what a great job this is - what a great thing to do! how cool!!!!!!!!!

NY TIMES
December 17, 2006
To Sketch a Thief
By TOM MUELLER
Noah Charney hasn’t stolen a major artwork, as far as is known, but he gives it lots of thought. I met him one day last spring in Rome, in a cool, shadowy side chapel of the church of San Francesco a Ripa on the west bank of the Tiber. He stood with his hands clasped reverently before him, gazing at Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s statue of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni. Bernini seems to have caught the pious mystic just as she passes to her great reward; she lies prostrate on a tousled bed of marble and jasper, her back arched, her eyes slitted, her lips parted and her right hand pressed to her breast in an ecstasy of divine transport that, as more than one critic has observed, resembles a far earthier kind of ecstasy. “I’ve spent hundreds of hours here with Ludovica,” Charney said, less to me than to the statue, about which he wrote his master’s thesis in art history in 2003. “We have a special relationship. I want her in my living room!”
Charney, a slender, courtly 27-year-old from New Haven with a back-swept mane of jet black hair, pointed out details in the statue and the ormolu molding around it that suggest an inner meaning few observers have perceived: a pomegranate and a flaming heart, which signify Ludovica’s passionate love of God, and her shoes, which prove that she isn’t on her deathbed, as most people have assumed, but is experiencing the fierce, heart-melting heat of divine rapture. “A lot of art history is detective work,” Charney told me. “Instead of just staring at a piece, you’re studying it and gathering information.”
Then, with the same probing eye, he noted what for him were even more essential qualities of the statue: how it might be stolen and by whom. The nearby window, the old-model motion sensors and the doubtless un-manned surveillance cameras would all facilitate theft. Yet the stature of the Blessed Ludovica herself, a cool ton or so of stone, would give any thief pause. “To get her out of here, you’d really have to be obsessed,” he said. Then again, he reckoned someone who was truly smitten with the work could find a way to pinch it. “And if Ludovica were ever stolen,” he said, “I’d be the first suspect.”
Charney is completing a doctorate at Cambridge University in a field he appears to have invented: the use of art history, combined with the more conventional tools of criminology, psychology and deductive logic, to help solve modern-day art thefts and to prevent future art crimes. The stolen-art trade is now an international industry valued as high as $6 billion per year, the third-largest black market behind drugs and arms trafficking. Yet the solution rate in art crime is reported to be a startlingly low 10 percent. Investigations are hampered by the cult of secrecy within the art world itself — museums sometimes don’t report thefts, fearing to reveal their vulnerability to future crimes and thereby hurt their chances of receiving new donations. “The art trade is the least transparent and least regulated commercial activity in the world,” says Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register, a London-based company that maintains a leading database of stolen artworks.
Charney wants to cut through this murk by treating art theft as a scholarly discipline, drawing on a wide range of sources in an attempt to reach the first unbiased, statistically based conclusions about the nature of the crime. He has reviewed police files of art crimes in Europe and the United States from the 19th and early 20th centuries, looking for ways that past thefts might illuminate current trends, and he has questioned investigators from the F.B.I., Scotland Yard, the Spanish Policía and the Italian Carabinieri about their often distinctive attitudes and crime-solving methods and about the different cultural and bureaucratic barriers that each force encounters. Charney has explored the legal aspects of art ownership, sale and copyright by consulting with lawyers, federal prosecutors and art insurers, seeking to chart the complex currents in the flow of stolen art worldwide and to understand how laws in certain countries smooth the passage of stolen pieces into the legitimate market.
More than anything, Charney is interested in understanding the motivation and mentality of art criminals, an area that has traditionally received little attention from the police. He has scrutinized the biographies of famous collectors like the financier J. P. Morgan, as well as legendary art thieves like the Victorian-era burglar Adam Worth, looking for ways that the details of their emotionally charged, obsessive psyches might help investigators understand the criminal mind — and, specifically, the art-criminal mind. He has also studied Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, whose conception of Aryan supremacy, according to Charney, led him to loot even second-rate works by northern European painters rather than genuine masterpieces by “degenerate” artists like the French Impressionists. Both collectors and collector-thieves sometimes form a bond with an artwork that is as intense as a love affair. According to Charney, several owners of Ghirlandaio’s “Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni,” the famous profile portrait of Lorenzo Tornabuoni’s young wife who died soon after she sat for the painting, have said that she reminded them of their own deceased wives. And Stéphane Breitwieser, the French waiter arrested in 2002 for stealing some $1.5 billion in art from museums and galleries in seven European countries, declared that he was fascinated by the eyes and the beauty of the woman in the first painting he stole, who reminded him of his grandmother.
In a more contemporary approach to the criminal mind, Charney wants to apply to art thefts the techniques of criminal profiling that forensic psychologists use to help solve serial rapes and murders. To supply the necessary raw materials for this analysis, he has begun to compile a database of art thefts that records salient details: the way the work was stolen, for instance, along with biographical information about everyone involved, including thieves, fences and the collectors who eventually bought the purloined artwork. This is an arduous, time-consuming task, which is complicated both by the limited number of cases in the public domain and by the police files themselves, which typically have no separate category for art theft and lump the crimes together with other burglaries. Eventually, however, Charney says he hopes this project, along with his other initiatives, will establish a clearer, more empirically rigorous understanding of art crime.
Major thefts often result in a number of contradictory theories about the identity and intentions of the culprit. Consider, for example, the robbery that took place in 1990 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the largest art theft in American history, the solution to which is currently the holy grail of the art-crime world. At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, while Boston slept off its St. Patrick’s Day excesses, two men in police uniforms and fake black mustaches knocked on the side door of the museum and said they were investigating a disturbance. Once inside, without using weapons, they subdued the guards, duct-taped their hands, feet and mouths and stowed them in the cellar. For a leisurely 80 minutes, they had the run of the place. In the end they made off with $300 million in art, including a Manet, three Rembrandts and Vermeer’s “Concert,” one of only 35 or so extant paintings by the enigmatic Dutch genius. Surprisingly, however, they left behind works by Raphael and Fra Angelico, as well as Titian’s “Rape of Europa,” one of the greatest masterpieces in any American museum collection. Instead, the thieves took five comparatively insignificant Degas pastels, a Chinese beaker and the eagle-shaped finial of a Napoleonic battle flag. (They tried to get the flag itself by unscrewing the lid to the glass-fronted case that held it; when this failed, they didn’t smash the glass as most criminals would have done, but contented themselves with the unprotected finial.)
The wide range of explanations proposed for this crime, which remains unsolved despite a $5 million reward offered by the museum, suggests the equally wide range of criminals who steal art, as well as the uncertainties that plague law enforcers. Experts have variously blamed the Irish Republican Army, South American drug traffickers and gangsters like James (Whitey) Bulger, the widely feared head of organized crime in Boston when the Gardner theft occurred. Others maintain that it was the work of thieves who intended to use the art as a bargaining chip — to negotiate immunity for another crime, perhaps. Still others, noting that paintings like the Vermeer and the Rembrandt are too famous ever to be resold on the open market, argue that an obsessed collector commissioned the crime in order to procure artworks he could never have acquired legally — works he intends to keep for his own private delectation. In art-theft circles, such a figure, frequently evoked after the disappearance of a masterpiece, is known as a “Dr. No,” after the reclusive criminal genius of the James Bond film, who inhabited a cave on a Caribbean island bedecked with stolen art treasures.
Charney says he believes that the Gardner case has the earmarks of a Dr. No type of thief and that his study of prominent past collectors and their criminal doppelgängers can help narrow the suspect pool. Only a criminal collector, he says, would design a theft of such exaggerated selectivity and delicacy. He speculates that the person who arranged the Gardner theft was a wealthy connoisseur who had seen the works many times before ordering their theft and that a list of past museum patrons, as well as records of previous sales of works by the artists he stole, particularly the Degas pastels, could help to identify the culprit.
Behind other crimes, Charney sees a very different criminal personality. During the 2004 theft of Edvard Munch’s “Scream” from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, for example, robbers in black balaclavas ran into the museum in broad daylight, brandishing guns and terrorizing onlookers. They tore the delicate painting off the wall (and later wrenched it from its frame) and roared away two minutes later in a black Audi before the police could intervene. “The Scream” was returned in August; though the Norwegian police have yet to explain the circumstances of the recovery, Charney theorizes that such a violent, thuggish crime, which could easily have damaged or destroyed the painting, was not commissioned by an art lover. Instead he blames “Russian Mafia types,” members of one of the criminal networks that in recent years have been increasingly active in art theft.
A third crime, which Charney has recently discussed with Scotland Yard, was the December 2005 theft of Henry Moore’s “Reclining Figure,” an 11-foot-long, 2-ton bronze sculpture that was taken from the late artist’s home in Hertfordshire, England, by thieves using a flatbed Mercedes truck with a crane mounted on the back. Some observers, citing the work’s bulk, have again blamed a Dr. No, while others, including the British police, have assumed it was sold for scrap. But Charney, who says that the metal itself was worth as little as $3,000, thinks he has a better theory. Recalling numerous precedents in art history in which looted bronze artworks were melted down and used to create new art — Gian Lorenzo Bernini himself stripped bronze from the Pantheon to make the massive canopy over the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican — Charney suggests that the Moore sculpture was actually stolen and melted down to make forged antiquities, small items like statuettes or “Greek” coins that could easily be sold to noncriminal buyers at markets or on eBay. By using stolen bronze rather than buying it, the thieves would eliminate the paper trail of the raw materials, he says, and laments that the police failed to target foundries as well as scrap yards during their investigation.
Though Charney’s work has thus far been largely theoretical, he has plans to put it to active use. “I’ve been a student all my life, but I don’t want these things to remain locked away in the ivory tower,” he told me. He is establishing a nonprofit consultancy based in Rome that will employ the same international, interdisciplinary approach to art crime that he has used in his scholarship, with a staff trained in criminology, statistics, museum security and art history. In June, as something of a trial run of his art-theft enterprise, Charney organized a two-day conference at Cambridge University titled “Art Theft: History, Prevention, Detection, Solution,” attended by the same broad spectrum of art and art-theft authorities with whom he has conferred during his dissertation research. “It’s going to be fun,” he told me a few days before the conference. “Besides the presentations, we’ve laid on lots of social events — teas, formal dinners, punting on the Cam — to get people comfortable talking to each another.”
The Cambridge conference was probably the most eclectic group of people ever assembled to discuss art theft. In fact, at first it seemed almost too eclectic: the art-theft agents from the F.B.I., Scotland Yard and the Italian Carabinieri moved with the spring and swagger of aging Olympic wrestlers, and they stood out like giants among the slender, self-conscious, soft-spoken, tweed-clad academics, in whose company they evidently felt out of place. “The two days of this conference are the longest time I’ve ever spent at university,” Vernon Rapley, head of the art and antiques unit of Scotland Yard, told me. He said it with a laugh, but there was also an edge of working-class angst. Yet the initial tensions and incomprehensions soon melted away, and the value of Charney’s interdisciplinary bridge-building became apparent. The police, in their presentations — punchy PowerPoint slides — taught Charney and his fellow academics some important lessons about how art theft works in the real world. One of the biggest hindrances faced by law enforcers is an enduring public misconception of art theft as the harmless fleecing of a wealthy, well-insured elite. “All too often, the general public sees art theft and the looting of antiquities as victimless crimes,” Col. Giovanni Pastore of the Carabinieri said. As a result, police departments devote far fewer resources to art theft than to crimes like terrorism, drugs, organized crime and street violence, which the public sees as more menacing.
In reality, however, because fine art is safe to steal, easy to transport and extraordinarily valuable, it has become a useful tool in the hands of precisely those criminals whom the public fears most. Bob Wittman, the senior investigator of the F.B.I.’s art-crime team, included in his presentation a slide of Pierce Brosnan in a winning pose, and he asked how many people in the audience had seen “The Thomas Crown Affair” or another of several recent films that portray art thieves as debonair rogues who steal purely for the love of art. Hands went up around the room. His next slide showed the mug shots of several convicted art thieves, a rogue’s gallery of brutish-looking kidnappers, drug dealers, racketeers and murderers. “Here’s what art thieves really look like,” he said. Scotland Yard investigations have revealed that criminal organizations regularly use stolen art as collateral to buy drugs or arms. Gabriel Metsu’s “Woman Reading a Letter,” stolen in 1986 by Martin Cahill, an Irish gangster, from a manor house near Dublin, was recovered four years later in an Istanbul hotel room as it was being swapped for heroin, while Vermeer’s “Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid,” taken in the same burglary, was left with an Amsterdam diamond merchant as collateral for a $1 million loan to buy drugs. Wittman told me that the sale of looted artifacts has also been linked to the financing of terrorism.
The scholars, for their part, appeared to persuade law enforcers of the benefits of collaboration. After watching Danielle Carrabino of the Courtauld Institute describe the seminal importance in art history of a late Caravaggio painting of the nativity stolen from a Baroque chapel in Palermo in 1969, Wittman remarked that such specialized information could be a real asset in his work. “Knowing how important these works are culturally could help people understand the true value of what is being lost,” Wittman said. “Maybe scholars could even help to predict what might be taken next, based on their knowledge of what types of art are popular right now.” Also, the data-analysis groundwork that most police departments now have no time for — collating documents, performing interviews, scrutinizing raw data in search of trends — is a scholar’s bread and butter and appears to offer an ideal opportunity for outsourcing. By the end of the conference, Vernon Rapley said that he would let Charney study his files and also make Charney and other interested academics special constables of Scotland Yard with a brief training course. Giovanni Pastore offered to take Charney to interview art thieves in Italian prisons, and Julian Radcliffe agreed to give him access to the Art Loss Register archives.
Since the conference, the seeds of cooperation Charney helped to sow are taking root. F.B.I. agents and art historians have convened in Philadelphia to talk about art and crime, and Robert Goldman, an attorney who prosecuted a number of important art crimes in the United States (and attended Charney’s conference), has begun advising the British Museum on art thefts. Charney himself is concentrating on his nascent art-theft consultancy. With the help of a professional fund-raiser, he has applied to the Getty Foundation and the Ford Foundation to finance the first three years of the project (he estimates it will cost $1.7 million), and he has persuaded Wittman and Pastore to serve as trustees, together with Dick Ellis, a leading private detective. Charney will probably never wear a gun or chase Dr. No down a dimly lighted alleyway, but his encounters with crooks, which until now have taken place on the comfortably lofty plane of scholarly theory, may soon happen in the grittier realm of the criminal underworld.

so this is one of the profiles i got matched on eharmony today. what can one say?

I DON'T THINK SO

The most important thing G__ is looking for in a person is:
You want me, but you don't need me-in other words you're not an emotional stalker; you're sexy and you kiss well. I take it you're also in good physical condition and not overweight. You have an excellent sense of humor and understand irony. You have your own life.

this was a fun quiz! har har harrrr

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Boston You definitely have a Boston accent, even if you think you don't. Of course, that doesn't mean you are from the Boston area, you may also be from New Hampshire or Maine.
North Central
The Northeast
The West
The Midland
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The South
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

today at work, the postwoman gave us a choice to pick a SANTA LETTER to respond to. basically, you have to get the item(s) on the letter. so i picked one. she saids she's 3 (i think someone else wrote it) and would like a dora tv & cassette. the postwoman said i can just give one, saying santa will probably bring the other one in the mail next year. so i'll get her this. i think it's pretty reasonable. :)

so, finally the long awaited video #1 & #2 of sarah mclachlan. she is sweet & nice. it was for the etown on npr. #2 is with leigh nash of sixpence none the richer and she was HORRIBLE. she is really tone-deaf.

this is TOO FUNNY!!!

Satire: Troop morale boosted by surprise visit from First Dog

POSTED: 4:12 a.m. EST, November 30, 2006

Editor's note: This may look like a real news story, but it's NOT. It is from the The Onion, a humor publication that calls itself "America's finest news source." CNN may beg to differ, but we do enjoy a good laugh, and hope you will enjoy a weekly selection of their satire.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (The Onion) -- U.S. troops stationed in Iraq hailed an unannounced and unaccompanied visit Monday from Barney, the senior White House dog who belongs to President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.
Landing in Baghdad's Green Zone amid extremely tight security, the Scottish terrier met with nearly 800 troops at a military mess hall, then visited Camp Victory, the U.S. military headquarters on the outskirts of Baghdad. In both locations, the 6-year-old First Dog was greeted with loud cheers and standing ovations by servicemen and women.
"Barney's visit really cheered us all up," said Army Spc. Anthony Udall, who was given the privilege of escorting Barney across the airport tarmac. "I can't tell you how great it is that the White House would send one of its own to spend some time with us out here."
Although was in Iraq for less than a day, he maintained a busy schedule while there. Events included handshakes with top U.S. field commanders, a tour of the base's new recreation facility, and a ride in an armored vehicle. Besides sitting and staying at a military briefing, Barney also participated in the ground-breaking for a new visitors reception center at Camp Victory, during which he energetically dug alongside camp officials.
"As soon as he stepped off the plane, it was clear he was interested in what was happening on the ground here," said Gen. George Casey, commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq who met with the First Dog in the courtyard outside his office at Camp Victory. "He seemed extremely enthusiastic about the whole situation and he was even visibly excited about some of the progress we're making."
But the visit's highlight was the First Dog's encounter with soldiers, who were clearly taken with his presence. Sitting with his head cocked to one side, he listened intently to the soldiers' concerns before receiving a treat and a pat on the head. Barney showed further solidarity with the troops by accepting an impromptu invitation to a belated Thanksgiving feast, during which he impressed servicemen and women with his hearty, nondiscriminating appetite.
The First Dog also received a tummy rub courtesy of the 100th Infantry Battalion.
Barney's appearance marks the first time a high-ranking Bush Administration official has toured the war-torn nation since Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's visit in April.
"Barney seemed very genuine and sincere, like he was really into being here," said Pfc. Steven Koch, who participated in a photo op with the First Dog. "The fact that he took time out of his busy schedule to play ball with me and my buddies means the world to us. It's nice to see a happy face from home."
Added Koch, "He's a good boy."
During his visit, Barney impressed top military leadership with his attentiveness and steadfastness, yet he tactfully avoided addressing such highly charged issues as extended tours of duty and the shortage of effective body armor.
Critics say the visit diverted time and energy away from Barney's domestic responsibilities. Yet a statement issued today by the White House defended the decision to send Barney to Iraq, saying it was "the absolute least this administration could have done for the brave men and women fighting for freedom" in Iraq.
The statement also pointed to the success of the January 2006 visit of the Bushes' other Scottish terrier, Miss Beazley, to troops serving in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, and, in November 2005, the favorable reception given to Ofelia, their Crawford, TX-based Longhorn cow, in areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

The First Dog Barney, the highest-ranking official to visit Iraq in months, had a full schedule:
8 a.m. Morning walk with generals on the ground
9 a.m. "Sit-down" with troops
10:30 a.m. Game of catch
12 p.m. Lunch, photo ops
1 p.m. Bathroom break
1:05 p.m. Moment of silence for fallen soldiers
2 p.m. Treats

© 2006 Cable News Network LP, LLLP.A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved.

this made me cry:

NEW YORKER

IN THE MUSEUMS
DO NOT TOUCH
by Nick Paumgarten
Issue of 2006-11-27Posted 2006-11-20
Before Nuria Chang went blind, at the age of eight, she had wanted to be an artist. When she was one, she could draw a human figure; at four, she was using perspective to sketch her bedroom. Still, by the time she lost her eyesight she had never really seen any art, so she grew up with no sense of what it was supposed to look like. (She is from Ecuador, and moved to New York in 1963.) That changed around fifteen years ago, when a ceramics instructor escorted her to the Museum of Modern Art, stood her in front of a sculpture, and encouraged her to touch it. In violation of the museum’s rules, she reached out and felt what seemed to be a leg. This was a human figure, apparently. She felt some more, then exclaimed, “Oh, it’s a naked man!”
Since then, Chang has become a MOMA regular. She often visits under the auspices of a museum program for people who are sight-impaired. A lecturer leads them through the galleries, describes paintings to them, and encourages them to touch a few sculptures. There have been no mishaps, although there was one session, in the sculpture garden, when a visitor’s Seeing Eye dog relieved itself.
Chang is now a sculptor, but at MOMA she has come to favor the paintings of Picasso. “If I could see, I’d be painting something similar,” she said. “I still think in color. When a person talks to me, I visualize his face, and as he pronounces words I imagine his lips.”
One morning earlier this month, Chang and six others who were either blind or partially blind gathered on the fifth floor of the museum. Along with their lecturer, Amir Parsa, a poet and a writer, they had the galleries to themselves. They gathered around a Seurat—“Port-en-Bessin” (1888)—and Parsa began to describe it, in a didactic and modulating tone: “The very bottom third is what you might think of as land; a body of water occupies the upper two-thirds. That bottom third is a greenish earth-color tone that suggests this landmass to us, and above that we have bluish hues that determine this watery body. You really have a lot of horizontals.” It was hard to see it, if you couldn’t see it, but the visitors were rapt, re-creating Seurat on the gallery walls of their minds. “He actually uses only dots, small dots,” Parsa went on. “He uses the very tip of the brush to create what we just described as a scene, and he does not mix colors, meaning that these small dots, juxtaposed with each other, in a complementary manner, create this effect.”
“Excuse me,” Chang said. “So when the artist wants to create different shades of color he will use primary colors and mix those dots so that from far away it will look like different shades?” Parsa nodded. “And also,” Chang went on, “what I feel is that maybe the shapes are not perfect, but our imagination adds to them and makes them perfect.”
The next stop was a series of sculptures by Matisse—five heads of Jeannette. A sign next to them read “Please Do Not Touch.” Parsa described the progression from one head to the next. Then everybody put on polyethylene gloves and began touching. The gloves made a rustling sound. This group tended to start with the small features and proceed to a fuller caress of the entire head, a sense of the whole proceeding from its parts. A man named Dennis Sparacino, a professional singer and a “dedicated decadent,” pinched Jeannette’s nostrils, felt her lips, then her chin and eyes and cheekbones, and only then did he wrap his hands around the skull. Moving on to the next head, he mistakenly touched the arm of the man to his right—“That’s actually Richard,” someone told him—and then went for Jeannette’s nostrils again. “This one looks ugly,” he said. “This is—not as nice a nose.” He pretended to choke one, exclaiming, “I told you to stop that!”
They huddled up for some commentary. Sparacino said, “I’m not sure the artist knew what he was doing. I can see no reason for his taking these turns.”
“I have another view,” Chang said, with some curtness. “I feel that the artist is trying to convey that things are not the way they seem, that things may change as your feelings toward them change.” It was her theory that Jeannette had spurned Matisse, and that this had altered his view of her.
“I have a question for Nuria,” Sparacino said. “If Jeannette lost interest in him, did he get even with her?” Chang shrugged.
The next stop was a Duchamp readymade. Parsa’s depiction was brief: “It is an actual bicycle wheel with its forks still in, turned upside down and thrust into a white four-legged wooden stool.” One by one, his charges stepped forward and fondled the components. A woman gave the wheel such a brisk spin that the work nearly toppled; museum staff jumped in to steady it. Chang touched the spokes and said, “Two words come to mind: motion and stationary.”
“You can get from this whatever your mind leads you to,” Sparacino replied. Another member of the group announced that in her opinion Chang and Sparacino, regardless of their aesthetic differences, always had astute things to say. Everyone nodded.
After the tour was done, Chang said of Sparacino, “The thing is, I don’t think Dennis was ever into doing art. We don’t talk about art, he and I. We hardly ever talk. We only see each other in the museum.”

today was:

eating yesterday's leftover
pies for b'fast
walking around harvard
meeting up with an old friend who i haven't communicated with for the last 10 years!

oh and getting embarrassed at the local staples for asking for a product that was "sold out in 3 minutes, exactly at 6:03 AM." (for the record, that wasn't me, but my brother!)

ha haaaaaaa

today i ate:

• turkey
• stuffing
• butternut squash thingy
• sweet potato
• mashed potato
• green beans casserole thingy
• cornmeal thingy
• cranberry sauce
• red wine
• sparkling apple cider
• crackers (& cheese, but i couldn't have the cheese)
• lactose-free eggnog
• pecan pie
• pumpkin pie
• apple pie

*PLOP*

oh I TOTALLY FORGOT that i had my first in-the-face racial slur thrown at me the other night.

it was friday after the sg...from tina's! i was coming out of her apt, 85th & 1st, walking towards 86th street to get the bus and then this black guy passes me and says:

YOU F-ING GOOK!

i think i was in shock cuz i didn't realize he threw that at me for at least 10 sec. i looked behind me only after that and nobody was behind me!!!

i'm sure i've been called names at least behind my back, whether racial or not, but this was a real shocker. i can't believe i forgot all about this until now!!!!

it's been almost a month since i've joined second life. last night, i searched under "church" and i got a ton of mormon churches, etc but only a couple of "christian" churches. this is the "snapshot" from the front of one of the churches that offer counseling, prayer room, etc. pretty cool huh? (that winged creature is ME!)

took the V to work this morning. when i got out, i smelled evergreens. i was like, no....but they there were at citicorp center! they're putting out the christmas decorations. awwww i love christmas!

i got myself a roommate - and this time, no kidding, cuz right in front of me is the roommate agreement & the security deposit! she moves in dec 15. so i have nov.15 to dec 14 free. i should have a party.

i miss playing the piano, i miss playing concerts. i miss music!

coming saturday is my Open House - for roommate choosin. I've gotten some strange but 'Okay' emails from folks overseas, including australia! (hi, i'm moving in February, can i live there?) i'm hoping to settle this soon so i don't have to bother with it. i am actually missing my old roommate who was pretty morose & depressing but nonetheless stayed out of my way, no passive-aggressiveness.

just for the heck of it, i've "opened" up the pool to both women AND men. we'll see what happens.

more roommate saga - if that's even possible:

i wake up this morning, go to the bathroom but the bathroom is closed. that means someone's in there. i look towards my roomie's door & it's closed too. so i'm thinking what the. i go closer to the bathroom door and there's a sign - with a drawing on it. i get closer to read and this is what it said:

"Seapea: i saw a waterbug in the bathroom last night. i sealed everything." with a drawing of something that's supposed to be (i'm guessing) the waterbug's size with the label: "<--- actual size" next to it.

she sealed the entire doorway!!! so i had to open everything and of course there was no waterbug. the waterbug probably got scared of her and went somewhere else. and then i see the cabinet under the sink is all shut & sealed - AS IF the waterbug can OPEN the cabinet doors by itself! if anything, she should've sealed the edges of the bathroom tile & the cabinet itself on the floor, not the doors! sheesh.

yes it's gross to see a bug of any kind. yes, it's freaky. but...

good luck living in manhattan!

from today's NY Times:

November 7, 2006
A Neuroscientific Look at Speaking in Tongues
By BENEDICT CAREY
The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who “speak in tongues” reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.
The images, appearing in the current issue of the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, pinpoint the most active areas of the brain. The images are the first of their kind taken during this spoken religious practice, which has roots in the Old and New Testaments and in charismatic churches established in the United States around the turn of the 19th century. The women in the study were healthy, active churchgoers.
“The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” said Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, leader of the study team, which included Donna Morgan, Nancy Wintering and Mark Waldman. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them,” he said.
Dr. Newberg is also a co-author of “Why We Believe What We Believe.”
In the study, the researchers used imaging techniques to track changes in blood flow in each woman’s brain in two conditions, once as she sang a gospel song and again while speaking in tongues. By comparing the patterns created by these two emotional, devotional activities, the researchers could pinpoint blood-flow peaks and valleys unique to speaking in tongues.
Ms. Morgan, a co-author of the study, was also a research subject. She is a born-again Christian who says she considers the ability to speak in tongues a gift. “You’re aware of your surroundings,” she said. “You’re not really out of control. But you have no control over what’s happening. You’re just flowing. You’re in a realm of peace and comfort, and it’s a fantastic feeling.”
Contrary to what may be a common perception, studies suggest that people who speak in tongues rarely suffer from mental problems. A recent study of nearly 1,000 evangelical Christians in England found that those who engaged in the practice were more emotionally stable than those who did not. Researchers have identified at least two forms of the practice, one ecstatic and frenzied, the other subdued and nearly silent.
The new findings contrasted sharply with images taken of other spiritually inspired mental states like meditation, which is often a highly focused mental exercise, activating the frontal lobes.
The scans also showed a dip in the activity of a region called the left caudate. “The findings from the frontal lobes are very clear, and make sense, but the caudate is usually active when you have positive affect, pleasure, positive emotions,” said Dr. James A. Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “So it’s not so clear what that finding says” about speaking in tongues.
The caudate area is also involved in motor and emotional control, Dr. Newberg said, so it may be that practitioners, while mindful of their circumstances, nonetheless cede some control over their bodies and emotions.

it's been 16 hrs since i've been up. a Hello from boston! last 12 hrs, i've been holding the baby, cooing the baby, strolling with the baby, getting on my knee & cleaning the new house, bathtub, kitchen, lining drawers, etc. I AM BEAT!!!

tomorrow, Day 2 of Cleaning & Settling the Park family in Boston. and tomorrow, i actually have do some work at WGBH, a local Boston station, where a quartet of ours is being interviewed.

i dunno how young couples w/o families near by do it...cuz i CAN"T! and i'm not even a mommy!

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

UNbelievable!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the girl who was supposed to become my new roommate emailed me early this morning saying she can't, because she needs more room and the room is too small. this is after i've deleted all the ads on-line. WHATEV!!!!

back to the drawing board.