Another weird multiculti twist: the US mint is cashing in (literally) on “8” mania with its Prosperity Collection of collectibles. All feature dollar bills with serial numbers prominently featuring the number “8” (sourced from Fed #8, in St. Louis) and generous splashes of red. Puts a new spin on “lucky money,” I suppose.

If they were really smart, they’d market these through Chinese-owned banks as well — red envelopes of lucky money are particularly popular at New Year but also given throughout the year as token gifts.

I’ve uploaded a few cameraphone pics of Montr�al and Qu�bec to Flickr, but since I don’t want to risk getting socked with a monstrous data-roaming charge (Fido’s prepaid voice service in Canada doesn’t include data) I’ll still hold off on uploading much until I get back to the States later this month. Still, consider my socks knocked off by these two urban jewels.

Oh, and no, we could not enter the Beaver Club.

Mary Schmich in “the Tribune”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0504220132apr22,1,3865394.column?coll=chi-business-hed points out that gentrification’s ghosts leave behind a fuzzy, indeterminate context:

There are other ghosts, too, old people I used to see ambling on the sidewalks. Occasionally the ghost of one will appear for no apparent reason except to say, “Hey, you hadn’t even noticed I was gone.” They’re right. Walking past the palazzos I can’t always remember what was there before, or who.

John Greenfield once pointed this out: when a building or store disappears, even if it was something you saw every day for years, its memory fades alarmingly rapidly. Obviously, grandmother’s house or the daily bakery are exceptions, but I’ve noticed it countless times.

In Pilsen, the “latest flare in the gentrification battles”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0504220158apr22,1,2295748.story?coll=chi-business-hed appears to be a loft conversion by Steve Lipe. Lipe has done quite a bit of groundwork (negotiating early on with a local CDC, not advertising the project outside the community, hiring Latino sales staff, and rehabbing an abandoned building so as not to displace any residents in densely populated Pilsen) but he nonetheless provides an easy target for easily confused, angry activists.

bq. Balderas, a project opponent, acknowledged that many residents would view the project more favorably if the newcomers were of Mexican descent, but just because the potential homebuyers are Hispanics who made good doesn’t mean that they should take precedence over longtime residents, she said. “We’re the ones who did all the hard work to make Pilsen a better place. But we’re not going to benefit from it. They are,” Balderas said.

bq. Chantico Lofts has caused a split among advocates of affordable housing. Some say Pilsen residents should fight developers tooth-and-nail while others want to become partners to create mixed-income projects.

NameVoyager, a neat little tool making the blog rounds, shows that soft initials (vowels, consonants like “n”) are definitely trending in, along with odd initials–Q and Z, for instance. (for some reason, I remember that Infiniti chose those as model initials precisely because they were underused in the language.) In the history of initials, boomers received a lot of names with hard consonant initials (K, P, T), and those are fading.

And yes, my parents were really cutting edge with my name. Payton/Peyton now accounts for 2 in 1000 babies, from almost non-existent in 1980 to both spellings landing in the top 300 (soon top 200) names for both girls and boys. Indeed, Crate & Barrel is now advertising a “Payton” series of wine glasses — perhaps the ultimate indicator of its popularity with the yuppie set. And just last week or so, my yuppie neighbors across the hall christened their baby boy — yup — Payton, making the kid only the second Payton I’ve met, ever. (The other was an old-South scion in the All-State orchestra in, er, ninth grade?) Although I’ve long liked my name, it gets misspelled so often that I’ve taken to making up names at sandwich shops that tag orders with names. (My favorite: Theo, brother of Vincent van Gogh.)

That said, I’m glad that Payton doesn’t appear on Stephen Levitt’s list of most popular names of 2005. Does my name’s increasing popularity (and thus declining exclusivity) portend that, come middle age, I’ll be surrounded with déclassé hooligans named Payton/Peyton? Young children want to have common names, but older children and adults like unique names, and hopefully I won’t end up in the odd position of having had an exceedingly rare name as a young child and a boring, familiar name as an adult.

(Update 11/2005: Not only did my next-door neighbors name their kid Payton [shortly before moving out], but the Brookfield Zoo named their baby polar bear after me.)

Just heard on KCRW (context is unclear, since I just tuned in): 3.9% of the American population is over 6’2″ in height, but over 30% of America’s CEOs are over 6’2″.

Just FYI, since I was challenged on this recently: the Guardian reports that “At the last census, England as a whole was 87% White British, while London was 59.8%… with a large variation between outer London (65.6%) and inner London (50.5%).”

So yes, we can probably safely assume that now inner London is less than half White British.

Crain’s this week also had an article about UIUC’s attempts to become “the top” public university in the US–a difficult feat in an era of steeply declining state subsidies (although a winning basketball team might help). Somehow, this led me to looking up the exact numbers on the hearsay that Illinois and New Jersey — two densely populated states with below-top-flight state universities — are the top “exporters” of college students.

Luckily, the higher education industry has a surfeit of social scientists tracking it; the National Information Center for Higher Education Policymaking and Analysis not only had exactly the numbers I was looking for, but detailed crosstabs and graphs of state-to-state migration by age bracket (20-somethings, adults) and education level, and a tasteful color scheme, natch.

In numerical terms, New Jersey and Illinois are the top exporters of college students, sending a net of 24,246 and 11,762 students out of state. Relative to the state’s population, only outliers Alaska and Hawai’i (with young, comparatively underdeveloped higher education offerings and literally a vast new world on the mainland to compete with) fare so poorly.

In the grander scheme of things, the bigger question is about the flow of human capital through the education pipeline. Both Iowa and Massachusetts do a comparably good job at educating their children: 28% of their ninth-graders go on to finish college (within six years), the top rank in a country where only 18% do. However, where Massachusetts benefits from other states’ investment in primary education — fully 38.8% of its adult residents have a college degree–Iowa is one of those underwriting other states’ dynamic, post-industrial economies, with 25% of its adult residents holding college diplomas (lower than the 26.7% national average).

A look at overall migration by state bears out the Bill Frey/Bruce Katz division of states into Melting Pot, Sunbelt, and Heartland. Sunbelt states in the South are gaining tens of thousands of residents, but primarily at lower educational tiers. States with strong post-industrial economies (the Pacific states, the Northeast) attract the young and college educated but not really those with less education — in some cases, like California, the less educated are moving away. And, in many cases, even those college graduates leave as older adults.

Meanwhile, the states of the Great Plains and northern Mountain West are leaking residents, especially college graduates. The industrial Midwest is faring better, but Ohio lost a net of 12,000 young people (age 22 to 29 in 2000) with college educations left between 1995 and 2000, along with nearly 4,000 adults (age 30 to 64 in 2000) with graduate degrees. The numbers are equally discouraging for Pennsylvania: 32,000 young degree-holders.

Robert Lanham’s Hipster Handbook describes Wicker Park in a vignette as “undoubtedly the most deck neighborhood in the city,” which is more or less still true. However, these little errors bug me, no matter how much I try to empathize with New Yorkers who just don’t care about my provincial little Western hamlet:

• The “Chicago Art Institute” is actually the Art Institute of Chicago.
• “Morning Edition” is not on at 9:30am here in Central Time-land, so one could not fall back asleep to it then. It ends at 9:30. (I should know, as I fall back asleep to “848,” which starts at 9:30, quite often.)
• Her bicycle is almost undoubtedly a Schwinn and very well may not have a front basket; they’re rare among the cruisers here.
• Almost all coffee shops around here are counter service and do not have waitresses.

Now that right-wingers have taken up “Merry Christmas,” of all things, as a crusade, what’s an indifferent secular humanist to do? I could spitefully retort “Joyous Solstice and Kwanzaa Greetings,” or stick with the indifferent “Happy Holidays” or inanely generic “Season’s Greetings” (after all, the solstice greets meterorological winter), but spite will only mean that the Christmas terrorists have already won. Not that they really have any standing, though, as Eric Zorn noted in the Tribune on the 23rd,

Even though scriptural clues put Jesus’ birth in the warmer months–September, many scholars say–Christian leaders set the date for celebration to coincide with existing celebrations tied to the winter solstice… Jesus is not “the reason for the season,” as so many from “the Christmas group” have smugly informed me in recent weeks. The return of the sun in this hemisphere is the reason for the season, and there are many ways to celebrate it…

It’s sad to see these angry people turning a glad tiding into a battle cry, especially since it’s totally unnecessary: The dominance of Christmas and Christianity in this country is not threatened by efforts to allow all belief systems in on the seasonal jollity.

The only threat comes from those whose “Merry Christmas” now includes an implicit nyahh-nyahh.

I mean, get over yourselves, people! If I don’t particularly care for Christmas, it hardly means that Christians are wildly persecuted in America. Just because you can’t force your religious views onto other folks, whether by taking a store’s decorating choices too seriously or “leading other children in prayer” at school or wallpapering a courtroom with the Ten Commandments, doesn’t mean that those other folks are on a wild-eyed anti-religious pogrom. It just means that everyone gets along just a bit better when we’re not all trying to convert one another.

By appropriating the words for their “revolt” in the culture wars, they’re doing what right-wing jingoists did when they appropriated the American flag for their brand of “love-it-or-leave-it” patriotism in the 1960s: defiling a symbol in a misbegotten effort to save it.

Having grown up entirely in the Reagan era of “US flag = jingoist political crusade,” I can’t say that I have ever held any great affinity for the flag. These days, I feel just a twinge of sadness that I’ve never been able to feel any sense of ownership towards the flag. The same also goes, of course, for the ubiquitous “support our troops” slogans — another ostensibly neutral, patriotic symbol that (since “patriotism” really means “rightist nationalism”) now establishes partisan bona fides rather than genuinely declaring actual support of the troops.

Supporting the troops once meant mending clothing and buying war bonds, but the hard-working but still desperately poor people of China have apparently found it in their hearts to sew us new clothes and buy our war bonds. Stateside, all that we do is loudly trumpet empty symbolism. USA! USA!

Find out more about our neighbors to the north with PRIZM CE, a consumer segmentation system devised by Claritas and Environics Analytics. Canada, while a tenth as populous as the US, apparently deserves just as many consumer clusters — partially because of its greater ethnic and linguistic diversity, as Qu�be�ois, Chinese, Sikh, and aboriginal populations get their own clusters. More-urban Canada also merits more urban and fewer suburban clusters.

One interesting cluster tidbit: cluster 43, Urban Spice, is described as “a collection of immigrant gateway communities… ranking highest among all cluster in working for a political party or candidate,” quite a contrast to young, immigrant, urban populations in the US.

Some new urbanists have started to talk about building “cool neighborhoods” from scratch, a term and, indeed, a concept — further reducing “cool” to yet another marketable, finance-able lifestyle choice — that I find highly suspicious.

One of the first such attempts that I’ve seen is The Lab, which self-consciously styles itself as “the anti-mall” down the street from monstrous South Coast Plaza — the 100% corner in prototypically suburban, obscenely wealthy Orange County, California. I suppose it’s inevitable that OC, with three million residents, would spawn some demand for underground techno, manga collectibles, and Urban Outfitters — and since the default building type there is the strip mall, it was time to build a strip mall for just that.

Next door, of course, is The Camp, where folks drive their bike-rack-ed SUVs into the parking lot and stroll past fake boulders and a vegan restaurant to get to their Bikram yoga classes. It’s all so self-consciously unreal and almost embarrassing, like someone trying too hard and yet not quite getting it. (Self-consciously cool Flash websites: thelab.com and thecampsite.com)

Both, of course, are just (indisputably successful) strip malls — a different sort of “lifestyle center” for a different sort of lifestyle, but just as creepily sanitized. There appears to be nothing intrinsically urban about “cool” retail after all; it’s just that cities offer an operating environment that requires less start-up capital, thanks to the decrepit and cheap building stock. But it appears that even grassroots, hip lifestyles that proclaim their skepticism of The Man can be successfully reduced, co-opted, and commodified as just another strip mall, financed by mortgage backed securities and ready for replication in Anytown, USA.

[originally posted to the Urbangeneration list]

Alan Keyes, quoted in the S-T: “In a homosexual relationship, there is nothing implied except the self-fulfillment, contentment and satisfaction of the parties involved in the relationship,” said Keyes, who holds a Ph.D from Harvard University. “That means it is a self-centered, self-fulfilling, selfish relationship that seeks to use the organs intended for procreation for purposes of pleasure. The word pleasure in Greek is hedone and we get the word hedonism from that word.”

“In an interview with CNN, Mary Cheney’s sister, Elizabeth, responded to Keyes’ remarks by saying, ‘I’m not going to dignify it with a comment.'” State GOP chair Judy Barr Topinka called the statement “idiotic” (stupid, yes, hateful, yes, but I dunno about idiotic) and demanded an apology. During a speech to the Illinois delegation at the convention, “some delegates clapped enthusiastically. Other rolled their eyes and clapped silently. Topinka stayed in another room during his speech.”

When asked if childless heterosexuals are also hedonists: “The heterosexual relationship is haunted by the possibility of the child, which means you have to commit yourself somewhere to your head to the possibility of a lifelong commitment that involves not only selfish pleasure but sometimes sacrifice.”

Sorry for the absence — I spent the weekend in New York City. Photos from Sunday’s demo (“manifestation massif” — Le Monde) coming soon. Speaking of which, 100,000 — the AP’s count — is a mathematical impossibility.

Aerial photos showed that the march stretched over two miles long at its longest — over 10,000 feet long. Are we to believe that the march was only ten persons wide? In fact, it filled three of Manhattan’s broadest avenues shoulder to shoulder and even spilled onto adjacent sidewalks and streets. The half-million figure cited by UFPJ (and, according to the Times, confirmed by police) sounds more reasonable.