I was working my way through my weekly Economist when I came upon this gem in a story about Pennsylvania.
Pittsburgh feels decayed, like Cleveland, Ohio.
What a bunch of jagoffs. Everybody knows Cleveland was the nation’s No. 1 poorest city in 2003, while Pittsburgh was only 37th. Take that, haters! We’re Number 37!
Friend of the site Steve B., whose New York Islanders failed to make the playoffs and thus are not up three games to none like my Pittsburgh Penguins, writes:
what do you make of this Obama/Pennsylvania thing?
Well, Steve: in short, it was mad dumb and probably will get its damage on.
This is usually what happens when you play too hard to your audience, and playing to the audience is particularly frought with difficulty when your audience is a political group like San Francisco liberals that’s defined very specifically on a national level. Americans aren’t into the whole condescending thing, and thus will vote for someone who fronts like a regular guy even as he keeps them down over somebody who might genuinely care about average people but can’t hide a sense of hoity-toitiness well-enough. Obama already has problems with so many of his supporters being hip, urban types — the type of people who are resented by rural PA dudes. William Kristol really went off the deep end trying to say that this makes Obama into some closet Marxist, but this was still tone-deaf politically. So there’s that aspect of it that will hurt him with all the Pennsylvanians who like guns and religion, I think moreso than Jeremiah Wright — at least it was Wright saying that stuff, not Obama.
Plus, it doesn’t even make sense to say that people pursue cultural activities like hunting or religion because of their economic situation. Lots of people back home go hunting and go to church, and I can’t remember ever hearing someone walk out of Mass to shout, “Woo! Take that, all you outsourcing CEOs! Where’s your Chinese manufacturing now!?”
On a related note, liberal fans of cute furry things shouldn’t look down their noses at hunting. With all the deer in Pennsylvania that would otherwise end up starved to death or exploded by a tractor trailer, hunters are a vital population check, plus they tend to be very pro-environment. So there’s that.
Yo from my blackberry in Ann Arbor. More on my trip coming later.
4-0 = the shiz.
And now for my quick predictions:
Eastern Conference
Pittsburgh-Ottawa: 4-1 Penguins
Montreal-Boston: 4-2 Canadiens
Washington-Philadelphia: 4-3 Flyers
New York-New Jersey: 4-0 Rangers (sadly)
Western Conference (which admittedly I barely follow)
Detroit-Nashville: 4-1 Red Wings
San Jose-Calgary: 4-3 Flames
Colorado-Minnesota: 4-2 Avalanche
Anaheim-Dallas: 4-3 Ducks
Today is an unofficial day to celebrate front-end web developers, and hey, that’s me. So here’s a look today at my site without any CSS. Note how I still did the bomb job of keeping the content readable even without the styling.
Word(press) up.
When I finish lifting for the day, I always find that I walk around afterwards with my chest out, my shoulders back and my arms hanging down about six inches from my side in this light-on-my-feet stance. This is unconscious, and I’m not even that swoll at the moment. I look around and every other dude is doing this too.
That’s my observation.
The Olympic torch relay has already been disrupted in two countries, first by Reporters Without Borders in Greece and now by assorted Tibetan-rights protesters in London. I also saw a big group of protesters chanting outside the Chinese embassy on Saturday. This news is the hotness.
My uncle worked as a major planner on two Olympic torch relays, so I feel for his counterpart in this Olympics who must be flipping out right now. But this choreographed parade of Olympic-torch happiness is just like the 2008 Olympic organizing effort itself: a papering over of serious issues that directly contradict the Olympic brotherhood-of-mannish spirit. As a result, I think it’s great to see these real problems brought to the forefront at the same time that China and the world that’s participating in its Games are going with the “We love everything!” theme.
I worked at the 2002 Olympics, and I think the Olympics are great, but being there you really get a sense of just how over-the-top the whole thing can become. There’s an amazing amount of money flying around; it’s good that this is used to celebrate humanity coming together, but it’s a bummer that none of it is used to recognize the challenges we need to fix. If protests have to get this into people’s headz, then bring it.
Hey all,
Here’s the audio from today’s Sirius appearance. Good times.
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