When was the last time you had a check up? Have you been to the dentist lately? How are you feeling?

I always thought this “campaign” was a good idea, an annual wake-up call for people to remind each other (not just women reminding men) to take care of themselves and see a doctor or some kind of health practitioner.

According to the press release from the Borough President’s office, men are 70% less likely than women to visit a doctor. So that’s why it’s “take your man.” Another disturbing factoid: blacks and hispanics are 10% less likely than whites to have a primary care provider.

On October 6th, Borough President Marty Markowitz will launch his annual “Take Your Man to the Doctor” campaign with a press conference at Borough hall.

Participating hospitals, clinics and health professionals are offering free health screening for blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, diabetes, glucose, glaucoma, HIV, podiatry and free flu shots.

So if you’ve been putting it off…

On Saturday, October 2, 2010, Spoke the Hub (STH) is presenting a FREE program, sponsored by the American Red Cross in Greater New York, on emergency preparedness, to be held at the STH Re:Creation Center at 748 Union Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in Park Slope. The program will last one hour, from 12:30-1:30pm. RSVP required.  Reservations for the free event can be made by calling Spoke the Hub at (718) 408-3234.

It is certainly prudent—and essential—for individuals and families, especially in New York City, to prepare for possible disasters and other emergencies. Both natural and human-caused crises can strike suddenly, anywhere and at any time.  This free workshop will provide participants with the crucial facts they’ll need  – before, during, and after a disaster or emergency situation. Attendees will learn how to create a family disaster plan, build and maintain a supply kit, and keep loved ones safe and informed.

Click on read more to see the topics that will be covered…

Continue reading Oct 2: Emergency Preparedness Workshop at Spoke the Hub →

Tonight see for yourself what the plaza of the Barclays Center is going to look like. From 6-8PM the public is invited as Forest City Ratner officials present the renderings to the public at Borough Hall (209 Joralemon St. between Adams and Court streets in Downtown Brooklyn).

So it seems, the activists were right all along and now developer Bruce Ratner is admitting the truth: the Atlantic Yards project will not be completed in ten years. There is just no way.

Now he’s saying that the 10-year-timeline that was bandied about was just a guess for environmental impact statements. Here Ratner is quoted on WNYC:

“That was really only an analysis as to what the most serious impacts [would be], if all the other planned development in downtown Brooklyn happened right away,” Ratner said. “It was never supposed to be the time we were supposed to build them in.”

That is so much balderdash:

Wasn’t it the economics of the 10-year-timeline that convinced the city and state that it was worth the mega milliions in direct subsidies the project got?

So the longer the construction takes, the longer it will take for the government to reap the so-called rewards in terms of income taxes from people who move in and property taxes.

Sounds like they were had.

Says Daniel Goldstein, an anti-AY activist, who had an apartment in the AY footprint, in press release: “What we have now is a site that was not blighted turning into a dormant site, nearly 20 acres of vacant lots and parking lots for 20, 25, 30, 40 50 years…What was not blighted has become blighted for a very long time.”

The following are facts about tornadoes from the FEMA website:

* They may strike quickly, with little or no warning.
* They may appear nearly transparent until dust and debris are picked up or a cloud forms in the funnel.
* The average tornado moves Southwest to Northeast, but tornadoes have been known to move in any direction.
* The average forward speed of a tornado is 30 MPH, but may vary from stationary to 70 MPH.
* Tornadoes can accompany tropical storms and hurricanes as they move onto land.
* Waterspouts are tornadoes that form over water.
* Tornadoes are most frequently reported east of the Rocky Mountains during spring and summer months.
* Peak tornado season in the southern states is March through May; in the northern states, it is late spring through early summer.
* Tornadoes are most likely to occur between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., but can occur at any time.

Click on read more to learn how you can protect yourself from a tornado:

Continue reading Tools to Fight Tornado Anxiety →

Thankfully there was no tornado yesterday despite word from the National Weather Service that a tornado watch was in effect in the five boroughs. There was, however, plenty of anxiety about the idea of another tornado fresh on the heels of the tornado that left much damage to trees and buildings in Park Slope, Brooklyn on September 16th. Thankfully there weren’t more casualties on that day. Sadly, a Queens woman died when a tree fell on her car.

My sister was in Prospect Park during the September 16th tornado and is still reliving the details of that terrifying afternoon. Her daughter and her first grade classmates and parents were in the park for a class picnic when the storm started. They left the park during the worst of the storm and saw a tree fall not far from them.

Yesterday her daughter’s class was told of the tornado watch during school and when they came out, her babysitter reports, the kids looks terrified and many were crying because they were “scared of the tornado.”

Obviously the kids were traumatized by the experience of being in the park that day. No wonder they were crying when they came out of school.

Other adults I spoke to were nervous about the possibility of another tornado. Some wondered if the National Weather Service was being more cautious this time around — better safe than sorry.

The September 16th tornado definitely gave people a sense of reverence for the power of nature to spontaneously wreak havoc and destroy.

As Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim said during his Yom Kippur sermon just days after the tornado: “We almost died yesterday.”

Indeed, it gave everyone new perspective on a lot of things.

Brought to you by the Feldman Family from their local weather tower.

Joint public safety /human services meeting: NY Shitty

Bike lanes should not drop out of the sky: Sheepshead Bites

Raw sewage in Gowanus canal after storm: Pardon Me for Asking

Coasting on a custom bike: Bushwick BK

Prison yard potluck: Effed in Park Slope

Brooklyn’s mellow street party: McBrooklyn

Guide to finding an apartment: Bed-Stuy Blog

Celebrating Sukkot in Clinton Hill: The Local

At a press conference on Monday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the City University of New York (CUNY) and IBM will open a new public high school, which combines high school with two years of college; students would earn an associate’s degree,

Sounds a bit like Bard High School Early College but maybe with a more technological bent. Graduating from this school will, according to Bloomberg, put students “first in line for a job at IBM,” Bloomberg said.

At the press conference Bloomberg also renewed his proposal to end automatic teacher tenure. Instead he wants tenure to be linked to classroom performance.

Woo Hoo.

When the EPA adds the Newtown Creek to its list of Superfund sites, Brooklyn will have not one but two, count ’em two, Superfund sites. Because of its new status, the Creek will  face a 10-year toxic clean-up that could cost more than a half-billion dollars.

It was just last March that the EPA declared the Gowanus Canal worthy of Superfund status. The Newtown Creek is an 3.8-mile waterway between Brooklyn and Queens.

Michele Madigan Somerville, the author of Black Irish and WISEGAL (2001), has written about religion for the New York Times (online) and the Huffington Post. She lives in Brooklyn. Here she turns her gaze to Allen Ginzberg, who is in the news these days because of Howl, a feature film about the poem and the censorship trial it caused.

One afternoon in fall of 1977, I sat in my college professor’s office talking about Yeats or Wallace Stevens when a fellow student poked her head into the open door to apologize. She wouldn’t be able to make it to Allen Ginsberg’s November 1st reading at the Neuberger Museum later that week. She was Greek Orthodox, and bound to observe All Saints Day with her family. I didn’t know the fellow lit major, but I’ll never forget the professor’s sotto-voce wisecrack as her footsteps faded down the corridor: “But Allen Ginsberg is a saint.”

A saint? No. An angel? Maybe. I know I “got religion” that night as I heard Allen Ginsberg read “Kaddish” in the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y. more than 30 years ago. The call came: a tap on the shoulder that doubled as a lightning bolt; an epiphany was had, and a conversion — not forced but seduced — transpired. I left the museum that night, on the Feast of All Saints, with a mission to “throw down” with life as a poet.

Amid the fresh fervor for Ginsberg and the Beats that is being fueled by the impending theatrical release of the motion picture Howl, I notice that my first thought — which Ginsberg might therefore insist is my best thought — is a of poet not so much hip as rabbinic. Schoolmarmish, even. Allen Ginsberg was my professor for two years in the late 1980s. He was a conscientious teacher. He came to class early, was always well prepared, made copious remarks on students’ work, and always wore a necktie. I had been a teacher for four years when I first began to study with Ginsberg, and it was clear to me, early on, that he had uncommon respect for educators. (Poet Louis Ginsberg, Allen’s father, had worked as a teacher for many years.) Read more at the Huffington Post.

Brooke Dramer, an OTBKB reader and sometime contributor, needs advice about a vexing situation.

We rent a garden apartment on 6th Avenue between 5th and 6th Street—literally around the corner from the tree-crushed grey car that both HuffPo and OTBKB chose as the signature photo of tornado damage in Park Slope.  Right after the storm, we telephoned our landlady (who lives in Bensonhurst) and briefly described the damage to her property.

Here’s the problem: my landlady is willing to believe that the devastation to the backyard—ie, everything’s been crushed by a tree that fell across four backyards–was the result of the tornado.  But she has accused us of breaking the wrought iron fence in front of her house.

“You’re destroying my building!” she yelled at me over the phone a few nights ago.
I explained that the fence had been broken by a huge branch that fell on it—so huge that a neighbor had to help me lift it off the fence.  I assured her that I’d put the broken-off pieces of the fence in a safe place in the basement, and that I’d wired the remaining pieces together so that they wouldn’t fall over on the sidewalk.

“What branch!” she yelled  at me.
“A branch from the tree in front of the building,” I explained.
“What tree?!” she yelled at me. She then ranted on about how I had broken her fence and the front of the building was a mess and I was destroying her building.

Do any of your OTBKB readers have advice? Should we go to landlord tenant court if the landlady raises our rent as “punishment”—something she’s done many times before? We have photos of the tree with the torn-off branches, photos of us cleaning up in front of the house, plus photos of other damage on the block (including a bashed-in fence). We even have a video of Dave and me in the backyard with an electric saw, continuing to clear away branches. So far, we’ve put in more than 30 person-hours of work in an attempt to save as many plants as we can until the tree-trimmer comes next week.  Would we be able to present any of this video in court?

Photo credit:  Andy Arrow (Nashville drummer-turned-NY-video artist).

Remember Scott Turner? Since he moved away from Brooklyn he doesn’t write much, he never calls. But he is coming back to the old neighborhood for a visit and a show. “I’m gonna be in Brooklyn for a few days early in October.  The timing’s good for a show and the release of the new RebelMart album. I’m playing two sets at Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook on Friday, October 8th.  Show starts at 9pm.  Lots of new songs, lots of old songs, and the always popular what-was-I-thinking? cover.  Could be Tom Waits, could be Perry Como, could be the Spunk Lads.”

Click on Read more to hear more from Scott:

Continue reading Greetings from Scott Turner →