Archive for December, 2007

Ringing in 2008

Happy New Year, and don’t forget to watch the Penguins decimate the Sabres New Year’s Day at 1 p.m. on NBC.

Bill Kristol at the Times

This announcement reads like a parody of lefty self-flagellation:

The Times Adds an Op-Ed Columnist

Echoing this thing, it’s pretty tough to argue that rightist media is more self-critical when you examine this dealie: you have a commentator dude who’s not only kept up his unflinching pro-war thing even as the rationale looks worse and worse, but has called for criminal prosecution of the very “liberal” media outlet that just hired him on as a commentator. Meanwhile, the media outlet both hires him anyway and makes a point to echo his past denunciations of said outlet.

Assuming you think the Times opinion page editors are liberal, I’ll echo walking-in-snowy-woods dude Robert Frost on this one: “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in an argument.”

One More Pakistan Thing

For a note on just why this stuff matters, you can read this paper, particularly the last paragraph.

Bhutto

Pakistan really can’t catch a break.

If you were Musharraf, would you go ahead with January’s elections knowing that everything is in even more turmoil than before, or would you risk the nation getting even more pissed after another suspension of democracy? (Or here, “democracy”, considering that independent media had been banned from election coverage.)

I think he might come out ahead if he allows the elections to continue: if Musharraf can pin this on Islamist sympathizers — not a given since his own sympathy for Bhutto was more forced than genuine, and the attack may instead feed anger toward Musharraf — then he might see more of the country turn towards him as the man most able to restore order, no matter how un-democratic that order might be.

Not that India is doing a much better job recently with the factional reconciliation thing.

Return of the Steeler Funerary Rites

The Post-Gazette wrote that another fan tied his memorial rites in with the Steelers, this time by having the Steelers logo carved into his gravestone and having his wife bring his ashes to the game on Sunday. This story was kind of bittersweet, in that he died having never fulfilled his wish to go to Heinz Field, but he did make it there in the end and it gave comfort to his family. He gets extra props by being from New Hampshire and becoming a Steeler fan by choice instead of by region.

This follows the infamous Pittsburgh funeral of two years ago, where the dude was laid out wearing Steeler gear, sitting in a recliner in front of a TV that played Steeler highlights. He even had a pack of cigarettes and a beer next to the chair. That one was more awesome than sad, and made me think that the deceased must have been a great guy to hang with.

In poor taste, I’d like to note that the Steeler / burial connection is starting to prove a lot more relevant after the past two games.

Busch-Swilling Bolsheviks

This one goes out to my senior-year apartment crew.

I was once discussing political philosophy with my dad, and we both agreed that under ideal theoretical conditions, a socialist utopia could be pretty cool: from abilities according to needs and all that lot. (Before someone from the future reads that and declares me a godless pinko, keep going.) But as dad pointed out, the fact that every utopian philosophy throughout history has failed applies just the same to communism, and the millions who were starved, repressed, detained and killed by benevolent guardians of the proletariat like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge indicate that, hey: communism hasn’t had such a great track record.

The conservatives among us argue that socialism fails because human nature is inherently corrupt, and thus people are always out to get theirs no matter what the system. Then they see the wealth generated by capitalist societies, and naturally want it for themselves. The leftist argument states that communism failed because of constant foreign anti-communist interference, and that capitalism’s economic impact on the lower classes has been too effectively degrading for them to rise up in revolution.

Those theories both have some truth to them, but that’s some heavy theory. For a simpler explanation, here’s one from personal experience.

Yeah dude, I’ll get in on that five-year plan next week, for real.

Senior year of college, five friends and I lived in a big apartment just off campus. We had just spent a year living in our fraternity house — still easily claiming the No. 1 spot as the filthiest place I have ever lived — and we thought, “F this, we’re seniors and men with standards: instead of nothing but Busch Light, we’ll now keep Rolling Rock or Miller Genuine Draft in the fridge in addition to the Busch Light. And while we’re at it, we’re going to keep our apartment in great shape. Not only do we deserve a clean living space, but you never know when some fine ladies will be stopping by to be flattered by our well-groomed apartment and Carlo Rossi wine.”

Planning for the glory of this collective effort, we made up a chore wheel that rotated each week so that each person would cycle through bathroom duty, floors, kitchen, trash, etc. We were pumped, we were planned, and we were in full agreement on just what we had to do to achieve our collective goal.

Then the next weekend came along, and that was pretty much the end of that.

There’s no good reason this plan shouldn’t have worked out. We all clearly wanted a clean apartment, and were smart, motivated dudes. The tasks were divided fairly, so that nobody felt an undue burden. This was a big group payoff for a relatively small amount of effort, and yet it still didn’t get done, mostly for a variety of personal reasons. Some of us laxly defined “clean” as only leaving boxers on the bathroom floor for three days instead of a week; others were so stringent about standards of cleanliness (substitute this for “party loyalty”) that several dudes stopped cleaning altogether in protest. Now we had the infamous free-rider problem, and it was back to growths in the refrigerator before you knew it.

Perhaps we could have increased each person’s stake in the outcome somehow and things would have worked. But to me, when you can’t get people to participate in a collective effort on something that is right there, solvable, in front of their freakin’ face every day, how in the hell are they going to do it when the impacts are esoteric and spread among millions? Moral of the story is that planning is one thing, but level of involvement is wildly variable.

And college is awesome.

Diamond Dave

If you had to set Pittsburgh to music, I always imagine the soundtrack to be early-era Van Halen. (Think Van Halen and 1984.) Particularly “Cradle Will Rock” and “Runnin’ With the Devil”.

This is almost solely attributable to WDVE.

Argumentative

I’ve noticed lately that I write much more clearly when responding to something than I do when initiating the discussion myself. Am I alone in this? Perhaps it’s time for more self-debating on the site.

Duality of Pat, here we come.

Pittsburgh At Its Dumbest

It seems that Kennywood Park — Pittsburgh icon and the scene of such Pat Stack childhood highlights as the Jackrabbit Double-Dip and the time that I puked after getting riding the Pirate Ship — has been sold to the Spanish amusement-park company Parques Reunidos. This is after more than 100 years of being owned by the same two local families.

I was reading some reactions to the sale on this forum, and being familiar with the yinzer “That Used To Be Where You Take Your Driver’s License Test” sense of nostalgia, I probably could have predicted how things were going to go down. That didn’t stop me from appreciating these gems:

Well… add Amusement Parks to the growing list of American companies and infrastructure being sold to foreign interests. Didn’t the Spanish either attempt to buy or did indeed buy the Pennsylvania Turnpike? I expect to see Mt. Rushmore be put on the Auction block next or maybe Yellowstone Park. It has been said by a few the White House & the Capital Building are already owned by foreign interests. In a figurative sense of course.

I HAVE SPENT MY LAST DOLLAR AT KENNYWOOD, SAND CASTLE, OR IDLEWILD. IS THIS AMERICA? I’M NOT SURE ANYMORE.

I think it a shame the everything in the United States is be bought up by foreigner isn’t any thing sacred any more.

I’m tired of seeing our country being sold to foreigners.

USA is being sold down the river, everything is going to be owned by outsiders and the USA citizen will no longer have a job with an American-owned company.

So much for keeping America, America. Let’s look at the bright side… At least it was not sold to the Chinese.

Kennywood — when you hear that name you think of Fun and Hometown America! Now it will be foreign-run and as everything else; workers and owners will not speak English. Sad, actually!

Really? Kennywood workers who don’t speak English? Because that would be an odd choice from a business perspective, but since fur’ners hate America so much, those Spaniards just might flush their $200 million down the toilet to spite The Burgh.

You know my first thought on hearing this? “I really hope they didn’t sell to Six Flags.” Yep, American-owned Six Flags Theme Parks Inc., where you can get an order of chicken strips for no less than $8.50 and the rich pay extra to cut you in line all day with that SpeedPass thing. (They really hit you over the head there with metaphors for the buying-and-selling of meritocratic democracy.) We’d have been attending Six Flags Three Rivers before we knew it, and so much for the Potato Patch or the Monongahela Monster — no way I’m riding The Texan Octopus.

Lots of posters on that forum have legitimate gripes with the fact that Kennywood is no longer a family enterprise. I second that: It’s sad to see such a longtime icon absorbed into yet another conglomerate, even if I’m glad it’s not the Six Flags conglomerate. Recognizing that the Kennywood families ultimately had the power and there’s nothing I can do about it, I’m holding out hope that a deep-pocketed company will be willing to invest more in new rides, while realizing the value of keeping the existing local-oriented management. (That’s what they’re promising so far.) The Kennywood families have resisted attempts to sell before, so they must have had their reasons to pick this company. Considering the business value of Kennywood’s history, it probably won’t change too much, and the next generation will still be going each year to buy a new Kennywood outfit from Kaufmann’s. (My bad, they’re owned by Macy’s now. Damn!)

So let’s chill with the xenophobia for a minute and accept that it’s no longer 1957: you can’t go dahn ‘a corner and get two pahnds ‘a jumbo for a nickel. This is the world that our society has long since chosen to make for itself. And for the record, even though Spanish people don’t eat them, tacos are delicious.

Strangest Brand Partnering of the Day

I just saw this today:

http://www.cyberjournalist.net/fox-news-for-iphone/

Fox News and Apple? That one just strikes me as a really unlikely pairing. But maybe Apple devotees have become so contrarian-cool that they’ve abandoned the leftist political views of the urban traditional-cool and embraced right-wing viewpoints as a sarcastic collective paean to right-wing America.

The New Slate Widget

We just launched a new app at work, the random Bushisms generator:

Feel free to grab it and spread it around on your own site / Facebook page / MySpace!

Drugs

One of my favorite movies of the past few years is Traffic, which gives a multifaceted look at the drug problem in the U.S. and all the complexities of tackling it. This article from Rolling Stone has the same effect. It’s long but great:

How America Lost the War on Drugs

Steelers v. Bengals

The game:

• The Steelers clearly won that game on merit, but I hate seeing so many controversial calls make it a murky win. This one wasn’t as bad as the Super Bowl, which even I will admit was a lucky break. Still, Seattle beat themselves that time. Enough revisiting.
• Willie Parker has fumbled twice in the entire season before today. Therefore, the fumbles this game get a “so what”.
• Congrats to Hines on the TD record.
• I hate the Patriots, but I hate the Ravens more. That’s why I really hope this screenshot from my Time Magazine NFL pick ‘em league comes to pass. (Also note how close I was on the Sunday tiebreaker score. Hell yeah. Good thing I was wrong, because my prediction would have wound up as a push. But, it didn’t. Hell yeah again.)