CultureJunkie

Special Delivery

Check out the beautiful flowers I received today from my dear friends at Helping Hands: Monkey Helpers for the Disabled, along with two cards: one signed by the full team, and one created by a Helping Hands monkey! Made my day :)

Buon Giorno, San Giusto

Earlier this week, Boston welcomed the prestigious Italian Navy training ship San Giusto to its waters.

In fact, it's docked right outside our office at the Black Falcon Cruise Terminal, giving us some great views. And today, they allowed visitors to board the ship for a tour (pictures below, although they wouldn't allow us to take photographs in the really interesting areas, like the control room, mess hall, and sick bay - complete with full surgical and dentistry equipment!).

The San Giusto is an amphibious transport dock which can lift a battalion of troops (350 people!) and up to 36 armored vehicles. It also has a runway on deck and can accommodate 3 aircraft. Today, it's used as a training ship, and is currently carrying second year midshipmen from the Italian Naval Academy. It's a young crowd, and a co-worker mentioned that it sounded like they were having a dance party there last night :)

Tomorrow (Saturday), Cardinal Sean O'Malley (who I just realized has a blog, where he announced that the archdiocesan newspaper is now available on the Kindle and iPhone...ha!) will celebrate a Mass aimed at Boston's Italian Community on board the ship.

Infestation!

No, not in my place, thank goodness.

But first I read about a Goldman Sachs office in NJ battling bedbugs, then a couple of Abercrombie & Fitch stores in NYC shut down for the same reason.

And now I present the cover of this week's New Yorker:
 

Ewwww.

Gasland, BP and The Summing Up

So, my day job had me doing some research on media outlets in Pennsylvania and I kept coming across stories about HBO's latest documentary, Gasland, which premiered last night.

It was a [controversial] hit at Sundance, and has since been covered by the Wall St. Journal, the New York Times, and the Daily Show among others. I've set my DVR to record it.

Gasland was directed by Pennsylvania-native Josh Fox and documents his multi-state investigation of natural gas companies' use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process involves pumping large amounts of water deep underground, fracturing rock to release natural gas. It also leads to natural gas leaking into the water supply, gas blow-ups, and according to Fox, an industry that "won't take responsibility for their actions." Sound familiar? Here's a preview:

Later in the day, I chatted with another Pennsylvania native who told me about Centralia, PA. Have you heard of it? A mine exploded (underground) here in 1962 and THE FIRE IS STILL BURNING. The town failed to install a fire-resistant clay barrier between an open trash pit and the mine, and when trash haulers proceeded to dump coal burners there...boom. Centralia's population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981, to 12 in 2005, and 9 in 2007. All properties were claimed under eminent domain and all buildings were condemned in 1992; the town's zip code was revoked in 2002. It is now a ghost town. 

[Photo via veender]

And then there is BP, which has been covered ad nauseum, but like the above show a troubling pattern in human history. From William Falk, editor-in-chief of The Week:

"In moments of distress and panic, it is tempting to succumb to ideologies that promise a single, simple solution to the mess that is the human condition. Communism was blinkered like that, but so, in its purest form, is free-market capitalism. While drilling in 5,000 feet of water, the capitalists at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig made a considered decision to forgo some troublesome safety measures, to save time and about $10 million in costs. Why not risk a small fine when millions of gallons of oil were waiting? It must have seemed like the smart play at the time... This is the problem with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand’’: To work its corrective magic, it depends on occasional disastrous mistakes, depressions, death, and widespread suffering... Regulation, too, often falls short of the ideal. Consider the case of Bernie Madoff, who ran his monstrous Ponzi scheme for two decades, right under the noses of the SEC. Even after a whistle-blower came to the agency with proof that Madoff’s “investment fund’’ was a scam, the regulators did nothing...That leaves us, I'm afraid, back where we started: groping our way forward, with no surefire solutions to human fallability."

From EJ Dionne, op-ed columnist at the Washington Post:
"Deregulation is wonderful until we discover what happens when regulations aren't issued or enforced. Everyone is a capitalist until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because they see it as being just as big and powerful as its Tea Party critics claim it is. But the truth is that we have dis-empowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task. The sludge in the gulf is, finally, the product of our own contradictions."

From W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (1938):

"So long as men are cursed with the sense of possession, and that I presume is as long as they exist, they will wrest what they can from those who are powerless to hold it. So long as they have the instinct of self-assertion, they will exercise it at the expense of others' happiness. In short, so long as man is man he must be prepared to face all the woes that he can bear." (p. 187)

6/23 Update: 3 more soundbytes I came across today that I needed to include here:

1) News from today that a northeastern Pennsylvania school district has reached a five-year gas lease agreement with a company that drills in the lucrative Marcellus shale field.

2) Attorney Eugene C. Kelley's blog post: Are We Doomed to Repeat History With the Marcellus Shale Deposits in Northeastern Pennsylvania?

3) Historian Margaret MacMillan, in Dangerous Games, "History should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated."

Happy Day-After-Halloween

Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

New Look

It's been a long time since I started this blog, and it was in dire need of a redesign.

Welcome to the new look. I'm hoping to further customize the header (i.e., adding a silhouette of Lulu!), but that requires some custom CSS edits for which I don't have the patience right now :)

And look at how it's grown over the years!

Moda di Magno tipped me off to this cool data visualization app, Webpages as Graphs. 

Fish Bowl

From the Super Bowl to the Toilet Bowl:

Shiny Shiny points us to the Aquariass (LOL), a live aquarium with fully-functioning tank that fits American Standard bowls (custom installations also available).

Soda Bowl

Great inspiration for Sunday, courtesy of Chris Brogan:

Merry Christmas