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Aug. 22nd, 2010 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyOUTRAGE OVER PLANS TO BUILD LIBRARY NEXT TO SARAH PALIN
An article on the Free Store in Brooklyn
April Gariepy, 30, wheeled her bike beneath the white tent on Saturday afternoon looking for a wire basket she could attach to her handlebars. A moment later, Sharika Barrow, 17, approached, gazed at the shelves of books, clothing and other items displayed beneath the tent, then wondered aloud what sort of place she was visiting.
“It’s a free store,” Ms. Gariepy replied, having made that determination herself just a few moments earlier.
After browsing, the two emerged from beneath the tent without selecting anything but both said they would probably return.
“I just came from the Brooklyn Flea,” Ms. Gariepy, said. “This is kind of like the same thing, but everything at the flea is higher priced.”
For six weeks, a group of people have been engaged in an unusual project in Bedford-Stuyvesant that they are calling the Brooklyn Free Store, where everything is available for the taking and nothing is for sale.
The name of the store is painted on a purple banner hanging from a chain link fence fronting a bare dirt lot on Walworth Street, near De Kalb Avenue. Behind the fence a blue plastic tarp is stretched over a white tent, covering an array of items stacked atop sheets of weathered plywood.
A handwritten sign reads “Take what you want. Share what you think others may enjoy (not limited to material items).”
There were cans of green beans and a pair of used brown wingtips beneath the tarp on Saturday, along with a used toaster oven, a flashlight and a galvanized metal bucket.
There were books by such disparate writers as Plato (“The Republic”) and Tina Brown (“The Diana Chronicles,” which details the life and times of the former Princess of Wales).
And there were dozens of items of clothing, including a brown fur coat and matching hat.
Organizers of the store said it was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of recycling and to offer an alternative to mainstream capitalism. It has no owners or customers, only participants, say the people who started it. Because everything there is free, the store has no official hours and it is never locked.
“New York is world renowned for having the best garbage," said Myles Emery, 34, an organizer of the store. “There could be free stores everywhere.”
Most of the items in the store are donated and a few of them are gleaned from a wealth of serviceable objects that are discarded on the streets each day. The number and nature of the items beneath the tarp vary, organizers said, adding that people have dropped off a digital camera, an electric stove and a TiVo with a recording capacity of 40 hours.
Some of those who started the Free Store in early July had also played a role in operating an earlier incarnation, which was run out of a storefront in Williamsburg from 1999 until 2005. Both stores drew inspiration from the original Diggers, a group of agrarian utopians in 17th-century England, as well as from another group that adopted the same name more than 40 years ago and opened storefronts in San Francisco and in New York where items were dropped off and picked up without any money changing hands.
About two dozen people stopped by the Walworth Street store over the course of four hours on Saturday. Some merely looked. Krissa Henderson, 25, from Bushwick, took some gardening books. Gregory Coleman, 54, from Bedford-Stuyvesant, left with wool socks.
Others arrived to drop things off. Caryn Prescott, 41, donated some clothes and cosmetics, and Eddie Ballard, 34, from Crown Heights, who came across the store by chance, contributed a recyclable tote bag he happened to have with him, mainly out of a sense of admiration for the project.
“There is something about the communal aspect of this place that appeals to me,” Mr. Ballard said. “I felt like I wanted to give something just to be a part of it.”
There's stupid people who run their A/Cs for days, even when they're not home, because it's "free", that is, included in their utilities.
In a handsome prewar building in Greenwich Village, a tenant struggled to remember the last time she turned off her air-conditioner. Upstairs, a young couple admitted to having let the window unit run for four days while they went out of town for a funeral, thinking it would be nice, amid the July heat wave, to return to a cool apartment.
Another resident of the 160-unit building, on Seventh Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, says he leaves the air-conditioning on when he goes to work, when he sleeps at his girlfriend’s apartment, even when he leaves the country on vacation — and only partly out of sympathy for his cat, Kitty.
“My A.C. is pretty much running 24/7,” Kitty’s owner, Michael Perlo, a 28-year-old television producer, said with more bravado than guilt. “Not having to pay for electricity makes me a little bit more reckless.”
Forget round-the-clock doormen or views of Central Park. This sweltering summer, the most coveted New York real estate amenity is two little words that in other times can go unnoticed: “utilities included.” Mr. Perlo and his neighbors live in a building where not just heat and hot water, but electricity, is part of their monthly rent — a more-common-than-you’d-think arrangement caused by old-fashioned wiring in which a building has a single “master meter” tracking power use rather than individual meters tied to each tenant. They can blast their air-conditioners all summer long without paying a dollar extra.
Con Edison counts about 250,000 apartments across the city, not including public housing projects, that do not have individual meters tracking electricity consumption, compared with roughly 1.75 million that do. One large management company, Cooper Square, estimates that these units expend at least 30 percent more electricity year-round than their counterparts.
So while lucky tenants across the city relax beneath arctic gusts, their landlords and building managers are left to worry whether these weeks of record-challenging heat will break the bank.
And regardless of who pays the electric bills, there is a considerable environmental cost: a 2009 report said that residential buildings account for 39 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, and 40 percent of the energy that buildings use is spent on heating and cooling.
“Using it when you’re not home is outright irresponsible and disrespectful of all the rest of us,” Dan Hendrick of the New York League of Conservation Voters said. “There’s no good way to look at this. The worst thing is, you’re warming our climate to cool your apartment for your own comfort.”
But as any introductory economics course might explain, tenants who blast air-conditioners on their landlord’s dime are making rational, predictable choices.
“This is Homo economicus coming out in full feather,” said Prof. Lawrence J. White of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. “When something is free, until some point of satiation, you will take up a lot of it.”
New York State’s Energy and Research Development Authority, in part out of concern over the environmental effects of excessive air-conditioning, is planning to offer building owners financial incentives to install “submeters” that measure individual consumption, a major construction project that can require a significant upfront expense.
Under an earlier incentive program, the state helped convert 426 buildings in the city over the last decade, said Jeffrey Gordon, a department spokesman.
The new conversion project will focus on submeters, which track individual electricity use but still feed a single utility account paid by the building owner or manager. (Some landlords then charge tenants based on actual consumption.) That is simpler than individual metering and is seen as an improvement over master meters because it introduces a level of accountability, according to state energy officials. Con Edison estimates that there are 30,000 apartments in the city with submeters.
David Kuperberg, the chief executive officer of Cooper Square, compared two co-op buildings he manages on the Upper East Side. Annually, the one with a master meter used 1.38 kilowatt hours per square foot more than the one with submeters, he said, costing an additional $52,000 a year. Over all, Cooper Square’s 45 or so master-metered buildings have energy costs 14 to 24 percent higher than their submetered counterparts, Mr. Kuperberg said.
But installing submeters almost always sets off a battle with tenants who are loath to give up what they see as a perk, even if it could lower their rent or maintenance charges.
“Many of these properties have older populations, and some people are scaring them, saying that if you do this your costs are going to go up,” Mr. Kuperberg said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Indeed, some tenants in Mr. Perlo’s building in the Village have become upset at a submeter plan in the works by the management company, Northbrook Partners.
Mr. Perlo said that Northbrook had agreed to knock $150 off his monthly rent; but some residents fear their air-conditioning habits would surpass that.
“It’s the end of an era,” lamented his neighbor, a telecommuter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering her landlord. “It was a great treat.”
Northbrook officials declined to discuss the matter.
Two years ago, a similar kerfuffle unfolded at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the famed middle-class enclaves overlooking the East River that had long offered “free” — at least to tenants — electricity.
Tishman Speyer Properties, which bought the complexes in 2006, announced plans to install individual meters in each unit as part of an effort to reduce energy use by 20 percent.
The news distressed some long-term residents, sparking newspaper articles and blog posts, including one that announced, “No More Free Electricity.”
Tishman Speyer abandoned the plans amid larger financial problems that ended with a default on the properties.
Danielle, a social worker who asked that her last name not be used, definitely considered free air-conditioning among the “pros” for the two-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town that she moved into last month.
She and her roommate have kept their two units running almost constantly ever since, partly for her purse-size dog, who is in the house all day, but also for that moment, after trekking through the sweaty subways and steaming sidewalks of the city in summer, when they open the door and get to feel a chill.
“I don’t want to walk into a hot apartment at the end of the day,” Danielle said, simply. “It’s nice to not have to worry about it.”
An Indian Church’s Colorful Tribute to Mary
There are pictures
Without doubt, many more people line the sidewalks to see the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan than to watch the St. Mary Malankara Indian Orthodox Church’s annual Assumption Day Parade, which began here on Sunday with the usual blowing of the kumbu horn and the dancing of the koladi by the congregation’s teenage girls, dressed in saris and banging sticks.
But the Indians’ parade has its longtime devotees: neighborhood residents, mostly, who say they look forward to the procession because it is practically the only time when the people of the congregation venture outside, not counting getting in and out of their cars.
None of St. Mary’s 100 or so parishioners live in West Sayville, a predominantly white, middle-class community on Long Island’s South Shore where in the last few decades a surfeit of empty church buildings has attracted various religious communities on wheels.
The Indian congregants drive in from Queens, Brooklyn, western Nassau County and even New Jersey and Staten Island, to worship in a former Dutch Reformed Church building they bought in 1992. Inside, they speak Malayalam, the language of the Indian province where most have their roots, and they worship according to an Orthodox Christian liturgy that traces its origins to the teachings of the apostle Thomas.
At an hour or more, their road time is longer than the average trip to church, but national surveys show that most Americans travel farther to religious services than they used to, just as they journey farther to work. Except for Orthodox Jews, who are required to do so, hardly anyone walks to a house of worship anymore — a shift in the landscape that may be best illustrated by the now-unimaginable tableau of Norman Rockwell’s 1953 work “Walking to Church.”
In West Sayville, the congregation and its parade have assumed a mysterious, almost mythical status, despite the procession’s official permit and the three Suffolk County police cars assigned to traffic control.
“If you didn’t actually see this with your own eyes, and some people around here haven’t, you might think I was making it up,” said Christopher Bodkin, a local historian and a former town councilman. “I mean it is so rococo, wonderful, Hindu-esque, with the flower petals, the girls holding the decorative parasols — everything but the elephants.”
On Sunday, people watched with a mixture of fascination and neighborly nonchalance as the procession made its way around the block, marking the annual observance of Mary’s ascent into heaven. At the front was a float with posters of Mary and Thomas and other saints perched on cottony white clouds. Then came the men playing the Indian kumbu horn and chenda drums, the women keeping time with little brass cymbals called Ilathalam, then the littlest girls in angel wings and then the teenagers dancing.
The congregation’s women followed behind, pastel-colored saris billowing in the breeze as they flung paper flowers of red and blue. Bringing up the rear was a car carrying the Rev. Paulose Adai, the parish priest, whose plaintive singing of the devotional hymns was greatly amplified from a loudspeaker on the vehicle’s roof.
“Usually, they’re very quiet people,” said Kathy Ahern, a neighbor, shouting to be heard over the din. “I mean, this is the only day we hear anything from them at all.” She laughed.
Across the street, some people sat on their porches, glancing occasionally over the tops of their newspapers at the passing parade.
Malankara Christians trace their origins to the first century A.D., when St. Thomas is said to have taken the heavily traveled trade route from the eastern Mediterranean to Kerala, a province on the southwest coast of India where today about 20 percent of the population is Christian. They have had churches in the United States since the early 20th century, but have grown significantly since the 1970s, when immigration policy opened the doors to many nurses trained in the Christian hospitals of Kerala. Nationwide there are about 100 parishes.
Though the churches hew closely to Orthodox Christian liturgy, members also sustain many Indian cultural traditions. Worshipers remove their shoes before entering the church. Men and women sit separately.
And as is still customary in large segments of Indian society, young people accept the notion that their parents will be deeply involved in their selection of a mate.
“It’s not, like, ‘arranged marriage.’ But your parents have to approve of him, and have a meeting with his parents, and you probably wouldn’t marry anyone outside your religion,” said Judy Geevarghese, 30, who is married to Christopher Geevarghese, 28, whom she met at a cousin’s wedding in another St. Mary Malankara parish. They have a daughter, Arianna, 19 months old.
Varghese Poulos, one of the congregation’s founders, said church members originally met in a rented basement in Astoria, Queens. Every Sunday, it had to be completely furnished — from the portable altar to the folding chairs.
Finding out that there was an empty church for sale, even an hour’s drive away, was “like a miracle to us,” he said.
Mr. Bodkin, the former councilman, suggested there was an oddity in the move: The Indian Orthodox congregation, with its bells and drums, had taken over what was once an outpost of the strictest Calvinist worship.
There is no Dutch Reformed Church in the United States anymore. It has splintered into several new churches. But Jim Stasny, a former pastor of one of those offspring churches in West Sayville, who now lives in Washington, D.C., said he was pleased that someone was putting the building to good use.
“It would be better, perhaps, if they weren’t honoring saints, of course — we don’t believe in saints, you know,” he said. “But hey, things have changed. We wish those folks well.”
An editorial on people in Hong Kong who raise their children to speak English.
I had always presumed that speaking to your child in your native tongue was the most natural thing in the world. Apparently not everyone thinks so.
When we held a birthday party for our two-year-old daughter several months ago, I had a bit of a shock.
The first sign came when a four-year-old Chinese boy looked annoyed and frustrated when I asked in Cantonese what snacks he would like from the table.
“No, no, no!” he yelled in English. His mother promptly translated what I said into English.
This baffled me. The boy was born and bred here in Hong Kong, and his parents are both native speakers of the dominant Cantonese dialect, but they speak to their children only in their less-than-perfect English.
It turned out they have a simple reason: They want their children to get into a prestigious international school.
They worry that if their children speak Cantonese at home they will not learn enough English to pass the interview.
The mother is delighted with her achievement. Her son has been accepted by an international kindergarten and her younger girl’s first words were all in English.
I quickly realized that she wasn’t the only one who thought like this. I noticed that several other parents at the birthday party were also speaking broken English to their children.
“I will show you how does it work,” said one father in heavily-accented English, showing a toy train to his 19-month-old son.
He admitted with slight embarrassment that his English pronunciation and grammar were not great, and trying to communicate with his toddler in a language he himself is struggling with has led to problems.
“One day I was trying to tell him this is how you button your shirt,” he said, switching into Cantonese. “But then I couldn’t say it in English, so I had to ring up a friend and ask.”
I asked: Doesn’t he think it is better to talk to his toddler in the language he is most at ease in?
“I think you’ve lived abroad for too long — you don’t understand what parents here have to think about,” the boy’s mother said. “Competition for international schools is fierce. If we don’t make sure he speaks English now, he won’t pass the interview.”
I looked at her very cute toddler, who was busy chasing a ball on the floor, and felt a bit sad.
The boy is not yet two, and he was still babbling away in baby words. Yet in this competitive world, it is considered better for him to be exposed only to English, a language that his parents are not confident speaking but one they believe is more valuable than their native tongue.
More and more, ambitious parents in Hong Kong are giving their children a head-start in English by putting them into English-speaking play groups, kindergartens and international schools. At these elite institutions, Mandarin Chinese is sometimes taught as a second language.
As for the local Cantonese dialect, who cares?
I am saddened. What will happen to those age-old nursery rhymes our grandmothers taught us, the songs we sang at kindergarten, those Tang-dynasty poems that every preschool child was taught to recite?
And surely the classic tales of the “Twenty-four pious sons” — the stories that the Chinese have used to teach their children about the Confucian virtue of filial piety since the 14th century — can’t have the same cultural resonance when translated into English.
Besides, Cantonese carries echoes of ancient Chinese that no longer exist in the official Mandarin. It is a lively language full of colorful expressions.
It is our heritage, and if we don’t pass it on, who will?
When these children are not taught to speak the language of their ancestors, a connection with their native culture is bound to be lost.
And when they grow up, how will they see themselves? Will they still have a sense of belonging to Chinese culture? Will this society’s future elites be international in outlook, yet somehow rootless in culture?
Perhaps I’m being alarmist, but I wonder whether there will be a day when we in Hong Kong come to regret the decline of our language. By that time, it may be too late.
In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming
The floods battered New England, then Nashville, then Arkansas, then Oklahoma — and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the lives of 20 million people.
The summer’s heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record.
Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global warming is causing more weather extremes.
The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably.
“The climate is changing,” said Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. “Extreme events are occurring with greater frequency, and in many cases with greater intensity.”
He described excessive heat, in particular, as “consistent with our understanding of how the climate responds to increasing greenhouse gases.”
Theory suggests that a world warming up because of those gases will feature heavier rainstorms in summer, bigger snowstorms in winter, more intense droughts in at least some places and more record-breaking heat waves. Scientists and government reports say the statistical evidence shows that much of this is starting to happen.
But the averages do not necessarily make it easier to link specific weather events, like a given flood or hurricane or heat wave, to climate change. Most climate scientists are reluctant to go that far, noting that weather was characterized by remarkable variability long before humans began burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA in New York. “If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.”
In Russia, that kind of scientific caution might once have been embraced. Russia has long played a reluctant, and sometimes obstructionist, role in global negotiations over limiting climate change, perhaps in part because it expected economic benefits from the warming of its vast Siberian hinterland.
But the extreme heat wave, and accompanying drought and wildfires, in normally cool central Russia seems to be prompting a shift in thinking.
“Everyone is talking about climate change now,” President Dmitri A. Medvedev told the Russian Security Council this month. “Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.”
Thermometer measurements show that the earth has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution, when humans began pumping enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. For this January through July, average temperatures were the warmest on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Friday.
The warming has moved in fits and starts, and the cumulative increase may sound modest. But it is an average over the entire planet, representing an immense amount of added heat, and is only the beginning of a trend that most experts believe will worsen substantially.
If the earth were not warming, random variations in the weather should cause about the same number of record-breaking high temperatures and record-breaking low temperatures over a given period. But climatologists have long theorized that in a warming world, the added heat would cause more record highs and fewer record lows.
The statistics suggest that is exactly what is happening. In the United States these days, about two record highs are being set for every record low, telltale evidence that amid all the random variation of weather, the trend is toward a warmer climate.
Climate-change skeptics dispute such statistical arguments, contending that climatologists do not know enough about long-range patterns to draw definitive links between global warming and weather extremes. They cite events like the heat and drought of the 1930s as evidence that extreme weather is nothing new. Those were indeed dire heat waves, contributing to the Dust Bowl, which dislocated millions of Americans and changed the population structure of the United States.
But most researchers trained in climate analysis, while acknowledging that weather data in parts of the world are not as good as they would like, offer evidence to show that weather extremes are getting worse.
A United States government report published in 2008 noted that “in recent decades, most of North America has been experiencing more unusually hot days and nights, fewer unusually cold days and nights, and fewer frost days. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense.”
The statistics suggest that the Eastern United States may be getting wetter as the arid West dries out further. Places that depend on the runoff from spring snow melt appear particularly vulnerable to climate change, because higher temperatures are making the snow melt earlier, leaving the ground parched by midsummer. That can worsen any drought that develops.
“Global warming, ironically, can actually increase the amount of snow you get,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “But it also means the snow season is shorter.”
In general, the research suggests that global warming will worsen climate extremes across much of the planet. As in the United States, wet areas will get wetter, the scientists say, while dry areas get drier.
But the patterns are not uniform; changes in wind and ocean circulation could cause unexpected effects, with some areas even cooling down in a warmer world. And long-established weather patterns, like the periodic variations in the Pacific Ocean known as El Niño, will still contribute to unusual events, like heavy rains and cool temperatures in normally arid parts of California.
Scientists say they expect stronger storms, in winter and summer, largely because of the physical principle that warmer air can hold more water vapor.
Typically, a storm of the sort that inundated parts of Tennessee in May, dumping as much as 19 inches of rain over two days, draws moisture from an area much larger than the storm itself. With temperatures rising and more water vapor in the air, such storms can pull in more moisture and thus rain or snow more heavily than storms of old.
It will be a year or two before climate scientists publish definitive analyses of the Russian heat wave and the Pakistani floods, which might shed light on the role of climate change, if any. Some scientists suspect that they were caused or worsened by an unusual kink in the jet stream, the high-altitude flow of air that helps determine weather patterns, though that itself might be linked to climate change. Certain recent weather events were so extreme that a few scientists are shedding their traditional reluctance to ascribe specific disasters to global warming.
After a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed an estimated 50,000 people, the worst such catastrophe for that region in the historical record, scientists published detailed analyses suggesting that it would not have been as severe in a climate uninfluenced by greenhouse gases.
And Dr. Trenberth has published work suggesting that Hurricane Katrina dumped at least somewhat more rain on the Gulf Coast because the storm was intensified by global warming.
“It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability,” Dr. Trenberth said. “Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In regards to the last article, it's worth remembering that each of the last three decades has been the hottest on record. (Yes, that sentence makes sense.) Which means that if you're my age (anywhere under 30), you've never been alive for the old normal. Heck, if you're less than, say, ten years older than me you don't really *remember* those times either. It's easy to say "Oh, it's not different than when I was a kid" (although exorbitant snowfall this year DID get a lot of people commenting that it "always was like this" when they were young), but if when you were a kid wasn't that long ago, well, you don't know, do you?
An article on the Free Store in Brooklyn
April Gariepy, 30, wheeled her bike beneath the white tent on Saturday afternoon looking for a wire basket she could attach to her handlebars. A moment later, Sharika Barrow, 17, approached, gazed at the shelves of books, clothing and other items displayed beneath the tent, then wondered aloud what sort of place she was visiting.
“It’s a free store,” Ms. Gariepy replied, having made that determination herself just a few moments earlier.
After browsing, the two emerged from beneath the tent without selecting anything but both said they would probably return.
“I just came from the Brooklyn Flea,” Ms. Gariepy, said. “This is kind of like the same thing, but everything at the flea is higher priced.”
For six weeks, a group of people have been engaged in an unusual project in Bedford-Stuyvesant that they are calling the Brooklyn Free Store, where everything is available for the taking and nothing is for sale.
The name of the store is painted on a purple banner hanging from a chain link fence fronting a bare dirt lot on Walworth Street, near De Kalb Avenue. Behind the fence a blue plastic tarp is stretched over a white tent, covering an array of items stacked atop sheets of weathered plywood.
A handwritten sign reads “Take what you want. Share what you think others may enjoy (not limited to material items).”
There were cans of green beans and a pair of used brown wingtips beneath the tarp on Saturday, along with a used toaster oven, a flashlight and a galvanized metal bucket.
There were books by such disparate writers as Plato (“The Republic”) and Tina Brown (“The Diana Chronicles,” which details the life and times of the former Princess of Wales).
And there were dozens of items of clothing, including a brown fur coat and matching hat.
Organizers of the store said it was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of recycling and to offer an alternative to mainstream capitalism. It has no owners or customers, only participants, say the people who started it. Because everything there is free, the store has no official hours and it is never locked.
“New York is world renowned for having the best garbage," said Myles Emery, 34, an organizer of the store. “There could be free stores everywhere.”
Most of the items in the store are donated and a few of them are gleaned from a wealth of serviceable objects that are discarded on the streets each day. The number and nature of the items beneath the tarp vary, organizers said, adding that people have dropped off a digital camera, an electric stove and a TiVo with a recording capacity of 40 hours.
Some of those who started the Free Store in early July had also played a role in operating an earlier incarnation, which was run out of a storefront in Williamsburg from 1999 until 2005. Both stores drew inspiration from the original Diggers, a group of agrarian utopians in 17th-century England, as well as from another group that adopted the same name more than 40 years ago and opened storefronts in San Francisco and in New York where items were dropped off and picked up without any money changing hands.
About two dozen people stopped by the Walworth Street store over the course of four hours on Saturday. Some merely looked. Krissa Henderson, 25, from Bushwick, took some gardening books. Gregory Coleman, 54, from Bedford-Stuyvesant, left with wool socks.
Others arrived to drop things off. Caryn Prescott, 41, donated some clothes and cosmetics, and Eddie Ballard, 34, from Crown Heights, who came across the store by chance, contributed a recyclable tote bag he happened to have with him, mainly out of a sense of admiration for the project.
“There is something about the communal aspect of this place that appeals to me,” Mr. Ballard said. “I felt like I wanted to give something just to be a part of it.”
There's stupid people who run their A/Cs for days, even when they're not home, because it's "free", that is, included in their utilities.
In a handsome prewar building in Greenwich Village, a tenant struggled to remember the last time she turned off her air-conditioner. Upstairs, a young couple admitted to having let the window unit run for four days while they went out of town for a funeral, thinking it would be nice, amid the July heat wave, to return to a cool apartment.
Another resident of the 160-unit building, on Seventh Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets, says he leaves the air-conditioning on when he goes to work, when he sleeps at his girlfriend’s apartment, even when he leaves the country on vacation — and only partly out of sympathy for his cat, Kitty.
“My A.C. is pretty much running 24/7,” Kitty’s owner, Michael Perlo, a 28-year-old television producer, said with more bravado than guilt. “Not having to pay for electricity makes me a little bit more reckless.”
Forget round-the-clock doormen or views of Central Park. This sweltering summer, the most coveted New York real estate amenity is two little words that in other times can go unnoticed: “utilities included.” Mr. Perlo and his neighbors live in a building where not just heat and hot water, but electricity, is part of their monthly rent — a more-common-than-you’d-think arrangement caused by old-fashioned wiring in which a building has a single “master meter” tracking power use rather than individual meters tied to each tenant. They can blast their air-conditioners all summer long without paying a dollar extra.
Con Edison counts about 250,000 apartments across the city, not including public housing projects, that do not have individual meters tracking electricity consumption, compared with roughly 1.75 million that do. One large management company, Cooper Square, estimates that these units expend at least 30 percent more electricity year-round than their counterparts.
So while lucky tenants across the city relax beneath arctic gusts, their landlords and building managers are left to worry whether these weeks of record-challenging heat will break the bank.
And regardless of who pays the electric bills, there is a considerable environmental cost: a 2009 report said that residential buildings account for 39 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, and 40 percent of the energy that buildings use is spent on heating and cooling.
“Using it when you’re not home is outright irresponsible and disrespectful of all the rest of us,” Dan Hendrick of the New York League of Conservation Voters said. “There’s no good way to look at this. The worst thing is, you’re warming our climate to cool your apartment for your own comfort.”
But as any introductory economics course might explain, tenants who blast air-conditioners on their landlord’s dime are making rational, predictable choices.
“This is Homo economicus coming out in full feather,” said Prof. Lawrence J. White of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. “When something is free, until some point of satiation, you will take up a lot of it.”
New York State’s Energy and Research Development Authority, in part out of concern over the environmental effects of excessive air-conditioning, is planning to offer building owners financial incentives to install “submeters” that measure individual consumption, a major construction project that can require a significant upfront expense.
Under an earlier incentive program, the state helped convert 426 buildings in the city over the last decade, said Jeffrey Gordon, a department spokesman.
The new conversion project will focus on submeters, which track individual electricity use but still feed a single utility account paid by the building owner or manager. (Some landlords then charge tenants based on actual consumption.) That is simpler than individual metering and is seen as an improvement over master meters because it introduces a level of accountability, according to state energy officials. Con Edison estimates that there are 30,000 apartments in the city with submeters.
David Kuperberg, the chief executive officer of Cooper Square, compared two co-op buildings he manages on the Upper East Side. Annually, the one with a master meter used 1.38 kilowatt hours per square foot more than the one with submeters, he said, costing an additional $52,000 a year. Over all, Cooper Square’s 45 or so master-metered buildings have energy costs 14 to 24 percent higher than their submetered counterparts, Mr. Kuperberg said.
But installing submeters almost always sets off a battle with tenants who are loath to give up what they see as a perk, even if it could lower their rent or maintenance charges.
“Many of these properties have older populations, and some people are scaring them, saying that if you do this your costs are going to go up,” Mr. Kuperberg said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Indeed, some tenants in Mr. Perlo’s building in the Village have become upset at a submeter plan in the works by the management company, Northbrook Partners.
Mr. Perlo said that Northbrook had agreed to knock $150 off his monthly rent; but some residents fear their air-conditioning habits would surpass that.
“It’s the end of an era,” lamented his neighbor, a telecommuter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering her landlord. “It was a great treat.”
Northbrook officials declined to discuss the matter.
Two years ago, a similar kerfuffle unfolded at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the famed middle-class enclaves overlooking the East River that had long offered “free” — at least to tenants — electricity.
Tishman Speyer Properties, which bought the complexes in 2006, announced plans to install individual meters in each unit as part of an effort to reduce energy use by 20 percent.
The news distressed some long-term residents, sparking newspaper articles and blog posts, including one that announced, “No More Free Electricity.”
Tishman Speyer abandoned the plans amid larger financial problems that ended with a default on the properties.
Danielle, a social worker who asked that her last name not be used, definitely considered free air-conditioning among the “pros” for the two-bedroom apartment in Stuyvesant Town that she moved into last month.
She and her roommate have kept their two units running almost constantly ever since, partly for her purse-size dog, who is in the house all day, but also for that moment, after trekking through the sweaty subways and steaming sidewalks of the city in summer, when they open the door and get to feel a chill.
“I don’t want to walk into a hot apartment at the end of the day,” Danielle said, simply. “It’s nice to not have to worry about it.”
An Indian Church’s Colorful Tribute to Mary
There are pictures
Without doubt, many more people line the sidewalks to see the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan than to watch the St. Mary Malankara Indian Orthodox Church’s annual Assumption Day Parade, which began here on Sunday with the usual blowing of the kumbu horn and the dancing of the koladi by the congregation’s teenage girls, dressed in saris and banging sticks.
But the Indians’ parade has its longtime devotees: neighborhood residents, mostly, who say they look forward to the procession because it is practically the only time when the people of the congregation venture outside, not counting getting in and out of their cars.
None of St. Mary’s 100 or so parishioners live in West Sayville, a predominantly white, middle-class community on Long Island’s South Shore where in the last few decades a surfeit of empty church buildings has attracted various religious communities on wheels.
The Indian congregants drive in from Queens, Brooklyn, western Nassau County and even New Jersey and Staten Island, to worship in a former Dutch Reformed Church building they bought in 1992. Inside, they speak Malayalam, the language of the Indian province where most have their roots, and they worship according to an Orthodox Christian liturgy that traces its origins to the teachings of the apostle Thomas.
At an hour or more, their road time is longer than the average trip to church, but national surveys show that most Americans travel farther to religious services than they used to, just as they journey farther to work. Except for Orthodox Jews, who are required to do so, hardly anyone walks to a house of worship anymore — a shift in the landscape that may be best illustrated by the now-unimaginable tableau of Norman Rockwell’s 1953 work “Walking to Church.”
In West Sayville, the congregation and its parade have assumed a mysterious, almost mythical status, despite the procession’s official permit and the three Suffolk County police cars assigned to traffic control.
“If you didn’t actually see this with your own eyes, and some people around here haven’t, you might think I was making it up,” said Christopher Bodkin, a local historian and a former town councilman. “I mean it is so rococo, wonderful, Hindu-esque, with the flower petals, the girls holding the decorative parasols — everything but the elephants.”
On Sunday, people watched with a mixture of fascination and neighborly nonchalance as the procession made its way around the block, marking the annual observance of Mary’s ascent into heaven. At the front was a float with posters of Mary and Thomas and other saints perched on cottony white clouds. Then came the men playing the Indian kumbu horn and chenda drums, the women keeping time with little brass cymbals called Ilathalam, then the littlest girls in angel wings and then the teenagers dancing.
The congregation’s women followed behind, pastel-colored saris billowing in the breeze as they flung paper flowers of red and blue. Bringing up the rear was a car carrying the Rev. Paulose Adai, the parish priest, whose plaintive singing of the devotional hymns was greatly amplified from a loudspeaker on the vehicle’s roof.
“Usually, they’re very quiet people,” said Kathy Ahern, a neighbor, shouting to be heard over the din. “I mean, this is the only day we hear anything from them at all.” She laughed.
Across the street, some people sat on their porches, glancing occasionally over the tops of their newspapers at the passing parade.
Malankara Christians trace their origins to the first century A.D., when St. Thomas is said to have taken the heavily traveled trade route from the eastern Mediterranean to Kerala, a province on the southwest coast of India where today about 20 percent of the population is Christian. They have had churches in the United States since the early 20th century, but have grown significantly since the 1970s, when immigration policy opened the doors to many nurses trained in the Christian hospitals of Kerala. Nationwide there are about 100 parishes.
Though the churches hew closely to Orthodox Christian liturgy, members also sustain many Indian cultural traditions. Worshipers remove their shoes before entering the church. Men and women sit separately.
And as is still customary in large segments of Indian society, young people accept the notion that their parents will be deeply involved in their selection of a mate.
“It’s not, like, ‘arranged marriage.’ But your parents have to approve of him, and have a meeting with his parents, and you probably wouldn’t marry anyone outside your religion,” said Judy Geevarghese, 30, who is married to Christopher Geevarghese, 28, whom she met at a cousin’s wedding in another St. Mary Malankara parish. They have a daughter, Arianna, 19 months old.
Varghese Poulos, one of the congregation’s founders, said church members originally met in a rented basement in Astoria, Queens. Every Sunday, it had to be completely furnished — from the portable altar to the folding chairs.
Finding out that there was an empty church for sale, even an hour’s drive away, was “like a miracle to us,” he said.
Mr. Bodkin, the former councilman, suggested there was an oddity in the move: The Indian Orthodox congregation, with its bells and drums, had taken over what was once an outpost of the strictest Calvinist worship.
There is no Dutch Reformed Church in the United States anymore. It has splintered into several new churches. But Jim Stasny, a former pastor of one of those offspring churches in West Sayville, who now lives in Washington, D.C., said he was pleased that someone was putting the building to good use.
“It would be better, perhaps, if they weren’t honoring saints, of course — we don’t believe in saints, you know,” he said. “But hey, things have changed. We wish those folks well.”
An editorial on people in Hong Kong who raise their children to speak English.
I had always presumed that speaking to your child in your native tongue was the most natural thing in the world. Apparently not everyone thinks so.
When we held a birthday party for our two-year-old daughter several months ago, I had a bit of a shock.
The first sign came when a four-year-old Chinese boy looked annoyed and frustrated when I asked in Cantonese what snacks he would like from the table.
“No, no, no!” he yelled in English. His mother promptly translated what I said into English.
This baffled me. The boy was born and bred here in Hong Kong, and his parents are both native speakers of the dominant Cantonese dialect, but they speak to their children only in their less-than-perfect English.
It turned out they have a simple reason: They want their children to get into a prestigious international school.
They worry that if their children speak Cantonese at home they will not learn enough English to pass the interview.
The mother is delighted with her achievement. Her son has been accepted by an international kindergarten and her younger girl’s first words were all in English.
I quickly realized that she wasn’t the only one who thought like this. I noticed that several other parents at the birthday party were also speaking broken English to their children.
“I will show you how does it work,” said one father in heavily-accented English, showing a toy train to his 19-month-old son.
He admitted with slight embarrassment that his English pronunciation and grammar were not great, and trying to communicate with his toddler in a language he himself is struggling with has led to problems.
“One day I was trying to tell him this is how you button your shirt,” he said, switching into Cantonese. “But then I couldn’t say it in English, so I had to ring up a friend and ask.”
I asked: Doesn’t he think it is better to talk to his toddler in the language he is most at ease in?
“I think you’ve lived abroad for too long — you don’t understand what parents here have to think about,” the boy’s mother said. “Competition for international schools is fierce. If we don’t make sure he speaks English now, he won’t pass the interview.”
I looked at her very cute toddler, who was busy chasing a ball on the floor, and felt a bit sad.
The boy is not yet two, and he was still babbling away in baby words. Yet in this competitive world, it is considered better for him to be exposed only to English, a language that his parents are not confident speaking but one they believe is more valuable than their native tongue.
More and more, ambitious parents in Hong Kong are giving their children a head-start in English by putting them into English-speaking play groups, kindergartens and international schools. At these elite institutions, Mandarin Chinese is sometimes taught as a second language.
As for the local Cantonese dialect, who cares?
I am saddened. What will happen to those age-old nursery rhymes our grandmothers taught us, the songs we sang at kindergarten, those Tang-dynasty poems that every preschool child was taught to recite?
And surely the classic tales of the “Twenty-four pious sons” — the stories that the Chinese have used to teach their children about the Confucian virtue of filial piety since the 14th century — can’t have the same cultural resonance when translated into English.
Besides, Cantonese carries echoes of ancient Chinese that no longer exist in the official Mandarin. It is a lively language full of colorful expressions.
It is our heritage, and if we don’t pass it on, who will?
When these children are not taught to speak the language of their ancestors, a connection with their native culture is bound to be lost.
And when they grow up, how will they see themselves? Will they still have a sense of belonging to Chinese culture? Will this society’s future elites be international in outlook, yet somehow rootless in culture?
Perhaps I’m being alarmist, but I wonder whether there will be a day when we in Hong Kong come to regret the decline of our language. By that time, it may be too late.
In Weather Chaos, a Case for Global Warming
The floods battered New England, then Nashville, then Arkansas, then Oklahoma — and were followed by a deluge in Pakistan that has upended the lives of 20 million people.
The summer’s heat waves baked the eastern United States, parts of Africa and eastern Asia, and above all Russia, which lost millions of acres of wheat and thousands of lives in a drought worse than any other in the historical record.
Seemingly disconnected, these far-flung disasters are reviving the question of whether global warming is causing more weather extremes.
The collective answer of the scientific community can be boiled down to a single word: probably.
“The climate is changing,” said Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. “Extreme events are occurring with greater frequency, and in many cases with greater intensity.”
He described excessive heat, in particular, as “consistent with our understanding of how the climate responds to increasing greenhouse gases.”
Theory suggests that a world warming up because of those gases will feature heavier rainstorms in summer, bigger snowstorms in winter, more intense droughts in at least some places and more record-breaking heat waves. Scientists and government reports say the statistical evidence shows that much of this is starting to happen.
But the averages do not necessarily make it easier to link specific weather events, like a given flood or hurricane or heat wave, to climate change. Most climate scientists are reluctant to go that far, noting that weather was characterized by remarkable variability long before humans began burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
“If you ask me as a person, do I think the Russian heat wave has to do with climate change, the answer is yes,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate researcher with NASA in New York. “If you ask me as a scientist whether I have proved it, the answer is no — at least not yet.”
In Russia, that kind of scientific caution might once have been embraced. Russia has long played a reluctant, and sometimes obstructionist, role in global negotiations over limiting climate change, perhaps in part because it expected economic benefits from the warming of its vast Siberian hinterland.
But the extreme heat wave, and accompanying drought and wildfires, in normally cool central Russia seems to be prompting a shift in thinking.
“Everyone is talking about climate change now,” President Dmitri A. Medvedev told the Russian Security Council this month. “Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past.”
Thermometer measurements show that the earth has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution, when humans began pumping enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. For this January through July, average temperatures were the warmest on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Friday.
The warming has moved in fits and starts, and the cumulative increase may sound modest. But it is an average over the entire planet, representing an immense amount of added heat, and is only the beginning of a trend that most experts believe will worsen substantially.
If the earth were not warming, random variations in the weather should cause about the same number of record-breaking high temperatures and record-breaking low temperatures over a given period. But climatologists have long theorized that in a warming world, the added heat would cause more record highs and fewer record lows.
The statistics suggest that is exactly what is happening. In the United States these days, about two record highs are being set for every record low, telltale evidence that amid all the random variation of weather, the trend is toward a warmer climate.
Climate-change skeptics dispute such statistical arguments, contending that climatologists do not know enough about long-range patterns to draw definitive links between global warming and weather extremes. They cite events like the heat and drought of the 1930s as evidence that extreme weather is nothing new. Those were indeed dire heat waves, contributing to the Dust Bowl, which dislocated millions of Americans and changed the population structure of the United States.
But most researchers trained in climate analysis, while acknowledging that weather data in parts of the world are not as good as they would like, offer evidence to show that weather extremes are getting worse.
A United States government report published in 2008 noted that “in recent decades, most of North America has been experiencing more unusually hot days and nights, fewer unusually cold days and nights, and fewer frost days. Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense.”
The statistics suggest that the Eastern United States may be getting wetter as the arid West dries out further. Places that depend on the runoff from spring snow melt appear particularly vulnerable to climate change, because higher temperatures are making the snow melt earlier, leaving the ground parched by midsummer. That can worsen any drought that develops.
“Global warming, ironically, can actually increase the amount of snow you get,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “But it also means the snow season is shorter.”
In general, the research suggests that global warming will worsen climate extremes across much of the planet. As in the United States, wet areas will get wetter, the scientists say, while dry areas get drier.
But the patterns are not uniform; changes in wind and ocean circulation could cause unexpected effects, with some areas even cooling down in a warmer world. And long-established weather patterns, like the periodic variations in the Pacific Ocean known as El Niño, will still contribute to unusual events, like heavy rains and cool temperatures in normally arid parts of California.
Scientists say they expect stronger storms, in winter and summer, largely because of the physical principle that warmer air can hold more water vapor.
Typically, a storm of the sort that inundated parts of Tennessee in May, dumping as much as 19 inches of rain over two days, draws moisture from an area much larger than the storm itself. With temperatures rising and more water vapor in the air, such storms can pull in more moisture and thus rain or snow more heavily than storms of old.
It will be a year or two before climate scientists publish definitive analyses of the Russian heat wave and the Pakistani floods, which might shed light on the role of climate change, if any. Some scientists suspect that they were caused or worsened by an unusual kink in the jet stream, the high-altitude flow of air that helps determine weather patterns, though that itself might be linked to climate change. Certain recent weather events were so extreme that a few scientists are shedding their traditional reluctance to ascribe specific disasters to global warming.
After a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed an estimated 50,000 people, the worst such catastrophe for that region in the historical record, scientists published detailed analyses suggesting that it would not have been as severe in a climate uninfluenced by greenhouse gases.
And Dr. Trenberth has published work suggesting that Hurricane Katrina dumped at least somewhat more rain on the Gulf Coast because the storm was intensified by global warming.
“It’s not the right question to ask if this storm or that storm is due to global warming, or is it natural variability,” Dr. Trenberth said. “Nowadays, there’s always an element of both.”
In regards to the last article, it's worth remembering that each of the last three decades has been the hottest on record. (Yes, that sentence makes sense.) Which means that if you're my age (anywhere under 30), you've never been alive for the old normal. Heck, if you're less than, say, ten years older than me you don't really *remember* those times either. It's easy to say "Oh, it's not different than when I was a kid" (although exorbitant snowfall this year DID get a lot of people commenting that it "always was like this" when they were young), but if when you were a kid wasn't that long ago, well, you don't know, do you?
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no subject
Date: 2010-08-23 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-23 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-23 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-23 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-23 10:57 am (UTC)I guess that to them "free" means "worthless", or maybe it's something about "kids these days, got no respect for others' property", or something. I don't know.
But "never locked" seems like a recipe for disaster for me, at least in some areas.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-24 01:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-24 09:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-24 02:20 pm (UTC)Climate change, cycles, and weather
Date: 2010-08-25 11:20 pm (UTC)Snow is what made an impression on my youthful mind, as it affected SCHOOL. And before I was ten, yes, winters were harder, colder, snowier. Days on end when the frozen ground didn't thaw and the icicles got longer every day. Days when the ice on the INSIDE of my bedroom window got to be half an inch thick and we laid towels on the sill to sop up the melt at noon.
Then that stopped, for almost twenty years. Then it started up again, after the year 2000. Our cold, wet spring and summer meant our garden is struggling. THere are no wild huckleberries this year, the strawberries never bore anything worth picking, the potatoes are small and scarce and there are almost no apples in the orchard.
I'm storing what I can, but I've got a bad feeling about this....
Re: Climate change, cycles, and weather
Date: 2010-08-26 05:03 am (UTC)