Month: July 2010

This morning, Google announced Google Apps for Government, a new version of Google’s suite of cloud-based enterprise applications that have been hardened to meet the government’s more stringent security restrictions.

The top spot for those arrests was the 75th Precinct, which had 3,036 last year. It covers Brownsville, the epicenter of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk strategy. “The police are taking this too far,” said Brownsville resident Natalie Robinson, 29. “Everyone knows that poor blacks and Latinos are going to be affected by the police in the worst way.” While marijuana topped the arrest list, violating the open-container law was the No. 1 summons last year – 132,225 were issued, almost a fourth of all NYPD tickets. That was followed by disorderly conduct, motor vehicle violations and riding bikes on the sidewalk, according to figures from the Office of Court Administration. There were 21,136 tickets in the bike-riding category, comparable to the number of arrests for theft of service, which includes fare-beating.

Are you ever surprised by how certain you can be about your position on a topic that you only heard about 30 seconds before? Where does this lead? Do we rebound from this trend and begin to compartmentalize that incoming information which requires deeper thought or does everything get put on the high speed and never ending instant-opinion assembly line?

There’s no such thing as TMI, only TMC (Too Many Characters).

Don’t expect the Tron Legacy soundtrack to simply be a cash-grab either, the two French musicians that make up Daft Punk (Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Mauel de Homem-Christo) are reportedly intimately involved in the film’s production process. Director Kosinski claims that he and his filmmaking crew have “built them a studio, they come to dailies, script meetings and trailer edits. We’ve been editing to their temp scores. The music is fully integrated.”

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

My favorite part of the Dutch bike fashion is the art of looking effortless (and even glamorous) while using the bike as something that has the ability of carrying as much as a Hummer stretch limo. Today, I passed a woman carrying an eight-foot ladder on her shoulder. Then, cycling down the canals, I saw a bright red bike outfitted with silver metallic details, several baskets and matching striped bags, boxes, and baskets. The owner was a woman wearing heels, tights, a large flouncy skirt and big jacket to match. What caught me was not just that she was able to bike so fluidly in un-ripped tights, a skirt that was not catching in the wheel, and stilettos that didn’t cause a big fuss at every stop light because they were caught in a cobblestone (a situation I have encountered far too frequently), but that she was talking on the phone while taking bites of an apple and still managing to carry an umbrella, three shopping bags, a basket full of Dutch tulips, a toddler, and two dogs; and was riding in perfect fashion down the entire canal.

The truth is, when it comes down to it, The Daily Show isn’t a boy’s club or a girl’s club, it’s a family – a highly functioning if sometimes dysfunctional family. And we’re not thinking about how to maximize our gender roles in the workplace on a daily basis. We’re thinking about how to punch up a joke about Glenn Beck’s latest diatribe, where to find a Michael Steele puppet on an hour’s notice, which chocolate looks most like an oil spill, and how to get a gospel choir to sing the immortal words, “Go f@#k yourself!”