NICK EDDY RELENTS

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Priorities!

Our city is in bad shape, with household-name businesses pulling out and rampant crime and such. Where to even start? The general worldwide economic mess has just exacerbated a winding down that has been going on for twenty-five years. Jobs are needed, yes. But a more important question that "how do we bring in new companies and work?" is "what can we do to keep the attractive people here?"

I expect most cities the size of D_____ and its environs have the same problem - lots of good-looking youngsters, most of whom leave for bigger, better places or go to a college in a real place and never come back. I don't know where they actually end up, as they are not intrinsically more talented or whatever, but I would guess there are all sorts of secret enclaves where the attractive congregate.

So: how can D_____ make itself more attractive to the attractive? I don't care about jobs or crime, even. If the people having shootouts and slinging illegal drugs around or wandering aimlessly were just more appealing to the eye, the rest of it (jobs, etc) would fall into place! Not that I would get to stay - if there were a mandatory "must be THIS goodlooking to stay" sign/chart as at a roller-coaster line to measure height, I would be run out of town on a special "goblin train" (and why is there not one of these?).

Still, even from a great distance where my giant, misshapen noggin and I were banished, I could see the sheen on the horizon of my hometown and the Beautiful Ones who would reside there.

(image via the greatest [and, yes, most necessary] web site I've ever come across: http://www.10yearsofbeingboring.com/)

Astronauts at home

"More gin!"

(via HuffPo)

Monday, July 20, 2009

Nothing more rock than this

A cautionary tale

A friend was in eastern Kentucky and heard the following, perhaps apocryphal, tale regarding drug use in the wilds.

There were some jobs available in a coal mining facility.

400 applicants showed up.

10 (ten) passed the drug screening.

4 (four!) showed up on the first day of work.

Meh-therland

So, Netherland, right? Look at the classy, prep-tastic cover.I bought it because I read it was about cricket. It's not - cricket plays a part and there is enough cricket jargon to cause head-scratching, yet not enough to make one care about cricket. So there's that.

The hero is a Dutchman living in New York during the current decade. After 9/11 his wife decamps with their son to her native England. Hans starts playing cricket a bit with some guys. Oh, shit, I'm already bored typing this. Anyway, he lives in the Chelsea hotel for no reason other than to give the blahness a splash o' color.

Look, I read the whole book and am too bored to talk any more about it. EXCEPT to say that the lead guy is very rich, so there's never any real debate as to whether he will overcome his Existential Malaise, and there are long dinner-partyesque segments making sure we know that The War in Iraq Was Wrong. In a very Ian McEwan Sunday kind of way. Annoying.

Also: one of the (lazy) blurbs on the back says something about "like The Great Gatsby, this novel blah blah--." I am hard-pressed to think of another look less Gatsby-ish. Maybe Ubik or The Thorn Birds or The Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet. But otherwise, no.

Also 2: this was good - "There is a limit to what Americans understand about the English. And that limit is cricket."

Also, right after this I read Martin Amis's book of 9/11 (ish) essays, which was a rather bracing tonic to the fatuousness of Netherland. Full of things to chew over like this: more books are translated into Spanish in Spain each year than have been translated into Arabic in the last 1000 years.