Everything else, obsessively.
This is Dan Koeppel’s blog. For my latest writing about bananas, please check out my recent story in The Scientist. If you’re looking for a copy of my book, and Amazon is sold out, I sell signed copies direct at retail cost (plus shipping.) Chinese, Thai, and Korean editions also available. Japan is coming soon.
The event is Saturday and Sunday May 21 and 22, 2011, with a prologue on Friday, May 20.
To learn what the Big Parade is, how to join it, why you can do it, and where we’ll go, visit the official Big Parade website.
To keep updated, join practice walks, and ask questions, visit the Big Parade Facebook page.
When I wrote my original story on the effort to preserve this amazing ship, which took my family across the Atlantic in 1964 – I’m the kid with the glasses in the picture; the other characters are my dad, mom, and brother – Dan McSweeney, executive director of the SS United States Conservancy, described my somewhat negative take as “morose.”
He was right, and I should have had more faith: last week, the group announced – against all odds – that it had raised the money required to buy the ship and save it from the scrapyards.
Here’s the piece I wrote on the news for Popular Mechanics website. The story also contains links to my two earlier articles on the ship – including the morose one..
Congratulations to the conservancy for pulling off what seems very close to a miracle (with tons of hard work, and a lot of finesse, accompanying.)
I’m on the road for the first two weeks of this month, and my eternal frustration with July travels is that I don’t get to watch the Tour de France (I co-wrote a book on the world’s greatest sporting event a few years ago.)
The Tour airs on Versus – formerly the Outdoor Life Network – and the folks there have issued an app that promises to show the same live video feed you get at home, sized down for your iPhone. (The feed is followed by a full day of re-airing the event, so you won’t miss anything.) The app is priced at $14.99 for the entire race, which concludes in late July.
Does it work? The answer is yes – if it works. I’ve just watched the Prologue stage on a trip that began on a ferryboat from Long Island to Connecticut, continued on Amtrak to Boston, and is concluding, as I write this, with a bus ride to Concord, New Hampshire – in other words, I’ve gotten to test the app under nearly every possible data scenario.
As I noted, when it’s good, it’s really good. Both wifi and 3G yielded decent (if pixillated – see accompanying screen grabs) video and clear audio. Stutters were minimal.
But when the app is bad, it is really bad. Connections were dropped fairly often, again with multiple network types. I’m guessing about a 30% problem rate – too high, perhaps, for many. For the Prologue, picture cut out just as Armstrong was reaching the finish line (maybe he snuck off for a pint of blood.) Other bummer-tent variations were picture without sound, sound without picture, no picture/no sound, and worst of all, picture with high-pitched screeching.
The best feature of the app is the all-day reruns, which – DVR-like – allow you to scrub forward and back, so you can pick up where you left off, or literally cut to the chase. The app also includes live GPS tracking, commentary, daily summaries, and profiles.
Two major caveats: The app does not stream video – EVER – on the iPad. And if you’ve got one of the new, limited data buckets from ATT, instead of the old unlimited plans, you’ll likely exhaust your allotment by the seventh stage. Buying more data would hike a dedicated Tour watcher’s toll to at least double the price of the app (consider this is preview of how it may be for all those new iPhone 4 users waiting fir the upcoming Netflix and Hulu apps, since ATT no longer sells a non-capped data package, unless you’re grandfathered in.)
Advice? Not a bad buy if you’re a Tour geek and have no other means of access. If you’ve got Versus on your TV, think hard about an app that is more than occasionally unreliable and eats data the way Contador eats hills.
THE SCREEN GRABS: See for yourself; they’re pretty blurry, most of the time, especially around the edges, though the stream does seem to be adaptive, detecting your bandwidth and adjusting accordingly. One problem is that reading the text captions on the image is almost impossible, so you’ll really need to listen to figure out who you’re watching. Static images – like the last one, of stage winner Fabian Cancellara, seem much better.
I would.
I’ll be talking about the Cavendish banana – our supermarket breed – and why it is an economic, political, and culinary dead end – organic, fair trade, or conventional. I’ll be offering a picture of what a future banana – one that helps correct a century of social and environmental justice – might look like. The talk is part of Fallen Fruit’s “United Fruit” installation; the location is at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), at 6522 Hollywood Blvd. 8:00PM, Tuesday, September 15. Admission is free. Info here.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman recommends it.
Listen to my interview on NPR's Fresh Air.
My own op-ed in the New York Times.
Other Books:
