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pH7 show

I wanted to share the details about an upcoming photography exhibit at the Michael Nelson Gallery in Saugerties, NY. The show features some of the photos of my friend Michel Leroy, including his Rally Biker images, "a portfolio of unrelenting black and white, large scale portraits that represent the diversity of motorcycle culture through the people who keep the spirit and legacy of the community alive."

The pH7 show runs from May 10th - June 20th. Opening reception is this Saturday May 10th from 5-8pm. Consider yourself invited!

(Click image to enlarge.)

The Herald finals bites the dust

My ex-'s 1963 Triumph Herald finally died. It lost a wheel on the way to Roxbury, CT. I wasn't there, thankfully, but had experienced a wheel loss while in the Herald before--on the way back from Baltimore. It's not a good thing when moving cars lose wheels.

The Herald: steering wheel on the wrong side, a turn radius among the tighest of all automobile models ever manufactured, an engine about the size and power of a lawnmower's.

Only the British . . . .

65 Years Ago . . .

Distributorcap NY reminds us that April 19 is the 65th anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

If you're in New York tomorrow (April 18), there's a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Commemoration at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial (83rd Street, on the Promenade) at 2:00 PM. Children from the Metropolitan Montessori School will participate in the ceremony and Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe will speak.

(Photo: a resistance fighter with a homemade flame thrower during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.)

Jeff dances (badly) all over Iowa

See one Jeff Hoskinson dance very badly all over Iowa...

Jeff got around…including to:

*The American Gothic house in Eldon

*Points of great Iowa cheesiness, including Adair’s smiley face water tower, McGregor’s Spook Cave, and the pink elephant in Marquette

*The old frontier fort in Fort Madison

*Lake Okoboji (one of only 3 blue water lakes in the world, the others being Lake Geneva in Switzerland and Lake Louise in Canada)

*The Blue Bunny dairy facility (Blue Bunny ice cream is amazing! but I hate their slick new logo) in LeMars, where I used to attend St. George’s Episcopal Church, a relic of a wee British immigration wave in the 1880’s into NW Iowa (spoiler: they pretty much all ended up going back to England *chuckle*)

*Some of Iowa’s more than 100 state and national parks (alas, not “Call Park” where I spend 100’s of hours with friends when I was growing up in Algona)

*That damn cornfield in Dyersville (I hated Field of Dreams)

*The Surf Ball Room in Clear Lake (where Buddy Holly, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, and 17 year-old Ritchie Valens performed before all three tragically perished later that night when their plane crashed after taking off from Clear Lake in a blizzard—the event Don McLean in the song “America Pie” refers to as “The Day the Music Died”)

*The Little Brown Church in the Vale (72,300 weddings (and counting) since 1855—one of which was that of my uncle and aunt Sid and Kathy Buffington)

*John Wayne’s birthplace in Winterset

*The Roman Catholic kitsch extravaganza that is the nonetheless oddly impressive Grotto of Redemption in West Bend

*One of the old covered bridges of Madison County

*The Vogel windmill in Orange City (the town where I went to college—“Orange” as in the Dutch royal house of Oranje, by the way, not the color -- which didn’t stop the town from idiotically painting their water tower orange. )

*The Sergeant Floyd Monument in Sioux City

*The old double-track railroad bridge in Boone (over the Des Moines River, which likes to flood)

*The wind farm in Alta

*Iowa high school football, one of Iowa’s two unofficial religions (the other being college wrestling) even makes an appearance, as well as RAGBRAI, of course

And more. Of course, there are countless conspicuous absences, like Effigy Mounds National Monument, the Old Capital in Iowa City, the Iowa Wine Trail, and . . . . . . the world’s largest Chee-to in, yes, Algona.

"The Happy Sad" - Extended for 3 weeks due to audience demand

A plug for The Happy Sad, a new one act by an acquaintance of mine, Ken Urban, founder of The Committee production company. He teaches at Harvard currently. The Village Voice and New York Magazine gave it great reviews.

Schedule:
Thu April 10 @ 7pm • Fri April 11 @ 7pm • Sat April 12 @ 7pm • Sun April 13 @ 7pm
Thu April 17 @ 7pm • Fri April 18 @ 9pm • Sat April 19 @ 7pm
Thu April 24 @ 7pm • Fri April 25 @ 7pm • Sat April 26 @ 7pm

Tickets: $20
Buying tickets @ The Flea is easy!
Online:  www.theflea.org
By phone: 212.352.3101
In person at The Flea Box Office, opens 1 hour prior to show time.
Special Committee Discount Code: Use code "COM15" and get $15 tickets for all shows excluding Saturday night.

The Flea Theater is located at 41 White Street, 3 blocks south of Canal, between Broadway and Church.  Subway: ACE/NRQW/JMZ/6 to Canal, 1 to Franklin.

IT'S SCOTLAND WEEK! March 30th to April 6th.

It's that time of year again in NYC, D.C., Toronto, Boston, and other cities around the US and Canada -- It's Scotland Week!

From March 30th to April 6th.

You gotta love opportunities like free haggis at Broadway and West 52nd Street in Manhattan! (April 5) I mean, forget the other events like the Red Hot Chili Peppers in concert and whiskey tastings. We're talkin' an opportunity for haggis!

Oh, and let the count down to St. Andrew's Day begin!

If you're heading to Scotland for holiday, I recommend Potteryhouse B&B near Inverness. This recommendation has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I know the owners, honest. (Congrats, guys, on the first daffodil of spring.)

Tonite: Frontline reveals and makes history

Tonight the investigative news program Frontline features the first of the two-part examination, "Bush's War." It draws on the more than 40 reports that Frontline has done on the "war on terror."

Frontline is also making history with online technology related to their programs. From the website:

Across the entire four-hour Bush's War series that will be streamed online, FRONTLINE will integrate and embed in its video player an array of related interviews, background material and video that can be viewed with just a click. In addition, more than 100 video clips of key moments and events in the Iraq war will be the centerpiece of an annotated master chronology which FRONTLINE will publish on the Bush's War site.

Frontline also continues to offer "Watch Online," a fantastic service providing past programs viewable online. I highly recommend "Secret History of the Credit Card," "The Dark Side," and "News Wars."

Blog Against Theocracy

The March 21-23 weekend "blogswarm" known as Blog Against Theocracy brought a wealth of posts on subjects like the separation of Church and State, freedom of religion, Christian Reconstructionism, Christian Nationalism, the religious right, Creationism, and more.

Also visit First Freedom First, an unofficial partner of the Blog Against Theocracy project and a partnership of the Interfaith Alliance and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU).

Satyagraha coming to The Met

A new production of Philip Glass's opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha, opens at The Metropolitan Opera on April 11. The story concerns Gandhi's crucial years in South Africa that helped prepare him for his influential international leadership role as a non-violent anti-colonial activist later in his life. The opera draws on the ancient Sanskrit text, the Bhagavad Gita. (Click photo to enlarge.)

Arthur C. Clarke: Space elevators, geostationary orbits and more

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, CBE died at the age of 90 yesterday in Sri Lanka, where he'd lived for more than 50 years. I got a text message last night from a friend with the news. I was a big fan of Clarke's. He provided the first in-depth description of using geostationary orbits for communication satellites, popularized the idea of the space elevator, and wrote a lot of good science fiction, including his early short stories "Rescue Party" and "Encounter in the Dawn," on which in part was based, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film he and Stanley Kubrick wrote and created. Clarke worked on the novelization of 2001 concurrently with the film project. The film is widely considered by historians and film professionals and buffs alike to be one of the most significant movies of all time. NASA's Mars Odyssey mission was named after Clarke's tale. Clarke also has an asteroid and a dinosaur species named after him. The Clarke Orbit is named after him; it's the orbital area into which most man-made satellites are placed. Clarke also helped cover the American moon landing for the BBC.

Some of the things imagined in the film have come to pass, including:

*Flat-screen computer monitors (simulated by rear projection in the film)
*Small, portable, flat-screen television sets
*Glass cockpits in spacecraft
*The proliferation of TV stations (the BBC's channels numbering at least 12)
*Telephone numbers with more digits than in the 1960s (to permit direct national and international dialing)
*The endurance of corporations like IBM, Aeroflot, Howard Johnson's, and Hilton Hotels
*The use of credit cards with data stripes (the card Heywood Floyd inserts into the telephone is American Express; a close-up photo of the prop shows that it has a barcode rather than a magnetic strip, as some present-day ID cards have PDF417 barcodes)
*Biometric identification (voice-print identification on arrival at the space station)
*The shape of the Pan Am Orbital Clipper was echoed in the X-34, a prototype craft that underwent towed flight tests from 1999 to 2001
*Electronic darkening of a normally transparent surface (Bowman uses a helmet control to darken his visor during an EVA)
*A computer that can defeat a human being at chess
*Personal in-flight entertainment displays on the backs of seats in commercial aircraft
*Voice recognition / voice controlled computing (although not as powerful as HAL) are seen today in things as simple as telephone systems and video games.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

"I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy." - Arthur C. Clarke

"Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories." - Arthur C. Clarke