quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

i guess i saw this thread as meant to detail the bothersome details and boondoggles of the rich more so than there general status reports

this is actually pretty awesome and only quiddities because they got their $500k+ passes revoked:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-0506-golden-ticket-20120506,0,7103119.story

any rich person who didn't buy one of those when they were available is not living life to the fullest IMO

yeah that's just an interesting article

agreed

ex-gf who worked for AA would occasionally just hop on a flight to NY or wherever for a day. But her employee benefits were domestic only and getting first class required a lot of luck.

Rothstein had loved flying since his years at Brown University in Rhode Island, where he would buy a $99 weekend pass on Mohawk Air and fly to Buffalo, N.Y., just for a sandwich.

I love sandwiches.

his carbon footprint is probably the same as puffy's

I've heard of people w/ private planes hopping from rural airport to rural airport for the best burgers/etc.

$99 in the 1970s, mind you

There's something so awesome about unlimited first class flying that it is overwhelming my quid-dar right now. I don't know why that's the case when the same is not true for me of private planes. I guess I enjoy the "got over on the airlines" aspect of it.

yeah it's hard to sympathize with airlines

Elvis was master of the preferred-food commute, iirc

As for the private plane thing, I'm kind of ambivalent -- if it's a corporate jet going into major airports, that sucks. If it's a private hobbyist plane and they're jumping from one podunk field to another for a burger, it's pretty much the same as most of their flights.

Hobbyist airplane ownership has definitely dropped, but it was more of a thing post-WW2.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/nyregion/in-montclair-elections-cause-town-to-re-examine-itself.html

come on, at least PRETEND to evaluate the arguments

that article is straight out of central casting

The WSJ has a nice little nugget from the quiddities and agonies of yore.

http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2012/05/08/was-the-scream-inspired-by-munch%e2%80%99s-tax-return/

if the Teabags weren't such a bunch of philistines who were proud of their militant & willful ignorance of all things non-American (b/c then they'd be "elitist liberals" see), they could add the agonies suffered by Edvard Munch and Ingmar Bergman at the hands of Scandinavian tax authorities to their list of "socialist sins."

fwiw I think "The Scream" is one of the shittiest famous paintings in art history.

It's probably pretty amazing if you haven't seen four million "The Scream" coffee cups

On the airline thing, I know a woman whose husband is an airline mechanic and they get free passage pretty much anywhere. But they can't really afford to stay long in any of the places they travel to, so they do things like weekend jaunts to Paris or Buenos Aires.

http://www.brewdog.com/blog-article/diageo-v-brewdog

As for Diageo, once you cut through the glam veneer of pseudo corporate responsibility this incident shows them to be a band of dishonest hammerheads and dumb ass corporate freaks. No soul and no morals, with the integrity of a rabid dog and the style of a wart hog.

Perhaps more tellingly it is an unwitting microcosm for just how the beer industry is changing and just how scared and jealous the gimp-like establishment are of the craft beer revolutionaries.

We would advise them to drink some craft beer. To taste the hops and live the dream. It is hard to be a judas goat when you are drinking a Punk IPA.

Walk tall, kick ass and learn to speak craft beer.

lol "craft beer revolutionaries" ... methinks someone has taken the Samuel Adams beer label a little TOO seriously.

also, i can't help but think of this when i read the brewdog's post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiirbLQ0dwI

http://i48.tinypic.com/20zoh91.png

l-r Avril Incandenza, Hal Incandenza

lol kid is white because mom can see his bonar

wait wait wait

Jeanne Sager set up a separate computer login for her 6-year-old daughter, Jillian, to protect her from objectionable material after Jillian stumbled upon a graphic video while watching “My Little Pony” videos.

Skrillex strikes again

who lets a 6yo on the internet? wtf

haha that skrillex thing made me laugh and then I realized I didn't get it

click here for a picture of skrillex having sex with a my little pony

no, thank you

"home and garden..... and kids and stuff"

a quick potted history of a given newspaper's "soft" section goes: society page >> women's page >> 'variety' page. in most papers the variety and arts coverage got mooshed together at some point, but, the nyt being about nyc, arts coverage was a bigger deal and always has been.

anyway this post started as "home and garden, lol woman stuff, amirite" and i kinda sidetracked myself

http://i49.tinypic.com/azjtiw.png

oh, dammit! someone already posted it. anyway.

he will never look at his mother's pearl necklace the same way again

Then there are those requests that are legal but morally suspect, said Mario Buatta, who still feels guilty about designing a bedroom for the mistress of a man to match the bedroom he had already designed for the man and his wife.

“I didn’t realize he had a mistress,” Mr. Buatta said. “It wasn’t nice. I’m Italian! But I replicated the bedroom that was obviously done in a floral chintz. Curtains hanging from the ceiling. A trellis carpet. The husband felt comfortable in it, and I had that middle-class guilt. I could never face the wife. I felt very icky.”

inside Mario Buatta's apartment, where maybe the guilt isn't so middle-class:
http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/i/nysdhouse/mario/P1400299-copy.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/nyregion/nepalese-pedicurists-must-overcome-aversion-to-strangers-feet.html?_r=2&src=rechp&pagewanted=all

Ms. Lewis was surprised when she was told that many Nepalese pedicurists were initially hesitant to touch strangers’ feet. She gestured to the woman ministering to her toes, which were separated by cotton balls, and said, “You would think she was born to do this.

:O

"I mean _I_ would at least"

http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/travel/a-mother-daughter-spring-break-on-fisher-island-florida.html

I can't even believe that thing is real, it keeps taking a knowing tone for like two sentences and then...?!??

At least there we weren’t surrounded by drunken, half-naked college students racing Segways along Ocean Drive. “I know I sound like I’m 90,” Emma whispered, “but I just want them to put some clothes on and go to vocational school.”

ALESSANDRA STANLEY is the chief television critic for The New York Times.

Ta-Nehisi Coates defended the writing in that Stanley essay.

Meanwhile it's been raked through the coals here: http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2012/05/new_york_times_writer_discover.php

I was trying to figure out what college her daughter goes to - my guess is oberlin

I want to know what her kid was up to during the trip!

Also, she really missed out at this point:
I considered driving our golf cart off the villa grounds to the Golf Grill, overlooking the nine-hole course, but that, Emma said primly, would set a bad example of maternal drinking and driving.
..then she later talked about how the kid loved to drive the golf cart around. Uh, you have a built-in chauffeur, lady!

She also doesn't want her daughter to see her drink, I think you're forgetting.

The daughter also had a little piece:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/travel/5-tips-for-traveling-with-your-mother.html?ref=travel