Why haven't we done this?

"Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes. 

Source

In the UK, the Great Recession has inspired ordinary people to do just that—with some success. link

Abe Lincoln

"I care not for a man's religion
whose cat and dog are not the better for it."

- Abraham Lincoln

True story

Bill, a friend of mine who lives here in the Carson Valley, is one of the nicest guys you could ever know. He helped build Tahoe’s Heavenly Ski Resort back in the day and, at 77, still roller blades with his three dogs and, in the winter, is a ski god. He also cares for his wife of many years, who suffers from Alzheimer’s. She has her lapses but Bill, with his ever ready humor and gratitude, is very savvy about keeping things on an even keel. Recently, wanting to get a measure of where she was at, he gently inquired, "Hey honey, do you remember our wedding?" She thought about it for a minute then replied, "What else did we do that day?"

Common concern

I'm not an "atheist" but I'm concerned about these things. I hope you are too.

Via boingboing via Don't Bother Me via atheism

New ride

Well, it's not a Tesla but we bought a new car yesterday and it is sweeeeet. We had to go to Oregon to get it as there was only one dealer on the entire west coast who had what we wanted, and he only had one, a white 2011 Hyundai Elantra Touring SE with 5-speed manual transmission.

There's still a lot of life left in our little 2000 Hyundai. It's a great car, it's just that we are planning to drive to Florida in the spring so this seemed like a good time to reup. Monday we decided on the Touring. We drove to Oregon on Tuesday, bought it on Wednesday and drove home on Thursday but it wasn't an impulse buy. Naturally, M. Lee had already read and digested all the reviews and hot threads on all the vehicles on his list. I had my own short list, another Elantra, but these things must be thoroughly discussed. We had pondered the Subaru, contemplated the Audi, took the Sportage for a test drive etcetera. We weighed all the factors till our heads spun, but all roads led back to the Touring. Hyundais are great cars. End of story. And no, they did not pay me to say that.

Then, once we were certain that the Touring was the best of class, we were left with the most agonizing, most mind boggling decision of all... black or white.

Peter, the cool internet sales dude, took this photo
and posted it on the dealership's Facebook page.

We like black. Black is stealth and cool, mysterious, powerful, maybe even a little bit dangerous looking. Diplomats, royalty, heads of state and other shady characters are chauffeured around in fleets of shiny black cars. The thing is, they have people to keep their sleek black cars looking untouchable but once a black car is dirty, the magic is gone. We tried to convince ourselves that we would keep a black car menacingly clean, but we knew it was a lie. We're slobs, so we got white. Plus white is better in the desert. We'll tint the windows.

We're giving the silver Elantra to our daughter. Baby Thea and Owen the Dog need a new ride. Currently poor Owen has to hunker down on the floor in the Saturn's scrinchy backseat space which he must share with Baby Thea's wiggly feet. Now, he'll get a whole third of a car to himself. Who's yer gma?

Time to move on

Professor William Strunk Jr.

Some time ago I got tired of living under the tyranny of Strunk & White's Elements of Style and sent my copy packing to the secondhand store. In case you are unfamiliar with it, this tiny book is a terse manual long considered by many educators and writers as the final word in rules of word usage and the principles of writing style. So this morning I was interested when I found a link at ArtsJournal to this article by Adam Haslett. For starters, Haslett notes that the work is "spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists".

"Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for “vigour” and “toughness” in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the cold war. A time before race riots, feminism and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair." source

Don't get me wrong. I believe we have all benefited by the good professor's dictates. I will be wary of adjectives to my dying day, although mostly because of their egregious misuse by bad poets, but I have an unabashed fondness for the well done run-on sentence. Perhaps this is because I am given to a perpetual adolescent rebellion. Nevertheless, I have no interest in novelty for its own sake. I just do not agree with Strunk's overarching rule: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat” although, as Haslett notes, Hemingway managed to successfully blend the two.

Still, a word about Strunk's famous dictum: "

Omit needless words".  Of course, I too am always on the lookout for flabby writing but I also agree with Haslett's conclusion that:

"This rule leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem."

How far into uncharted territory can any rule book or map take me? I realize it's tacky to quote oneself but a line from one of my own poems comes to mind... "The glass breaks and I am gone." I don't know about you but, for me, that's the point.