In a move to show that they are accurately representing the electorate, a number of Knifecrime Island parliamentarians were completely tanked during the recent vote on the country’s emergency budget. Leading the way was a new Conservative member with the half-assed Dickensian name of Mark Reckless, who missed the vote entirely because, depending on which story you believe, he recognized that he was too inebriated to affirm his position (his version) or he was passed out on the terrace of the House of Commons (other versions). Either way, it sounds like he had a few too many.

Mr Reckless, the MP for Roch­ester, Kent, was among the most enthusiastic revellers. At one point, he fell on the floor and had to be helped to his feet.

Later, he struggled to open a bar door, repeatedly slamming it on his toe, apparently unaware his foot was in the way.

Reckless was bundled into a cab and returned to his constituency. Those who remained were not much better off, with one member observing, “Several ­people were legless. The Tory newcomers were the worst, but Labour MPs were knocking it back, too. MPs old enough to know better were all over the Sloane Rangers who have come to work here as secretaries and researchers since David Cameron got in,” while another noted that “[t]he chamber and the voting lobbies stank of booze and sweat.” Sadly, there are no reports of glassings, but it is still early days.

Six months later, what’s going on in Haiti?
• “With an estimated 1.5 million Haitians still homeless, presidential and legislative elections are set to be held on 28 November. “
• “Jean Renald Clerisme, the presidential adviser, says that in any case the Haitian government hasn’t received the money it was promised by the donors, which it would need to buy land and reconstruct. ‘At a big donors’ meeting in New York, we were promised $10bn (£6.64bn),’ he says. ‘But we haven’t received even 2% of this money — how do you explain that?’”
• “International donors who promised earthquake relief money to Haiti will be getting calls from former President Bill Clinton asking them to ante up. As the six month anniversary of the quake approaches, Clinton says donors have given only 10 percent of the aid they promised.”
• “There are currently 55,000 Haitians whose petitions to immigrate to the U.S. have been accepted but they are languishing on waiting lists dating back as far as 10 years.”
• “The government had appointed Gerard-Emile ‘Aby’ Brun, president of Nabatec Development, a consortium owned by some of Haiti’s most powerful families, to be in charge of relocating the squatter camps in Port-au-Prince. For that first relocation camp for 5,000 people, with clinics, food on premises and some electricity, he chose a piece of Corail-Cesselesse land owned by Nabatec. The company now stands to gain part of $7 million the government will spend compensating landowners. That’s just a small part of the potential payoff.”

You could dip an American in a vat of oil straight from the Gulf of Mexico and he still wouldn’t acknowledge that our dependence on fossil fuels is causing problems. “Great tragedy, with the right timing, can bring great change…. When people are in a bunker mentality, sort of hunkered down over the economy, then that’s not going to produce significant change,” says a guy from the American Enterprise Institute. But hope remains for some who believe that eventually we will recognize the devastation caused by the oil that is eating the bottom of America alive.

At 11 weeks after the spill, some historians say it’s too early to say it won’t alter national environmental politics. Adam Rome, a historian of the U.S. environmental movement at Pennsylvania State University, said that it could take a year for the public to understand what the spill has done to the gulf — and for politicians to understand what the spill has done to the public.

“If we don’t do anything then, then it’s a sign that we’ve entered into some newer, more passive mode of responding to disasters,” Rome said.

Yep. Wish I had something a little more upbeat for you this morning, but no. We’re screwed.

In a bit of terrific news for anyone who was worried that there might not be enough to argue about on the Internet this week, Switzerland has rejected the U.S. government’s request to extradite director Roman Polanski on his 1977 rape charge. It seems like decades since that this whole thing went down (Polanski’s Swiss detention, not the actual crime), but it was actually less than a year ago. Now I guess we’ll never be able to determine if it was rape or rape-rape. [Image via]

Previously: Meditations on a Bowling Ball

Amy Jean Porter was in a race between her book deadline and childbirth and one of them won!

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Today, a new poem from Sam Donsky.

Where the Wild Things Are

Saturday sounds for the Situational Sweethearts, Sunday collapses
in Renaissance Bros. The drinks are smeared off & ink is sworn off &
paved in pencil our vision is plural. Letters for pleasure
from friends in infinitude, abstracts of triumphs
on loan for display. “I love you” is falling
untrammeled like family, the words come out
& they are hard to connect. Righteously no one tries, righteously
everyone does (they’re recording now as we speak).
Shook our fists, shook our hips, it was a Dance Anthem
apocalypse, the proximal gist: Farewell; Everything Is Connected;
You Are Your Face & I Am the Mirror-Filled Air.
“I love you” is falling & we belong to the ground,
there is nothing to say but we have words on retainer:
“The plot is uncolored,” “it snaps together like snow,”
we walk into it late, a little
Indie Rock, a little tired of people,
its remains distant, its absence
the kind of genius that won’t concern you
in this millennium, welcome to it by the way
where the boys tear possible pure, where the girls
frenzy fashion from doubt, where everybody’s a gin & tonic,
everyone’s a beer with a glossaried past, & have the boys
mentioned they’re talk chicken soup, & have the girls mentioned
they’re essays first published in The Paris Review
in the spring of 1985. It’s October but the night
performs August equations, it’s “downright anecdotal!”
I imagine, New York is woozy & London is awake & my ideas
are children sweating in their sleep. When it sleeps the city dreams
of re-ending the century, of rewinding what was said about
the sweetness of crisis, of glitchy accomplishment
& food in the bed. Sex lapsing into focus. Stars lapsing into focus.
In the kitchen is magic & in the bedroom is bad data, age & its ratio
of flexible terms: 9 is for Stop wearing heart couture. 24 is for
Start wearing heart couture. 23 is for the strength
to wane, the will to feel primal / throw your hands in the air,
U2, Rihanna, Nirvana, Rolling Stones,
amen, deep in my heart, couldn’t care less, against against
against against. “I love you” is falling & the charts don’t forgive,
I’ve got sisters shaking themselves with success, I’ve got
cities shaking themselves with architecture, One-Hit Wonder’s
gonna bang the drum, No-Hit Nothing’s gonna end the Cold War.
Which is already over, congratulations: Dance Pop Class of 2000;
Mnemonic Kissing Class of 2000; Getting Into Politics,
I Mean It Class of 2000; Four Meals a Day Class of 2000;
Smoking for Looks Class of 2000; Like a Virgin Class of 2000;
Like Wild, Like Things, Like Places, Like People Class of 2000.
Like It Was Class of 2000. It’s 2009, Sing me a compliment
your memory mumbles but with time cowering still
I’ve already written it, your heart pumps my brain
with ballads of blood, “J you were the bright-ish lights,”
“K you rock like a baby,” “L your lips are a globe on the street.”
New without the novelty, exclaimed without a point:
“I love you” is falling but there’s water below,
you’re 9 you’re the King, you’re 24 you can swim,
23 exiles you, 21 crowns you Prince of Boats, by 15 there is
no memory of this at all-that’s the 20th Century for you-
we were against it from the start, we were against this one too
but now we’re for it, it asks the wrong questions but who here doesn’t,
How are you, How’s poetry, How’s X, How’s Y, even the right ones
insist on their commas, whatever happened to making a point,
or a mark, or haste, or out, you’re a pretty good idea but who here isn’t,
it’s Saturday, it’s Sunday, it’s Monday, Happy Birthday,
eat your food, it’s getting cold, we love you very, very much.

Sam Donsky’s first book of poems, Poems vs. the Volcano, is a stack of Word documents sitting somewhere on his computer. It is a collection of 100 poems-one for each movie that he has seen since graduating from college in 2007. This is the first of those to be published. Sam is currently a law student at the University of Pennsylvania.

You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

I eat Hamburger Helper. Of course it’s bad for me, and of course I know better. “It’s ironic,” I used to explain, back when irony meant everything, but it’s not ironic at all. The shit tasted good, back then, and good in the way that good things taste when someone else is paying my rent and buying me clothes and comic books. So when I left home HH is what I took with me. Others my age/circumstance maybe maintained an affection for Ho Hos, or Flav-R-Ice, or Breakfast Squares. But me, I was raised in a place where deliciousness had only two aspects (salt, grease), so the idea of salt and grease and cheesiness was my idea of luxury and fame and reward for any accomplishment imaginable-better than Ponderosa, better than Long John Silver’s. It was like having a foie gras machine in the cupboard. And I am not alone.

General Mills, the manufacturer and brand-owner of HH, leads the dry dinner mix market with $400 million in annual sales [PDF]. And I’m probably not alone in that I generally (or otherwise) eat pretty conscientiously-cooking from scratch, using organic/local ingredients when I can afford it and keeping the processed and fast foods very scarce. But HH (specifically, the Cheeseburger Macaroni variety) is my friend. It’s been with me since elementary school, when the family made it every second week, and it’s stayed with me as I moved out on my own and grew older.

So it is this embarrassing devotion to the stuff that enables me to say, in my experienced opinion, that HH has changed, in how it is fabricated and how it ultimately tastes. First off, General Mills altered how the end user makes it. If you are unfamiliar, it is a pretty simple procedure-brown one pound meat, add a couple cups liquid and the packaged macaroni and seasoning packet, then simmer till done. The change is in the fluid: it used to be a couple cups of water, and now the instructions stipulate one cup water and two cups of milk, milk which is, obviously, to be provided by you. This would seem to be an improvement, adding actual milk instead of relying on whatever dehydrated milk substitute was buried in the seasoning packet, but to me it is not. Understand that this seasoning packet was the single best thing about cooking the HH yourself, because the flavor goop tasted just like your HH was going to taste, but it was concentrated and in powder form. Which meant that as the skillet simmered, you would rip that packet apart looking for every lost bit of flavor goop that might be stuck in a corner in there. The milk substitute was an intrinsic part of this flavor goop, and without it, the flavor goop is different. I think it’s worse, but objectively, it’s different, and when you are talking about a meal item that you are married to out of nostalgia, different is not a desired effect.

Also, the macaroni included in the box is demonstrably different. Sadly, I have not saved any HH from 15 or 20 years ago to provide iron-clad proof, but the pasta is now flimsier. Specifically, it is a wider bore of macaroni, and thinner walled. The macaroni in the box was never anything you’d send to relatives in Italy, but it was passable. In fact, it was how I learned to cook pasta al dente, before I ever knew what al dente meant. After one too many ruined batches with the macaroni cooked to soggy hell, I realized that care and attention should be paid to the timing of the cooking experience in order to maximize eating pleasure. It’s basically how I learned that pasta was something that could be tanked by operator error. And the redesigned macaroni is not far enough away from soggy hell for comfort, under the best of circumstances.

The more convincing argument for these changes (more convincing than spite, or a number of appealing conspiracies) is simply free-market economics. GM has a brand, an old brand. GM needs to keep this brand relevant so that brand will continue to be consumed. HH was rolled out in 1971, and was positioned to appeal to families suddenly absent a “housewife,” or to stay-at-homes wishing to save time in the kitchen. HH sexed up the casserole and kept it out of the oven with a single-skillet cooking method, revolutionary at the time, when even boiling an egg required an array of pans and dishes. And it legitimized simple (and cheap) hamburger as a base ingredient in a world dominated by chops and roasts.

It’s now nearly forty years later, and appeals to kitchen management are sitting in the museum next to the rotary phones. But a global recession is in play, and value was always a subtext of the HH pitch. So a year ago, General Mills reemphasizes the value and starts an ad campaign retrofitted to a more modern appeal. At the same time, GM plays with cutting prices-in a suburban supermarket two weeks ago, HH was on sale for a buck a box, which is unprecedented, in my memory. The price has averaged $2.25 or so for the past ten years. And to lower the price and maximize profit, corners must be cut-just like the old saw about an airline saving millions by decreasing the number of cherry tomatoes in the salads they serve.

So say, hypothetically, that General Mills decides to lower the cost of making HH, so changes the production method and shaves a fraction of an ounce off the pasta included-and also makes it a bring-your-own-milk party. The result would be savings per unit-and a product that does not taste like I remember it tasting.

At least, I hope that’s the explanation, good old fashioned profit motive. What that says about the world is disquieting but at least we’ve been soaking in it forever. And no one is buying HH for its haute appeal or its minerals and vitamins. At a buck a box you’re getting what you pay for.

Altogether sadder, however, would be that this was not a decision by General Mills, but just being the way things go, another example of entropy, tugging everything towards the middle and then below, without anyone noticing, a quiet inexplicable reverse engineering of lowered expectations. It would be difficult to reproduce this under laboratory conditions, but if you talk to enough people about how they’re doing and the like, you get a sense that there is some fundamental force that pushes things that way.

It’s a minor complaint, and it’s a complaint that does not appear on the list of things that I’m actively worried about. In fact, I continue to be a customer, and even the one-generation-later version of HH is something that makes me feel better when that list of things gets unreasonably long, or has items on it written in all caps. But on this list there is a Way Things Used To Be line item, and there’s even a general Entropy subsection, and so each successive unit of HH that I purchase, cook and consume ends up reinforcing the list in discrete ways.

And I’ll bet the vast majority of HH consumers have absolutely no measure of irony in their meal-purchasing decisions, actual or claimed. HH is not a walk down memory lane for them. It’s what’s for dinner, and it’s marketed to them as such, as the margins are whittled and whittled away, whether by choice or by habit, until someday there won’t be any margins left. This is a theme that is increasingly easy to stub your toe on.

by Jordan Carr

The LeBron thing happened and he went to Miami, and you may be left wondering how to react to the whole thing. Does he love me? Does he want me? Is he going to call me like he said he would? Is this really his real phone number? Worry not, the Internet has been really busy telling you how to think about this.

If you are in Cleveland or New York City, you definitely hate LeBron. Even if you are an adorable grandmother.

If you own the Cleveland Cavaliers, you hate LeBron (in Comic Sans). Like, really hate. REALLY.

If you are an acclaimed film director, you hate LeBron.

If you govern New York, you are perplexed and unimpressed with LeBron.

If you are a Canadian music superstar, you are surprised but congratulatory.

If you’re LeBron’s former teammate, you’re definitely mad at LeBron.

If you write about sports, you really, really, really, hate LeBron. But also, everything he stands for.

If you wrote a glowing book and op-ed about LeBron (actual quotation: “there are few things better in all of sports than watching him interact with children”), you now hate LeBron, his fans, his show, Greenwich, Connecticut, the Internet and apparently basketball. And you are incoherent.

If you’re Lance Bass or anyone else, you’re on your own.

by T. J. Clarke

“I haven’t seen Jason all week. He always says he is busy with bar stuff.” Dree pours herself another glass of wine, all the way to the top. “More?”

“No, I’m okay.” I stay in my seat and let her play hostess. She sets down in front of me a plate holding equal-sized portions of pasta and sauce. The pasta and the sauce don’t touch each other.

“It’s just annoying, you know, to have him so busy after finals and all that. I miss him. But of course I can’t tell him. It’s only been a week.” Dree is back from the kitchen. “I found these in the fridge. I think they’re still good.”

She puts down on the dining table an unopened package of Trader Joe’s prosciutto and the remainder of my fruit salad from lunch. She carefully removes a slice of prosciutto from its plastic backing and wraps the translucently thin meat around the last piece of cantaloupe. Her fingernails are painted lilac this week.

“Antipasti!” She laughs, falling to one side, her hand extending the offering of ham and fruit in my direction.

I open my mouth and let Dree place the fleshy morsel on my tongue. Both of her elbows are on the table; she is leaning forward. I catch her eyes and hold my gaze. Then slowly, carefully, I enclose the plump melon within the walls of my mouth, my tongue, then mashing out its juice with my teeth and tracing the salty residue of the prosciutto as it dissolves. She stares back at me. I lean in, close enough to touch my lip to hers. She takes a deep breath but still doesn’t say anything.

I pick up her wineglass and drain it. “Pour me another one?”

“Let me get you a new glass.” She hurries into the kitchen.

“Here you go.” A pink blush has alighted on her cheeks. Down below in the street, a car stopped at the traffic lights blasts “California Gurls,” the sound receding as the car drives away.

Dree picks up a slice of prosciutto and tears it into thin strips, carefully placing each strip on her plate. “Who still calls shorts Daisy Dukes?”

“The sauce is delicious.” I say before taking a bite of my food. “You are a regular Italian housewife.”

“So when are you taking the bar?” She asks, her eyes glancing from her wineglass to my plate, then settling on the pepper grinder.

“The last week in July. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.” I say.

“That’s soon.” She raises her eyes and smiles at me, “Jason has never been to California. Isn’t that funny?”

“What’s funny about it?” I watch her tear apart a second slice of prosciutto. I assess the situation: I got scared. Did she notice? Anything?

“He is so well traveled otherwise. Austria, London, Taiwan, just never been to California.” The oven timer beeps. Dree looks at me, puzzled. “The corn bread! Fuck!” She runs back into the kitchen.

I never eat at the dining table. Sitting here offers a different perspective on the room: Every piece of furniture is in the same spot as when I first moved in. The television and couch stand near the entrance, to their right is the dining table with its three mismatched chairs. My friend Tracy moved away last year and gave me her curtains, so that’s something different. Sliding doors divide the rooms-each one twenty square feet larger than the next-from west to east: kitchen, dining/living room, and then my bedroom/bathroom. Three years in New York and I am still in the same apartment. I don’t know if that says anything about me.

“They’re kind of burnt. I think I had the temperature too high.” She is disappointed. “So do you think you are ready for the bar?”

“Yeah.” I try to pick up one of the corn breads; it is too hot.

“You think you’ll stay in California after the bar?” Her cheeks are still pink, most likely from the wine though.

“I haven’t decided yet. Maybe.” Now I am not even sure she perceived my earlier, feeble attempt at seduction. “I am staying at a hotel for the bar. Then I’ll be there for another week house-sitting for a friend.” The friend is actually one of Nan’s childhood friends, someone I have never met.

“Well, that sounds like fun.” She smiles. “I’ll miss you.”

T. J. Clarke is the pen name of a struggling writer. She lives in Brooklyn.

Scientists in New Zealand have determined that one in four people do not cover their mouths when they sneeze and cough, which, quite frankly, seems a little low to me. I mean, have you seen people? They’re disgusting. I saw some girl on the train with open-toed shoes picking in between her toes with her keys the other day, blissfully unaware of the world around her. And she was one of the attractive ones! People are a fucking big ball of blech. Anyway, fun fact to remember: “Coughs and sneezes spew germs at rapid speed. About 3,000 droplets are expelled in a single cough, and some of them fly out of the mouth at speeds of up to 50 mph. Sneezing is worse-as many as 40,000 droplets come out of the mouth, sometimes as fast as 200 mph.”