In doing some housekeeping on the ol' site, I realized that the comments were completely busted. I apologize if you've tried to comment recently and it didn't work for you. Been fixed.
Watch Angelina tell a story at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, and then we'll discuss:
I've been in a funk the last few weeks because I recently started to really believe that new media -- read, blogs and other alternative media -- aren't even close to living up to their promise of directing the world's focus stuff that really truly matters. What matters? In my book, systemic problems and deep structural fixes.
Instea, we're inundated with information. Our minds and eyeballs flit from one thing to the next, from Britney to Guantanamo to the kidnapping in Portugal to Habeas Corpus to Bush saying something dumb about Nelson Mandela to...you get the drift. Fixing what ails us will take long-term and thoughtful attention. But cynical Nancy is really starting to think we're actually managing to become worse at sustaining that attention. I find it terrifying to think we could actually get less skilled at dealing with the world's great problems.
Angelina Jolie, though, is on to something very clever. She knows that she appeals to the part of our collective brain that craves beauty and glamour and compassion and excitement. Her genius is that she's figured out that if we're all staring at her anyway -- in fact, that we can't seem to turn away -- she can do a great deal of good holding up the story of a poor beggar boy in our field of vision.
"The way things stand today, doing politics in Second Life is a lot like having sex in a car. Just when things hit a groove, something falls out of whack. Still, when all is said and done, you're glad you did it." Oh yeah, I wrote that. If Sister Ellen could see me now...
Everyone I know has seen the U.S. vs. Brazil semi-final game by now, so I can finally say it: man, what an ugly display. Maybe a 4-0 loss to an outstanding Brazil team led by the spectacular Marta (video of her amazing goal here*) is not something to beat yourself up about. But to get that result by swapping a proven goalie for one who hasn't played for a long while, heading the ball in your own net, and then subbing in defensive players when you're down 3-nothing -- well, that's just poor soccer.
Seems to me that Brandi Chastain in right on the money here. Women's soccer in the U.S. has regressed since the last World Cup. I see everything in political terms these days, but this is exactly what happens when you (a) write off certain groups of people and (b) pick weak and unproven leaders.
* Watch it all the way through. It's only from the replays that you can see that Marta flicks the ball around her defender one way while making a run around her the other.
The situation in Burma shares facts and themes with Cuba's restrictions on the way its people use the Internet. Most Cubans are cut off from the true Internet entirely, and their online lives limited to the Cuban National Internet. But like the Burmese government, Castro isn't opposed to shutting down access for the whole country just before elections, during protests, or around other big political events. From a piece I wrote for Personal Democracy Forum on the Internet and Cuba a while back, here's how the Cuban government sees what it's doing to the Internet:
The technology professionals and bureaucrats charged with running the Internet in Cuba contend that the dearth of access isn't Castro's plan, but a consequence of the long-running U.S. embargo, known as El bloqueo ("the blockade") in Cuba. (The United Nations holds an annual vote calling for an end to the embargo; last vote, the U.S. stood with Israel, the Marshall Islands, and the Pacific island nation of Palau in voting "no.") Without access to U.S. vendors, they contend, they simply lack the infrastructure to let more Cubans online. In a 2001 interview with CIO Magazine, Luis Mourelos, an IT Director with the Cuban Academy of Sciences, said that the island's Internet users shared just 10 megabytes-per-second of bandwidth. (That was five years ago, but in comparison, the cable connection in my apartment delivers about one-tenth of that access for my use alone.)
Perhaps the embargo has hobbled Cuba's efforts to build an IT infrastructure. But in that same interview, Mourelos seems to indicate that the Internet Cuba has is the Internet Cuba wants. "In one way or another every country decides to what degree you can access the Internet and what you can't do and where you can go and where you can't," says Mourelos. "Every country has a right to at least think about how to protect its culture, its society and its people from things that could be damaging to them."
That idea, this this interest or that interest has a right to choose what the Internet will be, is what the Burmese government embraced today. Here's why I think that's scary not only for the people of Burma (who are rightfully our main concern today) but for the rest of us as well:
What Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, AT&T, Verizon are doing is a challenge to the Internet itself. Early Internet developers created a new order based on an "end-to-end" architecture, where this new tool was a neutral conduit through which information was shipped back and forth. Power over the system was in the hand of the end users, the then tens and now many millions of folks who joined the wave. Today, it's as much a matter of norms -- a shared belief that that's just the way that the Internet is -- as it is of architecture. And it's a norm under assault.
...
The big fear, beyond China, beyond Cuba, is that we're moving down a road away from one global network and toward Internet fiefdoms presided over by different lords. We may well one day find ourselves in a world where with the Internet is made up a Cuban Internet designed by Fidel Castro; a Chinese Internet governed by Beijing, Google, and other willing partners; and, if American telecom companies have their way, a Verizon Internet and an AT&T Internet as well.
Garance Franke Ruta has a much better photo showing the enormity of the crowd at the Barack Obama rally in Washington Square Park last night. Garance quotes the Obama campaign's communications directors as saying that 23,000 people had pre-registered to attend. Seems plausible. The best guess on crowd size that I can make is that there were many several thousands people there. But that's a shot in the dark because at no point in the evening could I actually view the entire crowd. It's difficult to judge how many people are gathered in place when you can't even tell where the crowd ends. Gates opened at 5, but I've been to enough political rallies to know that it was unlikely for the candidate to take the stage anytime before 6:30, so that's when I planned to arrive. But by the time I got there, the park was so packed that I couldn't even see the people who could see the stage.
In short, the place was packed. The charged-up crowd milled about for some time after the speech was over, and it wasn't until it finally dispersed that I remembered that there's a rather large empty fountain in the middle of Washington Square Park.
Obama's entry song was Kanye West's Touch the Sky, naughty words duly deleted:
I gotta testify, come up in the spot looking extra fly
For the day I die, I'mma touch the sky
Gotta testify, come up in the spot looking extra fly
For the day I die, I'mma touch the sky
Back when they thought pink polo's would hurt the Roc,
Before Cam got the shit to pop, the doors was closed.
I felt like Bad Boy's street team, I couldn't work the Lox (locks).
Now let's go.
Take 'em back to the plan...
Me and my momma hopped in the U-Haul van.
Any pessimists I ain't talked to them,
Plus, I ain't have no phone in my apartment.
Let's take 'em back to the club.
Least about an hour I would stand on line,
I just wanted to dance.
I went to Jacob an hour after I got my advance.
I just wanted to shine.
Jay's favorite line: "Dog, in due time"
Now he look at me, like "Damn, dog, you where I am"
A hip hop legend.
I think I died in an accident, cause this must be heaven.
Now let's take 'em high-igh-igh-igh-igh-igh la la la la la la la
(Top of the world, baby. T-Top of the world)
Back when Gucci was the shit to rock,
Back when Slick Rick got the shit to pop,
I'd do anything to say "I got it".
Damn, them new loafers hurt my pocket.
Before anybody wanted K-West beats,
Me and my girl split the buffet at KFC.
Dog, I was having nervous breakdowns,
Like "Damn, these...
If you know the song, you'll know that's an opportune place for Obama's staff to cut the lyrics.
Making use of a Kanye song was a fairly direct appeal to this somewhat young and urban crowd -- Washington Square Park is pretty much the center of youth culture in New York City, and choosing to hold an event there says something about the crowd you hope to draw. But Touch the Sky in particularly hits the same notes that Obama hits at his stump speech again and again: striving and achievement. The Obama story is one of him and his mom against the world, and he rose up from challenging circumstances to make something great of himself.
The early sections of Obama's speech last night were dedicated to telling that life story. The later sections were filled with
hot exhortations about the need to change Washington.
Insurance companies need to be stood up to! The Iraq war needs to end, but carefully! Oil and gas companies can't write our national energy policy!
Allowing special interest groups to make our legislation is the way Washington operates, he says, and he'll put a stop to it.
And once we create that change in Washington, positive change will ripple out from America across the planet. We'll even, he said last night, solve AIDS in Africa and bring an end to the genocide in Darfur.
(I had to laugh at the latter prediction, earning me scornful looks from the people around me.)
Still, that all sounds good. But how exactly is a President Barack Obama going to make these wonderful things happen? That's the question I have asked Obama in my head again and again over the last few months. Maybe that's the subject for another speech, but it's one that I've haven't seen him yet give.
I've heard Obama speak four or five times this election season already, and there's a line that he uses in every speech. Cynics in Washington, he says, accuse him of being a "hope peddler, a hope monger." It's gotten laughs every time I've heard him use it, helped along by a sly chuckle that Obama contributes after saying it.
But I started to fear last night, perched on a fence railing and watching this incredible crowd feed off of Obama mania, that "hope monger" is exactly where he is now as a candidate. "Obama as hope monger" at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 was a powerful call to action. But there's a real risk that just four months out from the Iowa caucuses "Obama as hope monger" leaves the people all riled up with no place to go.
(Photo: Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.)
This is simply exceptional long-form journalism. Writing for the Vanity Fair's website, David Margolick has several thousand words on the iconic photo above. Elizabeth Eckford is the young black woman in the white dress, and picture was taken by photographer Will Counts on the day that Eckford started the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. In rich and luscious detail, Margolick, traces the lives of both Eckford and Hazel Bryan, the white woman center-left whose face is twisted with hate. It's the complicated history of an era, of a country, and of two of history's actors. No excerpt can do this complex piece justice, but here's one anyway:
Less than a week into school, Mrs. Huckaby later wrote, Elizabeth came into her office "red-eyed, her handkerchief in a damp ball in her hands." The harassment was so bad that she wanted to go home early. But things only got worse, as the disciplinary files, in the collection of Mrs. Huckaby's papers at the University of Arkansas, reveal. Sometime in October: Elizabeth hit with a shower of sharpened pencils. October 28: Elizabeth shoved in hall. November 20: Elizabeth jostled in gym. November 21: Elizabeth hit with paper clip. December 10: Elizabeth kicked. December 18: Elizabeth punched. January 10: Elizabeth shoved on the stairs. January 14: Elizabeth knocked flat. January 22: Elizabeth spat upon. January 29: Elizabeth attacked with spitballs. January 31: Elizabeth asks grandfather to take her home after girls serenade her with humiliating songs in gym class. February 4: Elizabeth has soda bottle thrown at her. February 14: Elizabeth attacked with rock-filled snowballs. March 7: Elizabeth hit by egg. March 12: Elizabeth hit by tomato. "She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day," Mrs. Huckaby wrote at one point, apparently with a straight face.
My good friend Adam Conner send me a link to the Margolick article and he's got a great post digging up quotes on the Little Rock Nine from Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee, and others. Read Adam's post and, I beg of you, read Margolick's "Through a Lens, Darkly."
Worak has a set of gorgeous photos of Burmese monks taken this past summer up on Flickr under a Creative Commons license. How much do I wish I had taken them? A lot, a whole heck of a lot.
A few correspondents asked, in response to my Order 81 story from last week, why India had let Monsanto to start selling genetically-modified seeds in-country when they had kept them out for so long. My response, somewhat to my embarrassment, was largely "dunno." But an anthropologist by the name of Keith Hart, who I'm hoping won't mind being cited here, sketched out a possible answer: India passed the Patents Amendments Act in 1999 to conform to the WTO's TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement -- partly because it really wanted to enter into a nuclear deal with the U.S. Seems plausible to me.
A filmmaker by the name of Barbara Burstyn was kind enough to send me a copy of her film "How to the Save the World," on farming in India, all the way from New Zealand. It arrived in Brooklyn today. I came home from work and popped it in DVD machine intending just to watch a few minutes at first, and ended up taking in the whole thing. It's quite good.
The film's focus is on biodynamic farming, a method of agriculture that you might say is a few steps beyond organic. My Internet research since watching the film tells me that biodynamic farming was introduced by a German named Rudolf Steiner in 1924. It's an approach that views the farm as a single living organism. Plantings are done according to the rythms of the moon and stars. Like organic farming, composting is a big deal here. But biodynamic farming also weaves in the use of homeopathic herbal preparations, elaborate water treatments, and other techniques that give the approach a mystical aspect.
In India biodynamic farming is growing as an alternative to corporate agri-business (read, Monsanto) growing. The film suggests that the world has a choice between biodynamic-style farming and its own destruction. Very, very interesting stuff.
Ha. According to Google News, my interest in both women's soccer and media coverage go waaaay back. I was just playing around with their new news archives feature and found this letter to the editor of the Bergen Record, my hometown paper, from when the U.S. national soccer team won the first every FIFA Women's World Cup in 1991:
WE'RE NO. 1 - BUT DOES ANYONE CARE?
Editor, The Record:
I am writing in response to the placement of an article in a recent
Sunday sports section. The story of the U.S. women's soccer team winning
the first women's world championship was placed on the sixth sports
page, although it was an important and historic moment. Certainly if
the men's national team had won their championship, that ...
That's where the text of the letter cuts off without a paid subscription to the news service, but it's signed by one Nancy Scola of Waldwick, New Jersey. I don't even remember writing it. I must have been about 14 years old.
I'm finding it pretty amazing that somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 people rallied down in Jena, Louisiana yesterday. An interesting article in the Chicago Tribune this morning suggested that the protest sort of spontaneously generated out of the blogs of black bloggers. While Googling around to explore that idea, I started to wonder: is what we saw yesterday was really all that different than the organizing done during the civil rights era? To put it another way, is activist James Rucker (of Color of Change) working online qualitatively from activist John Lewis working offline in the 1960s? I put up a post on the topic over at Personal Democracy Forum, and I'm reposting it below:
Is there any chance that in the pre-Internet age several thousand people would have found themselves in Jena, a tiny speck of a town in central Louisiana, yesterday? The New York Times has estimated that a crowd of about 10,000 gathered to protest the treatment of six young black men arrested for the beating of a white classmate; event organizers pegged it at closer to 50,000. But either estimate makes clear that the gathering was huge. And the fact that a crowd of that size suddenly materialized without much attention being paid to the case by TV and in print media made me wonder: how exactly did so many people knew that they belonged in Jena yesterday?
Today the answer is looking a lot like it involves two primary compotents: community blogs, bloggers, and talk radio -- while not Facebook, "social networks" all the same; and the organizing power of a few influential black social leaders.
Of course, the civil rights era of the 1960s was driven by social networks of a kind. Except back then, the networks were less Color for Change, one of the most influential online civil rights groups today, and more Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC. In 60's, decisions were made by leaders like John Lewis and Martin Luther King sitting in a room together to hashing out strategy and plans. But even such central figures in the movement like Lewis and King had a limited tools for raising attention to and awareness what they were doing. Make what you will out of the fact that the "Bloody Sunday" march on Selma had about 600 participants.
Things have changed. Al Sharpton, who took part in some of the events in Louisiana yesterday, credits the Internet, blogs, and talk radio with fueling the enormous crowd yesterday in Jena:
Ten years ago this couldn't have happened. You didn't have the Internet and you didn't have black blogs and you didn't have national radio shows. Now we can talk to all of black America every day.
A Chicago Tribune article today focuses on the Color for Change and its leader James Rucker, as well as other black bloggers and their blogs, for raising awareness of the Jena 6 and leading to yesterday's enormous rally. A little digging into how the rally came about suggests that radio hosts played an integral role as well: Tom Joyner (aided, importantly, by his BlackAmericaWeb.com news network) and Michael Baisden of the normally apolitical afternoon radio show called "Love, Lust, & Lies" also used their soapboxes to prod people to get to Jena yesterday.
But I'm left wondering today: to what extent what happened in Jena was a result of leadership by Rucker, Joyner, and Baisden, and how much their leadership was a matter of, like Gandhi used to like to say: "There go my people. I have to go and run and catch up because I am their leader."
No matter how powerful the social networks involved, could tens of thousands of people really have been drawn to Jena yesterday without such strong leadership entered into the mix? I dunno, I really don't. But I'd be curious to dig more deeply into Jena to find out.
I'm didn't do a great job articulating the question, but I do think that it's an interesting one on some level. As I put it in the title over on PdF -- is this about social networks (new!) or social leaders (same old). I'm in a phase where I'm having trouble of thinking that the Internet's impact on politics is anything beyond the introduction of new distribution networks. But I'm probably just in a mood.
Thom Hartmann spent a little bit of time on his show today discussing my Order 81 article, which was of course completely awesome. The mp3 of that is here. There's also a good and informative discussion going on in the comments over on AlterNet, and it's not too late to Digg the story if you find it worthy.
AlterNet has a story up today that I wrote about Order 81, which is the directive issued by Paul Bremer back in 2004 establishing the legal framework for the respect of patented genetically-modified seeds in Iraq. I'm all into patents, and am newly obsessed with the future of food, so had been intrigued by Order 81 for a while now. But alas, there hasn't been too much to learn about it; the great Molly Ivins called it "one of the 10 biggest stories ignored or under-covered by mainstream media."
Then I started hearing about how Indian farmers were killing themselves by the thousands, when I started digging into it, it turned out that they were responding to same sort of Monsanto-driven, genetically-modified agricultural system that Bremer had introduced to Iraq. GM seeds promise great rewards, but when crops fail and harvests are smaller than promised, farmers find themselves in far deeper debt than they would have been had they stuck with traditional farming.
So that's the story I wrote, making the connection between the patented seeds we introduced to Iraq and how a similar scheme in India is driving farmers there to death. Again, it's up now and I'm hoping that you'll read it and keep the conversation going by offering your thoughts in the comments. And if your so inclined, go ahead and give it a Digg. (I swear, I didn't put it there nor do I know who did.)
As for the image above -- I'm calling it a "story card." It was a design exercise for myself but also a protest against the fact that so much of what we on the political left do is visually boring or just plain ugly. But I tend to think in pictures, even though I prefer to express what I'm thinking by writing it down. Consider it a challenge to better designers than me to come up with better ways of showing to go along with all our telling.
Holy gosh, what a beautiful goal. I wish the video was of a better quality, but you can still get a sense of how masterfully Abby Wambach handled the ball:
(Oh, I won't spoil it for you, but here's the latest result from the USA vs. Nigeria game, the one that decided the winner of the Group B.)
Tomorrow we here in Brooklyn go to the polls to vote in the Democratic primaries for a handful of judicial seats. Ugh, what a mess Dem politics are out here in this wonderful borough -- who to vote for, this machine candidate or that machine candidate? Anyway, I pulled some of my research on the candidates and races into a post for the Albany Project. And please, while I know it stinks, if you live in Brooklyn, we do need you to cast a vote one way or another. This stuff is too important to leave to the people who muck it all up. The reason they dare to do it is because they know no one's paying attention.
In 1986, King County, Washington changed its namesake from William Rufus deVane King, former American Vice President and slave owner, to Martin Luther King, Jr. To reflect the county's new focus on diversity, inclusiveness, and progress, they recently hired a design team to come up with a new logo. A fascinating project, and a demonstration of how graphic design is used to create identity as much as it is to reflect it. Much more on it here.
If your heart doesn't melt watching the reunion of Christian the lion and his former owners, then I'm not sure you have one. The backstory is that two London blokes named John and Ace bought a lion cub from Harrod's in the go-go 60's. When the lion, then named Christian, got to be too much to care for, he was sent to live in Kenya under the care of George Adamson, a conservationist who you might know from the movie Born Free. About a year after Christian had been in Kenya, John and Ace went back to visit him. Here's what happened:
My friend Elisabeth happened to pull this up last night when we were sitting around watching Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel. Forget the latest commercial from this or that political candidate. For my money, these short pieces of video that are so powerful but that you might not otherwise ever see are what make YouTube so revolutionary.
Post by that title by yours truly up at the excellent Albany Project. I've been waiting for a while now for the EPA to release its assessment of how big and bad the lake of oil under Greenpoint, Brooklyn truly is. It came out today, and all in all, eh.
The big news is that the spill is probably around 30 million gallons, rather than the 17 million previously estimated, which makes it
about three times the size of the Exxon Valdez mess from back in the 1980's.
Beyond that, well, read the piece. And remember, when you visit Newtown Creek, leave your cigarettes at home:
The EPA finally released its long-awaited report today on the huge, huge lake of oil under Greenpoint in north Brooklyn. I'll have a post on it up at the Albany Project in just a bit, but this line on page 5 made me chuckle:
[T]he use of the Creek for recreational boating and/or swimming has not been reported.
The whole report relies upon third-party research. But ah, if they had instead used the patented Scola "bike around the neighborhood" research technique, they may have come across this guy, who I found living on a houseboat on the creek while tooling through the area one day:
I think his name may have been Ed. Wave hi to the EPA, Ed!
Simple and spare text-only book covers are the new black, people. The cover of Matt Bai's The Argument that we talked about the other day was one example, but I just quickly spotted three more while checking out the front tables of the Chelsea Barnes & Noble. It's a good clean look that puts the focus on the words, where it belongs.
Yep, I'm very into book covers. I'm cool clear down to my bones. Could I possibly be more of a dork? What if I were to, say, be so excited about going to see a documentary about a font tonight that I can hardly stand it?
I'm finally watching the Tivoed U.S. vs. North Korea Women's World Cup match and it turns out that American forward Natasha Kai of Hawaii sports some awesome tattoos. One covers her right arm from shoulder to wrist and she reportedly has about a dozen others.
It has begun! The U.S. Women's National Soccer team played their first 2007 World Cup match in Chengdu, China today, ending up with a 2-2 result against a mysterious North Korean team -- which was a bit disappointing but okay, considering that co-favorite and group-mate Sweden tied Nigeria. Abby Wambach and Heather O'Reilly both scored for the U.S. Video of the goals is supposed to be here, but I can't get it to work. I tried Firefox, I tired IE, I tried Windows, I tried on a Mac. Perhaps you'll have better luck. If you do, please let me know how you managed to do so.
In other results, Germany trounced Argentina 11-0! Dammmmn. Next up for the U.S. is a match against the strong Swedish team on Friday. (Photo by emdurso.)
I took this about a year ago. I had gone to the World Trade Center site to try to get a decent photograph for a short piece I was writing on architectural copyright and the WTC memorial, but had trouble getting a good picture of what amounts to an absence more than a presence. So instead I started taking shots of stuff along the periphery of the site.
Our latest adventures in book design brings us to Matt Bai's "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics." I think that the tracking -- the space between the letters -- might be set too high, and that the cerulean blue of the subtitle is somewhat dated. But otherwise it looks just how it should, like the cross between a text book and a manual. "The Argument" is meant to be your essential guide to modern Democratic politics, and that's just what it looks like. Nice job, Matt et al.
With we're on the topic, John Maeda, the associate director of MIT's media lab, explains here his process for designing the most recent cover of Key, the New York Times's guide to real estate you will never, ever be able to afford. (Via J. Kottke.)
I suppose I should have a go at saying something intelligent about this. I've been trying to focus some of my writing on labor and the union movement, and I once wrote a paper on Second Life, so the virtual strike by IBM's Italian employees seems right up my alley. Here goes. At first glance, a virtual labor strike seems ridiculous. Strikes are all about hitting the pavement, chanting witty refrains, pumping signs up and down, right?
Well, sure, but that's when the goal is to increase public pressure on the offending company and to keep other workers from scabbing. The IBM strike might not win a lot of pity points from the Italian public for losing their annual bonus, so picketing up and down Italian streets might not be the most effective means of protest. But by striking in Second Life, the Italian IBM workers are letting the tech-savvy company know that they don't appreciate their behavior, while raising consciousness on Big Blue's doings in everytechpublication that has picked up the story around the world. They're connecting directly with their target audience of fellow techies and company management, and doing it in a cheap and easy way.
I do wonder, though, if it's too cheap and easy. What are the IBMers losing? I mean, I don't think that they're actually not working during the strike period. And on the cost to employers side, nothing's going to grind to a halt as a result. So that's a bit unorthodox.
I have heard, completely anecdotally, that IBM can be a tough place to work -- in particular that they over-rely upon contractors to whom they don't extend the same benefits, vacations, and the like. So an interesting aspect of the Second Life strike would be, I think, where it might connect Italian IBMers to employees elsewhere around the world so that they might work together for more humane labor conditions.
And I was in the studio this go round, as opposed to sitting at my home desk on my cell phone. Smart choice. Feels more real then. Also, I only said "sort of" twice I think, which is what the mean person who sent me an email after the last appearance gave me a hard time about.
But seriously, I don't know what it is about radio that makes me so jittery. I can do conference panels and solo talks now without too much trouble. And I the one time I've been on television (NY1), I wasn't nervous a bit -- I was too enthralled with all the lights and cameras, I think. But put me on the radio, and I start talking a mile a minute, like they're going to turn off my mic in mid-sentence. I blame my New Jersey upbringing and all the fast talkin' it entailed. Must. Pace. Self. Oh well. Onward and upward!
Some said it wouldn't happen, but New York City's cab drivers have indeed gone
on a labor strike in large numbers, protesting the new GPS/credit card/ad monitors
that the city is requiring they have installed in their cars. I hope to have
some time later today to write a longer piece on it, but for now, more here.
I'll be going on the Thom
Hartmann show again tomorrow at 2:30 pm, doing his "Best of the Rest"
segment on the week's underreported news stories. (You can listen via live stream
here.) I was incredibly nervous last
time and got a mean email from a listener telling me that I used some phrase
like "so on" too much, and that as I'm "not British" I should
just stop with trying to be fancy and talk American-like.
So let's hope that things go better tomorrow! I'll be recording in the studio,
rather than over the phone, and that should help. I'm thinking that I might
talk a bit about how the big gay political groups like the HRC and NGLTF have
reacted to the on-going
Larry Craig situation...
On this, our nation's Labor Day (don't bother me with your talk of "it was yesterday" -- I don't want to hear it), I pulled out a labor-esque (or at least "Labor-esque") photo from the vault. Jim Deegan drove the colorful AFL-CIO bus all over Pennsylvania during the '06 election cycle, in support of Bob Casey, Ed Rendell, Joe Sestak, and other candidates. I met Jim in first in Allentown, where he kindly posed for me a long while until I got the picture right. When we talk about "Labor" this and "Labor" that, behind it all are men like Jim Deegan. And women too. But Jim Deegan's a guy. So how else could I have written that sentence?
I woke up this morning with a powerful taste for currry -- prompted, I think, by reading Tyler Cowen's work on ethnic eating in Discover Your Inner Economist -- and decided that I had to have some for lunch. I poked around the web early this morning looking for a decent place in Chelsea in New York City, where I knew I'd be spending the day. One of the challenges of New York, though, is that there's so much good food that it can be tough to sort through all the assorted reviews and recommendations you find online.
So I did two things. I emailed a friend of mine who teaches at the School of Visual Arts, also in Chelsea, and asked for her guidance. And then I posted this message in my Gmail chat line: "Desperate for a good Thai place in Chelsea."
Within a couple of hours I had an email back from my SVA friend with a recommendation: Spice on 8th Avenue, an instant message from a colleague-of-sorts from West Philadelphia also recommending Spice, and an email from another friend who I hadn't realized also worked in the neighborhood and has been searching for a good Thai place. The first email gave a great suggestion, the IM seconded the suggestion, and I was able to flip the recommendation over to my friend who had been looking for Thai. And I made plans to have lunch with her sometime to boot!
And the verdict? I'm a seriously less adventurous eater than Cowen. It can be tough to experiment as a vegetarian -- I ordered the crispy cabbage and vermicelli spring rolls with lime mustard sauce and the panang tofu curry, for $7 plus tax. The verdict? The spring rolls could have been more flavorful and the tofu crisper, but both the lime mustard and panang curry sauces were delicious. (Photo by christmascarol under a Creative Commons license.)
