Honour Hizzoner!

Compared to the ball of inertia that is the Mayor of London, there’s a lot going for Michael R. Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City.

And here’s why:

… the plastic-foam container may soon be going the way of trans fats, 32-ounce Pepsis, and cigarettes in Central Park.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose regulatory lance has slain fatty foods, supersize sodas, and smoking in parks, is now targeting plastic foam, the much-derided polymer that environmentalists have long tried to restrict.

On Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg, in his 12th and final State of the City address, will propose a citywide ban on plastic-foam food packaging, including takeout boxes, cups and trays. Public schools would be instructed to remove plastic-foam trays from their cafeterias. Many restaurants and bodegas would be forced to restock.

In excerpts from his speech released on Wednesday, Mr. Bloomberg rails against plastic foam, even comparing it to lead paint. “We can live without it, we may live longer without it, and the doggie bag will survive just fine,” the mayor plans to say.

Nobody would argue that NYC’s air quality is “good” (no city air quality is “good”), but what is remarkable is that it is by no means the worst across the USA — ten of the worst dozen ozone-polluted,  and seven of the worst dozen counties for particle-pollution are in and around LA, so no surprise there.

It’s a live and populist issue in NYC. Meanwhile BoJo is failing to come to terms with London’s air pollution: he postures whenever his past mis-steps trip him up.

We know that BoJo and Bloomberg live on the same land-surface, though it might as well be on different planets:

… some of his more high-minded policies, like soda limits, have left the [London] natives bemused.

When the mayors met for the first time, Mr. Johnson recalled, Mr. Bloomberg kept talking about trans fats.

“I didn’t know what trans fats were,” Mr. Johnson said, a glint in his eye. “I thought it had something to do with transsexuals, obese transsexuals, or something. Anyway, he made a great deal about that.”

That went down like a 2-pint cola with the UK pink press.

 

Ex America semper aliquid novum

Malcolm reckons two elements should inspire a good blog offering:

• Serendipity: Horace Walpole’s invention, for:

The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.

Well, so far, there’s nothing ‘happy’ to be extracted from the Newtown CT massacre.

• Bizarrerie, which Malcolm discussed at some length recently.

Somewhere in there comes this, from the New York Times:

Newtown, incorporated in 1711, takes its child-friendly, Norman Rockwell ambience seriously. The all-purpose landmark is the downtown flagpole, which dates to 1876. Fat and packed with small-town ephemera, including weekly equestrian news, The Newtown Bee dates to 1877. Scrabble was developed in Newtown by a local lawyer, James Brunot, in 1948, who adapted an earlier version and changed its name from “Criss-Cross Words” to “Scrabble.”

That article is topped-and-tailed by references to a local business selling Christmas trees.

Scrabble, Christmas trees … it all seems so reasonable, so normal in an unreasonable, abnormal context. One has to reach to grasp a vestige of sanity.

For the record, it’s about 75 miles — say, around a hundred minutes driving time — from Stockbridge, Massachusetts (the Norman Rockwell home) to Newtown, Connecticut. Malcolm has to wonder what the late-period Rockwell would have drawn this weekend. It would be telling, caring, gentle, and incisive: it would be infused by some of that quiet anger — liberal angst, if one must —  that went into The Problem We All Live With, the painting of six-year-old Ruby Bridges going to school in New Orleans (and which hung for a while outside Obama’s Oval Office).

Or perhaps it would reflect the earlier, Birthday Surprise:

Here’s to those dedicated teachers who gave their all on Friday.

Grim and grimmer

From the New York  Times’ running blog on the Newtown CT massacre:

Parents were told earlier, according to CNN, that the rule for this evening was simply that if they had not been reunited with their children, they would not be.

Somehow that puts all other “news” into proportion.

No soul/sole in New York

Some years back, one warm Friday evening, the Lady in his Life and Malcolm had dined well, and were wandering through San Francisco. Doubtless in search of a couth bar. [Damn this spell-checker to blazes! Not a 'cough bar'!]

Suddenly it seemed as if all hell had broken loose. Along the road came hundreds of skaters, some with those little caver’s lamps on their helmets, others waving lights and light-sticks. Screams, shouts, and whistles. A good show was enjoyed by all, participants and by-standers.

It is, apparently, a regular weekly event. Being San Francisco, it even claims to have political significance: a campaign for ‘alternative transportation’. Just how many ‘campaigns’ can one city support?

Anyway, good-luck to the Midnight Rollers.

Cross the continent

We pick up the New York Times to find this:

Hundreds of skateboarders defied a court ruling on Saturday, gathering on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and then riding down Broadway to the Financial District, in an annual longboard race that a State Supreme Court judge had declared unlawful two days earlier.

The unexpected judicial intervention in the race, called the Broadway Bomb, caused some participants to worry about being arrested and others to say that they were more determined to take part.

In the end, the race proceeded with little incident. As skaters arrived at the finish line, near the sculpture of a charging bull at Bowling Green, some even posed for photographs with police commanders.

No arrests were reported.

Malcolm can see that a race down Broadway on a Saturday morning might be over-the-top. Why, though, ban it?

Why not ‘institutionalise’ it? Make it a regular event? Set an off-peak time and date. Advertise it. Bring the shopping crowds in. Close off the cross-streets, and get it over faster.

In London, Mayor BoJo would be branding it, sticky lapel-badges all round.

Come to think of it, Bloomberg and Bomb are also alliterative. Hizzoner is missing a photo-op of considerable potential.

You can diss Big Blue, but don’t mess with Big Bird!

Once upon a time the 600-pound gorilla on the corporate computing block was Big Blue — IBM.

One of the early Apple TV adds has a pair of old suits looking down at younger suits entering the building. These young ones (including the new wave of … women!) were carrying Macintosh SE30s. That would seem to date the memory back to about 1990. The old suits asked the redundant question: why were they bringing their “toy computers” to work. The message, then and still with Apple, is that their products “just work”.

A cynic might plausibly argue that the success of the SE in business owed less to Apple than to the way the hardware ran MicroSoft Excel (from a 1.4 MB floppy!) — and to the fact that Excel was way in advance of the clunky VisiCalc application to which behemoth mainframes were shackled.

You’ll still see SE30s in many laboratories — even if only used as door-stops, or under office desks. Plug ‘em in, switch ‘em on. Most still dong cheerfully, and boot up OS 7.5.5. Choose the right day of the week and you may get Arthur Dent telling you This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

We thought that neat, at the time.

Somehow that all seems relevant to Malcolm — but then he has a very disturbed thought-process.

Was Romney’s stab at PBS singularly ill-advised?

What he said to the moderator, Jim Lehrer, was:

I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not going to — I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.

The “cost”of that “subsidy”, as PBS quickly made clear is trivial:

Over the course of a year, 91 percent of all U.S. television households tune in to their local PBS station. In fact, our service is watched by 81 percent of all children between the ages of 2-8.

Each day, the American public receives an enduring and daily return on investment that is heard, seen, read and experienced in public media broadcasts, apps, podcasts and online — all for the cost of about $1.35 per person per year.

Far from huge tranches of money from China to pay for it, the PBS “subsidy” amounts to 0.001% of the federal budget. Were that the scope of a President Romney’s ambitions to cut the deficit, he — and we — really would be in trouble.

All this, and much more, is being very elegantly and eloquently made by Charles M. Blow at the New York Times:

Big Bird is the man. He’s 8 feet tall. He can sing and roller skate and ride a unicycle and dance. Can you do that, Mr. Romney? I’m not talking about your fox trot away from the facts. I’m talking about real dancing.

Since 1969, Big Bird has been the king of the block on “Sesame Street.” When I was a child, he and his friends taught me the alphabet and the colors and how to do simple math.

Do you know how to do simple math, Mr. Romney? Maybe you and the Countess Von Backward could exchange numbers.

Blow is vamping on the educational values of PBS in general, and Sesame Street in particular. When told his American-born grandchildren had “etiquette” as part of their pre-school daycare experience, Malcolm had to control his eyebrows. Yet that, too, is in the overt Sesame Street curriculum:

Big Bird and his friends also showed me what it meant to resolve conflicts with kindness and accept people’s differences and look out for the less fortunate. Do you know anything about looking out for the less fortunate, Mr. Romney? Or do you think they’re all grouches scrounging around in trash cans?

Moreover, anything must be a good thing that dilutes and uplifts the pabulum, notably those crude (and, to Malcolm, violent) oriental- made cartoons, which is the staple fodder on the commercial networks.

Pester power

Were the Obama campaigners and their assorted PACs truly Machiavellian they would be running Save Big Bird! ads in the post-school hours. All that is needed is a trim of that clip of Romney:

It would work on the same basis as those confectionary and SimpleWare [©] displays so adjacent to the supermarket check-out. Never underestimate the niggle factor:

Mom! They’re not going to hurt Big Bird, are they?

Basic, under-powered and over-stated — rather like the Macintosh SE — but it might. similarly, “just work”.

Nicely put 2

This could become a habit …

The real joy of Mitt Romney rollicking in the merde over Libya, 47% and now Palestine is how commentators have risen to the occasion.

Pride of place has to go to go, as always, to Maureen Dowd, originally in the NY Times, though Malcolm encountered it reposted on Real Clear Politics. Does this Washington re-tread of Dorothy Parker generate her own headlines, or does she have a tame viper of a super-sub-editor in her cupboard? Either way, this one — over a piece taking lumps out of Romney — is a winner:

Let Them Eat Crab Cake

Once Dowd awards an individual a nickname — “W”, “Spock” (it’s the ears!) — that person is both celebrated and nailed. here comes a meme:

The candidate, who pays so little in taxes relative to his income that he has to hide tax returns and money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, then added, condescendingly: “These are people who pay no income tax.” …

He seemed to have bought into the warped canard that some conservatives inside and outside of Congress have pushed: that the president and Nancy Pelosi were nefariously hooking people on unemployment benefits so they’d get addicted and vote Democratic to keep the unemployment bucks flowing like crack.

It’s literally rich: Willard, born on third base and acting self-made, whining to the rich about what a great deal in life the poor have.

 Ah! “Willard”! And, of course, she’s right. Willard Mitt Romney did himself a Gideon George Osborne. Well-skewered, too:

After months of doggedly trying to seem more likable, sharing his guilty pleasures like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snooki, Romney came across as a mean geek, a Cranbrook kid at the country club smugly swaddled in class disdain. He thinks being president is his manifest destiny. His father didn’t make it, so he will — no matter what far-out conservative positions he must graft on to in order to do it.

We’re in search of the real Romney. But, disturbingly, so is he.

One thing we have to give Mitt, though: He is, as advertised, a brilliant manager. He’s managed to ensure that President Obama has a much better chance of re-election.

Roger Simon, for Politico, had his turn:

The wheels are not coming off the Mitt Romney campaign. They came off some time ago. The press is just beginning to notice.

The Romney campaign is skidding along on its axles and scraping its muffler. Soon it will be down to the dog on the roof.

I hate to say I told you so. No, scratch that. I love to say I told you so. I just don’t get to do it very often.

But as I have been saying for a while now, Mitt Romney is a deeply flawed candidate who got the Republican nomination by beating a ludicrously weak field. Don’t believe me?

You know who came in second? Rick Santorum. Newt Gingrich was third, and Ron Paul was fourth. That’s not a field; that’s a therapy group.

Unlike the US, where David Letterman gave it a nightly outing,

Seamus, the Irish setter who got sick while riding 12 hours on the roof of Mitt Romney’s faux-wood-paneled station wagon …

hasn’t acquired, in the UK, the fame he deserves:

The Seamus story first surfaced in the Boston Globe in a chapter of a biographical series the newspaper published in 2007, when Romney first ran for president.

One summer day in 1983, as the Globe reported, the overpacked Romney wagon — suitcases, supplies and five sons, ages 13 and under — set off from Boston for the 12-hour trek to his parents’ cottage in Ontario on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron. Romney, then a 36-year-old management consultant, had planned a single stop to refill the tank, get food and go to the bathroom.

Until the evidence of Seamus’s sickness started dripping down the back window.

“Dad!” Tagg, the eldest son, yelled from the back of the wagon. “Gross!”

Romney pulled off the highway, washed down Seamus and the car at a service station, then got back on the highway.

Credit where it’s due: that’s Philip Rucker for the WaPo. Malcolm’s total amazement is reserved for any candidate who could survive that story. Stronger stomachs may recall that Seamus’s looseness may have involved a different part of his canine anatomy. It is a tail tale that grows in the telling.

And, but natch, Jon Stewart took it all apart (sadly, that doesn’t embed)

Off with the motley

Once we are past the bitter mockery, there’s still the even more bitter anger. It is most corrosive when it comes from natural allies. There’s a fine example from Peggy Noonan in the WSJ. Having demolished Romney’s nonsense about the 47%, she hits home:

So: Romney’s theory of the case is all wrong. His understanding of the political topography is wrong.

And his tone is fatalistic. I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.

That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not how Republicans emerge victorious—”I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.

You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.

They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.

 In passing, Noonan’s recipe for the Romney campaign is essentially defensive:

Time for the party to step up. Romney should go out there every day surrounded with the most persuasive, interesting and articulate members of his party, the old ones, and I say this with pain as they’re my age, like Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush, and the young ones, like Susana Martinez and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio—and even Paul Ryan. I don’t mean one of them should travel with him next Thursday, I mean he should be surrounded by a posse of them every day.

Malcolm reckons that boils down to an essential truth. Romney, once upon  a time, was a decent liberal Republican, convincing enough to make a mark on the bluest State in the Union. Now he has suffered a political sea-change, and is doing little beyond parroting the nostrums of the neo-Con Right and the Tea Partiers. The worst that can be said of him — apart from naivety — is he is an opportunist: not an unusual character flaw among ambitious politicians.

Now Noonan states the obvious: he is not to be trusted off-script, without a bodyguard of more-finely honed lies and more expert liars.

Aw, shucks! Let’s just finish with Jim Morin:

And, for old times’ sake:

— I wish I’d said that!

— You will, Malcolm. You will.

Pottery Barn rule, London, E14

As far as he can recall, the first time Malcolm encountered the “Pottery Barn rule” was from William Safire in the New York Times:

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That caution against obsessive reform was introduced into the American political language in the late 1970s by Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter’s budget chief. Ol’ Bert, a Georgian, claimed no coinage, saying, “It’s a bit of old Southern wisdom.”

Fast-forward 25 years to another phrase involving metaphoric breakage. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was quoted in “Plan of Attack” as cautioning President George Bush before the war that he would “own” Iraq and all its problems, after military victory. “Privately,” wrote Bob Woodward, “Powell and Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.” (Richard Armitage is the deputy secretary of state.)

Safire then went into a bit of Thomist [sic] nit-picking over who coined the expression, suggesting that Powell was borrowing from Tom Friedman.

 

One Olympic sight Malcolm intends to take in is the massed Monégasque navy in London’s Docklands. And the queen of the lot has to be (take your pick) the German cruise-line Deutschland (above) or the tall ship Stadt Amsterdam.

For the sake of argument, let’s settle for the German offering.

After all, that fits the Pottery Barn Rule: they broke it, so (for now) they own it.

When in a hole, stop digging

The mess over the Libor fixing grows worse, almost by the minute. Even the bunnies of the Daily Telegraph have been less than happy:

George Osborne will this afternoon be going through the motions of setting up an inquiry into the rate rigging scandal that broke over Barclays’ head last week. If you believe this will shed much useful light on the scam, prepare to be disappointed. This has the look of political cover being hastily fabricated so that the Government can be seen to be doing something about these wicked bankers.

At the utterance, Gids “Submarine” Osborne gave the game away with his “Hands up”, addressed to Ed Balls (who had been City Minister at the time. The point, Gids, is that this was a massive — even a global — conspiracy, and the malefactors made damn sure they kept their mega-fiddle under the radar. Whereas, you and your lot, Gids, wanted less regulation, less scrutiny, less interference in the sausage-making of bankers.

If you didn’t get the elliptic reference to the making of laws and sausages, it might be from Bismarck (though too frequently attributed to Churchill):

Je weniger die Leute darüber wissen, wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden, desto besser schlafen sie nachts.

Back in 2007 the sainted (by the Tory Right) John Redwood and Simon Wolfson were deputed to cook up a Tory Economic Competitiveness policy. That also was at the time that Barclays and others were ripping up the joint. This is the kind of fluffiness that resulted:

We appreciate that people want some business regulation, in addition to the civil and criminal law where it can do good. It may be 100 degrees in the business bedroom, but people still want a comfort blanket to keep them company. It is time, however, to present a more radical challenge to government’s desire to set out ever more things in legislation; and to become involved in ever more detail that properly should be managed by suppliers and customers. Too much regulation just overcooks, harming or putting off the businesses that need to deliver the goods and services.

Remember: Malcolm reads this twaddle so that you don’t have to.

Disgusted of Macclesfield (and now Islington)

One can hear the distaste Nick Robinson feels as he frequently updates his postings on the BBC website:

UPDATE 6.00pm: An inquiry but not as we know it. Led not by a judge but by a Member of Parliament. Staffed by politicians – other MPs and peers of all parties. Set up not with all party agreement, but in the midst of a political row.

Robinson loves the sting in the tail: note those final seven words. He adds:

Government insiders reacted angrily to the suggestion that, just as on phone hacking, the prime minister risked looking slow to react and had been forced to respond to Labour’s calls. Today’s announcement has, I was told, “absolutely nothing to do with Ed Miliband”. Then they added, not altogether consistently, this has “shot Ed Miliband’s fox”.

Labour will now try to force a Commons vote on whose idea of an inquiry is right.

Later still, we have:

UPDATE 7.38pm: The MP who’s been asked to chair an inquiry into banking has told me that this is “a ringfenced job” which is “not trying to work out how to reform the whole banking industry” but is, instead, looking specifically at one question – the Libor scandal in which Barclays was “making money by rigging the market.”

None of which could, or should induce Labour to participate in a white/black wash job.

Of course, to the Tory faithful this is another loony-leftie BBC smear. Bit difficult in the case of Nicholas Anthony Robinson, MA, chairman of the (very Thatcherite) Young Conservatives, 1986.

This show will (happily) run and run.

Syphonaptera

Or:

How Jonathan Swift well understood right-wing bloggers.

The vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Somehow, some when, that was contracted down to:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

In truth, the slim-line version was courtesy of Augustus de Morgan, the twice-coined professor of mathematics at the newly-minted London University: a great man who was ineligible for Oxbridge tenure because of his atheism — though he went the same way as Willie Yeats, seduced into spiritualism by the love for a good woman. Correction there: since the Yeatsian seduction was via that Surrey minx, Edith Maud Gonne, and de Morgan married Sophia Frend, that should read “the love for a better woman”.

Malcolm could wax lyrical and long on any aspect of that; but on to the main point.

1o,ooo albatrosses

In the fall-out from the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act for, former-Governor Ed Rendell was one of numerous talking heads for  MSNBC’s Now show. Rendell said:

Now I think the president can and will continue to point out the good things that are in this act because we’re not going to run away from it. They [Republicans] are going to make it a campaign issue. I have always said we make a mistake, we Democrats, when we don’t stand and defend. It’s going to be an albatross around our neck. Let’s stand and defend it.

No way around it: that is clearly saying the act is a good thing, and the Democrats should be loud in defending it. The “albatross” would be hung were the Republicans’ diatribes to prevail.

With less than two full days, a Google search on “Rendell + albatross” throws up over ten thousand “hits”. The point of contact, though, isn’t MSNBC but Fox Nation vamping on it. In short order the right-wing parasites had leapt on what they wanted to have heard. Within minutes, Erika Johnsen at hot air.com had a completely different interpretation:

I most indubitably agree that ObamaCare is going to be an albatross around Team Obama’s neck…

It’s the way they tell ‘em!

Soon after, a further inversion and invention occurred.

This time it was a distortion of a New York Times opinion piece. Professor Neal Katyal began:

The obvious victor in the Supreme Court’s health care decision was President Obama, who risked vast amounts of political capital to pass the Affordable Care Act. A somewhat more subtle victor, but equally important, was the rule of law more generally: in an era when so many people on the left and right view the justices, and constitutional questions, through the prism of politics, the court today made clear that law matters and that it isn’t just politics by other means.

The title of the piece was A Pyrrhic Victory.

Sadly, that bit of Hellenic history is now only a cliché: to most a “Pyrrhic” = defeat. So, for the record, thanks to the OED:

Of, or resembling that of, Pyrrhus; esp. (of a victory, etc.) resembling the victory of Pyrrhus over the Romans at the battle of Asculum (279 B.C.), in which he defeated the Romans but suffered a great number of casualties; (hence) gained at too great a cost to be worthwhile. Freq. in Pyrrhic victory.

The frothing Right picked especially on the first sentence of Katyal’s second paragraph:

But there was a subtle loser too, and that is the federal government. By opening new avenues for the courts to rewrite the law, the federal government may have won the battle but lost the war.

The “federal government” has executive, judicial and legislative branches. When Professor Katyal identifies two of those three as victors — so who or what is the implicit loser?

That doesn’t need to be a rhetorical question, for Katyal spells it out. The losers are the law-makers of Congress and the legislative process:

… longstanding laws, like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, contain clauses that condition money on state performance of certain activities. The decision leaves open the question of whether those acts, and many others (like the Clean Air Act), are now unconstitutional as well.

Can of worms there, then! Cui bono?

It vindicates, yet again, the axiom in Chapter XVI of de Tocqueville: Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.

That was de Tocqueville back in 1835.

The difference is we now have an interventionist — even a supremacist — Roberts Supreme Court.

The lesser blogging bloodsuckers take any vestige of truth, and regurgitate it as deceit.

If, though, the Supreme Court, having elected the previous President, now becomes not just the the arbiter of last resort, but an active agent in the formulation of all law, we have a greater evil.

And for saying that, and more, Malcolm is now — it seems — denied access to Slugger O’Toole. Yet again.

It gets my goat!

A recent essay, Japanese Knotweed on the Causeway Coast, County Antrim, by Linda Stewart on the ever-excellent NALIL site drew attention to a real problem with the local environment. An earlier piece, also by Stewart in the BelTel, had somehow slipped past Malcolm’s notice.

Anyone who has encountered Japanese knotweed knows it is a right bastard, and can be a very expensive enemy. Take the Royal Horticultural Society’s word on that:

Although rather attractive, Japanese knotweed (Fallopia japonica) is a real thug as it spreads rapidly. In winter the plant dies back beneath ground but by early summer the bamboo-like stems shoot to over 2.1m (7ft), suppressing all other growth. Eradication requires steely determination as it is very hard to remove by hand or with chemicals.

The Great White Hope, announced just before the last General Election, was going to be Aphalara itadori, a plant louse which — literally — saps the strength of the plant. The “itadori” (Japanese, apparently, for “pain-remover”) is the native name of the plant, so this louse might seem to be species specific — though, knowing the luck of the average agronomist, once imported and having seen off the knotweed, our creepy-crawly former friends are as likely to turn to proper crops.

Whether the ConDem government has a knotweed policy is not clear from the ever-elastic Coalition Agreement.

Anyway, good luck to the folk of North Antrim. As we go into the ever-exciting “marching season”, it must be nice to have something really important for them to be worried about.

Meanwhile …

In the shrubbery of Staten Island (that’s the fifth borough of New York City that gets largely forgotten, and known to tourists only from the free sight-seeing trip on the ferry) something is stirring.

There the problem is phragmites. Malcolm reckons that means the common reed, and wonders what is the difficulty. It seems that an alien variant (Phragmites australis) has displaced the native species across much of North America.

However, the brave souls of the New York parks department are introducing a secret weapon: a score of Nubian goats.

The Staten Island site, the developing Freshkills Park (actually a series of interconnecting open spaces),  is interesting for a couple of reasons. It is the biggest reclamation and land-improvement undertaken by the City for decades. Much of the site historically was New York City’s trash-heap, and — almost immediately after it was formally closed — part became the dumping ground for a couple of million tons of debris and waste from the World Trade Centre.

A Malcolmian aside

Fresh Kills is nothing murderous in itself. There are quite a few “kills” in and around what used to be Nieuw-Amsterdam, and the word derives from the Middle Dutch “kille”, meaning water-course or creek.

Fresh Kills, though, provided huge reserves of New Yorker wit, mainly because of the quantity of garbage that was carried there. Towards the end of its life, the tip was many metres taller than the Statue of Liberty, and was cited as the only rubbish heap visible from space.

For several years Kim and Scott Myles up in Astoria, Queens, ran a cottage industry, making “5 Boroughs Ice-Cream”. The gimmick was the naming: “rich white vanilla” was Upper East Side, chocolate was South Bronx Cha-Cha, and so on. The crunch came with Staten Island Landfill (brownie, fudge and cherry dumped together). This offended so much that a sticker had to be added to the packaging. Irony doesn’t work in the States.

The brand died, and the Myles menage debunked to the West Coast.

If all that’s  anyway”interesting”, what is amazing is one sentence from that New York Times piece:

The cost of renting the goats from Larry Cihanek of Rhinebeck, N.Y., is $20,625 for the six weeks.

That $172, a bit over £100, per goat, per week.

Put that costing to the Northern Irish Department of the Environment and they’d be all fouled up like Hogan’s goat.