This is the coolest bike
in the world for short trips around town, the Strida.
Folds in seconds, relatively light, rolls when folded,
stores easily, grease-free Kevlar belt (instead of a
chain), able to fit easily on subways and buses. I've
had mine for almost 3 years and love it! Perfect
for NYC. Click here
to visit the site.
I let Adi take a look at the posting below before I put it up, as I was purporting to speak on her behalf. She's at work, so she replied thusly:
Hey,baby,
go ahead and post it, except add this:
my other main point is that simply the US should be more considerate of the current explosive situation the world is in. as the world's only superpower and, as such, having a better chance to at least try to improve it, the US should be more receptive to the comments of its allies. I know that diplomacy goes nowhere with Iraq and i'm sure the world would be a safer place without our Saddam, so I think I'd support a war to depose him, but only if it came as a result of the approval of other countries, and at least a vague plan of a new Iraqi government (including what would happen with Iraq's immense oil reserves, and then, unavoidably, with OPEC, etc.). I haven't seen any of it yet, certainly not in the NYT or The Economist.
I think right now the US is not in a position to act alone because it should see and acknowledge that many countries have problems with its bullyish approach. Instead of trying to better communicate what the US wants, the cowboy just bluntly expresses what's going to happen, period. "It has to be written in plain English so if the boys in Lubbock read it they should understand it" or something like it he said about the new UN resolution Condi Rice put together for him (he probably didn't get it first, either).
It's the attitude that's a huge problem here. I'm sure average America agrees with him. i read somewhere that most Americans actually believe that they're better than the rest of the world. Excuse me. i've always had problems with the US's proudly admitted "superiority" but like other sensitive people i was very sad about Sept 11. However, if Bush will continue to ignore his "friends" and will unilaterally go to war (which he will), and if this war will bring about terrorist acts via fanatics, I will blame Mr. President for them big time.
As Magyar Narancs's excellent Sept 11. anniversary summary by Arató András said it in the end: "If Bush attacks Iraq unilaterally, all that we, New Yorkers, can do, is run. Because one terrorist attack was enough for a lifetime, thank you."
"If you want to buy me a t-shirt, get me that 'I Still Hate George Bush' one," Adi told me last night, while I was buying a late birthday gift for my sister (Happy Birthday, Sue! I love you!).
My wife, in case any of you are new this site, is a furiner. She grew up in one of those old commie countries -- Hungary, to be precise. So she brings a different perspective to our domestic politics. Don't get me wrong, she cried her eyes out on September 11, but she's never bought into the whole rah-rah America thing, before or since. And I can hardly blame her. I grew up with old-school lefty parents, and five years of living in Hungary gave me some perspective on how the rest of the world sees our country (I accidentally first typed "company").
To her credit, she never once suggested we "had it coming" and reviled those who did. But she has always been disgusted by America's arrogance in the world, which Bush embodies (for her, anyway) to a T. My own feelings on this pending war and the general screwed up state of the world are so muddled, I try to avoid blogging much about politics so I don't sound like just another helpless whiner. I keep working over in my mind some statement of my stance on all of it, but I can't make up my mind what I believe, so I keep it to myself. Blogging about her opinion, however, is a different matter.
In particular, she wanted me to point out here that she is outraged over this story in the Times about Bush's new doctrine on the balance of world power, specifically the point that says "The strategy document will also state, for the first time, that the United States will never allow its military supremacy to be challenged the way it was during the cold war."
It's a strange discussion that entails. So, the better alternative would be to allow another military power to create the kind of polar tensions we lived through during the Cold War? The world would be better served by another country or set of allies having the military might to challenge the U.S.? Which ones?
No, that's not what she's saying, but where does the U.S. get off telling China or other sovereign countries that they do not have the right to build up their military to credibly defend themselves?
Even on the subject of Iraq, her biggest opposition to the planned invasion is that the sanctity of Iraq's sovereignty makes it wrong in principal for the U.S. to insist on regime change. For me, that argument doesn't hold a lot of weight, considering Saddam's record invading and massacring his neighbors and own citizens.
I'm reminded of a neighbor when I was a kid, I'll call him Mr. T. He was a stock broker and a drunk who regularly beat up his wife and at least one of his three sons, all my little pals. He also liked guns. More than once, he held the entire neighborhood hostage. On one occasion, the mother fled with the sons, and Mr. T. went on a binge for several days, walking around on the front lawn waving a pistol and shooting squirrels off the electric wires. Incredibly, the police wouldn't come out for several days. This was in the early '70s. They said that unless he actually shot at someone, they didn't want to get involved. I remember driving with my dad and having to duck down in the car as we sped passed the T. house. Eventually, the cops came out in full SWAT gear and talked him out. The family moved back in and life went on as normal until a few years later she finally divorced him and, incredibly, the kids went and lived with him. I wish the police had intervened sooner, frankly, before the nut shot at me, for example, or another neighbor. The guy was a menace and not entitled to the same good-neighbor policies as the rest of us.
Adrienne, however, may have a different point of view on sovereignty owing perhaps in part to Hungary's history, 1,000 years spent mostly under the knuckles of one or another unwanted oppressor.
The U.S. hawks see taking Saddam out as necessary prudence facing a mad ruler in a perilous technological age. Others around the world see it as humiliating paternalism, hypocrisy and a betrayal of the rule of law. Why, after all, is it okay for the U.S. to have been making chemical and biological weapons all these years, as we now know to be the case, but it's not okay for other countries like Iraq to do so? That's a tricky one. Because...we're good and their evil? That's about how Bush would sum it up, I suppose.
I still can't make up my mind whether I think the war with Iraq is a good idea or not, all things considered. It's a Sophie's Choice. Regardless of whether it's the right thing to do, I believe it's inevitable. Bush has gone too far with it at this point to back down and, idiot-asshole that he is, he's our idiot-asshole, and I'd still have to go with him in a fight against Saddam. I just wish the Europeans and the other allies would hurry up and get on board at this point, because it's going down with or without them, and we're all going to be much worse off if they don't come along. That's just the pragmatist in me.
What I will, say, though, is that I believe Bush is squandering whatever moral authority America still had with the world a year ago. America is supposed to represent a country based on the rule of law, not of men. But from Enron to Carlyle to Big Oil to Poindexter to Skull & Bones and the Bush family history and on and on, there are way too many special exceptions to the rules and legitimate, let's say "conflicts of interest" going on in this administration for it to be an example to the world of anything but empire building in the name of...of what, exactly?
Did you listen to Andrei Codrescu's poem "9/11"? It's brutal.
So yes, Honey, I'm with you on this much: I Still Hate George Bush, too.
Speaking of the Bulgarian Disco (below), which Hutz describes as "an alcoholic hedonistic jam...a really great hang for immigrant punks of all kinds," there is one more chance to see the awesome Yugoslav brass band Boban Markovic Orkestra in town this week, that is on Tuesday night at Mehanata (aka the Bulgarian Disco, on Canal and Broadway).
Despite my earlier plug for today's world music festival, I'm not going to make it, because I'm behind on a client project (because obviously I spend too much time blogging). My own plan is to catch Gogol on Sunday and Boban on Tuesday at the disco.
(For those regular readers who do not live in NY or don't give a hoot about the Eastern Euro hipster scene, my apologies for all the concert stuff, but you know, once I got started with it, in for a penny, in for a pound.)
You heard it here first, folks. The Village Voice's Tricia Romano now reports on the story I blogged about two weeks ago of Gogol Bordello lead singer ripping up the Bulgarian Disco on the last occasion of his three-year DJing stint there. Her interview with him is hilarious. Choice quotes:
"Maybe the bar is too close to the DJ'ing booth."
"I went Bruce Lee on the whole equipment."
"I get so trashed I ruin all my stuff."
"The most important part is that we're still friends, even though I do have a black eye."
Just a reminder, Gogol Bordello is at the Knitting Factory tonight and tomorrow. (I'm going Sunday.)
The Voice article mentions he has a new DJ gig every Friday at Dibrova Social Club, 136 Second Avenue.
You just can't make this stuff up. John Englers points out that Hooters is planning to launch an airline. "Fly Hooters: the airline with the best rack."
Peter Maass points out this piece in the Washington Post that explains how allies in America's impending war against Iraq will have first dips to help rebuild that country's oil industry. Seems pretty straight forward: first come, first served.
I just set up a Rich Site Summary (RSS) XML syndicating feed on my ExecutiveSummary.com site. Hurray for me. Took about five minutes (in case you happen to be my wife thinking I'm wasting more time when I should be working, as usual).
Adi just discovered Saturday's music festival taking place at the historic Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens (29-19 24th Avenue). $35 for entertainment starting at noon and going till 1am, including in the afternoon bands from Italy, Spain, North Africa, Lebanon and elsewhere, plus dance workshops and panel discussions, and then in the evening the amazing Boban Markovic Orchestra from Yugoslavia and environs, plus other bands from Turkey and Albania. There are also festival events Friday and Sunday at the Bohemian Hall, one of the last remaining outdoor beer gardens in New York City. Call for tickets: 212-545-7536.
Then Gogol Bordello, the infamous NYC punk Gypsy Ukranian cabarete band, at the Knitting Factory Sunday night. Should be FUN!
The sad update. So much for the "no harm in asking" philosophy. He's since corrected the redundancy, but not in my favor. I'll just have to blog harder, apparently. Meanwhile, I'll take solace in my unsolicited links from Matt Welch, Ken Layne and, most recently, Blogger.com's homepage (thanks to Steve Hall for pointing that out!).
;-p
Matt Welch points out TheHomesslessGuy.Blogspot.com. Seems legit, tho not sure. He's quite savvy to the ways of the blogosphere, and citing Charles Bukowski and Tom Waits as influences sounds like a joke, but then he also seems savvy to the ways of sleeping on the street. Provocative reading either way.
I actually had an idea for a while about starting a non-profit network helping put homeless street papers online, networked together across the country. Homeless could get Internet access and online training and pool their writing resources across the country for a kind of homeless news portal. Needless to say, it went the way of most of my great ideas -- back to sleep.
UPDATE: Said homeless guy, who's name is Kevin Barbieux, by the way, found my post and wrote me to assure me that he is, indeed, homeless and gave me a name at the national coalition for the homeless to check his references. I'll take his word for it. Reading his writings in more detail, it's clear he has an insight to life on the street that would be hard to invent. It's also clear he's an intelligent, compassionate person who writes better than many other bloggers. I wish him the same peace he offered me in signing his email.
Exhibit Q, Letter From Mom: A Nun, A Crackwhore and a Duck Walk Into a Bar...
Okay, I have one more favorite email snafu story (see below). A friend in the dot-com space has a twin brother who was a top project manager at Microsoft working on some aspect of the Internet Explorer team, back in the early days of the Justice Department's pursuit of Microsoft for monopoly stuff. At one point the brother has his email subpoenaed by the Justice Department. That is, all the emails he's ever written or received for the full three years he's worked at Microsoft.
Can you imagine? Having all your emails submitted as legal evidence to the government?
His biggest worry was all the really disgusting smutty jokes sent to him over the years on a daily basis by his mother. My friend (the brother) said her sense of humor was so vile he deleted them without opening them.
That and the messages his brother would send him (twin humor) to the effect of "Say, Bob, what was that you were saying on the phone last night about you and your guys at Microsoft planning to crush Netscape like a wiggly worm by any means necessary?" to which the brother would reply, "I have no idea what you're talking about, Sam. Here at Microsoft we expect our products to win or lose in the marketplace based solely on their merits to the consumer..."
Nick has a funny thing about a woman at PWC who mistakenly sent a reply when she meant to forward, and it's gotten her in a bit of hot water. Needless to say, email is one of the most dangerous inventions on the planet for how easy it is to get yourself in trouble with accidentally.
My favorite all-time email screw-up story, however, was told to my by my sister, who is a Unix wonk at...let's just say a big well-known company, where, among other things, she deals with managing internal email flows. So about four years ago she gets called in by security who's investigating a hum-dinger. She had to piece together what happened backwards, but the long and the short is some guy is recently married and composes a really hot and steamy message for his new wife -- really hot and steamy -- about exactly what he planned to do to her that night when they get home. So her email address is something retarded like mary.d.smith@xyzcompany.com, but he accidentally addresses it to mary,d,smith@xyzcompany.com (note the punctuation).
As most readers will know, commas in email headers indicate separate addresses. What he didn't know, however, was that Big Well-Known Company had a sloppy way of shorthanding internal email lists (before my sister got on the scene and cleaned it up after this mess) whereby they had huge lists of email for everyone in the company according to the letters of their last names. So he accidentally copies this filthy message to the D List -- everyone in the company whose last name begins with the letter "D." We're talking about a Fortune 500 company with thousands of employees.
Turns out one such D person was a female top executive, who thought the note was sent to her with maliciously intent and called security. The guy's first instinct was to pretend nothing happened, and it worked for a bit, as security and the exec first assumed someone spoofed his return address, because nobody could be so stupid as to send such a note from his own computer.
This is not apocryphal. My sister was actually suspected at first (by the dim-witted security detail who couldn't understand any of the technical mumbo-jumbo), as she was one of the few people with access to make such a spoof look convincing. Not sure what ever happened to the guy, but I've taken it as a great object lesson ever since on how careful you need to be with email. That said, I did just reply when I meant to forward, back to a client, no less. Thankfully, nothing as bad as any of these stories.
I suppose he's referring to me. I pointed out he had Werbach there twice and myself, well...I assumed it was an oversight. I mean, Werbach is good but...
I promise not to say thanks (were I given the chance).
One of their weird, local effects of Sept 11 '01 was the dramatic changes it wrought on the NYC subway system. I believe to a certain the MTA used the event as an opportunity to introduce some changes they had been previously planning, like the new W and Q lines (how cool is it to have a Q line?). But other changes were certainly out of necessity, like the closure of the South Ferry Station, running directly below the WTC site.
Among those changes was one that affected me, the discontinuation of the 9 line, which runs along with the 1 right by my apartment (close enough that if our windows are open we have to turn up the TV when the trains come into the elevated 125th St. station). The 2, formerly an express along with the 3, ran for the last year as a local in Manhattan, though it continue to split off to the east at 96th St., so it never worked as a local for me.
Anyway, I'll spare you all the details in service changes. Point is, in another sign of the city's recovery a year later, the 9 is back! The expresses are once again expresses and the locals are locals. Repairs were ahead of schedule and under budget. Take that, terrorist scum!
I made some changes to the left-hand margins last night (added a few goodies for you folks to buy and make me rich thru affiliate links), and today the site is moving like molasses for me. I never know if it's my browser acting funky, my servers, Blogger, other inserted code or what. Hence, your opinion is desired:
I owe a word of thanks to some driver out there in Harlem for not opening his door in my face as I bicycled past him an hour ago.
I'll make a not-very-proud admission here: I'm the kind of NYC bicyclists I suppose pedestrians and drivers sometimes shake their fists at, or at least their heads. Outwardly, it might appear I'm a bit reckless. Three years of Manhattan biking and no accidents, so I just trust my instinct and go with it. Truth is, I feel much safer biking here than I did in San Francisco, where the cars get going much faster, constantly run red lights and generally don't share the same unspoken code with the pedestrians and bicyclists as in NY, where everybody agrees to get out of each other's way just in time, and nobody will get hurt. By comparison, South of Market on a bicycle will truly put the fear of God in you every day.
Here it's really easier to predict what everyone else is going to do, and they just expect the same of you. That's why I don't feel like such a jerk biking the way I do -- I'm really about average as recklessness goes. But that's what the drivers and pedestrians all expect from bicyclists, that's our role in the traffic flow. Everyone knows we're going to run the light if it just changed, so they simply wait for us to do it. If we stopped and let the cars that had the light go, they'd be completely confused, expecting we were going to dart in front of them just as they started to move. It's really easier for everyone's sake if we just never slow down.
Except, as I say, once in a while I push it perhaps a bit too far, jumping up on the sidewalk to avoid a delivery truck and threading thru pedestrians on their own turf. It's fine if they don't see me coming and I'm gone in a blur and thru another red light and back into traffic before they know the difference, but once in a while they'll turn and see you coming and drop their groceries or suddenly cling to their baby stroller or something. (Oh, and needless to say, I'm normally wearing headphones, too; listening exclusively to NPR, as if that made it any better.)
So I'm publicly admitting to being a cad on wheels here in hopes that coming clean somehow evens out my karma, as I just got a big favor handed to me about an hour ago. Normally, covering my own ass is my first priority, but even at that, I'm mostly just enjoying the ride. So I was zooming down 125th Street on my way back from the post office, hugging the parked cars on the right closer than I normally do because traffic is tight and narrow on that street. Suddenly, some guy in a van inches in front of me started to open his door. I was just tune out enough that I didn't notice it immediately and would certainly have had my first taste of glass and steel in that all-too-common bike accident scenario. But the guy apparently looked in his rearview mirror just in time and checked himself, sparing me dentures and plastic surgery. We made fleeting eye contact, and I think he was as alarmed as me, just better reflexes.
I turned over my shoulder and gave him a hasty thumbs up, but I'm afraid he might have thought I was flipping him off instead of thanking him. So, in the highly unlikely event that he's a Bruner Blog reader, thanks!
Enenations Discovers No Biz Model in Free, After All
Back in June, I wrote about the introduction of a new comments service for webloggers called enetation, which I put on my own ExecutiveSummary.com site. Shortly afterwards, a reader wrote in with skepticism, wondering how in the post-1999 world a service like this expected to stay in business giving away all the great functionality for free. At that time, the guy who is behind the service, Rob Taylor (I had to use the Internic WhoIs to get his last name, as I couldn't find it at all on the site or in our email correspondence), responded to me, promising they were not evil spammers but just well-meaning coders (as I had expected), noting:
There will be a point where I will have to make enetation 'pay for itself', or at least not incur infinately expanding costs to run it, that is as your reader correctly points out its very 1999ish and hiding from reality if I just ignore the issue until its too late. Usually generating an income stream would be done via donations or some form of 'Pro' version for a subscription fee. However I hope to combat that by enabling users to 'donate' bandwidth and 'load balancing' the commenting system. I must state this is just an idea and an ideal at this moment, and it would be damn good if the community could 'run' its own commenting systems!
Meanwhile, I quit using the service on ExecutiveSummary.com after determining it was massively slowing down my site. I liked the feature, and a few readers have asked me to bring comments back, but I won't until I'm sure that it won't slow down the site like that again. (I'm planning to switch from Blogger to Moveable Type anyway, which I think has a comments tool.)
Anyway, the point of all this (yes, I have those, occasionally) is that reality has now caught up with enetations and it's too expensive to run for free anymore, so Rob sent out an appeal for donations to users this morning. I wish them luck. My advice: instead of "donations," just charge for the darned thing.
