Englishman in New York

So nobody in the UK knows what blogging is and we’re all wasting our time. Or perhaps they do know what blogging is and this new survey about blogging in the UK is wasting our time.

A survey of British taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers — often seen as barometers of popular trends — found that nearly 90 percent had no idea what a podcast is and more than 70 percent had never heard of blogging.

Funny that. Three professions that spend all day interacting with people and none of their day at a computer. And they don’t know what blogging is. Well, I never…

Today’s links:
Danish air force admit liability in reindeer sleighing! (via Lise)
Pooter Geek has ten products routinely used in ways which expressly contradict their accompanying instructions or break English law.

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The International Freedom Center at the WTC site is no more. Thank god. I have discussed some of my reasons for opposing the plan before so I won’t repeat myself here, except to say that the WTC site was definitely not the place for so divisive an issue as freedom. Sad but true.

In other news:
Harry bows out at Harry’s Place
Blogger Michael Totten heads out to Beirut.
My hyper-local Daily Heights gets stuck in.
And Chinese blogger loves EiNY header image (created by Simon’s Brain).

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*NEWSFLASH* Lew on League is back!

After a prolonged absence brought on by the visit of two Belorussian 12-year-olds, his wife’s 60th birthday, Leeds Rhinos’ Challenge Cup defeat and a rush of unsuspecting massage clients, Lew on League is staging a comeback. I think he might have had one glass of wine too many before sitting down to tap out this missive, if you can keep up with his mind flow you are a better son than I…

THE RUGBY LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP

On Friday, Leeds 2nd in the league, meet St Helens 1st in the league. The winner goes straight through to the final at Old Trafford. The team which loses that game, will play the winner of the game at Odsal played on Saturday between Bradford and Hull.

The winner of that game played next week then goes on to play at Old Trafford. These four teams have shown themselves to be the four outstanding teams in the league and it is anyone’s guess as to which will win. For the first half of the season Leeds seemed impregnable. Then St Helens started to show their brilliance and eventually pulled ahead. Now in the last few games Hull, following their sensational victory in the Challenge Cup, has shown how dangerous their team can be in cup matches. At the same time, Bradford have revealed how vulnerable St Helens can be against a big pack, now that the Saints have paid for their victorious run by a series of injuries to their star players.

Hull were magnificent in their thrashing of Warrington who two weeks before that had beaten Leeds in a league game. Bradford defeated St Helens in their league game and showed some of their old power and pace.

With the softer grounds now being the norm, what is certain is that success is going to come to the teams which can produce the goods ‘up front’. Both Leeds and St Helens have looked to be weaker than Hull and Bradford. However this writer feels that one hopeful sign is that Chris Feather has now returned to Leeds. Chris is a young forward who is one of the heaviest in the league. He was loaned to Wakefield to gain experience in Super League. In the final game of the season he played against Leeds and although Wakefield lost, he looked to be the most powerful forward on the field.

Smith made a bad mistake in the Challenge Cup final in leaving out McDermott in a game where the Hull forward power needed taming. We need to use Bailey, Ward, McDermott and Feather if we are to retain the championship. Hopefully he will not make the same mistake again.

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A perk of being a writer is that it often leads to new friendships with interesting and inspirational people. Adam Linn, a blind film director, screenwriter and actor is one of them. (I have a story about Adam appearing in the next issue of MovieMaker Magazine.)

Adam emailed me this morning to express his disgust at a thoughtless article which appeared in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine about a blind or partially-sighted applicant for a chef’s job at a city restaurant. The article is one of 40 essays which appear in a new book by Bloomsbury called Don’t Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World’s Greatest Chefs. It was written by Gabrielle Hamilton the chef and owner of Prune in the East Village. I don’t doubt Ms. Hamilton’s sincerity. But I do think she could have been better advised by Bloomsbury about her tone and choice of words.

The book’s blurb states:

A hilarious and heartening collection of kitchen disasters.

In this raucous new collection, over forty of the world’s greatest chefs relate outrageous true tales from their kitchens. From hiring a blind line cook to flooding the room with meringue to being terrorized by a French owl, these behind-the-scenes accounts are as wildly entertaining as they are revealing. A delicious reminder that even the chefs we most admire aren’t always perfect, Don’t Try This at Home is a must-have for anyone who loves food or is fascinated by those who masterfully prepare it.

I’ll let you be the judge. The full article is here. Here are a few extracts:

The first thing I noticed when he arrived was that he was blind. His eyes wandered around in their sockets like tropical fish in the aquarium of a cheap hotel lobby.

I showed him our menu. He held it up to his face as if to breathe in its written contents, to discover by inhaling what it said in plain print. I felt more certain than ever when I observed this that he was blind, but naturally doubted myself because obviously the guy had worked in restaurants, something that - though we may joke - really can’t and shouldn’t be done.

When he arrived for his trail I took him around on an introductory tour of the prep area and the walk-in and the hot line. At each station, he bent over and put his forehead against everything I showed him. It was fascinating at first - and later, heartbreaking - to note the angle at which he scrutinized each item in the refrigerator.

We set him up in the basement prep area with a cutting board and a menial task that wouldn’t matter if he messed it up: picking parsley. This took him most of the afternoon, and it was painful to watch him bent in half, killing his back in order to have his untethered eyes close up to the cutting board.

I never did find out what he was doing. I allowed him to finish out the whole trail, and when he had changed his clothes, I encouraged him to sit at the bar and have something to eat, which he did. And as he was leaving, I said I would call him the next day, which I did. I told him that I was looking for someone with a little more power, a bit more of a heavy hitter, but that I would keep him in mind if a position more aligned with his skills became available.

This, remarkably, he seemed to see coming.

Here is Adam’s letter to the editor at the New York Times:

To The Editor,

It is difficult for me to express the level of disappointment I felt in the Times for printing Gabrielle Hamilton’s supremely offensive essay, “Eat, Memory: Line of Sight” in Sunday’s magazine section.

I am a blind filmmaker. I would be hard pressed to create a depiction of someone as disrespectful as Ms. Hamilton does here in describing a man in search of a job at her restaurant, “The first thing I noticed when he arrived was that he was blind. His eyes wandered around in their sockets like tropical fish in the aquarium of a cheap hotel lobby.”

To allow Ms. Hamilton’s self-aggrandizing callousness in your paper is tantamount to printing blatantly racist comments. If Ms. Hamilton had chosen to belittle the appearance of any other minority group in the promotion of her book I sincerely doubt you would have seen fit to print it.

I have many accomplished blind friends including Jay Wolf, a celebrated barbecue chef in Texas and another, Peter Mikochik, who single handedly built an addition on his Shelter Island home.

Ms. Hamilton also adds, “I thought maybe I was an ignorant jerk who didn’t realize how far the blind had come.”

This is the one instance in which Ms. Hamilton manages to come close to the truth with her pompous yet amateur prose.

Adam Linn

UPDATE: Check out the American Foundation for the Blind blog

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Congratulations to Ben Baruch on another animated feat of festive fun! Tekiah!.

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Look out New York neighbors a hurricane could be headed our way according to the Independent on Sunday which seems to have run the story twice!

Yes, the sister newspaper of the Independent (which three days ago called the latest hurricanes the “smoking gun” of global warming, ie, it’s all America’s fault) is now predicting that New York is next.

Apparently this could be one of the biggest hurricane seasons yet with two more months of hurricanes still to come:

Some of these storms could hit the US, and experts say New York could be the next city to be devastated. The area around the Big Apple is listed by the [US government’s official National Hurricane] Center as the fifth most vulnerable in the country, after New Orleans, the Florida Keys, Tampa in Florida and Galveston in Texas, all targeted by hurricanes in the past two years.

Max Mayfield, director of the Center, told Congress that Katrina “will not be the last major hurricane to hit a vulnerable area, and New Orleans is not the only location vulnerable to a large disaster from a land-falling hurricane”.

Local experts say that such a catastrophe is “inevitable”, and the New York City authorities warn that it could bring a 30ft-high storm surge crashing into Manhattan.

Nowhere in the story does anyone actually say that New York is next. But if I am to understand the report correctly: since there is likely to be more storms this year, and since four of the five most vulnerable areas have been hit in the last two years, New York is all but assured to be hit by a catastrophic tidal wave. If only either story was longer than 300 words, I may have been able to find out more…

Like the fact that the last hurricane to hit the New York area was called Gloria (a category 1 hurricane), which struck in 1985. And that the last major hurricane to strike the area was a category 3 storm…in the autumn of 1938 (hmn, was global warming America’s fault then too?), and the last major storm before that was 117 years previously in 1821 (more a smoking musket than a smoking gun, don’t you think?)—the only hurricane in modern times known to have passed directly over parts of New York City (according to LiveScience.com).

Yes, there is a chance that New York could be struck by a hurricane. Every year there is a chance that New York could be hit by a hurricane. But, surely the fact that it hasn’t been struck by a hurricane in the last 20 years, or by a major hurricane in the last 70 years, or directly by a major hurricane in 180 years, makes it more likely than the fact that it hasn’t been struck in the last two.

At least the Independent stopped short of predicting the felling of New York’s skyscrapers like the boffins at icWales.

Scenes from the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow may prove to be uncomfortably close to the truth after American scientists rated New York as the fifth most hurricane-threatened area in the country

The film, which saw the city submerged by a giant tidal wave, could soon be replicated in real life, with potentially devastating consequences.

Nigel Rhodes, of Stormforce, warned that a hurricane any bigger than Katrina or Rita could bring the city’s famous skyscrapers crashing down, with many only designed to withstand a category three storm.

Thank god I live in Brooklyn.

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A stunning piece of writing from one of America’s best journalists. Joan Didion writes about grief and loss following the death of her husband last year.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place.

When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” to rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

Link to full story here
Profile of Didion here

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Most of the time I feel like I live in the capital of the world. But occasionally I’m transported back to the hillside in Cornwall that I left two years ago. And never have I felt more parochial than the other day when I read the following on the front page of the New York Times:

DEAL IS REACHED TO PUT TOILETS ON CITY STREETS: After more than a decade of false starts, New York City officials announced yesterday that they had selected a company to remake the city’s jumbled streetscape by providing aesthetic order to its thousands of bus shelters and newsstands and, perhaps most intriguing, installing 20 freestanding public toilets on city streets.

Wow. How soon before I read the following?

FLUSH WITH SUCCESS: Exeter New York has some of the finest four-star toilets in the country - according to the experts who judged the latest Loo of the Year Awards. The city entered four of its public toilets and, although they failed to win the ultimate five-star accolade, they received high praise.

The loos in King William Street Times Square and Paris Street Herald Square gained four stars, those in Blackboy Road Chinatown three stars, and in Whipton Village Road the East Village two stars.

Mike Trim, head of the city’s cleansing services, said: “We are very pleased with the results. Currently, we are about to refurbish the loos at the Quay Columbus Circle and this work will be starting next month.”

The toilets will be closed for a short time for the £24,000 $2.4 million project.

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