very simple

This weekend was one of the most beautiful weekends in recent history. Warm, not humid, and absolutely begging people to be outside. On Saturday, I spent the day with my friends and their 9-month old, and we went wandering around Central Park for a good portion of the afternoon…

And people wonder why I always want to hang out in the city. For all I complain, nothing beats this sort of energy.

I kept reading the news this week and thinking “hmm, that might be something to blog about” and then proceeded to get distracted by other things, like work. and TV. and rearranging my closet. Yeah. This was a week of serious procrastination. So much so, that I have to go in to work at some point this weekend to catch up on something that I totally could have gotten done during the week except that I kept putting it off and then got hit with a bunch of stuff that needed to get done by Friday. So that was smart.

So, in an effort to put off going into the office just a bit more, here’s a list of the things that I thought about blogging about this week but never got around to…

• Edwards endorses Obama (finally). Just in time for it to make a really big difference in the last three remaining primaries. Good job waiting until it’s both a foregone conclusion and utterly useless in having any effect.
• California Supreme Court overturns gay marriage ban. I have to say I was genuinely happy about this, particularly given how much more influential California is than Massachusetts on an electoral level, but I also wondered why these things always seem to happen in a way that will drive the fundies out in droves during a Presidential election year. All in all though, good news.
• Oscar Pistorius can compete in the Olympics (if he qualifies). A little less obvious, and I normally don’t talk about work, but I had to throw this one in here since my firm actually represented Pistorius pro bono. Very cool.
• President Bush, apparently forgetting that his own grandfather did significant business with the Nazis, compared Democrats to Nazi appeasers. By quoting a conservative Republican in 1939 who wanted to negotiate with Hitler. Someone needs to explain history to Bush, because “talking” is not quite the same thing as “allowing Germany to annex half of the sudetenland without any substantial opposition”.

And on that note, maybe someone should put this guy in the same history class.

I’m not normally a big fan of misogynist-in-chief Matthews, but I nearly snorted my coffee through my nose from laughing so hard when I saw this the other morning.

With the death of congestion pricing here in New York City, Streetsblog takes an in-depth look at our next best alternative – a Paris-type model of street reclamation for public transport and cycling. I would personally love this, as I’ve been trying to figure out how to ride my bike to work for years (only to be hampered by crazy traffic and antiquating building policies that won’t let me bring my bike inside).

In related news, I’m totally in love with the Dahon Glide P8.

So, I don’t actually have much of an immediate "nuclear" family – there’s my dad and my brother, and that’s about it.  However, when my dad married my awesome stepmom a few years ago, she brought along her also very lovely sisters (and mom), which is how I ended up getting forwarded this e-card today…

 Which pretty much epitomizes this (not particularly significant,  yet close to Christmas so conflated with that giant shopping/consumerist  extravaganza)  jewish holiday.  I’m fairly certain I’ve never spelled it the same way twice.

City Room at the NY Times today brings up a recent proposal to require supermarkets in the city to recycle plastic bags.  After living in Milan for six months, I don’t really understand the resistance to reusing plastic bags that we’ve got here in the US.  Over there, you had to buy your shopping bags (at 10 eurocents a bag) if you wanted new plastic bags.  Most people either brought used bags back to the store and reused them or had canvas or other types of more durable bags.  Since I reused my bags as garbage bags (they were the perfect size for my kitchen garbage can, and it made more sense than buying additional plastic garbage bags), I would often spring for new ones, but I was one of the few. 

But, since I’ve been home, I’ve converted myself – I have switched to nylon shopping bags.  I like them, because the little carrying pouches they come in mean that they fold up tiny and I can keep them in my purse/messenger bag at all times, reducing the need to get plastic bags when I decide at the last minute to stop at the grocery store on my way home from work.   Since I still use plastic shopping bags as garbage bags in my bathroom and under my desk, I still have to get some once in a while, but I find that need is overwhelmingly taken care of during the few trips where I either forget my nylon bags even though they’re easy to carry (usually after I’ve gone shopping, I forget to put them back in my purse right away) or I buy too much stuff and I need a third shopping bag.  I also got one of those little plastic bag holders for under my sink, so that I know when I’m running out of the plastic – this had less to do with recycling, than the discovery that I was accumulating plastic bags faster than I was using them, and they were taking over all of my under-counter space. 

Other things I learned how to do in Italy?  bag my own groceries.  Of course, here the checkout lanes aren’t really designed to allow me to do this, so I have to sit and watch while my food gets bagged, and then take my stuff, move to the nearest flat surface, and rearrange everything (somehow the idea of equal weight distribution for balance (since i have to walk about six blocks home from the store) utterly escapes the checkout person’s mind –  please don’t put the milk, tomato sauce and canned goods in one bag while leaving the other one for nothing but a box of pasta).

Back to plastic bags – I think a proposal to charge people for bags would be ideal.  Something small, like 10 cents, is low enough to not be a burden, but serves as a gentle reminder to maybe get something more permanent. 

My brother, who has made fun of me for years for having a blog, has now started one of his own over on blogger.  He hasn’t quite gotten the hang of things like resizing photos to actually fit on the page, but the content is significantly more interesting than the drivel that I write over here:

Let’s look, for instance, at the Democratic Republic of Congo (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cg.html).

This is a land the size of Western Europe, with only 300 miles of paved roads, no electricity outside of the capital city of Kinshasa, a place where the deadliest war in the world since WW2 has raged for over a decade, with more than 5 million people killed and countless displaced. Most Americans could not locate this country on a world map. Why the indifference? When people begin to care, major things can happen. Where is the DRC’s George Clooney? I did notice press lately (worthy press, I might add) on the conflict that has been renewed in the east of the country, detailing a recent spate of killings. However, those killed were a group of mountain gorillas. Where is the press detailing the human suffering? People need to be informed to begin to care. And people need to care to enact any kind of change. We need to remember that we are all born with the same heart, the same lungs, eyes, ears. Yet some struggle even for the most basic level of survival. A great program that has been getting a lot of press lately, which is a worthy capitalist model, if you have a minute….. (www.joinred.com)

Yeah.  Much better than my obsessing over ipods. 

So, the city is looking to encourage more cycle-based commuting. I think this would be great, but in particular:

Because the lack of safe and adequate bicycle parking has become one of the primary concerns of cyclists, the city has said it will also pursue legislation requiring owners of large commercial office buildings to allow a place for bicycles to be parked indoors. Recent zoning changes in Long Island City, Downtown Brooklyn and the West Side of Manhattan have incorporated that requirement.

After I got home from Milan, where cycling is ubiquitous (along with vespas), I actually tried to find out whether I could commute to the office.  Unfortunately, it took me about two weeks to find out that, if I wanted to bring my bike into the building, I could only do so through the freight elevator, which closes as 5pm. 

Now, anyone who knows anything about being a lawyer in NYC knows that leaving before 5 would be considered taking a half-day of vacation.  So I could essentially ride my bike to the office once, and never be able to leave. 

And parking on the sidewalk/street is not an option – besides the fact that there are no convenient bike racks, the idea that my bicycle would still actually be there after working a 10-12 hour day is kind of funny.  Funny in that "if you don’t laugh, you’re going to cry" sort of way. 

As both an American Express cardholder and a prior donor to DonorsChoose (which is an awesome charity, by the way, and you should go donate to them regardless of whether they win), I had been dutifully voting for them in each round of the American Express Members Project. I had noticed when I voted in the final round that they were in second place behind "Clean Drinking Water for Kids". I didn’t think too much of it at the time, both are certainly worthy causes, and I just hoped that my favorite charity got into the lead. Well, I just read over at Tomato Nation that apparently, the water for kids program isn’t exactly the "individual idea" that it claims to be.

One of the other five finalists, though, isn’t so much a non-profit organization, it seems. Sure, drinking water for children is a concept everyone can get behind, but the problem in this case is that "everyone" is actually Procter & Gamble, which is a for-profit corporation. P&G and Amex have both tried to claim that the project is the brainchild of a P&G employee, who is working in concert with Unicef, so the entry violates neither the letter nor the spirit of the contest’s terms.

Uh…no. Not buying it. First of all, the text of the clean-drinking-water proposal is nearly identical to the text found here, which touts P&G’s PUR water filters. Amex has stated in an official message that "the project idea Cardmembers are voting on is not the P&G’s clean water program with PSI," but given that the Amex/P&G web sites are for all intents and purposes indistinguishable, this is hair-splitting — if you’re feeling generous. If you’re not, it’s merely absurd.

Seriously. As Sars points out, P&G has plenty of dough. They could just as easily just donate water filters (that they manufacture!) themselves to UNICEF. But apparently, beating out a truly startup and incredibly innovative charity organization that fills a major gap in our educational system was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

So. Go vote for DonorsChoose. and regardless of whether they win or not, go buy some books or computers for kids.

Edited to add – I don’t want this to seem like the water program isn’t a worthy project.  It is.  It’s just that UNICEF is an organization with massive corporate underwriting and a $300 million per year budget.  When Amex touted the Members Project, they specifically marketed it as a way to help fund a possibly little noticed, underfunded, original idea.  It’s not that you shouldn’t give money to UNICEF or support them in some way.  It’s that, in this very particular circumstance, they (and P&G), are pretty much the antithesis of what this entire campaign would appear to be about.

Taking a break from my obsessive naval-gazing to post the following:

The American Red Cross

Y’all already know what’s going on, so I won’t bore you with a recap.  

Apple has replaced it’s normal advertising-related front page with a list of organizations that can be donated to. Some of these are repeats, but what the heck: