My Running Coincidence

My coincididdle? I like that, we'll go with that for now. Pronounced coin-kid-diddle. That's the word I just invented to represent the idea that I brought up earlier, the one where something keeps bumping into your conscious world, say three times in two days for no good reason.

Today, for me, it's nom nom nom, written exactly so to mean eating noises.
"I eat your milkshake. I drink it up." nom nom nom.

Has this for years been universally acknowledged as the way to spell out enthusiastic eating?

Radio Silence

Neither running an leak-down test nor staking pinion nuts are my life's calling. Temping on an assembly line in my hometown for a smattering of nickels wasn't as bad as I could have imagined. The people weren't so bad. Excepting Turd. And DickDan. Some deserved the job they had and some clearly deserved better. They all deserved to be paid better. I am of the people and I am not. I can't ever convince them I'm one of them, my words are too obtuse (see?), my humor is too highbrow. But I am one of them.
I'm listening to Oil! in my last days here and it's a socialist treatise on labor v capital and red v white. It's interesting to look at the shop through a snarky idealist's eyes. In todays flatness of world I'm hard-pressed to understand how any union can exert much power. (well, truckers, that I could understand.) It doesn't matter where the shit is produced, it seems actually rather quaint and generous that Dana would bother even paying Adecco the 12$ or whatever to supply them an army of temps to build the stuff here, in America.

The one thing that I will be most glad to escape is the radio. Next to my head, for ten hours a night, we switch between the Fox and the Eagle. The Fox is ok, "classic rock" that attempts to not repeat itself, but can't for the life of it imagine an Alice Cooper song that isn't Poison. An artificial DJ with some variation, but he also has musical hiccups and incessant ATV ads. The Eagle has sold it's evening program to John Tesh. John Tesh is the Devil. DO NOT CLICK. He's a clueless twat. A middle-aged rich white guy who has a radio-friendly voice. His shtick is thus:
He goes to the studio, probably once a week, and records about an hours worth of material to be played per show. He has a book he's pushing on the show, Intelligence for Your Life, which is a life manual of common sense for the ever elusive white middle class medium adult. The one with a sports car and a minivan and 2.3 kids and a house and a mortgage and debt and acne. His show is just packed with trite moronic slice of Americana advice. He's got a platitude and advice for every family-friendly part of your life.
It's the radio equivalent of eating slices of American cheese. American cheese with a GMC logo cut into the middle. It's our culture after James Dobson has taken out the offending bits. It's an obese woman in a McDonalds drive-thru ordering a salad from her hybrid SUV. It's MythBusters for the short bus.
Thank god it's over.

Dear John (Tesh),
I'm through. Fuck off.
Sincerely,
Lord of the Barnyard.

An Agreement.

We have an agreement with the bank. They do not sell soup. We do not cash checks.

This platitude hangs on the wall of an all-too-clever cafe in southern California. In this cafe, an oil man named Ross is pointing to this wall-hanging to explain that yes, he will indeed sell oil to the Europeans who are asking, but they must pay for the oil with American dollars.
He isn't concerned with exchange rates and messy things beyond his scope of knowledge. He is an oil man. Paul Thomas Anderson has him say aloud, "if I say I'm an oil man you will agree." In Upton Sinclair's Oil! he is Ross. In There Will Be Blood the man is Daniel Plainview. Oil is what he knows. Oil is what he gets, what he profits from, what he succeeds at.

I like that. And in this sense, I know not what I am. I am not a farmer. I am not a pressman. I am not an advertising man. I hope someday I discover what it is I can be confident in am and choose to do.
I am moving to Philadelphia on Saturday. A few people have asked me if I have a job there. Or at least if I know what I'll try to do. I do not. I'll most likely take a job to get by. My girlfriend is there now, with a job that may lead into a career. That's very intriguing to me as I can't even imagine such a job for myself. What form it would take to suggest a future for me. Is that something I should know by now?

Farm Subsidies

Your taxes pay for farm subsidies. Politicians love them like they love ethanol. Makes for a pretty picture, ain't worth a damn. The wrong people learn the wrong lessons. The wrong farming practices receive the greatest benefits. I'm not an expert on the farm bill. Mulch Blog is.

If you live in a rural area, check and see if you don't know some of these people: the easily searchable, Environmental Working Group's Farm Subsidy Database.

Topping the list of direct payment subsidies are 5,125 recipients who collected over $60,000 in 2007, an amount roughly equivalent to average U.S. household income in 2006 ($66,000, the latest year available)). The cost to taxpayers was $537 million.

Piss Pot

Is there a term for a word/phrase/sentence/thought/idea/structure that suddenly pops up in your life? Like when you are watching a movie that has a character with elephantitis, and the book you are reading the next day mentions elephantitis, and then the local paper has an article about the history of elephantitis. The thing is usually fairly uncommon, not likely to come in spurts, but there it is.
Is there a term for that? There should be.

This week for me it's been the poor being referred to as not having "a pot to piss in." Which is just weird when you think about it. Seems pretty low on the list of things you'd want to bring to a desert isle.

One of those sources was last weeks This American Life. You should listen to it. Laymans understanding of the credit crisis.

Savage Legend, Name Lonely Nightingale Doctrine

In the meantime, I read some books.

The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano
I've read very little "latin american literature." One Hundred Years of Solitude I left unfinished, I didn't care. The Savage Detectives is good and written with immense skill. If forced to tell a plot it would be described as being about the lives of two poets from the 70's to the 90's. But really, the plot is an aside. It's the story of an artificial but real movement, and of the stories that interacted with it. It's full of things I didn't get, I don't have the frame of reference to understand, but it was still solid and moving. Reading it knowing Bolano is dead was much like reading Lord of the Barnyard knowing Tristan Egolf was dead. It will be much like watching The Dark Knight knowing Ledger is dead. 8.0

I Am Legend - Richard Matheson
Someone on Sensible Erection left a comment telling us that the book the Will Smith vehicle was based on was superior, original, and had already been made into a film, starring Charlton Heston. He also laid out the premise of the book, and an explanation of the title. (Last man uninfected, a daytime vampire killer, hunted at night, he becomes for the vampire a killer out of a nightmare, a legend, if you will.) It was very enticing. It was a very 70's book and had more than a few logic issues, but beyond that, it's definitely up there with the best vampire fiction written. Matheson has discovered that when you have but one character to work on, you can control the flow of time and emotions with relative ease. When someone finally makes this book a movie *ahem*, I will be there to watch it. 8.5
The blurb on Amazon asks you to "read the book behind the movie." Fuck that. Read the book.

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
My brother and Dr. Shutt have both sung the praises of mssr. Eco. I admit I gave up on a different book of his I started years ago. The Name of the Rose is about an ex-Inquisitor brought to an abbey to find a murderer within its walls sat atop the political bickering between Kings, Popes, and offshoot heretical monks. Eco has just so much he would like to share, but an editor has clearly told him to keep it moving along, that no one would read his books if they stretched 600 pages or more. So it moves along, characters but shadows. The murder mystery was insipid. Whodunnit? Who cares? Maybe I just despise this genre. The most interesting bits were the power play aspect of the question of monks being poor or wealthy. Yeah, exactly. 4.5

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Oprah's book club FTW! Excepting Frey's A Million Little Pieces, she has yet to aim her bow of super-sales awry. This is one of those, written by an almost unpublished 22-yr old, masterpieces. It was written in the 40's about the 30's. About a small town, about the size of my own small town (Mount Vernon), about a mute, about a girl, about a intellectual negro doctor, about an organizer, and about a diner owner. It's rich. Nothing out of the ordinary happens. But it's believable on an almost indescribable scale. One particular thing caught my attention. The mute was deaf from an early age, but in the book he wasn't deaf, he was mute. It wasn't that he didn't hear, he was made entirely of the fact (from others perspective) that he didn't talk. A flawed sounding board. 9.0

Across the Nightingale Floor - Lian Hearn
Some recommendations are good (see Oprah), others need taken with a rock of salt. Amazon and Audible reviewers laud it. It's a fantasy book built around feudal Japan. I had hopes. It's told from two points of view, the first person as the magically awesome, murkily fathered, hope for all good futures, knowledgeable of the ways of the mountain, teen boy. Fantasy Tripe One Oh One. The odd chapters tell the story from the third person of a extraordinarily beautiful teen girl whose use is as a politically stabilizing marriage and has a fame for causing men to die. The boy is magical and just (oh! and turns out his father was the supreme example of this super-secret Tribe with magically powers and he was the best assassin evAr!!!!!!!!!!!). The girl worries and loves him alone and often faints. The author's misogynism was on full display. I have no idea what these reviewers were reading. Maybe I missed something. 0.3

The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein
Naomi was making a name for herself in my world in 2002 when she wrote No Logo and was drooled upon by the publishers of Adbusters. I bought No Logo but never read it. I think I just might now.
The Shock Doctrine was also abundantly hailed from certain circles upon it's release last year. The progressive blogosphere had a love-in. But the progressive blogosphere loves most every political bent book that agree with it.

I'd heard the book described, but I didn't really understand. Much of the not understanding was a lack of knowledge of A) the history of the world 1970 - 2008 and B) market capitalism. The book clears up both in a small way. The Shock Doctrine is Milton Friedman's idea that economic change can be smuggled in behind cataclysmic disruptions. That a truly free free market needs a blank slate to operate from and that wars and natural disasters are great places from which to try. And tries have been made. From Latin America in the 70's to the fall of Russia and Katrina and through the Iraq War, the tries have been abysmal failures except for the distant shareholders. Or, in other words, not failures at all.
All in all an amazingly eye opening look at recent mostly American global fuckups. I don't think I've read a real political book before this one. Even Glenn Greenwald doesn't induce me. This one is incredible. If you can stomach politics in a book, stomach this. Naomi is a cynical cynical woman. I am a cynical cynical man. Lordy, does she put my cynicism to shame.
My one issue is that it was unfetteredly one sided look. I'd love to see a Friedmanite (Cheney perhaps?) rebuttal and a Klein follow up. 8.9

Coverville is a podcast. I wrote of it before. They are sponsored by Audible.com, the place for audiobook downloads. The banner at the top of the Coverville page is a link to Audible that allows you one free download. (I didn't ever use this, and found out about it after I had subscribed, I would assume that it is free, but that it signs you up for a monthly service? Opting out of that service is a simple phone call after the free book. Totally worth it.) For your free book I would recommend that you download The Shock Doctrine, because I think it is that it that important. But, do as you will.

Greening of May

Post Rain Warming

MTV Lib Book Sale $1