Saturday Quickies
Last year we learned about the gay penguins at the aquarium at Coney Island, now we find out there's another gay penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo. The New York Times story, with the subhead "Homosexuality Among Animals is Common," runs through a few other non "Roman-Catholic" animal sex practices. (Though no mention of the crazy teen-aged otters at the Monterey Bay Aquarium who were observed engaging in necrophilia for days with a dead otter corpse 10 years ago.)

Charlie at Manhattan User's Guide writes about the let-down that is the new NYC "mall" at the Time Warner Center and nails on the head one of the beautiful elements that makes the city great. He observes that "New York derives a lot of its energy from fresh, absurd, or delightful juxtapositions." The new mall has none of that but loads of traditional Mall of America retailers. "Until then, give us the slush, and trucks beeping as they back up, and the promise of something unlikely."

My friend Koll e-mailed me a story in the Orange County Register with the Southern California quality of life report card done by the region's main (though totally toothless) planning agency. The grades are poor: traffic D-; housing D+; education D; income C-; air quality C (but slipping); jobs B-; crime B. A couple facts I found particularly alarming: public transportation accounts for only 5 percent of total work trips and 2 percent of all trips in Southern California. And then there's this in the education category: "Fifty-six percent of the Hispanic adults in the region did not have high-school diplomas, compared with 20 percent of the African-Americans and 10 percent of the non-Hispanic whites. Southern California had the smallest percentage of adults with high-school diplomas among the country's nine biggest metro areas and the second smallest percentage of adults with bachelor's degrees." (The OC Register's archives are a nightmare, but the full SCAG report is here.)

The Shifted Librarian reports that the BBC is offering a spyware-free version of Real radio player.
- posted by Amy @ 2/07/2004 09:55:00 AM