Happy Friday. Boy, did this week ever suck. I'm happy as all Hell that it's almost over.
So, I don’t know that any of this stuff is important, but here’s a snapshot of what I found interesting this week:
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| Medieval statue of Pliny the Younger, the namesake of the alleged best beer in the world. |
According to Slate.com, Pliny the Younger is supposed to be the Best Beer in the World. Who knew?
I’ve never even had a Pliny. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever even seen one in stores. Anybody out there on the Internets ever had one? What makes it so awesome?
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Also on Slate, Farhad Majoon says that Facebook’s IPO mainly means the site will soon be featuring more ads. That makes an unfortunate kind of sense. With that said, I’ve been enjoying Facebook more than usual lately, and I think their algorithm for figuring out what I’m interested in is pretty damned impressive. Bottom line: they show me links to triathlon training websites and various comic-related things on a regular basis, and when that stuff interests me, I click on it. Viva e-commerce!
Now all they need to do is figure out how to get me a six-pack of Pliny the Younger, preferably without having to pay for shipping and handling.
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| Speaker Boehner's official photo. You're surprised I didn't show him crying, aren't you. |
Speaker of the House John Boehner is already setting up another fight over the debt-ceiling—for right after the November election! He says that any additions to current spending must be met with offsetting cuts, and if you ask me, that’s a fine idea. He’s apparently also making some noises about tax reform, and if you’re a regular reader of this space, you know that I’m for that, too. What I don’t particularly want to hear, however, is that we can only define tax “reforms” in terms of tax reductions and/or that no tax increases of any kind will be considered for any reason. That shit flies in the face of simple reality, and frankly, I’ve had enough of it.
Boehner says he wants a comprehensive solution, and again, I’m for it. But the idea that there can be no give-and-take, no revenue increases to counter-balance the spending cuts for a more realistic, more levelized approach to true budget reform is, to me, a total non-starter. As a Republican, I am no longer interested in my party’s grandstanding over their typical dogmatic bullshit. They need to balance the budget in a way that will actually work first, and then we can talk about the ideology of how we move forward. Until that happens, I will continue to believe that they are self-interested ass-clowns whose first and only care is the divisive politics that keep their party in some semblance of power in at least one branch of government—whichever branch that happens to be.
On the other hand, President Obama’s recent announcement that he now supports gay marriage seemed like a more left-winged attempt at that same kind of divisive politics. In this case, it’s on an issue that I don’t happen to care about, but still… The timing was weird, and it seems to have cost the President something in terms of his national polling numbers. I’m coming around to the idea that Obama made the announcement because he’s lagging in campaign contributions, and the gay community represents a potential contribution windfall, but it’s still such a tough issue nationally that the whole thing is hard to understand.
I mean, personally, I don’t care. My state of Connecticut recently legalized gay marriage, and that was fine with me. Which is to say that it’s a free country, and allowing gays to marry costs nothing, so why would we disallow it? Against that simple idea is the fact that the current standard, i.e. state by state legislation, seems to be working, so why suddenly make a push for a national policy when there’s no national-level consensus? Gay rights are evolving, but like it or not, it takes time to change minds. And bottom line, this is still a majority-rules society.
I suppose that if you’re gay, and you live in Tennessee, and you want to get married, then that’s a pain in the ass, and that’s unfortunate. On the other hand, it completely escapes me why anyone who’s gay would want to live in Tennessee, and more to the point, it’s not like the people of Tennessee are rounding up gays and putting them in camps. You can leave if you want to. So this issue, like so much in life, is about trade-offs. You can be gay and live in Tennessee, and you accept whatever level of marital freedom that state provides, or you can move to Connecticut like I did, and yeah, maybe the cost of living is higher, but the upside is that you can work in New York City and be surrounded by people who accept you as you are. That has certainly worked for me, and I’m not even gay. If other folks have to also make that choice, I fail to see why it’s my problem. It is what it is. We don’t always have to change the world just to suit our personal needs. Sometimes it’s enough just to go someplace where folks can accept us for who we are. That’s true even if you’re straight.
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While we’re talking about Tennessee, it’s now illegal in that state to talk about kissing and hugging in schools these days because those activities are supposedly “gateways” to sexual activity.
On a perhaps related note, sociologists have known for awhile that teenaged girls from poor families are far and away more likely to get pregnant than are girls from affluent families, and that once those girls from poor families give birth, their chances of breaking the cycle of poverty are almost non-existent. What they’re discovering through research, however, is that it’s not that teenaged motherhood causes poverty, but rather that poverty causes teenaged motherhood. They discovered this by comparing the outcomes of sisters from poor families who had and had not given birth during their teenaged years, and what they discovered is that the average differences in eventual socio-economic outcomes are negligible between the teen moms and their non-teen mom sisters, but that the poorer a girl is, the more likely she is to have a baby while she’s still a teenager.
This is not to say that we should start condoning teenaged pregnancy, or that being a young single mother is somehow not as difficult as we thought it was. Being a teenaged mom is definitely hard, and indeed, women who were mothers as teenagers are far more likely to be poor for their entire lives than are women as a whole. However, the research seems to indicate that where these girls started has more to do with where they wind up than the simple fact that they gave birth early on in life. Which is to say that we ought to consider how we can give these girls a fighting chance early on, and then maybe we’d be in a better place to address chronic, cyclical family poverty beyond simply saying, “Don’t have sex because you might get pregnant.” I mean, yeah, that’s true and all, but it’s also demonstrably only one part of the story.
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The Giants got their Super Bowl rings this week, and if you’re interested, there are some terrific pictures of the new rings up on Big Blue View. My favorite thing about the rings is that they not only have all four years that the Giants have won Super Bowls on them but also the years that Big Blue won the NFL championship before the Super Bowl era. The Giants are actually eight-time World Champions—a thing that I think gets lost in the shuffle when comparing the legacies of the most successful franchises in the League’s history.
If the Jets or Tim Tebow are more your thing, then what you want to hear is this: right now, Jets coaches are complimentary of Tebow and critical of incumbent QB Mark Sanchez. They’re saying that Sanchez needs to improve his decision making—fair point—but that Tebow’s throwing motion looks “good”—a thing that I think I will believe when I see it.
The Titans, meanwhile, don’t seem to be doing too much. They acquired a lot of skill players in the draft but no solutions for the interior of the Offensive Line, and that’s despite the fact that their Head Coach is a Hall-of-Fame Guard. If that’s not ominous enough, the team has also signed only two or three of its draft picks—in contrast to the Giants, who have all of their draft picks signed—and on top of that, the team just got word that star WR Kenny Britt needed another surgery on his knee (surgery was performed yesterday). Ugh.
In any event, it’s starting to look like it’s gonna be a tough year to be a Titans’s fan.
Finally, there’s some news about the Chargers, and if you’re interested, by all means go check it out. Personally, I feel so far removed from my halcyon days as a kid watching Dan Fouts and company that it’s hard to feel the same way about the team that I did way back in the day, especially since I find current QB Phillip Rivers to be personally unlikeable. I want to care, but I just don’t. Not in that same way, anyway.
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One last note: I’ve got my first—and perhaps only—triathlon of the year this weekend. It’s the Milford Y-Tri, a short Sprint consisting of a 300-yard pool swim, an 11-mile bike ride, and a 2.5-mile run. It’s been a fun race in the past, and I’m looking forward to it this year as well, but in a way I’m more looking forward to simply finishing it so that I can go ahead and shift my focus fully to training for the Fairfield Half-Marathon.
With that said, I feel like I’ve been swimming pretty well the past week or so, and yesterday morning I made my 4.7-mile Manhattan bike commute in well under 20-minutes—and that’s with one two-minute traffic light stop—so who knows? Maybe I’ll actually do well. That would be nice.
And that’s all I’ve got this week. Have a good weekend.
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