The raucous duo Make the Girl Dance released a video for their latest single "Kill Me." The concept is what would you do if you found out you had only eight days to live.
Verizon's FIOS HD cable comes with DVR, and though I rarely watch tv, I appreciate that I can hand pick the shows I want to see and watch it when I have down time. The problem is that my days are so full, I have a backlog of recored shows a gigabyte long. Yet in the year and a half I've had FIOS, there's one show marked 'do not delete' that I've had on repeat since the first week I got cable: Radiohead From the Basement performing "In Rainbows."
Watch them perform Reckoner: http://www.fromthebasement.tv/artists/radiohead/performances/reckoner
This episode of From the Basement is a beautiful intimate studio session with the greatest living rock band. They seem unguarded and free, playfully and perfectly making their last album come alive. Over at vimeo, you can now watch the entire show...and download it for your ipod/iphone. Check it out, but be warned, you might have to mark this do not delete for at least a decade.
Jamie Oliver won the TED 2010 Prize for his talk about Food and education. Most of us, especially Americans, are killing ourselves by consuming food-like substances. We need to go back to eating real food, cooking more for ourselves and our families, and educate children about healthy eating.
Eating healthy does not have to be more expensive than eating junk, especially if you think about the long term health costs and risks associated with poor diets. The academy award nominated film Food, Inc also explores this issue and suggests. The documentary makes a compelling case that the food chain has been artificially skewed by corporate and government subsidies so that the costs of fast food burgers are less than a third the cost of a healthy green vegetable. We can all fight this system by making wiser choices when we shop for food. Join a local CSA farm share. Shop locally. Grow your own greens and spices. Buy in bulk and cook healthy meals for your whole house. With a little energy and creativity, you'll learn that healthy cooking can be far less expensive and make you feel much happier. Here are ten simple tips to take action now, and find more educational resources over at helpguide.org.
Every time we get a cold spell or a massive snow storm, people start quipping, 'hey what the heck happened to climate change?' If you're joking around to make light of the difficult weather, fine. However, there seem to be a lot of people who say this with real conviction. These are the folks who view non-scientific anecdotal episodes of a cold or snow as concrete proof that climate change is a farce.
Hopefully you know that this argument is absurd. Yet when I see 1000s of blog posts, Facebook comments, and news articles questioning the validity of climate change after a big snow storm like the one that rocked the Northeast yesterday -- I'm beginning to think that logic is losing and idiocracy is ubiquitous. If we are living in an idiocracy, then Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are the king and queen of the idiot box: Listen to Hannity's response to the snow that DC got:
I'm not a violent man, but I've got a hockey stick half cocked to knock this fucker's teeth out.
I don't mean to get off on a rant here, but I feel the need to make a mini-documentary that explains in simple terms so anyone can understand that weather is not the same as climate. Bill Nye, The Science Guy, explained it best on Rachel Maddow's show: Weather is a small scale phenomenon: what happens day to day, climate is big phenomenon: the average weather in a region over a long period of time. In fact, record breaking snow and precipitation is completely in line with climate science. The IPCC predicted long ago that a rise in global temperatures would increase water vapor levels, elevating the frequency and severity of storms. If these storms are indicators of anything, it's simply that we are seeing an upward trend of record breaking storms over the past decade. Hats off to Maddow for producing this piece (and tip of the hat to Jeanne for posting this to FB):
So I am looking for a few volunteers to help produce a short 2min youtube video that gives a compelling, logical, and science based argument about why these record setting snowfalls do not refute climate change. I haven't seen anything like that. There are a few decent authors (and bloggers) who make the argument, but I just don't think they're getting through. Not many people read TIME magazine anymore, unfortunately... this is a great article:
Another project I'm working on, Change: The Documentary Series has a much broader scope with a documentary about the human impacts of climate change...but perhaps this mini-doc could be a supporting segment? What do you think?
This morning I dug up an old mashup set that I spun at River God's in Boston for the Weekly Wax. I had so much fun mashing classic rock, hip-hop, and 80s that I wanted to re-cut it to fit on a CD-R. You can download the mp3 or listen on Soundcloud:
Amanda McCall wrote a great pop-ed peace railing against the recent spread of hating on New Jersey. As she points out, New Yorkers making fun of NJ is something we accept because we know that the things they hate are not really representative of NJ. However, recently the NJ bashing has become ubiquitous, thanks to that train wreck of show called Jersey Shore. I love NJ, even if sometimes it's easy to forget why we're called The Garden State. Not only do we grow great tomatoes, we grow amazing people too.
Here's a taste of the Snookie themed rant:
Yo, you talk a lotta game, Washington state, but Jersey gave us Thomas Edison, Walt Whitman, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Jack Nicholson, Whitney Houston, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, to name a few. You gave us Ted Bundy and Glenn Beck, so get the f*ck outta Jersey's face....
Worth a read, if only for a laugh. A tip of the hat to Ms. McCall for defending my beloved NJ.
