Random notes + Quoted for (Painful) Truth

I slept the whole night through, which is a first since last week (yay!). Afraid cold remnants are transmuting into sinus infection (nay!). Though I didn't wake up I did have a long, involved dream featuring Darker Than BLACK characters (Hei and Yin), Kingdom Hearts characters (Sora and, um, Donald I think?), not a few of my own family members including my grandfather (one of them died? it might have been him), a wedding, I think, and a hurricane (warning--from which we were taking shelter in a cellar? I don't know). And floods, too, though I'm not quite sure how it all hung together. Moral of the story: Don't start watching anime and then go straight to bed.

I made banana bread and curry mee (chicken soup) yesterday. The soup is so good, and a very forgiving recipe, though definitely the ginger and the fried shallots shouldn't be left out like I did this time. I used half all purpose and half white whole wheat flour in the banana bread with no problems other than it being so tasty.

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I read Matt Bai's New York Times magazine article on New Jersey, and the gubernatorial race (I just love the word "gubernatorial"), with a sort of painful recognition: Yup, that's us, unfortunately. The key sentence is probably "If California collapsed of its own weight and drifted off into the Pacific, New Jersey would instantly become the most dysfunctional state in the country." But that's not the full story by any means. What's wrong with New Jersey?

1. Way too many municipalities and school districts (though, NB, Governor Corzine did this summer sign a law forcing school districts without schools to merge with nearby districts by next year). I think we have the most municipalities per capita of any state in the Union? This doesn't help corruption, either, though its main effect is to send local taxes (particularly property taxes) into an upwards death spiral.
2. Voters want lower taxes, more services, and to keep their little towns and school districts as-is. Last Friday Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania characterized this attitude on Radio Times as "money for nothing and chicks for free," quoting Dire Straits--the stuff-without-pain attitude is a national problem, as Bai rightly points out in the article (he later quotes Rendell, too). Personally I'd quote The Arcade Fire: "If you want something, don't ask for nothing! If you want nothing, don't ask for something!" I have nothing but respect for people who want low taxes and no services, but we need a statewide, and a national, reality check: going into debt rather than raising taxes to provide services is ruinous in every time frame.

Choice quotation from later in the article: "New Jersey could raise up its own army and invade Pennsylvania, and all the state’s voters would want to talk about, still, would be their property taxes." Maybe we could annex the five-county metropolitan area from PA and get Harrisburg to throw Rendell in as a freebie? Well, a girl can dream.