Would you pay $21 for a green tea? Well, if you were cultured, you would, you goddam heathen. But since we can't take you out anyplace nice, let's instead swig our swirled leaves with Ryan Sutton, the food critic for Bloomberg News and enjoyer of one fat night in Chicago.
Another snowstorm is blanketing the East Coast in a polar-vortexed-frost, which means it's time for residents of unplowed streets to complain of classist plowing.
There's a brief and enraging—to New York City's renting class, at least—aside in Constance Rosenblum's Sunday New York Times Real Estate piece about committed couples who live apart. In describing Michael Kenny and Ingrid Doyle's two-apartment love affair, Rosenblum mentions that Kenny, a 62-year-old "lawyer with Citigroup," has for years held on to his "rent-stabilized two-bedroom in a rehabilitated tenement on West 116th Street in South Harlem...for which he pays under $2,000 a month." Let me put that in context.
The 30-something Tallahassee man responsible for GhettoTracker.com sure is a fickle fucker. In response to all the "negative baggage" that came with inviting users to mark off which ghettos to avoid—no actual crime data necessary—he relaunched as "Good Part of Town." Then he took down the site because segregating lower-income neighborhoods "wasn't worth the trouble." Now, he's back and as bigoted as ever!
GhettoTracker.com is just as deplorable as its name suggests. The website, which surfaced yesterday on Hacker News and PandoDaily, invites users to rate neighborhoods based on "which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe." Unsafe to whom? Well, the gleaming white family on its "About" page, of course.
Like the rest of you, I've been worried sick this week about the fate of Hostess' top executives. Will they leave their bankrupt company with the millions of dollars they deserve? If not, who will provide for their families as they hit the unemployment line? Thankfully, we can all have a happy, stress-free weekend: Hostess executives gave themselves raises up to 300 percent even as they were preparing to file for bankruptcy.
If you're anything like me, last week's article about how much to leave your server on financial advice site The Billfold was the first time you heard about the practice of tipping. Did you know, for example, that you're supposed to leave exactly 20 percent of the tip, never rounding up, even if it's only a couple cents?
On tonight's Daily Show, Donald Trump's endorsement of Mitt Romney lead to a discussion about class warfare between Jon Stewart and correspondent John Hodgman. More accurately, it is the case that Hodgman has no stomach for Stewart's brand of liberal whining about the rich having it all and some such. It's a spirited debate, one that touches the very essence of what kind of place this nation truly is. Or maybe it's filled with vague platitudes about "haves" and "soon to haves." Either way.
Kremlin backed propaganda artists Russia Today have predicted that the United States could erupt into a violent class war within two years. "With an assumption that a strong or very strong conflict exists increasing in only two years time, at this rate 85 percent of Americans would sense a class war in two years' time," reads the barely coherent missive. The economy is down and jobs are hard to come by, so pretty soon we'll all be killing each other in the streets. Should you be scared? You should probably not be scared.
Mitt Romney has had five or six years to formulate his response to a full onslaught on his record as corporate efficiency dweeb at Bain Capital, and here's what he's come up with: YOU PEOPLE ARE JEALOUS. Stop it. Go away!
Hey! Billionaires have feelings, too, you know. Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone took to CNBC this morning to defend their honor from that bully Barack Obama, who is killing the economy by refusing to literally dance for them while holding pom-poms made of shredded cash: "We need leadership, we need cheerleading, we need encouragement. Businessmen and fat cats need to feel like they're doing something good not that they're villains and not that their criminals."
Someday, when historians try to explain the cultural milieu that led Occupy Wall Street (assuming future people even care about OWS?) they will point to this Wall Street Journal dispatch from a party where Kim Kardashian literally eats cake while discussing the plight of the protest's unwashed masses:
For the first time in two years, Americans' income fell last month. The drop was a meager .1%, but it was accompanied by a .2% increase in spending, which means your costs went up by twice the amount your pay was cut. But don't worry, because analysts estimate that corporate earnings of the S&P 500 companies will increase by 13% this quarter, so maybe you can borrow some from them? Just blue-skying here.
Rep. John Fleming, a Louisiana Republican who owns a string of Subway and UPS franchises, was on MSNBC this morning to explain how earning $6.3 million a year—which he did in 2010—isn't all it's cracked up to be and to tell Barack Obama to lay off the class warfare. For instance: $200,000 of that goes to food. Being "rich" doesn't sound so great now, does it?
Did you get a raise last year? Seventy-four percent of White House staffers did, according a Gawker analysis of the White House's annual salary reports to Congress. Probably for the great job they're doing with the economy.
