Category: Everything Else

I’m a city dweller – have been so my whole life. So the new study that says living in a city is better for your overall health is a welcome bit of news:

Living in the suburbs may have once been part of the American dream but it can lead to nightmares such as high blood pressure, arthritis and headaches, researchers reported on Monday.

An adult living somewhere like Atlanta, with its spread-out suburbs and car-heavy culture, will have a health profile that looks like that of someone who lives in Seattle — but who is four years older, the study found.

And also

There was no link between suburban sprawl and mental health. The RAND team found no differences in the rates of depression, anxiety and psychological well-being between people living in downtown areas and those in suburbs.

Even living in San Francisco, which is less dense that New York, I’ve noticed that I walk less here. It’s easy to see how that effect would be magnified once you leave town altogether.

Billmon’s op-ed on blogging in the LA Times has a lot of people navel gazing today. Given that I’ve been struggling with the question of my own relevance it seems timely.

Billmon takes issue with the fact that some of the top leftleaning bloggers (Kos and Atrios most notably) have achieved enough success to be self-sustaining financially and have arguably started to be taken seriously by the more mainstream press, as well as the political establishment.

In the process, a charmed circle of bloggers — those glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy — is gaining larger audiences and greater influence.

The fact that the New York Times would do a major Sunday story about left-leaning bloggers is a good sign – the mainstream media is starting to admit bloggers are something more than a bizarre new Internet fad. And I think that this is more a positive than a negative. I’ve always been more interested in results than in precess. Even if this blog is insignificant, people who more or less share my point of view are getting listened to, and that’s a good thing.

There are some bloggers who, I think, have let success go to their heads, but the number is small (the annoyingly smug Matt Yglesias being the most notable one). But overall, the successfull bloggers that I most liked do not seem to have been affected by success. Billmon is going through some sort of crisis of the soul, I suspect. What it is I don’t know and I am not going to speculate. I hope he’s OK, because his blog was consistently excellent and I’m sad he has decided to shutter the Whiskey Bar.

I’ll just add that the day Kevin Drum linked to a post here and I got 650 views in 18 hours was the day I realized exactly how big blogs really had gotten.

At any rate, blogging ablout blogging is somewhat of an exercise in navel gazing, something I’ve been doing too much of, so I won’t belabor the point.

Final side note – As it happens I have a Six Degrees connection in all of this – my husband was a co-worker of Kos’ before Kos went full-time with the blog. That does color my attitude a little.

I haven’t been in large office buildings much the past few years, but having started classes at UC Berkeley’s extension campus in downtown SF I am now going to one several times a week. And the security is ridiculous.

Call it a sign of the post 9-11 times, I suppose. Every person who enters the building is supoposed to sign in and show photo ID. Fine, but you’re talking about a building where both Berkeley and SFSU hold classes. At peak times you’ll have several dozen students lined up at the desk trying to get in before class starts, and two harassed, overworked guards trying to check everyone in. Someone ‘unauthorized’ can get in with no problem by scrawling something illegible on the paper and waving their wallet in the general direction of the guards. There’s no metal detectors or bag checks, so it’s not in any way a deterrant. It’s more of an annoyance to the students who are standing there checking their watches and wondering if they’ll get to class on time.

Seems to me this is just another example of a vast trend in America — doing something to look good although no actual result is being produced. The building management’s insurance company likely insisted on it, and if they didn’t, then some of the major tenants’ insurance companies probably did. After all, if a terrorist decided to bomb a classroom of people studying accounting and there was no building security someone might get sued. So now there’s a desk and some people and a nice set of policies to point to in case of an emergency. Not that a spiky haired kid and an overweight older woman behind a desk could really do anything about anything except possibly call 911.

Now maybe there’s hidden cameras with facial ID working to provide some accurate security, in which case I take it all back, but even in the unlikely possibility that there is, why go through the farce at the desk at all?

What’s even more annoying is I have to go through this three or 4 times a week for the next couple of months.

Amidst the despair, and there is a lot of it, a small ray of hope. Go read Bob Harris’ excellent column.

Sad news for fans of musical theater – Fred Ebb has died.

I was part of the technical team for a production of Cabaret in college. I have a love-hate relationship with the show – on the one hand, it’s great theater, but on the other hand, given the timeframe it’s set in and the unhappy ending, it’s not exactly uplifting material to work on. But then you have a gem like this:

[HERR SCHULTZ]

How the world can change
It can change like that –
Due to one little word:
“Married”.

See a palace rise
From a two room flat
Due to one little word:
“Married”.

And the old despair
That was often there
Suddenly ceases to be
For you wake one day,
Look around and say:
Somebody wonderful married me.

[FRAULEIN SCHNEIDER (spoken)]
You don’t think it would be better simply to go
on as before?

[SCHULTZ]
No.

Rest in peace, Fred. Thanks for the memories.

Amazing what you’ll find when you’re a police officer exploring the catacombs below Paris:

a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.
A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. “There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous,” the spokesman said.

“The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there.”

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: “Do not,” it said, “try to find us.”