Weekend Wrap
Whiskey Bar, perhaps nostalgic for those read-aloud nights with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, turns the Eric Carle children's story into a ravenous political fable on the occasion of a Harper's piece that details the $80,000 in campaign money that U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-PA., has spent over the past eight years on meals.
It begins:
In the light of the moon, a little campaign lay on a leaf. One November morning the voters came out, and POP, out of the campaign came a tiny, very hungry Congressman. He started looking for some food.
On Monday, the Congressman ate through one Boeing PAC contribution, but he was still hungry.
The Harper's piece, written by Washington editor Ken Silverstein, shows the Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania's 7th District dipping often into the campaign trough:
He spent $1,698 for a personal computer, delivered to his home, and several hundred dollars in Budapest, Moscow, and at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Oslo—all highly unusual campaign stops for a man representing a district in eastern Pennsylvania. In Atlantic City he spent $502 at The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa and $405.61 at the Taj Mahal. Add to that $4,618 paid for landscaping to a company owned by a campaign contributor and some $13,000 in unitemized personal reimbursements. ...
Congressional ethics rules state that campaign treasure funds should be used for "bona fide campaign or political purposes. In addition to the $80,000 spent on restaurants, he used $30,000 to pay hotel bills.
Silverstein, a former Los Angeles Times reporter wrote:
Weldon's office did not return phone calls, but his attorney, William B. Canfield, defended the congressman's spending habits. He said that ethics rules are "entirely amorphous," adding "you may think it's a big loophole, but he's allowed to spend money that way."
The Inquirer's lead story today details Weldon's raising 40 percent of his campaign money from defense contractors. He is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He's raised $724,285 since last year.
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They said it couldn't be done: Titanic, II. Deep in the ocean's embrace, Jack Dawson is found encased in a block of ice. Carefully they unfreeze him. He escapes! See Jack run. See Jack Google Rose. Bad Jack, Bad! See how many cheesy movies they nicked dialog from. What ever did we do for amusement before YouTube?
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Speaking of which.... the last U.S. survivor of the 1912 sinking has died. Lillian Gertrud Asplund, 99, of Worcester, Ma., was five that fateful night when her father and three brothers went down. The AP writes:
The Asplund family had boarded the ship in Southampton, England, as third-class passengers on their way back to Worcester from their ancestral homeland, Sweden, where they had spent several years.
Asplund's mother described the sinking in an interview with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette newspaper shortly after she and her two children arrived in the city.
Selma Asplund said the family went to the Titanic's upper deck after the ship struck the iceberg.
"I could see the icebergs for a great distance around ... It was cold and the little ones were cuddling close to one another and trying to keep from under the feet of the many excited people ... My little girl, Lillie, accompanied me, and my husband said 'Go ahead, we will get into one of the other boats.' He smiled as he said it."
No mention of Jack Dawson.
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Matt Geiger, livin' large. An ABC News 20/20 article, headlined "Pimped Out Property," yields these stats about the goateed gargantuan and former Sixer plague, whose bad knees forced his retirement from basketball in 2001:
Number of chair he's broken in his lifetime: 12.
Height of his bathroom shower heads: 9 feet.
Size of his bed 10 feet by 8 feet.
Other accouterments in his Florida digs: an NBA-size part area, DJ booth, out-sized exercise equipment and XXL tanning bed.
What the piece doesn't mention: Big Daddy, the 2,000 bison that Geiger used to let roam on his range.(hat tip, Passion & Pride Sixers blog)
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Speaking of literature, a Web site devoted to translating Phillies announcer Chris Wheeler. Example:
He's A Great Baseball Man = He won't talk to me
Not only that, but Wheels Bingo and Wheels comic strips?
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Six readers deliver an Rx for health care woes after Shaun D. Mullen at Kiko's House ask for ideas how to fix the mess. He weighs in, too.
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Finally, a quote:
The blogosphere in some ways is kind of the heir apparent to where the alternative press was years ago--it sees itself as the alternative to the quote-unquote "MSM." It's got a little bit of a chip on its shoulder about how the MSM behaves. But on the other hand, the blogosphere at this point is so big and so massive and so many things that its hard to describe it in one word. I think it's had a real impact on the mainstream media. After a long time of ignoring it, the mainstream media might be obsessed-- frankly, a little too obsessed with it at this point--but there are obviously notable cases where blogs have had a serious impact, from Dan Rather to Eason Jordan. ... Overall, the idea that you may have a larger chorus of voices who are looking at the media, whether or not their criticism is agenda-based, never hurts. It never hurts to keep the mainstream media on their toes.
Mark Jurkowitz, Boston media critic.
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Wait, found another quote, this one local, from Jack at Pound For Pound, written after the death of Jane Jacobs, author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities:"
I was born and raised in Philadelphia during the 80s. It was a time of the crack epidemic, rising violence, companies leaving, the culmination of white flight, the MOVE bombing. It was an ugly time, and those of us who lived here, those of us who lived in the big cities of America, were seen as relics, as terrible people, unworthy of a second thought.
It really wasn't until I came across Ms. Jacobs' book that I found someone writing the way I felt. She gave me a feeling of hope, something to fight for, namely the big cities of America that built this country, my city, my Philadelphia. She treated the city as a welcome entity, not something to be bulldozed or escaped or controlled. She pointed out the qualities that make a great city great, from its public spaces to its diversity of uses to its creative energy. She stood up for the people against developers and city planners and other authorities who sought to impose their will on our places of living, working and worshipping.
the "Caterpilar" story was a childhood fave here. this rendering is clever and original.
lending group The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest is held ever year at San Jose State Univ. by Professor Scott Rice. It is held in memory of Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), a rather pro...