Spent a long time trying to craft a joke about the “lights being out in Reagan” or some such, in light (har) of the power failure at Reagan Airport b/w you know, Reagan having been, even when he was the President and healthy, not entirely occupied with the role (so to speak). Couldn’t really get there-at least without being hideously offensive. It’s hard going back to work after vacation, right?

This collection of 19th century “letters to the editor” rejections is rather enjoyable.

Finally! Black people explain to slow white people what and what not to do: “If you write an article that results in a mass of people denouncing your article and possibly yourself as racist, it’s not going to be for some arbitrary reason. Though it won’t be comfortable, you need to accept the idea that you may have done what it is you are being accused. Calling the large group of people whom you offended irrational is not going to help.” Ha, you think? (via)

Just about everyone has written a Richard Florida takedown, to which I say, the more the merrier. This latest entrant, by Alec MacGillis, takes a long look at Catalytix, which is “A Richard Florida Creativity Group Company,” one that extols the virtues of and implements the Creative Class® philosophy that he espouses. This is a great racket.

In Syracuse, New York, economic-development officials are declaring victory, saying the $250,000 study that consulting firm Catalytix co-authored in 2003 laid the groundwork for the arrival of an electric-car manufacturer. Wilmington, North Carolina, recently received some of the first recommendations from its $250,000 Catalytix investment, including such tips as “Consider hiring a blogger to create, stimulate and participate in virtual conservations [sic] about the Cape Fear Region.” Providence ordered up a Catalytix report in 2003 that told it to “identify and amplify organically evolving nodes of creative energy”; seven years later, city officials are still holding events with college students to ask them what it would take to get them to stick around after graduation. Iowa, which hired Florida in 2005, is charging ahead with its “Great Places,” 25 communities — among them Coon Rapids, Council Bluffs, and Appanoose County — that are getting several million in state dollars to attempt to become creative magnets. Phoenix is looking to revitalize its downtown with the help of a $100,000 report by Catalytix that declares: “Downtown Phoenix is the right place. Now, is the right time!” Tampa’s “director of creative industries” was one of the first city jobs cut in the recession, but Creative Tampa Bay, a group of Richard Florida enthusiasts, is carrying on. In Naples, Florida, 400 people each paid $150 to hear Florida speak at a golf club in May. They learned to their dismay that Naples has few creative workers, says Beth Sterchi-Skotzke, an organizer of the event. “Obviously, with a lower amount of the creative class, we’re not as tolerant as we believe we are.”

The piece ends with Florida suggesting that people who live anywhere near Detroit commute, via the airport, to freelance employment of some sort, if, like, they can.

I’m more than a little troubled/confused by the story of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who survived an attack this Friday from an axe-wielding critic by hiding in a semi-fortified panic room. (Westergaard drew one of the controversial Muhammad cartoons in 2005). I mean, there are any number of complexities about the story, but here’s the one that I’m most perplexed by.

At the time, Westergaard was looking after his five-year-old granddaughter, Stephanie. He was confronted with a terrible choice: risk being killed in front of his granddaughter, or trust that the PET, Denmark’s security and intelligence service, knew what they were talking about when they had told him terrorists usually don’t harm family members but stick to their target.

Westergaard chose to escape into his bathroom, which had been specially fortified as a “panic room”, while Stephanie was left sitting in the living room. From the bathroom he alerted the police as his assailant reportedly battered the reinforced door with the axe, shouting, “We will get our revenge!”

Both survived unscathed, although God knows how a 5-year-old processes something like that, and you’ve got to imagine her folks aren’t going to be letting Grandpa babysit again anytime soon. Still, how does one even make that choice? Was it really a rational process, as implied above? I could not even begin to say. Or judge. But the article ends with a statement Westergaard made before the attack:

I do not see myself as a particularly brave man. If the country was occupied, I don’t think I would be running around doing sabotage; I would probably be sitting somewhere doing my drawings. But in this situation I got angry. It is not right that you are threatened in your own country just for doing your job. That’s an absurdity that I have actually benefited from, because it grants me a certain defiance and stubbornness. I won’t stand for it. And that really reduces the fear a great deal.

Which puts me in mind of nothing so much as another cartoon by a different artist. Human potential indeed.

Dear London Mayor Boris Johnson and Darren Johnson, AKA, the funsy gay guy who is chair of the London Assembly;

So you two do realize that this is a transparent ruse, yes? That Goldman Sachs “is understood to be considering its options in the wake of the UK’s windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses, a new 50pc top income tax rate, and increased banking regulations” is hilarious, and it is also a dead giveaway that the Telegraph uses the phrasing “is understood” to introduce this idea. Let’s see: here’s an incredibly-secretive, super-private financial institution of which it can be “understood” that they’re going directly to the papers as the first volley in a bargaining plan. But: hilarious! They’re going to pretend that they’re willing to leave London? They’re going to offshore the London office? To where? Glamorous downtown Sofia? Belfast? Tallinn or Toronto? Think it through, boys. Nobody who works in that office will leave London! What’s the point of being rich if you have to live somewhere crappy? It just doesn’t work like that. You can near-shore and off-shore the jobs no one wants to Salt Lake City or wherever-but you can’t move the income producers to a town where they can’t get a cab and a fat steak. If you give Goldman Sachs anything at all to stay put, it means you both are huge morons, just like New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg was when GS pretended it was going to move from downtown Manhattan to more expensive quarters in midtown, and they wouldn’t even have done that. Ever.

Our fondest regards,

The Awl

You cannot keep a good man down: A recuperating Silvio Berlusconi spent part of the holiday season by toasting the birthday of one of his hottie blonde parliamentarians. “Michaela Biancofiore called charmer Berlusconi, 73, to wish him well and when she reminded him it was her 40th birthday he then decided to invite her to his luxury villa to celebrate. Knowing his love of practical jokes Ms Biancafiore had a special cake made with the icing on the cake recreating a famous picture of the two taken in 2005 when he raised his middle finger during a rowdy election rally.” I can’t wait to see what else he’s got in store for us this year.

Oh, right, the underpants bomber. Here’s a theory: “Those who hate religion will see this as another instance of God’s murderousness. But religion is only the smokescreen. The great atheist tyrannies of the last century recruited their foot soldiers in an identical manner-targeting partially educated, preferably pampered, but certainly crestfallen young men for whom the usual safety valves of dissoluteness have for some reason failed to open. We should remember this when we rail against the morals of the young. Next time we are honked at by a stretch-limoload of vomiting adolescents we should give a little prayer of thanks. As long as they’re out on the town pissed they’re not in their rooms drawing up plans to blow up aeroplanes. Ditto sex.”

“Committed is an unfurling of Gilbert’s profound anxiety about reëntering a legally binding arrangement that she does not really believe in. All this ambivalence, expressed in her high-drama prose, can be a lot to handle. (One generally doesn’t indulge another person’s emotional processing at this length unless the jabbering is likely to conclude with sex.)”
–Ariel Levy on Elizabeth Gilbert on marriage, which is pretty much all you should need to hear to go a-clicking through.

The reliably enlightening Vigilant Citizen has some very interesting theories about the new Jay-Z video “On to the Next One.” Apparently, as illustrated by all the crows, blood drinking and ram’s horns in the clip, Jay is deeply involved in an occult conspiracy to put humanity under the control of the goat-headed dark lord Baphomet. This was also illustrated in the “Run This Town” video, and also, presumably, by his taking part in the MTV video awards show in September.

“I believe there are two types of ‘Illuminati artists’: the willing participants (I would place Jay-Z and Lady Gaga in this category) and those who are clueless (Rihanna seems like perfect example). Jay-Z, being the smart businessman that he is, knows that controversy sells. It is thus a win-win situation: Jay-Z gets the publicity he is seeking and the Illuminati continue their mass indoctrination. But what will happen when the elites are done using Jay-Z as a vessel for their sinister symbols? Will they say ON TO THE NEXT ONE?”

Hmm. Gaga, too. Definitely answers a lot of questions. Note to Vigilant Citizen: we’re way ahead of you.