Covid rant

 

Yes, I wrote that I would limit myself to photographs and the contrarities they reveal about our current way of life. I've been housebound for days now, and one of my kind neighbors has been delivering food to the top of my steps, including yesterday a delicious fruit salad with the most creamy, silky yogurt, along with a copy of the recent New York Times Book Review. So, here I sit this morning with my tea, hoping that this may be the day that I trust myself to walk down the steps and outside for some fresh air. I look at the front page of the Book Review on the table before me, and as always with this publication, I take umbrage. Which is my way of saying that I am offended by almost everything I read in it, starting with the headlines. Indeed, the headlines in the NYT are a signal for you to assume the opinion stated therein.

What offends me? Its assumptions, which are those that the loyal New York Times reader is to assume as their own. Let me start with the headline on the front page of this May 15, 2022, issue, which pictures a group of stewardesses -- oh, oh: make that flight attendants.:

TWO NEW BOOKS SHOW HOW FED-UP FLIGHT ATTENDANTS SPARKED A MASS LABOR MOVEMENT

There are two books under review concerning flight attendants. One is a nostalgic memoir of a woman who became a stewardess in the late 1970s when in her twenties. For the reviewer, Fly Girl: A Memoir "leaves out a lot" and reads "like watching a vintage Doris Day movie in which the clueless heroine mistakenly wanders out of the 1950s and into the sex, drugs, and rock and roll that followed ..." The other (The Great Stewardess Rebellion) is a takedown of such nostalgia. The reviewer stakes out her position in the opening sentences: stewardesses served as "sexual bait to lure the nation's burgeoning corps of male business travelers." The writer of The Great Stewardess Rebellion), Neil Wulfhart, is not identified in the review as having been a stewardess, but is, according to her website, a "decision coach." (Go see for yourself.) So, this expert in life coaching has done the investigation and can tell you "the real story": the stewardesses who get fired from gaining weight, the amp dependencies, "the vicious misogyny of all the sexist men ..." who countered the attempts to improve working conditions.

I'm not saying that the Doris Day account is the one to live by, but my objection is to the  assumption that "sparking a mass labor movement" was a good thing. That may or may not be the case, but destroying illusions is a given in the world of the New York Times. Is there some reason why the reviewer could not have given a more measured picture? Being a stewardess in the 1970s was not like chattel slavery. A lot of people, men and women, were trapped in jobs that were oppressive. But there is something very evil about the way that the NYT focuses on people's discontent, and clearly the reviewer here (Leslie Bennetts, author of articles on, among others, Jennifer Anniston) is committed to the arena of femal discontent. Almost every novel reviewed in the NYTBR concerns a topic like "toxic mother-daughter relationships." A headline to such a review reads: "The author suggests that the body is sickened by secrets; everything must come out." Oh, really? Why?

Thus, my disgust with this newspaper. The NYT obviously has an outsized influence on the kinds of books that are published, tales of blame and hurt and self-pity. And one wonders where the great writers have gone.  I feel for my kind neighbor, who reads this NYT trash every day and whose view of society is contaminated by it.

Corporate suck-ups, 1

 I am sure there will be more. Stay tuned.

It makes me think of people who find a gun pointed at their head and begin to whimper in fear.

Mesopotamia? Or New York?

 

Contrarities of modern urban life, 2

 

No. 1 Subway

Madison Avenue

Contrarities of urban modern life 1

It's been ages since I posted, and in fact the blog was closed to readers for a long time. I have decided to reopen it. The lockdown, the pandemic, the virus -- however you want to call what has happened in the past two years -- has made me look at the world around me more intently. I have been carrying my iTouch with me: I need my vax ID to get into a restaurant, right? and the proof is right there in my Photos file. I have loved taking pictures the past two years. There are many things about the life that grab my attention and that I would like to document. But why hide them away in the Pictures file of my Mac? For the next while, until I have a new inspiration, I want to post images occasionally. I choose the above title for today's post, and there will be other contradictions I would like to document: thus, we start with number 1. But there will be other subjects. For the most part, I will only post the pictures. I could probably write essays about them but I will allow them to speak for themselves. As always, click to enlarge.

 

Macy's Cosmetics Dept.

No. 1 Subway Line

Buying Guns in Beverly Hills

I live in New York City and have read or heard about the rise in crime here. I have not been affected (yet), and my neighborhood seems relatively quiet. I have noticed, however, that things are not tidy. It sounds petty, but since the pandemic the street cleaners have not been active in residential streets. Lately that means that the falling leaves are clogging the gutters. (It's not like the street is a forest, but things are looking very messy, )

Lately, it struck me that beggars and homeless people, when on the move, hang out at places where middle-class people like me are to be found: in front of the local bank when I exit after making a deposit, or on the corner near Zabar's. And of course in the subway, a moving procession of the indigent. In other words, they plague the consciences of people who have to go out and earn a living. I say to myself, why do they not hang out on Park Avenue or other places where really moneyed people live? Probably because they would be chased away.

In any case, the title of this post is from a report in Los Angeles Magazine. It was not only Schadenfreude (look it up!) that caused me to be amused to see that California types in favor of defunding the police are buying guns to defend their property. (Yes, I know, I am labeling an entire class of people, but, really, that state is out of control, and mostly because of the pieties of such types.)

What's Your Paw Print?

 The current climate conference is coming to an end. The vacuity of it all is overwhelming, especially the pronouncements and virtue signaling of Western leaders who are without leadership. Do they get up every morning and feel oppressed at having to go through motions that will have no outcome? Come on: no one in the West is going to give up their goodies, and why should the rest of the world not want the goodies that come from exploitation of the Earth? The conferences, the protests, the disaster scenarios are so much fury sounding. Below is a piece I wrote and published in the New York Sun in 2007. Don't get me wrong: I am all for better use or our Earthly resources. The piece, however, concerns the fatuity of the liberal mindset.

I live in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in the U.S., zipcode 10024, full of people who carry cloth shopping bags, who swear by fluorescent light bulbs, and who think that George Bush is evil for not signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.  The neighborhood also ranks high in the nation in the number of pet food deliveries.  (The highest is the adjoining zipcode, 10023.)  Parents and children now compete for space on the sidewalks and in the parks of the Upper West Side with the owners of medium-sized and large dogs or, increasingly, of multiple small dogs.  I wonder if these pet owners have calculated their dog's carbon paw print.

By this I mean the canine variation on "carbon footprint," a concept invented by environmentalists for measuring our energy consumption and, hence, our damage to the environment.  The more energy we consume, so it is claimed, the more carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere and, ergo, the more damage to the thermal equilibrium.  When we are not being told to hang out our laundry to dry, we are encouraged to visit websites where we can calculate our personal carbon footprint, based on household fuel use and travel.  On the larger scale of things, the so-called Carbon Trust in the U.K. is trying to force companies to publish the size of the carbon footprint required to bring their products to market.  It is only by submitting to such behavior-modifying protocols, say the environmentalists, that the polar bears, the rain forest, the earth itself can be saved.  As with most seemingly well intentioned but trendy projects, one can't help feeling that a great deal of obfuscation and hypocrisy is at work.

I'm not talking about Laurie David (living on Seinfeld royalties while traveling on her private Gulfstream jet to save the pl
anet) or Al Gore (spending $30,000 a year for electricity for his 20-room house with pool), but about my pet-rich neighbors on the Upper West Side.  According to the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, a moderately active 80-lb dog requires 1,955 calories a day, in other words, the energy requirement of a 120-lb woman.  A lactating dog of that weight requires 3,900 to 7,800 calories daily.  Smaller dogs of, say, 20 pounds, consume energy disproportionate to their weight compared to large dogs: translated, that means two miniature poodles consume more than a small German shepherd.  So, when calculating one's carbon footprint, dog owners should add an extra individual (or two or three) to their household size.

While it is true that some of the carbon dioxide released into the environment as a result of the metabolism of pet food is renewable, the energetics required to produce this food fare — the factories, the delivery trucks, the metal for the cans — are often nonrenewable or renewable more in principle than in practice.  "Tin" cans, for instance, made of iron, require about half a pound of carbon (in the form of coke) per pound to manufacture.  After use, they go to the city dump, where they may or may not be recycled.  Even the best metal-recycling systems recover only a fraction of the metal, while using huge amounts of nonrenewable energy in their operation.  A dog's natural diet is heavily weighted toward protein, while the fertilizer chemicals required to produce cattle feed or the high-protein legumes and grains that make up some pet foods are highly energy intensive.

Based on a report by MarketResearch.com, the U.S. pet food market is experiencing healthy growth: "marketers continue to convert pet owners to better quality, higher priced, more upscale fare."  This glowing report (from October 2006) mentions the "bases" that premium pet food makers manage to cover: among others, natural/organic, fortified/functional, weight control, breed-size specific, and gourmet.  People who purchase organic pet food would hardly be so cruel as to leave Fido in a warm apartment in the summer months without air conditioning.  Besides eight hours of cool air, don't forget to factor in the TV to keep him company, or the electric lights when he is home alone in the evening.  In very round numbers, a single 6000 BTU air conditioner run for eight fihours has the carbon footprint of 15 gallons of gas, which will drive a car for about 300 miles.  Over its ten-year life span, a dog enjoying the benefits of air conditioning will consume about 150 gallons of fossil fuel -- and that's assuming the system is operating at 100% efficiency! Don't get me started on cats, who compete with humans in consuming annually millions of tons of various fish varieties from overfished seas.

This exposition is not about animals, however, but about the hypocrisy and willful ignorance of the liberal mindset.  After all, what is the point of feeding "natural/organic" food to animals that lick the behinds of other animals, drink from toilets, chew on shoes (dyes and other chemicals in the leather), and sniff up dirty curbs and sidewalks?  As with the cloth shopping bags, the fluorescent light bulbs, and the Kyoto Treaty, Upper West Siders want to appear virtuous, all the while polluting the ground under our feet and fouling the air we breathe.