The Power and the Money

Pants on the ground! Pants on the ground!

 It has been a little harder to keep up the blog than I had thought. Work is quite pressing. But every so often, something comes up that the rest of the internets seem to be ignoring. So, in the interest of showing how Boston is changing, I would like to mention that Sunday was the fourth annual “No Pants Subway Ride,” in which people ride the T without any pants.

Of course, as you might expect, the “No Pants Subway Ride” didn’t start in Boston in 2007. It started in New York in 2002, and has since gone international. An example of the influence of the internet! I can hear some of you shouting. Well ... probably not. I mean, I’m sure that this idea in particular spread via the internets, but anyone familiar with the 1960s will find lots of similar events, and let’s not mention the decade after that one. Moreover, the participants physically rally before removing their pants. So please no conclusionamating about the awesome marveliciousness of our new interlinkeded planet. 

It isn’t really a surprise to find that it’s spread to Boston ... Boston has a giant 250,000 person college town laid atop the real city of 1.7 million. While Boston itself is not the sort of place that would smile upon pantless T-riding, the college town appended onto it certainly would. So no surprise there. And it has also spread to such unsurprising places as Philly. After all, the city that celebrates Mummer’s Day is not going to have a problem with pants-removing on the Orange Line. 

I have to admit that it was a bit more unexpected to find that it had spread to the Mexico City. But when you think about it, that reaction makes no sense. The D.F. long ago left behind its cultural conservatism. 

My excuse is that the rapidity of the cultural changes in Mexico between 1990 and today have left me reeling. Still, the United States changed even more between 1960 and 1980. So it is far from unprecendented. And why wouldn’t the chilangos take advantage of the opportunity to ride the subway without any pants?

My worry that it presages the end of Mexico’s unofficial ban on shorts.

Here is a much better photo of the Mexico City event, courtesy of El Pinche Holandés:

 

Overwork, French neocolonialism, and the economics of labor migration

 One thing that truly does suck is being in Paris on a rainy weekend with your wife and being utterly unable to enjoy the city, let alone take that side trip to the south of France, because a chapter of your next book (and an article for a conference) is taking much longer to write than it ought to. This post therefore gets a leisure tag, because of the lack thereof. But now you know why I haven't finished the Dubai posts (one more is waiting about Iran) or said more about nuclear power, the reason for my trip.

One thing that doesn't suck is Doug Muir's explanation of Comorian independence. It may be unsatisfying, but so is reality. It does leave me wishing that Julius Nyerere, a heroic man of heroic accomplishments, hadn't been so ... well ... unyielding in his anticolonialism. The world, I think, would be a marginally more happy place with 800,000 additional French citizens in the Indian Ocean, rather than 800,000 poor victims of lousy institutions wedded to French neocolonialism.

Something that doesn't suck but is, I think, incorrect, is Charlie Stross's analysis of the economics of restrictions on labor mobility. The discussion gets started at comment #27. Go, argue!

Of course, I have a dangerous streak of Francophilia, and am therefore not to be trusted.

Things that make you go “hmmm”

   Can’t sleep, my head is so stuffed up.  (Sleeping 17 hours the day before probably didn’t hurt.  Docs think I had a virus but kept wandering around in the rain anyway, allowing a secondary infection.  Lesson:  machismo does not pay.)  So I surf the net.  And what do I find?  France’s “hamster hotel.” 

Every country, paradoxically, has a typical way to be weird.  Most Americans, for example, don’t own more guns than socks, or dress like something out of a blaxploitation flick, but those would be very American ways to be outside the American norm.  You can all think of others, or examples from different countries.

So all I can say here is that a hamster hotel is not only weird, it is a very un-French way to be weird.

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. 

Chillin’ like it was 1999

  More like 1989, actually.  Or even 1984.  I’m putting the final touches on two cases (one on Pemex, one on the Iraqi oil industry) with a little blue pen on paper printouts, drinking Busch Light from a can, and switching between MTV Hits (you know, which still plays videos) and the Pittsburgh-Chicago game.  Break was eating my wife’s wonderful noodles.  After a week where sleep really has been optional, this is the way to work. 

One way in which digital technology is inferior to the old is in channel switching.  Analog cable televisions would go bam! instantaneously from one channel to another, especially if you had one of those multiswitch remotes that plugged into the set.  These new ones take a few annoying seconds to make the change.  Strangely, I find myself disappointed to know that said new inconvenience will not be a permanent part of the future’s video experience. 

Anyway, I had to turn on the internet and ruin it all.  Thus, this post.  More on the Canadian oil industry forthwith, but I need to finish these two cases.  Sometimes deadlines are hard, even in academia. 

Whatcha y’all doin’ on this not-so-lazy Sunday, gentle readers?

Helicopters are cool!

  Okay, so you're an accidental small businessman, who started an air-conditioning company in South Florida that did much better than you ever expected.  You save your money and set up a good life for your wife and daughter.  Then what do you do?

It's obvious.  You buy a helicopter.  Of course, that's predicated on knowing how to fly one, but that's why God created the U.S. Army.  Or barring that, flight school.

They are a lot of fun.

Here's my cousin helping my wife into her seat.

If you have $120,000 to spare, your house is paid off, and your kids' college education is provided for, I can't think of a better purchase than a used four-seat helicopter. Recommended. My wife approves.

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.

Cars of Februaries past

  After World War 2 ended, pent-up consumer demand meant that the auto manufacturers could pretty much sell whatever crap their factories could churn out.  It took, in fact, four years for the carmakers to start selling new products incorporating all the technological advances of the Depression and war years. 

Oldsmobile kicked it off with the restyled Futuramic Rocket 88.  It included the Hydramatic automatic transmission and a brand-new V-8 engine.  Now, neither was new.  Olds introduced the automatic transmission in 1940 and it had been building V-8’s since 1932, but the two things hadn’t been put together in a designed-from-the-chassis up vehicle.  In addition, the Rocket V-8 was the first overhead-valve design, allowing the engine to take up much less space and producing less vibration when accelerating.  It also had an AM radio that could sorta kinda be heard with the top down at cruising speed maybe if you had lots of imagination. 

My father, therefore, wanted one.  But they were hard to find in February of 1949.  Yet the above pic from 1949 shows that he got one.  (Well, actually the Rocket 76 with the Big Six engine.) Only wanting is not having.  How did he make that leap? 

Cars

 So I was just in Washington on business.  But I managed to get in some fun, visiting the Auto Show on Saturday evening.  Very cool.  In one sign of the recession, they have put all of the spokesmodels in more clothes than is usual. 

Here's the car I want.

Here's the car I don't want, but would feel very patriotic to have.

Here's the car I really want, but can't possibly justify.  As in, its existence.  On any level.

And here's the car I really really want.  It even has a five-point safety belt and a racing roll bar, which I'm sure would make my wife much happier about spending $39,990 on a tricked-out death machine.

What I'm going to get, however, will probably be either a Mini Cooper Clubman S or the Honda Insight.  Unless I think of something better.  What car do you want?

“The much reported decline of gardening”

It seems that somebody shares my former opinion of gardening in American life. In today's Slate magazine:

As historian Kenneth Jackson notes in his book Crabgrass Frontier, the shift to largely indoor living, accompanied by the much-reported decline of gardening and encouraged by everything from air conditioning (often now needed because houses seem to lack shade cover from trees) to front porches being replaced by garages, has left yards — when they even exist — curiously empty. “There are few places as desolate and lonely as a suburban street on a hot afternoon,” he writes.

I haven't anything to add, overlooking a very urban street on a cold and rainy morning.

Mummery!

Remarkably few people (okay, one person) wondered why Imperial Stormtroopers had occupied downtown Philadelphia. So I’ll tell you. It was the Fancies of Mummers Day.

I’ll turn the floor over to Amma. “It’s sort of a white people’s Carnival.  And since it’s cold, they can make more creative costumes because they don't have to be concerned with, you know, battling the heat with nakedness.”  

And to continue the parallel, the fancies are sort of like Carnival bands, kinda, only that Mummers tend to be older and fatter as well as paler than your typical Carnival reveler. Which makes it a good thing on multiple levels that they wear more clothes.

Among the Star Wars junkies, you also had political messages:

Roman gladiators:

Mexican wrestlers:

Roller-skating dragons:

Budding superstars:

Cavalry dancing with Indians:

And things that made no goddamned sense at all.

I don’t know if they suspended the alcohol laws or just didn’t bother to enforce them, but never in North America have I seen so many people wandering around with open bottles and cans of beer but nary a paper bag in sight. By nightfall, some streets looked like it had snowed colored aluminum. 

Supposedly there’s a long history here, dating back to the 1840s, combining ancient Irish and Swedish and Finnish customs. (The main newspaper also warned people not to fire their guns into the air at midnight, and then pinned the custom on Finland. Jussi?) I’ll let those who know more than you can find out in two minutes of googling explain it all in comments. 

All I can say is that it’s hella fun, and worth spending your next New Year’s in Philly to participate. And I mean “participate”:  it’s so unprofessional, and starts so far south along Broad Street, that you can’t not get involved in the action. So next year, in 2009, see y’all in the City of Brotherly Whatever the Hell it Is.