While we’ve been enjoying balmy mid-60s here in Massachusetts, we arrived at my in-laws’s house for Thanksgiving to find 6-8 inches of snow on the ground, and even more when we got to my mother’s house a couple of days later. This self-storage place just a few miles up the road from my in-laws wants you to get your wife shrink-wrapped and racked for winter before the deep freeze really sets in.
For a short time the other day, the official homepage of the Maine Tea Party declared Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik their “Man Of The Year”.
Nice.
As you can see, this comes via the blog at Mint.com, the personal finance website, and features a county-by-county map of the U.S. showing the percentages of populations living below the federal poverty threshold. Here’s the link to the interactive map itself, which features state-by-state breakdowns (I was kind of hoping for the drill-down to be county-by-county, too, but what can you expect?).
Personally, I was unsurprised to see where the “poverty belt” sits, since we’ve seen that same geographic dispersal before in maps that track where slavery was most prominent and where blacks make up the majority of the population. I was a bit surprised to see that the poorest county in the six New England states is York County, Maine, since I tend to associate that part of Maine with wealthy refugees from Massachusetts and places like Kennebunkport, but I guess that once you get away from the Bush family compound the average income must drop like a rock. Also, what’s up with South Dakota? Are those Native-American reservations, perchance?
If you click on that one button on the interactive map, it will tell you what the poverty thresholds are per household size, but I’ll tell you that the poverty line for a family of four is $22,205. One of the nastiest secrets about American poverty is that every entity that has a horse in the race is fully committed to not coming up with an accurate or reasonable assessment of the threshold of poverty and works from a formula originally conceived in 1965 and which are only adjusted for CPI (consumer price index), not any real-world assessment of the cost of living, nor any regional adjustments. Because if they actually did that, the already appalling figure of 14.3% of the American population living in poverty would skyrocket to reflect the reality of economic conditions in this country. Just like people who stop collecting unemployment no longer figure into the count of the unemployed, there is waaaaaaaay more actual poverty than officially-designated poverty, and there isn’t a politician or CEO around who wants to own that.
So have a look at this map and remember that it only BEGINS to tell you the story of how we are turning into a third-world nation with every passing day.
UPDATE 11/26/10 — A reader points out that since this post originally appeared, Mint has changed/fixed the map and York County no longer shows up as the poorest in New England. That dubious distinction belongs a lot less surprisingly to Washington County.
It has been nearly fifteen years since I moved away from Portland, ME and there is precious little I miss about it, but going to Harbor Fish Market to buy my seafood is definitely one of them. So is the best freaking pad thai I ever had, but that’s another story. Slashfood had a short interview last week with the owner of Harbor Fish, Ben Alfiero. They’ve expanded their business to include a wholesale business and they now include non-local product to cater to more sophisticated consumer demand, but they are still in that smelly little run-down wharf building and if you want the freshest possible fish in Southern Maine, they’re still THE place.
In case you hadn’t heard, the Great Bitters Drought of 2010 is finally over. Or, maybe you hadn’t heard there was a shortage of bitters in the first place…well, there was, but now there’s not. So there. This Atlantic Monthly food blog post from April explains the whole story behind bitters, what to look for, and how to use them in your cocktails for that exquisite little floral note.
Waah. Just waah.
Congratulations to the Maine Republican Party on completing the transition from Reality to Nutjobistan this week as the Teabaggers took full control of their party convention and imposed their bizarre list of demands onto the party’s official platform for the 2010 elections.
Among their demands:
And the really scary thing: these people are probably going to win whatever they are running for in November. All that inbreeding and Allen’s Coffee Brandy have finally taken their toll.
The place where I grew up, Lewiston-Auburn, Maine, has a reputation for being The Asshole Of America. Now, that reputation has caught up with it: A giant-sized walk-through model of a human colon is now on display at the Auburn Mall, complete with nasty pre-cancerous polyps and such. It’s educational, of course — the local hospital’s cancer treatment center is sponsoring it — but the irony of it was too much not to mention. Thanks to my blog-buddy Jack Cluth for the heads-up (sorry).
Meanwhile, in Austria…
A whole lot less education, but a whole lot more entertaining is this bar built to look like a human rectum, complete with massive quivering puckerhole. According to the post at that link, the bar, situated in the Museum Quarter of Vienna, is designed to be a replica of the entire human digestive tract, beginning with a tongue at one end and running to its..ahem..natural conclusion. The colon end is big enough to seat patrons, but sadly does not include squishy inflatable polyps or any other realistic bits in the interior.
From the gist of the post and its source, it’s not clear if the bar is still there, or if it was just a temporary art installation. So I hereby summon our Vienna correspondent, Mig, to bring us up to date on its status and, if possible, enjoy a beverage there for our benefit. Just don’t order the bran muffin, that’s all I’m saying.
They’re building a Sonic Drive-In on Main Street in my town. It’s just the latest in a number of retail constructions on the main drag in the past couple of years; you’d have no idea the entire economy was in the crapper by the number of construction sites. Sadly for the property developers, though, once they get the sites built, they don’t always have tenants ready to move in, and so there’s a lot of brand-new-but-half-empty retail space waiting for the time way, waaay off in the future, when somebody might want to move in. But I digress a little…
The Sonic is being built right next door to the McDonald’s, which cannot have the McDonald’s franchisee too happy. Previously, the space housed a car dealer. When the car showroom building was torn down a couple of weeks ago, everybody was abuzz wondering what would take the space, but now that the frame of the building is up, so is the large banner on the front of the site. No doubt the cognoscenti of our little suburb knew exactly what was going on well in advance, but for us hoi polloi it came down to a six-foot strip of vinyl tied to a temporary fence to bring the news.
It’s kind of a big deal, not just because our town lags behind all of its neighbors in sheer density of fast food chains that aren’t Dunkin’ Donuts, but because it’s only the second Sonic location in the entire state of Massachusetts. Indeed, it is only the second Sonic in ALL SIX New England states. The first Sonic opened last summer to much attention from cherry-limeade-starved souls, who were willing to endure two-hour lines, valet parking, and unholy traffic congestion on a major thruway (the infamous Route One strip). Needless to say, there is much tut-tutting and clucking by the villagers, who are worried that the already-busy section of Main Street will turn into a parking lot from all the looky-loos who will descend on us like a plague of french-fry-devouring locusts.
Having grown up in Maine in the 1970s, I have been down this road before. When we first moved to Lewiston-Auburn in the summer of 1971, there was only one McDonald’s for a “metro” area of about 70,000, and it was way on the outskirts of Lewiston, close to the Maine Turnpike exit. It was a huge deal when, several years later, a second McDonald’s was built on the Auburn side of the river, and then equally big deals ensued when Burger King arrived a few years after that, and finally, when I was in high school, Wendy’s. Maine, however, is always late to the party for the expansion of national retail chains; there are still only a small handful of Starbucks in the whole state (our town in Massachusetts got its Starbucks two years ago, but they are numerous in the Boston area).
In a bit of serendipity, this infographic is making the rounds online. It shows the distribution of the major fast-food burger chains in the United States. Here’s the Fast Company article that brought the map to the attention of the Internet, and here’s the original blog post from a site called WeatherSealed.com. The Fast Company version changed the background color to make the McDonald’s locations (which were plotted in black against a black background in the original) stand out better. It’s interesting to see that McDonald’s base is so tightly concentrated in the Northeast, but even more interesting to see the predominance of other chains in other regions: Dairy Queen, which is a rarity here in the Northeast and operates almost exclusively in its form as an ice cream stand, OWNS the South Central region in a way that McDonald’s can only dream of.
For the sake of the franchisee, I hope the arrival of Sonic goes better than the arrival of Krispy Kreme donuts a few years ago. The anticipation behind the opening of the Krispy Kreme in Medford was nothing short of insane, and the initial customer response was enormous, but after about a year the whole thing died right off and the Kripsy Kreme chain itself went into bankruptcy. The retail location sat empty for a long time before finally being picked up by the beloved local chain of roast beef sandwich shops, Kelly’s. Meanwhile, the Ghost Town Plaza across the street sure could use half a dozen tenants.
While most of the mainstream media have been busily slobbering over Sarah Palin all week, a lot of the blogs and news websites I read have been talking about something that actually matters: a report from the Department of Agriculture that indicated fully 25% of all the children in the United States live in households that experience what the USDA euphemistically calls “food insecurity”. (Link to PDF of the report itself here). “Food insecurity” means that those families basically do not know where the next meal will come from and frequently have to choose between buying food and paying for other necessities, or even choosing which members of the family will get to eat on a given day.
The steep rise in unemployment is the most obvious factor, but the report points out that food insecurity is a problem even for families where parents hold down full-time jobs, indicating that wages are not able to keep up with the increasing cost of food. The Tom Toles cartoon at the top highlights a genuine irony of the situation — obesity from over-consumption of junk calories because the cost of better nutrition is beyond the reach of people struggling economically.
This article from the Daily Beast looks at the data in terms of what the author calls “Disproportionate Hunger” — where the costs of food, housing and energy are disproportionately high and thus exacerbate the situation. Three of the six New England states fall into the “Top 10″ list: Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut (which comes in at an astonishingly high #4). Massachusetts, by contrast, is #49, and New Hampshire #48. New England is traditionally an expensive place to live due to high energy costs for our long winters and the cost of transportation of goods into this region, and it also suffers from a perennially weak economy outside of the Boston economic zone. When times get bad in this country, New England always feels it harder than most.
This post at Fast Company tries to make the case that maybe we should be looking for technological solutions — incorporating engineered food products like the infamous “golden rice” to improve nutrition in junk food — but that’s really terribly misdirected, if you ask me. The availability of adequate nutrition is not the issue in this country. Indeed, even the global crisis in child hunger is less about the availability of adequate nutrition than it is about the iniquities of the economic situation, although it translates into genuine starvation elsewhere in the world. The issue boils down to the inequalities of the economic situation, whether we are talking about Vermont or Ethiopia.
But, hey, as long as all those Wall Street guys got their multimillion-dollar bonuses for bankrupting the rest of the planet, who cares if some kids in Skowhegan or Bridgeport or Rutland go without breakfast a few times a week, right? It’s their own damn fault for being poor in the first place!
All Original Content Copyright © BrianKaneOnline
All Other Content Copyright © Its Original Authors
Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress
