There’s an article in tomorrow’s NY Times about the potential effects of one of the Big Three automakers going out of business.  It begins:

The failure of one or more of Detroit’s Big Three automakers would put a huge initial dent in American manufacturing, but in time foreign car companies would pick up the slack by stepping up production in their plants here, many industry experts and economists say.

The article mostly looks at GM, most in the news recently for its ferocious lobbying effort to get a bailout.  Acid tongues have noted that they would have been well served to bring the same sort of singleminded focus over the past thirty years to their business of creating cars that people actually want to buy.  (I routinely turn in GM cars when I get them in the rental roulette, even if they’re supposedly an upgrade.)

But the article also takes a nuanced view of the effects of a potential GM bankrupcy on the so-called ‘transplants,’ the foreign, mostly Japanese, automakers with manufacturing sites in the US.  Since they share many of the same suppliers — airbags, transmissions, window glass, tapered roller bearings, etc. — the transplants would be seriously buffeted by a structural change in the industry.

I have a friend at one of the transplants who made this argument to me last week, although he put it more forcefully; they’re praying that the Big Three get a bailout because they don’t want the disruption in their supply chains and my friend saw the implications of that distruption as much more dire, more severe, than the Times article suggests.

Ronnie Drew, 1934-2008.

Good online project management from Liquid Planner.

A nice overview of the Linux kernel, from IBM.

Stewart Butterfield’s Yahoo resignation letter, a classic.

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann’s Irish traditional music archive.

In a sorta similar vein, the Sherkin Island Hymn (video)

A BBC tour of Afghan cave paintings (video).

Probably the first book I ever read about Buddhism was Janwillem van de Wetering’s The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery.  It made a deep and lasting impression on me, although he later, characteristically, published a much more critical view on those same experiences in afterzen: Experiences of a Zen Student Out on His Ear.  So I was saddened to read in the Times that he had died on 4 July.

It turns out — I didn’t know this — that he was also the author of a successful series of Dutch detective novels, based in part on his experiences as an Amsterdam cop.  His literary agent reported that he lived in Surry, Maine (which is pretty much the best place to live, if you ask me) and used to sail up and down the Maine coast in an old lobster boat.  He also wrote children’s books featuring a porcupine named Hugh Pine (possibly a play on Bill Porter?)

Besides his family, all that — the Zen monastery, the Amsterdam cop, the novels, the Maine lobsterboat — adds up to a rich, enviable life, one that will be hard to top next time.

If Little Red Riding Hood were to meet Umberto Eco in some Masonic plot, I think this is where it would happen; at the corner of positively West 4th Street and West 13th Street in Manhattan.