Avocadoes-Gone-Wild

At the farmer’s market down the block every Saturday, I always wonder why, in the land of $1.00/lb heirloom tomatoes and $3.50 10-lb bags of Valencia oranges, you can’t find avocadoes for less than $1 each.  It’s California!  Trader Joe’s in Manhattan has (or had) a “guacamole kit” for $2.99 that contained 2 avocadoes, a tomato, a jalapeno pepper, a lime and a shallot.  Unreal.

Well, there’s this.

I want an avocado tree!  They produce so much fruit you couldn’t eat it all.  I want superabundance in my yard.

Grace Jones Releases New Album

Tom Friedman, Yesterday

It’s beyond axiomatic that you can’t make a living off of writing.  However, if you’re Tom Friedman, you can make a very lucrative living off of writing extremely shittily.  In spite of his noxious, self-serving ideas, I really will never stop my pointless crusade against him on the grounds that he simply can’t write at all.

In yesterday’s column, about the economic stimulus, he writes:

If China and America each give birth to a pig – a big, energy-devouring, climate-spoiling stimulus hog – our kids are done for.  It will be the burden of their lifetimes.  If they each give birth to a gazelle – a lean, energy-efficient and innovation-friendly stimulus – it will be the opportunity of their lifetimes.

Much has gone afoul here.  First, gazelles are agnostic on innovation, as far as I can tell.  Second, the pig seems to eat a stimulus while the gazelle…is a stimulus.  Third, references to “our kids” probably need to be taken as “people who are currently children or who are not yet born” although the median age of a newspaper reader is like ninety-three, so their children are currently adults who will not be inheriting the consequences of “our” stimulus decisions.  So those decisions probs won’t be the opportunity of a lifetime (hyperbole alert) to those who are already middle-aged or not yet alive.  And note how China’s potential bad decision could create huge problems for “our kids,” when the situation at hand is mostly the US’s fault.  I mean, damn.

Goddamnit, doesn’t this man have copy editors?  This is the same NY Times that still says Web site instead of website, so you’d think they’d be sticklers for precision and accuracy.

In terms of actual substance, the column advocates abolishing federal income taxes for public school teachers and double the salaries of math and science teachers so we’re better prepared for stomping on Asia, Friedman’s bete-noire and the continent we will always need to be beating somehow.

Except, what we really need are mathematicians, engineers and scientists.  No tax break for you people, though.  Bunch of nerds.  You get nothing.  Just teachers, of whom we all have fond memories and one of whom is married to Tom Friedman.  Basically, this reasoning is as simplistic as Bill O’Reilly’s, only he isn’t screaming about Reverend Wright or Plaxico Burress.  I mean, how un-clever and un-ingenious are these proposals, really?  This is what he came up with.  He’s such a middlebrow demagogue.  He reminds me of me when I’m really drunk, only he’s not arguing that gay people should get over marriage or that the US should have full employment.  That would be radical.  And to Thomas L. Friedman, anything to the left of Thomas L. Friedman is radical, or loony, or not-serious.  Ask David Brooks.

Lastly, in the print version, the headline-that-goes-in-the-middle-of-the-column-to-catch-your-eye-by-digesting-its-thesis (or whatever the fuck it’s called) reads Can we have a stimulus that also stimulates? Oh, the wordplay.  I’m dazzled!

Where It Was At

I started reading Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, which opens during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and it made me think of where I would have wanted to be living–if I were some sort of immortal being–from that time through the end of the twentieth century. The four criteria would be witnessing history in action, a freakout arts scene, cheap cost of living and experiencing a city that has since declined during its zenith.

1892 – 1897: Chicago

1897 -1900: Paris

1900 – 1904: London

1904 – 1908: Buenos Aires

1908 – 1912: New York

1912 – 1914: Madrid

1914 – 1916: Dublin

1916 – 1918: Moscow

1918 – 1921: Beirut

1921 – 1925: Paris

1925 – 1929: Berlin

1929 – 1933: New York

1933 – 1935: Miami

1935 – 1937: Shanghai

1937 – 1938: Asmara

1938 – 1940: London

1940 – 1945: Los Angeles

1945 – 1948: New York

1948 – 1950: Istanbul

1950 – 1952: Detroit

1952 – 1955: Amsterdam

1955 – 1956: Marrakech

1956 – 1958: Paris

1958 – 1960: Havana

1961 – 1964: Rio de Janeiro

1964 – 1966: London

1967 – 1968: San Francisco/Berkeley

1968 – 1969: Paris

1969 – 1970: Mexico City

1970 – 1972: Copenhagen

1972 – 1973: Rome

1973 – 1975: Cairo

1975 – 1976: Montreal

1976 – 1984: New York

1984 – 1987: Tokyo

1987 – 1989: Manchester

1989 – 1990: Prague

1991 – 1994: Seattle

1994 – 1995: Berlin

1995 – 1999: San Francisco

1999 – 2001: London

Highly Eurocentric and biased–especially towards places I’ve actually been to–and I totally admit some of these are outright cliches (like Havana ca. 1959 or San Francisco in 1967).

And who doesn’t want to live in Australia?  But I can’t really think of a specific time when Australia was particularly off-the-hook; unlike, say, Buenos Aires, which definitely had its heyday around 1910.  I’ve never even been to Paris but I would have lived there four times.