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July 5th, 2009

12:08 am - Lost and found I'm pretty well-organized, because I have a lot of stuff. But my "system" fails me often enough. 14 (!) years ago, my brother sent me a cute drawing from the New York Times of a man looking at a painting in a museum. He thought it resembled me, and it did! I'm a little plumpier now, but all the basics are still there, and I really liked that sketch. I took the clip my brother sent me, made a copy of it, and then filed it somewhere. And of course forgot all about it. Tonight I was going through a bunch of files that had all kinds of sketches, drawings, pics etc, some my own, others I'd collected along the way. And there in the middle of it all was the original clip and the photocopy I'd made. Why did I put them together? Darned if I know. Anyway, I'm glad I found it. It's a nice little drawing by the artist Guy Billout.

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July 3rd, 2009

12:06 am - A good reason to read a paper issue of a magazine... ...it has the full text of this great piece that blames ALL of the speculative bubbles of the US economy since the Great Depression on...Goldman Sachs. A really interesting conspiracy theory! http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/the_great_american_bubble_machine/print Current Mood: cranky

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June 29th, 2009

12:03 am - Alphistia - Future History (Alphistia outlined in red) Latest scenario for Alphistia's founding: The Collapse was not noisy, nor violent, nor immediately catastrophic. It was more a loss of confidence, which grew and spread, and damaged all the levees and the dams of the world's economy and political entities. After a time, it seemed like all the world was knee-deep in water, and for many there was the dreadful feeling of drowning. There was no nuclear event, no horrible act of terror, no sudden change in climate. Simply everything got worse - especially much more difficult to maintain long supply-lines from China to the developed world using expensive and shrinking supplies of oil. The only superpower in the world had become increasingly self-isolated. It had bankrupted itself in wars of choice for decades, and had lived so far beyond its means millions of its inhabitants were stranded in isolated former suburban settlements without jobs, ways to heat or cool their homes, and no transportation except their own two feet. In Europe, the unloved union existed in name only, as the hundreds of local cultures cultivated their own gardens once more, and envied their neighbor's. In the least developed parts of the world, life went on much as it always did. There was minimal central control, and enormous corruption and great extremes between rich and poor. The Collapse in the previously developed world was made it more like the Third World with each passing year. People all around the world were more than uneasy. Many were ready to rebel, but against whom, and what? Others wanted to escape, but as had always been the case, the options were limited. Immigration to the only superpower was over and done with - many there would gladly go somewhere more livable. For those in "Old Europe", the goal, as always, was to preserve what they had, or what little was left. They were not in the mood for others to move in, and only a few would be willing to leave behind the remnants of the good old days. But in some other parts of the world, control was so loose, that national boundaries didn't mean much anymore, and some countries were even willing to sell off some of their own land to those with gold, oil, or promises of either. A few new communities had sprouted up this way. Were they weeds or the roots and shoots of young trees? Project Alphistia was a small group of people who wanted to leave behind the chaos and insecurity of where they found themselves, and move somewhere new to build a community according to the ideas and ideals they believed in. They called this hoped-for homeland, the "lesenum", and they called the country they wanted to create, Alphistia. Finding a place for the lesenum was extremely difficult, and their resources were as limited as their numbers were small. But finally they found a benefactor. In the chaos that had developed in world markets, with globalization in free-fall, big multinational speculative projects weren't happening much any more. One of the world's wealthiest men, Koltek Luvdov of the Collin Group, was prepared to give Project Alphistia land that he'd bought outright from Paragtina, a failing state desperate for cash. He and the Paragtinians had hoped to make millions with a water diversion project called Huldudal. That would have created artificial lakes and a vast area of natural beauty with holiday bungalows for the jet set. The Collin Group provided capital for the building of dams and bought out the few people who were living on the floodplains for the new lakes. But only two dams and one lake were created before Paragtina was overwhelmed by corruption and lost its own supply lines of cheap imported goods. And there was no jet set anymore. Luvdov was left with a large empty valley, and wrote off expenses in the hundreds of millions. He offered Huldudal to Project Alphistia with the hope they would succeed where Paragtina and world markets had failed. In Africa, several groups settled on land owned by Luvdov, and they had been moderately successful in feeding themselves and paying the Collin Group back for the land they received. Luvdov had his doubts about Project Alphistia, with its idealism and their attempts to speak a language they invented for themselves. But otherwise, Huldudal would simply rot away. Paragtina was in no shape to rescue it, and Luvdov was always ready to take a risk. Project Alphistia sent an old cruise ship loaned to them by Luvdov with their first pioneers to the Paragtinian coast. From there they went by small boat to Huldudal and began building the lesenum. The pioneers renamed the ship "Velduner" (meaning benefactor, after Luvdov). It brought many thousand of settlers to Alphistia, along with two old planes that were used when scarce jet fuel could be found. And so, Alphistia was born.

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June 28th, 2009

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June 24th, 2009

11:29 pm - Kitty and friend Art Day ;-)

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June 23rd, 2009

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June 22nd, 2009

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June 20th, 2009

11:49 pm - It was a golden age photos taken by me in 1979 I was young, once. It surprises me to no end how quickly 30 years has gone by. I was 21 in 1979, enjoying my college years at the University of Kentucky, and just beginning to explore the world I'd read so much about, but seen so little of. During spring break of '79, while my peers were heading off to Florida for spring break, I visited my mom in her hometown, Maysville Ky. After 3 days I started to get a tad bored, so I told her: "I'm going to go to Warshington on Wednesday." She was OK about that...Warshington is a little village just outside Maysville with a lot of early 1800s cottages and homes - a nice place for a daytrip. It was only when she saw my Amtrak tickets and I started to pack my grandma's gray samsonite suitcase (which I "inherited" from her), did my mother realize my eyes were on the bigger Warshington about 400 miles away by train. She knew her little boy was growin' up...much too fast in her opinion. Having grown up in the foothills of the Appalachians and descended from hicks, I had always pronounced the nation's capital as "Warshington". After all, we also warshed our clothes...Only once I moved to NYC did I drop that regionalism after being teased mercilessly for my quaint pronunciations...But in 1979, Washington was Warshington to me. I boarded Amtrak's Cardinal train in the evening and arrived next morning in DC at the once elegant Union Station. In 1979 it had been "renovated" as the National Visitor's Center, but there were buckets in the arrivals hall to catch water from the leaking ceiling, and the whole building looked neglected. There was even talk of tearing it down! Being a young and spry guy in 1979, I WALKED the 3 miles to the Watergate hotel from Union Station with my grandma's Samsonite suitcase! Along the way I marvelled at the marble buildings, the enormous and impressive Capitol, passing by the White House and then on to Foggy Bottom, passing Kennedy Center. Finally I got to the Watergate, which I don't think had a hotel at the time...not that I could've afforded it anyway. But I wanted to see the place that sparked the scandal that brought down Nixon just a few years before. The whole scandal fascinated me and was an early lesson in the perils of democracy - don't let crooks run your country. It was early afternoon by the time I got to the Watergate, and right across the street I spied (ha!) a Ramada Inn. So I went in and asked for a room from the youngish, gayish man behind the front desk. He was very kind when I asked if they had any inexpensive rooms. He asked where I was visiting from, and when I said Kentucky, he told me he grew up in West Virginia. And he said "for you, we have a special of $29.95 per night." Well now that would be like staying for free, but that was a lot of money to me then. But I knew it was a bargain, and I asked if I could have a room facing the Watergate. "Sure!" and a few minutes later I had an institutional hotel room with a nice balcony, and I could see the Watergate, the Kennedy Center, and Georgetown too. I was beside myself with the thrill of being in WARSHINGTON DC, the nation's capital! I went out and explored the neighborhood, and soon was walking around George Washington University's very urban campus and along the side streets of Foggy Bottom with its many rowhouses. I saw a man pulling the kind of grocery cart my mom used and which to me seemed extraordinarily effeminate. Kentucky in 1979 was not ready for men pulling grocery carts, and I thought it was so progressive and liberating that DC was. The guy (who was most likely a gay 20-something) walked into the basement entrance of one of the lovely rowhouses. Oh how I envied his life - living in a $300 apartment (I'd checked in the Washington Post how extraordinarily expensive Warshington was!). I hoped I could mirror his life a few years later. I went on to discover the Washington Metro a little bit later, because I wanted to see the National Mall close up. Washington had only opened its metro a few years before, and the network was still very limited in 1979, But it did connect Foggy Bottom with the Mall and some other parts of central DC, and I was extremely eager to ride it. I was so impressed with its stations of arched honeycombed concrete, the gliding trains with cushioned seats, carpeting and air conditioning. I had been in New York City the previous summer for a week and those were the worst years ever for NYC's subway - filthy, graffiti-covered, noisy, and not particularly safe. The Washington metro was very, very civilized! After touring around the original Smithsonian building, I walked over to the Capitol. I barged right in and traipsed up the marble staircase, and thought I'd pop into the House of Representatives visitor's gallery. I was practically wrestled to the ground by several extremely surly security people. Obviously you had to have a pass to go to the visitor's gallery and I had walked right through a barrier as if I owned the place. I was tossed out on my ear, red-faced and extremely angry that I was thrown out of the parliament of MY country (though I wasn't patriotic even then but had put my Alphistian citizenship on hold for a bit during those years). I can only imagine the scene that would develop if I tried to walk around the Capitol building now without the proper passes and vetting! I was extremely excited to go to the Library of Congress and it was open late, so after eating a thrilling sandwich in the basement cafeteria of the library, I went to the old-fashioned card catalog in the library. The card catalog was of course ENORMOUS - this was the largest library in the country, by far. I was obsessed with Iceland (then, as now) and looked through all those hundreds of cards for books in Icelandic and about Iceland in English. I filled out call slips for several and then sat down in the absolutely beautiful circular reading room. This was the life, I thought to myself. I should work HERE! The next day, I explored Georgetown. This was after having lunch at Luigi's, a pizzeria recommended in the "Washington Post Guide to Washington", my bible and Baedeker to Warshington. The pizza was delicious and I sat in an outdoor cafe. So European! So civilized! And Georgetown was much as I imagined Europe to be, as much as my imagination could allow for then anyway. I walked along the old C and O Canal, which you might conceivably mistake for one of Amsterdam's canals if you were terribly nearsighted, and the lovely side streets of Georgetown were (and are) filled with rowhouses that wouldn't look out of place in London. Then I walked up the hill to Georgetown University. By all rights, I should have gone there as an undergrad, according to my misguided guidance counselor. In February 1976 he discovered Georgetown University existed apparently, and tried to convince me to apply, even though I had been wrongly steered by him into NOT taking the SAT exam the year before, and the application deadline for Georgetown was already a month prior. Plus, even a hillbilly like me knew that Georgetown University was an EXTREMELY expensive university and how on earth would I be able to afford to go there? I didn't take up the guidance counselor's advice, and look at the no account I've become as a result... Did I stay an extra night in DC? I honestly can't remember, and my handwritten diary from then doesn't reveal that either. But a very interesting event did occur, that I wrote about: "The last few hours I was in Washington, I spent in the Library of Congress reading War and Peace, and doing some browsing. After about a half hour, a man about 26 or 27 years old sat next to me -noisily. A few minutes later he made a small attempt to talk to me, and for the next hour (!) or so, I noticed he was more interested in what I was reading than the papers he had in front of him. I only glanced at him once or twice, and now I can't really remember what he looked like. He did have dark wavy hair, dark features, a mustache, and dressed like a businessman, although he wore a sweater instead of a vest...He got up several times, and finally he packed up his papers. He went away for a minute, but returned to where I was and for at least 20 seconds stood next to me. I did not look up, so I can't be sure, but I think he was looking at me, hoping for some kind of response. I kept my eyes on the book, but he stood there. I know he wanted me to say something, I think he wanted me to go someplace with him. But I'm not sure." HA! Could I have played any harder to get??? Obviously I went home to Maysville alone. I could've ended up living on I Street though with my own little grocery cart if I'd played my cards right that night...

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June 15th, 2009

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June 7th, 2009

06:31 pm - Big Butter Jesus It's actually a sculpture made of styrofoam and plexiglass and fronts a mega-church in the Cincinnati suburbs. If you live in Sodom and Gomorrah, or New York City (they all have the same zipcode), mega-churches are practically an unknown phenom. Basically they are evangelical churches built to resemble shopping malls, seating thousands, and providing services inspired by Las Vegas more than the Bible. They are very popular in the suburban American South, Midwest, the West -- well just about everywhere in the country except for the big cities and the Northeast. "Butter Jesus" is the nickname for the sculpture because, it sort of looks like it's made of butter, and melting. I don't know if they wanted it to be a towering work like the Statue of Liberty, and ran out of money...or they wanted the effect of Jesus sinking into a pond. The ducks are a nice touch though. By the way, the building in the background that looks like a cheap motel? That's the church...

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June 6th, 2009

11:37 pm - Times Square as if people mattered I was reading Ursula K. Le Guin's book of essays "The Wave in the Mind" as I was on the subway home last night, and I was so engrossed in it, I missed my stop. So I got out at 50th and Broadway and decided to walk down to the Times Square station to take the 7 train for the rest of the trip home. It was a little drizzly after some heavy rain all day, and it was cool. Of course it felt like daylight, from all the billboards and lights in Time Square, although it was already 9:30 pm. I realized that I'd be walking through the new semi-pedestrianized Times Square, and I was curious to see what it's like. It's an improvement! Times Square feels much more spacious now, but not oversized. It's always been cramped with very tall buildings all up and down the streets, and there really never has been a "square" in Times Square, just Broadway crossing through the East-West streets and Seventh Ave. The area has always been a mess. The sidewalks were far too narrow, the streets were choked with traffic day and night, and until a few years ago, there were a lot of tawdry sex shops and unpleasant people mixing among the crowds. All that has changed - it's now primarily "family" safe entertainment area focused at tourists. I hardly ever went to the old or new Times Square - too touristy and too crowded for me. But now there is some room to walk around - actually to stroll a little bit instead of being jostled. Broadway from 47th down to 41st Streets has been closed off, and the resulting spaces are now carfree. Traffic still goes down Seventh Ave. so the Times Square is still full of cars, but now they're going straight up and down instead of being choked by traffic from Broadway. It's a good combo of traffic and people and makes for a lively mix. There are hardly any amenities so far in the pedestrian areas. It's an experiment, although all one would need to do would be to look at other great cities of the world, from Paris to Tokyo, to see that pedestrianization is preferable to the dominance of cars in central parts of cities. So hopefully the experiment will be declared a success in 6 months time and they'll put some permanent features. At the moment some super-cheap-looking plastic lounge chairs have been put in the spaces here and there. But it would be wise to allow some semi-permanent cafes and snack bars to open, to give people a reason to sit and chat and take in the feel of the space. Also some little performance areas for those people who go to Times Square either to harangue passersby to repent or to sing in front of a guaranteed audience. And trees! I don't think there is ONE tree in the whole Times Square area, but they provide shade and a humane touch to just about any environment. The decision to make Times Square more people-friendly was a good idea. I'm not so fond of Mayor Bloomberg, who I think is an arrogant bully and power mad, but he has some good ideas now and then to make the city more livable. And the ideas actually do seem to be implemented! In a city like NYC, which traditionally has been a morass of conflicting interests with massive layers of bureaucracy, the fact that any kind of change EVER happens is a small miracle. For example, there have been plans to build a subway line under Second Ave since the mid-1960s, and work was even started on it at one point, but only now is it being completed, and that won't finish probably until 2020! Well, it was nice to walk in the middle of the street in Times Square, and people weren't rushing around like mad - they actually seemed to be more relaxed than any other time I've been through there. I'll write a bit about Ursula's essays next time - such a wise woman, she is.

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01:06 am - good point "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." -Oscar Wilde Current Mood: amused

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June 4th, 2009

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May 31st, 2009

09:40 pm - Melodies of youth When I was 10, my voice hadn't cracked yet, and I was "musical". I was also a religious zealot, and loved the hymns of the Catholic Church. So it was a joyful Christmas in 1968 when I saw that a Magnus organ was sent to me from heaven, via Kresges. It was a 12 chord version and there was an easy play-by-number method to produce rather wheezy ersatz organ sounds. I didn't care that my social climbing aunt had a deluxe Hammond organ for her kids that had chords that mimicked a full orchestra! I had my Magnus 12 chord model, on legs. 41 years later, I came across the Magnus organs on the web. And of course they are for sale on eBay. By the end of the week, I should have my own Magnus 12 chord model here in Sunnyside. I got it for $19.95 and the seller tells me it still works like it's new. It's a table model, which is even BETTER because of its portability. I also ordered the National Anthems of the World songbook that I remember fondly from my organist days. It strangely lists the Soviet anthem as the Internationale, which the USSR dropped during WWII, but no matter. I definitely remember singing the Internationale as I accompanied myself on the Magnus. It's a hymn alright, and as I've come to learn, the lyrics are far more meaningful to me than "Salve Regina" or "Humbly, we adore thee". Since my voice cracked in 1972, it's all for the best if I don't sing at all anymore. But I'll bang out some chords on the Magnus, probably for about a week and a half. Then it can be one more large tchotchke in the house. More about the Magnus organs is here: http://www.dbeconline.com/magnus/

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12:53 am - Getting round Alphistia nhpeacenik and tjuice made comments in my last entry about the Trabant that were extremely interesting. So I thought I'd go into that a little in this post: Yes, Alphistia would have cars, and yes, they would be about the size of a Trabi, or a little bigger. Cars would be made of wood, wood resin, and/or recycled steel. There wouldn't be very many of them, simply because Alphistia would be small, compact, with a well-developed network of electric trains and bicycle/walking paths. The auto "industry" would be a collection of workshops in Alphistia's biggest manufacturing center, the city of Tava. Actually the name of the workshops: TAVE (Tava Avto VErkstaten) is a sort of pun - that word means "good" in Alphistian and is very similar to the name of the town, Tava. In any case, the cars made by TAVE would be powered by electric batteries. A network of battery stations around the country would keep the cars from running out of juice, the way gas stations allowed internal-combustion powered cars to go further when they ran out of gas. A driver would simply pull into a battery station, take out the low battery, and pop in a fully-powered battery. Cars also wouldn't be able to go faster than 30 miles per hour, which would probably drive the average male of the species nuts. But they'd live longer... Most daily transportation would be by foot, bicycle, or public transit. A country of about 300,000 people living in an area of well under 1000 square kilometers could easily create a road and rail network connecting everybody with everybody else in less than 2 hours. Alphistian towns wouldn't be full of high-rise canyons of buildings, but would be dense and compact, low-rise and full of trees. It would be easy to do the everyday business of life: shopping, going to work or school, or to parks, sports centers etc without going in a car. A short walk or bikeride, or a short bus or tramride would be the norm for just about every daily task. Trains between towns and electric buses from villages would connect everyone in the country. Cars would be available to rent by the hour or day (e.g. Zipcar is a model that currently rents cars by the hour in American larger cities). People could have their own cars if they wanted to, but only the wealthiest or most addicted would find the need to spend so much money and time on such a thing. There would be three motor vehicles available: the ELVE (elektro-vehatel - electric vehicle) - a mini-car about the size of the Trabant, made of wood resin, with two doors, seating 4 persons. the VEPRO (vehatel-progres - progress vehicle) - an advanced version of the ELVE, with four-doors, seating 5 persons. the UTILO (utility - small trucks and vans) - a goods vehicle, used mostly by farmers to get their goods to market, and businesses to transport their products. nhpeacenik mentioned in her comment the writings of Ivan Illich. I REALLY need to sit down with his writings. I know a little about him, but not a lot, but the essay that nhpeacenik linked to had some wonderful insights. Some excerpts below: source: http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/texts/energy_and_equity/energy_and_equity.html The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry. .............. Thousands of years ago, the wheel took the load off the carrier slave, but it did so only on the Eurasian land mass. In Mexico, the wheel was well known, but never applied to transport. It served exclusively for the construction of carriages for toy gods. The taboo on wheelbarrows in America before Cortes is no more puzzling than the taboo on bicycles in modern traffic. It is by no means necessary that the invention of the ball bearing continue to serve the increase of energy use and thereby produce time scarcity, space consumption, and class privilege. If the new order of self-powered mobility offered by the bicycle were protected against devaluation, paralysis, and risk to the limbs of the rider, it would be possible to guarantee optimal shared mobility to all people and put an end to the imposition of maximum privilege and exploitation. It would be possible to control the patterns of urbanization if the organization of space were constrained by the power man has to move through it. Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it. The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred. ..................... If beyond a certain threshold transport obstructs traffic, the inverse is also true: below some level of speed, motorized vehicles can complement or improve traffic by permitting people to do things they could not do on foot or on bicycle. A well-developed transportation system running at top speeds of 25 mph would have allowed Fix to chase Phileas Fogg around the world in less than half of eighty days. Motors can be used to transport the sick, the lame, the old, and the just plain lazy. ...................... A country can be classified as underequipped if it cannot outfit each citizen with a bicycle or provide a five-speed transmission as a bonus for anyone who wants to pedal others around. It is underequipped if it cannot provide good roads for the cycle, or free motorized public transportation (though at bicycle speed!) for those who want to travel for more than a few hours in succession. No technical, economic, or ecological reason exists why such backwardness should be tolerated anywhere in 1975. It would be a scandal if the natural mobility of a people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against its will. A country can be classified as overindustrialized when its social life is dominated by the transportation industry, which has come to determine its class privileges, to accentuate its time scarcity, and to tie its people more tightly to the tracks it has laid out for them.

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May 30th, 2009

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May 28th, 2009

01:12 am - Itsy bitsy car I saw a Smart Car parked next to a Hummer on my street on Memorial Day. Quite a contrast to one another, that's for sure. The Smart Car is the smallest auto sold in the US, but there have been many other mini-cars through the years. I just came across the Peel P-50, 1963 model, pictured above and below. Adorable! Perfect for single people! Is it safe? Of course NOT! No car is safe. They kill about 40,000 people in the USofA every single year...

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May 25th, 2009

12:26 am Today I showed a cyberfriend Sunnyside. Thomas is a polyglot and he was in NYC for a few days for a Celtic language teachers' conference. It was lots of fun to talk with him about conlangs (constructed languages - Alphistian is one of them), and language learning in general. Who knew that Sunnyside was the hub of the universe though? The conference was held at the Irish Center in Long Island City, the neighborhood adjacent to Sunnyside on the west, the closing session was at an Irish pub/restaurant in Woodside, just to the east, and Thomas was staying at a hotel right on the edge of Sunnyside near the Long Island Expressway. Who needs Manhattan when there's Sunnyside? An Alphistian town in my imagination is a bit like Sunnyside, a bit like Eugene Oregon, a bit like Vlissingen in Holland, a bit like East Berlin in 1990 :-))) Wrap your mind around all that! Brought together, it would mean the ethnic diversity of Sunnyside, the human-scaled atmosphere of a classic college town like Eugene Oregon, the gezelligheid (coziness) of Dutch everyday life, and the socialist utopianism that briefly existed for a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the reunification of Germany in October 1990. I could only showcase Sunnyside today though. Sunnyside is a quintessential NYC immigrants' neighborhood, and it is wonderful. People from all over Latin America live here, as well as Turks, some Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, Romanians, Koreans, and real Irish from Ireland. They share this traditionally working-class neighborhood with second/third generation Irish and a trickle of yuppie refugees from Manhattan and Brooklyn. There isn't a dominant ethnic group and that gives an even nicer feel to the place. We walked around the modest but pleasant tree-lined residential streets with low-rise brick rowhouses and small apartment buildings, and poked around a few of the MANY ethnic shops along Greenpoint Ave and Queens Boulevard. Sunnyside has its Starbucks, but it also has a LOT of small bakery/cafes - Colombian, Romanian, and non-chain American ones, and there are at least a dozen Irish pubs. We went to a wonderful Irish diner - the Rose, which has standard Irish dishes and a full traditional NY diner menu too. After some more walking we stopped in a Romanian bakery on Greenpoint Ave at 40th Street. May the gods bless Romanian immigrants. Old-fashioned bakeries like these aren't very common anymore, but Romanians have a sweet tooth, and where there are Romanians, there are wonderful bakeries. Oh, and the weather couldn't have been nicer, with only a slight hint of our usually torrid nyc summer which is only a few weeks away.

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May 17th, 2009

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May 15th, 2009

10:42 pm - Nice way to live A family in Pasadena California has taken advantage of the mild climate and extra-long growing season by turning their ordinary semi-suburban home into an eco-garden. The results are lovely, and they claim to grow 50-90 percent of their food on a tenth of an acre. Love the cottage, love the garden, love the idea :-) More about their experiment is here: http://www.pathtofreedom.com/urbanhomestead/ataglance.shtml

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