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Funny
Nothing is stranger than reading the New York Times discuss NASCAR
For a certain segment of the population, Nascar’s raid on American culture — its logo festoons everything from cellphones to honey jars to post office walls to panties; race coverage, it can seem, has bumped everything else off television; and, most piercingly, Nascar dads now get to pick our presidents — triggers the kind of fearful trembling the citizens of Gaul felt as the Huns came thundering over the hills. To these people, stock-car racing represents all that’s unsavory about red-state America: fossil-fuel bingeing; lust for violence; racial segregation; run-away Republicanism; anti-intellectualism (how much brain matter is required to go fast and turn left, ad infinitum?); the corn-pone memes of God and guns and guts; crass corporatization; Toby Keith anthems; and, of course, exquisitely bad fashion sense. What’s more, they simply don’t get it. What’s the appeal of watching . . . traffic? It’s as if ”Hee Haw” reruns were dominating prime time, and the Republic was slapping its collective knee at Grandpa Jones’s ”What’s for supper?” routine. With Nascar’s recent purchase of a swath of real estate on Staten Island, where it intends to plop down an 80,000-seat racetrack and retail center for the untapped New York City market, the onslaught seems poised on the brink of full-out conquest. Cover your ears, blue America. The Huns are revving their engines.
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Sunday link smorgasbord
- ChicagoCrime.org – a wonderful marriage of Google Maps and publicly available crime stats. Now one can see where the bad neighborhoods really are. Hat Tip: Defense Tech
- Arnold Kling on starting a business instead of going to college.
- From one of the Jane Galt Commenters:
“Warning: the author of this piece is completely absent in any training in mathematics, science, or any other discipline involving rigorous thought that might qualify them to form a decent critical opinion. Read with caution.”
- Very good thoughts over at the Belmont Club, particularly “We live in a strange world where the Beslan story vanishes in weeks while Abu Ghraib lives on for years.”
- The Daily Pundit’s has come up with a very good blogger’s kit.
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Perfectly put
From Will Wilkinson’s blog
Should we expect less bottom to top, number one with a bullet, mobility as an economy grows wealthier overall?
Yes. People are constantly confused by the growing gap between the rich and poor. This is good thing, not a bad thing. If the bottom is fixed, at zero income, and the top keeps going higher, you’ve got a bigger gap. But lots of people are better off and nobody is worse off. Similarly, if the lowest quintile is anchored by a fixed bottom, and the top is untethered and rising, the distance from the bottom to the top will increase. The distance from the bottom to the middle will increase. So it will take longer to get there. If today’s middle is equivalent in real terms to yesteryear’s top, people who are going from the bottom to the middle are doing no worse than people of yore who went from the bottom to the top (even if we assume, counterfactually, that there has been no change in quality of life for people at the bottom.)
We should be AIMING at a system where the middle of the middle is, say $500,000 per annum, and so the trip from the bottom of the bottom to the top of the bottom, much less to the middle of middle, is a VERY BIG trip indeed.
The original post is here. I wonder why I’ve never heard that arguement put that way before. It’s the standard economic reasoning for a positive sum game, but that line is the best you’re going to see in terms of delivery.
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Saturday fights
I just saw Lamon Brewster knock out Andrew Golota. After the fight he offers condolences to Larry Merchant on a death in the family. A class act all the way, in the ring and the interview.
Oddly enough, then I go to his website, and while he does have a flash intro (bad in my opinion) it’s done in a comic book style, which is good. He also has an “Ask Lamon” feature to the site which more athlete/celebrity sites should have.
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Just got Team America
I just picked up the DVD, only the 5th non-instructional DVD I’ve ever purchased,and I have to say, it was as good as I remembered. It was as vulgar as I remembered too. Actually it was the most vulgar movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen Bad Lieutenant. There were only about 5 minutes of deleted scenes, and I’m not sure why they deleted some of them (though many were understandable to get the R rating). -
Post Secret
Post Secret just freaked me yesterday, it’s clean, weird and creepy. From their description:
PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.
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It’s odd
That no one has discussed the similarities and differences between the current Newsweek fiasco and the Valerie Plame affair. Both were anonymous sources, both were damaging and both were very political.
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And please join me in welcoming….
Leland-Nation to the blogosphere.
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Saw Revenge of the Sith
Mark and I saw Revenge of the Sith, and unlike many of the reviewers I liked it quite a bit, I hadn’t seen the previous two but this one stood on it’s own quite well. Eric was supposed to meet us but had car problems.
While walking back to the car Mark and I saw this bumper sticker (which was pretty good)
And this car, which is hilarious, inspired by the Napoleon Dynamite movie evidently.
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The worst job ever
The worst job of all time is dead body smell tester. In Israel the IDF is training their search and rescue people to do their jobs in the presence of dead body scent.
Could you imagine the product testing for this? The article says that they
Rescue and medical professionals, who are familiar with the stench from personal experience, tested several chemical and organic substances before finding the exact “smell of death
That must have been awful couple of days. “How about this one? Too alive This one? Too dead. This one, that’s perfect, its smells just like death!”