Our Irish Fairytale of New York
Yesterday it was St. Patrick day and we fully enjoyed it. In the morning we crossed a white Central Park to go to the St. Patrick’s day parade on 5th avenue.
I was impressed by the high number of black and asian Irish parade participants.
It was cold and windy, and after 5 hours marching in the streets was not that pleasant any longer.
I especially enjoyed the girls of a catholic school who, in a skillful high-lift leg move, proudly showed their Vatican yellow underwears.
In the evening, we couldn’t miss the Pogues’ concert at the Roseland Ballroom. So many people, so much beer and drunk jumping, sticky hardwood floors, and Shane MacGowan singing from a wheel chair. What’s not to love about Ireland?
Via Margutta - November 2006
In my twisted, contradictory, conflictual way I really love Rome and I always will.
Of the kindness of strangers (in NYC)
Who ever said that New Yorkers are rude?
I’ve been in NYC a little bit more than a month and I’ve been rescued, helped, advised, and even received medical attention by total strangers, without me ever having to ask for help.
It started with the young woman who saw me trying to buy a MetroCard from a machine with my credit card. She stopped to tell me that that machine never worked with credit cards; I should use cash or go to the other Subway stop across the street.
Then it was the turn of the elegant black businessman who rescue me in the Time Square tower where I was trying to figure out how to get to one of the high floors. He showed me the right spot and how to operate the elevators (which worked like no one I’d seen before).
It was Maria from Ecuador who didn’t even speak English and saw me coughing. Instead of stepping away from me and looking at me with despise, she talked to me with kindness and gave me a Cepacol lozenge for my throat and a menthol lotion to spread on my neck for relief.
It was the woman who saw me standing with my luggage in front of the emergency exit door of the ACE subway stop at Port Authority—would the alarm sound if I opened the door, as the sign read?—who moved towards me and without even slowing down (I’ve been told that New Yorkers walk 30% faster than non-New Yorkers) opened the door for me. “I was afraid the alarm would sound.” “So what? Go!”
Then the elderly black woman with the cane waiting for the green traffic light , who scolded me for being too close to the corner where cars could hit me. And the two guys who—independently—prevented me from forgetting my gloves in the subway car (one stopped me and pointed at my gloves, the other collected them and handed them over to me).
When people don’t use cars, they actually share the same space-time; they perceive the connectedness among human beings who find themselves in the same space (even more strongly in smaller spaces like subway cars).
New Yorkers practice an efficiency-driven solidarity I haven’t experienced in any other place. They act as a collective “Getting started” manual for a city that it’s not always easy to use for newbies. Perhaps it’s because so many people are new to NYC. Perhaps it’s because of the many traumatic experiences who have taught New Yorkers how important is to rely on each other. Whatever it is, it makes you feel like you belong and people care.
Then, one evening going home from work, I heard the man sitting to my right saying something about “his biggest fear.” I looked at him. He looked at me asked: “Do you think a man should confront his biggest fears?” It was a rhetorical question; he only needed to find the courage to do what he knew he had to do. I asked him what his biggest fear was. In the space of a subway stop, the man told me about his biggest fear and how he was avoiding it, and how he decided to deal with it. “Good luck!” I said standing up to get off at my stop. I really meant it.
The NY Times on using social software to connect the dots
Clive Thompson’s article on today’s New York Times Magazine is an interesting reflection on what social software can and cannot do to help intelligence agencies gathering and analyzing information.
Among other things, Thompson discusses two proposals submitted for the Galileo Award, a competition created by the C.I.A. to collect ideas on how to improve information sharing among American intelligence agencies. The first proposal, written by C.I.A. Calvin Andrus, proposes to use wikis and blogs to collect and share information among agencies. By allowing linking of information and ideas, previously disconnected pieces of data are shaped and structured by the dynamics of a social network.
If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.
Tears in Paradise
Paradise, Pennsylvania, saw the nation’s third deadly school shooting in a week and the second that targeted female students. A 32-year-old man who was “acting out to achieve revenge for something that happened 20 years ago,” let the boys leave, tied the girls, all between 6 and 13 years old, and then shot them in the head at close range. He killed three girls, critically wounded 3, and injured 5 more before killing himself.
An adult, father of three, executing children tied to the blackboard in a small rural school? I really need to blame somebody, because I cannot make sense of this. If I only knew who.
Technorati Tags: amish, school, shooting
Five years
I’ve tried to write a post on 9/11 for the past two days and I couldn’t. Today, I kept CNN’s replay of the September 11, 2001 broadcast on the entire day. I thought that the emotional grip of these images would be lighter after five years. I was wrong.
On September 11, 2001 it was impossible to understand the impact of what was going on. Fragments of information were hitting us from all over and formed a fuzzy picture. I was at work, and after the CNN website got jammed, I got small pieces of news throughout the day. At night, the continue replay of the planes hitting the twin towers felt as a scene from an apocalyptic movie, not as a very real event that had just happened 106 miles from where I lived.
The day after, even in the awareness of the horrible tragedy, the entire world seemed to close around us and hug us tight.
Today, the facts are even too clear. We know how many people died, we can name some of them, we know some of their stories, we have seen their pictures. We know what happened after that day. No worldwide hugs are left. There is no mystery, no suspense. September 11 now appears as it is: just a terrible tragedy that is still unfolding in front of us and whose human sense escapes us.
Technorati Tags: September 11
The TED Conference is online
Every year, the brightest and most influential gather in Monterey for TED. The theme of this year’s TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, was The Future We Will Create….
Google Video has a set of video recordings of some amazing 2006 TED conference talks. Al Gore was there and you can feel his presence in many of the videos. If you only have time for one, watch Majora Carter, MacArthur “genius” grant winner and founder of Sustainable South Bronx, talking about environmental justice and explaining why green is the new black.
For more videos, visit the TED site and YouTube; you can also find photos from the TED conference on Flickr and visit/subscribe to the TEDblog for more information and video updates on the conference.
No, you cannot attend TED 2007. The conference is by invitation only (although anybody can apply for an invitation) and it seems to be already sold out.
Technorati Tags: TED, conference, TEDconference, 2006
Katrina, one year later. Mission not accomplished
After one year, New Orleans is still wounded. This pictures of the 9th Ward was not taken last year; it’s just a few days old and was taken by photographer 1115 (via Albert; view the entire set on Flickr).
Technorati Tags: remembering, anniversary, Katrina, New Orleans
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