Christmas movies are so corny. This year we watched Love, Actually. It’s a feel-good, very watchable chic flick. Loved this track from it by Darlene Love, although the video is for Home Alone 2 (which I also enjoyed years ago). This holiday fanatic is always looking for good christmas flicks, so if you have a rec let me know :-)
missing Christmas in New York
Holidays in the tropics just isn’t the same as Christmas in New York. This year my annual leave happened to fall short of letting us stay in the city for Christmas, but at least I got to catch most of the holiday frenzy. It’s the time of year to enjoy the tourist areas of Rockefeller and Fifth Avenue, normally avoided like the plague the rest of the year. I especially love the creative window displays where department stores try to outdo each other– including their own past displays– every year. Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth never disappoints, and it’s a dense visual feast this year. Merry Christmas everyone!
Kermit Ruffins’ A Saints Christmas
Here’s a great piece by jazz trumpeter Kermit Ruffins. All I want for Christmas is the Saints in the Superbowl! Who dat wear that Black and Gold! Geaux Saints!! Here’s a list of other Saints-inspired covers, including an awesome number by Hunter McGregor from MySpace, Here We Go, Soldiers of the Black and Gold.
New Orleans Saints at the Superdome
It’ll be almost five years that I’ve been working in Phnom Penh. Like other nomads there is no “home” for me. I miss the familiar comforts of family and friends and a community built around a settled life. I miss the food, the law and order, and the extensive range of entertainment and options. But while memories of my time in New Orleans is not as extensive as those of my husband’s who grew up on its outskirts, of all places I’ve lived it is this much maligned, recently battered and often misunderstood city that inspired most my imagination. Here in this city was one of the more waking periods of my life – my greatest risks and biggest mistakes, and some very big decisions. Photos by Keith Kelly.
This year on our visit back we were treated to a surprise by some very good friends – tickets to a Saints game at the Superdome, where they beat their biggest rival the Atlanta Falcons. It’s a side of the city I never partook in, not normally being a sports fan, but it’s a subculture as part of the essence of New Orleans as jazz itself.
Here is an excerpt from an excellent piece on the Saints and the Soul of America’s City, by Wright Thompson. It’s a long piece worth reading, for anyone who has ever lived and loved this amazing city.
Where do you even begin? Maybe you describe the couture shops that have replaced the latest fashions on the storefront mannequins with Saints T-shirts? Maybe you tell how vampire novelist and native New Orleanian Anne Rice, never much of a football fan and now living on the West Coast, recently ordered a Drew Brees jersey with “Anne” on the back. Maybe you use numbers: 84 percent of the televisions in town were tuned to the recent Monday night game against the Patriots. Maybe you use bizarre trends, such as an NOPD cop telling me the 911 calls almost stop when the Saints play and there’s been only one murder during a game this year…
All of them — Besh, LeBlanc, Brees, Payton, Bush — they are all part of this first generation of post-Katrina successful New Orleanians. They are building a city from scratch, and people see them every day, working, adopting charities, enjoying life, sitting at the next table or listening to the same band. Katrina almost destroyed the city but, if you look closely, you’ll find that it did something else: It strengthened it, made the people who loved it love it even more. Everyone left the city, so no one is here because of inertia. They chose to come back…
.. the drive out of New Orleans, through a city still battered, past the exits for the Vieux Carre and Uptown, past the Huey Long, which runs narrow and high out to the leaning oyster and chicken shack. ..It is decayed on the outside, but inside there is life. Here is a citizenry that believes in the power of the underdog. New Orleanians fell first and see something the rest of America is blind to right now: a way back into the light.
Investing in an Empire of Illusion, by Chris Nelder
Here is a good piece in its entirety below, via @pdenlinger and written by @nelderini, critiquing “an America in thrall to its illusions, unable to respond meaningfully to the challenges of peak oil, climate change, and population.” Agree or not on any of the points, if you invest or follow climate, oil and energy policy developments, it is a thinking piece on the status quo.
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As my regular readers know, I’ve spent much of this year contemplating big themes, like the long-term picture for energy, energy and monetary policy, black swans and the human penchant for valuing the present more than the future, the problems of complex systems like the energy-food-water nexus, sustainability, and the relationship between climate change and peak oil.
As this year draws to a close and I review my work, the biggest question that emerges is about why it is so incredibly difficult to reach people on these subjects.
It’s more than the usual culprits. Yes, the corporate media and the ad-supported business model are problems — like when I was called a “peak freak” on television and given no opportunity to respond to my opponent’s disinformation.
Yes, the overweening influence of corporate lobbyists has effectively neutralized policy and confused the public debate on our most serious problems. Yes, the capitalistic system favors short-term concentrated profits over long-term public good. And yes, the simple human preference for happy talk over sad stories plays a role in our denial.
The real problem is much more pervasive. Those actors cannot explain more fundamental questions:
Why has our economic theory failed us?
Why is the reality of climate change so hard to accept?
Why does climate change dominate public dialogue while the more proximate threat of peak oil remains far off the radar?
Why do we have such resistance to change?
Why would anyone ever think Dubai World was a good idea?
Why is talking about population control — arguably the only real way out of our predicament — taboo?
For over 40 years, our public dialogue has gotten progressively dumber and more polarized. The one “town hall meeting” I attended on health care was a horrifying display of tribal theater, with both sides screaming at the other and drowning out the elected official. It did not even remotely resemble intelligent discussion of issues.
Our news media have substituted entertainment for information and sponsor-endorsed opinion for neutral reportage, while the literacy of the public and the capacity for critical thought have progressively declined. Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Chomsky, and a long line of others have decried it all along.
Yet it persists, and grows. Why? [Read more…] about Investing in an Empire of Illusion, by Chris Nelder
A pharma christmas carol
from Pharma Gossip, a little carol (to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”..)
Got rest us, pharma CEOs, let nothing we concern
Ineptitude will not reduce the millions that we earn
Our management is failing yet we think we need not learn
No tidings of comfort or joy
Comfort or joy
For the scientists we used to employ
God bless ye, Jeffrey Kindler, Pfizer’s dubious accolade
A corporate malfeasance fine, the largest ever paid
Regarded as a simple cost of business, I’m afraid
Sad tidings of marketing fraud
Marketing fraud
Sad tidings of marketing fraud
Financial joy for Fred Hassan, now Schering Plough’s been sold
His second mega-golden parachute can now unfold
And twenty thousand Pharma hands once more are on the dole
Schering Plough’s gone the same as Pharmacia
Pharmacia
Cut and run marks out good ol’ Fred’s career
God help thee AstraZeneca, pharma’s Titanic liner
It’s shutting down it’s First World sites and shipping them to China
For short term savings now – what motivation could be finer?
Sad tidings of jobs gone abroad
Jobs gone abroad
For the benefit of members of the Board
God rest our Pharma industry, it hasn’t got a prayer
Now run by greedy plutocrats who simply do not care
About the science or the ethics of human healthcare
Downsizings for comfort and wealth
Personal wealth
Downsizings for personal wealth
So spare a thought this Xmas for all those made unemployed
To boost the wealth of plutocrats whose greed is unalloyed
Because of them the Western pharma trade will be destroyed
Mad tidings of Money For The Boys
Cash For The Boys
Slash and burn is making Money For the Boys…