Monday
Gosh, Give Me a Break
As people get older, they get more serious.
That seems to be the general consensus. That was my opinion . . . until I got older. When I was younger, I would wring my hands over all sorts of things, but now I'm much more inclined to scoff at the hand-wringing. I used to read hand-wringing articles with compassion and an inclination to believe there's a problem. Now, I enter the page jaded.
This is especially my disposition with what I call "issue hand-wringing." A person finds a big societal issue and writes about it, expecting to raise our collective conscious in hopes that something might be done about it.
It seems to me that issue hand-wringing is the sport of youngsters. Whereas younger people pick a societal issue and freak out over it, older people are more inclined to wring their hands over personal finances, their children missing curfew, job stress. Maybe that's why older people like me aren't inclined to get worked up over things that are largely out of their control: they have enough issues to address within their own sphere.
Slate magazine recently featured one of the dumbest hand-wringing articles I've read all year: The blight of drive-through restaurants. This guy thinks drive-through services are a major problem. I'm not kidding. He even raises the terrifying specter of "spatial exclusion"!
The proliferation of late-night and 24-hour drive-throughs has led, because of concerns about crime, to an increasing number of places with what amounts to a "no car, no service" policy. One of the ironies in the creation of these zones of spatial exclusion is that they often occur in areas where fewer people have access to a car. Perhaps the logical extension of the whole trend is the drive-through only facility, which restricts nonvehicular access at any hour, as this Seattleite found at a Starbucks. That the coffee chain, which once resisted drive-throughs as too "fast food," should now exclude pedestrians and others entirely is one thing; that the facility was built in a neighborhood with new light rail and burgeoning transit-oriented–and thus pedestrian generating–development is even worse.
Not only couldn't I care less about spatial exclusion, I'm also guessing the writer hasn't had to grapple with many toddler car seats. For those of us who have had to yank little kids out of car seats for 15 years, the drive-through has been an unqualified blessing.
Christmas Miracle
This is the second Catholic family I've stumbled across this season that is in dire need. Please help if you can.
Are We Ready to Throw These Bums Out Yet?
Why are these people still in charge? One of the best five-minutes of economic video footage ever (the video says it's 8-minutes long, but the montage takes only five minutes):
It looks like this group of citizens is steamed up:
