Where is Everybody?

Where is everybody?



We were out in Manhattan all afternoon and the place is empty. The cabs are empty. The parks are pretty empty. Just a smattering of foreign tourists. The locals have clearly fled - but where are all the Republicans who are supposed to be out seeing the sights and spending their cash?
- posted by Amy @ 8/28/2004 09:25:00 PM

 
Finding Intelligent Life

Finding Intelligent Life

At Heathrow yesterday morning I picked up a copy of Intelligent Life, a new publication from The Economist. Apparently it's not available in the United States, though a wee bit of the content is available online to non-subscribers.

There is a strong opening message from the editor that basically says life has changed a lot in recent years creating the need for people to think of themselves as the CEO of their own life.

Inevitably, it is the social changes wrought by all this turmoil that will be the most pernicious. For a start, the social compacts that many of us have taken for granted—employment contracts, corporate pensions and health-care plans, as well as public education and welfare schemes—are now up for wholesale renegotiation. More than ever, each of us is going to be very much on our own henceforth — making difficult choices, often for the first time, about how best to spend our own limited resources as we fend increasingly for ourselves. Like it or not, we are all becoming free agents, forced to manage our personal lives as we might an enterprise.

Here are some of the highlights:

A story (premium content) about HitSongScience.com, a program that analyzed 3.5 million hit songs and determined "that all hits converge around a few mathematical patterns." While it can't create a hit song, it can predict if a song is hit-worthy. Sony, Universal, BMG, EMI and Warner Bros. are already toying with the technology, and garage bands around the world can test thier prowess for $50 a pop at the web site.

More to come when i get around to it. Blogger cut out on my this morning. ...
- posted by Amy @ 8/28/2004 07:35:00 AM

 

Buzz at Buzznet

Buzznet, the online photo gallery that feeds the pictures from my digital camera up across the top of my web page, has done gone and upgraded to 2.0. Loads of new features and options to check out.

Buzznet has also created a group photolog for the protesters coming to NYC for the convention. You can post to it anonymously via this e-mail: nornc-04@buzznet.com

And the Buzznet blog also tipped me to this clever new accessory that I hope might work for my camera phone: a lens attachment. The Treo 600 just can't do a thing when it comes to capturing images far off in the distance.

I'm in the process of posting the pictures from my trip to England.
- posted by Amy @ 8/28/2004 06:23:00 AM

 
Back in Brooklyn

Back in Brooklyn

Lovely trip in via Heathrow today where the security and check-in staff at American Airlines were among the most thorough and polite ever encountered.

Just before landing at JFK this afternoon, the pilot announced that Olympic gold medalist Amanda Freed (softball) was on our plane -- and everyone cheered. But then a stewardess got on and announced that passenger Joe Hirshfeld-whatever just reached 2 million miles on the American frequent flyer deal. And really, that's like winning a silver, isn't it?
- posted by Amy @ 8/27/2004 05:52:00 PM

 
More America Bashing

More America Bashing

From yesterday's Guardian story on American wrestler Rulon Gardner: "Greco-roman, meanwhile, has gone back to where it came from; far from the American consciousness, which prefers sporting events that are short, violent and decisive."
- posted by Amy @ 8/26/2004 02:28:00 AM

 
Paula Talks

Paula Talks

The Guardian this morning leads its Olympics marathon story with pending medical test on why Paula Radcliffe gave up as soon as she fell into fourth. They push her key quote to the bottom of the second column: "They were tough conditions but they were tough for everyone. You have to train to cope with that. I'd done that. The conditions were tough, but I didn't finish the race dehydrated or in any sort of distress form the heat."

It looks like the paper is more eager to make excuses for her than she is.
- posted by Amy @ 8/24/2004 03:00:00 AM

 
Brit Quits Marathon

Brit Quits Marathon

Judging from the media coverage, you'd think all England assumed their female marathoner Paula Radcliffe would win the gold, so it's quite a shock that she just stopped running yesterday seconds after she fell into fourth place. The Guardian's front page story this morning slips in a graf that tries to blame America for their athlete's decision to quit.

Radcliffe's traumatic failure will reopen the question over why organisers bowed to pressure from US broadcasters to stage the event in the early evening heat, not in the morning.

"Quit," by the way, isn't a word I've yet seen used in relation to her decision to stop running. Thus far the media I've seen here has been very gentle with her.
- posted by Amy @ 8/23/2004 05:32:00 AM

 
Erotic Volleyball?

Erotic Volleyball?

Ah, the Olympics through the eyes of the British Press. Two paragraphs from a weekend sports story in the The Telegraph that might well have been headed "What is this funny sport called beach volleyball?"

Beach volleyball remains a much misunderstood sport. To the general public, the male game is associated with the homoerotic scene between Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer in Top Gun.

The female game - given that it pretty much perforce involves suntanned skin, young women in swimsuits, and jumping up and down - is all too easily imagined as a more vertically bouncy version of the credit sequences of Baywatch.

- posted by Amy @ 8/23/2004 05:18:00 AM

 
Old York

Old York

Among the highlights of the Brit trip has been the visit to the city of York, a two-hour train trip north from London, but a mere hour from where we stay here in Peterborough.

We only had a short time in York, a magnificent old city dominated by the Minster cathedral and marked throughout the city center with Roman ruins. We did the tour of Jorvik, the town’s original Viking settlement. It was an odd tour, including a ride through a pretend Viking village with smell-o-vision. They went to great lengths to let you know how it smelled on the farms, down by the river near the fish guts, and at the tannery. Thankfully the smell-o-vision cut out as we passed the mechanical figure of a Viking seated at an outdoor loo – covered only from the chest down – so that we could see his face repeatedly strain to take care of his business.

The city is home to the world’s largest train museum and regrettably we didn’t allow ourselves more than about an hour to see this place. Not only do they have beautiful old trains, but also there is a huge warehouse absolutely packed chock-a-block with memorabilia from train stations, posh trains, royal coaches and who knows where else. It looks like the secret stores of a mad scientist obsessed with transportation. There were glassed-in models of ships, placards meant for the trains of foreign dignitaries, stately logos of old train lines and metalwork from all parts.

Also paid a visit to the city’s Castle Museum – which was used at least in part as a jail. While stretching in the former prisoners’ exercise yard, I was surprised to learn that America, not Australia, was the main recipient of England’s prisoners exiled to the colonies. After 1717, prisoners whose crimes weren’t severe enough to warrant the death penalty were sent to the colonies – primarily America, until the Revolution. They were also sent to New South Wales and Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania.) And “a small number were sent to Western Australia in the mid 19th Century.”
- posted by Amy @ 8/23/2004 05:05:00 AM

 
Hating Americans for Sport

Hating Americans for Sport

We're halfway through this year's Brit trip and I would guess the British loathing for America is about on par with last year. It's mostly about politics - and I should point out that people are nothing but nice to me and one of the first questions is always who will win the November election.

Besides the prominent display at the local bookstore of a silly book called "Fat, Dumb and Ugly: The Decline of the Average American," I didn't have a lot of hit-you-over-the-head examples of what I was sensing. (The book, by the way, is printed in New York, and has a completely unsourced, one-sentence fact on each page about the rise in plastic surgery, or hamburger consumption, etc.)

However, The Guardian has helped me out by printing this odd column on page 3 of the its Weekend section. It starts off like this:

Is it just me or (h)as hating Americans become really childish and silly and tedious? ... I used to enjoy this as much as the next person - I liked the frisson of being allowed a racism carte blanche, as it was obviously so absurd to be accused of bigotry in reference to a place so very large and rich. I delighted in the pompous, table-thumping, "Substitute the word 'Africans' and see how that sounds!" response it would sometimes elicit. I took a great deal of apparently "ironic" pleasure from how many Americans could find only America on a map, and how many couldn't find Iraq, and how many of them didn't have a passport, and that one I met once thought Milton Keynes was related to Maynard, and the size of their portions and, commensurately, arses.
But it's suddenly become very depressing - almost everything we find hilariously bad about them is either located in and wholly limited to the person of George Bush, or it was his idea, or it was one of his friends' ideas. And let's imagine you can judge an entire people by the government it elects: we're still left with the fact that a greater proportion of us voted for Blair than Americans ever did for Bush.

- posted by Amy @ 8/22/2004 03:40:00 AM