The thousand year Rove Reich

Seems to be crumbling like the dung it was built on.

Times does Guthrie

Enter the Boosters, Bearing Theaters
By JESSE GREEN

IT isn’t every day that a busy portion of Philadelphia’s longest thoroughfare gets shut down, at least not on purpose. But one scorching morning in October, the block of Broad Street from Pine to Lombard, part of a stretch somewhat grandly called the Avenue of the Arts, was taped off, tented, festooned with mums and Mummers. While hundreds of guests sat wilting before the dais, awaiting words from Mayor John F. Street, Gov. Edward G. Rendell and Senator Arlen Specter, a clown on stilts entertained. It was all so quaint and civic, you’d have thought President Taft was coming to town.

But no, the worthies were there to cut the ribbon on the $25 million new home of the Philadelphia Theater Company, which for 25 years had rented a charming but dysfunctional theater a few blocks away. That 1912 building was called Plays and Players; it often seemed that the word audience was omitted deliberately. Sara Garonzik, the company’s producing artistic director, said that many of its 324 seats were broken, that the lobby was too small to shelter patrons, and that the two hideous little bathrooms were barely accessible even to people not in wheelchairs. “That facility was a very trying situation,” Mr. Street recalled. More

Hmm, this looks familiar

A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill
By DAVID STREITFELD

LAWTON, N.D. — Whatever Dennis Miller decides to plant this year on his 2,760-acre farm, the world needs. Wheat prices have doubled in the last six months. Corn is on a tear. Barley, sunflower seeds, canola and soybeans are all up sharply.

“For once, there’s great reason to be optimistic,” Mr. Miller said.

But the prices that have renewed Mr. Miller’s faith in farming are causing pain far and wide. A tailor in Lagos, Nigeria, named Abel Ojuku said recently that he had been forced to cut back on the bread he and his family love.

“If you wanted to buy three loaves, now you buy one,” Mr. Ojuku said.

Everywhere, the cost of food is rising sharply. Whether the world is in for a long period of continued increases has become one of the most urgent issues in economics.

Many factors are contributing to the rise, but the biggest is runaway demand. In recent years, the world’s developing countries have been growing about 7 percent a year, an unusually rapid rate by historical standards. More

The article goes on about how the US market talked the Nigerians into eating bread instead of the native foods:

Mr. Ojuku, the man who buys fewer loaves, and one of his fellowtailors in Lagos, Mukala Sule, 39, are trying to adjust to the new era.

“I must eat bread and tea in the morning. Otherwise, I can’t behappy,” Mr. Sule said as he sat on a bench at a roadside cafe a fewweeks ago. For a breakfast that includes a small loaf, he pays about $1a day, twice what the traditional eba would have cost him.

It's almost as rich as getting the Italians to eat durum wheat pasta! Oh, wait...

Geek Love?

Geek Love
By ADAM ROGERS

San Francisco

GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

Dungeons & Dragons was a brilliant pastiche, mashing together tabletop war games, the Conan-the-Barbarian tales of Robert E. Howard and a magic trick from the fantasy writer Jack Vance with a dash of Bulfinch’s mythology, a bit of the Bible and a heaping helping of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Mr. Gygax’s genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless hordes, as you did in, say, the board game Risk. Roll the dice and you generated a character who was quantified by personal attributes like strength or intelligence. More