Archive for February, 2007
Better Isn’t Good Enough; Worse Is Worse
I can’t stand it when anyone, out-of-towners or residents, make the statement that the District is dangerous. ANY city is dangerous if you’re stupid, and Washington has come miles from the dark days of the crack epidemic. Amid all the hubbub of the crime emergency last year, I was quick to point out that by [...]
Buying Jobs
You know, it’s easy to understand why officials from Caldwell County in western North Carolina wanted to spend millions on incentives to attract a Google computing facility. Caldwell is small and poor, and most of its talented young people leave to go to college and don’t come back. Still, you have to think about whether [...]
I’m Just Warming Up
Nice outside, innit? My favorite part of the New York Times is their science section; it always makes me chuckle (ruefully) that the Post gives top billing to their OnFaith tab while the Gray Lady makes with the knowledge. Today, the paper of record has some nice stories on global warming; worth reading is this, about [...]
The Myth of Joel Kotkin
There’s something amusing about a New Yorker living in Los Angeles writing in the Wall Street Journal about the Myth of so-called Superstar Cities. There’s also something extremely disingenuous about describing metro areas containing some 50 million people as hubs of the elite, about using Houston as an example of an upstart city, and about dismissing [...]
Worth Repeating
Lest we ever forget how poorly President Bush has handled his time in office, read this and this, and learn how our focus on the war in Iraq and our absurd obsession with Iran are allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and expand. It’s impossible to categorize Bush’s foreign policy as anything other than a catastrophic [...]
Dense
1. I was startled this morning to see an article in the Raleigh News and Observer trumpeting the growth of something called the Kerr-Tar Hub. A rural swath of land far north of the city of Raleigh and its northernmost suburbs, the Hub is a consortium of counties advertising themselves as a business location for [...]
Unplugged
That’s what I was this weekend, as the wife and I took advantage of wintry conditions and a fortuitous offer and went to Wisp, in western Maryland, for some skiing (or in Lisa’s case, paper-grading at altitude). Things got off to an ugly start, as a stalled bus on a 395 on-ramp kept us in the District [...]
Guh?
Man, all it takes is a stupid cold to render me a blithering idiot. Seeing as how I’m averaging about ninety minutes per sentence on my Sunday DCist post (and trying, fitfully, to do actual work) there will be no blogging here until Monday. Unless I uncover the identity of the MIVM.
I Just Love That He Tried This
As is so often the case with the Nabob, the details are what really turn a marvelous post into a work of art. In this case, le mot juste is the casual evocation of the Rebel Yell (heritage not hate!), an ancient wooden roller coaster at King’s Dominion theme park which may or may not [...]
Mister Smarty Pants
My wife, who’s using a lovely ice-caused seven day vacation to reacquaint herself with the internet, directs my attention to this New York Magazine piece on how praising effort produces psychologically healthier children than praising intelligence. Since she made sure to tell me about the article over gchat, instead of just waiting until I read her blog, I can only assume [...]