Fast Company magazine has an amazing article about Johnathan Goodwin, a Wichita mechanic who’s able to modify cars to provide drastically more running time on dramatically less fuel (or biodiesel).
As the article reports, “The numbers are simple: With a $5,000 bolt-on kit he co-engineered–the poor man’s version of a Goodwin conversion–he can immediately transform any diesel vehicle to burn 50% less fuel and produce 80% fewer emissions.”
Chris Colin has a damning article at SFGate.com documenting the workplace harassment faced by Kurdish-American mechanic Hamid Sayadi after September 11th. Sayadi, who was granted amnesty in the United States in 1977 after fleeing Iraq, alleges he was called a terrorist, had his tires slashed and had his lunch box inspected by his superior (for fear of a bomb being inside); he’d worked for his employer, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., since 1990. The last straw? Being strip-searched by security when he attended a company-sponsored “Mission Accomplished” party after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
I doubt this is an isolated incident; I can’t imagine the barrage of hostility people of Middle Eastern descent have had to endure over the past six years. Of course, American ignorance isn’t a finely wielded tool–my best friend, who is of Indian descent, has been called “a Palestinian terrorist” and “Osama Bin Laden” by thoughtless pigs on the street. If this is the new America we’ve chosen, let me offer a thought for our updated national anthem: a series of oinks and squeals.
Jack McCallum has a moving piece in this week’s Sports Illustrated that parallels the death of his best friend in Vietnam with the loss of another small-town athlete in Iraq. The joy of sports, the complex motivations behind military service, and the senselessness of loss are all effortlessly evoked.
Some things I learned recently:
Jazz legend Louis Armstrong came late to the political arena, but he didn’t mince words when he arrived.
As David Margolick reports for the New York Times, Armstrong responded to the desegregation standoff in Little Rock, Arkansas by stating, “President Eisenhower…was ‘two faced,’ and had ‘no guts.’ For Governor Faubus, [Armstrong] used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print….He then sang the opening bar of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.”
The back room is part of the Chicago mythos. It’s a tucked-away place where city players—people with connections—breathe in cigar smoke and broker inside deals to divvy up taxpayer money. It’s a place where power is expressed in naked patronage, rarely to the benefit of the citizens whose interests elected officials are supposed to oversee. The back room is also a place, as the Chicago Tribune’s recent series on the CTA makes clear, that’s very real.