ODAM NAP // obscure design and marketing, news and politics

"The Miracle of the Cerrado"

2010-09-07T21:06:00.000-07:00

Brazil is trying mass farming without leveling the rain foresting, and in the process created some innovative techniques to increase yields. Organic farmers take note.

Article

Pecha Kucha

2009-02-02T07:52:00.000-08:00

In the fight against ineffective emails, mismanaged meetings, and presentations with zero engagement and way too many attendees, the Japanese have found a little trick on one of our worst enemies. From Kaizen Training in the UK:

Pecha Kucha (Japanese for 'chit-chat') is a new way of using PowerPoint where you are given 20 slides and the timer set so each slide is only on screen for 20 seconds. That's 6 minutes 40 seconds and you're finished. You could find it revolutionises the way you present! What if you made that the norm for your company from now on?

Human-Powered Spaces

2008-08-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

Gyms, football stadiums, dance clubs, … Check out this article on the HK gym:

http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/03/08/human-powered-gyms-in-hong-kong/

Styrofoam Construction

2008-08-22T10:27:00.001-07:00

Since when did Styrofoam become eco friendly. Since the Japanese created the Dome House, I guess.

http://www.i-domehouse.com/characters.html

Consumerism postively correlated to death

2008-08-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

Facing one's death, Americans like to live by splurging:

http://knowledge.wpcarey.asu.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1645

Bicycle Subculture

2008-07-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

More people who wouldn't normally ride bikes are investing in a 2 wheeler for a number of reasons: gas prices, environment, obesity, etc. I have been immersing myself in the urban bike culture right for the past year.

A new breed of cyclist is being born. Here I will highlight some of what's going on:

Los Angeles Urban Posse
Reno Bike Workshop
Montreal Chop Shop
Paris Fixie Hub
Australia Dumpster Divers

Mexico hates Emo

2008-05-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

Blender and star reporting are like milk and bourbon. But Senior Editor Josh Eells did a great piece called The Eyeliner Wars. While trying to find the story online, I found a related one on NPR.

Basically, Mexico is rapidly becoming more liberal. Goths and Emo kids are not as hip here because of how quickly it hit mainstream, but over there it is aspirational and somewhat underground still, and the Mayor and others in politics are not so happy. Looking for a political drum to beat, they label these non-conformist as anti-church, anti-family trouble makers and has put an all out ban on Emo. One kid's trash is another kids treasure. It makes you wonder how other US trends fair overseas.

Coltan

2008-05-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

One of the best articles I've read on Coltan. Basically, Coltan is the new blood diamond. It is a metal mined in places like Canada, Australia, and the Congo for tantalum. Tantalum is used in hi-rel capacitors because of it's great thermal properties. It is used in cell phones and laptops. Demand has forced the US gov to keep reserves. Price has gone way up and so has the fight for profits. Congo has been victim to internal and external profiteers, resulting in bloodshed, humanitarian and environmental crises, and little attention from the international community. Many companies including vodaphone and nokia have spoken to their supply chain to stop using the metal in their capacitors, and US-based Kemet is swearing that all coltan is from the non-Congo region.

artist of the month

2008-04-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

joe girandola does cool things with duct tape. He considers himself a sculptor. check him out at www.joegirandola.com

big companies thinking sustainability

2008-03-22T08:43:00.001-07:00

Here's an article about the work of Patagonia's Mike
Brown and others:
http://www.fastcompany.com/node/60982/print

and here's Brown's company:
http://www.bw-environmental.com/

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Artist of the month

2008-03-10T23:48:00.000-07:00

This month's privilege goes to cellist Wendy Sutter. Sutter teaches at Colombia and has a number of albums under her belt, but she is best known for ravaging her strings to works Philip Glass wrote for her. They date and have been touring the country for the past year. Her performance at LACMA earlier this month gave me chills; she did things to that cello I have never seen done with any string, and she even had little skulls and angels on her beast (original Amati).

new favorite blog

2008-02-28T22:33:00.000-08:00

this is genius:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

The Boneyard

2008-01-23T12:35:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder where our old military planes go? They get sent to the yard to be preserved. The boneyard is known as AMARC (Aerospace Maintenance And Regeneration Center). Every once in a while, a big company like BAE would regenerate some planes to sell overseas. Check out their site:

http://www.amarcexperience.com/AMARCDescription.asp

Imagine the land and maintenance staff wasted to maintain 4200 planes that we don’t use while the military ponies up for JSF planes? It’s a bit of a waste. But is it cheaper than trying to find spare parts on a carrier? Should we replace our computers after 3 years, our 747s after 30? Or should we continue to maintain. I sometimes wonder how much an airplane or ship would cost if we focused on reducing costs instead of improving technology that we don’t really need.

members only library

2008-01-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

For LA writers, when they aren’t striking, there’s a place to go to pretend you are writing and be watched writing.

http://www.theofficeonline.com/

give away your stuff

2008-01-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

Paul Budnitz, founder of Kid Robot, makes a good point about the weight of
nostalgia:

http://www.core77.com/blog/broadcasts/core77_broadcasts_paul_budnitz_at_core
77_offsite_nyc_8579.asp

NoPoPo

2008-01-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

The guys behind the liquid-refillable (aka pee-powered: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/09/04/nopopo/) battery may be one step behind the curve. With ipods and digi cams and cell phones, does anyone really use AA and AAA batteries? Is it that much of a concern to refill? Will new AA and AAA shift consumers products back towards standard batteries?

Brazil Grafitti

2008-01-03T17:10:00.000-08:00

Dude from Strawberry Frog snapped these pictures:

http://scottgoodson.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/street-grafitti.html

American culture today as related to the 60s

2008-01-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a special little post to those born out of 100% flower power. We wear our tie-die and corduroy blazers looking because perhaps it will be trendy. We protest the Kyoto agreement by turning off the TV when we leave the room. And we forget about the 60s entirely.

This is a great review on known libertarian Brink Lindsey’s new book The Age of Abundance. The book discuses how the hippies and evangelicals both rose out of the 60s aimlessness to give people a cause and how both movements are still impacting the US today. Knowing these two poles, Lindsey really hopes to draw a theory on why separation of church and state, abortion, and stem cells are news topics, why celebs excess are both abhorred and idolized by the media, and why we so eagerly spend beyond our means.

How America's 'Age of Abundance' Has Paved the Road to the 'Pursuit of Happiness'

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1853

artist of the month

2007-12-28T13:04:00.000-08:00

Step aside Punjabi MC, we know your type. Exploiting a few rhythms for big money deals, you should be ashamed of yourself. And hey, you over there, Daler Mehndi, I love your music but your videos have become viral crack for internet surfers.

DJ Rekha has been blowing up the NYC bhangra scene for some time with her regular shows at SOBs. Just in the past year, she's crossed into mainstream with mentions on Aurgasm, NPR, and Fader. She heavily promotes her co-deejays and is becoming the new face of Bhangra in the US.

A lot of this buzz is just around her album, but give it a bit of time and she will make it past the audiophile dorks and onto dancefloors worldwide.

great longboarding video from loaded

2007-12-11T12:38:00.000-08:00

cross-stepping, grinding gloves, weight-shifting carves, wheelies, ... things have changed, my friend.

http://www.loadedboards.com/shops/Download/Whirling_Dervish-download.mp4

Let's hear it for thew king

2007-12-10T09:02:00.000-08:00

Happy Monday morning, everyone. Thought I would share with you some obscure Elvis facts.

----------

Elvis: 30 weird and wonderful facts

The Belfast Telegraph: Monday, August 13, 2007

Thirty years after his death, he is still always on our mind. Ed Ceaser pays homage to The King with 30 weird and wonderful facts from the life of the man who embodied rock ‘n’ roll

1. Elvis was a black belt in karate. He took up martial arts under the shotokan sensei Jürgen Seydal, while fulfilling his military duties in Germany in 1958. He was awarded his black belt before he returned to the United States, in 1960, by the chito-ryu instructor Hank Slemansky. Elvis’s love of martial arts continued throughout his life. His favourite form of fighting became American Kenpo.

2. On 21 December 1970, Presley met President Nixon at the White House. Presley had initiated the meeting with a six-page letter to the President, in which he had spelt out his desire to be made a “Federal Agent-at-Large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. During his meeting with Nixon, Presley denounced The Beatles as being ‘un-American’ for their open drug-taking and anti-Vietnam politics. For his part, Nixon reminded Presley of his need to “retain credibility”. Nevertheless, he is said to have given Presley a ‘Special Agent’ badge.

3. Elvis’s first radio play was on Memphis station WHBQ, on the Red, Hot and Blue Right”, Show, in 1954. DJ Dewey Phillips played “That’s All and, a week later Sun Records had received 6,000 advance orders for the single “That’s All Right”/ “Blue Moon of Kentucky”.

4. The King’s entourage were known collectively as the Memphis Mafia. All members of the Memphis Mafia sported diamond and gold rings, given to them by Elvis, on which a thunderbolt and the letters TCB had been imprinted. TCB stood for “Take Care of Business”.

5. In 1960, when Elvis was at his post-military trimmest, he weighed a little over 12 stone. When he died, in 1977, he weighed a just under 19 stone.

6. None of Elvis’s feature films or music documentaries were ever nominated for an Oscar in any category. He made 31 movies and two music documentaries.

7. Elvis’s first public performance was at the Mississippi-Alabama competition Fair and Dairy Show. The young Elvis entered the singing dressed as a cowboy, and had to stand on a chair to reach the microphone. His performance of “Old Shep” by Red Foley earned him second prize.

8. Elvis recorded more than 600 songs in his music career, but didn’t write a single one of them.

9. Until his late teens, Elvis was blond.

10. Elvis ate nothing but meatloaf, tomatoes, and mashed potato for two years.

11. Some of Elvis’s bejewelled jumpsuits weighed more than two stone.

12. When Elvis discovered that his wife, Priscilla, had been having an affair with Mike Stone – a karate instructor and mutual friend of the couple – he flew into a rage. The biographer Peter Guralnick claims that Elvis was so angry, he said: “there’s too much pain in me ¿ Mike Stone [must] die.” But when his body-guard, Red West, came back to his boss with a price for Stone’s contract killing, the King’s mood had softened. “Aw hell,” he said. “Let’s just leave it for now. Maybe it’s a bit heavy.”

13. Elvis won three Grammy Awards – for his gospel recordings.

14. He only performed five concerts outside the United States – all in Canada in 1957. At the time of his death, he was planning a European tour. He only set foot on British soil once, when the plane taking him back to the United States from Germany stopped to refuel at Glasgow Prestwick airport. The singer enjoyed a two-hour stop over before re-boarding the military plane.

15. The last film Elvis saw at the cinema was The Spy Who Loved Me. The day before he died, though, he had tried to obtain a print of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, to show his daughter, Lisa Marie.

16. Sometime in the early 1960s, Elvis adopted a chimpanzee called Scatter. Scatter had previously belonged to a Memphis children’s entertainer, and was trained to perform. He also had a penchant for looking up women’s skirts. Elvis found this trait amusing. A well-known wheeze was to gather his female friends together, and then let Scatter wreak havoc among them.

17. Even before the obese later years, Presley was a prodigious eater. In his 20s, he told Country Song Roundup Magazine that he could demolish eight deluxe cheese burgers, two bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches and three milkshakes in a single sitting.

18. Elvis first nourished his taste for outlandish clothes while a student at LC Humes High School in Memphis. He admired clothes at Lansky Brothers on Beale Street, but only had enough money to buy the occasional shirt. When he became famous, he began shopping there more regularly, and continued to use Lansky Brothers his whole life. Indeed, Bernard Lansky, the proprietor, is responsible for some of the more egregious fashion crimes perpetrated by the King. It was Lansky, for instance, who made Elvis’s gold lamé jacket.

19. In 1954, when Elvis was cutting some early records at Sun Studios, he auditioned for an amateur gospel quartet called the Songfellows. They turned him down.

20. On 30 July 1954, Elvis played one of his first shows, at the Overton Park Shell in Memphis. He was, apparently, so nervous, that his legs started to shake. The outlandish flares the singer had chosen to wear that evening only exacerbated the shaky movement. The girls in the audience went wild, and Elvis decided to incorporate his shaky-legs routine into future shows.

21. Elvis had a brief affair with the Swedish-American actress and singer, Ann-Margret, as they filmed the kitsch 1964 hit Viva Las Vegas. Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded that the relationship end, but his charge continued to hold a special place in his heart for Ann-Margret. Every time Ann-Margret opened a show in Las Vegas, he would send her flowers arranged in the shape of a guitar.

22. Elvis was christened Elvis Aron Presley, but his gravestone reads Elvis Aaron Presley. Elvis was christened with only one ‘a’ in his middle name, so that he would share a characteristic with his still born twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley. Towards the end of his life, Elvis sought to add an ‘a’ to his middle name to make it a biblical name.

23. Not only was Elvis a direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln’s great-great grandfather, Isaiah Harrison, he was a distant cousin of Jimmy Carter.

24. Led Zeppelin were big fans of Elvis and were desperate to meet him when they toured the US. In 1973, the longed-for meeting came to pass, when Robert Plant and John Paul Jones met the King in Los Angeles. The Zeppelins were rendered speechless by the meeting, but Elvis broke the ice by swapping his $5,000 gold and diamond watch for Jones’s watch – which featured a picture of Mickey Mouse. From that moment on, any member of Led Zeppelin was welcome in the front row of an Elvis concert.

25. Elvis collected marble statues of the Venus de Milo and Joan of Arc.

26. In 1973, Elvis gave Muhammad Ali a $10,000 white robe, with the words “People’s Champion” emblazoned across the back. Ali was touched, and wore the robe on 31 March, when he fought Ken Norton for the first time. Norton broke Ali’s jaw in the second round, before winning a 12-round decision. Ali vowed never to wear the robe again, although he maintained his friendship with Elvis.

27. Elvis’s favourite toothpaste was Colgate. His favourite aftershave was Brut. And his favourite soft drink was Pepsi.

28. This year, the American firearms company America Remembers released a special edition “Elvis Presley TCB Tribute Revolver”. The weapon, a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum Revolver, is decorated with a picture of Elvis, as well as a lightning bolt, in 24-carat-gold. The weapon is designed, say its makers, to “honour the legend of Elvis Presley, and we are proud to offer it on one of the most powerful firearms ever used in American law-enforcement”. Elvis was himself a keen collector of guns. He had 40 weapons in his arsenal, including M-16s and a Thomson sub-machinegun.

29. The book Elvis was reading at the time of his death was Frank O Adams’s The Scientific Search for the face of Jesus.

30. Elvis wore a cross, the Hebrew letter chai, and a star of David around his neck. “I don’t want to miss out on heaven due to a technicality,” he said.

Cosmetic Surgery for the Eccentric

2007-12-06T13:00:00.001-08:00

If stem cells, cosmetic surgery, and genetics were available for the general public, people would start doing useless things to their body. Oh wait, they already are:

http://hugemagazine.com/blog/?p=27

Steal My Idea

2007-12-01T13:03:00.000-08:00

I stayed at a hotel that had an the iron attached to a heat-resistant mount at the base of the ironing board. And then they had a hanger for the ironing board in the closet and a retractable cord. This is way more advanced than the ironing set-up of olden times where you have to find the iron and unwrap the chord and find a place for the iron and keep it upright when not in use. Everything is in one place.

One thing would make this better ... if the ironing board's holder was a charging station for an iron, and that linked up with the hook. The hook would need to be plugged in, so you would probably have to put a 110 plug in your closet or cupboard or wherever you keep your ironing board. That way you can have a cordless iron that was always put back in it's place and always ready to rip it up.

High school volunteering

2007-11-23T08:49:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you but the extent of my High school volunteering was food shelters and car washes for the sports team. I recently met a young woman who got involved with a program selling jewelry to raise money for medical expenses of a mexican village. And she's working to spread the word to other schools yet she's only a senior. How cool is that?

http://www.chiapasproject.org/

SC Toxic

2007-11-16T15:06:00.000-08:00

Nuclear waste dump sites are in short supply across the US. I suspect real-estate developers are eager to clean up South Carolina and care less about the Nevada dessert.

---------

South Carolina nuclear landfill closing. Starting next summer, many power plants, hospitals, universities and companies in 36 states will be forced to store low-level radioactive waste, because a South Carolina landfill is closing its doors to them. At issue is the Barnwell County dump site, a 235-acre expanse that opened in 1971. The equivalent of more than 40 tractor-trailers full of radioactive trash from 39 states was buried there each year before South Carolina lawmakers in 2000 ordered it to scale back, because they no longer wanted the state to be a national dumping ground. As of July 1, the landfill will take waste only from South Carolina and the two states with which it formed a partnership, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Source: November 2, The Associated Press

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/11/02/1102nuclearwaste.html

How about some bad design

2007-11-15T12:34:00.001-08:00

This is a fun site that focuses on some examples of poorly designed systems. Some improvement ideas are solid, and some could be refined a bit more.Either way, this website is crack for designers. It’s like the Jerry Springer effect: you just feel better knowing that your designs aren’t on this site.

http://www.baddesigns.com/

Artist of the Month

2007-11-15T10:13:00.000-08:00

Linzie Hunter, UK Illustrator, kicks ass. Here’s some proof:

http://www.linziehunter.co.uk/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/linzie/

Dolphin Slaughter Going on Now

2007-11-14T10:22:00.001-08:00

Interesting event …

http://www.savejapandolphins.org/captiveIndustry.html

I wonder if we are being a bit harsh on the Japanese because our society portrays dolphins as more heroic animals than cows. Damn you flipper!

opinion-data-perception

2007-11-13T08:50:00.000-08:00

Anyone want to play a round of opinion-data-perception?

This is a great observation:

http://gotboondoggle.blogspot.com/2005/10/game-of-rock-paper-scissors.html

White Collor Scandal

2007-11-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

I just read the following paragraphs in AdAge. Is this worthy of US Weekly?

--------------------

One exhibit attached to the lawsuit is an image of tennis star Maria Sharapova allegedly taken by Mr. Shigeta during a 2004 commercial shoot for Dentsu client Canon. Ms. Sharapova is pictured with her legs propped up on the back of a director's chair exposing her panties as she snacks on what appears to be a can of Pringles. Mr. Biegel is claiming that Mr. Shigeta's crotch obsession led him to pass the photo around and is part of a pattern of behavior that created a hostile work environment that led him to complain. He was fired in November 2006.

Also included in the complaint is a link to a website for a Czech whorehouse. The internet home of Prague's Escade describes its services in a version of English reminiscent of Borat. Sample: "Young strippers and their performance will make you (sic) evening enjoyable." Another: "If you want to choise (sic) yourself, just call us and we take care of you. If you buy lady-companion for all night, we'll surprise you by an interesting discount." Also available is an interactive, panoramic view of the premises.

Mr. Biegel claims he and another employee were duped by Mr. Shigeta into visiting Escade but that he didn't sleep with a prostitute there despite Mr. Shigeta's efforts to pair him up.

http://adage.com/article?article_id=121698

Patch Fit

2007-10-30T19:13:00.001-07:00

I thought this was a good way to teach fitness to
those who dislike it, be they shut-ins, kids, or the
discouraged and out of shape ...

http://patchfitness.com/

Artist Of The Month

2007-10-29T18:01:00.000-07:00

Molly Crabapple, making burlesque art fun and spreading it to the masses. She’s getting media for her art classes in Brooklyn dives, and her watercolors aint half bad.

http://www.mollycrabapple.com/

Unfortunate airport security

2007-10-26T10:46:00.001-07:00

Screeners missed most fake bombs (WTSP, 10/18/07)
http://www.tampabays10.com/news/national/article.aspx?storyid=65683

Security screeners at two of the nation's busiest
airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on
undercover agents posing as passengers in more than
60% of tests last year, according to a classified
report obtained by USA TODAY. Screeners at Los Angeles
International Airport missed about 75% of simulated
explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security
Administration testers hid under their clothes or in
carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows.

At Chicago O'Hare International Airport, screeners
missed about 60% of hidden bomb materials that were
packed in everyday carry-ons — including toiletry
kits, briefcases and CD players. San Francisco
International Airport screeners, who work for a
private firm instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of
the bombs, the report shows. The TSA ran about 70
tests at Los Angeles, 75 at Chicago and 145 at San
Francisco.

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http://odamnap.blogspot.com

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best blog ever

2007-10-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

My new favorite site

http://mustachesofthenineteenthcentury.blogspot.com/

ecofuel closer to consumers

2007-10-08T17:16:00.000-07:00

Bio-diesel stations are now popping up with unleaded fuel stations. Ethanol stations popping up as well.

artist of the month

2007-09-19T21:54:00.000-07:00

Adam Neate. There, I said it. He's seen as a Grafitti artist but his style is more contemporary at times.

Recent Gallery Exhibit:
http://www.elmslesters.co.uk/exhibitions/exhs15.html

His Page:
http://www.adamneate.co.uk/

Top Hits:
http://cloudking.com/artists/adam-neate/
http://www.woostercollective.com/2006/03/event_adam_neat_sells_out_in_london_on_a.html
http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/graffiti/adam_neate.htm

Artist of the month

2007-08-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I've had a watch thing for the past year or two. Most people look at pilot watches or swiss as the pinnacle. I found inspiration in Japan.

Issey Miyake is a legendary fashion designer who has made a name for himself by experimenting with high tech textiles, methods of pleats and seams, and a perfume line that smells like moldy wood on me.

He's been on the scene for a while and has many design interests. Keep an eye on him; he's not done.

Email business

2007-08-13T00:55:00.000-07:00

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America 175 Million Email Address
Europe 156 Million Email Address
Asia 168 Million Email Address
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Australia 6 Million Email Address
Canada 10 Million Email Address
Russia 38 Million Email Address
England 22 Million Email Address
German 40 Million Email Address
France 38 Million Email Address
India 12 Million Email Address
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Automobile & Transportation 6,547,845
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Computer & Telecommunications 654,655
Construction & Real Estate 3,443,544
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Energy, Minerals & Metals 6,765,683
Environment 656,533
Food & Agriculture 1,235,354
Gems & Jewellery 565,438
Health & Beauty 804,654
Home Supplies 323,232
Industrial Supplies 415,668
Office Supplies 1,559,892
Packaging & Paper 5,675,648
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Security & Protection 5,653,494
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lego mystery

2007-08-08T22:13:00.000-07:00

A giant Lego man washes up on the shores of the Netherlands. Is this an art project going wrong or a marketing stunt gone right?

See full article here.

Signing Up For A Board

2007-08-06T08:15:00.000-07:00

Short and simple article reproduced below:
---------------------

Before You Join That Board...

By Executive Leadership, August 2007

Being asked to join the board of a hospital, charity or school certainly can boost the ego. But, to make sure you say “Yes” for the right reasons, ask these four questions, recommended by seasoned board members:

1. “What do I bring to the table?” Is it knowledge of your field, financial savvy or something else? If your experience resembles that of the board’s other members, decline and volunteer where you will make a difference.

2. “When will I know I’ve completed my job on the board?” You should be able to invest a year or two to reach very specific goals. Just “being there” will drain your time.

3. “What has the board accomplished in the last year, two year and five years?” Don’t join a board that takes up a lot of members’ time in meetings or retreats without accomplishing much.

4. “May I talk to three or four current members before I join?” Ask, “What difference can I make?” If a clear picture doesn’t develop, consider turning the invitation down.

Artist Of The Month

2007-07-30T18:06:00.000-07:00

Andrew Hem, Cambodian living in Culver City.
http://www.andrewhem.com/

I wish I said it

2007-07-10T15:51:00.000-07:00

Speaking on how things suddenly become popular ...
"Commerce and culture only overlap when it is commercially viable, not culturally viable."

-- Marc English
Adholes, 10 July 2007

Artist of the Month

2007-06-15T18:13:00.000-07:00

Leeds-based Paul “Moose” Curtis is pioneering an art known as “reverse graffiti,” using a shoebrush and water to selectively erase dirty surfaces. His bio describes a life immersed in music and this art just kinda became something he could make money at. Fun stuff and aesthetically pleasing. And begs the question: Can you get arrested for cleaning the sidewalk?

Marriage Trends

2007-05-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

A very interesting article in this week's Economist: http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9218127

Basically, the article discusses the gap between people who have babies in their teens versus those who don't. It equates young marriage and child-rearing with lower education levels, higher poverty, more chance for divorce, and more of the repeating cycle. And it shows this gap rising over time.

It also supports the education of what marriage is and raises questions about the glorified importance of marriage to Americans beyond the core idea of continuing the family line, where as countries like Italy and India stress that importance.

The marriage gap within the US makes me wonder about consumption being tied to a mass of people single without children. With the rising number of people waiting to have greater responsibility, has this aided to our more consumer-based culture? Sure not all people are single and gluttonous, but the single people are sometimes put on a pedestal. Rarely do I see the media value a stable relationship without the bait that it gets you tangible stuff.

Food for thought.

Willy Warmers

2007-05-08T09:25:00.000-07:00

This is actually for sale!

Recycling for architecture

2007-05-07T08:57:00.000-07:00

Patagonia's offices are made out of reused materials and aiming to be off the grid. Tru Yoga is a green space in the consumption-friendly city of LA. Lot-ek recently submitted an idea to use old airplanes fuselages for the interior structure of a library in Mexico.

I was listening to Lee Iacocca on NPR go on about how Detroit is in the past and how he see the future on electric/fuel combo cars. When asked what got him to this POV, he said it was paying 8 bucks to see a PowerPoint on the big screen. I've seen the Al Gore phonemenah with my friends and with strangers. More people are freaked out by the end of the world. And it's becoming hip to care. Same Underneath is pushing green clothes onto trendy people while Delta and major airline brokers are backing carbon neutral flights. But back to buildings ...

Even with all the old building abandoned buildings in cities, it's still not hard to justify building new ones. Maybe location is not right, or layout, or construction, or parking. Like BP's green gas station, recycling materials for new buildings is "a little better." Not as good as moving back to the city.

Steal My Idea

2007-05-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

Exclusive ads on TV to increase effectiveness.

NPR doesn't really advertise. They take in sponsors and spit out their message in a typical NPR tone. The print world has made a fortune off of magazine-specific advertising, most notably GQ's advetorials and The Fader's CPG ads. And even Wal-Mart and Target ask for customized POS. Why hasn't TV done the same?

What if NBC asked Audi to come up with an ad, but that ad could not be on any other channel? The incremental ad production may be cheap while media will be the same price.

I suspect viewership may boom on a network offering unique ad content. The ads will be paid attention to in a more active way by some viewers. The consumers won't feel as bombarded with crap they've seen before. Agencies and production companies will have more business.
And the network will begin to create more of a brand in all 24 hours.

Now I know it is not possible to mandate for all advertisers, and local affiliates and political ads will present some challenges. But if you received a discount for following the network's culture, that may incentivize enough. Who knows; maybe you can even get the network to produce network-specific ads for you.

Biomega Bikes

2007-05-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

Biomega unleashed their bicycles on the world around 2004 and have been tearing up the bike world with high design. Their cruiser is available at DWR for about $1200 and their commuter through Puma. These bikes are hyped as the 21st century bike for good reason. They replaced chain with drive shaft. They use new materials like plastic-aluminum combos. And they use crazy wheels.

Who is Philip Mangano

2007-04-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

Philip Mangano's name rolled off Malcolm Gladwell's tongue the other day and I had to learn why.

He was a Bush appointee and has been working to fight homelessness in the US. It's funny he shares his name with a mafia don.

Some stats: 34 m Americans live below poverty, estimated 3 m homeless.

Mangano has been traveling the US holding press conferences on homelessness. This issue has not been a Bush admin hot button but it has been impacted. Large Section 8 housing cuts needed counter-spin by an investment in helping the homeless without families get back in the workforce. Mangano has been shuffling around federal funding from one homeless program to another. Either he's hoping to get his agenda across with a radical shakeup or he's demanding more accountability and not finding it. Either way, I am not sure why Gladwell thinks he's so great.

This may just be one more instance where government passes off social programs to the non-profit sector. In Costa Rica, rural schools grow crops to pay for amenities like books and paper. He has been working closely with churches and local groups to solve the problems. Though Mangano has been working with California heavily, the evidence of his impact may lie in New Orleans. Keep your ears open to see if he's worth the hype.

Comparison Shopping

2007-04-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

Progressive designed their whole advertising campaign off of comparison shopping, but I used them and felt a little overwhelmed with the plan features and a little skeptical of the prices they compared with. It turns out I was better off going to someone else.
Travel aggregators and shopping aggregators were some of the first online players to get comparison shopping right.
Survey Monkey is doing comparison shopping in a more honest way. They recognize that their savvy consumer is going to want to look around and they are making life easier by giving them links to other sites. They are also giving a pitch on why you should choose them even if they are not the lowest. Smart marketing.

Dog-on-doll action

2007-04-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

I don't know why someone didn't create this before ...

Artist of the Month

2007-04-14T11:03:00.000-07:00

Nouvelle Vague is only the second musician to get pinned up here on AOTM. They are a french collective founded in 2003 who cover 80s punk and new wave songs in a bossa nova style.

Does the world really need another album of covers? No, but the founders of this collective just seem to find the most sensual sirens to sing these songs. And they took creative leaps on this to make the songs sound so fresh and appetizing. Hear them at myspace or pick up their self-titled. Just one earfull and you wont be able to stop humming.

The birth of corrupt cops

2007-04-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

Philip Morris has finally started bribing police for their time to handle their crimes (full story).

Is this $50,000 simple civic fundraising, or a return to corruption of law enforcement. Will this lead to a growing mercenary force known as the LAPD? Can I hire the police to patrol my Beverly Hills block or my quiet suburb instead of wasting time in crime infested ghettos?

On the flip side, why can't big companies sponsor police departments and buy them gifts and equipment? The government isn't pitching in as much as they should. As long as it doesn't directly correlate to their assignments, as long as no link can be made between priorities and money, I no change in how effective is law enforcement. And if LAPD does more contract policing, it will help them be accountable. It makes when giggle when I imagine the LAPD doing a cost analysis and calculating overhead into the project.

This latest event with P.M. rubs me a little in the wrong direction.

April Fools

2007-04-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

So my family held me back from doing any April fools day jokes at work. The confetti over the doors didn't fly. Neither did the industry-rattling press releases I drafted. Oh well, I can live vicariously through Google.

Artist of the Month

2007-03-26T07:57:00.000-07:00

Though AOTM is normally a section dedicated to recognizing new artists, I want to use this time to recognize an under-appreaciated man.

Carlo Mollino was a true renaissance designer. He did furniture, buildings, cars, and photographs. He lived a life of an intellect, a playboy, an adventurer, and an Italian.

You can see his work here.

kinky japanese

2007-03-14T09:20:00.000-07:00

Not all japanese are kinky, but this guy certainly was. And it sounds like he was in shape too. I can just imagine some guy going down to the police station to claim all 4000 of them ... for his wife

Steal My Idea

2007-03-10T18:23:00.001-08:00

So Chrysler is going down in smokes. Big automaker can't seem to sell enough cars to keep doors open. Daimler's unhappy. What's a girl to do?

Saving Chrysler by bringing back the ornate brand:

Sure efficiency is a nice thing, fuel consumption and aerodynamics are the talk of the town. But Chrysler can't compete anymore with the big fish at the big fish games.

It should sell the plants it has in prime real estate to boost cash flow, put that cash into existing plant renovations and R&D, and come out with 50 unique products in small batch runs available for a limited time (maybe reissued after 4 years when significant improvements have been made).

In the US, brands like Maserrati, Lotus, Maybach, Bentley, and Ferrari are thriving, and the Fords and Caddys and Dodges of this world are making imitations for affordable options that are inconsistent with their brands. Caddy these days is more of an upscale GM than it's own brand.

Chrysler is in the right spot to design American Luxury Cars. Make cars that stand out and hold up but you have to act fast to get one. It can dominate with cars like the Prowler and PT Cruiser. The US auto market is craving a modern-day collectible car. An American car that harks back to the 50s when portholes and fins were all the rage.

Alternative Uses in Design and Reality

2007-03-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO and Richard Wentworth have eyes for catching interesting uses of the world around us. Just take a look at their pictures and feel inspired to notice the many "band aid" solutions that can be applied in our lives. Jane also has a book coming out on the subject, and her website and Flickr site are becoming a forums for these band aids.

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard would ask: how can we take one tool and put it to many uses? Though there will always be a limited-use luxury market, it's is increasingly important for the masses to design for multiple purposes.

Working to Retire

2007-03-04T12:03:00.000-08:00

In the USA, college graduates have high expectations that they are going to be successful, make it rich, and retire in their 30s. For those that actually do retire in their 30s, I have to wonder what example you give your kids. Hear me out.

In Asia and Latin America, there is a deep respect for elders. One works hard through their life and supports their parents. And you raise your kids hoping that when the time comes they will take care of you. It seems like the biggest difference here is that people work to retire the previous generation, and build on their success through the next generation. With this model, everyone wants the next generation to be as successful or more than the previous.

The American model of striking it rich and then giving your kids an easy life is not a sustainable model. But most entrepreneurs follow this. And this whole generation of middle- and upper- class kids is mentally relaxing, not working to their full potential in part because their pressure to succeed is not as high as in Asia and Latin America. To be more competitive, should something change in America?

Steal My Idea

2007-03-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

Not everyone can afford to buy a DaVinci or a Rembrandt. You don't see too many Caravaggios in your friend's living room, but you really love his work. Lithographs and posters are sooo dorm room, don't you wish there was some way to show off your interest in art while still portraying an air of contemporary sophistication?

Step 1: Take 3-10 of your favorite pieces and find images on the internet (do a google image search for large files). Maybe mix and match new with old artists, but definitely put in some pieces that are 300+ years old.

Step 2: Size them all so that they are the size of post cards.

Step 3: Print them on your photo-printer.

Step 4: Put them in identical frames that has a diagonal of at least 28", 1 picture centered per frame. Try a white/cream canvas background, glass cover, black wood frame. Something like this. For the more adventurous, try an even more contemporary frame.

Step 5: Show off at your next party. Maybe line a hallway or stagger in a room.

The Clinton Jinnah Tale

2007-03-03T15:14:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at the pictures in this article for nearly 2 weeks now, and even have a few collectables of my own. Among the many incidents that Jinnah has been accused of, he made the FBI's list for his "scheme to funnel money" to the Clintons. As sneaky as he seemed, I wonder if he just really loved to give money to and take pictures with Bill and Hillary.

Urban Planning Geek

2007-03-01T15:18:00.000-08:00

The East Biloxi community rebuilding plan.
This is one of many post-Katrina projects. 76 pages of boring and generic planning. It is compassionate and somewhat detailed, but I can't help but think East Biloxi deserves better. That we can really take these projects and make them something huge and exciting.

Artist of the Month

2007-02-28T12:30:00.000-08:00

Mark Kirschenbaum is a master paper folder. Check out his warlord mask and cobra snake.

But he made AOTM for his exhibit on dirty origami.

Though he has competition, I see good things for Mark this month.

T-Bell Rats

2007-02-26T12:44:00.000-08:00

Rats at a NYC Taco Bell afterhours, as seen from the street just outside the W4th subway stop. Just one more reason why NYC eating is overrated.

Click Here to see the video

Tough Marketing Job

2007-02-22T11:50:00.000-08:00

NY Times did an undercover story on the life of a magazine subscription seller reveals a world of low lifes, whores, drugs, and poverty.

Finally some good journalism.

People join up with the magazine crews after high school to travel the country, to get out of their parents' house. They end up forming these gang-like bonds with their magazine crew mates and live in some rough conditions (by both choice and intimidation). There is very little regulation in the industry. Hopefully things will change.

Best magazine ever

2007-02-21T16:10:00.000-08:00

Titty City. This small little zine has huge fun writen over it. It also has "short lived zine" and "guerilla photo submission competition" writen somewhere on this concept.

Steal My Idea

2007-02-18T15:07:00.000-08:00

Fueling stations have pretty much been focused on price and branding. It's a commodity. Service is actually scorned upon, as evidenced by the decline of full-service stations. As gas prices go up, gas stations really need to differentiate themselves. And I'm not talking about adding techron to their fuel, but that's a start.

Super-Premium Gas Stations

- One aisle for "on-the-go," where you fill up your mid-grade gas and pay with credit card while filling.
- One aisle for shoppers, where you stop and can either go into the store or order via kiosk if you don't want to get out of the car.
- One aisle for full service which does oil change and car wash within 10 minutes.
- Special fuels: European Sports Car , Drifter, Stop & Go Commuter, Hydrogen, Ethanol, CNG, ...

Poo gets down

2007-02-15T13:31:00.000-08:00

I don't really understand why, but I'm not complaining. See the video for yourself.

ATHF

2007-02-07T09:11:00.000-08:00

I love the Aqua Teen Hunger Force guys. They can totally crack me up. They are gaining in popularity. And they even got featured on one of the best hip hop albums of 2005.

But the folks at Turner have mixed feelings following someone's misinterpretation of advertising for acts of terror. Bedlam in Boston. Come on, do you have to be that dumb to think that this is a threat?

An okay kind of idea, nothing great or groundbreaking, but it really backfired for Cartoon Network's future advertising tactics. Interference should have told the city first, they should have gotten the permits for sure before mounting little devices to the sides of buildings. With a little bit of advanced notice, the campaign could have run a lot smoother, or been vetoed. $2 million in fines is not a pretty picture and may be hard to justify in ROI. Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were 2 kids who probably stumbled on a craigslist ad about a job of hanging light boxes on the side of a building and thought they'd make a few extra bucks. Now they have lawyers fees and 10 seconds of fame. What a destructive campaign ...

The only way I can spin this around is if we lobby cities to be more forgiving about advertising messages so that people don't have to plot out guerrilla campaigns with so much secrecy.

Chocolates for Women

2007-02-06T08:26:00.000-08:00

Valentines day is brewing. As much as I shy away from scheduled celebrations, this is a nice time to reflect upon some naughty habits that we may have neglected.

Maybe it's time to pick up a box of Diane Kron's K Sensual Chocolates and make a night of it. She's been hyping up her female-only chocolates for years. Maybe the 4-point restraints are more what you had in mind. Either way, it the time of the year to step it up.

Couch Surfing

2007-02-05T16:47:00.000-08:00

Looking for a free place to crash and maybe some new friends. Adventurous travelers should spend a little time at this site before their next trip. According to an article about them in Good Magazine, this is like a friendster for drifters, a nomadic myspace, and a potential lawsuit if it gets any bigger. Right now, it seems to be a group of merry strangers gently using each other to travel on the cheap.

Rise in alternative sports

2007-01-24T12:53:00.001-08:00

The '90s saw extreme sports. The '00s are seeing hipster sports.

Hoosierweight Boxing was a cool little St. Louis thing that was nothing to snarf at. My friend Apillow Creed just competed in a Pillow Fight competition in Brooklyn. Another friend was injured in an arm wrestling competition a few years back. Beach Tennis, anyone? There are several professional Rock-Paper-Scissors organizations poping up. Soap Box races are seeing a comeback through NASCAR, and even a reinvention with the annual race across the Brooklyn Bridge that leaves many bruised and wasted. And who could forget, dodgeball and kickball are taking over intramurals.

Will the '10s see a return to soccer and more mainstream sports?

When did bob saget get cool?

2007-01-23T12:45:00.000-08:00

He wowed me with his 2006 film. This is brilliant, totally immature and fun. Check out the preview.

And according to his website's theme song, Bob's the "illest muthaf*cker in a cardigan sweater." How did this happened to the Full House guy? And will Martha Stewart and Tony Blair follow suit?

Architecture for Humanity

2007-01-19T13:20:00.000-08:00

The organization promotes architectural and design solutions to global, social, and humanitarian crises. They celebrate the power of good design. They recently asked the world to design a new logo for them. Humbling experience or cheap labor, I'm not sure. But it worked. Some info on the ongoing logo competition recently.

sketchup

2007-01-16T17:02:00.000-08:00

Google recently released an improved 3D CAD software. Is there anything these guys can't do? It's free for playing around, and you can upgrade to a professional version or share your designs with the world.

When I think about all the hours wasted in video games, Sim City and Sim Tower ate up as much of my time as Zelda. They felt like living games and I was the emperor. Well, Google wants you to play Sim Campus, a promo to build buzz and trial of SketchUp, and build up their 3D database. Very smart.

Artist of the Month

2007-01-15T13:24:00.000-08:00

I feel so much cooler for knowing about this.

Of course I am not any cooler. I actually am more of a lame-o hype builder for bringing this up, but I love my silver ring from French streetartist and metalsmith Hoon.

The double-knuckle ring is so in right now ... says me. In the US, you can find his jewels at Reed Space on Orchard or Atmos in Harlem.

lessons learned from my gimpy phase

2007-01-10T00:19:00.000-08:00

On July 29, 2006, I was horribly injured skateboarding in Seal Beach at 1:30am. Now I don’t want to pass blame, but I’m pretty sure it was my damn flat feet that delayed the union and kept me on crutches for 5 months. As I go through physical therapy now, I would like to share some things I learned by being disabled.

Everyone feels guilty when they see a disabled person. Smiles turn to grimaces, people start to say “I’m sorry,” and a crippled can never get used to women holding doors open for him. But to reject any of these jesters of help would cause discomfort in those around. It’s a tough situation.

Most attempts at being helpful in this world, from attempted extermination of rats in Hawaii with the mongoose or the liberation of the Iraqis with a destabalized government, has a potential of harm to it. Like I said above, everyone wants to be helpful. Most often these people tend to get in the way or cause more discomfort than assistance. You have to learn to laugh at it and not let it make you bitter.

Vicodin can knock you out solid for 6 hours, but give you some great dreams in the days afterwards. Some painkillers can cause loss of bladder-stopping power. I think it’s called incontinence, but that’s such an old-person’s word.

It’s illegal to drive with the left foot on the gas pedal.

No body can really know the pain or the frustrations, but a lot of people can empathize with the challenge of using restrooms.

Smoking is harmful to bone regeneration.

The best crutches in the world are by Keen Mobility. I’ve felt so free and functional when using them. They are even great on the beach as long as you don’t get sand in the shaft. I never thought of myself as disabled when I had them, and parting with them for the cane gave me a slight case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Savoring hardships is the best way to grow.

No one really cares about crowding handicapped ramps. Able-bodied people actually prefer them to stairs, in spite of a line of cripples waiting to use them.

HMOs suck. They really value processes over patient health and cost reductions. It’s really bad business; I don’t get it.

My physical therapist knows too much about the artist formerly and recently known as Prince.

Crutches are an amazing workout. Abs, arms, and the working leg. Great cardio, too.

It’s very easy for crippled people to be mistaken for criminals when grocery shopping.

Being on crutches gets you all kinds of cred. Homeless people see you and say, “oh man, that sucks.” Girls (in my dreams) want to nurse me back to health. Strangers want to share war stories. It’s a social lubricant.

Canes are a social repellent. People see those on canes as weak for the long haul.

The weakest I’ve felt has been in PT, when very normal things such as walking on my toes seem unimaginable.

It’s very easy when you are in pain 24/7 to not realize how curt you are with people.

Handicapped parking is everything they say it is. Same with early boarding on air planes.

The guys who cart you around airports in buggies or wheel chairs can be slower than you on crutches.

People will tend to send you emails about famous people with similar injuries. In my case it was con artist Heather Mills and dance guru Bill Shannon and "hard core sitter" Aaron Fotheringham.

It’s a lot of fun to tell fellow injured people that their lives would be easier if they just amputated.

Stiff

2007-01-06T12:36:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Mary Roach's book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. A few fun facts:

Our flatulence comes from bacterial waste products in our digestive tract. The dead can fart.

People prefer to say beef to cow, pork to pig. We have a hard time with dead animals and people.

Proctology made surgery a credible field. It was once a field of trial and error, black magic. Then in 1687, a French king had an anal fistula. The rest is history.

Dogs can be trained to find a dead body dumped in a lake from decomposition gasses leaking to the surface.

Anatomy students are given cadavers with their heads and hands wrapped. Those are the most emotionally charged body parts.

Embalming fluids make the penis bigger. Without the fluid, bacteria will bloat one’s testicals to the size of softballs.

Composting and tissue digestion are the next hot things in funeral services.

Behind UT Knoxville, there’s an open space where forensic researchers watch bodies decomposing in a wide variety of ways.

Necrophilia is illegal in only 16 states.

The Taliban forbids human body dissection, so students sometimes commit criminal acts to study the body on their own. A lot of the world used to forbid dissection.

Maggots feeding on fat sound like Rice Krispies.

In Sweeden, cremation is very popular due in part to a policy where after 25 years your grave is reopened and dug deeper so that they can bury someone on top of you.

Design for Sale

2007-01-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

Some of my favorites sites for useless, innovative, and/or pretty:

Compact Impact - Gadgets

GreenerGrassDesign.com

A list from Core77.com

menu.as

Dune Furniture

Desiron

Woah Torpedo

2007-01-04T14:44:00.000-08:00

Click Here

Martyr Saddam

2007-01-01T17:04:00.000-08:00

The whole Saddam case was as botched as the case for war. First his trial took too long and did not seem orderly. Then his future trials are canceled. Then his year-end execution is rushed in like someone trying to beat tax day at the post office.

But I was shocked flying through O’Hare yesterday to see the broadcast and rebroadcast of Saddam’s execution on some grainy hidden camera. Sure he was an awful person, but give him some respect in his final moments instead of rubbing it in. It’s this type of insensitivity that ruins our image outside and captivates/satisfies the mainstream within our borders.

Should we be proud as Americans to execute Saddam? I don’t feel that way.

This following article paints a very human picture of the man post-Iraq. Some parts funny, some sad. I only clicked the link because Google-News told me Gore Vidal wrote it, but I'm not so sure about that now.

Web Link

save your vinyl

2006-12-31T14:25:00.000-08:00

Front-loading record player has optical scan.
http://laserturntable.com/

At $15k, it's not going to fly off the shelf. But as a novelty for audiophiles, could be cool.

Or just convert to mp3 with an Ion:
Review
Buy

Steal My Idea

2006-12-30T16:23:00.000-08:00

LA is a car town, for sure. Angelinos live in their cars. They customize them for comfort and style, since they probably spend as much time driving as they do sleeping. Traffic is as prolific as the entertainment biz. I just flew through LAX and the traffic isn't pretty. Parking tends to be a problem. It's one of the most screwed up airport. The idea of a U-shaped system works in theory but somehow failed for auto and passenger flow.

This idea is not going to solve many problems in traffic, I know, but it will generate funds to get the airport to solve some of their problems.

Valet parking at the terminal - Drive up to the front of the terminal, drop of your car, and go. The attendant will take care of your car and you'll get charged $25-50 per day. Much better than waiting for shuttles to take you to the airport. When you are late for a flight, sometimes you just want to ditch your car in the red zone and rush to screening with your pre-printed boarding pass. Roll this out first at brief flight airlines like Southwest. Or better yet, get a sponsor to offer this for a month or two.

If they can generate enough cash, maybe the airport could finally do underground parking and use the centerspace for centralized check-in.

Designer of the Month

2006-12-25T14:33:00.000-08:00

Pam West and Matt Edmonds do some fun stuff with industrial/interior design.

http://www.frankhome.co.uk/

Best of the Web - 2006

2006-12-24T14:22:00.000-08:00

Yelp - Restaurant reviews made accessible
Pandora - Smart internet radio
Netflix - Movie recommendations based on past behavior
Myspace - Stalking made easy
SideStep - Aggregates all online flight and hotel search engines
My Google - Best RSS reader on the web
Soulsides - Most serious music blog online

Castro's Fresh Rice

2006-12-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

This is old news, but I've been obsessed with the Castro rice cooker for a month. Castro got a great deal on rice cookers from China. In 2005, he offered every woman an electric rice cooker (at subsidized prices) to help the hungry and conserve energy resources. He did this on the day before Women's Liberation Day, which would be ironic in the USA but actually welcomed in Cuba. Many of the rice cookers turned out to be defective and the people in Cuba started rioting. The cookers were repaired. Shortly after, he did a news broadcast demonstrating how to use rice cookers. If anyone has video footage, please post! And I would pay good money for a Castro cooker.

Here's the NPR story, reported by Dan Grech for Marketplace on 12/1/06:

http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/marketplace/morning_report/2006/12/01_mktmorn0450?start=00:00:04:53.0&end=00:00:08:17.0

Fidel's energy obsession

SCOTT JAGOW: Tomorrow, Cuba celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. December 2, 1956, was the day Fidel Castro landed on Cuba's eastern shore in a yacht named the Granma. You may not be aware of this, but 2006 has been a year of revolution in Cuba. A very different kind of revolution. From the Americas Desk at WLRN, Dan Grech explains.

DAN GRECH: Jorge Piñón was watching Cuban TV earlier this year.
President Fidel Castro appeared on screen with a Chinese-made pressure cooker.

JORGE PIÑÓN: "And on national television, he was telling people how many cups of rice you had to put into how many cups of water and how you had to cook the rice so it won't be sticky, so it will be fluffy. It was extremely bizarre. Again I'm talking about a head of state telling us how to cook rice."

Piñón is a Cuba expert at the University of Miami. He says there's a method to this madness. Castro calls it . . .

PIÑÓN: "El Ano de la Revolución Energética. That means, The Year of the Energy Revolution."

Castro's on a kick to save energy.

Pressure cookers use less power than the stovetop, but the revolution doesn't stop there. Castro's importing energy-efficient fridges, TVs and air-conditioners from China. And he's recruited battalions of students to go house to house installing fluorescent bulbs.

Kirby Jones is president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade Association. He says this fits into a pattern.

KIRBY JONES: "He does get a bee in his bonnet. And he gets on certain kicks and he follows them personally and through his leadership the country follows suit."

In 1970, Castro mobilized the entire country to grow 10 million tons of sugar. He even took to the cane fields himself. That didn't work.

Then in 1982, a Cuban cow, La Ubre Blanca, produced 241 pounds of milk on a single day, a Guinness world record. But attempts to breed other supercows went sour.

Castro's latest kick is to solve Cuba's problem with rolling blackouts.

But Jorge Piñón says Cuba doesn't have the money to repair or replace its decaying power plants. So Castro came up with another solution.

PIÑÓN: "He has bought about $800 million worth, I repeat the number again, $800 million worth of small generators."

Piñon has a nickname for this do-it-yourself approach.

PIÑÓN: "The Home Depot strategy. And that is where he has bought thousands of small generators and distributed those generators across the country to bakeries, pharmacies, schools, hotels. So that in the event that the major power plants come down during the blackouts, all those businesses can function and turn on their generators."

While this band-aid approach draws ridicule, another front of Castro's energy revolution has the U.S. worried:

Cuba has up to 9 billion barrels of oil off its coast. Firms from Venezuela and China are drilling wells, but the U.S. is shut out.

Artist of the Month

2006-11-17T21:16:00.000-08:00

I am blown away that there is no wikipedia entry yet for Sam Flores. And there are some real tools in the art/music world that have entries. In case you don't know, Sam is not one of those tools. He has bringing street art to the masses. You've probably seen some of his work in college dorms and on hipsters' torsos. His style is not as agressive as most piece-makers, helping him show and work in more mainstream art circles. Actually, I'd say his work is rather peaceful. He is also in with the art dolls scene with his Tigerbaby.

http://www.samflores.com/

Pictures to be uploaded shortly.

election 2008

2006-11-13T15:00:00.000-08:00

Now that rudy's in the race, things will get interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election

Here's the preliminary list ...

Democratic Party:

Barack Obama
Bill Richardson
Christopher Dodd
Evan Bayh
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Joe Biden
John Edwards
John Kerry
Mike Gravel
Tom Daschle
Tom Vilsack
Wesley Clark

Republican Party:

Bill Frist
Chuck Hagel
Duncan Hunter
George Allen
George Pataki
John H. Cox
John McCain
Michael Charles Smith
Mike Huckabee
Mitt Romney
Newt Gingrich
Rudy Giuliani
Sam Brownback
Tommy Thompson

Third Party:

Bob W. Hargis
Charles T. Maxham
Christine Smith
Daniel Imperato
David Koch / Ken Goldstein
Don Cordell
Doug Stanhope
Gene Amondson
George Phillies
James Gilchrist
Jon A Greenspon
Kat Swift
Lance Brown
Nan Garrett
Rebecca Rotzler
Rich Whitney
Steve Adams
Steve Kubby

I've been a fan of McCain vs Clinton for a while. There are a lot of assorted candidates on both sides which will be shaken out depending on Iraq and the economy. Gore doesn't seem up for loosing again, poor guy. Obama is just too staged for my book. From 2004 repeated, Clark has the best chance out of Edwards, Kerry, and Clark. Pataki versus Rudy, I mean come on that's like Bloomberg vs Rudy, the 9-11 icon in a heartbeat will carry home the votes. Biden and Newt and Daschel are a little too partisan. No one else really has game. But hell, that's what people thought of the democrats in '04 and that turned into odd little group-think primary. This time there are some real page-turners. (and it's interesting that wikipedia has democrats before republicans.)

Wiki Spy

2006-11-09T14:48:00.000-08:00

Negroponte adds wiki tools to better share intelligence.

From my experience in marketing research, I know how intelligence constantly evolves, and it should be constantly updated by all stakeholders. Every year strategies were altered and the view of a target or supplier was modified slightly. Wikis make sense, both in government and private sectors. Imagine if investment bankers could contribute to an internal wiki on all clues and gut feelings they feel about a company, on all facts and signs they pick up on. Or overlapping sales reps update their data on prospects. Wiki is the way to go.

Fun with shredding

2006-10-30T08:05:00.000-08:00

I posted this 2 years ago on another site and just dug it up for repost here. Simply amazing. I can watch this for hours on end.

http://www.ssiworld.com/watch/watch-en.htm

This will be the only item on my wedding registry.

Artist of the Month

2006-10-30T08:04:00.000-08:00

My friend recently introduced me to this Canadian duo that sings songs in an old-time style, but with very naughty lyrics. Very creative and driven, this band has been slowly taking over NYC in October. They've been around for a little longer, getting their break on The L-Word.

This is their website, where they have 2 videos samples, a view into their most recent CD, and the opportunity to own their DVD.

http://www.wetspotsmusic.com/buystuff.html

Take a look though their past. Lead singer Cass King has been pervy her whole life:

http://www.cassking.com/bio_frameset.htm

I just wonder how they can follow up their Hello Kinky album. It is really so perfect in so many ways.

Lion mutilates 42 midgets

2006-10-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

It’s a fun little story made by someone with too much free time on their hands.

http://www.fmft.net/archives/BBC_NEWS.htm

Watch Paris Slowly Relapse

2006-10-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

Some cities never learn. But really, didn't Paris make some effort to improve the situation after $160m in damage and more than that in negative PR and opportunities. I don't know Celestine, but she seems to paint a clear picture.

---------------

France Braces for Violence in Paris Ghettos a Year After Riots
By Celestine Bohlen, Bloomberg, Oct 27, 2006

Epinay-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris with immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa squeezed into high-rise buildings, is bracing for the worst.

A year ago, this town of 49,000 people remained unscathed when youths went on a rampage across France's suburban ghettos, leaving 10,000 burned-out cars and 160 million euros ($200 million) in damage. Then, on Oct. 13, between 30 and 50 Epinay teenagers lay in wait at night for a police car, which they pelted with some 300 stones carried to the scene in sports bags.

The premeditated targeting of the police shows a deepening divide in French suburbs. It also raises the specter of a repeat of last year's riots and violence. Six months before France's presidential elections, the debate is reopening on the nation's failure to integrate its growing immigrant population, and more particularly their French-born offspring.

``The riots last year were an illustration of a dramatic rupture between the young in the suburbs and the institutions of the authority of the French republic, and we have seen a radicalization on both sides,'' said Christophe Bertossi, a researcher at the Institute of International Affairs in Paris. ``It's a guerrilla war.''

The October 2005 riots, which began in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after two young boys fleeing a police check were accidentally electrocuted, spread to other parts of France and lasted about three weeks. The riots revealed tensions in districts marked by youth unemployment of more than 30 percent -- three times the national average of 9 percent.

Mistrusting the Police

They also showed mistrust of the police among suburban youth, which Manik, a 17-year-old high-school student in Epinay, says has gotten worse.

``They come looking for us, and we go looking for them,'' he said during a half-hour suburban train journey into Paris, warning that the violence is ``going to start again.''

It already may have. The Epinay incident, which put four men between the ages of 17 and 21 behind bars, was followed by other violent episodes. In the Paris suburb of Grigny, a bus and three cars were burned in reaction to a police check at a local tea- house. On Oct. 17, about 30 young people set fire to garbage cans and cars in La Source, in the city of Orleans, before stoning vehicles outside the local police station.

``Now there are rumors that are going in all directions,'' said Jean-Michel Genestier, an aide to Epinay's mayor, adding that police in sensitive areas have been asked by the Interior Ministry to keep a low profile. ``Any element could set things off,'' he said.

Police Report

The intensifying attacks were noted in a police report published in the French newspaper Le Figaro on Oct. 23.

``The danger now is of outbursts that are not spontaneous but structured, taking on one of the last institutional presences in some neighborhoods: the police,'' the report said. Ile-de- France, the region around Paris, is cited in the report as the most volatile.

The government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has held several meetings of officials and community representatives from the suburbs, with another planned for Nov. 7.

In December, de Villepin said he would free 100 million euros for local agencies in the low-income suburbs. About 46,000 jobs were created for young people in these areas and a plan to cut discrimination with anonymous resumes is being studied.

Haunting a Nation

Last year's riots, which produced television images of hooded youths silhouetted against blazing cars, have haunted France. A TNS-Sofres poll shows that the number of people concerned about violence rose to 23 percent in October from 19 percent in September. The same poll shows 60 percent expect to see ``social conflicts'' in the next three to four months. The poll on Sept. 27-28 surveyed 1,000 people 18 years and older.

Segolene Royal, who leads the polls in the contest for the Socialist Party nomination for presidential elections, has proposed military-style ``boot camps'' for recidivist delinquents. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who heads the ruling party and is its leading candidate in the race, has built a campaign on law-and-order themes.

``Those who ambush police or firemen must know that it's not acceptable,'' he said in a speech last week.

The anniversary of the riots coincides with the conclusion of Ramadan, the month-long Muslim fasting period, and French school vacations timed to the All Saints holiday.

``We are very worried,'' said Jean-Marc Bailleul, a national secretary of the National Union of Police Officers, which represents 56 percent of the nation's 13,500 officers. ``We didn't need the intelligence service to tell us there is reason to be worried about this anniversary.''

The police report said violence could start again in Clichy- sous-Bois. Unlike Epinay, Clichy has no rail links to Paris, no police station or movie theater and nearly half its population is under the age of 25. Back in Epinay, Manik said the police should back off from youth in these areas.

``I am searched all the time, my book bag is searched,'' he said. ``It is not working.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen1@bloomberg.net .

Weblink To Story

site for cancer research

2006-10-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

This site is one of my favorites, not just for their pediatric oncology content but for people of all ages and for patients at all stages of their life. Incredible breadth and depth of information.

http://www.curesearch.org/

Also, in terms of website design and organizing data, these guys did a phenomenal job.

If you are in the market for med info, checkout www.pubmed.org and allow your inner geek to dig through medical journals.

audio in the bedroom, part 2

2006-10-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

Musical condom hits the high notes

(ananova.com: 2 Oct 2006) A musical condom designed to play louder and faster as lovers reach a climax is to go on sale in Ukraine.

Grigoriy Chausovsky, from Zaporozhye, said his condoms came fitted with a special sensor that registers when the condom is put on.

It transmits a signal to a miniature speaker in the base of the condom which play a melody.

He told local media: "As the sex becomes more passionate, it registers the increased speed of the movements and plays the melody faster and louder."

Renewable Energy - Using tidal shifts, like wind power

2006-09-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

Images and full article available here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/business/worldbusiness/03tides.html?ex=1312257600&en=a0172afbc7c00d14&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Energy From the Restless Sea

NYTimes, HEATHER TIMMONS, Published: August 3, 2006

There is more riding the waves here than surfers, thanks to a growing number of scientists, engineers and investors.

A group of entrepreneurs is harnessing the perpetual motion of the ocean and turning it into a commodity in high demand: energy. Right now, machines of various shapes and sizes are being tested off shores from the North Sea to the Pacific — one may even be coming to the East River in New York State this fall — to see how they capture waves and tides and create marine energy.

The industry is still in its infancy, but it is gaining attention, much because of the persistence of marine energy inventors, like Dean R. Corren, who have doggedly lugged their wave and tidal prototypes around the world, even during the years when money and interest dried up. Mr. Corren, trim and cerebral, is a scientist who has long advocated green energy and pushed through numerous conservation measures when he was chairman of the public energy utility for the city of Burlington, Vt.

Another believer in the technology is Max Carcas, head of business development for Ocean Power Delivery of Edinburgh. "In the long run, this could become one of the most competitive sources of energy," said Mr. Carcas.

His company manufactures the Pelamis, a snakelike wave energy machine the size of a passenger train, which generates energy by absorbing waves as they undulate on the ocean surface.

With high oil prices, dwindling fuel supplies and a growing pressure to reduce global warming, governments and utilities have high hopes for tidal energy. The challenge now is turning an accumulation of research into a viable commercial enterprise, which for many years has proved elusive.

No one contends that generating energy from the oceans is a preposterous idea. After all, the "fuel" is free and sustainable, and the process does not generate pollution or emissions.

Moreover, it is not just oceans that could be tapped; the regular flow of tides in bodies of water linked to oceans, like the East River, hold promise too. In fact, it seemed like such a sensible idea that inventors started making the first wave of such generators centuries ago. Many operated like dams, trapping water and then releasing it after the tides fell. But they were outmoded with the rise of steam engines and other more efficient fuel sources.

Ocean energy had a brief revival when oil prices rose in the 1970's, and prototypes were tested in Europe and China. But financing dried up when oil prices were low in the 1990's, and advances in wind turbines and other renewable energy elbowed out tidal projects.

These days, wave power designs vary from machines that look like corks bobbing in the ocean to devices that resemble snakes pointing into waves. There are shoreline machines that cling, like limpets, to rocks.

Tidal power machines, in contrast, often come in the form of turbines, which look like underwater windmills, and generate energy by spinning as tides move in and out; some inventors also are testing concrete-and-steel machines that lie on the seabed and pipe pressurized water back to the shore.

Even big commercial power companies are joining the action. General Electric; Norsk Hydro, a Norwegian company; and the Germany power giant Eon have recently pledged money for new projects or investments in tiny marine energy companies.

"It is an untapped renewable energy source," said Mark Huang, senior vice president for technology finance in General Electric's media and communications business, which is financing marine projects. "There is no where to go but up," Mr. Huang said. He added that solar or wind energy should be viewed "as a case study" for the direction marine energy could take.

Right now, wave power generators are being tested near the shores of New Jersey, Hawaii, Scotland, England and Western Australia. A long-awaited East River tidal turbine project is to start this fall, and Representative William D. Delahunt, Democrat of Massachusetts, has proposed that the United States follow in Britain's footsteps to build an ocean energy research center, the country's first, off the Massachusetts coast.

A handful of commercial projects are also in the works, including the world's first "wave farm," as the fields of machines are known, being installed off the north coast of Portugal. A field of tidal turbines is also being built off the shore of Tromso, Norway.

Britain could generate up to 20 percent of the electricity it needs from waves and tides, according to an estimate by a government-financed group here called the Carbon Trust. That is about 12,000 megawatts a day at current usage, or three times what Britain's largest power plant produces now. In fact, England and Scotland have become experimental laboratories for ocean energy development. As reserves shrink and the offshore oil business in the North Sea winds down, governments are trying to capture the accumulated knowledge and transform oil industry jobs into other ways of generating energy.

One research center here in Newcastle is putting marine devices to the test in a wave pool, and another is deploying them in the roiling ocean off the Orkneys, the low islands off northernmost Scotland. The Scottish government has pledged to generate 18 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2010.

If marine energy replaces the burning of some fossil fuels like coal, it can help reduce overall carbon dioxide emissions and possibly increase the diversity and security of energy supply, said John Spurgeon, a marine energy specialist in the British Department of Trade and Industry. Since 1999, the government has committed more than $47 million to research and development, $93 million to commercialize that research and additional money to bring the energy into the electrical grid, Mr. Spurgeon said.

No energy source is perfect, though, and marine energy developers are running into some hurdles. While such generators do not emit smoky pollutants or leave behind radioactive waste, the machines are not small or delicate, and can be an eyesore. To draw energy from the ocean, they often need to be rooted on sea floors relatively close to shore, or mounted on rocks on the shore — places that have not traditionally been used for energy generation.

And despite their green-friendly intentions, inventors are finding some of the stiffest resistance is coming from environmental groups.

Take the case of Verdant Power, Mr. Corren's company, which has been trying for years to erect a small field of tidal turbines in the East River — a project that may finally get started this fall. Mr. Corren, the company's technology director, first developed the turbines as part of a New York University project in the 1980's and planned to attach them to the Roosevelt Island Bridge.

After the school pulled the plug on the project, the design team spent years trying to find a new home. One executive even brought a prototype to Pakistan, but the data it collected was lost when the computers and instruments went missing.

Verdant embarked on a new East River turbine project in 2003, but it has taken two and a half years to get regulatory approval for the project from environmental agencies and the United States Army Corp of Engineers. The issue was not blocking the river to boat traffic, or how it would hook up to the electrical grid or even how it might mar the view, because it is mostly underwater. It was the fish population of the East River.

"We had eight fish biologists against it, and no one on the other side advocating for clean air" or other environmental issues, said Ronald F. Smith, the chief executive of Verdant Power. "You can see that the regulatory process is extremely biased towards doing nothing," Mr. Smith said, adding that regulators were worried about complaints that could arise from any new projects.

To get approval, the company is installing $1.5 million in underwater sonar to watch for fish around the turbines "24 hours a day, 7 days a week," and the data will be shown online, Mr. Smith said. Verdant Power executives warn against looking forward to a live "East River cam" that broadcasts the murky mysteries beneath the water. Sonar transmissions look more like fuzzy black and white television, they say, and besides they have seen "very, very few fish" on their visits to the river.

Ultimately, Verdant estimates it can generate 10 megawatts of electricity from the East River's tidal flows — enough to power several thousand homes, though its test turbines will be used primarily to power a Gristedes grocery store on Roosevelt Island.

To date, studies on the effect of wave and tide machines on marine life have been sporadic and sometimes bizarre. For example, in one British trial, frozen fish were shot like projectiles onto a piece of metal that was supposed to estimate the effects of the turning blades of marine turbines.

Proper testing will involve putting some of these devices where they are not wanted, a problem reminiscent of the wind industry's battle to construct new turbines. Some leading environmental advocates say that the issue is part of a larger wrenching change being thrust on the green movement.

"It's a major psychological and cultural challenge for the environmental and conservation movement," said Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK. "What we need to combat climate change is a complete transformation of our energy system, and that requires a lot of new stuff to be built and installed, some of it in places that are relatively untouched."

But the potential of marine energy is too strong to ignore. For example, a recent report identified San Francisco Bay as being the largest tidal power resource in the continental United States. "There are tremendous resources for generating power along the northern coast of California," said Uday Mathur, a renewable energy consultant to government agencies and private enterprises.

The biggest hurdle is creating a landscape for development "where these technologies can thrive," he said, which includes a combination of government involvement, community support and of course the availability of financing.

"The situation is very similar to wind 15 years ago," said John W. Griffiths, a former British gas executive and founder of JWG Consulting, which advises on renewable energy projects. He added: "We think that this is an industry waiting to happen."

DDT re-approved for Africa as the lesser of two evils

2006-09-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

Sneaky news article came out today ...
-----

WHO Backs DDT Use To Stop Malaria

by Marjorie Mazel Hecht, September 29, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review

The World Health Organization's announcement Sept. 15 that it will back DDT spraying on the inside walls of houses to kill or repel malaria-carrying mosquitoes is very good news. The reversal of WHO's 30-year policy against DDT brings the hope that the relentless disease, which now kills one African child every 30 seconds, can be brought under control. Malaria sickens and debilitates 500 million people a year, killing about 1 million of them; the majority of the dead are women and children on the African continent.

Indoor residual spraying, or IRS, involves spraying minute amounts of insecticides on the inside walls and roof of houses once or twice a year. DDT is the most effective of the approved insecticides. It is also long-lasting (it can be sprayed just once a year) and relatively inexpensive (about $5 per average five-person household). It either kills mosquitoes resting on the walls, or repels them from the dwelling. The malaria-bearing mosquitoes bite mostly at night.

For many African countries now debating the use of DDT, the WHO decision will be a lifesaver. Just days after the WHO announcement, Uganda said that it will go forward with its indoor spraying program in 2007. Uganda's Health Ministry reported on Sept. 20 that spraying with DDT would help reduce infant mortality from the current 88 out of 1,000 births to 10. Opponents had complained that use of DDT will cut into their agricultural exports to the European Union, which is notoriously frightened of pesticides. Meanwhile, 800 Ugandan children die a day from malaria.

Studies have shown that malaria incidence drops dramatically after an indoor spraying campaign. South Africa, for example, resumed the use of DDT in 2003, and within one year, the incidence of malaria in the worst-hit province, KwaZulu Natal, fell by 80%. In two years, the number of malaria cases and deaths dropped by 93%. As the WHO has stressed, there are no environmental effects when small amounts of DDT are sprayed on inside house walls.

WHO's Policy Turnabout

WHO appointed Dr. Arata Kochi as head of its Global Malaria Program in late 2005, with the task of assessing the WHO program and making proposals for its future work. Kochi was blunt in his criticism of WHO's past effort and in what was needed to combat malaria. As he announced at a Washington, D.C. press conference Sept. 15, "We must take a position based on the science and the data." Anticipating a reaction from a public brainwashed into demonizing DDT, he issued an appeal: "Help save African babies, as you help save the environment."

The new WHO malaria campaign has three aims: 1) prompt and effective treatment of the infected; 2) indoor residual spraying, with DDT as the most effective insecticide of those allowed; and 3) the use of bednets treated with a long-lasting insecticide.

Dr. Pierre Guillet, a medical entomologist who coordinates the WHO Vector Control and Prevention Team, acknowledged in an interview with this reporter Sept. 21, that DDT had been out of the picture for many years, under pressure from environmentalists, who wanted an end to all pesticides. But the alternative approaches—such as "case management," "integrated vector control," and more recently, insecticide-treated bednets—did not work to control the spread of malaria. Guillet has spent 17 years working on malaria control, 10 in Africa, and the past 7 years at WHO headquarters in Geneva. He stressed that WHO's policy now is to focus on areas of high malaria transmission to achieve at least 80% coverage of the population with indoor house spraying and bednets. "We need a very fast scale-up of these efforts," Guillet said.

"The change that has been made by Dr. Kochi is to say that if we want to seriously talk about malaria control, we have to control transmission, and to do that we need high coverage. To reach high coverage, we have to use the interventions that we know are effective, which are IRS and long-lasting bednets. They are not exclusive ... it is the combination of the the two with the main objective to scale up rapidly coverage, in order to be effective in terms of transmission control."

Was the motivation for the ban on DDT at the WHO because of Malthusian views? Guillet said that he could not speak for the WHO as an institution. "For me, DDT is a non-issue. The issue is the intervention and the objective.... Today, we have to admit that DDT is the most effective and the cheapest insecticide. And when recognizing that, at a time when the genome of the parasite has been sequenced, and the genome of the major vector has been sequenced, still relying on a compound is more than 60 years old, and that has damaging effects when used indiscriminately, is a shame. And I see that, to a certain extent, as a failure of our international community to develop safe alternatives—not that DDT is not safe, but DDT is an emblematic product.... You cannot swim against the stream too long."

Guillet noted that the Stockholm Convention on pesticides had put DDT on the phase-out list, but with no time limit imposed. "Fine," he said, "but if we ban DDT right now, it will have more damaging effects on human health than using it...."

In response to my assertion that there had been no damage to human health from DDT, Guillet said that he wasn't a toxicologist, but he agreed that "There is no direct evidence of toxic effects of DDT on human health." If we haven't found any such evidence after 60 years, "It is bloody safe," he said. However, WHO will conduct studies on the effects of IRS on human health and will monitor potential side effects of DDT and other insecticides.

Guillet strongly recommended that an international partnership work on the development of new insecticides, and said that the Gates Foundation has begun to do this, to improve the formulation of current insecticides and their application in vector control.

A Deadly Ban

While the fine points of previous anti-malaria policies can be endlessly debated, the bottom line is that millions of people have died of malaria as a result of the ban on DDT, most of them in Africa. and hundreds of millions more have severely suffered from the disease.

DDT was banned in the United States in 1972 on the basis of a big lie, not science. In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency held seven months of hearings on the issue, producing 9,000 pages of testimony. The EPA hearing examiner, Edmund Sweeney, ruled, on the basis of the scientific evidence, that DDT should not be banned. "DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to man [and] these uses of DDT do not have a deleterious effect on fish, birds, wildlife, or estuarine organisms," Sweeney concluded.

But two months later, without even reading the testimony or attending the hearings, EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus overruled the EPA hearing officer and banned DDT. He later admitted that he made the decision for "political" reasons.

Although other nations continued to DDT after 1972, the U.S. State Department mandated that no U.S. aid could go to any foreign program that made use of a pesticide banned in the United States. As a result, malaria rates in tropical countries began to climb, turning around DDT's initial success in either eliminating or lessening the impact of the disease. Former Secretary of State George Shultz reinforced the State Department anti-DDT policy in a 1986 telegram to all U.S. embassies abroad. But in the last year, in response to Congressional hearings on the science, and pressure from constituent groups like the Congress for Racial Equality, the U.S. Agency for International Development did an about-face on DDT, permitting use of DDT.

DDT is not a panacea for malaria. Africa desperately requires economic development, including adequate public health programs and health infrastructure to keep malaria under control. This is not just a question of Africa or other tropical countries: In the rest of the world, including the industrialized West, the takedown of public health infrastructure has begun to leave even privileged populations vulnerable to insect-borne diseases. Policy has been determined by the views of those environmentalists who foolishly leave human health out of their schemes to protect a mythical Mother Nature—and mosquitoes are allowed to breed freely.

For background information on DDT, see Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, "The Ugly Truth about Rachel Carson," 21st Century Science & Technology, Summer 1992, and "Malaria: The Killer That Could Have Been Conquered," 21st Century Science & Technology, Summer 1993, available at 21stcenturysciencetech.com.

designer of the month

2006-09-26T14:39:00.000-07:00

"Please God, save me from your followers." - Derek Hess

http://www.strhessclothing.com/

I have his calendar on my wall and it definitely attracts some noise in the office. Really dark, interesting illustrations.

Why I Love NYC - Dog on Track

2006-09-19T14:47:00.000-07:00

September 19, 2006, New York Times, by Joe Sexton

Tales of the City: Dog on the Track

The Q train announcement was, actually, decipherable. That's not to say it was easy to comprehend.

"This train is being delayed. There is a dog on the tracks."

That got the attention of the folks in the front car of the subway train. Cell phones popped open. Calls were made to work. Doubts were expressed as to whether this excuse would be accepted.

"There's a dog on the tracks."

"Hi, I'm at Parkside Avenue. I'm going to be a while. There's a dog in front of the train."

"I don't know what kind of dog it is. But it's been running in front of the train, and it does not look tired."

It was nearly 8:30, the height of the morning commute, the train at a halt along the outdoor tracks in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. The dog, which one passenger said had been seen on the Newkirk Avenue platform before it took up the next stage of its adventure, had led the Q train in a weird sort of herding exercise for several stops, striding unfazed in front of the train as it inched along cautiously behind the dog. The dog — with a visible collar and estimated by one passenger straining to look out the front car at no more than 2 years old — hardly looked up on its trek. It stuck inside the two rails, stayed clear of the electrified third one, and appeared, for quite a while, well, headed to a breakfast meeting in Manhattan.

But now the dog, and the train, had stopped — a standoff of understandable, shared confusion.

"Lord," said one passenger..

Track fires; sick passengers; terror scares. The routines of subway delays had conditioned the people in the front car to most anything. But this seemed different. Someone called 911 — which said call 311. Of course.

"Is a transit employee doing something," the 311 operator asked the caller.

It was hard to tell. But seconds later, a transit worker emerged from the motorman's cab. He smiled, but did not seem to have a plan.

"Is there anyone here who has a familiarity with dogs?" he asked.

The question provoked general astonishment. The man seemed to be asking if there was anyone willing to drop down onto the tracks and corral the dog.

"He could have rabies," said one passenger.

"Honk the horn," said another.

"Call the cops," said another.

"Yeah," offered a third, "they have a K9 unit."

People smiled. Sort of.

Chastened, the transit worker stepped out of the train's front, scooped up the dog without incident, and the Q train lurched back into action.

Someone had taken a picture with a cell phone. Good, it was agreed. Evidence. Otherwise, who would believe it.

Renegade Lunch Lady (From The New Yorker)

2006-09-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

One woman making a difference in what kids eat at school. See below for the very long story

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The Lunchroom Rebellion

by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker, Sept 4, 2006

The lunch ladies of my elementary-school memories in Oklahoma are a stout, sweet-tempered breed. They wear cat's-eye glasses and have beauty-shop perms, with hairnets drawn taut across their foreheads. They have gray uniforms and dishwater complexions, and stand in line dolloping out grayish food—boiled okra, spinach with vinegar, corn bread and black-eyed peas—smiling wearily, as if they knew that they were slowly killing us. I'm not sure what they would think of Ann Cooper, the new executive chef of the Berkeley public schools, in California. I suspect that she would make them nervous.

Cooper, who calls herself "the Renegade Lunch Lady," was hired last fall to revamp the city's dismal school-lunch program. She is small and tightly wound, with shoulders bunched from lifting weights. She has bright, defiant eyes, unruly brown hair, and a raspy alto that tends to break when she gets excited. In the kitchen, she moves with quick, stiff-legged strides, nipping at heels, barking out instructions, and sending her large, slow-moving colleagues into bewildered stampedes. She is, in short, a typical chef, landed in a world where real cooking is almost unknown.

Cooper is quick to admit that she's making the worst food of her life. In her twenties, she attended the Culinary Institute of America and cooked on cruise ships. In her thirties, she owned her own restaurant, in Telluride, and was named an "up-and-coming chef" by Gourmet. In her forties, she transformed the Putney Inn, in Vermont, into a bastion of New American cuisine. Now, at fifty-two, Cooper has ended up where most chefs wouldn't deign to begin: in an under-staffed, under-equipped cafeteria, trying to wean four thousand children from deep-fried chicken nuggets. "I spent my whole career making fancy food for rich people," she says. "I've cooked for Hillary Clinton and Emmylou Harris, Jimmy Buffet and the Grateful Dead. I don't want to do that anymore."

Cooper's first experience with cafeteria cooking was of a more utopian sort. In 1999, her work at the Putney Inn caught the attention of Courtney Sale Ross, the wealthy widow of a former chairman of Time Warner. Ross had founded a school for fifth to twelfth graders in East Hampton, New York. It had a progressive, ecologically minded curriculum, and she wanted its food to be equally enlightened. "At first, I said, 'No way! I'm a chef, not a lunch lady!" Cooper recalls. But when Ross showed her the school's new, ten-million-dollar Wellness Center, where students could do yoga or dine overlooking a forest of silvery pines, Cooper agreed. Over the next few years, she hired a local poet-farmer to grow organic vegetables and sent students to help with the harvest. She lured sous-chefs from French and Asian restaurants in New York and wrote recipes linked to the curriculum—a feast of fifteenth-century dishes, for instance, for a course on the Renaissance. She made celery-root soup and green gazpacho, Caprese salad and fennel stew, and the children cleaned their plates, after a little cajoling.

People used to joke that the Ross School had the best restaurant in the Hamptons. Martha Stewart filmed a segment of her television show there, and a magazine for Lexus owners ran a story on it entitled "Haute Cafeteria." But although Cooper had hoped that other cafeterias would adopt some of her methods, few could afford to do so. Elsewhere in America, one in five schools was selling fast food and less than half had working kitchens. The country was in the midst of an epidemic of childhood obesity, the Surgeon General had declared, yet eighty per cent of school lunches contained more fat than federal guidelines allowed. "I got tired of everyone telling me that what I was doing could only be done at the Ross School," Cooper says.

Berkeley is her first attempt at cooking for the masses—at making private-school lunches on a public-school budget—but she is hardly alone anymore. America is suddenly full of people who want to save school lunch: celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver, who exposed the sorry state of British cafeterias two years ago and has threatened to do the same in New York; guerrilla documentarians like Morgan Spurlock, who championed healthful lunches in "Super Size Me"; and a swelling horde of angry parents, crusading cafeteria directors, and politicians with bitter lunchroom memories of their own. Last year, more than two hundred bills in forty states sought to ban sodas and junk food from schools, and in May the major beverage companies voluntarily agreed to remove non-diet drinks by the fall of 2009. Bill Clinton, whose foundation helped broker the deal, called it "courageous."

Still, expelling junk food won't do much to improve school cafeterias. In East Hampton, Cooper had twenty-seven employees for five hundred diners; in Berkeley, she has fifty-three for four thousand. In East Hampton, Cooper spent about twelve dollars per day, per child on breakfast and lunch. In Berkeley, she spends three and a half dollars for the same two meals. Can a decent lunch be made for so little? And, if so, will anyone eat it?

The Central Kitchen of the Berkeley Unified School District lies on a quiet side street in northwest Berkeley not far from the city's foothills. It was built in the nineteen-fifties, as part of Jefferson Elementary School, and has survived periodic upheavals from desegregation, bilingual education, No Child Left Behind, and the Loma Prieta earthquake. The kitchen occupies a dingy, high-ceilinged room. It smells of stale bread and disinfectant, and is populated by hulking industrial machines: a steam kettle, a sautéing vat, a pair of convection ovens, and a Hobart mixer with a vaguely menacing air, like the hooded mother beast in "Aliens." There is no blender, no food processor, no stovetop or grill, yet the kitchen produces food for thirteen of the city's sixteen schools, including all eleven of its elementary schools. (The other schools have their own kitchens, which Cooper also oversees.)

On a Tuesday morning in May, the menu called for meat loaf—four thousand servings of it, with mashed potatoes and oven-roasted squash. In the kitchen's walk-in refrigerator, thirty cylinders of government-supplied ground beef, each two feet long, five inches in diameter, and ten pounds in weight, awaited Cooper's attention. She heaved two of them onto her shoulders and dropped them on a butcher-block counter. "Now you can see why I lift weights," she said, then took a swig from a protein shake. She'd had braces put on her teeth in January to fend off gum disease, and this was the only breakfast that wouldn't stick to them. "It's a chef's worst nightmare," she said.

Cooper had been up since three-thirty, and cooking since five. She lives alone in a rented house in Moss Beach, an hour's drive to the south, and commutes to Berkeley every day before dawn. Her crew is usually there when she arrives. The assistant chef, Alan Lyman, an amiable Englishman with the shape and blush of a Bartlett pear, was making a tub of coleslaw. He had spent ten years cooking in British hospitals and twelve in the Berkeley schools, but he was still getting used to Cooper's pace. Across from him, a team of eight black and Hispanic workers was scooping chicken and noodles into take-out trays. The group was led by Cecelia Adams, the kitchen manager, a middle-aged black woman with a deep, easy voice and an unflappable manner. Because the other schools lacked proper kitchens, the food had to be prepared well in advance. The chicken had been made on Monday for Wednesday's lunch; the meat loaf would be served on Thursday; and a truck outside was unloading Friday's lunch—tamales and enchiladas made by a local company. Cooper had met the owners at a stand at a farmers' market. "Do you think you could make four thousand of these a week?" she'd asked.

To make the meat loaf, Cooper dumped the tubes of beef into the Hobart's bowl, then added ingredients one by one. The full recipe called for three hundred pounds of meat, seven and a half pounds of bread crumbs, three gallons of milk, ten pounds each of beaten eggs and Parmesan cheese, twenty pounds each of diced onions and shredded carrots, and nearly four pounds of garlic and spices. Cooper worked in batches, calculating the proportions as she went. She has always had a good head for numbers: growing up in Hingham, Massachusetts, she was kicked out of high school twice for smoking pot, but she passed her equivalency tests in a day when she needed them for culinary school. When she had finished adding ingredients, she set the dough hook spinning. "They never would have served meat loaf here before," she said. Why not? I asked. "Because it's food."

She looked around for Adams, who was shuttling a row of take-out trays through a shrink-wrapping machine. "Cecelia! Get me one of those things you used to serve!" Adams gave her a long, heavy-lidded look. Like most of the staff, she had little formal training as a cook, but she'd worked in the schools for seventeen years and was getting tired of being reminded of her deadly, grease-dispensing history. She trudged off to the freezer and back, then thumped a rectangular object on the counter. Cooper pounced on it. "El Extremo Burrito!" she shouted. She flipped it over and pointed to the ingredients list, a block of small-faced type six inches wide and an inch deep. "They'd go into the oven just like that," she said. "They didn't even get opened until the kids ate them."

When Cooper took charge of the Central Kitchen last fall, she began by banning heat-and-serve dishes. She then made a list of undesirable ingredients—transfats, preservatives, and foods with too much salt, refined flour, sugar, or high-fructose corn syrup—and began looking for substitutes. White bread gave way to whole wheat, canned fruits and vegetables to fresh, and generic hot dogs and hamburgers to ones made from grass-fed beef. "Those changes anyone can do," she said. "I banned chocolate milk. Easy. I only accepted hormone-free milk. I banned vending machines. I banned fried foods. That is not brain surgery. The hard part is to get back to scratch cooking, and getting around the commodity program."

Every year, the federal government buys nearly a billion dollars' worth of raw and processed foods and sends them to schools for free. Many schools then have some of the food sent to plants to be turned into ready-made dishes. The commodity program provides about twenty per cent of the food in cafeterias. Last year, schools got about seven hundred million dollars' worth of meat and dairy products, and less than two hundred and fifty million dollars' worth of vegetables. Cooper blames this imbalance on the Department of Agriculture, which uses the program to buy up farm surpluses and stabilize prices. "The U.S.D.A. is the marketing arm for agribusiness," she said. "It's responsible for the national organic standards, and it's responsible for school lunch. How many ways can you say conflict of interest?" Yet schools are free to choose their own commodities, and they can fill their quota with vegetables and other nutritious staples. The real problem for Cooper was that the items must be ordered months in advance, so she was still using food chosen by her predecessor, now the food-service director for a prison system.

"Look at this printout!" Cooper said, flourishing a long list of processed cheese, canned fruits, and condiments, laden with sugar and salt. Cooper couldn't afford to throw out those items, so she tried to incorporate them into more nutritious dishes: "beef crumbles" went into spaghetti sauce, croutons into turkey stuffing, canned peas into split-pea soup, and canned apricots into a barbecue sauce. Just that week, she'd received twenty-six cases of cranberry sauce and eighteen cases of lo mein noodles. "Oh, what are we going to do with it?" she said. "I don't want to use any more shitty food."

The answer was coleslaw. When Lyman had filled a five-gallon tub with shredded cabbage and carrots, raisins, salt, and apple-cider vinegar, Cooper came over with a can of the cranberries. "It'll be like a sweet vinaigrette," she said, without much conviction. She measured out a pound of the sauce on a scale, dumped it into the tub, then slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and mixed it with her hands. When she was finished, the coleslaw looked as if someone had bled into it. "Ah, that's lovely," Lyman said after he'd tasted it. "But I do think it needs a little more salt."

Feeding four thousand on a public-school budget is at best a loaves-and-fishes affair, and at worst the equivalent of a bad casserole—full of dubious proteins cleverly disguised. The federal government subsidizes meals according to a sliding scale: schools get two dollars and forty cents per lunch served to the poorest students, and as little as twenty-three cents for more affluent students. In Berkeley, the state contributes another fifty cents or so, but it doesn't add up to much. "It's impossible," Cooper said. "It's egregious. It makes me want to cry." But she's lucky to get any subsidies at all.

In 1946, when the National School Lunch Program was first proposed to Congress, the country still had fresh memories of the Depression, when children sometimes fainted from hunger in class. Yet plenty of politicians were leery of paying for their food with federal dollars. "It was a highly improbable program," Janet Poppendieck, sociologist at Hunter College who is writing a book on school lunch, told me. "Congress was looking at one of the largest deficits in national history—two hundred and eighty billion, in yesterday's dollars—and it was full of articulate conservatives who wanted to shrink government." No one wanted to take lunches away from needy boys and girls, the Republican whip at the time, Leslie Arends, declared. But, he added, "the greatest thing that we can hand down to our children is a solvent government." The bill was finally signed by President Truman as "a measure of national security." The country didn't need healthier students, it seemed, so much as stronger soldiers: more than a third of the conscripts who failed the Army's physicals had been malnourished at one time.

During the next thirty years, the program went from subsidizing seven million meals a day to twenty-seven million, and its annual budget grew to more than three billion dollars. Then, in 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed David Stockman as his budget director. Stockman had a simple plan for cutting subsidies: he redefined "lunch." A nutritious meal would now have to provide only an ounce and a half of protein instead of two, six ounces of milk instead of eight, and half a cup of vegetables instead of three-quarters—a quarter cup of which could be a condiment. To show how this would look on a plate, Patrick Leahy served his colleagues in the Senate a mock school lunch. It consisted of a silver-dollar-size burger on half a bun, a box of milk, a squirt of ketchup, and six grapes.

The Reagan Administration withdrew the new guidelines after thousands of letters of protest were sent to the Department of Agriculture. But funding for child nutrition still fell by nearly a billion and a half dollars. (The Carter Administration had previously cut it by four hundred million.) Grants for kitchen equipment were eliminated, forcing districts like Berkeley to move their cooks into centralized facilities, and most schools couldn't afford to cover their cafeterias' losses. They needed them to turn a profit. "The gospel was preached that cafeterias should be operated like a business, and students as customers," Poppendieck says. And these customers wanted sodas and snacks.

In the late nineteen-eighties, when my former high school started offering Coca-Cola and Mazzio's pizza alongside regular lunches, I was more jealous than appalled. Fast food had yet to be demonized, fat kids were still just fat—not the tragic victims of an obesity epidemic—and name-brand pizza sounded a lot better than the cartilaginous stews we'd been served. Even in pure business terms, though, the new foods were often a failure. The more snacks and sodas students bought from vending machines or fast-food lines, the less they spent on regular lunches. Two years ago, when Texas banished junk food from its elementary schools and tightened nutrition requirements for all grades, cafeteria sales increased so much that the state received an extra fifty million dollars in federal subsidies—more than compensating for the loss in vending-machine revenue.

Berkeley first tried to reform its cafeterias in 1999, calling for salad bars in every school and organic vegetables for all. Like many of the city's social campaigns, the effort was both pioneering and impractical. It drew mocking news coverage nationwide—the Washington Post accused locals of liking "to brag about how progressive they are"—and the salads disappeared as soon as the grants that paid for them ran out.

When Cooper was hired, last fall, after working with the cafeterias for a year as a consultant, her plan was to rebuild the system from the inside out. She wanted not only to improve the food but also to create a step-by-step manual for lunchroom reform nationwide—complete with recipes, menu cycles, and staffing and ordering guides. But she answers to three masters in Berkeley: the school district is her official employer; the U.S.D.A. subsidizes her meals; and the Chez Panisse Foundation pays her salary (ninety-five thousand dollars, plus benefits, a year). The first needs her to stay within budget; the second insists that she conform to its dietary standards; the third wants her to hurry up and start a revolution. She may yet fail on every front. "We've got union issues. We've got kitchens that don't cook. We've got the same shit everybody else has," she says. "This is the reality of school food."

Tuesday is pizza day at the Malcolm X elementary school. When the second graders arrive for lunch, they bounce up and down and do little dances in line, chanting, "Oh, pizza! Oh, pizza! Oh, pizza! Oh, pizza!" The school has four hundred students, from kindergarten through the fifth grade. About a fourth of the students are white, a fourth are Asian and Hispanic, and close to half are black, and for many lunch is the best meal of the day. Berkeley's wealth, like its houses, is distributed on a steeply inclined plane, with the poor clustered below and the rich perched high in the hills. People at the two extremes have a twenty-year difference in life expectancy, a study in 2000 found. About forty per cent of the city's students are eligible for subsidized meals. At Malcolm X, the children wear bar-coded payment cards around their necks, so that no one can tell who pays full price. They get a slice of pizza, some grapes or an orange, and the pick of a salad bar that Cooper recently installed, then hold their cards up to the scanner.

Cooper doesn't have a problem with pizza. When it's made right, it contains vegetables, protein, fibre, and calcium—a full meal. "A slice of pizza isn't bad for you," she says. "A diet of pizza is bad for you." When she first arrived, the cafeteria's pizza came in bags, like its burritos. The Central Kitchen had neither the staff nor the equipment to make it, so Cooper hied Karen Trilevsky, an old friend who owns FullBloom Baking Company, in nearby Menlo Park. Trilevsky put her staff to work in her test kitchen for the next three months, then called Cooper in for a tasting. The FullBloom pizza had a thick focaccia crust made with spelt and whole-wheat flour. It had homemade tomato sauce, skim-milk mozzarella, and a variety of sophisticated vegetarian toppings: zucchini, corn, and fresh tomato; blue cheese, walnut, and roasted onion. "It was fabulous," Cooper recalls. "It was fresh. It was delicious."

The kids couldn't stand it. The toppings were weird, they said, the crust too bready, the cheese too brown and not cheesy enough. At Malcolm X and the other ten elementary schools, the trash cans overflowed with rejected slices. "It was across the board," Cooper says. The cooks at FullBloom tried chopping the vegetables into tiny pieces; the complaints continued. They tried hiding the vegetables beneath the cheese; the children rooted them out. Finally, in January, the cafeteria manager from Malcolm X came to Cooper's office with a tersely worded petition ("We do not like the veggie pizzas, nor do we like the pork roast with applesauce. . . .") and a large sheet of butcher paper signed by more than two hundred students. Cooper hung it beside her desk, beneath a line of Tibetan prayer flags. In the bottom left corner, a girl named Shalika had drawn a frowny face. Next to that, her classmate Tajahniqua had written, "Veteteriyin pizza. I hate that food."

Two weeks later, Cooper put on her chef's whites and went to face her critics. They marched into the Malcolm X auditorium in three shifts, during recess, and listened politely to her explanations. Then they raised their hands and began the inquisition. "What happened to the double hamburgers?" 'Why haven't we had orange chicken lately?" "Where are our nachos?" Cooper told them that there was hardly any chicken in the orange chicken and no real cheese in the nacho sauce, but they didn't care. "They were really pissed off," she says. "I took away all the crap they liked."

Children can learn to eat almost anything, given time. In Mexico, they consume fiery chilies; in Japan, whale meat; in Sweden, pickled herring. But a palate, once formed, isn't easily expanded. At Penn State, the psychologist Leann Birch has tracked the eating habits of a hundred and sixty girls between the ages of five and fifteen, as well as various tortured attempts to improve their diets. The most common ploys tend to backfire: forbidding sweets instills a craving for them, and insisting on vegetables can instill an aversion. Labelling foods as "healthy" makes them taste worse to children, and offering sweets as rewards for eating vegetables makes the latter seem even less appetizing. (Birch also tried offering vegetables as rewards for eating sweets, but the children just laughed at her.) Peer pressure sometimes helps. When Birch had kids who hated peas eat at tables surrounded by kids who loved peas, the pea-haters switched sides within a week. But cafeterias tend to breed complainers. At the Ross School, Cooper served three or four entrees a day, two desserts, and two kinds of pizza baked in a brick oven. Yet a month after she arrived she was cornered by a gang of sulky fifth graders. They were going on hunger strike, they told her, until they got their grilled-cheese sandwiches back.

The best way to broaden a child's palate is to start early. When mothers eat garlic or carrots while pregnant, recent studies have shown, their newborns have a taste for those flavors as well, and breast-fed babies tend to be less picky about solid food than bottle-fed babies. By the age of four or five, almost all children become "neophobic": they develop an aversion to new foods, and to vegetables in particular—an ancestral memory, perhaps, of too many poisonous plants eaten by children in the past. To overcome this instinct, preschools in Minneapolis, New York, and other cities have lately experimented with hand puppets, gardening and cooking programs, and color-coded vegetable charts. But there's no real substitute for patience; the average five-year-old has to taste a new food between five and ten times, Birch has found, before he'll accept it.

At the Ross School, Cooper could afford to wait: within a year, her students were happily eating jicama. In Berkeley, she had no food to waste. And so, in the month after the meeting at Malcolm X, the veggie pizza was slowly stripped bare. "They would call every week and say, 'Take off the zucchini. Take off the corn. Take off the fresh tomatoes,' " a manager at FulIBloom told me. "Within three weeks, all the vegetables were gone." The crust was still rich in protein and fibre, and the cooks pureed some squash, carrots, and other vegetables into the sauce, where even the students' X-ray eyes couldn't detect them. But by and large the pizza began to look like pizza again.

The second graders at Malcolm X had made their peace with it. Across town, though, the fourth graders at John Muir were unconvinced. Not having had a meeting with Cooper, they blamed the food on their new principal, Mr. John, whom they suspected of being a vegetarian. "It's all vegetable," a small, apple-cheeked girl named Melika told me. She hunched her shoulders and shook her ropy braids: "Ooooooooo! That principal get on my nerves!" Her tall, skinny friend Naeemah was of two minds. The food was better for you, she said, now that it wasn't extruded by "this big machine thing" anymore. But the pizza was still overcooked, and she missed all the meat from last year. She picked at her pink coleslaw. "I'm moving to Texas," she said.

The low point of Cooper's lunchroom crusade came in February. She had always known that her food costs would go up, but she had hoped that her revenues would rise as well. Fewer than half of the district's ten thousand students ate school lunches: most of the high-schoolers went off campus, to places like Top Dog and Extreme Pizza, and many of the middle-and grade-schoolers brought their lunch. If Cooper could lure a few hundred of them back to the cafeteria, she would be able to pay for a lot of organic vegetables. By late winter, however, she was tens of thousands of dollars over budget, and cafeteria attendance had yet to go up. Then came the inspectors.

The Department of Agriculture has devised a welter of well-meaning regulations over the years to insure that schools serve healthful lunches. Its original scheme, which is still used by most schools, is known as "food-based menu planning." It requires that elementary-school lunches contain at least six hundred and sixty-four calories and portions of meat, grains, milk, and fruit or vegetables. Less than thirty per cent of the calories can come from fat, but carbohydrates are unrestricted. This has led to some predictable perversities. Corn and French fries are by far the most popular vegetables in schools, followed by other potato dishes. To keep fat down, schools often ban whole milk and deep-fried foods, only to find that they're not serving enough calories. "It's really an Alice in Wonderland situation," the sociologist Janet Poppendieck told me. "They can increase the size of entrées, but it's hard to do that without increasing the fat. They would like to increase the vegetables, but that they can't afford. So they end up adding dessert. Or they sweeten the milk with strawberry or chocolate. They've taken the fat out of it, then put the calories back in with sugar."

In the mid-nineties, the U.S.D.A., led by a former health activist named Ellen Haas, introduced a more flexible alternative called "nutrient-based menu planning." Cafeterias could make almost anything they liked, as long as a week's worth of meals contained all the necessary nutrients. If Monday's lunch was heavy on beef, Tuesday's could be a stir-fry. The only drawback was that every recipe had to be entered into a database so that its ingredients could be broken down into vitamins, minerals, protein, and so on. The most common ingredients and processed foods were preloaded in the software, but Cooper was cooking from scratch and reworking recipes continually. She didn't have time to analyze her dishes before serving them. So she didn't bother. She hired a consultant to enter the recipes as she perfected them, but otherwise kept cooking. "I never met a rule I didn't want to break," she says. "Especially stupid rules."

The three inspectors who came to Cooper's office in February weren't pleased with this attitude. They asked to see her recipes and her analyses. She did not have them. They asked how she knew that the children were getting enough calories. She said, "Have you looked at the obesity rate?" They told her that she was not in compliance and was in danger of losing her federal subsidies. "I felt like a comet slamming into the side of a mountain," she told me.

Cooper's friend Kate Adamick, a corporate lawyer turned cafeteria consultant, sat in on one of the meetings. "I listened for a while, as they told Ann that she was doing everything wrong, that they were going to have to shut her down, and they hadn't even tasted the food," Adamick told me. "So I stepped in and said, 'Would you rather Ann had spent a year getting the paperwork in place and then improved the food?' And they said, 'Yes.' I said, 'But the food they were serving was terrible!' And one of the women said, 'That is not true. They were using commodity foods.'"

As it happened, Adamick had recently attended a trade show in Los Angeles and had home pictures of the newest products being made for schools out of U.S.D.A. commodities. She called them up on the screen of her laptop one by one: corn dogs, pizza strips, and deep-fried cherry pies; grilled-cheese sandwiches, Texas cheese toast, and breaded chicken treats molded into hearts and moons and stars. "Look! Fried things in shapes!" Cooper joked, when she showed me the slides later. But, at the time, she was on the verge of losing her job. "Ann is basically fearless," Adamick says. "I've never seen her intimidated by anything, ever. But these women made her seriously nervous. She would say, 'We have a meeting with the mean people and they're going to put me in jail.'"

As usual, Cooper's cooking proved to be her most convincing defense. When the inspectors returned in March to examine the cafeterias, their attitude softened noticeably. Their report cited dozens of administrative and food-service infractions—"[the children] received 1/2 kiwi instead of the specified '1 each' "—but noted that the food was "very high quality and was visually pleasing as well as tasty." Cooper was given until November to fix the problems. "They could haw made my life miserable," she told me. "They could have given me forty-five days to come into one-hundred-per-cent compliance, and in the end they didn't." She grinned. ''I'm proud to say we coöpted the U.S.D.A."

By this spring, Cooper's outlook had improved markedly. Her staff was getting used to cooking fresh food again, the consultant was filling the database with recipes, and, in March, cafeteria attendance had finally begun to climb. At this pace, Cooper's losses would level off at around seventy thousand dollars—an acceptable amount, given all that she'd accomplished. And yet when she picked me up for dinner one evening in her Toyota Prius she looked haggard. She'd been to see her orthodontist for another radical tightening session, she told me. "It hurt so much I wanted to throw up." But her uneasiness had more to do with meat loaf.

Earlier that day, Cooper had gone to see Alice Waters, the chef and owner of Chez Panisse, whose foundation paid her salary. Waters was no fan of meat loaf. "I was really excited," Cooper said. "I told her that we were going to serve it with fresh vegetables and mashed potatoes. And she looked at me and said, 'Meat loaf! The kids can't possibly like meat loaf!'" Cooper took a long sip from her protein shake. "I almost got into it with her," she said. "I mean, what is a French country pâte? It's basically meat loaf, only it's steamed, right? But we can't possibly eat meat loaf."

Cooper and Waters had seemed like a perfect match. They met in the mid-nineties, when Cooper was writing an oral history of female chefs and Waters was breaking ground for the Edible Schoolyard—a vegetable garden on the site of an asphalt playground in Berkeley. Waters's vision, which has given rise to school gardens across the country, was that students would spend an hour or two working the soil every week, then cook and eat what they grew—learning history, ecology, and healthful eating in the process. Cooper's cooking was supposed to be an extension of this philosophy. 'The whole experience of lunch needs to be completely transformed," Waters told me. "It needs to be a place where you can experience the ritual of the table, a way to teach kids about stewardship of the land, about nourishing yourself and communicating with people, about this rich subject of ecogastronomy."

A year later, here they were, serving meat loaf. Cooper had been as idealistic as Waters once, but the longer she struggled to feed the masses the more she appreciated mass production: centralized kitchens, mainstream recipes, economies of scale. FullBloom, for example, had grown from a small bakery in the back of an espresso shop in San Francisco—the kind of soulful local enterprise that Waters adored—into a factory that made two hundred thousand pastries a day. That size allowed the bakery to spend months formulating pizzas for Cooper, knowing that they might recoup the investment later by baking for other local schools. "Alice doesn't want to work with anyone as large as FullBloom," Cooper said. "And I'm not sure I can work with anyone smaller. If I asked them to do the kind of R. and D. FullBloom did, they'd just say, 'Get the fuck out of here.'"

Waters admitted that Cooper had made great progress—"We're not sort of in the nacho place anymore"—but she felt that they still had a long way to go. Why couldn't they serve vegetable curry, she wondered, or sauté dishes to order? Cooper, meanwhile, had decades-old refrigerated trucks that kept breaking down. Her produce sometimes looked as if it came from a compost heap. Her labor costs were fifty-seven per cent of her budget (in most restaurants, it's less than forty), yet she couldn't cut union wages. "Alice is a really wonderful visionary," she said. "But this work is all about baby steps, and she can't see baby steps. In her perfect world, she'd like to have the kids served bountiful baskets of fresh-picked berries. And you know what? It ain't happening."

When I was in the seventh grade, my father took a two-year sabbatical in southern France and put us all in public schools. My lycée was a glum, disagreeable place. The hours were long, the students anarchic, the teachers authoritarian, but the cafeteria nearly made up for it. We sat at round tables in groups of eight and were served three courses of some of the strangest food I'd ever seen—sautéed squid, boudin noir, rabbit with mustard sauce. There were no choices to make, no variable subsidies to claim, no bagged lunches or vending machines. Everyone ate the same food, and the food, I discovered, was wonderful. Thinking back on those meals when I was in Berkeley, I could understand Waters's frustration. "What I'm imagining is happening all over the world," she told me. "It's not like we're inventing something that has never been done before."

For Cooper, too, the French system seemed an ideal model, if only she could afford it. A month before my visit, she had toured some cafeterias in the town of Challans, in the west of France. The lunches there were made in a central kitchen then trucked in bulk to the satellite schools, to be served family style, just as I remembered. "At one meal, the first course was raw beets in a vinaigrette," Cooper recalled. "The second was braised salmon with lentils and leeks, and the third was a cheese course. That was school lunch." The cost of food and labor came to about eight dollars a meal—more than three times as much as the average American lunch—of which every child paid about two dollars. (In Rome, which recently adopted a similar system on a much larger scale, the meals cost only about five dollars, and seventy per cent of the ingredients are organic.)

I asked Cooper, one morning, as we were driving to the Central Kitchen, how long it would take American schools to switch to the French or Italian system, if they had the money. "Two years," she said. "There are three big issues: investing in kitchens, food procurement, and staff training. But I've made all these changes in six months without any money. You can't tell me it's going to take anyone else more than two years." This sounded optimistic at best. The school-lunch program won't be reauthorized until 2009, and it already costs the country seven billion dollars a year. To double the subsidies "would take a profile in courage," one anti-hunger lobbyist to me. Then again, the program has always been a creature of implausible politics. "Come on!" Cooper said. "The war costs more than a billion dollars a week! Why don't we say we'll double what we spend on school lunch? Where are our priorities? Maybe I was high the day they explained that in school."

It was well before dawn, and Cooper had to focus on the long, looping coastal road from Moss Beach. I could tell, though, that she was still running the numbers in her head. Politics, more than cooking, consumed her these days. "If I was getting up every morning at three-thirty just to make tuna-fish sandwiches, I'd jump off the Bay Bridge," she said. She owns two houses on the East Coast, one of them with a former partner, but she said that she had no intention of moving back anytime soon. She had agreed to work in Berkeley for three years and was already looking further ahead—to reforming the cafeterias of Portland, Oregon, perhaps, or to some other, more subversive scheme. "I want to sue the U.S.D.A.!" I'd heard her say, her eyes gleaming. "I want Oprah to pick this up! I want school lunch to be an election issue in 2008!" But first she had a few thousand mouths to feed.

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Reposted from Chef Ann's Blog, originally published in the Sept 4, 2006, The New Yorker: http://www.chefann.com/blog/?p=397