Working hard on long days. It makes me kind of giddy.
After the tenth hour at work, the guard comes down and you say things that you might not have said.
It’s kind of fun, but then, I wonder. Is it GOOD to break down the professional barriers?
Do I want these people to know me personally?
A Long Beach Newspaper
Press-Telegram – Opinion
Back then, the lines were clear: On one side were the working people trying to ensure decent wages and basic safety for the dangerous work deep in the earth. On the other side were the heartless thugs brought in by the fat cat bosses to break the strike.
The current Metropolitan Transportation Authority strike by mechanics and drivers and other workers brings to mind the story of striking coal miners — only in this case the roles have been reversed.
This time the MTA strikers are the thugs, using political blackmail to shut down public transportation for nearly half a million people. And the workers are left by the side of road. Like the coal miners of yore, those who can least afford it are those who will suffer the most.
—
This is not helping. Almost everyone I know has had to tighten their belts and deal with the downturns in the economy. If the union-managed Pension and Health Care fund has lost money, well, almost everyone else’s pensions have been reduced.
These mechanics are not going to be very popular going forward.
It’s a listFrom London. They are naming the 100 greatest novels. Naturally, they miss all kinds of good ones and elevate some ones I don’t think deserve it.
But here’s my score of which ones I’ve read:
1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes YES
2. Pilgrim’s Progress John Bunyan YES
3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe YES
4. Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift YES
5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding NOPE
6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson NOPE
7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne NOPE
8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos NOPE
9. Emma Jane Austen NOPE, but read others byher
10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley YES
11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock NOPE
12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac NOPE
13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal NOPE
14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas NOPE, I could live without Dumas
15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli NOPE
16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens NOPE, but read others by him
17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte NOPE
18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte YES
19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray OWN IT, haven’t read it yet
20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne YES
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville YES
22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert YES, love it
23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins NOPE
24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll YES, pure genius
25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott YES
26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope NOPE
27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy IN PROGRESS
28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot NOPE
29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky NOPE, but read others by him
30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James YES, I love this novel
31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain YES
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson NOPE
33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome NOPE
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde NOPE
35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith NOPE
36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy NOPE
37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers NOPE
38. The Call of the Wild Jack London NOPE, but read others by him
39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad NOPE, but read others by him
40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame YES
41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust NOPE
42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence NOPE, but read others by him
43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford NOPE
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan YES
45. Ulysses James Joyce STILL IN PROGRESS
46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf YES
47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster NOPE
48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald YES
49. The Trial Franz Kafka NOPE
50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway NOPE
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine NOPE
52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner NOPE, but read others by him
53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley NOPE
54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh NOPE
55. USA John Dos Passos NOPE
56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler YES
57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford NOPE
58. The Plague Albert Camus NOPE
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell YES
60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett NOPE, but read others by him
61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger YES
62. Wise Blood Flannery O’Connor NOPE, but read others by him
63. Charlotte’s Web E. B. White YES
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien YES
65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis NOPE
66. Lord of the Flies William Golding NOPE
67. The Quiet American Graham Greene NOPE
68 On the Road Jack Kerouac YES
69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov YES
70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass NOPE
71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe YES
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark NOPE
73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee YES
74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller YES
75. Herzog Saul Bellow NOPE, but read others by him
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez YES, LOVE IT
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor NOPE
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre NOPE
79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison NOPE, but read others by her
80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge NOPE
81. The Executioner’s Song Norman Mailer NOPE
82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller Italo Calvino YES, it was very highbrow
83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul NOPE
84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee NOPE
85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson NOPE
86. Lanark Alasdair Gray NOPE
87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster NOPE
88. The BFG Roald Dahl NOPE, but read other by him
89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi NOPE
90. Money Martin Amis NOPE
91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro NOPE
92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey NOPE
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera NOPE, but read others by him
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie READ IT, own it, love it
95. La Confidential James Ellroy NOPE
96. Wise Children Angela Carter NOPE
97. Atonement Ian McEwan NOPE
98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman NOPE
99. American Pastoral Philip Roth NOPE, but read others by him
100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald NOPE
I am forced to fall back on using my car. The bus mechanics are striking, so all the busses are stopped in solidarity.
Now, I think it is important to band together to be heard, but you have to pick your battles.
The public transportation system is something that many city dwellers rely on. There are some that use it exclusively.
the MTA website has this to say about the strike:
MTA Media Relations – Press Release
The biggest issue dividing MTA negotiators and union leaders is over contributions to health benefits. MTA deposits $16.8 million annually into a trust fund administered by the maintenance union which buys medical coverage for 2,000 employees plus retirees. An independent audit of the trust fund shows the union has wasted millions of dollars in recent years through duplicative coverage, poor record keeping and other problems.
Among other issues, the audit faulted the union for transferring $36,000 a month into union operating funds but union officials refused to provide documentation for how the money is spent. The audit also noted that the union has been paying a consultant up to $15,000 a month since 1998 to automate their record keeping but the task still has not been accomplished and the data is kept manually so the union has no real time information about how the trust fund is doing.
—
We already know that the last bus strike lasted for more than a month. It is a crisis, really.
LA has been coming to terms with it’s Metropolitaness, and creating public transportation systems that were approaching usefulness. A lot of my co-workers have been learning to rely on busses.
But this is not a step forward. In addition to the massive inconvenience, this same MTA article repeats a figure I have heard elsewhere.
The bus strike costs the local economy 4 MILLION bucks A DAY.
I don’t know that I’m terribly supportive of this strike.
Patrick Brogan’s book World Conflicts: A Comprehensive Guide to World Strife Since 1945 is really good. It’s the kind of thing I should read, but I always feel sad when I do.
Here’s the layout: he gives short synopses on what’s been happening in all kinds of countries since WW2. No, he doesn’t cover every country. No, he isn’t without bias. But this book is a great catch-up on stuff that’s been going on.
And stuff has been going on everywhere. When I read his chapter on Argentina, I finally understood the Falkans. I’m sure I didn’t have all of it, but I feel like I have some basic facts.
What’s the deal with Africa? What’s the deal with the Middle east? What is going on in the Phillipines? These kinds of questions pop up in my mind every day. THis book gives me some answers.
It’s really great, and it makes me sad. I wish the world were not so full of trouble.
Iranian Wins Nobel Peace Prize
“Ebadi, who is the first Iranian and Muslim female to receive the honor, has maintained that democracy and Islam are compatible. A devout Muslim, she has fought against conservative Islamic rulers on behalf of women and children, in particular. Her efforts represent a radical change in a country where clerics maintain strict rules.”
I am very pleased about this. Iran, and all the middle east needs some brave women to stand and be heard.
This woman literally risks her life to do what she is doing.
Bravo!
5. It didn’t drag on forever.
Regular elections seem to go on and on, allowing for a HUGE amount of junk mail a mudslinging. This one got straight to the point: JUST VOTE
4. I got out of work early to vote.
This might not work everywhere with everyone, but it worked for me so I don’t care.
3. With this number of candidates, no one argued with me about “Throwing my vote away” if I vote Green.
It’s not possible to throw your vote away on a governor. Actually, it’s not possible NOT to throw your vote away. Which of these candidates could possibly be taken seriously? Which brings me to my next point:
2. We can debate about “the principle of the thing” and completely ignore the principles of the people
Yeah! Should we be allowed to recall a governor barely a year after we’ve voted him in? there are pros and cons, and it may have NOTHING to do with Gov. Davis’s personal principles. Or any of the candidates morals. “It’s the principle of the thing!”
AND THE NUMBER ONE REASON TO LOVE THE RECALL:
It’s fun! Look at the turnout!
Danny Kaye, with his curly blonde hair gets to be the inspector general for a Russian? French? town. They can’t seem to decide which it is. But it doesn’t matter, because Danny Kaye isn’t either one.
It’s very silly and funny. Danny Kaye does vocal acrobatics with his sound effects. The main plot device depends on the fact that Danny (a poor gypsy boy) cannot read.
I’d never seen Danny Kaye before. He’s pretty good.
She is SO bewildered. He is SO un-forthcoming.
What HAS happened with Mr. De Winter’s first wife, Rebecca?
I have to use capital letters, you see. This movie is highly melodramatic. It’s such a great story for it, too. Rebecca, who is the beautiful first wife. The current Mrs. De Winters, whose name I somehow never caught, is left to feel very inadequate and second class.
Rebecca must have been some act to follow, she thinks.
Of course, it’s totally different than she thought. And WORSE!
This is one of those great old classic movies. They over acted, I think because they were still getting used to being able to talk. Over acting was the way you did in the silent movies…
So my cat had a little disorder last weekend. I made an appointment for him at the vet, and even though he seemed better by the time the appointment arrived, I thought I’d better keep it.
I’d been meaning to talk with the vet about my cat anyway. He’s fat. About 18 pounds of cat.
YES, he’s big boned, YES, he a very muscular, and YES he’s a little fluffy.
But he’s FAT. I’ve been buying him this high-fiber diet cat food for forever, and it seems to do no good. Therefore, I wanted to discuss the situation with a vet.
The vet looked him over, agreed with me that he’s fat and told me to put him on the ATKIN’s diet. Well, to use the ATKIN’s principles anyway. All meat for the cat.
Cats are carnivores, supposedly. My previous diet cat food choice was high in fiber ‘n’ stuff, and may well have been working against him in his need to lose weight.
He seems to like his all-meat diet.