those crazy americans

Americans Are Crazy Workaholics -- It's Time We Brought More Balance to Our Lives
By Arianna Huffington

KunstlerKast

This is one of my favorite podcasts:

theKunstlerKast
The tragic comedy of suburban sprawl
weekly interviews with James Howard Kunstler,
author of The Geography of Nowhere

A recent episode reminded me of one of my favorite Barack Obama quotes from 1990:
"I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me."

men are right about shopping

Dont' be a basket case
by David Wilson

Enough is enough. It’s time for change. It’s time to reassert the wisdom of the male instinct about a central area of our national life. It’s time for everyone to admit that shopping is rubbish.

Most men have always known instinctively that shopping is not fun. By now, surely, no one in their right mind should even hope that it can be fun. Yet it remains a national leisure pursuit, emptying our bank accounts and filling our homes and our lives with pointless tat.

more DANCING

Get this book NOW! I am in the middle of reading it and can't put it down.

"Dancing in the Streets"

An interview with Barbara Ehrenreich about her new book:

Barbara Ehrenreich on the Importance of Collective Joy

We have never lost the capacity for collective joy. It's part of our nature. But if you look at how little we get to exercise it ... if we compare ourselves to the French in the 14th century, with Saint's Days and this huge calendar of festivities, we just don't do it very much, if at all.

This [lack of festivities] represents a triumph of the powerful, and their idea that you have to work all the time. This is a recent [development]. Historically, peasants worked when they had to, when they had to plant or harvest. When they didn't have to work, they worked on having a good time -- planning festivities, costumes, dance steps; great expressions of human creativity.