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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Back by popular demand

Looking deep in the thread of the previous post, I find that the people are one person is clamoring for new posts.  Well, Mr. Mike Roberts, your wish is my command!  But first I have to take care of some important post-ironic business.  In comment 47, Dave Maier writes,

Okay, when you said

you know I love that spacy ambient dreamy stuff

I didn’t mean to suggest that you were being insincere in saying you liked Code 46 (which, as we agree, is very nice). I simply noted the irony you seem to need to employ in expressing even this relatively straightforward fact: because as you very well know, we know no such thing about you, given that this is the first you have ever said about it, and that in a post which is mostly about how great X and Hüsker Dü and suchlike are.

Well, Dave, this is not the first time we have disagreed about the status of the natural world, is it?  In fact, I have informed my readers of my love of that spacy ambient dreamy stuff a couple of times—as, for example, in the second paragraph of this five-year-old post, and more recently in this important parenthetical remark I inserted into my two-part post on 2001: A Space Odyssey a mere three and a half years ago:

Brian Eno had the same reaction to the Apollo visuals that I did, except of course that he responded by recording this brilliant album which sought to rectify those staticky TV images by reminding us of the immense void surrounding our tiny, frail bodies.  Hey, have I mentioned that I want “Ascent,” track 5, to be played at my funeral service?  Just a reminder.

I can’t believe you don’t remember that important parenthetical remark from three and a half years ago, and no, I am not being ironic.

All right, back to your irregularly scheduled blogging.
__________

So we’re back from Rhode Island, where we did some swimmin’ and golfin’ and chowin’ down at this fine establishment (thanks to Nick for the tip!).  And lots of extended-family business.  Today, we’re off to Norfolk, to my father’s book party and some extended-friends-and-family business.  I’m not even bringing the laptop, so don’t take this opportunity to send me a whole bunch of electronical mails.

Besides, I have rediscovered the virtues of the non-electronical mail!  Before leaving for vacation, I used the Internet to buy some things, and lo, they were waiting for me when I returned, courtesy of the US Postal Service.  One was the soundtrack to Code 46, which is lots of that spacy ambient dreamy stuff I like—as you well know.  The other was Mark Alan Stamaty’s epic MacDoodle Street, which you must buy now if you want to continue reading this blog.  It’s not that I forgot how good it is, not only for individual panels and strips but also for its whole entire twisted plot; I’ve always known how good it is.  What was astonishing, reading it again after 30-plus years (during its run in 1978-79 it was the first thing I read every week in the Village Voice), was realizing how much of its humor I’ve stolen it’s influenced me over the years.  I’m willing to bet it influenced the young Matt Groening, too, though he wound up doing more in that medium than I did.  Anyway, plunk down the extra bucks at Alibris.  You’ll be glad you did—and, more important, I’ll be glad you did.  Because that way you’ll know what I’m talking about when I refer to Gustave Ranto, Dishwasher Monthly, Rebecca the Cow, and the Conservative Liberation Front.  You’ll resonate with sympathy when I say, “the mere twitching of an eyebrow is worth more than a hundred tons of gold,” and you’ll reply, “All my life I have hungered for those words.” And we’ll both be richer for it.

I may write about MacDoodle Street at some point—it’s a long-overdue assignment, since I volunteered to review the book for the Columbia Spectator thirty years ago and froze up, paradoxically because I had way too much to say about it for an 800-word review.  But on the Internets, you can run on and on and on and on and on, just like one of Stamaty’s marginal characters (really, he has characters who inhabit the margins of the comic strip, just as he has characters who are capable of climbing out of the strip and salvaging part of its plotline when the strip itself is too drunk and belligerent to meet its deadline).  So let me know if you’d like to hear more.

In the meantime, I’ve been reading about the financial crisis in Illinois, where the elected representatives of the state in which I lived for twelve years are engaging in an all-out effort to surpass California for advanced achievement in the general area of total systems failure.  The reason this matters to me, dear readers, is that part of my retirement savings lies vested in Illinois’ State Universities Retirement System, which means that part of my retirement plan is made up of IOU’s, ticker tape, and filling-station coins commemorating the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur.

But I have a solution to Illinois’ pension crisis—and the pension crises facing dozens of other states in the next decade.  My slogan is this:  Don’t default, prioritize! 

There are many different kinds of state employees, after all.  Some deserve to have their pensions honored, and some ... not so much.  If state legislatures would simply rank state employees by the degree of their patriotism, paying out pensions to the most patriotic retirees first, this would go a long way toward solving the solvency problem.  That way, states could prune roughly 40 percent of K-12 teachers as well as up to 90 percent of college professors from the pension rolls, while ensuring that state legislators themselves could collect their full pensions—indeed, more than one full pension, if they took advantage of Illinois’ “double-dipping” option back in the day.

Pension reform ... it’s about country, and it’s about time.

Posted by Michael on 07/15 at 11:01 AM
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