Tuesday evening roundup and ramble and playlist

What a sad, sad story about the consequences of deinstitutionalization.

Mo Ibrahim once again looked for leadership in Africa and came up short.

Can we leave Big Bird out of politics and out of fashion? Those are just wrong.

It's unfortunate that people would look for, or provide, inspiration on how to be unhealthy and hate oneself.

I've slammed overly wordy writing on these pages, and here, Ben Masters ostensibly defends it:

The contemporary preference seems to be for the economical, the efficient, for simple precision (though there is of course such a thing as complex precision). Books, it appears, should be neat and streamlined. Language shouldn’t be allowed to obscure a good story.

 Right. But it should be allowed to create a good story. If it works, it's not excess, is it? He explains,

Not every sentence, however, can or should stretch its seams. Not every thought, not every subject, warrants a maximalist approach (a point I have attempted to explore in my own fiction through parody). The elaborate has to be earned and justified, lest excess become a tyranny of style, whereby the prose levels out into an unhelpful equivalence of so many adjectives, adverbs, phrases and images. Proliferation shouldn’t come at the expense of distinction. Bare prose, in the right places, can be equally intense or vivid.

Exactly!

***
I've learned of a new, vegan-friendly pizzeria near my office, but is it really friendly to gouge vegans, even while accommodating them? This came up in Ocean City, where a place wanted to charge me $3 for subbing in Daiya cheese in an enchilada (I just got it without cheese, and it was probably better that way). Isn't that excessive? Daiya's not that much more expensive than dairy cheese. This pizza place asks $1.50 per vegan substitution (cheese, topping, etc.). Um, really? So dead-animal sausage is "free" but I have to pay for a soy substitute? Really? It would be less offensive if they just served a whole vegan pizza or two and charged more for them, but itemizing the higher expenses just draws attention to the hypocrisy. I'll just keep going to Busboys and Poets, where the vegan options are comparably priced and proven to be delicious.

***
A couple of my friends have gone through breakups over the last couple of weeks, which got me thinking about breakup music (which I'd been thinking about anyway since "Less than Strangers" came on Pandora). I thought about how the breakup music that resonates now is different from that of a decade ago. And about how it falls into two, or maybe three, categories: (1) sadness and (2) hope/defiance, and maybe something in between. So I've decided to write you a quirky list of breakup music. I'll probably keep adding to it, especially the middle category (2), which is the best.

When you want to wallow in your sorrow
Ghost (Indigo Girls)
Tear in Your Hand (Tori Amos)
Adam and Eve (Ani DiFranco)
Don't Speak (No Doubt)
Mississippi (Paula Cole)
Le Train Bleu (Jean-Luis Murat)

When you're ready to move on
Gravel (Ani DiFranco)
Gonna Get over You (Sarah Bareilles)
The Easy Way (Dar Williams)
Lately (Linda Nawn)


When you're somewhere in between
Gravity (Sarah Bareilles
Less than Strangers (Tracy Chapman)
This Fire (Lori McKenna)
Little Love (Melissa Ferrick)
Caroline (MC Solaar)
World of Our Own Making (Merry Amsterberg)