The New Yorker: John Updike issue. Amazing. The excerpts from his writing over the decade were magnificent. Starting the current issue with A-Rod on the cover signing autographs for cartoon kids with Popeye arms.
Saturday by Ian McEwan. Due to a review in the current New Yorker. I kindled a copy and started it on a flight. About a brain surgeon. Great voice.
My Life in France by Julia Child. Recommended by Chas. Dubow at Businessweek.com in response to last weekend’s sausage posting. I need to post more on French cooking, one of my winter weekend hobbies. Julia Child was more than the woozy TV cook played by Dan Ackroyd on SNL, she wrote the bestselling treatise on French cooking for the American cook and loved France with a passion. Just a great book. I’d put it on the shelf next to A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals and Geo. Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.
Atlantic Monthly – crash issue. Four different covers for four seperate metro markets. Each with the tag line that New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco come out for the better after the current panic abates. Custom magazine covers aren’t news. The issue is okay. I need to go back and find the ultra prescient piece by James Fallows on the coming meltdown. Here it is. Great piece of early eco/sci fi crashapalooza set in 2016. It freaked me out when I read it three years ago, and I think a lot about it today.
Movies
The Reader, Kate Winslet up for best actress. I could argue for that.
Le Jour se Leve, 1939. Jean Gabin, directed by Marcel Carne. Wow. Poetic Realism at its best. Jules Berry as the evil dog trainer was pretty awesome.
I just climbed off the erg for the first time since Jan 7. Six weeks without exercise (other than beach walks) has left me fat and out of shape. So back on to the erg I went today — 5,000 meters in under 20 minutes so the news wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. Rotator cuff not affected by the stroke, so it would appear I have no more excuses and can try to work off the pounds in anticipation for the first water row on or around St. Pat’s.
I have over 500,000 meters logged so far in the Concept 2 log book for the year (C2’s year begins May 1), maybe I can get another 100K onto the books before the calendar resets.
Tomorrow is the CRASH-B sprints in Boston. I have an entry, but I think my best effort might be a feeble 7:30-7:45. Maybe I should man up and waddle up there anyway. Guilt will weigh on me for the rest of the day. And this was to be the year I went for a 6:15 race as it is my first in the 50+ heavyweight category. Oh well. Always next year.
The New York Times took the words out of my mouth Friday morning by raising the criticism that the economic stimulus package – which is long on tax breaks and non-infrastructure projects – totally misses the opportunity to restore the American railroad network through a heavy investment in high-speed train lines on the two coasts.
“It may be the longest train delay in history: more than 40 years after the first bullet trains zipped through Japan, the United States still lacks true high-speed rail. And despite the record $8 billion investment in high-speed rail added at the last minute to the new economic stimulus package, that may not change any time soon.”
Acela is a feeble disappointment, hamstrung by a 19th century railroad bed from Boston to Washington and a xenophobic Congress that demanded the train be built in the US on inferior American technology rather than on the state of the art advances seen in France, Japan and China. Result? A bad train capable of 150 mph that generally runs at 86 mph except for a brief stretch in Rhode Island near the site of the Great Swamp Fight. The French TGV operates at average speeds of 173. I should, in this era, be able to ride from Providence, Rhode Island to New York Penn Station in two hours. I should be taking the train from New England to North Carolina and accomplishing the 750 mile trip in less than six hours. Instead I get $100+ one way ticket prices, no wireless, antiquated speeds, and broken down equipment. Thomas Friedman is right – walk through the new airport in Beijing and then walk through JFK and tell me who is the superpower.
“A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.
Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.
The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.
All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity?”
I don’t think it is backwards nostalgia to state that America was built on the strength of its railroad, was a pioneer in mass transit at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries with its Interurban line systems, and then let it all go to hell in the 1960s when the Eisenhower administration decided to pave America with superhighways. The result was the birth of the automobile society, the rise of Detroit, and a short-term mortgage on our future predicated on $0.25 a gallon gas, muscle cars, and the Kerouacian vision of every man expending his rugged individualism on the highway to hell.
Meanwhile the railroad slipped from backbone to creaking embarrassment. Not to be a cheese-eating/European-loving surrender monkey, but I did spend two years of my life in Switzerland and got a close look at how mass transit is supposed to work. From my government subsidized “halb-tax” pass, to a precise schedule that insured the train arrived at a station on time where a bus arrived – on time — to make the transfer to essentially any spot in the country within a half-kilometer of one’s final destination … this obsessive coordination included mountain trams! How did the Swiss and rest of Europe do it? First they taxed the snot out of a liter of gas, making it prohibitively expensive. Then they invested those taxes in the subsidization of the railroad, making it the most attractive form of transportation there is.
If the objective of the stimulus package was to turn things around for the future then why doesn’t it reduce reliance on petroleum, create heavy duty public works projects, push a green agenda, increase the efficiency of travel and commerce …. why didn’t Congress stuff a ton of cash into a total rebuild of the coastal rail systems? Instead we get a weak last minute allotment and keep shipping stacks of cash to Detroit. I don’t want to make this a car vs. rail post – but if we learned anything since the Oil Embargo thirty years ago, it’s that the car is doomed in the long term. Amtrak is a joke, kept on life support, and barely so, by a congress enthralled with the Big Automotive Supply Chain and the public works implications of an ever expanding federal superhighway system.
The historian in me can’t help but compare these early days of the Obama administration with FDR’s 100 Days – nowhere do I see the same hardnosed emphasis on public works, reform, and true Keynesian stimulus that my grandparents saw with the rise of the WPA, the CCC, and the reforms of Glass-Steagall. As rock-ribbed Cape Cod Yankee Republicans they were doubtlessly horrified by the socialization of the American economy, but the net result of FDR’s stimulus was a pump priming that put people to work. This package reeks of give-backs, tax breaks and dispensations to people who can’t pay their bills and not an investment in the future that government can, and has made in the past. This is the time to rebuild our power grid, air traffic control systems, railroads, nuclear power, wind, solar, invest in a new DARPA, and find the technical innovations that will drive the next generation of progress.
