Tyler asks (I paraphrase) "Would you kill your good friend for the lives of a million cats? What about a billion cats?" He answers, No, but says "Yet I still wish to count cats for something positive."
My answer is not only Yes it is that we do this routinely today. The introduction of "your good friend"...engages our primitive intuitions and feelings and that is why Tyler's answer goes awry. But consider, last year Americans spent more than 34 billion dollars on their pets. That money could have saved human lives had it gone to starving Africans.
But that's a different question, isn't it? The question involved "your good friend," not "someone you don't know" or even "millions of people you don't know." I understand that the law shouldn't privilege my family and friends over a bunch of strangers, but in my personal life I'm going to do that all the time. That's part of the definition of a friend, and of a loving family.
There's an old moral puzzle about a man who's about to shoot a dozen innocent bystanders; you can pick him off yourself, but there's a risk you'll hit his equally innocent hostage. I always hated that puzzle, because the most important piece of data was missing: Do I know the hostage? Anyone who claims that shouldn't matter is either a liar or a monster.
I wouldn't kill my good friend for the lives of a million cats. I think I would kill my cat for the lives of a million people, but then, that's easy for me to say; I don't actually have a cat. It's always easier to murder an abstraction.
We were briefly in Baltimore yesterday. Had lunch in Little Italy at a place called Sabatino's. Awful. I'd heard great things about Baltimore's Little Italy. Did we just happen upon a stinker?
In three and a half years of living in this city, nearly all my ventures into Little Italy have been disappointing: The district is a magnet for mediocre, overpriced food. Rona finally asked a friend of hers if there's any place in the neighborhood that's worth the price. She was told that a few good bistros are tucked away here and there but that most of the venues exist to fleece the tourists.
Baltimore itself is filled with good restaurants; I'm a huge fan of The Helmand, for example, a cheap & terrific Afghan place run by President Karzai's brother. But for some reason the idea has taken hold down in D.C. that the sole places in Baltimore worth visiting, other than the Ravens and Orioles stadiums, are the Inner Harbor and Little Italy. I guess if the only other part of the city I'd been to was the Inner Harbor, where every restaurant is an overfamiliar chain, I'd be more impressed by Little Italy's relatively homey charms. You might not like Sabatino's, but it still beats Hooters or the Cheesecake Factory.
DADDYBLOGGING: Last weekend Fluid Movement, a campy local water-ballet troupe, brought its annual performance to the pool in the park across the street. Maya came along in a Snugli attached to my chest. ("Snugli": a cheap knockoff of the better-known "Baby Bjorn.") It was her first public pageant, and she slept through most of it, though we did have to slip her a bottle of freshly pumped breastmilk about midway through the play. Since she was attached to my chest while I fed her, I had the distinct feeling that I was breastfeeding in public.
Such gender-bending moments aren't out of place at a Fluid Movement show -- the group's sensibility owes at least as much to John Waters as to Busby Berkeley. The ballet's plot was loose enough to include cameos by Jaws, Eric von Zipper, an enormous lobster, and Tom Jones in a gorilla suit. I can't imagine Maya absorbed any of it, but I figure it's a good idea to expose her as soon as possible to the best that Low Culture has to offer. You know -- the first three years and all that.
SELF-PROMOTION: I wrote a blurb about Robbie Fulks for the new L.A. Weekly, in theory to announce an upcoming concert but mostly just to praise his latest CD, Georgia Hard, currently the leading contender for Best Album of 2005. It's not the first time I've written about Fulks: I did a mini-interview with him for Reason back in 2000.
Also: A few years ago I helped make a movie with the unfortunate title Talking Butts: A Smoking Documentary. About half of it explores the culture of smoking, and about half is a muckraking exposé of the tobacco settlement, which was sold as a way to rein in Big Tobacco but wound up creating a government-enforced cartel instead. I'm credited as co-director but, pace the auterists, I don't consider myself an author of the film; the final form of the narrative was established in the editing room, by Mark Toscani and Paul Feine.
The long version of the documentary isn't available right now, but one of my collaborators, Bretigne Shaffer, has created a 12-minute cut of her own and posted it online. The full version is around 50 minutes, so obviously there's a lot missing, but her edit should give you a feel for the movie's style and POV. Curious viewers can watch it at the Mises Institute website.
Steve wrote three features for Reason, one about Iraq and two about archeology. The archeology articles were excellent. The Iraq piece I didn't care for -- not so much because I disagreed with its political stance, though there was that too, but because it seemed to psychoanalyze an entire society based on one rather limited visit. To his credit, Steve kept exploring Iraq, and his later reporting from the frontlines was much more interesting and nuanced. Indeed, his scathing final post to his blog is one of the best dispatches from this war that I've seen.
I never met him, but we corresponded, and he seemed like a smart and decent man. Every time there was a Reason event in New York, he'd write me to ask if I'd be there and if we finally would meet. I never went, and now I'll never meet him.