Welcome to 2024 Forum
Happy New Year from OTB!
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, January 1, 2024
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32 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Well, hello!
To everyone at OTB,
Happy New Year, May your every wish come true !
16 hours in it’s looking pretty much the same as the last one.
Usual collection of neighborhood peeples exercising their right to keep me awake with weapons and boom-booms. Happy New year
Did everybody survive?
T’was a quiet night here, but today is the Annual Moonlight Racing Hill Climb. I will be counting ambulances, and noting the ones that go in screaming and come out silent as a hearse.
Happy New Year.
Here’s a New Year’s trivia question: What country has the highest number of Nobel Laureates per capita?
While I completely ignore New year’s Eve, I do have a kind of year end tradition. Looking up the Airlines We Lost post on Cranky Flier, which is published at the close of the year, and seeing how many I knew about.
Odd thing this year it lists Calafia Airlines as deceased, but it’s website is working and says not one word about having ended operations. It’s a small regional airline centered in Cabo San Lucas, which for some reason flies along the west coast and north of Mexico. For the life of me, I can’t see why they never expanded to the US southwest. The airline’s been around since 1993.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I would guess Iceland, on the grounds that they are the answer to most of the other “most __ per capita” trivia questions I’ve heard.
Good morning and Happy New Year. A mildly queasy stomach kept me limited to very small tastes of beer all night long. Traditionally every one brings four different beers to try and we do four ounce flights. I changed that to one ounce and enjoyed the tasting just as much. Completely coincidentally, I feel great this morning!
@DrDaveT: Close, but no cigar.
Happy New Year! Is Las Vegas really dystopia? Have avoided going but now I sort of want to go just to see.
Steve
@OzarkHillbilly: I don’t know the answer to your question, but we have an entire subdivision in my town where all the streets are named after Nobel winners with connections to the local university.
Happy New Year. I have a hard time getting excited about January 1. It’s the end of Christmas lights that offset the overall bleakness of winter. I am going to leave some up this year. It will help my outlook in the coming election year bullsh!t deluge.
I made a big pot of white bean soup with carrots, ham and kale to cover all my good luck bases for the months ahead. Fingers crossed it will put trump in jail, not in office.
@steve:
We were looking for a place that was more walkable than LA, and cheaper, and we are liking Vegas more than we thought we would. We bought our condo outright with the profit from owning a home in LA for less than five years. The 115 degree summers are, um, challenging, but mostly as I walk the dogs at 7 AM, cold has been the issue – mid-30’s (But it’s a dry cold.) Now, within a ten minute walk, I have 5 casinos with probably 100 restaurants, bars and fast food places. It’s kind of amazing. When the cocktail hour rolls around we have many, many options, and no need to drive. I’ve never before lived in a place that made me think, “I don’t drink enough. . .”
Also the driving – despite F1 and despite Elon’s Tunnel of Burning Teslas – is amazing. I drive west toward Summerlin and there are frequent times when I can keep it at 50 down a boulevard and not be stopped by traffic for miles. Miles! Try that in Los Angeles.
The down sides: medical care is at a fairly primitive level. My own PCP agrees that you want to avoid major medical in Vegas. Also, not a lot of nature. Not a lot of green. Many, many rocks. So many rocks. And most annoying is an absolute absence of high-end grocery stores. On that score it’s been all decline, from Marin County which had fantastic upscale grocery chains, to LA where we at least had Gelsons and Pavilion within range, and more further out, to Vegas with nothing but fucking Albertsons.
But all that said, I wouldn’t want to raise kids here. This is a place for jaded cynics. Don’t bring your hopes to Vegas.
@DrDaveT: @Joe: I’m getting off now so the answer is….
I was looking them up for a different reason and stumbled upon that little factoid.
Happy New Years, folks!
@OzarkHillbilly:
Hah! It would be hard to find anything the commentariat here has in common as general rule, except that we are all the type of people who could find themselves researching the Faroe Islands on a New Years morning
@MarkedMan:
All of a sudden, I’m hearing the song “immigration man” playing in the background.
Nah, too cold in the winter for this luddite
@MarkedMan:
Oh, I don’t know about that. Ninety-nine point nine percent of us loathe Trump. There’s a commonality right there.
Also, the overwhelming majority of us are literate, sane, and well-informed.
@becca: Happy New Year to you and all. Like you I’m keeping fingers crossed re t-Rump. The good luck food is tamales with green chili and frijoles and good lager beer.
@CSK:
“sane”
Speak for yourself 🙂
@OzarkHillbilly:
OK, on a totally different theory — Sweden?
ETA — ah, just saw your reply. So my first theory was almost the right one. “Just wrong enough” — story of my life…
He’s hoping we can keep the social contract intact and in place beyond this year. Congratulations to the Ignint Cracker calendar contest winners: The National Parks Foundation and the National Wildlife Federation.
@Michael Reynolds: I upvoted this. I’d read this blog.
Guten Rutsch!
@Mr. Prosser: Between your tamales and my beans and greens we may just save America!
Jazz master Les McCann, 88, died yesterday. Comic Shecky Greene, 97, also died yesterday. RIP.
@Kathy:
On the topic of defunct airlines, the flight log of Epstein’s rather busy private 727 was made public. That bird was going back and forth 3-4 times a freakin’ week! My rough guestimate: $10 mil a year to keep a 727 going like that.
The redacted bits appear to be small, so they were probably initials-indicating the courts are protecting someone who worked for him. Full names are used for VIPs and for FAA check pilots apparently. The Dersh was a fairly frequent flyer in 2004. Bill Clinton’s name appears once in 2004, just from a quick scan.
Thx Michael. Visiting wife’s old friend in Palm Springs in a couple of months. Maybe we will add a stop there just to visit on way back.
Steve
The wife and I are watching the Rose Bowl. There was a car commercial featuring the song “I’ll be seeing you.” The wife objected to the use of a WW II song for a Mercedes ad. Mercedes-Benz was a part of the bad guys in WW II.
With apologies to our esteemed hosts…
GO BLUE!
@Mikey: Seconded!