First Looks category archive

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

H/T Susan for the pic.

Off to drink liberally.

Your tax dollars at work:

Via Delaware Online.

Addendum, Later That Same Week:

Thoreau recounts his mother’s experience. A nugget:

So, to recap: They barked at a middle-aged woman who was recovering from shoulder surgery and didn’t raise her hands fast enough while they were taking naked pictures of her.

And via Thoreau, a Raving of a Feral Genius.

Struggling start-up needs your help for fun and fellowship. All you have to do is show up and pay your tab.

Think of Drinking Liberally as a support group for liberals.

When: 6 p.

Where:
Jack Quinn’s Irish Pub
241 Granby Street
Norfolk, Va. (map)

More about Drinking Liberally.

Back when Ed Koch was mayor of New York and I was working for the railroad, Koch decided that it was okay for the homeless to spend their nights at Penn Station.

For the mayor, it got them out of sight of most of the populace by foisting them on the railroad. (We always wondered why he didn’t invite them to JFK Airport–at least that was city property.)

The three railroads that used that station and their customers and employees didn’t think much of the idea; they did not look kindly to camps being set up in the nooks and crannies of the station (Penn Station is a very large place stretching under several city blocks, with three public levels and many more private ones; it has lots of nooks and crannies). It was not uncommon for employees to come to work to find someone sleeping on the floor in front of their office doors.

I recall one of my co-workers referring to the railroad police’s efforts to deal the situation as “playing water polo with the homeless.”

Now Virginia Beach has taken up water polo with the homeless (there is much more information at the link):

Raymond Strand built a small cabin in a wooded area off Loretta Lane and furnished it with a bed, a stove and a closet. He lived there until a month ago, when Beach officials told him and more than 20 other people to vacate the “tent city” they called home.

Strand since then has moved his belongings just a half-mile, to another wooded lot. It’s a much smaller tent city, but the 62-year-old former Army engineer said he had no other options.

All I can say it that the city’s motto seems to be, “Move ’em up, head ’em out.”

Afterthought:

There’s not enough money to help the homeless, but there always seems to be enough money to “partner” with a developer.

At Comically Vintage.

Offered without comment:

A small, private Floyd County (Va.) school has closed for the week after more than half its students became ill with whooping cough.

At least 30 people associated with Blue Mountain School have been diagnosed with the highly contagious disease, also called pertussis, including 23 of its 45 students, said Shelly Emmett, the alternative school’s director.

(snip)

The outbreak was caused by not properly vaccinating people against the disease, O’Dell (Dr. Molly O’Dell, director of the New River Health District–ed.) said, noting that a subset of the population does not follow vaccination recommendations.

Stephanie Wraith, Contra Costa Teen Correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News, considers prom fashions and asks, “When did hooker chic become in style for prom?”

She suggests some remedies. Here’s one:

Mandate that all chaperones purchase their dresses for the evening from the local prom retailer, too. One glimpse of that history teacher in a strapless minidress should have most girls swearing off such attire for life.

See the rest at the link.

The end of the interminable, pointless, and corrupt college basketball season.

Every since Operation “Odyssey Dawn” started, this song has been stuck in my head.

John Timpane, writing at Philly dot com, considers the influence of the King James Version of the Bible in a fascinating little column. I didn’t know, for example, that, despite its introduction, it was never actually “authorized” by King James, though he “commissioned” the project.

A nugget:

We human beings often use our most beautiful things to poison our world. I hope we are not doing that now. Think of the KJV, created as a compromise between tradition and the needs of a young faith. Its creators, wary and weary of sectarian strife, hoped it could bring peace, lead the faithful to the God they sought.

It has done that in millions of lives – and in some of the most sublime English ever written. But a particular way of reading it has been made into ground zero by those who can’t stand others not belonging to their church. Or party.

Dick Polman shines the light (sorry, couldn’t resist) on Michelle Backmann’s crusade against CFLs* (follow the link for the complete article):

Michele Bachmann, who is basically Sarah Palin with better articulation, appears to be mapping a 2012 Republican presidential bid. Swell. This means we’ll be hearing a lot more about how the socialists are coming to take away our incandescent lightbulbs.

Seriously, this is one of Bachmann’s big causes. She happens to be flat wrong on the facts, but people who pay attention to facts probably wouldn’t vote for her anyway. Besides, she’s interested in being visceral, not empirical, and the lightbulb shtick is a wonderful way to quicken tea party pulses.

The last sentence of the excerpt above does not go far enough.

Bachmann, Palin, and, indeed much of the Republican Party don’t care for or about facts–consider Newt the Gingrinch’s flippity flops on intervention in Libya.

They say today whatever they think will get attention, feed the base, and fool the middle, then say the opposite tomorrow, if they think it will get attention, feed the base, and fool the middle.

Republicans don’t have positions.

They have press releases.
_________________

*The bill requiring more efficient light bulbs was passed under George Bush with support from his administration.

Facebook, cells, and cells:

Via MarketWatch.

This headline makes me think of Dune:

Police seize spice in Newport News

Drinking liberally.