It happened before. (Midterm elections causing Democratic hearts to sink.)
And, here are some good answers to the question, What’s Obama Done for Me Lately?
Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett's reviews, news, theories and quibbles.
Hosed.
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If you are in America, make it to your 50s, and have some combination of insurance, alarm about inevitable personal decline, relevant family history and inability to ignore physician edicts, you will probably have a colonoscopy.
No matter what you read or hear, you will wish you could avoid this procedure; if for no other reason than it seems just plain wrong to pay a stranger to do this.
Afterward, you will become one of the veterans who assure others it is a walk in the park. Armed with two gallons of lemon Gatorade and a stack of reading material, the prep is tolerable. The procedure is easier to navigate than an appointment for a root canal. If you’ve given birth, this will not slow you down at all. You’ve been on the beaches of Normandy; this is a parking ticket.
One nagging question remains unanswered. If they don’t find anything wrong in there, how do you actually know they did anything?
The oxymoronic “conscious sedation” works so well that you don’t remember anything that proves the procedure took place. They wheeled you in and next thing you knew, a nice nurse is offering you some apple juice and handing you your clothes. Other than a mad scramble for a BLT and a large chocolate milkshake, the aftermath is uneventful.
What if–as my mother (of blessed memory) used to insist about NASA’s space program in the 1960s—they faked the whole thing on a sound stage?
We may all be part of a conspiracy much larger than we can imagine. And what with the slashed budgets at daily newspapers, it might be awhile before anyone gets the goods on this one.
Leo Cullum, pilot, cartoonist and honorary critter.
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You may not know the name “Leo Cullum,” but his voluble owls, dogs, anchovies and doctors made you laugh. The prolific New Yorker cartoonist has died, leaving behind a delightful archive.
The obit for Cullum in The New York Times by William Grimes is the rare one for a famous person that lists no sins or weaknesses alongside the accomplishments.
Cullum started cartooning later in life, and quickly developed a style of clever, deadpan humor conveyed in deceptively simple line drawings, often featuring animals. He earned his living previously as a pilot, starting out as a military flier. His quote about his Vietnam War service is a cartoon without a drawing:
“In 1966 he was sent to Vietnam, where he flew 200 missions, most in support of ground-troop operations, but at one point he flew secret bombing runs over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. ‘Who these were secret from I’m still not sure,” Mr. Cullum told Holy Cross magazine in 2006. “The North Vietnamese certainly knew it wasn’t the Swiss bombing them.’ ”
“Blind Man’s Alley” is good, semi-trashy read.
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You wouldn’t think a thriller about a New York City developer and the lawyers who represent him would be a page turner, but Justin Peacock’s novel, “Blind Man’s Alley” is, in fact, just that.
His characters’ dialogue rings true; the lawyers, real estate robber barons, and the journalists are well cast; New York City is as much of a player in the plot as any human. There’s even some biracial angst and the realistic amount of sex possible for a lawyer who works 80 hours a week. It won’t be long before this one is a movie, I’ll wager.
(If you order the book through the Powell’s link below, I get a small kickback. I don’t get any info about you or your purchase.)
Filed under All tucked in and reading, Books
End of life prose.
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This is a remarkably good article about dying. Don’t get all squeamish now, just buck up and read it.
It’s hard to believe that with all the talk about advance directives, patient rights, hospice and other related topics, there is anything new to say. Yet, as this New Yorker article by Atul Gawande shows, this is a subject with nuances inside of nuances. It is a rare view inside a doctor’s brain, as honest as anything you’ve read.
Land of (limited) milk and honey.
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We Americans have a hard time deciding if we’re a Land of Opportunity or Opportunism.
We’ve got a thriving “income defense industry,” which New York Times writer Paul Sullivan defines as “accountants, lawyers and financial advisers employed by the wealthy — and the merely affluent — to manage their financial affairs.” (See the entire article, here.)
Now, there’s nothing wrong with holding on to your hard-earned gains, but much of what these defenders do amounts to standing on the necks of those living way down the food chain. The money-guarders’ machinations mean more tax dollars are growing interest off in distant accounts, not here at home paying for schools and roads.
Yet some of the tax dollars that are collected end up funding programs that do help the little gal. Case in point (and written about in the same issue of the NYT) is the feds’ 203(k) mortgage program. This little-touted method of borrowing allows us to buy ailing properties with small down payments and then renovate them under what seem like some wisely strict regulations. (Lynnley Browning’s article, here.)
Even when we have a good idea that benefits the worker bee in our society, we seem to make sure it doesn’t fully succeed. (For a start, can’t someone give better names to these tax-status things? Let’s branch out to punctuation marks at least: the 203(!) program would look a lot more upbeat, wouldn’t it?)
What we need is a better income defense industry for the regular folks. That used to be the job of elected officials, but, well, they’re busy elsewhere.
Nerd humor.
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I don’t even need to fully understand this cartoon to find it funny.
Filed under Tech
The bookworm turns.
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The summer/fall reading list has been updated. Check it out, here.
Filed under Books
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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