The Hanover Collaboration

Dear America,

I know a lot of you are anti-bailout. And I can understand why— those are my tax dollars, too. But as a line worker at GM, I’ll be the first to feel the effects of my company’s collapse. So please, hear me out on why I want to keep my job at General Motors:

I want to keep working for a company that turned my labor into expensive, impractical, environmentally-destructive vehicles. I need that paycheck, because, thanks to deceptive financing, buying those vehicles has put me deeply in debt to my company’s insolvent financial arm, GMAC.

I want to keep working for a company that created, then buried the first modern production model electric car —a car that could have saved me thousands of dollars this summer when gas prices peaked above four dollars a gallon, as well cut back on greenhouse emissions, along with ozone, smog, and noise pollution in my neighborhood

I want to keep working for a company whose CEO who makes 250 times what I do. I want to keep working for a Vice Chairman of Global Product Development who called global warming a ‘total crock of shit’ and took pride in producing a hybrid that somehow gets less than 22 miles a gallon. I want them to keep their private jets.

I want to keep working for a company that funneled millions into lobbying against higher fuel economy standards, instead of pushing for the same universal health coverage that allegedly makes competition with foreign manufacturers ‘unfair’. Without that coverage, I’m pretty much forced to keep working here.

I want to keep working for a company that raked in record profits less than a decade ago, and turned the new income into innovative vehicles, like an SUV that converts into a pick-up truck, and FlexFuel systems that get equally poor mileage running on gasoline or even-less-carbon-friendly corn ethanol.

I want to keep working for a company that helped buy out and all but destroy the extensive public transportation infrastructure that existed in America in the 1930s. I might get stuck in traffic on the way to work, but at least I do it in my own car.

I want to keep working for a company that admitted in a full-page ad that it’s been ignoring the needs of the American consumer for years, but still expects us to buy their vehicles because…well, I’m not sure why.

And I especially want to keep working for a company that, over the past four decades, has dismantled the American auto industry piece by piece, outsourcing jobs, closing factories, and bringing unprecedented economic blight to what was one of America’s most promising Midwestern cities.

So please, America, write your congressman. Tell them to support the company I work for with an infusion of your tax money. Because clearly, if my loyalty to GM is indicative of anything, it’s that I’m too stupid to work anywhere else.

Sincerely,

GM Auto Workers.

Oh Netscape, it’s sad to see it’s come to this. I remember when you were new and fantastic and way cooler than Kermit or TurboGopher or even Mosaic. It was through you that I learned about awesome things like jpgs and gifs.

This article is painfully retarded. I mean that literally, like, an article with a learning disability. The lack of technical awareness, the oversimplification, the mealymouthed nostalgia – it’s stunning that an online magazine would publish such a thing, but extremism in defense of the counterintuitive is no vice, right Slate?

Somewhere between Absolute Clubhouse and Game On, they materialized out of the mob, like some phishing scheme come surreally to life. Except this time, the Nigerian millions were real.

“Are you two alone? Or are you meeting people inside?” one asked.

“Uh…”

Seconds earlier, Game On’s line wrangler had promised swift and brutal relegation to anyone allowing people to cut.

“Would you rather go to the game?” they continued.

Bella almost said “no”, but by then the tickets were out.

“Take them. Go as a guest of the studio.”

By this point I had them in my hands. Sure enough, the back of the ticket was stamped “COURTESY OF FOX”. The man handing them out seemed bona fide enough, with his sport coat, walkie-talkie and lap-dog looking intern.

“Oh, no way” said a girl behind us in line.

It could still be a scam. Would finding out be worth the 45 minutes we’d already invested in line? To ask the question is to know the answer, and seconds later, we were certifiably the luckiest pair of the 38,805 on hand for ALCS Game 7.

The tickets said $95, but lord only knows what they were actually worth. Why hadn’t Fox just scalped them? Probably some sort of contractual obligation – or as atonement to Red Sox fans for producing Fever Pitch. I guess it could also be general karma restoration for foisting Fox News upon the world.

Every game at Fenway since god knows when has been sold out, but on this night, the stadium felt the full weight of a (probably well above) capacity crowd. Every sub-code, Wilson-era doorway, ramp and staircase slowed progress two a crawl. Beer lines were immense – probably because no one had intentions of missing even a second of what promised to be the sensational end to an exciting series.

We got to our seats just as a local girls’ dance troupe was finishing up its routine (the first of about 30 times we’d hear “Shipping Up to Boston”), and from there it was pretty much non-stop mayhem until the first pitch. Even though Row 15 is waaaay back there in the Grandstands, the seats still weren’t bad, and the rowdy and talkative SROers just behind us more than made up the the loss of the jumbotron.

First three innings were insane. Stand up and shout. Sit. Base hit. Stand up and shout. New batter, stand and shout, then sit down. Two strikes, stand and shout. Etc. It was like some bizarre Catholic megachurch, and considering all the praying that’s gone on in Fenway over the years, a kneeler wouldn’t have been out of place. Dice-K was near-perfect through two outs in the third inning, and the fans were really giving it to a struggling Westbrook.

“Weeeeeest-Broooook. Weeeeest-Broooook”

As the game went on, though, Matsuzaka got sloppier, Westbrook tightened down, and the score got closer. While on a bathroom/beer/panini break in the 4th, there was palpable tension, with fans (or rather, the few full-bladdered or empty-bellied enough to be pulled away from the game) and servers alike glued to the TVs as they watched struggling Red Sox starter. For a while, the game became a duel of inning-ending double-plays.

Okajima came in for relief in the 6th, protecting a razor-thin Sox lead. While there was plenty of shouting and screaming later in the night, for pure, jubilant explosion, it was hard to beat the crowd’s reaction to the almost-didn’t-get-it double-play that lead into the 7th inning stretch.

From there on out, though, the game was pretty much a party. In the bottom of the seventh, the fans got to watch Julio Lugo sac bunt, which is such a double bonus. Pedroia made it all a moot point at the next at-bat, and it was damn cool to watch the entire grandstand crane awkwardly forward to try and catch the last little bit of his homer as it bounced off the top of the Monster.

Okajima kicked off the 8th with two consecutive base hits, but all nervousness was allayed as the the Fenway sound system boomed out the first rumbling strains of “Wild Thing”. Between Papelbon’s 98 mph cheese and Youk’s Off-The-Coke-Bottles homer (which I could see none of, I might add) the crowd was certain of a win, and chanting “hey hey, goodbye” before the the 9th inning even began.

“...good times never seemed so good.”

I’ve read far too many Greek myths (and seen far too many Red Sox games) to engage in such hubris, and top of the 9th was about as nervous as any well-padded three outs can be. The Sox pulled Manny, bumped Ellsbury to left and put Coco Crisp in center, and not a second too soon – the inning’s first and last outs were pretty exceptional catches on hard-hit flies. Brayt called during the game’s final batter and got a decent audio picture of the final 15 seconds, probably just ahead of the TV delay.

Afterwards, there was a few minutes of unrestrained celebration and a wicked lot of camera phones, followed by the slow, trickling departure of those fans still concerned with catching the T. A decent sized crowd hung around to watch Papelbon pour beer on the AL Eagle and dance jigs, while Ortiz made up for a pretty lackluster performance by pumping the crowd, starting a wave and telling the fans how awesome they are.

Things started to settle down, the players went back inside, and so we left, passing two cops in riot gear at the doorway on our way out. The streets had pretty much cleared, but I still had to talk my way past two lines of cops on Comm Ave to get back to my bike. No one got shot, which was nice, and the crowds seemed well behaved, minus a tossed bottle or two. Then the Sox went on to sweep the World Series, and, to be honest, it seemed like a far, far less exciting couple of games.

Big freakin’ deal. It’s bike to work week every week in Cosmoland. If you really want to get all these non-hackers who do not pack the gear on bikes every week, or even once or twice a week, you’ve got to properly incentivize. I realize most companies shirk from handing employees extra cash for anything other than profit-related performance, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

How about covering the remaining health and dental insurance contributions of cyclists to reward their commitment to a healthy lifestyle? Or subsidizing their rent for braving the ludicrous cost of living within biking distance of a major economic center? Or maybe employers could pony up for a free tank of gas now and then, in recognition of all the hydrocarbons cyclists aren’t burning on a daily a stop-and-go commute through traffic lights and rush-hour gridlock?

If any expense – cash or otherwise – is too much, I can think of a couple cost-free incentives as well. Cyclocommuting employees could make a mint leasing their space in the parking garage to local residents or other commuters. And if companies can work out volume discounts with with local cleaners, health clubs and movie theaters, why not a bike shop? The promise of service nearby would leave fewer people put out by the prospect of mechanical failure. Plus the cheaper goods would encourage riders to buy equipment that was suited to their needs, rather than dictated by their paychecks.

But hey, I’m a realist – so how about some improvements that would serve everyone, while at the same time encouraging cyclists, like adding showers to the physical plant? Even the most unrepentant SUV driver could wash up after long hours, and cyclists could both get to work faster and smell better afterwards. And putting a bike rack near the front door, instead of at the complete antipode of the building, would shorten bike commute times and keep locked courier bikes from blocking fire exits.

But the fact is, most employers have no interest in doing any of these things, because Bike to Work Week is nothing more than a temporary platitude to the concept of societal change, like Bring Your Daughter to Work Day or National Black History Month. Americans are irretrievable bottom-liners conditioned for and addicted to the path of least resistance, and this week is just another perverse Saturnalia to remind the majority of the workforce why they’ve fallen into such a selfish, destructive and unhealthy routine in the first place.

My primary computer is a 1st-gen MacBook, with a 13” screen, 60GB hard drive, and 2GB of ram. This would be unremarkable, save that May 18th marks exactly one year from its purchase date – the time when the one year of complimentary hardware coverage expires.

I should say right now, I have an atrocious record with laptops. My first was a cast-away 15” G3 iMac from the Williams College Office of Information Technology. The logic board and power manager croaked after less than a year. I think it’s still in my parents’ TV room.

I realize an Avril Lavigne interview might not be the most compelling journalism that comes across an editor’s desk. And I know that this is an AP story, and maybe they’re the ones to blame for this mistake. But CNN, if you decide to publish a piece on your web page, you’re going to have to take the shame when it sports a typo that most third-graders could pick out.

Seriously – they make a busted tee for this particular snafu.

Here’s a nice bit of work from Forbes’s World’s Cleanest Cities list. Though I’m at a loss as to how the barely-mentioned criteria yielded the cities they did (#2 Honolulu has severe traffic congestion issues, while #10 Boston has failed to implement a number of environmental remediations from the Big Dig), my real complaint was in how the web page presented its results.

It’s great that the person writing text for #6 Oslo knew that city was the capital of Norway. Many Americans are probably unaware of this fact. But it would have been a nice gesture if this person had let whoever wrote the blurb title in on the secret. And while I’m sure the City of Vancouver was tickled pink to mentioned twice, perhaps erasing the City of Boston’s entry wasn’t the best way to do it.

So the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority just received its Big Fat Compensatory Check from the events of 1/31. And guess what they’re going to do with it? Push the same, common-sense-free safety awareness campaign that started this debacle in the first place.

Awesome.

This is not intended as some liberal keelhauling of the most trenchant and well-spoken supporter of the Iraqi occupation. It is, rather, as the title would indicate, an annotation of this article; an academic supplement so that the less careful reader might fully appreciate the depth and delicacy of Christopher Hitchens’ rhetorical style. It’s doomed to the woeful incompletion inherent to any such endeavor, but then again, my time was limited.

To pick up the paper this morning, you might think that Boston yesterday was a picture of terror and chaos. “Panic was the order of the day”, swooned the Herald. There was “considerable disruption and anxiety in our community”, stated newly-elected Governor Deval Patrick. “Relatives across the nation were in fear for their loved ones here in the city of Boston,” said Daniel Conley, the Suffolk County DA.

Excuse me – is this Boston, Massachusetts, we’re talking about? Because I live there, and I sure didn’t see anything like that. I didn’t even get a nervous phone call from my mom. What I did see was a pretty serious traffic jam at the intersection of Route 38 and I-93 at around nine in the morning, but other than that, my day was pretty normal.

So I weighed myself on the bathroom scale today. I weigh 185 pounds. At five feet, eight inches tall, that gives me a BMI of 28.1, or well into the overweight category.

Of course, I also ride my bike ten miles to and from work each day, and can do 30 push-ups without resting. So should it really be of any concern that 65% of American adults are as fat as I am?

In case you hadn’t heard, Apple made its first foray into the mobile phone market yesterday with the announcement of iPhone. And if the live report on Engadget is any indication, Mac and PC users alike are willing to knife their own grandmothers to get their hands on one this June.

But, just as they did with the release of iMac in 1998, Apple has overlooked a critical component for their of their new “gotta-have” machine: with the absence of a flash reader, USB, or FireWire port, there’s simply no way to get large amounts of data onto and off of iPhone without a fast wi-fi connection.

Slashdot ran a feature today chronicling something of an anti-simplicity backlash in the design world. Several important points were made, but one comment, by alleged design guru Don Norman, is absolutely bathed in idiocy:

“Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use [than Google’s].”

Yeah, I know. Blog bait if I’ve even seen it. But such specious reasoning demands a swift and solid refutation.

So I was perusing the official list of US Citizenship practice questions today. Aside from missing an unacceptably high number (9 of 96), and being taken aback by several of the answers (apparently, the Constition is not a document outlining the organization and function of the United States Government, but simply “the supreme law of the land”), what really struck me was this question:

93. What is the most important right granted to United States citizens?