Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Los Angeles V. New York: Driving Edition

So, in a (not findable on line as far as i can tell) article from Los Angeles Magazine a few years, we discovered that the PhD traffic pattern studying guys at UC Berkeley had taken a long look at many different urban traffic systems. they'd discovered that LA drivers could drive, on average, 20 MPH faster in full traffic than any other drivers they studied. LA drivers have actually adapted to their conditions and, in a funny way, evolved to deal with them.

Now i'm in NYC. i'm staying on what is probably one of the loudest corners in the universe, near both a major hospital (sirens from ambulances), a fire station (ditto), a boombox bass cranked up collection (seriously), and, of course, regular NY drivers. A regular NY driver hits his or her horn at any and all provocations. This Onion article pretty much nails what is wrong with this perfectly. i've watched a guy lay on his horn in the west village while a cab wouldn't go for some crazy reason. could it be someone else was backing up and the cab had to wait? why yes, of course that was it. but asshole guy still laid on the horn, despite the fact that tons of young children surrounded his car on all sides. when i pointed out that he might want to wait for the cab to be able to move...well, you know how that goes with New Yorkers.

Motherfucking ass-stain cum gargler!!!!


now little violet can say it too! awesome! and the cabs, when someone is getting dropped off or picked up and the cab dares to not drive off and crush them, well that's worth everyone honking, even though this goes on every day all the time and everyone knows it. getting in the far left or right lane on an avenue means this WILL happen. doesn't matter. gotta honk.

NY drivers: you suck at driving. you suck at figuring out how to avoid these situations. you misunderstand them and behave with total insanity about them. then you make fun of LA.

so i say to all of you what i said to him:

eat me, taint clown

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Hullabaloo

blah blah tristero at digby's blog blah blah. i'm right-er than him anyway. but not more right. if you know what i mean. kakutani's review is here, and as lousy as you would expect. she's the kind of person who walks down a wide boulevard that has been nicely cleaned by the rains the night before, but still somehow manages to find a pile of shit to step in. then she smears it all over the damn sidewalk and inevitably you step in it too.

so...

two things:

one: don't go crediting Kakutani with anything. she is a terrible writer, a mediocre thinker. i don't give a shit about her reviews of larry mcmurty or richard ford--reviewing fiction is a meaningless enterprise for serious humans, but it does help or hurt sales, and about that we should care not ne whit. however, when she writes about politics, she is invariably shallow and asinine in her thinking. she never rises above a combination of ninth grade thinking mixed with nasty and vicious rich-person-dinner-party social observations. she did it to clinton and several others. she is not an ally. it's like people cherry picking chris matthews--look, he was really good here!!!!! and ignoring the fact that he is a fuckwad. she is too.

two: you can't take fukuyama seriously, ever. he is like james cramer--36,000 dow forever? no? ok, get off the public stage, your pundit card has been revoked because you are stupid. period. end of history? fuck off, dude. you wrote that shit in 92 and oh...my...god...were you wrong. embarrassingly so. but we keep giving asshats like this credence--so don't be surprised when he helps lead us into a fucking war of fucking choice like the idiot he has proven himself to be.

and kakutani, loser that she is, falls right into the "because he was one of them it is particularly important" trap. wrong. because he was one of them he was wrong and stupid. and evil.

Monday, March 13, 2006

The Poor Man Institute � Beyond the infinite

see, this is a blog post about my own comment at another (reflexively meta) blog. the comment is about how republicans have taken post-modern post-derrida philosophy and turned it into will-for-power. now i'm blogging that comment.

see, republicans? THIS is how you do meta--pointless and inane navel gazing that comments on itself even as it empties itself of meaning in the process.

get it?