Re: Sebby is 100% full of shit
 

If there’s a greater fart around gathering than a wedding, I’ve not seen it.

“Hey Dad, buy a Lexus and now let’s pitch it off a cliff!” (Thank god I’ve no daughters.)

ETA: But you do get all that glorious china, and crystal glasses.

ETA2: And all those cousins falling down in the lobby and geriatric aunts and uncles bitching about the food.

Re: Sebby is 100% full of shit
 

You need to hang out with people who throw better parties.

We went to about a half dozen weddings in the last year, including weddings thrown by friends who are Indian, Bahai, Chinese, Greek, and Irish Catholic, and each was a unique and interesting experience, from different liturgies and ceremonies to different foods and celebrations. A lot of geriatric aunts and uncles showing they still had it on the dance floor, very few people falling down at any of them.

But I'm starting to understand why you have such inane cocktail party stories. You go to bad parties.

Re: Sebby is 100% full of shit
 

You're right. Plus Penske was in the wedding party, and he could get Coltrane's wife to do ANYTHING: but not that. Trust me, I've seen his photos.

Re: Sebby is 100% full of shit
 

Don't take this personal, because it is more about my in-laws, but I'm getting to where, you know in Fail Safe the President says he will bomb NY? If that ever has to happen I'm hoping we give up Philly. Plus, look up Wingbowl or Eagles celebrations on youtube. You all eat horse shit?

Re: Sebby is 100% full of shit
 

2. You always sacrifice Philly first. Is this even a discussion?

I grew up a Pirates, Yankees, and Giants fan.

Re: Sebby is 100% full of shit
 

I've been to Korean and Indian ceremonies. The food's generally better at those. And the processes are indeed more interesting.

I've never heard a liturgy through which I didn't incessantly daydream. We made a few errors with our wedding, but one element all guests save the pious (whose sensibilities were of .0000% importance to me) agreed was excellent: No mass. Even the priest who did the wedding agreed it was best to eschew that, particularly given the wedding parties were Jews and Episcopalians. (Episcopalians may be Catholic-lite, but even they don't desire to sit through some pompous ritual.)

I love Greek food. I have to get invited to one of those.

ETA: They're on Sunday sometimes, so they kind of ruin Monday, but Conservative or Orthodox Jewish weddings have amazing food.

Re: Sebby is 100% full of shit
 

Ha! Then I remember it even less than I thought I did!

(Although, what a tribute to Adams that what popped into my head was a different quote from the same book. That has to be some kind of high compliment.)

TM

Barcelona
 

We're going to Barcelona for a week. Anyone have recommendations for neighborhoods to stay in?

We did a week in Amsterdam (with an infant even) last year and it turned out that city is way better slightly away from the main tourist action with access to more neighborhood-y type restaurants and shops, especially if you're lingering. I kind of stumbled into that result but would like to try to replicate it in Catalonia if I can.

Re: Barcelona
 

Regarding Barcelona, I have several suggestions.

But I'd like to talk about 41 here instead.

It's probably not surprising that his funeral seems like such a non-event. In many regards, 41 was an extinct creature long before he actually died. He had low points, like Willie Horton, but it's safe to assume that was all Lee Atwater. And his high points are more for what he didn't do than anything he did.

Most notably, H.W. didn't go into Baghdad. This might have been the wisest consideration of the "you break it, you buy it" rule in history. And he observed undying civility, carrying himself as a President should. In fact, over the last five Presidencies, he and Obama are the only two who truly dignified the office. (W was technically dignified, but Iraq blights all positives for which he might be credited... It's hard to cite the good manners of one who blew 3 trillion and wasted over a hundred thousand lives because he was too lazy to stand up to Rummy and Cheney.)

I liked H.W. I'd vote for him today, for the civility and prowess. But I'm not sure he'd be the right kind of person in this age of discontent. The time seems to call for a more aggressive leadership. I think a guy like H.W. would be eaten alive in the office now, much like Macron is being savaged in France. Slow, steady, and measured doesn't cut it at the moment.

I feel like that should be disconcerting. But it seems somewhat linear. If you were reading the papers when Bush was in office, you absorbed discussion of many of the same problems that persist today. (Perot's giant sucking sound actually wound up being a spot-on prediction.) We didn't do much about them back then, when they were easy to tackle. And so we're reacting violently to them now, as they've become acute.

People on the radio have been lamenting that we don't have Presidents like H.W. anymore. I don't think we could have such a President today. Trump is exactly the kind of extremist one would expect in this age. A symptom, a reaction, rather than a steward, or manager, like H.W.

Re: Barcelona
 

It wasn't just Willie Horton (and Michigan might have been the only place where "he let Willie Horton out" could have been seen as a positive thing)- his whole campaign was stupid. I actually voted for Dukakis in disgust. There were commercials that basically just had waving flags, no substance whatsoever.

And we could/should still have a boring competent president. Trump came along and blew up the process a bit- took a second for pols to figure out what to do with an opponent whose main tactic is to call you names
(but next time they'll be ready for him). Mix in the perfect storm of Bernie driving people to believe we deserve a "choice" and Hil having been around for so long, and here we are.

Re: Barcelona
 

I don't think Trump blew up anything. The process, the political system, the economy, was so fucked up, so ill, a disease like Trump appears.

Trump is like cancer. You need a number of bad things to all go very wrong inside a cell to get metastatic disease. We as a nation had enough of those things going on that a thing like Trump appeared, the normal immune response never killed him, and he spread.

Same thing is going on throughout Europe right now.

Populism sat relatively idle, controlled, from the days of Father Coughlin. Its appearance and spread is not the problem, but the symptom. If smart people like us don't realize that -- if we keep saying Trump "hacked" politics (he's not that smart) or that populism is the cause of problems -- we're fucked. And I don't think any of us actually believe that. We know exactly what caused extreme politicians like Bernie and Trump to acquire such support. I just don't think we want to admit it. It's much easier to see Trump as an aberration in a line of people like H.W. or Obama. But I think that's seeing it backwards. H.W. and Obama are very much Yesterday, the former a dinosaur Rockefeller Republican, the latter our last Moderate Democrat for a while.

Until we address inequality (that the economy is not delivering anywhere near what it should to all people), and I've no idea how that can or will be done, we're going to get more populism, which will bring us more Bernies and Trumps.

Trump = Symptom. Bernie = Symptom.

Re: Barcelona
 

It was indeed a good and difficult decision, that others who came after should have valued more.

Huh?

Re: Barcelona
 

It was placated with an economy and a political system that provided for more than just the very rich, only to rise again after a decades-long, worldwide "conservative" movement reverse things.

Bernie isn't extreme, though.

Literally the only way to do that is to be more like Bernie, though. If we're not willing to use government to take a bit more from the wealthy and spend it on the less fortunate, there's literally no way to close that gap.

Re: Barcelona
 

Agreed.

In terms of traditional politics and acceptable policies (being anathema to most of what we call "capitalism"), he is. Not extreme in rhetoric or luridness of policy prescriptions, like Trump, of course.

I don't disagree. But even if we taxed the .00001% at 90% of everything over $1mil a year, there's not enough to bring the level of equality needed. Also, extreme redistribution does have an adverse impact on growth. Comparisons to Eisenhower years having a 90% top rate are inapt, for obvious reasons.

Re: Barcelona
 

To your Willie Horton point, Bush sometimes took the high road and sometimes took the low road. To take the measure of the man, you've got to acknowledge both.

Bush was not a conservative, and conservatives always found him suspect. He tried hard to overcome it, e.g., recanting on voodoo economics and vowing no new taxes, but it seemed that he was trying to hard, so he couldn't remove the suspicions. His Republican Party is no more, and he could never get elected today.