Five miles in 42:15 — an 8:27 pace. Ran out of steam, though, so I missed my goal. Decided to lift weights (arms, shoulders).
Music: Wilco, Kicking Television
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I’ll open this post by saying that I am skeptical — and this is generous — of the plan announced today by the governor to “monetize” the state’s toll roads.
Speaking at the state League of Municipalities convention in Atlantic City today, he offered the plan as a way to cut the state’s debt load in half.
In a speech before the 92nd annual New Jersey League of Municipalities convention, Corzine said he would reduce the state’s bonded debt by at least 50 percent, largely through toll increases. He would not say how much tolls would be going up, nor offer a range.
Corzine promised to unveil details of the plan in January, including any proposed toll hikes. He stressed he would not sell the New Jersey Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway, but try to form a nonprofit agency to manage the toll roads and raise money through bonding to pay down the debt.
“Every dollar that goes to debt service or unfunded liabilities is a dollar that can’t go to municipal aid or school funding,” Corzine said to several hundred local, county and state officials who attended the luncheon. “It’s all connected.”
There is something to be said for doing something drastic to reduce the state’s $32 billion debt, which as Juan Melli at Blue Jersey points out “could save about $1.5 billion in yearly interest payments which would help close our over $3 billion structural deficit.”
There is truth in this. The question is whether the method being floated is anything more than another in a long line of gimmicks.
I remain skeptical.
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I’ve held off on commenting on Stephon Marbury’s sudden departure from the Knickerbockers and the circus that surrounds this lousy team, mostly because the entire sordid episode has left me speechless. In fact, much about this ballclub — a team for whom I’ve rooted for most of my life — leaves me speechless these days.
This is a team without a plan, an organization without class, a hard team to like and one that has me more interested in what the Suns are doing, what the Spurs are doing and what LeBron James is up to than what is happening at the Garden.
I don’t see it getting better anytime soon — at least not before the coach and the team’s highest-paid headcase are sent packing. Once that happens, we’re still probably a few years away from getting this mess cleaned up.
Where are you when we need you, Patrick Ewing?
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Paul Mulshine is just as obsessed with the music of Bruce Springsteen as I am, only his obsession is with his mistaken belief that Bruce has abandoned some musical past that never actually existed. That’s the only way I can explain this, one in a long line of dopey columns on the Boss. You wonder why Springsteen’s people were unwilling to pass along press credentials?
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I haven’t written about the death of Norman Mailer (pictured above from New York Times obit) yet, because I am still trying to come to grips with my opinions of him as a writer. I’ve read several of his books, mostly his nonfiction novels, and have had great difficulty getting through much of his fiction. He was, as “Advertisements for Myself” shows, a remarkable egomaniac and intellectual, one who would fight both physically and rhetorically for the things he believed (even if some of them, especially his disdain for feminism and feminists, completely contradicted his professed humanism).
Much of the writing about Mailer over the last few days has been fawning — some of it deserved, like this one from John Nichols (in which he mentions Mailer’s pointed attack on President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” Moment — an earlier, prewar piece by Mailer also is worth reading).
Some of it, however, seems to gloss over the nasty edges of his character — for a deconstruction of this trend, read Steven Hart’s takes on Stevenhartsite and The Opinion Mill).
Mailer, as Hart writes, was a generational writer, meaning that his commitment to the novel and storytelling was formed during an earlier time when the novel was still deemed an important pursuit and postmodernism had not fractured storytelling (I say this not to criticize current writing, but only as an observation and description of the changing face of fiction writing). Mailer was committed to the big book, the Great American Novel, a noble pursuit that has fallen out of favor and probably was more a mythical enterprise anyway, sort of like the pursuit of the Holy Grail.
That Mailer’s big fiction books were mostly awful ultimately is not the point. His writing about 1967 Pentagon protest (“Armies of the Night”), the presidential conventions of 1968 and 1972 (“Miami and the Siege of Chicago” and “St. George and the Godfather”) and the Gary Gilmore execution (“The Executioner’s Song”) are brilliant forays into what was then a new genre of literature and among the best works the so-called New Journalism produced.
These nonfiction novels should secure his place in literary history — a place of ambivalence similar to the awkward perch he will occupy within the intellectual history of the American left.
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Hank Kalet 