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Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett's reviews, news, theories and quibbles.
Monthly Archives: September 2010
More inventions we need.
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1. Prayer books with source footnotes pointing out that “our” religion is a direct descendant of “their religion.”
2. An African American man playing James Bond.
3. Toaster that works in 60 seconds.
4. GPS for socks in the laundry.
5. An iPhone ap for personal body scans in event of mysterious middle-of-the-night pains.
Filed under Business
Sep 28, 2010
Sir James Dyson, slayer of bed bugs?
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Sir James Dyson has done more than any man alive to keep floors clean, breezes flowing, water moving uphill, and hands dry. He is, of course, best known in America for his “root cyclone” vacuum cleaners.
Now is the time for Sir James to truly shine. As the epidemic of bed bugs makes news across America, the nervous itchy population awaits some new way to fight these hardy critters. A recent convention in Chicago brought hundreds of entomologists and pest-control experts together and the consensus was: The bugs are winning.
Who better to invent a device to zap these mattress invaders? Anyone who has experienced the 400 mph winds of a Dyson hand dryer in a restroom knows the man can’t be far from figuring out how to roast, suck up or blow away bugs.
Filed under Business
Sep 28, 2010
Support indy bookstores. And me.
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If you order books from Powell’s through my blog, I get a small kickback. Just use this search box to find the book and order it. The computer magic does the rest. I don’t get any info about you or your book buy. Just the dough. Thank you.
Filed under Ruminations
Sep 24, 2010
It’s true: It gets better.
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For anyone who is getting bullied, left out, harassed because of her or his sexual orientation…or really, any “difference” from the so-called norm…this video project initiated by writer Dan Savage will strike a chord. He’s a professional speaker, so his video is more polished than the others, but the theme is the same: We all just want to be accepted for who we are. The project was initiated as a way to honor a young man who took his own life, and it has grown quite quickly. Check it out.
Sep 24, 2010
A state for the robber barons.
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Columnist Paul Krugman takes a tough stand in his New York Times column. Consider this excerpt:
“…if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.”
As Krugman points out, everyone gets to whine…but things are really going south when Forbes magazine runs a cover story saying that President Obama “is deliberately trying to bring America down as part of his Kenyan, ‘anticolonialist’ agenda, that the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.”
These rich people are obviously terrified. And of what, exactly?
Maybe it would be easier to let this one percent of super-wealthy Americans have their own state. They can elect their friends to leadership positions, ban all state income taxes, and call in their state’s militia when anyone tries to cross the border who doesn’t think the way they think.
Of course, it might be tough to form a state militia. Or get the living rooms cleaned.
As for that clogged bathroom drain…unplug it yourself, moneybags. All the little people are busy helping the President figure out ways to screw you out of your last buck.
Filed under Hate crimes, Race & Class
Sep 21, 2010
Yeah, Nick. I’m sorry too.
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Prejudice, even xenophobia, is not always all about hate. Sometimes it’s about plain ol’ laziness.
This insight dropped on me this morning like the anvil in the old Roadrunner cartoons. Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column, “Message to Muslims: I’m Sorry” was the shove.
Kristof makes the point that those of us who fume over the question “Why don’t moderate Muslims speak up against extremists?” should also ask another question:
Why don’t I, a moderate non-Muslim in America, speak up against the extremists in my own country?
Well, let’s see. I guess I’ve decided that Tea Party folks, Fox News, Rush Whatshisname, and followers of Sarah Palin are so absurd that there’s no reason to spend time debating their hateful and demoralizing messages and their flatly untrue “reporting.”
And I guess I’ve shrugged off the Arizona approach to illegal immigration because it seems so patently ineffective that it is beside the point to decry its racism.
And maybe because our tax structure is easily dismissed as slimy self-interested rich people taking care of their own, I haven’t felt much need to point out that it is systematic discrimination and larceny directed at the working poor.
In other words, because it is easier to ask: Why don’t those moderate Muslims stand up for what’s right?
I’ll tell you what: I’ll do better.
As with any new exercise, I’ll start slow. Whenever I hear someone trot out that moderate Muslim criticism, I’ll look up from my full plate in my cozy home long enough to say: Bullshit.
I can do it, I know I can.
Sep 19, 2010
Stuyvesant would have liked Fox News.
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Historian Jonathan Sarna wrote this in the The Jewish Daily Forward recently, referencing Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Amsterdam (now known as the Big Apple), who lived 1647-1664.
An excerpt:
In distancing himself from Peter Stuyvesant and the many others who have defined American religious liberty in narrowly restrictive terms, [Bloomburg] reminds us that if today’s target is the mosque, yesterday’s was most assuredly the synagogue.
(Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and chief historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History. He’s the author of the excellent book, Judaism: A History. The book should be on every American history buff’s bookshelf.)
Yup, the little woman is clever.
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Last week I wrote a long overdue fan letter to our health care provider about the terrific attention my husband received from hospital staff more than a year ago.
A note came back promptly from Member Relations, addressed to him, which said:
“Thank you for the letter submitted by your wife in which she expressed your satisfaction…”
It’s not often that a big health care operation seizes the opportunity to thank a guy for his wife’s actions.
Sep 16, 2010
Escapist reading has its uses.
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If you wait long enough, your favorite theories will be proven by some researcher, somewhere. If you’re very lucky, the research will be explained by a talented reporter.
Some years ago I returned to college as a full-time student. It was the first time I’d studied for exams in more than 20 years. Okay, if I’m honest, it was probably the first time I’d ever studied for exams, period.
I discovered a technique, by accident, that helped me retain information. The week before exams, I read through my notes from textbook readings and class lectures. I read those notes for 30 minutes or so, then took a break. During the break I read a trashy period-piece novel with very detailed descriptions of places, furnishings and clothing. It had a plot so predictable that it took almost no thinking to absorb what was going on.
I aced the exam.
Now perhaps I know why it worked. As reporter Ben Carey explains in The New York Times:
The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
It’s not exactly what Carey is describing, but close. For me “background associations” were not the physical rooms in which I studied, but the places I saw in my mind while reading the novel.
This is cool stuff. Read Carey’s piece, here.
And the next time you have to read and learn material, try switching locations. If nothing else, it will acquaint you with new coffee shops.
This is your brain on my blog.
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Clip this article, get a sharp pin, and attach it to the shin/arm/other appendage of anyone whose life will be better if they understand how drug/alcohol abuse works.
And, as long as you’re going to that much trouble…make a few copies and leave them in every exam room, waiting area and restroom at your medical-care facility. Some of the folks there need to know about the real science behind addiction.
Filed under Drugs & Alcohol, Health
Sep 13, 2010
Give Mom a check, and she’ll spend it on rent.
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This post by Paula Span on The New Old Age blog in The New York Times is intriguing. It makes sense, but who knew Social Security had this effect so quickly?
(I’ve excerpted, then edited it down. See the whole piece here.)
In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, almost 70 percent of elderly widows lived with an adult child; by 1990, that proportion had plummeted to 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau.
Economists Robert F. Schoeni of the University of Michigan and Kathleen McGarry, now at Dartmouth College, investigated this phenomenon, using more than a century of Census data showing where elderly widows resided…they pinpointed the year the big change began: 1940. After that, the graph depicting the percentage of widows living with children resembles a ski slope: down, down and down some more, until by 1990 more than 60 percent of widows lived ALONE.
So what happened in 1940? The economists, testing various hypotheses, found a far simpler explanation.
In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. In 1940, the monthly checks began to flow. And even those tiny checks — Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., got the first one, for $22.54 — were enough to allow widows, who had historically high poverty rates, to remain in their homes. As Social Security benefits rose and reached a larger proportion of the elderly, the trend toward remaining at home accelerated.
The single greatest factor driving this immense cultural shift, in other words, was economic. Once elders no longer had to move in with their children to survive, most opted not to.
“When they have more income and they have a choice of how to live, they choose to live alone,” Ms. McGarry said. “They buy their independence.”
Sep 9, 2010
Stand for tolerance at the bookstore.
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Burning books doesn’t cut it. Here’s one response to the Florida nutcase pretending to be an observant Christian, and others who believe their faith tradition should be the only one.
Want to join in and buy a Qur’an? I did.
Sep 9, 2010
A toast to life.
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Booze, the great giver of….well, what?
If you guessed “a red nose and a lot of apologies” you have not been listening to TV news.
A respected study has shown that moderate drinking in one’s later years leads to a longer life. The University of Texas at Austin study looked at 1,824 people, age 55 to 65, for twenty years. “Moderate” drinking is defined as one to less-than-three drinks per day.
By the time the study had been “reported” through a full 24-hour news cycle, it had boiled down even more. I watched as the statement “Three drinks a day can help you live longer” crawled repeatedly across the bottom of the TV screen.
Yes, and lying down on the freeway can help you sleep better.
Even with my shockingly limited science background I was able to trudge through the original report, and see that this was misrepresented from start to finish.
It appears that there is indeed evidence that people who take a drink now and then can be longer-lived than abstainers. The bigger issue, for me, is that definition of “moderate” as one to less than three drinks a day. That’s less alarming than the truncated TV-news summary, but I still wonder. That’s 7 or 14 or almost 21 drinks a week. The only time in my life I thought even 7 drinks a week was moderate was when I was losing count.
The writers of the report and other experts have bent over backwards to stress that these findings are not a reason to let ol’ Johnny Walker nestle in there next to the B Vitamins and wheat germ on the shelf. But, alas, the sound byte is winning.
It reminds me of Animal Farm, when the Seven Commandments observed by the critters (“Whatever goes on four legs or has wings in a friend” and “No animal shall sleep in a bed…wear clothes…drink alcohol…kill another animal” etc.) gets reduced to “Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better!”
We do love to reduce things to the one-liner that justifies our excesses, don’t we?
Filed under Drugs & Alcohol, Human nature
Sep 5, 2010
Who’s in charge around here?
I’m a former daily newspaper journalist who worked in the Pacific Northwest and New England. Now a book reviewer, writer, editor, iMac user.
Read more in the About section.
Email me at kimberly@typelikethewind.com
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