Sherry Chandler

of doing nothing in America is the face of the chronically homeless. The NYTimes this morning reports a new approach to get our cardboard dwellers into permanent shelter and some sort of stable life:

DENVER — Arthur Sena spent years living in a hole that he had dug near the railroad tracks. He would probably still be there, defying offers of help from social workers and using cardboard to ward off the chill, if Denver had not adopted a radical strategy of putting homeless people into apartments of their own, no strings attached.

The “housing first” policy that this city adopted last year is part of an accelerating national movement that has reduced the numbers of the chronically homeless — the single, troubled men and women who spend years in the streets and shelters — in more than 20 cities.

In this campaign, promoted by a little-known office of the Bush administration, 219 cities, at last count, have started ambitious 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness.

…

Part of the credit, Mr. Hess and others said, goes to Philip F. Mangano, a Bush appointee who has spent five years visiting every mayor and governor he can, brandishing successful examples, cost-benefit studies and his own messianic fervor along with modest amounts of federal money.

…

Wherever he goes, Mr. Mangano, 58, who was director of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance, emphasizes that it is cheaper to put the chronically homeless right into apartments, and provide medical and addiction treatments there, than to watch them cycle endlessly through shelters, soup kitchens, emergency rooms, detoxification centers and jails.

“Cost-benefit analysis may be the new expression of compassion in our communities,” he said at the Denver meeting.

An interesting statement, that last. It’s cheaper to help people before they hit rock bottom. And that from a Bush appointee—

you might like to watch a movie, a good movie. Here’s how Netflix helps Americans watch the movies they want to watch:

…a brainteaser I have been giving my friends since I visited Netflix in Silicon Valley last month. Out of the 60,000 titles in Netflix’s inventory, I ask, how many do you think are rented at least once on a typical day?

The most common answers have been around 1,000, which sounds reasonable enough. Americans tend to flock to the same small group of movies, just as they flock to the same candy bars and cars, right?

Well, the actual answer is 35,000 to 40,000. That’s right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. “Americans’ tastes are really broad,” says Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want — and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process.

Five million families now have Netflix accounts, and the company has basically reinvented the concept of a quick-turnaround mail-order business. It is, in short, one of the most impressive companies around. So why do so many people think it’s doomed?

To find out why, read the rest.

Oh I forgot all about yesterday being 06/06/06. I guess that explains why I got thousands of SPAM comments from what seemed to have been Japanese or Chinese porn sites.

Lost your chance, readers. With help from my web guru, I deleted them all.

Fortunately, I See Invisible People remembered yesterday for me. She provided the link to the sticker:

And to some Fun with Beastly Numbers. My favs:

And the font color for that table is 666666.

As you may have gathered, I’m looking for inspiration in a book called Doing Nothing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), in which Tom Lutz explores American attitudes toward work in everything from Walden to Ferris Buellar’s Day Off (and I’m still reading the first chapter).

Although the book is about slackers and bums in the United States, one of the first things Lutz mentions is flying to Great Britain to talk with Chris Davis. Davis is “one of the early mainstays” of Why Work?, home of CLAWS (Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery). Davis is a proponent of the Idle Theory of Evolution:

“All living creatures have to work to stay alive. Some have to work harder than others. Those creatures that need do little work to stay alive are more likely to survive periods of difficulty than those who must work harder and longer. …survival of the idlest.”

Which seems to be a way of saying that creatures eking out a marginal existence will go first, and that makes sense. Still, much as I’d love to be one of the idle class, this argument seems to say that, once George W. Bush has destroyed western civilization, he is among the more likely to survive, and I don’t think I like that idea at all. I was more taken by Davis’s quarrel with Darwin:

“Freud isn’t what he was twenty-five years ago, but Darwin! I just love taking shots at Darwin. …Because he sees nature as a war. This idea has permeated our whole society, and it’s profoundly destructive, devisive, not just because it’s racist—and he is racist—but because the culture is permeated by the idea that skirmishing for survival is natural. The idea is a menace! War is the opposite of everything I’m trying to get to.”

I will be reading on and probably talking more about all this. I think, though, that British idlers probably have one great advantage over those in the United States: the National Health.