David Halberstam R.I.P.
Dawkins v. O'Reilly
summer of love on now ch 13 / american experience
i was saying the other night how hard it was to roast beans in manhattan. well, it took an engineer to figure it out. now all he needs to do is learn how to ice a latte and he'll be in business.
The proposal for “congestion pricing,” which City Hall believes would reduce traffic and auto emissions while raising money for transportation projects, has already been met by harsh criticism from drivers and some officials outside Manhattan.

Other proposals in the plan, dubbed PlaNYC by the mayor’s staff, range from building huge capital projects and creating government authorities to implementing relatively benign initiatives in housing, transportation and land use.

One proposal calls for investments of $200 million a year from both the city and state to create a financing authority that would assure the completion of major projects like the Second Avenue subway. New authorities, with representatives from the city, state and private industry, would push for improved energy efficiency in new buildings and for the replacement of energy-guzzling power plants.

The city also would encourage the construction of platforms over railyards and highways to create land for housing. In addition, the plan would open 290 schoolyards as playgrounds, eliminate city sales taxes on energy-efficient hybrid vehicles, increase the number of bike paths and cultivate mussels to suck pollution out of the rivers.

Much of the plan, including its most costly proposals, would require state approval. Gov. Eliot Spitzer did not attend Mr. Bloomberg’s address, although another governor — Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, who appeared via videotape on two large screens — introduced the mayor.

Governor Spitzer, in a brief statement released late yesterday, said: “The mayor has released a comprehensive plan with admirable goals, especially the commitment to reduce energy consumption, and we look forward to reviewing the plan.”
The characters who populate Savage's pages have never been linked before in a single story, if only because they span the entire class spectrum. The roll call of adolescent groups includes abandoned vagrant youth; semi- organized urban gangs like New York's Bowery Boys, Dead Rabbits, and the Montgomery Guards; the hobo children armies of the Depression; and the Wild Cliques of homeless youth in the outer rings of 1930s Vienna. Others were middle class and bohemian, like the neo- pagan ramblers who joined the Wandervogel in fin de siécle Germany, Woodcraft Indians in the U.S., and the Woodcraft Folk in England. Also making an appearance are upper-class factions like the Decadents, devotees of Oscar Wilde's delicious aesthetics, the flappers (whom Zelda Fitzgerald decided were "merely applying business methods to being young"), and the Bright Young People of London's 1920s gilded youth. The more familiar subcultures in Teenage include zoot suit–clad pachucos, Parisian zazous, British spivs, and American bobby-soxers. Savage details how the media, with tireless consistency, stoked moral panics about the threats to civilization posed by wayward youth, coining unsavory labels like "hooligans" and "scuttlers" (the more clinical term juvenile delinquent was in use by the 1810s), or more sensational ones like "the Apaches," applied in 1900 to publicity-seeking French ruffians who adopted a form of Indian pidgin speech.
psychological spaces of manhattan
diner lingo
Torboto
calling george washington
lewitt_redwall

LeWitt at Dia
"Immense coils of hot, electrified gas in the Sun's atmosphere behave like a musical instrument, scientists say."
a strawberry as big as the ritz
Coming up on Animal Planet: Spring Watch USA. And with warm weather finally coming in spring should be busting out all over in the next few days.
Whale in Brooklyn.
Get Skinny #7

Its time to get back on tract here after too much fun eating and free my body of decades of toxin.......Master Cleanse Take #2, I hope to beet the last one of 6 days by at least one day......Than its spring/summer eating like a pig (Veggie Heaven) till we resume the cleaning this September.....

Tasty treats are starting to pop up out of the ground....

Locanda Vini Olii which has always been at the top of my NYC eating charts from day one.......spring fava's, spring chich pea;s (new to me), asparagus blanco, than pasta pasta pasta, insanely great steak (Italian low fat breed from Montana)

While some people say the best pizza in NYC could be this new-ish place on 12st?? First Ave near 12th??....My fav is at The Modern's Tarte Flambee but in a micro thin version, stunning, at $12 and easy to eat it solo (with a beer), its a $25 snack spot w/ tax and tip, so its dear but its living!!

Bar Masa's tofu salad is another $12 treat that I cant get out of my head (mouth).......greens, raisons, pine nuts, is this Japanese, but than add the insane tofu, and the wasabi dressing = WOW!!!....the deep fried spring flowers rock too
VC-1 can be licensed, but virtually no royalty cash goes to Microsoft

Microsoft claimed to have invented Windows Media Video 9, and tried to undermine the acceptance of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 by saying WMV9 would be cheaper. (They also said it was better, which was, how to say, "optimistic".)

In an attempt to broaden the acceptance of WMV9, Microsoft went to SMPTE to have it turned into an open standard, called VC-1. In the process, it became clear that WMV9, um, "shared" some technology with AVC. Almost all of the essential patents belong to other companies.
I'm still not exactly sure what to make of James Kunstler, but I can definitely agree with him that Tom Friedman is an idiot.
Bolton encounters an actual interviewer. Hilarious.
Fox's new show, Drive has crappy dialog, lame character development, and Fla. looks strangely similar to San Bernardino County, mountains and all.
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.
jim.....fyi

The Jason Neroni files: leaves Porchetta citing irreconcilable differnces, reportedly finds himself the subject of an arrest warrant, says it's all good, gets arrested, and finally, is released with a court date, but not before getting the full treatment.

(skinny)

couldnt pass up this headline number three on the soy milk charts from the good folks at wingnut daily:

Soy is making kids 'gay'
Why Apple can't sell movies