Willis Loughhead at Country
Had a very fine evening last week enjoying a press/blogger dinner sponsored by Arm & Hammer at Country ... the recently renovated Carlton Hotel is very luxurious and comfortable in the Neo-Classical style.
Cocktails and dinner were served on the second floor over-looking the lobby. It was a sight to behold with the lovely chandeliers and Roman style mosaic-tiled floors. The executive chef, Willis Loughhead, presented us with a wonderful series of his creations, running from cod cheeks to pig ears. Wonderful service and lovely French wine.
Learned much about Arm & Hammer and their baking soda ... The next morning, I brought out my silver-plated soup ladle and polished with baking soda - what a brilliant shine! For many more uses of baking soda, see Peter Ciullo's "Baking Soda Bonanza."
Lauren Steinhorn and her crew from Edelman were magnificent ... it was a great pleasure to meet everyone.
Country, web site, 90 Madison Avenue, at 29th Street, New York, 212-889-7100 [savory ny]
More
- "So Fresh, So Clean," Food Rush, July 18, 2008
- "Country Steak to open this September," Strong Buzz, June 30, 2008
- "Country Steak Planned for Country’s Upstairs," NY Mag, June 30, 2008
- "Country and the Café at Country, under Chef Willis Loughhead," eGullett
- "Country," New York Journal, May 12, 2008
- "Willis Loughhead Brings Nose-to-Tail Fare to Country," gothamist, May 11, 2008
- Willis Loughhead - Chef DB
Sandra Rivera - Flamenco San Juan - FREE
Free out-door concert at the Naumburg Bandshell, naumburgconcerts.org
Sandra Rivera - Flamenco San Juan, July 22, 2008, 7:30 pm, at the Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park, enter at 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue, then go to approximately 70th and mid-Park, 718-340-3018
King's Seafood Restaurant
Another great discovery for Fine Cantonese cuisine in Chinatown ... King's Seafood .... a very fine replacement for the defunct Nice restaurant ... the menu comprising: Beijing duck, jumbo prawns with walnuts and broccoli in a mayo sauce, Hong-Kong style T-bone steak (medium rare), half-chicken in garlic sauce, salt-and-pepper pork chops, the whole flounder done two-ways, chicken chow-mein, beef chow-fun, saute "dao-miu" with garlic ... duck meat with green chives .... a very sumptuous dinner for everybody to enjoy ... for less then $30 a person...bring your own wine or champagne ...
I also went there to try their dim-sum lunch .... very, very good food and service but 2.5 times more expansive then Chatham ....
King's Seafood, 39 East Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, 212-233-3359 [Yelp]
Time for Some Campaignin'
Time for Some Campaignin' - from JibJab on YouTube
Happy Yorkie and owner
Grand Sichuan
Last night, ate at the new location of the Grand Sichuan, web site, 15 7th Avenue South (at Leroy Street), NY, NY 10014, in the West Village. 212-645-0222 [MenuPages |NY Mag | Yelp | Ubereater]
real authentic Sichuan cooking, no-holds-barred very-very hot & spicy mung bean noodles, cool cucumber with green scallion sauce, crab-pork steamed dumplings, dan-dan noodles, tripe & tongue slices, etc. ... so hot that I needed orange slices to cool my throat ... only ordered from the appertizers ... so far, bring your own beer or whiskey ...
See web site for other locations
____________________________________
Subway info (new window opens): MTA map | schedules | HopStop | Interactive Transit Map
Turn off the Internet
(Hint: once you've enjoyed shutting down the Internet, press Alt then F4 to start it back up - works best with IE)
Globalization and Its Discontents
Red State Update: Budweiser Bought By Foreigners? - YouTube
Tony Dragonas
An update on Tony Dragonas, the Greek street-hawker....
I have noticed with great sadness that the city planted tree has been totally embalmed with the greasy-smokey BBQ fire. That poor tree could not survive the constant bombardment of smoke and heat. It is now a blackened dead tree.
This is the good-and-bad about Tony Dragonas... I suppose he must be sent to a re-education camp...
Post by Peter
- Save Tony!, May 24, 2008
- "Tony Dragonas - best grilled hamburger in NYC?" January 10, 2006
"Bachelorhood And Its Discontents"
It wasn't just that the bachelor was untrustworthy, wrote [George] Ade, he was also a “draft dodger” and a “slacker,” one who had exchanged the traditional male role of provider for that of refusenik. Or, as another wag put it, “The bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce.” Until quite recently the office bachelor was seen as a serious liability, and earned considerably less than his married counterpart. Vance Packard, in his 1962 book The Pyramid Climbers, noted that, “In general the bachelor is viewed with circumspection, especially if he is not well known to the people appraising him…[However] the worst status of all is that of a bachelor beyond the age of 36. The investigators wonder why he isn’t married. Is it because he isn’t virile? Is he old-maidish? Can’t he get along with people?” By contrast, the married man was the steady one, the stable lot, not least because, in Tallyrand’s memorable phrase, "a married man with a family will do anything for money.”
"Bachelorhood And Its Discontents," by Christopher Orlet, New English Review, July 2008
"Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013"
The Onion: Sources Warn Miley Cyrus Will Be Depleted by 2013
"Global Warming as Mass Neurosis"
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
. . .
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
. . .
A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
"Global Warming as Mass Neurosis," by Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2008
More
- EPA's Climate Change Site
- "Don't fight, adapt. We should give up futile attempts to combat climate change." Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, December 12, 2007
- Global Warming: Frequently Asked Questions - from NOAA
- GlobalWarming.org - from the Competitive Enterprise Institute
- Global warming - from Wikipedia
True calling ... and standard of living.
If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich--which is, after all, what we’re talking about--but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist--that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?
Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher--wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.
"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers." by William Deresiewicz, The American Scholar, Summer 2008
. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
Amazon down since Monday? 3-day Amazon outage?
Is it just us or has Amazon.com been down since Monday morning, June 9, 2008?
Since Monday, during the day, we have been able to reach Amazon less than 1 hour each day. We've tried 2 different locations using 2 different access providers, and can't reach Amazon from either.
Anyone else having these problems?
Diplomas Count 2008 - Dropping Out of High School
As the nation struggles to close its graduation gap, Diplomas Count 2008 examines states' efforts to forge stronger connections between precollegiate and postsecondary education.
. . .
Nationwide, about 71 percent of 9th graders make it to graduation four years later, according to data from 2005, the latest available. And that figure drops to 58 percent for Hispanics, 55 percent for African-Americans, and 51 percent for Native Americans.
Those rates improved slightly from 2004 to 2005 for all groups, but large gaps remain across states. While more than eight in 10 students graduate on time in Iowa, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Wisconsin, for example, the proportion drops to fewer than six in 10 in the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and South Carolina.
Analyses conducted for Diplomas Count by the EPE Research Center also continue to show wide disparities between state-reported graduation rates and the center’s estimates. Such disparities are one reason that the U.S. Department of Education proposed new rules this spring that would require all states to calculate graduation rates based on a uniform method that tracks cohorts of students as they progress through high school.
"Executive Summary," Diplomas Count 2008, by Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center
More
- Diplomas Count 2008
- Table of Contents
- Interactive Map of U.S. Congressional Districts
- Graduation Briefs
- Mapping Tool - A geographical Web interface where users can create interactive maps and download special reports for any school district in the country that includes comparisons to state and national statistics.
- High School Dropout Rates - from Child Trends DataBank
- "They made it!," by Joanne Jacobs, June 7, 2008
- Mapping Educational Progress 2008 - from the U.S. Dept. of Education
- Famous High School Dropouts: Part 1 | Part 2
- High School Dropouts In Their Own Words - Susan Lulic Enholm
- "High School Graduation Rates in the United States," by Jay P. Greene, Manhattan Institute, April 2002
- "High School Graduation, Completion, and Dropouts: Federal Policy, Programs, and Issues," by Jeffrey J. Kuenzi, CRS Report for Congress RL33963, July 24, 2007 (26-page pdf
) (also available from Open CRS)
- "Vulnerable Youth: Federal Mentoring Programs and Issues," by Adrienne L. Fernandes, CRS Report for Congress RL34306, January 4, 2008 (38-page pdf )
- "What You'll Wish You'd Known," by Paul Graham, January 2005 (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)
"China’s Cyber-Militia"
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few cases, gained access to electric power plants in the United States, possibly triggering two recent and widespread blackouts in Florida and the Northeast, according to U.S. government officials and computer-security experts.
"China’s Cyber-Militia: Chinese hackers pose a clear and present danger to U.S. government and private-sector computer networks and may be responsible for two major U.S. power blackouts." By Shane Harris, National Journal, May 31, 2008
Hat tip, Slashdot
More
- "Chinese hackers: No site is safe," by John Vause, CNN, March 11, 2008
- "Hackers exploit China earthquake to punt Trojan," by John Leyden, The Register, May 22, 2008
- "Cyber officials: Chinese hackers attack 'anything and everything'," by Josh Rogin, FCW, February 13, 2007
- "Botnets, Cybercrime, and Cyberterrorism: Vulnerabilities and Policy Issues for Congress," by Clay Wilson, CRS Report for Congress RL32114, November 15, 2007 (43-page pdf )
- "Information Operations, Electronic Warfare, and Cyberwar: Capabilities and Related Policy Issues," by Clay Wilson, CRS Report for Congress RL31787, March 20, 2007 (17-page pdf )
- "Critical Infrastructure: Control Systems and the Terrorist Threat," by Dana Shea, CRS Report for Congress RL31534, January 20, 2004 (22-page pdf )
- "Banking and Financial Infrastructure Continuity," by N. Eric Weiss, CRS Report for Congress RL31873,
January 31, 2008 (24-page pdf )
- "High Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP) and High Power Microwave (HPM) Devices: Threat Assessments," by Clay Wilson, CRS Report for Congress RL32544, March 26, 2008 (24-page pdf )
Nutella ... and guilt....
See this image from Mr. Toledano.
Mmmmmmmm, Nutella
- Nutella - from Wikipedia
- Super Simple Nutella Ice Cream, Chocolate & Zucchini, February 13, 2008
- What Nutella (and I) Can Teach You About Blog Marketing
Save Tony!
Tony Dragonas has been a vending fixture on the East Side of Manhattan (62nd and Madison) for nearly 25 years.
Last year, a jealous restaurant owner down the street started making complaints to the Department of Health.
Now the City wants to revoke Tony's vending permit and license. For good. For real.
"Save Tony!" The Street Vendor Project
"Tony Dragonas - best grilled hamburger in NYC?" A Guy In New York, January 10, 2006
"Food Fight: City Hall vs. Vendor," by Colin Moynihan, The New York Times, May 22, 2008
"From Silver To Street Vendors," by Elizabeth Benjamin, News Blog, NY Daily News, May 22, 2008
The Department of Health will ask the judge to revoke Tony's license and permit. Tony will be there, with his lawyers, making a defense. The hearing is open to the public for people who want to observe and/or testify in support of Tony. Please come!
You can support Tony by appearing at his hearing, scheduled for June 5, 2008, 9:30 am. NYC Office of Administrative Tribunals and Hearings (OATH), 40 Rector Street, 6th floor, New York , NY 10006
Redneck Update, er, Red State Update
A few videos from Red State Update....
Catching Up With Edwards, Biden, Huckabee:
Hillary Wins Kentucky, Obama Takes Oregon:
From Red State Update
Red Hook taco vendors
We've not tried any of the food from the Red Hook taco vendors, but if it's sold around a soccer field we're confident that it is worth trying. Thanks for the tip Ed!
Ikea Hack: Free Ferry and Bus Service Will Give Easy Access to Red Hook Ball Field Vendors," Ed Levine's New York Eats, May 16, 2008
And you thought your divorce was acidic....
A biochemist was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole Friday for killing her estranged husband by knocking him out and stuffing him into a vat of acid, possibly while he was still alive.
Larissa Schuster was convicted in December of murdering Timothy Schuster with the special circumstance that the murder was committed for financial gain. At the time of his death in July 2003, the Schusters were in the middle of a divorce after nearly 20 years of marriage.
"Chemist gets life for husband's acid vat murder," CNN, May 16, 2008
Football, er, soccer, and promotion
For the promotion-phobics, the Premiership is a gilded fake while the Championship represents authentic football. ‘In my years as a supporter I have seen seven relegations and six promotions’, recounts Watford fan Graham Smith. ‘That is what being a football fan is all about. It is about supporting your team through thick and thin. It is about suffering the bad times and enjoying the good times. That’s why I like being a fan of a team that basically belong in the Football League rather than the Premier League. It is real football.’
"Every team wants to be promoted, right? Wrong," by Duleep Allirajah, Spiked!, May 9, 2008 [emphasis added]
More
- GolTV
- Fox Soccer Channel
- Major League Soccer (MLS)
- NY Red Bulls
- Jersey Sky Blue
- United Soccer Leagues (USL)
- Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA)
- Women’s Professional Soccer (WPS)
- US Youth Soccer
"Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn?"
In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic of a new discipline.
Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.
Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.
"Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm," by Gary Wolf, Wired, April 21, 2008
More
- SuperMemo - Super Memory: Forget about forgetting
- "SuperMemo Helps You Remember Everything Before You Forget," lifehacker, April 22, 2008
- Introduction to "Memory" Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885/1913), by Robert H. Wozniak
- SuperMemo Library
- SuperMemo and learning English
"How Roses Handle Water"
A team of chemists from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China figured out why tiny water droplets seem to get stuck to petals of red roses. Not unexpectantly, the mechanism, known as the Cassie impregnating wetting state, is a result of nanostructures ("hierarchical micropapillae" and "nanofolds") on the surface of petals.
"How Roses Handle Water," medGadget, April 29, 2008
Reminds us of the invention of Velcro by George de Mestral.
The World's Best Restaurants?
First published by Restaurant magazine in 2002 and now in its seventh year, The S.Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants is recognised around the world as the most credible indicator of the best places to eat on Earth.The S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants. In the US:
- 5. The French Laundry, Yountville, CA [Yelp]
- 6. Per Se, New York [Yelp]
- 17. Jean Georges, New York [Yelp]
- 20. Le Bernardin, New York [Yelp]
- 21. Alinea, Chicago [Yelp]
- 37. Chez Panisse, Berkeley [Yelp]
- 38. Charlie Trotter's, Chicago [Yelp]
- 41. Daniel, New York [Yelp]
Rounding out the top 100:
52. Nobu, New York [Yelp]
54. Masa, New York [Yelp]
63. WD-50, New York [Yelp]
85. L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon, New York [Yelp]
87. L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon, Las Vegas [Yelp]
"Hillary is Dunkin Donuts, Barack is Starbucks"
Hillary is minivans and American sedans, Barack is Range Rovers and Hondas. Hillary is cross-trainers with jeans, Barack is Abercrombie and Fitch and Banana Republic. Hillary is Dunkin Donuts, Barack is Starbucks. And their supporters are equally vocal, in different ways.
"Primary concern: Nasty fight between Obama, Clinton could blow it for Democrats," by Lisa van Dusen, Edmonton Sun, April 22, 2008
John McCain is Costco.
"McCain Knows Where to Vote Shop: Costco," Washington Whispers, April 18, 2008
These Yorkies love riding on the Piaggio MP3
Useful Yorkie Stuff | Piaggio MP3
