anarchitect

Just a note

2010-07-16T18:17:00.003-04:00

There's no point in writing about this amongst 265 comments on week-old post at Ta-Nehisi Coates' place, but, in discussing the Daily Show sexism issue, he notes

Us black and Latinos often come from backgrounds in which our families' primary reason for sending us off to college is stability. We often have siblings and parents to think about, and can't contemplate a year in New York at a free internship. Beyond that there are cultural factors--magazine journalism isn't simply very white, it's very Ivy League and Northeastern, which indicates that a certain kind of cultural capital is almost a requisite requirement.

Which jibes very much with my experience in architecture, an extremely white profession.

Put simply, among economic newcomers (i.e., those coming directly from either an immigrant or working class background), architecture is perceived as a bit of a frivolous profession for the leisure class - something to keep you busy while you manage your trust fund (perhaps that's why the pay lags behind other professionals). As a result, you tend to see immigrants and children of the working class pursuing engineering and business degrees. This links to a whole series of thoughts about the place of architecture in American culture, but this specific preconception - and the way it self-perpetuates - is something I've seen for a long time.

Incidentally - and obviously TNC isn't thinking about architecture at all in his post - I don't think that the second part (about cultural capital) is as relevant as it may be perceived. Certainly becoming a high profile architect (whether a "starchitect" or just the go-to architect in the local business/institutional community) is tied to cultural capital (it's driven very much by personal relationships), but the nuts and bolts of becoming a successful practicing architect are tied largely to having a good sense about building things, good organizational skills, and having people skills (sometimes classic skills like active listening and empathy, sometimes charismatic misanthropy).

I might note that this arc is revealed in my family background as well: my great-grandfather was a no-good drunk; my grandfather was a top tool-and-die man at Chicago Faucet*; my father, first to get a college degree, was a mid-level executive at a multinational, and I got an architecture degree and spent most of my 20s unreliably employed in architecture offices, by contractors, and as a handyman. My father got a good, responsible degree, but his children (my sister a poli-sci major) pursued less practical paths.

* "Lasts as long as the building."

I'd love to spend a day with her and take in a game

2010-04-30T12:17:00.002-04:00

Janet Marie Smith, one of the people most responsible for the groundbreaking Camden Yards:

Now she is getting a second chance to tinker with a park that many fans believe doesn’t need any tinkering. It is something that she both welcomes and wrestles with.
“It’s flattering it’s been mimicked, it’s rewarding that it’s held up, and it’s refreshing to have a chance to think about how to ensure that it stays fresh,” Smith said of Camden Yards. “But I don’t know what any of that means.”
Smith, who has degrees in architecture and urban planning, has plenty of ideas. In an hours-long walk around the park on a sunny day recently, she talked about everything from the integration of Camden Yards into the city’s street grid to the need to waterproof concrete to the cast iron figures of Wee Willie Keeler built into the ends of some aisles.

Review: Giant Eagle Maple & Bacon Baked Beans

2010-04-16T12:59:00.003-04:00

I don't expect this to be a regular feature here, but I can only hope that the Google will pick this up somehow, and others can be spared the absolute can of shit that is Giant Eagle brand Maple & Bacon Baked Beans.

Giant Eagle label products are, in my experience, basically fine - sometimes better, sometimes worse, but rarely actually bad. So I figured I'd save a few cents compared with the national brand. Holy shit, what a mistake.

These things are so larded with maple flavoring and sugar that they smell nauseatingly like maple candy - no exaggeration. I was unable to finish a serving of them, and the plate sat near my desk until I had to carry it down two flights of stairs to put them in the kitchen trash, so sickening (and strong) was the smell. And the flavor was just as bad.

I don't know what the hell is wrong with whoever formulated this crap, but for the love of God: DO NOT BUY GIANT EAGLE MAPLE & BACON BAKED BEANS.

180° in 18 seconds

2010-04-16T12:55:00.002-04:00

I saw the headline "Officer who took first Roethlisberger report resigns" and thought, "Wow, the guy's so disgusted that no charges were pressed that he's quitting over it. Must be awful."

Turns out, not so much:

A friend of the accuser told investigators that it seemed at first that Mr. Blash was not going to take a report on the incident the night it occurred. She said Mr. Blash then said he would but noted that Mr. Roethlisberger has wealth and access to lawyers and that they would be wasting their time.
One of the quarterback's bodyguards also quoted Mr. Blash as making derogatory comments about the accuser.

Good riddance, asshole. And kudos to whoever in Tinytown, GA was in a position to drive out a bad cop and did so.

LEED

2010-04-07T09:54:00.002-04:00

Matthew Yglesias quotes a DC blog citing a New Yorker writer about LEED and its failings. I have some other thoughts about the DC blogger's post, but I want to address the bit that Matt quotes:

But Owen reserves his most pointed criticism for the very tool we hope will make our cities greener, one building at a time: LEED. It’s a little known fact that most architects, particularly the ones who take sustainability seriously, all hate LEED. With its prescriptions and brownie points for bike racks and proximity to alternative fueling stations, LEED is—in Owen’s estimation—both too difficult and too easy. Too difficult because the process is stupifyingly bureaucratic, requiring even LEED accredited designers to hire expensive LEED accredited consultants to manage the paperwork. And too easy because even after much refinement, many designers and developers still game the system with a few cosmetic changes to achieve LEED certification with a minimum of effort, expense, or innovation.

I’m a LEED-accredited architect who is passionate about sustainability, and I don't hate LEED. Although there are plainly flaws in the system (a lot fewer in the newest version), it’s far more comprehensive than a carbon tax or any other regulation-based effort to push green architecture.

A few points:
requiring even LEED accredited designers to hire expensive LEED accredited consultants to manage the paperwork “Require” is not actually correct here. In practice, it tends to happen, just as, in practice, architects – whose licenses permit them to design structural, electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems – tend to hire licensed professionals in all those fields. It’s called specialization, and it’s worked pretty well for post-hunter/gatherer humanity.

As for the paperwork, that’s an inevitable side-effect of trying to be comprehensive and swimming against the tide. Some of the most pain-in-the-ass paperwork is gathering the packaging for every case of zero-VOC caulk used in a project (if you want that point). It sucks, but it’s the only way LEED – or anyone – can determine that the contractor isn’t claiming to do one thing while actually doing another (this happens, you may be shocked to know). Until the day that zero-VOC is the law of the land (which will probably be never – it’s not an appropriate metric for every need), there will be no other way to ensure that a building has been built with non-VOC materials – which is a real, valuable goal.

brownie points for bike racks This is precisely what LEED does not do. A developer who wants to greenwash his project without going to the trouble of LEED will install a couple bike racks and trumpet his efforts. But a developer who actually wants to get LEED needs to install covered or otherwise secure bike parking as well as shower and changing facilities (exact requirements vary a bit by building type) in order to get credit, because the reality is that, without support for bike commuters, bike commuting will be an occasional activity for pleasant days, not an all-weather option.

many designers and developers still game the system with a few cosmetic changes to achieve LEED certification with a minimum of effort, expense, or innovation. Aside from the perfect vs. good situation being set up here (no one should claim to be green unless they put in a great deal of effort, expense, and innovation? Really?), it’s simply not true that LEED certification can be achieved with a minimum of effort, unless you’re getting certain big things right. Rehabbing a building in a dense location with good transit access gets you about a quarter of the way to certification (at which point it isn’t that hard to go the rest of the way); is this supposed to be a flaw? Alternatively, if you’re building in a greenfield, you can get a big chunk of points for being ultra-energy efficient (which isn’t technically challenging; it’s basically smart design + budget); again, is this a problem? The latest version of LEED is much stronger because it has increased the values for important factors (like urban location) relative to the old version.

Product manufacturers, like packaged food makers, have big incentives to oversell their merits. Developers, contractors, and disinterested architects, like ordinary consumers, are in no position to judge those claims. In contrast, LEED-accredited professionals are trained to judge the claims, and have a framework in which to do it. It’s easy to mindlessly select materials with recycled content without paying much attention to whether it’s adding up; but if you’re seeking LEED certification, then you need to actually track your materials, and pay attention to where you can select a 100% recycled ceiling tile to offset the 20% recycled baseboard that the client loves.

As a general comment, LEED in no way competes with efforts to write green building into law – no one opposes cap and trade because LEED exists. Incorporating every LEED consideration into building codes, even if it were desirable and practical, would be a decades-long effort. In contrast, the LEED system has had a real (and lasting) impact in a scant decade of existence. Self-righteously bitching about it is treating green building and sustainability as an expression of your own merit, not an effort to, you know, make things better.

Chutzpah, newly defined.

2010-03-26T09:41:00.002-04:00

Murderous orphans everywhere are embarrassed by this behavior.

The iPad

2010-03-11T13:18:00.003-05:00

I've been a Mac/Apple fan since using them in college, enough so that part of my reason for picking my last two employers was the ability to work on Macs. I was an early adapter of the iPod and iPhone, and I was pretty excited in the runup to the iPad announcement.

Then, like many others, I was a bit underwhelmed. Part of it was that I'd read too much in advance, and so there was really nothing about it that was new (and therefore exciting). But part of it was that I couldn't see any real role for it in my life - I've got a laptop and an iPhone, and I don't need an in-between machine.

But, over the last 6 weeks or so, I've read a number of pieces that convince me I was looking at the iPad incorrectly. The first phrase that shifted my thinking came from the child of a tech blogger: "Dad, it's that thing from the movies." Every sci-fi movie for 30 or 40 years has featured flat, portable, effortless data screens; the iPad. This post, in particular, captures well what the iPad represents (as does this followup post). No guarantee it gets there, of course, but Apple has been hitting its targets pretty reliably lately.

The original Macintosh computer was advertised as a computer "for the rest of us." And, relative to command-line DOS, with its C: prompt and arcane, 8 character commands, it was. But the iPad promises to be the first computer that really is for the rest of us - for everybody's who's ever hunted for the file they've just created, for everyone who's closed a window thinking that they were closing a program, for everyone who's hunted through 50 drop-down menu items searching for the tool they want to use.

I'm still not sure I, personally, need one: as an architect, I'm pretty much a power user, and I don't see anyone making a full-featured gesture-based CAD program in the near future (I'd love to be proven wrong; Sketchup has some of the appropriate characteristics, but it's not actually adequate for contract documents, and I hate the idea of a building model in one program and the "real" drawings in another). But this is surely the first computer I'd consider recommending to my mother-in-law, and I think it won't be long before the iPad starts to draw a lot of customers who are stuck with a lot more computer (and a lot less usability) than they need. A designer friend recently noted that design isn't about making things pretty, it's about making things more useful; I'm not sure that there's a better example of that than Apple's iPhone OS approach.

PS - All that said, until the printer interface becomes seamless, computers will remain a source of frustration. Sometimes, you just need a piece of paper, and I don't think the iPad gets us any closer to making that process non-frustrating.

Senatus Populusque Romanus

2010-02-02T16:10:00.002-05:00

I was aware that there are Roman reënactors out there - I once happened upon a site explaining how to make your own legionary shield - and so was not entirely surprised to find that someone out there is selling legionary banners. What did surprise me was hearing from the shop owner that they're big sellers. It's just a small shop in Pittsburgh's South Hills, and the flags are locally made by some guy, but I guess it's the miracle of the internet - they're the #2 hit when you Google "Roman legionary banner".

Innumeracy

2010-01-14T10:37:00.002-05:00

In some crucial way, then, Playboy gave what was previously considered pornography a kind of dignity. It was a deeply limiting, dingbat dignity, to be sure, but to allow the mid-century American woman any identity beyond that of mother, virgin, or whore increased her available social options by 25 percent.

Or, you know, 33%.

Sigh.

From an otherwise decent review of a new book about Playboy and its role in America's postwar cultural shifts.

Caloric Information on Menus

2010-01-13T13:29:00.002-05:00

Ezra Klein has written a lot about various initiatives to introduce calorie info on menus - generally on menus for chains, so that every hole in the wall in the country doesn't have to send off samples to labs. There's all sorts of accusation of nanny-statism and such, but the bottom line is that, when eating out, we don't have a crucial piece of decision-making information.

So, just as an anecdata point, I was at a Steak n Shake yesterday (I was out beyond the suburbs and had to get lunch), and was trying to decide whether to get a shake (IMO the burgers are meh, but the shakes are pretty good). At first I thought I'd save some money and just get a soda*, but the sodas there are crazy expensive ($1.79!), so I figured, "Well, for an extra buck...". Then I started to think about calories (especially in winter, when I hardly get to ride my bike, I try to ease up on intake). I would have loved to know exactly what the hit was on the milkshake, since it's not like a 20 oz. soda is low-cal, but the menu didn't tell me, and so I just went with the Coke. But I wished I could have made an informed decision.

* I really don't enjoy that kind of food without a highly caloric beverage; that's just how it is

Dibs

2010-01-13T13:21:00.003-05:00

The recent cold snap in the American southeast seems to be abating with significant, but not catastrophic, results for agriculture. But, for the record, if another cold snap follows and Florida faces a lost year of crops, I think it will be known as the Ice Bowl, to match the Great Recession.

Ezra Klein just threw up in his mouth.

2009-12-04T15:22:00.002-05:00

I've been reading your chats for about the last two months, and I'm not quite sure what to make of you yet -- whether you're a straight shooter, or pushing an agenda. One columnist I do believe I get unbiased economic analysis from is Robert Samuelson.

From yesterday's chat.

Robert Samuelson is a shameless hack (as are most of the Post's columnists). I can't imagine what went through Ezra's head when he read that chat question.

Where I should be today

2009-10-13T15:03:00.003-04:00

I've mentioned it here before, but because it's on my mind, here's a nice story about Bill Mazeroski's epic, Game 7, World Series-winning homerun, which was struck 49 years ago today, at 3:36 p.m., about a mile and a half from where I sit. As I type, a few dozen faithful are gathered there around a boombox playing a tape of the game. In half an hour, they'll cheer, and 17 years of losing, and half a century of aging, will be washed away.

My 2010 Pirates Forecast

2009-10-02T15:09:00.003-04:00

Just for the record. I'll probably revisit this next April, once we know what happens in the offseason.

Oh, and to establish a baseline: my prediction for 2009, emailed to a friend on Opening Day, was 72 wins if the pitching held up, 62 wins if it didn't. The pitching has been OK this year (although it could be argued that Snell and Gorzo together represent a failure), but of course they traded away all but 2 of their most talented position players. I don't think I'm on the hook for having foreseen that last spring.

If the Pirates start 2010 with this group of starters (including, possibly, Clement coming up to platoon with Garrett Jones at 1B), I expect them to play at a sub-.400 pace – that is, about 100-loss baseball. Improvements due to youth development and Doumit returning at least somewhat to form should make this a team that can score at least 3.5 runs/game, which should get them within sniffing distance of 60 wins (note that a team with 3.5 RS/game and 4.5 RA/game is a 61 win team). I expect aggregate performance from the starting pitchers to about match what we’ve seen the last 3 months; the big question mark is the bullpen, which is costing us something like half a run a game relative to a mediocre pen. If Neal Huntington cobbles together a professional pen around a resurgent Hanrahan and Capps, then I think we could get above .400 – if nothing goes wrong. If Jones turns into a pumpkin, if Cedeno regresses, if Doumit misses 2 months again – if anything along those lines happens, then I think we could comfortably be on pace for 110 losses.

That said, I don’t see any way that the whole season plays out like that. Among Tabata, Alvarez, Lincoln, and Alderson, I expect at least one to reach the bigs and make an impact. Depending which one it is, that’s worth 5-10 wins. In other words, if none of the better players on the existing roster blow up (due to injury or general failure), I expect to see ~95 losses, plus or minus 5.

To do much better than that, either 2 of the MiLers need to make an impact or Milledge and/or someone else needs to take a big step forward (or a FA needs to really pan out). I think it would take only a couple things going wrong to do much worse than that: 110 losses is in reach if none of the minor leaguers step up.

Architects as Problem Solvers

2009-10-02T14:33:00.003-04:00

A professor of mine who was also the onetime head of the CMU architecture department used to say that architects are, primarily, problem-solvers. She had a well-worn talk on the topic, titled "The Twelve Professions of Architecture," outlining all of the different jobs for which architects are well-suited (only a couple of which look like what we think of as "being an architect"). But the thesis was that (and I apologize for my 15 years later paraphrase) the skillset of the architect is only incidentally building materials and the like; it's primarily and fundamentally problem-solving.

I'm currently involved with a couple of projects (one only potential right now), both sprucing up existing, pretty crummy commercial/industrial buildings. The Equipment Co. is in a really nondescript cinderblock building, constructed in 3 campaigns on 3 lots with 3 different wall heights and no consistency in window sizes or symmetry or any of the other things we rely on for making buildings look "good." My job is to figure out — within a tiny budget — some way to make it look good anyway.

The Appliance Co. is in a crumbling old building, once kind of Tudor-ish, with a 1950s storefront that is also crumbling, plus aging and outdated GE and Frigidaire signs. How to make it look good?

There are various other constraints, but those are the nuts of the problems (note that I've already done a lot of sifting through issues to identify the key components that need to be solved). The Appliance Co. is actually pretty easy — take out the clutter, pull the whole thing together with a cornice above the storefront height, and use all new materials above (stucco) and below (??) the cornice. Easy peasy. The Equipment Co. is really really hard. Even if we reskinned the whole thing, it's still a mess compositionally. So what I need to do is to think about ways of tying things together or, alternately, acknowledging differences. One way to do this is through almost-literal "narrative" — part of the building is offices, the remainder is shop space. Use materials and colors to explicate that. Another way would be to impose a "narrative" — define a line, even if it doesn't correspond to any function, and use that to establish what gets metal panels and what gets paint.

But my point is that building-knowledge is only incidental to the problems I need to solve here. My first task is to identify the moving pieces that make up the problem — where does the sign go, how do we direct visitors to the office door? — and the next task is to identify the narrative that will tell me how to place the pieces. And while the architect's problem-solving skills are honed for dealing with buildings (both as objects and as containers of space), they are readily applicable to broader sorts of problems. I've actually long though that it would be good to have more architects in politics: the job already includes some of the prerequisites (public speaking, flattery of the rich), but, more importantly, the problem-solving approach is radically different from that of lawyers, who of course dominate American political life.

A few notes on the Pittsburgh Story

2009-09-11T16:13:00.004-04:00

The coming of the G-20 to Pittsburgh is really all anyone can talk about around here (well, aside from Troy's knee). Over at Pittsblog, Mike Madison has been running a series with his take on what has happened to make Pittsburgh the subject of so many glowing national and international stories over the past year or so. Now, Mike is much more of a skeptic - especially regarding Pittsburgh - than I am, but I think his take is sound and worthwhile, if hardly definitive. One post in particular, I felt obliged to comment on, more or less as follows:

A couple notes to what I think is a basically correct argument, about the myth that Pittsburgh has thrived after deindustrialization by dint of hard work and "grit.":

Mike's point about sitting around waiting for Big Steel or Big Something Else to save the city is a really important one. In 1994 I was interning for a regional heritage/tourism org and talked to some fellow interns who were living in Johnstown for the summer. They described to me the crowd in local bars as "old men sitting around waiting for Big Steel to come back." Even then - 15 years ago - such thinking was a thing of the past in Pittsburgh. I'm sure there were a few bars like that, but they were a relic, not the dominant way of thinking in the city. Instead, the focus was on how to turn the new things we were doing (biomed, robotics, computer science) into the Next Big Thing. There was always the underlying, ancient mindset of hoping for the next Carnegie or Westinghouse, but the social and political discussion in the city was all about moving forward. As a concrete example, I'll note that, when the Hazelwood works were going down a few years later, there was interest from an outside company in building a modern coke works there, and the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. I can't vouch for the reaction you'd get in other parts of SWPA or elsewhere in the Rust Belt, but it was clear that, by the late 90s, the city had decisively abandoned the Big Steel mindset.

The other thing I want to talk about is "grit." I guess it depends how you define it - there's a certain bullheaded, romantic notion that I agree is inapt to describe what has happened. But there are 2 quotes that I think are relevant for describing the Pittsburgh mindset. One is from Laurie Graham's "Singing the City," and I don't have it exactly, but it's to the effect that, in Pittsburgh, there's a sense that a desk job is what you get if you don't want to work. Now that's a very blue collar, outdated way of thinking, but I also think it has left remnants in the region's workforce: outside employers are often pleased at the productivity they find at their Pittsburgh locations, and I think it ties back to the idea that jobs are for working at, in a very practical, hands-on way. The other quote is actually about Chicago, but I think it applies equally here (and surely throughout the Rust Belt): "I've always been impressed by people from Chicago. New York is talk and LA is flash, but Chicago is work." The gist is similar, but it clarifies exactly what Pittsburgh is not about: talk and flash.

Mike writes, "I know a lot of enthusiastic and energetic movers and shakers, in the arts, in the neighborhoods, in politics, and in entrepreneurship -- and they aren't 'gritty' at all" Well, I know the same kinds of folks, and I disagree with his characterization. To me the clearest example is a local reading series that has a serious national reputation (they are booked well over a year ahead, and have to turn down requests from established authors). Its founders are from the region, but not the city, and lived away from here for a long time before coming back and, soon after, starting this series. And in conversations with them (they're close friends), the distance they see between themselves and their counterparts in places like NYC and SF is clear, and it's precisely around the kind of issues I'm getting at. The acclaimed NYC reading/performance series The Moth came to town recently, and it was oozing with self-congratulation in a way that frankly disgusted my friends. The Pittsburgh reading series is all about getting top-flight talent and presenting it in a comfortable, cheap, and unpretentious setting; the New York reading series is all about letting everyone know how great the NYC reading series is.

I could list other examples - from the arts, from the neighborhoods - but I think you get my point. The reading series and its founders aren't "gritty," but they sure are Pittsburgh.

The Most Important Event of My Lifetime

2009-09-10T10:41:00.003-04:00

This has arrived in my city.

You know all the cupcake hype of the last few years? Fuck that shit. It's all about the donuts. I will now be biking down to the Strip at the drop of a hat.

UPDATE: I have been, and it's all it's cracked up to be. The small donuts are tiny, delicate little things - probably weigh less than a traditional "donut hole." Even the large are small - less than half the size of even a modest donut. But it's all good.

An Additional Note

2009-08-17T10:17:00.002-04:00

On the Dylan story below:

I understand why someone might have called the cops. But I cannot fathom why the cops felt the need - and the right - to put him in a police car and take him back to his hotel to ascertain his identity. WTF, America?

Dylan's Inspiration

2009-08-17T10:10:00.003-04:00

I've wondered in the past just how someone like Bob Dylan, who's been world-famous since he was 20, is able to write the kinds of songs that Dylan writes. Obviously, he writes some abstract songs, or songs that are based on his personal experiences as a world-famous rock star, but he also writes (and has always written) songs that seem to be grounded in experiences that he hasn't had in almost 50 years - the experiences of an anonymous wanderer.

Turns out he sometimes is an anonymous wanderer. I think that we probably underestimate how easy it can be to become anonymous, especially if you run counter to expectation - who would think that scruffy-looking white guy is a rock star? He probably couldn't go unrecognized in (supposedly anonymous and aloof) Manhattan, but he sure can on the backstreets of Long Branch, NJ.

Does Health Care Reform Stand a Chance?

2009-08-05T13:48:00.004-04:00

Yesterday morning, news from TPM had me feeling very grim. After months of Blue Dog wankery, Republican obstructionism, and Democratic ineffectuality, reports that town halls were being hijacked by crowds of Teabaggers (organized by well-funded Republican operatives, of course), whose concerns were of course being taken very seriously by the media had me ready to give up entirely. And health care isn't just a political concern for me - last fall, with a 6 week old baby plus a four year old, our family went off health insurance for 4 months (COBRA was simply too expensive, and SCHIP takes forever to get enrolled). My family needs the public plan.

But this makes me feel much, much better. A Daily Kos diarist from Indiana reports from a town hall held there in which the Good Guys showed up in force, organizers were prepared for and prevented disruption, and the meeting proceeded in a democratic, rather than mobocratic, spirit. Combine that with the fact that, if you scratch a teabagger, you'll find a birther, and I start to feel a bit of hope that August will not kill the dream of worthwhile health care reform in America.

What's Wrong With This Building?

2009-07-22T10:12:00.005-04:00

This is from the irritating (to me) Times series "What You Get For...", in which they pick a price and look at real estate from around the country. It's irritating because the vast majority of the prices are not merely beyond my personal means, but beyond practically anything in Pittsburgh, making the whole thing something I can't identify with. I don't really care what $2 million dollars buys in Miami, Austin, and Montana.

Anyway, this isn't about price, it's about design. I suspect the neighbors hate this, because neighbors like boring colonials and such, but they real reason to hate this is that it's an awful, awful facade (I don't know anything else about the design, so maybe it has other virtues; frankly, based on the facade, I kind of doubt it). Let's talk design concepts:

Symmetry: Either you've got it, or you don't. Classical buildings - think the Parthenon or the US Capitol - are rigidly symmetrical, while Romantic buildings - think Queen Annes or rambling castles - are not, usually using vertical and horizontal elements to create an asymmetrical balance. There's a certain leeway in symmetry that can allow, say, an off-center front door in an otherwise symmetrical building, as long as it's balanced by something else off-center, and as long as the overall composition remains pure. But this building is neither here nor there: assuming that the panels are evenly-sized, the center window on top is just off-center, the ribbon windows are not equidistant from the corners, and the first floor openings are arrayed without any reference to a central axis. Yet the overall effect is plainly intended to be symmetrical - this kind of High Modern architecture is Classical, not Romantic.

Regulating lines: These design guides can be implicit - used by the architect to promote consistency and balance but not actually apparent on the building - or explicit - used by the architect to illustrate the presence of these things (Frank Lloyd Wright used to cut grids into his concrete floors). The eight vertical panels are (or appear to be) equal in width, making for explicit regulating lines. They should be used to provide centerlines and edges for objects in the facade; they certainly can't responsibly be ignored. Yet that is precisely what the architect has done. None of the upper floor windows is evenly spaced with respect to the panels (oddly, the ribbons both appear to have the same slightly-off relationship with their panels; this could be interesting if there were follow-through elsewhere). Downstairs, it appears that the architect started with the front door recess, which is symmetrical about its panels, and then simply spaced the two (different size) garage doors evenly down the facade, with the result that the middle door has one edge aligned with a panel joint, and the other garage door is just asymmetrical with respect to its panels. Just awful.

Heights/Floors: Where are the floors and ceilings in this building? Why are the panel heights the way they are? We have no idea. The design idea appears to have been that the occupied floors would have panels of a certain height - 9 feet by the looks of it - and then intermediate panels would designate the structural sandwich of the ceiling/beams/floor-or-roof. But it is incredibly unlikely that the sandwich between first and second floors is really that thick and, more importantly, it makes the building unbalanced, a bit top-heavy. The way we expect buildings to be - whether from some sort of natural intuition or from lifelong experience - is like a Classical column - base, shaft, and capital. Andrea Palladio, iconic architect of the Renaissance, created palazzos with a heavy, rusticated base that contained the ground floor, semi-public, quotidian functions (think garage and foyer), a light, relatively simple upper floor with elegant public spaces, and an ornate attic floor that contained bedrooms while capping the building. Louis Sullivan adapted this concept for his great skyscrapers, in which the middle floors repeated for a hundred or more feet. We still see this form in tract houses with concrete block bases, vinyl siding walls, and dormers within the roof. Now, a Modern building need not heed these old-fashioned ideas. But why are the intermediate panels the heights they are? Why is the "sandwich" panel taller than it need be? Why is the top panel (which covers the parapet above the flat roof) taller still? If there's no base, why is there an attic (the top panel, the height of which hints at an attic or cornice)? The whole thing feels top-heavy and unresolved (imagine if, instead, the "sandwich" panel were narrower, perhaps 12 or 15 inches - which is surely about what the actual structural sandwich is - and there were another one above the second floor, and then an "attic" panel not quite so high; now you'd have rhythm going up, a lighter attic, and more weight anchoring it).

But design is subjective, right? Maybe this architect doesn't give a whit for my rigid, old-fashioned ideas of how to design (although Le Corbusier, the Modern master whose style this building approximates, would be on my side). But if that were the case, then s/he'd have to do a lot more to subvert widely-understood concepts of how to design. Take pure, white panels and apply them to a Victorian form. Pull a Gehry and bend the shapes. Get really asymmetrical, not just barely. I could even imagine a slightly-off Modern building that works, thanks to good taste. But there's nothing - nothing - in this design that suggests to me that the architect knew the rules yet chose to break them. Instead I see a designer who didn't understand the language s/he was trying to speak, and produced Modern-inflected gibberish. The architect as Ugly American.

[Update: I hadn't looked at the slideshow, which shows the interior and the rear balcony/patio. There's nothing as egregious there, but also nothing that makes me want to take any of the above back. There is one unforgivable downspout, but that's venal.]

Pittsburgh apparently drives outsiders nuts.

2009-07-03T13:47:00.006-04:00

OK, thanks to Sherrie Flick, I discovered this incredibly annoying article in an SF alt-newsite. It's ostensibly about how the G-20 coming to Pittsburgh will be problematic, but it turns out mostly to be about how the writer has a lot of issues, including classism and ignorance. She's already appended a note apologizing about the classism, but there's no corrections to her factual errors, so:

I appreciate the apology and the frank admission of classism, but I'm actually more annoyed by the factual inaccuracies.

The Eastside development (it's a distinct property that is actually in upscale Shadyside, although it's popularly considered East Liberty) has not razed a single "historic brick building" - not one. It has, however, spurred the renovation and redevelopment of no fewer than 6 nearby historic properties, 1 of which houses a good Caribbean restaurant and 2 of which house Pittsburgh's first Ethiopian restaurants, run by immigrants - not exactly the stuff of gentrification.

Meanwhile, Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, which is exclusively staffed by longtime neighborhood residents, has mostly bought up vacant and blighted properties, as well as a bar that was nothing more than a front for drug dealing (the suburban building owner claimed ignorance). The 50 new, single-family houses they're in the process of building in the neighborhood are subsidized and targeted for below-median buyers (a single mother who rented on my street moved to one because, although the neighborhood was "tough," she was looking forward to owning).

The bottom line is that, in a city that has lost over 50% of its population in 50 years, there is no threat that an influx of new residents will gentrify and drive out the well-established local culture.

Wait 'Til 2011?

2009-06-30T08:45:00.002-04:00

That’s the year that some baseball folks around here (including Rocco DeMaro, who does the postgame show on the radio, and, more notably, some in the front office) are tentatively pointing to as when the Pirates could maybe start competing. In the aftermath of the McLouth trade, my frustration was that the trade seemed to be an announcement that the Pirates had no intention of trying to compete before then*. Regardless, that’s the golden year, the one year where we will still have the best of our current pitchers (Duke, Maholm) as well as most of the coming talent. Here’s the best case lineup, if every minor leaguer progresses as he should (but assuming no miracle seasons):

G Hernandez, CF
A McCutcheon, LF
P Alvarez, 1B
R Doumit, C
J Tabata, RF
An LaRoche, 3B
S Ford, 2B
?????, SS

That’s pretty good looking, at least 1-6. However, it’s assuming a little bit that Tabata and Hernandez both make it by then; it’s assuming a lot that both will contribute as rookies; it’s assuming unrealistically that both will come north with the team, as opposed to being late May callups (the Longoria/Wieters rule of arbitration-delay should hold). With that in mind, suddenly this lineup doesn’t look much better than today’s, does it? Cutch should be better, but he’s already been so good, I don’t think you can project too much more from him (maybe some more pop). Alvarez should be fine as a rookie (and, again, I’m not convinced he’s with Pittsburgh from April, unless he breaks out big time in 2010), but I don’t know that you can really project him, in 2011, as better than Adam LaRoche today (plus his glove will be worse). Doumit is Doumit (if he’s healthy), LaRoche will maybe show a bit more pop, and that’s it. Ford will obviously be a downgrade from Sanchez, no one in the system represents an upgrade from Wilson at SS, and I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a free agent signing who would be an upgrade, either (maybe someone with more bat but less D, which I’m calling a wash on a team without strikeout pitchers). So, in 2011, the offense is about where it is now, albeit with upside.

B Lincoln
Z Duke
P Maholm
C Morton
R Ohlendorf

There’s lots of guys we can slot in 4-5, but they’re all about what you get with Morton and Ohlendorf – credible, major league pitchers, but not much more. From what Dejan has written, I don’t think they’ll be able to keep Lincoln away, so let’s assume he comes up in 2010, gets his growing pains out of the way, and is prepared to be an ace in 2011. Duke and Maholm, who knows, but let’s pretend that, unlike Gorzo and Snell (and Cordova and Benson and…), they’re for real.

It’s a credible, even good, rotation, and a semi-credible offense, plus an excellent defensive outfield. Is it a much better team than 2009? I don’t see it. I mean, there’s clearly more talent, but I think it’s extremely unrealistic to imagine that a lineup that’s 50% rookie will have no growing pains: if any of Tabata, Hernandez, or Alvarez pull an Andy LaRoche, that alone drags the team below 2009 performance. But 2011 is probably when we crack .500.

Meanwhile, in 2012 we lose Duke and Maholm. Bryan Morris and Jeff Locke, fruit of the Bay and McLouth trades respectively, could be ready by then, but will be 25 and 24. It’s hard to imagine both of them stepping in and becoming 2-3 starters. That said, all of my caveats above about the offense should be resolved by 2012. So call it a wash with 2011. 82 wins again.

Finally, we reach 2013, about as far as we can project. Feeling positive, I’ll grant that the offense is hitting on all cylinders – we’ve either drafted a stud SS or, heartened by 2 years of decent baseball, Huntington opens the checkbook for a solid FA – and Morris and Locke both pan out, staying healthy. I can finally see a team that can not only compete, but actually look like a division favorite. But there’s an awful lot to go wrong between then and now. And, more important, I’m not convinced that 2011 and 2012 look so much better than 2009’s team, a team that all the cool kids agree sucks.

When does Steelers Training Camp start in 2012, anyway?

* McCutcheon has been, not surprisingly, a great substitute for McLouth, but that ignores the gaping hole that is Brandon Moss in RF – Cutch could have come up and McLouth could have slid over, and that would have been an improvement. Meanwhile, Charlie Morton is, to date, nothing more than John van Benschoten, Jr. He may well turn out to be more, but it’s foolish to look at a guy with mixed success in the minors (he was rarely more than mediocre in A and AA ball) and one terrible stint in the majors as a significant pickup.

What’s the Prognosis, Doctor?

2009-06-30T08:39:00.002-04:00

When the Dave Littlefield era mercifully came to an end two summers ago, everyone agreed the organization was a mess. Talent evaluation had failed, player development had failed, and a poor major league club was backed up with a barren minor league system. Other than Andrew McCutcheon, not a single impact player was on the horizon. New team president Frank Coonley and GM Neil Huntington started to rebuild, a four-letter word in Pittsburgh, where rebuilding commenced in 1993 and has never ceased. Nonetheless, disgust with Littlefield opened a window – the fan base could swallow a little directed action.

Unfortunately, Huntington – a man who, in the comically bad Torres trade and the unceremonial dump of Jose Bautista, not to mention his intemperate remarks about Snell, has shown a clear willingness to act based on emotion and pride* - misunderstood what he had. Recognizing that the minors were devoid of talent, Huntington determined that the major league club represented little more than trade bait for a restocking the farm system. As a result, when the outfield in 2008 coalesced into the best in baseball, he didn’t spend a moment thinking about how to build on that; he saw players to be traded, and now that outfield is all gone.

But the 2008 team wasn’t very good, despite that outfield, right? Actually, the 2008 team was – as I said at the time, in various online fora – two mediocre pitchers away from 85 wins. Last year I mined all sorts of game-by-game results to show that the combination of Matt Morris, Tom Gorzelanny, and the awful revolving cast of AAA callups were responsible for more than 2 dozen games in which the Pirates had almost literally no chance to win – games in which the starter gave up 5 or more runs by the 5th inning, often leaving early and severely overtaxing a bullpen that, at the back end, was as good as any in baseball. This year I don’t need to do that to make my point, because this year, with the same 3 core starters (Maholm, Duke, & Snell), plus two mediocre pitchers, the team’s runs allowed total has gone from a breathtaking 884 runs in 2008 to a projected 714 in 2009. Meanwhile, the 2008 offense was on pace, before the Bay trade, to score 800 runs. 800 runs scored plus 714 runs allowed projects to a season win total of 90.

90. Can you comprehend that, Pittsburgh?

Now, all things are never equal, and you can’t simply assume that the April-July of Bay, Nady, and McLouth could be duplicated by Bay, McLouth, and Morgan. But I think it shows, pretty clearly, just how close the Pirates actually were. I would argue that, with only 2 changes made, the Pirates would be in or near first place, several games above .500, right now, and without having mortgaged their future.

Change 1: Don’t trade Bay, obviously. In terms of PNC Park impact, you put Bay in RF, keep the dynamic Morgan/McLouth/McCutcheon LF/CF combo (I don’t even care if they trade McLouth). No Bryan Morris, but that’s a maybe for 2012, not something I’m putting too much weight on. Craig Hansen has had no impact on the team, and at best is a replaceable bullpen piece. But then there’s Andy LaRoche, which brings us to…

Change 2: Sign a free agent 3B in the offseason. Now this is the tricky part. There were not a lot of decent FA 3Bs last year – Joe Crede, Jerry Hairston, Mike Lamb, and Ty Wigginton are the cream of the crop, which is pretty crappy cream. But neither Hairston nor, particularly, Crede would represent much of a step down from LaRoche, nor would they have cost much money, nor would either be blocking Pedro Alvarez or, I suppose, Neil Walker.

With those two changes, the Pirates are a much better team in 2009 – statistically, they would almost certainly be in first place (Bay is worth at least 10 runs so far over Moss, and we’ll call 3B a wash; that would put our Runs Scored/Runs Allowed ratio at 345/330, which is better than anyone in the NL Central has shown). And they are no worse down the road, except possibly in 2012 or 2013 when Morris is scheduled to arrive.

Most important, if the Pirates were winning this year (and if they hadn’t traded Bay last year), PNC Park would be packed. Easily averaging over 20k/game (that’s what they did in 1997, at 3 Rivers). Increasing revenues before the magic year of 2011. Completely changing the perception of them around baseball. Even if Bay leaves after 2009 (and, in this economy, I bet he’d take a hometown discount for a suddenly-contending Pirates), 2010 represents at worst a step backwards, and 2011 a fulfillment of 2009’s promise.

Instead, it’s wait ‘til ~~next year~~ year after that (maybe). And all because Neil Huntington saw a sprained ankle and decided to shoot the horse.

* in the Torres trade he evidently decided that a player who had clashed with previous management must be a problem, and traded a closer-grade pitcher on a good contract for the proverbial bag of balls; in the Bautista trade, he decided he’d rather have a mediocre player that he’d acquired than a mediocre player he’d inherited – not indefensible, but not exactly shrewd

For Want of a Busy Signal

2009-06-30T08:34:00.002-04:00

[This post is #2 of 4 that I wrote all together yesterday, before the latest trades. I was planning to space them out a bit, but time is of the essence. FWIW, other than this note, all of the content in this post and the two following was written before the Morgan/Burnett trade came down]

I’m increasingly seeing the Bay trade as the worst thing that’s happened to the Pirates since Dave Littlefield lost his mind.

Dejan Kovacevic of the Post-Gazette likes to note that, last summer, the consensus was that the Bay trade was the good one, and the Nady trade the bad one. But that’s not how I saw it at the time. I understood all the reasons to trade Nady, although I liked the guy. I was a bit let down to see Marte go, but 2 major league starters, plus the maybe-stud of Tabata, seemed like a good return. Frankly, the Pirates – not the organization, but the team – looked stronger on July 30 than they had a week before.

2008 was still a lost cause – too many starts by Morris, Gorzelanny, and the rotating disaster that was the #6 starter had squandered baseball’s best offensive outfield, and #3 offense overall – but the pieces were mostly in place for a solid 2009.

Then, just when it seemed that Jason Bay would, against all odds, remain in Pittsburgh, the Dodgers called the Pirates and Red Sox one minute before the trade deadline and upped their offer. It was done. The face of the team, their best hitter, was gone. In return, the Pirates got OF Brandon Moss, RHP Craig Hansen, 3B Andy LaRoche, and A-ball starter Bryan Morris.

Moss has been a bust, providing essentially replacement-level offense and defense in right field, one of the two easiest positions in baseball, especially at PNC Park. LaRoche, after an epically inept 2008, has become a solid young third baseman. Hansen has been hurt, and Morris has continued his history of injury - whatever his upside, he has to be considered an if, not a when.

In other words, to date, the Pirates have gotten Andy LaRoche for Jason Bay – a comically bad return for a guy who has been the best player on the American League’s best team. And why? Because Neil Huntington, in my opinion, badly misdiagnosed this team. And because, in this day and age, it’s too damn easy to make last minute phone calls.

[Update: I understated Moss' defense in this post; he has been comfortably above-average in the field. Nonetheless, his offense remains mediocre for RF, a position where late, fat Babe Ruth was stuck because he couldn't do too much harm out there. Moss remains on track for 4th OF status]

It’s Easy If You Try

2009-06-30T08:28:00.002-04:00

Imagine, if you will, that it’s the morning after the Penguins victory parade. A still-giddy Steel City picks up the paper and looks at the baseball standings for the first time since April, and spies the Pirates 3 games over .500, 2.5 games out of first place.

Not much of a fantasy? Well, it doesn’t have to be because, statistically, that’s about what should have happened. This Pirates team – the team of Ian Knucklehead, Brandon “Replacement Player” Moss, Adam “Icemay” LaRoche, and 20 sad games with Ramon Bixler at SS – has outscored its opponents thus far in 2009. On that day, the real life Pirates were 31-34, but they had outscored opponents 288-280, a rate that should correspond to an 82-80 final record, and, on June 17, could just as well have made the Pirates, say, 34-31.

Its not much of a stretch to think that that alternate reality – statistically more likely than ours – would have seen a surge of Bucs Fever in Pittsburgh. This town is desperate to see winning baseball, as the buzz over the Pirates’ 31-31 record a few years back will attest. They’re selling shirts in the Strip right now in the form of a Championship Checklist, with the Steelers’ and Penguins’ boxes duly checked in. What’s amazing to me is that there’s no snark attached to the next team on the list. It’s the Pirates, with an empty box – as if anyone in his right mind could hope to see it checked. But there it is, an emblem of a city that wants to believe.

Credit Where Due

2008-08-01T15:37:00.003-04:00

Hot-looking PCs from Dell. One is even wrapped in bamboo. And they use less energy than most, so not just eye candy.

That said, they look almost exactly like this super-hot stereo system* I spotted on a shelf in an IKEA ad about 3 years ago. And it was a retro design. So maybe not bleeding edge ID from Dell. But better than they've managed heretofore, so, kudos.

* Sadly, no longer on the market, apparently. But uncannily like these computers.

Now things get interesting

2008-07-20T12:48:00.003-04:00

Today's Tour stage was what a mountain stage should look like. Team strategy, small group tactics, and individual effort. Cadel Evans, default favorite as the only returning Paris podium member from 2007, came into the day only one second up, with a team (Silence-Lotto, formerly Davitamon-Lotto, formerly Predictor-Lotto; Lotto is one company, the other part of the name is the pharmaceutical d'anno of the other sponsor) that doesn't look very strong, and a reputation as a time trialist, rather than a climber (not to mention the victim of this blog's official policy). Just one second behind was Fränk Schleck who, with brother Andy and perennial Grand Tour threat Carlos Sastre*, form a solid core for CSC-Saxo Bank. Also within a minute were American Christian Vande Velde (Garmin-Chipotle), young Austrian Bernhard Kohl (Gerolsteiner), and onetime white jersey** Russian Denis Menchov (Rabobank - still the best jerseys on the Tour).

So, with all that laid out before the first Alpine day (of three) of the Tour, who would do what? Evans can out-TT all the other contenders, but even a dominating performance in a 53 km TT like Stage 20 can't blow away the field the way a crushing mountain victory can - Evans can expect to gain a few minutes on the road to Saint-Amand-Montrond, but he could lose 10 or 20 minutes on the slopes of Alpe D'Huez (where Schleck won a couple years ago). The course for today's stage consisted of a big climb early, a steep bump towards the end, then a long, but not too steep, climb to a mountaintop finish. An early breakaway quartet looked well-positioned to stay away, with legit riders like Egoi Martinez and Danny Pate (Garmin-Chipotle), but no one so high-placed as to demand chasing. But it's hard for a small group to stay ahead of the contenders that inevitably shred the peloton as they drive up the final climb. In the event, a couple of crashes helped the breakaway stay ahead - although Pate wouldn't have minded dropping back into the yellow jersey group with team leader Vande Velde.

Meanwhile, CSC started picking up the pace on that steep bump I mentioned, and Evans was already without a teammate when the ascent to Prato Nevoso began. With a group of about ten (a few riders were losing and regaining contact), all the contenders were in place for the 11 km climb. And here's where things got really exciting. As Joe Lindsay of the Boulder Report noted, this is what you see when none of the riders are doping - everyone was very close, with no one able to simply ride off (as disgraced Ricardo Ricco and his Saunier Duval teammates had done in the Pyrenees, making a mockery of the competition). CSC, with 3 riders, kept attacking, but the group held together until the final 3 km, when Sastre attacked and only Kohl, Valverde, and Menchov were able to follow. At the end, the Kohl group finished about 40 seconds ahead of the Evans group, with Fränk Schleck putting in a big pull to gain 9 seconds on Evans - enough for an 8 second lead in the overall. Kohl is one second ahead of Evans, but it's hard to imagine him staying close for another week.

Meanwhile, the leaderboard shows 6 riders within a minute of the overall lead, and 5 of them legit GC contenders. Tomorrow is a rest day, then Tuesday's Alpine stage is a valley finish, some 20 km past the final summit - unless a rider completely blows up on the climb, he should be able to close any outrageous gap. That leaves the legendary Alpe D'Huez for Wednesday. The final TT will be definitive, of course, but we should have a much better sense of who can pull it off after Huez.

* Although Sastre has finished third and fourth in the Tour and second (twice) and fourth in the Vuelta, he's best known to casual fans for crossing the finish line with a pacifier in his mouth - it's even part of his website's logo. He did it in honor of his newborn daughter when he won the 13th stage of the 2003 Tour.

** Best young rider - 2003

A Revival of Small Town America?

2008-07-02T18:52:00.004-04:00

This is a rewrite of a comment I left over at Yglesias's. It has to do with the implications of the coming flight from exurbs - people won't just return to cities and inner ring suburbs. They'll rediscover America's small towns - or at least they might.

Tthe thing about small towns - my model is the county seat - is that they're very flexible, because 19th century American town planning was simple and adaptable - the scale makes autos feasible, but in no way dictates driving for daily living.

I've pointed this out before - before WW2, most county seats in America were linked by trolley to the nearest big city. County seats are still at least minor employment centers thanks to courthouses. The dense CBDs are still there, but usually at least a quarter vacant.

The big question is what needs to be done to allow such places to take advantage of the nascent demand for walkable, transit-oriented communities. What makes college towns work is a one-two punch of a big local employer (a small college with grounds will have nearly as many total employees as students) and a captive population. But even with these factors in their favor, they often struggle to maintain vitality in the face of the commercial strip at the edge of town. Maybe $5 gas will reverse the still-recent trend of auto ubiquity on campus.

Probably the simplest solution for non-college towns is recruitment of the kinds of businesses that til now have located in suburban office parks - drop a couple of 500 employee offices in the mid-height tower across from the courthouse, and you've got a daytime population to foster retail vitality, plus a group of people who have a huge incentive to live in town, or at the near margins. The business benefits from offering such a lifestyle to their employees, and, thanks to the courthouse, the necessary amenities for business are existing. The key is to keep the businesses from building massive parking structures (or worse, lots) - they would undermine the density of the town, while encouraging workers to live distantly, emptying downtown at sundown.

Washington, PA is potentially a model of this. The developer responsible for the über-office park Southpointe has shifted directions and built a handsome new office building in downtown Washington (they're also investing in downtown Pittsburgh, but that's much more comprehensive and mixed use). Washington is straight down I-79 from Pittsburgh, and a decent little town, but it's been hollowed out. Here is a chance for it to fill back in.

Maz and the Battlin' Bucs

2008-06-24T23:27:00.003-04:00

In honor of the Yankees' long-awaited return to the site of their momentous 1960 World Series defeat at the hands of the underdog Pirates, I'm going to post something I wrote almost 8 years ago. I've always meant to turn it into a bit more, but for now, here it is:

October 13, 1960, Bill Mazeroski hit the most famous World Series homerun ever, beating the Yankees at Forbes Field in the bottom of the 9th, Game 7. Pittsburgh celebrated as it never has, before or since: people spilled into the streets, honking horns, embracing strangers, etc. The players themselves joined the throngs in the streets, wandering up the road to Schenley Park.

Every year since 1985, a loyal few fans have gathered on October 13 at the remnants of the Forbes Field outfield wall to listen to a recording of the radio broadcast. At 3:36, a cheer goes up. This past October was the 40th anniversary, and there was no way I was going to miss it; my boss at the time, at a job I'd only just started, looked a little incredulous when I announced at 1 that I was leaving, but it was an incredibly beautiful day that I wouldn't miss for the world.

I made my way through Oakland to the site, and came upon an enormous crowd: hundreds of fans had gathered, in a carnival atmosphere. One entrepreneur had a plexiglas-encased model of Forbes Field on a table, surrounded by T-shirts, while the faithful had set up lawn chairs surrounding the pathetic old boombox. I wheedled my way in close, where it was still the 5th inning. Several old Pirates were there, trading recollections; fans called to them like old friends. As the time drew near, the crowd kept growing, with film crews and the Pirates Parrot making the scene. In an striking reversal of an old Forbes Field tradition, a photographer climbed a spindly tree to get a shot of fans listening to the game. About the 7th inning, a limo pulled up, and a buzz rose in the crowd; could it be?

Of course it was: Maz showed up, for the first time. After a lengthy ovation, and chants of "Hall of Fame, Hall of Fame" (he would finally make it a few years later, and his prepared speech at the ceremony was replaced by an eloquent silence; he was too tearful to say more than a couple words), a path was cleared, and Maz sat between the two founders of the tradition. For 2 innings, he signed countless mementoes - game tickets, newspapers, as well as random Pirates ephemera. At the start of the 9th inning his hand started to give out, and he took a rest. The game see-sawed back and forth, and an 8th inning Pirate homer seemed to seal the deal, but the Yanks roared back in the 9th, taking a 2 run lead. Those of us in the front rows (did I mention I was within 5 feet of Maz?) leaned in to follow the action, as the old-timers called out the batters as they came up - the fans knew who would do what.

Finally the moment came, preceded by hushes through the crowd. At the crack of the bat, the fans rose in a shout, clapping and cheering and hooting & hollering. Maz stood with old teammate Nellie Briles, who raised Maz' arm in triumph. We shouted til we were hoarse, calling out "thanks Maz." It was an amazing window to a baseball-crazed town of 40 years before.

So annoyed, I have to post.

2008-01-29T16:45:00.000-05:00

OK, it's not really news: developer gives big bucks to mayor, reaps rewards. But this case is just so obvious and petty, and the developer is so noxious:

It took nine months for residents of Oakland's North Neville Street to get a few new parking spaces from the city. It took politically connected developer Walnut Capital a week to take some of those spaces away.

[...]

When residents parked in front of The Metropolitan, they found warnings on building letterhead on their windshields saying they had "parked in a reserved parking area. Your license has been recorded. The next violation will result in vehicle tow and impoundment at your expense."

Private landowners can't reserve city streets, said city Public Works Director Guy Costa. "They had no right to do that," he said of the warnings.

[...]

Mr. Costa said state law bars parking within three feet of a driveway, but the city is allowed to increase that distance as needed. He visited the site, and his department created a 42-foot no-parking zone next to the driveway. He said he would have made such an inspection and change for any property owner.

Of course he would. Why, in a city of 300,000, everyone gets that kind of personalized service, especially after they've pulled illegal BS.

Walnut Capital, which was started by a couple of trust fund babies, has been a bad-faith developer for a decade. Their M.O. is to make false promises to current residents (like telling tenants that they can come back after renovations), flout legal requirements (like preservation laws), screw around with important structures, and then pat themselves on the back for investing in the city.

The Midwest Really Is Different

2007-08-17T10:22:00.000-04:00

OK, so I wanted to see whether Greenfield, Iowa's town square really is "European Style," as its website proclaims. Google Maps, so. Sadly, the satellite imagery for this area is a joke, so I couldn't answer my question, but I noticed that this little county seat features 240th St. That seemed like an awfully big number, and, indeed, the entire town lies between 230th and 250th. Hmm. So, is there some metropolis 240 blocks to the north, the way nearly all of Dade County is laid out from a point in central Miami?

No.

Turns out that this part of Iowa is laid out with east-west streets that run from 110th up to around 360th or 400th, and then starts again at the next county. Meanwhile, the county lines are demarked by evocatively-named roads such as Adair-Adams St. (between Adair and Adams counties) or Adams-Union Ave.

Good Lord, I just realized that the north-south streets are in alphabetical order, again starting and ending at each county line. So Clover Ave. turns into Orange Ave. because the third north-south road in Union County is the fifteenth in Adair County. Wow.

Now, the rationalist in me - the dork who loves logical systems - thinks this is kind of cool. And it's a million times better than the Utah system, which proves that Mormons really are freaky cultists with their street names like S 100 E St. (and they're all streets! No avenues to distinguish orientation). But when you look at those Iowa roads, those endless, dead-straight lanes leading to and from nothing in particular, it has a chilling feel, as if devised by intellects at a slight remove from our own.

The people, that is, with an outsize say in who our next president will be.

OK, So It Was Over

2007-08-03T18:52:00.000-04:00

The post below this one suggested that the annual Parade to Paris could be more exciting if the final gap was below 0:30. Yet there it was, at 0:23, and nothing happened. Why?

Well, first of all, that 30 second figure was a guess. It was surprisingly difficult to determine how many time bonuses were on offer that final day. Turns out to have been something like 28 seconds. So Cadel Evans could only have overtaken Alberto Contador with a near-perfect day.

But why not fight for it anyway? Why not try?

Well, the simple reality was that there was no way for Evans to esacpe from the peloton and take those time bonuses by sheer strength/gall. Among (many) other things, at each intermediate and final sprint, there are time bonuses available for each successive place. So Evans would need not only to beat Contador to the line 3 times, but he would also have to have over a dozen other riders do so. There is no rational reason to think that was possible. So Evans accepted second place, and was, I'm sure, fairly happy with it.

In other wrap-up news, Levi had his best day of the Tour on Saturday, winning the Time Trial by 0:51 over Evans, putting him a tantalizing 8 seconds out of second. Frankly, it's conceivable he could have snuck in a final day time bonus, but, again, unlikely - if he contests one of the intermediates, Evans and his team are on alert, and he doesn't stand a chance; and the final sprint is always a showcase for the sprinters' teams, and it's hard to imagine Levi sneaking into position. More agonizing is that Levi lost 10 seconds in the Alps when he was penalized for being "towed" by his team car during a mechanical check. There was a minor controversy - lost in the doping scandals - in the sudden enforcement of this rule this year. Essentially, riders have long gotten little boosts from their team cars when being handed drinks, or getting a medical check, or a mechanical assist. It's meaningless over the course of 3500 km, and everyone does it, so it's just not a big deal. But officials decided to be dicks about it this year, and it cost Levi.

Nonetheless, it was a big year for Team Discovery, which has no sponsor for next year. Three finishers in the Top Ten, including two on the podium in Paris. Much of the sports world has dismissed the Tour, and pro cycling in general, in the wake of this year's doping scandals (and former star Iban Mayo, who had a poor tour, apparently tested positive for steroids after it was over). But there are signs that the young riders, who began to take over the race this year, have a new attitude about doping. Most notably, after the second rider was caught, a number of teams sat out the day's start, protesting the rider. Ten years ago, when the Tour was similarly racked with scandal, teams protested as well - against enforcement. Of course, the scandals, which even hit teams with commitments to internal testing, aren't a good sign. But you can't clean up a dirty sport without exposing some dirt.

Here's to a 2008 Tour with just as much testing, but many fewer (no?) positives.

Last Big Day of the Tour - Maybe

2007-07-28T09:40:00.000-04:00

So after two days of exciting racing, in which the General Classification was never in doubt - today, Saturday, is the second Time Trial. The last one was won by "Two Bloods Are Better Than One" Vinokourov, with Cadel Evans a strong second. Well, Evans is sitting in second overall, 1:50 behind Contador. Unless Contador has a terrible day, or Evans has an amazing one, Evans shouldn't be able to make up that much time. But - and this is the exciting possibility - he could get to within 30 seconds or so, in which case tomorrow's parade into Paris will not be one: it will be a race. This hasn't happened in almost 2 decades, since Greg LeMond won the Tour by 8 seconds on a Time Trial into Paris. Since then, Paris has always been a mellow route, with some sprinters jumping up on the final laps of the Champs Elysees for points, but otherwise not much happening. But with time bonuses for intermediate sprints and the overall stage win, Evans could make up 30 seconds or less. Probably won't be able to, but it would be a chance enough to make things exciting. Let's root for exciting.

One other note: David Millar, a Scotsman, was booted from racing for 2 years for doping. He returned a year ago with the zeal of the converted, and is now a very vocal member of the peoloton on doping issues. He writes a Tour Diary for Bicycling Magazine, and had a powerful piece in response to Vino's positive test. Give it a read.

But Should Green go Unseen?

2007-07-25T23:50:00.000-04:00

Witold Rybczynski, the insightful architect/writer/professor, has another of his slide shows up at Slate, this one called Green Unseen, and subtitled "Environmentally friendly buildings don't need to look like cheese wedges." Well thank goodness for that, I suppose.

There isn't much meat here, which surprised me at first. But I'm pretty sure what we're seeing is yet another manifestation of the Dirty Fucking Hippie syndrome. When Rybczynski was young and idealistic in the early 70s, he designed and built some overly-earnest eco-sensitive buildings that he's now ashamed of. He hasn't abandoned these ideals - he repeatedly lauds them - but he is embarrassed by their obviousness. And certainly, much of the first generation of eco-architecture was flawed, in a variety of ways (Same thing can be said for Modernism, incidentally).

But his conclusion - his takeaway from his own experience - is that buildings shouldn't give any evidence of greenness. Robert AM Stern's yet-again Georgian dorm is praised for energy efficiency without detracting from its up-to-the-minute 18th Century style, and Witold's glad that the banal 7 WTC tower (think "glass box," and you've pretty much got it) betrays no hint of its Gold LEED rating.

I have some sympathy for this viewpoint - I would rather every building be LEED rated and look traditional than only wacky buildings be green, and almost no one builds them. BUT. A lot of green things aren't particularly easily done in traditional forms. If you start a project with a commitment to an aesthetic, and then shoehorn green into it, that's where you get extra costs for going green, because it's not actually organic to the design.

I'm a strong believer that buildings should express their intent. This can be interpreted broadly, but what it really comes down to is that I'm pretty disdainful of generic architecture, whether "green unseen" or neotraditionalist when it needn't be. Maybe only the best architects (Wright, Foster) are really effective at really expressing their function through their form, and so maybe we're better off if the rest of us stick with tried-and-true. But I can't help but think that we're actually better off with all of us designers and builders trying to do more, not less. It's what got us out of the caves, after all.

Oddly Better

2007-07-25T22:35:00.001-04:00

I was saying to my wife at dinner tonight that the worst thing was that Rasmussen was on track to win, despite being the first yellow jersey (at least in the last couple of decades) to be presumed guilty without actually failing a test. But now he's gone, and it seems at least possible that the ride tomorrow will be clean.

I suppose I'm just setting myself up for more disappointment, but at least some of these guys must be clean, right? And if the last 3 days haven't put the fear of God/UCI into them, perhaps nothing will.

FWIW, Contador, the Team Disco rider now leading, is having a magnificent Tour. I'd put him at 50/50 clean. Maybe better.

That said, I won't be shocked, or much shaken, if dawn tomorrow sees three more teams out. Just because that's how it's tending.

Furthermore

2007-07-25T08:33:00.000-04:00

I've always trusted Lance. I had some underlying doubts, but was able to convince myself that he was clean.

No more.

His denials sound to me like everyone else's denials, and his amazing performances are too much like everyone else's. If he really was clean, and no one around him was (as now seems apparent), then he should have been sounding a clarion call against doping. Instead, all he did was proclaim his own innocence.

Bullshit.

I've got the Tour up on my screen right now (Dutch feed), but I haven't even checked to see what's going on. What difference does it make?

Alright, now I'm down.

2007-07-25T08:16:00.000-04:00

Vino, how could you do this to us?

More Shakeup

2007-07-22T16:15:00.001-04:00

First day in the Pyrenees - which are generally harder climbs than the Alps, although today wasn't too challenging - and while most of the race leaders (with one big exception) were in the chase to the end, it was a tense and exciting finish. Early in the race, Saunier Duval wasted a lot of effort trying to position team leader Iban Mayo for a stage victory - his GC chances vanished in yesterday's poor Time Trial - and then he blew up before the summit of the first of two big climbs. Rabobank, middling quality team of yellow jersey Rasmussen, did the remainder of the early work, but then Discovery picked up the pace on the second big climb, somewhat reminiscent of the Lance Years. For the last 15 km or so the lead group (aside from the remnant of an early breakaway) included contenders Rasmussen, Evans, Sastre, Klöden, Leipheimer, and Contador - the last two being Discovery, along with strong rider but non-contender Popovych. No one else had any teammates, meaning that the situation was perfect for Discovery.

And, indeed, Popo lead the group up the beyond-category climb with its summit finish, dropping off pretenders like Valverde. But Leipheimer, with the kind of tactical position that Lance probably still dreams of, couldn't pull off the stage. He had one attack that looked like it would take, but then faded. You can't win the Tour if you can't make a mountain attack stick. So, at the end, it was Rasmussen and Contador, with Contador having the legs to win easily at the line. He's now in second overall, 2:23 back, :41 ahead of Evans, and 2:06 ahead of nominal team leader Leipheimer. As I said, Levi had a fine ride, coming in fourth on the day, but he utterly failed to do what a yellow jersey wearer must do. Cadel Evans did somewhat worse, up front for awhile, but then blowing up in the last 5 km and finishing almost 2:00 behind. Klöden - riding on a fractured coccyx, mind you - struggled most of the day to stay within sight of the leaders' group, yet managed to finish with Evans, which to my mind makes his day the better one.

But the worst day belonged to my beloved Vino, who was simply tapped out by his magnificent TT performance on Saturday. Vino slipped back and back all day, visibly struggling, even with three teammates up the road. He came in 28:50 behind Contador (81st on the day!), and slipped to 30th place, over 34 minutes back. Alas, poor Vino, we knew you well.

[Much later update: Well, aside from the fact that we now know that Vino was doping, we also know that he was 28 minutes back because some jagoff fan waved his flag at the Astana rider in front of Vino, got the flag caught in the spokes, and sent down both Vino and his teammate. In retrospect, I'm kind of glad that Vino landed on his sutured knees. Fucking cheater.]

Time Trial Shakeup

2007-07-22T09:48:00.000-04:00

Well, with one week left to Paris, we know much more about the Tour than we did Friday, before the Time Trial (TT). Vino rode himself back into contention, jumping from something like 22nd up to 9th with a monster effort that took 1:15 out of Cadel Evans, who was second on the day, and 2:00 or more off of everyone else. A couple of nominal GC (General Category) contenders, like Cristophe Moreau and Iban Mayo, were wiped out, and have nothing to work for other than stage wins. Levi Leipheimer didn't do poorly, but he didn't show much either - his teammate, young Alberto Contador, is showing himself to be a better overall contender at this point. Yellow Jersey Michael Rasmussen - currently dogged by doping rumors - is a famously poor time trialer, but actually held on to his race lead with an 11th place finish.

And Cadel Evans - of whom I said last year, I don't know why he's a GC contrender, but everyone says he is - looks right now to be the best positioned rider. He has looked strong every day so far, he obviously will not get hurt in the final TT, and he's up in the standings. Klöden remains ahead of Vino in the overalls, so if Vino falters again (as he is currently doing on Stage 14, but it's early yet), Andreas can take over as team leader and be in a position to go for yellow.

Exciting stuff with 3 Pyrennean days to go.

...And he's back up.

2007-07-13T19:38:00.000-04:00

Well, despite that nasty-looking road rash pictured here (courtesy of Bicycling), Vino rode today - gingerly, at the back of the back, but with the peloton all day nonetheless. Same for Klöden, whose coccyx is apparently "fissured," not broken. But I think he has to be treated as a presumptive DNS (Did Not Start) every day until Paris.

A fair amount of commentary was made today that Astana - believed coming in to be one of the stronger teams - looked terrible trying, and failing, to run Vino back up to the peloton. There's no denying that - as I think I said, Vino ended up alone, having blown apart his own team. But I think that people may have inflated expectations from Postal/Discovery's years of domination. The first few years of Lance's wins, USPostal was not the race-ruling express train they later became. Plenty of talent, but a lot of what Lance achieved in those years was from his own strength - chasing down climbers on impossible mountains and leaving them in his wake. It was after his success that Postal, then Discovery, had so much talent, so much experience, and, frankly, such an aura that they could exert their will on the other 180 riders without breaking a sweat. Astana shouldn't be measured against that, especially not on a day when both of their leaders have nasty falls.

All that said, if Klöden's done, then Team Astana is mortally wounded, and only a heroic performance by Vino can win it.

Vino Down!

2007-07-12T16:49:00.000-04:00

Well this is alarming news. Alexandre Vinokourov, who was cheated out of competing in last year's Tour but is now the last giant left in the field, had a nasty fall close to the end of today's stage. 2/3 of his Astana team stayed back to pace him forward, but they could never catch the peloton, and he ended up 1:20 back, with all of his likely rivals near the top of the standings. 1:20 is far from insurmountable, but it's a hell of a handicap to give up before the first mountain stage.

As for those rivals?

Well, this is a week late, but nothing much has happened in this Tour yet, so it's still preview-quality in terms of likely accuracy.

As even the most casual observer knows, doping has been the story of this year's Tour, even moreso than last year's, when the top 4 contenders were knocked out before the first day of riding. Reigning champion Floyd Landis is unavailable to defend, as he is defending his reputation - as well as last year's win - in the courts. Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso are both gone for good, hounded by drug allegations and admissions. As I said above, Vino's the only one left who really has the stature of a Tour champion, because, for all his unproven leadership abilities, he has simply shown in prior Tours that, physically, he can dominate a race the way that few could during the Lance Era (not to mention his overall win in the Vuelta a España last year).

But, once again, Vino is teamed with Klöden of Germany. Everything I've heard is that Vino's the definitive leader of his team, but a small slip - like today's - could well change that calculus in the accomplished Klöden's mind. For even more intrigue, Andreas also crashed today. He reconnected and finished with the peloton, but apparently broke his coccyx, which doesn't bode well for the next 15 stages. Vino may not want a rival on his squad, but he could surely use an able lieutenant.

Lieutenant describes most of the remaining contenders. Great American Hope Levi Leipheimer has returned to Discovery, also with assurances that he will be the acknowledged leader. But Levi has still not proven that he can take it to the next level as a team leader and champion.

Spaniard Carlos Sastre of CSC has pretty strong credentials - podium finish at the Vuelta and 4th place last year when he was suddenly thrust into Basso's no-doubt stylish shoes - and, more importantly, a strong team: probably the strongest team on the Tour, with accomplished specialists for each portion of the race. Strong climber who has learned to time trial. The only question is whether CSC will actually focus its efforts on Sastre - they've already spent 4 days defending Fabian Cancellara's yellow jersey.

Alejandro Valverde of Caisse D'Epargne has been mentioned in relation to the Puerto doping scandal, but he's here, and he's shown some Grand Tour abilities. At last year's Vuelta he finished second to Vino, and in the last two Tours he was riding well before injuries took him out. Not a great team, but a strong lieutenant in Oscar Pereiro (who could become the 2006 Tour winner by default if Landis loses his case).

OK, now that I've got this post out, maybe I'll be a bit better about keeping things up to date around here. Come on back.

It really does get worse

2007-05-04T08:59:00.000-04:00

I've long taken Brad DeLong's modification of Hofstadter's Law to heart: The Bush Administration is worse than you can imagine, even after taking into account the fact that it is worse than you can imagine.

But, unbelievably, they keep doing it. A reader writes in to Josh Marshall to spotlight the fact, as testified to by ex-DOJ honcho Comey (the Bush appointee who refused to fire Fitzgerald), that the Washington State US Attorney who was fired was fired because he requested more funding to investigate the murder of an Assistant US Attorney.

Think about that for a second. Sounds impossible, right? But it's been established, at least as much as the other reasons for the USA firings. So what could the AUSA have been doing that the Bush Admin didn't want his killer caught and convicted? Drowning orphans? Investigating corrupt Republicans? Volunteering at Planned Parenthood? Signing up minorities to vote?

Worse. He was pro-gun control. Indeed, his killer was likely a gun nut, killing him for his political views. And the Bush Administration chose to protect the murderer, because they supported his political stance.

I don't know how we are going to clean this stain from the body politic.

Vandalism in Defense of Slavery

2007-04-18T11:33:00.000-04:00

Just remember: the Confederate flag has nothing to do with racism:

'White Power' banner hung on Westmoreland water tower

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The Associated Press
Someone scaled a barbed-wire fence and hung a "White Power" banner on a water tower behind Mount Pleasant High School earlier this week.

State police in Greensburg said someone cut through barbed wire on top of the fence [...] before climbing the structure [and hanging] a Confederate flag and a banner saying "White Power," police said.

It's just that racists really like the flag flown by an army constituted to defend chattel slavery. No idea why they'd make that connection.

Frogward, March!

2007-04-12T16:50:00.000-04:00

This could finally be it. The straw that breaks Rove's back. From TPM:

Waxman spoke to RNC Counsel Rob Kelner. According to Kelner, even after the RNC began saving Karl Rove's emails, in response to orders from Pat Fitzgerald, Rove himself apparently continued to delete the messages himself well into 2005.

That would be Karl Rove, under investigation by a Federal prosecutor, destroying evidence that he was directly told to preserve.

It's beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas....

You Shouldn't Take It So Hard

2007-04-06T16:16:00.000-04:00

I haven't had anything specific to say about the Keith-Richards-snorted-his-dad's-ashes story. It befits his legend as rock's greatest hedonist, and part of me is impressed, but it's not exactly role model behavior, you know? Nonetheless, the faux outrage makes me want to come out foursquare behind ol' Keith.

Keith became my hero while I was in architecture school, pulling allnighter after allnighter. Why? It wasn't his stupendous drug use, but rather his story of staying up for 9 days straight, finally passing out against a guitar amp in a studio. His explanation? "Life was just too interesting to miss a single minute."

I no longer resent my body's need for at least 6 hours a night, but I certainly would like to experience as much life as possible. And sometimes, that means just staying awake for it all.

Natural Design

2007-04-04T11:29:00.000-04:00

I've always hewed to the belief that we respond instinctively to natural beauty, and that capturing aspects of natural beauty is what makes for pleasing art and architecture. This is a commonplace in the art world, although exactly how "natural beauty" gets defined is at the core of a lot of historical debate: Classicists - the more rationally-minded - point to symmetry and mathematical proportion, while Romantics - who might be called organicists - focus on dynamic equilibrium and more and less abstracted naturalistic ornament.

All of this throat-clearing is just to note that I was struck this morning as I filled our Brita pitcher. Our faucet has lost a washer, and so the water spritzes out a bit, and as the stream entered the opening, droplets of water accumulated on the adjacent lid. And they did so in a pattern that was lovely. With a bit more forethought, I would've taken a photo, but you'll just have to picture a fan of droplets, bigger at the base (closer to the stream), tapering towards the edge of the gravity- and water pressure-defined distribution. Not entirely dissimilar to a peacock's fan, actually.

It never ceases to amaze me how simple, natural patterns like this please the eye. And of course fractal geometry has taught us that the distinction I made up above is superficial - once you get beyond the surface circumstances of symmetry and ornament, both schools of thought are looking at the same truth. Our minds, evolved in this world, respond with subconscious delight to the forms and arrangements that follow from natural laws.

The trick is reliably echoing natural beauty in artificial design. I'll let you know when I get there.

Noted

2007-01-31T17:08:00.000-05:00

Got a letter published over at Altercation on the ongoing If-Malkin-is-wrong-does-it-prove-AP-was-right debate involving LTC Bob Bateman.

Ethnicity and Politics

2007-01-31T14:40:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot of noise at the top of the blogosphere (the Arctic region, as it were) about the influence of Jews on our national discourse, in particular regarding Iran. Note that I don't say "the Jews;" the discussion, properly understood, regards the unavoidable fact that a lot of high profile opinion-makers are Jewish, and clearly have an emotional attachment to Israel that they don't about, say, Thailand. Thus, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and others have pointed out, their opinions on the matter may not be strictly defined by the best interests of the US.

Anyway, I bring this up not to inveigh - while the point seems trivially true to me, it's hardly worth getting in the mud about - but to bring up a parallel that has, I think coincidentally, been raised simultaneously.

The redoubtable Bob Somerby, of the Daily Howler, has for the past few days pointed his finger at a more specific target than his generalized "millionaire pundit values" as a villain in our discourse. The problem is, in his words, "those g*dd*amn m*cks." He points to an extensive list of Irish Catholic pundits who are prominent in our punditry (especially at NBC), and whose old-fashioned values - sexist, hidebound, "blinkered" - have been a major cause of their obsession with the Clenis and hatred for Hillary. It's an interesting thesis, and certainly makes sense as a generator of what is, frankly, stunningly reactionary commentary on these two very important Americans.

Now, Bob was long ago dismissed by much of the lefty blogosphere as a bit of an embarassing uncle, someone who harps tirelessly/tiresomely on the War on Gore. Myself, I still read him every day because he never develops outrage fatigue - he never gives Chris Matthews or Frank Rich a pass because they're temporarily saying something pleasing, or because "that's just the way they are." And it seems to me that, with the cranking up of the Kewl Kids, his profile is rising once again. But I haven't seen anyone mention his thesis. And I think it's important, if only to help Dems defend themselves from the coming onslaught.

If you thought the War on Gore and the pathetic coverage of Kerry and the Swiftboaters were bad, you haven't seen anything yet.

More unpopular by the minute

2007-01-23T13:06:00.000-05:00

On some level, I've been surprised that Bush's cratering popularity hasn't dipped further - in several polls, he's never been below 33% (this is job ratings, BTW, not actually personal popularity), and only occasionally have any polls shown him under 30%, despite his staggeringly unpopular escalation plan. Evidently, John Rogers was correct that the Crazification Factor (or BTKWB Quotient) really is right around 27%.

But anyway, what I thought I had noticed, and Atrios conveniently gave me the evidence for this morning, was that what is happening is that fewer and fewer people are doubting that Bush is a truly bad president. For awhile his numbers averaged something like 35% approve, 55% disapprove, with 10% waffling. Now, and for a few weeks now (probably since the idea of escalation started to hit the news), disapprove has been well into the 60s. Which means that everyone's off the fence now: you're either a Bush dead-ender or you want the man gone.

America, I take back what I said about you at 11PM on November 2, 2004.

Foodie Blogging

2007-01-23T11:59:00.000-05:00

Interview in Salon today, with some guy named Barry Glassner who's written a book called The Gospel of Food. Apparently it's a rather whirlwind takedown of food-related pieties, from exclusionary eaters like vegans and Atkins dieters to judgmental opponents of fast food.

Since it's an interview, not a review, it's a little hard to gauge the exact balance of what he does, but it sure sounds like a "pox on both their houses" thing:

The kind of diet that Morgan Spurlock went on in "Super Size Me" is obviously going to make you sick. But so would eating three meals a day of boiled broccoli. So, I think that it's certainly wise to be concerned with eating well and eating moderately and taking into account the sorts of advice that generations of mothers have given, and occasionally fathers. Eat your veggies, eat your fruit, and don't overdose on sweets.

Well, yes. I mean, I'm not sure how valuable it is to have a book arguing that common sense is, in fact, commonsensical. Furthermore, I think it's pretty absurd to compare an all-fast food diet with a caricature of a vegan diet - who, other than snake oil salesmen, argues for extended diets of single vegetables? Not to mention that Spurlock's symptoms - liver shutdown, cholesterol count of a dying man - actually wouldn't result from an all-broccoli diet.

So what do we have? A guy opposing an actual problem - the millions of Americans who eat fast food more than a half dozen times a week - with an imaginary "other side." Why, oh why, is this formulation so endlessly popular, so addictive to publishers? I know the answer - everyone wants to be either a True Believer - and that's who the extreme diet books are for - or a Sensible, Rational Decider. And those people get claptrap like this:

I see relatively little organized attention to hunger, for example, relative to, for instance, the kind of effective and organized campaigns against particular types of foods, like trans fats. When somewhere around 35 million to 40 million Americans are facing hunger every year it seems to me that that would be the top priority of any reasonable food activist. The ban on trans fats may be a good thing, but should it be the first thing? Should it take precedence over much more pressing food issues like hunger in the city, or the availability of fresh foods to the poor in the city? No, not for one minute.

Because, of course, there are no food kitchens and pantries in New York City, neither bureaucrats nor grass roots activists promoting farmers' markets and efforts to get fresher foods into bodegas and corner markets.

Stuff like this makes me alternately agitated and exhausted. Sheesh.

Why I blog for Choice

2007-01-22T13:52:00.000-05:00

Actually, I haven't much, if at all, but choice is a central political value of mine. Many others have said it better, so I'll simply say this: the right of adult humans to determine thier own fates is the THE central right - it's life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the wellspring of every other right. And the right not to gestate, bear, and raise another human is critical to making those other rights meaningful.

And as for all the threadbare retorts that demagogues use to respond to my assertions above, well, I used them too, once. As some of you know, I was once a devout Catholic and quite conservative (although with minimal racist, sexist, and homophobic tendencies - at least no more than any other unenelightened, privileged white son of the Reagan Era). And part and parcel of that was effortless confidence in the wrongness of abortion. After all, a fetus is so obviously human - what else could it be? - and the injunction against murder is so definitive, there could be no debate.

And frankly, in the op-ed pages, that simplistic analysis gets you pretty far. Because the one thing that rarely gets mentioned in the op-ed pages is the hard reality: abortions will happen. No matter what. You can outlaw it, you can restrict it, you can make it expensive and humiliating, but you will never prevent it. And it was having this simple, obvious fact laid out for me that sent the whole edifice crashing down. After all, what use, what sense, is an absolutist moral system that flies in the face of reality?

It was this realization - that conservatism, the creed that claims for itself "realism," as opposed to the naive idealism of liberals, was hopelessly out of touch with reality - that set me on the path to liberalism. Because if there will always be homosexuals, no matter how loudly bigots preach; if there is racial injustice, no matter how rotely bigots cite selected excerpts from Dr. King; if sexism remains pervasive, no matter how many individual women achieve success, then we need to face up to the reality of our world, and respond humanely towards it. That means taking seriously the claims of the oppressed; that means knocking down barriers of prejudice, whether enshrined in civil or religious law; and that means fighting, tooth and nail, for the right to choose for all women.

Good to eat

2007-01-07T22:36:00.000-05:00

So, as I hope someone noticed, I put up new food photos a week or two ago. At this point, those are mostly old meals - you can learn about them at Flickr, if you care for more detail. Recent holiday feasts will be coming, but I wanted to give these their time in the (very low-wattage) spotlight.

At any rate, this is, alas, a post about a failed pie. Looks gorgeous, doesn't it? My first-ever apple pie. I've done lots of elaborate cooking, but somehow this staple of Americana has eluded - indeed, intimidated - me. Step one is knowing nothing about pie crust, then step two is worrying about getting the filling right - I'm very particular about apple pies, so I hardly wanted to let myself down.

So I went with Cook's standard, classic apple pie: nothing fancy, or tricky. It's a long-lead item: about an hour to assemble, then another to bake, and a few hours to cool. And at the end of all that: heartbreak. I didn't take a picture of the overspiced puddle of soup hidden beneath that handsome crust, but I could barely choke it down. I consulted with a good friend who's an excellent baker, and it appears that a series of small mistakes may have led to the disaster. I suppose I should hop up on that horse again, but somehow, I haven't.

I was right: PA Dems are smart

2007-01-03T09:54:00.000-05:00

Not smart enough to prevent treason, evidently, but smart enough to bring a gun to Perzel's knifefight. House Dem leader Bill DeWeese - whose "petty vindictiveness" was apparently so offensive to the dear Rep. Caltagirone - nominated Rep. Dennis O'Brien (R-Phila.) for Speaker of the House, thus defeating anti-democratic prick (and longtime O'Brien foe) John Perzel (R-His Own Ego). O'Brien is, according to reports, reform-minded and, more importantly, indebted to DeWeese. Obviously, this is not the optimal result of Dems taking the House majority, but it's certainly good enough, most importantly because Perzel had dedicated himself to obstructing Gov. Rendell's popular (supported by 60% of Pennsylvanians) agenda.

One other note, a tally I hadn't seen before: November gave us 50 new House members (of both parties), representing just under a quarter of the 203-member chamber (which is I believe the 2nd-largest in the nation, for the 6th-largest state). I think that qualifies as a sea change.

Now there's a resolution I can get behind

2007-01-03T09:32:00.000-05:00

From Stroll, guest-blogging at Bitch, PhD:

"I realize this post is all over the place, but that's how I plan to be in 2007!"

It's old news by now, but PA Leg update to come soon; it's better news.

PA Dems know how to treat a traitor

2007-01-01T15:54:00.000-05:00

"Caltagirone sold out to Perzel and the House Republicans," [state Democratic Party chair T.J.] Rooney said. "He now has two options: He should remain in the Democratic fold, or resign his seat immediately and switch his political affiliation to Republican -- which he in essence has done with this decision -- and run for the seat during a special election."

This article in the Post-Gazette shows a state party that has learned the hardball lessons of the past 12 years of corrupt Republican rule, using strong language, taking principled stands, and making perfectly clear the issues at hand:

"The Republicans have been in control of the House for 12 years, and the voters of Pennsylvania have voiced their opinion. It's time for a change," Mr. Mahoney (D-Uniontown) said. "There's no reform coming down the pike from the Republicans and we really need reform of the open records law and taxes. I think the Democratic leadership can deliver on that and I am going to be pushing for them to do that."

I will note that, according to the article, Caltagirone sold his soul for promises "to divide committee chairmanships equally between the parties and to adjourn the House no later than 10 p.m.," the latter to end late-night sessions intended to avoid public scrutiny. The former is only relevant to salve the conscience of the traitor, while the latter could surely have been negotiated with Dems, who have been campaigning to clean up a corrupt Republican House. Which is why I maintain that the guy's getting something that hasn't come to light yet.

Rally in Reading today, Harrisburg tomorrow. Let's hope for a Blue Revolution in PA (I'm sorry to say I'll be at work. I know, I know).

TREASON

2006-12-30T17:42:00.000-05:00

Scumbag Thomas R. Caltagirone of Berks County plans to cross party lines to keep anti-voter Republican John Perzel as Speaker of the House despite Dems holding a 102-101 majority.

If it weren't a 6+ hour drive, I'd be in my car right now to march in front of his district office. Fucking anti-American, anti-democratic, arrogant, sure-to-be-bought-off bastard.

Wonder what was in your stocking, Tom? A nice, juicy Committee Chair? Maybe some earmarks for the district? A little lobbying thrown to your wife, or brother, or daughter? Or maybe a nice, old-fashioned suitcase of cash?

If the people of Berks County had any self-respect, they'd be after his traitor ass with pitchforks and torches - a coward who announces this on the Saturday before New Year's, hoping the heat will die down before he has to face the public.

Why I Blame Rio

2006-12-30T10:05:00.000-05:00

A year or two ago, I wanted to post about my trip to Brazil, apropos of something on City Comforts. But my thoughts on that brief visit, now more than a decade ago, have always been extensive and a bit complex, so I never got around to writing them up. But this post over at Alterdestiny (which I've been meaning to blogroll - and to read more often) gets at part of why I don't have a lot of good things to say about Rio:

What we couldn't know as she did that was, earlier that very morning, 7 people were burnt to death on a bus in a wave of violence across all parts of the city. Even eerier, the bus that held the victims was the same company as the bus we were on.... And near our apartment, while shooting up a new police stand on the sidewalk, the assailants killed an innocent street vendor.

Much of Rio is rather anxious, tonight and going into the weekend. [...] The theories are not really clear as to the reason for the violence. The article claims either economic struggles or gang-related turf wars, though here in Rio, the most popular explanations seem to be a reminder from traffickers in the favelas to the public of who exercises power and can instill fear here, especially given the high number of tourists present. The general paranoia is severe enough that, while riding back on a bus from dinner tonight, my girlfriend and I saw a cop with an MP5 pointed at a guy who was slowly reaching into his handbag on the sidewalk, something she'd never seen before in her 24 years here.

I have never felt as unsafe as I did wandering Rio de Janeiro, and this includes late night walks in some seedy parts of Manhattan and nearly getting jumped in the projects of my own fair city. There's something palpably broken about civil society in Rio, and no amount of white sand beaches (many of which are too polluted to swim at these days) can wash that away. Throw in truly oppressive heat and humidity (it was late March), and it was not a place I intend to revisit.

[Updated to add obvious title]

Fuck yeah!!!!

2006-12-07T14:17:00.000-05:00

Heinz Field grease to fuel city fleet

I can hardly tell you how great this is. When I was single, about 6 years ago, if you could get me to stop talking about underground architecture, I would surely be extolling biodiesel. And not that subsidized soybean shit, either - repurposed fry oil, the good, cheap stuff. I chickened out of getting a brand new Jetta TDI to put it in (voided warranties and all that. I know, I know, but it was my first new car), and, opportunity having passed, I obsessed less. Since then, I've noted with pleasure the burgeoning place of biodiesel in national energy discussions, but this is a whole nother thing. Steelers fry-oil. Converted to fuel right here in town. City cars (and garbage trucks!). 10 kinds of awesome. My only regret is that my wife is leaving the city workforce, so I won't be seeing one of these beauties out front every couple of weeks after evening meetings.

Self-Correcting Blogosphere

2006-12-06T10:08:00.000-05:00

This is just egregiously wrong:

Last night we celebrated with cocktails. Iris even had one of her own. We are very, very bad parents. If it helps to know this, J called it a virgin Shirley Temple because it didn't even have fizz, just water, lemon, and a maraschino cherry. Her glass: a votive candle holder.

In fact, there was Grenadine for a little sweetness and red color, and that's a lime on there.

Folks, that's my lovely wife. We were incognito while she worked at the City and I said things like this, but she's quitting, so now we can acknowledge one another.

It's nice to be out of the closet.

The Consistent American Public

2006-11-29T09:34:00.000-05:00

So as I said, I was, for unimportant reasons, looking at Atrios' archives for the second week of the war. Aside from posts bringing back the sickening feeling of those war-mad times, there was one that had fascinating polling data from Zogby on the eve of the war.

Currently, would you strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose a war against Iraq?"
Support 54%
Oppose 41%
Not Sure 5%

"Would you support or oppose a war against Iraq if it included sending in hundreds of thousands of U.S. ground troops?"
Support 47%
Oppose 45%
Not Sure 8%

"Would you support or oppose a war against Iraq if there were hundreds of American casualties?"
Support 46%
Oppose 47%
Not Sure 7%

"Would you support or oppose a war against Iraq if there were thousands of American casualties?"
Support 41%
Oppose 51%
Not Sure 8%

"Would you support or oppose a war against Iraq if it meant thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties?"
Support 40%
Oppose 53%
Not Sure 7%

Atrios noted the balance between opinion based on American & Iraqi civilian casualties, which obviously didn't pan out - perhaps if you add "tens of" to the Iraqi question, you'd get a more honest gauge of American attitudes towards US & Iraqi suffering.

But that's a sidenote. What's amazing, in retrospect, is that the poll was predictive. Support was tempered - albeit not down to even - once casualties were well into the hundreds. And by the time they were in the thousands, Americans threw the bums out over a war that seemed a sure political winner just a few years before.

All They Are Saying....

2006-11-28T23:29:00.000-05:00

OK, Blue Tuesday was great news and all, but here's a nice sign that the country is getting its head straight again:

Last week, a couple were threatened with fines of $25 a day by their homeowners’ association unless they removed a four-foot wreath shaped like a peace symbol from the front of their house.

The fines have been dropped, and the three-member board of the association has resigned, according to an e-mail message sent to residents on Monday.

[...]

The former president [of the homeowners’ association for the community where Mr. Trimarco lives, who said Tuesday that he had stepped in to help form an interim association] described himself in a telephone interview as a military veteran who would fight for anyone’s right to free speech, peace symbols included.

Town Manager Mark Garcia said Pagosa Springs was building its own peace wreath, too. Mr. Garcia said it would be finished by late Tuesday and installed on a bell tower in the center of town.

This is in some community 200 miles from Denver, where Colorado gets seriously red (this town may not be bright red, but it ain't Boulder, either). And in a matter of days, the community, with near-unanimity, utterly annihilated this attempt at anti-American censorship.

I was just perusing some Eschaton from late March 2003, and it's striking to remember just how bad things were then. NBC bragging about their great combat cameras, Drum was touting crazy liberal professors, and it was entirely unclear where things were headed in Iraq (there was talk about how Americans would respond to more than a few dozen casualties). But here we are, 3 1/2 years later, and sanity is returning. There's no strife in Pagosa Springs, no one marching with flags past the Trimarcos' home, no BS. Just a community coming together to defend their collective right to express their beliefs.

Something to be thankful for.

YES!

2006-11-28T15:29:00.000-05:00

Dems take PA State House.

We split the two exceptionally closely contested races in Chester County, giving us a 102-101 majority in the State Legislature. The most satisfying thing about this is that the now-exiting Speaker, John Perzel, was an absolute prick last week, bragging about how the Republicans wouldn't let Ed Rendell pursue his agenda. He even claimed that a guy who won by 20 points didn't have any kind of popular support, as compared with a Republican majority that would have been 1.

You know, I still have my Casey sign out front of my house, because every time I see someone else's Santorum sign, I laugh and laugh....

GOP Torn by Infighting

2006-11-17T11:18:00.000-05:00

Really.

The Republican Majority for Choice is running ads here in PA that explicitly draw a line between Republicans' roots in Lincoln, TR, and Reagan (?) and extremists such as Haggard, Robertson, and Santorum. The ad originally included images of Tom Ridge and Arlen Specter as non-extremists, but the two objected to being contrasted against Santorum.

I can't find the ad online - I'll keep looking - but the sponsors are explicit about trying to be divisive. They want an open discussion about the direction of the party, and they want it to be more than just John McCain running into the arms of Bob Jones.

I think this is important on the merits - if moderate(ish) and libertarian(ish) Republicans can admit to themselves that the GOP is a party of, by, and for the Radical Right, then they will either change the direction of the party, making it less dangerous (in addition to pro-choice rhetoric, the group also talks about "less intrusive gov't"), or they'll start sitting out elections, and the actual Good Guys will win. Either outcome would be an improvement over the last dozen years.

Setting aside the merits, this of course leads to the meta-question: will the national media talk about this? I mean, this is an intentionally controversial ad, attacking not only religious figures but also (formerly - ha!) elected politicians. The group is supported by the likes of Specter, Jerry Ford, and Goldwater's widow. This should be a big story - bigger than Hoyer/Murtha, since it could have long-term implications for the viability of one of our two parties. But of course our media is in utter denial that the GOP is becoming (or at least in danger of becoming) a regional, minority party. The success or failure of this group, and its allies, will have a huge impact on whether or not that happens.

But then, did you hear about Pelosi's lose-lose?

Update: A thoughtful Republican operative in comments has given us the URL to see the aforementioned ad. On viewing, I gotta say, I'm all for it. It really seems to be the sort of thing we've been waiting for as the GOP has lurched rightward over the past 6, 12, 26, 40 years. Yeah, arguably a long time coming. But hey, at least someone's saying it - and without first innoculating themselves by attacking liberals or foreigners to prove themselves "good conservatives." Bully.

Rime of the Ancient Blogger

2006-11-10T23:19:00.000-05:00

The Ghost Ship revives!

The Mighty Reason Man is Back.

And we are all very, very happy....

Regional Parties

2006-11-09T14:39:00.000-05:00

So I'd say that the underreported story of this election is the death of the Republican Party in the Northeast. It's been coming for awhile, but the South seems to loom so much larger in the national imagination than the Northeast (probably because the Northeast really includes both the Midatlantic states and New England, plus the distorting presence of New York City, its own region) that people don't really talk about it. There are a few reasons, but implicit in all of them is the idea that The South is critical to national power, while the Northeast is not. Presumably this dates back to the region's historic schizophrenia between mildly conservative Rockefeller Republicans and tough machine Democrats. Whereas the South has - except for relatively brief transitions - always been fairly unified, whether Democrat or Republican.

And just today some flack from AEI dismissed concerns about the GOP disappearing in the NE by pointing to "real problems" for Dems in the South. So I decided to do some counting.

Well, lo and behold. Looking at the above map (from the Times), we see 4 regions in the country: the "Solid South," the Northeast, the West Coast, and the Middle. The Solid South turns out to be not-so-solid (more on that in a moment), but if we look at the old Confederacy plus reliably Red KY and OK, we get a region that's almost 2/3 GOP in the House, and almost 100% GOP in the Senate. The Northeast, from PA & MD up to Maine, is actually much more thoroughly blue, as is the West Coast. The Middle, for our purposes, is the remainder - states that are either pretty well mixed, or don't add up to much electorally (I know those empty Plains states can add up in the Electoral College, but I think Senate Dems have shown that they're attainable for Team Blue).

So is it true? Do you need to compete in the South to win? Here's the breakdown by region:

South: 26 Senators, 141 Representatives
NE: 20 Senators, 91 Representatives
West Coast: 6 Senators, 67 Representatives
Middle: Doesn't matter for this discussion - it's not a cohesive region, culturally or politically

So we can see that the two Blue regions equal the South in the Senate. What about the House? Surely the Solid South gives the GOP a huge head start in the House? Not so much. The two Blue regions are much bluer than the South is red, and have more Representatives. The NE is now 77% blue in the House, the West Coast 66%, for a total of 72%. The Solid South, in contrast, is just 61% red. And while some of that is due to states like FL and AK that have never wholly left the Dems, you actually find Deep South states like GA and MS that have scant, if any, red majorities in their delegations. What's the upshot? 114 Dems come from their home regions, where the GOP gets only 86.

Obviously, none of this is set in stone, and political tides run both ways. But it turns out that, while the Dems need to retain credibility in the South, they don't necessarily need to do much more. They've got a decent presence there, and they OWN two regions that, combined, are significantly bigger.

So I can't wait for the anguished new stories about How Can the GOP Win Without New England.

Yup. Any day now.

Oh, fer cryin' out loud

2006-11-09T11:44:00.000-05:00

Pa. House control could come down to 1 race

That's the headline in the Post-Gazette today (online only). A race for an open seat in Chester County (near Philly) was down to a 19 vote lead for the R, when they found 250 uncounted absentee ballots, plus 40 provisional ballots that will need to be judged. And then there are overseas absentee ballots still not in hand. They're saying it could be another week. Oy vey.

By the way, I haven't seen a breakdown, but scanning a list over at the Philly Inquirer yesterday, it appeared to me that there was not, in fact, a huge anti-incumbent wave. But these things are relative, and the whole thing is skewed by the significant number of incumbents thrown out in primaries. Indeed, in my quick scanning, it looked like at least as many races had no incumbent as had an incumbent losing. Clearly, many of those would be retirements, but some portion must have been seats where the incumbent lost the primary due to the payraise scandal.

Either way, stay tuned.

PA House Update

2006-11-08T14:32:00.000-05:00

After being generally ignored in the excitement last night, the (very important) status of state legislatures is being discussed, both in blogs and elsewhere. As you might expect, Dems did well, and now control most governorships and most state leges - they were behind in both before last night. This is huge, since it makes it much more likely that the redistricting after the next census will be favorable to Dems. It also ups the number of states who might enact anti-Electoral College legislation (saying that, as long as an electroal majority of states also do so, the state will throw its electoral votes to the popular vote winner).

Meanwhile, PA remains an unkown. There are 5 undetermined districts, and the Dems lead in 2. They need 3 to take the House, although party-switching is possible (especially among old line GOPers in the Philly 'burbs who may not be comfortable with their redneck brethren from mid-state).

If the GOP holds on, Rendell will be in a stronger position, but still unable to really promote an agenda, which is a shame. While he was in some ways a proto-McAuliffe at the DNC, he's also a big city paleo-Dem, and would do some nice, liberal things given the chance.

Another failure for the Boy Genius

2006-11-08T09:57:00.000-05:00

Lynn Swann - who lost to Governor Rendell by even more than Santorum lost to Casey - was apparently pushed on state GOPers by none other than Rove:

The decision to coalesce around Mr. Swann as the most viable candidate against Mr. Rendell took place at the highest levels of the state's Republican establishment. With encouragement from presidential adviser Karl Rove, members of the Pennsylvania leadership quickly signed on.

One of the things that has long struck me about Rove is how transparent most of his tactics - especially the non-dirty ones - are. Harriet Miers? USS Abraham Lincoln? Gonzalez and Alito (especially with the endlessly-repeated talking point of "what are you, anti-Catholic?")? Run a black football hero in PA - he can't lose!

Maybe part of what held Dems and the press (especially the press) in thrall to him was that he won with such blatantly showy political moves. It was brazen, like Jordan taking three-and-a-half strides to the basket (you see, kids, there was a time when travelling was called on almost everybody...). If he could run right past the ref like that, and not get called, then what couldn't he do?

But, as this election has shown, Rove's ham-handed tactics always were just that. It wasn't the show-pieces that won - it was the fearlessly dirty tactics going on behind the scenes (from calling a child advocate judge a pedophile to rioting in FL to illegal robocalling in 2002 and 2006). And for all his dirt, he never would have won in 2000 if not for the butterfly ballot; even after 9/11, it was only shamelessly politicizing Iraq that gained (a few) seats in 2002; whether Ohio was stolen in 2004 or not, he barely beat Kerry. And now he's been crushed in 2006, all his "you're not seeing the polls I'm looking at" bullshit now just comical (think Robert Siegel of NPR will call him out on it?).

Turd blossom.

PA State Legislature Goes Blue!?!?

2006-11-08T01:10:00.000-05:00

OK, this is my own late-night count, and the stupid fucking State House has 202 seats, but I think the Dems have taken it!

Based on this official Commonwealth page, with 92.44% reporting statewide, Dems hold a 104-98 lead! I could be wrong - I could have miscounted, some races could flip (scanning through, I saw maybe a half dozen within a point), and at least 3 uncontested candidates are listed as D/R - I have no idea how they'd caucus. But as I've been reporting for months, the groundwork was laid for a big shekup in Harrisburg, and we appear to have had it.

BTW, you heard it here first - the Post-Gazette appears to have no stories whatsoever about the state races, except for one high profile incumbent upset.

PS - Santorum and Hart gone in one night! Fantastic.

UPDATE: The Post-Gazette still hasn't called it, and is skeptical of Dem chances. WDUQ this morning said the Dems had netted at least 4 seats, but didn't announce how many races were still unknown. Two Dem incumbents in western Pa. lost, which sets us back considerably. We needed 9 before the night began, and thus needed at least 11 gains elsewhere. We'll see.

Election Night Top 5

2006-11-07T23:35:00.000-05:00

I've been too nervous and pessimistic to get really excited about tonight, even after America's Worst Senator was sent home. The first smile of the night came courtesy of the good majority of South Dakotans. The second came courtesy of my national anthem:

Star Spangled Banner - Jimi Hendrix
Exhuming McCarthy - REM (only to chuck the bones in the Potomac, we hope)
My Orphanage - Rasputina (foreshadowing Newt's '08 run?)
Why Don't You Do Right - Rasputina (they did, Melora, they did)
Satisfaction Guaranteed - The Firm (well, we'll see about MT, TN, VA, & MO...)

The best thing about Hendrix's anmthem, to me, was his response to Dick Cavett, who asked him about all the people who thought it was disrespectful, or unAmerican, or whatever: "I thought it was beautiful...."

Maybe it was Godwin?

2006-11-06T12:20:00.000-05:00

A more cynical thought occurred to me right after I posted about the hunter-gatherer to farmer transition below. One thing David wrote was

I believe that writ large, over many decades or centuries, people get the kind of societies they want and choose.

But, of course, in the shorter term, we have seen societies go drastically wrong, not through revolution, but through small, inceremental steps that don't portend their outcome. Sara Robinson posted the following excerpt from Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free over at Orcinus today:

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it."

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these "little measures" that no "patriotic German" could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings" and "consider the end." But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings."

Do you think that Americans have decided that we should be a torturing, kidnapping, wiretapping autocracy? Or do you think that each little step towards that end was taken without any sense of where it might lead? And if the pressures I speculate on below are generally right - if agriculture is hard to reverse, and if it can grow in power without benefitting most of its individual constituents, then all it takes (in each location) is one ill-considered transition.

No do-overs.

Whose dumb idea was this, anyway?

2006-11-05T23:03:00.000-05:00

David Sucher, over at City Comforts, takes a break from blogging about the Viaduct debate in Seattle to wonder

Were they stupid?

An academic suggests that

only recently has the European standard of living surpassed that of hunter-gatherer societies.

Interesting. That implies an odd choice by all those hunter gatherers, no? Why would they step from a higher to a lower standard?

This has puzzled me for a number of years. It seems quite clear that, by certain significant measures (lifespan, caloric consumption, nutritional intake), farming was a loser of a decision for H-Gs. But I think that there are a number of explanations entirely consonant with that basic story.

1. H-Gs couldn't analyze this. Agriculture must have offered a number of comprehensible advantages, and it would have been hard to judge - especially in advance - the disadvantages.

1a. Comprehensible advantages may have included stability - I think it's easy to see ways in which humans to this day value quotidian certainty over high return uncertainty. Actually, I can imagine the New Yorker cartoon (or maybe Far Side) in my head - haggard H-G sees his compatriots mauled by a saber-toothed tiger, and thinks "maybe a nice place in the country, just a few acres with some proto-wheat...."

1b. Another (likely) comprehensible advantage would have been culture. I may be wrong about this, but I would imagine that semi-dedicated agriculture would almost instantly offer the benefits of specialization, etc. It wouldn't take much experience of pottery made by full-time potters, or clothing made by full-time tailors, to value that material improvement.

2. Agriculture benefits societies more than it does individuals. So the farming village is able to outcompete the nearby H-Gs, even though each farmer is doing (a bit) worse than each H-G. It's not as if one farmer can say, "Fuck it, I'm going to hunt and gather."

2a. Obviously, you start to get into politics and power here, as well. If that village leader has a couple dozen dedicated warriors at his disposal, he grows far more powerful than any neighbors. Aside from what that does for him (booty, wives, ego), it also makes him a more desirable leader in the eyes of his tribe. And other tribes. So they join him, whether directly or in imitation.

3. Deny the premise of the question: what village life lacks in longevity, it gains in culture. Straight-up superiority, even if the life is shorter. Hell, this is easy to see: do you want 75 years without any products of culture (save, perhaps, bardery), or 50 years with expert-made goods, art, literature, etc.

4. Directionality. It's not clear that H-G to farmer is reversible, maybe not even after just one full generation. Studies of modern H-G societies show staggering levels of detailed, sophisticated environmental knowledge. But how would you retain that after a decade of disuse?

So let's posit the transitional, horticultural H-G tribe - they have some known gathering areas where they've learned to tend the berries for better yield. They realize that, with a bit more attention, yields keep growing. At some point, in a good year (or three), they do better without so much wandering. Soon, the H-G becomes supplementary, thus becoming less all-consuming. H-G knowledge atrophies, replaced by horticultural/agricultural knowledge. A few more years, and the H-G lifestyle can't compete, because they can't do it as well anymore. And, as they fail to find quarry, or are less successful in utilizing it, they think back on that nice, reliable crop. And the words drought, blight, and (animal-borne) disease don't even exist yet....

PS - Actually, I think Jared Diamond says herding preceeds agriculture, not the other way around, but I'm not sure that affects my argument in any meaningful way.

By the way, that was me

2006-11-02T22:06:00.000-05:00

I meant to take credit (or blame) last week for this. Bob Somerby took a break from talking about the War on Gore to eulogize the late mayor of Pittsburgh. He (Somerby, not the dead Mayor) was at an event in town a couple weeks ago (with Will Durst - wish I could've made it) at which the Mayor's son spoke. Bob was touched:

To us as outsiders, it was obvious that Pittsburgh’s Democrats remember Mayor O’Connor with feeling. His son wasted few words in describing a man who had earned that warm regard.

I felt obliged to set him straight:

[excerpt from email]

The man you heard eulogized was a legend in his own time - in the sense that his public persona was a feel-good story bearing only limited relation to the facts. My wife is a city employee who dealt with O'Connor when he was in City Council and when he became mayor, so the following is based on a firsthand witness.

Bob was a wholly-owned corporate shill. In a city with a functioning two-party system, he never would have run as a Democrat. His funding came largely from developers (many from out of town) who wanted him to give them what they wanted. His first acts as mayor advanced their interests, booting out companies with existing projects in favor of those who had given him the cash to run for mayor 3 times.

He hired a City Planning Director whose most noteworthy accomplishment as Zoning Administrator, several years before, was meeting behind closed doors to "make deals" with zoning applicants. Bob's right hand man was a long-time friend with no qualifications for government, who was recently fired for using his position to help a cop friend avoid an official reprimand.

His status as a man beloved of the people derived entirely from a genial disposition, an ability to deliver pork, not progress, for his Council District, and the provinciality of a small city that viewed him as a favorite son.

I don't know if you'll appreciate this speaking ill of the dead, but I've been biting my tongue around here for a month, and to see this fairy tale passed on to the world at large, by a source I respect, is just too much. The lessons of Bob O'Connor are strikingly similar to those of George Bush - both of them strikingly unintelligent, both of them in favor of corporate interests over the public interest - to the point where one doubts that they even understand the latter term - and both of them hailed for being fun to have a beer with. And, of course, both of them popularly elected by people who would bristle at hearing the above assessment. How liberalism and good government can survive in such an environment is the great problem of our day.

And it's that last that I find critical. I don't think that what Somerby meant what he wrote "But then, it’s “average people” who decide the nation’s course when they go to the polls and vote. Their values and opinions must be addressed when progressives and liberals do politics." was what I took away. What I took away was, "How the hell can progressives and liberals win when the grass roots, when the populus, is taken in by corporate tools like Bob O'Connor?" But whether Somerby meant that or not, he's right that it's the essential problem of our time.

Even if this election is the sea change that it looks like it could be (ohplease ohplease ohplease), that's only Step One. And it doesn't do anything to undermine the natural advantages held by well-funded "nice guys" like O'Connor and Bush. Maybe Good Government liberals will always be at a disadvantage in that fight. But we need to acknowledge it, and deal with it.

Maximum R+B

2006-11-01T23:57:00.000-05:00

I grew up in the aftermath of the rock era, when the airwaves were dominated by bands ten or twenty years past their primes, but whose new albums were still as anticipated as their more worthy predecessors. As any of you who've read my Friday Random Tens can attest, some of those have retained their hold over me, but I'm jaded - and mostly bored - by the majority.

The Who are a rather major exception. I find Pete Townsend an intriguing artist and individual, and the power of the band in their heyday leaves me wistful. I still resent that, for various reasons, my sister got my ticket to see them at Giants Stadium in '89. And though it's fallen into utter neglect - and disdain - by practically everybody, I still like Psychoderelict.

So as a result, I've been irresistably drawn to their new album, Endless Wire. Yes, I know that "they" is only half the band, including the individual that Pete, in an interview with the NY Times, identified as the bandmate who was least important to him. But, ultimately, it's Pete's songs, written with The Who in mind, and I want it to work.

Early indications have been positive, and the 3 tunes the Times had up were OK. But it was this video of the band (and the "new guys" have mostly been playing with the band for years and years - dig Zak Starkey's fantastic drumming) that made my heart race. In some ways, it's a throwback - Roger belts, Pete strums. But my response was visceral, not based on "oh good, more Who's Next." I dunno. Maybe it's just my viscera saying that, and my brain is rationalizing. I don't care. All I know is, there's a new Who album out. And I want it.

All bets in?

2006-10-02T21:57:00.000-04:00

OK, whoever had 7:44 PM EDT for first staggeringly predictable "contrarian," every-scandal-is-bad-for-Dems article at Slate wins the pot.

Kaus must be off his game; his didn't run until 9:23 (damned Pacific Time Zone!)

Dickerson's angle in that first piece, BTW, is that for the scandal really to have an impact, Dems will have to play the homophobia card - that, somehow, a US Congressman (repeatedly) hitting on (many) underage pages (over the course of years) is not, in and of itself, a big enough deal. Unless you really hammer the fag angle.

Of course his real analysis is, "What would Rove do?" And then assume that he'd be right.

At Long Last

2006-09-08T14:49:00.000-04:00

No more missed meetings for me. No more rolling into the office at 9:20. Why not, you ask?

They finally fixed that half-assed atomic clock.

The current standard clock will neither gain nor lose a second in 70 million years. The new clock pushes that figure out to 400 million years.

Phew.

No word on whether it comes with a programmable snooze function.

Lot of people don't have too much food on their tables

2006-09-01T16:49:00.000-04:00

But they got a lot of forks and knives
And they gotta cut something.

- Bob Dylan

If you want to know What's the Matter with Kansas, a good first place to look is Brad DeLong's blog. There's a lot I like about his Semi-Daily Journal - the blend of the intellectual with the geeky, the often-informative discussions, the occasional digressions. But what drives me insane is that, despite his role in the Order of the Shrill, despite his repeated demands to "Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now," is that, deep down, he's just another Neoliberal economist, fiercely loyal to policies, ideas, and usually the politics, of the worst of the Clinton Era.

One of the interesting things about Paul Krugman is that, for the first few years of his Bush-induced shrillness, he stuck with the basic underlying economic beliefs that so pissed me off when he contemptuously dismissed the WTO protestors in Seattle in '99. But somewhere along the line - I would peg it around 2003, after it became clear that Enron wouldn't change anything - he beagn to come around. I'm sure he's still well to the right of, say, Dean Baker, and certainly Max, but I'd say that he now Gets It: he understands that this really is class war, and the wealthy are the only ones waging battle.

Today, Krugman calls for "smart populism," and DeLong recoils in horror:

What populist policies that we can think of would be smart? And how can we make our high politicians allergic to populist policies that are stupid?

Lyndon Johnson, yes. William Jennings Bryan, no.

And this is, to a T, why we had to spend last week discussing how could we have this curious result that the rich have gotten richer, and the rest of us (as in, the other 99%) have gotten next-to-nothing. All due respect, but liberals like Prof. DeLong don't merely bring a knife to a gunfight; they deny there's a gunfight, and struggle to explain the shrapnel felling their comrades.

Republicans are already using the worst aspects of populism - xenophobia, racism, and implicit anti-Semitism* - to further their anti-popular economic policies. Hell, if Dem populists wanted to use unsavory populism to abet economic populism, I'm not sure they'd be able to wrest the Know-Nothing appeals from Republicans' cold, dead hands.

As Tom Franks suggests in the Times today, let's win now with policies that help the 75% of Americans falling behind, expressed simply, and fret about the decadent era of our policies when it arrives, if it ever does.

* Nearly every adjective applied to liberals and the media - coastal, cosmopolitan, elite, etc. - is identical with universally-understood anti-Semitic code of just 60 years ago.

[PS - much of this is a comment I posted over at DeLong's]

Worse than I thought

2006-09-01T15:11:00.000-04:00

It astonished me when I read about people switching to Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) a few years back, just when it should have been obvious to anyone that interest rates were headed upwards (while I may pay more attention to such things than most, how could any American be unaware that interest rates were sitting at a 40 year low; you don't need to be Alan Greenspan to understand that what goes down must come back up). I know that there was a class of people - first-time buyers, or people stepping up from starter homes that had appreciated enormously - to whom ARMs offered otherwise-unattainable home wealth. But even so, those people were taking a huge gamble - not even a gamble, since no reputable bookie would have given them odds.

What's worse, though, is people who refinanced their perfectly solid, 5.1% fixed-rate, traditonal mortgages into ARMs for existing houses. I went to college in the early 90s, so I have no personal history of mortgage rates, but I understood well that 5% for any kind of stable mortgage is an incredible deal - that 12% was considered a good rate in the late 80s. So what fool would throw one away for something that was, by definition, riskier?

What I hadn't realized, and just learned through Atrios, was that these ARMs (I don't know if it's all of them) have enormous pre-pay penalties - that you are essentially locked-in. Part of the amazing thing about traditional mortgages is that you can almost always get out to seek a lower interest rate, but the bank can't kick you out to charge you a higher one. Instead, we have millions of Americans in suddenly-overpriced homes, falliung behind on escalating montholy payemnts, and with no way out save default.

This is going to get ugly, people.

"[L]ike the neutron bomb," says George McCarthy, a housing economist .... "It's going to kill all the people but leave the houses standing."

PS - And never forget - Uncle Alan told people, at exactly the moment when he knew that he intended to raise interest rates every 6 weeks until retirement, that ARMs were a good idea. The man deserves tar and feathers, if not worse. And I am completely serious about that.

A requiem for a Lightweight

2006-08-24T11:26:00.000-04:00

Poor little Pluto is so damn small
Some people don't think it's a planet at all
Clyde thinks so, that's good enough for me
It beats Planet X, which you can't even see.

The Phenomenauts, "Earth is the Best" Rockets & Robots

Apparently the thugs at the International Astronomy Union think otherwise.

9-11 Anniversary a Boon for Dems?

2006-08-24T09:23:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty sure journalists call it the Rule of Three: three examples make a trend. And over the last few days, I've seen at least 3 promotions for major bin Laden documentaries & books. CNN's "In the Footsteps of bin Laden," National Geographic's "Triple Cross: bin Laden's Spy in America," and Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower. Plus, Slate is running this (somewhate bizarre) comic book of the 9-11 Commission's Report.

Now what struck me about all this is the focus on Osama himself. Because, as you may recall, we never caught the son of a bitch (as Paul Hackett brilliantly put it the other day, "Where's the six-foot-two, left-handed guy with the flowing white robe and the kidney problem? [This Republican yahoo on TV with me] doesn't understand the war on terror."). And, especially with Americans doing a better job of distinguishing between the (failed) war in Iraq and the (stalled) "War on Terror," I think that reminders that Bush and the Republicans took their eye of the ball mere months after the attacks (indeed, Ground Zero was literally still smoldering when Iraq talk began) are definitely not in the Republicans' best interests. If the Dems have the guts to call them on this - and I think that signs are that they're ready to do it - then we may not have competing pageants over the next couple of weeks, with Dems pumping up Katrina memories and Rove going back to the smoking well one last time. Instead, it may be more like a one-two punch for the Dems.

And then there's Murtha.

2006-08-20T17:08:00.000-04:00

A smaller piece in the paper today is on John Murtha. It does a pretty good job of describing the remarkable arc of his career - for years he was a classic small-city US Rep, bringing home some economic development/pork to his Rust Belt district and having a fairly low national profile. But since he came out strongly for withdrawal, he's become a national lightning rod. Yet the hometown folks still seem to love him - and with good reason. He really embodies his district: conservative, but not reactionary, devoted to the troops but not to the Administration, and ultimately worried about domestic issues most.

The PA Legislature article I discussed below doesn't mention him at all, but he's turned into a bit of a Democratic star. His district is right at the border between blue SW PA and bright red Central PA ("Alabama in the middle"), and his high profile should be a very good thing for nearby Dems, who will have a strong Dem with ironclad bona fides to point to, as opposed to the culturally liberal national Dems that so frighten rednecks.

PA State Legislature Update

2006-08-20T16:57:00.000-04:00

Big story in the Post-Gazette this morning about Dem chances to retake the PA House. As I've written before, there are several factors at work here, the primary one being the notorious middle-of-the-night payraise that spurred more voter outrage than anyone ever imagined. Add to that 10 years of not especially glorious Republican rule in the Statehouse, and the times may be a-changin'.

Tom Barnes' article is a bit thin - maybe the first third is just useless he-said, she-said between Dems and Reps (although it's worth noting that the Rep response to Dem confidence is tired old "Dems will raise your taxes!" talk - not a hint of substance in strategy or actual policy). But later on Barnes gets into specifics, and raises some other factors that could turn this into a perfect storm: Rendell is running for reelection, and he remains popular - Lynn Swann (yes, ol' 88) hasn't laid a hand on him yet; Bush is, of course, bringing down the Republicans across the country; and, although the article barely mentions him, Santorum is also not exactly bringing glory on the GOP here in PA.

I would say that Casey-Santorum is the bellwether for Dems in PA this fall - if Casey can really spank Santorum, pulling away as we approach Election Day rather than seeing his big lead whittled down, then I predict a huge November for us.

Moving backwards...

2006-08-11T09:58:00.000-04:00

jr's birthday 026.jpg
Originally uploaded by JRoth.

Aside from that little introduction, I think this is a good place to start. For my 30th birthday, we had a great big bash. My wife surprised me with a visit (from Denver) by my sister and her then-new girlfriend (soon to be wife; first time we'd met). But really, it was all about the pig.

Purchased at Farmer's Choice in the Strip District, herb-rubbed and chilled overnight in a trash bag, then slow (really slow) cooked over a homemade pit from noon 'til 10 pm on a chilly November day. And it was amazing.

For the serving and the aftermath, just click through.

Chow Time

2006-08-11T09:26:00.000-04:00

Huevos Rancheros.JPG
Originally uploaded by JRoth.

OK, finally time to do something I've wanted to for years: food blog.

I've always loved eating, and food's only grown more central to my life as I've grown older. What started as fried eggs with David Letterman in high school has become a near-obsession with elaborate - or at least detail-oriented - meals from all sorts of cultures. There's little I won't try in the kitchen, but I've at least learned to restrict my biggest efforts to the weekends. Weeknight meals at 11 pm are a thing of the past, thankfully.

But cooking remains my primary recreation, the part of the day when there are no clients, no contractors, and no codes to get between me and my creation, whether it be panaeng curry with homemade curry paste or a really nicely fried egg that came from a friend's duck.

[These are not, in fact, from the duck. But they were delicious]

Whither Cuba?

2006-08-09T13:44:00.000-04:00

In an ideal world, I would figure out the Spanish equivalent for whither. Anyway....

With some reluctance, I read Christopher Hitchens' Slate piece on Raul Castro taking over for Fidel. The reluctance derives from Hitchens' uniformly contemptible work over the last 5 years, following on his often contemptible work of the previous decade. But I figured his twin obsessions - the Clintons and "Islamofascism" - wouldn't play in this story, so he might be readable, especially with his Trostkyite history. The blurb suggested that his thesis was that Raul's leadership is, in fact, a coup, which I found absurd. But I was curious to read his argument, plus they called it the 18th Brumaire of Castro, and I've never known what the hell that phrase meant, so I read on.

He is, in fact, arguing that last week's events constitute a military takeover - that "the army has replaced the party as the source of authority." But he quickly backtracks, admitting that Fidel always wore a uniform anyway, so maybe the army was the authority all along. Yeah, I know - kind of dumb. I think he has a lead, and a narrative, and he refused to alter either to make them harmonize. I guess they call that contrarian.

His ultimate conclusion is that the future of Cuba is military dictatorship, whether under Raul or someone else. He points out that the Army already runs much of Cuba's commerce, so this may be a stable situation. He doesn't make the comparison, but I think the analogy to China, with the Party running enterprises, is clear.

It's all interesting to ponder. For so long, Fidel=Cuba=Bad has been about as thoughtful as Americans have been on the subject - and I don't just mean the man on the street. The infantile treatment of Cuban issues in this country is a true shame on us all. And so not much serious thought has been given to Cuba post-Castro, just a vague sense that it'll go back to the way it was, maybe with fewer Mafioso. And goodness knows, that's where the money is. But I don't think there's anyone left on that island who thinks that way.

The greatest failure of our 47 year failed embargo is that it has sapped us of nearly all influence in our nearest non-contiguous neighbor. Not that our role was always, or even often, benign, but at least sometimes America does the right thing, and smart foreign leaders can leverage our idealized self-image to force us to promote the interests of other peoples. But for 47 years, every other country in the world has been ahead of us in developing relationships in Cuba. If American peacekeepers show up in Havana, rest assured that there will be no flowers, candy, or rum on offer.

Aha!

2006-08-09T11:16:00.000-04:00

I finally remembered to look up something that has bugged me literally for years.

What is the actual expression designating an improvised solution? If you've used scraps of electrical wire to strap down your latest IKEA purchase, have you jerry-rigged it? Jury-rigged it? Or, as I've heard from less-progressive workmen, have you n_-rigged it?

I always figured the second option was just an odd misuse of a known phrase to stand in for something misheard. And I feared that the first was a bowdlerization of the third, original term. Either way, I was always leery of the expression, however worded.

Well, apparently it's all OK. According to answerbag.com (citing a few other sites and the OED2), the middle phrase is the correct one. And it's nothing to do with how Mafioso get out of jail time - it's a nautical term, with the jury being a mast. The first one is, in fact, a deterioration of another expression, jerry-built, meaning shoddy construction (origins English, and unclear, but ca. 1865). And the last one is apparently wholly disreputable, yet another example of the poisonous legacy of race in America.

So: jury-rig a solution. Avoid that jerry-built house from Maronda Homes. And wash your mouth out with soap if something else slips your lips.

Forgive me, Mother, for I have sinned....

2006-08-09T09:46:00.000-04:00

The (headless) Diocese of Pittsburgh is sending formal notice to the Office Formerly Known as the Inquisition ("Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith") regarding the dozen women ordained as priests here last week.

For clarity's sake, I'm just going to skip all the scare quotes that last sentence seems to require. Interesting point in the article: apparently, these women are excommunicated by the very fact of their actions. That is, according to the local Monsignor, by undertaking this process, the women excommunicated themselves, and the Pope doesn't have to lift a finger. Canon Law is a crazy, funky thing.

Progressive Pittsburgh?

2006-08-01T09:45:00.000-04:00

Well, we're ordaining women as Catholic priests on the 3 rivers, so that's got to be worth something.

Here's an article with video from the Post-Gazette.

And here's a decent radio story from the local NPR affiliate. Incidentally, the Diocese spokesman quoted, Fr. Ron Lengwin, is a complete tool, based less on this story than on other things he's done.

¡Ay Caramba! Li'l Ricky's gone loco!

2006-08-01T08:01:00.000-04:00

Pennsylvania's Most Embarrassing Senator* came out in favor of more civilian deaths in the cause of Israeli failure yesterday.

The Post-Gazette reports that "Santorum urges total defeat of Hezbollah." Now, as some of you may have noticed, what the last few weeks have shown pretty conclusively is that Israel cannot, in fact, totally defeat Hezbollah. For those who may think that it's just a matter of time, of waiting a few more weeks, you may want to cast your memory back to the nearly two decades Israel spent occupying southern Lebanon. Didn't eliminate Hezbollah. So what, precisely, does Li'l Ricky think is different this time?

Well, he doesn't know, of course. After all, it's not his house getting bombed at 1 am. So if a little tough talk wins over a few more suckers who learned everything they need to know about the Middle East from Rush, that's good enough for Ricky. And what's a few hundred - or thousand - more civilian casualties? Not his constituents.

*Astonishingly, he only makes the National Top 5

Prokpya!

2006-07-28T13:46:00.000-04:00

Meanwhile, in some ways more shocking news: Team Astana (ex-Astana-Würth, ex-Liberty Seguros-Würth) has been categorically cleared by Spanish authorities. That's right, Vino's team, which was ineligible for the Tour with 5 riders suspended under suspicion in the Peurto scandal, now finds itself in the position of an innocent man released after years in prison. Name smeared? Check. Unparalleled opportunities missed? Check. No way to be made whole? Check.

And now this entire scandal, which blew apart the favorites board the day before the Tour, risks becoming the biggest clusterfuck of all time (Sports category). Imagine if Ivan is cleared, in a year when he was all set to pull a rare double of the Giro D'Italia and Tour de France. Imagine if Jan is cleared, after missing what was really his last, best chance. The evidence against these guys was not, to my understanding, any stronger than it was against the Astana Five.

Christ. What a fuck-up.

Dammit!

2006-07-28T13:21:00.000-04:00

Floyd's Out!

OK, it's not official, and apparently the testosterone test that he's half-failed is notoriously flimsy, but Jesus this sucks. And after everyone else, too. You'll note that I couldn't even write about it when it was news, yesterday. Fuck.

Now, about that Tour

2006-07-26T08:05:00.000-04:00

OK, sort of curious radio silence here since Landis bonked last Wednesday. As you all now know, he proceeded to perform one of the most stunning rides in 103 years of Tour history, in one day helping people to forget 7 years of Lance moments. As impressive as Floyd's ride was - and it was an almost superhuman effort, the kind Leipheimer kept trying to pull off to get himself into contention, but kept being unable to follow through on - what thrilled me was the way Team Phonak shattered the peloton as a launching point for him. This is what USPostal/Discovery always did for Lance, but rarely so dramatically, and never so early in a ride. All 8 of Floyd's teammates sacrificed themselves for him, riding as hard as they physically could extremely early in an extremely hard stage, absolutely blowing apart the peloton and giving Floyd the leadout he needed to develop an escape that no amount of chasing at the end of a long day could reel back in. One team member had to quit the Tour that day, so spent was he by his effort for his leader. But his reward will be great: not only does the Tour winner give all his winnings to his teammates (he's got more money coming, thank you very much), but also the team - and no doubt his compatriots - will not forget that effort.

So, everybody loves a winner, and after what Floyd did, I'm over my initial unenthusiasm about him. Meanwhile, my boy Klöden did just fine (3rd place), thank you. And the enigmatic and invisible Cadel Evans finished off the posium, so screw him. It is now the official policy of anarchitect to ignore Cadel Evans.

Tom Tomorrow and the Big Dog

2006-07-26T07:38:00.000-04:00

This post reminded me of something I though of posting a few months ago. Tom writes:

I’ve never entirely understood the tendency of bloggers who revile the DLC and everything it stands for to simultaneously revere Bill Clinton, who is pretty much the embodiment of the DLC and everything it stands for. [...] his decision to stump for Lieberman should nonetheless serve as a reminder that this guy will sell out progressives at the drop of a hat if it is somehow politically expedient to do so.

That this is not exactly breaking news is something anyone who was paying attention during the nineties should understand.

Awhile back, I reread Tom's Great Big Book of Tomorrow, a comprehensive collection of pretty much his whole career up to 2003. It was mostly funny of course, and where the Bush 1 years seem quaint and the Bush 2 years horrifyingly prescient, the Clinton years mostly pissed me off.

Why? Because, while Tom's criticism of course comes from the left - why isn't HillaryCare single payer, etc. - the actual complaints tend to be grounded in the exact same tired, slanderous, and - as we know understand too well - completely wrong tropes that rightwingers and the press used to obstruct Clinton, wound Gore, and ultimately lay the groundwork for Bush to become president. Think of every bit of nonsense you ever heard Rush say about Clinton, and - short of drug-running at Mena and murdering political opponents - it's in This Modern World throughout the 90s. And it really pissed me off.

Ultimately, what Tom Tomorrow did was very similar to what we're now angry at Lieberman for: attacking a Democrat with the same weapons used - honed - by the rightwing. Unlike Lieberman, Tom makes no claims of being a Democrat, so at least the disloyalty issue is less salient, but you know what? Attack centrist Dems for pusillanimity in the face of Republicans, promote lefty ideas, mock DLC mantras all you want. But don't pat yourself on the back for promoting, in whatever small way, anti-American bullshit like the '98 impeachment. Anyone who thinks that what has gone wrong in the last 15 (25?) years in this country is not enough lefties attacking Democrats needs to wake the fuck up.

"Landis has cracked"!

2006-07-19T11:04:00.000-04:00

At 10:58 EDT, according to LeTour.fr. Holy shit. There's still 15+km to go on the final climb of the day. If he's truly cracked, he could get wiped out today. Others ion his group - which has now left him - include all the contenders: Evans, Menchov, Klöden, Sastre....

10:59: "Landis Stranded...
Landis has no puff left. He cannot respond to the surge that was started by Sastre. He has already lost 15"..."

Wow.

On the Road Today: Levi!

2006-07-19T10:52:00.000-04:00

Levi Leipheimer has been looking stronger since his dismal first two weeks, and today has made a strong move. After aggressive attacks from the outset and a breakaway of 13 riders, the race settled down to Mikael Rasmussen ("The Chicken" for his long mountain biker's legs) way out in front, and Levi gradually moving up on him. Rasmussen's a strong climber, so it's unlikely that Leipheimer can catch him, but Levi has put some distance between himself and the peloton. A stage similar to this was run in the Dauphiné-Libéré in the spring, and Levi won it, so we know that he can hack the climb. He has a chance - a small one - to make significant dent in Floyd's lead - maybe take it from 6+ minutes to under 4. But Floyd has teammate Axel Merckx with him, so it'll take a heroic effort from Levi - something we've yet to see this Tour.

Landis back in yellow

2006-07-19T09:09:00.000-04:00

OK, this post is almost 20 hours too late, but, as nothing stunning has occurred in the first 3 hours on the road today (an unbelievable number of attacks - the course starts out going straight up the hors categorie Col de Galibier, the highest mountain in this year's Tour), a little analysis is still viable.

From LeTour.fr's summary of yesterday:

Landis attacked a number of times and Kloden was always able to follow. This group dropped Evans, Menchov, Leipheimer and Sastre early.

And from the redoubtable Samuel Abt in the Times:

Landis, who rides for Phonak, said Monday that he did not intend to win any of the mountain stages. He said he merely wanted to stay within striking distance of the overall lead and make his move in the time trial Saturday in the Tour’s penultimate stage.

But he was forced to alter his strategy Tuesday, when one of his top challengers, Andreas Klöden of Germany and the T-Mobile team, attacked with about three miles remaining. Landis had to follow in order to prevent Klöden from gaining considerable time. As a result of that push, Landis regained the overall lead.

So here's the deal: Floyd is no Lance. He's not as strong (of course), and he doesn't have the same strengths. So when Klöden made his move, Floyd didn't crush him the way Lance always crushed Jan, Ivan, or Pantani. But he followed him, took him at the line, and in so doing, dropped every other rider who could be considered a contender (including the surprising Menchov, whom Landis has identified as his primary rival at this point). Now, they're all still in the race, and Landis could bonk today or tomorrow (although tomorrow is not a mountaintop finish, and so it's unlikely for any contender to gain a lot of time there, because the peloton can regroup on the final descent). But the bottom line is that Landis has ridden quite well, and has been strategically sound. It's hard to believe he won't win it all.

Break Day

2006-07-17T09:49:00.000-04:00

They take a break, so I'll take a break from writing about riding. Instead, let me direct you to a beautiful and sad meditation on death. Neiwert's best known for writing about right-wing extremism, but his thread of posts on orcas and the natural wonders of the Northwest is a welcome leaven.

How the Mighty Have Fallen.

2006-07-15T08:01:00.000-04:00

One of the remarkable facts about USPostal, then Team Discovery, during the Lance Years, is that over the course of 7 Tours de France - 161 stages and over 15,000 km - not a single rider retired from the race. Not from illness, injury, nor exhaustion.

Well, yesterday, not only did Benjamin Noval, a low-profile worker, abandon the race, but so did Paolo Salvodelli, who was one of the team's four "co-leaders" at the start of the race. I'm not sure you need to know much more than that about the chances of the team this year.

This, despite the fact that yesterday - Bastille Day, when the French riders are always desperate for glory - Disco got their first stage win of the race. And it wasn't Big George, who took part in a big breakaway that lasted over 50 km, but rather Ukrainian Yaroslav Popovych, who was in a late breakaway and then burst away in the final 3 km to win by 0:27. He halved his time to Landis, who remains in yellow, but it seems awfully unlikely that he'll get any closer. He certainly won't be permitted to escape again, although he could conceivably simply take a mountain stage away from Floyd. But even if he does, Floyd would take it back at the time trial in the penultimate stage.

As you may be able to tell, I'm a bit resigned to a Landis victory. Which wouldn't bother me, but I'm not really rooting for it.

Paolo in better times, winning Stage 17 last year:

Wrapup

2006-07-13T11:31:00.000-04:00

OK, that was exciting. What's the upshot?

Well, Floyd's in yellow. He was 4:45 behind yesterday's stage winner and today's maillot jaune, Dessel of AG2R, and came in 4:46 ahead of him today. It's actually not quite as dramatic as that, since Landis also gets 0:10 (I think) for finishing third.

Yes, third, behind Menchov & Levi. After that, Evans & Sastre 0:17 back, some others, and Klöden 9th at 1:31 back. And I think that those are the riders to watch from here on out. There are certainly a few others who could do something (after all, 3 mountain stages are left), but these guys (apart from Sastre) were favorites going in, and today they showed that they deserved to be. Klöden, whose mettle has been questioned, I think showed something today, particularly holding reasonably close after being dropped with 6 km to go. Leipheimer, although he won't make up huge hunks of time today (and certainly not against Landis or Evans) at least showed strength for the first time all Tour. Better late than never. Discovery looks awful now, and the shine has come off T-Mobile - they may not have spent their energy ideally over the past 2 days.

And tomorrow, this could all change.

[Updated slightly to reflect some more accurate distances]