Reading

I'm going to be doing a bit of reading. I've limited my reading lately to house magazines and trashy mysteries. Not very edifying unless you wish to confirm that people are still on the stainless steel appliance and granite counters kick. (I've said before that granite counters will soon date a remodel just as avocado refrigerators did in the 1970s.) But I'll be reading up on pensions ( Robin Blackburn's Age Shock: How Finance Is Failing Us, and his now old (2004) Banking On Death: Or Investing In Life: The History and Future of Pensions). I probably should have read these a long time ago, but never got 'round to it.

And I recommend Doug Henwood's series on education in the Left Business Observer. In the olden days when Metropolitan Home was still being published, I remember receiving that and LBO on the same day, and putting aside Metropolitan Home to read LBO first. It states the obvious, that poor kids do less well in school than rich kids, and that the way to address the problem is to get kids out of poverty. But it has cool charts and graphs and stuff.

And I've become addicted to the old Perry Mason series (starring Raymond Burr), which is now available on video. The black and whites are much better than the color episodes--I don't know why--but it shows an LA that no longer exists. Also fun are the episodes in rural areas, areas now overrun by house farms. You can get them at the library.

And Matt Taibbi has the latest installment of the Goldman tales in Rolling Stone, proving that capitalism is a great system for making money.