In a Ballpark, far, far away...

The image below is totally real:

An actor playing Chewbacca threw out the ceremonial first pitch prior to a game between the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays at Fenway Park in Boston, Wednesday Sept. 28, 2005. Chewbacca and Princess Leia were on hand to promote the Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston.

After this stunt, I swear if the Yankees lose to the Red Sox again this year I'm going to do something drastic, though I'm not sure what. Get Donnie Baseball his damn ring!

George DeStefano: NYC Art Show

A few months back I posted about George DeStefano, one of my favorite up-and-coming artists. I am very happy to announce that he finally is showing his work in NYC.

The show is tomorrow night, Tuesday September 27th at Mona, a bar/lounge located on 988 Amsterdam Avenue (109th St) from 7:00 - 11:00 pm. I will definitely be there and cannot wait to see what new masterpieces he has put down on canvas/wood and whatever else he uses.

Please join me and/or tell a friend - this is just the start of a what should be a stellar career. As art's an investment, its always good to get in on the ground floor. Not sure if he's the real deal that I say he is? Well, stop by Mona tomorrow night and see for yourself.

How Does Water Expire?

I have been in all-day Client meetings the past 2 days where access to the good old office water cooler is not possible. So, I have been drinking bottled water. I happened to notice on my .500 mL bottle of Dannon Natural Spring Water that it was bottled on 8/11/05 at 16:59. That was nice to know I guess. I also noticed right under those stats that it will expire in August, 2007. No more specifics were given. So, I thought to myself, how the fuck does water expire?

In case you are wondering, I'll tell you. Water is known as the universal solvent. What that means is that it will absorb almost anything. So, even though it's been on earth for millions of years, once you put water in a bottle it's life is limited. Its actually better for you to drink tap water than bottle water because florescent lights, the kind of lights that illuminate every convenience store in the world, help grow bacteria. During the bottling process, there are various processes used to clean up the water including filtration and ozonation. If too much ozone was added, the plastic will leach into the bottles. If too little ozone was added, bacteria can start growing immediately. Awesome!

Now, take that gross tap water. The tap water that arrives at your house is just hours from where it has continuously been tested for hundreds of contaminants. Even with a bottled date, I would prefer freshly tested water than water that has been in a bodega or in a corporate pantry for months. Next, if your teeth important to you you should almost definitely skip bottled water. While bottled water does not have fluoride, most city municipal systems add fluoride to their supply.

So, the next time you are at someone's house or apartment and they don't have a Brita, don't worry. Turn on the tap. Forget the marketing bullshit that everyone is selling you. Relax. And enjoy a cold drink of water. Because its probably better for you than a bottle of Poland Spring/Dasani/Dannon/Deer Park/Evian/etc.

Don't believe me? Check out this past episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit which showed that tap water is usually safer for you, and often better tasting too. Or, if you don't like "comedy," you can always peruse the NRDC's report on bottled water titled "Pure Drink or Pure Hype?" which found that there are major gaps in bottled water regulation and that bottled water is not necessarily safer than tap water.

A Very Un-Magic: The Gathering

For anyone who is familiar with the card game Magic, or any other strategy based card game for that matter, I give you Katrina: The Ungathering. This is a flat out unbelievable effort. I wonder if anyone else is doing topical card sets, the same way that Monopoly has a version for every conceivable instance of life every real or imagined. Erik wants to print them and play them - as he puts it, "It really gets interesting once you realize that they actually have attempted to create a complete deck that can actually be played." We'll see if there is enough ink in the ink cartridge.

Via Neu

And the Winner of the All Time Best Hall Pass Request Award is...

... our president of course. He is always winning great awards such as these. I first saw the photo below on Chris's site and it has been much blogged about. I thought and still think it is hysterical. See for yourself below:

I didn't want to post it because I wasn't sure if it was real or not and if I was in a meeting with 180 other world leaders and needed to pee, I'm not sure what I would have done either. Then, Neu swooped in, unknowing, and sent me an article from Photo District News titled "Reuters Explains Photo Of Bush Bathroom Note" verifying it anv voila! I love the statement that Reuters gave:

"The photographer and editors on this story were looking for other angles in their coverage of this event, something that went beyond the stock pictures of talking heads that these kind of forums usually offer. This picture certainly does that."

Via Chris and Neu

Guess Who Gets To Rebuild The South

My cousin said that this disaster mirrored Iraq in every way except one: that lucrative rebuilding contracts had not yet gone to administration cronies. Oh wait, that just happened. Nevermind.

Via Quirine

'Nuff Said

Via Monty

Landlord Sues Restaurateurs Over Ghosts

I just had to post something funny - too much Katrina coverage can really keep you in a dark mood. This was filed by the AP yesterday:

Landlord Sues Restaurateurs Over Ghosts
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) -- The owners of a Japanese restaurant who claim their newly renovated building is haunted are being sued by their landlord for refusing to move in.

An offer to hold an exorcism was refused, according to the 2.6 million dollar lawsuit filed by the owners of the Church Street Station entertainment complex last month in Orange County Circuit Court.

The lawsuit also asks a judge to decide whether the building is haunted and, if so, whether the ghosts would interfere with the restaurant's business.

Christopher and Yoko Chung had planned to move their Amura Japanese Restaurant into the building in October 2004, but backed out of the lease.

The Chungs' attorney says subcontractors gave several documented reports of having seen ghosts or apparitions in the restaurant at night. The attorney also says Christopher Chung's religious beliefs require him to ''avoid encountering or having any association with spirits or demons.''

Thanks Jessie for making me smile - something I haven't done too much of lately

He's Just The Acorn - You've Got To Look At The Tree

From "The Nation" comes a report on Barbara Bush's Labor Day visit to the Astrodome:

Commenting on the facilities that have been set up for the evacuees -- cots crammed side-by-side in a huge stadium where the lights never go out and the sound of sobbing children never completely ceases -- former First Lady Barbara Bush concluded that the poor people of New Orleans had lucked out.

"Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them," Mrs. Bush told American Public Media's "Marketplace" program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home.

On the tape of the interview, Mrs. Bush chuckles audibly as she observes just how great things are going for families that are separated from loved ones, people who have been forced to abandon their homes and the only community where they have ever lived, and parents who are explaining to children that their pets, their toys and in some cases their friends may be lost forever. Perhaps the former first lady was amusing herself with the notion that evacuees without bread could eat cake.

Thanks Phyl for making sure that my anger doesn't dissipate.

Remember, if you are in need of info on the Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort happening in NYC, go to www.nolareliefnyc.com for all the latest news.

NOLA Relief NYC

I am still so upset about this tragedy that I can hardly speak or think about it without getting red in the face so I'll leave my blistering criticism of the federal government's reaction (it took 4 days!?!?) for another post.

In conjunction with my cousin Jimmy, proprietor of Jacques-imos, and the president of the NYC Tulane Alumnus Association, I have launched Nola Relief NYC, a site dedicated to information related to the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort that is going on in the Greater New York City Area. There are going to be many, many, fundraising events in the NYC area. This site will be listing all NYC fundraising events that are being held in conjunction with the NYC Tulane Alumnus Organization. There is already one planned at Jacques-imos for Wednesday, September 14th. It will be a night of food, drink, and live New Orleans music. We will celebrate while we mourn in the greatest of New Orleans's traditions.

The copy below is from an email that Jimmy sent out yesterday:

Most of you have watched this weeks events in New Orleans and The Gulf Coast in horror. As many of you know, we operate a New Orleans restaurant here in NYC, Jacques-Imos, and have two restaurants New Orleans. Our sister restaurants, Jacques-Imos New Orleans and Crabby Jack's of Jefferson Parish, employ more than 85 people. Too date, we have only heard from 5 of these employees. We have reason to believe that more than 60% of the homes of our employees have either been destroyed or looted. The personal stories we are hearing from our friends and employees down in New Orleans are horrific, often worse than what we are hearing on the news. Here in NYC, our staff has been personally effected by the events as more than 70% of our employees are from New Orleans. Due to Katrina's wrath, Jacques-Imos NYC has become the orphanage of New Orleans' residents and refugees in NYC.

For those of you who have been touched over the years by the majesty and charm of New Orleans, for those who simply want to help the people of The Gulf Coast, please come by Jacques-Imos NYC on Wednesday, September 14th, to show your support. 100% of the proceeds will go to relief efforts in New Orleans. For those of you in a position to donate something that can be auctioned off that evening, please email me or call me Jacques-Imos, 212 799 0150. Whether it be a weekend at a home in the Hamptons or in St. Maarten, 20 cases of Abita beer, plane tickets to Miami, a years subscription to the NY Times, we'll take any and everything that we can auction off. Again, 100% of the proceeds from the evening are going to the American Red Cross.

Finally, there is a real need to find short term housing in NYC for our New Orleans employees and New Orleans friends. If any of you have access to apartments in the NYC area that we can rent please let us know or send an email to info@nolareliefnyc.com. Everyone from New Orleans is in the same boat. Many of the financial institutions in New Orleans are very local as opposed to what we have here in NYC. Therefore their ATM and Credit Cards are not working. We are looking for large and small affordable apartments in NYC.

Please do what you can. Open your hearts. Open your homes. Open your wallets. Let's make a difference when obviously our government has failed to do so. After the jump, feel free to read a poem I wrote about Nawlins after I visited the the city for the first time - Jimmy took me to Jazz Fest and I just fell in love with Nawlins. It was written during my sophmore year and included in my intermediate creative writing class portfolio.

Nola by Jeff Lipson

It came from out of the bayou,
a sound of jazz and of zydeco,
a sound of the blues and of funk,
a smell of gumbo and of jambalaya,
a smell of po boys and of crawfish
a sense that I found a home.

Black child eyes the crowd,
feet blazing away on the sidewalk,
dancing hard, dancing out of love,
dancing for me,
and I smile,
throw a dollar in the hat for his effort,
and he smiles back.

Seventy year old black man,
blind but never beaten,
damns his frail body, athritic fingers,
joins his friend down at the Howlin Wolf,
gets his remedy
jamming the night like he did in '58
except there are white folk swaying in the crowd
swaying to his mastery,
smiling with love at the negro layin down the groove.

The nights are wet, are humid,
fifteen foot shutters seal doors and windows,
wrought iron gates protect secluded gardens,
they're everywhere in the Quarter didn't you know,
and the street names are in french,
and the city seems ancient,
and the city is ancient
and my ticket says I have to go home,
cab speeds away toward the airport,
up 36 hours and still ready for more,
I say I will call this place home.

These People Are Not Refugees, They Are American Citizens

Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick from Detroit, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus just said in a speech aired on CNN,

"We come to you this morning as a sense of urgency. First of all, these people are not refugess, they are American citizens. They pay taxes, they raise their families, they help America grow and I wish the media would called them American citizens and not refugess which relegates them to another whole status."

Well, well said. I will be noting which channels and media outlets refer to these people as refugees from now on. See also said that Detroit is offering to airlift out 500 families immediately and to house and feed them. That is probably around 2000 people. While that isn't a whole lot, if a few more cities did the same we would have one issue resolved immediately.

Margins Of Society at Center of Tragedy

Now this is where the story gets really political: many of those still stuck at the center of this tragedy are people who for generations had been pushed to the margins of society. Poverty exhibits a bizarre sense of equality - the poor, white and black, are now equally suffering. Here are just a few views on this aspect of the southern situation:

• Mark Naison, a white professor of African-American Studies at Fordham University in the Bronx wrote, "Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by segregation laws? If Sept. 11 showed the power of a nation united in response to a devastating attack, Hurricane Katrina reveals the fault lines of a region and a nation, rent by profound social divisions."
• "We tend to think of natural disasters as somehow even-handed, as somehow random," said Martín Espada, an English professor at the University of Massachusetts and poet of a decidedly leftist political bent who is Puerto Rican. "Yet it has always been thus: poor people are in danger. That is what it means to be poor. It's dangerous to be poor. It's dangerous to be black. It's dangerous to be Latino."
  


• "Everything is God's will," said Charles Steele Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. "But there's a certain amount of common sense that God gives to individuals to prepare for certain things." That means, Mr. Steele said, not waiting until the eve of crisis. "Most of the people that live in the neighborhoods that were most vulnerable are black and poor," he said. "So it comes down to a lack of sensitivity on the part of people in Washington that you need to help poor folks. It's as simple as that."
  

Fallujah, LA (formerly known as New Orleans)

It just keeps getting worse and worse. If I were to tell you about a city that: has no power, has no clean water, has no food, has no working infrastructure, consists mainly of rubble, has dead bodies laying about in the streets, has rampant lawlessness, is controlled by armed bands of people roving the streets and has people shooting at helicopters you might name a city in Iraq. You would never have named a U.S. city, until today that is: what I just described is happening RIGHT NOW in New Orleans. The reason why the scariest horror stories to me are books like The Stand and movies like 28 Days Later is because our society is so loosely held together - in the end it only takes so very little to rip it all to shreds. The animal side of humanity can take over so quickly and things can go from bad to worse to atrocious in no time. We are seeing this first hand by watching Nawlins become a third world country.

This is from an AP report dated today, filed at 2:02 PM:

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

"I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. "I buried my dog." He added: "You can do everything for other countries but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can't get them down here."

To echo those sentiments, the NY Times published an absolutely scathing editorial lambasting our dear President's performance over the past few days. To give you an idea of how angry the Times (and I am) is, here are the first 2 sentences:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed.

Again, we're told with a smirk that everything will be alright by someone who has less than zero credibility. Where is the LA National Guard, which could have been deployed to help prevent what has happened from happening? Oh yeah, they are fighting a losing war in Iraq. The authorities should have very quickly realized that the poorest and most desperate (not just before this storm hit mind you) part of the city's population was not leaving. Its tough to think that your citizens will become animals but you always have to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Seems as if that wasn't done that well down south from where I'm sitting.