Category: No Politics Friday

Two Fridays ago I posed an open question about the best and worst places you have visited or in which you have lived. As I noted at the time I have little experience with international travel but I've travelled extensively in the United States, visiting 49 states (all but Alaska) and spending a decent amount of time driving around both the big cities and back roads of each. Here, then, are my conclusions about the worst towns/cities in the U.S. It's not impossible to live in these places and like them, I suppose, but it would require a ton of money, the optimism of a Mormon missionary, and a mastery of self-delusion. There are a lot of crapholes in this country and I could spend all day naming them. But these stand out, for reasons that you no doubt understand if you've visited.

5. Lubbock, Texas – Quite literally the Middle of Nowhere, Lubbock stands as an oasis of nothingness in an enormous sea of more nothingness. Bad places often advertise their proximity to decent places, i.e. "Scranton is only an hour from Philadelphia!" Lubbock's claim is "Only five and a half hours from Fort Worth!" Favorite pastimes among Lubbock residents include crapping out kids like Pez dispensers, bragging about how cheap their huge homes were (oblivious to the relationship between property values and desirability) and committing suicide. Being in Lubbock creates a sense of total isolation comparable to over-wintering in Antarctica or spacewalking outside the International Space Station. Hot, boring, and stuffed to the brim with prodigiously breeding Fundamentalist Texas stereotypes, Lubbock edges out El Paso and Huntsville for the right to represent the state. Trust me, Texas has a lot of candidates here.

4. Youngstown, Ohio – The poster child for post-industrial Midwestern urban decay. Gary, Flint, and Detroit get more press, but Youngstown is the perfect synthesis of blight, obscene pollution, a complete lack of anything to do (economically or for entertainment), and a crime rate that would make Johannesburg blush. Hopelessly corrupt Ohio politics govern this excuse for a city, not that there's anything a competent government could do. The attitude seems to be "Why fix it? Who gives a fuck?" which makes perfect sense in a city that hasn't seen a tree planted, a lick of new paint, or a pothole filled since the steel plants shuttered thirty years ago.

People in Youngstown have absolutely no reason to live and spend their days desperately plotting an escape to Dayton, Allentown, or the sweet release of death.

3. Reno, Nevada – Where hope goes to die. A fifth-rate, non-union Mexican equivalent of Vegas. Given that Vegas already kinda sucks, this is particularly damning. Don't go to the casinos hoping to live out a 1960s Rat Pack film. They're loaded to the gunwales with junkies, the homeless, people who soon will be homeless, and other assorted societal detritus. A sad black hole of broken dreams, alcoholism, and gambling addiction. If Vegas is a glamorous date with a supermodel, Reno is being fingered by your uncle.

If Vegas is champagne toasts with celebrities, Reno is beer-bonging Natty Ice behind a currency exchange. If Vegas is a majestic cruise ship, Reno is bobbing from Havana to Miami on a floating door. If Vegas is a $1000 meal with Thomas Keller, Reno is jamming a can of Cheese Whiz in your mouth and pressing hard. If not for its proximity to Lake Tahoe, Reno might rank even lower.

2a. Colorado Springs, Colorado – Unlike the others on this list, CS is relatively clean, has some wealth, and enjoys decent (if extreme) weather. It is also a megachurch and defense contractor infested cesspool which feels as artificial as Main Street, USA at Disneyworld. Celebration, Florida has more authentic character. Strip malls, megachurches, subdivisions, more strip malls, more megachurches, and more subdivisions, all populated with a mixture of humorless Dobson acolytes, buzz-cut Air Force personnel, and defense industry hangers-on.
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If Orange County and Southern California invented the awful, generic suburban strip mall landscape, CS took it to its logical extreme. Driving through this "city" is like watching one of those old, cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoons where they re-used the same background over and over and over.

2b. Lexington, Nebraska – Oh, you want someplace "bad" in the more traditional sense? Lexington is a rank outpost dominated by incomprehensibly big meat processing facilities (Tyson, IBP) which bathe the town in a noxious, knee-buckling blanket of excrement, rendered animal matter, and chemical wastes. Classic meat processing town – illegal aliens (the meat industry are equal opportunity exploiters, sampling Mexico, north Africa, and Eastern Europe with equal aplomb) crammed 10 per apartment, unbreathable air, undrinkable water, obscene crime rates, and a closer resemblance to Calcutta than Cleveland. Lexington goes the extra mile, though, littered with abandoned and rusting cars, often simply left in the middle of the road, and completely overrun by packs of feral dogs. Seriously. A Mad Max backdrop of burned buildings, broken windows, rusted appliances dumped on lawns and sidewalks, abandoned vehicles, and garbage that no one, least of all the city, bothers to pick up. Now Tyson is importing illegals from the Sudan, giving the rural Nebraska town an exploding HIV-positive population it is ill-equipped to handle. Redefines "godforsaken."

1. Holbrook, Arizona/Pine Ridge, South Dakota – Indian reservations, especially those not proximate enough to populated areas to throw up casinos, are horrendously depressing places. So take your pick. These two, representing the Navajo and Sioux nations, respectively, are just brutal. Like abandoned trailer parks after an F5 tornado. If you want to see people living in the borders of the United States without electricity, indoor plumbing, or any source of income, here's your chance. Grinding poverty, a complete absence of hope for improvement, cultural disenfranchisement, and magnified doses of every social problem in the country – teen pregnancy, meth, suicide, homicide, illiteracy, gangs – define reservation towns. Holbrook looks like a beat-up carnival ride, the kind you see in parking lots of county fairs, and ensures that anyone foolish enough to visit (Petrified Forest National Park is nearby) will have their car broken into as a reward. Shameful. Embarrassing. Pitiful. Guaranteed to make you feel better about your town.

I defy you to dispute any of these, although I'm confident that there are a lot of close honorable mentions one could argue for inclusion.
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About a hundred people – and bear in mind we're talking about people I actually like – have lit up my social networking world with "tributes" to Michael Jackson.

Several things.

1. We're going a little overboard remembering a child molestor who we wanted kept alive mostly as a trainwreck/curiosity, no? I mean, it's good that you enjoyed his music but, and I can't stress this part enough, he fingerbangs kids. I realize that a person can create things that entertain us while being criminals, perverts, or plain old assholes in their private lives.

Regardless, I'd have a difficult time remembering a child molestor fondly unless he created something a hell of a lot more meaningful than Thriller. I mean, if Frank Lloyd Wright felt up Cub Scouts in his spare time I would look at Fallingwater and grudgingly give him a pass. But Michael Jackson? Come on. Have you listened to that crap lately?

2. It was nice of our media to devote a week's news cycle to Ed McMahon (relevant!

), Farrah Fawcett (shocked to discover she didn't die 10 years ago), and "The King of Pop.

" This is possible because there is no other important news happening anywhere.

3. Did I mention that you need to keep in mind that Michael Jackson fingers 7 year old boys when watching the laudatory retrospectives on his life and career? OK. Just throwing that out there.

My longtime friend and reader Scott pointed me toward this Daily Telegraph list of the 10 best and worst cities on Earth according to Mercer, Inc., a company which apparently gets paid to come up with really, stunningly obvious (and elitist) information for the corporate titans. Such lists appear regularly and spark time-killing message board debates. I'll save you the trouble of clicking through the list: Europe is good. South America does not exist. Nor does the U.S. Africa is bad. Very, very bad.

Did someone really need to pay Mercer, Inc. to tell us that Bangui, Baghdad, Kinshasa, Khartoum, and most of the Congo are sweltering, violent, and pestilent shitholes? Likewise, did we need yet another slide show-style affirmation of the awesomeness of Vancouver, Auckland, Vienna, Frankfurt, and other places with 99.7% white populations and exorbitant costs of living? I have not yet been in a position to be a world traveller, but I always have a hard time imagining these places to be either as great or as awful as magazine rankings suggest. People tend to see these lists and picture themselves living in the World's #1 Metropolis where the streets are paved in candy and fairies grant one's every wish.
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At the same time we are to imagine the untold horrors of living in the average African superslum with curiosity and revulsion. Would I bet that Bern, Switzerland or Auckland or Frankfurt are great? Would I bet that Africa's conurbations of 10,000,000 people with no effective government are shitty? Yes and yes. But rather than turning me on or off of these places, such rankings always make me want to go. To find out what it's really like.

More importantly, the cultural and class biases inherent in these lists are interesting.

I have a very hard time believing, for instance, that Lahore, Pakistan or any of India's obscenely crowded asylums are any better than N'Djamena or Port-au-Prince. Everything I have ever heard from travellers to the subcontinent suggests that its megacities have everything the suicidal tourist could want: crime (both petty and violent), unfathomable pollution, ineffective governance, oppressive heat, diseases that opportunistically attack our Western constitutions, and an overpowering sense of filth and crapulence. But India is a "good" non-Western country now, ripe with investment and job-siphoning opportunities. Mercer can't say anything bad about Calcutta to its rich, outsource-happy Western clients. That would be rude.

My India-travelling friends also report in the same breath the many things they loved about India or Pakistan. That's why I always greet these lists with skepticism. People live in and travel to "the worst" places every day and it is not always clear to me in what way these cities are supposed to be inferior to the dozens of other shitty cities dotting the globe. These lists feel like little more than periodic reminders of the unfettered glories of teutonic, Aryan European outdoor museums like Vienna and the sweaty, barbaric other-ness of Africa. Coincidentally, the "worst" lists conveniently omit some countries renowned for their horrendous urban ghetto-cities – China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, etc. – when they happen to be our latest low-cost trading partners of convenience.
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All that said, I do find the topic fascinating. What are the best and worst places you've been?

I worry that I created the wrong impression with my rant about Sandra Lee a few Fridays ago. In no way was that entry intended to imply that there is anyone, Ms. Lee included, that I want to see hit by a speeding vehicle more than Paula Deen. My deep suspicion that Ms. Deen hails from Patterson, New Jersey stems from the fact that every word out of her gaping mouth suggests the most fraudulent, cartoonish, overblown imitation of a Southern accent since Peter Sellers tried and failed to play the part of Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove. Listen to her drop "y'all" into every sentence and tell me that she isn't trying very hard to cover up the fact that she actually sounds like Joe Pesci:

Whether the entire manner of speech is put on or she is merely exaggerating, this ludicrous caricature of a drawl comes off as only slightly more dignified than pulling both eyelids into slits and yelling "ME SO SOLLY!"

Paula Deen is like your grandmother, or at least the Food Network hopes you will think so. My grandmother did not sing the praises of factory-farmed meat that tastes like styrofoam, nor did she talk like Charles Laughton after three strokes, nor did she look suspiciously like Divine from all those John Waters films. My grandmother did not have a soul-stealing cackle, Christopher Lloyd's hairdo, or a sixty pill per day methedrine habit which raised her artificial perkiness to levels previously achieved only by Richard Simmons.

Deen has lowered the common denominator of the network she infests at every available opportunity, from the original and insufferably cloying Paula's Home Cooking to the utterly unwatchable Paula's Party and Paula's Best Dishes. But her greatest sins sprung forth from her uterus and, after 30+ years of careful training under some of the world's most accomplished child molestors, her hell-spawn Jamie and Bobby received their own show, the threateningly erotic Road Tasted (which draws in viewers with the unambiguously terrifying "You ready, brother?")

With fake Southern accents of their own and charisma levels that make their mother look like John F. Kennedy, Bobby and Jamie take time out of their busy schedule (18 hours daily of 69ing each other while Guy Fieri captures the action on camera and provides play-by-play commentary) to drive around the country eating at family restaurants and exchanging the kind of banter that can only bloom from decades of ritual satanic abuse. It should be noted that this was the next most entertaining thing Food Network could conceive after their original idea – 30 minutes of Emeril pressing his naked buttocks against a cutting board and expelling diarrhea with great force – fell through at the last minute. Realizing that most Americans would rather get a lapdance from their own mother than watch the Deen Boys cruise around in a convertible looking for Hot Browns, fried chicken, barbecue, and vicious truck stop gay sex, Food Network prodded the Boys to "eventually (decide) that they wanted to devote more time to their family restaurant" and thus stop hosting the show. This step was a financial necessity for the network, which just recently settled a class action lawsuit from consumer focus group members who viewed Road Tasted and immediately returned home to beat their children before committing suicide.

Food Network has problems overall and it would be unfair to pin its descent into self-parody solely on Deen, but wedging her deranged kindergarten teacher persona into every single special and series on the network (I wonder how much Bobby Flay has to drink before sitting down to eat a staged Thanksgiving dinner with Paula, Sandra, and Guy?) isn't helping. Her omnipresence across the network's daily schedule leads me to believe that Food Network is managed by a cadre of Japanese WWII holdouts recruited from Kamikaze squadrons and sent to America to bring about our national apocalypse.

If you ever have wondered what it might be like to sit in one of my classes, I have three words: obscure presidential trivia.

When Mary Truman-Daniel died in January of 2008, John Eisenhower became the oldest (in age as well as in order of presidents) living presidential child by a comfortable margin; the 86 year-old military historian's closest competitor is Lynda Robb (Johnson), age 64. Since it is historically common for Presidents to be older and have children who are either adults or at least teenagers there are very few cases of children living sixty or seventy years beyond their parent's presidency. Eisenhower is going to take a decent run at it.

Barack Obama, in fact, is noteworthy in how young his children are. His daughter Natasha is about to turn 8. In the 20th Century, only JFK's children ("John-John", who died in 1999 and Caroline, age 51) were younger when their father took office at ages 1 and 5, respectively. Amy Carter, who was just under 10, is the only other child to sneak into the single digits in that era. You'd have to go back more than a century to Theodore Roosevelt's sons Quentin (who died in the trenches in WWI) and Archie to find children under 10.

Like the rest of our society, 20th Century presidents had fewer children than their predecesors. FDR, with 5, and the apparently virile George H.W. Bush, with 6 (one died in infancy), were the most prodigious. Comparatively, many 19th Century presidents did as people commonly did in that era – had tons of kids and assumed 1/3rd of them would die. While some had a small number (Buchanan, Polk, etc.) there were a few whoppers. Hayes had 8 kids. William Henry Harrison had more kids (10) than he had weeks as President.

And the honor of the most active wang goes to John Tyler, who had enough kids (15) to fill out an NBA roster.

Now. Are you ready to have your mind blown?

Who might you guess is the earliest president, chronologically, to have a grandchild alive today? Don't cheat. Guess.

My immediate guess was the aforementioned Theodore Roosevelt.

Knowing that he had two children who were born in the 1890s, it seemed conceivable that a grandchild might be alive today albeit very old. Sure enough, TR has one surviving grandkid: son Archie's daughter Nancy is alive and 85 years old. But she doesn't take the cake.

Keeping in mind that Barack Obama is the 44th President, does it blow your mind to know that the correct answer is John Tyler?
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The tenth President!? The man who was President in 1841? As ridiculous as that sounds, it happens to be entirely true. As noted earlier, Tyler had a very productive wang. And it didn't tire with age: his last three children were born when Tyler was 63, 66, and 70. The first of that trio, Lyon G. Tyler (bitchin' name, for the record), inherited his father's reproductive prowess. Lyon, born in 1853, also had children throughout his life and into old age. In fact he had sons born in 1924 and 1928 when he was 71 and 75, respectively. Those two sons, Lyon Jr. (!!!) and Harrison Tyler, are alive today.
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So Mr. Harrison Tyler, a chemist, and Lyon Tyler Jr., a college history professor, can tell people that their grandfather was President…twenty goddamn years before Abraham Lincoln. Their grandfather, as a child, made regular weekend visits to hang out with Thomas Jefferson. Their grandfather was born before the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution.

The fact that knowing this stuff is at least indirectly relevant to my job makes me happy.

Schadenfreude has a strong presence on the internet, and my vote for its purest, most misanthropic expression is WreckedExotics.com. It is, as the name would indicate, a user-submitted photo gallery of rare, six-figure sports cars turned into piles of rubble by man or nature. Thus the world's wage-earners can visit the site (preferably at work, on the BMW-driving boss's dime) and relish in mental images of vacant yuppies distractedly yakking into a cellphone whilst driving their Ferrari into a rusted-out 1977 Ford Ranchero.
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Or a brick wall.

If you've ever seen an astronomically expensive Italian sports can manufactured after 1980 you realize that they all look like doorstops, flying wedges with about 4 inches of ground clearance and front bumpers low enough to mow lawns.

And if you've ever wondered, as I have, what would happen if such a car impacted a normal vehicle at moderate to high speed – say, if a new ($289,000) Lamborghini assholed a Hyundai Entourage minivan – WreckedExotics provides the simple answer: The laws of physics take over.

The best part about that is that it happened to someone who isn't me.

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It's a veritable monument to passive-aggressive bitterness. And I'm OK with it.

(PS: Be sure to check out D-list comedian Eddie "Undercover Brother" Griffin trashing a $1.2 million Enzo Ferrari, one of about 100 in existence.)

We already knew that host of Food Network's abominable Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee can't cook. Let's put it this way: if you have a can opener, a microwave, and some old I Can't Believe It's Not Butter! you could do her job standing on your head. But I imagined that she thought of herself as a serious culinarian, however misguided that might be. One must at least keep up appearances while hosting a cooking show, no?

There was a time at which Food Network programming mostly featured chefs – that is, trained and experienced people who have successfully made their way through the culinary world based largely on talent. As old-school TV chefs like Julia Child or Martin Yan (from PBS's awesomely lo-fi Yan Can Cook) proved, however, being a great chef does not mean one has great "camera appeal." At some point the quest for ratings led Food Network to write as many of their Big Name Chefs as possible out of their programming to be replaced with chirpy, mall focus-grouped bobbleheads who smile pretty while throwing out marketable catchphrases but are not chefs. Thus we are subjected to amateurs and glorified home cooks like Paula Deen, Guy Fieri, Rachel Ray, and the horrific Ms. Lee. Anthony Bourdain described her as follows in a lengthy rant about the "Newer, Younger, More Male-Oriented, More Dumb-Ass Food Network":

Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time. She Must Be Stopped. Her death-dealing can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained. I would likely be arrested if I suggested on television that any children watching should promptly go to a wooded area with a gun and harm themselves. What’s the difference between that and Sandra suggesting we fill our mouths with Ritz Crackers, jam a can of Cheez Wiz in after and press hard? None that I can see.

While I find her show unwatchable, I've wondered if Mr. Bourdain's comments were unnecessarily harsh. For example, he says much the same thing about Rachel Ray, who I find supremely irritating but has put out a number of excellent cookbooks which suggest that, yes, she knows enough to be useful. Lee's show, which consists mostly of opening cans and/or preparing boxed grocery store items ("Coming up next: how to make great instant mashed potatoes!"), might not be a complete synopsis of her talents and her take on cooking. She could, like Emeril, be a decent person who happens to have a horrendous TV show.

Then I saw this.

Sandra, you shameless hooker.*

First of all, describing her as a "Chef" disregards and disrespects the real meaning of the term. Second, what's the matter Sandra, you don't have enough fuckin' money? As the star of a show on the Food Network you need to look at America with a straight face and talk about how delicious KFC is for another paycheck? The TV show, the book deals, the magazine gigs…those don't make her rich enough. She needs to shill for fast food that tastes like cleaning a grease trap with one's tongue in order to make ends meet.

One of two things must be true here. Either Sandra Lee really thinks KFC is awesome, which would be a damning critique of her judgment, or she is an empty shell of a person who has no self-respect and literally will do anything for a dollar. I have not eaten at a KFC since I was about 10, and even then, when my diet consisted almost entirely of fried/salted snacks, candy, frozen entrees, and fast food, it tasted like Frank Perdue shitting on my tongue. I always thought their motto should be "KFC: We use the chickens that die of natural causes…and pass the savings on to you." The shriveled, emaciated, oily, flavorless wads of garbage they serve to life-weary or seriously misguided people around the world are the kind of food one would expect to eat in the aftermath of a nuclear war – when the survival crackers run out and we're reduced to gnawing the bones of the family pets who perished in the first strike. If it was possible to taste despair, it would taste like Original Recipe KFC.

I understand how one could become a spokesperson for the culinary equivalent of Chernobyl and still have enough balls to host a cooking show and use the title of "Chef" but until Sandra Lee came along I had a hard time believing that anyone could be so devoid of self-awareness as to do it.

*Please note that this is a reference to Ms. Lee's willingness to prostitute her "credentials" as a "chef" to hawk disgusting, processed junk food to a seriously overweight nation and not a reference to prostitution in the traditional sense. I have to point this out because, as you are all aware, I am a misogynist who hates women.