Too much access to information?

This morning I was looking for a nearby site for us to camp this weekend. While making the reservation, I went to a Google satellite image of the state park to identify the best available site (spacious, good trees, away from the road). Weird and too obsessive, I think. But if I have access to this information, how can I not avail myself?

California has the worst bubble

Assessing the bubble through housing price-to-wage ratio locates the worst disparities in one state: "Six regions - all in California - posted ratios of 15 of greater: Salinas, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Oxnard-Thousand Oaks, Napa, and San Luis Obispo." Other high ratios were in L.A., San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, and Riverside, California.

I've lived in three of these regions -- Santa Cruz, Napa, and San Francisco -- when property prices were already prohibitory. It makes the midwest, where I now reside, a great relief.

Covering Elton John

Another from My Morning Jacket.

The mythology of working-class labor

Lance Mannion on how class has shaped gender values. He's addressing larger debates about retraining former rust belt workers for so-called "emotional" sorts of labor.

This will be hard, but it shouldn't be. Men have worked as essentially shop keepers and store clerks for a lot longer than they have worked on assembly lines. There have been waiters forever. Lawyers are the world's second oldest profession. Teaching was a male-only profession for centuries. The idea that men are and ought to be unreflective, grunting, two-fisted louts good with their hands but not so much with their hearts and their heads is a class thing not a gender thing and it is imposed upon working class men by a system that needs them to be beasts of burden.

Men who reject certain values and behaviors as "sissy" or "girlie" are rejecting success, and don't think their bosses aren't grateful.

But the flip-side of the stereotype, that women are better at emotional labor, is also useful to bosses, because it often works out in practice to mean that women are more deferential generally, not just to customers but to their bosses. They don't speak up, they don't question, they don't assert themselves, and they don't fight back, not if they are real women in the way that men who accept and live by their stereotypes are real men.

Elliott Smith

My Morning Jacket

Like Bonnie Prince Billy, MMJ is from Louisville (thanks Dad). Faint echos of Pink Floyd in the lead guitar's central riff.

Happy Mondays

Used to have this song on cassette. Yes, that long ago.

I approve

I don't usually like such lists, but the Underwire blog at Wired.com picked five albums for blasting into space. This would be close to my own list, if I were to undertake such a task. I'm most surprised by the DJ Shadow, which I don't see as being as visible on the radar (DJ Shadow, by the way, started in college radio at UC Davis). These are all favorites of my mine, reflecting a range of pop music that swings from late behop and trip hop to punk, shoegaze and prog rock. I must like "space" music!

Pixies, Doolittle
If Korpa’s going to nostalgically rifle through his record crates, he might as well pick what is arguably the best ’80s album from a group that many artists, from that decade and those that came after, consider to be the best band of the era. Stacked with short, sharp pop shocks, Doolittle starts fast with the surrealist anthem “Debaser” and doesn’t let up until the western noir of “Silver,” before crashing to a close with “Gouge Away.” It’s a bracing blast, especially if you need to stay awake in space. The enviro head-trip “Monkey Gone to Heaven” alone might be worth the ride.

My Bloody Valentine, Loveless
Speaking of the late ’80s and early ’90s, this seminal effort — and band — inspired the term “shoegaze,” a misnomer for mesmerizing rock music that pushes the envelope. Whether it’s the straight-ahead fuzz of “When You Sleep” or the underwater distortion of the serenade “Sometimes,” My Bloody Valentine’s last full-length record is well worth the extra fuel need to get it beyond Earth’s atmosphere. To hear it in space, to get redundant, would be out of this world.

Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon
A no-brainer; it’s all there in the title. But it’s also there in the suggestive grooves: the kinetic synths of “On the Run,” the grinding rock of “Time” and “Money,” the ethereal gospel of “The Great Gig in the Sky.” You can’t go wrong. There are even a couple tunes about going insane, for those who succumb to space madness.

DJ Shadow, Entroducing
If you can find a more stone-cold set of instrumentals made for interstellar travel, do share. Entroducing is the first musical effort built entirely of samples, which means it’s the perfect sonic soundtrack for boldly going where only a few have gone before. If you want to get culture, pop and otherwise, DJ Shadow’s stunning debut is a go-to spacewalk. The beat palette is deeper than a black hole, and everything from Altered States to Twin Peaks gets mashed into the turntables. You can even train on Earth: Load it up, close your eyes and let it flow. You never know what you might see.

Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool
Jazz and space go hand in hand: Voyager’s Golden Record featured Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” among other standouts. But which jazz works best for astronauts? Charles Mingus seems a shoo-in, but his combo’s eruptions might prove too challenging for a weightless environment. Coltrane, Parker, Sun Ra … where to turn? Perhaps stick with Miles Davis’ classic Birth of the Cool until everyone can agree on something. These legendary sessions marked bebop’s evolution into the ’50s, and inspired a whole new school of cool. Its breezy hypnotics are perfect for the hypoxia of space.

Atmosphere

We should all believe Pelosi

This should go without saying. It's no secret that the CIA has misled, bamboozled, and engaged in domestic psy-ops for its own advantage (see "Bay of Pigs" or "Iran-Contra"). Pelosi is a political operator, but she's speaking truth to power here. And I hope she's able to swat down the politically motivated calls for her resignation.