Give me a Freegan Break

This doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as the showy no toilet paper yuppies and certainly not as much as the backwards thinking involved with these products. In fact I must admit that for the most part I agree with these hippies.

Of course not without exception: dumpster diving and trash picking is something poor people have been doing, well, probably since there has been rich people to throw out perfectly good stuff. Buying things at garage sales and taking them off the street is just ingrained as good sense in people without money. Truly, the lower your income, the more resourceful you have to be.

New York City is probably one of the worst places in America to be poor, yet one of the best places to find almost anything for free. And while I don’t begrudge these white people from middle and upper class backgrounds taking things from the trash (it’s public domain after all, it should be equal opportunity), I do take offense that they have co-opted it as their idea.

Only when people who retired early from investment banking start realizing that there’s a lot of waste and a lot of nice stuff in there does it become a news item (they probably came to this realization by remembering how much nice stuff they once chucked themselves). Producing less waste, consuming less, reusing more, all of these are necessary and their ideas and actions are in the right place, it’s the self-important “revolutionary” approach that is annoying.

Poor people might not pick trash to save the environment, but their impact (or lack of impact) on the environment is probably considerably more over their lifetimes since they buy less in the first place, have smaller homes, cars, etc. The New York Times however, isn’t likely to print an article about poor people picking trash, as it wouldn’t be as self-congratulatory to it’s perceived readership.


Side Note: A vegan eating meat so it doesn’t go to waste rubs me the wrong way; it seems like morals that are a bit too flexible. (Couldn’t they just give the meat to a meat-eating homeless person?)

The New Coney Island

Gothamist posted the plans for Coney Island, and there’s no other word to describe it than creepy. Adding hotels doesn't make it more attractive or appease people who wanted to save the character of Coney Island, it just adds to the sterile Disneyfiycation of the place.

Coney Island is Coney Island because it feels a little trapped in time with the sideshows and old rides and boardwalk. The idea of it as a vacation spot is absurd, tourists come to New York for New Yorky things, if they want amusement parks with overpriced hotels, Six Flags, Cedar Point and Disneyworld are going to win out.

As for the condos, they of course ruin Coney Island more than anything. And who’s going to live there for that kind of money? Trust fund hipsters? Maybe, it might be ironic, or post-ironic, or something. And that would be the biggest crime, turning Coney Island into Williamsburg…

Related: The plans claim the Wonder Wheel will stay even though it is technically in Astroland, yet it doesn’t appear to be included in the drawing. Other rides are for sale though, at surprisingly low prices.

Update: Oh and it turns out that on top of it all the developer is a massive racist: "The hotels, Mr. Sitt said, would offer black residents not only jobs, but careers. The Russian immigrants, who enjoy a 'quality of life and activity by the water,' would flock to the hotels and nightclubs. Jewish and Italian-American residents would get the "quality retail, bookstores and entertainment venues" that they want."

New York's Sexiest Vegetarian

Let me just preface this with saying I think this whole thing is a bit silly.

First of all how does the fact that you don't eat meat make you more sexy? But most importantly why are only celebrities allowed to compete? What they don't get enough attention?

That said, I think I should totally win "New York's Sexiest Vegetarian" for the following reasons:
1) I am a lot less annoying than most other vegetarians and celebrities
2) I live in New York
3) I have been a vegetarian for 14 years and have never had a piece of KFC on the sly
4) As evidenced by the photo above I am totally sexy

Also, so much for being the capital of the world, turns out New York is only the number four best city to live in as a vegetarian in 'merica (damn you West Coast hippies!)

UPDATE: So PETA has named the Sexiest Vegetarian for 2007: Carrie Underwood (I don't know I think she won 'merican idol or something), all I can say is: LAME!

Land O' Plenty

I just read about photographer Chris Jordan today, his stuff isn't the most amazing photography I have ever seen in my life, but it is pretty cool.

Although the message may come off a bit preachy at times, his new series: Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait is a really interesting idea: to read that 2 million plastic bottles are used every 5 minutes in the US and then photograph it (above). Well, it makes me feel good about using the same water bottle for the past four months- germs be damned at least I'm not wasteful.

Dude....

Ah! This is just the kind of article I needed to read right now. It's like the New York Times and The Onion decided to join forces on this one. But really it's just a case of life being more amusing than fiction.
Here's what makes this story so great:

1. This quote: ''If you're a cop and you're arresting people and you're confiscating the marijuana and keeping it yourself, that's bad. That's real bad,'' said City Councilman Doug Thomas.
2. He only got caught because he's paranoid when he's high and called 911 because he thought he was dying.
3. As if all of this hadn't won him cop of the year, when he got caught, he blamed his wife. Awe.
   

Enough Already: Crocs

This is long overdue and even a bit outdated, but it needs to be said none-the-less: These hideous shoes need to be banned.

Now, I’m no America’s Next Top Plus Sized Model or anything, and I’m not on the cutting edge of fashion, but I know how to dress myself, and I have the good sense not to leave the house, or even stay in the house in something so disgustingly offensive as these shoes.

It may sound a bit like a conspiracy theory, but I think that crocs are a dangerous world-wide epidemic on par with the trend of combining celebrity names, or caring what Britney Spears does. They must be stopped.

No one seems safe–people who seem otherwise perfectly sane are voluntary seen by the whole world in shoes that can best be described as clown shoe/clog/bedroom slipper hybrid. I don’t care if they are comfortable or not, my bathrobe is comfortable, but I don’t leave the house in it, because I have something that the croc wearing world could use a healthy dose of: Shame.

The is a lot wrong in the world, some things give you hope in humankind and others, like the popularity of such deplorable footwear, and spas for napping make one think that maybe Devo really was right after all.

Stupidest thing I've seen today

Most days people say things that are more clever than me, which sometimes threatens my massive ego. But luckily I always come across at least one really dumbass thing that secures my air of superiority. Today its a spa designed around napping. Now I've been know to do a new-agey thing or two (I do after all go to yoga twice a week), so I am not above paying to relax, but for fuck's sake- paying for a power nap? That's just plain stupid.

Starbucks doesn't charge that much for coffee, or you could, I don't know, just leave work before dark. If you are paying $24 to take a nap, you have too much money, way too much, and you should send some me right now. The only place I would pay to sleep is a hotel, where give you little soaps and let you sleep as long as you want, with out forcing you to do so in something that looks like it was designed by Steve Jobs.

I just can't wait until this place goes out of business and the city's homeless gets a supply of futuristic beds that elevate their feet above their hearts.