Video Vigilante Catches the Tears of a Hooker

I was up early watching the snow fall and had a chance to fall back in bed and read the latest issue of Wired. There was a small story about a man in Oklahoma City who films prostitutes and johns in action and posts them on YouTube. The story included other examples of video vigilantes, who use video cameras to push for actions to clean up their neighborhoods. JohnTV.com, the website owned by the Oklahoma filmer, has clips of the prostitutes and johns in action, as well as poignant interviews with hookers whom he met 'on the track,' the city's streetwalker hotspot.

I watched the video he made interviewing one sad-eyed woman who said she was a crack addict and tearfully admitted she had the HIV virus. "I'm going to die of AIDS," she said and putting her hands over her eyes. It was a stark lesson on how unglamorous the life of a street hooker can be.

Helen, Dear, How Can I Help You Today?

On the trip back up from NJ to South Deerfield, I found a Christian radio station in New York that featured shows about medical topics. One show was called Urology and You, and was hosted by a jolly Indian named Dr. Zafar Khan, and a guest OB/Gyn named Dr. Zuckerman.

"Hello, Helen dear," said doctor Khan, in a soothing Indian lilt. "Today is women-only day, we are only taking calls from women today." So proceeded a string of calls from NY-area women with problems urinating and other related complaints. Dr Khan happily counseled them, and then gave out his phone number, so they could make an appointment to see him in person. He was a good sounding doc with a reassuring, 'it will be ok' tone of voice.

Woman after woman told the doc about how they had to get up so many times to pee during the night, or that they leaked. "There's a cure for that," he told them. "You don't have to suffer," we have creams and pills you can take." Each woman sounded progressively more pleased with the good doctor's advice, and many said they'd call to make an appointment.

Later I looked up the doctor's website at urologyandyou and discovered a whole bunch of info about treating enlarged prostates, that make many men have to get up time and time again at night to urinate. The things you can learn alone in a car with the radio on!

An Assemblage of Siblings Relaxing in Jersey

When I bought my Nissan truck for the cafe, I didn't realize that it was purely a short-radius vehicle. It's great for popping back and forth from the house to the cafe, and sometimes for a jaunt down to Holyoke or Costco. But last night I took the rig on the longest ride of its life...and emerged from the cramped cab feeling wigged out and tired. It was a rainy slog down I-287 to my sister's house in Harbourton NJ, where she had planned a big St. Stephen's Day Party last night.

I walked into the party which was full of my sisters and many friends from my parent's neighborhood, and everyone wanted to get me a drink, or shake hands, or say hello. I was beat, that little truck just isn't made for a 6 hour trip.

But I settled in to talking to my old pal Reed, and to my father Nat, and as the night wore on and I relaxed on the comfy sofas at Jen's big house, I caught up with everyone and felt great. Today I've got my three sisters here and it's a mellow and slow day at this country estate.

We all woke up late today and enjoyed cafe coffee while the dogs played outside. Sister Anne shared tales of horrible dates, and Jen chimed in with her own tales of woe (before she got married) and with no commitments and ample supplies to keep us all sated, it's a quiet day on vacation.

Christmas Lights and Best Wishes...

George Washington's Single Act Saved the US

Today's WSJ came with a op-ed piece by Thomas Fleming, an excerpt from his new book called "The Perils of Peace: America's Struggle for Survival After Yorktown," in which the author credits George Washington for a single act that he says saved the US.

It was difficult time, at Christmas 1783. The country had been at peace a short while but there were angry officers and soldiers who had been sent home, unpaid, after the war. Congress would not agree to pay them despite the Great General's pleading, and a smear campaign had been launched, making the military out to be greedy and demanding too much.

Washington made his way down to address a small gathering of congressman, who had assembled in Annapolis, to make his official resignation from duty to the new republic. He spoke of his great gratitude for these man who had won the war and then paused.

"For a long moment, Washington could not say another word. Tears streamed down his cheeks. The words touched a vein of religious faith in his inmost soul, born of battlefield experiences, that had convinced him of the existence of a caring God who had protected him and his country again and again during the war. Without his faith he might never have been able to endure the frustrations and rage he had experienced in the previous eight months."

At that moment, many men would have grabbed the reins of power and taken advantage of the turmoil, and proclaimed themselves King, as many had wanted and asked Washington to do. But in this moment, this 'the most important moment in American history,' says Fleming, instead, the great man handed the resignation document to the congressman and stepped down. He renounced power during this perilous time, and prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of liberty as it was intended to establish," said Jefferson.
Because of this, in Europe Washington's resignation restored America's battered prestige, and it earned 'the astonishment and admiration of this part of the world." He left that night and the following evening--Christmas Eve, he greeted Martha and two grandchildren at the door of Mt. Vernon.

The Anger of a Taxi Dispatcher on a Rainy Night

Last night I had a job to do at 1o:55 pm. I hate having to stay up that late, and as I sipped wine at 7 pm I thought that I'd better not have another since ugh, I have to drive to Northampton to meet the bus. My son Sam was coming out from Boston, and I was assigned the task of fetching him. I lolled on the couch, waiting and waiting for the time to depart, then slogged through the water in the driveway and lurched out into the night in the truck.

The drive wasn't bad, it was raining but the roads were well salted, and I parked in front of the bus station at the appointed time. No bus. But I did spend a half-hour observing a woman inside who is a taxi dispatcher. She worked the phones, then the radio, and then stuck her body half-way out the door to have a smoke. Then I cracked my window and listened to her lash out at a taxi driver. "I supported you, I stuck up for you! You did crap for me....You're full of sh**!" He meekly hung back and she attacked him angrily, I kept wondering what it was that made her so mad. She kept on yelling and gesticulating and finally closed the shades, stopping my observations.

I stayed there in the lot for another 15 minutes and finally the bus showed up. Sam bounded off the bus, and told me that the windshield wipers had broken and they had to spend an hour in Palmer waiting for help. It was nice to see him, and to have him home for the holidays.

Congregation Amazes Itself after $50 Gifts

My eyes were misty when I finished reading an AP story by Helen O'Neill about a pastor who both stunned and challenged his congregation by handing out $50 to all of them with a caveat: They had to use the money to raise funds for the church.

The parable of the talents, he told them, goes back to the gospel of Matthew. He entrusts three servants with money and tells them to 'go forth and do good' and praises the two who double their sum and chastises the one who is afraid to take a risk.

Hamilton Throckmorton, the pastor in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, had assistants dole out the $50 bills to all 1700 adults in his congregation one Sunday. What resulted was an outpouring of hidden talents and a competition that brought the whole town together. One doctor offered to work shifts for his partners, used the $50 for gas, and earned $3000. Another man gave rides on his Harley to church members for $30 a pop. Others discovered family recipes for soup and sold jars, a retired nurse bought flip flops at Old Navy and decorated them with beads, another offered up a song on a CD written about her dying father.

The talents were legion and at the end of the contest, more than $38,000 above the original $40,000 was raised, and split between three very worthy causes. Many of the aging church members never dreamed they had talents that would earn money, and though some took up the option of giving back the $50, most people rallied and earned far more than the original sum.

I like this story because it shows how a church can bring out so much good in people and that pastors with vision and courage, like Throckmorton, can truly inspire people.

Cats Prowl the NYC Bodegas and Keep Rats Away

The New York Times today had a piece about working cats who help out in delis and small bodegas all over NYC. The store owners say they're invaluable, patrolling the aisles looking for rats and mice.

The problem is that the health department has laws against keeping cats and other pets on the premises. But the alternative, say the shopkeepers, is a mass rat problem. One man who worked in an East New York deli said that a little marmalade kitten named Junior made all the difference.

"I used to have to put the bread in the freezer," he said. Within weeks, the rats had fled. The other bonus is that the cats bring the dead mouse and rat bodies out to proudly show their masters, while the exterminators victims often die underneat the refrigerators, causing terrible smells.


"He wants me to get rid of the car, but the rats will take over if I do," said one store owner,

What Makes a Really Good Party?

What makes a party? What is it that makes you talk about it excitedly the next day? I think you can tell it's a good party when you hug everyone who walks in. Like each person is worthy of that level of affection, they're the ones you've missed, or haven't caught up with, or whom you hoped would be here tonight.

Kathy had a party last night in Amherst and it was a delight. So many friends I haven't seen, so many interesting stories to share, so many new people with new interests to discuss. I met a guy who works in solar panels, generates electricity using solar cells. He said many houses can be set up with photovoltaics for about $18,000--and with around $9K in government tax credits you could pay it off in 8-9 years.

I think the topic of photo-voltaics and green energy is really ripe, and that people are seriously trying to move toward this and many other smart ideas. The price of oil going above $100 is likely and this will push more and more people toward the idea of sustainable energy.

Tor Tells the World About Malmo's Bo01 Area

Today I met a man who spends his days meeting with people and officials from all over the world. He's Tor Fossum, the Project Manager of the City of Malmo's Environmental Department. He talks again and again to visitors from the UK, China, the US and others from around the world about the Bo01-area, the most exciting part of the city.

It's an area borne from a bad time. In the late 1980s, Malmo was down and out. "Imagine, if you will, that we lost 30,000 jobs, out of a population of 270,000. Things were grey and dim," said Tor. The closing of a Saab plant and a large shipyard was disastrous. But the city's leaders and their ultimate way out was magnificent.

Using state and city funds, they built the Western Harbor's Bo01 Area, which today is a marvel of environmental sustainability and self sufficiency. More than 6600 people now work in this rejuvenated green community, with 250 companies located there and more than 1000 flats that are all zero emission and zero waste. And up to 15,000 people flock to the beachfront area that was created in reclaimed land near the development on summer evenings because it's the coolest place to be in the city.

The details are inspiring--rainwater is funneled from the green roofs and used in ponds, fountains and long channels to water flowers and plants. Many of the apartments have separate sinks into which they can throw food waste that gets piped to a biofuel plant and the methane gas emitted is used for to create biofuel that powers city buses. A single wind turbine, combined with thousands of solar panels and the creative use of heat pumps (that harness energy by changing the temperature of water cooled from pipes under the sea or underground) provides all of the electricity in the Western Harbor.

Combining the above with ubiquitous broadband so people can work at home, bus service and bicycle friendly layouts, B001 is a model for a truly sustainable and admirable way of life. No wonder Tor has so many visitors these days!

The Ultimate Collection of Cool Stuff in Skurup

Bengt Almquist wasn't sure what the English word was that describes his vast collection of machines. "Gadgets?" Well, sort of. I'd say it's more like a thousand assortments of things. At the Johanna Museet, he's got walls full of typewriters, including models from the 1880s before they came up with the notion of a keyboard--these babies required you to identify the key with a stick then push a button. There are walls full of the oldest irons you ever saw, and cameras, stretching back to just before Lincoln...and neatly arranged kids toys from the '20s, '30s, and '50s.

There are telephones, from the earliest days when a man named Erikson decided to break with the man named Bell and make his own phones here in Sweden. And of course there are the cars. And bikes. Bikes from the 1910s, with wooden fenders; models from later on that use two pump pedals instead of rotary ones, and even a plastic bicycle made for a short while here in Sweden, until everyone realized it was a bad thing to do with plastic.

Bengt got into this from his father. He was a tinkerer extraordinaire who amassed this vast collection and knew how to keep even the oldest car in Sweden (yep, it's in here) running in good order. "They all run," Bengt assured us. He rents the classic cars and old fashioned bikes out to movie producers and supplies props for people around Sweden and the world. His museum visitors are mostly seniors, enjoying a chance to re-connect with that same old sewing machine or phone that they used when they were young.

Listening to an Automatic Organ in Sweden: Video

An automatic organ was just one of the amazing things we saw today at the Johannes Museet, a collection of thousands of machines, all arranged together. The museum is owned by Bengt Almquist, whose father was the original tinkerer and collector of the family. 41 secs

Here is a video of the song the organ sings reading its paper sheet dotted musical score.

A Blazing Yule Tree in Malmo Sweden

This is one of things I love about Sweden. This tree is ablaze with small candles, cranking out a whooshing noise as they burn in the cold Swedish night.

Next to the tree, there are three rows of at least 150 candles each, all burning and emitting that same pleasing small roar of their fires. It's a miraculous looking spectacle, and I keep thinking about the guy who has to light these wicks, it must take hours.

The Oresund Bridge: Malmo's Secret Weapon

The 12 km Oresund Bridge connects Copenhagen with Malmo, and has helped the entire Skane region prosper with new jobs, new tourists and a new flexibility to travel. Many Danes live here in Skane where taxes are cheaper and commute over the long bridge to work in Copenhagen.

Video: Choosing Christmas Herring in Malmo

This little seaside fish market stall is where the locals find the freshest herring and salmon for their Christmas tables. "Hey' means hello, and 'tack' means thanks in Swedish, as you can hear in this 39-second video.

Park in Malmo--Who Turned On the Light?

Turn on the lights in Malmo!

I want to put one of these into South Deerfield's town common...do you think I can get the ok from the selectman?

At the Nobel Museum, Listening to A Jerk on Tape

Kent and I are holed up in our monk-sized rooms in the monastery, er, Hotel Rica in downtown Malmo. No, they're ok, just kinda small after the cavernous chambers in Stockholm we called home for three nights. Today we noticed that the darkness, which succombed Stockholm at 3:30 pm, hit here about 30 minutes later, due to the southern location of this city just across the bridge from Copenhagen.

We walked down toward the city's castle and there we saw a submarine, up on concrete pilings, looking huge and daunting in the waning light of the evening here. Tomorrow we'll see if we can get a look at the inside.

When we were in Stockholm, we stopped by the Nobel Museum, where the prizes are categorized and memorialized. There was a place you could listen to Nobel winners on tape...one was of Ernest Hemingway, who sounded like a jerk on the tape. He was stilted, sort of conscious of the tape, so that he was stiff and formal. And it sounded like he was not a guy I'd like to spend time with.

Then I learned that Jean-Paul Sartre had turned down his award for literature, declaring that awards for one work cheapens the environment for all, and at the time the Academy here was stunned. Nobody except Sartre turns down the cash and the prize. When Falkner (also on tape) was asked what he'd do with the money, a princely sum of $30,000 then, he said he'd give it to a cause as serious and as important at the source of the prize. He spoke with a lilting soft southern accent, his voice was as pleasant as Hemingway's was crass.

Sweden the Home of the Filka, or Coffee Break

No Swedish break is complete without some rich cake or cookie and the obligatory strong cup of Joe. Here we are sampling their cappuccino, and a cheesecake at a cafe in Stockholm's SoFo area.

This cake was redolent of lime, a teasing key lime sort of taste, and coffee was creamy and strong. Some day GoNOMAD Cafe will offer a huge wide range of pastries, cakes, pies and cookies to rival those found here in the filka capital of the world.

Kentski, World Traveler and My Pal

Here is GoNOMAD's connoisseur of travel, facing the cold winds atop an outdoor elevator in the city of Stockholm.

We're visiting Malmo this week, and you can read reports about our travels and the people we meet on this blog and on Kent's Be Our Guest blog.

Sweden: The Ultimate First-World Country

We've reached Malmo for the second half of our Swedish journey. Here there were only frosty hills, lots of green actually, and it's a bit warmer than Stockholm. No snow to be found.

As we glided to the airport on the Arlanda Airport 20-minute shuttle, I thought about how advanced the Scandinavians are. They have figured out transportation so that it's precise and easy. Each bus stop shows a clock that ticks down to the second when the bus will show up. The driver easily handles your credit card to pay for the tickets, none of what we get in the US, 'no bills, change only, or get off.'

They just make it easy and that makes people enthusiastic about using public transportation. Many of the buses here in Malmo run on compressed natural gas, and they're colored appropriately green. In Stockholm there were these plus electric buses.

I am still amazed at the story I heard about how all of the houses hot water pipes are connected to the central city furnaces. That means there are not thousands of burners cranking out energy, but just a few big ones for all to use, and the pipes that go back to the plant underneath the sidewalks eliminate snow shoveling. I wonder if such a system has ever been done in the US? That seems to be so against our nature, we all have to have our own power plants, we don't trust our government to be in charge of heating the water to make our houses warm. Do we?

Video of the Koh Phangan Thai restaurant, Stockholm

Here is what you see and hear as you enter this fantastically wild Thai restaurant in SoFo, one of Stockholm's coolest neighborhoods. The green curry and baby back ribs were delicious!

Seeing Gamla Stan with Ylva da Silva

Ylva da Silva showed us her hometown this morning. It was brisk, about 20 degrees, and we took off walking to a nearby underground station and then jumping aboard a city bus. We were headed to the Old town, on the island of Gamla Stan, one of fourteen islands that make up Stockholm.

"Nobody gets married any more," said Ylva, when we asked her about her 'marital status.' "And only two percent of the people go to church here," she added. Marriage she said, is out of favor and she never goes to weddings. She's had five kids and just a week ago she moved to the center of the city...to the island called Gamla Stan where the parliament is. She works there as a guide. We stopped by her top floor apartment, which was built before the year 1000. "I don't have key, but my daughter is there, she'll let us in." She showed us the compact and classically old features of the apartment. It will be nice to be so close to work, and to the city, she said.

A Christmas Tree with Lit with Candles in Stockholm

From my previous trip here to Sweden last December I knew that the holiday of Christmas is celebrated with more vigor and enthusiasm here than in any other country. This darkened nation revels in their candlelit doorways and every window in the city has a triangle of lights or a lit up star.

Last night we had a family dinner with Ann-Charlotte and Fredrick Jonsson, in their fifth floor walk-up apartment in the city's Ostermalm section. It was a brisk walk in the cold night air and we got a chance to learn from these Stockholm natives about what's being talked about and their favorite cafes and restaurants.

Ann Charlotte also lit her Christmas tree--a real tree with white tapered candles. Lit the old fashioned way trees were once done in the US, and it was a beauty.

They said that the biggest news here in tourism is a new congress being built that will hold 3000 people for events and conferences here in Stockholm.

The Jonssons said that a new government in Sweden is bringing a more conservative approach, cutting back a bit on the lavish benefits that most people here have gotten used to. They both seemed to appreciate this more realistic way of governing and said they were glad it is moving more in this direction. But other Swedes we met disagree...they cite the privatization of the hospitals and subway systems as examples of bad ideas done by the 'moderates' who used to be called the conservatives.

I asked what the most current news is out of Stockholm: they said it was a case of a store that was videotaped by a local TV station exposing how employees were taking out of date meat into the back and repackaging it for sale. But they were caught red handed by the tapers.

Settling in to the Hotel Hellsten in Stockholm

After a train, monorail, two planes, a train and a cab, I'm in my room at the Hotel Hellsten in downtown Stockholm. The temperatures are cold, but there is no snow on the streets here, but it has that feeling in the air that it's about to snow. At 3:30 pm you can see that it's already getting dark here.

After you open the main door of the hotel, you enter a strange room, it's walled in slate and there is nothing on the walls, all you see is the desk at the back facing the door. It's one of those modern hotels that's very sleek. In the bathroom, there is no shower curtain nor any sort of barrier, just this shower head and a drain, and again, the slate accessories hold the cups, soap and shampoos.

My room is high-ceilinged, and in a corner sits what looks like a Balinese armoire, and in the other corner, a carved wooden bench--but no desk. Across the large room is an old fashioned ceramic heater, the kind that used to heat buildings in Scandinavia, now a novelty and the flue is filled with cement.

Tonight we meet Tina our guide and her friends and relatives at a dinner party she's organized for us. It will be fun to chat up the locals and ask them about what makes Stockholm special, and why they live here.

"All We Have Is Pasta and Pizza" Say Italians

I joined my mom and dad out on their enclosed porch to read a New York Times article about the malaise that is modern Italy. The sleet rained down and it's quite cozy in here.

It seems that everything is going wrong in Cindy's adopted country...from Europe's lowest birthrate, to the lowest internet adoption, to the lowest rate of US investment, and a tangling, choking web of bureaucracy that is leaving Italy behind the rest of Europe.

The story by Ian Fisher includes an interview with Beppe Grillo, railing about the terrible politicians, as he calls them a 'whole stinking kettle of fish.' He burst on the scene on Sept 8, when we watched him on TV in our hotel in Pisa, when the blogger and newspaper columnist called for a Day of Rage in Bologna. He's had enough and he is mad as hell.

The story cited many other examples of how Italy has fallen...lawmakers who are driven around in chauffeured cars, so many convicted criminals in government, and a general sadness among Italians who are just sick of a government that is paralyzed. Everywhere there is evidence of Europe's most aging population, no toddlers in prams, just old people sitting in parks, no cutting edge cinema, or art, nor world renowned music. Nobody is starting fantastic companies in their garage, instead, men of a certain age are living with their parents.

When Pavarotti died, it was a dagger in the Italian heart. "Now all we have is pizza and pasta," said a young student.

You Think It's Expensive Here to Ride?

I'm spending part of today with my family in Blawenburg NJ, the town and the house where I grew up. Last night it was nice to see two of my sisters and other relatives gathered around a huge table. I've got that familiar pre-trip feeling, trying to make sure I don't forget something important.

On the bus back from New York, I read the New York Post, and found a story that had European tourists gushing about how much they like the city's subways. A fare hike is coming that will increase the cost of multi-ride cards but leave the tourist's one-time rides at $2. "We're happy with the subway here," said Italian tourists Ilaria Turi and her sister, "They're better than the ones in Rome."

Another visitor updated the cost of such a trip in Belfast. That would be $5 for a single trip. In London, said another traveler, Daniel Feaster, 25, the cost would be $8. In Paris another traveler said the cost of a ride is $2.20.

For locals who want to save a bit, the MTA gives out a 15 percent discount if they spend more than $7 on a multi-ride metro card. The paper congratulated Mayor Mike for standing up to the 'populist poseurs in the media and demagogues in City Hall by passing a rate hike that is fair--and still a better deal than most overseas city's fares.

Rushing Out the Door to Stockholm

A nervous end of the day because I'm on the road tomorrow for a week. What did I forget? Tomorrow I begin with an early morning bus ride, Springfield to Port Authority then a visit with an ad agency we work with. Then I meet Val, my mother, at her favorite French restaurant for a bite then we go to a show. I never know which show it will be, but lately we've liked musicals, so maybe that's what it will be.

Then I travel by bus to Blawenburg with Val to overnight and see my sisters for a quick visit the next day. Then at 12 it's back on the rails, train to the plane, Newark for a flight to Stockholm at 5:30 pm. Packing the big Elizabeth Taylor model suitcase, huge but I need all my stuff.

What did I forget? Who's number do I need? Ok , well I guess I can go now.

The Credit Karma Comes Back to Haunt Me

Karma is a funny thing. Today I am experiencing this from my decades-long career in sales. The boomerang is coming around and I can feel it wacking me on the side of the head. It has to do with credit terms and vendor relationships.

I used to sell shirts and custom embroidered hats for two different vendors. I would make my rounds and visit my customers and they'd buy. But in the early days, sometimes I'd run up against a purchasing manager or division head who would need to buy his shirts and hats on credit. He didn't have a company VISA card, and figured we'd just send him a bill for the order.

That line always got my bosses suspicious, and caused a furor in the office. My Napoleonic company president would yell at me and demand that we get half the money up front, or insist that they fill out an impossibly long form in order to have the privilege of using their credit card. There was more than one time that customers got insulted by our strict terms, and I lost sales as a result. Very few were trusted, most were never given the benefit of the doubt.

Fast forward to 2007: I own two businesses and need to buy lots of things from vendors. Some things, like food, you just have to have terms for, since nobody knows how much the bills will be for each delivery. And so now I am getting hassled and threatened with no food delivery unless I produce a check -- right now!

Errggh. Is this kharma calling me? Am I paying the heavens for those years when I was the most demanding bill collector, the guy who always forced them to pay up front, or produce a credit card after completing a long questionaire? I take a deep breath, and realize that hey, we are all people with jobs in this life. And I won't take it out on the sales guy, just relax and fork over the dough.

Want to Make Something Delicious? Umami It!

Yum, yum, UMAMI yum. That's the new taste sensation, according to a story in yesterday's WSJ by Katy McLaughlin. It's a Japanese term coined in the early 20th century by Kikunae Ikeda, a scientist who made the word up based on the word for 'deliciousness.' Simply put, it's the fifth basic taste after sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It's that incredible goodness you taste when you bite into a slice of pepperoni and mushroom pizza, slurp chicken soup, or crunch a bit of parmesan-laced caesar salad--that full, tongue-coating sensation--it's umami.

Chefs are creating 'umami bombs' like Jean-Georges Vongerichten's bowl of parmesan custard and white truffles, which goes for $185, or a less-expensive bomb such as black bread and sea urchin. What the famous chef and the folks who develop products for Kraft foods and others are after are ways to capture this taste, and to do it without the main ingredient that brings umami out--MSG.

Oh no, you say, no way I'd want to eat MSG, isn't that what makes me have headaches after Chinese food? But many studies have suggested that MSG isn't the villain its made out to be, and in fact it is that glutamate that is the best source of umami kick. So that explains the more than 95,000 metric tons of MSG that are sold in North America each year.

But if you're still convinced that MSG will make you feel bad, try roasting tomatoes, or adding anchovies (use Worcestershire sauce), or dump in some soy sauce Another source is one of my all-time favorite British foods--Marmite, a concentrated yeast extract that's high in glutamate too.

What's a Five-letter Word that Starts with Q?

Last night was a triumph of seven-letter words: Our first Scrabble Tournament at the cafe. I have been talking about this event for months, and it finally happened. In cafe tradition, it was full of energy and life--the kind of spirit I like to think our cafe brings out in people. We gathered at 6:30 pm, some familiar faces like the two Joes O'Rourke and Obeng; Bill Hewitt, cousin Steve and a bunch of others who read the story by Mackenzie Issler in the Recorder.

We had four tables blazing with words, and we were awarding a prize to the person with the highest single game point score. First, Charlie impressed us with a 209, then Sarah, a UMass student and cafe newcomer, popped up at 225. As more games were played, the scores got higher, we finally ended up crowning our night's winner Bela Breslau who topped out at 226 when we added the points from the other players she got from going out first.

"Are you going to be doing this every week?" asked Tony, a self-described old fashioned guy with no email. I replied that I'd like to make it special, so we'll keep it bi-monthly.

After the players all left, Bill, Joe and I walked over to Sienna, the fine restaurant across the street, where Cindy had met some musician friends. We sat at the bar and drank some dark liquids, and the owner Carl comped us as we talked about the bright future for our little towne in the years ahead. "It's great to have a night out right here in South Deerfield," said Joe. Amen!

The Housecleaner and Cabby with the $700K House

Naira Costa is a house cleaner from Brazil who is a prime example of why the mortgage melt down happened. In yesterday's WSJ, her story was told and it is a doozy. Through a pastor turned mortgage broker, with her taxi driver husband the pair bought a house in the Bay area for $688,000, even though they had very bad credit scores and couldn't possibly afford the payments.

The story by Jonathan Karp and Miriam Jordan follows their convoluted path. First off, they were told the house would appreciate $100,000 per year. Her real estate agent then put Costa's name on her own credit card to boost her rating, and lent her $2000 at closing. The application listed her housecleaning income at $12500 per month (she made six times less) and her bank account as having $50K when it contained just $42.

So the pair bought the house, and the first mortgage bill arrived. The bill is $3,600 and another is for $1400. "Barely three weeks after moving into the house, the couple decided to abandon it and left without making any payments. Eventually, the house slipped into foreclosure." So the case went to court, and just as the pair was about to be deported back to Brazil, they got a break. By agreeing to testify in the criminal investigation, they can stay, and presumably, happily rent a place they can afford.

The offices that once held 30-40 property and mortgage agents is quiet and empty now. "The only growth in the sector, said a broker, is lawsuits." She's now shifting out of real estate and into a multilevel marketing scheme to create online travel agencies.

Cars That Drive Themselves...Yeah, That's the Ticket

When I was about six, we went to the New York World's fair, in Astoria, Queens. There we saw the Futurama, and one of the coolest exhibits showed cars that drove themselves as you sat back and just rode. The NY Times today has a story about this elusive, yet closer than we think goal.

"These smart cars still have their bugs, but engineers have made amazing progress the past several years. In 2004, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency held its first Grand Challenge for driverless cars, none made it more than seven miles. At Darpa’s next Grand Challenge, in 2005, five cars made it 132 miles to the finish.

And then, last month, six cars completed a 60-mile course that was the grandest challenge yet because they had to deal with traffic along the way.

These empty cars drove themselves around an Air Force base in Southern California, finding parking spots, obeying stop signs, idling in traffic, yielding to other cars at intersections and merging into traffic at 30 m.p.h. There was one accident and a few near misses, but the cars’ engineers are so buoyed by the results that they’re hoping the next competition will be a high-speed race on a Grand Prix course.

“Within five years, it’s totally feasible to build an autonomous car that will work reliably in several limited domains,” says Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at Stanford and head of its racing team, which won the 2005 Darpa competition and finished second in last month’s.

In five years he expects a car that could take over simple chores like breezing along an expressway, inching along in stop-and-go traffic, or parking in the lot at a mall or airport after dropping off the driver.

In 20 years, Dr. Thrun figures half of new cars sold will offer drivers the option of turning over these chores to a computer, but he acknowledges that’s just an educated guess. While he doesn’t doubt cars will be able to drive themselves, he’s not sure how many humans will let them."

Military Hogs Air Lanes that Passengers Need

I write a blog for my friends at Airport Parking Reservations. Here is a post I feel strongly about, that I posted tonight.

It's time we took back the thousands of miles of highways in the sky that the Pentagon has claimed for its training flights and missile tests. Over Thanksgiving weekend, airlines got a chance to use this restricted airspace,and guess what? The extra room for planes heading to Florida made a huge difference to every plane trip on those three days, and as a result, many more flights were on time.

In the WSJ today, a clear case was made by Mike Sammartino of the FAA that it's time to give the public the chance to travel in these eight-mile wide lanes at 24,000 feet, that stretch from Boston to Miami.

The military balks--says it needs the airspace. "The offshore airspace is heavily used on a daily basis" huffs Gerald Pease Jr, of the Defense Dept. But it's clear that there are more of us than them, and even when they try to put up the flag of 'important training for national security,' we have a more pressing problem, and I think they can manage to move a few miles further out to sea to make room for passenger planes.

The skies above Washington DC are the real bottleneck, and getting a permanent clearance to travel these offshore air lanes will help solve this decades-old problem. It's a ripple effect and having even 10 planes an hour traveling out there over the ocean instead of the congested over land routes clears a whole lot of space and makes this easier for air traffic controllers.

It will take a presidential order, says the article. Let's hope Bush will decide to help out the traveling public by doing so.

Maybe This New Compensation System Isn't Working...

When half of a media outlet’s editorial staff decides to jump ship, chances are it will be reported first on the media gossip blog Gawker — even, it turns out, when those departures are from Gawker itself. The New York Times reported today that Emily Gould, a Gawker editor, dropped the bomb: both she and Choire Sicha, the site’s top editor, were quitting. A third editor, Joshua David Stein, confirmed on Saturday that he was leaving, too.

“Choire’s departure as managing editor, and that of his blogger protégés, will obviously be a complete pain,” Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, which includes 13 other sites, wrote in an e-mail message. “But we’ve been through it before, three times, and this change of the guard does give us the opportunity to accelerate the transformation of Gawker from cute blog to fully-fledged news site.”

Reached by telephone, both Ms. Gould and Mr. Stein said their departures were predicated partly on Mr. Sicha leaving. Ms. Gould, who has been with Gawker for a year, said she was upset about a new compensation system that pays writers according to how many times people view their blog posts rather than only by how many posts they write. The system, she said, pits writers against one another.

“It really gets in your head in this weird way because you’re getting so conscious of how many people are reading what,” Ms. Gould said. “You get focused on being sensational and even more brain candyish than Gawker was to start with.”

Two weeks after complaining about the page-view-pay system in a post on Gawker in September, another Gawker staff writer, Alex Balk, quit and took a job at Radar magazine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/business/media/03gawker.html

Venezuelans Either Love or Hate their Chavez

When I visited Medellin Colombia in June, we met several journalists from Venezuela, and the first thing we asked them was what they thought about Hugo Chavez.

"Well, one woman editor told us, "people either love him or hate him. But really, we don't care that much about what he does, most of the people who support him are the poor in the cities. It's pretty much split in the middle" Here Paul Shoul checks out a Venezuelan nature magazine.

I thought that it was a little bit like how our president is thought of...he's mostly an embarrassment when we have to explain his war policies during trips overseas.

Today's voting results mean that Venezuela's 'Dear Leader' won't get the chance to be president for life, as his sweeping constitutional changes were voted down 51 to 49. "It's a photo finish," Chavez said, but he will respect the voters and not challenge it.

But he has until 2012 to do more damage to Venezuela...and I predict that despite losing this vote, he will try to cut off supplies to the US, his great foe. I am very eager to visit Venezuela so I hope he keeps it possible for Americanos to come down to his country, despite how much he despises our president.

Dear Leader's Dreary Country Comes to Life

Richard Read wrote a piece for Newhouse News service about a trip to North Korea. Here at the end, he finally breaks away, and it's the best part of the story.

"The ceaseless propaganda had gripped me, but not in the intended manner: I found myself fighting an impulse to regard all North Koreans as programmed as the corps of "traffic girls" who performed robotic maneuvers at sparsely trafficked intersections.

But two hours later, our bus broke down. A substitute bus also quit. Taking unofficial pity on us, our handlers impulsively let three of us go for a stroll of up to three kilometers.

Three kilometers!

Giddy with freedom, our trio hit the country road.

Before long, an old woman approached, a bundle of sticks on her head. Seeing us - three tall, white, Western men - she bolted into the undergrowth, ignoring our smiles and waves.

Next, we saw a man cradling a toddler in his arms. We walked up to admire the napping girl, clad in holiday pink with matching hair ties. The man smiled. He spoke Korean; we spoke English.

But it didn't matter. I felt jubilant. I was making unscripted contact with another human being. He was showing tenderness, even genuine delight.

We gestured. We laughed. I raised my eyebrows and pointed to my camera, asking his permission for a photograph. He beamed. I clicked. At last, I felt a sense of possibility for this tyrannized land. For an instant, a man's love for a little girl had swept away the fog."

Porsche CEO's $100 Million Pay Irks Workers

On Saturday night after we got back from our favorite restaurant, Apollo Grill, I got a chance to finish reading the Weekend WSJ, and found a story about Porsche. The headline referred to the $100 million that their CEO Wendelin Wiedeking took home for a year's pay. That's making big headlines in Germany, where excessive pay is not looked on kindly. This is compounded by the fact that the same man has made many statements castigating companies for putting shareholders' interests before those of workers. Ironically, Wiedeking's King Midas compensation all comes from Hedge-fund like operations.

You see, Porsche made more money trading derivatives than it did from selling cars in 2007. The management board in charge of these brilliant market moves is headed by their CEO, and it is his performance-related incentives that pushed his pay into the stratosphere.

In Germany, ordinary working-stiffs have not seen pay increases in many years, according to the story by Stephen Power, and with Porsche now owing 31 percent of VW, many of them are afraid that big cost cuts are about to come down at this company. Some industry analysts claim that the sports car maker is now itself acting like a hedge fund, which is Germany, isn't a good thing at all.

Random Musings About Nudes on Bureaus and Blog Comments

It's windy outside and there's a bit of new snow on the ground. Cindy and I are on our dueling laptops, she doing some sort of continuing ed and I of course, having read all that I can read on line, am sitting here writing blogs. I got a comment on a year-old blog post in which I agreed with Thomas Friedman about how silly it was for GM to hand out free gas cards to anyone who purchased a Hummer or a Tahoe SUV.

A man who apparently lives on a ranch in the west took me to task, saying how he needed that big rig, and 'what do you expect me to do, drive a Nissan?' He closed by saying that since I came from 'Taxachusetts' that explains why I am so hard on GM. But it's still nice to have readers even when they disagree with you.

Today I hope to get over to the Open Studios in Easthampton, where my friend Bill Hewitt is showing some of his most recent furniture work. He's done a pair of eye-catching bureaus, large pieces with intricate inlayed wood, and the artwork is quite compelling--a nude man and women, front and back. I think people will definitely want to see these though I think if they were in my bedroom I might cover them with a sheet when my inlaws came to visit.