Author: Ruby Sinreich

The weather’s getting nice, the students are gone, there’s no better time for cruising around with the top down.

Kelly Blue Book says $1,000. Make me an offer!

Convertible 1989 VW Cabriolet. Light/medium blue body, black vinyl top. Wolfsburg Edition (ie: it was made in Germany, well). 171,000 miles, power steering, power brakes, 5-speed manual clutch. Top was replaced in 2000. AM/FM tape deck with detachable face. Nice wheels. No A/C, no cruise control. Some small cosmetic paint issues and minor* mechanical problems. The inspection, registration, and insurance are all current.

I have owned this car since 1996, it’s a lot of fun to drive!

Here’s a picture of the exact same make, model, color and year (not my actual car):

I will add actual pictures soon!

Or maybe I’ll just take it to CarMax…

* I have asked my mechanic and he certified in writing that these are not serious problems. They’re just not worth fixing on a car this old.

Some kind of Ukrainian party and other madness encountered on the lower east side today.

Potato latkes with apple sauce at Veselka.

Pommes frites eating itself. I think this creature is from the planet as that huge hot dog on Ninth Street in Durham. The land where food eats itself.

Women posing with a cutout of Ukranian president Viktor Yushchenko.

Dancers flying aroundthe stage. They were really excellent.

St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Crowds leaving the first stop on the kind of disappointing First Warm Night.

New Yorkers are excited about their First Warm Night. And so am I. We’re about to go check it out.

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki (a former Daily Tarheel writer, now with the New Yorker) posits that groups of people are naturally smarter than individuals, even smarter than smart individuals. This reinforces my ideas about network-centric advocacy by showing that no matter how articulate and even correct one person (one activist, organizer, leader, lobbyist, spokesperson, whatever) may be, that groups of seemingly less-qualified people can be more powerful, have better ideas, and get more done.

Of course this requires that systems are in place that support distributed networks and that allow group leadership to emerge. While there will certainly be exceptions to this superior groupthink rule, the growing power of everyday people is something that advocacy organizations need to understand to succeed.

…If you run ten different jelly-bean-counting experiments, it’s likely that each time one or two students will outperform the group. But they will not be the same students each time. Over the ten experiments, the group’s performance will almost certainly be the best possible. The simplest way to get reliably good answers is just to ask the group each time.

Bonus link: Here are some pretty thorough notes on the book.

I wasn’t going to write about this, but now I’ve gone and commented on EdCone.com about it so what the hell.

Last night The Daily Show addressed the cable news networks’ pathetic attempts to capitalize on the popularity of blogs. Brian and I lived through a pretty obnoxious of example of this stupidity last week. On a Wednesday MSBNC segment hosted by Ron Reagan and a blond woman whose name I missed (darn), the blog “expert”* showed them our wedding site which basically uses the web to do something that ordinarily happens offline – friends and family help us to plan our wedding.

After the “expert” ham-handedly failed to explain open source software, Reagan’s co-host mistook herself for a friend and offered me some unsolicited advice. Fortunately our website does not allow idiots like her to post, and I will not be wearing a garbage bag in the ceremony as she suggested. Why our site is even considered noteworthy beyond our circle of friends is beyond me, but I guess MSNBC saw an opportunity to give one last kick to those geeks they picked on in high school and they just couldn’t resist.

Here is the video ( it is hosted by a childish conservative blog, thepoliticalteen.com, who are big fans of inane programming). We are mentioned about 2/3 of the way through.

* Some guy named Tony who trolls blogdex for 5 minutes apparently qualifies to be an expert on “the blogosphere.” Who knew?

The brand spanking new Huffington Post (Ariana’s celebrity group blog) is only hours old and already some genuine dialog can be found, in spite of the fact that the celebrities do not take comments.

On The Blog (which appears to contain posts from the less-famous authors in the Huffington stable), Hillary Rosen posted a plea for the iPod to be able to get music outside of iTunes. Less than 9 hours later, on the same page, Richard Bradley calls out her bullshit.

I had to laugh reading Hilary Rosen’s post, “Steve Jobs, Let My Music Go,” arguing that Jobs should open the iPod to non-Apple music formats. “Why am I complaining about this?” Rosen asks. “Why isn’t everyone?”

…

I mean, why is Rosen complaining about this? As head of the RIAA, no one was more fervently anti-consumer than she. For years, Rosen defended the interests of the big record conglomerates, a group of companies which treated its customers with such contempt that millions of young people simply took to stealing music. Rosen doesn’t exactly have a lot of street cred with us consumers.

I don’t even know what Rosen is even doing posting on this supposedly-liberal site. Just because she’s a lesbian doesn’t mean she’s progressive.

As for the whole celebrity blogging idea, I’ll keep watching but the jury is still out.

used to be called Airport Road

Turns out Kevin Smith has a WordPress blog. And his wedding anniversary is on my birthday. And he got to see Revenge of the Sith on said day. And he posted a pretty good review, with spoilers. All of this is in one post.

I’m really excited about the potential for this one to suck a lot less than the last two. As Smith says, “this is a movie I was genetically predisposed to love.” I was raised on Star Wars. It’s in my blood. No matter how bad they are, I have to go and see this fundamental mythology played out on the screen.

The part of the storyline most interesting to me is how Luke Leia got born and then were split up. Sadly, the kids do not even appear in the trailers, so I’m expecting this plotline to be pretty minimal in the film. Everyone else seems very interested in how Annakin becomes evil. This part just seems obvious to me. We already saw him being impatient and arrogant.

From a Buddhist perspective, you can see him doing everything wrong. The “three poisons” are anger (hatred), desire (attachment or greed), and delusion (ignorance). Annakin is rockin’ all three, so what you think will happen? I don’t find it hard to see how those bad ideas could take over and eradicate his humanity.

According to IMDb, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the top grossing movie this weekend:

USA Weekend Box-Office Summary
29 April 2005 (Sunday Estimates)
Rank Title Weekend Gross
1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) $21.7M $21.7M
2. The Interpreter (2005) $14.2M $43.6M
3. xXx: State of the Union (2005) $13.7M $13.7M
4. The Amityville Horror (2005) $8.1M $55.1M
5. Sahara (2005) $6M $57.2M
6. A Lot Like Love (2005) $5.22M $14.7M
7. Gong fu (2004) $3.84M $13.2M
8. Fever Pitch (2005) $3.75M $36.5M
9. Robots (2005) $2.65M $124M
10. Guess Who (2005) $2.2M $65.5M