bequoth

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A photo of mine — the first mini/urban Home Depot, on Halsted in Lincoln Park — made it into the Kansas City Star, of all places. Thanks to Kevin Klinkenberg for making the connection. (It’s a Knight-Ridder “RealCities” site; use username null@carskill.com / pwd carskill to get in.)

Ironically, the author writes: “The Chicago Home Depot has windows rather than blank walls. Its facade is properly scaled to fit the street… The people in that Chicago neighborhood got something different, in part because they had some notion of what they wanted their city to look like. Those desires were written into development rules.” In fact, the neighborhood went up in arms over a previous proposal to rezone the commercial site to build condos; the developer retaliated by plopping (as of right!) a giant gray box which generates even more traffic.

I kind of like how the angles of the buildings are contrasted. It’s hard to get a full-on shot of the store, since it’s so broad and fronts a two-lane road, but in this case it works.

Tie a string around your finger

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“White House officials dismissed the [IMF] report [criticizing fiscal policy in the USA] as alarmist, saying President Bush had already vowed to reduce the budget deficit by half over the next five years.”

Aha. I see that the president is no longer promising, then, to eliminate the deficit (and return us back to the surpluses he promised he’d keep back in 2000) — merely to cut it in half after he’s out of office. Hmm. Strange how many of Bush’s goals fall in either 2005 or 2009, isn’t it?

[Found at TNR &c.]

Liberal radio network announced

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After much buzz, Central Air Radio, programmed by Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead, will soon be broadcasting on stations they’ve bought in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. No word yet on specific personalities, programs, or other markets — to be covered through syndication or affiliation, perhaps, since buying just those five stations will cost a pretty penny.

Strange, though, that they’re starting a political radio network without a Washington presence, or that they’re overlapping with Pacifica Radio in three markets. Then again, Pacifica has been badly bruised; maybe Central Air smells a chance to grab market share.

Update: The Tribune reports that Central Air will broadcast 24/7 on WNTD-AM 950 here. That station is being sold to a third party.

Paying the price for cannibalism

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An unforeseen twist to industrial agriculture, from the NYT:

By the reductive logic that rules our food system, cannibalism should be as legitimate a way of eating as any other: it’s all just protein, right? Yet the great unlearned lesson of B.S.E. and other similar brain-wasting diseases is that, at the level of species or ecosystems, it isn’t quite true that protein is protein. Eating the protein of your own species, for example, carries special risks. The Fore of New Guinea were nearly wiped out by kuru, which bears a striking resemblance to B.S.E.; they spread it among themselves by ritually eating the brains of their dead kin.

This Sunday’s Magazine also includes an article on the Farmer’s Diner in Barre, Vt. The December Harper’s carried a (better) article [not online] by Bill McKibben on the Farmer’s Diner and other peculiar Vermont ways of preserving local ways in the face of industrial logic.

Recalling your local TV station

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Adbusters mentions one case where a broadcast station’s license was revoked simply because it wasn’t up to par — WHDH-TV in Boston, which was replaced by WCVB-TV. CVB got its license on a promise that it would do better than HDH in providing local programming, and it has kept that promise to this day.

Technically speaking, the airwaves are owned by the public; broadcast stations have the privilege of using them subject to the public’s blessing, and are ultimately accountable to the public. In the case of HDH and later WNAC-TV, also in Boston, local officials were able to convince regulators not to renew licenses based on the quality of broadcasting and overconcentration of local media ownership.

However, the specter of beheading by the FCC apparently doesn’t seem to faze most broadcasters these days. If it did, we would undoubtedly enjoy better broadcasting — better because the stations would put effort into actually providing a service that their audiences appreciate. Similarly, Adbusters points out that corporate charters can, and have been, revoked in the past, and states the obvious conclusion: maybe they should be revoked in the future as well.

Real unemployment: 9%

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Bush’s economic policies don’t sit very well with economists working for major banks, it seems. Here, economists for Bank One and Wells Fargo slam the magical mystery of unemployment and “economic growth” figures:

Economists believe the drop in the labor force masks a much higher jobless rate�perhaps as high as 9%, according to Anthony Chan, chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors in Columbus, Ohio.

“The decline in the unemployment rate is the most misleading aspect of this employment report,” said Mr. Chan. “It’s a sham because of how we got there�the labor force dropped precisely because more people became discouraged…”

“Despite all the hoopla, neither businesses nor potential employees have confidence in the economy. They’re not believing all the stories about a strong and healthy economy given by the economists and the government,” [Wells Fargo chief economist Sung Won] Sohn said.

From Reuters/ChicagoBusiness

Segway user realizes…

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‘Paris is a walker’s city, built for sauntering, window-shopping, the sideways topple into the cafe chair. On our final day here, we finally realized that the best way to get around on Segways is to use the bike lane rather than the sidewalk. The ride is fast and uncluttered, and you aren’t constantly giving pedestrians heart attacks. Technically, Segwaying in the street is illegal, but the policemen who stared us down at intersections and in front of President Chirac’s house all seemed to be following the same penal-code decision tree (“Not a bicycle, yet has two wheels and moves in a leisurely manner: ALLOW TO PROCEED”). ‘

From Tad Friend’s Slate travel journal of a week spent Segwaying in Paris. Segway tours this past summer were around $75 a day; rental bicycles (provided by the RATP at stands around town) were EUR8 a day. Hmm.

Building neighborhoods reduces crime

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Yesterday’s NYT ran an article summarizing one study drawn from the MacArthur-funded Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Dr Felton Earls finds that strong social capital (“collective efficacy,” in the study’s parlance) underlies both the “eyes on the street” and “broken windows” theories on crime prevention. In other words, strong neighborhood social capital creates safe neighborhoods and positive school outcomes:

In a landmark 1997 paper that he wrote with colleagues in the journal Science, and in a subsequent study in The American Journal of Sociology, Dr. Earls reported that most major crimes were linked not to “broken windows” but to two other neighborhood variables: concentrated poverty and what he calls, with an unfortunate instinct for the dry and off-putting language of social science, collective efficacy.

“If you got a crew to clean up the mess,” Dr. Earls said, “it would last for two weeks and go back to where it was. The point of intervention is not to clean up the neighborhood, but to work on its collective efficacy. If you organized a community meeting in a local church or school, it’s a chance for people to meet and solve problems.

Like sugar

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Archibald Candy, better known locally as Fannie May (not to be confused with the mortgage underwriter) has announced its plan to shutter its West Loop candy factory and sell the retail outlets to an owner who will likely offshore production. As a result, 625 manufacturing jobs will disappear.

The city points out that Chicago still has over 100 candy and confection-making companies, providing a $4 billion boost to the city’s economy. Brach’s, by far the largest manufacturer, recently completed its shutdown of its giant West Side factory — one of the last major factories in denuded West Garfield Park/Austin. Owner Barry Callebaut has moved production to Mexico, where American sugar price supports don’t artificially raise the price of candymaking. The sugar supports pay off Jeb Bush’s sugar plantation friends in Florida, corn-syrup distillers like ADM, and corn growers across the Plains, so they’re a great deal for Washington; problem is, America gets stuck with icky corn syrup instead of real sugar in everything, and our food suffers for it.

Meanwhile, tea sellers have caught on to the power of sugar. Of all the articles on the tea boom, this is the first I’ve seen which has caught on to the sugaring up of tea thanks to bubble tea and bottled Snapple tea — but also following Starbucks’ charge into the realm of sugar and spice (oh, and a little bit of burnt coffee). None of the various holiday-theme-flavored coffees and Frappuccinos that Starbucks trots out over the course of a year taste anything like coffee, but that’s the point: Trixies and other middle-American consumers guzzle them down, since sugar in copious quantites can hide whatever drug is hiding beneath (caffeine, or, in the case of flirtinis, grain alcohol).

An aside: Paul Fussell, in Class, writes:

The ultimate class bifurcation based on drink… cuts straight across the center of society, unmistakibly dividing the top classes from the bottom. I’m speaking about the difference between dry and sweet… To a startling degree, prole America is about sweet… Sweet alcoholic drinks are favored by the young and callow of all classes, a taste doubtless representing a transitional stage in the passage from the soda fountain to maturity.

The mystery owners behind the unnervingly well-capitalized Argo Tea, plopped right at Lincoln Park’s most conspicuous corner, are exposed with their plan: to convert half-caf-Frap-guzzling Trixies nationwide (starting in Lincoln Park, naturally) to tea with “Carolina Honey Breeze, a blend of honey, tea and lemon, and Tea Squeeze, a mix of hibiscus iced tea and lemonade.” Even the WASPy Yankees over at Nantucket Nectars mix their iced tea with sugary lemonade, creating something vaguely akin to the sweetened Lipton or Luzianne served by the pitcher all over the South. Kudos to the Trib’s ever-astute Susan Chandler for picking up on this.

And kudos too to John Wallace of the local Aion Tea & Antiquities: “I find people are looking for something that isn’t a cookie-cutter franchise environment. The environment is really important.” Sure, but for my buck, I really like the Zen appeal behind Wild Lily Tea Market and TeaNY. Tealuxe ain’t bad, even if I haven’t been to one in years; the East India Tea Company theme is kind of cute, and the brass tables at Harvard Square are a nice touch.

Want to find a tea house near you? Try TeaMap.

Mayor: cars made Detroit fat

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From Reuters, via the Chicago Critical Mass list:

“It’s probably something to do with the culture,” [Mayor Kwame] Kilpatrick told local journalists, when asked about a report that Detroit had passed Houston to take the title as America’s fattest city.

“We’re not a walking city,” Kilpatrick said, adding that this was because Detroit is “the automotive capital of the world.”

Detroit’s international auto show, the industry’s biggest yearly event and a celebration of all things automotive, opens on Sunday.

I read through the Men’s Fitness cover story in 2002, when Chicago was declared second fattest. Compared to the Men’s Health copycat cover, the Men’s Fitness story is not only the better researched of the two (which is not to say that the methodology couldn’t be a lot better); it also offers much more pertinent recommendations. Men’s Fitness recommends that cities install bike racks, bike lanes, and bus bike racks to fight obesity — whereas Men’s Health recommends that guys get computer voice recognition software and eat cinnamon. Umm, sure. That’ll help. The latter recommendations absolve government of any responsibility for people’s health, which, I suppose, might help to sell health-related magazines.