Culturally Unconscious

The Spanish film Crimen Perfecto is one of the best films to watch on Halloween that’s not about Halloween. It has murder, butcher knives, ghosts. I highly recommend watching it.

Since the Eisenhower administration half a century ago, the Yankees have never won a World Series with a Republican in the White House. Nothing has made me want to vote Republican more.

Boise State, TCU, Utah, BYU, and Houston should get together and form their own conference. If they invite Idaho, who is currently undefeated and Fresno State and Hawaii. Fresno State and Hawaii, although not strong this season have had histories of success. This could be considered a super mid major confrence. If it existed today it would have five top-25 teams than any of the BCS conferences; more than the pac-10, Big-10, Big East, ACC, or even the vaunted SEC.

This would also solve a big problem for all of these schools which is finding ranked opponents to play them. For example Boise State played only one ranked opponent this year, Oregon, in it’s first game. That’s not a schedule that will set you up to climb the BCS standings. But BCS schools virtually refuse to schedule games against Boise State. (Given what happened this year Oregon would probably help itself if it dropped Boise State from it’s schedule.)

Portland get mentioned in one of Matt Yglesias’ recent posts, commenting on how many cities cited as models for urban planing have low African American populations.

if you take a place that’s under-invested for decades in walkable urbanism and then create a bit of walkable urbanism the tendency is for that bit to become very expensive. And since African-American households have lower incomes and substantially less wealth than white households, the tendency is for the walkable urban places to become white. But to raise this as an objection to building walkable urbanism is like saying that we shouldn’t try to have great public schools, because poor people might not be able to afford to live near them. That’s totally backwards—the inability of poor people to afford to live in good school districts highlights the need for more good educational opportunities not fewer. By the same token, if investments in walkable urbanism cause prices to shoot up and price people out of the area that shows that we need more walkable urbanism.

From my own personal experience, living in NE Portland, I think it is obvious that progressive urban planning can make it more difficult for low income families to live in gentrifying neighborhoods (Alberta). While I agree with Yglesias that investing in more walkable urbanism will help solve the problem of low income people being priced out, I think other policy solutions should also be used. Such as housing vouchers to help low income families afford living in gentrifying neighborhoods.