Archive for March 2008
Erin Go Bragh, dudes.
It being St. Patrick’s Day — at least in one hour — I’d like all of you still living in NYC to take a moment at your local grocery establishment and appreciate the 1/4 of an aisle devoted to feeding the Irish immigrant masses, those still moving to New York after all these centuries. It’s one of the things you don’t really get here in D.C. — the last one I saw was when I went to visit Boston a few weeks back — and it’s much missed by your correspondent. Having lived in Queens, where there’s an immigrant community for every nationality known to man, I’ve gotten to know and love the Irish-food section while perusing the aisles of Sunnyside, Astoria and Woodside.
You’ll know you’ve found the aisle when you see Barry’s Tea, in the familiar red box at the top of the section. It’s meant to be drunk in the Irish style, meaning strong enough that you mistake it for coffee. Also known as “the bomb”. Next to that they’ll keep the breakfast theme going with some McCann’s Irish Oatmeal. They should probably change the name from “steel cut” to “oat gravel”. For real, it’s stony. For those who like their biscuits named for what happens after you eat them, we have my grandma’s favorite Digestives tea cookies from Burton’s. It all finishes off with some Chivers jam and Fruitfield Orange Marmalade. We in America eat normal fruit preserves like grapes, peaches or strawberries, but in Ireland they like to invent weird fruits like “gooseberry”, “bramble” and “lemon curd” (?), pack them in sugar and sell them to toast fans who don’t know better. Watch out for these, they’re strange.
Under your breakfast stuff comes the Knorr and Erin soup. I’m down with Irish potato, but a little wary of the brown tomato. You can top your soup off with some HP Curry Sauce or maybe some Bisto White-Sauce Granules — what discerning eater doesn’t love granules? Also a winner is Chef brown sauce, which comes in a handy 2.5 liter (or “litre”) container for those times when you need to dip 200 dozen french fries (or “chips”) at once.
Below the Cadbury chocolates, the beauty of which I have already described, you have the junk food — a personal favorite. We all enjoy Tayto cheese ‘n onion crisps, but the real pleasure is washing it down with a cool, sugary glass of Club orange. This stuff is definitely the best-tasting orange pop in the universe, but I will concur with my friend John who said it probably shouldn’t be drunk out of the bottle, lest the world’s most well-fed bacteria colony grow in its incredibly high-fructose medium. Club lemon and Club rock shandy (again, ?) are a little disappointing, but you won’t go wrong with pop made from real orange juice. Fizzy orange: favorite of both me and my bro.
On another Irish food note, the one thing missing from the Irish food aisle is the best Irish food of all, the breakfast bangers. You have to special order them in the U.S., but they make a great gift for your family porkosseur this March.
To end on another Queens food note, the poultry market in Flushing, across the street from the U-Haul, is the proud home of the worst smell in the world. That is all.
Bear Sterns, the biggest player in the subprime mortgage crisis, agreed today to sell itself to JPMorgan for an astounding $2 per share. The deal was set up by the Federal Reserve, which feared that Bear Sterns’ failing to find a buyer would have flooded the market with mortgage-backed securities and ruined more banks holding similar assets. In layman’s terms, it would have hella sucked, so they had to do some stuff to stop it.
Reading this article, there really is a lot to be said for having Bear Sterns die a mean death. It’s fitting as a consequence of their rough-and-tumble business dealings that went against everything my rural-Ohio landlord grandpa knew to be true about real estate: giving cheap money to people who can’t pay is generally a bad idea, and that’s extra true when it’s done on a nationwide scale.
The problem is that our national economy’s financing has become highly centralized, such that letting any one of the several big-time Wall Street banks — Citi, JPMorgan, HBS, Merrill Lynch and all those others where Northwestern MMSS kids go to become analysts — is a recipe for a major economic hurtin’ on people who don’t necessarily deserve it. We’d all love to see Bear Sterns’ disaster-makers get what they deserve, but the U.S. has given them such power in the first place that we can’t afford to let that happen.
That’s why I grudgingly support this bailout for the sake of those on the far end of Wall Street who would be hurt the most, with the caveat that the market needs greater regulation on the front end: the government can’t afford — literally — to keep waiting until things fail before it jumps in with lots of tax-provided cash to save the day. It’s odd that this happens in the same week that Eliot Spitzer, chaser of investor irregularity, took such a public dive. More action in the spirit of what he was trying to do could have prevented things like this, but if anything the momentum in that sphere has gone the other way in the wake of Spitzer’s hooker-induced political demise.
I just hope that Bear Sterns is a wakeup call to the public, but because it’s so complicated and industry-specific, I doubt that will happen. The funny thing is that it’s really not that complicated: people who think they know better probably don’t, and giving them too much leeway is asking for trouble.
Update 3/17: This Paul Krugman column says it better than I did.
Writing that last post about political messages in movies reminded me to note the really odd political points that 300 made last year. Before someone chimes in with, “But you’re supposed to abandon that and enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations,” I will note that I acknowledge the movie as a groundbreaking action / cinematography movie, and I truly did enjoy the awesome CGI decapitations and giant killer rhinos. Still, I think it’s notable that the movie conveys the following viewpoints:
- Those who aren’t white, physically attractive and within sexual norms are the enemy and must be terminated with extreme prejudice.
- Those with physical disabilities must be terminated with extreme prejudice, as they grow up to become traitors.
- Nine-foot-tall gay men with robotically deep voices are nothing but trouble. They are dangerous and tend to lead armies of non-whites (see above). Terminate with extreme prejudice, assuming you aren’t first terminated by arrows.
- City-states that appreciate culture and science, even if they still terminate fools with extreme prejudice, are pedophiles. And that’s true even when their navy does more to win the war.
- “This! Is! Spahta!”
Still, those CGI battle scenes were pretty sweet. Four phats for those. The moral of the movie only gets half a phat, which I will award for its doctrine of standing up as a nation.
CGI battles: 
Moral message: 
This Saturday my amigo Andre and I decided to see Be Kind Rewind at the Landmark E Street Theater in fabulous Washington, D.C. We got there and they were down to one ticket. Thus ends my tale.
In a quick backup idea, we opted for There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s turn-of-the-century capitalist epic loosely based on muckraker icon Upton Sinclair‘s Oil! In a word: hmm.
My Slate D.C. coworker Tim Noah hit the nail on the head when he noted that the film divides into two halves: a first half that sets up the nerve-jangling expectation that this film will have some sort of awesome, morally complex message about business and religion in America, and a “WTF” second half that abandons that conceit and decides to concentrate on making Daniel Plainview into an unredeemable psycho. Andre and I both left the final scene — it’s really thrown in there out of left field — wondering what the hell just happened, and I think this was a common reaction among the other theatergoers present.
There was so much about this movie that was great: the Oscar committee should cancel the Best Actor award each year that Daniel Day-Lewis does a movie and just hand him the statue. (He has done a great deal to associate mustaches with bad-assedness in his past two roles.) The musical score annoyed the hell out of me with its loudness and horror-movie tone, but after I left I thought back on it and realized that the music really worked. PTA also did a phat job of making this a period piece, and the sweeping shots of the empty California landscape — though the movie was actually filmed in Texas — really established the sense of isolation and hardscrabble individualism reflected in Plainview’s life. Lots of reviewers have praised the dialogue-free first 20 minutes, and that’s warranted because it was amazing.
The supporting cast was decent — guy who played Plainview’s brother, good; kid who played H.W. Plainview, quite good; vow-of-silence dude from Little Miss Sunshine who played the crazy preacher, not convincing at all in conveying religious fervor. But I just can’t get past the letdown that was the movie’s lack of message. Boogie Nights and Magnolia both had a lot to say about the importance of being genuinely connected to others, and while TWBB touched on that a little bit, it just didn’t deliver enough.
Sorry, PTA: I love your stuff, but not as much this time. Three phats out of five:
I just saw one of the commercials in which Guinness promoted its effort to make St. Patrick’s Day an “official holiday” through the U.S. Congress. Leaving aside the fact that, pragmatically, March 18 should be the national holiday — people get hangovers, after all, and we get Jan. 1 instead of Dec. 31 off — I’ll give them credit for a clever idea-planting deal.
Clearly Guinness — and Diageo, its parent — know that this official-holiday thing, from a political perspective, really isn’t much. If Congress does recognize it, it would likely be just a symbolic recognition and not a federal holiday like Thanksgiving; if they don’t, well, whatever. The idea they’ve planted is to reinforce the predominant idea that St. Patrick’s is a time to take the entire day — particularly nice if it’s a day off anyway — and drink until you’re lying on the floor, which just might involve such Ireland-iconic (and delicious!) Diageo brands as Guinness, Harp or Smithwick’s. Either way, the drinking idea stays sticky in your brain-piece.
But back to the campaign, I would like to point out that St. Patrick’s Day is already a national holiday in — shocker — Ireland, where it is celebrated by taking the day off, going to Mass, and then hanging out at home. Parts of Ireland have imported the Americanized St. Patrick’s, but it’s by and large a day where people just rest up to honor my patron saint.
While I love a good party as much as the next guy, the wilding-out of St. Patrick’s is a trend I don’t much like — call it old-school, but St. Patrick’s Day to me is a day to watch bagpipers in parades and look back at just how far the Irish have come in the past 200+ years of America’s existence. Yes, pub-going is a big part of Ireland, but the whole get-blasted-in-green-hats thing is way more about consumerism than it is about any sort of ethnic pride. (Check out the number of Bud and Miller promos next time you’re out on St. Patrick’s.)
To acknowledge the counterargument, woo! Alcohol! But yeah, take it easy.
One has to wonder at this stage whether Senator Obama and his children’s crusade completely appreciated that this is the way it would play out, but then their own actual delegate count is not immediately affected by last night’s events. What may be affected is their blissful sense that it would all be one long peace-and-love cakewalk to the nomination. (And this same uneasy feeling may communicate itself to the voters of the great blue-collar state of Pennsylvania, where there are a number of hardened adult political types who are wedded to an old-fashioned and unsentimental version of the Democratic Party.)
Agreed on the Pennsylvania problems for Obama. Hitchens is too harsh on the candidate in this piece, but I do love “children’s crusade”. Touché, old dude.
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