Half Changed World

I’ve been slowly working my way through Nixonland, and I’m reading Whatever It Takes for work, but you want to know what I’m really reading? (other than about a hundred blogs, but those don’t count, do they?)

• Down River, by John Hart.  This was my book group’s pick, and since I was making it to book group for the first time in about six months, I figured I should read it.  I enjoyed it, and stayed up later than I should have in order to finish it, but can’t say that it was a particularly memorable book.  The plot kept moving nicely and the writing stayed out of the way.

• Heart Shaped Box, by Joe Hill.  This is a book that I’d never have bought, since I’m not particularly a fan of horror stories.  But it showed up in the box of books that I got from Books4Barack and I started reading it, and got hooked.  Again, it’s not great literature.  But it was a good read, and not too scary.  I was actually somewhat reminded of Sharyn McCrumb’s Appalachian stories.

I guess I needed some downtime.  That’s ok.

I don’t want to jinx it, but unless all the polls are totally wrong, or something horrendous happens in the next few weeks, the uncertainty on November 4th is not going to be about who is the next President, but about the rest of the elections.*  Do the Dems really have a chance at 60 votes in the Senate?  Is Massachusetts going to commit budget suicide? What’s going to happen to marriage equality in California?

Sam Wang makes a convincing case that if you have money left to spend on political contributions this cycle, you should spend it on the Senate races in Oregon, Georgia and Minnesota.  Of those, the one that jumps out at me is Georgia, because I haven’t forgiven Chambliss for his utterly sleazy ads about Max Cleland.  (And Jim Martin’s making sure the voters don’t forget either.) 

Increasing the margin in the House is probably less of a priority, but I’m still trying to find some money to toss towards a couple of races:

• Judy Feder’s contest to beat Frank Wolf in Virginia — she’s awesome, and is one of the half dozen or so people in the US who I actually think understand health care reform.  That said, he’s a popular incumbent and he trounced her two years ago.  Virginia polls close early — 7pm Eastern time** — so that’s a good race to keep your eye on — if she wins, it’s a sign that the Dems are really riding a wave.
• Dennis Shulman in New Jersey.  He’s a blind rabbi, a psychologist, running against someone who is incredibly conservative for his district.  And I know his daughter.

I’m finding it hard to get too excited about my own Congressional race, but Anonymous is a Woman has some good posts about it here and here.  I haven’t seen any polling, but I think Connolly should win easily — the district has moved to the left, and the seat has only stayed Republican as long as it has because of people’s respect for Tom Davis and appreciation of what he’s done for federal workers.  I got a very annoying push poll from Fimian last week (although even the poor sap they had doing the poll couldn’t pronounce his name.)

As far as I can tell, we don’t have any wacky policy referenda on our ballot here in Virginia.  Here in Fairfax, there’s a parks bonds referendum, which I’m probably going to vote against.  Given the huge budget deficit the county is running (due to the collapse of property tax revenue), I just don’t think that it makes sense to borrow for things that are nice, but not essential.

* Not that I’m complaining about this.  After the last two Presidential elections,I’d really like one where I’m not sure it’s worth staying up to watch the California returns come in.  My dad and I were talking about this and we decided that the question we wanted to ask is: what’s your prediction for what time you go to bed on election night?

In 2000, I was 6 months pregnant, had a brutal cold, and had to catch a
flight to go to a work meeting in Cleveland at 5.30 the next morning.  At about 2 am, I finally gave up and went to bed.  In 2004, I gave up when they moved Florida back from Kerry to too close to call.

** If you’re likely to be stuck at work and racing home to vote, you might consider going ahead and voting absentee early.  If you’re at work *or commuting* for at least 11 hours that day, it’s an approved reason to vote absentee.  That sounds like a lot, but a 9 hour day and a one hour commute each way qualifies you.

So, no sooner had I said that I wouldn’t do reviews of cleaning products, then on the same day one of our foster kitties pissed where he shouldn’t have and I got an email asking if I wanted to be on the MomCentral blog tour for Spot Shot, by the folks who make WD-40.  So here I am, eating my words.

So, the first question: does it work?  I was pretty impressed.  They sent with the sample a little square of carpet and tubes of chocolate syrup and ammonia that you can squeeze on to test it, but I tossed those and went for the real deal: the spot in N’s room where he puked blackberries all over the place last summer.  I can still see where the stain is, but it’s a lot better than it was before, and I’d tried a bunch of cleaners.  I didn’t actually try it on the cat piss, because when we tried it in a corner, it looked like it was picking up the upholstery dye, and we didn’t want to risk it.

The second question: is it really "environmentally friendly" as it claims?  I have absolutely no idea.  It didn’t smell like solvents, which I guess is good, but I don’t really know what’s in it, or how that compares to regular carpet cleaners.  I think the cleaning market is somewhere close to where organic food was 20 years ago — there are no standards, and so it’s hard to know whether what you’re getting is worth the price.  Is the fancy "green" window cleaner (which costs 4x more than the traditional blue stuff) anything more than vinegar and water and perfume?  Is rubbing alcohol considered environmentally friendly?  Beats me.

I don’t know anyone except T and me who are watching America’s Toughest Jobs.  It seems to be drawing pretty low audiences.  But I’m enjoying it.  It’s a tough competition, without the random luck or bunching that drives me crazy on The Amazing Race, and it’s mostly just about the ability to do the job, without a whole lot of relationship drama.  (They’ve occasionally tried to make a story about why the contestants are doing this, but that’s been underwhelming.)

"Tough" jobs, in this context, mostly translates as physically demanding and/or dangerous.  Certainly today’s episode, logging, was brutally physical.  Since they’re putting untrained people into the jobs, they can’t require serious training, so no air traffic control here.  And as much as I’d love to see these folks dealing with a room full of toddlers, it’s not going to happen.

Interestingly, two of the final five contestants are women.  They’re very tough women, but they’re mostly not as strong as the men. Some of the men are complaining that the bosses are grading the women on a curve, but I don’t think that’s it — I think it’s that they’ve consistently shown hustle and good attitude, and the bosses give them credit for that.

The grand prize at the end will be the total annual salary of all the jobs they do.  The main thing that’s struck me is how *little* most of these jobs pay.  I don’t think any of the ones we’ve seen so far pay more than $45,000, and some of them (prospecting for gold) pay a lot less.  Life lesson: go to college — you can make a lot more money for a lot less work.  Or get a union job — although they didn’t say so, I’m sure the bridge maintenance work they did last week is unionized.  And it’s the best paying job so far — and probably the least real danger (yes, you’re very high, but you’re always clipped in).

At the end of the show, they tell you what the contestant who got kicked off that week is doing now. Almost all of them have changed their jobs since being on the show.  One of them did in fact get hired to drive a truck in Alaska.  Another is working in a national park.  So, I guess that’s another life lesson:  there’s a lot of options out there, and you don’t have to do the obvious ones.

Anyone else watching?

Annika’s getting a new liver right now.  It’s been a long time since I blogged about her, but I hadn’t forgotten her.

I don’t believe in the kind of God who would decide whether or not to let a little girl make it based on how many people are praying for her.  (And I know Moreena doesn’t believe in God at all.)  But I’m praying for her nonetheless.  I firmly believe that prayer is a positive thing to do, even if no one’s exactly listening.*  If you’re so inclined, you might spare a prayer or two for Annika, her family, and the brave family that donated the liver.

*Earlier this month, I decided that I felt more or less the same way about political canvassing — I’m not sure I changed anyone’s votes, but it made me feel more hopeful about democracy.

Updated: And if you’re looking for something more concrete than prayer, blood donation is always good.

This week’s book is Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.  It’s the story of how Mortenson’s failed attempt to climb K2 led to his receiving hospitality from the residents of a small village in Pakistan and to a promise to build them a school.  This promise eventually led him into founding the Central Asia Institute (CAI) and building dozens of schools in the hardest to reach corners of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It’s a pretty amazing story, as Mortenson started out as a climber and a night nurse, without any particular expertise about that part of the world, building schools, or raising money.  But he plunged ahead anyway, and learned what he needed to do along the way.  And he did it more or less in obscurity, until 9/11 suddenly made a lot of people start to pay attention to that particular corner of the world.  Mortenson and Relin argue persuasively that the CAI’s work does a great deal to create peace, in part by showing people that the US can do things other than drop bombs, but more significantly by providing an alternative to the radical madrassas that have filled the gaps left by the lack of government schools in much of Pakistan.

While it’s an amazing story, I can’t say it’s an amazing book.  It focuses directly on Mortenson, without ever pulling back to provide a greater context about the culture and history of the area.  And while his successes in building the schools are improbable unto the point of miraculous, if you pick up the book, you probably know already that he’s going to build the school, he won’t get killed driving off a road, neither the Taliban nor the CIA will leave him in a jail cell to rot, etc.  So, while it was clearly very suspenseful to live through all of this, it’s not that suspenseful to read.  My sister in law gave it to me last spring, and I read about half of it right away, and then got bogged down in the middle.

But read it anyway.  Because you’ll learn a little about that part of the world, and because you’ll regain some hope about one person’s ability to make a difference.  And you’ll be inspired to give what you can to CAI.  And to tell our elected officials to live up to their promises to help rebuild Afghanistan.

I highly recommend this week’s This American Life, appropriately titled Another Frightening Show about the Economy.  After listening to it, I finally feel like I have a decent idea about why the rest of the economy, not just Wall Street, is at risk, and what the heck a credit default swap is.  Enough so that I was annoyed at how bad the explanation of a CDS on Marketplace tonight was by comparison. 

The main thing I took away from it was just how massively leveraged the whole system was.  In Bonfire of the Vanities, my favorite scene is where the main character’s daughter asks him what he does.  She says that her friend’s daddy (a publisher) "makes books."  "So what do you do, daddy?"  And he tries to explain what an investment banker does, and totally confuses her.  So her mother, his wife (who despises him), jumps in and explains that what he does is like slicing up a cake, and passing it around, and whenever some crumbs fall off, he gets to keep them.  (This of course pisses him off, as he thinks he’s a Master of the Universe.)

Well, as far as I can tell, what happened is that the ibankers decided that crumbs weren’t enough, so they started passing the cake faster and faster.  And then they decided that they didn’t actually need to pass the cake, they could just promise to deliver a cake next week, and they didn’t have to own a cake, but they could get someone else to promise them a cake next week.  And they got to keep more and more crumbs.  But now someone’s actually asking for the cake, and it turns out there isn’t one.

In the comments on my last post about the meltdown, Amy and amy have been going on about how everyone who bought a house they couldn’t afford, or who financed a better life than their cashflow justified through cash-out refinancing is guilty of contributing to this mess.  And on some level, they’re right.  But if Wall Street hadn’t leveraged all this to the nth degree, it wouldn’t be threatening to take down much of our economic system.

Judith Warner had an interesting column last week on how much "regular" upper-middle-class New Yorkers, especially those who are by education upper-class, but not especially affluent, resented the huge amounts of money sloshing through Wall Street over the past decade.  And similarly, I think the people who didn’t take out huge mortgages are bitter about bailing out those who did.

There’s a good discussion going on at 11d about how much people feel like they’re personally being affected.

Anyone going to the DC BlogHer event next weekend?  I’m interested in meeting people, but am not sure that I want to spend the $100 they’re charging for the actually conference.  Cecily is organizing a dinner for the night before so I may just go to that.

Phantom Scribbler posted today, asking where the cool kids are hanging out these days.  I told her I didn’t know, but I agreed that I’m finding less sense of community in the blogosphere these days.  I’m still writing, and still reading, but commenting less, and getting involved in fewer long conversations.  I’m still on a bunch of listservs too, but I’m wondering how much this is a matter of habit, rather than something that’s still important to me.

Phantom did convince me to sign up for Facebook, which I had been resisting.  I guess I’m an old fogie or something.* I know, I’ve been hearing for years about how popular it is, but I was still shocked when it told me that there were 588 people in my gmail address book who had Facebook accounts.  I only attempted to friend about 50 of them, but that’s still a lot.  Obviously, not everyone who has a facebook account actually uses it, but 28 people use it enough to respond to my request to friend them within 9 hours.

* This summer, I decided that a good description of my precise state of being almost but not quite up-to-date is that I watched Dr Horrible, but I heard about it first on NPR.  Similarly, I’ve been blogging for four years, but this is the first social networking site I’ve joined.

I keep checking the electoral map projections at RealClearPolitics.  They’re far more encouraging than they’ve been until now — McCain would have to win pretty much all of the "toss-up" states in order to win.  And a friend pointed me to this post at FiveThirtyEight, which suggests that RCP’s averages are biased toward McCain, including polls in or out based on how favorable they are towards him.  I don’t know if that’s true, but if even a supposedly pro-McCain site is coming up with numbers like this, that’s a good sign.

Martin Manley correctly warns us that a month is an eternity in politics, so I’m not counting my chickens.  No jogging through the finish line.  But I’m feeling hopeful.

(yes, I’ve got the debate on, but no, I’m not going to blog it unless something crazy happens.)

I seem to have fallen out of the routine of doing regular weekly book reviews.  I’m going to try to get back into the habit, since they often provoked good discussions, and the deadlines helped me control my bad habit of reading five books at once and not finishing any of them.

This week’s book is The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon.  The discussions of this book that I’ve seen mostly treat it as a dancing bear — e.g. they don’t criticize its skill in dancing, because the impressive thing is that it dances at all.  But I don’t think the idea of rendering a serious topic as a comic* is such a radical idea.  So, I’m taking it seriously, and asking whether this is an effective use of the medium.

The first chapter of the book absolutely blew me away.  Telling the stories of the four flights that took off on the morning of September 11, 2001 as four parallel stories playing out horizontally across the page is a very effective move.  I’ve always been a little blurry on the timeline of that morning — I spent it alternating between television and trying to contact people in NYC, and never sorted out what I was seeing live and what was replayed — and this made sense of it.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book didn’t live up to this start.  The main problem is that, while the format is that of a comic, the rest of the book doesn’t conform to Scott McCloud’s definition in Understanding Comics — the sequencing of the images does not contribute to the narrative; they simply illustrate the text.

Even as illustrations, the images don’t always contribute to our understanding. I totally don’t understand why the statement that Bin Ladin drew terrorists from at least 21 countries is followed by half a page of flags, rather than by a map of the world.  And in at least one case, the images confuse the story — a discussion of what went wrong in the evacuation of the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing is accompanied by a picture of the towers on fire, an image from from 2001.

The book includes a forward from the chair and cochair of the 9/11 Commission, praising it strongly.  It is, by all accounts, a fair and honest abridgment of the report.  And I do think that making the key findings of the report accessible to people who would never pick up a 1000 page book is a valuable and important task.  But as a work of graphic narrative, it doesn’t quite work.

* I’m calling it a comic because it’s clearly not a graphic novel and we don’t have a better word in English to use.  And because McCloud calls the whole category comics.