At eleven forty the crowd slowly becomes bored and people start to entertain themselves. “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” An interpreter for the hearing-impaired is still on stage, who raptly joins in. She clenches her right fist to nod with it, brings it to her chest with her index finger out, then clenches both fists and stems them toward the ground - Yes, we can! Back and forth, the crowd and the little woman in a summer dress are firing each other up; all just to lure him, the Democratic Presidential Nominee, savior and general hopeful on to the stage. To no avail. Barack Obama sets his own timetable.
I know… it sounds like a relic from the 70s or something, which it actually is. But obviously it’s one of those ideas that even gain relevance over time.
That said, I have to add that I really feel for the 1000 people losing their already underpaid jobs. But it also shows that there is not unlimited demand for ever the same products. I admit that it gereally makes sense to have chain stores in some respect. But it also makes traveling (and living) so not exciting at times, because it kills cultural particularities.
Her comes a sermon by Reverend Billy, founder of the Church of Stop Shopping, getting the word out to the masses on Fox Biz News:
30 years ago New York City was a dangerous place. Especially Bushwick in Brooklyn, my neighborhood today, was one of the most poor and devastated places you could imagine. You can still see that in missing buildings, which were often burned down by their owners because they just wouldn’t sell.
Anyway, I just read a blog post on woot.com that has occasional reviews of funny used books. This one is called “Street Smart” and was written by Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa and their lawyer Murray Schwartz.
In his blog entry Jason Toon highlights the funniest and most paranoid moments of the book (including Guardian Angels fashion) and wouldn’t miss the chance to spice them up with a handful of hilarious comments. My favorite excerpt from the book is probably this one:
Today I went to the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in the Javits Center in New York. I expected an insight in latest developments in design but in the end it was (not surprisingly) just a furniture fair. Anyway, I saw a few interesting things. If you want to go and see for yourself, tomorrow the fair will be open for the public.
Sometimes, silence seems louder than the shrillest noise. In New York, where noise is the norm, silence can pierce your heart and penetrate your soul, until you feel like crying.
6 years after 2 planes pierced the hearts of an entire nation, and penetrated the souls of the Western world, the silence at Ground Zero still screams. And though the pain will never go away, New York is back on its feet. [Read more]
For the past 2 hours I’ve been dwelling mid-air above a calm, bright sea of white, cotton candy clouds.
Vivid images of casualties of cross-Atlantic crusades are safely tugged away in the books of history, and the hunger for the land of milk and honey has been staved off by a club soda, a chicken breast with risotto and season salad, a complementary cracker and cheese, and a chocolate chip cookie.
120 years ago, the people now 30,000ft below me, securely screened underneath the friendly skies, would have risked their life to cross the very same waters for the mere dream of a fresh potato. This goes to prove, like anything else, there’s a past and there’s a future – a prologue and an epilogue. First come the prologue…
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