Three Beautiful Things 03/23/11: To Do, 99, Wire = Everything

1.  I never write a to do list.  Never.  Never ended today.  If I get recommendation letters written, taxes done, AAOT stuff done, bills paid, Sly worked on more, syllabus x2 written before school starts Monday morning, I will start spring quarter weighing about seventy fewer pounds, uh, in mental weight.  I've already knocked out some stuff.

2.  Russell snapped some really good pictures.  I haven't looked yet.  But we went to the Arc and the Embers on Highway 99 and took pictures today.  I'll look at mine later.  I'll reward myself for knocking stuff off of my Spring Break to do list.

3.  Not on my to do list, but on my "it's about time" list is Season 2 of The Wire.  I wish back in the days of team teaching Working Class Lit with MB we could have reserved about thirteen hours of viewing time and watched this season with our students.  It's about dock workers, the union, and corruption.  I've watched ten episodes now.  I really want to put my to do list aside and watch the rest of the season.  It's not just a poignant portrayal of corruption.  It's about jobs shrinking, pressures on families, temptation, and, as always in The Wire,  it's about power and how its structures in the police force, the union, the street drug trade, the prison, the courts, the Greek mafia, the church, gentlemen's clubs and everywhere else all mirror each other, all intertwine, are barely distinguishable from one another.   I've said in before and here I go again:   

The Wire is everything.