Call Your Representative in Congress

Entering the House is House Bill 627, the so-called Credit Card Holder's Bill of Rights. HB 627 would outlaw the slew of hidden fees and rate hikes that go completely unregulated. Those companies get to do pretty nifty things, like double your percentage without warning and don't have to tell you why; also on occasion they do what they call "two-cycle billing" where you'll get charged interest on two months worth of balances, even if the first has already been paid in full.

It does take two to tango, and the American consumer machine has racked up $935 billion in debt as of the end of 2008.

I would have to say that regulating the billing practices of banks offering consumers credit would actually help those banks, and keep the number of those consumers close to defaulting on their payments away from actual default.

Maybe it's the American way to let companies have their way with the citizens. Seems almost hard to argue with that from a historical standpoint. But, if you think that people should have the right to be cleanly bled little by little without fear of unannounced rate hikes, then contact your Representative and tell them to vote in favor of HB 627.

Also, you should get in the ear of your Representative and Senator all the time anyway. YOU are their boss, and THEY work for you. 

Something New from the Sports World

Not so new, really, but new to me. 

Corrie is a member of a service that emails her weekly about discounted tickets to various shows and activities around the City. Using the service over the past few years we've seen Mary Poppins, a wonderful show called Dust, Madame Butterfly, New York City's girls Rollerderby league games, my birthday's rock opera of Beowulf...

A new thing showed up recently...free tickets (with a small service charge) for the New York Sharks ladies tackle football team.

All contact women's professional football? Holy crap, how did I not know about this...

They've been around for ten years (in some cities), and right now the league boasts three tiers and forty-one (41!) teams in the US and Canada.

Both baseball and football's professional male leagues have been slow to understand the fact that women make up a large portion of the fan-base, and only really have begun to court them outside the marketing realm. According to the Independent Women's Football League's (IWFL) website, the numbers show that the amount of ladies who watched the Giants win the Super Bowl in 2008 was double the number of ladies who watched the Academy Awards three weeks later. Double. Maybe that was due to Tom Terrific, but who knows...

A Note for Norm

Fickt nicht mit dem Raketenmensch!

This is a note ostensibly for my friend Norm, but I'll do my best to include the other five people checking out this blog.

I found a site this morning that my friend Norm told me about; pretty cool. I created a Pynchon loving monster (like myself). I was reading some of the essays (I like the one about him and Brian Wilson), and I then tried to find some more information about the Imipolex movie from other sources, but couldn't manage much.

It did remind me that, Norm, you'll know what Imipolex is after getting through Gravity's Rainbow, and that if you get a chance, check out Prufstand 7, a german made movie using some characters from GR (Bianca, Blicero, possibly Slothrop), and since Pynchon never lets his books be made into movies, it took quite an explanation from the producers to convince him to relinquish hold on his characters. Since the film is a character study of a rocket, and not the telling of GR's story, Pynchon caved.

Too bad about the no-Pynchon-book-to-movie deal...for anybody who's read Against the Day, a long form Anime-style season-long series would be the best way to tell that story outside of printed word. Am I right?

Swine Flu Reaches Queens

The swine flu has reached Queens, apparently, as eight cases at a particular school have been reported. The school is getting a thorough bleaching as we speak by masked janitors.

It is being said that the strange thing about this outbreak, seen most strikingly in the numbers of cases in Mexico, is that it is afflicting mostly the young and relatively healthy. 

I did some research. Influenza outbreaks tend to sicken the infants and elders among us. That's not news. What's known as the Spanish Flu Pandemic mostly killed the young and healthy, a fact that was odd in its time. Estimates on fatalities from that pandemic range from 20 million to as high as 100 million. 99% of those killed or infected were between the ages of 18 and 60, and the percentage is around 85 for those between 18 and 45 years old.

Researchers are thinking that in the Spanish Flu Pandemic, and possibly what's happening with this swine flu, is that the influenza virus strain is creating a cytokine storm in afflicted patients. A cytokine storm is when the immune system goes into overdrive and eventually damages the tissue it has been sent to defend. This seems to make sense looking at the ages of those who died, as those with vigorous immune systems will be at a higher risk.

You see all kinds of weird crap in the City...if it's not manhole covers that electrocute dogs, or fashion models trampling each other to death, it'll be an infectious disease...

Please don't worry about us in Brooklyn. We keep clean, have masks if necessary, and rarely venture into Queens. 

A Note on Sports

My Yankees got swept in their first meeting this season with the Red Sox. Judging by the press out here, the end is nigh, what with Wang, Bruney, Nady, Ransom and A-Rod all on the DL...

I do have to say that the empty seats at the new Stadium in the Bronx pleases me. This new baseball cathedral was built with tax-free bonds and rent-free land leases, and what do the fans get for fronting $450 million (one estimate of the final cost to taxpayers)? So-so seats for $900, good seats for $1250, and great seats for $2500. Oh yeah, let's not forget the luxury boxes (19 in the last stadium, 54 in this one) that can be had for lease--for the entire home season--starting at a quarter-million dollars. They are my team, they do throw money around in a relentless desire to deliver championships, and I was gifted a pair of the $5 tickets randomly available...but jeeze, folks.

I would like to extend a congratulatory wish to  Ramses Barden , who was drafted in the 3rd round (85th overall) by the New York Giants Football Team. These wishes are extended because the kid is a Mustang...he went to Cal Poly, and he has an opportunity to make an immediate difference since he's a tall wide-receiver, kinda like that other tall wide-out who shot himself through the thigh at a nightclub, during the season, before he got cut by the Giants.

Ramp Season!

For anybody lucky enough to live in an area that enjoys the five to six week season of ramps---sometimes called wild leeks---the season is getting ready to close, I think.

Ramps look like scallions, sort of, near the bottom, with white fading to red stalks, but instead of a tube the entire way up, like a scallion, the green part flattens out to look like a blade of grass.

Oh man, they're good...the flavor is a cross between onions and garlic, and simple pasta dishes using only them and a pinch of red pepper flakes really enhance and bring out the ramp flavor. here's a recipe.

Ramp Pasta

sliced stalks of ramp, a third or half a cup per person

saute in oil, add pinch of salt and pinch of red pepper flakes

saute until clear and soft

add white wine, lightly covering the bottom of the pan, reduce by half

add 1 tbsp butter, turning off the heat to mix the butter in

add the cooked pasta

add the sliced green leaves of the ramp, tossing everything together

Pesky Afghani Lawmakers

So, jeeze, at least it was repealed, right?

Not sure if you've heard about this, but in Afghanistan the lawmakers put a law into a recent batch of legislation that would prevent wives from rebuffing their husbands sexual advances.

One more time? Preventing you from denying your husband's sexual desires? Wow...

Now I've never been to Afghanistan, but it seems to me that these Shi'ites who snuck this legislation through must be painfully out of touch with their women...making the specter of rape a viable option?

Here is a link on the story.

Karzai, the US installed president, after fielding plenty of angry calls from world leaders, admitted that he hadn't actually read the legislation that was given to him to sign, and had begun the process to repeal that piece of the law.

In Sociology class while I was in college we learned about two opposing frameworks to view "exotic" cultures.  One being labeled "universalism", where there are universal 'goods' and 'bads', but since nobody ever could agree of what those universals were, the field began to sag into Eurocentrism. The other option, "cultural relativism", seemed to be in control when I was in class, and the tenets were what is right in our culture isn't right in other cultures, and that each culture has its own barometer of what is okay and what isn't. Sounds nice and cosmopolitan and politically correct. But what about this rape law in Afghanistan?

I'd be surprised to find any cultural relativists to sign on to that, saying that's right and proper and culturally okay. And, I'd always hoped that in the world of universals, that at least we'd be able to agree that rape is bad, right? 

It just seems like a symptom that the plight of the world's ladies hasn't changed for thousands of years...

When a few hundred women bravely protested a mosque who's cleric was instrumental in the legislation, they were apparently pelted with small rocks and cursed, while the police watched.

On the upside, with the light of the world paying more attention, the act of assembling a peaceful protest even being possible in such a repressive land is astounding. Here we are, "...witnessing the power of the people..."

A Beautiful Sight

I saw one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen in Brooklyn in the early morning hours of November 4th, 2008.

A small note about my neighborhood: I live in the Bedford-Stuyvesant (usually shortened to Bed-Stuy) neighborhood; originally home to hip-hop stars like Jay-Z, Biggie Smalls, and Mos Def. The entire city of San Luis Obispo could fit inside Bed-Stuy's outline, and yet it's an average sized neighborhood in Brooklyn. It houses around 190,000 people, of which about 184,000 are black, about 4,000 are either Latino or Chinese (usually living above the stores they run) and about 2,000 are white. When we first moved here, you could easily lay eyes on 30,000 people just walking around, and absolutely ZERO were white...interesting days, for sure. Most people have been very kind.

Now, on November 4th, I had to be at work at 7:30 am, which meant I had to leave my house by 6:30 (generally need to slate an hour for subway traveling), but since the polls opened at 6 am, I thought I'd just get up a little earlier, vote, and get to work at a normal time. 

I left my house at one minute after six, and started walking down the six or eight blocks to the school that acted as this district's polling station. From a distance, it looked like there might have been some people waiting, and I thought, wow, cool, it certainly does take a lot to get black people interested in turning out to the polls. 

My view became less obstructed as I got closer, and I noticed a line coming out of the front of the school. With each step towards the scene, the line kept growing, down the school's steps, down towards the corner, and then, as I got the full view, it had snaked around the corner for a ways...maybe 300 people waiting in the cold dark for a chance and a hope. 

I almost fell to my knees and wept. These folks, black folks anyway, never felt like they mattered politically, and it would be tough for anyone to argue the fact that they did matter using evidence from any point in our history, besides, I guess, the Voting Rights Act of '64. 

As I stood in line, I could hear stuff like "I been coming to this school to vote for twenty years, and never seen a line! Never even waited" and the whole time the mood was happy(!) and hopeful and a level of historic awe had set in as the sun was starting to blue up the sky. 

Inside, after you figure out which of the three rooms you were in, then once inside the room, you find your precinct's machine, since here in New York State we use these old antiquated machine and switches and levers...each of the three rooms must have had like eight or nine of theses machines, and all three rooms were pretty crowded, and this scene was happening as close as two avenues away, and elsewhere all around the ghetto. 

After finding my precinct's machine, I was in line again, this time behind a woman with her bleary-eyed ten year old, bundled up in his school uniform. When she took him behind the curtain, I realized what she was doing: having him actually pull the lever, so he would remember that he had been a part of history. I looked around at all the youngsters who'd been woken up at unreal times to get dressed and go stand in line in the cold and then in line in the warmth, all being shuttled behind the curtain with their parents to do something meaningful for a change... 

I wasn't late to work, like so many other people in New York, and across the country. Corrie and I went to a bar to watch the returns since we don't have TV, and at 11 o'clock, when the west coast polls closed, and Obama was declared the winner, the rowdy bar erupted in a tearful shout. Everybody was hugging and choked up, some of us went outside and cars were honking with fists raised out the windows like it was New Year's Day. 

People from Kenya to the Stuy were dancing in the streets... 

So I decided to shill...

I've decided to let these guys put ads on my site...

A paltry bit of income cannot hurt in these economic times, especially given my job status.

Introduction

Tomorrow is the day I turn 30 years old, and I'm excited, as I've felt that old at least since '05 when we went to Europe.

I'd like to use this platform to talk about travels, observations, politics, literature, entertainment, and haute cuisine.