THINGS I WISH I DIDN'T KNOW: Justices Rehnquist and O'Connor dated each other in college. Now you know it as well. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!
GOD BLESS TINY TIM! Cavanaugh has provoked Unremitting Verse's Will Warren to new heights of wit and wicked cleverness, and we're all better off for it. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, eat your heart out! I won't spoil any of the fun by attempting to excerpt it. I'll just say, click as fast as you can, you won't want to miss this one!
HAS BLOGGING CHANGED JOURNALISM? Well, take a look at National Review Online's new blog, The Corner. It's fantastic!
POOR MARK MORFORD. The Idaho town where he vacations when not living in San Francisco has both a Wal-Mart and a Kmart, and it seems to be more than his fragile soul can bear. Where someone made of stronger stuff, say, a person like myself, might see not just one, but two convenient places to pay less for more, Morford sees "[s]creaming bright perky inescapable American detritus" and "overlit voids of headache-inducing lowbrow goods."
Ah, that explains why some fellow shoppers dropped to their knees, clutching their skulls with howls of pain as we crossed the Wal-Mart threshold. "The goods!" they yelped, "They're not even middle-brow! Sweet! Baby! Jesus! Make! The! Pain! Stop!" Yeah, I was wondering about that.
Here are two things about Wal-Mart and life that Morford doesn't seem to grasp. First, most Americans don't consider themselves rich and some are actually truly poor. Either way, they don't want to pay a dollar more than they have to for anything. Second, there's nothing wrong with the quality of most Wal-Mart goods. I'd like to know where exactly he buys his high-brow toilet paper. Perhaps he frequents some TP boutique in Union Square. For the rest of us, Charmin' is easy on the hiney and cheapest at Wal-Mart. That's good enough for me and for most of America.
I am often frankly dazzled at the array of attractive dry goods available at Wal-Mart. Not everything mind you, but plenty if you look. I mentioned the wooden trouser clamps yesterday. A few weeks ago I bought a very nice pine and canvas folding laundry hamper at Wal-Mart and then saw its twin at Linens N' Things for twice the price. $12 is a quarter of a bottle of single-malt!
The rich of every age have been able to accumulate fine goods. What is so wrong exactly with the poor being able to do the same now? What is so distasteful about a country whose prosperity allows its common workers to live "a life that would have made the Sun King blink," as Tom Wolfe put it in Hooking Up? Even if the masses are buying, don't faint now, lowbrow goods, why is that such a burr in Mark Morford's bum? Does he think everyone should shop at Pottery Barn? He disdains Tarjay's "faux-upscale... formula," but I bet he scowls just as viciously at Restoration Hardware shoppers. You get the feeling that nothing short of a meal of grass in North Korea would make the guy happy. There's only one way to find out. Maybe he could start vacationing there and leave the good Wal-Marts of Idaho alone.
ENRON ROUNDUP: Michael Granof, the man who taught me the meaning of FASB, has a nice piece in the NYT today on Congress' obstruction of accounting standards reform and its role in the Enron debacle, Unaccountable in Washington. Dr. Granof made governmental accounting interesting, if you can believe that, not least of all by convincing us wholeheartedly of the dangers of financial shenanigans.
This Forbes.com article explains how Enron used its own creative accounting standards to overvalue its revenues to such a degree that it was billed as the 7th largest company in the US. It also suggests that FASB neglected its responsiblities as much as it was thwarted by Congress in fulfilling them. Also, Michael W. Lynch has a great summary in Reason of the central issues in the scandal thus far.
QUESTIONS OF PROPORTION: Last week, Steven Den Beste commented on the common European grouse that America does not send the same proportion of its GDP in foreign aid that some European nations do. We send twice as much aid money as France, bien sûr, but our pie is more than twice as big as the French tarte. The intimation is that somehow we are stingy. He identified a lot of ways the US aids the rest of the world that aren't considered traditional aid. Now Andrew Hofer cleverly points out the huge sums of private money doled out by Americans to the rest of the world. The difference is that this money is given voluntarily, not wrenched from someone's wallet and distributed to the masses by the US Government.
WHO DOESN'T LOVE a good war movie? Last night we watched "Patton" again. Mr. Bucher was in some pain of a dental nature and we were almost out of Scotch. So I went out and bought something rather smooth and old to ease his sorrow. Can there be anything more delicious than the smell of good Scotch? It's like a combination of all the good smells in the world married together. It makes me wish my nose was bigger and my gullet more swift.
As is our custom when there is a new bottle of Scotch in the house, we watched "Patton." We drink only a wee bit of it now and again, because it is so dear and because we're not dutiful drunks. Thus, it had been a while since my last run to Wiggie's, and, in the meantime, I had forgotten how good Scott's opening scene is. Here's an excerpt, appropriately enough from manlyweb.com:
You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men. Yes, every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood. Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base. Americans pride themselves on being He Men and they ARE He Men. Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and probably more so. They are not supermen.
I wish that I had thought of reading this a few months ago. There's a lot more, so go read it. The above passage reminds me of my favorite Hemingway quote, from A Farewell to Arms: A brave man dies perhaps two thousand time if he's intelligent, he just doesn't mention it.
TWO THUMBS UP, WAY UP!: Iain Murray points out a brilliant new blogger, Will Warren, who blogs in verse. Here's one of the many jewels on his site, Unremitting Verse:
If My Grocery Store Wrote Me
As My Old College Does
by Will Warren
We opened new vistas to you long ago.
New shoppers are here; can you help them today?
Please send us a gift to allow us to grow.
Remember when you didnšt know of Bordeaux?
Of sourdough bread glistening with salmon pâté?
We opened new vistas to you long ago.
Wešre happy to welcome our new CEO;
Hešs got our big fundraising drive underway:
Please send us a gift to allow us to grow.
How did you survive before deli to go?
Imagine your life without fresh crème brûlée!
We opened new vistas to you long ago.
Wešd like the support of a check apropos;
We need to defray a new produce display:
Please send us a gift to allow us to grow.
The cost of radicchiošs rising, you know;
You donšt want your store to become déclassé:
We opened new vistas to you long ago;
Please send us a gift to allow us to grow.
Copyright 2002 Will Warren
OH, K: The Kmart bankruptcy is no surprise to me. I just went to Kmart the other day, before the Professor reminded me about the NRA's boycott. My mother had been telling me about the Martha Stewart wares being peddled there and I had to check them out. She was right (this tends to happen a lot), Martha's got some nice things for sale at the Big K. But they're not exactly cheap. Well, they were cheaper than anything I've ever seen hawked on marthastewart.com (check out this $56 set of various rare scotch tapes, should you doubt me). Yet the fact that they're being sold at Kmart makes me question their value, despite the Martha label. And I say that as a loyal Wal-Mart shopper. There are plenty of things I wouldn't buy at any discount store, but the purchases I do make at Wal-Mart I rarely regret.
For example, I've been trying desperately to organize the closets and keep them so. A place for everything, and everything in its place, et cetera. In this vein, Martha's Good Things for Organizing has been a great source of inspiration. (I know I bitch about her on a near daily basis-- Martha and I have a very complex relationship.) Her closets are cathedrals of order and taste. There are no cardboard boxes full of crap, for example. All the crap is discretely tucked away in handwoven, linen-lined seagrass baskets, which are each, no doubt, priced higher than several shares of Martha stock. And there are no ugly plastic coat hangers. What isn't folded on the cedar shelves, or nestled in a seagrass box, is hung nicely on its own hanger of wood. Above even the handwoven boxes, I lusted for the wooden coat hangers. And I found some very nicely-priced ones at, you guessed it, Wal-Mart. I also found them at Target for a little more, but they weren't as nice. Unlike the trouser clamps at Target, the wooden clamps at Wal-Mart were lined with felt. And the other day at Kmart, I saw the Martha Stewart version for quite a bit more.
They appeared to all be of the same quality of dead-tree matter, but apparently Kmart feels it can charge more because of the Martha seal of approval. Or perhaps some Faustian deal with Martha requires that they charge much more. Either way, I'm satisfying my pretentious need for elegant hangers at Wal-Mart. I wouldn't be surprised if others are as well.
THE JURY IS IN: Looks like the Labour Party in Britain has abandoned its push to eliminate the right to a jury trial in two-thirds of criminal cases. This should be a relief to everyone who truly values real civil liberties. (Via the excellent Blogs of War)
HEH, HEH, HEH, PART II: While Andrew Sullivan has vowed not mention further Paul Krugman's Enron takings, Mark Steyn summarizes:
Last week, a gazillion paragraphs deep into a butt-numbing roundup of developments in the "rapidly exploding" scandal, the Times confirmed that in 1999 its star economics columnist Paul Krugman had received US$50,000 (that's eightysomething Canadian, probably more if you're reading this after the markets open) for serving on Enron's advisory board. What did this board do? "This was an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of," said the columnist. "My later interpretation is that it was all part of the way they built an image. All in all, I was just another brick in the wall."
And then piles on:
Fifty thousand dollars is a high price to pay even for prestigious nothing. It's not walking away rich, but it's walking away with more than most Enron employees have to show for their years of labour. It's ten thousand more than the median household income of the United States, never mind all those little folks the Prof feels so badly for. The man who sneers at the malign influence of Enron money on Republican politicians -- or, as he calls them "the people Enron put in the White House" -- has received more money from Enron than any member of the House of Representatives. If he were in the Senate, where 71 of 100 members have been endowed with Enron moolah, he would rank in that crowded field as the third biggest beneficiary of the company's generosity. And, whereas the pols' Enron take was stretched out over several election cycles, Professor Krugman got his nice, clean 50,000 in one year. Yet, while he takes it as read that Enron's cheques to Dub and Dick and Senator Sleazebag and Congressman Forsale were in return for something, in his case, he assures us, it was a big fat cheque for ... nothing. So that's OK.I do believe Professor Krugman is getting his Pink Floyd hits muddled up. It's not Another Brick In The Wall he should be singing, but Money, which seems neatly to sum up his world view:
Money, it's a crime
Share it fairly
But don't take a slice of my pie.
HEH, HEH, HEH: It's great to hear that the Al Qaeda prisoners in Gitmo are being guarded by burqua-free women with automatic weapons! No doubt some lily-livered do-gooder will consider that to be a violation of their human rights in some way.
WOW, THIS IS EXCITING SPAM: I got the following email:
From: immortality@post.com
To:
Subject: The most important discovery in the history of mankind!
X-Priority: 3
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 15:18:2 +-0800Today millions of people all over the world receive this letter.
What we longed for and had a presentiment about - has happened. A doctor from Russia
has discovered the secret of the "Elixir of Youth". Whether the pharmacological companies
want it or not, mankind is faced with the fact - the secret of death is opened. Now everyone
can fight with the illnesses by himself, - winning and prolonging the life, - not growing old!Tell your friends and relatives. The whole world should know about it.
Details here: http://long-life.shorturl.com OR http://long-life.da.ru
This is just what I've longed for! Boy, I'm sure the "pharmacological companies" are very very scared now.
YEP, SHE'S NUTTERS: Because of the severity of her crimes, I've reserved judgment so far about Andrea Yates' sanity. Here in Texas, the question is if you understood right from wrong at the moment you committed your crime. Is it not crazy, by most people's everyday definition, to desire to do what you know to be evil? I think you can clearly be fairly off your rocker yet still retain moral agency. In Yates' situation, I've resisted the initial conclusion many people had that any woman who murders her children must be insane. Not everyone is cut out for parenting, and for some murder might be an easy way out. Children are actually more likely to be killed by their mothers than anyone else.
Also, the way that feminists like Anna Quindlen immediately rushed to use Yates' situation to indict motherhood itself sickened me. I have no desire to "understand" the brutal murder of small children, because all to often "understanding" is a precursor to excusing. And, as Mary Eberstadt has pointed out, there seems to be a trend towards reduction in outrage at the killings of small children. Certainly the feminists who rushed to her defense showed a marked lack of even initial outrage at the murders. They were amazingly eager to understand and defend her acts, offering no more condemnation of the killings than one imagines they would have proffered if the children had still been in her womb.
Still, after reading the TIME piece about Andrea Yates, I'm fairly convinced that she'll be ruled insane even by the notoriously strict Texas standard. And it's also obvious to me what led to her initial breakdown-- her husband's insistence that she live with three small children in a bus in Houston's inhospitable climate! Now, there also seems to be insanity in her family, as well as in her pre-marital life, which indicates she was mentally fragile to begin with. That might explain why she acceded to her husband's rigid expectations in the first place. But he clearly doesn't have such a firm grip on reality either. The TIME piece was done with his extensive cooperation, a surprise to me, since I thought there was a gag order. But it explains why the writer doesn't draw the obvious link between the burdens he placed on his wife and her eventual psychotic break. But they are there for one to clearly see.
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: I've been looking at the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War this morning. Little bit of light reading on my day off. For the most part it seems pretty reasonable, though I wonder if the right to access to tobacco would still be included if the Convention were written today. Also, the requirement to have a canteen "installed in all camps, where prisoners of war may procure foodstuffs, soap and tobacco and ordinary articles in daily use" seems to require granting detainees more freedom of movement than would be prudent, given their vicious promises to kill their captors.