This Pot's Got A Beef

A little post designed for the benefit of our English readers.

Look, do you see what we have to deal with over here? Not content with having mobile telephones that are good at neither making calls nor entertaining us, not content with an inability to make decent sandwiches in advance of one's entry into the store (thus forcing one to coverse with the food preparers), but one of the premier electronic news and opinion outlets in the US has just discovered that heating up water using a superheated electrical element might be a faster way of boiling it than bathing a lump of tin in flame, and waiting for the heat to reach the water.

As the author notes, US voltage, being lower, erases some of the advantages, and we suspect that the process probably consumes a bit more energy, but given the American love of gagetry and speed, the absence of decent electrical kettles from US households is mystifying. And before you point out that Americans all have coffee machines, and do not drink instant coffee like you disgusting Limeys, true, very true. But if the US household does not have more than about three uses for boiling water in any given day, we'd be gobsmacked.

Ahem.

Perhaps we should try and distract you from that intemperate and hackneyed rant with a post of music. New York City does indeed face an election today, a choice between a pretty able and revoltingly rich Republican and a pleasant but possibly compromised Democrat. No whoops, and while it is always good to punish Republicans for being wrong, we'll get over it. Hell, we might even prosper.

Not so the poor sods in Detroit. As the mighty detroitblog puts it, the city is in imminent danger of a takeover, as well as the flight of all of its prosperous citizens, black or white, if the wrong guy gets in. The post is laced with a discussion of racial politics that we don't feel comfortable, or brave enought, to convey properly - we'll note only that both candidates are black. And we'll quote a paragraph here:

"This is pure self-defeatism, and it’s what has defined politics in Detroit for decades. When you vote not for qualifications but out of spite, you get the highest poverty rate in the country. When you vote based on race rather than responsibility, you get 15,000 people a year fleeing the city. When you vote to spite the suburbs, the suburbs get wealthier and the city gets poorer. When you vote for “our” mayor instead of our real interests, the city goes broke."

We don't know the city of Detroit that well, but we know the suburbs, and always find it deeply depressing to conceive of the greater Metro area as a series of prosperous and well-kept suburbs sprouting around a deaying core. Cities shouldn't be like that. Make 'em dangerous, surely, but make 'em busy, or they lose the point. Scott Morgan understood that, and we think The Hellacopters understood that too, even though they came from Sweden.

The Hellacopters - "16 With A Bullet"
Buy Cream Of The Crap, Vol. 2 Here, and Buy "Scots Pirates", home of the original, here