I keep meaning to write a long-ish post on this subject, yet fail to get around to it. So instead, I’m simply going to take note from time to time of the positive things that are coming out of the way Americans are responding to the high price of gas.
For example: The Globe reports that the price of gas is leading to a surge in adults learning how to ride bikes…..
Forbes rounds up various possibilities for Treasury secretary should Barack Obama become president, and one of them is…Larry Summers.
* Lawrence Summers. Economist. Former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and former president of Harvard University. Summers’ brief tenure at Harvard was marked by conflict with faculty and other controversy. Summers told Fortune this year the U.S. economy is resilient and he would be “very surprised” to see it supplanted as the leading global economy. He wrote in the Financial Times in April that interests of working people and the middle class must be more closely aligned in a global economy. Summers is also a former World Bank chief economist.
It’s a sign of just how effectively Summers has refurbished his reputation that he’s included in such discussions….but would women object? That “innate aptitude” remark still sticks in the craw of many of them.
Will Colin Powell support Barack Obama?
Writing about “Obamacons”—conservatives who are so disgusted with George Bush that they’ll support Barack Obama—Robert Novak says that the former secretary of state is likely to back the Democrat.
Do you ever read those short items on the right-hand margin of the Boston Globe website in which Globe scribes working on stories petition for help?
“Reporter’s Questions,” the Globe calls them.
They inadvertently tell so much about the decline of the newspaper biz….
For example, here’s this from today’s website:
Will yesterday’s dreary Supreme Court decision on guns actually hurt Republicans by taking the issue off the table this November?
“What the National Rifle Association does is try to scare gun owners by telling them Democrats are going to take their guns away,” said Doug Hattaway, a Democratic strategist who advised Hillary Clinton this year, and Gore when he ran for the White House. “Well, the Supreme Court has just said nobody’s going to take their guns away.”
That would be a silver lining, I suppose…..
This is shallow of me, but does anyone else think that there’s something just a bit odd about John McCain’s well-preserved wife? I mean, who holds a microphone like that, anyway?
Or is it just that she represents both the case for and the case against Botox?
New York, as we all know, can drive a person crazy. The traffic, the noise, the congestion, the heat, the pollution, the tourists….
But then you go through stretches, like the one I’ve just been through, where you really take advantage of all the city has to offer, and you wonder, How could I live anywhere else?
Friday night: The Cure at Madison Square Garden. Three hours, just like heaven.
Saturday afternoon; the New York City Ballet performing Jerome Robbins at Lincoln Center. Ravishing and impressive.
Monday night: Coldplay, free at the Garden. (Yes: free.) Like the new record a lot.
And Tuesday night: Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil, at the Nokia Theater in Times Square. Have you ever been to a concert with Brazilians, particularly Brazilian expats? It’s a wonderful experience; the emotion is palpable. And Gil is not only a brilliant musician, he’s a great teacher who interspersed his songs with short histories and commentaries on the origins of Brazilian music. (He was, after all, Brazil’s minister of culture.)
Below, some photos.
The Cure pray for rain….
Coldplay: Fix You and Viva La Vida
Gilberto Gil
I’ve mentioned before that I like the sportswriting in the NY Sun. Time to reiterate.
Last night I was watching the Yanks whomp the Pirates, 10-0, and in, I think, the top of the 5th a Pirate hit a fly ball to deep right field. Yankee rightfielder Bobby Abreu loped back towards the wall, then waved his glove at the ball as it bounced on the warning track, looking like it would have been well within reach of a determined effort. That was lame, I thought.
The idiotic and irritating YES announcer Ken Singleton said something like, “I thought Abreu had a chance at that ball, but it was too deep.”
Which, even to my untrained eye, looked just flat wrong.
So this morning I’m reading Steve Goldman’s column in the Sun about the virtue of employing utility players and I come across this phrase, almost surely written before the game last night: “A fast outfielder… can contribute to a team that has the famously wall-shy Bobby Abreu playing right field.”
Nice.
And by the way…how is it possible that all these years after Moneyball came out, the Times still has no one writing about sabermetrics?
Another Yankee thought: Joba Chamberlain is something special. In the bottom of the fifth, I believe it was, he retired the side on 11 pitches, absolutely blowing away the last batter on a fastball third strike that the guy was so late on, he might as well have waited for his next at-bat to swing.
Meanwhile, David Ortiz will be out several more weeks with a damaged tendon sheath. Sox fans go beserk when I say this, but…could this be a steroids-related injury? Check out his rookie baseball card below…looks kind of svelte, doesn’t he?
Much of the mainstream media continues to blow off the anti-Facebook lawsuit brought by three former friends of Mark Zuckerberg, but that lawsuit continues and the stakes are high.
“In the worst case scenario, this could be a fight for Facebook’s life.”
… Facebook and ConnectU recently appeared to have reached a settlement. But ConnectU attorneys then filed court documents asserting that a computer forensics consultant discovered instant message logs on Zuckerberg’s hard drive that might be relevant to the case.
Ever since Luke O’Brien wrote a hell of a piece about the origins of Facebook for 02138, I’ve been convinced that Zuckerberg did indeed steal the idea for the site.