Ficke

WOOBAMA

O hai internets. Miss me?

I can't help but be giddy as a schoolgirl about Obama's victory in Iowa tonight--particularly with his 57% of the under-30 vote. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, indeed (oh, and I totally called the order of the Democratic race--just ask Beutler. So who wants to hire me?)

Even more so, though, I'm beyond pleased with Edwards's showing in the caucus. Though he only narrowly placed second in the contest, his and Obama's combined success seem to demonstrate strong support for the progressive agenda among the Democratic base. Only time will tell what will happen in New Hampshire and beyond, but I'm optimistic.

And I am personally getting kind of juiced up. I'd like to do something, to get involved.  Along those lines, does anyone have any suggestions? I am in fact quitting my job tomorrow (to focus on finally finishing up this damnable undergraduate degree of mine), so I'll have pretty much the entire summer to do as I please.  I haven't worked a campaign since 2004, and I want to get back in the game. How can I best spend a couple of months a ways out from the election to help with the cause?

(Title stolen from Becks)

Back On The Grid

Apologies to anyone who has tried to get in touch with me via text message in the last month and a half; I haven't been ignoring you. AT&T helpfully decided that I didn't need to get any of these messages, and refused to yield even in the face of my protestations to the contrary. But they finally saw reason and reactivated SMS on my account, so I'm now back in action. Text away.

Comparison Shopping

Whenever the subject of air travel comes up, particularly its rather high cost, I often joke that one could just ship oneself in a crate for a lot less money.

I was about to make such a comment in regard to a certain upcoming event, when I realized that I had never actually checked out whether it was true. Is it really cheaper to FedEx yourself cross-country than to buy a plane ticket? Time to do some research.

The first thing to consider is the container itself. Since shipping a live (or otherwise, I suppose) human is probably illegal and/or against FedEx policies, you would need to conceal the true contents. Thus, a wooden crate should be used, to hide any suspicious sagging and squishiness. As for the size, using my own dimensions as a guide and compensating for supplies and the weight of the crate, I arrived at a 200 lb. box measuring 74x24x24 inches.

Next is the issue of time-in-transit. Since there isn't a whole lot of leg room (or any other kind of room, for that matter) in a shipping crate, it is important to minimize the amount of time spent in-box. An overnight, morning delivery shipment should involve no more that 18 hours or so door-to-door. Any more than that is probably unreasonable.

To test the relative prices of each journey, I compared a round trip ticket between San Jose International Airport and National Airport for December 29th to January 2nd with a 1-Day FedEx Freight shipment from Gaithersburg to Santa Clara, California (a town adjacent to San Jose, so chosen because one of the contractors I frequently ship things to is located there, and the address was easily found in our FedEx account history).

The results?

• US Airways: $356 (round trip)

• FedEx: $964.78 (one way!)

So there you have it. Oddly enough, shipping yourself in a crate turns out to be the poorer choice not only from a comfort perspective, but from a financial one as well.

The one caveat here is that you can drastically cut down on shipping costs if you're willing to take three or four days to get to your destination, swinging the advantage (in terms of cost, at least) to FedEx. Do so at your own risk, of course.

Sartorially Screwed

Becks complained last week about the poor clothing choices available these days for women, specifically the lack of linings in shirts:

There were two shirts I would have bought had they been lined. That's one of my biggest pet peeves -- I hate that so many things come in that grey area now where it's obviously not meant to be sheer but you can see right through it.  Bah.

One might be tempted to cry "conspiracy!" and curse the names of those in the fashion-industrial complex. And it would be correct to do so. Caroline Weber had a review in the Times Sunday Book Review of Dana Thomas's book, "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster," which details the increasingly corporate and profit-driven nature of the luxury industry over the past couple of decades:

Insofar as luxury has gone corporate, relentlessly focused on the bottom line, quality has disappeared. In order to keep margins high (in 2005, LVMH recorded more than $17 billion in sales and a net profit of almost $1.8 billion), Arnault and his competitors have cut costs wherever and whenever possible. The most obvious strategies involve using cheaper materials, replacing skilled artisans with computers and machines and outsourcing labor to less expensive markets like China. Sneakier tactics include “cutting sleeves a half an inch shorter” (“when you get to 1,000, you see the savings,” one employee told the author), replacing finished seams with raw edges and eliminating linings on the grounds that “women don’t really need” them. [emphasis added]

Spoon

10/22 and 10/23 at the 9:30 Club. Tickets on sale now. Get 'em before they're gone.

The Monday show, on the 22nd, seems to be the one that folks are settling on, though I am in fact going to both.

Arcane Statistical Measure of the Day

Carillons per 1000 km².

The degree to which The Netherlands and Belgium are kicking our collective asses is totally unacceptable. This carillon gap is a grave threat to our musical security.

Whoops

Apparently a bag of popcorn left in the microwave for a minute too long can set off the whole building's fire alarm system. Uh, sorry about that, folks.

Update: Oh crap, a fire truck showed up. I'm hoping this day doesn't end with me getting a large fine.

Beach Week is a Tool of the Fascists

The mandatory paid leave theme that rippled through the blogosphere a few weeks ago got an airing in the New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. I thought all the angles had been pretty much covered already, but Walter Kirn takes a novel approach in his case against paid leave, which might be called the "Vacation as Nazi Propaganda" tack.

Kirn makes a two-pronged assault on the whole "vacation" concept. First he argues that it is an obsolete habit:

Grasping the truth about why more Americans are taking holidays from their vacations is as easy as stepping outside your workplace...and seeing that the recuperative promises of the old-style extended getaway...are redeemable everywhere, in every form and so close by that it'€™s a wonder thousand-mile drives in gear-packed station wagons still take place at all.

Add a new verse, Woody Guthrie. This land is leisure land. Strip-mall day spas. Corner yoga studios. Suburban mega-gyms. Wholeness and Recovery Camps. And don'€™t just behold, but gape upon and shiver at the colossal gaming-dining-bowling-Omnimaxing ultra-plexes whose honeycombed, multiplanar interiors evoke the vast convolutions of Utah canyons or the seemingly exitless great basilicas and which produce in me an awe that I felt coerced into experiencing during a boyhood trip to a billboard-hyped cavern in South Dakota, but didn't experience and had to fake so my dad wouldn'€™t sulk and neglect to buy me ice cream.

Ok, so Kirn had an unpleasant family vacation when he was a kid, and has hated nature ever since. Fair enough. Pinning this view on the rest of the country is perhaps a bit presumptuous, but whatever.

The big guns come out next, as Kirn plays the Hitler Card:

The duffel-bag-lugging vacations of my youth...always struck me as forced, unnatural, compulsory. Did people take long vacations out of instinct, to quench an urgent appetite, or had vacations been consciously devised by some overbearing master-protector figure rather like my dad? The answer is that the ritual arose, to a substantial degree, from a decree. I was right, it turns out, so astonishingly right that rather than explaining what I have learned, I'd prefer to let the reader discover it for himself, and shudder. Type the phrase "€œStrength Through Joy" into a search engine, even if you'€™re on a trip right now. Hint: The motto, as its utopian terseness instantly leads you to suspect, is a translation from the German. Another hint: Lederhosen. Conclusion: Invigoration-through-vacationing is not the expression of some bursting life force but, in large part, a Triumph of the Will.

I'm not entirely sure where to begin.

First things first--I did as instructed, and indeed, "Strength Through Joy" turns out to be the name of Nazi Germany's state-controlled leisure organization. That this slogan represented the driving philosophy of the Nazis is taken for granted. I would suggest, as a rebuttal to this view, that Kirn type "Arbeit Macht Frei" into  search engine, but that would avoid the main point here which is that this is all a fucking joke of an argument. Really now, Godwin's Law is supposed to apply to rambling internet discussions, not to the goddamn Paper of Record.

Next week in the Times: a response to criticisms of bloated Defense spending entitled "So's Your Mom".

Punk Rock Science

Ok, meta-meta-meta-meta commentary time! So:

• Jeff Jacoby writes a column in the Boston Globe lamenting that Isaac Newton's religious beliefs would keep him from getting an academic job today.
• James Kirchick thinks that's ridiculous, saying that “the Newtons of today don't believe in some of the silly things Newton did 400 years ago (like alchemy, and the "domination of an intelligent and powerful Being" over the universe).”
• Kevin Drum, while in agreement about the silliness of Jacoby's column, disagrees with the quoted bit above: "Alchemy is indeed considered silly today, but belief in the "domination of an intelligent and powerful Being" over the universe is, um, still pretty widespread, isn't it? Or did I miss a memo somewhere?"
• Brian Beutler finds fault with Drum's objection, saying “I think it's probably accurate to suggest that "the Newtons of today" (oblique way of saying "the world's most brilliant scientists") don't believe in things like ID, which, in fact, are silly.”

And Brian is, in fact, correct. There's even data!

It just so happens that Greg Graffin (who, when not touring with Bad Religion, teaches Biology at UCLA) wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on this very subject*. In Evolution, Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist World-View, Graffin explores the religious beliefs of evolutionary biologists around the world. After surveying quite a few of them, he discovered that nearly 90% of them say they do not believe in God.

In contrast, 90% of the general population in the U.S. expressed a belief in God in a 2003 survey.

Belief in a higher power may be quite widespread, but it shouldn't be surprising that elite scientists might not share these views. I think Sir Isaac's job prospects are pretty solid.

*How do I know this? Why, I have a signed copy.

Getting My Drink On

Since most everyone I know in the DC area is in another country, at the beach, or otherwise on vacation at the moment, I am spending my Friday night drinking at a bar by myself. And it's great! This is a woefully underrated activity, at least by those of us who have yet to achieve full-blown alcoholism.

The bar in question is Mayorga Lounge, located on the second floor of the old Tivoli Theatre at 14th and Park NW (above the coffee shop), a block north of the Columbia Heights Metro station. I've been hanging out here this past week, and I must say I'm impressed. It's not the sort of place I'd ordinarily frequent (the place is a bit slick, with a lot of artsy subdued lighting), but I like it. Their free wifi (and ample table space for such a small place) helps, and the bartenders know their stuff—their mixed drinks are well prepared. They have a small but respectable draft beer selection—Dogfish Head IPA, Pilsner Urquell, two varieties of “Hook and Ladder” beer, which I had never heard of (and is delicious), Blue Moon, and Miller Lite for the frugal-minded. Likewise with their whisky.

However, I don't know how well the place will hold up if more people start coming. A large part of the appeal is that it's not at all crowded (at 12:30 on this Friday night, there are 5 other people here), so we'll see if it changes as more people find out about it. It's only been open a short while, and I hope they can stay open, but I don't want the douchebag crowds that have been lately taken over Wonderland to migrate over here. Only time will tell. In the meanwhile, I'm going to milk this place for all it's worth.