Steve Jobs was the Saul Alinsky of Palo Alto.
Honky culture is vibrant in its own way.
Even the honkies in Palo Alto are deracinated.
It's no South Side of Chicago but East Palo Alto is not not a gang-afflicted minority neighborhood University types like to meddle unproductively in.
What a dumbass article. The order goes Chicago-New York-Palo Alto-Boston, obviously. If your parents are rich, flip Chicago and New York. The University of Chicago is lame not because of its location but because its students are a bunch of lameass dorks; Chicago is like the ideal town for a student, big, fun, and pretty cheap. Admittedly the weather is ass.
When I was researching grad schools, more than one guide said that students often rank weather surprisingly high in surveys about happiness and quality of life.
Presumably because of Halford's longstanding hatred of all things Boston.
Palo Alto at least has great weather, incredibly awesome access to nature, and proximity to a self-satisfied urban playground/current bedroom suburb for computer dudes and badly dressed overgrown children but it does look pretty and have good restaurants "The City." Boston IME is just cold and boring and I HATE BOSTON.
But Boston is already a city itself, was my thinking.
Proximity to the city is so much more tantalizing than being actually in the city. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. Palo Alto and Lynn, Massachusetts are both above Boston and whatever that other city is.
Proximity to the city is so much more tantalizing than being actually in the city.
Yeah, I mean, if you're actually in the city you have to deal with, like, black people and stuff.
I cannot say that was my experience of living in Palo Alto, though I have to admit that I never really fell for San Francisco, either; no, my heart, like the quince or scandalous medlar, softens not at summer's height or even in the hazy autumn, but only after the first freeze, and belongs, therefore, to Chicago, where first it—not ripened, but—bletted.
Yeah, I mean, if you're actually in the city you have to deal with, like, black people and stuff.
Not in San Francisco!
Well, there are plenty of rich black people there. And I guess some of the homeless guys are still black. And there must be some non-gentrified parts of Hunter's Point still there.
I guess trapnel didn't specify if the shooting in front of his apartment involved black people or not.
If you're in Boston right this very moment, you're proximate to me.
In fact, I'm wearing black sweatpants. In Boston.
I guess trapnel didn't specify if the shooting in front of his apartment involved black people or not.
I think it did, though I'm not certain. The vast majority of the folks who hang out at that corner are, in any case. I was kind of surprised to learn that there's been such a dramatic recent shift in demographics: Bayview/HP was almost 50% black in 2000, but was down to 1/3 in 2010.
I'm moving this weekend, to SoMa, where there are apparently junkies hanging out in front of my door most of the time. I'm not clear on their ethnicities, though.
I guess trapnel didn't specify if the shooting in front of his apartment involved black people or not.
I think it did, though I'm not certain. The vast majority of the folks who hang out at that corner are, in any case. I was kind of surprised to learn that there's been such a dramatic recent shift in demographics: Bayview/HP was almost 50% black in 2000, but was down to 1/3 in 2010.
I'm moving this weekend, to SoMa, where there are apparently junkies hanging out in front of my door most of the time. I'm not clear on their ethnicities, though.
If I could move back to the Bay Area, I would definitely pick Berkeley/Oakland(/El Cerrito?/Alameda?) above Palo Alto or even (probably) SF. Maybe I shouldn't be using the word "definitely" in that last sentence.
Not too hott, not too coldd. Just rightt.
I remember hearing in the late 90s/early 2000s, that a lot of black homeowners in the Bay Area who had retired or were near retirement age took advantage of high housing prices to sell and then move to the South.
Hey, I'd be cool with my old over privileged school fixing town. Middletown, CT was nothing to write home about.
Mr. Trapnel will indeed be joining my Soma hellhole. I haven't studied this in any rigorous way, but would guess that the junkies are about 70% white. The annoying loud people are, generally speaking, annoying and loud. That includes the fucking bikers, who are mostly on my end of the building, are not homeless, and apparently can breed motorcycles like bunnies.
The folks around the gate, dog bless them, are mostly harmless, and generally look out for the area. I talk to the homeless folk a lot more than my neighbor. Nothing so much, but a sandwich goes a long way. Never cash.
I rate weather very highly in my personal general happiness. naturally there were other considerations but as I know I have mentioned, I visited harvard, michigan, and berkeley in february, in that order, when I was deciding on grad school, and when the plane landed at SFO the green strip between the runways was starred with yellow flowers, and I could see the bay. fuck it, I thought. I don't need to visit the campus. (I did, of course. but I had decided already.) I love the tropics, although I do miss ever being able to walk around without sweating. basically I miss berkeley. I love my family and I'd love to be near them, but DC weather pretty much sucks.
My theory is that the original draft said SF and someone realized there's no top university there and edited it. Why they chose PA and not Berkeley though is beyond me.
DC in autumn is even more lovely and is the season I miss most. I hate 43 and raining, and object to 103 if there is not going to be a pool right there. my mom just needs to put in a pool and it would be fine.
I hated living in Hyde Park but I was also 26 when I moved there. It might have been fine when I was 18, question mark.
53rd Street had a kind of ratty charm, I guess. Rajun Cajun (to be pronounced ruh-JOON cuh-JOON) certainly needs no upgrading, if it's still there, though I always found people's cathexis to Valois kind of over the top. I would have been glad of Chipotle at the time, since the only places to get a burrito were Pepe's and Maravilla's, both of which were colossally terrible. YES MY LIFE REVOLVES AROUND LUNCH.
Heh. I remember a friend of mine who had lived in Hyde Park for five or six years saying "oh my god I just realized I've been saying Ragin' Cajun all these years and it's ruh-JOON!"
Also it turns out you can live somewhere you don't much care for the weather if it has other things you are excited about (NYC: coming up on 9 years) though eventually it will make you kvetchy. If you live somewhere you find the weather completely miserable (Chicago: 4 years) and there are other miserogenic factors (PhD program, lack of burritos, upper midwest vowels) you may develop Post Traumatic Snow Disorder and spend a lot of time wondering "why did I move to this very cold place?"
I've been saying "Ragin' Cajun" too! What a fool I've been!
If they wanted better burritos, couldn't they have worked with LOCAL ENTREPRENEURS from Pilsen or whatever rather than bringing in Chipotle? But why would you want a burrito when you could go to Rajun Cajun for some fried chicken and dal?
Smearcase, are you saying you aren't excited by a world-class "creative music" scene?
Maravillas did have a delicious horchata, but yes, their burritos were awful. I have now manufactured a memory of someone correcting my pronunciation of Rajun Cajun.
I think Ragin' Cajun is correct pronunciation regardless of spelling. It's like Gloucester.
I always stuck to the Ragin' side of the menu and never tried the fried chicken. Otherwise a man named Harold might come at me with his great axe.
I take it no? What was worst about Maravillas was the guac, which was about 60% sour cream.
I don't think I ever actually went inside Cholie's, but I liked the sign.
I can't really fault the U for trying to appeal to overprivileged North Shore kids whose parents tell them they'll get shot in Hyde Park, since that was once its main constituency. Just so long as Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap remains the same.
And that is all the fond remembering I care to do today.
Proximity to the city is so much more tantalizing than being actually in the city
As a committed urbanite I don't really understand this position. Most of the benefits of being in the city come from being in the city. Especially not needing a car. Being able to walk to the shops or a restaurant/cafe. Being able to get a night bus or affordable taxi home at 3 in the morning. That sort of thing.
I would have said the worst thing about Maravilla's was the watery, flavorless salsa, but really the burritos were equally awful. I remember them as a stale tortilla around a lot of lettuce. Other ingredients were in homeopathic doses.
But why would you want a burrito when you could go to Rajun Cajun for some fried chicken and dal?
If I had to choose between burritos and dal, you'd have to hire Meryl Streep to play me.
Also I feel bad about it, but I like Chipotle.
Me too. I always get the bowl, because rice is enough starch.
All this living in a vibrant community with live music and restaurants is for young people who like to "go out" and "do things."
I dunno. I live in a vibrant community but don't do much in it lately other than sit inside and drink coffee and type things. Still it makes me happy to know it's there.
51: Sophie's Choice reference? Not that funny.
I don't think I ever actually went inside Cholie's, but I liked the sign.
Wow, I haven't thought about Cholie's in years. I never went inside either, only ate it when it was purchased for campus events. It always tasted like cardboard, IIRC.
54: Oh! I thought it had to do with needing to have both a Mexican and an Asian-Indian accent.
It doesn't make any sense, but it's funnier.
It always tasted like cardboard, IIRC.
Did you ever have a pizza puff? I always wondered what those were.
HP has changed a little but not all that much. The mediocre and overpriced establishments are still all in business, including Maravilla's (and Pepe's!). The last burrito I got there made me nauseous, but their margaritas aren't bad. They've added a Five Guys, a fro yo place, and Clark's diner, which manages to be worse than the Clark's diners up north. Supposedly we're getting a Whole Foods, but I'll believe it when I see it. Village Foods has been closed, so there's officially no place to buy cheap staples here anymore. They're definitely trying to appeal to a more wealthy and 'normal' undergrad student body, but, for obvious reasons, they don't really care about grad students happy here.
for obvious reasons, they don't really care about grad students happy here
Because no grad students have ever been happy anywhere?
I read somewhere that they got their B school rankings way up but devoting a ton of resources to "student life" -- concierge service! valet parking! I really could have done with valet; I'm sure it would have been cheaper than what I paid in parking tickets.
I'm sure it would have been cheaper than what I paid in parking tickets.
likely true for me as well. the speeding tickets couldn't have been avoided though. lakeshore just wasn't built to be driving 40 on it.
62: I got a speeding ticket on Lake Shore Drive too! I guess that was the closest thing I got to a diploma from the U. of C.
The best place to eat in Hyde Park is Salonica's.
There's just no reason the speed limit should be 40 on that road, except to provide an excuse for pulling people over.
The best place to eat in Hyde Park is Salonica's
I think it's just called Salonica. Otherwise, yes.
The best place to eat in Hyde Park is the Med!
The Med is also very nice. I have a soft spot for Salonica though. Where else can you get a big pile of gyro meat on top of a big pile of raw onions?
I wonder if there's an educational institution that's caused more harm to the world in the last 50 years than the University of Chicago. I mean, e.g. Bob Jones University is clearly worse, but also less influential.
@60
Peep, no, because the university isn't worried about catering specifically to grad students. Chicago programs are ranked highly enough and currently pay well enough that most people accepted into one will attend even if the neighborhood is complete crap. That is not true of wealthy undergrads with overprotective parents who pay 40K, or B-school students who don't mind giant debt and will one day donate 300 million dollars back to the school.
The Hoover Institution at Steinford is clearly in the running, I guess. But less identified with the University as a whole.
The Med is absolutely not the best place to eat in Hyde Park, though I do like the bread from the bakery.
I really don't understand the Chicago administration's focus on trying to drive up undergraduate enrolment by hook or by crook, or with widening the university's appeal, etc. Was there something wrong with the students the university had previously been attracting? Clearly not, since I was among them. Or with trying to improve their US News ranking, when they should rather be emulating Reed in that regard and not taking part in the shameful exercise.
69: If you extend your timeframe to the last century, you can throw in Chicago Pile-1 and everything that fell out of that.
Clearly not, since I was among them.
Perhaps they wish to increase their proportion of Nosflowian undergraduates.
74: I do not think "emulate Reed" is a strategy likely to gain much favor among U of C administrators.
69: The Kennedy School credentialed more than a few murderous villains.
There were one or two good Mediterranean restaurants, but I think they may have ceased to exist. I have a fondness for Giordano's that I suspect will earn me some sneers from this crowd.
75: and of course the nuclear weapons would never have happened without Cornell.
I remember Giordano's with affection. It's not pizza, but it's good.
Well, none is without their harm-causing, but I'd say that for scale of harm-causing and identification of harm-causing with the entire school, Chicago has to take the cake.
I liked that other place better, but I don't remember it's name.
Let's not forget the School of the Americas.
80: And Cornell wouldn't have happened without the Morrill Act. We can only conclude from this that Buchanan's veto of the first land-grant university bill was a heroic but futile attempt to save humanity from mutually assured destruction.
86: he couldn't have known what a pit of unrepentant evil it would become.
Ok fine, the objective ranking of places to eat in Hyde Park.
1) Harold's
2) The Med
3) Rajoon Cajoon
4) The 27 identical but good Thai places
5) the Div school cafe until you've had everything there 1,000,000,000,000 times
6) Giordano's
7) Salonica
8) that Italian place that's nothing special but the portions are really big
9) Noodles Etcetera or Noodles Inter Alia or Noodles Erat Demonstrandum or Noodles or Fiat Noodles Ruat Caelum or whatever.
1,397,823,224) Maravilla's
Noodles, Noodles, Ted & Alice
I loved the Div School Café -- even when I got a hummus-n-pickle pita (from The Nile?) that had clearly been sitting there for too long so it was all squashy. Love love love.
It's funny -- my two years at Chicago weren't all that bad; classes were interesting, I liked the people I was living with, and so on. But I managed to get out of there with absolutely no affection for the institution or the city. Cambridge and MIT I'm still vaguely attached to in that "My goodness, it's been twenty years," sort of way, but if someone melted everything in Hyde Park into black glass, I wouldn't feel any differently about it than about any other equivalently populated place I hadn't ever lived.
but if someone melted everything in Hyde Park into black glass
The racism is coming form inside the blog!
The Nile! That's what I was trying to remember. Contra oudemia, hummus dipped in lentil soup was the lunch to get from the Div School Café.
88: That looks to be a very serious, thoughtful, ranking that has never been made in such detail or with such care.
The Div school is still by far the best coffee shop. The others are run by clueless undergrads who care more about flirting with each other than learning how to make coffee or rudimentary customer service. The Div school is also the cheapest, and still sell falafel sandwiches for $3. The only food that doesn't get tiresome there is the chocolate frosted doughnuts, and those sell out by about 10.
I really don't understand the Chicago administration's focus on trying to drive up undergraduate enrolment by hook or by crook, or with widening the university's appeal, etc.
I don't actually think these are the considerations motivating UofC admins, and I admit to having felt annoyed by the expansion plans back when I was an undergrad, but I honestly think BdL had the right take on this general topic 4 years ago. In brief, if a Chicago education is a good thing, then there are strong prima facie reasons to try to see whether more people can have it without diluting its quality. And maybe they can't, especially given budget constraints. But the example of the University of California system in the postwar period, which went from 5k graduates a year in 1960 to 40k in '08, is some evidence to the contrary.
91: It probably has something to do with Hyde Park's fifty six thousand eateries per capita.
According to the great wiki, Hyde Park was founded by real estate speculator Paul Cornell, brother of Ezra. The plot thickens.
98: Let's play Cedars, Nile, Fire.
If I had to choose between burritos and dal, you'd have to hire Meryl Streep to play me.
Contra 54, actually very funny.
34: PA = Stanford. Not a vibrant community, but well developed restaurant corridor [University Ave] and other suburbia style attractions. (Plus access to SF in under an hour.)
I have no comment on any of this nonsense, since I wouldn't be caught dead in places like the U of C or Stanford or Boston or the Bay Area, but I would like to interfere in the thread to ask if this plea in my inbox is a worthy cause.
(Ok, fine. I had Pizza Capri programmed into my phone, because I tended to do things like eat nothing but yogurt and a granola bar for 48 hours, then get a whole pizza delivered to my studio apartment and swiftly eat it all up unto goneness. The usual was their roasted potato lemony-wine-sauce thing with no chicken (it is less good with the tiny, spammy bits of chicken). It may have been starvation that made it taste that fucking good. I would spend 6 hours wandering around Powell's and then stagger home to find that I'd set most of the pasta on fire trying to cook it, and the anhedonia... the anhedonia... I can't actually imagine Hyde Park without the anhedonia, which is the best restaurant by default, since it so improves the flavor of any reasonably good food.)
||
OK, this may be the best soccer goal I've ever seen (be sure to watch the close-up replay starting about 46 secs in). Not to mention that it was Ibrahimovic's 4th goal of the match and 3rd in the final 15 minutes or so as he brought Sweden from 2-1 down to a 4-2 victory over England.
|>
104: It was a friendly, so not that consequential, but still. Also, good shirtless action (leading to a yellow card, but as one commentator said that's like yelling at Van Gogh for not cleaning his paint brushes).
104: I love the response to that goal around the 'net. This, for example, is perfect.
105: people abuse the distinction-the players care, the coaches care. They're not necessarily selecting, substituting, nor willing to risk injury to the same extent as in competition, but they really do care.
Now do retting.
Retting retting bo betting...
I don't think you could ret on your person without developing horrible skin conditions.
1. It's pronounced Ragin' Cajun. They catered my wedding, so I claim ultimate authority!
2. Cedars and the Nile are still around, but Cedars moved to Kimbark Plaza.
3. There is now gelato on 53rd Street, but it's kind of mediocre.
4. I had breakfast table away from Jesse Jackson at Valois once. I think people worship it because a guy got a sociology thesis out of it, which is not bad for restaurant with no table service.
There is now gelato on 53rd Street, but it's kind of mediocre.
This goes without saying.