Lil' hobby

Now don't waste it, dudes.

Rather than raise taxes on the whole state, Georgia's just raising them on the paychecks of those it directly employs, which is not an appropriate response to a problem funding Medicaid.

But, you know, woo! A resolution. With no teeth. Can we pass one that says, "We're awesome"?

Guys, I'm pretty sure that is not the same form of recycling Heidi mentioned. By your logic, if I just turn my hose on and point it at the sky, I'm recycling water, right? I see your general point, but it's difficult to adjust pricing at the governmental level easily. And conservation should continue to be encouraged. Not doing so is part of what screwed us in the first place.

Viewing Diary

Friday Night Lights, season 1: Oh yeah. I get it now. Because this show got me. We started watching out of curiosity, at long last, figuring episode by episode that it was good enough to continue and we wanted to see what happened, and then it got its hooks into our hearts. It's not that the show doesn't have problems. It's occasionally heavy-handed in dealing with capital-I issues, as when Smash Williams has one bad game before turning to Roids, and yes, they do win all of their games at the last minute, in spectacular style, but the writing and the acting of characters is so strong and interesting and real that before you know it you genuinely care about them, and you get angry if someone hurts them or happy for their triumphs. It's a show that really could be called Big Love if that title weren't already taken, in that it deals with many forms of that emotion, all of them deeply felt: high school crushes, the love of friends, the love of teammates, the kind of long-lasting and strongly founded love between Coach Taylor and his wife (and that they have with their daughter), the love of a town for a team, and the love of football itself as a thing of beauty. It's when we fail to love that we fail at life, and that's really the message hiding at the core, which suggests, a little, that this is a Christian show. Maybe it is, but that's a message I'm on board with. Plus: I love football. I don't think you need to to get and like and maybe even love the show, but it helps.

Read

Jeffrey Toobin's portrait of Roland Burris and his rise to the Senate isn't that long, and it doesn't need to be. It also, mostly, isn't that interesting, wisely reflecting the man himself, a career politician who set himself small goals and grabbed onto them hard. And there's nothing wrong with the tone of the article or even the approach Burris has taken. He has achieved milestones for African Americans, even if he seems determined to call attention to them. But here's the bit where you realize he might be a little bit crazy:

Within months of losing the primary, Burris, determined to return to office, began running for mayor of Chicago as an Independent. The incumbent, Richard M. Daley, defeated him, sixty per cent to thirty-six per cent. Burris opened a law and lobbying practice, working with his son, Roland, Jr.—he also has a daughter, Rolanda, a university administrator—but he continued to pursue elected office. In 1998, he ran for governor again and received thirty per cent of the vote in the Democratic primary. Four years later, Burris ran for governor a third time, finishing third in the primary, behind the eventual winner of the general election, Rod Blagojevich.

Are you picking it out? Let me illuminate what is dim. Not only is his son Roland Jr., but his daughter is Rolanda. That is some straight-up George Foreman shit right there. Naming one of your kids after you is acceptable (although I still find it slightly strange), but both your son and your daughter? That suggests a concern with legacy that would lead a man to build a giant-ass mausoleum engraved with his accomplishments. Oh, he did that? Yeah.

Whatever you think of the Twinkie defense, this dude seems pretty clearly not competent to stand trial. Psychotic delusions and paranoid schizophrenia, y'all.

Yeah, those three bills up for debate today look like big winners, in that they all screw the public school system in some way or other.

Let me say again that I'm really not necessarily in favor of our state legislature becoming more efficient. The delays built into the process mean that very little gets done, but considering what does get done, that may be a good thing, right? When the general assembly gets its act together, we get voter IDs and draconian (and unconstitutional) sex offender laws. We may miss out on transit funding, but all told it probably balances out in favor of the good.

Yes, if we should be lynching anyone over having too much money, it's the Mexicans...

Please note that even Dick Yarbrough opposes teacher furloughs.

Movie Diary

Doubt: Jared pointed out that this was a pretty ideal movie to catch at the dollar theater in town (by the mall) because no one parks their kids here while they watch something else or shop up a storm at Man Style. So, yes, the audience was quiet and pleasant, which is sort of required by this movie, as there's only a little bit of yelling. It's very clear, even if you didn't know, that it's from a play: limited settings and characters, strong themes, little in the way of cinematic tricks (although Roger Deakins kisses every shot in the colors of a vintage Christmas card--he makes every person onscreen look both real and totally beautiful, from the chubby cheeks of a little fat boy to the withered hands of the old nuns, and it's a relief as well as a delight to see a movie that doesn't try to be gross at all). The great strength here isn't the direction so much as the acting. It's terrific fun to watch Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep go at one another, and both performances are excellent. No one is bad, and Viola Davis is as good as promised. And yet it's not quite A++ all the way. There's something missing, and I guess it's surprise. It's really interesting stuff to watch play out, but one is never caught off-guard, and while your brain kind of keeps churning post-watching (what does that last line mean?) and the film is fun to look at through different lenses (racial, feminist, Vatican II, contemporary hysteria), it's never overwhelmed the way it is with true greatness.

Lil' hobby

This is a very fair way of looking at the possibility of UGA furloughs, i.e., y'all better think pretty carefully before you make them a possibility.

Also: the state's willing to pay some teachers more, today, and isn't paying attention to charter schools.

Read

D.T. Max moves from David Foster Wallace to Tony Gilroy, a very different kind of critter, with perhaps more success. I'm not sure it makes me love Gilroy as much as my friend Zig does--mentioning The Devil's Advocate is not necessarily a way to get off on the right foot either:

Taylor Hackford, who directed Gilroy’s script, wanted him for his next movie, “The Devil’s Advocate,” starring Al Pacino as John Milton, the head of a Manhattan law firm who happens to be Beelzebub. He showed Gilroy the script. “This just sucks,” Gilroy told Hackford. “It was very soapy, Satanism meets ‘Dynasty,’ ” he remembers. Hackford pressed Gilroy, and, reluctantly, he agreed to join Hackford in Los Angeles to work for a week for free, on the condition that if he backed out of the project they would remain friends. He took a copy of “The Portable Nietzsche” and C. S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters,” and spent the flight to L.A. thinking about how to dramatize evil.

So it didn't end up soapy? I'm not saying I don't like the movie okay, but it's more an example of how a good writer can do small things to a script to make it better than an example of sneaking a great rewrite through the system. But this is nice:

His movies follow two fundamental rules: “Bring it in within two hours” and “Don’t bore the audience.”

More writers/filmmakers should paste those rules up on a board to follow.

John Updike's last poems are behind the wall, but they are beautiful. Here are some lines:

I think of those I loved and saw to die;
my Grampop in his nightshirt on the floor;
my first wife's mother, unable to take a bite
of Easter dinner, smiling with regret;
my mother in her blue knit cap, alone
on eighty acres, stuck with forty cats,
too weak to walk out to collect the mail,
waving brave goodbye from her wind-chimed porch.

And friends, both male and female, on the phone,
their voices dry and firm, their ends in sight.
My old piano teacher joking, of her latest
diagnosis, "Curtains." I brushed them off,
these valorous, in my unseemly haste
of greedy living, and now must learn from them.

A combination of generous and selfish to the last, he wrote it all down as he moved toward death. How does a happy man die? Not willingly but not with great anger either--that is what we discover. It's more of a quiet "damn," a not wanting to.

Publication

Julie Doiron, Canadian singer-songwriter with interesting tastes, has a new record that does some things differently and other things the same, and it's pretty good.

Also, dudes, "My Love" is a fabulous single.

Lil' hobby

Oh balls. I'm not a fan of this statement either:

The board could have increased the rate from 18.9 mills to 20 mills - the maximum allowed by law without voter approval - but the higher tax rate would raise only $1.9 million and shift the burden to taxpayers who are already hurting financially.

It would distribute the burden. This is what we're supposed to do.

So: bad art = no violation of copyright. Go ahead and cover that Metallica song all you want. Just make sure your version sucks. (I'm not sure UGA is really in the right on this, but neither is the student organization, and the university has been pretty vigilant about defending its copyright and trademark rights.)

Isn't "willy-nilly" on the state flag?

Yup.

5. 5 thousand. 5 thousand posties...

Milestone. This one.

Read

Gosh, almost none of the style issue of the New Yorker is up for your perusal. Maybe those who want to look stylish need to go buy that copy or something. Anyway, I was going to point you to Ariel Levy's profile of the designer Alber Elbaz, which is my favorite thing I've come across so far in this set of pages, but it's not online. Nor is Patricia Marx's piece on buying American (rather difficult, she discovers, in the world of fashion), nor Judith Thurman's intelligent profile of playwright Yasmina Reza. You can, however, read Paul Rudnick's humor piece, "Confessions of a Pilgrim Shopaholic," which is short and worth your time. Rudnick is greatly impelled toward making his Shouts and Murmurs contributions funny, which is nice and also unusual, at least insofar as success goes. So here's a particular bit from the Elbaz piece that's one of the reasons I liked it, in which he explains why his stuff is expensive:

"It took me six or seven dresses to make one. And it's time and it's money and we are not doing it in offshore countries--we pay sixty-five-per-cent taxes in France! It is so much work. Doing a collection for me is almost like creating a vaccine. Once you create the one vaccine, then you can duplicate it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. But see if you can create it for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, and the answer is no. In that sense, I have absolutely no problem with the prices. I don't think we do it just to do it."

It's kind of like asking a painter why something costs so much, and while I'm not sure these reasons hold true for every designer (or every artist in general--clearly the laws of supply and demand play into prices, as does aspiration), they're at least a good explanation and the statement of an artist.

Police Blotter (scratched wieners edition)

Damage: On March 9, deputy Michael Taylor met with a man at the office of North Oconee High School. The man said his son noticed that morning as he was leaving for school that someone had defaced two car doors by carving the likeness of a male sexual part on them.

Not that the singular article isn't appropriate (males have more than one sexual part, and it might have been a particular male's sex organ depicted), but what's wrong with writing "penis"?

Theft: On March 9, deputy Joe Williams was dispatched to a Zaxby's restaurant on Butler's Crossing whose owner said she caught a manager on video surveillance taking money from a nightly deposit. The manager quit the next day but later sent the owner a text message apologizing for the missing money, which totaled $2,757.

Clearly he knows his Emily Post.

Burglary: On March 16, deputy Byron Smith was dispatched to the H&R Block office on Epps Bridge Road, where an employee said she arrived at work that morning to find a back door was pried open. A 42-inch JVC flatscreen television was taken, along with a DVD player and a copy of the movie "Over the Hedge." The employee said an Athens H&R Block office had been burglarized the same way.

That movie has a secret message in it about accounting.

Forgery: On March 17, deputy James Reavis met with a 17-year-old Hull woman who said someone had withdrawn $5,100 from a bank account jointly owned by the woman and her husband at the Merchants and Farmers Bank in Danielsville. The woman recently inherited $22,000, she explained. Bank representatives said her husband took the money, but the woman disputed the information, saying the transaction signature did not resemble his. Bank employees told her they identified the man as her husband through video footage. Reavis questioned the husband, who said it wasn't he, but someone who looked like him, who withdrew the money.

That damn doppelganger. He's also been carrying on an affair with the woman around the corner.

Oconee. Madison.

Lil' hobby

Damn it. Scooped. I've been meaning to hit this place up for weeks, so it's my own fault, especially considering he works with my tipster. I'm willing to believe they may be the best tacos in town, too, but it's not like this is the only place to get real tacos either.

Yes, increasing most spaces to two hours would help, but the fines are still crazy low. Note how the first commenter says, "I suppose I could park in the parking deck and walk." I believe that's part of what this is supposed to encourage!

What proportion of Smith's proposals this year have hypothetically increased local control? Not that university building projects are currently under Athens's thumb in the slightest, but it's strange how he keeps putting forth shifting control to the state.

"The board of regents is in the business of educating our youth, our people," he said. "They shouldn't be in the business of building."

Yes. Let them learn outside, right?

This is embarrassing.

Why does either bill include a list of projects?

Plug

I'm also blogging every weekday here. For work, y'all.

First of all, you should maybe go check out Athens Transit's new website, which has been massively improved, with considerably clearer ways of accessing route timetables and maps (the old navigation system was a mess). Also, take the survey thereupon.

Brief piece about community gardens. I was at one in Atlanta (Oakhurst, specifically) this past weekend, and it had the biggest damn chickens I've ever seen (Marietta excepted), plus a lovely array of sprigs for sale on the honor system and a sweet group of children singing songs about gardens (tiny hippies).



The thing is, people are going to think the statewide sales tax for transit is just going to benefit Atlanta, whereas a regional tax can be sold as specifically targeted to that region, but a statewide tax also raises more money. One or the other please, though.

Branding firms must be lovin' on some Obama these days.

You know, har har and all that, but this isn't the first time Fred Munzenmaier's made a bad impression.

Listen

Someday, my review of Mark Mallman's best of record will run, but in the meantime, I strongly suggest you go here and download my favorite song off of it, "Hardcore Romantics," which is a perfect pop nugget, full of melody, emotion, and late-night ambience. If I could will it into the Singles Jukebox, I certainly would.

Movie D

The Edge of Heaven: Sort of like Mike Leigh + globalization. My mom is near-obsessed with this movie, and I really liked it too. Not enough to watch it three times, probably, although I don't suppose I'd mind if that happened. Akin's shots, painterly as they are, are a little too static for the most part (also a complaint that can be made of Leigh, who's more interested in telling a story than in working the camera), but his direction of actors is clearly excellent, and the story itself, told in three parts, the third one being where the other two come together, is good and told without excess emotion. When people die (and they do), they just fall down, without drama, in a pile of what was once human. It's also not that depressing, even though the subject matter (whores, terrorists, people's children dying) certainly is. I also think I really like Hanna Schygulla. I'm not very familiar with German film, aside from Herzog, so this may be the first thing in which I've seen her, but she has a wonderful face and very expressive hands.

Read

There's plenty o' Schadenfreude to be had in Roger Angell's book review of The Yankee Years but perhaps none more deliciously weird than in this paragraph:

Clemens, who picked up his sixth Cy Young Award with a 20–3 season in 2001, used to slather his entire body, including his testicles, with a fiery salve just before taking the mound; aflame with concentration while pitching to the Mets’ slugger Mike Piazza in the second game of the 2000 Subway Series, he fielded a shattered bat fragment, weirdly mistaking it for a ground ball, and, on discovering his misapprehension, nearly whacked Piazza with the foot-long shard, up the line, as he irritably flung the thing away. Mel Stottlemyre, seeking him out in the clubhouse later, found him weeping uncontrollably.

Lil' hobby

I'm sure it's hard to sum up the past six years of war in a couple of sentences, but even so, I don't think these do the job:

The war was launched March 20, 2003, to deny Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction and when events proved he had none, the goal shifted - to establish a Western-style democracy in the heart of the Middle East. That goal was only partially achieved.

Ugh. x 2.

Um, is this our solution to food safety problems? Allow the industry to continue to regulate itself? Dude, I know the state has no money, and that the problem is lax enforcement rather than lack of laws, but this contributes to the latter rather than helping solve the problem.

This requirement that students take an annual fitness test, with no consequences (which is fine) if they fail and no way of preparing them to do so and, presumably, no kind of funding to administer it, is pretty characteristic of the current state government.

Can we maybe keep this law in place in some form, too?

This is a very strong and good editorial.

View

The first-year MFAs show open in the old Lamar Dodd School of Art building on Jackson Street is pretty delightful and fun hint of things to come, especially Denton Crawford's exploding flower that melts off its surface and, seemingly, onto the walls around.

Movie Diary

W.: Oliver Stone must be chilling out in his old age. This is somewhere between what the trailers promised and what the article in the New Yorker on movie marketing that used this film as an example of what trailers can manipulate you into thinking a movie is like had me worrying. Whew. Trailers aren't all lies. Or at least this one wasn't. I think that means I can see Know1ng, right? Anyhoo, the film has its problems, like an abrupt ending that really should close with Animal House-style updates ("W. went on to be reelected for another term. He still hates pretzels.") but can't, mostly because we know what happened. So it mostly feels oddly empty. When you have W. recite his well-known malapropisms in private (that actually were uttered in public), it feels like a play. A play I enjoy watching, but still a play. Josh Brolin, who y'all better continue to keep an eye on, digs into the role with abandon, taking a Will Ferrell-ish approach to it but disappearing farther. He has a particularly fabulous moment upon meeting Laura for the first time, when he greets her happily with an open mouth full of hamburger. I'm not sure what Stone's intentions are here--whether he was just so angry that he decided to turn everyone into a buffoon and discovered that reality had got there ahead of him, or whether he was attempting to create some sympathy for poor old Bushie, the same way he'd tried to do with Nixon. I suppose he's very slightly successful at both goals, but this movie isn't going to change anyone's mind. Nor should it, necessarily. But it's rather watchable, at least to play a game of who's who.

Ten Favorite Things in the Kitchen

So The Kitchn was doing a nice series of people's ten favorite things in their kitchens, food excluded (I believe), and I kind of got inspired one morning to take pictures of my own.

Ikea nonstick skillet. Picked up for me by the Ramseys one weekend after I'd scratched my previous one (not a very nice one) all to hell with forks, metal spatulas, etc. Chuck informed me I would have to take care of this one and use a rubber spatula, which I have, and it has treated me rather well in return. Best for eggs.


Coffee mug designed by Scott Sosebee. An Xmas gift and one I use nearly every morning, provided I've remembered to wash it. Nice big handle, cute design. What's not to like?


My mom passed along these adorable little Mikasa plates, which are a bit too small for most dinners but good for just about everything else, plus dishwasher-safe.


Cheap-ass paring knife, bought at Harris Teeter the first year of my marriage, back when there was a Harris Teeter, in the Beechwood Shopping Center. This dude has held up in the way that only a $5 knife can, sometimes, against all odds. Is this the one that I dropped in the disposal and mangled the handle of? No. That one was nice.


Various glassware. The wine glasses in the back are nice ones, the flutes are useful to have around, the vintage champagne glass in the front was handed down from my great-grandmother (I have six of them. It was seven, but one broke in the move), and the little flat glasses on the right are Spanish wine glasses, brought home from Spain by my mom. The latter are especially great because even the very schnockered can't tip them over.

Microplane grater. This one's nice because it doesn't want to slice your fingers open on its edges when you wash it. And it's tough.


Cast-iron frying pan. Registered for and received as a wedding gift. It could use a good going over with steel wool at some point to even out the surface a bit, but it is a marvelous pan, never happier than when I cook hog jowl in it once a year.


This is my favorite spatula, clearly, judging from the discoloration. Much preferred to a wooden spoon, as it scrapes better.

New knife. Sharp as a mothereffer. Xmas gift from my dad. I'm doing my best to sharpen it regularly.


OXO peeler. My mom bought me this in Williams-Sonoma in Lenox Square Mall, following my cutting myself by trying to peel asparagus with a chef's knife. She tested it out on apples that were in the display, then insisted on buying specifically the one she'd tested, as she didn't know from experience that any of the others would work as well.


I tag you and you and you. Go to.

Read

You can't read Ian Parker's article on the financial collapse of Iceland (in the March 9 issue of the New Yorker) unless you're a subscriber or a buyer of things at newsstands, but you should at least read this paragraph I'm transcribing below, sans Icelandic diacritical marks:

One evening, I met a man in his thirties who had once had a powerful job in the arts in Reykjavik. A few years ago, he began to charge personal expenses on his company credit card. The habit grew--"I wanted to be able to do things, have dinners, buy champagne"--until he had slipped into "a kind of madness" of embezzlement. He was eventually exposed and convicted. His sentence included a month in priso in Reykjavik, which he described as "a pretty positive experience, kind of like some people take a vacation in a monastery to clear the mind." He exercised, lost fifteen pounds, and read the works of Thorbergur Thordarson, a twentieth-century experimental writer and a champion of Esperanto. (The prisoner was also able to join the Wi-Fi network of the cafe next to the jail.) While at pains to emphasize the many differences between a just punishment for a crime and a national bankruptcy, the man drew a hesitant line between his experience and his country's: delusion, denial, followed by an upheaval that brought clarity--"a fundamental change in the most basic ground rules in your life." Or, as Andri Magnason said, "The people who couldn't understand how money could be created this way are relieved that it wasn't reality. It was true what your grandmother said: Don't owe too much, don't take risks, use things well."

Lil' hobby

If by "more work" you mean "a nice home in the trashcan," which is what the rest of the editorial, apart from the headline, seems to be arguing.

The next thing to take a look at would be how his IVF-regulatory bill benefits the insurance companies. I'm not saying it necessarily does, but it's worth examining.

The potential teacher furloughs suck, but the restoration of funding for school nurses is good.

"I don't have any figgers," he said. "I just know they lost my luggage oncst." Seriously. What the eff.

This isn't a sure thing yet, but I'd like to see more coverage on all the options for which this money could be used. What kind of work does the trail need? Is it currently unsafe or unusable in any way (e.g., when it rains)? It seems to me that the proposed sidewalks are preferable, but I could be talked out of that idea.

Judy Long's article in the Flagpole on the first buy-local campaign in Athens is totally worth the reading.

Publication

Grub Notes. Ike & Jane. They meet. (Oh don't worry. It's good. The only point of quibble is that I'm pickier about doughnuts than everyone else in town, apparently.)

Lil' hobby

Um, isn't it possible, too, that the number of red light runners didn't actually drop this year, due to that last bit of information provided, that police didn't monitor the Lexington/Cherokee intersection for two thirds of the year due to road construction?

Yes, lord knows there are no gas stations in the area... This park-and-ride lot location still sucks, being, as it is, about a mile from downtown (1.2 miles to the Banner-Herald). It's also rather close to the entrance/exit for the 10 loop, meaning it doesn't exactly alleviate the traffic caused by that shortcut.

Damn it. They have to close the Rite-Aid that sells beer.

Dude, if you can't even start for Georgia at basketball, you probably might as well transfer.

Instead of pushing for flexibility, y'all could be pushing for the acknowledged lack of funding to be restored. I know they're not mutually exclusive, but preaching acquiescence isn't preferable. Scroll to the comments, too, for some more explanation of what those positions do.

I'm pretty sure that Bill Norris wrote his letter on opposite day.

A mouthful of coffee grounds

Is not a way to start off a morning. Damn you, El Aguila.

Read

Not quite as much internetty hoo-ha about Meredith Root-Bernstein's poem "Contemplation" (in the 03/09/09 New Yorker) as about "Alien vs. Predator," and the title probably has a lot to do with that, but her poem is almost as nice. It's craftily constructed, with a rhyme scheme that half breaks up the correct flow of words and half directs it where it's supposed to go. It strikes me as the poem of someone who makes things other than words, and it turns out I'm not quite right.

I saw the fox squirrel sitting on the stand
of the sundial with the twig-shaped hand.
He sat still, his tail flung carelessly
forward over a shoulder. The make-do tree
overlooked bird feeder, lawn, and on this date
a flood of snow that seemed to sublimate.
A dim mist huddled by the scraggly wood;
I saw it mill about, precess, stir, rise. Could
we attribute to our squirrel some notion
predicated on, I don’t know, image, motion,
of the strangeness of this mist above snow,
as if the sky were un-snowing from below?
Can we name him some beauty or bewilderment
to see the sharp fuzz and the near went,
to feel far brittle branches’ caress and the press
of space nest into the mind? Intuit yes.

He clutches the twig-dial with little hands
like a helmsman prefiguring close lands.
His brain must be smaller than a walnut,
like his snow-footprints it must course its rut
from tree to tree to tree, from space to space,
along dip tense liquid pivot up bough, the race
and the swell of branch, dense push to earth,
paws spread-eagled on a big tree’s girth.
Suppose he thinks trees the same way I dress.
God knows I don’t conclude the sleeve, less
do I have a plan to remove a sweater.

I used to put on shirts, or dresses, better,
front to back, so I could seem them just
as they would look on me, just as I thrust
among their labyrinths. Dimly perplexed,
I was too involved in what would come next—
wearing the dress—to let one turn its back,
to wait, to hold foreknowledge in its track.
Another thing, when I was very small,
at eight after the amber lamp in the hall
was switched off, when the night-light shone,
I used to feel one of my digits grown
massive but weightless, a toe on the loom,
waxing, palpitating frontiers of the room.
Then obscurely it would erase, vaguely forgot.
I seem to remember it happening a lot.
I remember doing things I didn’t understand,
“taking notes” on Marco Polo in Samarkand,
clasping hands in prayer in kindergarten.
I heard names—Richelieu and Spartan—
with no meaning other than what I felt:
a quickening of the pulse, a rufous pelt
pinned with the soft gurgle of mother-of-pearl,
a brick cathedral, an oil-spill whorl;
something else angular and red-yellow,
emanating the pre-sound of sounding hollow.

The squirrel sitting on the primitive clock
is stuck between no hard place and no rock,
he changes and is morphous like the fog,
like the sundial he swoops, he has no cog,
no pause. He feels his tail hair on his fur,
he knows of numbness in his toes, the slur
of a breeze by his flank, and the warm
instantiatedness of insides. The form
of things drifts, particulates, rushes,
opaquifies, holds its breath, teeters, blows, hushes.
The squirrel feels out half-assumed stances,
tentative conjoined smells, small knit trances.
These sensations come to a head, to nought,
and the fox squirrel, innocent of thought,
stirs over his strange white domain, impels
his tiny realm from now to what now foretells.

We are back

The Singles Jukebox. You know you missed the hell out of it. My guess is that the rest of the writers felt the same way. So, um, bookmark it, and expect to see a lot more posts. (Also, that Flo Rida song is kind of awesome and definitely a highlight of the week in my book, topped only perhaps [and probably not even] by Soulja Boy.)

Viewing Diary

1) The Staircase: Apparently some people think this should be shorter, but would they bitch about Shoah? For a documentary geek, six hours ain't nothing, especially when it's this compelling and good. I would strongly encourage you not to read up on the case, as the film is stronger when you don't know what's going to happen, although it's hard to avoid reading anything as even the IMDB page linked above is riddled with angry nuts commenting. If nothing else, it's a fascinating portrait of all the steps and preparation that go into building a criminal defense case, with many debates about whether or not to take a certain action (e.g., putting someone on the stand) and an unusual number of surprises. It's also touching but not overly concerned with being so. Rather, the filmmaker doesn't inject himself into the proceedings, despite the fact that he clearly spent years involved with the people at hand, and while there's a separate case to be made for people like Russ McElwee, most documentarians should keep out of frame and hearing as much as possible. If I'd compare this to anything, it's Capturing the Friedmans in terms of its ability, depth, and the reactions it provokes.

2) Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired: I suppose it's interesting to learn more of the facts of the case and trial, although I'm not sure it changes my mind in any way--I'd already heard, due to the film itself, that there was judicial misconduct. But this could all have been laid out just about as well in a longish magazine article, such as for the New Yorker. Part of the problem is that the attorneys start thinking about parallels between Polanski's films and life, just as in The Staircase a few people start thinking about parallels between Michael Peterson's novels and life, and that makes me extremely uncomfortable, the same way it does whenever some kid gets yanked out of school because of a violent short story. It's treading on art's turf, and I'm not sure that should be done. Anyway, lots of clips, most of which are great looking, and Polanski continues to be an interesting guy, but the documentary itself is more passable than awesome.

3) Howl's Moving Castle: Kind of great and yet it makes so very little sense. I think you could say that about all of Miyazaki's films, but this one seems to exemplify it exceptionally. I didn't like it as much as Spirited Away, which may forever have the title as my favorite, but I liked it more than a lot of the others of his I've seen (a majority of the films he's made). Also: Billy Crystal as a crotchety fire demon.

4) Watchmen: I have little to add that's new. It's quite competent, especially visually. Some of its weaknesses are weaknesses of the original (the plot is kind of silly), some of them result from the translation of one medium into another (some things look far less silly in a comic, and a nekkid blue dude is one of them), and some of them belong to Zack Snyder's adaptation (the sex scene is embarrassing to watch, for many reasons; Snyder's thirst for violence doesn't really fit with the material). But it does look good, and a lot of things have been nicely included, while, at the same time, the overall plot has been streamlined and clarified. But would you clarify Ulysses? I dunno. I haven't seen the film adaptation of that. And while Alan Moore's book is good and revolutionary and important and very interesting in its addressing of superheroes and comics in general, it's not Ulysses either. The book has flaws. Like an excess of chattiness. I'm not really sure the movie works, but I'm not sure it could have, entirely.

Read

I was just commenting the other night to a new acquaintance who doesn't watch TV (Hi, Rachel) that Nancy Franklin's TV writing drives me bonkers, and here's an example of it in her write-up of Dollhouse. It's not just that she doesn't like it, which she doesn't:

Now, with “Dollhouse,” Whedon is back on Fox, and the second time is probably not the charm. Only people who are willing to cut Whedon endless slack could find anything much to draw them in to this show, at least in the three episodes I’ve seen. So far, the vision, humor, and storytelling skill you’d expect to find are absent, and at the core of the series is an unpromising performance by Eliza Dushku (from “Buffy” and “Angel”).

It's that she doesn't really seem to have watched the three episodes she says she has. e.g.,

When Echo (Dushku) and the dozen or so other dolls we see are at the facility, they spend their time getting massages, taking showers, and doing yoga—just like zombies everywhere. Trailing Echo wherever she goes is a handler, Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix), a former police officer whom we don’t know much about and who is so concerned about Echo’s welfare that, in this context, it seems suspicious.

I'm not saying both of these things are explained entirely convincingly, but they are explained, the latter in the second episode. She complains, too, about she how wishes the dolls weren't wiped completely clean and how in one episode there's a hint that they're not, but she fails to notice that those hints are in every episode. But it's the concluding sentiments that made me dog-ear the page for later notation with annoyance:

The problem with playing someone whose default setting is tabula rasa is pretty obvious, and the primary qualification that Dushku brings to the part is that she graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Cleavage. In terms of gender studies, it is notable that Dushku’s demeanor as a zombie is much the same as the demeanor many actresses her age resort to when trying to project an image of themselves as unthreatening and “feminine”: a slouchy walk, a bobbly head, and ever-parted lips. Would someone please show these actresses a movie starring Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, Bette Davis, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, or Judy Davis? Whedon wants to explore the farthest corners of our natures to discover what it means to be human. But this vehicle, which he created specifically for Dushku, doesn’t seem fit for the journey.

Doesn't she think that Dushku's blank behavior, to which she calls attention and castigates her for, pointing out the resemblance between it and the way many young actresses appear as a default, is, rather than an example of such, possibly a commentary on it? Not reading this show as feminist is a mistake, even though, yes, there's plenty of cleavage, and the second episode makes that clear. Does Boyd come to rescue Echo when she's being choked to death? Or does she stab her attacker in the neck with an arrow? So far, the show hasn't been stellar, but it continues to be promising enough and better than a lot of stuff that's on.

Link

McGinty's feeling a pinch in visits since he moved to fancier quarters. Here he deigns to write of Athens once again.

Publication

Whoops, I kind of forgot about this review of the eponymous EP by The Goldest.

Movie Diary

Design for Living: Sheesh, I went to all that trouble to tease this, and then I forgot to write about it. Anyway, Miriam Hopkinson, Gary Cooper, and Frederic March star in this clear antecedent to Jules et Jim, only (mostly) without the tragedy and adapted from a Noel Coward play (loosely, apparently). It's a hard movie to get a handle on, and it's sort of appropriately packaged with Peter Ibbetson that way, in that parts of it are great and other parts make you think that it must have flopped, theatrically, like the way it swings from Lubitsch comedy to near-melodrama at moments. It makes one uncomfortable because one doesn't exactly know when to laugh at some parts. Surprisingly, it's post-Code, even though Hopkinson lives with two men and, clearly, has sex with both of them, both before and after marriage, and they're all very open about it, and she even expresses feminist sentiments about her actions, pointing out that men can kind of try out future partners before settling down, so why can't the ladies? Maybe Lubitsch slipped someone an encouragement? There's certainly no message of reform in the film. It's got lovely bits in it, like the opening scenes, in which Hopkinson sketches Cooper and March on the train, where they're asleep, before they've met, which is a long silent scene, followed by a lot of conversing in French, sans subtitles, before they all realize they're Americans. On the whole, it's minor Lubitsch and probably not worth going out of your way for, but it's still relatively entertaining and cute.

Lil' hobby

Flagpole has more on the proposed downtown parking deck. It's nice that it'd be LEED certified and that they're considering a public art gallery. It'd be nicer yet if they can make it look a little less square.

Thank you, Jack Kingston.

You know, just because Bob Smith heads the committee on financing the university system doesn't mean he has its best interests at heart all the time.

Read

I haven't posted much on the March 2 issue of the New Yorker, and that's because it hasn't contained anything very exciting. It's like all the good stuff got pushed forward, to the March 9 issue that has the Wallace stuff and then, no doubt, to the March 16, the style issue, which is always fun. So this one has pieces on an Indian jazz musician and the tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and Ariel Levy's "Lesbian Nation," which is okay and has an interesting subject, but isn't all that well written, being too personal and kind of digressive in not such an awesome way. Rebecca Mead's piece on opera singer Natalie Dessay is pretty good stuff, but not online. A.M. Homes's short story is worth reading. And I kind of forgot about Ryan Lizza's article on Rahm Emanuel, which is amusing and made me like him much more than I did when he was a congressman. I want a nameplate that says "Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself." But the only piece, so far, on which I feel like I could make any kind of comment other than a vague thumb up or down or middling hand gesture is Jeff Toobin's Comment on the potential nonrenewal of the Voting Rights Act. I agree with his larger point (it should be renewed), but it itches a little when he writes:

Barack Obama won the Presidency, but voting patterns in the Deep South suggest that race remains a major factor in American political life. As part of a brief in the Northwest Austin case, Professor Nathaniel Persily, of Columbia Law School, shows how poorly Obama did with white Democrats in those states. According to Persily’s analysis of the 2008 returns, Obama received forty-seven per cent of the white vote in states that are not covered under Section 5 but won only twenty-six per cent of the white vote in covered states. “Barack Obama actually did worse among whites than John Kerry in several of the covered jurisdictions, despite the nationwide Democratic swing,” Persily writes. Race seems like the best explanation for this difference. The fact that other African-American candidates have failed so often and for so long with white voters in the South indicates that no one should be in a hurry to declare the United States a “post-racial” society.

And it's not that he's not right. It's more that the following paragraph shows that other states have problems too:

What recent electoral history shows is that voting requires broader, not narrower, protection. In many parts of the country, the voting rights of poor and minority citizens are treated with not so benign neglect. In the 2000 election, African-American voters in Florida suffered disproportionately from that state’s shoddy practices, such as inadequately maintained registration lists and inferior technology; in 2004, many minority voters in Ohio endured long lines waiting for balky, and too few, voting machines. Across the nation, laws that remove the franchise from those with criminal convictions hit minorities especially hard. More directly, the Republican Party has made an institutional commitment to eradicate the nonexistent problem of voter fraud by imposing identification requirements that are obviously aimed at limiting the numbers of voters from demographic groups that favor Democrats. But neither Florida nor Ohio is a covered jurisdiction under Section 5, and the act is not written to address new techniques of suppression.

Maybe it should be.

Phewooof

So, little posting around here partially due to the big office move, which is mostly done. Set-up is still ongoing. It's not easy to move that many people and that much stuff, especially when you know you won't be able to change it or retrieve anything you've left behind for the next two-ish years. But I do get to see the sun come up every morning.

Police Blotter (strong, fast, and hungry edition)

Assault: On Feb. 28, deputy Joe Williams was dispatched to a business on Epps Bridge Parkway where a 46-year-old Athens woman said she had been visiting a friend's home on Main Street in Watkinsville. She said they were both drinking and for an unknown reason the 53-year-old man slapped her face twice.

She should read this report and the first half of the last sentence to find the probable reason.

Theft: On Feb. 28, deputy Victor Green was dispatched to the Waffle House on North Macon Highway where an employee said a man left the restaurant without paying for $36 worth of food. He said the man ordered the food to go and while the waitress helped someone else he left. The man was described as black, in his mid-30s, with a gold tooth and wearing a yellow and orange shirt and jeans. He left in a newer-model green Honda.

$36 worth of food at a Waffle House is a pretty impressive amount to sneak out with. Did he back his truck up?

Assault: On Feb. 25, deputy James Reavis was dispatched to meet with a 23-year-old Hull woman who said she became involved in an argument with her girlfriend. She said she told the other woman to "bring it on" and the suspect hit her in the eye. The victim then called the sheriff's office, but the suspect had left by the time Reavis arrived. The deputy told her how to obtain an arrest warrant for the suspect, who lives in Colbert.

What did she think she was meaning by "it"? A cheer routine?

Oconee. Madison.

Lil' hobby

The fine should at least be higher. I believe in leniency, especially when it comes to accidental deaths, and it's not really right to make them carry mandatory jail time, but $1000 is a little low for recklessness that resulted in death.

Also, people are hungry!

Kelly's right.

Two hours for all spaces sounds fine. Although it may be a bit longer than needed for many.

And please don't miss Jason Winders's blog post about just how uninformed many angry letter-writing dittoheads are.

Lil' hobby

In the middle of this bit about the proposed "super speeder" bill is another proposal designed to screw with the tag tax:

Meanwhile, powerful House Republicans are lining up behind a new scheme that would eliminate the annual car tag tax and replace it with a one-time fee of up to $1,500. Supporters hope the fee, which only would apply to newly purchased vehicles, eventually would funnel millions of dollars toward trauma care.

Doesn't this, um, penalize owners of older used cars and benefit owners of expensive shiny new cars? While creating a mess wrt funding trauma care?

See, they got rid of the part of the bill that was slightly more sensible. That's what was holding it up.

Movie Diary

Peter Ibbetson: We didn't really plan on watching this movie. It's on a DVD of Gary Cooper films along with two others, one of which (Design for Living) is the reason we queued it, but we thought, oh, let's check out a couple of minutes, and before you know it, we'd decided to watch the whole thing. It's not really a great film. Actually, in many ways, it's a terrible film, with a jumpy sense of narrative and appallingly poor English accents by most of the cast, but it does have something odd and appealing about it, and that thing isn't just the prettiness of Gary Cooper, although he certainly is pretty. It's strange to see him with a little pencil-thin, aristocratic mustache, but he still walks around behaving the way he often does in films: blunt, dreamy, and with a good sense of humor. Not only is it a bit weird to throw Gary Cooper into this movie, but the director, Henry Hathaway, didn't really do swoony romantic melodrama either. All of that may account for its alterations in tone, from violence to the strong love depicted between children to hilarious cartoons about the architecture of a stable intended to prove a point. Sort of worth watching?

Don't you mean 8-tracks?

The Container Store is slightly behind the times in terms of its media storage.

Beautiful stuff

If we live in a society that tolerates the death of 40,000 people to die each year for the right to convenient travel, how can we sacrifice our right to taste, to choice, and to dietary self-determinism?

Thank you, Chris Cosentino. This is well-articulated and, generally, right. I might disagree, somewhat, that the minuteness of an issue is a reason to dismiss it outright, but in this case, it is a relevant point.

Excursion

Surprisingly, in all our time here, we'd never yet ventured from the Lyndon House Arts Center into the Ware-Lyndon House, even though they're connected, literally. Anyway, we rectified that this weekend and took some photos.

Lil' hobby

Who's the lone anti-Sonny person who voted agin it?

Doesn't Charles Tucker know meters are being expanded to two-hour windows? And for exactly the reasons he mentions.

I'm also kind of confused wrt Irvin Alhadeff's stringent opposition to the new fees, especially considering his previous column on the matter, which he links to and in which he supported some increase in fees. It's not like it went from $3 to $100 for an expired meter. The answer, too, is simply not to let your meter expire. Team Brown has managed to have that problem only once in going on 13 years of residence here, and we got lucky. A two-hour period of parking means it's even less likely to happen.

Viewing Diary

Mad Men, season 2: So we're all caught up and ready to go whenever it starts up again. I'm sure season 2 maintained a similar level of quality to season 1. There are, at least, no notable differences easily spotted upon watching a bunch of episodes in a row, other than a greater concern with race relations, which makes sense if Weiner continues to do this one year of the 1960s per season thing. I think that, in some ways, Stanley Fish is right when he says:

And that is why “Big Love” is one of the few TV programs I look forward to watching. There are people to like. Likability is not highly prized on the small (or not so small) screen these days. If you watch programs like “Mad Men,” “Damages” and “The Shield” (which has now concluded its run), you would think that the point is to keep introducing characters who are even more repellent than the characters you already shrink from. Any hint of a redemptive quality is quickly overwhelmed by deeds so heinous that you literally cringe.

No doubt this is “realistic” (a sure-fire honorific) and an antidote to the sentimentality everyone likes to put down. But sentimentality is good for you, especially if it comes wrapped in first-rate acting, crisp dialogue and a directing style (imitative of “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “The Wire”) that ferries you from dramatic moment to dramatic moment without asking you to think too much about what is going on. (The thinking comes later.)

He's overstating it, of course, and I'm not sure he's right that sentimentality is good for you or that characters one doesn't like preclude a good show (they're kind of essential to comedy--or at least make it much easier). Still, what I think he's reacting to is mostly Don Draper, who remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and although he's very nice to look at and good at his job and even quite upstanding from time to time (refusing to beat his kids, helping out Peggy), he still behaves like an unhinged ass quite frequently, going off the rails at will and with no concern for others. I suppose this is part of what makes the show compelling, only I'm not sure it is. I'm okay with the Draper mystery, but he's rarely the center of the show to me. I'd point out to Stan Fish, in return, that Peggy is hardly repellent, and while she behaves selfishly, like all of us, she doesn't do so to excess.

Read

I was going to write about Louis Menand's revisiting of Donald Barthelme, in which he considers the two meanings of postmodernist (after the modernists, in that everything after the modernists is shaped by their innovations and continues in the same direction, or antimodernist, in that postmodernism is a reaction against the high art/low art divide the modernists pursued) and comes down on the side that Barthelme is the first sort. He says interesting things about Barthelme's experience as a museum director (which I didn't know about) and how his stories often resemble Robert Rauschenberg's collages.

But. Then I skipped ahead two issues and read the Wallace stuff. Which is very much out of my normal compulsive order of things. I'm not allowed to skip ahead or, indeed, anything, when I read the New Yorker, lest I get in the habit and stop reading things I wouldn't normally read but then find to be incredibly interesting. Anyway, in the current issue there are both an excerpt from a longer work, "Wiggle Room," and an article by D.T. Max about that longer work and also some of the factors that may have led to his suicide in September. I'm not quite equipped yet to talk about either, but I will say that my primary emotion was less sadness than annoyance, mostly with Max's tossing off of references. Like this:

After she left, Wallace went into the garage and turned on the lights. He wrote her a two-page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and hanged himself. When one character dies in “Infinite Jest,” he is “catapulted home over . . . glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”

Which, like, what the fuck? Lucien Antitoi, a mute idiot, is murdered by a radical terrorist Quebecois separatist group for being unable and mistaken for unwilling to give them information. Whether or not Max thinks, like many others, that that episode is the center of the book, I cannot see how it's relevant here. Antitoi is a fairly happy character, both in life and here in death. Wallace, clearly, was not. And this is the penultimate paragraph. I'd say it taints the whole article, but the whole article is already somewhat tainted. More on the story later, once I read the voluminous listserv posts I have thus far avoided due to not having read either piece yet.

Lil' hobby

You know, I would sort of prefer a building that looks like a parking deck. This looks rather like the hotel on the other side of downtown. And what that looks like is every other town with some sort of convention business. I'm not opposed to better quality, but if a public-private partnership like this gets us more brick and tan, I'd much rather have plain old concrete.

Hudgens's bill isn't coming up yet. I suppose it's nice that the state at least worries a little about getting its ass sued off.

This is an interesting position for the paper to take, as it's usually in favor of more and more accessible information, but it shows, to me, how firmly they're on the side of the University System when it comes to the current budget issues and where control should lie. Also, they probably know how to get that information, as should state legislators, if they want it.

The most important thing to note about this guest editorial is who wrote it and who he is.

Keith, are you sure you want to focus on making a guideline into a law, when it probably won't be enforced anyway?

24

Let me say a bit more about this season so far, and that bit is that Jack Bauer has now tasered an innocent telephone, a mere bearer of bad news, the messenger who is not supposed to be shot, if you will, but now can no longer count even on not being injured a bit. He tasered a phone.

I'm starting to get the impression that this season may be about Jack's mental breakdown. Or David Fury's not reading the scripts anymore.

Read

"Shoot!: An Appalachian Gunsmith's Robot Army" is not online from the Feb 23 issue of the New Yorker, but I'd really recommend you track it down for the glimpse it gives of the future of warfare in a manner both mildly appalling and hilarious. For example, when Jerry Baber, describing his powerful yet repeat weapon, the AA-12, "reflectively" says "You can just machine-gun a whole crowd with it, if you want to." Of course, Baber comes off like the kind of nut who wants to sell his scarily good weapons to the U.S. military, rather than to anyone who walks in off the street, which is only slightly less terrifying but is, at least, slightly less terrifying.

Then there's Jane Mayer's "The Hard Cases," about possible test cases for the Obama administration with regard to detention of terrorist suspects sans trial.

No matter how Obama responds to the case, his decision is likely to arouse controversy. Hafetz says, “If President Obama is serious about restoring the rule of law in America, they can’t defend what’s been done to Marri. They would be completely buying into the Bush Administration’s war on terror.” This view is widely held by Obama’s political base. Yet the political risks of change are obvious. In 2004, Jeffrey Rapp, an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, claimed in a sworn affidavit, without providing evidence, that Marri had met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and “offered to be an al Qaeda martyr.” The government’s theory is that Marri came to America in order to help carry out a second wave of terrorist attacks. “Al-Marri must be detained to prevent him from aiding al Qaeda in its efforts to attack the United States,” Rapp said in his statement, which is the sole public document offering reasons for holding him.

Isn't "without providing evidence" the key thing there? I think Mayer kind of quietly lays out the case for at very least minimizing detention and, probably, eliminating it. No one supplies a truly compelling reason these cases can't be prosecuted through the legal system, other than the fear of failure, which isn't ever spelled out. But it's a smart article, and I'm glad they put Mayer on it as opposed to some of the reporters who might have been assigned, less effectively.

You also don't get access to "The Background Hum," Daniel Zalewski's excellent and extremely long profile of Ian McEwan, which contains much that is valuable, whether or not you have read any of McEwan's works (I haven't yet). This is a lovely description of writing that concludes the piece:

He told me, "You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They've got that twist, a little trip that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you're fiddling around with something that's already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be."

Arg. Louis Mendand's article on reconsidering Donald Barthelme is behind the wall as well, despite its placement in the "The Critics" section, which is almost always available in toto online. Perhaps I'll cover that one tomorrow, as there's much to it.

Movie Diary

1) Valkyrie: Attractive but fairly empty, and this may be because there's not a lot of real suspense involved. You know, for example, unless you were raised in a cave, sans media, and this is the first film you've ever seen, that their plot to kill Hitler wasn't successful. So Bryan Singer could have spent more time on the mechanics of their plan, focusing on little details that would have been intriguing (e.g., how they construct the bomb), or he could have focused the film on the suspense of the aftermath, once they didn't succeed. He sort of does the latter, but it still feels like an afterthought, and, again, there's not much tension. I don't fault him for the decision, mostly, to have actors not do German accents. It's a silly convention, and it doesn't take anything away from the movie. Also, Tom Cruise is fine. It's not a great performance, and it's not a bad one. Really, there's too much walking and not enough running, but he's energetic about it all. And I enjoyed the supporting cast, even if it's fairly silly to cast Eddie Izzard as a sweatily nervous Nazi. Tom Wilkinson, for example, kind of has yet to be bad in anything. Most of all, it's a good looking movie, with a real grasp of the appeal of the Nazi aesthetic, but that should probably be making people more uncomfortable than it apparently did. Also: not nearly enough homoeroticism (although there is some)!

2) Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father: A difficult film to talk about, because the subject matter is incredibly compelling and sad and dramatic, but the filmmaking skills aren't always up to the task. Kurt Kuenne brings passion to the story, which is about a longtime friend of his, Andrew Bagby, who was murdered, probably by his [Andrew's] girlfriend, who then announced, after fleeing to Canada, that she was pregnant with Andrew's child, upon which Andrew's parents moved to Canada (Newfoundland, specifically) to fight for custody of the child and to continue to get her extradited and prosecuted, but having to maintain a civil relationship with her the whole time, in order to keep seeing Zachary. That's a mouthful, and it doesn't even contain everything that happens while the camera rolls. But this isn't quite Capturing the Friedmans. That was an equally riveting story, one that the filmmaker similarly kind of lucked into (a hard thing to say wrt Kuenne, considering his connection and the tragedy of the story), but Andrew Jarecki is less fueled by grief and anger as a director and also less fond of hyper montages. I understand the reasons for a lot of Kuenne's choices, but I also think they weaken the film at times. Still, it's definitely worth seeing, but be warned about the upsettingness contained if you are a sensitive person.

Lil' hobby

I'm pretty sure it's not just students who were unhappy about being told UGA was open as usual yesterday. Whether or not UGA's going to hear about it either way (and no doubt they will), if neither Athens Transit nor the UGA buses were running first thing, the start should have been delayed. There's nothing wrong with admitting a mistake. Things were still kind of bad at around 10 a.m., when we left the house.

Lots of bidness got done at the Commission meeting, including raising parking fines downtown (yay), selling ads on the buses (likewise), approving the construction of a historic district ordinance for Milledge (you get the idea). Were meter times expanded from one to two hours?

I appreciate that Erroll Davis is at least looking into furloughs for professors rather than for staff.

Georgia's business lobbyists are pushing for this in part because they'd rather something come via a sales tax, which is spread more evenly, than from a corporate tax increase, no? As long as it gets done.

This article covers several state legislative efforts, not just the budget (which isn't good news, anyway). Actually, none of it's good news, and the last blurb, about a bill requiring would-be voters to prove their citizenship, is just more silliness. Y'all. We do not have an illegal alien voting problem.

Police Blotter (is that a ribeye in your pants? edition)

Arrest: On Feb. 17, deputy Robert Elder was dispatched to Kroger on Epps Bridge Parkway, where a nighttime cashier said he saw a man he knew to be a shoplifter stick two packs of ribs and two packs of steaks down the front of his pants. The cashier saw the man leave the store and get into a car with a Barrow County tag. Elder saw the vehicle on his way, so he did a U-turn and stopped the car on the Oconee Connector. The driver said he didn't have any ID, but he met the description the cashier gave. Elder, who smelled alcohol in coming from the car, told the man why he stopped him and asked if he had any meat in the vehicle. The man denied drinking but then wouldn't blow properly into the field breath test. Elder arrested the driver, [F.W. Colqhoun], 37, of Sunset Drive, Athens, and found two packages of ribs and three ribeye steaks in the car under a jacket. He charged [Colqhoun] with shoplifting, giving a false name to a law enforcement officer and driving with a suspended license.

Didn't Mae West say something about men with a lot of meat in their pants?

Harassment: On Feb. 19, a 48-year-old Madison County woman called the sheriff's office to report that a man, who identified himself as Emanuel from Ghana, Africa, was calling her home wanting to become her friend. The man said he loved her and although she told him to stop, he called her house eight more times.

And also "I kees you, 48-year-old Madison County woman."

Oconee. Madison.

Publication

Grub Notes revisits Just Pho and More and writes up Two-Story Coffeehouse.

Whoa

So, you know, there was this white stuff that fell from the sky in mass quantities. Hence the outage the past couple of days. It was an adventure, a kind of scary one. Jared said it felt like being in a Stephen King novel, and as night fell on Sunday, and transformers continued to blow, lighting up the sky with a green flash, that is exactly what it felt like. I was waiting for the octopus tentacles to come out of the damn mist. But they didn't, and things are clearer now, although there's still a lot of snow on roofs and sidewalks and in our tiny back yard, where the azaleas are covered with it.