Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Mrs. Fisher has to set up a boardinghouse everywhere she goes to make ends meet, for she has a family of seven to feed. The small house they rent here has six rooms and they have six roomers. Others stay in a cabin built in the backyard. All use the single bath. Childersburg, Alabama. Stoney, 1941.

The $3500 bottle of wine

I won't dispute Neil Irwin's claim here that "If you spend $41,500 on a case of wine, you just might be a moral monster."

If you are about to drink a $3,500 bottle of wine, you have to think for just a minute about this option instead: Drink a $100 bottle of wine that is about as good, but from a less renowned chateau. And deploy the other $3,400 to pay for malaria-preventing mosquito nets in Africa that, by one charity’s calculations, would be enough money to save about 1.5 human lives.

But it's hard to see why the logic doesn't extend a lot further down the expenditure chain, as Peter Singer famously argued. How much will you suffer if the $100 bottle is replaced with the $20, or for that matter the 2-buck chuck? Utilitarianism is a tough taskmaster.

Note: title fixed 7/31

Three million attend Mass led by Pope Francis in Rio

Wow. I don't suppose he said, "We're more popular than Jesus now."

Caturday blogging

Everyone else does it, why not me?

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 31

The almost always reliable "Dean of Rock Critics" Bob Christgau gave the album "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" his very rare A+ rating. I always thought it lacked some of the authenticity and immediacy of the two classics that preceded it... to me, a little bit of the "Lucinda trying too hard to sound like Lucinda" syndrome. But every damn song nails it, hard. I may have been wrong.

This live version shows that while she may not need that particular guy, she is well-served by the guys in the band.

Thanks, Anna Eshoo

My Rep did the right thing and voted to defund the NSA's bulk collection of domestic telephone records. Too bad she couldn't get her buddy Pelosi to join her, or any 7 of the 83 Dems who sided with the national security state and its ruler, our occasionally very disappointing president.

I'd love to know the poet...

... who spray-painted (quite unobtrusively) the following exquisite one-liner on the pedestrian bridge across 101 at Embarcadero:

This hair that I leave on boys' pillows splits the sun's rays for my eyes only.

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

By popular request, a picture in honor of Detroit. This shot is rich in history and perhaps some irony. Ford Motor Co. was a notoriously brutal union-buster. The UAW gained recognition at GM and then Chrysler in 1937, but it was not until 1941 that they succeeded at Ford. Meanwhile, partly as a means of dividing and conquering, Ford earned a reputation as a major employer of African-American workers. Fortunately the UAW recognized the virtue in and necessity of cross-racial worker solidarity.

Detroit, Michigan. Ford workers carrying American flag and union banners in the Labor Day parade. Arthur S. Siegel, 1942.