inspiration

. . .

walking nyc with swt

what a terrific last six days that was! alas, I forgot my camera every single day, so the revolution will not be picture-blogged. Instead, let's look at this (throat-clearing):


MMhmm. Until Thanksgiving, mon amie.

. . .

blond, bland and bradley whitford, West Wing star

Justice O'Connor pronounces the first syllable of her first name such that it rhymes with the word "bland," not like it rhymes with the word "blond."

Somehow I got signed up for the Alliance for Justice listserv. Today, I received from them this letter signed by Bradley Whitford, of West Wing fame:

"Dear Anne,

On The West Wing I played a character who was deeply interested in public policy. In real life, as the father of three young children, I'm also concerned about issues that affect our future. That's why I want to share with you an important new documentary film, titled Quiet
Revolution, produced by Alliance for Justice.

[Blah de blah de blah.]

Thanks,

Bradley Whitford"

It also had this picture of him:

I tried hard for the sake of both of our dignities, but I totally failed to not reply:

"Dear Bradley,

I had no idea you had my address. I notice that you say you have three children. Does that mean that you're married/otherwise unavailable?

thanks,
anne"

I'll let you know if he responds and/or we get married and I become his kids' stepmom.

. . .

bring it, Nebraska

"Because of their high incarceration rate, blacks are most affected by the [felon] voting bans that vary widely among the states, with many barring current inmates and parolees from voting until they have fulfilled their sentences, and some barring felons for life.

In recent years, Iowa, Nebraska and New Mexico have repealed their lifetime bans on voting by people who have been convicted of felonies, and several other states made it easier for freed prisoners or those on probation to vote, according to the report, issued yesterday by the Sentencing Project, a liberal advocacy group in Washington."
--From an article in today's NYT, by Erik Eckholm.

It's not too often that I get to be proud of Nebraska for leading the country in something I find politically salutary. Bravo, Cornhuskers!

. . .

SDO'C

Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, First Woman Supreme Court Justice, came to speak at NYU today on the topic of judicial independence.* She's a terrific speaker, good sense of humor, a pleasure and an inspiration to see and hear. As SKP and I later agreed, in comparison to Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Breyer (who have also come to NYU during our tenure there), she is bigger than her ego, and that is a beautiful thing. I was glad to hear that Chief Justice Roberts is tremendously capable, in her opinion. He had advocated 35+ cases before the Supreme Court while she was a Justice, and she said that he was the best advocate of any she'd seen. She is, therefore, hopeful about the future with him at the helm. I really wish I'd taken advantage of being in DC while I lived there and gone to see more oral arguments before the Court.



It's not a great picture, but there she is, along with Professor Oscar Chase, her interlocutor.

At about 5:55pm, 5 minutes before the event was scheduled to end, one of her comments received long and loud applause. After it died down a bit Professor Chase said that he wasn't going to take that as a cue to finish, and there was something else he'd been wanting to ask her, and she flat-out interrupted him, saying, "Don't you think it's time we stopped?" or something like that. He smiled graciously and said, "Court is adjourned!" We all laughed, and clapped some more, and it was over. It's what I would imagine being around the Queen of England is like. You don't interrupt her; she interrupts you. When she's done, you're done. But it also said something to me that she was ready to be done, and probably felt the audience was too. Most speakers let only the clock shut them up.

Thanks for coming by, Your Honor! We were glad to have you.

. . .

*The event was a dedication of the Dwight D. Opperman Institute of Judicial Administration at NYU.

I voted today.

and I feel good about it. But god it would be nice to win for once. Maybe I should start voting in New York instead of Nebraska. As it is, apparently my best hopes for something good happening lie with constitutional amendments and voter initiatives, not even a candidate. What a blast it would be to vote for Hillary.




I really hope that in the next presidential election I'm voting in person rather than by mail. I like getting the sticker.

. . .

good luck, I.M. Pei.

you're pretty cute.



his new chinese museum.

. . .

and she's just my type

Hellllllo there.


Here are some apples on my table.



These are wandering jew clippings, a burkina faso pot, and a 1999 Nebraska Truck license plate.




And this is my new comforter and its future cover. The future cover has been waiting for 2 years now to be a cover, ever since I bought it in Lincoln Nebraska from a gay couple who import turkish rugs, etc. Now that I finally own a comforter that requires a cover, I can get started making the cover into a cover. Right now it's just a big beautiful embroidered rectangle. I'm hoping to have it finished by the time my next visitor arrives: SWT, on Friday. But that may be a bit ambitious, considering that I am, after all, in law school. At worst, it will be ready for JEC, when she next comes.

Here are a few other apartment tidpics. Also, SWT alerted me to this terrific website, www.delightfulblogs.com. It has listings of, um, delightful blogs. I found the "Deals and Steals" category especially useful. It still takes some time to sort thru, but at least the wide web world of blogs is pared down a little tiny bit.

Today, in addition to being Columbus Day, was Thwart McShane Day. I hope all you all found ways to celebrate this most enjoyable of holidays. The NYU Varsity Swim Team did, by using the entire pool from 2:30 to 6pm. The post office also enjoyed this holiday by being closed (they celebrate both holidays in this fashion). All right, I'm just complaining. Plenty of other things worked out just fine. Most recently, my dinner of homemade pesto (props once again, this time for the basil, to SWT), pasta, and beer was splendid. and this is getting into the sort of stupid minutiae that makes most blogs unreadable, so I. will. now. stop.

. . .

Oh yeah, except for it's Kieran's and Link's birthdays. Happy 78th and 4th, respectively! (Following the word "respectively" with an exclamation point is utterly ridiculous, I think.)

peeps?

peeps!


peeps.

. . .

evidence

birthday dinner with law school peeps
















. . .

(Just so people don't think I really have nothing to do--two of these posts that are technically from October 8th I posted last night before I went to bed.)

sharing the wealth

For those of you likers of interesting music out there, Minnesota Public Radio's the current is a great interesting music station, and you can listen to it on the internet (props to SWT for finding it). Por ejemplo, here's the playlist for the last hour:

9 - 10 AM
9:48 Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins - The Charging Sky
9:46 the Louvin Brothers - The Great Atomic Power
9:41 Mission of Burma - 1001 Pleasant Dreams
9:36 Stereolab - I Was A Sunny Rainphase
9:31 Morcheeba - The Sea
9:25 Miles Davis - E.S.P.
9:21 Supergrass - Sad Girl
9:18 Greg Laswell - High And Low
9:12 Okkervil River - Another Radio Song
9:07 Joe Henry - Trampoline
9:04 Johnny Cash - Further On Up the Road
9:00 Josh Ritter - Wolves

. . .

about swimming

1. When one swims freestyle (crawl), one is not supposed to emulate a windmill, as one always assumed, but rather, an ice skater. You shoot one arm out there, let it glide, then pull it back when the other arm, coming forward, reaches your ear.
   
2. There is a very particular method to swimming freestyle (see #1). For this reason, "freestyle" seems like a misnomer.
   
3. The everyday habit of inhaling immediately when one has finished exhaling must be broken in order to swim efficiently. This habit can be hard to break, and if one is trying to break other habits simultaneously, one can get confused and accidentally inhale water instead of air.
4. Invaluable swimming accessories: goggles and swimming cap (if one has ridiculously long hair).
5. About That Hair: There are special shampoos that allegedly take chlorine out of hair. If one puts one's hair in a ponytail, then flips the pt forward over the head, then dons the swimming cap, one's hair will stay a little drier. The hour or so that one swims while wearing the swimming cap is an ideal time to deep-condition one's hair, as the heat from one's head is trapped (this allegedly deepens the conditioning). The conditioner will also allegedly protect one's hair from the chlorine.
6. Merely useful accessories: kickboard, flippers, and swimsuit drier. The swimsuit drier is a little spinning collander in a machine. One puts in one's suit, holds the top closed, and it spins like mad for about 10 seconds. Voila, dry suit. One wishes one could stick one's head in it.
   
7. Flippers are Fabulous. One can swim very fast using them without much effort. That's not exactly the point of swimming-as-exercise, but they make it easier to concentrate on improving one's stroke, if that's what one is trying to do.
8. . . .
   

smokin' pins: my new shirt

I made this!
. . .

a great, if cutesy (in a man way), article about painless ways to reduce CO2 emissions around the house

From today's New York Times:

The Energy Diet
By ANDREW POSTMAN

I’VE tried to be responsible.

I’ve thought pro-green thoughts and occasionally even done pro-green things. I’ve run the dishwasher and washer-dryer only with full loads. I’ve recycled, as ordered, though like every New Yorker I’ve ever met, I suspect the system does more good for our feelings than for the environment. I’ve shaved while showering, although I can’t remember anymore whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

I’ve been too busy to do much more, though, and too confused and overwhelmed by all the eco hype out there, and too inflexible to seriously change my lifestyle. No way am I hanging clothes out to dry on a clothesline. I won’t drive more slowly — as President Bush, like past presidents, has urged Americans to do to save gas — and neither will you, and neither will anyone. And I recently bought a flat-screen high-def 37-inch TV, an energy-Hoover you’ll have to pry from my cold, dead hands; if you haven’t seen an N.F.L. game on something like that, my friend, you might as well watch curling.

But the morning after I saw Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” I was spurred to action. I bought 50 compact fluorescent light bulbs — 50 — intent on replacing every incandescent one in my home. The new bulbs were supposed to be 67 percent more efficient and last up to 15 times longer. Unfortunately, the ones I bought also cast a considerably colder light, so I aborted my plan after just two bulbs when I realized the quality of light they emitted reminded me of a bus station bathroom.

In the weeks since, I dispatched the six cartons of unused C.F.L.’s to the basement, and my guilt grew alarmingly. As the father of three very young children, I had to do something — but something I would actually follow through with, something that would take minimal effort. Then, two weeks ago, while eating a doughnut and watching the scintillatingly clear images of Mets and Yankees scampering across my TV screen, I saw what I needed to do.

Flipping channels, I came across the news that Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative had just ended with Richard Branson, the British mogul, pledging $3 billion to fight climate change over the next decade. On another channel, Mayor Bloomberg stood at a podium in California and announced, to my pride and delight, his sweeping eco-initiative for New York: the city’s carbon emissions would be measured, an Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability would be created. Meanwhile, the man standing next to him, Governor Schwarzenegger, was set to sign legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for his state — the world’s 12th largest contributor of such gases — at a level the federal government had continually rejected. Everyone was chipping in, even Arnold, the first civilian ever to drive a Hummer. I took another bite of doughnut.

And that’s when it came to me. I should go on a diet.

A half-ton diet.

I knew, having taken the “Calculate Your Impact” survey on climatecrisis.net, the companion Web site for the Gore movie, that our household produced some 19,100 pounds of CO2 last year, 4,100 pounds more than the national average. (The concept of a “pound” of gas is a nebulous one — depending on the pressure and temperature, it can fill a thimble or a stadium — so maybe it’s best portrayed this way: one pound of CO2 is what’s released per each mile driven, or each mile flown per person; it’s what’s produced to heat five gallons of water.)

For easier math, I rounded my number to 20,000 pounds, or 10 tons. As a family, as a household, couldn’t we drop a half-ton, a mere 5 percent of our weight? That’s 10 pounds for a 200-pounder to lose, 6 for a 120-pounder.

Absolutely. It was a goal, one I could stick to. Ambitious as it sounded, it was, amazingly, not excessive. I could keep living generally the way I wanted. I gave myself eight hours, no more, to lose the weight. In a world where texting passes for conversation and hooking up for a relationship, perhaps I’d just defined the new activism. Very little pain, not insignificant gain.

Mindy Pennybacker, the editor of The Green Guide and thegreenguide.com, was also enthusiastic about my plan. “Americans have too much weight in many ways, so it’s a metaphor that makes sense,” she said when I called her. “If it motivates you because it’s familiar and part of your everyday life, that’s terrific.”

“It’s all about attitude,” said Laurie David, the founder of the Stop Global Warming Web site (stopglobalwarming.org) and a board member of the National Resources Defense Council. “Change one or two things, you end up changing four or five things. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Before you know it, you start influencing people around you.”

Like most dieters, I cut deals with myself. If you’re trying to lose real weight, you vow, say, to give up beer and ice cream but retain your pizza rights. Since I was trying to emit less CO2, I vowed to lower the thermostat at night by one degree — not two, as often recommended by tree-huggers — a tweak I expected none of us would notice. (That saved 79 pounds; each degree equals approximately 315 pounds of CO2; turning it down only at night, for the six colder months, or ¼ times 315). In return? No more guilt over TV size.

Friends I called for suggestions understood my deal-making. Judy said she never used electrical kitchen appliances — “Opening a can is something I’m able to do” — but was still not ready to swap Vaseline for non-petroleum eye-makeup remover. Victoria said she saw a young mother with her baby in some sort of recycled paper diaper that did not look at all absorbent. “My baby is wearing Pampers, probably one of the most wasteful things I do,” she said. Then again, as much as she loves S.U.V.’s — the way they feel and handle — she and her husband realized that if they bought one they would be ostracized by half their circle. They bought a station wagon that gets three times the mileage.

I vowed to quit my profligate morning habit of turning on the shower and leaving the bathroom, not returning until several minutes after the water was hot. On the flip side, once I stepped into the shower I was not going to turn the experience into a 60-second spasm of sudsing and rinsing. Two minutes shower going unnecessarily times 2.5 gallons per minute times 365 morning showers times three ounces of CO2 produced per gallon of hot water equals 342 pounds. (My calculations, here and elsewhere, were made with the help of experts at the National Resources Defense Council and The Green Guide, several credible Web sites and a few smart relatives who grew up to be physicists and engineers.)

When washing white loads, I’d switch from the warm/warm cycle to warm/cold, comfortable that neither I nor my wife would notice the difference. (We didn’t.) Sixty-two pounds saved.

Four hundred and eighty-three total pounds, 30 seconds of effort to reprogram the thermostat, two no-brainer decisions. Maybe my diet was riddled with compromises, but it was working.

I found further validation for my lack of rigor. “When people equate efficiency with discomfort and sacrifice — like when Jimmy Carter put on a sweater and encouraged Americans to lower the thermostat — they shy away from it,” said Bill Prindle, the deputy director of the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “A month later they’re back to their old ways. We need to ask people to act from their values” — meaning fundamentals like “physical security, clothing, food and shelter, including thermal comfort.”

I felt certain I could unearth more savings in what Danny Seo, an eco-expert with a TV show, a Sirius radio show and a series of books all titled “Simply Green,” described to me as “bad habits we don’t even realize are bad habits.” For example, was it really energy-wiser, as I’d often heard, to leave a light or computer on for the few minutes you’re out of the room, rather turning it off and then on again?

“Total myth,” Mr. Prindle said. “Actually, I think that’s a projection. Because it takes me more work to shut it off, people think, then it must generally require more energy. It’s like the better-to-leave-the-car-idling theory.”

There were other bad habits that were just as easy to break. A friend suggested this quickie: Call retailers to get them to stop sending the print catalogs to which our house had become addicted. I chose 10 — L. L. Bean, Crate & Barrel, J. Crew, Eddie Bauer, Garnet Hill, Design Within Reach, Lands’ End, Restoration Hardware, Hammacher Schlemmer and the Company Store. (Originally I’d included Williams-Sonoma, but my wife vetoed that idea.) It took me 22 minutes total to cancel them — eight phone calls and two e-mails. Ninety (the average number of pages) times 12 (number of issues per year we seem to get) times 10 (retailers) equals 10,800 pages. Since my research shows that one tree produces about 25,000 pages of the coated, lower-end virgin paper used in most catalogs, I’d just saved 43 percent of one tree. One tree produces 260 pounds of oxygen, 43 percent of that is 112 pounds, which converts to 154 pounds of CO2 saved.

Everyone but me seemed to know about “vampires” — those energy suckers plugged into the wall when not in use (toasters, coffeemakers, hair dryers, cellphone chargers), consuming energy in standby mode. The easiest solution? Pull out individual plugs or, particularly for areas near computers and home entertainment equipment with lots of components, plug everything into a power strip (with surge protector) and, when done for the night or weekend, flip off the illuminated switch. Doing that would save me about 115 pounds annually on the computer, about 200 pounds on the TV, DVD and VCR. (Cable and satellite boxes draw huge amounts of energy, but turning them off may result in considerable reboot delays. I’m not going to turn mine off every night, but I might when I go on vacation.)

My boys and I drove to Lowe’s for surge protectors as well as a thermal insulating blanket for our 75-gallon hot-water heater; wrapping it, every expert I spoke with told me, significantly reduces the massive heat loss, especially in winter. (Newer water heaters tend to have higher levels of insulation built in.) The largest blanket they carried, though, was for a 60-gallon tank, and a check of their Web site (and, later, of Home Depot’s site) showed no blanket for a tank our size. Forget it, then; this was the lazy man’s diet: minimum effort.

On our way to the cashier, we passed an aisle with motion sensors, and I remembered my brother had them in his bathrooms, where they shut off the lights soon after people left. They seemed an easy enough item to buy and install. I called my brother, Marc. “Be honest,” I said. “Will there be re-wiring?” My brother, an astrophysicist, said no, there wouldn’t be; then something to the effect that, unless I was too stupid to remove a light switch plate and put another one on, I was fully capable.

“Wait,” I said. “Why does anyone need a motion sensor in their bathroom? Don’t people turn the light on when they go in and turn it off when they leave?”

“Ah,” he said. “You don’t have teenagers yet.”

Scratch the motion sensors, at least for six more years.

I was now up to 952 pounds, more than 90 percent of the way to my goal. Okay; I was ready to turn back to the C.F.L.’s. I decided I could tolerate the cool white ones in two places only: our outside vestibule (60 watts replaced with 13 watts, with the same number of lumens, or brightness), and one overhead fixture in my office (75 watts replaced with 19), where its effect was neutralized by incandescent track lighting. They were lights that were on much more often than most. Together, they would save me, annually, about 300 pounds in 20 minutes, including shopping time.

Three hundred pounds. No typo. Two bulbs.

I wasn’t done, though — soon but not yet. I learned from Laurie David of Stop Global Warming that it makes almost no sense to rinse dishes in very hot water when they’re going into a dishwasher to be rinsed in even hotter water. I would hereby skip that step, plus I’d also hand-wash dirty dishes created after 10 o’clock (no real chore since I find it relaxing). Should buy us two loads weekly, down to four instead of six — or 200 pounds saved for the year.

And I would have to give up my screensaver habit, much as I loved images of my children floating across my line of sight while I thought up sentences. In screensaver mode, my computer still draws a lot of power, according to David Goldstein, the energy program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He advised that by changing my settings so that the computer and display both go to sleep when inactive for 10 minutes (as opposed to my original setting of three hours), I would save about 250 pounds annually. It took me 30 seconds to click on the Apple icon, then “System Preferences,” then “Energy Saver.”

Seventeen hundred pounds dropped in 68 minutes — a little more than one of the eight hours I’d allowed for. All that would be required of me in the future was 10 seconds nightly to shut off two power strip switches and five to 10 minutes, every now and then, of pleasant dishwashing.

I ought to be done with it now — even if my numbers were a bit off, I’d blown past my goal, a dangerous thing to do early in a diet. But maybe Ms. David is right: make one change, soon you’re ready to make three. Maybe one day soon I’ll be ready to change a whole floor’s worth of light bulbs; I learned after buying my 50 bulbs that it’s possible to find C.F.L.’s that cast a warm glow, and the Green Guide’s helpful light bulb product report suggests that C.F.L.’s have been improving. Danny Seo says that Ikea carries lighting fixtures that handsomely mask the shortcomings of C.F.L.’s, with tinted glass or a strip of wood veneer. Maybe we’ll replace a roll or six of virgin toilet paper with post-consumer waste napkins — maybe. This is all I’m willing to do right now. Don’t look for me to carpool at elevators.

Then again, I can’t help but wonder how much I might accomplish if I actually put in more effort than a garden slug. I’m intrigued by what a friend, an architect, told me: That if just one teensy change were made to New York City — if all black roofs were painted white or silver, a simple, surprisingly inexpensive fix — the financial and energy savings would be jaw-dropping, not to mention that it would severely reduce the possibility of blackouts and brownouts. Relatively meager effort, monster bang for the buck.

So, like, I don’t know, maybe some weekend soon we all just get brushes and roof paint, fan out across the city, and just do it and get it over with? And afterward everyone comes by my place to watch the World Series on my big old flat-screen?

another reason why yesterday was fabulous

it was also my brother's birthday. Happy Birthday, Shum!

. . .

in which I explain why I deserve lots of presents, love, and financial support

it's my birthday

. . .

my, the world is a pretty place

Tonight's my last night of 27, and I've recorded its sunset and a homeslice of Brooklyn here.



. . .
p.s. you have to log in, etc.

my two favorite newish-to-me websites

www.overheardinnewyork.com
www.cuteoverload.com

Two great things about both of these sights: they are funny; new stuff is uploaded to them at least once a day and usually more often than that.

. . .

timo says

"this [Professionally choreographed treadmill hipster band antics] needs to be seen!" Yep. It's pretty much better than reading tax (kind of a straw man, I know).

Also, HB, TJC!

. . .

photo fizz!

So.


The T&R Train rooooooolls through town and things start happening! New Coke gets a second chance, we walk the the Brrrrrrooklyn Appreciation Tour of America, and, in my apartment, a brave new world of fish embellishments grabs the limelight and it's out with the blue, in with a new old coffee table.


These are some beautiful peppers.



Here's Tim looking like a little Ghanaian market lady, selling his beautifully stacked pillows.



And Rachel at Greenmarket Market, trying on a new color of yarn.



and Brooklyn.



Oh yes, and a tearful, chest-bumping reunion with Michael George at SKP & JPK's final wedding finale.



The new table, boldly bargained for by me.



And the fishes. The school on the table hails from Accra, Ghana, the ones hanging in the air, from someplace in India, c/o Michael & Seemee.

Oh yeah, and today there were Polish parades in Greenpoint. And by "parades" I mean about 5 cars driving by periodically with red and white flags honking a lot.

This is not Greenpoint. Rather, it is the Vatican.

More pictures of recent events at a webgallery near you:
the apt: http://annescanon.rhymm.com/digipics/nyc/1018man/year3/
about town with the yung-cherrys: http://annescanon.rhymm.com/digipics/nyc/lhsnyc/trtrainsept06/
the SKP/JPK PTY: http://annescanon.rhymm.com/digipics/nyc/nyusol/0607/skpjpkpty/
and the nighttime approach to NYC: http://annescanon.rhymm.com/digipics/nyc/citylights/flysept06/


The pictures are password-protected, so in order to see them, you have to register and be approved by me. Approval usually happens within 24 hours, check back to view later. Thanks.

. . .