Fey Accompli

no, i’m not writing the start of a gut-wrenching novel. i swam in a saline pool this afternoon. Apparently this is the hot new thing, to convert chlorine pools to saline. It’s mildly salty, not nearly as much as the ocean, and has none of the abrasive effects of chlorine. it is in fact like tasting tears.

we swam A LOT when i was a kid - every single day during the summer. we bought special shampoo to help prevent the damage to our hair and expected the red eyes and crackling skin feel after hours in the offending but entertaining liquid. Saline pools have none of that; your skin feels soft afterwards and you can open your eyes under the water without any problem.

Here are some of the marketed benefits:

– significant cost savings
– healthier
– more comfortable swimming environment

and of course, the most important quality for new products or innovations today: it’s “environmentally and ecologically positive.”

sign me up.

After experiencing it myself, I must agree that it is certainly a more pleasant swimming experience.

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they kill people. i know. it’s terrible.

over at Slate, Timothy Noah thinks it’s terrible too, and therefore has trouble understanding the constitutional argument against the DC gun ban that resulted in it being struck down today. well kinda.

UPDATE: and my Mayor doesn’t give a shit anyway.

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particularly in high school - “the canon” is so incredibly boring. but you can do fun things like this - c/o McSweeneys:

LIT 101 CLASS IN THREE LINES OR LESS.
BY BEN JOSEPH

- - - -

1984

WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

C.S. LEWIS: Finally, a utopia ruled by children and populated by talking animals.

THE WITCH: Hi, I’m a sexually mature woman of power and confidence.

C.S. LEWIS: Ah! Kill it, lion Jesus!

Moby-Dick

ISHMAEL: I’m existential.

AHAB: Really? Try vengeance.

ISHMAEL: I dig this dynamic. Can we drag it out for 600 pages?

The Great Gatsby

NICK: I love being rich and white.

GATSBY: Me, too, but I’d kill for the love of a woman.

DAISY: We can work with that.

Oliver Twist

OLIVER: Poverty ain’t so bad, what with all the Cockney accents and charming musical interludes.

ME: Thanks to movies, no books were read in the passing of this class.

PROFESSOR WATERMAN: You’re half right.

[thanks Ian via Montzter]

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this is a brilliant post by Steve Sailer about American education versus that of Germany, England, and other countries. it contains a fantastic explanation of why our K-12 is a disaster but our universities are still top in the world.

check this:

The top American universities now have such colossal wealth that Jim Manzi blogged at The American Scene:

“Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.”

The prestige of Harvard and the other apex predators at the lofty pinnacle of the American educational pyramid means that the vast K-12 bottom has been infected with Harvard’s values (such as abstraction and abstruseness) and rhetoric (equality uber alles)…but not, alas, Harvard’s brains. Most of the K-12 educators, much less their students, aren’t smart enough to get the joke. They don’t understand that the IQ elitists of America are pulling the wool over their eyes when they rattle on about their purported liberal beliefs about how everybody should go to college.

They don’t understand it’s all a big pyramid scheme. The Harvard professors’ graduate students become the UCLA professors whose graduate students become the Cal State LA professors whose students become the schoolteachers who browbeat their more gullible pupils into believing that everybody should go to college, no matter how obvious a waste of money and time it will turn out to be.

Students with below average IQs are just the cannon fodder that keeps the system churning along for the professors.

basically Harvard is Harvard because it doesn’t believe its own bullshit - haha.

can’t wait for the new Charles Murray book!

THANKS FOR THE LINK JORDAN.

UPDATE: On a related note, young basketball players may be going to play in Europe instead of putting in obligatory college time. I hope they do and avoid the stupid rule that you can’t go straight from high school to the NBA.

Would you like to spend your winter in, say, Syracuse, N.Y., playing against other teenagers, not getting paid and not allowed to make money in other ways, living in a dorm room, forced to go to classes you may or may not be interested in? Or would you rather spend it in, oh, let’s see, Milan, playing against men, making a few million, living in a villa and meeting supermodels?

it’s incredibly offensive to Lefty elites that someone would have a marketable, profitable skill outside some rubberstamped college degree, and the establishment has duped Americans into agreeing that without it you’re doomed.

h/t Montzter

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My friend Jordan just crossed one of the access roads at 15th and K. He was on the phone with me and just started walking against a do not walk sign when a man comes careening through in a convertible Volkswagon Bug wearing a bow tie and a short sleeved collared shirt, points at the pedestrian sign and yells out “I’m Jim Graham!”

That would be Councilman Jim Graham of Ward One.

Ah, small politicians, so jealous for their small and petty power. Wait…that’s all politicians.

The story brought to mind the scene in Oh Brother Where Art Thou? when that manic depressive bank robber known as “Babyface” is wildly driving the car and shooting his tommy gun while shouting his Christian name to his pursuers.

UPDATE: Jordan called Graham’s Chief of Staff to complain - haha.

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I have been using Facebook to reconnect with all sorts of people from my past. Just last month hopped on a plane to Seattle to see a friend from High School that I hadn’t talked to for 11 years until our first phone conversation, during which I booked the ticket to see him. We had an absolute blast and I’m stoked that he’s back in my life.

I’m now digging into college years since there are only a few threads left from those days that I didn’t cut. I just found out my friend Derek Turner is sailing around the world and documenting it here at the world by sea. this was his answer to the question many of us are asking after working into our late twenties and looking for the next step. Do i take that next job or do I go abroad and have an adventure? The wealth of our society can be stultifying, and the pursuit of wealth soul-crushing, but it also enables us to escape and seek experiences that are much more humane than anything found inside a cubicle or an office.

My Seattle friend, Brad, also travels the world for 3 months at a time. He just finished backpacking through Southeast Asia. Another high school friend is training for his first Iron Man and chafes at his law profession. Good friends from college are missionaries in Croatia. Another girlfriend went to Central America for several years and returned home after getting married there. She’s expecting her first child.

It’s wonderful to rediscover my roots and see what life paths people have taken. It also reminds me of how blessed we are to have so many options available.

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The NYT is saying the “economic stimulus” worked?!?

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BFF just sent me this link to this video about consumer jet packs - available this year!

I’ve complained before about the lack of jet packs before, but i can’t link to it because I’m still trying to get my 2007 archive back up.

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Saw this in an alley in Harrisburg, PA a few weeks ago with my future sister-in-law Anne. It must have been a vision just for us because we walked by later to show The Bro and The Lord was gone. But here’s our proof. It still makes me laugh every time I see it.

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After three months of criticism - and sometimes outright ridicule - at Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo, Microsoft slinks away rebuffed. The consensus seems to be that the marriage would not only not provide much value but would create something of a bureaucratic nightmare. My buddy Tim Lee pointed out the importance of cultural differences between the two companies when we talked about it last week. That would have been a difficult integration.

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A few things I learned about recently.

I just bought an expensive bottle of worm poop at my local hardware store, but I was looking for something other than miracle grow to feed my indoor herbs i recently planted for use in cooking. Apparently it’s the Nantucket Nectars of fertilizer - a couple of Princeton grads figured out how to emulsify worm poop and bottle it. As an added bonus, it’s actually bottled in reused 2-liter soda bottles that they collect at local drives. I had to laugh, then i forked over twelve bucks to bring it home.

In my Flow Yoga newsletter (Flow Yoga being my yoga studio, which was recently named the best one in DC btw), I learned about 41pounds.org - a nonprofit that contacts direct mail companies on your behalf to get your name removed from lists such as catalogs and credit cards and gets your junk mail reduced by 80-95% for five years. Fourty-one is based on the fact that the average American receives about 41 pounds of junk mail each year. And, cleverly, for $41 they’ll work their magic for you. They provide the service and donate to your favorite charity when you sign up.

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while looking for decorative pillows on Overstock.com, I found the Hug Me Pillow:

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I’m watching The Daily Show and Jon Stewart just made fun of Sen. Brownback’s comments at an abstinence hearing. Brownback said the culture does not promote with the Brownback family teaches.

Stewart:

“In the Brownback family, we teach that boys have a God Stick and girls have a Shame Cage and we don’t say another word about it.”

True Love Waits, Bitches.

Interestingly, I read today that 51% of Latina girls in America get pregnant before they’re 20. The identified reason is that there are lots of misconceptions plus general ignorance about contraception.

Gotta run - Newt’s on the show.

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“The whole ethanol thing is depressing. It’s so dumb that our government tries to put all its eggs in one basket [ethanol], only to find out that the basket is wrong and we’ve wasted a lot of time and money.” -Sister

Yes, my sister is in the medical field but apparently has her thumb on the pulse of politics as well. We talked last weekend and she was cracking me up with her summaries of the Presidential campaign and - of all things - ethanol subsidies. It’s not something I’ve paid much attention to because I knew the premise of it was false. But I was browsing Knowledge Problem today and got caught up on the general discussion. It appears “wrong basket” conclusions are becoming more frequent:

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Lester Brown and Jonathan Lewis seem overly generous in their interpretation of the motivations for the now-obvious-failure of ethanol policy in the United States:

“Food-to-fuel mandates were created for the right reasons. The hope of using American-grown crops to fuel our cars seemed like a win-win-win scenario: Our farmers would enjoy the benefit of crop-price stability. Our national security would be enhanced by having a new domestic energy source. Our environment would be protected by a cleaner fuel. But the likelihood of these outcomes was never seriously tested, and new evidence has shown that the justifications for these mandates were inaccurate.”

I must have missed the analysis indicating that ethanol was intended to create crop price stability. I thought the hope was always that the policy would push food prices up. Isn’t that how increases in demand work?

Also, the national security argument for ethanol always struck me as false. We import most of our oil from Canada and Mexico, and with oil a fungible product in an international market, it is hard to see just how some other nation might wield oil-withholding as an offensive threat.

Possibly the move to increased ethanol could have lead to environmental improvements, but biofuel mandates are a bad way to implement policy even if it were true that they produced benefits. As a practical matter, the environmental arguments for ethanol have always been mostly a smokescreen. Ethanol policies were never popular in Iowa because of their potential for improving air quality in Los Angeles or New York City. “Food-to-fuel mandates” always smelled like political pork to me, so I guess I’ve never had a generous opinion of the motives of its political supporters.

And now we’re freaking out because food prices are shooting through the roof.

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No, not troops in Iraq. According to Ed Week there’s a school choice “surge” going on. Apparently there are new programs quietly cropping up in states, and from the success rates it appears that quiet is the better strategy (instead of painting our asses white and running with the antelope, as an old boss used to say).

Georgia keeps popping out surprises:

If Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue signs the legislation passed earlier this month, Georgia will become the sixth state to offer tax credits for donations to private organizations that give vouchers to students for private school tuition.

The legislation would offer credits of up to $2,500 to families, and even more generous credits to companies, equivalent to the maximum value of their donations, although there’s a statewide $50 million cap.

the GA legislature enacted a special needs voucher last year. it’s been a rough road since the Utah defeat but it looks as though the choice idea is unsinkable. i wish we could skip to the part where we start to see real innovation on models. almost everything is still a variation on the traditional theme.

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everyone’s got Green issues these days - meaning publications devoted to proving their Enviro-hipness.

a friend pointed me to the NYT Magazine Green Issue. we both think Green Hype is lame but secretly love the advances in technology. So I skipped right to the technology section titled “Invent” (right after “ACT” and “EAT”). those of you in my vicinity have probably heard my CFL bulb speech. and I KNEW i’d read something about federal legislation dooming incandescent bulbs.

Voila:

By 2020, all bulbs in the United States must use 70 percent less energy than incandescent ones do today. (A conventional bulb converts only 5 percent of the energy it uses into light; the rest is released as heat.) In the short term, consumers will very likely turn to compact fluorescents, or C.F.L.’s, which already meet the new efficiency benchmark. C.F.L.’s, though, have their own drawbacks: their coil-shaped “bulbs” emit what some consider to be a cold, blue glare, and they contain small amounts of mercury, a toxin.

that five percent figure is hard to believe. what a waste.

I’ve been reading a lot about solar power. It looks like in the next 5 years that sector could really break through and start seriously replacing our other power sources. more on that later.

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I watched 2 surprisingly great movies this week on television.

I was absolutely riveted tonight to a film called “Conversations with Other Women.” Helena Bonham Carter (whom I love) and Aaron Eckhart give fantastic performances in this movie about love, marriage, and memories. Clever editing enhances the wonderful script. Netflix it immediately.

Also a surprise - “Return to Paradise” from 1998 also with great actors. Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Joaquin Phoenix, even Jada Pinkett Smith. Great acting and a compelling and emotional story about friendship and sacrifice.

UPDATE:
Almost forgot - I saw “The Singing Revolution” at our local indie theater last weekend - excellent documentary on Estonia’s heroic struggle for freedom from the Soviet Union. Go on the website and put your email address in - they’re doing a road show based on local demand. And if you’re here in DC go see it - I think it’s still at E Street.

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FINALLY we’re getting a little past this myth of the worth of college. Nick Gillespie over at Reason quotes Charles Miller, head of the Dept. of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in his new calculations about the lifetime earning premium on a college education which used to be known as $1 million.

Miller says it’s more like a $279,893 differential (using his own as an example). Why? Among other things, because the costs are so astronomical.

If we actually judged graduates coming into the workforce on their knowledge and skill, that number would probably go into a negative differential. But we’re too lazy to reevaluate the proxy.

I sometimes get push-back on my anti-college rants from people (AHEM, Ray, *cough* *cough*) who retort that I wouldn’t go back and undo my college degree if I could and that it’s an easy criticism for me standing on the other side of a college experience.

My response is that I had a good school experience that was by no means a mainstream one. I left early because four years is too long and I was anxious to get into the workforce. While there I studied abroad, had great relationships with my professors, and was involved in student leadership. More importantly, I lived on a DRY CAMPUS with no co-ed dorms. It was a calm, disciplined environment. Most importantly, it was $12,000/yr in tuition.

So I think I have some credibility on this argument. I basically agree with all Camile Paglia’s criticisms about college being is now a 4 year summer camp for extended adolescence.

UPDATE: Unrelated but related, Little Bro sends this over from the NYT about the boon in philosophy majors. I think it’s actually a good discipline. if done well, it’s one of the few degrees left that teaches kids how to write and think.

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I thought I just wasn’t nerdy or blog-savvy enough to appreciate the insane amount of links in various blog or news posts but I’m glad to hear it bugs the crap out of other people. This is money from Jack Shafer at Slate
who goes through his linking pet peeves:

Only slightly less maddening are the sites and writers that think a links package that reads “click here, here, here, and here for more” is an inducement to visit additional pages. If a writer is too lazy to indicate where the link is going to take me, I’m too busy to click.

Thank you! Especially when it’s all self-referential, like “I’ve talked about this before here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.” Wtf??

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I wanted to go down to the Cherry Blossoms at the Tidal Basin today but it’s too cold! 52 degrees. Of course it was like 70 yesterday. I may bundle up later and go anyway…I bought a bunch of picnic items for me and My Boy to sit under the blossoms and enjoy!

I made an early run for Trader Joes this morning. I always forget about the one on 25th street in Foggy Bottom and end up in a rut going to the Giant all the time. But I stocked up for some yummy meals for next week - seasoned fish fillets, red snapper, fresh produce, and of course 4 bottles of 2 Buck Chuck!

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