This is great, because these are two of my favorite movies of all-time. I love trailer remixes. (via kottke.org)
Author Archive for Steve
Crumbling Financial Giants Gave Generously To Dodd. Besides being an interesting look at the financial industries connections to a local Senator, this is also a great and timely piece from the Hartford Courant. The newspaper just launched a redesign this weekend that focused on bold design and more local coverage and this seems like a pretty good start.
Collegian: Prisoners run, walk for charity. Probably the coolest story I’ll read all day - the prisoners at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Rockview organized an 8-hour run to raise money to counsel at risk youth. Run annually for 29 years, the event has raised nearly half a million dollars. The whole thing really changes your perspective on people.
Duke down by 1, sorry Lam.
Time: The Evolution of the College Dorm. A pretty cool history of dorms as they’ve gone from tightly controlled living spaces to become more student driven - which has resulted in “country club” dorms. I would say that most of the dorms I experienced at Penn State were more of the 70s-80s era brick or cinder block variety. It’s clear though that the focus of future dorm development was on more expensive ones with amenities.
Thanks Restivo!
Sonic Youth. Old news by now, but ESPN the Mag named Penn State the best student section overall and most fun. Says Beno Cook, “If you aren’t impressesd with the White Out, you’re probably one of those people who thinks the moon landing was faked in a TV studio.” Well said. I’m proud to have been part of the greatest show in college football.
After a false start yesterday, I got out to Gillette Castle State Park today for an afternoon of sightseeing and hiking. It’s a pretty striking building architecturally and the history behind it is interesting as well. It looks over the Connecticut River, providing beautiful views and easy access to the water. There are a bunch of trails that take you down the hill to the river. All in all a nice afternoon, taking in some of Connecticut’s natural treasures. Check out my Flickr slideshow after the fold.
Continue reading ‘Gillette Castle’
Friedman: Melting Pot Meets Great Wall. I think Thomas Friedman is my favorite writer because of the way he can recognize the world’s most serious problems and yet still find optimism. In this passage he observes something I’ve also caught onto while watching the Olympics.
Walking through the Olympic Village the other day, here’s what struck me most: the Russian team all looks Russian; the African team all looks African; the Chinese team all looks Chinese; and the American team looks like all of them.
This is especially true when you include the coaches. Liang Chow, the coach of the Iowa gymnast Shawn Johnson, was a popular co-caption of China’s national gymnastics team in the 1980s before he emigrated to West Des Moines. The U.S. women’s volleyball team was coached by a former Chinese player, Jenny Lang Ping, when it defeated China a few days ago.Lang, a national hero in China, led the Chinese team to a gold medal in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. It would be like Michael Jordan coaching China’s basketball team to a win over America.
The Associated Press reports that there are 33 foreign-born players on the U.S. Olympic team, including four Chinese-born table tennis players, a kayaker from Britain, seven members of the track-and-field team — as well as Lopez Lomong, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan’s civil war, who was resettled in the U.S. by Catholic Charities, and Leo Manzano, the son of an illegal immigrant Mexican laborer. He moved to the U.S. when he was 4 but didn’t gain citizenship until 2004.
It is amazing that with our Noah’s Ark of an Olympic team doing so well “that at the same time you have this rising call in America to restrict immigration,” said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. “Some people want to choke off the very thing that makes us strong and unique.”
I couldn’t agree more - more and more American ingenuity is coming from outside our borders. This is a good thing - the best and brightest from around the world want to build a life in our country. At the same time, the rest of the world is continuing to get better and brighter. So I would appreciate it Lou Dobbs and his crazies focused their attention not on closing our borders, but on raising the bar for our education system so American kids can compete in this new world. How many new schools could be built for the price of that border fence?