Wednesday!

* Whole Foods boycott update: consumer opinion towards the Whole Foods brand is tanking and two unions have joined the boycott. Hard to see whether anything is actually being accomplished, though. I must confess I bought a pack of Smart Dogs there last week.

* Jason Schwartzman seems to like Fantastic Mr. Fox much more than I'm expecting to.

* Please feel free to politicize my death.

* And my hometown mall had an exciting day today.

MMLD #2.

* The recession comes home to Randolph: they're closing our beloved Pathmark.

* A musical tribute to "Ozymandias" from Handsome CD Plus Three.

* On everybody's lips: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Links to reviews here and here. I look forward to having time to read this c. 2017.

* "Do It Again: One Man's Quest to Reunite the Kinks."

* Comics Should Be Good is running a month-long "iconic panels" series all month long to celebrate Marvel's 70th.

* And Joss Whedon says they should have renewed Terminator instead.

New Jersey: epicenter of American poetry?

Last month, Mr. Merwin won a second Pulitzer prize for poetry — the fourth New Jersey poet to win in the last 10 years, a streak that is unmatched of late by any other state, and one that raises the question of whether it is more than just a happy coincidence.

The truth is the poets up there don't write nothing at all; they just sit back and let it all be.

The Daily Show visits the site of a tea party protest in Morristown, New Jersey, approximately five minutes from the house I grew up in.

Somehow still-local members of the extended Canavan clan were able to avoid on-screen humiliation, for which we can all be thankful...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Tea Party Tyranny
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Two self-admitted skeptics who rigged highway flares to weather balloons to create a UFO hoax are now facing misdemeanor charges in Morristown, New Jersey for endangering public and air traffic safety. (via Posthuman Blues)

Morris County rocked by earthquake. 2.1 on the Richter scale. Randolph not yet swallowed into hell.

Trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in: someone else has made a movie out of Morris County.

Equal parts drama, horror, true-crime anthology, this grim life-cycle piece presents three tales of alienation and woe in suburbia. Starring indie regular Pamela Stewart (100 Proof, Amateur) and TV mainstay Albie Selznick (24, Suddenly Susan) alongside stunning newcomers Alice Cannon and Darcy Miller, Morris County juggles the horrors of human nature against the kind of sadness that cuts deep. In Ellie, we spend one day in the life of a damaged teen-age girl whose reckless behavior hides a grave secret; The Family Rubin finds a seemingly happy couple and their young son, whose questionable lifestyles begin to tear at the seams; and finally, Elmer & Iris explores the life of an elderly couple who prove that love can overcome almost anything, even death. This triptych of suburban decay will leave you questioning just how well you know your neighbors.

Matthew Garrett’s disturbing debut feature recalls the work of fellow New York indie director Douglas Buck (Cutting Moments), exposing suburbia’s dark heart and the self-destructive compulsions that fester there.

Here's a trailer:

Morris County Movie Trailer

The headline reads, "Police Puzzled By Strange Lights Over Morris County."

The Caucus takes me home to Morris County, NJ, where upscale Republicans are deeply demoralized.

Mr. Nielsen is one of the thousands of people in Morris County — one of the country’s wealthiest — that can usually be counted on to vote Republican. Morris County voters, including Mr. Nielsen, chose George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, even though Democrats won New Jersey in both elections.

But that was then.

“I look at this election selfishly,” he said over coffee at Drip café on Main Street. “If I am honest with myself and my family, I am better off with a Democrat in the White House. I would be better off health care wise, and I don’t believe in privatizing Social Security. Can you imagine if we had gone that way what would have happened over the last three weeks? With Obama in office we are going to get a more socialized system and some people don’t want that, but more and more people I talk to are going to cross the line.”

If McCain's lost Morris County, he's completely screwed.

(Thanks, Steve!)

Unexpectedly busy day today, but I do have a few links.

* Anti-Obama racism comes to Roxbury, just one town over from my beloved Randolph.

* The Paulon bailout continues to take pretty heavy fire; you can find details and good analysis at Krugman's blog, where he is taking a pretty hard line on the demand for a taxpayer equity stake in the companies we'll be bailing out.

* And Glenn Greenwald takes the Brooksian dream of the Wise Old Men of Washington back out to the woodshed.

* Given that he is the Scourge of Lobbyists, it's ironic that the person tapped to run McCain's transition team lobbied for Freddie Mac just a few months ago.

* And given his well-known penchant for Straight Talk it's odd that McCain hasn't given a press conference in 40 days.

* FiveThirtyEight has polling data showing that the debates may not move the polls very much after all. There's also a new poll out showing Obama with a two-point lead in Florida, which has got to be an outlier.

Another day, another promising academic career strangled in the cradle: hometown heroine Julie is blogging food and politics at Gastro-Politico.

I must confess, I find myself still pretty agog over the Palin choice. I'm hard-pressed to think of a more cynically short-sighted, purely news-cycle-motivated choice in presidential politics history, and given the events of the last eight years that's saying a lot.

Consider: John McCain picked Sarah Palin in a desperate bid to win the half news cycle two days before the start of his own party's convention. This is nothing more than a publicity stunt—except now the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, (population: 8,000, or about a third the size of my tiny suburban hometown) could be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Really, has there ever been a more deeply unserious choice in the history of the vice-presidency? It's not as if they haven't shown it before, but these people just don't believe in governance, at all. It's lunatic. It's stunning. I am stunned.

I even, amazingly, find myself in agreement with Pat Buchanan:

Biggest political gamble I believe just about in American political history...that is not hyberbole. I can think of no choice of VP that approaches this.

Yes. But I think it's a bad bet, the sort you make when you're down $10,000 and trying to break even. The election isn't this Tuesday, it's 67 days away—even under the best of circumstances, with the best possible performance from Palin, I don't see the choice being a net positive for McCain after two months of scrutiny. No way.

Hell, I'm not sure this will still look like a good idea on Monday.

Matt Yglesias is having fun with facts about Alaska, but it's Kevin Drum who better speaks my shock over this:

Look, call me a partisan hack. Whatever. But I'm just stunned by the cynicism of the whole thing. I'm sure Palin is a fine person, loving mother, devoted wife, learning her way as governor, and so forth. But a heartbeat away from the presidency? Someone with virtually no serious political experience, and no serious experience of any other kind to make up for it? She's going to shake up Washington?

I don't know how she'll do on the stump or in the debates. Maybe she'll be great. Who knows? But a potential leader of the free world? You gotta be kidding.

Internet Tuesday!

* Parsippany, NJ, is looking to put up red light cameras that know you only came to a rolling stop before turning right on red. Dystopia is now.

* Are we already nostalgic for the Bush era? Salon investigates using the leaked trailer for Oliver Stone's W as its source text.

* Via Boing Boing, Crooked Timber has a pretty good piece up about the vacuity of the commonplace rhetoric that "managers of corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize corporate profits." It turns out, of course, that this duty actually refers to nothing in particular and can be used to justify any action.

So we’re left with “maximise the present value of future profits”, or maximise the intrinsic value of the company, which is already a bit of a problem because our maximand is now an intrinsically unobservable quantity, which reasonable people can differ wildly in their subjective assessment of. But even if we grant a massive epistemological free lunch and pretend that managers have a set of reliable conditional forecasts of the consequences of different courses of action, we’re still surprisingly far from a workable decision rule.

The reason is that all the paradoxes of choice theory which arise at the individual level are still there when you try to impose a maximisation rule for corporate decisions. For example, it can’t possibly be the case that we want an interpretation of “maximise the value of the shareholders’ equity” to mean that corporate managers have a fiduciary duty to play the (Defect) strategy in a business situation analogous to a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Or for that matter to be two-boxers in a business situation analogous to Newcomb’s Problem (such situations are incredibly common, as the kind of deals you are offered are very definitely related to people’s assessment of whether you’re the kind of guy who grabs every nickel he sees). Economists can ignore these problems and paradoxes in choice theory with a shrug of the shoulders, a mutter of “oh ordinary people, will you never learn” and a few quid for the Experimental Economics lab. But fiduciary duties are important things, so if we’re going to make our maximisation criterion into a fiduciary duty, then we have to interpret it in a way which allows for strategic behaviour.

* And the Pinocchio Theory has a similarly good post on capitalism, consumerism, and waste.

We are forced, as Karatani says, to buy back as consumers the very goods that we initially created as producers, and that were taken away from us. This “alienation” is the reason why my subjective jouissance as a consumer has nothing to do with my objectified toil as a producer. I do not consume in the same way that I produce. Even the money that I spend wastefully and gleefully, as a consumer, on (as Deleuze and Guattari say) “an imposed range of products (’which I have a right to, which are my due, so they’re mine’)” seems utterly disconnected from the money that I earn painfully in wages or salary — despite the fact that it is, of course, exactly the “same” money. It is only, and precisely, in such a climate of disconnection that “acts of consumption” can be exalted as our only possible “expressions of freedom.” Or, as Graeber puts it, “rather than one class of people being able to imagine themselves as absolutely `free’ because others are absolutely unfree,” as was the case under slavery, in consumer capitalism “we have the same individuals moving back and forth between these two positions over the course of the week and working day.”

* Corrections to Last Month's Letters to Penthouse Forum.

* List of fictional films from Seinfeld.

* And, via Neilalien, an in-depth investigation of why Star Trek: The Next Generation should actually be understood as a creative failure, in two parts. This sums it up pretty much exactly—like all huge nerds of a particular age I remember the show rather fondly, but it's no accident that it's been fifteen years since I watched an episode. And the point about "alternate universe" episodes is especially well-taken:

"Best of Both Worlds" has only one real rival for the title of "best TNG episode": "All Good Things". It's one of the best -- if not, hell, the best series finale I've ever seen. It summed up, in two hours, everything that was good about the show, as well as putting much of the preceding seven years to shame in terms of showcasing interesting, well-written, dynamic and downright awesome sci-fi writing. It deals with alternate realities -- TNG was always good when it dealt with alternate realities, probably because they could get away with the illusion of consequence in alternate realities where things could actually "happen", at least sort-of. Most importantly, watching "All Good Things", the viewer can fool themselves into thinking that there really was an alternate-universe TNG where all that cool character development and sharp writing came together every week, and not just a handful of times over the course of 178 freakin' episodes. But of course, since it was the last episode, they probably thought they could get away with actually changing things up a bit. A shame, that.

I liked "Parallels" and "The Inner Light", two more alternate-reality episodes that actually seemed to cut to the heart of the respective spotlight characters -- Worf, in a rare non-Klingon-centric starring role, and Picard himself. Again, though, in order to find something interesting to say about the characters, the writers had to go out of their way to concoct Rube Goldberg plot machines that would allow for emotional arcs without messing with the precious status quo. If you start looking, you can find a lot of episodes that go to the same well: there's always something to trigger or mitigate unusual behavior, something to excuse the characters from acting like real people as soon as they put on those damn Starfleet unitards.

Even now you see Heroes doing the same sort of thing with their repetitive "Bad Future" arcs, which give the illusion of plot rather than plot itself.

Friday leftovers.

* The director of a leading US cancer research institute has sent a memo to thousands of staff telling them to listen to Ze Frank and use a cell-phone headset (even if Salon is right and it won't really make you a safer driver).

* Hometown heroes Hurwitz and Hayden are writing another Harold & Kumar—which is a good thing, because it was always conceived as a trilogy. (I'm told they actually have nine H&K movies planned out, including the three prequels.)

I regret to admit I missed the second in theaters, but I plan to make up for that error when the DVD is released in just four days.

* Now that its competing Facebook application is up and running, Hasbro has renewed its lawsuit against the makers of Scrabulous. More at Slashdot, which notes: "EA's version has netted fewer than ten thousand players, versus Scrabulous' estimated 2.3 million." I still say they ought to just buy Scrabulous and be done with it.

* Math may be hard, but there's no gender difference in math performance, according to a new study in Science. Via MeFi, where the poster adds: "Bite me, Larry Summers."

* And the Edge of the American West continues to impress: here's a look back at the decision in United States of America v. Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, handed down 24 years ago today.

* The minimum wage: a disgrace and a scandal.

Here is how the political and economic system has been ripping off workers. Once upon a time, if you worked hard and were productive, that translated directly into your paycheck. Not anymore. From 2000 to roughly 2007, productivity went up 20 percent -- while the median hourly wage was up 3 percent. My friend Joel Rogers,director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, made a stunning calculation not too long ago: Had wages tracked productivity as they have over the past 30 years, "median family income in the U.S. would be about $20,000 higher today than it is." Check this out: Taking into account productivity, the minimum wage should be $19.12 -- which would make it almost 50 percent above today's median wage (not to mention the pathetic $6.55).

That's right. The minimum wage should be more three times what it is today. At that level, you would make almost $40,000 a year. Not an outstanding amount given all the other costs and the likelihood that you would not be in a job with health care and a pension (that's another issue). But, beginning to be in the realm of respectable.

Geritopia: the endless war between the Senior Citizens' Center and the rest of Randolph Township has gone national.

It has become increasingly clear to me that Sun City, the Villages, and thousands of other "voluntary ghettos" around the nation, are neither sustainable nor accountable. Rather, they are a fantasy, the product of a developer's profit-driven concept of "geritopia."

Sustainable communities aren't based on leisure. Living among a community of aging peers and golf courses may be comforting and a lot of fun, but a complex and functioning society demands cooperation between the generations.

No one can live in a bubble, regardless of how pleasant the initial experience may be. As Arizonans may remember, even Biosphere 2 eventually needed oxygen pumped in. Similarly, without new generations and reinvestment, and the constant renewal they bring, it is hard to imagine how these communities will survive, much less prosper over time.

And then there are the rest of us. After defeating 17 school-bond measures in 12 years, de-annexing from the local school system, and all the energy spent evicting "contraband children," Sun Citians can likely forget relying on the goodwill of their neighbors who often share a reciprocal bounty of distrust, anger and apathy. Shown in this light, Sun City's claim to fame - community service - rings rather hollow.

Life in the Villages is similarly premised: Seniors have taken control of their county's political machinery and have already begun closing parks for young families who live outside the gated community. As one Villager proudly told me without a trace of irony, "In the Villages we spend our tax dollars on ourselves."

Tuesday, Tuesday.

* Global warming may increase kidney stones. Now will you act, America?

* Shutting down coal plants makes kids smarter.

* Can the human species be sophisticated (mature) enough to keep in mind a looming challenge (decarbonizing the energy system, which will happen eventually anyway) even as it deals with a real-time problem (avoiding energy-related economic turmoil)? An interesting two-part discussion at the New York Times Dot Earth blog.

* LEGO Futurama.

* And pictures from the wedding I attended in Jersey this weekend are up at my Flickr account.

11:50 AM EST:
Switzerland vs. Czech Republic
2:30 PM EST:
Portugal vs. Turkey

When I did the World Cup in '06 my blogging was mostly along a Winners & Losers, Heroes & Villains line, and I think I'll probably stick with that.

These aren't that hard to choose on either register. One of my best friends from high school grew up in the "Little Prague" section of Randolph and so Czech Republic was one of the teams I was most rooting for in the World Cup 2006. Though they underperformed a bit in that tournament I think they're pretty likely to advance in this one. I generally like Switzerland, and I'll probably be rooting for them in later games, but today it's all about the Czech.

Portugal vs. Turkey is easy: I have friends from Turkey and Portugal is probably my most hated squad from 2008, what with their constant dirty play and shameless diving. But they're going to beat Turkey, and they're also sure to advance, so I'll be resenting them for a while yet.

While we're waiting for the polls to close, here's Keith Olbermann with a helpful primer on which states count and which don't.



In other useful K.O. videos, Chuck Todd explains why the race is effectively over tonight, while Kal Penn explains how it was that Harold and Kumar came to Guantánamo. The hometown heroes get their names deservedly dropped.

Dueling Harold & Kumar reviews! Salon says "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay isn't a political picture, but it is a patriotic one, in the nonpartisan sense of the word," while the House Next Door opines "Somebody needed to do a merciless sendup of Homeland Security bullshit, but are Harold and Kumar up to the task? Not quite."

Either way, Randolph! Catch the fever.

Monday!

* Which imaginary animals are kosher? Via Boing Boing.

* Plan59.com is a great site for retro and nostalgia art.

* MetaFilter has now apparently set about translating all of Pulp Fiction into Shakespearease, following the lead of this link.

* Cogitamus has a question for the class, via Cynical-C.

Do you think if Barack Obama had left his seriously ill wife after having had multiple affairs, had been a member of the “Keating Five,” had had a relationship with a much younger lobbyist that his staff felt the need to try and block, had intervened on behalf of the client of said young lobbyist with a federal agency, had denounced then embraced Jerry Falwell, had denounced then embraced the Bush tax cuts, had confused Shiite with Sunni, had confused Al Qaeda in Iraq with the Mahdi Army, had actively sought the endorsement and appeared on stage with a man who denounced the Catholic Church as a whore, and stated that he knew next to nothing about economics — do you think it’s possible that Obama would have been treated differently by the media than John McCain has been? Possible?

* The New York Times says Harold and Kumar 2 creates a whole new genre: the stoner protest film. The legendary Randolph High School debate squad of the 1990s even gets a veiled shout-out...

* The Catcher in the Retirement Home.

* A people's history of the banana.