a concern which roughly doubled the usual number of comments to which "lying old bag" was appended, and which engendered my reply above. Soar high, Young Democrat! I think this idea of talking like a Republican, except about your own party, shows enormous potential in managing to lose a gimme national election in new and exciting ways.

That's not what I predict, and, Lord knows, however much I dislike both Democratic candidates, John McCain doesn't even register on the same scale. But the simple fact that this stuff can't be turned off owes, not to an anonymous rabble, but to a partisan campaign driven, Kos-like, by the desire to Just Win.

If that has a point I'll climb on board, but if it does someone has to explain it to me. Common sense and conventional wisdom both say it's a Democratic year; standard functional intelligence says you don't take anything for granted, especially once an election becomes binary. It's perhaps a shocking revelation, but middle-class or working-class Middle Americans don't really give a shit what bloggers think, and, as such, if the New Breed imagines it can win elections without them I say go for it. You can always blame your loss on their bigoted ignorance.

I used to discount this "divided Democrat" business, but I've been forced to give it another look. The sad thing to me is that none of it needed to happen; the Big Whoop of the campaign is that Obama did not receive his coronet in New Hampshire. The race ran absolutely true to form thereafter.  But his supporters--let's be fair, huh?--went apeshit.  Clinton slagging, in the long run, hurt the Obama campaign by drawing the line even more starkly. Before New Hampshire Senator Obama had a minor problem with genuine racists, one that it would have been hard for them to create much trouble about in an open forum. Afterwards he had a problem with his supporters calling all non-supporters racists. It's this fissure through which Jeremiah Wright pokes his head. In March, Senator Obama responds with a "masterful speech on race"; by late April he's being battered on the same issue by people like Brooks and Noonan who'd had no opening before. You may try if you wish to convince me that the portrayal of Clinton supporters as backwards, toothless, cousin-marryin' racists did not turn this into a major fault.

History walks backwards, like a crab; each generation learns that backwards, too. The practice of noticing things right after they fall on your head is time-honored, and none too smart.

If You Make A Dog Politically Relevant For A Month He Won't Turn Around And Bite You.

Headline, Indianapolis Racist Star online:

Clinton's Chances Dwindling

AFTER a month of being told how exciting it was to finally be involved in the political process, Hoosiers wake up the next morning and are told their votes didn't actually mean squat, but it sure was fun pretendin', wasn't it?

Best moment: when some wise-ass local reporter--I came in in the middle, or else I'd buy him lunch--asked some of these newly-politically-energized Hoosier voters to name the two Democratic candidates for governor. Guiltiest pleasure: Dan Burton renominated; nothing but being caught with two live boys or dead hookers, or the most fiendish redistricting in US history come 2010, can now prevent the day when Burton is found dead in his office, with his pants on backwards, an indelible, full-denture smile on his face, and a fire blazing in the fireplace being fed documents by a half-dozen aides.

There's added joy in Burton's victory in that Republicans throughout the state are done with him, all except for his constituency. A few weeks ago Professional Republican shill Racist Star political columnist Matt Tully wrote a piece critical of Burton, then wrote one about the "response" to his column by printing nothing but favorable comments. Enjoy the millstone, Indiana Republicans! It's a bit showy for daytime, but it sure does fit you well.

Biggest disappointment: Republicans in my own district nominate smarmy proven loser and legislative timecard cheat Jon Elrod over Cat Ping. Cat Ping! is defeated. I'll never understand Republicans.

It's Because You Don't Know.

I EAT out maybe four times a year, generally family occasions where someone else has simultaneously made the reservation and assured that I'll have a miserable meal in unspeakable surroundings. Still this is about four times as often as I read the Cool Kids--I don't even follow links there anymore--and roughly twice the pleasure. The last time I found myself anywhere near them--can't for the life of me think why--Ezra was excoriating Parker Brothers for their harassment of the Scrabble™ pirates at Scrabulous, seeming for all the world to be completely and blissfully unaware of the requirements of holding a trademark I imagined everyone learned by grade 6 (Kleenex™, cellophane, Coke™, trampoline), not to mention the peculiar notions about economic ethics and the behavior of behemoth corporations. I've stopped reading more than one blog because someone said "as Matt points out..." more than twice.

But hey, live and let live. Yglesias and Klein are at least readable, if one foregoes one's devotion to English, and as for McArdle, there's always Roy to read her.

I got there late. Seems the Cool Kids got all hot and bothered by the condescending tone of this Times piece on chain restaurants, though where it is they found the condescension I'm still not clear. It's all handled well by Roy's commenters, who point out, among other things, that the article in question didn't sneer, and wasn't even as critical as it might be, that both the reverse snobbery and the reverse classism [ 1) all snooty New Yorkers are from Peoria 2) chain restaurants are therefore their national cuisine 3) therefore their dislike of chains is simple pretension] is bogus, and, somewhat surprisingly to me, that the delicacies at Olive Garden are one variety of corporately-distributed frozen Boil-In-Bag grub or another.

(Let me explain: maybe I shouldn't find that all that surprising; it's just that it flies in the face of common sense as well as culinary wisdom. Pasta is ages-old fast food. You could cook all the pasta you needed for the weekend Thursday afternoon--excepting the really tiny stuff like capellini, which takes one minute to cook from dry--and drop it in boiling water to reheat when needed. No compromise in quality. Why freeze? The people who run these Concepts will tell you it's quality control and chain-wide uniformity of product, which is bullshit; it's the ability to short labor costs and rampant employee turnover.)

Before we move on to Ezra, honorable mention to Susan of Texas, for this response to "Why would anybody read the Atlantic's columnists?"

When you ignore them they multiply, like little supply-side rats.

So, as to Ezra (because I have no idea why anyone would have me-too'd the piece, unless they're just always doing this). He thinks the Times went too damn far, even if he feels their pain:

I'm pretty much your consummate coastal elite (I biked back from the farmer's market today with a baguette and artisan cheese fastened to my rack)

Y'see, the thing is, Ezra, behaving like a caricature might make you a caricature, or even a paragon of caricature-ness, but it does not make you any more elite than anyone else who reads the same fucking magazines and espouses the same carefully selected "tastes". That comment is twice as condescending as anything in the Times piece, which merely occasionally disdained a group of corporate operators who deserve occasional disdain. You and your cohort grew up in an atmosphere of celebrity chefs and cooking networks and Bon Appétit, and so you imagine that, having inhaled enough culture dust, you're all officially gourmands by now, able and accredited to denounce fusty food snobbery in the name of the Little People.

Pah. It's painless expertise, and unearned (later, seeking an adjectival gotcha to substitute for any evidence supporting his thesis--these folks really ought to learn to keep their opinions about grammar wars and Middle East ground combat to themselves--Ezra will ask, "Can a batter really be 'insipid'?" And rather than point out that "insipid" can mean "lacking vitality or imagination" as well as flavor, we will stick to the subject and note that even batters lacking distinct flavoring agents [beer, brandy] may be designed specifically for meat, fish, vegetables, or fruit, and of varying viscosities, and as such may be horribly misused--obscuring, say, the delicate flavor of seafood, as Ms Cook reported). Palates are born, not made; still, their training is more arduous than cycling to the market. It's possible there are a few out there worth listening to which are attached to people still in their early twenties (the adult palate generally surfaces around age 25; before then you are clamoring for the sweet gooeyness of Not Poison and the, yes, insipid richness of Mother's milk. Afterwards you will long simply for the container) but if so they belong to people raised in the restaurant business or the wealthiest homes, not to everyone who buys Swiss truffles. None of them, I daresay, is yours. Had you dedicated yourself to connoisseurship these would be the early days of your learning to distinguish St. Julien from St. Estèphe, or Nahe from Rheingau, and your tongue would be too busy for any half-assed lecturing.

Take It Back

DON'T get me wrong; the carnival's got to come to your town every so often, and it's gonna be loud and Hair Metal-y, and the rides will be of questionable maintenance, and the games will all be fixed. Under the circumstances it might just as well be democracy, since it probably treats the animals a little better.

But Indiana is no place for this sort of thing. Indiana is a place where other people's enthusiasms are always unfortunate.

Last night one of the screen readers for the local CBS affiliate tossed to some veteran CBS streetwalker so he could inform us that this was the first time in forty years Hoosier votes in a Presidential primary would actually count. Apparently he was just there to check our math, since that's been the point of every other sentence uttered on local news for the past month. Or maybe he was using his Hypno-vision to try to convince Hoosiers it made sense.

If so I'm immune. "You're a veteran CBS newsman, whoever you are, and I'm trying to recall one example of anyone at the Tiffany Net in the last forty years complaining that Indiana wasn't involved enough in the process," I told him, but he didn't seem to get it. "Indiana suddenly matters? Indiana's been a reliable Republican state for those same forty years (which is every other every-other-sentence we've heard the last four weeks). Is there a Republican race still going on? I must've missed it. There are two nominal Democrats nominally left in the race, and as I understand it (if you'll forgive my natural disinterest in other people's enthusiasms, or in Government By The People Who Pay Attention To Such Things) a substantial win in Indiana could, potentially, make the other one cry. Also, if I recall correctly, Iowa and New Hampshire got to choose from among twelve or sixteen Democrats, and we're supposed to be excited about two. Indiana has a statewide inferiority complex, but it's not about Iowa or New Hampshire. This is like getting excited because you're the fourteenth caller and you get to father Madonna's next child.

Leave us recall that the Indiana Voter was already discounted by the Times weeks ago; after six PM tonight no one is going to be analyzing what Hoosiers have to say to the nation, because the answer is Could we get some more breadsticks when you have a minute? We're not selecting a Democratic nominee, we're getting a chance to register which candidate's skid marks we dislike the least.

There's a simple fix to all this, an easy way to make the major party primaries equally accessible to all, and to make the votes of every American count toward the selection of our next President.

Do me a favor and don't look for it.

Next Week: Smith & Wesson Debate Handgun Violence

What: "How to See This Mission Accomplished".


Where: Times Sunday Opinion back page

Intro:  For the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s declaration of the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked nine experts on military affairs to identify a significant challenge facing the American and Iraqi leadership today and to propose one specific step to help overcome that challenge.

The Experts:

L. Paul Bremer III
Anthony Cordesman
Gen. Paul D. Eaton, USA (ret)
Nathaniel Fick, Center for a New American Security
Frederick Kagan
Richard Perle
Danielle Pletka
Kenneth M. Pollack
Anne-Marie Slaughter

Ouch.  Quit It: Slaughter, Huffington Post, March 20:

"Hayden's post and many other commentaries surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion are a microcosm of the problem with our Iraq policy as a whole. The debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion and far too little about how, in Obama's formulation, to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in."

That Aprille With His Shoures Soote

Greenman

shredded LCL

Siberian bugloss

arthritis

Yellow-shafted flicker nest

cyst

I'll Vote In Person, But I'm Seriously Considering Living Here Absentee.*

OUR story so far:

1) Friendless and issueless, Indianapolis Republican mayoral candidate "Lonesome Greg" Ballard attaches himself to the Racist Star's headline writers and makes the city's escalating murder rate his campaign theme. 2) The White People's Property Tax Revolt, LLC., accidentally puts him in the mayor's office. 3) Ballard launches a three-pronged attack on crime: he showily muscles out the Democratic, and democratically-elected, former sheriff who's heading the newly-merged Indianapolis Metro Police Dept.; he appoints a showy committee to demonstrate he's Doing Something, to be headed by former Marion County Prosecutor Scott Newman; and he starts turning up at showy crime-related press ops, jostling current Marion County Prosecutor and former Dan Burton henchman Carl "Facetime" Brizzi for angles.

Now, I have to admit that in the annals of political painting-the-hull-without-scraping-the-barnacles-first this one is remarkably successful, as the Racist Star almost immediately is moved to stop publishing year-to-date crime rate comparisons.

Jump to April 23, when a masked man robs a local bank branch, and in the process shoots Katherin Shuffield, a teller who is pregnant with twins. It's the sort of crime which shocks and outrages a community, unless its mayor and prosecutor turn up on local news to assure the voters they'll hunt the perpetrators down. And it's always nice when they can find the time to make it to dais a couple days later when the arrest of five people is announced with, oh, let's call it fanfare, despite the acknowledgement that none of them was the guy who'd actually robbed the bank and shot Mrs. Shuffield.

Now, first, I'm no criminology expert--I've never even been convicted--but it did seem to me that having five people in on a one-man bank heist would play hell with the overhead. And the whole story gets a mite fuzzy here, because, well, because that's the way the people responsible want it. Apparently acting on a tip, police arrested four men, and the next door neighbor for good measure. The next morning they stopped a guy driving a car matching the description of one that might've been the getaway car. He turns out to have a record and some cocaine. And he gives them the name of the shooter. And by the end of the weekend Metro Police are able to announce the end of a crime spree--two charges of false reporting, plus the coke bust, and the drug paraphernalia/child neglect charges on the neighbor. Neither the mayor nor the prosecutor was on hand for those announcements.

The weekend also brought news that the woman's twins, initially thought to have survived, died of extreme prematurity, while she remained in critical condition.

Which brought Carl Brizzi, who may or may not have once been Danny Burton's chief melon squeezer, back to the spotlight as he demanded that the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™ declare life begins at conception, on the grounds that the man who shot Mrs. Shuffield can only be charged with feticide in the death of her twins, and a Class C felony is barely worth a notch on a hotshot prosecutor's gun.

If convicted he could get as little as two years! scream several dutiful Indiana newspaper columns, as though a case infamous enough to get local politicians fighting for air time might result in a minimum sentence for the guy who gunned down twins. (The presumptive sentence for a Class C felony in Indiana--this is assuming it's all one is charged with--is four years.)

It's an odious crime, to be sure, and anyone with a heart has to feel the loss--meaning we expect our elected legal representatives to be immune--and to hope beyond hope that Mrs. Shuffield survives, whatever that does to Brizzi's conviction rate. But we might look first at what he does not propose to do: raise feticide to a higher class felony, re-formulate the notion of "viability", or call for a ban on, or increased penalties for the use of, semi-automatic handguns like the Tec-9 reportedly used in the shooting. And we might ask, "Why?" Except we know the answer. Rewriting the feticide law--it passed two Republican-controlled Houses in 1999 over the veto of the late Frank O'Bannon--would be messy, arduous, and exacting, and the Indiana State Legislature can only do the first of those. It would expose both the slippery rationale for the law and the serious weaknesses of its enforcement and potential for abuse.

Local teevee coverage was instructive. Brizzi gets his face time, introduced by a warning from the anchor team that his solution "may prove controversial". Why, yes, yes it may. And it may prove cynical and opportunistic, and it might pander to a political constituency the Prosecutor will depend on to fund his further career moves, not that I expect you people to mention those, or investigate anything. Really, we're just thankful you bothered to nod, however briefly.  Both the teleprompter readers and their non-telegenic cousins at the Racist Star saw fit to ask Planned Parenthood of Indiana for comment, just in case somebody in the audience might have missed where all this is supposed to fit in the script.


What we have instead is an episode of 24, where an easily roused rabble imagines recognizing the rights of Blastocyst Americans will put trigger-happy bank robbers in the hellholes where they belong, and leave everyone else alone (excepting the people who intend to move onto abortion providers next). What we don't have is something that'll add one day to the sentence of the perp in question.

That is, of course, assuming we stop holding press conferences and actually find the guy.


__________
*False. I've never voted in an Indiana primary, and I never will so long as one has to declare oneself a member of a major political party.