get closer to nature

Times Square New Year's Eve ball goes green

ooo, trashy

i love it.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/12/31/trash.man.ap/index.html

The 35-year-old Berkeley caterer said he has saved every piece of trash he has generated during the past year to see how much garbage one person creates. In his case, it was about 96 cubic feet.

it is december 31

and i am at work.

pms and midnight steak

i was starving last night. had a hankering for a burger. 25 was kind enough to accompany me, in the sleeting rain, to the spotted pig. they were completely out of the burger, so i had to settle for the skirt steak which was not as satisfying as the burger.

i am definitely PMSing. jeebus help me.




www.gourmetsleuth.com/beefcuts.htm

an even better reason to visit Stowe this winter!

The Sound of Music is on right now. I know it's cheesy, but I love the movie, not to mention Julie Andrews.

I looked up the real von Trapp family. Did you know...

• In 1957, the Trapp Family Singers disbanded and went their separate ways. Maria and three of her children became missionaries in the South Pacific. Maria later moved back to Vermont and managed the Trapp Family Lodge until her death in 1987, at the age of 82. Maria von Trapp, her husband Georg, and Hedwig von Trapp (1917–1972), the fifth child of Georg and Agathe von Trapp, are interred in the family cemetery at the Lodge. The Lodge is now managed by Georg and Maria's son Johannes. It remains one of Vermont's most popular tourist destinations and also serves as one of the main concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. (Wikipedia)

• that Captain von Trapp's grandson Sam (son of Johannes) is currently living in Chile working as a ski instructor? He is very handsome and he hates to be asked about the movie because he considers that it is way too different from the real story. He says it's outrageous to see his granfather as the mean one and his grandmother as the goody considering it was exactly the oppossite in his eyes. (http://www.geocities.com/vlsmarble/rtrivia.html)

• The von Trapp's only made $8,000 from the Sound of Music, but they did get more popular as a result. (http://www.geocities.com/vlsmarble/rtrivia.html)

Maria von Trapp, photograph from her Declaration of Intention, dated January 21, 1944. (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)

Barron Hilton will give most of his fortune to charity

Barron Hilton has announced that he will pass on 97% of his estate to the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.

read more digg story

Kipp Nelson | Outside Online

Retired Goldman Sachs partner becomes philanthropist skiing bad-ass.

read more digg story

kicking off an almost new year

or something like that. whatever.

it is friday morning. i'm a little hung over, a lot tired, and swamped at work.

i just realized that i'm headed to costa rica in under a week. thankfully i checked my flight date today, or else i would have missed the flight. i'm leaving next friday. i thought i was leaving next saturday.

i do not have all the gear i need for costa rica. where exactly does one go to buy surfing equipment in the middle of winter in nyc?

my passport has expired. i have sent it off to philadelphia where it is in the hands of a passport renewal expediter. pray for a miracle.

my laundry hasn't been done in over three weeks. i wear my gym socks for at least two workouts now before throwing them in the hamper.

i am broke. i have no idea how that happened. a trigger happy holiday season? damn you, holiday sale emails and flyers. i was unable to withstand your garish lures.

what was i saying now? right. here's to kicking off a new year.

I can't decide

if I think this is cute or a whole bunch of bullcrap.

Julia Boorstin and Couper Samuelson
By JAMIE DIAMONDPublished:
December 23, 2007
It is a truth not universally acknowledged that a single man who meets his wife-to-be at the Sundance Film Festival is likely to make his proposal of marriage a cinematic one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/fashion/weddings/23VOWS.html?ex=1355979600&en=68351362b646a852&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Nin the cat retires

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/worklife/12/27/cat.retires.ap/index.html

oh touch screen technology

i know you are cool and hip and up to date, but i have managed to avoid you so far.  why must you invade my gym?

Equinox recently switched to touchscreen treadmills, and it's just straight up silly.  it's hard enough to push buttons while sweaty and winded, but i'm not required to gently tap at a very exact spot on a screen while sprinting for my life?  really?  i can already see it, and it's an accident waiting to happen.

Merry Christmas

Now who loves an evil beaver?

This was bizarrely amusing, so I thought I'd share:

Erin Fetherstone Heart Scarf

Thought this was cute for B.

Ballsy

every holiday season, a fedex truck or two gets knocked off. but, in midtown manhattan and then leave the cargo behind?

http://wcbstv.com/seenon/fedex.truck.robbed.2.615688.html

[A FedEx truck driver was accosted] while he was stopped at a traffic light at 47th St. and 11th Ave., two men approached the truck, pulled guns on the driver and forced him out of the truck.

The truck was eventually located by police around 5:30 a.m. in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Police didn't believe any of the contents inside was missing.

this is awesome

don't just listen to this, but actually watch it. the violin play is friggin amazin'.

it doesn't hurt that the hair and 'stache are wicked cool.

it's only the two of them, but they manage to bring out an amazing range and depth of sound.

Perlman & Zukerman - Handel - Halvorsen: Passacaglia



Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman in their youth, playing Handel's Passacaglia, arranged for violin and viola by Halvorsen. Video directed by Christopher Nuphen.

my mother

says she doesn't understand my blog. she wants me to write more about what i've been up to. i didn't have the heart to explain to her that my life is boring. i don't do much. i just surf the internet and read the news.

instead of reading my blog, she now just wants me to send her pictures of things i've been up to. my mother is a very demanding consumer of my content.

We are all savages

What's happening in Abu Ghraib and to American contractors overseas just reminds me that in the end, we're just a bunch of savages.

Remember the Stanford Prison Experiment done in the early 1970s?

Phil Zimbardo: "I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was "off." Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners."

Sound familiar?

Not much has changed in 2007.

Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR

This is so effed up.

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.

On the fifth day of Hannukah

25, KatieG and I went to the 5th night of Yo La Tenga's 8 nights of Hannukah extravaganza. Here's what 25 had to report:

Hi there. 25 here, guest-blogging for the day. Gotta pay the bills somehow, I guess.

Anyways, All Carbon asked me to report on the Yo La Tengo Hanukkah we went to on Saturday night. For those of you who have better things to do than obsess over critically acclaimed, moderately commercially successful indie rock bands (are there any other kind?), here's a brief history. Over the past 20 years, YLT (much like Sonic Youth) have aged gracefully into the elder statesmen of noise/art rock by continuing to release superb records and touring their a**es off.

After taking a year off, YLT has returned to their tradition of playing a series of charity shows on each of the 8 nights of Hanukkah-- all the shows take place at teeny-tiny Maxwell's in Hoboken, the band's hometown. Each night has a different special opener (typically a older band who doesn’t play live very often), a guest comedian and at least one unannounced special guest. And per tradition, every show ends with an encore set of cover tunes written by Jewish musicians.

Dew Claw (led by ex Hypnolovewheel guitarist Stephen Hunking) opened the show and also joined YLT during their set. I was relatively unimpressed-- as was our friend KatieG, who in a moment of auditory confusion conceded that she would have been much more excited to see Steven Hawking fronting a psychedelic indie-pop band.

Next up were a pair of comediennes, Sarah Vowell and Amy Poehler. Vowell (of NPR and "The Incredibles" fame) read a short piece that recounted the true story of a disheartened mapmaker on the Oregon Trail. Pretty funny in that NPR sort of way-- meaning of course that you laugh at all the jokes out of fear that the people around you will think you don't get them. Luckily, I had a head start as I had heard Vowell read the same story a year earlier at a different charity show.

Poehler (from SNL, Upright Citizen's Brigade et al) was great, doing a brief and largely-improvised piece on Kabbalah-- the whole time in "disguise" as Ira's (guitarist for YLT) aunt. On a side note, we also saw Poehler's husband Will Arnett (G.O.B. on Arrested Development) milling about in the crowd.

YLT was next, ripping through a 1.5 hour set that included songs from their entire repertoire, including their very first single from 1985. The show could have ended there, and everyone would have left happy-- but for the second night in a row, the band had a very special surprise in store.





Joining YLT for their encore was none other than Alex Chilton-- leader of the fabled early 70s band Big Star. Chilton and Big Star are often seen as the missing link between 1960s guitar pop and the new wave/college radio scene that developed in the early/mid 1980s. I don’t want to be hyperbolic (who am I kidding-- yes I do), but without them there would be no R.E.M., no alternative rock as we knew it in the 1990s. And given Chilton's reclusive tendencies, seeing him play live is the musical equivalent of J.D. Salinger doing a reading at your local Barnes and Noble.

Alex Chilton fronting Yo La Tengo playing the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale" followed by a Carol King tune-- it was like watching the evolutionary chart of indie rock implode in front of us. Watching them interact was nothing short of adorable-- there was obviously a mutual admiration and sense of deference on both sides. At least twice Alex asked "Is it OK if I count this one off?-- as if Ira would say no.





It was the perfect Hanukkah gift (sorry, dreidel-- maybe next year).

Note: Most pictures and youtube are from the Dec 7 show the night before.

How does that old saying go?

"Never trust a man with pigs."

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/12/09/canada.murder.trial.ap/index.html

Prosecution witness Andrew Bellwood had testified that Pickton told him how he strangled his alleged victims and fed their remains to his pigs.

Congratulations, you've been promoted!*

I got pulled into a room today and told about my promotion. Er, I wasn't even aware I was up for a promotion?

* The following Terms and Conditions apply. Promotions will affect changes in title and increased internal politics and backbiting. Expect no additional responsibilities, no change in job description, and no increase in compensation.