I'm pretty sure that underlying this claim is the same sloppy demographics that have plagued all discussion of Trump voters. In the country, they're the successful ones--the car dealership owners, the plant managers, the agribusiness farmers. In the suburbs and exurbs... well, those are mostly affluent white people in general (obviously there are non-white suburbs; they didn't vote Trump).
IOW, the people who are desperate to move to NYC and SF but can't afford to are not, actually, Trump's base. At least, that's what the preëlection polling said. I don't know if that held up, given the other, uh, flaws that were revealed in that polling.
IOW, the people who are desperate to move to NYC and SF but can't afford to are not, actually, Trump's base
I thought the article was making a separate claim -- that if a bunch of people from all over the country moved to CA/NY/NJ/MD that the increased electoral votes for those states would more than make up for the fewer Dem voters in the states that lost population.
It's an interesting back-of-the-envelope calculation but so much else would change in that alternate world that I don't know that the electoral college is the first thing to try to figure out.
Furthermore, given our fucked-up system of overrepresenting acreage, I'm not convinced the math works, either. Montana gets 3 EC votes even if every single resident moves to SF--and CA won't get a single additional one. PA's been losing EC votes for decades, but it's still one of the biggest totals in the country, and as many reliable Democratic voters left as Trumpers.
I suppose you could make an argument that the rise of the Sunbelt states was driven by zoning issues (it's at least part of the story), and that if each of them had a couple fewer EC votes, we'd be better off, but... really? The only reason people started moving to Florida from New York was cheaper housing? It wasn't sun and pools and lawns and, oh yeah, the deindustrialization of the North?
True. But those migrants would eventually inflate the EC and House representation of blue states. Which I guess is what the link actually argued, before I facetiousized it.
The hive mind pwns faster than it can type.
Anyway, I was actually thinking more about somebody's point in another thread: a realistic recovery plan for the rustbelt would be to help people get the fuck out of Dodge.
But there's all those great coal mining jobs to be had, Mossy
I am so goddamned sick of these kinds of articles. (Not that you shouldn't post them, heebie. This is just my personal gripe.) Does everything wrong with this country have to be the fault of white cosmopolitans? Can't anything be the fault of the actual people who actually voted for Trump, poor pitiful lambs who can't be held responsible for anything because somewhere a millennial is drinking a pumpkin spice latte?
Zoning/density issues are maddening -- I don't understand them even when they're in my backyard. My neighborhood has been having a flap: there's a parcel on Broadway where a developer wants to put an apartment building, and under the zoning regulations they can, as of right.
There is a city program allowing them to get a zoning variance allowing a larger apartment building if some percentage of the apartments are 'affordable housing.' There were serious protests, ultimately successful, to prevent the application of the variance, on the grounds that the bigger building would lead to gentrification.
And everything depends on the particular local issues that I don't feel comfortable saying that's nuts, but man, it sounds nuts to me. It's going to be a new building anyway. The neighborhood is super dense anyway, a bigger building won't change the character of the neighborhood density-wise. 'Affordable' housing probably isn't affordable enough, but it's still cheaper than market rate. And the neighborhood is gentrifying anyway (although in a fairly slow manner, which is something), it's not like richer people are being held back by the quality of the housing stock we've got now.
So I've been staring at that one for a year, unable to take a side, because everyone I would naturally agree with generally was fighting to keep the affordable-housing variance from being applied, and I could not figure out how it made sense.
I am so goddamned sick of these kinds of articles. (Not that you shouldn't post them, heebie. This is just my personal gripe.) Does everything wrong with this country have to be the fault of white cosmopolitans? Can't anything be the fault of the actual people who actually voted for Trump, poor pitiful lambs who can't be held responsible for anything because somewhere a millennial is drinking a pumpkin spice latte?
I've been crabbing at Tim Burke on FaceBook about exactly that -- I couldn't agree with you more.
We're at about 733k people per seat in the House right now, but the first 50 seats go out without regard to state population. So the actual marginal number of people per seat is 829k*. So you're talking about relocating almost a million people for every EC vote you want to shift. And doing so without flipping any states in the process (VA has gone blue; would it have done so if MD were more growth-friendly and thus capturing a greater percentage of DC population growth?), including turning blue states red.
I'm highly dubious.
*the apportionment process is actually pretty interesting
Barry, I never expected you of all people to sell out to Big Carbon.
Anyway, 8 is IMO bullshit. Here's some pretty solid thinking on the matter.
You want to talk about how Dems could reach the WWC? Stop talking about the places they live like they're doomed hellholes*, and start figuring out ways to make them great again.
*we were all super-sensitive to how Trump talked about black communities, right?
10: Indeed. "Trolling is not a substitute for politics" is a bit of wisdom that more people need to take to heart.
I'd add here that the Europeans have figured out lots of ways to keep their small towns and rural villages vibrant, all coming down to tax transfers. When you're in the Alps and cowbells are ringing from the hillsides, it's not because it's economically viable, it's because the gov't decided that Alpine passes full of lowing cows are worth paying for. We look at once-charming towns and scheme how to get the last few holdouts out of there so they can live in a place they don't want to.
10: The frustration is deserved and widely shared. I think it has to do with what writers think they can control. Rightly or wrongly, lefty thinkpiece writers don't presume they will be read by white rural voters, so they address how their perceived audience can influence those people rather than trying to persuade them directly.
10 is well taken. My spin is, these people need to be destroyed. How will they be destroyed? I'm guessing urbanization is a big part of the answer.
Trolling is not a substitute for politics" is a bit of wisdom that more people need to take to heart.
Odd - that's hardly the lesson that I would derive from this election.
No, 1968 was not as important as 2016. The Big Sort started in 1965, and had very little to do with Nixon.
Thinking about "worst Presidents Evah" which I predicted in 2008 I am wondering how much worse, considering external circumstances and the condition his country and party are in, Obama cursehisname is than Buchanan, Hoover, or Carter.
Obama cursehisname is not worse than Buchanan, so far, but definitely worse, may his reputation soon crater, than Hoover or Carter.
Dallas County went Clinton 61-35, even without my vote. I know you coastals don't care about me, but remember 55% of Texans are African-American or Latinos or Asians etc, before you try to secede from flyover country.
Good breakdown on Cali succession today. Definitely and irrevocably illegal, so plan carefully. I don't care about the NE at all.
17. And in Britain, where trying to solve a problem by "throwing money at it" is regarded as less acceptable than telling the queen to fuck off to her face, villages are either entirely taken over by second homes and almost deserted Monday to Friday, or delapidated hell holes populated by desperate racist scag fiends. Funny what a few bucks in the right place can achieve.
But the point that seems to underlie JRoth's contributions here is the idea that the hared core of Trump voters are people whose childhood memories of a Brady Bunch paradise (or their parents' tales about it) seem closer to being actually in reach than is the case for the actual working, or would-be working class.
Well, okay maybe Obamacare is gone (check LGM) but Obama left with so much infrastructure, and they can't take away bridges! Oh wait.
But the unions...
But the Middle East...
Well there was a boom...
The climate legislation...
Wall Street...
What the fuckety fuck did that fucker leave behind? I was right to hate him from the start.
It's the winner take all system.
Adopting the Wyoming rule (the population divisor is equal to the population of the smallest state) adds 110 representatives, but in this last election that would have increased Trump's lead in the EC to 368-280.
As far as the post-mortems, completely impossible here. I can only suggest Naked Capitalism, and Jamelle Bouie at slate and the commenter "drexicya" at LGM. drex has come close to kicking white people from the Democratic Party. Bouie, drex and others are strongly hinting that after two "successful" ROTFLMAO terms of Obama, Dems have to put two blacks on the 2020 ballot. It isn't as if the feminists have shown anything but fail-and-whine.
Brace yourself for 2018.
Secession (spelled wrong above) is your only hope.
Texas will be ok.
it's because the gov't decided that Alpine passes full of lowing cows are worth paying for.
When the put that money on the appropriations bill, it's called a Low Rider.
I like the title of the OP, amusing, and not far off from the feeling of some of these threads.
And in Britain, where trying to solve a problem by "throwing money at it" is regarded as less acceptable than telling the queen to fuck off to her face, villages are either entirely taken over by second homes and almost deserted Monday to Friday, or delapidated hell holes populated by desperate racist scag fiends
I should say that this isn't my experience of the typical British village. It's the medium-sized towns and regional cities that are really taking it in the neck. The villages don't seem to be doing too badly.
Dallas County went Clinton 61-35, even without my vote
bob voted Trump. Well, I called that one about a year ago. Demographics are destiny.
Do the villages benefit from all that CAP money? Guess we'll find out soon!
Lost in the shuffle is that CA has a Dem supermajority again.
Yay, Cali! Build apartment buildings and trains and shit. Also an independent nuclear deterrent.
30: I stayed home, like millions of others, since I was told Clinton was a lock and she wasn't going to win Texas anyway.
California (and more specifically San Mateo and Santa Clara counties) refusal to grow at a reasonable pace and in a good way really is one of the biggest problems in the US right now. It's a big driver of global warming (people in California have small carbon footprints, and an actual city in San Mateo county would decrease footprint even further), it's a big drag on our economy (because people in cities have much higher productivity), and it's making everyone miserable whether they stay (and have huge financial stress) or leave (and are sad that they don't get to live in the bay area). It all makes me so mad any time I think about it.
Also a thriving new industry in Humboldt, and perhaps an airport expansion in Eureka for throngs of weed country tourists.
35 is something I am literally looking at right now. Next to my office is a wide, flat apartment building with empty retail and courtyard parking on top of the underground parking, and also a giant ugly bronze statue of a naked woman pouring water from a jug. I don't know how much money you have to pay to live in that thing. Ima occupy the jug until they greenlight more highrises.
17: My favorite episode of C'est pas sorcier has a great explanation of this issue in the context of the transhumance: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YKb4wN_K5Jw
So great to see a sensible explanation acknowledging environmental, cultural and economic considerations in the context of a kid natural science show. I bet Megan would find it interesting, particularly the valuing of a human-created alpine landscape as that is far from the dominant conception of non-urban landscapes meriting preservation that prevails in the US west.
28. Come and visit a few pit villages around here some time. Or in Fife. Or bits of Wales.
The ratio of central city to metro area population for the Bay Area has to be one of the lowest in the country (1 million vs 8.7 million).
26 was part of my ongoing attempt to make a pun so bad it causes physical pain in the reader.
And now that I've checked, the winner of the ten largest is Miami at 16:1. With Boston (13:1) and Baltimore (15:1) close behind.
Commented at Welch's
In the near term, neoliberalism may live. I can imagine a scenario where Republicans leave the coasts and Nevada/Colorado alone, with the not-so-quiet deal that has been practiced for a decade, and concentrate on returning their Red States to 1840 conditions.
Make no mistake, these fucks want slaves. Best bet is criminalizing being a minority. and then using prison labor. Won't be on SF tv, and what, the coastals are going to kill and die for blacks in Red America? Give me a break. They allowed the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans. This isn't the Civil War or WW II generation.
The would leave neoliberalism in NYC and California, finance + identity politics, and the attractions of the metropole may provide compensation for the local servant classes.
41: The ratio is even worse if you count Palo Alto as the central city.
Around here is Yorkshire, right? I have actually been to Wales and Fife.
The multiple-deprivation figures look worst in regional towns and cities; Blackpool, Burnley, Middlesbrough, Liverpool, Grimsby, Rochdale. And London, of course. In fact 98% of the most deprived areas are in cities. 98%!
None of them sound particularly rural, and almost all the "least deprived" bits do. South Oxfordshire. Chiltern. Mid Sussex.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/indices-multiple-deprivation-poverty-england
46. You have a very Country Life idea of what constitutes a village. Conditions in Elsecar, for example, shadow those in the nearest town which is Barnsley. And Elsecar is one of the places that has been more imaginative than most in reinventing itself pot-Thatcher.
The rationale behind the statue is something like: let's make it classy like the Rodin scupture garden at Stanford, evoking local color etc., but maybe not so much suffering and despair.
I wonder if I can get my perky, inane Bay Area vignettes to alternate with bob's demographic SOC here, like being trapped between two very loud sets of earbuds on a packed commuter train.
When I've advocated for rezoning everything west of arguello to central paris density with rapid bus dedicated lanes I've been met with howls of protest here, but it's the right thing to do and would also create more interesting neighborhoods out there.
On my neighborhood's message board, some people tried to get the neighbors to object to turning a house into a bed and breakfast (with maybe six rooms) on the grounds that we couldn't handle the extra cars.
Come to think about it, that's just the old pattern. Although sharing the army and some justice system, the metropole and country (Paris, Edo/Tokyo) sometimes pretty much left each other alone, metropole providing finance, technology, and the larger expense of security, while the country slave areas send food and resources to the metropole, along with grateful underpaid refugees from slave states eagerly serving coffee and being sex workers for the enlightened and generous cosmopolitans.
Sounds like a plan. We'll call it neoliberalism, as homage to the previous liberal white supremacist era.
52: I'm in the part that's probably going to be permit parking. The whole process has been very NIMBY and driven by only a few personalities.
Your part is more neoliberal. There's no coffee shops on my end.
Why is no one commenting on the slander against Jane Jacobs here? Would she have been A-OK with Santa Clara county's housing policies? Surely not.
I was wondering about that. She's pretty much pro density. Anti tearing down old neighborhoods, which is sometimes in conflict, but not anti-density.
"You have a very Country Life idea of what constitutes a village."
Ouch. But, seriously, 98% of the most deprived areas in this country are in cities. 98%! You don't have to believe that every English village is full of old maids cycling around in warm beer to realise that the real poverty is in cities these days.
Just out of curiosity, when they count poverty in the cities, do they adjust for cost of living?
Which would make that stat worse, rather than better, if they don't. (I mean, obviously, but I had to count on my fingers to remember that it was obvious.)
59: it isn't just poverty:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_deprivation_index
I have fewer fingers than the U.K. has poor people.
Maybe there's some subtlety I'm missing, but the distinction in 17 seems wrong to me. We pour tons of money into rural areas in this country. The outcomes may be different from Europe, but it's not from lack of investing resources.
63: But it's what it gets poured into. It's not poured into better schools, it's not poured into better infrastructure (excepting anti-community infrastructure like highway bypasses), and it's not poured into ordinary properties. That is, even when you get some money to do the Ye Olde Main Street thing, the 150-y.o. houses a block away still look like garbage.
Some of it gets poured into retraining programs that are well-intentioned but, afaict, close to worthless.
Finally, "tons of money" is entirely contextual; since our overall gov't expenditure is so small, a "ton" of that isn't actually very much compared to what's needed.
Some of it gets poured into retraining programs that are well-intentioned but, afaict, close to worthless.
I think this is where the "get out of Dodge" funding can be helpful. At least on an individual and family level. I am in agreement that it is problematic at a community level.
What retraining is would look like, in practice, is that some portion of the 2 million people who have lost manufacturing jobs since the recession will be trained for service sector positions. But service sector positions are a lot more diffuse than manufacturing.
You can have 2000 people working in a factory someplace, but if they all loose their jobs and have to be trained to be home health aids or baristas or whatever, its going to be difficult for an already distressed small-to-mid-sized city to absorb all those new service positions. Some people can stay, but the reality is that if they all do, there still won't be enough jobs for them, and wages will be depressed due to oversupply of labor.
You can either fight that - which isn't likely to work - or you can try to make the transition easier for everyone by providing relocation grants to help people migrate to places with better opportunities. How do you do that while simultaneously supporting those who stay behind? Beyond handing out lots of money, I don't have a good answer for that.
64.1: Maybe we're just thinking of different contexts, but in my experience there are lots of programs that fund rural infrastructure. USDA Rural Development spends billions of dollars a year on it. Still not enough to cover the full extent of need, of course, and some areas have problems severe enough that no amount of infrastructure investment is going to fix them (which I think is your point).
re: 65
A friend of mine wrote a report for the previous Labour government in the UK on a similar topic.
His, "let these towns die" recommendation didn't go down well. But his point was that a lot of them were located where they were because of a thing -- a mine, a source of minerals, iron, a fishing port, whatever -- that simply doesn't exist anymore. And no amount of funding was going to create thousands of jobs there once that reason to exist had gone. I don't think I entirely agree with his full set of arguments, but "plough money into a place forever, because it was once economically viable" doesn't always seem the right answer.
67. dsquared has made a similar argument on occasion. In principle they're right, I think, but you would need a shedload of money to relocate them in a civilised fashion. Probably cheaper to let them rot in the shadow of their slag heaps, especially if you're any currently imaginable government.
re: 68
Yeah, my friend (in conversation) was keen on building up other towns in the areas that had better economic prospects, e.g. better transport links, better existing infrastructure, etc. Not chucking whole areas under the bus, but just accepting that certain small villages or towns really were not going to thrive absent sums of money that no realistic government would spend. Said friend was working for a Labour government, so at least had some semi-justified belief that some kind of regional spending was going to exist.
Shit all chance now that we are in the never ending reign of bastards.
---
I had a related conversation with a bunch of friends about the relative prosperity of the various bits of our respective families. Related also to some of the issues around immigration. It's a cliché and I'm sure doesn't always hold true, but the immigrant who arrives in your area looking for work is pretty much by definition, someone at the upper end of the whole motivation/self-discipline/education/skills curve. They've made some massive relocation in their life, often at great personal risk/cost, sometimes prompted by unimaginable hardship and danger. Of course they are going to economically shit all over the existing people who are at the opposite end of the same motivation/self-discipline/education/skills bell curve.
Similarly, we, as a group -- one Scot, a couple of Mackems, one Catholic from Belfast, all from working class families -- were living in very different material and social circumstances from the rest of our families. Because we'd all moved hundreds of miles away from where we used to live, spent years in education, and often years in fairly extreme circumstances and doing multiple shitty jobs while retraining, in education, etc. The problem is, "be smarter and harder working than most people, and be prepared to relocate to Manchester/Birmingham/London, etc" isn't any kind of generalisable policy at all. And I think we were all wary of the (classically Tory) tendency to blame people for their own poverty.
But ... when I hear younger relatives complaining about lack of jobs, and not being able to get the kind of jobs they want, the temptation to just say, "For fuck's sake, you are 22, and smart, you have no dependents. If you wanted to do this you could just move to fucking Glasgow -- which is 30 miles away, not the fucking moon -- and study part-time, the only reason you don't is you can't be fucking arsed."
A Chinese colleague was telling me about how they moved his entire village to fill one new apartment complex. (The town was getting destroyed by a new reservoir.) But they're a totalitarian government, so they could just do that.
In 1961 when the volcano on Tristan da Cunha became active, the entire 264 residents of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas were evacuated to England. In late 1963, 196 of them (and 4 new husbands) moved back. People really like living where they live. If you can't get people to abandon the most remote town on the planet, you're not going to have much luck emptying out West Virginia.
70: I thought the US was full of ghost towns, abandoned mining towns, deserts factories etc. Admittedly this impression is based mainly on Scooby-Doo.
65 et seq: A friend worked until recently administering the EU Globalization Adjustment Fund, which provides grants for exactly this purpose that can include mobility/relocation allowances. According to my friend, the British government disliked the fund and refused to apply to it on principle, which is a shame as a few well-targeted and well-publicized projects like those in Spain, Finland, and elsewhere might have helped mollify attitudes toward the EU in some Brexit-voting areas.
Ironically, my friend says that apparently the UK has recently been making overtures to ask if any British projects might be eligible while they're still able to apply.
71: The only part of Scooby Doo that is true is that everybody involved in real estate uses comically convoluted, and evil, logic.
||
My weather channel says the Alamo Steakhouse in Gatlinburg ..."has been damaged by the fires"
|>
I did pass a place in Arizona called Black Mesa. I was not even tempted to slow down.
It's a tragedy that the Smokies are burning, but I've been to Galinburg. A fire will probably be bad for the economy, but at least it will improve the aesthetics.
I thought the US was full of ghost towns, abandoned mining towns, deserts factories etc.
It is. People do eventually leave when there's no way left to make a living.
I did pass a place in Arizona called Black Mesa. I was not even tempted to slow down.
You didn't miss much, unless you like coal mines.
This is Donald's America. We all like coal mines.
After all, Christmas is coming. We have to fill those stockings up somehow.
Meh. Come to think on it, the Weather Channel has probably been sued by insurance companies.
"Sir, the plaintiff is basing part of his case for full payout using you as a witness. Are you an appraiser or other expert that can judge whether a building has been "destroyed", rather than just 70% damaged?"
"Uh, the walls and roof were gone."
"Your honor, the witness is unresponsive."
It wasn't the coal mines that concerned me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_(video_game)#Plot
Which is more annoying: people who say 'neoliberal', or californian baby boomers who say anti-immigration policies are so racist but support nimby zoning/permitting to keep out all the working & middle class riff-raff
I.e. "our prices discriminate so we don't have to"
"Your honor, the witness is unresponsive."
"I thought she was English."
Unresponsive witness?
"I think I'd better take a look me lud."
(Opens coffin)
"No further questions me lud."
If only people who say 'neoliberal' were so annoying that dem politicians stopped being neoliberal.
People seem to both want to get the blue dogs back and move the party to the left. I think you sort of have to fudge that difference if you want to win.
It's never too early to start on 2018 and a fifty-state strategy, but we could take a couple months reading and listening and thinking.
Theda Skocpol thinks we do not have to change a thing, just expand and tighten networks and communication in purplish states and fucking work turnout. This might mean a local in every precinct working full time, sharing up the levels.
Bouie is careful, but drexicya is more open and firm. After fifty years of unquestionable loyalty, it is time to turn over leadership to blacks and a radical agenda.
The point is that any universal program will entrench white supremacy (see Scalzi) and is therefore racist.
What is not racist? Open differential treatment of African-Americans as a explicit response to institutionalized de facto White Supremacy.
SOTU: "And I propose tax cuts for the middle class! 10% for whites, and 30% cuts for blacks.
Free tuition for whites, free tuition and housing for blacks.
A basic income guarantee of $20k a year, but only for African-Americans.
My cabinet and their employees must have twice as many blacks as whites."
Now even if this weren't illegal, the SCOTUS for our lifetimes will make it so, but essentially I agree with the above radical agenda in principle.
You know, the 2018 governor's map doesn't look that bad. Lotta red to play for.
90: I had noticed that too. The state legislative map looks pretty formidable, but even there a lot of the GOP majorities are quite small. (Obviously gerrymandering is a problem there in a way that it isn't with governorships, but not necessarily an insuperable one.)
||
A FB friend who has published a couple op-eds in a big city US newspaper posted today that she had been planning on trying to get another one published, but decided not to after Trump went after a CNN reporter on Twitter. She remembered the harassment she got from her previous op-eds, and imagined what it would be like if Trump called her out.
So she decided not to speak. the chilling effect is in effect.
It's been the most depressing thing I've read all day, and I've been horribly depressed all day. My last ethics class of the day was dreadful, and I kept thinking, "It doesn't matter that I'm failing to engage the students, because everything good is going to be crushed soon anyway."
56: That blog has talked about Jacobs before, and its view is more nuanced. I think the title is just a callback, not intended literally.
A CNN headline I saw today was "Trump: Burn a Flag, Go to Jail"
So, CNN seems to have decided what side of the bread the butter is on. It turns out that bullying the media works.
They left out the nuance (stripping citizenship).
My son's girlfriend (they are visiting right now) is from Gatlinburg, and apparently her father, aunt, and grandmother all lost their homes (they had not been allowed back in yet to see if anything was salvageable). Last minute narrow escape down a fiery road. Not good. We had a completely unsatisfying Two-Minute Hate of Everything this evening.
Oof, that's horrible.
The 2 minute hates are never as satisfying as you think they will be. They're like potato chips that way.
Why is the southeast on fire right now? Dead trees? Exceptional dryness? This is usually more of a western thing.
In case any of you are burn-curious, one good thing Lee and I did together was burn a flag one Fourth of July pre-kids. I had no idea what an emotional and cathartic moment it would be for me, though I think her experience was more just Woooooooooo! but anyway you might want to try it if you have a safe opportunity to do so.
That was supposed to be back when it was just about flags and not forests, FYI.
Running through grass fires is also quite exciting. Haven't tried a forest though.
AIMHSHB, I once started a grass fire by accident.
Can't anything be the fault of the actual people who actually voted for Trump, poor pitiful lambs who can't be held responsible for anything because somewhere a millennial is drinking a pumpkin spice latte?
Seriously, this.
I had to vote for the maniac because there are hipsters in Brooklyn.
||
There's a "Canadian Journal of Irish Studies" because of course there is.
|>
107: Well, because of course there is a Canadian Association for Irish Studies, and naturally they would have a journal.
There is also a Canadian Catholic Historical Association which puts out a journal under the ridiculously broad title of Historical Studies. It has a fair bit of Canadian Irish content, but from a somewhat narrow ecclesiastical perspective (lots of stuff on the careers of notorious notable Irish priests and bishops in various and sundry outposts of Canada).
|| Having now seen it, I can recommend Certain Women. |>
Certain Women is on my must-watch list.
And speaking of women and acting, I was seriously irked yesterday when someone in my fb feed dismissed "the pretty young thing" who plays Elizabeth II in The Crown. Er, that would be Claire Foy, a serious and highly accomplished actress. And her role as Elizabeth II is actually quite complex and subtle: she has to only just let the mask slip, while playing the part of a woman who never let the mask slip.
Also, she played Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall. So excellent! (I watched it twice).
I'm really enjoying The Crown. I'm ignorant of most of the history of the politics, so I think it's adding a bit of suspense where most of the audience I imagine knows the outcome.
There's a Canadian Journal of a bunch of things - CJZoology isn't a great journal (fine and useful basic science) but CJFisheries is really good. As a Canadian resident, you get free access to all back issues (or did last time I checked).
There's also the Upper Canada Lower Bowel Clinic.
Fortunately, I did not quite have my drink actually in my mouth, but merely tilting out of the situated-on-my-lip glass, when I read 113.
I'm really enjoying The Crown.
Yeah, me too. I initially thought it would be little more than a well-executed costume drama, but by the third or fourth episode, I found myself really drawn in.
I watched episode 9 earlier this evening, so only one more to go. And without spoiling the plot for anyone who hasn't seen it yet (SPOILER ALERT: ELIZABETH II IS STILL QUEEN!), can I just say that John Lithgow as Winston Churchill is thoroughly excellent? That role could have been a caricature, or a set-piece, but there is a scene in episode 9 (NO SPOILERS!) where Lithgow as Churchill almost made me cry.
John Lithgow as Winston Churchill is thoroughly excellent
That seems... surprising, I guess.
