Seven Sons

So I’m in Clarksville, Tennessee a town that services Ft. Campbell, KY.
We’re staying just off of I-24 at an Interstate island featuring a
strip of strip malls and big box stores, 10-15 fast food franchises
and adult book stores, mammoth, ever-glowing 50 telescoping signs for
McDonalds, Shell, Applebees and about 40 other places.

I walked from the hotel over to a nearby Target after dinner.  On my
left, very easy to miss, is a fenced-in, civil war graveyard founded
sometime around 1855.  It is sandwiched between the Marriott
Courtyard, the Days Inn, the Homewood Suites and some other chain
dump, bathed in the light of all that is the meeting of I-24 and US
79.

I simply can’t imagine a worse place to lay for eternity.  Thanks for
your sacrifice, young Tennesseeans.  In return, won’t you please
accept this garishly-lit eternal resting place along a six lane
boulevard lined with grease pits, gas stations and porn shops?
Thanks.  Hopefully not too many Big Gulp cups fall upon you.

Okay. So I get this offer. From AT&T. It’s literally so not good I can’t not comment on it.

Here’s the pitch:

I can get “upto” five bars in my own home by buying this AT&T/Cisco prop from Tron for the low, low price of $150. What this magic device does is apparently poach bandwidth from your broadband connection.

Wait. It gets better. You could get a $100 rebate if you sign up for a $19.99 a month calling plan that gives you:

So, I can save $100 by spending $239.88 a year to help AT&T with their spotty network issues. Go. Me.

Thankfully, this is not an issue. I have, on average, 4 bars here. In my secret lair. So I decidedly won’t be contributing to the cause. And I’ll continue to have all my bandwidth for. . . research.

But you might like it. Visit AT&T’s site (featuring music that may drive you insane) or read Engadget’s unboxing.

Of course, I’m curious if this intersects at all somewhere down the litigation/Karma spectrum for AT&T doing an about face on iPhone applications using VOIP on their wireless network. I’ll leave to it to smarter people to chime in, but as far as I can tell this is the Bizarro version of that.

And if anybody has any insight into how much pipe this thing leaches: Post up below.

I’m not sure that the rule-of-threes applies to the death of a magazine. But it deserves an obituary.

I’ll start by saying I’m not much of a food magazine guy. I love to cook, but only because I love to eat. I like photos of food, and appreciate “food porn” as much as the next person, but every photo I have taken of something in my kitchen ends up looking like pancakes. I get Cooks Illustrated, but that’s more like an instruction manual for cooking engineers as opposed to a celebration of the artistic aspects of cooking.

I love to read about food. I came of age in my love for food writing with Bourdain’s seminal “Kitchen Confidential,” but quickly discovered more true artistry in Ruth Reichl and Molly O’Neill. I read MFK Fisher’s translation of Brillat-Savarin and then listened closely when she taught me how to cook a wolf. Lately I have been enthralled by Rochelle Bilow and this weekend I plowed through the Julie/Julia book by Julie Powell (can’t imagine the movie is as satisfying).

And today, maybe not so much tomorrow, but today… I am forced to confront a death of something important that I knew, but not well. Like losing a famous aunt whose home you have never visited. A magazine, silly enough, that I have bought maybe once or twice at the news stand, and ignored every ad in it. A periodical I cherished in absentia because of the name on the masthead. I’m not idealistic enough to feel any guilt about helping cause the downfall of Gourmet, but I am enough of a history buff to recognize the need to celebrate its 70 years of history, the comfort it provided in spite of its commercial nature, and the headlines that its death will garner in contrast to its lack of widespread notoriety in life.

Ruth Reichl, the erstwhile editor of Gourmet and the protagonist of several incredible (meaning hard to believe but nevertheless true), poignant books centered around food, may retire in comfort tomorrow. One can only hope that the passion she exudes in her autobiographies is real enough to keep her written word in constant circulation in a post-Gourmet world. With the charity of history her epitaph will not read “the last editor of Gourmet magazine.” It will read “an artist whose palette was taste and whose media was the written word.”

Rest in peace, Gourmet magazine.

I know I shouldn’t wear it like a badge of honor, but today when I heard his name on the radio, I realized with some smugness that I must have been one of the few people in the entire nation who thought it was pronounced like “caine” instead of like “con-yay”.

This photo speaks for itself; what it says, I suspect, is entirely up to the listener. The man in the picture is picking up loose change off the street. Thanks to ChezWhat for keeping a cell phone cocked and ready for photo opportunities like this.

Hope for Change

I started a class on Chi Running today.  It’s supposed to be a blend of Tai Chi and running that uses mental focus, posture and the martial arts’ focus on core strength to avoid injury and increase efficiency.  No matter–within 5 minutes my addled mind had left all that behind and was cranking out David Carradine jokes.  Running with a rope around your neck and pants around your ankles is apparently bad for you.

Once that had run its course, I noticed the instructor was still talking so I began to listen and follow.  I got the parts about elongating my spine and relaxing my shoulders.  But lifting my pelvis?  That took awhile.  Then it was to the track to start running while holding the position of a store window mannequin.  It did get easier with each lap and the additional focus on striking with the midfoot and not the heel helped as well.  The focus on efficiency is right up my alley and I discovered that I’d already been trying to do a lot of this on my own but didn’t know how.  I still don’t but maybe after 6 classes I will.

That said, my knees were killing me by the time I left.  Only ran a mile or so today.  Ran three yesterday and will go four tomorrow and due to the excessive heat, nearly all of my runs for the past 2 weeks have occurred on a 1/16th mile indoor track.  The constant turning and changing stride has begun to play havoc with my shins and knees.  So tomorrow I’ll head out on the road at 6am, I prefer road work anyway.

The culmination of this class is a 5k sponsored by our church.  That will be my first actual organized event.

The current health care system is riddled with inefficiency. Health insurance companies spend, what, 1/3 of their money on overhead? Vs 1/2 of 1% for Medicare? I’m not saying reproduce Medicare, but there’s a hell of a lot of room between 33% and .5% for cutting. And let’s not get into Big Pharma and their advertising budgets for Celebrex or whatever they’re pushing this month (God damn the pusher man…)

Give me a public option plan, minimal overhead like Medicare that lists exactly what they will pay for and how much (be it a drug or a procedure), and watch it drive down everyone else’s fat-ass profit margins to something far more reasonable. You don’t think providers will take patients from a public plan that covers 20% of the population? They’ll just ignore that?

Seriously, THIS IS NOT FUCKING HARD. A ten-year old can grasp the math. You don’t need a degree in economics, just basic sense. But ten-year olds don’t need campaign money if they want to turn 11.

Story on CNN.com today, out of the blue, about how sex scandals can be bipartisan. Thank you for reminding us that Democrats also have dicks (if they only had balls to go with them). Blatant overcompensation–the second Dem example is Gary Hart, whose scandal was barely pre-dated by the most recent Scritti Politti album. There are legally-drinking college graduates who were not alive when that happened. The other Democratic examples were Spitzer and that drunk senator who flipped for the stripper in 1974. The Pinto debuted in 1974 so, yeah, that’s timely. Assinine.

Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz throws it down. We’re going to be paying for this for a long time–weak economic growth due to poor economic systems will cause more crises, and the loop may start anew.

Here is a great representation of the ideological history of the Supreme Court.  Click on the image to go to the web site and start playing with the data. It is interesting that our activist court is quite firmly in the red, on average.

The Martin-Quinn ideological scores of Supreme Court justices