This was reported in the New York Sun and it is so f—ed up.

A 4-year-old boy was struck and killed yesterday by a yellow sport utility vehicle in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, police said.

The young boy’s name was James Javarrice. He was hit while crossing Baltic Street at 3:38 p.m. when a Hummer made a right turn off Third Avenue, police said.

The SUV also struck an 18-year-old woman. Both were rushed to Methodist Hospital, where Javarrice was pronounced dead, police said.

LISTEN TO THIS ON WNYC. TODAY.

The House of Representatives debates a Democratic resolution objecting to President Bush’s proposed troop buildup in Iraq. Many Republicans are unhappy that they aren’t being permitted to offer amendments, but a considerable number in the party still plan to vote in favor of the resolution.

“The American people have lost faith in President Bush’s course of action in Iraq, and they’re demanding a new direction,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in opening the session.

Scaredy Kat: Fifth Avenue between President and Carroll. Cards, vintage-y toys, and books. Classics like candy necklaces, Be Mine candies, etc.

Lion in the Sun: Seventh Avenue and Third Street. Cards and more.

Sweet Melissa: Seventh Avenue between 1st and 2nd Streets. Candies, lollipops, Valentine cookies and cakes.

Cocoa Bar: Seventh Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets. Chocolates

Dianna Kane: Seventh Avenue near Berkeley. Jewelry, lingerie, and more…

ON THURSDAY FEBRUARY 22 at 8 p.m. I have such a great Brooklyn Reading Works lined up. Three interesting women with interesting stories and a way with words. What could be better. A Brooklyn Reading Works you won’t want to miss.

Even better — fabulous refreshments. The Old Stone House. Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets. Information and directions go here or here.

CARLA THOMPSON, an award-winning freelance writer and filmmaker, invites readers to travel the clay and paved roads of Montgomery, Alabama in her first book, a memoir, Bearing Witness: Not So Crazy in Alabama.

In Bearing Witness: Not So Crazy in Alabama, the Harlem native meets an itty bitty beauty queen, a redemptive ex-con, and a wheelchair-bound quiz kid among others and discovers that the American South is a complex intersection of race and class filled with people who go about the business of living the best way they can.

MRS. CLEAVAGE (AKA Mary Warren) author of the blog MRS CLEAVAGE’S DIARIES, is a single
mother who lives in  a cluttered apartment in East New York. She is
saucy, opinionated, creative, and a smarty-pants – not necessarily in
that order. Her blog is her story, live and unedited from Brooklyn. Mary received an MFA from Brooklyn College, where she won their MacArthur award for promising fiction.

BRANKA RUZAK was born and raised in the steel and rubber belt of northeastern Ohio, the youngest daughter of Croatian and Slovenian immigrants. Her passion for words and music was sparked as a child, where she spent many hours listening to her father’s stories and playing Croatian folk music in his tamburitza orchestra. Her current studies in Hindusthani classical music, as well as her enthusiasm for Indian novels, textiles and a good cup of chai have taken Branka further afield to India. Always an avid traveler, her essays and poems are journeys to different times and different places. Her essays “Hungry Heart” and “Mothballs: A Chemical Memory” is from a growing collection of writings about family, culture and travel.

Tiny Maters of Today, a tween band from Brooklyn has two shows coming up and two fabu posters. Check ’em out. All info on the posters, which saves me typing time. YAY. The poster (left top) by Chloe Dietz for the February 22nd Club Loco at Old First Church with bands Cool and Unusual, Dulaney Banks and The Floor is Lava! is super cool, too. That show is at 7:30 p.m. 

Great post by Andy Bachman, rabbi at Beth Elohim in Park Slope, on his always interesting blog about — well you figure it out.

The faster it goes, the harder I work, the more things slow down.

How come no one explained this peculiar Law of Jewish Physics to me?

I
remember a time, back in 2002, when I ran the NY Marathon. In the first
8 miles I felt fantastic. I was high-fiving people left and right.
Imagine old film footage from the 1920s, black and white, hipsters and
floppers dancing the Charleston in fast motion. That was me. In Fort
Greene I felt a rumble, in Bed-Stuy I thought I might die, in
Williamsburg the Bais Yaakov Shul let me faciliatate use of their
facilities. The problem was solved and I pushed along, in regular time,
through Greenpoint and Long Island City. When I crossed the 59th Street
Bridge, I felt fine.

The crowds on 1st Avenue were wonderful;
but by about 110th Street, time slowed down. Significantly. I was in
the Law of Jewish Physics. I had entered the vaunted PARDES, spoken of
in the Talmud. I got to the place of pure marble. I wanted “water,
water,” but I knew what I really wanted was to “come out whole.” I bet
if I had tried to speak in the Bronx, I would have been
indistinguishable from a character in a David Lynch movie. Slow. For
those pre-digital readers, we’re talking 16 RPM.

I remember
seeing faces in Central Park. I remember ending. I remember throwing up
on my shoes. I remember my bones aching on the subway ride back to
Brooklyn; and I remember not being able to walk up or down the subway
stairs the next day.

And, finally, I remember it as the greatest just-under-four-hours of my life.

The Jewish Law of Physics.  Living my life in slow motion.

Read the rest…

Wendy Zarganis, of About Brooklyn, has the dope on Chinese New Year’s celebrations in our fair borough.

It’s the Year of the Boar and there’s a ton to do.

Have other cafes with wireless been approached by the police?

Do the police really expect citizens to spy on their neighbors at Internet cafes and public spaces?

Can the police or others check the Internet records of a cafe or other public space with wireless?

Who do they need to get permission from. The cafe? The Internet service?

What are the ways that individuals using wireless in public spaces can protect themselves from spyware?

Is this story Tea Lounge specific, Park Slope specific, or city-wide?

Hepcat said that Onion Routing is a way to prevent spying when using wireless Internet. Thanks Hepcat. I haven’t wrapped my head around this information yet — but it’s interesting. This info is from Wikipedia. 

The goal of onion routing (OR) is to protect the privacy of the
sender and recipient of a message, while also providing protection for
message content as it traverses a network. Onion routing accomplishes
this according to the principle of Chaum’s mix cascades:
messages travel from source to destination via a sequence of proxies
("onion routers"), which re-route messages in an unpredictable path. To
prevent an adversary from eavesdropping on message content, messages
are encrypted between routers. The advantage of onion routing (and mix
cascades in general) is that it is not necessary to trust each
cooperating router; if one or more routers are compromised, anonymous
communication can still be achieved. This is because each router in an
OR network accepts messages, re-encrypts them, and transmits to another
onion router. An attacker with the ability to monitor every onion
router in a network might be able to trace the path of a message
through the network, but an attacker with more limited capabilities
will have difficulty even if he or she controls one or more onion
routers on the message’s path.

Onion routing does not provide perfect sender or receiver anonymity
against all possible eavesdroppers—that is, it is possible for a local
eavesdropper to observe that an individual has sent or received a
message. It does provide for a strong degree of unlinkability,
the notion that an eavesdropper cannot easily determine both the sender
and receiver of a given message. Even within these confines, onion
routing does not provide any absolute guarantee of privacy; rather, it
provides a continuum in which the degree of privacy is generally a
function of the number of participating routers versus the number of
compromised or malicious routers.

The primary innovation in onion routing is the concept of the
routing onion. Routing onions are data structures used to create paths
through which many messages can be transmitted. To create an onion, the
router at the head of a transmission selects a number of onion routers
at random and generates a message for each one, providing it with symmetric keys
for decrypting messages, and instructing it which router will be next
in the path. Each of these messages, and the messages intended for
subsequent routers, is encrypted with the corresponding router’s public key.
This provides a layered structure, in which it is necessary to decrypt
all outer layers of the onion in order to reach an inner layer.

The onion metaphor describes the concept of such a data structure.
As each router receives the message, it "peels" a layer off of the
onion by decrypting with its private key, thus revealing the routing
instructions meant for that router, along with the encrypted
instructions for all of the routers located farther down the path. Due
to this arrangement, the full content of an onion can only be revealed
if it is transmitted to every router in the path in the order specified
by the layering.

Once the path has been specified, it remains active to transmit data
for some period of time. While the path is active, the sender can
transmit equal-length messages encrypted with the symmetric keys
specified in the onion, and they will be delivered along the path. As
the message leaves each router, it is encrypted using a different key,
and thus is not recognizable as the same message.

 

Rabbi Michah Kelber just sent word that the Bay Ridge Jewish Center has an interesting blog. I interviewed Rabbi Kelber for an article in the Brooklyn Paper last year — so I am aware of him and his work. Micah and BRJC blog: Welcome to the Brooklyn Blog Zone.

Here’s an excerpt from  interesting post called Where We’re From.

This is a photograph of the grandfather Eliezer Bloshteyn, one of the
members at the Bay Ridge Jewish Center. His name is Ze’ev Shleyfer. He
was called Wolfe in Yiddish, and Vladimir in Russian. He was born
around the year 1870 in the shtetl Ovruch, which is in the center of
the Ukraine, close to the shtetl where Rabbi Nachman was born. In 1941,
their family had left Odessa and moved to Tashkent where he died. In
Odessa, he was a shoemaker and a serious man. In the community, he was
considered to be a very dignified person. Eliezer and his family lived
on the third floor of the building and his grandparents lived in the
basement. His grandparents’ apartment was always clean and light.
Inside of their apartment there was a big storage cabinet with Kosher
plates and forks. They always ate kosher food.

He was
religious, but in private, as you were forced to be in the Soviet Union
at the time. In 1937, Stalin had taken a lot of people and put them in
jail, not because they were Jewish, but because they believed in God.
So few people prayed in the synagogues out of fear and eventually they
were closed. The Jewish newspapers and other institutions were closed
down as well. So, Ze’ev would put his siddur on the window ledge, put on his tefillin and davin facing
the light. Eliezer remembers him putting his talis on his shoulders and
making Eliezer say prayers. He remembers distinctly the words “Modeh Ani Lifanecha.”  (“I acknowledge that you are before me.”)

Check it out.

This is my story in this week’s Brooklyn Paper

One of Brooklyn’s highest-profile “9-11 widows,” Marian Fontana of Park Slope, is engaged.

More
than five years after the horrific day that claimed the life of
thousands — including her husband, Lt. David Fontana of Squad 1 —
Fontana got engaged last week to Tom Martinez, a minister at the All
Souls Bethlehem Church, a Unitarian congregation in Kensington.

“What
I love about Tom is that he understands what I have gone through and
the deep love I will always have for Dave, and is okay with all of it,”
Fontana wrote in an email to her friends.

“I am blessed to have so much love in my life.”

Fontana
told friends that she had a hunch that Martinez, a fine arts
photographer and author of “Confessions of a Seminarian: Searching for
a Soul in the Shadow of Empire,” was going to propose because he first
asked Fontana’s 10-year-old son, Aidan, about how he should go about it.

“Tom
asked for Aidan’s permission first, a gesture so sweet and so
indicative of the love they share,” Fontana wrote in that email.

“I was not surprised that he began his proposal with ‘I love Aidan with all my heart.’”

Of course, 10-year-olds aren’t the best at keeping secrets, so Fontana knew the big question was about to be popped.

Though
she now lives in Staten Island, Fontana remains a larger-than-life
figure in Park Slope, thanks to the way she mobilized the neighborhood
after 9-11 to keep Squad 1 open when the city threatened to shut it
down just weeks after the attacks.

The squad, which is housed on Union Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, lost 12 firefighters that day.

— Louise Crawford

The best Valentine’s day: It was a surprise. Hepcat took me to see L’Atalante, this incredibly romantic French film made by Jean Vigo in 1932, at a short-lived tiny repertory movie house called the Van Dam (I think). He knew it was one of my favorite films ever. Still is.

Second best: Drinks at the Tiki Bar at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.

The worst: Hepcat woke up with hives barely breathing after we slept on new, unwashed sheets from Ikea.

We spent much of the day at the Methodist Hospital Emergency Room. He still calls it the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The day his wife tried to kill him with sheets.

1. Home. Not the restaurant on Cornelia Street but the one on Third Street (suggested by OSFO)

2. Stone Park Cafe

3. Nathan’s Hot Dogs in Coney Island

4. Al Di La

5. The Rainbow Room (where Hepcat and Smartmom had their pre-wedding rehearsal dinner).

6. Great Jones Cafe (where Hepcat had his very own seat at the bar before and after he met Smartmom in 1986).

7. Fanelli’s (where Smartmom and Hepcat went the night they met in 1986).

8. 48th Street Howard Johnson’s except its been torn down

9. One of those Indain places on 6th Street (big night out for Hepcat and Smartmom back in the day).

10. Restaurant Florent (site of many a late night meal when Smartmom was pregnant with Teen Spirit — Hey don’t you dare take a bite of my Evelyn’s goat cheese salad!).

11. Snack bar of the Staten Island Ferry (that would be romantic, wouldn’t it?)

Nathan’s pix on Flickr by ain’t no joke.

Gowanus Lounge has the picture: Ikea began building on its construction site on the Brooklyn waterfront last week. In GL’s pix you can see the beginnings of the big blue-and-yellow box that the Swedish multinational is known for.

Hepcat’s camera is broken so we won’t be able to do this again. But we did it in 2005. And the pictures are wonderful.

A soggy night didn’t  keep friends and neighbors from the Be Your Own Valentine
event at Mary Warren’s shop, Fou Le Chakra. Photographer Hugh Crawford
set up a small photo studio in the front of the store with his nifty
strobe light and the old gray backdrop that he’s been using for years;
it’s practically his signature.

Party guests enjoyed sparkling wine, assorted hor doeuvres and sweets
while taking  turns getting their picture taken with or without kids,
with or without significant others.

For some it was like going to the dentist – "Oh, is it my turn?" For
others it was pure bliss: "I’m ready for my close up, Mr. C."

A former house photographer at Fiorucci and the nightclub, Xenon,
Crawford has plenty of experience taking portraits at special events.
After a ten year stint in the computer biz, he’s returned to
photography full time concentrating on editorial and fine art
portraiture, Times Square street photography and a series of pictures
called Earth. Water. Fire. Air. His photographs of Park Slope appear
daily on Only the Blog knows Brooklyn (see No Words_Daily Pix).   

Crawford managed to keep his cool as a band of wild children, fueled
by chocolate chip cookies and too little supper, ran in and out of the
pictures unable to resist the cool photo studio in their midst. My
daughter was disappointed that her photographer-dad wouldn’t let her
help as much as she wanted to.

Here’s this week’s Smartmom from the Brooklyn Paper:

Something is in the air. Two of Smartmom’s lovelorn friends are finding love again. And that is so inspiring.

These
are friends who’ve been through the emotional mill. Harried Harriet
endured an unpleasant marriage that resulted in an unpleasant divorce.
And Marian Fontana lost her firefighter husband on 9-11. Grief
stricken, she learned how to be a single mom as she struggled to heal
and move forward after that life-changing event.

Harried Harriet
found love on eHarmony. And a really good man who loves her back.
They’re living together and planning to get married soon. When her
divorce comes through, that is.

Marian met her guy on a blind date, sort of. The man she was supposed to meet chickened out and he sent his friend instead.

They
hit it off right a way. When Marian told Smartmom and Divorce Diva
about her blind date over drinks a year ago at Black Pearl she told
them, “He’s the one.”

If raised eyebrows could talk. Divorce Diva
and Smartmom could barely contain their skepticism. Take it slow, they
cautioned. What’s the rush?

“We just don’t want you to get hurt,” Diva said.

To
be honest, there was surely a spray of jealousy in the air. New love
sounded like such fun to long-married Smartmom and the recently
divorced Divorce Diva. It had been a long time since either of them had
been wined and dined at the Rainbow Room.

As time went on,
Marian’s new love affair escalated unabated. A couple of months in,
“the One” told her that he wanted “Ring of Fire” to play at their
wedding.

Now she was telling him to slow down. Besides, she thought it was an odd choice of song. Considering.

Still,
things moved fast as they often do when two decisive people fall head
over heels in love. Plus, her new man was crazy about her son. And
vise-versa.

It was a match made in heaven.

Sure, they had
their ups and downs. Arguments. Heavy talks. Nights spent sleeping on
the couch. It wouldn’t be a real relationship without all that. In
fact, one of the reasons Marian loves “the One” as much as she does is
that he is willing to talk, analyze and talk some more about just about
everything.

In other words, he’s in therapy. And there’s nothing more romantic than a guy in therapy.

So, last week, on the anniversary of their first date, he proposed. And he did everything right.

First, he told her 10-year-old son what he had in mind to make sure he was on board. And boy-oh-boy was Marian’s son excited.

Then, he went to Green-Wood Cemetery to ask for permission from Marian’s late great husband, Dave.

On a cold January day, he waited and waited. It’s not easy to get a thumbs-up from the dead, but “the One” did receive a sign.

Smartmom won’t say how he knew. Marian is a writer and that’s her story to tell.

Last
week, Smartmom, Divorce Diva, Cinderella, and Marian got together at
Santa Fe Grill for a congratulatory glass of champagne (except, they
don’t serve champagne there, so they had to settle for the house
Chardonnay).

Marian remembered last year’s raised eyebrows. “You guys thought I was crazy,” she said.

The group wanted to hear every detail of “the One’s” proposal. And Marian obliged with her usual gusto.

Then she showed off her beautiful new engagement ring that she was wearing on her pinky finger.

“Why is it on your pinky?” Smartmom asked.

“The
One” had grabbed a ring from her jewelry box so he’d know her finger
size. Problem was, he snatched a pinky ring. The new ring needs to be
resized.

Staring at Marian’s pinky-sized engagement ring,
Smartmom realized that along with happiness, her friend was also
experiencing just a smidgen of pain. It can’t be easy getting engaged
when you’re still someone else’s wife.

Like the ring, this engagement would take a while to really fit.

While Marian will never stop loving Dave, the father of her adorable child, she can still create a great life with someone new.

Her love for her late husband and her love for “the One” are not mutually exclusive. And that’s something “the One” understands.

And
that’s why he is “the One.” It won’t always be easy, but the openness
these two share will go a long way toward making this a wonderful and
lasting marriage.

For starters they didn’t feed him. And he waited three days for an MRI. Here’s an excerpt. Read the rest at Seeing Green.

The third day passed with no signs of the tests I was scheduled to
have, and no amount of inquires seemed to elicit any information.
Considering that they use a computer to keep track of when they
dispense one Motrin, you’d think that they’d have some idea when a MRI
was to be done, but, no. I finally threatened to check out if it didn’t
happen soon, and, hey, it was scheduled in an hour. Maybe they didn’t
want to lose the exorbitant amount charged for the procedure (but it
was worth it, the most fun I had, see here) or maybe, as my resident gave me a thumbs up when I was being wheeled away, the squeaky wheel got the grease after all.

I didn’t get fed that day either, not that I was coveting the stuff
that passes for food there, but it would seem that a basic requirement
of a hospital is to keep its inmates nourished. Luckily Elizabeth,
bless her heart, had been feeding me croissants from Sweet Melissa,
(the best) and falafel sandwiches. Seeing as she couldn’t provide
breakfast, I tried to get on the food distribution list. After two
presses of the nurse call (not) button, I padded over the nurse’s
station and asked my RN why I didn’t get any food the previous day.

The Shiksa from Manila has posted something new. Be the first to see…

I’m sitting in Cocoa Bar with Mrs. Cleavage. She’s eating  white chocolate chocolate cake and telling me about her twin sister’s blog.   (Full disclosure: she’s treating to a latte right now).

Her sister’s blog is called Saucytart.typepad.com and it’s so so so saucy as she dishes the dirt on  life, work, love, and elementary school.

BE THE FIRST TO CHECK IT OUT.

More about charges of censorship at the Brooklyn Public Library. This from the Real Estate Observer Blog.

Isn’t everybody sort of sick of the controversy surrounding Atlantic Yards? Wouldn’t it be nice to just look at some pictures of people and places in and around the footprint and leave out all the anger (or, maybe even joy?) the project has generated?

Well, the Brooklyn Public Library hears you. Its Grand Army Plaza headquarters will next Tuesday re-mount the “Brooklyn Footprints” exhibit that debuted in October at a multi-cultural center in Prospect Heights, but in condensed form. About six works, including Aisha Cousins’s mixed-media piece, above, will be left out, according to Dan Sagarin, the co-curator of the original exhibit. (Cousins instead submited a different, less controversial image, that the library is exhibiting, Sagarin said.)

“I think it’s commendable that they want to address the Atlantic Yards issue, and as a public institution, they did not want to take sides,” Mr. Sagarin told The Real Estate.

He said library officials saw the exhibit when it was up at Grand Space last fall, and decided then not to take the more overtly critical pieces, including one very large portrait his sister, Sarah Sagarin, painted of arch-opponent Daniel Goldstein, as well as other, more abstract work. (For more slides of those included and omitted, see the “Brooklyn Footprints” Web site.)

“We could have said, you can take all of it or nothing, and we didn’t say that.” But, Mr. Sagarin continued, “It hurt me. I would have to tell some of our artists, whom I had begged to do these works in the first place, that they would not be shown at the library.”

The Real Estate left messages with the library on Thursday morning and will report its response. Its blurb for the exhibit goes like this: “Footprints: Over 30 artists present their interpretations of the ‘footprints’ of Bruce Ratner’s proposed redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Rail Yards.”

Fortunately, one of the rejected artists, Donald O’Finn, knows some French, and he is mounting a “Salon des Refusés de la Bibliothèque de Brooklyn” at the condemned bar he manages, Freddy’s, with an opening Feb. 22.

“The only piece that I can see the slightest hesitation to exhibit in a public forum where children could experience it is my video piece called ‘The Burrow’,” O’Finn wrote in an e-mail, “because it is rather scathing and does have a moment or two of a cartoon penis becoming erect (from an old sex-education film) that visually pulls up an architectural image of the proposed stadium project from below screen. They also excluded my comical small illustration of the arena as a toilet bowl.”

À ta santé!

– Matthew Schuerman

This from the Working Family Party blog:

Today at 1pm the Albee Square Mall, located in downtown Brooklyn, and
UFCW Local 1500 will announce a deal to respect the wishes of the
community and exclude Wal-Mart from the development. Community
organizations, members of the New York City Council, the Working
Families Party, State Senator Eric Adams, faith-based leaders and other
unions – who all played a part in striking this deal – will also be in
attendance.

Sophia Romero, author of ALWAYS HIDING, a novel about illegal immigration published in
1998 by William Morrow & Company, is married with two children, and a Kerry Blue Terrier who goes by the name of Roxy. They all live
under one roof in Brooklyn, New York.

And she’s got a BRAND NEW BLOG, which is always good news in the Brooklyn Blog Zone. It’s called, SHIKSA FROM MANILA. it’s great and I for one will be a regular reader. I’ll be linking to it you can be sure. But here’s an excerpt from her very first post. WELCOME SOPHIA!

My name is Amapola and I am the shiksa from Manila. Twenty years ago I
married Glenn Gold. A good egg. He’s the Jew. We have two kids and a
dog. We live in Brooklyn, New York city. Glenn and I agreed to raise
the kids Jewish; I continue to remain Catholic. Yup, I eat the wafer
every Sunday; don’t drink before 5 unless I’m in a brasserie sipping
mimosas. Glenn and the kids go to Shabbat services every Friday much to
the chagrin of child Number One who thinks he has better things to do
other than be at Temple for an hour and a half. Number Two is catching
up with grumblings of her own but must come up with better excuses as
Number One has preempted most of them. I have every confidence that, in
time, she will.

By mutual agreement, Glenn and I decided to keep the
dog unaffiliated. She’s so screwed-up, she’s beyond redemption. Of
course, I could sneak over to the church two blocks from my house where
I am friendly with the parish priest and have him sprinkle Holy Water
on the puppy. I’d have to time it though so that it looks like we got
caught in the rain. No one would ever know. Dogs don’t talk. They just
bark. Come to think of it, I could have done the same with Numbers One
and Two but Ken would know. He always knows these things. Besides,
children talk.

Before I married Glenn, I had no idea what a shiksa
was or that there was a term for someone like me who married someone
like him. I thought bride and groom were it. In the Philippines,
practically every one would be considered a shiksa except for the
sprinkling of Muslims clustered around south of the archipelago. I
found out what a shiksa was on the day of my wedding, at the reception
no less, when one of my mother-in-law’s friends called me that to my
face. Since I didn’t know the meaning of the word (and she had a big,
fat smile as wide as the JFK runway), she walked away with her face
intact. Obviously, now I know better.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of NYC bloggers. Erin Montiero of WNBC did the best she could to  identify 140 NYC bloggers with popular blogs.

Some very notable bloggers were at the summit.

Some very notable bloggers were missing.

Nonetheless, here’s the list. Please email me or send comments with names of blogs that really should have been there.

I’d heard something about this. Gowanus Lounge has it on his blog today. MTV wants to do a reality show about Brooklyn Tech High School, one of Brooklyn’s highly selective high school, whose alumni include two members of Congress, two Nobel Prize winners, an astronaut, engineers, inventors,
an Olympic medalist and recognized leaders of industry and commerce.

Brooklyn Tech News has all the details about the MTV show. Brooklyn Tech has a very impressive web site.  This story is by Marc Williams.

MTV will be filming a pilot about Brooklyn. The producers are looking
for Brooklyn Tech Sophomores and Juniors. Read the information about
MTV’s pilot call Brooklyn.
Then send an email to Mr. Williams to sign up for the casting call. Or
you can sign up in Room 7E4. There will be several casting call
interviews and interested students will attend only by appointment.

MTV’s newest soon-to-be hit show is Brooklyn.
The premise is to paint an accurate picture for America of what life is
like for the average Brooklyn high school student. Brooklyn, New York
is made up of the Caribbean Americans of Flatbush, the Hasidic Jews of
Crown Heights, the hipsters of Williamsburg and the peacenik families
of Park Slope. The infamous Fort Greene projects, artsy DUMBO, upscale
Brooklyn Heights and the soon-to-be arriving NBA Brooklyn Nets. With
2.6 million people packed in Brownstones, tenements and multi-unit
apartment complexes, Brooklyn is a jumble of cultures, creeds and
economic strata. A cross between Harlem in its heyday and Paris,
Brooklyn is the ultimate city within a city. In fact, if it weren’t
already incorporated into New York City, Brooklyn would be the third
biggest city in the country. It’s said that one out of every six
Americans has had a parent or grandparent who lived in Brooklyn at some
point.

With that said, there is only one school in all of
Brooklyn that represents all of those people, and that is Brooklyn Tech
High School. BTHS does not only represent the people of Brooklyn, it
also offers the inspiration, education, values and glimmer of hope that
all the other public schools are lacking.

With a student body
of 4,000, BTHS represents the many faces of teenagers in Brooklyn.
Rich, poor, Asian, Black, White, Hispanic and everyone in between come
here to learn. Since 1922, BTHS has been the home to everyone from
bodybuilders to entertainers to noble laureates. Considered to be one
of the best magnet schools in the country, BTHS is a cutthroat
competition even before the year starts. BTHS has proven to be a golden
free-of-charge opportunity: the first step onto a life of success.

But,
at the end of the day, despite all its diversity, class divides and
Brooklyn grit, BTHS is just like any other American public high school.

This
is a show about America’s urban teenagers, the street savvy teenagers,
the teenagers who have to grow up that much faster because if they
don’t, the city will eat them alive. They will be real and they will be
tough and ready for anything that comes their way or at least so they
think.

Welcome to Brooklyn.

A reader emailed me a few minutes ago. She’d like OTBKB readers to answer some questions. I’ve asked her for some details — who is she doing this for, who is her audience, etc. In the meantime, here are her questions. I’m gonna type out some answers…

Dear Louise, I love your blog, and I was wondering if some of your readers might be
able to help me out with a small project. I am doing a short audio
slide show about Park Slope as a "small town in the middle of a big
city", and I would love to get some responses to the following
questions:

1. What qualities define a small town?

2. What aspects of (or places in) Park Slope epitomize these qualities? Why?

3. What qualities define a Park Sloper (Slopie? Slopette? Make up your own term if you like!)

Sadly, I’m on a really tight deadline for this
project, so if people could send responses by tomorrow (Feb 8.), that
would be amazing. Responses should be sent to
alexislloyd@gmail.com with "Park Slope" in the subject.

Yesterday I was interviewed by John Noel for WNBC’s News Forum Now. This is the first video interview I have done in a very long time.

I was once on the Lenoard Lopate show on WNYC Radio, promoting a film I co-directed (with Pamela Katz) called "In a Jazz Way: A Portrait of Mura Dehn" that was playing at the Film Forum at the time.

A lot of friends said my voice sounded really good. They have an amazing microphone at the Lenny Lopate show.

I never listened to that radio show. A lot of people heard it and insisted that I didn’t sound like an idiot. That was when I found out that sooooo many people listen to WNYC all day.

Now this. I am second guessing everything I said yesterday to John Noel and I am convinced that I am going to sound like an idiot.

It’s not easy being interviewed. BUT I LOVED IT. Okay, I thought it was a lot of fun. But when I do it again I will be more concise, more focused, more smart.

It’s not that I was nervous. John Noel was very gracious and easy to talk to. It’s just that the time went very quickly and I went brain-dead here and there.

I was thrilled that he asked a lot of questions about OTBKB. He even reads Smartmom because he lives in Prospect Heights. They even showed the blog and the URL on screen.

For those who watch it, keep in mind, I was a little nervous and I forget some key words in the English language from time to time.   

NPR has this piece by Vicki Valentine on their website.

Head lice and humans go way back; the parasites have been found
with their little claws locked around prehistoric mummy hair. And our
eons-long relationship has given us plenty of time to build up myths
about lice, too. Here, Harvard lice expert Richard Pollack dispels some
of the most persistent folklore:
                        

Dirty Kids Spread Lice:
Head lice have no preference for dirty hair or clean hair. "If you wash
your hair three times a day or more, the lice on your head will just be
clean lice," Pollack says.

Pets Spread Lice: Human head-lice infestations don’t come from pets — our lice only like our blood.

Brushes Spread Lice:
Combs, brushes, headphones, hats and helmets have very little role in
spreading lice. It’s all the tumbling, playing and hugging that does
it. In the vast majority of cases, lice are spread by direct
head-to-head contact.

Clean House to Get Rid of Lice:
If your house is dusty or dirty, go ahead and clean, says Pollack. But
that won’t prevent or cure a lice infestation. The parasites can’t
survive for more than a day without a meal of human blood, and they
generally aren’t going to let go of your hair to hang out on your
couch. Changing bed linens or vacuuming a car seat can only help, but
chances of a louse being on a bed or a car seat are incredibly small.

Shave Heads:
"It’s like using a cannon to kill a housefly," Pollack says. Completely
shaving a head will get rid of lice eggs, but Pollack says that’s a
needless tactic when there are so many other effective and less drastic
ways to solve the problem.

Head Lice Can Kill:
Nope, that would be body lice. Those parasites do thrive in dirty
environments and are perhaps most infamous for spreading deadly typhus
in the 19th century. Head lice just make you itch.

Coat Your Head in Vaseline:
Some people swear by the Vaseline or olive-oil treatments — the idea
is to suffocate the lice. But lice are extremely hard to suffocate, and
to date, no studies have evaluated the efficacy of either substance.
"Why not chose something that’s been tested and shown to work?" Pollack
says.

Insecticide Shampoos Can Be Toxic:
"The only ones who should fear the proper use of these products are
lice," says Pollack. Look for FDA-registered over-the-counter
treatments containing pyrethrin, which is a natural chrysanthemum
abstract, or permethrin, which is the synthetic form. If your lice
appear to be resistant to those, the next step is a prescription
shampoo containing either malathion or lindane. "When used properly,
they are valuable and low-risk pesticides," Pollack says.

Manual Removal Is Safest:
If you have short, straight hair, a special comb on its own could take
care of an infestation. "If my daughter, who has thick, shoulder-length
hair, had head lice, and I tried to use any of these devices on her,
the neighbors would call the cops, it would cause so much discomfort
and pain."

Editor’s Note: Pollack has served as a paid scientific advisor in the past to companies that manufacture head lice shampoos.

On Saturday I picked up my MacBook from Tekserve. It was hard/interesting to be without a computer for a week.

Actually, it was kind of a relief. I was still able to blog and write. But in a greatly limited way. That was a good thing. I needed a break from it all. It being: writing and blogging.

Turns out my Mac was a LEMON. It was from the early batch of MacBook production and some of those problems randomly turn themselves OFF.

When i told the technician my problem he said, "I think I know exactly what’s wrong with your computer." He checked the serial number. Viola. Mine is one from the early batch, alright.

In some cases it’s a software problem. In rare cases it’s a hardware problem. Mine was a hardware and software problem.

Problem is fixed. I’m glad I didn’t fumble around. I’m glad I didn’t suffer with it for too long. Good lesson. Act fast  when you have a problem. Especially when you have a lemon. 

My lemon is all better now. The motherboard has been replaced. I am happy, too. Back to writing and blogging…

This from the Brooklyn Record:

Today at noon, Council Members Yassky, Liu,
de Blasio, Transportation Alternatives and the Straphangers Campaign
will convene on the steps of New York City Hall and call on the Mayor
to meet his 2030 PLANYC sustainability goals by appointing a DOT
commissioner with a mandate to reduce automobile traffic while
improving surface transit, walking and bicycling options.

Returning  home from our not-Superbowl party at Diaper Diva’s,  Hepcat walked way behind us on First Street.

Now I know why.

He was taking today’s Daily Pix — the haunting shot above of the Poly-Prep construction site.

Sometimes I feel like No Words is my way of getting inside Hepcat’s brain.