Sapere Aude
Month: October 2011
i am glad someone is correcting the misconception that home improvement happens when it is nice out. say hello to the 24/7 hardware store: improvements when you need it, and crucially, when you actually have time for it.
nuthouse hardware
202 e 29th st
nyc
The first thing to know is that the Mojave Air and Spaceport, as it’s officially known, isn’t just a graveyard for inactive planes. It’s an active airport, home to one of the nation’s only civilian test pilot schools, and most famously the place where Space Ship One was developed and performed the first privately-funded human spaceflight in 2004. But it also functions as a giant parking lot for 100s of jets owned by 10s of different entities, from major airlines to private individuals. If an airline doesn’t anticipate needing some of its planes for an extended period of time, it’s much cheaper for them to park those planes in the desert and have maintenance crews check them out once every few weeks than to keep them active.
Some planes have been there only a few months — some have been there for years and years, owned by companies that rent space at the boneyard by the km2.
The most fascinating part of the facility, to me at least, is the boneyard itself. This is where planes that are no longer valuable enough to be repaired and put back into service — totaled, as it were — are cannibalized for spare parts. It’s not a delicate operation: the planes are ripped apart by big machines, torn into piles of fuselage that look, standing amidst them, like the aftermath of terrible crashes.
the mexican mafia acts like a government: collecting taxes, enforcing property rights and adjudicating disputes.
as the MM grew in power it started to provide public goods, i.e. it became a kind of government. Thus, the MM protects taxpayers both in prison and on the street, it produces property rights by enforcing gang claims to territory and it adjudicates disputes, all to the extent that such actions increase tax revenue of course. The MM is so powerful that it often doesn’t even have to use its own enforcers; instead, the MM can issue what amounts to a letter of marque and reprisal, a signal that a non-taxpaying gang is no longer under its protection, and privateers will do the rest.
“It’s good. So is hot chicken McNuggets and real honey, neither is good for you, but only one has scenester/yuppie line with strollers and no room to stand for this Chinatown peasant grub. It’s for the tools who can’t go into Chinatown and want some slick furniture.”
dinner at the great ny noodletown. dinner for 3 for $30, not bad.
it is true: entrees are overrated. i am usually much happier getting a bunch of appetizers instead.
You’re amazed when the busboys clear your table in preparation for the arrival of the entrée. It’s not that you’re full; it’s that you forgot what you ordered. The fish with the thing? The meat with the other thing? Or the chicken with no thing at all, except its pedigree? And then the entrées come and you realize: It doesn’t matter. Whatever you ordered, you now have to eat it, in the same way you’ve had to eat everything all your life. Yours: the tile of line-caught halibut, with the succotash risotto and the potatoes hashed with pork-belly jus. Hers: the sweating pork chop brined in bacon grease and pomegranate emulsion, sharing pride of place with a 6-minute egg nestled in a haystack of shredded asparagus. They both sounded pretty good. But then you feel yourself chewing, and suddenly the whole compact of America’s food revolution — that the food, and thus you, will be transformed — has been broken. The fish is just fish, the pork is just pork, and for the first time you don’t think to share.
And you understand something: that although, like all American eaters, you’ve been conditioned to think of the entrée as the climax of the meal, it never is. It is, indeed, almost always disappointing, especially if you order fish.
publishers and tv networks are some of those middlemen we no longer need.
Book publishers should be scared. After multiple major publishers played hardball with Amazon over the price of eBooks in the Kindle store, Amazon could very well woo away big name writers with promises of big digital sales and a huge marketing push through the Kindle. That could also translate into lower prices for books for consumers, given there will be less mouths to feed if they were to cut out the middleman.
We had come to Mars Bar, the only spot putrid and rank enough to still evoke the East Village of the mythically gritty 1970s, in advance of its destruction this August to make way for—what else?—luxury apartments. It’s tiny, infested with rust, blood, disease and worse. For many, it’s the only good bar left in the city, and its passing is an occasion to lament.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 