THE FIRST EVER RUNNING OF THE TACOS - OR WHY I'VE GOT A CRUSH ON CHRISTA FAUST

I've always admired Christa's writing (www.christafaust.com). HOODTOWN is one of the best, quirkiest, most fully-realized novels I've read in a long time. The other two books I've read by her ain't no slouches neither. The woman can write.

But boy howdy can she also eat:

Last night was Taco Truck Night here in Los Angeles. The misguided L.A. County Board of Supervisors, egged on by developers and restaurateurs, passed a law that would put hundreds, perhaps thousands, of taco trucks out of business. Even the L.A. Times has editorialized against the law. A whole lot of people depend on the trucks for cheap, tasty food, and few of the trucks are in real competition with brick and mortar restaurants. Even if they were in competition, isn't that what our economic system is supposed to be about?

To quote the L.A. Times editorial of today, May 2: "If providing cheap, tasty food that puts competitors out of business were a crime, the late McDonald's mogul Ray Kroc would have died in prison." Okay, so I disagree with the word "tasty" in that sentence. But still, you get the idea.

So last night, Christa, who is always up for an adventure, culinary or otherwise, unchained herself from her deadline burdened computer; brought along another writer pal, Nathan Long, and the three of us headed to East L.A. in my car to do our part to support taco trucks on their special night.

I was thinking to hit two, perhaps three of my favorite trucks and carts, eat a taco at each and retire happily sated from the field of battle. But Christa, whose slight but muscular, nicely illustrated frame belies her remarkable gustatory gusto, was having none of that.

Our first truck was La Korita, parked in a gas station two blocks east of Soto on Olympic. Nathan and I had carne asada, Christa the carnitas. For me, the real highlight of La Korita is its freshly made tortillas. The carne asada is also among the best in town. (The photographic evidence is above.)

Then we cruised up Soto in search of a place called La Estrella, but were distracted by the paintings of the Blessed Virgin, Jesus and a taquero with his al pastor wheel on the side of Tacos El Pecas, parked at a car wash. The tacos al pastor were good, not spectacular, but I have encountered few taco truck tacos that aren't at least good. Here's the evidence (Christa slurping an horchata):

From there we cruised north on Soto to Whittier Blvd. and turned east. There are often illegal taco carts along the sidewalk just west of the cemetery on Whittier. We were not disappointed. We stopped at the first one we saw - I don't recall seeing a name on the cart. It was on the north side of the street near Mott St. It was excellent al pastor.

We then passed a number of inviting carts, trucks and a chicken grill as we headed further east, past the 710 freeway, past the old Huggy Boy radio studio which is now a church of some sort. We were taking a break to simply cruise and take in the sights, sounds and smells of East L.A. - one of the great pleasures of life, especially on a hot summer night. Last night wasn't one of those, but it was close enough.

I was taking us to my favorite taco cart. At night, the southwest corner of Cesar Chavez and Hicks - a few blocks west of Gage - is home to what is, in my humble opinion, the finest al pastor to be had north of the border. Christa and Nathan seemed to agree. And they know their al pastor.

After that we were beginning to think we were filling up, so we thought to head toward Eagle Rock and Glassell Park where the fellows who organized Taco Truck Night have their home truck - La Estrella on York Ave. around Avenue 54.

But once again we were distracted. I was pointing out Los Cinco Puntos - a carniceria at the triangular corner of Cesar Chavez, Lorena and Indiana, where one can find the best carnitas and handmade tortillas in the city - when we noticed Cemitas Tepeaca and its colorful neon exclaiming "Cemitas, Tacos y Burritos." Better yet, it was parked in front of what looked like an interesting mural. (East L.A. walls are covered with great art, some of it truly great art. Just driving around and paying attention is as good as a visit to a museum or several great galleries.)

I don't know if Cemitas Tepeaca makes its own carnitas or gets it from Cinco Puntos, but they were superb tacos. While the al pastor place we went to just before it is the taco cart I'd most like to be stranded on a desert island with, this was the most interesting, colorful, and still extremely tasty stop of the night.



Finally we made it to La Estrella on York. It was, being an increasingly gentrifying neighborhood, and home to the organizers of the event, the only taco truck at which we saw any sort of large crowd of hipsters and foodies. And Spanish language news radio and TV reporters as well, of course. It was a fun scene, good to see that at least some people had come out for the event. But the carne asada tacos were the most disappointing fare of the night. They weren't bad, but they weren't all that good either. Still, a very big thank you is called for to the guys who organized the night, the petition and are working hard in the fight for taco trucks. You can find their website here: http://saveourtacotrucks.org/

After those, our sixth tacos (actually seven for Nathan who had two at the start of the trek), we decided to head home. But along the way we had to pass my favorite taco cart in Christa and my neighborhood (Silverlake) - the al pastor wheel at Fletcher and Larga, across from the U-Haul. It wasn't in us to simply drive by. So we finished off the night there, with excellent al pastor and what might be my favorite salsa roja in town - a bit thinner than most, but with a good, solid bite and a nice tickle of vinegar.

My car was low on its rims on the drive home. The three of us were groaning, belching, way too full but plenty content. Little more got done last night. It didn't need to. I don't know that we saved the taco trucks. But it was a splendid effort.

THANK YOU, BILL

Here's some quotes from a speech that Bill Clinton gave a couple of days ago in West Virginia:

"If a politician doesn't wanna get beat up, he shouldn't run for office...Let's just saddle up and have an argument. What's the matter with that? That's what America's about, right?"

He's right. At least that's what this country's supposed to be about. People have a bunch of different ideas, they get together and argue about them - sometimes the arguments even get a bit heated - and then they vote on it and the argument that has been most persuasive wins.

That's how democracy is supposed to work. Sure, it's not very efficient. Sometimes it's not even very civil. Undoubtedly some good ideas get voted down and some bad ones are enacted. Most of the time we end up voting for someone who's imperfect. (Can you imagine that; an imperfect politician? Gosh.) But so far it does seem to be the only way in which a government can manage to please a whole lot of people, a lot of the time.

Problem is that we've come to believe that this idea or that one is absolutely right or wrong, so argument with it is irrational. That's what the Bush Administration has been trying to do; make us all shut up and not argue because they're right and that's all there is to it.

Well, as a vast majority of people in this country now know, that's not all there is to it.

But the kind of right-wrong, black-white thinking that the administration has crammed down our throats, and in which the media has been complicit, has screwed us up in all sorts of ways.

Increasingly I have been hearing Obama and Hillary supporters say that they won't vote for the other one if their candidate isn't nominated. Are they nuts? They seem to think there's something wrong with the two candidates arguing and duking it out for the nomination.

But that's how it's supposed to work. Even when they insult each other, that's how it's supposed to work. And when your candidate doesn't get the nomination, what you're supposed to do is shrug your shoulders, say "maybe next time," and vote for the better of the choices that you've ended up with.

The thing about all this fighting and up and down and talk of right and wrong is that it's just a natural part of the process of things settling down into somewhere in the comfortable middle. You can talk all you want about change, but the great genius of democracy isn't radical change, it's the leveling affect that it has. When it works, it allows for measured, rational, slow but sure change; the sort that in the long run does the most real good and is the longest lasting. Too many of us, however, have become too impatient for that.

We've also got our heads deeply embedded up our asses over the economy. We catastrophize nearly everything. But a stable economy has its ups and downs. That, as in politics, is how it finds its smooth running middle.

The least stable economy is one that doesn't go through the occasional wild mood swing. Inflation, recession, expanding bubbles, bursting bubbles, are all natural in a growing, healthy economy.

I spent a while on the phone last week trying to convince a friend that they hadn't really "lost" several hundred thousand dollars in the stock and property markets.

"Have you sold any stocks or property at a loss?"

"No."

"Are you going to have to? Do you have a subprime loan or any upcoming payments for something that are going to require you to sell something at a loss? Or do you need to borrow some money against your portfolio?"

"No."

"So you haven't really lost any money, have you?"

"Well, my portfolio is down 15 percent and I can't sell my house for what I could have last year, and and and..."

All I can say is, you haven't lost any money, you've lost your common sense.

There are plenty of people who do have subprime mortgages and who do have payments they need to cash out some investments to make and other such things. And yes, those people are going to lose money. But most people, aren't. Just like any roller coaster, if you sit there and hang on, the track's going to eventually smooth out. If you try to bail out on a big hill or curve, you're probably going to get hurt.

Americans are so busy thinking that everything is supposed to be perfect - and that they have some sort of inalienable right to a free lunch - that they go into a huge tailspin when things aren't just the way they want them to be.

Well, nothing's ever going to be exactly the way you want it to be. Get over it. You're just making things worse for yourself and everybody else when you overreact.

Meanwhile, here's some pretty pictures from a recent excursion out to the California State Poppy Reserve near Lancaster in the far northeast corner of Los Angeles County:

THE JOYS OF LIFE IN LOS ANGELES

It got up into the 90s yesterday, at least in the parts of town where I spent my afternoon. There was a slight breeze though and it felt good.

Now I am fully aware that in these days of global warming and high gas prices, driving around, simply looking at stuff is politically incorrect. But that's one of the things I most like to do. Sure, the world your kids are going to get old in will be worse for it, but, well, so sue me.

One of the running themes of the book I'm currently working on - tentatively titled "Shanghaied," is the age old excuse of: "If I wasn't doing it, someone else would." I would like to go on record as saying that I think that excuse is a crock of shit. The book makes fun of people who use it. But, well, any claim I may have ever made on perfection is increasingly laughable as I get older. And wiser, of course.

So I cruised around yesterday. My first destination was my favorite freeway interchange in the city. The elegant, soaring curves of the 110 and 105 mashup. Luckily, there's a MetroLink rail station smack in the middle of it, so I was able to wander around and shoot pictures. I need to go back when the light's better though, around sunrise or sunset.



Then it was time for lunch. I started driving east on Imperial Highway toward Plaza Mexico on the western edge of Norwalk. There's a big goat taco place there, right in between The Gap and a Ritmo Latino CD store. But along the way I passed The Slater Market and Hawkins House of Burgers. It looked too good to pass up. Turned out that it was. It's been there since 1952, which is how long I've been here, too. It was cheap, the burger was fantastic, my conversation with a couple of regulars who've been hanging out at the place for many years was interesting. I'm going to have to go back for soul food one of these weekends. (It's at the corner of Slater and Imperial Highway, south side of the street, just a few blocks east of Central Ave.)

Then I cruised up Main Street back into downtown, past the several blocks of furiously competitive goat taco stands - but I was full at that point, so I didn't stop. I went all the way past Chinatown to the LAX-C Market at 1100 N. Main. It's an old wholesale market, decorated with murals of Native Americans shooting arrows from horseback. Imagine, if you will, a Thai Costco. That's what it is. It is as big, if not bigger than any Costco I've ever been to, and it is entirely Thai (and some other Southeast Asian) food, cookware and household products. It is open for retail. Someone was grilling satay in the parking lot. Kids were tormenting the giant fish in the moat that runs along the front of the place. No one was speaking English. I felt right at home. It's Los Angeles.

Then I went home, where the garden has gone apeshit.


There aren't a whole lot of other places in the world where you can do all this in the course of a few hours.

I USED TO, KIND OF, SORT OF LIKE

Hillary. I even voted for her in the California primary. I figure that barring reactions to unforeseen circumstances, even the greatest, most effective presidents have a small window of opportunity to get the best of their politicking done, especially when it comes to dealing with domestic issues. In his first year in office, before Vietnam wrecked everything, LBJ pushed through Congress the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty and numerous other significant legislation from which we have benefited since. A lot of FDR's New Deal was put into place in his first year. I don't like a lot of what Reagan accomplished, but much of it happened in his first year.

After the first year, politics sets in and everyone in government spends more time looking to their own reelection - the most important part of which is money raising - than they do to the common good. It's one of the reasons why every single presidential election really ends up being about domestic issues; the economy, taxes, health and education, the bread and butter of daily life. Those are the things the president is best equipped to deal with as soon as they get over their hangover from the inaugural balls.

And there's a whole lot of domestic business that needs attending to in this country, having been sorely neglected over the last seven years.

Which is why I voted for Hillary. I don't particularly like her style. I hate her war mongering on Iraq. I think she rubs too many people the wrong way. (A lot of which I think is unfair. If she was a man doing and saying the same things, I think it wouldn't be a problem for her.) But, I do, or did, buy the argument that she could hit the ground running as president. She hasn't been in the Senate all that much longer than Obama, but enough. And for even longer than that she's been well positioned to get a feel for how things work between the Executive and Legislative branches. She has been a highly effective senator because of her ability to navigate the maze of stupidity and venality that makes up the Congress. And she even seems able and willing to work with Republicans to get things done.

I figured that Hillary could get more done in her first year in office than Obama could, and that first year is going to be vital in getting the country back on the right track.

Now, I'm not so sure. The manner in which she has handled, or rather mishandled, her campaign makes me worry about her abilities to orchestrate the more crucial political tasks she'd face as president. She's not particularly inspiring, and I can live with that. A great leader is both inspiring and effective, but that's a very rare combination. I'll settle for effective if I have to choose between the two. (Hell, I was a Richardson supporter when this whole thing started.) I'm beginning to think Hillary might not be as effective on a national level, as she has been in representing her state.

As for Obama, he's certainly inspiring, I'll grant him that. But I still harbor worries about his effectiveness. I've had several interesting conversations with his supporters who seemed to see in him exactly, and just, what they wanted to see. According to one he's a staunch advocate of free trade. According to another he'll protect American jobs by putting up barriers to some imports and outsourcing. He doesn't have enough of an actual track record for me to get a strong sense of him.

Obama reminds me of JFK and that worries me. Kennedy was inspiring all right. He was also a lousy president. People tend to forget that because he was handsome and assassinated young. Some people say he didn't have time to accomplish much. Hey, what about that first year in office thing? He didn't have the political courage, or clout, to push for civil rights legislation when it might have been even easier for him than for Johnson. He didn't have the courage or foresight or maybe clout to begin pulling us out of the increasingly nasty foreign entanglements in Southeast Asia and Latin America, and even a couple in Africa, that Eisenhower had begun to ease us into. He elevated tensions with the first moderate government to show up in the Soviet Union since its creation, helping put the whole world at risk. But hey, he gave some great speeches.

Hopefully there's more to Obama than there was to JFK, hopefully a lot more. It's looking increasingly like we'll get a chance to find out. (That is, if a black man really can get elected president. I still think we're a lot more racist of a country than we like to think we are.) I will vote for him enthusiastically. I like what he represents. I love it that at long last we have a choice between a woman and a non-white candidate for president. And he's right, it is time for a change. I just wish I had a bit better feel for what that change might really be or how it's going to happen.

And the alternative? Well, there is no alternative. John McCain has a mostly terrible track record. I disagree with about 85 percent of his votes as a senator. I don't trust him as far as I could throw him when it comes to appointing Supreme Court justices. And most recently, despite having suffered terribly as a prisoner of war himself, he voted against the bill that would ban waterboarding - among other forms of torture - by all representatives of the U.S. (Something he seemed to be in favor of when he didn't need to court the conservative vote.)

ENOUGH OF THAT FOR NOW

I just returned from my latest book oriented road trip. L.A. to Tucson to Santa Fe to Denver (for Left Coast Crime) to Las Vegas to home. Here's some photographic evidence:
They weren't in bloom yet, but I've always loved saguaro cacti, ever since seeing them in cartoons as a kid.
I've also always loved baseball, especially during spring training when it's more casual than usual. (And I'm impressed with my new camera and lens, too. Note the ball.)
Bald men seem to be in great demand at Crime writing conferences. I'd consider shaving my head if I wasn't convinced it has an odd shape. (The highly paid escort? Nobel Peace Prize laureate? Astronaut? Webmistress? in the middle is disguised at her request.)
Three guys vying for the attention of the same girl - our agent, Janet Reid, who wasn't there. (Me, Bill Cameron and Colin Campbell at the bar. Where else would we be? It was a writer's conference.)
The view from my hotel room in Las Vegas. The highlight of my brief stay in the city - besides dinner with friends - was a conversation at a bar at Planet Hollywood Casino (the current "casino girl" hangout of choice) with a young, blond hooker. She was demurely dressed in jeans and a simple blouse with only a top button undone. I knew she was a hooker only from her slow cruise around the bar before settling into a chair, her body language, the way she smiled at me several times and, well, there were the shoes, too, of course. Any number of the other women in the place looked a whole lot more like the hookers you see on TV and in the movies. Only they weren't. And she complained about it when I bought her a drink. "With all these straight girls dressing like whores, it makes it hard for me," she said. The thing is, despite the legal brothels in the state, despite the whole "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" thing, it's still illegal for prostitutes to ply their trade in the casinos. Sometimes it's enforced more seriously than others. Marie, who I was talking with, had recently spent 11 days in the slammer for having picked a guy up at Caesar's Palace. So she tried to dress down, not be too obvious. But when all these straight girls were distracting the potential customers with their sleazy dress, she had to try harder to make her business known in other ways. And that puts her at greater risk of being busted. And she doesn't make nearly the kind of money that Governor Spitzer's squeeze does. I felt for her. She wouldn't let me take her picture.

CHILDREN AND OTHER ROAD HAZARDS

Yes, I did get got for driving 85 mph on a 70 mph freeway on the high desert highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I was guilty. The several SUVs and two Mercedes that had swiftly passed me just a minute or two before I was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol, had nothing to do with it. It was just my tough luck that his radar got me, rather than them.

So I spent a day last week in online traffic school, where I didn't learn a whole lot that I didn't already know. One thing, however, became quite clear. The single major road hazard, the one thing that is most distracting, dangerous, even deadly, is children. Nary a screen went by that didn't include some sort of caution about kids. They're noisy and disruptive in the car and unpredictable, quirky, quick and at times suicidal on the streets.

Sure, booze seems to be implicated in more traffic accidents than any other single factor, but near as I could tell from traffic school, children are running a close second.

I always knew they were trying to kill us. Gang way for the new generation. Biology is merciless and it is now evidently using technology to do its dirty work.

This is a matter of some immediate concern as I am once more about to hit the road. This morning I am off to Arizona, en route to Denver for Left Coast Crime. I'll stop for a night in Phoenix where my cousin Robert and I intend to find some minor trouble to get into. (It's the Sadie Hawkins Day Dance at The Rhythm Room. That could be fun.) Then down to Tucson to take in some spring training baseball with my father. (I'm trying to decide if I should take my mitt, but I never can find anyone to play catch, much less real baseball, with these days.) Then it's a drive through New Mexico, fueled by as many meals involving green chilies as I can squeeze into it.

Then, finally, Denver. I'll be there for four days, which is three days longer than I've spent there before. I enjoyed Left Coast Crime in Seattle last year, we'll see how it shakes out this year. I'm on a panel on Friday about sex and violence, so that can't be too bad.

And finally, speaking of sex and violence, I sure as hell want this stupid primary season to be over. When is someone going to wise up and pass a law restricting presidential campaigns to no more than four months, or something like that? The stupidity just keeps growing. Even if you start out sort of kind of liking a candidate, by the time they've finished - or even just got halfway through - pandering to voters and special interests, you've learned to loathe them. No wonder it's always a matter of voting for the lesser of two evils. The whole process tears down anything or anybody who goes into it with good, honest, intelligent intentions. (Although I must admit to cynical doubts that anyone ever does go into politics with "good, honest, intelligent intentions.")

Oh yeah, one more thing, I forgot:

MyPOD
I have gone modern. The other day, looking over the cabinet from which spilled my collection of CDs, I decided I was tired of them. Tired of trying to find ones that had been put back into the wrong case whenever a certain friend comes over and plays music, tired of shuffling through them to find what I want, tired of messing around with them, of the space they took up. So I bought a big (in capacity) small (in size) external hard drive and downloaded all 638 of them onto it. I then boxed them up, took them to Amoeba on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and sold them for a mere fraction of what they had cost me over the years, but still, more than enough for my purposes. With that money I bought a new 160 GB IPod Classic and a Bose stereo thingy to plug it into and an adapter for my car and still had money left over and still have all my music - which I downloaded into the IPod from the hard drive. Only now, rather than spilling out of a cabinet in my house, my entire CD collection fits in my pocket. I'm taking it with me to Denver. I wonder how long I can impose my collection of Cambodian cassette tapes (recorded onto CDs) on my cousin during the drive?

VOTE BUYING & QUICK FIXES

Maybe we really are idiots. Probably. Presidential candidates have all sorts of advisors and pollsters and consultants to tell them how best to pander to the interests, insecurities and prejudices of us, the electorate. So they must be pretty assured that we’ll fall for the nonsense they’ve been feeding us.

Lately, with all the talk of recession, they’re competing to see which one of them can promise to toss the most money our way, in the belief that we will be deceived into thinking that will actually do something good for the economy.
And most of us will fall for it. We’ll take the 250, 400 or 800 bucks and cheerfully spend it on something, under the mistaken impression that we’re helping fix the economy by doing so.

And maybe that will stem the problem, briefly. It is possible to stop a leaking pipe with duct tape, at least for a little while. Which is what the presidential candidates are hoping to do. It’s a whole lot easier to run for office in what is perceived as a strong economy, than in a weak one. If they can put off having the economy tank until after November, the politicians will prosper. Even if we won’t.

The problem is, none of them are talking about real solutions to the real problems. When you wrap duct tape around a leaky pipe, you are simply putting off potential disaster.

Trying to fix the economy by simply handing out money is stupid. There are a lot of reasons for that. Two of them are fundamental.

• The money’s got to come from somewhere. The government can’t simply print some more to pass around, that would cause inflation. The government has no savings it can simply dip into for this rainy day. Quite the opposite, it’s already deep in debt. The only way to come up with the cash, is for the U.S. to go even deeper into debt. And that is going to happen at a time when the dollar is weak and borrowing terms are going to be high. Among the reasons we’re facing economic problems now is the size of our debt. We need to try and cut it, not add to it.

• The stuff we’re going to buy with the money the government hands out is mostly already made; it’s mostly made elsewhere (like China); and once we’ve spent the money that will be that, we’ll be some new sneakers or digital cameras or one house payment richer, but we’ll be right back where we started. What then? Another handout?

Unfortunately the really big economic problem for the U.S. is psychological. We think buying stuff is all that it takes to make an economy prosperous. And sure, consumption is one of the pillars of a strong economy. But at a certain point, if there isn’t much in the way of new investment, if it becomes difficult to start new businesses, if there’s a dwindling pool of savings to draw from, it all turns into one big potlatch. Instead of producing new wealth, everyone just trades what they already have with each other. Some people take bites out of each trade and get richer that way, and a lot of people are happy for awhile because they’ve got some new stuff, or at least stuff that’s new to them. But you can’t keep that up forever.

Didn’t most of our parents warn us about how if we spent our allowance on candy bars, no matter how sweet they tasted at the time, later on, when we wanted money to buy that new bike, or baseball glove, or video game, we wouldn’t be able to.

Like the proverbial shark, a healthy economy needs to keep moving. An economy based entirely, or mostly, on consumption, is sooner or later going to be dead in the water.

The foundations for a strong developed economy are investment and innovation. Simply handing people cash to spend doesn’t do much for either of those things. (I suppose it might if the money came with a requirement that it had to be put into the stock market, or at least a savings account for a minimum amount of time.)

The people who are trying to buy our votes are talking about handing out something in the neighborhood of $150 billion. Maybe what they really need to do is to invest that money in something that is going to actually benefit the country and the economy for years to come, rather than simply buying us a bit more stuff now.

The estimated price tag, for instance, for a new, super high-speed rail line running through California, from Sacramento, through the San Francisco Bay Area, to Los Angeles and on to San Diego and the Mexican border, is about $20 billion. The long term economic benefits of that, not just to California but to the entire country – since California is by far the most important economic component of the U.S. – would be worth well more than the required investment. The project would also pump a lot of money into companies all over the country that participated in it.

Our educational and public health systems are among the poorest in the rich world. What kind of long term investment could be made in those with that money? What kind of jobs could be created, and long term economic benefits accrued from putting dollars into those areas, rather than just a few extra bucks into lining our pockets?

Several recent surveys have cited the U.S. for decaying infrastructure; dangerously so in some areas. Fixing that would create jobs, opportunities and facilities for companies that would put a lot more than a few temporary dollars into wallets.

Why not use the money to double, triple, hell, quintuple the funds available for small business loans. Loans to new, small businesses are one of the first areas to really suffer due to the current credit crunch related to the sub-prime housing loan debacle. Small businesses employ more people and come up with more innovative new products than any other sector of the U.S. economy

But no, why not just give me four hundred bucks. At the moment I’m in Washington D.C. Only yesterday I walked underneath a ramshackle old railroad bridge. It was very picturesque even if trains can’t run on it anymore. I’ve got my eyes on a new digital camera. I’ll buy it online from a place in New York. It’s a Japanese brand, manufactured under contract by a Korean or Chinese company, with parts that are sourced from eight or nine different countries. I’ll use it to take pictures when I walk around. Hell, it might even be tax deductible. Even the IRS wants me to spend my money, rather than invest it. Maybe they know something I don’t know.

While I’m picking bones about the economy, or should that be picking over the economy’s bones?, I must admit to a certain amount of perverse pleasure over the past couple of days when the U.S. stock markets fell.

The day before yesterday, while it was a holiday here, stock markets around the world plummeted, supposedly on worries about the U.S. heading into recession. The Federal Reserve, looking for a quick fix way to prevent U.S. markets following suit when they opened this morning, announced it was lowering interest rates by three quarters of a percent.

That doesn’t seem to have worked. Maybe in part because it reeked of desperation and savvy investors are learning to distrust the financial maneuverings of the U.S. government.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like low interest rates as well as the next guy. I’ve got a mortgage (although I’m happy to say it’s locked in at five percent) and I own stocks (which look much more desireable when interest rates are low.) But if the Fed could drag us back a year or two to the much-missed era of low interest rates and booming housing prices, all that would do is exacerbate our current mess.

Nothing has been done to rein in predatory lending practices, or even just plain stupid lending practices in which lenders and buyers both look for quick, easy, cheap money by offering terms that don’t make any sense to anybody who understands the concept of there being no free lunch.

As soon as interest rates drop low enough, it’s all going to start up all over again. The very least that ought to happen is that loan documents should be required to be written in real, easy to understand, no small print English. Oh yeah, and banks ought to be required to actually make a reasonable stab at ensuring their customers can pay back loans. If the government doesn’t require all that, the shareholders of lending institutions ought to find ways to do it.

There have to be some long term, realistic solutions to these problems. Something better, at least, than the panicky lowering of interest rates. But none of the people in power really want that. In the same way that a bad corporate manager only sees as far as the next quarterly report, our politicians only see as far as the next poll, or this year, primary. They’d rather buy our votes with money. That’s easier and cheaper than coming up with the hard work and creativity that are necessary to actually solve any problems.

WHAT THE FRENCH DO BEST

Las Vegas: Apparently, it's topless revues. That's what the ads for Fantastique! say here at the Paris Las Vegas Casino Resort.

But at Bally's, next door and owned by the same company, they do even better than that. They are, "Making the world a better place, one dancer at a time" with their Jubilee! revue.

Down the street at The Venetian, they have a new restaurant / nightclub called Tao. It promises "spiritual dining" and "religious nightlife."

Now I can sort of understand spiritual dining. Maybe it's gourmet vegetarian food, something like that. Although I doubt it. I'm sure they've come up with some good excuse for spiritual fifty buck steaks. If the Dalai Lama can eat steak, I don't see why a diner shouldn't be able to tuck into an overpriced t-bone at Tao.

The religious nightlife though; that confuses me. That sounds too much like quiet contemplation in your cell, maybe wearing a hair shirt. Some people, I'm sure, are into that, but probably not here in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is once again trying to pass itself off as "Sin City." It fails, miserably. If there are any of the seven deadlies being broken here, it's avarice and gluttony. There's no doubt plenty of lusting going on as well, but it's mostly unrequited unless it's an expensive commercial transaction - and in that case we're back to avarice.

In truth, Las Vegas is to vice as Adventureland at Disneyland is to adventure. At Disneyland it's kids that are taken in by the artifice, here it's drunk college kids and people who've never encountered the real deal.

This evening I've got a book event at a new bookstore called Cheesecake & Crime. It's in Henderson, a suburb of Vegas. I think it might be where the real world - at least the real world of shopping malls and strip malls and grocery stores and little houses where the people who work along The Strip can afford to live - is to be found. Maybe there will even be some real vice. Although I doubt it.