Yes, you too have an accent

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The South
The Northeast
Philadelphia
North Central
The West
Boston
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

However, it is most definitely soda, not pop.

HTM In Review: "Run Lola Run"

OK, so "Run Lola Run" is a 10-year-old movie. Let it be duly noted that HTM in Review has nothing to do with timeliness.

I felt the need to watch this movie again because years ago it tripped me out. Basically, what happens is that Lola has to get 100,000 marks (yes, in the pre-Euro days) to her boyfriend, Manni, in 20 minutes or he will hold up a store at gunpoint. The same 20-minute scene plays three times, with slight variations, and in the end of each one things turn out differently for everybody. Set in Germany in 1998, there is, of course, techno music. And there's running.

The trippiest part of the movie, I think, is that it shows snapshots of the futures of the people Lola runs past. In one scene a guy tries to sell Lola his bike and she declines. You see snapshots of the guy eventually falling off his bike, meeting a woman in the hospital and eventually marrying her. In the second version, Lola declines again, saying the bike is stolen. The guy ends up getting arrested and put in jail.

It's nuts how, a la "The Butterfly Effect" on a smaller scale, every teeny tiny decision you make has the chance to affect everything else around it. Which reminds me of an argument the teacher made (er, adapted from some other philosopher whose name escapes me) in my 10th-grade religion class on the validity of creationism — though as far as I was concerned, it was a perfectly logical argument AGAINST God in the way most Christians believe.

He gave us each an oatmeal cookie, insisting that because the cookie was made up of so many complex ingredients, combined in just the right way, that the cookie couldn't possibly have occurred in nature — it had to have a designer.

Change the cookie to something complex that occurs in nature (like, um, rocks, the food chain, the anatomy of any living organism ...) and it's clear that it's not really an argument for creation at all if you don't believe in creation in the first place. Just because something is complicated doesn't have to mean it didn't evolve that way, as opposed to being created. Similarly, just because life is a mind-blowingly complicated web of interactions and decisions that all affect each other doesn't mean they're all orchestrated by some dude in the sky with nothing better to do than micromanaging the fates of 6 billion people.

But back to Lola. There's one part of the movie that I didn't really think about the first time: in the last scene, she screams at the ball on a betting wheel until it lands on the number that she needs. Maybe God does work in more direct ways sometimes. Or maybe the freakishly red-haired Lola has some divine powers of her own.

Cooking class!

This is me having way too much fun with the food processor.

Yesterday I went to a cooking class. It was put on by a French woman who owns a company called The Wise Cook and runs healthy cooking classes out of her (really nice Upper West Side) apartment.

The class was me, a British woman and her two guy friends and an American guy (above). We made baked herb tilapia with pureed broccoli and carrots, which is a lot yummier than it sounds, because it involves potatoes and bleu cheese. Note to Mom: I don't know how pureed veggies with potatoes and cheese (cream cheese works too) fit into USDA dietary requirements, but I bet the residents would like them.

Oh, and it was pretty too:


All in all, definitely an educational experience. And the best kinds of learning experiences are the ones where you get to eat at the end. These classes run every week, but sadly they cost $45 a pop so I don't think I'll be a regular.

I heart Gail Collins

She is definitely my favorite of the Times' weekly op-ed columnists.

Nicholas Kristof is up there too. His writing leaves you with the impression that he is a genuinely nice man (I've never met him).

For supper tonight I went to McDonalds hoping to get a meal with a Shamrock Shake (That, along with wearing my Dropkick Murphys shirt, was the extent of my St. Paddy's Day celebrating today). But sadly they didn't have them (How many years have they not been doing that without me noticing?), so I went across the street to Yoshinoya and ordered a beef bowl, which was basically fat with pieces of beef attached atop overdone rice. Ick.

Tomorrow I have to teach a class for the new Harlem Live kids about the basics of journalism. That should be interesting. I'm a little scared. Though there will only be, like, five of them, so it shouldn't be too bad ... I hope. Then I'm going to a cooking class, and Wednesday I'm finally getting around to the ritual new-phase-of-my life haircut. Should be an eventful weekend.

Overheard

I was on the subway today when a boy and a girl, about 6 or 7, sat down next to me. Their conversation went something like this:


boy: Do you like to look out the window on the train?

girl: yeah.

boy: Did you have sex with 100 men?

girl: What?

boy: Did you have sex with infinity men?

girl: Six?

boy: sex! Like when you're married.

girl: no.

boy: oh. I saw a rat on the train track. ...

Also, if I were on the Green Bay City Council I'd propose a resolution to ban the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham from the city.

Oh, and I am very glad that we here in New York are finally starting to shut up about eliot spitzer, but this man has a point.

Yet another disaster of the week

Yesterday, a crane collapsed in East Midtown, killing at least 4 people and leveling a bar. This happened right before the Saturday budget meeting at work, so we had a little talk about how one of the effects of working in the news industry is that you're constantly aware of all the crazy things that are happening in the world. And they happen in Manhattan quite often.

There seem to be random disasters almost every other week in this city ... if you count the Eliot Spitzer debacle, we've been on quite a roll lately.

Last year when a steam pipe exploded near Grand Central, someone at work commented how people were abuzz, almost faintly excited, that something big was happening. I think that part of the mystique of post-9/11 New York City is that there is that chance at any given time that you could, just possibly, get blown up, or, more likely, find yourself stranded with millions of other people in a large-scale public services disaster. But it's not in a fearful, orange-alert kind of way, but more of a realization that even if you're careful, these things happen, and you deal with them ... and at least it gives everyone something to talk about.

Update: Spitz Quits!

I'm glad Eliot Spitzer decided to be a grown-up, admit his mistake and get out of office so as not to totally disrupt the state government when he most likely goes to trial for transporting a prostitute across state lines and/or money laundering.

I think a decent number of Democrats will forgive him in the end, after they get over their disappointment. Even if he gets convicted and disbarred, he'll end up writing a book or getting some plush consulting or lobbying job down the line. Also, his lieutenant governor David Paterson is pretty well-respected on all sides, not to mention that he'll become New York's first black governor and the first legally blind governor anywhere. Ultimately, it will all be OK. Except, probably, for Mrs. Spitzer.

That being said, I would enjoy nothing more than to see Bush get busted in a sting on a prostitution ring, preferably a sting that involved wiretapping (oh the irony). Sure, he may be able to reinvent executive privilege, openly support torture and oppose health care for poor children, tell the American people 935 flat-out lies on the subject of the Iraq war alone (none of them under oath, sadly), but you'd best believe that if he got busted Spitzer-style, his ass would be impeached faster than you could say "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

"Mr. Clean" gets dirty — and pays $5,500 an hour for it

Gov. Eliot "Ness" Spitzer, who after fighting corruption on Wall Street as an AG graduated to the cesspool that is Albany with a promise to clean it up, was forced to publicly apologize today after a months-long IRS investigation revealed that he had been visiting prostitutes.

You can bet that the investment-broker types downtown are drinking themselves silly right now in celebration. You can read an entire tome of Times metro section coverage (or check out any other major paper, political blog, 24-hour news network or highly vocal street person, for that matter). You can read the Times editorial in which you can almost feel the palpable anger. You can think that while, yes, he broke the law and betrayed his wife and flouted his anti-corruption ideals, maybe people are making a little too big a deal about the whole situation (I'm leaning toward this option.)

But really, all you need to do is watch the video of Silda Spitzer, standing next to her cheating husband as he goes down in a flaming ball of hypocrisy.

EDIT: I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. The mere time that it takes to say "five thousand, five hundred dollar-an-hour prostitute" would cost you about $20 with such a practitioner. And if Eliot Spitzer really wanted to cheat on his wife, I'm sure he could have found someone who would have happily complied, without risking a decade's worth of his public reputation. So I take it back. Legal and ethical considerations aside, Eliot Spitzer is too big of an idiot to be running a state. Kick the bum out.

And Dick Cheney Said, "Let There Be Light!"

Happy (belated) Daylight Savings Time everyone!

Do take a few seconds to contemplate:
a. the fact that our dark overlord has the power to rearrange the clock for two weeks out of the year (OK, so Congress has to agree to it. But back when this was passed that was rarely if ever a problem).

b. that this is the only context in which you will ever see the words "Dick Cheney" and "sunlight" occur in the same sentence.

Not that I'm complaining. Not at all. I'm all about sunlight, especially when there's more of it at a time of day when I'm awake to appreciate it.

I probably would have forgotten to set my clocks ahead if it had not been for a homeless woman on the train. After she finished telling us how if we didn't give her money her daughter would have to go hungry that night, she reminded us all to reset our clocks or we would be late for church.

I gave her a dollar.

Sleep, schmeep.

The damn neighbors are blasting their music again. That, in and of itself, is tolerable.

What is less tolerable is when the people upstairs think the music is coming from MY apartment and bang on MY ceiling. Argh.

Also, every Saturday night and some Fridays, there are parties at the church across the street that don't get going until about 1 or 2. But who parties in the wee hours with music blasting at a CHURCH? Well-dressed middle-aged people, of course.

Also, due to the fact that there are approximately 83734723727 churches in this neighborhood and exactly one parking lot, sometimes on Sunday mornings there are two rows of parallel-parked cars on one side of the street. No, I don't understand it either.

bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb bob-omb

Yesterday, after I heard that a tiny bomb had exploded the night before at the Army recruitment center in the middle of Times Square, I left for work 15 minutes early to go gawk at the scene. By the time I got there, 13 hours after the fact, there was really nothing to see except some Army men in uniform and a few reporters having what appeared to be an impromptu press conference.

This morning the New York Post made a complete ass of itself by conflating some nutjob's completely unrelated letters saying "We did it" with a confession to the bombings. Oops.

Goodbye, Brett!

Today is a sad day for Cheeseheads the world over, for it is the day our beloved Brett Favre announced his retirement from the game of football.

I take back any sentiments of goodwill that I may have previously expressed toward the Giants.

HTM in Review: Diet Books

I went on my first diet when I was 6. It lasted about three hours. Later efforts have had similar levels of success. Along the way, I've read enough silly weight-loss articles in women's magazines to earn an honorary degree in nutrition from the University of Conde Nast. I am not a fan of diets; I find it a lot less effort to just make little lifestyle changes over a period of time. But I do have a soft spot in my heart for diet books, mostly because they contain recipes. Of course, being that I don't usually end up cooking most of them, I'm kind of like those dudes who say they read Playboy for the articles. But whatevs.

Since I left for the city I've read two diet books, which were nearly polar opposites of each other.

The first was The Supermarket Diet from Good Housekeeping. The basic premise being that you make all your own food (and buy certain frozen/prepared stuff), follow three decreasingly torturous phases of recipes and ta-da! You're skinny. Within the happy rhetoric about how much food you can choose from, this book is actually bossy as hell. The author promises "You won't feel hungry," But she prefaces the 1200-calorie "boot camp" phase of the diet by saying that if you just can't handle the hunger after two days, skip ahead.

I would never consider following this diet. If you're really dead-set on cutting your sodium, though, this book could be of help. Also, it does have a lot of useful information on how to read between the nutrition-label lines and pick the healthiest stuff from the grocery store. Also, there are LOTS of recipes (though I haven't tried any of them yet). For the $5 I paid for it, not a total rip-off.

I picked up French Women Don't Get Fat from a book exchange at work. I was skeptical. French women don't get fat — Spanish women don't either. But when I went to spain, I gained 10 pounds. 

This book, however, has a really good point, which is that one of the reasons Americans have such a weight problem is that we, as a country, have a massively dysfunctional relationship with food. We eat junk — in huge f-ing portions — without really consciously enjoying it. And we don't move enough or drink enough water. So the point is that you figure out what your bad habits are and over about 3 months you cut as many of them out as you can. Also lots of recipes One of which I actually tried. And it even turned out OK.

I do disagree with the author's hatred of workout machines. And she does project a certain amount of snooty French elitism. But because of this book's suggestion of mixing fruit juice with seltzer water I've given up soda almost entirely (well, that and the fact that there is a tea-brewing machine right next to my desk at work). Which may not have done anything for my waistline but it's saved me a ton of money.

And that's it for the first installment of Hoty Takes Manhattan In Review. What are you reading/watching/listening to these days?

Semicolons get me goin'

A few days ago on the train I saw a public service ad thats gotten its share of media attention:

No matter what paper you read,
Its language or viewpoint,
Please put it in the trash can;
That's good news for everyone.

Why did a story about this sign spend at least a good week on the Times' most e-mailed list, you might ask?

Because of its "impeccable" use of a semicolon.

Sadly, the irony of a newspaper praising an ad about throwing away newspapers is lost on them.

Also, shouldn't you be recycling that newspaper?