I’m off to Beirut to see the missus, who has been there for a month already. Yes, Beirut, the Pearl of the Levant, The Paris of the East, Chicago by the Sea. Except for rolling blackouts, a near civil-war next door (in the country that imposed peace in Lebanon, naturally), and some burning issues in…
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Need some good summer reading? Why not Eliot? It’s fiction set very firmly in Baltimore’s Eastern District. I know those streets well (even if the cameras are new to me). (and I love that he gives a shout out to Larry, the world’s best dispatcher.) I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say…
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In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin wrote: On the whole, I proposed as a more effectual watch, the hiring of proper men to serve constantly in the at business; and as a more equitable way of supporting the charge the levying a tax than should be proportion’d to the property…. It paved the way for the…
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Remember Dudas (AKA Christopher Coke), the Jamaican drug lord? He was sentenced in Manhattan (though most of his criminal acts were in Jamaica). When he was holding out in Tivoli Gardens, I did not think this he would ever be sentenced, much less by a US court. I wonder if life today is better or…
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From the Times: A federal judge ruled Thursday that the police did not sufficiently warn Occupy Wall Street protesters against walking on the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge before arresting about 700 of them in October. The ruling, by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, allows a class-action suit filed…
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And the report by Jerusalem Postreporter Gil Shefler, who got beat up by extremists on one end of the spectrum, but isn’t sure which. I’m amused that Gil asks the Greek Nazi party (Golden Dawn) how they differ at all from the German Nazi’s of WWII. All the party member can come up with is:…
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Check this out by Michael Corbin in Baltimore’s City Paper: Better of Two Evils. Makes me sound like such a intellectual bad-ass. And potty mouth. Fuckin’-A! Seriously though, it is very powerfully written. Makes me want to re-read my own books.
The end of the semester means I get caught up on some of my reading. I finished The Autobiography of Ben Frankin (good stuff) and David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” (The footnote on the necessity of formal wear would have been very useful to read before we crossed the…
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The massive overcrowding in California prisons has eased up a bit (thanks to court order). Of course much of the problem has just been kicked down to the county level, but the symbolic double- and triple-stacked bunks in gyms-turned-massive-dorm are empty, says the San Diego Union-Tribune.
I rarely talk about college, except negatively. But this is the funniest thing to come out of Princeton since… I don’t know, what ever funny comes out of Princeton? I went to Princeton, Bitch! (And yes, all the cool kids were in Terrace. Food does indeed equal love.)