Nate Knows Nada

You can still get drinks at Starbucks that don’t start with a “Tall” as the smallest. Slate tells you how.

Liberated from Target last night: Darth Tater.

It’s the coffee that’s doing it.  David Adesnik (over at Oxblog) provides an appropriately shrill commentary.

Has no one taught these people about relative comparisons?  $4500
on a $115,000 debt is 3.9 percent of that debt.  Now, go to any
bar near a law school, such as we have here in Cambridge or back in
Berkeley, and see how many law students are there.  (There’s one
bar here, with a rep as “the law school bar,” which keeps me and many
friends away from it.)  But how much per week do these students
drop on beer and cocktails.  A lot more than $15.  And from
what I have seen, the atmosphere of law schools sort of officially
encourages this behavior, because it develops “social and networking
skills.”  Right.

What about laundry?  Perhaps students, instead of wasting money on
machines, could just get a washboard and do their clothes in the
kitchen sink.  That’d save more money.

I get the point about saving money, but it’s not the particular items
that are the problem.  It’s the approach, and I bet Kirsten
Daniels’ money problems are more related to her bad savings and
spedning habits than just to the purchase of coffee.

I ran across this recently and really liked it.

“Saint Francis and the Sow”
    by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to re-teach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of the earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.