Mobility

Blogging a la Blackberry again. Here are some random Thursday thoughts...

Last night, Melanie and I attended an Occidental College alumni event:

WELCOME HOME, TIGER!

Featuring Special Guest: Janette Sadik-Kahn '82
Commissioner, NYC Department of Transportation

It was a special "winter break party" with a range of alumni. Alas, no one from my class, but some people I knew from younger classes, including John McGee, who was around for the infamous "Newcomb Used Car Lot" incident. See the post from April 1, 2007, if you hadn't read about it yet.

It was a nice event in a beautiful downtown apartment and listening to Janette Sadik-Kahn was inspiring. She is the champion of a concept called "congestion pricing," which basically proposes that, during the day, vehicles driving in and out of Manhattan would be charged an $8 toll.

That's sensible to the non-car owners, but heresy to those who rely on their vehicles daily to take them in and out of the city.

Of course, Barack Obama's name came up several times throughout the night. He was an Oxy undergrad before transferring to some Ivy league school. Obama is also a graduate of Punahou School in Hawai'i, the arch-rival of my alma mater, Iolani. I always liked to think of Punahou as the school students went to after they were expelled from Iolani. An unfair characterization, for sure, but one that makes me smile, nonetheless.

It's nice to see Jon Stewart back on the air with The Daily Show, even if he is sans writers. Ever since getting DVR in the Fall of 2005, I haven't missed an episode.

I may have mentioned this before, but something happened with google searches at the beginning of December 2007 that drastically increased the amount of traffic BillyBlog has seen. Viewership (notice I do not say "readership") has increased. A lot of entries come off of image searches. More noticeable is the spike over at the upstart spin-off Tattoosday. Of late, that "side" project has outdrawn BillyBlog, based on hits per day.

Crossing Manhattan Bridge now. Beautiful, bright sunrise.

Despite the lovely weather the last two days, we have dipped down to a more moderate range in the forties. I had hoped to shoot some tattoos, but was limited to passing out a Tattoosday printout to a woman eating in the Manhattan Mall food court.

Shifting gears, just finished The Gonzo Way, a short little tome about the philosophy of the late great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. His widow, Anita Thompson, composed the book and it's a quick, invigorating little read well worth a peek, especially if you like HST. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the only non-fiction book on my Top 20 Books list.

Bookpeeping on the N: The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek.

That's all for this trip. Thanks for reading!