According to the Boston Globe, former Cornell prez Jeffrey Lehman had the highest salary of any Ivy League president in 2004-2005: $1,004,034
As Harvard is on the eve of selecting its first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust, maybe we should revive the investigation into Lehman's axing. Or at least until we find out the salary numbers on his replacement, David Skorton.
I'm currently watching The View on week 3 of my winter vacation from school: They've been having quite a bit of heated debate, now that Rosie has returned from her week-long vacation, and I've been enjoying it for the most part.
However, there is a bit of hypocrisy- Rosie and Joy, and even sometimes Barbara, have been spouting off about the Iraq war, explaining clearly, many of the simple arguments used by the Left, but mentioned scarcely by the Democratic bigwigs: they go off about how Americans aren't seeing all of the gruesome details that were banned from the media by the Bush administration, etc.; they talked about how people don't care enough about it, perhaps, due in part to the restricting of bodies on TV, but then they spend the majority of the show focusing on the celebrities, winter make-up, and other things that Americans are obsessed with instead of caring about the trajectory their globe is taking to hell in a handbasket. and then they wonder why nobody cares enough about the war...
The other odd thing is that following each of the first two hot topic/discussion segments, there were strange pseudo-PSAs that counteracted the main point just made on the show. First, Rosie etc. were responding to the latest Donald Trump nonsense, with Rosie highlighting how ridiculous is that he actually uses "fat" as an insult--as if it's news to her that she's fat. After talking about whether and how the word fat is used in the Carpenter O'Donnell household, they talked about whether you should express concern to the child if your child is fat...They talked more about if you should tell your child to lose weight or not do anythign or try to make them more active, etc...Joy talked about how they can tell whether you value thinness even if you don't say it to them directly, by observing your own behavior about your own weight.
Then, as soon as they went to commercial break, there was a ridiculous ad from the Dairy Council, about how to get your child to lose weight via exercise and other things and of course, by drinking milk "instead of" sugary drinks. I have other comments about this commercial, of course- I couldn't believe it was from the Dairy Council, but then the milk part made perfect sense. But the fact that it came after this segment was pretty funny.
On the next segment, they were bashing Bush, in quite a good, drawn-out, consistent manner, with Joy referring to Sen. Jim Webb's experience standing up to Bush about his sons coming home from Iraq. Elizabeth jumped in with the oft-used semantic argument about how parents can't "send" their children to Iraq- the children must enlist themselves, which is totally not the actual point. Rosie made a good comeback, explaining to Elizabeth and the audience the relationship between wealth and likelihood of joining the army in order to get a college education- a clear, and concise point. As soon as they went to commercial break, not only was there an ad for the Army, but it was directed at parents- to convinve their children to join the armed forces!!!
I'm starting to wonder if they strucutre the ads to relate to the content in this specific way, something which I'd never thought about before. Isn't The View live, though?
aah. I stil have one final left, but am taking the time for some nice TV time and relaxation.
Dork that I am, I was very excited when I got home and turned on the TV and found a wonderful episode of Scientific American Frontiers about Obesity...I think it was a repeat, but was really quite informative, even for someone who is studying these things at the graduate level. The best parts were a food lab studying children at Penn State and a segment about the traditional diet of two tribes in the SW United States, one of which was the Pima, (I forgot the name of the other one), and how the traditional diet of plants gathered from the desert prevented diabetes in this population supposedly genetically predisposed to diabetes through the "Thrifty Gene." I enjoyed Alan Alda asking one of the elders "What are the ways in which this food connects you with your culture?" It was like a little food anthropology experiment gone PBS. Heaven.
Anyway, yeah, I said... I'm a dork. It's really nice to have some downtime to one's self. As this semester is coming to a close- I only have a statistics take home final remaining and then I'll be heading down to New York on Sunday or Monday.
I just saw a commercial for Freedom Writers, a new movie opening in January, and even the trailer made me tear up a bit. Looks great--- It supposedly takes a place in Long Beach, where my roomate is from- she has told me tales of great diversity in the district, I think this movie, which is supposedly based on a true story, portrays a different version of that story, although I'm sure it wasn't actually filmed there.
Which brings me to mention that there's an insane number of movies out right now, or that have been out in the past month- Usually, I'm reluctant to see anything in the movie theater more than 2 or 3 times a year, but there seems to be a turn towards actually making good movies.
I really wanted to see the Last King of Scotland, as well as Fast Food Nation, although I'm not sure those are playing anymore. Then there's Borat, Babel, Volver, 3 Needles, Blood Diamond, and now this new film...oh, and Bobby looked pretty good too.
Any suggestions on how to choose, now that I will be finding myself with a bit of free time? Recommendations for light reading would be great as well, although I definitely have a list in my head and lots of NY Times to catch up on....hmmm...oh, to not be a student again....
Update 05|05|07: I just discovered this wonderful report on the study of traditional Tohono O'odham foods, the featured subject on the Scientific American Frontiers show above. Read for more information...
check this out.
(post title not intended as commentary on the actual Committee on Law and Standards decision, but on the comic.) :)
I'm currently in the middle of crazy crunch time, writing 2 papers, 2 presentations and 3 finals (plus more stuff) in the next two weeks.
I found these interesting blogs while researching for my Fair Trade paper:
http://fairtradecoffeeinperu.blogspot.com/
http://www.poorfarmer.blogspot.com/
http://greenlagirl.com/
http://www.fairtradecoffeenews.com/
in honor of the upcoming thanksgiving, the lyrics to your fire, your soul by dar williams:
Button up that shirt you're supposed to wear.
Don't forget your airline ticket or to brush your hair,
Show that family that you care.
But could you wear something that celebrates
Everything you love, and maybe what your family hates.
'Cause that might be what it takes.
It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
First thing they'll say's take off your shoes,
And they'll say they want your story, but they get confused,
By all those words you use.
A year ago your car went off a cliff,
And you saw an angel in midair who said you'd live.
Well, that's a story you can give.
It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
Your fire, your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
And they'll say, "You're family, you belong to us.
You can stay at home and have our love and trust,
But any day now one of us could die,
and if we make you suffer don't you want to find out why,
'Cause we love to watch you try,
With your fire, your soul, your soul.
It's your fire, it's your fire, it's your fire.
Then you'll fly home and get the flu,
And you'll keep staring at the ground, you always do,
When they get their time with you.
You are not a punching bag, my dear,
I think your darkest day should have some light this year,
I think you should stay right here.
It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
It's your fire, it's your soul, you shouldn't have to go.
also.....we won! yay! I've had just a wee bit of spring in my step since Tuesday night, and especially since Thursday when George Allen miraculously conceded defeat. I though this day would come, but not so soon. Just when I turn away from politics and marginally stop caring, hope is restored.
And this was my election voting non-absentee for a non-school board vote. Which was rather less exciting in this great Commonwealth, because we have paper ballots here, unlike the lever-style voting machines of my youth in New York.
My sister and I had a discussion, agreeing that more people would vote if the levers were used everywhere, because well... it's just cooler. Or at least it feels cooler and more part of something.
I didn't even get to play around with hanging chads here, only black markers to fill in scantron-like bubbles at the polling place which was, excitingly, a mere 2 blocks from my apt.Yay for the People's Republic of Cambridge and our 87% of the vote that went to our Rep. Michael Capuano. And Yay for the taking back of America. I think Howard Dean was just a few years before his time...
well, I haven't stopped by this blog in a few weeks, which have been quite busy.
I somehow have gotten involved with:
-producing the website for a student research conference being held at my school in March,
-work-study job for the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, which is awesome
-writing article(s) for Balance, the Tufts Daily's wwhealth and nutrition supplement
-working on the 2007 Symposium of my school's lone student group, brilliantly titled "FOOD"
and a bunch of other stuff, which, when combined with my new addiction to watching Grey's Anatomy and ER and my hebrew school job, have left me running raggedly to finish my assignments on time.
Also, this past week I attended the American Public Health Association's Annual Meeting, which happened to be in Boston this year, at the mega-sized Boston Convention Center. This was a wondeful experience, which I hope to blog further about one day, but the two best sessions I went to were about a) linking Public Health to Agriculture Policy (which is basically what I want to do with the rest of my life, to a degree) and b) different methods for mapping food acces.
So when Parke Wilde, the now oft-cited-on-this-blog Prof. at my school, posted this on his blog, I've become very excited. I sat through multiple presentations on Tuesday about using GIS to map food access in different ways in difference parts of the U.S., two of which were focused on NYC. If you click on "Explore and Interactive Map," you can see a number of indeces of food access mapped on to economic and other data for all of the city, in an enticing visual format (aka a "map". The fact that this data is now publicly accessible from the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, is amazing, if it is actually utilized. I may try to write something for Gothamist or City Limits about it, because they have focused on food issues a bunch in the past. Maybe someone beat me to it.
here are a few pictures from the amazing Indigo Girls concert I attended on Monday night near Park St in Boston. I haven't seen them since freshman year of college, when Darya, Faye, and a few of Darya's friends all went to Carmine's beforehand. This crowd was a little bit less noticably butch, but that's probably just because I've grown more accustomed to butches since then :)
This time, Lauren Herman and I and two of Lauren's friends from Cornell went, and stopped by the Beantown Pub beforehand, and it was equally exciting.
See this for the setlist. They played a lot of songs from their new album Despite Our Differences, but also a bunch of older songs that I knew and some that I didn't. Little Perennials is a great new song, as is Trouble a great older song, (although not that old). This reminds me that I really need to get/copy/download more of their older stuff.
this is what i would do: go to South Africa with my two favorite people ever: Ruth Messinger and Tony Kushner
wow- that is unbelievably amazing.
in other news, i am excited about grameen bank winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I first heard of Grameen when I read about it in the book Hope's Edge, by my other two favorite people: Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe.
This really tops the latest list of things it's not possible to believe humans have actually constructed. The Naples Daily News reports that Ron Evans Sr. was operating several labor camps in Northern Florida and North Carolina, recruiting homeless people from Miami and NOLA by luring them with crack cocaine, in exchange for working off the drug payments on their labor camp. I don't even know if Abraham could plead for pity on behalf of these guys...
In the realm of Florida labor issues, I never realized just how close Immokalee, FL is to all my relatives living in the fancy, shmancy splendor of Weston, FL, a town which was plopped down a few years ago on what used to be the Everglades. Google Maps says it's about a two-hour drive. Straight form the Connecticut-in-the-summer country clubs and shopping malls to the tomato pickers fighting for UN CENTAVO MAS. Well, they got it from Taco Bell, at least in theory--we'll see how that goes.
Check out the Alliance for Fair Food to see the work that's being done in a similar vein for McDonald's suppliers.
How ironic (and reflective of the complexity of our food system's problems): The CIW wants to include a community garden in the community center they are trying to bring to Immokalee.
Coming soon: a few photos from the fab Indigo Girls concert last night at the Orpheum Theater, Boston, MA.
When I was a little kid, my family used to make fun of me because I would randomly come up with all these tidbits of information and when asked how I knew, I would inevitably be known to have "overheard" them from people around me, oftentimes strangers.
I think I've always prided myself on my ability to "overhear" information, whether it is aurally or by "stalking" people, organizations, institutions, etc online or via reading signs on bulletin boards that nobody else reads. Sometimes this is helpful; sometimes it leads to a paralysis and lack of action in the face of information overload.
As anyone who has lived with me knows, I constantly find myself distracted by the sudden need to search online for any number of random questions or thoughts that pop into my head at all hours of the day, and many of the night. My new roommate, who I have known for all of about 5 weeks already remarked to a friend of hers that I'm like her personal web-searcher, and I must spend all my time "surfing the web" (a phrase I would never use) while she's doing her homework. Sadly, that's closer to the truth than you could possibly imagine.
I don't know why I constantly feel compelled to do this. But it's really become and addiction and I'm constantly fighting with it in order to get ANYTHING done, including eating, going to the bathroom, going to sleep, getting any homework done, and going outside so I don't become a hermit lacking in Vitamin D. It often makes me wish the internet/computers had never been invented (or so widespread and accessible).
I'm not sure why I'm writing about this, except that in terms of my constant stalking/searching about people, I think it stems from a strong fear of interaction with people in real life. I somehow subconsciously spend so much time searchign about people online, that it often prevents me from ever having to go about real life.
This afternoon I found myself sitting on our backporch, which faces into a leafy courtyard, trying to get some homework done. Although I was fairly interested in what I was reading, I was constantly drawn to listening/watching two people across the courtyard, whose porch also looks into their kitchen, who were preparing and then eating dinner, talking all the while.
Then I got as excited as a light clicked in a room in another apt, where a man sat down at a bunch of music mixing equipment.
I think the "overhearing" was the beginning of this need to constantly look into other people's lives and enviously wish I had [elements of or] their lives. I think this is a common behavior for adolescents, but maybe because I was doing it way before then, I never got over it and it often creates a lot of negative energy and wasted time in my life.
On both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Rabbis at both my parents' shul and the shul I went to here in Cambridge spent a lot of time talking about overcoming our own negative habits that prevent us from living, as Oprah would call it "our best life." On RH, the Rabbi used the metaphor of smashing our own personal idols, based on the Midrash of Abraham and the idols; on YK, the Rabbi dwelled particularly on a piece of the Avodah service, the prayer of the Kohen Gadol, in which we, in the tradition of the Israelites in the Temple, prayed for the residents of the Sharon valley ( a part of Israel), that "their homes not become their graves." In the prayer it refers specifically to the fact that those people lived (and presumably still do) on a fault line and constantly lived "in fear of sudden earthquakes." (My roommate, a native of California, took great issue with the repetitiveness of saying "sudden earthquakes," as all earthquakes are ostensibly sudden.) The Rabbi then made reference to an extended metaphor about how our own negative habits and inertia to not live the life we want to be living causes "our homes to become our graves," a metaphor which, though profoundly depressing, makes a lot of sense to me.
This slightly related post by ZT almost brought me to tears and helped bring the point of the 2 sermons home as well.
Every time I think about these ideas, portrays the imagery of the Neilah service of YK, that the "gates are closing" every second of every day, and it exponentially increases the importance of each action and each day, ideally changing the way I look at life. The question is if it actually is effective enough to actually change the way I live my life.
I hope so. This is a problem I have tried to deal with multiple times, with minimal progress each time. I hope I have the courage to spend less time peering into the mundanities of other people's lives and actually live the life I want to be living. A very simple concept but one that seems drastically different from my usual mode of operation. and I imagine many other people's as well.
Despite missing most of Kabbalat Shabbat, I had a lovely [albeit shivery] time at a potluck last night in, and around, a local couple's beautifully decorated Sukkah. I wish I had more time to truly draw out the links between Sukkot and agriculture, historically and in the present. I think it would be a great topic for future resarch/a book.
Anyway, the folks had a whole bunch of concord grape vines, for which I have a particularly strong penchant, and one ofthe potluck attendees, who I think had also led services, was remarking about how they might not be kosher if they don't know who originally planted/harvested the vines, bc they were there before the current folks moved in.
is there any sort of written rule/precedent for this?
Afterwards we headed over to TBS and got a taste of some 1-yr aged etrog vodka...
Incidentally, I just discovered there was an article this summer in Tikkun about Omivore's Dilemma, my favorite book that I never finished reading.
I really should be studying for my nutrition exam right now, but I'm too inspired by the connections in my life to put off sharing this with others. In my agriculture science and policy class we just begin studying "water" as it relates to soils and other issues in agriculture. I must admit, it's been a little hard, as someone who has never spent a day working on a farm (Gustavo Esteva's compost garden in Oaxaca notwithstanding) to conceptualize, let alone memorize, many of the detailed scientific characteristics and irrigation strategies I am learning about.
After class I helped a few other students put together a pre-fab Sukkah outside of my school building, the Jaharis Center. It was a lot more down-to-earth than other sukkah-building I've done, becuase there were really just a few of us, scattered from my school (the Friedman school of Nutrition), and the medical school across the street, and even one staff member; and you could tell how genuinely touched each of was that it was really coming together, and we'd really have a little sukkah to spend time in throughout the coming week, in planned programs (as of yet unplanned, but still...) and quiet individual moments, eating, studying, shivering...
While looking for resources to prompt a lunchtime discussion in the Sukkah next week about connections between Judaism, food and agriculture, I also just read about a [relatively] new organization called Canfei Nesharim to encourage environmental awareness and conservation in the Orthodox community, an organization which has put together a number of resources and activities around the upcoming holidays, and also specifically to celebrate Simchas Beis Ha-shoeva (ashkenazi emphasis NOT mine), the "Water-Drawing Ceremony," about which I previously knew nothing.
Subsequently I saw that a college friend of mine now works for COEJL, and stumbled upon this wonderful d'rash for Sukkot by the illustrious Frances Kreimer's mom...
I think when my friends and I sit around and bitch and moan about how spending time with the Jewish community is frustrating because of all the--what someone I recently met termed them--"Princeton i-banker types," we tend to feel like we are alone in this frustration and are on the constant path of existential crisis.. So it's nice to read that Mordechai Kaplan
"agonized over his rabbinic role serving wealthy capitalist Jews in a synagogue in New York City, when his heart was with the workers."Wow. Rabbi Fuchs-Kreimer just keeps hitting on all the insightful points in this piece, tying together both the social justice and "socially-conscious living/back-to-nature" being reclaimed by young Jews these days. She also writes, of Kaplan:
In a relatively rare mood of contentment, after a morning of teaching sermon-writing followed by a brisk two mile walk home, he wrote: "The lunch I found at home was the ideal one for the appetite I had worked up on [my] walk, oatmeal…asparagus tips on toast in an ocean of cream sauce and a cup of coffee with the dried crumbs of chocolate cake…I gave the world three hours of homiletics and the world gave me back a nourishing lunch. I can never cease marveling at the miracle of the exchange of goods and services… It is for this marvel of marvels that I thank God whenever I say grace [after meals], and I say it quite often with cap on or without a cap."mmm....too bad it's not asparagus season right now. I think now I can get to studying with a clean conscience and stop agonizing over the fact that I missed participating in my program's local food week.....you know, it was Yom Kippur and then I suddenly had to catch up on work....I think this coming week should be the real local food week...I can't imagine a better way to honor the earth, and all those who tire to conserve it, improve it and bring us tasty, nutritious foods, then to celebrate them and think about the ways Judaism provides me with these perfect opportunities to integrate my studies into my life. Here's to Mordechai Kaplan! Maybe his blessed memory can give me the strength and inspiration to conjure a Simchat Ha-Shoeva ceremony in the Tufts Medical Campus Sukkah next week! After all, according to Canfei Nesharim, the Mishnah (Sukkah 51a) says that anyone who has not participated in it has not known true joy.
wow. apparently, MANA was in New York in August and I missed them! I had been periodically checking if there was anything new on the radar with them and somehow I fell off the wagon at the worst time! They now have a new album out that was #4 on Billboard 200 in August, they had an autograph signing at the Virgin Megastore @ Times Sq where they were mobbed....
boo :(
Also, I need to fix my camera. One of the reasons I haven't blogged in ages is that my camera's been slowly dying since March when I had it out in the rain during the mural tour in San Francisco and dropped it several times in the rain.
And now I'm a student!
Parke Wilde, a professor in the FPAN program at my school has a great blog about U.S. Food Policy, which he updates regularly.
U.S. Food Policy: Who is Kevin J. Martin? links to a speech made by the chairman of the FCC about a new commission Sen Sam Brownback (R-KA?) and others have sponsored which will study the relationship between TV "food" advertising and childhood obesity in the U.S.
I was ecstatic upon hearing about this commission, and still think it has great potential, but my excitement was downgraded when I explored further, found Brownback's office's press statement which cites the Beverly LaHaye Institute as one of the task force members...this is the same Beverly LaHaye Institute which includes, among many other predominantly anti-feminist polemics, a report on its main page bashing the UN Millenium Development Goals as leftist propaganda, preferring that the problem of world poverty be solved through Christian charity...hmmm...
I know that many of the folks most interested in media regulation issues tend to be extreme conservatives, and I recognize that the task force does need to be bi-partisan, but somehow I don't think this group (and others who are also probalby going to be involved) could actually come down in any forceful way against corporate influence. I guess that's what happens when you get a task force sponsored by Republican senators disguised by its connections with Sesame Street...
