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Enter the Wu Chang Clan.

Chang leads a crew of like-minded chefs, each of which he wants to make star in his own right. Hip-hop mastermind RZA did the same with the Wu, helping O.D.B., Ghostface, Method Man, Raekwon, etc., spin off successful solo careers.

Serious Eats has arrived.

When Affordable Housing Gets Expensive

Uptown Flavor notes that the Daily News is tracking cases where the city's public housing falls too quickly into disrepair:

Most people know that homeownership is expensive. You pay for everything from the closing costs to water bills to fixing a leaky faucet. When the costs of repairs are directly connected to poor workmanship by the contractors then whose pocket should the money come out of?

As part of a continuing series in the Daily News, homes that were shoddily built using HPD subsidies are exposed. Some would shrug it off and say, “sell it and move on.” It’s not quite that simple for homeowners like Lt. Delgado from Harlem. Delgado has only owned his home for 3 years and he has suffered extensive water damage due to poor construction of the home. If he were to bail out now, the city would require him to pay back about $100,000 in subsidies.

This news item is like the NYC housing trifecta: gentrification, rent control/subsidized housing and the ineptitude (possible corruption?) of the city's administration.

The Best of Sean Connery part 2

We've all seen it, but it's worth watching over and over.

On Faith: Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo: Bridging the Hitchens’ Gap.

His latest essay, stretched into book length, proposes that “religion poisons everything.” This is a valid observation only if we add the tag appropriate to an essay: “everything FOR ME.” However, adding such a qualifier would grant equal status to the opinions of most of the human race, a premise that Hitchens’ arrogance does not entertain. Hitchens never quite grasps the profundity of the Chesterton’s observation to the effect that Christianity is not so much a religion tried and found wanting as a religion that is still wanting to be tried. In arguing that religious people have spread poison he avoids applying the same criteria to professed atheists like Robespierre, Nietzsche, Pol Pot, Stalin, Jeffery Dahmer, etc. Perhaps favoritism to one’s own (Hitchens says he is an atheist) is understandable, but objectivity is preferable in pursuit of truth.

"Like a Parchment"

The vertical content layout quickly results in a cluttered, sluggish page.

Vote Lincoln

vote lincoln
Originally uploaded by arimoore.

You Might Be A Teacher If...

Tomorrow’s world needs today’s teachers, and that pool is growing smaller. Every one of our children has had a weak teacher along the way, one who sends home messages that are either grammatically incorrect, or hostile in tone. If you cringe at the thought of your child spending a year in a weak teacher’s classroom, you just might be a teacher.

What Passes for Accountability These Days

From our friends at Radar Online:

Crying wolf: Helping lead a country into a disastrous war under false pretenses got Paul Wolfowitz a cushy job atop the World Bank. Paying his girlfriend a ton of money gets him fired.

Sunday Baseball Links

I've been going down the rabbit hole of baseball stats, scorekeeping and sports on-line.

Erik Berg's summary of SportsML, and his ongoing project to record all MLB Box Scores in XML is worth your attention.

Major League Baseball has their own undocumented but pitch-by-pitch complete xml feed of gameday news. I was hoping today's Mets/Brewers game would have projected lineups, but it's not up yet. Take a look at what they have for yesterday's game.

Scorepad offers a free trial of their scoresheet software for the Palm. I want to try this, but it looks like a little bit of a pain.

Chris Nandor's Game::Baseball::Scorecard is a free perl interface to Chris Swingle's PDF Scorecards. Chris's scorecards are the nicest I've found on-line, which may have something to do with the triangulation of his other hobbies: bookbinding, baking bread, and woodoworking.

(Thank you Alan Mitchell)