We Really Need a New Word For Looting (from the Awl)
“Looters,” reported the Wall Street Journal yesterday from Port-au-Prince, “were scaling a crumpled building, apparently a grocery store, and throwing items to the assembled throng below.” That “looting” is traditionally construed to mean illegally obtaining goods for one’s own benefit—not for the benefit of a waiting crowd of the recently homeless—seems to have entirely escaped these reporters.
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just a few blocks away on the road, a store owner was calmly overseeing an orderly emptying of his broken shop. He was using a kind of bucket-brigade of some 30 young men stretching over the store’s shattered roof, handing out goods can by can.” This article, incidentally, is headlined “Haiti Authorities Battle Looters.”
You can read the whole article but you’ve probably already figured it out. Haitians intent on surviving are doing what it takes to survive. But newspapers are nothing if not predictable in their headline writing.
I had MLK day off, but I’ll have a Monday Jam up for you later today.
Tags: haiti, idiocy, newspapers
Six years ago Stuart Stevens, a write and competitive cyclist, contacted a doctor who was willing to guide him through the same regimen of performance enhancing drugs that a professional athlete would use.
The story is the most illuminating article I have ever read about PEDs. How they work, what they are used for, and why athletes use them. In light of Mark Mcgwire finally telling us what we already knew I think it’s worth reading again. I pretty much consider it mandatory reading before you get to have an opinion about PEDs.
Drug Test.
Tags: HGH, Mark McGwire, PEDs, Steroids, Testosterone
I live just outside Indianapolis and I feel I am required by some kind of law to post this.
Hennessy, Dog Crap, And A Touching Glimpse Into The Head And Home Of Ron Artest - The Dark Side Of The Locker Room - Deadspin.
I’ll never forget what I saw inside. Instead of crown molding, there were empty Hennessy bottles glued to his wall. There was dog crap everywhere, and where there wasn’t, there was either someone sleeping or evidence that someone had just slept there — a sleeping bag and pillow. There were guys all over the place. On the landing of the stairs. On the couch. Free-style rapping in the corner. (I can’t help but wonder if one of his stairwell dwellers, transplanted to Los Angeles, was the “box” Artest tripped over last month.) I engaged one for a few minutes as Ron went to change clothes. I asked if all the guys were from the “QB,” Queensbridge, the public housing development in New York where Artest grew up. The reply still sticks with me.
“Yeah,” he said. “We all are. We all made a deal when we were young. If one of us made it out, we’d take the rest with us. Ron made it out.”
Tags: pacers, ron artest, sports
The Great Joe Rollino, Bender of Steel, Is Dead at 104 - NYTimes.com.
Among his many accomplishments, Mr. Rollino was proudest of one in particular. “My finger strength,” he told an interviewer for ESPN The Magazine. “Six hundred thirty-five pounds. See the size of it. At 150 pounds, nobody ever beat me in this world.”
He was run over by a van while crossing the street. Even the world’s strongest man can’t live forever.
I think I’ve written before that I like to wake up and race to work like a napalm dropping Super Sabre. This of course requires a certain variety of toe tapping music that really gets the gas pedal feeling juicy. I never know what I’m looking for. I only know when I find it.
Here’s this morning’s: Go Go Gorilla from the Shandells. Just another forgotten garage band.
Tags: Go Go Gorilla, The Shandells
American Evangelicals Role Seen Uganda’s Anti-Gay Push:
KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.
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Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.
It would be easy to accuse the NY Times of being ridiculously naive and American-centric in writing an article detailing how three schlubs from the Evangelical ghetto of American ideology had an impact on Ugandan domestic policy. Except that Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, has written extensively about American Christians exporting their homophobia to Africa and the impact its made across the continent: The U.S. Christian Right and the Attack on Gays in Africa.
From his article:
Amid the utter hysteria, any sense that homosexuality has been in Africa from time immemorial was lost. While hardly embraced, and indeed illegal in many countries, at least LGBT people were not hounded by churches and police alike – until American culture warriors came to Africa. Bishop Christopher Ssenjonyo, one of the most progressive voices on LGBT issues in Uganda, expressed his own concerns about the Americans’ role to me in March, “I am sure that these lies will incite public hatred against gays.“
It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly
At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door.
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A few doors down on 35th Street, hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart — hoodies and T-shirts and pants — were discovered in trash bags the week before Christmas, apparently dumped by a contractor for Wal-Mart that has space on the block.
Each piece of clothing had holes punched through it by a machine.
A true story about true things.
And a story about true things from 50 years ago:
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates–died of malnutrition–because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath
Where are you Tom Joad?
Maybe an appropriate song for a new year and a new decade. Johnny Cash’s excellent cover of the Rolling Stone’s No Expectations
Take me to the station
And put me on a train
I’ve got no expectations
To pass through here again
Once I was a rich man and
Now I am so poor
Happy new year, happy new decade.
Tags: Johnny Cash, no expectations, rolling stones
Its the return of the indomitable Monday Jam (on Tuesday). I’ve listening to a lot of Buddy Holly lately, so guess what? You get to too! I think these two songs are pretty representative of Buddy Holly’s best work, and furthermore I’m pretty sure they show how Buddy Holly built a template for pop and rock songs that would be copied again and again even up to now.
Words of Love
You’re So Square
Have a great Thanksgiving. I’ll be back next week with more music, and maybe a lengthy post or two on Miyamato Musashi’s classic Book of Five Rings
What a squeak: Daring mouse show who’s boss as it scares off leopard and steals its lunch.
Sometimes you see something adorable and you have to post it, even if “adorable” isn’t really your thing. This is one of those times.