A new documentary on hydrofracking gets serious love from Variety mag's Robert Koehler:
Who could have anticipated that one of the most effective and expressive environmental films of recent years would be the work of a Gotham theater director who's never before made a doc? Nobody, perhaps least writer-director Josh Fox, whose "GasLand" may become to the dangers of natural gas drilling what "Silent Spring" was to DDT.
Lest anyone doubt the passion and commitment of the protestors at today's dueling rallies on the issue of natural-gas drilling in New York State, let the record state: It was January, and it was raining, and it was in Albany. Enough said.
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A representative of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability was on hand with a Blackberry posting live updates to Twitter. Crowd estimation at a protest is always a slippery beast, but it sounds like a good number turned out:
@stopgasdrilling At least 600 to 1000 ppl strong here to protest against fracing
Recipe for New York State politics:
1. Take a rural county where almost a fifth of residents are under the poverty line.
2. Extract from it the nation's second-highest tax burden, preferably with a citrus reamer.
3. Stuff with massive prisons. Re-inject with tax dollars in the form of correctional officer salaries.
4. Repeat steps 1 through 3 until most of the region's natural economic juices have been thoroughly replaced with recycled porky broth.
5. Add thousands of inmates imported from New York City. Be sure to measure them carefully, as they will later be used to inflate upstate population estimates when drawing congressional districts.
6. Set sentencing laws to "extra tough."
7. Bake forever. Seriously. It can never come out of the oven.
The Chronogram's Nina Shengold had a terrific profile recently of local writer Shalom Auslander, author of Foreskin's Lament and a frequent NPR contributor. In it, Auslander--who is screamingly hilarious, in that way that comes only from having endured deep psychological torment--dishes about his fundamentalist upbringing, his love/hate relationship with loosey-goosey Woodstock, and why he won't drive his car in Rockland County.
It’s easy to spot Auslander at Bread Alone in Woodstock—he’s bent over a notebook, frowning. He’s just come from the writing office he rented on Tinker Street a few weeks after Paix was born, where he’s been wrestling with a novel tentatively titled Leopold Against the World. “It’s about a genocide, but funny,” he says.
NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg's in the capital, telling state legislators how bad the governor's proposed budget is for Noo Yawk.
Meanwhile, citizens from across the state are rallying both for and against natural-gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, an issue that's particularly pressing here in New York City's watershed. We'll be posting more about the rally later in the day. If you have photos, video or anything else you'd like to share, send us links or media at [email protected].
In the meantime, you can follow along with the rally on Twitter. Damascus Citizens for Sustainability is tweeting at @stopgasdrilling. On the other side, the Independent Oil and Gas Association of NY is tweeting at @IOGANY.
[img_assist|nid=16156|title=|desc=|link=url|url=http://chickenhillfarmhandmadesoap.blogspot.com/2010/01/we-are-donating-...|align=left|width=213|height=320]Delhi soapmakers (Soapmasters? Soapeteers? Sudscraftisans?) Chicken Hill Farm Handmade Soap report that their soap odds and ends are going to a good cause.
We will be donating our excess soap to "Clean The World" an organization that collects soap from hotels, soapers and other organizations. They put it through a special cleaning process, repackage it and deliver these recycled product donations to domestic homeless shelters and impoverished countries suffering from high death rates due to acute respiratory infection and diarrheal disease. Right now, Clean the World is concentrating on moving hygiene products and medical supplies into the Haiti Relief Effort.
Soapers. That's it.
Full disclosure: That Chicken Hill soaper in the photo is my cousin Quinn Kelley. Photo by me.
Haggis, long outlawed, is soon to be legal again.*
Hope they're busting out the Laphroaig at Livingston Manor's Snowdance Farm, where the Guardian's Ian Williams hied himself last year in search of that supremely unobtainable foodstuff, an authentic American haggis. Williams's account is a marvelous read, though not for the faint of stomach:
The sheep's stomach looked like an alien sex organ, and it had a pervasive cloacal smell, as I everted it and scrubbed it thoroughly, over and over again in cold running water. The lungs were a bit of a trial: the recipe points out that they should be boiled with the rest of the pluck, but with the windpipe over the edge of the cauldron so any mucus would drip out into a bowl.
Many hours of pluck-grinding, oatmeal-toasting, stomach-stuffing and cauldron-steaming improved things considerably, and the evening ended in haggisy jubilation:
The Liberty Independent reports that city councilman Sean Hanofee died yesterday.
An earlier post reported on Friday that Hanofee had suffered a heart attack.
Coming soon to a breakfast table near you: The face of Sullivan County blogger Jennifer Desroschers (a.k.a., Momma D And Da Boyz), which appears on special-edition "Blogging Against Hunger" Cheerios boxes at ShopRites across the Northeast this week.
Illustration: Detail from photo posted on Momma D And Da Boyz.
It may be the middle of a Catskills winter, but the weather was nice enough for diehard local cyclist Michael Wentland and a buddy to hit the road from Bovina to Andes and back today.
I pulled up to Pete's place with a good smile, a nice chilled sweat on the skin, tickler cold toes, and a real hunger churning in my belly. In hindsight, it was really sketchy in places. But it was also incredibly fun!
Photo from the Catskills Cycling blog, courtesy of Michael Wentland.
