feed the hungry, blow up the coliseum

Photo courtesy of yours truly, ACCESS Inc.

From the The New Haven Independent:
FEED THE HUNGRY, BLOW UP THE COLISEUM

Only in New Haven can you do both. City and Connecticut Food Bank officials announced a unique holiday-season promotion Monday: Donate at least six canned goods or non-perishable food items to the food bank, and you'll receive a personalized, engraved seat from the New Haven Coliseum, which the city is in the midst of demolishing. You'll also receive a raffle ticket. If you win the raffle, you get the push the plunger to start the final implosion of the joint (probably) next month. To donate: Visit City Hall weekdays from 9 to 6 or the Food Bank (150 Bradley St., East Haven) weekdays from 8:30 to 4:40. Click here for a list of preferred items. “This is a great opportunity for people to come together and help those working families who are struggling,” Mayor John DeStefano said. “Why the Coliseum? So many people have an emotional attachment to it and this is a perfect way to honor that.”

Man, I would kill for the chance to push that button. Even loving the Coliseum as I do, I need to satisfy my slightly destructive tendencies somehow.

no surprises

A heart that's full up like a landfill,
A job that slowly kills you,
Bruises that won't heal.
You look so tired-unhappy;
Bring down the government,
They don't, they don't speak for us.
I'll take a quiet life,
A handshake, some carbon monoxide,

With no alarms and no surprises,
No alarms and no surprises,
No alarms and no surprises,
Silent silence.

This is my final fit,
My final bellyache,

With no alarms and no surprises,
No alarms and no surprises,
No alarms and no surprises, please.

Such a pretty house
And such a pretty garden.

No alarms and no surprises,
(Get me outta here)
No alarms and no surprises,
(Get me outta here)
No alarms and no surprises,
(Get me outta here) please.

[radiohead, "no surprises"], the song of my captors.

and oh how it rains

I finished the last chocolate tonight. What does that mean?

biking in LA

Nobody Bikes in L.A. - But they'd be a lot happier if they did. Maybe I'd consider living in SoCal one day after all. If they build a carillon for me, that is.

innocence

Last night I dreamed that I was going to an abbey for a birthday party and ended up joining the abbey and taking vows of chastity (never mind that I'm not actually Christian). But somehow I also ended up being responsible for transporting some extremely large cargo that could only be lifted by crane. It was necessary to transport it by plane, but to be economical, I had to rent a car and drive to the destination in Mexico to meet the load, and from there, somehow take the cargo to its destination outside the airport.

That dream morphed into a wedding party at a resort. Immense crowds of people were taking public transport to the event. However, evildoers had planned an attack, and I perished in it with countless others. When I awoke, I found myself at the beginning of the dream with a second chance.

I failed again, but awoke for the third time alive, knowing that this chance could be my last. Working my way backwards on the train lines, switching and sneaking through underground passages, I struggled to lead myself and others to liberty. Finally, we reached our escape, the departure point of the trains... and I awoke to the morning darkness and the pain of my leg.

leven te huur

I haven't ever really found a place that I call home
I never stick around quite long enough to make it
I apologize that once again I'm not in love
But it's not as if I mind that your heart ain't exactly breaking
It's just a thought, only a thought

If my life is for rent, and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cuz nothing I have is truly mine

Always thought that I would love to live by the sea
To travel the world alone and live more simply
I have no idea what's happened to that dream
Cuz there's really nothing left here to stop me
It's just a thought, only a thought

If my life is for rent, and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cuz nothing I have is truly mine

While my heart is a shield, and I won't let it down
While I am so afraid to fail, so I won't even try
Well how can I say I'm alive?

If my life is for rent, and I don't learn to buy
Well I deserve nothing more than I get
Cuz nothing I have is true tonight...

[dido, "life for rent"]

gooo ssp in the news!

IDL Provides Support for the Summer Science Program

amazing

A New Haven police officer established an organization, The Chain Fund, to financially assist cancer patients. Now that's inspirational.

just google it

"We think there is plenty of opportunity for innovation in the Google economy," Mr. Breyer said.

Key words: "Google economy." Google has become a verb as well as an adjective for the wealth and resources of a region. Frightening, but a friendlier alternative to Microsoft.

wifely

Today's fortune on Orkut.com for me:
You and your wife will be happy in your life together

First line of a self description from Yahoo! Personals in Köln: "Allein sein sucks! Denkst Du auch so?" Languages might sometimes do better without incorporating English words into everyday usage.

The photos of Halloween CritMass in New Haven made it look like an rockin' party... talking with Zoe about biking in NYC only made me miss it even more...

strange beauty

I still wonder how the hell I got into urban spelunking as a nature-girl/city-girl.

crapola

while biking had terrifying realization...they're way too much alike. way too much. especially for such an unlikely combination of interests.

other realization was better, much better: it's good to be complete in oneself again.

hmph

Puzzled. Or just deliberately self-delusional. I don't trust myself sleep-deprived.

laziness

Another gem from ElmCityCycling:

"Best bike vs. suv story ever -- My friend andy got yelled at by a woman in a Ford Expedition, who was pulling out of a McDonald's drive through lane. She told andy, who was returning from his weekly century, to stop being so lazy and get a driver's license."

Great quote about idleness: "Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time." (Sir J. Lubbock)

Whether I can make myself subscribe to it is a different story, but I'm sure in the right country to try.

RAGE

I HATE PAYPAL. I have attempted every freaking permutation of steps I could think of to confirm my address, but it just responds with one inane and irrelevant message after another. I also hate shippers who demand a goddamn confirmed address before they'll ship to you. Bastards, I want to give you my f*cking money, and you won't even take it.

food fight!

Excerpts from World Carfree News #25:

- On September 11, the annual food fight on the Oberbaum Bridge in Berlin kept the cars away. Once a year, autonomous people from the Friedrichshain and Kreutzberg district turn the bridge into a vegetable battlefield. This year, like every year, writes Jason Kirkpatrick, Friedrichshain reigned victorious.

- Bicycle sales in the US reached 19 million last year. The US Chamber of Commerce says more bicycles have been sold than cars over the past 12 months.

- A Galway, Ireland, gardener celebrated World Carfree Day by taking her wheelbarrow to and from work, while 30,000 Critical Mass cyclists rode through the streets of Budapest.

- Eighty-four Chinese cities have banned small cars in their city centres, because they like big cars.

to pay or not to pay

Spend $99.95 on Virtual PC for Mac from the Apple store before my student discount at Yale ends on September 30, or struggle for untold hours that could have been spent at a paid job getting QEMU to work, but then become a truly bad-ass Mac l33t h4x0r?

bike art

From cicle.org: "Bicycle Remnants Clutter an Urban Landscape, This Time as Art"

Seems like a very TC kind of project. But TC's off making the lives of Katrina victims better.

commission-smishm

I'm not sure how much I respect MoveOn.org anymore. Although I participated in and forwarded info on their campaign to stop Bush from shifting the blame for the Katrina fiasco on Louisiana officials, I was utterly disappointed today when I received an email from them citing that emergency FEMA housing was still sitting hundreds of miles away unused, and encouraging us to demand an independent Katrina Commission modeled after the 9/11 Commission, as proposed by Hillary Clinton. While I agree that it's important that such a commission begin its work now if it's going to trace and gather convincing evidence, the fact that emergency housing remains unused screams that a larger problem needs to be addressed: Helping the victims. Imagine that! Saving lives might be more important that pointing fingers--which is what these past two emails have concerned. It's difficult to believe that MoveOn.org is prioritizing its political agenda over actually helping those in need. Sure, clean reputations for a few Louisiana officials might just encourage a few more donations, but in the end, MoveOn.org is expending much of its considerable power to reach the public on telling them who to blame. What good would an investigative commission do, when the culprit is in the White House, in Congress, in FEMA, in Louisiana, in the war in Iraq? How can a Katrina Commission announce that the cause of the disaster was five years of an unwise and continuing Presidency?

4:20

it's 4:20 am on my last day in the states. it's so awesome to discover who's willing to watch my last american sunrise with me from harkness tower, a la raphi's last day before brazil. i wish i could sleep on my own bed though. casualty of the party is on it instead.

ACCESS: The Architecture Club and City-Environment Studies Society.