In moderation, all pleasures are by nature good for one’s well-being. That being said, I have a huge weakness for fried dough in large quantities—beignets, Chinese cruellers, sopapillas—if it’s fried and contains flour, I’m there.
- Chichi Wang, food blogger and new intern at Serious Eats
We gathered near my truck, 40 seniors, my English students, on the last Monday of their high school careers. The First Annual Newport High School Senior Walk was about to begin. We would take to the holy sand and freely recreate on what former Oregon Governor Oswald West called "our great birthright" — Oregon's publicly owned beaches. These students might have paid $3.50 for latte on their way here but they didn't have to pay a cent to walk on an ocean beach.
They knew the story. They knew how decades ago West and other politicians steered Oregon on a different course, a better course, to protect beaches from privatization. And here these Oregonians were, most of them half asleep, primed to exercise their great birthright.
- Matt Love, Newport High School English teacher, in a lovely Powell's Blog entry about gathering his seniors together at 5:30 in the morning to celebrate their impending graduation (and, of course, Oregon beaches)
I do find these acronyms terribly confusing. For a while, I thought Chairman Mao's first name was Rofl.
- 'Mrs Stephen Fry' on Twitter
Steve Duin posted a reader's letter to him today, which took him to task for not being harder on the Metolius River developers. This has got to be one of the best examples of reader mail I've ever seen:
Steve lad ...
Your column in the Sunday Oregonian re the Metolius River was only slightly less wasteful than a reader's slow-drowning. True, I'm not the world's most patient, forgiving reader, but when I have to slug through a writer's swamp more than twice, it's time to drain the swamp or at least distill the water.
What the hell is your point? What I'm looking for is some steel cannon ball that blasts any attempt to clog one of Oregon's beauty spots with some asshole's idea of a sustainable money maker. No matter what the existing planning laws say or what money can buy or who has family holdings on The River.
What I want is a loud mouth evangelistic bozo goading cheap, self-centered Oregon ass-sitters (me included, sometimes) into paying for what it takes to keep pristine what we have.
Coming back from Sun River last Wednesday, we stopped at Trader Joe's in Bend and bought two ready-to-eat salads and two juices which we saved to eat at Pine Rest (I think that's it) down stream from the Metolius Store. Sitting at the picnic table where years before some SOB stole our picnic jug, my wife and I tried to recall how many times we'd camped in the exact spot. Our melancholy was fanned by a fisherman who waded the stream, cast and I'll be damned hooked what he called a white fish. Then he hooked a rainbow and threw it back into the pool where at a time way back we saw Mergansers float down like drunk sailors off the side of a ship. (In) the same pool back in '69, we watched "Jay Gatsby" in navy blazer, white flannel trousers and white bucks, trickle down from a party in the summer house across the way, martini glass and cigarette in one hand and fly rod in the other, gulp, drop the glass on the soft green, and with cigarette in teeth pull out a twelve-inch nasty bugger. We hooted and saluted the champ. At the time, I figured it was about as much traffic as the one-of-a-kind gem could withstand.
Steve, my boy, I want someone to speak out against the enemy. Stop wallowing in the backwaters of bureaucratic fair play and your own mumbo-jumbo and stand for what's right. Perhaps in past columns you have. If so I apologize for being too heavy. I read you three times a year. Your Roosevelt High piece was tight, christian action.
The enemy? Look no further than boozy Hunter Thompson's work, about as true as you're going to get, I'd say: "The enemy is any man who is willing to take the necessary steps to protect his own short-term interests -- now or later, often never admitting it even to himself, rarely understanding his own implications, and always a little too human for any moral censure except in the name of fate or expediency."
That's it. Enough of my own mumbo-jumbo and ranting. In the name of keep the bastards out, I remain
-- Fred Newton
Newberg
NPR has a fantastic article on The Bear and The Bow, Pixar's first movie to feature a girl in the starring role, but God help us, she's yet another princess. Linda Holmes writes:
...Little Russell, in Up, is Asian-American, right? And that's not a big plot point; presumably, he just is because there's no particular reason he shouldn't be. You don't need him to be, but you don't need him not to be, either. It's not politics; it's just seeing the whole big world.
Well, the whole big world has a lot of little girls in it, too. And not all of them are princesses -- and the ones who are princesses have plenty of movies to watch.
And even many of them who do aspire to be princesses are mixing their princess tendencies with all manner of other delicious things. Their tiaras fall off when they skin their knees running at top speed; they get fingerpaint on their pink dresses; they chip their front teeth chasing each other in plastic high-heeled shoes.
There's nothing wrong with the movies you're making; I'm sure your princess movie will be my favorite one ever. I'm just saying, keep them in mind, those girls in Band-Aids, because they want to see themselves on screen doing death-defying stunts, too. You're making some of my favorite movies in the whole world right now.
Please, please make one about a girl who isn't a princess.
(Thanks, David.)
11:41: Nelson bricks both freebies, followed by a great "What the eff was that?" face from Hedo Turkoglu. Hedo might have the best "What the eff was that?" face in sports right now. And really, that's the only time you will ever see the words "best" and "face" in the same sentence as "Hedo."
- ESPN's Bill Simmons on Game Two of the NBA Finals. Simmons also had some interesting things to say after Hedo's sweet block on Kobe at the end of regulation:
Important note: Kobe's reputation as a "killer" at the end of games remains overblown. The site www.82games.com just posted a study of game-winning shots from the last five-plus seasons (regular seasons and playoffs since the 2003-04 season) that revealed Kobe was shooting 14-for-56 (25 percent) with one assist and five turnovers, and made 12 of 15 free throws. So let's say that was 70 possessions total, including Sunday night ... he only had one assist in nearly six years??? That's why Orlando quadruple-teamed him in that spot. Kobe is a phenomenal streak shooter, and he has a real talent for catching fire with a lead and closing games out ... but you can stop him in one-shot situations simply because he's his own worst enemy. He wants to be a hero, he's shooting it, and that's that.
0:00.6: Funniest moment of the game: Kobe storms back to the bench, whacks the chair in disgust and sits down as Phil Jackson (already sitting) looks at him with a bemused, "Should I point out to him that MJ absolutely would have passed there?" smile on his face. Classic.
The Powell's blog has a regular feature called Q&A, in which they ask many different authors the same standard questions. This week, they asked religious scholar Huston Smith to "offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer." His response:
The final words of Saint John Chrysostom: "Thanks, thanks for everything; praise, praise for it all."
This is crazy. From the NY Post:
Reader Gary Cicio, NYC podiatrist, did the research, and asks us to choose one of the two options to see a Mariners-Yankees game this season, and from the very best seats:
Option 1: Two tickets to Tuesday night, June 30, Mariners at Yanks, cost for just the tickets, $5,000.
Option 2: Two round-trip airline tickets to Seattle, Friday, Aug. 14, return Sunday the 16th, rental car for three days, two-night double occupancy stay in four-star hotel, two top tickets to both the Saturday and Sunday Yanks-Mariners games, two best-restaurant-in-town dinners for two. Total cost, $2,800. Plus-frequent flyer miles.
(Thanks, David)
From Charles Taylor's review of Killshot, a 2009 DVD:
Is Diane Lane the most believable presence in contemporary American movies? There’s currently no one who better registers both the satisfactions of maturity and the regrets that only deepen with age.
...It’s Ms. Lane who gives this streamlined thriller its rueful edge, personifying, as she often has, the hard-won grace of adulthood.
Diane, please don't ever let me see you on awfulplasticsurgery.com!
From Toure's review of the new Colson Whitehead book, Sag Harbor:
Now that we’ve got a post-black president, all the rest of the post-blacks can be unapologetic as we reshape the iconography of blackness. For so long, the definition of blackness was dominated by the ’60s street-fighting militancy of the Jesses and the irreverent one-foot-out-the-ghetto angry brilliance of the Pryors and the nihilistic, unrepentantly ghetto, new-age thuggishness of the 50 Cents. A decade ago they called post-blacks Oreos because we didn’t think blackness equaled ghetto, didn’t mind having white influencers, didn’t seem full of anger about the past. We were comfortable employing blackness as a grace note rather than as our primary sound. Post-blackness sees blackness not as a dogmatic code worshiping at the altar of the hood and the struggle but as an open-source document, a trope with infinite uses.
The term began in the art world with a class of black artists who were adamant about not being labeled black artists even as their work redefined notions of blackness. Now the meme is slowly expanding into the wider consciousness. For so long we were stamped inauthentic and bullied into an inferiority complex by the harder brothers and sisters, but now it’s our turn to take center stage. Now Kanye, Questlove, Santigold, Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead can do blackness their way without fear of being branded pseudo or incognegro.
From Mary Roach's review of The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Party Saga of a Donner Party Bride:
I kept interrupting my husband, Ed, to relay the latest Donner dinner horror. “They’re toasting their moccasins,” I’d say. Ed happened to be reading Calvin Trillin’s “Feeding a Yen.” “Calvin’s eating fish tacos in Barbados,” he’d answer. It went on this way for 100 pages. Boiled ox bones. Macaroni pie. Luis’s organs! Pain baguette.
One of our most well known posters was done ages ago, in 1989: It says: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met museum?” We went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and did what we like to call “the weenie count.” We counted the number of naked males and naked females in the paintings versus the number of female and male artists [whose works were on display]. Less than 5 percent of the artists were women, but 85 percent of the nudes were female. A couple years ago, we went back to the Met and counted again. We were sure it would be so much better! But in 2005, we found the statistic was less than 3 percent of artists were women and 83 percent [of the] nudes. So, a few less women artists but a few more naked men.
- Guerilla Girl "Kathe Kollwitz" in an article in this week's WW. The Guerilla Girls ("a feminist collective") turn 20 this year.
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