Mr Clapper

Monday, May 15th

Great Review Essay

Here.

Will be a good resource in years to come.

MC lapper on 05.15.06 @ 08:11 PM EST [link] [No Comments]

Best Works of Fiction of the past 25 years

NYT critics poll.

Have to agree with Beloved, although it took me three or four passes to get much from it.

I loved Underworld, although I thought the critics disliked it.

Surprising omissions to me:

Song of Solomon is a tremendous book.

Nothing by Richard Russo? Russell Banks? Nadine Gordimer?

Other than the novel, Housekeeping (which I haven't read,) were there no other women writing novels in the past twenty five years?

I loved Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee, and could see it making this list in a few years.

Surprising Inclusions:

Is everything Philip Roth wrote worthy of inclusion on this list?

I loved Blood Meridian, but the Border Trilogy?

MC lapper on 05.15.06 @ 07:59 PM EST [link] [No Comments]

Politics

So...I know that the two local races that could make a series difference in the composition are the house are PA-06, where Lois Murphy is running against Jim Gerlach, and PA-07, where Joe Sestak is running against Curt Weldon. I wrote both campaigns, pledging my time to volunteer in any way possible, and unlike Bob Casey, they actually emailed me back. I spent a portion of Colin's nap making cold calls to voters to remind them about tomorrow's primary on behalf of the Lois Murphy campaign.

About midway through, I started to feel a bit weird. At least I was a live volunteer calling, as opposed to an autodialer. But who really pays attention to phone calls anymore? Was a message I read into someone's machine really going to get them out to vote tomorrow? I get hostile to telemarketers, or to anyone reading off a script when they call my house. Wouldn't folks the same way about me, i.e., the voice of any stranger is annoying enough on the telephone, so why should my request to get out and vote be any different?

What else can be done, though?
More thoughts on this later...

MC lapper on 05.15.06 @ 02:06 PM EST [link] [No Comments]

Thursday, May 11th

Report on Fairmount Park

Lots of recent talk in Philadelphia city council regarding a potential merger of the Fairmount Park Commission and the Department of Recreation.

It's a silly idea fueled by misguided notions of efficiency.

A report commissioned to assess this merger can be found here.

MC lapper on 05.11.06 @ 09:13 AM EST [link]

May 2006
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31