Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Sunday, January 06, 2008
2008 Resolutions
1. Sleep more regular hours. Ideally midnight to eight. The idea is to wake up earlier.
2. Drink less. Nothing radical, but I'm cutting back on the mid-week beer.
3. Don't be an energy suck. Add energy to a room. Be excited to be wherever you are.
4. No more sidewalk rage. In California, I was an enraged driver. Walking has replaced driving here. Slow-walkers, weavers, stallers - I hate them all. No more.
5. Say "sorry" more.
6. Don't be lazy. Write, create, plan, organize, enjoy - those are fine verbs. TV, internet procrastination - less of that.
7. Become an Elite Yelper. I love the website and think it's a good way to proactively explore what the city has to offer.
I think 7 will go unfulfilled. 1-4 and 6 are the kinds of resolutions I will progress on for a while, but will forget by April. 5 I think I can do - I'm a pretty polite guy as it is.
2. Drink less. Nothing radical, but I'm cutting back on the mid-week beer.
3. Don't be an energy suck. Add energy to a room. Be excited to be wherever you are.
4. No more sidewalk rage. In California, I was an enraged driver. Walking has replaced driving here. Slow-walkers, weavers, stallers - I hate them all. No more.
5. Say "sorry" more.
6. Don't be lazy. Write, create, plan, organize, enjoy - those are fine verbs. TV, internet procrastination - less of that.
7. Become an Elite Yelper. I love the website and think it's a good way to proactively explore what the city has to offer.
I think 7 will go unfulfilled. 1-4 and 6 are the kinds of resolutions I will progress on for a while, but will forget by April. 5 I think I can do - I'm a pretty polite guy as it is.
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
A Champainful Morning
Actually it wasn't that bad. I woke up at 9, took a couple Motrins, and went back to sleep for a while.
I haven't written in a while. But I'm still not as absent a blog minder as Joshua P. Smith. (Latest post: Aug. 23.)
The biggest news is that I co-wrote a cover story for Newsweek International. Read it here.
Also, one of my New Year's Resolutions is to become an Elite Yelper. Help me out by rating my reviews highly and showering me with compliments. You can find my most recent scribbles here.
Other New Year's Resolutions: to keep better sleep hours (i.e. wake up earlier). Also to drink less.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Mafia, Inc.
I have some new responsibilities at Newsweek, and part of them entail developing web-only content to help build the site. My biggest foray to date just went online. It's a photo gallery about how organized crime both benefits from and is challenged by globalization - just like traditional businesses. It's tied to a story by Christian Caryl in this week's magazine, on the yakuza's "corporate restructuring."
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Santacon 2007
No one heeded my advice to come to Santacon this year, and even before the event was over, I was receiving regretful emails: "Just passed a horde of Santas...Looks like so much fun! So sad I didn't come." Well in this case I do not hate to say "I told you so," in fact I relish the opportunity. Although the altruist in me does hope your Saturday afternoon at The Container Store was an equally unique event.
Anyway, once again it was just Alisa and me, but we had a blast anyway. We met up with the group at Spring and Greenwich. At the bodega, a line of Santas snaked through the store, all waiting to buy beer or breakfast bagels. Later, a Santa confided to me that he had stolen a six-pack at that store. I chided him, "That's not in the Christmas spirit." He replied, "But it is in the spirit of Santarchy." And so it was.
We made our way east across Spring street to the E train.
We passed a Christmas tree lot, and Alisa and I gave candy canes to the little ones, who were very confused and possibly frightened by the sheer number of Santas, most of which already had a good buzz on. Their parents were good sports.
The train was, of course, crowded with Santas.
We got off at Times Square. Last year, Times Square was my favorite part. Five hundred Santas walking through the Tourist Mecca of the Western World is an awe-inducing spectacle. We stopped traffic, gave away candy, impressed Midwesterners with our sheer joie de vivre.
This time around, Alisa and I had gotten ahead of the main group, so it didn't have the same impact. But there were still choice moments like this one:
We paused at a bar called Connolly's. I believe it was chosen by the event's organizers merely because it was four stories and could host hundreds of drunken rabble-rousers. And a rabble we did rouse. Here's a shot of the street from my third-floor vantage point:
This is as good a point as anyway to show off some of the day's curiosities. Here's Alisa with a couple Alfs/Elves.
The guy pictured below was a Spanking Santa, who was giving random people wallops on the bottom.
But definitely the costume (contraption?) that received the most gawking was this bizarre cross between Santa's sleigh and an S&M film set gone horribly wrong:
Anyway, after Connolly's we walked across Midtown to Grand Central Terminal, which was by far the best stop of the trip. When Alisa and I first arrived, there was already a horde waiting for us:
But by the time we left, the place was simply Santa-ridden.
The many tourists that flock to Grand Central loved it. After all, we are a Seussian childhood fantasy come to life. Alisa and I had our pictures taken with a couple lovely women from South Carolina. They were very nice, even when I mistakenly placed Charlotte in their state and Alisa mistook them for Australians.
Afterwards, back on the subway...
...where we ran into Meredith, Josh's friend from Washington, DC. Which is doubly weird, because a) I hardly run into friends from New York on the street and b) I was wearing a Santa costume. But Meredith, too, loved our joie de vivre, and even tolerated the random Santa who was unabashedly hitting on her. (In the subway! In a Santa costume!)
We got off at Astor Place and made a ruckus. This taxi driver took note.
After getting some dumplings at The Dumpling Man on St. Mark's Place, which is my new favorite cheap food spot, we congregated in Tompkins Square Park. We noticed a parked Red Bull promo car nearby. Alisa and I were some of the first on the scene.
But then other Santas noticed the car and started piling in...
...until it was something of a free-for-all. Thinking this was great publicity, and very much in the nature of the Red Bull image, I said to one of the Red Bull girls, "You ought to get a promotion for this." "Or fired," she replied.
Last picture: Alisa with an unidentified Jewish character.
Afterwards, I played some drunken Buck Hunt at a nearby bar (I did horribly, except for the bonus round), and then got irrationally mad at Alisa for wanting to go home at four. Sorry about that.
Anyway, once again it was just Alisa and me, but we had a blast anyway. We met up with the group at Spring and Greenwich. At the bodega, a line of Santas snaked through the store, all waiting to buy beer or breakfast bagels. Later, a Santa confided to me that he had stolen a six-pack at that store. I chided him, "That's not in the Christmas spirit." He replied, "But it is in the spirit of Santarchy." And so it was.
We made our way east across Spring street to the E train.
We passed a Christmas tree lot, and Alisa and I gave candy canes to the little ones, who were very confused and possibly frightened by the sheer number of Santas, most of which already had a good buzz on. Their parents were good sports.
The train was, of course, crowded with Santas.
We got off at Times Square. Last year, Times Square was my favorite part. Five hundred Santas walking through the Tourist Mecca of the Western World is an awe-inducing spectacle. We stopped traffic, gave away candy, impressed Midwesterners with our sheer joie de vivre.
This time around, Alisa and I had gotten ahead of the main group, so it didn't have the same impact. But there were still choice moments like this one:
We paused at a bar called Connolly's. I believe it was chosen by the event's organizers merely because it was four stories and could host hundreds of drunken rabble-rousers. And a rabble we did rouse. Here's a shot of the street from my third-floor vantage point:
This is as good a point as anyway to show off some of the day's curiosities. Here's Alisa with a couple Alfs/Elves.
The guy pictured below was a Spanking Santa, who was giving random people wallops on the bottom.
But definitely the costume (contraption?) that received the most gawking was this bizarre cross between Santa's sleigh and an S&M film set gone horribly wrong:
Anyway, after Connolly's we walked across Midtown to Grand Central Terminal, which was by far the best stop of the trip. When Alisa and I first arrived, there was already a horde waiting for us:
But by the time we left, the place was simply Santa-ridden.
The many tourists that flock to Grand Central loved it. After all, we are a Seussian childhood fantasy come to life. Alisa and I had our pictures taken with a couple lovely women from South Carolina. They were very nice, even when I mistakenly placed Charlotte in their state and Alisa mistook them for Australians.
Afterwards, back on the subway...
...where we ran into Meredith, Josh's friend from Washington, DC. Which is doubly weird, because a) I hardly run into friends from New York on the street and b) I was wearing a Santa costume. But Meredith, too, loved our joie de vivre, and even tolerated the random Santa who was unabashedly hitting on her. (In the subway! In a Santa costume!)
We got off at Astor Place and made a ruckus. This taxi driver took note.
After getting some dumplings at The Dumpling Man on St. Mark's Place, which is my new favorite cheap food spot, we congregated in Tompkins Square Park. We noticed a parked Red Bull promo car nearby. Alisa and I were some of the first on the scene.
But then other Santas noticed the car and started piling in...
...until it was something of a free-for-all. Thinking this was great publicity, and very much in the nature of the Red Bull image, I said to one of the Red Bull girls, "You ought to get a promotion for this." "Or fired," she replied.
Last picture: Alisa with an unidentified Jewish character.
Afterwards, I played some drunken Buck Hunt at a nearby bar (I did horribly, except for the bonus round), and then got irrationally mad at Alisa for wanting to go home at four. Sorry about that.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Return to Innocence
Hello. How are you?
It's been a while, I know, and for that I'm sorry. Torres recently posted for the first time in eons/aeons/ions and threw her voice out into the echoing abyss: "Anyone still out there?" I won't ask the same because I won't like the response. I've always hated the sound of my own voice. But when/if I work for NPR or Marketplace or This American Life, I'll have to cope.
Last night, saw Southland Tales, which towards the end had this stunning fever dream of a scene where Sarah Michelle Gellar and her porn star friends dance in slo-mo on a stage in a zeppelin while Moby's "Memory Gospel" massages ear canals and an ice cream truck floats into the sky. It was a beautiful scene, but if you're getting excited for the movie don't, cause it sucked.
Elsewhere in life. I visited my brother in Middletown, CT but had no time for cemeteries, and the foliage was lackluster. He's threatening to drop out of school and my parents don't know what to say.
In Pennsylvania, Alisa and I met a superhero dog by the name of Brogan, an Aussie shepherd/lab mix. Tell him to "walk" and he'll take you on a 1.5-mile loop through the forest. Then I hit a few golf balls with a six-iron and Brodie took off like a flash of mottled black-and-brown.
Halloween was all about the dry ice.
I'm working through the first season of "The O.C." Don't judge me.
It's been a while, I know, and for that I'm sorry. Torres recently posted for the first time in eons/aeons/ions and threw her voice out into the echoing abyss: "Anyone still out there?" I won't ask the same because I won't like the response. I've always hated the sound of my own voice. But when/if I work for NPR or Marketplace or This American Life, I'll have to cope.
Last night, saw Southland Tales, which towards the end had this stunning fever dream of a scene where Sarah Michelle Gellar and her porn star friends dance in slo-mo on a stage in a zeppelin while Moby's "Memory Gospel" massages ear canals and an ice cream truck floats into the sky. It was a beautiful scene, but if you're getting excited for the movie don't, cause it sucked.
Elsewhere in life. I visited my brother in Middletown, CT but had no time for cemeteries, and the foliage was lackluster. He's threatening to drop out of school and my parents don't know what to say.
In Pennsylvania, Alisa and I met a superhero dog by the name of Brogan, an Aussie shepherd/lab mix. Tell him to "walk" and he'll take you on a 1.5-mile loop through the forest. Then I hit a few golf balls with a six-iron and Brodie took off like a flash of mottled black-and-brown.
Halloween was all about the dry ice.
I'm working through the first season of "The O.C." Don't judge me.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Joel Stein is Plagiarizing Me
Okay, the title's not really true, but there are some amazing similarities between Stein's recent piece in Time and my last feature in Stanford magazine. First of all, they're both about Brian Wansink and his work on the psychology of eating at Cornell University, and since mine came out about a month ago and Stein is a Stanford grad and probably gets the alumni magazine, it's reasonable to assume that my article influenced him, and may have even introduced him to Wansink and his research.
And then there are the little parallelisms in syntax and phrasing. I tell a story about Wansink deceiving theater-goers into eating stale popcorn, and then revealing the trick, and say, "And Wansink took delight in pointing this out to them." Stein tells how Wansink fooled professional bartenders trying to pour same-sized shots into different-sized glasses, and then surmises, "All of this delights Brian Wansink."
Me describing Wansink: "...with his high brow, rimless glasses and mischievous smirk, [he] looks a little like a high school chemistry teacher."
Stein describing Wansink: He "has all the nerdlike characteristics you'd expect from a mad professor."
Elsewhere, I note the charming congruence in the fact that his wife studied the culinary arts at France's Le Cordon Bleu; so does Joel.
Despite what you might think so far, I'm not mad. You've heard the old trope, imitation is the sincerest form of blah blah blah. And I know that Stein isn't a plagiarist - I've met him, he's a decent guy, and journalism is a giant echo chamber anyway - we all get our best ideas from things that other people have already written. So color me flattered. Nice piece, Joel. Now thank me by taking me to lunch.
And then there are the little parallelisms in syntax and phrasing. I tell a story about Wansink deceiving theater-goers into eating stale popcorn, and then revealing the trick, and say, "And Wansink took delight in pointing this out to them." Stein tells how Wansink fooled professional bartenders trying to pour same-sized shots into different-sized glasses, and then surmises, "All of this delights Brian Wansink."
Me describing Wansink: "...with his high brow, rimless glasses and mischievous smirk, [he] looks a little like a high school chemistry teacher."
Stein describing Wansink: He "has all the nerdlike characteristics you'd expect from a mad professor."
Elsewhere, I note the charming congruence in the fact that his wife studied the culinary arts at France's Le Cordon Bleu; so does Joel.
Despite what you might think so far, I'm not mad. You've heard the old trope, imitation is the sincerest form of blah blah blah. And I know that Stein isn't a plagiarist - I've met him, he's a decent guy, and journalism is a giant echo chamber anyway - we all get our best ideas from things that other people have already written. So color me flattered. Nice piece, Joel. Now thank me by taking me to lunch.
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