beck tipped me off to this local website, beerforthehomeless.com and i've been chatting with a few people in town about it. mike had something on his site about it recently too which i started to comment on and then realized i was writing more of a diatribe than a comment, so i'm copying it here too. check out the site and then let me know what you think of my "analysis."
my comment
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i'm kind of ambivalent about the beerforthehomeless phenomenon. while i like the idea that being homeless shouldn't make one a "second-class citizen", i don't think the solution is providing beer. the logic of the whole thing seems to be built on a couple of false assumptions. first, beer is not "a simple pleasure that society allows" to a certain strata of people as the site claims. its not as if someone is handing out free beer to the wealthy, and the poor are just being excluded. no, the homeless don't have beer for the same reason that they don't have caviar and that i don't have a BMW -- its out of my price range, and i don't need it. A second faulty assumption is that all mature adults have unlimited access to beer. I know plenty of mature adults who either can't afford beer or choose not to drink it, but this has nothing to do with whether they're homeless, much less second-class citizens.
now don't get me wrong, i'm not saying its wrong to hand out beer to the homeless; just that the justification on the website is a bit weak, and seems to be driven more by the desire to get a reaction out of people rather than actually help the homeless. it seems to me that there are better ways of helping the homeless than merely giving away beer. a free handout has never been the solution to solving the poverty problem, has it?
granted, this is not really the proper forum for presenting a solution to the problem of poverty, nor do i even have one, but i would submit that the real solution has something to do with developing relationships with the homeless such that you could discover their real needs and actually help them in the same way that you would help anyone you love and value.
i haven't said much about my musical tastes on here yet, but i guess now's a good a time to start as any. today i'm listening to the new(ish) coldplay album. up to this point i've not been much of a fan. i guess i just feel like they came in that whole group of bands who were radiohead knock-offs, but i'm beginning to reconsider. a few songs off their latest album keep getting stuck in my head, and getting better and better. so, i borrowed the album this morning from a neighbor and hope to, well, make a decision.
chattanooga felt like a wasteland on the way into work this morning, and i almost felt convicted for not celebrating memorial day. at my office, we don't really observe official holidays, so much as personal holidays. downtown, where i live, however is made up largely of big businesses like Unum Provident, TVA, and Cygna who do take the day off. so the whole place felt like some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland. i think the only movement i saw was a few bums rustling about down by warehouse row. reminds me of the opening scenes from "Strange Brew"... "Fleshy headed mutant! Are you friendly?... " also reminds me of walking to church on sunday mornings in Boston last summer. that city hums with activity every hour of the week except sundays from about 8am to noon. for those few hours you'd think everyone had been drugged the night before... which they probably had.
"In these essays, mostly written in the 1970's, Mr. Baudrillard suggests that because of technology and the rise of modern capitalism, everything has become a simulacrum; as in the Matrix, nothing real remains. Disneyland is one of his examples: an imaginary world that invokes something "real," though that "real" world is just as imaginary."
seems like saturdays are typically pretty good days for the new york times if you're hunting for some lightweight philosophical ramblings. today is no different. there was an interesting article today about the recent matrix films. i've been wanting to put something up on my blog about 'reloaded' but just haven't had the time. work has been unbelievably busy. the NYT article focuses on postmodern philosopher baudrillard who is referenced in the first film for his book Simulacra and Simulation. evidently, the wachowski brothers have admitted that this hint is only the beginning of numerous philosophical and cultural tips throughout the film. but the article and baudrillard in general reminds me of umberto eco's book Travels in Hyperreaality which i'm guessing is much more accessible to the common man (since i understood it pretty well, and have no desire to try to dig through baudrillard). the main essay is concerned with man's fascination, particularly american man's, with unreality, or hyper-reality as he refers to it. that is, we tend to prefer those things that are more real than the world that we live in, even though they aren't, um, real. for example, most people would rather see an animatronic aligator at disney world jump out of the water and snap at them, than go to, say, busch gardens, and see a real aligator sitting in the swamp barely moving. even though, for the most part, aligators tend to sit in the sun and do nothing. just one of the observations that i remember. its worth checking out though, as is the NYT article, and if you have time, adam gopnik's article in the new yorker is superb.
more later...
chattanooga making waves in the regional beer scene.
you may have heard about all the water here in tennessee. last week, the city of chattanooga was pretty well submerged under water for about 4 full days. this made travel difficult, and had everyone involved with JosiahQ's wedding a bit worried. for my part, i tried unsuccessfully to avoid the runoff. taking morris home one evening i was forced to drive through a slightly-too-deep puddle (okay, it was a small lake, but i thought i could make it) and in the process caused my car to drink up about half the contents. according to my mechanic, engines and water don't mix well. if you paid attention at all in chemistry 101, you'll remember that liquids don't compress quite as well as gases do, and when said water got into the the cylinders where the pistons were firing, well, the piston didn't get to fire. my mechanic used words like "wadded up" and "smushed" when referring to the metal internals of my engine. it's really amazing and kind of sad. i'm quite impressed with myself for killing a vehicle so quickly; it couldn't have taken more than 5 seconds to get throught the 3/4s of a puddle that we did.
for a while there the insurance people were telling me that it would be totalled and i'd just get a check for the value of the car (read not much). but thankfully, they found a cheap used engine and are actually going to repair the beast, freeing me from the trouble of car shopping and loan shopping - two things i don't much enjoy.
aside from the car fiasco, everything went well with Josiah and April Roe's wedding weekend. the weather cleared up just in time, and the casa grande del rio was perfect. even the sight of trees underwater in the flooded tennessee river couldn't dampen the high spirits. isaac wardell, as usual, was the hero of the weekend. without a doubt he put more time and energy into making this thing happen than everyone else combined. it was all pretty incredible. ranks right up there with lang and ty for best wedding festivities ever.
the first of what may be many etymological entries...
today being the first of may, april, fiance of JosiahQ asked in a comment whether i knew the etymology of "May Day" and "mayday" and what one has to do with the other. so, i did a quick lookup at one of my favorite linguaphile sites, bartelby.com and here's what i came up with.
apparently the two have nothing to do with each other. "May Day," in pagan Europe it was a festive holy day celebrating the first spring planting. Since then it has gone through many transformations, incorporating, as you might have suspected a number of fertility rite associations: the Maypole as phallic symbol, etc. etc. During industrial revolution it somehow became associated with the labor party when an historic strike took place on May 1, 1886.
from workers.labor.net.au:
"Our modern celebration of Mayday as a working class holiday developed from the US workers struggle for the eight hour day in 1886. The working class movement in the USA began campaigning for an eight hour day in the 1860s, following the Civil War. The historic strike of May 1st, 1886 was a culmination of a concerted struggle. Chicago was the major industrial centre of the USA. Police attacked striking workers from the McCormack Harvester Co., killing six."
evidently it's become something of a rallying point for workers of the world to unite around. Even Noam Chomsky has something to say about it.
but the more interesting word to me is "mayday," used as a distress signal. according to bartleby.com its defined as "An international radiotelephone signal word used by aircraft and ships in distress" and the etymology is from from the French phrase m'aider meaning "help me!"
a coincidental tidbit: the two actually came together on May 1, 1986, 100 years to the day after the labor strike, at the nuclear reactor melted down in Chernobyl. there was an editorial shortly thereafter in the New York Times entitled, “Mayday! and May Day” criticising Soviet suppression of news.
so a couple of weeks ago we realized we've been going through so much coffee here at the office that we decided to start buying it in bulk from the local coffeeshop, greyfriars. this cuts our cost in half, and keeps us from running out quite so regularly. (we buy in 5 pound bags every 2 weeks.) it's gone so well in fact that this morning jeff, my boss, suggested we start buying beer in kegs. :)
so this morning i was reading the review of the new mac iTunes Store software over at slashdot. apparently the latest in an attempt to make a legalized kazaa/napster/morpheus/etc. and what should i bump into, but this. mmmm... i want one.