Today is Memorial Day, a day associated with barbecues, the Indy 500, trips to the beach, and the start of summer. And with honoring the men and women who served in the US military, right? Well, not exactly. Modern American culture has more or less completely conflated Memorial Day and Veterans Day, despite the distinct differences between the two holidays. But in fact, these two days serve different purposes: Veterans Day honors all the veterans who served in the military, while Memorial Day honors those who died as a result of their service. Continue reading ‘the conflation of memorial day and veterans day’
Monthly Archive for May, 2010
The other day I was driving around town listening to WWNO. They were doing a special comparing Detroit’s public schools with the ones in New Orleans. Some guy was talking about the schools in New Orleans. Except that he was pronouncing New Orleans as “New Orleeeenz,” that hideous (yet all too common) mispronunciation that makes the natives cringe. I figured that this guy must be a clueless Michigander perpetrating offenses against our way of speaking. But guess who the guy turns out to be? Paul Vallas, a Chicago native but current resident of New Orleans as superintendent of the Recovery School District. You’re gonna come here and take taxpayer money to the tune of whatever the hell your salary is, and you can’t be bothered to learn how to pronounce the name of the city? Fuck you, Paul Vallas. It seems like you’re doing a decent job as far as I can tell, but you are now on my shitlist and you will remain firmly ensconced upon even if the students in the RSD magically become Einsteins overnight thanks to your leadership. How fucking hard is it to pronounce it correctly? Hell, there’s probably half a dozen different pronunciations you could get away with—basically, any of them except the ones that make the last syllable rhyme with “cleans.” Continue reading ‘the mispronunciation of “new orleans”’
I hate answering the phone. At least with cell phones I know who’s calling, and, with the sole exception of a wrong number, I can be assured that the person calling wants to speak to me. But the home phone, which is not equipped with Caller ID? The odds are damn near infinitesimal that the call will be for me, and instead I’ll have to relay some stupid message or another. The following exchange just happened: Continue reading ‘answering the phone’
An automatic icemaker is a nice thing to have. I can remember being a kid and having to fill up the ice cube trays at my grandmother’s house; then, once the ice was frozen, I’d have to slam the cubes into the box, and a few ice cubes would be stuck and I’d have to run water over the outside of the tray to loosen it up. Total pain in the ass. But at least the ice cubes were a decent shape. The usual automatic icemaker pops out those frustrating little crescents that always seem to adhere perfectly to the side of whatever glass you’re drinking out of.
I don’t know what the makers of these devices were thinking. Cups almost always have a circular opening. Ice with a circular side will tend to jam up against the side of the cup, acting like a dam for whatever liquid is behind it. So you slide the ice down the glass to your mouth and suck furiously in an attempt to maneuver the liquid out from behind the ice. Or you tilt the glass too far and the ice spills out, possibly getting your drink all over the table or your clothing or your face. Or, when you have only a little bit of drink left, the ice gets stuck at the bottom and you have to shake it to juggle the ice around, again, possibly leading to a spill. Whether you’re having a glass of ice water on a hot day, or a Coke, or a cocktail, it’s incredibly frustrating.
It’d make a lot more sense if the ice cubes were more like the shapes you’d see from a commercial ice dispenser—either actually cubes, or the tubes with a hole in the middle, or small rectangles, or even the small pebble type. All of these types are smaller than the half-moon type, meaning they are much less likely to settle at the rim of the glass and block the beverage. Yet somehow, the shape that is about as idiotic as possible manages to survive.
Living on the Gulf Coast I’m used to dealing with natural disasters. But this decidedly unnatural disaster we’re dealing with is quite bizarre. In some ways it’s like dealing with a hurricane—we even get a daily NOAA forecast—but it’s not like we have to board the windows and evacuate. We just move on with our daily lives and watch as what could become the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history rages on some 60 or 70 miles from downtown New Orleans.
At this point I don’t really know how to feel. Should I pissed off at BP? Yeah. The government? Yeah. Maybe this is the work of a company cutting every corner it can, regardless of the risks. Maybe it was just a freak accident. (I think the former is more likely, but that’s besides the point I want to make). What I am pissed off about is the fact that for far too long we in Louisiana have run the risks and taken so much damage from the oil industry without being fairly compensated. For years Louisiana and the other states with offshore drilling got completely screwed out of oil royalties.* We got nothing.** States with inland oil and gas production? A 50/50 split between the state and the feds. What is wrong with this picture? Sure, there’s an argument to be made for giving the federal government some of the money; Americans have a right to enjoy all of our natural resources, not just the ones from the state they happen to live in. But we are the ones bearing the negative externalities while the federal government reaps the benefits. We are the ones who have had our wetlands ripped apart by subsidence and canals. We are the ones with Cancer Alley. And we run the risk of a spill like this. Continue reading ‘not getting a fair share of offshore oil royalties’