Merry Christmas

Reforestation Lite (Green)

This spring, officials in Yunnan Province in southern China beautified Laoshou Mountain, which had been used as a quarry, by spraying green paint over acres of rock.
-The New York Times

Someone painted this mountain green, but who?

Navigating the Bronx

It’s nine on a sunny morning, I’m sitting down to breakfast, and the whole room starts to tilt. The sound of automatic weapons fire cracks nearby, and I instinctively reach for my coffee cup, my bowl of cereal, and do a quick scan of the room to make sure nothing is about to topple over. I’m not experiencing Armageddon, a major earthquake, or a terrorist attack, just the start of an average morning at home.

Let me explain.

Scheme: Get Rich

Your money problems are over, friends. These two siblings "personally both wrote" an e-book that will teach you how to make $100 an hour, honest. Brother says, "I've bought new DJ equipment, front row seats at concerts, taken girls out and been able to spend over a $100 at the bar on expensive drinks without a blink of my eye." They have the pictures to prove how good the good life really is.

I go out for a nice dinner EVERY weekend...
WITHOUT having to check my bank account!

Buying another round of

Shots of PATRON!

Let me buy you a drank!

Spending time at theme parks... ON A WEEKNIGHT!

Hanging out with my famous music industry friends

VIP status at shows.

DON'T WORRY GUYS, I'LL PICK UP THE TAB!

For MSNBC, hip + fuel-efficient + cheap = DUMB

Sign in to your Hotmail account, and you are welcomed by vapid headlines linking to MSNBC content. After a long line of zingers, ("Too Tall to Date?"), here is the latest, which proclaims the environmentally friendly, 40 mpg (estimated), small footprint Smart Car to be "dumb" for seemingly no other reason than its name invites a not-so-clever inverse adjective. Granted, the U.S. distributors of the car invite such mockery, claiming that the cars are produced in "smartville," wherever that is, but MSNBC's cheeky headlines start to annoy, especially when they are followed by nothing that backs them up--in this case an interview with Smart USA's president David C. Schembri, who discusses the vehicle's safety features, gas mileage, and thirty thousand preorders. Like many other major media outlets, MSNBC misses the mark, putting an oddly negative spin on what might have been reported as an interesting (and to some of us, heartening) public cry for a smaller, more fuel-efficient automobile.