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While everyone else is busy talking about how the American Letterpress Picayune Company Incorporated recently purchased Arachne Huffinpuffington XLV's community newsletter, I would just like to note, because I know at least one of Nick Denton's manlove boyslaves reads this blog, that the Gawker media empire site redesign sucks my balls, and I do not mean that it opens its pretty young mouth and takes my balls gently, one at a time, into the warm embrace of its moist affection, its vulnerable eyes, now brown, now almost green in the soft winter light peering up from time to time across the low, flat plane of my stomach and the subtle rise of my chest to meet my own dark eyes and, glancing in them a tender submission that is the truest, if most brief, if most carnal and therefore most fleeting, form of affection, to take my thighs and guide them higher, to move from there toward a deeper and harder co-mingling of desire and disgust, an act of defiant preparation, a defiling . . . ahem, uh. Yeah. What was I saying? Oh, yeah, um, the Gawker redesign sucks my balls like navigating the WaPo site sucks my balls. It is that horrible. If David Cronenberg got ahold of Katherine Graham's corpse and reanimated it in some satanic scifi ritual, the new Gawker sites would be her brood.

HOV

I was in rush hour the other observing some self-centered dude blocking four lanes and snarling traffic for blocks to spare himself a minor inconvenience and it occurred to me that the logical result of our recent embrace of vulgar libertarianism is a total breakdown of social order. Even in rush hour traffic where it's vital to everyone's survival that we observe certain norms, there always seems to be some entitled, selfish ass in an expensive car making it worse for everyone else these days.

-La Digs

Were I a dick (I am a dick), I would point out that because the typical lane on a US road is between 9' and 12', it is impossible for a single car to block 4 lanes. But maybe the dude was driving a tractor trailer? The "selfish ass in an expensive car" suggests otherwise.

In any case, I invite you to journey with me to the past, in FDR's America, when no one ever got into the wrong lane or merged ill-advisedly. Oh, um, what? The idea that rude drivers represent "a total breakdown of social order," or even intimate such a thing, is so laughably hyperbolic that I was tempted to let it pass without comment, but then I was like, oh, shit, this is laughably hyperbolic.

Allow me to suggest that while it is not especially nice to cause a bit of gridlock, it is, in fact, the titanically self-entitled bourgeois outrage at the minor inconvenience of a little rush-hour traffic that makes a person a "selfish ass".

Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Well, that was a disappointing loss, but you don't win Superbowls with three turnovers that all lead to touchdowns, including a truly boneheaded pick six. I know Rogers won MVP, but, and maybe this is because his receivers kept dropping passes, I thought that despite his impressive stats at game end he looked like an ordinary, workmanlike quarterback. The guy whose single play did more than anything to prevent a Steelers comeback was Clay Matthews. Also, he's got dreamy eyes and looks like Thor, whereas Aaron Rogers looks like a guy who sells smokes at the Circle K around the corner.

Eh. If Pittsburgh had to lose, I'm glad it was to Green Bay. It was a great game, wasn't it? Unlike so many Superbowls, it didn't turn into an insipid, quiet affair. It was as good and rough-house as a divisional game, and yet it seemed to me--did anyone else notice?--that the guys really liked each other, that after the faux bonhomie of the pre-AFC championship week, Pittsburgh's Mike McCarthy's Pack and Tomlin's Steelers were laughing and smiling an awful lot on the field.

Additional silver lining: we will not have to hear any more about how Roethlisberger's three rings outweigh his two sexual assaults. The loss is in this sense a regrettable outcome that I will have trouble regretting.

On a related note, a good friend points out to me that Geno Malkin tore up his knees and is out for the season. If he goes on IR, our Pens have a few million bucks under the cap to toss around before the trade deadline. Who's the dirty birds now?

Here We GOOOO!

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Foodie Friday: Pie

Someone asked for a dessert recipe, but the truth is that I rarely make dessert. I am so much of a fronch fag that I usually make do with a slice of cheese or a piece of fruit or just another glass of wine. But on occasion I do make a little something sweet, and this may be the best, easiest tarte you can make: a little sweet, quite salty, and topped with the sour note of homemade crème fraîche. You'll need:

for the filling

3 large, soft, sweet pears (like Anjou), peeled, cored, and cubed
3 large, crisp, firm apples (like Fuji), peeled, cored, and cubed
1 cup raw sugar
1 stick sweet cream unsalted butter
zest of 1 lemon

for the crust

1 cup AP unbleached flour
1 cup pastry flour
2 sticks chilled butter, diced
about 1 tbspn sea salt
1 cup raw whole almonds
1 tbspn extra virgin olive oil

for the crème fraîche

1 cup buttermilk
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup active culture plain whole milk yogurt

The crème will take a whole day to make, so start it in the morning. This staggeringly complex recipe requires that you combine the ingredients, mix for a couple seconds, and then let it sit at room temperature for 6-8 hours.

To make the filling, melt the butter in a heavy sauce pan. When just bubbling, add the sugar and stir well. You are not making a caramel here; you just want the sugar and butter to warm and brown together for a few minutes. At that point, add the apples, pears, and lemon zest, stir together well and let cook over a low heat for about an hour.

Remove the fruit from the pan with a slotted spoon and fill the bottom of a ceramic pan leaving perhaps a half inch of depth for the crust.

To make the crust, first pulse the almonds in a food processor, then add the flour butter, salt, and oil. Pulse again until the butter is evenly distributed. Pour the loose mixture out of the food processor into a bowl and begin squeezing it together in your fists. It will form a clumpy, crumbly mixture, almost like a fine gravel. Spread this mixture evenly over your fruit until the filling is totally covered. Bake in a 400 degree oven until golden brown on top. Serve warm drizzled with the crème fraîche.

The Dirty Laundry. The Whites.

On a related note, I do not want to appear unsympathetic to the 10% of the nation's former Jr. Assistant Sr. Spend Process Account Outside Representative Sales Manager Team Leaders who are now living in tent cities or whatever, but when Digby writes:

Oh why pretend anymore? We have a permanent underclass and it's growing and nobody gives a damn about the cause.

I just, I mean, I just, I just. Yeah. They're called BLACK PEOPLE, you cracker.

H&R Blockhead

Matty Woodchuck avers:

On a related note, if WalMart manages to “drive mom and pop stores out of business” by selling affordable groceries to under-served urban neighborhoods, that’s what I would call a triumph for human progress.

And our friend Ethan asks, slightly astonished despite himself:

Yeah, it's great, because then mom and pop can join the ranks of the "under-served," too. And, hey, maybe one day every single person in the country can be underpaid by the same company that's the only one they can afford to buy necessities from. Honestly, do people like him really think that some people are "under-served" and others aren't for just no reason at all?

IOZ answers:

Yes.

Like a lot of collegegraduates and newyorktimesreaders, Matthew Yglesias has picked up a vague language of socioeconomy, a sort of loose vocabulary cobbled together from the business press, Brad Delong, and Nobel Paul Krugman, recipient of the Rhinegolden Nordic Memorial Guilty Conscience Pseudoprize for Piggybank Essayism. Perhaps he read a Michael Lewis book somewhere along the way. He is self-convinced, because he is able to deploy a somewhat particularized economics argot, that he understands "economics," but like so many collegegraduates who have never worked in a business, who took Econ 101 but never learned what to them appears a lower-order, secretarial skill like, oh, say, the basic principles of accounting, the actual movement and recording of money continues to elude him. He understands graphs, but not budgets; He has opinions on quantitative easing, but give him a deal, a couple of partners, some income streams, some shared expenses, and a blank Excel sheet, and he will stare in mute incomprehension. Don't forget to do the cash rec, Matty!

So, to the world's Yglesiasses: yes, some people and communties are "under-served" for effectively no reason at all. Oh, they understand that some kind of vague tidal forces of inequality and inequity are at work; especially in minority communities, they may prattle half-sympathetically about, oh, the legacy of Jim Crow or whatever. The end of manufacturing and the decline of labor does not especially concern them. What these people need are the new skills to win the future of the economy today for the children of tomorrow. Ethan bitterly jokes that "every single person in the country can be underpaid by the same company that's the only one they can afford to buy necessities from," but that's being unkind to Yglesias. Only half of the country will be underpaid by the same company that's the only one they can afford to shop at. The quarter of the country above that will get paid to update their twats, and the quarter above that will work for Goldman.

The so-called mom-and-pop model of manufacture, wholesale, distribution, and retail that WalMart et al. have destroyed did make a pound of sugar or a pair of jockey shorts a bit more expensive relatively speaking, but because actual human beings were employed throughout the entire nodal system of production, distribution, warehousing, wholesaling, further distribution, and retail sales, the modest relative increase in final retail price could be offset by the distribution of income throughout the entire system. I guess in the eyes of a DC think-tank scumbag this whole thing reeks of "inefficiency," but a world of Ben Franklin general stores seems to me to be far preferable to a world in which there are a dozen Walton family billionaires and a billion people of WalMart. To an Yglesiass, there is no correlation between these things, obviously; that the destruction of traditional modes of production and distribution in order to sell more crap for less has not only lowered prices, but lowered income, driving more people to buy the cheapest shit possible, causing corporate retail to behave in an even more predatory manner when it comes to pricing by making up for in volume what it loses on the margins, is totally beyond his capacity to understand. In part, this is because he is an privileged, oblivious dickhead whose encounters with the less fortunate consist of watching The Wire and yipping about social realism. In equal part, this is because for all his superbandant recent discovery of the obfuscatory language of economics, the most complex encounters he's ever had personally with money consist of balancing a checkbook and filing a 1040EZ.

To return to those "under-served communities," I think it is worth noting that Jim-Crow style apartheid was a crude and blunt instrument, and that the twined drug-war penal system and "service" economy economic segregation are no less destructive but far more resistent and resilient.

Growing up Is Hard to Do

Obviously, Islam needs to make its peace with modernity and democracy.

-Robert Kagan, quoted by Maureen Dowd

This is a standard variant on a common observation in the West, that Islam is effectively unmodern, that it is mired in a sort of pre-Reformation dark age, as opposed to what used to be called Christendom, which through religious reformation paved the way for modern nations and Enlightenment and democracy and all that. Leaving aside the weirdness of this characterization of Islam, as a normative history of the Christian West, it is totally crackpot, an attention-deficient skipping stone leaping from the Henry's first divorce to the Peace of Westphalia to Jean Monet and leaving out everything else in between. In this history, the wars of religion never occured, there was no Terror, no Napoleon, no Somme, and no Holocaust. The modern western mind is mostly notable in civilizational history for its colossal contribution of violence and destruction. I mean, I guess it's true that the occasional stoning-to-death of an adulterer is indicative of a somewhat atavistic mind, but by that light, the principal characteristic of modernity is its committment to the slaughter of millions through the advent of mechanized warfare. Wait, oh, uh, whut? Hang on guys, there's a transmission coming through. It's a little fuzzy. You say . . . you say that is the principal characteristic of modernity. Oh, shit. Europe "made peace with democracy" by slaughtering two generations its youth.

An American Pastoral

I think it is not enough to fire underperforming teachers. We must expel underperforming students! Indeed, we must persistently eliminate underperformers, starting at the bottom and, having eliminated the bottom, moving on to the new bottom. We must continue firing the poorest performing teachers and expelling the worst performing students until we have eliminated all the teachers and all the students. In a distant parking lot between the high school and the football field, a single, rusty Pontiac shrugs its dull shoulders against the grim February rain in Pennsylvania. Inside, the old pool is half-evaporated. It laps against the painted depth markers. The distant echoes of the beautiful boys who once awoke early to come to this place, rising before dawn and kissing their mothers' soft cheeks, in whose lanes their arms wheeled in parallel until the first bell rang and they pulled themselves from the cold water, smelling of chlorine, and towelled their hair, and went to homeroom curl like mist against the tiled walls. In the hallway, a single janitor pushes a long broom. Overhead, above the roof, angling the plane of its wings awkwardly as if jerking on the end of a filament, a red-tailed hawk rises and rises, until, in the weeds below the field house, a mouse rustles a reed, and the bird dives like the very avatar of death, like the first claw piercing the first flesh, back when the world was new.

Hang the DJ

What's occurring in Egypt is obviously a popular uprising. Not, for clarity's sake, populist. This is causing some consternation for the Western media: who is the leader? What capacious human vessel will emerge into which Egyptians might pour their myriad diverse hopes and dreams, wishes and aspirations, fetishes and peccadilloes?