Fresh Loaf

Those nifty contrarians at Slate, God bless ‘em, have gone through the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and made a fun and depressing animation of a heady few months of job gains followed by a blood-red pattern of job loss. The animation, which covers January 2007 to February 2009, provides some much-needed context to the headlines and numbers we’ve seen thrown about.

It’s interesting to watch how metropolitan regions went from blue to red. Not surprising, sure, as this is where the bulk of people live. But notice the areas where jobs grew. I heard an interesting rumor while reporting for the Green Guide that laid-off workers in Florida’s manufacturing industry were migrating north into south Georgia to look for jobs. You don’t see much of that in this animation, or you don’t see if they landed work, but it’d be interesting to also plug migration data into this map.

And look at that little blue dot along the Mid-Atlantic. That’s Washington, D.C., people! Or at least I think it is! Regardless, socialism! Government job programs! Big Government blah blah blah! (Click the screenshot to head to Slate’s site and watch the animation.)

(Screenshot from Slate)

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As I sit here at my desk inadvertently watching the UNC/Radford game on my cell phone (nice job on that ACC record Hansbrough! Wish I’d seen it last week though), I came across this article on Slate discussing loss of workplace productivity during the NCAA tournament.

For the record, my editor did try to take my phone away from me when she realized I had the ability to watch games on it. “I’m gonna blog about it!” I protested.

“Whatever,” she said.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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The Clickable Advent Calendar is almost over for 2008, so here are some items I couldn’t get to, in the spirit of “stocking stuffers.”

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention humorist David Sedaris, who made his name with acerbic commentaries on Christmas, particularly The Santaland Diaries (the theatrical version of which currently runs at Horizon Theatre and stars Harold Leaver, whom I interviewed in 2004). This year, for some reason I’m flashing on Sedaris’s “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol” in which a typically caustic theater critic takes on a school pageant.

Other favorite holiday TV shows include “Justice League’s” Christmas-themed “Comfort and Joy” (which features a great subplot in which the Flash and a bad guy called the Ultra-Humanite team up to give some orphans an impossible-to-find Christmas gift), the “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special” and pretty much any “South Park” Christmas installment. (I found this video of Cartman’s “Swiss Colony Beef Log” via a The Onion A.V. Club.)

Slate has “A slide show of some of America’s weirdest holiday light displays” (I particularly like #2, from Batesville, Miss.)

The blog Musical Fruitcake lives up to its billing as “A collection of the worst Christmas songs ever recorded.” Hear a girl sing “Mom and Dad, Please Don’t Steal for Me This Christmas.” Speaking of Christmas music, Andisheh drew my attention to WFMU’s Beware of the Blog post on MORE Christmas Disco!

Alejandro pointed out the Elf Yourself site, and since I saw it, I know at least one friend who’s elfed-up her family.

For atheists and agonistics alienated at advent, here’s Thomas Bell’s secular variation on “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” “Yes Shirley, There is a wide body of evidence suggesting there may be a higher order to the universe.”

And finally, for your Christmas Eve reading, “A Download from St. Nicholas:”

(more…)

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Can you say car-denfreude?

Slate has an interesting piece about how Southern states banded together to block the proposed federal bailout of the Big Three automakers. We know the opposition was led by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and other prominent Republicans, but the Slate article explains how it wasn’t GOP philosophy — or simply a shared dislike of unions (though that’s a big factor) — that rallied their efforts.

It was more the fact that foreign car makers have been very good to several Southern states — much better than Detroit has been in recent years. Ford shut down it ’40s-era Hapeville plant in 2006 and GM closed the doors on its Doraville factory this past September. But Kia, from South Korea, is already hiring Georgia autoworkers for its first U.S. plant, set to open in a few months in West Point.

While the Big Three frequently exhibit an air of entitlement when dealing with the state and federal governments – remember the disastrous private-jet caravan when the CEOs came to cry poverty in Washington? – the foreign automakers have gone out of their way to ingratiate themselves with their new hosts.

Other Asian and European companies are likewise heavily invested in the South — Toyota in Kentucky; BMW in South Carolina; Honda, Mercedes and Hyundai in Alabama; and Nissan and Volkswagen in Tennessee.

Basically, the thinking is no longer “What’s good for GM is good for America,” but may be “What’s good for Kia is good for West Georgia.”

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We’ll never live down Whatizzit, a.k.a. Izzy, the lamest, stupidest aspect of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. Slate has a piece today defending China’s Olympic mascots that includes a take-down of Izzy and takes some surprising swipes at Atlanta as a city:

Let’s not forget the 1996 Atlanta mascot, known variously as “Whatzit,” “Whatizhee,” or the shortened “Izzy.” To this day, I remain unsure what exactly Izzy was meant to embody. The Journal recalls that he was “derided as everything from a ‘blue slug’ to a ’sperm in sneakers.’ ” (Izzy also represented perhaps the worst Olympics since Munich. The Atlanta games featured both a terrorist attack and a wave of nauseating Nike/Coke/America triumphalism and were held in a backwater of a town smaller than, I’m not kidding, at least 25 Chinese cities you’ve never even heard of.)

Oh, snap! Livejournal blogger elemess rightly points out:

Since when is Atlanta a “backwater”? We have the world’s busiest airport. The world’s most recognizable news organization, the most successful delivery company in history, and the most consumed beverage other than water were all founded here… There are cities in China no one’s heard of larger than practically every Olympic city, including such backwaters as Berlin, Rome, and Athens, not to mention such cosmopolitan locales as Lillehammer and Nagano. Let me let you in on a not-a-secret: Shenyang is a backwater. So are Wuhan, Dongguan, and nearly every other Chinese city that isn’t Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong.

Coincidentally enough, the new documentary Up the Yangtze, which I review this week, conveys the staggering scale of some of those Chinese cities that are obscure to us in the West.

I always hated Whatizzit because the choice felt like an admission (not necessarily correct) that Atlanta lacks its own identity. But I don’t recall Izzy ever being known as “Whatizhee” — is that incorrect, or have I just suppressed that unpleasant memory?

(Image from the official website of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games)

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(Sony Pictures Classics)

It feels like it’s been a decade since “The West Wing” went off the air, and I’m still waiting for a TV show that matches its blend of wonkish politics and lofty idealism whipped into a compelling and witty dramatic narrative. Maybe that’s because, in 2008, I’m pining for Jed Bartlet as my president, because Martin Sheen portrayed a greatest-hits/composite president that was one part John F. Kennedy, one (small) part Bill Clinton and bits of other Democrats who deserved a closer look but never made it to the White House.

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