If I’ve lent you a book anytime before October 1st, 2008, please return it. My bookshelves are feeling a little empty these days.
I’ve been thinking of getting Delicious Library properly set up, so I can scan my books in via their barcodes (it uses the Mac’s built-in iSight camera to do this — neat), and keep tabs of who’s got what. Plus I think there are hooks to let you publish your ‘lending library’ online.
Oh yeah, and it’s probably time for me to design some really good ‘EX LIBRIS’ stickers…
There was a little protest here in Connecticut as small town merchants began to protest the intrusion of lots of new banks. And sure enough a town like Darien has an intrusion of banks. And this is odd, and I wondered if we are now a kind of micro brewery trend in banking. Or is there such a thing as artisanal banking? Has small come to the ultimate big? And how will we feel about banking and bank branding once we recover from the present difficult?
Full disclosure! I used to work at the now-defunct York Music on Ste-Catherine (where the Nine West shoe store is now). We would play lots of instructional videos like this all day long, from be-mulleted losers from South Florida who played crazy bass guitar to unknown be-mulleted jazz nazi guitarists.
And that’s why I do all my music using computers, nowadays. Frankly…”musicians”..well, at least of the jazz-fusion-overserious-have-their-own-column-in-Bass-Player-Magazine ilk are just…GAH!
*I did sell Murray Lightburn his vintage Hagstrom guitar while working there. So yay!
“As big cities and most suburban areas are not Real America, and “sharing the wealth” is apparently an incredibly evil thing to do, those of who live in Fake America will stop sending our money to Real America anytime it wants.”
So sayeth Naomi Klein, and I agree. Klein recently went into the “belly of the beast” — speaking at the University of Chicago — to deliver a barnburner that equated the current Wall Street crisis with the fall of the Berlin Wall: as the death knell of an ideology, namely, Friedmanesque deregulated, trickle-down economics:
I admit to being a journalist. I admit to being an investigative journalist, a researcher, and I’m not here to argue theory. I’m here to discuss what happens in the messy real world when Milton Friedman’s ideas are put into practice, what happens to freedom, what happens to democracy, what happens to the size of government, what happens to the social structure, what happens to the relationship between politicians and big corporate players, because I think we do see patterns.
Now, the Friedmanites in this room will object to my methodology, I assure you, and I look forward to that. They will tell you, when I speak of Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin and the Chicago Boys, China under Deng Xiaoping, or America under George W. Bush, or Iraq under Paul Bremer, that these were all distortions of Milton Friedman’s theories, that none of these actually count, when you talk about the repression and the surveillance and the expanding size of government and the intervention in the system, which is really much more like crony capitalism or corporatism than the elegant, perfectly balanced free market that came to life in those basement workshops. We’ll hear that Milton Friedman hated government interventions, that he stood up for human rights, that he was against all wars. And some of these claims, though not all of them, will be true.
But here’s the thing. Ideas have consequences. And when you leave the safety of academia and start actually issuing policy prescriptions, which was Milton Friedman’s other life—he wasn’t just an academic. He was a popular writer. He met with world leaders around the world—China, Chile, everywhere, the United States. His memoirs are a “who’s who.” So, when you leave that safety and you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories. So, to quote Friedman’s great intellectual nemesis, John Kenneth Galbraith, “Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his policies have been tried.”
“Team of Mavericks.” That little gem came from Sarah Palin during last night’s VP debate.
Aren’t mavericks supposed to be — well the dictionary says ‘unbranded, stray calves’ but I think the intended association is something more like ‘untamable horses?’
If so, if you harnessed them into a team, wouldn’t they take off in all directions, pulling your wagon to pieces?
If you tried to ride them, wouldn’t they throw you, causing some sort of critical injury?
