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Time passages
Kidding, right?
You’re exactly correct
Lifetime investments
Ya win some
Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review. Where the hell does the time go? It’s freaking November, and I really don’t know where 2014 went. I like my life the way I live it. Between school, work and Fatal Encounters, I basically work three jobs, and I never lift my head up. But there are things I’d hoped to cherish this year. For example, Hunter will graduate high school on June 12. This is the last year we’ll probably ever live together, and I’d hoped to spend more time with him, but I sit at the dining room table and do my homework, while he’s upstairs doing his. We both have hard times disengaging from our thoughts when we’re concentrating, so our meal conversations together are frequently superficial or silent. The pace I keep also seems to cut into the memory process, and I’m never quite sure what causes that. Is it because I only sleep a few hours a night, and sleep is supposed to be when we process information, filing it into permanent storage? Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, which freaks me out a little bit. Combine that with the speed of life that keeps accelerating, and I feel a little like the world is passing by me. So this time relativity perception—where each year seems to pass faster because we’ve got more experience of years—it’s got an upper end, right? Maybe one of our older readers can fill me in on this. Does time keep accelerating even when we’re into our 80s and 90s? Does it feel as though we can’t savor the time we have because it passes by so quickly? It’s an interesting train of thought. If we don’t spend our time doing things—living life— then it feels as though it’s a life wasted. But if you live at full tilt, you end up with little in the long-term storage, and feeling as though it’s a life wasted. Hard to say what it all means. I tend to look for the symbolic or deeper meaning of things. People don’t seem to kick and scream about going into that dark night when they reach a certain age. Does life just become too fast to keep up?
I am sorry, but I really have to say that I can’t stand most of the Californians that relocate here. What seems to happen is that, just like in California, and I grew up a native of Los Angeles, we were swamped with people. In fact, at one time, we had over 200,000 per month relocating to LA, and it really pissed me off. Trouble was, they wanted to be hippies, but they didn’t leave their bad habits at the border and proceeded to screw the state up so bad that the natives had to leave. This is what’s happening here. They don’t leave their stinking bad habits at the border and now we have gay parades, more drugs, more crime, housing costs have gone through the roof. It all stinks. Reno used to be a place with strong family values, not anymore. Joseph Benenati Reno
Re “On the wing” (Editorial, July 7, 2011): To the person who wrote this article, just for clarification, there are no laws against being intoxicated in public in the city of Reno. They have laws against possessing open containers of alcohol in public and distributing alcohol in public spaces, but not against being intoxicated in public. Ryan Fordyce Medford, Oregon
Re “Age of Empire” (Feature story, Oct. 9): While I agree that the “Age of Empire” story wasn’t particularly well-written, I would like to take issue with David Flynt’s letter of response of Nov. 13. Among other things, he said, “(America is) ... a nation that understands the importance of promoting free societies which historically have a higher regard for human rights ...” Here’s a short list of dictators we heartily supported while simultaneously declaring our love of democracy: Somoza, Batista, Suharto, Duvalier, Marcos, Pinochet, Noriega, Franco, Trujillo, the Shah—you get the idea. These people are easily researched. If you’re interested, also look up a few of the guys we maybe should have supported: Papandreou, Allende, Sukarno, Bosch, Arbenz, and Lumumba, Mossadegh. They received simply wonderful treatment from our friendly neighborhood CIA. So far in human history, it’s been quite clearly established that big, powerful countries go to war to obtain or maintain money and power, not to support democracy. “... free societies which historically have a higher regard for human rights and rarely, if ever, go to war against one another”? We’ve now been at war for, what, 70 years without a break? Ninety years? I’d guess that if some big, powerful country invaded America and installed a brutal dictatorship with a ruling elite and brutal secret police, and then backed it for decades with military aid, there might be more Americans who suspect that the big, powerful country isn’t particularly interested in Democracy. Steven Lipschultz Truckee, California
Re “Working Classical” (Arts & Culture, Nov. 13): I did not recently relocate from the Bay Area and in no way did I ever have “the idea to bring a version of Classical Revolution to Reno” and then find out that “somebody had beat [me] to the punch.” Kati Dayner, at the time Kati Wentink, was the one who brought this concept to Reno sometime in 2007 or 2008 (not 2010 like the article says) with the blessing of its original San Francisco founder, violist Charith Premawardhana, and I knew this from the beginning. My only idea was to organize a session at Wildflower Village last November (2013) because none had ever been done out there, and nobody had been organizing any for about a year. You could say that I revived it with the support of my colleagues who came out to play and have continued to come out, but it was never my idea and I do not wish for the record to show that it was. Also, the musicians of Classical Revolution Reno do not approach an event “trying to find out if they’re going to get paid.” These events are always on a purely volunteer basis for us musicians. What I said was that you wouldn’t want to get into a situation in which you are always playing at the same place and the expectation of the business owners becomes that we are a kind of unpaid house band. Additionally, the article made it sound like all Classical Revolution Reno events take place in bars and the musicians are all drinking as they play “to take the edge off.” We also do events in coffee shops and other community hangouts—some of them open to all ages—and not all of us drink. I, for one, do not. Jessica Escobar Reno
—D. Brian Burghart
The South will rise in Austria Re “The power of gold and silver” (Let Freedom Ring, Nov. 6): Although Brendan Trainor describes some of the crash of 2008 fairly accurately, fractional reserve banking was not the culprit. The cause was mainly financial deregulation in the form of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. This was a dose of pure libertarian laissez faire from Phil Gramm, not some sneaky progressive plot from a hundred years ago. The CFMA allowed derivatives traders to create and regulate their own marketplace. It then took only a few years for that marketplace to implode and bring the global economy to near collapse. Libertarians always try to paper over the crater that results whenever their policies actually get implemented (witness Kansas and the Brownback walkback). And about rebranding libertarian schemery as “Austrian Economics”—the one place they would never screw around with this stuff is—Austria! That’s because Austria is busy thriving as a social democracy with strong labor unions, universal healthcare, free university tuition, and really fast trains. The truth is that “Austrian Economics” gets cooked up at an Alabama think tank. It should be called “Alabamanomics” and clearly labeled as poisonous. C.G. Green Reno
But somebody voted Elections? In “Home Means Nevada” Washoe County, 113,000 so-called voters—all gussied up and registered—don’t give a flyin’ burrito about democracy. City offices, county offices, district offices, federal offices, statewide offices, statewide measures and constitutional amendments don’t mean beans. These guys and gals don’t absentee vote, they don’t early vote—and physically going to the polls, well, what is that? Communism? They just don’t vote. All 113,000 of ’em. Half of the county’s registered electorate. Half. Hell, “Home Means Nevada,” my ass. Turns out, home means 50 percent of Washoe County’s registered voters have more pressing things to do than engaging some silly synapse in their busy brains. There might be a doohickey on sale somewhere. Craig Ayres-Sevier Reno
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OPINION
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NEWS
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GREEN
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FEATURE STORY
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ARTS&CULTURE
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ART OF THE STATE
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FOODFINDS
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FILM
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MUSICBEAT
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Distribution Director Greg Erwin Distribution Manager Anthony Clarke Distribution Drivers Sandra Chhina, Steve Finlayson, Debbi Frenzi, Vicky Jewell, Joe Medeiros, Ron Neill, Christian Shearer, Marty Troye, Warren Tucker, Gary White, Joseph White, Margaret Underwood General Manager/Publisher John D. Murphy President/CEO Jeff vonKaenel Chief Operations Officer Deborah Redmond Human Resource Manager Tanja Poley Business Manager Grant Rosenquist
NIGHTCLUBS/CASINOS
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THIS WEEK
Business Nicole Jackson
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MISCELLANY
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Web site www.newsreview.com Printed by Paradise Post The RN&R is printed using recycled newsprint whenever available. Editorial Policies Opinions expressed in the RN&R are those of the authors and not of Chico Community Publishing, Inc. Contact the editor for permission to reprint articles, cartoons or other portions of the paper. The RN&R is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts. All letters received become the property of the publisher. We reserve the right to print letters in condensed form.
Cover and feature story design: Hayley Doshay
NOVEMBER 20, 2014
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