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Kabul, Afghanistan August 2008

Fellow Daniel Pinkwater afficionado 3m1ly recently returned from Afghanistan on official snark-out business and posted images gleaned from her travels at her flickr account.

Post-Parks Conference Thoughts

I’ve taken more notes than I’ve been able to blog just yet, and the conference is already over. I came to the conference to see what opportunities there might be for a former researcher for a major park advocacy group to stroll back into the world of park professionals after cutting his teeth working on […]

Urban Parks 2008: Opening Session

I’ll be blogging the Urban Parks conference session as I attend them. The opening session occurred yesterday evening. Luis Garden Acosta, founder of El Puente, a community based human rights and environmental organization in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, and recipient of the Heinz Award for the Human Condition, provided a rousing keynote address, “Parks: […]

Body & Soul: Urban Parks 2008

Over the next few days I’ll be in Pittsburgh for the Body & Soul: International Urban Parks Conference. Besides attending sessions and workshops, I’ll also be monitoring certain sessions to handle audio-visual and other computer issues that often arise. I promise to blog, or at least twitter, interesting ideas gleaned from the conference here at […]

On Mind Flayers and the Faith of our Fathers

Isaac S. and I were talking role playing and the biological basis of behavior for Mind Flayer society again this past Shabbat when our conversation meandered into the ever fertile field of movement ideology and identity politics in American Modern Orthodox Judaism. (In hindsight it seems appropriate we were taking a stroll through Spring Grove […]

Ghost Recon and the South Ossetian War

My friend Guilherme R. and I were chatting about the terrible new war in Georgia’s South Ossetia (soon to be Russia’s South Ossetia?), and he blew my mind recalling the premise of a particularly prescient video game released back in 2001, “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon.” From wikipedia: Ghost Recon begins in 2008, with civil unrest […]

Rockboxing the iPod Classic (6g and above) (was The Forbidden iPod: HFS+ on Windows)

UPDATE (May 2013): For the record, I’ve formatted my iPod back to FAT32 so I could install the open source Rockbox operating system for music players. (Rockbox will run on the iPod Classic if you first install the opensource Emcore firmware). I’m happy to run open source software on hardware that was difficult to reverse-engineer. […]

More on Emergency Broadcast Network

Ten years ago I was in Philadelphia and excited to learn that Emergency Broadcast Network (or EBN for short), an art music/video project would be touring with dj Spooky providing live mixed visuals and even performing their own set. I had first seen their work in college in the mid 90s, probably on a friend’s […]

You Don’t Mess With the Samson

I promised myself that I would not think too hard about You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Robert Smigel and Adam Sandler’s comedy film this summer. But alas, reading about the story of Yiftach in the haftorah reading this past shabbat, I couldn’t help but think of the context of Zohan within the context of […]

Jeer at them

Yochanan Lavie, who regularly reads and comments over at failedmessiah.com, recently shared this poem inspired in general by the sickness and evil near the root of Aaron Rubashkin’s animal slaughtering and meat processing factory in Postville, Iowa, and specifically by Rubashkin’s use of PR flacks, paid industry “representatives,” and the Orthodox establishment to shill for […]