This is so weird to a Western NYer, as my area is filled with ________-_______ Town Line Roads. Like, I can think of abut 25 off the top of my head.

Next time a right wing fox news type accuses anti-war USrs of being unpatriotic:

[link]

Note that even after he gave out the information on national TV, Fox begged the Pentagon to let Geraldo stay. God forbid they should put the lives of our soldiers above ratings.

The Boswash megalopolis!!

Heh. I grew up on the north end of it, currently living on the south end of it. Two different worlds.

6 hours between cities - changes the angle on the American "love affair" with cars/oil/gasoline a bit, doesn't it?

meara!

Well, now I'll never know what Jim posted, but just as well. Looks like it would have given me the vapors!

Was caught peeking at CNN during a break at work and warned quickly by a co-worker to stay off the Net at the company I'm temping at. I feel so ill-informed and antisocial. All the more frustrating because I need to have it open for a database we use.

Merkuns have trouble with distances too, sometimes. My Dad used a travel a lot around NY State for work--to this day he can name the county seats of all 62 counties--and once he found himself sharing a Syracuse to NYC flight with an exotic creature--a Texan! Dad has the friendly gene and in chatting, found out that the guy wanted to drive from Boston to New York. Dad said that sounded great and started suggesting the prettiest, most historical routes. The Texan listened and then frowned. "Can I do all that? I only got three days and it's four whole states!"

(Boston to NYC is about 200 miles or so; driven straight through at the breakneck Mass Pike and I-95 speeds, it's about three and a half hours).

Counties in NYC are called boroughs and they're pretty important. There are entire states less populated than Brooklyn (ne Kings) the biggest one--there's four million people there. In New England, NSM. The lines are weird--Barnstable County is just Cape Cod, except for Gosnold which sticks out and is part of Dukes (Martha's Vineyard.) Nantucket is its own county. Hampden and Hampshire are both in Western MA just to confuse people. And the town of Brookline is in Norfolk County but due to annexations is surrounded by another county.

The United States are just that--a federalist system. It makes me laugh ruefully when unAmericans say that "America has the death penalty" or "America's gun laws are such and such" or "America spends x dollars on education" or whatever. All of those things are largely reserved to each state and can vary wildly depending on where you live. I've lived in two of the most populous states in the Union. Neither has the death penalty--Canada was still executing people 15 years after MA had stopped (1962 vs. 1947)--and both have strict (by US standards) gun laws. And there are about ten thousand school boards, mostly funded by local property taxes. The feds do give some money, of course, for things like school lunches and all, but it may surprise a few of you to learn that often it's the locals themselves who resist federal money, with the adage in mind "He who pays the piper calls the tune."

Great thing is that, if you're lucky or rich enough or poor and rootless enough, you often can move to a state you like and flit around until you find a belief system and lifestyle and climate to match your own tastes. Aside from the distances involved for most people, that's another reason Americans are attached to the idea of the road.

Interesting articles:

Translated from 'Der Speigel' via the NY Times. I knew about the German bar on using military force aboard, but didn't know they still had the draft. The Germans have a lot of thinking to do, evidently. Cute that they too seem to be tired of French gloating. And, although this is doubtless the work of a bunch of stupid teenage vandals, it's so not nice for the Brits.

From celebrated leftist columnist Nat Hentoff, "Why I Didn't March This Time", in The Village Voice of all places.

Special for FayJay! McDonald's Protests! When you look at a picture of Ronald McD on his back, his face burnt, and a swatstika drawn on his chest, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. OK, I laugh, but that's just me. Whatever happened to good ol' fashioned boycotts? Or DIY--that Mecca Cola thing sounds like a great idea if you want to make a point. Vote with your wallet and leave the Eeeeevil Companies alone--and unpatronized.

Yay for Jessica Lynch and the four Western reporters!

Moonlit, those essays were really something. Sounds like somebody's been reading Z-Mag.

As for Saddam, this whole touted "live speech"--whoops! Let's let Announcer Guy read it--thing today is very suspicious. To quote Kenneniah re Vern Schillinger in the last episode of OZ, "That mother******'s DEAD!" Let's hope so. But the snake might writhe without its head for a while longer, sadly.

Baby brother shipped out on Sunday morning. We got a call from him and he can't say where he is, but he's definitely not directly in harm's way, although that frontier does seem to move around a bit in this war. He works on the big cargo planes, which are now being loaded with relief supplies for the people. Let's hope they can fly into the country safely as soon as possible.

Edit: Oh yeah, Rumsfeld is a tactless idiot. At least Bush yanked his chain and told him to stay out of Frank's way. Dubya himself seems to have read at least one book--the biography of LBJ, so he's staying out of micromanaging the war. Only way it could be worse. It's about 9:00 in Iraq and a big battle seems to be starting right now. I feel torn between "Yikes" and "God help the civilians" and "Let's roll".

Counties in NYC are called boroughs

I don't think that's quite right. New York City is so big that includes five counties and the counties correspond with the boroughs but I don't think they are the same thing.

When I was in Virginia I was annoyed that the cities were independent of any county. Heather didn't have Counties growing up because Louisiana has Parishes.

[Edit: Now I'm thinking that NYC only has four counties and that Staten Island is in Kings with Brooklyn. Being me, I shall obsess about this and Google things at one in the morning until my curiosity is satisfied.]

[Edit edit: Nope, Staten Island is Richmond County. There are 5 in NYC. IIRC the counties are a state delineation and the boroughs are a city one.]

S'True. I didn't even know what counties were for what seems like a long time. Does everyone do a state history class in junior high or thereabouts?

Anyway, one of the really cool things about growing up in La. and learning about La. history was the connection that state has to what was nastily, I think, called "old Europe." French is usually most associated with La., but Spain is a big part of our heratige and German in a few of the center southern parishes. And Canada! Not European, but still, it's Canada!

Sighhh... I realize this is only of interest to me anymore but I'm obsessed and that's just the way it goed

wikipedia.org tells us about US Counties in general:

The term "county" is also used in 48 of the 50 states of the United States for the level of local government below the state itself. Louisiana uses the term "parishes" and Alaska uses "boroughs". The power of the county government varies widely from state to state as does the relationship between counties and incorporated cities. In New England, counties function only as judicial court districts (in fact, in Connecticut and Rhode Island, they have even lost that function and are solely geographic designations), and most local power is in the form of towns.

And New York Counties in specific:

The City of New York is composed of 5 boroughs, each a county of New York State:

The boroughs, although legally counties, do not have separate county governments. Each borough elects a Borough President, but under the current city charter, the Borough President's powers are limited--he or she has a small discretionary budget to spend on projects within the borough.

Does everyone do a state history class in junior high or thereabouts?

Ohio State History. They might as well teach "The Geography of Cincinnati's Suburbs" for all the good it'll do you later in life.

The form of democracy that prevailed in core Western states in much of the post-war period was a form of compensatory democracy, distinguished, at least in part, by a diachronic understanding of democratic governance. Following Enlightenment beliefs that understanding history enabled humankind to better itself, democracy was seen, within the context of a process stretching back into society’s past, as the result of past improvements. Thus, liberal democracy was viewed as a means of continuing improvements into society’s future, part of the progress of civilisation.

This earlier conception of democracy was prepared to at least attempt to ameliorate the inequalities produced by market-society through mechanisms such as social welfare provisions. Democracy was understood to involve ‘social citizenship’, where citizens could expect to be ‘compensated’ by the state in areas where the market was deficient in providing what was necessary.

Since Thatcher and Reagan the discourse of compensatory democracy has gradually been supplanted by one of ‘protective’ democracy that ignores the idea that democracy might involve compensation for market failure, or that democratic citizenship might involve a social-welfare dimension. Rather, “...it is nothing but a logical requirement for the governance of inherently self-interested conflicting individuals who are assumed to be infinite desirers of their own private benefits. Its advocacy is based on the assumption that man is an infinite consumer, that his overriding motivation is to maximise the flow of satisfactions, or utilities, to himself from society, and that a national society is simply a collection of individuals”. Responsible government, even to the extent of responsibility to a democratic electorate, is needed for the protection of individuals and the promotion of the GNP, and for nothing more. [(Which is the way it was in the 19th century but lots less people had the vote)]

In contrast to the earlier diachronic understanding of democracy, this ‘protective’ view is an unambiguously synchronic one. In this understanding, democracy is reduced to a process that exists in a single moment in time. Protective democracy is characterised by a strict separation of the economic and political spheres, the former responding only to the logic of the market place, and the latter constrained to allowing that logic to proceed without interference.

The main difference, however, is that the earlier general understanding of the need to redress the deficiencies of the market has been taken over by one based on a limited agenda of ‘deficit reduction’ and ‘tax relief’ to be achieved through the inexorable reduction of the welfare state.

I sourced this to a working paper by Mark Neufeld, "Globalization and the Re-Definition of Democratic Governance", for anyone who wants to read the rest of it. It's pretty good. (And quoting it all gives me the longest meara ever!)

From that Der Spiegel article,

Germany's annual military budget is 23.4 billion Euros, and is fixed until 2006. But even if Schröder were to add 1.5 billion Euros to the budget of his defense minister, Struck,

This seems like counting pennies next to the $50 billion Bush added to our $322 billion defense budget after 9/11. Come on, Germany, the combined defense budget of the other 191 countries in the world will never catch up to America's if you don't start pulling your weight! (Who was that quote from: "We were in an arms race with the Soviet Union. Now, it seems, we are in an arms race with ourselves.")

[Lake Champlain] was classified as a Great Lake for a little while-- long enough to be the final answer on a friend's college Jeopardy appearance, not long enough to stay the correct answer by the time of broadcast.

I bet Alex Trebek got so many phone calls. I guess Jeopardy can only spend so long in reruns, huh? "I'll take 'World's Largest Economies' for $100, Alex. What was Japan?"

Dai Watkins! I was just thinking about you today while pondering this ZoeFinch thing with England. Really.

"I heard that monologue guy again, his name is Rush Limbo or something".

That is a classic tale.

From my own limited travels, though, I've really gained a different perspective on what "normal" is, in terms of material possessions and world picture and all that.

You know how Australia pays everyone to take a year of travel before college? (That's how I understood it from the Australian guy in the next airplane seat, anyway.) America should offer everybody to spend six months in Haiti or somewhere. My friend went to Haiti for Army training and she's a lot more content with how much she earns and owns now. It's an important perspective.

I would love that! My HS did France, Germany and Rome trips and I think the drama kids had the chance to go to NY for a broadway play.

You know how Australia pays everyone to take a year of travel before college? (That's how I understood it from the Australian guy in the next airplane seat, anyway.)

I am sceptical. Maybe an Australian can confirm or deny? It's very common in Britain to take a year out between school and university (to earn some money, travel, etc.) but nobody actually pays you for it. Which would be undeniably cool.