Dusk from the South Tower
"In the Light of Memory" by artist Christopher Evans is briefly back on display at the New York Historical Society. Impressive post-Sept. 11 art worth seeing in person.
- posted by Amy @ 10/04/2003 10:20:00 AM

 

B-L-O-G
Blogger's built-in spell check doesn't recognize the word "blog."
- posted by Amy @ 10/02/2003 05:52:00 PM

 

The Carrie Bradshaw of Blogs
Elizabeth Spiers launches "The Kicker" - a daily snarky blog for New York magazine. You'll read it and suddenly realize this is where gawker should have been all along. New York magazine needs Elizabeth, and it should be very thankful for Nick Denton and gawker for paving the way. It's a bit more gossip and hip than I need every day, but Elizabeth strikes a nice chord of being dishy and snobby and smarter than you without actually being nasty about it. Now run along and update your links.
- posted by Amy @ 10/02/2003 05:48:00 PM

 

California Kings
California Authors has an excerpt from "King of California," the new book coming out about one of the state's biggest and most secretive farming families - the Boswells. Very anxious to see what writer Mark Arax (a Fresno native) and another LA Times writer, Rick Wartzman, have come up with.

We had driven the equivalent of Washington to Philadelphia, though it seemed pointless to measure it that way, and nearly every road, field and irrigation canal belonged to Boswell, and every worker we passed and waved to was his worker and every truck, tractor and leveler for which he politely moved to the side of the road bore the same diamond–B logo. The goofy grin on a few of their faces made you wonder if they even knew who the old guy waving at them was.

He was the biggest farmer in America and the last land baron of California, and he saw no good in playing it up. His 200,000 acres in the middle of the state, just part of his domain, may have ranked as one of the biggest land grabs in the modern West but, to hear him tell it, the product of guile and vision it was not. A chance encounter here and a little seller’s desperation there and, presto, tens of thousands of acres just fell into his lap. The fact that he had built the most highly industrialized cotton operation in the world and had grown more irrigated wheat, safflower and seed alfalfa than any single farmer in the country and was aiming to do the same with onions and tomatoes, well, the fewer people who knew about that, the better. It was not by accident that Boswell had changed a 200–year–old American institution, altered the way cotton was grown, picked, ginned and marketed, and hardly anyone outside Kings County knew his name.

When I was taking Amtrak through the Central Valley with my grandma years ago, I remember her striking up a conversation with another passenger, who happened to be a Boswell. My grandma said that grandpa - who had his own crane business - had worked for "Mr. Boswell" for awhile. Apparently grandpa liked the man a lot.

My Grandma Collins died when I was in junior high school, so this train ride was probably around 1980. Even at that age, I recall knowing who the Boswells were and that they were powerful, but that's it.
- posted by Amy @ 10/02/2003 05:31:00 PM

 

$25 of Nothing from HP
About two years ago I shelled out $299 for Hewlett Packard's Office Jet K60, an all-in-one machine with a printer, scanner, fax and copier. Mostly I've used it for printing and copying, but it got a little bit of use as a fax and scanner. It's now dead except as a printer. Sadly, HP doesn't care.

Their tech support people were very nice, but ultimately gave me only one absurd option to fix my problem: Buy a new one. The e-mail support was free, but ultimately didn't fix my machine. Today I finally broke down and paid HP $25 for a "seven business-day warranty" to talk to tech support. "Mike" determined it's a hardware problem, possibly electrical. Mike said I could take it to Radio Shack to get fixed for an unknown cost. I went with option B, which was to talk to the trade-in/trade-up department. Unfortunately, the K60 has no upgrade option, but I could exchange the machine for a price as low as $161. At the time, I was looking at a new HP all-in-one machine on Amazon for $199.

So if I was foolish, I could have given HP $186 today to fix my K60 - which would again be out of warranty as soon as it arrived at my home. Maybe I've gotten spoiled, but I expect my devices to last more than two years -especially if I haven't been very demanding of the equipment.

Now I'm in the market for a replacement. I have limited space so would prefer another all-in-one, but if I'm getting only mediocrity for a higher price, I'm willing to buy separate devices. Any advice much appreciated.
- posted by Amy @ 10/01/2003 02:26:00 PM

 

Rebuilding and Reseeding
Megan McArdle, who worked in a construction company's trailer on the Ground Zero site for a year, has a proposal for the memorial. It's at Tech Central Station. She explains why Manhattan doesn't need the new office space (12.5 percent vacancy rate) and why the WTC towers weren't near capacity for most of their lifespan (including the 15-minute elevator rides to the top offices.) Megan's proposal:

If I were in charge of the site, I would make it a simple sheet of grass, with flat stones set into the earth to mark the outlines of the missing buildings. There would be no other memorial on the site but the shape of what was absent; if you must have a statue or some such, you can put it next to the site of 7 World Trade Center, which is already being rebuilt. But on the site itself, just a grassy space, with enough room for people to reconstruct the site in their imaginations if they wish -- and enough room for those who don't so wish to sit on the grass and enjoy life's short moments in the sun.

Her main point, which I agree with, is that the huge emptiness of that space makes a strong impact on visitors to the site. To stand at the edge makes you understand what was lost.

My personal opinion is not so much what is or isn't built there - but just that it's done tastefully. And if you go down there now, there are a lot of poorly informed tourists milling about. Something at the site now needs to better explain the events of Sept. 11 to the tourists. A block away at Broadway and Fulton, St. Paul's Chapel has a nice exhibit recounting the events of the day, but I'm afraid most tourists miss that.
- posted by Amy @ 9/28/2003 11:34:00 AM

 

Needle with Clouds, Wind: No Camera
Stunning New York day yesterday. The white, puffy clouds were very low in the sky and moving so fast that my husband pointed out it seemed like time-lapsed photography. We were at Cleopatra's needle in Central Park, craning our necks down to look up at the obelisk with nothing but fast moving clouds in the background.

So now I want not only a cell phone with a built in camera, but one that allows me to capture a few seconds of video as well.
- posted by Amy @ 9/28/2003 10:39:00 AM

 

Holiday Madness
I got an e-mail from John Hodgson at Chrysalis TV in London seeking wacky Christmas stories to use for a show. He'd like to come to the United States and "meet men and women who have had freaky Christmases, or festive obsessives or any tales of Christmas gone wrong on an immense scale." If you can help him out, e-mail John directly. But readers, if those stories involve me, please realize I probably have dirt on you, too.
- posted by Amy @ 9/28/2003 10:13:00 AM

 

A Less Sober Subway Ride?
I'm guessing my time stuck in a New York subway during the blackout was more pleasant than being trapped by a blackout in a Roman subway during an all-night party.
- posted by Amy @ 9/28/2003 09:59:00 AM