In My Backpack… Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef; In My Car… Die In Plain Sight by Elizabeth Lowell; On My Nightstand… Life Of Pi by Yann Martel; On My Computer… 318 by Emily Dickinson; On My Screen… Touching Evil: A Pupil Of Murder (***) directed by Sheree Folkson, screenplay by Mike Cullen.

My Soundtrack: She’s So Unusual by Cyndi Lauper.

What do you drink in the morning? Folgers? Phoenix? Maxwell House? Arabica? Sanka? We are a nation of coffee drinkers. Does it matter what you drink? Superbarista Sarah Wilson-Jones thinks it does. Writing in Coffee Culture And Economic Development she suggests:

There is a link between the level of advancement of a city’s coffee culture and the city’s economic development. It may not be a causal link, it may just be a coincidental link, but if you are looking for a way to gauge the health and vitality of a city’s economy, look at how sophisticated their coffee culture is.

Look at Portland. Look at the Raleigh Durham area, where the baristas are getting psyched up for the Southwest Barista Jam, look at Seattle, look at wherever in Canada Espresso Lab is published. Chicago. New York. San Francisco.

I spend a lot of time in coffee houses. I drink a lot of espresso. And Sarah’s observation made me think of a book I read a few weeks ago: Bangkok 8 by John Burdett. There is a lot going on in the book, but one of the underlying themes is the importance of Yaa Baa, methamphetamine, to the industrialization of Thailand. Burdett’s protagonist, the detective Sonchai, muses about how Thais could not work the long hours they do if it were not for the easy access to Yaa Baa.

Which leads me back to another book, Mel Rosenz Zieglar’s Republic of Tea. The business book, written in 1992, tells the story of the creation of a company specializing in premium teas. Zieglar suggests that if the ’80s had been the decade of coffee, then the ’90s would be the decade of tea. Well, we know how that went.

But the reason that Zieglar made his prediction was that he thought Americans would be ready to slow down, to enjoy less buzz. Less jangling.

What he didn’t count on, of course, was the way the rest of the world – some using caffeine, others Yaa Baa and it many incarnations – would kick into high gear and threaten to run down the U.S. and pass it. America had no time to sit back and sip its tea.

But if the goal is just to get that buzz to get through the day, why spend $5 on a large cup of coffee? I think it is because we want to work a bit of magic when we fill our physical and mental work space with the special. We do extraordinary things when we are fortified with our own talismans and potions.

And there is magic in a well-crafted espresso. A pot of French Press is a potion. And that baristas sport nose rings and tattoos just adds to the exotic quality of the experience.

And when there is magic, oh the things we can do.

My Soundtrack: Sundown by Gordan Lightfoot.

I’ve bought the jar of pickles. I love Vlasic dill pickles and the idea that I could buy a gallon of the them for less than $3 was a bit of heaven. When I put the 12-pound jar on the bottom shelf of my refrigerator, I didn’t give a thought to what I had done. And the pickles were good.

For me. For the time it took me (several months) to eat them.

The business editors of Fast Company, however, ran down a different story about the pickles. In The Wal Mart You Don’t Know, Charles Fishman tells us the retail giant was:

“…using [the jar of pickles] as a ‘statement’ item,” says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the “mad scientist” of Vlasic’s gallon jar. “Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart’s about. You can buy a stinkin’ gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it’s the nation’s number-one brand.”

It’s the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.

Rubbermaid, Vlasic; what other brand names will Wal Mart trash in its quest to afford $35 million paintings on the walls of the Walton family homes?

My Soundtrack: One For The Road by The Kinks.

In My Backpack… Women’s Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Life Of Pi by Yann Martel; On My Computer… Life’s Work by Maxine Kumin; On My Screen… Touching Evil: A Pupil Of Murder (***) directed by Sheree Folkson, screenplay by Mike Cullen.

My Soundtrack: Leftoverture by Kansas.

Google the phrase +”failure is not an option” +iraq and you get 19,400 hits. I couldn’t find a definitive source for whoever first uttered this now-popular phrase, but it has come to pervade out national and international discussions. And I don’t like it. It’s the kind of swaggering sound bite that produces the abuses taking place at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

What it really means is that the ends do justify the means and that no consequence is to horrible to prevent the accomplishment of the chosen goal.

Do we really want the United States to be guided by that principle?

Is it right to murder one in order to save a another? How about murdering two people to save one? Murdering twenty? Two hundred? Two thousand? Or, is it right to accept that an ill conceived mission is doomed to failure because the cost is too high?

Leadership by platitude is no leadership at all.

My Soundtrack: Friends by Elton John.

The good folks at The Neighborhood Retail Alliance have a posting this morning on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s economic development plans in the Bronx. In Seifman Siphon’s Bowles’ Study, the group focuses on Jonathan Bowles’ Center For An Urban Future report: Beyond The Olympics.

In particular, the group says, Bowles’ study:

focuses on the manner in which the Bloomberg team, because of a top down approach, has ignored the impact of development on existing businesses in the areas being targeted.

[snip]

…isn”t it about time that all of our local press start to examine Bloomberg”s top down approach (or Doctoroff”s to be more accurate) and begin to dig a little bit more concerning the incestuous Doctoroff-Related love affair.

Too often what happens is that the allocation of tens of millions of dollars to a favored developer is characterized by the press as “60 million dollars earmarked for the Bronx” rather than, as in the case of the Terminal Market, “60 million dollars allocated to Doctoroff”s close friend Steve Ross” (Of course when all is said and done this figure could double or even triple).

Sound familiar?

My Soundtrack: 11-17-70 by Elton John.

In My Backpack… A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind by Diana & Michael Preston; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Rage by Jonathan Kellerman; On My Computer… The Old Soldiers’ Home by Howard Nemerov; On My Screen… Touching Evil: A Pupil Of Murder (***) directed by Sheree Folkson, screenplay by Mike Cullen.

My Soundtrack: An Innocent Man by Billy Joel.

Store Wars, this hilarious parody of George Lucas’ Star Wars series, comes via the inestimable artist P. Alexandria. Yes, I know, this is a side issue, and it very well may be that Wal Mart carries some organic produce in it’s superstores, but I have a hard time visualizing the array I can find at Zagara’s, The Mustard Seed or at the Food Co-Op displayed at a Wal Mart.

My Soundtrack: The Nylon Curtain by Billy Joel.

Is there anyone in the United States who can’t at least paraphrase the Miranda warning? You have the right to remain silent… It’s been nearly forty years since Harold Berliner, district attorney for Nevada County, California first wrote those words. (For something really cool, you can hear Berliner read the Miranda Warning here.)

Police officers have read them millions of times in real life, and they’ve been been repeated hundreds of thousands of times on television cop shows since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Miranda vs. Arizona on 13 June 1966.

A coffee house friend told me this morning that she heard a different version on the television program: 4400:

The Keatings are injured, but not fatally, and Diana and Tom arrest them; Tom tells one as he cuffs him, that he is being arrested as a terrorist, that he’ll be treated as an enemy combatant, that he does not have the right to remain silent, he does not have the right to an attorney, and anything he says will ‘damn-sure be used’ against him. Lily runs to Richard, and hugs him to her.

(Cue shouts of Yeah! Gotcha, you terrorist slime ball! and the every popular, Eat Dirt Raghead!)

Sure, it’s fiction. It’s a television show. But it also represents an attitude that is growing in this country that civil rights are something we can throw away when we’re dealing with terrorists.

And who gets to say who’s a terrorist? Are you Irish and ever give money for a good cause back in Ireland? Or are you Jewish and did you respond to a call for tsedakah in Israel? How about Korean and write a check to help orphans? Are you a Scots-Irish evangelical and make a small donation to that church doing god”s work in Idaho or Montana?

Are you absolutely sure that none of your money offered in good faith was not funneled in some hidden way to a group or groups that might, in some bureaucrat’s fantasy, be tagged as terrorist? Wouldn’t you like someone other than the arresting officer to make that decision? I sure would.

My Soundtrack: Pearl by Janis Joplin.

In My Backpack… A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind by Diana & Michael Preston; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Rage by Jonathan Kellerman; On My Computer… The Star by Jane Taylor; On My Screen… Touching Evil: A Pupil Of Murder (***) directed by Sheree Folkson, screenplay by Mike Cullen.

My Soundtrack: 52nd Street by Billy Joel.

I spent a wonderful few hours in Little Italy this afternoon: gallery hopping the Murray Hill Art Walk, eating Polenta Con Sausage and sipping a glass of Chianti at La Dolce Vita, savoring a cannoli at Presti’s and plopping down with my laptop to enjoy the Turkish coffee and free wifi at Algebra.

As I was sitting at a sidewalk table enjoying my wine I mused: Little Italy is horrible: it doesn’t have easy access from the freeway, there is no place to park, the traffic up and down Mayfield is congested. Yet there were hundreds (thousands?) of people on the street doing what I was doing. And they were all having a great time doing it.

I’ve never bought the real estate truism of location, location, location. Compared to Legacy Village, Little Italy has a rotten location. But on this particular Saturday, I have no doubt which was busier and which people were enjoying the day more.

If you provide people with a truly interesting destination, they’ll find their way to it. And if you put a cookie-cutter development in the best location for miles around, people will drive right on by.

All of this, of course has to do with Steelyard Commons and Wal Mart. Three days ago in If Not A Wal Mart, Why Not… I suggested that a better use for the 126 acres might be as a pedestrian village. As I was people watching at Murray Hill and Mayfield Road, images of another Italian gem came to my mind: Venice.

How hard would it be to create Cuyahoga’s own canal-orientated community at Steelyard Commons? Instead of streets, imagine waterways crisscrossing the property with arching bridges carrying foot traffic and water taxis moving supplies and people.

The canals wouldn’t have to be deep. At most you’d have to dig them down to allow for four or five feet of water. Engineers could figure out the best way to allow the Cuyahoga to flow in at the south end and back out at the north. Granted, Winter could be a problem, but the Dutch seem to do fine when their canals freeze.

How many people would like to live in a community where there is flowing water and not crawling cars outside their front door? How many thousands of people would choose to stroll the sidewalks and visit the restaurants and shops?

The image is a lot more appealing to me than yet another big box selling cheap plastic crap.

My Soundtrack: 52nd Street by Billy Joel.

Here’s a truly amazing bit of visualization guaranteed to put you in your place. It reminds me a bit of how I used to feel lying in the grass at night on our hilltop looking at the Milky Way. Every time I’m feeling like I’m at the top of the heap, I’ll try to remember to run through Molecular Expressions’ sequence that allows you to:

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

As that late, and much missed, Dr. Carl Sagan might have said, billyons and billyons.

(Thanks to reader Cailin for the link.)

My Soundtrack: The Album by Elton John.

In My Backpack… A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind by Diana & Michael Preston; In My Car… The Hanged Man’s Song by John Sanford; On My Nightstand… Rage by Jonathan Kellerman; On My Computer… Pulling Up Beside My Husband at the Stoplight by Marjorie Saiser; On My Screen… Touching Evil: To Death And Back (***) directed by Marc Munden, screenplay by Paul Abbott.

My Soundtrack: Songs In The Attic by Billy Joel.

The folks at Wal Mart aren’t making enough money selling cheap plastic crap. That was the core message coming out of the annual meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas. Target is capturing the more upscale market and Wal Mart wants it.

According to Micahel Barbaro’s Wal-Mart Moving Upscale in the Washington Post:

The U.S. division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which has served as the engine behind the global chain’s phenomenal growth, has hit a rough patch, with customer service lagging, stores appearing unclean and merchandise failing to appeal to higher-income shoppers.

To steal away those shoppers Wal Mart is going to do things like:

carry upscale merchandise, such as 550-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, 42-inch plasma high-definition televisions and cashmere cardigan sweaters, to shake its image as a purveyor of cheap, unfashionable goods.

Fake hardwood floors are being installed in the apparel departments of new stores to evoke the inside of a boutique. In place of a hodgepodge of seemingly random product colors, a handful of carefully chosen shades – baby blue and lime for the spring season – will now dominate clothing and housewares to send a clear message about what’s trendy.

I’m sure that Wal Mart thinks this is a good move. Hey, it could be the only thing it could think of, but I don’t think it’s going to work. What they’re more likely to do, I think, is alientate their existing customer base while failing to attract enough new customers to make up the difference.

Executive Vice President Mike Duke, who runs the chain’s discount store division, had the million-dollar quote. He said the company is concerned about:

inconsistencies” in customer service – long checkout lines, sold-out products and dirty store restrooms – that can drive consumers away.

Well, duh!

Do you suppose that a store in Steelyard Commons would rate real fake hardwood floors?

My Soundtrack: The Stranger by Billy Joel.

I’m pro-draft because I think that a citizen military is one of the strongest supports any democracy can have. In his classic juvenile science fiction novel, Star Ship Troopers, Robert Heinlein posits a world where military service is tied to the franchise, the right to vote. Military service is not mandatory, but only veterans (not active-duty personnel) are allowed to vote. Such a system, I think, serves two purposes.

First, it guarantees that every parent has a direct interest in any government decision that places our military forces in harm’s way. Second, it underscores the fact that our freedom is earned, not given. I think you tend to take things like Liberty more seriously when you’ve worked for it.

(Full disclosure: I voluntarily served five years in the U.S. Navy and six years in the Ohio Army National Guard.)

I’m writing about this today because of three pieces I found originating from Hollow Army: Parents Kill Recruitment at Daily KOS. The first is Damien Cave’s Growing Problem For Military Recruiters: Parents from the New York Times. The second is this military memo from Slate. And, the third is Fifteen Months, Try Eight Years Instead by Chad Miles at Soldiers For The Truth.

Cave tells us in his piece that:

A Department of Defense survey last November, the latest, shows that only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.

The Pentagon – faced with using only volunteers during a sustained conflict, an effort rarely tried in American history – is especially vexed by a generation of more activist parents who have no qualms about projecting their own views onto their children.

The recruiting obstacles are serious enough that now commanders are being told to think carefully before discharging sub-standard personnel. In a 5 May memo from the Bureau of Military Personnel in Washington, commanding officers that: (I apologize for the all caps. I’m just to lazy to retype the memo. JH)

3. WE ARE AN ARMY AT WAR AND INCREASING LEVELS OF ATTRITION OF FIRST-TERM ENLISTED SOLDIERS IN BOTH THE TRAINING BASE AND UNITS IS A MATTER OF GREAT CONCERN. WE NEED YOUR CONCERTED EFFORT TO REVERSE THE RECENT NEGATIVE TREND IN FIRST-TERM ATTRITION.

WITHHOLDING OF SEPARATION AUTHORITY FROM BATTALION COMMANDERS, AND ELEVATING IT TO SPCMCA LEVEL, IS DIRECTED BY HQDA PURSUANT TO PARAGRAPH 1-19E, AR 635-200. SEPARATION AUTHORITY FOR CHAPTERS 5, 10, 14, AND 15 REMAIN AT THE SPCMA LEVEL.

And, in a classic case of recruiter bait-and-switch, Miles details how recruiters are getting young men and women who don’t read the fine print to commit to eight-years of service. Writes Miles:

As with most things, the Devil is in the details. The option is only available for 59 of the 150 military occupational specialties (MOS) offered by the Army. Basic training and advanced individual training (AIT) do not count toward the fifteen months of active-duty time.

You see, the overall obligation is for eight years, so you would spend the remainder of your time in the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) and be subject to recall to active duty (which has been happening with more frequency lately).

This is not a good time to be a parent. I have an 18-year-old nephew who is a terrific kid with a great future ahead of him. I know that his mother and father are rightly worried about what may happen to him. I worry about what may happen to him.

All the more reason for all of us to stay informed, stay involved and rage against the machine.

My Soundtrack: I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll by Joan Jett And The Blackhearts.