Red Rooster

Despite my snickering at the demise of this worthless lair of foolishness, it’s not due to any ill will. I’ve simply moved on from the suburban corporate life that would have made a place like this an appealing destination. Yes, I used to be from Jersey, and places like this have big appeal to that sort of crowd. It’s in New York, and there’s a lot of action in it environs, but it wasn’t too snobbish and expensive - nor was it gritty and terrifying. Since I now frequent all the snob/$$$ and dirt/horror places as a resident New Yorker, and since surburban people are now generally exhausting in long doses, people like me simply have no use for places like Culture Club.

But places like these are popular. And very successful. And now in short supply. The rules of economics dictate that demand goes up as supply goes down. I mean, it’s not like Marquee started letting all the Culture Club people in. When you shut down an Avalon or a SoundFactory, or (now) a Culture Club + Nerveana, you tighten the B&T market, putting the squeeze on the patrons and increasing profit for the owners.

Since this has been happening for a while, in no small part due to Guiliani and his reign of terror, you’d think that B&T bars would be running things well enough to beat away bubble investors. Apparently, the bubble has gotten that big such that developers are convinced they can afford to buy out most of the nightclubs in a market of 30 million people (plus 44 million tourists) without so much as blinking. They paid $14 million dollars for a plot of land that requires a delicate expensive teardown (abuts a busy subway and is squeezed among a whole block of buildings), THEN the construction (costs running at all time highs), and this will take years to complete starting from a time when the national real estate market is already softening. The economy is doing well enough and the opportunity cost for sinking $30-$40 million in something other than equity investments is pretty high. So how does the math work on this? Poorly.

This is clearly a greedy and stupid move on behalf of the developers. I only hope that $14 million wasn’t a low price, because that would make the Culture Club owners stupid too.

Your homework: how soon will the new building crumble and fall apart? Obviously, when it comes time to build, they’ll “cut costs” in all the wrong places and cheap materials will be one of them. I’d be afraid to bump into a wall in that place.

Why They Booed Her In Mexico (New York Times)

What is there to say as a reaction to an unsettling racist story? (Not to accuse the journalism as being racist, but to acknowledge that the topic is racial) One could deny the validity of the story. One could respond with similar racism. Or a person could try to bring understanding to the discussion, even when that seems to be an impossibly difficult task.

In any case, the linked story describes how Mexico, in a very strange and not-well-explained way, hates the United States. Apparently, we are so disliked by Mexicans that they heckle our beauty queens and taunt us in public by chanting for Osama bin Laden. This coming from a society that neighbors us but hasn’t always been neighborly. (Not that the USA has done a particularly great job of that over the years, either) I can’t neatly tie it in with the prior discussions here about immigration, because the strokes are too broad and the immigration issue involves many more societies and cultures other than Mexico, but I offer this: a culture that disdains us is providing most of the contention right now in the immigration debate, as they are practically the face of illegal residency. It might be reasoned that these people, the illegal Mexican residents here in the United States who claim to be mistreated and exploited, are implacable; that they really just don’t like us, and that there is no urgency for social justice at the moment; that we are being manipulated; and that our culture and legal system for handling immigration is adequate as it is, as it has been for years (and has been for virtually every other culture of American immigrants).

Rather than go through a big mess with an immigration amnesty law - something we obviously don’ t have a grip on at the moment - why don’t we instead deal with international relations first and foremost, the topic of the highest crisis? So that we have support from abroad, especially when dealing with 21st century rogues ranging from Putin (tough talking bogeyman, but generally benign) to Al Qaeda (extremely dangerous and aggressive)? Or at the very least so that when people move to this country or accept manufacturing jobs from American industry, they actually like us and they’re not just doing it for the money only?

Regardless of the fact that the commenter is razzing on Yankees fans (because, despite my love for the Yanks, that part of it is well deserved), I found this to be the best taunt line of the year:

I see a lot of text from Yankee fans, but all I’m reading is “WAAAAAAAAH! WAAAAAAAAAH!” Your tears are delicious to me, like little liquid Drake’s Cakes.

P.S. - Regarding the headline, I’d classify myself as quasi-liberal, and in no way does my annoyance at extremist liberals make me a staunch conservative. You never need to taunt conservatives, because they’re miserable people in the first place. Life is its own revenge for them.

P.P.S. - Pavano is a dick, a turd of the smelliest and most foul classification.  He should keep his $40 million, but he should pitch in the bullpen with a $1 salary for 3 1/2 years after his surgery if he has any conscience. Also, Cashman should get that fat fuck a treadmill and make him walk/run off that lard-filled ass for 18 months while his gimpy elbow heals.

For the First Time, New York Links a Death to 9/11 Dust (New York Times)

There’s a whole debate about the effects of the dust. I won’t get into that, other than to say that I strongly side with people who claim that the dust created by the WTC collapse had harmful potential. (otherwise, why are you supposed to wear a dust mask when sawing through drywall/gypsum?)

The interesting thing about this is that it raises the 9/11 death toll, by adding on someone who did not die that day and who did not die violently. This wasn’t a firefighter, or a plane passenger, some i-banker trapped in his 100th-floor office, or someone who jumped from 1,200 feet up. Her death is nonetheless tragic (equally so)… yet this creates a problem. A problem not of the dead, but of the living, grieving, and politicking.

The problem is, does she now gain official status as a 9/11 victim? Apparently, yes, as the authorities have increased the official death toll, classified her death as a murder, and have even recognized her passing on prior memorials:

Mrs. Dunn-Jones’s name was engraved on the Sept. 11 memorial in Staten Island. But when Mr. Jones tried to have her name added to the official list of Sept. 11 victims, Dr. Hirsch’s office rejected the request in 2004, saying there was insufficient proof.

The thing I’m curious about, which isn’t mentioned here at all, is now what are the other victims families going to say about including her name on the main memorial, at this later date? If you haven’t followed the tale thus far, you’d assume that no one would have a problem. It would be the human, compassionate thing to do. But if you have followed the story, you know that the “victims’ families” are unofficially “represented” by a small number of militant crows who have done nothing but interfere with the rebuilding and recovery process. (Recovery includes much more than digging up bone fragments under West Street) Their position has been oppositional on nearly everything memorial-related. Nothing will ever be good enough for them - in part, an extension of a horrible grief, but also shaped clearly from narcissism. Without any indication of their actual position, why do I get the feeling that they’ll fight to keep this poor lady’s name out of Ground Zero? Why do I think that they won’t think of her as enough of a victim to make the cut?

(My position is that she should be on the list, on all lists, but I have no sway on the matter)

This is the sort of ridiculousness that we’ve come to expect from many of the parties involved in reconstructing the World Trade Center and the 9/11 memorial. I am quite thankful, though, that Governor Spitzer (and to a smaller extent, Mayor Bloomberg) have helped cut through much of the nonsense going on down there, and have actually started rebuilding. (For those of you who cannot see, there are now 10 construction cranes on the site, which means things are only going up from here - literally)

Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier (nytimes.com)

Yeah, uh, my point now stands more firmly.

It’s worth passing on that most of these kids will, at least for a brief period of time, end up working for free, working for minimum wage, or working at a temp job. AFTER Harvard, Lehigh, etc. The purpose will not be to achieve a character building experience - no, it’ll be because that’s what needs to be done to get into the workforce nowadays. And no, it’s not good for anyone financially, especially with all those college loans to pay. So there’s some deep irony there.

It’s good to see, though, that universities which haven’t been featured in dozens of movies (*cough*HARVARD*cough*) are getting a higher profile out of today’s trends. It’s a good thing and I can’t complain about it, so I have nothing left to write.

Harvard Screener Beat Down By Overachievers - Gawker
(my comment here)

I read the original article before Gawker published their take. I kinda liked it. More on this topic:

I got the impression that the author of the Times article wasn’t the one doing the rejecting. It seemed to me like he found reasons to heartily recommend most of the students whom he interviewed, yet only one of them (in the end) actually got an offer for admissions - he’s not actually on the admissions committee. I think that’s pretty much how it goes; most Ivy alumni are shocked at what today’s youth do to themselves to be competitive for college admissions.

The Ivies’ dilemma should be the other universities’ windfall. If Harvard & Co. are rejecting so many qualified applicants, wouldn’t that mean that there’s a lot of other schools out there ultimately picking up Ivy-caliber talent? If Harvard & Co. fail to maintain their dominance in collecting elite students, well they won’t be so special anymore, will they?

I’m sure that the collection of Ivy hopefuls in New Jersey alone would be a strong enough group such that Rutgers, if they all used it as a fallback school, would end up within a few years being a more impressive institution than half the Ivies (crowded with their dopey legacies). Actually, that’s exactly where things are headed.

Keep in mind: yearly admissions at most of the Ivy League schools hovers between 1,500 and 2,000 students, meaning that under 20,000 students per year actually get in the club*. Out of over 4 million high school grads**. That’s under 1 percent of all applicants each year. So out of the top 5% of students (most of whom, I would think, attempt to get into at least one of the Ivies just for the sake of trying) in the United States, the greatest country in the world, 4 out of 5 are, arbitrarily, going to schools other than Ivy League schools. So what the hell are those other 4 out of 5 doing at the other universities? Much more than bong hits, I presume.

In closing, while everyone knows that Ivy League schools offer excellent opportunities to ambitious students, our national fixation on these institutions is increasingly absurd, based more on 200+ years of extremely competent branding rather than their true standings among all universities. From the numbers alone, it’s easy to see that they could not possibly remain an exclusive destination for elite students - they might be exclusive of elite students, but elite students don’t exclusively attend Ivy League schools. Not by a long shot. They are exceptional schools, but are hardly peerless. (And I’m not just talking about Duke, Stanford, and the top polytechnic schools) I don’t know why, among probably a hundred excellent universities from which a talented student might be conclusively or arbitrarily rejected, Harvard is the number one perennial heartbreaker. Maybe today’s kids aren’t all that smart after all.

* http://ivysuccess.com/admissions_stats_2008.html
** Calculated roughly from census data: http://www.census.gov/popest/national/asrh/NC-EST2005-sa.html

9 U.S. towns ready for Atlantic tsunami - Yahoo! News

Should you need a hint of reality, the title of this post is completely facetious, but would you be surprised? After our various Homeland Security budgeting debacles, I’d assume they’d have all the life rafts shipped to Iowa and all the snowplows shipped to Arizona. You are only as “safe” as your Congressman is a whore.

But, anyway. The actual meaning of the story (because headlines are written by brain-damaged people) is that “9 U.S. Towns have bothered with the process of being tsunami-certified”. Sure, everyone in those towns will surely die should the event ever occur, but they’ll have been notified first in a government-approved manner!

I, for one, do not believe in this nonsense. I instead propose the following: every disaster contingency kit for a catastrophe that large should consist of nothing more than a fast-acting Viagra pill and a large bottle of lube. Forget the condoms, that’s not going to matter. Life is short, nature is cruel, fornicate  the best you can with the time you’ve got and the apparatus that God gave ya.

(Not everything has to be about sex, of course, but I don’t think a Mulberry-street cannoli keeps well on a shelf)

Like most evolved creatures, I cannot help but stop to admire the movie “Groundhog Day” whenever it plays on television, regardless of the planned activities of the day. It’s on all day today, so whatever might have seemed like a good activity is now off the schedule. And through the magic of DVR technology, I can stop, rewind, and fast-forward any part that I wish. (Mostly fast-forward through commercials, anyway)

Anyway, I noticed one thing that was probably not an intentional plot device, but it’s an idea that should be announced.

**MINOR SPOILER ALERT**

Near the end of the movie, Phil Connors takes an unusual interest in the plight of a homeless man, offering to assist him at several intervals (even though, previously in the story, he had callously ignored him). I noticed that he keeps calling the man “Dad” and “Pop”, even though it’s not established in the movie that the man is in any way related to Phil. And then, at a key point, when Phil realizes that he is powerless to help the homeless man live a comfortable life, he looks up, in frustration, and seems to realize fully the fragility of life. At which point he begins his final trek through Groundhog Day.

Coincidence? Is this man really his father? Can he only solve the problems of his life by resolving things with his father, or with a father-like figure? Was that the cause of his bitter outlook on life from the very beginning?

Anyway, this is a movie that everyone should own. It’s fairly cheap to buy, too. It is certainly one of Bill Murray’s masterpieces.

From Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Using a (signed) 64-bit value introduces a new wraparound date in about 290 billion years, on Sunday, December 4, 292,277,026,596. However, this problem is not widely regarded as a pressing issue.

Personally, I’d like to find the couple of guys who consider that to be an unworkable problem. And subscribe to their newsletter.

In Reversal, Toys “R” Us Gives 3 Baby Prizes

Catching you up if you haven’t seen: the big toy store mentioned in the title had a contest for a $25k college bond for the first U.S. baby born in 2007. A Chinese baby from NYC won from a random drawing in a 3-way tie, but was then found to be disqualified because the parents did not have legal status here in the U.S. So they drew another winner from the other 2 babies. Naturally, this makes national news because it’s a grave social injustice (even though it explicitly states in the contest rules that the parents must be legal U.S. residents). The eventual outcome, after Toys “R” Us took a beating in the press, was that they awarded the prize in triplicate to all three babies who were tied (including the disqualified one).

Yes, a major corporation was bullied into paying out a prize for a disenfranchised minority group (residents without legal resident status) who, by their very existence, are breaking the law here in America. And while I do like the outcome - I would never insist that the baby suffer for the mistakes of the parents - I just think it’s terrible that the company was pilloried by the Chinese-American community. Yes, that’s right - these minority racial and ethnic groups have figured out to confuse everyone by making immigration issues look like racial issues. In this particular case, an American lawyer of Chinese descent made the point through an email campaign that Chinese people are good enough to make our commodity retail items, but not good enough to win a scholarship:

… Albert H. Wang, a corporate lawyer who had mounted an e-mail campaign on the couple’s behalf, said that they were happy, adding, “I think justice has been done.”
Some people were concerned that the parents’ status had been exposed, he said. “But the safest place is actually the eye of the storm,” Mr. Wang said, “and any politician who says we should deport the parents, it would be the end of their political career.”

Deport them? No. But exactly what should we do, Mr. Wang? Shall we have no recourse for people who enter the country illegally? Should we not stand by some form of legal remedy for an illegal act, and reinforce the privilege of our own national citizens? At the very least, our society should receive some sort of contribution from people who sneak their way into the country and put a strain on the economy. (We still have unemployment here in America, so for that reason alone you have to hold illegal aliens liable for creating a hurtful situation to existing citizens) I kind of like the idea of some sort of “citizenship tax” in the form of government service or a cash payout as a residency application fee - assuming that, if you were not some insane murdering asshole from somewhere else, you’d be approved for permanent legal resident status. (Citizenship? They should still take the courses and learn English and everything, too.) To let this couple disappear into the crowd without having a solution for their legal residency problem - which it seems Mr. Wang is totally inclined to do at this point - is terrible not only for the parents (who will now continue to suffer the disadvantages of illegal status) and the child (who was born into a family in resident peril), but for the rest of us citizens who kinda need to find a way to fix this problem to prevent all sorts of bad things from continuing to happen to people.

Also, not lost on me is the fact that a citizen of Chinese descent made a Chinese-American issue out of the Chinese-American child of two Chinese illegal immigrants getting screwed out of a contest prize. You didn’t hear much from the Chinese when it was mostly Hispanics marching down Broadway for resident rights. Draw your own conclusions.