Killer Owls, Zombie Plants and Marbled Murrelets
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Final Score: Santa 1, Grinch 0
in a division game with post-season implications. Inclement weather, short rest, and a long flight to Whoville had led odds makers to tab St. Nick’s North Pole squad as a two point underdog. At first it seemed the bookmakers had called it correctly as the Grinch had strong showing in the first half and seemed poised to claim the division title with either a win or a tie in front of a joyous hometown crowd. However, late in the second half, Santa Claus team captain Kris Kringle slipped around a distracted defender and laid a gift for Cindy Lou under the Who family tree.
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Silent Night? We Should Be So Lucky
music, which they don’t typically play in elevators anymore, and thank your lucky stars for that, especially if you’re even remotely claustrophobic), but do they have to ratchet it up a holy notch by putting a liturgical spin on it? Can’t I just sit here, in this normally atrocious atmosphere, eating this beastly awful food and not be subjected to a parable about some kid with a drum? I was 18. I was a little more indignant back then. The irony of my 20s and cynicism of my 30s were still ahead of me. Now, in the graying haze of my 40s, it’s no longer about the religious message in the music, which is largely irrelevant to me. It’s about the music itself, and boy does it suck.
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Welcome Back My Friends to the Season That Never Ends
garish clothing made by exploited Indonesian children; a stern, Teutonic St. Nick who really did keep two lists, who never dreamed of offering punch-card guarantees on the latest electronic do-dads, whose ire manifested itself in the form of coal lumps, who demanded to be placated not only with modesty and obedience but also with offerings of milk and cookies, and who seemed to more closely resemble a red-robed Karl Marx than some jolly, docile servant whose fetching and offering was at the beck and call of screaming, sugar-crazed children. But that was then. Things were different. During World War II there was rationing. Before that, expectations were understandably minimal as people slogged through during the Great Depression.
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A Living Memoriam: Charles Rangel
Charles Rangel used to be my Congressman. I was born and raised in the Bronx and attended John F. Kennedy High School, which is located in the borough’s southwestern corner, a neighborhood called Marble Hill. Once 1970. Powell himself was a living monument, a larger than life character who had outmaneuvered Tammany Hall to become the first African American to represent New York State in Congress, and only the second in America since the end of Reconstruction (1877). When Rangel bested him, it was in the shadow of a corruption scandal. Once an important trailblazer, Powell had devolved into a slacker who spent most of his time in the Caribbean, and an embezzler who, among other things, funneled Congressional money to his third wife through a no-show job while she was living in Puerto Rico. In light of such scandals, the House voted not to seat Powell in 1969. He sued and eventually won in the United States Supreme Court; Powell might be a crook, the Court ruled in Powell v. McCormack, but Congress had no right to refuse seating a duly elected official.
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The Permanent Under Class – Part II
offered middle class wages to semi-skilled and sometimes unskilled workers. And many white collar workers had little or no college education, instead having worked their way up the bureaucratic chain or from more skilled industrial positions. A college education was an available avenue for success, but hardly a necessity. Indeed, the great expansion of American colleges and universities was a post-WWII phenomenon, and the widespread opportunity for accessible and affordable college educations first became available on a large scale to Baby Boomers, not their predecessors (the GI Bill aside). Even today, only about one-quarter of American adults hold a Bachelor’s degree from a four-year college.
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The Permanent Under Class – Part I
became scarce. Wages also suffered as unskilled and semi-skilled laborers were easily replaced and had little bargaining power. Thus, while the new industrial economy transformed natural resources into finished products and created a vast, national wealth the likes of which had never been seen before, that money was distributed very inequitably. Fortunes aggregated into the coffers of the few while the masses increasingly slogged through poverty. At the same time, however, there also appeared a new, urban middle class, a cadre of professional managers.
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Taking Back Plymouth Rock
outbreak of war and grew during America’s industrial golden age that followed. The other was a disingenuous federal program of the 1950s-60s called Relocation. The actual goal of federal policy makers had been to liquidate reservation populations by luring Indian people to distant cities with empty promises. The actual result was the rise of Indian ghettos that had cropped up in cities across America. Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the emerging Black Power movement, and a desire to re-connect with their Indian culture and heritage, early AIM efforts included openly monitoring the city police to prevent and report abuses against Indian people, fighting housing and job discrimination, and setting up Survival Schools: after school programs for Indian children where they could stay out of trouble, pick up tips on handling the city’s mean streets, and learn about Indian culture and history, topics that were still absent from most public school curricula.
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Trick or Treat, Baby
Halloween Part II Halloween as well. Another reason is that my neighborhood is generally considered “safe,” despite the random assortment of lowlifes and hoodlums that back in the `70s we would’ve referred to as “hustlers, pimps, and pushers.” So part of it is just circumstantial. But a lot of it is that most of the neighborhoods and suburbs where some of these kids are coming from, be they modest and urban or well-to-do and tree-lined, aren’t pulling it off; the black kids are the obvious munchkin migrants, but there are plenty of white kids visiting too. In other words, my neighborhood is a magnet for these kids because it’s one of the few places around the area where trick or treating is still a viable and thriving activity. How many times are you going to watch your kid pound on a door and get no response before you realize this place just ain’t happenin’?
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