The Takeaway is a new morning news program that debuted on WNYC about three weeks ago. I've been holding back my opinion to give the show a chance to get into its groove; unfortunately the show has not lived up to my expectations, and I've switched my radio alarm to CBS FM for now (fun music but the DJ and commercials are supremely annoying). I guess it doesn't help either that it's spring fundraising time for public radio and they've seriously damaged my confidence in them.

The reason why I listen to NPR is that the news is presented in a calm, measured and thoughtful manner. In interview segments, the interviewer gives the interviewee plenty of time to state his or her case. Most of the time the line of questioning makes logical sense and the interview feels like it has a beginning, middle and end. The interviewer isn't doing most of the talking, the interviewee is. To me, this is the hallmark of NPR's style and why I choose to listen to WNYC and not talk radio in the morning. NPR also has a knack for bringing stories to the radio (both local and national) that don't necessarily make it onto most people's radar, and I very much appreciate that as well.

The Takeaway seems like the exact opposite to these qualities. The segments are ultra short, so short that the hosts are perpetually cutting off the interviewees in mid-sentence. It feels rather rude and amateurish. I don't really get a sense of the issue they're discussing either way, because it seems like the hosts are just trying to create quick, quotable sound bites that sound cool but don't actually mean anything. They aren't facilitating any kind of discussion in a serious way, they just seem to be following a script and ask the question, regardless of whether or not it had anything to do with the response. When they do go off-script, it's pretty obvious because the questions are so awkward that the interviewee doesn't even know how to respond to it. And asking the audience such inane questions as "What's on your personal endangered list?" seems so patronizing.

The weather has finally turned springlike in New York in past few weeks and I can't wait to spend more time outdoors. But as I've been roaming the streets, I've been forced to notice the horrible, horrible footwear choices of so many New Yorkers. What so many people don't understand is that what looks good on a model or what may be trendy looks completely horrible on you.

Everyone knows the UGGs example. Those boots make any girl look like the abominable snowman. I still don't understand how this trend hasn't died yet. Perhaps it's because of the hordes of tourists from other places other than New York that invade Soho, and the styles they wear are about three years behind in the rest of the country. Don't get me wrong, I am not dissing middle America, but everyone knew that UGGs are horrible looking, why continue the trend? I can't wait until UGG fanatics look at photos of themselves in five years, and think, "God, what was I thinking? I looked like a total tool!" Sort of like anyone who grew up in the 80s and wore a side ponytail.

So here are my top five rules on spring footwear. Well, footwear in general.

1. Do not, under any circumstances, wear those flat boots without heels and tuck your jeans in to said boots. Unless you wear a size -1. Otherwise your legs will just look like tree stumps. Just because some chick in that Urban Outfitters catalog you received last week can pull it off doesn't mean you can!
   
2. Do not wear leggings with ballet flats. Your legs will STILL look like tree stumps. And for godssakes, pick up your feet when you walk, that shuffling duck walk is so unappealing.
3. Do not wear those really really flat sandals or flip flops. YOU ARE NOT AT THE BEACH. And again, did you realize you walk like a duck?
4. Men: do not wear flip flops. Especially you jocks with those black Adidas sandals. What the hell? If you have ugly, uncared-for feet, I don't want to see them. If your girlfriend doesn't want to see your feet, neither do we. At least trim your toenails and get rid of that fungus if you're going to show us your toes. (addendum: if you have a nice pair of leather sandals, go for it. it's just the OP-surfer-dude-crappy sandals that I can't stand.)
5. extra super pointy shoes. Don't do it. Do you really want to look like a medieval court jester? Because that's exactly what you look like.
6. sorry, one more rule: don't wear Crocs. You're not Mario Batali. And what's up with the holes? Are those shoes really going to protect you when you spill a bucket of hot grease on them?
   

Banning UGG boots goes without saying. Besides, has anyone poked their head out the window lately? Guess what, it's spring and I don't see any snow, do you?

Next fashion topic: wearing leggings without a skirt. Banned? Discuss.

This was inspired by a piece in the New Yorker about light pollution via kottke.org , I wrote it a while back but I never posted it.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the thought of becoming an astronaut. Not just for the thrill of floating in zero gravity and eating freeze dried ice cream. There was something compelling about leaving the Earth and seeing the sky for it really is - the billions of stars, the moon in all its glory. But really the night sky that had fired my imagination had been an amalgam of glossy hardcovers from the Air and Space Museum, IMAX films, and PBS shows like Nova. The stars were so dim in the suburb that I grew up in that all I could really identify were Orion and the Big Dipper.

As I grew older, I forgot about my obsession with the sky. Through college and my early adult years, I was living in mostly urban environments where you'd be lucky to even spot the moon. Perhaps that sense of wonder and excitement about "what's out there" dimmed a bit as well. I remember clearly though the first time I really felt like I "saw" the sky: I was in a small village called Bulungula on the east coast of South Africa. I wanted to cry for joy; I could have stayed out all night just gazing at the millions of points of shimmering light. I felt so tiny and in awe, it felt like I was spinning and the ground had dropped away. It was so clear and bright that you could see the clouds of galactic dust that blotted out the starlight from beyond the dust. And I really understood why the Milky Way is called the Milky Way.

Maybe the reason why we have become so careless and destructive of the environment is because we can't see the night sky anymore. We can't stand in awe of where we came from and what we're made of.

well, not really. I was on the subway and my ipod suddenly froze in the middle of "Do You Realize". So I restarted it and the sad ipod icon came up. It's like the equivalent of getting the bomb icon or the sad mac icon in system 9. So now I have to drag my sorry ass over to the apple store and probably get the hard drive replaced.

I was just thinking the other day about how my listening habits have changed over the years with technology. I was the kid who had a portable cassette player with her at all times. I would drag around at least 10 tapes with me in a giant neon pink fanny pack (i swore i never wore it, i just used it for storing my tapes and game boy). I am also embarrassed to say that I joined Columbia House in the sixth grade. (10 free cassettes?? hell yea!) I'd make mix tapes from other tapes and records and listen to them straight through, because i knew that fast-forwarding or rewinding would totally drain the batteries. Remember how you knew that your batteries were running out? The song would get slower and slower and slower.....Besides, do you know how hard it is to find the beginning of a song on a cassette? I put up with the scratchy sound and only being able to listen to the number of tapes I could carry.

Then the portable CD player became ubiquitous just as I was making the transition to CDs in middle school, so I saved up some money and bought myself one. What sucked: no more mix tapes. No one had figured out yet that you could organize music on your computer and burn it to a disc. Hell, people were just getting their first home computers and Prodigy and BBS's were the hot thing. At least you could skip a song without it draining your batteries. But another major point of suckage: the first generation CD players were HEAVY and BIG and they skipped ALL THE TIME. They also ate batteries like there was no tomorrow (although I am proud to say that I got a set of rechargeable ones). The more buffer time a CD player had, the more expensive it was. I still had to carry around discs, and again only as many as I was willing to carry. Plus that meant that the chance that a CD would get scratched and ruined was much higher. At this point I was still making mix tapes from CDs, so I was carrying around a CD player AND a tape player AND CDs AND tapes.

So this whole method of listening went on for a while, pretty much into college. Then I fell into a weird technology called minidiscs. Mainly because you could record audio through a mic that sounded way better than what you could record to a cassette - I had a radio show with a friend and that's how we ended up recording our broadcasts. Ripping CDs still wasn't quite viable yet - hard drive space was still expensive. So at least now I didn't have to lug around cassettes because I could make mixes on minidiscs, but recording everything was still in real time. Plus I had to transfer everything to minidisc - the format never caught on here so you couldn't buy albums directly on minidisc. Plus now I was carrying around 10 minidiscs at any given time, and often I'd misplace them.

Then came the era of ripping CDs. My friends and I started making mixes for each other. Which was cool. Except that you still had to carry around a CD player. Yes, they didn't skip as much, and they were lighter, but there was still something missing. Mp3 players started appearing - they were promising, but they had crappy interfaces and puny storage capacities.

Then Apple came out with the ipod. It was like nirvana. It's the way that I've been wanting to listen to music since I had my very first cassette player.

Damn you, Apple. I funnel hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year into your pocket and I've had three of your products (2 ipods plus dual G5 tower) die on me over the few months. Am I cursed? Or maybe your products are just crappy. But unfortunately I am just going to crawl back to you every time this happens because there isn't any other company out there that comes close to how you've changed the way that I listen to my music, and HOW I've wanted to listen to my music. Damn you!

We rented a documentary on Jimmy Carter that was part of PBS's American Experience series. It was completely fascinating. It's a period of history that I had absolutely no clue about. I was a wee tyke during Carter's administration, so I was oblivious to everything that was going on. But I've never really discussed the issues of the period with anyone. It was probably considered too "contemporary" to discuss in any history classes I had taken, yet so much of what happened during Carter's administration is directly affecting what's going on today.

For instance, the legacy of the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel set the tone for the next decade or so of trying to achieve peace in the Middle East (although that seems to have gone completely out the window). And the whole incident in Iran, when a group of students kidnapped about 50 Americans and held them hostage for more than a year, it was seen as a major "terrorist threat". Terrorism has much deeper roots than many of us realize - we all tend to think back to September 11th as "the event" that brought us to our current attitudes.

We need to analyze our history more thoroughly and learn from our mistakes. It seems to me that we keep doing the wrong things over and over again.

I'd like to know what Carter thinks of the prisoners that are being held in Guantanamo Bay, who have no access to legal representation and are quite possibly being tortured...as a champion of human rights, what does he think of our current administration?