I know it’s said that nobody walks in LA (or alternatively, only nobodies walk in LA). If that were true I’d probably be a great deal happier given that one of the main things that irks me about living in LA is how oblivious people seem to be to other people. This is true, [...]

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Sustainability is all the rage these days.  She who buys the greenest stuff wins (no I won’t comment on the practice of running out to buy the coolest most environmentally friendly widget out there when one could just reuse an old widget or go without widgets entirely).  One of the places where this comes up [...]

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I would like to preface this post by noting that some of the people who know me in person might suspect that this was inspired by a recent very emotional conversation that followed a similar thread (well, to the extent that it followed any threads at all given my state at the time).  In fact [...]

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Am I the only one who thinks there’s something wrong with a world where magazines feature ads for diet drugs for dogs?  It’s bad enough that every time you turn on the TV or flip open a magazine you’re faced with a plethora of blue, purple, and red pills that you’re encouraged to ask your [...]

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Some time last winter the fence at the back of our yard disappeared, leaving nothing between our yard and the yard of the neighbor behind us. Notice how this story starts with a very firm assertion of private property? It’s the nature of fences, I think. They bound where you are from [...]

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I’ve been reading Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan lately. It’s good stuff.
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about the coming primary election. Yes I live under a rock culturally speaking but I do read the Economist and the LA Times pretty frequently and I regularly interact virtually with people who read news from all sorts of places. [...]

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Last weekend I was feeling kind of crappy and decided I’d curl up on the couch and watch some stupid TV. The problem with this plan, of course, was that we don’t have cable, a tivo, or any of the other technologies that allow some sort of control over the stupidness of the available [...]

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I commute 60 miles round trip on days when I go to campus. I’m pretty careful about avoiding the times with the worst traffic, but it still works out to somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours in the car. Lately I’ve decided I’m sick and tired of the selection [...]

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Last week’s Economist has a book review of Philip Legrain’s Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. As I understand it Legrain argues that immigration does not do economic harm to receiving countries and is highly economically beneficial for sending countries. The reviewer jumps off from Legrain’s economic analysis to talk about the intersection [...]

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Last week I logged onto the website of my local credit union to check and see if my rent check had cleared yet. Upon arriving at their website I was greeted by a picture of a large TV with a football player jumping out of it to catch a football and text proclaiming “Buying [...]

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