Okay, now that I’ve read it, TNC is back on the top of the roundup:
I have a friend who has a kid who was caught with drugs at school. The kid is white. The administrators wanted to kick the kid out of school. They were trying to put the kid into one of these schools for kids who get kicked out of schools. The parents went to those hearings, did everything in their power to keep the kid in his original school. They won. That kid is in a very, very nice college right now. That has nothing to do with the individual effort of that kid.
You can talk about that kid individually. But then it starts sprawling out into millions. That’s the kind of room to make mistakes that millions of people have but another community of millions doesn’t have. So I don’t know how you don’t talk about policy.
Hildale, the small Utah town that nearly got washed away by flash flooding yesterday, is one of the scariest places in the world, and I honestly fear that something like this is only going to make lives worse for the boys and girls who will somehow be blamed for bringing tribulation upon their community.
Here is an excellent piece on the decline of the loathsome Tony Abbott:
“Boat people” and the “carbon tax” were the issues that swept Abbott to power, and no one could accuse him of not dealing with them once in office. But, as Labor continued its infighting, there were signs that Abbott wanted to deal with other things, too—things about which Australians felt more fond, like the largely functional health-care system, the national broadcaster, and the progressive taxation system for repaying university fees. As a young man, Abbott had entered a seminary, for which the media called him the “Mad Monk.” There were fears in the fiercely secular electorate that he was letting his religion get in the way of governing, like when he was asked about issues such as gay marriage and abortion. He reintroduced knights and dames to the Australian honors system, and this year gave the nation’s newest, highest honor to Prince Philip, who in 2002 asked an indigenous Australian, “Do you still throw spears at each other?” The world’s most famous ex-Australian, formerly a supporter, complained. “Abbott knighthood a joke and an embarrassment,” Rupert Murdoch tweeted, and, shortly after, Abbott conceded, “I probably overdid it on awards.”
ALWAYS here for a salute to the women of American Ninja Warrior:
When Kacy got up the Warped Wall, she was also the shortest person to do so, Weed says. In the spirit of equality, the producers do take height into consideration when designing obstacles: One test, the Body Prop, has three different settings. But otherwise, it’s just everyone versus the course, and people may be surprised by the Ninjas who do well, says Kristen Stabile, co-executive producer of ANW. For instance, former NFL players and Olympic gymnasts have come and fallen. “When you see a guy who’s well-built, maybe 220 pounds, go down on the third obstacle and then the 145-pound, five-foot-seven athlete comes up and whips right through the course, that’s exciting,” she says. “We’ve given a forum to an athlete that’s not necessarily celebrated in traditional sports.”
Why is air travel worse than so many other things?
In other words, because bus travel has always been awful, people expect a ride on the Greyhound to be only marginally more bearable than being dragged behind a horse, and so they are not disappointed. Whereas passengers have seen air travel look sexy, even fun, in movies and on TV, which makes the sharp contrast with reality all the more maddening.
Especially since some select passengers do still get the Don Draper experience denied to everyone else: those in first class. And there’s the rub. In most areas of life, Americans can believe the polite fiction that life is fair and that everyone receives relatively equal treatment. My subway train is delayed? So is his.
this is BANANAS:
On the night of September 10, 1987, my father vanished from this place. He called my mother to say he was on his way home; he never showed up. From the start, our family was sure that his business partner, Augie, had him murdered after my father accused him of embezzlement — all vehemently denied by Augie. Detectives at Baltimore City Homicide have said they had similar suspicions, but no charges were ever brought. Over the years the case first grew cold and then became the stuff of cop campfire lore. David Simon based an episode of Homicide on it in 1997 and later mentioned my father by name in The Wire. In 2008, Sergeant Roger Nolan, then head of the cold case unit, told me, “We sit around this office sometimes and wonder, Whatever happened to Eddy Crane?”
A woman was arrested at her gynecologist’s office after being identified as an undocumented Mexican immigrant. She had come to the clinic seeking a routine checkup; now she is being held in a Texas detention center on a $35,000 bond.
I liked this thing on the class and political backdrop to Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (I am, however, down with Chuck Klosterman’s old observation that Springsteen has been rich as God for several decades now and still pretends he’s pumping gas in Nebraska somewhere):
Springsteen’s critics misread his appeal. Absent from their analysis was class. The young heroes in “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” are in flight from a very specific condition. Marsh recounts an interview in which Bruce explained, “I know what it’s like not to be able to do what you want to do, because when I go home, that’s what I see. It’s not fun, it’s no joke. I see my sister and her husband. They’re living the lives of my parents in a certain kind of way. They got kids; they’re working hard. These are people, you can see something in their eyes … I asked my sister, ‘What do you do for fun?’ ‘I don’t have any fun,’ she says. She wasn’t kidding.”
I feel highly confident in my readers’ abilities to identify Agatha Christie novels from their covers, I must say.
My friend Carrie’s new puppy has a frog:
