This is just so fucking lazy. The mayor is black AND female AND gay AND she's called Lori Lightfoot? Like what, she's a hobbit superhero? And the conservative bad guy is Ed(mund) Burke? Fuck off back to wherever you came from and leave the writing to professionals.
I told a friend recently, in re "Detroit-style" pizza, that the whole of the Midwest is, to me, deniable as to existence and value. Chicago included.
1: If only she were also Canadian and the bad guy was named Edmund Fitzgerald.
What's lazy is Burke's bribery circumlocution.
'"So did we land the, uh, the tuna?" Ald. Burke allegedly asked about one developer he was targeting for legal work.'
You know, from all that tuna fishing in Lake Michigan.
Has anybody read that book about how Chicago colonized the Midwest by standardizing the size of grainsacks and stuff?
There's a kind of trendy Detroit-style pizza place here. It's not as bad as Chicago-style.
that the whole of the Midwest is, to me, deniable as to existence and value. Chicago included.
It's intellectually lazy to shit on the midwest.
Not as lazy as shitting on the south.
The south has a bigger temper about it.
Per Linklater, Heebie technically dwells in Mexico, so the shit will miss her regardless.
So that's two reasons to shit on the south.
Texas isn't the "south". Texas is just Texas.
East Texas is definitely the south. But I don't live in east Texas.
Speaking of, has anyone read Meyer's The Son? The TV show is really not good but it got me interested in the book.
13: The animated map thing in Bernie! I'm sure we did that before.
AIHMHB, the Beaumont accent is not the Southern Belle accent, but it's the accent you automatically use when you're trying to pretend to be as utterly dumb a yokel as possible. It's impressive.
And, have you watched Boyhood yet? You'd really love it, totally unstressful I promise.
The real experts aren't pretending.
I am ashamed that I have not yet watched Boyhood yet.
I haven't seen Bernie because I'm allergic to Jack Black.
He's actually a really good actor.
Texas is just where the South intersects with the Southwest.
2. Apoplexy. Which warren of pointless shanties do you come from, I'd like to respond with an equally nuanced assessment.
To the OP, Chance the rapper bough Chicagoist a while back. At the time he put out an informative video explaining aldermanic politics in Chicago.
Bernie is a fantastic movie, I've gotta say that I was a little uncomfortable with the slanted biography aspect though.
Wikipedia explains: Between the time of his release in 2014 and his resentencing in April 2016 Tiede resided in Austin, Texas, in filmmaker Richard Linklater's garage apartment, which was a condition of his release.
26: Very uncomfortable! But Linklater says the entire Carthage population was behind Bernie, and I see no reason to disbelieve him. And the Before... series is so fucking good. Just the hope of a next installment is almost enough to keep one going. And in #2 they walked right opposite the Notre Dame! It's us, on film.
Rode a boat. Whatever. It's a good story.
Wikipedia explains: Between the time of his release in 2014 and his resentencing in April 2016 Tiede resided in Austin, Texas, in filmmaker Richard Linklater's garage apartment, which was a condition of his release.
"You wanna use the power of cinema to sway public opinion in his favor? You deal with him."
2: Please continue to tell everyone this. Tell them that the midwest, in particular Minneapolis, is a total disaster area, horrible, nothing whatsoever good about it. Jobs, people, landscape, options for amusement, rents - all utterly beyond redemption. Then they won't move here and fuck it up.
2: Please continue to tell everyone this. Tell them that the midwest, in particular Minneapolis, is a total disaster area, horrible, nothing whatsoever good about it. Jobs, people, landscape, options for amusement, rents - all utterly beyond redemption. Then they won't move here and fuck it up.
7
It's intellectually lazy to shit on the midwest.
I had a layover in flyover country once, Cincinnati or something. Three out of four airport bars were closed at 4 PM on a Friday. Truth is a defense.
34: Cincinnati's airport isn't a major hub, which leads to airport places having weird hours. Also, said airport is not in any way in the midwest.
It's because they're so badass that drinking hours are 9pm to noon, you hit them when everyone was sleeping off Thursday's activities.
I guess it's reasonable to decide the Midwest must not exist, since none of us can ever agree about where it is.
For people confused by 38, Cincinnati's airport in is in Kentucky.
None of this is changing my mind. Perhaps if you were to sic your suety, sweaty serial killers on your tiresome "nice" politicians I'd become more inclined to indulge your little perorations about the famous Duluth brake pad tacos or Muncie's shimmering spot in the tapestry of trade union history.
40: You have clearly given this much deep thought and one can only admire the strength of your convictions.
34. Was there sewage? LGA is worse.
40. Steinberg summarized this provincial attitude with a drawing printed on the cover of the New Yorker in 1976. Narcissism of small differences maybe-- the other variant, maybe also one that somehow helps you, is snobbiness about time-- "so last year." I hope you're trying for humor.
Does the midwest really have more serial killers? I mean, leaving aside Cleveland.
New York has Joel Rifkin and Son of Sam. Mason was a Californian and Ted Bundy was in the west.
43: Probably not, but the claim is just that our* serial killers are sweaty and full of suet, unlike the lean serial killers of California, cooled by the sweet sea breezes.
* Pittsburgh is Midwest, but not exclusively.
When you put it that way, it seems reasonable.
I'm trying to restrain myself from regretting that Pittsburgh has no noteworthy serial killers.
Unless you count Frick, of course.
One of our parks is named after a brutal robber baron and the other after a statutory rape.
I thought Frack was the one people in Pittsburgh were mad about.
My mom always used to talk about Frick and Frack.
I fear you people are not taking my election-year-vicinity disdain for the heartland's apocryphal paraphernalia seriously.
We take your every utterance seriously.
I quite like the idea of using famous directors as part of the criminal justice process. "Mr Hick, you have committed a very serious crime. I have no alternative but to sentence you to a term of imprisonment of no less than five years, of which two years are to be spent in a state penitentiary and the other three in Werner Herzog's granny flat."
I could be the next Klaus Kinski, but hopefully less horrible.
Also Minnesota isn't the Midwest. Large parts of it fall within the Selkirk Concession and are thus rightfully Canada Irredenta.
38: That part of Kentucky really sort of is, I'd argue. But Fiona the baby hippo didn't want to see Flip anyway, so he can keep his disdain far away.
I've only been to that part of Kentucky for a connecting flight. Otherwise, I've been to the parts where Abraham Lincoln left look cabins around and to the fancy horse track.
Lexington. That was what they called it.
Was it decadent and depraved?
Nobody was having sex with the horses, if that's what you mean. Just gambling and drinking.
This guy once told me that, but frankly he didn't seem very reliable.
38: That part of Kentucky really sort of is [the Midwest]
Other way around: Cincinnati is a city that rightfully belongs in Kentucky. Ohio can have all of Indiana to make up for the loss.
Ohio need punished, but it doesn't deserve that.
Relatedly: someone from Cleveland recently told me that her city's joking motto was "At least we're not Detroit!" I didn't have the heart to tell her that Detroit is definitely cooler than Cleveland.
Drew Cary and LeBron James should do something about that.
Maybe they should do what Cincinnati did and drop live turkeys from a helicopter.
As God as his witness, Les Nessman thought turkeys could fly.
They can fly, but only with ground effect. As do certain conveyances with which the blog is familiar, and for which the rivers of Cincinnati would appear to be ideal.
Wild turkey can fly reasonably well.
Airborne distribution of liquor would definitely be decadent.
The "cold Kentucky rain" referred to in the Elvis song is actually aerosol-distributed bourbon and Coke.
"Warm Kentucky Rain" is also known as the "Donald Trump Special."
||
Marianne Williamson's speeches sound like they were formulated to be read. Long sentences, long words, complex paragraph structures. Competently delivered, at least.
|>
Continuing hijack: in an odd quirk, I saw Williamson and Bernie Sanders each give quick speeches in the same room/meeting.
It left me warmer to Bernie than I had been before; I was reminded of the power of his message's simplicity, although he veered dangerously close to sounding like hectoring/blaming young people (the room's primary occupants) in a bit about acting rather than just complaining. The oddest part of the combination was that he and Williamson both had a bit about how black people, women, and a third group took their rights for themselves rather than being given them by the kindness of others; so near tone- and construction-identical (three-in-a-row parallelism) it sounded like one had cribbed from the other.
On a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 is "standing in Burlington wearing a 'Feel the Bern' shirt while holding a Ben & Jerry's pint", how warmly do you feel?
Bernie said Ben Cohen was in the room with him. I didn't see but assume he was telling the truth since he said the same of Cornel West whom I did see.
Ben Cohen is such a generic name there's probably one in every room containing more than 100 Americans.
It's a very common name, but probably significantly less evenly distributed than most.
Unlike your all-American Nguyễn Văn Hưng, for instance.
Nebraska provides documents in three languages: English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
70. They can actually fly well enough that they roost overnight in the trees. That requires flying to a specific target, not just flying away from a threat.
83: Yes. Or at least for the driving test.
|| Google Cloud went down. That's going to leave a mark. |>
I guess they stopped Vietnamese. I didn't know that.
Presumably most of the Vietnamese getting driving tests are second or third generation by now?
Vietnamese-Americans probably are more evenly spread across the country than Jews. After the war the government resettled them primarily in cities with large military bases, which are all over the places, whereas Jews tend to congregate in a smaller number of large cities.
90: Slightly over 50% of Vietnamese-Americans live in California or Texas. Jewish Americans are more spread out in terms of states, but probably somewhat more urban. I think this can be argued either way, depending on your preferred metric of spread.
91: Interesting. How does that compare with other immigrant groups. I'd be unsurprised if "50% live in CA/TX+x" were a common pattern.
Too lazy to put much effort into searching as the data isn't always as easy to find, but one clear case: 73% of Hmong-Americans live in California, Minnesota, or Wisconsin. I suspect California is a focus of settlement for many countries of Asian origin, while Texas is probably a particularly Vietnamese-American destination.
For an amazing second I thought that this funny twitter thread was by the same person who did those Flemish airplane toilet paper collar portraits, but no.
Houston is the most diverse city in the US.
According to some survey none of us have ever heard of.
Carcinogens will do that for you. Faster speciation.
Queens is both larger and more diverse than Houston, but it gets grouped with Staten Island to pull down its average.
Queens is larger than Houston?! Houston proper or Houston MSA?
I suppose the diversity of Houston probably gets diluted as well, if we're talking Houston MSA.
Let's use Houston proper to beat Queens in diversity, and Houston MSA to beat Queens in population, and Houston Astros to beat Queens in sportsball.
Nothing like coming home and having a raging three hour argument with ones parents and brother about Trump.
That sounds productive. Is he still president?
I thought you'd decided to disown them?
103 I'd check the New York Times or the Washington Post but apparently those are not reliable sources.
104 Pretty hard to do when I stay in their house when I come back on leave.
It was actually closer to four hours. I didn't want to argue about this but my Trump-supporting brother is here and he'd been drinking and he steered the conversation that way and once the topic is broached I'll damn well say what I think.
Houston MSA to beat Queens in population
Yeah, but if you look at the Queens MSA, which has four other boroughs, you get more population than the Houston MSA. Also the Astros were so bad they got kicked out of the National League.
Actually, I count the other four boroughs as part of Houston. Sorrrrrryyyy.
Christ, Barry. Are you going to have a cortisol hangover? Those are the worst.
Also, the Astros have a better name than the Texans, which cracks me up because it's such a non-mascot. You're the Houston, Texans? You're the Texans from Houston? You're the Peoples from City State? Okay, why not.
My phone's browser used to autocomplete "un" as "unfogged.com" but now it's going to "unl.edu" and I blame Moby.
Has anybody read that book about how Chicago colonized the Midwest by standardizing the size of grainsacks and stuff?
It's good, but I haven't read it in years so I don't know if my memory that the chapters on specific commodities (lumber, grain, meat) are much more engaging than the rest of the book is accurate. The early parts about geographical approaches to analyzing urban centrality still stand out too.
Also, it's called Nature's Metropolis for anyone for whom the references to it here are as obscure as metaphors of charismatic minifauna were in the context of whatever that context was.
Possibly closer to the post topic, I'm also going to recommend James Grossman's Land of Hope, about Chicago and the Great Migration in the years around World War I.
113. The "urban centrality" of Chicago seems sort of over-determined. They even tried to burn it down and it didn't take. That's grit.
For those who prefer their corruption English, the most astonishing small scandal today is the news that David Prescott, son of the former Labour deputy leader John Prescott, had his advances turned down by a woman in 2009. He responded by taking a dump on her kitchen floor.
Yet he remained a member of the party; some journalists at least knew what had happened -- a mocking an indirect reference appeared in the New Statesman at about that time -- but others knew only that he had come under a cloud of some sort.
Skip forward to 2015. He was an early backer of Corbyn and was rewarded with a shot at a safe seat. In 2017, a young woman MP came to Corbyn personally and one of this senior consigleri, Karie Murphy, and recounted, almost in tears, an unrelated attempt Prescott had made on her virtue. Two more women, students, were also cited as victims.
Nothing was done. Eventually the scandal came to light in yesterday's papers.
This is one of the many things that makes me believe that Corbyn's policies are entirely irrelevant. The central problem is that in a crisis he makes infallibly wrong choices and will always protect his cronies. So he should never be Prime Minister, or hold any position of responsibility. (This has of course always been the opinion of his parliamentary colleagues)
By "they", you mean "cows". Eat them before they burn us out.
St Louis on the face of it would be even more determined.
Leaving aside everything else, if you felt the urge coming on, wouldn't it make sense to take a dump before you made advances on anybody? Just on the off chance that they said yes.
119: The Erie Canal is the determining factor there. If the geography of the Mohawk River valley or Niagara Escarpment were even slightly different, the Midwest would be unrecognizable.
120: Had to read this a few times to realize that you weren't qualifying it with "on their kitchen floor." It seems presumptuous and self-defeating to assume that they'd be into that.
Maybe what they say about British public schools is true?
When you get shot down by a bird and you've got to lay a turd...
A Tory would have asked in a restaurant so he could take the dump where there's staff to clean it up.
Also, I'd be interested in NW's take on this from the other day.
No |||> because honestly wtf I don't even know.
I haven't read the Chicago book, obvs.
Chicago vs. St. Louis and the orientation of commercial traffic from north south vs east west comes up in Nature's Metropolis, for those who might think a book could be worth reading even if some of its arguments can be anticipated easily. But again, I think the analyses of commodities more than Chicago was important, dontcha know, are the main reasons to read it.
Jonathan Franzen says its because the St Louisians wouldn't approve bonds to pay for railway bridges over the rivers.
128: but Chicago already started to gain preeminence during the canal era, right? And some of the most important railways followed paths close to the canals. (Most obvious here with the disastrous Pennsylvania Main Line canal system.) And sure, you can ship grain downriver, and that did happen, but the bigger markets are due east.
I have lots of takes on the rise of religious fundamentalism as a way to prop up authoritarianism. Unfortunately I also have deadlines and will be lost for a couple of hours at least.
No way you got this far without blowing lots of deadlines.
138: Agglomeration, first mover advantage, sure. But I'm thinking the Midwest was big enough for more than one metropolis.
Jonathan Franzen is the most trusted source of Midwest history and analysis.
Since the Highlanders settled in Appalachia, you know.
I thought Chicago was just the best place to get goods from the Mississippi/Ohio system to the St. Lawrence system by water.
He's probably read the book. His Boston novel has this whole excursion on the Mass Bay Company or something that looks like real history.
And "the biggest markets were in the East". Wasn't the biggest market in Europe, actually? And what's the margin on shipping NY-Europe vs NL-Europe? NY is closer, but NL is downstream all the way, no canal toll.
going all the way back to 1: She is clearly a minor character from the Silver Age Superman comics who was supposed to be a recurring character/alternate love interest for Superman but didn't catch on with the public. And now Grant Morrison or someone brought her back and reinvented her as a lesbian political activist.
And turns out Syrah is just another name for Shiraz. Assholes.
I mean, it's a perfectly ok wine. But I wouldn't have bought it if it just said Shiraz, like an honest non-French person.
144: It is, although I don't think that matters as much if you're shipping downriver. The Great Lakes watershed doesn't extend very far from the lakes on the American side, so any given farm is close to a Mississippi tributary, and probably reasonably close to a navigable one. The question is why shipping didn't go downriver (making St Louis preeminent), but IMO the fact that most shipping could go east explains that.
As for why the Midwest didn't develop two huge metropolises, I dunno. Two equal size cities probably aren't as useful. Something about the rank-size distribution.
St Louis was bigger than Chicago in 1870, but after that Chicago had a huge growth spurt that St. Louis didn't match.
151.2: Rationality hah! In terms of water shipping AIUI it's all much of a muchness, but by rail distance counts and Chicago is much less central than St Louis. (This is much more fun than reading a 500-page book.)
152: Railways! Franzen smart!
rail distance counts and Chicago is much less central than St Louis.
But Chicago was more central to the part of the country not hollowed out by war.
156. Chicago was also more central to trade between the new grain-growing areas and manufacturers in the east. Originally (on the eastern side) it was partly lake and canal based, then eventually railroad based. St. Louis has a much longer water route to the east coast.
156: Elaborate? How quickly did the South recover? My vague impression is most of the cotton moved by rail to the E seaboard. Which implies* post-Sherman there was opportunity for river-based systems.
*In sync with soil exhaustion and the migration of cotton culture westward.
OT: If red state Democrats boycotted the Census what would happen?
The Europe point was a good one. Chicago is also closer by rail to the eastern ports than St Louis is (on average) to New Orleans by river or Charleston and Savannah by rail. And as Spike says the war properly greatly hampered both shipping and production in territories closer to St Louis.
Also, lawyers, what say you?
161: Closer on the map, or closer even when adjusted for cost?
I have no idea what corresponding railroad miles in the north vs south cost in the late 1800s. I assume comparable but am not going to actually research it. River shipping needs to take into account the amortized cost of getting the boat back upriver. I tried doing research on this but it's beyond what I can do on my phone while commuting; none the less, the fact that railroads became the primary method points to them being cheaper in many instances. (Although I see river shipping of commodities every day still, so it's not like that ever became unviable in all cases.)
By foot, over the Appalachian foothills. I expect to be replaced by someone who commutes via mule-powered canal boat.
160: Why? I was hoping y'all would help me game this out.
Blue places would appear to have fewer people than they do and would accordingly be underrepresented.
We should have a geology reading group. And by "we", I mean you guys who read stuff.
169: We absolutely should. I repeatedly find it an annoyingly big hole in my knowledge.
That being said, my conversations with Stormcrow (yes yes VSOOBC or whatever) have led me to believe that learning geology involves a lot of staring at black-and-white photos of different rocks. Which sounds less pleasant than bullshitting about 19th century transportation costs.
How quickly did the South recover?
Well, one gauge is that they didn't have enough money to start building a lot of monuments to dead confederates until the early 20th century. In the north, by contrast, towns were getting their Union soldier statues in the 1870s.
This is much more fun than reading a 500-page book.)
In fairness, I think there are a lot of footnotes. Also, I took my copy out of storage recently and my first thought was that it's much longer than I remembered.
170: How Chicago was created by the last ice age or whatever.
168: The gerrymandering of red states may mean it's possible for Democratic districts to not lose any representation while the states themselves lose overall.
The existence of the NA Great Lakes has not been explained to my satisfaction, tbh.
Geology is the bestest. I should have been a geologist. I would be mercifully dead in a rockburst or strike by now.
Niagara Escarpment plus glacially flattened land, I guess? Maybe also somehow affected by the old inland seaway? North America has had a bunch of huge temporary lakes in geologically recent time, so it seems to be a common variation on a theme. What gets me is how small the watershed is, relatively. Some huge percentage of the rain that ends up in the lakes falls on the lakes.
Right!!??! Like Africa, it's rift valleys, depressions with volcanoes around, I get it, I think. But NA, where are the faults? Where are the rifts? They're just puddles, except Superior.
When Lake Monogahela comes back, my basement water problem will be much worse.
It looks like a hill, but it's actually the side of a valley.
Everywhere in Pittsburgh and most of southwest PA is either on a (non-orogenic) hill or directly next to a stream. I can't say "dissected plateau" often enough. It's fractal drainage all the way down.
So you're living in a Banks novel, basically.
Speaking of St. Louis, they seem to be under water right now.
Anyway, I have a long, steep climb home after I get off the bus.
176: If a red state loses a district they can either eliminate a Republican seat or absorb the Democratic voters and weaken their gerrymander. In 2018, the Democrats made gains by just barely breaching that gerrymander.
Practically speaking I believe Montana-At Large may be the biggest district and thus Montana is on the verge of going from 1 to 2 districts. This is where the non-Republican boycotts should start.
Aren't some federal programs allocated based on census results?
Yes, the idea of wanting NOT to be counted in the census just for the sake of marginal effects on the Electoral College and congressional districts is crazy. Making it all the crazier that the Republicans in all their efforts to try to manipulate the census are ONLY thinking of manipulating the Electoral College and congressional districts at the margins.
I guess a boycott by red district Dems would be better. I'm working under the belief that marginal changes in federal allocations are unimportant compared to the electoral results.
180. They are indeed just puddles, but carefully prepared ones. Glaciers advancing and retreating scraped out the basins that now house the lakes, and the melting of the glaciers filled them with water.
Ned made this point already, but yeah: Census figures are important for all sorts of federal programs, so while Eggplant's idea might work in narrow electoral terms it would be a disaster for the red state Dems (which in practice mostly means black people in the South) themselves.
I'm the third hold in line for Nature's Metropolis, which was published in 1992? Does Unfogged have so many lurkers or did it come up in a larger context recently?
Not that I know of. The clusterfuck of the US rail system, centered you-know-where, seems gradually to have been emerging into consciousness?
Should I be worried if a white tail deer won't run away from me? It's maybe 15 yards away in plain sight. Related: If I put meat on the grill, will it try to steal it?
No, and probably no. The deer in the cemetery are very bold but not obviously rabid or anything.
Folks are thinking we're going to get a congressional seat out of the census. If we do, it'll be blue.
I suppose not, but they've always run away when the door opens before.
And, of course, our legislative seats are also apportioned based on the census. I don't think there'd be much support for reducing our position in the legislature. Much of the growth in the last decade has been in bluer areas. Well, actually, it sorts. So, what, you think we should give that up? I'm totally not seeing the logic.
201. They are getting used to you, having realized you are harmless. We have a lot of deer. Initially they run when they see you, or open a door or window. Then they only run if you yell at them or wave your arms. After a while, they only run if you run at them. Eventually you have to do all those things, and even then they walk slowly away like guests at a terrible party.
Moral of story: deer are not as stupid as they look.
So I should shoot them is what you're saying?
He's saying let them walk right up to the grill, then shoot them.
I just assumed you had a firepit.