Category: Rightous Anger

I just finished letter D. I’m taking a break to each dinner and play Xbox. Perhaps naked.

We are currently on hour 23 of the quest to organize my CD collection. I figure next week will mark 1 year since I moved in here so its about f’n time.

Right now, the dining room table is a precarious theme park of CD’s old and new (I haven’t ever purged, not once since I started buying them in 1986) so this is probably my punishment. An earthquake right now would be poetic justice of the sharpest kind.

To amuse myself, I’ve consumed 1 Odawalla Bar, drank 3 glasses of water, called several relatives, listened to old episodes of Invisible Ink and cursed under my breath enough times to horrify a whole convent worth of nuns.

I have no idea if I’ll finish this foolishness today or if Tony, my next door neighbor, will find me dead, face down on the broken remenants of CD’s that all begin with the letter “J.” You’ll know if there’s another post after this one.

Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large Michael Kelly was killed in a Humvee accident while covering the war in Iraq. What an awful shame. Though Kelly was a bit conservative for my tastes, he did wonders for what was once a stuffy, east-coast patrician magazine. His journalistic talents were extensive and will be missed (via Crabwalk).

In typical ivory tower tunnel vision, the CS Monitor is reporting that college campuses are losing their intellectual rigor. Reasons range from the continued unfashionability of the “nerd” label to the growing perception that college is either a “beer and circus” partyfest or 4 years worth of pre-high-paying job training. Students also assert they have almost no time for the quiet self-reflection so omnipresent in college lore with the mad rush of classes, extra-curriculars, friends and part-time jobs.

For the most part, this article avoids the usual “kids these days” nonsense that middle-aged journalists like to sather around on slow news days. However it makes a glaring omission when it fails to mention that going to college in 2003 can be the eviqualent of buying a Honda Civic every six months. Tuition is an enormous burden on middle-class families, many of whom have more than one kid in college at a time. Over half the students at most elite universities are on some form of financial aid. Never mind that the practice of licencing key services on campus to exclusive providers (At my alma mater, Barnes & Noble ran the campus bookstore) creates what amounts to a debt bondage economy with students.

Given these conditions, which most unviersities are full partners in creating, is it any wonder that say a Yale student (annual tuition $27,130) isn’t spending their four years debating the essays of Montaigne but is looking toward getting a high paying job to begin paying off their debt?

If universities are truly worried about the level of intellectual discourse on their campuses, perhaps they should make them a place where more than simply the richest students have the luxury of partaking in it. (via Cup of Chica).

This is just what we need, more Why-San-Francisco-is-not-as-good-as-New-York windiness. Is it possible for one’s city ego to be so large that they A) must continually remind everyone of how great they are while B) being so insecure that they must pick a fight other cities whom they’ve already claimed ad nauseum to be better than?

Newsflash: No one in San Francisco cares (link via megnut).

I can’t tell you how wrong I think this is and how ashamed it makes me to be an American. And I have spent the better part of my adult life wearing my patriotism proudly. This might be the end of it for me and just when I thought it couldn’t get worse.

When are we going to get the message here in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” that those words are not conditional, no matter what state of war we are in? In fact, they were specifically enshrined in Amendent 1, as in THE FIRST, THE MOST IMPORTANT AMENDMENT protects all Americans from religious prosecution. All of them. Muslims included.)? When will we learn, as Americans and as human beings, that fear and repression will not protect us from another September 11th? It will, I fear, only make us look more like those who we despise (link via Metagrrrl.)

My credit card company has been bothering me for two weeks insisting I owe them money. I told them I told them I have a record of the check in the exact amount of the money they say I owe. I get my bank to send me a copy of the check and it turns out I sent it to the wrong credit card company.

Crap.

Now I have to find out who cashed my check, get it to the right people all before I leave for the east coast on Thursday and below the finance charge bury me alive.

Crap again. I hope I’m not the only one who has made such a personal finance blunder although it’s beginning to feel that way.

Students at the University of Ottawa have set up their own campus bookstore in direct competition to the University’s with the express goal of putting them out of business. Anyone who has attended a major university in the last decade knows this is an action long overdue. My own Johns Hopkins University did business through a Barnes and Noble-owned store which held students effectively in indentured servitude. You needed books, the store charged outragous prices and most of the neighborhood shops didn’t stock political treatises of ancient Sumerians or Developmental Biology texts. And this was before Amazon.

Bravo Ottawa.

Happy 10th Birthday to Critical Mass! In September 1992, a handful of bicyclists converged in downtown San Francisco the last Friday of the month during rush hour and rode in a big clump down the street in protest of the lack of attention and respect non-car transportation gets on city streets. Motorists were confused then angry, the police befuddled but someone listened. Today Critical Mass happens the last Friday of every month in 300 cities around the world and it’s pretty damn hard, in most major cities, to ignore the presence of bicycles.

I was fortunate to ride with the Mass yesterday in the city where it all began, with thousands of other bicycles eager for and passionate about a safer, cleaner, more humane city. Critical Mass has a mixed reputation among practically everyone because as progressive as someone claims to be, see how long they stay that way when stuck in their car for an hour behind a wave of thousands of cheering cyclists. And infamously, in some larger rides, cyclists has been arrested and beaten by police, and gotten into screaming matches and physical confrontations with those on two wheels.

Media coverage of the ride has often emphasized these violent confrontations, portraying the riders as law-breaking thugs with a sadly misguided political agenda. Indeed there are rouge element of the ride who still think Critical Mass is about pissing off people in cars. Hell, even I did when I started riding it and still get a perverse charge out the angry drivers. But really I think the Mass, because it has no organizer, no governing body, it just happens, suffers from a public relations problem. I’ve been in the middle of it several times and mostly you see ordinary people smiling, cheering, happy to be riding in the city they love without fearing for their life. I’ve seen teenagers and senior citizens, people in wheelchairs, and dozens of parents riding alongside their children.

Thank God in celebration of the anniversary, some wise person passed out a sheet outlining the principles of Critical Mass, which included “MOTORISTS ARE NOT THE ENEMY!” It forced me to remember why I was there. And while I read about frusterated drivers “just drying to get home” and merchants worried that their customers won’t arrive if they can’t drive, and say “come off your high horse and take the damn bus!”, I don’t get the same self-rightous thrill I used to.

I couldn’t have put it any better.