The Power and the Money

Explained!

  That Nobel Peace Prize for the President was a little perplexing.  My father, however, just emailed me the explanation.  It all makes sense now.

21st century something

  Now this is pretty cool.  It starts off as just a bunch of hardware rolling by.  Tanks, trucks, missile launchers ... although the blue digital camoflague on the missile launchers is a little odd.  What will they be defending, exactly?  Mongo?   Anyway, whatever.

And then comes minute 1:20. 

After which nothing is the same.  Watch it yourself.  But you want to put on your own soundtrack.  Rhythm-wise, “Tha Shiznit” is spot-on. 

China's 60th Anniversary national day - timelapse and slow motion - 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

I am speechless.  And highly entertained.  And sort of embarrassed for some of the participants.  What the hell was that with the hardhats and mirrors at minute 2:51? 

You can tell I had some trouble with the category tags here. 

A George Will moment

  Some time ago, George Will published an odd screed against blue jeans.  Gancho mentioned the column on this blog here, where he pointed out that I was, in fact, wearing blue jeans while travelling in Greece. 

But I have to say that I have my own George Will moment when it comes to male sartorial style in early 21st century America.  Below is a picture of the street outside the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, where I met with some officials from the country’s Treasury department to ask some questions about the recent petroleum reforms.  What don’t you see in the photo?

That’s right!  Shorts.  Only one guy is wearing shorts, thankfully long ones, and yes, he turned out to be a European.  What about looking in the other direction?

What about out front?

None!  No shorts.  This is true throughout Latin America.  If you’re over the age of 18, standing on a hard surface, and cannot see the ocean, then you don’t wear shorts.  Not in Panama, not in Venezuela, not in Mexico. 

And I agree with that convention.  The only exception is if you are actively engaged in exercise.  Period.  Adult men in shorts look ridiculous.  I have felt this way since I turned 18; my high school graduation was the penultimate time that I broke this rule.  I ultimate time was while I was travelling in Trinidad, and I looked ridiculous.  It won’t happen again.

As for sandals?  Gimme a break.  At least shorts are comfortable.  Sandals and flip-flops don’t even manage that.  I found flip-flops useful in the Army for the prevention of athlete’s foot, and that’s about it.  They are not comfortable.  They flip, see.  And flop.  Sandals, meanwhile, manage to be shoes without the advantage of keeping your toes safe if you drop something on them.  So, WTF?

Ban ‘em.  End.  None of this.  C’mon Americans.  Get some dignity.  No more shorts.  And no more capri pants on men either, which have started to infiltrate the USA from Europe.  So all you shorts-wearing flip-flopping young people?  Get off my damn lawn. 

An idle thought from Pasig City

  Proposition:  As traditional written science fiction fades away as a popular genre, it becomes increasingly acceptable to cite it in intellectual and academic circles.

Proximate inspiration from Brad Delong, with secondary impetus from this event with Charlie Stross and Paul Krugman.  (What the hell did happen to my post about Charlie?  I swear, he has magically erased it from the internets.) 

I'm not sure this rises to the level of a great debate attempt.

Demography matters, and a music video

  There is an interesting (if rarely updated) blog called “Demography Matters.” It's hit a few interesting topics lately.  Randy McDonald is the driving force behind it.  For those of you who don't know him, he wrote the defining takedown of the whole “Eurabia” nonsense, aka the idea that immigration and differential birthrates will eventually give Europe a Muslim majority.  But the blog is a lot more than that.

Here is a discussion of Greenland.  Short version:  considering the country's dependence on Danish expats for skilled labor, even a non-independence independence of the sort negotiated by other microstates could lead to disaster.  The population is shrinking despite high birthrates.  Maybe they'll get lucky and find oil.  More likely they will remain a dependency of Denmark forever, most likely de jure but definitely de facto.

The blog also recently discussed Iran.  Short version:  looks like Europe!  Crashing birthrates could fuel an economic boom if only the place could get the policies right.  In comments there is an interesting discussion of the fact that American birthrates have stayed above replacement ... and that much of that difference is because urban birthrates in the U.S. aren't appreciably different from their suburban or rural equivalents.  The really weird fact?  Canadian birthrates are crazy lower than U.S. ones, even in such similar places as Washington and British Columbia. 

Finally, it presents a scary version of Cuba's future, in which the country enters a demographic death spiral.  All it lacks is a projection of the worst case scenario: what would Cuba's population and age pyramid look like in 2050 if it goes the way of Ukraine and stays there?

Below the fold is a music video.  It is for Randy, for reasons he understands.  Essentially, while not my cup of tea, it shows what can be accomplished in his preferred genre in both aural and visual terms when attempted by two rather accomplished artists.  Enjoy.

The great recession

  This weekend, my wife and I made our way up to Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport to grab a helicopter ride above ground zero for the real estate collapse.  It isn't just in marginal neighborhoods, as some observers have suggested.  Spot the foreclosure in this photograph.

In fact, if you look closely, you can spot a second distressed property in the picture. 

Nor is it only individual single-family houses.  South Florida is dotted with what Mexicans used to call “obras negras”:  stopped construction projects left to rot.  And in the South Florida humidity, they will rot:  unsealed foundations will flood and unprotected fixtures will erode.  They are calling them “ghost towers” down here. 

It was a Sunday, but note the lack of construction machinery around the site.

In fact, readers of this blog have already had contact with what became a pair of ghost towers.  Last year, we spotted my brother working on a high-rise located on the border of the Everglades, far out on the urban edge, near nothing but a ginormous shopping mall.  Now it is an infamously distressed complex in which, as far as the local papers can figure, no one lives.

Of course, the recession is also visible at ground level:

The new math

  I have a friend who is a professor of economics at Oxford. One of his students appears to have discovered an astounding new property of natural logs on an exam. It revolutionizes our understanding of, well, everything. 

I want one!

  Yes, it is an environmental atrocity.  Sure, the purported safety of all the extra power exists only in my imagination.  Indeed, while quite comfortable, the cupholders are in a weird place and the dashboard looks kind of cheap.  And it's noisy as hell.

But it is fun to drive, and that growl makes up for any and all inadequacies you might have.  Would it really be a problem to get a child-safety-seat in and out of the back?  The front seats fold way forward.  Hell, people, I'm under forty, recently married, and we don't drive enough for it to cause an appreciable increase in our gasoline consumption over, say, the Fusion hybrid or a Prius.  And it isn't a convertible.  Plus, my wife loved driving it around Maine last weekend.  So it wouldn't be that pathetic.  Would it?

I really am wondering about those child safety seats in a two-seater.  Hmm.

Bronx, accents, Supreme Court

  And it goes to the woman who saved baseball™!  Excellent.  But I want to discuss accents.  Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx, you see, and will bring a third New York accent to the bench, after Antonin Scalia from Queens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg from Brooklyn.

Sotomayor has an accent of the older type, with modern elements, which many people (of all ages) in the New York region still speak.  The fellow who gives the New York speech lessons certainly does, as do I with my relatives.  But it is not a fully modern accent of the sort spoken by my younger in-laws.  See here at minute 1:52 (it is worth it) or here or here. 

What about the other two New York members of the Court?

Accents, Brooklyn

  Over at Randy's place, he's got a neat post on the survival of Dutch in New York City.  Seems like it held on for a couple centuries after the English took it over.  In the post, Randy suggests that the “Brooklyn” accent derives from Dutch.  Peter takes issue, debate ensues. 

Goin' Back To Brooklyn @ Yahoo! Video

Here, I'd like to say three things about New York accents.

1. There are no geographic variations.  None.  Zip.  Say-roe.  All of what seems to be geographic variation is due to race, immigration, or social class.  All of it.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is either confused or f*@king with you.  I have been asked this question every goddamned time I go to Britain.  It ain't true.  Somebody from New York, they say different, they probably be playing games.   
2. The traditional New York accent is dead.  (For a brief period in college, I tried to affect one, for reasons which are beyond me.  My natural speech is bad enough.)  Its more modern variations are also in fact dying, save for ...
3. ... the accent exemplified by Rosie Perez, held by most children of Latino immigrants in the New York metropolitan area, and now spreading throughout the Northeast. It is somewhat different from the previously dominant version of the accent, and it is replacing that version very rapidly.  Even among non-Latinos.

For your edification, click here for Ms. Perez on Letterman, with the new New York accent.  It's worth it.  (For some reason, the damned embedding won't work.)  My older sister isn't quite young enough to talk like this, although I have some very non-Latino in-laws in their twenties who do.  You can see two more examples of the same accent coming from the eyewitnesses in the below BBC report around minute 2:06.

Finally, here is a fellow who gives pretty good lessons in the older version of New York English, the one I speak with my siblings.  He does confuse class and geography, presumably ingenuously, when he describes his accent as a mix of Westchester and Staten Island.  There is no speech difference between a blue-collar dude from Rosebank or one from southeastern Yonkers, or between the child of Ivy League graduates in Todt Hill or in Scarsdale.  He is simply cottoning on to the fact that there are a lot more upper-class types in Westchester County than in Richmond County, and a lot fewer plumbers and police officers. 

Now that you been schooled in the Kings English, what sort of English do you speak? 

My return, I hope, plus some apparent nonsense

  I've been busy, what with the election and then finishing Work-in-Progress number 1.  It isn't quite done, but Carlos and I went through a frenzy of productivity (and three steak lunches, with wine) in New York last week, and the end is very near.

So I will try to get back to posting, although I can't promise anything.  Anyway, I began today with a brief discussion of the Typealyzer.  It purports to be able to analyze the personality type of a blog-writer using some sort of unspecified text analysis algorithm.  I heard about it on Kevin Drum, and then again on Language Log. 

Now, I usually like this sort of thing.  What British political party should I belong to?  The Liberal Democrats!  Of course!  What kind of movie is my life most like?  An action flick!  Obviously!  What South American country would I be?  Venezuela!  Uh ... well, yes, that does make more sense than any of the others, when I think about it.

But the result from the Typealyzer, well, it was just odd:

Doug in Burundi, part 5

More about Burundi, starting with the presence of the African Union, moving on to the rebels, and ending with a discussion of the country's really really bad transport problems.  It appears to still be raining in Bujumbura.

One point that I'll repeat on Doug's comment page:  narrow gauge isn't a problem.  Narrow gauge railroads can be upgraded to carry similar loads and operate at close-to similar speeds as standard gauge.  They simply lose most of their initial cost advantage.

Big day

My father and I (along with a slew of other friends and relatives) are in Trinidad at the moment for some very very very important business, after which I'll be travelling for a bit and posting only sporadically, if at all.

For those of you who don't know him --- and I plan to start posting a bit about his experiences when I return to the States --- here's a picture of the grand old man and myself:

See y'all later!

Once was Kings

This is increasingly hard to imagine, but Brooklyn wasn't always cool.  Once upon a time, the other name for Kings County brought up visions of overweight white men in tank tops, women with very big hair and very tight clothes, and people who actually said "neighbuhud" and "fuggedaboutit." Or, conversely, visions of howling wildernesses of burnt out buildings and blighted lives, someplace going the way of the Bronx.  In fact, you'd hear people say, "TheBronxandBrooklyn," as one combined place.  Hell, other than in bad World War 2 movies or good Mafia ones, you could probably have lumped Brooklyn in with Cleveland in the popular American imagination.  It was a great place to be from.  It wasn't really where anyone would want to go to, unless from happened to be someplace like Fujian or Tajikistan. 

But that's not Brooklyn anymore.  Nope, now Brooklyn is cool. And all those cool people in Brooklyn want you to know about how cool and special and hip Brooklyn is.

Which is why I have grown to appreciate Queens.  Queens is not cool.  The producers of Entourage picked Queens for their guys' home town because Queens is not cool.  And while rents have risen, thus far, thank God, Queens shows no sign of becoming cool.

So when two cars crash into eachother on Hillside Avenue, and the driver at fault gets out gesticulating wildly at the much calmer person he hit, and skateboarding local kids start cracking wise about the show, it's just another car accident and not a deep metaphor for the inassailable uniqueness of place or whatever.

Which is ironic, because nowadays Queens is hella more exotic than most of Brooklyn.  Just not in a cool, hip, attitudinal way. 

And it's still a good place to be from.

(Hat tip:  Marcia.)

Nobody likes my shirt

One way of telling a Boricua isn't always accurate.

Amma, my father, nobody else likes it.  No clue why.

Interlude: Obra blanca

I may have a little more to say about the Dominican Republic, including an answer to Will's original query.  But first, a report from Miami.

Financial collapses take some time, you see.  And so, this 28-story condominium is still going up within spitting distance of the Sawgrass Mills mall, on the very edge of the Everglades.  Turns out that the architect screwed up the specifications for the awnings, which needed to be bigger.  And so, who you gonna call?

Right!  My older brother, pictured above, in the sunglasses.  (You can also see the back of my cousin Larry's head.)  My brother runs a contract air-conditioning company based in Fort Lauderdale.  Larry and his brother Jesse started the firm and still own it:  South Florida in the 1970s was the right place at the right time to start installing AC systems; they soon moved into service followed by contract manufacturing.  (How d'ya think I found out about the Trinidadian air conditioning industry?)  When I was a teenager, I spent summers cutting fiberglass for them at $5.00 an hour; $9.37 in today's devalued money. 

And so, when you need to airlift a 2000-pound slab of concrete 28 stories in to the air, Thermal Concepts is the place to go.

That helicopter was built for the Army during the Korean War.  More below the fold.

Support the Troops

Like you have a choice.

A Geographic Inquiry

Is the greater Miami metropolitan area part of the Caribbean?

A Personal Warning from Che Guevara

The University of Puerto Rico could mostly be in California.  The architecture is not unlike that found on the campuses of Stanford, Santa Clara, UCLA, Caltech, and even parts of Berkeley.  But there are some things with little Cali equivalent:

Good advice?

Guest-blogging with Leon Maurer, part one

HDTD readers may know Noel Maurer as an occasional commenter and guest poster here. Some of you may even know that he and I have been working on a project together. But most of you don't know Noel's dad Leon; and you should. The word 'raconteur' was devised to describe him. I remember sitting spellbound at a diner on Broadway, listening to the man's tales. He was a young man in World War Two:

Did I tell you the story of how I was picked on by the gumba Mafiosi tough guys when I first arrived in the company and had to beat up a punk twice my size to get my reputation as someone to contend with in the company? Besides the supply sergeant named Goldstein, I was the only other Jewish guy in outfit, but they soon forgot all about that. The rest of the outfit were Midwesterners and Southerners whom I got along with easily. The gumba guys later became my buddies too when I told them all about Meyer Lansky, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano and the rest of the Brooklyn mob that were my Dad's high school buddies.

But maybe we should start at the beginning. Mr. Maurer?

Well, the story goes like this...

It was around February 1944. There I was, hanging out at the overseas staging camp in Newport News, Virginia, waiting for a bunk on the next departing ship.