I posted on this a couple of days ago, but it’s sooooo sweet that perhaps it’s worth a repeat — here, courtesy of Rachel Maddow filling in for Olbermann on Countdown. Matthews expands on talking points, double-speak and the power of buzzwords.
As Nicole @ Crooks & Liars says: “We’re quick to call out Matthews when he does something wrong, I think it’s incumbent upon us to let him know when he’s done well too.”
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Coughing Up a Hardball
Real Estate Ad Speak
While every kind of sales profession traffics in a certain degree of linguistic mendacity to embellish their wares, surely none seems to do it with such shameless abandon as estate agents. Here’s an advertisement from 1890 by a fabulist named James Hutchinson that would be pretty hard to top for its staggering hyperbole. It appeared in the “Dub. News” and is quoted by Charles Carroll Bombaugh in his delightfully titled Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of Literature:
TO BE LET,
To an Oppidan, a Ruricolist, or a Cosmopolitan, and may be entered upon immediately:
The House in STONE Row, lately possessed by CAPT. SIREE. To avoid Verbosity, the Proprietor with Compendiosity will give a Perfunctory description of the Premises, in the Compagination of which he has Sedulously studied the convenience of the Occupant. It is free from Opacity, Tenebrosity, Fumidity, and Injucundity, and no building can have greater Pellucidity or Translucency — in short, its Diaphaneity even in the Crepuscle makes it like a Pharos, and without laud, for its Agglutination and Amenity, it is a most Delectable Commorance; and whoever lives in it will find that the Neighbors have none of the Truculence, the Immanity, the Torvity, the Spinosity, the Putidness, the Pugnacity, nor the Fugacity observable in other parts of the town, but their Propinquity and Consanguinity occasion Jocundity and Pudicity — from which, and the Redolence of the place (even in the dog-days), they are remarkable for Longevity. For terms and particulars apply to JAMES HUTCHINSON, opposite the MARKET-HOUSE.
Are you doing laundry in the love of God?
And other curious ways to get a “harvest” from the Almighty… Let the “miracle seed-planting” begin and the “anointing” flow! Learn how YOU too can be a healer!
Saturday, May 17, 2008
New Europe: Wild East (Part 1 & 2)
Another great BBC travel documentary with Michael Palin, this time in which he visits Eastern Europe. This is from the third episode called “Wild East” covering his travels through the Republic of Moldova (formerly a part of the USSR and now the poorest country in Europe) as well as the unrecognized breakaway state of Transdniester.
Who Killed the Electric Car (Part 1)
A 2006 documentary film that explores the birth, limited commercialization, and subsequent death of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the 1990s. The film explores the roles of automobile manufacturers, the oil industry, the US government, batteries, hydrogen vehicles, and consumers in limiting the development and adoption of this technology.
Some Perspective on Gas Prices
From an article by Robert Bryce in Slate:
When measured on an inflation-adjusted basis, the current price of gasoline is only slightly higher than it was in 1922. According to the Energy Information Administration, in 1922, gasoline cost the current-day equivalent of $3.11. Today, according to the EIA, gasoline is selling for about $3.77 per gallon, only about 20 percent more than 86 years ago.
In addition to comparing the price of gasoline to other “essential fuels” such as a Starbucks venti latte ($23 per gallon) and Budweiser beer ($11 per gallon), Bryce also compares American gas prices (that he calls “dirt-cheap”) to those in other countries around the world:
British motorists are currently paying about $8.38 per gallon for gasoline. In Norway, a major oil exporter, drivers are paying $8.73. In 2007, out of the 32 industrialized countries surveyed by the International Energy Agency, only one (Mexico) had cheaper gasoline than the United States. Last year, drivers in Turkey were paying three times as much for their gasoline as Americans were. The IEA data also show that in India—where the per capita gross domestic product is about $2,700 (about 6 percent of the per capita GDP in the United States)—drivers have been paying more for their diesel fuel and gasoline than their American counterparts.
Here in Canada (or Victoria at least) we’re paying the equivalent of just over $5 per gallon.
All that’s cold comfort for American drivers perhaps, but there’s something to be said or the contention that prices have been far too cheap for too long — a situation that certainly hasn’t done much to wean motorists off petroleum, move our countries towards energy independence or even encourage automobile companies to provide more fuel efficient vehicles. In fact, overall fuel economy had until recently been in a long period of decline since the late 70s.
Who Killed the Electric Streetcar?
In 1922, according to internal General Motors files, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., the MIT-trained genius behind GM established a special unit within the corporation which was charged, among other things, with the task of replacing America’s electric railways with cars, trucks and buses.
A year earlier, in 1921, GM lost $65 million, leading Sloan to conclude that the auto market was saturated, that those who desired cars already owned them, and that the only way to increase GM’s sales and restore its profitability was by eliminating its principal rival: electric railways.
At the time, 90 percent of all trips were by rail, chiefly electric rail; only one in 10 Americans owned an automobile. There were 1,200 separate electric street and interurban railways, a thriving and profitable industry with 44,000 miles of track, 300,000 employees, 15 billion annual passengers, and $1 billion in income. Virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system.
Together with Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum, General Motors formed the National City Lines (NCL) holding company, which acquired most streetcar systems throughout the United States, dismantled them, and replaced them with buses in the mid 20th century.
Convicted of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, GM was fined $5,000 and each executive was ordered to pay a nominal fine of $1 for a conspiracy to force the streetcar systems to buy GM buses instead of other buses (but not for dismantling the streetcar systems, which were also being dismantled by non-NCL owned systems).
6 AM
A short film by Carmen Vidal Balanzat set in New York — winner of the Student Academy Award® in 2006. It’s a documentary in the “urban symphony” style depicting New York City in the moments before dawn.
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