Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters

Feed me, Seymour.


Another of life's little victories gets more scarce. The WSJ reports (via The Obscure Store)

In Pacific Grove, Calif., parking meters know when a car pulls out of the spot and quickly reset to zero -- eliminating drivers' little joy of parking for free on someone else's quarters.

Bummer. Like you, dear reader, I have better things to spend my quarters on. At least there's still the thrill of actually finding a space. I have poor luck in that arena, but often benefit from Caffeinatrix's legendary parking mojo.

In other high-tech parking meter news, Chicago has installed a few "pay and display" boxes. There's one box per block; a driver pays at the box and displays the receipt on the dashboard. These pay boxes sound like they're worth the hassle of the small extra walk. They allow more cars to park on a block, because spaces don't have to be sized to the largest cars. And you can pay by credit card.

Not only is that easier for drivers, it makes it harder for the likes of John "Quarters" Boyle to add to their coin collections. Of course, some of Mayor Daley's pals will consider that more a bug than a feature.

Bush vs. reality

President Bush's speech on Iraq was completely divorced from reality. He failed miserably in addressing the reasons for war, poor planning for its aftermath, and how to get America out. He's tapdancing on the edge of a quagmire.

Bush made five references to September 11th; he talked Iraq as part of the "War on Terror"; and he used the words "terror", ""terrorism", "terrorist", or "terrorists" 34 times. But Saddam Hussein wasn't involved in 9/11, and neither were any other Iraqis. Al Qaeda wasn't active in Iraq before we invaded because Hussein didn't allow it. All of the terrorism in Iraq now is a consequence of our involvement. So when Bush talks about "our mission" in Iraq, he's talking about spending American lives and money to fix a foul-up he created.

He doesn't discuss how his rush to war led to America going in with:

• too few allies
• too few troops to maintain peace
• too little equipment for the troops.
  

He claims we're making progress in Iraq, but many things are worse, worse than they were a year ago and worse than they were before the invasion. Sure, they've had elections, but compared to either one year ago or before the war:

• Fewer Iraqis have access to fresh water.
• Iraqi infant mortality is higher.
• More Iraqis are being killed.
• More Americans are dying.

Worst of all, Bush has no serious plan for getting out. He'll bring the troops home when there is a stable society in Iraq. But he hasn't committed the resources to build such a society; we don't have enough to build society by ourselves; and Bush has so alienated the international community that we won't get help from outside. So unless Iraq magically fixes itself, Bush has no plan to extricate America. Meanwhile, U.S. military recruitment and retention is so far down that the current catchphrase is "broken army".

Bush actually harmed his case with this speech. The only people it will convince are the blindest believers. Everyone else will be appalled by the fog of irrelevance. Rather than talking about progress and victory in Iraq, Bush would have been better off talking about something plausible, like

• How do you hunt a T. rex? (via The spectacularly obtuse blog)
  
• Could a man armed with a knife successfully fight a grizzly bear?
• Can you fight a leopard bare-handed?
  

Tandem headlines?

Today's Washington Post has a story on the "Downing Street Memos," the British government documents which describe how the Bush administration stampeded into war with Iraq, with Tony Blair stumbling blindly behind. The understated headline is "From Memos, Insights Into Ally's Doubts On Iraq War".

Today's New York Times has another story — on another subject entirely — whose headline serves as an arch comment: "Where the British May Reign but the Monkeys Rule".

Criminal freakonomics

Nicholas Kristof has a column today about the Freakonomics of LoJack. Since LoJack cars aren't stickered, thieves face much greater risk of capture for stealing any vehicle. It works out that "every $1 invested in LoJack saves other car owners $10."

Kristof suggests extending the model to home burglary alarms:

What if we encouraged hidden silent alarms to change the economics of burglary?

Granted, most people don't want hidden alarms that entice a burglar to stay until the police show up. But suppose communities adjusted the fees they charge for alarm systems - say, $2,000 a year for an audible alarm, but no charge for a hidden LoJack-style silent alarm.

Then many people would choose the silent alarms, more burglars would get caught, and many of the criminally inclined would choose a new line of work, perhaps becoming chief executives.

That's a great idea. Except the criminals wouldn't become CEOs — they would become Republican members of Congress.

Add to the must-own list

This fall, the New Yorker is releasing a complete set of its first 80 years on DVD-ROM. That's ~4000 issues for only $100. (via DeLong, Boing Boing, PW)

Mellow yellow

The Army faces a recruiting crisis. Kids have heard about increasing casualty rates, inadequate force levels, inadequate equipment, and extended deployments. And they are staying away in droves. In May, the Army fell short of its original recruiting target by more than 35%. Military recruiting is so difficult that recruiters are going AWOL.

The Republican Party doesn't seem interested in fixing these problems. They claim to "support the troops", but they would rather cut taxes for the rich than buy enough body armor for the infantry. People are beginning to say that Republican war cheerleading is hypocritical.

The awesomely heterosexual General JC Christian has come up with a brilliant solution: OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT. He wants to help Republicans show they truly support the war — by fighting it.

The objective of OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT is to recruit College Republicans and Young Republicans to serve as infantry. They demanded this war and now viciously support it. It's only right that they also experience it.

The General and his team have put together a bunch of special ops. Check it out!

I doubt the General will enlist many soldiers. The unofficial Republican tax policy is the same as Leona Helmsley's: "Taxes are for the little people." I suspect they support the war the same way: "Death is for the little people, too."

The blogroll that ate Chicago

Added to the blogroll:

The Big Picture
BlondeSense
blue girl
Bradford Plumer
Conversational Reading
Cooking For Engineers
Dark Bilious Vapors
The eGullet Society for Culinary Arts ..
Gravity Lens Weblog
Hypothetically Speaking
Jeremy Zawodny's blog
Legal Fiction
The Liberal Avenger
The Maelstrom
mimi smartypants
Paper Frigate
Pub Sociology
Saucy magazine
ScribeStalker
skimble
soul sides
TPMCafe || The Coffee House
Total Drek
TwoGlasses

Whole lotta shakin'?

A quarter-inch of snow is a big deal in L.A. or San Francisco — or anywhere with year-round allergy seasons. Those of us in colder climes (Chicago's winter motto: "The wind blew the glaciers away.") are amused that such a minor event is considered newsworthy.

Californians feel the same way about pitiful Midwestern earthquakes. This story ran recently on the Trib site:

Illinois, other states feel 3.9 earthquake

Items compiled from Tribune news services
Published June 21, 2005

CLINTON, KENTUCKY -- A small earthquake centered in western Kentucky rattled residents across parts of Illinois, Kentucky and three other states Monday morning. No damage was reported.

The 3.9 magnitude quake centered near Clinton hit at 7:21 a.m. and was felt in southern Illinois, western Kentucky, southeast Missouri, northwest Tennessee and eastern Arkansas, said Diane Noserale, spokeswoman for the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va.

It was the second quake to hit the area in a matter of hours along the New Madrid Fault System, Noserale said. A 2.7 magnitude quake Sunday in the same area was felt in southern Illinois and Kentucky.

As a native of California, I feel an obligation to point out that 3.9 is a pretty small earthquake. It feels like a truck going past. Many people won't even recognize that it's an earthquake. And 2.7 is so tiny that USGS calls it a "micro earthquake." I can fart harder than a 2.7 magnitude quake.

This is what real earthquake activity looks like:



That's just for the past week.

dept. of hard-working marsupials

you can make skippy the bush kangaroo the happiest marsupial in blogtopia. skippy's goal is to reach exactly one million visitors on july 10, skippy's third blogiversary. click through the way we vote in chicago — early and often.

Duke of discussion: more Republican sleaze

There hasn't been any Tom DeLay news lately, but there's never a shortage of Republican sleaze and corruption. The latest story is that of Randy "Duke" Cunningham. (Josh Marshall has been all over it.)

Cunningham represents California's 50th District, in northern San Diego County. A couple of years ago he made a lot of money when he sold his house. That's no big deal in California's bubbly real estate market. It's interesting that the buyer, Mitchell Wade, is a defense contractor Cunningham has supported.

And it's a big deal because after Wade bought the house, two things happened. Wade resold the house and took a loss of over $700,000. And Wade's company, MZM Inc., got a lot of government business, overseen by the defense appropriation subcommittee Cunningham sits on. Other details make it clear that this is the most obvious case of political bribery since the ABSCAM videotapes.

Cunningham promised a full explanation, but has been silent for many days. Wade has been unable to find a telephone for over a week. The FBI and a federal grand jury are investigating.

It looks like Congress won't look into the matter because Tom DeLay's allies have crippled the House Ethics committee. Pete Stark (D-CA) ran a satirical ad saying "Attention Powerful Lobbyists! House for Sale By Influential Member of Congress ."

Darrell Issa, a Republican representing a neighboring district, tried to defend Cunningham, but didn't do very well:

"Wade was either a fool (as a businessman) or a fool in how he tried to curry favor," Issa said. "He accomplished what he wanted to accomplish, but that doesn't mean Duke was in on it."

This interpretation is awesomely fragile:

• "Too stupid to realize he's being bribed" is the weakest defense since Marion Barry said (after smoking crack on camera) "Goddamn bitch set me up."
• It wasn't an arms-length transaction. Cunningham and Wade appear to be buddies: Cunningham's DC residence is aboard a yacht Wade bought for him.
• Darrell Issa is a poor choice for a character reference. He's been accused of car theft. Three times.
  

Fantasy economics

No, this isn't a rant about the Bush administration.

My last post got me thinking about about the economics of fictional worlds. As Diana Wynn Jones points out in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (now sadly out of print in the US), "The Economy of Fantasyland is as full of holes as its ECOLOGY." Here are a few scenarios I'd like to see:

* Dragons hoard gold. This contracts the money supply, causing deflation.

* After a dragon is slain, its hoard gets spent, and there's a big inflationary shock.

* Thanks to their small size, hobbits have a competitive advantage in lace-making and other delicate crafts.

* House elves unionize (coming next month, "Dobby the Wobbly").

* After Jack returns from the Beanstalk, there's a speculative bubble in magic beans.

Faster faster

Charlie Stross has made his new novel, Accelerando, available as a free e-book (via a bunch of blogs). It should be a lot of fun, even if you would prefer to wait for the tree-book. Stross takes classic sf tropes, thoroughly rethinks them, and packs them full of Neat Ideas and eyeball kicks.

Singularity Sky hangs out at the playground with Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod. It's a space opera about a backward society undone by affluence, including "the brightly colored sporks of revolution."

The Atrocity Archives takes HP Lovecraft, mixes in the classic British spy thriller, and updates the mix for the Information Age. Alan Turing's obscure theorem on "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-dimensional Summoning" explains how it all works.

The Family Trade has been described as "Amber with economics." An investigative journalist takes on a quasi-magical aristocracy.

Redistricting

There's an apparent paradox. I like the idea of nonpartisan redistricting (see The Carpetbagger Report for a good nationwide plan). But I don't like the nonpartisan plan Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing for California.

Most current redistricting schemes follow one of two models, both of which are bad for voters. States with strong one-party government, like Florida, tend toward partisan gerrymanders that further strengthen the party in power. For 2004, Texas tilted the scales with an unprecedented mid-decade remap, which gained the Republicans five seats in the House. States with divided government or weak one-party government (in 2001, Illinois and California, respectively) tend to optimize for bipartisan incumbent protection. Their lucky politicians have hand-tailored "designer districts." Illinois' last remap was particularly elegant that way: every serious challenger to an incumbent congressman got shifted into another district.

Either way, the voters get ripped off. Partisan gerrymanders make delegations less representative of the electorate. Bipartisan gerrymanders make it harder to challenge entrenched incumbents. Both schemes make politicians less accountable to voters.

Schwarzenegger's ballot initiative would take redistricting power from the state legislature and give it to a panel of retired judges. Why don't I like it? It's a matter of fairness. Republicans in Texas have given an unfair advantage to the national Republican party. Democrats in California should keep the ability to fight back. Arnold certainly won't help Democrats redistrict, but he won't be Gubernator forever. A nationwide solution hits both sides the same, rather than just one of them.

Arnold's redistricting is unilateral disarmament for one side, while his side breaks all the rules. When a charismatic Austrian pushes that kind of scheme, should you do what he wants?

Pissing on the third rail

Tip O'Neill was right when he said, "Social Security is the third rail of American politics." Step on it and you'll get a big jolt. President Bush isn't just touching the third rail, he's pissing on it.

Bush's plan, to the extent that he has one, is not designed to fix any problems. The system isn't "bankrupt;" it's healthier than the rest of the federal government. Private accounts would have a terrible rate of return and seem designed to drive people out of the system. Bush's benefit cuts are huge — bigger than if we did nothing but wait passively for the crunch. The President doesn't want to save Social Security: his plan is unsocial and insecure. Republicans have always hated Social Security, and their plan seems designed to phase it out. Those College Republicans who chanted, "Hey hey, ho ho, Social Security has got to go!" were just saying the unofficial Republican party line. Bush isn't just touching the third rail, he's whizzing on it like a frat boy after a kegger.

Congressional Republicans know there's a problem. That's why they're looking frantically for an exit strategy. Holding Bush's hand is painful when there's 600 volts zapping through it.

The White House knows there's a problem, too. Bush's approval rating on Social Security is in free fall; it's down to just 26%. That's why they keep changing the name — first "privatization," then "private accounts," then "personal accounts" — I bet the next name is "freedom accounts." That's why Bush is now attempting to blame Democrats for his party's reluctance to act. He doesn't like the way the current is arcing, and he's trying to move the stream of urine away. If he can't break the connection, at least he can try to splash some onto the Democrats..

Democrats should stay up on the platform, away from the puddles. They can help the poor, crispy Republicans by tossing buckets of water on them (salt water is best). If the electricity doesn't put the GOP out of its misery, well ... the light at the end of the tunnel is a train.

(crossposted at Daily Kos.)

Searchy fun

Inspired by a dismayed Neddie Jingo, I tried a bit of googlery. There are at least three phrases where I currently sit atop Google, numba one with a bullet point.

• This is surprising: "just like Pagliacci"
• This will not have any real results for some time, I hope: "jar jar slash dobby"
• This is unique, but probably not for long: "little monkey prostitutes"

Glimpses of an alternate history

So, I was reading John McWhorter's The Power of Babel: a natural history of language. After describing how a creole language develops (a pidgin, usually from colonialism or slavery, grows up), he follows the sentence, "Similarly, there is no Italian creole," with a wistful footnote:

In the strict sense, this is a good thing, because, the tragic truth is that most creoles have have arisen amid conditions of unthinkably stark and ineradicable social injustice. However, if we can allow ourselves to very briefly take a purely hypothetical perspective, a creole based on an encounter between Italian and West African languages would most likely be a ravishingly beautiful tongue to both Western and African ears.

It reminded me of Calvin Trillin on "The Italian West Indies," collected in Third Helpings (now part of The Tummy Trilogy).

I daydream of the Italian West Indies. On bleak winter afternoons in New York, when the wind off the Hudson has driven Alice to seek the warmth she always draws from reading the brochures of ruinously expensive Caribbean resorts, I sometimes mumble aloud, "the Italian West Indies." Alice gets cold in the winter, I yearn for fettuccine all year round.

"There is no such thing as the Italian West Indies," Alice always says.

"I know, I know," I say, shaking my head in resignation. "I know."

But why? How did Italy end up with no Caribbean islands at all? ... When I happen into one of those conversations about how easily history may have taken some other course ... I find myself with a single speculation: what if the Italians ... had emerged from the colonial era with one small Caribbean island?

I dream of that island. I am sitting in one of those simple Italian beach restaurants, and I happen to be eating fettuccine. Not always; sometimes I am eating spaghettini puttanesca. Alice and I are both having salads made with tomatoes and fresh basil and the local mozzarella. That's right — the local mozzarella. The sea below us is a clear blue. The hills above us are green with garlic plants. The chef is singing as he grills our fresh gamberos. The waiter has just asked me the question that sums up for me what I treasure most about the Italian approach to drinking wine: "You won raid or whyut?" I say "whyut," and lean back to contemplate our good fortune in being together, soaking up sunshine and olive oil, on my favorite Caribbean island, Santo Prosciutto. "Ah, Santo Prosciutto ... " I found myself saying out loud one brutal winter day.

Beating on the Long Tail: an infinite sum game

I think the Long Tail is a great idea. But I have to take issue with how Chris Anderson expresses some of it. I don't intend this as an attack on Anderson and his ideas. It's more of a rant on Wired style and its excesses, inspired by a recent post in his blog. He writes,

But where you have unlimited shelf space, it's an infinite sum game

What does "infinite sum game" mean? "Game" is a term of art from economics (via game theory). A game is a strategizable interaction with quantifiable results, which, in English, means: you and other participants put money in (Or you put something in: effort or prestige, maybe), you do stuff, and you get money (or something) out. A zero-sum game is one where the total gains and losses of all the participants (players) add up to zero, as in a friendly poker game. In a negative-sum game, individual players may win, but in general they lose, as casino gamblers do. In a positive-sum game, everybody is better off on the whole, as in a good baseball trade where both teams are improved; however, a positive-sum game may still have individual losers, as a growing economy usually does.

An infinite-sum game is the ultimate positive-sum game because the return is infinite. But all the inputs are finite — money, eyeballs, time, the universe —, and all the outputs are finite, so an "infinite-sum game" is impossible and the term is therefore meaningless.

Ultimately, "infinite sum game" is just an poorly-constructed metaphor. The master of this style is Thomas Friedman, who builds grand metaphorical castles (and malls and office parks) from blocks of warm Jello mortared with a thick slurry of bullshit. To build in Friedman's style, simply pile nifty, loosely-connected ideas atop each other: We've got an interaction with a payoff, so it's a game; everybody wins, so it's a positive-sum game; and it's a big sum, a really really huge sum — what's bigger than big and huger than huge? infinity; it's an infinite sum game! "Infinite-sum game" does not, thank goodness, rise to the height of to Friedman's towers of babble, nor is it an essential part of the argument for the Long Tail.

I think "infinite-sum game" is symptomatic of the tech buzz that Wired is prone to. In the "trees grow to the sky" milieu of Silicon Valley promotion, it's too easy to go from "neat idea" to "best thing ever." I keep turning away from Wired because of its hyperbole (along with unreadable yellow-ink-on-white-paper). But articles like "The Long Tail" are why I keep coming back.

The long tail

The "long tail" is a brilliant idea. It combines elements of a lot of stuff I'm interested in: genre, niche, midlist, backlist, gatekeeping, economies of digital distribution.

The Long Tail is the sort of Big Idea I really like. If you rank stuff by popularity, all the attention gets focused on the left side — the popular side of the graph. In the bestseller region of the chart, sales fall off quickly. The bestseller region looks like a big head, and the rest looks like a very long tail. After the popular stuff, sales trail off slowly, and for a long, long time: there's a lot more stuff out there. If you add things up, the area under the curve (i.e., total sales) is larger on the right side of the graph.


That means that there are a lot of opportunities there, opportunities that have been under-explored because most attention and promotion have been for the popular stuff. Some of these opportunities didn't even exist thanks to financial and technological limitations. One limitation is the cost of shelf space: A bookstore generally has to sell two copies of a title per year (and four is a lot better) in order to pay rent and other expenses after cost-of-goods. Quick special orders allow the bookstore to expand its inventory beyond what it can physically afford to carry. Another limitation is printing cost: offset printing is cheaper than hot lead, and allows many more books to be profitably published and kept in print. But a publisher still needs to sell a minimum number in the first year to initially publish the book, and afterwards must sell enough per year to afford keeping it in print. Print-on-Demand allows a publisher to print a smaller initial run of a title and keep it available at a lower level of sales. These and other factors (blogs discussing neat stuff, small online communities, digital distribution of music, etc.) can combine, sometimes dramatically, which means that although there's more stuff out there, it's easier for consumers to find and for retailers to sell it to them.

Check out the article and Chris Anderson's blog on the topic.

In which I am briefly nice, but recover

Normally, when I hear the word "inspiring" I reach for my power tools.

</snark>

But this is swell story about a kid who worked hard, was given a chance, and had a dream come true. It's a good piece of feature writing, too. Go read it. (via)

<snark>

Humans and other animals

My inner twelve-year-old has been reading the news lately.

Stock market investors are as rational as little monkey prostitutes.

Clever vengeance for wretched customer service is not a crime.

Sheep urine helps prevent air pollution. (via)

Robot slugs will crawl up your ***. (via)

Search 'n' replace reveals Harry Potter's hidden meaning.(via)

X-Rated fringe benefits will aid recruitment of airport screeners.

Female orgasm has no evolutionary purpose, so it must be proof of God.

The musical baton

Tom Bozzo passed the baton a fortnight ago. Since then, I have (in no particular order) dropped the baton, kicked it around in the dirt, stuck it up my nose, taken it out of town, and dropped it again.

Total volume of music on my computer: 4 songs, 16MB. The new hard drive is going in Real Soon Now.

Last CD I bought: Bob Dylan, Live 1966: the "Royal Albert Hall" concert

Song playing right now: Toots & the Maytals, "Funky Kingston."

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

In no particular order,

1. Louis Armstrong, "Saint Louis Blues."
   
2. The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset."
   
3. The Gourds, "Gin and Juice."
   
4. Talking Heads, "Don't Worry About the Government."
   
5. Howlin' Wolf, "Killing Floor."
   

Passing the baton to: Whoever wants to pick it up. You don't know where it's been for the last two weeks, though.

Effective elective invective perspective

Political invective just ain't what is used to be (Of course, nothing has ever been what it used to be.). Via Brad DeLong, the Valve laments the current low standard of political insult and recalls Eugene Debs on Teddy Roosevelt:

This political pet of the plutocrats, this bogus reformer, this shreiking charlatan, this raving mountebank, this crazy-horse of Oyster Bay ranch, this blood and thunder prophet, this opera bouffe ghostdancer, this blatant quack hero, this freak of froth and foam and buncombe, this nauseating moralizer, this dysenteric scold, this chattering midwife and meddler and all-around nuisance has buncoed the people long enough and they at last know him for what he is, at least those of them who have mentality above a shell-fish, and who can tell a jibbering fraud after he has exhibited himself to them daily for a score of years.

Mrs. Semiquark recently came across this in Put Downs: A Collection of Acid Wit. H.L. Mencken describes the virtues of Warren G. Harding as a prose stylist:

... the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

Does that remind you of anybody in the White House today?

Nowadays, Republican skins are oh, so tender. Crybaby conservatives raised a huge stink about Howard Dean and his recent words. Dean didn't howl a Menckenesque aria of vituperation. He merely pointed out a couple of simple truths. First, Dean said that many Republican leaders "have never made an honest living in their lives."

And second, the Republican party is

not very friendly to different kinds of people. They're a pretty monolithic party. They pretty much--they all behave the same and they all look the same, and they all--you know, it's pretty much a white, Christian party. And the Democrats here adopt everybody you can think of in our party.

To illustrate this, John Aravosis at Americablog helpfully provides a group portrait of all the black Republicans in Congress. It's empty white space, with an ornate frame.

What Dean said, and how the Republican reacted, reminds me of Harry Truman's, "I don't give them hell, I just tell them the truth and they think it's hell."

Where I didn't go last weekend

Last weekend, we got out of town. Since I'm no longer a bookseller, I didn't go to Book Expo America. It's the country's largest trade show for the publishing industry. It looks like I didn't miss much. There are the usual duelling headlines.

---

The show. How was this year's show?

Little glamor, few surprises.

Glamorous and surprising.

Part of the glamor I missed was this giant hot dog (via). It's obviously a New York dog, for Chicago hot dogs are much better-dressed.

---

The industry. How is the book bidness doing?

The number of titles published is up

Unit sales are down.

---

Returns. Unlike most products, books are sold returnably to stores: Bookstores can return unsold books to publishers for credit. The system started during the Depression. Too many stores sharply curtailed orders because they hadn't sold their old stock and couldn't afford newer stock, so publishers began allowing returns of unsold books in order to unclog the distribution pipeline. After WWII, returnability became standard. But the returns ratio kept growing. Now, 34% of adult harcovers are returned. The consensus seems to be that returns are the worst possible system, except for all the others.

Returns suck.

Returns really suck.

---

Independent bookstores have had a bad decade or three. Their decline may have halted.

Independent stores are surviving.

Indies are thriving.

One bad benchmark: All independent bookstores, combined, sell less than Amazon.

---

The future.

The industry hasn't addressed the problem of authorgeddon, when there will be more people writing books than reading them. (It only seems like that now.)

The Donner Party Cookbook

Hurray for stoopid web aggregators. In a previous post I joked about a Jungle Cookbook in honor of the centenary of Upton Sinclair's novel. That post ended up excerpted on several cookbook pages. Apparently, somebody is collecting RSS feeds with likely keywords and slapping them onto their lame, uninformative ad pages. Obviously, my post either wasn't seen by human eyes or was reviewed by eyes that didn't know the novel at all. We can test by running copy that human editors should reject even though it's loaded with tasty keywords.

The Donner Party Cookbook will commemorate the 160th anniversary of the famous expedition. The Donner Party Cookbook features dozens of delicious recipes. The recipes are based on authentic frontier cookery, but are adapted for the modern chef. Many of the recipes highlight outdoor cooking methods, such as grilling and barbecue. The book tells how to cook popular cuts of meat like loin, shoulder, and ribs.

There are chapters on food selection and storage. There is also a special section on nutrition for Atkins and other high-protein diets.

The Donner Party were early innovators in the development of California cuisine. They also inspired singing gourmet Alferd Packer.

Surprise the guest of honor at your next celebration. Mmm, steak's on the grill — Chuck steak!

update: I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's a real Donner Party Cookbook. But its recipes are from "before the food ran out."

The shirtless ones

Whiskey Bar is one of the best political blogs out there. Billmon writes both passionately and well. I'm surprised to catch him in an error, albeit a small one.

Personally, I've come around to the idea that any Social Security fix based on accumulating surpluses now to balance shortfalls decades down the road is strictly a sucker's game, since the neo-Peronist wing of the GOP will only use the money to "pay" for more tax cuts and spending boondoggles -- albeit for billionaires, not the shirtless ones.

Bush is committed to "the shirtless ones." That's why he's celebrating Flag Day by having dinner with porn star Mary Carey. Americablog and Daily Kos have the details.

The ever-expanding blogroll

Blogger Forum
A Consuming Experience
Crooked Timber
Dan Gillmor's blog | Bayosphere
GeekPress
Left2Right
The Long Tail
The Mandate of Heaven天命
NewPages Weblog
Northcoast Exile
Paine's Law
rebelbookseller.com
"...she's a flight risk."

Mmm, crunchy

I'm a
Crunchy Crustacean
in the
TTLB Ecosystem

How'd I get such a high rank?

Hallelujah, I'm a bum

I haven't posted for a while (as if anybody would notice).

First, a coupla days preparation for a road trip. Then, without polite notice of non-posting, off on a trip. Then, recovery for a coupla days.

More soon: new and improved — with verbs!