Our local Evel Knievel of the skateboard, Danny Way, went to China to jump the Great Wall at Ju Yong Guan Gate. He did it four times, three times with 360-degree spins mid-air. Rock on, Danny! What leapt out at me from the article, though, was this tidbit:
"A crowd of several thousand people, including China's ministers of extreme sports and culture..." I really want to see a picture of that minister...think he's got a Mao tatt and dyed red hair?
Depressing to read mathematical proof that my vote is meaningless and that every minute I spend going to and from my polling place will be more proof of sucker status than lounging in a bar waiting for my Keno numbers to come up. Since I'm still going to head down and pull that lever (or punch that chad or touch that screen or whatever they do here in San Diego) anyway, I'm clearly a pretty irrational person. And so are all of you good Brooklyn souls. However, there is a sliver of hope for us.
The vote-decision math says that in a 50/50 state like Florida 6 million people, any one vote has a 1/3071 chance of being the deciding one. If you can only influence your own vote (assuming first that you live in Florida), you're still just playing the lottery. But there are ways you can affect the numerator! You can drive to a swing state and register voters. You can give swing-state voters a ride to the polls (if you can get there on election day). You could forward that article to all the Republicans you know--especially the rational ones--and induce them to stay home.
Or, the best idea I've seen: call people in swing states who've raised their hands to the Kerry-Edwards campaign and give them information on how they can get involved with door-to-door canvassing in their state. What's great about this is the leverage effect--each of your successful calls could in turn create a handful of additional votes. Who knows, through heroic efforts you might just be able to have an influence over, say, 100 swing state votes? In which case your odds are no longer 3000-to-1 Powerball odds, but more like the 30-to-1 odds of getting dealt a pair of kings in 5-card stud. And the payoff if Kerry wins would be worth that gamble.
According to this AP story, a Yale scientist and her graduate minions are turning dozens of cute wittle Sony AIBO doggies in "street-smart, wily" packs of robots with upgraded brains, super-sensing noses and interactive butt cameras. They then sic these mechanical hordes onto waste sites, where the scientist claims they are scouting out radioactive particles for the good of humanity, but where we all know there are simply awaiting the genetic mutation that will allow them to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!
(um, assuming they had genes, that is...I wish someone could alert me to a technology that hybridizes robotics and genetics so that I can continue my paranoid trajectory...)
All of the Democratic contenders say they're for increased fuel efficiency. But among the three front runners they've got 11 cars and not a one of them gets over 30mpg.*
Plus, they're pretty damn boring cars to boot. Props to Dennis Kucinich for keeping it real in a Ford Focus and to the Reverend Al for styling in the back seat of a DeVille.
John Kerry
(2) Chrysler minivans (~16/23)
Chrysler PT Cruiser (21/29)
Chevrolet Suburban (14/28)
John Edwards
1998 Buick Park Avenue (19/28)
1994 GMC pickup (~18/22)
1998 Volvo S90K (18/25)
2001 Ford Expedition (14/18)
Howard Dean
(2) Ford Explorers (~15/19)
Chrysler minivan (~16/23)
Dennis Kucinich
Ford Focus (28/36)
The Rev. Al Sharpton
No driver's license
Chauffeur drives a 2001 Cadillac DeVille (17/27)
Wesley Clark
Didn't respond, but his son noted that they used to live in a trailer, so I'm thinking maybe a refurbbed and souped up 1985 'Vette (16/22).
*When they didn't give details as to model and year, I just picked the first one I saw on the fuel efficiency web site. I'm lazy that way. Sorry if it misrepresents anything.
Not 'an' Old Dirty Bastard, mind you, the Ol' Dirty Bastard aka Dirt McGirt aka Big Baby Jesus. I would never have expected to be asked that question in anything other than the hypothetical mode, but New York's a funny place.
A rental agent held an open house for our upstairs apartment in Brooklyn, and called us to say that Russell Jones, a rapper recently signed to Roc-a-Fella, was interested in our place (he must like parquet floors, I guess). She wanted to know if we would be willing to meet with him, his manager, his parole officer (!) and a VH1 camera crew to discuss terms. The only catches were that he needed to have an answer that night and he had to meet before his 9PM curfew. She emphasized that he was intent on straightening out his life and knew that the slightest violation of his parole (i.e. drinking, failing a drug test, skipping curfew) would return him to the criminal justice system. In addition, his mother would sign the lease and he'd pay a year's rent in advance. Really, she said, he's just a guy looking for a second chance.
I'll let you know what we did in the comments, but first I'd like to hear from the collective Ish as to what you would do in such a hypothetical (to you) situation.
| Fort Greene | New York City | Old Dirty Bastard | Real Estate | Reality TV
I'm not one to follow the intricacies of top level domains, registrars and their interNICene conflicts too closely, but I was surprised to see in today's paper that Bloomberg & Pataki had announced the launch of a site www.lowermanhattan.info to keep the public updated on developments in that area. I had thought that these alternatives (like .name and .biz) to the old stalwart domains would be the purview of scams, spam, and the like.
Looking into the .info TLD a little more, I found that it had already been used for a WTC Relief site and the MTA. In fact, these are the only prominent .info users highlighted on the Afilias global registrar site that seem to doing something beyond staking out the .info turf to protect their brands. I don't know if the usage of .info by New York City governmental organizations is a harbinger of the future importance of this domain or just some quirk of bureaucracy (e.g. the MTA said cited as a motivation for its choice the fact that its old URL, www.mta.nyc.ny.us, was too hard to remember). But I did find it a little too eerily appropriate that .info's open registration and start-up period began on September 12th.
I know this site is lousy with Elis, so I thought some of you might share my sorrow in reading of the passing of (Yankee Doodle owner) Lew Beckwith after an 18-month bout with cancer. I never became a 'regular' at the Doodle, but I went there enough to admire Lew's dedication, his efficiency at the grill, and the long, hard hours of work he put into the place. There were rumors a few years back that the Doodle would go the way of the dodo when Lew retired in 2000, but instead his son Richard has taken over. Be sure to stop in the next time you're in the vicinity of New Haven and have a pig and a burger for Lew. It's still better food, at cheaper prices, with faster service than anywhere else.
| New Haven
From the folks who brought you the Disney Boycott, Creationism in public schools, and opposition to homosexual Boy Scout leaders, comes the latest ratcheting up of Muslim bashing in U.S. public discourse.
It seems speaker and former SBC president Rev. Jerry Vines blamed many of the country's problems on religious pluralism saying, "Islam is not just as good as Christianity...Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives -- and his last one was a 9-year-old girl." A spokesman for the SBC said that while he did not "want to give the sense that we are not sensitive or caring about this issue," the SBC wouldn't renounce the statement, which is seems to me does just precisely that. Taking the whole thing to another level, current SBC president Rev. Jack Graham asserted that, "[Vines'] statement is actually a statement that can be confirmed," which to me implies a level of literalist belief in ancient texts that only a radical fundamentalist could love.
George W. Bush was scheduled to address the SBC conference this morning. No word that I can find on whether or not he took a principled stand condemning Vines' statement, but I wouldn't put money on it.
Incidentally, among the SBC's strongly worded resolutions on matters of faith and public conscience (many of which, it must be said, are worth praising), was a rather mundane gem condemning second-class postage rate hikes and this one terming beauty contests and bathing revues "evil and evil only"(perhaps the only feminist issue in which the SBC is in agreement with NOW).
I felt out-of-sorts this weekend. Didn't know why. Something...just...seemed...off. After a bit of soul-searching, I realized what it was! Here it has been three months since the launch of "IT", of "Ginger", of the "Super Scooter", er, I mean the Segway Human Transporter (it's not a scooter, it's not a scooter), and I haven't heard a breath of late about the device that will be revolutionizing human transport like nothing since the combustion engine.
I was excited to see that the revolution is afoot. Police, as part of their ongoing drive of the past 10 years to make sure that their officers look completely ridiculous on patrol, are giving it a try as a way to make Faneuil Hall and Manchester, N.H. safer places. Meanwhile, Amazon.com is auctioning the first three builds of the consumer model, and the price tags are already hefty with a month to go. Okay, so its not July 1776 or October 1917 just yet, but I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for the first one gliding down St. Marks nevertheless.
| Inventions | Segway | Transportation
