Who Said It?

Give ’em hell, Harry.

The other day I came across a quote of E.M. Forster’s from 1911ish that is entirely apposite today. Switch empires and wars and it’s all much of a muchness. Money rules (which is why I’m so glad I made the choice to be wealthy); thugs govern; Andrew Lloyd Webber is a billioinaire (full disclosure: he did buy that Tintoretto to keep it at the National).

If I can drag up the energy I’ll post it at some time. Forster’s quote.

Today I strolled over at lunch and ordered from my locally owned, bricks and mortar, California sales-tax paying bookstore, a copy of “Traitor to His Class” on Nabisco’s recommendation. When I looked for it at the store (and ultimately had to talk to the clerk to order it), the clerk said, “Oh, I remember reading that one a couple years ago. Quite timely that you want to read it now,” which I took as a good sign that he wasn’t blowing smoke up my ass and he probably had read the book or at least the NYT Book Review article about it. That says something about that place.

Oh, and P.S. to Nojo looking for a way to pay for the popcorn since FuckAmazon fired its Kahleefornya affiliates pending manipulation of the voter initiative process.

I’m taking a few days off next week to go sit by water in the woods in the Great Northwest and I’m taking that FDR biography and a stack of New Yorkers. I may or may not be coming back.

@SanFranLefty: Werd. Oh and plus I’ve become addicted to the New Yorker. 20 pages on elevator technology? Sublime.

@Nabisco: Not being able to stay up to date on the New Yorker and the Economist is about the only thing that kinda sucks about my new job and no longer spending an hour and a half a day dealing with SF’s Muni system (or longer on nights like yesterday when the V for Vendetta crowd shut down BART and MUNI to protest BART shutting down cell phone service in the tunnels). Instead I’m in a car flipping between classic rock stations and the jazz station and NPR trying to find a traffic report like 99.9999% of AmeriKKKa which is a revelation to someone who hasn’t commuted by car since working at a waterpark in college.

@SanFranLefty: I am going to sound like a conservatard asshole for saying this, but what amuses me more is the fact that there is cell phone service in the subway at all. In Atlanta and other major American cities, we don’t have it, period. Of course, in Atlanta, we’re lucky to have a pitiful excuse for a train system at all and our one true portion of legitimate “subway” we have is only about 3 miles long, excluding minor spits along some of the rail lines.

@rptrcub: No, you don’t sound like a conservatard. I never ride BART because it’s more a suburbanite/East Bay thing. My response was, “They have cell phone service on BART?” and then thanked FSM that I don’t ride it because if I had to sit on their nasty ass cloth seats that are never cleaned, while the person next to me chatted away, I’d be having my own V for Vendetta moment. Give me the sullen Chinese ladies carrying 15 pink plastic shopping bags shoving me on MUNI’s subway if it means I’m spared cell phone access.

@rptrcub:

I noticed (to my surprise) that they had cell phone service for at least some providers on the DC metro, but I suspect that’s more about making sure the pols’ Crackberries work at all times…

@SanFranLefty: BART from the airport into the city is a great deal; our SF office is a block from the Montgomery St. station. I can catch up on emails I’ve missed while sleeping on the flight up from LA.

Speaking of fascist douchebags, here’s the latest from Airstrip One:

Rioters’ families face eviction

Apparently our Limey friends are working hard to stay ahead of even the teabaggers in the “let’s all play police state” rally…

@Dodgerblue: Yes, BART definitely beats the $35 death cab ride from SFO to the Financial District.

@al2o3cr: Metro has had its own wireless network since 1993 (!), but up until a couple of years ago it only covered Verizon.

@al2o3cr: Oh, hell, the Limeys are rank amateurs compared to what we do here. The Supreme Court said by an 8-0 vote almost ten years ago that grandmas in public housing can be kicked to the curb if their grandson gets arrested for a crime even if granny had no idea what happened (and even if charges are dropped!), and now some housing authorities are trying to drug test residents.