1:00 p.m. I know you guys are excited as I am!
1:02 p.m. Okay so. Esta dia on La Tormenta, on Telemundo, things are starting off CRAZY. That hot guy, who I think is Maria Teresa’s son? (It might be Simon Guerrero?) He is holding a baby that I think someone wants to take away from him?
1:04 p.m. Now this girl is changing outfits, on the train? I think she is wearing a wig! I don’t know what she’s up to.
1:05 p.m. Okay so she’s off the train. There are all these people on the train station. And she’s getting a cab. The thing that’s so great about La Tormenta is that there are like people carrying bags of rice and stuff in the background? It’s like everyone’s a peasant except the very important people who are very dramatic.
1:07 p.m. They’ve already cut to commercial. By the way, I should probably mention at this point that I don’t speak Spanish, but that doesn’t lessen my desire to understand the fiery drama that consume the lives of people at the Maria Teresa’s family estate, the titular La Tormenta.
1:09 p.m. Ha, the ads are amazing. 1–800-CANTASO!

1:11 p.m. So there is some sort of voodoo priestess, with a spooky staff, who is tormenting (so much tormenting!) this other woman, who I think is a maid or something? It’s like Kurosawa, except with women speaking.
1:13 p.m. She is INTENSE. I sure wish I knew what she was saying! And her wrap-around hair braid is really rad and asymmetrical.
1:15 p.m. You know what is worthless? The Wikipedia page for La Tormenta. It’s sort of like it was written by people who primarily speak Spanish or something.
1:17 p.m. The lady who was tormented by the priestess is seriously UNLOADING on some other lady. She’s standing in front of a fabulous waterfall. And the other lady is standing in front of all these candles.
1:19 p.m. EVERYONE IS REALLY UPSET.
1:20 p.m. Wikipedia, SERIOUSLY? “Among these people there are people with bad filings, one of them is Maria Teresa’s cousin, Isabela Montilla (Natasha Klauss), a beautiful woman, cruel and calculating to whom Don Ernesto Montilla (Alejandro Buenaventura) became her protector since her parents’ death.”
1:21 p.m. They sure have a lot of ads for abogados! I wonder if the Spanish-speaking people need lawyers more often than non-Spanish-speaking people?
1:23 p.m. Oooh girl. Some other ladies are having a deep conversation and maybe one of them is getting their palm read? And NOW the lady in the black wig is talking to her… wait for it… ABOGADO. It all begins to make sense to me now.
1:25 p.m. And by “make sense” I mean, wow, this is no way to learn Spanish.
1:26 p.m. Did I mention that they cut off my cable the other day? And the only way I can see TV is in 20 second chunks, before it times out, and I have to change the channel and then change it back?
1:27 p.m. A business man is telling his gang of thugs what to do and now a plane is landing and/or taking off!
1:28 p.m. Oh the guy with the baby is in the plane. And he is learning how to bottle-feed it. Someone called him a “papa”! Something something in el mundo something something necesito!
1:29 p.m. I think what’s happening is the guy with the baby is being hunted by the businessman with the thugs? But what about the voodoo priestess then?
1:30 p.m. Um there are suddenly new characters? Lady with Huge Rack and Lady with Slightly Less Huge Rack. I will call them Luci and Pepi. I am sort of understanding early Almodovar better than ever.
1:33 p.m. When they have flashbacks on this show? The screen is split by a frantic lightning bolt! It’s fabulous. This is a flashback to a passionate love conversation. (Surprisingly.)
1:33 p.m. Wow, they are GETTING IT ON in the water in this flashback. Slightly brackish water? But they are GOING FOR IT.
1:34 p.m. Perdóneme! Nunca! Making out!
1:36 p.m. I sort of used to speak Spanish a LITTLE when I lived in California, but you know how it is in New York-you forget everything you used to know here, because you’re so busy with the whole “living like rats and eating human flesh” thing.
1:37 p.m. You know what else is weird? Usually Time Warner turns off the Internet at the same time as they turn off the cable. Weird.
1:38 p.m. You know what else seems to be a must watch? 12 Corazones! “The show consists of twelve contestants divided in two groups (usually four males and eight females, but sometimes vice versa). Each of the contestants is identified and referred to by his/her Zodiac sign. In between segments, Edward’O offers advice to the contestants according to their respective Zodiac signs. Occasionally he also offers advice to popular Latin American musicians and actors when they appear on the show.”
1:39 p.m. AND? “As the show is aimed at women, the host is most exaggeratedly on the female contestants’ side. She often mocks the men, baits them to make them look dumb, and praises the ladies when they ridicule them.” And at the end it looks like someone gives someone a rose, and I LOVE shows where roses are exchanged.
1:41 p.m. Oh shit, wait, they’re announcing that new Apple thing today? Fuck. Our publisher is going to be so mad that we didn’t cover that.
1:43 p.m. Ha, they went with IPAD? *UNFUNNY MENSTRUATION JOKE HERE*
1:44 p.m. Man, La Tormenta has a cast of THOUSANDS. Now some old cowboy is holding a bruised woman hostage and yelling into his headset phone thing, which is not an Apple product?
1:45 p.m. Okay that guy on the plane with the baby seems to have delivered the baby? To someone else? “CUIDATE, JESUS!” says some woman in a off-one-shoulder gown. (Why? I mean, why off-one-shoulder?) OMG it’s not a gown, it’s just a blouse. With black slacks.
1:46 p.m. Wait, now someone else is flying a plane?
1:47 p.m. Wow, this is SO MUCH BETTER than American-people TV! I bet these people could make better gadgets than us too.
1:49 p.m. I mean, I kind of don’t need to carry around this big, breakable, kind of douchey thing that plays bad racing games and a low-rent version of Microsoft Paint, right? I have something really small and flat that checks my email and gets phone calls and stuff already.
1:51 p.m. 1–800-CANTASO!!!
1:53 p.m. Ooh, Dora the Explorer is also on. Anyway, hot guy who used to have the baby is still on the plane. Bound for LA TORMENTA, I think? Oh wait, the baby is still on the plane! There are TWO BABIES.
1:56 p.m. Tom Scocca asks: “Was there a part of the demo where he dropped it from four feet off the ground and kicked it and then it was unscratched and worked fine?” (He means the iPad, not the babies in La Tormenta.)
1:58 p.m. Huge Rack Woman is visiting some burn victim?
1:58 p.m. At no time in the watching of this TV show did I require the assistance of a giant, oversized phone with a stupid name that doesn’t appear to have a phone and that doesn’t prop up and doesn’t have a standalone keyboard.
1:59 p.m. Also? The future of online book-buying is not $15.99 e-books. Sorry!
2:00 p.m. AND THIS CONCLUDES another shocking episode of La Tormenta. What happened? WHO KNOWS. Tune in tomorrow for more of the same, in general!

The Independent’s Matthew Norman on former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is scheduled to testify on Friday in that country’s Chilcot Inquiry on British involvement in Iraq:

For all the braggadocio, the sunken eyes and haunted expression betray his fear of arrest, and even more so his awareness of the loathing felt for him here and around the world. He may or may not be tortured on Friday by the Furies, as represented by the parents of troops killed in Iraq, but he will be tormented until the only Judgment Day he tells us means anything to a demigod whose stature far transcends the insolent judgments of mankind. If he leaves for a well-guarded gated community in the United States or Australia, he will be an exile. If he stays to flit between his many homes in England, he will be an outcast in his own land. Robert Harris brilliantly portrayed him as The Ghost in his excellent novel of that name. Now he looks more like one of The Undead.

Wow. The British hate so much better than we do.

The Hollywood Reporter brings word that George Lucas is producing a CGI-animated musical, which is pretty much all the excuse I need to put up this clip. Young’uns can learn more here.

by Erica Sackin

On Monday night, Pete’s Candy Store-on Lorimer Street, in Williamsburg-was packed. Flannel shirts, skinny jeans and thick-framed glasses with people inside them filled every seat, blocked the door and spilled out into the street. Outside the bar, there were two cops wearing “Community Outreach” jackets and also a smattering of Hasidic men. This was because people in Williamsburg really care about bike lanes, and so they had all showed up for a “debate” about a recently-disappeared Bedford Avenue bike lane.

The Department of Transportation eliminated the bike lane in early December, saying that the bike lanes two blocks away on Berry Street and three blocks away on Kent Avenue were more than sufficient for bike traffic.

Among bikers, outrage ensued. One attendee at Pete’s, Heather Loop, who has been described as your “typical anarchist bike punk”-that means tattoos, messenger bag, skinny jeans and an attitude-had even organized a topless bike ride in protest, due to a belief that the Hasidim had caused the bike lane to be closed due to horror at bike-riding womens’ bare arms and legs.

That protest was canceled due to snow-”I care too much about my nipples to lose them to 25 degree weather,” she said-but the underlying idea has lingered: they don’t like scantily clad ladies. (A related notion also circulates; Brooklyn women bikers also talk, perhaps sometimes apocryphally, about being regularly and overtly propositioned-for sex, no less!-by Hasidim.)

The Hasidic community, on the other hand, insists their opposition has more to do with parking and safety, especially as they are not upset at all by the bare arms and legs of bikers on the other Brooklyn bike lanes.

“The other day my daughter was knocked over by a biker,” said Leo Moskowitz, one of the few Hasidic men in attendance that night. “The press is trying to paint this as about modesty, but that’s not the issue. This is a community with a lot of kids. That’s why I have a minivan-when I go to the grocery store, how else am I supposed to bring five kids? Yet the bike lane took 100 parking spots away.”

So why the outrage when there are other, safer bike lanes so close by? Yes, Bedford Avenue is a main street that leads right to the Williamsburg Bridge. And yes, with the number of accidents that happen to bike riders every year, the last thing the City needs to be doing is taking away bike lanes. But perhaps more than anything else, it’s because the removal of the bike lane on Bedford Avenue was just so super-sketchy.

“There was a very long community process to put the bike lane on Bedford Avenue, and then overnight, it was gone,” said Brian Sweeny, 26, of the Freegan Bike Workshop. “It would be great if the DOT would come and say something.”

“The DOT and Bloomberg made some sort of deal with the Hasidic community, that they’d all vote for him and if he won reelection he’d remove the bike lane,” said Tamara Kneese, 25, repeating a theory I heard often that night. “They’re a strong community and vote as a monolithic block. They have a lot of power.”

“From what I see, there is actually a lot of violence, like people dooring bikers in the line of traffic,” said Sweeny. “There is a very painful rift between the Hasidic community and any other community. They have their own police force, their own hospitals, their own language, their own unique style of dressing.”

“Repainting those lines was a knee jerk reaction to the idea that special interest groups could pay off our city government to have something removed,” said a bike activist who was refused to give his name but who was involved in repainting the bike lane. “I think the fact that it was all over the papers was an embarrassment to the Bloomberg administration.”

Clearly there is a rift between these two communities, at least-even as they interact, and sometimes even overlap, as in the case of those rare hipster Hasids one spots from time to time in bars.

“In reality, as someone who lives in South Williamsburg, there’s a lot of interaction between the two communities,” said Kneese. “I work out in a gym where there are Hasidic men and women on the treadmill next to me. I’ve been asked to light a Hasidic man’s cigarette for him on Sabbath.”

In the end, the debate did very little to bring the two sides together. At one point, Isaac Abraham told a joke about statistics, in response to a claim about the number of bike accidents caused by drivers.

“Nine women are sitting in a doctor’s waiting room,” he said, “and one of them is nine months pregnant. The doctor comes out and says ‘statistically, each of you are one month pregnant.’ And eight of the women want to kill him.”

The crowd groaned. Heather Loop stood up with a joke in response.

“They say bike wheels are like tits,” she said. “One is too few, and four is too many.”

Erica Sackin writes and lives in Brooklyn. She was once a contestant in the Ms. G Train competition, but lost. ‘The Spandex Report’ covers the lives of the youngs.

Because it’s winter or something, I’ve been spending (too much of) my time these days going back to first principles. Like: why are there sidewalks? Why do we like bread so much? Why did some buildings in New York get torn down and why not others? What is the deal with cats getting domesticated? So this pullback on assumptions, by James Kwak, about how humans get paid, in a discussion about Goldman Sachs bonuses, is striking: “Investment bankers are overpaid. Now, before all the bankers get all indignant on me, let me say that bankers should make more money than average people, at least according to the normal rules of our society; for one thing, they are, on average, better educated than most people. (As I’ve written before, I don’t think there’s any moral reason why people should make more money simply because they are better educated, or have unique skills, or are more intelligent, or work harder; but that’s the way the world works, and most people are OK with that in principle.)”

I’m stuck on that. Like, stuck for the day on that. Yes, no, maybe so?

If you are interested, he goes on, from there, regarding the specific instance of Goldman:

You would expect wages in finance to be about 30% higher than in the economy at large because of higher education and lower job security; yet… wages in finance were over 70% higher than average earlier this decade. 40 percentage points divided by 1.7 implies that wages should come down by about 25%. This is an industry-wide figure, however, and recent wage growth has been much higher in investment banking than in the rest of the industry (largely banking and insurance), so 25% is probably a very low figure for investment banking. But without more data, that’s the best I can do.

Now, Philippon and Reshef’s data only go through 2006. In 2006, Goldman paid $16.5 billion out of $31.1 billion of its profits to employees (53%, the same as in 2007), which worked out to about $620,000 per employee. (In 2007, that figure was about $660,000.) Subtracting 25%, we get that Goldman employees should have earned abut $470,000 on average. This is probably still much too high, because that 25% figure is undoubtedly far too low for investment banking. But it’s a starting point.

“Studies have shown that three-quarters of service members say they are personally comfortable around gays and lesbians. Two-thirds say they already know or suspect gay people in their units. This raises important questions about the assertion that openly gay service would impair the military. In fact, it shows that gays and lesbians in the military have already been accepted by the average soldier…. As a nation built on the principle of equality, we should recognize and welcome change that will build a stronger more cohesive military. It is time to repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and allow our military leaders to create policy that holds our service members to a single standard of conduct and discipline.”
-Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General John Shalikashvili says what everybody knows.

A new theory on carpal tunnel syndrome: “The etiology of non-occupational carpal tunnel syndrome is not well understood. It is proposed that carpal tunnel syndrome can develop during sexual intercourse when the hands become repeatedly extended while under pressure from the weight of the upper body.” I am fully on board with this. I would much rather that people thought my bent and mangled hands are a result of delivering serious poundings rather than blogging.

Last week Slate’s Josh Levin tweeted that a “Colts-Saints matchup would generate the most-lopsided mayoral food bet in Super Bowl history.” (The bet wound up being King Cake, beignets, and cafe au lait vs. Indianapolis shrimp cocktail, which seems a little slack on New Orleans’ part, but, you know, fucking Nagin.) A far more interesting wager, however, is happening between the directors of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art. As a correspondent noted, it is likely the only time you will see the words “sentimental blancmange” in relation to Super Bowl speculation. Also: Go Saints.

“Some people will say [AQR Capital Management founder Clifford Asness] is over the top in comparing Mr. Obama’s proposal of a 0.15% tax on liabilities of firms with assets of $50 billion or more to a pogrom, in which Jews were thrown from rooftops, raped, and had their homes looted. And they may be correct.” [Via]

Wow! Explicitly recorded as a commercial for his upcoming album, The Stimulus Package, Freeway’s two-minute take on “The Trap Door,” a two-year-old track from his producer Jake One, is better than most full-fledged new rap songs you’ll hear all year.

The Philadelphian has been very busy lately. As he likes to say, he gets to work early! (And he pronounces this in a way that sounds like it might hurt his throat. Like he gargled extra hard with the Listerine.) As was the case with folks like Bun B, who’s back at it lately, and, so famously Lil Wayne, it seems like there’s a new Freeway recording waiting every morning when you click on the internet. And so many of them are fresh like that Listerine.

But back to the freestyle, which is probably the best explicitly-recorded-as-a-commercial rap since Wu-Tang shilled for their clothing company with “Wu Wear The Garment Renaissance” back in 1999. The original “Trap Door” appeared on Jake’s White Van Music album, featuring rhymes from MF Doom, and is an original, meaning sample-free, production. Surprising, since it sounds like something Link Wray might have come up with in 1962. (Linking to Link Wray just made my day, by the way. It doesn’t take much.)