The Salt-Box

Standing on line at the Genius Bar Wednesday night, I overheard the end of a transaction between the Genius and a Customer:

G: You’re all set . . . just pull your car to the door in parking lot B1, and I’ll have someone meet you with your iMac.

C:  Great!  But I don’t need anyone to meet me–I got a spot right outside Nordstrom.*  I can carry it that far by myself.

G: Yes, but Nordstrom complains when people walk through their store carrying unboxed computers.  (G & C share an eyeroll.)

Stay classy, Nordstrom!

*Nordstrom is two doors down from the Apple store; it’s easily the most convenient entrance.

Urmee Khan has a terminally silly post this morning at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site, arguing that only middle-aged white guys like HBO’s brilliant show, The Wire.  Her chief objection to the show is its treatment of women:

It is misogynistic. All the main characters are men, apart from one woman. It is a world of men, in which many of the women are portrayed as subservient, lap-dancing gangsters’ molls.

This isn’t really true (there are several women who’d count as main characters) as a description of facts on the ground, and it’s just insipid as cultural commentary, inasmuch as it confuses a representation of misogyny with its endorsement.  The show signals pretty clearly indicts even its most sympathetic characters for their attitudes toward women.

She’s not much better on race:

The white characters in The Wire inhabit - usually - a sort of post-race world, where friendships and enmities with black men are denuded of racial tension. There are questions about how realistic this is, but for the purposes of the show, race in The Wire is a background hum rather than a dominating theme. When, in season three, a white detective kills a black colleague, under the mistaken belief he’s a criminal, the “racial element” (as it’s referred to) of the resulting controversy is shown as something unreasonable.

This isn’t an especially reasonable reading of season 3, which includes in it a ludicrous white cop who insists on singling out black cops as character witnesses for the shooter.  It also glosses over racial tensions depicted in the first two seasons.

But my main reason for writing this post is just anecdotal: As far as I can tell, women love The Wire.  That’s how it came into our home, through word-of-mouth from West Hartford moms.  (Think Little Children, and you’re not far off.)  I’d heard of the show for a couple of years, but never queued it on Netflix because I figured A. wouldn’t be interested.  But then Every Single WH Mom she hangs out with started watching it obsessively, plowing through those first 3 seasons on DVD over and over again, and talking about it nonstop at playdates.  So, we started watching, and got hooked.

Frankly, the first scene of the first episode caught us: It’s the greatest opener to any television show.  “This is America–everybody gets to play.”

Via Digital Digs, here’s Walk Score, an interesting Google Maps mash-up that “calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.”

Our house scored a 28, or Not Walkable.

Which is funny, because we in fact walk everywhere (except the grocery store, but that’s usually because we have the 4 year old in tow).  In particular we walk to work, which for both of us is the fair-sized university  about three or four blocks from home, and which doesn’t show up at all on the Walk Score results.  So while the neighborhood might not be extraordinarily walkable in general, we actually bought the house in order to walk.

Their algorithm is a little peculiar: It sees the campus bookstore as the closest bookstore, but it doesn’t see the campus library.  It also misses the bar right across the street from campus, but it counts the local head shop, Snotlocker, as a “clothing store.”  I don’t think it distinguishes “movie theater” from “theater for plays,” and, again, for both it omits campus as a venue for these.

(I think this is a general problem with the way they harvest data–when I plug in my first address from graduate school, freely available campus resources don’t show up.  As a result, it gets a mediocre walk score, when in fact I lived without a car for three years.)

Those caveats aside, it’s an interesting project–focusing attention on the practical realities of getting around is a good idea.

I know typo-blogging is a bit unfair, but this one’s pretty funny.  From today’s New Britain Herald:

The story, of course, is deeply unfunny.  While I’m prepared in theory to agree that throwing money at problems isn’t always a good solution, it does strike me as unreasonable to take a state “Educational Cost Sharing” grant and apply it to . . . tax relief, at a time when the city’s high school risks losing accreditation.

The thing that nearly prevented us from moving to New Britain wasn’t the tax burden, though I recognize it’s relatively high; rather, it was the reputation of the schools, particularly the high school.

When the city postponed fireworks on Wednesday, we decided to go see Ratatouille.  (A split decision: A & I loved it; The Little Man thought it was a little funny, but nowhere near as good as Cars, Toy Story, or The Incredibles.  I do think that the movie may demand a little too much attention to social nuance for a 4-year-old to truly love it, especially when there’s no compensatory violence. He thought the short, “Lifted,” was awesome.)

Three notes from our adventure:

• The family in line ahead of us had 3 adults and two kids.  As the man in the family stepped up to the register, he turned to one of the women and said, “Take [name] and the kids and get snacks.”  Then, he turned to the cashier and asked for 1 adult and 4 children for Transformers.  The cashier sold the tickets without batting an eye, and the ticket-taker admitted them without a second glance.   It turns out that teenagers *might* not care 110% about minimum-wage jobs.
• At the Loews theater we attended, there was no way to get water as the drink in a kid’s snack pack (which A and the Little Man share).  When A asked the snack dude, “Well, what if you don’t want to give your 4-year-old soda?,” his first (nonverbal, but very, very obvious) answer was, “Unclench.”  I was proud of him for choking the word down.  Ultimately, we had to spring for an extra water.  And to upgrade from “popcorn-and-Goldfish crackers”, which seems ridiculous, to “popcorn-and-fruit snacks” cost $1.
• According to the black couple coming out of Transformers, the point of that movie is “protect the white girls.”  The woman of the couple claimed that is in fact the plot of all movies.