Idiom Watch

• Inside baseball - I can't tell if I like this one because it is always used in the context of some secret knowledge (the best knowledge!), or if the idiom has inherent worth. After all, I am not the biggest baseball fan in the world (ChiSox!), but any kind of respect paid to those who would study a field to within an inch of ridicule has a tip of the hat and five on it from me.
• Hit the spot - Again with the food idioms, I know. What is the spot? Is it the bullseye of your consumptive target? What happens when you hit it? Are you supposed to feel some sense of satisfaction, as though you had trained yourself over time through repetitive practice sessions to find exactly the right combination and amount of foodstuffs to satisfy your dietary needs? If so then by all means, because that sounds laudable now that I've written it out, but this phrase is far more often uttered in response to less condonable desires.

City Living 2

Alec Baldwin reads Colson Whitehead's "Lost and Found":

Hosted by kiwi6.com file hosting.
Download mp3 - Free File Hosting.

I read this piece for the first time back during the 10th anniversary recap in September when folks were linking to articles written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It's got two of my favorite quotes about urban living that apply equally well to New York as they do to any city:

You are [from a place] the first time you say, ''That used to be _____''

And this quote about change, maturation, acceptance, and / or forgiveness:

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us. To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. The kid on the uptown No. 1 train, the new arrival stepping out of Grand Central, the jerk at the intersection who doesn't know east from west: those people don't exist anymore, ceased to be a couple of apartments ago, and we wouldn't have it any other way. New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

Idiom Watch

• That's my speed - You instantly picture Steve McQueen in place of whoever utters this phrase, and he's a cool dude who drives fast (which is itself a cool thing to do), so you want to match his speed. That's what separates this phrase from generic "I like ____" statements: it implicitly invites the listener to agreement, if only they would step on the gas to catch up, or equally, one supposes, the brakes to chill out.
• Walking around money - Nothing says class like old timey political grift, and this phrase connotes the fattest of ward bosses doling out dollars in exchange for votes on the correct side of the ballot. Try it out on your partner the next time you need a couple bills from your (ultimately, if not explicitly) shared bank account but forgot to swing by the ATM before meeting them at the bar, and see if it doesn't put a smile in the corner of their mouth.

SOPA / PIPA and the 2012-01-18 Blackout

Here's a form letter I created that you can feel free to adopt for you own usage:

Dear Senator / Congress Person _____ ['s legislative aid],  

I'm writing today about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), but now I'm annoyed that your office doesn't even have a "Topic" on your contact page for Technology. I imagine this is an outcropping of the same lack of technological awareness that has lead our Most Deliberative Body to unanimous past support for the horrendous Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). I can only assume it is this chronic misunderstanding of America's high tech economy that now prepares support for SOPA / PIPA, without regard for the underlying structure of the internet that everyone claims to value so highly as the source of our nation's future revenues. As a _____ professional at _____ that greatly benefits from unrestricted, uncensored internet access, I can only say that I am figuratively shocked and literally appalled that this kind of legislation has gotten so far, especially given the lip service paid by politicians to the "job creators" in the technology sector. If Congress truly values the creation of 21st century jobs, if the Democrats really want to "Win the Future" (seriously, whoever came up with that slogan watched way too much "X-Files"), then lobbyist fodder like SOPA / PIPA should never live to see the light of day outside of its authors' offices on K-Street. 

To quote the most useful source of general knowledge every created in the history of mankind, Wikipedia, on this the day of their historic (and heroic) blackout:

SOPA and PIPA cripple the free and open internet. They put the onus on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the blocking of entire sites, even if the links are not to infringing material. Small sites will not have the sufficient resources to mount a legal challenge. Without opposition, large media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for small competing foreign sites, even if big media are wrong. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines.

I wholeheartedly agree, and I hope your office does as well. These bills don't need to be 'adjusted', they need to be torn up. The content cartels in Hollywood and elsewhere don't need any further anti-competitive protections, or any more custom written laws from their lobbyists straight into the law books; they need new business models. New technology, not new laws, will save the wages of our artists and content producers. Bills like the DMCA, CTEA, SOPA, PIPA, et al, can do nothing but stifle our greatest innovators in a blind effort to save a stagnant oligopoly chronically uninterested in changing it's ways to meet producer or consumer demands. 

Thank you for your service to the great State of _____, and to the United States of America, 

_____

Occupation

Oddly enough, today I was mistaken for someone who doesn't support the Occupy Wall Street movement. While it is certainly true that I am pushing the boundary of heart versus head, I was still taken aback by this mischaracterization. I don't believe that OWS will be the start of any lasting reforms, I don't believe it will tip the scales in any relevant election cycles, and I don't believe that most of its constituents even really understand (much less agree upon) what it is they are protesting. In spite of those beliefs, I think a populist movement advocating economic solidarity between 99% of the American populace can be counted as a Good Thing™.

It is always easy to make fun of people who care, who warm to a topic or movement and expose themselves as uncool by definition. The rebel without a cause would never join any movement that would have him. To be sure, I was among the many who saw the Tea Party protests against Wall Street's partners in crime in Washington and took cheap shots, variations of which are now deservedly aimed at the hodgepodge of conflicting interest groups currently camped out in lower Manhattan. False equivalence aside however, the Tea Party was clearly the product of a sustained campaign by the wealthy influential class, in control of their media outlets for hire, steering, nay shoveling, their avaricious anti-regulatory agenda down the gullible gullets of the electorate via the ever convenient vehicle of class outrage. Occupy Wall Street on the other hand is the typically weak sodded but undeniably grass roots movement of disparate leftist interests succeeding in spite of themselves to steer equally anarchic social media into a virtuous circle of attention that has culminated in something worthy of being called, in the words of Wikipedia, "Part of the impact of the Arab Spring".

Did the true populists in Tea Party think their movement was the one that would be welcomed into the broader global movement for justice? How naive must anyone be to think they've invented the freedom by themselves. Taken together however, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of a coin that deserves our respect. For all the gullibility, racism, and anarchy of the Tea Party, and all the stupidity, paternalism and ... anarchy of the OWS, there is an endemic problem to be addressed by every society on record, that of power. The concentration of power, be it in the religion wielding, land owning, title bearing, gun toting, gold hording, political office taking, money grabbing, or stock selling class, is the problem every generation must confront. And every generation gets to decide for themselves how they will find their voice to do so. In the immortal words of David Bowie:

These children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds,
They are immune to your consultations,
They're quite aware of what they're going through.