This from New York 1:
Police are asking for the public’s help in locating a missing Brooklyn woman.
Police say 30-year-old Natasha Kinsale of St. John’s Place was last seen last Thursday going to the public library on Eastern Parkway and Schenectady Avenue.
She is described as 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighing 160 pounds with black hair and brown eyes.
Police say she is in poor mental health, but good physical condition.
They believe she may be in New Jersey.
Anyone with any information on any of these cases you’re asked to call crime stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS.

I just stopped in at Outside.in, that’s right, outside dot in, Steven Berlin Johnson’s national directory of neighborhood blogging by zipcode and it looks cooler than ever. It says it is currently tracking 3,243 neighborhoods.

On February 27th they rolled out a whole bunch of new features and it’s pretty impressive and a big boost for neighborhood blogging.

“As you can see, we’ve rolled out a ton of new features this morning, along with a significant streamlining of the design. We’re going to walk through some of the changes on the blog in the next day or so, but for now the most important thing to understand are the basic new categories we’ve added that now form the underlying architecture of the site: Neighbors, Places, Stories, and Comments. We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with these different variables, but we think you’ll see why they’re going to be a lot of fun to explore.”

FROM BROOKLYN SPEAKS:

Forest City Ratner plans to demolish two entire city blocks – including historic buildings that should be reused like the Ward Bakery – to create enormous “temporary” surface parking lots for over 1400 cars that would blight Brooklyn for decades.

These parking lots will also encourage more people to drive, leading to worse traffic, worse air quality, and worse quality of life for those living in the surrounding neighborhoods. And they simply aren’t needed. No other large-scale development in the city has required the demolition of two city blocks for parking.

We need to send Eliot Spitzer and Mike Bloomberg a simple message: New Yorkers deserve better. Please join BrooklynSpeaks.net to rally against demolition for parking. There will be passionate speeches and great music – the Lafayette Inspirational Gospel Choir and singer Dave Hall will be performing.

When
Sunday, April 15th, 2007 2:00 pm
Where
Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt Avenues
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
More Info
BrooklynSpeaks

This from the New York Sun:

A city proposal to put Park Slope’s Ninth Street on a “road diet” — narrowing the busy thoroughfare to two lanes of traffic from four — was approved last night during a board meeting of Community Board 6.

Starting in July, the street will be converted to just one driving lane in each direction, and two five-foot bike lanes, one in each direction, will be added to the traffic mix. The redesign of the street came at the community’s request, after a series of accidents underscored the problems with pedestrian safety and reckless driving along the main corridor.

“The problem here is not the volume of cars, so much as their speed,” the chairman of Community Board 6, Craig Hammerman, said in an interview. Ninth Street is as wide as Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, but carries less than half of its traffic load, according to the transportation department.

In 2005, a sedan careened into Dizzy’s Diner as it maneuvered a sharp right turn off of Ninth Street. Two boys were killed a year before by a truck that turned into a crosswalk on Third Avenue from Ninth Street.

Opponents of the redesign say that cutting down on street space for cars will only aggravate the neighborhood’s parking woes, as residents would not have room to park and unload their vehicles. Transportation department officials said they would seek to modify curb regulations to allow more space for residents to load and unload their cars without double parking.

Kurt Vonnegut, author of classic American novels of the 1960’s and 70’s, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” died last night in Manhattant at the age of 84.

In the obituary in the New York Times, Dinita Smith writes, “Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

“He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Mr. Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.””

LITTLE SCHOOL OF MOVING PICTURES: SPRING CLAY ANIMATION CLASSES FOR KIDS

This from 1010 Wins:

NEW YORK (AP) — New York
City produces nearly 1 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the
nation, equal to the level of countries including Ireland and Portugal,
officials said Tuesday after releasing a study of the city’s output.

The report found that the buildings, subways, buses and cars and the
decomposition of waste in America’s biggest city produced a net
emission of 58.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2005. It
said the U.S. total was 7.26 billion metric tons for that year.

Carbon dioxide, methane and other gases essentially trap energy from
the sun, which warms the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere. Human
activity that increases those gases is believed to be changing the
climate of the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations
network of 2,000 scientists, warned last week in a global warming
report of possible catastrophic risks such as floods, disease, food
shortages, species extinction and human suffering throughout the world.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is limited to two terms and leaves
office at the end of 2009, ordered the study of the city’s emissions
because he needed a benchmark for his goal of a 30 percent emissions
reduction by 2030. The study was conducted by the mayor’s Office of
Long-term Planning and Sustainability.

"You have to have a real baseline or we’re just talking past each
other as to what works and what doesn’t work — we won’t ever know
whether we really made a difference,” Bloomberg said.

Considering the city’s share of the U.S. population — 8.2 million
of 300 million — the levels could be much worse. And there is good
news: The average city resident contributes less than a third of the
emissions generated by a typical American.

I read this on Park Slope Parents this evening:

Word from the employees at D’Ag (a big supermarket on 7th Ave and 6th
Street) is that the company is closing the location on April 28.

Does anybody know what is planned for that giant space, or how we can
find out? (Anyone wanna go in for a giant playspace? A new preschool?)

Or where else to get a whole store-cooked Murray’s organic chicken for 4.99 (with points)?

Here’s the first draft of the Blogger Code of Conduct developed by Tim O’Reilly and posted on his blog: Radar.

We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and
open conversation. But frankness does not have to mean lack of
civility. We present this Blogger Code of Conduct in hopes that it
helps create a culture that encourages both personal expression and
constructive conversation.

1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.

We are committed to the "Civility Enforced" standard: we will not
post unacceptable content, and we’ll delete comments that contain it.

We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
– is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
– is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
– infringes upon a copyright or trademark
– violates an obligation of confidentiality
– violates the privacy of others

We define and determine what is "unacceptable content" on a
case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list.
If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why. [We
reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]

2. We won’t say anything online that we wouldn’t say in person.

3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.

When we encounter conflicts and misrepresentation in the
blogosphere, we make every effort to talk privately and directly to the
person(s) involved–or find an intermediary who can do so–before we
publish any posts or comments about the issue.

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.

When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are
offensive, we’ll tell them so (privately, if possible–see above) and
ask them to publicly make amends.
If those published comments could be construed as a threat, and the
perpetrator doesn’t withdraw them and apologize, we will cooperate with
law enforcement to protect the target of the threat.

5. We do not allow anonymous comments.

We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they
can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an
alias, rather than their real name.

6. We ignore the trolls.

We prefer not to respond to nasty comments about us or our blog, as
long as they don’t veer into abuse or libel. We believe that feeding
the trolls only encourages them–"Never wrestle with a pig. You both
get dirty, but the pig likes it." Ignoring public attacks is often the
best way to contain them.

We also decided we needed an "anything goes" badge for sites that want
to warn possible commenters that they are entering a free-for-all zone.
The text to accompany that badge might go something like this:

This is an open, uncensored forum. We are not responsible
for the comments of any poster, and when discussions get heated, crude
language, insults and other "off color" comments may be encountered.
Participate in this site at your own risk.

Did anyone see the story in Monday’s New York Times about a blogger’s code of conduct? Last week on the Brian Lehrer’s show I called in and said I was against regulating behavior in the Blogsphere. But now I am rethinking my original reaction. I actually like the idea of a carefully worded set of principles and guidelines. Not everyone has to agree. But if you come to my place, I’m allowed to set some standard of civil behavior. Nu?

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?

The
conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere
can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures
in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the
quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a
conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the
term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal
online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape
online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is
that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to
their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments
without facing cries of censorship.

A recent outbreak of
antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to
change the level of expectations that people have about what’s
acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary
recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com). Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

RUNNING COMMENTARY NO. 4
Written by Scott Adkins
Directed by Kenn Watt

Developed in the SoHo Writer/Director Lab

Presented at:
The Atlantic Theater: Studio A
330 West 16th Street
Wednesday April 11 at 8 pm

Running Commentary No. 4 is a play of nostalgia for the past and a
delusional future. Stories emerge from songs, lucid dreams, and letters
between a very old woman and a young paranoid man. The line dividing reality
and fantasy is eaten by a water snake; what follows is the forgotten
(forbidden?) planet, which happens to be in your backyard.

Read by:
Kate Benson
Tanya Calamoneri
Kelly Copper*
Danyon Davis
Marian Fontana
Nina Hellman
Deborah Knox
Pavol Liska*
Danny Manley
Jen Morris
Molly Powell
Peter Richards
Heidi Schreck
James Scruggs
Paul Willis

Park Slope actor, Charlotte Maier, plays Mrs. Krebs in the Broadway revival of  Inherit the Wind opening Thursday night at the Lyceum Theater on West 45th Street in Manhattan.

OSFO, Hepcat and I went to a preview Monday night and really enjoyed the show. Christopher Plummber plays the Clarence Darrow character and Brian Dennehy plays the character based on William Jennings Bryan. Dennis O’Hare is teriffic in the role based on H.L. Mencken. The following is from Wikipedia’s entry on the play:

Inherit the Wind is a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, which opened on Broadway in January 1955, and a 1960 Hollywood film based on the play. It is currently being brought back onto Broadway in a revival. The play’s title comes from Proverbs 11:29, which in the King James Bible reads:

He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind:

and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart

Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes Trial (the "Monkey" Trial), which resulted in Scopes‘ conviction for teaching Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution to a high school science class, contrary to a Tennessee state law that mandated the teaching of a form of creationism.
The fictional characters of Matthew Harrison Brady, Henry Drummond,
Bertram Cates and E. K. Hornbeck correspond to the historical figures
of William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, John Scopes, and H.L. Mencken, respectively.

Despite numerous similarities between the play and history, the play was not intended as a documentary-drama about the Scopes trial, but as a warning about the evils of McCarthyism, which some see as one of the darkest moments in American history. The play has been hailed as one of the great American plays of the 20th century, and its themes of religious belief, religious tolerance, and freedom of thought resonate down to the present day.